TIm PRISM OF TIm SELF

CONTRIBUTIONS TO PHENOMENOLOGY
IN COOPERATION WITH
1HE CENTER FOR ADVANCED RESEARCH IN PHENOMENOLOGY

Volume 19

Editor:

William R. McKenna, Miami University

Editorial Board:

David Carr, Emory University

Lester Embree, Florida Atlantic University
J. Claude Evans, Washington University
Jose Huertas-Jourda, Wilfrid Laurier University
Joseph J. Kockelmans, The Pennsylvania State University
Algis Mickunas, Ohio University
J. N. Mohanty, Temple University
Thomas M. Seebohm, Johannes Gutenberg-Universität, Mainz
Richard M. Zaner, Vanderbilt University

Scope

The purpose of this series is to foster the development of phenomenological philosophy

through creative research. Contemporary issues in philosophy, other disciplines and in
culture generally, offer opportunities for the application of phenomenological methods that
call for creative responses. Although the work of several generations of thinkers has
provided phenomenology with many results with which to approach these challenges, a truly
successful response to them will require building on this work with new analyses and
methodological innovations.
THE PRISM OF THE SELF
PHILOSOPHICAL ESSAYS IN HONOR OF
MAURICE NATANSON

edited by

STEVEN GALT CROWELL

Rice University,
Houston, Texas, U.S.A.

SPRINGER SCIENCE+BUSINESS MEDIA, B.V.

A C.I.P. Catalogue record for this book is available from the Library of Congress.

ISBN 978-90-481-4570-6 ISBN 978-94-015-8408-1 (eBook)

DOI 10.1007/978-94-015-8408-1

Printed on acid-free paper

AH Rights Reserved
© 1995 Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht
Originally published by Kluwer Academic Publishers in 1995
Softcover reprint ofthe hardcover Ist edition 1995
No pact of the material protected by this copyright notice may be reproduced or
utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical,
including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and
retrieval system, without written permission from the copyright owner.
 TADLE OF CONTENTS

Editor's Foreword .........................................ix

PART I. CONSCIOUSNESS

JUDlTI-I BU1LER

Thresholds o[ Melancholy .................................. 3

STEVEN GALT CROWELL

Solipsism (Modalities o[the Strange) .......................... 13

OSBORNE P. WIGGINS, JR.

Natanson on Phenomenology in Psychiatry . ..................... .31

FRED !{ERSTEN

Notes [rom the Underground: Merleau-Ponty

and Husserl's Sixth Cartesian Meditation . ..................... .43

LESTER EMBREE

The Problem o[ Representational Adequacy,

or How to Evidence an Ecosystem ........................... 59

PART 11. SOCIAL ENCOUNTERS

THOMAS LUCKMANN

On the Intersubjective Constitution o[ Morals .................... 73

vi CONTENTS

MICHAEL BARBER

The Vulnerability o[ Reason: The Philosophical

Foundations o[ Emmanuel Levinas and K O. Apel . " ........... 93

LEWIS R. GORDON

Sartrean Bad Faith and Antiblack Racism ..................... 107

JOSHUA MILLER

Truth in the Experience o[ Political Actors:

William James on Democratic Action . ....................... 131

RICHARD M. ZANER

Interpretation and Dialogue: Medicine as aMoral Discipline ....... 147

PART III. THE WORKINGS OF ART

NOBUO KAzAsHI

The Musicality o[ the Other: Schutz, Merleau-Ponty, and Kimura ...... 171

VICfORIA MORA

The Spirit in Flamenco and the Body in Motion:

Discovering Gender Difference in the Dance ................... 189

MICHAEL F. McDuFFIE

Art as an Enc1ave o[ Meaning .............................. 205

GAlL WEISS

Anonymity, Alienation, and Suspension

in Kafka 's Metamorphosis ............................... 221

JAMES M. EDlE

The Philosophical Framework o[ Sartre's Theory o[the Theater. " ... 231
 CONTENTS vii

GILBERT T. NULL

Art and Part: Mereology and the Ontology of Art ................ 255

Appendix I:

ALFRED SCHUTZ

Husserl's "Crisis of Western Science"

(edited by FRED KERsTEN) . . . . . • . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 277

Appendix 11:

A Conversation With Maurice Natanson ....................... 289

Maurice Natanson: A Bibliography

(compiled and edited by DAVID ROYAL) ...................... 335

Contributors ............................................. 345

Index ................................................... 349

 Maurice Natanson

Photo by David Houghton

 EDITOR'S FOREWORD

This volume contains sOOeen essays written by his students and colleagues
in honor of Maurice Natanson. The essays explore some of the diverse
themes Professor Natanson has pursued through forty years of teaching and
philosophizing in the tradition of existential phenomenology. Because it also
includes a lengthy biographical and philosophical interview where one can
find an absorbing account of Natanson's Lebens/au/in his own words, there
is no need to detail that polypragmatic career here. Suffice to say that even
passing acquaintance with the man and the work will reveal that Edmund
Husserl's self-description holds equally of his distinguished interpreter: "I
seek not to instruct but only to lead, to point out and describe what I see.
I claim no other right than that of speaking according to my best lights,
principally before myself but in the same manner also before others, as one
who has lived in all its seriousness the fate of a philosophical existence."l
For Natanson, as the diversity of the contributions to this volume attest,
such seriousness involves something other than that narrow technical vision
for which a topic is the more philosophical the less it has to do with
anything else. In Natanson's pages-to say nothing of his teaching and
conversation-there are no men of straw but living, breathing human beings;
with hirn philosophy's tentacles are ubiquitous. Phenomenology, wrote
Sartre, "has reinstated horror and charm in things; [it] has restored to us the
world of the artists and the prophets: terrifying, hostile, dangerous, with its
harbors of grace and love."2 Natanson's thinking abides in this life-
world-shrouded by its great mystery, death-where reflection is nourished
upon the divagations of the flesh in medicine and psychopathology, upon
sociality's inexhaustible variations of anonymity and recognition, upon the
fullness and failures of time in history, and upon the aspirations-moral,
existential, and religious-framed in works of literature and art.
Doing justice to the apparently unruly heterogeneity of these multiple
realities within the lifeworld calls for a supple philosophical idiom far
removed from the burnished tones of the academy, and for this reason

1 Edmund Husserl, The Crisis 0/ European Sciences und Transcendental Phenomenology,

trans. David Carr (Evanston: Northwestem University Press, 1970), 18.
2 Jean-Paul Sartre, "Une Id~e fondamentale de la pMnom~nologie de Husserl: L'intention-
cited in Herbert Spiegelberg, The Phenomenological Movement, third edition (The Hague:
alit~,"
Martinus Nijhoff, 1984), 475.

ix
x EDITOR'S FOREWORD

Maurice Natanson has crafted a prose owing as much to Dostoevski,

Beckett, and Agee as to Husserl or Sartre. Unmistakable and inimitable,
Natanson's writing has beckoned many a student to further acquaintance
with European thought and has embodied the idea, too rarely realized
outside his pages, that, though absorbed in the world's messy complexity, the
philosophical struggle for clarity need not be wedded eidetically to monotony
of style. A thinking that is foundationalist in the sense of "being on the way"
to the originary will neither take the form of a System, nor that of a
precious, self-contained journal article that swallows its own tail because
there is no more nourishing fare inside. But while the essay may be rather
more accepted today as a philosophical genre than it was in the Arnerican
philosophical scene of 1953 when Natanson began his career as a writer, so
are the vices of the form, vices whose avoidance constitutes Natanson's
genius as an essayist. The wasted rhetorical question, faux profundity,
ideological winking and nudging, cultivated obscurity, substitution of name-
dropping for thinking, and the cancerous proliferation of jargon: all this is
absent from the pages of hirn who nonetheless can be said to have carved for
the first time in the Arnerican grain a phenomenological synthesis of
philosophy and literature as a style of inquiry and expression.
The terrain of Maurice Natanson's philosophical world was first mapped
in detail-and his idiom first given full voice-in the 1970 "Study in
Philosophy and Social Role," The Joumeying Self. Here the self-which is
"hoth a presence in and a concealment from the world"3-takes stock of its
paradoxical career. Displaced from the current of commonsense life by the
shock of the strange, the self discovers that philosophy, radical reflection on
its experience, is one of its own possibilities. So reflecting, it uncovers the
"ego alone": not yet the self constituted in role and in recognition by others,
but the inescapable ground of an analysis which will be radical because it
must be "mine." From there the journey traces the birth of identity in the
encounter with the other, and the selfs paradoxical retreat into the complete
anonymity of those typifications whereby it achieves social weight. In this
typified world the self participates in the projects of science and his tory,
tensed between the claims of its estate, between anonymity and recognition.
In the great symbol systems of art and religion, finally, where the realm of
transcendence opens up beyond the typical, the selfs reflection comes full
circle to discover its irreducible individuality-no longer as the pre-social ego
who has yet to experience the universal, but now as the concrete universal,
or better, what Kierkegaard called the "single individual." Exploring the
meanings taken for granted in the current of everyday life and commonsense
reality, then, uncovers a wondrous sedimentation that is anything but

3 The Journeying Sei! (Reading: Addison-Wesley, 1970), 3. A complete bibliography of the

works of Maurice Natanson will be found at the end of the present volume.
 EDITOR'S FOREWORD xi

everyday or common.
To echo this itinerary the essays in the present volume have been
organized into three sections: "Conseiousness," "Soeial Encounters," and "The
Workings of Art." In Part I Judith Butler pursues the phenomenology of
melancholy to the point where it reveals its paradox: the delieious mourning
not for a lost Other, but for the selfs own lack of itself, an apprehension of
ontological decay. Furthering the regress to the ultimates of conseiousness,
Steven Crowell and Osborne P. Wiggins, Jr., each explore that existential
level Natanson identified as the "ego alone," a kind of phenomenological
solipsism. In its methodological aspect, isola ted by Crowell, this appears as
a pre-soeial stratum of meaning, as the "strange" that haunts the familiar
world, while in the clinical perspective adopted by Wiggins it appears as
pathology, as the other shore to which the psychiatrist must construct a
bridge of communication. Can it be, as Wiggins (with Natanson) asks, that
the goal of such therapeutic communication can only be to restore the
morbid self 10 a condition of bad faith?
It was Husserl's great achievement to have forged, by way of the
phenomenological reduction, a path to this root level of conseious
experience, but the implications ofHusserl's approach to conseiousness have
always been contested. Is it the epistemological high road to a seientific
transcendental philosophy, as Husserl often claims, or is it a risky, explorato-
ry point of departure for a worldly philosophy attuned to the ontological
textures of existence? Identifying the existential paradoxes of phenomeno-
logical method that come to light in the "Sixth" Cartesian Meditation
(composed with Eugen Fink), Fred Kersten suggests how Husserl's trans-
cendental philosophy finds itself turning into the existential philosophy
Merleau-Ponty would make of it. Still, the experiences of conseiousness
remain indispensable foei in phenomenological analysis of that evidence
upon which the sciences and everyday life stake their claims. As Lester
Embree shows on the example ecological research, a complex web of
different representational forms is required to grasp an ecosystem, forms
whose modes of adequacy to the things themselves must complement one
another in the texture of seience. Phenomenology is called upon to clarify
the intentional connections which make this diversity harmonious and
productive.
In Part 11 those aspects of the self that turn essentially on being with
others in the social world come into focus. If value pluralism is an
undeniable feature of our historical world, Thomas Luckmann's penetrating
essay argues that value relativism does not necessarily follow. The genesis of
personal identity in the encounter with others can itself be seen to implicate
what Luckmann calls an historically invariant "proto-morality," an intersub-
jective structure of reciprocal obligations. Further investigating this most
primordial encounter between self and Other, Michael Barber then shows
that an initial opposition between two current and influential ways of
xii EDITOR'S FOREWORD

understanding the role of reason at this level-its apotheosis in Apel's

"discourse ethics" and its marginalization in Levinas's ethical first
philosophy-conceals an ultimate phenomenological complementarity. Lewis
Gordon, on the other hand, analyzes the notorious disfunction and
distortion of the social bond we knowas antiblack racism. His interdisciplin-
ary reflection shows that the etiology of racism is not exhausted by its socio-
logical, psychological, and historical aspects but reaches right to the
ontological level, to that dimension of the self in which it practices the
metastable form of self-deception Sartre called "bad faith."
If as an actor in the political arena the self must take astand, must
believe passionately in the rightness of the cause, is such a psychology
compatible with viewing the social world as a human construct, a "pluralistic
universe" in which truth has no transcendent warrant? This question receives
pointed treatment in Joshua Miller's reflections on William James as a
political thinker. And tuming to a different concretization of the social
encounter, the therapeutic situation in which the physician's power confronts
the patient's vulnerability, Richard Zaner explores the eidetic and hermeneu-
tic principles that ought to govem clinical communication. He thereby
uncovers the fundamentally moral imperative which, though frequently
eclipsed by modem medicine's scientific self-understanding, subtends the
very meaning of medicine as a discipline that treats persons, not diseases.
The typifications of the social, historical world allow the "ego alone" to
take on an identity and the contours of selfhood, but it is the symbolic
resources within this world-reaching a kind of perfection in the work of
art-that allow the self to glimpse the meaning of its being. The essays
included in Part III pursue these revelations in music, dance, literature, and
dramatic art. Reading Alfred Schutz's published and unpublished essays on
music together with the phenomenology of the "between" (AlI1a) developed
by the Japanese philosopher Bin Kimura, Nobuo Kazashi uncovers in the
tonal valence of silence between notes in a musical work c1ues to the way
self and Other co-temporalize-and to the inevitable limits of that achieve-
ment. What Victoria Mora discems in the dance, by way of a subtle
phenomenological reflection on Flamenco, is no less suggestive. Introducing
the terms "psychic saturation" and "psychic restraint" to designate certain
existential styles of embodiment, Mora demonstrates how gender-difference,
the root meaning of feminine and masculine independent of sexual
difference, is inscribed in the body's own movement.
Art effects a remarkable break with the world of everyday life while never
fully losing contact with it; it is, as Michael McDuffie's essay argues, an
"enc1ave of meaning." Because the work of art does not replace the
paramount reality of commonsense life (as does a dream), but rather
suspends it by means of a certain epoche, communication between the world
of art and the lifeworld remains possible. It is thus that we are able to learn
from the work. Nevertheless, as Gail Weiss's reading of Kafka's "The Meta-
 EDITOR'S FOREWORD xiii

morphosis" shows, there is often a good deal of resistance to the learning

process. The tenacity with which Gregor Samsa clings to his identity, to his
comforting (if unheroic) anonyrnity, shows that a radical answer to the
question, Who am I?, asense for what is most my own beyond the typific-
ations of social identity, is not to be attained without risk.
The revelatory powers of art bring it into proximity with action.
Exploiting this kinship, James Edie's reconstruction of Sartre's theory of the
theater in terms of existential categories (the Look, bad faith, nihilation,
freedom), together with his illumination of the connection between theater
and existential psychoanalysis, makes plain that the much missed Sartrean
"ethics" should be sought precisely in his theatrical works (or at any rate in
his theory of drama if, as Edie argues, the plays themselves fail to live up to
the theory). Finally, returning to the logical issues that inaugurated Husserl
on his path toward phenomenology, this section ends with the general
question of what art is. Offering a regional ontology of the artwork that
deploys a non-standard part/whole theory inspired by Husserl's Logical
Investigations, Gilbert Null shows how one can distinguish ontologically
between two things which are materially indistinguishable, only one ofwhich,
however, is a work of art.
Each of the essays in this volume cultivates a bit of the philosophical
terrain pioneered in the work of Maurice Natanson. In turn, as we learn
from the "Conversation with Maurice Natanson" included as an appendix,
the trajectory of his own career was crucially inforrned by the years of study
and lasting friendship with Alfred Schutz. It is thus fitting that Schutz
himself should be present here not only as an inspiration to several of the
authors but also as the author of a letter to Eric Voegelin in which he seeks
to defend the approach Husserl took to the philosophical tradition in the
Crisis. Far more than a simple defense of Husserl, this letter provides a
glimpse of how Schutz hirnself understood the possibilities, and limits, of a
philosophical reflection on history that, in the hands of an original
philosopher, is essentially a form of autobiography. Though modestly
eschewing the title of "original" philosopher in the "Conversation," Maurice
Natanson is surely no stranger to philosophical origins, and in his work
readers will find, as have those who contributed to the present volume,
insights forged in his unflagging zeal to "have it out with the world."

*
In acknowledging those whose help was indispensable in bringing this
volume into being, first mention appropriately goes to hirn in whose honor
the essays were collected. When approached for advice, Maurice Natanson
was as generous with his editor as he has always been with his student. No
less gratitude is due his wife, Lois Natanson, whose warmth and hospitality
the editor recalls with great fondness. Arnong the volume's authors, each of
xiv EDITOR'S FOREWORD

whom is deserving of thanks, two merit special mention: Lester Embree, who
first suggested that the time might be right for this venture, and Fred
Kersten, who enriched the volume substantially with his edition of the
Schutz letter. For permission to publish the letter (which will also appear
in Alfred Schutz, Collected Papers Vol. IV) thanks are due to Evelyn Lang
and the estate of Alfred Schutz, and to Kluwer. David Royal took on the
considerable task of compiling and editing the bibliography of Natanson's
writings, and his efforts deserve grateful acknowledgement here. Thanks are
due, too, to Allen Matusow, Dean of Humanities at Rice University, whose
generous support of travel greatly facilitated work on this volume. To speak
in propria persona, finally, my greatest and abiding debt of gratitude is to my
wife, Laura Elizabeth Lark, who teaches the teacher.
 Part I

CONSCIOUSNESS
 JUDl'TII BUTLER

THRESHOLDS OF MELANCHOLy1

... beneath
The stillness that comes to me out of this, beneath
The stillness of everything gone, and being still,
Being and sitting still, something resides,
Some skreaking and skrittering residuum,
And grates these evasions of the Nightingale
Though I have never-shall never hear that bird.
And the stillness is in the key, all of it is,
The stillness is all in the key of that desolate sound.

-from "Autumn Refrain", Wallace Stevens2

I take as my point of departure Maurice Natanson's essay, "Prom Apprehen-

sion to Decay: Robert Burton's 'Equivocations of Melancholy,.,,3 One might
be slightly disconcerted by the emergence of Burton in Natanson's corpus,
since the better known trajectory might begin with Pascalor Kierkegaard,
take Husserl as its central station of transfer, then Sartre, and Schutz. But
Burton makes a certain sense, for, like Natanson, he writes between the
literary essay and the diagnostic reflection, and, like Natanson, he takes as
the occasion for his reflection precisely that state of the self that does not
directly appear, but that might be said to haunt any such appearance. Not
everyone knows that Natanson considered a medical career, and still fewer
understand that in some sense he has never given it up. But what is it that
is subject to diagnostic reflection and why is it that the essay becomes the
genre in which this diagnosis proceeds? If diagnosis does not have an object,
what does it have, and how might we speak about it? What kind of writing
does the dia gnosis become when that which it seeks to know persists as the
undelineated and undelineatable in the seIt?

1 This essay is written for Maurice Natanson, the one who taught me.
2 Wallace Stevens, The Palrn at the End o[ the Mind, Selected Poems and a Play, ed. Holly
Stevens (New York: Vintage, 1971), 95.
3 Maurice Natanson, "From Apprehension to Decay: Robert Burton's 'Equivocations of
Melancholy'," The Gettysburg Review, Vol. 2, no. 1, (Winter 1989).

3
S. Galt Crowell (ed.), The Prism olthe Self, 3-12.
© 1995 Kluwer Academic Publishers.
4 JUDIlli BUTLER

Natanson's titie suggests that a direction is to be followed from appre-

hension to decay: although an itinerary is set out, this will not be a
Bildungsroman of the soul. "Apprehension," Natanson teIls us, His the soft
trumpet of melancholy" (134). In apprehension, melancholy is yet to come,
and yet it is in apprehension that melancholy begins to take its shape. It is
there from the start, waiting to be known. But this will not be the Socratic
apprehension of The Meno in which the solace of eternal forms offers itself
as the object of a future recollection. What is coming is not a resolution, but
neither will it be only gloom. The loss that melancholy affirms will also be
the occasion for the persistence of passion. Natanson writes,

What there is must be taken as a faint sign of what perme-

ates our lives: a light despair, which nothing can dislodge
from memory or consciousness, a time-haunted enchant-
ment of rotted foundations first discovered, the far side of
hope, the inflections of the body in prayer-the ecstatic
davening of the flesh (134).

What is the link between that discovery of "rotted foundations" and that
"ecstatic davening"? Can these two be thought in relation to one another, or
is this paradoxical coupling of decay and ecstasy stationed at the limit of
thinking itself?
If this melancholy is not an object to be thought, if it is that which
permeates a life, "an atmosphere of the self' (135), through what cracks can
it be glimpsed? At what moments can its non-phenomenal force be gauged?
If we turn to Burton's Anatomy o[ Melancholy, we cannot heip but notice
that the topic of melancholy is the occasion for a burgeoning forth of words.
This voluminous essay starts and stops, moves between poetry, high rhetoric,
recipes, colorful digression, typology, sermon, moralist diagnoses, elegy. It
is Natanson who points out that this unruly set of ruminations is not beside
the point: "For all his discussions and digressions regarding melancholy, I do
not think that Burton ever coneIusively defines his subject. That is part of
his method, no doubt, a eIue to the power of typologies of indirection. But
if I am correct, attempts to define the meaning of melancholy can at best be
entrances to the being of melancholy" (137). Natanson offers his own
remarks on Burton as a "thesaurus of experience," a title that might weIl
describe Burton's work on melancholy as weIl. Is there, then, a relationship
between the offerings of a "thesaurus" and "the entrance to the being of
melancholy"? Natanson eIarifies: "My idea of the thesaurus ... is not the
expected movement ofword to word but the linguistieally arhythmie shift from
meaning to being" (131, myemphasis). If, then, Burton's attempts to define
the meaning of melancholy are "entrances" to melancholy's being, they
cannot give us that melancholy; they can only bid us to enter that threshold
where language itself cannot go.
 1'HRESHOLDS OF MELANCHOLY 5

Melancholy will mark the limit of definition, its indexical elsewhere. Ag

the indefinite in definition, melancholy will prompt a digression precisely
when one might expect something more lexically precise. This digression will
not be beside the point, for the very self under question is, as it were, always
beside the point, contouring the point, circumnavigating the imprecision that
conditions the very definition by which that imprecision is concealed.
Melancholic digression means that precisely where one might expect a fine-
tuned denotation, a certain circumlocution slowly begins to make its rounds.
If it is linguistic meaning that cannot give us being, and if an arhythmia
aIDicts the "shift" from meaning to being, then the language that opens the
threshold to melancholia will be less than mellifluous. It will stop and start;
it will bear the marks of an essai, an effort, a trying. In that shuttling
between a language and the being that it can only imprecisely indicate, the
digression takes hold, that form of narrative wandering-that poetics of a
modern Moses-that can never reach its point. If anecdotes and sermonic
recollections proliferate in the place of lexical precision, that is not a sign
that an evasion of melancholy is at work; rather, digression establishes the
evasive quality of the everyday that melancholy is.
But let us, ifwe can, return to the problem of "decay" and "rotted founda-
tions." The apprehension that forebodes melancholy is the apprehension of
making the recognition 01 decay. Understood as an anticipatory intentional
positing, melancholy might be said to have "decay" as its object or, better, to
apprehend "decay"-prepredicatively-as the constitutive condition of objects
in the world. And yet, this horizon of decay intimates the decaying horizon
of the apprehending self. This is not the gradual decaying of a self once
whole, but a "decaying" that persists as the permanent ground of the self.
Natanson reminds us that it is Montaigne, indirectly, for whom melancholy
attends "the inner wreckage of the self" (135). "Montaigne probes the limits
of hirnself, his limits; and he comes to know melancholy by realizing that
what hinders his understanding is not the world but himself-a hidden fault
in the foundation of his own being" (135). And whereas Burton tends to
diagnose melancholic man in the midst of the world, Burton also opens his
Anatomy 01 Melancholy with a poetic testimony to the pleasures and perils
of melancholic reflexivity:

When I must go musing all alone,

Thinking of divers things fore-known,
When I build castles in the air,
Void of sorrow and void of fear,
Pleasing my self with phantasms sweet,
Methinks the time runs very fleet,
All my joys to this are fOlly,
Naught so sweet as Melancholy.
6 JUDITII BU1LER

When I lie waking a11 alone,

Recounting what I have ill done,
My thoughts on me then tyrannise,
Fear and sorrow me surprise.
Whether I tarry still or go,
Methinks the time moves very slow.
All my griefs to this are jo11y,
Naught so sad as Melaneholy.4

The alteration between a joy "void of sorrow . . . and fear" and a grief
"surprise[d)" by fear and sorrow, suggests that melaneholy consists in the
alternation between being engulfed and purged of fear and sorrow. In either
case, it is this reserve of fear and sorrow, of antieipation and memory, from
whieh pleasure is wrought and vanquished. For Burton, pleasure emerges
from that temporary suspension of temporality that otherwise makes its
phenomenological appearance in the lived experience of fear and sorrow.
Apprehension and decay, Natanson reminds us, are not exaetly opposites.
For what is apprehended, what is feared is the recognition of decay, and this
will not be any decay, it will be that specifie, individuating decay, this decay,
the decay that rots the foundation of this self.
The speetre of this apprehension (where "apprehension" carries the
meaning ofbothfear and conceptual grasp) governs the arhythmie temporali-
ty that either "runs very fleet" or "moves very slow". Although Burton will
call this "fear", Natanson is right to suggest that it approximates anxiety, for
it is not the loss of this or that object that is "apprehended," but an
objeetlessness that implicates the self in that very insubstantiality.
If, as Natanson suggests, "decadence and decay are softened by melan-
eholy," then melaneholy will be something other than the fear and sorrow it
alleviates; there will be a comfort in melaneholy, if not a voluptuousness.
The love whose loss melaneholy registers reemerges in melaneholy as a
certain love of decay, of loss, of memory itself. But this is not an adequate
substitution, for what is lost is not fu11y reconstituted in melaneholy-it is
also defleeted. If melaneholy consists in the recognition of decay that is
deflected or digressed, then its softness must be found in the fabric of that
digression. To what extent, then, can we infer from the apparent felicity by
whieh melaneholy prompts digression a certain aesthetic possibility of
melaneholy and, in particular, a linguistically "equivocal" reckoning with
temporality in narrative?
By the time Burton writes his manual of melaneholy, genres appear to

4 From ''The Author's Abstract of Melancholy: A Dialogue," Robert Burton, The Anatomy
0/ Melancholy, eds. Aoyd Deli and Paul Jordan-Smith, (New York: Tudor, 1927), 8.
 THRESHOLDS OF MELANCHOLY 7

have blurred. Although the classical roots of melancholy suggest an originary

link with mania and that philosophical inspiration conveyed by the daimon,
for Burton melancholy bears traces of the ~ity and fear" associated with the
Aristotelian notion of catharsis in tragedy. For Aristotle, tragedy facilitated
the catharsis of pity and fear through the recognition of the force of
circumstance-the world we never made-as the necessary limit of trans-
parent decision. Aristotle's tragedy, though, progresses by way of a narrative
structure that establishes the likelihood and probability with which events
follow one another. The apprehension built up through tragic narration is
"purged" in the scene of recognition, a scene in which decision is linked both
to circumstance and effect, and the tenuous causality of moral action is
established.
To what extent does Burton's early modern focus on melancholy rework
that ancient Greek preoccupation with tragedy? If, as Natanson suggests,
melancholy contains within it a critique of the notion of progress, if it
haunts every teleological narrative with the reminder of persistent and
constitutive decay, then melancholy will counter narrative from within,
constituting a narrative that cannot take the straight path toward closure. If
pity and fear cannot be purged through tragedy's progressive narrative, then
is there an altered relation to narrative that melancholy demands? In
classical tragedy, it is "pity" that the audience of the play is said 10 experi-
ence for the actors, but only on the condition that the action is a more
generalizedmimesis that produces an identificatory enthrallment, temporarily
severing action from the actor, establishing the action as not only the actors',
but also potentially the action of the audience. For Burton melancholy is a
"sorrow", one that pervades the action of the everyday, a pervasive haunting
of that action. Melancholy is not the same as a self-pity over this or that
circumstantial plight, but, more specifically, a self-sorrow that takes hold in
the midst of the everyday, that laces circumstance, a sorrowing for the self
that does not appear as a phenomenon, but emerges as a persistent fading
of the phenomenal. This is a self-sorrowing noticed at the edges of what
appears, as the fading horizon of the world itself.
In Montaigne, in Burton, and in Natanson, melancholy comes to haunt
reflexivity, pervading the selfs relationship to itself, not to its ultima te decay,
but, rather, to its originary decay, a slipping away from itself installed at its
origin. Is this the kind of loss that can be mourned? Can this sorrow find an
end? Or is this a constitutive loss, a lack, that remains coextensive with the
selfwho would mourn it? Where would this self stand in relation to this loss
such that the loss might be fully thematized, isolated, made to stand over
and against the self as an object of diagnosis? When it is this very self that

5 M. A. Screech, Montaigne and Melancholy: The W/Sdom of the Essays (London: Penguin,
1993), 29-33.
8 JUDIrn BU1LER

is, as it were, nothing without this loss, how will the self come to know or
to mourn that which constitutes it essentially?
If the progress toward catharsis can no longer be secured, it is not that
"circumstance" stands in the way. Rather, it is the fault at the heart of "the
journeying self," that which thwarts progress, that undercuts and soils that
teleological movement that would move toward a cleansing recognition. The
"flaw" of the tragic actor is now more generalized: it is not simply a matter
of what he cannot see or know, but much more a question of what he
cannot be, what he can never be, a negation installed at the core of his
being.
If, as Natanson says of Montaigne, Hit is the inescapable recognition of
inner wreckage" that constitutes melancholy's misery, and for Burton, "it is
the presentation of the individual in the world," we might suggest that for
Natanson it is the inextricable link between the two. The inner wreckage is
not represented or expressed by the individual presentation in the world; it is
the condition and limit of that presentation, the prospect of its fading and
fraying that does not fully emerge as an object, but constitutes the tenuous-
ness of the horizon within which objects appear.
If melancholy attends not only the loss of an object, but the fraying of the
horizon, how is such a tattered zone of ontology to be diagnosed? If it is, as
Max Scheler claims, not only the event that makes for the tragic, but the
world in which such an event is possible, then what kind of narrative will
take the place ofwell-placed diagnosis? Perhaps this is why digression is one
aesthetic venue both for Burton and for Natanson. Melancholy will occasion
a narrative that cannot find its point of catharsis, a story, as it were,
banished into the wilderness of non-closure (what Kierkegaard understood
as being lost in a parenthesis without end). Digression cannot offer the
narrative means by which to grieve the loss that it circumscribes; hence, this
wandering narrative can only essay to recapture its loss-and fail.
But this failure does not silence digression; it prompts a linguistic rash
of regalings, recountings, recallings, one that tries to grasp and purge a loss
that eludes every such effort. If melancholy is the fear of sorrow, its
digtessive chatter is perhaps the moment of its linguistie suspension and
diffusion. If this is a loss that cannot be named, cannot be resolved by the
name, for whieh language is no final reparation, then digression will be that
suspension and diffusion of loss in language, as language. Digression will be
the sound of loss in language as language erashes and splinters against what
is finally unspeakable. If there is a manie narrativization that takes place
after the event of loss ["ah yes, 1 remember seeing hirn just months ago! He
seemed to be doing better"; "I remember when he first opened that office at
Cedar Center. He refused to skip a day's work"; "I remember he loved you
better than rne"; "I rernernber he took rne to see Sornerset Maugham's Rain
on the first date"; "Do you recall ... do you?" "Just the other day, he was
still able to open one eye. I'rn sure he saw rne then"-all this before the first
 THRESHOLDS OF MELANCHOLY 9

platter slathered with smoked salmon drops onto the family breakfast room
table shortly before 8:00 a.m.], then this narrative is the "softening" effect of
melancholy, 10 borrow from Natanson's thesaurus. To what point does it
lead? To what point can it lead?

*
Another and more recent poetic diagnostician who reflected on the per-
sistence of melancholia was, of course, Dr. Freud. And he seemed to link
this peculiar malaise with an ungrievable loss housed within the ego itself.
In an earlyessay, Freud conjectured, "in §rief the world becomes poor and
empty; in melancholia it is the ego itself." In 1917, Freud still thought that
a strict distinction might be made between successful and unsuccessful grief,
that is, between a mourning that acknowledges the loss of "the object" and
proceeds to "replace" that object, and a melancholia that remains attached
to the lost object and suffers a withdrawal of libidinal attachments from the
world. Freud's equation of heaIthy and successful grief with the ideal of a
libido that happily (and successfully) replaces one object with another relied
on a view of the ego and its attachments that he himself came to discount.
According to this early view, however, an already formed ego invests and
withdraws its attachments at will from "objects" (Freud's euphemistic term
for others) that have no integral relationship to the ego itself. Freud's
vocabulary here falls short of conveying the sense in which the ego might be
understood nonsubstantially, that is, as the very consequence of attachment,
the intentional enthrallment with the objects of the world, centered outside
itself in the trajectory and aim of its passion? In a phenomenological
account that underscores the intentional constitution of the ego, the ego is
inseparable from its attachments. Tbe ego is not a self-standing being
instrumentally calculating investments and returns; on the contrary, the self
is its attachments and comes to exist only in the trajectory of its passion.
Tbe loss of the "object" would register as a Ioss in and of the self.
In "Mourning and Melancholia" Freud imagines that grief consists in
withdrawing libido from an object, and that the resolution of grief consists
in reinvesting that libido in a new object. But this ideal of happy transfer is
marred by the persistence of "unfinished grieving," an exception to the norm
by which an imaginary relation to the lost other is set up within the psyche
itself. Freud describes this situation in the following way:

6 Sigmund Freud, "Mourning and Melancholia", General Psyclwlogical Theory, tr. James
Strachey (New York: MacMillan, 1983), 167.
7
See Jean-Paul Sartre, The Transcendence otthe Ego, (New York: Noonday, 1957). Freud
does suggest that the ego is born of attachments in "On Narcissism: An Introduction," in General
Psychological Theory.
10 JUDITH BUTLER

The free libido [is] withdrawn into the ego and not directed
to another object . . . serv[ing] simply to establish an
identification of the ego with the abandoned object. Thus
the shadow of the object fell upon the ego so that the latter
oould henceforth be criticized by a special mental faculty
like an object, like the forsaken object. In this way the loss
of the object became transformed into a loss of the ego,
and the oonflict between the ego and the loved person
transformed into a cleavage between the criticizing faculty
of the ego and the ego as altered by identification.8

Those identifications which are formed from unfinished grief are the modes
in which the lost object is inoorporated and phantasmatically preserved in
and as the ego. But this effort to preserve the lost other is not without its
oost, for the other is set up within the ego as a critical faculty, a berating
agency, recalling Burton's own poetic rendering of the painful extreme of
melancholia: "my thoughts on me do tyrannize."
Reflecting on his speculations in "Mourning and Melancholia" (1917),
Freud writes in The Ego and the Id (1923)9 that in that earlier essay he
supposed that "an object which was lost has been set up again inside the
ego-that is, that an object-cathexis had been replaced by an identification.
At that time, however," he oontinued, "we did not appreciate the full
significance of this process and did not know how oommon and how typical
it iso Since then we have oome to understand that this kind of substitution
has a great share in determining the form taken by the ego and that it makes
an essential oontribution toward building up what is called its 'character'"
(18). Freud then expands this view: "when it happens that a person has to
give up a sexual object, there quite often ensues an alteration of his ego
which can only be described as a setting up of the object inside the ego, as
it occurs in melancholia" (19). He ooncludes this discussion with the specula-
tion that Hit may be that this identification is the sole oondition under which
the id can give up its objects ... it makes it possible to suppose that the
character of the ego is a precipitate of abandoned object-cathexes and that
it oontains the history of those object-choices" (19).
What Freud here calls the "character" of the ego appears to be the sedi-
mentation of those objects loved and lost, the archaeological remainder, as
it were, of unresolved grief. Most striking about this reformulation is that
it reverses his position in "Mourning and Melancholia" on what it means to
resolve grief. In that earlier essay, Freud argues that grief oould be resolved

8 Freud, "Mouming and Melancholia," op. eit., 170.

9 Sigmund Freud, The Ego and the Id, tr. Joan Riviere, ed. James Strachey, (New York:
W. W. Norton, 1960).
 THRESHOLDS OF MELANCHOLY 11

through a de-cathexis that would be similar to a quick diversification of

assets in the face of a potential market crash: a "withdrawal" of attachment
is followed by a "reinvestment" of new libidinal capital. In The Ego and the
Id, however, the savings account appears to become more highly valued:
melancholic identification-the preservation of the other-is aprerequisite for
mourning, and not, as it was earlier, its opposite.
By coming to this conclusion, Freud also puts into question whether grief
can ever be completed. In the place of a final breaking of attachment, there
is now the incorporation of the attachment as identification, where identifi-
cation becomes the psychic form of magically preserving the object. Insofar
as identifications become the psychic preserve of the lost object, and such
identifications come to form the ego, then the lost object continues to haunt
and inhabit the ego as one of its constitutive identifications, and is, in that
sense, made coextensive with the ego itself. Indeed, one might conclude that
melancholic identification permits a recognition of loss precisely because, at
the same time, it provides a way to preserve the object as part of the ego
itself. What is preserved-and also transformed-is the attachment to the lost
other, an attachment to the other as absent, as having been lost in the
specific ways that only that other was lost.
On this phenomenological translation of Freud, then, it would be
difficult, if not impossible to know, what the "ego" is apart from its "at-
tachments," its passionate intentionality toward the world. Hence, it would
not be quite right to say that the Other is preserved "in" the ego. Rather, the
"ego" might be said to constitute itself in and through that continuing
identification, to persist in its identity as an attachment to that absent other.
Hence, the earlier view of Freud, in which "successful" grief requires the
abandonment of the attachment to the lost other and the emergence of a
radically new set of "investments" would prove to be impossible. The Freud
of The Ego and the Id comes closer perhaps to a Natansonian view of inten-
tional enthrallment, for it is there that Freud recognizes that an attachment
to the other as absent requires a shift in the modality of attachment, but not
a dissolution of attachment altogether. In Freud's view, the work of
mourning would involve the transferring of the status of the other from an
"external" domain to an "internal" psychic domain; and this sense of "giving
up" the object would be simultaneous with its psychic incorporation. Indeed,
Freud comes to see that the ego itself is constituted by these sustained
attachments to lost and absent others, and without this sustaining power of
the grieving imagination, the ego could not exist at all.
In phenomenological terms, the other is sustained not merely as a
memory or as an image, but in and as the self in its imaginary dimension.
Those preserves of identification do not fully assimilate the other into the
self; that act of preservation moves in the other direction, in the echo of
action, the mundane rituals haunted by the other that they sustain, in the
weight of the gesture, the shuffling gait, the uneasy breath. This is the subtle
12 JUDIlli BUlLER

and endless labour of melancholia, its magical conjuring, imaginary surges,

the mundane ek-stasis of being, the davening of the flesh.
Surely, melancholia can also symptomatize the refusal of loss, the refusal
of the recognition of decay, and its diffuse and heavy sadness may attest
obliquely to the loss that cannot be named. But the refusal to acknowledge
loss must be sustained as a refusal, and in such a case, the very belief, "this
loss did not happen," becomes the substitute object of passionate attach-
ment, thus affirming the loss that it refuses. But where does this refusal to
name what is gone become indistinguishable from that dimension of grief
that can never be named? Is melancholia ultimately indistinguishable from
grief? Does melancholia not attest to permanent difficulty of distinguishing
between the losses that we have suffered and the losses that we are, that we
have become?

*
I've conducted this tour through Freud not because his thesaurus is
preferred (indeed, the recourse to "internal" and "external" worlds, "attach-
ments", "egos" and the like a11 ca11 to be thought again philosophica11y), but
because he seems, despite his early efforts, to affirm that there is a kind of
grief that is constitutive of the self, and that this constitutive loss might be
indicated by melancholy. If this is a loss that pervades the self as its
insubstantiality, an "atmosphere of the seIt" as Natanson ca11s it, it is not for
that reason a purely universal condition. The paradoxical movement of this
"universal" plight is that it returns the selt to this self, to having this history
of loss, this unfinished and unfinishable grief. That every self incorporates
ungrievable losses, indeed, that there is no selfwithout that magical weaving
of the lost other into and as the self, the ambivalent assimilationism of the
ego, is incommensurable with this selt that is founded on the losses that it
houses, that it magica11y reinvokes in the ritual movements of the mundane,
and that it cannot fu11y name. That there is always a this does not elose the
gap between the universal and the life that it indexes. That gap is absolute.
It makes itself known in that repeated arhythmia between meaning and
being that launches us into a language that can never traverse the divide
from which it emerges. This means of course that we continue to chart a
course in language for "the journeying selt," but that our progression is
digression for which the siren ca11 is the elamor of the unspeakable.
 SruVEN GALT CROWELL

SOLIPSISM

(Modalities of the Strange)

Exhibiting the root strangeness of experience is not a prepara-

tory step toward analysis but in fact a substantive part of
philosophical work.

-Maurice Natanson1

Some philosophers have a fondness for what might be called "refutation by

personification." Richard Rorty, for example, in his Presidential Address to
the American Philosophical Association, argued that the "relativist" is
nothing but "one of the Platonist or Kantian philosopher's imaginary play-
mates, inhabiting the same realm of fantasy as the soIipsist, the skeptic, and
the moral nihilist." Such characters need not be taken seriously because the~
are merely philosophical, not "fellow participants in a common project."
Now it is both true and important that philosophical positions must be held
by human beings, but that would not refute the ones mentioned nor banish
the philosopher from the poIite company of a common project. The relativ-
ist seems no more to belong to the bestiary of fantasy than does, say, Rorty's
own "ironist"-or any homunculus crafted as a personified position. One still
wants an account of why soIipsism, scepticism, ironism, and the Iike are
attractive in the first place. One might chalk it up to the repetition compul-
sion of a certain "game" called philosophy; however, one might also recog-
nize in such positions dues to the truth of the situation in which we partici-
pants in a common project find ourselves.
This sort of truth would not be incompatible with the falsity of philo-
sophical doctrines going under the name of relativism, solipsism, or scepti-
cism, for it signifies what may be called the "intuitive," pre-philosophical soil
from which such doctrines draw nourishment. From this truth they derive

1 Maurice Natanson, Edmund Husserl: Philosopher of Infinite Tasks (Evanston: Northwest-

em University Press, 1973), 142.
2 Richard Rorty, "Pragmatism, Relativism and Irrationalism," in The Consequences o[
Pragmatism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1982), 167.

13
S. Galt Crowell (ed.), The Prism ofthe Self, 13-29.
© 1995 Kluwer Academic Publishers.
14 STEVEN GALT CROWELL

that (perhaps perverse) existential plausibility without which they never

would have arisen through faulty logic alone. Tbe present essayaims to show
that there is such a truth of solipsism, and that it leaves legible traces in
everyday experience as certain modalities of the strange. But first we should
indicate what we do not understand by "solipsism."

§1. Solipsism Traditionally Understood

Of the playmates Rorty mentions, only the solipsist would have been
foreign to Plato. Whether as a position, a puzzle, or a temptation, solipsism
belongs to the modern period. Some might see this as evidence of philo-
sophical decline since the Greeks-believing that even if progress in
philosophy is hard to discern, decline is readily measured by the number of
imaginary playmates inhabiting the philosophical sandbox. Others, however,
may find in the same historicity an indication that a certain dimension of
existence, only obscurely delineated in the ancient world, has come to clarity
in the modern, bringing new philosophical tasks. If so, one might argue not
only that there is a truth of solipsism, but that solipsism is the "truth" of
modernity.
Tbe term "solipsism" has traditionally been used to characterize positions
granting some kind of priority to the self, priorities which have included
metaphysical, epistemological, and methodological ones. In this context a full
account of each, with their numerous historical variations and overlappings,
is not possible. But a rough characterization may serve to situate Edmund
Husserl's more nuanced version, where we begin to discern something like
a truth of solipsism.
Metaphysical solipsism may be characterized as the claim that only I (and
my states) exist; or less rigorously, that only "the seit" and its states
exist-meaning that other selves exist, though nothing which is not a self
does. Epistemological solipsism, then, would hold that only the self and its
states can be known; or again, less rigorously, that only the self and its states
can be known directly (or with certainty), and that all other knowledge is
gained through inference from the self and its states. Finally, the less
rigorous version of epistemological solipsism yields the even more generous
methodological solipsism, which may remain agnostic about what can be
known (directly or indirectly) while insisting only that the philosopher must
inevitably proceed from "where she is," i.e., from herself. Methodological
solipsism also takes astronger form, arguing that because only the self and
its states can be known with certainty, and because philosophy must proceed
by way of certainty, philosophical method is restricted solely to what belongs
to the self.
All three versions of priority lead critics like Rorty to place the solipsist
in the philosophical sandbox. "Fellow-companions engaged in a common
 SOLIPSISM 15
project" find metaphysical solipsism wildly implausible, wholly unconvincing
even when "rigorous" arguments for it are offered. Epistemological solipsism
fares little better, though its first premise, viz., that I am directly acquainted
only with my own states, may be accepted. This tends, however, to lead
either to metaphysical solipsism (e.g. Berkeley) or to scepticism3-and the
sceptical notion that I neither know nor have any good reason to believe
that there are things other than myseIf is almost as implausible as metaphys-
ical solipsism.
There remains methodological solipsism, which can argue for the neces-
sity of beginning and proceeding solipsistically in philosophy without thereby
being committed to the view that only the seIf is, or is known. But what
reason could there be for adopting methodological solipsism? Ir it were
antecedently decided that certainty was a desideratum in philosophy, and if
certainty were found only in the seIf, one might adopt it for epistemological
reasons. Yet one might also adopt it for "Aristotelian" or ontological
reasons, namely, if an approach through the seIfwere somehow ontologically
appropriate to the specific subject-matter of philosophy. Motives for
adopting methodological solipsism are not to be elucidated apart from a
consideration of what method in philosophy might mean, a problem I don't
propose to develop here. But the question further helps to situate solipsism
in Husserl's phenomenology, where both epistemological and Aristotelian-
ontological motives operate.

§2. Solipsism in Phenomenology

Husserl's transcendental phenomenology involves aversion of method-

ological solipsism with an epistemological motivation. Husserl demands that
philosophy, as "rigorous science" and as science of science, take nothing for
granted, borrow nothing from any science, whether natural or cultural.
Philosophical knowledge requires "absolute evidence" not found in sciences
taking their start from a presupposed region ofbeing, a given object-domain.
With what, then, can philosophy begin? Philosophy is philosophizing; it is
the act of a philosopher and as such "the philosopher's own quite personal
affair."4 This means that to ask about philosophical beginnings is already
to have answered; one has begun in the very act of inquiring. The crucial
point for Husserl is to get that de facto beginning-the seIf of the philoso-

3 As in Stroud's recent interpretation of Descartes's dream hypothesis. Cf. Ball)' Stroud,

The Significance o{ Philosophical Scepticism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984), esp. chs.
1 and 2.
4 Edmund Husserl, Cartesian Meditations, trans. Dorion Caims (The Hague: Martinus
Nijhoff, 1969), 2. Henceforth CM.
16 STEVEN GALT CROWELL

pher, her inquiring consciousness-into view in such a way that it does not
constitute an unnoticed presupposition. Philosophical responsibility thus
dictates methodological solipsism in the sense of giving priority to one's own
inquiring self as the starting point and accompaniment of all further inquiry.
But phenomenological solipsism runs deeper still, for "self-explication"
proves to encompass the peculiar Sache of philosophical inquiry, revealing
it in originary fashion. Thus while phenomenology is motivated epistemo-
logically by the drive for the "certainty" of ultimate philosophical self-
responsibility, it is also motivated by an Aristotelian-ontological concern that
its method be tailored to the character of the "things themselves" specific to
philosophical science. Against the temptation to model philosophical inquiry
after some positive science like psychology, physics, or anthropology, Husserl
insists that philosophy investigates what makes them all possible, viz., the
meaning (Sinn) in which the objects of these sciences are "constituted" in
consciousness. Phenomenology is meaning c1arification; its theme is not
things, but the intelligibility of things. Since meaning, intelligibility, is
encounterable as such only in phenomenological reflection and thus is
explicitly given in experiences which are irreducibly "mine," the very topos of
philosophy calls for a first-person approach. Husserl's insight here exhibits
part of the soil in which the truth of solipsism is rooted.
Phenomenological reflection is a descriptive recollection of the self
carried out under the strictures of the phenomenological reduction, which
sets aside the question of "fact" to focus on "essence" and brackets causal-
inductive in favor of intentional (noetic-noematic) interconnections.5 The
phenomenon of meaning disappears when this first-person perspective of
consciousness is abstraeted, but a foeus on meaning-constitution does not
transform entities into parts of the ego. Consciousness is not a metaphysical
absolute but the basis of a prior transcendental meaning-question; hence
phenomenology has nothing directly to say about the empirical, ontic,
positive predicates of entities. What counts is the weave of consciousness
itself, the intentional acts and their correlates making up the texture of
meaning taken for granted in pre-reflective (pre-philosophical) experience.
Neither a formal epistemological principle nor one psychological entity
among others, phenomenological consciousness is the jield o[ evidence as
such, the site of all possible encounter and question.
Consciousness, experience in the phenomenological sense, is "I myself" as
a "monadologically concrete ego." And because this ego "includes also the
whole of actual and potential conscious life," the problem of "explicating this

5 See the c1assical formulations in Edmund Husserl, ldeas Pertaining 10 a Pure

Phenomenology and 10 a Phenomenological Philosophy, Book I, trans. F. Kersten (The Hague:
Martinus Nijhoff, 1983). On the reductions, esp. pp. 131-145; on the theory of reflection, pp.
171-210.
 SOLIPSISM 17

monadic ego phenomenologically . . . must include all constitutional

problems without exception. Consequently the phenomenology of this self-
constitution coincides with phenomenology as a whole" (CM 68). Thus
phenomenology is "a systematic egological science, an explication of my ego
as subject of every possible cognition, and indeed with respect to every sense
of what exists, wherewith the latter might be able to have a sense for me, the
ego" (CM 86). The solipsistic ego, the monadological matrix of transcenden-
tal experience, is not an "immanence" divorced from what transcends it, its
other, but the very locus of that other's sense: "if transcendental subjectivity
is the universe of possible sense, then an outside is precisely-nonsense" (CM
84). Bya transcendentallaw of sense, not a causallaw, the "universe of true
being" and the "universe of possible consciousness . . . belong together
essentially" (CM 86). Husserl's phenomenological solipsism, unlike Des-
cartes's (where doubt concerning the existence of things passes into a denial
of their existence), is not called upon to decide about the factical existence
of things constituted "asn things in the transcendental ego. That is a matter
for other sciences on the basis of positive, not reflective, evidence.
Still, in claiming to encompass the universe of possible sense in its field
of evidence, monadology faces a serious challenge. Even if common sense
realism regarding things can be recovered and constituted in the egological
sphere-where reflection shows that the sense of "otherness" belonging to
transcendent reality is a function of the open reviseability of the perceptual
noema, the rule-governed play of presence (the adumbration given "in
person") and absence (the non-present but presentable aspects of the
thing)-in the case of the other person Husserl acknowledges a "grave
objection" (CM 89). Where monadology first appeared to represent the core
of truth in solipsism, it now threatens to pass over into its opposite, a false
"transcendental solipsism" which "excludes" the "transcendency of the Other"
insofar as "other egos," precisely as other constituting subjects, cannot be
constituted on the basis of my intentional experiences (CM 89). As con-
stituting consciousness, the Other can never be given "in person" as consti-
tuted in my ego; hence this sense of otherness is not a function of an
adumbrative series, even as an infinitely removed Idea in the Kantian sense.
As Husserl poses it, then, the problem of "transcendental solipsism" is to
show that phenomenology can account for the constitution of the otherness
of the Other on the basis of what such otherness appears to put into
question, viz., the universal reach of the field of monadological evidence.
Against the objection that phenomenology is a solipsism that can account
for my world but not for our ("objective") world, Husserl proposes to show
how the sense "other ego" is constituted in "my" transcendental subjectivity
so that a genuinely intersubjective world results (CM 90). His strategy is
decisive for our interest in the truth of solipsism, since it involves establish-
ing a second and originary form of solipsism, a second reduction carried out
upon transcendental consciousness, a reduction to "my transcendental sphere
18 STEVEN GALT CROWELL

of peculiar ownness" (CM 93).

The initial reduction to the transcendental ego involves reflection on my
intentional experience. This experience, however, still includes fellow human
beings as intentional correlates. "My" world is an intersubjective world
precisely as lived in everyday life-a social world of culture, institutions,
language, a particular history, family, friends. Thus the monadological world
is infused with the sense accruing from the presence of other persons, and
because Husserl seeks to show that the very sense, "Other," and all that goes
with it, can be constituted in transcendental subjectivity, he proposes to
"disregard" everything that makes reference to the Other within my monad
(CM 93). Here 1 do not merely imagine myself alone, for such aloneness still
refers necessarily to the Other who is "not there" (CM 93). Rather, 1 must
set foot upon the intuitive basis or root soil of all solipsism, its most radical
form, viz., intentional world-experience as it would be had there been no
encounter with the Other. Can such a reduction to the "sphere of ownness"
be imagined? What would remain of experience under such circumstances?
To appreciate the implications of Husserl's reflection one must resist the
temptation to trivialize the own-world by treating it as a fiction or mere
abstraction. True, the sphere of ownness is not some genetically primary
stage in developmental psychology. It is, as Ricoeur says, a "product of
abstraction" in the sense that it begins with, and remains within, the horizon
of adult mundane experience.6 Yet the abstraction yields neither a mere
thought-experiment nor the bare form of an experience, for the sphere of
ownness is a concretum. It is a particular "unitary coherent stratum" of
experience-indeed "the founding stratum" (CM 96)-and it must therefore
be lived as sedimented in monadological experience. 7 Thus we can express
only qualified agreement with Ricoeur when, seeming to shrink from the
radicality of Husserl's view, he writes that this primordial solipsistic stratum
is "the intentional terminus of a searching back"-not "some sort of inchoate
experience conserved within my cultural experience, but rather something
prior, never given, the limit of a purification."8 Ownness is indeed no
"inchoate" experience, but it is an experience that is conserved, sedimented,
precisely "within my cultural experience." Only so can it be the focus of a
phenomenological Rackfrage. Likewise, it is only partly true to say that
ownness is "something prior, never given." Finding oneself in an inter-
subjective world, one cannot simply experience it altogether other-

6 Paul Ricoeur, Husserl: An Analysis 0/ his Phenomenology, trans. Edward G. Ballard and
Lester E. Embree (Evanston: Northwestem University Press, 1967), 120.
7 On the notion of a "concretum" in relation to the thoo!)' of abstraction see Edmund
Husserl, Logical Investigations, 2 Vols., trans. J. N. Findlay (London: RoutJege & Kegan Paul),
esp. Investigation III "On the Theo!)' of Wholes and Parts."
8 Ricoeur, Husserl, op. eil., 122.
 SOLIPSISM 19

wise-unless one is the victim of a pathology. But the varieties of pathology

are many, and as Maurice Natanson has shown so vividly, they have their
analogues in mundanity.9
Commonsense experience is not solipsistic, but phenomenology reveals
that the stratum of intentional life Husserl calls "ownness" haunts the
commonsense world in traces that are given as traces. Par from being
inchoate, these traces adumbrate another order of meaning that signals itself
in the ordinary as various modalities of the strange. That, then, would be the
sought-after truth of solipsism. Only this side of psychosis can the strange
be experienced as strange; and only in the intersubjective world can the
stratum of solipsistic ownness be given-not in isolation but as living on in
the ordinary, the wellspring of peculiar obsessions.

§3. Solipsism and the World o[ Things

Leeched of all intentional reference to others, Husserl's descriptions of

solipsistic ownness begin with the experience of a certain "nature," a
"unitarily coherent stratum of the phenomenon world," indeed "the [ounding
stratum" without which I can have no other experience (CM 96). I must have
"this stratum in actual experience," for it is interwoven with all more compli-
cated experience. But this nature, the perceptual world as such, is neither
the physicalistic nature from which all psychic predicates have been removed
(CM 96) nor the "common" or objective nature that is "there for everybody"
(CM 97). Still, it is "a kind o[ 'world'" (CM 98), an order that is not to be
confused with some instinctual or "animal" experience. Reflection on the
sorts of intentional experiences that would be ours were we in a solipsistic
situation does not turn us into what we are not; it divulges a dimension of
what we are, the strangeness of a being who is before it is something.
As a "world," the sphere of ownness must exhibit a certain order. Though
it will not have the meaning of a nature that has entered into the logos of
a tradition, it will not be wholly void of meaning. Here one could speak,

9 Tbe "absurd" is such an analogue for Natanson, and since I return to this notion below,
letthe following passage stand for countless similar ones throughout Natanson's writings on the
pathologies of mundanity: ''Tbe absurd ... approaches some forms of schizophrenie conscious-
ness. Everything has its secret connection. Tbe world is domina ted by mysterious Iinkages,
endless chains of implication, a subtle apparatus of forces and hidden controls. Far from
appreciating only the specific intention, the individual is led to the Hegelian disaster of total,
absolute causation pulsing in every Iiving act and implicit in nature itself. Tbe world is rendered
Absurd either way, with the shallering of causation or its pathological magnification to tbe point
of unbearable Gnostic design." Maurice Natanson, "Causation as a Structure of the Lebenswelt,"
in Literature, Philosophy, and the Social Sciences (Tbe Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1968),206 n 2.
20 STEVEN GALT CROWELL

with Merleau-Ponty, of "wild meaning,dO did that locution not suggest the
absence of order, the merely negative collapse of the restraints imposed by
the logos of intersubjective communication. To describe the other meaning
of the solipsistic world of things, solipsistic nature, we prefer to speak of
"equivocality," of an order that is meanin~-full but not fixed and hence, from
the standpoint of mundanity, strange. 1 We might call this order "the
mythical," thereby signifying experiences out of which certain elements of
myth-na"atives arise.
From Husserl, whose extensive descriptions in Ideas II point the way,12
we leam that solipsistic nature is already experienced as a world of real
things independent of my animate organism. The solipsistic subject dis-
tinguishes "appearance" from "reality" in a purely perceptual way, without
drawing on any categorial acts. Through the motility of the lived body and
the implicitly alethic intentional structure of sense experience, I differentiate
between sensa as modifications of the body and sensations as qualities of the
perceptual thing. The normative appearance constituted on the basis of
"optimal" bodily positionings and "optimal" conditions of the "medium"
provides the originary experience of a "thing-with-properties" (IdII 60-80).
As solipsistically constituted, however, the familiar thing-with-properties
schema is filled out in very unfamiliar ways. First, the appearance/reality
distinction cannot be understood by means of the concept of perspective. My
perceptual experience as a whole can be seen as a "perspective" only if
others, with their perceptual experiences, put the absoluteness of my "reality"
into question (IdII 841). I have no sense that my perceptual system is pre-
cisely a perceptual .rystem-relative to other perceptual systems and inten-
tionally connected to non-perceptual ones. As a purely perceptually
established distinction, then, the distinction between appearance and reality
in my consciousness cannot yield the idea of a thing whose being would be
altogether independent of particular perceptions. Thus, for the solipsist the
thing is as it (optimally) appears.
This sort of thing involves strange properties; for instance, its reality does
not rule out its discontinuity. Such entities need not be (and perhaps cannot
be) experienced as continuously in being. The strange sense of discontinuity
that can assail us in everyday life (die Tacke des Objekts) is the trace of

10 Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The VISible and the Invisible, trans. A1phonso Lingis (Evanston:
Northwestem University Press, 1968), 155.
11 My use of the terms "equivocal" and "mythical" derives from Emmanuel Levinas, Totality
and Infinity, trans. A1phonso Lingis (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press 1969), but I do not
presume that Levinas would necessarily endorse the ana1yses carried out under their aegis.
12 Edmund Husserl, Ideos Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological
Philosophy, Second Book: Studies in the Phenomenology o[ Constitution, trans. Richard Rojcewicz
and Andre Schuwer (Dordrecht: K1uwer, 1989). Henceforth IdII.
 SOLIPSISM 21

"ordinary" solipsistic experience. Likewise, though there would be a "spatio-

temporal form" to the own-world, it would be "the form included in my
ownness" (CM 98) and not that of a single objective space and time. The
Here and the There (and the Now and the Then) established around the axis
of my body does not integrate itself into a uniform space-time system but
responds to the vagaries of the perceptual order-an order that is neither
chaotic nor "logical" (mathematical), but equivocal. A task that I pursue
seems to me at one time "endless," at another to "fly by;" the distance from
one place to another today seems limitless, tomorrow no distance at a11. In
another register, I may sense that things are repeating themselves exactly
(deja-vu), that the prior has returned or I have gone back somehow. These
familiar experiences can be dismissed from the everyday world because that
world is achieved on the basis of perspectival relativization through
communication with others. Variance of spatial or temporal "duration,"
together with the possibility of exact spatio-temporal "repetition," get ruled
out as predicates of being and are deemed subjective. But in the solipsistic
own-world they are precisely predicates ofbeing: events, distances, situations
have equivocal spatio-temporal boundaries or locations.
In this discontinuous reality of the solipsistic thing, the equivocality of
where it is and when it is, we rerognize one experiential source of the
mythical notion of metamorphosis. Though certain "typicalities" may be
found in my own-experience, these are equivocal and loose regularities that
cannot give rise to the sorts of fixed boundaries necessary for establishing
"natural kinds." Thus metamorphosis, transformation across natural kinds,
is not ruled out. Anything can berome anything else. That branches turn
into snakes; that bees circling a pole berome a flowering vine; that a pack
of wolves petrify into a field of stones-such possibilities haunt and pervade
the equivocal order of meaning in the own-world; they belong to its way of
taking for granted and do not result from merely imagined variations of an
otherwise sortally fixed nature. The fascination with metamorphoses in the
everyday world, with the new and strange that makes its appearance "out of
nowhere," reca11s a level of experience at which the thing-with-properties is
equivocal, is the site of unpredictable transformations.
Situating the discontinuous, polymorphous thing is a solipsistic causal
order which includes the strange efficacy of magie. The solipsistic distinction
between appearance and reality requires a distinction between the causal
circumstances of the thing and the visual alterations occasioned, e.g., by the
motion of my eyes (ldII 671), but such "objective" causal circumstances
cannot be described by exceptionless naturallaws. The equivocal "unity" of
solipsistic nature-the polymorphous plenitude of perceptual/horizonal
experience-is not grounded in the "Kantian Idea" of thoroughgoing law-
fulness, so it tolerates both regularities and efficacious exceptions. Conjunc-
tions are never so constant as to yield necessity; conversely, behaviors not
based on the constancy of a conjunction may be experienced as causally
22 S1EVEN GALT CROWELL

effective. Like the discontinuous and protean character of things, magic

causality lives on in intersubjective experience as the pull of strange powers.
When a college ballplayer insists on wearing the same shirt so that his team
won't lose, this "superstition" cannot be dismissed as lack of knowledge,
sloughed off to a more primitive stage of culture. The player knows the shirt
has no causal power, and yet the pull toward crediting the singular instance
is strangely strong-its strength deriving from asedimented stratum in which
the world is indeed experienced as being and behaving like that. Since magic
causality is of the order of experience and not knowledge, its strange pull
can emerge at any stage of culture and is largely impervious to the tutorings
of knowledge that disenchants the world.
So far we have discussed only those aspects of nature direct1y correlated
with "sensuous" predicates. The solipsistic subject would not experience its
world neutrally, however, but as threatening, reassuring, and so on. The
solipsistic subject is an embodied subject for whom things, though lacking
all "cultural" predicates, would nevertheless have "value" predicates of
various sorts (CM 98): use predicates (things would be "good for" sitting,
cutting, restraining, etc.), and also aesthetic predicates (they would be
attractive, delightful, disgusting, etc). There would be no "disinterested"
pleasure, as Kant defines the experience underlying the judgment of taste;
for that depends on judging with "a universal voice" (sensus communis) and
thus demands that I go beyond the stratum of my ownness. But if there
could be no experience of beauty in Kant's sense, there would still be the
delightful and the repugnant. I could not be a mere spectator in such a
world; as embodied I would find myself obsessed by its offerings, at horne in
its order because "bathed in the element," nourished by it, at its mercy,
enjoying its sensuous richness. 13
Now Husserl argues that the solipsistic subject experiences itself as an
"utterly unique member of this reduced 'world'" (CM 98), that is, as the sole
"animate organism" (CM 97). But we may wonder whether Husserl is right
about this. Would I alone obtain the sense "animate organism"? That sense
supposedly derives from (1) the experience of "localizing" sensations, by
means of touch, in a particular piece of physical nature, my Körper, which
thus becomes "more" than mere physical nature, i.e., animate Leib; and (2)
the experience I have of "governing" within such a body (CM 97; IdII 152f).
But if the nature I move through is never mere physical nature, i.e., if things
and their behaviors are correlates of an interested-attracted, threatened,
obsessed-embodied subjectivity, it is not obvious why the things in my
environing world would not also be constituted (at least sometimes) as
"animated. " Because my psyche fee1s its connection with the movement of my

13 Levinas, Totality and Injinity, op. eit., 110-114, 127-134. Compare Merleau-Ponty's
notion of "partieipation," The VISible and the Invisible, op. eit., 132, 140ff.
 SOLIPSISM 23

bOdy, movement in general would likely be linked with a psyche such that
universal animism, rather than a sophisticated sense of my own uniqueness,
would result. The unequivocal distinction between the animate and the
inanimate would thus be a function ofintersubjectivity, while the own-world
is ensouled with things that plot, sneak up, change themselves to fool Me;
hostile or benign things to be invoked, cajoled, or placated.
The world of solipsistic experience is not, then, to be equated with the
absurd world described in existentialist literature. In discussing the en soi as
encountered by the protagonist of Sartre's Nausea, for example, Natanson
defines the absurd as "the intrinsic questionability of all order," as "causation
turned inside out."14 The solipsistic world lacks neither order nor causality,
however; it is not sheer facticity but the site of another order. Camus's
example of absurdity-our sudden perception that the gesticulations of a man
in a phone booth lack sense, are absurd-depends on a contrast between the
reason we ordinarily see in the situation because we are familiar with what
one does in a phone booth, and the gesticulations perceived in abstraction
from such reason or sense. For the solipsist, however, those gesticulations
are not absurd at all-theyare full of "reason" in the sense that the solipsistic
world has its own order of meaning and value. In breaking through the
mundane order on occasion, such meaning is experienced not as the absurd,
but as the strange-the haunting, the threatening, the unfamiliar.
The world of solipsistic nature is an equivocal world of "correspon-
dences, " i.e., of tropological rather than logical connections and meanings-a
world whose order pulsates beneath the surface of the everyday world as the
strange moments of coincidence, synchronicity, and influenza. But if the
mythical, animistic, magical, elemental world of things offers clues to the
truth of solipsism as a sedimented stratum of experience, it is nevertheless
not in considering things that one finds the most telling survivals of solipsism
in mundanity. These show themselves instead when one asks how I would
experience myself in solipsistic life.

§4. Solipsism and Self-Experience

How does the solipsistic subject experience itself? To the extent that its
sensuous life is "localized" bodily by way of feeling itself touching or hearing
(feeling) itself vocalizing, the subject finds itself bound up with the Leib as
field of its sensations. But the solipsistic subject will not experience itself as
wholly one with this body. As Husserl notes, certain intentionalities (e.g.,
willings, desirings, believings, etc.) are not localized directly in the body, as
are sensings (IdII 161). As the one for whom the magical, mythically ordered

14 Natanson, "Causation as a Structure of the Lebenswelt," op. cit., 205.

24 STEVEN GALT CROWELL

own-world is, then, I experience myself as both o[ that world by virtue of my

sensuous-sensing body which shares in the world's equivocality, and at the
same time as "free"-that is, as separated from it precisely by that distance
which makes it "mine."
This freedom would, on the one hand, be experienced as barely more
than a breath. Without long-term strategies of control based on the predict-
ability that intersubjectivity and communication make possible, the extent of
my freely holding sway within the own-world is greatly exceeded by the
horizon of futility. On the other hand, the non-identity between "me" and my
body, together with the deep correlation of being with appearing at this
level, would serve to found an exaggerated sense of control, an experience
of myself as having remarkable powers. My experienced behavior in waking
and dreaming states, for example, could hardly be definitively distinguished
from one another as "reality" and "illusion." The self which found itself now
in one of these orders of reality, now in the other, would attribute to itself
the capacities exercised in each. That in the one I am capable of flying, in
the other not, would be experienced as part of my being, not as an occasion
for epistemological distinctions.
One might wonder, though, whether it is even possible to speak of the
self-identification and re-identification of the solipsistic "I". Is not my sense
of self-identity, as Mead and Hegel argue, necessarily dependent on
interaction with others? What sort of sense of "self" is attainable by a
solipsistic subject?
The foregoing suggests that this self too would be equivocal. A core of
identity would be established in virtue of the capacities 1 exercise (and
experience "myself" as exercising) in the living present. And since the living
present is constituted with the temporal horizons of protention and
retention, the rudimentary conditions for projection of myself toward future
possibilities and for recollection of my accomplished exploits are at hand.
But could the recollecting ego grasp the recollected as an earlier mode of
"itself"? To argue that it would grasp itself as "another" is to argue that the
Other is in fact generated from the solus ipse. Suppose, then, that it does
grasp the recollected ego as "itself;" it is still not necessary that it be seen as
its earlier self. It could be taken as itself elsewhere. Since the solipsistic
experience of self is not wholly localized in the body, it would not need to
grasp the recollected self as "having" inhabited the present lived body. As a
"remarkably imperfectly constituted thing" (ldII 167), the lived body could
not rule out a "doubling" of myself, a finding myself elsewhere too. Finally,
just as the thing-world exhibi~ discontinuous realities, the recollecting ego
might grasp the recollected both as itself, and as earlier, but as discontinuous
with its present self. These rough descriptions, each of which finds an echo
in the more perplexed moments of mundane self-experience (even short of
psychosis), suggest that solipsistic self-identity would be a primitive affair
with porous and equivocal boundaries. Anchored securely in the embodied,
 SOLIPSISM 25

living present, it would be subject to strange permutations as retention gives

way to recolleetion.
A further source of the ego's identity is found at the level of desire.
Husserl suggests that underlying the social stratum of the "person" there is
a "faeticity, in itself beyond our comprehension," an "obseure underlying
basis" of eharaeter, latent dispositions, and motivations (IdII 2881). The
embodied eharacter of the solipsistie subject means that before making overt
ehoices I am drawn to, or repelled by, the world's offerings according to an
ultimately idiosyneratie logic. One person delights in sounds, another does
not; one loves to lie upon the bare earth, another abhors its filth, ete.
Earlier we saw that the solipsistie world of things was a world of original
value; now we see that the values things have for the subject reveals its own
"nature," who it iso What the ego finds attraetive and repulsive reveals the
workings of what Husserl calls the "total style and habitus of the subject"
(IdII 290); before playing a publie role which bestows upon me a persona,
prior to being for the Other, my responses to stimuli, my motivations, my
desires already exhibit a "pervasive unitary style" (IdII 291). This solipsistic
style, this identity at the level of desire, leaves its trace in intersubjective
experience as fetishism.
Against the horizon of normativity constituted in the public wOrld, the
order of rank established among things on the basis of the ego's faeticity
appears as fetishistic, as the irruption of strange, compulsive preferences that
do not originate in the (public) persona. Without being formed through
social sanetioning, the factic "style and habitus" of the solipsistic subject
remains uninhibited, creates the world in its image. Not that the subject
would be a slave to its every momentary passion, its identity exhausted by the
charaeter of its impulses. Such a subject could perhaps become quite refined
in executing projects, delaying, laying aside, organizing its obsessions by
means of a will that molded its desires-not in the light of "principle," of
course, but according to a kind of aesthetics of satisfaction. Initiating courses
of aetion whose imagined end lay in the future, recollecting what had been
done, integrating such beginnings and endings into the equivocal order of
the own-world and not the definite order of the publie wOrld, the solipsistic
subject could actively "style" its existence in Nietzsche's sense, craft an "order
of rank" among its "wills" on the basis of a dominant will. 15
But even if the solipsistic subject could bring a certain order to its
desires, it is not clear that it would do so in the name of a unitary self,
constituting an identity for itself. Could the solipsistic subject grasp itself as

15 Friedrich Nietzsche, 1he Gay Science, trans. Waller Kaufmann (New York: Vintage,
1974), 232-33. Together with all developmental questions, the question Nietzsche raises in The
Genealogy 0/ Morals about whether the subject must be ''bred'' to make promises, i.e., to will
across time, must be set aside here.
26 STEVEN GALT CROWELL

a unity at all, i.e., unite its moments projeetively and retrospeetively into a
"history"? Or would it only experience its willing against a horizon of
fragmentation, dislocation, hiatus, with a shifting and equivocal sense of its
own being?
ft
If Heidegger is right that a temporally existin being can gain a sense of
"being-a-whole" only as a "being-toward-death," 6 then Maurice Natanson
supplies the answer to our question:

Within the egological sphere, it would seem that death is

a possibility hidden to the self, a seeret that will be dis-
closed only in the progression to sociality . . . [D]eath
becomes a possibility for the self when the ego has attained
socialization; before that, in the ~urely egological aspeet of
its being, the self is 'pre-finite,.1

The pre-finitude of the solipsistie subjeet is not a sense of immortality,

whieh presupposes the conseiousness of mortality. The phenomenological
issue concerns, rather, the status of experienced time, and in partieular the
experience of beginnings and endings. I could certainly grasp the relative
beginning and ending of my projeets, but that is insufficient basis for
constituting the idea of my own "absolute" beginning or ending. I would
experience myself as always having been, and so also my end or demise could
not be an issue for me. Though I would experience the destruetion, dis-
appearance, and emergence of other ereatures (as qualified in the equivocal
order of nature), birth and death could have no meaningful application to
myself.
Thus the Sehutzian fundamental anxiety-"I know that I shall die and I
fear to die"-is possible only in sOciety,18 and the Heideggerian thesis that
being-toward-death is constitutive of Dasein must allow for the effeets of a
conerete (though non-independent) stratum of pre-finite existence, prior to
the distinetion between authentie and inauthentie, in whieh the self projeets
itself upon possibilities for being without totalizing them against the horizon
of "my ownmost ~OSSibility" as the "possibility of the impossibility of any
existence at all." 9 The solipsistie self could not be as a whole, and its
"history" would not take form as an epie, but as a Iyrie or an essay.

16 Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (New
York: Harper & Row, 1962), 303.
17 Maurice Natanson, The lourneying Self: A Study in Philosophy and Sodal Role (London:
Addison-Wesley, 1970), 137.
18 Alfred Schutz, "On Multiple Realities," in Collected Papers, Volurne L' Ihe Problem 0/
Sodal Reality, ed. Maurice Natanson (Tbe Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1973), 228.
19 Heidegger, Being and Time, op. eit., 307.
 SOLIPSISM 27

Were I unable to collect myself as a whole in terms of a consciousness

of my death as being-toward-the-end, my self-experience would oscillate
between continuity and discontinuity, being every bit as polymorphous as my
experience of the discontinuous identity of the nature-thing. Occupying the
living present with a vivid sense of its own egoity but without the notion of
absolute beginning and ending (birth and death), the ego could not gain the
idea of its "numerical" identity. Not that it would recollect itself as "someone
else;" it would simply not have the idea of itself as a continuous, numerically
one, being.
Everyday life betrays traces of this pre-finite condition-for example, in
the strange feeling of "oneness" with all things. Freud's analysis in terms of
a "primary narcissism" is supplemented by the phenomenology of solipsistic
experience, where oneness signifies not a primary expansiveness or gener-
osity of spirit but rather a stratum where the boundaries of the self are so
ill-defined and equivocal that everything other can be experienced as being
me. More to the point, the analysis suggests that my incredulity at my own
death is not necessarily to be understood as a flight from it, from the funda-
mental nullity of my being. The strange sense of the impossibility of my
death would instead be the mark of the pre-finite being of the solipsistic ego
in the living present haunting my social existence, a certain lightness and
"unconcern" that from the social standpoint appears as irresponsibility and
denial, though from the solipsistic standpoint it merely reflects the "ordinary"
way meaning is constituted at that level. 20 Death lies altogether "outside,"
in the transcendence of the Other, and to say"1 die" is to speak a language
the Other has taught me. Having been taught, there is part of me that con-
tinues to inhabit the world as though I had not been.
At this point we may draw several aspects of the solipsistic self and its
world together in a tentative summation of the meaning that belongs to the
solipsistic order as a whole. Let us start by invoking Natanson one last time:

Loneliness is prior to moods and antecedent to disposi-

tions. In one sense it is also prior to the world of fellow
men, the absence or distance of Others. We may under-
stand the loneliness of the ego as its immersion in the

20 That our strange "delusions" of immortality are not simply a function of fleeing the
anxious consciousness of death can be seen in the fact that these "delusions" can grip us even
where death is desired. Georg Büchner's Danton expresses both the strange sense that it is
impossible to die, and the regrettable character of that fact: "We're all of us buried alive like
kings in three or four layers of coffins: the sky, our houses, our shirts and our coats. We scratch
at the coffin lid for fifty long years. If only we could believe in annihilation! It would at least be
a comfort. There's no hope in death; it's only a less complicated form of decay than life." Georg
Büchner,Danton's Death, in Complete PlaysandProse, trans. Carl Richard Mueller (New York:
Hili and Wang, 1963), 57.
28 STEVEN GALT CROWELL

anonymous and purely typical stream of perceptual life in

which neither the ~erson nor the alter ego has yet emerged
as a true identity. 1

This essay has all along sought to uncover the order of meaning that belongs
to this specific sort of anonymity and typicality. If it is now identified with
a primordial "loneliness," we must try to understand how solipsistic loneli-
ness-"prior to moods and antecedent to dispositions"-is to be understood.
Does "ordinary" loneliness showa trace of the solipsistic, betray the strange-
ness of a mode of being-in-the-world ultimately intelligible only by recourse
to a stratum prior to the absence of Others? But what could it mean to call
a self, prior to the encounter with others, "lonely"? How would such
loneliness be experienced as the meaning of the own-world's order, one
whose trace is borne in social loneliness?
The existential category of alienation may provide a eIue to the character
of solipsistic loneliness insofar as it suggests the passing of the social order
as a whole. To be alienated is to experience oneself outside the social order,
to find it indifferent. But here too, as in the case of the absurd, the exper-
ience of alienation depends on a contrast between the self and the social; as
the collapse of social significance it presupposes it and, like the absurd,
cannot provide a positive characterization of solipsistic loneliness. Taken on
its own, that loneliness cannot be described as alienated.
We come eIoser to a positive sense when we note that the socialized self
is lonely not merely when others are absent, but also when they are present
and one feels that one is of no concern to them. This sort of loneliness
cannot characterize the solipsistic subject who has yet to encounter the
Other, but in recognizing that here, as also in the case of alienation,
loneliness takes shape against a certain lack of concern, a certain indiffer-
ence, we locate what is most distinctive, and strange, about the solipsistically
constituted order of meaning. For though the solipsist can be absorbed and
obsessed by the world, the world cannot definitively matter to it. Solipsistic
loneliness would not be an affect but rather a certain lack of seriousness or
"concern." The equivocal order of the own-world can fascinate or terrify me,
but it cannot finally matter to me because I matter to no one-not even
myself. Here my loneliness has nothing to do with the Other but sterns from
my status as pre-finite; for without the consciousness of my death, my
projects (such as they are) lack "weight," lack the definiteness bequeathed to
them by the consciousness of their irrevocability. The loneliness of the
solipsistic ego, then, would be precisely the impossibility of Angst.
For the same reason, the solipsistic world is not "uncanny" (unheimlich),
the source of being "not at horne" in the social world. The sense of the

21 Natanson, The Joumeying Self, op. eil., 23.

 SOLIPSISM 29

uncanny arises when the social meaning, constituted as what "matters," slips
away and no other meaning emerges to replace it. Tbe experience of the
strange, on the other hand, is not the experience of an ultimately meaning-
less being eating away at the veneer of the everyday order, but rather of
another order of meaning-one in which things are playful, duplicitous,
tricky, equivocal and, finaUy, lacking in substance since the one who could
take them seriously is unable to lend to its own existence the weight of
finitude.
Which is not to say that the order of the strange is not to be taken
seriously within the social world. Indeed because it is a clue to an an-archic
dimension of our own being, it deserves the most serious attention as that
which has been "overcome" in order that the world can matter. Tbe truth of
solipsism, then, lies in the possibility of experiencing the strange as the trace
of an always already overcome order of an equivocal, fetishistic, an-archic
(groundless) world that floats free of the genuine depth of seriousness, of
Care. Tbe crucial philosophical act, then, would be to grasp the achievement
of that overcoming: it is not as a solus ipse facing my own death that the
world attains its weight, but rather only when my pre-finitude is "invested"
with death-and so with responsibility-from a certain "outside." Tbis cannot
have the character of a law of reason that I could conceivably give myself or
find in the recesses of the equivocal; it can only come from the "transcen-
dence" of the Other who caUs me to account, demands my justification. Tbe
Other, then, would not be the source of my selfhood as such, but of my
humanity. As Husserl knew, "the other man is constitutionaUy the intrinsical-
ly first human being" (CM 124).
 OSBORNE P. WIGGINS, JR.

NATANSON ON PHENOMENOLOGY IN PSYCBIATRY

§1. Introduction: Phenomenology in Psychiatry

This essay arises out of reflections on Maurice Natanson's rieh artiele,

"Philosophy and Psyehiatry.nl To some extent I have tried simply to inter-
pret Natanson, but I have also taken the liberty of adding to and diverging
from what he has written. Natanson's work, in its multifaceted implications,
actually invites such liberty on the reader's part. But the reader, in taking
this liberty, thereby ineurs a duty always to respect the work. Hence if I have
made claims that Natanson has not, it is only in an attempt to think through
his claims. I have here purposefully chosen the phrase "thinking through his
claims." It is like a person with seriously defective eyesight being given the
opportunity to see through the proper spectacles; if one does it, one's vision
is much enhanced, truer and more detailed.
Natanson's essay concems the contributions that philosophy can make to
psychiatry. If the philosopher is rooted in the analytic tradition, the
contribution would probably be characterized as an analysis of the meaning
of psychiatrie terms. If the philosopher's orientation is phenomenological,
however, the contribution is likely to lie, first, in a clarification of the
patient's experience and, second, in an exploration of the best methods for
providing psychiatrie access to this experience (232-238).
Natanson thinks that the phenomenological philosopher can help
illuminate the field of psychiatry by marking out some distinctions that
would appear to be central to the understanding of psychopathology. He
begins by explicating the essential struetures of "normal" experience and
"abnormal" experience (240-252). In this essay Natanson focuses on "the
pathological itself, or, to use a somewhat outdated term, the morbid" (248).
"Morbidity" is, for hirn, a term which covers "the full range of mental illness"
(ibid). Psyehosis is only one case of the morbid, its most "radical illustration"
(ibid). Natanson's claim, then, is that there is an eidetics of the morbid just
as there is an eidetics of the normal. This, it should be noted, is a bold

1 Maurice Natanson, "Philosophy and Psychiatry," in Phenomenology, Role, and Reason:

Essays on the Coherence and Deformation of Social Reality (Springfieid: CharIes C. Thomas,
1974), 232-264. Subsequent references to this essay will be incorporated into the text.

31
S. Galt Crowell (ed.), The Prism ofthe Self, 31-41.
© 1995 Kluwer Academic Publishers.
32 Os BORNE P. WIGGINS, JR.

claim. It implies that the differences between normal and morbid experience
are not merely factual differences; normal and morbid experience are rather
essentially different. Normal and morbid experience exemplify two essentially
different types of human existence. Making sense of morbidity, then, means
conceptualizing a possible mode of human life which is, fortunately, not too
often encountered in reality.

§2. Morbidity and the Lifeworld

Natanson begins his phenomenology by asking first about the origin of

our experience of the morbid person. Where and how do we first encounter
the morbid person? We first encounter the morbid person where we
encounter all persons, in the commonsense world of everyday life, the
lifeworld. Indeed, it would be impossible to encounter the morbid person
anywhere else. For, in order for us to experience a person as morbid, his
morbidity must stand out against a pervasive background of the normal, and
everyday life within the sociallifeworld is the very definition of normalcy.
Normallife is the life we share within the lifeworld (240-244).
Since Natanson views normalcy as defined by the style of life present
within a lifeworld, he deerns it imperative to address the often raised claim
of the relativity of normalcy. Societies differ in their standards of normalcy:
what is considered normal in one society is judged abnormal in another.
Natanson admits this variability, but he points out that each society does
have some standards of normalcy and abnormality. The distinction between
the normal and the abnormal is universal. The "normal" is that which is
taken for granted as typical human life within that particular society. The
"abnormal" is that which defies the typifications of that society. The ab-
normal is that which, relative to the society in question, is strange or other.
Sociologists frequently make such a claim. But they usually have no way of
explaining why "strangeness" and "otherness" are essential to the very nature
of human life within any lifeworld. Natanson does (244-246).
Let me now formulate as succinctly as I can what I take to be Natanson's
central theses. Essential to human life within the lifeworld is its inter-
subjectivity. "Intersubjectivity" means that the meanings which things and
events have within the lifeworld are more or less shared meanings. By
speaking of "more or less shared meanings," I am maintaining that objects
and events do not exhibit precisely the same meanings to everyone: different
individuals will intend the same objects in slightly different ways. But in
their typical senses the objects and events are the same. It must be
remembered that, for Schutz and Husserl, "typical" signifies generic and
pre-predicative: typical meanings are generic, pre-predicative meanings. The
generic meanings of pre-predicative typifications are not the general
meanings of predication and language, although the generic meanings of
 PHENOMENOLOGY IN PSYCHIATRY 33

typifications function as the perceptual basis from which first-order general

linguistic meanings are abstracted. To speak of intersubjectivity, then, is to
refer to the fact that within the lifeworld people share a common stock of
typifications through which objects and events are perceived and interpreted
(240-248).
Following Natanson, I can now characterize "morbidity" as a root failure
of intersubjectivity. Tbe reverse of intersubjectivity would be solipsism. What
renders the morbid person morbid is that his I is a solitary I, a solus ipse. By
"solus ipse" I mean an experiencing subject who typifies objects and events
but through typifications which are his alone. Tbe solus ipse is a subject
inhabiting a world which it alone has constituted (248-252).
Note that in my definition of solus ipse I claimed that this subject typifies
objects and events. Its world is a true world; i.e., it is an ordered whole of
objects and events. Tbe morbid mind is not the wholly disordered mind.
Although psychiatrists today prefer to call mental illnesses "mental
disorders, " this is "disorder" only if we take the normal mind to be the single
standard of "order." Taken in its own right, the morbid mind is ordered.
Natanson gives us an example of such an order:

Let us imagine a man who receives messages from a distant

sphere which is not precisely a planet but an orb of special
character which defies further description. Tbese messages
are transmitted to hirn by a process akin to telepathy of the
internaiorgans: certain intelligence is received by the heart,
other information by the liver or stornach. Tbe content of
the messages cannot be translated into intersubjective form,
but this is unnecessary because certain men are attuned to
their meaning, and such men may be recognized by special
characteristics which manifest themselves only on certain
days and at certain magical places (249).

Commenting on a person with such amental "disorder," Natanson writes,

"Far from such a person lacking an ordered wOrld, his world reeks with
order: everything has connections, everything is bound to something else,
everything has its proper translation, its interior and transcendent signifi-
cance" (249). Tbe morbid mind thus constitutes an ordered world, but it is
its world alone. Tbe typifications through which this constitution occurs are
not shared.
We can understand this solitariness better if we explicate a further
characteristic that Natanson ascribes to morbidity: "Tbe causal structure of
the world is known only by the individual and can be translated through hirn
alone. A sense of epistemic grandeur pervades the scene" (249). Tbis idea is
related to a later analogy Natanson draws between morbid experience and
dreaming: "Dreams are in principle solipsistic events. We attend to the
34 OSBORNE P. WIGGlNS, JR.

reports of dreams; we cannot attend to the dreams directly unless they are
our own" (255). The morbid person and the dreamer are analogous in that
each inhabits a solipsistic realm, and this means that the world that each
experiences can be experienced directly only by hirn. The "causal structure"
of the morbid person's world can be originarily given to hirn alone.
Negatively expressed, other people cannot directly encounter the morbid
world. And this applies even to other morbid people: even other people with
the same mental illness can never directly encounter the world of the morbid
individual. Therefore, "the causal structure of the world ... can be translated
through hirn alone": only the morbid person can convey to others the order
of his world. If others are to know about it, they must learn about it second
hand, through the reports of the privileged observer. There exists no
alternative access to it. The "epistemic grandeur" of the morbid mind, then,
issues from that fact that it alone has direct access to its typified realities.
The morbid world in its originary givenness is not intersubjectively available
to others, not even to other morbid minds.
Any indirect access to the world of a morbid person faces a sizable obsta-
de, however. Natanson writes of the morbid person: "he cannot render what
he experiences an object for his own inspection, he is unable to stand back
and regard his own situation. Rather he is his situation" (249). The morbid
person lives an order he cannot comprehend. Natanson's account here
resembles what Erwin Straus writes about the schizophrenic patient:

[H]e cannot understand himself and his world. He experi-

ences it only in a sequence of moments of being overpow-
ered. Understanding, shared or individual, demands some
kind of indifference, the possibility of detaching oneself
from the impact of impressions, of reflecting about one-
self[·f

Indifference and detachment are conditions for understanding oneself and

one's world. It is this indifference and detachment that the morbid mind
lacks. The morbid mind thus employs an interpretive schema to make sense
of its wOrld, but it cannot make sense of its own interpretive schema. As
Natanson writes, "The normal man is capable of rendering his own
(interpretive) schema an object for his own inspection and analysis; the
morbid man cannot characterize his ordering principles, he can only express
them through his naive behavior. . .. The patient secretes the principles
which might explain his being. In this sense, the morbid person is essentially

2 Erwin W. Straus, "Aesthesiology and Hallucinations," in Existence: A New Dimension in

Psychiatry and Psycholo~, ed. Rollo May, Ernest Angel, and Henri F. Ellenberger (New York:
Basic Books, 1958), 166-67.
 PHENOMENOLOGY IN PSYCHIATRY 35

secretive" (256).
For this reason other people, especially psychiatrists, face a difficult
problem of understanding. They have no direct access to the morbid world.
They must rely on the reports and behavior of the morbid person as indirect
manifestations of that hidden world. But these manifestations, when judged
by normal experience, seem genuinely "disordered." The commonsense
typifications of the lifeworld, we have said, merely deern them "strange."
Psychiatrists must thus move to another level of typification. They must
construct their own ideal types in order to conceptualize the patient's
experience (255-256). The psychiatrist's ideal types are constructs of the
second order. They are conceptual constructs geared to delineating the main
components of pathological experience. According to Natanson, the
psychiatrist endeavors "to relate the patient's world-order to the method-
ological constructs of psychiatry. Through aseries of artificially genera ted
typifications of morbid reality the psychiatrist attempts to comprehend the
ordering principle of his patient's world, and so come to terms with the
problems of treatment" (256).
Psychiatrie treatment is an encounter between two human beings, and
like every such encounter particular values undergird and direct it. Natanson
wams us, however, against viewing the psychiatrist's commitment to treating
the patient as predicated on values peculiar to psychiatrie ethics. The
commitment to healing is more fundamentally human than that. It is, we
might say, "pre-psychiatric" in the sense that it is a commitment that comes
with daily human existence within the lifeworld. It is the commitment that
the other people we encounter at least be capable of sharing a common
world with uso It is a commitment that every human being be able to
participate in the community of some lifeworld. Psychiatrie treatment rests
on a commitment to the basic goodness of intersubjectivity (251-252).

§3. Etiology and Therapy

In the section of his essay entitled "Etiology and Therapy," Natanson

contrasts the phenomenological method in psychiatry with the natural
scientific method (256-260). The natural scientific method seeks to
comprehend occurrences by specifying their causes. Natanson notes that the
phrase "scientific explanation" is usually assumed to refer necessarily to
causal explanation. By virtue of this assumption the main, if not the sole,
scientific question is the question "Why?," and the answer to this question
lies in supplying some "because of . . ." (256). Indeed, in present-day
psychiatry preeminence is awarded to etiological studies of mental patholo-
gies.
Natanson points out, however, that any causal explanation of "why" some-
thing occurs depends upon a prior knowledge of "what" it is that has
36 OSBORNE P. WIGGINS, JR.

occurred. One must first know what it is that requires causal explanation
(257-258). This requirement suggests a central role for phenomenology in
psychiatry. In the Logical Investigations, Husserl tried to clarify the approach
peculiar to phenomenology by claiming that it provided a "presup-
positionless" description of the phenomena in question. 3 By "presupposi-
tionless" Husserl meant that the phenomenologist did not seek to incorpo-
rate the phenomena into any presupposed theory or conceptual system.
Theories of all sorts were to be set aside, and the phenomenologist was to
attend faithfully to the phenomena and describe them precisely as they
presented themselves.
If this method were employed in psychiatry, it would require that the
phenomenological psychiatrist attend to the patient's mental pathology
precisely as the patient experiences it. The task o[ the phenomenologist consists
in describing the patient's experiences exc/usively but fully as they are lived
through by the patient under examination. The adverb "exclusively" is
important here because it signifies that the psychiatrist is not to impute to
the patient any experiences or any causes or motives of experience for which
there is no evidence in this particular case. This suggests a phenomeno-
logical version of "Occam's Razor": 00 not multiplyexperiences unnecessar-
ily. That is, do not ascribe to a person any experience for which there is
insufficient evidence. Moreover, the qualification "fully" is necessary because
it means that the psychiatrist is to develop a rich, detailed, and thorough
description of the patient's experiences. The phenomenologist is to explore
the patient's experiences to their fullest extent. 4
I can now state more adequately what makes such a study "presup-
positionless." The phenomenologist does not assume that since a person is
having experiences of a certain sort, the underlying causes of these exper-
iences must be of a certain sort. In order to make such an assumption, one
would, of course, have to rely on a "theory," no matter how elementary or
sophisticated, that delineates a connection between experiences and their
underlying causes. And such reliance is prohibited by the phenomenological
requirement not to presuppose theories. The phenomenological approach
can thus be characterized as non-etiological, except in so far as some of the
experiences through which the patient actually lives might be viewed as
"causing" others. 5

3 Edmund Husserl, Logical Invesligalions, Vol. I, trans. J. N. Findlay (New York:

Humanities Press, 1970),263-266.
4 O. P. Wiggins, M. A Schwartz, and M. Spitzer, "Phenomenological/Descriptive Psychiatry:
Tbe Methods of Edmund Husserl and Karl Jaspers," in Phenomenology, Language, and
Schizophrenia, ed. Manfred Spitzer, Friedrich Uehlein, Michael A Schwartz, and Christoph
Mundt (New York: Springer Verlag, 1992), 46-69.
5 Ibid.
 PHENOMENOLOGY IN PSYCHIA1RY 37

Explanatory theories can be introduced later, onee the phenomenologist

had made it clear in detail just what it is that the theories are to explain. If
causal theories are applied too hastily, however-i.e., before the
phenomenological description has made clear what experiences the patient
has actually had-they risk being misapplied.
Although Natanson characterizes the phenomenological method as
"description," it does not in this case signify a description in the sense of a
report on what is directly observed (257). For in psychiatry, access to the
patient's experienee requires what is usually called "understanding" (Ver-
stehen) (259-260). The descriptive method of phenomenology, as Husserl
depicted it, did not involve Verstehen. Understanding must be used, however,
when it is a question of comprehending another person 's mental life.
Understanding consists in an integral apprehension of another person's
embodied experienees. Such understanding is "psychophysically neutral." It
does not grasp solely the mental; nor does it focus on the somatic only. It
rather apprehends both the mental and the physical in their interwoven
givenness. Understanding attends to the person as an integral psychosomatic
whole, i.e., as a whole in which the mental and the physical do not form
separate ontological spheres.
Only understanding can appreciate the person in his or her individuality
and uniqueness. Theories are general. And, as Natanson notes, patients wish
to be comprehended in their uniqueness (258-259). Moreover, the patient
first wishes that his illness be understood as he lives it. He does not live the
causes of his illness, and thus causal theories appear to the patient to refer
to something other than his illness as he experiences it firsthand. Causal
theories may be valuable for treatment. But they are not sufficient in
thernselves.
Crucial to such phenomenological understanding is, according to
Natanson, "the willingness of the physician to see the structural features of
the patient's world as the latter livingly sees them" (259). Or again, "seeing
is the first therapeutic act" (260). Why this emphasis on "seeing"? Does this
add anything to the notion of understanding as explicated thus far? 1 think
it does. 1 suggest that what Natanson has in mind here is a process similar
to the one that Karl Jaspers deemed eentral to phenomenology in his
General Psychopathology.6
For Jaspers, phenomenology provides only one of the methods of the
scienee of psychopathology.1 Jaspers thinks that, because the psychopathol-
ogist airns at comprehending the mental life of another person, namely, the

6 Karl Jaspers, General P~hopathology, trans. J. Hoenig and Marian W. Hamilton

(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1963).
7 Ibid., 55-57.
38 OSBORNE P. WIGGINS, JR.

patient, phenomenology here takes the form of Verstehen. 8 Moreover, in

understanding his patient's experiences, the psychopathologist must
"intuitively represent" (anschaulich vergegenwtirtigen) these experiences to
himself.9 "Intuitive" is used here, I suggest, to mean "graphie," "detailed," or
"vivid." "Represent" is used in the sense of "as if it were itself directly
present." Tbe patient's mental processes, because they are the mental
processes of another person, are not and cannot be directly given to the
psychiatrist. Nevertheless, the psychiatrist is to "represent" them to himself
as ifthey were directly given. He is thus to represent them to himself in all of
their dejiniteness and graphic detail. 10 It would be possible, of course, for
the psychiatrist to imagine his patient's experiences in a vague and indistinct
manner. For Jaspers, this would constitute a faHure of scientific rigor. As
Jaspers himself expresses it:

In histology it is required that, when examining the cerebral

cortex, we should account for each fiber and each cello
Phenomenology places upon us entirely analogous de-
mands: we should account for each mental phenomenon,
each experience which comes to light in the exploration of
patients and their self-descriptions. We should in no case
remain satisfied with a global impression [Gesamteindruck]
and a few details selected ad hoc, but we should know each
single particularity and how to apprehend and judge it. l1

I suggest that what Natanson calls "seeing" Jaspers terms "intuitive repre-
sentation. "
Natanson insists on the therapeutic value of such seeing. Phenomen-
ological seeing must play an important role in the psychiatrist's commitment
to alter the patient's world. As Natanson puts it, "seeing is the first thera-
peutic act:

Take physic, pomp;

Expose thyself to feel what wretches feel" (260).

But why should the psychiatrist's seeing of the patient's world have a
therapeutic effect on the patient? Natanson says it is because it moves
beyond medical technique to an existential dimension (260). Before the

8 Ibid., 55.
9 Ibid.

10 Wiggins, Schwartz, and Spitzer, "Phenomenological/Descriptive Psychiatry," op. eit.

11 Jaspers, General Psychopathology, op. eit., 56.
 PHENOMENOLOGY IN PSYCHIAlRY 39

therapist worked so hard to understand, no one else had taken the trouble
to see the patient's world. No one else had ever shared his world to this
extent. No one else had ever participated this intimately in the reality which
is the patient's life. And it is from within this morbid world of the patient
that therapy must begin. A therapy which takes its bearings only from within
the normal world cannot succeed. As Natanson writes, "Without such
structural seeing, therapeutics becomes a mode of rhetoric, an instrument of
persuasion. And persuasion if it fails gives way to violence" (260). Natanson
is here warning that the psychiatrist's commitment to alter the patient's
world can easily go wrong if it does not honor the existential dimension that
genuine understanding opens up. Honoring the existential dimension means
that the doctor-patient relationship must take the form of what Gabriel
Marcel calls "presence" and "availability" (260). If this existential dimension
is not adequately appreciated, therapy can be transformed into force.
We recognize, then, that understanding as a phenomenological method
leads, if pursued faithfully, to an existential dimension in the doctor-patient
relationship. Natanson will trace this connection between the phenomeno-
logical and existential components of psychiatry in a final section of his
essay.

§4. Phenomenology and the Uncovering 0/ the Existential Dimension

In a "Methodological Afterword," Natanson links the phenomenological

method he has been advocating thus far with "the existential dimension in
psychiatry" (261-264). This section is especially interesting for the new light
it sheds on what he wrote earlier. Thus far it might appear that the goal of
a phenomenologically informed psychiatry lies in a therapy, guided by
understanding, that would reintegrate the morbid person into the social
lifeworld; the return to normal life within the lifeworld signals successful
treatment and the health of the self. Natanson's view is crucially different.
Normallife within the lifeworld is pervaded by bad faith. Normal life itself
suffers, if not from its own kind of pathology, at least from a critical
blindness. The phenomenological method, consequently, does not simply
ratify the lifeworld. It rather penetrates the blindness of bad faith and lays
open the disturbing existential dimension of human life that common sense
conceals.
Natanson argues for a necessary tie between phenomenological and
existential philosophy. He insists that existential thought is related to
phenomenology not just historically but also systematically. While exist-
entialist thinkers differ on many issues, they do share a concern with
explicating the nature and status of the human self. This self is first defined
by its being in the world, and then the notion of being in the world is
further developed through analyses offear, dread, guilt, aloneness, and death
40 OSBORNE P. WIGGINS, JR.

(261).
Such categories can be properly appreciated only from the phenomeno-
logical point of view. The phenomenological point of view is that point of
view attained through the phenomenological "bracketing" or epoche. This
epoche sets aside, puts out of action, or makes no use of the commonsense
belief in the reality of the lifeworld. The commonsense belief in the reality
of the lifeworld consists in taking its typifications for granted. Within the
epoche the phenomenologist attends to and explicates the essential workings
of these typifications; but she does not herself assurne the validity and
accuracy of the typifications (262-263).
Furthermore, putting these typifications out of action brings to light
aspects of human life that the typifications ignore. These aspects are
precisely those of fear, dread, guilt, aloneness, and death. The basic
categories of existentialism, then, can be defined and comprehended only
within the philosophical attitude achieved through the phenomenological
epoche (263).
Rather than saying that commonsense typifications ignore these
fundamental realities it would perhaps be more accurate to claim that
typifications "socialize" them: anguish is viewed as an extreme form of
unhappiness; aloneness is social isolation; and death is what happens to
others (263). This "socialization" of the existential realities renders them
avoidable: one can strive to be happy and thos avoid anguish; one can form
strong bonds of friendship and love with other people and thus avoid
aloneness; and finally one can avoid talking or thinking about death.
Natanson thus points to "an internal inconsistency in man's being and the
being of the social order" (262). Living with others in the social lifeworld,
I am assigned typical roles to play. Playing these roles places demands on me
that are frequently incompatible with the realization of my own selfhood.
Hence I face a choice: either Irespond appropriately to the societal
demands and deny my self, or I circumvent the societal demands in order to
develop my self. We might even speak here of a kind of "repression," as long
as we realize that this "repression" is not produced by psychic mechanisms
within the individual but rather by social bonds within the lifeworld.
This "internal inconsistency in man's being and the being of the social
order" is usually not even noticed by theorists of social life. Theorists
frequently hold out some possibility for harmonizing the inherent require-
ments of selfhood with performing the roles that society places at one's
disposal. Existentialist philosophers, however, have emphasized the dilemma
posed by the inconsistency. For the existentialists, the denial of selfhood that
comes from conformity to society's roles is "bad faith." And most people live
in bad faith, not noticing the inevitable sacrifice of self that occurs in the
course of ordinary social life (262).
This bad faith can be adopted by psychiatrie theorists, too. Hence
theories arise whose main aim consists in helping people adapt to the social
 PHENOMENOLOGY IN PSYCHIATRY 41

roles available to them. Morbid people are the maladapted par excellence.
And consequently, theories of pathology aim at "correcting" the morbidity
to the point at which the individual becomes "functional," i.e., able to
negotiate the demands of the social lifeworld successfully. "Successful
treatment" means the former patient is now able to live in bad faith
(263-264).
Phenomenological seeing, however, makes the lifeworld appear "strange."
Phenomenological seeing becomes possible only within the epoche. The
phenomenological attitude is necessary if we are to see those aspects of
human existence within the lifeworld that are designated by existentialist
categories like anguish, nausea, aloneness, death, etc. As Schutz has noted,
commonsense life exercises its own kind of epoche, and this "'epoche of the
natural attitude' is the opposite of the epoche of the phenomenological
attitude."12 The taken-for-grantedness of the natural attitude sets aside any
doubts or questions regarding the validity of commonsense typifications.
Living within the natural attitude is living in the blindness of bad faith.
Within this "suspension of doubt" the realities of the life designated by the
existentialist categories cannot appear. These realities are rather socialized
and rendered harmless. The typifications of the lifeworld "normalize" our
perception (262-263).
The natural scientific approach to psychiatric therapy, accepting, as it
does, le prejuge du monde, usually operates within such "normalized" vision.
It too remains blind to the existential components of human experience. Its
goal is at best the successful reintegration of the patient into the inter-
subjective lifeworld (264).
The phenomenological attitude allows the psychiatrist to remain aware
of the disintegrative elements of human existence. It thereby permits therapy
to proceed to a confrontation with these elements: both therapist and
patient can come to terms with the ineluctable existential constants of
human life. Therapy thus reaches a deeper level than simply reintegration
into the lifeworld because it recognizes that this lifeworld-despite its
apparent "givenness"-can at any moment be placed in question by experienc-
es of dread, death, guilt, boredom, or nausea. In these experiences the
individual is again separated from the ordinariness of intersubjective life.
The individual is again "alone," only now in a way that is not morbid but is
rather starkly human. In such cases, having lost the ordinary intersubjectivity
of the lifeworld, the patient needs the intersubjectivity provided by the
therapist-patient bond. This bond is made possible by the kind of phenom-
enology that recognizes both the claims of the lifeworld and also the
experiences that can make those claims appear meaningless.

12 Alfred Schutz, Collected Papers L' The Problem o[ Social Reality, ed. Maurice Natanson
(The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1962), 229.
 FRED KERSTEN

NOTES FROM THE UNDERGROUND:

Merleau-Ponty and Husserl's Sixth Cartesian Meditation

§1
When 1 went to college in the 1950s 1 became an Existentialist. The problem
with Existentialism is not so much that, like Romanticism, it is a "disease,"
but that, like Romanticism, it is an "incurable disease." 1 became an
"incurable Existentialist." 1 am also sure that even before 1 went to college
1 was an Existentialist even though 1 had not yet acquired the label. The
label itself was something 1 checked out of the college library. Never having
mastered the card catalog system, and too embarrassed to ask for help, 1
found myself back in the library stacks staring at aseries of bound volumes
of University of Nebraska Studies. They did not look promising; for example,
in the volume for 1951 1 found several very long monographs on planting
and growing potatoes. But bound in with the potato monographs, and what
saved me from the a career in agriculture, was a long essay by Maurice
Natanson: A Critique of lean-Paul Sartre's Ontology. That essay made a
lasting impression on me. And although it may seem irrelevant to try to
explain how 1 came to realize that I am an Existentialist, or at least how 1
came to pin that label on my sleeve, and although it may seem unfair to
remind an author of his first book, there is nevertheless an important
connection between that essay and the present contribution to this volume.
The connection is this: At the very end of his essay, Natanson says that
"Sartre's greatest achievement is to have returned us to the nexus of
philosophical problems concerned with the ultimate isomorphism between
human subjectivity and human reality. We are returned, then, to the
profound core of Kant's Copernican revolution and to the question: Can
phenomenological ontology complete or advance beyond the Copernican
revolution ?"1
It is this last question which disturbed me then, for 1 did not understand
it, and which haunts me still because, understanding it, 1 have no answer. It
is a question which has occupied me in many different ways in practically

1 Maurice Natanson, A Critique o[ Jean-Paul Sartre's Ontology (Lincoln: University of

Nebraska, New Series No. 6, March, 1951), 114.

43
S. Galt Crowell (ed.), The Prism ofthe Self, 43-58.
© 1995 Kluwer Academic Publishers.
44 FRED KERSTEN

everything 1 have written. Most recently the question returned when 1

realized that it raised the very issue which set the limit to how far Maurice-
Merleau Ponty was willing to carry the thought of the late Husserl,
especially in the draft of Husserl's Sixth Cartesian Meditation, almost all of
which Merleau-Ponty had read in manuscript. It is precisely where phenom-
enology seeks to go beyond the Copernican revolution (as it finds its
expression in Husserl's phenomenology) that Merleau-Ponty balks, and not
just in his early writings.
This essay is one more attempt on my part to try again to deal with a
question that has stuck with me ever since 1 found Natanson among the
potatoes.

§2

The recent publication of Eugen Fink's draft of Husserl's Sixth Cartesian

Meditation (along with other manuscripts drafted by Fink)2 makes public
a manuscript that has a long underground career. For the fact is that not
just the existence but also the contents of the Sixth Cartesian Meditation
have long been known. To be sure, that knowledge was often, although not
entirely, transmitted by an important oral tradition in phenomenology
transpiring as much in seminars as in cabarets, bistros and even biker-bars
in university towns throughout the Western world. This oral tradition,
moreover, was never just a matter of hearsay with an occasional surfacing
from underground in published references to unpublished, privately circu-
lated work. The Sixth Meditation has had a career, indeed, a life of its own
which has made its mark on the fate of phenomenology at the end of the
twentieth century.
At first blush one might think that the underground career of the Sixth
Cartesian Meditation would have, at best, onlya peripheral influence on the
course of phenomenology since the 1930s. That may be true generally but
there are exceptions, and one exception is quite exceptional because it marks
a milestone in the surfacing from the underground which yields a fascinating
as weH as instructive sighting of the consequences of working out the line
of thought in the Sixth Cartesian Meditation. The exception I have in mind
is The Phenomenology o[ Perception of Maurice Merleau-Ponty, first
published in 1945. With The Phenomenology o[ Perception as a focus we can
realize a dual purpose: first, indicate the consequences of the "prehistory" or

2 Eugen Fink, VI. Cartesianische Meditation, Teil I: Die Idee einer transzendentalen
Methodenlehre, hrsg. Hans Ebelin, Jann Holl und Guy van Kerckhoven; Teil 2: Ergänzun&Sband,
hrsg. Guy van Kerckhoven (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1988 [Husserliana,
Dokumente, Band II/l, Band 11/2]).
 NOTES FROM THE UNDERGROUND 45

underground career of the Sixth Cartesian Meditation, and, second, the

shape which the Sixth Cartesian Meditation acquires and can acquire in the
"history" or public career of phenomenology.
On the first page of the Preface to The Phenomenology o[ Perception there
is the well-known reference to the Sixth Cartesian Meditation3 where
Merleau-Ponty says that although Husserl searched for a philosophy which
shall be a rigorous science that describes experience as it is "without taking
account of its psychological origin and the causal explanation which the
scientist, the historian or the sociologist might provide, yet Husserl in his
last works mentions a 'genetic phenomenology' and even a 'constructive
phenomenology'." For the "constructive" phenomenology of Husserl's last
works Merleau-Ponty mentions the unpublished Sixth Cartesian Meditation,
"to which G. Berger has kindly referred us."
The kind referral bore within it a reference to a still earlier surfacing
from the underground by way of a note to the Sixth Cartesian Meditation:
In his Le Cogito dans la Philosophie de Husserl, published in 1941,4 Berger
refers to the Sixth Cartesian Meditation edited by Eugen Fink which he,
Berger, "has had in his hands." It is another footnote, to be sure, but clearly
the Sixth Cartesian Meditation has been circulating, its underground career
crossing national borders.
Be that as it may, these are footnoted surfacings. There is another, un-
footnoted reference in Merleau-Ponty, an allusion to the Sixth Cartesian
Meditation, but no less specific for all that. It comes at the very end of the
Second Part of The Phenomenology o[ Perception ("The World as Perceived"),
at the conclusion of the Chapter entitled "Other People and the Human
World." It is a chapter that has led Merleau-Ponty to the problems of the
cogito, time, and freedom at a crucial but unmarked crossroads when he
realizes that he cannot provide a phenomenology of the social and others in
the wOrld without first establishing a transcendental "ground," and that just
there lies the heavy, sinking and dark heart of "ambiguity" he has endured
and sought to surpass for 419 closely printed pages on paper hardly "acid-
free."
"We have discovered, with the natural and social worlds," he says, "the
truly transcendental, which is not the totality of constituting operations
wherebya transcendent world, free from obscurity and impenetrable solidity,
is spread out before an impartial spectator, but that ambiguous life in which

3 Maurice Merleau-Ponty, La PMnombwLogie de la Perception (Paris: Gallimard, 1945),

ij English translation by Colin Smith, 1he PhenomenoLogy 0/ Perception (New York: The
Humanities Press, 1962), vii.
4 Gaston Berger,Le Cogito dons La Philosophiede Husserl (Paris: Aubier, 1941), 114f., and
115, note 1. Berger's reference is in the context of a somewhat different issue than that of
Merleau-Ponty, namely whether the constituting life of the transcendental Ego has an analogue
in the activity of consciousness in the world.
46 FRED !{ERSTEN

the forms of transcendence have their Ursprung, and which, through a

fundamental contradiction, puts me in communication with them, and on
this basis makes knowledge possible."5 To deal with this "fundamental
contradiction" Merleau-Ponty alludes to the 5ixth Cartesian Meditation
when he goes on to say that "to phenomenology understood as direct
description needs to be added a phenomenology of phenomenology" which
returns us to a more basic logos in the sense of one which both provides
objective thought its "relative validity" and assigns objective thought its place
in the scheme of perceptual experience. Tbe immediate solution here for
Merleau-Ponty is to "rediscover time beneath the subject, and ifwe relate to
the paradox of time those of the body, the world, the thing and other
people, we shall understand that beyond these there is nothing to under-
stand." Can this be anything else but precisely the telos of the 5ixth
Cartesian Meditation in its most ambitious formulation?
In a footnote to the passages and their paraphrases just cited, Merleau-
Ponty realizes that he has a bear by the tail because the telos remains
unfulfilled, that even when we "rediscover time beneath the subject" an
intractable dilemma remains. With the publication of the 5ixth Cartesian
Meditation we can now see that the dilemma in question is the central topic
of its later sections. Before we can root those sections from underground, it
is worth while formulating the dilemma in the fashion of Merleau Ponty:
Either phenomenological analysis of (transcendental) constitution
makes the world transparent and understandable; thus phenomenological
reflection would seem superfluous for describing mundane experience-i.e.,
a "mundane phenomenology" is ipso [acto and de jure a transcendental one;
orphenomenological analysis of (transcendental) constitution retains
something of the world and always remains in part opaque.
Correctly, I believe, Merleau-Ponty says that Husserl's thought, in the
later works, moves in the second direction, as for example in Formal and
Transcendental Logic, in certain parts of Experience and Judgment, and most
certainly in the 5ixth Cartesian Meditation. Tbus phenomenology turns out
to be an "infinite task" (5ixth Cartesian Meditation, §§ 11, 12). Yet, when
understood with respect to the second alternative, phenomenology reaches
a limit, though it sounds contradictory to say so. It is a "limit" in an "infinite
task," and here I think that Merleau-Ponty put his existentialist finger on
why the 5ixth Cartesian Meditation must deal with the idea of method,
specifically the "idea of a transcendental theory of method," the title of the
5ixth Cartesian Meditation. As it appears in the context of developing such
an idea of method, the dilemma determines the final shape of Merleau-
Ponty's "phenomenology of perception"-as unfinished as the dilemma is
unresolved: Tbe Tbird Part of The Phenomenology o[ Perception neither

5 Merleau-Ponty, op. eil., 41Sf; (English translation, 364t).

 NOTES FROM TI-IE UNDERGROUND 47

rediscovers time beneath the subject (but falls back on an account of

immanental time of the subject), nor does the idea of freedom relate the
paradox of time to those of body, world, or thing, nor does the idea of the
cogito return us to a more basic logos.
It is the unresolved dilemma that I wish to explore further in the Sixth
Cartesian Meditation, but always only in the light of the shape it gave to The
Phenomenology of Perception.

§3

What is it Merleau-Ponty read in the Sixth Cartesian Meditation? What

lurked in the background of the underground and which came to the surface
only at the end of The Phenomenology of Perception? What in fact did
Husserl and Fink cobble together, and what phenomenological buzzsaw did
they back into which left the Sixth Cartesian Meditation unpublished and
underground?

A. What Merleau-Ponty Read

The first four sections of the Sixth Cartesian Meditation, with its
imposing and very Kantian title of "The Idea of a Transcendental Theory of
Method," develop the idea that, in its application, the transcendental
phenomenological method inc1udes a "doctrine of elements" of which three
parts are identified for discussion: first, the phenomenologizing activity that
carries out the various phenomenological reductions; second, the subsequent
phenomenologizing which embarks on a "regressive analysis" of what is
disc10sed by the reductions-Merleau-Ponty's return to the more basic logos
in which "the forms of transcendence have their Ursprung;" and, third, the
phenomenologizing activity which is "constructive." In the following sections
5 through 7 we learn that by making explicit each of the three parts, the
"method" becomes aware of itself and finds itself as what may best be called
in English a "functional exponent" of constituting life, thereby distinguishing
itself from itself by exercising the phenomenological epoche. As a result, the
transcendental life of experience and the having of the world are disc1osed,
and the full extent of transcendental subjectivity is uncovered which inc1udes
the past history of the actualliving present, revealing transcendental others
within an intersubjective community or, as Merleau-Ponty says, "wherebya
transcendental world ... is spread out before an impartial on-Iooker."
This is rather heady stuff, especially when Husserl/Fink and Merleau-
Ponty proceed to tell us that there is an inherent ambiguity so that one may
ask whether the impartial on-Iooker is a phenomenological datum at all,
whether the time of the on-Iooker is the time of the transcendental
subjectivity explicating all the syntheses, unities and the like of world-
48 FRED KERSTEN

constituting. Here we have to rediscover "time beneath the subject," and it

is here that the idea of "constructive phenomenology" is introduced because,
although not a constituting life, the on-Iooker is nonetheless an exponential
factor of world-constituting allowed for in the first place by constituting life
itself (which is all that Merleau-Ponty examines in the third part of The
Phenomenology of Perception under the headings of "cogito," "temporality,"
and "freedom"). The "time beneath the subject," then, is not a phenomen-
ological datum in the sense of the first two parts of the theory of method;
hence it would seem that the only approach to it is by way of "construction."
Constituting-life-time and impartial on-Iooker-time, to coin locutions that
are like bumps on a potato, may have a commonness, but that does not
mean the on-Iooker turns up in an original presentive awareness or intuition
in Husserl's sense.
Accordingly sections 8 through 10 speIl out the grand task of detailing
the nature of "constructive" in contradistinction to "regressive" (or "genetic")
phenomenology. The next section, 11, considers the question that immedi-
ately arises of how "constructive" phenomenology can be a science, if not in
the sense of a "philosophy that shall be a rigorous science" at least in so me
sense of "science." In what sense? The final section, 12, informs us that the
"science" in question proves to be a "transcendental idealism" which
undercuts both realism and idealism in historical and other senses. Just here
it would seem that Merleau-Ponty, at least in The Phenomenology of
Perception shaped by the underground career of the Sixth Cartesian
Meditation, parts company with Husserl/Fink. Transcendental phenomeno-
logical idealism, like tax-and-spend liberals running for public office, always
seems to have a bad press. Still, we have to observe that The Phenomenology
of Perception carries out the task of the theory of method of the Sixth
Cartesian Meditation up through section 10. Why not further? It would
seem that it is not just a matter of Merleau-Ponty being unable to resolve
the dilemma that emerges at the end of the second part of The Phenomen-
ology of Perception, nor just that he was uninterested in writing a "phenom-
enology of phenomenology" and preferred writing something else.
What else is at stake? What else has been brought to boil?

B. What Husserl and Fink Cobbled Together

In section 12 of the Sixth Cartesian Meditation the point is made that we

have to maintain a number of distinctions no matter how we carry out the
"phenomenology of phenomenology." For instance, the distinction between
the concept of science in the natural attitude (clarified by phenomenology)
and the phenomenological concept of science. Or, we might say, the sharp
distinction between truth and meaning must not be allowed to disappear in
a "phenomenology of phenomenology." Phenomenologizing is not somehow
"outside" the world so that all distinctions would be sucked up in the sweep
 NOTES FROM THE UNDERGROUND 49

of the phenomenological Hoover. Tbere is a statement in this connection

which I find intriguing:

Tbe world is understandable as the set o{ ends of constitu-

tive life-processes belonging to transcendental subjectivity;
thus it does not lie outside this living itself. And, moreover,
we recognize that any idea of an 'outside' beyond constitu-
tive becoming is essentially meaningless . . . Is this
'Universum o{ Constitution' now the absolute in phenomen-
ology? ... Be{ore the phenomenological reduction transcen-
dental world-constituting ... is the 'absolute' in the under-
standing of phenomenology. After the reduction, however,
the constitutive 'cosmogony' (world-constitution) is alone
no longer to be designated as the absolute: Instead <the
absolute> is precisely the unity of transcendental constitu-
tion and the transcendental occurrence of phenomeno-
logizing ... the absolute is the overriding collective unity
of any transcendental living whatever that in itself is
articulated into mutual opposition. Tbis division between
constituting and phenomenologizing living now defines the
concept of the absolute: it is the synthetical unity of
antithetical moments.6

Tbis statement expresses a solution to the dilemma formulated by

Merleau-Ponty, at least by-passing if not advancing beyond Kant's Coperni-
can Revolution, and if that is indeed the case, it even sets the philosophical
problems concerned with the ultimate isomorphism between "human subject-
ivity and human reality" as a synthetical unity of antithetical moments.
Nevertheless, it is also clear that the statement offers a solution into which
Merleau-Ponty would not want to buy. Some clarification above ground is
required to see why.

C. The Phenomenological Buzzsaw

So far, I believe, we now have some sense of just what Merleau-Ponty

read of the Sixth Cartesian Meditation and of what Husserl and Fink
cobbled together. We also have a sense of where the Sixth Cartesian
Meditation can lead us, and we can see how far Merleau-Ponty ran with it
in The Phenomenology o{ Perception: section 12 is where the line is drawn.
Tbere are difficulties confronted in the Sixth Cartesian Meditation itself,
certainly, and sufficient to make even as youthful a reader as Merleau-Ponty

6 VI. Cartesianische Meditation 11/1, op. eit., 156f. The translation is mine.
50 FRED KERS1EN

suspicious. But the difficulties are also internal to phenomenology itself, and
that means that they entail vast revisions, for instance, of the first five
Cartesian Meditations, to say nothing of the many other works Husserl had
in the mill at the time. And it is a phenomenological buzzsaw into which
Husserl and Fink have backed because the revisions of the first five
Cartesian Meditations also head out into uncharted terra phaenomenologica.
To arrive at a closer approximation ofwhat Merleau-Ponty realized reading
the Sixth Cartesian Meditation I would like to give two examples of what
happens when the Sixth Meditation is read back into the first five Cartesian
Meditations.

§4

The Ergänzungsband published with the text of the Sixth Cartesian

Meditation contains, among other things, the revisions made by Husserl and
Fink of the first five Meditations. The first example of revisions I have in
mind are in the Fourth Meditation, §31, which is completely replaced in the
revisions made by Husserl and Fink in the summer of 1932. It is arevision
certainly made in the light of the Sixth Meditation, throwing further light on
the problem of reconciling constituting life and phenomenologizing life, of
meaning and truth, and of formulating a phenomenology of phenomenology.
In the published version of the Fourth Cartesian Meditation (in French
and in German), §31 bears the title: "The Ego as Identical Pole of Mental
Processes [Erlebnisse]." The term, "pole," presumably used in a sense bor-
rowed from geometry, in §§31 and 32 betrays an ambiguity: In §31 the pole
referred to is that of mental processes, so that if two or more intendings, for
example, acts of seeing, point to one object, a seen tree, as identical, as the
same tree seen now and again, we say that those intendings, seeings, point
to one object as a "pole." And the same is true of the "subject" pole; that is,
the seeings point back to an identical "self' seeing the tree in the many acts
of seeing. The "polarity," however, refers strictly to the mental processes, to
the acts of seeing.
In the next section, §32, Husserl also speaks of the "pole" of abiding "ego
properties," and speaks of it as the "pole as substratum" of habitualities.
Then, two sections on, in §34, he attempts to clean up the ambiguity by
referring to the "theory of the Ego as pole of its acts and as substratum of
habitualities." In the published text 7 there is an implicit reference to Ideas,

7 Edmund Husserl, Cartesianische Meditationen und Pariser Vorträge, hrsg. S. Strasser

(Haag: Martinus Nijhoff, 1950), 103ff; English translation by Dorion Caims, Cartesian
Meditations. An Introduction to Phenomenology (Tbe Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1960), 69ff. Tbe
German edition contains as an appendix a commentaIY by Roman Ingarden, 205ff.
 NOTES FROM TIiE UNDERGROUND 51

First Book, that is made explicit by Roman Ingarden in his commentary on

these passages8 and which is likewise made explicit in the revised text of
1932 with the addition of new material and a new beginning to §34.
Of what do these revisions consist? Surely there is more at issue than
resolving a terminological ambiguity which would hardly require such
extensive revision. Why in the revised text9 is there a reference to Kant?
The answer lies in §131 of Ideas, First Book, where, with Kant in mind,
Husserl is concemed just with the "object pole" of mental processes-to use
the language of the Cartesian Meditations. That is to say-now in the
language of Ideas-in the noema of any particular mental process we
distinguish between the determinable object, X, and the determinations
imputed to it in the particular noesis in question (e.g., the act of tree-
seeing). This is basically a distinction between the noematic substratum
intended to and the noematic properties intended to.
Now the idea in Cartesian Meditations, §31, is that a parallel distinction
is found with respect to a "subject pole" such that we can distinguish
between the Ego, X, as substratum of determinations and the determinations
imputed to it as "subject pole" of the particular act in question. For example,
if the particular act in question is a judicative act such as judging that "The
tree is in bloom," then as the subject of that judging the Ego is characterized
as a judging-believing subject or self which is living in that process of normal
judging. And the point that Husserl proceeds to make in Cartesian
Meditations, §32, is that owing to engaging in an act of a certain kind, such
as judging, the Ego acquires abiding properties, habitualities. 10
So far, so good.
But what is the problem here?
First, and most obviously, what are constituted are, to use Ingarden's
phrase, "relatively abiding" properties of the Ego-properties constituted by
virtue of the Ego's being engaged in the acts in question.
But this presupposes the existence of the Ego and the Ego's engaging in
the particular mental processes in question. There would be no difficulty
here except for the fact that, phenomenologically, our only datum is the
"lived-in" quality of particular mental processes, "acts;" phenomenologically,
we can make thematic and clarify the abiding acquisitions of Ego-determina-
tions but not the coming into being and going out of being, of "birth" and
"death," of "waking" and "sleeping," of the Ego itself. 11

8 Ibid., 215ff.
9
11/2,235.
10 §32, p. 100, Iines 30f (English translation, p. 66, Iines 21ft).
11 It would certainly seem possible, and wholly consistent phenomenologically, to
"genderize" the abiding habitualities, the Ego-determinations, in mental processes because, as
52 FRED KERS1EN

Still, as emphatically stated in the paragraphs that replace §31, determi-

nations themselves of the Ego are neither mental processes, nor are they
moments of mental processes, just as the Ego itself is neither amental
process, an Erlebnis, nor even a "really inherent [ree!) moment" of the mental
processes. As Fink points out in the last lines of his replacement of §31, the
Ego is transcendent to mental processes just as an object is said to be
transcendent 10 the intending to it. This observation, however, only deepens
the problem and makes the buzzsaw sound louder.
In other words, Husserl/Fink realize just what they have presupposed and
are really talking about in these sections of Canesian Meditations. They have
de facto characterized the Ego apan [rom any engagement in mental processes,
independently of the polarity of mental processes and acts, and thus the
phenomenological reductions are not required to describe and characterize the
structuring itself of the transcendental Ego ("Selbstaufbau des transzendental
Ego").12
And this realization is the result of reading back into the Fourth
Meditation the results of the Sixth Meditation. Reverting to the under-
ground, this would seem to be precisely the realization at which Merleau-
Ponty balked at the end of the Second Part of The Phenomenology of
Perception, deciding to stick with the "phenomenological-anthropological"
determinations in the chapter on the cogito that opens the Third Part of The
Phenomenology of Perception. It would also seem, then, that "phenomeno-
logical ontology"-Merleau-Ponty's or Sartre's-cannot go beyond the
"Copernican Revolution."

§5

No wonder, then, that all reference to the polarity of mental processes

is eliminated in the replacement of §31, although it must needs return in the
subsequent §§32, 33, 34, even in the new texts added. After all' the Ego-
determinations are enduring, abiding habitualities and hence exist in time.
By extension we can say that the Ego too exists in time-thus the new text
replacing §31. Yet the Ego's existence in time is not the filling of so-ca lied
immanental time because that time-form pertains to mental processes. But
if this is the case then there must be, over against the time of constituting

Fink notes in the new text added to §30, p. 232, it is a phenomenological-anthropological

question pertaining to the worldness of human being, hence of determinations effective in the
natural attitude. The question for an existentialist Iike myself is whether we can "genderize" the
transcendental Ego, and there would seem to be no way to answer that question phenomen-
ologically. Even the "Iaw of transcendental generation," referred to at the beginning of §32 of
the published text, only accounts for a "new objective sense," a "new abiding property."
12 11/2, 233, Iines 23-24.
 NOTES FROM TI-IE UNDERGROUND 53

life, a "time" in which the Ego endures, acquiring properties, habitualities.

Tbus we have to distinguish at least two (if not more) time-forms: first, the
time-form of transcendental constituting mental processes and, second, the
time-form of the transcendental Ego. Howare they related (assuming, of
course, that we may still speak in such terms)? Moreover, the objects of
consciousness, of constituting life, of acts of tree-seeings, for instance, are
after all enduring in a time which is neither the temporal form of mental
processes, of seeings, nor of the Ego. Must we now speak of three time-
forms (World-time, Mental Process-time, Ego-time)? And which is the
"time," as Merleau-Ponty says, we rediscover beneath the subject?13
Tbe difficulty reaches out in other directions as weH, and even back into
the First Meditation. And this is the second example of revision.
In 1931 Fink prepared a draft of the First Meditation, and in so doing
developed a substitution for §§7-11 of the published text. 14 It is not im-
mediately obvious why, but the fact is that §§7-11 were collapsed into one
long section. Tbere are also new headings, and it is not clear to which
section they refer. For instance, the heading, "Tbe mundane sense of the
heading: Apodicticity and Evidence First In Itself," could just as well apply
to §7 as to §9 of the published text, referring as it does to the line of
thought concluding §6. Tbe next heading, "Tbe Question About the Being
of the World," may be areplacement for §8 as well as for the foHowing §§9,
10, and aH of the published text of the First Meditation.
At the end of §6 of the published text, and then again at the end of §7,
Husserl insists, against Descartes, that even the apodictic must fall to the
epoche. Similarly, the "experienced world must also be deprived of its naive
acceptance." Is this now the place to introduce the "question about the being
of the world"? Is the section prepared by Fink (pp. 114ff.) a substitute for,
or an addition to, the last paragraph of §7? Or is it a new beginning and
replacement of §8? Above aH, how can we decide?
Apparently picking up on Husserl's statement at the end of §7-that
"world" may after all be the name for the universe of whatever exists, and if
that is the case, can we then avoid beginning with a criticism of world-
experiencing, of the object-pole of constituting life (which yields the result
that an ontic basis was presupposed for the existence of the world, just as is
done in the Fourth Meditation with the Ego and its habitualities, proper-
ties)-Fink begins the new text by setting aside at first the difficulty whether
the world itself is a "being [Seiendes]," setting aside for the moment the
questions of the ontological structure of self-identity of the world, of the

13 There are still other ways of arriving at the same problem; see Fred Kersten,
Phenomenological Method: Theory and Practice (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1989),
276.
14 11/2, 109ff.
54 FRED KERSTEN

object-pole, and its difference from other actual individuals (Anderen). He

can then examine a variety of meanings of the being of "world" before
making the "great reversal" following Descartes (in the first sentence of §8
in the published text in French and German). Once this has been accom-
plished we can consider the "ambiguity of the Cartesian recourse to the
Ego, "15 which lays the groundwork for introducing the "great reversal
proper as the 'phenomenological reduction,."16
This strategy, almost the same as the one we encountered in the Fourth
Meditation, places §1O right after §7, and combines §§8 and 9 and eliminates
§11 in form, though retaining its substance. Just what is the strategy?
The clue, I believe, lies in the passage concerning the "self-identity" of the
world introduced by Husserl as the name for the universe of whatever exists.
For presumably the world is self-identical, but there is of course no other
actual individual from which it is different; nor is world individuated by
having a place in time and space as are other actual individual particulars.
But does this point to a difference in the kind of being as Husserl then
suggests in the last lines of the published text of §7, a kind of being
"intrinsically prior to the world," a "Seinsboden" or ontic basis presupposed
for the existence of the world? Again, what have Husserl/Fink done here?
They have, as with the Ego, characterized the World, the object-pole of
constituting life, apart from and independently of the polarity of mental
processes and acts; and, again, the phenomenological reductions are not
required to describe and characterize the structuring itself of the world as
the universe of whatever exists.

§6

Does this signify, finally, that a "phenomenology of phenomenology" ends

up by making phenomenology superfluous? What is the fate of the under-
ground career of the Sixth Cartesian Meditation when read back into a11 of
the Cartesian Meditations? Earlier we cited a statement from the Sixth
Cartesian Meditation which concluded with the idea that the "division
between constituting and phenomenologizing living now defines the concept
of the absolute: it is in the synthetical unity of antithetical moments." We
may try to express this idea in a somewhat different way, that is, the way in
which it may be understood "from the underground," from certain events in
the actual phenomenologicallife of the Sixth Cartesian Meditation. I7

15 Ibid., 117-119.
16 Ibid., 119-133.
17 This is how I recall the shape given it in conversations with Dorion Caims who, like
Berger and Merleau-Ponty, bad a copy of the Sixth Meditation "in his hands." But this shape also
 NOTES FROM TI-lE UNDERGROUND 55

Presumably the phenomenologizing activity carrying out the transcenden-

tal phenomenological reductions, and the consequent regressive analysis, is
explained by Husserl as a methodology revealing a field for exploration,
observation and explication which, in turn, serves as a foundation for making
evident judgments about world-constituting life. Also, presumably, the
transcendental Ego and the World emerge on the scene only in so far as they
are observable and describable and whenever acts of the cogito require
reference to the self-identifying polarity of intentionality. And precisely when
phenomenological analyses are introduced which are at least roughly correct,
though perhaps without fuHy adequate methodological clarification as in our
examples of the First and Fourth Meditations, then analyses of the Ego and
World are made where they are thematized as "objects" (but in what sense?)
for description independently and apart from the polarity of the acts and
intentionality disclosed in regressive analysis.
Riding in on the back of regressive analysis, as it were, are analyses of
Ego and World which are neither "outside" regressive analysis, nor "before"
or "after" regressive analysis has been carried out. This is the "limit" reached
by phenomenology18 and would seem to make it impossible for phenomen-
ology to complete or advance beyond the Copernican revolution. How do we
account for this? In what actual or possible sense are Ego and World
phenomenological data? We still have to speak of them in some sense as
"data" for, after aH, they ride in on the same phenomenological wagon as the
self-identifying polarity of acts. 19
It would seem that what has happened is not just that phenomenological
method has outrun itself by implicitly carrying out another method which
has not been made explicit, but perhaps even of necessity it has made
methodological assumptions already put into practice in the very phenomen-
ologizing that carries out the phenomenological reductions. On the one

occurs in yet another unnoticed and independent surfacing of the underground career of the
Sixth Meditation in several works of J~ Ortega y Gasset. His wrestling with the Sixth
Meditation led to the development of his concept of "historical reason," as welI as to the
problematic of the ego in the light of the last part of the Sixth Meditation, not alI that different
from other underground surfacings; see "Apuntes sobre el Pensamiento, su Teurgfa y su
Demiurgfa" (1941), in Obras Comp/etas (Madrid: Revista de Occidente, 1951), Vol. V, 546, note
1 (which also credits Fink's editing of Husserl's manuscripts with bringing about a ''1eap'' of
phenomenology to ideas that could never have grown out of it); and La [dea de Principio en
Leibniz (Buenos Aires: Emere Editores, 1958), 332, note 2.
18 Above, p. 7.

19 Here a further problem must be mentioned, although it cannot be developed because

it does not directly bear upon the dilemma posed by Merleau-Ponty. In the Canesian Meditations
purely passive intentionality, primary passivity in contrast to secondary passivity (habitualities)
and acts, is not a polarity. Primary passive intentionality points beyond itself to an object, but
only those intentionalities engaged in by the ego point to a subject in any pregnant sense. See
Kersten, op. eit., 25lf.
56 FRED KERSTEN

hand, as Merleau-Ponty clearly recognized at the end of the Second Part of

The Phenomenology o[ Perception, phenomenological practice has outrun its
theory, and, on the other hand, phenomenological theory has outrun its
practice. There is no way to jump off the phenomenological wagon and,
because it has no methodological seat belts, there is no way to be certain of
staying on it. It is no wonder that, at this juncture, Merleau-Ponty balks, or
that Natanson experiences the necessity of introducing the question of
completing the Copernican revolution of Kant. This is, it seems to me, the
real fate of the underground career of the Sixth Cartesian Meditation; it is
bound 10 make its appearance in the midst of phenomenologizing, and only
there. Expressed in terms of Merleau-Ponty's dilemma: Something of the
World and Ego is retained and always, in part, remains opaque. It will be
interesting to see whether the public career of the Sixth Cartesian Medita-
tion shares the same fate.
But whatever speculations we may wish to pursue in this direction, 1
would like to conclude these notes from the underground by returning to
Merleau-Ponty.

§7

1 think that Merleau-Ponty was haunted by the Sixth Cartesian Medita-

tion long after The Phenomenology o[ Perception and its transcendentally
ungrounded Third Part-haunted by the diligent search for the "transcenden-
tal ground" by which to resolve the otherwise intractable dilemma of the
"phenomenology of phenomenology." There are surfacings of the under-
ground career of the Sixth Cartesian Meditation in many late manuscripts;
for example, those published as The Vzsible and the Invisible, especially
Chapter Three. 20 But in one of his last publications, "The Eye and the
Mind,,,21 1 have the impression that Merleau-Ponty returns even more
overtly to a "constructive" phenomenology and that he does so in a novel
way. Rather than develop this suggestion in detail, 1 only want to allude to
his solution because it is a solution, of sorts, to the dilemma arrived at in
the Sixth Cartesian Meditation.
Among many other intriguing things, in "The Eye and the Mind"
Merleau-Ponty tens us that the painter is the only one who is "entitled to
look at everything without being obliged to what he sees," that the pa inter
is "sovereign over his own ruminations of the world" by his eyes and hands

20 Maurice Merleau Ponty, The VISible and the Invisible. Followed by Working Notes, ed.
Claude Lefort, trans. A1phonso Lingis (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1968).
21 Maurice Merleau-Ponty, ''The Eye and the Mind," trans. Carleton Dallery, in The
Primacy of Perception and Other Essays (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1964).
 NOTES FROM TIIE UNDERGROUND 57

alone-rather like the impartial on-Iooker in phenomenology. In short, the

painter is the true phenomenologist. Even more, though, more than anyone
else, Merleau-Ponty goes on to add, the painter lives a paradox that makes
the painter emblematic of human being and humanity.
Now that paradox has many shapes and forms which Merleau-Ponty
elaborates usually in contrast to Sartre and the idea of image and the
imaginary. For Merleau-Ponty, the imaginary turns out to be, not a negation
(or "negafying") as in Sartre, but instead what he calls the "visible of the
second order" consisting of the inward traces of vision and the inward
tapestries or texture of the real visibly inscribed. What does this mean? It
means that we ask that which only has existence at the threshold of vision
what it does so as to suddenly make something be and be just this and not
something else. For this Merleau-Ponty gives an example, and it is this
example, or his treatment of it, which bears the haunt of the Sixth cartesian
Meditation. The example is the painting, The Nightwateh (to use its popular
title), by Rembrandt:

We see that the hand pointing to us in The Nightwateh is

truly there only when we see that its shadow on the
captain's body presents it simultaneously in profile. The
spatiality of the captain lies at the meeting place of two
lines of sight which are incompossible and yet together.
Everyone with eyes has at some time or other witnessed
this play of shadows, or something like it, and has been
made by it to see aspace and the things included therein.
But it works in us without us; it hides itself in making the
object visible. To see the object, it is necessary not to see
the play of shadows and light around it. The visible in the
profane sense forgets its premises. 22

What we find and experience in The Nightwateh is the fusion of non-fusible

aspects, just as in phenomenologizing we beeome aware of the unity of the
"antithetie moments" of eonstitution and eonstruetion (Ego and World); what
the painter does-as an exponential factor of painting just as the on-Iooker
is an exponential factor of wOrld-constituting-is to recall those otherwise
forgotten premises immediately in the act of painting, just as in phenomen-
ologizing we outrun our method, and praetiee a method which is not made
explieit.
Toward the very end of his essay Merleau-Ponty adds that "Vision is not
a certain mode of thought or presence to self; it is the means given me for
being absent from myself, for being present at the fission of Being from the

22 Ibid., 167.
58 FRED KERS1EN

inside-the fission at whose termination and not before I come back to

myself. "23 In terms of the Sixth Cartesian Meditation, to draw a little
whimsy from the underground, we may say that "Construction is not a
certain mode of thought or presence to self; constructive phenomenology is
the means given me for being absent from myself, for being present at the
constituting of the world from the inside-the constituting at whose
termination, and not before, I come back to myself. "
Bizarre as it may seem, and perhaps is, that, I believe, is the message
from the underground of the Sixth Cartesian Meditation, whether dreamt by
Husserl, written by Fink, painted by Rembrandt, balked at only to be
overcome by Merleau-Ponty, or returning us, with Natanson, to the
"profound core of Kant's Copernican revolution and to the existentially
modified question: Can <phenomenology of phenomenology> complete or
advance beyond the Copernican revolution?"

23 Ibid., 186.
 LESTER EMBREE

THE PROBLEM OF REPRESENTATIONAL ADEQUACY,

or How to Evidence an Ecosystem1

Environmental action, i.e., acting for the sake of the environment, requires
for its justification both evaluation and cognition with respect to organisms,
habitats, and ecosystems: how they evolve, how they work, how they lang-
uish, how they change, how they flourish, and how they die. The present
investigation is generally confined to cognition. Cognition is believing
justified by evidencing. Along one dimension, such justification can be prima
facie or critical; along another dimension, justified believing can be in
various degrees relative or non-relative; along a third dimension it can be
certainly or probably positive or negative; and along a fourth dimension it
can be pre-predicative or predicative and, in the latter case, it can also be
called knowledge.
Some of the mentioned dimensions of variation in cognition will be re-
turned to in passing below. The emphasis here, however, is on the awareness
that can justify believing and for that reason can be called "evidencing."
Evidencing awareness can be presentational or representational and, as
representational, it is either linguistically, pictorially, or indicationally
representational. The emphasis in this investigation is, in particular, on the
relationship between representations of the latter sorts and that which they
represent such that truth is but one species, while "representational ade-
quacy" names the genus.
The following exposition begins with linguistically representational
adequacy (or truth) because it is the most familiar type in phenomenological
reflections. Then it proceeds to the pictorial and indicational types. The
closing section includes some methodological remarks for the reader who is

1 Earlier versions of this essay have been presented to the Departments of Philosophy at
the Universities of Waterloo, Jadivpur, Poona, and South Florida and I am grateful to colleagues
for their responses on those occasions. Related work by the present author indudes Lester
Embree, ''The Phenomenology of Representational Awareness," Human Studies 15 (1992),
301-311; "Phenomenology of a Change in Archaeological Observation," in Metaarchaeology:
Reflections by Archaeologists andPhilosophers, ed. Lester Embree (Dordrecht: K1uwer Academic
Publishers, 1992); and "Representation and the Historical Sciences," in Phenomenology East and
West: Festschrift Jor J. N. Mohanty, ed. F. M. Kirkland and D. P. Chattopadhyaya (Dordrecht:
K1uwer Academic Publishers, 1993).

59
S. Galt Crowell (ed.), The Prism ofthe Self, 59-70.
© 1995 Kluwer Academic Publishers.
60 LESTER EMBREE

unfamiliar with investigations of this sort, and also some suggestions for
further research to prevent any illusion that this is more a solution than a
clarification of the pertinent problems.

§1. Linguistically Representational Adequacy

There is no consensus in philosophy concerning what truth is, but there

may be a convergence of views about it concerning (a) assertions, which are
at least publicly and thus linguistically expressed propositions, and (b) the
formulation of the relation between the proposition and the state of affairs
it is about, such that "an assertion is true if and only if the state of affairs
is as asserted." In these terms, truth pertains to what it seems best to call
linguistically representational awareness, which needs to be analyzed before
the truth relationship between the linguistic representation and the
linguistically represented object can be clarified.
Suppose an ecologist is conducting research on an ecosystem. This system
may be a desert, a coral reef, a swamp, a forest, etc. Perhaps forests are the
most familiar of these because city parks are somewhat forest-like. In the
most general terms, how does an ecologist observe a forest? To begin with,
she engages in sensuous perceiving of trees, grass, birds, insects, etc.
Perceiving itself includes immediate retrotention of the just impressional and
immediate protention of the about to be impressional. Besides perceiving
there is remembering of distinctly earlier objects, e.g., a bird she had seen
half an hour previously. Also, mindful of her research focus, i.e., the types
of data that will strengthen or weaken her hypotheses, she has distinct
expectations involved in the directions in which she observes. Since her
interest is cognitive, the perceiving, remembering, and expecting involved in
her efforts are as much as possible serious. Were her interests literary,
painterly, or in another way fictional or artistic, there would be a large
component of fictive perceiving, remembering, and expecting.
What the mentioned types of awareness have in common is that they are
presentational, which is to say that they are directly intentive to their objects,
that there are no representations involved between them and their objects,
and that their objects present themselves directly to them. Representational
awareness contrasts with this.
Suppose that our ecologist is concerned with the health of the forest,
considers the demographics of a species of owl as indicative of this health,
and, suspecting that the health of the forest being researched is waning,
expects to find fewer signs of these owls on this occasion than the last time
a survey of this sort was conducted. That which is central to the set of
propositions she is attempting to verify can be simply put as "There are
fewer owls than last time." (It does not seem necessary to get involved with
questions of numbers of owls per square kilometer). By the formula
 THE PROBLEM OF REPRESENTATIONAL ADEQUACY 61

expressed above, this proposition is true just in case there actually are
significantly fewer owls than on the previous occasion.
One might think that this implies that propositions, and the combinations
of concepts and the affirmedness (or deniedness) in various modalities that
make them up, are different from the matters they refer 10, Le., owls, trees,
forests, etc. In scientific obsetvation, however, states of affairs are constitut-
ed, Le., obsetvable objects are predicatively formed and believed in by the
ecologist. This constitution of states of affairs is already involved in their
selection as data for the scientific interest. Thus, there being fewer owls in
the forest than before is what the proposition is related to in attempts at
verification. Perfect verification happens when the entertained proposition
and the state of affairs coincide in what can be called a verification synthesis.
It is simplistic to believe that truth obtains immediately between a theo-
rized proposition and a pre-predicatively obsetved object. Actually, it is a
predicatively obsetved object and the theorized proposition that coincide or
identify. An identification theory of truth is not a coherence theory because
more than propositions are involved (which is not to deny that theories are
logical systems of propositions), and it is also not a correspondence theory
because, when verification occurs, there is no longer a correspondence but
rather a coincidence between believed proposition and believed-in state of
affairs or predicatively formed object.
It may be added, firstly, that the same processes occur in non-scientific
common-sense experience, where what is operative is the conceptual form
and content in the syntax and semantics of ordinary language, from which
scientific thought frequently differs. This can foster various types of
linguisticism and linguistic relativism, which are mistaken not least because
they overlook the differences between scientific (including philosophical) and
common-sensical thought-above all the control exerted by the will to
verification. This issue becomes more complicated when the objects in
question are cultural, and thus obviously relative on the pre-predicative
level, and further because the cultural characteristics of objects, Le., their
belief characters, values, and uses, can be confused with propositions and
concepts, common-sensical or scientific. The present concern being with
naturalistically obsetved trees and owls, these complications do not need to
be explored on this occasion.
Secondly, it may be inserted that the problem of truth, which concerns
the relation between a proposition and astate of affairs, is different from
the problem of objectivity or non-relativity, which concerns whether the
object or state of affairs is the same for a multiplicity of encounters in one
person, in an interrelated group of persons, or in an interrelated group of
groups-something that will not be discussed here. 2 It is also different from

2 Cf. Lester Embree, 'The Constitution of Non-Relativity, or How to Dump Garbage in

62 LESTER EMBREE

the problem of justification, which concerns how a positing is justified if that

positing is founded upon and motivated by the evidencing-something that
will be retumed to briefly below.3
The awareness above alluded to as the entertaining of propositions prior
to and apart from verification is interesting in several respects. While
perceiving is distinguishable from the object as perceived and does vary
according to whether seeing, hearing, smelling, etc., predominates within and
thus characterizes a given case, it is not stratified. In entertaining a pro-
position, however, there is stratification. The infrastratum includes a
secondary stratification between the serious or fictive hearing or seeing or
speaking or writing in which phonemes and graphemes as signification
carriers are fundamentally constituted and the thinking in comprehending
and expressing in which significations, which makes sounds and marks into
expressions, are constituted.
In the superstratum of this complex awareness, which as a whole it seems
best to call linguistically representational awareness, there is an awareness
of the objects referred to by the expression. Such an awareness can range
b.etween being empty or blind and being fulfilled or intuitive with respect to
the object of the awareness, which is, so to speak, "awared" in correlative
ways. The outstanding difference of this whole awareness lies in how the
representation constituted in the infrastratum represents the object
constituted in the superstratum. In specifically linguistic awareness, as it may
be called for short, the linguistic representation or expression refers to the
objects. In other words, one can ask and answer the question of what an
expression is about, what one is hearing or reading about, and what one is
speaking or writing about. As intimated, this is clearest when verification
syntheses are not occurring; also, one needs to reflect in order to evidence
the relevant differences. A diagram may make the foregoing sketch clearer
and more distinct (see Figure 1, p. 61).
In the diagram, the arrow slanting up- and rightward represents the
reference of the expression to the state of affairs. The horizontal arrows
represent strata of intentiveness and point to what is intended to in them.
The "I" is included to represent how the executive can be engaged in the
predicative expressing or comprehending, perhaps while engaging in attempt-
ing to verify that there are now fewer owls than last time in a particular
forest. It is also possible for her to be actively or passively engaged in
non-thinking pre-predicative seeing of the owls, trees, etc. And when

Nobody's Backyard," Festschrift for James M. Edie, ed. Brice Wachterhauser (Evanston:
Northwestem University Press, forthcoming).
3 Cf. Lester Embree, "Action for Ecosystemic Health, or How to Tend One's Own
Garden," in Don E. Marietta Jr. and Lester Embree, eds., Environmental Philosophy and
Environmental Activism (Lanham: Roman & Littlefield, 1995).
 THE PROBLEM OF REPRESENTATIONAL ADEQUACY 63

(Figure 1)

----thinking and believing------------------ >state of affairs, Le.,

predicative structure
----blind or intuitive awareness----------->and matter or affair

I{
/
----thinking and believing------------------>expression, Le.,
signification and the
----sensing and acting----------------------->sound and/or mark

verification occurs she can be considered engaged in the entire multi-Iayered

intentiveness.

§2. Pictorial Representational Adequacy

Tbe chief burden of the present essay is not an analysis of linguistically

representational awareness. Tbe above sketch can be developed in manifold
respects, above all with respect to how the awareness at the bottom can
justify the believing in the object such that the object is actually as alleged
in the proposition, which is thus true in a deep rather than superficial way.
But the task here is to show that there are two other species of representa-
tional awareness involved in cognitive efforts such as that by which our
ecologist researches a forest ecosystem.4
Often our ecologist in the field chiefly takes notes while conducting her
observations and then conducts analyses on their basis when she is back in
her laboratory. How is she aware of the forest when back in the lab? As she
works on her notes, she is not intuitively aware of trees, owls, owl pellets,
etc. Rather, the superstratum is blind. Tbe ecologist in the lab is then

4 That there are three and only three species of representational awareness can be grasped
if it is considered that there are, firstly, linguistic as opposed to non-linguistic representations
and, secondly, that the non-linguistic representations either resemble their representata and are
thus pictorial, or do not and are thus indicational. Beyond this specification there can be much
sub-specification. The indicational species would seem the most populated, and also the most
difficult to sub-specify, but the difference between natural and conventional indications seems
a good place to begin. Sub-specification according to the sensory modality that predominates can
be a useful approach for pictorial representational awareness: an audio recording resembling a
symphony, a photo resembling a scene, the scent of a lover resembling him, etc.
64 LESlER EMBREE

straightforwardly aware of such ecosystemic components and this on the

basis of reading her notes. A different version of Figure 1 is now relevant
(See Figure 2).

(Figure 2)

------blind but believing awareness------------>owls, trees, etc.

/
------seeing and thinking in reading----------->field notes

The vertical arrangement in Figure 2 represents how, if there were not

the reading of the field notes, there would be no awareness of what the
notes are about. To be sure, one could come back from the field and
remember, rather than linguistically represent, the forest. Probably our
ecologist would first go over her notes in relation to her recollections in
order to amend them and, as she proceeded with the analysis, recollective
awareness, which is presentational, would support, correct, and extend what
she was representing. But the studying of the notes is chiefly representation-
al awareness of the linguistic sort; it is relied upon because it can convey
more detail and focus than recollection normally can, especially after a
passage of time. (Others who have never been in the forest at the time in
question, and thus have no memories of it, can still use an observer's notes).
The notes are linguistic representations. Audio-recordings of spoken rather
than written notes can play the same role. These are expressions in language,
as would be video-recordings made by a deaf ecologist who set up her video
camera and stood before it signing. What is characteristic of linguistic
expressions is that they are expressive of thoughts or significations in
linguistically structured ways.
Our ecologist will bring back more than notes from the field. She will
also bring back photographs and sketches. Interestingly, she mayaiso have
recourse to photographs taken from airplanes and satellites, some of which
may rely on radar and non-visible light spectra (ultraviolet and infrared) to
see determinations of the forest not visible to the unaided eye. Here a
diagram like that in Figure 2 could easily be drawn with the seeing of the
photograph at the bottom, the pictorially represented ecosystem at the top,
and the diagonal arrow representing not significational reference but
pictorial representing or depicting.
 TI-JE PROBLEM OF REPRESENTATIONAL ADEQUACY 65

The representation in such a case is best called not a picture but a depic-
tion, because this leaves the former expression free for cases where the
depiction is subspecifically visual, while the latter expression is thus free 10
express a specific concept under which subspecifically auditory and other
representations can fall. These would occur if a tape recorder with a timer
were left in the forest for, say, a week, recording a random sampie of forest
sounds so that the number of owl hoots recorded could be used in statistical
estimates of the numbers of owls within a determinable distance from the
device. Just as one "sees" things on the basis of photographs, one can "hear"
them on the basis of audio recordings.
There are two differences between a depiction and a linguistic expression
(since "expression" sometimes conveys the broad signification here conveyed
with "representation," the qualifier "linguistic" is needed). Firstly, an ex-
pression must not only express signification but also have syntax. It also
indicates an expresser, a comprehender, and a context, but these-except as
they specifically inc1ude thinking and conceptually related significations (as
"texts" that belong "with" a text do)-are the same as the maker and viewer
and the related objects of the depiction. The expresser and comprehender
do not need to be the same person any more than the writer and the reader
of field notes must be the same person. A depiction may be, and often is,
accompanied by written or internally or externally spoken language, but it
would be an error to mistake such a frequent contingency for a necessity.
One can "see" the depicted of a depiction without any thinking, concepts, or
syntax being involved; discussion of pictorial awareness in such properly
linguistic terms, which thus take on transferred significations, can be
misleading. Pictorial awareness is essentially non-linguistic.
Secondly, no reference is discernable when the relation between the
depiction and the depicted object as depicted is reflectively observed, but the
resemblance is conspicuous. Not only is a depiction a likeness of the
depictum, but the contrary is also the case. Owls heard in the woods sound
rather like owls "heard" in recordings. They also look like their still and
moving pictures. The species of representational adequacy that pertains to
pictorial awareness can be called pictorial representational adequacy, but for
short likeness will do.
Likeness is established (and this is different from although parallel to
verification, where truth is established) when one compares the depiction
with the object as depicted. It is often a pleasure (but sometimes not) to
consider a photograph and have the memory of the object depicted occur,
or 10 see how that object now is in comparison with how it was when the
photo was taken. A difference between the depictum and the depiction is
typical, if not necessary, so that an analog to the coincidence between
proposition and state of affairs in verification is rare or impossible. "Doc-
tored" photographs are, however, as possible as mendacious speech.
Nevertheless, absent motives to doubt them, depictions are accepted as
66 LESTER EMBREE

like what they depict and thus can be used to justify belief. In this case, the
justified believing is not founded upon and motivated by linguistic represen-
tational awareness in which the linguistic expressions are accepted as true
about what is blindly intended to in the superstratum (See Figure 2); it is
instead founded upon and motivated by the pictorial representational
awareness in which the depictions are accepted as similar to what is blindly
awared in its superstratum.
Just as one must learn to hear and speak and read and write, one must
learn to be aware of depicted objects on the basis of depictions. With
respect to ordinary picture, the learning involved seems to occur so early in
life that pictorial awareness may seem instinctual, but the experience of
learning pictorially to represent objects using air photos, especially those
that depict normally invisible differences-e.g., variations in the heat of
different parts of the object-shows the role of learning.
Scare quotes were used above for "see" and "hear" where it was a case of
representational rather than presentational awareness. Often in contempo-
rary American middle-class English a person's "perceptions" are spoken of
when predicatively formed beliefs are intended-a parallel with respect to
presentational awareness that can mislead analysis. As a rule, the context
specifies "seeing" (and "hearing") as representational or presentational.
Sometimes, however, it may be of use to speak of representational awaring
and the representationally awared in general, and pictorial or linguistic
awaring and the pictorially or linguistically awared specifically.
Finally, the specific formula for pictorial adequacy can be stated as "a
depiction is adequate (or is a likeness) if and only if the object as depicted
resembles (or is similar to) the depiction." This is probably not astonishing
to the reader. The crucial thing, however, is that this species of the genus of
representational adequacy, while analogous, is different from the species
called truth. The generic formula for representational adequacy is plainly"A
representation is adequate just in case the representation is as represented."

§3. Indicational Representational Adequacy

Indications are like depictions in being non-linguistic, but they differ from
them in not resembling what they indicate. The degree to which indicational
representational awareness or, more concisely, indicational awareness has
been investigated seems inversely proportional to its importance. It seems
plausible that the largest single concern of most people, in daily life at least,
is with the attitudes, states of mind, intentions, etc. of other humans. There
is a vast range here, which includes the consternation of our enemies as weIl
as the approval we seek and the disapproval we avoid in our friends. Upon
reflection, however, while praise and blame might tend to take linguistic
forms, approval, disapproval, etc. can be, and indeed more often is, awared
 THE PROBLEM OF REPRESENTATIONAL ADEQUACY 67

on the basis of postures, gestures, and visages ("facial" rather than "linguistic"
expressions), which are non-linguistic somatic manifestations of psychic
processes. If a smile resembled approval it would be a depiction, but
approval is not a colored and spatially extended dynamic configuration of
the face. Hence a smile is an indication.
Practically anything can become an indication. To determine whether
something is an indication, one need only ascertain whether it brings to
mind something else that it does not signify or depict, i.e., motivates an
awareness, which can often be blind, of something other than itself, whether
it is linguistically formed, and whether that which is represented resembles
the representation of it. This exercise teaches, among other things, how
effort must be made to learn to focus on the merely presented as presented,
because so many objects are indications. In a forest, undergrowth of certain
types beneath trees of certain species, maturity, and density may come to
indicate owl roosts, the undergrowth in particular being due to nutrients as
weIl as undigested seeds in herbivorous prey deposited under branches in
owl pellets. Sometimes the indicativeness of an indication is related to causal
connections between objects, e.g., between plant growth, owl pellets, owls,
owl diets, and what their prey eat. And the population density of owls can
indicate the health or illness of the forest.
Formalistically, "An indication is adequate (or 'indicates' in the emphatic
signification) if and only if the object indicated is as indicated." This is a
distinct species of representational adequacy and already clearly relevant for
any account of ecological cognition, but it deserves further discussion.
Perhaps more clearly than is the case with pictorial awareness, indicational
awareness is learned. This learning may come through deliberate instruction
("Red lights mean to stop because other cars will unhesitatingly move across
the street in front of us"), but often theyare simply picked up through some
sort of an informal conditioning process where the conditioned person is not
conscious of leaming what indicates what. A wise old woodswoman may
come back from a walk in the forest and assert that it is declining faster than
she thought, and this claim may be true even though she cannot point to the
indications that justify her belief. In the case of the owl as an indicator
species, there may be a great deal of sophisticated science that establishes
that the number of owls per square kilometer correlates directly with the
biodiversity and thus health of the forest. This does not signify that the
person who has learned to use this indication as a symptom of ecosystemic
health can trot out the science upon request or even that she ever knew it,
but it does imply that somebody knew it and that the science be published
somewhere. A student can simply be instructed: Count the signs of owl per
kilometer along this transect and if there are fewer than three then the
forest is languishing-which may be due to forestry practices, drought, fire,
invading species, erosion, etc.
It might be objected that the owls are parts of the forest, but nothing
68 LESTER EMBREE

precludes apart being used as a symptom of the health of the whole. More-
over, since an owl is not a sentence, or even a word, it is a non-linguistic
representation if it is a representation at all, and the resemblance between
an owl and a forest of which owls are parts is too slight for it to be
significant to say that a forest looks like an owl.
An experienced ecologist who sees lots of owls or indications of owls is
aware of a healthy temperate rain forest. There is at least one aspect of this
awareness that was not brought out above and is shared with the other
species of representational awareness. This is that the original form of the
awareness 'is straightforward or unreflective. What the person who has
leamed to have it focuses on is the represented object, but not the
represented object as represented, much less the indication or depiction or
expression about it, but it in and of itself, i.e., the healthy or sick ecosystem.
It requires some reflection to discern the strata, the representation, the
representativeness, and the adequacy.
An earlier contention might at this point be reconsidered. When there
are infrared air photos, how does one establish that they are adequate, i.e.,
that the forest is as depicted in them? In principle, at least, photographs
based on the visible spectrum can be compared with the forest as it looks
when seen out the window of the airplane. In this case, however, the
depiction is of differences in heat. In crude cases one could produce such a
photo of, say, the kitchen and then, through touching, establish that the
bright red area on the sheet depicted the stove while the bright blue area
depicted the refrigerator, and so on with respect to various intermediate
degrees. Then, through confidence in the equipment, this might be inferred
also to hold for thermal variations in a forest that cannot be feIt by putting
one's hand out the window of a plane high in the sky. On this basis, then,
the infrared air photos are photos. But when there is no object as perceived
for the representation to resemble, are they photos or indications?
The above analysis has for the most part kept the three species of repre-
sentational awareness and adequacy distinct, whereas actually they are often
combined, something that can strengthen the tendency to construe the whole
in terms of the linguistic species. For example, there can be a description of
a photograph of undergrowth that indicates owl pellets, and thereby owls
and thus ecosystemic health. Literally, one reads the description; but does
one literally "read" the photo or "read" the owl sign, much less "read" owls
as about forests?

§4. Approach and Further Problems

Cognition is believing justified by evidencing, and evidencing is the

awareness in which the object gives itself optimally for an object of that
kind. This becomes complicated when the evidencing is representational
 THE PROBLEM OF REPRESENTATIONAL ADEQUACY 69

rather than presentational. An enormous proportion, probably most (but

one cannot quantify sueh malters), of the evidencing that is used to justify
believing-not only in science but also in everyday life and philosophy-is
representational. When believing that is prima facie justified on this basis
is found not to harmonize with other cognizing, some reflective analysis
begins. When it is a case of presentational evidencing, one observes again
and more carefuIly, thoroughly, ete., but when it is representational evi-
deneing, one foeuses on the representation first and considers its adequacy,
which, as shown, varies with the species of representational awareness. The
examination of the adequacy of representations takes one to the predica-
tively formed affair complex and how weIl the object can be evidenced in the
relevant respects in it, to the likeness between depictions and the objects
depicted, and to how indicative indications are.
Much more can be investigated where the representation of representata
by representations of these three sorts are concerned. How scientific results
are reduced to convenient habits of representing has been touched upon, but
it requires deeper analyses relating to the focus on scientific cognition in the
present investigation. Closely related is how such representations are used
in scientific technology, e.g., in science-based forest exploitation, preserva-
tion, and restoration. After aIl, if the densities of the populations of a
species of owl are not reliably known and its representativeness with respect
to the health of a forest inadequate, then massive and irreversible
ecosystemic destruction can occur.
As for the above analysis, it pertains to constitutive phenomenology and
is adequately examined only from that standpoint. For the uninitiated, it may
be mentioned, firstly, that the approach is fundamentally reflective, and that
reflection can be practiced upon the intentive lives of others as weIl as upon
one's own life. The former technique, which is best called reflection on
others, is part of the running example. One does not need to be skilIed in
ecological field work to comprehend the account, at least to the depth to
which it has been taken here. That whieh is reflected upon fits Husserl's
most general analysis of the phenomenological field. It includes, to some
extent, the engagement of the 1 in her intentive life, but it dweIls on
intentive processes as intentive and objects as intended to or, in other words,
objects as they present themselves.
The components within intentive processes can be divided, first of aIl,
into the positional and the awareness components. Secondly, the positional
components are of volitional, evaluational, and cognitive sorts and the
former have been excluded from consideration in this analysis of the
cognitive, which, moreover, has been concerned with how evidencing justifies
believing in cognition. Thirdly, the awareness components can be divided
into the presentational and the representational. For the sake of complete-
ness, it needs to be mentioned that there can be awareness of ideal objects
and that the present investigation has been confined to real objects. More
70 LESTER EMBREE

specifically, the emphasis here has been on organic objects of botanical and
zoological sorts, and to our field ecologist's intentiveness to them. Pre-
sentational awareness of real objects is intentive to objects in time and
varies according to whether the objects intended to are in the now, the past,
or the future of what are, correlatively, perceivings, rememberings, and
expectings of them. Representational awareness, as shown, includes pre-
sentational awareness in its infrastratum but is linguistic, pictorial, or
indicational by virtue of its superstratum.
Fourthly, to describe the components of intentive processes as above, to
disclose the relations among the strata and components, and also to describe
objects as they present themselves to intentive life, reflection includes
analysis. Fifthly, reflection is predicatively observational, i.e., as reflective
observation it evidences states of affairs to verify claims made about them.
Sixthly, the reflectively descriptive accounting for objects as consti-
tuted-carried out in terms of the intentive processes (syntheses included) in
which the objects are constituted-is called constitutive phenomenological
accounting. And again, such an account needs to be examined from the
standpoint from which it was developed and thereby confirmed, corrected
and extended.
 Part 11

SOCIAL ENCOUNTERS
 THoMAS LUCKMANN

ONTHE
INTERSUBJECTIVE CONSTITUTION OF MORALS

§1
In the first paragraph of the first chapter of his first book Alfred Schutz
asked:

Hat es die Sozialwissenschaft mit dem Sein des Menschen

an sich oder nur mit seinen gesellschaftlichen Verhaltens-
weisen zu tun? Ist das gesellschaftliche Ganze dem Sein
des Einzelnen vorgegeben ... oder ist umgekehrt das, was
wir das gesellschaftliche Ganze nennen ... eine Synthesis
von Funktionen der einzelnen menschlichen Individuen,
deren Sein allein Realität zukommt? Ist es das gesell-
schaftliche Sein des Menschen, das sein Bewußtsein oder
umgekehrt sein Bewußtsein, das sein gesellschaftliches Sein
bestimmt?1

Schutz not only asked these questions, he also contributed more than anyone
else to an answer. Yet sixty years after those lines were written, the issues
to which the questions referred remain alive and are still debated in the
ongoing discussion about the foundations of social theory.
Few contemporary philosophers are as attentive to these issues as is
Maurice Natanson. In many of those parts of his writings with which I am
acquainted, he demonstrated that they could be most rewardingly ap-
proached by a mode of thought rooted in Husserl's phenomenology.
Phenomenology, as Natanson somewhere reminded his readers, is the science
of Hbeginnings. HAmong other things, it is a science of Hbeginnings Hfor social
theory. It offers a rigorous method of reflection upon its presuppositions. In
the following remarks I intend to address an issue in social theory which in
my view demands such areturn to Hbeginnings. H I hope that I am thus
following the example set by Maurice Natanson, and I think that it is

1 Alfred Schutz, Der sinnhafte Aufbau der sozialen Welt, Vienna 1932.

73
S. Galt Crowell (ed.), The Prism ofthe Self, 73-91.
© 1995 Kluwer Academic Publishers.
74 THoMAS LUCKMANN

appropriate that 1 should try to do so in my contribution to the Festschrift

honoring my old friend.
It may be appropriate; it certainly is not surprising! In order to show why
this is so, I may be allowed a brief personal reminiscence. Natanson and I
first met over forty years ago as students of Alfred Schutz. I think that I may
say that what we learned from hirn then lastingly influenced our intellectual
development. Schutz did not introduce us 2 to the emerging phenomenolog-
ical canon in an exegetical attitude. What we did learn from Schutz was the
application of phenomenological thinking to problems of human life in
society. Schutz, as a social theorist, was at least as much a Weberian as he
was a Husserlian.3 In his dedication to the development of what I may
retrospectively call a philosophical protosociology, in which he drew upon
phenomenology to cope with unresolved problems in Weber's attempt to
establish social theory upon a theory of social action, Schutz transmitted to
us a mode of thought about the human condition. Schutz thus linked us,
members of the third generation, to Husserl's diagnosis of the crisis of
Western science. Schutz followed Husserl in believing that the crisis could
be only resolved if the life-world were reinstated both as source and object
of theoretical reflection. He initiated those of his students who had ears with
which to listen and eyes with which to see into a program designed to
provide a philosophical foundation for the social sciences, a program to be
fulfilled by a meticulous phenomenological description of the manifold
structures of the life-world, thereby uncovering both the intentional activities
and the intersubjective processes presuppOSed in its constitution.
In the course of his work as a philosopher, Natanson engaged in
reflection about a wide range of problems. His thought in social philosophy
was not narrowly circumscribed by phenomenological orthodoxy. I, for my
part as a sociologist, gave free rein to curiosity about certain puzzling
aspects of historical social realities, and tried to cope with the social-
theoretical problems to which they inevitably seemed to lead. Only a limited
part of my work was protosociological in a philosophically precise sense of
that term. 1 think that I may say none the less that, personal friendship
aside, the intellectual bond between us, across the disciplines and over the
years, is mainly due to the early Schutzean "imprint." I, therefore, hope that
my present attempt to return to the beginnings will meet with the critical
sympathy on the part of the man for whom this Festschrift was assembled.

2 Perhaps I should now better speak for myself only and say: did not introduce me. To the
exlentthat I learned "technical" phenomenology, I learned it from Dorion Cairns and, later, from
Aron GUlwitsch. Natanson, I think, had been introduced to phenomenology several years before
I became a student of Schutz.
3 Cf. Maurice Natanson, "Alfred Schutz on Social Reality and Social Science," in Maurice
Natanson, Phenomenology, Role and Reason (Springfield: Charles C. Thomas, 1974), 33-50;
(originally published in Social Research XXXV, 1968).
 ON THE IN1ERSUBJECfIVE CONSTlTUTlON OF MORALS 75

The problem which I intend to address is that of the "origin" of the moral
order of society. Questions of origin, most notoriously the question about
the origin of language, have been in academic disrepute for a long time. But
in many areas concerning human abilities and social realities, the wild
speculation which led to such disrepute is giving way to well-founded hypo-
theses in several related disciplines, from primatology and palaeoanthrop-
ology to the integrating views of a philosophical anthropology. Some of
these hypotheses and views have been supported by the phenomenological
description of the fundamental intentional processes and intersubjective
structures presupposed in the constitution of complex human realities.
Supported indirectly-because phenomenological descriptions are of course
formulated in a different sub-universe of discourse and are based on a
different kind of evidence than in the "positive" empirical sciences. None the
less, the phenomenological "Parallelaktion" (if I may borrow a term from still
another subuniverse, that of Robert Musil's literary creation) which was
envisaged by Husserl, yielded significant results in a number of instances.
This emboldens me in my present essay.
Of course, I am not so presumptuous as to think that I could resolve the
entire issue of the "origin" of the moral order beyond any doubt. Addressing
myself to the problem, I have a narrower intention. But even that-an
attempt to identify the most important constitutive elements of the moral
order-may be overly ambitious. Particularly so since I will not attempt to
place my reflections in the honorable tradition of moral philosophy. Indeed,
I lack the competence to proceed from Aristotle to Thomas and from
Thomas to Kant and Adam Smith. If the issue had not become intellectually
pressing in a different context-empirical research on the forms and
functions of contemporary moral communication-I would not have dared
to take up its challenge without adequate credentials in moral philosophy.
I may briefly explain my motive for approaching an old problem as if it were
a new one.

§2
In our time hardly anyone continues to hold the traditional pre-
Enlightenment view that the world as we experience it, the world in which
we live, act and die, was created by God in one simple and direct act. Nor
do many still cIing to the materialistic fundamentalism of mainstream
Enlightenment philosophy, or to its younger partner in shaping the scient-
istic world view which was dominant in the later 19th and much of the 20th
century, evolutionist theory in its original form. Hegelian historicism and the
anthropology of the "early" Marx were probably the most important
contributors to a change both in the philosophical and in the wider intel-
lectual climate. Today neither direct creationism nor simple evolutionism
76 THOMAS LUCKMANN

seem to offer believable accounts of the origin of a human world.

Whatever its root in nature, the human world is best understood as
having been constructed, and as being maintained and modified, in human
action. If we take the general view that the reality of a human world
originated in long, intertwined chains of social interaction, we must believe,
a fortiori, that the historical social worlds are human constructions. In the
words of Kant:

Die physiologische Menschenkenntnis geht auf die Er-

forschung dessen, was die Natur aus dem Menschen macht,
die pragmatische auf das, was er, als freihandelndes Wesen,
aus sich selber macht, oder machen kann und soll.4

The social world, the field of human interaction, is intrinsically a moral

order. The elementary assumption that the social reality of a human world
is a historical construction is thus an assumption about the origin of the
moral order. What consequences does this assumption have for a view of the
nature of morals?
The assumption does not necessarily lead to a position of historical-and
moral-relativism. That position could be reasonably taken only if one were
to make the additional assumption that social constructions are arbitrary.
But is there any good reason to think that social constructions are not
constrained by natural conditions as weil as conditions which-although not
natural because they belong to the historical dimension of human life-are
also historically universal? On the contrary, it makes more sense to assume
that social constructions in history presuppose both natural and trans-
historical conditions: the human condition. But if moral relativism ceases to
be a credible option, the alternative is not simple moral absolutism. In order
to formulate a credible alternative one must try to answer several difficult
questions.
Which elements in the human condition are generally, and which are
specifically, presupposed in the constitution of what may be called a
universal proto-morality? Do these elements belong to the pre-social strata
of human life or to human sociality? It is easy to demonstrate that the moral
code of Victorian England differs from what was considered morally
desirable during the Golden Age of Athens. But the search for the consti-
tutive elements of a universal proto-morality, necessarily presupposed in the
historical variety of moral constructions, may turn out to be substantially
more difficult.
The traditional, naturallaw conception of a universal morality contained
the assumption that a moral sense is implanted in human beings from the

4 Immanuel Kant, Anthropologie in pragmatischer Hinsicht, Hamburg 19807, 3 (orig. 1869).

 ON THE INTERSUBJECTIVE CONSTITUTION OF MORALS 77

outset and that that sense enables them to distinguish positively and sub-
stantively between good and evil. This oonception leads to a number ofwell-
known difficulties. Even though these may be less devastating than those to
which one is led by moral relativism, they are real nevertheless. Can a
oonception of proto-morality avoid the difficulties of natural law theory? I
think that it can, although it will do so at a certain oost, the notion of a
substantive universal morality.S The oonception of a universal proto-
morality as an intersubjective structure of reciprocal obligations emerging
in social interaction may have serious shortoomings of its own. Nevertheless
I think that it deserves to be submitted to critical discussion. I should, there-
fore, like to explore it in the main part of my oontribution.
But first I must oontinue with the explanation of my motive for approach-
ing such a difficult problem without proper credentials. If the social and
moral order of a human world is socially oonstructed, evidently the most
important kind of human interaction involved in the process is oommunica-
tion. In fact, this may be too obvious a point. In the great traditions of social
theory, oommunicative processes were simply taken for granted, with the
partial exception of George Herbert Mead, James Horton Cooley and a few
other social theorists who were close to the philosophy of pragmatism. The
oonviction that only a closer look at ooncrete oommunicative processes will
yield knowledge about this source of social order (and disorder) only began
to take hold in recent years.
Some time aga I, too, turned my attention to the empirical study of
oommunication. Interesting as oommunicative processes are as part of social
reality, the social-theoretical motive in singling them out for detailed study
is that they are by far the most important medium in the oonstruction of all
of social reality. In the oompany of several younger oolleagues I at first
began to investigate some oommunicative forms whose main function was to
reoonstruct past events and actions. 6 They were of different orders of
magnitude, ranging from minor forms such as alarm-calls to the fire depart-
ment to full-blown oommunicative genres such as religious oonversion
stories. The notion that oommunicative processes with reconstructive
functions were important both in the intersubjective formation of personal
identity and in the orientation of social interaction in families and other
social milieus and institutions was amply oonfirmed.
We soon disoovered the implicit presence of another function in virtually

5 In rny view Scheler's critique of Kant, which led hirn to formulate a substantive
"personalist" ethics of value, failed to resolve the problem of value-relativism. Cf. Max Scheler,
Der Formalismus in der Ethik und die materiale Wertethik, Halle 1916.

6 The project funded by the German Science Foundation was directed by Jörg Bergmann
and myself. The team included Angela Keppler, Hubert Knoblauch, Bernd Ulmer, Ruth Ayaß
and Ute Lacher.
78 THOMAS LUCKMANN

a11 communicative processes at whieh we looked closely. It was a moral

funetion. In some communicative processes it became explicit, and it
combined with the reconstruetive function, as in gossip, or with a didactic
function, as in the conversational imparting ofwisdom. After the conclusion
of the first project we therefore started with a second one whose aim was to
analyze communicative processes in whieh a moral funetion was important
or dominant.? My colleagues and I looked not only at face-to-face com-
municative processes in whieh blame was formulated, indignation voiced ete.,
but also at public moralizing provided by certain TV programs, the oblique
moralizing in genetic counselling, at the moral entrepreneurship of anti-
smoking campaigns ete. While proceeding with the collection and analysis
of data, it seemed useful and proper to gain an impression of the positions
held in those contemporary diseussions in whieh the state of morals in
contemporary society is explicitly thematized.
It seems that two sehools of thought prevail in these debates. Proponents
of both schools can be found in the rarefied atmosphere of academic philo-
sophy as weH as in the ideological and political rough-and-tumble of moral
entrepreneurship. Although the two schools propagate entirely contrary
evaluations of the moral climate prevailing in modern society, they share a
similar assumption. The assumption-which to them seems so obvious as to
require no proof-is that morals as we traditiona11y knew them vanished
from the mainstream of modern life. One school holds that the dissolution
of traditional morals signifies the end of any moral order in social and
individual life. The other school celebrates the emancipation of the
individual from the bonds of traditional, repressive moralities and hails the
advent of the ultimate stage of universal moral evolution, the autonomous
self. If one wishes to look at contemporary society without rigid preconcep-
tions one must avoid the Jessaian despair over the rise of the ungodly,
certain to result in the perdition of the world, as well as the enlightened
rejoicing in the triumph of reason, soon to eulminate in universal moral
insight. The state of morals in modernity then appears substantia11y more
complicated than it is presented in the contradietory exaggerations of the
two main camps of moral entrepreneurship.
It is certainly true that failures of the moral order are conspicuous in
many parts of civil society although it is open to question how singularly
modern this phenomenon iso Surely, there was always a gap, perhaps of
different widths, between the ideals propagated by moral institutions and
everyday praetice. However, it may be a modern development with few

? This project, once more funded by the German Science Foundation, is again directed by
Jörg Bergmann and myself. The team inc1udes Ruth Ayaß, Gaby Christmann, Susanne
Günthner, Hubert Knoblauch, Allison Wetterlin, Thomas Willmann, Monja Messner, Verena
Grötsch and Michaela Goll. In addition, Jennifer Hartog and Helga Kotthoff are associated with
the project.
 ON THE INTERSUBJECfIVE CONSTITUTION OF MORALS 79

precedents that the very authority of moral institutions is radically placed in

doubt. On the other hand, it is also true, that we continue to evaluate and
-these days perhaps hesitatingly-judge other people's actions according to
transsituational standards. We know to our sorrow or joy, as the case may
be, that our own actions are considered blame- or praise-worthy in the light
of other than purely utilitarian values. Thus, while dramatic failures of the
moral order impinge upon our lives occasionally, the morality of social
interaction is part of our daily life.
If an analysis of the teachings of traditional moral institutions no longer
yields much knowledge about the actual state of morals in modern sOciety,
the social scientist must look for other sources of information. On the
assumption that implicit and explicit evaluations of human conduct continue
to be made in ordinary social interaction, my colleagues and I, among others,
have turned to an analysis of the internal structure and social location of
moral(izing) communication. But in the study of morals and moral com-
munication a problem arises that reaches deeper than the usual problems of
social research. 1 am not referring to the special difficulties in the collection
of "naturally" situated data, as, e.g., gossip. Nor am 1 thinking of the
"technical" problem of interpretative ("hermeneutic") reliability when
analyzing texts and transcripts of this nature. Nor, finally, is it a matter of
operational definitions of what is to be considered the moral dimension in
social interaction and, especially, in communicative processes, although it is
this issue which is more closely linked to the problem 1 have in mind than
the other two.
We all have intuitive knowledge of what is not moral communication,
e.g., the formulation of a solution to a mathematical problem, although we
could easily imagine contexts in which this would become a moral issue, e.g.,
in covertly passing on the solution to an examinee. Equally, we have
intuitive knowledge that a direct form of moralizing is involved in accusa-
tions or excuses, and an indirect one when in genetic counselling scientific
information is selectively transmitted to clients. For most practical purposes
such intuitions suffice not only in ordinary life but also in the first step of
social research. They are part of our social "competence" upon which we
draw in reconstructing what Schutz called the "first-order constructs" of
common sense. It is a starting point both in the collection and interpretation
of data.
But what about the comparability of such data, and the results of their
analysis, between different societies and different cultural epochs? We hope
that the results of studies such as ours will yield significant knowledge about
the contemporary situation. However, they will not be able to answer a
fundamental question raised by a historicist view of morals: is the variety of
moral conceptions in human his tory all that there is to be said about the
matter? Or is there something in the human condition that provides a
common matrix from which the varied conceptions arise? What, if anything,
80 THOMAS LUCKMANN

underlies the concrete, historically and culturally so varied articulations of

what is good and what is evil? In the terms lalready used earlier, is there
a proto-moral foundation for the many so conspicuously different moral
edifices?
Obviously, an answer to this question cannot be found by inductive
empiricism. The social competence which enables normal people to
distinguish between good and evil and which permits social scientists to
gather information on such distinctions may be universal in form (but that,
precisely, is part ofthe question) but it varies in content (and that, precisely,
occasions the question). The empirical search for cultural universals may
offer useful hints about a common basis of morals, but of course it already
presupposes an answer to the question.
If an answer is to be found, it is more likely to be arrived at in the
phenomenological "Parallelaktion." As I implied at the beginning, the
approach which seems most promising is suggested by the Schutzean pro-
gram for a comprehensive analysis of the structures of the life-world.

§3
The issue to which I pointed earlier and which I would now like to
submit to closer scrutiny involves two intrinsically related questions: Which
elements that are basic to the human condition are generally, and which are
specifically presupposed in the constitution of proto-morality? It should be
noted that the questions do not imply that proto-morality is not an essential
part of the human condition; it does imply, however, that it is not basic to
it.
Looking for answers to these questions, one clearly need not consider
anything which at one time or another may have been taken for a universal
element of human existence but which turned out to be a historical social
construction, characteristic of a culture and an epoch. Particular moral
codes, locally thought to be universal, and even some specific moral
sentiments, prematurely assumed to be part of human nature, failed to stand
up to historicist critique, although the matter seems to be more easily settled
with regard to the former, e.g., the Mosaic Code, than the latter, e.g.,
sympathy.
Answers to the first question, about the general presuppositions for the
constitution of proto-morality, will be less contentious than those to the
second one. Evidently, any kind of subjective orientation and action in the
life-world, their moral aspects included, rests upon the manifold constitutive
layers of the universal structure of consciousness. The founding strata of
experiences whose meaning is constituted in the "natural attitude" of
everyday life, and of actions directed by the relevance structures of common
sense, range from the polythetic constitution of action projects and the ego-
 ON THE INTERSUBJECTIVE CONSTITUTION OF MORALS 81

identity subscript of ongoing experiences, over the constitution of typical

meanings of (typical) experiences, the synthesis of identity and difference,
and the horizonal awareness of the bOdy, to the passive syntheses of inner
time. It is not necessary to elaborate upon these and other, conterminous
elements of the founding strata of experience and action in the life-world.8
All of them are generally presupposed in the constitution of proto-morality
but only one of them is more directly involved in it.
1 am referring to the acts of valuing and their sedimented results, values.
Evaluative acts are not necessarily moral judgements; one also evaluates
athletic, scholastic and many other performances. Nor are values necessarily
moraiones; one also speaks of aesthetic, economic and other kinds of
values. Axiology is not limited to ethics. Nevertheless, moral judgements are
acts of evaluation, and moral values are values. In the search for the
"origins" of proto-morality they therefore deserve more than a passing
glance.9
Values are constitutive aspects of the subjective meaning of actions. To
value something means to value it more than something else. To wish for a
future state of affairs to come about means to prefer it to other possibilities.
The act of evaluation, including the act of choosing a project of action
(wh ich precedes the action itselt), results in choice.10 Human beings norm-
ally "live" in their experiences and actions, but they not only have the ability
to recollect past experiences and actions, they also do exercise this
ability-except in quasi-automatic experiences and highly routinized actions.
As they engage in new valuing acts and as they make new choices, they
remember past ones. And if they do not remember them individually, one
by one, past choices are at hand as sediments, as preferences embedded in
their attitudes. Earlier valuing acts either led to satisfaction or frustration.
Whether remembered individually or functioning as preferences, the
histories of former choices orientate ongoing evaluations and the choice of
future courses of action.
Furthermore, human beings are not only able to "live in" their ongoing
experiences and actions, and are not only able to remember past ones, they
can, and in problematic situations they do, grasp the value-aspects of their

8 Cf. Aron Gurwitsch, Theorie du Champs de la Conscience, Paris 1957, and Alfred Schutz
and Thomas Luckmann, The StructuTes olthe Life-World, I (Evanston: Northwestern University
Press, 1973; London 1974), The Structures 01 the Lile-World, 11 (Evanston: Northwestern
University Press, 1989).
9 The following remarks on evaluative acts and values elaborate upon a short passage in
my "Morals in Communicative Processes," Conference on "'!be Young People of Central and
Eastern Europe. Social Conditions and Values in Transition," Trento, October 8, 1993.
10 A1fred Schutz, "Choosing Among Projects of Action," in Collected Papers Vol. I (Tbe
Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1962),67-98.
82 THOMAS LUCKMANN

experiences and actions reflectively. In other words, remembering past

valuing acts and reflecting upon choices of future action, individuals may
attend to the criteria of relevance by which the valuing acts were oriented
and which determined the choices. Either the criteria themselves or the
"items" of choice arranged in hierarchical sets may be called values. (To
repeat: not necessarily moral values). In principle, individuals are capable of
constituting subjective value hierarchies for entire sets of related action
projects, culinary as well as erotic, athletic as well as aesthetic. (In principle;
empirically, the contents of most value sets, as well as some of their criteria,
are derived from socially objectivated value systems rather than constructed
individually).
We may say that values are criteria by which choices are made, especially
those choices by which some action projects are favored over others.
Moreover, they are criteria not only for prospective choices but also for
retrospective justification of choices already made. (Justification, first of all,
to oneself. One is of course more often asked to justify one's choices to
others than one is inclined to do so to oneself. But here we are still dealing
with individual egos in the solitary confinement of phenomenological reduc-
tion, not yet with the human beings engaged in social interaction and com-
munication within their life-world). It should be noted that these criteria are
elements of motivational relevance which, along with thematic and
interpretative relevance, was described by Schutz in his general theory of
relevance as one of its three subsystems.l l
Being more directly involved in the constitution of proto-morality than
any other element among the general presuppositions of the latter, evalu-
ative acts and values form the transition between the general and the specific
elements in the human condition upon which proto-morality is founded.
Now the more difficult question is to be raised which specijic elements are
constitutive of proto-morality.

§4

One of the answers given to this question in recent moral philosophy

deserves consideration. It traces the constitution of morality to personal
identity. Because it assumes some sort of priority for personal identity (it is
not always clear whether the claim is made on logical or genetic grounds),
the answer is wrong. Leaving aside the priority-assumption, however, the
answer, connecting personal identity and morality, points in the right

11 Alfred Schutz, Reflections on the Problem o[ Relevance, ed. Richard M. Zaner (New
Haven: Yale University Press, 1970).
 ON THE INlERSUBJECTIVE CONSTITlITION OF MORALS 83

direction. 12
If the term "morality" is understood to refer to a historical moral code,
it designates a social construction. And if the term "personal identity" is used
to designate the character of a human being socialized in one of these moral
codes, it also refers to a social construction. A proposition claiming priority
for one of these terms is therefore neither more nor less plausible than a
proposition making the reverse claim. The time, and the time scales,
involved in the social construction of moral codes and personal identities
belong to different dimensions. The hen-and-the-egg dilemma therefore can-
not arise. Empirically, human beings are born into a social world transmitted
to them as a moral order. Empirically, social worlds are fashioned in long
chains of social actions by human beings. Empirically, moral orders put into
practice the assumption that human beings are responsible for their actions
and that they are to be held responsible for them.
Whatever the nature of the relationship that obtains between personal
identity and morality may be, it is not temporal. In the cautious formulation
of Tugendhat, one could of course maintain that one cannot understand
morality without recourse to the concept of personal identity. One would
have to add, however, that one cannot understand personal identity without
the concept of morality either. But the presuppositions necessary to the
understanding of something are not necessarily the presuppositions for its
existence. Substituting a social theoretical perspective for an epistemological
one, the relationship between morality and personal identity is seen as an
empirical issue in the theory of socialization as weil as in the historical
sociology of moral codes and institutions. The problems of constitution
within the universal structure of the life-world, however, cannot be resolved
empirically. Proto-sociological claims for the "priority" of different elements
on different levels of the structures of the life-world must be settled in a
different court.
The perspective in which such claims are viewed before adjudication is
the phenomenological perspective on "origins." In this perspective one must
clearly distinguish between the analytical constructs of empirical social
theory and the formal entities of phenomenological description on the
severallevels of reduction. Thus one must maintain the distinction between
moralities and proto-morality which lalready suggested in an earlier pas-
sage. In addition, one must differentiate between the historical tokens of

12 Although in a somewhat more circumspect formulation, this is the position seemingly

taken by Ernst Tugendhat in his "Die Rolle der Identität in der Konstitution der Moral," in W.
Edelstein, G. Nunner-Winkler, G. Noam, eds., Moral und Person, Frankfurt/M. 1993, 33-47. At
the beginning of his notable attempt to refute purely "cognitivist" conceptions of the origins of
morals, he writes: "Ich will zeigen, daß weder der formale Sinn der Moral (im Sinne eines
moralischen Systems) noch das, was wir 'unsere Moral' nennen würden, ohne Rekurs auf ein
Konzept personal-sozialer Identität verstanden werden kann" (33).
84 THoMAS LUCKMANN

personal identity and its transhistorical essential type, which, in analogical

coinage, I shall call proto-identity.
The relation between morality and personal identity thus need no longer
concern us here. The question to be answered is: What is the relation
betweenproto-morality andproto-identity? I shall try to formulate an answer
step by step. But I may already anticipate the result. Proto-identity is not an
element of the founding stratum of proto-morality. Nor does proto-identity
require proto-morality in its foundation. They are conterminous. I think that
it can be shown, moreover, that proto-morality and proto-identity are not
only founded upon the same specific-and, of course general-elements of
the human condition but that they are "dialectically" co-constituted.
If this answer is correct, proto-morality and proto-identity are such
closely linked entities in the universal structure of the life-world that to
account for the constitution of one will, in the main, also be to account for
the constitution of the other. It will be necessary to specify both that which
they have in common and that which distinguishes one from the other.
(Evidently, the problem does not arise when one speaks of historical moral
codes and historically individuated types of personal identity. No one fails
to see the difference between Moses and the Mosaic Code).
In general terms, proto-morality is an intersubjectively constituted inter-
subjective structure. Proto-identity is an intersubjectively constituted subjec-
tive structure. Specifically, proto-morality refers to the intersubjective
structure of reciprocal obligations which is originally constituted in inter-
subjective actions and which consequently 'governs' intersubjective actions.
("Governs" normatively, not necessarily "determines" in fact). Proto-identity
refers to the transsituational subjective control of the individual's action-
projects, again arising in intersubjective actions. (Control of action-projects,
not necessarily of accomplished acts). Proto-morality, to repeat, is the
universal structure of the life-world which is presupposed in the historical
social construction, maintenance, and transmission of substantive moral
codes; proto-identity is presupposed in the historical social construction of
personal identities.
Proto-identity is constituted in the interaction of the mundane ego and
its alter ego. Given the elementary spatial, temporal and social stratification
of the life-world, it must be also presupposed that ego and alter ego be
within reach of one another in order to be able to engage in interaction. 13
As a constituted entity, proto-identity will not be confused with what
remains after further steps of reduction, Husserl's constituting transcenden-
tal ego. 14

13 Cf. Alfred Schutz and Thomas Luckmann, The Structures of the Life-World I, op. eit.

14 I have no intention to reopen the mucb-discussed question of the constitution of the

alter ego by tbe transcendental ego. It is weIl known that Scbutz-whose analyses of the structures
 ON THE INTERSUBJECTIVE CONSTITUTION OF MORALS 85

Ego does not experience itself as a Self directly. Of itself, it experiences

without mediation only the sensations, moods and functions of its body. The
overwhelmingly larger part of ego's experiences directly grasps objects, qual-
ities and events in that sector of the world which are within its actual reach.
(This does not imply that the largest part of all of ego's experiences is of the
direct kind. There are recollections-some of which are recollections of
direct experiences-and there are phantasies, projects, thoughts etc.).
Typifications of these objects, qualities and events had been sedimented in
ego's past experiences. Their meaning was determined by ego's relevance
structures contemporary to them. In unproblematic instances the relevant
typifications are automatically appresented to the ongoing experiences. They
are relevant according to the subjective relevance system which is of course
contemporary to the ongoing experiences. The "older" and the "younger"
relevance systems are not-indeed, cannot be-identical in matters of detail,
but their basic structure iso (Radical shifts in subjective relevance systems,
exceptional as they are, may characterize concrete persons in historicallife-
worlds).15
Some bodies in the world within reach are experienced as bodies of alter
egos. This means, first, that they are experienced as bodies to which con-
sciousness is appresented, and second, that the consciousness appresented
is of a kind which makes a "successful" application of the general thesis of
the reciprocity of perspectives likely.1 6 The motives for such appresent-

of the Jife-world were carried out within the frame of phenomenological psychology in which the
intersubjectivity of the Jife-world is taken as given-rejected the "solution" Husserl proposed in
the Cartesian Meditations. Cf. A1fred Schutz, 'The Problem of Transcendental Intersubjectivity
in Husserl," Collected Papers III, (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1966; original German 1957).
Natanson pointed out the problematic nature of some of Schutz's thought which was attributable
10 his setting aside the transcendental question. Cf. Maurice Natanson, op. eit., 51. Natanson
came back to the issue. In his own analysis of anonymity, he instructively juxtaposed Schutz' and
VoegeJin's critique of Husserl's "transcendental solipsisrn." CL his Anonymity, A Study in the
Philosophy o[ Alfred Schutz (BJoomington: Indiana University Press, 1986), esp. 142 ff. I
formulated my view of the matter in "On the Boundaries of the Social World," in Phenomenology
and Social Reality: Essays in Memory o[ Alfred Schutz, ed. Maurice Natanson (The Hague:
Martinus Nijhoff, 1970). Reprinted in my Li[e-World and Social Realities, London 1983,40-67.
I may sum up my position in the following quotation: "Within the primordial sphere of the
transcendental ego one finds only a 'universal' transfer of sense 'living body.' Any restrictions
of this sense-transfer belong already to historical Iife-worlds and should be investigated by the
methods of 'phenomenological psychology.' It is the empirical and worldly ego that may 'become'
human. Its humanness is constituted rather than constitutive. It is founded on the humanness
of the alter ego and not vice versa" (46).
15 On relevance generally see A1fred Schutz, Reflections on the Problem o[ Relevance, op.
cit., and A1fred Schutz and Thomas Luckmann, The Structures o[ the Li[e-World I, op. cit.
16 "Reciprocity of perspectives," a term originally coined by Theodor Litt (Individuum und
Gemeinschaft. Grundlegung der Kulturanthropologie, Berlin 19263, 221), was a key concept in
Schutz's analysis of the sociality of everyday reality in the Iife-world. Cf., e.g., A1fred Schutz and
86 THOMAS LUCKMANN

ations to some bodies and not to others are not as simple as they may
appear at first glance. Tbey cannot be discussed hereP
Tbe bodies of alter egos are experienced directly, their consciousness is
appresented. Although the meaning of the experience of alter ego is unitary
to ego, the experience does not entirely loose this ambivalence between
immediacy and mediateness, an ambivalence which may lead to situational
alternation from body to consciousness and back again.
When ego does something in the sector of the world it shares with alter
ego, it follows that-other things being equal-its action can be observed by
alter ego. I should stress that I am not yet talking of actions specifically
addressed by ego to alter ego. Empirically, these will be the largest part of
an individual's actions to which others in fact do pay attention-but they are
not necessarily presupposed in this step of constitution. (Tbey are presup-
posed, however, in the constitution of proto-morality).
Tbe body of alter ego serves as a field of expression of alter ego's con-
sciousness to ego. In consequence, whenever alter ego pays attention to what
ego does, ego may become aware of alter ego's attention. 18 If one were to
take it for granted that language is not yet constituted on this level, one
would have to assume that only bodily expressions and movements could be
the basis of such awareness. However, in my view language, too, is in the
process of constitution on this level-to use an empiricist temporal meta-
phor-as soon as ego's actions are directed at alter ego. When ego addresses
his actions to alter ego and alter ego responds, a "conversation of gestures"
(Mead) begins. An elementary referential sign system is constituted in this
"conversation." Once constituted, it may serve to convey to ego what its
action "means" to alter ego with more precision than can normally be
achieved by bodily expressions alone. 19
As it experiences directly alter ego's reaction to its actions, ego indirectly
experiences significant, indeed, constitutive aspects of itself. It perceives itself
as someone whose actions have consequences beyond their immediate,
tangible results, as an actor in an intersubjective world. In face-to-face
encounters, the experience of one's own self is built up in experiences of
other selves. Tbis complex process of experiencing self-reflecting experiences

Thomas Luckmann, The Structures of the Life-World I, op. eil.

