Phenomenology of the Political (CONTRIBUTIONS TO PHENOMENOLOGY Volume 38)

CONTRIBUTIONS TO PHENOMENOLOGY IN COOPERATION WITH THE CENTER FOR ADVANCED RESEARCH IN PHENOMENOLOGY

PHENOMENOLOGY OF THE POLITICAL

Volume 38

Editor: John J. Drummond, Mount Saint Mary's College

Editorial Board: Elizabeth A. Rehnke David Carr, Emory University Stephen Crmvell, Rice University Lester Embree, Florida Atlantic University J. Claude Evans, Washington University Jose Huertas-Jourda, Wilfrid Laurier University Joseph./. Kockelmiins, The Pennsylvania State University William R. McKeima, Miami University Algis Mickunas, Ohio University J. N. Mohanty, Temple University Tom Nenon, The University of Memphis Thomas M. Seehohm, Johannes Gutenberg-Universitat, Mainz Gail Soffer, New School for Social Research, New York Elisabeth Stroker, Philosophisches Seminarium der Universitat Koln Richard M. Zaner. Vanderbilt University

edited by

KEVIN THOMPSON Southern Illinois University, Carbondale, IL and

LESTER EMBREE Florida Atlantic University, Boca Raton, FL

Scope The purpose of this series is to foster the development of phenomenological philosophy through creative research. Contemporary issues in philosophy, other disciplines and in culture generally, offer opportunities for the application of phenomenological methods that call for creative responses. Although the work of several generations of thinkers has provided phenomenology with many results with which to approach these challenges, a truly successful response to them will require building on this work with new analyses and methodological innovations.

KLUWER ACADEMIC PUBLISHERS DORDRECHT / BOSTON / LONDON

Contents

A C.I.P. Catalogue record for this book is available from the Library of Congress.

Introduction Kevin Thompson Notes on Contributors I. Basic Concepts 1. Who is the Political Actor?: An Existential Phenomenological Approach Steven G. Crowell

ISBN 0-7923-6163-6

Published by Kluwer Academic Publishers, P.O. Box 17, 3300 AA Dordrecht, The Netherlands. Sold and distributed in North, Central and South America by Kluwer Academic Publishers, 101 Philip Drive, Norwell, MA 02061, U.S.A. In all other countries, sold and distributed by Kluwer Academic Publishers, P.O. Box 322, 3300 AH Dordrecht, The Netherlands.

2. Political Community John Drummond

29

3. Phenomenology, Ethics, Politics Adriaan Peperzak

55

II. Figures 4. Elements of Ricoeur's Early Political Thought Bernard Dauenhauer

67

5. Alfred Schutz on Reducing Social Tensions Lester Embree

81

III. Fundamental Issues

Printed on acid-free paper

All Rights Reserved © 2000 Kluwer Academic Publishers No part of the material protected by this copyright notice may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without written permission from the copyright owner. Printed in the Netherlands.

6. Personality of Higher Order: Husserlian Reflections on the Quebec Problem 105 R. Philip Buckley 7. Socrates, Christ, and Buddha as "Political" Leaders Natalie Depraz

121

8. Towards a Genealogy of Sovereignty Kevin Thompson

133

9. Taking Responsibility Seriously Hwa Yol Jung

147

Contents

A C.I.P. Catalogue record for this book is available from the Library of Congress.

Introduction Kevin Thompson Notes on Contributors I. Basic Concepts

ISBN 0-7923-6163-6

Published by Kluwer Academic Publishers, P.O. Box 17, 3300 AA Dordrecht, The Netherlands. Sold and distributed in North, Central and South America by Kluwer Academic Publishers, 101 Philip Drive, Norwell, MA 02061, U.S.A. In all other countries, sold and distributed by Kluwer Academic Publishers, P.O. Box 322, 3300 AH Dordrecht, The Netherlands.

1. Who is the Political Actor?: An Existential Phenomenological Approach Steven G. Crowell

11

2. Political Community John Drummond

29

3. Phenomenology, Ethics, Politics Adriaan Peperzak

55

II. Figures 4. Elements of Ricoeur's Early Political Thought Bernard Dauenhauer

67

5. Alfred Schutz on Reducing Social Tensions Lester Embree

81

III. Fundamental Issues

Printed on acid-free paper

All Rights Reserved © 2000 Kluwer Academic Publishers No part of the material protected by this copyright notice may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without written permission from the copyright owner. Printed in the Netherlands.

6. Personality of Higher Order: Husserlian Reflections on the Quebec Problem 105 R. Philip Buckley 7. Socrates, Christ, and Buddha as "Political" Leaders Natalie Depraz

121

8. Towards a Genealogy of Sovereignty Kevin Thompson

133

9. Taking Responsibility Seriously Hwa Yol Jung

147

VI

IV. Race

Introduction

10. The Invisibility of Racial Minorities in the Public Realm of Appearances Robert Bernasconi 11. Identity and Liberation: An Existential Phenomenological Approach Lewis Gordon

i

Subject Index Name Index

207 209

This volume is a collection of phenomenological investigations of the political domain. Its aim is to present recent examinations of political matters and to foster a renewal of this sort of inquiry in phenomenology generally. Although it has often gone unrecognized, investigations of this sort have been a part of the phenomenological project since its inception. Two phases can be identified: the first governed primarily by the methods of realistic and constitutive phenomenology, and the second under the guidance of existential and hermeneutical approaches. Standard accounts of the history of phenomenology begin, of course, with the publication of Husserl's Logische Untersuchungen (1900-1901) in which for the first time he publicly developed and applied his distinctively descriptive approach—the so-called method of eidetic analysis with its unique emphasis on the concept of evidence understood as intention fulfillment—to the fields of logical and mathematical systems. But those around him in Gottingen quickly saw the innovative character of this method and began employing it in a wide variety of other areas of research: literature, sociology, ethics, action theory, and even theology, for example. During this period various social issues were addressed, but preparations for what we can now call a phenomenology of the political began principally with the work of Adolf Reinach. Reinach was a prominent member of the so-called Gottingen circle of realistic phenomenology that took the description of the fundamental structures of the matters under investigation as its principal task, employing the method of eidetic intuition to do so. In his "Die apriorischen Grundlagen des biirgerlichen Rechtes" (1913), Reinach developed an account of the essential structure of what he called "social acts," the set of spontaneous human activities that bear an essential relation to an addressee (acts of promising, etc.).1 Although his primary concern was with the nature of juridical rights and the relation of positive and natural law, his analyses of social acts established the conceptual resources needed in order to describe the basic structures of the domain of public interaction generally. The actual beginning of investigations devoted exclusively to the political domain took place then with Edith Stein's investigations of the relationship between the individual and the community and the nature of the modern state. Stein, of course, was Husserl's influential assistant and her "Individuum und Gemeinschaft" (1922)2 demonstrated that human interactions, including especially the formation of voluntary associations, are founded upon a strata of 1

Adolf Reinach, "Die apriorischen Grundlagen des burgerlichen Rechtes," Jahrbuch fur Phlosophie und phanomenologische Forschung 1 (1913): 685-847; "The Apriori Foundations of the Civil Law," trans. John F. Crosby, Aletheia 3 (1983): 2-142. 2 Edith Stein. "Individuum und Gemeinschaft. Beitrage zur philosophischen Begrundung der Psychologie und der Geistesvvissenshaften. Zweite Abhandlung," I^I...I

u f..»

INTRODUCTION

meaning composed of the concept of community and the intentions constituting this sense tacitly engaged in by the various participants in such activities. In this sense, the actions of individuals presuppose, even if unknowingly, the structures of communal life. Stein returned to this issue in her "Eine Untersuchung Uber den Staat" (1925).3 Here she made use of Reinach's concepts of social acts such as commanding and determining in order to designate the primary ways in which the state, understood by her as analogous to the human person, was able to act freely in setting limits upon itself, a trait Stein held to be the essential mark of political sovereignty. According to Stein, this activity opens up contexts wherein citizens are able to form various sorts of associations. For example, by issuing commands, the state establishes certain institutions that enable those under their governance to interact with one another as well as engage in collective action. The legitimacy of such institutions in turn depends, she showed, as the structure of social acts uncovered by Reinach requires, upon the compliant response of those issued such commands. Stein was thus able to articulate the dependency of sovereignty upon obedience through the need inherent in a social act for response in order for such acts to obtain completeness. Tomoo Otaka became interested in Husserl's work through the friendships he forged with Felix Kaufrnann and Alfred Schutz in the seminars of Hans Kelsen in Vienna. In his Grundlegung der Lehre vorn Sozialen Verband (1932) Otaka adopted the constitutive methodology Husserl had first advanced in his Ideen zu einer reinen Phdnomenologie und phdnomenologischen Philosophic I (1913) in order to uncover the noematic and noetic structures whose correlation uniquely formed what Otaka called "social organization."4 Otaka specified four basic domains within this general region: law, religion, the economy, and the state, and he identified the set of basic practices out of which each arose. In particular, Otaka uncovered the structures of two constitutive activities-which he called "communalization (Vergemeinschaftungy and "socialization (Vergesellschaftungy'-that he showed to be responsible for the unity of law and the state. These spheres, Otaka demonstrated, are essentially bound together. The principles of the legal order, the legal codes and statutes of a specific nation, are authorized by the state, the political organization, while the state in tum is legitimated by the constitution, the fundamental legal document. The former relation establishes appropriate sanctions for violations of legal norms thereby carrying out a process of social ordering, whereas the latter relation defines the basic social norms that set the parameters for harmonious communal existence. Thus, on the basis of these phenomenological insights, Otaka was able to clarify the complex relation of the political and legal domains.

3 Edith Stein, "Eine Untersuchung Uber den Staat.'" Jahrbuch fiir Philosophie und phdnomenologische Forschung 7 (1925): 1-117.

Tomoo Otaka, Grundlegung der Lehre vorn Sozialen Verband (Vienna: Julius Springer, 1932).

PHENOMENOLOGY OF THE POLITICAL However, despite these quite promising first steps, no major advance in the field appears to have built upon these important works. It was only with the emergence of existential phenomenology in the thought of Sartre, de Beauvoir, and Merleau-Ponty, and most especially with the development of Heidegger's project of destructive retrieval in the hermeneutical phenomenology of Hannah Arendt that investigation of the political again returned to a prominent position on the research agenda of phenomenology. The impetus behind this development was, of course, the necessity for those involved of responding to the challenge of Marxism and the emergence of the novel form of terror unleashed in the totalitarian regimes of Nazi Germany and Stalinist Russia. The results achieved through their analyses provided fundamental clarifications of such basic problems as the nature of social unions, institutions, and the structure of oppression, important distinctions between various sorts of human activities (labor, work, and action, for example), and a new rudimentary vocabulary was established for articulating the essence of the political domain itself. Throughout this work the task of understanding the specific contexts within which humans presently act remained constant, as did a pronounced concern with historical development. More recently, with the publication of various manuscripts and lecture courses, we now know that both Husserl and Heidegger reflected upon political matters such as the nature of the state, community, and rule, albeit in a rather unsystematic form, throughout the many phases of their respective philosophical developments.5 Accordingly a reexamination of these major figures, among others, has begun that has led to the employment of their often quite scattered reflections in more systematic fashions.6 And a potentially quite fruitful engagement between the Anglo-American tradition in political thought and the 5 For examinations of Husserl's largely unpublished work on these matters see Rene Toulemont, L 'essence de la societe selon Husserl (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1962), and Karl Schuhmann, Husserls Staatsphilosophie (Munich: Karl Alber, 1988). For discussion both of Heidegger's notorious political involvements as well as his own reflections on political matters see Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, Heidegger, Art, and Politics: The Fiction of the Political (Cambridge. MA: Basil Blackwell, 1990), and Dominique Janicaud, The Shadow of That Thought, trans. Michael Gendre (Evanston, 11; Northwestern University Press, 1996). 6 For examples of this sort of work employing Husserl's reflections, see James G. Hart, The Person and the Common Life: Studies in a Husserlian Social Ethics (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1992), Yves Thierry, Conscience et humanite selon Husserl: Essai sur le sujet politique (Paris: Presses Universitaires, 1995), and H. Peter Steeves, Founding Community: A Phenomenological-Ethical Inquiry (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1998). For a similar treatment of Heidegger see Reiner Schiirmann, Heidegger on Being and Acting: From Principles to Anarchy, trans. Christine-Marie Gros in collaboration with the author (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1987).

INTRODUCTION

PHENOMENOLOGY OF THE POLITICAL

hermeneutical tendency within phenomenology has also emerged.7 However, even with what perhaps may be a third phase emerging, there still remains a deep need for fresh investigations into the basic concepts, figures, and issues of the political domain from both historical and systematic perspectives. The present collection seeks to fulfill this task. It examines several different matters from a variety of phenomenological approaches. What unites them all, however, is a commitment to careful description and a concern with the modes of givenness characteristic of these matters. The essays collected here serve to demonstrate that the distinctive contribution of phenomenology to political philosophy remains its commitment to matters as they present themselves, rather than to the ways in which these issues have traditionally been construed within various intellectual and philosophical frameworks. The fidelity evident in each of the investigations that follows serves then not only to advance inquiry into the issues with which each is concerned, but also to further an approach to political philosophy itself that, though still often overlooked in the mainstream, nevertheless continues to produce significant clarifications and revisions in its pursuit of the fundamental problems of the political sphere. The dedication of phenomenology to such matters itself testifies against the obfuscation under which so much of contemporary political thought continues to labor. The essays that follow focus upon four major areas of concern: investigations of basic concepts such as action, community, and the relation of the political to the ethical (I); expositions and discussions of previous phenomenological work on these issues (II); analyses of fundamental matters such as the nation-state, leadership, sovereignty, and responsibility (III); and finally, the convergence of the various levels of the political realm as exemplified in the issue of race (IV). The collection emerged from a symposium held in the fall of 1996 under the auspices of the Center for Advanced Research in Phenomenology, Inc., headquartered at Florida Atlantic University. The meeting was organized by myself and Lester Embree, the President of the Center. Its purpose was to further investigation of the problems peculiar to the political domain and to thereby serve as an impetus for further work in this area. We believed that this required not only careful examination of prior phenomenological investigations into the issues, but fresh explorations of the field as well. The ultimate strength of such work proved to lie in the interweaving of both dimensions. This was demonstrated time and again in the contributions of the participants as well as in their responses to one another's work. Each of the essays collected here benefited from the uniquely collaborative approach to philosophical investigation fostered by the research symposia of the Center. And their advancement of this field is a testimony to the commitments embodied in this institution. In conclusion I would like to mention several individuals without whose diligent work this volume could not have been produced. Eric Brown of

Washington University in St. Louis checked the spelling and diacritical markings of the Greek terms used in several of the essays. Lester Embree guided me in organizing the symposium from which these essays are drawn, and contributed greatly to the editorial process. And finally, I want to thank Maja de Keijzer of Kluwer Academic Publishers for her deep commitment to phenomenology and to this project throughout its editing.

7

See Paul Ricoeur. Autour dupolitique (Paris: Seuil, 1991).

Kevin Thompson Southern Illinois University

Chapter One

Who is the Political Actor? An Existential Phenomenological Approach Steven Gait Crowell Rice University Two dangers seem to plague many attempts to talk about the political philosophically. One is the danger of overestimation, epitomized in the claim that "everything is political," hence that only political criteria of judgment can be employed without bad faith. The other is the danger of underestimation, failure to distinguish what is properly political from concomitant phenomena such as economic calculation, social engineering, or individual psychology. The tricky thing is to get the political clearly in view, to distinguish it from other facets of life with which it is always entangled and often confused, and to keep the terms that articulate it from becoming a "final vocabulary" or ultimate arbiter in nonpolitical matters as well. Can phenomenology aid in this task? Does phenomenological reflection offer a way of making the desired distinctions and of preserving proper order between what is political and what is not? That is the question explored, in very introductory fashion, in this essay.1 Whatever else a phenomenology of the political may offer, it should begin as a reflection on the first-person experience ofjhe political. This demand stems not from the political per se, BuTTrorrTthe nature of phenomenology as a reflective, intuitive method. Thus the tendency among phenomenologists to adopt dialectical modes of thinking whenever social, historical, or political questions are at stake should be resisted, at least initially. The reasons for this tendency are certainly worth exploring, but it will be more phenomenological, if conceivably less profound, to begin with a reflection on political experience.2

' This essay is dedicated to the memory of Rudy Escobedo (1952—1989)—political thinker, political actor. 2

In the hands of Husserl and Heidegger phenomenology was resolutely antK^ dialectical. A peculiar accommodation with dialectical thought was achieved during the\ ', French reception of phenomenology in the highly politicized context of the 1930s to 1950s. This reception, with its persistent attempt to fuse the phenomenologies of Hegel and Husserl, belongs as much to the history of Marxism (and to the question of "praxis") as it does to phenomenology. A full historiographical account of this reception from a

12

WHO IS THE POLITICAL ACTOR?

PHENOMENOLOGY OF THE POLITICAL

Where should such reflection find its point of departure? If we grant that the question of politics has always been bound up with the issue of action, then it is reasonable to begin by inquiring into the "first person" aspects of political action, i.e., action conceived not as the prerogative of vaguely defined (according to phenomenological standards) social agents—movements, groups, mobs, states, or forces—but as the behavior of an individual agent, the political actor. Who is the political actor? The existential formulation is necessary, for though much can be learned by an eidetic inquiry into political action as such, certain crucial political phenomena become visible only if we identify the conditions necessary for someone to be a political actor. Because these conditions turn out to be quite complexly founded, the present investigation can only be a very tentative and by no means comprehensive account of them.

On the one hand, it is often held that virtually any act is political since, by construing the institutional framework very broadly, any act can be shown to be horizonally bound up with a political way of fleshing out the matrix. For example, if I choose to eat grapes with my meal this is (whether I am aware of it or not) a political act, since my choice takes place at a time of dispute over a certain matter of justice as determined by the institutional framework of a boycott. If any act that has political consequences is to be deemed a political act, however, then it is an easy matter to identify the political actor since "to be is to be a political actor." And if acting is, as such, equivalent to acting politically, then we may simply offer a theory of action and have done with it. But in rejecting such overestimation, it is easy to succumb to underestimation in turn.

Finally, the method here aims only at eidetic insights based upon phenomenological sources; it does not pursue the analysis to the transcendental level. Questions of ultimate meaning-constitution are bracketed in favor of reflections carried out on the terrain of what Schutz called a "phenomenology of the natural attitude," where the issue is to locate essential features of meaning as lived by subjects in the world, not meaning as constituted by the transcendental ego that arises when the presupposition of the world is bracketed. This restriction would already be justified by the introductory character of the project; it turns out, however, that the investigation itself suggests reasons for thinking that no "transcendental politics" is possible. I. The Fourfold Matrix of Political Action Though the political actor may play many roles, it cannot hurt to begin with what is most familiar to us. For most Americans, to act politically is to participate in elections—in particular, to vote. What makes this a political act? In voting I exercise a choice of a certain kind, within a certain institutional framework, at a certain time, on certain matters. We thus describe a fourfold matrix—optative intentionality, institutional space, deliberative time, and deliberable matters—and to the extent that these elements contain the founding strata that make voting intelligible as a political act, the political actor should be approachable in light of this matrix. Little is gained, however, unless one can say more about what it means to fill out the four elements in a distinctively political way. It is here that the dangers of overestimation and underestimation arise. phenomenological perspective does not exist, but see Vincent Descombes, Modern French Philosophy trans. L. Scott-Fox and J. M. Harding (Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press, 1980); Herbert Spiegelberg, The Phenomenological Movement (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1982), 440-442; Jean-Francois Lyotard, Phenomenology, trans. Brian Beakley (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1991), 65-69.

13

Max Weber, for example, suggests that politics always concerns "an interest in the distribution, transfer, or maintenance of power" and that thus one who is "active in politics strives for power either as a means in serving other aims, ideal or egoistic, or as 'power for power's sake,' that is, in order to enjoy the prestigefeeling that power gives."3 Here the matrix is filled out differently: my choice, its institutional space, and its proper time are all overdetermined by the introduction of the idea of power as the exclusive stakes or matter of the political. The institutions in which power is an issue and the times at which its "distribution, transfer, or maintenance" can be a matter for choice may differ, but the political as such is circumscribed essentially by the attempt to wield or attain power—which, as Weber makes clear, means the ability to coerce and dominate, through violence if necessary. Thus the political actor is one engaged in strategies of domination with whatever means are available. But this seems to underestimate the specific intentionality of the political; power seems to take on "transcendent" or nonphenomenological explanatory status. For instance, Weber reduces the political to a kind of instrumental action, thus subordinating the whole sphere of deliberation to the struggle for power. Such a view excludes apriori the idea—articulated by theorists of democracy like Sheldon Wolin—that politics is the realization of equality. Such democratic politics tends toward effacement of the distinction between rulers and ruled (between dominators and dominated) and subordinates the pursuit of power to another end, viz., the pursuit of "the common well-being." Hence "authentic political action" becomes "a cultivating, a tending, a taking care of beings and things."4 However, if this view of the political avoids Weber's reduction of politics, it flirts dangerously with overestimation, for what act could not, in some sense, be seen as such a cultivating? 3

Max Weber, "Politics as a Vocation," in From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology, ed. H. H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills (New York: Oxford University Press, 1946), 78. 4

Shp.idnn Wnlin. "Democracy and the Political," Salmagundi 60 (1983): 16, 17.

WHO IS THE POLITICAL ACTOR?

PHENOMENOLOGY OF THE POLITICAL

These contrasting conceptions might be said to represent the "politics of the beautiful" (Wolin) on the one hand and the "politics of the sublime" (Weber) on the other. The former takes its point of departure from ancient, the latter from modern, political conditions. The politics of the beautiful imagines the political act primarily in spatial terms: choice takes place in a time where the gap between decision and consequences is neutralized, always already enclosed (spatialized) within a notion of the "good" that is "there" both as the ultimate matter of politics and as its institutional framework (noXiq). The political actor "stands out" in this "space of appearing," hence the political act can take on the aspect of tragedy. In daring the choice, the actor may fail to attain the true good and, in the very exercise of his political excellence, the unintended consequences are measured against him according to the register of a finite time (destiny). In the politics of the beautiful, time is space.

spatialization of time, there was a property criterion for citizenship. To be a political actor one had first to have a "place to stand." The liberal democratic example of the politics of the sublime, in contrast, where space is temporalized or historicized, retains only an age requirement. Full political participation requires only a certain "maturity." What is signified by this age criterion? If it reflects something of our sense for what political action is and entails, it may be possible to specify what that is by way of a contrast between political action and moral action, whose age of responsibility falls considerably earlier than the political one. Political responsibility is therefore something different from, and "later" than, moral responsibility; the political actor must be "older" than the moral actor.

14

In the politics of the sublime, however, space becomes time—or rather, history—which gives no assurances, even in retrospect, as to what the common good is. The politics of the sublime knows no tragedy for it knows no closure to the contest. The pursuit of power cannot be understood in terms other than itself; the infinite, unpresentable (hence sublime) perspective of history offers only shifting stances of domination, never a verdict about who ought to dominate or rule. HistoricaLnarrative, which seeks to conceal the sublimity of history, is itself one more political act and not a final arbiter. In this situation of what Lyotard calls "differends," there is no metalanguage to adjudicate competing claims that would not already adopt the terms of one side, thus silencing the other. 6 When the space of the political thus becomes time, one seeks merely formal or procedural universalities to regulate the contest over the good, while acknowledging the impossibility of rationally adjudicating it.7 We may derive a phenomenological clue from these speculations. In the classical Athenian example of the politics of the beautiful, governed by the 5

As Merleau-Ponty, writing of Weber's stance regarding history, puts it: "Since we cannot be sure that the history within which we find ourselves is, in the end, rational, those who choose truth and freedom cannot convince those who make other choices that they are guilty of absurdity, nor can they flatter themselves with having 'gone beyond' them." Maurice Merleau-Ponty, "The Crisis of Understanding," in Adventures of the Dialectic, trans. Joseph Bien (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1973), 2526. Jean-Franc, ois Lyotard, The Differend: Phrases in Dispute, trans. George Van Den Abbeele (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1988). This understanding of history is common to the post-Marxist projects of Karl-Otto Apel and Jiirgen Habermas, and the liberalism of the early John Rawls.

15

II. Contrasts in Moral and Political Action: The Time of the Political Above we highlighted a fourfold matrix belonging to political action: its time, its space, its intentionality, and its matter. To flesh out what is distinctively political in it we now turn to the experience of the political actor. Following the clue of the age criterion through a contrast with the moral actor—who occupies the space and time of the political actor without, so to speak, being "of it— allows the distinctive temporality of political action to emerge. This, in turn, suggests ways to probe further into other features of the matrix. The moral actor will here be understood as one who acts out of obligation. Though this is a Kantian conception, it shall be developed phenomenologically, i.e., without presupposing anything about the concept of reason. Though there is no room to argue the point, the phenomenon of obligation (hence the Kantian perspective) provides a better phenomenological window upon the moral than an Aristotelian approach focusing on "ethical" matters (the virtues of an T)6oc,). The latter too easily conflates specifically moral phenomena with specifically political phenomena (as also with merely instrumental or technical matters), thus making it difficult to see where the moral and the political differ. With this in mind, we may note the following contrasts: (1) We expect children to be morally responsible at a relatively early age. Certainly, we expect them to fulfill their moral obligations long before we allow them full citizenship. This is because to act morally is to obey. Of course, it makes a difference whether I obey some arbitrary authority, or whether I obey the "law which I give to myself," but this difference does not affect many important phenomenological features of the moral act. For instance: (2) Moral acts can be commanded (they are phrased as imperatives). As a young person I can be told how to act, and in acting on the basis of what I am told to do, I am acting morally (i.e., I experience my act as a moral one, as fulfilling my obligation). In contrast, it seems to make no sense to speak of commanding a political act. To the extent that the political actor is ordered to act

\ >

WHO IS THE POLITICAL ACTOR?

16

in a certain way—say, to picket during a strike—this act remains moral (i.e., obedience) only, unless it is embedded in a larger context of choice in which obeying-the-order is only part of the genuinely political act (viz., acting as a union man). 8 We shall try to clarify this issue below. But first: (3) Because moral acts can be commanded, the moral actor knows what is right. To act morally is to know what one ought to do. If so, then so-called "moral dilemmas" confront the moral agent with problems that require extramoral resources for their resolution. Often these are political resources. In contrast to the moral actor, the political actor never "knows" what is right, what he or she ought to do. This is not because such an actor is lacking technical knowledge; nor is it because opinions about the political good are always fallible. Rather it is because there is no obligation or categorical imperative in such cases. The union man who pickets the factory does not do so on the basis of an obligation, or on the basis of a kind of knowledge of what is right; rather, he does so from a conviction that the action will bring about a politically desirable result. 9 This reveals another contrast: (4) The moral actor does not consider the consequences of the act, i.e., does not look to strategic matters in deciding whether to fulfill the obligation. For this reason, the moral act is in a certain sense timeless or, in less Fichtean language, the time of the moral decision is independent of history. Looking neither forward to future consequences nor back to past traditional precedents, the moral actor need not know all that has gone into the constitution of the obligation; the fact that it arises within a tradition is, while true, irrelevant to moral consciousness. The political actor, in contrast, acts only insofar as his or her action self-

8

To this extent, then, there are certain situations in which not even all adults are capable of any form of legitimate political action. In an Absolute Monarchy, for example, where all social behavior is construed as "duty" to the Monarch, only the Monarch has any room for political action. His advisors occupy a dangerous intermediary role, while the common people have no possibility for action at all, apart from subversion.

PHENOMENOLOGY OF THE POLITICAL

17

consciously emerges from a tradition-/-i.e., understands itself in terms of a concrete, historical moment—and aims at a specific future.'Thus, one cannot act politically by accident. And as in an instrumental or technical action, the temporality of the political act is futural, but the act is not itself instrumental because it is not based on knowledge. It is finite in an essential way—i.e., it aims at a specific future without any assurance that the action could even contribute to that future. The political actor, therefore, never knows what should be done, yet finds herself in an historical present where one must act.10 Thus, finally:/ (5) Moral action is possible in abstraction from all concrete conditions of intersubjectivity; it can be taught before the child has any real (social) identity, and moral responsibility can be expected of one who is still essentially dependent (e.g., upon the family). The moral act does not intentionally implicate any concrete institutions, any particular community. Hence the child can be morally responsible "before" being a member of an historical community, and the moral actor will in a sense remain forever outside such communities. The moral actor cannot act as the agent of a special group or in the name of a specific concrete future; otherwise one could have no obligations to strangers, foreigners, etc. The political actor, on the other hand, must be concretely autonomous, i.e., an adult whose identity is "recognized" as particularized in specific intersubjectivities beyond the family. Only so can the acts of such a subject exhibit the specific sort of intentionality—the precise sort of futurality—that distinguishes the political. To see why, we must abandon our contrast with moral action—which has revealed a certain historically futural time of the political act—and explore the other three elements of our matrix, viz., the nature of political intentionality, its matter, and the space occupied by the political actor. III. Political Intentionality: Choice and Deliberation First, then, what is the intentionality of the political act? Is it a perceiving, imagining, wishing, willing, calculating, etc.? If it is certain that political acting will be founded upon some or all of these intentionalities, it is equally certain that no one of them adds up to a political act. If as a first pass we take voting as

9

When Rosa Parks refuses to move to the back of the bus, this might well be a political act. Is it not based on knowledge—if not of what is right, then at least of what is wrong and intolerable? Without claiming to exhaust the issue we might point to the curious status of such knowledge. If it is moral, i.e., based on a clear consciousness of obligation, then it becomes immoral not to act as she did—a harsh judgment on many of her fellow riders. But if it was a judgment that certain social (legal) conventions were wrong, such knowledge does not seem separable from a conviction that another set of (politically negotiable) conventions are more desirable. Hex feeling of being wronged is the basis of a political act of resistance that would bring about, as its end, the state of affairs (new conventions) which would allow her feeling to be phrased as a wrong for the first time, i.e., as a violation of her legal rights. My thanks to Marianne Sawicki for posing this question in correspondence.

10 In contrast to the moral act the political act is, as Weber suggests, like a Hence the political actor, unlike the moral actor, requires "passion"—namely, "passionate devotion to a 'cause,' to the god or demon who is its overlord" (Weber, "Politics as a Vocation," 115). In the face of futural uncertainty, this passion is often generated by indignation, a keen consciousness of current injustice. But knowing that some state of affairs is morally wrong cannot transform the political act "based" upon it—oriented toward a future—into one based upon knowledge of what should be done. This is in part because moral judgments concern individual acts while political judgments always implicate institutions whose relation to individual acts remains essentially indeterminate. On this matter, see the previous note.

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paradigmatic, however, we may say that the intentionality of a political act always involves something of choice or decision. Ronald Dworkin, for example, identifies two roles for the political actor in our system: "judge" (voter) and "participant" (office-holder, lobbyist, etc.)." Setting aside the institutional framework, to be examined below, these two roles exhibit a common intentional feature. Both the office-holder and the voter can be said to act politically when they take decisions. 12 If deciding is essential to political action, then much of what is called "political action" will—as far as intentionality is concerned—be so only analogically (Ttpoc, ev). For example, lobbying would count as political action insofar as it seeks to influence decision-making. To decide is to act on the basis of what we, following a long tradition, shall call "deliberation." An impulsive act is not a decision. Deliberation is thus an essential element of any political act. Indeed, Hannah Arendt suggests that deliberation, carried out in public speech, just is the medium of political action, while the upshot of deliberation becomes dispersed, so to speak, in other modes of intentionality (in her language, modes of "work" such as "law-making and city-building," in which statesmen shade into craftsmen). 13 How, then, are we to distinguish the intentionality of the political act from that of instrumental action?

case of technical action the means toward the end are given (at least in principle) and there is no need for deliberation. As Kant says, where the end to be brought about is sufficiently determined, the actions which are "hypothetically commanded" to attain it are also sufficiently determined. In the case of strategy, however, the antecedent condition is not fulfilled, the goal is not sufficiently determined; thus, in Kant's language, we cannot appeal to genuine "imperatives" but only to "counsels of prudence."14 Where the goal is given only as an "ideal of imagination," as Kant (speaking of happiness) says, the deliberation that seeks to choose what will attain it can only be strategy and not skill or knowledge. Given the particular kind of futurality of the political act, however, this is precisely the situation of the political actor. Because the "common good" is an "ideal of imagination," the intentionality of political choice cannot wholly be grasped in terms of reason.15 The tool of the political actor is rhetoric, not reason; or rather, reason (what Weber calls the "cool sense of proportion") will inevitably be subordinated to the aims of rhetoric.

18

Let us approach this issue first by noting a difference between technical instrumental reasoh and strategy. Both are oriented toward an end, but in the 11

Ronald Dworkin, "The Curse of American Politics," New York Review of Books XLIII (October 17, 1996): 23. 12

Clarification of this optative intentionality requires a phenomenological account of action in light of acts of valuation (Wertnehmen). Building on the work of Robert Sokolowski, John Drummond has developed fundamental dimensions of these issues in "Moral Objectivity: Husserl's Sentiments of Understanding," Husserl Studies 12 (1995): 165-183; "Agency, Agents, and (Sometimes) Patients," in The Truthful and the Good: Essays in Honor of Robert Sokolowski, ed. John Drummond and James Hart (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1996), 145-157; and "Political Community," in this volume. 13

Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Garden City: Anchor Books, 1959), 158: "Without the accompaniment of speech . . . action would not only lose its revelatory character, but, and by the same token, it would lose its subject, as it were; not acting men but performing robots would achieve what, humanly speaking, would remain incomprehensible. Speechless action would no longer be action because there would no longer be an actor, and the actor, the doer of deeds, is possible only if he is at the same time the speaker of words." And cf. 174: 'The Socratic school . . . turned to these activities [sc. "law-making and city-building"] which to the Greeks were pre-political, because they wished to turn against politics and against action. To them, legislating and the execution of decisions by vote are the most legitimate political activities because in them men 'act like craftsmen'."

19

Because the political actor is one who deliberates and decides, and because such deliberation is not strictly speaking instrumental, the intentionality of political action entails a specific sort of responsibility. Governed neither by a categorical nor by a hypothetical imperative, the political actor is responsible not only for proper reasoning, but above all for his or her "imagining" of the "end." This is a responsibility precisely because the only imperative confronting the political actor is the imperative to act. We have no choice but to do something. In a democracy every citizen (potential political actor) has this political responsibility, whether or not they ever actually act politically. For though acts of personal enjoyment or satisfaction and acts of ahistorical moral obedience are intentionally distinct from political acts, they are not concretely possible outside the exigencies of political (that is, historically futural) contexts. Thus there is a kernel of truth in the notion that everything is political—not because every act has political consequences, but because responsibility for imagining the

14

Immanuel Kant, Grounding for the Metaphysics of Morals, trans. James W. Ellington (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 1993), 27-28. A political example: What it means to build a bridge is sufficiently determined; what it means to bring about justice (or "to build a bridge to the twenty-first century") is not—though what it means to get some particular candidate elected is, and hence this is in principle a technical problem. 15

For an alternative position which argues that political rationality is not compromised by the fact that the idea of the good is "indeterminate," see Drummond, "Political Community." 16

Weber, "Politics as a Vocation," 115.

20

communal future belongs to the existential constitution of the "citizen" and thereby enters into the facticity of all other acts. In trying to flesh out this notion of political responsibility for the end, implicated in the nature of political intentionality as non-instrumental deliberation and choice, we encounter the third feature of our matrix, viz., the matter (Sache) at issue in political activity as such. The political actor cannot noetically deliberate and decide without also noematically deliberating "about" something and deciding "on" something. Given the many things that might occupy the noematic position here, can anything general be said about the matter of the political? IV. The Matter of the Political: Meaning Suppose one disputes the distinction between instrumental and strategic action, claiming that the determinateness of the goal is irrelevant and only the teleological structure of the reasoning, noetically identical in both cases, matters. Even so the noematic aspect of the political act proves to be different, for (to use Heidegger's language) it involves a transition from the "in order to" to the "for the sake of," i.e., a shift from concern with things in their interconnectedness to a concern for the meaning of things.17 Thus, the political actor engages in all sorts of instrumental acts toward the end of getting a particular candidate elected: passing out leaflets, engaging in debates, donating money, etc. Or the lobbyist engages in all sorts of acts in order to influence the decisions of legislators: distributing literature, persuading over dinner, pointing out consequences, making threats, etc. But these acts are political only analogically (Tipog ev); that is, such intentionality becomes political only if one locates them in a noematic horizon that goes beyond the string of instrumentalities. For example, I might do x, y, and z in order to get Clinton elected but—perhaps paradoxically—my vote, my choice of Clinton at the ballot box, cannot be seen as instrumental; it is an act of a different order. My vote is not in order to keep the Democrats in the White House; it is instead, in Dworkin's terms, a judgment on what is best, on what I imagine ought to be. It is for the sake of something and not "in order to." What does this "for the sake of signify? One could approach this question by following up clues in the tradition of political thought that show the matter of the political to be essentially revealed only by a certain suspension—not only of the instrumental, but of the everyday in general. The noematic core of political intentionality shows itself distinctly only where the taken for granted course of things becomes an issue. In classical

17

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WHO IS THE POLITICAL ACTOR?

Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (New York: Harper & Row, 1962), 116-17.

21

Athens, for example, the turn to discourse—i.e., to debate, speech, the various tactics of persuasion—is itself a suspension of the ongoing course of events; deliberation is a break with the rhythms of labor and work (as Arendt would say), a recognition that something is in play.18 We may call this the "common good," so long as the common good is not taken to be an ideal state of affairs which, could we but know it determinately, would remove the need for deliberation. Radicalizing Kant's notion of an ideal of imagination, the necessity of suspending everyday concerns suggests that the "matter" of the political differs toto caelo from a (more or less) determinate thing. Similarly, the political as such appears in Machiavelli's suggestion that the prince "not deviate from what is good, if possible, but be able to do evil if constrained" by the demands of "[maintaining] the state."19 The political actor must be prepared to suspend virtue, to bracket the claims of morality, in order to see (and so to address appropriately) the specifically political situation. To recognize a distinction between the claims of the political and the claims of the moral is already to have suspended the latter.20 A similar "interval of suspension" is acknowledged in Rousseau's contention that "once the populace is legitimately assembled as a sovereign body, all jurisdiction of the government ceases."21 Government is merely executive—that is, instrumental—whereas genuine political action is the prerogative of the sovereign, the people deliberating in the Assembly. Finally, there is Marx's idea that politics is essentially "revolutionary," a suspension of everyday relations of authority which would be unnecessary in realized communism. Rather than develop this point in terms of political theory, though, let us inquire phenomenologically into what is at stake in such suspensions.

18

Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition, 177-78, 185-87.

19 Niccolo Machiavelli, The Prince, in The Prince and the Discourses, ed. Max Lerner (New York: Modern Library, 1950), 65. 20

Compare Weber's neo-Machiavellian distinction between an "ethics of ultimate ends" and an "ethics of responsibility." One who would take up politics as a vocation "lets himself in for the diabolic forces lurking in all violence." Weber, "Politics as a Vocation," 125-126. In another direction, the possibility of distinguishing between the moral and the political suggests a reformulation of Kierkegaard's idea of a "teleological suspension of the ethical" in the direction of revolutionary praxis, where the State no longer possesses a higher ethical claim—as it does in Kierkegaard's Hegelian account of Agamemnon as tragic hero—but the destruction of the State has a higher political claim. Soren Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling, trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1983), 54-67. 21

Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Social Contract, trans. Donald Cress (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1987), 73.

23

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At issue, in every case, is not this or that thing, ordinance, policy, measure, or institution, but always and only the meaning of such institutions, measures, and policies. Whatever the noematic object of the political act, that which is politically at issue in it is its meaning. Because meaning is not a "worldly" thing (not a "real" predicate of the object) it can be addressed only under such a suspension: there is no (technical) knowledge of what things mean, and the issue of meaning is never an instrumental matter; meaning is a function not of the "in order to," but of the "for the sake of." It is the political actor's own being-in-theworld that is at stake in political action.22 The existential concept of the "for the sake of—the phenomenological factor that accounts for how we dwell in a world of meaning and do not merely occupy a space among things—can also help clarify the particular sort of meaning at issue in political action. The political actor, always being-withothers, in each case deliberates and decides who we are to be. Because the "for the sake of is not a teAoc. but a mode of Existenz, however—that is, because the question of what it means for me to be is always at issue—political meaning can be pursued authentically or inauthentically, but it cannot be seen as governed by a given ideal of what we "ought" to be. Instead, politics is the essentially contestable terrain upon which abstract values (e.g., equality, freedom, rights, welfare, etc.) are concretized through acts whose primary task is to decide how conflicts among these values are to be reconciled. To vote Democratic in American elections, for instance, is to decide the extent to which liberty is to be restricted in favor of equality, and this is to determine or judge the meaning of these values, i.e., to decide who we are to be, to choose "for the sake of our being. Political action always decides what it means—shall mean—for us to be. In this, the political act has the closest kinship with philosophizing. In both political action and philosophical reflection, meaning is the matter.23

element of our matrix, viz., the space in which a political act takes place. Political acts are possible only in a specific institutional framework and in reflecting on this space we return to that concrete autonomy or "adulthood" that was found to be necessary to the political actor.

22

Introducing the concept of meaning as the matter of the political, as the specific noematic core of the political act, may strike one as a tour de force. To mitigate that impression somewhat we should consider the fourth and final 22

Heidegger, Being and Time, 116: "The 'for the sake of always pertains to the Being of Dasein, for which, in its Being, that very Being is essentially an issue." Thus the context of significance, including its instrumentalities, is a function of the fact that "Dasein has assigned itself to an 'in order to' ... in terms of a potentiality-for-Being for the sake of which it itself is" (119; my emphasis).

V. The Space of the Political: Institutions and Historical Narratives We shall adopt the term "citizenship" to circumscribe the phenomenological space in which alone an actor can be a political actor, an act a political act, for this term indicates that sort of institutional framework without which an act can have political consequences but cannot have political significance for the actor. Beyond numerous variations in the way citizenship can be concretely instanciated, there are certain features which belong to it in every case and distinguish it from the sort of institutional framework that makes social actions possible, with which it is often confused. Let us begin with an example drawn from the cliches of the literature on action. When I raise my arm there occurs an event in the physical world. By itself this is not normally considered an action; something more must be involved, some sort of intentionality, if it is to have a meaning and be distinguishable from a spasm. Under what minimal conditions can raising my arm be considered a political act? If I consider it from a psycho-physiological (methodologically solipsistic) perspective, the act can never be political: it can signify anger (at something in my perceptual horizon), desire (to reach the tantalizing fruit), and many other things, but the conditions for political intentionality are clearly lacking. If I take the ego as existing in society with others, then many other intentionalities not available at the previous level become possible. For instance, since society is unthinkable without certain conventions (customs, typifications, roles) governing intersubjective interaction, the raised arm will now be "readable" in terms of such conventions. It may be a greeting, a signal to stop, a bid at an auction, and anything else of that sort. Because such conventions and typifications depend on the idealizations of the "reciprocity of perspectives" and "iterability," as Schutz has argued,24 the social can be seen as a context in which transactions between individuals take place on the basis of taken-for-granted modalities of reciprocity. Sociality is economic—i.e., based on a principle of equal exchange—and is the locus of institutions, whether tacit or explicit, that allow for "mindless" (automatic) circulation of social goods (behaviors) and so

23

What is the difference between philosophy and politics then? To put elliptically a matter into which we cannot enter here, the two are distinguished as are the temporalities of questioning, on the one hand, and deciding on the other. Thus, as shall be suggested in the conclusion of this essay, every political decision opens up a crevice through which the philosophical (transcendental) shines through.

24 Alfred Schutz, "Symbol, Reality and Society," in Collected Papers Volume I: The Problem of Social Reality, ed. Maurice Natanson (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1973), 315ff.

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anonymous social interactions (intentions).25 This economic character of the social thus enables the social actor to become a calculator, a good predictor of behavior under prevailing conventions. Does this social institutional context also suffice for the emergence of political significance in the act of raising one's arm? Consider the difference between the mass audience at a rock concert, arms raised with cigarette lighters lit in salute of the band, and the mass audience at a Nazi rally, arms raised in a Hitler salute. The latter but not the former is a political act. Why? In both cases the participants follow a convention, but in the latter case that convention is explicitly conceived in light of an institutionalized contest over the very meaning of social conventions. That is, the salute signifies not merely commonality—the kind of bond forged at a rock concert—but rather solidarity, commonality in a cause. Thus it is possible only where opposition to that cause is explicitly co-intended and, moreover, where such opposition occupies the same institutional framework as the current act.26 The context that makes it possible for an act to be political must involve institutions for the management of the conflict not over things (socio-economic conventions suffice in principle for that), but over the meaning of things. The institution of voting would be one such; but also rallies, petitions, political conventions, the press, deliberative bodies, "grass roots" movements, courts, constitutional guarantees, designated times for assemblies, campaigns, changes of office, and so on. Without such institutions, however rudimentary, no act could take on political significance, since without the institutional regulation of conflict over meaning one does not have politics, but war. Politics would thus be the attempt to contain the Us versus Them within the Us; without political institutions every dispute over meaning constitutes the disputants as aliens.

however, it will be useful to focus, very speculatively, on one aspect of this framework, viz., its connection with history. For the political actor can only attach political significance to his or her act if that act is understood in terms of a specific narrative of identity, or "tradition." The political institutions which regulate conflict may themselves be said to articulate and concretize such a narrative. The historicality of existence entails that the constitution of meaning (at least at the level of a phenomenology of the natural attitude) will refer, finally, to a horizon of narrative structures.27 The specifically political consequence of this lies in the fact that though narrative meaning is in a sense "given" as tradition, it is neither determined by the past nor an adequate determinant of future meaning. Because facts can be placed in dispute, and because any narratively constituted meaning involves appeal to normative elements that cannot be redeemed cognitively, politics is not only possible, but inevitable.28 The political actor is one who reads the particular narrative of her political culture in a certain way and judges that it ought to be carried on in a particular way that necessarily stands opposed to another—equally defensible— particular way. Political responsibility is thus responsibility for writing the narrative, continuing it, even to the limit case of revolution. And to be an adult, to be capable of such political responsibility, is to grasp oneself precisely in light of such a project. If, therefore, Roger votes for Bill because he is his brother and Bill has promised to give him a government job, his act has political consequences (because it occurs within the framework of political institutions), but he cannot be said to be acting politically. Or, if one prefers, the political intentionality of his act is in a certain sense "empty": qua voting, it emptily intends the future meaning adumbrated in the choice of a Democratic president, but it lack the "fullness" of being done "for the sake of that future.

Many things could be (and have been) said about the institutional framework necessary for political action. In order to delineate the political actor, 25 On the kinds of anonymity at issue here, see Maurice Natanson, Anonymity: A Study in the Philosophy of Alfred Schutz (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1986). 26 In an article analyzing how the secret ballot replaced open voting in Britain and the United States, Robert Bernasconi shows the connection between the raised arm and the political production of solidarity when he notes that "open voting in the course of an election meeting could mould a dispersed mass into an effective political body conscious of its power." Hence even while it protects the individual from coercion, adopting the principle of secret ballot also means reducing the political act to a private affair, thus further atomizing the political sphere. With regard to the newly enfranchised masses it thus "broke through the bonds that united a class of people and enabled them to see their power," i.e., it made solidarity invisible. Robert Bernasconi, "Disembodying the Body Politic: The Ballot Box and the Price of Democratic Reform in Britain and the United States," River City: A Journal of Contemporary Culture 15 (1995): 69.

25

One might object that though politics necessarily involves a conflict over the meaning of the narrative of one's political culture, it is not necessarily the case that opposing views are equally defensible, as was suggested above. But according to what standard is this judgment to be made? To claim that one view is morally superior to the other is to neglect the distinction between the moral and the political, while to claim that one narrative gets the facts wrong is to miss the point of politics. Since facts underdetermine narrative meaning, it is not necessarily the case that a politically relevant distinction between views can be derived from the fact that one resorts to "history" and the other to "myth." 27 This point is elaborated by David Carr, Time, Narrative, and History (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1986). 28

For a development of these points see my "Mixed Messages: The Heterogeneity of Historical Discourse," History and Theory 37 (1998): 220-244.

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Finally, if one claims that a certain continuation of the narrative better "lives up to" or embodies our political, cultural, or civilizational values, and is thus more defensible than another, what is this but to take a political stand, to be a partisan? Where is the court of appeals, outside of politics, to decide the issue? Thus an institutional framework of citizenship embodying a contestable narrative tradition is essential to that concrete autonomy which eidetically characterizes the political actor, i.e., one whose act is political as opposed to merely having political consequences. The political, but not the moral or the merely social, actor, must identify himself or herself explicitly in terms of a concrete (and therefore particular, contested) story that bestows meaning on the things of everyday life and that must be written by his or her deliberations and choices.29 How does this emphasis on conflict square with the communitarian view of politics, in which tradition also plays a central role? If communitarianism claims only that most political conflicts are resolved in light of shared assumptions and agreements about values within a particular community, our emphasis on conflict need not contest it, since this just means that embodying those shared assumptions and agreements are specific institutions and procedures for coming to political decisions in cases of conflict. But because political questions always have the meaning of cultural values (like liberty and equality) at stake, and because no narrative or tradition suffices to give that meaning the force of an ultimate ground or reason, it is not possible to claim that "background agreements" over values have political authority. For every background agreement uncovered in a particular instance of political dispute, disagreement can be generated by occupying the background level and questioning its meaning. The political actor is always at some level deciding whether the tradition is to be sustained as it is currently understood, or else understood in a new way, taken in a new direction. Charles Taylor nicely illustrates this when he demonstrates that the background of our own political culture involves two distinct, incompatible, and rationally undecidable visions—the naturalistic and

the theistic. He opts for the theistic as having "incomparably greater" resources for articulating and preserving that political culture, but this is a political decision: not an arbitrary decisionism, but not authoritatively sustained by any background agreement about the good either.30

26

VI. Conclusion: The Dilemma of the Political Actor Here we encounter the fundamental question facing an existentialphenomenological approach to the political actor. What does constitute the difference between the stance of sheer decisionism and something more responsible? Perhaps it can be shown that this is a pseudo-question, that radical decisionism is never an option, never a phenomenological circumstance. But even if I always have some reason for choosing what I choose, this does not mean that my reason can be shown to be better, in a specifically political sense, than another. Max Weber keenly felt this problem in his analysis of the political actor whose "passion"—selfless devotion to a cause—must be sustained only by "faith,"31 and it would be useful to explore this faith in light of our phenomenology of the political actor.32 Instead, Weber's formulation gives rise to a final speculation. Weber asks how "warm passion" (i.e., striving for a cause that gives the political pursuit of power some meaning and gives "inner strength" to one's actions) and "a cool sense of proportion" (i.e., a certain "distance from things and men," a "relentlessness in viewing the realities of life") can be "forged together" in one person.33 We might phrase this in our terms as follows: How can one act decisively for the sake of a particular narrative meaning when, with cool reflection, one recognizes that nothing either constrains or authorizes such a writing?34 Though this formulation implies the stance of the modern "politics of

30 Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989), 518.

31

Weber, "Politics as a Vocation," 117ff.

29

This suggests why civility is a fundamental value of our political culture. For it makes possible institutions in which conflict can be managed discursively, thus political institutions that are equal to the challenge of culturally pluralistic democracy. The political actor is not obliged to be civil (politics is not a sphere of obligation), but civility's contribution can be gauged phenomenologically. It is not equivalent to respect; I do not have to respect my opponent's views, but without civility the political act always verges on violence. And for similar reasons civility also seems politically prior to tolerance, for it is required if we are to deliberate on the meaning of the value of tolerance itself. That such deliberation is needed is shown in T. M. Scanlon, "The Difficulty of Tolerance," in Toleration: An Elusive Virtue, ed. David Heyd (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996), 226-239.

32 One who has taken up these problems explicitly in many essays over the years is Karl-Otto Apel. See, for example, his Diskurs und Verantwortung (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1988). 33

Weber, "Politics as a Vocation," 125f.

34 Joshua Miller shows how a similar problem emerges for William J a m e s ' s pragmatism when the psychological support for action derived from belief in a fixed, absolute truth collides with the idea of a "pluralistic universe" which can contain no such absolutes. Joshua Miller, ' T r u t h in the Experience of Political Actors: William James on Democratic Action," in The Prism of the Self: Philosophical Essays in Honor of Maurice

28

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Chapter Two the sublime," Weber still believes that the political actor can be understood in terms of the category of tragedy: acts taken for the sake of the cause cannot be counted upon to have the effects desired, cannot be counted on to contribute to the story that "should" be written. On our account of the political actor, however, this situation lacks one element of tragedy, viz., clear consciousness of what ought to be. For nothing authorizes us to claim that the best outcome was not attained, only that the one the actor intended did not come about. If this threatens to render human action meaningless (and no doubt Weber adopted dramatic metaphors as a hedge against this eventuality), it is also possible to draw another conclusion, namely, that in serving the cause the political actor must become aware that the origins of meaning are not visible from the vantage of the political, that politics cannot be everything. There would be no "transcendental politics," no fully grounded answer to the question of how the meaning of things ought to be written. Reversing Richard Rorty's "private irony, liberal hope" slogan,35 this would lend a certain irony to political action: the political actor would not be able to see her moment on the "stage" of history in terms of tragedy, but only in terms of unfinished narratives, contests, differends. To have attained this insight is to stand at the threshold where (non-narrative) philosophy's contribution to politics—or beyond it—becomes visible. Such insight, a "private hope," need not hobble one's ability to act politically with conviction but might well point toward motivations for the cultivation of civility, maturity, and a new understanding of political responsibility.

Natanson, ed. Steven G. Crowell (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1995), 131 — 146. Richard Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity (Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 73-95.

Political Community John J. Drummond Mount Saint Mary's College, Maryland

D e r n a t i i r l i c h e S t a a t u n d d e r k i i n s t l i c h e S t a a t . Letzteres: der Staat kiinstlich erwachsen aus einer Staatsvereinigung, einem Staat bildenden Verein. Ersteres: ein Staat erwachsend aus einer natiirlichen Abstammungsgemeinschaft. erwachsend als Gemeinschaft der Unterordnung des Willens unter eine Autoritat. des Stamrneshauptes. des Despoten, Tyrannen. etc. The natural state and the artificial state. The last: the state arising artificially from a political unification, a union forming a state. The first: a state arising from a natural ancestral community, arising as a community of subordination of the will under an authority, of the chief, of the despot, tyrant, etc.

