James Mensch

In our increasingly interdependent world, human solidarity has become a topic of general (and heated) discussion. It has been urged as an antidote to the competitive pressures of globalisation and to the threats of climate change. Others argue that the sense of belonging together, of sharing a common fate that it brings is essential for civil society. Without this, we will seek to avoid the burdens our governments impose on us, for example, taxes and the draft. This sense of belonging facilitates our talking to each other and forming a democratically based consensus on such matters. A common history, language, religion, or ethnic identity can ground this sense of belonging. So can a feeling of shared danger.

How would we conceive a phenomenology that has been purified by a post-modern critique? Although the term “post-modernism” names an extremely varied phenomenon, two features seem especially relevant. The first is its distrust of meta-narratives or overarching accounts of the way things are. The second, which is closely related to this, is the deconstruction of the subject. By this is meant not just the deconstruction of the “author”—i.e., the undermining the notion of his/her subjective intentions as setting the parameters of textual interpretation. At issue is the grand meta-narrative of modernity itself. This is the narrative of subjectivity. Beginning with Descartes, and continuing through Kant and Husserl, subjectivity has been central theme of modern philosophy. For Descartes, it provided the Archimedean point, the central focus of certainty. For Kant, subjectivity is the terminus of his Copernican turn. Rather than assuming that all our knowledge must conform to objects, let us, Kant suggests, turn and try the reverse. Let us see if the rules of our understanding make possible the experience of objects.1 Husserl, in radicalizing this position, takes these rules as rules of synthesis. He sees the world we experience as the “product” of the synthetic (or constitutive) activities of transcendental subjectivity. After pointing out the difficulties with this narrative, difficulties involving the inability of subjectivity sustain the normative role that modernity assigns it, my question will be: what remains of the phenomenological project? How can we think of phenomenology apart from the narrative Husserl inherits from his predecessors? In othe words: What is phenomenology’s self-understanding, once it admits the validity of the post-modern critique of the subject? Such an understanding, I shall argue, can be found in Patocka’s insight that that..

In this essay, Domenico Jervolino summarizes twenty years of Ricoeur’s reading of Patočka’s work, up to the Neapolitan conference of 1997. Nowhere is Ricoeur closer to Patočka’s a-subjective phenomenology. Both thinkers belong, together with authors like Merleau-Ponty and Levinas, to a third phase of the phenomenological movement, marked by the search for a new approach to the relation between human beings and world, beyond Husserl and Heidegger. In the search for this approach, Patočka strongly underlines the relation between body, temporality and sociality. Central to this new encounter of Patočka and Ricoeur is the discovery of an idea of inter-human community based on a a-subjective conception of existence.

Only rarely does life imitate art in the starkness and directness of its message. When that message is a tragic one the effect becomes indelible. Such was the impact on Peru of the events of Uchuraccay, a small village located in its central highlands. Peru’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission called it “an emblematic referent of the violence and pain in the collective memory of the country” (TRC, 121). [i] In the twenty-year turmoil that engulfed Peru at the end of the last century, 69280 violent deaths were recorded. What makes Uchuraccay emblematic of this carnage is not just its own destruction; it is the web of misunderstandings that entangled the participants. On January 23, 1983, eight journalists from Lima were caught in this web. Mistaken for terrorists, they and their guide were attacked by the natives of the village. Remarkably, one of the journalists left a photographic record of their slaughter. There also exists a photograph of the bodies of the journalists after they were exhumed a few days later. In it, their eyeless sockets are clearly evident.[ii] When I saw the photo in Lima, it reminded me of the moment in Greek tragedy that is called “recognition.” This is the point when the veil of illusion is stripped from the characters. The most striking example of this is Oedipus’ appearance after he has blinded himself. In his eyeless state, the audience recognizes his previous blindness to his unnatural condition. This moment of recognition is a public exhibition. It is a disclosure of the way things actually were during the events depicted. In what follows, I am going to take this final image of the journalists as a disclosure of the communal blindness that engulfed Peru. My aim is to relate this blindness to the violence that was its tragic correlate.

