James Mensch

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.

In a series of conversations recorded towards the end of his life, Husserl is quoted as saying, "Yes, I do honor Thomas ..." and "... certainly I admit Thomas was a very great, a colossal phenomenon."1 With this, however, is the assertion that one "must go beyond Thomas."2 What is this going beyond Thomas? The purpose of this essay is to explore this in terms of the distinction between existence and essence we considered in our first chapter when we inquired into the ontological status of the ideas. Our claim is that on this point at least, Husserl is in agreement with Thomas Aquinas. The demand that we go "beyond" him does not concern this distinction. It rather amounts to an implicit call to bring Thomas’ epistemology--in particular, his view of consciousness--up to the level achieved by his metaphysical 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.

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

As Hegel observed in his Phenomenology of Spirit, “Self-consciousness, for the most part, is desire.” Phenomenologically, the “object of consciousness is itself… present only in opposition” to consciousness, while consciousness is felt as the absence of the longed-for object. According to Hegel, when desire is satisfied, this opposition ends and self-consciousness ceases. My essay seeks to answer the question of why desire never really terminates, why it almost continuously characterizes our waking life. I shall do so by exploring desire not just as a subjective phenomenon but as an ontological condition. What does desire say about the being of the subject? Desiring, the subject is stretched out in time. It is ahead of itself in its directedness to a not-yet present object. What is the condition for this temporal extendedness? What role does our embodied being-in-the-world play in it? How does the very spatiality of our selfhood condition our temporal extendedness? The goal of these questions is t..

The question of who we are is a perennial one in philosophy. It is particularly acute in transcendental philosophy with its focus on the subject. In its attempt to see in the subject the structures and activities that determine experience, such philosophy confronts what Husserl called “the paradox of human subjectivity.” This is the paradox of its two-fold being. It has “both the being of a subject for the world and the being of an object in the world.” As the first, it appears as the subject whose constitutive syntheses result in the presence of the world. Possessing an “absolute being,” it is uniquely singular. As the second, it is itself but one object among many in the world. It appears as a particular human subject with all the vulnerabilities and limitations that we all too readily recognize in ourselves. Reflecting on this duality, Husserl asks: “Howcan human subjectivity,which is a part of theworld, constitute thewhole world, i.e., constitute it as its intentional product . . .? The subjective part of the world swallows up, so to speak, the whole world including itself. What an absurdity!”4 The absurdity arises when we identify the two subjectivities, that is, when we say that the absolutely constituting subjectivity is, in fact, our own limited empirical subjectivity. It is at this point that we say that a part of the world constitutes the whole of the world and hence itself as a part of this whole.

conciliation behind. How do the Ukrainians forgive the Russians for the famines they caused? How do the blacks reconcile themselves with the whites that were once their oppressors in South Africa? What of all the countries that suffered from German or Japanese occupation in the last world war: How do they forgive? How does one ask for forgiveness? These are the questions that occupied Derrida towards the end of his life. With the Pope asking forgiveness of the Jews and Clinton in Africa apologizing for slavery, Derrida decried the inflation in the concept of forgiveness. He remarks that were we “to accuse ourselves, in asking forgiveness, for all the crimes of the past against humanity … there would no longer be an innocent person on earth.”[i] Given its essentially Christian origins, “the ‘globalization’ of the concept of forgiveness,” he writes, “resembles an immense scene of confession in progress … a process of Christianization which has no more need for the Christian church.”[ii] The religious basis implicit in this process becomes clear when we reflect that in many cases the victims are no longer alive. They cannot forgive. Yet forgiveness primarily involves the victim and the offender. It is a face-to-face encounter that becomes impossible with the loss of either. “This,” Derrida remarks, “may be one of the reasons … why forgiveness is often asked of God. Of God … because, in the absence of the singularity of the victim who is sometimes no longer there to receive the request or to grant forgiveness, or in the absence of the criminal or the sinner, God is the only name, the name of the name of … the absolute substitute. Of the absolute witness”[iii] The religious notion, then, is that of God as “the absolute substitute.” Even when the victim has died and the criminal and the surviving witnesses have passed on, God, “the substitute,” will forgive

