FOUNDING COMMUNITY
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FOUNDING COMMUNITY
PHAENOMENOLOGICA SERIES FOUNDED BY H.L. VAN BREDA AND PUBLISHED UNDER THE AUSPICES OF THE HUSSERL-ARCHIVES
143 H. PETER STEEVES
FOUNDING COMMUNITY A PHENOMENOLOGICAL-ETHICAL INQUIRY
Editorial Board: Director: R. Bernet (Husserl-Archief, Leuven) Secretary: J. Taminiaux (Centre d'l~tudes phenomenologiques, Louvain-la-Neuve) Members: S. Usseling (HusserlArchief, Leuven), H. Leonardy (Centre d'etudes phenomenologiques, Louvain-laNeuve), U. Melle (Husser!-Archief, Leuven), B. Stevens (Centre d'etudes phenomenologiques, Louvain-la-Neuve) Advisory Board: R. Bernasconi (Memphis State University), D. Carr (Emory University, Atlanta), E.S. Casey (State University of New York at Stony Brook), R. Cobb-Stevens (Boston College), J.F. Courtine (Archives-Husser!, Paris), F. Dastur (Universite de Paris XII), K. Diising (Husserl-Archiv, Koln), J. Hart (Indiana University, Bloomington), K. Held (Bergische Universitat Wuppertal), D. Janicaud (Universite de Nice), K.E. Kaehler (Husserl-Archiv, Koln), D. Lohmar (Husserl-Archiv, Koln), W.R. McKenna (Miami University, Oxford, USA), J.N. Mohanty (Temple University, Philadelphia), E.W. Orth (Universitat Trier), B. Rang (Husser!-Archiv, Freiburg LBr.), P. Ricoeur (Paris), K. Schuhmann (University of Utrecht), C. Sini (Universita degli Studi di Milano), R. Sokolowski (Catholic University of America, Washington D.C.), E. Stroker (Universitat Koln), B. Waldenfels (Ruhr-Universitat, Bochum)
H. PETER STEEVES, Ph.D. Department oj Philosophy, California State University, Fresno, USA
FOUNDING COMMUNITY A Phenomenological-Ethical Inquiry
....
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FOR MI CONEJITA
Table of Contents
Acknowledgments
IX
CHAPTER I: MORALITY AND PHENOMENOLOGY
1. Introduction . 2. Science, Morality, and Phenomenology Notes .
1 3 8
CHAPTER II: THE EGO AND THE OTHER IN A PAIRING RELATION
1. Introduction 2. Empathic Perception and the Constitution of the Ego and the Other in Cartesian Meditations 3. The Sphere of Ownness 4. The Reciprocal Relation of Pairing: Some Problems 5. Theunissen and the Question Concerning Pairing Notes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
9 10 13 20 22 28
CHAPTER III: INSTINCT AND THE PRESENCE OF THE OTHER
1. 2. 3. 4.
The Case for Instinct . The Other as Unity . Re-Thinking Infantile Intentionality Limitations from a Husserlian Standpoint Notes .
31 35 39 43 51
CHAPTER IV: MORAL CATEGORIALITY & MORAL BEING
I . Introduction . 2. The History of Moral Theory . 3. Categoriality and Foundations
54 54 57
viii 4. 5. 6. 7. 8.
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Moral Categoriality . Morality as Choice v. Mode of Being Problem: The Unthinking Actor . . . Problem: The Non-Judgmental Actor. Conclusion Notes
59 62 63 70 76 76
CHAPTER V: PHENOMENOLOGICAL COMMUNITARIANISM
1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6.
Introduction: The Descriptive and the Normative . Communitarian Theory in General: Three Problems The "Disappearing-Self' Problem ..... The "Intersubjective Good" Problem . . . . . . The "Constitution of a Community" Problem .. The State of our Union, the Union of our State. Notes .
CHAPTER VI: NON-HuMAN
83 88
94
102 116
LIFE AND THE BOUNDARIES OF COMMUNITY
1. Introduction: A Persian Fable. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2. Initial Human Pairing with Animals 3. "Animal Phenomenology" and the Possibility of Community Generated Without Humans . . . . . . . . . . 4. The Gracious Act of Attention Late-in-Coming .. . 5. Community Through Narrative. . . . . . . . . . . . 6. Humans and Animals in a Second-Order Community. 7. Conclusion: The Common Good as Moral Foundation No~s
78 81
121 123 126 129 131 134 137 141
BIBLIOGRAPHY
144
INDEX
152
Acknowledgments
Philosophy, like any other endeavor, flourishes in community. I have been lucky enough to find members of my community willing to share their time, their talents, and their hearts with me now for several years. First, I would like to thank those who have played a role specifically in the work which follows: Professors James Hart, Paul Spade, and Paul Eisenberg. I am grateful for Paul Spade's perceptive comments, keen philosophical insights, and friendship. He has provided support and guidance that has made this project stronger and my life richer. Jim Hart's role in my project will be especially clear to the reader. These pages are filled with his spirit and his intellectual presence. In large part, he is responsible for setting me on my present philosophic course and for providing an enthusiasm, dedication, and demeanor which continues to inspire me in both my academic and my personal life. I am lucky and honored to call him my friend. Gratitude is also owed to Robert Sokolowski who offered his constructive comments on an earlier draft of this work and whose philosophic clarity is a blessing to the world. My thanks to Ullrich Melle who helped see to the publication of this work, and to Maja S. M. De Keijzer at Kluwer whose infinite patience for, among other things, my lack of skills with technology made all of this possible. I am grateful to the Department of Philosophy at Indiana University for supporting me with a teaching contract from 1990-94 and for honoring me with the Nelson Fellowship for the 1993-94 academic year which allowed me to concentrate on writing my dissertation-the work from which this text has grown. A deep gratitude is also owed to my friends-academic and otherwise. The fact that these friends are too numerous to mention here only serves as testimony to my great fortune. To each of you-old and new-my thanks. And for Dr. Charles Klingler, who is responsible in so many ways for my continuing education and joy in life, a special place in my heart is always reserved. Also, a wonderful and heart-felt thanks to my family: Jennylind, David, Chris, and Marian. As Aristotle reminds us, one thinks best with friends, and I have been truly blessed by those to whom I am
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related and those I have been lucky enough to encounter. Finally, I acknowledge my gratitude to my wife, Marines. She has been all things to me: a typist, a critic, an artist capable of acting out appropriate examples when called upon to do so, a deep well of appropriate thought and insight, and a continuous inspiration. She has played a role in the development of the ideas presented here too deep to be expressed adequately in such a short space. I am guided by and grateful for her everpresent reminder of the richness of a truly communal life. Some of the work which follows appeared in a different form in various locations. Parts of Chapters Two and Three were included in "Constituting the Transcendent Community: Some Phenomenological Implications of Husserl's Social Ontology," Selected Studies in Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy 19 (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1996), pp. 83-100. Chapter Five appeared in a different form in "Moral Categoriality and Moral Being," International Philosophical Quarterly, vol. XXXVI, no. 1, issue 141 (March 1996), pp. 65-83. Chapter Six appeared in part as "The Boundaries of the Phenomenological Community: Non-Human Life and the Extent of our Moral Enmeshment," Becoming Persons, edited by Robert Fisher (Oxford, England: Applied Theology Press, 1995), pp. 777-797. Other parts of Chapter Six appeared in "Deep Community: Phenomenology's Disclosure of the Common Good," Between the Species, vol. 10, numbers 3-4 (Summer/Fall 1994), pp. 98-105. These works are reproduced here by kind permission of the editors of the respective journals and volumes. Part of Chapter Two also appeared in "Husser!, Aristotle, and the Sphere of Ownness," The Southwest Philosophy Review, vol. 12, no. 1 (1995), pp. 141-150, and is reproduced by permission of the author.
CHAPTER I
Morality and Phenomenology
1. INTRODUCTION
Phenomenology, in its traditional encounters with ethics, has commonly aimed at a more descriptive rather than prescriptive goal. That is, the project is often one of describing the structures of the ethical experience and of moral action. This comes as no great surprise as it is the aim of phenomenology to investigate such structures of consciousness and thereby achieve understanding. The proposed direction of the following project, however, is both phenomenological and prescriptive. It is thus my aim to undertake a phenomenological description of intersubjectivity-eventually coming to relate how it is that we constitute the Ego and the Other-and then to move toward claiming that a certain ethic is born of the realizations encountered as a result of this phenomenological inquiry. More specifically, if it can be shown that the Ego and the Other arise together in sense-that it is not the case that we first have a notion of Self and then constitute the Other through a simple, unilateral, analogical transfer of sense from my Ego onto the other "object" which I deem is acting and looking enough like me to warrant my granting her subjectivity-then we can conclude that we are phenomenologically committed to a sense of community in a very foundational way. This is to say that there is never a point at which I consider myself as an isolated, monadic Ego. Rather, I am always and fundamentally constituted as a member of a community-as a Self among Others-and given this, there are certain ethical implications. Namely, Libertarian or Egoistic theories can be critiqued by the simple fact that they fundamentally misdescribe the individual: we are not isolated units seeking to survive through competition, separate and distinct from the relationships in which we are involved and from those with whom we are involved as well. Furthermore, the Egalitarian or Kantian theories also offer a misdescription of humanity in their insistence that we can abstract away particular social and relational contexts and achieve a true, generic human Self which is rational, isolated, etc. Whether we go through the moves of Rawls' Original Position argument
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or attempt to follow Hospers' call for the primacy of choice and noninterference in society, we encounter a point at which such theories rest on a description of the Ego-the human individual-as being able to be thought of apart from a social context. But this is, in effect, impossible, for there is never a sense in which the human Ego exists under such conditions. We are fundamentally in community. The communitarian realization we have achieved at this point is not startlingly new. Many have argued for something similar. Michael Sandel, for instance, insists on a communitarian ethic given that the way in which we are situated in the world "makes a difference" I and we must thus take our relationships and social roles into consideration when doing ethics. But the force of this "must" is lacking. This is a common problem for communitarianism-perhaps such projects sit well with our intuitions or seem to offer a more pragmatic and realistic description of humanity, but the theory that convinces us that communitarianism is the proper prescription is conspicuously absent. The phenomenological investigation undertaken here hopes to offer the is from which the ought can be had-or, to be more precise, to suggest how this dichotomy is foundationally misdirected. The project which follows is divided into six chapters. Chapters two and three attempt to set the phenomenological groundwork of intersubjectivity and will thus be concerned with social ontology-showing how it is, exactly, that we are committed to the claim that the Ego and Other arise in sense together. Chapters four and five then describe the communitarian ethic which falls out of such phenomenological commitments. Chapter four deals with the structure of moral acts in general and the nature of our moral being, while chapter five discusses the form of communitarianism generated by the phenomenological community: the way in which the Other's good and the Good of the community are so intertwined with my own good-indeed, each relies on the other in a foundational, definitional way-that when I fail to consider the Other's good in my own pursuits I am acting, somehow, in an uninformed way. Finally, chapter six is an investigation into the limits of the community. That is, given that we are in community and that we are phenomenologicaIly committed to a certain ethical responsibility to Others, where do we draw the boundaries of our community and in what sense can our community be thought to include non-human life? Before embarking on such a project, though, we first encounter a question of justification-the problem of the descriptive rather than prescriptive goal of phenomenology to which I alluded above. How could phenomenology as a descriptive tool and a method ever hope to found an ethic?2 The answer has something to do with the relationship between science and morality.
Morality and Phenomenology
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2. SCIENCE, MORALITY, AND PHENOMENOLOGY Science after Galileo has made its impact felt in realms beyond the "scientific." It is a point to which Husserl turned our attention in the Crisis and one which has been repeated over and again in various incarnations in Post-Husserlian Continental philosophy. With the advent of an exact science committed to ideal forms and pure essences came the notion that the world around us is mere appearance-that truth was somehow beyond or distinct from this appearance. The complete vacuum, the frictionless surface, the string of perfect flexibility-such entities which do not, indeed cannot, appear are taken as the measure of truth in our world. Ours is now a world which is somehow imperfect and unable to live up to the standards of the exact science which studies it, ultimately representing a realm of mere appearance which is clearly not as "good" as the ideals our science posits. Suddenly, the complete vacuum is not just a notion created through experiencing relative vacuums and imagining a limit-volumes of spaces with less and less stufe Rather, the complete vacuum is the best vacuum; but alas, we are doomed only to experience inferior vacuums in our world. Strangely enough, all of this has a great deal to do with ethics. As Husserl points out: 4 After Galileo had carried out, slightly earlier, the primal establishment of the new natural science, it was Descartes who conceived and at the same time set in systematic motion the new idea of universal philosophy, ...philosophy as "universal mathematics." And immediately it had a powerful effect. Consequently, if exact essences are the norms-the true, best forms toward which our scientific, philosophic, and everyday world strives-then there is no room for subjectivity or agency. Let me be clear why this is so. Often, the crisis of moral philosophy is thought to be that there is a standard of scientific truth unattainable in the realm of morality; namely, science involves a process of measurement, but any sort of value theory is immeasurable. Standardizing an ideal norm for a coefficient of friction, for instance, leads to a rather simple and universal system of measuring friction, but measuring and standardizing the Good is not such an easy task. The problem with morality, then, is that the scientist can measure while the ethicist cannot, and this makes science better. Indeed, according to this theory measurement lends a certain "credibility" to science that value theory lacks. However, I would not characterize the problemthis crisis of moral philosophy-as one of measurement. Rather, the true
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tension lies in the marginalization of human subjectivity (and thus agency) given a scientific world-view. And this is due, in part, to the nature of exact essences. Exact essences are objective: this is, to some degree, an analytic truth. The complete vacuum is complete regardless of the subjectivity of the scientist. All complete vacuums are exactly the same. Projecting the imaginary Iimit-emptying space until it is fully empty--<.:annot depend on the characteristics of the emptier. The irrelevancy of ethics becomes clear when we take this world of pure essences to be the real (as opposed to apparent) and best (as opposed to inferior and everyday) world. In such a world, all has been determined. There is no need for human action. As Robert Sokolowski explains: 5 ... [I]n a world of exact essences, there are no situations that call for human action because there are no situations that need to be determined one way or another by a human being, and the sheer objectivity of exact essences precludes any reference to an agent and an agent's character as a measure of what ought to be done....Therefore, a world in which exact essences are taken to be the final reality excludes what seems to be most important to human beings: human skills and human virtues do not count in such a world. Exact science becomes the measure and ethics is passe. There are no more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in our philosophy: ideal essences account for all. The consequences of such a commitment to scientific idealization are manifest in a variety of ways. What is common to each is the fact that there is no room for ethics. Within the academic discipline of philosophy, the logical positivist movement is, to a certain degree, a form of such idealization. Language, the world, and philosophy itself become imperfect reflections of a higher logical order under the positivist paradigm. Understanding "pure logic" becomes the goal, and it is assumed that once we reach this goal we will realize that the questions we asked before-especially questions having to do with ethics and values-were bad questions in the sense that they reflected our imperfect world and tools. Hence, A. J. Ayer says with certainty that "[t]he presence of an ethical symbol in a proposition adds nothing to its factual content,,,6 and Rudolph Carnap maintains that "a value statement is nothing else than a command in a misleading grammatical form It does not assert anything that can neither be proved nor disproved [I]t is neither true nor false."? More recently, Paul Churchland has
Morality and Phenomenology
5
straightforwardly admitted that science will eventually "explain away" such things as values. In this future and better world, "neuroscience [will have] matured to the point where the poverty of our current conceptions is apparent to everyone, and ...we shall then be able to set about reconceiving our internal states and activities, within a truly adequate conceptual framework at last."s This is only slightly different from the proposal that science destroys the possibility of ethics due to the objectivity of ideal scientific essences and the lack of a need for human subjectivity. Here the suggestion is that an objective ideal such as a scientific map of the brain (i.e., an indication of what thoughts "really" look like) will eventually show that values and subjectivity can be explained in terms of something "independent" of values and subjectivity. Indeed, a good map of the brain (which includes a proper understanding of a value) must not have anything to do with the cartographer's agency, character, etc. The same is true for logical analysis. Logic (i.e., a logic without a real content, a formal logic, or a pure logic) must be the same for everyone-it is an ideal essence that logicians study. Our understanding of the world is confused by messy logic as it is manifest in messy language. If only we could speak the language of an ideal logic, we would see that values do not "really" exist. The ideal logical language can say a lot about how some things are and some things aren't, but it cannot say what should and shouldn't be, and since this ideal logic is the best, we can only conclude that any talk of values in everyday language is actually nonsense. More concrete examples can be found. Consider, for instance, the work of entomologist Miguel Altieri who suggests that there are dangerous and destructive consequences to the scientific idealization of agriculture. The problem begins at the university, where scientists study agricultural techniques and goals with the aim of increasing yields. In the past, agriculture was a matter for farmers, not scientists. But, as Altieri points out, with the advent of the discipline of agriculture (a term that has been nearly replaced by agribusiness ), a new set of standards has emerged. In their investigations of soils and crops and insects and weather, scientists come to posit idealized conditions and even idealized farms. Consequently, all "real" farms are treated as imperfect instantiations of the better idealized farm, and two things result. First, the output of real farms is measured by the possible (and preferred) output of an idealized farm. Of course, this output can never be realized-it is based on a constructed ideal-but it serves as a standard for judgment. Efficiency and total yield offer a way of evaluating the farm, thus replacing traditional goals and standards such as how rewarding the work is to the farmer, whether the farm is capable of sustaining the life of nearby people, the quality of the relationships between the land and crops and animals and weather and people, etc. These new standards serve to
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alienate the real farmers who work the land as their success comes to be measured by how well they meet abstract requirements and ideals that have nothing to do with their particular land or capabilities. Second, it is typical for scientists to become frustrated that their ideals are unrealized, and thus they attempt to re-make the real land in the image of the ideal. They bombard the soil with chemicals and technology in hopes of achieving the proper pH level, the perfect level of nutrients and water, the ideal balance of insects. 9 This is to say that: Working with universities, agricultural scientists have increasingly emulated the norms and laboratory practices of pure biology, physics, and chemistry ....Farmers, however, are interested in specific crops growing in a specific location (i.e., on their farm) ....[I]ndustrial agriculture...attempts to reproduce the conditions of controlled variability that are necessary for good science within the farmer's fields. It does this by altering the environment through massive inputs of chemicals and capital-intensive equipment for irrigation and standarized cultivation.... [T]hese practices . make [farmers] completely dependent upon new science, . [and] while this cycle suits the interests of scientists (who have a steady flow of research funds) and chemical companies (which can introduce a steady flow of products), it is far from clear that it truly serves the interests of farmers. 10 Objective, ideal essences have thus become the norm and human agency, subjectivity, and the world of real people and real land suffer the consequences. Indeed, Altieri even suggests that the agricultural crisis (which is an environmental and socio-political crisis) can be traced back to Descartes, whose philosophy ushered in an age of "reductionist research norms ... [and a] scientific emphasis upon universal laws and the replicability of experiments [which] has inadvertently substituted a set of values that are inappropriate for agriculture."" Yet, to return to our phenomenological ponderings, James Hart still contends that l2 [although] the specifically ethical side got lost [after Descartes], and the theoretical philosophy became independent of the ethical...Husserl sees, nevertheless, in Cartesian radicalism an essential feature of ethical refiection ....[Namely, that we must] wake up and radically resolve to live an enlightened life according to evident principles.
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Clearly, systematic doubt was not an essentially ethical project for Descartes. 13 But when translated into phenomenological terms we see the importance of the attempt to doubt to the discovery of ethics. The phenomenological reduction-the great epoche disengaging us from the world-has its roots in Cartesian doubt, although the reduction is better understood as a bracketing, a setting aside of truth claims and a distancing of ourselves from our convictions, rather than a disbelief about the world and what appears. And related to the phenomenological reduction is the attempt to perform a transition from a practical to a theoretical life in another sense-an attempt to perform an ethical epoche where we "disengage all established attachments, commitments, and validities which our continuously streaming life contains in itself.,,14 This is what Hart calls the ethical reduction, and a form of what we will encounter later as Husserl's reductio "sphere of ownness" argument. IS In the fifth of the Cartesian Meditations Husserl argues that it is impossible to screen off what is other from our Self-i.e., when attempting to reduce our experience to a "sphere of ownness" where all that is not basic to the Ego is screened off, we discover that we cannot: we are foundationally committed to the Other as a necessary precondition for there being a sense of Self. It is a small step to attempt to disengage all attachments and values that are alien as well (that is, all that is not essentially monadic), only to realize that again the task is impossible. The sense of an I is destroyed by screening off the way in which we are committed to the Other and the way in which the Self's values are intertwined and interdefined with the Other's. The Ego's good is so enmeshed with the Other's good that the experiment fails. And now it is clear how phenomenology is the first step to establishing ethics in a world where exact science reigns. Phenomenology allows us to focus on the appearing world with pride rather than shame. We see through it the crisis of the exact sciences, and as Sokolowski points out, we have a bridge for communication between the two worlds and for recognizing and dealing with the power exact science seems to possess. Ideal essences owe their being to the appearing world-this is easily and often overlooked, but the phenomenologist knows the humble beginnings from which the current sovereign arose. Finally, phenomenology establishes the necessity of a moral Self-a Self which does not, indeed cannot, find itself in a world of exact essences where human deliberation is irrelevant. But we are getting ahead of ourselves. I wanted only to suggest, at this point, how phenomenology is an ethical project, how it makes room for the ethical and even points to the inescapability of an ethical Self. We will soon tum our attention toward describing morality in more detail (chapter 4), but for now we begin our investigations in earnest by asking how it is,
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exactly, that there not only comes to be a world populated by moral agents, but that there comes to be a world populated by people at all: how are the Ego, the Other, and the community constituted?
NOTES ISee, for instance, Sandel (1984), 17. 2As we will see, this will become a non-issue. The descriptive/normative boundary, much like the is/ought boundary, will prove to be a fiction. Thus in a very real sense, an ethic need not to be "founded," for the ethical world is our world, appearing to us at every moment. ]All of this is covered in the Crisis (Cf., especially, Part II), and Sokolowski does a nice job of putting these issues together in his "Exact Science and the World" (see Pictures, Quotations, and Distinctions) as well. It might also be pointed out that such science has a Platonic element to it as well. Galileo takes the brunt of the blame, but Platonic forms are, on a certain level, ideal instances of imperfect worldly instantiations as well. And in Plato, it is clear that the forms are good ideals. 4Husserl (1970),73. 5Sokolowski (1992), 162-163. 6 Ayer (1965), 30. 7Carnap (1935), 85. 8Churchland (1984), 89. YAnd when they learn how to control the weather, they will demand this as well (although modern irrigation is certainly one aspect of just such an attempt). IOThompson, et al. (1994), 218. llThompson, et al. (1994), 217. 12Hart (1992), 30. iJUnless one considers the importance of God (or an appeal to the passions of the soul) in Descartes' project; yet even the appearance of a beneficent God cannot make the project ethical in the sense we are now pursuing. 14Hart (1992), 31. Cf. Hart's Chapter I, §8 and Husserliana Vlll for more on all of this. 15Cf. the Fifth Meditation and Chapter 2 of this work.
CHAPTER II
The Ego and the Other in a Pairing Relation
1. INTRODUCTION
The Husserlian corpus contains numerous passages focusing on intersubjectivity and related issues. Husserliana Xl/I-XV, texts collected and edited by Iso Kern in 1973, span the first thirty-five years of this century and bear witness to Husserl's dynamic account of social ontology. Indeed, it is a question that never left him and one which he never thought to have solved in its entirety. To pick the Cartesian Meditations from this catalog and claim for it a special standing as Husserl's definitive theory of intersubjectivity would, clearly, be an historic and scholarly inaccuracy. Kern's introductions make clear that there is no reason to privilege the Cartesian Meditations-it is simply one statement of one form of one theory. Although we will be turning, from time to time, to the Husserliana texts, the work which follows primarily focuses on the Cartesian Meditations-specifically, the Fifth Meditation. This is justified, I believe, by the goal of the project. If the goal were to present Husserl' s version of intersubjectivity, i.e., to "get Husserl right" by painting an accurate picture of his theory as it developed and changed over time, a different approach would be necessary. But this is not the case. Rather, I hope to present a phenomenological theory of intersubjectivity and suggest its implications, and for this purpose the Husserlian theory contained in the Cartesian Meditations is appropriate. In fact, it has not been chosen by accident. Not only is this particular starting point productive in terms of providing a successful foundation for the rest of the work which follows, it is, I would maintain, true. Consequently, we will spend some time getting Husserl right as he argues in the Fifth Meditation-working through the theory in detail, pointing out its strengths, and patching up its weaknesses. Thus we begin in earnest. Husserl opens the Fifth Meditation with a dilemma: "When I, the meditating I, reduce myself to my absolute transcendental ego by phenomenological epoche do I not become solus ipse... ,,?I That is, he asks, how can the phenomenologist come to believe in other Egos if statements of fact concerning the external world have been bracketed, their truth or falsity "put
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on hold"? Such is the motivating question behind both the notion of empathic perception and the discovery that a reduction to the level of a windowless monad is impossible. Yet, as we will see, James Hart is correct in explaining that the attempt to perform such a reduction need not be considered a failure, since Indeed, it is continuous with the results of the project of bracketing all forms of belief (doxa) in regard to being: At the most basic level of the primal passive streaming this is not possible. Thereby the true value and the great discovery of the primordial reduction comes to light. Only in attempting the radical reduction do we obtain the evidence that an absolute disengagement from an elemental world-substrate (identity synthesis) and from the co-presence of the Other is not possible. 2 Thus the Ego and the Other are constituted together, and a basic level of community forms the foundation of our ontology. But before turning to such issues in detail, let us first investigate how Husserl attempts to demonstrate this point in the Fifth Meditation by outlining the argument for empathic perception, eventually moving to describe and solve some of the problems related to the concept of empathy and the establishment of the Ego and the Other. To be sure, these passages are dense. Consequently, a bit of patience is a prerequisite. In the next section I will provide a sketch of the Fifth Meditation with very little detailed explanation. The analysis I offer is not the standard reading, but I will attempt to construct an account of Husserl's thought that both makes sense and strives to do justice to the text. Following this-that is, after having established the basic framework of the argument, its boundaries, and its flavor-I will tum to investigate two key passages in more detail: the reduction process that leads to the sphere of ownness and the pairing relation that exists between the Ego and the Other.
2. EMPATHIC PERCEPTION AND THE CONSTITUTION OF THE EGO AND THE OTHER IN CARTESIAN MEDITATIONS
Husserl begins with a reductio argument in which he first assumes that it is possible to reduce all experience to a "sphere of ownness" in which everything that is not basic to us is screened off. This "sphere of ownness" is a bit of jargon that is important to pin down. Husserl refers to it throughout the rest of the Fifth Meditation, and it is a cornerstone for the ethic
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which we are attempting to uncover. Simply put, it is the collection of experiences we might have which are not experiences of other people and which do not rely on other people for their meaning. Try to strip away or reduce these experiences involving Others (i.e., other Egos) and supposedly we are left with a unique sphere of experiences involving only Self-a sphere of ownness. In more technical terms, Husserl suggests that we make an attempt to reduce all relational predicates from our experience until we are left with only those monadic qualities that are inherent to our nature and that are not dependent on any outside being or state of affairs. Toward this end we block off all "alien" and "other-spiritual" things, abstracting the characteristic of belonging to the surrounding world, i.e., the "world for everyone" in which we are "capable of mattering or not mattering" (CM 9596). Once this is accomplished, we look to see what is left. Husserl remarks that there is a certain stratum of Nature still in this "peculiar epoche," although it is not the Nature of natural science since it has lost its sense of being experienced by everyone (CM 96). In addition, there are some predicates left to us in this "kind of world"-specifically those "value" predicates and predicates of "work" directly associated with the Ego (CM 98). It is at this point, however, that we come to realize something truly amazing. We have reduced experience to things only in our sphere of ownness, but we find that the "psychic life of my Ego..., including my actual and possible experience of what is other, is wholly unaffected by screening off what is other [Which is to say that] I, the reduced 'human Ego' ...am constituted as a member of the 'world' with a multiplicity of 'objects outside me'" including the possibility of other Egos (CM 98). This is a major discovery. But the question, then, is how it is that we actually come to constitute empathically an alter-ego. In other words, how do we conjure another original sphere, one that is not our own? As it turns out, our original sphere was not what we might have expected. We were unable to reduce experience completely so as not to have a notion of Others. This still leaves us, however, with the problem of accounting for the process by which we can securely have access to the Other's essence (CM 109). For this, Husserl invokes the notion of apperception. Apperception is a making "co-present"-a "making present to consciousness a 'there too,' which nevertheless is not itself there..." (CM 109). This process occurs, for example, in everyday experience when we perceive objects as wholes. When I see a house, I do not have the experience of seeing "the front of a house" though the front of the house is all that is actually in my field of vision. Instead, there is an apperception of the back of the house-a making present to my consciousness a "there too" in that, although all I physically see is the front of a house, the back is "there too"
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for me; I thus can say "I see the house." A question arises at this point as to the nature of apperception. Is it a matter of induction or inference? Husser! is clear that this is not the case. "Apperception," he writes, "is not inference, not a thinking act. Every apperception ...points back to a 'primal instituting,' in which an object with a similar sense became constituted for the first time ....[There is thus] an analogizing transfer of an originally instituted objective sense to a new case..." (CM Ill). That is, apperception is simply an acknowledgment of the fact that we can intend something that is absent. It is a mode of perceiving. Husser! illustrates the point further with an example of a child first encountering a pair of scissors. At first, the child apprehends them as a mere object; after finally grasping them in their "final sense," however, she will then always see scissors as scissors at first glance (CM Ill). A judgment will not take place once the transfer of sense occurs. The child need not judge "These are scissors," but rather will take them to be scissors straight off. A key aspect of this notion of the role of apperception and judgment is made clear when it is applied to our inquiry into the constitution of the Other. In this case, the only primal instituting we have to go on is, supposedly, our Ego. Thus it would seem that the Ego must act-at least in some foundational way-as a primordial agentival model for our grounding of the idea of an Other. This is one sense in which it is clear how Husser! can claim that the notion of the Other is inherent in the notion of the Self. This claim, however, will become troublesome, as we will see below. Husser! calls the exact mechanism for this apperception of the Other "pairing." Pairing is a "universal phenomenon of the transcendental sphere...a primal form of that passive synthesis which we designate as 'association'" (CM 112). Furthermore, "[i]n a pairing association...two data are given intuitionally...as data appearing with mutual distinctness... [and] found phenomenologically a unity of similarity and thus are always constituted precisely as a pair" (CM 112). Consequently, the Other-during this pairing-takes from my Ego the sense of animated body, my Ego always being available for this move since I "am always prominent in my primordial field of perception, regardless of whether I pay attention to myself..." (CM 113). The result of this is that a second animated body is now experienced. There is, however, still a question as to how we endow this second organism with existent status and an Ego all of its own. As Husserl puts it: "What makes this organism another's, rather than a second organism of my own?" (CM 113). The answer has to rest in appeal to further evidence, but we are limited as to what we can allow as evidence since we are still operating in a world supposedly reduced to ownmostness. Clearly, the notion of a presentation that fulfills our horizonal anticipation of the Other is excluded
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as is any similar notion that depends on evidence found outside our "reduced world." Of such evidence Husserl remarks that we must "exclude it a priori" as it would lead over to another original sphere and, in a sense, assume what we are trying to prove (CM 109). The kind of evidence that we are seeking is not evidence that "gives something originally," but rather evidence that consistently verifies something indicated: "[t]he character of the existent 'other' has its basis in this kind of verifiable accessibility of what is not originally accessible... [in that the] experienced animated organism of another continues to prove itself as actually an animate organism, solely in its changing but incessantly harmonious 'behavior' ..." (CM 114). Of course, such experiences would not be possible if there were not an original "set" to allow for an analog. It is in this way that we might (eventually) understand Husserl's claim that the Other is a "phenomenological modification of myself' (CM 114). Finally, the Ego is used as the primordial model for the Other in one other sense, namely, in the way in which I further define the Other's existence by seeing him as a possible, but never actual, version of me as I am located in space. The argument is that I am always Here while the Other is always There. I define There as what I could call Here if I were the Other. Since I can "convert any There into a Here," it follows that my perspective is arbitrary (CM 116). This makes room for Others in a sort of "logical space." I realize that "I apperceive... [the Other] as having spatial modes of appearance like those I should have if I should go over there and be where he is" (CM 117).3 Such is Husserl's discussion of empathic perception. Yet clearly, it is not the case that the relationship of defining and constituting is solely one-sided. In as much as I define and act as a model for the Other, so too am I defined and constituted by him. This is the nature of apperceptive pairing and the key to understanding Husserl's argument. But before turning to this theme, we first investigate the process by means of which these discoveries were made possible: the reduction to a sphere of ownness.
3. THE SPHERE OF OWNNESS
What could Husserl mean by this reduction to a sphere of ownness, this "peculiar kind of epoche"? The first thing that we notice is that it involves an abstraction, an exclusion, a stripping away. This is unlike the phenomenological reduction in one significant way. Although the transcendental epoche of the phenomenological reduction is a bracketing, a setting aside of truth claims concerning the world, and an attempt to disengage
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ourselves from the natural attitude where the world and our engagement with it are taken for granted, we might best understand this transcendental epoche as a true re-ductio, a "turning back," where attention is turned back on itself. Rather than reflecting on the world, we reflect on our reflection on and our engagement with the world. Consequently, though something is ignored something else is newly attended to. We can think of it as Hart explains as a kind of reflection or bending one's attention back on oneself. Reflection interrupts our straight away preoccupation with the passing parade to a consideration of our involvement with it....The act of the epoche is ...at once an act of detachment and disclosure: I refrain from going along with my non-reflective involvement in the parade [i.e., I give up the natural attitude], and, at the same time, I intend my watching of the parade [i.e., I tum my attention back to my engagement with the world]. These are not two distinct acts but two aspects of moving from "looking at the parade" to "looking at the parade".... 4 But the reduction to a sphere of ownness is somewhat different in that it does not have these two aspects. That is, the peculiar epoche which achieves the sphere of ownness (let us henceforth call this the primordial reduction, as Husserl labels the sphere of ownness the primordial sphere) detaches but does not redirect. The primordial reduction, like the phenomenological reduction, excludes something, but unlike the phenomenological reduction, the primordial reduction does not refocus or move from looking at one thing to another; rather, in the primordial reduction we continue to attend to an ever-shrinking world-a world in which all experiences "relating immediately or mediately to other subjectivity" (CM 93) are systematically stripped away, leaving us, supposedly, with less and less experience. But what sort of stripping is this? How do we actually carry out this reduction? There are several parallels in the philosophic tradition which might help us. Perhaps something similar is occurring in Aristotle's Metaphysics 23 in a passage that is usually referred to as "the stripping process argument." Aristotle writes: When all else is taken away evidently nothing but matter remains. For of the other elements some are affections, products, and capacities of bodies, while length, breadth, and depth are quantities and not substances. For a quantity
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is not a substance; but the substance is rather that to which these belong primarily. But when length and breadth and depth are taken away we see nothing left except that which is bounded by these, whatever it be; so that to those who consider the question thus matter alone must seem to be substance. By matter I mean that which in itself is neither a particular thing nor of a certain quantity nor assigned to any other of the categories by which being is determined. For there is something of which each of these is predicated, so that its being is different from that of each of the predicates; for the predicates other than substance are predicated of substance, while substance is predicated of matter. Therefore the ultimate substratum is of itself neither a particular thing nor of a particular quantity nor otherwise positively characterized; nor yet negatively, for negations also will belong to it only by accident. [1029all-26] Here, Aristotle suggests that we imagine stripping away all of the qualities of an object in order to see what remains. While it is true that Aristotle is stripping away predicates from objects, and Husserl suggests stripping away experiences from a subject (i.e., "the Ego"), there is an important and strong parallel. Many commentators maintain that Aristotle's work is metaphysical, and that this particular passage in Z3 is an argument for prime matter, but we need not think of Aristotle in this way.5 Donald Stahl, for instance, suggests that there is no argument for prime matter present-that Aristotle is proposing a mental exercise in this passage whereby the qualities of an object are systematically disregarded until we have "reduced" the object to a propertyless thing in our mind. 6 For example, we might imagine stripping the moon of its color. We imagine the moon without its gray or its bright white. Then we strip the moon of its shape. We imagine it without its circularity or crescent curves. We disregard every bit of knowledge we have of the moon-we strip away every quality it has for us-and then we look to see what is left. The surprising thing is that it is not prime matter. It is not a kind of "stuff' that possesses no qualities in and of itself yet acts as a backdrop, a medium, a point of origin, etc. for all of the qualities we have mentally stripped away. We might have expected to find prime matter at the end of the stripping process. At least at first, logically speaking, it makes some sense to assume that "when all else is taken away evidently nothing but matter remains." After all, predicates have to be predicated of somethingin order to strip them away they had to be stuck to something in the first
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place, and since that something itself cannot be a predicate (otherwise it, too, would be stripped), once all of the predicates are gone only the something-the quality-less stuff-must remain. So it is surprising not to find prime matter in the end. But this is exactly what happens. There are two ways of putting what we do, in fact, find. Either we can say that the stripping process was a failure, or that it was ineffective.? In either case, we realize that even after the stripping process we still have the object. Consequently, Stahl suggests that Aristotle is not attempting to postulate "the matter of the original object [as] a peculiar entity with no properties...[but rather to] consider that same thing without considering its properties."s That is, the moon is still the moon after undergoing the stripping process. The best we can do is say that we will try to think of the moon without its roundness or without its whiteness, but we have to admit that it is still the moon in its totality about which we are thinking. Stripping might be an interesting mental exercise, but it has no effect on its object (i.e., on our experience of the object).9 Consequently, Aristotle has shown, through a reductio argument beginning with the reasonable assumption that when all else is taken away only matter remains, that there is no such thing as prime matter. Stripping an object of its qualities does not result in a bare hypokeimenon. 1O Of such a subject neither something positive nor negative can be said [1029a24-26]. It is helpful to see Husserl's argument as a parallel-the primordial reduction as a sort of stripping process, and the sphere of ownness as akin to prime matter. Just as the stripping process failed to achieve prime matter, so the primordial reduction never gets us to a sphere of ownness. Given the account of Aristotle we have been discussing then, a remarkably similar story can be told about Husser\. When we disengage or strip away "all constitutional effects of intentionality relating immediately or mediately to other subjectivity" we might very well expect to find a "sphere of peculiar ownness" (CM 93). It makes sense. If I start with my full and rich intentional life and systematically disregard any experience that relies on an Other for its meaning (i.e., all experience of the Other and all experience which the Other makes possible), I would expect to be left with experiences of myself and experiences of other things, events, etc. which have meaning for me in the absence of the Other; i.e., things that are peculiarly mine. For example, I could begin by stripping away my experience of my students. I would systematically disregard their physical appearance (e.g., the color of each student's hair, the shape of his or her face, the bright sea of school colors and Greek letters that confronts me as I stand before the class during lecture). I would disregard the sounds of students (e.g., the hesitant questions, the confrontational demands, the scattered coughs and throat-clearings that rise up in chaotic
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patterns across the room). I would, as Husserl explains it, strive to obtain the "reduced 'world' ...by excluding the sense-components pertaining to what is other or alien" (eM 104). Notice, also, that it would seem I need to strip away the notion of teaching in general, for without some Others around to be (at least possibly) taught, there is no experience of teaching. And so it is, I would discover, with experiences involving sports, politics, religion, commerce, compassion, reproduction, competition, cooperation, sharing, stealing, feeling crowded, feeling isolated, arguing, agreeing, leading, following, trusting, envy, friendship, acceptance, abandonment, mourning, all types of communication, and all concepts of justice, just to name a few. My world truly begins to shrink as it becomes evident that not only must I disregard the people around me, but also the institutions, actions, and objects of my life that only have meaning in the context of assuming other people. Now what can we expect to remain? Perhaps at this point I would have to change my initial expectation of what the sphere of ownness will look like. Admitting that the things and events around me lose their meaning without intersubjectivity,', I might want to say that only experiences of myself will survive the stripping process. Suppose I begin this stripping, this primordial reduction, right now. My wife, unfortunately, would be the first thing to go. I would have to disregard every experience of her that I am having now as she sits across the room reading. Now things are very different for me. Not only has my wife disappeared, but this disappearance drastically changes the way I experience the room. At once, I am alone. But I must disregard this feeling of loneliness or isolation as well since it rests on my wife's not being here, and this is an experience that relies on an absent Other for its meaning: I can neither feel accompanied nor isolated when reduced. 12 So my feelings change and some of my perceptions change, but I am inclined to say that the room still exists for me; i.e., my wife is no longer sitting on the daybed, but the daybed is still there. The problem is that the daybed was one of the first things we bought when we were married. I had wanted a sofa but my wife wanted that daybed. In a real sense, that is what the daybed is for me, and since these layers of meaning require my affirming my wife's existence, they must be disregarded in the reduction. The daybed is no longer experienced, and similar stories exist for the other objects in the room. But surely some experiences survive. The significance the daybed had for me in my relationship with my wife, the fact that the daybed was purchased, the knowledge that I did not make the daybed but rather it was constructed by another-all of these experiences will be disregarded, but surely I will still see something. Someone might want to maintain that the shape and color and feel must remain. At least we could admit, the argument
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would go, that I will still experience "a patch of red" in the "shape of a rectangle" or "the smooth, wood texture of the backboard." And other experiences might remain as well. Right now my back hurts from sitting too long; my glasses are slipping down my nose and need to be pushed up again; I feel a little warm. I experience my body and my internal states, and these things seem peculiarly mine. Basic sensations of the external world, then, coupled with experiences of myself might be thought to remain, survivors of the primordial reduction. This, however, is not the case. If I actually try the epoche rather than just write about it or attempt to reason out what might happen, I am struck by a remarkable fact. As in our discussion of Aristotle, there are two ways of stating this fact. We can either conclude that the reduction is impossible and has failed or that it has been carried out to no effect. Take the daybed for instance. Try as I might, I simply cannot think of my experience of it as "a patch of red." Experience is not made up of uninterpreted sense data (e.g., light of a certain wave length impinging on my eye). This, if nothing else, must be the lesson of the phenomenological project in general. Experience, to be experience, is interpretation. Experience is always experience of something-something more than patches of color, durations of sound, etc. When I look at the daybed I experience the daybed-it appears to me as the daybed, not as a set of sensations that need to be collected, analyzed, and judged to be representative of something else. Furthermore, the horizonal context simply cannot be stripped away. The possibility of experiencing the daybed includes the fact that I experience it as a whole object, as furniture, as constructed, etc. Assuming that we can strip away this horizon, this context, relies on a fundamental misconception of experience. If intentionality could be characterized as "object + its horizonal context" then we could properly imagine that subtracting the horizonal context would leave us with the object. But the structure of my intentional life is to have objects given to me in an horizonal context. There is no summation here; i.e., the content is not simply the sum. Things simply appear to me as things. 13 My expectations of an object might prove to be wrong-I might emptily intend things-but if something were "to appear" without context, it would, in effect, not be experienced. To speak of such a thing appearing in the first place is somewhat of an absurdity, but that is the point. Either we can say that a "daybed of ownness" (i.e., a daybed without horizonal context, a daybed merely understood as a collection of bio-physical sense data peculiarly mine) would not be experienced and therefore would not be in the sphere of ownness, or we can say that the daybed remains the daybed for me throughout the reduction-that though I might try to ignore the intersubjective nature of the daybed, I never have "daybed - intersubjective nature" as the object of my consciousness, but rather "daybed + the
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attempt to disregard its intersubjective nature." Under the first interpretation the reduction fails, under the second it had no effect on my experience of the daybed itself. Either way, the point has been made. And what of my experience of myself-my own body and my own states? An even deeper problem exists here with the attempt to characterize the experience of my body as an experience which in no way relies on the Other. First, we would have to question the use of the predicate "my." Does not ownership of my body assume the presence of Others? That is, is this not my body only in virtue of the fact that the Other's body is his? If so, then I would have to disregard and strip away all experience of myself, since these experiences depend on other subjectivity for their meaning. Notice that the whole notion of "my sphere of ownness," and "experiences peculiar to me" must be done away with now. Consequently, the primordial reduction leading to the sphere of ownness actually makes the experience of a sphere of ownness impossible. The "peculiar epoche" is a failure. Again, there is another way to understand this. Rather than saying that the reduction fails, we can say that it is ineffective because at each step the attempt to strip away experiences relying on other subjectivity did not actually change the whole of my experience. That is, getting rid of my relationships and involvement with other people, stripping away friendship and politics and envy and justice, etc., did not change me. Indeed, on a certain level it could not be done at all. I am what I am in virtue of my relations to the Others around me. Never once did I have "myself - my relation to the Other" as the object of my experience, but rather "myself + the attempt to disregard how I am related to the Other." Setting aside my attachments could not result in a primordial experience or a "more monadic" me, but rather I would not be experienced at ~ll. The life of my Ego is, consequently, "wholly unaffected by screening off what is other" (CM, 99). I am, fundamentally, a member of an intersubjective world. Clearly, then, there is no experience of a solitary monad within a sphere of ownness, but we can understand what Husserl means when he suggests that "even as solitary... [1 have] the sense: member of a community" (CM, 129). Even after the primordial reduction I am committed to other subjectivities. When Husserl continues to use the terms "sphere of ownness" and "reduced world" as he does throughout the rest of the Fifth Meditation, we must understand these as referring to my experience of myself and my world after attempting to strip away what is alien or other. There is no isolated monad revealed, just as Aristotle's stripping process did not lead to prime matter. The object, stripped of its properties, is, for Aristotle, the same object-only now it is seen in conjunction with the attempt to disregard its properties. No new thing emerges or is uncovered by the process. The only positive thing gained is the realization that prime matter cannot be
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experienced. Similarly, the life of the Ego stripped of its experiences including other subjectivities, is, for Husserl, the same life of the Ego, only now it is seen in conjunction with the attempt to perform the primordial reduction. No new thing emerges or is uncovered in the process. The only positive thing gained is the realization that a non-intersubjective Ego cannot be experienced. But this is a major discovery. It gives us reason to press on and evidence that we are headed in the right direction. Now we must wonder: if the primordial reduction fails and the Ego is fundamentally in community, how did it get to be this way? That is, we have worked our way back from the rich life of the fully developed Ego to its most basic qualities and nature, but can we go in the opposite direction? Can we tell a story of how the Ego initially develops as being in community, and then matures into a full and rich individual? Indeed, and the pairing function which we encountered earlier seems to be the key.