Thesis: With the end of the cold war, ideological conflicts have faded. In their stead, we have witnessed the rise of cultural strife. On the borders of the great civilizations conflicts involving basic cultural values have arisen. These have given increased emphasis to the ethical imperative of cross cultural understanding. How do we go about understanding different cultures? What are the grounds and premises of such understanding? How does such understanding tie into the basic ethical theories that have marked the West? The premise of this paper is that such understanding requires a new paradigm, one fundamentally different from that animating Western, scientific rationality. What is required is a rethinking of what constitutes our ethical selfhood. After proposing a concept of such selfhood, this essay shows that it is an implicit premise of Plato’s, Kant’s, Freud’s and Darwin’s thoughts about ethics. It makes some practical suggestions for increasing cross-cultural understanding and then concludes with a brief description of the normative, ethical ideal of such understanding

A constant theme in human self-reflection has been our ability to escape the control of nature. As Sophocles remarks in his Antigone, “Many are the wonders, none is more wonderful than what is man. He has a way against everything.”[1] A list follows of the ways in which man overcomes the limits imposed by the seas, the land, and the seasons. We do this by creating new environments for ourselves. These environments condition us. Thus, we do not just escape nature by building cities. We, in turn, become city dwellers. The fact that we determine ourselves by determining our world has led thinkers like Hannah Arendt to describe us as conditioned beings. In her words, “Men are conditioned beings because everything they come into contact with turns immediately into a condition of their existence.” This includes “the things that owe their existence exclusively to men.” They too “constantly condition their human makers.” [2] Since Hegel’s time, such self-conditioning has been understood to include our very nature. Our ability to determine our environments, i.e., escape being determined by nature, has been taken to mean that our nature is our own creation. There are, in other words, no external limits to the freedom we have to determine who and what we are. This freedom, to put it paradoxically, is ground-less. There is nothing prior to it that determines it. “Freedom,” here, does not signify some nature or essence, but rather the lack of such. As Heidegger writes, “Freedom is the abyss (Ab-grund) of human existence (Dasein).” It is our character as ground-less beings.

For phenomenology, the study of appearances and the ways they come together to present a world, the question of the ego presents special difficulties. The ego, itself, is not an appearance; it is the subject to whom appearances appear. As such, it cannot appear. As the neo-Kantian, Paul Natorp expresses this:“The ego is the subjective center of relation for all contents in my consciousness.... It cannot itself be a content and resembles nothing that could be a content ofconsciousness.” Husserl will wrestle throughout the whole of his career with the issue of how to handle phenomenologically an ego that cannot be considered asa content of consciousness. In this article, I will outline the stages of his journey toward resolving this question.

Freedom is a perennial topic of philosophy. It is also one of themost puzzling. Regarding it, we are tempted to say with Augustine, “I know well enough what it is, provided that nobody asks me.” 1 We can all sense its presence.We use the word constantly, yet an account of it seems to elude us.My purpose in this paper is to see if phenomenology can provide such an account, one that includes in its description the features philosophers ascribe to freedom. I will have recourse to a number of Husserl’s positions. Although never brought together by Husserl to describe freedom, their presence makes the account a phenomenological and, in a broad sense, a Husserlian one.

One of the permanent factors driving philosophy is the puzzle presented by our embodiment. Our consciousness is embodied. We are its embodiment; we are that curious amalgam that we try to describe in terms of mind and body. Philosophy has sought again and again to describe their relation. Yet each time it attempts this from one of these aspects, the other hides itself. From the perspective of mind, everything appears as a content of consciousness. Yet, from the perspective of the body, there are no conscious contents. There are only neural pathways and chemical processes. As thinkers as early as Locke and Leibniz realized, we may search the brain as thoroughly as we wish; within its material structure, we will never find a conscious content.[i] Both perspectives are obviously one-sided. We are both mind and body; we are determined by our conscious contents and our physical makeup. Husserl’s Logical Investigations takes account of this fact in speaking of the real and ideal determination of the subject. As embodied beings, we are subject to real causal laws. Such laws, insofar as the relate to our mental contents, take these as determined by the contents temporally proceeding them.[ii] As engaged in mind, we are also subject to the ideal laws of “authentic thought.” These are nontemporal, logical laws governing “the compatibility or incompatibility of mentally realizable contents.” In the Investigations, the problem of the mind’s relation to the body comes to a head in these two determinations. How can the same set of mental acts be subject to both causal and logical laws? How can a causally determined subject grasp an apodictically certain set of logical relations? As Theodor DeBoer puts this question: “on the one hand, these acts are empirically necessary and determined; on the other hand, an idea realizes itself in them through which they claim apodeictic validity. How can both these views be combined?”[iii]

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.

Since the close of the cold war, there seems to be a certain constant in the conflicts that have marked multi-national conferences. Again and again, we see the smaller states opposing the efforts of the larger to determine the structures of their relations. One of the factors of this opposition is their fear of losing their identity. In a world increasingly determined by global interests, cultural and economic particularity seems to be a luxury that few can afford. For many, the name of this fear is “globalization.” They take the term as signifying a process that threatens to replace their individuality with an empty universality. Benignly regarded, globalization promises a world where we all drink the same soft-drinks, wear the same jeans, watch the same movies, and listen to the same music--all of it, presumably American. A darker vision sees within such homogeneity the dangers of totalitarianism. As Hannah Arendt noted, totalitarian systems presuppose a certain uniformity to achieve their effect. The ideal they tend to is that of reducing their subjects to a situation analogous to marbles on a table. The slightest tilt will make the marbles roll in the same direction. When citizens lose their individuality, when each is stripped of his particularizing relations to his neighbors, then the state gains the ability to apply a uniform power to produce a uniform effect. Here, the controllability of the response is directly proportional to the reduction of each of us to every one else. In this less benign view, the globalization that American capitalism promotes is actually a new form of totalitarianism. After the fascism and communism of the previous century, its third, capitalistic wave is now upon us. We need not accept this dark vision to feel uneasy about the emerging global community. At the root of our current disquiet is, I think, a sense that an aspect of our selfhood is under attack. The fear is that when we do become just like everyone else, we will lose our privacy..

In a world shaken by terrorists’ assaults, it can seem as if no one is in control. Political leaders often appear at a loss. They cast about for opponents, for those on whom they can exert their political will. The terrorists, however, need not identify themselves. If they do, the languge they use may be messianic rather than political. Rather than indicating negotiable political solutions, it points to something else. Coincident with this, is the pursuit of terror dispite the harm it causes to a given political agenda. The extreme form of terrorism does not speak at all. It bombs and kidnaps, not to negotiate, not to use its victims as pawns to gain a political advantage, but simply to terrorize, to involve innocent bystanders in its own suicidal acts. How does politics confront the absense of negotiable demands? By seeing terrorist’s acts as a “declaration of war?” War, however, has its goals. It is, Clausawitz teaches, a continuation of politics by other means. Yet in the absence of any clear statements, can we know what someone who mails anthrax has in mind? Can we tell what would actually satisfy those who use passenger planes as missiles to kill themselves and thousands of others? Terrorism, here, represents, not politics, but its breakdown. It is not some state power in control of a political process. It cannot be characterized as a political opponent. It is, rather, a method. By implying a way to achieve a political goal, even the word, “method,” says too much. As a sign of the breakdown of politics, it should rather be called a symptom

We can make very sensitive machines and may arrange for them to distinguish themselves from other objects. The programs that are designed toward specific goals, such as the identification of external objects, can also be imagined as action programs relating to the manipulation of these objects. These programs can be designed to retain data in order of receipt, picking patterns and anticipated appearance of perspective based on the success of their past performances. In this way, could be designed to allow the machine to identify their own “here” and “now”, but would It has a self a machine capable of doing this? If so, where would it be? The purpose of this article is to address philosophical questions, revising extensively the question of the self in artificial intelligence

Jan Patočka and Maurice Merleau-Ponty attempted to get beyond Husserl by focusing on manifestation or visibility as such. Yet, the results these philosophers come to are very different — particularly with regard to the a priori of the visible. Are there, as Patočka believed, aspects of being that can be grasped in their entirety, the aspects, namely, that involve its “self-showing”? Or must we say, with Merleau-Ponty, that being can only show itself in finite perspectives that can never be summed to a whole? At stake in their attempts to speak of appearing as appearing is, I propose to show, nothing less than the question of the finitude of being.

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.