17 Cf. my "On the Boundaries of the Social World," op. eil.
18 Schutz carefully analyzed this process when he dealt with the synchronization of two
streams of conseiousness. Cf. his Der sinnhafte Aufbau der sozialen Welt, op. eil.
19 Cf. my ''The Constitution of Language in the World of Everyday Life," in Lester E.
Embree, ed., Life-World and Consdousness. Essays for Aron Gurwitsch (Evanston: Northwestern
University Press, 1972), 496-488. Reprinted in Life-World and Sodal Realities, op. eil.
 ON THE INlERSUBJECTIVE CONSTITIJTION OF MORALS 87

may be called "intersubjective mirroring."2O The process is fraught with

evaluations of two kinds, the original subjective ones and the intersubjective
ones. (One may speak of refraction rather than reflection here: it is a matter
of something, i.e., evaluations, passing through one "medium" into another).
First, ego's original action is chosen in accordance with its subjective
system of relevance. The choice is determined most directly by the sub-
system of motivational relevances. As was shown before, motivational
relevances are sediments of past evaluative acts. Second, the perception of
ego's action by alter ego is governed, in its turn, by alter ego's subjective
relevance system. Formulated in a somewhat simplified fashion this means,
in effect, that alter ego evaluates the values which guided ego's original
action. As far as this point is concerned, it does not matter whether these
values formed routine aspects of the motivation for ego's project of action
or whether they were grasped reflectively and weighed carefully before ego's
choice of the project. Similarly, alter ego may have actively thematized the
values which it attributed to ego's project in order to evaluate them, or it
may have evaluated ego's action in an almost automatic fashion.
Alter ego's evaluative reactions to its action, whether intentionally
conveyed or automatically expressed, can be "read" by ego in its turn. If that
happens, they are of course "read" in terms of its own subjective relevance
system. Such "readings" must perforce destroy the original value-solipsism of
ego. Henceforth its choices of action-projects, although evidently still
governed by its subjective relevance system, are no longer "naive." They are
made with the tacit knowledge of congruence or disparity of its own evalu-
ations with those of alter ego. "Reciprocal mirroring" is not a matter of
simple reflection in a perfect looking glass. Each mirror has its own
convexities, concavities, cracks and sections of blind glass. And each mirror
refracts the peculiarities of the other mirror in its own peculiar way.
The preceding steps of description showed the elementary structure of
"reciprocal mirroring," including its original as weIl as refracted evaluative
aspects. It was the structure of a first instance of ego's action, and a first
instance of alter ego's reaction to ego's action. This was the basis for ego's
"reading" alter ego's reaction, future projects of action then being chosen by
ego in cognizance of alter ego's reaction. This basic structure of "reciprocal
mirroring" is presupposed in the constitution of proto-identity.

20 It can be seen that-although formulated in a phenomenological frame-this part of the

argument reconstructs the well-known accounts of the evolution of the Self by George Herbert
Mead (Mind, Self and Society, Chicago 1967, first published 1934), and of the ontogeny of the
Self by Charles Horton Cooley, Human Nature and the Socia! Order, New York 1967 (first
published 1902). These accounts formed the basis of my essay "Personal Identity as an
Evolutionary and Historical Problem", in Mario von Cranach, Klaus Foppa, Wolf Lepenies and
Detlef Ploog, eds., Human Ethology: Claims and Limits o[ a New Discipline, Cambridge, 1979,
reprinted in my Li[e-World and Social Realities, op. eit., 95-109.
88 THOMAS LUCKMANN

But proto-identity is not constituted in one single instance of "reciprocal

mirroring" involving a single alter ego in the here-and-now of a unique face-
to-face situation. It is constituted in manifold processes of intersubjectively
mediated experiences of Self, involving multiple alter egos in a transsitu-
ational dimension of time. 21 The overall structure of this process is
temporally and intersubjectively more complex than the elementary structure
of "reciprocal mirroring" upon which it rests.
Even when considering the processes involving ego with only one alter
ego, a higher level of complexity is reached by the addition of other actions
to the first action. Ego remembers alter ego's (evaluative) reaction to its first
action when engaging in the second one. In accordance with the principle of
the reciprocity of perspectives, ego attributes to alter ego the ability to
recollect both its (ego's) action and its own (alter ego's) reaction to it. If the
same action provokes the same reaction, it can be typified by ego as an
action with a typical valuation, either an intersubjectively congruent or a
disparate one. (Again in accordance with the principle of the reciprocity of
perspectives, the typification to which ego was led by its actions and the
experience of alter ego's reaction to them, may be attributed to alter ego by
ego).
As ego does different things, its actions will elicit different reactions by
alter ego, and as these are repeated, ego will first "read" and then typify alter
ego's valuations of its actions. Step by step, typifications of different actions,
associated with characteristic reactions and corresponding valuations will add
to ego's subjective stock of knowledge about values shared with alter ego
and values of ego's which are not congruent with those of alter ego. Ego's
choices of action-projects will take into account alter ego's anticipated
typical reactions.
At the same time, these processes establish typical aspects of ego's proto-
identity. Ego experiences itself as a doer of things which are positively
valued by itself and by alter ego, and as a doer of things which it values in
opposition to alter ego's valuation. Although all aspects of ego's proto-
identity are constituted in processes of reciprocal mirroring, some of these
aspects emerge in conformity with alter ego's views of ego and its actions,
others in opposition to them.
In principle, the elementary constitution of proto-identity requires no
more than one alter ego as a "mirror" of ego's actions. But an important
change occurs in the identity-constituting effects of "reciprocal mirroring"
when another alter ego joins the situation shared by ego and alter ego.
(Empirically, socialization-the introduction of children into a socio-
historical apriori and the formation of their personalities-involves more

21 Cf. my ''The Constitution of Human Life in Time," in John Bender and David E.
Wellerby, Chronotypes, Stanford 1991, 151-166.
 ON THE INTERSUBJECfIVE CONSTITUTION OF MORALS 89

than one person. Ever since Georg Simmel it is an axiom of the theory of
social relations that the addition of the third person to a dyad profoundly
alters the relationship between the original members of the dyad. 22
In the dyad, congruence in the valuation of actions (and aspects of the
seIt) not only confirms the principle of the reciprocity of perspectives but
also bestows a status of intersubjective validity upon ego's valuations. The
addition of another, congruently valuing alter ego merely supports what had
been already established by alter ego. One might perhaps say that, tres
facientes collegium, the valuations now aspire to the status of social object-
ivity.
It is an entirely different matter if the second alter ego enters a situation
of disparate of conflicting valuations. (In principle, it is not important
whether these are of the positive-negative or the negative-positive kind).
Incongruence of valuations in the dyad casts doubt upon the principle of the
reciprocity of perspectives or at least its applicability in that particular case.
Ego cannot be certain about the validity of its valuations. An aspect of its
proto-identity remains in suspense.
Doubt and suspense are strengthened if the second alter ego aligns itself
with the valuation of the first alter ego. Ego may admit the intersubjective
validity and potential social objectivity of the valuation of the two alter egos
and experience itself as deviant at least in this particular instance. It may
then either change its own valuation and join the fold of "correct" valuations
or embrace a "deviant" aspect of its proto-identity.
If, however, the second alter ego supports ego's original valuation, ego
may consider the first alter ego's incongruent valuation as "deviant. " Ego's
and the second alter ego's valuations aspire to the status of intersubjective
validity and, eventually, social objectivity. The corresponding aspect of ego's
proto-identity, in suspense after the first alter ego's disparate valuation,
receives support.
Both the addition of different types of actions and of alter egos adds to
the complexity of the processes in which proto-identity is constituted,
especially if the two factors are considered in various combinations (e.g.,
different types of actions having their particular "significant others").
Furthermore, the sequence of alter egos will be important. Other things
being equal, the first reflected valuations will be more significant in the
constitution of proto-identity than subsequent ones. Moreover, over time
alter egos may be differently valued as "mirrors" byego on the basis of both
of its own "original" valuations and of valuations of alter egos by others. And
finally, action types and their valuations are not segregated, one by one, but
placed in subjective-now intersubjectively constituted-value hierarchies. (It

22 Georg Simmel, Soziologie. Untersuchungen über die Formen der Vergesellschaftung, Leip-
zig 1908 (chapter on "Die quantitative Bestimmtheit der Gruppe'').
90 THoMAS LUCKMANN

should be remembered what was said about the formation of subjective value
hierarchies earlier). With these remarlcs we have reached the threshold
separating the description of the constitution of proto-identity from the
analysis of the social construction of personal identities.
I suggested earlier that proto-morality and proto-identity are such c10sely
linked entities in the universal structure of the life-world that describing the
constitution of one would also account, in the main, for the constitution of
the other. The detaHed description of "reciprocal mirroring," of the original
and refracted valuations of ego's actions, and of the role of congruence and
disparity in intersubjective valuations, showed how elementary aspects of
ego's proto-identity are buHt up intersubjectively. All these processes are
also essential and conterminous steps in the constitution of proto-morality.
Only one essential element is still missing in the account of the "origins"
of proto-morality as an intersubjectively constituted mtersubjective structure.
(One remembers that proto-identity is an intersubjectively constituted
subjective structure). In the constitution of proto-identity the presence of
alter ego in the world within reach for ego was required. However, alter ego
was only required as an observer of ego's actions. Its reactions did not need
to be active responses. This limited role of alter ego does not suffice for the
constitution of proto-morality.
When ego addresses its actions to alter ego, it expects a response. When
it receives a response, that response has a special significance. It contains
more than merely a "parallel evaluation"-a congruent or a disparate one-of
ego's action, and of the values attributed to ego in its choice of that action
project. That much was already necessary for the constitution of proto-
identity. An action directed at alter ego also necessarily activates alter ego's
own motivational relevances as a concerned party to the interaction.
If alter ego's evaluation of ego's action is negative, its response shows ego
that its own valuation of the action is not only different but in conflict with
alter ego's. The resolution of the conflict, at this level, can be merely
interactive and contributes nothing to the constitution of proto-morality. (It
may be likened to an original state of the "war of everybody against every-
body").
If, however, alter ego's evaluation of ego's action is positive, its response
expresses not only the congruence ofvaluation but a common interest in the
accomplishment of the interaction. The repetition of the interaction (a
minimum of an action addressed by ego to an alter ego, and a response by
alter ego) with its congruently positive evaluative aspects permit typification
of the interaction as "good" from both points of view, for ego and for alter
ego.
For both, the expectation is established that under typical circumstances
a typical interaction will occur, an interaction which is considered "good" by
both partners. Because both partners also have a direct interest in the inter-
action and its "goodness" more than a simple intersubjective expectation
 ON THE INTERSUBJECfIVE CONSTITUTION OF MORALS 91

structure is established. (Alter ego as a mere observer, e.g., may learn to

expect that under certain circumstances ego will repeat an action which,
while negatively evaluated, is of no concern to it because it was not ad-
dressed to it by ego). One may call that "more" than a mere expectation
structure, an intersubjective structure of obligations. If ego disappoints alter
ego's expectations (or vice versa) it has broken an obligation. Ego's actions
now not only have intersubjective consequences (that much was already the
case in the constitution of proto-identity), ego is held responsible for its
actions.
The response by alter ego to abreach of obligations on the part of ego
may consist in simply expressing a negative valuation. Since one may assume
that language is already constituted on this level, it may consist in communi-
cative actions such as blamings or accusations. Finally, alter ego may (try to)
"enforce" ego's obligation by its own actions.
Thus, the elementary intersubjective structure of proto-morality is
constituted intersubjectively. Its constitution as a universal structure of the
life-world is conterminous-with the exception of one presupposition-with
the elementary constitution of proto-identity. The elementary structure of
proto-morality resembles the outline of the basic "dialogical" morality as
envisaged from different perspectives by Jörg Bergmann23 and Ragnar
Rommetveit. 24
As other "good" interactions are added to the "first" interaction, an inter-
subjective hierarchy of obligations emerges. The entry of other alter egos as
parties to the different kinds of interactions adds social objectivity to the
"goodness" of certain interactions and supports the "enforcement" of
obligations. Thus, a socially objective and socially enforceable structure of
obligations emerges.
But here we again reach the limits of a phenomenological search for the
"origins" of proto-morality. Beyond these limits lies an analysis of the social
construction of communicative processes in which moral codes are historic-
ally established and of the institutionalization of the enforcement of moral
codes. This is another story.

23 Jörg Bergmann, "'Ibe Dialogieity of Morals and the Morality of Dialogue," in J.

Bergmann, P. Linell, eds., Morality in Dialogue, to appear in 1994.
24 Ragnar Rommetveit, "On 'Proto-morality,' Discourse-intemal Ethics, and Manifestations
of the Moral Self in Dialogues," in Morality in Dialogue, op. eit.
 MICHAEL BARBER

THE VULNERABILITY OF REASON:

The Philosophical Foundations of

Emmanuel Levinas and K. O. Apel

In a recent contribution to a conversation between philosophers from the

"Third" and "First" Worlds, Karl-Otto Apel contends that part B of his
discourse ethics can easily accommodate the preoccupation with the
exc1usion of the Other that characterizes the philosophy of Enrique Dussel,
a Mexican philosopher in the tradition of Emmanuel Levinas. In my
opinion, however, such a facile accommodation cannot take place since
Apel's reconstructive transcendental methodology conceives interpersonal
relationships as if their terms were the reversible and interchangeable ones
of formallogic. Therefore, Apel inevitably fails to recognize the Levinasian
discovery that the Other is not given as an equal but as one commanding
from a height. Instead of Apel subsuming Dussel and Levinas, I would rather
suggest that these two philosophical endeavors with their different method-
ologies, purposes, and emphases, can be located at different levels on a
common architectonic, analogous 10 the dual levels of the life-world and
transcendental philosophy in Edmund Husserl's philosophy. Dussel and
Levinas, reflecting on the forgotten horizons prior to the origin of theory
itself, at a level analogous to Husserl's lifeworld, utilize an intuitive-
descriptive methodology in a continual effort to revivify the Other's easily
overlooked height and resistance to totalization. Apel, on the other hand,
through self-reflection, explores the operative but unadmitted presupposi-
tions within argumentation and every ongoing theory, at a level analogous
to that of Husserl's reflections on the transcendental ego. My purpose here,
though, is not to defend further this architectonic, but to c1arify Levinas's
and Apel's philosophical "foundations," offered at different levels of the
philosophical spectrum and sharply honed through critical confrontations
with Jacques Derrida, on the one hand, and Jürgen Habermas and Hans
Albert on the other. I will attempt further to point out the similarities
between these "foundations" and to suggest the implications of their
respective endeavors for an understanding of rationality as a source of

93
S. Galt Crowell (ed.), The Prism ofthe Self, 93-106.
© 1995 Kluwer Academic Publishers.
94 MICHAEL BARBER

vulnerability.1

§1. Levinas's "Foundation" and Derrida's Critique

Levinas confers an atmosphere of foundationalism on Totality and Infinity

when he announces in the Preface that his notions owe everything to the
phenomenological method. This foundational motif continues when he
describes his own work in terms that evoke the memory of Husserl's Crisis,
going back behind theory in order to probe the life-world out of which
theory arises.

Intentional analysis is the search for the concrete. Notions

held under the direct gaze of the thought that defines them
are nevertheless, unbeknown to this naive thought, revealed
to be implanted in horizons unsuspected by this thought;
these horizons endow them with a meaning-such is the
essential teaching of Husserl. What does it matter if in the
Husserlian phenomenology taken literally these unsuspect-
ed horizons are in their turn interpreted as thoughts aiming
at objects! What counts is the idea of the overflowing of
objectiTng thought by a forgotten experience from which
it lives.

The rest of Totality and Infinity proceeds to situate the branches of

philosophy, such as ODtology or epistemology, and philosophical problems
such as truth, language, universals, freedom, God, suffering, and death, with
reference to the forgotten metaphysical relationship to the Other which

1 Karl-Otto Apel, "Die Diskursethik vor der Herausforderung der Dritten Welt," in Diskurs-
ethik oder Befreiun&Sethik?, ed. Raul Fournet Betancourt (Aachen: Verlag der Augustinus
Buchhandlung, 1992), 20; Transformation der Philosophie, voI. 2: Das Apriori der Kommuni-
kationsgemeinschaft, 385-389; English translation by G1yn Adey and David Frisby, Toward a
Transformation of Philosophy (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1980), 248-251; "Normative
Begrundung der 'Kritischen Theorie' durch Rekurs auf lebensweltliche Sittlichkeit," 21-58. In this
essay, Apel criticizes Habermas for not seeking ultimate grounding at a transcendental level
beyond that of the Iifeworld. Apel explicitly argues that he is replacing Husserl's transcendental
consciousness with the apriori of intersubjective meaning-validity and truth-claims on the
presupposition of speech and an in principle unlimited communication community in Diskurs und
Verantwortung: Das Problem des Übergan&S zur postkonventionellen Moral (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp,
1988), 113. Emmanuel Levinas, Totality and Infinity, trans. A1phonso Lingis (The Hague:
Martinus Nijhoff, 1979), 22-30, 35-36, 43-44, 49, 80-81, 84,103-104,194-197,201,210-212,219,
289-290,292,295.
2 Totality and Infinity, 28.
 THE VULNERABILITY OF REASON 95

subtends them all. 3

Yet this Other also uproots phenomenology. Intentionality, tinged with
the voluntary and the teleological and aspiring to be filled and fulfilled, as
a centripetal movement of a consciousness that rests in self-certainty and
confirms itself, runs aground before the Other. The Other's presence,
irreducible to evidence, neither enters into an intuition, nor spreads out as
a theme beneath the phenomenologist's gaze. It does not figure as a noema
correlative to a noesis since "there is no meaning in speaking here of
knowledge or ignorance." The Other fails to appear in the full light as a
phenomenon but disturbs phenomena like an enigma. As far as language is
concerned, the Other stands beyond every attribute which would qualify her
and reduce her to what is common to her and other beings. Levinas's
uncovering of the Other shows that in fact "Western philosophy has most
often been ... areduction of the other to the same." Paradoxically, Levinas's
Husserlian-like search for the ultimate horizon in "allegiance to the
intellectualism of reason," leads to the discovery of the Other whose
eschatological irruption defies every effort at domestication and highlights
the inadequacy of every supposed comprehension. It is no wonder that
Levinas contrasts his philosophy with previous philosophy that sought to
secure itself by providing an epistemological "objective knowledge of know-
ledge," based on freedom founded only on itself. Instead, Levinas proposes
an anti-foundation, an essence to undo all essences: "The essence of reason
consists not in securing for man a foundation and powers, but in calling hirn
in question and inviting hirn to justice."4
Here Derrida's critique in "Violence and Metaphysics" intersects Levinas's
philosophy, although some have suggested that Derrida's critique is actually
a deconstructive double reading that repeats the author's intentions and
illuminates blind spots without passing a final verdict. For Derrida, Levinas
speaks of the infinitely Other at the same time as he renounces the violence
of language, thereby depriving hirnself of the very foundation and possibility
of his own language. Levinas's ensnarement in the very language he criticizes
has its parallel in his employment of phenomenological method. Even to
point out how the Other eludes phenomenological procedures and
categorizations, Levinas must appeal implicitly to some other phenomeno-
logical self-evidences against phenomenology. One must apprehend the
Other sufficiently to recognize that other characterizations fall short of this
Other. Furthermore, since the Other can only appear in relationship to a

3 Ibid., 42-48, 60-64, 72-77, 77-79, 82-101, 201-212, 232-247, 302-303, 306-307.
4 Ibid., 29, 43, 50-51, 60-67, 74, 83-85,88, 90; Emmanuel Levinas, O/herwise than Being or
BeyondEssence, trans. Alphonso Lingis (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1981),47-48,53,96,111;
Emmanuel Levinas "Phenomenon and Enigma," Collected Philosophical Papers, trans. Alphonso
Lingis (Dordrecht: Martinus Nijhoff, 1987), 70.
96 MICHAEL BARBER

consciousness, Levinas presupposes the very transcendental phenomenology

he seeks to put in question. In brief, Derrida accuses Levinas of falling prey
to the age-old dream of "empiricism" to reach a pure thought-a dream that
must vanish at daybreak as soon as language awakens. 5
In arecent paper at the International Levinas Conference in Chicago,
Charles Scott cautioned against Levinas's presentation of the Other as if his
own Jewish tradition were not integral to his description, as if this Other
were given immediately, obviously and independently of the conditioning of
a tradition. Without such a recognition of the finitude and historicity of
one's insight, one assurnes the patent correctness of one's dehistoricized view
and so is prone to the very dogmatism and violence to which the entire
Levinasian project is opposed. Derrida, it seems to me, is making a similar
point at the level of language and philosophical methodology: not to admit
the kind of language one is using and the philosophical methodology
employed is to succumb to a kind of dogmatism-as if the facts were im-
mediately manifest, not mediated through language or philosophical tradi-
tions, and so (an Inquisitor might say) resistible only by a malevolent
heretic. In the same vein, critics have charged that Enrique Dussel, who
relies on Levinas's thought usually without methodological self-reflection,
fosters dogmatism because his assertions seem to rest upon emotional or
mystical conviction. Although Derrida's questions here could appear as a
logocentric plea for transcendental phenomenology-a strange tactic for
Derrida-self-reflection on one's own language and philosophical methodolo-
gy in the manner of transcendental philosophy seems called for if one wishes
to avoid the dogmatism and violence of those who make claims to truth
without attending to the access through which they find it.6
In Otherwise than Being, Levinas reformulates his findings in Totality and
Infinity and res ponds to Derrida's criticisms without explicitly mentioning
them or hirn. Levinas reflects upon his own philosophical language a bit
more pointedly than he did in Totality and Infinity and recognizes that it
betrays that of which it speaks.

The very discussion which we are at this moment elaborat-

5 ''Editor's Introduction" in Robert Bernasconi and Simon Critchley, eds., Re-Reading

Levinas (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991), xii. Jacques Derrida, ''Violence and
Metaphysics, An Essay on the Thought of Emmanuel Levinas," in Writing anti Difference, trans.
Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978), 114, 117, 125, 129, 133, 141, 151.
6 Charles Scott, "A People Witness Beyond Politics," paper presented at the International
Levinas Conference, Loyola University, Chicago, May, 1993. Ofelia Schutte, "Origins and
Tendencies of the Philosophy of Liberation in Latin American Thought: A Critique of Dussel's
Ethics," The Philosophical Forum 32 (1991), 280, 289, 291, 293; Horacio Cerutti Goldberg,
Filosofta de la Liberaci6n Latinoambicana (Mexico: Fondo de Cultura Economica, 1983),292,
308; Robert Bernasconi, "Skepticism in the Face of Philosophy," in Re-Reading Levinas, 157.
 THE VULNERABILITY OF REASON 97

ing about signification, diachrony and the transcendence of

the approach beyond being, a discussion that means to be
philosophy, is a thematizing, a synchronizing of terms, a
recourse to systematic language, a constant use of the verb
being, a bringing back into the bosom of being all significa-
tion allegedly conceived beyond being . . . Everything is
shown by indeed betraying its meaning, but philosophy is
called upon to reduce that betrayal. 7

At this point of self-reflection, Levinas recognizes that his philosophical-

linguistic means do not do justice to the relationship with the Other, here
elaborated under the rubrics not of metaphysics, but of proximity, significa-
tion, diachrony, and the approach. Even to criticize these philosophical-
linguistic means, though, depends upon some prior recognition of the nature
of proximity to which these means are not adequate. It is as though Levinas
is in touch with a unique "object"-that really cannot be classified as an
object like other objects or as an object at all-such that this "object"
demands a philosophical-linguistic approach unlike all previous ones.
Levinas appears then to be doing something analogous to Husserlian trans-
cendental philosophy, which, in contrast to positivism's assumption that all
regions of being could be treated by the univocal method of the natural
sciences, articulated regionalontologies specifying distinctive scientific and
philosophical approaches. However, Levinas does not underestimate the
difficulty of "coming to grips" with this unique "object" or "ontological
region" with which one can never "come to grips" and which cannot accur-
ately be classified as an "object" or "ontological region." This strange "region"
seems to forbid the usual Husserlian transcendental approach, even as it
requires an analogate to that approach.8
The uniqueness of this "ontological region" unsettles the usual practices
of language and philosophy in general as it invites novel ones. Already in
"La trace de l'autre," Levinas, in anticipation of "Violence and Metaphysics,"
is aware of how one both resorts to language even as one discovers its limits
in the presence of the Other. The Other requires "grasping" through that
favorite Derridean device, the trace, a sign like and unlike other signs, since
while it signifies, as do other signs, it does not inscribe the Other within the
sign-user's world, as do other signs, but deranges (derange) that world. The
trace is the presence of that which properly speaking has not been there.
Just as the Other mandates a type of symbolic activity that is like and unlike
every other kind of symbolizing, so a unique kind of philosophy is needed.
Immediately after the above quotation from Otherwise than Being, Levinas,

7 Otherwise than Beillg, 155.

8 Bemasconi, "Skepticism in the Face of Philosophy," 153-154; Totality and Infinity, 80-81.
98 MICHAEL BARBER

in response to this "region" unlike any other region, undertakes a favorite

Husserlian transcendental activity-namely defining the task and essence of
philosophy itself, a philosophy of philosophy-but defining it unlike Husserl
ever defined it.

It [God] is non-thematizable, and even here is a theme only

because in a said everything is conveyed before us, even the
ineffable, at the price of a betrayal which philosophy is
called upon to reduce. Philosophy is called upon to con-
ceive ambivalence, to conceive it in several times. Even if
it is called to thought by justice, it still synchronizes in the
said the diachrony of the difference between the one and
the other, and remains the servant of the saying that signi-
fies the difference between the one and the other as the
one for the other, as non-indifference to the other. Philoso-
phy is the wisdom of love at the service of love. 9

In the face of the Other, langua~e and philosophy itself are thrown off a
balance they will never recover. 1
In allowing a "region" to dictate this novel, correlative philosophical
method-a philosophy of philosophy-Levinas's thought reminds one of Hus-
serl's development of transcendental philosophy in correspondence with its
object, the transcendental ego. Or one thinks of Alfred Schutz correlating
the social lifeworld with a constitutive phenomenology of the natural
attitude from within the natural attitude prior to any transcendental
phenomenology, whose methods are not appropriate since they are forced
to bracket intersubjectivity from the outset. Regions prescribe diverse
philosophical methodologies. However, this phenomenological "region" of
the Other could still be located at the commencement of discourse and
theory, at a level analogous to that of Husserl's lifeworld, just as Schutz's
transcendental-like correlation of object and philosophical method focused
on the natural attitude prior to theory and transcendental reflection. 11
When one thinks of providing philosophical foundations, one usually

9 Otherwise than Being, 162.

10 Emmnuel Levinas, "La trace de I'autre," in En Decouvrant l'Existence avec HWiserl et
Heidegger, 3d ed. (Paris: J. Vrin, 1982), 198, 199-200,201; Totality and Infinity, 80-81.
11 Edmund Husserl, Cartesian Meditations, An Introduction to Phenomenology, trans.
Dorion Caims (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1960), 151-157; Edmund Husserl, ldeas, General
Introduction to Pure Phenomenology, trans. by W. R. Boyce Gibson (New York: Collier Books,
1962),373-394; Alfred Schutz, The Phenomenology olthe Social World, trans. George Walsh and
Frederick Lehnert (Evanston: Northwestem University Press, 1967),44; Alfred Schutz, "Concept
and Theory Formation in the Social Sciences," in The Problem 01 Social Reality, vol. 1 of
Collected Papers (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1962), 48-66.
 THE VULNERABILITY OF REASON 99

thinks of establishing an epistemology, impregnable to philosophical assaults,

as if the task of reason involved defense and the suppression of further
questions. In Levinas, on the contrary, reason tirelessly raises questions,
exploring the unexamined horizons of theory itself and discovering the
Other-who continually generates questions, summons toward the discourse
that rationalism prays for, and renews reason, preventing it from congealing
into a closed totality and dissolving its pretenses to secure foundations.
Derrida's critique, though, prevents Levinas's anti-foundationalism and
critique of reason from degenerating into the dogmatism and violence
Levinas abhors by pointing to the foundations underlying his anti-
foundationalism and the reason at work in his critique of reason. Paradoxi-
cally, self-reflection in the transcendental style-the archetype of a philosoph-
ical fortress mentality to many-renders even the critique of philosophy and
language vulnerable since that critique must resort to the flawed means of
philosophy and language. Levinas indeed articulates "foundations"-even a
philosophyofphilosophy-but these "foundations" are unusual, always "under
erasure" because they have become destabilized, tentative, and self-critical
in response to the "region" of the Other. This strange blend of a "founda-
tion" that affirrns the Other as the starting point and yet as a starting point
that imperils every affirmation, even the affirmation that affirms it as a
starting point, testifies to the insecurity the Other will introduce into every
intellectual discourse. As a result, discourse can never be "the unfolding of
a prefabricated internal logic" because of "the strangeness of interlocutors,
the revelation of the other to me."12

§2. Apel's Foundation and the Interchanges with Habermas and Albert

Apel arrived at his own systematic position through interchanges with

logical positivism and the hermeneutical philosophies of Heidegger,
Gadamer, and Wittgenstein. In Apel's view, positivism's insistence on the
nonsensicality of metaphysical questions disguised its own metaphysics of
physicalism. By focusing on syntactico-semantic analyses, it overlooked and
effectively suppressed the pragmatic dimensions of its own communicative
activity, except for occasional behaviorist forays in this direction. Apel's
alternative, reconstructive, non-empiricist methodology remedies this deficit
by illustrating how scientific and philosophical argumentation itself involves
practical relationships of co-subjects, reciprocally and respectfully recogniz-
ing each other as autonomous subjects of logical argumentation. This
detecting of unacknowledged suppositions continues in Apel's confrontation
with defenders of these hermeneutical-pragmatic dimensions of language of

12 Totality and Injinity, 73.

100 MICHAEL BARBER

which Apel hirnself takes account. Apel chides Gadamer and Heidegger,
whose embraee of historicity coneeals the claim to universal validity that
their own philosophizing raises, thereby falling into a self-undermining and
self-destructiveLogosver;gessenheit (forgetfulness of reason). Wittgenstein, al-
though self-reflexive regarding his own statements in the Tractatus, was
compelled by his positivistic, objectivistic-physicalistic presuppositions to
conclude that those statements themselves were nonsensical metaphysics-a
mere ladder to be discarded onee the climbing is completed. Likewise,
preferring the modest role of therapist sensitive to the diversity of concrete
life-forms that preclude any univocal notion of linguistic usage, the later
Wittgenstein resists attributing any theoretical status to the statements of his
Philosophical Investigations. In contrast to Wittgenstein's reserve, Apel,
however, contends that Wittgenstein, unaware of his own achievement, in
fact ofters a transeendental philosophy of the preconditions for the possi-
bility and validity of meaning and understanding-a philosophy embodied in
the coneept of the language game. Wittgenstein also fails to recognize the
distinctiveness of the philosophical language-game he himself engages in.
The philosophical language game, depicting the features of all other
language games and not fulfilling its function within any of them, constitutes
a metainstitution at a higher self-reflexive level than any particular language
game associated with a particular form of life. 13
Apel's philosophical strategy can be characterized as educing from the
philosophical positions of logical positivists or hermeneutic philosophers
those tacit presuppositions that they often would prefer not to acknowledge
sinee they seem to run counter to their philosophical projects. This pointing
to the blind spots and ellipses of an author's intentionality much resembles
Derrida's parrying with Levinas. Apel, in fact, performs a similar eduction
with respect to argumentation itself. When one considers philosophical or
scientific argumentation in terms of the relationship between interlocutors,
it is evident that argumentation, as Levinas observes, is a highly precarious
endeavor in which any claim can be challenged at any time. Almost as if
against the grain of the very contingency of the argumentative proeess itself,
Apel uncovers eertain presuppositions that are neeessary and unavoidable
for argumentation-neeessary because the very eftort to plaee them in
question would make use of them. According to Apel, the pragmatic condi-
tions of the interlocutor relationship that are present universally (tran-
seendentally) in any philosophical or scientific argumentation-proeess

13 Transformation der Philosophie 1: 63-67, 249, 268, 272-273, 308-309, 332-334,

358-346-347/11, 357-360120-22, 371/33; 2: 35, 41 [cf. Karl-Otlo Apel, Analytic Philosophy of
Language and the Geisteswissenschaften (Dordrecht: D. Reidel, 1967), 7-8, 12-13], 149,
181-185/96-98,233/147,400/259; Karl-Otlo Apel, Understanding and Explanation: A Transcen-
dental-Pragmatic Perspective, trans. Georgia Warnke (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1984), 37, 202,
249; Karl-Otlo Apel, Diskurs und Verantwortung, 66, 383.
 THE VULNERABILITY OF REASON 101

include those specified in Habermas's Theory of Communicative Action: the

four validity claims necessarily implied in human acts of communication and
open to further discussion in argumentation, the presupposed consensual
redeemability of validity claims, and the primacy of communicative
rationality over strategic-purposive rationality. Apel's disclosing of the
metaphysics of anti-metaphysical positivism and the transcendental under-
pinnings of anti-transcendental hermeneutic philosophies accentuating
historicity and the diversity of contingent life-forms is thoroughly consistent
with his discovery of the incontestable presuppositions of the argumentative
process which renders every claim contestable. 14
Jürgen Habermas, whose pragmatic conditions of argumentation Apel
espouses, argues against Apel that one cannot justify these presuppositions
of argumentation but can only prove that there are no alternatives to them.
However, the claim that there are no alternatives involves hypothetical
elements that must be checked against individual cases since, as G. Shönrich
has affirmed and Habermas concurs, nit is in principle an open question
whether the subjects of cognition will change their way of thinking about the
world at some point or not. n Habermas's tentativeness toward his own
theoretical position springs from his own conception of philosophy as stand-
in and interpreter, furnishing fallibilist reconstructive hypotheses in
cooperation with the equally fallibilist sciences. For Habermas, philosophy
need not raise foundationalist or absolutist claims a la Kant and Hegel or,
conversely, fall into forms of historicism and contextualism. Similarly, Hans
Albert, holding a critical rationalist position akin to Karl Popper's, argues
in favor of a universal fallibilism in which even the criticist position itself
can become dubitable, however much it may in the end prove to be right.
For Albert, one has no right to exempt even the principle of contradiction
from doubt just because one's limited imagination cannot entertain the
prospect of alternative logics. Therefore, when Apel cordons off a set of
necessary presuppositions of argumentation and claims for them ultimate
justification and immunity to critique, he is limiting (according to Albert)
the principle of fallibilism to the domain of the sciences, mathematics, and
everyday knowledge, thereby protecting philosophy from exposure to criti-
cism with the same kind of defensiveness typical of theology. It is no wonder
that Habermas accuses Apel of hungering for the certitude he should have
given up when he abandoned the philosophy of consciousness. Further, it is
not surprising that Albert ascribes to Apel a certain dogmatic unwillingness
to consider alternatives, an inability to understand another's more sceptical

14 Karl-Otto Apel, "Normatively Grounding 'Critical Theory' through Reoourse to the

Lifeworld? A Transcendental-Pragmatic Attempt to Think with Habermas against Habermas,"
in Philosophical Interventions in the Unjinished Project of Enlightenment, ed. AxeJ Honneth,
Thomas McCarthy, Claus Offe, and Albrecht Wellmer, trans. William Rehg (Cambridge: The
MIT Press, 1992), 140, 142.
102 MICHAEL BARBER

point of view, an arrogance about philosophical infallibility, and a fearful

longing for truth-guarantees. 15
Apel's response to both Habermas and Albert hinges on fundamentally
distinguishing between the self-referential claims to universality of philo-
sophical statements and the individual or empirically general claims of
nonphilosophical statements. While individual or empirically general claims
are actually always testable and revisable hypotheses, claims regarding the
above mentioned pragmatic conditions of argumentation laid out in The
Theory o[ Communicative Action do not seem revisable in this manner. For
instance, while new evidence could come to the fore that would refute an
empirical claim, the defense or disproof of that claim cannot avoid
presupposing a communicative community in which interlocutors propose
truth claims with the mutual anticipation that such claims are consensually
redeemable in a context of communicative rather than strategic rationality.
Likewise, should one choose to debate at a still higher level whether in fact
those presuppositions are actually involved in disputing such empirical
claims-that debate would make use of those very presuppositions. Looking
toward the future, one can conceive that any given empirical claim could be
refuted, but it seems impossible to imagine a situation in the future in which
claims about the presuppositions of argumentation itself could be refuted
because that very argumentative refutation would have to avail itself of the
presuppositions it sets out to refute. Hence these transcendental pragmatic
conditions furnish conditions for the possibility of placing in question any
claim and thus for the possibility of fallibilism itself. To accentuate the
distinctiveness of these two types of claims, Apel proposes different modes
of testing for them. He refuses to extend the requirement of empirical
testing to the central statements of universal pragmatics, as Habermas has
done in interpreting universal pragmatics as a reconstructive theory along
the lines of Chomsky's linguistic theory. Instead, Apel contends that
universal-pragmatic statements must be tested according to whether they can
be disputed without the sort of performative contradiction that occurs, for
instance, when the skeptic argues against the presuppositions of argumenta-
tion even while performatively relying on them. 16

15 Jürgen Habermas, "Philosophy as Stand-In and Interpreter," in Moral Consciousness and

CommunicativeAction, trans. Christian Lenhardt and Shierry Weber Nicholsen (Cambridge: The
MIT Press, 1990), 15-16; Habermas, "Discourse Ethics: Notes on a Program of Philosophical
Justification," in Moral Consciousness and Communicative Action, 94-97. Hans Albert, Trans-
zendentale Träumereien: Karl-Ouo Apels Sprachspiele und sein henneneutischer Gott (Hamburg:
Hoffman and Campe Verlag, 1975), 86, 110, 112, 119, 122, 149, 152; Hans Albert, Treatise on
Critical Reason, trans. Mary Varney Rorty (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985),35,45,
48, 87, 94, 101, 112, 134, 147, 164; Hans Albert, Die WISSenschaft und die Fehlbarlreit der
Vernunft (Tübingen: J.C.B. Mohr, 1982), 58, 61, 63, 76, 78, 81, 84, 88, 94.
16 Karl-Otto Ape1, "The Problem of Philosophical Foundations in Light of a Transcen-
 THE VULNERABILITY OF REASON 103

Although Apel and Habermas both concur on the conditions presup-

posed by argumentation, however inadequately these conditions might be
formulated, their differenee lies in how they self-reflexively evaluate the
statements laying out those presuppositions-whether those statements are
empirically revisable or not. Like Apel, Edmund Husserl differentiated
contingent empirical claims (e.g., that a figure in the distanee is a scarecrow)
from necessary eidetic claims (e.g., that any physical thing must be given
through aseries of spatio-temporal perspectives). Husserl asserts that
necessary eidetic claims implicitly accompany empirical claims, are discover-
able through reflection on them, and uncover a paradoxical necessity
contrary to the fluctuating circumstances of their discovery. In Husserl's
discussion of the apodeictic evidenee associated with eidetic claims in
Cartesian Meditations, he remarks that such evidenees are not merelyeertain
of astate of affairs, but rather in critical reflection, one recognizes the
absolute unimaginableness of their non-being, thus excluding in advance
every doubt as "objectless" and empty.
Although Apel's discussion of the separation of transeendental-pragmatic
claims from empirical ones differs from Husserl's analysis at several points,
it does seem that Apel, like Husserl, undertakes a similar critical reflection
upon his own claims. What distinguishes the transeendental-pragmatic claims
about the conditions of argumentation is that as one looks toward the
future-in advance-it seems unimaginable that any argumentative proeess
could disprove the presuppositions of argumentation. Even if, as Albert
suggests, some disproven claims may have onee been thought to be unimag-
inably revisable due to insufficient imaginative creativity, transeendental
pragmatic claims seem distinctive sinee one would have to make use of what
they claim to revise them and henee they differ markedly from empirical
claims, whose revocation one can easily imagine. Rather than caricaturing
Apel's position as adesperate search for security, one can interpret it as the
culmination of a trajectory of bold self-reflexivity-not all that different from
Derridean deconstruction-daring to unmask the metaphysics of the anti-
metaphysics of positivism, the transeendental structures of the anti-
transeendentalism of hermeneutics, the nonnegotiables of argumentation in
which everything is negotiable, and the irreviseable presup&OSitiOns underly-
ing the fallibilistic principle that all claims are revisable.
Given this understanding of transeendental pragmatics, one could concur

dental Pragmatics of Language," in After Philosophy-End or Transformation?, ed. Kenneth

Baynes, James Bohman, and 1110mas McCarthy (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1987), 266;
"Normatively Grounding 'Critical Theory' through Recourse to the Lifeworld?," 141-143.
17 "Normatively Grounding 'Critical Theory' through Recourse to the Lifeworld?," 142;
Husserl, ldeos, Generallntroduction to Pure Phenomenology, 47; Husserl, Cartesian Meditations,
15-16.
104 MICHAEL BARBER

with Habermas that what is being shown is that there are no alternatives to
the presuppositions of argumentation spelled out in the Theory o[ Communi-
cative Action. But for Apel the proof that there are no such alternatives is
stronger than Habermas recognizes since it is not achieved through exposure
to possibly falsifying empirical instances. Rather, for Apel, one finds oneself
unable to imagine a disproof of these presuppositions since every attempted
disproof would be ensnared in aperformative contradiction, presuming in
practice what its propositions deny. Habermas conflates empirical with
transcendental claims due to his lack of self-reflection on their heterogene-
ity. As regards Albert, Apel finds hirn drawing on unadmitted essential
insights in defining his own critical rationalist view of knowledge. Further-
more, Albert, like Apel, anticipates future processes of questioning, although
for Albert these processes make any certainties inconceivable. However,
Apel, unlike Albert, would assert that one cannot imagine the presupposi-
tions of argumentation not accompanying those future inquiries, and hence,
any future argument against these presuppositions would fall into a per-
formative contradiction. Although Apel's belief that transcendental presup-
positions are not open to empirical disproof might seem as arbitrary and
dogmatic as theology to Albert, still Albert's own amalgamation of disparate
types of claims overlooks the subtle self-reflexive attention Apel pays to his
own claiming activity. Albert's failure to notice the paradoxically indubitable
(under pain ofperformative contradiction) presuppositions ofhis own unre-
stricted fallibilism results in this fallibilism becoming a disguise, appearing
as anti-dogmatic but concealing a dogmatism blind to the shadow that
haunts its own resolution to doubt. 18
In his interchange with Habermas, Apel makes it quite clear that he seeks
his ultimate grounding at the highest epistemological and argumentation-
theoretic level of reflection instead of relying on presuppositions that the
"subject of lifeworld communication may possibly find practically inescap-
able." At an entirely different philosophical level than Levinas's, Apel calls
upon "background resources of reason that are not identical with the
historical conditioned, contingent background resource of a 'lifeworld in
each case our own.'" This "foundation," though, has left behind found-
ationalism in the sense of a dogmatic metaphysics based on axioms assumed
as evident. Rather, Apel's foundation climaxes his struggle to uncover the
unrecognized presuppositions that protagonists of positivism, hermeneutics,
argumentation, and fallibilism would rather not avow because they seem to
undermine their entire philosophical enterprise. In this convergence between
transcendental method and Derridean deconstruction, reason shows itself
adept at exposing blind spots and rendering invulnerable positions vulnera-

18 ''The Problem of Philosophical Foundations in Light of a Transcendental Pragmatics of

Language," 263.
 TI-IE VULNERABILITY OF REASON 105

ble. In fact, Apel illustrates how the anti-foundationalism of Habermas and

Albert, like the anti-foundationalism that Derrida criticizes in Levinas,
actually involves insufficient reflection upon one's own claims and thus runs
the risk of concealing its own dogmatism beneath a mantle of anti-dogma-
tism. Like Levinas's, Apel's foundationalism, once it is arrived at, commenc-
es to imperil every future affirmation since it essentializes fallibilism. For
Apel, every argumentation-process raises claims to validity that call for a yes
or no response that does not permit one to rest secure in what one has
traditionally taken for granted. The presupposition of consensual resolution
of validity claims forbids one from indulging in a comfortable contextualism
or relativism that allows one to turn away in indifference toward another's
viewpoint instead of taking seriously the challenge that it poses for one's
own perspective. Finally, the very entrance into communicative rationality
demands that one forsake strategic rationality and open oneself to the
precarious ~and exciting) possibility of yielding before the force of the better
argument. 1
The foundations of Apel and Levinas do not permit one to solidify
defenses; on the contrary, they are the product of rationality, examining
unexplored horizons and hidden presuppositions, upholding standards of
self-reflection and thereby fending off any lapse into complacency, dogma-
tism, or even violence. The foundations they finally arrive at are not citadels
for self-assurance, but rather springboards for ensuring and promoting the
same restless scrutiny and fearless interrogation that have led to them. In the
hands of Levinas and Apel, rationality does not guarantee safety, but
becomes an instrument of vulnerability, even as it was for Socrates whose
wisdom consisted in knowing that he was not wise. Finally, the differences
between Apel and Levinas suggest directions for future collaboration.
Because Levinas's foundation "trembles" as it corresponds to Other as a
"region" summoning it from without at the commencement of discourse, it
introduces a chastening, fragility, and self-critique that Apel's foundation
needs. Apel's effort to remind one of what one already presupposes
resembles a Socratic maieutic method that, as Levinas puts it, runs the risk
of falling into amistaken determination "to receive nothing of the Other but
what is in me, as though from all eternity I was in possession of what comes
to me from the outside." On the other hand, Levinas's prophetic, eschato-

19 "Normatively Grounding 'Critical Theory' through Recourse to the Lifeworld?," 140,

150-153, 156-157, 161. Apel's essay "Die ethische Bedeutung des Sports in der Sicht einer
universalistischen Diskursethik" insists that one does not embark upon argumentation in order
to score a victory, but to allow the arguments to struggle to see which is the stronger and which
can elicit the consent of all. Argumentation is not to be understood as a philosophical "tourna-
ment." Diskurs und Verantwortung, 235-236. Apel also argues that transcendental philosophy is
less dogmatic, particularly in his critique of Richard Rorty in Diskurs und Verantwortung, 391,
398,400.
106 MICHAEL BARBER

logical proclamation of the Other can easily degenerate into a dogmatic

denunciation of the edifice of rationality instead of taking it on its own
terms and subverting it (to make it more rational) from within-as Apel
does. If, as Husserl understood, the lifeworld and the transcendental level lie
on each other's horizons and cannot dispense with the other, then would not
the same be true for Levinas and Apel? The rationality that deflates sureties,
pries open self-enclosure, and makes for vulnerability and that has shaped
Apel's and Levinas's separate foundations and the relentless critique flowing
from these foundations, is the very rationality that finally beckons each of
them toward the other. 20

20 Totality and Infinity, 43.

 LEWIS R. GORDON

SARTREAN BAD FAITH AND ANTIBLACK RACISM1

Ar. a limiting constant, the color of a person might be thought of as, in

paradigm cases, an unalterable, objectively given absolute. However a
distinctively black Negro may think himself racially, it would seem that he
cannot change the fact of his color. In physiological terms, he is a black
man. In situational terms, the matter is far more complicated. . . . One
thing is clear: race in some color-wheel sense has little to do with the
reality of being black, white, or anything else in the present world. It is in
the situation of the individual that race categorles have significance, and
that means that the definition of the situation by the actor on the sodal
scene establishes the meaning which 'objectivity' and the constants have for
social reality. Definition in this sense is a modality of choice.

-Maurlce Natanson2

What Natanson is considering in this passage from The Joumeying Seifis that
antiblack attitudes and some pro-black attitudes may be forms of bad faith.
Natanson's conception ofbad faith in that work is "That which threatens the
self by fixing and desiccating the subject. . . . Bad Faith consists in the
individual's moving from subject to object in social roles which have
congealed consciousness into routine expectancy and whieh have made of
intersubjectivity a masked and masking reality" (45). Bad faith threatens
every dimension of human reality, including the existential impact of history:
"The binding of time in Bad Faith is a way of denying the possibilities of the
self, of stripping the individual of his involvement in his tory" (92).
The concept of bad faith and the difficulty of developing authentie social
relationships from an existential-phenomenological perspective have played
a major role in the development of Natanson's philosophical ideas. He first
grappled with the concept in his dissertation on Jean-Paul Sartre's ontology
in 1950. In his subsequent work, he continued to contribute to our

1 I would like to thank Steven Crowell, Phyllis Morris, Martin Matustfk, Gary Schwartz, and
Erlc Ramsey for their valuable, constructive crlticisms of earlier drafts of this paper.
2 The Joumeying Seit A Study in Philosophy and Social Role (Reading: Addison-Wesley,
1970),102-103.

107
S. Galt Crowell (ed.), The Prism ofthe Self, 107-129.
© 1995 Kluwer Academic Publishers.
108 LEWIS R. GORDON

understanding of the concept. What follows is an exploration of Natanson's

insight in the above quotations through stressing the importance of the
Sartrean concept of bad faith for the understanding of racism-partieularly
antiblaek racism. Although Sartre will be the foeus of the rest of our
diseussion, the underlying interpretation of bad faith takes advantage of
Natanson's reminder of the self-deception involved in "stripping the
individual of his involvement in his tory. "

§1
I should like to quote a passage from The Words, a passage whieh, I hope,
will make c1ear a great deal of what Sartre is up to when he comments on
the various ways in whieh human beings evade responsibility and in effeet
evade human beings. He writes,

In the struggle between generations, ehildren and old

people often join forces: the former pronounce the orac1es;
the latter puzzle them out. Nature speaks, and experience
translates: adults have only to keep their traps shut. Failing
a ehild, one can take a poodle: last year, at the dogs'
cemetery, I recognized my grandfather's maxims in the
trembling discourse that runs from grave to grave: dogs
know how to love; they are gentier than human beings,
more faithful; they have taet, a flawless instinet that enables
them to recognize Good, to distinguish the good from the
wieked.... An American friend was with me. With a burst
of indignation, he kieked a cement dog and broke its ear.
He was right: when one loves ehildren and animals too
much, one loves them against human beings. 3

The erucial term here is human beings. Sartre sets human beings in
opposition to "ehildren" and "animals." There is a sense in whieh a human
being embodies a form of maturity for Sartre. He is, in effect, saying, "Oh,
grow up!"
There are many ways to attempt not to grow up. These forms of evasion
are generally eharaeterized as forms of bad faith. The Sartrean conception
of bad faith is that it is an effort to evade freedom and responsibility-an
effort to evade living in situation, an effort to evade human beings.
Fascination with ehildren and animals suggests an effort to evade judg-

3 The Words: The Autobiography 01Jean-Paul Sartre, trans. Bemard Frechtman (New York:
George Braziller, 1964), 30.
 BAD FAITH ANO ANTIBLACK RACISM 109

ment-the Look, that is, of those who are aware of what we are up to. We
can call this fascination a form of exoticizing and romanticizing of the Other
in a way that denies his freedom to judge. In the language of subject-object
dichotomies, we can speak of bad faith as adesire to be either purely a
subject or purely an object.
The effort to become purely a subject carries the danger of eliminating
both the social world and the world; it is an effort to protect oneself by a
retreat to a form of solipsism, where one would, in effect, escape being seen
by others by way of eliminating the presence of all other perspectives and
consequently the very notion of perspectivity itself. 4 To become a pure
object involves the elimination of one's own humanity in the presence of an
Other. In both cases, the social world is threatened and misanthropy
emerges. 5 Misanthropy and its many variations usually take the form of
emphasizing abstract humanity over concrete human beings or of focusing
upon the corporeality and facticity of human beings as though they were
devoid of other possibilities.
Thus, a person in bad faith could love humanity in the abstract while
torturing human beings in the flesh. Or a person who claims to hate all
"isms" may choose to regard the materiality of the flesh to the point of living
in a world best suited for the dead. Sartre identifies these tendencies in his
discussion of the body.6 His discussion can be regarded as a description of
the body in bad faith. 7
The body can be regarded through three dimensions: the body as lived,
the body as seen by others, and the body realized as seen by others. Sartre

4 Natanson and Alfred Schutz have criticized Sartre for commiuing forms of methodologi-
calor practical solipsism. See Natanson, 'The Problem of Others in Being and Nothingness," in
The Library 01 Living Philosophers, Volume XVI, The Philosophy ollean-Paul Sartre, ed. Paul
Arthur Schilpp (La Salle, 111: Open Court, 1981),341; and Schutz, Collected Papers, Volume I,
The Problem 0/ Social Reality, ed. Maurice Natanson (Tbe Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1962), 203.
On this matter, see our discussion below of Sartre's ontology as an examination of human reality
[rom the standpoint 0/ bad /aith. Tbe methodological or practical solipsism of which Natanson
and Schutz speak is a function of bad faith attitudes towards human relationships. But such an
attitude depends, ultimately, on the possibility of authentie attitudes-or a practice that is not
solipsistic. Tbe problem is comparable to Freud's problem of the scope of sexuality in the
interpretation of human reality; he needed a non-sexual standpoint from which to make the
sexual aspects meaningful.
5 See Sartre, Being and Nothingness: A Phenomenological Essay on Ontology, trans. Hazel
Bames (New York: Washington Square Press, 1956), 533-534.
6 Ibid., Part 3, chapter 2.
7 For a developed discussion of this formulation of bad faith, see Lewis R. Gordon, Bad
Faith and Antiblack Racism (Atlantic Highlands: Humanities Press, 1995), esp. Part I. For
similar discussion, see also Oebra Bergoffen, "Casting Shadows: Tbe Body in Oescartes, Sartre,
Oe Beauvoir, and Lacan," Bulletin de la Soci~t~ Americaine de Philosophie de Langue Frant;aise
IV, nos. 2-3 (1992), 232-243.
110 LEWIS R. GORDON

regards the denial of embodiment, the denial that one has a perspective on
the world that can be seen by others, as sadistic; it is an effort to deny the
humanity of others. He regards as masochistic the denial that one has a
perspective on the world; it is a retreat to the view that one is pure body in
the sense of a corpse or wood floating on water. The correlated forms of bad
faith attitudes towards the body are that the sadist regards the Other's body
as mere physical body and the masochist regards the (subject) Other's body
as if it were achasm into which to fall.
Another feature of bad faith is a form of play on evidence. A person in
bad faith may demand "perfect" evidence where adequate evidence is all that
can be achieved and accept shady evidence where evidence of necessary and
sufficient conditions being met is needed.8 One example is the demand for
the Other to justify his right to exist. A person may offer his deeds, his
history, examples he has set by his actions, but the problem is that the
standard by which they are judged belongs to him who makes the demand
for justification. The questioner's right to make such a demand is presumed
in the question, but the Other who is questioned is presumed suspect. No
human being "is" existentially justified in virtue of the fact that no human
being is a complete(d) reality or substance. His existence in itself is without
justification. It is, in a word, absurd. The human being lives his justification
as weIl as his lack of justification, his triumphs as well as his failures. If his
deeds are excluded, if his history is of no consequence, all is left is his bare,
existing body. Without appeal to other criteria, all he can offer on behalf of
his existence is the fact that he exists. Since he cannot justify his existence
beyond his own presentations of himself, the very demand ultimately sets
him who makes the demand on the level of God-that is, a self-justified,
substantiated standpoint on all reality-and the Other, ultimately, below
human. 9

§2
Rather unexpectedly, the raeist group points accusingly to a manifestation
of racism among the oppressed. The "intellectual primitivism" of the period
of exploitation gives way to "medieval, in fact prehistorie fanaticism" of the
period of liberation.
-Frantz Fanon10

8 Being and Nothingness, esp. 113.

9 Sartre argues that this is the ultimate implication of the stand point of power. See his
diseussion of The Third, Being and Nothingness, esp. 547.
10 "Racism and Culture," in Toward the African Revolution, trans. Haakon Chevalier (New
York: Grove Press, 1967), 37.
 BAD FAI1H AND ANTIBLACK RACISM 111

A problematic demand on some liberation movements is the demand for

ideal subjects of liberation. This demand relies on the thesis that to deserve
liberation, an oppressed person or group must be without fault, must be
morally pure, must be materially constituted as either pure virtue or pure
innocence-in short, the ideal victim. This demand is an obvious form of bad
faith in that it imposes a double standard on subjects; dominant groups are
exempted from the criterion of innocence and idealness (if not falsely
presented as innocent or ideal), whereas oppressed groups are judged by
higher and perhaps unattainable standards. Among the oppressed group a
different situation emerges, however, when ideal subjects of liberation are
sought. Whereas a dominating or oppressing group may say that members
of the oppressed group aren't worthy of compassion, are guilty of their own
victimization, members of oppressed groups sometimes compete for victim
status. The former claims to be holier than thou, whereas the latter claims
to be (if not holier) more oppressed than thou. 11 The consequence of both
forms is the spirit of seriousness that Sartre declares war on in Being and
Nothingness.
The spirit of seriousness involves regarding values as material features of
the world. For a serious person, people are, in their "essence, n materially
constituted as good or bad, innocent or guilty. We can regard this serious
attitude as a demand that one be objectively valuable. Consider, for example,
the problems raised by the demand or search for ideal agents of liberation
in the supposed tension between gender and race categories. 12 This
demand has been a source of tension between black and white feminists. 13

11 Ibid., 25, 36-37.

12 The literature is extensive, but for general discussions of gender categories, see Women
and Philosophy: Toward a Theory 0/ Liberation, ed. Carol C. Gould and Marx W. Wartofsky
(New York: Perigee Books, 1980), and for race categories, see Anatomy 0/ Racism, ed. David
Theo Goldberg (Minneapolis: The University of Minnesota Press, 1990). For a study of the use
of gender categories to undermine resistance to Western coloniallracist onslaughts, see Fanon,
A Dying Colonialism, trans. Haakon Chevalier (New York: Grove Weidenfield, 1965), chapter
1, "Algeria Unveiled."
13 During the infamous Mike Tyson rape trial, a number of my white female friends were
outraged that their black sisters were reluctant to ''believe'' the prosecutrix's testimony that she
was raped by Mike Tyson. This case hit the core of what I suspect is the key difference between
what is sometimes caricatured as ''white feminism" versus "black feminism." White feminism calls
for the construction of women as victims. Black feminism argues that although women are
oppressed, they are not victims. Thus white feminists purportedly invest a great deal of energy
on the dynamics of rape and the rejection of the thesis that when a woman says "no" she means
''yes.'' But in this regard, their plight differs from black women. Black women live in a reality in
which it simply doesn't matter whether they say anything. The consequence is that although it
is a politically feasible route to reject ideal innocence of the victim in rape cases-for the
obvious reason that it should be the rapist, not the woman on trial-black women are more wil-
ling to admit that women, like men, are neither ontologically nor morally neat. Both can not only
112 LEWIS R. GORDON

Black feminists have argued that white feminists have presented "woman" in
ways that militate against the aspirations and womannesss of black
women. 14 But the problem goes deeper. So me black feminists have observed,
for instance, that white feminists have been wont to objecti~ black men in
stereotypical identities of rapists and violent criminals. 1 The tension
between race and gender comes to a head here. This is beeause a conse-
quence of making women "pure victims" is the mistaken notion that men
eannot possibly be victims, that they are purely victimizers. The black male,
the embodiment of the exploited or colonized male, is an obvious threat to
this model, for such a model relies on rendering illegitimate his claim to
being oppressed. The consequence is an evasion of wider eategories of
exploitation. Such a model loeates women as fundamental subjects of
liberation and ultimately glorifies black women, in virtue of their "double-
victimization" status, as contemporary bearers of oppression and libera-
tion. 16
The irony of the situation ofwomen and blacks (conspicuously presuming
white women as women in the formulation) is that women who attempted
to objectify black males as lustful and as rapists situated themselves on the
oppressive end of seriousness. Although black women's criticisms of white
women placed black women on the oppressed end, they have often also

say what they don't mean, but they can also lie to themselves about what they mean when they
say what they say. B1ack feminism therefore doesn't deny the possibility of seduction, that a
person can deny what he wants in order to deny responsibility for what he receives. But this
doesn't entail that he who takes advantage of such a situation is not responsible as weil. In this
regard, black feminism is more in stream with Sartrean ontology. Because of his many
observations on the role of seduction in human reality, Sartre has been the object off a great
deal of white feminist attacks, and 1 would say for good reason, for without the possibility of
seduction, sexual or otheIWise, Sartrean ontology, premised as it is upon freedom, responsibility,
and the ever-present threat of bad faith, loses all meaning.
14 See Angela Davis, Wornen, Race, and Class (New York: Vintage, 1983), bell hooks,Ain't
Ia Wornan?: Black Wornen and Ferninism (Boston: South End Press, 1981), and Jacqueline
Grant, White Wornen's Christ and Black Wornen's Jesus (Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1989). The
argument predates the feminist movements of the 1960s and 1970s and the Womanist movement
in the academy in the 1980s. For example, women's causes on the part of colonizers in the
supposed interests of colonized women took the form of European female identity and served
as a means of breaking down the anti-European identity of colonized people-particularly in
regards to their family structures. See Fanon'sA Dying Colonialism, 37-42.
15 See Davis, Wornen, Race, and Class, chapter 11, "Rape, Racism and the Myth of the
B1ack Rapist." It should be noted that the maligning of black males is not indicative of feminism
in general. It can be argued, for instance, as Davis does, that a strong feminist position is against
the exploitation and stereotyping of females and males of all races, dass, and creeds. Our
discussion here is meant to iIIustrate how bad faith can be identified in cases where ideal
subjects of liberation are sought.
16 An example of the exoticizing of black women is the mania around black female lit-
erature in the academy. For discussion, see Hazel V. Carby, "The Multicultural Wars," in Black
Popular Culture: A Project by Michele Wallace, ed. Gina Dent (Seattle: Bay Press, 1992), 192-193.
 BAD FAIlli AND ANTIBLACK RACISM 113

argued that black women have the claim to paramount oppression. 17 Tbe
demand for holy or morally "clean" black men betrays a false standard. Black
women's demand for "truly oppressed" white women masked a criterion that
no white woman could achieve as a white woman. No white woman could
"be" a black one.
Before we go further, let us take a pause to address a concern that may
be on the minds of some Sartre scholars. Wait, they might urge, how can we
be looking into black liberation (and feminist) concerns from a Sartrean
perspective when it is well known that Sartre's "early" philosophy, particular-
ly his critical work on ontology, not only lacks a social theory, but is also
vehemently antisocial?18 Witness the very structure of his description of
human reality as a reality built upon conflict and his relegation of subject-
subiect relationships-"we" relationships-to mere psychological phenome-
na. f9
First, recall that it is a form of bad faith to deny facing either one's
embodiment or the Other's freedom. If these are bad-faith relations to
embodiment, what would be authentic relations to embodiment? In the case
of the Sartrean sadist, it would be the recognition of his facticity or the
possibility of his objectification and recognition of the Other's transcendence
or subjectivity. In the case of the masochist, it would be recognition of his
own transcendence and the Other's facticity. Tbat the body is the perspective
on others and is seen by others makes the body-subject here necessary for
social experience. 20 But, second, there is astronger argument, a transcen-
dental one. Evasion of the body cannot be a form of bad faith without the
social significance of recognizing humanity, or perhaps I should say human
beings, in the flesh. Tbat is to say, the concept of bad faith radically applied,
unfolds into the social world of contextually significant forms of alienation
and dignity. Tbis transcendental move is not intended to serve as a proof of
the existence of others. Instead, it is here presented as a line of argument
that Sartre cannot avoid given his existential phenomenological critique of
sociality in Being and Nothingness. Sartre later conceded a variation of this
argument when he wrote, "Tbe very fact that Being and Nothingness is an
ontology before conversion takes for gran ted that a conversion is necessary

17 For example Grant, White Wornen 's Christ and Block Wornen 's Jesus, op. eit., 220.
18 I describe Sartre's ontology as "critical" because it ultimately falls outside of the
traditional interpretation of ontology as the study of Being or the Metaphysics of Presence.
Sartre's claim that we encounter our own ex:istence, which is a lack of being-in-itself, suggests
that his is an ontology that is ultimately critical of traditional ontology.
19 Being and Nothingness, 545-555.
20 This is, by the way, one of the contentions of Husserl's Fifth Meditation, in Cartesian
Meditations: An Introduction to Phenornenology, trans. Dorion Caims (Dordrecht: Martinus
Nijhoff, 1960).
114 LEWIS R. GORDON

and that, as a consequence, there is a natural attitude. "21 The world of the
natural attitude is a social world. 22
That the Sartrean conception of bad faith actually leads to a transcenden-
tal phenomenological move leads to the ironic conclusion that Sartre may
have also set the groundwork for a transcendental existential phenomen-
ology. The deeper structure of social reality and critical good faith is, as
Natanson observed on more than one occasion, rich with Husserlian trans-
scendental phenomenological significance. 23 The problem, properly
understood, is how to be seen in the "right" way and how to see others in
the "right" way. The wrong way is tantamount to not seeing human beings
at all.
There are at least two kinds of "look" or ways of seeing others and being
seen in Being and Nothingness. There is the immediate encounter in the
flesh, where one actually looks at the Other or one is actually looked at.
Then there is the symbolic Look, which is best developed in Sartre's
discussion of the Third. The Third is the institutional super ego that
influences factical identities along collective lines. Sartre identifies the bad
faith implicit in the Third when he refers to it as the anarchie conscious-
ness. 24 The Third is a variation of the futile effort of disembodiment, for
it is ultimately a form of radical freedom that is regarded by itself as the
perspective beyond which there is no other perspective. Thus, for example,
the bourgeoisie's being the Third involves a form of denial on their part of
the possibility of being seen as an "us," as an object. Frantz Fanon makes a
similar observation on the powerful when he describes French settler's way
of seeing Algerian natives: "In Algeria there is not simply the domination
but the decision to the letter not to occupY anything more than the sum
total of the land. The Algerians, the veiled women, the palm trees and the
camels make up the landscape, the natural background to the human
presence of the French. "25

21 Notebook fOT an Ethics, trans, David Pellauer (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press,
1992),6.
22 Husserl, Cartesian Meditations, op. eil., esp. seetion 57. See also Natanson, The
Journeying SeI[, op. eil., passim.
23 The Joumeying Self, 31-32; ''The Problem of Others in Being and Nothingness," op. eil.,
331-334,342.
24 Being and Nothingness, 554.
25 The Wretched of the Earth, with aPreface by Jean-Paul Sartre, trans. Constance
Farrington (New York: Grove Press, 1963), 250. Hereafter "Preface" will refer to Sartre's
preface and Wretched of the Earth will refer to Fanon only.
 BAD FAITH AND ANTIBLACK RACISM 115

§3

Ourworthiest souls contain racial prejudice

_Sartre26

There are obvious ways in which antiblack racism is a form of bad faith.
One way of looking at antiblack racism is that of its being the institutional
demarcation of the inferiority of black people. Another way of looking at it
is the institutional demarcation of black people's being regarded as material
embodiments of inferiority-objective antivalues in the world. Under this
interpretation, which doesn't preclude the first, it is a form of spirit of
seriousness and hence a form of bad faith. But Sartre argues that bad faith
is a choice. 27 Thus as a form of bad faith, antiblack racism is also the
choice of lying to oneself about one's superiority to black people. One
ultimately chooses to be an antiblack racist-even when one is black. For
example:

"You, as a Negress _.n "Me? A Negress? Can't you see I'm

practically white? I despise Negroes. Niggers stink. They're
dirty and lazy. Don't ever mention niggers to me."
I knew another black girl who kept a list of Pari-
sian dance-halls "where-there-was-no-chance-of-running-
in to-niggers. ,,28

How can something institutional be a choice? It is this problem of

antiblack racism and racism generally that Sartre touches upon in Being and
Nothingness and grapples with here and there in his many post-Being and
Nothingness discussions of race and racism. The philosophical discussion that
emerges is a development of the existential significance of situation. Choices
don't occur in themselves but in the midst of a world of institutional

26 Sartre, "Preface," 21.

27 Being and Nothingness, 112-113.
28 Fanon, Black Skin, White masks, trans. CharIes Lamm Markmann (New York: Grove
Press, 1%7), 50. These two quoted examples present a rather startling challenge to conventional
wisdom. An implication of these two black women's efforts to avoid places where there are
blacks is a form of self-lie that involves the denial of their being black in a room in which any
one of these two women is the only black. This challenges the thesis that the black becomes self-
conscious of himself as black in virtue of the way he is seen by whites. In the absence of other
blacks, these women are able to make themselves believe the lie of a coordination between their
white masks and their skin-the lie of having both white masks and white skin. They confront
the fact of their blackness through the eyes of other blacks.
116 LEWIS R. GORDON

presentations and meanings. Choices are lived byvirtue ofsoeial reality. Yet,
soeial reality can be infected, poisoned, against the beings by whom it exists
in the first place.
Recall that the demand for the Other to provide evidence of his right to
exist is a form of bad faith that involves playing the role of being God. The
raeist usually demands members of the condemned race to provide evidence
for their right to exist. But this demand conceals an impossible standard, for
there is no evidence that can serve as justification for one's existence beyond
one's existence "in itself." In one of his many discussions of the anti-Semite's
attitudes towards Jews and the Jew's situation in face of such attitudes,
Sartre makes this point clear when he writes, "The Jew had to be put to
death wherever he came from not because he had been caught preparing to
fight, or because he was taking part in resistance movements, but simply
because he was Jewish.,,29 The Jew is ultimately guilty of being Jewish. In
The Respeciful Prostitute, the same point is made regarding blacks: "A nigger
has always done something.,,30 To be black in an antiblack world calls for
Natanson's observation of a factical existence of closed possibilities. To be
black is to be too black; to have always done something means to be guilty.
No amount of evidence can establish a black's innocence.
The Respeciful Prostitute can be regarded as a study of the Manichreism
of antiblack soeieties, where good and evil are regarded as material embodi-
ments of white and black people. 31 When the character Fred looks at the
bed in wh ich he has spent the night with the prostitute Lizzy, he observes,
for instance, that it "smells of sin." In a serious world, the "rational" route
is obvious: clean the bed and wipe away the sin. The historical significance
of "cleansing" the world hardly needs development here.
The Respeciful Prostitute has often been critieized because of the
seemingly politically incorrect portrayal of the black man in the play: He is
not a protagonist and he is weak. But we should note that the character (1)
has no name-he is simply referred to as The Negro-and (2) his fate is
subject to the "choice" of a white woman who, within a purely white context,
is regarded as pariah. The Negro's lack of a proper name exemplifies a
fundamental feature of all antiblack soeieties: there is no difference between
one black and a million blacks. Any one will do. Thus, as a prineiple of
"justice" the lynching of any black would set the material balance of

29 Between Existentialism and Marxism: Sartre on Philosophy, Politics, Pt.ychologj, and the
Arts, trans. John Mathews (New York: Pantheon Books, 1974), 67.
30 The Respectful Prostitute, in "No Exit" and Three Other Plays (New York: Vintage, 1955),
263.
31 For a discussion of Manichreism, see R. McL. Wilson's articte, "Mani and Manichreism,"
in The Encyclopedia 01 Philosophy, Vol. 5, ed. Paut Edwards (New York: Macmillan Publishing
Company and the Free Press, 1967), 149-150.
 BAD F AITH AND ANTIBLACK RACISM 117

dikaiosoune, or (Platonic) cosmological justice, back on course. In The

Negro is every Negro and in the lynching of a Negro is the symbolic death-
wish on every Negro. The Negro is simultaneously a substance who can be
represented and represents. But he is also an absence. As Fanon confesses,

As a good tactician, I intended to rationalize the world and

to show the white man that he was mistaken.... Reason
was confident of victory on every level. I put all the parts
back together. But I had to change my tune. That victory
played cat and mouse with me; it made a fool of me. As the
other put it, when I was present, it was not; when it was
there, I was no longer. 32

Wherever the black stands, rationality, logic, humanity are apparently sucked
into the void, and the black soon comes to realize that wherever he is, the
"standard" roles of the game no longer apply; where he is, they are not.
The Respeciful Prostitute presents yet another dimension of racial
dynamics. Lizzy stands to the Negro as the possibility of solidarity or
betrayal. Since betrayal for Sartre is also self-betrayal, Lizzy faces herself
when she faces the Negro. Lizzy, the white woman-desired, exploited,
existing as the meaning of rape victim-may choose to prostitute herself to
become a white man in relation to the Negro in virtue of her de facto power
over his future or to liberate herself by showing that she does not have a
price. I won't develop the existential psychoanalytic significance of Lizzy
here, but I suggest that the infamous discussion of slime and femininity in
Being and Nothingness 33 ultimately makes sense in regard, and perhaps only
in regard, to white women and the underlying, gnawing sense that to be a
white woman in an antiblack world, a world that was in fact Sartre's world
and is in fact our own, is to live as the symbol of betrayal. Whatever
solidarity she may have with The Negro on the level of "class," or perhaps
even "the oppressed," Lizzy's situation comes to the fore in the fact that she
needs only declare "rape." She knows who really has a "race problem.,,34
We now face a central theme of black liberation theorists from W.E.B.
Du Bois to Cornel West, that antiblack racism is a "white problem." The
expression "white problem" is loaded with equivocation. I here declare

32 Black Skin, White Masks, op. eit., 118-120.

33 Being and Nothingness, 772-782.

34 The literature on raeists' identification of other races with sexual promiscuity and rape
is extensive. Angela Davis and bell hooks have already been mentioned. Consider also Fanon's
"The 'North African Syndrome,'" in Toward the African Revolution, op. eit., esp. 11-12; Black
Skin, White Masks, op. eit.,passim; and Calvin Hernton, Sex and Racism in America (New York:
Grove Press, 1965).
118 LEWIS R. GORDON

straight away that I reject the interpretation that the white problem excludes
the possibility of a nonwhite problem. Fanon has shown in Black Skin, White
Masks that, like it or not, oppressed people have special problems of their
OWD. The white problem could mean that it is a white pathology. Or it could
mean that it is a white responsibility. When Du Bois originally deployed it,
it simply meant that antiblack racism betrays a white pathology: hatred of
blacks. He observed this when he wrote his monumental tome The
Philadelphia Negro, which was initiated bI the University of Pennsylvania to
speIl out the "problem" with Negroes. 3 Du Bois' retort in The Souls of
Black Folk and Darkwater was to shift the discussion to the "problem" of the
powerful. Yet from an existential standpoint;there is a sense in which whites
are responsible for the white problem.
Sartre's later writings represent a long meditation on his coming to grips
with his bourgeois status in a world in which, at least from the stand point
of authenticity, losers win. 36 Only the oppressed, it seems, can have
salvation. Sartre understood that although each individual bourgeois cannot
change the relation of the bourgeoisie to the proletariat, each individual
bourgeois is nevertheless responsible for such a relationship.37 He can
either stand out of the proletariat's way or work on behalf of the proletariat
revolution or try to destroy it, but in either circumstance his project is
bankrupt in virtue of the realization that the revolution is not for hirn.
Similarly, there are whites who may fight on behalf of racial justice, and they
may even develop interesting arguments premised upon either universal
racism ("Everyone is racist") or moral self-interest, but in the end, there is
the gnawing feeling that racial justice is not for whites. 38 The white prob-

35 Du Bois provides a discussion of the histOI)' behind this work and The Souls o[ Black
Folk in The Autobiography o[ WEB. Du Bois: A Soliloquy on Viewing My Li[e [rom the Last
Decade o[ Its First Century, ed. Herbert Aptheker (New York: International Publishers, 1968),
see espeeially chapter XII.
36 See "Preface," 7-31; The Words, esp. 247, 254. See also Simone De Beauvoir's account
of his meeting with Fanon in Rome, where Fanon argued that Sartre is ultimately "guilty" of
being French. Simone de Beauvoir, The Force o[ Circumstances, trans. Richard Howard (New
York: Putnman, 1965), 592.
37 Being and Nothingness, 554.
38 This is the heart of the problem with so-called "reverse discrimination" arguments. They
are based upon the assumption that raeial justice is met when one fights for the interests of
whites (as if the interests of whites weren't already a feature of the structure of the antiblack
world). This is no doubt the seduction and foundation of the logic deployed by most white
supremaeists and the reason why their arguments, however loaded, have some appeal to their
audience. White supremaeists and the like argue·that whites who seek the liberation of non-
whites are ultimately fighting for a cause that is "abnormal" because it is not their OWß. Fanon
puts it this way, '''!be raeist in a culture with raeism is therefore normal. .. One cannot with
impunity require of a man that he be against 'the prejudices of his group'." "Raeism and
Culture," op. eit., 40. In 1961, he stated the situation of raeial justice in more succinct, biblical
 BAD FAITH AND ANTIBLACK RACISM 119

lern is deeper than most of us-white, brown, or black-may be willing to

admit. To be black may mean to suffer, literally and figuratively, on an
everyday basis, but to be white may ultimately mean-at least when moral
reflection is permitted to enter-to be condemned: "... it would be better
for us to be a native at the uttermost depths of his misery than to be a
former settler. . . . It is enough today for two French people to meet
together for there to be a dead man between them."39 Although it may
appear that this exaggerated conclusion has its genesis in Plato's Republic,
it is more likely based on a line of reasoning from the Notebooks tor an
Ethics, Appendix B. There Sartre observes that the "kind" master is regarded
by the slaves as more responsible for their condition in virtue of the fact
that he has let the cat out of the bag: to treat his slaves humanely is to
admit, by virtue of action, that they should not be slaves. We can see the
obverse in acts of lynching: to treat the victim as inhumanly as possible is to
attempt to absolve the white man from moral condemnation.
The white problem, then, is that there doesn't seem to be any salvation
for whites in an antiblack world once antiblackness is admitted to be
oppressive (which is the reason why some whites may choose vehemently to
deny that such a world is oppressive). This was certainly Sartre's conclusion
in his preface to The Wretched o[ the Earth (p. 27):

What a confession! Formerly our continent was buoyed up

by other means: the Parthenon, Chartres, the Rights of
Man, or the swastika. Now we know what these are worth;
and the only chance of our being saved from shipwreck is
the very Christian sentiment of guilt. You can see it's the
end.

When the Rights of Man take up company with the swastika fulfillment of
one's moral duty takes on a meaning that carries a degree of faith and
commitment that dwarfs the most staunch Kantian and paralleIs Kierk-
egaard's Abraham's Faith.

§4

Let us now focus on the problem of applying Sartre's analysis of Jews to

blaeks and foeus on Fanon's eriticisms of Sartre. These two concerns are of
importance to us for two reasons. First, the problems raised by Sartre's
diseussion of anti-semitism question the extension of phenomenology to

terms: ''The last shall be first and the first last," Wretched 01 the Earth, 37.
39 Sartre, "Preface," 29-30.
120 LEWIS R. GORDON

history, or more appropriately, to whether there can be a phenomenology of

history. Second, Fanon's criticisrns of Sartre have been the most enduring
criticisms among black liberationists and scholars and, as such, like the
problem of history, poses the question of the limitation of existential
phenomenology.
A great deal of Sartre's discussion in Anti-Semite and lew is built upon
the anti-Semite's problem of anti-semitism. Its major premise is that the Jew
is fundamentally constituted as an object of the anti-Semite's sadistic look.
Although it is true that the anti-Semite is The Third in anti-semitic societies,
Sartre's conclusion that it is the anti-Semite who makes the Jew is blatantly
false. Those who adhere to Abraham's covenant have lived long before
anyone decided to hate them. What the anti-Semite makes or, in phenom-
enologicallanguage, constitutes is the pejorative conception of being Jewish.
The black situation is different. Although Jews may have existed before
anti-Jews, it is not clear that blacks existed before antiblack racism. The
reasoning requires aseparate work for a developed discussion, but in brief,
it is possible that no African nor Aborigine had any reason to think of
hirnself as black until Europeans found it necessary to define hirn so. This
power of dejining required specific conditions that were external to those
people themselves. It is possible that, given the conditions emerging in
Europe near the advent of slavery and exploitation on the basis of race,
black people may have emerged even if there were no people morphological-
ly similar to the people of Africa or Australia whom we have come to regard
as "blacks." It is this aspect of the black condition that compelled Fanon to
declare that there is nothing ontological about antiblack racism:

Ontology-once it is finally admitted as leaving existence by

the wayside-does not permit us to understand the being of
the black man. For not only must the black man be black;
he must be black in relation to the white man. 40

There is an interpretation, however, under which sense can be made of

one of Sartre's more controversial claims. Sartre was rebuked for claiming
that Jews have no his tory. Suppose we make a parallel claim about blacks:
blacks have no his tory. The meaning of such a statement is obviously
false-in a colloquial sense of having a history.41 Let us demarcate this
sense of history with a lower-case h. Suppose we adopt a Hegelian sense of
History-distinguished with the upper-case H-where the "highest" embodi-

40 Black Skin, White Masks, op. cit., 110.

41 For tbe significance of tbe relationsbip between tbe colloquial or everyday sense of
baving abistory and tbe understanding of bad faitb, see Natanson, The Joumeying Sei!. 91. One's
bistory is an aspect of one's facticity. To deny it is a form of bad faitb.
 BAD F AlTII AND ANTIBLACK RACISM 121

ment of Geist is situated. According to Hegel, the place and the people of
History in his epoch were European Christians. 42 Today, it might as weIl
be "Americans." Geist is where the globally dominant culture is located. 43
In such a context, is it any wonder that historians of Africans and
Afrocentric historians send their messages to deaf ears? Would this not also
be a meaningful sense of lacking History? How can one have History when
one is invisible to History?
It should be noted that, in The Journeying SeI[, Natanson offers a
phenomenological theory of being historical that falls outside of the frame-
work of the two conceptions offered thus far. "It must be understood at
once,~ he writes, "that microcosmic history is not written at all; it has no
historian. We are speaking of the life of the individual in the mundane
world, and the 'we' speaking is the participant himself, each of us who lives
reflectively in the midst of the social world and seeks to transcend the limits
of Bad Faith."44 Every black person [aces history-his or her story-every

42 See Hegel's Phi!osophy of History, trans. J. Sibree (New York: Dover, 1956), 107, and
Part 111; and Hegel, Philosophy ofRight, trans. T. M. Knox (Oxford: C1arendon Press, 1967), esp.
51. See also CharIes Taylor, Heget and Modem Society (New York: Cambridge University Press,
1979), 100-101.
43 We should note that for Hegel, this does not mean that might makes right. See
Philosophy ofRight, op. eit., 216, paragraph 342. There is, however, a problem. In paragraph 343,
he claims that "Geist is only what it does, and its act is to make itself the object of its own con-
sciousness. In history its act is to gain consciousness of itself as Geist, to apprehend itself in its
interpretation of itself to itself." Does this preclude black self-consciousness outside of the
framework of a white conception of blackness? I don't see how an affirmative response can be
made without being fallaeious. Blacks would either become Historical through their own
recognition of their own History, in which case there would be at least two Histories, or they
would be Historical through recognizing themselves in a way that is equivalent to the History
that has already emerged. The former affirms blackness, the latter marks its elimination. But if
the former were asserted, I don't see how the following resort can be avoided: Whose History?
An Hegelian would have to show that although blacks may make themselves objects of their own
conseiousness, and hence become self-conseious, this does not constitute, in their case, their
embodying Geist. Such aresort is identical with the raeist's credo that, ultimately, the problem
with other races is the races themselves. Ordinary criteria of evidence for their equality to those
who are the self-designated standpoint of all humanity are thereby rejected.
44 The Joumeying sett, 94. In this regard, Natanson antieipated what has been described
by Pauline Marie Rosenau as the "Alfirmative Post-Modemist Subject": "a post-modem subject
with a new nonidentity, focused not on the 'Great Men' of history, but rather, on daily Iife at
the margins. This subject will reject total explanations and the logocentric point of view that
implies a unified frame of reference, but slhe need not oppose all dimensions of humanism,"
Post-Modemism and the Socia! Sciences: Insights, Inroads, and Intrusions (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 1992), 57. It would not be correct to conclude, however, that Natanson is a
"post-modem" philosopher. He emphasizes history versus History, but he doesn't reject the latter,
and his philosophy of soeial role is firmly rooted in the Husserlian conception of the
transcendental ego, which is a form of "unified frame of reference" (see esp. The Joumeying Se!f
and his more recentAnonymity: A Study in the Philosophy ofAlfred Schutz [B1oomington: Indiana
122 LEWIS R. GORDON

day as a situation, as a choice, of how to stand in relation to oppression, of

whether to live as a being subsumed by oppression or to live as active resist-
ance towards liberation or to live as mere indifference. This conception of
his tory is rooted in daily life. As a consequence it has no "heroes." There is
no question of elevating one's value beyond oneself into arealm of seri-
ousness. There is, instead, the recognition of how one's actions unfold into
one's identity in relation to the sociotemporallocation of one's experience.
Natanson adds,

It is his [the individual's] career in the world which is at the

center of the his tory of mundanity. To say that he is
prejudiced or naive is to miss the point, for what is at issue
is not disengaged observers. Action, not description, is the
operative category here.... The 'history' which emerges is
then an egological or 'first-person' report of the becoming
of the person. If the 'history' of each one of us were
nothing more than the story of what befell us, we would be
lefi with the simple meaning of autobiography.... What
distinguishes microcosmic his tory from autobiography is the
typification of ordinary existence which the individuallives
through and defines are constitutive of an intersubjective
matrix of mundane reality, the public world which tran-
scends autobiography. The his tory of the individual is then
caught up inevitably in the his tory of sociality, a structure
which phenomenologists called the 'life-world.'45

We have said that racial discrimination leads to a form of existential

indiscrimination; from the standpoint of antiblack racism there is no dif-
ference between any of the following dyads-blacks versus a black, the black
versus a black, blacks versus this black. In existential phenomenological
language, this means that blacks are "overdetermined." In the eyes of
antiblack racists, blacks suffer a hemorrhage in their facticity that permeates
their existence into a colored totality. A consequence is that there is no
black autobiography in antiblack worlds. To read Frederick Douglass'
Narrative 01 the Life 01 Frederick Douglass or W.E.B. Du Bois' various
"autobiographies" or Malcom X's "autobiography" means more than to look
into the lives of these men. It is to stare the black situation and the life-
world of the United States in the face. Their facticity is linked to the

University Press, 1986]). Given his concerns with philosophical anthropology as weH as
phenomenological perspectives of the social sciences, his argument here should be considered
no more post-modern than existential phenomenology itself.
45 The Joumeying Self, 94.
 BAD FAITH AND ANTIBLACK RACISM 123

significance of the United States beyond the sphere of the Revolutionary

War, the Emancipation Proclarnation, the 13th and 14th Arnendments,
Plessey v. Ferguson, or Brown v. Board of Education of Topelca Kansas. Their
facticity is linked to who they were in light of their choice to recognize their
relation to those moments in History. Frederick Douglass' situation was that
of once being a slave. But Frederick Douglass emerged out of a clear
understanding of his situation and his facticity. The Frederick Douglass of
History is one figure. The man who made the decision to escape from Mary-
land was another. When he was making the decision, he was no hero. He
simply knew the world that mattered to hirn in specific ways that limited his
options but not his choices. His options were factical, mediated, and
"objective" (Historical), but his choices were transcendent, immediate, and
"situated" (historical). Impositions upon hirn may belong to aseries of
factors beyond his power, but his liberation could not be achieved without
his taking account of his "role" in the process. It is bad faith to deny one's
role in his tory.
I suspect this is what Sartre had in mind in "Black Orpheus" when he saw
negritude as a dialectical negation into History qua the proletarian revo-
lution. 46 He had reflected in the Notebooks for an Ethics, whose comple-
tion was abandoned during that period, that "In a word, for progress to be
one of the meanings of History, it has to descend into History as lived,
sought for, and suffered progress."47 If what the authors of negritude
wanted was progress on the fight against antiblack racism, then their plight
had to be understood in its lived, willed, and suffered dimensions that
ironically set the stage for their liberation (progress). The authors of
negritude, Fanon observes in Black Skin, White Masks, needed not to know
their Historical situation. 48 Fanon's conclusion affirms Sartre's verdict on
the negritude-fortified black's relation to History-that ifthe black's crywere

46 "Black Orpheus," trans. John MacCombie, in "What is Literature?' and Dther Essays, ed.
Steven Ungar (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1988), 326-330.
47 Notebooks tor an Ethics, op. cit., 42. For a discussion of Sartre's conception of progress,
see Ronald Aronson, "Sartre on Progress," in The Cambridge Companion to Sartre, ed. Christina
Howells (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 261-292. Sartre's efforts to articulate
his tory as lived took on more complex form in his discussion of the relationship between
interiority and exteriority in the later Critique o[ Dialectical Reason, Volume 1, Theory o[
Practical Ensembles, trans. Alan Sheridan-Smith and ed. Jonathan R(!e (London: Verso, 1991),
passim. He writes, for example, "If History is totalisation and if individual practices are the sole
ground of totalising temporalisation, it is not enough to reveal the totalisation developing in
everyone, and consequently in our critical investigations, through the contradictions which both
express and mask it. Our critical investigation must also show us how the practical multiplicity
(which may be called 'men' or 'Humanity' according to taste) realises, in its very dispersal, its
interiorisation" (64).
48 Black Skin, White Masks, 135.
124 LEWIS R. GORDON

to be heard as a cry, it would not be a black one. 49 History (with upper-

case H) already had and continues to have a "place" for the black man.
"However painful it may be for me to accept this conclusion," Fanon
confesses, "I am obliged to state it: For the black man there is only one
destiny. And it is white. "50 That is a consequence of an earlier proposal:
"I propose nothing short of the liberation of the man of color from
himself. "51 There is no hope, from Fanon's point of departure, for the
black man to gain another "place. " For his blackness, recognized as such,
renders such a feat no more than a coup.52 What both Fanon and Sartre
began to see in the late forties and ultimately saw by 1%1 was that revolu-
tionary considerations were needed for a human place in the story of self-
consciousness that stands outside ofwhite superiority and colored inferiority.
Yet Fanon provides an argument against the application of Sartrean
ontology to antiblack racism. This is ironie since, as we will see, Fanon's
revolutionary humanistic project is rooted in Sartrean ontology. As one of
Fanon's commentators notes, "... it has to be said that a Negro is 'thrown
into the world' in a total sense which escapes the white man, and therefore
the testimony of a Fanon provides indispensable evidence for the wider and
more complexly articulated system of a Sartre. "53 Before discussing Fanon's
criticisms of Sartre's ontology, it may be fruitful to devote a few more words
to "Black Orpheus," since 1 regard that work as suffering from a number of
disturbing problems in spite of its political insight into the Historical
invisibility of blacks.
"Black Orpheus" is a classie case of racial exotieism, where the proponent
of the oppressed, in league with what Fanon calls "Negro baiters," slips into
reductions of virtue and victimization. Sartre slips into the general racist,
dyadie matrices of whiteness in the world of reason and blackness in the
world of affect. It is not, as one might be inclined to think, that Sartre
attempts to reduce blacks to the proletariat. It is instead that Sartre seeks
to elevate blacks to such a level. Sartre appears to have been aware of the
"under-class" status of blacks. Yet Sartre seems to have abandoned his
general project of exposing the spirit of seriousness, for even though negri-
tude reflected an under-class designation, it also reflected a form of Mani-
chreism-the material anti-value of blackness in the face of whiteness. Even
if it is pointed out that Sartre regarded negritude as a relative attitude
instead of an objective value-which means that he was not to regard it as

49 Ibid., 29.
50 Ibid., 10.
51 Ibid.,8.
52 Ibid., 11, 30.
53 David Caute, Frantz Fonon (New York: Viking Press, 1970), 33.
 BAD FAI1H AND AN'rIBLACK RACISM 125

what the proponents of negritude considered it to be-it must be remem-

bered that he also regarded the white working-class as an objective value, as
in fact History. The same problem of seriousness re-emerges.54
Fanon's explicit attack on Sartrean ontology is this. Even if the white
working class were to recognize black workers as workers, there was still the
problem of the fact of blackness. For example, Fanon and Sartre were both
formally French-educated men who would, but for their color, be considered
members of the same class. But Sartre was addressed by his colleagues and
strangers with the respectful French second-person pronoun "vous," whereas
Fanon had to contend with the second-person pronoun "tu," a term that
refers to personal acquaintances or strangers who are either children or
one's inferior. The consequence is an attack in Black Skin, White Masks on
Sartre's ontology as weIl as his interpretation of blacks' relation to History:
"Though Sartre's speculations on the existence ofThe Other may be correct,"
Fanon writes, "(to the extent, we must remember, to which Being and
Nothingness describes an alienated consciousness), their application to a
black consciousness proves fallacious. That is because the white man is not
only The Other but also the master, whether real or imaginary."55
Since Fanon rejects the ontological significance of alienation, his
interpretation of alienation is here psychoanalytical and Historical. He
accepts the psychoanalytical significance of Sartre's analysis, but he argues
that the Historical reality shadows the hermeneutic of "Other" in black-white
situations.
What would be the case, however, if we were to re-introduce the critical
ontological significance of alienation, of unfreedom, in our interpretation of
the Sartrean system and consider it in relation to antiblack racism? Fanon
would have to show how the existential phenomenological description of bad
faith does not operate in his criticism. He would have to show that his effort
to liberate the black man from himself, to eradicate the black man as black
skin with a white ego, can be explained without an appeal to the concept of
bad faith. If he cannot do so, then he will have to show that existential
phenomenological interpretations only contingently fit such phenomena. To
be white may be to deny that race "reaIly" matters, but Fanon shows that to
be black is to know and to live every day the reality of how much race really
matters. How different is (Fanon), "'Mama, see the Negro! I'm frightened!'
Frightened! Frightened! Now they were beginning to be afraid of me. I made

54 This is not the place for a discussion of the meaning, and social-scientific and phenom-
enological validity of "dass." The literature on the concept is vast, and here I only hint at some
of Sartre's interpretations. But Sartre's most sustained analysis of the concept can be found in
his Critique. For commentary, see William L. McBride, Sartre's Political Theory (Bloomington:
Indiana University Press, 1991), esp. 78-79, 164-166.
55 Black Skin, White Masks, 138 n. 24.
126 LEWIS R. GORDON

up my mind to laugh myself to tears, but laughter had become impossible,"

from (Sartre), "... it is as a No that the slave first apprehends the master,
or that the prisoner who is trying to escape sees the guard who is watehing
him"?56 How different is Fanon's analysis of white hypocrisy towards
universal brotherhood from Sartre's claim that "the bourgeois makes hirnself
a bourgeois by denying that there are any classes, just as the worker makes
hirnself a worker by asserting that classes exist and by realizing through his
revolutionary activity his 'being-in-a-class,"?57 Fanon's own experience
attests to Sartre's conclusion that we are responsible for the way we live our
situations. First:

"Look how handsome that Negro is! . . ." [Fanon's re-

sponse:] "Kiss the handsome Negro's ass, madame!" Shame
flooded her face. At last 1 was set free from my rumination.
At the same time 1 accomplished two things: 1 identified my
enemies and 1 made a scene. A grand sIam. Now one would
be able to laugh. 58

Fanon regarded the situation of each man to be a constant struggle

against the degradation of Man. "I find myself suddenly in the world and I
recognize that 1 have one right alone: That of demanding human behavior
form the other. One duty alone: That of not renouncing my freedom
through my choices.... I, the man of color, want only this: That the tool
never possess the man. That the enslavement of man by man cease forever .
. . . That it be possible for me to discover and to love man, wherever he may
be. "59 In his letter of resignation from his position as chef de service at the
Blida-Joinville psychiatrie clinic, he summarized the existential situation of
the psychiatrist and the colonized neurotic:

Madness is one of the means man has of losing his free-

dorn. And I can say, on the basis of what 1 have been able
to observe from this point of vantage, that the degree of
alienation of the inhabitants of this country appears to me
frightening.... For many months my conscience has been
the seat of unpardonable debates. And their conclusion is
that I cannot continue to bear a responsibility at no matter

56 The first quotation is from Black Skin, White Masks, 112, and the second quotation is
from Being and Nothingness, 87.
57 Being and Nothingness, 680.
58 Black Skin, White Masks, 114.
59 Ibid., 229-231.
 BAD FAITH AND ANTIBLACK RACISM 127

what cost, on the false pretext that there is nothing else to

be done. 60

The way Fanon lived his situation in 1956 was not only by resigning, but also
by placing himself in the service of the revolutionary forces of Algeria.
Fanon issues a rejection of Sartrean ontology because, 1 suspect, he, like
some of Sartre's critics, fails to appreciate fully the significance of the
concept of bad faith. Bad faith is not simply a by-product or possibility of
human reality. It is, as Sartre declares in Being and Nothingness, the "de-
termined attitude which is essential to human reality and which is such that
consciousness instead of directing its negation outwards turns it toward
itself. "61 Sartre's ontology is a critical ontology premised upon the human
being qua freedom as the being who can deny its own freedom. Fanon's
criticism of ontology was qualified by the phrase "once it is finally admitted
as leaving existence by the wayside" for good reason. Existential phenomen-
ology stands outside of his criticism of ontology, though not his criticism of
the Sartrean interpretation of I-Other relationships.
The very liberation project that Fanon seeks for blacks is possible in
virtue of the fact that blacks are human beings. This is not only a historical
realization. The black is also pre-reflectively aware of this at every moment
he feels responsible for his oppression even though he is aware that he is
being oppressed just as the rape victim feets responsible for what she knows
is not her fault.
Fanon has shown that the white stands in front of the black as the master
in an antiblack world, in the Historical world. Although he has not shown
that the relation is contingent, he believes the relation is a consequence of
a contingent Historical situation. We find ourselves in the epoch of an
antiblack world, but other kinds of world have existed and could exist in the
future. His liberation project demands that the relation of the white to the
black be contingent. 62 Otherwise, how would "this [veiled Algerian] woman
who sees without being seen frustrates the colonizer" make sense?o3
Fanon declares that "[Society,] unlike biochemical processes, cannot
escape human influence. Man is what brings society into being. . . . The

60 "Letter to the Resident Minister" (1956), in Toward the African Revolution, op. eit., 53.
61 Being and Nothingness, 87.
62 In short, the struggle for raeial justice requires such a possibility. In his discussion of
class struggle in The Critique o[ Dialectical Reason, op. cit., 679, Sartre makes a similar point:
"But this serial, practico-inert statute [roughly, a stratified, oppressed group identity] would not
lead to class struggle if the permanent possibility of dissolving the series were not available to
everyone; and we have seen how a first, abstract determination of this possible unity emerges
through class interest, as a possible negation of destiny."
63 A Dying Colonialism, op. eit., 44.
128 LEWIS R. GORDON

black man must wage his war on both levels: Since [H]istorically they
influence each other, any unilateral liberation is incomplete, and the gravest
mistake would be to believe in their automatic interdependence."64 To this
we add that what is contingent need not be accidental. History (all three
kinds) has shown that a subjugated black race was no accident. Two years
later, in his analysis of the Antillean and the African, Fanon takes the
existential phenomenological stand point of analyzing racial phenomena from
the stand point of bad faith and, in effect, substantiates our criticism of his
earlier position through admitting the importance of an analysis that
differentiates contingency from "deeper" levels of philosophically significant
phenomena: "I shall be found to use terms like 'metaphysical guilt,' or
'obsession with purity.' 1 shall ask the reader not to be surprised: these will
be accurate to the extent to which it is understood that since what is
important cannot be attained, or more precisely, since what is important is
not really sought after, one falls back on what is contingent. This is one of
the laws of recrimination and of bad faith. The urfent thing is to rediscover
what is important beneath what is contingent."6 This realization is often
overlooked in contemporary, ultimately post-modern approaches to the study
of Fanon and the study of race. 66

§5
Natanson's conception of philosophy, brought to fruition especially in
The Joumeying SeI[ and the subsequent Anonymity, is that philosophy is
fundamentally existential, phenomenological, social, therapeutic, and
imaginative. It is the commitment and effort to stand as clearly and truth-
fully as possible before oneself, others, and the possibilities shared by such
commitment. It is from such astandpoint that he considered the impact of
race in the quotations that opened our discussion. He was one of the first
professional philosophers to understand the social significance of Sartrean
ontology. What he understands and 1 now affirm is that the common thread

64 Bklck Skin, White Masks, 11.

65 "West Indians and Africans," op. eit., 18.
66 Arecent example of interpreting Fanon in a post-modernist (post-structuralist or
deconstructive) way is Homi Bhabha's "Interrogating Identity: The Postcolonial Prerogative," in
Anatomy o{ Racism, op. eit., 183-209. Although Sartre and Fanon would agree that there is a
postcolonial prerogative, I suggest that they would also add that to assert our contemporary
neocolonial Historical situation as a postcolonial one is a form of bad faith. Postcolonial
discourse in colonial and neocolonial times serves, ultimately, as sustenance for the status quo.
Both Sartre and Fanon were aware that colonial categories of identity needed to be criticized
with eircumspection and a critical historical outlook-ultimately, critical good faith-for a
revolutionary praxis to emerge.
 BAD FAITH AND AN'rIBLACK RACISM 129

in tbe application of Sartrean existential pbenomenology to problems of

social role-a primary concern of black and I suspect all liberation
tbeories-is tbis: tbat ontology sets the framework from wbich to be on
guard against tbe reductionism or bad faitb of demanding ideal, romantic,
innocent, or exotic subjects on tbe one band and tbe denial of responsibility
for tbe liberation of bumankind in tbe current epocb on tbe otber. Instead
of a dichotomy of tbe free and tbe determined, existential pbenomenology
reminds us tbat proper buman categories are tbe free and tbe unfree, wbicb
calls for tbe dialectical resolve of tbe bistorically liberating.
 JOSHUA MILLER

TRUTH IN THE EXPERIENCE OF POLITICAL ACTORS:

William James on Democratic Action

§1
To treat James as a political theorist, or even as a thinker with serious
political concerns, may seem strange to those familiar with traditional
readings of hirn as a philosopher, psychologist, or interpreter of religious
experience. Although James has frequently been dismissed as a radical
individualist who hated institutions, his lack of interest in politics has been
exaggerated. 1 Admittedly, his attention to political theory was not comp-
arable to his devotion to philosophy, psychology, and the supernatural.
Although his Principles of Psychology frequently draws on Hobbes's Levia-
than, James made few if any references in his writings and letters to Plato's
Republic, Aristotle's Politics, Machiavelli, Locke's Treatises of Govemment,
Rousseau, Tocqueville, or Marx. Nevertheless, much of James's writing is
implicitly related to pOlitical themes, and toward the end of his life it
became explicitly politica1. 2
A sign of James's broader interests can be seen in his students who
included Gertrude Stein, W. E. B. Du Bois, Walter Lippmann, Horace
Kallen, and Theodore Roosevelt, all of whom had a significant impact on
American politics, political theory, or culture. James's interest in politics has
been dated from 1883. In 1895, he protested the United States role in the
Venezuela crisis, and "was henceforth keenly concerned about colonialism,
imperialism, international relations, militarism, and America's role in the

1 Discussions of pragmatism's political implications usually turn quickly from James to

Dewey. Richard Hofstadter's statement is typical, "Unlike Dewey ... James was guilty of only
the remotest interest in systematic or collective sodal reform. One expression of his funda-
mental individualism is the fact that ... he had no sustained interest in sodal theory as such."
(Social Darwinism in American Thought [Boston: Beacon, 1955], 134). See also Henry Steele
Commager, The American Mind (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1950), 99.
2 On James's public career, the development of his political ideas, and the relationship of
his philosophy to his politics, see two studies by intellectual historians: George Cotkin, William
James, Public Philosopher (Baitimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990), and Deborah 1.
Coon, "Courtship with Anarchy: the Socio-Political Foundations of William lames's Pragmatism"
(Ph.D. diss., HaIVard University, 1988).