4. THE RECIPROCAL RELATION OF PAIRING: SOME PROBLEMS
Husserl is somewhat vague in describing how, exactly, pairing leads to the dual formation of the Ego and the Other. In fact, there are several seemingly deep problems left unanswered concerning the workings of the pairing relation. The most obvious question to begin with is how we might initially found pairing. Recall that pairing requires two data to stand out in experience and that there is then a reciprocal founding and meaning transference that takes place. We might imagine, for example, a conductor and several individuals playing instruments coming to constitute an orchestra through a pairing relation. Pairing would seem to be working on at least two levels here. First, there is a similarity in the individual performers--each making music with an instrument and striving toward what we come to discover is a common goal. The plurality of performers eventually gets constituted as a group-as a set. The earlier impression of the individuals is transferred to the later impression of the group in that the group is seen as the individuals working as a unity toward a common goal. And the later impression of the group is simultaneously transferred to the individuals in that they are no longer simply individuals but rather individual members of a group. On one level, this is the mutual transfer of sense. Similarly, we can come to understand that the group of musicians and the conductor are involved in a pairing relation that gives rise to the orchestra. The one becomes dependent on the other for its full sense, there is the mutual implication, and, in Husserl' s
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words, though they appear "with mutual distinctness, they found phenomenologically a unity of similarity and thus are always constituted precisely as a pair" (eM 112). The problem is that in examples such as these, there are already well defined and clear subjects undergoing the pairing. Before they become an orchestra in the full sense, the individuals involved are not so mysterious. The musicians, for example, are men and women making noises. The conductor is a human being making arm movements. These initial subjects-the data that will be involved in the pairing-already have a sense for us as people involved in certain actions. Now it is true that our understanding of the actions and the people becomes much richer after the pairing takes place. We see the orchestra in a new way and we see the individuals and their actions in a new way-such are the rewards of pairing. But the point is that there was already some sense of the subjects there before the pairing. The data being paired are already well defined on a certain level-not as members of an orchestra, but at least as human beings with a variety of qualities. This is not the case when we speak of the Ego and the Other undergoing pairing. What we are attempting to understand is a pairing that initially founds these subjects. That is, before this pairing there is neither Ego nor Other, and if this is so, then we are left to wonder what, exactly, are the two data undergoing the pairing. The pairing is happening at such a foundational level here that there is not yet the concept of individual subjects that can act as data for the pairing relation to "get off the ground." If we say, following Husserl, that I notice in the Other some quality that I transfer to me, and that I transfer some of my qualities to the Other, and this is the basis of the pairing relation that eventually gives rise to the Ego and the Other, we are, quite obviously, cheating. If there is not yet a concept of Other before the pairing process runs its course, then how is it that we can see some quality in the Other that we then transfer to our sense of Ego during the pairing? And, for that matter, how can we transfer qualities to and from our Ego if the sense of Ego itself has not yet arisen? One might imagine the pairing process acting something like a rubber ball bouncing back and forth between two walls. As the ball bounces off one wall it takes a bit of paint from that wall with it and attaches it to the opposing wall. In the end, when the ball stops bouncing, the two walls are still distinct but now we see them as foundationally related-each contains a part of what used to be the other and we have the sense of unity as they are seen as a pair. This works fine if we imagine the musicians (and conductor) as the walls that eventually come to constitute the orchestra. After enough "bouncing," the walls change for us-the musicians are not just individual musicians but rather members of an orchestra. But if the goal is eventually to constitute the basic community of people-to constitute the Ego and the
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Other as members of the community-the problem is that there are no walls off which the ball can start to bounce. The pairing relation cannot begin because the Ego and the Other do not yet have a sense and cannot be the data that stand out to be paired. Consequently, fundamental intersubjective pairing is impossible. It is like trying to bounce a ball between two unformed walls. This is not a small problem. If there is no way to found the pairing relation then the entire intersubjectivity project fails. Little attention has been given to Husser! on this point, but there have been two notable attempts to deal with the problem. The first, as voiced by Michael Theunissen, suggests a pairing that initially takes place between "bodies" rather than "subjects." The second, originally espoused by Theodor Lipps and more recently by Ichiro Yamaguchi and James Hart, introduces a notion of instinct as a means for getting the pairing relation off the ground. The solution that I want to suggest is somewhat different from these attempts, but it is well worth our time to examine them closely as various aspects of these theories will prove important in achieving a final resolution to the problem. We turn first to Theunissen's work on paired bodies.
5. THEUNISSEN AND THE QUESTION CONCERNING PAIRING
Theunissen attempts to patch-up Husser!' s account of empathic perception by maintaining that there are actually two forms of pairing: the pairing that precedes the understanding of the alien body and the pairing that follows the understanding of the alien body. The distinction is based on the objects that are being paired. In the first instance, physical bodies [Korper] are paired. In the second, personal-human objective I's are paired. Pairing that precedes the understanding of the alien body is understood not by a passive synthesis of association between organic bodies [Leiber], but rather by a passive synthesis of association between physical bodies [Korper]. It is not the Ego in any of its formulations (i.e., the absolutely unique Ego, the primordial Ego, or the personal-human objective I, to use Theunissen's terminology) that is paired. Rather, the organic bodies are related through an analogizing apperception that assumes a Korper pairing. According to Theunissen, such a notion is supported in Husser!'s discussion of the constitution of other bodies in §54 of the Cartesian Meditations. Here Husser! explains: The body [Korper] that is a member of my primordial world (the body subsequently of the other ego) is for me a
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body in the mode There. Its manner of appearance does not become paired in a direct association with the manner of appearance actually belonging at the time to my animate organism (in the mode Here); rather it awakens reproductively another, an immediately similar appearance included in the system constitutive of my animate organism as a body in space.... Thus the assimilative apperception becomes possible and established, by which the external body over there receives analogically from mine the sense, animate organism, and consequently the sense, organism belonging to another "world," analogous to my primordial world. (eM 117-18) Reading "animate organism" as "organic body" (or Leib), Theunissen maintains that it is clear that the relating of my organic body to the organic body of the Other is an analogizing apperception that is not a pairing, but rather one that assumes a physical body pairing. Yet given this, how is it that the pairing of physical bodies can actually be said to be a reciprocal relation? If Korper are truly paired, then it is not only the case that the Other's physical body is defined (foundationally constituted, as it were) by my personal physical body, it is also the case that my personal physical body is so defined by the alien Korper. Thus, as objects in the world, physical bodies are interdefined, and with each encounter of the Other, "I take part in the alien primordinal positing of my organic body as a pure physical body.'.I4 My physical body is taken as a physical body for the Other, and "[o]nly now can one truly say that my body is a thing like any other thing. It is for the Other an 'environmental object,' in no way different from the chair and the table, next to which it makes its appearance in the alien surrounding world.',15 The pairing relation is fulfilled as the Korper achieve their sense and arise with meaning together. One might question Theunissen here by turning his own line of reasoning against him. If pairing requires a basic correspondence between the objects to be paired, it might be asked, does not a pairing of Korper assume a proto-pairing that established the physical bodies as similar objects capable of undergoing the pairing? That is, how can we know that two objects are capable of being paired as physical bodies? What prevents the necessity for a pre-established similarity from becoming an infinite regress? We might attempt to defend Theunissen here by appealing to the notion of pairing as a primal form of association. Recall that Husserl has suggested that primitive objects are given intuitionally as data appearing with mutual distinctness yet founding phenomenologically a unity of similarity. There is enough similarity between these primitive objects for the
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pairing to "stick"; when the passive synthesis "engages" and the attempt is made to pair my physical body and the physical body of the Other, the pairing succeeds. 16 Consequently, there is the mutual transfer of sense that is typical of the pairing process. Inevitably, Theunissen believes that such a move saves Husserl from solipsism-here noted as one of the fringe-benefits of the notion of pairing, although for our purposes it is more than a fringe-benefit: it is the goal of our inquiry. While it is clear that the external object receiving the sense I already have for my personal physical body prospers from such a transfer of sense (in fact, such is the necessary founding step for constituting Others in the full sense of "alien Egos"), what is it that the object being constituted as "my Korper" receives from the mutual transfer of sense? Theunissen suggests that my organic body is constituted as an external object by means of the reciprocal pairing. Following Husserl's argument in the Fifth Meditation (as well as his work in Book II of the Ideas), Theunissen maintains that there is a physicalization of my organic body which is only possible given the mutual transfer of sense. Without the Other-i.e., the experience of the alien Korper-my Leib "can only be partially constituted...as a visually perceptible physical body ... .1 can look at my hands while I move them, peer at my legs while walking, inspect the place where I feel the pain; but in primordinal viewing, I can never represent my body to myself as a whole."'? In the "solipsistic attitude" my body never appears as a whole-for this I need a pairing. Pairing "changes my body into an outer thing" according to Theunissen. 18 My Leib receives from my experience of the Other the sense "external" and the sense "whole"; senses which, otherwise, it would not have. This warrants further inquiry. How, for instance, might the act of shaving help make this point? Theunissen wants to argue that when I shave, my experience is not of the whole of my body. My hand touches my face (i.e., the hand touches the razor which touches the face) but there is not a sense of being touched. Surely, I feel something. But it is more appropriate to say that "my hand is touching my face" rather than "my face feels touched by my hand." The primary experience is in the active. Being touched is, in fact, another sense of myself made possible only through my interaction with the Other. The Other touches me and I experience myself as being touched. If a tree limb brushes against me or if I lean against a wall, I do not have myself as being touched. If a raindrop falls on my head or if the razor slips from my hand as I shave and hits my foot, I do not have the experience of being touched by something that is touching me. There is a certain alien subjectivity that is necessary for the sensation of being touched. The experience is one of being acted upon-being altered (i.e., suddenly presencing myself as being touched) by another's will. 19 The tree
The Ego and the Other
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limb does not give rise to this experience. It is only through touching the Other and taking her as one being touched that I possibly come to have a sense of myself as being touched as well. When the Other touches me back, the pairing relation allows me to understand the Other as one touching and thus myself as being touched. But all of this does, in fact, miss the point. It also fails to capture the fundamental phenomenological difference between touching one's own body and touching an inanimate object. We can understand why, though, someone might want to say that "being touched" requires alien subjectivity. Surely there is a sense of being acted upon in the experience of being touched-of being "encountered" and willfully "manipulated" (a pinch, a caress, a slap, a stroke, a brush) by some subjectivity. To be sure, such a sense is not present when I am touched by the wall against which I am leaning. The point, though, is that while it is true that "being touched" requires willfulness and subjectivity, it only comes to require alien subjectivity as a result of an initial pairing with the Other. That is, the first experiences of being touched are monadic. The infant touches himself and experiences his Leib as touching and as touched, but this experience of being touched involves only his own subjectivity. This becomes clearer if we distinguish, phenomenologically, three experience types. First, there is a touching. The infant kicks at the rails of the crib or grabs at the mobile above and experiences a touching. The flesh explores the world and has the sensation of encountering and touching "things." Second, there is a touched/touching. The infant grabs his feet or runs a hand across his face. Here, the flesh is touched and it touches back. Dual sensations-the hand on the foot, the foot on the hand-form the sensory content of the experience. This is a touching that is unlike touching the crib, because the infant does not "feel from the crib's perspective," but he does feel something localized in the foot when his hand reaches out for it-namely, the sensation of being touched. Without this distinction, touching the razor would not differ, phenomenologically, from touching my face, but these are, indeed, two very different experience types. Consider Husserl's and Merleau-Ponty's discussion of this experience: Touching the left hand I have touch-appearances; i.e., I do not only sense but I perceive and have appearings of a soft and a so or so shaped, smooth hand. The indicating sensations of motion and the representing sensations of touch, which are objectified to being features on the thing, "left hand," belong to the right hand. But touching the left hand I also find in it a series of touch sensations, they become "localized" in it; they are not constituting properties (as
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Here, then, for our purposes we note that there is a burgeoning sense of one's own subjectivity-a conglomeration of acting and beingacted-upon that forms the initial proto-touched experience of flesh upon flesh. It is, in fact, only because such an experience exists that the third experience-that of being touched-is made possible. When the Significant Other touches the infant, there is a sensation of flesh upon flesh and of being acted upon much like the touched/touching experience, but the subjectivity involved-the willful toucher-is alien and transcendent. Surely this must be startling. The infant experiences being touched and his own burgeoning subjectivity is not the subjectivity doing the touching (as it is in the touched/touching experience). Consequently, there is a pairing-a sense of the infant's own subjectivity as touched/touching paired with the sense of another transcendent subjectivity as touching which inevitably gives rise to the experience of being touched.
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Through such a pairing, two new experiences are made possible. First, there is a continuation of the process giving rise to the senses of Ego and Other, of owned and alien-transcendent subjectivity. Second, such a pairing makes possible the experience of being touched and of touching (in the full and rich senses that we mean them today). Thus we see why it is that someone might mistakenly think that being touched requires alien subjectivity, for it is true that the experience could not have the sense it does for us now without the Other. Still, though, we must be careful to separate the touched/touching experience from the experience of being touched. Strictly speaking, we should not disassemble the touched/touching into separate components and label them "touched" and "touching" for these experiences are essentially in isolation and the sensation of "touched" has not arisen in its full form yet. "Touched/touching" is an experience all its own. The key is that the touched/touching experience makes possible the touched experience through a pairing relation:. neither achieves full sense in isolation. Consequently, much is accomplished in infancy in these initial experiences. Various senses arise-of the Ego and the Other, of touched/touching and touched, of the Ego as touched and the Other as touching, etc. Given all of this, though, let us return to our discussion of Theunissen's reading of Husser\. Though not having understood the full ramifications or proper application of his theory, Theunissen is still relevant. What I have been suggesting does nothing to refute his basic attempt to found an initial pairing, and having thus established a form of pairing that precedes the understanding of the alien body, Theunissen moves to consider the postpairing that follows the understanding of the alien body. To begin such an analysis, he considers Husserl's statement that the Ego and alter Ego are always and necessarily given in an original pairing. To what sort of thing could "Ego" be referring in this instance? There are three possibilities: the absolutely unique Ego, the primordinal Ego, or the personal-human-objective-I. Theunissen rejects the first two interpretations as analytic impossibilities. "To be sure," he explains, my absolutely unique ego would not be absolutely unique if it were only given in an original pairing with the alter ego. And, in the same way, my primordinal ego would not be primordinal if it needed the alter ego as a condition for its own givenness. 22 Thus the Ego to which Husserl is referring must be the personalhuman-objective-I. 23 This is to say that the analogizing apperception of the Other's body precedes the pairing of Egos as personal 1's. In this way, the
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Egos arise, as it were, as personally owned. This is truly a reciprocal pairing relationship as is evidenced by Husser!' s further discussion of this level of constitution of the Other. Though the Other is, in a sense, "phenomenologically a 'modification' of myself," he writes, "[I get] this character of being 'my' self by virtue of the contrastive pairing that necessarily takes place..."(CM 114). The alien body and my body are now paired and ownership is established: myself as my self and the other as the Other's self. There are, then, two forms of pairing-one preceding and one following the understanding of the alien body. Through this relation of reciprocity, the Ego and the Other arise together as animate, lived, bodily, organic, personal, and owned selves. Thus, according to Theunissen, we come to understand what it means for the relation of pairing to be truly reciprocal: without the Other-and the alien body-there is no I. But the problem here should be evident. What sense does "alien body" make when there is not yet an awareness of the non-alien body? That is, in order for the notion of "another" body, a "foreign" body, or an "alien" body to have meaning, one must first have an understanding of the body that is self-owned, familiar, and non-alien. Indeed, if we unpack the term "alien,,24 we necessarily find reference to the Self. Theunissen has not accomplished a solution. He has merely re-stated the original claim and created the same problem using new terms. Furthermore, the possibility of an infinite regress is much more of a threat than we suggested above. If the alien body, or Korper, actually needs the notions of the Other and the Ego to make sense, then there must be an earlier pairing that founded the Korper as objects with enough similarity to stand out as capable of being paired, and so on and so on. Saying that the pairing of bodies is a primal form of association is no answer. Simply calling a process "primal" does not give it a proper foundation. Still, there are important lessons to be found in Theunissen' s work-the significance of reciprocity, the role of the body in pairing, etc. But before pulling all of this together we first tum to investigate another attempt at solving the problem of pairing that suffers from a similar appeal to somewhat dogmatic foundations.
NOTES IEdmund Husserl's Cartesian Meditations (1960), p. 89. Hereafter cited as "eM" and a page number referring to this edition. 2Hart (1992), 186.
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3This can lead, as Hart points out, to the notion that the Other is in some sense an irreducible presence. (Cf. Hart (1992), 190). But as we will see, this matter will be straightened up in a further explication of the apperceptive pairing that takes place. 4Hart (1992), 6-7 5Perhaps this argument is more controversial than my primary concern-my interpretation of Husserl-but I believe it does have some merit. It is important to mention, however, that it is not key for this project to show that Husserl was Aristotelian or that Aristotle was anticipating Husserl. I use Z3 only to show that there is a structural parallel in Husserl's and Aristotle's arguments. Whether Aristotle is correctly interpreted here is another matter altogether. Indeed, Aristotelians are clearly not in agreement on this passage from the Metaphysics. Some maintain it proves the existence of prime matter; others suggest that there is a change of voice in the text and Aristotle is relating an argument an opponent might make to his theory. (Cf., e.g., the work of H.M. Robinson and W.e. Charlton respectively). Still others maintain that the analysis is logical and not metaphysical and need not lead to prime matter (See Hugh R. King). For more on a phenomenological interpretation of Aristotle, see my ''Taken Up ..." (1992). 6See Stahl (1981). Stahl does not use phenomenological terms, but this account of his version of Aristotle is, I will argue, fair. 7The two ways of putting this conclusion can lead to some confusion but they are, essentially, identical. To say that the stripping left the object unaffected is to say that nothing was actually stripped; that the stripping was a failure. This will become important in understanding Husserl. Sometimes he seems to say that the primordial reduction failed (e.g., in making the reductio argument work). Other times he speaks of the reduced world looking just like the non-reduced world because the epoche left experience "wholly unaffected." However, whether the reduction fails or whether it has no effect, the result is the same. 8S tahl (1981), 179. Emphasis mine. 9Thinking of the moon without its color does not result in "moon - color", but rather "moon + attempting to disregard its color." The moon, as an intentional object, is not laid bare by stripping, rather it is presenced in a new context. IOthe Greek "subject," suspiciously translated as "substratum" above. IIEven my experience of a park, a lecture hall, a farm, etc. cannot exist without Others-the world is fundamentally an intersubjective world: it is the arena in which the actors meet. 12We might be able to stop right here and maintain that we have reached an absurdity. If someone lacks a feeling of isolation-lacks the feeling of being alone-it must be the case that they have a feeling of togetherness (being accompanied, being crowded, etc.) at least to some degree. But here we have reasoned that I lack a feeling of isolation and a feeling of togetherness. This would seem a problem unless we allow for the possibility that feelings of this type need not exist at every moment. That is, if I have been concentrating only on my work for the past few minutes, I have been feeling neither isolated nor accompanied and there is no absurdity here. This response is somewhat suspect, but as there is a stranger critique and a deeper problem still to come, we press on. 13This is the way it happens in adult intentionality, at least. Whether an infant's burgeoning consciousness has these same structures is a question we will turn to shortly. l~heunissen (1984), 84. 15Theunissen (1984), 84. 16At this level, however, it must be remembered that the Other's physical body is not yet taken as belonging to the Other, for we have not yet constituted him. We have distinguished a physical body but as of yet cannot assign ownership-indeed, the notion of ownership is basically meaningless at this level. 17Theunissen (1984), 66. 18Theunissen (1984), 66.
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19This might explain, for example, the difference between being slapped across the face by a friend and mindlessly stroking one's own arm. It also speaks to the different experiences of erotic touching. Since self-stimulation only results in one's self as touching (and not as being touched) it is, on many levels, inevitably less rich than being with a partner who makes possible the experience of touching and being touched at the same moment. Alphonso Lingis (1985) and Thomas Nagel (1969) are sympathetic to such a notion. In Nagel's terms, selfstimulation would be a perversion because there is no possibility of being aroused by another's arousal-no possibility of being the object of another subject's desire. That is, there is no possibility of being touched. But as will be shown, the instance of self-stimulation results in a touched/touching rather than a touching, and this is still far less enriching than a true touched. 20Husseri (1952); translation by James G. Hart. 21Merleau-Ponty (1962), 93. 22Theunissen (1984), 63. 23Perhaps the primordinal Ego is a condition for the possibility of pairing, yet does not exist first chronologically. The primordinal Ego is uncovered through analysis, not through remembering or experiencing. I am grateful to Robert Sokolowski for suggesting the point might be made in this way. 24 0r any other such term: "foreign," "non-personal," "different," "unfamiliar," etc.
CHAPTER III
Instinct and the Presence of the Other
1. THE CASE FOR INSTINCT
Husserl was well aware of the tendency to found the infant's ability to begin pairing on an instinct-an instinct, in some sense, "for the Other." As early as 1909, Theodor Lipps had claimed that the only possible foundation for social ontology was instinct. He was led to this conclusion through a line of reasoning which should be very familiar. How, asked Lipps, might an infant come to think of other bodies as "inhabited" by selves? How could he come to realize that his own body housed an Ego? One possible explanation would involve parallel experience-the infant seeing, for instance, a smile on the face of the "Other" and then seeing a smile on his own face in a mirror. In a sense, this is one aspect of the kind of pairing that Husserl seems to have in mind. Granted, Husserl is more insistent on the bilateral nature of the pairing, but the point is this: Lipps maintains that any such explanation for how we come to the sense of Other begs the question. Since the infant never has immediate experience of his facial expressions, how could he possibly achieve a sense of the link between Ego-centered consciousness and countenance? Surely, this sense must arise from his experience of the Other, but this, of course, takes for granted exactly what we are trying to prove. In order for the infant to understand the relationship between Egohood and gesture, he must be able to isolate the Other as an example of this relationship in action. Thus, the infant presupposes the Other's psychic life. And this is but one way of stating the problem. Lipps concludes that accounts of this type necessarily take for granted the selfhood of the Other, and, consequently, the task is to find an explanation for why this is so. The solution he suggests is instinct. Instinct, he argues, allows the infant to make the link between Egohood and countenance. Instinct allows that the experience of the exterior body is taken to be the experience of the Other-of another mind. It is instinct that is foundational-the most basic concept on which to build a theory of intersubjectivity, as instinct itself cannot rest on any more basic concept.
H. P. Steeves, Founding Community © Kluwer Academic Publishers 1998
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Lipps, of course, was satisfied with this answer, as are many contemporary child psychologists.! Husserl, however, was not. For him, instinct was the "last refuge of phenomenological ignorance" and a giving in to dogmatism. But late in his life, Husserl seems to have accepted the possibility of instinct, though perhaps not the variety we have been discussing. More than twenty years after Lipps first proposed his particular brand of instinct as the solution, Husserl suggested that there might be an alternative-a non-psychological, less dogmatic, "transcendental" instinct. In Husserliana XV there is an indication that Husserl was moving to this distinction and proposing it as a solution to the problem of establishing a foundation. Psychological instinct is a constituted theme. One comes to it through observation of behavior patterns in other individuals. It is not a matter of self-reflection and it is certainly not a matter of phenomenological reflection. Rather, over time one observes those individuals around him and derives psychological theories, only later coming to apply them to his own behavior. An instinct for pairing, then, would be one such constituted theme. But a transcendental instinct is different in that "it is a way of thinking about the ultimate constituting world-delineation as well as the development of monads ... [which is] occasioned by the attempt to account for how 'awakened' primal presencing becomes directly attentive to the world's impressions prior to all worldly apperceptions which associative synthesis makes possible.,,2 This is to say that a non-psychological concept of instinct accounts for the necessary preconditions of a phenomenological life-for what must be occurring "pre-phenomenologically" in the waking consciousness of the infant which will make it possible for the emerging Ego to have ordered experience. It is, to be sure, a slippery notion. Hart describes transcendental instinct in several different ways-as the "dark obscure prior apperceiving which accounts for determinate features or items being brought into relief from out of the flux of sensibility"; as what stands behind "the emergence of wakefulness... [and] the coming to be of the distinction between the hyletic affecting (the impression as impressive) and the egological being-affected (feeling, the impression as being-impressed) which precedes the I's 'turning towards,' and actively attending and striving.,,3 Clearly, it is an attempt to describe what a "prephenomenological" life looks like, but herein lies the problem. How are we to understand a "prior apperceiving" or an Ego that does not yet exist making non-attentive, non-active distinctions? Surely, the phenomenologist does not have direct access to all of this. We cannot investigate our own past infantile experience and come to understand transcendental instinct. In this way, transcendental instinct is similar to psychological instinct. But unlike the psychological variety, transcendental instinct is not something that arises as a constituted theme by
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observing other individuals' behavior from a third-person vantage point. It is not a matter of watching newborns or looking in on fetuses before they are born and then making generalizations that one can later re-apply to himself. Rather, transcendental instinct is a reconstruction-neither description nor observation, it is more like an "educated guess" or a "theory that makes sense" which takes up where reflection leaves off. Unable to access experience before the emergence of wakefulness, the phenomenologist reconstructs what must be there in order to make later experience possible. This, then, we call transcendental instinct. At this point, though, the notion is not very fulfilling, yet it does seem to serve a purpose. It makes sense to say that something must be occurring in the conscious life of the infant. Soon, the infant will achieve full wakefulness and Egohood, and if we claim that this rich phenomenological life simply pops into existence from nothing we are certainly being as, if not more, dogmatic than if we claim that there must be forces and structures at work which pre-date and make possible this emerging wakefulness, even if we cannot uncover them through first-hand reflection or observe them in Others. The ability to attend to one particular thing-to see it as an isolated whole and a distinct unity-would seem to be one such necessary precondition. It could be argued that this "talent" is a transcendental instinct, but how could one make a case for this? Perhaps the best way is by ruling out other possibilities. What might account for attentive individualization-this ability to order the stream of consciousness and focus on one thing as a unity which rises out of the flux of sensibility? Perhaps it is a learned talent. Here we might imagine that the infant is receiving, at some very early point in his life, a constant flow of sensory input with each bit of data being equal in importance to the next. Nothing stands out or rises from the flux as an isolated unity to which the infant can specifically attend. Now at some point, his Significant Other-what we will just call "mother" for now-joins the flux and becomes part of the sensory input (though certainly not as "mother" yet or even as "Other" or "unity"). She takes a brightly colored rattle and shakes it, pushing it closer to the infant's face. His head turns, his eyes seem to follow it for a moment and then he looks away. But as the scene repeats many times, the infant's focus seems to be less random. He comes to stare at the rattle, transfixed by its sound, color, etc. Has he been taught attentive individualization? Has he learned to single out the rattle as a unity? Answering yes proves troublesome. If he has been taught this ability-if his mother has succeeded in showing him that the rattle is a thing on which he can focus, a thing that is a unity of sensory inputs (shape, color, sound, texture, etc.) and is separate from other inputs-then we must ask
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how she managed to teach this to him. Simply holding up the rattle and shaking it cannot accomplish this, for the infant cannot form a unity out of the sensory inputs and thus single out the rattle for attention. Indeed, this is exactly the talent the mother is attempting to teach and thus we cannot assume the infant already has the ability. Furthermore, moving the rattle closer and closer to the infant's face-and repeating this motion time and again-cannot be the key. The infant cannot distinguish the rattle and isolate it as a thing even if it is approaching him in a constant pattern. This is to say that at time A, when the rattle is far away, he cannot isolate it from the flowing stream of sensibility-it is simply one input among others. At time B, when the rattle is moved closer to him, nothing changes-it is still simply one input among others. To assume otherwise is to beg the question. Consequently, attentive individualization cannot be a learned talent, for the learning process presupposes this very ability. 4 We are left to conclude that attentive individualization must, in some sense, be innate. Clearly, it is a talent that we possess right now, and it is a necessary talent for a "full phenomenological life." If we look at our immediate experience we realize that we are involved in ongoing unity formations. In fact, we cannot remember a time or uncover through any sort of reduction a consciousness that is not engaged in attentive individualization. We must therefore conclude that since this talent was not learned, it must have been a transcendental instinct. Yamaguchi comes close to this when he speaks of the instinctual delineation of unities. The first unity formation, he suggests, takes place soon after birth. When the infant drinks from the breast, feels the nipple in his mouth, and at the same time sees his mother's face, there is a mixing of touch, taste, and vision. The mother is thus the first perceptual unity.5 Though clearly not yet perceived as the Other, the mother is perceived as a thing-surely a necessary step along the way to her being perceived as endowed with Egohood. But what does all of this have to do with pairing? Yamaguchi, Hart, and even the later Husserl maintain that pairing is a transcendental instinct-that there is an instinctual presence of the Other. Hart explains that
there are good reasons for holding for a rather obscure or analogical "primal You." Such a "schema," as the original instinctual apperception, would account for how, out of the manifold of items in the surroundings there is highlighted by the infant another body, especially the face ....With Lipps we must hold that the infant does not yet have a reflective or objectified knowledge of its own body or face which may serve as the basis of the recognition which, then, can
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found the analogous transference. Unless there is this originating inkling of the Other's essential absence and transcendence, as well as utter immanent "fittingness," the entire novel realm of the "other 1" remains invisible among the infant's surroundings. This instinctual inkling...would be what founds empathy.... 6 Instinct, then, solves the problem of foundation. If we maintain that there is an instinctual presence of the Other as "primal You," then pairing can take place. This "primal You" becomes the wall off which the ball can bounce, the subject to which paired qualities can stick, the framework on which the full-fledged Other will be built. Consequently, the infant comes with a built-in awareness of the Other at a very basic level, and this makes possible the success of the pairing relation and the infant's inevitable achievement of Egohood. Clearly, there are important differences between this "instinct for the Other" and the common psychological notion of instinct. But there is still something unsatisfying about such a conclusion. Saying that there is a built-in awareness of the Other--even when "built-in" refers to a protophenomenological structure rather than a psychological awareness, and even when "the Other" here is not the full-fledged Other but rather a burgeoning sense of otherness-seems like too much of a concession. Surely, a foundation has been achieved, but at what price? The closer we look at the foundational structure, the more it seems that we have taken up shelter in the last refuge of phenomenological ignorance.
2. THE OTHER AS UNITY
One possible solution is to keep our "instinctual claims" to a minimum. In the last section we investigated attentive individualization/unity formation as an example of transcendental instinct. I would now like to pull together some of these previous points and suggest that we understand the "primal You" as an intricate yet basic unity formation, consequently eliminating the need for an instinctual presence of the Other. Following this, and having reduced transcendental instinct to one particular ability, I propose that an instinct is not the best way to characterize this talent at all. What follows, though, is not without problems itself-problems I will discuss in full at the end of this chapter rather than point them out as I argue the position. In the end, I hope to have suggested some new possible directions which might be taken toward founding the pairing relation, but one will find
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no claim of having solved the problem in its entirety in these few pages. Recall that unity formation is closely related to identity synthesis and what we have been calling attentive individualization-the ability to see one particular thing as an isolated, whole, distinct unity which stands out from the flux of sensibility. Now, Yamaguchi has argued that the mother is the first unity formation-that the feel of the nipple, the taste of the milk, and the look of the mother's face are perceptions that rise out of the flux and form a unity. We must imagine here that there are a myriad of perceptions flooding the infant at the moment of nursing, none of which stands out from the rest. But the infant, with his instinctual drive for unity formation, isolates these particular sensations as a group. Attentive individualization and unity formation are thus operating and arising at the same time. As the perceptions of nipple, milk, and face converge in the stream of consciousness they become isolated and unified. They stand out from the flux, arising as perceptions that are related. Properly speaking, this unity is not best understood as "mother."? It is simply a unity of three perceptions. With time, more perceptions accrue and the unity grows in size and detail. With further touchings, explorations, and visual experiences the unity achieves a fuller sense-object, and, eventually, body. At this point we might rely on Theunissen to take us the rest of the way. With a foundation for establishing the body, his theory no longer faces the problems outlined in the last chapter. The important point, though, is that the need for an instinctual presence of the Other has been overcome. With simply an instinct for unity formation we can achieve the necessary preconditions for getting pairing off the ground. The infant perceives the mother while nursing and forms his first unity. Other experiences of the mother-touching, smelling, hearing, tasting, and seeing her-are accumulated and gradually add to the unity. Eventually, this unity grows more complex and is best labeled "body," consequently allowing the pairing relation to achieve a foundation. The proliferation of instincts is ended: assuming a single drive for unity formation eventually leads to establishing the Ego and the Other. This is better, and maintaining one instinct rather than many is somewhat of an improvement, but there are those who will be troubled by even a single non-phenomenological claim. Just a little dogmatism still seems dogmatic. At this point, however, I would like to propose that unity formation is not best understood as an instinct. An instinct, whether of the psychologicalor transcendental kind, is, in some sense, passive. This is to say that it simply "turns on." It is not taught, pondered, coaxed out, deliberated, or created in any way by the individual or those around her. Sea turtles, when hatched, head for the sea. Some birds, when it grows cold, fly south. The
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human infant, even while gestating, starts sucking in preparation for receiving food. And this same infant, if we are to characterize unity formation as an instinct, at some point isolates various perceptions as related and forms them into the unity that is his mother. In each instance, something has taken place "automatically." If asked to explain why, our only answer can be "that's just the way it is-these things come built in." But unity formation clearly does not operate in this way. It is not a passive talent, lying dormant in the infant until just the right moment when it suddenly turns on and starts to function. If this were the case-if unity formation were an instinct-then there would be no reason for the first unity that is formed to be the Significant Other. 8 Unity formation could "click on" at any moment, thus causing the infant to form his first unity around a prototelevision or a proto-plant, etc. On the contrary, the Significant Other is the first unity formation-the first thing-for the infant. As countless psychological and infant behavior studies indicate, infants seem to be able to focus on and "pick out from the world" their Significant Other before they can pick out any other everyday object. There is, of course, some room for debate here. We see evidence of the claim that the Significant Other is the first thing for an infant in various otherwise misdirected theories in which the infant is said to picture himself as a unity with the mother. This supposedly occurs because the infant cannot separate the experience of his mother from experiences of himself. Consequently, psychologists such as Judy Rosenblith, Judith Sims-Knight, and Norman Denzin speak of a mother-child dyad. 9 The empirical evidence here is that the child "recognizes" his Significant Other and responds to her with a regularity that does not exist with other worldly objects. Most of these psychological theories, however, presupposing a pseudo self-awareness, move to conclude that since the infant can pick out the Significant Other but only possesses an innate egoistic self-awareness, the infant must be confusing the Significant Other as a part of himself. Granted, this is a caricature of such psychological theories, and the ones that I have mentioned by name probably would not be satisfied with this caricature, but the general theory seems fairly represented by this brief sketch. Other psychological theories do not necessarily support the claim that the Significant Other is the first "object," though if they are thorough enough they eventually arrive at a compatible conclusion. Rachel Melkman, for instance, starts from a neo-constructivist standpoint and argues at length that the first object is the nipple, the breast, or the "nursing process," depending on what our notion of object is. Agreeing with Piaget, she maintains that "the infant's distinction between nipple and non-nipple when hungry undoubtedly instantiates objectal recognition." However, unlike Piaget she suggests that "the recognition that precipitates this state, namely the innate
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rejection of the non-nipple [for sucking], represents objectal recognition as well.... [Consequently,] the progress in nursing during the first days must be understood as progress in object construction.,,10 Melkman, working from a non-phenomenological point of view, assumes that object recognition is a talent that exists before birth: it is an innate structure that "unfolds" when in contact with the environment. II All of these claims would seem to go against what I am arguing; however, Melkman is using "object" here in a loose way. Simply because at one moment an infant can "suck, receive pleasure or a fulfillment of a need, and keep sucking on one item" while at another moment "suck, not receive fulfillment, and stop sucking on another," this does not mean that there is a unity formation or an act of attentive individualization at work. Eventually, Melkman herself admits the point, suggesting that the nipple-sucking is more of an experience or an action than an object. "[A]ny talk of an object proper," she writes, is premature at this stage, as each of the infant's encounters with the environment that the observer may characterize as an action-i.e. nursing on an object, e.g. the nipple-is not that specific from the infant's perspective. After all, nursing does not take place in a vacuum; infants are held in a certain position, certain patterns of light impinge on their eyes, and certain noises register in their ears. Thus, each encounter with the nipple gives rise to a multitude of accommodations. Although the act of nursing is the most developed among them and the one that directly leads to satisfaction, we have no reason to assume that it is differentiated in the infant's mind .... 12 When these sensory inputs come together to construct the first unity while nursing, then we have object formation, and this implication fits very well with Yamaguchi's theory. Other empirical psychology findings could be enlisted to help support this position as well. The work of Broerse, Peltolta, and Crassini (1983) gives us good reason to believe that our notion of unity formation is correct, for the babies tested in these studies at the age of three to four months were still not capable of the unity formation of everyday objects. Although newborns, for instance, were found to tum toward a sound, the researchers argue that there is evidence that they are not looking for an object from which the sound emanated, thus indicating a level of unity formation (visual + auditory). Rather, the turning
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appears to be a primitive reflex-like mechanism, which drops out and is replaced by a more mature, corticallymediated mechanism. Only in the latter, more mature, form will infants understand that objects have both visual and 13 auditory characteristics. We might explain this phenomenon by maintaining that there is something about the Significant Other that triggers the instinct in the infant. This is getting closer to the truth, but unity formation is still being characterized as more or less passive and necessarily instinctive even if we maintain that it is activated by the Other. If, however, we allow the role of the Significant Other to expand and become even more active, we should find that it is no longer necessary to posit an instinctive ability for the infant. This is, I believe, the answer. Such a theory not only bypasses the need for instinct, but will later prove to be a better explanation for certain aspects of the infant's further phenomenological development.