If we trace the word phenomenon to its Greek origin, we find it is the participle of the verb, phainesthai, “to show itself.” The phenomenon is that which shows itself; it is the manifest. As Heidegger noted, phenomenology is the study of this showing. It examines how things show themselves to be what they are.1 One of the most difficult problems faced by phenomenology is the mystery of our self-showing. How do we show ourselves to be what we are? How do we manifest our selfhood to one another? To put these questions in the Husserlian context of intention and fulfillment is to ask: What do we intend when we direct ourselves to another person? What sort of fulfillment—i.e., what kind of givenness—satisfies this intention? Once we speak in terms of intention and fulfillment, we face a number of possibilities. The givenness of what we intend can exactly match our intentions. It can be other than what we intend—as is the case when we are simply mistaken. The givenness also can be less. It can, for example, not offer the detail that was part of our intentions. Finally, givenness can exceed our intentions. In showing itself, the object offers us more than what was intended. In this paper, I am going to defend the claim that this excessive givenness happens systematically when we intend another person. To intend another person is, paradoxically, to intend the other as exceeding one’s intentions. As such, the showing which manifests the presence of the other is a kind of “supersaturated givenness.” It is a givenness that makes us aware that more is being given than we can formulate in our intentions. This awareness points to the other’s freedom. It is also a moral awareness. Here, I will argue that our awareness of the other’s excessive givenness is our entrance into morality.2 I In continental philosophy, we have long been accustomed to thinking of the other, not in terms of givenness, but rather the reverse. We think of the other as not being able to be given..

Patočka and Merleau-Ponty are both interested in appearing as such. Both attempt to understand this in terms of the body. Despite this agreement, there is a fundamental difference. For Merleau-Ponty, the body’s determination of appearing is ultimately a function of its intertwining with the world. Indeed, its very status as an animated body or “flesh” involves the fact that, located in the world, it also is able to internalize the world that encloses it. This intertwining or “chiasm” is its form as flesh. For Patočka, by contrast, what is crucial is the body’s motility, a motility whose sense embraces all of its actions. He claims that “movement … first makes this or that being apparent, causes it to manifest itself in its own original manner.” I bring these approaches into dialogue by seeing Merleau-Ponty’s chiasm, not just as the form of flesh, but also as the form of its movement

Religion has been a constant throughout human history. Evidence of it dates from the earliest times. Religious practice is also universal, appearing in every region of the globe. To judge from recorded history and contemporary accounts, religious intolerance is equally widespread. Yet all the major faiths proclaim the golden rule, namely, to “love your neighbour as yourself.” When Jesus was asked by a lawyer, “Who is my neighbour?” he replied with the story of the good Samaritan—the man who bound up the wounds and looked after the Israelite who was neither his co-religionist nor a member of his race. Jesus’ example has been rarely followed. What is it in religion—and not just in the Christian religion—that leads its members to limit their conception of their neighbour? How is it that, in preaching the universal brotherhood of mankind, religions so often practice the opposite? In my paper, I suggest some answers by focusing on the notions of faith, ethics and finitude

Socrates taught that philosophy begins with conversation, with the questioning and response that marks dialectic. This book also developed through a serious of conversations. Thus, acknowledgment is above all due to those with whom I shared and developed the themes of the present work. I am grateful, first of all, to Dr. Barabara Weber of the University of Regensburg, with whom I worked out the conceptions of the central chapter of this book, “Public Space, during a daylong conversation in Strasbourg. Dr. Michael Staudigl and I worked on the theme of violence during my stay at the Institute of Human Sciences in Vienna. My gratitude goes out not just to Dr. Staudigl, but also to the Institute for its hospitality. I also would like to acknowledge Prof. Branko Kuln of the University of Ljubljana for the many insights he shared with me on the theme of politics and religion. I wish also to thank Prof. Ernst Hankammer of Bonn-Mehlen for his friendship and the many political discussions we have had over the years. Finally, I must express my gratitude to my wife, Josephine. Without her careful proofreading and suggestions for improving my text, it would not have reached its present form.

Religion has been a constant throughout human history. Evidence of it dates from the earliest times. Religious practice is also universal, appearing in every region of the globe. To judge from recorded history and contemporary accounts, religious intolerance is equally widespread. Yet all the major faiths proclaim the golden rule, namely, to “love your neighbour as yourself.” When Jesus was asked by a lawyer, “Who is my neighbour?” he replied with the story of the good Samaritan—the man who bound up the wounds and looked after the Israelite who was neither his co-religionist nor a member of his race. Jesus’ example has been rarely followed. What is it in religion—and not just in the Christian religion—that leads its members to limit their conception of their neighbour? How is it that, in preaching the universal brotherhood of mankind, religions so often practice the opposite? In my paper, I suggest some answers by focusing on the notions of faith, ethics and finitude.