131
S. Galt Crowell (ed.), The Prism of the Self, 131-146.
© 1995 Kluwer Academic Publishers.
132 JOSHUA MILLER

world scene.,,3

That [James] had the energy to be concerned with the

position of blacks, women, immigrants, minorities in other
countries, the care of the insane, vivisection, medical
legislation, educational policy, the temperance movement,
the imperialism and militarism of the Spanish-Arnerican
War, the annexation of the Philippines, and the Monroe
Doctrine is a remarkable feature of his life and thought. 4

James expressly discusses political themes such as action, equality, citizen-

ship, blindness and respect among citizens and communities, materialism,
and war in his essays, "A Certain Blindness in Human Beings," "What Makes
a Life Significant," "The Moral Equivalent of War," and in his speeches,
"Robert Gould Shaw" and "Remarks at the Peace Banquet." He seemed to
derive much of his political thought from John Stuart Mill, and credited his
ideas about practical politics to E. L. Godkin, editor of The Nation. 5 James
often called hirnself a "liberal," and one can presume that, as a well-educated
Harvard professor, he knew the classic authors and texts of Arnerican politi-
cal thought: Winthrop, Paine, Jefferson, The Federalist, and Abraham
Lincoln. Santayana thought that James's belief in the principles of the
Declaration of Independence was at the heart of his anti-imperialism.6
James's contribution to political thought goes beyond his explicitly
political pronouncements. Although he did not pay much attention to
institutions, economics, or power, his insights into psychology and religion
can be applied to political experience. To the extent that politics involves
the efforts of citizens to improve their lives and collective condition by
acting upon their ideals, James has something useful to say on the subject.

3 Gerald Myers, William James: His Life and Thought (New Haven: Yale University Press,
1986), 435-36. James also publicly opposed Iynching and supported the civil rights movement
(Essays, Comments, andReviews [Cambridge, MA: HaIVard University Press, 1987], 170-76, 192-
93). Ralph Barton Peny wrote that James was "a mugwump, an anti-imperialist, a civil-service
reformer, a Dreyfusite, and intemationalist and a liberal" (Thought and Choraeter o[ William
James [Boston: Little, Brown, 1935]2:290).
4 Myers, William James, 598, n. 109, and 429. For a counter-view, see George R. Garrison
and Edward H. Madden, "William James-Warts and All," Ameriean Quarterly 29 (Summer
1977), 207-221.
5 The Letters o[ William James, ed. Henry James (Boston: Atlantic Monthly Press, 1920),
1:284.
6 Persons and Plaees: Fragments o[Autobiography, ed. William G. Holzberger and Herman
J. Saatkamp, Jr. (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1987), 404. Santayana called the Declaration "a piece
of literature, a salad of illusions." On Godkin's influence see Peny, Thought and Charaeter,
2:290, 294-95.
 WILLIAM JAMES ON DEMOCRATIC ACTION 133

Once America's preeminent psychologist, James illuminates the complexity

of democratic political consciousness. In The Will 10 Believe James was
concerned with the philosophical and psychological bases for action when
faith in absolute truth is impossible. There is no reason to restrict James's
reflections on action to private life; he made it clear that he was also
thinking of action in political contexts. The essays "Great Men and Their
Environment" and "The Moral Philosopher and the Moral Life" can be read
as descriptions of the psychological and ethical dilemmas of the person who
wants to change institutions and ideas. 7 In Varieties of Religious Experience,
James identified radical political actors with the religious activists he studies
in the book: "[T]he Utopian dreams of social justice in which many
contemporary socialists and anarchists indulge are, in spite of their
impracticability and non-adaptation to present environmental conditions,
analogous to the saints' belief in an existent kingdom of heaven."8
If I have been able to make the case that James should be heard on the
subject of political experience, I can now indicate my argument. Neither
passivity in the face of increasing governmental and corporate power, nor
violence, terrorism, or hatred are compatible with democracy. Democrats
today want to encourage, as did James, principled action and mutual respect
among citizens of different viewpoints, races, genders, social classes, and
religions. James offered pluralism as a path to both action and respect, but,
accepting his own premises, the psychological roots of one may make the
other difficult. He understood that action usually springs from a passionate
belief in one's principles; this passionate belief will lead the typical political
actor to resist pluralism.

§2

James spoke to two features of United States politicallife at the end of

the nineteenth century: resignation coexisted with intense social conflict.
James lived in the era of the Populist movement, the campaign for women's
suffrage, the Haymarket riot, violent struggles between labor and manage-
ment; the dismantling of Reconstruction, the rise of Jim Crow laws and the
Ku Klux Klan, and the antecedents of the Civil Rights movement; massive
immigration, the building of the railroads, and the escalation of American
imperialism. Nonviolent resolution of domestic and international conflicts

7 See Jeffrey Lustig, Corporate Liberalism (Berkeley: University of Califomia Press, 1982),
150-94, and Comel West, The American Evasion 0/ Philosophy: A Genealogy 0/ Pragmatism
(Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1989), 54-68.
8 William James, Varieties 0/ Religious Experience (Cambridge: Harvard University Press,
1985),287.
134 JOSHUA MILLER

seemed a remote possibility. Yet, even in this period of change, James and
other intellectuals were anxious about a lack ofworthwhile action. 9 Political
scientist W. Y. P. Elliott wrote that

Tbe twentieth century began with a fear of the monstrous

complexity with which it was faced hanging in the air like
a heavy pall. Life had lost forever, men seemed to think,
the poetic simplicity and untroubled confidence with which
the youth of Western civilization had faced its problems.
Eucken said of this time ... : 'paralyzing doubt saps the
vitality of our age. We see a dear proof of this in the fact
that with all our achievement and unremitting progress we
are not really hapI>Y .. .' Tbe prophet of this period is old
Henry Adams ....10

Walter Dean Burnham describes 1898 and the defeat of the Populist party
as the crucial election after which American citizens stopped voting in great
numbers. 11
In trying to overcome the apathy, violent conflict, and imperialism of his
age, James analyzed the motivation of political involvement and withdrawal.
Passivity might be overcome, said James, if citizens realized that no higher
power determines fate, that truths are created by men and women, and that
institutions and cultures are human constructions. James proposed that the
best psychological framework for those who undertake creative action is to
seek the fulfillment of their ideals, while not taking those ideals to be
objectively or absolutely true. 12 Citizens whose convictions are too fervent
should acquire some doubt. Political actors should also respect the ideas of
others and realize that even one's opponents possess a share of the truth.
James's desire to combine action with mutual respect can be seen in the
following passage:

I use the brief term labor-question to cover all sorts of

9 See Henry Adams, The Education of Henry Adams, ed. Emest SamueJs (Boston:
Houghton Miftlin, 1974); and T J. Jackson Lears, No Place of Grace: Antimodemism and the
Transformation of American Culture, 1880-1920 (New York: Pantheon, 1981).
10 The Pragmatic Revolt in Politics (New York: Macmillan, 1928), 21.
11 Critical Elections and the Mainsprings of American Politics (New York: Norton, 1970).
12 By "political actors," I am thinking not of career politicians and bureaucrats, but of
visionaries and activists of the left and right, who work for causes and want major changes in the
political order. These men and women would be the political equivalent of James's "saints."
Their experience is not, however, completeiy different from that those who participate in
established political institutions nor from those who simply care about politics and public issues.
 WILLIAM JAMES ON DEMOCRATIC ACTION 135

anarchistic discontents and socialistic projects, and the

conservative resistances which they provoke. So far as this
conflict is unhealthy and regrettable-and I think it is so
only to a limited extent-the unhealthiness consists solely
in the fact that one-half of our fellow-countrymen remain
entirely blind to the internal significance of the lives of the
other half. 13

Widespread withdrawal from public life and bitter discord among self-
righteous groups persists in American politics. Moral absolutism can be seen
in the anti-abortion movement, the religious right, the Nation of Islam, and
the campaign to censor books, television, music, and film. One fears that
acts of political terrorism, such as the bombing of the World Trade Center
and the shootings of doctors who perform abortions, will increase. Many
groups and individuals act as if they have a direct line to God; they see their
opponents as deluded or deviant; their demands are non-negotiable.
Absolutism is anti-political and anti-democratic because politics requires
recognition of and negotiation with opponents; democracy implies that
everyone is allowed to state their claims and become part of the decision-
making process. 14
Another formidable obstacle to the recovery of democratic politics is
passivity, not only of social and intellectual elites, but of ordinary citizens.
In The Prince, Machiavelli depicted a popular attitude like the one James
saw in the United States in the late 1800s and which is still prevalent tOday:

It is not unknown to me that many have held, and still

hold, the opinion that the things of this world are, in a
manner, controlled by Fortune and by God, that men with
their wisdom cannot control them, and that, on the
contrary, that men can have no remedy whatsoever for
them; and for this reason they might judge that they need
not sweat much over such matters but let them be governed
by fate. This opinion has been more strongly held in our
own times because of the great variation of affairs that has
been observed and that is being observed every day which
is beyond all human conjecture. 15

13 Talks 10 Teachers on Psychology (Cambridge: HalVard University Press, 1983), 165-66.

14 Hannah Arendt, "On Humanity in Dark Times: Thoughts About Lessing," Men in Dark
Times (New York: Harcourt, Brace, and World), 24-25.
15 The Ponable Machiavelli, ed. and trans. Peter Bondanella and Mark Musa (New York:
Penguin, 1979), eh. 25, p. 159. See also lohn Higham, Strangers in lhe Land (New York:
Atheneum, 1981), 135.
136 JOSHUA MILLER

From the standpoint of the acquiescent, God, the government, capitalists, or

any power except themselves and their neighbors shape reality and control
events; human beings are helpless to do more than accommodate the direc-
tion of force. Seeing no hope for political change, many citizens focus on
themselves (body, spirit, psyche, pleasures) or turn their attention from this
world to the next.
James offers, if not a way out of resignation and violence, an
understanding of their dynamics and the difficulties of overcoming them.
Although James advocated both action and mutual respect, they are in
conflict even in his own theory. The psychological roots of action make
reconciliation of contrary positions difficult; put simply, it is hard for those
who believe in their causes passionately enough to act on them to truly
respect the opposition. James never says that one possible result of his
pluralism could be the erosion of action, but the logic of his argument
points in that direction.

§3

James himself was the most respectful of men, sometimes embarrassing

even his friends with his openness to advocates of eccentric causes such as
parapsychology. He believed that the psychological root of imperialism and
violence was the inability to empathize with the purposes and customs of
other individuals and communities. If we could overcome this blindness we
might see the good in others that they see in themselves. James said that we
must not

be forward in pronouncing on the meaninglessness of forms

of existence other than our own; and it commands us to
tolerate, respect, and indulge those whom we see harmlessly
interested and happy in their own ways, however unintel-
ligible these may be to uso Hands off: neither the whole of
truth, nor the whole of good, is revealed to any single
observer, although each observer gains a partial superiority
of insight from the peculiar position in which he stands. 16

Mutual respect describes the ideal relationship among citizens in a

democracy. A revival of democratic politics tOday requires mutual respect
among citizens of various races, religions, ethnicities, ideologies, genders,
and sexual orientations. American democracy is based, said James,

16 "On a Certain Blindness in Human Beings," Talks to Teachers, op. eil., 149.
 WILLIAM JAMES ON DEMOCRATIC AcrION 137

on two inveterate habits carried into public life.... They

can never be too often pointed out or praised. One of them
is the habit of trained and disciplined good temper towards
the opposite party when it fairly wins its innings-it was by
breaking from this habit the slave States nearly wrecked our
Nation. The other is that of fierce and merciless resentment
towards every man or set of men who break the public
peace-it was by holding to this habit the free States saved
her lifeP

Taking these clues from James, I will go outside of his texts to elaborate
an interpretation of respect that is congruent with his theory. In defining
"respect," the Ox[ord English Dictionary and Webster's New Collegiate
Dictionary, 10th ed., link the words regard, attention, and esteem. To respect
is "to consider worthy of high regard." High regard without deference for
fellow citizens and foreigners is close to democratic respect. Elements of
mutual respect include, first, equality that gives everyone, regardless of race,
religion, gender, education, or wealth a share of power; and, second, a
charitable attitude toward one's fellow citizens and political opponents which
attempts to see the world from their point of view, learning from them if
possible. The political usage of "respect" might be as follows: "Even if I
disagree with your views I have to think about what you say, and I will
neither Eunish you for your ideas nor ignore the fact that you have
spoken." 8 The suggestion that every person's point of view should be
recognized runs counter to the idea that only a few, because of their
education or status, have opinions that matter. This proposition is related
to universal suffrage whose implication of equality is usually taken for
granted. The belief in equality means that one's fellow citizens, including
political opponents, are not nullities. Entrusted with a portion of power to
decide the direction of the polity, they are potentially one's teachers, not
only possible converts or targets. 19
To respect someone is not to like them, or even to admire them.
Christopher Lasch disagrees:

17 "Robert Gould Shaw: Oration by Professor William James," in The Works o[ William
James: Essays in Religion anti Morality (Cambridge: HalVard University Press, 1982), 74. See
also The Letters o[ William James, 1:252.
18 A disrespectful teacher either ignores or openly disdains the comments of the students.
19 According to Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr., those working for change should try
to understand and even love their opponents. King said, "[T)he Christian virtues of love, mercy
and forgiveness should stand at the center of our Jives...." Love of enemies "might weil be the
salvation of our civilization." "Facing the Challenge of a New Age," I Have a Dream, ed. James
Melvin Washington (New York: Harper San Francisco, 1992), 21.
138 JOSHUA MILLER

We are determined to respect everyone, but we have for-

gotten that respect has to be earned. Respect is not another
word for tolerance.... Respect is what we experience in
the presence of admirable achievements, admirably formed
characters, natural gifts put to good use. It entails the
exercise of discriminating judgment, not indiscriminate
acceptance. 2O

I understand Lasch's use of "respect," and to a degree accept it, but this
definition is inappropriate for democracy which is built on respect of a
certain kind for everyone, even the obnoxious, ignorant, untalented, and
failed. 21 Countries that would be direct democracies must promote
universal respect more than deferential admiration because respect maintains
the bond among citizens of a diverse democratic society. Democracy requires
preserving a relationship with political opponents. In a wonderful passage
too lengthy to quote here, John Stuart Mill described his father as a model
politician, in this characteristic at least, because although James Mill disliked
his adversaries, as activists are wont to do, he was fair-minded enough to
acknowledge the good points in his opponents' characters and positions. 22
This attitude was seen in the speech by Nelson Mandela upon winning
election as the first president of post-apartheid South Mrica:

I would ... like to congratulate President de Klerk for the

strong showing the National Party has displayed in this
election. I also want to congratulate hirn for the many days,
weeks and months and the four years that we have worked
together, quarreled, addressed sensitive problems and at the
end of our heated exchanges were able to shake hands and
to drink coffee.... The calm and tolerant atmosphere that
prevailed during the election depiets the type of South
Mrica we can build.... We might have our differences, but
we are one people with a common destiny in our rieh
variety of culture, race and tradition. 23

20 "Modernity and Progress: an Exchange [with Jeffrey Isaac]," Salmagundi, no. 93 (Winter
1992),107.
21 James believed that Americans were so preoccupied with material success that it was
difficult for them to appreciate those with other goals. See Talks to Teachers, 141.
22 Autobiography, ed. John Robson (New York: Penguin, 1990),57.
23 "Mandela and De K1erk: Words on a Transition," New York Times, 3 May 1994, National
edition. What led Mandela to this gracious speech? Perhaps it was the strength of his
character, an educational influence, de K1erk's virtues, and a pragmatic assessment of the
consequences of revenge.
 WILLlAM JAMES ON DEMOCRATIC ACTION 139

Mutual respect implies the attempt to imagine how the world looks from
the viewpoint of other groups and individuals. What is the his tory of their
community? How does a partieular divisive issue appear to them? What is
the best presentation they could make of their position? Realizing that no
community, and no individual, is monolithic, one wants to identify the
differences and lines of disagreement within that community and even within
the individual. Sometimes it is easy in a negative sense to see others'
contradictions (e.g., the pro-lifers who support the death penalty), but those
contradictions may be positive (e.g., the opponent of abortion who otherwise
believes in equality for women).
Respect, toleration, and understanding should be distinguished. An
attempt should be made to understand some things, as difficult as that may
be, which should not be respected or even tolerated, for example, the
violence of neo-Nazis or the Ku Klux Klan. In a passage cited above, James
referred to both toleration and respect, toleration being the minimum,
respect the maximum of generosity toward others.24 Toleration in tradi-
tional liberalism, written into the first amendment of the Constitution,
implies letting others alone. Some civillibertarians would say that the views
of one's opponents need not be considered, but only permitted to be
expressed. You can tolerate others by ignoring them and being ignorant
about them. Respect goes further than tolerance, implying that one needs
to leam about communities other than one's own. The culture of a college
campus which has been traditionally dominated by white wealthy Christian
young men might tolerate women, Jews, Blacks, Asians, and gays in the
sense that they will admit them to the school, letting them go about their
business without insult or violence. Admittedly, civility is preferable to
persecution, but the young men might never try to leam the history and
outlook of these other groups, leaving intact the dominant culture instead
of reshaping it to reftect the diversity of the campus population.
Mutual respect is premised on equality, not necessarily admiration or
even affection; it begins with recognition and continues to knowledge. 25
A community is made up of diverse individuals and groups, just as a nation
is made up of diverse communities; the unity among those diverse elements
can come from a powerful state that suppresses conflict, from a hegemonie
identity that stiftes other identities, or, and this is probably the most difficult
to achieve, from mutual respect in face-to-face relationships among the
polity's various individuals and groups. Mutual respect is a relationship

24 Arendt writes in Men in Dark Times, op. eiL, 26: '''This has very little to do with toler-
ance in the ordinary sense ... hut it has a great deal to do with the gift of friendship, and with
openness to the world, and finally with genuine love of mankind."
25 I recognize as unrealistic the premises that one can know weil many cultures other than
one's own, and that one will respect all cultures and persons upon getting to know them.
140 JOSHUA MILLER

especially to be fostered among adversaries and those one sees as much

different than oneself because it is with them that the danger of misunder-
standing and conflict is greatest.

§4

Although James advocated mutual respect based on pluralism, his own

understanding of political psychology reveals how difficult that will be to
attain. James is well-known for offering pragmatism as a solution to fierce
political conflicts. Instead of disputing the validity of first principles, political
opponents should look to the potential results of different policies;
redirecting attention to consequences will perhaps take the edge off of
conflict. Because pragmatism has already received a great deal of attention,
I will focus on a related theme: pluralism as a proposed path to action and
mutual respect. The metaphor of the "pluralistic universe" is James's
alternative to the "scientific" model in which the truth is thought to be
discovered, not created.
Prom the standpoint of the political actor, the pluralistic universe is
characterized by freedom and doubt. According to James, God has not
written a discernible text of commandments for humanity to obey, but
instead, people create truth and reality by acting upon their beliefs. 26
Truth functions in moral life, James said, as a hypothesis; it lives on~ if
human beings are willing to act on it and bring it into the world. 2 In
Pragmatism, James wrote that "Laws and languages ... are thus seen to be
man-made things."28 Accepting the fact that human beings are responsible
for their own fates requires them both to strive in order to attain the
conditions that they desire, and to doubt, to some degree, their ideals. James
linked pragmatism to localism in political and religious thought. "In other
spheres of life it is true that we have got used to living in astate of relative
insecurity. The authority of 'the State' and that of an absolute 'moral law,'
have resolved themselves into expediencies, and holy church has resolved
itself into 'meeting houses,.,,29 James hoped that embracing uncertainty
would make citizens more energetic, and political partisans more generous
to their opponents.

26 "Pragmatism and Religion," Pragmatism (Cambridge: HaIVard University Press, 1975),

131-44.
27 Will to Believe (New York: Dover, 1956 [1897]), 3, 184.
28 Ibid., 116. James says there that the idea of human beings making their own truths was
the contribution of Schiller's humanism.
29 Ibid., 117.
 WILLIAM JAMES ON DEMOCRATIC ACTION 141

James had two politically relevant audiences for his pluralist theory, one
that acts on faith and another in despair because they lack faith:

Of course if any one comes along and says that men at

large don't need to have facility of faith in their inner
convictions preached to them, [that] they have only too
much readiness in that way already, and the one thing
needful to preach is that they should hesitate with their
convictions, and take their faiths out for an airing into the
howling wildemess of nature, I should also agree. But my
paper ["The Will to Believe"] wasn't addressed to mankind
at large but to a limited set of studious persons, badly
under the ban just now of certain authorities whose simple-
minded faith in 'naturalism' also is sorely in need of an
airing-and an airing, as it seems to me, of the sort I tried
to give. 3O

Those with excessive zeal need to leam hesitation and doubt. They should
support their position without certainty that it is ultimately true or dismiss
their opponents as completely wrong. James hoped that belief in a pluralist
universe on the part of those with excessive zeal, which inc1uded ordinary
citizens as weil as political activists, would lead to respect. Perry summarizes
James's position:

The grip of the hand on the sword is relaxed by the

reflection that the other's cause is as real and warm to hirn
as is mine to me, and has its own inner and equal justi-
fication. If the principle of sympathy be given priority over
the principle ofself-assertion it is still possible, however, to
save the militant and heroic qualities. The principle of
sympath~ is itself a cause for moral and even for physical
courage. 1

Both faith and respect are essential to democratic action.

According to James's own understanding ofpolitical psychology, however,
mutual respect is unlikely to be compatible with committed action. James
weil understood the American tradition of action based on faith. He could

30 James to Dickson S. Miller, 30 August 1896, Letters 01 William James, 2:49-50. Two
types of actors, one acting on a "monist" model, the other on a "pluralistic" one, are described
by James in '"!be Absolute and the Strenuous Life," Pragmatism and The Meaning 01 Truth
(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1975), 289-91.
31 Perry, Thought and Character 2:277.
142 JOSHUA MILLER

have been speaking about Jefferson, Paine, Hamilton, and William Lloyd
Garrison when he wrote, "Political reformers accomplish their successive
tasks in the his tory of nations by being blind for the time to other
causes."32 Perry remarked, "Por James life assumes a heroic form only
when the moral subject believes in the superiority of his own ideal, not as
merely his, but in some sense absolute or infinite."33 James wrote that the
political actor is like the Christian saint in that both are moved by a truth
that they take to be greater than themselves. The saint has

a feeling of being in a wider life than that of this world's

selfish interests; and a conviction, not merely intellectual,
but as it were sensible, of the existence of an Ideal power.
In Christian saintliness this power is always personified as
God; but abstract moral ideals, civic or patriotic utopias, or
inner visions of holiness or right mayaiso be feIt as the
true lords and enlargers of our life. . . .34

The saint's energy, and one can infer by analogy the energy of committed
political actors, comes in large part from their ideals. 35 The saint feels "a
sense of the friendly continuity of the ideal power with our own life, and a
willing self-surrender to its control."36
Are political saints likely to adopt pluralism and become respectful of
their opponents? Pervent political actors are usually not skeptics. Doubt
maybe an essential element of scholarship, but not of politics. Even if they
have never heard of debates about epistemology, activists tend to hold their
beliefs tenaciously, acting as if their beliefs are objectively true. The rest of
us may often see strong arguments on both sides of the issue and are
thankful that we do not have to decide, but partisans feel their cause to be
righteous.
This way of thinking may not be peculiarly American, but it is an
American tradition to believe that when we act God is on our side. 37 The

. . op. cll.,
32 V.anetles, . 272.
33 Thought and Character 1:488.
34 Varieties, op. eit., 218-19.

35 Ibid., 194,219-220,241. In Varieties, James says, "Religious feeling is thus an absolute

addition to the Subject's range of Iife. It gives him a new sphere of power. When the outward
battle is lost, and the outer world disowns him, it redeems and vivified an interior world which
otherwise would be an empty waste" (46). Faith in an ideology or cause works the same way for
the committed political actor.
36 Ibid., 220.

37 See Sacvan Bercovitch, The American Jeremiad (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press,
 WILLIAM JAMES ON DEMOCRATIC AcrION 143

Puritans saw New England as a light for the entire world; American revolu-
tionaries and the Constitutional framers similarlYiosited a unique historical
role for U.S. political principles and practices. When individuals claim
that their rights are being violated, they tend to echo Jefferson's formu-
lation: "We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men are created
equal; that they are endowed by their creator with inherent and inalienable
rights. "39 Most subsequent steps in American his tory, including the Civil
Rights movement, sought to link God, country, and cause. As James
conceded, belief in one's aims as absolute has been a typical component of
great political efforts. Imagine the psychological needs of Ida B. Wells who
tried in the 1890s to stop Iynching and to attain the vote for women. In face
of massive, often violent resistance, even from white suffragettes, did she not
need unquestioning conviction in the justice of her struggle?40 Could
Martin Luther King, Jr., who tried to love his enemies, have continued his
work if he did not believe that racial equality was an absolute good? He
wrote, "We will win our freedom because the sacred heritage of our nation
and the eternal will of God are embodied in our echoing demands.,,41 It
is difficult to imagine a rluralist, postmodern King who did not tie his
crusade to heavenly will. 4
In addition to those with an excess of certainty, James addressed another
group, which he called "studious persons,· that feels there is no grounding
for belief and action; they need to learn that they can choose their ideals
without foundations. Many of the intellectual elite in James's audience, such
as Henry Adams, no longer believed that God intervened on the side of the
United States or took any interest whatsoever in human affairs. They feared
that there was no ultimate truth, reading Darwin's conception of evolution

1978).
38 "It has been frequently remarked," wrote Alexander Hamilton in the first number of The
Federalist, "that it seems to have been reserved to the people of this country, by their conduct
and example, to decide the important question, whether societies of men are reaJly capable or
not of establishing good govemment from reflection and choice, or whether they are forever
destined to depend for their political constitutions on accident and force." If the United States
failed it would show that no country could establish a free govemment.
39 Brian Wiener points out that Jefferson can be read in a Jamesian fashion if "holding"
the truths is defined as "choose to believe" rather than ''we know without having to prove it that
our American view is that of God."
40 On WeJls's career, see Paula Giddings, When and Where I Enter (New York: William
Morrow, 1984), 17-31.
41 "Letter from a Birmingham Jail," I Have a Dream, op. eit., 98.
42 The religious roots of the Civil Rights movement are explored in Taylor Branch, Parting
the Waters (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1989).
144 JOSHUA MILLER

as evidence of a random universe. 43 When James as a young man experi-

enced this loss of faith, he suffered a nervous breakdown, and recovered only
after reading Renouvier who posited that principles could be freely chosen
instead of scientifically discovered. 44 In writing "The Will to Believe,"
James addressed those who feared that they could not act because the uni-
verse seems random and meaningless. He prescribed to American skeptics
the cure that had worked for hirn: beliefs grounded in choice rather than
ontology. He hoped that this outlook would not only overcome paralysis, but
make action less beIligerent. Doubters needed to know that they can choose
their convictions, and that their choices are just as solid as truths discovered
by faith and endorsed by God. 45 James's formula became: believe in what
you need. If you lack faith in an objective truth, you may still legitimately
attempt to realize your ideals. He thought that the vision of an open or
pluralist universe would inspire action. In arguing for faith, which James
defines as "belief in something concerning which doubt is still theoretically
possible," he wrote, "any mode of conceiving the universe which ... makes
the man seem as if he were individually helping to create the actuality of the
truth whose metaphysical reality he is wiIling to ass urne, will be sure to be
responded to by large numbers. "46
James delineated two models of political action, one based on passion
and faith, and another based on will. He thought that the adoption of
pluralism would affect both traditional political actors and skeptics in
beneficial ways. It would inspire action on the part of those who saw no
meaning in the world, who had lost faith in God and absolute principles;
and it would foster respect for opposing views in committed political actors
once they realized that their truths were validated only by their
commitments. His description of action based on faith seems truer to the
ordinary experience of political action; the new way, based on choice and
respect for others, is attractive, but difficult to achieve.

§5
James's teaching that beliefs grounded in action and will are legitimate
might inspire some people; whether committed political actors would accept
pluralism is more problematic. Would the notion of a pluralist universe

43 Commager, The Amencan Mind, op. eit., 83.

44 Gay Wilson Allen, Williamfarnes: A Biography (New York: Viking, 1967), 161-170. See
also Cotkin, Williarn farnes, op. eit., 55-56.
45 See Lustig, Corporate Liberalism, op. eit., 159-163.
46 "Rationality, Activity, and Faith," Princeton Review, 2 (July 1882), 71.
 WILLIAM JAMES ON DEMOCRATIC ACTION 145

really motivate action if, as James posited, action is based on faith in a

cause? Can a freely chosen ideal, experienced as freely chosen, produce the
same inspiration? Are those who are so committed to their ideals as to act
upon them tolerate, much less respect, alternative points of view? Does the
teaching of doubt in all truths, the spirit of postmodernism, foster not
action, but resignation by draining action's wellspring of conviction?
Recognition of a pluralistic universe might give strength to those in
des pair but could undermine the confidence of committed activists. James
has indicated that most people seriously engaged in politics have a strong
faith in their ideals and see riyal causes as mistaken. One can imagine a
person who believes that nothing can be changed because everything is
determined by large forces-you cannot fight city hall or progress, to say
nothing of late capitalism-who finds inspiration in the notion that these
forces do not determine his tory and that present conditions have not been
sanctioned by God or the march of his tory, and instead, we can affect the
world in directions that we choose. But one can also imagine activists who
would become discouraged if they came to believe in a pluralistic universe,
and thought there was nothing "objectively" superior in their cause.
James did not always believe that we are naturally moved to act by the
idea of a pluralist universe; by nature, he often said, we are inclined the
other way, Le, we need faith in the grounding of our ideals. He hoped that
if political actors recognize that absolute truth does not exist and God's will
is inscrutable, that realization should inspire action. Nevertheless, a
contradiction exists in James's theory of action between the old model of
action based on faith and the new one based on will. James does not easily
or completely abandon the traditional paradigm of political action even as
he seeks to create a new one.
What, finally, should be made of this contradiction? If politics is thought
10 inflame the passions, one could try to encourage peace by reducing
political participation. This was the aim the Federalists had when they
designed institutions that put layers of representation between the people
and power. 47 The authors of The Federalist attempted to avoid altogether
the problem of fostering respectful relationships among the citizens. Friend-
ship and understanding among citizens would be unnecessary because the
country's enormous scale and representative institutions will prevent any one
faction from becoming permanently dominant.
Institutional solutions that promote passivity and avoid face-to-face
relationships among citizens would be unacceptable to James who linked
action with health. And it is unlikely that a privatized people would be more
tolerant than one which learns to work with opponents in the political

47 See my Rise and Fall o[ Democracy in Early America, 1630-1789 (University Park, PA:
Penn State Press, 1991), chapter five.
146 JOSHUA MILLER

realm. The widespread distribution of power in a democracy is itself acheck

on the absolutist tendencies of politicalleaders. It may be that the problem
of respect cannot be resolved within the psychological framework created by
James; after recognizing the insoluble tension between respect and action,
one has to turn to more tangible factors that would encourage respect: for
example, reducing poverty, articulating anational rhetoric of respect and
equality, and public education which emphasizes a self-critical examination
of American his tory in its diversity as weIl as knowledge of other cultures.
Having revealed some of the complexities of democratic politics, James's
proposed combination of action and mutual respect can be seen not so much
a contradiction as a formidable goal.
 RICHARD M. ZANER

INTERPRETATION AND DIALOGUE:

Medicine as a Moral Discipline

§1. From Discovery to Intervention

Whether medicine is understood as a disciplined craft or technology, an

artful exercise of informed reasoning, or a diagnostic science-or aH of
these-one thing is perfectly obvious: it abounds in interpretations, as diverse
in some ways as are the data about which physicians reason and with which
they work. In modern medicine as in its history, it is equaHy true that
medicine is characterized at any time by certain usages, some of which seem
to be "generative ideas," in Suzanne Langer's term (1942: 1-5)-central
beliefs or commitments about the nature of the discipline itself, as weH as
about medical knowledge and its relation to practice, what constitutes illness
or health, what patients are, and the doctor-patient relationship, etc.
Some of these usages seem to defy rigorous formulation even though they
may be surprisingly pervasive. An example is "appropriate," a notion with
important epistemological, methodological, ethical, and metaphysical con-
tent. As even a cursory study would show, it often conveys a significant
social and political sense as weH. A careful delineation of this variety of
usages would be very revealing about medicine's actual practices. That
fascinating study, however, will have to wait another occasion.
Other usages tend to be not only relatively more precise, but remarkably
pervasive over long periods of time. One of these, "symptom," is especially
interesting. OriginaHy conceived in the ancient Dogmatic or Rationalist
tradition as an external sign of internal disorders or disease, it has been a
central idea in that dominant model in medicine's history. Then as now,
symptoms are understood as the causal effects of pathological events or
processes within the body that are suggested ultimately by the proportion
and position of "humors."! Then as now, understanding and treating
diseases by way of symptoms (which Dogmatic physicians termed diagnosis)

1 Although "humors" are no longer obviously accepted, it might be argued that the
underlying idea, a kind of "balance" among bodily systems, still informs the modern pathophysio-
logical conception.

147
S. Galt Crowell (ed.), The Prism ofthe Self, 147-168.
© 1995 Kluwer Academic Publishers.
148 RrCHARD M. ZANER

involves a form of analogical reasoning (analogismos) that moves from the

external ("visible") to the internal ("invisible") in search of causal connec-
tions (between outer symptoms and inner pathologies) according to
statistical, or at least numerically significant, patterns.
A number of contemporary physicians have emphasized, however, that
since the 1930s medicine has undergone important changes that raise serious
questions about the Dogmatic way of understanding illness and "the
art"-even while "diagnosis," "analogical reasoning" and "causality" continue
to form a key part of medicine's discourse (Jonsen and Toulmin 1988). In
any event, it has been evident since the mid-1960s that medicine began to
change from being primarily a profession of discovery (of diseases and their
causal mechanisms) to a discipline of intervention. As Eric Cassell (1976: 6)
pointed out, the very success of biomedical research has led to a change
"toward a basic concern for the sick person." That shift of focus became even
more evident as emphasis on preventive medicine and especially on chronic
illness grew in the 1980s (Kleinman 1988).
This shift is in large part due to the fact that momentous discoveries have
been made in effective therapies and regimens which became generally
available to practicing physicians, especially since the 1950s. The physician's
earlier focus on discovery, diagnosis, organic lesion, and bodily pain
(medicine as science) increasingly shifted to intervention, healing, style of
living, and human suffering (medicine as clinical intervention)-an emphasis,
however, that has taken over three decades to make itself widely feIt. One
consequence of this change is that the contemporary physician is now
thought 10 need far more, and more diverse types of, knowledge than hither-
to: not only biology, but sociology, psychology and perhaps even others
(Odegaard 1986; Engels 1988).
The shift is historically significant, for central to it are generative ideas
at the root of a quite different and one of the more fascinating of medicine's
main traditions. Known as Empiricist medicine in Hippocratic times
(Edelstein 1967: 303-18), one of its main forms later evolved into medical
Skepticism-from its association with Aenesidemos (Edelstein 1967: 186). By
Hellenistic times, physicians such as Thessalos, Themison, Proklos and
Soranus had taken the name "Methodist," due to their prominent concern
with medical method (Edelstein 1967: 176).2
This important tradition, it is interesting to note, was opposed to the
Dogmatics on each of its claims, including the idea of "humors." Then as
now in clinical medicine, the understanding of symptoms, for instance,
focuses on personal and historical signs of the patient's mode and place of

2 For a fuller discussion of ancient Methodism, see Edelstein's historical account (1967:
173-191), based in part on the writings of Galen, Celsus, Sextus, and others; regarding its
philosophical significance, Zaner (1988: 177-201).
 MEDICINE AS AMoRAL DISCIPLINE 149

living, dietary regimen (food or drink), psychological moods, habits, and the
like. Then as now, medical reasoning involves thinking about the "whoie
person" (including family, associates, environment, etc.) in search of con-
nections between the patient's current illness and his/her his tory, so as to
devise a future plan of action that will both alter the course of illness and
life-style (that in all likelihood led to the illness in the first place) and,
hopefuIly, correct or ameliorate the condition. In this understanding,
presenting symptoms are taken as commemorative signs of the patient's
prevailing mode of living that require interpretation: semeiosis. Seeking to
devise ways of changing the patient's state of illness into one of health, these
ancient Skeptics followed a form of experientiaIly-based, deliberative
reasoning: epilogismos. 3

§ 2. Illness and Disease

In a remarkably similar way, contemporary physicians who emphasize the

central place of clinical work have had to recognize that physicians must
become quite skilled at communicating with patients and families as the
major way to gain access to the patient's own understanding of illness,
his/her sense ofwhen and how the problem first began, how long it has gone
on, as weIl as determining his/her current body-state. To understand and
treat illnesses requires that the clinician understand the patient's own life-
style (along with family and/or significant others). As Cassell (1976: 16)
remarks, the major diseases of our times (heart disease, cancer, stroke,
ulcers, diabetes, even the malignancies such as lung cancer and AIDS) stern
"primarily from the way we live," and treating these diseases requires
sensitivity to these modes of actual living.
Taking patients' histories and engaging in clinical conversations with
them and their families (or whomever they include in their circle of
intimates) have thus become increasingly central. Clinical conversations are
typically aimed at devising strategies of intervention that must be designed
jointly with patients and families. These strategies are necessary, not only
because their effective realization depends on the patient's initiative, com-
pliance, and discipline (as weIl as support and understanding of family
and/or significant others).4 Beyond this, as Ruark (1988: 26) and his
colleagues on the Stanford Medical Center Committee on Ethics emphasize,

3 Semeiosis is taken as opposed to diagnosis; in the same way, epilogismos is deliberately

contrasted with the rationalist's analogismos.
4 For just this reason, as I suggest later in this essay, it is essential that courage be
understood as among the vital virtues at the heart of clinical practice and the experience of ill-
ness.
150 RICHARD M. ZANER

the patient or legal surrogate is the "true source of authority" for decisions,
since either the one or the other have the "right to control what happens to
them" (especially, but not only, in decisions regarding the initiation or
withdrawal of life supports). This shift shows remarkable similarities to the
ancient Skeptic's emphasis on epilogismos: deliberatively weighing the
different factors of a patient's personal life, bodily condition, social
circumstances and history so as to enable areturn to more healthy living.
Something else is suggested by this gradual but quite basic shift of focus
from discovery to effective intervention. For a scientific medicine focused on
discovery, understanding the biology of disease requires that disease
symptoms and their sundry mechanisms must be abstracted from individual
patients, then generalized into commonly recognizable diagnostic disease
patterns (which in ancient medicine was termed "logical classification of
diseases"). Diseases are typically expressed in fairly constant ways in cells,
organs, or enzyme systems; similarly, a person's genetic makeup or changes
in the immune system can alter his or her biological reaction to diseases.
Ni is suggested by clinical interventions, however, it is equally clear that
personal habits, diet, physical conditioning, and the like can also alter that
reaction. Each illness

is unique and differs from every other illness episode

because of the person in whom it occurs. Even when a
disease recurs in the same individual, the illness is changed
by the fact that it is a recurrence . . . [T]he presentation,
course, and outcome of a disease can also be affected by
whether the patient likes or fears physicians, 'believes' in
medication or abuses drugs, is brave or cowardly, 'self-
destructive' or vain, has unconscious conflicts into which
the illness does or does not fit, and so on (Cassell 1985 I:
6).

These concerns have become all the more critical as attention shifts to the
problems presented by chronic illnesses. Pointing out that the personal
experience of illness (as distinct from the biomedical disease) is a key factor
in clinical encounters, Kleinman (1988: 8-30, 49) marshals impressive
evidence to support his idea that one of the core tasks in the effective
clinical care of the chronically ill is to affirm the patient's experience of
illness in the very terms by which it is constituted in commonsense ways, and
to negotiate, using the specific terms of those ways, an acceptable therapeu-
tic approach.
In another vein, Norman Cousins collected and reviewed interesting evi-
dence from recent research suggesting that there are multiple connections
between emotional and physiological factors (in particular the nervous,
 MEDICINE AS A MORAL DISCIPLINE 151

endocrine, and immune systems).5 As a result, he argues, it has become

imperative for physicians to leam to "strike a sensible balance between
psychological and biologie factors in the understanding and management of
disease" (Cousins 1988: 1612). Personal and emotional life have too long
been regarded merelyas "intangibles and imponderables." Instead, there is
a "presiding fact" in these inquiries: "namely, the physician has a prime
resource at his disposal in the form of the patient's own apothecary,
especially when combined with the prescription pad" (Cousins 1988: 1611).

§3. Interpreting Patient Discourse

The basie idea underlying these insights was not unknown in the ancient
skeptical or "Methodist" tradition-whose methodical views derived strietly
from the healer's own clinical experience (Edelstein 1967: 193-99). They
believed that each illness or injury was utterly unique precisely because every
person who fell ill or was injured was unique and reacted differently.
Symptoms were taken as signs of the body's own powers (physies) to eombat
the influences of bad living, noxious environment, or both. As the Hippo-
eratie texts state, "the physies are the physicians of disease" (Epidemics VI),
and the doetor is their servant, aeting to support these powers (Epidemics
I). In contemporary terms, Ruark et al (1988: 26) insist, physicians "should
act as consultants engaged to evaluate their patients' problems, present
reasonable options for treatment in understandable language, and faeilitate
decision making." Or, as Cassell (1985 11: 4-5) says, "the illness the patient
brings to the physician arises from the interaction between the biological
entity that is the disease and the person of the patient, all occurring within
a specifie eontext." In ancient medical skepticism, the physician is understood
as the servant of the patient-in particular through clinical conversational
encounters. Accordingly, the interpretation of patient/family discourse must
be recognized as a central requirement of clinical medicine.
On the basis of his research over the past two decades, moreover,
Kleinman suggests that when proposing medical reeommendations the
clinician must foeus on the patient's own experience and interpretations.
"When we speak of illness, we must include the patient's judgments about
how best to cope with the distress and with the practical problems in daily
living it ereates" (Kleinman 1988: 4). To accomplish this, it is necessary for
the physician to utilize "common-sense" in categorizing and explaining the

5 Cousins (1988: 1610) dtes 39 research reports on this topic. All of them were conducted
weil after W. Cannon's important work more than 50 years ago demonstrating that emotions can
stimulate the spleen, "resulting in an increase of from 10% to 15% in the population of red
blood cells."
152 RICHARD M. ZANER

kinds of distress brought on by patho-physiological processes.

By means of the interpretive categories ingredient to everyday life,
patients "order their experience of illness-what it means to them and to
significant others-as personal narratives" (Kleinman 1988: 49). Frequently,
however, neither the patient nor family is able to express the fu11 narrative
adequately or accurately-surely a requirement for judging whether s!he is
truly informed, uncoerced, and capable of making decisions. Thus another
core clinical task, in Kleinman's words,

is the empathetic interpretation of a life story that makes

over the illness into the subject matter of a biography ...
[that] highlights core life themes-for example, injustice,
courage, personal victory against the odds-for whose
prosecution the details of illness supply evidence.... [To
do this] the c1inician must first piece together the illness
narrative as it emerges from the patient's and the family's
complaints and explanatory models; then he or she must
interpret it in light of the different modes of illness mean-
ings-symptom symbols, cultura11y salient illnesses, personal
and social contexts (Kleinman 1988: 49).

In ancient skeptical medicine, this interpretation (semeiosis) involved hist-

ory-taking and conversation, along with therapeutic planning (judiciously6
combined with patient participation wherever possible) arrived at byartful
deliberative weighing (epilogismos) of a11 those personal, historical, social,
and bodily signs made manifest by the presence of illness.
The significance of that shift of emphasis implies that the development
of the linguistic ski11s necessary to fulfill the aims of this complex interpre-
tive discipline, is or ought to be quite as important as any of those
commonly associated with physical diagnosis. For instance, regarding
informed consent for withholding and/or withdrawal of life supports, Ruark
et al (1988: 26) emphasize, "The ability to communicate effectively with
patients and families or legal surrogates is one of the most vital professional
ski11s in appropriate decision making." Physicians bear the responsibility not
merely for "attempting to communicate, but for ensuring that effective
communication takes place."
Cousins (1988: 1611) also emphasizes that "the physician's communica-
tion skills need no longer be regarded as theoretical assets." In Casse11's
words (1985 I: 1), "the spoken language is the most important ... diagnostic

6 As will be seen later, the Hippocratic Oath is based on ablend of two virtues, justice
(dike) and self-restraint (sophrostlne); to this, as noted above, it seems necessary to add courage
as weil.
 MEDICINE AS AMoRAL DISCIPLINE 153

and therapeutic tool" the physician can possess. Writing in the Foreward to
Cassell's study, Stanley Joel Reiser emphasizes that, although the "patient's
role as narrator in the drama of illness has declined in the twentieth
century," the fact is that "medical encounters begin with dialogue." Indeed,
Reiser continues, "there are few more important tasks for contemporary
medicine" than the careful cultivation and enhancement of "our communica-
tion skills" through which a balance must be sought "between understanding
general biologic processes that make us ill and understanding the illness as
experienced ... by the patient" (Reiser, in Cassell 1985 I: ix-x). In his
analysis of Christiaan Barnard's first heart transplant into Louis Washk-
ansky, Katz (1984: 130-37) also recognized that clinically conducted natural
conversations or dialogues are essential for every medical consideration, not
merely for patient compliance or consent.
The kind of eIinical conversation that is focused on patient experience
and self interpretation, nevertheless, has only begun to be more generally
appreciated in medicine. Physicians are not "trained to be self-reflective
interpreters of distinctive systems of meaning, • Kleinman (1988: 17) argues,
indeed "are rarely taught that biological processes are known only through
socially constructed categories that constrain experience as much as does
disordered physiology." In part, this may be traced "to a preoccupation with
and the limitations of the scientific point of view" (Donnelly 1986: 93).
To be clinically effective and sensitive in communication, physicians must
learn to be as precise as the physician who auscultates a heart or palpates
a spleen, as careful "in its use as is a surgeon with a scalpel" (CasseIl 1985
11: 4). Not only fascinating in the light of the historical precedents, these
considerations lead to several points bearing directly on disciplining the
physician's interpretive intelligence in clinical conversational contexts.

§4. Clinical Semeiotics

Interpretation occurs within specific contexts whose various constituents

and multiple interrelations determine the physician's interpretations
(Gurwitsch 1964: 105-154). In the scientific approach to medicine, Kleinman
(1988: 17) emphasizes, physicians are trained to be "naive realists, like
Dashiell Hammett's Sam Spade, who are ted to believe that symptoms are
eIues to disease, evidence of a 'natural' process, a physicat entity to be
discovered or uncovered" -incorporating a positive tendency to "regard with
suspicion patients' illness narratives and causal beliefs." Practitioners of
scientific medicine rarely credit the patient's subjective account. 7 It is thus

7 This constitutes one of the anomalies in traditional allopathie medicine (Zaner 1988:
96-106), which demonstrate the "dominance of technologically centered techniques of medical
154 RICHARD M. ZANER

not surprising that ehronic illnesses are typically regarded as messy and
threatening.
Nevertheless, diagnosis, therapeutie recommendations and prognosis are
precisely semiotie aetivities,8 by whieh one symbol system (patient com-
plaints) is translated into another (signs of disease) (Kleinman 1988: 16).
Central to clinical encounters, it is therefore imperative for clinicians to
become proficient at these symbolie, interpretive translations. For that, it is
not enough to attend merely to what are taken to be physical symptoms.
One must rather attend to the full context of what eaeh patient presents. As
the latter includes bodily experiences (and patient interpretations of them
expressed for the most part in common discourse with its socially derived
categories), as weIl as a rieh tapestry of personal meanings, the elinieian is
always faced with symptoms that are contextually determined and configured.
Thus, the symptom and its personal and eultural context are, like symbols
in a text, mutually determinative and enlightening: the context elaborates the
meaning of the symbol, and the symbol erystallizes the context. Kleinman
observes that there is

both sufficient redundancy in the living symbolism of the

symptoms and density of meanings in the life text and
enough uncertainty and ambiguity in their interpretation to
make this aspect of elinical work more like literary eriticism
or anthropological analysis of a ritual in an alien society
than like the interpretation of a laboratory test or a
mieroscopie slide of a tumor (Kleinman 1988: 42).

Clinical methods differ importantly from those of physical science; they

are, indeed, "closer to the human sciences" (Kleinman 1988: 42). But so, too,
are the interpretive "methods" of the patient and family-who, like "revision-
ist historians," "arehivists," "diarists," even "cartographers," seareh their pasts
for present meaning, record the most minute diffieulties on the map of
ehanging terrain of ongoing illness, and foeus on the "artifaets of disease
(color of sputum, softness of stool, intensity of knee pain, size and form of
skin lesions)" (Kleinman 1988: 48).

evaluation in which the views of patients become largely irrelevant, if not obtrusive" (Reiser, in
Cassell 1985 I: ix).
8 This point, as mentioned, is a central part of the ancient skeptic's insight (Zaner 1988:
177-201).
 MEDICINE AS AMoRAL DISCIPLINE 155

§5. The Physician-Patient Relationship

These eonsiderations prompt refleetion on aspeets of the physician-

patient relation that have not been generally appreciated in philosophical
and moral diseussions of clinical work.
(1) Consider a typical encounter between physician and patient in a
hospital. To make the diseussion manageable, we can ignore here many of
its features-e.g., the specific ailment, whether the patient is self-admitted or
transported by ambulance, whether the physician is on the hospital's clinical
staff or only has admitting privileges, and so on. We can instead concentrate
on the doetor's efforts to explain the diagnosis and offer therapeutic recom-
mendations.
The situation is still considerably eomplex. To explain to a patient and
family what a particular procedure will involve is for specifie people to be
engaged in a conerete conversational process that goes on at a specific time
and within specific cireumstances. The encounter occurs within a particular
hospital unit (intensive care, cardiae unit, surgical ward) that includes other
providers (nurses, eonsultants, residents, technicians, ward clerks), which is
only one of many such units in the hospital, itself only one of many hospitals
in that region, in that State, and in the United States. Eaeh of these eontexts
(units, clinics, hospitals, regions, ete.) operates under certain written and
unwritten guidelines, protocols, regulations, and laws, the totality of which
lies within the broader society with its own eharaeteristic patterns of
prevailing values (about, among other things, doetors, hospitals, sickness and
health).
Eaeh of the providers has hisjher own respeetive personal biographical
situation, including values, beliefs, habits, ete. (Schutz 1973; Wieder 1974),
and works within a specific profession with its codes and understood
praetices. Eaeh praetices within a specifie hospital unit (with its own proto-
eols on resuscitation, accepted therapeutic regimens, written and unwritten
rules and codes of conduet, and so on). Then, there is the hospital as a
socially legitimated institution with its eomplex of rules, committees,
policies, ete.; the particular hospital region and State with their body of
regulations, licensure policies, laws, ete.; the federal government with its
regulations, policies, ete.; the medical profession and specialty and sub-
specialty organizations with their accepted standards of praetice, ete.-all of
which are components of the eurrent eulture with its eomplex folkways,
mores, laws, institutions, history, ete. There are thus personal, professional,
institutional, and prevailing social value-contexts that configure eaeh medical
encounter.9
(2) On the patient and family side there is an equal, though less formally

9 Needless to say, this constitutes a terrain that is ripe for conflicts of various types.
156 RICHARD M. ZANER

organized, complexity. On the one hand, eaeh patient has his or her own
specifie biographical situation with its distinetive values, attitudes, history,
linguistie usages, habits, ete. The patient, moreover, is only rarely without
some immediate family or friends (circle of intimates, significant others),
who (implicitlyand explicitly) share certain beliefs, values, attitudes, history,
and the like with the patient. Every patient is a member of social, business,
political, or religious groups, eaeh of which has its own specifie traditions,
values, usages, ete.-which in various ways point to and reveal personal
eharaeteristics and views that can, on occasion, prove to be quite significant
for decision-making. Like every provider, moreover, every patient is part of
the same (or at the very least part of some) eulture with its prevailing,
commonly shared nexus of social values, mores, folkways, ete.
(3) As has long been recognized, prevailing social conditions (fragmenta-
tion, specialization, mobility, ete.) mean that, aside from a person's
immediate family, circle of intimates, small groups and associations, or (at
times) relatively stable neighborhood, people interaet for the most part as
strangers. They often do not know whether the6' share values, beliefs, or
attitudes-in partieular, about health and illness1 -and thus do not usually
know what claims they may legitimately make on eaeh other. When what
brings them together is a need for help by one and the claim of being able
to help by the other, their relationship can be quite diffieult. When that
need is signaled by distress, illness, or injury, the situation is often ripe for
trouble-when, for instance, the physician proposes to carry out quite
aggressive and intimate aetions on patients who are strangers. Yet, for the
hospitalized patient, there is unavoidably little ehoice but to trust in
numerous ways: other people (often anonymous, from doetors to manufae-
turers of drugs), things (equipment, substances), and procedures (protocols,
surgical regimens, ete.) (Zaner 1991).
There is thus all the more reason for ensuring ongoing, sensitive
conversations in every patient encounter, even while initiating and sustaining
these among strangers can be quite diffieult. A close and historically
informed look into clinical encounters of any type suggests that the "implieit
demand for joint decision making" must invariably "confront the painful
realization that even in their most intimate relationships, human beings
remain strangers to one another" (Katz 1984: xviii). These conversations are
nevertheless quite clearly essential, for they are the sole means by which the
physician can at all earn that trust (Katz 1984: xiv)-even if it be only
temporary (Lenrow 1982).
For their part, physieians often have equally little ehoice but to take care
of a patient, even if slhe is regarded as a "gomer" or a "dirtball" (Donnelly

10 This is true even for persons belonging to the same or different groups; hence, health
care issues can be charged with problems that arise strictly from interactions among strangers.
 MEDICINE AS AMoRAL DISCIPLINE 157

1986), is found to be seductive or deceptive (CasseH 1985 I: 8-21), or even

seems to be only mimicking illness (Ford 1983). Although there are limits,
the doctor also often has little choice but to trust: for instance, that the
patient really wants help and is candid, capable and accurate; that tests and
radiologie data are correct and equipment functioning properly; that drugs
have been properly manufactured and dispensed; etc. Indeed, it may weIl be
that being ill and seeking help of itself carries certain moral responsi-
bilities-a point that clearly deserves examination, although this is not the
place for that. In any event, given the plight of the patient, who is not only
ill but surrounded by strangeness-the illness, people, places, customs, etc.-it
is the physician who bears the responsibility for initiating and sustaining
these conversations (Katz 1984: 133).
(4) To initiate a conversation with a patient, the physician engages in a
conversational (and interpretive) effort to find out "what's going on" in the
patient's life. This requires attention to patient talk as regards content and
intent, whieh are always framed by a variety of paralinguistie features,
physiognomie gestures and situational components that help determine the
sense of what is said and done. Within this framework, the physieian must
also detect the patho-physiology and how it is modified within this partieular
siek person's embodying organism, personal life, and cultural milieu. That
they are strangers, however, ineluctably influences and shapes the talk of
both doctor and patient/family, especially when recommended regimens,
surgeries, or other proposed treatments are aggressive, invasive, risky, and
intimate. Diagnosis and therapy-both of them semiotie activities-require
careful attention to a patient's pertinent his tory, understanding of his/her
ability 10 understand and comply, as weH as his/her willingness to accept
recommended regimens and act appropriately.

§6. Clinical Hermeneutics

These considerations suggest that the interpretive aspects of clinical

medieine are inherent to it. They also indicate that clinical medicine
incorporates a kind of hermeneutics, a clinical-circumstantial probing and
understanding that should clearly be part of the training of physieians.
Several features of that discipline can now be delineated.
(1) To interpret in a clinically appropriate manner requires that the
doctor must never pre-interpret what a patient/family exhibits during these
conversations-neither moans or groans, expressions of pain or comfort, nor
what the patient is trying to say (communicative intent) (CasseH1985 I: eh.
4). The doctor has to be constantly on the alert and oriented to each patient
in ways that are, Katz (1984: 85) vividly points out, opposed to almost
everything in the "millennia-Iong tradition of solitary decision making" in
medicine-from the deeply-rooted place of authority and presumptions about
158 RICHARD M. ZANER

patients' ability to understand when in great pain, to the wariness and

confusion generated by the serious linguistic gap between medical and
everyday terms, understandings, and communication of uncertainty (Katz
1984: 165-206).
The physician who initiates serious conversation with patients must
invariably become exquisitely aware of the pervasive principle of everyday
life, whieh Alfred Schutz (1973) identified as "taking things for granted."
This suggests that conversations with patients and their families (and/or
cirele of intimates) must be governed by what might be termed a first
principle of clinical hermeneutics: as far as possible, take nothing for granted!
As is demonstrated by Katz's sensitive study of the "silence" so often present
between patients and their doctors, while it is easy to state the principle, it
can be inordinately difficult to practice while being engaged in these
conversations. This sterns not merely from the sheer power and pervasive-
ness of this fundamental feature of daily life generally, but also from
medicine's long history of solitary decision making. To aIlow, not to say
encourage, patient participation in decisions, however, has precisely this
principle as a primary methodological orientation.
(2) Siek or weIl, people not only experience and interpret their own
bodies (pain, discomforts, hunger, etc.) and themselves (weIl, sick, poorly,
etc.), but also react emotionally to what's happening to them (fear, hope,
uncertainty, etc.). It is dear from numerous case studies that patients want
to know, at times fervently, about their illnesses; they want to know "what's
going on" and "what can and should be done about it," as they want to know
that the people taking care of them also care for them (Hardy 1978).
Whether their doctors specifically inform them (and whether weIl, poorly,
or not at aIl) about their ailments, people not only experience but interpret
their own illnesses in typical ways: as "bronchitis," a "cold," "ulcers," but also
as "unfortunate," a "damned nuisance," "devastating," and the like.
A second principle of clinical hermeneutics is thus suggested: namely, the
doctor is ineluctably engaged in "second-order" interpretations (Schutz 1967 I:
59), precisely because the doctor is always faced with the patient's specific
experiences and interpretations (of self, body, world, as weIl as of physician,
nurse, etc.).l1 In somewhat different terms, illness or disease, like language
more broadly, is intrinsically complex: the disease, the way it is manifested
in the patient's bOdy, what the illness means to the patient, what the doctor
says and how this is interpreted and understood by the patient (and vice
versa), what family or friends say, and still other factors always needing to

11 Kleinman (1988: 52) notes the difficulties clinicians face in this act, especially in light
of their own special interests: therapeutic, scientific, professional, financial, personal, etc., as weil
as the influence on a patient's account due to the different settings in which patients are met and
"the very ways of auditing the illness" are taken into account by the doctor.
 MEDICINE AS AMoRAL DISCIPLINE 159

be taken into account. Thus, medical interpretations are inevitably multi-

dimensional: the doetor interprets the pathophysiology, the way the disease
is uniquely manifested in a partieular patient, how it is experienced and what
its significance is for the siek person, how the patient reaets to the
physician's talk, ete. 12

§7. Physician-Patient Asymmetry (I)

(3) These considerations suggest a third principle o[ clinical hermeneutics:

medical interpretations (diagnosis, therapeutie alternatives, prognosis)
cannot ignore what things are really like [rom the patient's and [amily's points
o[ view. While that seems evident enough on the face of it, one significant
feature of the physician-patient relationship gives this a eritical moral edge.
Peter Lenrow (1982: 48) has emphasized that the relationship between
the helper and the one to be helped is asymmetrieal, with power (in the form
of knowledge, skills, access to resources, social authorization, and legal
legitimation) in favor of the helper. The social organization of professional
help within bureaueratically struetured institutioßS further enhances the
asymmetry, as this organization itself inevitably carries substantial weight. So
far as helper and person helped are most often strangers, the one often
engaged in aggressive and quite intimate aetions to and on the other, the
asymmetry itself is a prime source of immensely diffieult issues. The social
authority of rhysieians, however, extends far beyond the usual senses of
power noted. 3 Abrief historical remark will be helpful to clarify this.
Even though medical therapies were for many centuries virtually useless
and medical understanding often erroneous, the relationship's asymmetry of
power has been a fundamental and remarkably unaltered component of
medicine's self-understanding almost from its inception. Rarely understood
in this way, this is nevertheless an essential component of the Hippoeratic
tradition. Steeped in an understanding that the relation to patients must be

12 Without being able to pursue the matter here, something Iike the same issue must be
faced by every patient: s/he must also interpret the physician's interpretations, even while most
patients are usuallywithout resources for this sometimes critical task (Zaner 1988). Additionally,
it should be noted that so far as families (much less significant others) are included in
conversations, the physician's second-order interpretations, how these are written as "Progress
Notes" in the patient's chart, etc., grow all the more complex and difficult.
13 Our common-sense understanding of our bodies, for instance, and therefore also the
language used to express it, is primarily derived from medicine and biomedicine. On the other
hand, our usual ways of experiencing our body-embodiment-are not so easily expressed in that
framework. Hence, what we experience and how we are educated to conceptualize and talk about
our bodies constitutes an anomaly that itself needs cautious attention, by physicians and by those
of us seeking to understand clinical medicine (Zaner 1988: 95-99, 102-06).
160 RICHARD M. ZANER

governed by certain fundamental virtues, these ancient physicians had a

remarkable insight, I believe, into a key facet of the moral order.
As Edelstein lucidly shows, the principal generic virtues in the Hippocrat-
ic Oath are justice (dike) and self-restraint (sophrosane). Whatever one may
think of the at times barbaric "treatments" practiced in medicine (almost up
to the twentieth century), ancient physicians realized full weIl that the
practice of medicine involved the physician in the most intimate kind of
contact with other human beings-and required decisions that could affect
the patient and family in profound ways. On the other hand, it was also
realized that the patient faced an urgent issue: "How can he be sure that he
may have trust in the doctor, not only in his knowledge, but also in the man
himself?" (Edelstein 1%7: 329). This critical blend of virtues-judicious
restraint-was, not unsurprisingly, regarded in the ancient Hippocratic texts
as the primary sense of medical wisdom (On Decorum and On the Physician;
in Edelstein 1967: 6-35).
To be a patient is to be intimately exposed, directly vulnerable. Because
of the specific type of knowledge unique to medicine, the healer's possession
of drugs and technical skills, and the access to the intimate spheres of
patient life (person, bOdy, family, and household), the ancients clearly
realized that they were uniquely in position to take advantage of patients
while, by contrast, patients were disadvantaged both by illness or injury and
by the very asymmetry of the relationship. Precisely this appreciation of the
asymmetry of power in favor of the physician led to an understanding of "the
art" as a fundamentally moral enterprise under the guidance of central
virtues: justice and restraint.

§8. Interlude: Gyges and Asclepius

It is perfectly evident: the physician, not the patient, has the advantage
in the asymmetrical relationship. As one patient poignantly remarked, "you
have to trust these people, the physicians, like you do God. You're all in
their hands, and if they don't take care of you, who's going to?" (Hardy 1978:
40). Noting how "overpowering" doctors can be, another emphasized,
"They've got an edge on you" (Hardy 1978: 92-93).
In these plaintive words is the echo of an ancient puzzle-the temptation
of having actual power over the existentially vulnerable patient. This puzzle,
I am convinced, is at the heart of the Hippocratic tradition in medicine; it
is especially plain when one considers the mythic sources of the Oath. At the
source of the tradition is the god Apollo and his progeny, Asclepius, "the
god of doctors and of patients" (Edelstein 1967: 225). Physicians who took
the Oath were covenanted to help sick and injured people, and as healers
were involved with the vulnerable in the most potent and intimate ways, at
times called on to render judgments and make decisions that reached far
 MEDICINE AS A MORAL DISCIPLINE 161

beyond the application of merely technical knowledge and skills. They

believed they were entrusted by the "gods" with a supreme wisdom about
afflicted people; indeed, their vow committed them to be "physicians of the
soul no less than of the body" (Edelstein 1967: 24-25).
The Asclepian healing-places were open to every siek or injured person
(Edelstein 1967: 245), whether the person be slave or free, pauper or prince,
man or woman. Following the guidance of Asclepius-"the god who prided
himself most of all on his virtue of philanthropy" (Edelstein 1967: 344)-the
healer as such assumed certain fundamental responsibilities. These are, said
Sarapion in a poem inscribed on stone in the Athenian temple of Asclepius,
"First to heal his mind and to give assistance to hirnself before giving it to
anyone" and to "eure with moral courage and with the proper moral attitude
... For we are all brothers" (in Edelstein 1967: 344).
Behind the covenant to Apollo and Asclepius, and his daughters, Hygieia
and Panaceia, is an understanding of social life-especially that form whieh
brought the vulnerable siek person face to face with the healer and powers
of the "art." The covenant clearly invoked a moral vision focused on the
healer-patient relationship. It also showed a strong sense of the power
inherent in "the art," a potential for control and even violence to the patient
who placed himself "in the hands" of the physieian. Acting on behalf of the
siek person and maintaining striet "silence" are as integral to the Oath as
certain conducts were strietly banned. 14 It thus incorporates that peculiar
blend of justice, restraint and, as I've argued, courage to govern the rela-
tionship. This implies that the physician clearly recognized that he was in a
unique position to take advantage of people when they are most vulnerable
and accessible. It also strongly suggests a recognition of the central challenge
and temptation inherent to the work of the physieian, thus demonstrating
the emergence of a sophisticated moral cognizance (Zaner 1988: 202-223).
Finally, the Oath and many of the Hippocratie works repeatedly refer to
medicine as a "sacred art" (Edelstein 1967: 6, 20). The covenant at the begin-
ning of the Oath requires the physician to understand the relationship
between teacher and student as the closest and most sacred that can be
imagined, "for no other apparent reason than that the pupil is being
instructed in the art" (Edelstein 1967: 40). A "morality of the highest order"
was thus "infused into medical practice," for the physician was enjoined to
"a life almost saintly and bound by the strietest rules of purity and holiness"
(Edelstein 1967: 326-27). To practice medicine is to take on, deliberately and
voluntarily, the responsibility of being equally attentive and responsive to
each and every unique person who seeks aid-within a covenant with each
person, his family, and household.
The moral cognizance at the heart of the Oath is striking but, as noted,

14 Für instance, abürtiüns and prüviding lethaI substances für suicides.

162 RICHARD M. ZANER

forces a searching moral question: What could possibly move any physician
not to take advantage of the vulnerable patient? Why not take advantage,
especially when the patient is, precisely, at his/her most vulnerable? Just
here, buried squarely within the Hippocratic tradition, is that ancient puzzle.
One need only consider another equally ancient and powerful myth about
the temptation of having actual power, to put the puzzle into perspective:
the Gyges story in the Second Book of Plato's The Republic.
Having gained the power of the ring (to become invisible at the flick of
the ring's collet) found in the belly of that bronze horse (uncovered by an
earthquake), Gyges is then able to do what he wishes. And, he does precisely
that: seducing the queen and, with her assistance, slaying the king-becoming
himself the king. In these terms, the puzzle within the Hippocratic Oath is
strikingly posed: having the advantage, the power, a Gygean physician will
surely take advantage precisely because, given the "ring" and its power, the
patient is vulnerable and readily accessible (as were the queen and king of
Lydia). Hence, if medicine is interpreted from the Gygean myth, the very
Oath itself is but a guise for the exercise of power (of whatever sort).
Anything else is a mere facade masking the truth of human relationships.
When people are strangers, there is even more reason for suspicion and
distrust as the basic form of social orientation, inasmuch as the very grounds
for trust for a helping relation are missing, or at the very least are quite
problematic (Zaner 1991). On the one hand, between strangers there is no
set of common, enduring, and mutual values and understanding: neither the
healer nor the one seeking help knows what, if any, values they have in
common nor how their values differ. Is the healer trustworthy? Does the
patient mean what she says? On the other hand, at the core of the
relationship is the asymmetry of power in favor of the healer and the
vulnerability of the one seeking the healer's help. While the healer has the
power to influence the patient, often without her knowing, the healer
doesn't know how this power is regarded by the patient nor whether he is
trusted to use his power for her benefit.
But if the Gyges myth is alien to the Hippocratic-Asc1epian understand-
ing of the "art" of medicine, it nevertheless poses and highlights the key
moral question. If the healer is to be entrusted with such power and
intimacies (affecting the patient's body, the person, the family, the house-
hold), the crucial question concerns what the healer must do and be to
ensure that trust, i.e. to be trustworthy. Why not use the asymmetry for the
healer's own advantage? The patient must trust precisely while being at the
mercy of the physician-the very one who professes and then proceeds to use
the power of the art (knowledge, skills, resources, etc.), who proposes and
then proceeds to engage in highly intimate, potent, and consequential ac-
tions on people when they are at their most vulnerable.
These myths invoke contrary visions of the social order, especially that
presented by clinical encounters. In both, one with power confronts another
 MEDICINE AS AMoRAL DISCIPLINE 163

at a decided disadvantage. In the Hippocratie tradition, the potencies of the

art were c1early appreciated and given expression in its Oath: the injunctions
to act always "on behalf of" the siek person, never to take advantage of the
patient or his family/household, never to "spread abroad" what is learned in
the privacy of the relationship with the sick person. In the Gyges tale,
however, the therapeutic act can make no sense: why engage in helping,
since that will only allow the vulnerable to become less vulnerable, less open
to coercion? But if therapeia must be read as Asc1epean, we still face the
grave moral issue, one that has been an abiding part of medicine's his tory:
why "act in the patient's interest" much less "do no harm?"

§9. Physician-Patient Asymmetry (11)

The clinical event is a very special sort of relationship as it is inherently

haunted by Gyges-the extraordinary temptation to manipulate, control, or
otherwise take advantage of the ineluctably vulnerable person. Why
Asc1epius and not Gyges? It may be that it is in the mythic interplay
between these images that the moral character of encountering the other-as-
ill is best understood. 15 That interplay provides a fascinating opening for
probing the puzzle at the heart of the c1inical encounter. The Hippocratic
tradition sets forth, as Edelstein says, a "morality of the highest order." No
matter how you look at it, such a life must seem wholly unlivable, its virtues
and holiness unachievable, and thus medicine a thoroughly impractical
practice. While the "art" seems unable to abide a Gygean reading, a Gyges
may nevertheless nestle snugly within each of us-and surely haunts the
clinical relationship, making its fundamentally moral character all the more
apparent.
As I interpret it, the asymmetry of the physician-patient relationship is
c1early tempered by the moral recognition of the governance of fairness and
restraint in every relationship with patients. That imbalance of power is
evidently a fundamentally moral phenomenon, a sustaining feature of
medicine poignantly captured by Cassell:

I remember a patient, lying undressed on the examining

table, who said quizzically, 'Why am I letting you touch
me?' It is a very reasonable question. She was a patient new
to me, astranger, and fifteen minutes after our meeting, I
was poking at her breasts! Similarly I have access to the
homes and darkest secrets of people who are virtual

15 Indeed, it may be that these terms are also the most appropriate for grappling with the
morality of encountering the stranger.
164 RICHARD M. ZANER

strangers. In other words, the usual boundaries of aperson,

both physical and emotional, are erossed with impunity by
physicians (CasseIl 1985 I: 119).

Because the asymmetry is in favor of the physician-who, unlike the

patient, is not (or ought not be) ill-the physician must be the one who
sanetions and authorizes the patient's experience and interpretation. The
physician thus bears the responsibility of helping patients and families
appreciate that their views of the illness are a legitimate part of "what's
going on"-as weIl as "what can and should be done about it"-in the clinical
encounter. This seems to me what Kleinman means when he remarks that,
just as illness "demoralizes" the patient, helping the patient understand16
is a kind of "remoralization" of the patient's life-an aet that sterns from
"empathic witnessing"-and, it is necessary to add, sensitive talk and listening.
To correet for this imbalance, in moral terms, there must therefore be
what Kleinman (1988: 54) terms an "existential commitment to be with the
siek person and to faeilitate his or her building of an illness narrative that
will make sense of and give value to the experience." This is a process, it
seems to me, that requires considerable courage by patient, family and
providers. In these terms, the virtues that Edelstein takes as constitutive of
the therapeutie aet-self-restraint and fairness-must not only be expanded
to include courage, but these need to be appreciated as ingredient to the
relationship itselJ, not merely eharaeteristic of the clinician's aetions. Drawing
on "irony, paradox, humor, and what wisdom they have acquired," this
remoralization is the "moral eore of doetoring and of the experience of
illness" (Kleinman 1988: 54).
The third principle of clinical hermeneutics suggested above therefore has
profound moral significance. In view of the essential vulnerability of patients
within the asymmetrical relationship, every medical interpretation must be
framed so as to be sensitive to, and to capture as exaetly and fully as
possible, what things are really like from the patient's point of view. In these
terms, medical understanding is a form of what may be called affiliative
feeling (Zaner 1988: 315-19), or what in daily life is termed "putting yourself
in the other's shoes"-an aet that therefore seems quite fundamental to the
constitution of the moral order.
Katz (1984: 225-29) may weIl have had precisely this affiliative aet in
mind when at the conclusion of his fascinating book, he remarks that
doetors must learn that patients genuinely want to know about themselves

16 Which means authorizing and legitimating the patient's experiences and interpretations
(though obviously not always thereby endorsing these as accurate and/or adequate). The
principal means for this crucial act is plain talk that is at once sensitive to and understandable
by the patient, family, and others who are important for the patient.
 MEDICINE AS A MORAL DISCIPLINE 165

(and, it must be added, to know that those who take care of them really do
care) (Zaner 1985: 97-98). While it is surely difficult to talk about the highly
sensitive, at times even explosive issues, anxieties, and fears inherent to
illness and its treatment, just such talk is quite necessary. For only then can
the relations hip exhibit the kind of "mutual respect" inherent to helping
patients (Katz 1984: 225) and the experience of being helped by provid-
ers. 17

§10. The Place o[ Error

(4) Another way to bring this point horne is to note that the possibility
of mistakes has an essential place in medical practice. What distinguishes
medicine from most other professions, Cassell (1985 11: 7) notes, is the
"constant possibility of error, and thus of doing terrible harm to someone."
This suggests a[ourth principle o[ clinical hermeneutics: the physician's work
with patients must always include the constant possibility o[ diagnostic,
therapeutic, prognostic, and other types o[ interpretive error, which there[ore
requires developing concrete plans in the event mistakes occur. The relationship
with patients thus also includes the oftentimes difficult effort to com-
municate to patients both the risks of treatment and the experiential uncert-
ainties associated with every treatment-as patients, after all, must live with
the aftermath of every decision.
Katz points to another dimension of this issue, noting how physicians
readilyand intelligibly converse with one another about uncertainty (and, of
course, errors) in theoretical discussions, yet seem to suppress such talk
when they discuss clinical issues, especiaHy with patients, families, and others
in the patient's circle of intimates. "The distinguishing characteristic of this
mode of thought is that the physician will tell a false or incomflete story not
only to his patient but to himself as weH" (Katz 1984: 170).1
While there is surely talk of "risks" outside the arena of the laboratory
and experimentation, this talk often seems more to ignore, even mask, than
confront the uncertainties and ambiguities the patient must face. There is a
certain "flight from uncertainty," coupled with a kind of "training for cert-
ainty," that begins already in medical school (Katz 1984: 184)-and, doubt-

17 This point highlights another, fascinating moral issue to which little attention has been
paid: the ethics of receiving. While much attention has been devoted to giving, we must surely
probe with equal intensity what it means to be on the receiving end of gifts.
18 Kleinman reminds us that this also applies to patients, especially those with chronic
illnesses. To ensure that such life-threatening events are really not so threatening, and that there
are firm supports available to us, all of us engage in denial and illusion. Furthermore, we not
only construct various tales and myths to reassure ourselves, but we also engage in various forms
of self-deception which alone seem to make chronic as weil as severe acute illness tolerable.
166 RICHARD M. ZANER

less, much earlier than that. On the other hand, it might also be noted that
those physicians who do try to talk with their patients about the uncertain-
ties, not to say possible errors, inherent to various treatments inevitably
come up against the awesome difficuhies of making plain sense to patients
about statistical probabilities-that is, the risks, benefits, and ambiguities of
treatments-coupled with those treatments. Clearly, the requirement of affil-
iative feeling with one's patients and their families takes on a critical
dimension at this point, precisely because the way in which patients and
families understand and accommodate to the prospect of error and uncert-
ainty most often differs in important ways from those with which physicians
are most familiar.

§11. Concluding Word

These considerations make it evident that the fundamental shift in

medicine occurring over the past five decades, and still going on today, is
toward the recognition that clinical practice is a complex interpretive
discipline, more like the human sciences than the biological sciences, as
Edmund Pellegrino observed long ago. 19
The relationship between patient and physician is unique in a number of
ways, and is among the most intimate and certainly most delicate among
persons (Zaner 1990). Because of its inherent inequality (of condition and
awareness) and structural asymmetry (of power, knowledge, resources,
legitimation), the relationship is especially fragile and exposed to constant
dangers and temptations: manipulation and coercion, improper intimaeies,
and therapeutically compromising forms of remoteness, among others.
Whatever else may be said about the interpretive disciplining of medical
intelligence, therefore, it must surely include its being understood and
practiced as a fundamentally moral discipline.

Bibliography

Cannon, W. (1963), Bodily Changes in Pain, Hunger, Fear and Rage, Harper
& Row Inc., New York.
Cassell, E. J. (1976), The Healer's Art: A New Approach to the Doctor-Patient
Relationship, J. B. Lippincott Co., Philadelphia (Reprinted 1985,

19 See, for example, Edmund D. Pellegrino, "'!be Most Humane of the Sciences, the Most
Scientific of the Humanities," first delivered as The Sanger Lecture (1974), now included in his
Humanism and the Physician (1979: 16-37).
 MEDICINE AS AMoRAL DISCIPLINE 167

MIT Press, Boston).

Cassell, E. J. (1985), Talking With Patients, two vols., MIT Press, Boston.
Cousins, N. (1988), "Intangibles in Medicine: An Attempt at a Balancing
Perspective," Journal o[ the American Medical Association 260:11
(September 16), 1610-12.
Donnelly, W. J. (1986), "Medical Language as Symptom: Doctor Talk in
Teaching Hospitals," Perspeetives in Biology and Medieine 30:1
(Autumn),81-94.
Edelstein, L. (1967), Ancient Medicine, O. and C. L. Tempkin (eds.), The
Johns Hopkins Press, Baltimore.
Engels, G.L. (1988), "How Much Langer Must Medicine's Science Be Bound
bya Seventeenth Century World View?", in K. L. White (ed.), The
Task o[ Medieine: Dialogue at Wiekenburg, The Henry J. Kaiser
Family Foundation, Menlo Park, CA
Fard, C. V. (1983), The Somatizing Disorders: Illness as a Way o[ Life,
Elsevier, New York.
Gurwitsch, A (1964), The Field o[ Consciousness, Duquesne Studies,
Psychological Series, Duquesne University Press, Pittsburgh.
Hardy, Robert C. (1978), Siek: How People Feel About Being Siek and What
They Think of Those Who Care for Them, Teach'em, Inc., Chicago.
Katz, J. (1988), The Silent World of Doctor and Patient, The Free Press, New
York.
Kleinman, A (1988), The Illness Narratives: Suffering, Healing and the
Human Condition, Basic Books, New York.
Jonsen, A J. & Toulmin, S. (1988), The Abuse of Casuistry, University of
California Press, Berkeley & Las Angeles.
Langer, S. (1942), Philosophy in a New Key, The New American Library, New
York.
Lenrow, P. B. (1982), "The Work of Helping Strangers," in: H. Rubenstein
and M. H. Block (eds.), Things That Matter: Influenees on Helping
Relationships, Macmillan Publishing Co., New York, 42-57.
Odegaard, C.E. (1986), Dear Doctor: A Personal Letter to a Physician, The
Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation, Menlo Park, CA
Pellegrino, E. D. (1979), Humanism and the Physieian, University of
Tennessee Press, Knoxville, TN.
Ruark, J. E., Raffin, T. A, and the Stanford University Medical Center
Committee on Ethics (1988), "Initiating and Withdrawing Life
Support," The New England Journal of Medieine 381:1 (January 7),
25-30.
Schutz, A (1967), "Concept and Theory Formation in the Social Sciences,"
in: Colleeted Papers, Vol. I, ed. M. Natanson, Martinus Nijhoff, The
Hague, 48-66.
Schutz, A and Luckmann, T. (1973), The Strueture ofthe Life-World, Vol. I,
tr. H. T. Engelhardt, Jr. and R. M. Zaner, Northwestern University
168 RICHARD M. ZANER

Press, Evanston, IL.

Wieder, D. L. (1974), Language and Social Reality, Mouton, Amsterdarn.
Zaner, R. M. (1985), "'How the Hell Did I Get Here?' Reflections on Being
a Patient," in: A. H. Bishop and J. R. Scudder, Jr. (eds.), Caring,
Curing, Coping, The University of Alabarna Press, University, AL.,
80-105.
Zaner, R. M. (1988), Ethics and the Clinical Encounter, Prentice-Hall, Inc.,
Englewood Cliffs, NJ.
Zaner, R. M. (1990), "Medicine and Dialogue," in Engelhardt, H. T. (ed.),
Special Issue: "Edrnund Pellegrino's Philosophy of Medicine: An
Overview and an Assessrnent," Journal of Medicine and Philosophy
15:3, 303-325.
Zaner, R. M. (1991), "The Phenornenon of Trust in the Patient-Physician
Relationship," in: E. D. Pellegrino (ed.), Ethics, Trust, and The Pro-
fessions: Philosophical and Cultural Aspects, Georgetown University
Press, Washington, D.C., 45-67.
Zaner, R. M. (1994), "Experience and Moral Life: A Phenornenological
Approach to Bioethics," in HarneI, R. & DuBose, E. (eds.), Beyond
Principlism, The Park Ridge Center for the Study of Health, Faith,
and Ethics. Trinity Press International, Valley Forge, PA, 211-39.
 Part III

THE WORKINGS OF ART

 NOBUO KAzAsHI

THE MUSICALITY OF THE OTHER:

Schutz, Merleau-Ponty, and Kimura

In a short essay entitled "De quelques rencontres"1 written ten years after the
death of Merleau-Ponty, Claude Uvi-Strauss recounted some reminiscences
of their relationship which dated back to their youthful days at the L'Ecole
Normale. While fi1led with a deep sense of thankful affection for a friend
who made every effort to help create achair for "Social Anthropology" at
the College de France in behalf of Uvi-Strauss, this essay reveals a
fundamental rift which Uvi-Strauss had been feeling to exist between them
with regard to the understanding of the notion of "structure." He wrote:

[T]his savage vision of the painter ... is the same as and,

at the same time, totally different from what I called the
savage mind (la pensee sauvage). I concur with Merleau-
Ponty in recognizing that both tap 'this expanse of brute
sense about which activism does not want to know
anything' (L '(Eil et I'esprit, p. 13), but, while I seek the logic
of this brute sense, in his case this brute sense is anterior
to all logic (The VISible and the Invisible, p. 222). In sum,
what constitutes explanation far Merleau-Ponty does for me
nothing more than enunciate the givens of the problem and
delimit the phenomenal plane from which it will become
possible, and necessary, to explain. 2

Uvi-Strauss proceeds to claim that Merleau-Ponty's ambiguous attitude

toward structuralism is manifested most pointedly in the oscillating roles
assigned to music by his later thought.
In Eye and Mind, according to Uvi-Strauss, Merleau-Ponty seems to
"disqualify music for the sole benefit of painting." Indeed, Merleau-Ponty's
characterization of the privilege of painting over music reads as follows:

1 L'Arc 00. 46 (1947), 43-47.

2 Ibid., 45.

171
S. Galt Crowell (ed.), The Prism ofthe Self, 171-188.
© 1995 Kluwer Academic Pub/ishers.
172 NOBUO KAZASHI

In this primordial historicity, scienee's agile and improv-

isatory thought will leam to ground itself upon things
themselves and upon itself, and will onee more become
philosophy.... But art, especially painting, draws upon this
fabric of brute meaning which activism [or operationalism
-tr.) would prefer to ignore. Art and only art does so in
full innoeenee. From the writer and the philosopher, in
contrast, we want opinions and adviee. We will not allow
them to hold the world suspended. We want them to take
astand; they cannot waive the responsibilities of men who
speak. Music, at the other extreme, is too much on the
hither side of the world and the designatable to depict any
thing but eertain schemas of Being-its ebb and flow, its
growth, its upheaval, its turbulenee [myemphasis).3

Uvi-Strauss notices, however, that, in The Vzsible and the Invisible,

Merleau-Ponty has begun to treat both painting and music in different
manners: first of all, music is now "plaeed on the same plane" as painting,
as attested by Merleau-Ponty's positive regard for the Proustian ideas on
music; secondly, among the various aspects of the art of painting itself,
"sketch" has come to assurne an importanee equal to light and colors, though
it used to be relegated to a secondary status in Eye and Mind.
For Uvi-Strauss, the co-existenee of these two incompatible views on
music is emblematic of the later Merleau-Ponty's ambivalent stanee with
regard 10 structuralism. The "abstract" notion of structure must have been
regarded by Merleau-Ponty as nothing but a set of "schemas·4 of Being
involving the "risk of being utilized for allegedly scientific purposes for the
sake of the conquest of subjectivity. ,,5
Uvi-Strauss' own fascination with music as weil as his intimate knowl-
edge of Merleau-Ponty's love of music no doubt contributed to his
pereeptive observation of an oscillation in the latter's views on music.
However, the straightforward parallelism Uvi-Strauss draws between
Merleau-Ponty's ambiguity over music and his ambivalent relationship with
structuralism as a scientific, abstractive enterprise is not so convincing as it
might appear on first reading. Uvi-Strauss' interpretation indicates that his
structuralist frame of mind is responsible for his rather one-sided preoccupa-

3 L'lEil et I'esprit, 14. The underlined part is my translation of the French original, "trop
en de!;3 du monde"; which is rendered as "far beyond the world" in the English translation. Cf.
Maurice, Merleau-Ponty, The Primacy ofPerception, ed. James M. Edie (Evanston: Northwestern
University Press, 1964), 161.
4 L ~rc, op. eit., 46. The French original is "des ~pures de L'Etre."
5 Ibid., 47.
 THE MUSICALITY OF lliE OlliER 173

tion with the structural elements of musical experience to the neglect of

what really lies at the heart of Merleau-Ponty's meditation on music.
Uvi-Strauss' interest in the structural nature ofwestern music goes hand
in hand with his interest in the similar nature of the modes of mythical
narrative. In Myth and Meaning he summarizes his views on the topic:

Therefore, we have to read the myth more or less as we

would read an orchestral score.... That is, we have to read
not only from left to right, but at the same time vertically,
from top to bottom. And it is only by treating the myth as
if it were an orchestral score, written stave after stave, that
we can understand it as a totality, that we can extract the
meaning out of the myth. 6

It is hard not to recognize the cogency of the structuralist perspective

invoked by Uvi-Strauss' analysis, for instance, of the "renunciation-of-Iove
themen in Wagner's tetralogy, The Ring-an analysis which Uvi-Strauss
presents immediately after the passage quoted above. However, granting
legitimacy to the Uvi-Straussian approach to music does not commit us to
accepting its adequacy as a treatment of the full gamut of musical experi-
ence. Indeed, Uvi-Strauss fails to capture what Merleau-Ponty tries to bring
into focus by way of a meditation on musical experience.
For Merleau-Ponty, musical experience serves as a most typical illustra-
tion of the problem of the "ideal" status of the sensible experience. Here
"ideal" is used as an adjectival form of "idea," not of "ideal."
As Uvi-Strauss points out, the last several pages of The Vzsible and the
Invisible are devoted to a meditation on musical experience, which derives
inspiration from Marcel Proust's description of Swann's experience of
listening to "the little phrase" in Remembrance of Things Past:

No one has gone further than Proust in fixing the relations

between the visible and the invisible, in describing an idea
that is not the contrary of the sensible, that is its lining and
its depth. For what he says of musical ideas he says of all
cultural beings, such as The Princess of Cleves and Rene,
and also of the essence of love which 'the little phrase' not
only makes present to Swann, but communicable to all who
hear it, even though it is unbeknown to themselves, and
even though later they do not know how to recognize it in
the loves they only witness. . . . Literature, music, the
passions, but also the experience of the visible world are

6 Myth and Meaning, 44-45.

174 NOBUO KAZASHI

-no less than is the science of Lavoisier and Ampere-the

exploration of an invisible and the disclosure of a universe
of ideas. The difference is simply that this invisible, these
ideas, unlike those of that science, cannot be detached from
the sensible appearances and be erected into a second posi-
tivity.7

Merleau-Ponty's assertion runs contrary, we might add, to the abstract

notion of "structure" which Uvi-Strauss brings to the fore as the hidden,
governing principle of musical composition.
In his last, incomplete project Merleau-Ponty set himself the task of
"making a philosophy of the Lebenswelt" by way of rediscovering "the
incarnate subjectivity of the human body" and "an intersubjectivity, a
universe of Geist that, if it not be a second nature, nonetheless has its
solidity and its completeness, but has this solidity and completeness still in
the mode of the Lebenswelt. "8 And, in this philosophy of the Lebenswelt, a
meditation on music was to playa role equally as important as meditations
on painting and language. In short, Merleau-Ponty recognized in music a
pre-eminent ability to bring horne to us the ontological right of a "rigorous
ideality in experience," the moments of which "adhere to one another with
a cohesion without concept" (myemphasis).
Merleau-Ponty was not, however, the sole or, for that matter, the first
phenomenologist to become aware of the crucial importance of musical
experience to the phenomenological enterprise of comprehending the basic
modes of social reality. Alfred Schutz is widely known as a phenomeno-
logical philosopher and sociologist who took a distinctive route to the
clarification of the meaning-structure of the life-world by way of a critical
assimilation of both Husserlian transcendental phenomenology and Weber-
ian sociology of Verstehen.
It seems, however, seldom remembered that Schutz's contemplation of
the nature of musical experience played a crucial role in his endeavor to
clarify the basic modes of social reality. We know that Schutz wrote two
essays on music, namely, "Making Music Together" and "Mozart and the
Philosophers," published first in 19519 and 1956 respectively;10 but, partly
because of their brevity and their editorial classification as "applied theories"
in the overall framework of The Collected Papers, Schutz's involvement with

7 Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The VISible and the Invisible, ed. Claude Lefort, trans. Alphonso
Lingis (Evanston: Northwestem University Press, 1968), 149.
8 Ibid., 167, 170.
9 Social Research, VoI. 18, no. 1 (1951).
10 Social Research, VoI. 23, no. 2 (1956).
 'fiIE MUSICALITY OF THE OTHER 175

music does not seem to have been paid the extensive and careful attention
whieh it deserves.
As a matter of fact, however, there are two other manuscripts on musie
left by Schutz, but not included in The Collected Papers. One is a group of
65-page manuscripts whieh Schutz wrote in English in 1944. It can be found
in an issue of Music and Man under the title of "Fragments on the
Phenomenology of Music."l1 The other is apart of the manuscript whieh
was written by the young Schutz in the years between 1924 and 1928 but was
left unfinished to make way for the new project on Der Sinnhafte Aufbau der
sozialen Welt. By taking these almost forgotten manuscripts of Schutz's into
consideration along with the two aforementioned essays, we shall be able not
only to comprehend more clearly the significance of musical experience for
Schutz's endeavor to clarify the structure of the life-world, but also to find
a common perspective from whieh to approach the works of Schutz and
Merleau-Ponty.
In his preface to Schutz's "Fragments on the Phenomenology of Musie,"
Fred Kersten summarizes the three theoretical points that are at stake in
this manuscript. Altogether, these points indicate the singular importance
of musical experience for Schutz.
First, consideration of musical experience shows that the distinction made
by Husserl between "monothetie" constitution and "polythetie" constitution
does not have the universality whieh he claimed it possessed. In the case of
musical experience, whieh is a most evident form of non-conceptual
signification, "to seize upon the musical experience 'monotheticaIly' signifies
to step outside the experience, so to speak, indeed, to step outside the very
meaning-context of musie itself' (MM 9). In other words, there are forms of
experience whose originary signification cannot be summed up conceptually
in a single, reflective glance; their distinct modes of signification as weIl as
the meaning contents embodied in them, can remain intact only through
their step-by-step, "polythetie" unfolding in inner-time consciousness.
Secondly, meditation on musical experience led Schutz to challenge
another basie notion in Husserl, namely, that of the fundamentality of the
passive synthesis of identification. In Husserlian terminology, passive
synthesis refers to the mental processes in whieh the transcendental Ego has
supposedly no part: prime examples are perceptual syntheses of identifica-
tion and association, retentions and protentions. On the other hand, "active"
syntheses comprise all the workings of consciousness such as predication,
inferring, judging, and wishing. As Kersten points out, in the Cartesian
Meditations Husserl argued that

11 Music and Man, Vol. 2, no. 1/2 (1976), abbreviated as MM in the following. According
to Maurice Natanson, it was Schutz's own wish that these manuscripts not be incJuded in The
Collected Papers.
176 NOBUO KAzAsHI

[i]f we consider the fundamental form of synthesis, namely

identification, we encounter it first of all as an all-ruling,
passively flowing synthesis, in the form of the continuous
consciousness of internal time. 12

Therefore, Kersten argues, "on Husserl's view, it is owing to the passive

synthesis of identification that 'the Ego always has an environment of
"objects"'" (MM 15).13 Schutz thinks, however, that this Husserlian thesis
suffers from its tacit and unexamined choiee of the experience of visual
objects as the paradigm case of experience. According to Schutz, the
foundational status of the passive synthesis of identification cannot hold in
the domain of audition. In the acoustie experience, the form of "sameness"
is not that of a numerical unity but of recurrent likeness, Le., a passively
constituted associative synthesis. In Kersten's summary:

'Sameness' as numerical identity is peculiar to the visual

field where, however, we can also discover a further and
founded meaning of 'sameness' as recurrent likeness. But in
the auditory field, recurrent likeness is a founding, never a
founded, meaning (MM 15).

