Phenomenology of Sociality

Discovering the ‘We’

Thomas Szanto, Dermot Moran, Thomas Szanto, Dermot Moran

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• eBook ISBN: 9781317420613
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

Phenomenological accounts of sociality in Husserl, Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, Sartre, Scheler, Schütz, Stein and many others offer powerful lines of arguments to recast current, predominantly analytic, discussions on collective intentionality and social cognition. Against this background, the aim of this volume is to reevaluate, critically and in contemporary terms, the rich phenomenological resources regarding social reality: the interpersonal, collective and communal aspects of the life-world (Lebenswelt). Specifically, the book pursues three interrelated objectives: it aims 1.) to systematically explore the key phenomenological aspects of social reality; 2.) to offer novel, state-of-the-art assessments of both central and lesser-known proponents of the phenomenology of sociality (Gurwitsch, Löwith, von Hildebrand, or Walther), and 3.) to contextualize this elaborate body of work in light of contemporary social cognition research, the growing literature in analytic social ontology, and current trends in moral psychology, moral phenomenology, and social and political philosophy. The collection brings together original articles by a host of prominent scholars and upcoming young talents to provide a comprehensive and up-to-date treatment of the topic. It will be essential reading for those studying phenomenological accounts of intersubjectivity, empathy, and community, including analytic, social, moral and political philosophers, and will also be of interest for social scientists and social psychologists.

Part I Historical and Methodological Issues

1 Locating Shared Life in the ‘Thou' Some Historical and Thematic Considerations

James Risser

DOI: 10.4324/9781315688268-1

1

In this chapter, I want to explore the issue of the sociality of existence under the heading ‘shared life,’ first historically, then thematically, with a specific focus on Gadamer’s contribution to the issue. The key development in this exploration is the point of difference that emerges between Gadamer and Karl Löwith in their respective projects in the 1920s.

For phenomenology, the issue of sociality came to prominence in the early part of the 20th century. When Edith Stein published Philosophy of Psychology and the Human Sciences in Husserl’s Yearbook in 1922, she had already made great inroads to surpass the prevailing idea that the relating of one to another resided in analogical presentation—the form of presentation in which one apprehends the other by comparison with oneself. As we learn from her earlier dissertation work under Husserl on the problem of empathy, Stein thought that the experience of relating to another was a form of intentionality directed towards the experience of others. The experience of empathy, which she took to be comparable to an act of perception, is for her an experience of foreign consciousness in general (Stein 1989, 11). It is an encounter with the foreign other in which the ego sees both identity and difference, in effect allowing the ego to become more aware of itself through the encounter. While Stein’s understanding of empathy ultimately preserves the experience of the non-identical in the relating of one to another, it remains configured through perceptual presentation and the starting point of the conscious subject. What is different in Philosophy of Psychology and the Human Sciences is Stein’s extension of her analysis of relating to another through a consideration of the various forms of living together. At the center of this investigation is the specific living together of community, understood as the organic union of individuals. But here too, despite the fact that she introduces the notions of solidarity and being-with-one-another, she continues to frame her analysis in the language of consciousness. And here too, the starting point is the subject, as if community were simply a plurality of subjects in a relation of reciprocity. More to the point, Stein does not appear to thematize the relation as such, but only takes note that there is evidence to account for an orientation of individuals to one another, thereby constituting an idea of sharing in a broad sense. The broader with-one-another of community is simply “out there in life” (Stein 2000, 197). In the end, Stein’s analysis of the relation of one to another is insufficient for coming to terms with more fundamental aspects of the with-one-another of shared life. ¹

When Martin Buber publishes I and Thou in 1923, we have what could be considered the first attempt to explicitly thematize the relation of one to another as a relation. For Buber, the I-Thou relation precedes any self-recognition of an I. The relation occurs “in the beginning,” which means that there are not first two terms, the I and the you, which are subsequently placed in a relation. What is first is the “genuine originality, the lived relationship,” as the immediate encounter (Buber 1970, 69).

