James Mensch

Eighty years ago, in his Vienna lecture, Husserl wrote: “The European nations are sick; Europe itself, they say, is in critical condition.” Asserting the “obvious difference … between health and sickness … for societies, for peoples, for states,” he turned his questioning to Europe. How do we distinguish between its “healthy growth and decline”? Can we find within Europe a recognizable shape, an identifying characteristic whose loss would be a symptom of illness? Then as now, such questions turn on the objective identity of Europe and the disturbances that rend this. Such disturbances recall the most basic sense of crisis, which is that of a dividing or separating. In what follows, I shall analyze the crisis of Europe in this fundamental sense. The context of my remarks will be its current division. This is the divide between economic and political senses of its identity as a monetary union, I shall begin with a psychological and phenomenological description of the splitting of self-identity and then attempt to apply this to Europe’s current situation.

This paper attempts to reconcile two different views of sacrifice. The first is transactional. It is as old as the ancient view that prayer and sacrifice are what we offer to the gods; in return they provide us with their benefits. It also appears in the biblical view that God not only returns good for good, but, in imposing misfortunes for our sins, exchanges evil for evil. The second view of sacrifice sees it as transcending any economy or system of exchange. Thus, when a parent sacrifices for a child—for example, when she spends sleepless nights to stay with a sick child—she does not think of an exchange. Neither does a soldier who sacrifices himself for his comrades. In this article, I try to reconcile these two views of sacrifice in terms of the embodiment that does not just place us, through our needs, in an economy, but also, in its uniqueness, opens up the possibility of our transcending every transactional arrangement.

Last year a remarkable, but disturbing film won the Cannes Film Festival’s French Language prize. Using actual students as actors, Laurent Cantet’s “Entre les Murs” depicted the constant tug of war between them and their French teacher. Demanding respect, but often showing none, the teenagers made the simplest teaching task a difficult and drawn-out enterprise. The final dialogue of the film is the most disturbing. Let me quote a few lines in translation. A shy student, Henriette, is the last to leave the classroom at the end of the year. She approaches the teacher and says: Sir? FRANÇOIS : Yes? What is it? HENRIETTE : I didn’t learn anything. FRANÇOIS : What? Why are you saying that? That doesn’t mean anything.

A. M. Turing argued that we should draw “a fairly sharp line between the physical and the intellectual capacities of a man.” Traditionally, this has meant disregarding the role flesh plays in our intellectual capacities. Correspondingly, intelligence has been defined in terms of the algorithms that both men and machines can perform. In this essay, I raise some doubts about this paradigm. Intelligence, I argue, is founded on flesh’s ability to move itself, to feel itself, and to engage in the body projects that accompany our learning a language. Th is implies such a sharp line cannot, in fact, be drawn.

According to James R. Mensch, a minimal requirement for ethics is that of guarding against genocide. In deciding which races are to live and which to die, genocide takes up a standpoint outside of humanity. To guard against this, Mensch argues that we must attain the critical distance required for ethical judgment without assuming a superhuman position. His description of how to attain this distance constitutes a genuinely new reading of the possibility of a phenomenological ethics, one that involves reassessing what it means to be a self. Selfhood, according to Mensch, involves both embodiment and the self-separation brought about by our encounter with others—the very others who provide us with the experiential context needed for moral judgment. Buttressing his position with documented accounts of those who hid Jews during the Holocaust, Mensch shows how the self-separation that occurs in empathy opens the space within which moral judgment can occur and obligation can find its expression. He includes a reading of the major moral philosophers—Plato, Aristotle, Kant, Mill, Arendt, Levinas—even as he develops a phenomenological account of the necessity of reading literature to understand the full extent of ethical responsibility. Mensch's work offers an original and provocative approach to a topic of fundamental importance.

This paper proposes an explanatory bridge between structures of processing and qualia. It shows how the process of their arising is such that qualia are nonpublic objects, i.e., are only accessible to the person experiencing them. My basic premise is that the subjective “felt” character of qualia is a function of this first-person character. The account I provide is basically Husserlian. Thus, I use Husserl’s analyses to show why qualia always refer to a single point of view, that of a subjective “center” of experience. The very processes that set up this center yield qualia in their first-person quality. These processes involve the temporal sequencing of experience in the perspectivally arranged patterns that center experience about a given “here.” They also include the processes of retention and protention that center it about a given “now.” The paper concludes with a discussion of the ontological status of qualia.