The third point whieh Kersten examines as a major consideration of

Schutz's manuscript is the thematization of the "ideal status of the work of
musie." This third point is most critieal. It can be regarded as the leading
topie embracing the first two points whieh we have discussed.
Regarded as an "ideal" object-namely, an inherently meaning-Iaden
object-a piece of music convinces us of the existence of a mode of ideal
object which, not allowing of a monothetic, conceptual grasp, can be
appreciated only through a polythetic, step-by-step co-performance in time.
A piece of musie as an ideal, individual object is repeatedly identifiable, but
is neither a material universal (generic or specifie), nor a formal universal
like a mathematical theorem, nor a dass or a type. It can be considered an
"eidetic singularity" like verbal expressions, especially in the mode of poetic
embodiment, but it differs completely from the latter due to lack of
conceptual content. Thus, Kersten maintains, "Part of Schutz's originality is
seeing that there is a genuine case of polythetie thematization" (MM 19).
Now it will be dear that, in spite of the different sets of terminology they
employ, both Merleau-Ponty and Schutz would have us grant ontological
citizenship in the life-world, so to speak, to a mode of non-conceptual

12 Edmund Husserl, Canesian Meditations, trans. Dorion Cairns (The Hague: Martinus
Nijhoff, 1969), 41.
13 The quoted Husserl passage is from Canesian Meditations, 79.
 THE MUSICALI'fY OF THE OTHER 177

signification exemplified most vividly by musical experience: "this invisible,

these ideas [that], unlike those of science, cannot be detached from the
sensible appearances and be erected into a second positivity," in Merleau-
Ponty's words; or an "ideal individual [that stands out] over against but
always with reference to actual or imaginary performances embodying it," in
Kersten's words summarizing Schutz's views.
When we go through Schutz's early, unfinished manuscripts, assembled
as Life Forms and Meaning Strueture, we can recognize the fact that interest
in music and opera was already central to, and intertwined with, his con-
sideration of social reality. For example, a passage in a section entitled
"Meaning Structure of Drama and Opera" reads as folIows:

Summing up, we could say that, by [sie] Mozart, the

dramatic conflict issues always from the original source of
the drama; from the fact that a Thou exists, that we live in
a social world, that we depend on consociates and orient
ourselves toward them. . . . It [opera] finds in music a
medium which makes understandable, capable of being
experienced, and evident the original experience of pure
duration and the Thou relationship in a manner which
cannot be achieved by any other form of art. 14

In the article, "Making Music Together," which is subtitled "A Study in

Social Relationship," we can find an explicit formulation of the intent with
which Schutz concerned himself with musical experience:

It is hoped that this analysis [of the activity of making

music together] will in some measure contribute to clarifi-
cation of the structure of the mutual tuning-in relationship
which originates in the possibility of living together
simultaneously in specific dimensions of time. It is also
hoped that the study of the particular communicative situa-
tion within the musical process will shed some light on the
non-conceptual aspect involved in any kind of communica-
tion.t 5

Schutz considers that, because most of the sociological studies that have
been carried out on social interaction presuppose the "existence of a

14 Alfred Schutz, Life Forms and Meaning Structure, trans. Helmut R. Wagner (London:
Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1982), 203.
15 Alfred Schutz, "Making Music Together," in Collected Papers, Vol. 11, ed. AIvid
Brodersen (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1964), 162. (Abbreviated CP 11 in the following).
178 NOBUO KAzAsHI

semantic system as something given from the outset," the "problem of

'significance' remains unquestioned" (CP 11/160). In this regard, George H.
Mead's original notion of a "conversation of gestures" is no exception insofar
as it takes the possibility of a prelinguistic "conversation of attitudes" for
granted. Consequently, what Schutz tries to do is to burrow deeper into the
ground of the communicative process with a view to bringing to light the
"existence of some kind of social interaction which, though it is an
indispensable condition of aIl possible communication, does not enter the
communicative process and is not capable of being grasped by it" (CP
11/161).
In this vein, as Fred Kersten duly points out, Schutz's consideration of
musical experience can be regarded as not only going far beyond the bounds
of "applied theories, " but also pointing to a "paradox" lying at the root of
conceptual theorizing about social interaction.
As for the label of "applied theory," the label itself mayas weIl be consid-
ered dubious if we share Maurice Natanson's view that "philosophy has no
'outside'" and that "[i]n the application of theory to social reality, the
philosophic dimension of actuality shows itself.,,16 But, to put it positively,
the gist of the whole matter is this: Musical experience provided Schutz with
astalwart fulcrum which enabled hirn, with the aid of Bergsonian ideas, to
maintain creative leverage with regard to the theoretical legacies of both
Weber and Husserl; that is to say, we have the Weberian view of social
interaction as coordinated through the "subjective meanings" endowed upon
actions by each actor, and the Husserlian view of the flow of experience as
rendered "meaningful" by the reflective glance of consciousness.
On this account, the implication of a "paradox" is testimony to the
radicality, at least implicit if not developed, of Schutz's independent
meditations on the musical experience as an irreplaceably precious clue in
the inquiry into social reality. In concluding "Making Music Together,"
Schutz argues:

It appears that all possible communication presupposes a

mutual tuning-in relationship between the communicator
and the addressee of the communication. This relationship
is established by the reciprocal sharing of the Other's flux
of experience in inner time, by living through a vivid
present together by experiencing this togetherness as a
'We.' Only within this experience does the Other's conduct
become meaningful to the partner tuned in on him-that is,
the Other's body and its movements can be and are

16 Maurice Natanson, Edmund HUSS,TI: Philosopher 0/ Infinite Tasks (Evanston:

Northwestem University Press, 1973), 121.
 THE MUSICALITY OF TIIE OTIIER 179

interpreted as field of expression of events within his inner

life [my emphasis).

According to Kersten, if Schutz can argue successfully for the existence of

essentially polythetic, non-conceptual interaction as the ground of the "We"
experience, it would signify, as a "possible conclusion to be drawn from his
analysis carried as far as its radicality allows," that "'rationality' has definite
limits" (MM 10). In fine, it would mean that the "social world has a
substructure which is not only non- or subconceptual, but which is also, in
principle, unconceptualizable" (MM 10).
Such an indication of "limits of rationality," however, does not need to be
taken as pronouncing the impossibility of theorizing about social interaction;
it rather invites us to reconsider our basic assumptions about the "rationali-
ty" of social interaction. This will become clearer when we look at another
essay by Schutz on music, namely, "Mozart and the Philosophers."
In contrast to the Enlightenment view of art as represented by Rousseau,
which held the role of music 10 be imitation of human nature with the unity
of individual melodies as the "main principle of naturalness and simplicity
in music," Mozart's dramatic art consisted, according to Schutz, in a
"representation of the basic structure of the social world,,:17

[Mozart] uses this specific device of the art form of opera

[=its ability to show diversified actions and reactions in
simultaneity) to present in immediacy the intersubjective
relations in which his characters are involved. In spite of
their diversified reaction to the common situation, in spite
of their individual characteristics, they act together, feel
together, will together as a community, as a We. This does
not mean, of course, that they act, feel, or will the same or
with equal intensity. On the contrary, ensembles such as the
admired first Finale of Figaro clearly show many groupings
of the personae involved both in cooperation and in antago-
nism [my emphasis] (CP 11/198-99).

In terms of the Mozartian overcoming of the Enlightenment philosophy

of music, Schutz is setting forth a distinct vision of intersubjective reality
which not only grants primacy to the "complicated texture of meanings
constitutive for our experiencing the social world" (CP 11/196), but also gives
due recognition to the affective constitution of our communality. And,
because "this is precisely the condition in which each of us finds hirnself in
everyday life" (CP 11/195), it is, for Schutz, the phenomenologist's way of

17 Schutz, "Mozart and the Philosophers," in CP 11, 179-200; cited passages CPII/182, 196.
180 NOBUO KAzAsHI

showing that the "greatest miracle of all is that the true, the genuine
miracles can, and should come to seem so commonplace to us."18
However, there still persists the impression that these quite intriguing
ideas of Schutz's came short ofbeing integrated in a full-fledged and organic
manner into his overall theorizing on the life-world, and one would naturally
wonder why. Apart from the external cause that The Structures o[ the Life-
World, which should have become his second systematic work, was cut short
by the author's death, some internal reasons might be considered to have
been at work: first, an unresolved discrepancy between the Husserlian view
of the constitution of meaningful experience through the monothetic, ref-
lective glance of consciousness, on the one hand, and the radical implica-
tions of the essentially polythetic signification of musical experience, on the
other; secondly, the problematic nature of the very choice of musical exper-
ience as a model of sociality.
To better appreciate the import of the first problem, let us introduce
here a work of Bin Kimura, a leading psychiatrist in contemporary Japan,
who has, like Schutz, recognized in musical experience an exemplary mode
of intersubjective relationship. While acknowledging the general orientation
of Schutz's work to be on the right track, Kimura aims critically to develop
it further. 19
"Aüla" is the theme at the center of Kimura's psychiatric inquiry which
aims to penetrate into the deepest grounds of the dynamism of intersub-
jective relationship. As a common Japanese expression, "aüla" literally means
"interval" or "between." And the Chinese character used for "aüla" has a
second way of pronunciation in Japanese, namely, "ma." And it is this theme
of "ma" that has been regarded as one of the essential hallmarks of Japanese
art, most typically in the Noh play, but in music and painting as well.
However, the artistically refined theme of "man has its roots in a variety of
meanings which it has come to assume in everyday idiomatic usage related
especially to interpersonal relationship.
"Ma ga wand" = "be bad in man means "be untimely"; "Ma ga motenai"
= "Ma can't be maintained" means "unable to keep a conversation flowing
smoothly"; or, "Ma-nuke" = "lacking in man means "goofy"; etc. Kimura uses
"aüla" and "man synonymously, for example, in his book entitled simply Aüla,
which contains several essays on musical experience.
Now, in order to understand Kimura's views on the intersubjective "man

18 Schutz's motto for the whole project of The Structures 0/ the Li/e-world taken from
Nathan the WlSe by Lessing. Cf. A1fred Schutz and Thomas Luckmann, The Structures o/the Li/e-
world Vol. 11, trans. Richard M. Zaner and David J. Parent (Evanston: Northwestern University
Press, 1989), 191.
19 Those interested in Kimura's work available in a European language are referred to
Ecrits de psychopathologie phenomblologique (Presses Universitaires de France, 1991).
 THE MUSICALITY OF THE OTHER 181

in the experience of the playing musie ensemble, it is indispensable to

comprehend first his views on the acoustie "man or "interval" between
sounds. Quoting from a work of Tohru Takemitsu, a contemporary Japanese
composer, Kimura lays emphasis upon the fact that musical intervals are far
from lacunae devoid of acoustie contents:

A single sound of one plectrum or of one blow is too

complex 10 play the role of conveying logic, and is already
complete in itself. The complexity of the sound whieh can
complete itself as a single sound has produced a 'ma,' that
is, a soundless but dynamically tense, metaphysical duree
whieh is not susceptible of quantification.... The silent
'ma' without sound is actually recognized as a 'ma,' replete
with innumerable sounds, whieh contends with the single
sound. 20

This is abasie point often propounded, but just as often forgotten. As a

matter of fact, even the Schutzian thematization of the essentially polythetie
nature of musical experience appears, when contras ted with the formulation
cited above, still to be restrained by a residue of atomistic and rationalistie
views of musical signification.
In the last and the longest chapter of "Fragments on the Phenomenology
of Musie," whieh is entitled "Refleetion and the Experience of Musie," Schutz
examines the articulation of the musical flux into units and sub-units in
terms of the "flights" and the "resting places" in consciousness, notions
borrowed from William James. 21

The art of musical phrasing consists in making each unit

and sub-unit discernible by bringing together into one
single phase what belongs together, and to separate it from
the next phase by a very short interruption of the flux of
musie.... These very short intermittences are the resting
places during whieh the flux of musie comes to astandstill.
The listener is invited and incited by them to look from
this end-phase back to the initial phase, to return to the
beginning still accessible to him by reason of the interplay

20 Tohru Takemitsu, Oto, Chinmoku to Hakariabu hodoni (Sound, to Such an Extent 10

Measure up with Si/ence), 196 (my translation). Quoted by Kimura in Aiäa, 5B.
21 Speaking of these Jamesian notions, wh ich are sometimes paraphrased by James as the
"transitive" and the "substantive" parts in consciousness, let us keep in mind that the former is
nothing but anothervariant of his notion of "fringes" or "horizon." Cf. William James, The Princi-
pIes o[ Psychologj Vol. 1,243.
182 NOBUO KAZASHI

of retentions analyzed before (MM 66).

In contrast to the characterization of the "silent man given by Takemitsu,

the significance of intervals seems to have been analyzed by Schutz largely
from the viewpoint of the technical need for "musical phrasing"; that is to
say, it is understood largely as partitioning between melodie Gestalts. The
aspect of intervals as moments of significative excess does not seem to have
been accorded full recognition.
Phenomenologically speaking, "intervals" are acoustic "horizons" which
are not simply "empty backgrounds" for positive sounds, but ralher fields
resonant with all but imperceptible echoes from the past and the future as
weil. A field of intervals opened between sounds begins to take on, as it
were, a spontaneous and quasi-autonomous life of its own, and begins to
lead the flow of musical time. These ideas recall to us a crystallized formu-
lation which Merleau-Ponty gave to this phenomenon by way of expanding
on Proust's meditation on the "little phrase" toward the very end of the
completed part of The VISible and the Invisible:

We do not possess the musicalor sensible ideas, precisely

because they are negativity or absence circumscribed; they
possess uso The performer is no longer producing or
reproducing the sonata: he feels himself, and the others feel
him to be at the service of the sonata; the sonata sings
through him or cries out so suddenly that he must 'dash on
his bow' to follow it. And these vortexes opened in the
sonoroUS world finally form one sole vortex in which the
ideas fit in with one another [myemphasis].22

This is a point of great consequence because it means that aseries of

successive intervals opened between sounds now open in turn, so to speak,
a flow of lagging intervals between themselves as a succession of flowing,
noematic fields with unfathomable horizons, on the one hand, and the
performer's momentary acts which have initially produced the series of
sounds, on the other. Thus such a musical experience brings to the fore the
limits of the notion of constitution of noema by noesis, and, hence, obliges
us to reconsider it in terms of the reciprocal determination between them.
It is not that Schutz was not cognizant of this creative aspect of the
phenomenon of "horizon"; on the contrary, he was keenly aware of the
momentous implications of the notion of "horizon" for transcendental

22 The VISible and the Invisible, op. cit., 151. (Translation altered. Tbe underlined part is
"ces tourbillons ouverts" in the French original, and translated as "these open vortexes" in the
English translation.
 THE MUSICALITY OF lliE OlliER 183

phenomenology. For instance, Schutz once posed a straightforward question

to himself: "Is not 'to have in a horizon' something other than constitution?"
(CP 11/82). And indeed, it seems that Schutz had a similar point in mind
when he continues the passage quoted above as follows:

Looking back to the initial phase, the listener becomes

aware that there was a single impulse going on, that each
element of the unit was connected with its predecessors and
attracted or, better, brought about its successor; he will
conceive, then, the unit or subunit as a meaningful context
••• (MM 66; myemphasis).

The significance of such understanding of the function of intervals as

consisting in the formation of a moving field of spontaneous, emergent
signification would prove still more important if we consider it in the
context of ensemble playing. And this is what Kimura does by drawing on
the notion of "Acting Intuition," propounded by Nishida, the most represen-
tative philosopher of modern Japan: 23 that is to say, the view that there
exists a dynamism of reciprocal formation between what makes and what is
made. Kimura writes:

It would not be right to divide, as in Husserlian phenomen-

ology, noesis and noema into intentional function and
intentional object, and to consider that the former
'constitutes' the latter. From the viewpoint of 'acting
intuition,' we must think that the noematic side determines
the noetic side at the same time that the noetic side
produces the noematic side. Since both sides are in the
relationship ofwhat Weizsäcker calls 'Gestaltkreis,' neither
is cause nor effect of the other....
In the case of ensemble playing where each player is
listening to the whole of music as the noematic side of his
consciousness, the noetic side relative to it can be no
longer [regarded solely as] his own 'actual' noetic side. It is,
as it were, the 'virtual' noetic side in his consciousness. It
can be said that there has been established, in the 'inside'
of individual consciousness, a collective, intersubjective,
autonomous correlation of noesis-noema which has sub-
lated the subjectivities of individual consciousness. And, at

23 Kimura's work is all the more significant because he has drawn heavily on the works of
Kitaro Nishida, whose formulations of the incarnate nature of human existence bear remarkable
resemblances to those of Merleau-Ponty.
184 NOBUO KAzAsHI

the same time, each player's autonomous will to create

music is also working there without fail ....
When an individual subject goes on engaging in the
world of music through the perpetual, mutual determina-
tion between the playing act on the noetic side and the
perception of music on the noematic side, this subjectivity
continues always to be determined by the metanoetic
intersubjectivity of the whole. 24

Kimura's broad use of the terms "noema" and "noesis" is not faithful to
Husserl, and the term "metanoetic intersubjectivity" should sound more than
unorthodox. But the point at stake is this: in the case of an ideally per-
formed ensemble, the very intervals between sounds come to take on a
creative and quasi-autonomous life of their own, not only within a single
consciousness, but primarily in the place of the intersubjective "between."
Therefore, it can turn out that individual performers find themselves to be
led by the horizonal, ever-emergent life of the musical movements produced
intersubjectively, while embracing the noematic flow of the whole of the
music as if produced by their own individual acts of playing.
Certainly, there are some definite qualifications to be made about the
Schutzian proposal to understand the basic modes of social interaction after
the model of musical experience. To touch upon only two of them here, one
might weH be predisposed to find it too naive to attempt to comprehend the
formation of social structures on the model of the musical experience of
playing music together. The world is fraught with incidents, the nature of
which is antithetical to what we take to be the joy of musical experience. In
a similar vein, there seems to be a latent discordance lying between Schutz's
thesis of the founding status of the simultaneity of the streams of experience
for the establishment of communication, on the one hand, and his doctrine
of "multiple realities," on the other. For all its oversights and limitations,
however, we cannot help but recognize a profound appeal in the vision of,
so to speak, "echo-sistence" put forth by Schutz and Kimura. What would be
the main reason for this appeal?
I suppose it is not because their views are applicable to all levels of social
interaction, but rather because they have succeeded in grasping the deepest
roots of human interaction, which alone are capable of providing support for
our precarious relations in the life-world. Simply put, it is rare in everyday
life to be able to enjoy the pure intensity of human interaction like those we
can derive from playing or listening to a piece of music.
Schutz himself made a point of bringing home to us the fact that, even
in the face-to-face relationship, our understanding of each other is never free

24 Kimura, Aüla (Between), 46-50 (my translation).

 THE MUSICALITY OF THE OTHER 185

from the necessity of abstract typifications. He did so to such an extent that

Natanson finds it justifiable to assert, as an inevitable conclusion of Schutz's
Philos~hy, that "anonymity leads ultimately to a desolation of common
sense." Mere bodily coexistence does not guarantee a formation of mean-
ingful communication. If we are ever to achieve relationships whereby we
encounter each other mutually as irreplaceable Others, we have first to
recognize the violent power of typification and endeavor to listen to the
voices of the Other coming from the invisible worlds of their transcendent
being-voices which are otherwise destined to remain unheard. In this sense,
we are the invisible denizens of the life-world par excellence.
Schutz's view on the topic of "reciprocal immediate action" is expressed
in one of the passages in The Structures ofthe Life-World as folIows:

If not shy of using grandiose words, one could say that life
and death are the consequence of just any reciprocally
immediate act and that death can follow from reciprocally
immediate acts. Less impressive, but perhaps just as
important, is the circumstance that the social everyday
consists for the most part of routinized, reciprocally imme-
diate acts. 26

Most of the time in everyday life we are little better than dead to each other,
so long as we are engaged in the modes of life in which we encounter each
other through blindly taken-for-granted typifications. Only by bringing
ourselves to live a precious segment of our temporally finite existence
together shall we be allowed to enter into relationships beyond typifying
understanding, and to experience the emergence of horizonal intersections
between the myriad worlds of meaning woven by each of us. And these
horizonal interseetions shall not end, so 10ng as they are truly significant,
without re-weaving the textures of these myriads worlds of meaning.
This could be regarded, I submit, as an implicit message contained in
Schutz's often enigmatic declaration-in spite of its apparently truistic
meaning-that "we are growing older together." We are always getting older,
but not always growing older together even in face-to-face situations. In
other words, could we not hear a moral call to "grow older together" in the
Schutzian thematization of the experience of "making music together"?27

25 Maurice Natanson, Anonymity: A Study in the Philosophy ofAlfred Schutz (Bloomington:

Indiana University Press, 1986), 130.
26 Structures ofthe Life-World 11,77.

27 It is to be noted that Greek philosophers such as Pythagoras, Plato, and Aristotle were
keenly aware of the pre-eminently moral character of musical experience. For example, in the
Politics Aristotle points out that "we are altered in soul when we listen" to tunes and that "the
186 NOBUO KAZASHI

I believe we could, and indeed we find ourselves led by this call to explore
a distinct view of authentie selfhood alternative to the Heideggerian view
that Dasein facing its finitude is to stand alone in anxiety with all the ties
with others cut completely, if not definitively.
Natanson concludes his work on the Schutzian notion of "anonymity" by
citing a personal remark Schutz made to hirn as a student of his at The New
School for Social Research in New York: "Perhaps you will find in the end
that anonymity and death are the same." And Natanson suggests that we
take this remark of Schutz's as a "sanction-a term of stubborn indetermina-
cy: recognition without identification, the music of awareness."28
We can hear asound of "double entendre" in this use of the word, "sanc-
tion"; that is to say, sanction as "recognition" and sanction as "binding force."
As "recognition" this sanction of the "identity of anonymity and death" is
bound to remain indeterminate because of the complete invisibility of the
elusive death that comes overshadowing our anonymous dealings in the
mundane world. On the other hand, as "binding force" the indeterminacy of
"sanction" will also persist because it is one of those callings whose force can
be effective only to those eager to hear them. In other words, the "identity
of anonymity and death" is recognized only in the form of a twinge of sorrow
one feels, whether faintly or acutely, at the poverty of mutual expression in
interactions dominated by gross and shallow typifications. And such recog-
nition of the sterile silence is to be backed with an awareness of the music
of social interaction to be played together.
Now, seen in this light, the "ideality" of the sensible signification em-
bodied in musical experience retrieves fully the meaning which we took away
from the word at the beginning of this essay to avoid confusion due to the
ambiguity of its meaning; namely, the meaning of an "ideal" as something to
be sought after. 29
Merleau-Ponty also came to ascribe special significance to the sonority
of our being in The VlSible and the Invisible. However, a moral appeal which
we have drawn from the Schutzian thematization of the phenomenon of
"growing older together" may be considered tenuous in Merleau-Ponty, as
Levinas has already expressed his dissatisfaction with the pre-eminently
"aesthetic" nature of Merleau-Ponty's view of the social unity achieved

wise assert that the soul is a harmony or that it involves harmony." Aristotle, Politics, trans.
Cames Lord, pp. 236-237. I am indebted to Martha K. Woodruff for this speeific reminder.
28 Natanson, Anonymity, op. eit., 144.
29 In his Phenomenology, Role, and Reason: Essays on the Coherence and Deformation of
Social Reality (SpringfieId: Charles C. Thomas, 1974), 174, Natanson argues: "It is simply the
case that friendship and love do seize the Other in his untypified essentiality. At least we may
take friendship and love as primordial events in human existence which typification cannot deny.
The paradox is that such events are themse1ves features of our ontology: soeial order is, in part,
possible in virtue of the ulterior possibility of there being uniqueness and absolute individuation."
 THE MUSICALITY OF TIIE OTHER 187

through the reversibility of the Flesh: Levinas argues for the "ethical"
necessity of "attuning oneself to the other" in the active sense of the
expression.3O
Like most moral imperatives, however, this Schutzian call to "grow older
together" makes us realize some inherent limits which threaten and nourish
the call at the same time.
First, the very fact that we are allowed to exist in this world for just a
limited span of time means that we cannot always afford to "attune ourselves
to the other." Since it takes time to understand an other, an unconditional
act of "attuning oneself to the other" remains a "limit idea." The singularity
of the temporally finite "I" stands in an immense asymmetry with the radical
plurality comprising myriads of others existing in simultaneity with each
other-hence, the inevitability of resorting to the "monothetic," typifying
mode of comprehension. This is a very simple but decisive condition con-
straining our engagement in the act of understanding others. But it is
interlocked with another constraint internal to the very possibility of the act
of understanding.
As Schutz rightly pointed out, it is our awareness of the temporal finitude
or the "fundamental anxiety" that is working as a hidden organizer of the
"relevance" system we live by; its general "sens (=direction)" derives from
our sense of temporal finitude. In consequence, most of the time we are
obliged incessantly to make selective judgments, reflectively or pre-ref-
lectively, with regard to the typified "relevance" of an object of our attention,
whether a thing or a person. In other words, the "internal" horizon of the
world of "meaning" is continually polarized around its kernel-topic estab-
lished by the predominant "selective interest," whether just temporarily or
quite steadily. And this most fundamental dynamism, inherent to the life of
consciousness, entails the formation of an "external" horizon where what is
considered "irrelevant" to the present kernel belongs.
Unlike the case of the world of "objects," the border distinguishing
between the "internal" and the "external" horizons is neither dear-cut nor
rigid; its formation is multifold and fluid: important is the fact that what
belongs to the "external" horizon remains, by its nature, more or less "empty"
in substance in proportion as it is "irrelevant" to the "internal" horizon. In
this sense, the "external" horizon in the world of "meaning" could be called
the realm of "unreality": what belongs to the "external" horizon can begin to
assume "reality" only by being incorporated into the "internal" horizon.
On reflection, this apparent truism turns out to be rather paradoxical. If

30 Emmanuel Levinas, "De la sensibilite," in HOTS sujet, 167; English translation,

"Sensibility," by Michael B. Smith in Ontology and Alterity in Merleau-Ponty, ed. Galen A
Johnson and Michael B. Smith (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1990), 53-66. The
original French expression used by Levinas is "s'accorder il I'autre."
188 NOBUO KAZASHI

the "reality" of what formerly belonged to the "external" horizon can be

established only on the "internal" horizon, then its former "unreality" on the
"external" horizon can be recognized as such only in hindsight. In other
words, both the "reality" on the "internal" horizon and the former "unreality"
on the "external" horizon of that which has been neglected by selective
interest as irrelevant come to consciousness simultaneously.
This has a very sobering implication for our consideration of the under-
standing of the other. If the meaningfulness of experience lies in its
"horizonal" structure, to understand an other is to explore step by step the
internal horizon of a particular meaning-world in which the other lives. But
the "otherness" of an other consists in the irreducible incongruity between
the horizon-structure of the meaning-world in which the other lives and that
in which the "I" lives. To put it differently, the "internal" horizon of the
other's meaning-world is bound to remain "unreal," namely, virtually
inexistent to the "I" so long as it falls on the "external" horizon of the "1."
Only by becoming aware of the irreducible "blindness" inherent in the
horizon of one's own meaning-world, and by striving to expand its "internal"
horizon shall we begin to recognize the "otherness" of the "Other" flickering
over the horizon.
 VICfORIA MORA

THE SPIRIT IN FLAMENCO AND THE BODY IN MOTION:

Discovering Gender DitTerence in the Dance

There is a special difficulty for the phenomenologist concerned with clari-

fying "ordinary, mundane experience."l This difficulty is grounded in a
double significance of the familiarity that characterizes that experience. On
the one hand, familiar phenomena are in fact readily accessible insofar as
they are common-that is, immediately available as well as shared. To use
Alfred Schutz's language, the familiar world is the world that is "taken for
granted."2 It is the world that we accept at face value, as real, as, in a very
real sense, unquestionable. On the other hand, the familiarity that charac-
terizes the mundane world can mask precisely the phenomena that it charac-
terizes. When a phenomenon becomes a familiar aspect of the day to day,
it ceases to hold out its unique structure and significance. Instead, it recedes
into the milieu of "typical" social experience. Yet just because these phenom-
ena have come to be understood as "typical," we may be too hasty if we
conclude that they have come to be understood in their deeper significance.
As "typical," familiar phenomena become caught within the net of the pat
perceptions and interpretations with which we manage our daily life.
Reflective insight into these phenomena is actually hindered by their
familiarity. Edmund Husserl writes that "where the phenomenological
interest dominates, we endure the hardship of having to describe phenomen-
ological relationships which we may have experienced on countless occa-
sions, but of which we were not normally conscious as objects, and we have
also to do our describing with expreSsions framed to deal with objects whose
appearance lies in the sphere of our mutual interests.·3 Usually we
approach the everyday world, and its "countless occasions" for phenomeno-

1 Rodman B. Webb, "The Life and Work of Alfred Schutz: A Conversation wit" Maurice
Natanson," Qualitative Studies in Education, VoI. 5, no. 4 (1992), 283-84.
2 Alfred Schutz, Collected Papers, VoI. I, ed. Maurice Natanson (The Hague: Martinus
Nijhoff, 1962), 326-27.
3 Edmund Husserl, Logical Investigations, 2 Vols., trans. J. N. Findlay (New York:
Humanities Press, 1970), 283-84.

189
S. Galt Crowell (ed.), The Prism ofthe Self, 189-204.
© 1995 Kluwer Academic Publishers.
190 VICTORIA MORA

logical encounter, from what he calls the "natural standpoint."4 Within this
standpoint, we do not "objectity" the mundane world, but merely live it. We
experience phenomena within the natural standpoint as already constituted,
already accessible, already understood. But it is precisely the comfort of the
natural standpoint that the phenomenologist must suspend, or "bracket," if
the everyday world is to be disclosed in its full philosophical richness. This
is not to say that this world is in any way changed or compromised by the
transition trom the natural standpoint to the phenomenological standpoint.
Rather, it is revealed reflectively. The work of the philosopher whose
concern is to clarity the world of mundane experience requires a break from
the natural standpoint, much like a coffee break is sometimes needed if the
workday is to be put in perspective. 5 In taking this break, the phenomeno-
logist must be true to the phenomena being described even while acknowl-
edging that their description bears significance beyond its immediate
articulation.
Gender-and the intimately connected topic of gender-difference-is a
perfect example of the double significance that familiarity can have with
respect to everyday phenomena. The breadth of gender's familiarity is far
reaching; it extends from the average horne, in which "accepted" feminine
and masculine conduct is almost immediately understood by the smallest
member of the household, to the university, where gender issues require
their own departments. The result of this familiarity is that no matter to
whom one talks regarding gender, she or he can bet that preconceived
notions abound. These various preconceptions share at least one thing in
common. They typically locate the significance of gender within the context
of sex. The familiarity that characterizes gender, whether in the horne or in
the university, is intimately connected to discussions of males vs. females,
men vs. women.
A radical descriptive analysis shows that gender's conflation with sex is
a trap. By a radicaL descriptive analysis, I mean one that gets to the roots of
gender experience by locating its originary (to use Husserl's language)
manifestation. Here the difficulty imposed by gender's familiarity is
underscored, for it turns out that the originary manifestation of gender is
not equivalent to its familiar manifestation; its unreflective association with
sex does not, in the end, capture either gender's most basic appearance or

4 Edmund Husserl, ldeas, trans. W. R. Boyce Gibson (New York: Collier Books, 1962),
45.
5 The analogy is deliberately ordinary. It is meant to capture the unique position of
phenomenology when "applied" to the world of everyday life. Though the natural stand point is
set aside in favor of the phenomenological standpoint, the everyday world is precisely the object
of investigation and therefore remains clearly in focus. In a peculiar way, the world of the
natural stand point both recedes and comes into relief when the phenomenological attitude is
assumed.
 THE SPIRIT IN FLAMENCO 191

significance. This is because gender appears as a phenomenon rooted in the

movement of the bOdy, not the body's physical form. This distinction will be
explored presently. The important point at the moment is that we will have
to set aside the assumption that familiar experience surely gives us insight
into originary experience. Sex may not enlighten us regarding gender;
discussions of females and males may not inform our understanding of
gender -difference.
How, then, do we take a break from our usual way of approaching
gender? A coffee break may be in order, but coffee breaks themselves
become mundane and therefore non-reflective. Perhaps we need to try a
different brand of coffee, as a way of savoring-that is, saving-the moment?
If phenomenological method is hindered in diseIosing everyday phenomena
like gender because they have been typified and taken up unreflectively, its
ability to deal with these phenomena is restored when they are discovered
in atypical, or at least non-typical, contexts. This is because non-typical
contexts provide enhanced opportunities for reflection, whereas familiar
contexts may tend to interfere. I propose to take a step eIoser to a genuine
description of gender by diseIosing it through a phenomenological analysis
of a moment in Flamenco dance. As we shall see, the dance reveals a
distinction in the quality of bodily movement that I have termed psychic
saturation vs. psychic restraint. But these qualities of movement cannot be
fully explained by the specific context of Flamenco dance. This is because
Flamenco, as a highly specific context, is embedded in a much broader
context, viz., that of the body in motion, the horizon on which psychic
experience appears and therefore the foundation from which social experi-
ence arises. The Flamenco example thus opens onto a broader discussion.
Through it, the significance of these categories to the topic of gen der is
revealed. The psychic saturation and restraint that we discover in the dance
have their counterparts in the common-sense world in which we discover our
own humanity, as weIl as the humanity of others. These counterparts are
femininityand masculinity, respectively.
Let us turn our attention to a smaIl, dimly lit stage in a tavern some-
where in Spain. In the center of the stage are two Flamenco dancers. Behind
them are one or two guitarists, and a singer of the Cante Rondo, or Deep
Song, but our attention is focused on the dancers. At first, the pair is
perfectly still, so that we have time to peruse their static bodies. The first
thing we notice about the female dancer is that her body, both its form and
surface, is largely covered by the costume that she wears. Her shoes are
heavy and black. Her skin is ankle length, voluminous, and has at least two,
maybe three, layers; it flares at the bottom. Her upper body and arms are
covered by a loosely draped shawl, though we catch a glimpse of a tight-
fitting "body-suit" underneath. In contrast to this largely shrouded appear-
ance, our dancer's neck and face are fully exposed; her long hair is pulled
back into a tight bun at the nape of her neck. Apart from her neck and face,
192 VICfORlA MORA

the only other parts of her body that are fully exposed are her hands. Our
eyes wander to her male counterpart. His body, too, is mostly covered-at
least the surface of his body. Contrary to his partner's appearance, the form
of his body is readily discernable through the tight-fitting pants that come
above the waist, the uniform-fitting shirt that is slightly open at the ehest,
and the vest that exaggerates the upside-down triangular appearance of the
well-conditioned male torso. Like our female dancer, our male dancer's
neck, face, and hands are fully exposed.
The music bursts forth, and the dance begins. The onset of movement
calls attention to the posture of the dancers, which is essentially open and
bowed. The ehest is the most protruding aspect of the are formed by the
body, and the crown of the head and the heels of the feet are the "tips" that
keep the bow taut. The dancers' heads are raised from the crown, so that the
chin is dropped, slightly. Reaching to meet the chin, the sternum is raised
so that the entire ehest opens up, appearing as if a deep breath had frozen
the moment in which the lungs are filled to their fullest capacity. The
shoulders are pulled back, further accentuating the convex appearance of the
upper body. The arms are raised and lowered alternately, always, however,
returning to a reaching position above and slightly behind the head. The
constant wringing motion of the wrist and hand-floreo, which suggests the
similarity between the opening and closing of a flower and the opening and
closing of the hand affected by the rotating motion of the wrist-constantly
redirects our attention upward, even when the arms are moving in a
downward direction. Like the rising slope of an are, the upper bodies of our
dancers beckon our attention upward.
If the overall appearance of the upper body draws our attention upward,
toward the sky, the overall appearance of the lower body draws our attention
downward, toward the earth. Alternately, the knees raise the lower leg and
feet, in a muted marching motion. The feet are then brought down onto the
floor, but in aseries of stamping motions that articulate the entire foot: first
the toe strikes a blow at the floor, then the heel is brought down. Or the
heel strikes the floor first, the leg is raised again, and then the toe comes
down onto the floor. Then the entire foot is planted at one blow. These
patterns alternate from foot to foot, their increasing intricacy and speed
necessarily drawing with them the weight of the lower body, lest they lose
their sometimes tenuous grip on the floor.
The basic movements constituting the dance are identical in each of the
dancers, as is the basic posture. Now they are facing one another, in close
proximity, and their movements mirror one another. Suddenly they move
away from one another, each articulating the same basic movements through
which the locomotion is accomplished. Now they are facing one another
again, but from afar, and one dancer pauses to study the movements of the
other. He then repeats them, sometimes deliberately and sometimes in an
exaggerated, playful way. She returns the attention to his movement, and
 THE SPIRIT IN FLAMENCO 193

then the repetition. Slowly they move toward one another, and they are
gently touching shoulders even though the profusion of powerful stomping
and relentless arm and hand gestures continues. Each of the dancers'
movements-their facial express ions, the looks they exchange, the tilts of
their head, the rotating of their upper bodies, the invisible patterns etched
out by their arms and hands, the "marching" of their legs, and the stomping
of their feet-comprehend the other.
What is surprising about the appearance of our two dancers is that even
though their posture is the same, and even though the content of their
gestures is the same, and even though the speed and rhythm of their move-
ment is the same, their dancing appears distinctively different. What
accounts for this difference? So far, the only difference we have noted is the
difference in the dancers' costumes. Our female dancer is almost fully
covered, the form of her body barely visible beneath the fullness of her skirt
and the folds of her shawl. The form of our male dancer's body, however, is
largely exposed. Could the difference so readily discernable in the dance
have its origin in the extent to which the body's form is available to exper-
ience? The difference between our two dancers has an inverse relationship
to the extent of this availability: Though less of the female dancer's body is
discernable, "more" of the female dancer is in her dance; though more of the
male dancer's body is discernable, "less" of the male dancer is in his dance.
What I am referring to here is a difference in how the body is moved, as
distinct from what the body is doing.
In focusing on the dance so far, we have concerned ourselves with what
is being done. Perhaps we focused on an action, imbued with deliberate
significance. We attended to aseries of steps, spontaneous, yet choreo-
graphed in light of the particular rhythm being played by the tocaor, the
particular cante being sung by the cantaor. Or we focused on an inadvertent
gesture, a movement that teIls us something that the individual did not
intend to teIl-a look of disdain as one dancer watches the other perform,
a hint of unflattering mimicry as one dancer repeats the steps of the other.
Whatever the motion, (provided that it is not merely reflexive, but falls
within the realm of conduct), it teIls us something about the dancer's state
of relationship 10 the other dancer and to the dance. In general terms, what
the body does teIls us something about the individual's state of relations hip
to the surrounding world of others and objects.
But what is being done by the dancers only scratches the surface of how
the body in motion appears, and therefore of what it reveals. Though the
movements of our two dancers are identically choreographed, so that they
are doing the same thing, how they do it, the mode in which they do it, is a
distinct if not wholly separate matter; it effectively discriminates between the
movements of the dancers, which in their content, are virtually identical.
What I am pointing toward here is the qualitative dimension of bodily
movement. This qualitative dimension is projected in the general manner in
194 VlcrORIA MORA

which the dancers accomplish their various actions and gestures. Attention
to this aspect of movement allows us to pinpoint the distinguishing feature
of the dancers' movements.
The quality characterizing the dancers' movement differs on essentially
one point: while the movements of our female dancer call attention to them-
selves and to the individual performing them through the manner in which
they are executed, the movements of our male dancer call attention, not to
themselves and to the individual performing them, but to the point in space
toward which they are directed-sometimes this "point" in space is the other
dancer, sometimes it is the wooden floor, and sometimes it is a place in the
distant sky that isn't even visible from the confines of the tavern. How is this
difference in appearance possible?
The female dancer's movements are imbued with psychic saturation, by
which I mean an increased sensation, awareness, and attention to her body.
They appear saturated with the conscious experience of her own body such
that her inner self (her psyche, her interior life) is there, concentrated in
each of her body's movements and therefore available in the appearance of
her surface body. Thus in the quality of their execution, her movements call
attention to themselves and to her. Her increased sensation, awareness, and
attention to her body increases our awareness of, and attention to, her body.
The male dancer's movements, however, manifest psychic restraint. They
appear to hold the dancer's inner self just beneath the surface of bodily
movement, so that a distance is effected between the movements of the body
and the conscious life of which they are expressive. His movements therefore
appear more controlled, more mechanical, than those of his counterpart.
They do not call attention to themselves and to hirn, but to the direction of
their execution. They call attention to what he is doing rather than to how
he is doing it. 6
There are many aspects of the dancers' movements that contribute to the
qualitative difference just disclosed. I will restrict myself to discussing two
of them. One example of how the distinction in appearance between psychic
saturation and psychic restraint comes to our attention presents itself in the
look of each of the dancers. On this view, the look is a manifest relation

6 The terms "saturated," "controlled," and "mechanical" might be misconstrued. Let me

make it clear that no valuation is meant with respect to either the female dancer's or the male
dancer's quality of movement. The difficulty involved in finding language to describe phenomena
that may be familiar, but are not very often described, is that the words we choose not only
denote certain meanings, but also carry with them connotations that may not be intended by
their denotation. In choosing the words to describe the qualities of movement that I am trying
to lay bare, I have focused on their denotations with respect to consciousness: a "saturated"
movement appears wholly drenched with consciousness, whereas a "controlled" or "mechanical"
movement appears somehow distanced from the consciousness that animates it. Whatever the
pejorative or stereotypie connotations that might come to mind in light of the vocabulary I have
chosen, they will have to be set aside if the spirit of this study is to be realized.
 THE SPIRIT IN FLAMENCO 195

between the individual and the social world. Sartre says it suecinetly. "The
face and the body have one thing in common, namely, that their movements
are gestures.,,7 Unlike the look of our male dancer, whieh remains foeused
away from his own person, the look of our female dancer alternates between
other-direetedness and self-direetedness. Eaeh time her own look is met by
that of the other dancer, her look ehanges from a general gaze in the
direetion of his whole visage to a piercing hook that grasps his look, holding
it fast. Once this piercing is accomplished, she slowly, deliberately, lowers
her lids until her foeus has shifted eompletely from her partner and his
movements, to her own body and its movements. Since his own look has
been "hooked" by hers, our male dancer follows the movement of his
partner's lids and lashes to the point on wh ich her eyes are foeused. What
we have is the attention of both dancers foeused on the movements of the
female dancer, with her look aeting as guide. When the male dancer's gaze
becomes foeused elsewhere, because of the ehoreography of the dance, the
female dancer again searehes his visage until she captures his look, and again
both dancers become foeused on her movement. We could say that in a
peeuliar way, it is she who is "leading."
Tbe eonstant alternation of our dancer's look between her partner and
her own body suggests an inereased awareness of her own body as that
medium through whieh she eneounters hirn and he her. This inereased
awareness is manifested in the deliberate movement of her eyes, which maps
out the relation between her attention to her partner, her attention to her
own body, and her awareness that he is attending to her body. Even though
her dancing is a dancing with her partner, so that her movements are
direeted toward hirn, are comprehending hirn, her body never ceases to be
there for her. This produces the appearance of saturated awareness and
attention to her own body that contrasts her partner's more detaehed
appearance with respeet to his own body-the body he does not lower his
lids to look at, the body whose movements he does not attend to, the body
that carries on its movements without benefit of his obvious awareness.
In addition to the inereased attention and awareness to her own body
manifested in the look of our dancer, there is an inereased sensation that is
also apparent in the surface movements of her body. This inereased
sensation permeates her body. It comes to our attention in the diffuse
participation of her individual body parts in her whole body movement, as
eompared with the concentrated participation of our male dancer's
individual body parts in his whole body movement. For example, I men-
tioned earlier that the hands of both the dancers are fully exposed, and that
eaeh is engaged in the floreo that is produced by the rotating motion of the

7 Jean-Paul Sartre, "Faces," in Essays in Phenomenology, ed. Mauriee Natanson (The

Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1966), 160.
196 VICTORIA MORA

wrist. Though they are doing the same thing with their hands, the floreo of
each is distinct. Her floreo is characterized byan intricacy that calls attention
to her experience of the activity of each and every muscle and digit through
which she moves her hands. The opening and closing of each finger is
articulated in the movement of the hand, producing a waving cacophony of
"petals" that enhance the illusion of a flower opening and then closing again.
The palm is engaged in a cupping motion that fluctuates along with the
tension between the moving fingers and the rotating wrist, so that the
connection the dancer feels between the discrete movements of her wrist and
fingers appears there, on the surface of her body. His floreo, however, does
not disclose the connection he feels between the parts of his hands and arm
that facilitate his movement. It masks it! This is because the participation
of his fingers and palms is kept in check. These parts are moving, but their
movement is subordinate to the overall movement of the wrist and hand.
There is not the same level of sensation apparent in the execution of his
movements that is apparent in the movements of his counterpart. Rather,
a distance or chasm appears between what his body accomplishes in the
movement, and how he is "feeling" while that movement is being accom-
plished through his various body parts.
There are other examples of how the saturated sensation of the female
dancer comes to our attention in the increased participation of her individ-
ual body parts in her whole body movement, including examples that focus
on how her clothing ultimately acts, not as a cover or shroud, but as a
means through which the movements ofher individual body parts are accent-
uated so that her body is revealed in its saturated appearance. In the lifting
of her knee to bring down her foot, for example, her powerful thigh swings
out, producing a ruffling motion in her skirt that ends up calling attention
to the rotation of her hip. We see that even though the male dancer's body
parts are more readily discernable through his costume, they remain "quiet"
as compared with the body parts of our female dancer, whose covering calls
attention to her body, calls attention to her.
In a discussion of flirtation, Georg Simmel captures the importance of
clothing in revealing the individual it covers. He notes that clothing has a
dual function, accentuating even while concealing the body. He terms this
function "simultaneous presentation and refusal," remarking that "in
contemporary ethnography, it is regarded as certain that ... clothing ...
originally had nothing at all to do with the feeling of shame. Rather, it
served only the need for ornamentation and the closely related intention of
exercising sexual attraction by means of concealment."8 The importance of
Simmel's account-apart, that is, from its relevance to the issue of sexual

8 Georg Simmel, On Wornen, Sexuality, and Love, trans. and ed. Guy Oakes (New Haven:
Yale University Press, 1984), 136.
 THE SPIRIT IN FLAMENCO 197

communication-is that it emphasizes that covering the body does not

necessarily call attention away from the individual. Indeed, sometimes we see
"more" of the individual through layers of clothing than when the individual
is naked. As our Flamenco dancers suggest, it is the movement of the body,
regardless whether the body is more covered or exposed, that calls attention
to a conscious life and its experiences. Though covered, the female dancer's
body calls much more attention to her than does the male dancer's body,
even though it is more exposed. Her psychic saturation is available despite
her veiled appearance, and his psychic restraint endures even though the
physical form of his body is readily seen.
What appears in the how of the dancers' movement is something more
subtle and more subjective than the what of their movement revealed.
Whereas what the dancers did informs us about their exterior relations, to
one another and to the dance, how they accomplished their actions and
gestures informs us about their interior experience. The appearance of
psychic saturation and restraint lays bare something about the manner in
which the dancers experience being embodied, something about the manner
in which they experience what they are doing. In general terms, the quality
of bodily movement, its how, appears as a semaphore signalling the individ-
ual's interior bodily experience. The social significance of the body in motion
is revealed here at the level of subjectivity. How the body is moved teIls us
how the individual experiences being with her or his own body.9
The context in which the qualities of psychic saturation and psychic
restraint appeared might suggest that these qualities are deliberate, highly
stylized, distinctive interpretations of the dance itself. Attention to these
qualities of movement as such is perfect1y reasonable, given the context in
which they appeared. However, there is a nagging feeling that even though
we recognize that the distinct qualities of movement were choreographed
along with the postures and gestures that make up the dance, their signifi-
cance goes beyond Flamenco choreography. This nagging feeling is produced
bya familiarity that characterizes the qualities that we have described, one
which calls our attention to the fact that we have seen these qualities in
other, more mundane, contexts. A eIue, which begins to open up the
phenomenon of gender, has emerged along with the descriptive analysis of
the dance.
Our analysis of the dancers suggested that bodily movement can be
understood as distinct from the physical body; psychic saturation and
restraint unfolded in inverse proportion to the availability of the physical

9 There is a danger here in the language I have chosen to express the interior experience
that constitutes the body's qualitative appearance as a vehicle of expression. In speaking of being
with one's body, I do not by any means intend a dualist position. On the contrary, the being with
that constitutes the relationship between the body and the psyche is one of exterior and interior
connection, not of external and internal separation.
198 VICTORIA MORA

form of each dancer's body. Though within the natural attitude we do not
typically make a distinction between the physical body and the body's
movement, it is nevertheless an identifiable feature of mundane experience.
The physical body is fixed; its boundaries are easily discerned by the
empirical scientist, who measures those boundaries in terms of height,
weight, color and the topographical characteristics of the body that include
sex. What is revealing is the fact that the physical body can be grasped by
either the surgeon or the pathologist; it is a body in the Cartesian sense,
machine-like in its ability to be wholly comprehended through its parts, their
functions, and their relationships.
But the movement of the body reveals more than itself, and in this sense
it lacks the boundaries imposed on the physical body by its constitutive
parts. The body in motion is essentially expressive. It reveals the psychic life
of the individual, both what the individual intends to be revealed and what
the individual does not intend. As a result, the body's movement necessarily
points beyond itself. It points in the direction of the exterior world in which
the individual is enmeshed, and in the direction of the interior world that
the individual may deliberately or inadvertently share with others. In virtue
of its mediational role, the body in motion is actually a breaker of bound-
aries, a bridge that makes social experience fundamentally possible.
The distinction proposed here is a preliminary step in mapping out the
philosophical significance of gender. For if we adjust our focus on the
Flamenco dancers, attending to their appearance as typically feminine or
masculine-that is, as typically genderfied-we find that the distinction
between the physical body and the body in motion is telling. What is it, most
basically, that grounds the appearance of the dancers as feminine or
masculine?10 The usual answer, one deeply rooted in biological essential-
ism, suggests that the physical body is what reveals femininity and masculini-
ty. Gender is an accompaniment to sex, the twin that we know is just around
the corner when sex makes its appearance. But the twin is not always an
identical one. The female dancer may not be feminine; the male dancer may
not be masculine. The "exceptions" or "anomalies" aid the phenomenological
epoche in its work. If we juxtapose the effeminate male dancer with the
feminine female dancer, for example, the relevance of sex to gender is dimin-
ished. It is revealed that whatever the relationship between sex and gender,
that relationship is not essentially causal when it comes to femaleness and

10 The formulation of this question is not meant to suggest that femininity and masculinity
are the only originary manifestations of gender, which given the insights of this study remains
an important field for further exploration. Rather, the question is formulated in the terms that
are most familiar in our everyday discussions of gender. Though this study suggests that gender
is itself an independent phenomenon whose significance lies in its revelation of the individual's
psychic experience of her or his own embodiment, our usual way of approaching gender focuses
on the extreme "opposites" that characterize that experience-femininity, and masculinity.
 THE SPIRIT IN FLAMENCO 199

femininity and maleness and maseulinity. Pointing to the female dancer when
trying to understand femininity, and pointing to the male dancer when trying
to understand maseulinity, is a moot pointing. Feminine dancers can be
female or male. Their typification as feminine suggests that they belong in
the same category. That inclusion, however, cannot be accounted for in
sexual terms. It is predsely sex that the effeminate male and feminine female
do not have in common.
Sodal and cultural explanations immediately present themselves. What
the dancers are doing, where and when they do it and in what context, what
they wear-aH of these would be common constituents in an everyday des-
eription of gender as it appears in the dance. But insofar as they are variable,
these constituents cannot account for the universality of the phenomenon of
gender; they cannot account for what is essential. Our dancers' movements
might not mirror one another at an, but might unfold in altogether different
gestures. They might not be in a tavern in Spain, but at a ritual ceremony
performed somewhere in New Mexico where only a seleet few are welcome.
The costume the male wears might be more like a Scottish kilt than the
tight fitting pants worn by the male Flamenco dancer. The point is that no
matter what the daneers are doing, no matter what the context in which they
are doing it, or what they are wearing while they are doing it, that whieh is
feminine and maseuline endures. We know gender when we see it, in spite
of its various guises!
Gender abides within disparate dancers and dances for much the same
reason that femininity abides in females as wen as males (and, for that
matter, for the same reason that masculinity abides in females as weH as
males). Just as gender is not limited by sex, it is not limited by sodal and
cultural considerations. This is not to say that these forces aren't operative
in the definition of gender. They are, and will probably continue to be. But
gender itself, in its most fundamental incarnation, is more than sexual,
sodal, or cultural expression. Where, then, or how does it present itself? The
unvarying element in the eidetic variation carried out above can be grasped
by returning to our Flamenco dancers, this time juxtaposing their static
appearance with their appearance in the ebb and flow of the dance. Gender
appears originarilr in movement, which itself expresses consdousness at the
most basic level. 1

11 Our discussion of the role of sex, and of social and cultural considerations, in our
understanding of gender suggests a point that must be understood if the dance is to succeed in
yielding something originary about gender and gender-difference: there is a way in which the
dance both conceals and reveals gender as gender has been conceived in this study. It conceals
gender insofar as it does, in fact, reinforce the sex-gender correlation that I have suggested is
a trap. In the Flamenco film version of Bizet's Camu:n, the director, who also plays Jose, teils
Carmen, the dancer playing Carmen, "Tienes que ser mas femenina!," intimating that the female
is meant to capture the quality of femininity in her dancing. (Emiliano Piedra [producer],
200 VICTORIA MORA

While the dancers might be said to appear feminine or masculine both

before and after the onset of movement, their appearance as genderjied
before the dance begins is flimsy at best. Tbis is a function of the fact that
the gender expressed in their static appearanee is neeessarily an imposed
expressivity. Whether the curves and lines of the physical body are pointed
to in arguing that the appearanee is feminine or masculine, or the posture
that situates the daneers and therefore establishes a context, the static
dancers are "doing" nothing to contribute to their appearanee as either
feminine or masculine. Rather, their static appearanee is appropriated by the
audienee. Whether that appearanee is deemed feminine or masculine
depends largely on the physical, social, and cultural considerations of the
onlookers in appropriating gender. Onee the danee begins, however, the
femininity or masculinity of the daneers is revealed by the dancers them-
selves; their gender need not be (indeed, cannot bel) foisted upon them by
the observer. Tbis is because onee the danee begins, the femininity or
masculinity manifested is an exposed rather than imposed expressivity. Tbe
sex of the daneers, perused in the lines that were available when we
concentrated on their static appearanee, may not be telling after all as to
their gender. Tbe female daneer may appear masculine, and the male dancer
effeminate. Tbe typical significanee of the costumes as feminine or masculine
might recede given the way in which the daneers' movements call attention
to themselves and to the dancers. In short, it is the onset of movement that
distinguishes between an imposed genderjication and an exposed one.
Here we would do weIl to recall the distinction between the what and
how of bodily movement. It is not the what of bodily movement that grounds
the appearance of femininity and masculinity, for the same gesture can be
performed by the two daneers and appear feminine or not, appear masculine
or not. It is what we identified earlier as the how of bodily movement that
unites the feminine or masculine individual's appearanee regardless whether

Cannen, Orion Classics, 1983). Another reference to gender in Flamenco circ\es, and one
expressed either with disappointment or disdain, is that the dancing of the male is "en demasfa
femenino," too feminine. It seems, then, that within the dance the female is meant to appear
feminine, the male masculine. Another way in which the dance conceals gender is insofar as it
is indeed a form of social and cultural expression. The significance of the dance is, at least in
large part, rooted in the external factors that shape it. But I have suggested that while these
external forces may shape our conceptions of gender, they are not constituents of its originary
significance. Gender is, first and foremost, an exterior expression of the interior experience of
human beings.
In what sense, then, has the dance been able to reveal gender? As we shall see, its invitation
to reflect on the subtle yet exaggerated elements of its movement-namely, its what vs. its
how-has provided a basis for recognizing that gender is both distinct from sex and independent
of social and cultural elements. Specifically, the suspension of the natural attitude that facilitated
the discovery of the how is pivotal. How the body moves is a universal category that transcends
both sex and external factors Iike context and costuming.
 THE SPIRIT IN FLAMENCO 201

that individual is a she or a he, a Flamenco dancer or a Native American

ceremonial dancer, a wearer of pant-like garb or skirt-like garb. Whatever
the genderfied individual is doing, wherever and whenever it is being done,
femininity and masculinity present themselves in the mode in which the
individual moves. Femininity and masculinity, in their most original form,
appear as distinct qualities characterizing human comportment. Yet insofar
as the sense of each is constituted in contrast to the other, they would
appear to be different manifestations of a single, unified phenomenon. That
phenomenon is what we refer to as gender. In its most abstract appearance,
gender is a qualitative aspect of bodily movement that gauges how human
beings experience their own embodiment.
With this insight into gender's originary appearance and significance, the
connection between gender-difference and the difference manifested in
psychic saturation and restraint is brought into relief. Continuing with the
eidetic variation that taok our dancers out of Spain and even into a different
context for the dance, we see that they need not be dancing at all; the
qualitative difference that distinguishes their movement carries through to
two of the most mundane elements in our experience of the feminine and
masculine individual as different: the look and the walk. The typifiability of
the feminine look and walk is rooted fundamentally in the phenomenon of
psychic saturation, just as the typifiability of the masculine look and walk is
rooted in psychic restraint.
It is precisely psychic saturation that is expressed in the gesture of
lowering the eyes away from the gaze of the Other, which is one typical
element in the mundane appearance of the feminine individual. Walking
with a professor in Yale's Old Campus, we passed a woman who said hello
to both of us. After having addressed us, she lowered her eyes and continued
on. The professor remarked that it bothered hirn that so many women
dropped their gaze when confronted with a male-especially one in a
position of authority. Taking seriously his suggestion that I was not properly
feminist in my observations of male and female dynamics, I made note of the
gesture and began to seek it out. What is interesting is that this gesture, the
lowering of the lids after making direct eye contact with another, is neither
limited to women nor to the contexts suggested by the professor's remark.
Men and women alike, adults and children, (even whole cultures?)
commonly perform this gesture. At times the gesture appears deferential,
which is, I think, what the professor had in mind when he made his
comment. At times it appears downright subservient. Both of these
characterizations entail a kind of weakness, which dismayed the professor.
But the same gesture can also appear coquettish, flirtatious, playful; that is,
it can appear quite confident, quite powerful. Do the characterizations of
deference, subservience, coquettishness, flirtatiousness, and playfulness have
anything in common? Within the standpoint of the natural attitude, the
answer isn't so elusive: they are typically associated with the feminine, which
202 VICTORIA MORA

is why the professor, operating uncritically within the natural standpoint, saw
the gesture precisely as a woman's gesture.
Though we need not commit ourselves to the sex-gender correlation
functioning within the above example, or to the specific characterizations of
the gesture that clued us to its feminine association in everyday experience,
that association does underscore the fact that the appearance of femininity
is somehow highlighted in the lowering of the eyes. As we saw through the
Flamenco example, lowering the eyes actually accomplishes the task of
drawing attention toward the lowered gaze, toward the body of the individual
who so gestures. But insofar as this gesture represents a concentrated
looking at oneself as weIl as others, a deep awareness of, and attention to,
one's own body is revealed on the part of the feminine individual. This
attention is simultaneously personal and public. The alternation of the
feminine individual's look from self, to other, to self suggests that the
feminine individual is deeply aware of her or his own body as a phenomenon
experienced from the inside out and as a phenomenon experienced from the
outside in. This particular mode of awareness and attention was discovered
as elemental in the appearance of psychic saturation. When set side by side
and observed within the phenomenological stand point, appearances of
deference, subservience, coquettishness, flirtatiousness, and playfulness have
one thing in common: they manifest an intense awareness, on the part of the
individual, of her or his body's presence to self and to others.
The typically feminine gait, which calls attention to the individual body
parts engaged in the body's locomotion insofar as these parts are not only
communally operative in that locomotion, but also discretely, rounds out the
appearance of the third constituent of psychic saturation. The feminine walk
manifests the increased bodily sensation available in the female Flamenco
dancer's movement. Each body part, with special focus in the hip and chest-
shoulder region, appears to be "feIt through" by the individual whose walk
is characterized as feminine. This gives the feminine individual's walk the
"swishy" appearance that is often caricatured by female impersonators. This
appearance highlights the availability of the interior, psychic experience of
the individual on the surface of the exterior body. Each part is moved
through, so that what is being done becomes almost subordinate to how it
is being done. As suggested earlier, how something is done tells us
something about how it feels while being done. The surface body whose
individual parts participate in the fluidity of the whole body movement
appears saturated with the psyche that animates it.
The look and walk described briefly above are the more munda ne
counterparts to the role of our female dancer's look in manifesting her
attention to her own body and her awareness of the Other's attention to her
body, and to the intensified movements of the dancer through each of her
 THE SPIRIT IN FLAMENCO 203

body parts. 12 These mundane manifestations of psychic saturation have

their counterparts in the gaze that is firmly directed outward, and in the gait
that is manifestly focused on what is being done such that the individual
body parts recede while the whole-body motion takes center stage. I contend
that these latter gestures undergird the appearance of masculinity.
The look of the masculine individual is most easily discerned in contrast
to the look of the feminine individual. While the feminine individual's look
does not finally rest on what is outside of her or his own body, but returns
as if to a kind of reference point, the masculine individual's look typically
remains focused outside of her or his personal sphere of embodiment. It is
a directed gaze, whose concentration on what is other suggests a kind of
rest raint or detachment on the part of consciousness with respect to the
experience of its own embodiment. The look of the masculine individual
effects a kind of concealment of consciousness. It does not draw attention
to the masculine individual and therefore to the interior experiences that are
exteriorized by the gestures and expressions of the body. Rather, the
masculine look draws attention to the fact that attention is not being drawn
to her or his interior person! The masculine look does not flinch, which
gives the impression of control, perhaps even of a mechanical nature, that
we discovered in the male dancer's overall movement. This is central to the
appearance of psychic restraint on the surface of the body, which in a
peculiar sense appears as a semaphore that does not signal. In looking to
this semaphore, we as observers have little choice but to shift our focus in
the direction of the masculine individual's gaze, which is acting as a guide
away from the masculine individual.
The masculine "strut" is a study in contrast when juxtaposed with the
"swishy" appearance of the feminine walk. The strut most certainly calls
attention to itself. But it calls attention to itself not because its how is
intensely intimated in each of the discrete body parts involved in locomo-
tion, but because its how is somehow muted along with the discrete body
parts. The knees bend very little, the hips do not rotate at all, but remain in
a direct line with the chest and shoulder region, which itself betrays very
little movement. The body's parts, in fact, remain curiously still even while
the whole body is propelled forward. Our attention is drawn to the
masculine walk in much the same way that it is drawn to the masculine look.
We look because of what is not manifested there, because the bOdy, which
appears as the essential vehide of expression, expresses very little apart from

12 Hopefully we will not get too bogged down in the sex-gender correlation seemingly
reinforced by the Flamenco example. After all, it was the non-sex-specific body parts that
revealed psychic saturation and restraint. The eyes and hands were particularly telling in the
example, just as the eyes and hips were particularly telling in our everyday characterization of
a feminine look or walk. The eyes, hands, and hips are not sex-specific. Gender presents itself
as a broader bodily phenomenon than sex.
204 VICTORIA MORA

what is being done. The psychic experience of the masculine individual is re-
strained in its appearance by body parts that tell little regarding how the
movement is experienced, from the inside out, while it is being accom-
plished.
The crucial insight, which admittedly needs further attention and analysis,
is that the distinction between psychic saturation and restraint is to be found
at the heart of the distinction between the feminine and masculine
individual's appearance in the world. Though we can by no means ignore the
frequent correlation between femaleness and femininity, and maleness and
masculinity, that constitutes our familiar experience of gender, we must be
willing to acknowledge the limitation of this correlation in providing access
to the originary significance of gender. That significance cannot be
discovered in discussions that focus on men and women and the natural and
social forces that distinguish them. Gender's meaning is more primordial
than its conflation with sex can finally suggest. It is embedded in the most
fundamental structure of what it means to be a human being: embodied,
cognizant of that embodiment in various modes, and expressive of those
modes. To put it another way, gender is not available during the autopsy.
Only sex remains when the body in motion is reduced (in the pejorative
sense, not the phenomenological one) to the physical body. Since our
concern as phenomenologists, not pathologists, is with the expressive body,
we should be careful not to conflate gender with sex uncritically. Rather, we
must explore the interior dimension of gender as a phenomenon that reveals
something about the way in which human beings inhabit their bodies and
therefore the world. Gender merits careful philosophical consideration; it is
the concern of women and men alike who, in the spirit of social ontology,
wonder about what it means to be a human being and to encounter other
human beings in the world.
 MICHAEL F. McDuFFlE

ART AS AN ENCLAVE OF MEANING

For a relatively brief work, Alfred Schutz's essay, "On Multiple Realities,"1
presents a remarkably wide-ranging theory of subjective life. In it Schutz is
ultimately concerned with the themes that occupied his primary attention
throughout his life's work: the methodology and conceptual foundations of
the social sciences. However, as he defines his approach to these themes, he
addresses issues well beyond the range of what we might expect from a
"philosophy of the social sciences." For much of the essay, discussion of
direct questions of social-scientific methodology is postponed for the sake
of inquiry into the most general features of subjective experience. Schutz was
hoping to combat the naivet~ harbored in any expectation that a philosophy
of the social sciences might restrict itself to a narrow concern with method.
Schutz believed that, if these methodological issues are to be resolved, what
is needed is a thorough philosophical critique of subjective and intersub-
jective experience. Since subjective experience-experience as it is lived-is
the presumed "object" of social scientific investigation, discussion of social
scientific method must be guided by philosophical clarification of the nature
of subjective experience. Schutz thereby develops the notion of "multiple
realities" to serve as a general conception of the structure of subjective
experience; this philosophical conception, in turn, is called upon to provide
methodological guidance for the social sciences.
As he articulates the idea of multiple realities, Schutz discusses a variety
of experiences comprising the range of subjective life. I wish to pursue a
suggestion that Schutz makes, in passing, about the overall import of art.
Schutz proposes that the world of art constitutes one of many multiple
realities, a "finite province of meaning," to which we turn in contrast to our
mundane experience of the world. Accepting this claim, I hope to develop
it further and propose an additional suggestion: That art, as a finite province
of meaning, is best approached when it takes on the character of an
"enclave." The meaning of art, as aseparate "world," is most enriched when
works of art are explicitly intended along with, and within, a wider province
of meaning: that which is taken for gran ted as the life-world.

1 Alfred Schutz, "On Multiple Realities," in Collected Papers, Vol. I, ed. Maurice Natanson
(The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1962), 207-259. Hereafter cited as OMR.

205
S. Galt Crowell (ed.), The Prism ofthe Self, 205-219.
© 1995 Kluwer Academic Publishers.
206 MICHAEL F. MCDUFFIE

Schutz, following William James, develops the general idea that subjective
experience concerns itselfwith a multiplicity of "worlds," "sub-universes," or
"realities." Although Schutz cites James' work as a generally viable starting
point for his own investigation, the way in which he sets his own view apart
from James' is important. For James, each sub-universe is understood as a
separate domain ofbeing, in view ofwhich the experiencing subject res ponds
with belief or disbelief. For Schutz, on the other hand, each sub-universe is
to be regarded as a discrete domain of meaning; the issue of "being" is set
aside for the sake of analysis of various forms of intentionality. The manner
in which an experience is meaningfully intended as real, rather than the sort
of object given for experience, is what qualifies it as an experience within
this or that domain of reality. By posing the problem of reality as an issue
of intended meaning, Schutz secures his own investigation within a
phenomenological approach to experience:

In order to free [James'] important insight from its

psychologistic setting we prefer to speak instead of many
sub-universes of reality of finite provinces of meaning upon
each of which we may bestow the accent of reality. We
speak of provinces of meaning and not of sub-universes
because it is the meaning of our experiences, and not the
ontological structure of the objects, which constitutes real-
ity. Hence we call a certain set of our experiences a finite
province of meaning if all of them show a specific cognitive
style and are-with respect to this style-not only consistent
in themselves but also compatible with one another (OMR
230).

Each "province" is understood as aseparate domain of meanings,

associated with one another by virtue of the manner in which these mean-
ings receive the "accent of reality." What counts, for Schutz, is not a variety
of real domains of objects, believed or disbelieved, but a variety of "cognitive
styles" through which experiences are bestowed with different accents of
reality. Multiple provinces of meaning are therefore distinguished with
respect to the manners in which these various cognitive styles bestow a sense
of reality upon the "contents" of experience. For example, mundane experi-
ence of the life-world sustains its familiar sense of reality by virtue of being
intended through a particular cognitive style-the natural attitude. From the
standpoint of the natural attitude, the life-world receives its particular
"accent of reality" as the "real" domain of "actual" objects and events. The
life-world, as the social world of public time and space, of physical objects
and practical activities, as the "world of working," is taken for granted over
the course of experience as the "paramount reality" (OMR 226f). Strictly
speaking, the life-world sustains its reality tor the subject only as long as the
 ART AS AN ENCLAVE OF MEANING 207

subject sustains his or her adoption of the natural attitude; yet, due to the
dominance of the natural attitude, as one cognitive style among many, it is
likely that the life-world is taken for granted as the truly "real" world across
the course of a variety of experiences. Regardless of the frequency with
which other styles are adopted and other provinces of meaning receive their
customary accents of reality, the life-world comes to be taken for gran ted as
an unquestioned, truly "real" domain of "real being." Its status as a particular
province of meaning, as a correlated system of meaning-formations, goes
unnoticed. So seamless is the natural attitude-as it is experienced-and so
familiar is its standpoint, that it is likely to go unreflected as a particular
"cognitive style." It is hardly regarded as a "style" of experience in any sense;
rather, if it is noticed at all, it is regarded as synonymous with "experience"
itself. After all, its correlated field of meanings-the life-world-is typically
taken for granted as "the world" itself.
Nevertheless, phenomenological reflection reveals that the natural atti-
tude is one style among many. As we tend to pass over the natural attitude
as an attitude, we also tend to overlook the frequency with wh ich we
abandon it for the sake of other attitudes, or styles of experience. The
exchange of cognitive styles, in the course of daily life, is abundant, but we
are not likely to remark upon what is indeed a remarkable phenomenon: the
manner in which various "cognitive styles" are continuously adopted,
abandoned, and re-adopted. So familiar is the course of experience that its
structure as a manifold of cognitive styles is taken for gran ted. "Naturally
enough," our attention drifts away from the life-world, as the world of im-
mediately perceived objects and practical activities, toward various, multiple
provinces of meaning. As we adopt different standpoints for experience,
various accents of reality are bestowed on any number of discrete provinces
of meaning. These include: the world of theoretical contemplation, the many
worlds of intersubjective experience, the various worlds of imaginative
fantasy, dreaming, madness, and delusion, the worlds of play and gamesman-
ship, the world of religious experience, and, as we shall see, the world of art
and artistic creativity and enjoyment. As we adopt different cognitive styles
of experience, different provinces of meaning become important to us and
attain their characteristic sense of reality, at least for the moment.
For example, when 1 direct my attention to a problem in mathematics,
struggling, say, to pass a test, 1 adopt a style of experience markedly different
from the style sustained in my overall, ongoing orientation to the life-world.
Even if, in so me moment of ontological reflection, 1 might justifiably defend
the idea that the life-world is the one "true" world, "more real than num-
bers," numbers acquire a sense of reality all their own when numbers are
important to me. At least for the duration of my mathematics test, it is upon
the world of numbers that 1 prudently bestow the accent of reality. Over the
course of my test-taking, the world of numbers is more "real" for me than
the "actual" world of extended objects, and it will retain this reality for me,
208 MICHAEL F. McDuFFIE

at least until my test is completed. Victorious or downtrodden, I leave the

test behind, redirect my attention to the life-world, and pursue the next
happy task which lies before Me.
At issue here is the manner in which the world of mathematics takes on
the character of a particular domain of reality, as a province of meaning held
apart from the life-world. The set of experiences which I endure as I attend
to the test are of the same sort, "not only consistent in themselves but also
compatible with one another" (OMR 230). That is, they are all "mathemati-
cal experiences." Furthermore, they are only mathematical experiences: The
world of numbers is a finite province of meaning, even if its "content"
-number-is infinite. The finitude of any province of meaning-its structure
as one versus another province, with its own limits and borders-arises from
the distinction between multiple cognitive styles of experience. The cognitive
style which I adopt in order to dweil in the domain of numbers allows me
to dweil only within that domain, and as long as I sustain that style, nothing
besides numbers can occupy my attention. This is one reason why test-taking
can be so difficult, and the ability to "concentrate" our attention is such a
premium. When my pencil breaks, when my shoulder itches, when I notice
the hum of fluorescent light fixtures, my effort to sustain the cognitive style
of mathematics suffers. To live is to struggle, with or without math tests.
The path to temptation has multiple lanes.
Which of these lanes I follow depends upon the network of phenomena
which Schutz assembles under the title of relevance. The issue of relevance
is crucial to Schutz's overall theory of action, and it deserves abrief
description. 2 Relevance is an intended meaning, a sense of the present
significance of a motive, theme, or item of knowledge, in relation to my
ongoing action. The sense of relevance provides the drive and directionality
of human action; the issue of relevance is therefore a complicated affair.
Which of the multiple, finite provinces of meaning I turn to, bestowing the
accent of reality, or (to say the same thing) which of many cognitive styles
I adopt in the course of experience, depends upon my overall system of
relevances. In any moment, various motives for action assume different
degrees of "motivational relevance." As I choose among possible projects for
action, some desire or aversion, some trust or mistrust, gains priority over
other motives, occasioning me to select a particular course. Then, according
to the project chosen, one or another theme of attention attains "thematic
relevance" as a topic for study, investigation, or overt action; to that theme
I direct my attention, adopting whatever cognitive style of experience is

2 For a summary treatment, see Alfred Schutz, "Some Structures of the Life-World," in
Collected Papers, Vol. III, ed. I. Schutz (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1970), 116-132. For
SchulZ's most thorough treatment, see his Reflections on the Problem o[ Relevance, ed. Richard
M. Zaner (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1970).
 ART AS AN ENCLAVE OF MEANING 209

appropriate to the topic at hand. Finally, in view of that theme and the
problems it presents, various components of my "stock of knowledge at
hand" attain "interpretative relevance" toward the resolution of those
problems. Whatever projects I pursue, recognizing their import for my
ongoing situation in the world, my pursuits are governed according to the
system of relevance which I have developed over the course of my life. 3
These interconnected schemes of relevance lead me to one or another con-
cern, in view of which it becomes appropriate to adopt this or that cognitive
style, bestowing a particular accent of reality on this or that province of
meaning. According to the rule of relevance, as I pursue whatever themes,
act on whatever motives, and draw upon whatever items of knowledge I have
on hand, the course of my experience as a whole attains its character as a
sojourn through multiple provinces of meaning.
Each province of meaning attains its particular character, and its
potential relevance for me, according to the variety of meanings associated
within it. Nevertheless, each province of meaning attains its characteristic
import, as a particular domain of reality, according to the cognitive style
specifically correlated to it:

All these worlds-the world of dreams, of imageries and

phantasms, especially the world of art, the world of reli-
gious experience, the world of scientific contemplation, the
play world of a child, and the world of the insane-are finite
provinces of meaning. This means that (a) all of them have
a peculiar cognitive style (although not that of the world of
working in the natural attitude); (b) all experiences within
each of these worlds are, with respect to this cognitive style,
consistent in themselves and compatible with one another
(although not compatible with the meaning of everyday
life); (c) each of these finite provinces of meaning may
receive a specific accent of reality (though not the reality
accent of the world of working) (OMR 232).

The cognitive style of dreaming is typically different from the cognitive

style of the "wide-awake" natural attitude, and it is due to this difference that
we owe any clear demarcation between "waking life" and "dream life." Hence,
the meaningful "content" of an experience is not what qualifies it as dream-
experience or waking-experience. The life-world can take on the character
of a "dream-world," if it is experienced in a dream-like fashion, just as an

3 Schutz raises the issue of relevance in a particularly interesting section of OMR entitled
"The world of working as paramount reality; the fundamental anxiety; the epoche of the natural
attitude" (OMR 226ft).
210 MICHAEL F. MCDUFFIE

"imaginary world" can take on the reality-accent of "actuality," if it is

approached through the natural attitude of belief. Of course, from the
perspective of our "normal" orientation to experience, i.e., from the
perspective of the natural attitude directed toward the life-world, the latter
experience is to be understood as delusional, and the former as whimsical.
Nevertheless, as far as the experiencing subject is C9ncerned, a shift in the
cognitive style directed to a given theme of experience implies areal shift in
the subjective character of "reality" attributed to it. Whether my experience
takes on the reality-accent of a dream, or of vivid, wide-awake, "real" life, is
not determined by the themes to which my experience is directed; rather, the
sense of reality of my experience is determined by the specific cognitive style
adopted with regard to those themes. Certainly, the "noematic content" of
these themes ("Enough of these foolish daydreams!") can occasion an ex-
change of cognitive styles; nevertheless, that exchange alone is what de-
termines the character of my present experience as a particular sort of exper-
ience, whether "mere dream" or "real life."
What we must consider, therefore, in reckoning the world of art as a
finite province of meaning, is the general idea of the cognitive style adopted
through any single trajectory of experience. In order to grasp the world of
art as a particular province of meaning, we must prepare to distinguish a
cognitive style of experience peculiar to "aesthetic" experience. Each style of
experience bestows a different character of reality upon its correlated
province of meaning, determining its limits as a finite province of meaning.
Each cognitive style implies different criteria for what sorts of experiences
can count as valid within it; each style determines what sorts of experiences
can be held as compatible and consistent with one another, as experiences
of a particular province. What counts as a valid, "real" experience in my
dream-life is one thing; what can be counted as a valid experience in the
wide-awake natural attitude is another. Dream experiences cannot be "ex-
ported" suddenly to the world of waking life, and, without further analysis,
be rendered consistent and compatible with the sorts of experiences that
count as valid within the wide-awake style. The dream-world and the wide-
awake life-world have their own borders. Certainly it is possible, perhaps
even routine, that waking from my dream I wonder whether I'm still
dreaming. I may wonder if the familiar setting of my bedroom is the "real"
bedroom or the "dream" bedroom; but this is to say that, for the moment,
I am caught between two worlds-caught between two cognitive styles of
experience. Eventually I wake up, "shake off" the cognitive style of dreaming,
and reconcile myself to the ugly reality that this is no dream. (I really have
been transformed into a "monstrous vermin," and I really do have a horrible
jOb).
The transition from dream-life to wide-awakeness may be sudden or
gradual, smooth or disturbing, but eventually it becomes a transition com-
plete in form and quality. The movement from one province to another
 ART AS AN ENCLAVE OF MEANING 211

entails a total shift in our overall attitude of experience; one cognitive style
is abandoned, as a whole, for the sake of another. Schutz, borrowing from
Kierkegaard, describes this movement as a "leap" (OMR 232). Any such
"leap" is experienced as a sort of "shock," as a momentary, sudden or gradual
transition away from the previous attitude. As I shift my attention from one
province to another, I experience a heightening or relaxation of the specific
"tension of consciousness" (OMR 212f) that I had sustained in the earlier
attitude. A different intensity of attention-in the phrase which Schutz takes
from Bergson, a different attention a la vie (OMR 212)-is directed to the
course of experience. The feeling of shock arises from the fact that an
entirely different accent of reality is bestowed upon the province into which
I "leap." As this other province of meaning is taken up, my horizonal
anticipations adjust themselves in a manner consistent with the character of
reality bestowed upon that province. I enter into a sense of reality which
may differ greatly, or less noticeably, from that which I have left behind. The
reality-accent bestowed upon that province informs my sense of experience
as being this or that sort of experience-waking, dreaming, practical,
contemplative, and so on.
Subjective life is therefore aseries of departures and returns between the
natural attitude and the cognitive styles specific to provinces of meaning
other than the life-world. Each of these "leaps" acquires its own character as
an experience of cognitive transition. As Schutz writes:

There are as many kinds of different shock experiences as

there are different finite provinces of meaning upon which
I may bestow the accent of reality. Some instances are: the
shock of falling asleep as the leap into the world of dreams;
the inner transformation we endure if the curtain in the
theater rises as the transition into the world of the
stageplay; the radical change in our attitude if, before a
painting, we permit our visual field to be limited by what
is within the frame as the passage into the pictorial world;
our quandary, relaxing into laughter, if, in listening to a
joke, we are for a short time ready.to accept the fictitious
world of the jest as a reality in relation to which the world
of our daily life takes on the character of foolishness; the
child's turning toward his toy as the transition into the
play-world; and so on (OMR 231).

This quotation returns us to our central theme. The clear suggestion here
is that the world of art is given to experience as a finite province of
meaning, intended through a specific cognitive style adopted as a movement
away from other concerns with other provinces of meaning. This view of art,
though undeveloped, holds a certain promise for the philosophical investi-
212 MICHAEL F. MCDUFFIE

gation of art. If we can c1arify, phenomenologically, the sense of that

"passage into the pictorial world," then I think we can better understand the
relevance of these pictorial worlds for our ongoing existence in the life-
world. For art, even as "f'art pour f'art," retains significance for those who
make and appreciate it, and preserves its relation to the life-world from
which it is created. There remains, between these two provinces of meaning,
a certain sort of connection, however inexplicit it may be. The question of
how these worlds are related remains, I think, the principal issue for the
philosophy of art. The challenge for a phenomenological approach to art,
Schutzian or otherwise, is to articulate how this connection between worlds
is given for experience in the creation and appreciation of works of art.
Here, the idea of a cognitive style of experience, specific to the world of
art, will prove helpful. Aesthetic experience acquires its meaning by virtue
of the manner in which a work is experienced, through a specific style of
experience. That cognitive style provides our sole assurance that we view the
work of art as art-as a finite province of meaning in its own right, with its
own particular accent of reality. What remains obscure is how art, as a finite
province of meaning, is experienced in immanent relation to that province
taken for granted as the "actual" world-the life-world. Here again, however,
the idea of a specifically "aesthetic" style of experience will c1arify matters.
The cognitive style of aesthetic experience must be one through which, at
least some of the time, the "world" of the work and the world of our ongoing
lives can be experienced in direct relation to one another. For it is as a
discrete, finite province of meaning, directed to, but independent of the life-
world, that art derives its power to captivate our attention, to hold us in the
sway of its own reality, and to enrich our mundane experience of the life-
world.
By virtue of a particular style of cognition, the world of the work can be
explored for its immanent relation to the life-world. All that remains is the
c1arification of this particular cognitive style. Schutz, in his discussion of the
natural attitude as the cognitive style typically directed to the life-world,
provides a succinct list of its general stylistic features. Let us review that list,
in order to adopt it as a general guide for the description of any particular
style. Every style exemplifies some variant of the following features that
Schutz outlines with regard to the natural attitude:

1) a specific tension of consciousness, namely wide-

awakeness, originating in full attention to life;
2) a specific epoche, namely suspension of doubt;
3) aprevalent form of spontaneity, namely working (a
meaningful spontaneity based upon a project and character-
ized by the intention of bringing about the projected state
of affairs by bodily movements gearing into the outer
world);
 ART AS AN ENCLAVE OF MEANING 213

4) a specific form of experiencing one's self (the working

self as the total seIt);
5) a specific form ofsociality (the common intersubjective
world of communication and social action);
6) a specific time-perspective (the standard time origi-
nating in an intersection between duree and cosmic time as
the universal temporal structure of the intersubjective
world) (OMR 230-31).

A complete analysis of "aesthetic" experience would attend to each of

these features as aspects of the specific cognitive style attuned to the world
of art. Here, however, a host of complications seems to arise. It seems
reasonable that each of the arts-theater, dance, music, painting, sculpture,
architecture, etc.-should be experienced by virtue of a cognitive style of its
own. Furthermore, each work of art, it would seem, should be experienced
through a cognitive style suited to it as an individual work. It also seems
likely that significant differences should be noted between the cognitive
styles specific to the creation of works of art-the artist's point of view-and
those associated with an audience's point of view. If the world of art can be
understood as a finite province of meaning, then every art form, every
medium, and each work, in turn, might stake their claims as separate
provinces of meaning, experienced through their own, singular styles of
cognition. These claims should be recognized; every experience, of a work
of art or whatever, is lived according to an irreducibly unique cognitive style.
We should not be deterred, however, from attempting 10 articulate the
general features of experience, observable across the variety of individual
experiences. To clarify the general features of experience, to investigate the
possibility of their apriori status, and to locate their origins in the structure
of subjective life, is after all the principal business of phenomenology.
We already operate with a rough idea of "aesthetic experience," despite
the countless variations among experiences that qualify as such. Therefore,
it seems possible to sharpen this idea and to articulate, in the jargon of
phenomenology, the "eidetic generalities" observable throughout these exper-
iences. In other words, it would not appear impossible to outline a "specific
cognitive style" of aesthetic experience in general: When we turn to a work
of art, whether visual art, a theatrical performance, or a musical piece, we
adopt an attitude different from our ordinary, mundane orientation to the
life-world. To appreciate the work as a work, we must direct our attention
10 it with a particular intention of meaning, bestowing upon it a particular
accent of reality (quite different from that bestowed on the life-world). This
is to say, we sustain a "specific epoche," (feature number 2, above) suspend-
ing disbelief in the work while preserving an awareness that it is "only" a
work of art. By virtue of this epoche, we allow ourselves to be drawn into the
work as a source of sensual and imaginative experience. If successful, the
214 MICHAEL F. MCDUFFIE

work derives apower to command our attention, stirring us, according to its
own textures, to relax or heighten the "specific tension" of our consciousness
(feature number 1, above). Along the same lines, as we enter into the
"world" of the work and pursue its horizons of meaning, we allow our "time-
perspective" (number 6, above) to be structured according to its own
rhythms. Whether as a visual composition or as a musicalor dramatic
performance, the work establishes its own dUTee. Our own inner time, as
viewers or as composers, takes on the time-structure of the work; we lend
ourselves to the dUTee which it establishes.
This lending-ourselves-over to the work, even as we remain bodily
situated in the life-world, is experienced as the "prevalent form of spontane-
ity" of aesthetic experience (number 3, above). Our experience in viewing or
creating a work of art retains a spontaneity similar to our experience of play,
even if it requires us, especially as artists, to engage in the world of working.
The spontaneity of our activity, as we follow the time-structure of the work,
retains an awareness of itself as a form of action in the life-world not
reducible to any concept of ordinary working. At the very least, as viewers
or audience members, in sustaining the epoche of the experience we position
ourselves in a certain stance within the life-world, however different it may
be from the stance of ordinary working. We remain aware of our status as
viewers who in time complete their viewing and move on, and we preserve
awareness of our capacity to turn away from the work at any time, should
we choose. This is to say, throughout the experience we are alive to a
"specific form of experiencing [the] self" (number 4, above). We are aware
of a self somewhat detached from itself, from the "working self as the total
seIf," especially as viewers rather than producers of the work. 4
Finally, aesthetic experience involves us in "a specific form of sociality"
(feature number 5, above). Here, generalities are more difficult to determine
across the spectrum of the arts. Depending upon our circumstances as
viewers, artists, or performers, we may view and create works alone or as
members of groups, depending upon the sort of work involved. These
circumstances notwithstanding, to view a work of art that is not of one's own
creation implies a specific sort of sociality: To involve oneself with a work
is to involve oneself with a virtual Other. The work is the work of another
human being. The meaningful content of the experience is not reducible to
one's own activity. We lend ourselves over to the dUTee of another as we
view the work, to that dUTee which the artist has fixed in the time-structure

4 Here the similarities between viewing and ereating works draw thin: To produce a work
we must adopt the perspeetive of viewers, detaehed from the total self, and altemately, remain
capable of adopting a particular mode of working in the world. This implies significant differ-
ences in the "prevalent form of spontaneity" as weil as in the time-strueture of the ereative aet.
The ereative aet requires moments of detaehed viewing but introduces additional faetors specifie
to it as a form of working.
 ART AS AN ENCLAVE OF MEANING 215

of the composition. Whether we bring this relation with the Other into
awareness at any point, our experience is given its time-structure, as weIl as
its sensual and imaginative "contents," by virtue of another's activity.
To experience a work of art, we must adopt some variation of this overall
cognitive style, which in any instance will take on a particular texture as the
style of a singular aesthetic experience. What I wish to emphasize, in
connection with the question I have raised earlier, is the way in which this
general style of experience, although adeparture from the life-world, retains
a particular sort of connection with the life-world. This connection is
preserved by virtue of each of the factors I have described, but its dearest
aspect can be seen in the specific epoche which is adopted in aesthetic
experience. To experience a work of art as a work, we must give ourselves
over to its sensual and imaginative contents, follow its time-structure, and
lend it credence as a theme of our attention. Yet, if the work is to be
experienced as a work, our suspension of disbelief in its reality must remain
vigilantly incomplete. 5 The work must remain "only" a work, in contrast to
the sustained "actuality" of the life-world. As we view the work, we must to
some degree intend it explicitly as a domain of meanings separate from the
life-world; we must intend it "against" the life-world, as other than the life-
world. The work receives an accent of reality that is, as an aspect of the
intrinsic meaning of the experience, knowingly different from that bestowed
upon the life-world.
This demand, placed upon our experience by the decision to turn to the
work, is the origin of greater things. Since the work must be intended in this
"negative," "dialectical" relation to the life-world, the work can always be
related to the life-world in a more "positive" manner; what is experienced in
the work can be referred, in that very moment, to what is experienced as
relevant in the life-world. Our experience of the work transcends the char-
acter of a mere entertainment, if, over the course of its appreciation, we
refer the work explicitly to our overall situation as human beings. We best
appreciate art when, far from "losing ourselves" in its meaning, we relate the
work to our ongoing experience in the life-world, and (so to speak) "find
ourselves" in its meaning.
Our experience of a work of art can acquire the structure of a particular
sort of "appresentation," or "pairing," of the work with the life-world. 6
Within what is immanent to the meaningful thrust of a single series of per-

5 This problem has received attention, in a c1assic article, under the rubric of "psychical
distance." See Edward Bullough, ''Psychical Distance as a Factor in Art and an Aesthetic Princi-
pie," British Journal o[ Psychology, Vol. V, (1912); reprinted in Problems o[Aesthetics, ed. Eliseo
Vivas and Murray Krieger (New York: Rinehart, 1953).
6 Schutz offers an excellent discussion of Husserl's concept of appresentation in "Symbol,
Reality, and Society," in Collected Papers I, op. cit., 294-300.
216 MICHAEL F. MCDUFFIE

ceptions, the work and the world can be intended as overlapping one
another in their separate meanings. Then our experience of the work pur-
sues a dual horizon; the work is not viewed as a discrete horizon of meaning,
set apart from the life-world, but as a horizon of meaning given along with
and within the overall world-horizon. As I experience the work, pursuing its
horizons, I retain awareness of its import as a province of meaning imma-
nently related to the life-world as a wider province of meaning. In other
words, the work, as a finite province of meaning, takes on the character of
an "enclave" within the greater horizon of the life-world.
"Enclave" is the name Schutz gives to this phenomenon of the overlap-
ping of finite provinces of meaning, when "regions belonging to one province
[are] enclosed by another" (OMR 233n). Although Schutz leaves this
concept somewhat understated, its importance should not be underestimated.
At the very least, it helps to express the idea that

[t]he concept of finite provinces of meaning does not

involve any static connotation as though we had to select
one of these provinces as our horne to live in, to start from
or return to. That is by no means the case. Within a single
day, even within a single hour our consciousness may run
through most different tensions and adopt most different
attentional attitudes to life (OMR 233).7

Although experience generally takes on the style appropriate to a partic-

ular province of meaning, it is more accurately the case that experience of
the one province is modulated by continual leaps and returns to and from
other provinces of meaning. Given these modulations, it is inevitable that
our experience also quite frequently takes on the structure of enclaves. Even
as we direct our attention to one province of meaning, it is typical that we
find relevance in "importing" meanings from other provinces; without
abandoning one cognitive style altogether, we take up aspects of another.
For example, as I type this sentence the main thrust of my attention is
devoted to the meaning which I am trying to communicate. Now I notice a
typographical error. Without forsaking my original train of thought, I make
the deftest detour through the world of working, find the backs pace key on
my keyboard, enter a correction, and continue my writing-a commonplace,
taken-for-granted performance. I introduce another style of experience, even
as I continue the thrust of the original style.
Remarkably enough, we take for granted this capacity to adopt different
styles at once, and to attend to different provinces of meaning within a

7 See Maurice Natanson's discussion of enclaves in Anonymity: A Study in the Philosophy

0/ Alfred Schutz (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986), Chapter V.
 ART AS AN ENCLAVE OF MEANING 217

single series of pereeptions. Our expeditions through enclaves may be

voluntary or imposed, occasioned by our own choiee or thrust upon us by
factors beyond our control. In either case, when some foray through an
enclave becomes relevant to our purposes at hand, we respond to the
situation with minimal reflection. Our ability to correlate various species of
experienees within the immanent drive of a single course of experienee
attests to our routine, taken-for-granted, cognitive mastery of the world. The
unreflected character of enclaves is a marvel among marvels; the enclave is
overlooked as just another side-show along the underesteemed midway of
mundane life. Still, it is no mean feat to be able to render quite disparate
sorts of experienees "not only consistent in themselves but also compatible
with one another" (OMR 230).
For the moment, as I negotiate my way through an enclave, my experi-
enee pursues a dual horizon, adopting at onee the features of separate styles
of experienee. Schutz provides us with another example of an enclave: "Any
projecting within the world of working is itself, as we have seen, a
phantasying, and involves in addition a kind of theoretical contemplation,
although not neeessarily that of the scientific attitude" (OMR 233n). This is
to say that, for the sake of completing my work, my practical attitude of
working must involve within itself a contemplative attitude. Through a
"phantasying," I "check up" on my previous work, project ahead imaginatively
to the finished product, revise my working strategies, and forge ahead. An
imagined, "phantasied" provinee of meaning is intended as an enclave within
the world of working, acquiring its relevanee by referenee to a project
pursued in the world of working. The "working attitude" is not abandoned
for the sake of a purely contemplative activity, but is sustained throughout.
Conversely, this contemplative activity is not taken up for its own sake, but
only for the sake of the work to be done, even as the work is continued. A
further provinee of meaning reeeives attention, but only out of its relevanee
to what is continued in an original and separate provinee of meaning.
The relevanee of art to life is best appreciated when the work of art is
intended as an enclave of the life-world. At very least, the "pairing" of work
and life-world must occur as I view a work, ifthat work is to be understood
as anything more significant than entertainment, a fantasy among fantasies.
As I view a work of art-for example, a painting-I should view that work not
merely as a provinee of meaning separate from the life-world but as an
enclave of meaning within the life-world. The pictorial world of the painting
constitutes one provinee of meaning intended within, and along with,
another provinee of meaning: the life-world. In the course of this experienee,
I pursue what is at least a dual horizon: Even as I bestow an aceent of
reality upon the visual field of the pictorial world, my attention retains its
sense of the life-world as the paramount reality. The world within the
picture-frame is approached in a manner that ties its import to myexperi-
enee of the world extending beyond the frame. My interest in the life-world
218 MICHAEL F. MCDUFFIE

is not abandoned, as it might be for the sake of mere entertainment; rather,

the life-world, as the overall field of my mortal concerns, is intended along
with the painting, and the work, as a province of imaginative meanings, is
appreciated as an enclave within the wider province of the world.
Intended as an enclave in the midst of mundane experience, the work is
laid open as an expression of human concerns. What must be understood is
that enclaves are not like separate puddies of meaning on the dry sidewalks
of the world. Tbe enclave and its "surrounding" province are not given as
different sorts of experiences side-by-side, but as overlapping experiences of
a different sort. Tbe enclave, as aseparate province of meaning, is connected
in its own meaning to the province given primary and ongoing concern. Tbe
relevance of the "enclaved" meaning, as a theme for present attention, sterns
from the actor's ongoing system of relevances, in virtue of which the
primary, "surrounding" province of meaning preserves its importance. Two
domains of meaning are intended through the same act, receiving different
accents of reality in the same moment. If, to borrow a phrase from Maurice
Natanson, we can speak of a "current" of experience,B then we might
compare an enclave to an eddy in that current. An eddy takes its force from
the main current, continuing that current even as it channels the current in
a different direction, swirling it back against itself, in order that the water
should overcome some obstruction, eventually to continue its current
downstream. Tbe eddy originates from the primary current, as apart of that
current, and contributes to its eventual direction: Tbe eddy is an eddy of the
current. By analogy, an enclave is an enclave of the primary province of
meaning, taking its force or its relevance from that province, according to
the relevance recognized there. Even as an enclave is opened up, the original
trajectory of experience is maintained. Tbe current continues through the
eddy, and is continued by it.
At the peril of overworking this metaphor, we might suggest that works
of art can take on the aspect of eddies in the current of daily life. Set within
and against the course of daily life, the work of art deflects, yet carries
through, the current of ordinary experience. Tbe work transcends the life-
wOrld, but even as it alters the flow of experience, it contributes to that flow
of experience. It emerges as an enclave of (and not merely within) the life-
world. As an enclave, a painting is experienced not merely as a picture of

B Natanson's use of this figure is widespread. For one example, see "Phenomenology as a
Rigorous Science," International Philosophical Quarterly, Vol. VII, (March 1967),7. I find the
same figure of speech throughout my notes of his lecture course at Yale, "Philosophy in Litera-
ture." Twice I enjoyed serving as a teaching assistant for that course; the present discussion is
rooted in that experience. Although I must take full responsibility for putting it in these terms,
Mr. Natanson's lectures remain, for me, the most forceful argument for treating the literary
work as an enclave of meaning, whose import is best appreciated through devoted attention to
the world of daily life.
 ART AS AN ENCLAVE OF MEANING 219

another world, given for experience in this world; rather, the pictorial world
is tied into this world, understood as "appresenting" the life-world. The
meaning of the work attains a particular symbolic dimension. 9 Its import
extends beyond its inner pictorial content; our sense of the world, as a
province of meaning in its own right, is intended as integral to the overall
import of the work. As aseparate visual world, the painting refers us back
to the life-world-the very same world that it transcends as aseparate
province of meaning.
Experienced in this manner, the work of art is intensified in its meaning,
and resonates with the meaning of the world as it is taken for granted. Art
is not merely a province of meaning beyond the life-world. Art is an enclave
of meaning woven into the life-world. As a reality separate from mundane
life, art opens a view to that life as a· whole. The life-world, reflected
through the work of art, is brought to awareness in its own right. Co-
intended with the work, the life-world offers itself up as a province of
meanings less easily taken for gran ted. Set in relief from the course of
mundane experience, art throws that course of experience, as a whole, and
as the origin of all meanings, into relief.

9 Schutz, in fact, draws upon the notion of enclaves, in order to characterize the
appresentational force of symbolic signs. See his discussion of the interpretation of dream
symbols, in ReflectiollS on the Problem 0/ Relevance, op. eit., 106-107. Here the dream symbol,
when interpreted from a wide-awake stand point, is specifically referred to as "an enclave in the
actuallevel of reality." See also "Symbol, Reality, and Society," in Collected Papers I, op. eit., 343.
Here, although Schutz does not use the term "enclave," his description of "symbolic appre-
sentation" amounts to the same idea: Tbe "appresenting member" of the symbolic sign is given
in the paramount reality of the life-world, whereas the "appresented member"-the symbolic
meaning-refers to a province of meaning which transcends the life-world. I would at least
suggest that the symbolic meaning of a work of art, in transcending the life-world, returns our
attention to the life-world.
 GAIL WEISS

ANONYMI'IY, ALIENATION, AND SUSPENSION

IN KAFKA'S METAMORPHOSIS

Upon his transformation, at the outset of The Metamorphosis, into a

"monstrous vermin," Gregor Samsa asks himself a rather predictable
question: "What's happened to me?" In response, the narrator teHs us only
that "it was no dream." Both Samsa's question and the narrator's response
haunt the entire text-the question is never satisfactorily answered and the
response itself is continuaHy chaHenged as Kafka narrates a surreal sequence
of events. It is noteworthy as weH that Samsa asks himself the question and
the narrator supplies a rejoinder. Embedded in this question are several:
"Am I the same?" "How, exactly, have I been affected by this metamorpho-
sis?" "Have I reaHy changed or am I just dreaming?" "What has happened?
"What kind of happening is this?" "How has this happened? The question, in
itself, does not privilege either the subject of the happening, the "what" of
the happening, the "how" of the happening, or the happening itself. Instead,
aH are placed in question, and the question is left suspended and remains
suspended even after the story has ended. 1
The narrator's rejoinder to the question does, however, privilege one
interpretation of the question over the others, namely, the "what" of the
metamorphosis itself. Moreover, the response depersonalizes the experience
by rendering the "me" invisible: "It was no dream." Accordingly, the reader,
Samsa, and the narrator immediately turn their attention away from the "me"
and defer questions regarding the current status of the "me" in order to
begin a cursory inspection of Samsa's immediate environs to ascertain that
aH is indeed in order. The narrator's matter-of-fact description of Samsa's
tragi-comic attempts to reckon with his changed situation initiates a critical
distance between the reader and Samsa that is carefuHy maintained through-

1 The explicit self-reflexivity ofthis question makes it especially apparent why, as Heidegger
has noted in "What is Metaphysics?", "the questioner as such is present together with the
question, that is, is placed in question." See Martin Heidegger, Basic Writinl§S, ed. David Farrell
Krell (New York: Harper & Row, 1977), 95-96. The apparent simplicity of this initial question,
"What's happened to me?", conceals the very real danger, in Gregor Samsa's case, that the
answer will turn out to be "nothing."

