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.6yo1' 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?"

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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