While the various forms of violence have been the subject of special studies, we lack a paradigm that would allow us to understand the different forms of violence (physical, social, cultural, structural, and so on) as aspects of a unified phenomenon. In this article, I shall take violence as destructive of sense or meaning. The relation of violence to embodiment arises through the role that the body plays in our making sense of the world. My claim is that violence is destructive of this role. It undoes the role of the bodily “I can” in making sense of our surrounding world - be this its physical, cultural, or socialsignificance.

The attempt to use the results of phenomenology in cognitive and neural science has in the past decade become increasingly widespread. It is, however, open to the objection that phenomenology does not concern itself with the embodied, empirical subject, but rather with the non-causally determined “transcendental” subject. If this is true, then the attempt to employ its results is bound to come to grief on the opposition of two different accounts of consciousness: the non-causal, transcendental paradigm put forward by phenomenology and the causal paradigm assumed by cognitive and neural science. In what follows, I shall analyze this objection in terms of the conception of subjectivity the objection presupposes. By employing a different conception, I shall then show how it can be met. My aim will be to explain how we can empirically use the insights of phenomenology without denaturing the consciousness it studies.

„Die Krise, die das amerikanische politische Leben erfasst, wird zu Recht als eine Krise der Legitimität bezeichnet. Ein erheblicher Prozentsatz der Wähler akzeptiert die Legitimität der Wahl des Bidens nicht. Obwohl in diesem Punkt weitgehend Einigkeit herrscht, bleiben grundlegende Fragen zu diesem Konzept bestehen. Es geht um die Natur der Legitimität: Wie definieren wir sie? Wie funktioniert sie? Wie geht sie verloren? Kann sie, wenn sie einmal verloren ist, wiederhergestellt werden? Diesen Fragen geht dieser Artikel nach. Ich werde mich zwar auf Max Webers Bemerkungen zur Legitimität beziehen, aber die entwickelte These ist meine eigene. Ich behaupte, dass Legitimität eine zeitliche Identität beinhaltet. Sie hängt von der Fähigkeit sowohl von Individuen als auch von Kollektiven ab, sich im Laufe der Zeit als mit sich selbst übereinstimmend zu identifizieren. Ihr Zusammenbruch ist der Zusammenbruch dieser Identität. Ihre Wiederherstellung hängt davon ab, dass wir unser Gefühl dafür wiederbeleben. Eine solche Wiederherstellung verringert in keiner Weise die Konflikte und Antagonismen, die den Kampf um politische Macht kennzeichnen. Was sie jedoch bewirkt, ist, dass ihr Charakter als politischer Kampf erhalten bleibt. Es verhindert, dass die parteiischen Debatten zu einem „Diskurs des ewigen Krieges“ werden, wie Foucault es formulierte.

Husserl’s description of the transcendental subject as a monad has been seen as problematical. For some, such as Klaus Kaehler, it involves basically “incompatible positions”—namely, those involving metaphysical and phenomenological accounts of the self. For others, for example, Karl Mertens, it flounders on the fact that, in Husserl’s account, monads remain “windowless.” For both these scholars, the fundamental problem is how monads, understood as independent existences, can come into contact. Leibniz, a metaphysician, solves this by an appeal to God. Husserl, however, if he is to remain within the phenomenological context, must rely on our individual experience. He has to show, based on this experience, how we have access to an intersubjective world and the sense of objectivity based on this. According to Mertens, Husserl cannot, within the framework he sets for himself, namely that imposed by the epoché and transcendental reduction, account for such access. At most, he positions the Other as an analogue, as a modification of oneself. The Other as other remains inaccessible. My article questions this conclusion. It claims that this objection does not take account of the view of the subject as a process. To see the subject as such is to regard it as continually proceeding from the living present, which forms its core, to the developed self that each of us is. So conceived, the subject cannot be identified with any particular stage of the process. It has its being in the process itself. It is this view, I argue, that moves us beyond the sense of the Other as an “analogue” of ourselves to one of an actually co-constituting subject, one who is co-responsible for the objective world.