221
S. Galt Crowell (ed.), The Prism ofthe Self, 221-230.
© 1995 Kluwer Academic Publishers.
222 GAIL WEISS

out most of the story. Although we are told of Samsa's laborious struggle to
get out of bed in a manner that induces our sympathy, our sympathy is not
tied to the individual, Gregor Samsa (whom we don't yet know, and never,
ultimately, come to know), but to the Sisyphean struggles of Everyone and
Anyone who might find themselves in such a plight. And, by empathizing
with the struggle itself, a struggle to restore "normalcy" in the face of
unforeseen obstacles, the reader sets aside the fundamental question of the
"me," the questioner, who is so wholeheartedly implicated in this question,
and instead res ponds to Samsa from an alienated standpoint that paralleis
Samsa's own response to himself and his situation.
Rather than pursuing the quest to discover whether everything (except for
Gregor Samsa himself) is as it was, let us (re)turn to the unresolved ques-
tion of the ontological status of the "me" who has undergone this metamor-
phosis. To begin with, it may be helpful to describe this particular "me" from
within what Husserl terms the "natural standpoint."2
According to Husserl, the natural standpoint is an ongoing perspective
that human beings for the most part uncritically adopt, in which we individu-
ally accept the "givenness" of the world as a whole, even when aspects of the
world are placed in question. Moreover, it is because the world is itself
"taken-for-granted," ontologically speaking, that it provides a stable structure
against which questions about this or that aspect of it can be asked. Most
importantly, the natural standpoint, while individually maintained, is inter-
subjectively accessible as a shared horizon for all social interaction. It is not
surprising, therefore, that the unexpectedness ofGregor Samsa's transforma-
tion in no way diminishes his conviction that the "fact-world," which has
comprised his existence prior to his transformation, remains one and the
same after his transformation. The very question, "What's happened to me?,"
through all of its various interpretations, is a question that can only be asked
from within the natural standpoint, since the change that precipitates the
question would not be recognizable as such unless it stood out against the
backdrop of Gregor Samsa's ordinary expectations about how things are and
should be. And yet, the very inexplicability of Samsa's metamorphosis raises
questions about the limits of the natural stand point itself, since there is no

2 The c\earest articulation of the "natural standpoint" appears in Husserl's chapter entitled
"lbe Thesis of the Natural Stand point and its Suspension," in Edmund Husserl, ldeas: General
Introduction to Pure Phenomenology, trans. W. R. Boyce-Gibson (New York: Collier Books,
1%2), %: "I find continually present and standing over against me the one spatio-temporal fact-
world to which 1 myself belong, as do all other men found in it and re1ated in the same way to
it. This 'fact-world,' as the world already teils us, 1 find to be out there, and also take it just as it
gives itself to me as something that exists out there. All doubting and rejecting of the data of the
natural world leaves standing the general thesis 01 the natural standpoint. 'The' world is as fact-
world always therej at the most it is at odd points 'other' than 1 supposed, this or that under
such names as 'illusion,' 'hallucination,' and the Iike, must be struck out of it, so to speakj but
the 'it' remains ever, in the sense of the general thesis, a world that has its being out there."
 ANONYMITY, ALIENATION, AND SUSPENSION 223

way to make sense of the metamorphosis from within the natural standpoint
except to argue that it is a dream, illusion, or hallucination-alternatives that
are rejected at the outset by the reply to Samsa's question and by Samsa's
own discovery that his immediate surroundings remain constant despite his
own substantial change.
If the question, "What's happened to me?," takes place from within the
natural stand point, and if, as I will argue, Gregor Samsa never abandons the
natural standpoint despite the fact that his metamorphosis directly chal-
lenges the stand point and all that it presupposes about his everyday exist-
ence, we should look first to the natural standpoint itself to see how the
question might be interpreted from within it and what answers the natural
standpoint might provide.
The temporal ambiguity of the statement "What's happened to me?"
opens up the possibility that this "happening" itself need not be coincidental
with Samsa's overnight transformation into a "monstrous vermin." Indeed,
it is not uncommon to utter the expression, "What's happened to me?," in
response to the recognition of a change one has undergone over a relatively
long period of time. So, to what extent does Samsa's present situation
(commencing with the discovery of his metamorphosis) differ from his past
situation? From the natural standpoint, the most immediate change is so
obvious it hardly needs mentioning: Gregor Samsa now no longer has the
body of a human being but the body of some type of insect. Instead of two
legs he has numerous pairs of legs; instead of walking upright, he crawls
along the floor and walls; he has antennre and a carapace that covers his
back; he cannot digest fresh foods, but can only eat spoiled or rotten re-
mains; and, he can no longer use his linguistic skills to communicate directly
with anyone.
Ultimately, however, what is more interesting about Gregor Samsa's
metamorphosis is not the changes themselves, but rather what does not
change. For the very question, "What's happened to me?," signals that
something very fundamental has not changed at all, namely, Gregor Samsa's
own sense of identity. Although Samsa is unable to continue on in his job,
can no longer maintain the same relationships with his family that he
enjoyed prior to his transformation, does not like the same foods as before
(but stillloves music, a point we shall return to), and, most frustrating of all,
cannot discuss his misery and pain with anyone, he retains a sense of self
that varies very Httle from the beginning to the end of the story:

Sometimes he thought that the next time the door opened

he would take charge of the family's affairs again, just as he
had done in the old days ... At other times he was in no
mood to worry about his family, he was completely filled
with rage at his miserable treatment, and although he could
not imagine anything that would pique his appetite, he still
224 GAlL WEISS

made plans for getting into the pantry, to take what was
coming to him, even if he wasn't hungry (My emphasis).3

Samsa's frustration and rage are understandable reactions to an incomp-

rehensible situation, and yet what is surprising is that he never takes these
responses one step further, namely, he never begins to question the presup-
positions that have heretofore grounded and guided his existence and which
cannot be relied upon now. Despite his extraordinary circumstances, Samsa
firmly retains the sense of reality of an "ordinary man" and refuses to place
this perspective into question. And, "as an ordinary man in ordinary life"
Maurice Natanson claims in his book, Anonymity,

I tacitly assurne that not only am I areal being in areal

world which I share with other real human beings but that
the meaning of 'real' in this case is of no interest to myself
or to my fellow-men. Under ordinary circumstances, real is
real. Unless there is a question of hallucination or some
quite remarkable set o[ circumstances, there is no need to
seek clarification or confirmation regarding what is real
(My emphasis).4

But is not Samsa's transformation precisely such a "remarkable set of

circumstances" that might lead us to expect hirn to forgo the standpoint of
the "ordinary man?" What sense can we, as readers, make out of his refusal
to abandon it at any cost? What is at stake here? To ask this question is to
ask what it is that the natural standpoint provides the "ordinary man;" more
specifically, it is to ask how the natural standpoint both establishes and
perpetuates an individual's sense of identity.
In The Problem o[ Social Reality, Alfred Schutz explores at length the
most characteristic feature of the natural standpoint, namely, the way in
which it takes the world for granted. According to Schutz, to "take for
granted"

means to accept until further notice our knowledge of

certain states of affairs as unquestionably plausible. Of
course, at any time that which seemed to be hitherto un-
questionable might be put in question. Common-sense

3 Franz Kafka, The Metamorphosis, trans. and ed. Stanley Corngold (New York: Bantam
Books, 1972), 43. Subsequent references to The Metamorphosis will be incorporated into the
text).
4 Maurice Natanson, Anonymity: A Study in the Philosophy o[ Alfred Schutz (Bloomington:
Indiana University Press, 1986), 9.
 ANONYMITY, ALIENATION, AND SUSPENSION 225

thinking simply takes for gran ted, until counterevidence

appears, not only the world of physical objects but also the
sociocultural world into which we are born and in which we
grow up. This world of everyday life is indeed the unques-
tioned but always questionable matrix within which all our
inquiries start and end. 5

We have already noted that Gregor Samsa, despite his transformation, does
not seem to question, or want to question, those aspects of his social exist-
ence which have been radically disrupted by his metamorphosis. Instead, he
continually, and rather pathetically, tries to communicate to his family that,
despite his radical physical change, he, Gregor Samsa, has not changed, and
wishes to sustain the same relations with them as before. Much to his
dismay, this is precisely what proves to be impossible since his family refuses
to acknowledge that the metamorphosis could have extended simply to
Samsa's physical appearance.6
Samsa's sister, in the end, is the one who is incapable of sustaining the
connection between the Hold" Gregor and the dying insect who inhabits
Gregor's room. Grete's sudden refusal to participate in what she has come
to view as an intolerable burden and charade is expressed as a decisive
rejection of the very identity to which Samsa has dung as dearly as he has
dung to the walls and ceiling of his room. Thus she dedares:

I won't pronounce the name of my brother in front of this

monster, and so all I say is: we have to try to get rid of it.
We've done everything humanly possible to take care of it
and to put up with it; I don't think anyone can blame us in
the least (51).

While Gregor needs to retain a sense of identity both before and after the
metamorphosis in order to uphold the validity of the natural standpoint

5 Alfred Schutz, The Phenomenology olthe Social World, trans. George Walsh and Fred-
erick Lehnert (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1967),327.
6 While Gregor Samsa wants his family to recognize a metaphysical dualism between his
mind and his body, they appear to take a monistic, materialistic approach to the question of
personal identity. Since his body has changed, they assume that he has changed and never really
question their initial judgment in this regard. It is doubtful that Kafka himself would advocate
the dualistic stance that Gregor Samsa clings to, since Samsa's existential possibilities are
radically affected by his metamorphosis, and his body seems to play more than an incidental role
in defining who Gregor Samsa iso On the other hand, the question of Gregor Samsa's identity
cannot be reduced to questions regarding his bodily identity-the deli berate ambiguity of the
narrator's description of Samsa's body after the metamorphosis defies attempts to "pin down"
a definite image of what Samsa has become.
226 GAIL WEISS

within which that identity is grounded, Grete can only retain the natural
standpoint toward her own and her family's existence by denying that Gregor
and "this monster" are one and the same. Interestingly enough, she appeals
to Gregor's humanity to justify why it is no longer possible to view this
dying insect as her brother:

But how can it be Gregor? If it were Gregor, he would

have realized long aga that it isn't possible for human
beings to live with such a creature, and he would have gone
away of his own free will. Then we wouldn't have a brother,
but we'd be able to go on living and honor his memory
(52).

Gregor Samsa spends his final moments of life, unable to move, hardly
feeling any pain, reflecting on his family "with deep emotion and love."
Rather than take umbrage at his sister's refusal to acknowledge his human-
ity, he accepts her view that his presence has created an excessive burden on
his family, and "his conviction that he would have to disappear was, if
possible, even firmer than his sister's" (52). Acquiescing to death thus
becomes, for Gregor, his final human act, although death itself arrives, like
so many aspects of Gregor's life both before and after the metamorphosis,
"without his consent."
What unites Gregor and his sister is their unwillingness to give up the
natural attitude, despite the fact that it is only by suspending the natural
attitude that this extra-ordinary event can be reckoned with on its own
terms. For there is no precedent within the natural attitude for a metamor-
phosis such as Gregor Samsa's, and this leaves the entire Samsa family
without any guidance as to how to respond to this unique situation. Para-
doxically, by remaining within the realm of the familiar, the Samsas become
more alienated from one another than they would have been had they
abandoned the taken-for-granted world of the natural attitude altogether.
This is because none of the typical "formulas" for conducting family relations
can be applied (without radical revision) to this particular situation. The
unfamiliarity of Samsa's transformation, both for himself and his family,
demands unfamiliar responses, and it is precisely these that neither the
family nor Gregor himself is willing to explore, much less initiate. Instead,
they absurdly rely upon processes of typification which continually break
down, but which all refuse to abandon.
Typification, Schutz claims, is the primary means by which we negotiate
the intricacies of daily life, and it both enhances and expands the taken-for-
granted nature of the natural standpoint. More specifically, Schutz argues
that we tend to structure our experiences by setting up a "system of typical
relevances" whereby similar activities, events, objects, relationships, jobs, etc.
are grouped together under categories such as dancing, anniversaries, tables,
 ANONYMITY, ALIENATION, AND SUSPENSION 227

friends, and police officers. Through this process of typification, we identify

certain behaviors, attitudes, and responses as appropriate within this or that
"typical" situation and we anticipate "typical" responses from others.
Inevitably, the process of typification leads to a great deal of anonymity in
our social interactions, to the extent that we often relate to one another
more as exemplars of abstract types (e.g. mail carrier, cashier, student, etc.)
than as concrete individuals.
Although the fact that typification encourages anonymity in our social
relations might make it appear to be a negative phenomenon, Schutz points
out that typification and the anonymity that accompanies it is absolutely
indispensable for successful negotiation of the social world. Given the
enormous number of people with whom each of us comes into contact
throughout our lives, it is impossible to have what Schutz calls "face-to-face"
or direct social relationships with each of them. The process of typification
allows us to increase our "stock of knowledge" about the social world, and
thereby enables us to sustain several complex social interactions simulta-
neously.
Schutz identifies two general orientations we adopt towards others, the
"Thou-orientation" and the "They-orientation." The former characterizes
what he calls direct social relationships and the latter, indirect social
relationships. In the "Thou-orientation," I relate to another person as a
concrete individual-whether it be as friend, sibling, mentor, etc. In the
"They-orientation," I relate to another as an "ideal typen-be it doctor,
soldier, reporter, etc. Although the anonymity that permeates the "They-
orientation" does not seem to be present in the "Thou-orientation," Schutz
asserts that the two are interconnected to the extent that indirect social
relationships are generated out of direct social relationships, and "ideal types
serve as interpretative schemes even for the world of direct social experi-
ence.,,7
It is important to recognize that typification not only produces and
perpetuates anonymity in our social relations, but, as Natanson points out,
"for Schutz, typification is the medium through which man in daily life finds
his way through the anonymous structure of his everyday world."8 That is,
the process of typification allows us to make sense of the anonymity that is
a constitutive aspect of human social existence and it allows us to develop
reliable standards of conduct for ourselves which we can then pass on to
future generations.
"Before any predications of value are made about anonymity," Natanson
claims,

7 Schutz, 1he Phenomenology o[ the Social World, op. cit., 185

8 Natanson, Anonymity, op. cit., 25.
228 GAIL WEISS

it should be understood that anonyrnity is an invariant

feature of an existence lived in the taken-for-granted terms
of ordinary life. What is implied by this taken-for-grant-
edness is the reciprocity of anonyrnity: I am anonyrnous to
most Others just as most Others are anonyrnous to me. 9

Earlier, I claimed that what is most interesting about Gregor's meta-

morphosis is not what does change as a result of it, but what does not
change. Tbe relationships that are sustained between Gregor Samsa and his
family, both before and after his metamorphosis, are characterized by the
reciprocity of anonyrnity Natanson describes. Despite the fact that we a11
engage in such anonymous relations with strangers and distant associ-
ates-with, in short, what Schutz refers to as the world of our contempo-
raries-it is less common to find such indirect relationships prevailing among
members of the same family. Tbis does not mean that we do not come to
expect "typical" behaviors and responses from our parents, siblings, spouses,
children, etc., but it is not often that we find typification to be the exclusive
mode according to which individual family members relate to each other. 10
Gregor Samsa's room, we are told, has three doors and a window, yet it
is noteworthy that a11 three doors are locked and the window is closed at the
outset of the story, even though Samsa is sleeping in his own home with his
own family. Samsa's room, once an insular retreat from family life, becomes
his prison: "When the doors had been locked, everyone had wanted to come
in," but since the tumultuous discovery of Samsa's metamorphosis, "no one
came in, and now the keys were even inserted on the outside" (22). Given
the confines of his quarters, it is hardly surprising that Samsa's favorite new
occupation is looking out the window at the world outside. With his newly
limited, and continua11y diminishing vision, Samsa no longer sees the
hospital opposite, "which he used to curse because he saw so much of it,"
and

if he had not been positive that he was living in Charlotte

Street-a quiet but still very much a city street-he might
have believed that he was looking out of his window into
a desert where the gray sky and the gray earth were indis-
tinguishably fused (29).

While the very act of looking outside reca11s "the feeling of freedom he used
to have from looking out the window," it is the current indistinguishability of

9 Ibid., 24.
10 To lhe exlenl lhal lhis does occur, such families lend lo be regarded as dysfunclional,
or non-healthy represenlalives of "typical" family life.
 ANONYMITY, ALIENATION, AND SUSPENSION 229

this "new" landscape that gives Samsa asense of peace (29). The solitary
nature of this activity and the lack of definition to the landscape releases
Samsa from his worries about his family and hirnself. The fuzzy grayness of
the world outside meets Samsa's gaze without expectations and with indif-
ference to his plight. Its anonymity soothes Samsa, perhaps because it is an
anonymity that resists typification. The unfamiliarity of this transformed
world outside his window corresponds to Samsa's own unfamiliarity to him-
self and to others. But whereas the latter is a source of torment, the former
provides a means of respite.
Samsa seeks a similar "escape" from his situation through listening to his
sister play the violin, and finds contentment in the fact that music is
something he stillioves. The profound enjoyment he experiences in listening
to his sister reinforces Samsa's sense of his own humanity; for "was he an
animal, that music could move hirn so? He feIt as if the way to an unknown
nourishment he longed tor were coming to light" (49, emphasis mine). What
is especially striking about this passage is that it points towards a discovery
that Samsa is on the verge of making, but which (due to the disruption
caused by the other listeners' awareness ofhis presence) is never successfully
brought to fruition. What is this unknown nourishment, a nourishment that
appears to have been unknown not only after, but long before, Samsa's
metamorphosis?
The most obvious answer, and one many critics have explored at length,
is that it is aspiritual nourishment that Samsa is seeking, a "hunger of the
soul" that he is attempting to fulfill. A Schopenhauerian interpretation
would emphasize music's distinctive ability to recreate the very movements
of the Will, thereby freeing us from its cyde of ceaseless striving and
allowing us to become (albeit temporarily) pure Will-Iess subjects of
knowledge. Thus, one might argue, it is this transcendent perspective that
Samsa is seeking, one that distances hirn from his daily cares and allows hirn
to reflect upon his world without being troubled by it.
Regardless of which interpretation one espouses, it is dear that Samsa
desperately wants not only to obtain this nourishment, but to retain it
forever. Most importantly, obtaining this nourishment cannot be accom-
plished by hirnself alone but requires the active participation of another
person, his sister, who must aid hirn in realizing it Hof her own free will." It
is Samsa's failure to obtain this hitherto unknown nourishment through an
intimate, face-to-face relation with another, that makes his life tragic not
only after, but before the metamorphosis has even taken place.
Alienated from others (who are in turn alienated from one another),
suspended from his daily pursuits and activities, increasingly disheartened by
and dissatisfied with the reciprocal anonymous relations that have character-
ized his social relationships in the past, Samsa is ultimately unable to realize
an alternative way of living. And, although he has dung to his identity as
Gregor Samsa, a human being, up until the moment of his death, the
230 GAIL WEISS

question of who, exactly, Gregor Samsa is, remains. At the end of the story
the nature of Gregor Samsa's metamorphosis remains in doubt-has there
been a metamorphosis at all?
Although one might ascribe the metamorphosis to Grete Samsa and/or
to her father, rather than to Gregor, the original question with which we,
and the text, begin, "What's happened to me?," cannot be dismissed. Its
unanswerability suggests that this "me" cannot be understood through
processes of typification, nor can it be adequately grasped from within the
natural standpoint. lronically, Samsa's metamorphosis seems to have prov-
ided the very opportunity necessary to dislocate the "me" from the anony-
mous structure of the sodal world, and, in so doing, makes it possible for
the hitherto familiar to be seen through an unfamiliar perspective. Rather
than embrace such a possibility, however, Samsa avoids the risks of the
unfamiliar, in order to maintain his increasingly tenuous grasp on the
familiar world.
By continuing to seek the familiar in the unfamiliar in order to maintain
his identity, Samsa not only loses all chance of maintaining his identity but
proves never to have had much of an identity in the first place. Samsa
hirnself is and remains an ideal type: fabric salesman, loyal son and brother.
To be more than this type would be to be more than hirnself, something
even his metamorphosis does not enable hirn to do. Thus to realize the "me,"
to realize his identity, would mean transcending his identity, indeed
metamorphosing into another creature altogether, something Samsa is
ultimately incapable of doing.
This leaves us with an unexplored alternative to the question "What's
happened to me?," one that emphasizes the future rather than the past. The
unasked question, "What will happen to me?," suggests the transformative
possibilities made available by the metamorphosis itself, possibilities which
might allow Gregor Samsa to develop a distinctive "me" for the first time.
It suggests a potential, unrealized metamorphosis that would truly release
Gregor Samsa from the depths of his anonymity and provide hirn with the
unknown nourishment he so deeply craves. Much more than his unremark-
able death, it is the raucous call of the cleaning woman, "Come and have a
look, it's croaked; it's lying there, dead as a doornail," the very woman who
alone "credited hirn with unlimited intelligence," that seals the anonymity of
Samsa's existence and buries this possibility once and for all (54).
 JAMES M. EDlE

THE PHILOSOPHICAL FRAMEWORK

OF SARTRE'S THEORY OF THE THEATER

Both in his life and in his thought Jean-Paul Sartre was frequently theatrical,
as exaggerated as his prose. He really believed that "the chief source of great
tragedy is human freedom." In this spirit he rewrote several ancient myths
and was not at all bothered by the ironie incongruity of asserting that
"Oedipus is free; Antigone and Prometheus are free. The fate we think we
find in ancient drama is only the other side of freedom. Passions themselves
are freedom caught in their own trap."l Sartre's continual invocation of
freedom and his own experience of being free pervade all his writings.
He is one of the few major philosophers in his tory to write both technical
works of philosophical argument as well as short stories, novels and plays.
He wanted to be an actor, a doer in life as a political force, in theater as the
author of myths of freedom, in philosophy as a scandalous and disruptive
thinker: a "communist," an advocate ofviolence, an anti-Anlerican, frequent-
ly disagreeable, "pessimistic," "anti-social," "pathological," "tragic," able to
illustrate the viscosity, the meaninglessness, the obscenity and pettiness of
human life with philosophical and theatrical insight.
Sartre teIls us in his autobiography of 1963, Les Mots, that, after the
death of his father and an early life in Alsace in the household of his
maternal grandfather, Albert Schweitzer, his mother took hirn with her to
Paris where he used to wander the Luxembourg Gardens in search of
playmates who would not be turned off by his short, stumpy, wall-eyed
presence. He and his mother went about in the park in a vain attempt for
the young child to gain acceptance-from which he would ultimately gladly
retreat to their sixth-story apartment "on the heights where dreams dwell."
He read voraciously but was especially fond of melodrama and imagined
hirnself as the romantic hero who would save those dependent on hirn from
pending doom at the last moment.
Sartre's philosophical writings and commentaries present us with many
questions of interpretation. He indulges in hyperbole, in paradox, in a "new"
vocabulary with which to comment on Hegel, Husserl and Heidegger-the
three German H's who are densely intertwined in his 1943 philosophical

1 Jean-Paul Sartre, Sartre on Theater (New York: Random House, 1976), 3.

231
S. Galt Crowell (ed.), The Prism ofthe Self, 231-253.
© 1995 Kluwer Academic Publishers.
232 JAMES M. EDlE

essay, L 'ttre et le Neant, and which perhaps helped get it published during
the German occupation of Paris-a vocabulary and a usage which was meant
to, and which did, epater la bourgeoisie. Since the focus of this study is his
philosophy of the theater, we must begin by saying that he, more direct1y
and more correctly than any theorist of the theater up to now, began by
focusing clearly on the most important phenomenological problem which
theater presents: the enactment of a text.

§1. The Enactment o[ a Text

Prior to and independent of the text, any text, is the act. There is, howev-
er, an ambiguity in the word "acting" which Sartre explores. It is based on
the distinction, at first sight so clear, between acting in everyday life and
role-playing in the theater. When we examine the concept of "acting" and
"action"-the act-more closely we see that the distinction can become
blurred in operation.
To begin on the common-sense level of Aristotle and the ancient scholas-
ties, a specifically human act (as opposed to any act a man can physiologi-
cally perform) carries moral and sometimes legal implications; it is an act for
which a person is responsible, for which he deserves praise or blame, for
which he is held accountable. It is an act deliberately done, with some
knowledge of the consequences, a free choice. That is why our lives are so
messy; there is no script according to which they must develop, no fixed or
fated plan, no guarantee. At each moment the entire future changes almost
by accident; our individual choices are mired in a slough of chance; there are
continual surprises which require us to reinterpret our past actions in terms
of the future in a present which we cannot dominate. We are subject to
irreversible time, to contingency, to uncertainty. There is no science of an
individual life. Aristotle said it: there can be no science of particulars, no
science of contingent facts.
It is for that reason that dramatic poetry in Aristotle's theory is of more
philosophical import than his tory or individual biography: it gives us the
typical-not the story of what actually happened but of what ought to have
happened, of what is instructive, of what repeats (in its generality) through
time, of whatever there can be of sameness in human nature. And here we
enter the theater.
Unlike history a text can be repeated; it is allographic. The text of a great
play, while it depends for its existence on the imagination and the work of
a really existing, historical playwright, is itself an ideal entity capable of
being repeated in its ideal meaning again and again. The "idea" of a play, its
philosophical and "typical" import, is an eidetic and not areal object, which
always eludes our present grasp; it is a Polidee Husserl would say, a limit-
concept which teleologically transcends and rules all its possible versions and
 SARTRE'S THEORY OF 1HE THEATER 233

interpretations. True, it can only be enacted by these actors, under this

director, in this theater, here and now, for this audience; but performance
never exhausts the meaning of the play.
As Structuralism and Hermeneutics have taught us, the meaning of a text
always exceeds the real psychological intentions of the author. We do not
study the text of a play like Hamlet the way we do the documents of the
Council of Nicea or the Gospel of St. Mark, or the way the Supreme Court
scrutinizes the text of the Constitution, because we know this obvious truth
of hermeneutic structuralism. It would do us no good to examine the text of
Hamlet to rediscover the true, final intentions of Shakespeare. And in the
enactment (or performance) of a text we find a multiple play of intentions
converging: the intention of the author, of the actors, of the audience and,
above all, o[ the text itself. The result is that a play will frequently have
dimensions that the author could never have foreseen nor intended.
Even if we could discover the exact psychological intentions or thoughts
which were in the mind of Shakespeare or S1. Mark, which as fleeting, dated,
historical events are not recoverable, these could not give us the meaning of
the play even from the stand point of the author. Writers as diverse as
Dostoevski and Pirandello have testified that an author learns his story from
the characters in his novel or play, which emerge with their own indepen-
dent lives and motivations in his own imaginary and literary creation as he
writes. They, as much as anyone, teach hirn what to write. Once he has
conceived them in his imagination, he no longer writes as he will but as he
can; there is an inner logic to each literary text which requires that the
characters, once given life in imagination, teach the author and the audience
their own story. They could, and no doubt have, done many things which
have not been recorded so that we can say, putting Hamlet in a new situa-
tion, one that does not occur in the play, that it would have been just like
Hamlet to have done or said such and such. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, when
asked if Sherlock Holmes had ever met Gladstone, had to say that he didn't
know but had a good idea of what Holmes would have told Gladstone if he
had.

§2. Bad Faith and the Look

In Sartre's theater we have studies of madness, megalomania, frequently

of murder, of adultery, incest, defiance of God and the political order,
betrayal, seduction, conflicts of rights. But let us, by way of introduction,
turn to simpler and more underlying structures of behavior.
In classical theater acting was considered to be a kind of noble He. When
asked if lying were a moral imperfection Gorgias answered: certainly not!
since tragic poetry and theater present us with "deceptions which it is better
to cause than not to cause; to succumb to them shows greater powers of
234 JAMES M. EDlE

artistic appreciation than not to."2 And Stanislavski says:

All these properties, make-ups, costumes, the scenery, the

publicness of the performance, are lies. I know they are lies
... But ifthey were true, then I would do this and this, and
I would behave in this manner and in this way toward this
and this event ... creativeness begins from that moment .
. . when there appears the magical, creative if.3

Sartre's No Exit begins for the three characters at the moment when they
die and are ushered into the hotel room from which they cannot escape and
which is to be their "hell," where their interminable conversation begins. We
know that dead persons cannot talk, but if they could, what would happen?
Likewise, Pirandello's Six Characters in Search of an Author is the story of
the lives of characters who have been conceived in the imagination of a
playwright who lost interest in them and who never let their "drama" be
performed. Without actors to embody, enact, and perform their "drama,"
characters are mere figments ofthe imagination. We all know that characters
in a play are not real people and cannot behave as such, but what would
happen if they could? One must create an imaginary world, consistent in
itself, but different from ours.
The distance between play-acting and acting in everyday life is
unbreachable. Wbether Laurence Olivier or some college student performs,
the character of Hamlet is essentially unchanged, fixed like a Platonic idea
(whose acts, whose life, whose thoughts are fixed by the script of the play).
The actor, as actor, already knows before he goes on stage that he will slay
Polonius by thrusting hirn through in the third act with a sword but, as
Hamlet, he is completely surprised and reduced to confusion each time it
happens. No actor is morally responsible for the death of Polonius; only
Hamlet iso One cannot enter the space and time of the play from outside;
not even the actor as such can enter it. He can disrupt it as Edmund Kean
does when he drunkenly forgets his lines or as the paratroopers did when
they leapt from the balcony onto the stage at the first Parisian presentation
of The Deputy, but they cannot become part of the play. This was, of course,
complicated in Kean's case because Kean was apart of the play, the princi-
pal character, and his disruption of the play is as illusory as the sudden ap-
pearance from off the street of Madame Pace in Pirandello's Six Characters.
But let us return to Sartre and his analysis of role-playing from a moral
point ofview in everyday life. Wbat Sartre calls "bad faith" holds an essential
place both in his metaphysics and in his theory of human reality, his

2 Plutarch, De gloria athen., 5, 34&.

3 Konstantin Stanislavski, My Life in Art, (New York: Meridian, 1956),466.
 SARTRE'S THEORY OF 1HE THEATER 235

philosophical anthropology. In Being and Nothingness he gives us a plethora

of examples-the grocer, the student, the soldier, the gambIer, the flirt, the
waiter, and others-to show that no performance of any role in everyday life
is ever wholly what it is; that in numerous instances we have to pretend to
"be ourselves," that there is only a difference of degree between the real,
"sincere," unselfconscious performances in which we act ourselves, and the
"dishonest," calculating, fully conscious staging of a scene for a given public,
in short, that it is impossible ever fully to be oneself. And this playing of
roles is essential to society.

A grocer who dreams is offensive to the buyer, because

such a grocer is not wholly a grocer ... There are indeed
many precautions to imprison a man in what he is, as if we
lived in perpetual fear that he might escape from it, that he
might break away and suddenly elude his condition. 4

In his radical theory of a transcendental, non-egological, operating con-

sciousness which experiences both the world and itself prior to reflexion
Sartre ejects all "objects" from consciousness. Not only does consciousness
objectity and give meaning and value to things but it also is capable of
objectitying itself, its own acts, states, emotions and dispositions. Even these
are "essences" or "objects· of consciousness and I am myself cut off from my
own essence "by the nothingness that I am.· 5
Sartre's discussion of "bad faith" takes place within the context of his
theory of consciousness as a whole. Consciousness is described as an inten-
tionality utterly purified of "all egological structure." It is an anonymous
operating intentionality, a "having of objects" which is pre-egological, non-
egological. All its behaviors are negative; consciousness "arises· in the world
through questioning, contesting, distinguishing, negating, experiencing the
possibilities, the potentialities, the "other side" ofbeing-in-itself. It is capable
of taking a distance, of becoming "unstuck" not only from objects in the
world but from itself as the source of acts, states of mind, dispositions, as an
ego. Consciousness is precisely a "lack" or a nihilation of being; it is the
source of the negativities which it "secretes" through a continual activity of
nihilating. It adds nothing to being except a relationship to its own attitudes,
expectations, acts. 6

4 Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, trans. Hazel Barnes (New York: Philosophical
Library, 1956), 59.
5 Ibid., 39.

6 See James M. Edie, "Sartre as Phenomenologist and as Existential Psychoanalyst," Phen-

omenology and Existentialism, ed. Lee and Mandelbaum (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University
Press, 1967), 139-178, and Edie, ''Tbe Question of the Transcendental Ego: Sartre's Critique of
236 JAMES M. EDlE

The noetic attitudes of interrogation such as abstracting, isolating, im-

agining, doubting, denying ground the possibility of experiencing the world
otherwise than as it is, as constituted not only of positive bits of being but
also of absences, otherness, of possibilities and potentialities, of the unreal
and the imaginary, of the "ideal" reality of the objects of inference and
demonstration, even of moral and physical evil, of psychophysicallimitations
and contingency.
Take the aU-pervasiveness of the experience of the unreal or "the imagi-
nary." The imaginary appears "on the foundation of the world," but reciproc-
aUy aU apprehension of the real as world implies a hidden surpassing
towards the imaginary. All imaginative consciousness uses the world as the
nihilated foundation of the imaginary, and reciprocaUy aU consciousness of
the world caUs forth and motivates an imaginative consciousness as grasped
from the particular meaning of the situation. 7
Or, to turn to actual perception, when I perceive something as a determi-
nate object on the background of the world as a synthetic totality, I must
nihilate the world as a totality, i.e., I must treat it as ground, in order to
perceive this object as distinct from it. Our world, as the correlate of per-
ceiving, imagining, thinking consciousness, is, says Sartre, constructed in such
a way that we always pose the unreal on the ground of the real and the real
on the ground of the unreal owing to a nihilating activity of consciousness.
What consciousness adds to being is, thus, "the unreal."
In order, on this basis, to better understand Sartre's paradoxical defin-
ition of consciousness as the being which "must be what it is not and not be
what it isH8 it is necessary to turn to the subtIer behaviors of self-object-
ification which are "bad faith." It is of the nature of consciousness to be able
to reflect on its own acts, objectify itself, take itself as an object. This gives
rise to the existential dialectic of bad faith, however. In Sartre's description
of the flirt, for example,9 who disarms her companion's behavior of aU its
sexual implications by making herself into pure consciousness without a
body, without thinghood, we encounter a mode ofbad faith, because human
reality is always an inseparable admixture of essence and existence, facticity
and transcendence, being and consciousness. It is never just the one or the
other but the ambiguous reality of always being both at the same time. To
recognize this duality, this necessary inseparability of essence (what one is)
and existence (what one is not but could be as a directness-towards-the-

Husserl," Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology, Vol. 24, no. 2 (1993).
7 Jean-Paul Sartre, The Psychology of the Imagination (New York: Philosophical Books,
1948), 273. Translation corrected.
8 Being and Nothingness, 67.
9 Ibid., 55.
 SARTRE'S THEORY OF TI-IE THEATER 237

future) is authenticity; to deny it, or ignore it, or to escape either into being
on the one hand or pure consciousness on the other is "bad faith."
Sartre's example of the cafe waiter gives us just the opposite. Here is a
young man who escapes from his freedom, his transcendence, his possibilities
into his faeticity. His movements are "quick and forward, a Httle too precise,
a Httle too rapid ... a little too solicitous." His behavior is agame, he is
playing at being a waiter in a cafe. But he ultimately finds hirnself unable to
coineide with his role. A conseiousness is never a thing or the role that it
plays; it is forever ahead of its past, more and other than it is, condemned to
the uncertainties of fre.e<1om.
Sartre's third exampk;, that of the homosexual,10 shows that "bad faith"
is not opposed to "the ideal of sincerity" or "good faith" but rather to
"authenticity," namely the recognition that human reality is always and
necessarily an unstable mixture of essence and existence. To deny this
duality, this necessary ambiguity, is the very definition of inauthenticity. The
ideal of sincerity is impossible for human reality to aehieve, it is the passion
to "become god," i.e. to be what one is, to coincide with one's being, while
at the same time remaining a consciousness, and this is a conceptual
impossibility.
The cafe waiter denies his transcendence to lose hirnself in his role, as
just being a waiter, but he is pre-objectively aware that there is more to his
existence than that; he belongs to a union, has rights, holds religious and
political opinions, ete. He could no more coineide with his behavioral role
than the flirt could escape from her embodied condition and all that it
implied. The homosexual knows, in pre-reflexive, operating, future-directed
consciousness that he is both more and other than a homosexual. Everybody,
in short, is always in bad faith in Sartre's non-pejorative sense of the term.
"Bad faith" is an existential strueture of human reality.
Before turning explicitly to Sartre's theory of aeting in everyday life and
on stage, there is one other "existential" strueture that is essential both to
his own plays as he writes them and to his philosophical anthropology, viz.,
The Look. An examination of "the look" helps us understand the mutual
reciprocity involved in the intersubjeetive objeetification of others.
As we learn from Sartre's famous example of the person who, "moved by
jealousy, euriosity, or vice," is absorbed in the aet of peering through a
keyhole, the fact of being caught in the aet, of being "looked at," brings
about "essential modifications ... in my strueture."l1 I move from a pre-
reflexive state of consciousness to a fully reflexive state; I am no longer a
pure, disembodied consciousness-experiencing-the world, no longer the
dominant subject, the sole objeetifier of the world. I am also an "object," a

10 Ibid., 63ff.
11 Ibid., 259-60.
238 JAMES M. EDlE

"me," being seen by others. I am not just the absolute center of the universe
before whom a11 things and a11 "others" spread themselves out before me as
my objects, but I am myself capable of experiencing "shame," "guilt," "other-
ness," of taking myself as an object among others. I am also an "object" for
a11 the others who drain the world away from Me, out of Me.
Here we come up against another rock-bottom faktum, an existential
structure, of experience. While I may always be the absolute subject for my
own experience, I am at the same time always an "object" for others as they
are for Me. There is an inescapable truth of solipsism. I can always exper-
ience others and they can always experience me but I cannot experience the
others' experiences nor they mine. A co-experiencing of the world is of
course possible; nothing could be easier; but there is always the unbridgeable
gap between my experiencings and the experiencings of others.

§3. Acting in Everyday Life: An Existential Ethic

Sartre once wrote: "there is no existentialist ethics; there are only right
choices." This may be true, but he is still obsessed with the description of
moral behavior; he is the Voltaire of the twentieth century. As an atheist he
is the great anthropologian of the twentieth century.12 In answer to the
tripie Kantian question: "What can I know?," "What should I do?," "What
can I hope for?," his emphasis is emphatically on the What should I do? In
the absence of God, man must bear the responsibility for his own existence
on his own shoulders. There is nobody to save us from the human condition,
from ourselves, even if we had a valid proof of the existence of God.
There is a strong contrast here between writers like Sartre (and his
sources: Nietzsehe, Kierkegaard, Dostoevski) and the British moralists. If, as
A J. Ayer says, Sartre's examples "do not correspond empirically to the way
most people behave,"13 this is because, as Iris Murdoch replied, the British
restriet themselves to the world "in which people play cricket, cook cakes,
make simple decisions, remember their childhood and go to the circus," and

12 Nevertheless, for an atheist, Sartre has a rather well-developed theology. Being and
Nothingness, as weil as his plays, is full of Biblical references and scriptural interpretations. Of
course, from a phenomenological point of view, God is necessarily an object o[ consciousness;
he is held in being by a social consciousness (and not the other way around) but, so long as
there are those who believe in his existence and efficacity, the idea of God operates in human
society as a strong social force. Perhaps that, and the fact that he had some friends who were
priests, usually Jesuits, from the time he was a prisoner of war in a German Stalag in Trier,
influenced him, in spite of his frequent anti-Catholic statements, to treat priests, and religion in
general, with a certain respect. The tortured priest, Heinrich, in The Devil and the Good Lord
is one of his best delineated characters, and his own spokesman for correcting the social order.
13 A J. Ayer, Horizon, August, 1945, 10Hf.
 SARTRE'S THEORY OF TIIE THEATER 239

thereby exelude themselves from the adult world "in which they commit sins,
fall in love, say prayers or join the Community Party.,,14 But contrasting
Sartre to the British moralists is like contrasting the Old Testament with the
Book of Mormon. In the latter all the righteous are heroic, upright, good,
motivated by noble principles, dripping with sentiment and sanctity. Whereas
what we come across is the Old Testament are betrayal, apostasy, stealing,
lying, rape, murder, incest, sodomy, mutilation, revolt, dissimulation, evil
motives, vile commitments, slander, evil-in short, it has the ring of true
his tory. The trouble with British empiricism since its inception has been that
it smugly spurns human experience.

A. Freedom in Situation

There are two existential facts about human reality; namely, that (1) it is
situated, determined, in a place, contingent, not-necessary, factical, limited
and particular and (2) that it is, in this situation, absolutely free, its own
basis, its own source. Like William of Ockham, the one British empiricist
with whom Sartre had something in common,15 he finds no other source,
or proof, or criterion for an act of free will than free choice itself. Let us
proceed to discuss these existential structures by way of Sartre's examples.
His first example sounds as if it came from Kierkegaard (even though
Sartre's conelusion is the exact opposite of Kierkegaard's): God appears to
Abraham in his sleep and orders hirn to take his only son up mount Moriah
and offer hirn as a human holocaust to the divinity. How did Abraham know
the vision he had was from God and not that of a lying demon from Egypt?
Only Abraham, alone, could decide for hirnself. Even if there are signs,
divine commands, even if there are moral laws written on tablets of stone,
only man can interpret them. Sartre, like Kant, holds that even in accepting
the divinely sanctioned moral law it is the individual man who must
recognize it as the voice of God, alone, and on his own authority. That is
not an act that God can do for hirn. Man is isolated in his own subjectivity
and must choose a path for hirnself.
A given person's subjective aloneness in recognizing the voice of God is
accentuated by another Kantian moral principle: each moral choice has a
legislative dimension. By performing a moral act we are, in effect, saying "Go
thou and do likewise."
This legislative burden is the source of "ethical anxiety." We cannot not

14 Iris Murdoch, Sartrc: Romantic Rationalist (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1959),
42.
15 Frederick A. Olafson, Principlcs and Persons (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins Press,
1%7), 19ff, gives a good historical disquisition on "medieval Franciscan voluntarism" and shows
its affinity with Sartre's theOlY of freedom.
240 JAMES M. EDlE

choose; we are condemned to be free. Not to choose is itself a choice. At

each instance we are forced to make moral choices, but we always have to
make these choices without full knowledge of the consequences of our
actions, assuming a responsibility for choices which may turn out to have
been wrong. Moral choice, for Sartre, rests finally upon the "noetic freedom"
from the things of the world, to which consciousness alone gives structure,
meaning and value, our permanent possibility "of dissociating ourselves from
the causal series which constitutes being and which can produce only
being."16 Prom such freedom of consciousness follows both analytically and
in fact the freedom to choose and its consequent, pervasive "ethical anxiety."
Our goal thus cannot be to live without anxiety; that would be less than
human. We must accept anxiety and choose freely in circumstances
circumscribed with uncertainty.
That is why there can be no ethic built upon self-evident or universal
laws. There are such laws, such as the Biblical injunction to "do unto others
as thou wouldst be done by," or the Kantian moral imperative never to treat
another human freedom as a means to an end but only as an end in itself,
but these laws are empty when we are faced with concrete situations, which
means in any actual case of moral choice. Scheler was right; each ethic is a
Situationsethik.
When one of Sartre's students came to ask his advice on a personal
moral dilemma, Sartre, as is well-known, had to say that he had no advice:
general principles were of no use; the young man had to choose his own
way. Let us grant that the ideal of saving civilization from barbarism is
greater than a purely personal loyalty focused on one ailing old woman
(even if it be one's own mother). The possibility of realizing this ideal
successfully is not great. At the same time, the less pretentious moral goal,
based on affection and personal loyalty, but only to one individual and not
the whole of civilization, has a much greater likelihood of succeeding. What
help in this instance are general principles? Moreover, to ask the advice of
someone else would bring no greater enlightenment. In choosing one's
advisor one already loads the dice, already makes a choice as to what kind
of advice he will receive. So Sartre advised nothing and told the young man
to choose himself, to invent, to find his own way, "all the while knowing," he
says, "exactly what he would do."17
The moral hero does not ultimately depend on the advice of others.
Socrates before the ecclesia where he was condemned said that he had to
obey "the god rather than men." Martin Luther before the court of Charles
V did not take a consensus but declared: "Here I stand and cannot do
otherwise." Pranz in The Condemned of Altona appeals to his jury of

16 Being and Nothingness, 23.

17 Jean-Paul Sartre, L'Existentialisme est un humanisme (Paris: Nagel, 1957), 84ff.

 SARTRE'S THEORY OF TIIE THEATER 241

crustaceans of the twenty-first century to judge the crimes of the twentieth.

Ultimately one makes one's moral decisions alone, if necessary appealing to
God or to the future, 10 judges wiser and better than those of the present
time.

B. Existential Psychoanalysis

In my view it is because a "general" ethics of universal principles is empty

that Sartre developed his most important ethical insights through exemplary
existential psychoanalyses and in the "myths" he forged in his plays-elevating
examples of individual choices to the level of "the typical," "the mythical,"
just like the ancient tragedians.
Sartre's existential psychoanalysis was certainly not meant to be a thera-
peutic method; he did not set hirnself up as a "doctor of souls." It is, rather,
clearly an exercise in philosophical anthropology, in studies aimed at a
theory of man through an investigation of instructive individual cases. Since
any absolutely general and final theory is ruled out in principle, one must
begin with instructive instances: Baudelaire, Tintoretto, Flaubert, Jean
Genet. Most of Sartre's cases are historical figures; only Genet was a "live
subject," and even there, much of the evidence examined was taken from his
published short stories and early plays.
Sartre had the same interest in the writings of Freud, Alder, Jung,
Ferenczi, and the others as did his contemporaries, but he soon concluded
that their theoretical writings were interesting primarily for their alternative
anthropologies; he does not criticize Freud because he thinks hirn a poor
doctor but because of his mechanistic conception of man. He rejects the
"materialistic mythology" of Freudian psychoanalysis because it makes the
ego into a weak plaything of subliminal "causal" forces, all the while
surreptitiously introducing into the "unconscious" the structures of con-
sciousness: the "censor" or "superego" knows which libidinal desires, Triebe,
to suppress. Sartre's writings on his own "method" are difficult, diffused, and
scattered, but the chief underlying principles are easily stated. Above all, it
does not search into the causalorigin of present behavior but puts the
present in focus through an examination of its future-oriented intent and
implications.
Sartre approaches the life of a given, more or less mature, adult who lives
(sometimes barely) within the limits of normality, as a unified whole, not a
"bundle of drives" haphazardly juxtaposed. A person and his world constitute
a unified, structured whole. He writes:

The principle of this psychoanalysis is that man is a totality

and not a collection. Consequently he expresses hirnself as
a whole in even his most insignificant and his most superfi-
242 JAMES M. EDlE

cial behavior.18

He rejects Freud's conception of the unconscious but does not rule out
unconscious or preconscious intentionalities, because the meaning of surface
behavior is not immediately intelligible; it must be interpreted. There is a
large realm of pre-reflexive, pre-Iogical, pre-predicative behavior which
primarily defines our individual choice of lifestyle, our way of being-in-the-
world. One of the reasons Genet is so interesting is that he does not write
about thieves, homosexuals and deserters but as a thief, as a homosexual, as
a traitor who deserts in the face of the enemy. The behaviors examined are
just those that would be examined in any theory of individual psychotherapy:
sexuality, eating, interpersonal relationships, ways of possessing and using
things and persons. Sartre's aim is to discover those free (but frequently
prereflexive) individual choices of being which are unique in each life, that
pattern of action which will reveal the meaning of an individual life in its
total, complex, existential density. This is the "fundamental project" or
primary choice of a way-of-being in the world. And all the choices an indi-
vidual makes reveal his "fundamental choice," if only we know how to "deci-
pher" them.
Sartre believes in going down to the most minute details, usque ad
minima:

To eat, for instance, is to appropriate by destruction: it is

at the same time to be filled up with a certain being ... It
is not a matter of indifference whether we like oysters or
clams, snails or shrimp, if only we know how to unravel the
existential significance of these foods. 19

Moreover, to appropriate, in whatever fashion, is never "innocent." If I climb

a mountain, I affix my flag to it; if I seduce this woman she becomes mine.
In appropriating I necessarily alter and transform ("digest") what I possess,
and at the same time there is always the "surreptitious appropriation of the
possessor by the possessed." Knowledge, like exploration, is a "rape of the
world."
To summarize rapidly, the "three big categories of concrete human exis-
tence, n writes Sartre, are to be, to have, to do. And, since a man "is what he
does," since he secretes his essence by his actions, and his actions are
revealed in his ways of "having" (i.e. possessing, appropriating, absorbing,
digesting, assimilating, destroying) the objects that constitute his world, we'
will find that a man's fundamental choice of a way-of-being in the world is

18 Being and Nothingness, 568.

19 Ibid., 614-615.
 SARTRE'S THEORY OF TIlE THEATER 243

revealed by the categories of possession and these are, in turn, revealed by

the categories of acting. And action brings us to moral categories: to
freedom and responsibility.
Such moral categories govern Sartre's analysis of Jean Genet. 20 In it,
Genet becomes the very embodiment of "bad faith," the person who takes
hirnself for what he is, now as a thief, later as homosexual and a traitor, like
a substance. But what is different in the case of Genet is that he assurnes
this "essence," which he at first accepted from others, so completely that he
"sanctifies" it and even endows it with subjectivity. He moves from the level
of possessing his character to that of doing it, and this is why Sartre
describes his project as one of being a "saint," of becoming one who com-
pletely assurnes his destiny, who is not to be judged by men, who holds up
to humanity the example of the complete embodiment of its moral ideals
and possibilities.
Sartre calls Genet a moral "actor and martyr;" the story of Genet is not,
however, one of "conversion" to the right side of morality, but rather of
"salvation" within the morality which he accepts from his foster parents, as
its "other side." He does not contest it. He accepts it; he makes hirnself to
be the "evil" criminal which this morality judges hirn to be. He is, of course,
in bad faith. No more than anyone else can Genet be what he is called. But
this prospect of ultimate failure is no more serious in his life than in any
other. The project of "conversion"-i.e., to be honest, heterosexual, and
faithful-would be no more successful. In any case, one's ultimate lack of
success in achieving an "essence," of endowing oneself with being, is
irrelevant because it is the project itself, the striving, which alone gives
structure, unity, and meaning to a life.
Genet does not propose a new morality; he accepts the one that con-
demns hirn; he is the obverse side of sainthood. But, says Sartre, if there is
a "reversibility of merits" according to which we all deserve the accolades
given to the few inventors, geniuses, creators among us, there is also a
"reversibility of crime," and the existential psychoanalysis of Jean Genet is
not just another case history but the description of our own "human possi-
bility." Genet's life is a mirror he holds up to us in which we can only see

20 Jean-Paul Sartre, Saint Genet: Actor and Martyr, trans. Bernard Frechtman (New York:
Braziller, 1963). This is certainly the most successful of Sartre's attempts at the existential
psychoanalysis of a particular Iife's project and it apparently hit home. Genet said that reading
the book filled him with "a kind of disgust because I saw myself stripped naked." He needed six
years to get over the analysis, during which time he ceased writing; when he did begin again it
was not to continue with the short novels and short stories or the early one act plays of the kind
Sartre had studied (along with other evidence), but to write a new kind of theater, much more
symbolic, much larger in scope and in a completely new style. So it seems that Sartre's subject,
in this case, recognized himself in the analysis, which is certainly not to say it "cured" him of
anything. Both Sartre and he would have scoffed at such a suggestion. See James Edie, "Sartre
as Existentialist and as Existential Psychoanalyst," op. eil.
244 JAMES M. EDlE

ourselves. The story of his martyrdom is as edifying as that of Saint

Sebastian.

§4. Myths o{ Freedom

After his Existential psychoanalysis the other, and more important, basis
on which Sartre founded his ethics of the free act was his theater. Again he
has given his own theory, though in an incomplete, scattered, and sometimes
confusing way. This theory, however, can by synthesized in its essentials
without too much difficulty.
Sartre calls hirnself a "forger of myths." He distinguishes his theater, and
that of "the young playwrights of France,"21 as a theater o{ situations
opposed to the psychological theater that has held sway in Europe since the
great tragedians of the 16th and 17th centuries and is typical of Anglo-
American theater at the present time. "The young playwrights of France"
emerged after the Second World War with an altogether different concep-
tion of what theater should be, it was influenced by the cultural upheavals
of the war, communism, and the theater of Bertolt Brecht. Like Brecht, they
looked upon going to the contemporary theater as it existed in Europe prior
10 the war with a feeling of having stumbled into a lunatic asyl um. The
people on stage writhe about and wring their hands over some psychological
imbroglio, and the audience is likewise absolutely tense, wringing their hands
too, and writhing about like the actors. After this descent into a bathetic
purgation they leave, cleansed and reassured at having seen what human
nature is really like, fixed by the causal determinants which make men bad,
immutable only in their inability to change human nature itself, stable in a
bourgeois order.
Sartre does not believe in a ready-made "human nature. n Existence pre-
cedes essence; an individual man creates his own essence as he goes along,
by his acts. A theater of situations will present a free man in a particular
social environment in which he makes an irrevocable choice,

a free being, entirely indeterminate, who must choose his

own being when confronted with certain necessities, such as
being already committed in a world full of both threatening
and favorable factors among other men who have made
their choices before hirn, who have decided in advance the
meaning of those factors. He is faced with the necessity of

21 Among those to whom Sartre apparently thought this label applied were Jean Anouilh,
Albert Camus, Simone de Beauvoir, and Jean Genet. There may have been others, though Sartre
never gives even this list, and one could, today, hardly caU it a "schooI."
 SARTRE'S THEORY OF THE THEATER 245

having to work and die, of being hurled into a life already

complete which is still his own enterprise and in which he
can never have a second chance; where he must play his
cards and take risks no matter what the cost ... We put on
stage certain situations which throw light on the main
aspects of the condition of man ... and have the spectator
participate in the free choice which man makes in these
situations. 22

We are living in the second half of the twentieth century; God is dead,
or absent; the human race is certainly not the center of the universe; human
nature is no longer fixed and stable and the situation of the individual is
uncertain and difficult to think through. In this condition men need "myths"
of freedom in their effort to understand the human situation in the present.
Each of Sartre's plays, including the rewriting of the Greek myths, presents
an individual in a particular situation in which he must make an ethical
commitment without full knowledge of the consequences of his actions, but
which is nevertheless one authentie free choice, one way of understanding,
and insofar forth "dominating," making sense, giving a specific meaning and
value to that situation by his decision to act.
Most of these plays are written for the sake of a single scene. As in
classic tragedy we enter upon the action, the agon, at the very moment it is
headed for catastrophe.

Our plays are violent and brief, centered around one single
event; there are few players and the story is compressed
within a short space of time, sometimes only a few hours.
As a result they obey a kind of 'rule of the three unities,'
which has been only a little bit rejuvenated and modified.
A single set, a few entrances, a few exits, intense arguments
among the characters who defend their individual rights
. h passIOn
wlt . ... 23

There is, therefore,passion, but it is not merely or even primarily induced

by psychological conflicts and oppositions but by moral dilemmas, conflicts
of rights. The three unities of time, place, and plot are observed; No Exit
and The Condemned of Altona, plays of final judgment, human not divine,
take place in very confined spaces. The Devil and the Good Lord, Sartre's
only "epic," while stretched out in time, still takes place within the Faustian
time of "one year and a day" and actually is focused on just two juxtaposed

22 Sartre on Theater, ap. ciL, 35.

23 Ibid., 41.
246 JAMES M. EDlE

scenes, the wager and the final accounting. Moreover, Sartre eschews "exper-
imental techniques like theater-in-the-round; he preserves the proscenium
and the distance from the audience; he claims to uphold "the ancient dignity
of our tongue":

To us a play should not seem too familiar. Its greatness

derives from its social, and in a certain sense, religious
functions: it must remain a rite ... That is why one of our
problems has been to search out a style ... which, while
utterly simple and made up ofwords on everyone's lips, will
still preserve something of the ancient dignity of our
tongue. We have barred from our plays the digressions, the
set speeches ... all this chit-chat debases a language. It
seems to us that we shall recapture a little of the pomp of
ancient trt}edies if we practice the most rigorous economy
ofwords.

Sartre's theater is "austere, moral, mythic, and ceremonial in aspect"

focused on great social and religious questions. It deals with the great
themes of death, exile, love. It is not a theater of symbols or of the natur-
alistic presentation of psychological rivalries and exaggerated emotions. It is
a matter of "the rights of citizenship, the rights of the family, individual
ethics, collective ethics, the right to kill, the right to reveal to human beings
their pitiable condition ... We do not reject psychology" but integrate it
into a struggle over opposing moral claims. In Dirty Bands the drama is not
exhausted by the question of whether or not Hoerderer has seduced Jessica,
though the psychological duel between Hugo and Hoerderer over Jessica and
Hoerderer's love is central to the play; the chief source of drama lies in
answering the question of who, Hugo or Hoerderer, is ultimately in the
right.
The theater must will to be moral (which does not at all mean "didactic"
in the Brechtian sense):

It was not a question of the opposition of character be-

tween a Stalinist and a Trotskyite; it was not in their
characters that an anti-Nazi of 1933 clashed with an S. S.
guard; the difficulties in international politics do not derive
from the characters of the men leading us; the strikes in
the United States do not reveal conflicts of character
between industrialists and workers. In each case it is, in the

24 Jean-Paul Sartre, "Forgers of Myths, The Young Playwrights of France," in Theater Arts
Anthology (New York, 1950), 141.
 SARlRE'S THEORY OF TIIE THEATER 247

final analysis and in spite of divergent interests, the system

of values, of ethics and of concepts of man which are lined
up against each other. 25

We do not resolve the question of who is ultimately right by delving into

whether the person is sensual or cold, has an Oedipus complex or not, is
vain, reckless, pusillanimous, irritable or jo11y. It is not what goes on in the
character's mind so much as what he in fact does, what he is to be held
responsible for, how he alters the human condition for the better or the
worse by his actions, since every moral choice has a universal, legislative
result both for the meaning of the individual's own life and for a11 those
influenced by it. One life influences only a few persons; when it is raised to
the level of myth it can affect everybody. And the spectator also has a new
role thrust upon hirn: that of witness or moral judge, the jury who delivers
the verdict uft,0n what takes place in "the ring in which people battle for
their rights." In Sartre's own plays, especia11y the important ones like
Dirty Hands, The Flies, The Condemned of Altona, The Devil and the Good
Lord, the action is frequently ambiguous and can only be judged by those
who stand outside the agon itself, namely the audience, us.
Sartre's theater puts us in touch with universal truths by using mythical
means. It is helpful to compare his theory briefly with that advanced for
ancient tragedy by Aristotle in his Poetics and that of Brecht. In Aristotle's
theory the unity of plot is the most important element in tragedy, "the end
and purpose of the tragedy." The proper presentation of this plot, this agon,
before an audience induces in the audience an empathetic identification with
the fear, pity, and other "base emotions" undergone and caused by the fate
of the characters caught up in the drama on stage. In fact, the empathy of
the audience with what is happening on stage is the final purpose of the
plot; it is necessary in order to accomplish the katharsis of these emotions
in the audience; this is of the essence of dramatic theater. Sartre certainly
agrees with this; his essay "Epic theater and Dramatic Theater" (written both
to glorify Brecht and to take his distance from hirn) states this very clearly,
while at the same time indicating that Sartre wants to incorporate into his
own dramatic theater the kind of "objective" social consciousness found in
Brecht.
Against Aristotle and classical dramatic theater Brecht says that the true
aim of the play, and of the actors presenting the plot, should not be to
foster, but to inhibit, the spectators' empathetic identification with the
characters on stage, so as to prevent any catharsis of the emotions and thus
move the spectator from the realm of the imaginary into the realm of the

25 Sartre on Theater, op. cit., 38

26 Ibid., 31.
248 JAMES M. EDlE

real, into effective political and social action. Brecht wants to sublimate
empathy into action, which begins only after the audience leaves the theater.
The play is not an end in itself, to be wallowed in, but a means to the
interpretation of life itself and to the reinvention of "human nature." Thus
Brecht's theater employs a Verfremdungseffekt in order that Lear's wrath, e.g.,
will no longer appear as "the most natural thing in the world," but instead
as something

that the spectator can be surprised at it, so that he can

conceive of still other reactions from Lear as well as that
of wrath. The attitude of Lear is alienated, that is, it is
presented a belonging specifically to Lear, as something
shocking, remarkable, as a social phenomenon which is not
self-evident ... What do we achieve by this? We achieve
the fact that the spectator need no longer see the human
beings presented on the stage as being unchangeable, un-
adaptable, and handed over helpless to fate. What he sees
is that this human being is thus and so because conditions
are thus and so. And conditions are thus and so because
human beings are thus and so. This human being, however,
is capable of being presented not only in this way, as he is,
but in other ways also, as he might be ... As a result of
this the spectator has a new attitude in the Theatre. 27

One point on which Sartre and Brecht are in profound accord lies in the
rejection of any notion of a "flXed" human nature. Human life and human
emotions are something on which we can and should act, mold to our goals
and purposes.28 Emotions are not "self evident;" they are not ultimate
givens; we are at a distance from even our own real emotions; they must be
used for purposes which transcend them.
Sartre can agree with Brecht not only because he has been persuaded by
hirn but because what he says was developed earlier in his own theory of the
transcendence of consciousness with respect to its roles, its emotions, its
innermost psychological acts. The theory he developed in The Transcendence
o[ the Ego and illustrated in his plays gives us a basis for a theory of
enactment which justifies the essential analogy between acting on the stage
and acting in real life. From Aristotie to Sartre there has been, in theories
of action, a consistent movement away from the externalized mask of
behavior, the emotions which we read on the surface of the ego, on the

27 Bertolt Brecht, "On Experimental Theater," in Theater in the Twentieth Centwy, ed.
Robert W. Corrigan (New York: Grove Press, 1963), 107.
28 Ibid., 96ff.
 SARTRE'S THEORY OF TIIE THEATER 249

persona, to the ego itself as the source of its many guises and disguises.
Aristotle proposed a theory of empathy centered in the spectator's vicarious
experience of the emotions portrayed by the actors. Stanislavski proposed a
theory of empathy which went beyond the persona to the real emotions of
the characters as they are fixed by the idea of the play. Brecht attempted to
"alienate" reallife from the roles of the characters and the idea of the play.
Sartre takes the final step of showing that in real life, no less than in
theatrical experience, persons are alienated from themselves, i.e., from their
roles, their essences, their very emotions, and alliearned behaviors. The law
of the egological distance which consciousness is constrained to insert
between itself and its own acts places a man, according to Sartre, in the
same relation to his own emotions and emotional behaviors as the audience
is to the play, according to Brecht.
Sartre argued that an human action takes place before the gaze of
objectifying consciousness. This is a necessary structure of an conscious
experience, and it is in being looked at by others that we discover ourselves
as ethical subjects, as guilty, blamable, praiseworthy, as the subjects of rights
and obligations, as situated in a human and finite world in which we are
never alone. In his analysis of "the look" he implies in one place that the
idea of God is necessary to man precisely because his mode of being requires
that there be an objectifying consciousness which sees hirn at an times and
in an places, and provides hirn with his necessary audience. Without a
spectator, without a witness, without being "watched," consciousness would
lose its being, its essence, its past, and would be reduced to its momentary,
fleeting spontaneity-to nothingness.
But the idea of an external observer, a God, or even an audience of
spectators (which we can society) is a creation of consciousness. The
essentiallaw of consciousness is that it can reflect on its own acts, objectify
itself, and take itself as an object. And what appears to reflection in such a
case are just those actions, states, and dispositions which give to conscious-
ness its appearance as being. A man is not his emotions, his roles, or his acts
because he is a consciousness of acting emotions, roles, and states. My
egological acts, according to Sartre, are more intimate, perhaps, but no
different in kind from any other objects.
Sartre is, therefore, able to accept a good deal of what Brecht has written
on the concept of alienation.

One recognizes what is human in the bourgeoisie by what

is bad, since the reasoning usually is: it's human when
someone has just committed a knavery, a cowardice;
therefore, it is necessary that this nature be bad and it is
necessary that it be immutable ... Besides, if human nature
is bad and eternal, it is evident that no effort is necessary
to achieve some progress ... But, to act, which is precisely
250 JAMES M. EDlE

the object of the theatre, is to change the world and in

changing it, of necessity to change oneself.29

In Brecht's writing on the experimental theater, and in Sartre's writings on

Brecht, we find an indication of how the aesthetic use of the imagination can
produce real results and thus be reintegrated into social action.
Sartre, therefore, would certainly agree with the aims of Brecht's "epic"
theater-namely, to deal with rights and duties, legalities and obligations,
with "oil, inflation, war, social struggles, the family, religion, wheat, the
meat-packing industry."30 He would also agree that theater could become
a "moral institution" that would not "imitate" the emotions and feeling as if
they were "natural," "inevitable," without need of explanation, but create
experiments which would evoke in the face of human nature such responses
as: "That's extremely odd"; "people shouldn't do things like that"; "this has
to stop"; "nothing is self-evident." The purpose of non-bourgeois theater is
not to recover ourselves as we are, says Sartre, but "rather to recover our-
selves as we act, as we work, as we meet difficulties, as we are men who have
roles and who establish roles for these actions." Brecht feIt that the distance
between the audience and the actors was not yet great enough and wanted
to increase it; he did not want to "move" the audience emotionally but to
"show" them the way to the barricades.
But Sartre incorporates only apart of Brecht's theory into his own view.
He rejects the extreme didacticism and activism of Brechtian epic theater as
completely as he rejects the "subjectivity" and social quietism of the
bourgeois dramatic theater. He proposes a dialectical reconciliation of the
two in a theater which would teach men to understand man, i.e., neither to
teach an ideology nor to reflect and repeat the status quo of "already made
human nature." He sometimes describes his project as a "return to the
concept of tragedy a the Greeks saw it." "If it is to address the masses, the
theatre must speak in terms of their most general preoccupations, dispelling
their anxieties in the form of myths which anyone can understand and feel
deeply. "31 The universal truths about which the theater can instroct man,
according to Sartre, do not concern primarily his emotional conflicts or his
rationality, but his situation of freedom and responsibility for the history in
which he finds himself. Imagination is the faculty of freedom, of projection
into the non-yet of the future; theater is the instrument of this freedom.
Sartre, therefore, opts for "dramatic" theater as opposed to "epic" theater

29 Jean-Paul Sartre, "Beyond Bourgeois Theater," Theater in the Twentieth Century, op. eil.,
133-34. See also James M. Edie, '''The Problem of Enactment," lournal o{ Aesthetics and An
Criticism, 1971, 303-318.
30 Brecht, '''Theater for Leaming," Tulane Drama Review, no. 6 (September 1961), 21.
31 Sartre, ''Forgers of Myths," op. eil., 138-139.
 SAR1RE'S 'fHEORY OF THE THEATER 251

(a slice of life or history, without beginning or end except through the

arbitrary decisions of the playwright), and he fully accepts the precepts of
Aristotle that the audience must be able to empathize with the actions on
stage, just as he accepts the precepts of Stanislavski that the actors must be
able to empathize with their roles in order to convey the meaning of the
plot to the audience. And in fact Brecht was never able to put his theory or
method fully into practice or to achieve its intended effect, not even with the
Berliner Ensemble; he was too great a poet for that. The audiences of the
Three Penny Opera are not disgusted by "Mack the Knife" even though he is
a disgusting character. Mother Courage, it is true, learns about as much
about war, trudging all over Germany during the Thirty Years' War, as a
rabbit learns of anatomy under the dissecting knife of a physiologist, and yet,
at the end, as she slumps down in a heap with only her wagon left for her,
alone, to pull, the surge of empathy that goes out to her from the audience
is so thick it could be cut only with an axe. The same thing happens with
Galileo, Saint Joan o[ the Stockyards, and all the others who were supposed
to be "distanced" from us and teach us lessons. We find ourselves identifying
with them. Brecht's theory, therefore, failed, while his theater was an
enormous success.
What about Sartre's theory? It would seem to be stronger than the plays
it was mean to account for, since the theory lasts and his plays are (in my
opinion, unjustly) neglected as "dated," "too argumentative," "too full of
words and discourses," "dead ends."

§5. Conclusion: The Three Clowns

Sartre's theory, in my view, is superior in that it requires and achieves

multiple levels of meaning both in itself and in the numerous classical and
other plays to which it applies. Sartre, like Brecht and Pirandello, was a
playwright who not only wrote plays but who had a theory of what he was
doing. Most artists are quite inarticulate about what they are doing and,
when asked, like Cezanne, are very likely to give ludicrous explanations on
a theoretical level. This is not the case with Sartre.
Centeno, in his Sartrean commentary, came up with the Theory o[ the
Three Clowns to distinguish the three principal levels of action and inter-
pretation at work in a Sartrean play: The White Clown, The Red Clown and
the Blue Clown. 32 Everything we have said up to now about "dramatic

32 This is presented in Centeno y Rilova and D. Sutherland, The Blue Clown, Dialogues,
(Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1971). Though I take these dialogues as my inspiration
for applying these distinctions to Sartre's work, I have considerably "interpreted" Centeno's
original presentation.
252 JAMES M. EDlE

theater," and nearly everything that has been produced throughout history,
and certainly almost everything which is being produced at the present time,
is the work of The White Clown. This is the actor who plays by the rules,
who is exhibited in "normal" psychological theater, who presents a sometimes
ordered and sometimes disordered play of psychological emotions and con-
flicts. It is a theater which entertains, which shows the audience itself in its
fully acceptable language, setting, character and plot, even if these be
exaggerated to include the most bizarre abnormalities and deviations. We are
not disturbed by the presentation of abnormalities, of "the orgiastic," of
systematic ugliness; we welcome them to literature so long as they are
presented to us as unusual representations of ourselves, so long as we are
outside looking in. They are only brief disturbances between moments of
calm. In Sartre's eyes this applies particularly to theater in the United States.
He admired Henry Miller (he rewrote The Crucible for the cinema as The
Witches 01 Salem in order to introduce into it a social dimension), Tennessee
Williams, Edward Albee, Eugene O'Neill, and others, but considered them
unidimensional. In fact, on this view the gulf separating Anglo-American
theatrical taste from Sartre's is as deep as the one which separated the
ancient Roman from the Greek.
There was as much sex and violence in Greek theater as there was in the
Roman, only it took place off stage; the Romans wanted their violence
visible, they feIt the need to introduce it in exaggerated form not only in the
circus and the amphitheater but in the theater itself, where mutilations and
other extremely cruel and degrading acts were not only alluded to but
actually performed.33 In contemporary America, actual mutilations do not
occur on stage nor does the persecuted hero actually die, but psychological
dramas like Who's Afraid 01 Virginia Woolj7, Suddenly Last Summer, The Boys
in the Band, Death 01 a Salesman, and many others, consist of nothing other
than the play of characters tearing one another apart psychologically,
reducing each other to impotence for the satisfaction of the audience.
Sartre considers the level of meaning embodied in psychological tensions,
confrontations, contests and struggles absolutely essential to good drama
(this is his main point of disagreement with Brecht's theory), and he is very
skillful in developing them. He is almost as acute an observer of subtle
psychological behaviors as William James, and this ability is certainly a
necessary condition for a playwright; but it is not enough, it is not a sufficient
condition. To stop there is to remain in what he calls "bourgeois" theater, on
a level of understanding beneath his primary concerns.
But there are other clowns. The Red Clown, unlike the White Clown,
possesses a political or social (perhaps even a religious) point of view which

33 Carlin Barton, The SO"OWS o[ the Ancient Romans: The Gladiator und the Monster,
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993), 6Off.
 SARTRE'S THEORY OF lliE THEATER 253

is always disconcerting, sometimes "diabolic," "heroic," even "epic," to convey

to his audience. He presents the vagaries of human subjectivity, not just to
show forth the dark side of human nature but primarily to display men in
a raw struggle to establish their moral rights. The action, agon, of the
theater does not terminate with the performance but is directed towards
changing men and society for the future, in reality, beyond the confines of
this production. This is not the work of the "poet who affirms nothing" and
whose writing is purely self-referential; its reference is to the real world of
cultural change and revolution.
Finally, there is the level of The Blue Clown who has seldom held the
leading role in the past, though he has frequently been present to some
extent-certainly in the Greeks, in Shakespeare, in the major tragedians. His
is the level of philosophical, of "typical" and "mythical," understanding; his
is "the theater of existence." He is not only "heroic" but "cosmic." His symbol
is the clear, blue, dark night; his are the characters who are "unconditional
subjectivities," witnesses to whatever there is or whatever is done.
Jeanson has said34 that it is possible to understand Sartre's novels, short
stories and plays without having read his philosophical works, but it is
certainly easier to grasp their full meaning and import after having done so.
It is not that Sartre is the only, or even the first, to have distinguished the
psychological, the social, and the philosophical dimensions of meaning in
theater, but he has made the distinction the thematic center of his theory of
the theater and of his plays. His theory brings what was pre-thematic,
prereflexive, pre-predicative in theatrical experience to the level of fully
conscious, reflexive clarity.

34 Francis Jeanson, Sartre par lui-meme, (Paris: Seuil, 1956).

 GILBERT T. NULL

ART AND PART:

Mereology and the Ontology of Art

§1. Danto's Problem: The Ontological Problem o[the Artwork

as the Eidetic Phenomenology o[ Art

In The Transfiguration o[ the Commonplace, Arthur Danto formulates the

ontological problem of the artwork in terms derived from the Wittgen-
steinian analysis of (social) action. Wittgenstein's question was formulated
in terms of a notion of subtraction: "What ... is left over when, from the
fact that you raise your arm [in an action of admonition, or welcome, or
rejection, etc.], you subtract the fact that your arm goes up? Danto [1981:
4] characterizes Wittgenstein's own answer as "nothing: any of the [three
different] actions which involve raising my arm are identical to the event of
my arm going up."
Danto fo11ows the later Wittgensteinians in rejecting this answer on the
grounds that it implies that the different actions of welcoming and rejecting
are identical. The position preferred is that an action must be a movement
of the body plus x, where the x is the properties shared by a11 and only those
bodily movements which are actions. The ontological problem o[ action
(specifying the properties x essential to any action whatever) is the desider-
atum of the eidetic phenomenology o[ action.
The desideratum of the eidetic phenomenology o[the artwork is formulated
analogously by Danto [1981: 5] in terms of the Wittgensteinian notion of
"subtraction":

a work of art is a material object plus y; and the problem

in either domain is to solve in some philosophica11y res-
pectable way for x and y respectively.

Danto rejects both the (later) Wittgensteinian's solution "x is a rule" and the
Institutional Theory of Art's solution 'Y is consensus within the artworld" for
the same reason:

The [Wittgensteinian] solution . . . left unresolved a

distinction between ... [actions] of signaling and [meaning-

255
S. Galt Crowell (ed.), The Prism ofthe Self, 255-275.
© 1995 Kluwer Academic Publishers.
256 GILBERT T. NULL

less behaviors, such] as ties and spasms ... Granted that

these don't fall under rules because they are not actions, it
follows that being an action is a condition for falling under
an appropriate rule-and hence falling under a rule cannot
explain a distinction it after all presupposes [1981: 5].

Danto's complaint about the Institutional Theory of Art is that it

accounts only for how an object (e.g. the urinal involved in Duchamp's
Fountain) becomes elevated from a mere thing to an artwork (i.e. how the
urinal gains the "art-making" ("+y") properties), but does not reveal what
these peculiar "+y" properties are. Whether Danto's suggestion [1981: 5, 94]
that the artworld's consensual act presupposes the urinal's prior possession
of the art-making (+y) properties is supportable, or whether the artworld's
act is a consensual intersubjective constitution of the urinal as exhibiting the
+y properties [also suggested by Danto 1981: 104] or both [see Section 6
below] is irrelevant here. In either case, the fatal flaw of the Institutional
theory is that it has nothing to say about what the +y properties shared by
an and only artworks are [1981: 94].
Danto identifies the desideratum of the eidetic phenomenology (Le. the
regional ontology) of the artwork as his own. Assuming an implicit part-
whole theory in the formal ontological language of his analysis, he
understands the Wittgensteinian notion of subtraction as the inverse of some
form of mereological summation, and discusses [1981: eh. 4] the artwork
(u+y) as a mereological sum of an object (u) and the art-making properties
(y) which he seeks to identify. It is the goal of this essay to examine the
mereological presuppositions of Danto's ontology of art, to show the
inconvenience of those assumptions in that context, and to suggest some
alternatives.
Section 2 formulates Danto's conception of the artwork as a mereological
sum, and examines a distinction between the artwork, its material base, and
its artifactual counterpart imposed on his analysis by the transitivity of the
part relation. Section 3 concerns the criterion of mereological identity
employed by Danto and considers his need for an equivalence relation of
substantive sameness which is weaker than identity but unavailable due to his
commitment to mereological extensionality. Section 4 considers Danto's
need to maintain that the criteria of identity and spatio-temporal individua-
tion of artworks are different in spite of the fact that the difference cannot
be formulated in the extensional mereology he assumes, and argues for an
alternative principle ofmereological individuation. Section 5 presents a non-
extensional mereology better suited to the ontology of art, and Section 6
concludes by suggesting a reformulated ontology of art which assumes the
non-extensional alternative of Section 5.
 MEREOLOGY AND 1HE ONTOLOGY OF ART 257

§2. Danto's Mereological Analysis of the Artwork and the

Transitivity of the Part Relation

As exercises of free variation in the imagination, Danto [1981: 101] pres-

ents a variety ofwhat he calls "arrayed examples" of different artworks which
share common (or at least, visually indistinguishable) constituent artifacts.
The first consists of six distinct artworks and two mere artifacts, all of which
are visually identical "squares of red paint" [1981: 1]. Danto refers to the
artifact "square of red paint" as the material counterpart of the artwork, and
also as the base (u) which supports "variable superstructures" (y's), the idea
being that by adding different y's (i.e. different "art-making properties") to
the same artifact one generates different artworks:

What [my examples of different artworks] have in COmmon

may be thought to be simply everything that is congruent
with the mere real object. My claim throughout is that an
artwork cannot be flattened onto its base and identified just
with it, for then it would be what the mere thing itself is-a
square of red canvas . . . It would be whatever the real
thing itself consisted in that we proposed to subtract from
the work of art, in order to see what the remainder might
be, supposing that the essence of art might He here [1981:
101].

Danto is clearly thinking of the artwork u +y as a whole which may be

(exhaustively) divided into the parts consisting of the material base u and the
art-making properties y, and of the inverse + of the Wittgensteinian
subtraction operation as some form of mereological summation:

It was as though the artwork in every instance was a

complex entity with the red square, for example, as a
proper and indeed an easily interchangeable part: our
arrayed examples were almost as though several souls
shared the self-same body [1981: 101].

Danto's use of the language of part, whole, and mereological summation

is intuitive, but generally conforms to the tradition of formal part-whole
theories deriving from the Brentano schooll via Lesniewski2 and developed

1 See Husserl [1928]; Null and Blecksmith [1991]; Null [1994]; Simons [1982]; Simons
[1987]; Stumpf [1873]; Smith [1982].
2 See Lesniewski [1930]; Tarski [1956].
258 GILBERT T. NULL

by Leonard-Goodman, et. al. 3 For instance, within that tradition the part
relation is characterized as transitive. The transitivity of the part relation
combined with certain descriptive findings from the phenomenology of the
artwork forces Danto to introduce a distinction between the "material
counterpart" and the "base" of the artwork.
Danto [1981: 100ff] asks whether a11 the parts of the material base are
parts of any artwork of which it is apart, and answers this question negat-
ively. A counter example: there are Tintorettos where the coarse canvas is
so in evidence it is very difficult to overlook it, even though one ought to
try, because although the canvas is part of the material counterpart, it is not
part of the artwork [1981: 103].
The traditional understanding of the part relation as transitive implies
that if Danto's description is accurate (Le., if the artwork need not contain
every part of the material counterpart), then the relation between the
material counterpart and the artwork must be something other than the part
relation. If the base is part of the artwork, then the material counterpart
cannot be identical to the base (otherwise a11 its parts would be parts of the
artwork). Since mereological identity traditiona11y means sharing a11 parts,
Danto claims that some parts of the artifact (material counterpart) are not
parts of the material base. More importantly, he claims that the selection of
which parts of the material counterpart are parts of the material base is a
function of the parts of the artwork other than its base.
Describing a bronze statue of a cat chained to a railing at the head of a
stairway at Columbia University, Danto raises the question whether this is
astatue of a chained cat or a chained statue of a cat. In the former case the
chain is part, and in the latter case the chain is not part of the material base
of the artwork. In order to determine what the parts of the material base
are, it is necessary to know what the artwork iso Danto [1981: 103] says that
"a decision must be made as to what the work is before we can tell what
must be subtracted. Then:
H

Let us continue to speak of the mere thing, various [but

not a11] parts ... of which will be parts ... of the artworks
that compose the other members of a given arrayed exam-
pIe, as the material counterpart of any of these ... the work
itself will determine [which parts] of the material counter-
part will have to be subtracted [1981: 104].

Danto's ontology of art then distinguishes the artwork, its material

counterpart, and its base as three different entities. The non-identity of the
artwork and the material base is required by the assumption that the former

3 See Leonard and Goodman [1940]; Eberle [1970]; Quine and Goodman [1947].
 MEREOLOGY AND THE ONTOLOGY OF ART 259

is a mereological sum of which the latter is a proper part. The non-identity

of the material counterpart and the material base of the artwork is required
by the transitivity of the part relation, because the base may be part of an
artwork which fails to have so me parts of its material counterpart.

§3. Identity and Substantive Sameness of Artworks and Artifacts

In claiming the non-identity of the three pairs made up of the material

counterpart u, the base u', and the whole artwork u' +y, Danto understands
identity in traditional terms. He assumes (1981: 34-5] Leibniz's dual prin-
ciples of the identity of indiscernibles ("Things which share an properties are
identical") and the indiscernibility of identicals ("Identical things share an
properties"). In part-whole theory, the only property at issue is that of
having parts, and the two Leibnizian principles are expressible (respectively)
as:

3.1 The principle of the mereological identity of

coextensives: Wholes which share an parts are
identical.

3.2 The principle of the mereological coextensivity of

identicals: Identical wholes share an parts.

3.1 is The Principle of Mereological Extensionality; any theory of the part

relation is extensional just in case 3.1 is derivable as one of its theorems. It
requires of any two non-identical wholes that there is some part which they
fail to share. Danto appears to accept 3.1; his claim that the material
counterpart and the base of the artwork fail to share all parts supports his
claim of their non-identity in accordance with 3.1. Similarly, his claim that
the artwork is non-identical either to its base or to its material counterpart
is supported by evidence that the artwork has parts (or properties, con-
sidered as parts) shared by neither of the above.
In his refutation of George Dickie's Institutional Theory of Art, Danto
raises the question whether the urinal (u) which is the material base of
Duchamp's Fountain (u+y) is identical to the artwork. Danto [1981: 94]
denies that the base and the artwork are identical on the Leibnizian grounds
that the artwork has properties which the base (and also the material
counterpart) lacks:

But the question is whether the artwork Fountain is indeed

identical with that urinal, and hence whether those gleam-
ing surfaces and deep reflections [viz. properties of the
urinal] are indeed qualities of the artwork ... But certainly
260 GILBERT T. NULL

the work itself has properties that urinals themselves lack:

it is daring, impudent, irreverent, witty, and clever . . . a
work of art has a great many qualities ... of a different
sort altogether than the qualities belonging to objects
materia11y indiscemible from [it] but not themselves art-
works.

Danto's position is then that Duchamp's Fountain (by extension, any

artwork) is not identical to the urinal (base) which occurs as part of it
because the two [ai! to share all parts. While this position is commensurate
with the criterion of identity available within extensional part theories, it
incurs a crucial conundrum within the ontology of art. If the material base
and counterpart are non-identical because they fail to share a11 parts, then
it becomes impossible to explain the difference between their relation and
the relation between any whole and one of its proper pieces.
For instance, Danto is forced to claim that the urinal which occurs as a
part of Duchamp's Fountain is not identical to the (same.') urinal considered
as a mere artifact, in abstraction from its function in Fountain. It is plausible
to imagine this claim being disputed by Duchamp, who quite intentiona11y
acquired a urinal, and then used that self-same and entire urinal in Fountain.
The philosophical problem confronting Danto is that he is unable to account
for the fact that it is somehow the same urinal which was manufactured as
a mere artifact, and then used by Duchamp as the material base of Fountain.
This philosophical obscurity derives from Danto's acceptance of 3.1. Just
as the transitivity of the part relation forces Danto's denial of the identity
of the material counterpart and the base of the artwork, the thesis of
extensionality requires that the two fail to share a11 parts. But having
established non-identity, Danto is left unable to account for the fact that the
material counterpart and the base are, even if non-identical, nevertheless
substantively the same. The only connection between the two wholes which
Danto is able to establish is that they share some parts, and that relation is
insufficient to account for the fact that these two particular non-identical
wholes are (somehow different versions of) the same arti[act. Danto is unable
to distinguish within his analysis between non-identical pairs of objects
which (like the urinal qua the base of Fountain and the urinal qua mere
artifact) are and those which (like a urinal and one of its proper pieces) are
not substantively the same artifact. The lack of a needed criterion of substan-
tive sameness within Danto's regional ontology of the artwork derives from
his assumption of an underlying formal ontology of part and whole which is
extensional (Le. within which 3.1 is a thesis).
 MEREOLOGY AND TIlE ONTOLOGY OF ART 261

While Danto has remained too faithful to the tradition of part-whole

theory in accepting the thesis of extensionality,4 he also violates the tradi-
tion in one important regard. He wants to say that the same artwork can
exist with different bases [see Section 4 below]. 3.2 implies that identical
wholes share all parts. Therefore, if (u +y) and (u' +y) are identical artworks
and y=y, then u=u' (i.e. they must have identical material bases). While it
is possible to construct a (non-extensional) part-whole theory in which 3.1
is not a thesis [see Seetion 5 below], 3.2 is unavoidable. This defect of
Danto's analysis is therefore irreparable so long as it relies on an underlying
ontology of part and whole. Besides this clear mereological faux pas, Danto's
analysis of the individuation of artworks yields results which clash with the
nominalist and physicalist predilections ofmost post-Husserlian extensional-
ist part-whole theorists, but which are nevertheless philosophical positions
consistent with a (non-extensional) mereological point of view.

§4. Individuation and Artworks

Danto uses his distinction between the artwork and its material counter-
part to argue that even though mere artifacts (material counterparts) can
exist in only one place at any given time, artworks suffer no such ontological
degradation. He cites [1981: 33-5] examples of many copies of the same
literary artwork, many recordings (alternatively, performances) of the same
musical artwork, many performances of Hamlet, but also many recordings
of the weather report, copies of the newspaper, etc., as evidence that there
are many things which may exist at more than one point in space at the
same time, and that artworks are such things.
The traditional mereological principle of individuation implies that if two
wholes share all parts, then they exist at the same point in space and time.
Within the extensionalist tradition (where 3.1 is accepted), the implication
is that identical wholes exist at the same point in space and time [Eberle
1970: 2-10, 37 (2.3.1 and 2.3.2)]. Danto's claim that identical artworks can
exist at different places at the same time conflicts with this extentionalist

4 Danto is committed to mereological, but not to Iinguistic extensionalism. Never

questioning the former, he suggests abandoning the latter (i.e. the principle of unrestricted
intersubstitutivity salva veritate of co-referential expressions ) for the language of the ontology
of art [1981: 172-189). Since the substitutivity of identicals and existential generalization [1981:
180) would also fail for such a language, he comments [1981: 182) that a "fairly complex
semantics" would have to be developed. Conversely, I suggest [Section 6 below) using a
Iinguistically extensional language (viz. first -order predicate logic) for which a standard
(Tarskian) semantics is available to formulate a part-whole theory in which the thesis 3.1 of
mereological extensionality is independent, and adopting the resulting (irregular) part theory as
the language of the ontology of art. Such a mereologically non-extensional but Iinguistically
extensional language avoids the semantic quagmire which confronts Danto.
262 GILBERT T. NULL

principle of individuation. The formal ontology of part and whole underlying

Danto's ontology of art clearly requires some principle of individuation
other than that of the extensionalist mereological tradition.
Besides claiming that the same artwork may exist at more than one place
at the same time, Danto also claims that different artworks can exist at the
same place at the same time. It would be a friendly amendment of Danto's
example to imagine that there is only one square of red paint (Le. a single
artifact) but six distinct artworks in which non-identical but substantively the
same versions of it occur as proper parts (Le. as material bases). In the
example he borrows from Borges' Pie"e Menard, Symbolist Poet [Danto 1981:
34ffJ, two different literary artworks (fragments of works by Cervantes and
by Pierre Menard) are instanced by visually indistinguishable printed pages.
A single copy could be arbitrarily used to study either or both of the two
works. Danto's point should be that the artworks by Menard and Cervantes
are different (even though they share a single material counterpart) both
because a-) they contain non-identical but substantively the same material
bases, and b-) the art making properties which occur as parts of each are
different.
In fact Danto too often fails to maintain the required distinction between
the (non-identical but substantively the same) material counterpart and base,
violating the transitivity of the part relation by falling victim to the tendency
to confuse substantive sameness with identity. In such cases he emphasizes
b-) to the exclusion of a-) above, suggesting that the non-identity of different
artworks which share a single material counterpart derives only from the
difference of those parts which would remain after the bases are "subtract-
ed":

Borges teils us that the Quixote of Menard is infinitely

more subtle than that of Cervantes, while that of Cervantes
is immeasurably more coarse than its counterpart ... The
contrast in style is also vivid . . . The archaie style of
Menard-quite foreign after all-suffers from a certain
affeetation. Not so that of his forerunner, who handles with
ease the current Spanish of his time [1981: 35].

The point is then that the two different artworks by Cervantes and
Menard share a single material counterpart, viz., the single printed page
which instances them both. A second implication of the traditional mereo-
logical principle of individuation is that if two wholes exist at the same point
in space and time, then they share all parts. Within the extensionalist
tradition (where 3.1 is accepted), this implies that wholes which exist at the
same point in space and time are identical. Danto's claim that non-identical
wholes (artworks) exist at the same place at the same time conflicts with this
extentionalist principle of individuation. Thus we find a second reason why
 MEREOLOGY AND TIlE ONTOLOGY OF ART 263

the formal ontology of part and whole underlying Danto's ontology of art
needs some principle of individuation other than that of the extensionalist
mereological tradition. The principle of individuation urged for the altern-
ative, non-extensional part-whole theory presented below satisfies Danto's
second, but not his first need.
The principle 3.1 of mereological extensionalism imposes undesirable
characteristics on Danto's ontology of the artwork. In order to maintain the
distinctness of the artwork from its base and material counterpart while
accepting 3.1, Danto must maintain that no two of the three share all their
parts. In the absence of 3.1, Danto could claim that the base, the material
counterpart, and the artwork are all non-identical even though they share all
parts. Secondly, 3.1 is directly responsible for the impossibility of formulating
a principle of substantive sameness which is weaker than the principle of
identity. In the absence of 3.1, it would be possible to account for the fact
that Duchamp's Fountain and its urinal base are non-identical but neverthe-
less substantively the same objects.
The following part-whole theory is non-extensional in the sense that 3.1
is not derivable from the axioms of the theory, and supports a perspective
in the ontology of art such as suggested in the preceding paragraph.

§5. A Non-Extensional Formal Ontology of Whole and Part Congenial

to the Regional Ontology of the Artwork

5.1 Axioms for Non-Extensional Part Theory

The definition of'x is part ofy' traditionallyaccepted in extensional part-

whole theories (and which informs Danto's discussion of the ontology of art)
is: x is either a proper part of or identical to y. The primitive concept proper
part is then defined contextually via axioms. What follows is adeparture
from the definition and axioms accepted by both the extensionalist tradition
and Danto.
The axioms presented here imply a non-extensional theory of the part
relation which is presented with a much more detailed discussion in [Null
1994]. I begin by introducing a non-traditional definition of Cis apart of
suggested by Peter Simons [1987: 112 (SD1S)]:

DEFINITION 1: x9 [read: 'x is part of y'] means

{3z(z<x) :> 'Iz[(z<x) :> (z<y)]} & {-3z(z<x) :>

[(x<y) v (x=y)]}

[i.e. if x has a proper part then every proper part

of xis a proper part of y, and if x has no proper
264 GILBERT T. NULL

part, then x is either a proper part of or identical

to y].

The crux of the definition is that being apart of a whole means having
every proper part inc1uded as a proper part of the whole (and vice versa). So
defined, the part relation is reflexive and transitive. But of course it is not
antisymmetrie (cf. 3.1); it allows non-identical wholes to be parts of each
other just in case they both have and share (all) proper parts.
I define the overlap predicate in the standard way, and use it to state the
two axioms of the theory:

DEFINITION 2: Oxy [read: 'x overlaps y'] means 3z[(z<x) & (z9)]
[i.e. x and y share some part].

The language in which the theory is formulated is first-order predicate

logic with identity. The dyadic predicate '<' (intended to denote the proper
part relation) is the undefined primitive of the theory formulated below.

AXIOM 1: [Transitivity of <]: 'v'x'ly'v'z{[(x<y) & (y<z)] => (x<z)}

A proper part of a proper part is a proper part of the

whole.

AXIOM 2: [Weak Supplementation]: 'v'x'ly{(x9) => 3z[(z<y) & -

Ozx]}

If a whole has a proper part, then it has another proper

part disjoint from the first.

Transitivity [Al] and weak supplementation [AZ] are the defining character-
istics of the proper part relation, and consequently it has the property of
asymmetry [TI]. The part relation defined by D1 comports itself reasonably
civilly vis-a-vis the proper part relation. However, the following traditional
property (the "Regularity of Parts" principle) is not available as a theorem:

5.101 'v'x'ly<3z(z<x) => {[-(x<y) & -(x=y)] => -(x9)} >

If a whole has a proper part, then if it is neither a proper

part of nor identical to a second whole, it is not apart of
that second whole.

The unavailability of 5.101 means that wholes with proper parts can have
parts other than themselves which are not proper parts. Such apart would
be non-identical to the whole and also not a proper part of the whole. I will
 MEREOLOGY AND TIIE ONTOLOGY OF ART 265

refer to parts which are neither improper nor proper parts of the whole as
irregular parts, and to parts which are not irregular as regular parts. The
possible inclusion of irregular parts in a whole distinguishes the present
theory from traditional, extensionalist part-whole theories, and motivates my
referring to the present theory as irregular part theory.
The axioms Al and A2 permit the proper parts principle [T4] and weak
supplementation [A2] to be derived as theorems, and permit the existence
of mereological sums and products (overlaps). The definition D2 of overlap
is standard, but unique overlaps are unavailable. A standard definition of
mereological summation and an axiom establishing the existence of such
sums would be possible in the present theory. However, establishing the
uniqueness of sums is out of the question because of the loss of extension-
ality; a given sum would correspond to a class of non-identical wholes. Like
the theses of extensionality [3.1] and regularity of parts [5.101], neither the
uniqueness of mereological sums, nor of products is derivable.
The unavailability of sums means that Danto's notion of the artwork (as
the mereological sum of its base and certain "art-making properties") is not
commensurate with a regional ontology of art which assumes an irregular
part theory in its underlying formal ontology. An alternative to Danto's
account of the relations between the mere physical object, the artifact, and
the artwork will accordingly be offered in Section 6 below. This alternative
will be formulated in terms of irregular parts (which are unavailable in
extensional mereology) rather than in terms of summation (which is
unavailable in non-extensional mereology).

5.2 The Consistency and Non-Extensionality

of Irregular Part Theory

Al and A2 have a finite model M, Le. are true when an appropriate

interpretation of predicates and assignment of variables is made in a four
member model M having the (Hasse diagram) structure shown below:

o 0
M =
o 0

Interpretations of the predicates of the system are as follows:

5.201 x < y means x is below y in M.

5.202 x < y means If x is not on the bottom of M, then everything below

x in M is below y in M, and if x is on the bottom of M, then it is
below y in M or identical to y in M.
266 GILBERT T. NULL

The satisfaction of Al and AZ by this model is discussed at more length in

[Null 1994]. Since both Al and AZ are satisfied in M, M is a model of
irregular part-whole theory, which is therefore consistent.
I next show that 5.101 is independent of the system. The negation of
5.101 is:

5.203 3x3y<{3z(z<x) & -[(x<y) v (x=y)]} & (x.$J»

Under the present interpretation, 5.203 means that there is some x and some
y such that both:

a-) If x is on the bottom of M then x is below or identical to

y, and;

b-) If x is on the bottom of M then x=y, and if x is not on the

bottom of M, then everything below x is below y in M.

Since condition b-) implies condition a-), the satisfaction of condition b-) is
sufficient for the satisfaction of 5.203. The following four member model
satisfies 5.203 (and thus falsifies 5.101) for either of the assignments x=b
and y=c, or x=c and y=b:

b c
a d

Thus, 5.101 is independent of the part-whole axioms Al and AZ. Since 5.101
is a consequence of 3.1, the independence of 5.101 guarantees the indepen-
dence of 3.1 and the non-extensionality of the system.
The independence of 5.101 is attributable to the fact that 3.1 is a conse-
quence of the conjunction of 5.101, the weak supplementation principle
[AZ], the transitivity of '<' [T22], and the assumption that x has a proper
part. 5.101 is independent of any non-extensional system of mereology in
which some wholes have proper parts, and weak supplementation and the
transitivity of the part relation are theorems.
Similarly, the claim that any part of a proper part is a proper part of the
whole:

5.204 'V'x'v'y'v'z{[(x.$J) & (y<z)] ::> (x<z)}

is a thesis of regular part theory, and is satisfied in the finite Hasse models
considered above. But 5.204 also is independent of the axioms of irregular
part theory, which imply that parts of proper parts are parts, but not that
they are proper parts of the whole. Joseph B. Stephen (Department of
Mathematics at Northern Illinois University) has proven the independence
 MEREOLOGY AND TIIE ONTOLOGY OF ART 267

of 5.204 within irregular part theory by providing a type of infinite model of

axioms Al and A2 in which the negation of 5.204 is satisfied. Models of the
Stephen type are infinite partially ordered sets in which at least one member
functions as the limit of an ascending series of real numbers. One is an
atomless upper semi-Iattice, but others have atoms or no universal whole (or
both).

5.3 Regular and Irregular Parts; Some Theorems of

Irregular Part Theory

It is distinctive of non-extensional part theories that wholes with proper

parts may have and be parts which are neither proper parts of, nor identical
to their wholes, parts which 1 now formally define as i"egular:

DEFINITION 3: x < < y [read: 'x is an irregular part of y'] means

{(x.sy) & [-(x<y) & -(x=y»)} [i.e. x is a non-
identical part ofywhich is not a proper part ofy].

Note that -(x< <y) means that either x is not part of y, or that x is either a
proper part of or identical to y. Then 'x is a regular part of y' means that x
is apart but not an irregular part of y. Accordingly:

DEFINITION 4: x<=y [read: 'x is a regular part ofy'] means

[(x<y) v (x=y)] [i.e. xis either a proper part of or
identical to y].

Compare the definition of regular part with the second conjunct of the
definition D1 of part above. All (but not only) parts which have no proper
part are regular parts. As might then be expected, irregular parts have
proper parts [T19]. But it turns out also that wholes which have irregular
parts have proper parts [T20]. From the point of view of non-extensional
part theory, irregular parts and regular parts which have proper parts are the
most interesting kinds of parts.
The following theorems of irregular part theory are selected from [Null
1994], where they appear with the same identifying numbers and accompany-
ing proofs.