—Edmund Husserl'

I. Introduction This curious and puzzling epigraph immediately raises two issues involved in Husserl's understanding of the political. The first, evident in the first sentence and emphasized by Husserl himself, is the apparent paradox that the state or political community arises at once by nature and by art or practical convention. The second concerns the particular forms of superordination and subordination found in the political community. The naturalness both of the state and of its authority is tied to ancestral relations. Husserl departs {a) from the fact that we are born into ancestral, that is, ethno-familial, communities and (b) from what he takes to be natural authority present in such communities, more specifically, from the natural authority of the father in the family (!). But familial or ancestral authority, on the one hand, and the political domination of the chieftain, the despot, and the tyrant, on the other, are not simply analogous. The familial community and the authority appropriate to it are grounded in the parents' natural, instinctual love for the child. While the superordination of the chief in the ancestral community might by extension be similarly grounded and while one might even stretch 1

Zur Phanomenologie der lntersubjektivitat: Texte aus dem Nachlass. Erster Teil: 1905-1920, ed. Iso Kern, Husserliana XIII (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1973), 110. First references to volumes of the Husserliana will include full bibliographic data; subsequent references will be abbreviated as "Hua' followed by the appropriate volume and page numbers.

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one's imagination and concede actual benevolence and beneficence to the benevolent despot, one would be hard pressed to imagine a similar grounding for the superordination of the malevolent despot or the tyrant. Moreover, even if Husserl is correct about the nature of the father's loving authority, his examples of the chief, despot, and tyrant seem far removed from his views concerning authenticity in the individual and the community. These views would seem to call for freely chosen patterns of superordination and subordination, a call that recalls Husserl's claim that the state is in part artificial or conventional. Coming full circle, however, if the political community arises from a voluntary act of association, we must ask whether it must still be tied to natural ancestral relations. What is clear from the epigraph is that the state is a community. In both its natural aspect as arising out of an ancestral community (Abstammungsgemeinschaft) and its conventional aspect as arising out of a political unification (Staatsvereinigung), the state is a species of community. Hence, our understanding of the political must anchor itself in a reflection on the nature of community. Interpretations of Husserl's social and political philosophy regularly and rightly emphasize (a) his notion of the rationally and volitionally autonomous agent ordered toward "self-actualization" in an "authentic" thinking and doing and (b) the (paradoxically?) related notion of the ethical renewal of the authentic community.2 A number of these interpretations, however, fail in one way or another to capture important features of political communities and of what political communities ought to be. This is, I think, no fault of the interpreters, but rather of Husserl himself. Born and raised in empires, suffering severe personal losses in the Great War and disillusioned in its aftermath, witness to the ineffectuality of the Weimar Republic, and suffering discrimination late in life under Nazi rule, it is perhaps no great surprise that Husserl, without rich examples of political life in which his notions of ethical renewal and philosophical authenticity could easily be seen, did not devote substantial efforts to considering political communities. Moreover, since he was temperamentally disposed to abstract reflections, he might—at least for substantial portions of his career—have thought it less important to focus on the concrete realities of political structures that he believed arose from factual rather than essential necessities. Hence, I wish to return to and take up anew certain tendencies in Husserl's phenomenology in order to disclose an understanding of

political communities consistent with what is expressed at the beginning of the epigraph (regarding the blend of the natural and the voluntary) but other than what is suggested at its end (regarding subordination).

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" I have especially in mind Karl Schuhmann. Husserls Staatsphilosophie (Munich: Verlag Karl Alber Freiburg, 1988); James G. Hart, The Person and the Common Life: Studies in a Husserlian Social Ethics (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1990), chap. 5; R. Philip Buckley, "Husserl's Notion of Authentic Community," American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly 66 (1992): 213-227. and Husserl, Heidegger and the Crisis of Philosophical Responsibility (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1992), chap. 5; and Natalie Depraz, "Phenomenological Reduction and the Political," Husserl Studies 12(1995): 1-17.

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II. The political community as natural Husserl's turn, later in his career, to problems of "generativity"3 provides the background for understanding his claim that the state is natural. The term "generativity" is essentially and happily ambiguous; it refers to the processes of engendering and becoming as well as to the fact that these processes occur repeatedly over generations.4 A generative community accounts for its own continued generation through generations, and accounts as well for how the world is already there for its members as passively constituted, shared, historical, and cultural. A natural generative community is one into which we are born. We are born, most obviously, into the natural community of the family with its biological patterns and rhythms: birth, maturation, mating, aging, disease, death. The nature of the family, however, is not exhausted by this biological relation. The family takes its place in a larger community—an extended family, a clan or tribe, an ethnic unity, a race, a cultural community. This cultural community is also a natural generative community. Its generativity is enabled by language. Language enables (a) the spoken and written transmission of traditional meanings, beliefs, practices, customs, rules, and institutions to new members of the community, (b) the appropriation of these traditions by the new members, and (c) the mutual interaction in which shared experiences are realized. Linguistic interaction, in other words, generates a common life, and any individual sharing this common life has a temporality and historicity

3

Cf, e.g., Edmund Husserl. Cartesianische Meditationen und Pariser Vortrage, ed. Stephan Strasser, Husserliana I (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1963); Cartesian Meditations: An Introduction to Phenomenology, trans. Dorion Cairns (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1970), 169/142; Edmund Husserl. Zur Phdnomenologie der Intersubjektivitdt: Texte aus dem Nachlass. Dritter Teil: 1929-1935, ed. Iso Kern, Husserliana XV (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1973), 168, 171-72; and Edmund Husserl, Die Krisis der europaischen Wissenschaften und die transzendentale Phdnomenologie. Erganzungsband: Texte aus dem Nachlass 1934-1937, ed. Reinhold Schmid, Husserliana XXIX (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1992). 3-17, 3746. 4

Cf. Anthony Steinbock, Home and Beyond: Generative Phenomenology after Husserl (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1995), 3. Cf. also Steinbock's discussion of Husserl's use of "Stamm" and its cognates (194-96), a root which can be translated variously as "stem" (of a plant), "trunk" (of a tree), "strain" (of bacteria), "root," "stock" or "lineage." We see this dimension of generativity in Husserl's claim that the state is grounded in an Abstammungsgemeinschaft, a community formed by familial descent and ancestral relations. We shall return to this point later in the paper.

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encompassing not only the totality of his or her own life but that of the community as a whole. Individual members of the community participate in a single, communal historicity made possible by linguistic transmission (Hua XXIX, 5). Our experiences of objects and the world are, then, invariably social insofar as they arise within and against this generative cultural horizon, within and against the passive background of the received opinions, common beliefs, and ordinary convictions that characterize the cultural tradition into which we are born. This tradition embodies a normal world-apprehension. 1 find myself in a world already articulated by the cultural community into which 1 am born, a community which values certain goods and establishes certain practices to secure them. My present experiences and anticipations regarding future experience are structured by linguistically transmitted and passively appropriated forms of apperception embodied in experience as conventions, as customary ways of encountering the world, as what "one" thinks or should think. These traditional forms of apperception, in other words, condition my normal and optimal expectations regarding the world and my individual and communal life, and so define (at least in part) my identity. Insofar as these conventions belong to a generative community, the normal world-apprehension is a cultural and traditional normality, or, as Husserl calls it, a "home-world" normality.5

"nation" (Nation) (Hua XXIX, 9-13). The interaction with alien peoples transforms the cultural generative community bound by linguistic and ethnic or racial commonality into a political community. The "we" of the cultural community into which I am born is, therefore, also and at the same time a national "we." The political community, although grounded in a cultural community, need not be bound exclusively by linguistic and ethnic or racial ties. Conquest, the movement of refugees, and patterns of immigration and emigration create the possibility of different cultural traditions coexisting within the same political territory, that is, they create the possibility of a linguistically, racially, and ethnically diverse political community. In other words, while the political community is grounded in the generative cultural community bound by race, ethnicity, and language, it is not simply coincident with that community. What is required, then, is an account of the "internal determination" of the political community, of its voluntary aspects which transform it from a natural, homogenous, and traditional people into a potentially heterogenous political community with defined patterns of authority no longer reducible to familial or ancestral patterns of authority.

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Our epigraph tells us that the state is natural insofar as it arises out of the natural generative community of the family grounded in ancestral relations, that is, insofar as it arises out of the cultural community Husserl has called a "people" (Volk). How is the natural, cultural, and generative community united by linguistic and, presumably, ethnic or racial bonds transformed into the political community? We can point first to what we might call an "external determination" of the political community. The normal world-apprehension is properly considered a home-world normality only in relation to another, foreign normality. The contrast between home and alien world-views arises insofar as I am aware not only of myself as belonging to a cultural community grounded in kinship but also of neighboring communities whose traditions, customs, and practices differ from those of my own community. When communities with alien normalities threaten our community, a political concentration is motivated. Our cultural community unifies as a political community, as a territorial community of citizens whose wills are united in establishing and maintaining fixed structures and agents for governing the affairs of the community in relation to alien, threatening communities (Hua XXIX, 11, 37). Husserl calls a people considered as a political community, that is, a people interacting with other peoples or political communities and a people with its own political historicity, a Cf., e.g., Hua XV, 214ff. and Steinbock's interesting and rich discussion of generative communities in Home and Beyond.

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III. The political community as voluntary Not all generative communities are natural; some, such as bridge clubs, trade unions, professional associations, academic societies, business partnerships, and political parties, are voluntary. I am not, for example, born into the community of mathematicians, but I can choose to join it. Should I so choose, I am introduced—in course work, for example—to mathematical concepts, to the theoretical language in which mathematicians speak, to the symbolic notation used by mathematicians, to the methods and techniques of mathematical reasoning, and to the solutions for classic mathematical problems. As an aspiring mathematician I receive the traditional determination of the discipline's nature and goals. Within this passively functioning context, I take up particular sub-disciplines and particular issues and problems, and I understand myself as working with others—those upon whose work I build, my contemporaries with whom I interact as colleagues in collaborative work or in controversy, and those newcomers, students, and research assistants to whom I pass along the mathematical tradition—in order to preserve, maintain, and extend the mathematical tradition.

6 For Husserl's discussions of the traditional character of disciplines, geometry in particular, cf. "Die Frage nach dem Ursprung der Geometrie als intentionalhistorisches Problem." Die Krisis der europaischen Wissenschaften und die transzendentale Phanomenologie. Eine Einleilung in die phanomenologische Philosophie, ed. Walter Biemel. 2nd ed. Husserliana VI (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1962: "On the Origin of

nrl TmnsrpnHpntnl Phpnnmpnn/ncrv An

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Every community has for the mature adult its voluntary aspect. Although I do not choose to enter the political community into which I am born, I can choose to remain or leave. I shall now explore the voluntary dimensions of the generative, political community, and shall proceed in several steps: (a) a consideration of the community as a functional interpenetration of wills; (b) a consideration of the cultural community as a moral community; and (c) a consideration of the relation between the moral and political communities. (a) Community as the functional interpenetration of wills A community, first of all, is nothing apart from the individuals composing it.7 However, a community cannot be reduced to the mere collection of individuals it comprises, nor are its achievements reducible to the separate achievements of individuals (Hua XXVII, 48). The communities in which we find ourselves have experiences and activities proper to themselves. The active community arises against the background of the passivity essential to the generative community. It is founded upon individuals as mediated by specifically social acts, "acts in which [a man] places himself in a communicative relation toward his fellow men, speaks with them, writes letters, reads about them in the papers, associates with them in communal activities, makes promises to them, etc." (Hua IV, 182/191; cf. also Hua XIV, 166-67; Hua XXVII, 22). In addition to and in contrast with the sociality arising from the passivity of an appropriated tradition, our experiences of objects and our actions within the world are social insofar as they are constituted, enhanced, and extended by patterns of reciprocal communication and co-operation, insofar, in other words, as our reciprocal, communicative interactions co-constitute an active foreground for our jointly experienced world and our common pursuit of social goods therein.

sociality is little more than the coincidence of separate experiences. Second, there are experiences that are verbally or non-verbally communicative and in which the articulation of the object is a shared activity, for example, when neighbors talk about the weather over the back fence or friends embellish a joke they have heard.8 There is a mutual interaction, a give-and-take in which responses are received from the other, and amendments are made and offered back to the other for incorporation into a joint articulation. Third, there are social acts in which one person seeks via a communicative experience to influence not only the understanding but the actions of another. One person directs a communicative action, say, gesturing, speaking, or writing, towards the other with the intention that the other notice it and take it up not merely for consideration but also for action (Hua XIV, 166ff). When a listener accepts the communicated volitional intention of the speaker as his or her own, then the speaker's intended act, realized through the listener, is the listener's act, and the listener's act, intended by the speaker, is at the same time the speaker's act. In this way a genuinely communal experience and activity is formed (Hua IV, 192 ff./202ff.); the action is their action. The community is fully achieved in these communicative, reciprocally interactive experiences in which we experience others as companions, colleagues, and co-workers (Hua IV, 194/204) whose interpenetrating wills form a practical community of wills embodying a shared understanding of the world.

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There are different degrees or levels of social acts. First, several persons can be directed to the same object; they recognize the object as the same and as an object for us. Their experiences are social insofar as they share a common object, but, apart from the shared horizon a generative tradition provides, this Introduction to Phenomenological Philosophy, trans. Northwestern University Press, 1970), 353-378/365-86.

David

Carr

35

For Husserl, then, the community has its own striving and willing life, analogous to that of an individual person (Hua XIV, 170, 174; Hua XXVII, 22), and the individual within the community is a representative (Trager) and functionary of the communal will (Hua XIV, 178-81; Hua XXVII, 22). Each person assumes his or her own role and function in the larger community, recognizing the fulfillment of that role as his or her contribution to the striving of the community as a whole, a striving whose realizing activity is irreducible to the activities of the individual members of the community (Hua XIV, 181). Within the mathematical community, to take Husserl's example, individual mathematicians study their different areas, and individuals working in the same

(Evanston: 8

For Hussed's discussion of the interpenetration of wills in the formation of a communal will, see Ideen zu einer reinen Phanomenologie und phanomenologische Philosophic Zweites Buch: Phanomenologische Untersuchungen zur {Constitution, ed. Marly Biemel, Husserliana IV (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1952); Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy. Second Book: Studies in the Phenomenology of Constitution, trans. Richard Rojcewicz and Andre Schuwer (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers. 1989), 192-94/202-204; Zur Phanomenologie der Intersubjektivitdt. Texte aus dem Nachlass. Zweiter Teil: 1921-1928, ed. Iso Kern, Husserliana XIV (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1973), 169-70, 200-201; and Aufsdtze und Vortrage (1922-1937), ed. Thomas Nenon and Hans-Reiner Sepp, Husserliana XXVII (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1989). 22, 48-49.

Cf. Charles Taylor's example of neighbors talking about the weather as a joint articulation; see "Cross-Purposes: The Liberal-Communitarian Debate," Philosophical Arguments (Cambridge: Harvard University Press. 1995), 189. The crucial point is not the appeal to discussion and language in these examples, although both involve conversations. The crucial point is that we move beyond coordinated and cooperative actions to what Taylor calls a "common rhythm'" ("To Follow a Rule." Philosophical Arguments. 173) and to what Nancy Sherman refers to variously as "mutual interaction," '"mutual tracking," and "mutual engagement" ("The Virtues of Common Pursuit," Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 53 [ 1993J: 280). The mutual interaction can be established, for example, by nods of the head in response to another's description of the weather; cf. Taylor, 189 and Sherman, 281. For Husserl's discussions of communicative interaction, cf. Hua IV, 182-94/191-204. and Hua XIV, 196-97.

36

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areas form groups seeking to attain evidential insights for those issues, questions, and problems central to the particular area of mathematics in which they work. Together the mathematicians comprised by such groups articulate views on these issues and solutions to these questions and problems by collaborating on certain tasks and by reviewing and commenting upon each other's work. Equally important, individual mathematicians, to the extent that they explicitly recognize that their work affects and is affected by the work of other mathematicians in their area, recognize that the evidences they achieve are already accomplishments of a social reason and, to the extent that they recognize that the work of the group to which they belong is similarly interwoven with the work of groups in different but conceptually related fields, they recognize that their work and the work of their group are functionally related to the work of the community of mathematicians as a whole. Hence, any evidences a mathematician might attain have a functional interconnection with evidences achieved by other mathematicians working both in their own sub-discipline as well as in other sub-disciplines. The functional interweaving of such evidences yields an evidence appropriate to mathematics as a whole, and this social achievement is irreducible to the sum of the achievements of individual mathematicians conceived as isolated thinkers.

In this coordination and subordination of wills is formed the authentic community with a single, communal will to be realized in the separate, but interpenetrating activities of its members (Hua XIV, 170-81, 194-95; Hua XXVII, 22). In such a community, we find the fullness of social, rational agency. But this view of community seems realizable primarily for artificial communities voluntarily entered. The tension between individual and social activity and between individual and communal goods is much more difficult to resolve in moral and political communities, for it is not clear that there is agreement, as there is in the mathematical community, about the goods to which the community directs itself. It is not clear, in other words, that the nature of the coordination and subordination of wills existing in moral and political communities is analogous to that in the mathematical community. (b) The cultural community as a moral community The cultural community is generatively formed and maintained by the transmission of traditional beliefs, customs, and practices. Concerned with practice, the cultural community is necessarily a moral community wherein one

Moreover, the goods realized by the mathematical community are not decomposable into the goods realized by individual mathematicians. This is true, as we have seen, because the mathematical work is both divided and interwoven, and the evidential insights attained by individual mathematicians or subdisciplinary groups is interwoven with every other mathematical evidence. Second, the goods belonging to the mathematical community are not decomposable precisely because one of the goods realized is attained in the interactive work itself, in the collaboration, in the co-articulation of the mathematical discipline. One of the goods realized, in other words, is the good of collegiality. Finally, the goods realized in the mathematical community are irreducible insofar as they belong to the discipline itself rather than to any individual. It is in the nature of mathematical reason itself that we find the nature of mathematical truth and evidence; it is in understanding the nature of mathematical reason that we understand the good mathematicians seek. To summarize, then, the voluntary community of mathematicians—and any voluntary community—has two fundamental characteristics: (a) a freely undertaken coordination of individual wills and, at the same time, (b) a freely undertaken subordination of individual wills to the goods defined by the nature of the activity to which the community is dedicated.9 The mathematical community is Husserl's favorite example of an authentic community. Lewis Gordon, in our discussion of Philip Buckley's paper in this volume, suggested that a jazz ensemble might be a better example. The jazz ensemble in its improvisations, wherein players alternately take the lead and support the lead of others.

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certainly manifests that combination of individual insight, functional interpenetration of wills, and subordination both to highlighting the lead player and to the piece itself, and is an excellent example of a community in Husserl's sense. Buckley himself suggests that Husserl's selection of the mathematical community as his example was influenced by David Hilbert's view of all the mathematical disciplines as forming a unitary science. Buckley also suggests that the attainment of a single understanding by the mathematical community as a whole is probably impossible. It is likely true, however, as Buckley indicates in a note to his paper, that Husserl's direct experience of the extraordinary group of mathematicians and mathematical physicists (including not only Hilbert but also Felix Klein, Hermann Minkowski. Richard Courant. and Hermann Weyl) collaborating at Gottingen in the early years of the century influenced Husserl's understanding of the possibility of an authentic, mathematical community. Husserl's model, in other words, might in fact not have been the mathematical community but a mathematical community. Both the jazz ensemble and the Gottingen group are small communities, and it is certainly easier to envision Husserl's notion of an authentic community as a small community in which each member can attain or share the insights of the other members, thereby creating the possibility of a single understanding belonging to the community as a single '-personality of a higher order" (cf. Hua XIV, 22. and Hua XXVII, 194-95). Nevertheless, I do not think we should abandon thinking about the possibilities of an authentic community as large, since most political communities today are in fact large communities. In such a community, it would not be the case that each member would replicate the insights achieved by all the other members such that the community could be said to have a single understanding. But the large community might nevertheless comprise individuals who achieve a certain level of individual authenticity (cf. below, 39-41), and it might at the same time satisfy the two conditions stated above, the first of which joins the activities of interconnected groups within the larger community (groups in which a strong sense of authentic achievement might be realizable) and the second of which unifies the ends (rather than the activities) of the community as a whole. This is a weaker sense of authentic community, perhaps, than Husserl's, but it is, I think, also mnrp rpalislir anri more nnnmnriflte for a larpp nolitical commnnitv.

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PHENOMENOLOGY OF THE POLITICAL

person takes another's good or bad as his or her own good.10 Moral communities embody a sociality of reason, a sense of the goods to which the community and its members are directed, and a plurality of virtues conducive to these goods. Moral sociality as realized in the practice of the moral virtues manifests degrees comparable to those we have seen in social reason. In the case of so-called "selfregarding" or "intrapersonal" virtues, such as temperance, I pursue for myself what I recognize to be a good for others distributively, that is, a good common to each individual, but I do not target the other in my activity.'' My temperate activities realize goods for others insofar as they provide examples for others to follow, but the activities of individuals in pursuit of temperance appear somewhat coincidental. In the case of the so-called "other-regarding" or "interpersonal" virtues, such as generosity or justice, on the other hand, I pursue the good for the other in a manner that targets the other in my action. The realization of the other's good is the end of my action, and the good accrues to the other directly rather than indirectly by example. In the case of the interpersonal virtues, then, we find an interpenetration of wills and action, but not yet in the full sense, for this kind of agency can exist without mutuality and reciprocity. When such reciprocity exists, moral agents act in such a way that the good is done not only to the other but also with the other; the reciprocal activities co-articulate the good and realize the good for all the agents (and patients) involved. We can see here why compassion is the fundamental social emotion and justice a fundamental social virtue. Continued, reciprocal acts of justice, grounded in a compassionate valuing of the other's good, confirm and refine the community's sense of justice and not only benefit individual patients but produce a just order in the community as a whole. Nevertheless, despite the presence of a generatively transmitted sense of common goods and despite the exercise of the moral virtues, the moral community seems to lack the homogeneity of ends present in voluntary communities. In the voluntary community, the controlling ends chosen by its members are the same for all, but in the cultural and moral community individuals make varying vocational choices and, given these different controlling choices, differently order their pursuits of the good life.12 To what Cf. Hua XIV, 172-75: cf. also Robert Sokolowski. Moral Action: A Phenomenological Study (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1985), 54-55. " Cf. John J. Drummond, "Agency. Agents, and (Sometimes) Patients," The Truthful and the Good: Essays in Honor of Robert Sokolowski, ed. John J. Drummond and James G. Hart (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers. 1996), 155-56. 12

Cf. Hua XXVII, 28; cf. also John Drummond, "Moral Objectivity: Husserl's Sentiments of the Understanding," Husserl Studies 12 (1995): 179. A vocational good compares to what Charles Taylor calls a "hypergood," a material good of overriding

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ends then, could the members of a moral community be said to subordinate themselves freely such that the differences among individual ends would not prevent an interpenetration and unification of wills in an authentic moral community? To the extent that membership in a moral community reveals that humans are thinking and desiring agents, to the extent that we can philosophically identify essential features of rational agency, and to the extent that our intentional life is teleologically ordered toward evident judgment, we can articulate a material a priori of the human good, that is, we can articulate universal—but indeterminate—goods whose attainment is part of the realization of rational agency itself.13 In addition to any vocational callings to a central good around which we order the pursuit of goods in our daily lives, we are all as humans called to the full exercise of reason with its teleological direction toward evidential understanding in both the theoretical and practical domains. We are called, in other words, to the "authentic" human life, the life of rational, free, insightful agency, a life that involves not just the understanding but also the desires and emotions,'4 and not just ourselves but others. The realization of an authentic life, for Husserl, is genuinely a philosophical task, for evidence in the full sense requires not only that we recognize the evident truth of something but that we attain an evidential understanding of the experiential and sense-foundations of our ordinary experiences and beliefs. Even if we assume that not everyone will be a philosopher in the full sense, there remains a sense of authenticity common to all members of the human community. Everyone in principle can raise questions and resolve doubts about the beliefs they hold and the goods they pursue. This ethical criticism and reflection on the true and the good involves attaining evidences about human nature, about ourselves, about our culture's understanding of the good, and about available goods and what conduces to them in the situations wherein we are called upon to act. Everyone in principle can attain those evidences proper to the critical, reflective life ordered around a non-philosophical vocation and its pursuit. The realization of the authentic life in this non-philosophical, vocational sense is a non-manifest good insofar as it is superveniently realized in the truthful pursuit of every other substantive, vocational good (Hua XXVII, 2 8 34).15 certain moral identity to a person; cf. Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1989), 63. 13

For an indication of how such a view might be developed, cf. Drummond. "Moral Objectivity," 174-78. 14

15

Cf. Drummond, "Moral Objectivity." 170-74.

For a discussion of authenticity as a non-manifest good, cf. Drummond, "Moral Objectivity." 180-81.

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Certain conditions are necessary for the full exercise of rational, free, insightful agency. Some of these conditions are primarily bodily, for example, life itself, health, and the sustenance and shelter necessary for maintaining them. These conditions call forth virtues such as civility, temperance, generosity, and justice in the distribution of material goods. Others are not primarily bodily, e.g., education with its concern for both theoretical and practical truth, and freedoms such as those of thought, association, and speech. These conditions call forth virtues such as wisdom, prudence, courage (both intellectual and practical), and honesty. All these—the exercise of thought and agency in the fullest degree, its conditions, and the virtues called forth by those conditions—are human goods as such. It is the nature of rational agency itself, then, and the goods necessary to it that provide the abstract and a priori framework of ends to which rational agency in the moral community directs itself. If some of these abstract and a priori goods in their concrete cultural determinations are irreducible social goods—and they are, since rational agency is necessarily social in its passive appropriation and active articulation of goods—then the moral community can be understood in a manner analogous to the mathematical community. There is a free subordination of wills to those ends disclosed in the philosophical reflection on the nature of rational, moral agency itself, and there is a free coordination of wills in realizing in common pursuits the activities and virtues conducive to rational free agency. Our .se/^actualization as individual, rational, moral agents requires, in other words, the communal realization of certain moral goods in a definite historical situation. But there is an apparent paradox here. Individual freedom and authenticity require that the individual evidentially recognize and choose that vocational good and those supporting goods which are the best for that person in the circumstances in which he or she lives.16 The authentic individual, then, can truly be a member of a community only to the extent that the communal will does not negate the individual will. Indeed, the notion of individual authenticity and the "voluntarism" it suggests could be thought to entail a liberal community wherein "shared" goods are merely coincidentally chosen in the way that "shared" objects are experienced when we individually perceive the same tree. And this problem is magnified to the extent that different individuals choose different goods. But if shared goods were willed only coincidentally, or even not at all, it would be hard to understand how the moral community could have its own will, one not reducible to the collection of individual wills. Indeed, we seem faced by a dilemma: either authentic individuality, precisely because it is authentically individual, prevents the realization of a genuinely communal will

16 Cf. Husserl's version of the categorical imperative with its tie to circumstance and the possibilities existing therein; see Hua XXVIII. 52, 221. Cf. also Drummond, "Moral Obiectivitv," 169-70.

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and raises the prospect of social unraveling, or the communal will, precisely because it is communal, undercuts the autonomy of the individual person. Can we solve the problem created for social reason and agency by different individuals choosing different goods or by their choosing the same good only coincidentally? Can the coordination and subordination of wills characteristic of authentic communities be realized by that group of individuals? I believe so. The universal goods identified in an eidetic abstraction as the material a priori of the human are indeterminate.17 They are particularized in different ways in different cultural and historical circumstances, and our experience of these goods is always the experience of a concrete, culturally determined, traditional understanding of them. The achievement of this understanding is already an exercise of social reason and the achievement of a moral community. But if several cultural groups cohabit a political territory, conflicts among different cultural particularizations of the abstract, indeterminate goods might arise. Moreover, even where the political territory is populated by a homogenous people, these indeterminate universal goods and the cultural determinations thereof can be further particularized in different ways in the lives of individuals living within that territory. The different particularizations in the lives of individuals reflect different choices about the vocational goods around which an individual chooses to order his or her life, and to the extent that these vocational goods are truly particularizations of the universal goods, all these choices are morally legitimate. Amidst this difference, however, it is possible to recognize the identity of the universal goods in the different particularizations; they might be embodied differently in different lives and actions and they might have different importance for different persons, but they are the same goods. The abstract, indeterminate good is an identity in a manifold of different cultural determinations, and the communal good is an identity in a manifold of individual particularizations. Consequently, it is at least theoretically possible that there could be an authentic moral community in which we find a harmonious and reciprocal coordination of wills differently directed to individual goods and a subordination to identical communal goods. Practical difficulties remain, however. Different persons might choose different, legitimately determined, concrete goods, but cultural and historical circumstances, for example, scarce resources, might make their concurrent realization impossible. This circumstance can actively disrupt attempts to forge a moral community, and exhibits the need for political structures in which the conflicts that arise can be reconciled. Husserl, unlike, say, Aristotle or Hegel, does not believe that the community qua political is the telos or fulfillment of all social groupings; he reserves that privilege for the authentic moral community,

Drummond, "Moral Objectivity," 176.

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the "community of love" as he sometimes calls it.18 Even so, however, the political community cannot be conceived apart from the moral community. Seeking to reconcile competing conceptions of the good as particularized by different individuals or cultural groups within the political territory and to resolve conflicts arising in the moral community therefrom, the political community is, on the one hand, a certain kind of limitation of the moral community and, on the other, a new community arising out of a political association. How should we understand this political community both as a limitation of the moral community and as original? (c) The moral community and the political community Reason in the moral sphere functions on three inseparable, but distinguishable, levels: (l)the identification—a philosophical task—of the material a priori of rational agents and the identification of indeterminate, universal goods for humans; (2) the cultural determination and particularization of these goods relative to the history, traditions, and material circumstances (for example, physical, geographic, and economic circumstances) of a people—a social task; and (3) the individual choices undertaken within and against the background of these cultural, historical, and material circumstances. Since the need for political mediation arises in the conflict of legitimate particularizations of universal goods, the problems to be addressed by what I shall call "political reason" can arise at the second and third levels. Individual choices and pursuits lead to conflicts at the third level, but these cannot always be settled simply by appeals to the second level of social reason. Since individual choices always occur against a passive, cultural background and since, given patterns of conquest, immigration, and the movement of refugees, it is possible that a territory identified with a political community will over time come to be occupied by peoples of different cultures—thereby possibly engendering conflicts at the second level as well—political reason cannot simply be identified with the second level of social reason. Moreover, while any mediation of conflicts, at either level, must occur within the framework provided by the universal goods identified at the first level, political reason cannot simply be identified with the exercise of philosophical reason at the first level. Political reason cannot abstract—as philosophical reason does—from the concrete historical, cultural, and material context in which the political community exists.19 Nor can political reason abstract from competing conceptions of the

18

For a description of the authentic community and its relation to authentic selfrealization, cf. Hua XXVII, 44-54, and for the language of the community of love, cf. Hua XIV. 175. Cf. also Schuhmann, Husserls Staatsphilosophie, 49, 116. Hence, Rawls's account of the original position (A Theory of Justice [Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1971], 1 Iff.) is an example of a confusion of philosophical and nr>litir*al rpasnn insofar as its In ahstrart frnm the nersnnal historical, and cultural

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good. It cannot offer itself simply as a limitation upon the moral by claiming neutrality with respect to competing conceptions of the good and by adopting merely procedural devices to resolve conflicts.20 A reliance on such proceduralism is self-defeating, for we must distinguish the mere fact of resolution from the justice achieved by that resolution or, to put the matter another way and on a deeper plane, we must distinguish between the principles of justice determined by a fair, rational procedure and the standard against which we judge the moral worth of those principles. Such a standard necessarily points toward concrete, substantive conceptions of the good.21 We cannot, therefore, avoid the claim that there are substantive goods to which a political community and its citizens should direct their activities. circumstances in which the parties to the original contract would be called upon to act. The first tendency of such an abstraction is to commit oneself to a Kantian metaphysics of the self as an autonomous being subject to rational constraints rather than a being for whom moral judgments are a blend of cognitive and emotional elements (although Rawls later claims that his account of justice is political rather than metaphysical [cf. "Justice as Fairness: Political not Metaphysical," Philosophy and Public Affairs 14 (1985): 223-39; and Political Liberalism (New York: Columbia University Press. .1993), 12f.]), and the second tendency of such an abstraction is to transform liberty or choice (and its procedural guarantees) into the fundamental political good rather than a supervenient good realized in the pursuit of other substantive goods. Here is a second difference between Rawls's conception of public reason and the view of political reason I am here suggesting. Reasoning on political questions beyond the fundamental principles of justice is, according to Rawls, governed by those principles and by establishing a set of guidelines specifying both publicly acceptable ways of reasoning and also criteria limiting the kinds of reasons that can be brought to bear on political questions (cf. Rawls. Political Liberalism. 223). In addition, public reason must agree, beyond the principles of justice, on '"constitutional essentials," e.g., the branches and powers of government and the basic rights and liberties of citizens immune to limitation by legislative action (ibid., 227). Finally, public reason must apply these principles of justice and constitutional essentials to particular cases. In doing so, an appeal to political values is unavoidable, but, according to Rawls's conception of public reason, we can appeal to only those political values we "believe, in good faith, that all citizens as reasonable and rational might reasonably be expected to endorse" (ibid., 236). Hence, neutrality among competing, concrete conceptions of the good is preserved by public reason insofar as no differences between the competing conceptions are decisive for public reason. Even when liberalism and its conception of public reason is divorced from a Kantian metaphysics of the person, it retains the tendency to transform choice into the fundamental good secured by procedural neutrality. But such a purely political or "minimalist" liberalism cannot, in fact, resolve our most intractable political questions without begging the question about the relative merits and demerits of competing conceptions of the good; cf. Michael Sandel, Democracy's Discontent: America in Search of a Public Philosophy (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1996), 17-24.

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Political reason, then, insofar as it is both social and moral, must devote itself to identifying the goods to be realized by the political community in a definite historical and social situation. It must articulate a determinate and shared conception of the community's good, and this conception must at one and the same time allow for differing particularizations of the good at both the second and third levels and enable the mediation of conflicts at either level. But if part of the function of the political community is to make determinate judgments regarding social goods, the political community cannot simply be the liberal community. The reconciliation of competing goods within a community can occur only insofar as they are united in a more encompassing good or insofar as one good is judged higher and more important than another.22 In either case, the pursuit of some goods will, in certain contexts and to some extent, be devalued in favor of others. If, however, the political community cannot simply be the liberal community, neither can it be simply illiberal. Among the goods identified in the universal a priori of human goods is authentic, rational free agency itself, that is, autonomy or self-responsibility or self-actualization as a rational agent. Autonomy, in Husserl's sense, is first rational and then practical (cf. Hua VI, 6/8). Moral and political decisions are made in the light of cognitive and emotional legitimation, and the end of rational free agency limits the illiberalism of the political community.

and those practices by which these excellences can be developed within its citizens. These, then, are the troubled waters through which political reason must chart its course. It must (a) define in an exercise of social reason a determinate, shared conception of the good centered around the fundamental political good of self-governance and the development of those virtues and institutions conducive thereto; (b) guarantee for all citizens the (political) exercise of rational free agency, i.e., free participation in self-governance; and (c) permit individual and group pursuits of legitimate particularizations of the indeterminate universal goods consistent with the shared conception of the good defining the political community. These—an emphasis on the common good, an emphasis on civil rights, and the mediation of individuals' relations to the political community by other and overlapping communities—are the main features of the primary good of self-governance. The determinate, political conception of the good cannot, however, simply be identical with that of the historically founding or presently dominant culture within the political community; otherwise, conflicts among legitimate particularizations of the good at the second level will be settled coercively (rather than reconciled) and authenticity will be unavailable to minority or new groups within the political society and to individuals who do not fully accept the dominant view. The political community, at least in heterogenous political societies, must in its focus on political goods "de-particularize" the founding or dominant conception of the good without falling into the philosophical abstractions of the first level. This is accomplished not by disallowing certain kinds of appeal in civic discourse but by remaining open to as many contributions from as many different groups, associations, and communities as possible while, at the same time, institutionally embodying only that determinate conception of the good necessary to enable self-governance and to ensure the continuation of a civic tradition of participation in self-governance. But political reason must at the same time continue to commit itself to a hierarchy of substantive goods—although this might change over time in response to contributions by new members of the political community—in terms of which conflicts are resolved and in terms of which some pursuits are judged outside the boundaries of the goods legitimately pursued in this political community.

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No individual, as we have seen, attains authenticity apart from the sociality of reason, that is, within a community. Moreover, no community can be authentic, that is, no community can attain in exercises of social reason the evidences appropriate to communal life, apart from the attainment of mutually interactive, interpenetrating, and functional related evidences by the individuals composing the community. The limitation of the moral community yielding the political community, then, is not the limitation of an abstraction from the concrete, cultural, historical, and materials circumstances of agency, and it is not the limitation of a neutrality among competing, substantive conceptions of the good. It is instead a restrictive focusing on those goods proper to the realization of the non-manifest good of authenticity in the political community. But the authenticity of a political community is nothing other than the self-governance of social reason. The political community must identify relative to the cultural, historical, and material circumstances in which it is situated those goods and civic excellences—for example, a concern with the common good, practical wisdom, a sense of justice, and civility as well as goods original and proper to the political community, for example, security, political stability, civic participation—that best conduce to self-governance by the citizens, and it must identify further those legislative, executive, and judicial institutions in which 22

This recalls Husserl's "law of absorption;" cf. Vorlesungen Uber Ethik und Wertlehre. 1908-1914. ed. Ullrich Melle, Husserliana XXVIII (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1988), 145.

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Are explicit prohibitions of vices and, more importantly, explicit limitations on arguably pursuable goods within determinate cultural, historical, and material circumstances incompatible with the pursuit of authentic rational agency? Not if we take seriously Husserl's conception of reason which insists that autonomous or self-responsible reason is realized in intersubjective evidential insight. Not, in other words, if we take seriously Husserl's insistence that reason is teleologically ordered toward truth and that moral and political truths are attained in exercises of social reason by a political community encompassing

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overlapping natural and voluntary associations, a community, in other words, that is at once political and moral. And not if we take seriously the claim that authenticity can be realized by the political community only if the goods pursued by the community and its citizens are ordered toward the community's self-governance or, at least, do not interfere with that overriding good of selfgovernance and the development of civic virtues in the citizens. In summary, then, the political community is a territorial community of citizens whose wills are functionally united (a) in establishing and maintaining fixed structures and agents for governing the affairs of the community in relation to alien, potentially threatening communities, (b) in determining the irreducibly social, political goods toward which the communal pursuits of the citizens precisely as self-governing citizens are to be directed in the definite historical, cultural (or multi-cultural), and physical circumstances in which the political community exists, (c) in guaranteeing to all citizens and in encouraging in each participation in authentic self-governance, and (d) in maximally permitting individuals and groups comprised by the political community to pursue additional goods consistent with the communal pursuit of political goods by the political community itself.2j The political community is natural insofar as it is grounded in generative, ancestral and cultural communities, and it is voluntary insofar as the determination of irreducible social and political goods involves both the free coordination of the citizens' willing activities and the free subordination of the citizens' wills to the indeterminate universal goods disclosed in the philosophical reflection on rational agency and particularized in and by the political community itself. To the extent that we are called to a life of rational free agency to be achieved in social acts, we are called to a free participation in the political community's insightful determination of political goods and in the common pursuits through which these are realized, that is, we are called to a free participation in communal self-governance and to the exercise of the civic virtues enabling it.

continuous nor analogous, and the latter cannot be simply grounded in the former. The political relations of superordination and subordination that exist in the political community must be established in the details of the voluntary association co-constitutive of the community. One way to enter this problem is to consider the relations of equality and inequality that exist in communities of various sorts. Some interweavings of wills are unequal. In generative communities qua historical, for example, we find an essential inequality in the interweaving of wills. To take a specific example, in the community of philosophers the work of past philosophers, say, Aristotle and Husserl, is informed by a willing and a striving that I take up as my own willing and striving (cf. Hua XIV, 195, 198). My activity is directed to the fulfillment of that volition that now has both a historical and enduring character to it. But Aristotle's will and Husserl's will are not reciprocally transformed by similarly experiencing and taking up my will's striving for philosophical truth. Similarly, the communal will of the writers of the Constitution of the United States is taken up by current citizens in such a way that the political goods sought by the authors are sought also by us; once again, however, the converse is not simply true. Although the wills of Aristotle, Husserl, and the Founding Fathers might have included within their intention that the goods they identified be further articulated by successive generations of philosophers and citizens, Aristotle, Husserl, and the Fathers do not experience my will in the determinate way that I experience their wills. Their intending of my goods is indeterminate; hence, there is for them only an empty intending of the historically reciprocal interweaving of wills. My intending of the goods identified by them, on the other hand, is determinate and fulfilled. This essential inequality within historical communities cannot be overcome.

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IV. Sovereignty, political institutions, and political virtues The second problem suggested by our epigraph concerned the relations of subordination and authority found in political communities. Husserl, we said, generalized (a severe!) paternal authority in his identification of the chief, despot, and tyrant. Familial and political authority are neither identical nor 23

This account, of course, does not exhaust the nature of the political community. It does not, for example, take into account questions concerning the institutions that might be established to achieve the ends proper to the political community, i.e., it does not consider the relation between the political community and the state. Nor does it consider what ends, if any, beyond self-governance (e.g., stability and self-preservation) might Drooerlv be soueht bv the institutional fimhndimpnt nf the nnlitiral mmmimitv

Similarly, in the naturally arising community of the family, the interweaving of wills during the child's immaturity is again essentially unequal, but it can be overcome. As the child matures, a greater degree of equality in the interweaving of the wills arises and, in some cases, for example, when infirm parents can no longer care for themselves, the inequality might even be reversed. What inequality exists in the familial community, however, is properly grounded in instinctual love and concern, and, given the varying abilities of persons to care for themselves at different periods in their lives, relations of authority, power, and domination arise. But, when considering the mature, adult members of a family, legitimate relations of authority won by rational persuasion can arise, whereas relations of power and domination are—or should be—absent. We find a similar equality in voluntary communities. When the member of a community becomes, so to speak, a full-fledged member, there is an equality of relation between the members of the community. When, for example, the aspiring mathematician completes his or her training—his or her apprenticeship, if you like— the new and the old mathematician become colleagues rather than

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teacher and student. The contemporaneous community of mature adults, in other words, is essentially an equal community. Other communities, however, are non-essentially unequal, and such communities are inherently bad. Take, for example, the politico-economic relation of slavery. Here we find a non-essential inequality in the interweavings of wills, an inequality which should be overcome. In the master-slave relationship, there is clearly a community of wills; actions come from the established interweaving of the two wills embodied in the master's commanding an action and the slave's dutiful performance, a performance that includes the slave's self-recognition as subordinate to the master, as obligated to obey the master's will (Hua XIV, 169-70, 181-82). Even though the subjugation to a particular command might in one respect be willful on the part of the one subjugated, the slave remains coerced in this relationship, for his or her will could not be otherwise within the context of this community to whose structures of power and domination the slave would not agree apart from the possibility of coercion already present in the generative community in which the slave finds himself or herself. No master-slave community, no naturally arising community based on coercive power among mature adults, and no artificial community not based on voluntary agreements is an authentic community. Authentic communities are only those populated by authentic individuals each of whose willing activity involves, first, a rational insight into what is valuable and, second, an autonomous willing grounded in that insight. The legitimation of authority is problematic when the contemporaneous community of mature adults is coercively unequal, for that is inconsistent with the realization of the non-manifest good of free, rational agency itself. The essential inequality of a historical community, for example, does not of itself involve the coerced subjugation of one will to another; it does not by itself establish relations of power and domination. However, the essential inequality of the historical community can produce a non-essential inequality in the contemporaneous community of mature adults when the traditional meanings, beliefs, practices, customs, rules, and institutions of the moral and political communities are passively, that is, uncritically, accepted. Any relationships of authority in equal communities must be debated and agreed upon by the equal members of the community themselves. Grants of authority in a community must be active and voluntary if the non-manifest good of individual authenticity is to be realized in the activities of the individual members of the community. Sovereignty in the political community must, then, reside in and remain with the citizens. Does this mean that a phenomenology of the political community grounded in Husserl's phenomenology must ultimately be

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anarchistic? I do not believe so.24 We have already seen that the community is a unity of interpenetrating wills wherein each member of the community is a representative and functionary of the community. There is, in other words, within any community a division of labor, and this is no less true for the political community. We can develop a preliminary sense of the division of labor within the political community by recalling that there are four levels on which we find the good determined: (l)the indeterminate universal goods disclosed in a philosophical reflection on the nature of our moral experience, that is, on the nature of rational free agency; (2) the culturally and historically determinate goods as particularized by a people; (3) the individual goods selected by different persons; and (4) the political goods disclosed when the culturally and historically determined goods of a founding or dominant culture are departicularized in such a way as to allow for different particularizations of the good by the individuals and groups comprised by the political community. The tasks of central concern to us relate to levels (1), (3), and (4), the last understood, for political purposes, as replacing (2). The first task, the identification of the universal, indeterminate goods proper to all free, rational agents, is, at least in part, a philosophical task. As a task, this is not bound to any particular political community, but the philosopher undertaking it is always a member of some particular moral and political community and, as such, the philosopher should explicitly consider himself or herself a member of the political community contributing to the communal determination of political goods.25 This contribution has both positive and negative moments. The positive moment is to identify the indeterminate goods. The negative moment is to criticize the cultural and political particularizations of the universal, indeterminate goods when they are inadequate. Although (2), the cultural and historical particularization of the indeterminate and determination of moral norms by a people is not, as such, a political task, (2) becomes politically relevant when the determination of social goods embodies and the passive transmission of these social goods perpetuates patterns of domination that deny rational free agency or its necessary conditions to any member of the political community. Philosophers must criticize such particularizations and reveal their inadequacy as moral and political norms; they must reveal the manner in which such particularizations fail to conform, to particularize legitimately, the indeterminate goods revealed in (1). Critical theory and feminist critiques of moral ideologies provide examples—some fruitful and others not so fruitful—of philosophical critiques revelatory of such patterns of domination. 24

Here I argue against positions suggested by Karl Schuhmann and James Hart; cf. Schuhmann. Husserk Staatsphi/osophie, 192. and Hart, The Person and the Common Life. chap. V, passim. 25

Cf. Depraz, "Phcnomenological reduction and the political," 9ff.

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This philosophical function—the identification of the indeterminate goods, the critique of passively transmitted and actively formulated cultural norms, and the critique of the political departicularization of the founding or dominant culture's moral outlook—is an essential moment of the jurisprudence which is one of the excellences of the political community. This philosophical function is part of that aspect of jurisprudence which knows the proper ends of the political community and is the specifically philosophical contribution to levels (2) and (4). It is an inseparable part of the political determination of constitutional goods, most notably self-governance and those goods which conduce to it, for it ensures that the constitutional determination of the good realizes universal goods. It is here that the issue of civil rights, those guarantees of participation in the self-governance of the community, arises. On this view and in opposition to liberalism's view, rights are not prior to the goods sought within a political community. Rights arise only within the context of a community's commitment to certain fundamental goods, most notably the universal goods of rational free agency and its necessary conditions and the political good of communal selfgovernance that follows directly from the notion of a necessarily social, rational free agency. Rights, then, are constitutional guarantees to all citizens of the nonmanifest good of authenticity in their pursuit of substantive goods, that is, the greatest possible exercise of rational free agency within the confines of the universal, indeterminate goods identified by philosophical reason and the political community's particular understanding of those goods. Central among these rights is the guarantee that citizens, i.e., free, rational agents whose agency is realized in social acts, will be allowed to participate in the political community's continuing particularization of the universal, indeterminate goods. This entails specific guarantees to the franchise, to freedoms of speech, association, and so forth. An exhaustive a priori list of rights is impossible, since the universal, indeterminate goods can be particularized differently, but however the list is realized, it must ensure a legitimate particularization of the universal goods of rational free agency and communal self-govemance along with all their conditions.

political goods. Citizens' participation in the legislative function does not replace legislators, but it does call for involvement in the legislative process, through nominating, voting, letter writing, public hearings, membership and activity in local party organizations, service on local civic associations and committees, and so forth. Without replacing legislators, citizens' involvement in the legislative process is possible through the various groups, associations, and communities that mediate a citizen's relationship to the political community as well as through active participation in electoral and parliamentary processes. The constitutional and legislative functions departicularize the dominant or founding cultural community's particularization of the universal, indeterminate goods by focusing on the fundamental political good of an authentic, selfgoverning political community and what conduces to it. This constitutional and legislative determination of political goods must remain within the scope of possible legitimate determinations of the universal goods and it must be hospitable to varying communal and individual determinations of the good. It is worth noting that I here speak of something more than the liberal virtue of toleration, for toleration fails in two ways to capture what is important in these considerations. First, toleration allows the possibility of a certain indifference toward communal and individual determinations of the good. But indifference cannot do. There are moral truths gained in rational insight, and the political community cannot be indifferent to the truth or falsity of judgments regarding communal and individual goods. Second, toleration allows for the possibility of another kind of indifference. It allows for the possibility that citizens, especially those belonging to the dominant culture within the political community, will simply put up with different views as long as those who hold such views are not disruptive. But more is required in a political community. The political community must be hospitable—hence, I would argue that hospitality too is a fundamental political virtue—to those who hold differing concrete views of the good but who commit themselves to the departicularized goods defining the political community. Hospitality, more than toleration, is required, first, because there is a "home" culture, the founding or dominant culture (including its historical transformations), from which the departicularization yielding a sense of the political good departs and which persists in its fundamentals in the political community. Hospitality is required, second, because the attainment of rational free agency and the debates and elections in which legislators gain grants of authority as well as identify political goods are achievements of social reason and will be recognized as authoritative and binding only to the extent that the body politic as a whole participates in the evidential insight into the truth of the goods identified. Consequently, the political community must invite all its members, including its minority members, to a life of participation in political reason rather than to a mere coexistence with other individuals, especially those belonging to the majority or dominant culture.

The other essential aspect of the jurisprudence proper to political communities is the more precise determination of the universal goods relative to the circumstances of this political community as well as the identification of what conduces to these goods, that is, the identification of those institutions, practices, and rules that are themselves political goods insofar as they conduce to fundamental political goods. This is a constitutional and legislative function properly exercised by those who have by rational persuasion won grants of authority from the citizens. Nevertheless, even though there are legislative functionaries within the community, the fundamental good of communal selfgovernance calls for all citizens to participate in this legislative determination of

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The constitutional function is rarely undertaken in an explicit way and involves the broadest and most explicit approval by the full membership of the political community, whereas the legislative function is a continuing identification of political goods and what conduces to them. The legislative function, therefore, involves political office. And just as the philosophical identification of the universal, indeterminate goods was paired with a critique of cultural and individual particularizations of these indeterminate goods, so the legislative determination of the good demands a critique, a determination that the legislated goods, institutions, practices, and rules accord with the constitutional determinations of the political good and are hospitable to the authentic exercise of rational agency by individuals and groups within the political community. Since legislated political goods are here in question, there must also be political offices whose continuing function is to undertake this critique. This function is judicial, and it is one role of the judiciary, therefore, to decide when the legislative determination of the good violates for some person or group of persons the constitutional particularizations and guarantees of the goods, which are free, rational agency itself and its necessary conditions.

even as it establishes the somewhat, but not fully, determinate framework within which those choices are exercised. It also requires that the home culture in its political manifestation be attentive to the legitimate desires and interests of those who enter the community and open to receiving new suggestions and new insights from them. Political hospitality recognizes both the way in which others are like us in being ordered toward universal goods and the way in which others are different from us insofar as they have different traditions and customs from which we might learn and benefit. The focus throughout is on the joint determination and realization of the political goods toward which the community and its members, old and new, majority and minority, are directed. The articulation and realization of political goods requires a commitment on the part of all citizens to participate in the common articulation of political goods, even though the final determination of these goods might be delegated to legislators. Although neutrality among different conceptions of the good and a toleration of all views is impossible, the political determination of the good must be maximally permissive of the exercise of free, rational agency by all individuals. Indeed, this is one of the fundamental, universal goods to which the political community must devote itself and requires that individuals be judicially guaranteed certain civil rights, most importantly (a) the right to participate in the joint articulation of political goods, (A) the right to the basic goods necessary to free rational agency in the manner the political community decides these goods are best instantiated and justly distributed, and (c) the right to pursue those goods consistent with the political goods articulated by the political community itself. Liberty is preserved to the greatest extent possible consistent with a commitment to a framework of common goods jointly articulated in an exercise of social reason and insight and jointly realized in our common, civic pursuits.

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Political reason as a limitation of social reason is primarily legislative rather than judicial. It is aimed at goods and not simply at rights. The political community must form a communal judgment enunciated in its constitution and statutes and a communal will directed to those goods necessary for and permissive of individual and communal authenticity, including the authenticity of all the mediating communities comprised by the political community: clubs, unions, trade associations, professional societies, the founding or dominant cultural group, minority racial and ethnic groups, and the moral community itself. And it must prevent actions that deny the satisfaction of rational agency or its necessary conditions to any group or individual; it does so by enunciating fundamental rights for all citizens, and it must through its judicial offices adjudicate competing rights-claims. But it must do all this within a legitimate particularization of the universal, a priori human goods achieved by a culturally and historically determinate political community. A Husserl-inspired political philosophy can contribute, I think, a new perspective on current debates in political philosophy, especially that between liberals and communitarians. An authentic political community embodies universal goods in a particular instantiation gained by rational insight into what is best for achieving communal self-governance given the historical, cultural, economic, and material circumstances of the community. This instantiation departs from the "home" culture of a people, and anyone joining this community enters that home. But anyone joining this community—by birth or by immigration and naturalization—is welcomed into that home, invited to feel at home, to be himself or herself. This requires that the home culture in its political manifestation not dominate the choices of the new members of the community

Chapter Three

Intersubjectivity and Community Adriaan T. Peperzak Loyola University of Chicago Everybody lives in a network of face-to-face relationships, but none of these can be isolated from the broader social and cultural context of the several collectivities to which we belong. If we use the word "intersubjectivity" to indicate direct relationships between persons, and "collectivity" or "commonality" to evoke the anonymous and "objective" structures and processes which form the "world" and the context of human action, one of the fundamental questions that have to be asked in social philosophy can be formulated thus: how are intersubjectivity and collectivity (or community) related? Since it is not difficult to see that they can never be separated from one another, this question asks how the communal and the intersubjective components of human togetherness are interwoven and form a sort of synthesis. Although not free from tensions and fights, their web binds people together, not only by common features, actions, and habits, but also, and even more so, through interaction and emotional relationships. To live a human life is to experience oneself as belonging to different communities within which human individuals encounter and converse with one another. Sociality is composed of two perspectives whose interrelations must be analyzed: as participating in the praxis of impersonal formations we form a "we," whereas we never cease to meet with others in relations of "you and I." "We-ness" or "being-with" (Mitsein, Mitdasein) summarizes and founds the dimensions of human coexistence and cooperation, but it is only one moment of sociality; without the directness of a being faced or being confronted by you, a being open to you and facing you, the description would be incomplete. A total immersion in collectivity would reduce human individuality to a Ccoov or "animal" without voice and speech (A.6yo<;) of its own, whereas reduction of social life to a cluster of face-to-face relationships would deny the "social facts" of sociology and history. This duality of perspectives explains why the history of social philosophy has been dominated by two opposite models: a) one that starts from the community in order to understand the actions and interactions of human individuals as moments of a global process which determines their behavior, and b) another model which, starting from the individuals as they experience themselves in their "private" and interpersonal relations, tries to show how these relations form a network and generate processes that bind the individuals together in groups, families, nations and so on. On the basis of these models, the classical authors built their more or less atomistic, relational or holistic 55 K. Thompson andL. Embree {eds.). Phenomenology of the Political, 55-64. © 2000 Kluwer Academic Publishers. Printed in the Netherlands.