In looking closely at the historical context, we know that Buber does not invent the terms I and Thou. As he tells us in “The History of the Dialogical Principle,” the expression I-Thou occurs first in a 1785 writing of Friedrich Jacobi, and is later used by Ludwig Feuerbach in his Principles of the Philosophy of the Future from 1843 (Buber 1972, 209f). Buber’s reference to Feuerbach is not at all a passing one. Buber had read Feuerbach intensively in his youth, finding there not just the mention of the I-Thou, but a philosophical anthropology centered on the dialogical relation of the I-Thou. ² We also know that in the years immediately prior to the publication of I and Thou, the neo-Kantian Hermann Cohen had used the expression in his religious writings, speaking of a correlation rather than a relation (Beziehung) (Cohen 1995). The expression was also familiar to Buber’s friend and collaborator, Franz Rosenzweig, who contested Buber’s account of the I-Thou prior to the publication of the book. Rosenzweig thought that Buber’s presentation of the I-Thou relation was too narrow, that he had compressed all of authentic life into his I-Thou, ignoring other possible relations in the basic relation of one to another (Buber 1996, 280). Ironically, it was Rosenzweig’s influence that provoked Buber to amend his text as it was going to print. The idea of dialogical speech as not simply an immediate relation of self-realization was now seen by Buber to be an essential component of the I-Thou relation.

When Karl Löwith then publishes his Habilitationsschrift, Das Individuum in der Rolle des Mitmenschen, under Martin Heidegger in 1928—the same year that Hans-Georg Gadamer was completing his Habilitationsschrift under Heidegger—he was well aware of these earlier developments on the sociality of the I-Thou. In his work, Löwith not only devotes the opening section to a brief summary of Feuerbach’s Principles of the Philosophy of the Future, but also makes the same argument for the I-Thou relation as Buber, viz., that the relation has priority over the relata. More importantly, Löwith sees his work as an attempt to supplement Heidegger’s analysis of intersubjectivity in Being and Time (1927). Despite Heidegger’s own insistence that the possibility of an I-Thou encounter must be grounded on the more basic being of Dasein as transcendence in which we live first from a shared being (Mitsein) in the world, Löwith thinks he can articulate a basic sociality of being-with-one-another (Miteinandersein) not erected from the fundamental ontology of Dasein in which the Mitsein of Dasein is determined. For Löwith, this will entail putting forth a concept of person within intersubjectivity drawn along Kantian lines. With Heidegger’s protest to the contrary—a protest repeatedly made in his lecture courses during this time, no doubt in direct response to Löwith’s work—it would appear that the real merit of Löwith’s argument was to exhibit the being-with-one-another as the primary and decisive feature of our being in relation, against what one could consider Heidegger’s insistence on having it both ways: Dasein as the original co-being and at the same time, in each case, mine. ³

Regarding Löwith’s contribution to the issue of shared life, two features deserve comment here. First, Löwith’s argument for the primacy of the with-one-another entails a primacy of social practices over individual activity, thereby giving greater weight to the sociality of existence than Heidegger does with his analysis of Dasein in its everydayness, where a commonly held world effectively disappears. Moreover, Löwith regards these social practices not as something an individual makes by him or herself, but as pre-existing the individual in their particularity of time and place. That is to say, Löwith wants to hold to a “formally concrete” ontic anthropology rather than to the formal ontology of the “existentials” of Dasein’s being (Heidegger 2007, 290). It is precisely this difference that allows Löwith to start from what he calls menschliches Dasein and not simply Dasein. And Heidegger, for his part, is willing to see this as an ontic supplement to his fundamental ontology, which we can see mitigates somewhat Heidegger’s initial protest against Löwith’s position. His protest, after all, could not have been so strong, since Löwith did in fact habilitate under Heidegger.

The second feature of Löwith’s position pertains to the point of intersection between Löwith and Gadamer that emerges in Löwith’s emphasis on being-with-one-another and the essential role played by dialogue. In the section titled, “Miteinandersein als Miteinandersprechen,” Löwith claims that the with-one-another of conversation binds the speakers such that there can be communication. Löwith writes: When Gadamer then writes his Habilitationsschrift on Plato, he too will thematize the being-with-one-another in conversation, but not without some criticism of Löwith’s position. ⁴ In his preliminary discussion of the nature of Socratic conversation and the ability to bring about a shared understanding (Verständigung), Gadamer first notes how the matter to be understood is taken up in speech and is thus understood through its expression: beyond the words spoken, the speaker’s intonation and gestures express the disposition and inner state of the speaker. The pattern of mutual self-expression will then constitute a specific possible way of being with another (Miteinandersein). Gadamer then adds that this would seem to imply that the shared understanding guiding this activity is not necessarily one in which agreement is reached, but simply what enables “the participants themselves to become manifest to each other in speaking about it” (Gadamer 1991, 37).

That which is communicated is there in an original way only in communication. In the communication (Mitteilung) that communicates something one shares (teilt) oneself with another at the same time. The authentic meaning of the ‘with’ of sharing (‘mit’ der Teilung) is found in the one-another (Ein-ander).