3. RE-THINKiNG INFANTILE INTENTIONALITY As an initial step toward describing this theory we need to rethink our notion of the infant, the flux of sensibility during infancy, and the infant-Other relationship. 14 Recall that according to Hart, the gracious act of attention requires an "instinctual apperceiving"-an instinct "for the Other"-and takes place only at the level of Ego-Other formation. IS Thus, with the elemental instinctual intentionality the infant becomes acquainted with an emergent sense of the Other and itself as Other to the Other....But this passive associative presencing of the Other is not an achievement of the I as the subjective point of unity of re-presenting acts ....The child starts to be "I" and a person when it appears to itself as the Other to the Other or in a developing contrast with "You." That is, the first unity ...of agency of self-displacing acts .. .is that of the Other. ... 16 The gracious act that I am suggesting is somewhat different in that it does not assume an instinct for the Other and it serves as a more primary foundation for the infant's intentional life. Not only is the Other the first "unity of agency"-that is, as Husserl points out, the first person l7-but the
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Other is, indeed, the first unity ofany kind. For Hart, the gracious and consistent behavior of the Significant Other-the way in which the Other attends to the child as an Ego-allows the formation of "obscure burgeoning distinctions within the infant's Leib (inner-outer, here-there, touching-touched and touched-touching) [thus] provid[ing] the sensible fulfillment of the instinctual apperceiving by which the original passive pairing gets under way.,,18 However, we might remove the notion of instinct here and use the same concept of the gracious act of attention to account for the infant's burgeoning intentional life. The Significant Other, under this theory, treats the infant as a unity, attending to it as a many-faceted whole which in tum gives rise to the ability for unity formation within the infant. How, exactly, might this happen? In some respects it seems fair enough to say that the change from streaming-flux-of-non-individuatedsensibility to experience-of-unities is intangible and wondrous. It is not that the sensations change when the infant is attended to as a unity, but rather that their mode of presentation is altered. The Significant Other treats the wailings, the reachings, and the facial expressions, etc. of the child as originating from a subjectivity centered in the unity that is the infant. An audible cry results in the infant being allowed to nurse, the presence of the nipple, and the fulfillment of a need. A grasping for the breast results in similar success and sensations. The continual repetition and reinforcement of the grouped sensations (feel of the nipple, taste of the milk, look of the face, etc.) which follow these beckonings lead to a blending of the sensations as a group (unity). The sensation of the taste of the milk becomes the-taste-ofthe-milk-following-the-cry. The look of the mother's face becomes the-lookafter-the-grasping-for-the-breast. As the mother responds with love and care to the infant's repeated multi-sensory call to be nursed, these burgeoning awarenesses and distinctions become more pronounced. As the infant is treated as a unity, so he develops the ability to unify. The details so far are somewhat sketchy. It might seem that being able to take a sensation as "the-taste-of-milk-following-a-cry" already assumes an ability for unity formation-the putting together of the milk and the crying. But such a temporal structuring must not be confused with a unity formation. Rather, we are encountering an instance of the "primal impression" (what the mind is aware of now) mixing with "retention" (what the mind is aware of as just-now-passed) and "protention" (what the mind is aware of as not-yet-now) in a meaningful way. That all experience-even at the level of the infant-is temporal is a claim of Husserl's with which I would not want to contend. 19 "Sensing," he reminds us, "is presencing timeconsciousness.,,2o Indeed, the temporal structure of infant intentionality is not due to an instinct or innate ability; it simply is the way experience takes
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place. In the case at hand, the infant's now moment consists of retention, primal impression, protention-i.e., "the cry, the taste of the milk, and the satisfaction" or "the grasping, the feel of the nipple, and the quieting of the inner need." Eventually, all such patterns lead to the same later now-moment while nursing: "the feel of the nipple, the taste of the milk, the look of the mother's face." Because the Significant Other treats the infant consistently and as a unity (i.e., assuming that the various tactile, auditory, visual, etc. beckonings are centered in the infant's subjectivity and indicate a common desire for nursing), this later-now moment repeats and a pattern develops in the infant's intentional life (composed of such now moments) which would otherwise not be there. This pattern allows the first unity construction to arise: the proto-mother/Other as "the feel of the nipple, the taste of the milk, the look of the face"-now. If there were no gracious act, there would be no pattern-no recurring, rich now moment, the retentions and protentions of which all center around a projected unity. There would be no unity at all. Approaching the problem from a slightly different angle, we can note that in cases where children are raised in the wild there is little evidence of a human Ego. Feral children reared by animals are not capable of achieving a human Ego because they have not been attended to as a human Ego?' In most cases, there has been an identifiable Significant Other, but this Significant animal-Other is incapable of attending to the human infant as a human Ego and, consequently, this sense never develops in the child. 22 If we were to encounter a case of a child "raised" in an environment devoid of consciousness, that is to say without even an animal-Other, then we could expect that there would be no real evidence of phenomenological development either. Without some individual (human? non-human?) taking and attending to the infant as a unity, even the ability for unity formation would not arise. Of course, we do not have examples of such children, for the physical necessities of life would most often not be met if there were no consciousnesses around the baby, and the result would be death-a fate worse than the lack of unity formation. But we do, in fact, have some documented examples of children raised by animal-Others, and the sketchy historical data suggest that not only are such children lacking a human Ego, but they show indications of lacking basic phenomenological structures such as attentive individualization as well. In 1799, Dr. Jean-Marc-Gaspard Itard encountered Victor, the wildboy of Aveyron, and concluded just this. Victor was approximately twelve years old when discovered by sportsmen in the Caune Woods of France, and it immediately appeared that Victor had never been among "civilized men"-that he had spent his life (at least those years from very early childhood on) in the wild. He showed no signs of possessing a human Ego and
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was referred to as the "man-animal," the" child-savage," and the "wild-boy" of Aveyron. Upon his transfer to Paris, the curious citizens flocked to see him, hoping to encounter an example of what Rousseau had termed the "noble savage": Man in his natural state. Instead, we are told that they discovered a beast, "human only in shape; a dirty, scarred, inarticulate creature who...was apparently incapable of attention or even elementary perceptions such as heat or cold... .',23 Philippe Pinel, curator of the Bicetre asylum and a pioneer psychologist who argued against the imprisonment and abuse of the mentally ill, suggested that Victor was simply an "incurable idiot," but Dr. Itard, fresh from medical school and seeking to make a name for himself, felt that there was a deeper story. Victor, he argued, was a product of his circumstances. Left without the love and care of a humanOther, Victor had fallen on animal instincts to survive. Itard's initial study of Victor suggested that there was no evidence to support the claim that there are such things as human "innate ideas," even ideas that form basic structures of consciousness. This made it extremely difficult to conduct a scientific inquiry into Victor's abilities. Key among these lacking structures was Victor's inability to recognize objects and attend to one particular thing. Clearly, he could eat food that was set before him and he would try to run away at the sight or sound (or smell?) of approaching people, but there was little evidence that he could actually pick out individual objects within his experience. Itard explains that Victor's "eyes were unsteady, expressionless, wandering vaguely from one object to another without resting; ...they were so little experienced...that they never distinguished an object in relief from one in a picture." Similarly, Victor lacked the ability to match a sound with its source or even to realize that there is an association between the "source and location of sounds," although he was "indeed capable of hearing very well." Victor had functioning auditory senses, it would seem, but could not put two sensations together to form a unity, an object. Now, of course we must be careful not to think that such examples prove the point. That is, it is not the case that Victor (and others like him) prove that the Other is a necessary condition for the development of unity formation. Rather, Victor is an intriguing footnote. An empirical and psychological evaluation of Victor suggested that those phenomenological structures I have been suggesting that are dependent on the Other's gracious act of attention were not to be found in the boy. It is not a phenomenological claim, but it is important. If the empirical evidence pointed in another direction-if Victor seemed to act as if he possessed a full-fledged human Ego and the ability to form unities and identify objects-then I would have either to reevaluate the phenomenological theory or at least say why it is that the theory is still true even though it looks as if feral children are operating with structures I maintain they cannot possess. In this sense, empirical observa-
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tion has some role to play in our investigation. And there is further anecdotal evidence to attest to the power of the gracious act of attention 24, but the point is this: we need not think of the human infant beginning his life in isolation, developing his innate abilities, and eventually being able to order his world and construct a sense of himself and the Other. Through pairing, Husserl provided us with a way to account for the simultaneous genesis of the Ego and the Other, and through understanding the role of that Other, we now have a clear sense of infant intentionality which is not dependent on assumptions of innate structures or instinct.
4. LIMITATIONS FROM AN HUSSERLIAN STANDPOINT
But is this doing justice to basic issues in Husserl's theory of intentionality? Do we not have the same problem of accounting for the genesis of unity formation as we did before? That is, if the ability for unity formation is not taught to the infant, then it must, in some sense, be innate. And clearly, "learning" is not the proper way to characterize what the infant is doing when the ability for unity formation is arising. After all, Husserl would maintain that such a talent could not be learned since "all learning presupposes senses of...unity and distinction, whole and part...[and] unless we have this field of 'concepts' or rather meta-forms interplaying all at once... we cannot begin to 'learn' ....,,25 Consequently, Husserl must assume that "feeble kinds of unities, properties, wholes and parts...are somehow there from the start.,,26 In other words, if I am suggesting a consciousness that lacks identity synthesis-a kind of experience in which everything is not experienced as recognizable and the flux of consciousness does not itself have form-am I not abandoning fundamental Husserlian concepts and commitments? After all, consciousness, for Husserl, must be consciousness of something. The response to this line of questioning is critical, for it points out both the strengths and the limitations of the solution I have been suggesting. First, the strengths. Hart and Yamaguchi maintain that without instinct we cannot explain the presence of these initial and necessary structures of consciousness. There is no such thing as an arising ability for unity formation, it is argued, because "when we have no unities of continuous syntheses, no feeble identities, we have no wakeful consciousness, but only dormancy, or perhaps even death.,,27 Furthermore, "we cannot learn sameness and difference, relation and feature; rather these are forms of the flux.,,28 Hart calls
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our attention to Husserl's 1906-07 lectures on logic and epistemology (Husserliana XXIV) in which Husser! names the primitive forms of identification within the flux of consciousness. These forms include identity and non-identity, likeness and unlikeness, oneness, manyness, etc. They are what he calls "the ABC's and essential grammar of the world," though Hart suggests that it might be possible to find an even more primitive consideration "such as presence and absence that rests behind them.,,29 "Presence and absence" is a notion worked out with clarity by Robert Sokolowski. It is deeply tied to the question of identity synthesis and unity formation. 30 As Sokolowski explains it, to recognize the identity of the object is to have the object thoughtfully, the way a human being has objects....Objects are present to mind only as mediated by their absence. Mind's capacity to intend its object signitively-usually in language but also with other signs and symbols-means that it can dislodge itself from its objects and still "mean" or "have" them. It can think about them in their absence... The work of mind, consciousness, is the process of having these identities in the appropriate synthesis of presence and absence. 31 This, then, makes it possible for me to think about my daybed when I am separated from it. When I do so, it is not that I have a new object of consciousness-something other than the daybed. Rather, the object of consciousness is still the daybed, but now it is presenced as being absent. This is how objects are experienced-as present or absent or some synthesis of the two-and thus this is how consciousness works. Consequently, presence and absence would seem to be "forms of the flux"-i.e., the way in which the mind intends objects-and we could not have consciousness without them. But are they innate? This is the important question right now, and we can see how easy it is to make a case for a positive answer in Sokolowski. Presence and absence must be there from the start because all of consciousness operates in this way: consciousness is always consciousness of something; this something is always intended in a meaningful way; this meaning is made possible by identity synthesis; identity synthesis depends on the structures of presence and absence as modes of appearance. Without presence and absence there would be no consciousness, and since presence and absence cannot be taught (for all learning presupposes them) the only way to account for the fact that there is consciousness in the world is that presence and absence must be innate. This much is clear; but there are some
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intriguing passages in Sokolowski that complicate matters. The complication has something to do with having been presented with a false dilemma. If presence and absence are operating but they cannot be learned, why must we conclude that they are innate? What I have been suggesting is that they arise as structures of consciousness-that unity formation, identity synthesis, attentive individuation, presence/absence (however one wishes to refer to the abilities) arise from the infant's burgeoning consciousness due to the fact that the significant Other is attending to the infant in a very special way. I have, of course, not yet offered a definition for "arising," but I have suggested that something is occurring that is not instinctual. We could put it another way and say that the Other is activating a talent-somehow causing (but not creating) structures to form in the flux that were not there before. Sokolowski, I would now like to suggest, makes room for this possibility-the possibility that presence and absence do not exist for the infant, but rather they are caused to arise by the Other, thereby becoming the basic form of consciousness for the rest of the individual's life. The first hint we see of this in Sokolowski is in his discussion of identity synthesis in Husserlian Meditations (§9). Here, he explains that objects always appear with meaning attached, and that [e]ven when we encounter an object for the first time, we appreciate it as something that can be meant in its absence, so we experience not only its presence but also its identity. Once we actualize our potential to be human and have gotten the sense of using signs, and so long as we have not lost our humanity through delirium, panic, illness, and the like, we experience everything as recognizable or namable. 32 So, identity synthesis is always functioning ... after we have actualized our humanity. Does this mean, then, that there is a point at which identity synthesis is not functioning because we have not yet actualized our humanity? When does this actualization occur-at some point in infancy, at some point before? This intriguing comment stands alone in the Husserlian Meditations, but in Presence and Absence, Sokolowski explains the idea which stands behind it a bit further: In the early years of life, the infant['s]' .. voice summons its mother, food and other things it desires. From the beginning, however, the absence that characterizes association is at work, because there is always some delay and frustration before the infant's desire is gratified; the rhythmic, consis-
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This passage points out several important themes. First, Sokolowski suggests that presence and absence are not forms of the child's flux of consciousness, but that they are "at work" in the child's experience of gratification and deprivation. This is an important distinction. It is to say that presence and absence are necessary forms of experience, that they have not yet developed in the infant, and yet they nevertheless play some role in early-consciousness because they are working to shape the experiences of feeling fulfilled (gratification) and feeling need (deprivation). If this is soand it is not a small claim for an Husserlian-then how do we ever achieve experiences of presence and absence? This development, it seems, is made possible by the Other. Through a rhythmic and consistent pattern of delay and gratification (e.g., the cry followed by the feel of the nipple, the hunger followed by the satisfaction, etc.) the infant begins to differentiate. And it is important to note here that Sokolowski never uses the language of teaching and learning: presence and absence are not instinctively functioning yet neither are they being learned; they are, rather, developing. The feeling of hunger (which is a deprivation and a pain) is followed by the feeling of satisfaction (which is a gratification and a pleasure). Coincidental and correlative to these feelings are experiences which are, as of yet, undifferentiated. The feel of the nipple, the taste of the milk, and the look of the mother's face occur with the feeling of gratification. With time and consistent treatment, this gratification becomes the presence of the nipple, etc. and the deprivation that is hunger becomes the absence of the nipple, etc. It is at this point that unity formation starts to function, identity synthesis begins to operate in earnest, and we "actualize our potential to be human." Another possible way to understand this is to distinguish between two "forms" of presence and absence-one passive, the other active. In fact, the labels "passive" and "active" do not do justice to the distinction. The idea is that there would be a presence and absence structure to experience that is simply "lived through." This structure would be "passive" in that it is necessary and unacknowledged. Sokolowski might even suggest that it
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results from our neural make-up.34 This elementary awareness of presence and absence, though, must not be confused with an active, reflective presence and absence. Thus, an elementary sense of presence and absence must be acknowledged for identity synthesis to do its job, and the role of the Significant Other would be to draw out reflective acknowledgment of presence and absence-to distinguish, as it were, between the object and its presence. Neurology would be responsible for our necessary, unacknowledged, non-reflective awareness of presence and absence, but the gracious act of attention would initiate an "ever-so-slightly" acknowledged sense of presence and absence. Such a foray into cognitive science and the physical, material conditions of consciousness might not seem to solve any phenomenological quandary, though. In a sense, we substitute one problem for another: Why do we experience presence and absence at all? Acknowledged presence and absence is the result of the gracious act of the Significant Other, but elementary presence and absence just is-that is the way our brains are put together. Whether instinct or hard-wiring, something is simply taken for granted. The extent to which any of this solves the basic problem of instinct, though, is questionable, and it is here that the limitations of my solution (and those of the parallel interpretation of Sokolowski that I have been offering) must be addressed. When we speak of such things as a potential for humanity that is actualized by the development of identity synthesis, are we not making a disguised appeal to an innate form of the flux? In other words, is there not an unspoken commitment to the instinctive presence of formal structures of consciousness resting behind every claim to an arising ability for unity formation? The answer is both yes and no. lt must be the case that some inherent potential for unity formation exists in the infant, and that this potentiality cannot itself be explained by anything more basic. Calling such a potential innate would not be a mischaracterization, but is this a problem? There need be no grand metaphysical claim here just as there is no grand epistemological claim in assuming a potential for full consciousness in the infant. But to write this off as an analytic truth (i.e., if X exists then X must potentially exist), is to fail to do justice to the concern that motivates such a question. If this ability arises-if it is not created from scratch or learned by means of the Other's instruction-then it seems fair to ask from whence it came. Something must have been there to start with that allowed this particular ability to develop and arise, and this something must be innate. Claiming that there is a potential ability waiting to develop that is built into every consciousness would seem no less dogmatic, no less speculative, than claiming that there is an instinctual awareness of the proto-Other or that the flow of consciousness must contain certain innate structures. 35
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And the problems, from an Husserlian point of view, are not limited to ones of potentiality. Indeed, the question "What might cause identity synthesis to arise" is one which is deeply troubling. I have pointed to some possible answers, but Husserlians are, as a rule, suspicious of such an approach. Preferring to speak of "necessary conditions," Husserlians accept that identity synthesis is not caused, but rather is. To be fair, Husserl himself was clearly struggling for an appropriate term to account for such phenomenological structures-hence his ABC's of the grammar of the world and the idea of a transcendental instinct. Sameness and difference, presence and absence-these and other structures must be there from the start for Husserl, and the strict Husserlian would take issue with the majority of the claims I have been advancing. In the case of the feral children, for instance, the strict Husserlian would suggest that I have not made a case for the lack of identity synthesis in humans raised without the gracious act of attention. In order to prove my point, Victor would have had to have been incapable of any focused attention, incapable of fear, even, for in order to be afraid of a thing or to see a thing in motion there is necessarily an elementary synthesis at work; otherwise, the feral child would be "comatose" or "lost in a dull gaze." Similarly, with non-feral infantile intentionality the Husserlian response to my claims would be that the infant necessarily achieves identity synthesis before the gracious act of attention is bestowed by the Significant Other: he cries in her absence, smiles in her presence, experiences sameness while nursing, and even sees the breast as the same when it is large and close and then small and far. I have tried to argue that the experiences are of gratification and deprivation, but in what sense are these truly different from presence and absence? If we are to speak phenomenologically-of the experience of the infant, and not the bio-physical states of the infant or the . psychology of the infant-then we must describe the structure of, e.g., the deprivation experience, and how can we do this without an appeal to the absence of some sensation or unity? Furthermore, and perhaps most controversially, I have attempted to argue that the Significant Other is the cause of functioning of the infant's ability for identity synthesis and unity formation-basically, the cause of the infant's active consciousness. It is not that the Significant Other teaches the infant these abilities or that these abilities are "built-in" to the infant and the (passive) presence of the Other activates them. Rather, identity synthesis and unity formation are caused to arise as forms of the flux by means of the Significant Other's agency. When the Significant Other acts toward the infant in a certain way (i.e., takes the infant as a unity, as the same unity across time, as an Other, etc.), these modes of attention cause the abilities for unity formation and identity synthesis to arise in the infant. Conscious-
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ness is, thus, not a self achievement, but an achievement by means of the Significant Other's agency. This is not a strict Husserlian notion of consciousness. In fact, it approaches Levinas' contention that the presence of the Other-particularly the face of the Other-is the realist/causal event which gives rise to consciousness: consciousness is constituted by way of an external agency. That is, Levinas argues that "the presence of the future in the present, seems all the same accomplished in the face-to-face with the Other. The situation of the face-to-face would be the very accomplishment of time ...."36 This follows closely what I have argued (consider the initial now-moment which ushers in the first unity as discussed above in section 3), but it is far from Husserlian. For Husser!, inner time consciousness is deeply related to passive synthesis-it is a kind of identity synthesis itself which is the foundation for consciousness. But in Levinas as well as in the theory I have been suggesting, consciousness (and inner-time consciousness) are "kick-started" by the Other-the results of external agency. In many respects, this parallel with Levinas is deep. What John Wild labels (in his introduction to the English translation of Totality and Infinity), "the strange asymmetry, the complete supremacy of the [O]ther" in Levinas' work, might be said to exist in the above theory as wel!.3? Now, it is not the company in which I find myself that is troubling at this juncture, but rather the ever-present spectre of Husser!. Husserl would maintain that there are elemental identity syntheses operating in infantile consciousness, and that such syntheses are the necessary conditions for the infant's achievement of the Other and the Ego-indeed, the necessary conditions for having any experience at al!. Seeing a color or a motion is an achievement. There is a unity formation and a sameness through temporal differences in such experiences, and in order to see the look on the face or the taste of the milk, the infant must be engaged in synthesizing identities. Consequently, the "constituents" of the now-moment I have suggested as the founding unity would be capable of being constituents only assuming that the infant's ability for unity formation already exists. Inevitably, this is why Husserl could not speak of the Significant Other as constituting consciousness by doing something independent of the infant's awareness. These are troubling words, indeed. These matters are troubling matters. How can one speak of consciousness "before" identity synthesis or an arising ability for unity formation? It seems as if such talents can arise only if they already exist. Some things have to stand out in experience in order to achieve sense as the first unity, but if they are things in the first place then clearly a unity formation has already taken place. The only response seems to be to accept that there are built-in structures to consciousness. Instincts, transcendental instincts, innate abilities, or the ABC's of the
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necessary grammar of the world-call them what you will, such notions begin to seem less a "refuge of ignorance" than a well-informed yet reluctant admission. Perhaps, though, we are dealing with an unsolvable dilemmaeither admit there are inexplicable instincts or adhere to a theory which accounts for the genesis of consciousness yet raises as many questions and problems as it solves. The dilemma might be "overcome" by choosing a camp in a leap of faith, but such leaps seem somehow unsatisfying and disheartening. We must take solace, nevertheless, in the knowledge that the problem might be a necessary one due to the nature of our inquiry. Our only tool in this inquiry is thought, and as Sokolowski reminds us, "thinking is the power of distinctly recognizing otherness and sameness." Our tool is "fashioned" to see wholes and parts, presence and absence, sameness and otherness, and when we attempt to operate in a world presumably without such features, the tool is of little use. Yet it is the only one ·we have at our disposal, so we fumble around with it hoping to accomplish something worthwhile. In a particularly relevant passage of his Husser/ian Meditations. Sokolowski deals with the problem of distinguishing members of a manifold-a kind of basic unity formation-and concludes that thinking about the problem is part of the problem: Continuous manifolds are engendered in a prelogical state of consciousness. They come about in sensibility and constitute the identities that sensibility enjoys. The problem of differentiating one member of the manifold from another arises because, in phenomenological reflection (which is the only kind of reflection that discloses these manifolds for what they are), we bring the distinguishing power of thought to bear on this domain of sensible continua and try to mark off parts within it; and "trying to rationalize the prerational is poor fishing.'.38 Here, then, is the agony of our dilemma-the desire to speak of a "prelogical state of consciousness" and the admission that embarking on the task might itself make a solution impossible. Inevitably, I hope only to have pointed to these problems and to have suggested some possible paths toward further understanding-not necessarily toward solution-of the issues involved. Hopefully, we have made some ground. Hopefully we have solved the problem of pairing as Husserl stated it in the Fifth Meditation. And if we have arrived at a point where we cling to instinct or press on in an attempt to rationalize the prerational and unify the preunified, then so be it. For the
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greater tale in which we find ourselves is not yet complete: the intersubjective world in which the newly formed Ego arises has many features in need of illumination, some of which we will tum to shortly. But first we move to refresh ourselves-and to take up fishing-in different waters altogether.
NOTES IThe examples are numerous, though one might confer Meltzoff (1985): "human beings have innate capacities allowing them...to recognize certain isomorphisms between themselves and other humans" (p. 3). 2Hart (1992), 184-86. 3Hart (1992), 187. 41n fact, there are probably even deeper problems, especially if Yamaguchi's claim that the infant lives in a world of inner perception for some time after birth is true. Yamaguchi argues: durch die Beobachtung mehrerer Psychologen ist bekannt, dass das Neugeborene in der der inneren Wahrnehmung entsprechenden Umgebung lebt, und dass die Fernwahrnehmung (Sehen und Horen) erst nach dem ersten Monat, verbunden mit der inneren Wahrnehmung und der Kinasthese allmahlich zu funktionieren anfangl. (Yamaguchi (1982), lIS). Surely, attentive individualization takes place in the first weeks after birth. 5Yamaguchi (1982),116. 6 Hart (1992), 192. 70f course, this example is the norm but not the necessary story. The Significant Other need not be the nursing mother. Other primary unity formations are possible-the father holding a bottle, for example. 8We start to move from speaking of the mother to speaking of the Significant Other-a human who, at least at the early stages of the infant's burgeoning Egohood, is in close contact with the infant and is, we might say, his primary caretaker. 9Denzin (1992), III and Rosenblith & Sims-Knight (1985),513. JOMelkman (1988), 30-32. IIMelkman (1988), 24 & 27. 12Melkman (1988). 70. 13Rosenblith & Sims-Knight (1985),355. I risk, of course, being labeled a radical empiricist appealing to such evidence, but this label would be misleading. I do not offer these empirical observations and psychological theories as proof of any claim I am making. I mention them, rather, because they are intriguing. If my reconstructive phenomenological account conflicted with the empirical "evidence," there would be good reason at least to attempt to re-evaluate the theory. If infants, for instance, appeared to possess an immediate knowledge of Self and Others-if their actions suggested that they were operating with such an awareness from the moment of birth-one could expect that any reconstructive phenomenology would have to be compatible with this observation. (Otherwise, we would at least have to say why it appears that the infant acts with an awareness of Others given that we have told a good story suggesting that he does not have such an awareness.) This point will come up again later when we discuss feral children and their lack of unity abilities. Again, the point is not that such evidence proves the theory. It is just that the empirical observations are consistent with such a
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theory, and this consistency speaks on behalf of the theory's success. More like a character witness for the defendant than an eye-witness to the crime, empirical evidence concerning infant (and feral) consciousness is brought in at this point. 14Again, it must be reiterated that what follows is a reconstructive phenomenology. We are working with experiences that are not self-evident and to which the phenomenologist does not have direct access. If successful, this reconstructive account will: a) begin by asking how those structures of consciousness to which we do have access might initially arise; b) move to describe what the waking-Ego's intentional life must then look like; and c) offer a consistent and useful description of this intentional life (theoretically, in terms of what an infant would say about his experience if he could perform the reduction; empirically, in terms of giving a description that seems to be consistent with how we see infants acting in the world; and phenomenologically, in terms of remaining true to our goal and our method). IlCf., especially, Hart (1992) § IS, Ch.lIi. 16Hart (1992), 198-99. l7Cr. Husserliana XIII, especially pp. 245-48. IR Hart (1992), 198. I~Now might be a good time to mention that Husserl insists that every perception involves an object in space and time. And it would seem that the theory of infant intentionality I am suggesting has no initial concept of object. In fact, some work would need to be done here to make all of this mesh perfectly with Husserl, but Husserl's notion of time consciousness and a rich now-moment (primal impression+retention+protention) is not something I would want to argue agai nst. 2°Husserliana X, 107. Cf., also, Ideas § 118. 2l This is a very important point and we will return to it in Chapter 6 when we investigate the status of non-human Others. 22Cf., e.g., Hart (1992),196. 23The account of Victor and Itard in this paragraph comes from Candland (1993), 18-28. 24And not just more stories of feral children. To name just two other possible sources of evidence, consider (1) the power to raise dog-consciousness to a nearly human level which will be dealt with-if only briefly-in Chapter 6; and (2) the lack of full subjectivity in those who are not attended to by humans as possessing full subjectivity. The latter is a theme in my "The Possibility of a Feminist Phenomenology" (1993). Here I consider the question: what if the significant Other cannot (or, perhaps, even will not) attend to the infant with this gracious act? What if the female child tries desperately to pair with those of her surrounding world, but they are male and the pairing never quite takes place? Even the women she pairs with can never offer her a full and complete subjectivity-as-Other since they themselves went through the same process and are living out their existence as "less-than-complete" subjectivities in a male Ego world. The result probably would be very much like what we have today. Women would be treated as objects-a certain type of object which proves, to men, quite useful, often "trouble-making," and more or less pleasureful, but an object nevertheless. Female objectification might become institutionalized, for the female Ego would not be able to resist the move to be objectified by half of the "fully subjective" population. Other modes of defining women-modes that are not based on subjectivitywould abound. The fashion-beauty complex, for instance, of which Sandra Lee Bartky writes, would help provide women with a sense of themselves. The female body, unlike a male body which houses subjectivity, might be seen as an end in itself. Women could be instructed to make their bodies over in different ways in order to achieve meaning: to "oil it, pumice it, powder it, shave it, pluck it, depilate it, deodorize it, ooze it into just the right foundation, reduce it overall through spartan dieting or else plump it up with silicon." (Bartky. 1990. Femininity and Domination: Studies in the Phenomenology of Oppression. NY: Routledge, p. 40). Females, as less-than-persons, would experience oppression. Of course this analysis fails
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to explain how male subjectivity first became the paradigm, but this is beyond our present topic. 25Hart (1993), 16-17. 26Hart (1993), 15-16. 27Hart (1993), 24 n24. 28Hart (1993), 17. 29Hart (1993), 15. 30"The object's identity comes to be presented only within the differences of presence and absence. It is founded on these differences and is a third dimension to them. Only when we are able to experience the object in its presence and in its absence do we encounter its identity. Identity is not a simple datum; it presents itself as a constant within the alternatives and the mixture of presence and absence. And, noetically, recognition of identity is founded on the blend of empty and filled intentions. Consciousness is the process of experiencing such identities; it takes place in different ways for different kinds of objects." Sokolowski (1974), 22. 31Sokolowski (1974), 29-30. 32Sokolowski (1974), 30. Italics added. 33Sokolowski (1978), 25-26. Italics added. 341 am indebted to Sokolowski, whose personal correspondence has helped to explicate this point. 350ne is reminded of Michelangelo's sculptures "Night and Day" on the sepulchre of Giuliano de Medici in Florence, Italy. The human shapes are left "unfinished" with hands, limbs, and faces partially formed. Michelangelo claimed that the forms were "innate" in the stone and that he was simply uncovering them. One can, indeed, see the whole of the forms emerging from the rock-it is quite suggestive how only part of a foot, for instance, is carved, yet the whole foot seems to be present. The point, for our purposes, would be that such forms are innate but that they could not have arisen "passively." That is, it took Michelangelo's "gracious act of carving" to bring such forms to the surface. His actions shaped the product and made it possible, yet the form was always there waiting manifestation. It is not like forcing an image onto the stone; neither is it like an archaeologist removing a fossil. The artistic form is innate yet needs Michelangelo's allention to be realized. 36Levinas (1989), 45. 37Levinas (1969), 19. J8Sokolowski (1974), 106.
CHAPTER IV
Moral Categoriality & Moral Being
1. INTRODUcrION
For the moment, we shift gears. Having investigated the constitution of the Ego and the Other, we eventually want to tum to the ethical implications of such a social ontology. I begin, though, with an inquiry into the nature of moral action and the degree to which being moral is a necessary human way of being as opposed to a voluntary choice made in certain situations. Robert Sokolowski has argued for a moral categoriality-an Husserlian, phenomenological notion which allows us to distinguish the moral from the non-moral act by means of a categorial identification. I Furthermore, Sokolowski suggests that being moral is not a choice, but rather we are necessarily moral by virtue of our social existence: moralbeing is our being. To a large extent I wish to agree with Sokolowski; thus I will be spelling out his views and arguing for them in some detail. But there are important problems with the Sokolowskian theory and points of weakness which need patching up. In the end I suggest that Sokolowski has arrived at the right point but has made some jumps along the way-jumps over ground which needs filling in, sometimes to a much greater extent and by means other than those he seems to indicate or deem necessary.
2. THE HISTORY OF MORAL THEORY
How might we define the realm of the moral? Surely our intuitions have something to tell us on this subject, but let us not take anything for granted. Baking bread is a culinary act. Without any lengthy analysis of terms, this seems straightforwardly clear. But why is this so? Bread baking is best labeled a culinary act, we might argue, for two reasons. First, it is an instance of cooking-a category defined by certain rules and types of con-
H. P. Steeves, Founding Community © Kluwer Academic Publishers 1998
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duct. The intent of bread baking is to engage in a cooking act. We might call this sort of justification a judgmental theory. Bread baking is a culinary act because we judge it to be an instance of cooking. But we might offer a second explanation in a different direction. Here we would label bread baking culinary because it is related to another state of affairs, namely eating bread that has been baked. The goal or consequence of the bread baking is to achieve and eat the bread, and that is best understood as a culinary goalthe taking of time to prepare food for ingestion. This we might call a relational theory: bread baking is a culinary act because it is related to a later act. Such an example, though, seems a bit forced-after all, who but a philosopher would worry about categorizing, let alone justifying the categorization, of bread baking in the realm of human action? But it is enlightening for two reasons. First, it makes us consider the nature of everyday acts like baking bread. We are called on to ask ourselves when does the ordinary become the moral. That is, when does baking bread become an ethical as opposed to a simple culinary act? Before analysis, our intuitions tell us that this is at least possible. It would seem that baking bread to cheer up a friend, to express to a loved one you are thinking of him or her, or to feed a starving person changes the act into one of moral dimensions. But what accounts for this change? This is how we are guided by the example in a second way, for the history of moral theory offers us a dichotomous understanding of the ethical instance of bread baking which is parallel to the understandings suggested above of the act as purely culinary. Judgmental theories in morality act exactly as we have already considered them in the realm of the culinary. If an action is subsumed under a moral category-e.g., baking bread for the starving is an instance of charity or beneficence-then it is a moral action. Another way of expressing the same is to say that if the intention of the agent is to engage in a charitable, beneficent, etc. act, then the act is moral. Many would find this understanding satisfactory: I intend to provide a basic necessity for someone who has need when I bake bread with the intention of providing it to an individual who is starving. Even if something happens to the bread while it is baking or while I am delivering it to the person in need, such faulty consequences do not detract from the ethical nature of the act. Kantian deontological theories are the best examples of this kind of reasoning. An act, for such theories, is ethical based on intentions and moral categories under which the act might be subsumed. The relational theory, however, suggests a different grounding. If an action leads to a good or bad state of affairs a relational theory labels it as
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moral. Baking bread for someone who is starving is an ethical act if it does, in fact, alleviate the starving, increase happiness, or establish some such good (or bad) consequence. Here the ethical nature of the act has little to do with the agent's intentions. Rather, we must look ahead in time and see what effect the act has had on the world. Utilitarian and teleological theories are the best examples of this kind of reasoning. We are left, then, with two different methods of determining whether an action is moral, and it is important to note at this point that the problem is not merely one of theory-i.e., when attempting to establish why such-and-such an act is moral we encounter differing opinions. Rather, the two methods can provide discrepant results: some acts will be considered moral by one theory and not by the other. Consider, for example, the baking of bread for the starving. Judgmental theories clearly label this a moral act-the intention is evident and the moral category of charity or some similar rule or value can subsume the action. But suppose that the bread tastes very bad and, in the end, is never given to the person who is starving. In effect, nothing much has changed in the world. Some flour and yeast have been altered but no one's good or bad has been changed-no one is happier or sadder. The relational theory would not-at least not without a lot of hand-waving and further argumentsconsider this an ethical action. It has not led to a state of affairs which the relational theory considers ethically significant. Consequently, the two theories disagree on whether or not the action of the bread baking even belongs in the realm of morals. The problem that we are encountering here is deep. I would like to suggest, following Sokolowski,2 that neither justification does justice to the ethical being of the act. Indeed, both the judgmental and the relational theories are inherently circular and unacceptable. The immediate problem and circularity of the relational theory is evident in the discussion above. The relational theory failed to label the bread baking a moral act because it did not lead to another proper state of affairs. Surely, some consequence resulted, though. The physical ingredients of the bread were put through a change of form. A loaf of bread-granted, a terrible, inedible loaf of bread-resulted from the baking. The bread was thrown away. A starving person continued to starve. All of these states of affairs are direct results of the action in question, but the relational theory does not allow them to count toward the act's gaining moral status because they are not "proper" or "ethically significant" states of affairs. But here, of course, is the problem. What sort of results, goals, ends, or states of affairs do count as morally significant and why? To say that morally relevant results count is to indulge in circularity. Hence we have discovered the problem of the relational theory: it cannot account for the moral goodness or
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badness of ends, only means. Methods and actions can be evaluated but the goals themselves are inexplicably either moral or amoral. This is a foundational problem which forces us to call into question the legitimacy of the relational approach. The judgmental theory suffers a similar lack of a grounding. Here the moral categories under which individual actions are subsumed thus achieving moral status are unaccounted for. Baking bread for the starving is a moral act because it is a instance of charity, but why is charity a proper moral category? The category (or value, rule, obligation, etc.) itself is above categorization: the judgmental theory does not judge the categories; it merely accepts them. Again, we are left without a firm foundation for our ethical justification. What is needed is a way to include the best from both theoriesthose parts which mesh most with our intuitions-and to construct a new theory from them which does not rely on any circularity. It must exclude neither intentions nor consequences, and it must be firmly grounded in the act itself, not a set of categories or ethically proper goals which lie beyond the act and thus beyond scrutiny.