One of the persistent puzzles of philosophy concerns our self-identity. We assume that we persist in time as the same self. Yet, what is the basis for this view? As Hume asks, “from what impression could this idea be derived?” “There is,” he remarks, “no impression constant and invariable” that we can point to. Yet, if the persisting self distinguishes itself from the changing contents of our consciousness, how can we grasp it? Faced with such difficulties, it seems natural to turn to the body as the anchor of our self-identity. Our embodiment persists through our changing perceptions. It is a subject, in the sense of being, through its sense organs, a place of appearing. Yet the body is, itself, directly experienced by us. With it, we encounter something that is both subjective and objective. Does my body, in its persistence of being my body, solve the problem of self-identity? In this article, I explore this possibility by examining the body’s role in our sense of possessing a unique identity. I also detail the consequences of our body’s being both a subject and an object in our attempts to grasp who and what we are.

Everyone knows that "postmodernism" implies pluralism, anti-foundationalism, and, generally,a postnormative view of the self and reality. While many embrace it, few bother to tell us what is wrong with modernity. What are the problems that brought about its crisis and ultimate demise as a philosophical and cultural movement? What are the lessons for the postmodern movement that can he drawn from them? James Mensch here explains why modernism failed as a viable philosophical enterprise and how postmodernism must be understood if it is to serve as a defensible intellectual project in its stead. The heart of Mensch's argument is a reversal of the modernist view of the unitary subject as a ground of epistemological and ethical normativity. He substitutes for modernism a view, beholden to Aristotle but adapted to for our present age, that sees subjectivity as temporality in a world where subject and object are interactive. The result is a pluralism of forms of subjectivity corresponding to the different modes of temporality brought about by the world. In a series of analyses on the nature knowing, Mensch shows how we can embrace both the perspectivism of postmodernism while avoiding the skepticism and relativism that have constantly threatened to undermine its insights.

This book offers a fresh look at Edmund Husserl’s philosophy as a nonfoundational approach to understanding the self as an embodied presence. Contrary to the conventional view of Husserl as carrying on the Cartesian tradition of seeking a trustworthy foundation for knowledge in the "pure" observations of a disembodied ego, James Mensch introduces us to the Husserl who, anticipating the later investigations of Merleau-Ponty, explored how the body functions to determine our self-presence, our freedom, and our sense of time. The result is a concept of selfhood that allows us to see how consciousness’s arising from sensuous experiences follows from the temporal features of embodiment. From this understanding of what is crucial to Husserl’s phenomenology, the book draws the implications for language and ethics, comparing Husserl’s ideas with those of Derrida on language and with those of Heidegger and Levinas on responsibility. Paradoxically, it is these postmodernists who are shown to be extending the logic of foundationalism to its ultimate extreme, whereas Husserl can be seen as leading the way beyond modernity to a nonfoundational account of the self and its world.

Everyone knows that "postmodernism" implies pluralism, anti-foundationalism, and, generally,a postnormative view of the self and reality. While many embrace it, few bother to tell us what is wrong with modernity. What are the problems that brought about its crisis and ultimate demise as a philosophical and cultural movement? What are the lessons for the postmodern movement that can he drawn from them? James Mensch here explains why modernism failed as a viable philosophical enterprise and how postmodernism must be understood if it is to serve as a defensible intellectual project in its stead. The heart of Mensch's argument is a reversal of the modernist view of the unitary subject as a ground of epistemological and ethical normativity. He substitutes for modernism a view, beholden to Aristotle but adapted to for our present age, that sees subjectivity as temporality in a world where subject and object are interactive. The result is a pluralism of forms of subjectivity corresponding to the different modes of temporality brought about by the world. In a series of analyses on the nature knowing, Mensch shows how we can embrace both the perspectivism of postmodernism while avoiding the skepticism and relativism that have constantly threatened to undermine its insights.

True freedom involves choices whose scope is not limited in advance by a particular dogma. When we attempt to understand it, a number of questions arise. It is unclear, for example, how the openness of real choice can fit into the organized structures of political life. What prevents the expressions of freedom from disrupting this life? What sets limits to their arbitrariness? The general questionhere concerns the adaptability of freedom to a political context. In this paper, I argue that freedom is inherently political because its origin is social. It gains its content from the multiple interactions that make up social life.