At first glance, a phenomenological account of the future seems a contradiction in terms. Phenomenology’s focus is on givenness or presence. Attending to what has already been given in its search for evidence, it seems incapable of handling the future, which by definition, has not yet been given since it not-yet-present. Thus, for the existentialists, in particular Heidegger, phenomenology misses the fact that the Da-, the “thereness” of our Dasein, is located in the future. It misses the futurity inherent in our “being-there” in a world.[i] As part of this, it forgets that “values” are inherent in this world. Attending to the constitution of the thing as already given through its visible features, phenomenology leaves out the quality of its desirability, of its being a thing of value. Such desirability, however, is what moves us to possess it. Desire directs us towards attaining what we do not yet possess, i.e., what is not already given. In this sense, it presents the future. Value or desirability, then, must be thought of in terms of our inherent future directedness. Phenomenology, however, is incapable of this. In fact, its indifference to the future is nowhere more apparent than in its assumption that values are constituted after we grasp a sensuously appearing object. Taking them as something “tacked on” to the latter, it misses the role that futurity plays in our intentional life.[ii]

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.

“Public space” is the space where individuals see and are seen by others as they engage in public affairs. Hannah Arendt links this space with “public freedom.” The being of such freedom, she asserts, depends on its appearing. It consists of “deeds and words which are meant to appear, whose very existence hinges on appearance.” Such appearance, however, requires the public space. Reflecting on Arendt’s remarks, a number of questions arise: What does the dependence of freedom on public space tell us about the nature of freedom? How does public freedom relate to the freedom of a private individual? Does the latter also depend on its appearing? Which is generatively prior: freedom or public space, i.e., the actions that publicly manifest freedom or the space required for their appearance? How does public power shape this space? In this article, I approach these questions through a phenomenological study of public space.

What is the origin of ethical responsibility? What gives us our ability to respond? An ethical response involves responding to myself: I answer the call of my conscience. It also involves answering to the Other: I respond to the appeal of my neighbor. Is one form of response prior to the other? Contemporary thinking about these questions has been largely taken up by the debate between Levinas and Heidegger. Responsibility, according to Heidegger, begins with our concern for our being.1 The “call of conscience” originates in our responsibility for what we are. By contrast, Levinas sees this “call” as beginning, not with ourselves, but with our neighbor. Its origin is “the face of the other.” So framed, the debate can be expressed in the opposition: self-responsibility against responsibility for the other.2 My purpose in what follows is to establish two claims. The first is that behind this opposition, there is a fundamental agreement concerning the origin of our ethical obligations. Both philosophers hold that ethical responsibility ultimately springs from our encounter with death. Their real quarrel concerns its location. Where do we first confront death? Is the “first death” our own or that of the other person? Do I confront death in the anxiety I have over my own demise or does it make its primary appearance in what Levinas calls “the face as the very mortality of the other person”?3 My second claim is that, whichever we choose, we cannot really base ethical responsibility on this encounter. This is because death for both philosophers is nontransferable and, hence, ultimately isolating. Furthermore, to face it is a traumatic experience. A traumatised self, however, cannot act. It can only flee. Given this, the response death actually provokes is avoidance. To adequately ground ethical responsibility, we must, I conclude, turn from seeking its basis in death understood in terms of absence and passivity. We must rethink this ground in terms of life taken as presence and affectivity. §1..

A striking feature of post-modernism is its distrust of the subject. If the modern period, beginning with Descartes, sought in the subject a source of certainty, an Archimedian point from which all else could be derived, post- modernism has taken the opposite tack. Rather than taking the self as a foundation, it has seen it as founded, as dependent on the accidents which situate consciousness in the world. The same holds for the unity of the subject. Modernity, in its search for a single foundation, held the subject to be an indissoluble unity. Post-modernism’s position, by contrast, is announced by Nietzsche: “The assumption of one single subject is perhaps unnecessary; perhaps it is just as permissible to assume a multiplicity of subjects, whose interaction and struggle is the basis of our thought and our consciousness in general? ...My hypotheses: The subject as multiplicity.” Given this, there is a natural correspondence between the success of post- modernism and the current interest in multiple personality disorder. In the latter, we actually have the experience of a “multiplicity of subjects” in their interaction and struggle. The subject stands there before us “as multiplicity.” It gives us a concrete case, one which raises some of the pressing questions associated with the post-modern denial of the subject. Confronting it, we ask: how real are the personalities composing the multiplicity of this disordered self? What, in fact, does this multiplicity tell us about the self? about its genesis and status? What does it reveal about “our thought and consciousness in general”? I plan, in the short compass of this paper, to sketch some answers to these questions. §1. A brief description of MPD. The American Psychiatric Association gives two criteria for (MPD) multiple personality disorder. First, and most obviously, there is “the existence within the person of two or more distinct personalities or personality states (each with its own relatively enduring pattern