3. CATEGORIALITY AND FOUNDATIONS
Sokolowski has, for the most part, achieved such an understanding. Key to his theory is the Husserlian notion of categoriality-a concept worked out in the Logical Investigations which has to do with the logical form and structure embedded in articulated things. One of the implications of Husser!' s study is that such forms and structures can be intuited. This is to say that, in contrast to most previous theories of intentionality,3 Husserl claims that when we understand that, for example, the bread is crusty, we intuit the bread's being crusty and not just bread and crusty; or we can intuit the being-together of the bread and the butter and not just the bread and the butter. Sokolowski adapts this concept to the question at hand and suggests that there is a certain type of intuited categoriality unique to morality. If this is true then we have made the first step toward solving the problem of grounding a theory of moral-act classification, for the realm of the moral will no longer be defined by rules, values, goals, or ends outside morality and thus ultimately unaccounted for. Rather, the act itself will carry with it the justification and the label of its status. But at this point someone might suggest that an account of moral categoriality, phenomenological or otherwise, is doomed to the same fate as
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the judgmental and relational theories, for even if we manage to describe what a moral action looks like, categorially speaking, we must still explain why that type of categoriality is to be considered moral. And this explanation must be more than an appeal to the inherent moral nature of the categoriality if it is not to be just as suspect as a Kantian appeal to moral law or a Utilitarian appeal to the goal of overall happiness. Sokolowski does not, at least directly, acknowledge this concern. Perhaps this has something to do with the relation he sees between the natural and the good-a question which will not concern us presently. For now we must attempt to illustrate how it is that moral categoriality neither exhibits circularity nor lacks foundation. In order to avoid accusations of ad hoc reasoning we do not yet investigate the specifics of moral categoriality. In this way we hope to show that it is not the case that we have first accepted categoriality as the solution and now are seeking a way to appropriately defend it; rather we will be led to categoriality as the solution through a phenomenological investigation of the problem. The concern over the judgmental and relational theories is not so much that they are invalid, but that they are not the types of theories which can adequately do the job of act classification. In fact, we might express the lack of foundation by suggesting that they both necessarily rely on a deeper, unstated theory-i.e., after we have determined the moral being of an act we can then "dissect" it in various ways, but that which determines the classification is not itself a tool of dissection. Sokolowski has suggested that this is 4 the case as well. In "Moral Thinking" he explains: the categorialities of judgments and of relation can...be grounded upon a more elementary form of moral thinking, on a type of fundamental moral identification. When the categorialities of moral judgment and relation are thus based on this more fundamental kind of thinking, they receive a philosophical clarification that resolves the difficulties that seem endemic to them. The categories, rules, values, goals, and outcomes will no longer seem to dangle from nowhere, they will no longer seem to be unexplained, simply given, and almost arbitrary. The key here is that we are approaching the problem from a phenomenological direction, and though we are attempting to make the move to show the prescriptive force of phenomenology we must remember that its main task is descriptive. That categorial form permeates the world is a phenomenological insight. This is how the world presents itself to us: objects are "infected," in Sokolowski's terms, with syntax. 5 Human action can
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be intuited categorially. Just as the bread and butter can be presenced as more than just the bread and the butter, so baking a loaf of bread can be more than just the baking, the baker, and the bread. Now the formalization of the modes of the presence (and absence) of things and acts is immediately called for, and specifically for the question at hand it must be asked: what types of categoriality infect human actions? Sokolowski uncovers seven forms. 6 In each case what is described is more than just an actor and her action-indeed, the world is much richer. For example, I can bake bread because I want to experience the activity of making bread. In this case it is the performance itself that is willed-that is important-and the baking bread for me is more than me and the baking of bread: it has to do with my way of being as baking bread. I can also bake bread because I want to produce a loaf of bread to eat. Here it is the creation of a product and its use that is infecting the action. The way in which the action is presenced is, again, not simply as me and the baking of bread. In this instance, the work is secondary to the product and the product is secondary to its consumption. My phenomenological understanding of the bread baking thus changes so that the action is presenced as a production for consumption. There are numerous and complex ways actions undergo presence and absence, and "reducing" the world to me and baking bread, or to any agent and action in general, does not do justice to how things "come on" to us, to how they present themselves to us. To reduce action in this waywhich is not unlike reducing buttered bread to a patch of yellow and a patch of white-is to misdescribe our experience of the world. Given this, and given the variety of ways in which the presence of actions is manifest, we can finally move to suggest that one such form of human action is moral-namely, the kind of action which "makes a move in the web of human relations," the kind of action in which "someone else's good or bad [is] taken [as such], and done as my own good or bad."?
4. MORAL CATEGORIALITY
If I bake bread in order to feed someone who is starving, my action can be said to be suffused with moral categoriality. The action itself is more than me and bread baking. It is a way of interacting with another human being, a way of promoting his good as such as my own. It is important to note at this point that there is a necessary thoughtful element to moral categoriality. The Other's good or bad must be taken up and acted on as my own; thus I need to make this judgment-the Other's
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good as my good-for the moral categoriality to be introduced. It is not the fact that the Other is better or worse after my act: it is not that the bread reduces his starving. If this were the case then moral categoriality would consist of taking the Other's good as a goal-a categoriality undifferentiated from that of producing and using a product (in this case making the bread in order to use it for the good of the Other). Neither is moral categoriality achieved through my being affected by affecting the Other. That is, it is not the fact that I will benefit or be harmed because the Other is benefited or harmed-not that my good is the Other's eating my bread and no longer starving-for this would be but another form of production/use categoriality. Instead, the moral is achieved when the Other's good (or bad) is taken up as my good (or bad). I recognize the good of the Other and pursue it, as' such, as my own. This judgment, identification, and action thus define the realm of the moral. Moral acts carry out moves in human relationships. Consequently, Sokolowski has managed to define the realm of the moral to coincide with our intuitions (i.e., the other forms of categoriality infecting human action are not concerned with goods or bads or human relationships in the "deep" sense that morality is-being charitable is expressed in baking the bread, but eating is not expressed in going to a restaurant),8 to allow a sort of "logical space" to open up within which moral evaluation can take place, and so as not to suffer from a lack of foundation. But in what sense do we not have in Sokolowski a disguised appeal to intentions as the source for morality? If the key to moral categoriality is the agent's identification of the Other's good and his adoption of that good as his own, is this not just a fancy way of saying that the agent must have proper intentions-that he must intend to promote the Other's good as his own? This is mistaken for two reasons. First it is a type-level mistake. As we have already suggested, neither intentions nor consequences are capable of defining the moral realm. A phenomenological argument was needed which introduced the categoriality of morality-the specific way in which a moral action is presenced as an action in a particular mode of being. Part of the definition of the being of a moral act involves a judgment-what we might want to call an intention-on the part of the actor to take up the Other's good as his own, but this phenomenological description is not making a claim which is on the same level as, for instance, the judgmental theory. Second, recognition of the Other's good as my own does not, by itself, conjure up the realm of the moral. Moral acts "live" in individual human actions. It is not enough that I adopt the Other's good as my own; I must actively promote it. The fact that we are within the web of human relationships is displayed by my awareness of the Other's good as a good
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which is not in isolation-as a good which is possibly my good or my bad. This move locates the playing field for the action, but it takes the action itself to make a move in this field-to make a move in the web of human relations. Sokolowski explains the importance of the material performance in the following way:9 Just as there cannot be an ace in tennis without a ball being hit, so there cannot be an act of gratitude, of contempt, of generosity, without at least a glance or a word or, more likely, a handing over, a striking, a making, a going....A move in the web of human relationships is never an act just by itself; it needs to be embodied, it needs to be expressed and accomplished in a more tangible activity... .To postulate an internal intention and act of the will is the typical philosophical mistake of making a dimension of something into a new event or a new thing, of creating new entities to explain the phenomena before us ... .Instead of being located internally, the moral act must be placed in the public domain; it is indistinguishable from the material performance, from its material substrate, but it is also accomplished in this substrate. This notion of the intention and the performance-of the entire moral act-taking place in the public domain is, according to Hart's interpretation of Sokolowski, the key element of moral categoriality. Intersubjectivity and the sharing of a world with other agents is, for Hart, the synthetic a priori "fact/essence" which founds moral categoriality.lo Indeed, this point will surface later when I attempt to pull together our earlier work on intersubjectivity and the current project of describing moral categoriality. For now, the notion might be understood in this way: taking up and promoting the Other's good as my own requires and is an acknowledgment of my being in the world with other agents. It is not just the fact that I can possibly affect the good or bad of another or that I can affect my own good or bad by affecting the good or bad of another, though this is certainly one indication that I am not an isolated monad. Rather, there is a much deeper truth suggested by the presence of moral categoriality. Taking up another's good or bad as my own assumes that the Other's good or bad is not just good or bad from their perspective, but that it can be seen as my good or bad as well. It is akin to saying that the desk I perceive from my perspective can be perceived from the Other's perspective. The commonality of our shared world makes the concept of perspective possible, and moral categoriality is thus an affirmation of this basic intersubjectivity.
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Inevitably, the point of all of this, for both Sokolowski and Hart, is that such a definition of morality in conjunction with a commitment to our intersubjective nature suggests that the moral point of view is necessarily thrust upon us-that we exist morally. It is thus to this claim that we now tum. 5. MORALITY AS CHOICE v. MODE OF BEING At first it might seem that taking up the Other's good as one's own-i.e., acting morally as opposed to amorally-is a choice. After all, the would-be agent needs to ponder the situation, make a judgment, decide whether or not he is going to adopt and promote the Other's good as his own. The simple acts of life-as I have gone to great pains to point out with the bread baking example-are not necessarily moral. It takes a special, thoughtful categoriality to make a moral act. With a variety of possible acttypes before him it would seem then that the actor could simply choose not to act morally-to refuse to enter the realm of the moral by refusing to engage in an act exhibiting moral categoriality. Sokolowski, however, suggests that this is not so. For him, our social way of being implies a moral way of being, as he explains in "Moral Thinking": II If we recognize this moral categoriality as the substance of
moral action, it becomes clear that there never is a serious problem about whether and how a human being needs to be persuaded to adopt the moral point of view. We have no choice about adopting a moral point of view. We exist morally not by virtue of a decision, but by virtue of the fact that we share a world with other agents, and that what seems good to us will usually also show up as good or bad to others, that as good or bad for others it can be good or bad for us, that there can consequently be both conflicts and harmonies in the intersection of goods and bads, and that we as agents can appreciate the intersection of our goods and bads with those of others. That space of intersection is the space in which we act. There is no more a problem about how we enter into the moral point of view than there is a problem about how what I perceive from this angle can also be perceived from another angle by someone else. That is the way things are and that is the way we are....[T]o be or
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not to be moral is not itself a matter of choice; we are moral by the way we exist with others. I choose to quote at length from Sokolowski on this question because of the importance of this claim to the overall project. Up to this point we have been busying ourselves with the formal consideration of morality. We have been investigating the structure of moral acts, and in the strictest sense the work has not been ethical. I have not said a word about distinguishing acts that are good, right, praiseworthy, and are to be promoted from those acts that are bad, wrong, condemnable, and are to be avoided. In fact, there has been a bit of circularity in what we have been discussing. Taking up and promoting another's good as one's own is not a very complete definition of moral categoriality if we do not address the question of what is, exactly, a good. But this question-though not to be answered immediately-is intimately tied up with the question at hand: in what sense is morality our way of being as opposed to a choice? That is, regardless of our definition of good is it true that that good is but a perspective on some more objective, public good and therefore when we promote it we are necessarily being and acting morally in the formal sense I have been describing?J2 I wish to answer with a qualified yes. Toward that end we now tum to investigate the claim and some possible arguments to the contrary.
6. PROBLEM: THE UNTHINKING ACTOR
The first, and perhaps most obvious, argument against morality as a way of being rather than a choice is that our definition of moral categoriality has a thoughtful element to it, and very often people do not think before they act. The problem, actually, is much deeper than this seemingly psychological fact would suggest. To be moral, I have argued in agreement with Sokolowski, requires a specific type of categoriality. For an action to be a moral transaction I must first identify what is good or bad for the Other as such as my good or bad. Clearly, this identification does not always occur. Indeed, the moral is but one possible categoriality which infects our actions. The problem is this: although my good or bad might be but one perspective (i.e., the Other has "a take" on the same action as being good or bad for her), what is to keep me from simply failing to make the identification? What is to keep me from being an unthoughtful actor, constantly failing to identify the Other's good or bad as such as my own? I can continuously think only of my own good and bad and never make the phenomenological move to identify the Other's
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good or bad as such as my own. Is it not the case that there is an is/ought bridge missing? Something is needed to say that I should consider the Other's good or bad, that I should choose to act morally. For example, what if I were to take food from a starving man in order to satisfy my own hunger? Clearly, if I take his bad, his continued starvation, as my good I am acting morally-actually, probably immorally, but at least I am clearly in the realm of morality as defined by Sokolowski's categoriality. But what if I do not concern myself with the Other in any way? What if I fail to consider how taking the food from him will affect him or how I am affected by his starvation as well? Here, it would seem, we are silenced. By the definition of moral categoriality we have been exploring I am not engaged in a moral transaction. There is no "thoughtful dimension...[no] complex identification that provides the categorial form that turns mere behavior into moral transaction.,,13 Such action is, in Sokolowski's terms, a non-moral human performance. Yet this conflicts with our intuitions. Surely some move is being made within the web of human relations here. The judgmental and relational theories anxiously await the opportunity to critique my action, yet they cannot: moral categoriality labels it as not within their domain. To make matters worse we can imagine an actor who never considers the ramifications of his actions, the goods or bads of Others, etc. Such an individual acts without taking up a good of any kind-he simply acts. Now it would seem that morality is certainly not a way of being for him. By our definition he never engages in a moral act in his entire life! Sokolowski does not seem worried about the unthinking actor problem. This is, perhaps, due to his Aristotelian leanings, for he contends that "even when we do no more that simply think we desire a good....,,14 Indeed, Hart concurs, suggesting that any expression of a choice involves "something willed in the light of something else....Whatever we do we do what seems good to do ... [and] this holds for all the forms of action ....,,15 How might we make a case for such a claim? Aristotle is surely the best place to begin. For him, the question is clearly analytic. The Nicomachean Ethics begins with the observation that "every action and choice [proairesis] seem to aim at some good; the good, therefore, has been well defined as that at which all things aim.,,16 But clearly, some actions are voluntary and some are involuntary for Aristotle. Does this not lead to the same problem we have in Sokolowski? Perhaps it makes sense to say that when we think, we desire a good; "we first of all are moral agents, just as we first of all are thoughtful beings."l? This, however, leaves us with the question of what happens when we do not think-what happens when I fail to consider the starving man as I take and eat his bread? One possible problem here is the term thinking, which I have been
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using with little regard for its various meanings. The equivocation is that "thoughtless" in a technical sense must be closely related to Aristotle's involuntary action. Thoughtless action would thus be an action divorced from the will, from choice, from deliberation, such as the person whom Aristotle describes as carried by the wind to a place he did not want to gO.IS If I slip and fall down the stairs and land on someone, it makes some sense to think of the action as 1) Involuntary, 2) Not exhibiting moral categoriality, 3) Thoughtless, and 4) Not making a move in the web of human relations. But if I were to wait at the top of the stairs and jump on top of someone in an attempt to injure her, the action seems 1) Voluntary, 2) To be exhibiting moral categoriality, 3) Thoughtful, and 4) To be making a move in the web of human relations. This, however, is not the way I have been using the term "thoughtless." When I called the actor who takes food from the starving man thoughtless, I did not mean to suggest that his hand "slipped," accidentally grabbing the food and shoving it into his own mouth. Rather, I employed the term "thoughtless" to indicate that he did not consider the full ramifications of his act. Clearly there was thought and there was a good pursued, but the actor did not think about the starving man's good or bad. This is thoughtless action in a less technical and less troublesome sense. But is it really less troublesome? Perhaps we no longer have to drag out arguments to show how all voluntary actions aim toward a goodperhaps we can admit that humans are thoughtful and that they therefore are constantly pursuing goods-but does this make us fundamentally moral? Unfortunately not, for it is not enough to show that human being implies human action which implies the pursuit of a good. Rather, we must identify and take up the Other's good or bad, not just any good or bad, if we are to demonstrate moral being; and is this not the point of the "thoughtless" actor who takes bread from the starving? He pursues a good and acts voluntarily but he does not identify or promote the Other's good or bad, and therefore he acts outside the realm of the moral. Perhaps the good he pursues really is the Other's good or bad, but without making the identification as such, moral categoriality does not exist and the action cannot be moral. We might attempt to bring Hart into the picture at this point in order to question the possibility of the "thoughtless" actor. According to Hart, moral categoriality is an "acknowledge[ment], i.e., actualiz[ation], [of] the latent 'we'/'us' which is the trans-categorial determination of every agent's wakefulness; it is making explicit the intersubjectivity and interconnectedness of our lives in what we desire and in our actions in pursuit of what we desire.,,19 The fact that the full referent of "I" includes-in an apperceptive way-"we" is, by Hart's admission, one of "the darkest and most difficult parts of transcendental phenomenology.,,2o We will not go into the details of
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the investigation which leads to this discovery here; nevertheless I wish to appropriate Hart's conclusion for the task at hand. If the full sense of "I" always involves a "we" then can we not say that the "thoughtless" actor is necessarily involved in moral categoriality even when he thinks something like "I take this good as mine"or "I take the eating of this bread as my good"? Given the sense in which the "I" apperceives a "we"-the sense in which there is no Ego without the community-ean we not take the argument a step further and suggest that our social way of being infects every thought and action we have, or, in Hart's words, that "the world's publicity [and thus the publicity of goods] ... is more or less evident even in our solitude and in our most guarded experiences,,?21 The answer here is "yes, we can." But, again, unfortunately this does not solve the particular problem at hand. We have sketched another proof for the fact that the agent's perceived isolated good is, actually, a public good; but the agent's own awareness is still not mandated. Note that for Hart moral categoriality is an "acknowledging," a thoughtful act. Every good phenomenologist makes such acknowledgments. Every good agent does it too. But there is nothing necessary here. Our "thoughtless" actor can mistakenly continue to consider only his own good because he believes they are goods in isolation. Without a moral act to his name, in what sense could we attribute to him a moral way of being? We are getting closer to a solution by investigating how attempted solutions have failed. What we have said so far is not wrong, but it is not enough. As a final move, let us now consider the problem from a different angle-one informed by our investigations with Aristotle and Hart. Rather than ask what the "thoughtless" actor is doing, we thus ask what is he not doing? Consider a similar yet categorially-different case. What if the actor were no longer "thoughtless" but rather "malevolent"? That is, he realizes that the man is starving, he hates the man and wants him to starve, and therefore he steals the bread and eats it. What is such an actor thinking and doing that the "thoughtless" actor is not? On the surface it appears that there is very little difference: The Case of the Malevolent Actor I. The starving man's bad is his continued starving. 2. The starving man's bad is identified as such as the actor's good.
3. The actor acts, promoting his good. 4. The actor takes bread from the starving man. 5. Is there a move made in the web of human relations? Yes. It can be expressed in many ways: the actor creates an enemy rather than a friend; the actor establishes a relationship with the starving man;
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the actor is identified as a merciless thief, an evil man, etc. 6. The actor's character becomes more firmly established (as a malevolent man). The Case of the "Thoughtless" Actor 22 The starving man's bad is his continued starving. The cessation of his own hunger is identified as the actor's good. The actor acts, promoting his good. The actor takes bread from the starving man. Is there a move made in the web of human relations? Yes. Clearly the starving man thinks of the actor in a certain negative way now, and a human relationship has been established. 6. The actor's character becomes more firmly established (as an uncaring, unthoughtful, etc. man).
I. 2. 3. 4. 5.
Although I have indicated a slight difference in the moves made in the web of human relations, it would seem that the main difference in the two scenarios has to do with how the actor identifies his good and what type of character he is establishing. We can see how these two phenomena are connected by taking a closer look at the former. It is not the case that the identification of the good is an internal thought process something like an intention. Identifying and acting on goods requires, first of all, that there appear both goods and possible-goods for the actor. It is the way in which goods appear, then, that differentiates the two scenarios. Further phenomenological analysis along these lines yields an intriguing conclusion: the world and, more specifically, goods in the world appear in strikingly different ways for the malevolent and the "thoughtless" actors. The bread, for the "thoughtless" actor, appears as his-for-the-taking, and as a means-toward-realizing-a-personal-isolated-good. Goods, for the "thoughtless" actor, appear as private and individual-this is, in fact, why we call him thoughtless: his conception of the Good does not involve Others and he does not think what the Good might look like from their perspective. Goods do not appear to him in their full, public sense. The malevolent actor, on the other hand, sees the world in a much different way. For him the bread appears as a tool-for-inflicting-suffering and as not-his-for-the-taking. This latter mode of appearance makes it possible for the malevolent actor to steal the bread from the starving man: the fact that it does not appear as the actor's means that taking it and eating it is a possible means of promoting the starving man's bad. Furthermore, goods for the malevolent actor appear as public-this is what makes possible his being thought of as malevolent. The bad of the Other appears as a possible good for the malevolent actor. The recognition of conflicting perspectives
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on the same good or bad is built into his view of the world. What has this analysis accomplished? Is this not just another more technical description of the way in which the "thoughtless" actor acts outside morality (because the Other's good/bad does not appear as such as a possible good/bad for him) and the malevolent actor acts within the realm of morality (because his goods and bads appear as intertwined with Others')? Our first response must be that at least we have set the stage for arguing that morality cannot be understood as a choice. Claiming that a person chooses not to be moral-not to adopt a moral point of view and thus engage in moral categoriality-assumes that moral categoriality is a realized possible structure of the world for him. This means that within his horizon of possible experience there is a public conception of the Good. To be a choice, moral categoriality must appear as a possible structure of reality, and this, in tum, implies that goods can have various perspectives. If, at this point and given this horizon of experience, the actor chooses to repress the publicity of goods and act as if there were no such thing, he is, indeed, making a moral choice. He is actively and thoughtfully setting aside the goods and bads of Others as his own good. Such an actor would recognize, for instance, that the good of quieting his hunger through taking food from the starving man is not a good in isolation-that the act is possibly good or bad from the perspective of the starving man and that he cannot help but affect that man's good or bad-yet after this recognition he would choose to think that his good is in isolation. He would choose not to be moral. Clearly, something is suspicious about this move. First, the actor is choosing to adopt a lie and call it the truth-to act as if something he knows to be false is true. Secondly, he is at once taking up the various goods and bads of Others and refusing to promote them. The goods and bads are as such a bad for him-he actively refrains from adopting them and promoting them-and this is a moral act. The choice to be moral or not is, therefore, meaningless. As soon as the choice appears to surface as possible it can no longer exist. Whether or not the choice arises as a possibility (and thus negates its own possibility) is decided by how the world appears to the actor, and this leads to our second discovery. The way in which goods and bads appear to an actor we might call a function of character. Morality, for anyone whose character is such that goods and bads appear as at least possiblypublic, is better understood as a way of being rather than a choice-the latter is ruled out for the reasons above, and the former seems acceptable because the actor is essentially moral: his mode of living and being is unavoidably infected with moral categoriality. But what of the actor-our "thoughtless" actor-who "cannot" see the publicity of goods? Morality does not seem to be a choice for him (for it is not even a possibility given his horizon of understanding), but in what sense is it a way of being? Here
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we might suggest that an actor is not only responsible for the goods which he pursues, but for the way in which those goods appear to him as well. That is, an actor is responsible for his character, and in this way even the "thoughtless" actor's being is moral. This claim needs further support and explanation. Sokolowski does not seem aware of the importance of such an argument, yet from time to time presents us with a suggestive comment on this very topic. "An agent's character," he writes,23 is the source of his ability to appraise a situation, to see it as an opportunity to help someone or an opportunity to defraud; in many cases character makes the agent obtuse, incapable of seeing that a human transaction should be carried out....This sort of blindness is not ignorance of facts but inability to appraise, and it reveals a deficiency .. .in being human. Aristotle adds an intriguing comment on the subject when, in the Nicomachean Ethics, he considers the possibility that "the individual is somehow responsible for his own characteristics... [and] is similarly responsible for what appears to him (to be good).,,24 It is the nature of this "somehow" which we must explore. How is the actor responsible for his or her own character and why does this suggest that the "thoughtless" actor whose horizon does not admit the possibility of the Other's good has a moral being? The answer is revealed when we further analyze the history of such actors. How is it that some people come to have a character that does not admit the possibility of identifying and pursuing Others' goods as such as one's own? They were neither born this way nor had such an horizon thrust upon them. Rather, at some point-or, more likely, at no particular point but slowly and gradually across a period of time-the actor made choices in his life that shaped his character and horizon to the point where he now cannot entertain the possibility of taking up the Other's good as such as his own. Through repeated acts of egoism (i.e., concentrating only on how the Good looks from his own particular perspective and ignoring other perspectives and thus the publicity of the Good), a sense of goods as private and isolated develops for the actor. The publicity of goods sinks further into the dark background of his horizon until there comes a point at which it no longer can be seen. The possibility of engaging in moral categoriality has, for such a person, disappeared?5 It is important to note here that the actor's original horizon had to admit the possibility of public goods and that the extinguishing of that
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possibility was accomplished through repeatedly chosen action-actions which themselves were moral. If we assume any type of good at all we must assume its public dimension as well. If the actor chose only to act on what he considered to be isolated, individual, egoistic goods early in the development of his character, these goods were necessarily possible goods for him-his horizon contained such goods. But in order for there to be a personal good or a recognition of a personal good there must be the Other's good, the idea of the public Good, and a recognition of such as well. Just as there is no Ego without the Other and the community, there is no private good without the Other's good and the public Good (i.e., the communal nexus of intertwined goods). This means that originally, the actor's horizon necessarily included non-private goods as possibly-appearing goods-it is a phenomenologically inescapable truth. Now if the actor no longer possesses an horizon containing such possibilities it is due to his actively pursuing the private and ignoring the public senses of goods. 26 This is to say that every time he acted and pursued a good, he could have taken the Other's good or bad as such as his own but he did not. And this is not an unthinking actor. This is an agent who necessarily recognizes his good is also the good or bad of the Other. And then he simply closes his eyes to the repercussions of his act which he knows exist. He refuses to see how the Other is affected, and thus in a clear sense is acting morally, though he wishes to disavow it. Eventually, he will come to possess a numb character and an horizon in which the goods of Others no longer appear as possibilities; but the path which led to such a character was a path filled with moral decisions-indeed, morality was never really a choice for the actor (though he thought it to be), for each step along the way he had morality thrust upon him. His actions, even the actions leading to the development of a "thoughtless" character, were essentially "soaked" with moral categoriality. Consequently, we must conclude that morality is best understood as a way of being-that we are fundamentally caught up in moral categoriality as human beings. The so-called "thoughtless" actors-even the actors who seem to lack the tools and character for making moral decisions-are inescapably moral. But one other possible problem still exists: the problem of the actor who is thoughtless in yet a different sense.
7. PROBLEM: THE NON-JUDGMENTAL ACTOR
Recall that moral categoriality involves an element of judgment, not just thoughtfulness. It is a "complex identification" that, for Sokolowski,
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makes an action moral. The actor takes up and promotes the Other's good as such as his own. Let me be more specific about the intentionality involved. First, the actor recognizes the Other's goodlbad as possibly his own. This is accomplished given the necessary preconditions we have already investigated. Next, the actor judges the Other's good/bad as such to be his own good/bad. Finally, the actor acts, promoting the good/bad which appears to him now in a dual sense-both as his own and as the Other's as such. These two senses are not simply conjoined. It would not be accurate to say that the good/bad is the Other's plus the actor's. Rather, it has a depth of meaning unarticulated by such a statement. Because it is the Other's goodlbad it is the actor's goodlbad, and because it has been labeled the actor's goodlbad as such any acting to promote it is a moral act. To think otherwise is to suggest that the Holy Grail, for instance, is simply 1) a cup, and 2) something that belonged to Jesus Christ. The full meaning is more than the constitutive predicates summed up. It is the being-together of those parts in certain important ways. This is not a new claim. This is simply a reaffirmation of categoriality, but we bring it up again to remind ourselves of the importance and the power of the actor's "complex identification," of the actor's judgment that the Other's good/bad is going to be identified as such as his own. The problem I want to consider now is the possibility of a non-judging agent. In the fifth of the Cartesian Meditations Husserl reminds us of a basic fact of intentionality. There comes a point at which the world appears to us with more and more precise and complex meaning, and judgments as to the essence and natJjre of things are no longer made, for their "full" sense is immediately intuited. Consider a child who understands the world as being broken up into individual items and things, and is just learning the uses and meanings of each of these appearing things. She sees scissors, for instance, but does not take them to be scissors. They are, instead, an individuated item within her horizon of possibly experienced things, but since she does not understand the useful, public, final sense of scissors, she first takes them to be an object and then later with further understanding, evidence, and thought, judges that object to be a pair of scissors. With time, she will understand the scissors to be scissors immediately. Her horizon will change and the scissors will appear to her as scissors. In Husserl' s worlds, "the child who already sees physical things understands .. Jor the first time the final sense of scissors; and from now on [s]he sees scissors at the first glance as scissors-but naturally not in an explicit reproducing, comparing, and inferring.',27 After this final sense is achieved, no judgment occurs. Now, what if the same process were to take place in a moral setting? That is, what if the agent no longer needs to make a judgment identifying the Other's good as such as his own, but rather his horizon is such that the
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Other's good simply appears to him as his own good? If he acts to promote this good it would not really make sense to cal1 the act egoistic, for even though he is promoting it as his own he certainly realizes its public nature and the fact that the good is the Other's good as well. This publicity is built into his horizon due to his repeated acknowledgment and placing of importance on the publicity of goods he has recognized in the past. Clearly, for Aristotle this is not a problem. An agent who naturally sees the Other's good as such as his own and then promotes it is an agent of virtue. But for Sokolowski the concern is evident. Although such an actor might appear virtuous-both through Aristotelian and contemporary eyesand such actions appear to be moral actions, for Sokolowski there can be no moral categoriality without the thoughtful judgment of identification. Consequently, if I have arrived at a point in my life and my relationship with my wife where I immediately take her good to be mine, where I simply intuit her bad to be my bad because it is her bad, where I act to promote goods which appear to me without judgments as "ours," I am no longer acting within the realm of morality. This is a strange situation. I have become a non-moral creature due to my diligence in acting morally. Each time I identified my wife's good as such as my own, I disclosed more of the "final sense" of the Good-i.e., the Good in its publicity. And now that I have achieved this identification without judgment, I am no longer moral-I no longer possess a moral relationship with my wife. A first response might be that the perfectly non-moral agent of the type just described does not exist. Perhaps I can become someone to whom my wife's good appears to me as such as my own without judgment. Perhaps even an inner circle of friend's goods can appear similarly, but the possibility of morality wil1 always exist for me because there are so many other goods and Other's goods, so many perspectives on the public Good, that they will never appear to me all at once as mine. Perhaps God can see all perspectives of the public Good. Perhaps we ought to strive for such understanding, to possess such an horizon, to love our neighbors as ourselves and thus see their goods as such as our own, but this is, if anything, a regulative ideal. To be human is to be forced to adopt a perspective-to not have all perspectives at once-and consequently, to be moral. The problem with such a response is that even if it were true-and its claim to limiting human horizons is at least suspect-it would not speak to the question at hand. It might be the case that we could never escape morality in certain aspects of our life, but we are still forced to conclude that when I interact with my wife, as I have been suggesting, it is not a moral interaction due to the fact that a judgment no longer needs to be made identifying her good as such as my own. This goes against our intuitions: moves
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are being made within the web of human relations, but Sokolowski is forced to conclude that such particular acts no longer fall within morality's domain. Still, the world seems to be appearing to such an actor morally. Clearly, for the non-judgmental actor of the type described, adopting the moral point of view is not a choice: morality is his way of being-in-theworld. Things appear with a built-in moral slant to them. It is a situation akin to Heidegger's description of the fearful agent, where it is not that things appear to the individual and then are interpreted to be frightening. Rather, fear infects the world and that which appears appears as frightening. Our being-in-the-world is as being-in-fear. 28 The same, then, might be said to occur for the non-judgmental actor. Morality is a way of being: he is thrown into a moral world where goods appear as public and the monadic Ego and isolated good are not even possibilities. Truly, morality has become a way of being. Still, the use of the word "morality" here is a bit sloppy, for, strictly speaking, since morality requires judgment it can never be a mode of appearing. As a first move toward a solution for this problem, though, we acknowledge the urge to think of morality as a mode of appearing. However, I want to suggest that this is misleading. The Heideggerian allusion is enlightening. If we characterize morality in such a manner we are implying that goods can manifest themselves in a thoughtless way-their publicity taken for granted, the actor simply acts, unaware of the richness of the good he is pursuing. The non-judgmental actor's turning into a "thoughtless" actor is possible here for public goods have become zuhanden. ready-to-hand, therefor-the-actor in a way that requires no acknowledgment. By definition, though, morality requires that goods be vorhanden, exhibiting the kind of presence-at-hand that makes them possible objects of judgment. We have already discussed the problems of entertaining the possibility of a "thoughtless" actor, but it is important to remind ourselves here that even the non-judgmental actor is thoughtfully pursuing goods, that "no matter how caught up [he] may be in what [he is] doing... [he] remain[s] quite aware of what [he does] as good and wanted, and as wanted precisely by [him] for [himself] and .. .for others as well.,,29 No judgment is occurring, but that does not mean that the actor is thoughtless. Consequently, when my wife's good appears to me as such as my own, we can assume that I am aware of this fact. The judgment no longer takes place but my world looks just as if it had. It is not that the coincidence of our goods is "taken for granted," "ignored," or "equipmentalized." Now if we were to say that this is the end of the story-the public good appears to the non-judgmental actor as such as his own, he realizes the nature of this good, and then he acts to pursue it-we would be right in maintaining that we have still made no room for morality, but there is a key
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step ffilssmg in such a description. Between the acknowledgment of the public nature of the good and the move to pursue it comes a "secondary" act of judgment-an act of questioning whether this good is truly good. Up to this point we have left this out of our analysis. Typically, it occurs after the initial judgment of the Other's good as such to be the actor's, but such an intentional act is not needed. Even if the Other's good appears as such as the actor's, the question of appropriateness is raised. Though Sokolowski does not raise the particular problem of the non-judging actor, the elements of a solution in the direction we are now pointing can be found in his Moral Action. As Hart explains,3o for Sokolowski as for Brentano and Husserl, the issue of the "truly good" always also burgeons in our appreciation of what is good... .This appreciation introduces an "enormous complication" because the issue of whether it is truly good for me arises. That is, seeing it as good [(and note here that no act of judgment is necessary)] inserts the good into the interplay of a manifold of emergent perspectives: not only between the spurious and the genuine good, but also between the perspectives of the present good and future good, between the good for me and the good for others.... In what sense is all of this a solution to the problem of the nonjudgmental actor? Again, what I am hoping to show is that such an actor cannot exist-that every seeing of a good as a good implies a secondary judgment as to the "truly good." The actor to whom the world appears with a multiplicity of public goods as coinciding with his own thus must judge whether the particular good appearing to him now as the Other's and as such as his own is truly the Other's and his own good. Before acting in pursuit of the good he is forced to make a judgment on the truth of the good. That such a secondary judgment is necessary is seen even more clearly in the case at hand, in the case of the "primary non-judgmental" actor, for such an actor is fundamental1y committed to the publicity of goods and thus to differing perspectives on the same good. During the secondary judgment, the actor thus judges whether or not the good in question is correctly identified. The result is one of the fol1owing conclusions: a) "The good which appears as the Other's and as such as mine is not real1y my good but it is the Other's good." b) "The good which appears as the Other's and as such as mine is not really the Other's good but it is my good." c) "The good which appears as the Other's and as such as mine is
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really my good and the Other's good." d) "The good which appears as the Other's and as such as mine is neither my good nor the Other's good." In each case a judgment the likes of which ushers in moral categoriality takes place. 31 Even given an appearance rather than an initial judgment concerning the coincidence of the actor's and the Other's goods, a moral judgment necessarily results. There are, of course, some hidden assumptions in all of this, the most obvious of which is that there is a truth of the matter as to whether or not this is my good or the Other's good. Actually, it is not mandatory that there be a true good-so long as the actor acts as if there were, the previous description of the "secondary judgment" can be meaningful. But I do, in fact, want to defend the notion that there is a real distinction to be made between the good appearing as such and the truly good: sometimes the two are not the same. This is a large and important claim, and the only support I can offer at this time will appear unsatisfactory: a promissory note and a nod in the direction of a line of defense. This defense will have something to do with the fact that we are committed to the truly good as soon as we understand that what appears to us as good is a perspective: a perspective on a public, "objective" good. There is much to be said here. Immediately, a post-modem criticism surfaces, suggesting that there need be no "object" on which we are having one perspective but rather the communal collection of perspectives might be inter-referring and inter-defined. Immediately, a feminist criticism surfaces, suggesting that the necessary result of a "second judgment" concerning the truly good is paternalistic. And immediately, a liberal criticism surfaces, suggesting that those in power will ultimately define goods and set the standards by which the "secondary judgment" succeeds or fails, thus subordinating the individual to an authority which may not promote her interest or let her version of the Good carry any weight. Indeed, all such critiques deserve thoughtful response, but the mechanics necessary to initiate such a response are intricate and must not concern us presently. What is important at this point is that the so-called "nonjudgmental" actor must engage a secondary judgment and that this judgment sufficiently constitutes moral categoriality. The latter we have seen to be the case in our articulation of the experience of the "primary non-judgmental" actor, an actor in whose horizon live rich, public goods. For him in particular, and for every moral agent in general, the issue of the truly good always also "burgeons in an appreciation of what is good." Recognizing the publicity of a good initiates the question of truth and the secondary judgment.
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Consequently, even the actor for whom no judgment is necessary to perceive the Other's good as such as his own is caught up in morality. The moral point of view is not chosen by him, it is an aspect of his experience: he is in the world in such a way that moral categoriality-ushered in by a secondary judgment-infects his being.
8. CONCLUSION Moral being, it seems, is our being. And moral categoriality is an attempt to describe that being-to point out the distinguishing features of moral actions and the way in which moves are made in the web of human relations. We have seen that the relational and the judgmental theories were without grounding, but that Sokolowski's account of moral categoriality solves this problem. We have also seen that morality is best understood as a way of being rather than a choice: even the seemingly "non-judgmental" and "unthoughtful" actors are caught up in moral categoriality in a foundational way. What we have accomplished, if we have been successful, is a formal analysis of the structure of morality-of moral categoriality and moral being. But what we have not accomplished is a moral theory providing a rule, obligation, mandate, or even suggestion as to how, specifically, we ought to act. The normative, in the strictest sense of the term, has not yet found a voice in our work. At this point we can separate the non-moral act from the moral act and we can describe the fundamental moral being of agents, but we can say nothing about right and wrong and how goods and bads are related to their determination. Such a program is, however, possible, and it can be achieved through a careful and thoughtful marriage of this formal analysis of morality and the theory of social ontology outlined in chapters 2 and 3. This promise of a new communitarianism is thus our goal, and the topic to which the next chapter is devoted.
NOTES I Sokolowski argues these points in Moral Action (1985) and three shorter, yet in many ways more insightful essays, "Moral Thinking," "What is Moral Action?," and "Knowing Natural Law" which have been compiled in his Pictures, Quotations, and Distinctions (1992). 2C f. Sokolowski (1992), 246-48. 31n particular, the prevailing Kantian interpretation of the mind which orders by categorization but cannot itself intuit such categorization.
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4Sokolowski (1992), 249. 5S o kolowski (1992), 266. Hart suggests something similar when he proposes that objects are "suffused" with syntax. (Cf. Hart (1992), 304.) 6Cf. Sokolowski (1985), 41-48. 7Sokolowski (1985), 45 and (1992) 266. RS ee Sokolowski (1985),46-75 for the uniqueness and superordination of moral acts. YSokolowski (1985), 48, 49, 53. IOHart (1992), 306. II Sokolowski (1992), 256. 12In the next chapter I will attempt to spell out how this good is a communitarian good: a definition as inescapable as our basic moral being. 13Sokolowski (1992), 250. 14Sokolowski (1985),157. 15Hart (1992), 304-5. 16Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, 1094a2. 17Sokolowski (1985), 157. 1RAristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, IllOa2. Choice, for Sokolowski, is different from a simple voluntary action, but the specifics of this-worked out in chapter I of Moral Action-will not concern us right now. 19Hart (1992), 306. 20Hart (1990), 133. For more on this consult this article as well as Hart (1992), chapter III, §17-19. 2IHart(l990),134-35. 221 allow the "thoughtless" actor this awareness to make the point that much clearer and stronger. He realizes that it is bad to starve, but he does not consider how his taking the bread promotes the starving man's bad-he merely sees in his desire for the bread his own good. This helps us refrain from picturing the "thoughtless" actor as simply stupid. Indeed, he knows that starving is bad, but he does not acknowledge the role he plays in promoting this bad. 23Sokolowski (1985), 71. 24Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, 1114b2. For more on this related subject of Aristotle's proto-phenomenological stance and the role of what-appears in human Being, see my "Taken Up by the Taken Up: Aristotle, Heidegger, and the Question of Being" (1992). 25Making sure this process never takes place and finding a way to make the publicity of goods and the possibility of moral categoriality live again for such unfortunate actors should the process take place are topics best dealt with within a theory of moral education. This topicimportant and provocative-will not concern us immediately. 26At this point I do not wish to rule out or diminish the role of moral luck-the role of one's environment and associates in the development of character-but even the slightest amount of personal responsibility for one's character is all that is needed to make the point. 27Husserl (1960), Ill. 2RCf. Heidegger, Being and Time, Chapter 5 for all of this. Of course the later Heidegger claims that a moral mode of being such as we suggest cannot be, but that is a debate for another day. 29Sokolowski (1985), 59. 30 Hart (1992), 305. 31 Another set of possibilities could be generated substituting "evil" (or "bad") for "good," but the structure remains the same.
