New Yearbook for Phenomenology and Phenomenological Philosophy

Volume 8

Burt Hopkins, John Drummond

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• eBook ISBN:
  9781000149708
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Critical Theory

The New Yearbook for Phenomenology and Phenomenological Philosophy provides an annual international forum for phenomenological research in the spirit of Husserl's groundbreaking work and the extension of this work by such figures as Scheler, Heidegger, Sartre, Levinas, Merleau-Ponty and Gadamer.

Moral Self-Identity and Identifying with Others

John J. Drummond
Fordham University

Most people are other people. Their thoughts are someone else’s opinions, their lives a mimicry, their passions a quotation.

– Oscar Wilde, De Profundis

Despite Wilde’s cynicism about the moral character of most people, the epigraph captures something true about all persons and perhaps the whole truth about some, perhaps even most, persons. As Aristotle long ago noted, our character is formed by habituation, and habits are formed, at least in part, by following the example of other persons. In the development of virtuous agents, our parents and the members of our immediate family, our teachers, our friends, our colleagues at work, along with the laws and their enforcement, conform our beliefs, attitudes, and behaviors to socially accepted norms by means of systems of praise and blame, reward and punishment. If that were all that is to be said, Wilde would be entirely correct. Even Wilde’s persons, however, no matter how thoroughly shaped by the opinions and passions they quote and the actions they mimic, experience these opinions, passions, and actions as at the same time their own. And it is just this fact that allows the emergence of the few for which Wilde leaves room, that leaves open the possibility of self-responsible individuals whose moral self-identity is not simply a function of having been formed by others and who question and transform the social consensus. Self-responsible persons, in other words, actively engage the views of others in order to form their own moral opinions and beliefs, and they “test” those opinions and beliefs—both others’ and their own—against the world as they themselves experience it.

In this essay I shall exploit some themes rooted in Edmund Husserl’s phenomenology in order to sketch briefly the relations between the moral self and moral others under four headings: 1) the intersubjectivity of thinking, its passive formation of the moral self, and its invitation to self-responsible thinking; 2) selfresponsible thinking in the moral sphere and the emergence of moral self-identity; 3) moral identification with the other; and 4) respect for the other.

I

In phenomenological terms, we think of the process of formation to which Aristotle and Wilde point as the passivity wherein: 1) the meanings that are constituted over time as the accomplishments of an intersubjective human activity in a particular historical and cultural context become sedimented in the form of common opinions and traditional beliefs, and 2) these traditional beliefs are passed on to subsequent generations and received by those generations as matters of fact to be taken for granted. While these traditional beliefs can be passively accepted such that they shape one’s own thoughts and actions without further reflection, they can also become objects of a critical reflection in which they are reactivated and appropriated or rejected by an individual. This reactivation and appropriation or rejection involves a subject’s actively thinking for herself in the light of evidence, where evidence is understood as the particular type of experience in which objects are intuitively given and our sense of them is rationally justified. The subject, in other words, in this reactivation and appropriation or rejection takes responsibility for her own beliefs.

We should not understand these possibilities for reactivation and appropriation or rejection to mean that the passive and traditional character of consciousness is something accidental rather than essential. The traditional character of thinking neither can nor should be entirely overcome. Even the self-responsible thinking that occurs in the light of evidence and justification—what Husserl calls “authentic thinking”—is unavoidably situated within traditions. The inherently and essentially traditional aspect of consciousness underlies Husserl’s view of the lifeworld as a world of sedimented meanings taken for granted in our ordinary experience. No thinker lives outside a lifeworld of this sort; no thinker is free from the influence of linguistically transmitted, sedimented meanings and culturally transmitted symbols; no thinker is capable of thinking or acting entirely apart from tradition. The apparent paradox that active, self-responsible thinking always occurs and must always occur within the concrete horizon of pre-given traditions that passively dispose us to think in certain ways requires that we recast the notion of self-responsibility in terms that recognize the intersubjective and social character of reason.¹

1. I have discussed this issue more fully in John J. Drummond, “Time, History, and Tradition,” in John B. Brough and Lester Embree, eds., The Many Faces of Time (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 2000), 127–47.

Tradition, we might say, is the inherited meaning-context in which active thinking works. This context is at once enabling and disabling: it enables us to encounter the world in meaningful ways ready for further thought and action, but it can also blind us to what is true and to what in our traditional beliefs must be questioned or revised. Insofar as self-responsible thinking always occurs within this context, we can say that authentic thinking is to think for oneself, but not by oneself. The reactivation of traditional beliefs, customs, practices, rules, and so forth requires their rational justification in the evidential experiences of individuals. When in such reactivation the thinking agent secures the evidence, the justification, for the reactivated beliefs, she can be said to take responsibility for her beliefs and practices even when those beliefs and practices are inherited from the tradition. Even if we assume that this can be done more or less straightforwardly in the case of cognitive beliefs about the way the world is—beliefs that are true or false about what is the case—this notion of reactivation and appropriation or rejection seems much more complicated in the case of evaluative and moral beliefs about what is good and what is to be done. Let us turn our attention, therefore, to what rational justification in the sphere of the moral, with its evaluative and volitional components, is for the self-responsible agent.