Theorem 1. The part relation is reflexive: 'v'x(x<x)

Theorem 4. [Proper Part Principle] If a whole has proper parts and

every one of its proper parts is a proper part of something,
then the whole is part of that thing:
'v'x'v'y<{3z(z<x) & Vz[(z<x) :> (z<y)]} :> (x.sy»
268 GILBERT T. NULL

Theorem 7. The proper part relation is asymmetrie:

Vx\fy[(x<y) :> -(y<x)]

Theorem 8. The proper part relation is irreflexive:

Vx-(x<x)

Theorem 9. Irregular parts are parts:

Vx\fy[(x< <y) :> (x.9)]

Theorem 10. Regular parts are parts:

Vx\fy[(x< =y) :> (x.9)]

Theorem 11. The irregular part relation is irreflexive:

Vx-(x< <x)

Theorem 12. The regular part relation is reflexive:

V'z(x<=x)

Theorem 13. Any part of a whole is either an irregular or a proper or an

improper (i.e. identical) part of the whole:
Vx\fy«x.9) :> {(x«y) v [(x<y) v (x=y)]}>

Theorem 14. Any part of a whole is either an irregular or a regular part

of the whole:
Vx\fy{(x.9) :> [(x< <y) V (x< =y)]}

Theorem 17. One whole is part of a second just in case it is either an

irregular or a proper or an improper part of the second:
Vx\fy«x.9) == {(x«y) v [(x<y) v (x=y)]}>

Theorem 18. One whole is part of a second just in case it is either an

irregular or a regular part of the second:
Vx\fy[(x.9) == [(x< <y) v (x< =y)]}

Theorem 19. Irregular parts have proper parts:

Vx\fy[(x< <y) :> 3z(z<x)]

Theorem 20. Wholes with irregular parts have proper parts:

Vx\fy[(x< <y) :> 3z(z<y)]

Theorem 21. If a whole is an irregular part of anything, then all its

proper parts are proper parts of that thing:
Vx\fy{(x< <y) :> V'z[(z<x) :> (z<y)]}
 MEREOLOGY AND TIIE ONTOLOGY OF ART 269

Theorem 22. Parts of parts are parts of the whole [The part relation is
transitive] :
Vx'v'yVz{[(x.:s.y) & (y<z) => (x<z)}

Theorem 23. Proper parts of irregular parts are proper parts of the
whole:
Vx'v'yVz{[(x<y) & (y< <z)] => (x<z)}

Theorem 25. Proper parts of regular parts are proper parts of the whole:
Vx'v'yVz{[(x<y) & (y< =z)] => (x<z)}

Theorem 26. Proper parts of parts are proper parts of the whole:
Vx'v'yVz{[(x<y) & (y<z)] => (x<z)}

Theorem 28. Regular parts of regular parts are regular parts of the
whole [The regular part relation is transitive]:
Vx'v'yVz{[(x< =y) & (y< =z)] => (x< =z)}

Theorem 35. No whole is an irregular part of any of its proper parts:

Vx'v'y[(x<y) => -(y< <x)]

Theorem 36. If apart of a proper part is not a proper part of the whole,
then it is an irregular part of that proper part:
Vx'v'yVz< [(x.:s.y) & (y<z)] & -(x<z)} => (x«y»

Theorem 37. If apart of a proper part is not a proper part of the whole,
then it is an irregular part of it:
Vx'v'yVz<[(x.:s.y) & (y<z)] & -(x<z)} => (x«z»

Theorem 41. Identical wholes are parts of each other:

Vx'v'y{(x=y) => [(x.:s.y) & (y<x)]}

Theorem 43. Wholes which are irregular parts of each other share all
proper parts:
Vx'v'y{[(x< <y) & (y< <x)] => Vz[(z<x) == (z<y)]}

Theorem 48. Non-identical wholes with proper parts are irregular parts
of each other just in case they share all parts:
Vx'v'y< {-(x=y) & [3z(z<x) & 3z(z<y)]} =>
{[(x«y) & (y«x)]> == Vz[(z<x) == (z.:s.y)]}>

5.31 Coextensivity of wholes

DEFINITION 5: Cxy [read: 'x and y are coextensive'] means

270 GILBERT T. NULL

[(x.::s.y) & (y<x)] [Le. X and y are parts of each

other].

Given D1 as the definition of 'part', the crux of D5 is that coextensive

wholes are either identical or share all proper parts [T36; cf. T41 and Simons
1987: 248]. The following theorems concerning it are provided:

Theorem 49. [cf. 4.03]: Identical wholes are coextensive:

'v'x'v'y[ (x=y) => Cxy]

Theorem 50. The relation of being coextensive is reflexive:

'v'xCxx

Theorem 51. The relation of being coextensive is symmetrie:

'v'x'v'y(Cxy => Cyx)

Theorem 52. The relation of being coextensive is transitive:

'v'x'v'y'v'z[(Cxy & Cyz) => Cxz]

Theorem 56. Wholes are coextensive just in case they share all parts:
'v'x'v'y{Cxy == 'v'z[(z<x) == (z.::s.y)])

Theorem 57. Coextensive wholes share all proper parts:

'v'x'v'y{Cxy => 'v'z[(z<x) == (z<y»)}

Theorem 60. Two wholes are coextensive just in case they are either
identical, or they share all proper parts if one has a proper
part:
'v'x'v'y<Cxy == «x=y) v {3z[(z<x) v (z<y)] =>
'v'z[(z<x) == (z<y)]}»

Theorem 61. Wholes whieh are irregular parts of each other are non-
identical coextensive wholes, neither of whieh is a proper
part of the other:
'v'x'v'y< [(x< <y) & (y< <x)] =>
{[-(x=y) & Cxy] & [-(x<y) & -(y<x»)}>

Theorem 66. Wholes are irregular parts of each other just in case they
are non-identical coextensive wholes:
'v'x'v'y{[Cxy & -(x=y)] == [(x< <y) & (y< <x»)}

5.311 Regular Coextensivity of wholes: Individuation vs.

Mereological Identity of Artworlcs
 MEREOLOGY AND THE ONTOLOGY OF ART 271

I here argue for the adoption of a non-standard principle of (spatio-

temporal) individuation as a philosophical framework for irregular part
theory when adopted as a formal ontological context for (i.e. as part of the
language of) the regional ontology of the artwork. The principle can be
stated as folIows:

5.31101 The Non-Extensionalist Principle of Individuation:

Wholes occupy exactly the same place in space and time

[i.e. are the same spatio-temporal individual] just in case
they are coextensive.

The dyadic predicate 'occupy exactly the same place in space and time' is
extra-systemic; i.e. it is not a defined predicate within the system, and bears
no logical relation to any defined predicate of the system (such as 'are co-
extensive'). For that reason, the principle 5.31101 of individuation can be
either accepted or rejected by users of the present system.
Whether 5.31101 or some alternative is preferred will depend on whether
one is willing to accept the thesis that non-identical things may occupy the
same point in space and time. Users of the present system who feel philo-
sophically uncomfortable with this thesis will prefer the standard (exten-
sional) mereological principle of individuation, which restricts the privilege
of occupying the same spatio-temporal point to just those coextensive
wholes which are identical. I begin the formulation of this alternative by
defining the relation of being regularly coextensive, i.e., the condition of
having the same regular parts:

DEFINITION 6: RCxy [read: 'x is regularly coextensive with y'] means

=
Vz[(z< =x) (z< =y)] [i.e. x and y have the same
regular parts].

Regular coextensivity is the criterion of mereological identity; furthermore,

the Principle of Mereological Identity for wholes is available as Theorem 70
of irregular part theory:

Theorem 70. Two wholes are identical just in case they are regularly
coextensive:
=
'v'KVy[(x=y) RCxy]

T70 is an expression of the fact that regularly coextensive wholes must share
the same improper part. We can then specify the standard (extensionalist)
principle of individuation as:

5.31102 The Extensionalist Principle of Individuation:

272 GILBERT T. NULL

Wholes occupy exactly the same place in space and time

[Le. are the same spatio-temporal individual] just in case
they are regularly coextensive.

I ca1l5.31102 the Extensionalist principle because regular parts are just those
which may exist in models of part whole theories in which the thesis 3.1 of
mereological extensionalism is a theorem, and sharing all of those kinds of
parts is traditionally the principle of individuation accepted in those
contexts. 5
The argument over whether to accept 5.31101 or 5.31102 as one's
principle of individuation is an extrasystemic, philosophical affair, and is
precisely an argument over whether non-identical things can occupy exactly
the same position in space at exactly the same time. Accepting 5.31101
amounts to maintaining that spatio-temporal individuation is a looser affair
than mereological identity. According to Danto's ontology of art, any
artwork (e.g. Duchamp's Fountain) and the material artifact (e.g. the urinal)
of which it is composed are non-identical things which occupy the same
point in space and time (so that favoring 5.31102 over 5.31101 implies being
unable to distinguish artworks from mere things). Another example is
provided by the works of Cervantes and Menard which are instanced by the
same printed page. Danto's regional ontology of the artwork requires the
non-extensional principle of individuation 5.31101, and the inclusion of an
irregular part theory (in which such a principle can be formulated) in its
underlying formal ontology.

§6. An I"egular Part-Theoretic Account of the Transfiguration

of the Commonplace

Danto's conception of Duchamp's Fountain as the sum (u+y) of the

urinal u and some "art-making properties" y presupposes an underlying part-
whole theory in which unique binary sums are available. The availability of
such sums requires the principle 3.1 of mereological extensionality. Given
3.1, the non-identity of the urinal qua mere artifact, the urinal qua base of
Fountain, and Fountain implies that no two of the three wholes share all
parts. Danto's attempt [1981: 94, 104] to verify this implication descriptively
serves as an attempt to preserve 3.1 and the availability of unique sums on
which his conception of the artwork relies. But he is then unable to account
for the sameness of the three non-identical wholes. His account of their
uncommon commonality as the sharing of some but not all parts is inade-

5 See for example Eberle's discussion of individuation [Eberle 1970: 2,5,25-31,36,37,38-

9,48-9,55,73,76-7,82-3,89-90,97,149, 151, 168-70, 178).
 MEREOLOGY AND TI-IE ONTOLOGY OF ART 273

quate; the relation between Fountain and the urinal cannot be the same as
the relation between the urinal and one of its proper pieces. But the
extensionality (Le. thesis 3.1) ofthe underlying part-whole theory permits no
further options for specifying the relation of Fountain to the urinal.
I here propose an irregular part-theoretic alternative to Oanto's
characterization of the artwork as a mereological sumo I suggest conceiving
of the artwork (e.g. Fountain) as a whole which contains its constituent
artifact (e.g. the urinal) as an irregular part. Then the concepts of coex-
tensivity [05], identity [TIO], and individuation [5.31101] permit aresolution
of the problem of non-identical but substantively the same wholes. In the
context of irregular part theory substantive sameness is coextensivity.
This conception of substantive sameness was unavailable in the extension-
alist mereological tradition, where coextensivity is identity. But here identity
is regular coextensivity, so we can characterize the commonplace artifact
(urinal) and the artwork (Fountain) as coextensive (Le. substantively the
same) but not regulariy coextensive (i.e. non-identical). An implication of
this conception of substantive sameness is that the urinal and the artwork
Fountain are (non-identical but) irregular parts of one another [T64].
We may then understand the printed page ("fragment") as different from
either Cervantes' or Menard's artwork, but as containing each of them (as
irregular parts). Similariy, Ouchamp's Fountain is not identical to the urinal
even though they are substantively the same (i.e. coextensive). The fact of
non-identity reconciles the Leibnizian principle of the indiscernibility of
identicals with the facts that Fountain (unlike the urinal considered as a
mere artifact) is daring, impudent, irreverent, witty, and clever, and that
Menard's work (unlike either Cervantes' work or the printed page consid-
ered as a mere artifact) is affectedly archaic. And the fact of coextensivity (as
the criterion of spatio-temporal individuation) reconciles the non-identity of
the Fountain and the urinal, or the printed page and the works by Cervantes
and Menard with the undeniable observation that in each case, there is only
one spatio-temporal individual corresponding to them.
The adoption of irregular part theory enables us to reconcile our
mereological and philosophical intuitions that the artwork and the mere
thing are indeed different objects, even though they exist at the same place
in space and time and seem to share all their parts. Wittgenstein's notion of
"subtraction" is made admittedly unclear by the faHure of summation in non-
extensional contexts. But such contexts nevertheless cast a different light on
Oanto's "subtraction" question, a light which might better illuminate the
central issue of the ontology of art. The answer to the Wittgensteinian
question can only be: If you "subtract" the urinal from Fountain, nothing is
left (Le. Wittgenstein's own answer was correct). But that does not mean
that Ouchamp's Fountain just is the urinal, and what makes the former an
artwork and the laUer a mere object has something to do with the reasons
why the two are not identical.
274 GILBERT T. NULL

The reason the two are not identical (even though they are coextensive)
is that the improper part of each is an irregular part of the other. The cru-
cial event involved in the creation of the Fountain out of the urinal is the
change in status of parts from irregular to regular. What was an irregular
part of the urinal becomes the improper part of the Fountain, and what was
the improper part of the urinal becomes an irregular part of the Fountain.
The claim of Dickie's Institutional Theory of Art that the circumstances in
which a commonplace artifact becomes an artwork include an intersubjective
act of consensus within the artworld need not be disputed. But the onto-
logical conditions which enable such creative acts to occur are formulable
in terms of irregular part theory. Insofar as any commonplace artifact can
become, under the right circumstances, a (or several) work(s) of art, the
artworks which it can become number amongst its irregular parts. The inter-
subjective act of artistic creativity which Danto calls the transfiguration ofthe
commonplace appears from the point of view of non-extensional mereology
as an act of converting irregular into improper parts.6

Bibliography

Bostock, David (1979), Logic and Arithmetic, Vol. 11, Clarendon Press, Ox-
ford.
Danto, A (1981), The Transfiguration of the Commonplace, Harvard Uni-
versity Press, Cambridge.
Eberle, R. (1970), Nommalist Systems, Humanities Press, New York.
Fine, K. (1982), "Acts, Events, and Things", Language and Ontology, ed.
Leinfellner et al., Hoelder-Pichler-Tempsky, Vienna, 97-105.
Husserl, E. (1928), Logische Untersuchungen (1901) 2nd Ed., Vol. I-III, Max
Niemeyer, Halle.
Husserl, E. (1970), Logical Investigations, Vol. 11, tr. J. N. Findlay, Humani-
ties Press, New York.
Leonard, H. and Goodman, N. (1940), "The Calculus of Individuals and its
Uses," Journal of Symbolic Logic, Vol. 5, 44-55.
Lesniewski, Stanislaw (1930), "0 podstawach Matematyki", Przeglad Filozo-
jizny vol. 33, 82ff.

6 An artwork and artifact which are irregular parts of each other are not ontological equals,
since the existence of the former requires the existence of the latter but not vice versa. For
example, Duchamp's urinal existed before FOWltain did, whereas FOWltain could not sUlVive the
disappearance of the urinal. This comment is relegated to an endnote because the topics of
conditional identity and conditional existence, viz., ontological dependence, have been excluded
from the present discussion. See Fine (1982); Husseri (1928); Null and Blecksmith (1991); Null
[1994a) and [1994b); Simons (1987); Stumpf (1873); Smith (1982)-
 MEREOLOGY AND THE ONTOLOGY OF ART 275

Null, G. and Blecksmith, R. (1991), "Matrix Representation of Husserl's

Part-Whole-Foundation Theory", Notre Dame Journal of Formal
Logic Vol. 32, no. 1 (Winter), 87-111.
Null, G. (1994a), "Conditional Identity and Irregular Parts: Aron Gurwitsch's
Gestalt-Theoretic Revision of the Stumpf-Husserl Conception of
Independence", included in Essays in Memory ofAron Gurwitsch, ed.
Claude Evans, Kluwer, Dordrecht, forthcoming.
Null, G. (1994b), "Formal and Material Ontology," in The Encyclopaedia of
Phenomenology, ed. Lester Embree et. al., publisher unknown, forth-
coming.
Quine and Goodman (1947), "Steps Toward a Constructive Nominalism,"
Journal of Symbolic Logic, Vol. 12, 105-112.
Simons, P. (1982), "The Formalisation of Husserl's Theory of Wholes and
Parts," in Parts and Moments, ed. B. Smith, Philosophia Verlag,
München.
Simons, P. (1987), Parts: A Study in Formal Ontology, Oxford University
Press, Oxford.
Stumpf, K. (1873), Ueber den psychologischen Ursprung der Raumvorstellung,
Hirzel, Leipzig.
Smith, Barry (1982), ed., Parts and Moments, Philosophia Verlag, München.
Tarski, Alfred (1956), "Foundations of the Geometry of So lids, " in Logic, Se-
mantics, Metamathematics, tr. J.H. Woodger, Clarendon Press,
Oxford, pp. 24-9.
Appendix I

ALFRED SCHUTZ

HUSSERVS CRISIS OF WESTERN SCIENCE

Edited by FRED KERSTEN

Editor's Preface

This letter of Alfred Schutz to Erlc Voegelin was written

between 11 November and 13 December, 1943. It contains
an extensive reply to a sweeping critique of Husserl's Die
Krisis der europl1ischen WlSsenschaften und die transzend-
entale Phllnomenologie1 which his friend Erlc Voegelin had
developed in a letter to him. Voegelin had found merit in
some of Husserl's lines of thought but on the whole
rejected them as much in their references to historlcal
trends in European philosophy, which he showed to be
arbitrarily selective and hence at variance with historio-
graphical facts and objectivity, as in their philosophical
inferlority because they were merely epistemological under-
takings and as such did not reach the level of genuine
philosophizing (i.e., they did not constitute a metaphysics).
Schutz's defense of Husserl followed two lines of thought:
First, that Voegelin misunderstood the whole philosophical
intent of Husserl when he considered his interest in past
philosophers as serving historiographical interests instead
of interest in the problems they had posed; and, second,
even if the whole philosophy of Husserl could be subsumed
under the heading of epistemology, it would still maintain
its high philosophical respectability.
At the very end of the letter Schutz spoke of the
possibility of continuing this defense of Husserl's way of
philosophizing in a further letter. However, no evidence has
surfaced to indicate that he found the time to continue his
attempt at vindicating Husserl's philosophical dignity.

1 Edmund Husserl, Philosophia, 1936.

277
S. Galt Crowell (ed.), The Prism ofthe Self, 277-287.
© 1995 Kluwer Academic Publishers.
278 ALFRED SCHUTZ

The English translation of the letter is by Helmut Wag-

ner. 2

*****
Your extensive and important remarks about Husserl's essay labelIed by
hirn Krisis der europlIischen WISsenschaften deserve a careful and extensive
response. Geographical distance forces us to written exchanges; at least this
shall offer us the advantage of putting our ideas into the clearest possible
and most orderly form.
Initially a personal word may be said about my relationship to the essay
of Husserl which is the object of these considerations. I openly confess that
I do not face it in a completely objective way. It is particularly close to my
heart because during the years in which I was privileged to carry out many
a serious dialogue with Husserl I have watched the essay originate and grow,
and I was fortunate to leam something about the over-all plan of the
fragment. Thus I know that Husserl planned the work to encompass six to
eight essays, each of which was to be as long as the one published. He
expected it to become the summary and crowning of his philosophical life-
work. So it is understandable that some of Husserl's enthusiasm was trans-
ferred to me. Indeed, it seems to me, as weIl as to you, that many things in
this essay belong to the best of what we have inherited from Husserl. So
most of all the chapter on Galileo.
Your main argument against the published part, but also against the
whole of Husserl's work, is the following: you accept the achievements of
Husserl in the area of epistemology but deny that they are a philosophically
respectable undertaking. Epistemology may be a prologue to philosophy, but
it is not a philosophical beginning. In none of his published writings did
Husserl touch on any fundamental problem of philosophy, and it can hardly
be expected that his literary estate would reveal new dimensions.
There are several things to be said to this point.
In the first place, it is a matter of personal evaluation whether one will
refuse philosophical rank to an "epistemological achievement," as you call
Husserl's work. I am convinced that the discovery of the prepredicative
sphere, the uncovering of the problem of intersubjectivity, the retracing of
logic, mathematics and the natural sciences back to the grounds of the life-
world, contributions to the analysis of the consciousness of inner time and
to the constitution of space: these examples culled from the fullness of his
work do indeed touch upon philosophically fundamental problems.

2 For the relationship between Erlc Voegelin and A1fred Schutz, see Helmut Wagner,
Alfred Schutz. An Intellectual Biography, Chapter 12 (the letter of Schutz to Voegelin translated
here is discussed, pp. 191ft).
 HUSSERL'S CR/SIS OF WESTERN SCIENCE 279

I do not know whether one has to apply the ideal-typical academic con-
cept of epistemology to this kind of investigation; in principle it makes no
difference to me. If this should be the case, epistemology is a pursuit worthy
of a philosopher. I would go even further and say that it is just these-and
perhaps only these-problems that can be treated within Husserl's ideal
framework of a "philosophy as strict science. " But I fully understand and
even share the notion that beyond this ideal there exist philosophically
fundamental problems that cannot be made accessible with the means of a
rigorously scientific method; they demand the courage to do metaphysics.
(As you know, I personally feIt the need to supplement my phenomeno-
logical studies through Leibniz and Kierkegaard).
Perhaps you will rightly and justifiably respond that Husserl daimed to
have laid out, if not constructed, a genuine and definite system of a universal
philosophy in his transcendental phenomenology-and this in contrast to his
phenomenological psychology under the title of which fall, with a few excep-
tions, almost all his published works. I openly confess that I cannot pose as
adefender of transcendental phenomenology because I fear it collapsed at
decisive places. For instance, it did not escape transcendental solipsism, nor
did it overcome the rift in the conception of the "constitution of the world
by the transcendental ego": it begins with the construction of the world of
experience by consciousness and ends up with the creation of the world by
the ego-become-god.
I ascribe much of the responsibility for these outcomes to Eugen Fink.
What I have heard from hirn about so-called "constructive phenomenology"
(dealing with birth and death, life and ageing, and other genuinely metaphys-
ical questions) has not made me confident that the publication of the
literary estate of Husserl will offer a solution to the metaphysical questions,
and therefore to the fundamental problems in your terms. However, I expect
many contributions to the solution of most important questions of the type
of Husserl's posthumous essays about the "Origin of Geometry" and the
"Analysis of the Constitution of Space" (essays you may know); they are for
me contributions of this kind.
All this does not alter the fact that we can do justice to Husserl's last
work even ifwe do not find in it the solution to philosophically fundamental
problems. However, for this purpose we must make the problem posed in
this essay our own. Nothing is more fruitless than to reproach a writer for
showing interest in problems not of interest to the reader, to accuse hirn of
not having seen the world with the reader's eyes and of deeming other things
more relevant than those dose to the reader's concerns. And this is what I
fear you are doing in part of your otherwise excellent critique. Here I arrive
at a basic remark.
You treat Husserl's essayas though he intended to develop an image of
the cultural history of mankind, and that from a speculative perspective. The
characteristic problems ofthe Averroistic speculation, correctly characterized
280 ALFRED SCHUTZ

by you, arise only from the grounds of such an ideal of the philosophical
contemplation of history.3 Only from there may one explain the contradic-
tion between the two possibilities of understanding the world which you
characterize as the Christian Orthodoxy and the Heterodoxy of Siger of
Brabant.
Certainly, questions of the relationship between world soul and individual
soul belong to a historically collectivist metaphysics. And in this general
sphere there appear theological problems of the kind you describe as the
Zenoistic, Averroistic, and Kantian types. You accuse Husserl of having
shifted the problem of humanity from this universality to his tory and of
having narrowed the conception of "humanity," making "man" into the finite
historical product of only certain periods of human history-of antiquity and
the modern age.
Had it been Husserl's intention, in his essay, to carry out a philosophical
speculation of the kind you specified, all three of your objections would be
justified even though they do not agree weIl with one another-namely, 1)
that Husserl did not occupy clearly a philosophically basic position with
respect to the history of mankind, 2) that he shifted the problem from the
universal sphere to that of history, 3) that his historical image of the world
is insufficient because of its narrow selectiveness.
Moreover, ifHusserl had aspired to write a philosophy ofhistory that was
cosmopolitan in intent, and were his concepts of "originary foundation" and
"final foundation" to be understood in the sense of a progressive ideal like
that of Kant, then omission of the Kantian "astonishment" about the attempt
to interpret all prehistory only as a step toward the final foundation would
indeed be reason for concern. Were this so, the temptation would be great
to view Husserl's essay as an example of a "demonic" historiography, his
philosophy of history as that of a typical philosophy in the three phases [of
history], and hirnself as a "messianic doomsday figure of our time." If Husserl
had aimed at writing history, he certainly would not have ignored the self-
witnessing of great thinkers. But, as I understand it, nothing of this was
Husserl's intention.
Husserl hirnself poses the problem of the self-contemplation of the
Western philosopher in his acting and doing. According to my view, unlike
the Greek thinkers he does not stand at the beginning of philosophical
wonderment about a world to be discovered and to be interpreted. The
world of philosophical problems has already been discovered and interpret-

3 A1though not explicit, Schutz is clearly referring to Voegelin's essay on Siger of Brabant
published in Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, Vol. IV, no. 4 (1944), 508-525, a copy
of which Schutz had no doubt seen in manuscript. The reference is to the transformation of
Aristotelianism in the commentaries of Averroes by the Faculty of Arts at the University of
Paris, and according to which philosophy became a form of Iife, a "style of existence," for an
intellectual elite in political society. See pp. 511ff [ED.I.
 HUSSERL'S CRISIS OF WESTERN SCIENCE 281

ed. We are not "beginners" in philosophizing, we learned to philosophize

about philosophical problems from our teachers and their teachers. A great
tradition of the philosophical interpretation of the world has come down to
us; it is our motivation to philosophize and our directive for the formulation
of our own problems. The typical forms of the problems and the typical
possibilities of their solutions are not only assigned as traditional contents
to our understanding, they pre-interpret our own possibilities and tasks.
Even though we partake in the happenings of philosophy only very
moderately, in the chain of generations we are founders of new traditions in
that we change what we inherit and, in the optimal case, augment it. Thus
there results for every philosopher, not just for the phenomenologist and for
Husserl, the dual problem of the originary and final foundation of the
tradition in which he lives and in which he partakes receivingly and givingly.
Basically, this problem is not at all limited to the philosopher; it is a
most common one. With certain significant modifications which I cannot
discuss here, it is the problem of effecting a pre-given world that has its own
whither and whence, and whose style is predesigned by the givenness of this
world. In the introductory part [of the Krisis essay] Husserl refers to the self-
reflection of the philosopher as an anthropologically basic category which,
as far as I know, he wanted to pursue.in many directions in his planned
essays. His reference to "man" and to "mankind" are to be understood in this
sense as is his declaration proclaiming the philosopher as a representative
of mankind.
But let us stay with the philosopher. He has two possibilities: Either he
lives in the tradition, allows hirnself to be motivated by it, takes for gran ted
and remains directed upon the objectives of his work without noticing how
and to what degree they are determined by tradition. This attitude will be
typical in the great school-bound philosophies and in periods of secure
metaphysical or religious truths of salvation. Or the philosopher no longer
feels hirnself secure in the inherited tradition; it remains his foundation but
does not make it possible for hirn to adhere to the idealization of the Hand
so on." What has been taken for granted now becomes questionable and will
be questioned about its origin and its history of interpretation. It will not be
questioned from the perspective of an objectivating onlooker who wants to
know "how it actually was," however, but from that of a passionate
participant who wishes to explicate the implications of the traditions in so
far-but only in so far-as this is necessary for his self-understanding. This
attitude is typical for thinking during periods of great spiritual crises in
which the so-called "fundamental problems" are posed not merely in specific
sciences but also in philosophy itself.
This is the attitude of Husserl in the whole analysis he planned which
justifiably bears the title "The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcenden-
tal Phenomenology" and whose introductory chapter is called "The Crisis of
the Sciences as Expression of the Radical Life-Crisis of the Life of Western
282 ALFRED SCHUTZ

Mankind. " It is not Husserl's intention to ask about the meaning of this
history of philosophy. Likewise, it is not his intention to write an "apologia
pro vita sua" or to manufacture a construction according to which all prior
thinking was only a preamble for his own achievement: the full execution
and justification of the ultimate foundation [of the ultimate truth].
In my opinion the comparison you make of Husserl with [Otto von]
Gierke is an absolute misunderstanding of Husserl's attitude; it does not
spring from self-satisfaction but just from that Kantian "astonishment" which
you correctly recognize as a genuinely philosophical idea and which you
assert is missing in Husserl.
It is this astonishment about the failure of tradition to solve the present
crisis of philosophy and of his own philosophizing that urges Husserl, from
his deIiberately tradition-bound point of view, to ask about the origin of
these handed-down contents which had been autobiographically determinate
for him, for his problems, for his style of philosophizing. However, hirnself
a philosopher, he describes an essential element of the philosophical
tradition when he justifies his selection by his autobiographical interest. 4
The word I just used, "essential element" [Wesenselement], is to be under-
stood directly in a technical-phenomenological sense. Although autobio-
graphical, it is an eidetic analysis of the tradition that determines Husserl's,
and thereby our, present philosophical situation and poses questions for it.
Tasks arise here in a two-fold sense: first, to define one's own vantage point,
and, second, to understand the meaning of his own plans. In the face of the
crisis of our times, these two tasks can only be carried out when the
philosophizing person retrospectively gets hold of the motives and urges
which have, first, brought hirn 10 philosophizing as such, and, second, to
philosophizing in one or the other philosophical style. This purpose is not
served by a mere inventory of the self-documentation of great thinkers, or
even by a study about the his tory of the problem of cognition in the manner
of Cassirer.5 To the contrary: a universal overview of the eternal treasure
of philosophical problems in their contexts, a reaching-back to the specific
subjective meanings which certain formulations of, and solutions to,
problems had for prior thinkers-this would be directly incompatible with
the specific formulations of problems for Husserl. Standing in the tradition
which motivates hirn and defines his projects, Husserl selects only those

4 The importance of Schutz's understanding and assessment of Husserl's way of

philosophizing as expressed in the Crisis cannot be stressed enough. Nor is it a philosophizing
that Husserl comes to at the end of his Iife; it is a style present from the vel)' beginning. See
Fred Kersten, Phenomenological Method: Theory und Practice (Dordrecht: K1uwer Academic
Publishers, 1989), 32ff, for an account of it in Husserl's early writings [ED.].
5 Schutz is no doubt referring here to Cassirer's multi-volumed Das Erkenntnisproblem in
der Philosophie und WISsenschaften der neuren Zeit (Berlin: Verlag Bruno Cassirer, 1922ff) [ED.].
 HUSSERL's CRISIS OF WESTERN SCIENCE 283

elements from the historical treasure chest which he feels are alive in his
own thinking. He does not judge the mode of their agreement according to
the meaning-structures in which they stood for their producers but according
to those in which they stand for hirnself. This may be so because they came
down to hirn in many pieces and in differing reinterpretations; it may be
because he gave them a specific sense within his own world of work.
This last-named case deserves particular attention because it is bisected
by a new circle of problems, and in particular the problem of the un-
avoidable self-misunderstanding of the philosopher (in general, of the actor)
with respect to his interests, goals and solutions. The basic thesis (not
formulated by Husserl) may be expressed as folIows: the philosopher under-
stands his problem (more generally, the actor his objective) always incom-
pletely. For hirn it stands in an essentially unfathomable context of meaning
comprising unclarified implications, emptily anticipated. It has its open
horizons which cannot be interpreted because they are unrealized: everything
is in doubt. In retrospect, the philosopher can sometimes interpret empty
horizons; the co-philosophizing contemporary can do this more frequently;
and the successors who stand in his tradition can always do this because the
horizons have meanwhile shown their specific features and their implications
have become visible.
This is the vital function of [Husserl's] critique of all forms of the
continuation of the philosophical tradition. (In the motivational chain of
practical actions other categories of reaction replace those of criticism.
However, in the present framework I cannot deal with these contexts). Of
course, the critique is unending and becomes a newly-set task for every new
generation. It establishes the contexts of meaning between its subject-matters
and their implications which, however, can be recognized only afterwards.
I am of the opinion that Husserl saw all these connections clearly, even
though possibly he may not have formulated them clearly. He treated them
under the labels of originary and final foundations. Pursuing his own motives
back through historical tradition, he arrived at the originary foundation of
philosophy by the Greeks and at the originary foundation of the
mathematizing natural sciences by Galileo. Thus he pursued just what you
yourself have posed in the second and third parts ofyour manuscript, namely
the biographical anamnesis of one's own effective motives. Only Husserl
enclosed in his autobiographical medium all of the philosophical tradition
to the extent, but only to the extent, that it was or is alive for his thinking.
Truly, it is curious that the parallel between Husserl's intention and that of
your own manuscript escaped your attention.
This much about originary foundation. The entelechistic character of the
image of his tory established on this foundation results from the principle of
turning back to tradition and of selecting and re-interpreting the pre-
interpreted contents thus gained; the latter are interrelated with the former.
[As a thinker standing in one of these traditions] I question the tradition
284 ALFRED SCHUTZ

about its sedimentations in so far as they can be the foundations of my own

philosophizing and the fields of my own work.
Connected with all this is the regulative principle [of the preservation]
of its indefinite remoteness. (There is no narrowing of the gap between the
answers established by successive generations and any metaphysically
conceived ultimate goal). The final foundation remains in the "same" remote
"distance" [for all successive generations]. This holds for the entelechistic
goal of my own design. Tradition as I transmit it enriched by my own activity
will have to be interpreted by the world of my successors as traditional
sedimentation. And others will come and will have to do the same thinking-
back and [the results of] my philosophizing will be one of the sediments of
the tradition they have to interpret-a tradition I co-created. But the
problem of final foundation will arise for these successors, too, as it arose
for me; land as for me] this problem will 100m in an indefinite future. Yet,
when they redraw the entelechistic course of the originary foundation of
their tradition, the result of my philosophical doings will be included in their
inherited sedimentations.
Dear friend: this is my interpretation of Husserl's basic idea. I cannot find
any passage in the whole essay in which Husserl declares that the
phenomenology created by hirn is the final foundation of the entelechistic
movement. This would be in blatant contradiction to his spiritual and human
stance. Husserl says merely that with transcendental phenomenology the
"revelation of reason"-his view of the course of philosophy-has reached an
apodictic beginning as human task with its horizon of an apodictic continua-
tion. According to everything I have said about the self-misunderstanding of
the philosopher, it is clear that only a later critique will be able to justify or
correct this claim. But it is beyond doubt that the effort to reach an
apodictic start in philosophizing was the determining motive of all of
Husserl's philosophizing. Therefore, standing in the tradition, he interprets
the telos of this tradition out of his own doing. Also, I do not believe that
Husserl considered his own work-the piece of philosophical work he left
behind-the executed foundation of an apodictic beginning ready for
continuing execution. He does speak, with undeniable justification, as one
"who lives through the fate of a philosophical existence in its complete
sincerity,,6 and says of hirnself in another passage ("Nachwort zu den Ideen")
that "practically" he had "to tone down the ideal" of his own "philosophical

6 Cf. Husserl, Die Krisis der europäischen WISSenschaften und die transzendentale
Phänomenologie (Haag: Martinus Nijhoff, 1954), 15. In this letter Schutz no doubt refers to the
text published in Philosophio in 1936. He gives a reference to pp. 98f, though he more than
Iikely intends pp. 93f. Cf. the English translation by David Carr, The Crisis 0/ European Sciences
and Transcendental Phenomenology (Evanston: Northwestem University Press, 1970), 17 [ED.].
 HUSSERL'S CRISIS OF WESTERN SCIENCE 285

aspirations to that of a genuine beginner."7 And he continued: "If the years

of Methuselah were allotted to me, then I could almost hope that I might
yet be able to become a philosopher." Is that the attitude of Gierke and the
philosopher of Progress at the time of the establishment of the German
Empire? Is that the Victorian image of his tory?
1. He who stands in the tradition (in this case, the "European") asks
about the sediments that motivate hirn as to their origin, their entelechies,
their becoming. (Historical tradition as autobiographical element is assigned
to self-contemplation, "anamnesis" in your terminology.)
2. The contents thus gained can be examined in terms of their Eidos (by
way of the searching for the invariant in phantasy-like transformation). From
this follows the structure included in the essence of the teleological
unfolding (in this case, the "self-revelation of Reason") with its originary and
final foundation (always seen from the correlate situation of the interpreting
person).
3. Starting here, a new interpretation of the tradition becomes possible
in that it can be shown (a) that the "obvious" starting points of the great
innovators (Galileo, for instance) were by no means obvious; (b) that and
why they (themselves standing in a tradition) feIt no need to make problem-
atic what they posited as unquestionably given; (c) that they were not aware
of the implications of their doing (for example, the indirect "co-mathe-
matization of the filling" in the Galilean turn), and they could not have
become cognizant of them (because "discovery" is always a mixture of
instinct and method; these elements can only be separated in retrospect, p.
115, for instance)8; (d) that the procedures of the re-interpretation-set in
motion by the emerging tradition-and the (explicitly or implicitly) used
fundamental hypotheses posited on the grounds of this discovery remain
ununderstood even though they work (p. 117); their methods are devoid of
meaning (p. 119), their operational functions technified (pp. 121ft), their
relations to the life-world as universal meaning-elements forgotten (pp.
130ft). (Earlier I summarized these problems under the heading of the "self-
misunderstanding of the philosophizing person").
4. [Further results have to be noted:] a typology of the positing of prob-
lems, of problem-solutions, of problem-enmeshing in the course of the
tradition; likewise, the latter can be examined with respect to its style.
(Compare Husserl's remarks about the problem of dualism and the
difficulties which arise in the course of its continuing pursuit).

7 Cf. Edmund Husserl, Nachwort zu meinen "Ideen zu einer reinen Phänomenologie und
phänomenologischen Philosophie, "injahrbuchfür Philosophie undphänomenologische Forschung,
VoI. 11, p. 569; cf. English translation by Richard Rojcewicz and Andr~ Schuwer in Edmund
Husserl, Collected Workf, Vol. III (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1989), 429 [ED.].
8 The page reference is to the text of the Krisis under discussion [ED.].
286 ALFRED SCHUTZ

5. From these analyses results the fixation of one's own point of view [in
this case, phenomenology] in the tradition and with it the possibility and
meaning-bestowal of further tasks. Most of a11, however, this serves as an
example of a dialectical difficulty: the interpretation of the tradition is
possible only from one's own perspective, while this perspective can only be
clarified through the understanding of the tradition. The "methodological
characteristic of our interpretation" fo11ows from Husserl's clear circumscrip-
tion at the end of the chapter on Galileo (pp. 132ft) to which you have not
given sufficient attention.
That much about the published essay. After a11 that I have heard from
Husserl, I am sure that the analyses developed in the fragment were only
meant as examples (eidetic examples) of further problems within the total
context of his planned book:
A The position of the philosophizing person in the tradition as an
example of the position of human being in the pregiven world.
B. The place of phenomenology between originary foundation and entele-
chistic final foundation as example for relating a11 philosophizing back to the
understood life-world. (Phenomenology will understand the life-world as the
root of its existence); according to Husserl, this understanding sha11 establish
the apodicticity of its beginning. It is not satisfied with universal theses
which remain ununderstood even if they are operatively effective.
C. The set of problems mentioned under (A) and (B) together serve as
examples of a possible (but not yet developed) philosophy of history. (The
work on hand is by no means this, nor does it claim to be so. Your critique
is based on the assumption that it is).
D. The philosophy of his tory to be developed may become an example of
the phenomenological analysis of the constitution the "natural attitude"
(compare this to the "Nachwort" p. 567).9
I think that it would be an idle question to ask whether Husserl would
have been capable of contributing an essential solution to these questions.
But I believe that this thematic is worthy of a genuine philosopher.
I have spent a great deal of time on the analysis of Husserl's basic
position; I believe that the exposition of his intentions refutes just about a11
of the objections which you, dear friend, offer in your critique. Of course, I
presuppose that the interpretation of Husserl's essay, as presented by me, is
correct. Should this be the case, there is no argument possible about the
question of why Husserl does not accept the Medieval, Chinese, or Indian
philosophies as determining motifs of his thinking. Likewise, it is not a
critical objection that he did not consider Hegel (who was ever foreign to
hirn). (At one time I did ask hirn why he did not deal more extensively with
Leibniz. He pointed out that he had planned to devote one of the essays of

9 Husserliana [/l, 158f; translation, 425ff [ED.].

 HUSSERL'S CRIS/S OF WESTERN SC/ENCE 287

the planned series to the treatment of Leibniz's philosophy).

Earlier 1 dealt with the role of philosophy in the wake of realized
potentiality (Entelechie) against which you directed your critique. The
concept of an unfolding world soul was completely foreign to Husserl. As in
other places, this is manifested in his fifth Cartesian Meditation in full
clarity. (As you know, 1 consider this meditation a failure).
There remain your remarks about Husserl's interpretation of Descartes.
You yourself have clearly established that, and to what degree, Husserl was
entitled to begin with Descartes. Doubtless you are correct when saying that
the course of Descartes' Meditations grew out of a formulation of a problem
distinct from that of Husserl, that the conception of the ego as anima
animae (animated soul) has an important function which Husserl did not
consider, and that for Descartes the proof of God is only the occasion for
an inquiry into a specific dialectical situation. 1 have no objections against
any of this; on the contrary, 1 gained much from your important analysis.
However, 1 am thoroughly convinced that Husserl, too, would have had no
objections against your interpretation of Descartes. Likely, he would have
willingly agreed that the elements you have laid bare are much more import-
ant for Descartes than for the foundation of transcendental philosophy.
However, according to all the things 1 have said, Husserl's problem was not
that of a historian. For him-Husserl-Descartes was and remained a step
toward the apodictic foundation of transcendental philosophy: This was the
living and effective motivating core of his thinking as it had reached hirn in
the tradition. For his specific formulation of the problem, the rest of the
Cartesian philosophy was i"elevant-as relevant as it may be seen to be from
different points of view, and as effectively as it may live on in other links in
the chain of the tradition (which, by the way, is not the case). And thus, for
me, Husserl's essay is also an important contribution to [the clarification] of
the problem of relevance, which is close to my heart and which is still very
much unclarified.
1 am very eager to hear from you what you think about the interpretation
of the Husserl essay offered by me. The second and third parts of your
manuscript deserve an analysis as detailed as this. It shall not remain
missing. However, in the circumstances under which 1 presently live, it may
take months before 1 will find the time write out the continuation of my
response. 10

10 [Note of Helmut Wagner]: No such continuation has been found in Schutz's Iiterary
estate. I doubt that he found the occasion to take time out fmm his quite hectic business
pursuits at the time and thus had to refrain fmm carrying out the intentions he stated at the end
of the letter.
Appendix 11

A CONVERSATION
WITH MAURICE NATANSON

Editor's Note

This document was edited from tapes recorded over two

days-June 28 and June 29, 1993-in Maurice Natanson's
study at his horne in New Haven. It was neither possible
nor desirable to include every utterance that found its way
onto those ten hours of tapes, but the effort has been made
here to preserve something of the spontaneity of our
discussions. The first day was devoted primarily to bio-
graphical explorations, the second to philosophical matters,
but of course such a distinction, always more or less
artificial, is entirely porous in the case of Professor
Natanson's life and work. What emerges, then, is the
emblematic paradox of phenomenology: the adumbration of
the universal in the unique contours of the individual.

STEVEN CROWELL: Were you always intent on philosophy as a

career?
MAURICE NATANSON: 1 think the idea of a career came after 1
graduated from college and decided to go to graduate school finally. When
1 was in college 1 was strongly attracted to literature-I had a major in
literature-and strongly attracted to psychology-I had the equivalent of a
major in that-and 1 always had certain interests in medicine and psychiatry
and thought for a while 1 would become a psychiatrist, a psychoanalyst. 1
think it was after 1 graduated from college that 1 first encountered anything
really higher-Ievel, intense, in graduate work in philosophy, and that was at
New York University. There-about 1946-47 or so-I studied with what 1
think, for its size, was a very good graduate faculty in philosophy: Sidney
Hook, Chairman for many years and widely known as a very sharp mind, and
the person I wrote my Master's Thesis under-James Burnham. Burnham was
at NYU in philosophy for many years from the early 1930s to the first part
of the 1940s. He was a member of a wealthy Chicago family, if I'm not
mistaken. He became a Trotskyist, a very important figure in the Trotskyist
movement. He had a famous exchange, finally, in writing, with Trotsky, when

289
S. Galt Crowell (ed.), The Prism ofthe Self, 289-334.
© 1995 Kluwer Academic Publishers.
290 A CONVERSATION

he challenged the dialectic. Eventually he left the Trotskyist movement, gave

up teaching, and he became not So slowly a very conservative thinker, so that
he ended up with Buckley on tfte National Review as one of its contributing
editors, formally, and then he wrote a whole series of books of a highly
conservative nature.
SC: So a dialectical shift?
MN: Very. He just swung violently. He was a very brilliant man in my
opinion, whether you agree with his pOlitics or not. I encountered hirn at,
I think, a very good time, after he had left the Trotskyist movement; he was
in fact the only one who really stood up to Trotsky intellectually.
SC: Was that political dimension part of your attraction to hirn?
MN: No, not really, it was philosophical. He gave a course entitled "The
Machiavellians" and had written a book under that name. The book inc1uded
not only Machiavelli but, as the plural indicates, a whole group of thinkers
who saw reality-especially political reality-as split in a certain way between
what appears to be the case and what, in a kind of underlying fashion, is the
moving force of reality; thinkers who, on the whole, look at the political
world-using the word in the broadest sense possible-as a spectrum of
surface and interior movement and motivation and force. I think the first
assignment I was given was to report on Plato's Gorgias, taking it as a
dialogue concerned with rhetoric. One can begin to see where that leads in
the notion of what is said, the force of language in conversion ofthe hearer.
That was one course I took with hirn, one semester. The other course I took
with hirn was in Aesthetics; that was I think the specialty c10sest to his heart.
He could have written a magnificent book on Dante. He was a very fine
scholar in terms of preparation, languages and skills, in addition to
philosophical acumen. In the course on Aesthetics he suggested I do a paper
on the psychoanalyst, Otto Rank. I hadn't read Rank before, but Burnham
told me about a book called Art and Artist by Rank to see if I would do a
paper and report in c1ass, which I did. I got rather excited by Art and Artist,
which I still think is a fine book. Rank, as you know, was a non-medical
psychoanalyst, a very brilliant one who ultimately broke with Freud and
established his own way of doing things. He, more than anybody else in
Freud's circ1e, had a strong knowledge of and interest in aesthetics, art,
myth, language in the broadest sense, culture, and so on. He is the author
of a great many books which deal with problems related to that. In any case,
at Burnham's suggestion I did my paper on Art and Artist-a long paper. He
thought well of it, and when the time came around for me to make a
dec1aration about what Iwanted to do about a Master's thesis I asked
Burnham whether he thought the piece I did on Rank could be developed
into a larger view of the psychoanalytic view of art, featuring Rank, and he
agreed, and agreed to direct the thesis. So I wrote my Master's thesis on
"Psychoanalysis and Aesthetics." I received my M.A degree from New York
University in 1948.
 WITI-I MAURICE NATANSON 291

SC: Had you already encountered phenomenology or Husserl, or, in your

earlier studies of literature, anything of the existential literature that was
available at the time?
MN: WeIl, at New York University of course 1 studied with other people.
There was a man there named Harmon Chapman, and 1 took his seminars
for a year-one each semester. Chapman taught a seminar on Husserl's
phenomenology. (He had gone to Freiburg from Harvard and attended
Husserl's courses). Unfortunately he didn't give the phenomenology seminar
at that time, when 1 was there, so 1 couldn't take it, but 1 heard about it and
that's the first 1 heard, reaIly, of Husserl. Technically the first notiee of the
name Husserl 1 ever had was in Boring's textbook in experimental psycholo-
gy. It was a kind of history of psychology, and you'l1 find the Germans in
there, including Husserl. That was when 1 was an undergraduate. It didn't
lead to anything and 1 didn't read any Husserl then, but 1 heard the name
1 think for the first time there. Then also at NYU Susanne Langer gave a
course-she typically gave one-semester courses at a variety of universities
(that's what she preferred to do) and wrote her own books-and her one-
semester course was on symbolism. We went through her Philosophy in a
New Key and took off from there. She was a good teacher, an interesting
philosopher; she was 1 think the first "European" (despite the fact that she
was born in New York City and educated at Radcliffe) 1 had studied philo-
sophy with. But the greatest impulse came from Burnham and his steering
me toward psychoanalysis, because 1 had to read a good deal of the psycho-
analytic literature as a background for Rank, as weIl as reading Rank
hirnself. And then there were visiting speakers at NYU. Though this did not
have a very powerful effect on me, it was there, 1 went. There was a talk on
the philosophy of Sartre by William Barrett-then a young man-who had
been on the staff of the Partisan Review, had been to Europe, had seen the
real "thing itself" going on-this was 1947; he gave his paper on Jean-Paul
Sartre to a large audienee. 1 remember asking a question about what kind
of ethics could emerge from a position like this-though that wasn't my
eentral interest. Later on 1 came to see that it was an important question.
SC: One that everyone would shortly be asking.
MN: Sooner or later. So 1 heard hirn, and that's the first time ... A
friend-a casual friend, a relative of a friend actually-had mentioned (we all
knew the litde book on Existentialism by Sartre) that Sartre had written a
big book, L 'Etre et le Neant. That was the first time I'd heard of it and
decided to get hold of it and read it. That was about the time 1 was going to
leave for Nebraska. At the time 1 got my M.A, 1 was at a dead end as far as
what to do. 1 had held various working jobs: I was a social worker in New
York City, officially, for a year, seeing the depths of Brooklyn.
SC: What sort of work were you engaged in there?
MN: 1 had a caseload of people who were on the dole, on relief. 1 had
thirty or forty names and it was my job to visit them at least onee a month
292 A CONVERSATION

and see how they were getting along, what their needs were, what they were
doing. For a young man it was a dramatic sort of position. It was largely
Italian, Irish, and some Jewish, a very varied stratum-une tranche de la vie,
you know-of New York. I had known it myself; I grew up in Brooklyn, went
to school there through high school. So I knew all that-I didn't come from
a wealthy family, the family had a lot of troubles, financially, during the
Depression-but now I knew it from the side of people who were on the
lowest ledge, people with abandoned, sick, paralyzed breadwinners, fathers
who had disappeared; there were many black people, people who didn't have
enough money for a loaf of bread at the end of the month, people who were
borderline psychopaths. It was astrange way to spend the day, going from
one place to the other. And these people I've never forgotten, in the sense
of ... We're not talking about politics or interests in the social sense, but
I've never forgotten the experience. It's part of my memorial consciousness.
1'11 give you just one case, all right? I had on my list the name of an Irish
lady-O'Leary, let's say. Mrs. O'Leary was in her eighties, it said on her
papers, and she lived at such-and-such an address with somebody who ran
a boarding house specializing in people who came from the agency. So I
went to see Mrs. O'Leary and I saw a very slender wraithlike figure who
screamed, "Oh thank God you've come. You don't know how I've suffered!"
I went in to see what the story was, and her landlady-an Irish woman
-started giving me a hard time. At that point I was not about to take that,
and I gave her a hard time back. She called my supervisor and told the
woman who supervised our group that I was giving her a hard time, etc. So
I spoke to the supervisor and said that this woman doesn't want me to see
the dient. WeH that's unacceptable. So when the supervisor backed me up,
said it was a legal requirement that the person be visited at least once a
month, told the woman who ran the house, "If you don't let this gentleman
see our dient I will send the police immediately and I will remove your
name from the list of accredited boarding houses for us," oh then! She'd
called me a "damn Dutchman" (this was a long time ago!) the last time lIeft,
but this time, oh! she couldn't have been sweeter, you know. But it was dear
from this woman's report-evident to me-that this woman tyrannized her,
and she was a very frail old lady. She had one niece who came to see her as
often as she could-but she was a great distance away and couldn't do it very
often-and nobody else in the world. So the landlady tyrannized her, and she
couldn't do anything. The woman desperately wanted to get out, I mean just
desperately. In those days I just took action. I didn't want to go through the
rigmarole of the bureaucracy. I'd seen it at work, you know, and it didn't
work.
SC: These days you might weIl be sued.
MN: That's exaclly the case. WeIl I just took action. I said, "How would
you like to leave right now?" She said [Irish accent]: "Oh you dear man." .
. . And, weIl, what I did was to get a taxi, went out in the street-Myrtle
 WIlli MAURICE NATANSON 293

Avenue in Brooklyn-got a taxi, told the guy we were going to move an old
lady. I'd found a room for her with an Irish landlady who liked the idea of
getting an Irish tenant, and she said "Why, O'Leary, that's as Irish as Paddy's
cat!" And I just helped her move her things. She didn't have very much;
what she had was packed up in little bundles which were actually shopping
bags, and each shopping bag was the size of a melon-a cantaloupe or
honeydew-wrapped up. So you'd open the drawer in her room and there
were all of these cantaloupes and melons of brown paper, carefully
packaged; then you'd find a dollar bill stuck underneath one, two or three
more dollars here and there she didn't know she had. And I just carried
them to the taxi. The landlady was screaming. She called the agency to
protest but couldn't get anywhere because she'd had this trouble before, and
she was worried about her future with the agency, from which she got most
of her customers. And so I moved the woman, gave her a piece of paper
with her new address-because I knew if she went out she wouldn't know
where she lived. She got a fine reception from her new landlady, and that
was it. Another one I won't tell you about, but just remark on: There was
aperson, Salvatore somebody, who never answered my letters. Finally there's
one thing you can do which will get an answer from such aperson: you cut
them off, financially. The checks stopped coming. Then a small man, one of
these wide, short Italians, Sicilians, comes to see me at the agency, the
welfare department, and he says [Italian accent]: "Whatsamatta, no check?"
And then I told hirn, "You don't answer, I came to your place six times, you
don't answer the door, you got no phone, I've written you ... " He says, "Oh,
no English." So I got somebody who spoke Italian to join me and she told
hirn, "Look, he's got to go in and see howyou're living." "Oh no!" "All right,"
she said, "no see, no check." Then he let me in. When I came in, what I
found was very strange ... We're in the midst of philosophy, aren't we,
really?
SC: These experiences live on, they echo in your work.
MN: They're very strong, very vivid. I went down some steps (it was a
basement apartment off Myrtle Avenue) and an old woman he was living
with (the record said that his wife had died-he was in his sixties, 65 or
something, 70) ... he had chained to the bed. I said [sputtering] "What are
you doing here?" "Ah, none ofyour business." "Yes it is-no check." Then he
untied the chain, released her. But the thing I learned from that year was
that I found people in the most execrable circumstances-filth, horror,
degradation-and what are they doing? They're carrying on all kinds of
affairs-not just love affairs, but litigation, all kinds of things, over nothing,
you know; wound up in aH sorts of business when they can barely get
enough food in their bellies. They're living like a mound of ants busily at
work on God knows what, some carcass-that's the image I have of many of
these people. There were the opposite as weH, people with very neat hornes,
didn't want anything, always did everything properly. But many of them, if
294 A CONVERSATION

not most of them, were all wound up in strange interludes of reality (to rely
on O'Neill).
SC: Did that strike your literary imagination at the time? It occurs to me
that this hooks up with the problem of mundanity and the problem of the
everyday from the egologieal perspective, various social niehes ...
MN: It certainly did "immanently." I didn't have the language for it at
that time, I didn't have the equipment-phenomenological or existential-to
characterize it, but what it linked up with was an equivalent, in a sense, in
literature, in Dostoevsky, in Tolstoy, all the writers who were terribly
important to me from high school on.
SC: The authors who were important to you: was it primarily European
authors in the early years?
MN: Yeah.... I had read people like Jack London, and certainly his
work, Martin Eden, was the first "philosophical novel" I had ever read, in the
sense that it contained "philosophy" or philosophical discussion in it. I found
out much later on that Sidney Hook had first come across philosophy in
Martin Eden. That's true. So I was interested in a number of writers and
poets, and I was writing poetry myself in high school, was part of what one
could ca11 a literary establishment in a public high school which was of a
very high level. And I found a11 of these experiences to be . . . to touch
something very strong in my imagination which was, as I think you suggest-
ed, an analogue of philosophy-with the other side of the analogy not yet
present, but immanent; though in literary terms it was present.
SC: Those authors that you mentioned-Dostoevsky, Kafka, and
others-present one with a paradoxical (or at least complex, conflicted) view
of the human being.
MN: Absolutely. That's what appealed to me, that's what rang true in my
experience, about the people I knew, the people I was concerned with, and
then the people whom I found in social work were altogether like this.
There were scenes out of a dozen European theaters, let alone the Yiddish
Theater. And I began to understand what it is-it's almost Dickensian-to
hear, once and for all and hear it reverberate forever, the cry of poverty,
rank poverty. People who are on the bottom, who would never get out of
the bottom; people who are paralyzed or partially paralyzed; people whose
husbands or wives had run away, never to return; people whose children
were in the penitentiary-you know, a11 these stories. You'd have a file that
thick on somebody: this little girl, at the age of twelve, ran away, came back
two years later, ran away again; aH these things in a cycle of horror. You had
legal cases, you had to go to court and testify and you'd see people waiting
there who were just mangled by life. WeH, I don't see how anybody can do
good strong analytic work in philosophy who has had no sense of what life
is about.
SC: It seems to me that your insistence on radicality in the task of
philosophy-philosophy as radical inquiry-is associated with these radical
 Wrrn MAURICE NATANSON 295

forms of existence, poverty, the experience of poverty. There is a kind of

experience in the situation of poverty that demands an equally radical
response on the part of the thinker who wants to do it justice.
MN: And 1 suppose it's partly my own life-time-age. 1 was born in 1924
and so when the Depression came 1 was old enough. Living through it under
very bad circumstances financially at horne, since my father was very ill for
two years ... 1 went through-from the standpoint of a boy, eight, ten years
old, old enough to know what's going on-the reality of the Oreat Depres-
sion in this country. And there are certain images which are apart of me,
images of WPA workers in the winter trying to warm themselves around
those big cans in which they put scrap wood. That's an image that 1 don't
think will ever fade from my mind, the image of people out of work, and
indeed of people selling apples; these kinds of images are not just memories,
they enter into my being and they remain there; and you're separated, in a
way, from people who, in asense, don't know what you are talking about.
SC: People who have not had those experiences?
MN: Or anything like them. It is the "like," it seems to me, that is crucial.
You don't have to have lived in the eighteenth century, the seventeenth
century, to understand certain problems that existed, let's say, in France. 1
don't believe you have to have had the experience, in some direct fashion,
in order to comprehend the experience. 1 think there is a certain set of
essential features which imagination can translate not into a duplicate, but
into a deep appreciation, of what took place, what was going on. 1 think
there is a kind of knowing prior to experiencing, within an act of recognition
via imagination, and that is very powerful in literature and presents itself in
life; and 1 think there is also, in Sartrean terms, a tremendous presence of
bad faith, by which people just cross something out, don't permit it to have
an impact: without self-consciously saying "I'm not going to do this," in
terms of bad faith that's what's done. WeH, 1 will move on to 1948 in this
voyage and talk about that.
SC: Yes. You were saying that you were somewhat at sea, having finished
the MA.
MN: That's right. 1 didn't know about any of these Assistantships and so
on-I thought this is the end, you can't do any more, have to find out
something else to do. 1 talked to some fellow students at NYU and they
said, "Why don't you try for an Assistantship?" (they knew more about it,
obviously), and 1 said, "WeH, how do you go about it?" They said, "Why
don't you talk to Professor Sidney Hook? He's the Chairman and knows aH
about it; a lot of people write to hirn for recommendations, he's an eminent
person in the profession." So 1 went to see Sidney Hook. First 1 wrote hirn
a letter. The letter was the story of my life-it was, it was a very long
letter-and when 1 came in he said, "You've had an extremely interesting
life." He appreciated my letter. So we hit it off in that sense (I had a course
with hirn too, but the letter appealed to hirn). He had asense hirnself of
296 A CONVERSATION

what life was like in New York. He said, "I've just gotten a letter from
Professor Werkmeister at the University of Nebraska asking me to
recommend a teaching assistant." I didn't know where Nebraska was! And
he said "Would you be interested?" I said, "Sure." Both he and Burnham
wrote to Werkmeister and, in sum, I was appointed as a teaching assistant
in philosophy. But "teaching assistant" is-or was at any rate-a bit different
than it is at Yale. I had my own classes, which I was in charge of fully,
without anybody's supervision. I had a class in logic and a class in ethics.
That was the thing. And I taught those classes-I guess one a semester
-while I did my graduate work. Nebraska at the time I was there had an
extremely interesting-smaH but very valuable-department of philosophy. W.
H. Werkmeister was the head of it-a very good professor. He knew the
his tory of philosophy thoroughly; he knew the natural and social sciences
very weH, and he was a person who had a lot to give. He was one of the
earliest people in this country to have read Heidegger, for example, and in
Philosophy and Phenomenological Research there is an article by hirn about
Heidegger, in the first volume, which goes back to 1940. Wen, there weren't
very many people in this country who knew about Heidegger in 1940. He
had been a visiting professor, through a government agency, in Germany in
the thirties and he had met with Heidegger to discuss Heidegger's work. My
first introduction to Husserl was in a course, for a semester, in phenomen-
ology which consisted of a study of the Logical Investigations.
SC: This was with Werkmeister?
MN: With Werkmeister, right. He knew them thoroughly, was able to
give us a sense of what Husserl was aH about, and I then took a great many
of his courses. I was and remain enormously indebted to Professor
Werkmeister.
SC: In what form did you study the Investigaoons?
MN: In addition to the texts of the Logische Untersuchungen there was
Marvin Farber's book on The Foundations o[ Phenomenology, which gave a
very adequate statement, a summary statement, of the Logical Investigations,
and that was used as the text, I think, since it was reasonable to try it that
way. That's how it started. I said it was a small but valuable department: the
other members were O. K. Bouwsma, and whenever you mention the
University of Nebraska, of course, people say, "Were you a student of
Bouwsma's?" I took courses with hirn, but I never became his student. He
was never able to get under my skin, philosophicaHy. He was certainly
somebody I'd never encountered before, philosophicaHy. He was quite a
remarkable presence, but it never came to ... even the very suggestion of
influence. I learned a lot from hirn, in asense, about what analytic
philosophy could be. He also had the tremendous advantage of being a very
good stylist. He was someone who could, who did, discuss the Brothers
Karamazov with Wittgenstein. That's what Wittgenstein wanted to talk
about. There's a book of Bouwsma's in which he says this. Those were the
 WITH MAURICE NATANSON 297

reaHy important things for Wittgenstein. Clearing away the linguistic mess
was only astart, shovelling it out in order to come to the Brothers Karam-
azov.
SC: I take it that that's a very different sense of philosophy than the one
you came to Nebraska with.
MN: That's right. But there was somebody there who was interested in
Wittgenstein-Thomas, or Tom, Storer-whom I was very close to in many
ways. We became friends. He was a younger man, in his thirties, had taken
his PhD under Gustav Bergmann at Iowa. WeH Storer was, I think, a
remarkable man. He was expert in logic, but logic turned out to be an
entrance into problems of reality, not a cut-off discipline of its own. And
why was I interested in Storer? WeIl, in the first place I hadn't studied a
great deal of logic, though I taught it, so I attended, just as an auditor, all
of Storer's classes in logic, just to learn enough to be decent in philosophy.
But apart from that I was interested in him, I suppose, initially because he
was interested in me. Which is the way things work. He was someone who'd
cut through a lot of things and try to find you, you know, at the center of
your life. WeIl I learned a great deal from Tom Storer, I attended his
courses and participated in them-I remember giving a paper, though I
wasn't registered for the course, on Peirce, to Storer's class, among others
things.
SC: Were you reading the pragmatists at the time?
MN: I had read some James under Sidney Hook, and pragmatism under
Hook, when I was at NYU; that interested me but never became a driving
force, so that by the time I came to Nebraska lalready had a kind of
concern, a sense of what Iwanted to do: what Iwanted to do was to read
L 'Etre et le Neant and write a dissertation on it. Werkmeister welcomed that,
which was tremendously useful to me. He had read it, he knew Heidegger,
he knew Hegel thoroughly, he knew all the sources; and he was a very good
person for organization. So I was able to write my dissertation pretty much
on my own. He gave me some suggestions, but the deepest suggestions he
gave me were about organization: Here something is needed, or there this
chapter must end and some other chapter must begin-something like that.
And Bouwsma left Nebraska for England the second year I was there, as a
visitor of some sort-which is when he held discussions with G. E. Moore
and Wittgenstein-so he wasn't part of my continuing study. I studied one
year with him, two courses: one on Hume's Treatise and one on Bertrand
Russell. It didn't much matter what you studied with Bouwsma-you got
Bouwsma. Bouwsma was very vitally interested in Kierkegaard, and I'm sorry
that I never had a course on Kierkegaard with him. But his Kierkegaard was
the Kierkegaard of Jesus Christ, so maybe it's just as weIl that I never
studied Kierkegaard with him ...
SC: You have your own Kierkegaard ...
MN: I have a Jewish Kierkegaard [Iaughter] ...
298 A CONVERSATION

SC: What were your first impressions upon arriving in Nebraska?

MN: 1 came out during the summer, and of course the heat was overpow-
ering, but it was a new part of the country-I'd never been there before-and
it was a1l somehow different in a way that accent and architecture couldn't
explain. A different kind of people, midwesterners. And so 1 tried to find out
... A friend of mine who was going on to UCLA to study parasitology had
arranged the whole thing so that he would stop off in Lincoln and pick up
a plane there to get to his destination. So we had an afternoon free to do
things, and we found out very quickly that there were not very many things
to do in Lincoln, Nebraska, in 1948. But there was something going on, and
it was, as you might imagine, agricultural. The state fair. Since nothing else
was going on, we decided to go out to the fairgrounds. And then you'd hear
it: "Mooo," "Baa," and a1l the noises, pigs and swine and oxen and everything.
All that out there: Angus bulls were being auctioned off ... all that stuff.
So we wandered around, and neither of us was very agricultural but we
noted the presence of chickens and everything else there is on the farm, and
before lieft I noticed a rather elderly farmer who was in charge of one of
the exhibits. He interested me because (I didn't have a beard then) he had
a beautiful Old Testament beard, a very long, white, patriarchal beard, and
1 decided to introduce myself to hirn, which 1 did, to see if there were any
possible bridge. WeIl, the bridge in 1948 was politics. Presidential election
year. So 1 said, "Do you mind telling me who you are going to vote for?"
And he said, "Not at a1l. I'm going to vote for Joe Louis." I said, "Seriously?"
He said, "Oh yes. 1 know he's not on the ballot, but 1 think he's the only
honest man in America. I'm going to write the name of Joe Louis in as my
vote for the President." It was extremely interestingl That's the last thing you
could think of imagining, at all, and that's what was going on. Who could
dream up a dialogue of that kind? The wildest playwright would be hard
pressed to think that up. WeIl, anyway, it happened. And later on 1 met
members of the department -Werkmeister and Bouwsma and Patterson.
One man who, again, is not weIl known, who came to join the faculty, is
Professor Bruce Waters. He was rea1ly in love with philosophy itself. He had
studied at Ohio State, and the German set of the Logical Investigations 1
have was given to hirn by his Professor-named Chandler, Albert
Chandler-who was a fairly well-known man in the thirties, twenties and
thirties, and 1 think he wrote in it a dedication to Bruce: "Just passing on
the torch. Don't burn your fingers."
SC: A dangerous set of books, there.
MN: It is. But Waters' interests lay elsewhere and he just kept it as a
token of his teacher's affection and then gave it to me as a token of his
affection. But 1 had a course with hirn. He was an unusual man in several
ways. He was split ... 1'11 just say a little about hirn; he became a friend.
One side of his life was philosophical logic and the theory of logic; he was
a very good technical philosopher. He always wanted to teach logic, and
 Wrrn MAURICE NATANSON 299

always did-as a kind of ... oh, the way some people use Listerine in the
morning. There was another side to hirn: he was a Kierkegaardian, and 1
took a course with hirn on Kierkegaard. He was on my orals committee and
we became great friends. He published only a few things. He had been
Bertrand Russell's assistant when Russell was teaching at the University of
Chicago, but he never wrote much, didn't care to write much; he wrote
under protest, usually, from a colleague who'd say, "Look you've got to keep
up your end of the pact, you've got to write an article to show that you've
published something." He always did it out of need, or out of respect for the
person. But he was genuinely in love with philosophy, and Bouwsma, 1 think,
goaded hirn on, because Bouwsma was hard. He wrote a certain paper and
Bouwsma wouldn't accept it-didn't like it, disagreed with it-and he rewrote
it and gave it to Bouwsma a second time and Bouwsma didn't like it. He did
a third version of it and Bouwsma said, "No, this won't do." So Bruce said,
"WelI, then, the hell with it," and just walked out. Well, he followed
Bouwsma down; he retired to Texas Tech for a number of years, then retired
to Arkansas; his idea was to live on the land. He was an extremely
interesting man. We also went to conventions-my first APA meeting in
Columbus, Ohio. We had an interesting life and a group of friends. My wife,
Lois, taught English at that point, in the English Department at the
University of Nebraska.
SC: What did you see as your road during this period?
MN: 1 saw my road at that time-Iet's sayat the time 1 did my disserta-
tion, which became my first substantial publication, on Sartre-as continuing
in those sorts of studies: existential and phenomenological. Getting a job
was a blisteringly difficult problem. 1 got my degree in 1950, and then 1 was
appointed as an instructor for one year at Nebraska. That was my first full-
time employment. But by the time 1951 came, there were no jobs to be had.
It was a terrible depression as far as jobs. So, just by fortune, the Arnerican
Council of Learned Societies, recognizing the situation not only in philo-
sophy but in the humanities generally, came up with a new program for 1
don't know how many-twenty, twenty-five-applicants who, out of a great
many, would become Arnerican Council of Learned Societies Scholars. 1 ap-
plied for that, had support from all the people 1 worked with in Nebraska,
and 1 got it. 1 got the equivalent of a fair salary for a year and 1 could go
anywhere 1 wanted to.
SC: Unlike the more recent Mellon Fellowships, which were constituted
for similar reasons, these were not attached to specific universities?
MN: No, you could do this anywhere-or nowhere, in asense: just by
yourself. Well, at that time 1 happened by chance to come across a catalogue
from the Graduate Faculty of the New School, and 1 saw the names and
courses of Alfred Schutz, Kurt Riezler, Karl Löwith. 1 read their catalogue
and found out that they even offered a degree called "Doctor of Social
Sciences" for someone who already had a PhD in some other field and
300 A CONVERSATION

wanted to explore the social sciences. If you go somewhere, you have to have
a claim on somebody's time. You can't just drop in and be the equivalent of
a dissertation student and not be a student, technica11y, at a11. What claim
do you have? I had met Herbert Spiegelberg, who was a very friendly man,
at a number of APA meetings in the midwest, and I had been in cor-
respondence with him on a number of subjects ...
SC: Did you already know Schutz's work before you went?
MN: No. I started looking at some of his things, but the first thing I did
was write to Spiegelberg-he knew a11 these people-and ask for his opinion
of them. He sent me a fairly long letter describing each one. Without going
in to what he said about a11 of them, it amounted to this: "But for me,
persona11y, the one I like best is Schutz, for his Viennese charm and warmth,
in addition to his qualifications as a phenomenologist." And that was enough
for me. I could see ahead of time that he was the one I would choose. But
I studied with a11 these people, and others. It was through the American
Council of Learned Societies which-thank God-renewed that award for a
second year; they had faith in me. I was able in those two years to work with
Schutz very closely and do a dissertation on George Mead which, together
with a11 the examinations, qualified me for the degree of Doctor of Social
Sciences. 1 So that was in a way a great event in my life.
SC: And a fortuitous one. Was it Schutz's idea to work on Mead?
MN: Yes. He suggested it to me.
SC: Had he written on Mead?
MN: No. He mentions Mead a few times in his articles, but he never
wrote what he ca11ed his "Mead paper." Now, The New School establishes
another phase of my existence, and an absolutely critical one: I wouldn't be,
in asense, who I am, without the experience of the New School-and that
means, centrally, the experience of Schutz. I took a11 his courses; the courses
I couldn't take I audited. Everything he ever gave. And I had-you could call
it-"private seminars" on Husserl. We went through parts of the Cartesian
Meditations in French, which was the only thing available at the time.
SC: Did you feel like you had similar readings and appreciations of
Husserl, for example, or was there a big gap to overcome initia11y?
MN: There wasn't-because, I think, of the character of his individuality.
I mean, what Spiegelberg said was that he was charming and warm and
Viennese-which he was, to the roots-and it was that that you immediately
feIt, that warmth. In terms of whether he agreed with what turned out to be
my rather existential reading of Husserl and phenomenology, an aberrant
reading of phenomenology in some ways, whether he agreed with it or not
(he sometimes didn't) didn't matter. He mattered to me. And he recognized

1 Maurice Natanson received the degree of Doctor of Social Science (summa cum laude)
from the Graduate Faculty of the New School for Social Research in 1953 [ED].
 WITH MAURICE NATANSON 301

that people cannot be molded in an absolute form, without becoming

puppets.
SC: He wasn't a "European" in the sense of insisting on a "School"?
MN: No. He was very suspicious of all that, and he didn't like pomposity.
He thought you ought to strike out and declare yourself in your work. And
I did. It wasn't that I simply wrote what I pleased; he read everything I wrote
and criticized it. At certain points we had differences, and I stood up, where
I thought it important, for a certain interpretation, and so on. But he was
a man who was so rich, and had such depth of comprehension as a human
being, had so many strata of social existence, that I learned not only a lot
about Husserl, about a lot of thinkers, but a lot about human existence. It's
weH-known that he had been most of his life in the business world, in a firm
that dealt with contracts, and he told me later on that he found it much
easier to deal with businessmen than with philosophers and academics, who
were big crybabies that had never grown up. I learned a lot about human
existence from Schutz precisely in terms of what's at issue when you're
dealing with another person. And at one point he told me, "Natanson, these
are human beings." You say, "WeIl, Professor So-and-So's done this, and this
person's done that; there's this quarrel and that difficulty." But basicaHy it
isn't whether the paper was given the right grade, or whether you did the
right thing, or the position you took was this, that or the other. It was
basically that you're dealing with persons, and that's what I came to realize,
through instruction by a master.
SC: It seems that Schutz represents a type that both attracted you and
you were attractive to throughout your inteHectual formative years, teachers
who saw to the person, who taught in a maieutic way by drawing out the
insights from you.
MN: I think that's correct. I think teaching is a mysterious and hidden
business, or transaction, and it does take enormous skill to find the heart,
as weH as the mind, of the alter ego, and develop it appropriately. That
doesn't often happen. In my terms, I recognized myself as a good teacher for
certain kinds of students-not by classification (whether they are interested
in European philosophy or this, that, or the other) as much as in terms of
whether I could reach them as a person . . . I think "indirection" in
Kierkegaard's sense is absolutely critical.
SC: And so also the time at which the student and the teacher encounter
one another. One point of life is the right time to encounter this sort of
teacher, while another time is a quite different matter.
MN: Quite right. That's a statement that Schutz could have, and certainly
did, make.
SC: The biographical situation makes the difference.
MN: Exactly. It's when and how something happens.
SC: Earlier you mentioned an interest in medicine. Would this be a good
time to speak of that?
302 A CONVERSATION

MN: Yes, some years were left out of my story. I graduated from college
in 1945 and I think it was 1946-47 that I went to medical school.
SC: So you actually had formal training?
MN: Yes, and the circumstances were these: 1 had taken enough courses
10 meet pre-medical requirements, but there were certain things against me
when 1 was applying, in 1944, for the next year. Though 1 did weIl in my
courses, New York then (my horne state) did not have its own medical
school. There were medical schools in New York, but they were private. So
1 had no state university, the natural place for me to apply. The second thing
was that 1 had graduated from a small college in Tennessee, which was
relatively unknown in most places. But in the summer of 1946 1 was working
at a place in upper New York for a charitable organization for children who
had rheumatic fever, as a counsellor. There was a man who was an MD
doing some kind of summer's research with these kids, and 1 10ld hirn the
story of how 1 couldn't get into medical school. He said, "Have you heard of
this new school in New Jersey? It has been in existence for one year, in
Newark. I've heard some good things about it. You might get their catalogue
and find out what you can." So 1 did. 1 had an uncle in those days-a lawyer,
my favorite uncle-who had a lot of connections with lawyers in New Jersey,
and he asked them about the status of the school. WeIl, it had provisional
approval from the State Board of Medical Examiners-which was the first
official body to approve a school-so it had this "so far, so good" sort of
approval. From what he'd heard, they had strong likelihood of having that
approval continue. And so-he was a cautious man, as most lawyers are-he
said, "I think you ought to try it." 1 applied and was admitted to the first-year
dass, with one dass ahead of me. And I can tell you that that one year was
at the same time exhilarating, remarkable, punishing in the extreme, and
unforgeuable. 1 wanted to be a psychiatrist and psychoanalyst. As with many
people interested in psychoanalysis, 1 feIt it was important to be a psychia-
trist and have medical experience; I'd read Zilboorg, the American
psychiatrist, who argued that there is such a thing as "therapeutic intent."
Whether he is right or wrong, 1 accepted that argument. "Therapeutic intent"
means an unconscious desire to heal, which can be gained only through what
a physician goes through dealing with patient after patient. Being in touch
with people in their physical being as weIl as in their emotional being. The
lay psychoanalyst misses out on all of that. WeIl, Freud didn't think so, and
his daughter didn't think so, but that's the way it was. Put very briefly: 1 had
to go through the hardest year of medicine, the first year, with terrific,
intense study of anatomy, physiology, histology, biochemistry; and 1 had, with
the President of the college (who was hirnself a lay analyst), a course in
psychiatry. And 1 can tell you that that is the hardest work-academic
work-that 1 have ever done of its kind. WeIl, as the year ended astrange
thing occurred. The President and the administration of the medical school
got into so me sort of political baule with the State Board of Medical
 WITII MAURICE NATANSON 303

Examiners. This was the first medical school in New Jersey because there
were ancient-relatively, for our time, ancient-anti-vivisection codes and
rules and statutes still on the books. So you could not open up a medical
school in New Jersey; it would be against the law because you couldn't
dissect corpses. The way they got around that was rather clever: they (the
administration) constituted themselves first as a board of pathologists who,
as pathologists, could do dissections. Then they incorporated that division
of pathology into the medical school so we could get bodies and work on
them. But bizarre things happened. Sometimes your cadaver, or a piece of
it, would disappear. 1 once ... I'd be studying very, very late and I'd go out
on so me cold night and go a half a mile off for a hamburger. The gross
anatomy room of the medical school was in the basement, and one of the
windows was open, and 1 saw a man (who was called "the Diener," tradition-
ally, the servant) handing a leg to someone outside. There was a good deal
of bOdy-snatching going on. It was a weird scene.
SC: Who was snatching these bodies? Other students?
MN: It was the administration of the college arranging with this board of
pathologists for acquiring stray bodies and limbs. 1 had the odd experience
of seeing in dissection-it wasn't "my" body-a man 1 had seen on the streets
of Newark. So it was a singular operation altogether. The teachers were
quite good, for the most part. We had a man in biochemistry who was a very
well-known chemist and theoretician. He was also, in his earlier days, a
Marxist, and in the midst of his lectures in biochemistry he looked at his
class-a hundred students or so-and said, "I'll give an A to anybody who can
tell me the correct title for what is really happening behind these chemical
equations." The answer was: dialectic. There was a French doctor from the
Sorbonne working on Hodgkin's disease. It turned out he hirnself had
Hodgkin's disease. We had a man from Columbia in histology, and an
absolute bastard in physiology. He used to go around with a white rat on his
collar; so you'd be talking to hirn and all of a sudden two pink eyes would
be staring at you, peering around. He was really a kind of sadist.
SC: Did they close down the school?
MN: WeIl, they got into a battle with the wrong people. It's like getting
into a battle with the President of your school. So eventually in a couple
weeks the situation got worse and worse, and by the end of the month
(which was the end of the school year) it was all over. We had lost. The
worst thing was, you couldn't transfer. No one wanted to touch you with a
ten foot pole.
SC: So you had a real foot in the door, and you might very weIl have
continued ...
MN: Oh, 1 would have continued, the whole thing; it would have been all
much more to my liking as it went along-going through clinical years and
so on. I feIt that I had ... All right, I'll say it: that I had therapeutic qual-
ities.
304 A CONVERSATION

SC: That elearly emerged in your later interests-not only in the subjects
of your writing but in your style as weil, the dialogical style.
MN: The only time I referred to medicine was in the book on Anonymity.
There, in the bibliography at the end, I said that I once attended an autopsy
performed by a very famous American pathologist. I got very involved in
anatomy and dissection, and the whole experience.
SC: 00 you find that that anatomical experience is reflected in your
descriptions?
MN: Oecisively. A elose friend from my medical school days recently said
to me that he wouldn't trade his year in medical school in Newark for
anything he had. And I feel the same way. It was enormously formative. The
year in anatomy, it strikes me, was just like my meeting with Schutz: it was
something that has made me myself.
SC: In your writing and teaching one is struck by the evocativeness of
your examples, their vividness. The anatomical training rounds out the
picture of the origins of a philosophical sensibility that is both phenomen-
ological and, as you put it, therapeutic. But there is another dimension. A
book like Anonymity, for example, seems to be a kind of tour de force of
indirect communication. Where does that come from?
MN: I think it comes in in the Sartrean work and is elaborated further
through that, through Kierkegaard himself-my reading and study of
him-and through a source which is still different: a sense for what might be
called "theatricality." The fact that my father was for all his life a profession-
al actor-in Europe, in England, in Africa, Johannesburg, in this
country-that has had, and still has, a tremendous power for me.
SC: Do you think of yourself-both as a writer and a teacher-in terms of
acting categories?
MN: Not in the sense of, "This is a performance," in the bad sense ofthat
term, but "performance" in the good sense, which means: a presentation of
self. But the presentation must be . . . what? . . . it must be first of a11
forceful, not because you go into ... As Hamlet instructs the actors, you
know: don't go into a11 these large gestures, that's out. Instead the intent
must be powerful, and it must be on the side of the student. This comes also
from Max Weber, that the professor must place hirnself on the side of the
student and use a11 his knowledge for the student's good-give that to the
student, not as a gift, but as a prized possession won; that's the professor's
wish, and strength through his teaching: that in a sense to teach somebody
(in some ideal sense) is to require that that student go through you.
SC: What complications enter in when the student is anonymous, that is,
when you are writing? Is the same sort of dialectic of presentation at issue,
and if so, is there a difference between the face-to-face experience (mediated
though it may be in the classroom) and the situation of writing?
MN: There has to be. And therefore the notion of indirection meets its
crossroads: In the case of active, face-to-face teaching there are certain
 Wlrn MAURICE NATANSON 305

things that can be done: pause significantly, the point is made. In the case
of writing, you offer some chaHenging formal statement which is arresting;
interestingly enough, one says "arresting," but it's an arresting for the sake
of motion and movement, to carry the student forward.
SC: Perhaps we'H have a chance to return later to some of these issues
about indirection and presentation; those are important aspects of your
work. But could we talk a moment about what happened right after your
time at the New School, how things worked out?
MN: WeH, what happened basicaHy was that now I had a second doctor's
degree and a wife and child, and I had to get a job! The New School was (at
least when I was there) very welcoming, and so on, but there's one thing
they lacked, and that's money. They were always poor. I taught a course in
the Graduate Faculty in my second year there, and my salary was based on
the number of students you had and a certain percentage of the fee they
paid. So it turned out that I earned $75 for the semester. The man who was
then Dean of the Graduate Faculty was an economist named Neisser and he
said, "How's the course you are giving going?" I said I thought it was aH
right, and he said, "Do you mind if I ask you how much you are being paid
far it?" I said, "WeH Dean Neisser, to tell you the truth, it's not much
money, it's $75." And he said, "Shameful!" And it was. But that was the
problem with the New School in the early 1950s. So if I stayed there I could
teach a course or two, but I couldn't afford that. My grant from the
American Council of Learned Societies for the second year was coming to
an end, and I had to have a job. I went to the philosophy meetings in search
of one, but it turned out that there were very few jobs. I got a few inter-
views. One man said, "I see you're interested in phenomenology." I said,
"Yes," and he said, "WeH you know, it's too bad. We do need a person for
our department, and your letters speak weH ofyou, but we have no room for
a mystic."
SC: That was the perception of the things you were doing?
MN: "Seeing essences" was a mystical event. Nobody but phenomeno-
logists could see them. It was like occult voices, and so on. It wasn't kosher;
it wasn't considered legitimate. You might have read Husserl and aH that
stuff, but after aH, that's European and foreign and German and this, that,
and the other. We want somebody who is a good sense-data man.
SC: Was there any interest in the Sartre side of your work?
MN: Suspicious interest.
SC: Not much philosophy there, mostly a literary terrorist or something?
MN: It was also political. They connected it with terrorism, and in a
certain way it was a kind of conceptual terrorism. They didn't understand
what that might mean, but I would recognize that as true. I'm a conceptual
terrorist. That's what a good philosopher ought to be-whether it's Sartre or
Nietzsche or whoever it iso But I went to another meeting and gave a paper
on Sartre, and a man got up and said-this was a philosopher, a smaH group
306 A CONVERSATION

meeting-li I came here with my wife! And whether it's in the regulations of
the Southeast Philosophy Division of such-and-such a Society or not, I think
matters of this kind should not be discussed in front of ladies." I was talking
about Nausea, you see. So that's the kind of response I got there. There was
a terrible suspicion, in other words, around 1951, about all of this stuff.
SC: Was there any red-baiting?
MN: There was a suggestion of that, and then as it went along and Sartre
got into his more nearly Mandan period, he was put under suspicion. I'd say,
"Look, the communist party is an enemy of his, won't let hirn in-he wants
to get in and they won't let hirn," and go through all of that. That didn't
matter.
SC: So how did you manage, then, to land that job?
MN: Well, it was by mail, correspondence. And it was terrible. University
of Houston. It was a ghastly place in 1953. Four years I was there, and
during those four years I gave talks to every organization that ever existed.
I once gave two papers by flying from one society to another in different
states, on the same day-one in the morning, one in the evening. I wrote,
wrote, wrote myself out. Unlike the medical school, which was terrific work,
this was work under a different kind of press ure, and the place itself . . .
nine-tenths of the University of Houston was just grim and ghastly. A faculty
member said to me, "By God, we beat the Aggies!" Well, there was nothing
to be done there. On the other hand, I had some good students-not only in
philosophy, but elsewhere. Perhaps my best, greatest student was Don
Barthelme. He was the most remarkable. In philosophy I had Zaner, and
Robert Jordan was a student of mine at the University of Houston. I had a
few very loyal, hard-working, good students.
SC: Were you teaching courses in phenomenology?
MN: No. What I did actually was to teach the standard courses-you
know, ethics, philosophy of value, whatever they thought ... the latest
language which captured them. Philosophy of value! I wasn't interested in
value-theory, but anyway I had to teach it. I taught history of philosophy
-ancient, medieval, modern. By then I had gotten a number of students-
six, eight, ten, twelve students at different times-who became interested in
phenomenology and Husserl, and I met them as a group, privately, without
a classroom.
SC: Was there anational network that you feit yourself apart oft
MN: No, there were people, individuals. In addition to Schutz there was
Gurwitsch who, as you know, was so close, as a friend and as a philosopher,
to Schutz; and there was Fritz Kaufmann-with whom I corresponded and
finally met at a philosophy meeting-who was a very knowledgeable and
profound phenomenologist. I corresponded with Spiegelberg and met hirn
at meetings, talked with hirn at some length, and a few other people like
that. I just worked at what I knew about and furthered that knowledge by
working at it. The people that I counted on for criticism were people like
 WITIi MAURICE NATANSON 307

Schutz, to whom 1 sent everything that 1 wrote. There 1 knew 1 could get a
real answer. So 1 just waited for possibilities of getting on programs, sending
in articles to various journals, and so on.
SC: So then how did the "writing yourself out" work? Did you go on to
North Carolina at that point?
MN: WeIl it worked out, literally, at a meeting. 1 gave one of my
papers-it was on death, of all subjects. 2 1 compared Sartre and Heidegger
on death. This was ... what? ... 1957. It was at a meeting of the Southern
Society for Philosophy and Religion, and in the audience were Everett
Hall-who was the Chairman at Chapel Hill, University of North Carolina
-and another professor of the same school. It turned out that 1 had friends
who had taught at Houston but had moved to Durham, and when they heard
that 1was giving a paper-wherever it was, Knoxville 1 think-they invited me
to come out and visit them. 1 told the Chapel Hill people, "I'm going to
Durham to visit these friends," and was told, "WeIl, Everett Hall and 1 are
driving. Would you like to come with us?" So I said, "Yes," and from
Knoxville-about four hours or however long it took to Durham-it was
philosophy every second of those four hours. By the time 1 got to Durham,
the next thing on the agenda was, "Would you like to meet the other people
in the department of philosophy?" I said, "Yes," and it turned out 1 got the
job. I didn't know there was a job there. WeIl, that was a good experience
for my family. By then we had three children, and Chapel HilI was a lovely
place in which to raise children-quiet, much smaller than it is now. Everett
Hall was an extremely good Chairman; he was a good philosopher, knew a
lot. He has a book on categories which is still worth reading, published by
the University of Chicago Press. He wrote a book called What is Value?
which is still considered a first-rate study. I found him to be a very clever,
forceful (not dramatic, but quietly forceful) philosophical presence. He
sometimes didn't agree with things, or thought they were better done in
literature or something-you know, that's the kind of response you get about
some of the things I do. But he was a good person, excellent as aChairman.
Generally it was a fine place until Hall died. He died of a heart attack. I got
a call from his wife, his children were in distant places. So 1 went to Duke,
to the hospital, with Mrs. Hall, and Everett died there. With his death the
whole department changed.
SC: Who were the philosophicallights that people were being guided by
at the time?
MN: C. I. Lewis was an early name in this period: Analysis 0/ Knowledge
and Valuation and his earlier book on Mind and the World Order. Quine had
made astart. Wittgenstein had made astart, people were starting to get

2 "Death and Situation," in Literature, Philosophy, and the Social Sciences (The Hague:
Martinus Nijhoff, 1968),212-220; first published in American Imago, XVI (1959) [ED].
308 A CONVERSATION

interested in hirn. There was relatively little interest in the his tory of
philosophy. Nobody emerged very strongly. Carnap, Reichenbach: these were
the figures who were best known. Still young men were Sellars (his father
was still alive at that time-and he was to me a more interesting person), and
Anderson-Omar Khayylim Anderson-(both of them taught at Yale for a
while). The chief interests were British. We were only seven miles from
Duke, so between the two departments we were able to get a speaker to
come, and money enough, to speak twice. We got all the visiting English-
men. They all made the rounds with their papers-Austin, Hare, any of these
people you can name. Duke then thought of itself as an ivy-Ieague school;
they were terribly concerned then (it's totally different now) with being
correct, and Chapel Hill was a "me too" place, in those terms, and they were
terribly impressed with British-Oxford, Cambridge-philosophers. There
were exceptions. We did have Dorion Cairns down-I recommended
him-once, but that was about it. He gave two papers: one at Duke and the
second at Chapel Hill. So that's as far as we got in phenomenology. But the
names were really coming from England. It was ordinary language analysis,
Wittgensteinian thinking; von Wright came, and so on. That was the sense
of what was "it" at the time. That was "doing" philosophy.
SC: In terms internal to phenomenology and to the reception of
phenomenology in America, how did Farber's attempt to "naturalize"
phenomenology appear to you?
MN: It wasn't an issue because I identified with the early Farber, the
Foundations o[ Phenomenology Farber; I knewabout Farber's Marxism and
naturalism, and so on, and I didn't think it went anywhere. So that part of
it didn't impress me. I published my first article in Philosophy and Phenom-
enological Research, so I had some connection with Farber. That was when
I was still a graduate student in Nebraska.
SC: Which one was that?
MN: "H. B. Alexander's Projection of a Categoriology." So I was in touch
with Farber, in a certain way, and I met hirn later on.
SC: It has always struck me as odd that there was that attempt early on
to overcome Husserl's anti-naturalism ...
MN: True ...
SC: ... and then that sort of faded out, I think. Yet now, if there is a
contrast between naturalistic and transcendental phenomenology, the tide
has turned back, via pragmatism, to the naturalistic side.
MN: WeIl, in the case of both Gurwitsch and Schutz, William James
became a common, sympathetic figure-through his Principles o[ Psychology,
the doctrine of "fringes," and all the rest. And that seemed to me to be quite
natural and respectable, obviously, and developable; I mean, there was
something there to be done. But the other person who probably comes in
at this point whom I should mention is Horace Kallen, who was the assistant
to William James and the editor of Some Problems o[ Philosophy by James
 WITII MAURICE NATANSON 309

as weIl as an assistant to Josiah Royce and an assistant to Santayana. WeIl,

I was an assistant to hirn when I was at the New School. He had an effect
on me, but I was already formed by the time I came in. I wrote a paper on
Sartre for his seminar on freedom, at his request-"Sartre's Philosophy of
Freedom"-and when I finished he said, "This is publishable." He had it
published in Social Research. WeIl, he had an effect on me as a person. He
wanted me to take his place, at one point, at the New School, and I had the
opportunity. But I had a family. New York would have been wrong.
SC: The economic reason again?
MN: There would have been special funds, in his name, which would have
perhaps made a difference. But we didn't want to live in New York, and I'm
not sure that if lever went to the New School as a teacher that I would
ultimately have been happy. Later on Gurwitsch tried to get me to come, but
there were too many ... problems.
SC: You were talking about how the department changed at Chapel HilI
when Hall died.
MN: Yes. When Hall died everything changed philosophically as weIl as
departmentaIly. At that time I received a telephone call asking whether I was
interested in being a visiting professor of philosophy at Berkeley. I accepted,
went out there in the great year of 1964-65-the Free Speech Movement
year, very exciting in itself-and then I had a whole bunch of offers from
different places. The one that interested me most was from Santa Cruz. They
had just started the new branch of the University of California, and it struck
me that, in a man's lifetime, how many opportunities do you have to come
to a college which is in its first year? Happens very rarely. I was there the
first year.
SC: That was 1965.
MN: Correct.
SC: Who made the contact at Santa Cruz? Was the historian, Page Smith,
there?
MN: Yes, Page Smith was there and he was already going to be the
Provost of Cowell. They had maybe a dozen people there, making plans,
getting names, getting names from people whose names they were given, and
other names. My name surfaced that way, and I got a letter from Page Smith
saying they were starting this new venture and would I be interested in
coming down and having a talk and bring my family; we'd all have a picnic.
So I went down with my wife and children, we did have a picnic, I met
McHenry, but I delighted in Page Smith because he was so much the
individual and not the pompous administrator that I'd always met. So that's
how it started.
SC: What were your feelings about the place?
MN: It was sort of a "beginning," and therefore alluring. I thought, "WeIl,
this is a place that is developing and .. ." Some good things did develop, but
it took time. My argument was, basicaIly, you can't impose anything on a
310 A CONVERSATION

place like this. If you get good people, or some good people (and they had
good people), it has to come out of them. How? When they get to know
each other. And the best thing that came out in my opinion were the joint
seminars, which 1 participated in. 1 think there were three or four of them.
SC: Yes 1 remember. It was an interesting place, an interesting mix. With
you and Albert Hofstadter there the Philosophy Department had a certain
phenomenological cast to it, and it was nicely pluralistic (we didn't use the
term in those days). And Santa Cruz now?
MN: John Rice, who founded Black Mountain College, says in his autobi-
ography, I Came Out ofthe Eighteenth Century, that the life of an experimen-
tal college is just about ten years. And that really hit the mark. lieft in my
eleventh year.

***
SC: Before moving on to some philosophical issues, could you elaborate
on one further aspect of your background? You mentioned that you had
gone to college at a small school in Tennessee. What was that?
MN: Lincoln Memorial University, in Harrogate, Tennessee.
SC: How did you end up going there?
MN: 1 was a kind of wanderer, a bohemian, as an undergraduate, and I
always liked the very idea of going somewhere new and sort of starting all
over again with nothing. Not that 1 had anything to hide or a bad record
where 1 came from-just the opposite, I did pretty well-but 1 liked the idea
of being an explorer, of having something new. I had a professor whose wife
had graduated from Lincoln Memorial and she mentioned it to me. It's at
the meeting point of the three states-Virginia, Kentucky, and Tennessee
-the Cumberland Gap. It's a very beautiful place, in a way, but that's not
why 1 went there. It just seemed to me astrange world, and by God it was!
Students looked on me, 1 think, as a little mad. 1 used to have a hotplate
and drink a lot of coffee, stay up late, study, and so on, and a group of these
students ... Most all of them were from Tennessee, Virginia, Georgia, and
Kentucky, with a sprinkling from other places, and 1 overheard one of the
group talking as 1 was passing: "He makes coffee all night." 1 made some
good friends there and it was . . . one is tempted to say "an educational
experience. "
SC: Had you started there?
MN: No. I went to a variety of colleges-I started off at Brooklyn College
and then went to other colleges. 1 was attracted to these places for very
unsound reasons. At that time people would say, "Look, you did weIl last
year, why do you want to go somewhere else?" and 1 had weird explanations.
1 was just a wanderer, and 1 finallyended up in Lincoln Memorial, spent
about two and a half years there, and completed my work. And as 1 say, 1
found some very good things; culturally it's about as far from New York as
 WITI-I MAURICE NATANSON 311

you can get.

SC: O. K. I just wanted to clear up a couple of points about your
Wanderjahre. I would like to turn to some philosophical issues and just see
where they lead.
MN: Sure.
SC: I'd like to start with the issue of philosophical radicality and the
notion of origins in your work. Specifically, how do you conceive those
issues in light ofrecent attacks on "certainty," "foundations," the "given," and
so on?
MN: I'm still absolutely convinced that Husserl is right in searching for
origin-I won't go into that now in the sense in which I've used it myself, but
consider the traditional Husserlian sense. I'm still convinced that Husserl is
absolutely right in being concerned with origin and with the whole notion
of radicality as the source or essence of philosophy-and of phenomenology
itself for that matter (because I think in the end that philosophy and
phenomenology are one for Husserl). What "origin" means really divides into
a variety of things. At one level it's methodological, concerned with
returning, in the traditional sense, to sources-prior interpretations,
decisions, analyses; going back to them, seeing what they are based upon,
and in a certain sense "uncovering" this whole sedimentation of meaning. So
radicality means a "turning back." As I interpret phenomenology (always
understanding "Husserlian phenomenology," basically my own interpretation
of it), radicality means a "turning back" to one's own origins in the sense of
perceptual origins in experience, and so on. Now here a certain thing enters
via Schutz, namely the whole notion (in Husserl) of a pre-interpreted world,
which Schutz made a great deal of. So when I look at these books on the
walls and at the papers on the floor of my study, I don't see masses or
conglomerates, I see individual volumes, sometimes sets. I have a new
Kierkegaard set of the new Hong translation: I can go back and recollect
-not only that I got it from Princeton University Press, that they announced
it and I subscribed, and all the rest of it, but basically that all that now
becomes built in to the very perception of seeing the Kierkegaard set.
"Seeing" it is not seeing just the jackets which face me and remarking, "WeIl
by now there are ten, fifteen volumes out" (whatever it is); it is seeing that
the announcement of the new translation (which I was interested in, most
certainly), and the acquisition of it from year to year over a considerable
number of years, becomes part of what I perceive in direct apprehension. So
what was, what preceded-the pre-experience of any event or any set of
events or phenomena-becomes part of what I have to disentangle, come to
terms with, and understand if I am to understand my own experience of the
world, and also if I am to understand the experiential world.
SC: Is that process of uncovering those layers of sedimentation part of a
phenomenological history of the individual's experience, and then by
extension a kind of eidetic of history?
312 A CoNVERSATION

MN: That's correct because, as 1 view it, phenomenology is concemed

with the interpretive act which looks at its material "world" (let's just say
blundy) as having already been interpreted by others.
SC: Is the uncovering of that, as a task for phenomenology, not an
infinite task? And if so, does that undermine a certain conception of
philosophy as science?
MN: Yes. l've actually discussed this in some papers, that there is a kind
of paradox in Husserl between philosophy as strenge WISsenschaft leading to
a kind of "absolute," solid, "founded"-in quotes "scientific" (in the best
sense)-set of results, and the open-endedness necessarily built in to
phenomenology, which says in effect, not only is this an infinite task, but
even getting started is an infinite task. These two don't seem to go together.
I think it is a paradox, and I think Husserl recognized this as a paradox but
pursued the whole thing. So what if it's a paradox? You go on and pursue
it. To say that we are concemed with the pre-interpreted world-this is in
certain respects an infinite task, but you can look at the eidetic features of
this given-this vast notion of the given-and see something of types, forms,
structures, which don't involve knowing what somebody who lived in the
fourteenth century made of some phenomenon. That that person interpreted
his world meets certain lines of eidetic formation.
SC: This seems to me to be a proper description of what one does in
pursuing phenomenological reflection on the sedimentation of meaning, but
it also sounds like a description of a hermeneutic process, and therefore it
would seem to fall within the purview of a hermeneutic phenomenology.
MN: WeH, I've never feIt committed to the idea of using the language of
hermeneutics, though I'm acquainted with it. I recognize that what I've
described is a hermeneutic task, but I've never feIt the need to draw in
Gadamer or traditional hermeneutics, Dilthey. It is an interpretive task,
phenomenology, but 1 think more deeply it says something to me that
hermeneutics doesn't. It's not only an interpretive task, it's a task which is
a movement toward the root of experience, or the roots of experience and,
with respect to the pre-interpreted world, the roots of that pre-interpreta-
tion. And if it can be said of hermeneutics that it is an unending task, an
infinite task in phenomenology has this difference, I think: it is more, to me,
a matter of the way an individual thinker moves from one thing to another,
or from one thinker to another, in the world. In phenomenology Husserl
conceived it as generations of phenomenologists carrying out his work, as
you know. I never thought much of that; I didn't think that that was going
to happen. But 1 thought, positively, that there was something in
phenomenology which was very powerful, namely, this very notion of
battering oneself against the world again and again. Not that there aren't
going to be new interpretations, as in hermeneutics, but despite the fact that
the truth is elusive ... 1 believe in the truth, I don't believe that it comes
straightforwardly; I believe much more that it is problematic, ambiguous,
 WITH MAURICE NATANSON 313

ambivalent, elusive, and ... sly.