CHAPTER V
Phenomenological Communitarianism
I. INTRODUCTION: THE DESCRIPTIVE AND THE NORMATIVE
We saw in the last chapter that certain traditional ethical systems are fundamentally misdirected. The judgmental and relational theories (of which Kantianism and Utilitarianism were, respectively, the obvious examples) exhibit an inherent circularity: the former cannot account for the moral character of the categories it employs and the latter can only evaluate methods and actions while the goals of those actions are inexplicably either moral or amoral. In fact, the problem seems to be that such theories are not invalid, rather they are not theories of the type which can adequately classify acts and judge whether or not they belong to the realm of the moral. The solution, then, was to uncover and explain a new notion of morality based on categoriality-to argue for moral action as a taking of someone else's good or bad as such as one's own. But the conclusion with which we ended the last chapter-the realization that we can separate the non-moral act from the moral act but we cannot say anything about right and wrong (and good and bad)-is only partly true. The negative force of the theory of moral categoriality is great, and does, indeed, have a prescriptive element. Suggesting that Kantian and Utilitarian theories are without foundation is no small claim. If such theories are wrong, then we ought not follow them. If such theories make invalid, unfounded, inconsistent, or unsubstantiated claims, then we should not allow these theories to guide our moral life. Now there will be some who see a red flag at this juncture, and for this reason they will wish to dwell on this last claim. In the humble statement "If a theory is wrong we ought not follow it," they will see the perpetual is/ought dilemma lurking in the shadows. Why should we abandon a theory if it is unfounded? How can the descriptive claim of inconsistency in a theory lead to the normative claim that we ought not follow its prescriptions? Such questions are at once both illuminating and perplexing. They are illuminating in the sense that an answer to them will be key to the rest of the project. Phenomenology is, surely, descriptive. I have not argued other-
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wise. But I do want to maintain that phenomenology has normative implications-some of which this chapter will attempt to bring to light. The move from the descriptive to the normative, though, must be made with great care: not every descriptive claim leads to a normative imperative. The assertion "I am hungry" does not automatically lead to "You should feed me." The claim "Everybody likes being happy" does not automatically imply "We should act to maximize happiness." Descriptive claims of critique, however, might have more obvious normative implications. That is, the descriptive statement "Theory X is false/inconsistent/invalid/etc." does suggest "Theory X should not be followed." Of course, there are several assumptions here, two of which rest on our understanding of the words "should" and "fol1ow." If a person follows a theory, he or she must, in some sense, be asserting the truth/consistency/ validity/etc. of that theory. Saying "I fol1ow the theory of Utilitarianism" includes the statement "I believe Utilitarianism to be capable of being followed by a thoughtful person; i.e., it is a valid/consistent/true l theory." Natural1y, there are many who appear to follow theories without giving them much thought-television, advertising, and capitalism in general thrive in an environment devoid of thoughtful fol1owers. This being the case (and since it is part of philosophy's task to point out hidden assumptions and argue for the examined life), unthoughtful followers are not a problem. Once they are confronted with a critique, they will either evaluate their actions and the theory which guides them or they will not feel the force of the critique and thus continue as they were before (in which case, the philosopher must restate the critique, hoping to "speak to" the unthoughtful follower). The point is that whether or not someone openly labels him- or herself a follower of a certain theory, people act in a way that seems right (true, valid, etc.) to them. The man who robs a liquor store knows that society believes theft to be wrong, but his action finds its motivation in some theory that he believes to be valid (e.g., "My happiness is most important," "When all else fails I have a right to get what I need to survive," etc.). If we push the unthinking capitalist to explain why she acts the way that she does, she will eventually be able to tell a story about the benefits of competition, the evils of laziness, the good of having accomplished something one's self, etc. This ethos is built into contemporary Americans, and articulated or not, it is a theory that most assume to be true. At least we can admit that it is not assumed to be false. That is, as soon as someone comes to think that, e.g., competition is not beneficial-as soon as one of the premises of the theory of capitalism is rejected-then there is a crisis, a sense that one should not continue to act in the same way. And here we have the "should" again. I take this "should" to be the real point of contact between the descriptive and the normative, for all it is
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saying is: "If A is a true claim it is wrong to maintain that it is a false claim, and if B is a false claim it is wrong to maintain that it is true." The Kantian distinction between the hypothetical and the categorical imperative is misdirected in this sense, since all human action has a hypothetical element. Indeed, Kant's categorical imperative has a hypothetical assumption which underlines the theory: "Act only such that your maxim could become universal law without contradiction" includes the unstated " ... because we should not maintain a contradiction" or " .. .if you want to avoid contradictions." Kant did not include such additions because he thought that it was not necessary to argue for why we should act truly and avoid that which is invalid/inconsistent/etc. On this point I am in strong agreement with Kant, and it is for this reason that I am perplexed by questions of the sort "Why should we abandon a theory if it is unfounded?" It is difficult to know how to respond to this question because it is not clear what such a critic would allow to count as a motivation for abandoning one theory and adopting another. When the is/ought problem gets to the point where we are asked to deal with the question "Even if I know the theory is wrong-it is built on false assumptions, riddled with inconsistencies and contradictions, and is, generally, unsound and invalid-why should I reject it?" then we have reached an impasse-a point of silence in the dialogue. One possible response would be a radical pragmatism on the order of Richard Rorty's.2 Here, someone might say that a false theory could be adopted if it is more useful-if it makes life easier, makes one happier, makes other theories and assumptions we need to keep our everyday life running smoothly seem grounded. The problems ushered in by such a radical pragmatism, though, are not worth its benefits. First, these sorts of pragmatic relativisms are usually self-defeating. That is, they inevitably maintain two contradictory statements: Statement A: There is no one, true theory-every statement is relative. Statement B: Statement A is not relative-it forms the foundation for the one, true theory (i.e., the theory of Relativism). If we accept A, then B does not follow. If we reject A, then B has no ground (because we have, in effect, rejected Relativism). Critics who shout "There is no Truth," often, in their next breath, whisper "and that's the Truth." Such is the nature of relativistic theories-it is impossible to claim that they are true. But there is a more relevant and related critique, as well, namely that it would seem that such a criticism of Truth is not at all a rejection of validity/soundness/etc., but rather a re-focusing of these notions. It is not that the
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radical pragmatist has abandoned following true theories. On the contrary, such an agent has merely come up with a new theory which he or she believes to be truer. Consistently opting for the most useful (pragmatic) theory is, itself, a theory to be followed only when one values usefulness and believes that the old theory of action (i.e., "follow the theory that is without contradiction, etc.") is invalid. Thoughtful relativists do not embrace relativism by chance. Rather, they have seen what they believe to be a lack of foundation in non-relativistic theories, thus forcing them to abandon such theories as false. This inescapable reliance on truth (and validity and rationality, etc.) even when arguing against such things as truth (and validity and rationality, etc.), is not necessarily a new critique of relativism 3 but it is a powerful one. The kind of truth and falsity which I have been discussing so far has only to do with the findings of the last chapter. In uncovering moral categoriality, we discovered that judgmental and relational theories of ethics were unfounded and therefore not to be followed. The power of negative critique grows, though, when we bring in the conclusions concerning social ontology which were worked out in the previous chapters. Combining these insights into our intersubjective nature with the notion of moral categoriality, we discover that we are provided with a powerful mechanism for critique as well as a positive foundation for a new theory altogether.
2. COMMUNITARIAN THEORY IN GENERAL: THREE PROBLEMS
Before describing this new Phenomenological Conununitarianism, it would be helpful to gain some context for the project by briefly describing some conunon conununitarian threads in various other authors. Though conununitarian thought is diverse, there are some overarching assumptions, the most basic of which is that people are foundationally connected to one another. Given this, Michael Sandel writes that we cannot conceive ourselves as independent. .. as bearers of selves wholly detached from our aims and attachments ....[O]ur roles are partly constitutive of the persons we are-as citizens of a country, or members of a movement, or partisans of a cause ....Open-ended though it be, the story of my life is always embedded in the story of those conununities from which I derive my identitywhether family or city, tribe or nation, party or cause. In the conununitarian view, these stories make a moral difference,
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not only a psychological one. They situate us in the world and give our lives their moral particularity.4 This view of the human Self as being embedded in community suggests to Sandel the impossibility of an ethic based on an isolated atomistic Self. If we cannot conceptualize the individual apart from her community, then it would be wrong to follow a theory that assumes an individual is a being apart from a community. Similarly, Alasdair MacIntyre argues for a social notion of self in which I am never able to seek for the good or exercise the virtues only qua individual. This is partly because what it is to live the good life concretely varies from circumstance to circumstance even when it is one and the same conception of the good life and one and the same set of virtues which are being embodied in a human life.... [I]t is not just that different individuals live in different social circumstances; it is also that we all approach our own circumstances as bearers of a particular social identity. I am someone's son or daughter, someone else's cousin or uncle; I am a citizen of this or that city, a member of this or that guild or profession ....Hence what is good for me has to be good for one who inhabits these roles. As such, I inherit from the past of my family, my city, my tribe, my nation, a variety of debts, inheritances, rightful expectations and obligations. These constitute the given of my life, my moral starting point. 5 If, then, it is true that I am never able to seek a good as an individual, then any theory that proposes certain goods which must be pursued as an individual should not be followed. Now, these forms of communitarianism-though only briefly considered here-suffer from at least three fundamental problems. 6 The first problem has to do with unfounded claims concerning the nature of the Self (The "Disappearing-Self' Problem); the second concerns the missing link between intersubjectivity and goods (The "Intersubjective Good" Problem); and the third concerns the question of what counts as a community and how communities are created (the "Constitution of a Community" Problem). I would like to investigate each of the problems in turn and suggest how a thoughtful synthesis of the work we have accomplished in the previous chapters gives rise to a theory which does not suffer from such problems. Along the way, the negative power of critique made possible by Phenome-
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nological Communitarianism will be made explicit, though its positive force of prescription will also be stressed.
3. THE "DISAPPEARING-SELF" PROBLEM
In general, communitarianism maintains that there is no such thing as an isolated, monadic Self. Rather, the individual is fundamentally a product of her culture, her communal roles, her traditions, etc. One of the problems with such a position, though, is that there seems to be a strong yet unfounded metaphysical conunitment underlying this claim as to the nature of the Sele Few communitarians offer metaphysical arguments for the ontological status of the individual, yet their theories rely on assumptions of an individual necessarily being communal. Non-communitarian theorists (e.g., Thomas Hobbes and Ayn Rand) are often quick to state a metaphysical conunitment to the individual as monad, whether led to such a notion through empiricism (e.g., look around and see how people have no security without a social contract), through further philosophic theory (e.g., the problem of other minds, as it is historically stated, suggests that one can only be sure of one's own existence), or through unspoken and non-critical assumptions (e.g., it's a dog-eat-dog world and people sink or swim on their own), this commitment is often fundamental to their theories. Perhaps one of the reasons communitarians have been reluctant to offer metaphysical arguments is because they know that the cards are stacked against them. The language and the conceptual framework of metaphysics seems to force a kind of individualism on the theorist. In order to play the game, one has to assume just what thy communitarian wishes to argue against: that there is some thing we are describing. We can argue whether or not the thing really exists or if it is really what it appears to be, but we are more or less conunitted to talking about units, things, monads, isolated individual subjects. On the other extreme, Post-Modernism offers not only a critique of the metaphysical project but a view of the Self as a complete social construct. This is particularly alluring to some communitarians, but though the deconstructive song is dissonantly sweet, the rocks it draws us toward are perilous. One can see the initial attraction between communitarianism and Post-Modem theory. If, as Sandel et al. argue, the Self is so deeply situated in its society and culture that any attempt to pluck it out (as in John Hosper's Libertarian vision of an isolated Self fighting to keep Others and the government at bay) or even to imagine it as separated from its situation (as in John Rawls' Original Position) is doomed to failure, then it makes
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sense to say that the Self is socially constituted. Sandel writes that "our roles are partly constitutive of the persons we are,"s but he does not say what parts or address the question of how much of our being is constituted by our surroundings. This "partly" makes it possible to fall back on a metaphysical claim if necessary, but it serves no other purpose. For Sandel, we are what we are because of our social enmeshment. Given this, it is a small step to suggest that the Self is not best understood as an entity, but as a social construct: it is not just that I am attached to Others in a fundamental way, but rather that this attachment makes me what I am. In fact, with only a slight push, such a theorist can accept that there is, actually, no Self to speak of-that it is not just that I am attached to Others in a foundational way, and not just that this attachment makes me what I am, but rather these attachments are what I am. That is to say, there is no Self that is attached to Others, there is only a conglomeration of attachments intersecting at a point which we label "the Self." The point can easily be seen if we attempt, for instance, a full critique of Rawls' position. Rawls argues that we should make socialethical-political decisions from behind a "veil of ignorance" and in the "original position." The veil of ignorance, when lowered, blinds us to our personal characteristics, relationships, and social standing. Behind the veil we forget whether we are rich or poor, young or old, this person's neighbor and that person's friend, etc. The only quality remaining is our rationality. Hence, argues Rawls, we will not be able to make decisions favoring ourselves based on our knowledge of our own standing. This "justice as fairness" approach thus puts an end to rich people fighting against taxes and poor people fighting for increased taxes for the rich. Not knowing whether one is rich or poor, one can only base a decision on a pure rationality, and rationality, according to Rawls, dictates a program of increasing one's benefits, cutting one's losses, and securing the best possible outcome. The result is egalitarianism. I could abolish all taxation to support a welfare state, but if it turns out I am poor then I would not be able to ensure meeting even my basic needs. I could instead tax the rich into poverty with a vengeance, but if it turns out I am rich, then I would be in trouble. Inevitably I come to the realization that an egalitarian distribution of goods maximizes gains and minimizes losses. Now the communitarian critique of all of this is to question the method, not necessarily the result. Rawls' veil of ignorance is only possible given a Liberal understanding of the Self. As Sandel and others have pointed out, although the original position is only meant to be a "thought experiment," we cannot imagine a Self that would survive the experiment. We can think of it as something akin to the stripping process investigated in chapter two. Aristotle could not strip properties from objects and achieve prime matter. Husser! could not strip experiences and achieve a
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sphere of ownness. And Rawls cannot strip relationships through the veil of ignorance and achieve a Self capable of choosing egalitarianism-in fact, he cannot achieve any kind of Self at all, for we are constituted by our social relationships and roles and cannot disregard them in hopes of uncovering some more basic Self which lies beneath. But here is the problem. Is it that we are the conglomeration of these roles and relationships, or is it that we cannot think of ourselves otherwise? Is it that a veil of ignorance deconstructs the Self leaving nothing in the original position, or is it that the veil's stripping process is impossible even to imagine? Recall that a similar question arose for us in our discussion of Husser!' s sphere of ownness: at times he seems to think of the primordial reduction as ineffective and at other times he thinks of it as impossible. Here the point is slightly different but the distinction becomes key. There is reason to think that the Self simply disappears if subjected to a veil of ignorance or reduced to a sphere of ownness. Such a radical deconstruction of the Self is very much at home in many communitarian theories; but even if one does not go so far, it is common for communitarians to argue that human nature is a social creation and that human selves cannot be described apart from their surroundings since they are fundamentally constituted by those surroundings. This raises several questions and even more problems, but the most relevant of the latter, and the one toward which I would like to direct our attention, has to do with the danger of losing the Self altogether. Elizabeth Frazer and Nicola Lacey, in their feminist critique of communitarianism, state the situation succinctly: [There are] two methodological and epistemological assumptions which are questioned, to a greater or lesser extent, by the interpretive approach. In the first place, the idea that communitarianism makes descriptive claims implies a quasi-scientific appeal to the "facts of the matter" about human nature. Second, the normative aspects of valuecommunitarian prescription could be understood as claiming some kind of objective or universal truth or validity. But beyond the frame-work truth claim about the validity of social constructionism itself, the espousal of a thoroughly constructionist position seems to entail the deconstruction of each of these projects. The only "fact of the matter" about human nature is its openness and contingency.... ,,9 This is to say that in a theory such as Michael Walzer'slo or a theory such as Michael Sandel's, II the Self and any concept of a fixed human nature disappear-both are merely social creations. This being the case, it is
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impossible to appeal to a true human Self as a Self that is non-monadic and foundationally enmeshed in community: there is no true or universal human Self. Without this fact to which an appeal can be made, the critique of Liberalism and other non-communitarian theories is unfounded. The Self has become a social creation to the point that it has disappeared and there is nothing to which we can point and say "That is the human Self; if your theory does not assume the Self to be like that then your theory is wrong." Consequently, most forms of communitarianism suffer from either a disappearing Self (the result of the Post-Modern path) or a Self which is first an ontological unit and only then is brought into community (the metaphysical Self). The type of communitarianism I would like to suggest, however, does not encounter such problems or allow such critiques. This is due to the fact that it is a phenomenological communitarianism. In chapters two and three, I proposed that it is impossible to experience the Self in any way other than communally enmeshed. From the very beginning I am constituted as a member of a community-the Ego and the Other arise in sense simultaneously and my experience of myself is always in the context of the community of Others. This is not a metaphysical claim (such questions deal with things that have been bracketed). It is a phenomenological claim, and this carries with it the self-evident truth of all phenomenological claims. Through reflection on experience augmented by phenomenological reconstruction, we discovered that the Self is experienced as fundamentally in community and that it is impossible to conceptualize our own Ego otherwise (i.e., the reduction to a sphere of ownness was a failure). This allows the benefits of a socially situated Self yet does not suffer from the drawbacks of non-phenomenologically based theories. There is no need for a metaphysical claim-indeed, such a claim would be inappropriate. Furthermore, given the account of intersubjectivity suggested above, the problem of the disappearing Self disappears. We are not forced to make an appeal to a true and absolute human Self, but rather to a true and absolute experience of the human Self. The experience itself does not disappear as our concept of the Self grows more and more social. Even if the Self is experienced as a completely social creation, we can always appeal to the truth of such an experience in order to ground our critique of non-communitarian theories. For example, when Hobbes suggests a pre-social status for human beings in which there is a war of every man against every man 12 we can respond that such a notion of a human Self is misdirected because there is never a point at which we experience a pre-social Self: the concept of a Self apart from community makes no sense even as a postulation since we cannot conceive of a Self that is pre-social. In order to see the human Self in such a way, I would have to lie to myself. I would have to maintain that the Self is
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experienced as isolated or that the Self can be experienced as isolated, and by phenomenological reflection we know these claims to be untrue. Notice that the critique does not offer an opposing metaphysical or historical claim. Rather, our response is that whether or not humans are naturally isolated monads until they agree to lay down certain rights before a Sovereign, we never actually experience our Selves in this way or even as possibly being like this. But there clearly are some people who think of themselves in this way, and here lies some of the positive power of Phenomenological Communitarianism. Part of philosophy's job in general, and Phenomenological Communitarianism's job specifically, is to point out the inconsistency and (phenomenological) impossibility of thinking of our Selves as isolated and monadic. By leading people through the phenomenological arguments above, they will be forced to abandon theories which they had uncritically followed before and they will find that communitarianism (or at least, so far, the communitarian notion of the Self) is thrust upon them. Appealing to this experience, then, we need not make metaphysical claims nor do we have a disappearing Self. The Self is constituted as a social entity, indeed, but the experience of such a Self is universal, true, and Self-evident. Consequently, we can appeal to the experience of a fundamentally communitarian Self-a Self that is always taken as a member of a community and that arises in sense with the Other. As a closing remark on this topic, it might be wise to point out that such a claim does not suffer from the genetic fallacy with which so many philosophers, including MacIntyre, seem preoccupied. In his article "Egoism and Altruism" in the Encyclopedia of Philosophy (1967), MacIntyre writes: 13 Philosophers discuss what passions men have and not what passions they might acquire. Learning is, at best, peripheral to the inquiry; insofar as it does enter, there is another fallacy in writers from Hobbes on-that of confusing the question of what motives there were originally (for Hobbes, in the state of nature; for Freud, in early childhood) with the question of what the fundamental character of motives is now, in adult life. The criticism, then, might be that even if I have given an accurate account of burgeoning consciousness and the initial constitution of sense for the Ego and the Other, there is no reason to think that such an understanding of Self is right because it is the first one that we have. There is, according to MacIntyre, no reason to believe that later attitudes and conceptions are "masks" for earlier and better understandings.
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The problem with such a criticism is that there is evidence that later understandings or claims of the Self as isolated are, indeed, masks. MacIntyre's point would be well taken if, in such cases, a person's notion of Self simply changed with new experiences. But there is more going on than simple change. Moving from a concept of a communitarian-Self to a monadic-Self requires active lying and/or passive averting of one's eyes to the truth. Recall that the selfish actor of the last chapter had to work very hard to arrive at a point where his horizon of possible goods were all seeming goods in isolation. A similar story could be told about someone who sees the Self monadically . It is not just that such an adult has a view of the Self that is different from the one with which she started out, but rather that this later view of the Self is warped and distorted and was only achieved at the cost of denying truth. Furthermore, since the reduction to a sphere of ownness always fails as it is undertaken by the adult, it is clearly not the case that Phenomenological Communitarianism is engaged in a genetic fallacy. The human Self, then, is always experienced as a Self-incommunity, and the first link in a communitarian theory has been forged. But now we encounter the question of how we connect this claim about the human Ego to a moral notion of communal goods. As before, it is a question for which Phenomenological Communitarianism has a particular answer.
4. THE "INTERSUBJECTIVE GOOD" PROBLEM
Even if I am fundamentally in community and my Ego is fundamentally constituted in conjunction with the Other, why should I care about the goods of the Other and of the Community? As Frazer and Lacey point out, perhaps [p]ersons are fundamentally connected with each other and with the world they inhabit...[and perhaps we would want to] emphasize the importance of intersubjective, collective or public goods ... [but] [t]hese two strands of communitarian thought-social constructionism and value-communitarianism-do not logically entail one another.... 14 This is a problem for most communitarian theories. There seems to be a bridge missing between the fact that we are socially constituted and the prescription that we should care about the goods of Others. Perhaps it is the case that we cannot conceive of ourselves as detached from our relationships, roles, and culture, but why does this mean that we should care about
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the goods of those to whom we are attached? The Others "constitute" us and give our life meaning, but this does not logically entail a commitment to promoting their goods. IS We have already seen a partial response to this problem in the last chapter in our discussion of the unthinking actor. It would seem that the publicity of goods is something that someone need not argue in favor of; rather it is a given, and if one wants to characterize goods otherwise there is a great deal of repression and straightforward lying which must be done. The point is made even stronger now when we realize that our experiences of goods are that goods are interrelated. We cannot imagine otherwise. Consider the infant's burgeoning awareness of goods in the world. It makes no sense to say that the infant has a private sense of good-that we are born little egoists or little libertarians-because this assumes that there is an individual for which there is an individual good. If we do not experience the Self as isolated, it makes little sense to suppose that we experience a good that is good for an isolated Self. But this is the negative aspect of the theory-telling us what we do not experience. The positive aspect is that we do, in fact, experience goods as fundamentally intersubjective. The argument should be familiar. My good (i.e., a good which appears to me as a good from my perspective and not a good which is mine because it deals with my well-being as an isolated monad) necessarily arises in sense with the Other's good and the goods of the community of Others. As the Ego and the Other simultaneously arise in sense, so my conceptions of goods arise with my understanding of the Other's conception of goods. This is how I experience goods-as necessarily interrelated. '6 This realization, coupled with our findings concerning the unthinking actor in chapter four, suggests that we should act in such a way that takes into consideration the goods of Others since whenever we act on any good, it necessarily is an intersubjective good which has repercussions for other people. Acting with a consideration for other people's goods is a way of acknowledging this intersubjectivity-a way of being true. All of this talk of my good and your good-key to Sokolowski's theory of moral categoriality which assumes that there is a good that is yours that I can take up as such as my own-would seem to be problematic if goods are fundamentally intersubjective. Thus, a critic might ask: what is the difference between yours and my good? Do we not have to assume individual goods if we suggest singling out someone's good and then adopting it as one's own, and does this not contradict what is now being suggested? The problem here is that we should not understand "your good" to mean "a good which is yours alone and focuses on your individual wellbeing, etc.," nor should we understand "my good" to mean "a good which is mine alone and focuses on my individual well-being, etc." Your good and
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my good can be fundamentally related and interdefined while at the same time be neither identical nor unrelated. To assume a collapsing of all goods into one would be to make a mistake similar to maintaining that the Ego and the Other are actually two different names for the same thing since they did, in fact, arise in sense together. My goods are goods which appear to me as such. This is not to say that they exclude the Other, for my goods appear as communally situated and enmeshed with the Other's goods. But they are goods from my particular perspective and goods that are appropriate (i.e., possible) for someone like me. 17 Thus when I identify your good and promote it as such as my own (i.e., I act morally), this is possible because goods are intersubjective-they are perspectives on the Good, where the other possible perspectives (other goods) are apperceived. So it is true, as Walzer says, that "[w]e do not have to discover the moral world because we have always lived there. We do not have to invent it because it has already been invented.... "18 But there remains one troubling point. Even accepting the socially constituted Self and the intersubjectivity of goods (i.e., even accepting that we live in a moral world), what is to keep someone from actively pursuing another's evil as his own good? All we can do is identify such an act as being within the realm of the moral, but as Hart rightly points out: Even when I affirm that my good is your evil or your good is my evil I necessarily have acknowledged the originality of the community of the world's appearing, wherein the same which appears to both of us is apperceived to be good for you while being my evil or to be good for me only if your evil. 19 Can we give an argument for why one should take up another's good only as one's good and another's evil only as one's evil? In a certain respect, this is a strange question. Perhaps it is not philosophy's job to encourage taking up goods only as goods and evils only as evils. Such reflection is encouraged by a moral education and upbringing and it will occur long before one comes to philosophy. The individual who needs to tum to formal philosophical arguments in order to choose good over evil is not the model citizen. Indeed, who would not fear such a person moving into their neighborhood? Consequently, an inquiry into a communitarian based philosophy of education would seem worthwhile. For now, though, we can at least hint at a more rigorous answer to the choice between good and evil from the perspective of Phenomenological Communitarianism. Surely, part of the answer has to do with how we define goods. Hart has completed a thorough Husserlian description of various senses of the
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Common Good. 20 I would like to appeal to this work rather than re-state it in its entirety here, but it is important to note its significance at this point. Something like "clean air," then (one of the common goods which Hart points out) is a "commonly necessary" good which must be recognized as constituting one of "the necessary material conditions for a life together... [and therefore] ought not to be excluded from any one.,,21 We might say that to deny someone clean air would be to deny her access to the common life. That is, if I take up someone's being denied clean air (her evil) as a positive project of my own (my good) then I am acting to destroy the community around me-the very community which inflates me to life, i.e., breathes life into me and allows me to have a sense of my good. I am, in effect, acting to destroy the necessary preconditions for my ability to have criteria on which to act. I am acting falsely. But what of rights? Could it be said that community members have a right to clean air which I would be violating were I to take up their lack of air as my good? Rights, for Hart, are a further sense of the Common Good, and are a way of "regulating mutuality." "Articulated individual rights," he explains, are but a common spiritual treasure and means for securing and explicating this original burgeoning wakeful differentiation of the common world through indexicals or occasionals within the emergent primal latent "we," i.e., of "I," "you," "they," and "it.,,22 This is quite different from Walzer, who claims that rights are a matter of historical record. While for Hart, rights are not founded on historicalor cultural facts, for Walzer, [t]here is a tradition, a body of moral knowledge; and there is ... [a] group of sages arguing. There isn't anything else.... Moral argument in such a setting is interpretive in character, closely resembling the work of a lawyer or judge who struggles to find meaning in a morass of conflicting laws and precedents....[W]e are all interpreters of the morality we share [a]nd if we disagree with [each other's interpretations] there is nothing to do but go back to the "text"the values, principles, codes, and conventions that constitute the moral world-and to the "readers" of the text. 23 I would like to suggest, more in line with Hart, that rights (and moral claims in general) are not historically dependent but can be founded
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on facts concerning the experience of the intersubjective world. Under such a view, rights would be a way of regulating this mutuality. The necessary preconditions for communal life, then, would be cashed out in terms of rights (a right to clean air, a right to food, a right to health care, a right to shelter, etc.). Surely, these commonly necessary goods will be culturally dependent in the sense that what constitutes adequate shelter, for example, will be different according to one's culture. Consequently, the way in which these rights materially manifest themselves is a direct function of culture, but the right itself is not. Other rights would, of course, exist as well, and they would exist in a regulatory capacity.24 They would not come into being through social contract (Rousseau),25 or through a discovery of the natural rights of the individual (Hospers), or through a maximin principle operating in the Original Position (Rawls). Rather, these rights would be an instantiation of the necessary structures of the common life. Furthermore, activities in which one regards the Other as an object and not as a subject are activities in which one ought not engage. 26 Regarding the Other as "a target of physical might,,,27 or as a means of producing personal wealth, involves a phenomenological contradiction. In such activities, my experience of the Other is as a person, but I must pretend that my experience of the Other is as a thing. Similarly, it might be argued that some types of visual pornograph/8 might be done away with under Phenomenological Communitarianism. Pornography requires that I take the Other as an object devoid of personal conceptions of the good, yet at the same time take the Other as a subject (albeit as a subject-for-my-consumption). Pornography does not usuaIIy "work" (i.e., produce the desired effect) unless the images presented are taken to be of a subject29 and yet the subject is treated as virtually non-existent apart from a basic corporeality. The subject is attended to as if she did not possess a good either to take up or not to take up. She is there-for-my-Ego. But this is not how we experience other people.
30
Consequently, there are a great many problems. First, we have the simultaneous objectification and subjectification of the Other. Second, we have the repression of the Other's good-a good which cannot be experienced as repressed for it constitutes and makes possible my own sense of good-again, I would be experiencing the destruction of the possibility of my experience. Third, we have an overarching concern having to do with the feminist desire for equal rights for women (assuming, for the moment, that the pornography in question is of women and for men), and if such practices as pornography can be shown to derail this equality then we have another good reason to abandon the practice (for the feminist project is at home in the phenomenologicaIIy founded community).3) I might take a moment now to comment on what some might see as
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a strong Kantian flavor to the communitarian theory I have been suggesting. I have made an appeal to what would seem to be rules very much like Kant's first and second categorical imperatives. This parallel is, however, not as strong as it would appear. While it is true that the first categorical imperative has an element of non-contradiction and I have suggested that one ought not act in a contradictory way, there are more dissimilarities than similarities. First, Kant is worried about a logical contradiction. Stealing, for instance, is wrong for Kant because it causes the concept of private property to become meaningless, which in turn causes the concept of stealing to become meaningless (i.e., if everyone is free to steal then no one has a right to privately own a thing; if nothing can be privately owned then "stealing" becomes meaningless because it is defined as "taking a thing which is privately owned by someone other than one's self'). I, however, am concerned about experiential (phenomenological?) contradictions. That is, certain actions call for us to experience things in certain ways and if an action requires we experience something in two contradictory ways at the same time, then we ought not engage in such an action. In order to enjoy pornography, I have argued, it is necessary to experience the Other both as a person (possessing subjectivity and perspectives on the Good) and as an object (lacking subjectivity and being there-for-me-to-consume). Not only is such a dichotomous experience "impossible," it is wrong. The Other is a person (i.e., is experienced as a person). This is a necessary condition for the experience of my own personhood. To deny subjectivity to the Other is to act falsely. Second, there is an element of universalization which is absent in my theory but is foundational for Kant. Logical contradictions are caused by universalizing improper maxims (stealing is contradictory only when everyone does it). The communitarian morality for which I am arguing, though, looks at the particular act and the particular actor-morality is, as I have argued in the last chapter, grounded in these particulars. Third, although something like Kant's second categorical imperative might be generated by phenomenological communitarianism these things are not to be equated. We must respect people as ends and not treat them as means because of the way in which we experience them. The phenomenological element is the more basic. 32 And this suggests the fourth and final problem, namely that Kant needs something like Phenomenological Communitarianism to ground his theory because he is unable to account for the moral status of the categories under which individual actions are subsumed (see Chapter 4, §2). Given all of this, there is one question which remains. If it is the case that the Self is experienced as fundamentally enmeshed with the Other (and the community of Others), and goods are initially and subsequently experienced as being intersubjective, how do I know the limits of my community and thus who counts for me? That is to say that while taking up and
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promoting the Other's good as such as my own constitutes the realm of moral action, how do I know which Others are in my community and thus have moral priority for me? This question will occupy us for the rest of this chapter-indeed, for the rest of the project in general. 5. THE "CONSTITUTION OF A COMMUNITY" PROBLEM Assuming a communitarian framework does not necessarily tell a communitarian who gets in and who is left out of the community. This is a perennial problem. What counts as a community, how is a community founded, and what are its boundaries? Frazer and Lacey note that Communities as entities can be identified in a variety of ways: as geographical entities; as groups constituted by ties of kinship; or as collectives bound by common values and/or a shared history....Additionally, or alternatively, we might identify communities in terms of some specific shared purpose or practice. Particular discourses and practices, ranging from complex, open-ended activities through to the institutionalized production and distribution of particular benefits, can be thought of as marking distinctive "communities." Hence we might speak, for example, of "linguistic communities," of "interpretive communities," of "communities" based around clubs or associations, all of these cutting across other lines of community membership and identification 33 Different authors adopt different perspectives. David Carr appeals to a community as that group which gives rise to a collective narrative in which a personal narrative and thus the Self is formed. 34 For Carr, sharing a story constitutes and defines a community. Stanley Hauerwas comes close to this definition in his appeal to a story-formed community, yet it is clear that it is not just a story, but an historical tradition (e.g., Christianity) which gives rise to a community for Hauerwas. 35 Similarly, Alasdair MacIntyre approaches this conception of community as the narrative embodiment of a tradition. 36 But not all authors see story-formation as a necessary element in community constitution. For Michael Walzer, it is a set of values, laws, and codes that defines our community, and social critics (interpreters of the codes) are either "close enough" or "not close enough" to give an interpretation worth listening to. 37 Finally, even primarily non-communitarian
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authors such as James Rachels have something to say about the role of the community in ethics and the constitution of that community. For Rachels, a community consists of all individuals who will be affected by our conduct, and since we live in a shrinking world where what one individual does in her back yard can have implications around the globe, Rachels must conclude that "everyone is included in the community of moral concem.,,38 In other words, "community" is a way of saying "all human beings" and is, in effect, meaningless for any communitarian theory grounded in particular communities. To a certain extent, Phenomenological Communitarianism does not have this difficulty of fixing and legitimating a method for drawing a boundary around the community because the phenomenological community is self-evident. That is, in a truly Heideggerian/existential sense, we are thrown-into a world that is already up-and-running. Our job is not to set the boundaries of the community-it is, at best, to describe those boundaries. It would seem that it is often the case that communitarian authors have missed the point of their own communitarian claims. They propose that we do not need to establish the moral world because we already live there, but having said this, they scramble to find a way to establish the moral world. It is difficult to make this mistake in Phenomenological Communitarianism because the community is right before us. I know you are a member of my community because you (as the Other) are fundamentally tied up with me (my Ego). If you are a member of my community your good has the sense for me of an intersubjective good (which I share). Again, we have the mixture of the is and the ought: phenomenology describing the normative community. But this is of little practical use. If we maintain that only the Significant Other (and a few Secondary Others) originally constituted my community and therefore this is the extent of my communal ties even as an adult, surely we are guilty of something far worse than the genetic fallacywe are, in fact, wrong about the world and our experience of it. Community intuitively seems to be greater than familial ties. 39 The first thing to be said is that the original constitution of the Ego (and the Good) takes place in a community which is larger than just one's Significant Other. I have already suggested that a Secondary Other is necessary for the full sense of Ego because one needs to gain the sense that Others take the Significant Other to be an Other too, as well as that one is the Other's other Other. (See chapter two for all of these complicated matters.) But the truth is, the original community is much larger. The Significant Other and the Secondary Other have social roles and relationships which define their senses of Self and the Good, and since my good is tied up with these goods, my good necessarily includes the complex goods of those who
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are related to and share a life with my Significant and Secondary Others. This nexus of Others and other perspectives on the Good is quite complex. However, I still do not wish to maintain that this is the extent of community, though it is certainly the initial experience. Rather, my community includes many people beyond this inner circle of initial family and family friends, etc. People I have encountered academically and professionally (students, professors, colleagues), people I have ended up living near (in an apartment building, in a neighborhood, in a city), people I learn about through second-hand reporting (a friend of a friend, a local woman in the newspaper, a starving child thousands of miles away glimpsed on the television)-all of these people and more seem (at some level) to be in my community. Typically, these are not individuals that I have actively sought out and pursued as possible community members. On the contrary, people come into my life (and leave my life) in a quite unexpected and uncontrollable way. And so it goes; such is the process of living. Thus to the initial question "How do you decide who gets added to your sense of community?" we might say that life has a way of deciding for you. Another way of putting all of this is in terms of the constitution of a "we." The initial awareness of one's self as Other to the Other might be said to lead to a sense of the world as the same "for us all." This is significant, for in this dative manifestation (i.e., the world as appearing the same for us) there is an initial sense of community-of a burgeoning "us"-which Hart calls the primal "we.,,40 This level of "community," though, surely includes everyone in the world. The "primal we," explains Hart encompasses "us all" for whom the world is. Because it is the correlate of the publicity of the world the "primal we" pre-predicatively encompasses "us all," or "everyone." This embraces people with whom I may not "grow old together," not share a life in common, experience common events, projects and agency through the simultaneity of the distinctive streams of consciousness, or share a clearly delineatable community of space, i.e., house, neighborhood, town, etc. 4 ! But there is, Hart maintains, a "fuller and more proper" sense of "we" having to do with a mutuality of agency. It is, in fact, a more exclusive sense of "we." This claim is founded on Husserl's observation that We do not only live next to one another but in one another. We determine one another personally.. .from one I to another I. And our wills do not merely work on Others as the
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components of our surroundings but in the Others: Our wills extend themselves onto the will of the Other, onto the Other's willing which at the same time is our willing, so that the deed of the Other can become our deed, even if in a modified manner.42 Consequently, there is a mutual participation of wills and it is though such mutuality that common goods are pursued. A fuller sense of "we" develops as "we who have a common agency and are pursuing common goals in a common world." This level of community is helpful for our purposes for it is neither all inclusive nor limited to the Ego and her Significant Other. Rather, there is a group which is "working together" toward some common goal, and the burgeoning Ego necessarily finds itself as constituted within such a group, as one of its members. Husserl explains further that in such a setting a common goal is not only the same goal held by different persons but a directedness to a work as that toward which and upon which I and an Other "work together." Thereby there belongs to each will the simultaneous willing or willing at the same time as the partner-an interpenetration of willings, a goal which each wills as the same as such from out of himherself but through the Other and the Other wills it from out of him-herself but through me....Communal willing is to be understood as general for the members of the local community and for the community as a community.43 Such a local community might then solve our problem of defining the boundaries of the normative community. That is to say that the "we" of the "we whose wills are intermingled" are the members of the normative community: when we act, we establish the community. Knowing who is in your community is knowing who is (properly) included in "we"-whose agency is tied-up with your own. Practically speaking, it would seem that family and friends probably are included in this "we,,,44 as are other acquaintances and neighbors. But all of humanity is not captured by such a "we." Some people will be so distanced from me (spatially and "spiritually") that there is no interpenetration of wills (e.g., passengers riding on the metro in Paris right now), while others will be close but will not be included in the community because their wills will not aim toward the same goals as my own will (e.g., Christmas shoppers converging on the mall, fighting for parking spaces and the last "nice presents" on the shelves 45 ). It is possible, though, that someone might still be concerned with
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having a method for accurately and systematically disclosing who is in this community and how someone might be added. That is, how might we conduct a census of the "local community" or do a roll-call to see who "we" are, and what are we to do with new community members-with ongoing additions (and substractions) from the community? In fact, someone might ask: "Even if someone is added to the community, why should we care about him? After all, my new neighbor across the street probably had nothing to do with the constitution of my Ego or my good, and it might not seem that we share a common agency either. I see no phenomenological tie and therefore there would seem to be no obligation." Part of the problem here is in thinking of the "new" community member as an "addition." This description is misleading. What I would like to submit is that such members are "actualizations" rather than "additions," and that their goods are not goods which are somehow added to my good, rather their goods are newly experienced perspectives on the communal Good, i.e., on my good as well. What was before emptily intended is now filled. What was absent is present. What was apperceived is straightforwardly perceived. The Good which initially arose for me was, I have argued, public. It was an intersubjective Good where my particular perspective (i.e., "my" good) was unique in that it was mine, but shared in that it was one perspective on a larger, intersubjective Good. Now, the structure of the experience of this Good is not that "my perspective on the Good" is given to me. In the same way that a house is not experienced as '~the-side appearing-to-me-now," so the Good is not experienced as "the-perspectiveappearing-to-me-now." This is not how we experience things. Rather, the experience of the house is the experience of a house: it is the-sideappearing-to-me-now in addition to the-other-sides-as-apperceived. Similarly, our experience of the Good is an experience of the Good: it is theperspective-appearing-to-me-now in addition to the-other-perspectives-asapperceived. That is, the Other's perspective of the Good is always apperceived in my experience of the Good. In the same way, then, that I can walk around, climb under and above, and generally "take-in" the house from a variety of perspectives-thus making my understanding of the whole of the house richer and the perspectives that are constantly apperceived actualized (filled, presenced)-so I can encounter Others who offer new perspectives ("their" good) on the Good for me, thus enriching my notion of the Good. My perspective on the Good ("my" good) is changed, because I know more about the Good, and in this way, the "new" community member is not an "addition"-not, in fact, "new"-but rather an "actualization" of a formerly apperceived and now presenced member of the Community. Would we conclude, then, that the community stretches so far as to include everyone in the world? If so, do we not have the same problem as in
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Rachels where the community includes each individual and thus loses the flavor and the sense of being a community-a particular group of people with a unique identity? Furthermore, where would one's obligation end? If we are linked to everyone, but clearly are incapable of promoting each individual's good, what criteria could we use to decide whose good gets promoted and whose good gets left out? Such suggestions are problematic only if we accept the framework in which they are formulated-namely, a climate of modem liberalism. Wondering how to choose who gets "actualized" is only important if one assumes that we are isolated choosers looking over the situation from some objective standpoint, coming up with a method and justification for our choices, and arguing like lawyers for the best social contract possible. Indeed, this idea of choice does imply a social contract setting-at least to a certain degree. If we see the individual as picking and choosing community members, then the individual is constituting his own community-building it up as he sees fit. What would be occurring would be the creation of a liberal "community" through acts of exclusion-a collection of individuals agreeing to take up each others good as their own after having looked each other over, decided if the Other's good is appropriate and interesting, and used some set of criteria to decide who gets in. 46 In many respects, this is what is masquerading as community in contemporary Europe, and it is more like a Country Club mentality than a communitarian ethic. As the European Economic Community gives way to the European Community (economic and otherwise), some are maintaining that the future promises greater centralization. Supposedly, this is an acknowledgment of our deep interconnectedness-or at least the interconnectedness of Europeans. In an age when communication is instant, travel is nearly so, and what I do in my home may affect the way of life of a family on the other side of the continent, the formation of a European Community suggests that these ties are fundamentally binding and that Europe will sink or swim as a whole. The French experience and the Italian experience, for instance, are subsumed under the European experience. Individual country passports are a thing of the past. A common currency is proposed, a common destiny assumed. Until recently, there have been two ways to look a this new community-either as an economic playing field (a newly level common market) or as an emerging Nation-state (an emerging United States of Europe).47 The first view has been attacked as lacking the proper vision. The European Community is not merely a group of national governments doing business with each other, goes the argument, because on the horizon there is a convergence of European goals, perspectives, and ways of life. Also for this reason, a super Nation-state is not the best way to understand the European
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Community. Those against the Nation-state view often argue that Community politics and national politics must not only relate to each other, they must be "institutionally intertwined," and given the fact that heads of State refuse to accept a role similar to that of a state governor in the United States, some method of institutionalizing this "intertwining" that is not based on a 48 Nation-state mentality must be found. The fashionable move recently is to suggest that the idea of a European Community means that "the nation-state would be undermined [and that the] tie woven ...would be even tighter than that proposed by the theorists of economic interdependence.,,49 The European Community would become, supposedly, a group of people with shared interests and experiences, all pursuing a common Good. The problem is that the group is being built up rather than discovered; members are being added rather than actualized. The history of a Unified Europe finds a few rich nations getting together and agreeing to set up an economic field which is mutually advantageous. The community is begun, more or less, contractually. There is a cost to enter this country club of nations-a little bit of sovereignty and a lot of protectionist trade barriers. Club members pay a fee, but what they get in return is very profitable: they lose sovereignty but they gain a sense of importance, prestige, and power as club members; they pay a fee, but they gain new contacts, eager to do business with them since they are members. Like a country club, the group provides (and perpetuates) image and wealth. To join a country club is to gain clout and new business contacts. Lawyers, doctors, financial consultants, etc. often exclusively use the services of other club members, and the same occurs in the European Community. Getting in, then, is a boon. But getting in is not easy. This is because the current members must have a reason-usually a self-serving reason-to accept your application. Greece and Spain were recently admitted to the European Community, but only after being initially rejected and sent off to "clean up their act."so And just as some ethnic groups have had difficulties in becoming members of particular country clubs in the United States (and this encompasses race, religion, economic class, etc.), so certain groups of countries are finding it difficult to enter the European Community. East European countriesespecially countries struggling in the aftermath of the break-up of the Soviet Union-could derive great benefit from club membership such as open markets for their goods, free access to the common assets of the members, and certainly political clout. But these are exactly the countries that are being denied membership. The rationale is at once blatantly paternalistic and politically straightforward. As Alberta Sbragia explains: For current members, enlargement that brings in countries like Sweden and Austria has benefits, in that both are rich
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(Sweden has already calculated that it will be a net contributor to the Community) industrial countries. The East European countries provide a far more complex set of calculations. Their economic and environmental problems are...serious... [and] liloining only the customs union ...might well expose their private sector to premature competition without their being able to qualify for help from the Community's structural funds. Yet full membership, which would qualify them for such help, would also bring to the fore difficult questions about redistribution among current Community member states. 51 In other words, in order to receive aid from the Community you must be a full member, and in order to be a full member you must not be in a position where you require aid. Such countries are told that their petition for membership has been denied for their own good-that it would not be in the best interest of their struggling economies to engage in "premature competition" with the big boys. But the truth of the matter is that in order to join the club one must fit the profile-in this case a "rich industrial country"because this is in the best interest of the existing members. 52 What is at work here seems to be something termed "Group Egoism" by Andrew Oldenquist. 53 Oldenquist argues that there is a movement from "me" to "mine" in a social life where group loyalty causes one to pursue the interests of his or her community to the exclusion of all noncommunity members' goods. This, he suggests, is a good thing and he sees his theory as basically communitarian. It is surely a liberal use of the word "communitarian," for Oldenquist's society is built from scratch just as the European Community is being constructed today. I have called such theories (and practices) Country Club mentalities rather than communitarian moralities because they are instances of exclusionary practices forging an ad hoc group based on some set of non-intersubjective criteria for membership. One of the many problems with the Country Club theory of community is that country clubs are always started after one has achieved an identity in some larger more inclusive group. Americans, Midwesterners, Hoosiers, Indianapolis residents, doctors, doctors on the West side of Indianapolis, etc.-the people who are defined by this narrowing of communal identity are the ones who then get together and decide to start a club. The "community" which they build-up is based on exclusion rather than addition. A country club is defined by those to whom it refuses admission, and this narrowing description of who will count as "us" is a way of kicking people out rather than refusing to let people into the group.