PHENOMENOLOGY OF THE POLITICAL reconstructions of social life. Did they thereby succeed in drawing an adequate picture of human existence? I. Hegel and his aftermath Hegel's social philosophy is an attempt to gather all the essential components of human praxis into an overall synthesis by showing how individual virtue and happiness, singularity, interpersonality and subjectivity, family, right, economy and politics acquired their perfection as functions of one harmonious totality: the nation-state. Starting from the concept of freedom as encompassing everybody's rational and reasonable will (or practical reason or "autonomy") as well as the universal will or "will in-itself" (Rousseau's volonte generate), Hegel tried to show that all moral obligations and virtues (and therewith all the moral demands of intersubjectivity) coincide fundamentally with the demands of our belonging, as members, to a family and a state, communities whose rational necessity can be proved. Ethics became thus only a part or aspect of politics, and politics is nothing other than the necessary and "objective" realization of human freedom (which is as much will as reason). On the one hand, Hegel accepts and assimilates all the key concepts of Lockean and Kantian liberalism; on the other hand, he tries to deduce the collective institutions from the concept of practical reason (that is a reason which, as practical, necessarily generates laws, authorities, procedures and so on). Hegel wanted to show how those two sides form one totality, but in the end he could not do so without a non-deductive and rather positivistic appeal to the factual existence of the people (das Volk) or nation with an ethos (Sitten), a culture and a spirit of its own. If Hegel had succeeded, he would have proved that every individual is free to the extent to which it obeys the laws of a rationally constituted community and that a community is free (and therefore rationally justified) when it realizes the autonomy (or rational will) of each of its members. All moral obligations, including the essential and normative aspects of intersubjectivity, would then be mere functions of the freedom and well-being of the whole. The study of politics would imply ethics and the theory of intersubjectivity would be no more than a subordinate part of politics. Hegel's political philosophy imprisons the individuals, as citizens, within the horizon of the nation-state, but even if we widened that horizon, the subordination of morality and ethics to politics would not disappear necessarily. Marxist and other post-Hegelian ideologies have widened the horizon by insisting on the international and worldwide solidarity of humankind, but outside the various theories of individualism, which, for their part, can hardly do justice to the communal aspects of human life, the subordination of ethics to an understanding of social totalities has remained the rule. Even Heidegger's insistence on the existentiality of Dasein's being-together (Miteinandersein) and being-with (Mitsein) has not changed this subordination radically: starting from the horizon of the social "world" of human coexistence, he too understood faceto-face relations as embedded in and secondary to global constellations. The only fundamental difference between these theories and Hegel's philosophy is

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perhaps that today's analyses stress more forcefully the social importance of our participation in cultural communities (of language, ethos, art, architecture, etc.). In all collectivistic or communalistic theories morality remains, however, a function of impersonal or superhuman institutions; even a rebellion against existing structures is seen as a primarily political task: their destruction and the establishing of new institutions would create a morally better situation, whereas "abstract" morality—a virtuous but not politically involved behavior—would lack the power to change the ethos of a population. II. Mediations Ever since Hobbes and Locke, philosophers have attempted to show how the relations between human individuals and their community in the form of a polis, an empire or a state imply one another and how this reciprocity unifies a human multitude. If most forms of modern collectivism (such as communism, fascism, nationalism) seem to oppress in one way or another the freedom of individuals, modern individualism seems to be incapable of showing how singular persons and their relations to other persons can generate a global cohesion and real community. The principle of liberty, equality, and universal human rights, a principle which seems to be accepted by all honest people and theories of our age, does not provide us with a principle of togetherness or community. Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, and Kant tried to explain the supraindividual unity of humans as the effect of a contract, but the model of a contract itself is a clear example of a multiplicity whose unity depends on a plurality of choices and therewith shows its own contingency. In order to find some necessity in such a unity, one must postulate or presuppose that it in the end (or originally) is caused by a supra- or pre-individual principle, by which the individuals' choices then would be determined. That principle has been sought in God, the People, Nature, Race, Ethos, Language, the universal will of a superhuman Spirit, etc., but in all cases it seemed to be incompatible with the principle of individual freedom, on which the entire reconstruction of the community was built. Either the principle of unity became oppressive, or it lost its explanatory force by subordinating itself to the free choices of singular individuals. In the latter case, the atomism of the starting point prevailed over the principle of community. The struggle between holism (or its recent versions in communitarianism) and individualism (or "liberalism") has not been settled, but perhaps the terms in which we are accustomed to ask the fundamental question are not altogether adequate. Can we oppose the community (which apparently includes the individuals) and the individuals (whose belonging to some community seems to be an essential part of their life) as if they were different poles? Communality is as much a feature (or structure or "existential") of any human individual as its individuality. If there is a tension between them, this is to be found within the structure of the human individual itself. If being oneself is simultaneously belonging, with others, to a community, the analysis of this simultaneity might reveal some truth about the unity of individuality and communality. In addition, as we have already seen, every individual is related to other individuals by face-

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to-face relationships which, though they do not yet constitute a community, create a certain involvement, maybe also a kind of belonging and solidarity. Would it be possible to "mediate" between the communal and the individual aspects of being human by an analysis of intersubjective relations as actualization of both? In any case, we should avoid the modern illusion according to which one could deduce or construct the essential structures of a community whose very perfection determine the participants to behave in a just or solidary way. Neither politics, nor political theory, are meant to be a kind of %oir\oic,. Human individuals cannot be reduced to material for social engineering; if one tries to do that, they will react through rebellion or opportunism, both of which are expressions of their liberty. In contrast with the modern temptation of making, planning, and constructing a good community, another modern temptation, which, in the name of individual freedom, "lets things go," does not seem to understand that human freedom, as situated in a world, needs the social conditions of an already established society for its concrete actualization. Whereas the constructive tendency underestimates individual autonomy, theories that consider the choices of unsocialized individuals to be the sufficient causes of social existence, are unreal and all too abstract. An attempt to mediate between individuals and community should recognize the social determinations as well as the "element" of individual freedom at all the key moments of its development. The reconstruction of the social order ordine geometrico does not reach far enough; we need also an analysis of the roles individual freedom plays within the limits of social necessity. We would be ungrateful towards Hobbes, Spinoza, and Kant if we did not recognize the greatness of their attempts to distinguish the more elementary from the more complex and to show how the elements fit together in one whole. However, a renewed analysis of inter-individual relations might show that a reconstruction of the whole out of its elements inevitably obscures and represses essential features of the personal face-to-face to which all social structures in the end and from the beginning refer. III. You and I There are two ways of bringing face-to-face relationships to language. 1. One can speak about a relation between two or more people from outside their relations. In this case, an observer who is not involved in that relation looks upon others who are encountering each other but not their observer. In order to describe an encounter as such, I cannot limit myself to what I see or hear or feel in observing two or more people who meet, for I miss then precisely the confrontation, that by which the encounter confronts a person who is involved in it. The observer's experience is different from the experience that is made in the observed relationship. By limiting myself to the triangle of the two persons facing one another and observed by an observer, and by calling the observer "he" or "she," while referring to the others as "you" and "I" or "me," we can give the following description. You who face "me," are "you" for "me," but both

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you and I are "they" and "him" or "her" for the observer. What distinguishes you as encountering and facing me is something different from all the features an observer can discover in you and me. 2. In order to discover what constitutes you as you, your "youness," if I may say so, one has to quit the observer's viewpoint and to take the position of an ego or "I"; in other words, one has to engage in the facing and confronting position, from which I no longer can call you "him" or "her" but only "you." When I observe or treat you as an interesting phenomenon or object or as an instance of rational animality, I cannot perceive what you are as facing me and faced by me. Facing can reveal itself only in a direct relationship of addressing. Since Western philosophy has developed its discourse about each and every topic within the horizon of xa ndvxa and TO rc&v its tradition has accustomed us to perceive and think about all beings as constituting together a universe displayed before the eyes of "a non-involved onlooker" (unbeteiligter Zuschauer). By making all that can be experienced only in the face-to-face of "you and me" invisible, this tradition has eliminated an essential component of sociality from philosophy. Philosophy has become the attempt to construct a universally valid monologue about the universe of beings, instead of addressing words and thoughts to others in a shared search for friendship and community in wisdom, virtue, and spirituality. Can we overcome the limitations that philosophy has thus set upon itself, by descriptions and analyses from the standpoint of me who am facing you and being faced by you? If such is possible, ought we then write a supplement only to the classical approaches or are we at the beginning of an entirely new task: the task of a philosophy within the perspective of a "me" who talks and writes to "you" about you and me and about other experiences in which you and I recognize our differences and similarities? Such a philosophy would unfold its discourse in discussion and correspondence; its monologues would function as proposals and answers that again propose a way of coping with a shared existence in dialogue. Whichever answer this question may deserve, the description of another person from within a face-to-face relationship does not coincide with the traditional description of persons and their social relations; in several aspects it proves them to be false. For example, the thesis that all humans are similar—a thesis no modern philosopher would risk to deny—does not express my immediate and original experience of your facing me. What I see or hear or feel primordially is a thorough difference. The phenomenon you are, does not resemble what I perceive of myself. You are neither similar to my image in a mirror, nor another instance, just like me, of the generic ideas "human being," "subject," or "ego"; you are not even an instance of the idea "unique human individual." The first "feature" of my experiencing your being-there is your looking at me or speaking to me or touching me; and / will never be able to experience myself in the same way. Because I cannot address myself as if I were you, I will never hear or see or touch myself from such a distance, within such an openness of space and time, and I will never perceive myself looking at me or speaking to me or touching me. True, that which comes to the fore when I touch

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certain parts of my own body or overhear my own words or look in the mirror, has several features that resemble those of your eyes and mouth and body, but it does not address itself to me as if it were another you. Originally, you are not an "alter ego," because you are not me plus a difference; as you, you are radically different from the ego I am. The expressions "an ego," or "the ego" do not say what only I can be; they are applicable to you as generic characterizations of properties you share with me, but what you, and only you, are cannot be expressed in it. The difference between you as you (i.e., your "youness" as such) and me as me (my "me-ness" or "egoity") does not fit into the network of genera and species; it escapes from any attempt to arrange it in an overview because it cannot be grasped or constituted within the horizon of an overall perspective. The dissimilarity between you and me constitutes an asymmetric relationship whose characteristics must be analyzed further, but before I do this, I want to state clearly that the asymmetry of the relation between you and me does not destroy or contradict a certain similarity and a certain fundamental equality as thematized in most theories of intersubjectivity and human rights. Our similarity and equality belong, however, to a dimension in which we no longer appear as facing one another but rather as coexisting partners of a gathering "we," for example, as citizens of one state or as members of a family. Our sharing fundamental rights and being similar within the horizon of certain communal formations is essential for any human existence, but it neither includes, nor can it encompass our being radically different, dissimilar, and unequal as unique individuals who address each other as you and me. The simultaneity of our being members of a "we" and our always remaining you and me for one another, beyond or before any "we-ness," is the point where communality and individual unicity form a knot. If we can disentangle this knot and explain how and why the solidarity of a we and the facing of you and 1 belong together and presuppose each other, we will have solved the most fundamental problem of social philosophy through the mediating character of intersubjectivity.

change of the entire philosophical project is necessary, not even in philosophical anthropology or ethics or social philosophy. If it is true, as Emmanuel Levinas has forcefully argued, that thematization excludes the other ("you") from philosophical discourse, the search for the truth must convert itself to another form of discourse, one that from the outset is addressed to other persons: the discourse of education, correspondence, dialogue, and discussion. Thematizing and objectifying discourses remain meaningful and necessary (for example, in the context of economy, politics, and universal justice) but they can neither replace, nor completely assimilate the addressing form of discourse. The fact of the other's appearance can be expressed in both forms of discourse, but the thematizing language inevitably hides or even destroys the other's otherness. An accurate phenomenology of the other must insist on your otherness and its shocking, provoking, and commanding character. Our confrontation reveals your surprising coming to me with a claim: not by your wish or need or will or choice, but by your mere existence before me you manifest your respectability (your "highness," as Levinas calls it in Totality and the Infinite) and my responsibility for you. The remark that "is" does not imply "ought" does not apply here because the "special quality" and the very quintessence of this fact (the other's coming to the fore) is precisely its vocative and provocative, its awakening, demanding, and ethical character. Your beingthere is the original claim. (In general, the Humean separation between "is" and "ought" shows an utterly impoverished conception of being and a quite false understanding of perception. There are no value-free theories or observations except within the limits of certain abstract and carefully delimited fields of

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IV. You are respectable Kant's ethics starts from what he calls a "fact of reason," the fact namely that reason, as constitutive of humanness, imposes itself upon us as a demanding and obligating force. According to Kant, an entire system of ethics follows from the rational analysis of this fact. There is, however, another fact which plays a fundamental role in Kant's ethics: the fact that every human being deserves respect (Achtung). Kant affirms and tries to show that both facts coincide insofar as a person's respectability or "dignity" (Wiirde) lies precisely in the reasonability (the Vernunftigkeit) or the "logical" character of human nature (as (t>i5oi<; of a Cwov Aoyov exov), but this attempt seems to me to be the hasty interpretation of an experience that deserves a more careful phenomenological analysis. Max Scheler, Martin Buber, Gabriel Marcel, Jean-Paul Sartre and, especially, Emmanuel Levinas have written fragments of such an analysis, but we cannot say that these have led to a widespread conviction that a radical

theory.) Indefatigably, Levinas has shown that the other reveals a "superiority" which does not belong to the hierarchical "world" of things and values in which we participate, but rather to the (non-)dimension of Plato's "good beyond essence." His insistence on the transcendence of my always already having been dedicated without any choice on my part, underlines the asymmetry of the relation between you and me. However, he interprets this asymmetry as a denial of reciprocity. At this point, I would like to propose an amendment to Levinas' splendid analyses. Although I agree that one does not experience immediately any similarity between the other as revealing my responsibility for the other (the asymmetrical relationship that relates you and me) and myself as perceived or experienced by you, I cannot persevere in the ignorance of the similarity that characterizes your experiencing your responsibility for me and my experiencing my responsibility for you. I will not try here to answer the difficult question of how we discover that we are similar in this and in many other respects. I do agree that the knowledge of human similarity, reciprocity, equality, and universality is somehow founded in and posterior to the immediate experience of human difference, but I also want to stress that asymmetry does not necessarily contradict reciprocity. You and I are involved in a double and chiastic relationship of respect: you obligate me, just as I obligate you. My awareness of my obligating you seems to

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be the condition for another fact, which might not be an immediately obvious phenomenon, although it certainly belongs to the mature consciousness of a wellbred person, namely the experience through which I perceive the respectability of my own self as a task or "work" (epyov) which I am obligated to perform. Here lies a connection with the Aristotelian approach to the ethical and a bridge to RiccEur's "I myself as another" (Moi-meme comme un autre). Must we interpret this experience, with Kant, Fichte, and Hegel, as an expression of the respectability of A6yo<; and reason (Vernunft) in each one of us? Or does reason, as the power of the universal, belong to the dimension of "we-ness" in which there is neither "you" nor "me"? From the preceding, it might have become clear that reason is not the highest or most original vantage or "principle," since it leaves no room for the unicity of individuals as engaged in their radical referral to unique others. V. A new formalism? As escaping from the "world" or "context" of natural and social structures, laws and processes, "you" can neither be described as a figure against a background, nor as an instance of some combination of particular kinds or modes of being. As unique, you do not fit into any case. Therefore, Levinas can describe your unicity through such metaphors as poverty, nakedness, destitution, unprotectedness, vulnerability and so on. As destitute and not belonging to the wealth of the "world," you reveal my nonchosen dedication, and all this can mut.mut. also be said of the quasi-other as which I experience myself when I am aware of my life as a task to be taken on. But does not this analysis present a new version of Kant's practical formalism, with all the difficulties attached to it? The "principle" of highness, asymmetry, preoriginal devotion and responsibility must be concretized. Can we deduce the "contents" of our obligations from it? If we answer that it orders us to live for the well-being, the "good," the authenticity of others, the first question of all ethics emerges again: What is "good," "well-being," "happiness," "authenticity," and so on? Levinas seems to lead us to questions that parallel Kantian ones. How can purely formal laws justify any specific end or action? If we answer that our subjective maxims are responsible for the contents of virtues and actions, whereas the categorical imperative is responsible for its reasonability, we rely in the end on the contingencies of nature. If we are not convinced that nature has its own, beneficial ends, we are stuck with logic as sole criterion for the goodness of human actions and motivations. In any case, we reduce again the question of human meaning to a world of universal laws and cohesion, in which the unicity of individuals either is an instance or case of the universal, or else an exception, and therewith ipso facto morally wrong. If you and I are irreducibly unique, the primary question is not a question of propositions, laws, and applications. Good is then what permits everybody's unique respectability to unfold in a world of general and impersonal rules and structures without reducing its unicity to a function or link of that world. In this sense the fact of your existence originates a special anarchy: as unique, you are

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not a part of any context, but without context you would not be able to exist. Laws are not useless or contemptible, but they exist for people who are more than functions, having an irreplaceable destiny: you and you and you and me. Your unicity is more empty than Kant's rational and autonomous subject, but also more open and adaptable to the world of changing phenomena, cultures, and mores. Many forms of gathering and ethos, many worlds and communities are possible, but each of them will mix violence and peace, consensus and fight, power and obedience, tyranny and submission, fairness and injustice, greed and poverty, hypocrisy and honesty in ways of its own. In all circumstances, however, even in the worst situations of totalitarianism or war, any other's "contingent" existence here and now calls for regard and compassion. Since regard and compassion cannot be concrete without at least some beginning of peace and justice, the call by which your existence appeals to me includes my task of contributing to the organization of a social context in which rules and structures realize the claims of a general, non-individualistic and, in that sense, anonymous justice. However, the organization of a just world or the conversion of an unjust one demand time, whereas my responsibility for you (and for myself as quasi-other) does not tolerate any delay. The ethical demands of intersubjectivity cannot be postponed. They must be answered in any possible context, even a chaotic one. However hampered or handicapped by collective greed and violence, my unchosen dedication to any you constitutes the urgency of morality for me. If everybody is an I, this urgency is general. It is everywhere and always, here and now, for everybody the appropriate time for being just. Justice cannot be postponed. By postponing morality until we have transformed the existing world into a better one, we would show how relative our interest in respect and compassion is. If we can neither make justice, nor force mankind to be fair, all attempts to establish a just community before engaging in morally qualified relationships appear to be unethical forms of Utopia. We would then lack an eye and a heart for the non-contextual and non-functional, useless but respectable otherness of human individuals. As all the descriptions of collective extermination from Dostoyewski to Carlo Levi show, there is an infinite difference between an ethical and a cynical approach to "impossible" situations. Face-to-face relationships are not simply parts or links of an institutional world. By reducing morality to a function of politics (or to any other "economy"), we destroy the difference between your face and your functioning (the epyov of your evepyeia). Your face does not fit into the dimensions of a social and cultural world or (con)text. But it shows its difference by simultaneously emerging from a world and referring to its structures and functions as the necessary context of its recognition. The radical difference between facing and contextuality confronts social philosophy with the task of analyzing the many ways in which various face-toface relations are hindered or helped by the world in and from which they emerge. The complementary analysis of economical, political, and cultural systems cannot separate itself from an ethics of facing and interpersonality

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because it would lack an orientation towards human meaning. Without any form of politics, morality becomes desperate or tragically heroic, but ethics judges politics. VI. Individuality—Intersubjectivity—Community Any theoretical plea for the irreducibility of the face-to-face betrays its own truth by thematizing what cannot be captured in a theme. Your and my unique individualities cannot present themselves except in the direct self-presentation of addressing oneself to the other. Because they do not fit in the text of theoretical discourse, unicity, otherness, and human difference are relegated to the margins, becoming thus "topics" of an indirect and negative heterology. This uncomfortable position keeps communal structures and individuality apart. The derivation of intersubjectivity and society from the Ego's original self-consciousness, as attempted by Fichte, Hegel, and Husserl, presupposes that the otherness of the other is homogeneous with certain elements that are found in a singular's self-consciousness. As primordial phenomena, otherness and addressing destroy the illusory starting point of an isolated ego. Fichte's thesis that self-consciousness cannot be thought of as isolated since it is necessarily and ipso facto consciousness of another's self-consciousness, is a splendid attempt to state the essential unity of the difference I have tried to describe, but by thematizing it in the form of a thesis, he already flattened the enigmatic marginality of the other outside and within "me." The non-thetic character of "you" (and of myself as a quasi-"you"), forbids a conceptual insight in the unity of the "world" (as text, context, "economy," system, structure, etc.) with "you and me." We cannot prove that facing (you and I) and togetherness (we) entail one another, but we can "save" and analyze the experiences of their meaningful connections. You and I enjoy and tolerate a distance from the world, but our face-to-face would not be serious if it did not change the collectivities in which we live.

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Chapter Four

Ricoeur's Early Political Thought Bernard P. Dauenhauer University of Georgia I. Introduction Paul Ricceur is undoubtedly among the most distinguished philosophers of his era.' In the course of his long career he has investigated a large number of crucial issues such as action, time, history, and language. These studies all fit together as what he himself has called a "philosophical anthropology."" Philosophical anthropology's task is to examine the multiple dimensions of human existence, to lay bare the distinctive ways in which we affect and are affected by the material and cultural contexts that we inhabit. From the earliest years of his academic studies he has been convinced that there is a fundamental, irreducible distinction between persons and things. Persons are capable of thoughtful free agency. Things are not. Nonetheless, he has never accepted any version of a dualism of substance in the person. With Gabriel Marcel and in large agreement with Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Ricceur has consistently emphasized the bodiliness and worldliness of everything human. We undergo multiple impacts of other people and things upon us and we can respond creatively and efficaciously to them. This interplay between our receptivity and activity constitutes us as thoroughly historical beings. We are beings who owe a debt to predecessors for our distinctive heritages—linguistic, cultural, religious, political, etc.—and who at the same time can exercise a freedom that enables us to introduce something new into the context in which we live, something that is imputable to us as our own. In short, Ricoeur has always worked out his anthropology in terms of the interplay between the voluntary and the involuntary dimensions of human existence and their unity as a limit-idea or project rather than as a completed achievement/

1

This paper is based on research done for my book Paul Ricceur: The Promise and Risk of Politics (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 1998), hereafter cited as PRPR. The research was supported in part by a grant from the University of Georgia Center for the Humanities and the Arts. 2 See for example. Paul Ricceur. Fallible Man. revised trans. Charles A. Kelbley (New York: Fordham University Press, 1986), xliii and passim. Ricreur's insistence on calling his work philosophical anthropology is apparently a reaction against Heidegger's denigration of the tradition of philosophical anthropology. See Martin Heidegger. Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (New York: Harper & Row. 1962), esp. 71-75. }

See Paul Ricceur, "Intellectual Autobiography," in The Philosophy of Paul Ricceur, ed. Lewis E. Hahn (Chicago: Open Court Press, 1995). 4, hereafter cited as 1A, and his "The 67

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Furthermore, from the outset, he has always conceived of his anthropological reflections as a form of involvement in the life of the City.4 His political thought is obviously integral to this involvement.

"progressive," that is, a form of violence that would reduce or even eradicate subsequent violence?7 In the fall of 1948, Ricoeur began his university career as a lecturer in the history of philosophy at the University of Strasbourg. At that time, and for the next decade, a powerful force in French cultural and intellectual life was a doctrinaire Stalinist form of communism. University faculties were dominated by aggressive communists who denounced as fascists anyone who opposed or even questioned them. As one of their opponents, Ricoeur had to undergo constant denunciation by these demagogues.8 Ricoeur's opposition to communism stemmed in large part from his membership in the French Socialist Party, which was in competition for the allegiance of people on the left and which accurately recognized the totalitarian dangers resident in communism. Another important part of his opposition was a response to some of communism's intellectual claims. Two of these are particularly relevant here. First, communist orthodoxy claimed that there is a fundamental unity to human history and that it has a predetermined culmination, namely in global communist society. Second, to bring history to its culmination, communists were not only permitted but also obligated to make use of progressive violence to eliminate obstructionists. Ricoeur found both of these claims to be wrongheaded and dangerous. More generally, in this period the consequence of World War II was that many thoughtful Westerners had lost much, if not all, confidence in the once prevalent conceptions of politics, history, and religion and the institutions that embodied them. The late 1940s and the 1950s were a time when it was very difficult for a morally sensitive Frenchman to accept the conditions he saw around him; it was only a small step from this to sharing the anger of working people against a government that seemed invariably to side with the propertied class and was holding in a state of political quarantine the party that alone inspired much confidence among the poor. And the way intellectuals translated their anger was by subscribing with wholehearted recklessness to the doctrines of Karl Marx.9 Ricoeur, however, was one of the exceptions to this turn to communism. He was among those who explicitly refused to subscribe either to the ideology of Western liberal capitalism or that of communism. A group of these thinkers, Ricoeur among them, drew upon their religious convictions to formulate a critique of French political life. The voice that Ricoeur brought to this trying and complex situation was that of a rigorously trained philosopher who was also a committed Christian.

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II. Formative Influences During the 1930s Ricoeur's political consciousness and conscience received particular nourishment from Andre Philip and Emmanuel Mounier. Philip was a professor of law at Lyon who brought together the skill of a highly competent economist with socialist convictions and a Protestant theology heavily indebted to Karl Barth. But he never made the mistake of thinking that Christianity itself embodied a full-fledged socialism. Ricoeur's own early Protestant education had given him a keen eye for and strong aversion against social injustice. This inclined him toward pacifism. Then Philip taught him to keep distinct from each other a twofold allegiance. On the one hand, the Gospel provides maxims for action, especially those that emphasize the obligations that one has to the poor. On the other hand, socialism must be defended in strictly economic terms. This defense is quite different from moral arguments that one can derive from the biblical command to love one's neighbor. To mix or confuse these two commitments and their supporting arguments is always a serious mistake.5 Mounier, who was both a devout Catholic and a man of the political left, founded the influential journal Esprit in 1932 and edited it until his death in 1950. He strengthened Ricoeur's recognition that a person is not only embodied but is also always a member of a community. Furthermore, he taught Ricoeur "to join spiritual convictions to political positions, which until then had remained in juxtaposition to my university studies and to my involvement in Protestant youth movements."6 During most of World War II the Germans held Ricoeur as a prisoner of war. As a consequence, he learned of the Nazi atrocities only after he was liberated in the spring of 1945. Those atrocities and his experiences during the next few years with people who had struggled to shelter Jewish children from the Nazis forced him to reconsider how one ought to resist violence. Was absolute pacifism really efficacious in reducing violence? If not, was there a form of violence that was Unity of the Voluntary and the Involuntary as Limit-Idea," in The Philosophy of Paul Ricceur. ed. Charles E. Reagan and David Stewart (Boston: Beacon Press. 1978), 3-19. Fora superb intellectual biography of Ricoeur. see Francois Dosse. Paul Ricceur: Les sens dune vie (Paris: La Decouverte. 1997). hereafter cited as PRSI'.

7

4

PRSI; i.

5 See Paul Ricceur, Critique and Conviction, trans. Kathleen Blarney (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998), 11, hereafter cited as CAC. For more on Philip, see PRSV, 41^17 and 61-64. 6

IA, 8. For more on Mounier, see PRPR. 9-13 and PRSI'. 32-39.

IA. 10 and Ricosur, "Non-violent Man and His Presence to History," in his History and Truth, trans. Charles A. Kelbley (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1965) 223-33. 8

Ricceur stressed this point in a conversation with me on December 9, 1997.

9 H. Stuart Hughes, The Obstructed Path: French Social Thought in the Years of Depression 1930-1960 (New York: Harper & Row, 1966). 169-70.

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Ricceur himself has always taken pains to be clear about the relationship between philosophical and biblical considerations in his works. The philosophical and biblical domains are two distinct and autonomous fields of investigation. Nonetheless, it is simply wrong to demand that investigations in either of these domains completely ignore considerations proper to the other domain. For example, biblical studies can profit from philosophical anthropology. Conversely, philosophy can find much food for thought in biblical reflections on evil. Hence, Ricoeur says of his way of dealing with these two domains: "I have always walked on two legs. It is not only for methodological reasons that 1 do not mix genres, it is because 1 insist on affirming a two-fold reference. This is absolutely primary for me."10 This set of formative influences makes its weight felt from the very beginning of Ricoeur's writings on politics. In his early political essays, those published during the years 1946-51, there are three major matters under consideration. These matters are distinguishable but are not wholly separable. They are: (a) the irreducible, nontotalizable complexity of reality and the necessity to think dialectically about it; (b) the nature of history and the lessons to be learned from it; and (c) our human condition of belonging to just one of the many cultures or civilizations and the proper role for Christians to play in the political life of their civilizations. In this essay I will concentrate on the first and third of these topics. Then I will briefly point out how Ricoeur's reflections fit together to present a distinctive, though noncomprehensive conception of the possibilities and limitations of politics. The conception that Ricoeur articulates in these early writings remains at the heart of all his subsequent thought bearing on political matters. It of course undergoes great enrichment, but is never displaced. III. Interminable Dialectic and Irreducible Complexity Ricceur clearly expresses his commitment to a way of thinking that is interminably dialectical in recognition of the irreducible complexity of reality in his 1951 essay "Truth and Falsehood."" His goal in that piece is to show that the unification of the true is at once the wish of reason and a first violence, a fault. We shall thus reach a point of ambiguity, a point of greatness and culpability. Precisely at this point the lie strikes nearest to the quick of truth. We shall go straight to the aspect of the problem that concerns the interpretation of our civilization. Historically, the temptation to unify the true by violence comes and has come from two quarters, the clerical and the political spheres. More precisely, it comes from two powers, the spiritual power and the temporal power (77% 165-66). Thus Ricceur seeks first to bring to light the plurality of orders of truth in our 10

CAC, 139. See also PRSW 117-18 and 653.

" The French title of this essay, "'Verite et Mensonge," would be better translated as "Truth and Lie." The English version appears in Ricceur. History and Truth, trans. Charles A. Kelbley (Evanston. IL: Northwestern University Press, 1965). The French original appeared in Esprit in 1951. All references here are to the published English translation that is hereafter referred to as TF.

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history, for example, the scientific, religious, artistic, and technological orders. Then he shows the ambiguous nature of our search for unity among these orders. This reveals "the merely 'probable' character of any syntheses set forth by the philosophy of history" (TF, 166). Here I will focus on what Ricceur calls "the political synthesis of the true." The proximate provocation for Ricoeur's analysis of this political synthesis is the totalitarian claims made by fascism and Marxist communism under the guise of a philosophy of history. He also notes that what has been called the "American way of life," which is professedly completely antithetical to totalitarianism, itself seemed at least implicitly to invoke a quasi-philosophical totalizing conception of historical progressivism. The political temptation to synthesize the multiple orders of truth can and should be resisted. But it cannot be definitively eradicated, for it springs from the very nature of politics. The most basic task of politics is to hold together the numerous and varied goals and interests of its members. Every geohistorical group—city, state, bloc of states—secures its own perpetuation by establishing and maintaining political power. Politics is not just one of many coequal spheres of life. The State weighs upon education, work, leisure, and every other facet of life. Even the most minimal state has some responsibility for everything that has a "public" character. This encompasses the arts and the sciences no less than it does the society's traditional customs and practices. In the last analysis, there is no domain of human life and no topic of human discourse that is completely politically neutral (TF, 182). Hence the temptation to proclaim a political synthesis of all orders of truth. This temptation is not purely malign. It does prod us to look for some philosophy of history, some way of ordering the vast and variegated domain of past actions and events. Without some philosophy of history we could make no sense of this bewildering diversity. But if we would resist using the philosophy of history that we adopt to deny the differences that we ought to acknowledge and respect, we must regard it as no more than a working hypothesis. We must treat it simply "as a method for researchers and as a probable rule for politicians" (TF, 185). Any interpretation of history that pretends to be all inclusive is in fact the worst of falsehoods. It does not merely say something untrue. By insisting on the correctness of the way it claims to have unified the orders of truth, it "essentially contaminates the search for truth" (77% 189). Thus one who wants to adhere to the spirit of truth must (a) respect the diversity of orders of truth and the complexity of the connections among them, (b) respect the integrity of both the sciences and the arts by resisting the impulse to try to make them serve some overarching orthodoxy, and (c) reject the notion that politics can be or become a science. This last requirement demands that we admit that there is no real certitude in political matters. Politics always operates on the plane of "'opinion' in the Platonic sense, or better, the probable, as Aristotle viewed it; there is nothing more than a political 'probabilism'"(777, 190, translation modified). Those who observe these requirements need not completely repress their desire for a unity among orders of truth. But they will have to admit that neither religious

clericalism nor political totalitarianism is a defensible expression of this desire. The only unity of truth to which people can sensibly aspire is one that orients their thoughts and deeds while being admittedly beyond complete attainment. This kind of unity never denies the endless dialectic at play in everything that we do and say. The dialectic is endless because the reality to which it responds is not only inexhaustibly complex but is also never static. Thus both our thought and action and their objects are historical through and through. IV. Politics, Democracy, and Christianity During the years 1946-51 French politics had to deal with the tawdry record of the politics of the Third Republic. And it had to do so in the context of the escalating antipathy between the two global powers, the Soviet Union and the United States, an antipathy that severely affected political life within France as well as other places around the world. Ricceur's contributions to the debate about French politics during this period dealt with four large, overlapping matters, namely (a) democracy, (b) "prophecy," (c) nonviolence, and (d) coexistence. (a) Democracy Democracy, on Ricceur's conception, is not a complete political form. It is a form in the making, one whose history we must prolong through contestations. It does rest on two basic ideas, liberty and equality, but each of them is subject to perversion. Political liberty in a democracy has a twofold meaning. It means that all political power is only relative. And it also means that this power does not come from on high and hence that it depends on active, responsible citizens acting in concert. Because of its twofold character, political liberty must ward off a twofold threat. It must resist despots who would try to make political power absolute. And it must resist anarchists who would try to make political power nugatory.12 Equality stands opposed to privilege. It is fundamentally an equality that law presupposes rather than institutes. But in practice it too can be perverted. This specific perversion consists in destructive criticisms of the unavoidable inequalities that arise when equal citizens organize the political power that they make together. For example, if there is to be political power, then equal citizens must establish some sort of inequality between the rulers and the ruled. Democracy, though, is more a practice or way of acting than a set of ideas. One's primary focus should be on its three kinds of "instruments" or "devices." First, democracy requires a constitution that specifies and limits all political powers. Second, it acknowledges a set of political liberties that have been won but are neither definitively specified nor completely secure. Principal among these are the liberties of association, political participation, and the press. Only through these particular liberties does political liberty exist. Third, democracy depends on an art

12 Paul Ricoeur, "La crisc de la Democratic et de la Conscience chretienne," Christiamsme social 55 (1947): 322, hereafter cited as CD.

of governing that fills the gap between the constitution and the several particular liberties that flesh out the principle of political liberty. The art of governance must follow three "fragile rules." It must (a) organize an honest process for having citizens choose their representatives, (b) provide for the exercise of power by the majority, without demanding unanimity, and (c) grant freedom to the minority to play a critical role in all political processes and forums (CD, 322-23). In Ricoeur's view, democracy at mid-twentieth century faced a double crisis, a crisis of growth and a crisis of decay. This double crisis was the result of the fact that the history of democracy, a political form claiming to respect universal values, is now interwoven with the history of the bourgeois class. Formal bourgeois liberty frequently amounted in practice to a license to exploit workers. What in fact developed was an immoral pact "between democracy as political liberalism and capitalism as economic liberalism" (CD, 324). The crisis of growth for democracy comes from non-communist socialism. The crisis of decay comes from the threat of totalitarianism. (b) "Prophecy" The Marxist response to this immoral pact between democracy and capitalism initially appears to replace the "Utopian" (i.e., non-communist) socialism that upholds the values of liberty and justice with a putatively scientific socialism that claims to base its deeds on the "recognition of a historical necessity and not on an appeal to values" (CD, 324). But, Ricceur argues, Marxism does in fact spring from ethical sources. At its root is "a social prophetism related to the ancient protests of Amos and Hosea. It is ' Utopia' that secretly gives purity and force to what appears to be merely the realization of a natural law of history" (CD, 324). One can therefore agree with the Marxist distinction between mere formal democracy and a real democracy that demands social justice. But real democracy is opposed to its bourgeois constrictions, not to its basic values and practices. Unlike a Marxism that would overthrow these values and practices in the name of overthrowing bourgeois capitalism, non-Marxist socialism is the economic form best prepared to bring about real democracy (CD, 325). Ricceur himself does not try to formulate a concrete plan for uniting a political democracy and a socialist economy. But he hopes that the outcome of this crisis will be a non-Marxist synthesis of political liberalism and economic and social management, a synthesis that does not relegate politics to a mere superstructure resting on the base of economics or simply reduce politics to economics. If such a synthesis could be brought about, then this crisis of democracy would be a crisis of growth. Democracy's second crisis, though, threatens to radically corrupt it. This is the totalitarian crisis that threatens to destroy the active, responsible citizenship upon which democracy depends. Totalitarianism is not primarily a doctrine. It is rather a deep-seated illness that leads people to abdicate their freedoms and prostitute themselves to a centralized regime. Ricceur finds multiple causes for the sickness of totalitarianism. Chief among them are (a) pervasive propaganda in favor of a pseudo-unanimity that refuses to

74

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admit that democracy always involves minorities and loyal opposition; (b) the establishing of a one-party political system that aims to exercise complete control over public opinion; and (c) a tendency within democracy to resort to a fatuous rhetoric that deceives its citizens or gives vent to hatreds and baseless quarrels instead of trying to convince people of its policies by explaining their underlying rationale. Unlike the socialist crisis, the totalitarian crisis holds no worthwhile promise. It is simply evil and to be resisted at every tum. Christians living in democracies, Ricceur argues, have a duty to join wholeheartedly with their fellow citizens to help democracy pass through these crises successfully. Paradoxically, Christians are better positioned than anyone else to provide reasons for esteeming both the private and the public lives of human beings and for respecting their freedom of thought and their pursuit of knowledge. Therefore, "democracy needs today more than ever a Christian baptism" {CD, 331). This baptism is one of word and example. The word is not doctrinaire and the example is not self-righteous. Both are prophetic. Ricoeur was prompted to amplify his thoughts about prophecy and nonviolence by Merleau-Ponty's Humanism and Terror. In his review of this book, Ricoeur pays particular attention to Merleau-Ponty's discussion of the contrast Arthur Koestler makes in Darkness at Noon between the Yogi and the Commissar. For Koestler, the Yogi is so determined to preserve his own abstract moral purity that he has no concern for the historical efficacy of what he does or omits doing. The Commissar, on the other hand, cares about nothing but this historical efficacy. Merleau-Ponty held that Koestler was wrong to take the Commissar as the figure of the typical Communist. Rather, it was Stalin who distorted Marxism by playing the Commissar. The true Marxist proletarian insists on both a humanistic orientation to moral values and a concern for historical efficacy.lj Ricoeur is not unsympathetic toward Merleau-Ponty's effort to rescue Marxism from Stalin's perversion. But he argues that the humanism Merleau-Ponty believes to be immanent in history in general and in the proletariat in particular is instead a "prophetic call" that enters into history "vertically," from a transcendent source. This call is like the one that Amos and Hosea proclaimed in Jewish antiquity. If we fail to recognize this prophetic voice that transcends history we will also fail to detect the pathology infecting Marxism as well as the pathology infecting liberal society (PE, 915). Marx was right, Ricoeur agrees, to stress the pathology of an ethical or religious conscience that leads to the reduction of the Prophet to the Yogi. All too often Christianity has failed to preserve the tension between the transcendent and the immanent. As a result, "the Prophet has become an incomprehensible personage, so incomprehensible that one can mistake him for his contrary, the Yogi. The Prophet. ..calls for justice on earth, he weighs on history, the Yogi withdraws from history" (PE, 914-15). Though Ricoeur agrees that the proletariat must be given real

freedom, he holds that without the voice of the prophet the proletariat is in danger of a history of endless violence (PE, 915). And because communism had rejected that voice, Ricoeur, unlike Merleau-Ponty, concluded already in 1948 that the Communist Party was more likely to become an agent of terror than one of true peace.14 (c) Nonviolence Ricoeur's reflections on prophecy and historical efficacy also led him to reject the Marxist claim that their use of violence was justified because it was "progressive," because it would lead to the end of organized violence. MerleauPonty had proposed that this claim remained plausible. Two of Ricceur's papers published in 1949 present what amounts to an alternative to Merleau-Ponty's proposal.15 In these papers, Ricceur argues that nonviolence is worthwhile only if it is historically efficacious in bringing about peace and justice, or at least in reducing injustice. Nonviolence, therefore, is not the same as a politics-denying pacifism. It is itself a form of political engagement. A necessary condition for a historically efficacious nonviolence is an awareness of the pervasiveness of violence. The roots of violence are within us. We are combative and domineering even when we seek justice, truth, and friendship. This violence shows up not only in quarrels and in war. It is also institutionalized in our political, economic, and social structures. To be authentic, nonviolence must spring from a consideration of the full history of violence. Only such a consideration can give nonviolence real weight. Pacifists mistakenly believe that pacifism is the manifestation of a goodness naturally inherent in humankind, a goodness that is merely concealed or blocked by a relatively small number of evildoers. They fail to recognize that history is a history of violence and that, if there is to be an effective resistance to violence, the source of that resistance must be something that transcends history. The nonviolent person, by contrast, has to live in a hope that, the historical record notwithstanding, history remains open to a universal humanism that respects each person. The nonviolent person hopes that, over and above the impurity which it shares with all acts that weigh upon history, his new act, which is always questionable on the basis of its short-term effects, has a double sense: that it supports the goal of values and the thrust of history toward the recognition of man by man . . . . The nonviolent person believes and hopes that 14

Paul Ricoeur, "Pour un christianisme prophetique," in Les Chretiens et la Politique, ed. Henri Guillemin et al. (Paris: Editions du Temps Present, 1948). 81-90. 15

13

Paul Ricceur, "LaPensee Engagee: M. Merleau-Ponty: Humanisme et terreur," 16(1948): 912, hereafter cited as PE.

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Paul Ricoeur. "'Le Yogi, le Commissaire. le Proletaire, et le Prophete," Christianisme social 57 (1949): 41-54, hereafter cited as YCCP, and his "Non-violent Man and His Presence in History," in History and Truth. 222-33, hereafter cited as NMPH, The French original appeared in Esprit (1949).

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freedom can cut through fate (NMPH, 229, translation modified). This hope leads the nonviolent person to resist the call of violence, however "progressive" it supposedly is. Instead, the nonviolent person hopes that his or her resistance itself contributes to the abolition of all violence, progressive or otherwise, Thus the nonviolent person brings to his or her political action a critical presence that insistently reminds us that progressive violence is still violence. Nonetheless, Ricoeur recognizes that there is something odd about this view of nonviolence. Persons fully committed to nonviolence do not see it as the historian or philosopher does. They do not see it as being in dialectical tension with the practices of those who espouse progressive violence. They insist that, unless their faith in nonviolence and its efficacy is total and uncompromising, it is selfstultifying. For them, to be nonviolent is to be pacifist. This "intolerance" of political violence of any sort prods Ricoeur to reconsider Merleau-Ponty's position. Merleau-Ponty had accepted the Marxist claim that the proletariat is a historical force oriented toward a set of humanistic values by reason of the very logic of the politico-economic history that produces it. The fit between the historical reality, the proletariat, and the set of values that inspire its deeds is enough to justify Marxist humanism. It does not need to appeal to any transhistoric or transcendent morality. Ricoeur's rejoinder to Merleau-Ponty is subtle. First, he grants that the proletariat today have a special position in the struggle for genuine human fraternity. But that is because the exploitation it has suffered has made it uniquely qualified to hear the prophetic call for justice and fraternity. Without its indignation at the injustices inflicted upon it, the proletariat would have no special status. Second, there is some justification for Merleau-Ponty's fear that talk of a transhistorical prophetic voice is just another example of a Yogi-like mystification. But in fact the prophet, unlike the Yogi, demands an institutional as well as a personal conversion. He demands justice immediately, on this earth. Third, reflection on debasing, otherworldly versions of Christianity and a Marxism blind to the transhistorical basis of indignation against injustice lets one see that, though the Marxist critique has been vitally important, between the Yogi and the Commissar there is a pair composed of the prophet and the proletarian, composed of the saint and the poor person. I doubt that one can conceive of a return to the proletarian's humanism, a revival after his alienation in the Commissar, without a rediscovery of Christianity's revolutionary force (YCCP, 52). Ricceur's recognition of the practical necessity but ultimate insufficiency of the Marxist critique of bourgeois capitalism and of Yogi-like otherworldly versions of Christianity led him to hold that during these years the special task for European Christians was to work to prevent a war between the Soviet bloc and the Allied bloc. Their task was to promote coexistence.l6

(d) Coexistence The way that Ricoeur proposed to promote coexistence between Soviet communism and Western capitalism is reminiscent of but different from the "third way" that Merleau-Ponty espoused at this same time. Ricoeur's objective was to bring to light the reasons within each bloc's ideology that would incline it to choose peace rather than war and then to encourage the leaders of each bloc to make that choice. His belief and hope was that "men of good will have an opportunity in 1951 to choose a peace that is not merely the absence of war. This peace would not suppress the struggles between classes, civilizations and nations. It would simply permit these struggles to forge again a history that has a meaning and a future" (PCPC, 419). This political peace is not a biblical peace. It is the kind of peace that one can look for in social, military, and diplomatic matters. It "is always a compromise that more or less consecrates some factual situations, that is, some power relationships. Even the most honorable peace requires the sacrifice of just causes, by one side or the other" {TPP, 371-72). The upshot of Ricceur's analysis of France's political situation during these years was his advocacy of several relatively specific policies. France should (a) oppose the rearmament of Germany, (b) terminate its Indochina war, (c) establish a French welfare state, and (d) resolutely commit itself to neutrality between the Soviet Union and the United States (PCPC, 417-18 and TPP, 377). He admitted that each of these policies had substantial risks. But those risks paled in comparison with the alternative risks of civil war or a war between the two superpowers. He therefore concluded: "Our slogan should be: From preventive war to preventive peace" {TPP, 378). V, Conclusion One can glean from this survey of Ricoeur's earliest political writings several elements and themes that persist throughout his works on politics. First, and probably most important, is his thought about history, both as it is lived and as it is reflected on. History, he argues, is not a single whole. Any system that claims to have discovered the one single, overarching truth about humanity does violence to the evidence and threatens to legitimate violence to people. History is ambiguous. There are multiple orders of truth. Consequently, any interpretation of history ought to be modest and receptive to challenge. Second, political practice today ought to be democratic. But there is no canonical form of democracy. It is in need of cultivation and elaboration in the light of the exigencies of the time. Today the exigencies require something other than liberal capitalism. Third, violence ought always to provoke indignation. But the response to it must seek to be historically efficacious. Sometimes, to be efficacious, nonviolent Esprit 19 (1951): 408-19. hereafter cited as PCPC. and his "Taches pour la Paix," Christianisme social 59 (1951): 371-78. hereafter cited as TPP.

' See in this connection, Paul Ricoeur, "Pour la coexistence pacifique des civilistions,"

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people will have to cooperate with those who practice a violence that is meant to be progressive. These themes, or some evident variant of them, remain throughout Ricoeur's subsequent political reflections. For example, their traces are clearly discernible in his discussion of ideology and Utopia.17 Both ideological and Utopian thought are unavoidable in actual political practice. But both of them also threaten to distort or even deny the thoroughly historical character of human existence. Ideology promotes solidarity but also tends to absolutize some particular political doctrine or order. Utopia provides an orientation for reform and amelioration. But it regularly tends to disregard historical considerations altogether. Those who want to practice responsible politics ought to acknowledge these elements for what they are. Their presence shows that no political theory or practice is immune to reasonable contestation. Everything political is a candidate for criticism and reform. Nonetheless, there can be politics whose positive worth is well attested to, politics that deserves dedication and sacrifice in support of it. Similarly, one can see, in retrospect, that these themes have their roots in the indissoluble paradox that Ricceur, in 1956, identified as lying at the heart of political power.'8 Political power is the power that people who belong to a geohistorical community accrue together by acting in concert to preserve and improve it. Together they are capable of feats they could never accomplish were they not acting in concert. But history makes it clear that there is no durable political power without some domination, without rulers exercising dominion over the ruled. The rulers' capacity for efficacious agency depends upon a partial but real restriction on the ruled's capacities for initiating actions. No political practice has shown itself able to dissolve the paradox of a power that requires both people uniting as free and equal persons and a subordination of some of them, the ruled, to others, the rulers. Those who keep this paradox in view are able to hold themselves open to political reforms that will give as much emphasis as the material and cultural context allows to the joint empowerment and constrain as well as possible the unavoidable domination. No reform can be complete or definitive. But it can be a genuine reform, one that, to paraphrase Merleau-Ponty, will subsequently appear to have been required by the times.19

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that tries to give full respect to the finite, historical character of human existence.20 This ethics provides a firm basis for accepting more refined but still recognizable versions of the basic positions articulated in his earliest political writings. Thus these early works contain valuable threads that one can profitably follow through the abundance and complexity of the political writings that he has subsequently published.

Finally, one finds these themes in the fabric of what Ricceur calls his "little ethics" in his Oneself As Another. In that work Ricceur develops a political ethics

17 Paul Ricosur, Lectures on Ideology and Utopia, ed. George H. Taylor (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986). See also my "'Ideology, Utopia, and Responsible Politics," Man and World22 (1989): 25-41.

18

19

Paul Ricoeur. "The Political Paradox." in his Truth and History, 247-70.

Merleau- Ponty speaks of truth in politics as ""perhaps only this art ofinventing what will later appear to have been required by the time." See his Adventures of the Dialectic, trans. Joseph Bien (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. 1973). 29.

20

See Paul Ricojur. Oneself as Another, trans. Kathleen Blarney (Chicago: University

of Chicago Press, 1992), 169-296.

T

1 Chapter Five

Schutz on Reducing Social Tensions Lester Embree Florida Atlantic University [W]e are worried citizens of the United States of 1955, deeply troubled by the many manifestations of discrimination, prejudices, and other social evils prevailing in our particular social environments, and we are looking for appropriate remedies.

Is the thinking of Alfred Schutz conservative? Is he a conservative because he urges value-neutral research, i.e., does he in effect support the status quo by not working to change it? To defend him, one might contend, positively, that theoretical knowledge is the best foundation for valuing and action and, negatively, that immediate ethical and political purposes distort theoretical efforts to lay such foundations. In that case, however, the question arises of whether Schutz ever gets beyond theory to practical application or at least urges doing so. That Schutz somehow engaged in practically applied as well as purely theoretical efforts is the opinion of the editor of the second volume of the Collected Papers. After mentioning that "the selection and organization of its material generally conform with the table of contents drafted by the author," Arvid Broederson writes as follows about the second part of that volume, (Schutz entitled Part I "Pure Theory") The title "Applied Theory" may appear somewhat misleading if the key phrase of Part II is read as meaning the use of insight for merely practical ends. These studies are not concerned with "social engineering" or "how to solve social problems." They are, as was their author in all his works, concerned with the use of theory for a more adequate interpretation of social reality. Their accent is on understanding rather than operation. Yet the clues they find to the inner meanings of human conduct lead closer to a sensible way of approaching its problems than any treatise on "techniques and methods of problem-solving" ever could do. The man who wrote pieces such as the essay on "Equality" and the related one on "The Stranger" and

1 Alfred Schutz, Collected Papers. Vol. IV, ed. Helmut Wagner, George Psathas, and Fred Kersten (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff. Publishers, 1996), 148. Hereafter this source will be cited textually by the volume and page numbers.

81 v TU—n,™™wi Kmhn>vt*H* I Phennmennloev of the Political. 81-102.

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on "The Homecomer" with its touch of self-reflection is a man of wisdom in human affairs no less than in scholarly thought and inquiry.2

Alluding to the conference at which "Equality" was presented, Schutz writes that "we are scholars—philosophers, theologians, educators, social and natural scientists—who are eager to investigate theoretically the problem of equality and its place within our theoretical interests and to use for this purpose the methods of our particular disciplines." (IV 148) His own theoretical interest is social scientific and thus excludes the approaches of philosophy, theology, natural science, etc. The "social scientist qua theoretician" is described:

Several passages from the 'applied' essay "Equality and the Meaning Structure of the Social World" (1957, hereafter "Equality") especially deserve comment in this connection. After drawing on Georg Simmel with respect to tensions between subordinate and superordinate groups, Schutz asserts that it makes a characteristic difference whether tensions of solved by shifts within the prevailing common systems whether this system itself must be abolished. The characteristic of conservative thinking, the second, thinking. (II 268)

this kind can be of relevance, or first attitude is of revolutionary

He goes on to allude to the French Revolution but must also have had National Socialism and Communism in mind. By contrast, conservative thinking seeks shifts in relevance systems, and Schutz next quotes his friend Albert Salomon: It is the specific postulate of our contemporary scene to be liberal in order to remain conservative. We can secure the continuity of our social and intellectual world as conservative reformists, (idem) Does Schutz then actually consider himself a liberal qua conservative reformist? Such political labels are of course vague. Nevertheless, there is a remarkable (and unusual) self-reference earlier in the same essay: Quite another question is that of the strategy by which the evil of social tensions can be at least diminished. This educational goal can in my opinion be reached only by a slow and patient modification of the system of relevances which those in power impose on their fellow-men. (II 262) Schutz thus considered himself a liberal qua conservative reformist. Furthermore, "Equality" can be read not only for the theory but also for the policy on how social tensions might be reduced that it contains more or less explicitly. I. Schutz's Approach "Equality" is methodologically most significant for its emphasis on in- and out-groups, which will be addressed presently, but the refinement of what Max Weber calls "subjective meaning" needs attention first and, as a means to that, the two ways in which his work is theoretical must be grasped. 2

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Alfred Schutz, Collected Papers, Vol. II, ed. Arvid Broederson (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1964), x & xi. Hereafter this source will be cited textually by the volume and page numbers.

The problems of the theoretician originate in his theoretical interest, and many elements of the social world that are scientifically relevant are irrelevant from the viewpoint of the actor on the social scene, and vice versa. Moreover, the typical constructs formulated by the social scientist for the solution of his problem are, so to speak, constructs of the second degree, namely, constructs of the common-sense constructs in terms of which everyday thinking interprets the social world. (II 248) Since his sources are Charles Cooley, Robert M. Maclver, Gunnar Myrdal, Talcott Parsons, Max Scheler, Georg Simmel, Albert Salomon, William Graham Sumner, R. H. Tawney, W. I. Thomas, Ferdinand Toennies, and Max Weber his perspective is sociological in particular. In a different signification of the word "theoretical," however, Schutz's efforts are, again, not merely theoretical: It is the task of the theoretical social sciences to study the rather complicated structure of this social reality. . . . It is the task of empirical research to apply such theoretical findings concrete social groups and social relations in a given setting at a given historical moment. (IV 150) The reference to application in this statement can be taken two ways. On the one hand, there are the actual cases that fall under theory, such as the many social groups and relations of the United States of 1955 discussed in "Equality.'" On the other hand, there is the use of theory to guide efforts at making changes, such as the reduction of social tensions to which Schutz has already been seen to be committed. Within Schutz's overall sociological approach, including its theoretical vs. empirical and its theoretical vs. practically applied dimensions, there is some evolution in "Equality": In Weber's unfortunate—but generally accepted—terminology, we have to distinguish between the subjective meanings a situation has for a person 3

This distinction seems to have been expressed as early as 1932; see Alfred Schutz, The Phenomenology of the Social World, trans. George Walsh and Frederick Lehnert (Evanston, 1L: Northwestern University Press, 1967), 248.

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REDUCING SOCIAL TENSIONS involved (or the one a particular action has for the actor himself), and objective meaning, that is, the interpretation of the same situation or same action by anybody else. The terminology is unfortunate because so-called objective meaning—or, better, meanings—are again relative to observer, partner, scientist, etc. (II 227)

the the the the

A parallel but more complex passage two years later explicates this "etc." with "the social scientist or the philosopher." (II 273) This development is complex. Linguistically, 'subjective' and 'objective meaning' have two components. Concerning 'meaning,' which the expressions share, there is an increasing tendency to use 'interpretation' as an alternative expression in Schutz's later writings and this tendency will be followed in the present study due to the greater flexibility of this term. Concerning 'subjective' and 'objective,' however, what Schutz curiously fails to appreciate is how they undesirably connote cognitive unreliability and reliability respectively in the languages of science, philosophy, and everyday life. Further useful alternatives can be supplied for interpretive and investigative purposes by beginning from his acceptance of the contrast of in-groups and out-groups and then proceeding in his spirit but beyond Schutz's letter: 'Insider' can be used instead of 'subjective' and 'outsider' instead of 'objective,' except, of course in quotations. ("Outsider" as a noun, but not as an adjective, does occur repeatedly in "Equality.") Taking into consideration the passage contrasting the constructs of common-sense and social science, it can now be explicated that the variety of interpretations includes the common-sense insider interpretation relative to the actor, the common-sense outsider interpretation relative to the partner, the outsider interpretation of the common-sense observer, and the outsider interpretation of the sociologist, and, for that matter, those interpretations that are relative to other social scientists, philosophers, theologians, etc. His approach in "Equality" is to common-sense insider interpretations from the standpoint of an sociological outsider interested in empirical and applied as well as purely theoretical research. II. Groups and Membership Groups are always already distinguished, named, classified, and related in common-sense thinking, and Schutz theoretically recognizes social collectivities all along. But most of his concrete analyses concern individuals either abstracted from or in relation to others and are thus psychological or social-psychological analyses. "Equality," however, is most remarkable in its great emphasis on groups and their insider and outsider interpretations on the common-sense level. This is not to say, however, that he accepts anything like Husserl's personalities of higher order, for "[t]he attempts of Simmel, Max Weber, [and] Scheler to reduce social collectivities to the social interaction of individuals is, so it seems,

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much closer to the spirit of phenomenology than the pertinent statements of its founder."4 Schutz prefers the expressions 'in-group' and 'out-group,' but also approves of Sumner's expressions 'We-group' and 'They-group.' This contrast can be clarified in terms of the antithesis of insider and outsider interpretations for "the term 'group' has an entirely different meaning for those who say "We Protestants,' 'We Americans,' etc., from the one it has for those who say 'the Catholics,' 'the Russians,' 'the Negroes.'" (II 250) [T]he subjective meaning the group has for its members consists in their knowledge of a common situation, and with it of a common system of typifications and relevances. This situation has its history in which the individual members' biographies participate; and the system of typification and relevances determining the situation forms a common relative natural conception of the world. Here the individual members are 'at home,' that is, they find their bearings without difficulty in the common surroundings, guided by a set of recipes of more or less institutionalized habits, mores, folkways, etc., that help them to come to terms with beings and fellow-men belonging to the same situation. (II 251) There is, furthermore, a different and important distinction that holds within in-groups (and also within out-groups). Schutz prefers to speak of 'existential' groups and 'voluntary groups': I cannot choose my sex or race, nor my place of birth, and, therewith, the national group into which I was bom; neither can I choose the mother tongue I learned or the conception of the world taken for granted by the group with which I was indoctrinated during childhood. I cannot choose my parents or siblings, or the social and economic status of my parental family. My membership in these groups and the social roles I have to assume within them are existential elements of my situation which I have to take into account, and with which I have to come to terms.—On the other hand, I may choose my spouse, my friends, my business partners, my occupation, change my nationality and even my religion. I may voluntarily become a member of existing groups or originate new ones (friendships, marital relations), determine at least to a certain extent the role I want to assume within them, and even make some efforts to attain by my achievements that kind of position and status within them toward which I aspire. (II 250) The individual member of an in-group finds himself within "a preconstituted system of typifications, relevances, roles, positions, statuses not of his own 4 Alfred Schutz, "Edmund Husserl's Ideas. Volume II [1953]." in Collected Papers, Vol. Ill, ed. Use Schutz (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1966), 39. Hereafter this source will be cited textually by the volume and page numbers.

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making, but handed down as a social heritage." (II 252) Race is one of the "existential elements" mentioned, but appears to be more than skin color for Schutz: "Could Marian Anderson sing Negro Spirituals in her unsurpassed way if she did not share with her fellow Negroes this specific cultural heritage, this specific conception of the world of which the Spirituals are partial expression?" (II 259) What is a "cultural heritage"? If "social heritage" is synonymous, then Schutz again draws on Sumner:

never be prejudiced because my beliefs are well founded, my opinions taken for granted, and my faith in the Tightness and goodness of our ways—whatever this may mean—unfailing" (II 261). This is insider interpretation. What, again, of outsider interpretation?

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The sum-total of the relative natural aspect the social world has for those living within it constitutes, to use William Graham Sumner's term, the folkways of the in-group, which are socially accepted as the good ways and the right ways for coming to terms with things and fellow-men. They are taken for granted because they have stood the test so far, and, being socially approved, are held as requiring neither an explanation nor a justification.— These folkways constitute the social heritage which is handed down to children born into and growing up within the group; and by a process of acculturation the approaching stranger who wants to be accepted by the group has, in the same way as the child, not only to learn the structure and significance of elements to be interpreted, but also the scheme of interpretation prevailing in and accepted by the in-group without question.5 What of out-groups? The members of an out-group do not hold the ways of life of the in-group as self-evident truths. No article of faith and no historical tradition commits them to accept as the right and good ones the folkways of any group other than their own. Not only their central myth, but also the processes of its rationalization and institutionalization are different. Other gods reveal other codes of the right and the good life, other things are sacred and taboo. . . . (II 245) (The changing 'central myth' of the United States is presented at the end of Section 5 below.) Relations between groups do not always go well. For example, prejudices, which are rationalizations and institutionalizations of the group's central myth, (II 262) are, contrary to what many think, exclusively attributed to others. "/ can 5

(II 230, emphasis added) In an earlier essay, "The Stranger" (1944), Schutz uses what seems another synonym: "Following the customary terminology, we use the term "cultural pattern of group life' for designating all the particular valuations, institutions, and systems of orientation and guidance (such as the folkways, mores, laws, habits, customs, etiquette, fashions) which, in the common opinion of sociologists of our time, characterize—if not constitute—any social group at a given moment in its history." (II 92)

The outsider measures the standards prevailing in the group under consideration in accordance with the system of relevances prevailing within the natural aspect the world has for his home-group. As long as a formula of transformation cannot be found which permits the translation of the system of relevances and typifications prevailing in the group under consideration into that of the home-group, the ways of the former remain ununderstandable; but frequently they are considered to be of minor value and inferior. (II 246) The out-group's interpretation of the in-group's natural conception of the world and the in-group's self-interpretation often interact in two ways: a. On the one hand, the in-group feels itself frequently misunderstood by the out-group; such failures to understand its ways of life, so the in-group feels, must be rooted in hostile prejudices or in bad faith, since the truths held by the in-group are "matters of course," self-evident and, therefore, understandable by any human being. This feeling may lead to a partial shift of the system of relevances prevailing within the in-group, namely, by originating a solidarity of resistance against outside criticism. The out-group is then looked at with repugnance, disgust, aversion, antipathy, hatred, or fear. b. On the other hand, a vicious circle . . . is thus set up because the out-group, by the changed reaction of the in-group, is fortified in its interpretation of the traits of the in-group as highly detestable. In more general terms: to the natural aspect the world has for group A belongs not only a certain stereotyped idea of the natural aspect of the world for group B, but included in it also is a stereotype of the way in which group B supposedly looks at A. (II 246) Then a discriminatory group interaction may lead to various attitudes of the in-group toward the out-group: the in-group may stick to its way of life and try to change the attitude of the out-group by an educational process of spreading information, or persuasion, or by appropriate propaganda. Or the in-group may try to adjust its way of thinking to that of the out-group by accepting the latter's pattern of relevances at least partially. Or a policy of iron curtain or of appeasement might be established; and finally, there will be no way to disrupt the vicious circle but war at any temperature. (II 246) And, finally, "[a] secondary consequence might be that those members of the in-group who plead for a policy of mutual understanding are designated by the spokesmen of radical ethnocentrism as disloyal or traitors, etc." (II 247)

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What of the individuals who ultimately make up and participate in groups? The most important thing for the individual is that she is a member of numerous social groups and has roles originating in these memberships that she experiences in terms of her self-typification. Yet "it is only with respect to voluntary, and not to existential group membership that the individual is free to determine of which group he wants to be a member, and of which social role therein he wants to be the incumbent." (II 254) This is a matter of individual insider interpretation. As for outsider interpretations of individual group members on the common-sense level, [t]he objective meaning of group membership is that which the group has from the point of view of outsiders who speak of its members in terms of "They." In objective interpretation the notion of the group is a conceptual construct of the outsider. By the operation of his system of typifications and relevances he subsumes individuals showing certain peculiar characteristics and traits under a social category that is homogeneous merely from his, the outsider's, point of view, (idem) III. Typification and Relevance "Equality" is yet again remarkable for its concern with relevance, which is much greater than in anything published previously and this even though only part of Schutz's full theory is used.6 Relevance is regularly linked with typification. 6

II 235 n.3. Re/lections on the Problem of Relevance, ed. Richard M. Zaner (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1970) is a posthumously published manuscript from 1947-51. The final and fullest albeit the most dense expression of Schutz's theory of relevance is ""Some Structures of the Lifeworld" (1959), posthumously published in vol. III. but it is a finished essay. Earlier and in opposition to Jean-Paul Sartre, Schutz offers a description of human reality in which relevance is central to how others as well as selves define their situations: "In the mundane sphere of everyday life I conceive myself as well as the Other as a center of activity, each of us living among things to be handled, instruments to be used, situations to be accepted or changed. Yet my possibilities, my instruments, my situation have their specific structure as they appear to me. his as they appear to him. Each of us 'defines his situation' as sociologists call it. In order to use an object as an instrument, I have to bring it within my reach: in order to engage in a project, I have to acknowledge it as being relevant. What is relevant to the Other, what is within his reach, certainly does not coincide with what is relevant to me and within my reach, if for no other reason than that 1 am "Here" and he is "There." . . . Yet recognizing that the Other lives in a setting not defined by me does not transform him into my utensil. He remains within his situation (as defined by him) a center of activity; I can understand him as being not me, his activities as being not mine, his instruments as being beyond my reach, his project as being outside my accepted possibilities. All the social sciences deal with the problem of how to interpret the Other's actions as they appear to me by understanding the meaning which the actor, the Other, bestows upon them." [Alfred Schutz, Collected Papers, Vol. I, ed. Maurice Natanson (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1962). 201]

PHENOMENOLOGY OF THE FOLll 1LAL'

The world, the physical as well as the sociocultural one, is experienced from the outset in terms of types: there are mountains, trees, birds, fishes, dogs, and among them Irish setters; there are cultural objects, such as houses, tables, chairs, books, tools, and among them hammers; and there are typical social roles and relationships, such as parents, siblings, kinsmen, strangers, soldiers, hunters, priests, etc. Thus, typifications on the common-sense level—in contradistinction to typifications made by the scientist, and especially the social scientist—emerge in the everyday experience of the world as taken for granted without any formulation of judgments or of neat propositions with logical subjects and predicates. They belong, to use a phenomenological term, to prepredicative thinking. The vocabulary and syntax of everyday language represent the epitome of the typifications socially approved by the linguistic group. (II 233) On this basis, Schutz can ask a question: "what are the motives for positing . . . certain traits as equal (or, as we prefer to say, 'homogeneous') in all the objects falling under the same type; and under other conditions for disregarding particular traits by which the typified objects differ from one another?" [T]he answer is that all typification consists in the equalization of traits relevant to the particular purpose at hand for the sake of which the type has been formed, and in disregarding those individual differences of the typified objects that are irrelevant to such a purpose. There is no such thing as a type pure and simple. All types are relational terms carrying, to borrow a term from mathematics, a subscript referring to the purpose for the sake of which the type has been formed. And this purpose is nothing but the theoretical or practical problem which, as a consequence of our situationally determined interest, has emerged as questionable from the unquestioned background of the world just taken for granted. Our actual interest, however, is the outcome of our actual biographical situation within our environment as defined by us. —The reference of the type is to the problem for whose solution it has been formed, its problem-relevance as we shall call it, constitutes the meaning of the typification. Thus a series of types of concrete unique objects can be formed, each emphasizing certain aspects which the object has in common with other objects because these aspects along are relevant to the practical or theoretical problem at hand. (II 234) Relevance holds for groups as well as individuals and is also relative to insiders and outsiders: The system of typifications and relevances forming part of the relative natural conception of the social world is one of the means by which a group defines its situation within the social cosmos and, at the same time, becomes an integral element of the situation itself. The terms "situation" and

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REDUCING SOCIAL TENSIONS "definition of the situation" are, however, highly equivocal. W. I. Thomas has already shown that distinction has to be made between the situation as defined by the actor or the group within it, and the situation as defined by outsiders. This distinction coincides more or less with that made by Sumner between the in-group or We-group and the Others-group or out-group, and is also at the foundation of Weber's concepts of subjective and objective interpretation. (II 244)

A domain of relevance is, actually, a set of interrelated problems. There are no isolated problems. Moreover, the field of everyday experience is at any particular moment structured into various domains of relevances, and it is precisely the prevailing system of relevances that determines what has to be assumed as being typically equal (homogeneous) and what as being typically different (heterogeneous). This statement holds good for all kinds of typifications. In the social world as taken for granted, however, we find . . . a socially approved system of typifications called the ways of life of the in-group. It likewise constitutes a particular structure of domains of relevance which also are taken for granted. Its origin can easily be understood: the world taken for granted by the in-group is a world of a common situation within which common problems emerge within a common horizon, problems requiring typical solutions by typical means for bringing about typical ends. (II 236) The rank ordering of domains of relevance can vary with the group. (The ordering for the United States relative to racial groups discussed below in Section 4 c.) Classical Greek analyses of relevance-domain ordering are given, beginning with Aristotle: Merit is, however, esteemed differently in different states; in democracy freedom is the standard and all freemen are deemed equal; in oligarchy the standard is wealth or noble birth; in aristocracy, virtue. This means that the order of domains of relevances prevailing in a particular social group is itself an element of the relative natural conception of the world taken for granted by the in-group as an unquestioned way of life. In each group the order of these domains has its particular history. It is an element of socially approved and socially derived knowledge, and frequently is institutionalized. Manifold are the principles that are supposed to establish this order. In Plato's Laws . . . , for example, all the details of the proposed legislation are derived from the order of goods: the divine ones (wisdom, temperance, courage, justice) and the human ones (health, beauty, strength, wealth); or the things in which every man has an interest have their specific rank; the interests about money have the lowest, next comes the interests of the body, and of the highest rank are the interests of the soul. . . . (II 242)

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Finally, the particular domains of relevance and their order are in "continuous flux within every group." (II 243) This can be accelerated if the relevance structure that demarcates a domain becomes questionable or if the order of the domains ceases to be socially approved and taken for granted. IV. Discrimination and Equality Concerning theory, Schutz's "main thesis is that the meaning which the common-sense notion of equality has for a particular social group is as such an element of the system of typifications and relevances approved by it and so of the sociocultural situation as taken for granted by it at any moment of its history." (II 226) Equality is different from homogeneity but depends upon it: Typification consists in disregarding those individual features in the typified objects, facts, or events which are irrelevant to the actual problem at hand. In a certain sense it could be said that all objects falling under the same type are "equal" or at least deemed equal. For instance, we think of people as Frenchmen or Germans, Catholics or Protestants, aliens or neighbors, Negroes or Orientals, men or women, as speaking English or Russian, and as being wealthy or poor. Each of these terms designates a type, and all individuals falling within such a type are considered as being interchangeable with respect to the typified trait. —This is certainly one meaning of the highly equivocal term equality. But in order to avoid semantic confusion it might be better to call all objects, facts, events, persons, traits, falling in the same type and so pertaining to the same domain of relevance, homogeneous. Elements, however, pertaining to different domains of relevances will be called heterogeneous. We propose to reserve the terms equality and inequality for the relationship of elements pertaining to the same domain of relevance. (II 239) Equality and inequality are relational terms that can only be applied to homogeneous elements; heterogeneous elements belong to different domains and cannot be compared. This is why "political equality, equality before the law, equality in wealth, equality of opportunity, religious or moral equality, etc." (II 258, cf. II 226) are separate. Since the domains of relevance are defined and ordered differently by each social group, the content of the concept of equality is part of a given group's relative natural conception of the world. "To give an example from our present culture: the Universal Declaration of Human Rights of the United Nations (art. 2) proclaims moral and juridical equality, that is to say, it is equality of opportunity, but not necessarily material equality as to the extent and content of rights of all individuals." (II 258) the group under consideration here ("our present culture") would seem to be humanity, (cf. IV 148) The second half of "Equality" is, however, focused on the culture or group called the United States, which includes various groups between which tensions can arise.

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A. Discrimination and Outsiders What is discrimination for Schutz and who discriminates against whom? The attempt by the Daughters of the American Revolution to exclude Marian Anderson from their concert hall in Washington, D.C. is discriminatory because "[c]olor of skin, we may say, has 'nothing to do' with a singer's art as, in Aristotle's example, wealth has nothing to do with the excellence of fluteplaying." (II 259) In other words, biological race can be a basis for homogeneity but is not the same as the domain of relevance established by the problem of musical ability in which individuals can be judged equal and unequal. Discrimination in "Equality" refers primarily to race relations in the United States. Yet what is race for Schutz? As mentioned, he recognizes a specific Negro cultural heritage that includes Marian Anderson's "unsurpassed way" of singing Negro Spirituals.7 Another passage above lists Negroes and Orientals along with French, Germans, Catholics, Protestants, English speakers, Russian speakers, men, women, the poor, and the wealthy. Age will be referred to below. Some of these groups are existential and others voluntary, but they are all products of typification and subject to outsider and insider interpretations, and thus might also be called 'cultural groups,' although Schutz does not use this expression. Schutz introduces the case of Marian Anderson to show that a domain of relevance can originate in an imposed typification, and he also uses it to raise the highly important question of whether the imposition of a typification alone, that is, the subsumption of individuals under a particular social category by an outsider, involves as such an unequal treatment of the kind that is commonly called discriminatory. In other words, is discrimination the necessary consequence of the imposition of a scheme of typifications or relevances in objective terms? (II 259) Americans would not feel discriminated against because unable to vote in Switzerland, but then there is the decision of the Supreme Court in Plessy v. Ferguson in 1896, which was the beginning of the famous 'separate but equal' doctrine. (II 260) The Court takes the position that to deny to the colored race equal access to public opportunities . . . does not establish that the individuals included in the imposed typification—that is, in the objective sense—are inferior. Merely the interpretation of the imposed typification in terms of the scheme

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PHENOMENOLOGY OF THE POLITICAL of reference of the typified group—in the subjective sense, therefore—gives birth to such an inference. And such a "construct" is obviously the outcome of an act of bad faith on the part of the colored race ("the colored race chooses to put that construction upon it"), (idem) As discussed above in general terms, the system of relevance of the typifying outsider group (here the Supreme Court speaking for White America!) includes a stereotype that is presumed to be accepted by the typified group and is actually imposed upon it. "The imposition of social categories both creates the 'group' and invests it with a fictitious scheme of relevances that can be manipulated at will by the creator of the type." (ibid.) Thereupon, Schutz quotes Myrdal: '"The real problem is not the Negro but the white man's attitude toward the Negro.'" (II 261) This is not to deny that a social category can affect the in-group upon which it is imposed. "Even under the assumption that segregation was not taken to involve an inferiority of the colored race, segregation is taken as an insult by the Negro and he becomes sensitive about it." (II 261) In more general terms, we may state that the imposition of a system of typifications and relevances does not in itself necessarily lead to discrimination. This objective interpretation of group membership has to be supervened by another element, namely, the afflicted individuals' subjective experience: by the very imposition of typification they become alienated from themselves and are treated as mere interchangeable representatives of typified traits and characteristics. Thus, discrimination presupposes both imposition of a typification from an objective point of view and an appropriate evaluation of this imposition from the subjective viewpoint of the afflicted individual (idem). Discrimination is the unwelcome exclusion of people of different types from a domain of relevance within which, by the problem-relevant homogeneous typification, e.g., flute players, equality or inequality can obtain. More specifically, the U.N. statement points out that equality does not exclude two classes of differences which are generally considered admissible and justified: a) differentiations based on conduct imputable to the individual—examples: industriousness-idleness, decency-indecency, merit-demerit; and b) differentiation based on individual qualities that in spite of not being imputable to the individual have a social value—examples: physical and mental capacities, talent, innate ability, and the like. . . .

7

The outmoded expression "Negro" will be retained here for historical accuracy; "Black" and "African American" are chiefly in-group provoked developments since Schutz wrote. His use of "man" in the generic signification should be understood analogously.

On the other hand, moral and juridical equality excludes any differentiation based on a) grounds which are not imputable to the individual, and which should not be considered as having any social or legal

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REDUCING SOCIAL TENSIONS meaning: such as color, race, or sex; and b) grounds of social generic categories such as language, political or other opinion, national or social origin, property, birth, or other status. (II 262-63)

This is an insider interpretation, i.e., "[i]ts language is clearly that of ethical-political postulates, in terms of the order of domains of relevances established and socially approved by the cultural setting the United Nations represents." (idem) Schutz goes on to comment that the existential groups based on color, race, and sex do have social meaning, but they should not have any meaning where moral and juridical equality is concerned. As for the other groups, they are based on unignorably social categories, but "[t]he unfavorable treatment of individuals as mere specimens of such categories by an imposed system of relevances is not compatible with the meaning of equality as defined by the United Nations": "[discrimination includes any conduct based on a distinction made on grounds of natural or social categories which have no relation either to individual capacities or merits, or to the concrete behavior of the individual person." (idem) For Schutz the qualifications in the subsequent section of the U.N. document prevent the above statement on discrimination from being too excessively broad. Discrimination can take the forms of denying rights or advantages to members of a social category, of imposing special burdens on such members, or of exclusively granting favors to members of another category. And, again, these categories are of members of groups, "as whites or blacks, as nationals or foreigners, as men or women, as members of the upper or lower class; as Protestants, Catholics, or Jews; as workers or employers" (idem). There is not just racial discrimination.

B. Minority Rights from Within Discrimination is first of all based on an outsider interpretation, "They" belong to these or those social categories, and "We" deny them rights and advantages, impose special burdens on "Them," and grant favors to members of groups other than "Them," all of which they may dislike. In the United States this is most prominently done by the White majority to the non-White minorities. A '"minority"' is a group "whose members share a common ethnic origin, language, culture, or religion" and is interested in preserving its existence as a national community or at least in preserving its "particular distinguishing characteristics." (II 265) As has been seen, discrimination requires not only an outsider imposition of categories but also an insider reaction: "Even if he never intended to travel by sleeping car, the principled denial of its use becomes to him relevant in his own terms." (II 261) Other examples are offered: persons who believed themselves to be good Germans and had severed all allegiance to Judaism found themselves declared Jews by Hitler's

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Nuremberg laws and treated as such on the ground of a grandparent's origin, a fact up to that time entirely irrelevant. Refugees from Europe, who believed they had found a haven in the United States, discovered themselves placed, after Pearl Harbor, in the category of enemy aliens by reason of the very nationality they wanted to abandon. A change in the rules or definitions established by a Senatorial committee turns loyal civil servants into security risks. (II 257) In contrast with discrimination, which is based on outsider interpretations plus insider interpretations by individuals as well as groups, Schutz discusses minority rights entirely in terms of insider interpretations by groups. The [U.N.] document distinguishes very clearly . . . between a) minorities whose members desire equality with dominant groups in the sense of nondiscrimination alone, and, b) those whose members desire, in addition, the recognition of special rights and the rendering of certain positive services. Minorities in category (a) prefer to be assimilated by the dominant group; minorities in category (b) feel that even full realization of the principle of non-discrimination would not place their group in a position of real equality—but only of formal equality—with respect to the dominant group. . . . For example, as many sociologists and political scientists have pointed out, a minority group that becomes satisfied with its relationship toward the predominant group tends to become more and more assimilated by the latter. If, however, the members of a minority group feel that the rule imposed by the predominant group prevents them from maintaining their particular distinctive characteristics, or inhibits the development of their aspirations for the future, the group's relationship toward the predominant one tends to become more and more strained. (II 267) It is not clear whether Schutz favors assimilationism or pluralism as a policy. He would have been acquainted with the latter because Horace Kallen had been his colleague for a decade, but that he recognized both types of minority-group ambition in that time means that he took it seriously. The quest for minority rights is a source of social tension. C. The Order of Domains of Relevance Concerning the ranking of domains of relevance by Whites and Negroes in the United States, Schutz quotes a famous passage that can be re-quoted: The white man's rank-order of discriminations: 1. Intermarriage 2. Social equality 3. Segregation 4. Political rights

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5. Equality before the law 6. Economic equality The Negro's own rank order is just about parallel, but inverse, to that of the white man. The Negro resists least the discrimination on the ranks placed highest in the white man's evaluation and resents most any discrimination on the lowest level. (II 266, quoting Gunnar Myrdal's An American Dilemma [1944]) Here there would seem to be agreement between the two groups about what the domains of relevance are, but not about their order. Social tensions would then seem to originate not only with respect to the whole sets of but also with respect to particular domains. Whites might then hear Blacks say 'I don't want to marry your daughter; I want an equal chance at a good job.' D. Equality of Opportunity aimed-at and to-be-granted Class differences would seem to be another source of social tension. That groups can be related in terms of power has been alluded to. When Schutz focuses on this relation, he begins with Simmel's analysis of individual life: Typically speaking, . . . nobody is satisfied with the position he occupies with respect to his fellow-men, and everybody wishes to attain a position that is in some sense more favorable . . . . Equality with the superior is the first objective that offers itself to the impulse toward one's own elevation— and, characteristically enough, equality with the immediate superior. Yet this equality is merely a point of transition. Myriad experiences have shown that once the subordinate is equal to the superior this condition, which previously was the essential aim of his endeavor, is merely a starting point for a further effort, the first station on the unending road to the most favored position. Wherever an attempt is made at effecting equalization, the individual's striving to surpass others comes to the fore in all possible forms on the newly reached stage. (II 267) The same striving beyond equality would hold for groups, and if there is always already stratification, then there will always be a higher group resisting a lower group. "Equality aimed-at" pertains to the insider interpretations of the group or individual aspiring—at least initially—to equality and "equality to-be-granted" pertains to the outsider interpretation by "those in the privileged position of who are required to grant equal treatment." (idem) If the formal/real distinction is then added to this situation, then more conflict can arise: To minority groups of [the formal] type (a), assimilation is the kind of equality aimed-at. To those of type (b), however, real equality is the kind aimed-at; that is, obtaining special rights such as the use of their national

i

languages in schools, before the courts, etc. . . . The predominant group may interpret equality-to-be-granted as formal, and may even be willing to concede full equality before the law and full political equality, and yet resist bitterly any claim to special rights. [An] instance is the different interpretation of the rank-order of discrimination by white men and by Negro. (II 267-68) The "predominant group" would thus defend its language and no doubt other parts of its cultural heritage, e.g., its religion, as not merely one among many but as the one for the whole society. (The United States, it may be remarked, has neither an established religion nor an established language, but this does not prevent English-speaking Protestants from resisting other languages and religions.) In addition, those in the "privileged position" tend to interpret equality-to-be-granted by them in terms of "conservative thinking," at most adjusting the prevailing system of relevances in order to reduce social tensions, while those aiming to obtain real equality incline to "revolutionary thinking," whereby "the system itself must be abolished." (II 268) Schutz approvingly quotes Tawney on how the inequalities before the French Revolution originated in social institutions and those afterwards originated in personal character. "La carriere ouverte aux talents . . . was the formula of reconciliation (between revolutionaries and conservatives) which had overthrown the class system of the old regime in France and supplied a satisfactory moral title to the class system which succeeded it." (idem) The title in the America of the 1950s for Napoleon's "career open to the talents" is "equal opportunity." As seen, equality has insider and outsider interpretations. One can attempt to approach opportunity both ways as well. Schutz begins with "objective" or outsider interpretation in modern sociology: In the objective sense a social group is a structural-functional system formed by a web of interconnected interaction processes, social roles, positions, and statuses. . . . Each role carries along a particular set of role expectations which any incumbent of the role is expected to fulfill. —In our terminology these role expectations are nothing but typifications of interaction patterns which are socially approved ways of solving typical patterns, and are frequently institutionalized. Consequentially, they are arranged in domains of relevances which in turn are ranked in a particular order originating in the group's relative natural conception of the world, its folkways, mores, morals, etc. (II 269) Also thus determined are the competence and qualifications needed to perform the role, and hence only qualified persons should be considered for the role or position. "[N]ot only competent persons should be eligible, but all competent persons, regardless of any other criteria, should be equally eligible, it

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being understood that among all the eligible persons the best qualified should obtain the position." (II 270) In our terminology we should say it is the relative natural conception of the world that determines, or at least codetermines, the competences and qualifications everyone eligible for a position has to possess. The reference of the definition of these qualifications to the natural conception of the world prevailing in a particular group leads frequently to the consequence that elements are included in the definition which have no, or merely a remote connection with the proper fulfillment of the particular position. It is, for instance, characteristic of the present American scene that the qualifications required for certain jobs exclude from eligibility, as they do not in other countries of the West, persons over thirty-five years of age. (II 270) Another difficulty consists in how all societies include hierarchies of positions in which the higher one goes the fewer positions there are for qualified persons, in which case other factors come into play. On what bases is there selection within the oversupply of qualified persons? Equality of opportunity for positions and careers is not the only form of equal opportunity. There is equality of opportunity for "education or the development of ability and talent; equality of opportunity for sharing the benefits of culture;. .. equal access to public opportunities;" (II 271) etc. Here too opportunity is determined by typifications of social roles and expectations as approved in the group. In terms now of individual insider interpretation, opportunity presents itself differently. "Such an individual experiences what we have defined in the objective sense as an opportunity as a possibility for self-realization that stands to his choice, as a chance given to him, as a likelihood of attaining his goals in terms of his private definition of his situation within the group." (idem) This opportunity has, however, at least four conditions: (1) the individual must be aware of the chance, (2) it has to be compatible with his private system of relevances and within his reach, (3) the outsider defined typifications of role requirements must be such that, in his self-typification, he is convinced he can perform them, and (4) the role must be compatible with the other social roles in which he is involved. "Hence, even if it made sense to assume that equal subjective chances correspond to objectively equal opportunities, the individual human being would weigh the chances in terms of his personal hopes, anxieties, and passions, which are his alone." (II 272) Strictly speaking then, equal opportunity can only hold from the objective or outsider point of view. Can there be "an equal start for everyone"? Most of the authors dealing with this problem have referred to many factors that make an equal start impossible: differences of wealth, the pressure of mere material surroundings such as housing situation, etc., economic

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conditions (such as the fact that only few men can devote their energies to education until manhood without being compelled to compete early for employment, or the inequality of access to information, particularly to financial information), are among them. Perhaps inequality of leisure time should be added to this catalogue. (II 273) Schutz agrees that collective action would be required to overcome such existential albeit cultural differences; he seems not to consider this likely to happen. Nevertheless, the ideal of equality of opportunity "should assure to the individual who finds himself in the human bondage of his various group memberships the right to the pursuit of happiness . . . and, therewith—in terms of his own definition—the maximum of self-realization which his situation in social reality permits." (II 273) "The pursuit of happiness" here of course alludes to America. Finally, [i]t has to be taken into consideration that the self-interpretation of the group, its central myth, as well as the forms of its rationalization and institutionalization, is subject to changes in the course of history. A good example is the change in the meaning of the notion of equality in the political ideas of the United States from the Declaration of Independence ("We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal") to the wording of the Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments and the various interpretations given by the United States Supreme Court to these amendments, leading to the "separate but equal" doctrine and the latter's recent abolishment, (idem) V. How to Reduce Social Tensions By a passage quoted early in the present essay, Schutz holds that social tensions can be reduced and that this is an educational goal attainable by the patient modification of the relevance system those in power impose on their fellow human beings. The tensions recognized in "Equality" are chiefly due to racial discrimination, but other sources are referred to as well. The exclusion from job eligibility of persons over thirty-five when this has no connection with the job's tasks has also been mentioned. Race and age are not imputable to individual effort. Nor are other existential elements on the basis of which there can be typification: Mother tongue, national origin, sex, and one's family's class and religion. What are (a) the preconditions and (b) the means and (c) who is or are the agent(s) of actions to reduce such social tensions? (A) Reflecting on the papers at the conference where he presented "Equality," Schutz writes as follows about the cognitive preconditions, some of which he attempted to fulfill.

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The term, "middle ground," was also used in order to determine the region where the theoretical attitude of the thinker can be translated into the practical attitude of the man of action, or, as it has been said, of the decision-maker. . . . On the one hand, the question was raised how we, members of the Conference, can communicate our findings to the man on the street who neither uses nor understands our language. On the other hand, several members emphasized the necessity of giving a series of practical answers applying to education, equality of opportunity in choosing work, international relations, etc. All this is <solely> possible if we have some knowledge of the particular structure of the common-sense thinking within the social group addressed by us, that is, the systems of typifications, the relevance structures, the schemes of interpretation, etc., that prevail in it. To convey our message to the common man and be understood by him we have to use his language and translate our thoughts into the conceptual framework accepted by him. In order to change attitudes and to promote, say, racial equality or equal opportunity of education, we have to know more about the mechanism of discrimination of all kinds. (IV 150) Cognitive or epistemological conditions furthermore include how a given set of folkways or cultural patterns is affected by previous thinking, which is implied in the notion of social heritage. One is born into a world that existed before one's birth, a world that is sociocultural as well as natural, "a preconstituted and preorganized world whose particular structure is the result of an historical process and is therefore different for each culture and society." (II 229) One needs also to know that typifications are institutionalized "by law, mores, rituals, etc." (IV 150, cf. II 237) For example, Schutz expected the reinterpretation of the Fourteenth Amendment in Brown v. United States to affect the country's central myth. And philosophical and religious thought can be secularized and institutionalized into common-sense: The concepts of Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, and other thinkers that influenced the framing of the American and French constitutions were secularized in different ways in either case. To the philosophical insight into the dignity of man corresponds the notion of "fair play" in American common-sense thinking—a term that certainly is [more] closely related to sportsmanship than to philosophy in the mind of the man in the street: "Let's give the other fellow a break" . . . —It seems to me that this region of secularized common-sense thinking is indeed the "epistemological middle ground" where ideas and ideals—transformed into taken-for-granted notions of social reality—become springs of social interaction. (IV 149, cf. II 249) Furthermore, and axiologically rather than epistemologically speaking, it would also seem a precondition for reducing social tensions that such tensions be disvalued; Schutz calls them evil.

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(B) The means for reducing social tensions that Schutz explicitly recognizes are legal and educational. On the highest level legally is the United Nations, the Commission on Human Rights which "has not only to make suggestions [presumably to the nations making up the U.N.] regarding the elimination or restriction of discrimination but also regarding the protection of minorities." (II 265) Then, within the United States, there would be the federal constitution and its interpretation by the Supreme Court. State and local laws and courts should be added. As for education, Schutz seems to have in mind more than formal schooling. A system of relevances and typifications is part of a social heritage "and as such is handed down in the educational process to the members of the in-group." (II 237, cf. Ill 120) Such an educationally transmitted system determines which items are treated as homogeneous for solving typical problems in typical ways; it transforms unique humans into typical role, so that "[t]he incumbent of such a social role is expected by the other members of the in-group to act in the typical way defined by this role" (idem): it functions as a scheme of orientation and also a scheme of interpretation for members of the in-group; its chances of success depends on its standardization; and it is the basis for the individual's definition of her situation. Efforts at change can be made with respect to particular domains of relevance or their orderings. [W]hat has been beyond question so far and remained unquestioned up to now may always be put in question; things taken for granted then become problematical. This will be the case, for example, if there occurs in the individual or social life an event or situation which cannot be met by applying the traditional and habitual patterns of behavior or interpretation. We call such a situation a crisis—a partial one if it makes only some elements of the world taken for granted questionable, a total one if it invalidates the whole system of reference, the scheme of interpretation itself. (II 231) (c) Finally, who are the agents of the preferred change for Schutz? It has been seen that he does not expect collectively produced change and, because much of the cultural heritage is worth preserving, he does not urge the total transformation of revolutionary thinking. Rather, it is his educational goal that a slow and patient modification of the relevance system be imposed by those in power. These would seem to include the privileged for whom there is equality-to-be granted and who are more willing to yield to aspirations to formal equality than the real equality of ethnic minorities. And it includes the Supreme Court and no doubt elected officials of all levels. These would seem the men of action or decision makers referred to above.

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VI. Closing Remarks "Equality" shows that Alfred Schutz was a liberal who urged a way in which to reduce social tensions. Perhaps the most impressive aspect of his account is his recognition of discrimination as in general based on cultural as well as natural determinations and thus that there is not merely racial discrimination but also discrimination on the basis of sex and age and also discrimination on the basis of class, language, national origin, religion, etc. Schutz might have suggested that desegregation would foster face-to-face interaction and thereby new typifications that would erode traditional stereotypes, but he does not do so. Finally, had he lived longer, he would have had to consider how popular movements such as the Civil Rights Movement, the Woman's Movement, or even the Environmental Movement in his adopted country could provoke at least partial crises and effect rapid and impatient change in particular relevance domains and their ordering through persuasion, demonstrations, and civil disobedience. He does recognize the ultimate option of disrupting the vicious circles of discrimination through war at any temperature.

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III FUNDAMENTAL ISSUES

Chapter Six

Personality of Higher Order: Husserlian Reflections on the Quebec Problem R. Philip Buckley McGill University There is a very strong sense in Quebec that there are two things in life which are worthy of genuine passion: ice hockey and politics. The difference between these two major spectator sports is that the hockey season has been expanded to last only eight months; whereas politics is front page news 365 days a year. Given this pervasive quality, it might be expected that a phenomenologist living in one of the most politicized environments imaginable would encounter few problems describing political life as it appears in Quebec. How one answers the phone, the paper one reads, where one shops, these are not just considered acts of personal preference or expressions of personal identity—these and all sorts of "everyday" acts are frequently attributed a profound political significance. But this very omnipresence of the political means that it is very difficult to conduct some form of phenomenological reflection upon it; very difficult indeed to turn away from the empirical self-interest that every Quebecois(e) has invested in the political life of the province. In looking for an aide for phenomenological reflection on the political, it is worthwhile to turn towards Husserl himself. For Husserl, the crisis of "Europe" has a societal dimension, and what he recognizes with great acuity is that part of the crisis consists precisely in being lost within the political and social world, that is, in accepting what has been given as self-evident, formulating solutions to political crises in the same worn out and sedimented concepts and language that are in fact part of the problem. In this paper, I want to trace through Husserl's own attempt to approach political life in a phenomenological way as a support for my efforts to understand what is going on around me in my lifeworld in Quebec (a situation having a number of unique features, but also mirroring many others throughout the world). Husserl's description of the political consists largely of a close analysis of the analogy between the " 1 " and the "We"—an analogy which he admits is clearly traceable back to Plato but which he also claims is "by no means the spirited invention of an eccentric philosopher who soars beyond natural thinking."1 To the contrary, he claims that this tendency to 1

Edmund Husserl, Aufsdtze und Vortrage 1922-1937, ed. Tom Nenon and Hans Rainer Sepp, Husserliana XXVII (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1989), 5. All subsequent references to Husserl's works are designated as "'Hua'" and cited according to the appropriate volume and page number. 105 K. Thompson and L. Embree (eds.). Phenomenology of the Political, 105-120. © 2000 Kluwer Academic Publishers. Printed in the Netherlands.

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think about a collectivity as an "individual writ large" arises in everyday apperception. In the first part of the paper, I outline some of the salient features of the "personality of higher order" which Husserl sees as the "We" functioning analogously to the individual "I." In a second part, two distinct ways in which this collective "We" can be interpreted are suggested, rooted in two quite distinct ways of conceiving the "I" termimus functioning as its analogical base. I conclude with some general reflections on what this type of analysis discloses about the political life of Canada. I. Personality of Higher Order The central feature of Husserl's theory of community is the notion of "personality of higher order." Different sorts of communities ranging from the family to the state are understood as analogous to the individual "I." A community is a "multi-headed . . . yet connected subjectivity,"2 and as such a subjectivity it too has a "personality," displaying particular tendencies, moods, and traits such as memory—indeed, many of the features usually attributed to individual existence. Nonetheless, the community which possesses a personality is of a "higher order." It is different than the individuals who comprise it, and its personal features belong to it "uniquely." That is, the personal features of the community are something "new"—they are not a mere conglomeration of individual features. It is here that a first ambiguity or tension arises in Husserl's theory of community, but I think it is a fruitful tension, or at least, a tension that has to do with Husserl's phenomenological sharpness. He is trying to account for the real identity which occurs within various types of communal existence without making community some sort of pre-existent structure which has enveloped and absolutely determines individual existence. Conversely, Husserl's notion of "personality of higher order" tries to maintain the essential aspects of individual existence, while still showing that something arises out of that individual existence that is truly new and different—a community. A first reading of Husserl's reflections on the community as "personality of higher order"3 runs up against what seems to be a great deal of boring repetition. But a closer second reading reveals that he is indeed trying to capture a very complex phenomenon without giving a one-sided view: the community is a real entity in its own right, but it cannot exist apart from individuals. On the other hand, individuals produce something which at the same time is both completely dependent on those individuals, but also exceeds them. Husserl's earliest 2

3

Hua XXVII. 22.

Some textual loci: Edmund Husserl, Zur Phanomenologie der Intersubjektivitat. Texte aus dem Nachlass. Erster Teil. 1905-1920. Zweiter Teil. 1921-1928. Dritter Teil. 1929-1935, ed. lso Kern. Husserliana XIII-XV (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1973); the most important texts are Gemeingeist I in Husserliana XIV andJJemeingeist II in Husserliana XV. See as well the Ka/zo-articles in Hua XXVII. 3-122.

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analyses of the multiplicitous layers of acts which form conscious life already contain this interesting insight that founding acts establish something "greater" than themselves; to use the words of the Logical Investigations, there is a "surplus" present in these foundational acts which both accompanies these acts and is distinct from them. One positive result of Husserl's constant re-phrasing of the relationship between individual and community is that it does attempt to account for the types of feelings we all have in belonging to a community without resorting to some metaphysical notion of the whole. It is true, however, that one can uncover within this fine example of phenomenological description a number of prescriptive elements. Though ontologically founded upon the individual, "communities" can dominate the individual and be arranged in a hierarchical and domineering fashion. Husserl describes such an "inauthentic" community as an "imperial unity of will," wherein individuals are subordinate to, and submit themselves to, a central will.4 Husserl, who never displayed a particularly subtle insight into history, took the medieval Church as the best example of such a communal organization. The "authentic" community, on the other hand, is one in which each individual, rather than being subordinate to the "whole," actually has insight into the whole and how one fits into the whole which the individual has produced. Or put slightly differently, the individual has an insight into the collective insight of the community, one knows how one's free activities merge with the free activities of others to produce a collective activity that is something larger than the sum of its parts. But this image of an emergent collective insight based on participation does seem to imply at least two problematic presuppositions. First, it requires a high level of individual authenticity, that is, it demands that people know what they are doing and why they are doing it—a heavy demand in view of the repetitive and self-forgetful nature of modern, technological life. Put more dramatically, since individual authenticity means producing the originary evidence for what one does and holds, or at the very least, being willing to strive to produce such evidence—to recollect it from the layers of passivity and sedimentation that allow for "smooth" but also "thoughtless" functioning—the requirement for authentic community seems to be that everyone become a "phenomenologist." Only in this way will people "see" the same thing, or at least, if not exactly "seeing" or "doing" the same thing, individuals will understand themselves as playing the same game. Though training everybody to become a phenomenologist in a strict sense would be very good for the academic "business," it might also have a rather negative impact on the economy at large. The fact that "personality of higher order" is linked to a vision of an authentic community, rather than resolving a tension between the individual and the collective which appears at the outset of Husserl's reflections on personalities of higher order, actually seems to increase it. "Authenticity" is, after all, a notion essentially linked with individual existence and for Husserl it Hua XXVII, 53.

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refers to a type of thinking which grasps itself, which knows both what it does and why it does what it does. When this notion is transferred to the "higherorder" individual—the community—it implies a collective thinking that grasps the meaning of itself in its entirety, which means grasping the meaning of the activity of each of its members. This seems, at the very least, to be rather incredible. Indeed, the mechanics of how we progress from hard earned individual insight to individually possessing the communal insight founded upon individual insight remain puzzling. Husserl seems to be aware of the difficulty of comprehending such a notion, and hence provides a concrete example: the community of mathematicians is used to explain this strange feat of pursuing an individual activity and yet at the same time realizing that the individual activity is actually a "part" of a larger activity. This is not the sole use of this example in Husserl's thought. Indeed, Husserl frequently contends that philosophy ought to achieve for science in general what mathematics achieves for the natural sciences. Husserl claims that the authentic community is "somewhat similiar to the way the collective of mathematicians forms a community of will, insofar as each individual work concerns a science which is a common good, and hence is intended for every other mathematician. In this community of will, the work of each mathematician profits from the work of every other mathematician, and present in everyone is the consciousness of the whole and the totality of mathematicians, of a common goal, and of the works which ought to be mutually determining and determined."5 One recognizes in such a Utopian statement Husserl's life-long condemnation of over-specialization in science and the type of inauthentic thinking which such specialization engenders. While this condemnation may culminate in the Crisis, Husserl stated as early as 1887 that the complete researcher who strives to be a complete human being as well should never lose sight of the relation of his or her science to the more general and higher epistemic goals of humanity. Professional restriction to a single field is necessary; but it is reproachable to become fully absorbed in such a field. And the researcher must appear even more reproachable, who is indifferent even to the more general questions which concern the foundation of his or her science, as well as its value and place in the realm of human knowledge in general.6

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Here we have a most noble statement about science as a collective activity, one wherein scientists must grasp the meaning of individual research within the framework of science in general and locate their singular efforts within the striving of all humankind for knowledge and meaning.7 There is, however, a further aspect of Husserl's early thought which in some ways works against this noble ideal. In a sentence immediately proceeding the passage just quoted, Husserl admits that specialization—though an "evil"—may in fact be necessary for progress in science. Husserl's earliest encounter with scientific research and a community of scholars already reveals some sense of "necessary specialization" and the need for narrow focus and division of labour. Namely, it is well known that Husserl's early thought was deeply influenced by the effort of Carl Weierstrass to provide a solid foundation for arithmetic by means of a rigorous development of the real number system. Though we know that this early experience can be seen as foreshadowing Husserl's life-long concern with "foundation-work,"8 we also know that Husserl parted company with his mentor on "who" should accomplish this foundational enterprise. This sort of ground work was, according to Husserl, a properly philosophical task9 But here we already have, in a nascent stage, the tension which is supposed to be overcome in authentic community as exemplified in none other than the community of mathematicians. That is, we see a group of "specialists" at work which is not in a position to understand and ground the meaning of its own collective activity. This must somehow be done by a group of other "specialists" 7

My guess is that this shift to seeing the community of mathematicians as some sort of paradigm probably came about due to the influence of Hilbert. In his famous lecture from 1900 before the Second International Congress of Mathematicians in Paris, Hilbert summarized his hope for mathematical science as a collective activity, and in doing so remarkably prefigures HusserFs statement from Kaizo. Hilbert concluded: the question is urged upon us today whether mathematics is doomed to the fate of the other sciences that have split up into separate branches, whose representatives hardly understand one another and whose connection becomes ever more loose. 1 do not believe this, nor wish it. Mathematicial science is in my view an indivisible whole, an organism whose vitality is conditioned upon the connection of its parts. For with all the variety of mathematical knowledge, we are still conscious of the similarity of logical devices, the relationship of the ideas in mathematics as a whole and the numerous analogies in different departments.

'HuaXXVII, 53. See Constance Reid. Hilbert (New York/Heidelberg: Springer-Verlag. 1970). 83. 6

Husserl-Archive manuscript K I 28/25a. Sections of this manuscript are published in Edmund Husserl, Studien zur Arithmetik und Geometrie, ed. Ingeborg Strohmeyer, Husserliana XXI (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff. 1983). This citation is found on 231. It is probably from the lectures of winter-semester 1887-1888 entitled "Einleitung in die Erkenntnistheorie und Metaphysik."'

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Husserl-Archive manuscript B II 23/8a.

J. Philip Miller. Numbers in Presence and Absence: A Study of Husserl's Philosophy of Mathematics (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1982), 6.

or "authorities," in this case philosophers, who are interested not merely in certain singular achievements of mathematics nor simply in its proper functioning, but in its meaning and in its foundation. There is an ambiguity in Husserl's approach to the collective activity we call science which I think he never fully overcame. On the one hand, he accepted the advantages of specialization, and at times almost implies that for science to make progress it must be focused, and hence forgetful of broader concerns and deeper meanings. On the other hand, such forgetfulness of meaning is "reproachable." With regard to community, this ambiguity can perhaps be rephrased in terms of an atomistic, functionalistic vision of society where at best a very few "authorities" understand how all the parts fit together; as opposed to a wholistic, organic, participatory model in which members fit together and form a goaloriented unit wherein they comprehend how their individual efforts contribute to their common goal. It is clearly this latter notion which is at work in Husserl's vision of authentic community in the 1920's—exemplified by none other than the community of mathematicians, who, at the earlier stage in Husserl's thought actually seemed to represent specialization and its forgetfulness. Can we find a way out of this impasse wherein the truly authentic community is inevitably dysfunctional and the well functioning community destined to inauthenticity? II. A couple of models of the "I" terminus for the analogy There are a number of possible routes to follow in the effort to deal with this ambiguity. One easy way is to see it as revealing the weakness of this analogical thinking in the first place. Collectivities just are not to be thought of as "individuals writ large"—to think that collectivities are to be conceived in an analogical manner is perhaps what Gilbert Ryle would call a category mistake. Going this route renders meaningless much political rhetoric, which often does speak of a "we" as an individual. And this is crucial in the present context in Quebec. For example, one of the key components of the sovereigntist strategy is to convince the electorate in the province not only that the nature of being a "we" calls for independence, but that the so-called ROC (Rest of Canada) will react as a unified rational agent in responding to any declaration of sovereignty. This is important because without the promise of negotiation and the working out of a new "association" with ROC, the support for sovereignty is quite low. But that whole strategy assumes that the rest of Canada is a "we" entity that will be able to enter into negotiations as such a higher order individual. If such entities just should not be thought to exist, the terms of the debate shift a great deal. This approach is often heard from various "Iiberal"(in the classical sense) perspectives: they claim that framing the whole debate about the future of Canada in terms of founding "peoples" (e.g., the English, the French, and as the failed Charlottetown Accord clearly indicated—the aboriginal peoples as well) is just bound to failure, and that part of the solution to the constitutional impasse in Canada is to reveal the entire falsehood of conceiving of a collectivity (or in this case—collectivities) as "thinking" and acting analogously to an individual. Of course, there are governments which might negotiate, but in the

present context the federal government would be totally crippled since the Prime Minister himself comes from Quebec,10 as does the titular head of government— the governor general, as do a large percentage of Cabinet, the House of Commons, the Supreme Court, etc. In other words, at least in terms of political strategy, some federalists often try to disrupt the rosy picture of negotiations after a vote for sovereignty not by saying that it is undesirable, but by saying that it would be impossible. At the very least, an entirely new governmental structure would have to be implemented, involving not only a reformed federal government but at least the nine other provincial governments as well—a messy situation indeed. This strategic practical argument seems rooted in a denial of easily recognizable "personalities of higher order." This "denial" of the analogy is, however, not that clear-cut. On the one hand, many federalists who employ the strategy of saying that there is no "we"entity that corresponds to Canada without Quebec use this merely as a prelude to the conclusion that if there is a "we" to be found, then only Canada "with" Quebec constitutes such a entity. This does not address the challenge to the analogy directly. Even those who claim that no government should ever be confused with a "we" entity in fact leave an opening for the analogy. Simply put, they often seem to be saying that such higher order personalities may well exist, but probably only in small groupings. So while Husserl's analogical thinking may have some relevance for small natural groups such as the family or relatively small organizations, it makes no sense to apply it to the political sphere (at least, the political sphere conceived of as national, regional, and probably even municipal governments). This criticism, which might be taken as saying that only small groupings can be "authentic" communities (Gemeinschaften) while larger political groupings are merely functional collectivities of convenience (Gesellschaften), does in fact address somewhat the ambiguity in Husserl's thought. Husserl's reflections on the inauthenticity of most collective existence really is an attack on the functionalism of such groupings, and is a call for a more intimate and direct type of communal existence. Nonetheless, he does seem to think that many, if not all of these Gesellschaften can be transformed into authentic communities. One way of rephrasing Husserl's criticism of the European sciences is that they have become over-specialized and merely functional—in short, the sciences have become a Gesellschaft. For the "crisis" to be overcome, they must become more "communal." And for Husserl, even political Gesellschaften can, and ought, to become "personalities of higherorder."

10 At the time of writing this paper, the leader of the official opposition also came from Quebec, indeed, the oppostion party (Bloc Quebecois) in the Canadian federal parliament consisted entirely of members from Quebec dedicated to independence. This dramatically heightened the sense that in the event of a positive vote for some sort of separation, the federal government would be politically and morally incapable of defending the interests of the ROC.

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This conception of large-scale political organization as a genuine community may be unacceptable when viewed from certain "liberal" standpoints, but it is something that fits in well with another strand of sovereigntist thought in Quebec. Namely, there are those who claim that what makes Quebec society "distinct" is precisely that it does form a genuine community (unlike the ROC—which is really just an anonymous collectivity of English-speakers whose only distinct characteristic is its on-going effort to distinguish itself from that other, larger anonymous mass of English speakers to the south). In short, "Canada" is a collectivity of convenience designed to ensure good functioning (e.g., free trade between the provinces), while "Quebec" is a true community, a true "we." This argument has its strategic merit because it asserts a difference of ontological proportions that seems to ground the call for political realignment, for independence. However, a number of objections can be made to this suggestion. First, the mundane point that it seems at best a misguided hubris, and at worst, a form of racism, to claim that only "'we' are a we" while the "rest" are just a "they." Second, it is not altogether clear that individuals in Quebec behave all that differently from people in the supposedly more functional collectivities, nor that the political life in Quebec operates any less like a Gesellschaft than any other government in the Western world. The debate around which collectivities, if any, can be identified as being "authentic" communities having the attributes of Husserl's "personality of higher order" often reinscribes many of the ambiguities found in Husserl's own analysis. On the one hand, there is a constant recognition that much of modern life simply is rather functional—and that this functionalism serves us well, at least in terms of "efficiency." On the other hand, the language of belonging to a genuine "we" has a continual attraction—perhaps even a greater attraction today in view of the anonymity of contemporary, functional existence. Some see the formation within the political sphere of a genuine "we" as a noble goal, but then fall into exclusionary and xenophobic language. Others see the substantive notion of community as "personality of higher order" to be an impossibility and the continuous use of such language as a threat to individual liberty and the modern conception of the human person as autonomous. Is there a way out of this stalemate between those who worship the "we" and those who cling to the "I"? Perhaps there is another route to go. Rather than claiming that any saying of "we" is senseless, perhaps one could try to envision a different sense of the "we" by reconceptualizing the "I" which stands as its analogical point of reference. The view of the authentic "I" which was developed in the first section is largely one of a subject which has insight into his or her activities, which knows what she or he does and why he or she does it, a subject willing to defend and justify all his or her various "position-takings." The idea that to be authentically human involves a will to know that encompasses both the theoretical realm and the realm of praxis carries with it the sense that authentic human life is a constant struggle against irrational impulses and irrational fate, against that which has not been chosen and willed in a rational manner by the subject. In a manuscript from his lecture-course on ethics from 1920, Husserl

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suggests that the desire for a fully rational life brings about a splitting of the ego into the higher ego of reason and the lowly and sinful ego of drifting along either in impulses or pre-given validities. Authentic human life is a Kampf against both individual impulses and social tendencies which run contrary to the rational selfdetermination of the subject by the subject. And it would seem that for Husserl this struggle ought to be taken up both by the individual subject and by the collective "we." There is plenty of evidence to support the reading of Husserl which claims that authenticity consists in the sovereignty of the rational, active self over the self of passivity. Take, for example, his view of the "saint." The person who does good without knowing why he or she does the good, is, for Husserl, a person leading a life of passivity and inauthenticity. Such a life remains a life in which the true self is subordinate to the lower self. Consequently, the "saint," the person who just does the good, is compared by Husserl to "a nice little animal" (ein gutes Tierchen).n Even though performing "acts" which are deemed to be good, such a person remains a passive "animal." The authentic human "saint" is the person who does good and knows why he or she does that good. The authentic human saint pursues good with insight and understanding into the good, or rather, with a desire not just to do, but also to "know" the good. For Husserl, the true self knows what it does and why it does what it does, and thus is fully responsible for itself, truly "answerable" for its actions. According to this line of interpretation, the best description of authenticity is self-responsibility, and the ultimate characterization of Husserl's philosophy is one of absolute, rational self-responsibility. This reading of "rationality" in Husserl is of the "universalizing" type, and it is often portrayed as monolithic and homogenizing, if not totalizing, rationality. Within this view, fragmentation within the self or within the community is taken to be a sign of "crisis," an indication of the absence of proper rationality, the loss of an originary and unified rational foundation. But perhaps there is another reading or sense of rationality in Husserl, what Ullrich Melle has called the "unofficial" notion of rationality.12 This notion is one which is radically open to otherness within the self and beyond, and hence is a genuinely pluralistic sense of rationality. By trying to get away from a narrow epistemological and Cartesian reading of Husserl, we can perhaps open up a much broader sense of rationality and bring with it a much different sense of individual authenticity, and by extension a much different sense of authentic community. In his recent book, James Hart accomplishes an undermining of narrowly epistemological and solipsistic views of reduction by tracing a close connection and continuity between transcendental reduction with its goal of 11

12

Husserl-Archive manuscript B I 21/7a.

Ullrich Mellc. "Selbstverwirklung und Gemeinschaft in Husserls Ethik, Politik und Theologie," Tijdschrift voor Filosofie 57 (1995): 111-128.

14

uncovering the transcendental constituting origin which lies at the basis of the "world" and what he terms the "ethical reduction."1' Let me briefly outline the possibilities Hart's ethical reading of reduction has for a broader conception of Husserlian reason. At first glance, ethical reduction seems confined solely to the concrete personal and social world and hence to be an aspect of "mundane" phenomenology. In our everyday life in the world, we can come to the realization that we do not know what we are doing, that we are not responsible for our lives but have been living along in a life which belongs not to ourselves but to what Heidegger calls das Man. For Husserl, the forgetful and thoughtless functioning of everyday life in the world can be overcome through an active and brave willing not to live in anonymous activity or to be driven through blind instinct. This overcoming is accomplished through an active seeking of insight into what one does and why one does what one does, through a constant effort to justify one's theoretical, axiological and practical "position-takings" {Stellungnahmeri) on the basis of evidence. According to Husserl, true human life consists in pulling oneself out of the life of simply living along in a current of mere tendencies and pre-given validities, and the formation of a life of critical choice. Ethical reduction from this viewpoint, i.e., the struggle to become responsible for one's life through self-examination, seems to be merely a parallel to the type of return to the origin of one's conscious life which is the task of transcendental reduction. Such a parallel is evident in Husserl, but the explicit connection between a mundane life of self-justification and a life of transcendental self-justification remains obscure. That is, when looking from the standpoint of the "natural attitude" within which the ethical reduction functions, the need for transendental reduction is not evident. However, from the transcendental perspective, the continuity between the two becomes evident. In fact, the full meaning of all "mundane" activity, including ethical activity, is uncovered by transcendental reduction. This is not only to say that ethics and politics have a transcendental ground. Rather, at the core of transcendental reduction one discovers not only the constitutive basis of the world but also what it is that ultimately pulls us in the direction of transcendental reduction—a sort of ethical imperative. The desire to go back "to the things themselves" (whether in mundane ethical life or in transcendental phenomenology) is based on this ethical imperative which arises within ourselves and is itself only uncovered in transcendental reduction. In brief, Hart claims that phenomenological reflection and its struggle to escape from transcendental naivete by turning back to the ultimate forms of self-experience inscribes an "infinite ideal" that ultimately is the "ethical" ideal of absolute self-responsibility. From such an ethical perspective, the analysis of the depths of subjective life takes on a different tone than the search for absolute certainty. Reduction can be 13

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James Hart, The Person and the Common Life (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers. 1992), 37.

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recast as the investigation of the structural preconditions of the personal identity for which we are responsible. A person "acts" and through the activity of various "position-takings" the concrete identity of the person is formed. The answer to the question "who am I?" is found in the first instance in the connection of my "position-takings" vis-a-vis various goals and objects, the coherency of my judgments and decisions. But how are these "position-takings" made possible? This activity is itself grounded in prior forms of "passive synthesis," of which the most fundamental are internal time-consciousness and association. Even at this fundamental level, however, there is a form of volitional intentionality, a form of willing that Hart identifies as a general will.14 This will is general in that it is not a specific intentionality but aims at an ideal form of truth and selfhood. It is both the foundation of individual acts of will and the overall horizon within which these specific acts of will function. The general will is ultimately a "theological" concept in that it is a transcendental "pull" that at the same time is immanent at the core of selfexperience. The identification of the "LV-constitutive" stream with a divine entelechy running through the heart of one's existence can be understood in neoPlatonic terms: there is a type of fundamental Eros which cuts through human existence, providing both the possibility of personal life and directing that life towards an absolute, infinite ideal. One of the great virtues of such a perspective is that it places Husserl's "voluntarism" and "decisionism" in an entirely different light than a totalizing (totalitarian) willing of rational self-control. The desire towards the habitus^ to examine, to understand, and to justify all of one's concrete and personal "position-takings," to constantly inquire into the unreflected habits and "passive" actions of everyday life, is no longer some form of obsessive rational selfcontrol, but is rooted in the general will that lies at the core of one's being. The specific direction of will rooted in the choice to direct one's life in a new way is certainly a solemn, active decision to move away from the passive tendencies and thoughtlessness which characterize everyday life.16 This "resolve of will" is also certainly a decision to live in a particular way, but this decision must be a continuous deciding, not solely a "once and for all" decision. Or perhaps better, it is a "once and for all" decision that is continually re-willed, a concrete direction of will that is rooted in the general will constantly functioning at the basis of one's life. 14

Hart. 82.

15

Hua XXVII, 64.

16

Edmund Husserl, Die Krisis der europaischen Wissenschaften und die transzendentale Phanomenologie. ed. Walter Biemel. Husserliana VI (The Hague: Nijhoff. 1954), 147-148; The Crisis of the European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology, trans. David Carr (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1970), 145.

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The notion of habitus expresses well this consistency, for it entails neither a single decision nor one noble act, but a way of life acted out continuously, always and everywhere, regardless of circumstance. Hart paraphrases Husserl to say that "I can never be good but can only become good"17 and the implication here is that "being true to myself is not a deciding for one stable and fixed self which knows concretely with absolute certainty what it is deciding for, but it is a deciding for the self as able to decide. Being true to myself is hence not being true to some fixed self but being true to what Hart identifies as the divine entelechy moving through me at the core of my being. In a two-fold sense, there is a fundamental "receptivity" enunciated here. First, there is a sense in which a demand is placed upon me, a call issued to me from the outside; put otherwise, the fundamental form of self-experience can be re-articulated as a sense of being the recipient of a "gift." Second, one must accept or receive oneself at the basis of one's being as that type of being which is never fully the source of one's own being. The recognition of this fundamental receptivity alters the sense of the subject's rational existence from one of autonomy and control to one of dependence and vulnerability. What do we end up with when, following the Platonic analogy, we extend to a "We" the view of the individual person as being rooted in a dynamic, activepassive motion of divine entelechy, in a presencing and absencing, as recipient of a gift which is the foundation of one's active life? What does all this say about the relation to others, and to a community? On the level of inter-subjectivity (the relation of "I" to another "I"), it can be asserted that the foreignness in myself is the precondition of there being "others" for me. What makes another possible for me is my own fundamental experience of time-consciousness and its presencing-absencing flow. Among the many subsequent developments that come to mind with this suggestion is Heidegger's assertion that Mitsein as constitutive of Dasein's own being precedes "empathy." Heidegger too recognizes that the genuine philosophical problem is not how two selfencapsulated subjects are able to recognize each other; but at a far more fundamental level what is it in the subjectivity of the subject that allows such recognition to occur. For Heidegger too it is a form of temporal displacement within the being of Dasein that first makes Dasein "open" to others.18 Indeed, while the notion of this divided subject is evident in Husserl, it is in the subsequent phenomenological tradition that it has been more clearly articulated. Various thinkers (who at the very least can be read phenomenologically) such as Heidegger, Lacan, Foucault, Merleau-Ponty seem to hold in common at least the view that whatever the "crisis" of the subject might be, it is not the loss of a primordial unity or identity. To the contrary, selfidentity is rooted in a fundamental division of the subject. A sense of self 17

18

Hart. 119.

Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and John Robinson (New York: Harper and Row, 1962), 153ff.

emerges not out of an experience of unity, but out of the "dividedness" we encounter at various levels of our being (e.g., temporal, linguistic, and social). For these thinkers, much of human activity consists of various ways of fleeing the vulnerable and fragmented beings we are, and seeking a stable, fixed and unified self. Not only does the dividedness, foreignness or "otherness" in myself account for the ability to have "others" around me, but it radically alters our view of the "personality of a higher order." We can, for example, better understand why the genuine "personality of higher order" arises "from below," and Husserl's condemnation of any view which maintains a "top down" or hierarchical sense of community. Such a community was inauthentic for Husserl, not only because of its distance from its foundation (which was essentially a foundation in freedom and the self-determination of individuals), but because such an imperial unity is essentially irrational. Power over others is fundamentally irrational because it takes away what Husserl sees as the basis of true rationality: the self-judgment, autonomy, seeing for oneself what others have seen, and inviting others to see what oneself has seen. It should be added that "laziness" on the part of the individual might be seen as co-productive of an imperial unity of will. Taking over thoughtlessly the dictates of those in power within a community makes an imperial community possible. Hence, apathy too is a mark of an inauthentic community. No matter what view of Husserl we take, active engagement is clearly crucial in his conception of genuine communal life. Within authentic political formation "from below," which is effected by a "communistic unity of wills," there reigns "a consciousness of the communal goal of the common good to be pursued, of an encompassing will of which everyone knows themselves to be functionaries, however as free , and not even a freedom which must practice renunciation, and also not subordinated functionaries."19 The emergence of a Willenseinheit takes place through the process of sharing insights, insights which are obtainable, at least in principle, by everyone, but which are first gained by the hard, phenomenological work of the individual. It is philosophers who must in the first instance be the "free functionaries" of authentic communal life. Husserl clearly recognizes, however, that while individual philosophical efforts may bring personal satisfaction, they are insufficient to affect a widespread community.20 An important stage in arriving at far-reaching communal authenticity is, therefore, for philosophers themselves to form an authentic community. It is the "estate of philosophers" which generates authentic communal life—a strange claim for Husserl in that its tenor clearly runs contrary to a notion of genuine community arising "from below." However, our refined notion of rationality yields a new perspective from which to re-consider what seems to be a rather "imperious" role for the 19

Hua XXVII, 53.

20

Hua XXVII, 28, 107.

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philosopher. To be a philosopher is to be responsible for oneself, which means to be responsible for a being which is not the absolute source of its own being. By highlighting the fundamental receptivity that lies at the base of the individual person, a genuine "vulnerability" enters into philosophical life. The recognition of this vulnerability in individual and communal philosophical life produces a radically different picture of the role of the estate of philosophers. Rather than dispensing certainties from on high, philosophers with a sense of the "displacement" within themselves are able to be open to divergent views of other philosophers, to engage in genuine dialogue about the on-going task for each philosopher and for the community at large of "becoming" good. In being true to what might be called the "dialogical" nature of human existence within the self and hence with others, the estate of philosophers can be a paradigm for other types of communities and, at the same time, be conscious of the need to engage other communities; but this "teaching" (or what Husserl calls "moral preaching"21) means simply to call others to be true to themselves. The recognition by the philosopher of the "otherness" within herself or himself does not lead to a narrow and dictatorial imperium, but rather to an openness towards others. III. Conclusion I hesitate to draw too many direct and probably hasty conclusions about what this reconceptualization of authenticity as a form of "wanting to be authentic" and the accompanying consequences for a "higher order personality" might mean for an analysis of the situation in Quebec. But I do think that there are a number of features which seem pertinent. First, it is an extremely egalitarian view of authenticity and as such leads to a highly participatory view of community. Everyone can participate through individual actions in a form of collective rational existence, everyone can act in the style of the phenomenologist, and because of this everyone can gain some insight into how their individual activity contributes to the collective activity. This egalitarianism at the core of Husserl's phenomenology does have practical consequences. It means that there is no group of "specialists" to whom one should bow in struggling to reach a communal accord. It is interesting to note that a very common complaint both within Quebec and the rest of Canada is that attempts at constitutional reform have taken place too much behind closed doors, and that this lack of widespread participation is actually a root cause of the failure of these attempts. (This sentiment has been well exploited politically by the Reform Party.) Second, in a component related to this egalitarian and participatory nature of Husserl's thought, the reflections on personality of higher order highlight a strong anti-authoritarian element which is characteristic of all phenomenological thinking. The view of the individual as "open" to the pull of reason still means that nobody can accomplish for me that striving for reason which demarcates my 21

Hua XXVII. 52.

authenticity. This anti-authoritarinism is something that would affect especially any knee-jerk sense of belonging to a group because it is the "proper" thing to do (e.g., that a francophone Quebecer must be a nationalist, or that an anglophone Quebecer must be opposed to language laws, etc.), and would undoubtedly help to create a more critical sense of the collective history of Quebec rather than accepting well-worn formulations established by a political elite. Third, this anti-authoritarianism may be so strong that it in fact leads to an entirely "anti-statist" conception of community. While it is true that Husserl at times views the state as a necessary constraint upon the irrational drives and tendencies of humans, that is, as a protection against disharmony within the practical realm when perfectly functioning autonomous reason is absent (and hence, as an inevitable aspect of finite human existence), his analysis does warn us against taking the state as an authentic "we." This is rather evident with regard to states that are founded on racial or cultural determinations, for an authentic community could never be based on empirical or naturalistic presuppositions, nor on mere tradition. It should be added, however, that any state seems to be a pre-given body that in some ways claims to speak for the individual and to express the individual's interests, even though the individual had nothing to do with the constitution of this entity (i.e., the state is always a pre-given validity). Thus, it is not too surprising that Husserl hints rather clearly in Kaizo that with the advent of large-scale authentic communal life, there would result an Abbau of the state power organizations.22 The state, says Husserl, "is a unity by power, by domination."23 This component of Husserl's thought is extremely pertinent, because within Quebec the survival of French culture is thought by the sovereigntists to be only guaranteed through state initiative. This dates back to the "Quiet Revolution" of the 1960's, when a movement against the Church— which until that time had been the guarantor and nurturer of French culture—led to the sense that another power organization had to assume this role. All sorts of state initiatives, such as a careful policing of the use of English through laws and forces of inspection, are thought to be justified a priori on the grounds that the state is the guarantor of the survival of French culture. To the contrary, the position developed here suggests that while a collective cultural identity may well exist, it can never be equated with nor created by means of a state authority. On this view, the state always remains essentially a Gesellschaft, and its functioning—which may be necessary—should not be confused with the life of a genuine community. Above all, I think trying to save the Platonic analogy is worthwhile, because it helps steer a middle course between radical liberalism and radical communitarianism. It is not a question of only individual rights nor of the survival at any cost of a collectivity. Husserl's view helps avoid the extremes of 22

Hua XXVII, 58.

23

Hua XV, 412. "Staat ist eine Einheit durch Macht, durch Herrschaft."

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those who think one can have community without genuine democracy and those who think democracy can be adequately thought of simply from the viewpoint of the individual. Within the Canada-Quebec situation, the debate is sometimes framed as being between the rights of a collectivity versus the rights of the individual. But as Charles Taylor points out (and he is often strongly attacked within the anglophone community because his communitarian views are often taken as a simplistic prioritizing of collective rights over individual), the situation is altogether more complicated. Indeed, the anglophone community itself plays the game on a couple of levels, at times invoking the individual right of a citizen to freedom of expression to combat restrictive language laws, at other times emphasizing the rights of a minority culture, of a identifiable collectivity, indeed of an "authentic" community, to survive (and hence mirroring within Quebec arguments that Quebec sovereigntists make within Canada). Moreover, an important phenomenological observation within Taylor's work is that we all belong to a multiplicity of communities, which consist of overlapping, shifting, and at times contradictory allegiences. This is especially true if we accept that certain types of collectivities such as the state are purely functional, while others can have the features of a personality of higher order. That is, we may have claims made upon us not only by a number of collectivities, but by different sorts (i.e., some functional, some being personalities of higher order). The view I have sketched here pushes towards a conception of genuine community which takes account of this multiplicity, and is open to the multiplicity of communities within it and to those around it. Finally, a very paradoxical result of this analysis is that what might be crudely characterized as the "liberal" notion of the autonomous self can be reworked to form the basis for the very conception of a "we" which "liberals" find most abhorrent. The conception of the subject as primordially intersubjective opens up the possibility of a far less totalizing "we." Conversely, a "we" which constantly is harping about its distinctiveness, always stressing its autonomy and exclusivity, is really functioning with a notion of authenticity which not only leads to a homogenizing and anti-pluralistic authoritarianism, but actually embodies the individual, subjectivistic viewpoint which it usually takes to be its enemy. Who knows, reading a little more Husserl may encourage embattled federalists not to give up on the dream of a genuinely multi-cultural, bilingual "community of communities" called Canada. Who knows, reading a little more Husserl may help the sovereigntists achieve their oft-stated hope (rarely evidenced in concrete action) for a genuinely open and pluralistic Quebec.

Chapter Seven

Socrates, Christ, and Buddha as "Political" Leaders Natalie Depraz College International de Philosophie, Paris I. Introduction Seen from a Machiavellian point of view politics is usually considered as necessarily involving both (1) violence as a dimension of open struggle and (2) cunning as a complementary more indirect way to access instituted power. Though conflicts are regulated and controlled by laws that result from a common and historical elaboration, strength and domination, on the one hand (the "lion"-side), and manipulation and hypocrisy, on the other hand (the "fox"side), constitute major features of political action upon the world.1 In that respect, Carl von Clausewitz formulated quite truly how much "war is but politics prosecuted through other means."2 To what extent then can Socrates, Christ, and Buddha be called "political" leaders?3 True, as reformers of an ancient law, they had to deal with peoples who were defending or at least taking a former political state of being for granted; they had to convince them of the relevance of the new law they were attesting to: about 500 years before Christ, Socrates claimed via Plato's Dialogues the superiority of timarchy (from the Greek term:f| Tiu.fi, honor) against democracy4 and had to react against the beginning degenerated state of the Athenian polis; Christ had to fight against the so-called Doctors of the Law, the Pharisees, who too literally conformed to the Jewish Law inherited from Moses. In contrast, he defended a law of Love and stressed how much his reign did not belong to this temporal world; during the fifth century after Christ, the Sakyamuni Buddha rebelled against the theoretical, abstract, and overly textual laws and rules of Hinduism and changed them into an experienced and existential awareness of un-knowledge, which leads to a pragmatics of selfstabilizing mindfulness.5

1

Niccolo Machiavelli, The Prince, Chapter XVIII.

2

Carl von Clausewitz, On War, Book VIII.

3 A first step in this question was taken in Natalie Depraz, "Phenomenological Reduction and the Political," Husserl Studies 12 (1995): 1-17. 4

Republic, Book VIII.

5

About such a reform, see Thi'ch Nhat Hanh, Old Path, White Clouds (Berkeley, CA: Parallax Press, 1991). 121 K. Thomoson and L. Embree (eds.), Phenomenology of the Political, 121-132.

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In each case, such radical reforms had a political effect due to the great strength of their claim; but for many, this temporal aspect of a reform that was initially thought of as a purely spiritual transformation was misinterpreted in so far as it was considered to be the ultimate and secret goal of those reformers, as if their action was primarily a search for access to political power, and the spiritual dimension of it only a way of hiding a much more temporal ambition. Thus, their true purpose remained unnoticed, be it really not seen or thoroughly confused with a quest for power. Now, a question remains open: in which sense are these spiritual figures politically acting people? What kind of "leaders" are they? In other words: what would be an authority fully deprived of power? Or: why is authority so easily misunderstood with power as domination? What would be the nature of a spiritual influence lacking every tendency to domination? Another series of questions also show up right at the beginning of our inquiry: to what extent is it possible to separate an ethical attitude from a charismatic spiritual one so as to define a kind of politics founded upon a spiritual transformation that would not be assimilated to a secularized ethics? In a manuscript from the thirties,6 Husserl mentions a decisive common point between Socrates and Buddha as prominent political figures: both criticize former political projects from the point of view of a new form of spirituality whose living testimony they claim to be in flesh and blood. Their only power is a critical power and in a sense—if we agree with the fact that the philosopher is but a criticizer of everything that is taken for granted—they account for the Platonic vision of politics as rooted in philosophy. But is it right to reduce them to mere representatives of the primal Platonic figure of the philosopher-king? Husserl does not go that far in his comparison, nor does he include Christ in it. The purpose of this article is to come back to this too quick comparison and to extend it to the leadership of Christ7 in order to be able to analyze its political implications. In that respect, the following question will serve us as a main leading-clue: is it possible to found politics upon spiritual transformation without instituting a theocracy, i.e., to a larger extent, without falling back into the difficulties and aporia of the politico-theological constitution of power?8

I shall proceed in the following way: first, I will examine the function of teaching and learning through dialogue as it is conveyed by these three figures; second, I will be able to describe the different ways of empathic imitation they require; and third, I will conclude by broaching the difficult problems of the political involvements of inter-personal transmission.

6 Edmund Husserl, Ms. B I 2/88-94 about "Sokrates-Buddha," quoted by Karl Schuhman in his Husserls Staatsphilosophie (Freiburg: Karl Alber, 1988), 180, n. 65. See also "Uber die Reden Gotamo Buddhos (1925)," in Aufsiitze und Vortrdge (1922-1937), ed. Thomas Nenon and Hans-Reiner Sepp, Husserliana XXVII (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1989), esp. 125-126. 7

In at least two passages Christ is depicted quite similarly as the Buddha from the 1925 text. Cf. Aufsatze und Vortrdge (1922-1937), 59-72; and Zur Phdnomenologie der Intersubjektivitdt. Texte aus Nachlafi. Zweiter Teil (1921-1928), ed. Iso Kern, Husserliana XIV (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1973), No. 9, §6.

II. Teaching and Learning through Dialogue9 Needless to say, Socrates is the one who first and foremost cared for and cultivated his own capacity for dialogic teaching so as to make a method out of it: such a method is called maieutics, from the Greek term iiaieiiou,ai,10 which means "to be delivered," "to give birth" and to a larger extent "to awake," "to become aware of." In nearly every dialogue we inherit through Plato, Socrates has a similar function: he is the one who asks people questions but never claims to know the absolute truth. " Quite to the contrary, in a sense, it is possible to see in him a first representative of a skeptical attitude emphatically embodied by Sextus Empiricus, which will flourish and be achieved later on along with Stoicism and Epicureanism. In any case, the Socratic way of philosophizing is interrogative: valid results as they are usually established in scientific disciplines are always held to be questionable. Hence the quite often aporetical ending of so many of the dialogues. The most common background for the meeting between Socrates and his interlocutors is the following: an issue or a theme is brought to the discussion until they manage to come to its most complete definition. In that respect the leading and recurring question is in the form: "what is (ft eoxi)?" The goal of the dialogue is apparently to give way to the essence of the matter. Beyond this common aspect, it is possible to distinguish two types of dialogue that reflect two different sorts of guiding procedures with relation to the kind of people Socrates is speaking to: (1) either Socrates has to deal with people who are knowers of a specific question but claim to know absolutely (Theateatus or Gorgias are interesting representatives of this attitude); (2) or he has to do with young unknowing people he helps to become aware of themselves (the young slave in the Meno learns to learn and how to learn basic mathematical truths thanks to Socrates' way of questioning him). Let us now come back more precisely to these two types of dialogues in order to examine Socrates' teachingprocedure as well as its political implications. 9 As far as learning through dialogue is concerned, two major references should be enough: Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method, trans. Joel Weinsheimer and Donald G. Marshall, 2nd rev. ed. (New York: Continuum, 1993), and Francis Jacques, Difference et subjectivite (Paris: Aubier, 1982). w

Theatetus, 151c and 161e.

11

8

On that question, see the remarkable historical study from Ernest Kantorowicz, The King's Two Bodies: A Study in Mediaeval Political Theology (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1957).

In a few Dialogues such as the Cratylus or Phaedrus, it might be more difficult to identify this function, either because Socrates takes on alternatively the role of Hermogene and the role of Cratylus, or because he appears to be the main actor in the dramatic play which occurs in the dialogue: his own being condemned to death.

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First case: his interlocutors come to see him and want to speak with him in order to convince him of a truth they think they are able to defend at all costs. Timaeus and Gorgias are good examples of this kind of situation. In such concrete cases, these young people are quite sure of their knowledge about violence in politics or about the beginning of the world in cosmology. Their psychological features are pride and arrogance. They have no doubt at all concerning their knowledge and their way of knowing. They try to impose their own view on Socrates. Through questions, Socrates leads them to account for their in fact very little, poor, and uncertain knowledge, till they end up asking him to tell them the "truth." But Socrates nearly always refuses to engage in such a process. Second case: Socrates has to do with ignorant people who neither know they are ignorant nor that they hide in themselves some kind of knowledge, simply because they are not conscious of it: The role of the birth-giver then is to help Meno's slave, for example, to re-discover a truth he has already within himself—the demonstration of the triangle-definition. In both cases, Socrates' function consists in initiating a process of becoming aware of oneself, be it from a knowing or from an unknowing state of mind. With the people who pretend to know, Socrates endeavors to ruin the presupposition they would know in order to let emerge in them a deeper knowledge of themselves guided by a renewed knowledge of the object that was put into question. With the people who appear to be fully ignorant of themselves, he leads them to a self-consciousness of themselves by teaching them how to trust themselves: they are invited to discover in themselves their own potentialities. In the Meno this is best formulated through the theory of reminiscence (avd\ir\o\.c,).n The result, however, is quite identical in both typical cases: both kinds of people have to discover how much they know that they do not know, be it by deconstructing a naive fabricated knowledge and by discovering their own poverty as far as knowledge is concerned, or by accessing a first authentic knowledge of themselves from a fully naive ignorant state. The Socratic motto: "Know yourself (FvwOi aeavxov) amounts to the same as "Know that you do not know." As Nicholas of Cusa formulated it quite accurately later on (1440), such a "learned ignorance" leads to the most authentic self-mastering: knowing clearly one's own limits is being lucid about one's true possibilities. In conclusion, Socrates' manner of teaching lies in a patient awaiting attitude and in an interrogative way of intervening in the dialogue with others. By refusing to state anything, he compels the other to justify his own assertions, which leads to a deeper questioning and to the emergence of a more authentic knowledge, all the more as this new knowledge is founded upon a newly discovered self-knowledge. As far as Christ and Buddha are concerned, we have to do in fact with a quite similar teaching-learning pragmatics: like Socrates, they both use a

questioning way of dialoging and they refuse to assert anything that could be considered an absolute truth. In other words, their way of teaching is quite the opposite of a didactics that would impose a doctrinal set of definitions to be learned by heart without any questioning. More specifically, Christ's teaching is characterized through his use of parables. Like Socrates, who makes use of image such as the cave and its prisoners in order to help his listeners to understand the passage from ignorance to knowledge,13 Christ uses the indirect way of concrete and everyday symbols to make people understand his own function: he is a shepherd and they are sheep. If a sheep gets lost, the shepherd will leave the whole flock to find the lost one. Similarly, Christ will first go to see to the most marginal and despised people (e.g., prostitutes and tax-collectors). Unlike Socrates, however, Christ does not always give the "solution" in his symbolic way of teaching: "Let us understand what has to be understood!" could be his own motto. Sometimes his way of speaking might therefore seem to be ambiguous and enigmatic, as if he was concealing the truth and delivering only partial sides of it. Two interpretations can be furnished concerning the meaning of such a symbolic teaching: either the listener is not ready to hear the truth and it is better for him not to understand the whole yet, or Christ's enigmatic way of speaking in parables is reserved for the few able to grasp it. In both cases, the singular power of Christ lies in his ability not to deliver the truth to everyone, as if everyone was not able to hear it. Finally, Buddha's way of teaching is still more minimalistic: neither interrogative, nor symbolic, his speaking emphasizes silence. He speaks very little, and only in a performative way in order to encourage acting itself. We are quite near to a self-coherent pragmatics, as Austin quite rightly defined it: saying amounts to acting.14 Like Christ, Buddha demonstrates his self-mastering through his own acts and his Tightness of conduct; unlike Christ, he uses quite concrete words which do not sound like symbols behind which the truth would hide, the symbols themselves being merely clothing. Buddhism does not have to do with another form of exegetical hermeneutics. On the contrary, most of the time, these quite simple words are to be taken literally: everyone can make them fruitful in his own practice. In that respect, these words are already fully acts.15 The specific power of the three figures lies in each's quite remarkable way of retiring, that is, of self-effacement. In other words, they let the other conquer their own space for growth without imposing on them their own view of the world. They produce for the other a space where they can act freely and produce for themselves their own knowledge. Socrates, Christ, and Buddha only create 13

Republic, Books VI and VII.

14

J. L. Austin, How to Do Things with Words (Urmson: Oxford University Press,

1962). 15

12

Meno, 8Oe-86c. See also Phaedrus, 72e-77a and 249b-250b.

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See Thich Nhat Hanh, Old Path, White Clouds, and Husserl, "Uber die Reden Gotamo Buddhos."

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the right conditions (questioning, symbolism, acting silence) for each person's own becoming aware of themselves. In a sense, it might seem they embody a passive questioning and listening attitude. As a matter of fact, what at first sight looks like passivity turns out to be the most active way of letting the other become genuinely self-aware. Socrates, Christ and Buddha are then quite powerful people. To use again Machiavellian symbols, they are more like the fox than the lion. By avoiding direct, violent confrontations and by using guileful means, they succeed in enabling the other to obtain true self-knowledge.16 III. The Function of Empathic Imitation Within the Christian context, the person of Christ plays a key-role as the first and unique model to be imitated by every Christian.17 Through embodiment, the second person of the divine Trinity has become a human being whose mission on Earth was to take on the original sin of humanity and to redeem the latter through his own Passion and Crucifixion. In that respect, Christ appears to be the sole true mediator between God and human beings: because he was embodied, he is part of humanity; because he remains one with God his Father the First Person of the Trinity, he belongs to divinity. The double nature (human and divine) of Christ thus forms the core of his possible mediation between God and the human beings. Unlike his Father, he went to meet the human beings by becoming one of them, by taking on a body like their own; unlike the other human beings, he remains pure of any sin, as a kind of virginal figure that evil and death itself are not able to contaminate. Only his purity is therefore able to ensure the Redemption of otherwise all impure creatures. The dynamics of imitation is wholly rooted in this double movement of approximation through embodiment and exception through purity. Every finite human being is given an access to God thanks to his embodiment in the person of his Son, and is therefore able himself to measure the discrepancy between his mortal state of being and the divine state of being, because of the factual reality of the sin. Thus, striving to imitate Christ and eventually to become one with him is the only way to attain deification: in Eastern Orthodoxy more than in Western forms of Christianity, the two correlate sides of this unique process of embodiment are firmly stressed: "God became a human being in order to enable

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every human to be deified."'8 Whereas Western Christianity highlights the finitude and the negativity within every creature due to his bearing original sin, the Orthodox tend to insist on the potentiality inherent in beings that enables them to gain infinity through deification. Both stresses are not contradictory: they only indicate two different conceptions of the imitation of Christ, both based upon empathy but stressing the event of death differently.19 For Western Christians, the Passion and Crucifixion are the key-moments of the life of Christ with which we are to identify: these unique events attest to Christ's most patent humanity, to his fragility and his vulnerability during what is called the KEVCOOK;. AS finite mortal creatures, we are said to be able to identify more easily at this precise moment when Christ himself shows us his very humanity. We therefore empathize with his sufferings as becoming our own sufferings: there is here a kind of lived transmission of nddeiv that St. Francis of Assisi revealed in a paradoxically mystical way through the process of his own stigmatization. In a more common and communitarian way, the event of Communion in every liturgy functions as a repetition of the Last Meal Christ shared with the Apostles, and as an invitation for every Christian people to live again the tragic event of Christ's Death and Resurrection.20 In other words, deification is not absent from Western Christianity, but it is subordinated to the crucial event of Christ's death. In quite a dialectical way of thinking Hegel later on remarkably illustrated in philosophical terms just how much the imitation of Christ is based on his suffering death, which alone enables our possible Resurrection.21 As for Eastern Christianity, the transformation of our own body from a mortal to a holy one, though it is reactivated during every Communion, is part of everyday life. More specifically, the long tradition of what is called "Philokalia" (Heart-prayer) insists on the unceasing attitude of praying at every moment of our life. We have to exercise our mind to stop thoughts from invading it by learning how to breath and by constantly attempting to avoid mental activity or, better, at letting thoughts flow in ourselves without being affected by them. These are the simple and true necessary conditions in order to become one with 18

See for example Athanase from Alexandria, De incarnatione (Paris: Cerf, 1973), SC No. 199, namely Part I, 1. 10

Such a relevant contrast is very well illustrated by Vladimir Lossky in his book, Essai sur la theologie mystique de I'Eglise d'Orient (Paris: Cerf, 1990). 16

This way of controling the other by watching him at a distance and without any direct intervention is best illustrated in Shunryu Suzuki, Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind (New York: Weatherhill, 1985), 32. 17

See as a paradigm, L'Imitation de Jesus-Christ, anonymous book from the XVth century, translated from Latin into French by Lamennais (Dijon: Marchet, Roux et Cie, 1879), namely Part I, chap. 1, "Qu'il faut imiter J6sus-Christ, et mepriser toutes les vanites du monde," and Part IV, chap. XIII, "Que le fidele doit desirer de tout son coeur de s'unir a Jesus-Christ dans la Communion

20

See Edith Stein's book on empathy, Zum Problem der Einfuhlung (Dio: Halle, 1917); On the Problem of Empathy, trans. Waltraut Stein (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1964); and her Kreuzeswissenschaft upon Juan de la Cruz, The Science of the Cross, trans. Hilda Graef (Chicago: Henry Regnery, 1960), where a real empathy with God himself is at work. "Meeting God as one person meets another." This the core of the mystical experience. 21

This philosophizing of Christ's Incarnation and Resurrection is particularly at work in Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit.

PHENOMENOLOGY OF THE FULll 1LAL Christ. In that respect, the prototypical prayer is in the form: "Christ our Lord, pray for us now and at our dying moment."22 Even if there are different stresses within Christianity due to various contrasting embodiments of the same message, there remains a decisive common point: the only power manifest in Christ himself is his genuine ability to remain passive: people will try to imitate him because they have become aware themselves that he is "somebody" who is worth being imitated, not because he would show off his own ability to be imitated. More specifically, Christ's passivity lies in his remarkable way of welcoming everybody. Now, such a welcoming attitude is called love alias charity. In other words, Christ's only but true power is love, passive welcoming even of his enemies.23 In some respects, the second step within Buddhism after Hinayana, the Mahayana-step, does not say anything different: compassion, a key word at that stage, is another word for the Christian charity. This attitude of passive (in fact most active) welcoming is also the core of Buddhism. And yet there remains an unavoidable difference with regard to the way that finite empathy is concretely lived. Within Christianity, you love every human being you encounter because you first and absolutely love God and are thus enabled to imitate the second person of the Trinity who himself became a human being. There is an absolute priority of divine transcendence over the transcendence of the other, which proves to be the condition of the loving relationship with everybody.24 The problem is: how can I feel empathy for a being that is not embodied just like I am? This raises the true difficult question of the type and quality of embodiment and bodily existence within Christianity and Buddhism. Of course, I do not intend to solve this problem in the context of this article. All the same, such a uniqueness of the mediation of Christ does not exist within Buddhism: the transcendence of an absolute does not constitute the founding condition for my empathic and compassionate relationships with other 22 See Olivia Cldment, Corps de mart et corps de gloire: Petite introduction a une theopoetique du corps (Paris: Desclee de Brouwer, 1995), and La philocalie: Les Ecrits fondamentaux des peres du desert aux peres de Veglise, ed. O. Clement 2 vols. (Paris: Lattes-Desclee de Brouwer, 1995). What proves that the contrast we made between both ways of living Christianity is not a contradiction in itself is illustrated for example by the works of Teresa of Avila. The mystical path is here described as a succession of different kinds of prayers, from the more external ones (asking prayers) to the most intimate ones (merciful ones), till divine union is attained where no more praying is necessary. About this, see The Collected Works of St. Teresa of Avila, vols. 1 & 2, trans. K. Kavanaugh, O.C.D. and O. Rodriguez, O.C.D. (Washington: ICS Publications, 1976, 1980). 23

About this Christian love as an ethical love and the Christian community as a community of love, see again Zur Phdnomenologie der Intersubjektivitdt. Texte aus Nachlass. Zweiter Teil (1921-1928), No. 9, § 6. See also Alois Roth's Edmund Husserl Ethische Untersuchungen (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1960). 24 As far as this double structure of transcendence is concerned, see Edith Stein's work on empathy already quoted.

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people. True, the re-discovery of my own nature as a Buddha-nature does need most of the time to be mediated through somebody else, that is, a Master, but it does not need to be Christ himself nor Buddha himself. It might be another Boddhisattva, that is, another human being who has gone further along in the way of self-achievement. In other words, the mediator is a human being in flesh and blood just like me, with his own limits and imperfections: the empathic identification takes thus place including the whole affective problems a very close relationship between two human beings unavoidably generates. Nonetheless, it is quite important for the imitation to take place between two human beings, insofar as everybody at his own stage of self-achievement is part of a chain that gradually goes from merely living beings to the absolute, and is thus true part of the transmission of the spiritual tradition. But such an absolute is nothing else than our own nature: it has to be immanently re-discovered within ourselves.25 As far as Socrates is concerned, we have to do with a basically human empathic imitation nearer to the Buddhist one than to the Christian one. The relationship between a master like Socrates and his disciples, be they living contemporaries or others coming later26 is limited to humanity and immanence. Even if Socrates is said to have been divinely inspired, he remains a human being amongst other human beings, though doubtlessly better gifted and attracting the desire to imitate. We know how that kind of say intellectual charisma may have been lived by Socrates and some of the young people around him within erotic relationships. The relationships between a master and his disciples are often ambiguous, so as to generate confusion between the different levels of that relation. What is clear within this philosophical context might also be true within Buddhism, in so far as the embodied inter-personal relationship between a master and his disciple appears to be crucial for spiritual transformation. In that respect, the Christian context is the only background where that kind of danger (confusing spirituality with eroticism) is avoided because of the non-sexualembodiment of Christ. The only possible empathic imitation is then a purely spiritual love, the intensity of which remains measured by the purely spiritual body of Christ. Let us notice though how such an empathic imitation may provide a sheer spiritual substitute for a quest that is in fact of erotic type.

25

About this acute problem, see Thich Nhat Hanh, Living Buddha, Living Christ (New York: Riverhead Books, 1995), and The Good Heart (Boston: Wisdom Publications, 1995); see also Choqyam Trungpa, The Lion's Roar: An Introduction to Tantra (Boston: Shambhala Publications, 1992). 26

See Edmund Husserl, Die Krisis der europaischen Wissenschaften und die transzendentale Phdnomenologie. Ergdnzungsband. Texte aus dem NachlafS. 1934-1937, ed. Reinhold M. Schmid, Husserliana XXIX (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1992), No. 28, "Die anthropologische Welt," esp. 331, where Husserl empathically identifies with the Greeks, beyond the many centuries that separate them.

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As we already said, such figures as Socrates, Buddha, and Christ are quite powerful people. The possible confusion between spiritual and erotic empathic imitation—and its Christian substitute-variation—is the main cause for the emergence of a possible manipulation of the disciple by the Master. The negative aspect of the Machiavellian fox-side comes to light here as the true political implication of such an intense empathic identification. Needless to say, alienating power as a quest for dominating the other has nothing more to do with a purely spiritual authority, which would entail a truly liberating impulse. But if empathy is generated by a pure encounter of two spirits, then the positive political aspect of such an imitation emerges. As a matter of fact, the common political feature of the three of them amounts to a kind of pacific kingship, where power lies in awaiting and in welcoming more than in intervening and in dominating.27 IV. Conclusion: Embodied Transmission and Personal Empowerment Controling the other at a distance, so as to allow him an autonomous space wherein he may discover his own way of knowing and thereby become aware of his own peculiar limits, as well as creating a relationship of true empathy, where the transmission of such a self-knowledge, proves to be all the more intense when it is affectively and intersubjectively embodied. Cognitive and affective aspects are both the main prerequisites of a self-mastering that has much more to do with genuine charisma than with manipulating power. Such a truly powerful attitude based upon both intellectual and affective self-mastery involves a quite precise understanding of historical tradition and intersubjective community. The common point of both collective dimensions lies in the stress they put on body and person: the historical transmission and the communal share of such a power requires that mediators and participants are willing to engage bodily and personally in such an enterprise. In that respect, a pre-requisite for such transmission and share is complete trust in the Master who is said to be empowered. Of course, when the people who receive such a power are not mature enough, it may entail manipulation and blindness: the nowadays well known "guru-sect" phenomenon. Nevertheless, if the traditional background is strong enough, it fruitfully gives way to new forms of immanent sociality. Let us be more precise: the more deeply-anchored the traditional link is in a form of an interpersonal chain of people transmitting personally to each other what they learnt from their direct predecessors, the more embodied that kind of concrete sociality proves to be. Such a general rule can be easily illustrated in each of the three contexts with which we here have dealt. As philosophers, we are but heirs to Socrates' philosophical interrogation upon the essence of every singular thing or notion: the T\ eoti. The question results in a leading-clue for every philosophybeginner, as a sign of a genuine awakening to a fundamental questioning. In a

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sense, every philosopher repeats the Socratic gesture and becomes a philosopher through its recreation in himself. More than as an historical succession of philosophies criticizing each other, the philosophical tradition taking root in Socrates' gesture of interrogation is reactivated through every re-beginning: Aristotle's 2\/p:V.,4<, Descartes' methodic doubt, Kant's critique, Husserl's epochD, Heidegger's anguish; as far as Buddhism is concerned, the key-role of an embodied interpersonal transmission has already been stressed. Although Buddha is seen as the true and genuine initiator of the state of awakening and illumination, the mediation played by a singular Master—called a Root-Guru for good reason—tends to become more important than the figure of the Buddha himself. In that respect, transmitting illumination can be achieved directly from one person to another: the part of innovation and creation is therefore at its height; as for Christianity, it is well-known that Christ appears to be the sole mediator, second to none. Bishops, priests, and monks remain purely human mediators. Even the Pope, whose function is to represent St. Peter, is not to replace Christ. Quite to the contrary, The best token of Christ's uniqueness as a mediator is the part played by Communion: his body and his blood are to be there really present in the bread and in the wine every Christian eats and drinks. The perpetuation of Christian tradition is thus founded upon the repetition of the Holy Communion, which solely ensures the transmission of a spiritual ability to every Christian. As a matter of fact, to transmit a spiritual power amounts to delivering a model and allowing the empowered person to create his own re-appropriation of the model. Two features thus constitute a spiritual tradition: repetition and renewal or, in phenomenological terms, sedimentation and reactivation.28 The better the repetition is practiced, the more renewal comes out of it. Now, such a dynamical renewal out of true repetition can precisely be apprehended from the Husserlian word "generativity." 2" All the same, each tradition stresses such a dynamics of generative perpetuation of living spirituality differently: a too literal repetition leads to ritualism, formalism, and dogmatism. Once more, living spiritual power turns into formal domination. Such a tradition ends up by dying. On the contrary, a too lax adaptation would turn out to be the ruin of the traditional transmission, which would get lost in its multiple possible versions. In every case, a balance can be found in the community that concretely embodies such a transmission. Whatever form it may take on, be it a school (philosophy), a Church (Christianity) or a sangha (Buddhism), people gathering 28

See Edmund Husserl, Die Krisis der europaischen Wissenschaften und die transzendentale Phdnomenologie, ed. Walter Biemel. Husserliana VI, 2nd ed. (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1962), in particular, "The Vienna Lecture" and "The Origin of Geometry." About this conception of phenomenological history, see paradigmatically Paul Ricceur, "Husserl et le sens de l'histoire," Revue de Metaphysique et de Morale 54 (1949): 280-316, repr, in his/11'ecole de la phenomenologie (Paris: Vrin, 1987), 21-59.

27

About that common point between Christ and Buddha, see Trungpa, The Lion's Roar, 173-179; about Socrates' peculiar kingship, see the Phaedrus for his being treated as a scapegoat used as a means for re-creating the City's unity and identity.

29

In his Home and Beyond: Phenomenology after Husserl (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1995), Anthony Steinbock gives this concept the key role it deserves within a phenomenological historical perspective.

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for the sake of the same spiritual aspiration seeking a safe background ruled by solidarity more than by balance of power. The only unifying strength of such an immanent sociality is a quest for transcendence and this remains quite shaky It depends on the quality of self-achievement of every person engaged in the que n, question A spiritual power therefore seems all the more flimsy as its own force, namely passive welcome, is opposed to any temporal force

r

Chapter Eight

Towards a Genealogy of Modern Sovereignty Kevin Thompson Southern Illinois University, Carbondale

This essay is an exercise in the form of eidetic analysis Husserl called "regressive inquiry (Ruckfrage)." The matter with which we are concerned is the sense (Sinn) of the modern state and our aim is to unearth the buried origins of this sense, the sedimented evidences from which it emerged. To achieve this goal we must first explicate the matter at issue, rendering it distinct. This entails specifying the defining traits of the state as it is currently encountered as well as discerning the specific nature of its ideality. This in turn will permit us to ascertain the necessary historical conditions, the "historical apriori," and the tradition of sense-formation that has enabled it to emerge.1 ' Husserl's most famous discussion of this method is developed in "Die Frage nach dem Ursprung der Geometrie als intentional-historisches Problem," ed. Eugen Fink, Revue internationale de Philosophie 1 (1939): 207-225 (see esp. Fink's important "Vorwort," 203-206), rpt. in his Die Krisis der europaischen Wissenschaften und die transzendentale Phanomenologie. Eine Einleitung in die phanomenologische Philosophie, ed. Walter Biemel. 2nd ed. Husserliana VI (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1962), 365-386; "The Origin of Geometry," in The Crisis of the European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology: An Introduction to Phenomenological Philosophy. trans. David Carr (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1970). 353-378. However, the method is also frequently discussed, typically though not always employing the terms Ruckfrage, zuriickfragen, or Ruckbesinnung, in Husserl's attempts to distinguish and relate the static and genetic methods of phenomenology: Formale und transzendentale Logik. Versuch einer Kritik der logischen Vernunfl, ed. Paul Janssen. Husserliana XV11 (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1974). 251-257; Formal and Transcendental Logic, trans. Dorion Cairns (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff. 1978), 244250; "Statische und Genetische Phanomenologische Methode," in Analysen zur Passiven Synthesis. Aus Vorlesungs- und Forschungsmanuskripten. 1918-1926, ed. Margot Fleischer, Husserliana XI (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff. 1966), 336-345; "Statische und Genetische Phanomenologie (Die Heimwelt und das Verstehen der Tiere)." in Zur Phanomenologie der Intersubjektivitdt. Texte aus dem Nachlass. Dritter Teil. 19291935, ed. Iso Kern, Husserliana XV (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1973), 613-627 (see esp. 614-617). For excellent accounts of the method of regressive inquiry as well as considerations of its centrality, especially for the relation of phenomenology to history, see Jacques Derrida. "Introduction" to Edmund Husserl. L 'origine de la geometrie, trans. Jacques Derrida (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France. 1962), 3-171; Edmund Husserl's Origin of Geometry: An Introduction, trans. John P. Leavey, Jr. (Lincoln, NB: University of Nebraska Press, 1989), 25-153; Karl-Heinz Lembeck, Gegenstand Geschichte. Geschichtswissenschaftetheorie in Husserls Phanomenologie (Dordrecht: Kluwer 133 K. Thompson andL. Embree (eds.), Phenomenology of the Political, 133-146.

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The impetus for our investigation comes from one of the many enigmatic conditions that may be said to define the current epoch. It is now a rather widely accepted truism that we live in a period often characterized as suffering a "crisis of the nation-state."" According to this dictum, the state fails to provide security for its citizens and it no longer masters the various economic, cultural, and ecological problems with which it is confronted. It thus appears to be no longer capable of functioning as a viable medium for political representation and action. But despite the very real urgency of such problems, this is not the matter that motivates us. Our concern is rather with a phenomenon that clearly emerges only at a level much deeper and less detectable than these surface permutations. The matter at issue for us is best expressed by the following thesis: the modern state has reached a point of exhaustion. As an apparatus that administers and regulates the public affairs and interactions of a community through its authority to engage in various types of activities, the modern state has entered a period of consummation and deterioration. By this I mean that the various possibilities inherent in the binding claim of the modern state-in a word, its sovereignty-have been fully employed and thus reached a point of completion. At the same time, however, the normative appeal of the state has been fully drained of its resources; it has reached a point of depletion. Strangely, this is most evident in the fact that, despite some periodic and rather superficial ruptures, the typical acquiescence of populations within the present global order remains constant and pervasive. The legitimacy of the state simply is not currently at issue. Its entitlement to order and rule as it does is not in question in the everyday experiences of the peoples of the world. This testifies at once both to the all-encompassing character of state sovereignty and to its loss of any density or hold upon us. In its comprehensiveness, it has become a mere abstraction; it is worn out, without bearing, and as such no longer at issue for us. In its fulfillment, it has been expended. We can say then that the sense of the modern state has become, in a word, emptied. The reason for this enigmatic condition lies in the progressive occlusion of the fundamental experiences upon which the modern state was erected. The original constitutive activities that at first supported this structure and instituted its sense, have become lost, no longer felt, and as such, no longer actual. The formation of the modern sense of sovereignty has become obscured.

Academic Publishers, 1988), 33-42, 43-78; and Anthony Steinbock, Home and Beyond: Generative Phenomenology after Husserl (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1995). 3 7 ^ 8 , 79-84. 2

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Among the many discussions of this issue see "The End of Sovereignty? International Law and the Stale in the 1990s," Harvard International Review 27 (1995); Contemporary Crisis of the Nation State?, ed. John Dunn (Cambridge, MA: Blackwell Publishers, 1995); State and Sovereignty: Is the State in Retreat?, ed. G. A. Wood and Louis S. Leland, Jr. (Dunedin: University of Otago Press. 1997); and The State in a Changing World: World Development Report 1997 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), esp. Part One.

