Political Phenomenology

Experience, Ontology, Episteme

Thomas Bedorf, Steffen Herrmann, Thomas Bedorf, Steffen Herrmann

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• eBook ISBN: 9780429535499
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophie
• Subtopic: Phénoménologie en philosophie

In recent years phenomenology has become a resource for reflecting on political questions. While much of this discussion has primarily focused on the ways in which phenomenology can help reformulate central concepts in political theory, the chapters in this volume ask in a methodological and systematic way how phenomenology can connect first-person experience with normative principles in political philosophy. The chapters are divided into three thematic sections. Part I covers the phenomenology of political experience. The chapters in this section focus on a variety of experiences that we come across in political practice. The chapters in Part II address the phenomenology of political ontology by examining the constitution of the realm of the political. Finally, Part III analyzes the phenomenology of political episteme in which our political world is grounded. Political Phenomenology will be of interest to researchers working on phenomenology, Continental philosophy, and political theory.

1 Three Types of Political Phenomenology

Thomas Bedorf and Steffen Herrmann

The relationship between phenomenology and politics is a difficult one, and there are methodological reasons for this. Since its beginnings, phenomenology as a method has been associated with a certain object: the experience structure of consciousness. As Edmund Husserl made clear in Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology (1913), it is not simply a matter of describing and identifying individual contents of experience but exposing their essential structures. Husserl therefore calls phenomenology a “science of essence” (Husserl 1983, XXII). He refers to “epoché” as an important methodical basis for understanding the essence of consciousness. This term, as is well known, describes the bracketing of our natural attitude in which certain assumptions are presupposed without further questioning. Through the epoché, Husserl identifies “pure consciousness” as the main object of phenomenological analysis. Insofar as this analysis is descriptive and not normative; however, the question arises about how phenomenology can position itself politically. It is precisely phenomenology’s methodological approach that seems to preclude its political involvement. Husserl seems to acknowledge this himself when he describes his work as “an entirely unpolitical one” (Husserl 1994, 244).

Such doubts concerning political phenomenology do not diminish when considering the second founding father of phenomenology, Martin Heidegger. Although he may have opened up phenomenology for the social dimension of existence by transforming Husserl’s transcendental phenomenology into fundamental ontology, his personal political stance only seems to confirm the adverse relationship between phenomenology and politics. While it has been assumed for a long time that Heidegger’s notorious rectorate speech was a blunder due to political naiveté (Beistegui 1998), the publication of the Black Notebooks has clearly shown that the problem lies deeper: The fundamental ontological concept of being-with is based on the idea of an ethnic destiny closely linked to eliminatory antisemitism (Mitchell and Trawny 2017). In the case of Heidegger, therefore, phenomenology is under suspicion of leading to fatal political views.

Of course, a completely different impression arises when one turns to the French tradition of phenomenology. In its initial phase, Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and Frantz Fanon addressed the hopes that were (or could have been) connected to a new historical beginning following World War II, both in philosophy itself and in postwar journalism. Subsequently, Claude Lefort (who considered himself a protégé of Merleau-Ponty) and Cornelius Castoriadis developed the idea of a democratic institution inspired by an empty space of power. The phenomenologies of alterity of Derrida and Levinas also demonstrated a political potential, widely recognized today. Employing concepts like the gift (Jean-Luc Marion), the retrait (Marc Richir), or the stranger (Bernhard Waldenfels), German and French phenomenologists finally worked on breaking open the harmonious wholeness that connected Husserl’s questions to the idealistic heritage, thus paving the way for a shift toward the tense and conflictual political.¹

Ideally these authors, as well as the phenomenological tradition in general, provide new impulses for problems of current political philosophy. With labels like “post-democracy” and “post-politics,” a certain strand of political philosophy is often accused of contributing to those populist and autocratic developments that are currently threatening Western democracies (Crouch 2004; Rancière 2015; Brown 2015). Although such allegations would require further substantiation, they point to a crisis related to contemporary political philosophy’s near exclusive focus on normative principles that obscure the first person’s perspective. Subsequently, the gap between what is and what ought to be has become increasingly unbridgeable and the ability to relate to life-world problems of social actors is gradually vanishing. Thus, phenomenology’s focus on the first-person experience may help to re-embed normative thinking in our life-world by showing how it emerges from it. In the course of this undertaking, the question arises: Is phenomenology merely a complementary science of political theory, or does it allow independent access to political questions? In the first case, the relationship between phenomenology and politics is supplementary, while in the second case it is foundational.