II

Following Franz Brentano² and Edmund Husserl,³ I claim that the value-attributes of objects and situations are the correlates of feelings and episodic emotions⁴ that are experienced by a subject having a particular experiential history, having particular passively and socially formed beliefs, emotional states, and dispositions, and having particular practical interests. These feelings and episodic emotions are that subject’s affective response to the experienced non-axiological properties of the object or situation. In the simplest situations, when responding affectively to the object’s or situation’s non-axiological properties, the subject has feeling-sensations (sensuous pleasure or pain) that by virtue of their attachment to the underlying cognitive content, ground an intentional feeling or episodic emotion that presents the affective aspect of the object and thereby values it. In more complex cases, however, especially those where action toward an end is involved, the feeling-sensations and the intentional feeling need not have the same valence. In rehabilitating my surgically replaced knee, for example, I feel sensations of pain in response to certain movements of my leg, but I nevertheless positively appraise those movements insofar as they serve the end of rehabilitation. My intentional feeling, in other words, is a feeling of (non-sensuous) pleasure at advancing the rehabilitative project and is grounded in the belief that the (painful) exercises will advance that project. In both the simple and more complex cases, we must stress, the value-attributes are neither reduced nor reducible to the non-axiological properties on which they are grounded, but our valuations—precisely insofar as they are grounded in the experience of these non-axiological properties—track them.

2. See Franz Brentano, Vom Ursprung sittlicher Erkenntnis (Leipzig: Duncker & Hum-blot, 1889).

3. See Edmund Husserl, Vorlesungen über Ethik und Wertlehre 1908–1914, ed. Ullrich Melle, Husserliana XXVIII (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1988), and Einleitung in die Ethik. Vor-lesungen Sommersemester 1920 und 1924, ed. Henning Peucker, Husserliana XXXVII (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 2004).

4. There are two distinctions important to note here. The first is that between feeling-sensations and intentional feelings; see Edmund Husserl, Logische Untersuchungen. Zweiter Band, erster Teil: Untersuchungen zur Phänomenologie und Theorie der Erkenntnis, ed. Ursula Panzer, Husserliana XIX (The Hague: Nijhoff, 1984), 401–10; English translation: Logical Investigations, trans. J. N. Findlay (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1970), 569–75. The former are merely sensory experiences, e.g., the visceral feelings such as the tightening of the abdominal muscles associated, say, with anger. Intentional feelings, on the other hand, refer to something as their object. So, e.g., liking and disliking are the liking and disliking of something; joy and sadness are joy and sadness in something, and so forth. The second is the distinction between emotional episodes and emotions (or emotional states); see Peter Goldie, The Emotions: A Philosophical Exploration (Oxford: Clarendon, 2000), 11. An emotion is a relatively enduring state that is built upon past episodes of singular and generally more intense emotional experiences and that is dispositional in character. The (relatively) momentary intentional feeling can for our present purposes be identified with an emotional episode.

The intentional feeling or episodic emotion experienced by the subject is “right” or “appropriate” when it is both rationally motivated and justified by the non-axiological properties underlying it and when the underlying apprehension of the non-axiological is itself both true and justified. Modifying somewhat a suggestion of Kevin Mulligan,⁵ we can say,

5. See Kevin Mulligan, “From Appropriate Emotions to Values,” The Monist 81 (1998), 161–88.

• a) E is an intentional feeling or episodic emotion whose base p is either a perceptual (or memorial or imaginative) or judgmental presentation (or representation) of an object O and its non-axiological properties.

Stipulating that

• b) “justification” in this context means prima facie, non-inferential, and defeasible justification,

then,

• c) E is an intentional feeling or episodic emotion appropriate to O and its non-axiological properties x, y, and z if and only if
  • i) p is a veridical or true (re)presentation of O and of its properties x, y, and z, and
  • ii) p is justified, and
  • iii) p justifies (is a reason for or rationally motivates) E.

Since the intentional feeling or episodic emotion and the valuation that attaches to it are founded on the cognitive presentation of the object’s or situation’s non-axiological properties, the feeling or emotion can go wrong in two ways. The underlying presentation can be false or unjustified. Conditions (i) and (ii) jointly address this possibility, ensuring that p is both true and justified. To say that p or any cognitive intentional content is justified means that it is directly presented to consciousness in a perception—a seeing of O as x—or a categorial modification of perception—a seeing that O is x—or a clear and distinct memory. Condition (iii) addresses the justification of the affective moment of the feeling or emotion.

There are instances, of course, when the underlying cognition is true and justified and the intentional feeling or episodic emotion is nevertheless unjustified. A person fearful of heights might know that the railing and Plexiglas shield around the perimeter of a high observation deck protect her from a fall. Nevertheless, she fears going onto the deck. Moreover, she might recognize both that it is true that she would be safe going out on the deck and that her fear is inappropriate. What is it in the experience that reveals this inappropriateness? My claim is that she is embarrassed by her own fear. Her intrinsic self-awareness, in other words, has its own affective and evaluative moment.⁶ Her embarrassment about her fear is a negative appraisal of it, and it highlights the fact that her knowledge that p—that is, that she is protected from a fall—fails to justify the fear.

6. For the notion of intrinsic self-awareness at work here, see John J. Drummond, “The Case(s) of (Self-) Awareness,” in Uriah Kriegel and Kenneth Williford, eds., Self-Representational Approaches to Consciousness (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT, 2006), 199–220, and for more detailed discussions of “cognitively impenetrable” emotions, see Goldie, The Emotions, 74–78, 110–11, and John J. Drummond, “‘Cognitive Impenetrability’ and the Complex Intentionality of the Emotions,” Journal of Consciousness Studies 11 (2004), 109–26 [reprinted in Dan Zahavi, ed., Hidden Resources: Classical Perspectives on Subjectivity (Exeter, UK: Imprint Academic, 2004), 109–26].

Hence, there is another justificatory dimension to the evaluative moment of the experience; this one, however, is an intrinsic, originally pre-reflective dimension of conscious life, and it can be stated as follows:

• iv) E justifies (is a reason for or rationally motivates) F, a (pre-reflectively or reflect...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Series Page
• Contents
• I. Essays
• II. Texts and Documents
• NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS