This article aims to examine sociality’s multipolar and intentional structure beyond an inter-subjectivist perspective; beyond the view that the social world consists of only subjects and their interaction. The article is divided into four sections. First, I present Benoist’s critique of mainstream inter-subjectivist accounts of phenomenology. Second, I introduce Husserl’s concept of Gemeingeist and provide a preliminary definition of it as a “substrate of habits.” Third, I focus on the sociological and ontological sources of Benoist’s critique, specifically Descombes’ reassessment of (...) Hartmann’s distinction between objective and objectified mind. Finally, I revise my preliminary Husserlian definition of “common mind” drawing both from the distinction between objective and objectified mind and Benoist’s account of habituation as a two-sided correlative phenomenon. Although he often tends to phrase his account in intersubjectivist terms, Husserl’s phenomenology offers valuable tools to address the multipolar structure of sociality, which does not only consist of subjects in their interactions, but foremost, in the way the human mind is embedded in institutions and extended in a range of objects that bear social meaning and that guide and bind human life to an extent that is unique among social animals. (shrink)

The notion of community—a many that is one—is troubled in two respects: (1) On a theoretical level, given that there are many kinds of communities, what, despite their differences, do they share as communities? (2) On a practical level, communities in fact often manifest little unity riven, as they are, by factions and conflicts. After exploring the ways in which empathy as supplemented and complemented by affective dimensions of experience contributes to both the unity and disunity of communities, I shall (...) focus on what I take to be an extreme instance of a disunified community, namely, the political community in which the disunity is institutionalized in political parties, governing administrations, and opposition movements. The focus on the disunified community, I suggest, points to a difference between those communities unified by a shared understanding of the ends and activities pursued in collective action and those communities more weakly unified by conflicting “thick” understandings of a shared “thin” understanding of the ends and activities proper to the political community. (shrink)

This paper offers a new philosophical account of vocations as deeply personal but at the same time also communal and generational forms of multimodal intending. It provides a reconstruction and a systematic development of Edmund Husserl’s scattered discussions on vocations. On these grounds, the paper argues that vocational life is a general human possibility and not determined by any set of material values, religious, epistemic or moral. Rather, vocations are distinguished from other complexes of intentional acts and attitudes by certain (...) structural features of their core valuations and volitions. (shrink)

This paper begins with a sketch of a few themes in the philosophy of property insofar as they relate to the concept of cultural appropriation. It then offers a survey of Edmund Husserl’s account of culture. These reflections put us in a better position to ask whether property ownership provides a suitable interpretative framework for acts of intercultural copying and influence. On the contrary, Husserl’s account of culture leads us away from the claim that members of a cultural group should (...) be understood to have property in cultural formations arising within their group. By putting meaning, rather than ownership, at the center of our understanding of culture, the paper offers an alternative account of what might be wrong, when there is something wrong, with events typically labeled culturally appropriative. The paper concludes by connecting concerns for cultural appropriation with conceptions of cultural authenticity, distinguishing between an autochthonal sense of authenticity, focused on internal origins and protection from outside forces, and a Husserlian sense of authenticity, connected to reason, responsibility, and truth. (shrink)

Husserl’s writings on sociality have received increasing attention in recent years. Despite this growing interest, Husserl’s reflections on the specific role of communication remain underexplored. In this paper, we aim to fill this gap by reconstructing the various ways in which Husserl draws systematic connections between communication and communalization. As will become clear, Husserl’s analysis converges with much more recent ideas defended by Margaret Gilbert and Naomi Eilan.

According to Husserl’s self-description, his phenomenological project was “completely apolitical.” Husserl’s phenomenology did not provide a political philosophy in the classical sense, a normative description of a functioning social order and its respective institutional structures. Nor did Husserl have much to say about the day-to-day politics of his time. Yet his reflections on community and culture were not completely without political implications. This article deals with an often-neglected strand of Husserl’s philosophy, namely his critique of liberalism. In this article, liberalism (...) is understood in the manner of Leo Strauss, as a tradition of individualist philosophy emerging from Hobbes’s political thought. As the article shows, Husserl followed many of his contemporaries in criticizing Hobbes’s abstract individualism, which could provide only a preventative function for political institutions. More importantly, Husserl’s engagement with Hobbes can be understood as a kind of ethical counterpart to his analysis of Galileo in the Crisis, as a critique of formal apriorism in the political domain. What Galileo did for physical nature with his “garb of ideas,” Hobbes did for human nature, reducing human sociality to interactions between atomistic individuals. In doing so, Hobbes ended up presenting a “mathematics of sociality” in an empirical garb. Going against the liberal view of the human person, Husserl presented his theory of social ethics founded on an original co-existence of subjects and a theory of human renewal. (shrink)

The paper offers a systematic reconstruction of the relations that, in Husserl’s work, bind together our shared social world (“the spiritual world”) with shared intentionality. It is claimed that, by sharing experiences, persons create social reasons and that these reasons impose a normative structure on the social world. Because there are two ways in which persons can share experiences (depending on whether these experiences rest on mutual communication or on group’s identity), social normativity comes in two kinds. It is either (...) directed (it has an addressee) or it is collective or absolute (it applies to all group members). Social normativity should be distinguished from axiological normativity: The first is grounded in shared intentionality, the second in values. (shrink)

What could a political phenomenology look like? Recent attempts to address this question under the rubric “critical phenomenology” have centered primarily around important issues such as the lived experience of marginalization and oppression or the ways in which power asymmetries or structural biases are internalized, habitualized, and embodied. In this paper, I will take a different route and test the impact of Husserl’s account of the state against the background of key classical and contemporary political theories. I aim to show (...) that Husserl indeed provides some conceptual requisites for an original phenomenological social ontology of the state. By furnishing analyses of the social formation that constitutes the stately body politic, Husserl helps us see the limitations of the standard, broadly Weberian, conception of the state underlying much of contemporary political theorizing. Moreover, Husserl provides an interesting alternative to both naturalistic and social contract theories of the state. However, against more optimistic readings, I argue that Husserl’s idealistic conception of the state, which is implicitly modelled on his notion of the “love community,” ultimately fails as a political theory, particularly when it comes to accounting for the struggle of recognition and the agonistic nature of politics. (shrink)

In this article I interpret Améry’s claims about the temporal dimension of trauma in the light of Levinas’s reflections on suffering and responses to suffering—and how both reject the temptation to generate narratives in which pain serves as a step toward transcendence and self-determination. That temptation finds support in Nietzsche’s critique of resentment, which identifies the refusal to forget as pathological, and against which Améry defends himself by demanding a substantive, intersubjective process of working-off the unjust past. I argue that (...) for Levinas and Améry, progressive narratives intensify the moral inattention that normalizes the initial infliction of suffering, and that revising how we understand time is necessary to respond ethically to trauma and human vulnerability more broadly. In light of that analysis, I consider contemporary examples of memorialization and the assumptions about time that they reveal. (shrink)

The first part of the article examines how Augustine’s notion of the everyday is mediated by his mystical ascensions, which give him the sense of height against which everydayness appears as oriented downward or fallen. These are the coordinates that make up the fundamental verticality of Augustine’s view. Heidegger’s understanding of everydayness was influenced by Augustine, particularly its inherent tendency to fall. In the article’s second part, it is argued that Heidegger explicitly avoids all references to metaphysical or religious heights. (...) For his reason, his notion of falling appears problematic as it both invokes and abandons verticality. Arguably, Heidegger’s turning from verticality to horizontality comes with a cost, as it must renounce the possibility of conceiving the radicality of the fall from a perspective from above. However, as the article’s final part shows, Heidegger and Augustine do not only provide a view of everydayness as falling, but they both share the conviction that there is more to it: Heidegger speaks of the enigmas rooted in everydayness itself, which, however, do not point above, but toward its overlooked sense of Being; Augustine invokes ordinary events as traces of wonder that point from the lowly up to the transcendence of God. (shrink)