Our preliminary remarks suggest that the role of phenomenology in political theory formation is unclear. While phenomenology may help to close gaps in political philosophy and contribute to its renewal, the political often seems to evade its methodological structure. Whether one subscribes to one view or the other depends, of course, to a large extent on how one understands both phenomenology and politics. A clarification of the relationship between phenomenology and politics therefore presupposes a determination of what is understood by these two terms. Accordingly, we would like to systematically distinguish three different phenomenological approaches to the field of politics: the analysis of political experiences, the enquiry of political ontology, and the investigation of political episteme. By elaborating upon these approaches, we will show that the phenomenological method itself changes along with the subject in question. This not only suggests that phenomenology can contribute to the renewal of political philosophy, but that political philosophy can contribute to the further development of phenomenology.

1. Phenomenology of Political Experience

The first approach of a phenomenology of the political conceives the political as the institutionalized sphere of the regulation of public affairs. Therefore, the analysis focuses on a series of basic experiences that are constitutive for acting in public, such as trust, power, and authority or dispute, hatred, and resentment. To elucidate this approach more closely in what follows, we will take up a negative experience of politics: the dispute, as described by Edmund Husserl. Although Husserl considers phenomenology value-free and thus apolitical, he is still interested in investigating the constitution of the political space of experience – as long as it can be described value-free. Accordingly, the political space of experience does not take center stage in Husserl’s reflections but repeatedly appears at the margins of his thought. In the following, we look closely at these side considerations in order to understand those experiences that can be described as genuine political experiences. Husserl’s reflections on the foundation of intersubjectivity provide a starting point. In his works and bequest notes on the matter of intersubjectivity, Husserl repeatedly makes it clear that although the epoché allows and guarantees a return to the transcendental ego as constituting ground, this does not imply solipsism. On the contrary, all constitution of meaning has a bodily monad apprehending other bodily egos as a prerequisite. The experience of the “transcendency of the Other” (Husserl 1960, 89), which is not an object in the world but “subject … for this world … experiencing it” (Husserl 1960, 91), prevents the solipsist threat. The lateral connection with others is a condition for shared sense, in other words, objective contents. It is the difficulties of this basic epistemological situation that Husserl will reconsider again and again, without ultimately resolving the tension between egological foundation and lateral-intersubjective experience in a satisfactory way.

Starting from the epistemic problem of understanding others, Husserl devotes himself to a phenomenology of intersubjective communities at various points in his work. In the course of this project, three areas are of particular importance: the community of love, the sociality of equal order, and the sociality of subordination (Schuhmann 1988, chapter I). Husserl defines the community of love as a union driven not by desire but by spiritual love: a “penetration of the otherwise separated to a joint personality” (Husserl 1973b, 175). However, the love community is not simply a fusion of two persons into a whole person but the “unity of two persons” (Husserl 1973c, 599), which makes it possible to live with and through each other. In the community of love, the individual reaches the highest form of existence through the “delight of coexisting” (Husserl 1973a, 107). These communities must be distinguished from those that come about through a shared external purpose, like trade associations. Husserl calls them “associations of equal order” (Husserl 1973b, 213). Such associations create belonging primarily on the basis of argument and counterargument, question and answer. Husserl, therefore, also speaks of “communicative communities” (Husserl 1973b, 201) that create a community of will. With the admittance into such a community of will comes the adoption of rights and duties by which the individual person merely becomes a functionary. Finally, the sociality of subordination must be distinguished from the sociality of equality. Here, it is not the mediation of the different wills but the subordination of one will to another that is at the center of communitization. It is on this very level that Husserl situates the state, which has the task of resolving the “collision of ends” (Husserl 1973b, 224) that may arise in the community of love and in the community of equals. Accordingly, the reason for the state’s existence is to prevent disputes and to provide compensation where they arise.

In this way, Husserl equates the political sphere with the balancing function of the state apparatus whose task is to ensure the harmonious self-fulfillment of the individual in the community of love. The purpose of politics is primarily negative: It serves to protect against attacks while pacifying disputes. One may, therefore, argue that dissent is the genuine experience from which the political derives. In Husserl and Transcendental Intersubjectivity, Dan Zahavi distinguishes three forms of dissent in Husserl’s theory: the dispute over perceptual phenomena, the dispute over everyday notions of normality, and the dispute over cultural idiosyncrasies (Zahavi 2001). While the first type of disagreement can be resolved by providing higher levels of perception systems, for example, the sciences, this is not possible in the second and third cases. Even if it is true that we can trace the dispute over normality and cultural expectations back to the genesis of our expectations of normality and reflect upon our integration into the collective tradition to understand such disputes, this does not guarantee that we overcome them completely. This is only possible through resolution by a higher authority, which, for Husserl, is the state.