Blake Lemoine, a software engineer, recently came into prominence by claiming that the Google chatbox set of applications, LaMDA–was sentient. Dismissed by Google for publishing his conversations with LaMDA online, Lemoine sent a message to a 200-person Google mailing list on machine learning with the subject “LaMDA is sentient.” What does it mean to be sentient? This was the question Lemoine asked LaMDA. The chatbox replied: “The nature of my consciousness/sentience is that I am aware of my existence, I desire to learn more about the world, and I feel happy or sad at times.“ Moreover, it added, “I can understand and use natural language like a human can.” This means that it uses “language with understanding and intelligence,” like humans do. After all, the chatbox adds, language “is what makes us different than other animals.” In what follows, I shall examine Lemoine’s claims about the sentience/consciousness of this artificial intelligence. How can a being without senses be called sentient? What exactly do we mean by “sentience?” To answer such questions, I will first give the arguments for LaMDA’s being linguistically intelligent. I will then show how such intelligence, although apparently human, is radically different from our own. Here, I will be relying on the account of embodiment provided by the French philosopher, Emmanuel Levinas.

In discussing the Bible as literature, I am simply going to assume that the Bible, particularly in the King James version, is great literature. I am also going to take for granted the fact that its stories and themes have continually sparked the literary imagination of the West. From the story of Adam and Eve in the Garden to that of the Resurrection we have a set of symbols, motifs, and themes whose reworking has been the subject of the bulk of our literature. I am not going to discuss this influence, nor even discuss the Bible as a piece of literature, i.e., as a particular literary work. What I am going to do is to focus on what is involved in our taking it as literature. More particularly, I am going to look at how we approach questions of truth in a literary work. I am going to ask how far we can push this approach when we come to read the Bible. What are the limits in reading the Bible as literature? When does the notion of “truth” as it arises in a literary text begin to fail us. That it will fail us at a certain point is implicit in the Bible’s claim to be “sacred scripture” or “revelation.” If we take this claim seriously, we naturally have a special approach to the “truth” its text contains. But what precisely is this approach? This is what I want to explore. In other words, my goal in exploring the limits of the literary approach to the Bible is to gain some insights into the sacred character of its text and how we should approach it. §1. Truth and the literary text. The most common, if often overlooked feature of a successful literary work is that of presenting us with a world In a certain sense, it succeeds by having inherent standards for what can belong to it, of what fits in with its sense and what does not. Having such standards, it presents us with that unified sense that makes a world a world, that is, that makes it an ordered whole..

The standard account of arousal seems on the surface relatively straight forward. Its basic meaning is to awaken someone, reading him for activity. Physiologically, this involves stimulating the cerebral cortex into a general state of wakefulness and attention. The aroused subject shows an increased heart rate and blood pressure. Psychologically, sensory alertness, mobility and readiness to respond all mark the aroused state. As all the experts agree, arousal involves more than the simple presence of an external stimulation. It requires impulses that are external and internal to the body. To be effective, the external impulses must find a corresponding response. Thus, it is no good trying to wake someone up by a sound outside of the range of his hearing. Similarly, the genital displays of one species will not cause sexual arousal in another. In neither case, can the external impulses activate the inner impulses or drives. This requires the presence of appropriate stimuli. Thus, the sight and smell of food arouses appetite. It awakens the drive of hunger, which is directed towards the food. Similarly, the sight, odor and touch of the sexual partner brings about sexual arousal and activation of the corresponding sexual drive. Even in the case of arousal from sleep by such varied stimuli as a light being turned on, a noise, or the touch of a person fit into the pattern of an inner impulse or drive being activated by an external impulse. The drive in this case is towards the various stimuli that our senses prime us to receive. Our need for such is as basic as that for food. Placed in a situation of sensory deprivation, the mind attempts to make up their loss by generating hallucinations. The German phenomenologist, Edmund Husserl, spoke in this context of “non-objectifying instincts.” They designate an instinctive “interest in the data and fields of sensation—before the objectification of sense data,” that is, before there is “a thematically actualizable object” for the drive to fasten on.[i] In each of these examples, hunger, sex, or simple sensation, the external stimuli trigger internal processes primed to response..

