Founding Community: A Phenomenological-Ethical Inquiry (Phaenomenologica 143)

FOUNDING COMMUNITY

PHAENOMENOLOGICA SERIES FOUNDED BY H.L. VAN BREDA AND PUBLISHED UNDER THE AUSPICES OF THE HUSSERL-ARCHIVES

143 H. PETER STEEVES

FOUNDING COMMUNITY A PHENOMENOLOGICAL-ETHICAL INQUIRY

Editorial Board: Director: R. Bernet (Husserl-Archief, Leuven) Secretary: J. Taminiaux (Centre d'l~tudes phenomenologiques, Louvain-la-Neuve) Members: S. Usseling (HusserlArchief, Leuven), H. Leonardy (Centre d'etudes phenomenologiques, Louvain-laNeuve), U. Melle (Husser!-Archief, Leuven), B. Stevens (Centre d'etudes phenomenologiques, Louvain-la-Neuve) Advisory Board: R. Bernasconi (Memphis State University), D. Carr (Emory University, Atlanta), E.S. Casey (State University of New York at Stony Brook), R. Cobb-Stevens (Boston College), J.F. Courtine (Archives-Husser!, Paris), F. Dastur (Universite de Paris XII), K. Diising (Husserl-Archiv, Koln), J. Hart (Indiana University, Bloomington), K. Held (Bergische Universitat Wuppertal), D. Janicaud (Universite de Nice), K.E. Kaehler (Husserl-Archiv, Koln), D. Lohmar (Husserl-Archiv, Koln), W.R. McKenna (Miami University, Oxford, USA), J.N. Mohanty (Temple University, Philadelphia), E.W. Orth (Universitat Trier), B. Rang (Husser!-Archiv, Freiburg LBr.), P. Ricoeur (Paris), K. Schuhmann (University of Utrecht), C. Sini (Universita degli Studi di Milano), R. Sokolowski (Catholic University of America, Washington D.C.), E. Stroker (Universitat Koln), B. Waldenfels (Ruhr-Universitat, Bochum)

H. PETER STEEVES, Ph.D. Department oj Philosophy, California State University, Fresno, USA

FOUNDING COMMUNITY A Phenomenological-Ethical Inquiry

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FOR MI CONEJITA

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments

IX

CHAPTER I: MORALITY AND PHENOMENOLOGY

1. Introduction . 2. Science, Morality, and Phenomenology Notes .

1 3 8

CHAPTER II: THE EGO AND THE OTHER IN A PAIRING RELATION

1. Introduction 2. Empathic Perception and the Constitution of the Ego and the Other in Cartesian Meditations 3. The Sphere of Ownness 4. The Reciprocal Relation of Pairing: Some Problems 5. Theunissen and the Question Concerning Pairing Notes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

9 10 13 20 22 28

CHAPTER III: INSTINCT AND THE PRESENCE OF THE OTHER

1. 2. 3. 4.

The Case for Instinct . The Other as Unity . Re-Thinking Infantile Intentionality Limitations from a Husserlian Standpoint Notes .

31 35 39 43 51

CHAPTER IV: MORAL CATEGORIALITY & MORAL BEING

I . Introduction . 2. The History of Moral Theory . 3. Categoriality and Foundations

54 54 57

viii 4. 5. 6. 7. 8.

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Moral Categoriality . Morality as Choice v. Mode of Being Problem: The Unthinking Actor . . . Problem: The Non-Judgmental Actor. Conclusion Notes

59 62 63 70 76 76

CHAPTER V: PHENOMENOLOGICAL COMMUNITARIANISM

1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6.

Introduction: The Descriptive and the Normative . Communitarian Theory in General: Three Problems The "Disappearing-Self' Problem ..... The "Intersubjective Good" Problem . . . . . . The "Constitution of a Community" Problem .. The State of our Union, the Union of our State. Notes .

CHAPTER VI: NON-HuMAN

83 88

94

102 116

LIFE AND THE BOUNDARIES OF COMMUNITY

1. Introduction: A Persian Fable. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2. Initial Human Pairing with Animals 3. "Animal Phenomenology" and the Possibility of Community Generated Without Humans . . . . . . . . . . 4. The Gracious Act of Attention Late-in-Coming .. . 5. Community Through Narrative. . . . . . . . . . . . 6. Humans and Animals in a Second-Order Community. 7. Conclusion: The Common Good as Moral Foundation No~s

78 81

121 123 126 129 131 134 137 141

BIBLIOGRAPHY

144

INDEX

152

Acknowledgments

Philosophy, like any other endeavor, flourishes in community. I have been lucky enough to find members of my community willing to share their time, their talents, and their hearts with me now for several years. First, I would like to thank those who have played a role specifically in the work which follows: Professors James Hart, Paul Spade, and Paul Eisenberg. I am grateful for Paul Spade's perceptive comments, keen philosophical insights, and friendship. He has provided support and guidance that has made this project stronger and my life richer. Jim Hart's role in my project will be especially clear to the reader. These pages are filled with his spirit and his intellectual presence. In large part, he is responsible for setting me on my present philosophic course and for providing an enthusiasm, dedication, and demeanor which continues to inspire me in both my academic and my personal life. I am lucky and honored to call him my friend. Gratitude is also owed to Robert Sokolowski who offered his constructive comments on an earlier draft of this work and whose philosophic clarity is a blessing to the world. My thanks to Ullrich Melle who helped see to the publication of this work, and to Maja S. M. De Keijzer at Kluwer whose infinite patience for, among other things, my lack of skills with technology made all of this possible. I am grateful to the Department of Philosophy at Indiana University for supporting me with a teaching contract from 1990-94 and for honoring me with the Nelson Fellowship for the 1993-94 academic year which allowed me to concentrate on writing my dissertation-the work from which this text has grown. A deep gratitude is also owed to my friends-academic and otherwise. The fact that these friends are too numerous to mention here only serves as testimony to my great fortune. To each of you-old and new-my thanks. And for Dr. Charles Klingler, who is responsible in so many ways for my continuing education and joy in life, a special place in my heart is always reserved. Also, a wonderful and heart-felt thanks to my family: Jennylind, David, Chris, and Marian. As Aristotle reminds us, one thinks best with friends, and I have been truly blessed by those to whom I am

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related and those I have been lucky enough to encounter. Finally, I acknowledge my gratitude to my wife, Marines. She has been all things to me: a typist, a critic, an artist capable of acting out appropriate examples when called upon to do so, a deep well of appropriate thought and insight, and a continuous inspiration. She has played a role in the development of the ideas presented here too deep to be expressed adequately in such a short space. I am guided by and grateful for her everpresent reminder of the richness of a truly communal life. Some of the work which follows appeared in a different form in various locations. Parts of Chapters Two and Three were included in "Constituting the Transcendent Community: Some Phenomenological Implications of Husserl's Social Ontology," Selected Studies in Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy 19 (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1996), pp. 83-100. Chapter Five appeared in a different form in "Moral Categoriality and Moral Being," International Philosophical Quarterly, vol. XXXVI, no. 1, issue 141 (March 1996), pp. 65-83. Chapter Six appeared in part as "The Boundaries of the Phenomenological Community: Non-Human Life and the Extent of our Moral Enmeshment," Becoming Persons, edited by Robert Fisher (Oxford, England: Applied Theology Press, 1995), pp. 777-797. Other parts of Chapter Six appeared in "Deep Community: Phenomenology's Disclosure of the Common Good," Between the Species, vol. 10, numbers 3-4 (Summer/Fall 1994), pp. 98-105. These works are reproduced here by kind permission of the editors of the respective journals and volumes. Part of Chapter Two also appeared in "Husser!, Aristotle, and the Sphere of Ownness," The Southwest Philosophy Review, vol. 12, no. 1 (1995), pp. 141-150, and is reproduced by permission of the author.

CHAPTER I

Morality and Phenomenology

1. INTRODUCTION

Phenomenology, in its traditional encounters with ethics, has commonly aimed at a more descriptive rather than prescriptive goal. That is, the project is often one of describing the structures of the ethical experience and of moral action. This comes as no great surprise as it is the aim of phenomenology to investigate such structures of consciousness and thereby achieve understanding. The proposed direction of the following project, however, is both phenomenological and prescriptive. It is thus my aim to undertake a phenomenological description of intersubjectivity-eventually coming to relate how it is that we constitute the Ego and the Other-and then to move toward claiming that a certain ethic is born of the realizations encountered as a result of this phenomenological inquiry. More specifically, if it can be shown that the Ego and the Other arise together in sense-that it is not the case that we first have a notion of Self and then constitute the Other through a simple, unilateral, analogical transfer of sense from my Ego onto the other "object" which I deem is acting and looking enough like me to warrant my granting her subjectivity-then we can conclude that we are phenomenologically committed to a sense of community in a very foundational way. This is to say that there is never a point at which I consider myself as an isolated, monadic Ego. Rather, I am always and fundamentally constituted as a member of a community-as a Self among Others-and given this, there are certain ethical implications. Namely, Libertarian or Egoistic theories can be critiqued by the simple fact that they fundamentally misdescribe the individual: we are not isolated units seeking to survive through competition, separate and distinct from the relationships in which we are involved and from those with whom we are involved as well. Furthermore, the Egalitarian or Kantian theories also offer a misdescription of humanity in their insistence that we can abstract away particular social and relational contexts and achieve a true, generic human Self which is rational, isolated, etc. Whether we go through the moves of Rawls' Original Position argument