Nietzsche writes a preface to _The Gay Science_ in 1886, four years after its first four books were in print. In this address, he explains that he has _been ill_ and is _in recovery_. He diagnoses himself as having suffered from “romanticism.” Nietzsche warns that he will henceforth vent his malice on the sort of lyrical romantic sentimentalism from which he suffered. Nietzsche then undertakes to write an additional fifth book to the corpus, which he added in 1887—a year after (...) the above-referenced preface, thereby providing a _new_ end in departure from his previous romantic excursions of the initial four books of _GS_. I wish to trace how these claims—of illness and convalescence are related to what I argue is a major philosophical turn in Nietzsche’s thinking on the nature of reality and how reality matters to us—as value. In this essay, I will locate Nietzsche’s turn. To do so, I explain (1) what Nietzsche describes as “romantic pessimism,” that is, an epistemological dualism (i.e., assertion of an irresolvable appearance versus reality distinction). I will first explain and then show how Nietzsche suffers from this illness in the early books of _GS_, using textual examples to demonstrate his epistemological presuppositions and romantic-pessimistic preferences (which manifest as a defiant claim that fictions are preferred to reality, thereby still crediting an appearance-reality distinction); (2) how by his later book five of _GS_ Nietzsche plays a different tune by which prior dualisms dissolve in his affirmation of a co-implication of fiction and truth, such that (a) neither are wholly separate from the other, and (b) it becomes difficult if not impossible to distinguish between them. (shrink)

Contemplating one’s own death is a core aspect in the history of Western philosophy. In the modern era, existential philosophy has inherited this tradition and established unique discussions on the concept of “_my_ death,” resting on the premise that this concept is unapproachable via scientific inquiry. Conversely, biological research is essentially conducted within the scope of life phenomena, with death being referred to in the sense of lifespan; thus, death is not among its inherent themes, which automatically excludes the concept (...) of _my_ death from its scope. To establish a dialogue between the two fields, this study questions the widely held premise that _my_ death is unrelated to science and is best examined by philosophy. I consider the movement between continuity and discontinuity as foundational to scientific development, and integrate it with the relationship between the unknown and known. Furthermore, I extend this to the concepts of consciousness and body, and subsequently clarify and define the unknown divisions. Finally, I examine the kinds of unknowns that science confronts to interpret philosophically how an aspect of reproductive theory has unwittingly revealed a completely new dimension of life: _my_ death. Overall, I argue that _my_ death is an essential point of contact between philosophy and biology that reveals the scholarly significance of the unknown. (shrink)

In “Making Music Together: A Study in Social Relationship,” Alfred Schutz offers a phenomenological description of a structure he contends is at the root not only of shared musical meaning, but of human communication and social relations as such: the “tuning-in relationship.” The aim of what follows is to establish that this same structure is at the root of ethical relationships, which may shed some light on the conditions under which it is possible to respond appropriately to ethically fraught situations. (...) Schutz’ analysis of the play of internal and external time establishes what the tuning-in relationship must be, but not yet how it is possible. His account also points to two important preconditions of tuning in: embodiment as the middle term between internal and external time, and practices as more widely shared meaning contexts which may persist across generations. For several reasons, Schutz does not give embodiment its due in his account, though his earlier work on course-of-action types sheds some light on the nature of practices. In all, though, these amount to promising leads for further investigation. (shrink)

Jean-Paul Sartre and Jan Patočka claim to go beneath the phenomenal correlation between the subject and the world discovered by Husserl in order to account for it from a more fundamental plane. Their going below the “universal a priori of correlation” allows them to describe it more thoroughly. But we wish to show that Sartre’s description remains dependent on a philosophical realism which prevents him from accounting for the genesis of the correlation. Patočka, however, achieves just this thanks to his (...) conception of an originary appearing. To verify this thesis, we will investigate the status of the body in both authors, so far as a successful account of the body should ensure the connection between the original plane and the openness to the world characteristic of the subject. Recognizing this function in the body, we ask if either Sartre’s or Patočka’s philosophy grants to the body the place it deserves and suggest that only Patočka achieves this, while Sartre is prevented from doing so by his realism. (shrink)