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Loosed from its foundation, the modem state has been left free to subject those under its control to ever more subtle forms of oppression and exploitation. Regressive inquiry becomes necessary precisely when senses become ossified and their genesis in constitutive activities is forgotten. Its aim is to reawaken and reactivate the layer of evidences that lies buried within the historical formation of the matters at issue. The investigation that follows is dedicated to this task. But if the problematic of sovereignty is to be genuinely advanced, then we must take note of two important obstacles to such an inquiry. On the one hand, historical realism, on the other, radical nominalism. We must not make the mistake, as so many have, of being guided by an exclusive focus upon the history of ideas.3 If we wed ourselves solely to a genealogy of the forms of political rationality, rather than to the concrete practices out of which they emerge, then we will fail to ascertain the formative evidences upon which the modern sense of sovereignty was erected. However, this allegiance to the procedures and tactics of governance must not blind us to their genuinely normative character; i.e., that they are encountered precisely as bearing binding claims upon those under their jurisdiction.4 The analyses that 3

Hannah Arendt's work most clearly embodies this approach. She tirelessly sought to uncover the formative experiences from which the basic concepts and conceptual frameworks of political thought arose. In particular, see her work on the concept of authority: "Authority in the Twentieth Century," Review of Politics 18 (1956): 403-417: "What was Authority." in Authority: Nomos I, ed. Carl J. Friedrich (Cambridge. MA: Harvard University Press, 1958), 81-112; "What is Authority?." in her Between Past and Future: Eight Exercises in Political Thought (New York: Penguin. 1961), 91-141; and her On Revolution (New York: Penquin. 1963). chaps. Ill and V. See also the following unpublished manuscripts: "Breakdown of Authority (1953)," Arendt Papers. Library of Congress, Container 68; and "Authority in the Twentieth Century (1955)," Arendt Papers. Library of Congress, Container 61, esp. Section III. For her own account of the phenomenological method she employed in these investigations see "Projektbeschreibung fiir die Rockefeller Foundation, December, 1959," in her Was ist Politik? Fragmente aus dem Nachlass, ed. Ursula Ludz (Miinchen: Piper, 1993). 200-201. 4 The genealogical work of Michel Foucault is the best example of such an approach as it carefully traces the lineages and developments of various sorts of political procedures and practices. See especially his work on the configurations of power/knowledge he called "bio-power" and "governmentality": La volonte de savoir (Paris: Gallimard, 1976), 177-191; The History of Sexuality: Volume I: An Introduction, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Vintage. 1978). 135-145; "La 'gouvemementalite,'" in his Dits et ecrits 1954-1988; III: 1976-1979, ed. Daniel Defert and Francois Ewald (Paris: Gallimard, 1994). 635-657; "Govemmentality." rev. trans. Colin Cordon in The Foucault Effect: Studies in Govemmentality, ed. Graham Burchell. Colin Gordon, and Peter Miller (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. 1991), 87-104; "Omnes et Singulatim: vers une critique de la raison politique," in Dits et ecrits IV, 134-161; "Omnes et Singulatim: Towards a Criticism of Political Reason," trans. P. E. Dauzat in The Tanner Lectures on Human Values: 1981 Volume II, ed. Sterling McMurrin (Salt

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136 A GENEALOGY OF MODERN SO VEREIGNTY follow are certainly indebted to both of these approaches, but the caution they present is nonetheless abundantly clear. Neither can sufficiently articulate the emergence of the modern state. Safe passage then can only be won here by remaining faithful to the correlational method of phenomenological inquiry. Thus, we must seek a genealogy neither of concepts, nor of practices. Instead, we must uncover the emergence of both in the continuous movement of sense formation and sedimentation. I. Making Sovereignty Distinct So as properly to isolate the modern sense of sovereignty, we must begin by delineating the general domain in which it is given: the political. This is the sphere wherein the activities of speech, action, and production are publicly joined with one another and with various sorts of states of affairs. It is an order of action in concert whereby words and things are united, as well as the basic field of social production. The fundamental type of order operative in this domain is spatio-temporal. Its objects are the various sorts of human interactions and the corresponding state of affairs, what have appropriately been called "public affairs," with which such actions concern themselves. And the structures of spatiality and temporality dictate the basic relations of these objects. However, for the present investigation, the most important aspect of this public space is the hierarchical organization that forms the basic style of this order.5 This feature is provided primarily by the state insofar as it acts as an apparatus of domination establishing, enforcing, and regulating rules of social interaction. By promulgating laws and enforcing attendant sanctions, thereby determining which actions are prohibited, which permissible, and which obligatory, the state organizes the very life of the public itself. And by ensuring Lake City, UT: University of Utah Press, 1981), 223-254, rpt. as "'Politics and Reason," in his Politics, Philosophy, Culture: Interviews and Other Writings: 1977-1984. ed. Lawrence D. Kritzman (New York: Routledge. 1988), 57-85; "La technologie politique des individus," Dits et ecrits IV, 813-826: "The Political Technology of Individuals," trans. P. E. Dauzat in Technologies of the Self: A Seminar with Michel Foucault, ed. Luther H. Martin, Huck Gutman, and Patrick H. Hutton (Amherst, MA: The University of Massachusetts Press, 1988), 145-162. See also the following lecture course summaries (1975-1979): "II faut defendre la societe," Dits et ecrits III, 124-130; "Society Must Be Defended," in his Ethics: Subjectivity and Truth, trans. Robert Hurley et al., ed. Paul Rabinow (New York: The New Press, 1997), 59-65; "Securite, territoire et population," Dits et ecrits 111, 719-723; "Security. Territory, Population," Ethics: Subjectivity and Truth , 67-71; "Naissance de la biopolitique," Dits et ecrits III, 818-825; "The Birth of Biopolitics,"" Ethics: Subjectivity and Truth, 74-79. And finally, see the lecture course. "II faut defendre la societe": Cours au College de France (1975-1976) (Paris: Gallimard. 1997). 5 For an examination of the concept of order to which the present analyses are indebted, see Bernhard Waldenfels, Order in the Twilight, trans. David J. Parent (Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 1996). esp. chaps. 1 & 2.

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the production and availability of needed resources and providing a secure framework for the exchange and distribution of such goods it also administers and regulates the well being of the participants in this realm. From this admittedly preliminary sketch, the basic traits that comprise the sense of the modern state can be discerned. 1.

Territory. The institutions of the modern state exercise their functions over a geographically definite area. Their operations are bound and contained by territorial borders and, as such, are always attached to a specific locus.

2.

Centrality. The modern state apparatus centralizes power. It possesses a monopoly over the coercive forces operative within the political domain. Accordingly, the modern state recognizes no legitimate rivals for its control over such force within its own territory.

3.

Differentiation. The institutions that comprise the modern state are able to accomplish their basic functions due to their inherent differentiation from other regions within the political domain. They are distinct both from society itself as well as from the person or groups who happen to control it. In this sense, the modern state is fundamentally impersonal and autonomous.

4.

Authority. The modern state possesses a monopoly over the binding authority to promulgate and enforce laws. That is, state institutions are entitled not only to be the sole possessor of coercive force, but also to deploy it in carrying out sanctions regulating social interaction.

5.

Population. Finally, the modern state apparatus provides and administers regulatory controls over such matters as the health, wealth, and life expectancy of its specific population. As such, it engages in activities that sustain and control the life and well being of its population as a whole.

In sum, we can say that the state is encountered in the modem epoch as a differentiated and centralized source of power that rules over a specific geographic region, holding ultimate legal authority, and concerned with the administration and sustenance of a living population. The dominance of this apparatus, its superiority over all other rivals, as well as its ability to exercise its various functions, resides in the compliance of the population it governs. Their consistent submission constitutes the modern state's legitimacy. According to the dominant strands of the philosophical tradition, as well as the founding documents and constitutions of many distinctly modem states, such legitimacy is said to be grounded in a state's conforming to established rules arising out of a community's shared beliefs and, most

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importantly, in some form of a free act or acts of agreement motivated by rational insight or conscience; in short, the rule of law and the consent of the governed.6 Submission, under such conditions, is accordingly said to be an inherently rational act whereby people place themselves under authority and thereby under some arrangement of domination. However, on phenomenological inspection, this account proves to be based upon a fundamental misdescription. The compliance of a population with the apparatus of the modem state is simply not an endorsement of shared beliefs, nor an agreement arising out of a free act. Such a portrayal is blinded by an intellectualist interpretation.7 At its core is the thesis that genuine authority can only be based upon human autonomy. This, however, is clearly normative rather than descriptive. It seeks to understand domination rather than explain it.8 Hence, such an approach imports illicit assumptions into a descriptive analysis that the matter at issue simply does not itself evidence. If phenomenology is to remain faithful to the matters as they give themselves, such an account must be rejected. What then is the nature of the mode of givenness of submission? Submission, as it is presently experienced, is fundamentally a pre-reflexive disposition to comply with the injunctions of the state apparatus, an habitual mode of comportment. It is a yielding to governance, a being-governable, a governability. Such a condition is better described as being produced in a population, though to be sure not in any sort of simply mechanical manner, rather than willed by it. We must thus turn our attention to the specific techniques whereby such compliance is generated. The submissiveness of a population is primarily produced through two basic means: practices of governance and structures of division and organization. Let us briefly examine each in turn.9

6 For an excellent account of the central elements of the modern account of legitimacy, see David Beetham, The Legitimation of Power (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press, 1991). 7

On this point see Pierre Bourdieu, "Esprits d'Etat. Genese et structure du champ bureaucratique," in his Raisons pratique: Sur la the'orie de /'action (Paris: Editions de Seuil, 1994), 127-128; "Rethinking the State: Genesis and Structure of the Bureaucratic Field," trans. Loic Wacquant and Samar Farage in Practical Sense: On the Theory of Action (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998), 55-56. 8

Weber's seminal analyses remain wedded to such an intellectualist assumption insofar as they consider the various forms of legitimate domination that they distinguish— rational, traditional, and charismatic-to be founded upon a "minimum of voluntary compliance, that is an interest (based on ulterior motives or genuine acceptance) in obedience" (Economy and Society: An Outline of Interpretive Sociology, ed. Guenther Roth and Claus Wittich, trans. Ephraim Fischoff et al. [Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1978], 212). 9

For the purposes of the present investigation, I set aside consideration of the rationalities supporting either of these means. A more complete examination would need

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Practices of governance. This designates the various networks of programs, calculations, documents, and procedures through which the lives of both individuals and groups are bound to social and political ends. These practices take as their object the conduct and interaction of a population and seek to establish stable and reliable patterns amongst them. The mechanisms for accomplishing this are quite diverse: legal, financial, administrative, professional, etc. They include, for example, systems of notation and computation such as collecting and archiving census and survey data and the entire realm of statistical information, systems of examination and assessment such as licensure and inspection, and policies of taxation and fiscal planning. Practices such as these, and a myriad of others like them, operate at a microlevel to regulate and stabilize-one could even say that they even civilize-the lives of both individuals and groups and that they thereby form a profoundly common sense of normalized and normalizing experience. A pre-reflexive reliance upon entrenched patterns and procedures thus arises that engenders acquiescence and through this is formed a deep disposition of compliance in the conduct and interaction of a population. Structures of division and organization. This refers to the various ways in which the spatial and temporal domains of social life are arranged. These structures operate at a macro-level and take as their object the localities and rhythms that frame social interaction and the domain within which such encounters occur. This includes systems of urban planning and the administration of structural codes and zoning districts, the regulation of the societal calendar in accordance with various national holidays, vacation seasons, and school sessions, and finally, rites of passage whereby clear demarcations between various stages of an individual's life and that of groups and institutions are formed. Together these and other such structures arrange and classify the spatiality and temporality of the political. In so doing they establish the fundamental order within which humans engage one another and live out their lives. By carefully delineating the boundaries and tempos for a population in this way, these structures produce fundamental comportments of adherence. When these practices and structures are intimately woven together in the political domain, they constitute the very fabric of that space; they thereby form a nexus of habituation that creates a compliant governable public. They produce, in short, a governable populace. Phenomenological analysis thus clearly shows that the submission upon which the legitimacy of the modern state is founded arises in and through the very techniques and frameworks that establish the hierarchical order of the political domain. The rather obscured modes of givenness of modern sovereignty and its correlate, submission, have now been sufficiently explicated. We can thus now proceed to uncover the necessary conditions through which this sense was historically instituted. to articulate carefully the intertwining of such technologies with the political reason underlying them.

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II. Unearthing the Historical Apriori Our investigation now stands in need of two things. First, we require a "leading clue {Leitfaden)" from which to begin the distinctly regressive work before us. This will specify the "meaning-direction" of the sense under investigation. It will thereby indicate both the origin from which the sense emerged and the generative processes, the "sense-history," that gave rise to it. Secondly, we need to clarify the nature of the ideality of modern sovereignty; in particular, we must establish the precise relationship between this sense and historicity. The key to the former can be ascertained through a consideration of the latter. The object of our examination, the modern sense of sovereignty, is what Husserl called a bound rather than a free ideality.10 For something to be an ideal object, of course, is for it to present itself as an identity persisting throughout a manifold of encounters, and to be, as such iterable. The distinction at issue hinges upon the intrinsic character of the relationship between this iterability and the nature of its historicity. Free idealities, such as systems of logic and mathematics according to Husserl, are identities that persist throughout any and all possible experiences. Nonetheless, as products of constitution, they still possess a "sense-history." However, their being handed down, and thus marked by a tradition, is a passage in and through history that purportedly adds nothing to their intrinsic development; they erupt in the generative flow of time, so to speak, fully formed. Such idealities are, as Husserl famously said, omnitemporal and omnispatial. For bound idealities, on the other hand, their core identity does not just persist in history; it genuinely develops, adding new determinations throughout these experiences. These idealities thus bear an intrinsic relationship to a set of spatially and temporally determinate constitutive activities. As a bound ideality, the general sense of the state has maintained its identity throughout a distinctive and quite specific period of development. It bears a quite determinate temporal and spatial relation to the lands of Western Europe and to the period stretching from the twelfth to the nineteenth centuries of the Common Era. This sense has undergone, through this movement, profound and deep transformations. As such, it is, we can say, inherently historical. However, the real import of the distinction between bound and free idealities for our investigation lies in the task it lays before us. If the ideality with which we are concerned is indeed restricted spatially and temporally, then it is incumbent upon us to distinguish between those elements that comprise its basic identity, its historical noematic core, and those that it has obtained in and through the most 10

Cf. Edmund Husserl. Erfahrung und Urteil. Untersuchungen zur Genealogie der Logik, ed. Ludwig Landgrebe, 6Ih ed. (Hamburg: Felix Meiner. 1985), 317-325 (esp. 320-321); Experience and Judgment: Investigations in a Genealogy of Logic, trans. James S. Churchill and Karl Ameriks (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. 1973), 264-269 (esp. 266-267). For an excellent discussion of this distinction and its importance for Husserl's general project see Jacques Derrida, "Introduction" to Edmund Husserl, L 'origine de la geometrie, 62-64; Edmund Husserl's Origin of Geometry: An Introduction, 71-72.

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recent phase of its historical development. For if we can distinguish those traits that bear a genuine newness from those which are of the most recent vintage, then we will have in our grasp the requisite "leading clue(s)" to guide our genealogical inquiry into the specific sense of the modern state. The preceding analyses suggest that the core identity of the state lies in four of the traits outlined above: territoriality, centrality, differentiation, and authority. The persistence of an apparatus of domination within a specific geographic region, its monopolizing of the coercive forces needed to regulate social interaction, and, most importantly, the emergence of a set of impersonal institutions with the power to promulgate and enforce laws together designate the fundamental unity of the Western state." These traits are thus clearly the essential markers delineating the uniqueness of this form of political organization. But this means that the distinctly modern experience of sovereignty, the modern state-sense, lies in the state's dominion over life itself. On this analysis, the governance of a living population presents itself as the definitive mark of the modern givenness of sovereignty.12 This then is the leading clue for which we have been seeking. And it will now guide us in our examination of the necessary conditions under which the modern state was historically able to emerge. The question before us can be formulated thusly: from what specific historical materials and from what specific practices did the state as an apparatus administering and regulating a living population arise? In short, what were the evidences and what were the instituting acts from which this distinctive sense arose?

The object of the modern state's domination is unique. It rules over a population. We should note that this has a twofold signification. On the one hand, a population designates a geographically definite group, a collectivity defined by the boundaries of a specific region. On the other hand, it refers to a " Amongst the vast literature on this topic see the following: Hanns Hubert Hofmann. ed. Die Enstehung des modernen souveranen Staates (Koln: Kiepenheuer & Witsch, 1967); Joseph R. Strayer, On the Medieval Origins of the Modern State (Princeton. NJ: Princeton University Press. 1970): Charles Tilly, ed. The Formation of National States in Western Europe (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1975); Gianfranco Poggi, The Development of the Modern State: A Sociological Introduction (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1978); and his The State: Its Nature, Development and Prospects (Stanford. CA: Stanford University Press. 1990); Michael Mann, States, War and Capitalism: Studies in Political Sociology (New York: Blackwell, 1988); Charles Tilly. Coercion, Capital, and European States: AD 990-1992 (Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1990); Hendrik Spruyt. The Sovereign State and Its Competitors: An Analysis of Systems Change (Princeton. NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994): and Thomas Ertmann. Birth of the Leviathan: Building Modern States and Regimes in Medieval and Early Modern Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997). 12

Cf. Michel Foucault. La volonte de savoir, 177-191; The History of Sexuality: Volume I, 135-145.

142 A GENEALOGY OF MODERN SO VEREIGNTY distinctive characteristic; this group is not only comprised of living beings, it is itself defined by this fact. The art of rulership employed by the modern state in turn reflects the distinctiveness of its object. The uniquely modern tasks of governance are defined precisely by the fact that that which is being dominated is a population, a living group, an organism, and not just a collection or sum of disposable, interchangeable individuals. Hence, the modem state initiates and maintains procedures and mechanisms that provide for and regulate the needs of the living collective under its governance. This includes the physical health of each member considered both individually and collectively, e.g., their life expectancies, birth rates, and disease patterns, as well as the social well being of the group as a whole, e.g., its consumption patterns, waste management, and resource allocation. Taken together, these functions reveal the defining aim of the modern state to be the governance of life itself. What objects then must have already been given in order for life to become the distinctive matter to be ruled? The sense of population is composed, as we noted, of two more basic parts: geographic regions and social groupings. However, what unites these elements into the concept of a population is the quality of being alive itself.13 Thus, the social groupings from which the sense of populations arose must be collections of beings whose life-processes are precisely not definitive of their union. Let us therefore refer to these groups as masses. Accordingly, in order for populations to be encountered as genuine objects of domination, masses and regions must already be given. The administration of a population therefore only even becomes conceivable when these objects are already under subjection and regulation. Masses and regions clearly form then the historical materials from which the governance of populations arises. But these are still only the material conditions for the emergence of modern sovereignty. They present themselves as fulfillments of specific activities and it is only together with these activities that they are able to engender a genuine development in the sense of the state. We must thus uncover the set of practices that take regions and masses as matters of governance. Let us begin with the practices concerned with masses. The object under regulation here is a collection of subjects rather than a living group. The techniques in question thus organize and regulate these beings purely in terms of their quantitative characteristics. The practices are thus primarily economic in nature. The particular mechanisms included the formation and maintenance of a

13 The unity at issue here is that of a whole composed of essential moments, rather than that of a merelogical sum. A more comprehensive investigation would need to address this quite important point. For the classical discussion of this matter see the Third Investigation of Husserl's Logische Untersuchungen and the important critique offered by Aron Gurwitsch, "Phenomenology of Thematics and of the Pure Ego: Studies of the Relation between Gestalt Theory and Phenomenology," in his Studies in Phenomenology and Psychology (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. 1966). 175-285, esp. 250-265.

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national market system, taxation, and coinage. The activities that formed these structures, as well as those carried out within them, established fundamental connections and patterns of interaction between the various members of society. In this way, the masses under domination were formed into a coherent whole, a genuine social body, submissable to the power of the state. The techniques concerned with regions were closely aligned with this task as well. Their object was a definite geographic territory designated by clear boundary demarcations. And their divisions and organization of this physical space were again accomplished through quantitative techniques. But here these practices were primarily coercive and informational in nature. They included the creation of a national army and an internal police force, as well as the arts of cartography and surveying. The expertise and special tactics that gave birth to such institutions and that were developed within them formed clear and reliable patterns for enforcing sanctions and for establishing property claims. This in turn formed the region at issue into a well-defined, and thus governable, territory both internally and externally. These practices thus integrated, sectioned, and thereby clearly defined, the various regions within which masses found themselves. Having now identified the historically necessary objects and practices from which the modern state emerged, we are prepared to address the most fundamental question of our investigation: how was the modern sense of sovereignty formed through these conditions? More specifically, how did life, as the unique object of the modern state, and the set of practices governing populations, as the modern state's distinctive activities, arise from this specific historical apriori? III. The Formation of Modern Sovereignty The techniques of governing life are, as we noted, the essential element in the sense-identity of the modern state. For them to have been incorporated into this sense requires that their emergence be a result of its intrinsic development. That is to say, for the techniques of dominance over populations to be genuine expressions of the apparatus of state power, they could not have been imposed upon the institutions of the state from "outside," whether from some other sector of the political domain or from beyond that domain itself. The production of sense has a fundamental integrity. Consequently, the transformation that we seek must be found in the generative processes undergone by the sense at issue. We must return, once again then, to our guiding clue. The trait of population shows itself to be formed in and through a process of coalescence. In this movement the practices governing masses and regions, as well as these objects themselves, are joined together in a fundamental unity. The basic structure of this process becomes evident if we consider once again the practices involved. The techniques organizing and regulating both masses and regions are, as we noted, fundamentally quantitative. They are practices of measurement and feasibility. This reflects the fact that the objects with which they deal are nondeveloping wholes whose distinctive features are ascertainable through methods of data collection and calculation. However, these practices did not operate in

144 A GENEALOG Y OF MODERN SO VEREIGNTY isolation. Rather, they gradually and continuously formed masses into social unities, social bodies, tied to a specifically ordered and bounded territory'. The concern of governance had been with the domination of groups of legal subjects. Although such groups were indeed confined by boundaries defining the parameters of the specific state's space of domination, the internal articulation of this space, particularly in terms of its property delineations, was imprecise and generally unenforced. The social groups bounded by them were thus likewise ill defined and lacked any basic cohesiveness. It was only when the territories within which these masses existed received internal ordering in terms of property boundaries, principally through the practices of cartography and coercion, that any bond could be formed among the members of these social groups. Their economic intercourse joined them together only insofar as the sphere within which they interacted was clearly ordered. Hence, the techniques of coercion and spatial data collection enabled the regimen of economic regulation to form the masses under their control into distinctive unities, cohesive social bodies. Now the significance of this is quite crucial for the present investigation, for it is in and through this unique object, the social body, that life emerged as a matter of governance. Specifically, because the social body is wedded to a particular distinct region, the cycles of the life-processes of this group, the rhythms of their bodily existence-their patterns of birth, maturation, and decline-were able to rise out of the private domain of the household into the political domain itself. Fluctuations corresponding to the patterns of life began to present themselves in the masses under dominance. The collection of data, the enforcement of rules, and, most importantly, the management of the economic system were all inundated with cycles of growth and decline. This was manifest in the corresponding changes in the rates of production and distribution of goods, the cyclical need for expansion and contraction of inhabitable areas, and the transformations in the rates of disputes and thefts. Through these practices then, the masses had become transformed into populations. Life thereby emerged as the fundamental issue for governance. Natality and mortality were encountered, for the first time, then as distinctly political matters, problems to be regulated, managed, and brought under control. To put the matter phenomenologically, Leib rather than Korper became here the distinctive object of political rule. Hence, the calculus of regions and masses had to evolve into techniques for administering life itself. The mechanisms of the quantitative had to give rise to the practices of the qualitative. Thus, here lie the constitutive activities that instituted the modern state. With this, the sedimented evidences and practices that formed the modern sense of sovereignty have been unearthed. The development of this sense has clearly shown itself to be a process of coalescence forging together specific objects, masses and regions, and equally specific practices, techniques of economic regulation, coercion, and data collection. In and through this movement modern sovereignty was formed not only as a set of institutions of centralized power and impersonal authority, but also as an apparatus for governing a population, a mechanism for ruling life itself. Hence, in these

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decisive transformations the fundamental identity of the Western state was preserved and a profoundly new form of governance instituted. IV. Conclusion To conclude, both the significance of this investigation as well as its limitations ought to be noted. Its significance is fundamentally twofold. On the one hand, our investigation has shown that the sense of the modern state arose out of the constitutive interactions between a definite set of objects (masses and regions) and an equally definite set of practices (economic and coercive/informational). Our work thus enables us to reactualize the basic foundations of the modern state and thereby to recover the initial relevance that bore this sense. Regressive inquiry unearths the formative experiences from which senses emerge so as to reawaken these matters from their unquestioned acceptance and to restore them to their original bearing, their primal orientation. In a time of exhaustion such as ours, when the sense of the modem state has become so fundamentally depleted, such an examination opens the possibility for a renewal of this concept. On the other hand, regressive inquiry also reveals the historical processes that have engendered the sense under investigation. Our analyses have thus also uncovered the inherent contingency and transitory nature of the practices of domination and control that have come to characterize the modern state apparatus and that so often portray themselves as the absolute and eternal prerogatives of governance. In this way, it enables us to loosen the grip of such operations and gain a space for critical reflection upon such forms of rule. Again, in a time in which the sense of the modern state has reached completion, such a space for rethinking is desperately needed. But despite these achievements, there remain two basic limitations inherent in this approach. The first is normative, the second, ontological. Although regressive inquiry demonstrates the intrinsic contingency of the practices of governance under which we live, it appears to be incapable of providing us with any criteria for the employment of critical reflection. It supplies us with no standards by which to render judgments about what appear to be quite exploitive and oppressive forms of rule. It thus exposes the practices and structures of governance as historically emergent, but fails to provide the conceptual resources need to assess their propriety. Furthermore, though regressive inquiry enables us to return to the constitutive practices and evidences underlying the senses that we elect to examine, what such a genealogical regression cannot unearth is the set of rules that prescribe what can count as a practice and what can count as an encounterable object within the layers of sedimentation through which it proceeds. These rules define the epochal order within which the practices and encountering of objects in question take place. As such, regressive inquiry reveals the correlation between economic practices and social masses and coercive/informational processes and geographic regions, but what it simply

146 A GENEALOGY OF MODERN SO VEREIGNTY cannot unearth are the epochal conditions, the topological principles, that govern the activities and evidences of governance itself. These considerations thus indicate the need for further investigations of the genealogy of sovereignty and they suggest, in particular, that the methodo.ogica deficiencies of an exclus.vely constitutive approach-such as we have employed here-must be overcome if a full account, a full reawakening, of the sense of the modern state is to be obtained.

Chapter Nine

Taking Responsibility Seriously Hwa Yol Jung Moravian College If we keep on speaking the same language together, we're going to reproduce the same history. Luce Irigaray

I. Prologue The concept of responsibility lives in the shadow of the hagiographic life of rights in the modern West.' Western modernity has privileged rights while handcuffing and marginalizing responsibility. Ours, in particular, is the land of rights talk, and our political and legal thought has been enslaved to and by it. As Amy Gutmann recently points out, "most prominent political philosophers are now rights theorists."2 Today rights talk has invaded and colonized even the nonhuman world of nature: we speak of the "rights of nature" and "animal rights" as well as "civil rights" and "human rights." We are indeed possessed and compressed by rights talk. So-called "retreat" from or the "reclamation" of responsibility is a phantom expression because responsibility has never assumed conceptual prominence or strategic equity with rights in Western modernity. The conceptual career of responsibility has been stagnant, taunted, and dismal. It has become suffused, infused, and confused with a person's "accountability" for his/her own conduct ever since it was first introduced in English and French in 1787." Having been associated with personal, political, and legal reward and blame or punishment, responsibility has by and large become and still remains a merely sublimated correlative of rights even for those who are concerned with the concept. Taking responsibility means standing behind, backing, or giving support to the substantive idea of rights.4 Mary Ann Glendon's Rights Talk is the most scathing and serious critique of American liberalism as possessive individualism or what she calls "the American rights 1

In memory of Maurice Natanson who introduced to me the social phenomenology of Alfred Schutz. 2

Amy Gutmann, "The Central Role of Rawl's Theory," Dissent 36 (1989): 338.

3

See Richard McKeon, "The Development and the Significance of the Concept of Responsibility.*" Revue Internationale de Philosophie 11 (1957): 3-32. 4

See Claudia Card, "Intimacy and Responsibility: What Lesbians Do," Working Papers Series 2, No. 10 (Madison, Wl: Institute for Legal Studies, 1987), 3-5. 147 II

T?+~.U~*~ t ~A« \

f the Pnlitiml

147-165.

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dialect," i.e., the American parochial language of the " / s have it."5 "The American rights dialect," she contends, "is distinguished not only by what we say and how we say it, but also by what we leave unsaid."6 This paper is conceived as a counterproposal to the work of Ronald Dworkin, presently the chief spokesperson for the rights tradition of Hobbes, Locke, John Austin, and William Blackstone.7 "Someone has a right to something," Dworkin asserts, "then it is wrong for the government to deny it to him even though it would be in the general interest to do so."8 The absolute and universal claim of rights talk begins with Locke's idea that in the beginning all the world was America and ends with Francis Fukuyama's recent apocalyptic and redemptive pronouncement that in the ending all the world will, if it has not already become, America. In this paper I intend to unpack or deconstruct rights talk and explore the ethical and political discourse of responsibility as an alternative to it.9 Rights talk may be faulted on a twofold account: first, it is based on a misconception of social ontology and secondly, it is, being egocentric, tantamount to the denial of the ethical in that there is no ethics involved in self-centeredness or in the pursuit of happiness as the maximization of one's self-interest. The ethical privileges the Other and is always other-directed. II. The Embodiment of Relationality To be human is to be interhuman. Human existence is relational through and through. As human reality is social process, it is socially constructed: we are born into and construct the world as "multiple realities." Social existence is 5

Mary Ann Glendon, Rights Talk (New York: Free Press. 1991).

6

Ibid.. 76.

7 See Ronald Dworkin, Taking Rights Seriously (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. 1977). 8

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Ibid.. 269.

In the tradition of existential philosophy and phenomenology. Schrader attributes responsibility to the inner-directed formulation of existence. Sec his "Responsibility and Existence," in Responsibility, ed. Carl J. Friedrich (New York: Liberal Arts Press, 1960), 43-70. Bernard Dauenhauer's Elements of Responsible Poliltics (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1990) is informative. It is useful particularly in that it distinguishes freedom as autonomous from freedom as relational. He considers tyranny and anarchy as "the twin antitheses of responsible politics" (xii). Larry May's Sharing Responsibility (Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 1992) explores responsibility particularly from Sartre's social existentialism and the philosophical insights of Arendt. Most recently Derrida attempts to formulate responsibility with an accent on difference in the backdrop of the homogenizing logic of European modernity. See his The Other Heading, trans. Pascale-Anne Brault and Michel Nass (Bloomington. IN: Indiana University Press, 1992). They all lack the heteronomic structure found in Levinas.

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characteristic of, and quintessential to, the humanty of humankind. Good or bad, we are indeed condemned to social existence. Insofar as we are bom of mothers, we are always already socially situated. The religious myth of immaculate conception is most miraculous of all miracles because it defies the law of human coexistence. There is no self unencumbered by the surrounding environment both social and natural, However attractive and precious the terms self-reliance, rights, autonomy, and independence may be, they are disconnected with affiliation, association, and interdependence. Interdependence, that is, interdependence cum difference, cannot and must not be anathema to the human or cosmic condition of plurality. In the beginning was the word, and it was called "Relation" that authors both thought and action in the co-presence of the self and the Other. As the basic root word, the Relation accompanies and corresponds to every human birth as a new beginning. Only where there is the Relation, is there the ethical. The ethical was born at the same time as the relational: they are born as twins. Like Jackson Pollock's paintings with a labyrinthine network of lines with uncountable intersections, the world is nothing but an interwoven web of relationships or the manifold points of contact. To put it simply: in the beginning was primum relationis.10 In the world described in terms of the primacy of relation, we need to introduce new words, new concepts: "interbeing"11 and "interdividuality."12 Alfred Schutz defines the social construction of reality or "social reality" as "the sum total of objects and occurrences within the social cultural world as experienced by the common-sense thinking of men living their daily lives among their fellow-men, connected with them in manifold relations of interaction."13 Just as the world is not my private but already socialized world, my knowledge of it is from the start socialized as well by way of the "reciprocity" of individual perspectives or the "interchangeability" of individual standpoints. Likewise, moral philosophy itself is grounded in the natural experience of the life-world as socio-cultural world or what Charles Taylor concisely calls the "affirmation of

10

See Francis Jacques, Difference and Subjectivity, trans. Andrew Rothvvell (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. 1991). 115-61. 1

' "Interbeing" is the concept employed by the Vietnamese Zen Buddhist Thich Nhat Hanh in his Interbeing, rev. ed. (Berkeley, CA: Parallax Press. 1993). It refers to the Buddhist teaching that in the universe nothing can exist by itself alone and that everything must "inter-be" with everything else. 12

"Interdividuality" is the neologism of Rene Girard. I appropriate the term to emphasize the space of the betweeness (inter) without losing sight of "individuality." See his Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World, trans. Stephen Bann and Michael Metteer (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1987). lj

Alfred Schutz. Collected Papers I: The Problem of Social Reality, ed. Maurice Natanson (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1962). 53.

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ordinary life."'4 In his work on the phenomenology of morals, therefore, Maurice Mandelbaum insists that the phenomenological approach is "eductive" rather than "deductive."15 "In other words," he continues, "the phenomenological approach holds that the proper basis for any moral generalization, and for the confirmation which we rightfully demand for such a generalization, are to be found in an examination of the moral judgments which [ordinary] men [and women] make."16 The body is the living site and the material condition of sociality. As the copresence of the self and the Other, sociality is inconceivable without bodies-inrelation. It is made of fleshly connected selves, that is, it is intercorporeal. It is not trite to emphasize that we began only very recently to understand the weighty normative consequences of defining sociality in terms of intercorporeality on matters of life and death in humanity ranging from abortion to euthanasia, from sexuality to pornography, from incarceration and torture to capital punishment, from illness to health and medicine, etc. We—particularly philosophers whose primary concern is allegedly the mind's I or Reason—often forget or take for granted the factum brutum that the body is the active mode of being in the world and that it is the primordial location of the social.'7 The body is indeed a carnal interbeing. The most serious consequence of the Cartesian division of mind and body as two separate substances—one as res cogitans and the other as res extensa—is that it denies, and is incapable of justifying, the concept of sociality. The Cartesian cogito is totally unaware of the body as a social phenomenon. It takes the disembodied subject as the hostage of knowledge or—to borrow William James's expression—it is "wedded to the decomposition of life."18 Its interiority is sealed from corporeal and thus worldly exteriority. Once the mind becomes a separate substance independent of and disconnected from the body, egocentrism or even solipsism is inevitable.

same stuff as the body. In defining the social, the phenomenologist Erwin W. Straus favors the ontological primacy of the body over the mind when he says that "the body of an organism is related to other bodies; it is a part of the physical universe. The mind, however, is related to one body only; it is not directly related to the world, nor to other bodies, nor to other minds."19 The mind becomes a relatum only because the body is populated in the world with other bodies. It is necessary that we exist as body, as flesh, in order to be social and thus ethical—notwithstanding the ethics of the body itself. It stands to reason to conclude that there is not only the primacy of perception in everything we do and think but also there can be no "disembodied reason" insofar as perception is a "nascent logos." Indeed the body is never an object among other objects but is a sentient subject or the subject of perception which is capable of "authoring" the world before "answering" it. Perception or the function of the body as flesh, in turn, is informed and "dilated" by the "ecological milieu" of culture.

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The body (as flesh) is an intrinsically social phenomenon. Everything corporeal, every flesh, is social through and through: where there is no body, there is no sociality and no reality. To be social is to be intercorporeal. Only because of the body (as flesh) are we said to be visible and capable of relating ourselves first to other bodies and then to other minds. The body is our social placement in the world. Only in this sense is the world said to be made of the 14 Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. 1989), 14. 15 Maurice Mandelbaum, The Phenomenology of Moral Experience (Glencoe, IL: Free Press. 1955). 31. 16

Ibid.

17

See Hwa Yol Jung. "Phenomenology and Body Politics," Body and Society 2 (1996): 1-22. 18

William James. A Pluralistic Universe (New York: Longmans, 1909), 256.

III. Difference as Relationality Relation, subjectivity, and difference are intimately related but never oppositional terms.20 Plurality or a web of relationships, according to Arendt, marks the human condition.21 It means that we coexist with others in their otherness. As the existential condition of both action and speech, plurality has the twofold character of "equality" and "distinction." Without equality, on the one hand, we—those who are living, dead, and yet to be born—cannot understand or communicate with one another. Without distinction, on the other hand, we have no need to understand or communicate with one another; that is to say, we would need neither action nor speech. In order to preserve the conjunction and continuity of the acting subject with the plural world, Maurice Merleau-Ponty proposes the idea of the "instituting subject";

' Erwin W. Straus. Phenomenological Psychology (New York: Basic Books, 1966). 21

Rosi Braidotti writes: "in the feminist framework, the primary site of location is the body. The subject is not an abstract entity, but rather a material embodied one. The body is not a natural thing; on the contrary, it is a culturally coded socialized entity. Far from being an essentialistic notion, it is the site of intersection between the biological, the social, and the linguistic, that is. of language as the fundamental symbolic system of a culture, Feminist theories of sexual difference have assimilated the insight of mainstream theories of subjectivity to develop a new form of 'corporeal materialism' that defines the body as an interface, a threshold, a field of intersecting forces where multiple codes are inscribed" {Nomadic Subjects [New York: Columbia University Press. 1994], 238). 20 21

See Jacques, Difference and Subjectivity.

Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition, 2nd ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 175-76.

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If the subject were taken not as a constituting but an instituting subject, it might be understood that the subject does not exist instantaneously and that the other person does not exist simply as a negative of myself. What I have begun at certain decisive moments would exist neither far off in the past as an objective memory nor be present like a memory revised, but really between the two as the field of my becoming during that period. Likewise my relation to another person would not be reducible to a disjunction: an instituting subject could coexist with another because the one instituted is not the immediate reflection of the activity of the former and can be regained by himself or by others without involving anything like a total recreation. Thus the instituted subject exists between others and myself, between me and myself, like a hinge, the consequence and the guarantee of our belonging to a common world.22

difference with the between (Unter/schied) that at once connects, preserves, and promotes difference and the relational (i.e.. interbeing). Difference as dif/ference (Unterschied) is capable of conserving the principle of complementarity in interhuman relationships. Nancy Julia Chodorow brings her psychoanalytical insight into the clarification of differentiation which is central to the security and promotion of a relational self. Differentiation even provides the basis of both spontaneity and autonomy. She judiciously contends that "we are all to some degree incorporations and extensions of others. . . . Differentiation is not distinctness and separateness, but a particular way of being connected to others. This connection to others, based on early incorporations, in turn enables us to feel that empathy and confidence that are basic to the recognition of the other as a self [and, I might add, of the self as an Other]" (italics original).24

Difference is a distinct mark of sociality. But for difference, there would be no sociality. Without it human communication either in speech or in action is unnecessary because we would be able to understand one another completely. Difference is also the axial principium of postmodernism as a philosophical mood and style. What identity is to modernity, difference is to postmodernity. It is the notion of difference that makes all the difference between modernity and postmodernity. At the end of modernity lies the adventure of difference. There is a proliferation of the ideas of difference in postmodern thought: among the most prominent are Heidegger's Differenz as Unterschied, Jacques Derrida's diffe'rance, Jean-Francois Lyotard's diffe'rend, Levinas's heteronomy, Michel de Certeau's heterology, and Bakhtin's heteroglossia. Let us compare the "modernist" Hegel and the "postmodernist" Heidegger on the question of the difference between identity and difference. In his eagerness to prove the teleology of history as the march of Reason, of world history or the end of historical progress, Hegel falls short of making his dialectics open-ended. History's final synthesis corresponds to the identity of identity and difference where the dialectics reaches or fulfills its telos. Gianni Vattimo thus concludes that the Hegelian dialectics consummates the long metaphysical tradition of identity in Western philosophy.23 Respect for difference promotes the very idea of plurality or multiplicity as an end in itself or having no ending. On the contrary, Heidegger's Differenz as JJnterschied offers a postmodern alternative to the cultural politics of identity. Unlerschied doubles " Maurice Merleau-Ponty. Themes from the Lectures at the College de France, trans. John O'Neill (Evanslon. IL: Northwestern University Press, 1970), 40. 23

Gianni Vattimo. The Adventure of Difference, trans. Cyprian Blamires with Thomas Harrison (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993). 160.

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IV. Relationality and the Primacy of the Other Alterity and relationality are born as twins. Alterity has already become "the topic of first philosophy."" In the ethical, however, alterity is primarily to the self. The ethical or ethics is always already social because it involves approval and disapproval. The absolute and universal claim of rights talk involves no ethics. For there can be no ethics involving the self alone without the Other or with the primacy of the self over the Other: in the ethical but not in the epistemological, egocentricity is a contradiction in terms or at best what Charles Taylor generously calls "moral laxity."26 In the ethical the Other is the center of value. Here we wish to appropriate Mark C. Taylor's neologism altarity to elevate alterity to a higher ground. What differance is to Derrida, "altarity" is to Taylor.27 The term altar comes from the Latin altare which signifies a higher place. Altarity refers to the inviolable sanctity of the other, not of the self. Thus the idea of altarity not only accentuates alterity as the otherness of the Other but also elevates the world of the Other and makes the reading of it an elevated text or intertext. The birth of heterocentricity is the ethical elevation of alterity to "" Nancy Julia Chodorow. "Gender. Relation, and Difference in Psychoanalytic Perspective," in The Future of Difference, ed. Hester Eisenstein and Alice Jardine (Boston: G. K. Hall. 1980). 10-11. 25

Michael Theunissen, The Other, trans. Christopher Macann (Cambridge. MA: MIT Press, 1984). 1. 26

Charles Taylor, The Ethics of Authenticity (Cambridge. MA: Harvard University Press. 1992), 16. 27

"Altarity." Taylor writes, "is a slippery word whose meaning can be neither stated clearly nor fixed firmly. Though never completely decidable, the field of the word "altarity" can be approached through the network of its association: altar, alternate, alternative, alternation, alterity" (Altarity [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987], xxviii).

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altarity. Altarity, in other words, is the ethical site of responsibility if not the ethical itself. Only by way of altarity is an ethics possible in which the Other is not only not an alter ego but is primary to the self. In the ethics of altarity, responsibility as self-transcendence precedes freedom, for the former is otherdirected while the latter is self-centered or egocentric. The ethical is the conception of the self whose center is "elsewhere" and "otherwise": the only ethical is a "responsible" self. Because each self is unique and thus different, that is, singular, responsibility is an untransferable moral performance.28 From the standpoint of altarity, of responsibility, the very idea of existence has been profoundly misunderstood among its antagonists as well as its protagonists: as its etymology shows, what is really central to it is not the centrality but the eccentricity (ex-centricity) of the self toward the world of other people (Mitwelt) and other things (Umwelt). The human as eccentric is a being who is compelled to direct himself/herself toward the outside world or what Levinas calls "exteriority." Thus the motto of existence must be: Do not go inside, go outside! Thus we need a new definition of existential authenticity as embodied eccentricity rather than disembodied subjectivity. Let us consider Hannah Arendt's unforgettable discussion of Adolf Eichmann whose indifference to alterity—let alone altarity—resulted in unthinkably irresponsible acts. Eichmann's "thoughtlessness" or inability to think is identified by Arendt with the "banality of evil."29 By thoughtlessness she never meant it to be our inability to conceptualize abstractly or philosophically but our inability to judge or use common-sense judgments (sensus communis) to live our ordinary daily life as humans. It is seldom if ever noticed that by Eichmann's thoughtlessness Arendt meant his real inability to think from the standpoint of an Other. He never understood the notion that "I am an Other." Eichmann lost touch with others or became inflicted with cutaneous alagia as it were. Incapable of thinking from the standpoint of an Other, thoughtlessness is tantamount to a "defacement" or an "effacement" of the Other: it is in essence the dehumanization of the Other, humanity's inhumanity to others. Eichmann's "banality of evil" is once again the reminder that the abolition of difference(s), of alterity is the price we must pay for the inhumane politics of cruelty, violence, and extermination. Responsibility as self-transcendence rather than self-affirmation scales the philosophical depth and plateau of Levinas's ethics as first philosophy (philosophie premiere). His meditations on the primacy of the ethical and the heteronomic ethic of responsibility were inspired, according to his own admission, by the ancient heritage of Israel. He acknowledges that the prime importance of the ethical is the Jewish contribution to the history of Western 28

See Emmanuel Levinas. Outside the Subject, trans. Michael B. Smith (Stanford. CA: Stanford University Press, 1994). 95.

Ut

philosophy, and he turns to Judaic texts for his heteronomic ethic of responsibility for illumination. For Levinas, Judaism is a parable, as it were, for the ethical. Although "Reason" and "Deed" go hand in hand, the former is the distinguishing characteristic of Greek thought, while the latter is that of Hebraic thought. One is preoccupied with immutable and totalizing Being in the arena of theory (the "I think"), while the other concentrates on mutable and infinite Becoming (movement) in the field of action (the "I do")/ 0 In hindsight, Heidegger's ontology and Levinas's ethics were on a collision course. For Levinas, both heterogeneity and heterocentricity (i.e., heteronomy) enrich rather than impoverish the social and ethical life of the individual self. Phenomenologically speaking, responsibility refers to one's capacity to respond or answer to the call of the Other and it ends up with becoming one's ethical calling for others. Interestingly, in Hebrew, the "other" (aher) and "responsibility" (ahariout) share the same etymological root.31 The speaking word in the life of a concrete individual person is a part of heteronomic dialogue. It is no accident that there is in German a familial circle of "word" (Wort), "answer" (Antwort), "to answer" (antworten), and "to be responsible for" (verantworten). Indeed, for Levinas, to be social is simultaneously to be ethical. Both sociality and ethicality can never be reduced to the regime of knowledge and truth. In writing his "Foreword" to Stephane Moses's recent study of Franz Rosenzweig, Levinas alludes to a deep crevice between Rosenzweig's heteronomic ethics and Hegel's abstract and totalizing logocentrism whose critique, I might add, can be traced in the modern West to Ludwig Feuerbach's paradigmatic discovery of Thou as the fountain of ethical life. Feuerbach's dialogical thinking abandons and refutes the monological thinking of a lone philosopher in isolation from the world.32 The "new thinking" of Rosenzweig, too, is the anti-modern "idea of reducing everything back to the self."3* Levinas draws our attention to Rosenzweig's teaching against modern logocentrism from

30

See Thorlief Boman. Hebrew Thought Compared with Creek (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1960). 205-8. 31

See Catherine Chalier, "The Philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas and the Hebraic Tradition," in Ethics as First Philosophy, ed. Adriaan T. Peperzak (New York: Routledge, 1995), 8. 32 Ludwig Feuerbach's Copernican discovery of "Thou" is iterated forcefully in the principle 59 of his "philosophy of the future" which was originally published in 1843. He writes: "The single man for himself possesses the essence of man neither in himself as a moral being nor in himself as a thinking being. The essence of man is contained only in the community and unity of man with man; it is a unity, however, which rests only on the reality of the distinction between I and thou'" (Principles of the Philosophy of the Future, trans. Manfred H. Vogel [Indianapolis, IN: Bobbs-Merrill, 1966], 71).

19

Hannah Arendt. Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil, rev. and enl. ed. (New York: Penguin Books, 1977).

" Nahum N. Glatzer, Franz Rosenzweig (New York: Schocken Books, 1953), 191.

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Hegel to Habermas in which the Same absorbs the Other and absolute thinking is a thought thinking the identity of the same and the Other. '4 Altarity, it should be reiterated here, is the site of responsibility if not the ethical itself. Heteronomy as the pragmatic "grammar of the Other"35 is the heartland of Levinas's ethics as first philosophy—to use his own neologism— "meontology" which confirms ethics as the "negation" of ontology. It is heteronomy, i.e., the primacy of the Other which conditions and defines the ethical. For Levinas, language too is an instantiation of the ethical rather than, as Heidegger formulates it, the house of Being. Levinas declares that he is radically opposed to Heidegger who subordinates the relation with the Other to a neutral ontology.36 No one, I think, is more daring than Levinas in challenging Heidegger by showing that the ethical cannot be inscribed or subscribed as a sequel to fundamental ontology. Levinas's ethics as first philosophy stands independently of both ontology and epistemology. The ethical is for him neither ontological nor epistemological. There is no compromise between ethics and ontology or epistemology. The ethical is "otherwise than Being" or "beyond essence." As he formulates it, "the social [i.e., the ethical] is beyond ontology."37 The Da of Dasein (Heideggerian category), according to Levinas, is not an ontological problem but already an ethical one.38 Zygmunt Bauman is judicious in observing that Levinas's proposal for the primacy of ethics is "a scandal for [Heidegger's] ontology."39 Levinas contends that "knowledge is always an adequation between thought and what it thinks. There is in knowledge, in the final account, an impossibility of escaping the self; hence sociality [i.e., ethicality] cannot have the same structure as knowledge."40 Knowledge or the "I think" does not and cannot take place in the atmosphere of sociality; rather, it takes place in the absolute "solitude" of the ego. The ethical begins and ends with the social. Therefore, according to

Levinas, sociality or ethicality cannot be reduced to the regime of knowledge and truth. The former is beyond the reach of the latter. Levinas defines heteronomy as the primacy of the Other over the self in the ethical: the ethic of responsibility in interhuman relationship is always and necessarily heteronomic. For him, however, heteronomy necessary for the ethic of responsibility calls for an asymmetrical relationship: interhuman relationships are not the symmetrical plural of the I's. The 1 alone makes the ethical untenable. Indeed, it defaces or effaces the ethical. It is only the presence of the Other, alterity, that makes the ethical possible and necessary. For the ethical, it should be reiterated, is not self-centered obsession but self-transcendence.41 Only by way of heteronomy or self-transcendence is an ethic possible in which, to repeat, the Other is not only not an alter ego but also is primary to the self. Thus Levinas maintains that plurality (sociality) is not a multiplicity of numbers, but is predicated upon a radical alterity of the Other. In the elevated ethic of alterity, in the ethic of altarity, responsibility does not negate but precedes and contains autonomy: it is to heteronomy what autonomy is to egocentricity. Although responsibility without autonomy is a sham, autonomy alone is not sufficient to complete an ethic. Autonomy is ancillary but not contrary to responsibility, and not the other way around, simply because we can be autonomous without being responsible, but we can never be responsible without being autonomous.

156

34 Sec his "Foreword" to Stephane Moses. System and Revelation, trans. Catherine Tibany (Detroit: Wayne State University Press. 1992). 19. 35 Michel Dupuis, Pronoms et visages (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers 1996). 158. j6

Emmanuel Levinas, "Philosophy and the Idea of Infinity," in his Collected Philosophical Papers, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Dordrecht: Martinus Nijhoff, 1987), 52. 37

Emmanuel Levinas, Ethics and Infinity, trans. Richard A. Cohen (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1982), 58. 38

See Levinas. Outside the Subject. 48.

39

Zygmunt Bauman. "Effacing the Face: On the Social Management of Moral Proximity," Theory, Culture and Society 7 (1990): 16. 40

Levinas. Ethics and Infinity, 60.

41

In his magnum opus Levinas writes that "in subordinating every relation with the existent to the relation with Being the Heideggerian ontology affirms the primacy of freedom over ethics. To be sure, the freedom involved in the essence of truth is not for Heidegger a principle of free will. Freedom comes from an obedience to Being: it is not man who possesses freedom; it is freedom that possesses man. But the dialectic which thus reconciles freedom and obedience in the concept of truth presupposes the primacy of the same, which marks the direction of and defines the whole of Western philosophy" (Totality and Infinity, trans. Alphonso Lingis [Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1969]. 46). Viktor Frankl gives us a glimpse of responsibility as "self-transcendence" which deserves. I think, more than a passing comment. He was a survivor of a Nazi death camp and founded logotherapy. psychotherapy with a human face, as it were. Like Jonas's "new ethic of responsibility," logotherapy calls for the affirmation of life at all cost as opposed to the abnegation of life (nothingness) relying on Nietzche's single dictum that "he who has a why to live can bear with almost any how." Like Levinas, more importantly, Frankl prompts and promotes an elegant way of formulating the concept of responsibility as "self-transcendence" which is "the cue to cure" the feeling that life is meaningless or worthless. By self-transcendence. Frankl means the discovery and recovery of life's meaning by engaging in the world, in the other rather than one's own psyche. Self-transcendence is embodied in the idea of responsibility: "Freedom . . . is not the last word. Freedom is only part of the story and half of the truth. Freedom is but the negative aspect of the whole phenomenon whose positive aspect is responsibleness. In fact, freedom is in danger of degenerating into mere arbitrariness unless it is lived in terms of responsibleness" {Man's Search for Meaning, rev. ed. [New York: Washington Square Press, 1985], 133).

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From the standpoint of heteronomic ethics, responsibility contains, but cannot be secondary and supplementary to, autonomy. "Existence," Levinas declares with Sartre in mind for whom hell is others, "is not condemned to freedom, but judged and invested as a freedom. Freedom could not present itself all naked. This investiture of freedom constitutes moral life itelf, which is through and through a heteronomy."42 In Levinas, subjectivity is affirmed never for itself but for the Other (pour I'autrui). It comes into being as heteronomic: "It is my inescapable and incontrovertible answerability to the Other that makes me an individual T." 4 j Consequently, the notion of responsibility that coincides with the ethical is, first and foremost, the confirmation of the "I," which is for Levinas the "meontological version of subjectivity." He writes that responsibility is "the essential, primary and fundamental structure of subjectivity. For I describes subjectivity in ethical terms. Ethics, here, does not supplement a preceding existential base; the very node of the subjective is knotted in ethics understood as responsibility."44 Responsibility is the vulnerability of the self s all-consuming sensitivity to and compassion for the Other as a person. Since each subjectivity is unique and thus different from others, moreover, its responsibility is accordingly untransferable. Not only is responsibility untransferable but it is also nonreciprocal: as Levinas emphasizes in no uncertain terms, "responsibility is without concern for reciprocity: I have to respond to and for the Other without occupying myself with the Other's responsibility in my regard."45 Thus responsibility for others is an unconditional gift without the forethought of reciprocation. Responsibility without concern for reciprocity is— in the very words of Levinas—"my call to help a person gratuitously in the asymmetry of the relation of one to the other."ib Kristen Renwick Monroe's recent work The Heart of Altruism has a decisive bearing on the ethic of responsibility which, as a paradigmatic moral theory, is an alternative to rights talk as well as the "banality of evil."47 It is deeply heartening in our epoch when the kind face of compassion transfigures 42

and prevails upon the nasty face of contempt. Monroe attempts to answer James Q. Wilson's cogent question: "If rights are all that is important, what will become of responsibilities?"48 Altruism may not be "a strong beacon light" but is "a small candle flame" that is capable of dispelling the darkness and warming our soul once it is brought close to our heart and cupped in our hands.49 Altruism lands a mortal blow to the cherished tradition of "rational choice theory" whose center is "economic rationality"—a part of rights talk. Wilson echoes Monroe when he claims that "the teachings of the heart deserve to be taken as seriously as the lessons of the mind."50 Economic rationality in rational choice theory is based on the premise that "rational man" is one who chooses to maximize his/her own self-interest, "enlightened" or otherwise. A "rational" person is self-centered, while the altruist is heteronomic. The altruist has the natural disposition and propensity to linking himself/herself to others through the sense of "a shared humanity." In essence, the "heart of altruism" refutes the twofold character of rational choice theory: (1) rationality and (2) choice. Neither rationality nor choice explains the good deeds of altruists. As Monroe emphasizes, altruists are left with "no choice in their behavior toward others. They are John Donne's people. All life concerns them. Any death diminishes them. Because they are part of mankind."51 The reverse side of altruism may be found in Eichmann's "banality of evil" where blind obedience was mistaken as Kantian "obligation" or "duty." Arendt's report on Eichmann's "banality of evil" drew severe criticisms from all quarters. For Arendt, however, the "banality of evil" does not absolve Eichmann's crimes against humanity because she appeals to the "ethics of consequences" ("responsibilities") rather than Kantian ethics of intention and principles. Arendt's "verdict" relies on the "actuality" of what Eichmann did. For her, he is guilty of committing crimes against humanity because "politics is not like the nursery; in politics obedience and support are the same."52 He and he alone is "guilty" and "responsible" for what he actually did. Arendt condones no "collective guilt" or "collective responsibility" simply because "where all, or almost all, are guilty, nobody is."5j

Emmanuel Levinas, Time and the Other, trans. Richard A. Cohen (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1987). 58. 43

Emmanuel Levinas, "Dialogue with Emmanuel Levinas," in Face to Face with Levinas, ed. Richard A. Cohen (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1986),

48

James Q. Wilson, The Moral Sense (New York: Free Press. 1993), 245.