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To put it another way, the criteria for exclusion in the Country Club theory are necessarily groundless. In order to choose who gets in (read: "gets kicked out") one must already have decided who counts as a possible candidate and what criteria will inform the choice one makes concerning his or her candidacy. But what could be the basis for choice if the chooser has no prior knowledge of what is good? Michael Sandel poses a similar question and proposes a similar critique to Rawls' conception of choice in the Original Position, and the same issues are at work here. 54 If choice is seen as "radical choice"-i.e., choice independent of pre-existing wants and desires-then what ground might it have? In the Original Position, one is supposed to make a choice that will maximize gains and minimize losses, but without a prior understanding of what is good (good to gain, bad to lose), again, how can one make a choice? Such conceptions of the Good are inherently communal. No idea of the Good can be used to construct a community for it will presuppose what it is, in reality, attempting to construct. 55 The chooser would have to rely on a conception of the Good (some set of criteria which she considers to be best) to make the choice which creates the community, and this is impossible without community. Sub-groups can be built-up (actually, broken down) this way, but the fundamental intersubjective nexus cannot: country clubs are raised through such practices, but community is more basic. 56 Still, my daily life seems to be populated with groups that are created and these groups seem important in defining who I am. In contemporary America, joining a political party, a work force, an environmental group, or a bowling league seems to be a choice based on exclusion as much as inclusion, yet these memberships do provide meaning to our lives and our conceptions of Self and the Good. What, then, can we say of such communities? Are they communities in the strict sense? What is their role in our Self-understanding and the communitarian ethic for which I have been arguing? An answer to these questions can be had by taking a closer look at the Liberal State as it is manifest in contemporary America.
6. THE STATE OF OUR UNION, THE UNION OF OUR STATE
America has been called many things in its brief history, but none has been so far off the mark as "The Great Melting Pot." If anything, diversity has flourished in these two centuries and has created a heterogeneous society with various pockets of seeming homogeneity. Different cultures, languages, beliefs, customs, religions, and visions of the future all exist within the United States, and the massive economic and political structures
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that have evolved in the State have altered these diverse practices and beliefs but have not unified them. So the Melting Pot has failed, but it is of no great concern for the Liberal State has apparently thrived in this individualistic climate and rocky, incongruous soil. Liberalism, with its notion of providing a framework of rights in which people can pursue any variety of disparate goods, fits well the image of a United States as a conglomeration of unattached individuals, busy conducting their separate lives, enjoying their personal liberties, and pursuing a private happiness based on some perspectives of a Good the publicity of which has been repressed. Indeed, there is repression in the Liberal State, but this is something we have already discussed. The task before us now is to suggest why the Liberal State is failing, why it is doomed to failure, what the mechanisms are with which the State attempts to prolong its life, and what are the alternatives for the future. We can begin by noting that if America were a fully Liberal State it would look much different from the way it looks today. Rights of noninterference, the so-called negative rights, would be paramount and the Libertarian vision would be achieved. But we are a society in which there is a constant struggle between positive rights (rights to something, such as a right to health care or a right to food) and negative rights. We are a Welfare State that gives tax breaks to big business. We own a system that is inherently discriminating, but we enact Affirmative Action. We hear preaching and high praise for the family, but we cling to an economic system which works to destroy the possibility of family at every level. We don't want homeless people, but we want our current banking and finance structure. We don't like poverty, but we love capitalism. We hate to see losers, but we can't live without the competition. It is a constant struggle we have grown used to, but our familiarity has not bred content. In fact, we are in a state of crisis. Ours is an age of alienation, impersonal relations, and anxiety. This is so obviously true that it needs little argument. One has only to look at the art, the literature, and the philosophy of our times. I do not wish to indulge in psychoanalyzing our society at large, but it would seem that deeply rooted feelings of anxiety and insecurity motivate much of our normal lives and even the thinking that goes on within our ivory towers. Garrett Hardin, I think, is a prime example. In his "The Case Against Helping the Poor," Hardin suggests that the world is like an ocean and that we are all "adrift on a moral sea."S7 Some of us (those in the rich nations) have a lifeboat, but most people (those in the poor nations) are treading water. Hardin suggests that even if we have a bit of extra room on our lifeboat we should not allow anyone else on because it will destroy our "safety factor." And since the carrying capacity of the lifeboat would be
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exceeded by letting everyone on, such an action would only lead to complete death for all involved. Those treading water should have been better prepared, and we cannot be our brother's keeper because it will only kill us in the end. Now the problem with this argument should be obvious: the usthem/Country Club mentality, the phenomenological contradictions of separating goods, etc. But it seems to me that the deep problem here is the metaphor itself, and I am not speaking of the consequences or inconsistencies of being in a lifeboat, etc. I am worried about Hardin's thinking that such a metaphor is appropriate in the first place. What would lead someone to think that living in twentieth-century America is like living in a lifeboatlike being in a hostile environment and a precarious situation where one false move kills us all? What would make someone think that at any moment we might capsize, that at any moment we might be attacked by the mad throngs of poor water-treaders and not only have to share some of our luxury with them but be led to certain death by their nearness? This is an important question, and I am reminded of its importance each time I teach an undergraduate ethics class. When discussing our responsibilities to distant people and future generations, it is hard to avoid Hardin-he is a cornerstone of the canon. The thing that always amazes me is the overwhelming positive reaction the students have to Hardin's position. It is important to remember that we are talking about young men and women fresh out of High School who, for the most part, have never stopped to reflect on, let alone formalize and organize, their own views on such a topic. They approach the material without the complex machinery a formal education in philosophy provides for picking apart other people's theories. And in the majority of students, Hardin's basic message of fear and insecurity resounds. "Yes," they say, "this metaphor perfectly describes how I feel." And in their class discussions and their papers, they defend Hardin's position and their words relay the deep anxiety that they have for their future. And this seems to me quite peculiar, for the majority of my students have been middle-class, advantaged, even white. They study business and law and accounting and medicine, and in all probability, they will go on to lead middle-class, advantaged lives. But from their perspective, the wolf is always at the door, or, not to mix metaphors, the lifeboat is always rocking. Being as objective as possible, we have to admit that middle-class Americans are probably the least socially and economically precarious people on earth. In order for their "lifeboat" to tip, the basic structures of world economics would have to change overnight. And what is this "lifeboat" to which we have been referring? Is it the relatively luxurious lifestyle of middle-class America? The two cars in the garage, the retirement fund in the bank, and the children off to college? Now certainly it is the case that the
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necessary conditions for such a lifestyle include the oppression of other people. Colonialism, imperialism, and all-out brutality are not only things in our past. America is what it is today at the cost of keeping oppressed people what they are today. But the fact of the matter is that middle-class America has no legitimate reason to feel that they could lose their lifestyle at any moment. Unless, of course, that lifestyle is inherently anxiety-producing, even inherently wrong. This, I think, is the explanation for Hardin's, my students', and countless others' feelings of dread and instability. Our current way of life generates these feelings because it is deeply alienating. The human Self, I have argued, is a socially immersed creature-perhaps, to some degree, a social construct. Our identity and our sense of Self emerge within and from our community, but our communities are becoming less and less meaningful, less and less powerful, and less and less capable of providing us with a full and rich subjectivity. This has not always and necessarily been the case, but in contemporary America it is undeniable. Communities are destroyed by the massive economic and social structures of our society, and with the destruction of these communities there disappears the possibility of our own existence. Various authors have been making similar observations for some time now. In the 1950's, sociologist Robert Nisbet suggested that our spiritual decay is a direct result of our communal decay. He proposed that [b]ehind the growing sense of isolation in society, behind the whole quest for [a return to] community.. .Iies the growing realization that the traditional primary relationships of men have become functionally irrelevant to our State and economy and meaningless to the moral aspirations of individuals. We are forced to the conclusion that a great deal of the peculiar character of contemporary social action comes from the efforts of men to find in larger-scale organizations the values of status and security which were formerly gained in the primary associations of family, neighborhood, and church....Within such groups have been engendered the primary types of identification: affection, friendship, prestige, recognition .... [Our] most fundamental problem has to do ...with the role of the primary social group in an economy and political order whose principal ends have come to be structured in such a way that the primary social relationships are increasingly functionless, almost irrelevant, with respect to these ends....Our present crisis lies in [this] fact. ... 58
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More recently, Michael Sandel has remarked that certain institutional developments may begin to account for the sense of powerlessness that the welfare state fails to address and in some ways deepens. But it seems to me a further clue to our condition recalls even more directly the predicament of the unencumbered Self-lurching, as we left it, between detachment on the one hand, and entanglement on the other. For it is a striking feature of the welfare state that it offers a powerful promise of individual rights, and also demands of its citizens a high measure of mutual engagement. But the self-image that attends the rights cannot sustain the engagement. As bearers of rights, where rights are trumps, we think of ourselves as freely choosing, individual selves, unbound by obligations antecedent to rights, or to the agreements we make. And yet, as citizens of the procedural republic that secures these rights, we find ourselves implicated willy-nilly in a formidable array of dependencies and expectations we did not choose and increasingly reject. In our public life, we are more entangled, but less attached, than ever before....As the scale of social and political organization has become more comprehensive, the terms of our collective identity have become more fragmented, and the forms of political life have outrun the common purpose needed to sustain them. Something like this, it seems to me, has been unfolding in America for the past half-century or so. 59 Small communities created us-literally created us-but it would appear that the world in which we are then forced to participate is one which is moving toward the destruction of small communities or at least their irrelevancy. And this is painful. It is painful because it is self-defeating and Self defeating. The possibility of our existence and our ability to act is being eroded by the larger Liberal State. Furthermore, this State promises us an identity-it promises to give meaning to our lives and remove limits to our freedoms. But these promises are hollow. Working in a factory where one never sees the finished product or even the owner cannot provide us with a viable identity. Buying food at a national chain supermarket means that we never know who grew the vegetables, where they came from, what chemicals they have been blasted with, whether their genetic structure has been manipulated, what people are being helped or harmed through our purchase of the products, etc. The process is inherently impersonal and alienating.
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Flipping a switch on the wall sends electricity to the lights in the room, but we have no idea how that electricity got there, who made it possible, and who it is helping or, more likely, harming. In Washington D.C., someone I voted for or did not vote for sits, representing me and my interests. He or she does not know me and probably never will. These structures form the political and economic foundation of our society, but they are incapable of providing us with meaningful lives. Worse yet, they destroy the possibility of finding such meaning. But we are not stupid-at least not totally. We realize the hollowness of our existence in this mega-machine-super-state and we realize that it is a false community. Perhaps it is true that we are fundamentally in community with everyone in the world, but we can be sure of two facts. First, the political, social, and economic structures operating on a large scale today do not nourish this interconnection that we have with each other; in fact, they work to destroy our connections by forcing us to repress our enmeshment and the intersubjectivity of the Good in order to attain the basic necessities of life such as food and shelter. Surely, the true nature of our relations with the rest of the world are not manifest in the systems we find implemented today. Second, our basic interconnection with the rest of the world was discovered through the care and love which we received in a smaller communal setting. This second point, then, causes us to strive for the smaller community in an attempt to regain our sense of Self and our feeling of well-being. Consequently, we engage in the Country Club mentality. We push people away in an attempt to regain something small enough that we feel we once again belong. We call these small groups "communities" and try to find meaning in our lives through them. It is a valiant but futile task. Take, for instance, joining a Little League baseball team. Typically, such teams are called "community teams." This separates them from schoolsponsored teams, etc. The players come from a common geographic setting, which means, hopefully, that they bring a shared experience to the team. Now it is certainly the case that adults attempt to find meaning for themselves in the team for which their child plays, but let us focus on the child's experience, for the feelings of alienation, insecurity, and longing of which I have been speaking begin very early in our lives, and Little League baseball-seen as a community-is one attempt at fulfilling the longing and holding those feelings of anxiety at bay. Little League baseball is an interesting example in part because it has been studied as an attempt at community outside the discipline of philosophy. Psychologist B. Shore, for instance, remarks that baseball in general is a microcosm of American life and a manifestation of the tension between Liberalism and community:
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The pervasive asymmetries of baseball constitute the ritual enactment of a conversation. The determinate and closed are counterpoised to the contingent and free in a dialogue that engages in a common discourse our communitarian and atomistic visions of who we are. 60 The vision of who we are which is given to us by the Liberal State is, I have been arguing, alienating. It does not fit who we are and, moreover, undermines who we are. Seeing ourselves as a member of a Little League baseball team is an attempt to regain a sense of our communitarian Self because we involve ourselves in a small group with a shared identity and a shared goal. This is an effort to mirror the rise of the Self (in identity) and the Good (in goal). Given this, Shirley Brice Heath, studying the language of group epistemology and shared cognition, argues for Little League baseball as community. The best summative characterization of what happens in such groups [i.e., Little League] may well be the constitution of a normative community. Historians, social scientists, artists, and philosophers have in the past decade given intense attention to the elements and qualities of community within American life and the dissonance between the quest for community and the ideal of individualism....Aside from the intention of longevity and permanence and the expectation of stable spatial connections traditionally linked with communal association, neighborhood teams carry many other features of communities, including interaction and mutual dependence, expressive ties through numerous symbol systems, mutual and common sentiments, shared beliefs, and an ethic of individual responsibility to the communal life... .These features help shape individual identity, lead to an acceptance of group standards, offer a sense of place through identification with the group, and ensure a sense of "winning" through solidarity and mutual support. Knowledge building and awareness of the interdependence of knowing and acting rest on some degree of intentionality to link play and work for productive individual and team outcomes. 61 The Little League team is truly an attempt at community and on many levels it succeeds in acting like one. Heath also points out that the team members make constant reference to players in the Major Leagues, and
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that they use these Major Leaguers as role models. The coach asks the players "How would a professional team react? What would a professional player do now?" and thus motivates the Little League players to isolate their problems and improve. This has an interesting parallel with some communitarian writers (e.g., MacIntyre) who suggest that moral role models (saints, heroes, etc.) are the ways in which a tradition maintains itself within a community. It is not that there is an explicit set of rules and values, rather there are stories and images of people who are considered "good," and we are asked to be more like them. 62 Also, the Little League good seems an inherently communal good-a good based on cooperation and pursuing the goods of the other players, a good which can neither be created nor consumed individually, a good committed to interdependence. But the problem is that although the good is internally cooperative, it is externally competitive. That is, the Little League team's good can only be achieved at the cost of the opposing team's bad-assuming that winning is good and losing is bad. Still, is this not an instance of moral action (taking up another's bad and promoting it as such as your good) and an acknowledgment of the interconnectedness of goods (i.e., if in order to achieve my good of winning I need for your good of winning to fail, this is surely an instance of connected goods)? I have answered some of these questions earlier (see §4 of this chapter), but it is worthwhile to bring up the matter again in a new context. First, this kind of competition requires that one group sees the individuals in the other group as a means to winning. It is not that the bad of the opposing team is actually taken up as such as the home team's good; rather, the opposing team's losing is a means for achieving the home team's good and in order for this to work, the home team must see the opposing team as lessthan-full-subjectivities whose conceptions of the Good do not factor into the Good. Second, competition is at fault for some of the anxiety which I suggested is so pervasive in our society. Although the Little League players are told to have a good time, their goal is to win. Alfie Kohn, in his excellent critique of competition, No Contest, tells us of a cartoon in which a Little League coach is giving a pep talk to a small boy. "Okay, old buddy," says the coach, "get in there and play the game win or lose. But remember, nice guys finish last, there's no such word as chicken, and every time you lose you die a little.,,63 Kohn suggests that competition not only contributes to the anxiety that is deteriorating our society, but that it inherently distances us from the Other. As we strive to dominate the Other we find that we are alienated from him and we end up in an "ugly individualism.,,64 Furthermore, competition forces us to see goods in terms of a dichotomous "either/or"-either your good or my good-but goods are much more complex and, we must remember, are but perspectives on the common Good 65
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Finally, competition "acts not only to strain our existing relationships to the breaking point, but also to prevent them from developing in the first place. Camaraderie and companionship-to say nothing of genuine friendship and love-scarcely have a chance to take root when we are defined as [or define the Others as] competitors.,,66 All of these considerations are important, though they are extraneous to the basic point at hand. There are participatory groups (such as a gardening club, an environmentalist group, or an aerobics class) that are not inherently competitive. The fact that baseball offers a view of the Self as competitor is only one reason for questioning its validity as a community. The fundamental problem is that the Little League team is incapable of delivering what it promises. Heath proposes that Little Leaguers gain a sense of place through identification with the team, but what is that sense of place? Perhaps there is a shared goal and a common destiny, but these things are different from a shared Good and a common identity. The best that the Little League team can hope to offer is a fleeting moment of belonging-of being a part of something larger than but separate from one's Self. This should not be equated with seeing one's Self as securely enmeshed in a community. The Little League team, and other constructed communities, are ad hoc. This is not to say, however, that they serve no purpose. As a fan of baseball, I would be disappointed indeed to see it abolished on any level. 67 Yet it is also disappointing and troublesome to see baseball stand in for real community. We are all guilty, though, of this or some similar misunderstanding and misappropriation of our hearts. Walking down the street, I see a man wearing a Cincinnati Reds baseball cap and I feel closer to him than I do to the other strangers surrounding me. This man, too, is a stranger, but in my longing for community I somehow think that we share a particular identity and good as fans of the Reds. The same occurs when I drive around town in California or Indiana and happen to see a license plate from my home state of Ohio, a window decal from the college where I received my bachelor's degree, a bumper-sticker supporting a candidate or a cause which I support as well, or even a car which is the same make and model as my own. It is truly absurd to feel "close" to these others drivers-to feel that we share a community and a good when we have never even met and probably never will-but I do, and I think that it is not too presumptuous of me to say that we all engage in similar absurdities. The basic institutions of society need to be rearranged if our longing is ever to be fulfilled and the anxiety behind such absurdities is ever to be put to rest. The people with whom I live and interact must be those people who can truly provide me with a sense of myself. When you know the farmer who raised the vegetables you cooked into a casserole, when you
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care about the carpenter who works on your house, when your doctor has the time and inclination to visit even when you are well-these are the situations which make a fulfilling communal life possible. They are what Nisbet has called "the primary relationships and associations" of our lives. These must have meaning and power in our lives because they are what inflate us to life. Yet our large-scale economic, social, and political institutions work to destroy the relevance of these primary relationships. Shopping at the supermarket, keeping a watchful eye on shifty contractors, and being filed away as a number in some hospital ward (assuming one is lucky enough to have health insurance) are standard modes of life in contemporary America; and notice that it is not just that such structures differ from the more desirable primary associations mentioned above, rather they tend to eradicate those primary associations altogether. Here, then, is a more basic understanding of the situation which gives rise to alienation, existential anxiety, and the kind of foundational insecurity and anguish documented by Freud and the heirs to his spirit: phenomenologically speaking, we are a lost people. Our unions falter, our State grows. We are more entangled and less attached. We are socially constituted and then set loose to destroy the necessary preconditions of our social existence in order to survive. The car manufacturer at his assembly line, the patient in her emergency room, the Little League player cheering on his teammate, the voter who pulls the lever (or not) for someone she will never know, the Bloods and the Crypts, the Right and the Left, the motorist, the consumer, the Stranger-this is who we are asked to become, but not who we truly are. The solution must be something small: a community which is small enough so that our primary relationships regain the power to maintain our lives without contradiction. But it must be a reduction in size that is achieved from "the bottom up" rather than through exclusion. We must be able to survive without destroying the conditions of our survival, and one positive step in this direction is to maintain the basic structures of our lives of eating and working and playing and celebrating and mourning and suffering and growing in such a way that we affirm rather than· deny our own subjectivity and our own intersubjective Good. It is true that our lives are enmeshed with the totality of humanity, but the best possible affirmation of this fact is to tum the cliche "Think Globally, Act Locally" into a working pattern of living. Common Goods must be understood properly if this goal is to be realized. Although we have a world in common, we have "deeper" commonalities in virtue of those relationships which affect us on a daily basis and which involve us in the maintenance of our daily lives. These Goods are formed by particular people in particular places. Indeed, the notion of place
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is key for our understanding of a common Good and a viable community. Common Goods are Goods for us here. Again, this is not a call for isolationism or group egoism. It is, instead, an admission that taking up a good and acting on it as such as one's own requires a concrete act (cf. chapter 4, §4)-real people in real places doing real things. The importance of place is something also stressed by Daniel Kemmis, the communitarian mayor of Missoula, Montana. Kemmis realizes that what holds people together long enough to discover their power as citizens is their common inhabiting of a single place....Before they become citizens, then these people are neighbors; this is a neighborly citizenship....Because each of them is attached to the place, they are brought into relationship with each other. ... [P]olitics emerges as the set of practices which enables these people to dwell together in this place....Places have a way of claiming people.... [T]hey must learn to inhabit their place together, which they can only do through the development of certain practices of inhabitation which both rely upon and nurture the oldfashioned civic virtues of trust, honesty, justice, toleration, cooperation, hope, and remembrance. 68 Wendell Berry characteristically puts the same point eloquently when he remarks that "our land passes in and out of our bodies just as our bodies pass in and out of our land; that as we and our land are part of one another, so all who are living as neighbors here, human and plant and animal, are part of one another, and so cannot possibly flourish alone. That, -therefore, our culture must be our response to our place.... "69 Simon Bolfvar, the liberator of South America, knew the importance of place to community as well, and in 1819 as he was helping plan the political future of Venezuela, he reminded the founders not simply to copy the model of the United States or Europe, for the new "laws must take into account the physical conditions of the country, climate, character of the land, locations, sizes, and mode of living of the people.,,70 Perhaps all of this speaks to the impossibility of a large community in the sense that as much as material commonality binds us together, once the land is no longer common the community cannot be maintained. We used to understand this quite well. We used to be plains people or river people or forest people or desert people, etc., but we no longer consider place to be a factor in holding us together or supplying us with meaning and an identity. Home has become wherever one can find a job, and it is com-
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forting to walk into a Burger King in Hong Kong and see the same tables and eat the same food as one can in Ohio. We attempt to physical1y re-create place-a place which is familiar and ours-but of course it is a lost cause for we who are essentially dis-placed by the Liberal State. Here, then, is yet another sense in which the European Community is headed in the wrong direction: Mediterranean people are never going to be in (fundamental) community with Black Forest people. Yves Simon, writing before the real rumblings of true European unity, seemed aware of this when he wrote that the "notion of natural boundary is not absurd, and sometimes a fence built by nature serves quite reasonably to distinguish one community from another. Spain is south of the Pyrenees Range and France north of it.,,71 But Simon's treatment of the topic is ultimately unsatisfactory, for his understanding of communities and the Common Goods which they embody and create is founded on a Liberal view of the Self. While it is true that he understands the importance of place, his good-fences-make-good-neighbors approach is decidedly different in spirit from the theory which we have been pursuing. Simon acknowledges the accident of place-the thrownness of our existence-but in the end "must confess that the final power of determination belongs to the choices of men ...."n Inevitably, Simon's work provides us with an interesting theory of Goods but a misdirected theory of community. He recognizes, however, that achieving Common Goods requires group action. If a banker lends an entrepreneur money to open a business, there is a common interest in the entrepreneur's success, but it is not a Common Good for Simon. The banker can simply sit back and watch what happens without acting. This "silentpartner" arrangement leads Simon to conclude that "[w]here there is no common action, there is no common good. These two men do not make up a community. What they cal1 their 'common interest' is in fact a sum of private interests that happen to be interdependent.,,?3 Much rides on this notion of interests which just happen to be interdependent. A surgery, Simon suggests, is a good example of necessary interdependence-the surgeon, nurses, and anesthetist are engaged in common action which is necessary for the pursuit of the Common Good of the surgery. Boating, though, is Simon's favored example. "A team of men pulling a boat from the bank of a river," he tells us, "supplies a perfect example of a community in act.,,?4 While it makes sense to say that Common Goods are more than the conglomeration of private interests, Simon's use of the word "community" does not precisely coincide with ours. Being engaged in action with Others whose presence is necessary for the accomplishment of the action is not sufficient for the constituting of a community. Boatpul1ing is not necessarily communal. Typical1y, in fact, it is not. The team members might very well be Liberal individuals, interchangeable and ex-
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pendable. If I can replace one member's work with cheaper labor from a desperate immigrant, or, better yet, construct some machine to do the business of pulling for me, in what sense is there a community? The surgery is an even more telling example. To today's surgeon I am typically a number. My appendix bursts and I am rushed to the hospital where I am tagged around the wrist-my social security number, insurance ID number, admitted-patient number, etc., is stamped on the wristband (perhaps also appearing as a bar code for a computer to read). If I am lucky, I meet the doctor for a few minutes. Regardless, I am soon sent home-hopefully in better health-bill in hand. The bill will include countless charges for equipment I never saw or used and from people I never met. My anesthetist, for instance, will most likely remain a complete stranger-a name on paper, just as I was to him. If I am forced to stay long enough in the hospital I might strike up an acquaintance with a nurse, though it could never be a true friendship. The only way in which we will be related is as patient and nurse, and although theirs is the most demanding-the most human-job in the modem medical profession, friendship requires sharing more than one isolated incident and aspect of life. But surely it is the case that many doctors would take up my good as their own. It might seem that even those doctors who are only in medicine to get rich are acting within the realm of morality if they take up my bad (my burst appendix and pain) as their good (their chance to get rich). Such analysis, though, fails to acknowledge that while the greedy doctor would be taking up my bad as her good and the earnest doctor would take up my good as her good, neither would take up my good or bad as such as her own. To do so would require that she is neither acting out of duty to a Hippocratic oath, nor (essentially) acting in order to earn a living, but rather acting because it is my good. Now, I do not want to push this so far as to exclude 'the possibility of medical ethics in today's (mega-)mechanistic, technologized, metropolis-laden, Liberal State. But we must admit that the depth of moral entanglement is a function of the complexity of social enmeshment which in turn is afunction of the size of the community. In order for the doctor to treat me as something more than an objectified patient and thus be capable of thoughtfully appropriating my good as such as her own, she must be related to me in more and deeper ways. The reason that the institution of modem hospitals fails to provide us with security, relieve our social anxiety, and keep us fully healthy-the reason that it is an improper and ineffective institution for community-building-is, by now, familiar. Like representative democracy and the rest of our foundational Liberal tenants, it is incapable of delivering what it promises and what we crave. The doctor who is also my neighbor, and who loves my fresh baked bread, and whose child my wife teaches in the nursery school, and
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whose father built the addition to my home-this doctor is more capable of sharing a Common Good with me. This doctor shares more of life with me-more of a common life. But Simon maintains that the simple and necessary goods of our existence are the opposite of Common Goods-they are individual and selfish. "Needs relative to such goods as food and shelter," he writes, "are self-centered by nature and remain self-centered in the most disinterested man despite all the generosity which enters into his way of satisfying his needs and of relating their satisfaction to further ends.,,75 I claim quite the contrary. Securing food, shelter, health, and general well-being is a pursuit of a Common Good, the commonality of which lies not in the conjunction of our private interests (as in the banker/entrepreneur example) nor in our contractual agreement to embark on a common project (as in a team of men pulling a boat). Surely it is true that having food to live is of individual interest to each of us, and there might be an agreement between us to provide this (e.g., "you grow the grain; I'll bake the bread"). But there might not be as well. The mother whose newborn cries to nurse has no contractual obligation with her child. Acknowledging the intersubjective nature of all goods is the first step toward understanding a Common Good, but Common Goods are more than intersubjective. They are universal in their appeal ("All of us need to eat"), yet relative to particular people and places when realized ("It is we who need to eat-we who are related to each other in these particular ways and who live on this particular land which is capable of providing us with this particular food"). They are intersubjective ("Eating is good for us, and I affect and have a stake in your eating-what you eat, your being able to eat, etc.-as you do in mine") and require action ("In order for us to eat we have got to plant and tend and harvest and prepare, etc."). Simon saw that action is necessary for Common Goods but failed to realize that it exists in securing our basic needs as well as in such projects as pulling a boat. In a good community the communal activity leading to the fulfillment of such a need as hunger will be made manifest and celebrated, but even in today's Liberal State such activity exists. It is hidden by institutions such as supermarkets and agribusiness, and although machines tend to much of the work, there are many hands which literally and metaphorically have touched my french fries before I pull up to the window at the drive-thru. Of course, in the finest community I will never be a "customer" rather than a person, and fulfilling my need for food will be seen not only as one aspect of a Common Good but as a good which is related to other goods as well. That is, my eating is tied up with our friendship and with a myriad of other Common Goods on which we have our own perspectives. I have not been purposefully vague in defining a Common Good.
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Undoubtedly it is a notion which deserves its own extended study. Formal analysis, though, cannot hope to substitute for living out Common Goods. Inevitably, we come to realize that this is part of the project of personhood and that the project of personhood is ongoing-being a person is not something that ends. Though we might be able to point to moments at which the process "begins"-the gracious act of attention the Significant Other bestows upon the burgeoning person, the creation of the experiential unity that is the proto-Other, etc.-there is never a moment at which the process is completed. True, the infant inevitably establishes the notions of Ego and Others, but to call this realization the "completion" of the personhoodproject would be misleading. One of the reasons we do not need to worry about adding people into our community is that the boundaries of that community and the extent of our own self-knowledge are always changing. With each encounter of the Other, there is an on-going pairing that strengthens or perhaps even drastically alters our understanding of Ego and community. Being a person is an enterprise. Given this, we must admit that the Liberal State is on a collision course with itself. It is a phenomenological fact that will catch up with us one way or the other. But before concluding this investigation of our predicament and our hope for a solution, there is one last question specifically having to do with the nature and the size of community which deserves special attention. Is it the case that our lives are enmeshed with the totality of the living world, or just with humanity? Is the "project of human personhood" informed-our sense of Ego and community fundamentally shapedby the greater-than-human-world? Is there any room for non-human life in Phenomenological Communitarianism? This question serves as the focus of the next chapter and the conclusion of the project.
NOTES ILet us not worry about defining truth right now. For our present purposes, the follower of Utilitarianism can simply be saying "it is true in my life" or "it is true for me." 2Cf., e.g., Rorty (1991). 3See, for instance, Husserl's rejection of skepticism in Ideas I §79. 4Sandel (1984), 17. 5MacIntyre (1984), 220. "I do not wish to go into Sandel's and MacIntyre's theories in any great detail. Such is not the purpose of this chapter. The specific problems of communitarianism have been documented and discussed in numerous places (Cf. Frazer and Lacey (1993); Buchanan (1989); Rosenblum (1989); Bell (1993)). Rather, 1 would like to discuss some of the common traditional problems in communitarian theory as a means of introducing Phenomenological Communitarianism and pointing to its strengths.
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7The degree to which metaphysical claims are necessary in ethics is highly debated. Cf., e.g., Frazer and Lacey (1993),149-158,181-190, and Rawls (1985). 8Sandel (\984),17. Emphasis mine. 9Frazer and Lacey (1993), 116. Frazer and Lacey's point is that feminism is powerless under communitarianism because a woman "cannot find any jumping-off point: ... her position as a socially constructed being seems to render her a helpless victim of her situation."(p.151) This is an important part of their critique but one with which I cannot deal directly at this time. In the passages which follow, I do hope to show how Phenomenological Communitarianism does not suffer from the problems of the disappearing self, but the specific problem of female subjectivity I have dealt with elsewhere in my "The Possibility of a Feminist Phenomenology," (1993). IOSee Walzer (1987). II(When it is taken to its natural extreme) 12Cf., especially, Hobbes' Leviathan Ch. XIII and Philosophical Rudiments Ch. I (both in The English Works of Thomas Hobbes, vols. " and III, Sir William Molesworth ed., (London: John Bohn, 1839)). Of course, someone might want to argue that Hobbes' state of nature is actually an example of a communitarian theory. That is, in this pre-contractual state, individuals are defined by their relationship to each other (even though this relationship is one of war). This would be mistaken, however, because the actors here are clearly individuals, each with an individual good to pursue. These classic Liberal selves are not constituted by their warring relationships and there is no instance of taking up another's good as such as one's own. Hobbes' pre-contractual selves are isolated, individuals who happen to be at waraggressive monads who want to get together and put an end to chaos for their own good. Perhaps the confusion stems from the use of the term "war." War seems to carry with it an underlying notion of declarations, sides, and historical struggles. Hobbes' war has none of these qualities. Each individual fears and is feared by all of the others. Again, this paranoia does not constitute them, though. Their "true nature" is to be something other than paranoid and they long for a sovereign to enforce a contract and create a "society." 13MacIntyre (1972), 466. 14Frazer and Lacey (1993), 102. 15For this reason, many communitarian theorists refrain from positive claims and simply offer negative critiques of other theories. See, for instance, Frazer and Lacey (1993), 102-03. 16In fact, a reduction to a sphere of owngoodness would fail just as the reduction to a sphere of ownness did-whether we are talking about selves or' goods, both are fundamentally intersubjective. 17A farmer's goods will not be identical to a carpenter's goods, but they can be equally tied to each other and equally interdependent. 18Walzer (1987), 20. 19Hart (1992), 307. 20See Hart (1992), chapter VI, §7-13. 21Hart (1992), 458. 22Hart (1992), 451. 23Walzer (1987), 20,29,30,32. 24Notice that "negative rights" cannot be fundamental in the community. That is, rights of non-interference will all be cashed out in terms of actualized-expressed-positive-goods. Noninterference in certain areas of life (e.g., freedom of religion, freedom to choose a vocation, etc.) will be expressed by individuals as a positive right (i.e., having a right to have a right of non-interference in religion) associated with their good. Thus, I will not interfere with the Other's worship practices, for instance, not because she has a fundamental right to noninterference, but because part of her good is worshipping in the way she sees fit and I am
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adopting this good as such as my own when I agree not to impose an alternative form of worship on her. 25See Hart's convincing critique of Rousseau in Hart (1992), 449-5 I. 260ppressing people is an example of such an action, and is deeply tied to taking up another's evil as your good or another's good as your evil. To do either is to oppress, and as Freire has pointed out, there is an objectification (loss of subjectivity) in both oppressors and oppressed when such actions occur. "Dehumanization," he writes, "... marks not only those whose humanity has been stolen, but also... those who have stolen it" (Freire (1971), 28). To oppress, to put it in other terms, is to take up another's evil as one's good (or vice versa) and that in turn leads to an experience of one's Self and the Other as less-than-persons-an experience which goes against the fundamental experience of one's Self and the Other (which made the act of oppression possible in the first place). 27Hart (1992), 450. 2Rperhaps all types of pornography, depending on our definition (again, a communally relative notion with absolute implications). 29The question of pornographic bestiality (and necrophilia, etc.) is left aside here, as is the question of pornographic paintings or cartoons or the newly emerging possibilities of computerized pornographic Virtual Reality. A case could be made that consumers of such pornography must imagine the fictional image to be real (i.e., to have a subjectivity), but such arguments are not necessary for the point at hand. 30Although this might be how the pornographer experiences his "subject," it is an inherently self-destroying experience of the Other because, in the Husserlian sense, the founded pornographic level destroys the founding level. 310nce again, the details of this are worked out in my 'The Possibility of a Feminist Phenomenology" (1993). Suffice it to say that a denial of equality to an individual based on group identity is a failure to take that person as possessing full objectivity. 321n fact, Kant's second categorical imperative is probably a bit off the mark since we do not experience Others as ends in and of themselves-i.e., as disconnected from the community and the communal good, and free to pursue independent (isolated) goods given a basic framework of rights. Rather, there would be a respect of the Other as a community member since this is how he or she is experienced. This fundamental phenomenological truth, coupled with the fact that moral categoriality requires a picking up and promoting of the Other's good as such as my own (in this case the Other's freedom and self-respect is the Other's good which I am promoting as my own) is the foundation for something like the second categorical imperative. Given this realization, though, and seen in conjunction with Kant's stressing of non-contradictory moral maxims as the necessary condition for a "kingdom of ends," we might try to force the later-Kant into a communitarian mold in which the kingdom of ends is a community founded on a commitment to (experiential as well as logical) non-contradiction. 33Frazer and Lacey (1993), 153. 34See Carr (1986), 153-85. I have considered the role of narrative in the constitution of community and Self as well ( Cf. Steeves (1994». 35See Hauerwas (1981). 36Cf. MacIntyre (1984). 37Cf. Walzer (1987). In this work, Walzer ponders whose interpretation "counts" based on the critics' "distance" from the tradition. The problem is, of course, unnecessary, and I will say something about this shortly. 3RRacheis (1986), 144. 390r ties to the Significant Other if this Other was not one's mother or father, etc. 40 Hart (1992), 209. 41Hart (1992), 211.