Phenomenological analyses of enjoyment are relatively rare; also, the few known attempts (e.g. Levinas) are elaborated in a transcendental fashion, without reflecting on the socio-historical constituents. The article aims at filling this gap by elaborating a social phenomenology of late modern enjoyment. Firstly, the experience is analysed with the help of general phenomenological descriptions: the visceral, existential and ethical constituents are mapped. The second section explores the structural transformations affecting these constituents, based on various critical theories of modernization: the impact (...) of the reified control over the visceral; social disintegration; persistent inequalities; over-burdening of intimacy is analysed. In the concluding section, a diagnosis of times is elaborated: the cost of controlling enjoyment on the visceral level is the giving up of its existential and ethical constituents. To break this paradoxical cycle, the “actor-networks” (Latour) of visceral stimulation need to be “hacked” by including existential and ethical dimensions as well. (shrink)

Husserl’s conception of theology and God is a lesser noticed aspect in his phenomenological system. This paper is devoted to a return to Husserl’s text, reconstructing the implicit threads and essential features of his phenomenological theology. First, I will outline the general features of a phenomenology of religion and theology, arguing that it is not without historicity, which is not in conflict with the essentialism that phenomenology has always pursued. Then, Sec. 2 focuses on the analysis of teleology, considering which (...) is the true teleology leading to God, pointing out that it ultimately resorts to an ethical approach. Sec. 3 and 4 provide an in-depth textual analysis mainly based on the Grenzprobleme der Phänomenologie, concluding that they are all fundamentally ethical-relevant and capable of being in harmony with each other. Last, I will respond to some criticisms of Husserl’s conception of God, the most major of which are Mall’s and Held’s. Of course, I do not mean to suggest that Husserl has perfectly integrated his project of theology and God into the phenomenology program—it is precisely these criticisms that motivate us to reconstruct Husserl’s fragmented narrative into a self-consistent system. (shrink)

This article seeks to reconstruct and critically extend Jacques Derrida’s critique of Edmund Husserl’s transcendental phenomenology. Derrida’s critique of Husserl is explored in three main areas: the phenomenology of language, the phenomenology of time, and the phenomenological constitution of ideal objects. In each case, Husserl’s analysis is shown to rest upon a one-sided determination of truth in terms of presence—whether it be the presence of expressive meaning to consciousness, the self-presence of the temporal instant, or the complete presence of an (...) ideal object through intuition. At every juncture, Derrida’s reasoning is deployed in order to demonstrate how presence is irreducibly bound up with absence and otherness and thus how the ideal of a phenomenological self-presence of consciousness is itself an abstraction from the contingency of history and our concrete embeddedness within a particular lifeworld. The article concludes with an appraisal of reason’s limits in a time of technological domination and the threat of global annihilation. Rather than a flight into irrationalism or skepticism, the author advocates a deepening of philosophical responsibility and an ethics of undecidability as essential for meeting the challenges of modernity. (shrink)

Shannon Mussett’s _Entropic philosophy_ offers a creative and important new lens through which the history of philosophy and a number of contemporary ethical, social, and political problems can be read and interpreted. By exploring the concept of entropy not merely as a scientific certainty but as a “root metaphor” through which the inexorable finitude, fragility, and vulnerability of material reality might be re-examined, Mussett invites her readers to re-consider the nature of their responsibility for one another and the material world (...) as a whole. In this way, Mussett offers her readers a new paradigm by which they can approach philosophical and ethical problems; one which takes the tendency towards pessimism entropic thinking typically inspires and transmutes it to an invitation to care more reverently for material beings, human and nonhuman alike. As such, Mussett’s work provides a valuable new contribution to contemporary philosophy by highlighting how we might re-imagine both its history and the ethical, social, and political problems which motivate it together. (shrink)