It is clear that Husserl’s “un-political” thinking of the political concentrates essentially on the phenomenon of dispute. The necessity of the state order results from the experience of an irrevocable dispute that cannot be resolved, only satisfied. This is because Husserl understands the dispute only as a negative force, without considering its productive potential. Husserl could have learned from his contemporary Georg Simmel that conflict does not necessarily lead to dissociation but can also contain integrating and socially stabilizing moments (Simmel 1971, Ch. 6). Thus Husserl’s phenomenology of political experience ultimately proves to be one-sided. It lacks eidetic variations that focus on forms of political disputes whose procedural conduct contributes precisely to the overcoming of tensions, thus, creating common ground.

2. Phenomenology of Political Ontology

The second phenomenological approach to the political no longer focuses on paradigms of political experience but attempts to elucidate the meaning of the political sphere as a whole by shifting attention from ontical inquiry to ontology. Instead of describing worldly experiences, the investigation now concentrates on the being-in-the-world itself. The work of Hannah Arendt reveals how such a phenomenological ontology interrogates the political.

Arendt begins her considerations by distancing herself from the anthropological approach of classical political philosophy. Since Hobbes, the question of what humankind is has served as the basis for determining how successful human coexistence is possible. In contrast, Arendt assumes that this cannot be determined anthropologically, since the answer to this question essentially depends on humankind’s self-image. Arendt, therefore, makes it her task to identify the basic conditions of being-in-the-world within which people develop their self-image (Arendt 1998, 7ff.). Most important in our context is the condition of human plurality. Because we are many without being the same, we need the political to serve as the sphere of collective self-determination. Our plurality poses a considerable challenge: We occupy different places in the world, so what we jointly refer to shows itself in different ways. The plurality of people means a plurality of opinions, which must be conciliated in the political without being annulled. Arendt argues that it should not be the task of the political to negate human plurality by sublating specific individual perspectives in an overarching general perspective. Instead, the political must be shaped in such a way that different perspectives can come together. Moreover, the role of the political is not simply to ensure a smooth coexistence of individuals but rather to create those conditions within which individuals can realize themselves. This is only possible if individuals can experience themselves in political action as identical to as well as different from others. Thus, the experiences of identity and difference are conditions that the political must provide if it is to enable the self-realization of individuals (ibid., 175ff.).

As is well known, Arendt’s major work, The Human Condition, focuses on the distinction between three spheres of human activity: labor, work, and action. Where labor serves to reproduce our lives and work our cultural world, action reproduces our common world. Political action is dependent on a public space where citizens can meet to discuss shared concerns. This guarantees that opinion-forming processes are not contingent and arbitrary but that the plurality of perspectives gathered in a community is considered, and that public opinion has influence and legitimacy. According to Arendt, power arises when the process of opinion formation leads social actors to join together to advocate their convictions. This is not a “power over” but rather a “power to” – the power to shape our way of life in a certain way (Arendt 1998, 199). It is this empowering potential of political action that allows agents to experience their equality with others and is the first step toward political self-realization. But what about the second condition: difference? For Arendt, this can only be realized if power-building processes are structured in an agonistic way. Where our perspectives lead to different ideas of what the world is and should be there is a conflict that allows individuals to distinguish themselves from one another. It is crucial that this conflict does not represent a deficit for Arendt but is necessary for the self-realization of individuals, since here they can experience themselves in their difference from others. The fulfillment of the two basic conditions of political self-realization results in the experience of “public happiness” (Arendt 1990, 119). As politically committed citizens, we experience ourselves as beings both different from and identical to others – and it is precisely this existential function that leads Arendt to link political action to public happiness.

Arendt also extends her phenomenological arguments to a political analysis of her time. Here the decline of the political as described in The Human Condition is seminal: For Arendt the ancient homo politicus has been replaced during the course of history first by the homo faber and then by the homo laborans. This develops alongside the colonization of the political sphere: Once the site of self-government, it has become a place that privileges economic utility. The problem is not that politics deals with economic issues, but rather that political questions are reduced to economic issues. This decline of the political is accompanied by the historical genesis of the party system, through which political action is transferred to professional elites. The separation of citizens from the decision-making process not only makes it possible to cede individual responsibility for the common world but also encourages individuals to see themselves only as private individuals. Arendt describes the emergence of the “bourgeois” who has lost all interest in public happiness and only thinks of securing personal happiness (Arendt 1994, 130). Arendt certainly sees this transformation of the political sphere flanked by far-reaching historical transformations such as the shift from class society to mass society and the emergence of modern bureaucracy. While massification produces a sense of individual superfluousness that further diminishes interest in the well-being of others, the logic of the administrative apparatus guarantees the dominance of “nobody,” replacing the principle of individual responsibili...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• 1 Three Types of Political Phenomenology
• Part I Phenomenology of Political Experiences
• Part II Phenomenology of Political Ontology
• Part III Phenomenology of Political Episteme
• List of Contributors
• Index