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42Husserl as quoted by Hart (1992), 248. 43Husserl as quoted by Hart (1992), 372. 4~0 the extent to which there is a common goal pursued through a common will. E.g., a family reunion, a picnic with one's spouse, a neighborhood "block party," etc.-all would point to common agency. The family commonly wills the reunion, otherwise it would not happen. My wife prepares sandwiches and I prepare dessert, but both of us commonly will the picnic. Similarly, the neighbors divide the tasks of the party and engage in different actions at different times-cooking, eating, playing music, dancing, talking, etc.-but it is the block party that is commonly willed. 45This is a particularly illuminating example because it might seem that if I am shopping at the mall as well, then there is a common agency. Nothing could be further from the truth, for even though we might be engaged in similar actions, we are not pursuing a common goal, but rather we have a goal in common. Indeed, my absence (both my physical absence and the absence of my will) would no doubt please most of the other shoppers. In Hart's words, our being together is not out of a desire to be together, "not a result of social-communicati ve acts." (Cf. Hart (1992), 249.) 4\or rather, who gets kicked out). 47See Sbragia (1992), I. 48Sbragia (1992), 5-6. 49Miles Kahler, "The Survival of the State in European International Relations," in Maier (1987), 300. SOBoth figuratively in terms of increasing their GNP and literally in terms of enacting stronger environmental laws. SISbragia (1992), 16. 52Reading through the literature one is struck by the anti-communitarian sentiment behind the European Community. The concerns run from what· I have already discussed to fear of "imbalanced internal immigration"-the thought that with all sovereignty barriers down, all the people in Greece, for instance, would move to Germany due to the higher standard of living there. No regard is given to culture and language and tradition except to see them as possible barriers to achieving consensus. If the academic minds behind the construction of the European Community can actually envision, let alone worry about, Greeks moving to Germany en masse, then the European Community is clearly doomed-and for reasons much deeper than the logistics of its implementation. 53See Oldenquist (1986). 54Cf. Sandel (1982),161-65. 55This might seem a bold statement for a communitarian. After all, most communitarian theorists maintain that a view of the Good is what provides a blueprint for building a community. My point here is that while a common Good does hold a community together, it is not the case that isolated individuals realized they had a Good in common and then agreed to get together. The initial construction of community cannot take place this way. 56Country Club mentality, though, when it passes for communitarianism is dangerous. Not only can it lead to the European Community's exclusion of struggling new East European states; not only has it given rise to the KKK, Nazis, Rush Limbaugh's "Dittoheads," American backed Contras, colonialism, imperialism and many forms of oppression in general. It does, as well, lead to a pervasive theoretical relativism. This is a logical consequence of Country Club mentality. Excluding Others-other people, other groups, other states, etc.-is a disavowing of our communal nature and the intersubjective nature of the Good. Thinking that our good is unrelated to the good of the other group or that the world is filled with isolated groups with isolated goods (i.e., a basic foundation for relativism) is improper in the same sense that thinking the Ego and my good are unrelated to the Other and the Other's good is improper. Relativism is but a type of solipsism, and is, inherently, unfounded.
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57See Hardin (1974), 38-43,123-126. 58Robert Nisbet, "The Problem of Community" in Daly (1994), 141-43. 59Michael Sandel, 'The Procedural Republic and the Unencumbered Self," in Avineri and DeShalit (1992), 28. 6°Quoted by Shirley Brice Heath in Resnick (1991), 122. 61Shirley Brice Heath in Resnick (1991),122. 62An equally interesting excursis could be made here into Christianity as a community, but it is beyond the scope of this project. I mention this now only because Christ's calling people to be those for whom the Kingdom of God is spread upon the earth is directly relevant to the point at hand. Here we have a community receiving its identity and a perspective of its good by being called on to act like those for whom Heaven has already arrived. 63Kohn (1986), 117-18. 64Kohn (1986), 129. 65Kohn (1986), 127. 66Kohn (1986), 134. 67Even gi ven Alfie Kohn' s critique of competitive sport, there would probably be a place for baseball (and Little League) in the phenomenologically founded community. Cooperative baseball is not out of the question, and apart from restructuring the game as a whole, certain aspects of it are very fulfilling in isolation. Case in point: throwing a ball around with a friend can be a deeply rewarding activity, and the "Home Run Derby" the day before the Major League All-Star Game is often much more entertaining than the competition which follows. 68Kemmis (1990),117,122,118-19. 69Berry (1977), 22. This observation about non-human life as neighbor will be important to keep in mind for chapter 6. 7°Bolfvar(l971), 51. 71Simon (1962), 65. 72Simon (1962), 66. 73Simon (1962), 30. 74Simon (1962), 125. 75Simon (1962), 25.
CHAPTER VI
Non-Human Life and the Boundaries of Community
1. INTRODUCTION: A PERSIAN FABLE
Once upon a time a young man was walking through the woods on his way home from the market. In his pack he carried vegetables, fruits, and bread for his family. Wandering down the path and approaching a clearing, he happened to smell smoke. A quick investigation uncovered a bush overcome by low flames that were growing higher, and from the middle of the bush an adder called out for assistance. Tying one of the bread sacks to his staff and reaching it into the flames, the young man called to the adder to slip inside the sack and be lifted to safety. The adder complied and was saved. Away from danger the adder expressed his happiness and explained that some travelers had kindled the fire a few minutes before. The young man, pleased with himself after saving the adder and then putting out the fire, prepared to go on his way and suggested that the adder go in peace now and no longer harm men since he owed his life to a man's kindness. The adder, though, turned to strike him. "How is it that you could sting me now?" asked the young man. "Have you no sense of morality?" "Of course I do," replied the adder. "Then how is it that you could tum against your compassionate neighbor? How is it that you could repay good with evil?" "I act by the standards of your own morality," said the adder. The young man denied that this was the way of his morality-of his people-and as they had reached an impasse in their argument, the adder suggested that they put the question to the first they meet. The young man agreed and they went off into the woods. The first they encountered was a cherry tree, and after introducing themselves and telling their story the young man and the adder asked how is it that one should repay good. "According to man," replied the tree, "with evil. I have been here for one hundred years providing shade and fruit for men, and tomorrow they are going to cut me down and tum my body into planks."
H. P. Steeves, Founding Community © Kluwer Academic Publishers 1998
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Frightened, the young man asked the adder for a second witness. The adder agreed and presently they met a cow. After introducing themselves and telling their story the young man and the adder asked how is it that one should repay good. "According to man," said the cow with deep sadness, "with evil. For many years I have served a family, providing them with milk, butter, and cheese, but now that I am growing old I am to be sold to a butcher who will put me to death in order to eat my flesh." Growing very fearful, the young man appealed once again, asking for a third and final witness. The adder agreed and soon they met a fox. After introducing themselves and telling their story, the young man and the adder asked how is it that one should repay good. "One moment," said the fox with a look of disbelief. "I do not think your story plausible. How is it that an adder could fit into such a narrow bag and be saved from fire?" In order to convince him and get on with the inquiry, the adder went into the bag once again. "Now," said the fox to the young man, "your enemy is in your power." So the young man grabbed the bag, fastened it, stomped the adder to death, and satisfied, returned to the path and his journey home. I The question with which we are left at the end of our fable is one which I do not wish to beg. The witnesses have made their point. Human morality does allow good to be repaid with evil if, under the notion of moral action, we include our interaction with non-human life. If the young man's relationship with the adder is of the kind that has moral worth-good or bad-then the irony is clear, for the good that the adder has done in teaching the young man the truth about human morality is truly repaid with an evil in the adder's being stomped to death. But are animals and plants moral beings? Is a cow's providing milk a good thing in the technical sense we have been investigating? Are trees really our neighbors? Are we in community with non-human life? There are distinct traditions one might follow in deciding the extent of our moral enmeshment. Some would agree that animals have rights-that as individual, monadic centers-of-life, animals and perhaps even plants have moral standing and therefore claims to be made against us. Others agree that animal pain and, again, perhaps even plant "pain" should be averaged into the total world utilitarian calculus and therefore our interactions with nonhuman life are of the moral type. And these are but the two main strains of historical pro-animal rights arguments. Contemporary thought offers a choice between deep and
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shallow ecology for those who propose that non-human life figures into the moral equation, while others who hold such beliefs prefer to grapple with individual past philosophers such as Aristotle and Kant in an attempt to show how animals have mistakenly been denied moral status in their grand systems. Clearly there is no lack of possible starting points-ancient, contemporary, or otherwise. But what we need to investigate now is a new starting point-one that is founded on the results of the investigations that we have been pursuing; indeed, one that establishes the rights of animals 2 given the basic notion of our being in a phenomenologically founded community with them. Without this latter notion, the overall suggestion that we share a community with animals is neither very interesting nor convincing. It would amount to saying that we have to share this world with the animals and therefore we should be nice to them, respect them, love them, do good to them-there are any number of ways to put it. The problem with such a well-intentioned argument is that it inevitably begs the question. Indeed, as we have discovered with most forms of na"ive communitarianism designed to found human rights, it is missing a fundamental step that says a community should have a certain ethic of respect or rights. Consequently, our task is twofold. First, we must show how it is that we are in community with non-human life-specifically, for now, with animals. Second, we must show that membership in this community implies a certain status-that as a member of a community, an animal's good is to be respected and promoted (that is, such a good is a perspective on the Good). Ultimately, what is under investigation now is a question of limits. Given that we are in community with the Other and that this community implies a certain communitarian ethic, how do we draw the boundaries of this community? Who is allowed in, allowed membership status, and thus moral standing, and who is excluded? Is the Other necessarily human?
2. INITIAL HUMAN PAIRING WITH ANIMALS
Can we go through the argument of the previous chapters simply substituting for "the Other" a "non-human Other"? At first this might not seem a problem, for if we are being true in our method we have bracketed the outside world. Thus we pay no attention to the species of the Other. We simply allow her to attempt pairing with us and vice versa. But here is the familiar problem: pairing does not always "stick." The infant attempting to pair only with a television set will never achieve subjectivity. Indeed, subjectivity is something of an achievement. Partially a
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gift, partially the result of prolonged "personal" effort, the pairing which founds subjectivity requires a sort of cooperation and a basic initial similarity be,ween the paired data in order to get off the ground. Not all genetic-humans achieve full subjectivity. A woman, born into a culture which sees men as the realization of full subjectivity-a culture in which men are empowered and thus capable of perpetuating this structure-might never feel "whole." The modem feminist's claim that women have been denied moral standing, even denied subjectivity, makes sense if we imagine that the "gracious act of attention" never fully occursthat she is never allowed to pair fully with men, with those who represent full subjectivity, thus she never achieves this full subjectivity within her community herselrJ Another, and more timely example for our present purposes is the infant raised in the wild by animals. Feral children, as we have seen, do not achieve full subjectivity. An infant having only wolves with which to pair will never achieve personhood. The psychic and physical data the wolf offers for pairing cannot sustain such a move to human subjectivity. Surely there will be some transfer of sense-the infant is touched, even cared for and caressed-but the basic dissimilarity is enough to halt the formation of human subjectivity.4 Here is an excellent example of the way in which pairing is a bilateral function. As Hart explains: "If the first Other is not a human person, the Other to the Other which I (i.e., the infant) can be is not a human person.,,5 Consequently, it is not the case that we can be said to be in community with animals if we are left to pair with them alone. But this is an extreme case. Perhaps the infant having a mixture of humans and nonhuman animals with which to pair discovers a community in which animals are members. After all, this seems more realistic, more fitting the way in which most infants are actually reared. Although this is an intriguing solution, I am inclined to reject it as problematic. Why, though, might such a proposal seem an appealing answer at first? The typical infant will encounter a variety of non-human life in his early development-both plant and animal. Whether such animal life takes the form of a family pet, birds at the window, farm animals, jungle animals, desert animals, etc., there will be instances of such life available for pairing. Now I have argued that the gracious act of attention is the foundation for the infant achieving a sense of Ego. thus the Significant Other(s), together with a group of humans who are not as significant yet playa role in the development of the Ego, must encounter the infant and treat him as if he possessed a fully developed sense of Self. The exact number of humans necessary for such an undertaking is not especially relevant at this point, but it would
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seem that the creation of a fully developed human Ego would require at least two-the Significant Other and someone who is separate from the Significant Other thus allowing the infant a sense of existing as separate from the Significant Other and as being involved in a network of Other-taking, etc. Along the way the infant inevitably attempts to pair with nonhuman animals he encounters as well as his Significant Other and the separate yet important Other (let us call her a secondary Other). What happens when this takes place? The encounters with the Significant and secondary Others we have already investigated. But when the infant attempts a pairing with the non-human animal he encounters what mutual transfer of sense occurs? We might want to say that the infant comes to discover what he is not-that the failed pairing teaches him as much as the successful pairing. Thus the infant comes to realize his human Ego-he is not a dog, he is not a bird, etc. Such is the lesson of failing to pair with the collie, the parakeet, and so on. A negative understanding of identity is thus as necessary as the positive descriptions of what the infant in fact is. Consequently, animals are members of the community by means of the important role they play in early pairing experiences for humans. But there are many problems with this appealing argument. First, there is the assumption that a pairing between an animal and an infant necessarily fails. We have already seen that left with animals alone, the infant will never develop a human Ego, yet there is a certain level of pairing which may successfully take place. The infant and the dog cannot pair qua humans, but perhaps there can be a pairing qua mammal, qua creature, qua animal-with-a-face, etc. 6 Such encounters with animals thus result in some "lower level" pairing. The infant does not get a sense of a failed pairing here; there is just a pairing which does not lend itself to the development of the infant's full potential. At what point, though, does the infant realize he is not a dog? It would seem impossible for him to reach such a strong conclusion based on his pairings with the dog, for it is not the case that a dog-dog pairing fails but rather that such a pairing never occurs. The Ego and the Other arise together in sense, but it would not seem that the Dog and the Human do as well. It is more likely that the infant develops his sense of Ego and along the way learns that his Significant and secondary Others take some objects of experience to be dogs, some tables, some flowers, etc. Thus the infant begins to do the same. Of course this might seem to beg the question of how the sense of Animal or Human ever arose in the first place, but I will address this question below. For now I want to conclude that the idea of negative pairing is unacceptable. And there are further problems. If the infant needs to pair with the
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dog in order to achieve the full sense of his humanity as "not dog," then it could be argued that he would need to pair with every object which he is not-birds, trees, pencils, microwaves, etc.-in order to achieve his full humanity. But this would be an endless task, and clearly it is not necessary as is evidenced by the instances of Egos existing today that never needed to embark on such a project.? The infant, we are forced to conclude, does not constitute a community replete with animals through any sort of pairing which parallels the pairing through which he comes to achieve a sense of Self, Other, and the human community. Pairing with animals alone or a mixture of animals and humans is not enough to generate communal membership for non-human life. Still, there is another way one might interpret the question with which I began this section; namely, can we construct an argument which generates animal members of community and which parallels our argument for humans? It is to that second interpretation that we now tum our attention.
3. "ANIMAL PHENOMENOLOGY" AND THE POSSIBILITY OF COMMUNITY GENERATED WITHOUT HUMANS
Perhaps it is the case that animals are in community (in the technical sense), but it is a community which they generate completely by themselves, not one which occurs as a product or by-product of humans interacting with them. That is to say that animals develop a sense of Self through a process not unlike that of their human counterparts-pairing with Significant and secondary Others of their kind and thus establishing an animal-Self, an animal-Other, and an animal community. Intuitively, this seems a bit far-fetched, but we must be cautious following our intuitions when it comes to animals-they are often unfounded and quite contradictory. We commonly anthropomorphize animals yet think of most of them as wild and uncivilized. Our opinions of animals are conflicting, our standards of judging them fickle. Consider a recent television ad for protecting endangered species which described baby seals as helpless, cute, and innocent-drawing a direct parallel with human babies-while another ad for a nature video showed scenes of hunting, fighting, and mating and invited the viewer to "see why it is that we call them animals!" When the family cat comes to sleep on the bed with me when I am sick, I think "she knows I am not feeling well and is reaching out to me as best she can." But when the same cat catches a mouse and tortures it to death on the front porch, I think "she is a slave to instinct-I cannot blame her or even call her cruel."
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If our intuitions tell us that animals do not engage in pairing relationships with each other, in fact it is doubtful they even really have much of a sense of Self, then we must ask why it is that we feel this way. An initial answer might be that we have never paid much attention to the phenomenological life of animals. Volumes have been written on speculative animal psychology, animal sociology, and animal biology, but the phenomenology of non-human life is a virtually ignored field. What little has been written in this area often begins with the admission that we do not have access to animal intentionality and thus what follows is a speculation which can never really be proven. Thomas Nagel's claim about the experience of an alien creature remaining alien even when the "scientific project" is complete is a point well taken, but it need not lead us to pessimistically abandon the idea of investigating animal phenomenology.8 Some have attacked Nagel's claim, arguing that science can provide a foundation for understanding the totality of alien experience. Kathleen Akins, in her "Science and Our Inner Lives: Birds of Prey, Bats, and the Common (Featherless) Biped," suggests that the difference in an eagle's eye-two foveae in each eye which are connected by a band of densely situated receptor cells-as compared to the human eye-only one fovea per eye and no horizontal band-can tell us a lot about what it is like to be an eagle. 9 Whereas the human directs the one foveal area in order to visually attend to something, the eagle can simultaneously attend to the horizon through the horizontal band, the left and the right sides through the two central foveae, and a stereo picture of the foreground through focused temporal foveae. Akins maintains that the eagle is attending to all views at once-not switching from one to the other-and thus we must change our notion of visual attention without the human prejudice of looking at one thing and then focusing on another: anatomy has informed phenomenology.1O I do not have the space to defend Akins on this highly controversial point-indeed, I would not want to push this defense too far even given such space, for her faith in modem science is, most likely, ultimately misplaced. I merely want to suggest that animal phenomenology is not a hopeless task. But there are some who might question by what right we attribute such human phenomenological terms as "attend" to animals in the first place? In fact, is phenomenology itself not something completely human? The only answer at this point can be that we have no reason to believe that such assumptions are unwarranted. It seems a question of "erring on the side of plenty." Why would Husserl, for instance, attribute a phenomenological make-up to a child, a Frenchman, a woman, or a person of color? Clearly because there is no reason for him to think otherwise. Indeed, it would seem that our willingness to attribute a phenomenological
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life similar to our own is based on a fundamental circularity. Those whom we treat as intentional beings from the very beginning-those to whom our gracious act of attention bestows, as it were, a communally accepted notion of personhood from birth (and perhaps before it)ll-are such beings as we naturally assume to be in possession of a phenomenological life. What would happen, then, should we assume animal personhood? Should we glance at animals with that gracious act of attention? These are questions with which we will deal presently, but for now let us consider the possibility of an animal phenomenology not so alien from our own that it remains forever vague. Rather, we admit our situatedness, our inescapable human viewpoint, and then move to understand how the animal-Other might achieve community as we do. 12 The argument is clear. Though the animal will probably never achieve anything exactly like a human Ego, it does achieve some level of Self as independent entity through a pairing relationship with Significantanimal-Others. While some in the tradition might disagree--e.g., Hegel argues that the fundamental characteristic of Man apart from animal is his ability to think of himself as an Ego 13-it does not seem unreasonable to think that a lion cub, for instance, has a sense of himself as an individual in a community with other lions, even as in a community with Others in his ecosystem such as antelope and zebra. Such an argument would parallel the description of humans coming to realize selfhood, and an animal community is born. Behaviorists, for example, often speak of imprinting, which might be a form of pairing (put into psychological terms). The most famous example is the newly hatched duckling following the human researcher around, mistaking him, we assume, for his mother. But there are processes that develop over longer periods of time as well. Consider George Archibald, the International Crane Foundation director, who found himself caught up in the phenomenological life of Tex, a female whooping crane who refused to mate with another crane. As Tex had been reared in captivity, she found herself comfortable only in the company of humans, and when it came time to mate she was only attracted to humans. In fact, she was only attracted to "Caucasian men of average height with dark hair.,,14 Archibald fit the bill, and as cranes are perilously close to extinction, he agreed to court Tex until she was in a breeding state such that she could be artificially inseminated. "My duties," explains Archibald, "involved endless hours of 'just being there: several minutes of dancing early in the morning and again in the evening, long walks in quest of earthworms, nest building, and defending our territory against humans.... "ls George and Tex ended up proud parents. Animals of all kinds might very well engage in pairing-typically, though, with their own kind-as they develop a sense of Self and commu-
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nity. The problem is that this community is in no way human. Indeed, such a situation could and most typically does occur entirely in the absence of humans. How, then, could we make the ethical step to include animals in our morality, to take up their good as our own, if such an animal community is in no way dependent-in any phenomenologically founded way-on humanity? Perhaps we have achieved animal community (granted, with a bit of arm-waving), but this resulting community is so alien and unrelated to our own and its inherent ethical commitment that we have gained no ground. What is needed is a way to include animals and humans in the same community.
4. THE GRACIOUS ACT OF ATTENTION LATE-IN-COMING
I have already suggested that the foundation of the Other's status in our community is decided by how the existing members of the community attend to her from the very beginning, and that perhaps attending to animals with that gracious act-i.e., treating them as members of our community-is the first step toward their claiming membership. The type of pairing we are discussing now is not an initial pairing with an infant, but a pairing of already-achieved-human-Egos with animals. This is to say that after we have realized our Ego as communally situated, we attend to animals as if they, too, were members of our community. But is such an initiation of a pairing enough for animals actually to become persons, i.e., members of our community with moral standing? Such gracious acts are not magical. Many would argue that the only reason the process works with human infants is the inherent potential for Egohood that already exists within them. Such an argument rests on three assumptions. First, there is the belief that animals do not possess the "innate" structures of intentionality necessary for participating in the pairing process in any meaningful way; second, that animals have no potential for Egohood of any kind; and third, that our process of bestowing the gracious attention simply has not worked for animals. As we saw in chapter 3, there is little need to posit innate structures of consciousness and instinctual forms of intentionality. This being the case, we cannot maintain that animals lack the proper instincts for pairing, etc. since such instincts do not, in fact, exist for humans. Furthermore, although the second assumption has a long history of proponents-Aristotle saw no rationality in animals, Rousseau saw only ingenious machines-again there
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seems no reason not to offer animals the benefit of the doubt, for we see them acting as if they have a sense of Self (and we have even considered the possibility of a social-Self for animals). It would seem that the question could not be answered one way or the other until we try to uncover this animal-Ego in a way that we can understand it, thus either failing or succeeding. And this brings us to the problem with the third assumption-that such attempts have failed. In fact, they have very seldom taken place, and when they do there is often a high rate of success. How might we begin to pair with an animal? When I encounter a tiger at the zoo, there clearly seems to be a mutual transfer of sense occurring. 16 From me, I can imagine that the tiger gets the sense of trapped as opposed to free, dependent as oppose to independent, etc. While from the tiger, I get the sense of the possibility of my being a raw meat meal rather than a philosopher, a jailer rather than a sightseer, etc. Vicki Hearne-in her entertaining and philosophical collection of animal stories, Animal Happiness--does not deal directly with this notion, but she does offer intriguing evidence of what such pairing might look like. At the conclusion of a story involving her husband Robert (also a philosopher) and a six month old black leopard named Cinder, Hearne discusses the lesson learned in the presence of the cat. She describes his body and his behavior, and the realizations she has about leopards and humans. "[L]ook at the extraordinary intelligence in Cinder's eyes," she commands, "at how dangerously that intelligence flames there. Think of the thinness of your own skin, the thinness of your own mind. Think of the vanity involved in presuming that you could ever own or control what goes on in those eyes.',)? We could be more technical if necessary. F. J. J. Buytendijk, one of the few to offer any worthwhile study of animal phenomenology, has argued convincingly for a similarity between human and canine pain, as well as the 'octopus' ability to distinguish touching from being touched. IS Clear bridges would seem to exist for founding a pairing relationship as a result of Buytendijk's work. The possibilities need not seem fictional nor beyond our reach. One could even argue that some people engage in such pairing with their family pet all of the time. The dog, they say, thinks he is a member of the family-he wants to eat when the family eats, go in the car when the family leaves, he even seems to display emotions paralleling those of family members. Perhaps animal behaviorists cannot fully understand such instances without considering the possibility that the dog has paired with the family (which treats him as a member), eventually coming to think and act as a member of the family himself. Inevitably this is all I mean when I suggest pairing with animalsattempting to treat them as if they were members of the community while at the same time being open to learning new things about ourselves through
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animals and the mutual transfer of sense which occurs. It is not the case that such attempts have failed and thus have been abandoned. Rather we have not really tried to live this way, and the few instances to which we might point are rather promising. 19 Still, there would seem a small problem. Such pairing apparently results in a somewhat ad-hoc citizenship for animals. First, we discover our human Ego and the community in which it is foundationally situated, and then we go around adding animals to this community as an "afterthought." The problem arises, once again, when we attempt to make the ethical move. The reason that the ethical move works with other humans-i.e., taking up thcir good as our own as moral categoriality-was our phenomenologicallyfounded initial sense of interdependence. As the sense of my good arises I realize that it is enmeshed with the Other's good and the good of the community of Others which have simultaneously arisen in sense. All goods are thus entwined. But animals are not included in this initial move if they are added to the community at some later point. Under this proposal, many senses of good exist independently of animal goods, and thus although we have included animals in our community it is "too late"-the phenomenologically generated moral commitment seems not to extend to them.
5.
COMMUNITY THROUGH NARRATIVE
At this point we might shift gears and investigate other approaches to community that do not ultimately result in a collection of isolated monadic individuals but rather a union of interrelated group-members bound together by commonalties. If we work with this notion of community, is it possible to argue that non-human animal life can still claim membership? What, in fact, do we have in common with animals that might lead to the establishment of a community? The first and most obvious answer to this question is that we share a common world and thus a common future with animals. This is no startling claim. Our interconnection with animals and the living world is, in some sense, commonsensical, though it tends to be obscured by our contemporary lifestyle-a way of being-in-the-world such that our relatedness is "suppressed.,,20 Hamburger does not come from a grocery and spotted owls do not exist to play the role of political pawns, no matter the degree to which the world might appear so. A common critique of such communitarian foundations, though, is that we tend to include animals in the community only to the degree to which they are important to and otherwise affect us. That is, animals are still
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being added to our community as we realize their importance to human existence. Such an anthropocentric ethic does not sit well with deep ecologists such as Dave Foreman, co-founder of Earth First!. Foreman rejects such notions as "a huge failure of moral imagination," and argues that "[a]1I living things have intrinsic value, inherent worth ... .They live for themselves, for their own sakes, regardless of any real or imagined value to human civilization.,,21 But there are many examples of non anthropocentric theories based on human and animal interconnections. Some Native American world-views are excellent examples of such theory and practice. John Mohawk's important work in providing a communitarian reading of the Iroquois Confederacy's oral tradition suggests that the Six Iroquois Nations lived by a "deep ecological" or "deep communal" rule where humans are said to be in community with animals, plants, rivers, air, etc. The laws of justice established by the Six Nations covered not only the human citizens, but the other members of the community as well. Such a form of communitarianism-a lived theory with a long history before it was forcibly eradicated by physically destroying its practitioners-is well worth greater study.22 And there are other approaches to community through commonality. Alphonso Lingis' recent work suggests that there is a "Community in Death" of which humans and animals are members in virtue of the fact that we are all mortal. 23 This is intriguing because species kinship plays no role in Lingis' view of community-the Other, human or animal, shares a connection to me when I put myself "wholly in the place of the death that gapes open" for her. 24 Death, though, is only part of the story of our lives, and perhaps it is the case that we share more of this story-more than the final death scenewith animals. Building a community on the foundation of a shared story or the on-going process of narrative creation is another communitarian tradition with a rich history. Stanley Hauerwas, Alasdair MacIntyre, and David Carr have, as we have seen, written in this area, though none have dealt extensively with the specific topic at hand-that of determining the role of non-human animal life in the creation of the stories which "inflate us to life" and provide us with meaning. Carr, for instance, has some insight into the role of narrative in human communities. He suggests that [a]t whatever level or size or degree of complexity, a community exists wherever a narrative account exists of a we which has continuous existence through its experiences and activities. When we say that such an account "exists," we mean to say that it gets articulated or formulated, perhaps
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by only one or a few of the group's members, in terms of the we and is accepted or subscribed to by the other members. It is their acceptance that makes them members, [and] constitutes their recognition of the others as fellow members... .To be a participant or member in this sense, and to posit a we as group-subject of such a communal story, are 25 really the same thing. One of the problems with such an account is that it fails to recognize the power of the story-teller and thus the possibility that certain characters in the communal story are marginalized--even written-out. Carr suggests that one's acceptance of the narrative makes one a member of the "we." The point, at first, seems to be well taken. I am quite sure that when the Ku Klux Klan rallies under slogans such as "We believe in a white America," the we fails to refer to me because I do not accept a role in that narrative-the Ku Klux Klan story is not my story?6 And the point can be made in less extreme situations as well. When Native Americans or Scandinavians or Buddhists speak of a "we" and tell a story which is "ours," I know that the "we" does not include me-these stories and thus these communities are not mine. But this is too simplistic. It is an inaccurate view of the way narrative operates, because it takes for granted the fact that I am free to choose the story in which I am enmeshed. But is this so? If I hear someone say "We have become obsessed with O. J. Simpson," or if the President goes on television and declares "We will not lift the Cuban embargo," in what sense am I free to say that these "we'''s do not include me? Whether or not I agree with the Cuban embargo, am I not a part of the story through my action and even inaction-does this narrative not encompass me, with or without my consent? Indeed, if Carr is correct, such stories not only include me, they constitute me. I am what I am in virtue of the "we" of the narratives in which I find myself enmeshed. To assume otherwise is to posit an initial state where humans are isolated individuals, picking and choosing the narratives and thus communities in which they wish to participate-a fundamentally non-communitarian assumption of what it is to be human. Consequently, communities, we must conclude, are not always constituted through consent. This point becomes especially clear when we consider the role of animals in narrative. Clearly, animals are part of "our" story. What we do affects them; what they do affects us. In fact, this us/them distinction is fundamentally misdirected, since the narrative is common: human and animal strut and fret, acting out their parts in a common space, within a common story. The difference is that animals do not seem capable of vali-
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dating the narrative which humans construct for them. Recounting our history and preparing for our future, we tell the stories of where we have been and where we are going. We have spread across the earth and cut trails through the land. We have thinned the forests, and lawn-and-gardened the soil, blackened the skies and spiked the water. We have domesticated the tasty animals and attempted to eradicate the pests. We have fought one another and loved one another, and we hope to go on telling our story for many more years. But do we have this right? When we say "Our Hoover dam is a great dam-it would be best for us to build some more" who are "we"? "We" certainly must include the varieties of non-human animal life caught up in the story. "We," in some sense, refers to this life, but there is something improper about this reference because it is always and only uttered by the human. The "we" of such statements picks out human and animal alike, but there is something inauthentic about the way it does so to animals. Inevitably, we humans represent animals in the common tale we construct, but we do it willy-nilly.27 Is there any way around this, though? How can we consider and represent animal perspectives when we cannot hear animal voices? Some Deep Ecologists would claim that this approach is misdirected from the start because we have favored human stories and overlooked the fact that the story we tell is one of many concurrent tales, none more important than the rest in the non-hierarchical structure of nature. Perhaps it all comes down to power-which the narrator has absolutely. The story-teller casts the parts, sets the scenes, and interprets the plotlines, and those unnamed characters to which the "we" emptily refers have no say in the matter-unless they rip the pen from the story-teller's hand and write their own account. If we are to say, though, that there is a right to revolution in narrative, and if we are to maintain that "we" can be used improperly-that it has been used improperly when we speak for the human and animal community without allowing the voices of animals to be heard and the goods of animals to be voiced-we are left with a difficult situation. If the "we" refers emptily, then we must assume that there is some more appropriate "we"-some more proper community-than the one which the narrative "we" picks out and, supposedly, creates. In other words, if the narrative "we" constitutes the community, how can it ever be wrong? To what standard could we appeal when we offer our critique?
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6. HUMANS AND ANIMALS IN A SECOND-ORDER COMMUNITY
I want to suggest that the answer might lie in discovering a newcommunity-neither human nor animal-in which both are included. The answer involves moving up a type-level and considering a second-order community of communities. What I want to show now is that the human community and the animal community are necessarily members of a larger community (hereafter "Community"). We begin with a familiar thought-experiment and reductio argument. Let us assume that it is possible to reduce all of experience to a "sphere of human-ownness." To accomplish this we screen off everything that is not basic to our experience of the human community. The world with which we hope we are left is thus in no way dependent on non-human life or experience: there is but the Ego, the Others, and the human community. But it is here that we are once again startled, for we discover that there is no experience independent of life beyond the human community. In fact, our sense of the human community is foundationally dependent on the Community beyond. Being Human does not even make sense without the Animal, just as being an Ego did not make sense without the Other. The result is that we establish-or rather discover-a phenomenological commitment to the animal community and thus the Community to which both animals and humans belong. There are many questions at this point. Someone might ask why we have established a commitment to an animal community and not some other non-human community such as a community of air molecules or a community of pianos; and furthermore, what keeps this from becoming an infinite regress, from establishing an infinite number of communities each a member of the Community? Surely an infinite regress is not necessary. Actually, we need only one non-human community to make the point about the dependency of the human community?8 Perhaps there are several communities beyond the human and the animal-their existence neither endangers our current argument nor can interest us here. But why is it that we believe the thoughtexperiment to have shown our dependence on the community of animals rather than one of these other possible communities? Perhaps because animals seem to be closest to being human without being human, just as the Other was closest to being the Ego without being the Ego. But more than this, it seems a fact that animals do play the role of allowing the establishment of the human community. In rejecting this, one might as well question why the human Other is the kind of "object" which allows the establishment of the Ego, rather than an air molecule or a piano arising in sense with the human Self. Indeed, this is not a valid question on many different levels.
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When we performed the reduction to a sphere of ownness we discovered that the human Other was still there-it was, to be sure, a phenomenological fact. Similarly, if we perform the reduction to a sphere of human-ownness, we discover the other-animal-community is still there-this, too, is an inescapable phenomenological fact. Albert Schweitzer argues along these lines when he maintains that our dependence on animals is obvious. He suggests that all true philosophies must begin with a recognition that "I am life in the midst of life."z9 Schweitzer's point (and mine) might be made in a more straightforward way if we try to imagine a human culture without animals in its midst. Can such a community be found in our world today, in our history, or even in our speculative future? It would seem not. All human cultures and communities are in contact in some way with non-human, animal life. We might even go so far as to suggest that an individual human, or more to our current point an individual human community, that has never encountered non-human animal life is somehow less than fully human by our common standards-just as feral children have not achieved full personhood in the absence of humanOthers. Perhaps it is possible to imagine a "feral" human community,30 though this is a particularly bad term for our purposes since "feral" often means "raised by animals" (not just "raised outside the context of the human community"). For us, the "feral" community would be a human community that has developed outside the context of the Community, i.e., apart from animal life. As in the case of the feral child, we can imagine that the "feral" community's development would be "abnormal." At least we would admit that there would be good reason to refrain from calling such a community a true, human community, just as the feral child was never taken to be a fullfledged human person. In both instances, the rich sense of "human" did not and could not develop. To be a human community is to be in Community with the animal community. Is there a kind of pairing which takes place between the human and the animal communities thus establishing the common Community? Clearly, there is at least the possibility? We might imagine that an awareness of being a group, being a separate group, being another form of life, etc. might be a sense which arises for the human community engaged in such a pairing. An important point, though, is the positive nature of such pairing. Unlike our earlier misdirected attempt to establish animals within our community through failed pairings with them (i.e., animals teaching us what we are not), the kind of pairing which takes place on this level is a positive one-the animal community giving rise to a sense of what we are. What the animal community might gain in sense as a result of such pairing is a question on which we can only speculate and perhaps come closer to answering through
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further study of animal phenomenology. The point is this: we are committed to a concept of a Community in which the human and animal communities claim membership and thus their individual members can as well. The final step now is to show how the members of the Community are similarly committed to a certain ethical stance-a move which will end our investigation and secure the boundaries of morality firmly around human and animal alike.