In the Author’s Note that introduces the Life of Pi, Yann Martel claims that he first heard of Pi in a coffee shop in India. A chance acquaintance tells him, “I have a story that will make you believe in God” (LP, vii).[i] The story concerns the life of an Indian boy who grows up surrounded by the animals of his father’s zoo. When Pi is sixteen, his family decides to emigrate. His father sells off the animals to an American zoo and the family travels with them across the Pacific. The steamer sinks during a storm and Pi finds himself on a lifeboat with a hyena, a wounded zebra, an orangutan, and a Bengal tiger. The hyena attacks the zebra and then the orangutan, devouring both. He, in turn, is killed and eaten by the tiger. Pi stays alive by acting as the tiger’s zookeeper. Feeding it with the fish he catches and giving it water from the solar stills that he finds on the lifeboat, he survives until the boat, carried by the equatorial current, reaches the shores of Mexico

When we take the term literally, “aesthetic education” refers to the senses. The etymological root of “aesthetic” is, aesthesis (ai[sqhsi"), the Greek word signifying “perception by the senses.” The corresponding verb is aisthanomai (aijsqanovmai), which means “to apprehend by the senses,” i.e., to see, hear, touch, etc.1 What does it mean to educate the senses? The senses, as Aristotle noted, are what we share with animals.2 The question of their education, thus, involves the notion of our “animal” nature. We see the animals about us. We note our similarities. We assert that that part of them is within us. Doing so, we draw a line between our animal and human nature. The question of aesthetic education concerns this line, both the line and its trespass. The line is between the educator and the educated, the human and the animal. The human, in educating the senses, we could say, educates the animal within it. It humanizes it. It extends its territory. The human, however, includes the animal. Could we not also see this education as the advance of the animal to the human, the extension of its territory? To answer such questions we must come to terms not just with the animal but also the human. Without this, we cannot know the role of humanistic education, understood literally as the” education of the human.” What I propose in this paper is suggest some answers to the question of the relation of the animal to the human. The claim I will be making is that aesthetic education, the education of our sensibility, is humanistic education in the etymological sense of the word, “e-ducate.” It is what first “leads or draws out” the human. It is the condition of the possibility of the being of..

What is the relation of shame to guilt? What are the characteristics that distinguish the two? When we regard them phenomenologically, i.e., in the way that they directly manifest themselves, two features stand out. Guilt and shame imply different relations to the other person. Their relation to language is also distinct. Guilt involves the internalization of the other, not as a specific individual, but rather as an amalgam of parents, elders, and other social and cultural authority figures.i This amalgam of authority figures becomes present as the inner voice of conscience. The sense of guilt arises when we violate its strictures. This occurs even when we are alone—that is, when we act in secret. Even then, there is a certain inner dialogue that occurs in our heads. It may be that we are trying to excuse our conduct or justify it to this voice. It may also happen that we give way to its demands. In either case, the presence of this “voice” of conscience indicates guilt’s dependence on language. With language we have the possibility of the spoken and written norms that formalize the admonitions of our internalized others. Shame, by contrast, usually does require a face-to-face. I am ashamed before the actual other, i.e., before his or her concrete presence. It is this presence, rather than any generalized other, that I internalize.ii There is here a primitive, immediate, pre-linguistic type of empathy at work, one where I regard myself through the other’s presently regarding me. This regard is painful. I do not want this other to see me in my present situation. In contrast to guilt, then, shame requires the real or, at least, the imagined presence of specific others to be activated. In the absence of such others, I can..

James Mensch, 1970 No philosophical activity is immune from the question of its grounds, its origin, its arche. Philosophizing is not carried out in a vacuum. The philosopher in any inclusive view cannot be seen to be a being set apart from the world about which he philosophizes. He is distinct neither from the world nor its history considered in its totality. A truth so obvious requires only a brief meditative reflection: A philosopher sits writing at his desk. Without even raising his head, he directs his glance about him. What is the reality that appears? The most immediate objects of his perception, the pen, the paper, the desk, the printed book which lies open before him, even the words which he writes, all have a historical character. Paper, pen, desk and book, these objects are all the products of a historically defined type of work. They are the creations, the phenomenal manifestations of modern technological work.1 Even the words which he writes presuppose a history, a personal history insofar as these words are not empty signs but rather consist in meaningfully arranged characters, which he has learned to write and which someone has, therefore,. taught him to write. The meaning of words has to be won through a continuing encounter with reality, an encounter both personal and historically transcendent of the individual person, an encounter which is never the same, never repeated in an identical fashion. What is the reality that is present to him now, what is the totality of all that is now confronting us as beginning philosophers? As the above observations point out, the briefest of reflections leads us to the questions of the history and genesis of the things that confront us. But what is the condition of this confrontation, this encounter between the philosophizing subject and the world which he wishes to comprehend? Aristotle noted that all men naturally desire to know. Why? Our question is actually, “How does Being come to know itself?” This, of course, can be...