(Löwith 1928, 20)

The question for Gadamer is “whether this way of understanding the other person represents a genuine way of being with one another,” for every response is to the speaker’s self-expression (Gadamer 1991, 37). What is behind this question is Gadamer’s concern that understanding others through self-expression about something is made possible by self-reflection and, if so, this would be a degenerate form of being with one another. ⁵ In this early text, Gadamer is framing what he will later call, in Truth and Method, the second form of the I-Thou relation, in which the relation is inadequate for understanding, precisely because it is reflective and does not express a shared world (mitweltlichen) in any real sense. In this relation, a person reflects him or herself out of the mutuality of the relation, thus changing the relation and destroying its moral bond in the process. Despite having the character of a ‘We’-relation, it is the form of understanding oneself by contrast with others, and, as such, Gadamer insists, it actually pushes the other away. A real conversation attends only to the substantive intention of what is said and not what the speech expresses, and in real conversation with an other, which can even occur in one’s own thinking, the distinction (and separation) between I and the other can break down. It is at this point in Gadamer’s text that a small critique of Löwith’s position appears in a small footnote. According to Gadamer, Löwith understood thinking in a one-sided way, as dealing with fixed cognitive assumptions, which loses sight of a more encompassing thinking and reasoning that Gadamer wants to argue for. While the critique is minor (for at the end of his note, Gadamer says that what he is arguing for is “in keeping with the deeper coherence of Löwith’s analysis”), it opens for us the context for yet another version of a shared world in which the Thou is a focal point (Gadamer 1991, 43). ⁶

2

Let me begin here to make my argument for this other version of shared life. Gadamer’s distancing from Löwith does indeed pertain in part to his rejection of the privileged place of reflection operative in speaking-with-one-another. It is not that Gadamer is opposed to reflection, since it is undoubtedly an essential dimension of thinking and the ability to make something present to oneself. His reservation is pointed at the difference between the thinking of thought, which holds to reflection, and the more primary thinking of something. The reflexivity of reflection amounts to a “secondary phenomenon, compared to turning directly to some object” (Gadamer 2000c, 277f). Gadamer insists that this non-reflective orientation has its own way of carrying out the necessary critical function achieved in reflection, namely, through the dynamic of question and response that occurs in dialogical conversation. But this is not to suggest that for Gadamer, dialogical conversati...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle Page
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Introduction: Phenomenological Discoveries Concerning the ‘We’: Mapping the Terrain
• Part I Historical and Methodological Issues
• 1 Locating Shared Life in the ‘Thou’: Some Historical and Thematic Considerations
• 2 Hannah Arendt’s Conception of Actualized Plurality
• 3 Habermas and Hermeneutics: From Verstehen to Lebenswelt
• 4 Second-Person Phenomenology
• Part II Intersubjectivity, the “We-World,” and Objectivity
• 5 Concrete Interpersonal Encounters or Sharing a Common World: Which Is More Fundamental in Phenomenological Approaches to Sociality?
• 6 Ineinandersein and L’interlacs: The Constitution of the Social World or “We-World” (Wir-Welt) in Edmund Husserl and Maurice Merleau-Ponty
• 7 Davidson and Husserl on the Social Origin of Our Concept of Objectivity
• Part III Social Cognition, Embodiment, and Social Emotions
• 8 From Types to Tokens: Empathy and Typification
• 9 An Interactionist Approach to Shared Cognition: Some Prospects and Challenges
• 10 “If I had to live like you, I think I’d kill myself”: Social Dimensions of the Experience of Illness
• 11 Shame as a Fellow Feeling
• 12 Relating to the Dead: Social Cognition and the Phenomenology of Grief
• Part IV Collective Intentionality and Affectivity
• 13 Affective Intentionality: Early Phenomenological Contributions to a New Phenomenological Sociology
• 14 Love and Other Social Stances in Early Phenomenology
• 15 Gurwitsch and the Role of Emotion in Collective Intentionality
• 16 The Affective ‘We’: Self-Regulation and Shared Emotions
• Part V Collective Agency and Group Personhood
• 17 Husserl on Groupings: Social Ontology and the Phenomenology of We-Intentionality
• 18 Collectivizing Persons and Personifying Collectives: Reassessing Scheler on Group Personhood
• 19 Brothers in Arms: Fraternity-Terror in Sartre’s Social Ontology
• Contributors
• Index