H. P. Steeves, Founding Community © Kluwer Academic Publishers 1998

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or attempt to follow Hospers' call for the primacy of choice and noninterference in society, we encounter a point at which such theories rest on a description of the Ego-the human individual-as being able to be thought of apart from a social context. But this is, in effect, impossible, for there is never a sense in which the human Ego exists under such conditions. We are fundamentally in community. The communitarian realization we have achieved at this point is not startlingly new. Many have argued for something similar. Michael Sandel, for instance, insists on a communitarian ethic given that the way in which we are situated in the world "makes a difference" I and we must thus take our relationships and social roles into consideration when doing ethics. But the force of this "must" is lacking. This is a common problem for communitarianism-perhaps such projects sit well with our intuitions or seem to offer a more pragmatic and realistic description of humanity, but the theory that convinces us that communitarianism is the proper prescription is conspicuously absent. The phenomenological investigation undertaken here hopes to offer the is from which the ought can be had-or, to be more precise, to suggest how this dichotomy is foundationally misdirected. The project which follows is divided into six chapters. Chapters two and three attempt to set the phenomenological groundwork of intersubjectivity and will thus be concerned with social ontology-showing how it is, exactly, that we are committed to the claim that the Ego and Other arise in sense together. Chapters four and five then describe the communitarian ethic which falls out of such phenomenological commitments. Chapter four deals with the structure of moral acts in general and the nature of our moral being, while chapter five discusses the form of communitarianism generated by the phenomenological community: the way in which the Other's good and the Good of the community are so intertwined with my own good-indeed, each relies on the other in a foundational, definitional way-that when I fail to consider the Other's good in my own pursuits I am acting, somehow, in an uninformed way. Finally, chapter six is an investigation into the limits of the community. That is, given that we are in community and that we are phenomenologicaIly committed to a certain ethical responsibility to Others, where do we draw the boundaries of our community and in what sense can our community be thought to include non-human life? Before embarking on such a project, though, we first encounter a question of justification-the problem of the descriptive rather than prescriptive goal of phenomenology to which I alluded above. How could phenomenology as a descriptive tool and a method ever hope to found an ethic?2 The answer has something to do with the relationship between science and morality.

Morality and Phenomenology

3

2. SCIENCE, MORALITY, AND PHENOMENOLOGY Science after Galileo has made its impact felt in realms beyond the "scientific." It is a point to which Husserl turned our attention in the Crisis and one which has been repeated over and again in various incarnations in Post-Husserlian Continental philosophy. With the advent of an exact science committed to ideal forms and pure essences came the notion that the world around us is mere appearance-that truth was somehow beyond or distinct from this appearance. The complete vacuum, the frictionless surface, the string of perfect flexibility-such entities which do not, indeed cannot, appear are taken as the measure of truth in our world. Ours is now a world which is somehow imperfect and unable to live up to the standards of the exact science which studies it, ultimately representing a realm of mere appearance which is clearly not as "good" as the ideals our science posits. Suddenly, the complete vacuum is not just a notion created through experiencing relative vacuums and imagining a limit-volumes of spaces with less and less stufe Rather, the complete vacuum is the best vacuum; but alas, we are doomed only to experience inferior vacuums in our world. Strangely enough, all of this has a great deal to do with ethics. As Husserl points out: 4 After Galileo had carried out, slightly earlier, the primal establishment of the new natural science, it was Descartes who conceived and at the same time set in systematic motion the new idea of universal philosophy, ...philosophy as "universal mathematics." And immediately it had a powerful effect. Consequently, if exact essences are the norms-the true, best forms toward which our scientific, philosophic, and everyday world strives-then there is no room for subjectivity or agency. Let me be clear why this is so. Often, the crisis of moral philosophy is thought to be that there is a standard of scientific truth unattainable in the realm of morality; namely, science involves a process of measurement, but any sort of value theory is immeasurable. Standardizing an ideal norm for a coefficient of friction, for instance, leads to a rather simple and universal system of measuring friction, but measuring and standardizing the Good is not such an easy task. The problem with morality, then, is that the scientist can measure while the ethicist cannot, and this makes science better. Indeed, according to this theory measurement lends a certain "credibility" to science that value theory lacks. However, I would not characterize the problemthis crisis of moral philosophy-as one of measurement. Rather, the true

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tension lies in the marginalization of human subjectivity (and thus agency) given a scientific world-view. And this is due, in part, to the nature of exact essences. Exact essences are objective: this is, to some degree, an analytic truth. The complete vacuum is complete regardless of the subjectivity of the scientist. All complete vacuums are exactly the same. Projecting the imaginary Iimit-emptying space until it is fully empty--