49

See ibid.. 251.

50

Ibid., 238.

27. 44

Levinas, Ethics and Infinity, 95.

45

Levinas. Time and the Other, 137. 46 Emmanuel Levinas, "Useless Suffering." in The Provocation of Levinas, ed. Robert Bernasconi and David Wood (New York: Routledge, 1988), 165.

51

Monroe, The Heart of Altruism, 216.

52

Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem, 279.

53

Ibid., 278.

47

Kristen Renwick Monroe. The Heart of Altruism (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996).

159

160

V. Responsibility and the Politics of Civility Having discussed the social and ethical conditions of responsibility, we will now proceed to describe the relevance of responsibility to the politics of civility in two specific but integrally related ways: (1) against violence and (2) for democratic deliberation. We mean to accentuate the reciprocal type of responsibility among equals or equal citizens. V.I. The late political philosopher Judith N. Shklar once proposed that "liberal and humane people . . . would, if they were asked to rank the vices, put cruelty first. Intuitively they would choose cruelty as the worst thing we do."54 Indeed, it is a "black hole" in the humanity of humankind. Cruelty, in all forms of its manifestation, results from disrespect for (the Other's) difference based on the anti-hermeneutical principle that the Other is never right. No doubt, violence—whether it be war, revolution, or capital punishment—is a form of cruelty, the ultimate form of cruelty. It is in principle an irresponsible act because it aims at the obliteration of the Other (both human and nonhuman) from the face of the earth. It is indeed the total, complete effacement of the Other. As Mona Ozouf puts it well, violence (revolution) is "the price to be paid for the abolition of differences,"55 of alterity, of altarity which signifies each person's dignity as a human being. Violence is a result of failure to acknowledge the worth of the Other in the life and death struggle of recognition—to use the gratuitous language of Hegel. It results from the absolute and universal affirmation and claims of the self against the Other that violate the basic principle of human plurality based on difference. The language of violence as well as rights talk tends to absolutize and universalize the human condition. They speak the language of identity at the expense of the language of difference. For in the absolute and universal, the other becomes exactly the same as the self.56 Leszek Kolakowski once pointed out that there is an ageless antagonism between a philosophy that perpetuates, and a philosophy that questions, the absolute and universal.57 It is the antagonism between the "priest" with "the garrote of catechism" and the "jester" (or "fool") with "the needle of mockery." The priestly finds solace in the stability and immobility of an established system, while the jesterly thrives on destabilizing and resisting it (i.e., it is "heresiarchal"). One relies on the politics of identity and the other fosters the politics of difference. 54

Judith N. Shklar, Ordinary Vices (Cambridge. MA: Harvard University Press, 1984), 44.

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Notwithstanding the claim of violence as the only way of transforming history and politics, nonviolence, too, is entitled to the remaking of history and politics. Camus justifies the cause of nonviolent rebellion against violent revolution in the name of tolerance, of difference and humanity. "Rebellion at grips with history," he asserts, "adds that instead of killing and dying in order to produce the being that we are not, we have to live and let live in order to create what we are."58 The rebel as a nonviolent person readily acknowledges the dialogical interplay between the ethical principle of culpability and the epistemological principle of fallibility, whereas the (serious, too serious) revolutionary as a violent person thrives on the monologic of inculpability and infallibility. Epistemological dogmatism and moral absolutism contradict the essence of the dialogical principle of coexistence that always and incessantly recognizes the zone of ever present, porous ambiguity between doubt and certainty. In the final analysis, ambiguity is an unavoidable condition of human plurality or peaceful coexistence with others.59 V.2. The recognition of and respect for difference calls for democratic deliberation in the ever dangerous presence of violence as the act of effacing the otherness of the Other. Deliberation is the "moral equivalent" of violence. It runs counter to the accepted norm of defining violence as—to use the famed expression of Karl von Clausewitz in the footsteps of Machiavelli—the continuation of politics by other means. As the French differend in particular, of which Jean-Francois Lyotard makes judicious use, implies disagreement (and dispute), difference gives rise to disagreement whose conflict is resolved by a "parliamentary" method. It is no mere accident that the parliamentary system of government is also called a "responsible government." In perpetuating dialogue, democratic deliberation is indeed a "talking cure" for politics, which is also a politics of civility. For, to paraphrase Alfred North Whitehead slightly, civilization is the victory of persuasion over violence. Just as difference is a permanent condition of humanity, Amy Gutmann and Dennis Thompson maintain in their recent work, Democracy and Disagreement, that "moral disagreement is a permanent condition of democratic politics."60 They argue, however, neither for the ethic of responsibility nor against violence which are perfectly compatible with, and even enhance, their formulation of the ethics and politics of deliberative democracy.61 Gutmann and Thompson argue 58

Albert C a m u s . The Rebel, trans. A n t h o n y Bovver (New York: Alfred A. Knopf,

1956), 277. 59

' Mona Ozouf. Festivals and the French Revolution, trans. Alan Sheridan (Cambridge. MA: Harvard University Press. 1988). 12. 56 See Michael Stacker, "Agent and Other: Against Ethical Universalism," Australian Journal of Philosophy 54 (1976): 219. 57

See Leszek Kolakowski, "The Priest and the Jester." in his Toward a Marxist Humanism, trans. Jane Ziekonko Peel (New York: Grove Press. 1968), 9-37.

Ambiguity, too. is the soul of Gadamer s hermeneutics. In 1989 he stated that "the possibility that the other person may be right is the soul of hermeneutics" (see Jean Grondin, Introduction to Philosophical Hermeneutics, trans. Joel Weinsheimer [New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. 1994], 124). 60

Amy Gutmann and Dennis Thompson. (Cambridge, M A : Harvard University Press, 1996), 9. 61

Democracy

and

Disagreement

Cf. James Bohman, Public Deliberation (Cambridge. M A : MIT Press, 1996)

TAKING RESPONSIBILITY SERIOUSLY

PHENOMENOLOGY OF THE POLITICAL

that "a deliberate democracy governed by reciprocity flourishes neither in a society of self-centered citizens nor in a society of saints,"62 presumably because in a society of self-centered or self-righteous citizens there would be no possible agreement or compromise based on genuine reciprocity, while in a society of morally perfect persons, no occasion would arise for disagreement. Rights talk is incompatible with deliberative democracy because it is deliberate but not deliberative, it knows no language of compromise.6' Deliberative democracy is necessary and possible because we are neither truthfully self-righteous nor saintly. The principles of deliberative democracy, Gutmann and Thompson argue, offer a way of reading and judging public policies more defensible than those of either utilitarianism, or libertarianism, or egalitarianism which, despite their differences, share in common the conception of what is morally correct prior to and independently of democratic deliberation. By contrast, democratic deliberation is a search for answers constrained by constitutional principles, which are themselves determined and developed through deliberation. Deliberative democracy is deliberative through and through. Without question, reciprocity is for Gutmann and Thompson the "leading principle" of deliberative democracy. By maintaining moral integrity but not moral arrogance or dogmatism, the virtue of "mutual respect" fosters the principle of reciprocity that facilitates accommodation, compromises, or mutually acceptable terms. Arendt, for whom speech or "talking cure" has a special, "riteful" place in the human condition, argues that the alternative to violence—including anticolonial revolution argued for by Franz Fanon and supported by Sartre—is not nonviolence but power. Power does not come out of "the barrel of a gun." Nonetheless, she argues that "power is actualized only where word and deed have not parted company, where words are not empty and deeds not brutal, whereas words are not used to veil intentions but to disclose realities, and deeds are not used to violate and destroy but to establish relations and create new realities."64 As "action in concert," power then has the character of "potentiality" {potentia, dynamis, or Macht) rather than of unchangeable and measurable substance. Power as a political concept and as the faculty of action is the human capacity to transform the world and, as she put it, create new realities. Action or

political action is distinguished from the necessity of labor and the utility of work. Unlike her mentor Heidegger whose Dasein is characterized by death or mortality, Arendt defines the initium of action, which is the fountain of human capacity to create new realities, in terms of the facticity of birth or natality. "Philosophically speaking," Arendt emphasizes, "to act is the human answer to the condition of natality. Since we all come into the world by virtue of birth, as newcomers and beginnings, we are able to start something new; without the fact of birth we would not even know what novelty is, all 'action' would be either mere behavior or preservation."65 Since human action is irreversible, that is, what is done cannot be undone, moreover, we actors can only forgive or be forgiven. On the other hand, equally because human action—unlike "behavior"—is unpredictable, we can only promise or be promised. Because action is unpredictable, politics is the adventurous art of the impossible as well as the possible.

162

T5T

VI. Epilogue In conclusion: this paper contends that social existence is the basic condition of humanity. By social existence, I mean an ensemble of multiple relationships anchored securely in bodies-in-relation, i.e., intercorporeality. Plurality is marked by difference, by alterity. But for alterity, there would be no plurality, no relationality. Altarity elevates the Other to the altar of interhuman relationships without defacing or emasculating but only decentering the self. It alone engenders the heteronomic ethic of responsibility inscribed in Levinas's ethics as first philosophy. The ethic of responsibility reclaims and continues the Copernican revolution of social thought initiated by Ludwig Feuerbach: what geocentrism is to egocentrism, heliocentrism is to heterocentrism. Feuerbach invented the "new thinking" of responsibility which has a riteful place in the study of politics because what is political is ethical. In his attempt to initiate a "responsible politics" by integrating ethics and politics, Vaclav Havel, who was close to Jan PatoCka since both were members of the "Charter 77" and studied Levinas in his prison years, speaks of politics hopefully as the art of the impossible (or heterotopia), that is, the art of improving ourselves in the world of difference.66 We may even agree with Arendt that ethics is primary to politics because "just as eating is not life but the condition of living, so living together in

62

Gutmann and Thompson, Democracy and Disagreement. 91. Significant synonyms for "deliberative" in the contemporary discussion of political theorists are "discursive," "communicative," and "dialogical." See in particular Seyla Benhabib, "Toward a Deliberative Model of Democratic Legitmacy," in Democracy and Difference, ed. Seyla Benhabib (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996). 67-94; Iris Marion Young. "'Communication and the Other: Beyond Deliberative Democracy," in Democracy and Difference, 120-35; and James Bohman. Public Deliberation. Young's "communicative model" particularly plays on difference. 63

Cf. Glendon, Rights Talk, 9.

64

Arendt, The Human Condition. 200.

65 Hannah Arendt, Crises of the Republic (San Diego. CA: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. 1972), 179. 66

See Vaclav Havel, Open Letters, trans. Paul Wilson (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1991), esp., 395; on his studying Levinas see Letters to Olga, trans. Paul Wilson (New York: Henry Holt, 1989). For a discussion of Havel as both a political activist and theorist see Jean Bethke Elshtain, "A Performer of Political Thought: Vaclav Havel on Freedom and Responsibility," in Theory and Practice, ed. Ian Shapiro and Judith Wagner DeCew (New York: New York University Press, 1995), 464-82.

164

TAKING RESPONSIBILITY SERIOUSLY ,,67

the polis is not the good life but its material condition.'"" The ultimate rationale for politics as ethics is that "it is not good to be alone."68 Indeed, the ethical is ubiquitous and overarching because it is related to everything we do. This paper further contends that the ethic of responsibility is an alternative to rights talk and that it should become—as Hans Jonas puts it—"the center of morality."69 A Confucian would say that the only exemplary and proprietary rights are rites.70 The ethic of responsibility calls for "downsizing" rights talk— to use the current language of the American corporate world. It would, however, be foolhardy for anybody to dump the Bill of Rights in the rubbish-bin of political, social, and economic thought. I only suggest that we tone down the cadences of rights talk because it has reached the point of eutrophication that destroys a web of interdependence and diversity. To emphasize: what autonomy is to modernity, responsibility is to postmodernity. It is not the "sleep of reason" but the lack or absence of altarity that produces monsters and monstrous deeds. The future of difference will make the heteronomic ethic of responsibility the pillar of heterotopia. The ethic of responsibility as self-transcendence subverts the obsession of the modern West with the sovereignty of the self, self-reliance, or narcissistic absorption, i.e., the ethic of autonomy. The noble idea of self-reliance or independence may be a necessary but not a sufficient condition for the postmodern geopolitics and geoculture of interdependence in the world becoming increasingly a global 67

68

1 lannah Arendt. "Philosophy and Politics," Social Research 57 (1990): 83.

Ibid, 103.

69 Hans Jonas. "Ontological Grounding of a Political Ethics: On the Metaphysics of Commitment to the Future of Man." in The Public Realm, ed. Reiner Schiirmann (Albany. N Y : State University of N e w York Press), 166. 70

De Bary contends that the trouble with Confucianism in China is symptomatic of the world in trouble today. He speaks of the Confucian notion of self-cultivation, for example, is not the cult of the self but the cultivation of "correlative responsibility." See his The Trouble with Confucianism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. 1991). Confucian humanism is also said to emphasize "communicative rationality," and it is concerned with "human rites" rather than "human rights." On this point see The Confucian World Observed, ed. Weiming Tu, Milan Hejlmanek, and Alan Wachman (Honolulu: East-West Center, 1992). In saying "Adieu" to Levinas. Derrida remarks that the word droiture ("straightforwardness" or "uprightness"), which is akin to the Confucian rite (ritefulness), comes from Levinas's teaching. It means "to speak straight on, to address oneself directly to the other, and to speak for the other whom one loves and admires, before speaking o / h i m " ("Adieu," trans. Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas, Critical Inquiry 23 [1996]: 2). The center of Levinas's thought lies in the "unlimited" and "unconditional" ethics of responsibility which precedes and exceeds freedom. Responsibility is "ethics beyond ethics." And yet only death silences and dissolves responsibility.

PHENOMENOLOGY OF THE POLITICAL

165

village We must not be mesmerized by the power and rhetoric of autonomy, independence, or self-reliance. As the "responsible self refutes the atomized and collectivized self as a theoretical abstraction and chimera, the ethic of responsibility is a hopeful alternative to both liberal individualism today and the totalitarian politics of bygone years. In the ethic of responsibility neither the individual nor the collectivity is sovereign. As it knows no language of compromise, however, the ethical and political Esperanto of rights is indeed unpromising and uncompromising for the future. The ethic of responsibility heralds and celebrates the dialogical principle of a consummate community where the singular self is enfleshed with the singular Other. Responsibilitycentered ethics is imperative for the future survival and preservation in perpetuity of the earth which shelters and nurtures humanity and nature in myriad ways. It is a paradigmatic way of thinking and doing—the way of a new phoenix, as it were, rising from the ashes of the past. By cultivating the habits of the heart as well as the mind, the heteronomic ethic of responsibility opens a new threshold for philosophizing politics for generations yet to come.

IV RACE

Chapter Ten

The Invisibility of Racial Minorities in the Public Realm of Appearances Robert Bernasconi The University of Memphis During the strike that preceded the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr., the sanitation workers of Memphis and their African-American supporters paraded with posters that read, "I AM A MAN." This was not only a labor dispute in which the right of public employees to strike against a city was in question, but it was also, given the historical context and especially the racial identity of most of the sanitation workers, immediately recognized as an important chapter in the Civil Rights Movement. There were signs that read "JOBS JOBS JOBS," "UNIONIZATION FOR THE SANITATION WORKERS," and "JUSTICE AND EQUALITY FOR ALL MEN." But most signs read simply "I AM A MAN," and the photographs of scores of Black protesters holding these signs provide the abiding image of the strike. They wanted economic justice and recognition of their union, but contemporary accounts record that more than anything else they wanted to be "recognized" for themselves.1 Even when Whites have not gone to the extreme of explicitly denying the humanity of Blacks, they have frequently found numerous ways, institutional and personal, in which to demean Blacks. The need to declare one's humanity arises as a response to this kind of racism. Beyond the appeal to civil rights due to someone as a citizen, there is also, at least since their recognition in the eighteenth century, the appeal to human rights due to a person on the basis of their humanity. Human rights stand as a testimony to the power of the universal. They have given the oppressed of the world a new basis on which to protest discrimination based on the particularities of class, sex, nationality, religion, or race. Human Rights are widely acknowledged as providing a standard that transcends national and cultural boundaries. But does universality offer an adequate defense against racism? Does the appeal to the universal provide a means for overcoming discrimination against groups on the basis of racial differences? Or is racism thereby being addressed by a cosmopolitanism that keeps White privilege intact? A recent example may serve to clarify what is at stake. During the 1996 election campaign the opponents of affirmative action liked to quote Martin Luther King's "I Have a Dream" speech with its vision of a land where everyone 1

For an account of the strike, see Joan Turner Beituss, At the River I Stand (Memphis: St. Lukes Press, 1990), esp. 285-286 and 453. 169 ,, T.i-

,,

*•„!,„,.,•,„/,)

Phpnnmennloev

of

the

Political,

169-187.

170

l \>1' lilt, i

would "not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character."2 Policies that made explicit use of racial designations were said to be discriminatory. Meanwhile, the opponents of affirmative action chose to ignore King's support for such programs under the heading of "compensatory or preferential treatment." King had written: It is impossible to create a formula for the future which does not take into account that our society has been doing something special against the Negro for hundreds of years. How then can he be absorbed into the mainstream of American life if we do not do something special for him now, in order to balance the equation and equip him to compete on a just and equal basis?3 This attempt to enlist Martin Luther King's support against affirmative action is part of a disingenuous attempt to deny minorities a political identity, while leaving in place the legacy of the racial oppression they have suffered in the name of that identity. This could not be more different from the call of the Memphis sanitation workers, which was a call for justice, respect, and recognition, but not a call for homogenization. Within the universal order of humanity there is a question about the political status to be accorded to solidarity based on gender, race, linguistic grouping, class, nationality, and so on. Are these divisions merely divisive? Is their value at best only strategic? Or do these differences have positive value so that appeals to cosmopolitanism or to global identity must be looked upon with suspicion? In this paper I focus on racial difference, with particular attention to anti-Black racism among Whites in contemporary America, but the issues are larger. Fanon wrote, "I wanted to be a man, nothing but a man."4 His book, Black Skin, While Masks, shows that racism cannot be overcome without addressing the effects of racism. But Fanon's formulation, like my quotation from Martin Luther King in the previous paragraph, now strikes us as insensitive to issues of sexual difference, inviting Sojourner Truth's response: "Ar'n't 1 a woman?"5 In the face of overlapping identities and a tendency to experience identities as more tyrannical than liberating, there is a temptation to want to employ singularity and 2

A Testament of Hope. The Essential Writings of Martin Luther King, Jr., ed. James M. Washington (San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1986), 219. / 3

Martin Luther King, Jr.. Why We Can 7 Wait (New York: Signet, 1964), 134.

4

Frantz Fanon, Peau noire, masques blancs (Paris: Seuil, 1975). 91: Black Skin, White Masks, trans. Charles Lam Markmann (New York: Grove, 1982), 113. 5

Olive Gilbert, Narrative of Sojourner Truth (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), 134. For a discussion of whether Sojourner Truth actually used the phrase, see Jeffrey Stewart's Introduction, xxxiii-xxxiv.

TTT

abstract humanism as the main resources in the battle against discrimination. But this is to overlook the need for identities that offer a sense of community, that inspire loyalty, and that promote a common interest, especially among members of an oppressed group. There is much still to be learned about how and why the classification of people into races took hold at the end of the eighteenth century and was quickly regarded as obvious.6 At almost exactly the same time that the concept of race was given precision, the American Declaration of Independence proclaimed human equality. Since the Enlightenment one of the great political puzzles has been the combination of cosmopolitan ideals and racist practices. One does not see an initial failure to meet a new higher set of standards, so much as a series of appalling blindspots in the application of the noble and profound statements of human dignity that are the hallmark of the period. Declarations of universal rights were authored and pronounced by people who were apparently oblivious of whole classes of people to whom those rights nominally applied, but to whom hardly anyone thought to apply them: the poor, women, nonWhites, and, above all, poor, non White, women.7 Take slavery, for example. There were few European voices against the slavery of Blacks until the last half of the eighteenth century. That is why one rarely finds justifications or defenses of this form of slavery until that time. The institution did not raise moral problems. It was somehow taken for granted, so long as it was contained within certain parameters that limited slavery to non Whites and, although this proviso had to be dropped under pressure from the missionaries, to nonChristians. The puzzle is that, when the principle of the equality of all human beings was enunciated by the American colonists, they failed to apply it to the Black slaves in their midst. For a society of slaveowners under the rule of a colonial power to demand liberation from "slavery" for themselves at the same time that they themselves relied for their prosperity on an especially brutal system of slavery was nothing new in the history of morals. What was new was the universal language that they brought to their cause while at the same time apparently being oblivious of its real meaning.

6 1 presented a preliminary account of the history of the development of a scientific conception of race in the eighteenth century at a conference on Race and the Academy organized by Kevin Miles at Villanova University in 1996. My paper, "Who Invented the Concept of Race?", gave a central place to Kant's 1775 essay, "Von den verschiedenen Racen der Menschen." See Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 2 (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1968), 427443. See also Emmanuel Eze's "The Color of Reason: The Idea of 'Race' in Kant's Anthropology," Postcolonial African Philosophy, ed. Emmanuel Chukwudi Eze (Oxford: Blackwell, 1997), 103-140. 7

The best example is, of course. Thomas Jefferson. See his "Notes on the State of Virginia," Writings, ed. Merill Peterson (New York: The Library of America, 1984), 264-267. See also Paul Finkelman, "Jefferson and Slavery. 'Treason Against the Hopes of the World'," Jeffersonian Legacies, ed. Peter S. Onuf (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1993), 181-221.

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One can say that this contradiction is evidence of brazen hypocrisy, although that would not explain why they insisted on postulating the universal principles that produced the contradiction. One can refer to racism, although that is to name the problem rather than to explain it. One can construct a philosophy of history which would attempt to resolve the contradiction by postulating that, against such deep-seated prejudice, the principle had first to be stated almost unwittingly long before its full application could be envisaged. But this philosophy of history, predicated on progress, would have to explain whether the broadening of the principle's application was the only way for history to resolve the contradiction inherent in the founding documents. The particularly virulent form of racism produced in the United States in the late nineteenth century, in which the very humanity of Blacks was questioned, can also be understood as an attempt at resolving the contradiction.8 However, the focus of this paper is not the history of the contradiction between the principle and the practice, but rather the underlying phenomenological truth that racial difference, as what is most visible, is within the public realm rendered invisible to the extent that the dominant group succeeds in overlooking a minority, denying its members their place in the sun.9

and I will not rehearse that analysis here." However, I refer to her here to make the point that the political realm is the realm of appearances and, because appearances can be manipulated, the reality can also be manipulated. Furthermore, it is sufficient that race be visible, in the sense that racial identities be marked with sufficient clarity, either physiognomically or by dress-code, to give rise to a consistent system of identifications, for its political reality to be secure. Only philosophers with an impoverished conception of perception could imagine that the category of race, let alone racism itself, could be contested by exposing the distinction between the phenomenal appearance of certain physical characteristics and what is said to lie "behind" that appearance once the appearance has been isolated.12 The problem is that within a racialized society to see skin color is to see someone as of another race with all that that entails. However unjustified the stereotypes may be, they are part of the political reality. To that extent, racism has made race "real" without making it true. As Tshembe explains to the American journalist, Charlie Morris, in Lorraine Hansberry's play Les Blancs, race once invented takes on a reality of its own: "it is pointless to pretend it doesn't exist— merely because it is a //e!"' J The fact that we now reject the racial science that taught previous generations to treat race as an indicator of character and even of moral worth does not mean that the stereotypes that are deeply embedded in popular culture and that are reinforced by the media can be broken by pointing out that they are unjustified. It is not just with reference to skin color that people are judged by appearances. Sexism often operates in the same way. Nothing is to be gained by pretending that racism and sexism can be eradicated by the introduction of a few skillfully chosen distinctions and the policing of ordinary language to ensure that these distinctions are respected. Rather, we must try to understand better the process by which society sustains, in this case, racism. Those who are most invisible in the public realm, in the sense of being powerless, mute, and deprived of human rights, are often most visible to those who disempower them, silence them, and exploit them. During segregation in the United States, White men as a class never lacked the capacity to see the Blacks

What does it tell us about the nature of the political realm that those who are most visible phenomenally for the dominant group, can nevertheless at the same time be rendered invisible within the public realm of appearances? In referring to the public realm of appearances, I am alluding to Hannah Arendt's notion that in the public or political sphere appearance constitutes reality, albeit without underwriting the precise terms in which she insists on a division between the public and the private.10 I have addressed elsewhere what I regard to be the systemic failure of Hannah Arendt's phenomenological conception of politics to accommodate an appreciation of the issues raised by race in American society 8 See. for example, Chas. Carroll, "The Negro a Beast" [1900], reprint edition (Salem, NH: Ayer, 1991). 9 I must emphasize at the outset that this paper is self-consciously one-sided insofar as it is a contribution to what Sartre called a "phenomenology of the oppressor." JeanPaul Sartre, Cahiers pour une morale (Paris: Gallimard. 1983), 579; Notebooks for an Ethics, trans. David Pellauer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 1992), 561. Even though I have attempted to balance my observations by including testimony from those who have experienced discrimination, it is still inevitably one-sided with the identity— and the location—of the author clearly marked. 10

Hannah Arendt. The Human Condition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 1958), 50. It is perhaps hard to see how Hannah Arendt's concept of the public realm of appearances can function as a definition of politics within the contemporary world, especially as a major part of Arendt's analysis in The Human Condition is an attempt to show that the distinctions that sustain the integrity of the public realm have become confused in the modern world. However, by borrowing her conception, it is still possible to clarify the relation of the ethical and the political, which is what is at issue here.

173

" See Robert Bernasconi. "The Double Face of the Political and the Social: Hannah Arendt and America's Racial Divisions," Research in Phenomenology 16 (1996): 3-24. 12

This tendency is operative within contemporary attempts first to reduce racial difference to ethnic difference and then to deny that what used to be called races can successfully sustain an ethnic identity. See the writings of Anthony Appiah including '"But Would That Still be me?' Notes on Gender, 'Race.' Ethnicity, as Sources of identity'," The Journal of Philosophy 87 (1990): 493-499. For an account of some of the unspoken assumptions underlying the historical development of this position, see Kamala Visweswaran "Race and the Culture of Anthropology." American Anthropologist 100(1998): 1-14. 13

Lorraine Hansberry, Les Blancs: The Collected Last Plays, ed. Robert Nemiroff (New York: Random House, 1972), 122.

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that waited on their tables, did their yard work, and passed them on the sidewalks. Their invisibility was in some sense deliberate or, at least, programmed. As Ralph Ellison wrote in Invisible Man, describing the experience of a Black man in a White society, "I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me."14 It has not been necessary for Whites to look Blacks in the face because Blacks were taught to divert their gaze, bell hooks has described this process in the following terms: One mark of oppression was that black folks were compelled to assume the mantle of invisibility, to erase all traces of their subjectivity during slavery and the long years of racial apartheid, so that they would be better, less threatening servants. An effective strategy of white supremacist terror and dehumanization during slavery centered around white control of the black gaze.15 This practice was so striking that Sartre remarked on the phenomenon in a newspaper article published after only his first visit to the United States: "if by chance their eyes meet yours, it seems to you that they do not see you and it is better for them and you that you pretend not to have noticed them."16 The refusal of Whites to see Blacks was predicated on the fact that they knew who was there to be seen and sought to control them by choosing not to see them. That is to say, Whites saw Blacks without seeing them. How was this possible? In no small measure by controlling the Black gaze, so that Whites did not experience themselves as they were seen by Blacks.17 Prejudice wants to make those against whom it is directed disappear. It wants to exterminate them but usually has to satisfy itself with hiding them away. It turns them into outcasts. Christians expelled the Jews or forced the Jews to live in ghettos. Whites today produce the same effect by staying in the suburbs and refusing to go downtown for fear that they would have to share the sidewalk with Blacks who might return their gaze. In this context to exaggerate one's 14

Ralph Ellison. Invisible Man (New York: Vintage Books, 1989). 3.

15

bell hooks. Killing Rage. Ending Racism (New York: Henry Holt, 1995), 35.

16

Jean-Paul Sartre, "Retour des Etats-Unis. Ce que j'ai appris du probleme noir," Le Figaro 16 (June 1945): 2; "Return from the United States," trans. T. Denean SharpleyWhiting in Existence in Black, ed. Lewis R. Gordon (New York: Routledge, 1997), 84. 17

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See Lewis R. Gordon, Bad Faith and Antiblack Racism (New Jersey: Humanities Press, 1995), 102: "The white body is expected not to be looked at by black bodies. This is because the black body's situation of being-without-a-perspective cannot be maintained if blacks are able to unleash the Look." For an account of Sartre's application of his analysis of the look from Being and Nothingness to the struggle between the races, see Robert Bernasconi, "Sartre's Gaze Returned: The Transformation of the Phenomenology of Racism," Graduate Faculty Philosophy Journal 18 (1995): 201-221.

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difference as Jew or Black is to make a gesture of defiance. But if the prejudiced find this threatening, they are even more threatened by the possibility of being fooled, as when they mistake a foe for a friend. Thus Jews were obliged to wear a yellow badge as a sign of their Jewishness. This was so there would be no mistake, which was to admit that otherwise a Jew could be mistaken for a Gentile. The pressure on Jews to assimilate highlights racism at the point where the demand to assimilate seems to have succeeded. That is why the persecution directed against the Marranos is regarded as one of the original instances of modern racism.18 Fear of failing to identify those from whom one differentiated oneself led racial scientists in Nazi Germany to instruct people on how to identify the distinctive features of each race.19 The visibility of Blackness in a "White world"—that space carved out by Whites for themselves—gave antiBlack racism a unique self-confidence. And yet one of the historical obsessions of anti-Black racism in the United States has been the fear that there are Blacks who can pass as White. This problem is of racism's own making. Because Whites in the United States have for much of their history been concerned with their own racial purity, they operated a "one-drop" rule that produced a class of people for whom passing was an option. Such people looked White but were counted as Black. To the members of this racialized society their "appearance" belied their "reality," not because skin color did not mean something, but because their skin color was a misleading indicator of how society classified them. When, as in Mella Larsen's Passing, a White man found that his apparently White wife in fact counted as Black, that man did not conclude that the idea of racial essence was false.20 So far as he was concerned, it was not his idea of race that had deceived him but his wife, because he now saw her as Black, something that, in this case, he had already seen - hence his use of "Nig" as a nickname for her - but which at the same time he had refused to see. Racism wants to make its targets disappear, but it does not want them to disappear into anonymity. It wants to see them without seeing them. It wants to identify its targets unambiguously without having to face them. This is accomplished in part by controlling how Blacks are made to appear. In slavery times, Whites saw Blacks as slaves: freed Blacks had to be able to prove their status. Furthermore, under slavery, Blacks were supposed to appear happy; under segregation, submissive; and today the stereotypes are manipulated in the form of images of the welfare queen, the teenage mother, the gang member, and the drug addict. As a result of the construction of these stereotypes that are disseminated through the media and through hearsay, many Whites are threatened simply by the sight of a young Black man. If he is not already known 18

See Richard H. Popkin, "The Philosophical Bases of Modern Racism," The High Road to Pyrrhonism (San Diego: Austin Hill Press. 1980), 79-80. 19

See, for example. Ludwig Ferdinand Claus, Rasse und Seek Ein Einfuhrung in den Sinn der leiblichen Gestalt (Berlin: Buchergilde Gutenberg. 1939). 20

Nella Larsen. Passing (New York: Alfred Knopf, 1929).

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to us, the stereotype intervenes. We Whites have trouble seeing past the stereotype as if it formed a layer of invisibility. It is a case of seeing without seeing. It is not that Blacks are invisible to Whites. On one diagnosis that means that their humanity is invisible to those Whites who are nevertheless most aware of them. Given that there can be few racists left, if any, who deny the biological humanity of Blacks, this raises the question of how modern-day racists express a belief in the equality of all human beings and at the same time treat Blacks as inferior. This blatant contradiction is in part sustained by the persistence of stereotypes. How do the stereotypes hold sway even among people who know better? One can begin to address this problem by noting what it is one does and does not see. One does not in the standard case see another human being as simply that, another human being. If one did, it would not have been necessary for the Memphis sanitation workers to line the street with their signs that read: "I AM A MAN." In a racialized society, everyone is seen in terms of the racial categories of the moment. Today they are seen as Black, White, Hispanic or Asian. This is so prevalent that there are times in such a society when it seems that it is impossible for an audience to follow an anecdote or a news story until the racial identity of the protagonist has been established: "Was he Black or White?" Within the context of racism, particularity intervenes between universality and singularity. This analysis is what leads to the widespread claim that if one could only look beyond the particularity of race, class, gender, and so on, then one would encounter a person in his or her singularity and there would be no obstacle against arriving at the universal designation "human" in terms of which all are equal. Levinas must be counted among those who have claimed that the "as" structure, according to which the individual is given to perception as being of a certain type, lends itself to racism: It is evident that it is in the knowledge of the other (autrui) as a simple individual—individual of a genus, a class, or a race— that peace with the other (autrui) turns into hatred; it is the approach of the other as "such and such a type."2' Not surprisingly, given the problems that his treatment of the feminine had already raised for him, Levinas did not say whether the sex of the individual should also be included in those characteristics that need to be overlooked for the encounter with the Other to take place. Nevertheless, although he said in an interview that to encounter the Other it is best not to notice the color of his or her 21

Emmanuel Levinas. "Paix et Proximite." Emmanuel Levinas. Les Cahiers de La nuit surveillee. ed. Jacques Rolland (Lagrasse: Verdier, 1984), 343; "Peace and Proximity," trans. Peter Atterton and Simon Critchley in Emmanuel Levinas: Basic Philosophical Writings, ed. Adriaan Peperzak, et al. (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1996). 166.

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eyes, one should beware jumping to the conclusion that Levinas offered this as a practical proposal, still less as an injunction.22 Although Levinas is not always read this way, it seems to me that he construes singularity not as a phenomenon that can be unveiled, but as an enigma. That is to say, it is "up to me" to retain its exorbitant meaning.2j Singularity interrupts the system of social identity that inevitably returns or, more precisely, always remains intact. To see someone in his or her singularity would not be unlike addressing them in their singularity in what Levinas calls "saying" (le dire)1* Just as the "saying without a said" that Levinas sometimes invoked is always in fact accompanied by a said because one addresses the Other in language, so even what might be called "overlooking" someone's race, sex, or class thereby to see them in their singularity does not leave them deprived of all characteristics. The following passage from "The Rights of Man and the Rights of the Other," dating from 1985, shows Levinas attempting to negotiate what is for him a difficult problem: These rights of man . . . express the alterity or absolute of every person, the suspension of all reference: a violent tearing loose (arrachemenf) from the determining order of nature and the social structure in which each of us is obviously involved; an alterity of the unique and the incomparable, due to the belonging of each one to mankind (au genre humairi), which, ipso facto and paradoxically, is annulled precisely to leave each man the only one of his kind (unique dans son genre).25 Levinas found himself forced to acknowledge that to relate to someone in their singularity through a certain dissolution of the particularity that would reduce that person to being a representative of a certain type, nevertheless still allows at least a passing reference of this singular person to the human genus. The question is whether this paradoxical structure, once allowed, could not also accommodate a passing reference to class and race.

22

Emmanuel Levinas, Ethique et infini (Paris: Fayard. 1982), 89; Ethics and Infinity, trans. Richard Cohen (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1985), 85. 23

Emmanuel Levinas, "Enigma et phenomene." En decouvrant I'existence avec Husserl et Heidegger (Paris: Vrin, 1967), 2 0 8 - 2 0 9 ; "Enigma and Phenomenon," trans. Alphonso Lingis in Basic Philosophical Writings, 70. 24 Emmanuel Levinas, Autrement qu'etre ou au-dela de I'essence (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1974), 4 7 - 4 9 and 5 8 - 6 5 ; Otherwise than being or beyond essence, trans. Alphonso Lingis (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1981), 3 7 - 3 8 and 4 5 - 5 1 . 25

Emmanuel Levinas. "Les droits de 1'homme et les droits d'autrui," Hors sujet (Saint Clement: Fata Morgana, 1987), 176; "The Rights of Man and the Rights of the Other," Outside the Subject, trans. Michael B. Smith (Stanford: Stanford University Press. 1994), 117.

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Somewhat surprisingly given Levinas's personal history as a target of antisemitism, his account, at least in his philosophical as opposed to his confessional writings, bypasses the attachment to social identity that is often found on the part of the oppressed.26 It ignores the fact that many people who have been discriminated against and persecuted want to be accepted, not just as a member of humanity, or for their singularity, but in the same terms under which they had previously been rejected. It is not enough to be "a man," "a woman," "a human being, nothing but a human being." Even if this were possible, it is not regarded as desirable. This is not only true of many Blacks, who choose to appropriate and transform the meaning of the labels assigned to them in the course of their oppression. Arendt also acknowledged this point on the basis of her experience of National Socialism: "If one is attacked as a Jew, one must defend oneself as a Jew. Not as a German, not as a world citizen, not as an upholder of the Rights of Man."27 Similarly one can recall Benny Levy's response to Sartre's Anti-Semite and Jew many years after first reading it. Sartre had led him to discover what he dreamt of discovering: "I am a man, not a Jew." However, Levy subsequently recognized the price for doing so: he had embraced a form of self-denial.28 He had sacrificed his identity in a way that, had it been sustained, would have been a victory for his oppressors, who would themselves still have seen him not in his humanity, but as a Jew. Already in 1797 de Maistre wrote that "In my lifetime I have seen Frenchmen, Italians, Russians, etc.; thanks to Montesquieu, I even know that one can be Persian. But as for man, I declare that I have never in my life met him."29 To see another as this or that, Black, East Asian, or White, male or female, young or old, to see someone as a representative of some class or group, is an irreducible aspect of social experience, even though the precise terms under 26

For a more sustained treatment of this aspect of Levinas's thought, see Robert Bernasconi, "Who is my neighbor? Who is the Other?" Ethics and Responsibility in the Phenomenological Tradition (Pittsburgh: Simon Silverman Phenomenology Center, Duquesne University, 1992), 1—31. I now regard as inadequate the attempt I made there to find further resources in Levinas to address racism. For a more detailed examination of the issues, see Robert Bernasconi, "Wer ist der Dritte? Uberkreuzung von Ethik und Politik bei Levinas," trans. Antje Kapust in Der Anspruch des Anderen. Perspektiven phdnomenologischer Ethik. ed. Bernhard Waldenfels and Iris Darmann (Munich: Fink, 1998), 87-110. Hannah Arendt, "What remains? The Language remains," trans. Joan Stambaugh in her Essays in Understanding 1930-1954, ed. Jerome Kohn (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1994), 12. See also Hannah Arendt. "On Humanity in Dark Times: Thoughts about Lessing," in her Men in Dark Times (New York: Harcourt, Brace and World.

1968), 17-18.

29

which this takes place are culturally determined and the emphasis that is given to one of the terms in relation to the others can change historically with reference to the general context. Acknowledging that someone is of a certain race, sex, or class, does not necessarily reduce that person to being a representative of a type, a persona. It can also mean, among other things, recognizing and being sensitive to aspects of their experience that one might not have shared oneself but which one knows have touched them deeply. Only for the kind of people who, for example, preface a racist remark by declaring that some of their best friends are Black, could it make sense to say that they must "overlook" race to relate to someone. But they are precisely the kind of people most likely to make that same racist remark in front of their Black friends, precisely because they overlook race. The double bind that racism imposes on its targets lies in demanding assimilation while at the same time denying its possibility. Racism says, "Become like us," while always reasserting under its breath, "You can never become like us, because you are not one of us and we will not mistake you for one of us." The current proposal to move without delay to a society without racial designations has all the appearance of being, and perhaps sometimes is, a further example of Whites attempting to determine how, for example, AfricanAmericans may present themselves in society. The phenomenological studies of Alfred Schutz are a helpful resource for understanding this kind of racism.30 In the course of his 1957 essay "Equality and the Meaning Structure of the World," Alfred Schutz offered an account of the impact of imposed typifications on groups.31 Each group not only has a view of itself, it also has a view of other correlative groups with which it is in contact. Drawing on distinctions that he had already outlined in his classic 1932 study, The Phenomenology of the Social World, but which he now reformulated in the terminology of William Sumner, Schutz set out to describe how the meaning of the world as seen by an in-group or We-group relates to that of an Others group or out-group.j2 Each group takes

30

The continuing relevance of Schutz's analyses of anonymity for the understanding of contemporary racism has already been demonstrated by Lewis Gordon. See his Fanon and the Crisis of European Man (New York: Routledge, 1995), 37-66 and "Existential Dynamics of Theorizing Black Invisibility," in Existence in Black, ed. Lewis R. Gordon (New York: Routledge, 1997), 69-79. 31

27

28

179

Benny Levy, L 'espoir maintenant (Paris: Verdier, 1991), 72.

Joseph de Maistre, Considerations sur la France, ed. R. Johannet and F. Vermale (Paris: Vrin, 1936). ^.Considerations on France, trans. Richard A. Lebrun (Montreal: McGill-Queens University Press, 1974), 97.

Alfred Schutz, "Equality and the Meaning Structure of the Social World," in his Collected Papers, vol. 2 (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1964), 226-273. 32

Ibid., 244. The distinction between the in-group or We-group and the Othersgroup or they-group was borrowed by Schutz from William Graham Sumner, Folkways (Boston: Ginn, 1906), 12-13. However, Schutz related it to a distinction, which he had borrowed from Max Weber already in 1932, between subjective meaning, which involves reference to a particular person, such as the producer of a product, and objective meaning, which is abstracted from and independent of particular persons. Alfred Schutz, The Phenomenology of the Social World (London: Heinemann. 1972), 132-136. In "'Equality and the Meaning Structure of the Social World," Schutz modified his

Uf RACIAL MfNUKTIIES its own perspective for granted. It regards itself as the center of everything and rates everyone else in terms of their divergences from its own practices. Again borrowing from Sumner, Schutz called this perspective "ethnocentrism."" Furthermore, each group is inclined to feel itself misunderstood by the other groups and the more misunderstood its members feel, the more they pull closer together in order to protect themselves from criticism. They are also liable to regard these misunderstandings as evidence of a hostility on the part of the other group, which vindicates their own initial antipathy and serves to fuel it. This has a serious impact on how the group understands itself, leading it, for example, to insist on ever more stringent forms of loyalty on the part of its members.34 The relevance of these considerations to the present inquiry is enhanced by the fact that Schutz went on to consider specifically the example of interaction between different races in the United States. Schutz considered race to be, in Max Scheler's terminology, a material factor or Realfaktor^ alongside such things as geopolitical structure, political power relationships, the conditions of economic production, and so on. However, it is immediately apparent from the context that Schutz did not thereby mean that race was a determining factor in the sense that it would be in a biologism, but rather that membership of a race, unlike membership of a voluntary group, locates one within "a preconstituted system of typifications, relevances, roles, positions, statues" which are not of one's own making but are handed down "as a social heritage.'"6 One's race, like one's sex or the national group into which one is born, is, according to Schutz, an existential element of one's situation in the sense that it is something with which one has to come to terms. In a text contemporary with "Equality and the Social Meaning Structure," Schutz explained that the Realfaktoren belonged to "the world of everyday life taken for granted in the common-sense thinking of the actors on the social scene with which they have to come to terms."37 Having already established that the view one group has of another group can, under certain conditions, serve to modify the way that second group comes to regard itself, Schutz introduced the question of the case where a group's world has

presentation of the distinction by acknowledging that "objective meaning" is relative to the observer or scientist who produced it. Collected Papers, vol. 2. 227. j3

34

Even under the assumption that separation was not meant to involve an inferiority in the colored race, segregation is taken as an insult by the Negro and he becomes sensitive about it. His being treated as a type induces self-typification with an inverted sign. Even if he never intended to travel by sleeping car, the principled denial of its use becomes to him relevant in his own terms. He has a new problem to grapple with/ 9 Schutz argued that the imposition of a typification by one group on another correlative group is inevitable but not necessarily discriminatory.40 Discrimination takes place only when the typification from outside is imposed in such a way as to become part of the experience of the afflicted individual. This may not coincide with what is ordinarily understood by discrimination, but the account does succeed in drawing attention to the fact that where one group is in a position to impose a typification on an individual as a member of another group, that individual becomes alienated from his or her own self-characterization and becomes a mere representative of the typified characteristics. Schutz added that such a person would be deprived of the right to the pursuit of happiness.41 Schutz clearly wanted to draw on all the deep resonances that phrase has within the context of the United States, but it also shows the extent to which Schutz's analysis is governed by and to a certain extent limited to a specific context. In any case, in such circumstances the members of a minority group would not be content to seek equality with the dominant group in the form of assimilation, but 38

Alfred Schutz. Collected Papers, vol. 2. 254.

39

Ibid.. 261.

40

Ibid., 258-262.

Alfred Schutz. Collected Papers, vol. 2. 244. Cf. Sumner, Folkways, 13. Alfred Schutz. Collected Papers, vol. 2, pp. 244-247.

35

Ibid., 249. Schutz adopted this term from Max Scheler. See the latter's Probleme einer Soziologie des Wissens in Die Wissensformen und die Gesellschaft Gesammelte Werke 8 (Bern and Munich: Francke, 1960), 20-23 and 44-51. 36

come to be dominated by a perspective arising from another group that is hostile to it. According to Schutz, even though one cannot choose to which race one belongs, one should be free, among other things, to determine with what force one participates in group membership and what importance one gives to that identity.38 He then proceeded to show how in the first half of the twentieth century African-Americans were denied that freedom. Schutz took as his example the "separate but equal" doctrine formulated by the Supreme Court in Plessy v. Ferguson. Whatever its proponents claimed, the repercussions of the decision rendered were discriminatory:

Alfred Schutz. Collected Papers, vol. 2. 252.

37 Alfred Schutz, "In Search of the Middle Ground," Collected Papers, vol. 4 (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers. 1996), 149.

41

Ibid., 256-257. There is a further limitation that arises from the fact that Schutz had in effect defined discrimination not only in terms of an act or a motive, but also in terms of the power to impose a typification. This would seem to render the structures of discrimination ultimately inaccessible to phenomenological description, at least as Schutz practiced it. and call for the addition of other kinds of analysis. 1 am grateful to Kevin Thompson for pointing this out.

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would, Schutz noted, insist on being granted special rights to secure real equality, in addition to mere formal equality.4" In an attempt to explain what led African-Americans to demand "special" rights for themselves, Schutz appealed to Myrdal's account of how "the white man's rank order of discriminations" was the inverse of "the Negro's rank order." Myrdal's study of this difference in priorities between Whites and Blacks showed that Blacks were right to believe that even full realization of the principle of non-discrimination would secure them only formal equality with the dominant group and not real equality. Myrdal had observed that whereas Whites in the United States tended to focus on laws against intermarriage and sexual intercourse involving white women as the most important type of discrimination to correct, followed in importance by the demeaning social etiquette imposed on Blacks in their relation to Whites and by the legal barriers against interracial social intercourse, Blacks were more concerned with discrimination in economic matters such as securing land, credit, jobs, and public relief, with discrimination in the law courts and by the police next in the order of priority .4j Schutz did not say what special rights Blacks were claiming, but clearly "compensatory or preferential treatment" of the kind Martin Luther King subsequently advocated would meet the description. In other words, Schutz showed how such a demand arises as a consequence of the form of racism to which Blacks are subjected in the United States. Contemporary attempts to cast such demands as another form of racism are thereby exposed as a form of blindness to the concrete context, a form of blindness that serves to perpetuate White blindness to the Black gaze. Schutz employed the example of life under segregation to highlight the way that European-Americans held a view of African-Americans that made itself felt in many aspects of the lives of African-Americans. The White stereotype of Blacks was, of course, contested by the meaning that African-Americans gave and continue to give to being African-American and it led to the inner conflict that W.E.B. Du Bois described as "double consciousness."44 In The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man, James Weldon Johnson provided a description of this "sort of dual personality" and drew the inevitable conclusion: "I believe it to be a fact that the colored people of this country know and understand the white people better than the white people know and understand them."45 European-Americans were largely oblivious to the way African42 Ibid.. 265 and 2 6 7 - 2 6 8 . Schutz presented "•formal equality" as full equality before the law and full political equality, but suggested that where assimilation has not taken place "real equality" would be liable to entail special rights, such as the protection of o n e ' s national language in schools and before the courts. 43

Gunnar Myrdal, An American Dilemma (New York: Harper, 1944), 6 0 - 6 1 .

44

W.E.B. Du Bois. The Soul of Black Folk in Writings, ed. Nathan Huggins (New York: Library of America. 1986). 3 6 3 - 3 6 5 .

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PHENOMENOLUUf UF l tin rum Americans saw them and, to a large extent, they still are. Schutz did not explore this asymmetry. Instead, he took his analysis in the direction of Sartre's account of the look. A few years prior to the "Equality" essay, Schutz had criticized Sartre's description of the look as a site of conflict in which one is either the seer or the seen: it left no place for mutual interaction in freedom.46 This is not the place to examine either Schutz's objections or the resources that Sartre subsequently developed for addressing this problem. Nor do 1 intend to determine the extent to which Schutz, having clearly shown how discriminatory practices arise, was able to conceive of a society without discrimination. One might think that because Schutz traced discrimination back to the inevitable discrepancy between the way a group looks at itself and the way it is seen by others, it was hard for him to explain the situation where discrimination did not arise, and when it did, how it might diminish, instead of grow. The problem was exacerbated in the case of groups organized in terms of race or sex as one's participation in those groups was not voluntary.47 Schutz was, therefore, consistent when he conceded that "We had better courageously face the fact that prejudices are themselves elements of the interpretation of the social world and even one of the mainsprings that make it tick."48 However, Schutz did recognize that when a minority group is satisfied with its relationship to the predominant group, that minority group is liable to see assimilation as the way forward.49 When a group feels that its opportunities have been deliberately restricted by another group, an entirely different situation obtains. For the dominant group to insist upon assimilation as a precondition of economic empowerment, while at the same time excluding the possibility of assimilation from the outset, guarantees conflict. In other words, if the dominant group insists upon assimilation because it perceives a specific minority group as failing to conform to the standards it imposes, in all likelihood this is because it is operating with stereotypes that render it impossible for that group to meet the demand. The conditions that underlie the issuing of the demand make it impossible for the demand to be met: the demand to act White is addressed not to Whites but to those who are seen, for example, as Black. In the rare case in which Whites fail to act White, as in the case of young suburban Whites imitating the forms of dress associated with rap, they are

46

Alfred Schutz, "Sartre's Theory of the Alter Ego," in his Collected Papers, vol. 1 (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1967), 203. 47

Schutz, in his commentary on certain documents, issued by the United Nations appears to underwrite the suggestion that "each individual should be able to decide voluntarily whether or not he (sic) belongs to a specific minority." Alfred Schutz, Collected Papers, vol. 2, 266. 48

Ibid., 262.

49

Ibid., 265.

4

" James Weldon Johnson, The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man (New York: Penguin, 1990), 14-15.

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not under the same pressure to conform: it is believed that they will grow out of it, because it is all an act. It is not real. The invisibility of African-Americans in the public realm of appearances, as I have presented it in this essay, refers to the way European-Americans silence African-Americans, shield themselves from the gaze of African-Americans, so as to remain comfortable and uncontested in a White world that does not acknowledge itself as such. The invisibility of racial minorities arises from a refusal on the part of the majority to see them or, more precisely, to listen to them. My analysis does not deny that at various times and in various arenas European-Americans have had access to African-American perspectives on the world and on themselves. These have always been available; they have been the focus of attention from time to time, as at the time of the debate over the abolition of slavery and during the Civil Rights Movement, albeit often filtered through a White media. What is new is that Blacks, who have always contested the meaning of Blackness imposed on them, have forced this contestation into the public realm. Whites cannot avoid hearing it and cannot avoid seeing how it implicates them. They now find their own identity being challenged by the meaning Blacks impose on them. This is the context in which an increasing number of Whites declare that they would prefer to drop all talk of race. That they should make this proposal now is not surprising. It is too easy for academics and politicians to consider all talk of racial difference taboo in their own sphere, while at the same time race organizes society, as, for example, with residential apartheid. Racial identity will only cease to be salient when one can say of a newborn baby that its racial identity will have no significant impact on the kind of life he or she is likely to lead. But the conditions that would make it possible to say that cannot be brought about without a radical transformation of society of a kind that most Whites would not even contemplate. To devote our efforts now to trying to determine how long it will be before we can get beyond the particularity of race seems hardly worthwhile, because even if it is sometimes possible for some people in some contexts to do so in some sense, even the minimal goal of a society in which people are not judged by the color of their skin is a long way off. Once it is recognized that in the present context it makes no sense to ask people suddenly to become literally color blind, as if one could ask them not to notice skin color or other physiognomic differences that have been given a meaning in contemporary society, attention can then pass to the construction and interaction of the various stereotypes. This is where the phenomenological studies of Schutz can be of assistance. The focus of this essay has not been the incoherence of the system of racial classification, nor the institutional segregation of American society that sustains the ignorance that fuels the racial stereotypes, but the imposition of the stereotypes and the conflicts that arise from them. However, if Schutz is correct, as I believe he is, White stereotypes of Blacks have an importance that, for example, White stereotypes of Japanese or Black stereotypes of Whites do not have, not because African-Americans are more sensitive than other ethnic groups, but because so many African-Americans remain economically

T disempowered. They recognize that these stereotypes seriously impact their lives both personally, for example, in terms of job promotions or loan approvals, and institutionally, for example, in terms of how those stereotypes work to determine where they live and thus what educational or job opportunities are available to them and their children. Consider, for example, the stereotypes of Jews or of the Irish that still operate in the United States. However unjust and unwarranted these typifications are, they tend not to have the impact they once had, because in contemporary North America the Jews and the Irish are not economically disempowered in the way African-Americans and some more recent immigrant groups are. When employers insist as a condition of employment that prospective employees have attained a level of assimilation that far exceeds what is necessary to do the work satisfactorily, one has a clear case in which issues of recognition and of economic justice cannot be kept separate.50 Of course, the employers would probably insist that they were acting this way because their customers demanded it. It is the same kind of excuse used by White houseowners who do not want African-Americans living next door. They usually insist that they have no personal objection, but that they are worried about how the value of their house might suffer once the general perception of the neighborhood changes. These are some of the ways in which racism can permeate a society in which hardly anyone admits being a racist. An individual can proclaim the invisibility of racial minorities by insisting on the invisibility, the non-existence, of race, but this does not change anything, so long as one assumes that "everyone (all other Whites) except me" is operating with the stereotypes. It is now possible to offer a provisional answer to my earlier question about what we know about the public realm of appearances given that those who are most visible for the dominant group can at the same time be rendered invisible within it. Treating African-Americans as invisible or, more precisely, rendering them invisible was, among other things, a mechanism by which EuropeanAmericans could protect themselves from encountering a point of view that conflicted with their own self-understanding. One can then better understand why European-Americans go to such lengths to avoid experiencing themselves as seen by African-Americans. That is a major part of why these two groups do not more often share the same schools, churches, clubs, factories, malls, playgrounds and, above all, the same housing districts. The invisibility of African-Americans, the suppression of their presence and thus of their gaze, has also been one of the ways Whites have secured their own disappearance as White. There are different kinds of racism operating by different logics but, according to, for example, the dominant logic of anti-Black racism within the United States, Whites do not thematize their identity, but disappear into the

50

For the contemporary debate between the supports of redistribution versus the upholders of recognition, see the essays by Nancy Fraser and Iris Young in Theorizing Multiculturalism. ed. Cynthia Willett (Oxford: Blackwell. 1998).