In marked contrast to Husserlian “unities of sense” that structure consciousness around _egoic_ ideal-meaning intention, contemporary phenomenology orders sense according to an excess of givenness – a surfeit of presence – that surpasses this intentional relation. But Emmanuel Falque argues that there is a resistance that _precedes_ the phenomenological order of givenness and sense. Before the saturated phenomena (Marion), the _pathos_ of the flesh (Henry), and the irruption of the Other (Levinas), there is a resistance of presence that is not (...) _sensu stricto_ given at all. Falque turns to the early writings of Emmanuel Levinas on trauma and insomnia and the hum and buzz of the _il y a_ (the “there is …”) that precedes the order of givenness and sense, including the Levinasian Other, in order to make sense of this _a priori_ resistance. There is a presence of the body, experienced in some sense via trauma, insomnia, and Falque’s own notion of the “spread body” that is not given yet constitutes an integral part of embodied experience. The way Falque engages with these bodily experiences reformulates the phenomenological limit, not in terms of excess and givenness, but in terms of resistance and the “extra-phenomenon.” Phenomenological engagement with resistance thus becomes a wager on meaning and sense, the outcome of which cannot be known in advance, that is, cannot be always and already ordered to phenomenological givenness. (shrink)

In this text, Heidegger's notion of the event is understood as a rupture on an ontological level. From this follows the aporia of whether the event concerns the coming about of being itself, or of beings. To address the ontological as well as the ontic aspect of the event, the article suggests to understand the event in a subjective framework, in line with transcendental conditions of experience, specifically as a "receptivity" to the event. The main part of the article considers (...) existing phenomenological approaches to the event and the possibility or impossibility of a receptivity to the event expressed therein. In conclusion, the article suggests that the subjective event can be conceived as a rupture within subjective experience, as being tied to the necessary coming about of experience. (shrink)

This review of Emmanuel Alloa’s _Looking through Images_ considers the author’s arguments with regard to their philosophical bearings and their significance for modern visual aesthetics. Particular attention is paid to the way that the traditions of Platonic and Aristotelian Realism are linked to modern phenomenological theory (Husserl, Merleau-Ponty, Marion). Alloa’s elegant and lucid exploration of the image as a form of non-propositional cognition makes this monograph a landmark document in contemporary visual studies and aesthetic theory.

If politics is understood as a foundational and open-ended activity, a general problem that arises from such a framing concerns the question of how to sustain the possibility of continuous openings without converting action into permanence and closure. In this article, we approach this problematic by treating Hannah Arendt as an exemplary figure in the current of political thought that emphasizes the indeterminate nature of action. We focus more specifically on how Arendt addressed the question of sustaining action by exploring (...) the role of forgiveness, promises, divided power, and principles of action in her thought. While we show that the task of sustaining the indeterminacy of action partly remains an unresolvable paradox for Arendt, a general force underpinning the thought of Giorgio Agamben sheds new light on this paradox. Rather than affirming radical openness and pure _praxis_ as such, Agamben’s work helps accentuate the need of a certain contamination of _praxis_ by its own limit or apparent opposite. Importantly, this allows us to interpret Arendt and the paradoxical task of bestowing some degree of permanence to the open horizon of political action in a decidedly positive light: that _praxis_ implies a moment of impurity is the very force that sustains it without sacrificing its indeterminate nature. (shrink)

Phenomenological analyses of ageing and old age have examined themes such as alterity, finitude, and time, not seldom from the perspective of “healthy” aging. Phenomenologists have also offered detailed analyses of lived experiences of illness including lived experiences of dementia. This article offers a phenomenological account of what we label as entering the grey zone of aging between “healthy” aging and aging with a disease. This account is developed through a qualitative phenomenological philosophy analysis of elderly persons’ lived experiences of (...) being tested for dementia through primary care in Sweden, i.e., within a cultural context where dementia commonly is understood as a frightening a loss of self even though this understanding also is questioned. To enter this grey zone of aging, we argue, does not dissolve dynamic self-becoming but can involve an experience of oneself as being old. Further, in the grey zone, the self experiences itself as neither fully healthy nor as having a disease, and as needing to negotiate and live this ambiguity. To enter this grey zone is to enter an affectively charged, sociocultural and medicalized zone, and while the self can still act in different ways within it, staying in the grey zone can result in a re-orientation in the self’s mode of being, in ways that are thoroughly beyond its control. To stay in the grey zone can have detrimental effects on the self, even though the self does not have a disease: the self can become “stuck” in a reflective mode of attending to embodiment, aging, health, and disease. (shrink)