7. CONCLUSION: THE COMMON GOOD AS MORAL FOUNDATION The image of gathering humans and animals within the boundaries of morality brings to mind a later Heideggerian metaphor of the agent as the shepherd of Being. In fact, Charles Taylor has suggested that with this notion, Heidegger is proposing an ecological ethic somewhere between a shallow and a deep ecology.32 Indeed, the Heideggerian move from "dwelling" with things to "taking care" of them is interesting for a communitarian theory, however our specific project must inevitably take us in another direction. 33 We have achieved the "dwelling" with animals, but the move to "taking care" of them is difficult within the theory I have been proposing. The problem is that animals seem incapable of taking up our good as their own or of understanding that we are taking up their good in return. As Robert Sokolowski puts it: 34 A material performance is made to be a moral transaction by the form of identification in which I take your good or bad as such as my good or bad. Only in a performance between persons can this identification occur. Not only the agent but also the patient must be the kind of being that can recognize the good as good, the bad as bad. The snails in my backyard do not seem capable of taking up my good as their own. They do not, in fact, even seem to acknowledge my existence beyond crawling around my tomato plants and scrunching up when I try to touch them. If one could legitimately imagine any feeling of relatedness they might possess in regard to me, "annoyance" would seem more reasonable than "attempting to care." The family dog is another case altogether. Often he seems to care for us, attend to us, try his best to take up our good as his own. De Montaigne tells of King Lysimachus' dog, Hyrcanus, refusing nourishment by
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his master's sickbed and then leaping into the flame when his master was 35 dead and set on his funeral pyre. But surely the dog is at best the exception to the rule. The problem is that we are incapable of communicating our good to animals so that they might take it up, and vice versa. Furthermore, it is doubtful that most animals, even if they were aware of what we consider to be our good, would have much of a desire to act in our interest given their seemingly narrow horizons and limited resources. 36 Such pragmatic, empirical concerns coupled with the phenomenological question of an animal's incapability of recognizing and taking up human good as its own seems to doom the project to failure. Of course, though, this all might be a human prejudice. Perhaps some animals are capable of taking up and understanding goods. Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson's work on the emotional lives of animals provides a detailed analysis of how such prejudices affect our treatment and study of animals as well. Scientists are seldom willing to admit that animals can have a notion of the Good. Often, this is used to justify torturous treatment. In an interesting critique of Harry Harlow's experiments on rhesus monkeys (in which the monkeys were separated from their mothers at birth in order to test how a lack of motherly love would affect their development), biologist Catherine Roberts claimed that Harlow's work was not immoral, but rather a waste of time. "Does he not know," writes Roberts, "that a human mother is unique because she has an abstract idea of the Good and that therefore human love, unlike animal love, has its ontogenetic beginnings in a spiritual bond between mother and child?,,37 Of course, there is no evidencescientific or otherwise-that awareness of Goods stems from a spiritual bond, nor even if this were the case that animals do not have such bonds as well. Masson, in fact, provides mountainous anecdotal evidence that some animals act with a thoughtful awareness of intersubjective Common Goods. Perhaps unselfish behavior in animals indicates such awareness. Hyrcanus' selfless act seems extreme and born of despair, but there are other documented cases of animal behavior which also would seem to go against common sense understandings of evolutionary selection and survival of the fittest (when "fittest" is understood to be "the most successfully selfish"). Washoe, the first chimpanzee to be taught sign language, once put his life in danger in order to save a stranger. Masson explains: When she was seven or eight years old, a chimpanzee who had just arrived at the institute was placed on the island [i.e., a "chimp island" where the animals were kept], but became panicky, jumped over an electric fence, and fell into the moat with a tremendous splash. As researcher
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Roger Fouts ran to the scene, intending to dive in and rescue her (a risky endeavor, considering how much stronger chimps are than humans), he saw Washoe run to the fence, leap over, land on a narrow strip of bank at its base, edge out into the mud, and clinging to the grass with one hand, pull the chimpanzee to safety....Fouts notes that the two chimpanzees were not acquainted. Asked whether he was surprised at Washoe's actions, Fouts paused, bemused... "You know, I was about to do the same thing.,,38 One might counter that lions seldom acknowledge the antelope's perspective on the Good, that a housecat has never been seen to save the life of a mouse, and, more to the point at hand, sharks do not come to the aid of drowning humans. But do such observations prove that animals have no awareness of the Good? First, this only speaks to some animals' awareness, not all animals' . Second, there is no indication that particular animals do not share common Goods, only that they typically do not take up other individuals' Goods as such as their own. Finally, though, like the snails who continue to feast on the product of my meager gardening labors, such examples only speak to the difficulties of communication when it comes to sharing our perspectives on the Good. Even with species which seem to desire communication with us, this is a perennial roadblock. Masson's story of wild dolphins at Australia's Mia Beach reminds us how far we have to go: Despite our differences, dolphins often treat humans as peers on some level....While it is traditional to offer them fish, the dolphins [of Monkey Mia] often do not accept the fish, or accept but do not eat them....What goes through the mind of a dolphin when it accepts dead fish and then lets it drift away? Two reporters who visited Monkey Mia saw a dolphin receive a fish from a tourist, then push it toward them. Confused, they accepted it. As the dolphin watched them, they felt socially awkward and wondered whether they were supposed to eat the thing, give it back, or do something else. As they dithered, the dolphin swam close, grabbed the fish back, and dived away, leaving them feeling 39 they had committed an unknown faux pas. Not knowing what the Other wants or needs or intends does not mean that we are not fundamentally connected. It does not mean that we both will not eventually figure out what the Good looks like from the
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Other's perspective. Furthermore, we must remember that we are discussing the goods of the human and animal communities and not necessarily each individual good of their members. And if our phenomenological arguments have been accurate, the goods of these communities are necessarily interdefined and dependent. Consequently, when any good is pursued, all are affected. Are animals aware of this? Perhaps. Perhaps not. But the Community as a whole seems to respond with an awareness of internal interdependence. Could it be the case that "living in harmony" with humans is, in effect, a way of the animal community taking up the good of the human community? Clearly there is some question begging here, or at least a need for further explication of such terms as "harmony" and "being aware" of a good, but the notion is intriguing. As we discovered at the conclusion of chapter 5, the fact that we share a place and have a specific piece of land in common is a strong indication of a concrete common Good. These realizations, which have been surfacing throughout this project in intertwining themes, are disregarded at our own peril. The common human Good on which each individual has a perspective, is itself but a perspective on a larger Good for the human and animal communities. These Goods are public items like any other. Indeed, the fact that individual goods are but perspectives on a common Good and that the human Good is but a perspective on a larger common human and animal Good is yet another reason to question the forces which would pull us apart, even the distinction between human and animal. Yet even as we are drawn together, we are made aware of the need for the small communities which inflate us to life. Such "connectedness"-such phenomenological truths--cannot be suppressed. We may speak of "disregarding facts at our peril" or of an egoistic "ignorance" of our communal nature, but inevitably the task of suppression proves impossible. The publicity of the world (which includes the publicity of Goods in the world) is a necessary publicity: we simply experience the world as communal. The conclusion at which we have arrived, then, is based on the reality of the common world, the Community, and a shared Good being made possible both through phenomenological reflection and the Natural Attitude. Hopefully, our investigations here have provided some theoretical foundation for such beliefs, but inevitably and practically we have learned nothing that our common sense, a walk outdoors, or even the daily newspaper might not have told us. We are in community with the living world-and perhaps even beyond it. We share a common future and we share a common Good. Though we submerge ourselves in Libertarian politics, mindlessly follow exterminist macho traditions, foolishly place our trust in a technological panacea, hope in vain for exclusionary "communities" to end our
Non-Human Life and the Boundaries of Community
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longing, and continuously strive to lose ourselves in the overpowering mega-machine, the future will bear witness to the reality of our common Community, Good, and destiny. To think otherwise is not only to uphold false philosophy-to maintain a contradiction by thinking of ourselves and our good as isolated when there would not even be an ourselves or a good which is ours without the common Community-rather, it is to act falsely as well. When we make choices leading to a "numb" character and think of ourselves and our goods in isolation, we are engaging in a phenomenological contradiction. Yet more than risking a label of inconsistency, we risk creating a world in which life and the possibility of life-both human and non-human alike-suffers. Such are the real consequences of our actions. Inevitably, stomping our adders is another way in which we misdescribe our world, we make an ethical statement, we take up another's bad as our good, and we find ourselves that much further from our eutopian potential.
NOTES ITaken from a Persian fable as recounted by Alexander Pope, "Of Cruelty to Animals" (1713) in Clarke (1990), 75-76. 21 would like to narrow the focus of the investigation to non-human animal life, though implications for plant life, ecosystems, etc. exist and will be acknowledged throughout. 3Cf. my The Possibility of a Feminist Phenomenology (1993). 4A wolf-Other, though, probably would be able to allow such things as identity synthesis (unity formation and the workings of presence and absence) to arise in the infant. (See Chapter 3 for all of this.) 5Hart (1992), 196. ~What such a moment might look like phenomenologically we leave for further discussionnow we simply acknowledge the possibility. 7There is also the possibility of a deep ecological critique which would question whether it is appropriate to base an animal ethic on animals' usefulness to humans (i.e., on the fact that we need animals in order to pair with them and get a better sense of who we are). RNagel (1974),435-50. YBekoff and Jamieson (1990), 414. lliBekoff and Jamieson (1990), 424. llThis, of course, opens up a huge can of worms-one with which 1 will not deal here! 12Husserl's "sympathetic understanding" of men in alien cultures might be expanded here to include animals (Cf. Cartesian Meditations, 133). 13Clarke (1990), 41. 14Masson (1995), 89. 15Masson (1995), 89. Masson goes on to remark that if "Tex had been raised by cranes, she would have fallen in love with one, as most cranes do. If George Archibald had been raised by cranes, with whom would he have fallen in love?"
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16A zoo, though, will clearly be one of those institutions of human society to go should we suddenly start attending to animals as persons. 17Hearl'e (1994), 7-8. ISCf. Buytendijk (1943), 70, and "Toucher et etre touche" (as referenced by Rollin (1981), 225.) 190ne is also reminded of some Native American cultures living in community with animals-a community based on interdependence and respect. See, especially, John Mohawk's "Great Law of Peace" (in Daly (1994)) where a communitarian reading of the Iroquois Confederacy's oral tradition is presented. Here, Mohawk suggests that the Haudenosaunee (the Six Nations Iroquois Confederacy) lived by a "deep communal" rule: we are in community with animals, plants, rivers, air, and the earth itself. The laws of justice of the Haudenosaunee covered not only the individual nations and the citizens of those nations, but the other members of this "spiritual" community as well (p. 165). 2°The fact that relatedness cannot actually be suppressed will be a topic for us below. 21Chase (1991),115-16. 22Cf. John Mohawk's, "The Great Law of Peace," in Daly (1994). 23See Lingis (1994). Though I am not in agreement with most of Lingis' claims here, his work on community is important and speaks to the relevance and importance of continental thought on this topic. 24Lingis (1994), p. 157. 25Carr (1986), 163. 26Indeed, I refuse to validate the view of the world inherent in that narrative. 270ne might confer Hart (1992) for more on this notion of an inauthentic "we." See, especially, pp. 264-74, 414-16, 458-62. Hart has worked out this theme in great detail, and much of what he has accomplished can be applied to the task at hand. Though animal "we'" s are not an explicit theme in The Person and the Common Life. the subject is touched on: "If we adopt the view that animals are monads, and therefore inherently entitled to respect, we may not regard them as goods for humanity but as members of the monadic community, i.e., of the 'we' and 'us' to whom the world appears and for whom the goods are." (p. 458) 2SOne way of putting this-though it is not without some problems of its own-is that if everything in the world were the color red we would clearly not have the concept of red or even of color. We need at least one instance of difference--{)ne non-red thing, one nonhuman thing. Furthermore, I do not mean to limit membership in the Community to two. In fact, it is at this point that we might move to include plants as a third community thus establishing an ecological ethic, but our task is already daunting enough. 29Clarke (1990), 152. In other words, there is no sphere of human-ownness. 3lThis is a somewhat common science fiction theme. Usually, the story is that humans have either polluted the earth, fought a nuclear war, or unleashed some particularly nasty substance which causes us to be left with a dead planet. The surviving humans are, without exception, "different." ("Different," of course, ranges in science fiction from "now all the humans are blood-crazed cannibal psychics" to the more modest "human beings seem, in some deep sense, to have lost their humanity.") The movie "Soylent Green" comes to mind, though it is not a perfect example. Here, the abuse of the earth has caused something like the Greenhouse Effect to kill off most non-human life on the planet. Even the plants are nearly gone-apart from the sea-weed which is cultivated from the ocean, processed into dried cakes known as "soylent green" or "soylent red," etc., and then used to feed the massive human population. Chaos rules, and human relationships and attachments are almost non-existent. There is a suggestion in the movie that society has fallen apart not just because it has come upon hard times, but rather because it is "missing something" as well. Man is no longer "life in the midst of life," and the human community has suffered spiritually as well as physically. In the climax, Charleton Heston discovers that the large complexes the government has built in
Non-Human Life and the Boundaries of Community
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which people commit ritual suicide are actually food-processing plants. That is, when someone is enticed into committing suicide (part of the reward is that before you die you get to go into a room and watch a movie that looks like an extended "National Geographic" montagebeautiful and panoramic shots of forests and birds and farmlands and fish, etc.), the body of the person is immediately taken away and processed into soylent green. "Soylent green is people!" screams Heston at the conclusion of the movie, shocked and outraged but mostly frightened at the spiritual implications of what human society has become in the absence of the Community of life. J1Couid a non-living entity have a phenomenology? Probably not. The human community has no consciousness to speak of (unless we consider the possibility of a sociological consciousness or a "collective consciousness"), but please allow me the metaphorical image for the moment. J2Dreyfus (1992), 267. JJBut Heidegger is well worth further investigation on this point. Taylor's article is an interesting introduction to a theme which appears from time-to-time in the later-Heidegger (Cf., e.g., "Building, Dwelling, Thinking"). J4Sokolowski (1985), 218-19. J5Clarke (1990), 105. J6This might be but a human prejudice concerning horizons and resources. And it is also the case that since humans seem continually to disregard animal goods, we must wonder what stake an animal would have in promoting a human good. J7Masson (1995), 65. J8Masson (1995), 166. 39Masson (1995), 168.
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Index
agriculture (farming) 5-6, liS Akins, Kathleen 127 Altieri, Miguel 5-6 animal(s) 41, 112,121-141 passim; phenomenology 126-129 anxiety 103, 104, 105, 107-111 passim, 114 apperception (see also, pairing) 11-12, 22,39,40,65,66,74,90,98 Archibald, George 128-129, 141nl5 Aristotle 14-16, 19,64-65,69,72,84, 123, 129 attentive individualization (unity formation, identity synthesis) 33-51, 141n4 Ayer, A. J. 4 Bartky, Sandra Lee 52n24 baseball 107-110, 120n67 Berry, Wendell 112 body 19,31,36,92; paired bodies (Korper, Leiber) 22-28 Bolfvar, Simon 112 Buytendijk, F. J. 1. 130 capitalism 79,103,106-107, III, 114 Carnap, Rudolph 4 Carr, David 94, 132-133 categoriality 57-61, 70, 71, 75, 76, 78, 89, 131 character 68-69, 141 Christianity 94, 120n62 Churchland, Paul 4-5 cognitive science 47 communitarianism passim, 2, 76, 81-116 competition 109-110 Country Club Mentality 99-102, 104, 107,119n56 De Montaigne 137 deep community (Community) 132, 135, 142nl9
Denzin, Norman 37 Descartes, Rene 6 Egalitarianism I, 84-85 Ego (Self) passim, I, 2, 7, 8, 10-51, 70, 86,89,95,102,116,124-125, 128; communitarian Ego 81-88; disappearing Ego 83-88; transcendental Ego 9 Egoism 1,69-70,71,89, 138, 140; Group Egoism 101, 112 epoche (primordial reduction, phenomenological reduction) 7, 10, I I, 13, 14, 18, 19 essence (exact/ideal essence) 4-5, 7 European Community 99-101,113, 119n52 existentialism 95, III face 31, 34, 35, 49 feminism 52n24, 85, 92, 117n9, 124 feral children 41-43, 48, 124, 136; feral communities 136, 142n30 Foreman, Dave 132 Fouts, Roger 138-139 Frazer, Elizabeth 85, 88, 94 Freire, Paulo 118n26 Freud, Sigmund 87, III Galileo 3 genetic fallacy 87 God 8n13, 72 good(s) 2, 3, 7, 56, 59-76, 91, 95, 98, 102,103,107,109,110,112, 113, liS, 116, 122, 123, 135, 137-141; intersubjective Good problem 88-94 gracious act of attention 40-41, 43, 47, 48,116,124-125,128,129-130 Hardin, Garrett 103-104
Index Harlow. Harry 138 Hart. James G. 6-7. 10. 14.32.34.39-40. 43-44.61.64.65-66.74.90. 91.92.96. 119n45. 124. 142n27 Hauerwas. Stanley 94. 132 Hearne. Vicki 130 Heath. Shirley Brice 108-1 10 Hegel. G. W. F. 128 Heidegger. Martin 73. 95. 137 Hobbes. Thomas 83. 86. 87. 117nl2 Hospers. John 2. 83. 92 Husserl. Edmund passim; Cartesian Meditations 7. 9.10-28. 71.141nI2; Crisis of the European Sciences 3; Husserliana 9. 32. 40. 43; ldeas 24. 116n3; Logical Investigations 57 Hyrcanus 137. 138 identity 105. 106. 108. 110. 113 infant 89. 123-126; infantile consciousness 32-51 instinct 31-51. 129; transcendental instinct 32 intersubjectivity (social ontology) 2. 9-5l passim. 61. 86. 89. 115 Iroquois Confederacy 132. 142nl9 Itard. Jean-Marc-Gaspard 41-42 judgment 12.59.60; judgmental moral theory 55-57; non-judgmental actor 70-76 Kahler. Miles 119n49 Kant. Immanuel (Kantianism) I. 55. 58. 78. 80.93. 118n32. 123 Kemmis. Daniel 112 Kern. Iso 9 Kohn. Alfie 109-110 Lacey. Nicola 85.88.94 Levinas. Emmanuel 49 Libertarianism I. 103. 140 Lingis. Alphonso 132 Lipps. Theodor 31-32 logic 5 logical positivism 4 Macintyre. Alasdair 82.87.94. 109. 132 Masson. Jeffrey Moussaieff 138-139 Melkman. Rachel 37-38 Melting Pot 102. 103
153 Merleau-Ponty. Maurice 25-26 Mohawk. John 132. 141nl9 Mother (see also. Other) 33. 34. 36-41 Nagel. Thomas 127 narrative (story) 94. 109. 118n34. 131134 Nisbet. Robert 105-106. I II Oldenquist. Andrew 101 Other passim. 1.7.8. 10-51.70.86.87. 89.95.105.109.116.125. 129.132.135.139; non-human 123-141; objectification of 92-93; Significant Other (see also. Mother) 26.33.37-41.47.95. 119n39. 124.128 pairing (see also. apperception) 10. 12. 20-28 passim. 31. 35. 36. 43. 116. 123-126. 128. 129-131. 136 Piaget. Jean 37-38 place 112-113. 115 Pope. Alexander 141 n I pornography 92. 93 postmodernism 75. 83. 86 presence and absence 44. 98. 141 n4 psychology 32. 33. 35. 37-39.63. 128 Rachels. James 95. 99 Rand. Ayn 83 Rawls. John 1.84-85. 92. 102 relativism 80-81. 119n56 rights 91-92. 103. 106.117n24. 118n32. 122-123 Roberts. Catherine 138 Rorty. Richard 80 Rosenblith. Judy 37 Rousseau. Jean-Jacques 42. 92. 129 Sandel. Michael 2. 81-82, 84. 85. 102. 106 Sbragia. Alberta 100-101 Schweitzer, Albert 136 science 3-6. 127. 138 Shore. B. 107-108 Simon. Yves 113-115 Sims-Knight. Judith 37 size, of community 111-112, 114. 116, 140 Sokolowski. Robert 4, 44-47. 50. 54-76 passim. 89.137
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"Soylent Green" 142n30 sphere of ownness (primordial sphere) 7, 10, II, 13-20,86,88, 117n16; sphere of human-ownness 135-136, I42n29 Stahl, Donald 15-16 Taylor, Charles 137 teaching 16-17, 104 Theunissen, Michael 22-28, 36 time 40 touch(ing) 24-27, 36,124,130 Truth 79-81,85,86,88,89, 116nl, 140; truly good 74-75
Utilitarianism 56, 58, 78,122-123 Victor, Wild Boy of Aveyron 41-42, 48 Walzer, Michael 85, 90, 91, 94 Washoe 138-139 we65,66,91,96-99, 133-134, 142n27 Wild, John 49 Yamaguchi, Ichiro 34, 36, 38, 43 zoo 130, 141nl6
Phaenomenologica 1. E. Fink: Sein, Wahrheit, Welt. Vor-Fragen zum Problem des Phanomen-Begriffs. 1958 ISBN 90-247-0234-8 2. H.L. van Breda and J. Taminiaux (eds.): Husserl et la pensee moderne I Husserl und das Denken der Neuzeit. Actes du deuxieme Colloque International de Phenomenologie / Akten des zweiten Internationalen Phanomenologischen Kolloquiums (Krefeld, 1.-3. Nov. 1956). 1959 ISBN 90-247-0235-8 ISBN 90-247-0236-4 3. J.-c. Piguet: De l'esthetique Ii la metaphysique. 1959 4. E. Husserl: 1850-1959. Recueil commemoratif publie a l'occasion du centenaire de la naissance du philosophe. 1959 ISBN 90-247-0237-2 5/6. H. Spiegelberg: The Phenomenological Movement. A Historical Introduction. 3rd revised ed. with the collaboration of Karl Schumann. 1982 ISBN Hb: 90-247-2577-1; Pb: 90-247-2535-6 7. A. Roth: Edmund Husserls ethische Untersuchungen. Dargestellt anhand seiner Vorlesungsmanuskripte.1960 ISBN 90-247-0241-0 8. E. Levinas: Totalite et Infini. Essai sur l'exteriorite. 4th ed., 4th printing 1984 ISBN Hb: 90-247-5105-5; Pb: 90-247-2971-8 9. A. de Waelhens: La philosophie et les experiences naturelles. 1961 ISBN 90-247-0243-7 10. L. Eley: Die Krise des Apriori in der transzendentalen Phiinomenologie Edmund ISBN 90-247-0244-5 Husserls. 1962 II. A. Schutz: Collected Papers, I. The Problem of Social Reality. Edited and introduced by M. Natanson. 1962; 5th printing: 1982 ISBN Hb: 90-247-5089-X; Pb: 90-247-3046-5 Collected Papers, II see below under Volume 15 Collected Papers, III see below under Volume 22 12. J.M. Brookman: Phiinomenologie und Egologie. Faktisches und transzendentales Ego bei Edmund Husser!. 1963 ISBN 90-247-0245-3 13. W.J. Richardson: Heidegger. Through Phenomenology to Thought. Preface by Martin Heidegger. 1963; 3rd printing: 1974 ISBN 90-247-02461-1 14. J.N. Mohanty: Edmund Husserl's Theory ofMeaning. 1964; reprint: 1969 ISBN 90-247-0247-X 15. A. Schutz: Collected Papers, ll. Studies in Social Theory. Edited and introduced by A. Brodersen. 1964; reprint: 1977 ISBN 90-247-0248-8 16. I. Kern: Husserl und Kant. Eine Untersuchung tiber Husserls Verhiiltnis zu Kant und zum Neukantianismus. 1964; reprint: 1984 ISBN 90-247-0249-6 17. R.M. Zaner: The Problem of Embodiment. Some Contributions to a Phenomenology of the Body. 1964; reprint: 1971 ISBN 90-247-5093-8 18. R. Sokolowski: The Formation of Husserl's Concept of Constitution. 1964; reprint: 1970 ISBN 90-247-5086-5 19. U. Claesges: Edmund Husserls Theorie der Raumkonstition. 1964 ISBN 90-247-0251-8 ISBN 90-247-0252-6 20. M. Dufrenne: Jalons. 1966 21. E. Fink: Studien zur Phiinomenologie, 1930-1939. 1966 ISBN 90-247-0253-4 22. A. Schutz: Collected Papers, lll. Studies in Phenomenological Philosophy. Edited by I. Schutz. With an introduction by Aaron Gurwitsch. 1966; reprint: 1975 ISBN 90-247-5090-3
Phaenomenologica 23.
24. 25. 26.
27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38.
39.
40. 41. 42. 43.
K. Held: Lebendige Gegenwart. Die Frage nach der Seinsweise des transzendentalen Ich bei Edumund Husserl, entwickelt am Leitfaden der Zeitproblematik. 1966 ISBN 90-247-0254-2 O. Laffoucriere: Le destin de la pensie et 'La Mort de Dieu' selon Heidegger. 1968 ISBN 90-247-0255-0 E. Husserl: Briefe an Roman Ingarden. Mit Erliiuterungen und Erinnerungen an Husserl. Hrsg. von R. Ingarden. 1968 ISBN Hb: 90-247-0257-7; Pb: 90-247-0256-9 R. Boehm: Vom Gesichtspunkt der Phiinomenologie (I). Husserl-Studien. 1968 ISBN Hb: 90-247-0259-3; Pb: 90-247-0258-5 For Band II see below under Volume 83 T. Conrad: Zur Wesenslehre des psychischen Lebens und Erlebens. Mit einem Geleitwort von H.L. van Breda. 1968 ISBN 90-247-0260-7 W. Biemel: Philosophische Analysen zur Kunst der Gegenwart. 1969 ISBN Hb: 90-247-0263-1; Pb: 90-247-0262-3 G. Thines: La problimatique de la psychologie. 1968 ISBN Hb: 90-247-0265-8; Pb: 90-247-0264-X D. Sinha: Studies in Phenomenology. 1969 ISBN Hb: 90-247-0267-4; Pb: 90-247-0266-6 L. Eley: Metakritik der formalen Logik. Sinnliche Gewissheit als Horizont der Aussagenlogik und elementaren Priidikatenlogik. 1969 ISBN Hb: 90-247-0269-0; Pb: 90-247-0268-2 M.S. Frings: Person und Dasein. Zur Frage der Ontologie des Wertseins. 1969 ISBN Hb: 90-247-0271-2; Pb: 90-247-0270-4 A. Rosales: Transzendenz und Differenz. Ein Beitrag zum Problem der ontologischen Differenz beim fruhen Heidegger. 1970 ISBN 90-247-0272-0 M.M. Saraiva: L'imagination selon Husserl. 1970 ISBN 90-247-0273-9 P. Janssen: Geschichte und Lebenswelt. Ein Beitrag zur Diskussion von Husserls Spiitwerk.1970 ISBN 90-247-0274-7 W. Marx: Vernunft und Welt. Zwischen Tradition und anderem Anfang. 1970 ISBN 90-247-5042-3 J.N. Mohanty: Phenomenology and Ontology. 1970 ISBN 90-247-5053-9 A. Aguirre: Genetische Phiinomenologie und Reduktion. Zur Letztbegrundung der Wissenschaft aus der radikalen Skepsis im Denken E. Husserls. 1970 ISBN 90-247-5025-3 T.F. Geraets: Vers une nouvelle philosophie transcendentale. La genese de la philosophie de Maurice Merleau-Ponty jusqu'a la 'Phenomenologie de la perception.' ISBN 90-247-5024-5 Preface par E. Levinas. 1971 H. Decleve: Heidegger et Kant. 1970 ISBN 90-247-5016-4 B. Waldenfels: Das Zwischenreich des Dialogs. Sozialphilosophische UntersuchunISBN 90-247-5072-5 gen in Anschluss an Edmund Husserl. 1971 K. Schuhmann: Die Fundamentalbetrachtung der Phiinomenologie. Zum ISBN 90-247-5121-7 Weltproblem in der Philosophie Edmund Husserls. 1971 K. Goldstein: Selected Papers/Ausgewiihlte Schriften. Edited by A. Gurwitsch, E.M. Goldstein Haudek and W.E. Haudek. Introduction by A. Gurwitsch. 1971 ISBN 90-247-5047-4
Phaenomenologica 44. 45. 46. 47. 48. 49.
50. 51. 52. 53.
54. 55. 56. 57.
58. 59. 60. 61.
62. 63. 64. 65.
E. Holenstein: Phiinomenologie der Assoziation. Zu Struktur und Funktion eines ISBN 90-247-1175-4 Grundprinzips der passiven Genesis bei E. Husser!. 1972 F. Hammer: Theonome Anthropologie? Max Schelers Menschenbild und seine Grenzen.1972 ISBN 90-247-1186-X A. Paianin: Wissenschaft und Geschichte in der Phiinomenologie Edmund Husserls. 1972 ISBN 90-247-1194-0 G.A. de Almeida: Sinn und lnhalt in der genetischen Phanomenologie E. Husserls. 1972 ISBN 90-247-1318-8 J. Rolland de Reneville: Aventure de I'absolu. 1972 ISBN 90-247-1319-6 U. C1aesges und K. Held (eds.): Perspektiven transzendental-phanomenologischer Forschung. Fiir Ludwig Landgrebe zum 70. Geburtstag von seiner KaIner Schiilern. 1972 ISBN 90-247-1313-7 F. Kersten and R. Zaner (eds.): Phenomenology: Continuation and Criticism. Essays ISBN 90-247-1302-1 in Memory of Dorion Cairns. 1973 W. Biemel (ed.): Phiinomenologie Heute. Festschrift fiir Ludwig Landgrebe. 1972 ISBN 90-247-1336-6 D. Souche-Dagues: Le developpement de I'intentionnalite dans la phenomenologie husserlienne. 1972 ISBN 90-247-1354-4 B. Rang: Kausalitat und Motivation. Untersuchungen zum Verhiiltnis von Perspektivitat und Objektivitiit in der Phanomenologie Edmund Husserls. 1973 ISBN 90-247-1353-6 E. Levinas: Autrement qu' etre ou au-dela de I' essence. 2nd. ed.: 1978 ISBN 90-247-2030-3 D. Cairns: Guidefor Translating Husserl. 1973 ISBN (Pb) 90-247-1452-4 K. Schuhmann: Die Dialektik der Phiinomenologie, I. Husserl iiber Pfander. 1973 ISBN 90-247-1316-1 K. Schuhmann: Die Dialektik der Phiinomenologie, II. Reine Phanomenologie und phanomenologische Philosophie. Historisch-analytische Monographie iiber Husserls ISBN 90-247-1307-2 'Ideen 1'.1973 R. Williame: Les fondements phenomenologiques de la sociologie comprehensive: Alfred Schutz et Max Weber. 1973 ISBN 90-247-1531-8 E. Marbach: Das Problem des lch in der Phiinomenologie Husserls. 1974 ISBN 90-247-1587-3 R. Stevens: James and Husserl: The Foundations ofMeaning. 1974 ISBN 90-247-1631-4 H.L. van Breda (ed.): verite et Verification I Wahrheit und Verifikation. Actes du quatrieme Colloque International de Phenomenologie / Akten des vierten Internationalen Kolloquiums fUr Phanomenologie (Schwabisch Hall, Baden-Wiirttemberg, 8.-11. September 1969). 1974 ISBN 90-247-1702-7 Ph.J. Bossert (ed.): Phenomenological Perspectives. Historical and Systematic Essays ISBN 90-247-1701-9 in Honor of Herbert Spiegelberg. 1975. H. Spiegelberg: Doing Phenomenology. Essays on and in Phenomenology. 1975 ISBN 90-247-1725-6 R. Ingarden: On the Motives which Led Husserl to Transcendental Idealism. 1975 ISBN 90-247-1751-5 H. Kuhn, E. Ave-Lallemant and R. Gladiator (eds.): Die Munchener Phiinomenologie. Vortrage des Internationalen Kongresses in Miinchen (13.-18. April 1971). 1975 ISBN 90-247-1740-X
Phaenomenologica 66. 67. 68. 69. 70. 71. 72. 73. 74.
75. 76. 77. 78. 79. 80. 81. 82. 83. 84. 85. 86. 87.
D. Cairns: Conversations with Husserl and Fink. Edited by the Husserl-Archives in Louvain. With a foreword by RM. Zaner. 1975 ISBN 90-247-1793-0 G. Hoyos Vasquez: Intentionalitiit als Verantwortung. Geschichtste1eo1ogie und Teleologie der Intentionalitat bei Husser!. 1976 ISBN 90-247-1794-9 1. Patocka: Le monde nature! comme probleme philosophique. 1976 ISBN 90-247-1795-7 W.W. Fuchs: Phenomenology and the Metaphysics of Presence. An Essay in the ISBN 90-247-1822-8 Philosophy of Edmund Husser!. 1976 S. Cunningham: Language and the Phenomenological Reductions ofEdmund Husserl. 1976 ISBN 90-247-1823-6 G.C. Moneta: On Identity. A Study in Genetic Phenomenology. 1976 ISBN 90-247-1860-0 W. Biemel und das Husserl-Archiv zu Lowen (eds.): Die Welt des Menschen - Die ISBN 90-247-1899-6 Welt der Philosophie. Festschrift fiir lan Patocka. 1976 M. Richir: Au-delii du renversement copernicien. La question de la phenomenologie et son fondement. 1976 ISBN 90-247-1903-8 H. Mongis: Heidegger et la critique de la notion de valeur. La destruction de la fondation metaphysique. Lettre-preface de Martin Heidegger. 1976 ISBN 90-247-1904-6 1. Taminiaux: Le regard et I'excedent. 1977 ISBN 90-247-2028-1 Th. de Boer: The Development ofHusserI' s Thought. 1978 ISBN Hb: 90-247-2039-7; Pb: 90-247-2124-5 R.R Cox: Schutz's Theory ofRelevance. A Phenomenological Critique. 1978 ISBN 90-247-2041-9 S. Strasser: Jenseits von Sein und Zeit. Eine Einfiihrung in Emmanuel Levinas' Philosophie. 1978 ISBN 90-247-2068-0 RT. Murphy: Hume and Husser/. Towards Radical Subjectivism. 1980 ISBN 90-247-2172-5 H. Spiegelberg: The Context ofthe Phenomenological Movement. 1981 ISBN 90-247-2392-2 1.R. Mensch: The Question ofBeing in Husserl's Logical Investigations. 1981 ISBN 90-247-2413-9 1. Loscerbo: Being and Technology. A Study in the Philosophy of Martin Heidegger. 1981 ISBN 90-247-2411-2 R. Boehm: Yom Gesichtspunkt der Phiinomenologie II. Studien zur Phiinomenologie ISBN 90-247-2415-5 der Epoch<:. 1981 H. Spiegelberg and E. Ave-Lallemant (eds.): Pfiinder-Studien. 1982 ISBN 90-247-2490-2 S. Valdinoci: Les fondements de la phenomenologie husserlienne. 1982 ISBN 90-247-2504-6 I. Yamaguchi: Passive Synthesis und Intersubjektivitiit bei Edmund Husser/. 1982 ISBN 90-247-2505-4 1. Libertson: Proximity. Levinas, Blanchot, Bataille and Communication. 1982 ISBN 90-247-2506-2
Phaenomenologica 88. D. Welton: The Origins of Meaning. A Critical Study of the Thresholds of Husserlian Phenomenology. 1983 ISBN 90-247-2618-2 89. W.R. McKenna: Husserl's 'Introductions to Phenomenology'. Interpretation and Critique. 1982 ISBN 90-247-2665-4 90. J.P. Miller: Numbers in Presence and Absence. A Study of Husserl's Philosophy of Mathematics. 1982 ISBN 90-247-2709-X 91. U. Melle: Das Wahrnehmungsproblem und seine Verwandlung in phiinomenologischer Einstellung. Untersuchungen zu den phanomenologischen Wahrnehmungstheorien von Husser!, Gurwitsch und Mer!eau-Ponty. 1983 ISBN 90-247-2761-8 92. W.S. Hamrick (ed.): Phenomenology in Practice and Theory. Essays for Herbert Spiegelberg. 1984 ISBN 90-247-2926-2 93. H. Reiner: Duty and Inclination. The Fundamentals of Morality Discussed and Redefined with Special Regard to Kant and Schiller. 1983 ISBN 90-247-2818-6 94. M. J. Harney: Intentionality, Sense and the Mind. 1984 ISBN 90-247-2891-6 95. Kah Kyung Cho (ed.): Philosophy and Science in Phenomenological Perspective. 1984 ISBN 90-247-2922-X 96. A. Lingis: Phenomenological Explanations. 1986 ISBN Hb: 90-247-3332-4; Pb: 90-247-3333-2 97. N. Rotenstreich: Reflection and Action. 1985 ISBN Hb: 90-247-2969-6; Pb: 90-247-3128-3 98. J.N. Mohanty: The Possibility ofTranscendental Philosophy. 1985 ISBN Hb: 90-247-2991-2; Pb: 90-247-3146-1 99. 1.1. Kockelmans: Heidegger on Art and Art Works. 1985 ISBN 90-247-3102-X 100. E. Levinas: Collected Philosophical Papers. 1987 ISBN Hb: 90-247-3272-7; Pb: 90-247-3395-2 101. R. Regvald: Heidegger et Ie probleme du neant. 1986 ISBN 9O-247-3388-X 102. J.A. Barash: Martin Heidegger and the Problem ofHistorical Meaning. 1987 ISBN 90-247-3493-2 103 J.J. Kockelmans (ed.): Phenomenological Psychology. The Dutch Schoo\. 1987 ISBN 90-247-3501-7 104. W.S. Hamrick: An Existential Phenomenology ofLaw: Maurice Merleau-Ponty. 1987 ISBN 90-247-3520-3 105. J.C. Sallis, G. Moneta and J. Taminiaux (eds.): The Collegium Phaenomenologicum. ISBN 90-247-3709-5 The First Ten Years. 1988 106. D. Carr: Interpreting Husser/. Critical and Comparative Studies. 1987. ISBN 90-247-3505-X 107. G. Heffernan: Isagoge in die phiinomenologische Apophantik. Eine Einfuhrung in die phanomenologische Urteilslogik durch die Auslegung des Textes der Formalen und transzendenten Logik von Edmund Husser\. 1989 ISBN 90-247-3710-9 108. F. Volpi, J.-F. Mattei, Th. Sheenan, J.-F. Courtine, J. Taminiaux, J. Sallis, D. Janicaud, A.L. Kelkel, R. Bernet, R. Brisart, K. Held, M. Haar et S. IJsseling: Heidegger et l'idee de la pMnomenologie. 1988 ISBN 90-247-3586-6 109. C. Singevin: Dramaturgie de l'esprit. 1988 ISBN 90-247-3557-2
Phaenomenologica 110. J. Patocka: Le monde naturel et Ie mouvement de l'existence humaine. 1988 ISBN 90-247-3577-7 Ill. K.-H. Lembeck: Gegenstand Geschichte. Geschichtswissenschaft in Husserls Phanomenologie.1988 ISBN 90-247-3635-8 112. J.K. Cooper-Wiele: The Totalizing Act. Key to Husserl's Early Philosophy. 1989 ISBN 0-7923-0077-7 113. S. Valdinoci: Le principe d' existence. Un devenir psychiatrique de la phenomenologie.1989 ISBN 0-7923-0125-0 114. D. Lohmar: Phiinomenologie der Mathematik. 1989 ISBN 0-7923-0187-0 115. S. IJsseling (Hrsgb.): Husserl-Ausgabe und Husserl-Forschung. 1990 ISBN 0-7923-0372-5 116. R. Cobb-Stevens: Husserl and Analytic Philosophy. 1990 ISBN 0-7923-0467-5 117. R. Klockenbusch: Husserl und Cohn. Widerspruch, Reflexion und Telos in Phanomenologie und Dialektik. 1989 ISBN 0-7923-0515-9 118. S. Vaitkus: How is Society Possible? Intersubjectivity and the Fiduciary Attitude as Problems of the Social Group in Mead, Gurwitsch, and Schutz. 1991 ISBN 0-7923-0820-4 119. C. Macann: Presence and Coincidence. The Transformation of Transcendental into Ontological Phenomenology. 1991 ISBN 0-7923-0923-5 120. G. Shpet: Appearance and Sense. Phenomenology as the Fundamental Science and Its Problems. Translated from Russian by Th. Nemeth. 1991 ISBN 0-7923-1098-5 121. B. Stevens: L'apprentissage des signes. Lecture de Paul Ricreur. 1991 ISBN 0-7923-1244-9 122. G. Soffer: Husserl and the Question ofRelativism. 1991 ISBN 0-7923-1291-0 123. G. Rompp: Husserls Phiinomenologie der Intersubjektivitiit. Und Ihre Bedeutung fUr eine Theorie intersubjektiver Objektivitiit und die Konzeption einer phanomenoISBN 0-7923-1361-5 logischen PhiJosophie. 1991 124. S. Strasser: Welt im Widerspruch. Gedanken zu einer Phanomenologie als ethischer Fundamentalphilosophie.1991 ISBN Hb: 0-7923-1404-2; Pb: 0-7923-1551-0 125. R. P. Buckley: Husserl, Heidegger and the Crisis of Philosophical Responsibility. 1992 ISBN 0-7923- I633-9 126. J. G. Hart: The Person and the Common Life. Studies in a HusserJian Social Ethics. 1992 ISBN 0-7923- I724-6 127. P. van Tongeren, P. Sars, C. Bremmers and K. Boey (eds.): Eros and Eris. Contributions to a Hermeneutical Phenomenology. Liber Amicorum for Adriaan Peperzak. 1992 ISBN 0-7923-1917-6 128. Nam-In Lee: Edmund Husserls Phiinomenologie der Instinkte. 1993 ISBN 0-7923-2041-7 129. P. Burke and J. Van der Veken (eds.): Merleau-Ponty in Contemporary Perspective. 1993 ISBN 0-7923-2142-1 130. G. Haefliger: Dber Existenz: Die Ontologie Roman Ingardens. 1994 ISBN 0-7923-2227-4 131. 1. Lampert: Synthesis and Backward Reference in Husserl's Logical Investigations. 1995 ISBN 0-7923-3105-2 132. J.M. DuBois: Judgment and Sachverhalt. An Introduction to Adolf Reinach's Phenomenological Realism. 1995 ISBN 0-7923-3519-8
Phaenomenologica 133. B.E. Babich (ed.): From Phenomenology to Thought, Errancy, and Desire. Essays in Honor of William J. Richardson, S.J. 1995 ISBN 0-7923-3567-8 134. M. Dupuis: Pronoms et visages. Lecture d'Emmanuel Levinas. 1996 ISBN 0-7923-3655-0; Pb 0-7923-3994-0 135. D. zahavi: Husserl und die transzendentale Intersubjektivitiit. Eine Antwort auf die sprachpragmatische Kritik. 1996 ISBN 0-7923-3713-1 136. A. Schutz: Collected Papers, IV. Edited with preface and notes by H. Wagner and G. Psathas. in collaboration with F. Kersten. 1996 ISBN 0,7923-3760-3 137. P. Kontos: D' une phenomenologie de la perception chez Heidegger. 1996 ISBN 0-7923-3776-X 138. F. Kuster: Wege der Verantwortung. Husserls Phanomenologie als Gang durch die Faktizitat. 1996 ISBN 0-7923-3916-9 139. C. Beyer: Von Bolzano zu Husserl. Eine Untersuchung tiber den Ursprung der ISBN 0-7923-4050-7 phanomenologischen Bedeutungslehre. 1996 140. J. Dodd: Idealism and Corporeity. An Essay on the Problem of the Body in Husserl's Phenomenology. 1997 ISBN 0-7923-4400-6 141. E. Kelly: Structure and Diversity. Studies in the Phenomenological Philosophy of Max Scheler. 1997 ISBN 0-7923-4492-8 142. J. Cavallin: Content and Object. Husser!, Twardowski and Psychologism. 1997 ISBN 0-7923-4734-X 143. H.P. Steeves: Founding Community. A Phenomenological-Ethical Inquiry. 1997 ISBN 0-7923-4798-6 144. M. Sawicki: Body, Text, and Science. The Literacy of Investigative Practices and the ISBN 0-7923-4759-5 Phenomenology of Edith Stein. 1997
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