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norm.51 This is the invisibility of the dominant group within the public realm of appearances. It sustains institutional racism by concealing it. Racial science often does not characterize the White race who, in Kant's formulation, "contains all impulses and talents in itself."52 In such cases racial science proceeds by characterizing the particularity of the other races. Within such a system of thought, Whites set the standard. They represent the universality to which others are supposed to aspire, but from which they are excluded by virtue of the limitations of their race. Such prejudices lend themselves to a universalism that is not so much opposed to racism as it is an instrument of racism. In this context, what it means to be human is contested and the statement "I AM A MAN" is anything but an underwriting of abstract humanism, because a certain model of humanity is covert within such a humanism. From this perspective, nothing is less surprising than the apparent contradiction between Enlightenment ideas about universal human equality and Enlightenment racism, so long as there is a dominant group that controls the look and thus the discourse of equality. In such a setting racism remains an irreducible component of the universalistic discourse, not its contrary, which is why we must always be suspicious of fine words and sentiments, as when people celebrate their color blindness by declaring race to be invisible. On a personal note, I may not have been in the United States long enough to be called a European-American, but I have not forgotten that from the moment I arrived I was seen as White. Coming from England, I came from a context where, alongside class and gender, what mattered was being English. This was also, in a sense, a racial designation. In Europe in the nineteenth century, what today might be called national identities, ethnic identities and racial identities were understood as interrelated. In spite of my resistance to being designated simply as White, I was forced to recognize that this is how I appear in the United States. I do not ever expect to be comfortable with this label. But, however much I would like to imagine that I could disappear into being a singular human being and nothing more, in a polarized society I cannot deny my social identity.53 " The problem with norms and with normalcy, against which one must always be on guard, is unwittingly exposed by Edmund Husserl in Die Krisis der Europaischen Wissenschaften und die transzendentale Phdnomenologie, ed. Walter Biemel, Husserliana VI (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff. 1962), 141-142: The Crisis of the European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology, trans. David Carr (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1970), 139. See further Jacques Derrida's comments in Edmund Husserl, L 'origine de la geometrie (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1962), 74-75; Edmund Husserl's Origin of Geometry, trans. John P. Leavey (New York: Nicholas Hays, 1978), 79-80. 52

Immanuel Kant, Vorlesungen Uber Anthropologie, Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 25, pt. 2 (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1997), 1187. 53

For an explanation of this point, see Albert Memmi, Portrait du colonise (Paris: Gallimard, 1985); The Colonizer and the Colonized, trans. H. Greenfield (Boston: Beacon Press, 1967).

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Fortunately I cannot, and certainly should not, be reduced to this social identity or any of my other social identities: like everyone else my singularity is mediated by several overlapping identities. To inherit a history is to assume the privileges, opportunities, and burdens that it brings, including certain responsibilities, among which is the responsibility to respond to how one is seen. Insofar as we fail to do so, it is we Whites who are trying to maintain our invisibility. But we will not be able to hide much longer.

Chapter Eleven

Identity and Liberation: An Existential Phenomenological Approach Lewis R. Gordon Brown University Political philosophy, whether in Rawlsian analyses of principles that demarcate who we are and what we should do about whom we exclude, Habermasian analyses of normative structural significations of communicative practice that also ask us who we are and what we should do about those who are excluded from our practices, or further back to Deweyan concerns about who we are and where we are going and Gramscian concerns about similar matters, has charted its twentieth-century course in many assertions and inversions of two paradigms that are part of the drama of who we, globally understood, are. Although effected in the twentieth-century, the drama unfolds from the nineteenth. What do 1 mean? We can begin with many examples, but perhaps the following two are most poignant. The first is a prophetic diagnosis. "Herein lie buried many things which if read in patience may show the strange meaning of being black here at the dawning of the Twentieth Century. This meaning is not without interest to you, Gentle Reader; for the problem of the Twentieth century is the problem of the color line."1 When W.E.B. Du Bois writes "Gentle Reader," he is being more than rhetorical, for this Reader, for whom there was once presumed a lack of interest and therefore (falsely) a lack of relevance, is here alerted that his condition, being other than black, is inscribed into the core of the problems in question. The black, whose "strange meaning" and "being" are also called into question, also represents a tension in the presumed order. Du Bois writes not of being black here but of its meaning. He announces here a hermeneutical turn that would delight even his most zealous contemporary philosophical successors.2 This turn signals a moment in a complex struggle, a moment marked by its admission of incompleteness and probably impossible closure. The black, subject to interpretation, becomes the possibility of many and as such is both concrete and metaphorical. If the color line is subject to interpretive 1

W.E.B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk, with a new intro. by Randall Kenan (New York: Signet/Penguin, 1995), 41. 2

For instance, Paul Ricosur, From Text to Action (Evanston, 1L: Northwestern University Press, 1994). See his discussion of the turn from the question of Being to its interpretation, its meaning. He speaks here, of course, outside of the contributions of Heidegger's formulations in Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (New York: Harper & Row, 1962). 189 K. Thompson and L. Embree (eds.), Phenomenology of the Political, 189-205. SP\ irWl lfhn.,ar A^Jvmi^ Puhliehvrv

Printed in thi> NfitnPrlnnAx

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blackness, then its boundaries carry risks, always, of bleeding into each other. The Gentle Reader's possibilities are announced, then, as paradoxically less fixed in its fixedness than he may be willing to admit. He may intensify, then, his effort to take "precautions." Du Bois's announcement has played itself out, prophetically, in this regard: race/color has marked a course through the twentieth century like a rift through the planet in whose wake and quakes bodies and heaps of ideological rubbish have piled themselves up, in their characteristic divides, like casualties on the Western front. Deny as we may the problem of the color line, as a consequence or cause of a multitude of evils, is a persisting problem, a problem that, in the eyes of some, is here to stay/ Born from the divide of black and white, it serves as a blueprint of the ongoing division of humankind. The color line is but a metaphor that exceeds its own concrete formulation. It is the line between races as well as the line between the genders, the classes, the sexual-orientations, the religions—in short, the line between "normal" and "abnormal" identities. The second example is not a declaration in a classic written text, though it is both textual and has emerged as a text in its own right: the Bolshevik revolution. Whereas Du Bois's pronouncements have their overtly textual space, the Bolshevik revolution is a historic moment whose historical textuality is the historicity of the revolutionary project in the twentieth century. Many revolts have occurred in the twentieth century, but none of them signify revolution as did that of the Bolsheviks. Like Du Bois's announcements, there is a paradox at the close of the twentieth century and the second millennium a.c.e.: the Bolshevik revolution is dead, but the forces that gave it validity haunt our present. Global economic inequality intensifies in the face of first-world dismissal of the relevance of revolution and hence revolutionary consciousness. Like the question of color, the question of an active consciousness, of taking a stand, of resistance, has shifted its foci from systems to intrasystemic "critique." There is no longer the Leninist call: what is to be done. Instead, there is the pathetic admission: what can one do? Two announcements at the twentieth century's dawn: identity and liberation. In spite of talking about "color lines," Du Bois's explorations have charted a genealogical thematic of "fundamental" thoughts on the twentieth3

The most noted proponent of the "racism is here to stay" conclusion, strategic though it may be, is Derrick Bell. See his Faces from the Bottom of the Well: The Permanence of Racism (New York: Basic Books, 1992). For discussion of the many dimensions, metaphorical and literal, of the color line, see Anatomy of Racism, ed. David Theo Goldberg (Minneapolis and Oxford: University of Minnesota Press, 1990), K. Anthony Appiah and Amy Gutman's Color Conscious: The Political Morality of Race (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996), Race and Sex: Their Sameness and Differences, ed. Naomi Zack (New York: Routledge, 1997), Joy Ann James, Transcending the Talented Tenth: Race and Intellectualism in America, with a foreword by Lewis R. Gordon (New York and London: Routledge, 1997), Lewis R. Gordon, Her Majesty's Other Children: Sketches of Racism from a Neocolonial Age (Lanham, MD Rowman & Littlefield. 1997), and Lester Embree, "American Ethnophobia, e.g., IrishAmerican, in Phenomenological Perspective," Human Studies 20 (1997): 1-16.

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century subject, of the twentieth century self. His anguished voice was, after all, addressing problems of identity the resolution of which later culminated in a voice advocating revolution. His final autobiography, A Soliloquy on Viewing My Life from the Last Decade of Its First Century, charts a course from New England liberalism in Barrington, Massachusetts, and Cambridge, Massachusetts, to Communist internationalism in Harlem, New York, and Accra, Ghana, although the closing remarks strike this reader as a beautiful fusion of Marxism with African-American existentialism: I just live. I plan my work, but plan less for shorter periods. I live from year to year and day to day. I expect snatches of pain and discomfort to come and go. And then reaching back to my archives, I whisper to the great majority: To the Almighty dead, into whose pale approaching faces, I stand and stare . . . Teach living man to jeer at this last civilization which seeks to build heaven on Want and 111 of most men and vainly builds on color and hair rather than on decency of hand and heart. Let your memories teach those wilful fools all which you have forgotten and ruined and done to death. . . . Our dreams seek Heaven, our deeds plumb Hell. Hell lies about us in our Age: blithely we push into its stench and flame. Suffer us not, Eternal Dead to stew in this Evil—the Evil of South Africa, the Evil of Mississippi; the Evil of Evils which is what we hope to hold in Asia and Africa, in the southern Americas and islands of the Seven Seas. Reveal, Ancient of Days, the Present in the Past and prophesy the End in the Beginning. . . . Let then the Dreams of the dead rebuke the Blind who think that what is will be forever and teach them that what was worth living for must live again and that which merited death must stay dead. Teach us, Forever Dead, there is no Dream but Deed, there is no Deed but Memory.4 - The Bolshevik revolution was animated, too, by an emancipatory call to the human spirit, a call that led to the aporiae that emerged from any call for an opening that has been foreclosed. Identity and liberation are two themes that lay beneath the waves that announce seemingly other themes. Identity calls for the question of a being's relation to itself. Thus, we find questions of identity in ontological questions, questions of being, essence, and meaning—in short, of the existential force of the question, in the end: "what am I?" In the emancipatory question, we head, too, through a series of philosophical turns. Although the two meet on the question of who is to be liberated, the liberating animus charts a course of value that at times transcends 4

W.E.B. Du Bois, A Soliloquy on Viewing My Life from the Last Decade of Its First Century, ed. Herbert Aptheker (New York: International Publishers, 1968), pp. 422-3. For discussions of African-American and other forms of black existential philosophies, including those influenced by phenomenology, see Existence in Black: An Anthology of Black Existential Philosophy, ed. with an introduction by Lewis R. Gordon (New York and London: Routledge, 1997).

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Being although not always essence. Liberation is a teleological concern, a concern about purpose, a concern about ought and why: whatever we may be, the point is to focus energy on what we ought to become. The courses charted by these two concerns have also manifested themselves in two dominating disciplinary approaches to human problems in the twentieth century: poststructuralism and Marxism. Emerging out of the "linguistic" turn, a turn that radicalized Kantian transcendental experience into language conditions (whether one can mean anything outside of a language), poststructuralism continued a tradition of radical reflection by radicalizing the linguistic turn into semiotic preconditions. The poststructural turn is the revolt of self-reference. Just as Kurt Godel transformed mathematics and logic by demonstrating their incompleteness, poststructuralism, too, is the story of absolute incompleteness through absolute difference. "Identity," from this erspective, is a highmaintenance affair. Eventually, we will be tired enough, and much of what we hold so dear will wither away or become stale as clothing do after a single wear in a shallow age of commodification. At the century's end, poststructuralism reigns as the uncontestable judge of identity, and much of what has become known as "identity politics" is, for the most part, poststructural explorations, whether sophisticated or "vulgar," on identity conditions of political identification: How do we unify when our unifying conditions—our being "one" or sufficiently similar to be "as one"—have collapsed? Marxism's normative import is manifold. The famous observation of an oppressed class having nothing to lose but its chains is a powerful normative theme of human expressivity.5 As a theoretical standpoint, Marxism's strength is its constant focus on structural conditions. Anyone concerned with institutional and structural conditions of human identity formation in the twentieth century will find themselves embodying some acquaintance with Marxist analysis, even if, in the end, it is a negative acquaintance. For thinkers who may think in terms of cultural structures, for instance, there is always the leitmotif of material conditions, of how environment affects, though not always determine down to the letter, the course of social evolution. Although pointing to the future and although, in its many emendations—particularly Antonio Gramsci's—resisting claims to anthropological closure, Marxism stands in practice as a discourse of completeness that sets it on a collision course with poststructuralism. There are poststructuralists who call themselves Marxists (especially in English departments), but it is difficult to find Marxists who call themselves poststructural ists (especially in sociology and political science departments). The divide is evident in the pronouncements from some of the strongest voices from each side. Listen to Michel Foucault: "Marxism exists in nineteenth-century thought like a fish in water: that is, it is unable to breathe

5

See Charles Taylor's discussion of expressivism from Rousseau and Herder through to Hegel and Marx in his Hegel and Modern Society (New York: Cambridge University Press. 1979).

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anywhere else."6 Then to Callinicos: Foucault, more democratic, asks why 'everyone's life couldn't become a work of art?' The answer, of course, is that most people's lives are still . . . shaped by their lack of access to productive resources and their consequent need to sell their labour-power in order to live. To invite a hospital porter in Birmingham, a car-worker in Sao Paolo, a social security clerk in Chicago, a street child in Bombay to make a work of art of their lives would be an insultunless linked to precisely the kind of strategy for global social change which . . . poststructuralism rejects.7 In a word, the lines are drawn. But must they be so? The portrait I have given thus far is lacking in many respects. I have left out several traditional portraits of identity and liberation. Where, for instance, are Sigmund Freud and his heirs on the ontogenic question of identity and unconscious manifestations of the self? How about Ralph Waldo Emerson and his heirs on pragmatic teleological concerns and Gustavo Guttierez and his heirs on theologico-teleological ones? Or Martin Delany, Edward Blyden, Alexander Crummell, and Anna Julia Cooper and their heirs on the teleological dimension of identity, especially with regard to the racialized and engendered self: Who, in other words, enters history through whom?8 Today, those movements have been subsumed under the poststructural-Marxist divide. The importance of psychoanalysis in contemporary poststructural discussions of identity is well known. Witness the influence of Jacques Lacan, Julia Kristeva, Luce Irigaray, Judith Butler, and Drucilla Cornell on contemporary discussions of identity. The historicist turn, whether explicitly Marxist or merely penumbral, has influential contemporary heirs in pragmatism and critical theory—for instance, early Cornel West and Jiirgen Habermas at the end of the 1960s.9 Eschatological dimensions of the historicist turn, with the moral demands of the Gospels, reveal similar Marxist themes—for instance, Gustavo Guttierez, James Cone, Enrique Dussel, Jacquelyn Grant, Josiah Young, Dwight Hopkins, and Eduardo Mednieta have all produced theologies 6

Michel Foucault. The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (New York: Vintage, 1971), 262 7

Alex Callinicos, Against Postmodernism: A Marxist Critique (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1992), 90-1. 8 For discussions of the thought of these theorists, see Key Figures in AfricanAmerican Thought, ed. with an introduction by Lewis R. Gordon (Oxford: Blackwell, forthcoming). 9

See Cornel West's Prophesy, Deliverance!: An Afro-American Revolutionary Christianity (Philadelphia: Westminster Press. 1982) and Jiirgen Habermas's Knowledge and Human Interests, trans. Jeremy J. Shapiro (Boston: Beacon Press, 1971).

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and philosophies of liberation out of the experience of and with a focus upon the oppressed (who are invariably poor, colored, and female).10 The early Cornel West was also a contributor to this branch of theologico-historical critique." Pragmatism has remained primarily a form of liberalism (Richard Rorty and recent Cornel West), which is, in the end, a skeptical position on Marxism and a regression into an at most welfare-state capitalism as an, if not the, end of history.12 Liberation theology has, for the most part, appropriated much of the language of postmodern poststructuralism, which, too, leaves us with an ambivalent relation to our contemporary global economic and historical condition.13 This ambivalence is marked by contemporary scholarship on the impact of nineteenth-century Africana thought as manifested in contemporary Africana philosophy and theology.14 Contemporary Marxism is thus the end of a 10

Representative works of these theologians are numerous. For a thoughtful survey, see James Cone, "Black Theology as Liberation Theology," in African American Religious Studies: An Interdisciplinary Anthology, ed. by Gayraud S. Wilmore (Durham. MD: Duke University Press, 1989). See also Gustavo Guttierez, The Power of the Poor in History (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1983). Enrique Dussell's The Underside of Modernity, trans. Eduardo Mendieta (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press, 1995), Jacquelyn Grant, White Women 's Christ and Black Women 's Jesus (Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1989), Liberation Theologies, Postmodernity, and the Americas, ed. with an intro. by David Batstone, Eduardo Mendieta, Lois Ann Lrentzen, and Dwight N. Hopkins (New York and London: Routledge, 1997), and Josiah Young's A Pan-African Theology (Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press, 1992). For a classic critique of the eschatological dimensions of the liberation theological turn, see William R. Jones, Is God a White Racist?:A Preamble to Black Theology (Boston: Beacon Press. 1997). " See West. Prophesy, Deliverance! 12

See my discussion of Cornel West's political thought in Her Majesty's Other Children. West's liberalism is particularly evident in his American Evasion of Philosophy: A Genealogy of Pragmatism (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1989), Race Matters (Boston: Beacon Press. 1993) and Keeping Faith: Philosophy and Race in America (New York and London: Routledge. 1994). Rorty's liberalism appears in numerous texts, but see especially Contingency. Irony, and Solidarity (New York: Cambridge University Press. 1989). 13 Cornel West has situated his work as postmodern from the start, and so has his heirs, for example, Michael Eric Dyson and Victor Anderson, which marks an important difference between his influence and James Cone's, from whose intellectual heirs we find work in womanist theology (for instance, Jacquelyn Grant) and Pan-African theology (for instance, Josiah Young). Foucault's influence on Dussel is evident in The Underside of Modernity. 14

The impact of poststructuralism and Marxism appears in nearly every recent major work in the field. See. for example. Pauline Hountondji. African Philosophy: Myth and Reality, 2nd ed. (Bloomington: Indiana University Press. 1996), V.Y. Mudimbe, The Invention of Africa (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988), Anthony Appiah, In

PHENOMENOLOGY Ut I tit fULi 1 long sequence of derivations that emerge in conversations on liberalism and structural change; its force rests on the convergence of its supposed death being simultaneous with the supposed death of revolution in toto. The phylogeny that opposed ontogeny was after all Marxist: "The working-class will be the human race" (emphasis added). Phylogenic talk leads, then, to Marxism as it does to few other progressive organizing schemes. Another voice that has been overlooked is the movement identified in the subtitle of this chapter. Today we find face-offs of poststructural psychoanalysts and pragmatic Marxists. Although the array of hyphenated formulations offer possibilities of breaking down the divide, in the end, the divide remains pronounced. To speak the political in the Present Age is limited to a discrete set of methodological approaches: positivistic and pragmatic liberalism; Freudianism; poststructuralism; and Marxism. With few exceptions, explorations from phenomenological methodological standpoints receive little serious attention, but instead what Foucault has referred to as philosophical laughter. The exceptions are of course meetings like those held by the Center for Advanced Research in Phenomenology and the Sartre Society of North America and their attending theorists who have been able to eke out a decent living (indecent to our opponents) from our explorations of these matters.15 Phenomenology has received, then, a similar sentence as Marxism; to the chaingang of the hopelessly outdated. Given phenomenology's rootedness in lived-experience and its leitmotif of thinking individuals (how else could problems of intersubjectivity emerge?), Foucault's ironically sweeping and totalizing conclusion at the end of the penultimate chapter of The Order of Things cannot be taken lightly:

My Father's House (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), Tsenay Serequeberhan. The Hermeneutics of African Philosophy (New York: Routledge, 1994), and Young's A Pan-African Theology. There are many more. For a genealogy of the New World black engagement with Marxism, see Cedric Robinson's Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition (London: Zed, 1983) This list is far from exhaustive. For more developments, readers are encouraged to consult D.A. Masolo's African Philosophy in Search of Identity (Bloomington: Indiana University Press. 1994), James, Transcending the Talented Tenth, and Gordon, Her Majesty's Other Children. 15 Participating in the meeting from which this volume is drawn—Phenomenology of the Political—is a virtual bevy of contributors to the field: John Drummond, Mariane Sawicki, Hwa Yol Jung. Kevin Thompson. Bernard Dauenhauer, R. Philip Buckley, Tom Flynn. Adriaan Peperzak, Steven Crowell, Robert Bernasconi, and Lester Embree. The Sartre Society of North America has a large membership of political theorists trained in phenomenology, which includes philosophers such as William L. McBride, Robert V. Stone, and myself. 1 leave aside here the "internal" question of those who are situated, also, along the poststructural/Marxist divide. A rigorous phenomenology, I will continue to argue, places these divides under radical critique. See my discussions of phenomenology in Fanon and the Crisis of European Man: An Essay on Philosophy and the Human Sciences (New York and London: Routledge, 1995).

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IDENTITY AND LIBERA TION To all those who still wish to talk about man, about his reign or his liberation, to all those who still ask themselves questions about what man is in his essence, to all those who wish to take him as their starting-point in their attempts to reach the truth, to all those who, on the other hand, refer all knowledge back to the truths of man himself, to all those who refuse to formalize without anthropologizing, who refuse to mythologize without demystifying, who refuse to think without immediately thinking that it is man who is thinking, to all those warped and twisted forms of reflection we can answer only with a philosophical laugh—which means, to a certain extent, a silent one.16

Phenomenologists of the political—realist, constitutive, existential, and hermeneutical—are familiar with this environment of laughter and silence. From Foucault, phenomenologists receive the genealogical poststructural road block to their journeys. On a less rhetorically grandiose scale, but equally dismissing, there is also the textual poststructural or deconstructive attack, which instead of addressing the noematic world of intended objects (for example, essence, truth, thought) attacks the Achilles heel of noesis-noema, noetic-noematic unities and all—intentionality. Listen, now, to Derrida: What does "consciousness" mean? Most often, in the very form of meaning, in all its modifications, consciousness offers itself to thought only as self-presence, as the perception of self in presence. And what holds for consciousness holds here for so-called subjective existence in general. Just as the category of the subject cannot be, and never has been, thought without reference to presence as hypokeimenon or as ousia, etc., so the subject as consciousness has never manifested itself except as self-presence. The privilege granted to consciousness therefore signifies the privilege granted to the present; and even if one describes the transcendental temporality of consciousness, and the depth at which Husserl does so, one grants to the "living present" the power of synthesizing traces and of incessantly reassembling them.17 Derrida arrives at this reflecting deflection of intentionality after placing under suspicion an array of phenomenological resources—for example "constitution," and "genesis" (12)—the evocation and invocation of which would betray an encircled naivete. Translation? Philosophical laughter, silence. At this point, it may seem that we have swayed from our path. Although we have arrived at a discussion of phenomenology, the crucial question now is its relevance to our opening themes of identity and liberation. The circumstance is particularly grave in light of phenomenology's obvious susceptibility to the 16

17

The Order of Things. 342-3.

Jacques Derrida. "Difference." in Margins of Philosophy, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 1982), 16.

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charge, from Marxist circles, of bourgeois stoicism: Phenomenological bracketing is, after all, an effort to "suspend" (although not eradicate) the natural attitude, which calls for a suspension of the exigency of historical moments. "What is to be done?" is subordinated in such a turn to "What is intended or meant by 'What is to be done?'?" In both the poststructural and Marxist turns, then, there is criticism of phenomenology's relevance by precluding its resources of critique. Are these turns conclusive? Much of my work in the mid 1990s has been devoted to engaging in a critique of poststructural and Marxist ideological formations. In the end, both, ideologically understood, present a claustrophobic reality of an ontologized presumption. Poststructuralism ontologizes language and its semiotic underpinnings; Marxism ontologizes matter. Marxism raises the question of the human being, for which it is castigated by Foucault but extolled by the likes of myself. For me and other Africana theorists such as C.L.R. James, Sylvia Wynter, Paget Henry, and Anthony Bogues, Marxism's continued relevance and importance resides in its focus on the question of humanity as a central question of our time, as a question of what form of life we shall live, which amounts to what form of life we shall become.18 The poststructural turn, the critique of identity and all, leads to the question: why bother at all? Destablization of any formation of presence or power/knowledge, without any directedness at all, becomes, willy-nilly, trivial. The problem is that the proverbial baby has been thrown out with the bath water. The problems that animate inquiry in these intellectual practices lack, in and by themselves, the attitude of concern. It is no wonder that, for ethical and political resources, appeal is never made to poststructural claims themselves. Existence had been thrown to the wayside. An existential reading of Marxism led Sartre into a new phase of methodological investigations culminating in the Critique of Dialectical Reason, and we need only look at the conflict within Marxism between Marxist humanism and Marxist scientism to substantiate our point about problems raised by material reductionism. In poststructuralism, there is the legendary path of Foucault to stoic resignation and existential "inner" resistance; in a word, 18

Sylvia Wynter's position has emerged over the course of several important essays over the past decade, but see especially, "Is "Development' a Purely Empirical Concept or also Teleological? A Perspective from 'We the Underdeveloped,'" in Prospects for Recovery and Sustainable Development in Africa, ed. Aguibou Y. Yansane (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1996), 299-316. For Paget Henry's thoughts on Marxism's historical significance in the project of exploring problems of Africana semiosis (which he refers to as the poetics of consciousness), see his Caliban's Reason: Studies in AfroCaribbean Philosophy (forthcoming), as well as his essay, authored with Paul Bhule, "Caliban as Deconstructionist,'" in CLR James' Caribbean, ed. Paget Henry and Paul Bhule (Durham: Duke University Press, 1992). Many of Bogues's ideas emerge in his study of C.L.R. James. Caliban 's Freedom: The Early Political Thought of CLR. James (London and Chicago: Pluto Press, 1997). My views on Marxism—that it is one among many interpretive tools with which to combat oppression in the modern (and supposedly postmodern) age—emerge in all of my cited volumes.

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authenticity}9 Derrida, too, twists and turns in his seat when interviewed about the ineffectiveness of his thought for matters of political organizing and emancipatory projects. Instead of accusing the question itself as a call to engage in the folly of seriousness and effecting a chain of presence, he voices his solidarity with those struggles and thus decenters his own decentering to a realm, at most, of the interesting and the aesthetic. In the end, he claims, he is about indecision, not indetermination20 Even in Paul Ricoeur, where we find a case of hermeneutical intrasystemic appeals, where a hermeneutical phenomenology subordinates a phenomenological Hermeneutics, we find—after subordinating intentionality to signs and interpretation, of intended objects to symbols and text—a call to existential hermeneutics (instead of hermeneutical existentialism). Why is this so? We return to the identity question. The poststructuralist critique of identity and phenomenology can be formulated as anti-essentialism without intentionality. Anti-essentialism with intentionality points immediately to the following cadre of thinkers as it does to no others: Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Paul Tillich, Alfred Schutz, and Frantz Fanon.21 Sartre, as we know, argued against the notion of a human essence and argued for an understanding of intentionality as a nihilating act. This core concern took him on a philosophical journey that marked the limits and limitations of essence and substance—in imagination, in emotion, in anguish, in social formation, in historical formation, in biographical construction. The

journey is marked by detailed descriptions of the structures of bad faith— consciousness' effort to negate itself, to hide from itself. Think of his sojourn from Imagination to the Critique and The Family Idiot. Simone de Beauvoir not only rejected the notion of a human essence, but she also saw a connection between phenomenological reduction and existential conversion, both of which are rooted in intentionality." Merleau-Ponty explored, in works such as Phenomenology of Perception and The Visible and the Invisible, ambiguities of the human condition from an understanding of intentionality rooted in the lifeworld of experience and experience of the lifeworld.23 Tillich saw intentionality not only as "being related to meaningful contents of knowledge and will" and a limitation on essentialist human identity, but also as an element of the human soul in which it is united with vitality.24 For Schutz, intentionality set the framework for problems of sociality, problems that rested upon the achievement of intersubjective reality. Without intersubjectivity, the social world would be monological, which would be, in effect, nonsocial2i Although Schutz at times reduced phenomenological philosophy to transcendental phenomenology, his explorations into the constituitive phenomenology of the natural attitude, typification's relation to phenomenological essence (which does not collapse into substance since ontological commitments have been bracketed in the phenomenological moments of reduction), and the features of mundane life have inspired many subsequent generations of phenomenological philosophers, including Maurice Natanson and Lucius T. Outlaw. The contribution here is the careful linkage and description of social reality with intentional life. And Fanon in particular took hold of problems of identity and liberation and fused them immediately through existential phenomenological appeals to livedexperience and contextualized them with a theory of sociogenesis. Sociogenesis rejects purely ontogenic appeals to identity and phylogenic appeals to structural or historical imposition: The lived-experience of intersubjective reality (history,

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19 See Michel Foucault, "Technologies of the Self," in Technologies of the Self, ed. Luther H. Martin, Huck Gutman, and Patrick H. Hutton (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press. 1988). For discussion, see Cynthia Willett. Maternal Ethics and Other Slave Moralities (New York: Routledge. 1995), 135-6. 20 See Derrida's responses in the afterword "Toward an Ethic of Discussion," in his Limited Inc. (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1988), 148-50.

22

* Since I am focusing on writers who situated phenomenological methodology at the heart of their existential explorations, I leave aside here the work of Martin Buber (who was influenced more by Kierkegaard and the Hasidim than phenomenology, although his treatment of 1-Thou relations has clearly influenced many phenomenologists), Gabriel Marcel, Karl Jaspers. Albert Camus (whose work focused more on resistance to forces of nihilism, especially notions of revolt for their own sake), and Paul Ricoeur (who substituted interpretation for intentionality). What these thinkers share with the group listed as existential phenomenologists is the importance of their work for philosophy of existence. It can, however, be argued that their work is most adaptable to and explicable by means of phenomenological description than no other, which explains, perhaps, why most of their commentators have been phenomenological philosophers. See, for instance, the group of philosophers who gathered in honor of Buber, Jaspers, and Marcel for the Paul Arthur Schilpp's Library of Living Philosophers series published by Open Court.

See Simone de Beauvoir's Pour une morale de I'ambigutte (Paris: Gallimard, 1947). esp. 19. 23 For discussion of Merleau-Ponty on ambiguity, see Hugh J. Silverman, Inscriptions between Phenomenology and Structuralism (New York and London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1987), chap. 5, '•Merleau-Ponty's Human Ambiguity." See also my remarks on ambiguity below. 24

See particularly The Courage To Be (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1952), esp. 37, 8 1 - 3 , and 128-36. 25

Schutz's succinct formulations can be found in his Collected Papers, vol. 1, The Problem of Social Reality, ed. Maurice Natanson (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Puiblishers, 1962).

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institutions, communities) call for assessment.26 Like Foucault, Fanon wished to move beyond questions of liberation and man as formulated in Europe, but unlike Foucault, he did not expect to surpass the fact of human existence and the need for liberation. Instead he raised the question of human constitution and consequently the constitution of liberating value.27 Sartre's and Fanon's writings have influenced several Africana phenomenologists whose works are critical of identity premised upon essence. These phenomenologists include Thomas Slaughter, William R. Jones, Paget Henry, and myself.28 Henry's recent work focuses primarily on phenomenological approaches to the constitution of social life, particularly in Africana cultural formations.29 My work has these influences with additional Schutzean explorations in which I have developed a theory of deontological essence (essence without essentialism) to address the antinomies that emerge from radical deconstruction and structural crises of reason and politics in contemporary philosophy of the human sciences, particularly social and political thought. For me, as for all the theorists here cited, the role of the human being in human phenomena must be brought to the fore, and this role is usually articulated according to the sine qua non of phenomenology: intentionality. We have arrived, then, at the crux of the matter. The rejection of intentionality erases an account of agency and, therefore, jeopardizes the "who" and "purpose" in any formulation of liberation. Deterministic turns to history amount to the same. In the midst of these two extremes, however, is the correlative theme of constitution in conscious life as formulated by phenomenology. The phenomenological problem of constitution can be understood, for instance, through the ambiguity of the German sich konstitutieren, which Husserl uses in his exploration of the problem. That expression can be translated either as "constitutes itself or "is constituted."31

Such ambiguity is at the heart of intentionality; it is at the heart of our experience of being the source of our world while encountering that world as "given." Maurice Natanson writes of constitution that it

See Peau noire, masques blancs (Paris: Maspero. 1952). For discussion, see my Fanon and the Crisis of European Man and "The Black and the Body Politic: Fanon's Existential Phenomenological Critique of Psychoanalysis," in Fanon; A Critical Reader, ed. Lewis R. Gordon. T. Denean Sharpley-Whiting. and Renee T. White (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers. 1996). See the closing chapter of Fanon's Les damnes de la terre (Paris: Gallimard

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refers to a logic of the building of meaning, a process through which the meaning we find in experience has come to be established and organized in its particular manner. . . . At times Husserl writes as though the constitutive process were one of world-creation and as though consciousness built up not only the order of meaning but the nature of reality, once again, ambiguity is not to be taken as a necessary sign that Husserl's doctrine is unclear. . . . That the creative sense of constitution is stressed most fully in Husserl's transcendental idealism is interpreted by some commentators to indicate the unacceptable direction phenomenology takes when it ceases to be a theory of meaning and becomes a philosophy of being. It is not necessary to accept all of the implications of philosophical idealism to recognize the particular placement of Husserl's version. It must be kept in mind that he explicitly disassociated himself from both traditional idealism and realism."2 How is it possible that we play an active role in the creation of meaning but also in each instance encounter meaning as already meant? This problem troubled Husserl throughout his works, especially in his reflections on internal time consciousness and his criticisms of psychologists and historicism and their philosophical extensions as idealism and realism.'3 A development of the problem in terms of its relation to time and problems of suspending both idealism and realism would require more space than a chapter in this volume could offer.34 What are within our scope are its obvious correlates in identity and liberation. Identity represents the seemingly passive side of constitution, that which "is constituted." Liberation beckons the active side, that which (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. 1973), 94; and Robert Sokolowski, The Formation of Husserl's Concept of Constitution (The Hague: Nijhoff, 1964), 216. 32

1990).

Edmund Husserl, p. 94.

33

28

See Thomas Slaughter's essay, "Epidermalizing the World," in Philosophy Born of Struggle, ed. Leonard Harris (Dubuque, 10: Kendall/Hunt. 1998). Jones did not only worked through Sartrean existential phenomenology in Is God a White Racist?, but also in his dissertation, "Sartre's Critical Philosophy" (Brown University). 29

See also his Caliban 's Reason.

30

The most pointedly phenomenological of my writings thus far is Fanon and the Crisis of European Man. See Maurice Natanson's Edmund Husserl: Philosopher of Infinite Tasks

See, for instance. Edmund Husserl, On the Phenomenology of the Consciousness of Internal Time (1893-1917), trans. John Barnett Brough (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1991) and Phenomenology and the Crisis of Philosophy: "Philosophy as Rigorous Science" and "Philosophy and the Crisis of European Man," trans. Quentin Lauer (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1965). 34

These issues are explored in my essay, "Communicative Bases of Social Reality in Light of Deconstructive Appeals to Difference." in Communicating Differences: Essavs in Phenomenology and Communicative Praxis, ed. Jacqueline Martinez and Lewis R. Gordon (forthcoming). And of course, among the classic treatments of this issue, see Merleau-Ponty's discussion of time in Phenomenology of Perception.

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"constitutes." One can see how these correlates relate to Fanon's notion of sociogenesis: It is humanity who actively constitutes socio-historical reality— "Man is what brings society into being"35—but in so doing, it is humanity that finds itself constituted in more complex ways by those forces. In an anguishedriddled struggle to find himself within the resources of the Western sciences, Fanon found that he never existed except as an external term (value-neutrality = white; values = white). The important factor, in Natanson, Fanon, MerleauPonty, Husserl, among other phenomenologists, is the role of ambiguity. The ambiguity is not one of equivocation. It is rather an ambiguity at the heart of human reality as an embodied point of intentionality (Husserl),36 which in turn manifests itself in care (Heidegger)/7 freedom and value (Sartre),38 becoming (Beauvoir),39 experience, meaning, and metaphysics (Merleau-Ponty),40 spirituality and faith (Tillich),41 sociality (Schutz),42 and purpose (Fanon).43 Recall that Husserl appealed to embodiment to prevent collapse into solipsism in his Cartesian Meditations. He there set the phenomenological motif of embodied consciousness, a motif that emerges in the work of all of the philosophers influenced by his work. Although Heidegger set death as instantiating Dasein's horizon and thereby initiating care as an ontological 35

Peau noire. 8-9.

36 In many texts, but especially the Fifth Meditation of Husserl's Cartesian Meditations: An Introduction to Phenomenology, trans. Dorion Cairns (Dordrecht: Martinus Nijhoff, 1960). 37

See Being and Time.

38

See especially Being and Nothingness: A Phenomenological Essay on Ontology, trans. Hazel Barnes (New York: Washington Square Press, 1956). 39

La deuxieme sexe (Paris: Gallimard, 1949).

40

See Phenomenology of Perception, trans. Colin Smith (New York: Routledge, 1961) and Sense and Non-Sense, trans. Hubert L. Dreyfus and Patricia Allen Dreyfus (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1964), esp. chap. 7, "The Metaphysical in Man." 41

We have already mentioned The Courage To Be, but see also Dynamics of Faith (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1957). For a collection of discussions on related themes, see Experience of the Sacred: Readings in the Phenomenology of Religion, ed. Sumner B. Twiss and Walter H. Conser. Jr. (Hanover: Brown University Press/University Press of N e w England, 1992). 42

Alfred Schutz, Collected Papers, Vol. 1. The Problem of Social Reality, ed. with an intro. by Maurice Natanson (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff. 1962). 43

See Peau noire and Les damne's.

feature of existence, an ambiguity stands at the heart of consciousnesses that constitute the social-ontological point of departure—namely, the Mitsein. Sartre's explorations of embodied consciousness in Being and Nothingness went beyond the problematization of social relationships into the co-extensiveness of various modes of being. In spite of the controversial articulation of "human reality" as freedom, there was also human reality as value, anguish, nothingness, and meaning.44 Simone de Beauvoir took on these themes through her explorations of existential becoming, in her famous dictum that one is not born but becomes a woman. This becoming also marked possibilities of existential conversion, where one realizes agency in one's existence. For Merleau-Ponty, these themes held metaphysical significance because of their being irreducible to physical phenomena. It is in our displacement from the physical, our ability to "stand out," that the meta-level of critique is possible. All of these co-extensions are thus extensions of metaphysical reality. It follows from all this that the spiritual, social, and teleological aims of Tillich, Schutz, and Fanon emerge from the heart of this metaphysical turn, a turn which is, in the end, the mode of being human. In human reality, these phenomena are intended and thus achieved. These many modes of being are, therefore, not competing claims. They are converging claims that return us to political investigations with the question of a philosophical anthropology. My concerns about poststructuralist and Marxist rejections of phenomenology, then, are that both offer more by way of theoretical selfsufficiency than they can normatively afford and that they suffer, in the end, from a failure to recognize the human contribution to human phenomena. Their rejections of intentional reality are, in Sartrian language, forms of bad faith. Offering a phenomenological exploration of their constitution provides, then, a way of discussing their status as what both Karl Jaspers and Merleau-Ponty described as the metaphysics of spirituality, which for Jaspers was Existenz and for Merleau-Ponty, simply, L 'homme. Foucault once regarded man as a modern relic that will one day be "erased, like a face drawn in sand at the edge of the sea"45 after pointing out that "the study of whom is supposed by the naive to be the oldest investigation since Socrates."46 This gesture, a snicker, is in the end but fantasy in the face of Aristotle's worries over featherless bipeds in his Metaphysics and political animals in his Politics. The constituted is always being reconstituted as the dynamism of agency and limitation is re-inscribed on all of us. A phenomenological revision? Man is, in the end, among even his ambiguous presentations, a political animal as well. 44

These variations emerge throughout Being and Nothingness, but are most poignantly stated in the last two parts. For discussion of these facets of Sartre's thought, see my Bad Faith and Antiblack Racism. 45

The Order of Things, 387.

46

The Order of Things, xxiii.

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What do we gain, then, from a phenomenological focus on the political? Phenomenological research is too multifaceted for a single answer. In the least, however, we can return to the problems with which we began and to the existential basis for my phenomenological explorations. Regarding the latter, phenomenology has offered me a methodology through which to describe the world from perspectives of historically marginalized groups. My work on convergences of race, gender, sexual-orientation, and class demands a methodology that is attuned to the humanity of people who live and are often overdetermined by historical, cultural, and political impositions on their identity.47 In an age where these categories are often dismissed as "social constructions," I have been able to show, through the use of phenomenological descriptions, that a theory of radical constructivity is needed, wherein even social constructions are shown to be redundant by virtue of their being constructed or their being an achievement of sociality itself.48 But in spite of this, a constructive theory of deontological essences is needed to account for how non-essentialized realities are lived. The constitutive dimension of phenomenological investigation raises an important limitation to all essentialist claims; eidos is, after all, presentationally complete and, thus, existentially incomplete. Phenomenology points to the human field of political presentation. It reminds us of politics as a human "science" or "study" and, as such, requiring a mode of interpretive analysis that falls under typifications marked by human agency.49 Similarly, the phenomenological use of the language of sense perception— of seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting, feeling—is, in most respects, metaphorical. "I see," in phenomenological terms, often means "I understand" or "I apprehend." For in the phenomenological world of subjunctive or "irreal" time consciousness, one does not see in the ways that one ordinarily sees, hear in the ways that one ordinarily hears. One sees and hears and tastes and feels as if one could do so forever. A mere glimpse from our finite, concrete existence, true. A glimpse, as we all know so well, can, however, change a life.

We began with a glimpse and a feat at the dawn of the twentieth century in a moment of its twilight. Our mode of theorizing about our institutions should no longer continue to be such that we are foreclosed by our effort to evade foreclosure. The antipathy to humanity inscribed in semiosis and predistinary reductionism relies on an objective consciousness wiped clean of subjectivity or spirit50 Such a contradiction is maintained only by an ideology that treats human reality as bacteria in water that need to be sterilized. "We are no longer here." A strange credo for the political. Collectivity without sociality. The phenomenologist, under the weight of philosophical laughter and pervading silence, is among the few, then, who continue to interject, as in Kierkegaard's concerns in Works of Love, where fools emerge who see and still do not see: "But don't you see? Don't you see?"

204

See my Bad Faith and Antiblack Racism, Fanon and the Crisis of European Man, and Her Majesty's Other Children. 50

48

49

See especially chapter 3 of Fanon and the Crisis of European Man.

The reader may here wonder whether it would be correct to articulate extraterrestrial intelligence as political associations. On this matter, the works of Sylvia Wynter and Fanon are illuminating, since both argue that the question of the human being is philosophically rich with boundaries that stretch the meaning of " h u m a n " through an epistemic morphology. Wynter calls this liminality. We would probably meet other lifeforms anthropomorphically, which means, perhaps, that they too will meet us in a morphology that stretches the meaning of their self-understanding. The historical specificity of " h u m a n " will fall sway, indeed, to a new form of human life—whether through extraterrestrial meeting or the tides of time. For the phenomenologist, this shift will substantiate the thesis of intentional life as an ongoing, transformative phenomenon.

"One of the unfortunate consequences of the intellectualization of man's spiritual life was that the word 'spirit' was lost and replaced by mind or intellect, and that the element of vitality which is present in -spirit' was separated and interpreted as an independent biological force. Man was divided into a bloodless intellect and a meaningless vitality," Tillich, The Courage To Be. 82.

207 Subject Index Action, 1-4, 12-13, 15-20,22-25.28,29, 35, 38, 43, 48, 55. 62, 67, 68, 71, 75, 81, 84,99-100, 102. 121, 134. 136, 138, 149. 152. 155, 163, 169. 170 Agency. 37-41, 44-46, 48-53. 67, 78, 200, 203-204 Altruism, 159-160 Authenticity, 30, 37, 39- 40, 44- 46,48, 50, 52,62, 107, 113-114, 118-119, 121, 154, 198 Authority. 16, 22, 27, 29, 33, 46-48, 50-51, 120. 122, 130, 134-135, 137-138, 141, 145 Body, 22, 25,51,60,91, 119, 126-127, 129, 130-131, 143-144, 150-151. 174 Capitalism, 69, 73, 76-77, 194 Citizen, Citizenship, 15, 16, 20, 23, 26, 51, 73, 120, 169, 178 Civility. 27, 29, 40, 44, 160, 162 Communal, 2-3, 20, 32, 34, 35, 37, 40-41, 44, 46, 47, 49, 50-52, 55-56, 58, 60, 64, 106-108, 111, 117, 118-119, 130 Communalization, 2 Communism, 22, 57. 69, 71, 74, 76 Communitarianism, 27, 57, 120 Community, 1, 3-4, 17, 27, 29^12, 44-53, 55-59, 63, 68, 78, 95, 106-110, 112114, 116-121. 128, 130-131, 134, 138, 156, 165.171 Complexity, 70, 71, 78 Constitution, Constitutional, 2, 17, 20, 25, 43. 50-52, 72, 101, 111, 119, 122, 140, 163, 196,200-201.203 Culture. Cultural. 26-27, 31-34, 37-39, 4042,44-46,49-52, 55-57, 64, 67, 69, 78, 86, 89. 92, 94-95. 97-100, 102-103, 119-121, 134, 149. 151, 153, 169. 173, 192, 200, 204 Deliberation, 13, 18-21,27, 160, 162-163 Democracy, 13, 20, 27, 72-73, 77, 90, 120121, 162 Dialogue, 59, 61, 118, 123-124, 155. 162 Differends, 14,29 Discrimination, 30, 81,92,93-97, 100-101, 103, 169-170, 172, 181-183 Domination, 13-14, 29, 47-49, 78, 119, 121-122,131, 137-138.141-144, 146 Embodiment, 46, 126, 128-129, 202

Equality, 13, 23, 27, 47. 57. 60, 62, 72, 83, 91.92.94-96,97-100. 102, 152. 171. 176, 181. 182. 186 Flesh, 15,20,72, 122. 129, 151 Freedom, 14, 23, 40, 56-58, 67, 72, 74-75, 90, 117, 120, 148, 154, 157-158, 165, 180, 183,202-203 Generative, Generativity, 31-34. 46-48, 131, 140-141, 144 Goods, 24. 32, 34, 36-47, 49-53, 91, 137, 145 Governance, 2,44-46, 50, 72, 135, 139, 142-146 Habitus, 115-116 Heritage, 86, 92, 97, 100-102, 155, 180 History, 1, 11, 14-15, 17,25-26,29,42,55, 67, 69-78, 85-86, 91,99, 107, 119, 131, 133, 135, 140, 147, 152, 155, 161, 171172, 175, 177, 186, 193-194, 199, 200 Ideality, 133, 140-141 Ideology, 69. 76-77, 205 In-group, 84-88. 90-93, 101, 179 Institutions, 2-3, 13, 17, 22, 24-25, 27, 31, 4 4 ^ 6 , 48, 50, 52, 56-57, 69, 86, 97, 137,139,141,143-145,200,205 Intersubjectivity, 17, 55-56, 60, 63-64, 195, 199 Iterability, 24, 140 Justice, 13, 19. 38, 40. 43^14, 56. 61, 63, 73-76,91. 169. 170, 185 Leaders. Leadership, 4, 76, 121-122 Legislative, 43-44, 50-52 Legitimacy, 2, 134, 138, 140 Liberalism, 15, 43, 50, 56-57, 73, 120, 148, 191. 194-195 Liberty, 23, 27, 43, 57, 58, 72-73, 112 Marxism, 3, 11,73-74,76, 191-192, 194195, 197 Meaning, 2, 12, 20, 22, 23-28, 63-64, 72, 77. 81, 83-85, 88-91, 94, 99, 108-110, 114, 125, 140, 154. 157, 171, 177-179, 182, 184, 189, 191, 196, 201, 203-204 Minority, Minorities. 45, 51-53, 72-73, 9 5 97, 101-102, 120, 170, 172. 181, 183, 185

209

208 Narrative, 14.25-28 Nation, Nation-State, 2, 4, 33. 56. 134 Noema, Noematic, 2, 20-23. 141, 196 Noesis, Noetic, 2, 196 Nonviolence. 72, 74-75, 161, 163 Obediance, 2, 138 Obligation, 15-17,27, 160 Order(s), 1,2, 11, 13, 16,20-22,25,30,33, .37-38,41, 55, 57-59, 70-71, 77, 82, 85, 88, 91, 94, 96-98, 100, 106, 107, 110112, 117-120, 122-127, 134, 136-137, 140,142, 146, 151-152, 161,170, 177, 180, 182, 189, 193,201 Organization, 2, 63, 81, 107, 112, 120, 136, 139, 142-143 Other. 48, 86, 88, 95, 136, 148-150, 153162, 164-165, 176-177, 190, 194-195, 198, 204 Out-group, 82, 84-87,90, 179 Political Reason, 42-43, 45, 51, 139 Population, 57, 136-140, 142, 144-145 Poststructuralism, 192, 193-195, 197 Power, 13-14, 25, 28, 47^*8, 57, 62-63, 70-72, 77-78, 82, 96, 100, 102, 117, 119, 121-122, 125, 128, 130-132. 135, 137-138, 141, 143-145, 163, 165, 169, 171, 180-181, 193, 196-197 Race, 4, 31, 33, 85,92-94, 169-173, 175178, 180-181, 183-185, 190, 195, 204 Racism, 112, 169-170, 172-173, 175-176, 178-179, 182, 185, 190 Rationality, 19, 113,117-118, 135, 159, 165 Relevance, 82, 88-94, 96, 100-103, 111, 121, 145, 160, 179-180, 189-190, 196197 Respect, 27. 43, 48, 60, 62-63, 71-72, 75, 78, 82, 88, 91, 95-96, 101. 121-123, 125-126, 128-129, 130-131, 162-163, 170, 193,204

Responsibility, 4, 15. 17, 20, 22, 26. 29. 44. 61-63.71. 113. 115. 147-148. 154-160. 162,164-165, 186 Rhetoric. 20, 73, 110, 165 Rights. 1,17, 23, 43, 45, 50, 52-53, 57, 60, 92,94-97, 120, 147, 149, 153, 159, 161, 164-165, 169, 171. 173. 177, 181-182 Self-governance, 44- 46, 50, 52 Slavery, 48, 171, 174-175, 184 Social acts, 1-2, 34. 46, 50 Social reason, 36, 38, 41-42, 44-45, 51-53 Socialism, 68, 73 Sociality, 34, 35, 38, 44, 55, 59, 130, 132, 150-152, 155, 157-158, 199, 202, 204, 205 Socialization, 2 Solidarity, 25, 56, 58, 60, 77, 87, 132, 170, 198 Sovereignty, 2, 4, 46, 48, 110, 111, 113, 134-136, 138, 140, 142-143, 145-146, 165 State, 1-4, 17, 21, 29-32, 46, 56, 57, 60, 64. 69, 71, 77, 93, 106, 119-121, 124, 126, 131, 133-134, 136-146, 194 Subject, Subjectivity, 18-19, 43, 56. 59, 63, 72,92,99, 106. 112. 116-117, 120, 135, 150-152, 154, 158,174, 189, 191, 196, 205 Subordination. 29-31.36-37,40-41,46, 56, 78 Superordination, 29, 47 Toleration, 51,53 Totalitarianism, 63, 71, 73 Tragedy, 14,28 Typification, 85, 88-89, 92-94, 99-100, 181, 199 Value(s), 23, 26-27, 32, 43, 61. 72-76, 81, 87,94, 108, 153, 170, 185, 191.200, 202. 203 Virtue(s). 15, 21, 38, 40, 45^»6, 51, 56, 59, 62,90, 115, 163, 186,204

Name Index Arendt. H, 3, 19,21,135, 148, 151,154, 160, 163-164, 172, 178 Aristotle, 41, 47, 71, 90, 92, 131, 203 Beauvoir, S, 3. 198-199, 202, 203 Bourdieu, P., 138 Buddha, 121-122, 124-126, 129-131 Christ, 121-122, 124-131,194 Clausewitz, C, 121, 162 Derrida, J., 133, 140, 148, 152, 154, 165, 185. 196, 198 Du Bois. W. E. B., 182, 189-191 Dworkin, R., 18, 21, 148 Fanon.F, 163, 170, 179, 195. 198-200, 202-204 Fichte, 62, 64 Foucault. M., 117, 135, 141, 192-198, 200, 203 Habermas, J., 15, 156, 193 Hegel, 11,41,56,62,64, 127, 152, 155, 161, 192 Heidegger, M, 3, 4, 11, 20, 22, 30, 56, 67, 114, 116-117, 131, 152, 155-157. 163, 177, 189,202 Hobbes, 57-58, 101,148 Husserl, E, 1-3, 11, 18, 29. 30-41,44-48, 52 64,85, 105-122. 125, 128-129, 131, 133, 140. 142, 177, 185, 196, 200-202 Jefferson, T., 171

Kant. 19, 21, 57-58, 60, 62-63, 131, 171, 186 Kantian, 15,43, 56. 62, 160, 192 King, Jr., M. L., 122, 169-170. 182 Levinas, E., 61-62. 148, 152, 154-159. 164-165, 176-177 Machiavelli, 21, 121,162 Marx, 22, 69, 74, 192 Merleau-Ponty, M., 3, 14, 67, 74-78, 117, 152, 198-199,201-203 Otaka, T., 2 Plato. 61,91, 105. 121, 123 Rawls.J., 15,42,43 Reinach, A.. 1-2 Ricttur, P., 4, 67-70, 72-78, 131, 189, 198 Rousseau, 22, 56-57, 101,192 Sandel, M., 43 Schutz, A., 2, 12,24, 81-86, 88-89,91-103, 147, 149, 179, 180-184, 198-199,202203 Socrates, 121-126, 129-130,203 Stein, E., 1.2, 127-128 Taylor, C, 27, 35, 38,43, 77, 120, 150, 153-154, 192 Wolin, S., 13-14