SC: The notion of foundations was dear to Husserl. 00 you see this
process as a foundationalist one-either as resting on foundations in some
way, or as heading to foundations?
MN: I'm a foundationalist. I'm obviously not an anti-foundationalist. I'm
a foundationalist, and 1 think that one is, in philosophy, on the way. So you
have to make a distinetion. Foundationalism doesn't mean that its like the
arehaeologists discovering what others thought to be a mythical eity and 10
and behold it's real, one can uncover it. 1 don't think the foundations are of
that type. 1 think foundations are more nearly of the type in whieh one sees
the whole development of one's life, of one's time, of one's grasp of prior
times, down to whatever roots one can find. 1 mean, there's no perfection
that's assured. But it's the task of philosophy to be belligerent, to keep going
in spite of that faet. That seems to me a feature of every human life: not
only that we die and therefore something remains contingent, namely, our
own life-now unfinished, incomplete-but that there is no escaping this
ultimate given of incompleteness. What that means, given my existential
orientation toward Husserl and phenomenology, is that a movement
downward toward roots, toward the root of the matter, of existence, may
depend on the interpretation of the whole doetrine of the transcendental
ego.
SC: You said someplace (in the Husserl book, 1 believe) that the
phenomenological reduction was equivalent to the entryway into philosophy
per se.
MN: That's right ...
SC: But of course that's a contested notion, and for many people it is
hard to reconeile with the existential dimension that you point toward.
MN: !t's contested, 1 know; but the last strikes me as preciselyexistential
in the sense that it is not dear at all what the reduetion signifies. One goes
through it, one meets ehallenges along the way, there's a certain pragmatie
dimension to the whole thing: you introduce special reduetions in order to
overcome special problems as theyarise. It's not an automatie procedure, for
me. The movement on a large scale is toward the transcendental ego, and
there 1 find a difference between transcendental subjectivity and the
transcendental ego. The phenomenologist Fritz Kaufmann has a remarkable
essay in the Farber volume, Philosophical Essays in Memory o[ Edmund
Husserl. It's on phenomenology and art, but it's more deeply-though
unwritten, in a sense-on phenomenology and religion, or religious experi-
ence. And toward the end of his essay he comes to the entire problem of
how one is to interpret, in effeet, the reduetion, the ultimate reduetion. It's
dear (if you read between the lines, 1 think, and 1 know from hirn) that he
is saying that the transcendental ego is God. He doesn't write that in the
essay; he says instead, "Suffice it this time to have asked the ultimate
question." Well, if one distinguishes between transcendental subjectivity and
314 A CONVERSATION

the transcendental ego one can work all of phenomenology by moving down
to transcendental subjectivity, in which a kind of vast eidetic is established,
and one can see the notion of origin in terms of what pillars and founda-
tions are. The transcendental ego has always been a problem for followers
of Husserl, and it's well-known that they are divided. I had a discussion with
Dorion Cairns, and I asked him whether the transcendental ego was one or
many. His answer was, "There are as many transcendental egos as there are
individuals. Each individual has a transcendental ego." I asked Fritz
Kaufmann, person to person, "Dr. Kaufmann, how do you interpret Husserl's
notion of the transcendental ego? Is it one or many?" And he said,
"Absolutely one." So these were the division lines-both were profound
phenomenologists-and if you interpret it along the lines of Dorion Cairns,
there's a much easier defense made of moving from transcendental subject-
ivity to a kind of basal level underlying it which is, for each individual, the
transcendental ego. But I myself believe, with Fritz Kaufmann, that there can
be only one transcendental ego. I can try to explain what I mean by this at
length, but I would say, simply or straightforwardly put: If there is a
foundation-not only of experience, but of possible experience-then it must
come forth in terms of a formative character, and I don't see how that
formative character can coincide and be identified between different egos
unless it has the shaping power of one ego, one authority.
SC: This is something quite different than the move from a plurality to
one through an eidetic variation. It's rather a transcendental argument from
the conerete level in terms of constitution conceived, if not as ereation, then
as a phenomenologically reduced equivalent of ereation.
MN: I believe that; I think that's correct.
SC: In your work you often diseuss the pair of terms, "symbol" and
"transcendence," where the symbolie order points toward the transcendent,
whieh seems to point outward or away, toward a broader context. Now it
seems that we discover the same sort of thing by going inward, down ...
MN: I never thought of it as "outward," I always thought of it as "inward. "
I think it's the ultimate inwardness.
SC: So transcendence is really going deeper and deeper into a kind of
immanence, into a phenomenological immanence?
MN: Absolutely. And this is why I find Kierkegaard congenial, and it's
why I think that many things involved in religious experience are relevant.
I don't want to get started with hasidie stories, but there's the famous story
of the hasidie master, Zusya, and he says, "In the world to come they will not
ask me, 'Why were you not Moses?' They will ask me, 'Why were you not
Zusya?'" Now that states, I think, as deeply and tersely as one can put it, the
movement downward. Again, in a story I love, as you know, "The Death of
Ivan Ilyeh": What if everything has been a fraud? What if everything I've
done has been wrong? It's too late to reverse maUers, I'm dying; what then?
He reviews his life in a different way. One begins to see that these
 WITII MAURICE NATANSON 315

statements are not very far apart. So one interpretation of the very end of
the story-the black bag-is 10ward a religious interpretation; but one can
move away from that and say that whenever the possibility offered itself to
Ivan Ilych to discover himself, to uncover his own being, his own inwardness,
he turned to ... what? ... to what the "best" people in society thought. He
saw himself reflected in their views and then wanted to associate himself
with them. WeH, aH of that is always a refusal. My own existential impulse
here is toward a movement-not away but inwardly-toward, if you like, the
transcendental ego, transcendental consciousness, and that means a lot of
defeated charges, movements, and efforts. I believe that life consists, to a
good measure, in defeats.
SC: Induding the perennial coHapse of the philosophical project?
MN: I think it collapses again and again; beginnings have 10 be made
again and again.
SC: Here one often talks about "self-discovery," but this movement toward
the transcendental ego as we've been talking about it now seems also to
uncover an "other" within oneself. I put it that way because some sources
-and one thinks here primarily of Levinas, but also perhaps Buber-develop
the same notion of religious transcendence by invoking the Other in a move-
ment "outward," a transcendence that seems to follow a different trajectory
from the almost Augustinian "inwardness" that ...
MN: I think they are merely two different faces of one reality. I remem-
ber I wrote somewhere that Schutz said to me, "Buber is right on the Other."
There is that element, and I'm attracted to Buber, I'm attracted to Levinas.
I'm also attracted in certain different ways to Augustine and Kierkegaard.
The attraction perhaps ultimately is that there's no assurance in one's
movement inward that you're going to reach the foundations. It isn't a
technicolor trek toward, you know, this "promised land." It's a different sort
of thing in which perhaps the better analogy would be: to understand, at
least in one case, what something finally is-whether it's in love, whether it's
in the matter of friendship (profound friendship as in Montaigne and
Augustine as weH). Whatever example is chosen, it has to be very serious
and one then has a primal setting, a primal resolution. I believe that's
possible and that occurs. I believe in this person's love, or in this person's
basic reciprocity. We talked last time about whether a professor is simply
interested in a student. That by itself establishes a relationship sometimes,
and perhaps most often-whether you find something in somebody. When
the thing comes-whether it's love, recognition-the primal sense that this is
aresolution of some feature of a relationship on sound ground, then it's like
evidence, absolute evidence. It doesn't mean that it's the whole of what you
could caH the experience of the transcendental ego, but it's a pushing
forward which gives a transcendental due.
SC: This transcendental due, then, this discovery in evidence, is at least
a movement toward the ultimate being of something ...
316 A CONVERSATION

MN: It's like Friday's print, when Robinson Crusoe finally discovers that
there's somebody else ...
SC: The shock of a being ...
MN: ... that there's another.
SC: Is that what allows you to criticize the early Sartre's position on the
impossibility of authentie relations between people?
MN: I think he's wrong on that; the dialectic has caught hirn up and
brought hirn into it. At certain levels you have to ask embarrassing ques-
tions. Schutz once asked me, "When you look at your litde boy do you find
hirn as an alienated Other?" How could I possibly say yes? Because Sartre
said so in Being and Nothingness? I think Buber is far c10ser to the truth. On
the other hand, I am attracted to the Sartrean position because he explores
possibilities of alienation, distraction, and destruction. He's a good
pathologist. Over the years I've come to see the inadequacies of Being and
Nothingness, but I'm still fascinated by its strong pull toward uncoverings of
possibilities in human beings-especially since I'm still interested in psychi-
atry, teach courses in philosophy and psychiatry, and deal with people that
we say are "disturbed." Some people argue-Wittgenstein-that philosophers
are disturbed people until their language is disenchanted, c1eansed, and so
on, whereas I think that the disenchantment is deeply woven into human
reality, human experience, and there is no c1arification by saying, "You've
been befooled by language." Language itself in a certain sense delivers, truly,
the complexities of normality and the possibilities of pathology.
SC: But you would agree with Wittgenstein that philosophy is a kind of
therapeutic enterprise that seeks to get c1ear, to c1arify things?
MN: Yes, but I wouldn't restriet it to the clarification of language.
SC: No. Nor does it strike me that your sense of therapy is the idea that
philosophy itself is to be driven out of the temple.
MN: "Quite," as the British say. Whieh is where you get with
Wittgenstein. But where does he come to? He comes to Dostoevsky, where
I am too. Now we don't join forces there because we come not only by
different routes, but we come for different purposes and reasons. I agree that
a philosopher who hasn't read the Brothers and absorbed it isn't anywhere.
Bouwsma held the same position. But Bouwsma believed, with Wittgenstein
. . . Bouwsma had a nice, fine handwriting on the blackboard; he'd be
endlessly putting down sentences from Hume or Russell or somebody and
then changing them: "Will this do? Will this? This?" Well, nothing would do
in the end. But I was in this sense a foundationalist; I thought that it wasn't
just defeats-that this "won't" do-but that the defeats involve the dialectie
of vietory.
SC: You see the goal ofvictory as adumbrated beyond the language that
is ever coming into defeat?
MN: Completely. I think its ultimate source or ground is the individual
uncovering or discovering hirnself; that is, again, inwardness in Kierkegaard's
 WlTII MAURICE NATANSON 317

sense, as a movement which displays subjectivity. Inwardness is subjectivity,

as Kierkegaard maintains. But the sense of subjectivity, if one translates it
into phenomenological terms, is that the whole of reality has a built-up
structure, that it is constituted, and that the task of the individual in
discovering himself is to discover the constitution of this world, of which
he's apart.
SC: Is that subjectivity a participant in this constitution as you see it? If
so, a problem arises concerning the relation between the uncovering of one's
own transcendental subjectivity and the move back to the unique transcen-
dental ego. What sort of participation is involved there?
MN: 1 think it is an activity, the strongest term possible here. The
movement toward the transcendental ego is itself the central activity of the
philosopher's life. The movement of philosophy, into philosophy, through
philosophy, is the basic movement of the individual's life. And that's an
activity not in the sense of a thing to do, like squash; it is a thing to do as
one loves, hates, fears-that kind of activity; it is achanging activity: it
changes what there is, as what there is presents itself; it changes what we
find and reconstitutes what we find. It is also the point at which one says,
"We11, we're defeated; we've reached aporias, we're stymied." But here 1 think
(as in the article that Fink wrote, of which Husserl approved) that it is
exactly in these aporias that we discover certain basic paradoxes, and these
paradoxes aren't failures but victories; they're recognitions of the way things
are in the world, and the way they'll always be for every person.
SC: This reminds me of a phrase that occurs in your work: "Philosophy
is the discipline of subjectivity." It seems to me that the movement of
transcendence that you've indicated-which moves in and down, but at the
same time can be thought of as out and away, toward the world-may be
found in Kakfa. Kafka's stories are undecidable, it seems to me, between
(let's say) a religious interpretation that moves out toward a "transcendent"
in the traditional sense, and a psychoanalytic interpretation that moves in.
Those interpretations are like the duck-rabbit: you can't decide which one
is getting the stronger pull. What is the connection between philosophy, as
the discipline of subjectivity, and such ambiguous or undecidable interpreta-
tions, yielded by the literary project?
MN: WeIl, 1 think the whole literary project is the statement of the
deepest ambiguity to be found in what we're discussing-philosophy basicaIly,
which means then phenomenology for Husserl-and that Kafka's work is a
portrayal of this double ambiguity. The transcendence which you ca11
"outward" is there: it's there in the sense that Count West-West is there in
the castle; it's there in the sense that the highest courts are there; it's there
in the sense that when the priest ca11s to Joseph K and there's abrief
discussion and Joseph K cries, "I'm innocent!" the priest replies, "That's the
way a11 guilty men talk." That's the clinching force of this movement outward
and this movement downward-here Kafka has come to its statement. I'm
318 A CONVERSATION

not going to force this, but if "the way up and the way down are one," it
seems to me that this is a profound illustration of that view. What one finds
in Kafka's work is, constantly, this absolute penetrating demand of what's to
be taken for granted from the beginning: Gregor has been transformed into
a gigantie, horrid insect. How can it be "given"? You may say that it's
Kafka's art to make it given. Undoubtedly. But if one pursues it philosophi-
cally, it's given in the way in whieh there is always an outward (in your
terms) yearning of subjectivity; and there is philosophically, in Husserlian
terms, a movement downward to utter, absolute foundations: the real
meaning of evidence. Maybe these pass each other, as it were, in movement;
but Kafka's genius makes the far-away authentie, undeniable, transforms it
into the transcendent-a different transcendent than the movement
downward and inward, though clearly related. There is the Law, and at the
most primordiallevel the Law is basically a recognition, by (let's say) Joseph
K, that something is the case. And-at least if you take the text of The Trial
as it ends, in that absolutely haunting scene where Joseph K is killed by the
warders, and he sees the lights from distant apartments-it is the world.
SC: Friday's footprint ...
MN: It's the Other. And those Others will never be discovered. Theyare
also the continuation of the race, the continuation of all sense of otherness,
whieh remains in certain respects necessarily elusive-what Schutz refers to
as "successors," those who will be born after we die; and in different terms
it is the rest of the world that we don't know-billions upon billions of
human beings ... an anonymity that is hostile in its striking power as it
knocks at the door of consciousness. In that final scene Joseph K asks,
"Where are the judges of the high court?" that he'd never penetrated. Who
are these people? Where are the sources of power? Why haven't they
revealed themselves to the individual? Why must I die-"like a dog"? In The
Stranger Mersault hears that he's condemned in the name of the French
State, the French People. Why not the Chinese people? It's all completely
anonymous and distant; it has no reference to hirn. In this sense I think the
whole business about transcendence ... I can't deny what you refer to as an
"outward" movement as such; that is, this has to be confronted. But I think
fundamentally what I've pursued-and want to be understood as pursuing--is
the movement inward. And ultimately inwardness can only achieve a certain
kind of recognition-and there's no assurance that it does-a certain kind of
recognition of love for another person, a certain kind of recognition of a
deep, profound friendship for another, in the sense of achieving absolute
evidence in human terms, without regard to whether this is traced back, in
phenomenologicallanguage, to the transcendental sources that produce it.
SC: The encounter with this kind of "evidence" is not really an epistem-
ological problem, then?
MN: No, I don't think so. Again, this is existential for me. There's little
left of all of that, God knows, today, but that's part of me. I've talked to
 WIlli MAURICE NATANSON 319

people who are very learned in phenomenology and existential philosophy,

and some were quite bewildered by how 1 could ever introduce any such
existential claims. Phenomenology was simply a method to reach certain
kinds of grounds in a rigorous fashion. And that is true in asense. But the
further force of phenomenology is-not a worldview or Weltanschauung, not
at all-but a recognition that in reality one has to penetrate the strangeness
of mundane experience to find its sources. If you don't find that strangeness
to begin with in the Lebenswelt, in your own life, then in a way you'll never
find philosophy "consequent," consequential, to begin with, no matter what
kind of philosophy you pursue. If everything is somehow obvious, agreeable,
and natural; if you never question it radically; then you are on secure
Wittgensteinian grounds, then you've escaped. But those few who do
question it in some radical way face, in Husserlian terms, several questions.
The question of motivation: How does this happen? That's a very difficult
question for phenomenology. But whether we can get a definitive answer to
it, it may happen that the Other presents this strangeness to uso Fundamen-
tally, associating with another human being intimately-in whatever domain
one wants, whether it is rational discourse or a sexual relationship, the
whole range-is astrange event.
SC: The fundamentally "unfamiliar" is in some sense the Other?
MN: Rimbaud says, "I is an other."
SC: The examples that you've given of what one discovers in the move-
ment "inward"-love, relationship-have as a matter of fact all involved the
Other.
MN: Without doubt. Now the temptation is to say that these are "out-
ward" forces. 1 recognize the sense of that, and 1 don't want to say that the
experience of God, of the transcendental ego, or something like that (which
1 can make no claims about) is a "downward" experience, in that God is not
transcendent in the other sense. 1 don't want to make that kind of an
argument. But on the other hand, 1 think there are recognitions of others
which bring us to the sense that something is "awry" in the ordinary world,
and there are a few tormented people who pursue that. They are philoso-
phers.
SC: Your work is characterized by a deep "humanism," a movement in-
ward toward the innermost resources and dimensions of one's own exper-
ience in order to discover something evidential, something phenomeno-
logically insistent. How then do you view current "anti-humanisms"; in
particular-since you yourself have emphasized the deep sense in which the
self is socially constituted-the quasi-structuralist anti-humanism that erases
or effaces the dimension of subjectivity in the name of a system of power,
or a categorial scheme in which the subject becomes a sort of "virtual
reality"?
MN: 1 think this is a kind of betrayal of the task of philosophy. 1 don't
even think that sociologically (in say Schutz's or Simmel's sense of "sociolo-
320 A CONVERSATION

gy") that this is true to the structure of society. For me it's not possible to
deny-without bad, devastating, consequences philosophicaIly-the alive,
forceful, multi-faceted creativity of the individual. And if you simply want to
build up a grid in place of the human being, to place the human being in the
grid and treat society in that sense, 1 think what one has done ... It's not
simply that 1 don't like it-and 1 don't-but beyond that level of argumenta-
tion 1 think that there is no way of discovering the identity, let alone the
motives, of the one who constructs that kind of a system. So the argument
goes back to Kierkegaard and his critique of Hegel. There's a kind of system
being built up, and Kierkegaard wants to know, "Where's the master builder?
I'd like to have a word with hirn. They say they'll be finished next week, but
I've been here many years"-which is again very Kafka-like. K never reaches
the castle; Joseph K never reaches the final courts which decide his fate, and
he dies. Gregor's transmogrification into a giant insect yields a most sad and
hideous death, when he is swept up by the charwoman and disposed of in
the dustbin. But you know, in every horne (this will seem to be irrelevant,
but it's not to me) there's a certain sense of security: the doors are ordinarily
c1osed. And in that story, when they send the sister out for help she leaves
the door open-because it is so urgent to get somebody, a locksmith, so they
can find out exactly what Gregor is up to, what's going on in his room,
what's happened-and at that point Kafka says something about houses with
open doors and the alarming character they have when that is observed. It's
a kind of terror; it's the terror of the horne as a metaphor.
SC: Ahorne exposed .. .
MN: Horne violated .. .
SC: ... open to the alien .. .
MN: ... horne vulnerable ... This is the outward reach of Gregor's
transformation as it affects others: the locksmith must be sought out until
finally, with his mandibles dripping his own ... liquidity, Gregor manages
to turn the key. The Metamorphosis is the most extraordinary-"brilliant" isn't
enough-the most extraordinary image for seeing the character of an inner
and outer transformation, which moves "outward" in the terms you've
suggested, but which is basically a tragedy of the inwardness of the self.
SC: By the end of the story the horne has been c10sed up again, every-
thing has settled back, the daughter stretches her body, she has a life now,
the parents are much happier, the door is c1osed, everything is c10sed in
again. Which suggests the possible illusion in placing too much emphasis on
the constitutive power of the individual's position within a system. An
externality keeps imposing itself. Perhaps there is another system-I won't
call it an "Hegelian" system but perhaps an inscrutable "Kafka" system-
which makes a mockery of a certain kind of humanism.
MN: WeIl, 1 don't think it makes a mockery of it. 1 would disagree with
that. 1 would say that what it does is to seek its destruction or its consolida-
tion under another regime, as it were-a death machine such as Kafka
 Wrrn MAURICE NATANSON 321

describes in his story. Merleau-Ponty has this wonderful sentence fragment:

"The urge finally to have it out with the world." 1 think that's wonderful. It's
one of those victories of language. Each individual ultimately has this pivotal
stance and may deny this in bad faith or, in other terms, shy away from it,
or refuse it, or seek a more careful life, try to become what the system
demands. But the individual at least has the challenge of accepting this, of
having it out with the world, finally, in the course of a finite life. Now, if one
asks what brings the individual to philosophize, it is that a choice has been
made. And 1 think one must again return to the question, What about Hegel
hirnself? What about the system-builder? Weil, you can say-and this has
been said at book-Iength-that the Hegel Kierkegaard railed against is really
a phantom, that Hegel recognized Kierkegaard's problems and included
them. But that's astrange notion: "Included" them in what way? How? And
is Hegel hirnself "given" in his work, in the way in which Kierkegaard is
"given" to the reader in his work? The choice of structuralism and positions
of that kind, as a philosophic choice, is a choice of retreat from pursuing
both what you call the "outward" and what 1 call "inwardness," from reaching
for the ultimacy that one wants in philosophy. These authors are not at risk,
not in question, in their endeavor. The individual is not an endangered
creature, though 1 think, as 1 said, that there is a danger involved in
encountering the Other, other people.
SC: To what extent does that evidence you spoke of before, that
definitive ontological encounter-the moment of genuine love, let's say-
stand outside the general grid which even the phenomenologist acknowledg-
es in the notion of "horizon" for example, the horizon that pre-forms one's
experience, "pre-interpreted" experience?
MN: 1 think there are differences between "horizon" and such aprioris (let
us call them) in Husserl's position, and elements of structuralism or
attempts to build a grid. One thing in the notion of horizon is that though
it is apriori, its recognition and in a certain sense its fulfillment involves the
movement of the individual both in time-the inner horizon-and outward
along a certain line involving a project or something of the sort. One has
never, 1 would say, "abandoned" the individual, and 1 think the structuralist
does. The structuralist wants to get rid of the individual, to get rid of hirn
by once and for all knocking the stuffing out of hirn and fixing hirn on the
grid; whereas 1 think the stuffing is everything. To knock it out is to commit
philosophical suicide. There are no resolutions to oppositions of this kind;
1 think there are basic existential choices. But of what I've called "primordial
experiences" which have a kind of finality to them, like love and friendship
. . . Given these experiences 1 think one is forced to ask questions, as in
psychiatry. Homelessness-the ultimate pathos of it. We have an individual
who has been taken out of his horne, has been put into a "horne" (in
quotes), and then is finally released from that "horne" and finds hirnself in
the streets with no horne at all. That's a dialectic worth exploring. To
322 A CONVERSATION

explore it phenomenologically is to see that the Lebenswelt, "the current of

existence" (as 1 refer to it, out of Tolstoy), has been invaded by cross-
currents and shifts, the individual has been transported out of the current
of his existence into a new stream, a new wOrld, and in that new world he's
asked, "How do you describe your missing home?" Fundamentally one may
find a certain rage against the wOrld, which 1 find comprehensible. Henri Ey,
the psychiatrist, makes the statement, "When a psychotic rages he rages far
more than you think he does." That to me is very penetrating. What is that
"more"? It's a kind of ontological assault upon reality; it's often seen, and
not only in terms of individuals who want to leave, get out. 1 once worked
in amental asylum one summer and of course they had the doors locked in
these wards. One woman spent the entire day, every day, throughout the
whole summer, as long as 1 worked there, waiting for someone to come in,
with the idea that she could slip out through the door. Well, you know, it's
hopeless. What is that? It's not so far away, phenomenologically, from this
hope beyond hope the individual has that there is an escape, that escape is
possible, that things could be different. The individual comes to the end of
something in his marriage, in his life, his work, and thinks, "WeIl, I've gone
as far as 1 can and now some fundamental changes have to be made." All
right. But with these changes one can begin to see the evidence of turning
away from a certain given project toward something quite uncertain and
something quite new. Father Zossima teIls Alyosha, as you know, that he is
not to stay in a monastery; he is to go into the world. There's evidence that
there was to be a second volume in which Alyosha ends up as an anarchist.
Now one can begin to see that sweet innocence turned inside out toward
what is ultimately incoherence, the destruction of order. And the ending of
a whole life ... To go back to some things you were saying about Metamor-
phosis, in a way things are not quite "all right" at the end of that story. What
you describe is perfectly accurate, but it's not just hermeneutics because the
interpretation of it is left open: the daughter arches her back, and the image
is, in the critical sentence, that she is "growing into womanhood" as her
parents observe; they look significantly at each other, a husband will have
to be found for her, a new life is opening up. But that is the tragedy of
Gregor. Gregor by now has been thrown into the dustbin by the charwoman.
And it's at the expense of Gregor's life. You interpreted The Metamorphosis
more nearly in the direction of stability and restitution, but 1 would argue
against that. 1 think that that arching of the back is a powerful symbol of
maturation. It is at the expense of Gregor's death and is therefore a tragic
metaphor. It was Gregor who was paying for his sister's violin lessons, he
was saving up to pay for her going to the conservatory. To be sure, in parts
of the story she's the only one who will try to see to his feeding, what kinds
of food he will eat; but basically at the end she denies him. And 1 think by
the time he is out of the world- dead, a carcass-she has bloomed out of the
flesh of his death. And so 1 regard that final scene as a tragic statement.
 WITH MAURICE NATANSON 323

SC: At the same time, the family and the sister are perfectly indifferent
to the sacrifices the individual makes, the world as a whole is perfectly
indifferent to the sacrifices that are made by the individual on its behalf, on
behalf of future generations. The role played by the individual is a vanishing
moment in a cycle.
MN: WeIl, 1 think that this whole business of indifference is perfectly
correct. It's a given for someone who ... what? ... matures, achieves
maturation as an adult in the world and comes to recognize that smiling
faces don't necessarily mean smiling hearts, or hearts at all. There's indif-
ference, you get a pink slip. You work for all these years, then you've got to
leave. It's a cruel business and this is the result. But to say that is not to lose
sight ... There is a continuing story of the individual involved, the one who
receives the pink slip, the one who leaves the hospital, who leaves prison,
who leaves horne; who "lights" out, in Huck Finn's sense, for the Territory.
There is a necessity, in my way of looking at social reality, not only to follow
up and see what the individual becomes and what becomes of the individual,
but to recognize (in Schutz's terms, about which I have written and would
still defend) that there are metaphysical constants. Among these are the
constants of having to work in the world and having to die in it. And in
between 1 don't see that these are "outward" givens or necessities; it's the
comprehension that we must live in the world, each of us, and die in it, and
do in the world, that makes the difference-the recognition. It's a recognition
which comes at certain points, or doesn't come; and for so me people I don't
think it comes at all. The question is whether the individual has been
recognized, whether his face has been seen, or whether one is dealing with
"We have this many people on your caseload." Last time we were talking
about doing social work. WeIl you can say, "Here is a typical case of a
family-a mother and two children, three children-living on the dole, living
on welfare." To do this is to generalize the individual, to put the individual
down as a cipher. And the cry of that individual, if it arises (and 1 think
most often it does) is: "See me not as a case but as an individual!"--though
1 know that is not likely, and though I know that my efforts to help are just
absorbed, the way Gregor's are absorbed. His family are takers; they are not
givers.
SC: It cannot be typicality "all the way down," then. Once again we come
to the point of "evidence" in the face-to-face, in the relation with the other
person. If there is a grid, the only thing that breaks through it is contact
with an other-whether it's the strange or, finally, the rediscovery of contact
beyond typicality, beyond typification.
MN: Anonymity and recognition.
SC: As you were describing the psychotic who rages more than you think
he does, I asked myself, "What then is the difference between the philoso-
pher and the psychotic?" Both refuse, in a certain sense, the notion that
meaning is constituted exclusively by the grid.
324 A CONVERSATION

MN: How does mental pathology present itself? It presents itself, oddly
enough, in the world of work, in the "paramount reality." The individual who
goes to work each day and then suddenly has to wash his hands constantly
is finally told, "Look, you can't monopolize the toilet. All you do all day is
wash your hands. You're here to do some work." In one way or another the
individual finds himself at odds with the outside world, with anonymous
figures. He's in the line to buy a ticket to see a movie, and somebody else
leaves and then comes back, and he doesn't recognize that person, starts an
argument: "You weren't here." Well, it's a trivial thing, maybe, but then it
enlarges itself into a fight, the police are called, the manager is called. These
small sorts of things explode, and the individual is then no longer in the
current, he's out of it: taken to the police station, sent horne, or whatever.
This intrusion of the disease, the pathology, into the working world, into the
Lebenswelt, is what finally shows the individual to the world as unsound,
unacceptable, to be treated, to be put away, to be taken away. Though there
are fantastic ranges to the breakdowns, they show themselves first of all to
the individual within his own setting.
SC: The philosopher too is at odds with the world of work, but there's
aspace carved out in the world of work for the philosopher. Were the
philosopher to pursue his philosophical interest single-mindedly, without the
benefit of the academy, however, you might find a similar kind of descrip-
tion.
MN: You very often would. If the philosopher were thrown on his own
into the world he would be somewhat like the person in Hyde Park, with the
soapbox. We were in England and we went to Hyde Park many times. It was
so interesting to hear these strange speakers: some were on politics, some
were on religion, some were on individual cranky bents. One man who had
a Cockney accent got up on his stand, and he said to the audience, which
had started gathering around hirn, "Now you may think it absolutely insane
that someone my age is standing here, having nothing better to do than talk
to a group of strangers. You must think I'm crazy to be doing this sort of
thing. Well, 1 want to prove one thing: I'm not crazy; I'm sane. But unlike
you, I can prove that I'm sane." And he took out of his pocket an old yellow
document which said, "This will certify that Mr. Wilbur MacDougall has
been released from St. Mary's mental hospital and pronounced ready to go
back to his job"-signed R. M. S. Wilson, M.D. And he said, "Here is proof
of my sanity. Where's yours?"
SC: You've written about the role of the philosopher as a representative
of the life of reason, but your conception of philosophy seems also to be a
matter of working out for oneself one's place in the wOrld, clarifying the
hidden order, coming to terms with the paradoxes, so that it is, finally, a
solitary pursuit. How are these social and solitary conceptions related?
MN: There are individuals-we call them our students-who don't go to
graduate school to get degrees in philosophy, but for whom philosophy has
 WI1H MAURICE NATANSON 325

a very powerful impact. It's not just that they remember a course or a
professor, but they continue to read philosophy, continue to think about
these problems. There are these people, and I think in a not inconsiderable
number. And there are those who go into other professions. I've had
students (and you have as weH, I'm sure) who have gone into medicine or
law or become ministers, whose work in philosophy is not to be assessed by
whether ethics is somehow nowan element of medical school, and so on. It's
not that at a11. It's that they themselves have absorbed certain things, or
haven't; but those who have, continue in their lives to think about these
problems. I'm convinced that the individual is a problematic instance of
humanity confronted with its own problematic nature, and that once having
been truly bitten by philosophy, the individual continues with it in many
ways.
SC: Can one point to some public virtue that such an obsession has?
Some people try to suggest that it has something to do with ethics. But I've
never seen that; I don't see that philosophers as a whole are more ethical
than other people, or that they are clearer about ethical issues than other
people are ...
MN: One part of it is what I ca11 (and what you quoted) the "representa-
tive" role of the philosopher, the one who is concerned-or should be
concerned, or claims to be concerned anyway-with ultimate problems of this
kind. Now some people may think, "We11 it's nice to have some people
worrying about things like that, but I'm a practical guy and I deal with the
marketplace." We11 that's one story. A person who is thought of as a
representative in some sense undertakes tasks. It's like paying the Church to
have masses said for some departed soul, or to have a professional prayer-
reader read prayers for one at a funeral, or something like that. But the
other side of it is that there are people who are recognized as seriously
concemed with all these issues, though most people would say, "I'm a plain
man, a practical man, in business, and it's very nice of you to be worried
about the ultimate and a11 of that, but apart from attending a few prayer
meetings or special holiday meetings or masses, I don't go in for that."
That's one side of it, the representative side. As far as other aspects of it are
concerned, one may say that changes are in fact going on. They tried to cut
off sociology at Yale. Now they may try to cut off philosophy at City
University. Who knows? But it's undoubtedly the case that in every gener-
ation there are people desperately attracted to this miserable set of
problems, and no matter what, some of them are going to become philoso-
phers-"fina11y," at last-whether there is an APA or no APA People are
going to insist, and I think the reason for this is not to be found in terms of
any interpretation of psychology, let alone psychoanalysis.
SC: Husserl, of course, thought that philosophy had a foundational role
to play in regard to other sciences. Do you share that view, and what do you
see as the relation between philosophy and fields like sociology (but not only
326 A CONVERSATION

sociology)?
MN: The large question of whether a perfectly fulfilled phenomenology
could provide evidential grounds for all disciplines (sciences included)-I
think that turns into a kind of mathesis universalis, that whole dream of
Descartes and Leibniz. One can only respect it, but I don't believe much in
it. I think more of the idea of phenomenology having to do with the
humanities and eertain social sciences. I think sociology is a domain, as
Schutz has shown, in which Husserl's phenomenology has a genuine role to
play, and I think Schutz has done it! He's shown-together, obviously, with
referenee to Weber and Bergson-how the grounding of sociology requires
phenomenological scrutiny. That seems to me the point of his philosophical
career. So I don't think of it as part of a larger mathesis universalis-a grand
founding of all the sciences and disciplines, as Husserl thought was going to
take plaee eventually-but I see it as concrete work accomplished. Schutz has
clarified eertain things in sociology and social scienee by pointing out, for
example, that the mundane world conceals within it the whole question,
What is mundanity? and, How does that relate to the sociological project or
venture? I'm strongly convinced that a contribution of a very solid and
lasting kind has been made by Schutz.
SC: In Anonymity you go to great lengths to separate Schutz's contribu-
tions to what you call "theory" (or "sociological theory") from his "unwritten
philosophy." Are you distinguishing here between a philosophical contribu-
tion in the strict sense and contributions to the theoretical clarification, say,
of eertain sociological presuppositions?
MN: I was really following up on a very strong-indeed astonishing-point
(which I indicated in the book) made by Schutz hirnself. I onee asked hirn
about (as I wrote), "Your philosophy ... " "My what?", he said. And he
made me realize that to speak of philosophy is not just to speak casually-to
have a philosophy is not just to say "I'm a neo-Kantian" or "I'm a Logical
Positivist;" it is to have wrought for oneself in a very rigorous and talented
way a new vision of reality-and that philosophers weren't all around the
plaee. He took a very modest attitude toward his own philosophical ac-
complishments, which were largely occult, in the sense of "occult blood,"
hidden, to be developed if he had maybe three or four lifetimes ...
SC: Much like Husserl ...
MN: Like Husserl hirnself. His philosophy remained hidden in many
respects. So what I'm saying in that book on anonymity is, "I'd like to take
eertain things as transeendental clues to what I think might underlie the
surfaee and might be aspects of this hidden philosophy." When I turn to
theory, it's something which is more-not superficial, but on the surfaee,
manifest.
SC: Is philosophy in that sense destined to remain hidden, and thereby
communicated only indirectly?
MN: That's a strong question, a proper question. I'm sure it has a
 WITH MAURICE NATANSON 327

number of answers in different directions. In one sense I think it's hidden

almost in a Cabalistic sense. That is, the truth (one might say, vis-a-vis
Cabalism) is so powerful that it scorches you. And so, in the Cabalistic
image, the sparks must be kept in leaden caskets, because if they were
revealed they would tear up the world in fire and destroy everything. So one
might say that truth, phenomenologically, is so philosophically powerful that
it must remain hidden and show itself only by way of indirection. I couldn't
make a claim to be a philosopher in the sense of having developed an
original philosophy-that claim would be ridiculous, I think. By the same
token, 1 don't believe that many of the people who are writing philosophical
books are doing any original philosophy. They're often applying certain
insights gained from other people-as 1 am applying insights gained from
Husserl, gained from Schutz, most positively and concretely, who had a
lasting, absolute influence on me. And I do it in a way which 1 think is
different, obviously, from Schutz's way or Husserl's way. Apart from
describing myself as an existential phenomenologist, which not many people
do, I am strongly interested in literature. It is my belief that the relationship
of literature to philosophy remains a hidden one, and perhaps ... (if you
start talking about what you are going to do, you don't do it) ... perhaps
1 might do something in a book concerning this subjecL That, it seems to
me, is orie of the hidden issues, and perhaps it's a way into ... as 1 think of
psychiatry also in certain respects. Without making vast claims about my
technical knowledge, I've done a lot of reading in psychiatry, I've done a lot
of associating with psychiatrists-Erwin Straus in particular, with whom 1
worked-experience working in hospitals. All the reading in the world won't
make you a psychiatrist; on the other hand, 1 think 1 have a therapeutic
feeling, and some knowledge of certain aspects of it. My kind of psychiatry
is "literary" psychiatry, some might say. WeIll'm not so sure that label isn't
acceptable to me, because my notion of literature is atypical.
SC: Not a mere illustration of this or that, but a tool for uncovering.
MN: That's right. And it's an indicator and a mode of indirection, a
realm of indirection. Literature offers some remarkable, penetrating,
examples-as has been appreciated by some psychiatrists-of various states
of psychosis, neurosis, and psychopathology. I'm much interested in that.
SC: 1 wonder if you could identify something that might be considered
the "tone" or "great bass" of your thinking, some problem or affect, that
carries your thinking at its root. Is there something that the problems circle
around and seem to be carried by?
MN: WeIl it's a difficult question to try to answer. 1 think ... There are
primordial concerns that 1 have. One such concern has for many years been
with death and the philosophical problems associated with death, in the
sense that to philosophize is to learn how to die. This goes back to
Montaigne, to Cicero, and so on, but (I've written a few things about death,
but nothing very solid or overpowering) 1 have an enormous interest in the
328 A CONVERSATION

thematic meaning of death as a philosopher tries to interpret it (and I think

this is one of the tasks of the philosopher)-the importance of death for
human existence. Certain works l've read, like Landsberg's The Experience
o[ Death, have had a great and lasting impact on Me. I mentioned "The
Death of Ivan Ilych," and there are many other things. But I would say one
primal problem, task, deeply grounded theme, in my concern is what I call
"death." Another very central task is that of trying to define where justice
lies in dealing with myself in the midst of fellow human beings. I'm not
interested, I've never been interested, in ethics. I've taught ethics many times
but it always seemed to me to be ... a lie. Abstract and not really there. On
the other hand, I am intensely interested in the kind of ethical problem
made real by Sartre, or in speaking of "If God does not exist then everything
is permitted" in Dostoevsky's terms, and so on. I'm deeply interested in
Dostoevsky's terms. We're back to the Brothers Karamazov; the book had a
great impact on Me, as the teaching of Schutz has had a decisive impact on
me and, through hirn really, the life of phenomenology coming through
Husserl. I don't think I'm the kind of phenomenologist of whom Husserl
would have approved. He thought highly of Dorion Cairns-quite rightly,
because he was a very brilliant man-as a phenomenologist, and I'm perhaps
more of a visionary. But I'm not so sure I have to apologize. The question
is, what are the visions and what do they reveal? How do they show
themselves in human experience-in teaching and in one's personal life?
That's the kind of question which I think is crucial: What is personal life?
Just yourself, your wife, your relatives, your children? Well, that's one
everyday meaning of it, of course, and certainly a valid one. But I think
there's something deeper involved which is not just the sense of
Gemeinschaft; it's even more deeply a sense of building up a reality which
"holds" integrally for yourself and for a few-if only one-other human
beings. In marriage, for example, or living with someone, you have in a deep
sense "elected" or "chosen" this person, and with the choice-it's not merely
let's share the rent, let's share the house, let's have children (whatever it may
be)-comes the interior challenge of moving into a new realm of human
existence that is indeed constituted, phenomenologically, and bears the
weight of that constitution all the way through. The marriage ceremony says,
"In sickness or in health, for better or for worse." But those things are true.
Like a lot of banal-seeming experiences, they turn out to be truths. To have
gone through a life in which there is indeed profound suffering-sickness or
whatever the suffering may be-of oneself or the members of one's family is
a devastating experience. Simmel said that human suffering was a subject
about which philosophers have had relatively little to say, have spoken about
in a very superficial way. I think that's true, and I think human suffering is,
at its depth, as much a philosophical problem as anything that can be
identified as deeply philosophical.
SC: The connection made, the choice for another person, and the
 Wrm MAURICE NATANSON 329

involvement in the suffering that that inevitably implies: is it that only with
such a choice does one discover that not everything is permitted?
MN: Everything is not permitted, even if God is dead (which I don't
believe) in the sense in which it's stated that "if God does not exist ..." I
believe God does exist, I believe in God. I believe in the human soul. We're
not about to start an examination of those subjects-and I have no proofs to
offer, or evidence-but I believe that when one comes to (the word should
be used, Marcel used it, others used it) the "mystery" of suffering, it is the
point-one point anyway-at which the limits of "everything is permitted" are
observed. Everything is not permitted. It is not permitted to destroy another
human being for the simple sake of seeing if one can do it. It is not
permitted to savage another human being just for the sake of a little sense
of power (which one sees every day in c1assrooms). In the Jewish religion it
is considered a sin-I mean areal sin-purposely to humiliate another
individual in the presence of a group. That is proscribed behavior. I believe
in that, and I've made every effort in my teaching never to do that. Well, one
begins to understand problems not just of that sort but the whole range of
the suffering creature and relationship to God in terms of trying to
understand and justify a world of the sort Ivan describes in the famous scene
with Alyosha: Soldiers who disembowel mothers with bayonets, throw up the
baby to screams of delight and then catch it with the tip of their bayonet in
front of the mother; the general who sets his hounds after the boy who
threw a stone and hurt one of the general's favorite dogs. Well, those
moments in literature are to me signposts. They aren't just things I've read
and which have made an impression on me; they are really part of me. And
1 believe, with Wittgenstein in this sense, that this is what you come to when
you c1imb up and over the "ladder": the real problems then open up. 1 would
say that for myself the primal questions are those I've expressed (and there
are others), which give you at least some idea of how one tries to reach
vindication and resolution in one's life. I know that these have theological
or religious equivalents or analogues, but I'm not as much interested in the
analogue as 1 am in the other side, the philosophical grounding ...
SC: The questioning ...
MN: ... and the continual questioning of it, because it isn't a static affair.
These problems are not only perennial; they are problems that must be met
again and again. That's the sense that "beginnings" had in the phenomen-
ology of Husserl, I think.
SC: That need to begin again seems to presuppose a gnawing-away at the
insight or conviction at the very moment it's attained, so that there seems
to be a temptation in another direction. Let me put this in terms of the
problem that we were just discussing. To see suffering as the limit on what
is permissible-or as a c1ue that there is a domain that is beyond
trespass-vies with a more Sartrean consideration, saying, "That depends on
the choice, and that choice is groundless."
330 A CONVERSATION

MN: WeIl, if you turn to a segment of the Sartrean notion that you're
talking about, there is a groundless-ontologically groundless-domain; there
isn't a fixity supponing once and forever the choice that is made. Just taking
that itself I would agree. The affirmation must be continued, and the choice
must be sustained again and again-not only at critical points where there
are difficulties but all the way through. 1 believe that underlying mundane
existence is a seeret affirmation: "Yes, there is a mundane world." But it's my
affirmation. There's a good solipsism and a bad solipsism, and this seems to
me a good solipsism. It's my choice, and 1 have to make it again and again.
It isn't just, "I've deeided to get married, that's my choice," but there is no
ontological foundation, there's a nihilation instead, and 1 have to continue
the choice, even though it isn't self-conscious, all the way through. The
bottom can fall out at any time-and often does. People's lives are changed,
obviously, for a variety of reasons. What seems to be solid and absolute
always regards the Other, about whom you know nothing: "Oh 1 thought
they were so happy;" it turns out they're not happy; "I thought they were
wealthy"-no, they were poor, living beyond their means; "I thought ... ," it
turns out you know nothing about anybody else, really. And the truth is, as
Conrad would say, you don't know much about yourself.
SC: There's all that fixity "out there" while one's self seems to be always
in flux. But when you come to realize that you know nothing about anybody
else, you get the Cartesian temptation to say, "Ah, but 1 do know about
myself," and then the bottom falls out of that too.
MN: And so here 1 would turn to Conrad-I'm much impressed with the
kind of point he makes in The Secret Sharer, namely, that freedom is gained
through risk. A first command, the captain of the ship: "And if the truth be
told 1 was astranger to the ship, and also to myself. " And how is that then
to be changed? Well, at risk: bringing the ship so close to the land to let the
secret sharer have a chance to swim and get away. Indeed one of the mates
on board screams, "We're all ruined, we'll never get out of this, we're too
close!" They catch the breeze, the secret sharer is off the ship, his white hat
(given to him at the last minute by the Captain) gives the Captain the
possibility of knowing whether the ship is moving. So it is in a certain sense
himself, released, and he is finallya free man-the secret sharer having gone
out of his life, he is a free man moving on to his own destiny. It appears
again in major stories by Conrad, and 1 think that what it contains is this
notion of the self realizing its freedom by way of risk. And 1 believe that it's
true. To tie it together with philosophy, and our previous discussion, 1
believe that choosing philosophy involves a risk. The risk is that you are
dealing with odd, strange questions, and that you may never be the same
again.
SC: Again we return to the ineluctable involvement of the individual.
MN: Yes. The philosopher has been described as a kind of "mortar-and-
pestle" man, always grinding away. Well that is an image that makes a
 WITH MAURICE NATANSON 331

certain type of sense, but with it there's also "finer and finer and finer"-the
more you grind, you grind it away into dust-which 1 don't accept. But there
is all of this heavy load, heavy freight, of introductions and beginnings. All
of these books of Husserl's: introductions. What does one make of that? 1
mean surely he could think of another title. Well, but that's the point: the
notion of beginnings is present to hirn (I can only say) as an "existential"
problem-though he wouldn't put it that way. On the other hand (as I've
pointed out and has been said by others), he was a reader of Kierkegaard.
And 1 can't help thinking that he thought of philosophy as a kind of dark
underworld which phenomenology would ultimately illuminate. 1 think of
human existence as a dark underworld which 1 think phenomenology makes
an effort to illuminate.
SC: Husserl makes some statements about that which are surprisingly
direct-at least they surprised me in looking at Ideas II recently where he is
talking about the realm of spirit and mentions a certain facticity that is
beyond our comprehension, that wells up in us, sets limits to our freedom.
He describes it in a variety of ways: a "root soil," an "obscure ground of
spirit." And it seems very much in line with what you are saying.
MN: And you know that article by Schutz in which he visits Husserl on
his deathbed. Husserl got very excited and said that he'd found a transcen-
dental-phenomenological proof for the existence of God, and Mrs. Husserl
had to come in because he got so disturbed and agitated about it. Well he
did believe in God; his conversion was a genuine one. It wasn't the usual
thing of having to do it, ifyou were a Jew, to get a jOb, to have a profession-
allife, and so on. He was a sincere convert to Protestantism, and he believed
in God. Whether his proof could prove anything is another story. I don't
know what he had in mind; he never published anything on it as far as 1
know, or wrote it out. But even if he did, and even if it made some sense as
a transcendental argument of some kind ... You know, I myself think that
the ontological argument, Anselm's argument, is the most brilliant of such
arguments. But what its brilliance does is to provide a matrix through which
one can conceive of the meaning of God. I don't think it proves anything,
but what it does is give this provision for formulating the concept of God.
And that's a brilliant achievement. Beyond that I don't see what philosophi-
cal proofs can do. 1 agree with Pascal-not the Pascal of the "wager," but the
one who speaks against "the God of the philosophers."
SC: I've been thinking lately about a distinctive aspect of your appro-
priation of Husserl: while many interpreters, especially now, tend to
emphasize the intersubjective elements in Husserl's view, you've always
insisted on an egological emphasis and have even argued for a certain kind
of solipsism (as you said a moment ago: good solipsism and bad solipsisrn).
Even if one properly acknowledges the intersubjectivity of the social world,
why is it important to recognize an inescapable stratum of solipsism?
MN: Gurwitsch used to speak of the problem of "access," and 1 think that
332 A CONVERSATION

comes in at this point. How does consciousness gain access to the social
world? There's never a denial of sociality or the social world, but there is a
question about how consciousness, the individual instantiation, gains access
to this sociality. Which is really the question Simmel asked, "How is society
possible? How is sociality possible?" And Simmel comes up with eertain
aprioris which make the social world possible, make society possible. I would
say here that for Husserl there definitely is a good solipsism that
becomes-as you put it-a "stratum" ofwhat is being considered. In my book
on Husserl I mention, as it were in passing, the idea that there is nothing
outside of consciousness. There isn't any outside, because whatever is outside
is coneeived of being outside by consciousness. WeIl there is sociality, and
there's no denial of the reality of the Other, but there remains the problem
of access of consciousness to that reality, the positing of the Other, and even
more important, the continual probing-not in an artificial and self-conscious
sense, but in the course of daily life-of the Other, which means an interest
in the Other. "What did you think of this? What did you think of that? Shall
we go to this movie? Shall we go to this play? Shall we be volunteers for
this or that or the other? What about this and that?"
SC: There seems to be a potential point of convergenee here between the
phenomenological approach and the "structuralist" in the broad sense-
though someone who takes the problem of access seriously will have very
different views from someone who holds that all access, all the effort put
into coming to terms with the Other, is finally not decisive because all those
approaches, avenues and experienees are pre-figured by institutional expect-
ations.
MN: WeIl isn't this the inverse side, one might say, of Dr. Ey's statement
that when a psychotic rages he rages much more than you think he does?
The other side of it is that in having built a microcosm of a relations hip
with another human being and being in the social world-being in the
macrocosm as a small unity with the other, facing this world, living in
it-what one finds is that there is much more intense constitution going on
than one suspected; even though there is a great deal ofwarmth and sharing,
talking to the other, there is infinitely more going on than even the indiv-
iduals themselves recognize.
SC: They are embedded in a context which co-determines them and pre-
forms the possibilities that are adumbrated in their relationship.
MN: That doesn't rule out the choiee that these people are making out
of what's given. No one of us creates sociality-it's a contradiction in
terms-and eertainly no one is claiming here that the physical world is
created by any one of us in so me arcane sense. That notion of solipsism no
one was ever interested in. It's phony. Christine Ladd-Franklin wittily wrote,
"Solipsism is eertainly a correct position, and I can't see why more people
don't agree with it." What we have is a reality that is shared in such a way
that it is at onee constituted by individuals, contains or bears a eertain
 WI1H MAURICE NATANSON 333

secrecy of relationship between individuals, and demands continual reconsti-

tution if it is to survive. Or it may not survive in its original form and may
survive in changed forms, or not at all. It's changing aspect is like a phantas-
magoria, and we ask, "Where is the line of advance, where is the burden or
weight of this whole existence?" If it is a phantasmagoria, what keeps it in
movement, not permitting it to collapse into disorder? And 1 think that part
of the answer is (in Schutz's terms) that we are able to move through
"multiple realities." This is what sustains uso We are beings who are capable
of doing that, of recognizing the paramount reality of everyday life, but at
the same time being able to move through a variety of other worlds. It is
that which makes human existence possible.
SC: Here 1 recall Schutz's views on the "fundamental anxiety" as
underlying sociality. Can one really say that the impetus toward sociality is
informed by a fear of death, a "fundamental anxiety," or is it, quite otherwise,
motivated by a fundamental desire? Is there a difference?
MN: They're different, but they don't rule each other out. It would be
wrong to speak of sociality as being constituted out of fear; 1 think it is
constituted out of love. This is a way of saying it is constituted out of desire.
But it is also the case that mortality-the whole domain of death in a certain
sense-gives us the confines for the possibility of love. That is, if we had
infinite time, if our lives just went on and on, 1 don't think love would be
possible; you wouldn't have human existence. So death makes human
existence possible, just as (one might say, with the arguments about
Theodicy) death makes human freedom possible. Why is death introduced
into the world? God could have created it otherwise, if one takes the
Biblical story; being all-powerful he could have done other things. He had
Adam and Eve eat of the forbidden fruit precisely in order to give human
beings freedom (as this argument runs-which 1 believe), and that kind of
freedom is the freedom made possible by mortality. It's this way in which
death enters the world, hard labor, pain in giving birth, and so on. It's the
stamp of precisely what human existence involves, and it certainly doesn't
leave out desire-it is included-but it is another "along with" element, fitted
into a frame which is not a grid. The whole egological domain is simply
crushed in the system or in the grid. And 1 just don't accept that, basically,
as "polite" philosophy.
SC: Perhaps the reason the grid is so popular, whether it's the logical
positivist kind or the Foucauldian post-structuralist kind, is that one can be
"polite" in its terms, one doesn't need to talk about ...
MN: 1 think that the difference in phenomenology is that it operates at
such a fundamental depth; even if it is swept away-in terms of acceptance,
of "schools" of philosophy, or interest among graduate students and
professors, books on it, journal articles-it is inevitable, 1 believe, that it will
remain as a permanent contribution to philosophy in the sense of Plato and
Aristotle and Descartes and Leibniz, precisely because its depth is so
334 A CONVERSATION

profound. Even if it is wrong on X and Y, that, in asense, doesn't matter.

SC: This suggests some final questions. I would like to know, first,
whether you see any promising developments in the philosophical communi-
ty today, that respond to the things you think are important. And second,
what are the crucial places where more work needs to be done?
MN: 1'11 give you a very short answer to the second one, for myself: it's
the book I plan to write. I won't talk about it, but I think the locus of it is
philosophy (or phenomenology) and literature. Now to the first, I don't see
anything very promising on the horizon, but it may weH be that ... You
know, there are people who read every journal every time it comes out. I
don't. I read selective things occasiona11y, but I don't like to go to the library
because they have guards. I've told you my story. I have a copy of Being and
Nothingness in hardback that I've used over the years-I teach Being and
Nothingness every two years here-and, though I'm a book lover, a biblio-
phile in a general sense, I do a terrible thing to that book anyway: I put in
paper clips. And now its expanded so that it looks monstrous. So I had it in
my briefcase and I took a trip to the library, and as I was leaving (you have
to open your bookbag or briefcase or whatever you have) the guard-the
uniformed guard-took one look inside and said, "What's that?" I said,
"That's Being and Nothingness," and he said, "Oet out!" He thought it was a
bomb. So I don't go to the library; I don't like to. That, and I have my own
library; my great sin is to buy too many books. I work here in my study at
home, in the midst of this incredible disorder. I don't make a claim to be
HUp" on the latest thing that's going on everywhere; I don't go to many
meetings anymore. I stay at home. So I can't claim to be in touch with the
latest thing that's going on. But the only answer I can give to your first
question is that, within my limitations as expreSSed' I don't see anything very
promising on the philosophical scene. And so I cultivate my phenomeno-
logical garden.
SC: In the end it seems as though that's pretty much what you've been
doing right along. I mean, there's never been a time when there's been a lot
of coHeagues around and a lot of movements that have captured your
attention ...
MN: Just the opposite. I won't do something because it is current, I won't
accept it because it's being talked about or written about, and I frankly don't
give a damn if anybody writes about X. I want to go deeper and wider where
I am. And it seems to me that the movements and subjects I've found-in
phenomenology, existential philosophy, philosophy in literature, psychiatry,
and philosophy itself-provide me with world enough to do what I want to
do. And so I'm making my own way. I'm a solitary figure, ultimately.
 MAURICE NATANSON: A BIBLIOGRAPHY

compiled and edited by

DAVID ROYAL

Editor's Note

A substantial number of Professor Natanson's articles have

been reprinted in a wide variety of collections and periodi-
cals, in some cases several times. Only the original publica-
tion has been listed, with the exception of those articles
published in a foreign language, in which case both the
foreign and the English versions are included.

Articles (and a few poems):

"High on the Mountain" [poem], Lincoln Herald, v. 46, 1944, p. 47.

"I Have Seen Their Faces," The Land, v. 5, 1946, pp. 196-198.

"H. B. Alexander's Projection of a Categoriology," Philosophy and

Phenomenological Research, v. 10, 1949, pp. 244-250.

"The Prison of Being," Prairie Schooner, v. 23, 1949, pp. 261-271.

"An Introduction to Existentialism," University of Kansas City Review, v. 17,

1950, pp. 130-139.

"The Rock Cried Out," Prairie Schooner, v. 24, 1950, pp. 7-12.

"Sartre's Fetishism: A Reply to Van Meter Arnes," Journal of Philosophy, v.

48, 1951, pp. 95-99.

"Hacia una Fenomenolgica deI Objecto Estetico," (translated from English),

Notas y Estudios de Filosofia, v. 3, 1952, pp. 127-134.

"Jean-Paul Sartre's Philosophy ofFreedom," Social Research, v. 19, 1952, pp.

364-380.

335
336 NATANSON BIBLIOGRAPHY

"George H. Mead's Metaphysic of Time," Journal of Philosophy, v. 50, 1953,

pp. 770-782.

"The Concept of the Given in Peirce and Mead," Modem Schoolman, v. 32,
1955, pp. 143-157.

"The Limits of Rhetoric," Quarterly Journal of Speech, v. 41, 1955, pp. 133-
139.

"Defining the Two Worlds of Man," University of Houston Forum, 1956, pp.
14-16.

"Phenomenology from the Natural Standpoint: A Reply to Van Meter

Ames," Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, v. 17, 1956, pp. 241-
245.

"La Historia corno Ambito Finito de Sentido," (translated from English),

Convivium, v. 2, 1957, pp. 143-150.

"Philosophy and the Social Sciences," University of Houston Forum, v. 2, 1957,

pp. 25-30.

"The Privileged Moment: A Study in the Rhetoric of Thomas Wolfe,"

Quarterly Journal of Speech, v. 43, 1957, pp. 143-150.

"Existential categories in Contemporary Literature," Carolina Quarterly, v.

10, 1958, pp. 17-30.

"Phenomenology: A Viewing," Methodos, v. 10, 1958, pp. 295-318.

"A Study in Philosophy and the Social Sciences, " Social Research, v. 25, 1958,
pp. 158-172.

"Being-in-Reality," Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, v. 20, 1959,

pp. 231-237.

"Death and Situation," American Imago, v. 16, 1959, pp. 447-457.

"Phenomenology and Existentialism: Husserl and Sartre on Intentionality,"

Modem Schoolman, v. 37, 1959, pp. 1-10.

"Sartre and Literature: The Implications of Jean-Paul Sartre's Contributions

to Aesthetic Theory," University of Houston Forum, v. 3, 1959, pp. 4-11.
 NATANSON BIBLIOGRAPHY 337

"The WeH Balanced View," Southern Speech Journal, v. 24,1959, pp. 123-128.

"Albert Camus: Death at the Meridian," Carolina Quarterly, v. 11, 1960, pp.
21-26 and 65-69.

"Causation as a Structure of the Lebenswelt, "Journal o[Existential Psychiatry,

v. 1, 1960, pp. 346-366.

"Existentialism and Literature," Rejlections [rom Chapel Hili, v. 1, 1961, pp.

3-16.

"His tory, Historicity, and the Alchemistry of Time," Chicago Review, v. 15,
1%1, pp. 76-92.

"Knowledge and Alienation: Some Remarlcs on Mannheim's Sociology of

Knowledge," Revista Mexicana de Filosofia, v. 3, 1961, pp. 87-94.

"Rhetoric and Philosophical Argumentation," QuarterlyJournal o[ Speech, v.

48, 1962, pp. 24-30.

"On Academic Madness," Carolina Quarterly, v. 16, 1%3, pp. 42-47.

"On the Death of a Logician" [poem], Dust, v. 1, 1964, p. 74.

"The Dialectic of Death and Immortality," Pacific Philosophical Forum, v. 3,

1964, pp. 70-79.

"The Lebenswelt," Review o[ Existential Psychology and Psychiatry, v. 4, 1964,

pp. 126-140. Polish translation, "Swiat ~cia" ["The Life-World"], by
Jacek S6jka in Studia Metodologiczne [Methodological Studies], Poznan
1993, pp. 171-188.

"On the Meaning of Death," New Wme, v. 2, 1964, pp. 23-29.

"Alienation and Social Role," Social Research, v. 33, 1966, pp. 375-388.

"Death and Mundanity," Omega, v. 1, 1966, pp. 20-22.

"The Discipline of Passion," New Wine, v. 4, 1966, pp. 11-15.

"Here is the Gate" [poem], Gato, v. 1, 1966, p. 30.

"Is Intentionality Intelligible Without Causality?," Journal o[ Existentialism,

v. 6, 1966, pp. 397-404.
338 NATANSON BIBLIOGRAPHY

"Man as an Actor," Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, v. 26, 1966,

pp. 327-341.

"The Phenomenology of Alfred Schutz," Inquiry, v. 9, 1966, pp. 147-155.

"Rhetoric and Counter-Espionage," Existential Psychiatry, v. 1,1966, pp. 188-

194.

"Phenomenology as a Rigorous Science," International Philosophical

Quarterly, v. 7, 1967, pp. 5-20.

"Disenchantment and Transcendence," Journal of Value Inquiry, v. 1,

1967/1968, pp. 210-222.

"Alfred Schutz on Social Reality and Social Science," Social Research, v. 35,
1968, pp. 217-244.

"The Fabric of Expression," Review of Metaphysics, v. 21, 1968, pp. 491-505.

"Nature, Value, and Action," Man and World, v. 1, 1968, pp. 293-302.

"Existentialism and the Human Condition," Existential Psychiatry, v. 7, 1969,

pp. 19-33.

"Phenomenology and Typification: A Study in the Philosophy of Alfred

Schutz," Social Research, v. 37, 1970, pp. 1-22.

"Phenomenology and Social Role," Journal of the British Society for

Phenomenology, v. 3, 1972, pp. 218-230.

"The Philosophy of Anonymity in Gurwitsch and Schutz," Research in

Phenomenology, v. 5, 1975, pp. 51-56.

"A Philosophical Perspective on the Assessment of Risk-Benefit Criteria in

Connection with Research Involving Human Subjects," The Belmont
Report: Ethical Principles and Guidelines for the Protection of Human
Subjects, Appendix Volume 11 (Washington, D. C.: The National
Commission for the Protection of Human Subjects of Biomedical and
Behavioral Research, 1978), Ch. 21, pp. 1-34.

"The Nature of Death" (an editorial followed by a bibliography), The Journal

of Medicine and Philosophy, v. 3, 1978, pp. 1-7.

"Phenomenology, Anonymity, and Alienation," New Literary History, v. 10,

 NATANSON BIBLIOGRAPHY 339

1979, pp. 353-346.

"Tbe Sleep of Bad Faith," New Literary History, v. 12, 1980-81, pp. 97-106.

"Gurwitsch Ascending," The Journal ofthe British Society for Phenomenology,

v. 12, 1981, pp. 115-124.

"Tbe World Already There: An Approach to Phenomenology,"

Phenomenology and the Human Sciences, v. 3, 1981, pp. 101-116.

"Erwin Straus and Alfred Schutz," Philosophy and Phenomenological

Research, v. 42, 1982, pp. 335-342.

"Tbe Schematism of Moral Agency," New Literary History, v. 15, 1983-84, pp.
13-23.

"Alfred Schutz on Everydayness: Fragment of a Work in Progress," The

Envoy (New Haven, Connecticut, n.d. [co 1984-85]), n.p.

"From Apprehension to Decay: Robert Burton's 'Equivocations of

Melancholy'," The Gettysburg Review, v. 2, 1989, pp. 130-138.

"Tbe Iliac Passion," The Yale Journal of Biology and Medicine, v. 65, 1992, pp.
165-171.

Some Selected Reviews:

Review: Phenomenologie de l'Experience Esthetique by Mikel Dufrenne,

Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, v. 15, 1954, pp. 140-142.

Review: Phenomenologie de Husserl by Quentin Lauer, Philosophical Review,

v. 65, 1956, pp. 563-567.

Review: Martin Buber by Maurice S. Friedman, Social Research, v. 24, 1957,

pp. 113-117.

Review: Thomas Mann by Fritz Kaufmann, Judaism, v. 7, 1958, pp. 86-88.

Review: Theorie du Champ de la Conscience by Aron Gurwitsch, Philosophi-

cal Review, v. 68, 1959, pp. 536-538.
340 NATANSON BIBLIOGRAPHY

An Interview:

"The Life and Work of Alfred Schutz: A Conversation with Maurice

Natanson" (ed. Rodman B. Webb), Qualitative Studies in Education, v. 5,
1992, pp. 283-294.

Contributions to Books:

"The Empirical and Transcendental Ego," in For Roman Ingarden: Nine

Essays in Phenomenology, ed. Anna-Teresa Tymieniecka (The Hague:
Martinus Nijhoff, 1959), pp. 42-53.

"Afterword" to The Death o[ a Nobody by Jules Romains (New York: Signet

Classic, 1961), pp. 115-124.

"Existentialism and the Theory of Literature," in The Critical Matrix, ed. Paul
R. Sullivan (Washington, D.C.: Georgetown University Press, 1961), pp.
154-170.

"Phenomenology and the Theory of Literature, " in The Critical Matrix, ed.
Paul R. Sullivan (Washington D. C.: Georgetown University Press, 1961),
pp. 137-153.

"Philosophische Grundfragen der Psychiatrie I: Philosophie und Psychiatrie,"

translated from English by Robert O. Weiss in Psychiatrie der Gegenwart
Band If2, ed. H. W. Gruhle, R. Jung, W. Mayer-Gross, M. Müller (Berlin
and New York: Springer, 1963), pp. 903-925.

"Anonymity and Recognition: Toward an Ontology of Social Roles," in

Conditio Humana: Erwin W. Straus on his 75th Birthday, ed. Walter von
Baeyer and Richard M. Griffith (Berlin and New York: Springer, 1966),
pp. 255-271.

"Humanism and Death," in Moral Problems in Contemporary Society: Essays

in Humanistic Ethics, ed. Paul Kurtz (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall,
1969), pp. 285-298.

"On the Nature of Social Man," in Patterns o[the Life-World: Essays in

Honor o[lohn Wild, ed. James M. Edie, Francis H. Parker, and Calvin O.
Schrag (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1970), pp. 248-270.

"Phenomenology, Typification, and the World as Taken for Granted," in

Philomathes: Studies and Essays in the Humanities in Memory o[ Phillip
 NATANSON BIBLIOGRAPHY 341

Merlan, ed. Robert B. Palmer and Robert Hamerton-Kelly (The Hague:

Martinus Nijhoff, 1971), pp. 383-397.

"On Conceptual Nihilism, " in Life-World and Consciousness: Essays for Aron
Gurwitsch, ed. Lester E. Embree (Evanston: Northwestern University
Press, 1972), pp. 287-305.

"Alfred Schutz Symposium: The Pregivenness of SOciality," in Interdisciplinary

Phenomenology, ed. Don Ihde and Richard M. Zaner (The Hague:
Martinus Nijhoff, 1977), pp. 109-123.

"Philosophy and Social Science: A Phenomenological Approach," in

Foundations ofPolitical Science: Research, Methods, and Scope, ed. Donald
M. Freeman (New York: The Free Press, 1977), pp. 517-552.

"The Arts of Indirection," in Rhetoric, Philosophy, and Literature: An

Exploration, ed. Don M. Burks (West Lafayette: Purdue University Press,
1978), pp. 35-47.

"Foreword" to The Theory of Social Action: The Co"espondence of Alfred

Schutz and Talcott Parsons, ed. Richard Gtathoff (Bloomington: Indiana
University Press, 1978), pp. ix-xvi.

"The Problem of Anonymity in the Thought of Alfred Schutz," in

Phenomenology and the Social Sciences: A Dialogue, ed. Joseph Bien (The
Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1978), pp. 60-73. Translated into German by
Astrid and Bruno Hildenbrand as "Das Problem der Anonymität im
Denken von Alfred Schutz," Alfred Schutz und die Idee des Alltags in den
Sozialwissenschaften, hrsg. Walter M. Sprondel und Richard Grathoff
(Stuttgart: Ferdinand Enke, 1979), 78-88.

"The Original Chaos," in Man and Value: Essays in Honor of William H.

Werkmeister, ed. E. F. Kaelin (Tallahasse: University Presses of Florida,
1981), pp. 97-108.

"The Problem of Others in Being and Nothingness," in The Philosophy of

Jean-Paul Sartre, ed. Arthur Schilpp (LaSalle: Open Court, 1981), pp.
326-344.

"Foreword" to Edmund Husserl's Phenomenology: A Critical Commentary by

James M. Edie (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987), pp. ix-xv.

"The Strangeness in the Strangeness," in Edmund Husserl and the

Phenomenological Tradition, ed. Robert Sokolowski (Washington, D. C.:
342 NATANSON BIBLIOGRAPHY

Catholic University of America Press, 1988), pp. 183-195.

"Foreword" to Philosophers in Exile: The Co"espondence Between Alfred

Schutz and Aron Gurwitsch, 1939-1959, ed. Richard Grathoff, trans. J.
Claude Evans (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989), pp. vii-xi.

"Transcendental Resonance," in Falling in Love with WlSdom, ed. David D.

Karnos and Robert Shoemaker (New York: Oxford University Press,
1993), pp. 253-255.

"On Seeing and Being Seen," in Die Objektivität der Ordnungen und ihre
kommunikative Konstruktion: fi1r Thomas Luckmann, ed. Walter M.
Sprondel (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1994), pp. 17-28.

Contributions to Encyclopaedias:

"Alfred Schutz," in International Encyclopaedia ofthe Social Sciences, v. 14,

ed. David L. Sills (New York: MacMillan and Free Press, 1968), pp. 72-
74.

"Jean-Paul Sartre," in Encyclopaedia of Religion, v. 23, ed. Mircea Eliade

(New York: MacMillan, 1987), pp. 74-75.

Books Edited:

Collected Papers, v. I: The Problem of Social Reality by Alfred Schutz, with

an Introduction by Maurice Natanson (The Hague: Martinus Nijhhoff,
1962).

Philosophy of the Social Sciences: AReader, with an Introduction by Maurice

Natanson (New York: Random House, 1963).

Philosophy, Rhetoric, and Argumentation, co-edited by Henry W. Johnstone,

Jr.,; with an Introduction by both editors and a Foreword by Robert T.
Oliver (University Park: Penn State University Press, 1965).

Essays in Phenomenology, with an Introduction by Maurice Natanson (The

Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1966).

Psychiatry and Philosophy, with aPreface by Maurice Natanson and Erwin W.

Straus (Berlin and New York: Springer, 1969). [Note: Natanson's
contribution to this volume includes the English version of
 NATANSON BIBLIOGRAPHY 343

"Philosophische Grundfragen der Psychiatrie I: Philosophie und

Psychiatrie" (1963)].

Phenomenology and Social Reality: Essays in Memory 0/ Alfred Schutz, with

an Introduction by Maurice Natanson (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff,
1970).

Phenomenology and the Social Sciences, 2 vols., with an Introduction by

Maurice Natanson (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1973).

Books:

A Critique 0/ Jean-Paul Sartre's Ontology (Lincoln: University of Nebraska

Studies, 1951). Reprinted by Martinus Nijhoff, 1973.

The Social Dynamics 0/ George H. Mead, with an Introduction by Horace M.

Kallen (Washington, D. c.: Public Affairs Press, 1956). Reprinted by
Martinus Nijhoff, 1973 (translated into Japanese and published in Japan
in 1983).

Literature, Philosophy, and the Social Sciences (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff,
1962).

The Joumeying Self: A Study in Philosophy and Social Role (Reading:

Addison-Wesley, 1970).

Edmund Husserl: Philosopher 0/ Infinite Tasks (Evanston: Northwestern

University Press, 1973).

Phenomenology, Role, and Reason: Essays on the Coherence and Deformation

0/ Social Reality (SpringfieId: Charles C. Thomas, 1974).
Anonymity: A Study in the Philosophy 0/Alfred Schutz (Bloomington: Indiana
University Press, 1986).
 CONTRIBUTORS

MICHAEL BARBER is Associate Professor of Philosophy at St. Louis U nivers-

ity. He has published two books, Social Typijications and the Elusive Other
and Guardian of Dialogue as weH as numerous articles in such journals as
Philosophy Today and Human Studies.

JUDllli BU1LER is Professor of Rhetoric and Comparative Literature at the

University of California at Berkeley. She received her PhD in Philosophy
from Yale University in 1984. She is the author of Subjects of Desire:
Hegelian Reflections in Twentieth-Century France (Columbia University Press,
1987); Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (Routledge,
1990); Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of 'Sex' (Routledge,
1993). She is currently at work on two projects: a philosophical consider-
ation of "subjection," and aseries of essays on speech and conduct in
contemporary political life.

STEVEN GALT CROWELL, Associate Professor ofPhilosophy and Humanities

at Rice University, learned the phenomenological craft in Maurice
Natanson's courses at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Crowell's
current research centers on the ethical ground of transcendental philosophy,
and on aesthetics. Among his recent publications are essays on the early
Heidegger, Husserl's philosophy of nature, and neo-Kantianism.

JAMES M. EDlE, Professor of Philosophy, a native of Grand Forks, North

Dakota, received his bachelor's degree at Saint John's University, then
studied at the Athenreum Anselmianum in Rome, before completing his
doctoral studies at the University of Louvain in Belgium in 1958. Edie has
spent almost his entire career at Northwestern University. Arriving in 1961,
he rose to the rank of professor in 1971, and chaired the Department for six
years in the 1970s, and helped build its current strengths in Continental
philosophy. Edie pioneered the introduction of phenomenology and exist-
entialism into the United States, as a translator, editor, philosopher, and one
of the founders of the Society for Phenomenology and Existential Philoso-
phy. He also helped establish the Northwestern University Press Series in
Phenomenology and until recently served as its editor. He is the author of
four books in phenomenology and language, Speaking and Meaning, The
Phenomenology of Edmund Husserl, William fames and Phenomenology, and
Merleau-Ponty's Philosophy of Language, and he is the editor or translator of

345
346 CON1RIBUTORS

nine more. He is currently working on two books, one on existential

philosophy in the theater and one a history of medireval philosophy,
centered around the development of the notion of "Christian philosophy."
He has served on a variety of executive committees in his profession,
inc1uding the Society for Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy and the
International Association for Philosophy and Literature.

LESTER EMBREE (Ph.D., New School for Social Research, 1972) is the
William F. Dietrich Eminent Scholar and Professor of Philosophy at Florida
Atlantic University. He has written, translated, and edited a number of
essays and volumes in phenomenological philosophy of the cultural,
naturalistic, and formal sciences and is currently interested in the constitu-
tive phenomenology of ethnicity, gender, and environmentalism.

LEWIS R. GORDON teaches in the philosophy department and African

American Studies and Research Center at Purdue University. He also taught
at Yale University, where as a Danforth-Compton Fellow he received his
doctorate in philosophy under the supervision of Maurice Natanson. He is
a Fellow of the Society for Values in Higher Education and an associate
editor of the American Philosophical Association Newsletter on Philosophy
and the Black Experience. He is the author of a number of articles on racism,
identity, existential phenomenology, and social philosophy, and author of the
book Bad Faith and Antiblack Racism (Atlantic Highlands: The Humanities
Press, 1995).

NOBUO KAZASHI is Associate Professor of Philosophy in the Faculty of

International Studies at Hiroshima City University in Japan. After receiving
Bachelor's and Master's degrees from Tokyo University of Foreign Studies,
he went to Yale University to work under the advisorship of Maurice
Natanson. His dissertation was entitled Four Variations on the Phenomen-
ological Theme of 'Horizon '; James, Nishida, Merleau-Ponty, and Schutz.

FRED KERSTEN studied at Lawrence University, Brown University and the

Graduate Faculty of the New School for Social Research, where he received
his PhD in Philosophy. In addition to translations of Edmund Husserl, Aron
Gurwitsch and Alfred Schutz, he has published studies in various fields of
phenomenology. Dr. Kersten is currently FrankenthaU Professor of
Philosophy at the University of Wisconsin-Green Bay.

THOMAS LUCKMANN was born in Jesenice, Slovenia, in 1927 and has been,
for the past twenty-two years, Professor of Sociology at the University of
Constance, Germany. After studying at the Universities of Vienna and
Innsbruck, he worked with Alfred Schutz at the New School for Social
Research, receiving his PhD there with a dissertation comparing four
 CONlRIBUTORS 347

German Protestant parishes. He has published numerous articles on soci-

ology, phenomenological foundations of the social sciences, the sociology of
knowledge, and the sociology of religion. Among his books are The Invisible
Religion, The Social Construction 01 Reality (with P. Berger), The Structures
olthe Lifeworld, vol. 1&11 (with Alfred Schutz), The Sociology 01 Language,
and Lifeworld and Social Realities. His books and articles have been trans-
lated into numerous European and non-European languages, and he serves
on the editorial boards of several journals and series in the social and
cultural sciences.

MICHAEL F. McDuFFIE is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Muskingum

College in New Concord, Ohio. As an undergraduate he attended New
College of the University of South Florida, and he pursued graduate work
at Yale University, where he received his doctorate in 1992. At Yale he
worked extensively with Maurice Natanson, as a student and teaching
assistant, and his doctoral dissertation, World and Life-World: A Study in
Husserl's Phenomenology, was directed by Natanson.

JOSHUA MILLER took courses in the philosophy of existence and Edmund

Husserl with Maurice Natanson at the University of California, Santa Cruz.
He is the author of The Rise and Fall 01 Democracy in Early America, 1630-
1789 (Penn State Press), and teaches political theory in the Department of
Government and Law at Lafayette College in Easton, Pennsylvania. Tbis
essay was written during a Fellowship year at the National Humanities
Center in 1993-94.

VICTORIA MORA is Tutor at St. John's College in Santa Fe, New Mexico.
Her particular interests focus on a phenomenology of the lived body. She
received her PhD at Yale University, under the direction of Maurice
Natanson. Tbe early drafts of the essay published here were written during
a Fellowship year supported by the Ford Foundation.

GILBERT T. NULL was introduced to Husserlian phenomenology by Maurice

Natanson at the University of California at Santa Cruz, and pursued
graduate studies at the New School for Social Research. His dissertation
(undertaken under the direction of Aron Gurwitsch and accepted by J. N.
Mohanty upon Gurwitsch's death) examined intentionalities involved in
physical science. He is the author of sixteen articles concerning Husserlian
phenomenology and formal ontology, many ofwhich concern the part-whole
analysis of dependent and independent universals and particulars characteris-
tic of Husserl's early writings.

DAVID ROYAL graduated summa cum laude from Yale College, where he
studied with Maurice Natanson and wrote a senior thesis, "Tbe World as
348 CONTRIBUTORS

Taken for Granted," on Husserl, Schutz, and the phenomenological reduc-

tion. In 1993-94 he taught in the English department at Friedrich Schiller
University in Jena, Germany.

ALFRED SCHUTZ (1899-1959) was educated at the University of Vienna. His

book, Der sinnhafte Aufbau der sozialen Welt, appeared in 1932 (and was
translated as The Phenomenology o[ the Social World, 1967). Three volumes
of his Collected Papers have been posthumously published. Dr. Schutz was
Professor of Philosophy and Sociology at the Graduate Faculty of the New
School for Social Research.

GAIL WEISS is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at George Washington

University and Associate Director of the PhD program in the Human
Sciences. She has authored articles in continental philosophy and feminist
theory and did her graduate work at Yale with Maurice Natanson, where she
completed a dissertation on Merleau-Ponty and Mead entitled "The Hermen-
eutics of Gesture. "

OSBORNE P. WIGGINS, JR. is an Associate Professor of Philosophy and

Associate Professor of Family and Community Medicine at the University
of Louisville in Louisville, Kentucky. He has published articles on
phenomenology, ethics, philosophy of medicine, and psychiatry. He is one
of the founding members of the Association for the Advancement of Philo-
sophy and Psychiatry and of its journal, Philosophy, Psychiatry, and Psycholo-
gy. Along with John Z. Sadler, M.D., and Michael Alan Schwartz, M.D., he
has edited Philosophical Perspectives on Psychiatrie Diagnostic Classification
(The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994).

RICHARD M. ZANER is Ann Geddes Stahlman Professor of Medical Ethics

and Director, The Center for Clinical and Research Ethics, at Vanderbilt
University Medical Center. He founded and directs the Clinical Ethics
Consulting Service for Vanderbilt University Hospitals and Clinics, and
established the Clinical Ethics Program at Saint Thomas Hospital (Nashville,
TN). He holds secondary appointments in Philosophy, Graduate Religious
Studies, Divinity, and Nursing. In addition to more than 80 articles and book
chapters, he has edited ten books and published five original studies, the
latest of which are: Ethics and the Clinical Encounter (Prentice-Hall, 1988)
and Troubled Voices: Stories o[ Ethics and Illness (Pilgrim Press, 1993).
 INDEX

Abraham, 239 255-263

absolute, 49
absurd, 23, 110, 19n
act, 232; creative, 214n
acting, categories of, 243; theatrical and
mundane, 232, 234, 248-249
action, 144, 208-209, 243, 255; psycholog-
ical roots of, in James, 133, 136
actor, dramatic, 234; political, 134 n.12,
140-141, 142; unavoidable self-mis-
understanding of, 283
adequacy, 66; pictorial, 65, 66; indicational,
66-67
aiila (between), 180
Albert, Hans, 101, 103-104
alienation, 28; and racism, 125; as theatri-
cal tool, 249-250; Gregor Samsa's, 226,
229. See also Verfremdungseffekt
aloneness, 239
alter ego, 84-91. See also Other
anamnesis, 283
anatomy, 304
Anatomy 0/ Melancholy (Robert Burton),
4, 7
Angst. See anxiety
anonymity, 185, 186, 227, 228, 229, 318
Anse1m, 331
anthropology, Sartre's philosophical, 235,
237,241. See also human reality
anticipation, horizonal, 211
anti-foundationalism, 95, 105
anti-humanism, 319-320
anxiety, 6, 28, 186, 239-240; fundamental
(Schutz), 26, 187, 333
Apel, Karl-Otto, 93, 99-106
apprehension, 6; and tragic narrative, 7
appresentation, of Iifeworld in art, 218,
219n
argumentation, 99, 100-101
Aristotle, 7, 232, 247
art, lnstitutional Theory of, 256, 259, 274;
ontology of, 260; phenomenological ap-
proach to, 210-212; relation to life, 217-
219
artwork, 257, 261; ontological problem of,
artworld, 256
Asclepius, 161
asymmetry, physician/patient, 159-160
Augustine of Hippo, 315
authenticity, 237. See also existence
authority, 159
Averroes, 280
awareness, types of presentational and
representational, 60-70; non-Iinguistic,
65; combination of types of, 68
axiology, 81
Ayer, A J., 238
bad faith, 108-110, 113, 114,243,295;
Fanon's failure to acknowledge, 125-
127; in psychiatrie treatment, 39-41; in
Sartre's theory of human reality, 234-
237; Natanson's definition of, 107
Barrett, William, 291
Barthelme, Donald, 306
beginnings, philosophical, 15, 73, 278, 284;
as an existential problem, 331. See also
evidence, origin
being, 172, 206; and meaning, 5,12; solip-
sistic, 21; sonority of, 186
belief, 133. See also faith
Berger, Gaston, 45
Bergson, Henri, 211
Berkeley, George, 15
biographical situation, 155-156. See also
situation
bodily movement, 193-194, 197, 200
body, 85-86, 113, 159 n.13, 198, 202; in
bad faith, 109; psychic experience re-
vealed in motion oe, 191, 193-194, 195-
196. See also lived body
Borges, J. L., 262
Bouwsma, O. K., 296, 297, 299, 316
Brecht, Bertolt 244, 247-248, 251
Buber, Martin, 315
Bumham, James, 289-290, 291, 296,
Bumham, Walter Dean, 134
Burton, Robert,4,6,7

349
350 INDEX

Cabalism, 327 Douglass, Frederick, 123

Cairns, Dorion, 54 n.17, 73 n.2, 308, 314, drama, 252. See also play, theater
328 dreaming, 33-34
Cassirer, Ernst, 282 dream-Iife, 210
catharsis, 7, 8, 247 Du Bois, W. E. B., 118
causality, solipsistic, 22 Duchamp, Marcel, 259-260, 273
causal explanation, 35-37 dur~e, 214
Camus, Albert, 23 Dussel, Enrique, 93, 95
Centeno y Rilova, 251
Chandler, Albert, 298 ego, 9, 10-11,25,51,50-52; and proto-
Chapman, Harmon, 291 identity, 84-91; as responsible, 91;
choice, 81, 123, 328; free, 239-240, 330; solipsistic, 17, 27; transcendental, 51
moral. See moral choice; of racism, 115 n.11, 121 n.44, 175, 279, 313-314, 315,
cognition, 59. See also evidence 317. See also self, individual
cognitive styles, 206-208, 210-211, 212 Ego anti the Id, The (Freud), 10-11
commitment, 144, 164 eidos, 285
communication, 77, 79,177-178; in c1inical eidetic analysis, 282
practice, 149, 152-153; indirect, 304. See eidetic singularity, 176
also indirection embodiment, 113, 201
Conrad,Joseph,330 empathy, 248, 249
consciousness, 80-81, 133, 183, 194n, 203, enclave, 216-217
214,235-236. See also experience, encounter, c1inical, 154, 156, 163
intentionality, subjectivity epilogismos, 149, 150
constitution, phenomenological, 46, 83, epistemology, 278-279
57-58,175,179,182-183,314,328 epocM, 47, 53, 198; and the existential
contradiction, performative, 102, 104 dimension, 40; in aesthetic experience,
conversation, clinical, 149, 153, 156-157, 213, 215. See also reduction
158; of attitudes, 178; of gestures, 178. equality, 137
See also communication essai,5
conversion, 243, 290 essence, 236-237, 244. See also eidos
Cooley, Charles Horton, 87n ethics, 238, 240,291, 328. See also morality
Copernican Revolution, Kant's, 43, 49 evaluation, 81. See also valuation
courage, 149 nA evidence, 15, 103, 323; existential sense of,
crisis, 281-282 315, 318; in bad faith, 110, 116. See also
experience
Danto, Arthur, 255-263, 272-274 evidencing, 59, 68
Danton's Death (Georg Büchner), 27n existence, 185, 227, 331; and essence, 236-
Darwin, Charles, 143-144 237; current of, 322. See also human
Davis, Angela, 111 n.13 reality
death, 26-27, 186,327-328,333 existential dimension, 39
decay,5-6 experience, 19,31-32, 197, 295, 321; aes-
democracy, 133, 135, 138, 146 thetic, 210, 212-214, 215; and meaning,
depiction, 65, 66 188,205,219; musical, 173, 174-176,
Derrida, Jacques, 95-97, 99 180, 181, 184, 185 n.27; political, 133.
Descartes, Rene, 17, 53, 287 See also consciousness, evidence
description, 36, 37, 75, 190. See also meth- expression, Iinguistic, 62, 64, 65
od extensionality, mereological, 259
Dickie, George 259 extentionalism, linguistic, 261n; mereolog-
Dilthey, Wilhelm, 312 ical,263
discourse, 128 n.66, 151. See also commun- Ey, Henri, 322
ication, conversation
disease, 150, 158 falIibilism, 101-102, 104
Dostoevsky, Fyodor, 233, 294, 316, 328 familiarity, 189, 226
 INDEX 351

Fanon, Frantz, 114, 117, 120, 124-127 ideals, 142, 143-144, 145, 186
Farber, MaIVin, 308 ideal types, 35. See also typification
faith, 141-42, 144. See also belief ideas, musical, 173-174
feeling, affiliative, 164, 166 identification, 11, 175-176, 247
femininity, 191, 198-201 identity, personal, 82-83, 122, 223, 224,
fetishism, 25 230; mereological, 258, 259. See also
Fink, Eugen, 44, 53, 279 proto-identity, Self
Flamenco, 191-197 illness, 150, 151, 154
foundations, BO, 99, 105, 314, 315, 318; imaginal)', the, 57, 236
original)' and final, 280, 281, 283-284. imagination, 250, 295
See also evidence indication, 66-67
foundationalism, 94, 104, 313 indirection, 301, 304-305, 327. See also
freedom, 24, 127, 231, 239-240, 245, 330. communication
See also choice individual, 8, 41, 122, 314, 320-321, 323,
Freud, Sigmund, 9, 10, 27, 109 n.4, 241 325. See also ego, Self, subject
friendship, 186 individuality, 37
individualization, 186
Gadamer, H. G., 312 individuation, principle of, 261, 271
gender, 190-191, 198, 199, 203n; and race, Ingarden, Roman, 51
112-113; of transcendental ego, 51 n.ll institutions, political, 145
genderfication, 200 intentionality, 55 n.19, 95, 242. See also
Gierke, Otto von, 282, 285 consciousness
Godkin, E. L., 132 intentive processes, 69
good, actions typified as, 90 interpretation, 151-152, 158,286. See also
Great Depression, 292, 295 hermeneutics, semeiosis
Gyges the Lydian, 162 intersubjectivity, 32-33, 41, 184. See also
Gurwitsch, Aron, 74 n.2, 308 aida,Other
inwardness, 314-315, 317, 318
Hall, Everett, 307
Habermas, Jürgen, 94 n.1, 101, 104 James, William, 131 passim, 181, 206, 308
Hegel, G. W. F., 121 n.43, 286, 320-321 Jaspers, Karl, 37-38
hermeneutics, 157-160,233,312 justice, 118-119, 127 n.62, 328
Heidegger, Martin, 26, 186, 221n, 296
Hippocratic Oath, 152n, 160-161 Kafka, Franz, 221, 225 n.6, 317-318, 320
histol)', 121-122, 128, 250; philosophy of Kallen, Horace, 308-309
120-123,280,286 Kant, Immanuel, 22, 43, 51, 238, 239, 280
historicism, 75 Kaufmann, Fritz, 306, 313
homelessness, dialectic of, 321-322 Kierkegaard, Soren, 119,211,239,297,
Hook, Sidney, 289, 294, 295 299,301,314,320-321
horizon, 94, 182-183, 187, 216-217, 283, Kimura, Bin, 180-181, 183-184
321 King, Martin Luther, Jr., 137 n.19, 143
human comportment, 201 knowledge, 242. See also cognition, truth
human condition, 80, 84
human interaction, 184 Lange~Suzanne, 147,291
human nature, 244 language, 8, 61, 316; and the Other, 86, 95,
human reality, 236, 239 97. See also expression
humanity, 109, 280 Lasch, Christopher, 138
Husserl, Edmund, 15 passim, 44 passim, Leibniz, G. W., 259, 286-287
98,103,175,189,222,232,277-287, Levinas, Emmanuel, 20, 94-99, 104-106,
291,296,300-301,311,327,331 186-187, 315
Levi-Strauss, Claude, 171-173
idealism, transcendental 48 liberation, 111, 127, 129
ideality, 173, 174, 186 life, 211, 217, 232, 241, 247, 328; as tran-
352 INDEX

scendental ground, 45, 48; everyday, moral institutions, 79

158, 224 moral judgments, 81
lifeworld, 41, 84, 98, 122, 185, 205, 206- moral order, 78
207, 285; and art, 212, 215; and pathol- moral principles, 240
ogy, 32-35, 324 moral recognition, 163
literature, 327, 329 moral reflection, 119
Litt, Theodore, 85 n.16 morality, 77, 83, 91. See also proto-morali-
lived body, 20, 21, 23, 24. See also body ty
Logosvergessenheit, 100 morals, 78-79
London, Jack, 294 morbidity, eidetics of, 31-32. See also
lonliness, 28. See also aloneness, solipsism pathology
Look, the, 114,237-238,249; and gender, motivation, political, 134; for philosophiz-
194-195,201-203 ing, 281, 319
Louis, Joe, 298 Mozart, W. A, 179
love, 98, 137 n.19, 186, 333 multiple realities, 184, 205, 333
Murdoch, Iris, 238
ma (synonym for aiäa), 180-181 music, 172-174, 176, 179, 229. See also
Machiavelli, Niccolo, 135 experience
MandeIa, Nelson, 138 musical inteIVals, 181, 182-183
Manichreism, 116, 124 MusiI, Robert, 75
material counterpart, 257, 258-259 myth, 173, 241, 245
masculinity, 191, 198-201
Marcel, GabrieI, 39, 329 narrative, 7-8, 152, 173
Me, the, 222, 230, 238 Natanson, Maurice, 3, 4, 7, 11, 19, 26, 27,
Mead, G. H., 86, 87n, 178, 300 31 passim, 43, 56, 73-74, 84 n.14, 107-
meaning, 16, 19, 32, 172, 176, 178, 185, 108,114,121-122,128-129,178,185,
187, 242, 283, 311; finite provinces of, 186, 218, 224, 227-228
206-208, 209; in art, 219; in theater, nature, solipsistic, 19-23
253; Iinguistic, 5; of a text, 233; solipsis- natural attitude, 114, 190, 206-207, 212-
tic, 20, 28-29. See also significance 213, 222-224, 226, 286
medicine, 147-150, 153, 162, 301-304; natural law, 76-77
ancient traditions in, 147-148; and natural standpoint. See natural attitude
hermeneutics, 157-160 negritude, 123, 124-125
melancholy, 4-6; and world-horizon, 7-8 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 25
mental process (Erlebnis), 52. See also con- Nightwatch, The (Rembrandt), 57
sciousness, intentionality nihilation, 235-236, 330
Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, 20, 44 passim, Nishida, Kitaro, 183
171-174,182,321 noema, 17, 51
metamorphosis, 21, 223, 226, 230 Noh drama, 180
metaphysical constants, 323 nothingness, 249. See also consciousness,
metaphysics, 279. See also ontology, being nihilation
method, c1inical, 154; phenomenological,
35-37,46,47,55,191,279 obligation, 84, 91. See also morality
MiII, John Stuart, 132, 138 objectivity, 61, 89
mirroring, 86-89. See also Other, intersub- Ockham, William of, 239
jectivity O'Neill, Eugene, 293
Montaigne, Michel de, 5, 315 ontology, 52, 113, 125, 127, 204; regional,
moral absolutism, 76, 135 256
moral character of medicine, 161, 163-164 origin, of moral order, 75; phenomeno-
moral choice, 239-240, 247 logical, 83, 282, 311
moral claims, 246 Ortega y Gasset, Jos~, 54 n.17
moral function in communication, 78 Other, the, 11-12, 29, 95, 97-98, 110, 188;
moral hero, 240-241. See also theater and race, 125; and reason, 99; and
 INDEX
religious transcendence, 315; as funda-
mentally unfamiliar, 319; givenness of,
12, 93, 95, 238, 318, 332; encounter
with, 163, 178, 185, 323; work of art as,
214
ownness, 18, 19, 21
painting, 172,217-218
Parallelaktion, 75, 80
part relation, 258
parts, theory of irregular, 265, 267-269
Pascal, Blaise, 331
pathology, 118, 316, 324. See also morbidi-
ty
Peirce, C. S., 297
person, 137, 150,241,249; morbid, 32-35.
See also ego, Self
perspectives, 110; reciprocity of, 85, 88, 89
phenomenology, 15-16,44,46,55,69,73,
213,255,279,286,305,308,311-314,
326, 333; constructive, 48, 56, 279;
existential, 114, 127, 129, 319; transcen-
dental, 15, 279, 284
Phenomenology 0/ Perception (Mealeau-
Ponty), 44-47
phenomenology of phenomenology, 46, 48,
50, 54
philosopher, 281, 324-325
philosophy, 39, 278, 287, 317, 324-325,
326. See also phenomenology
philosophy of philosophy, 98
physician, 148, 155-157; and power, 162
Pirandello, Luigi, 233, 234
play, 232, 248. See also drama, theater
pluralism, 133, 136, 140-142
pluralistic universe, 140, 145
politics, 135-136, 145. See also democracy
pragmatism, 140, 297, 308-309
presuppositions, 100-102
proto-identity, 84-91. See also ego, Self
proto-morality, 76-77, 80, 82-91
Proust, Marcel, 173
psychiatry, 31 passim, 289, 327
psychic restraint, 191, 194, 197, 201-202
psychic saturation, 191, 194, 197,201-202
psychoanalysis, 291, 302; existential, 241
race, 111 n.13, 112-113, 128
racism, 115-118, 125
radicality, philosophical, 311
Rank, üUo, 290
rationality, 179; communicative, 102, 105
reality, 179, 206, 210, 290, 332. See also
353
being, meaning
reason,98
reasoning, medical, 148-149
recognition, 139, 163, 295, 318, 323
recollection, 64. See also anamnesis
reduction, phenomenological, 52, 54, 55,
313; to ownness, 17-18. See also meth-
od, phenomenology
reflection, 68, 69, 191; diagnostic, 3; phen-
omenological, 16, 46, 70, 103, 207
relativism, 76
relevance, 82, 85, 87, 208-209, 287
Rembrandt, 57
representation, varieties of, 59
respect, 133, 136-140. See also recognition
Respectjul Prostitute, The (Sartre), 116-117
responsibility, 16, 118, 240
Rice, lohn, 310
Ricoeur, Paul, 18
roles, 40, 123, 235
Rorty, Richard, 13
sameness, 176; substantive, 260, 262, 263,
273
Samsa, Gregor, 221 passim, 320, 322
Santayana, George, 132
Sartre, lean-Paul, 57, 108-110, 113, 119-
120,123-124,195, 231passim, 291, 305-
306, 316, 330
Scheler, Max, 240
Schopenhauer, Arthur, 229
Schutz, Alfred, 41,73-74,82,98,158,174-
180, 182-183, 205-206, 211, 216, 224,
227, 277, 300-301, 304, 307, 326
seeing, 66, 311; phenomenological, 41;
therapeutic value of, 37-39. See also
evidence, phenomenology
Self, the, 5, 7-8, 85, 235; and proto-identi-
ty, 88; and social roles, 40; as object,
238; in aesthetic experience, 214; in
natural attitude, 222-224; in solipsism,
24; insubstantiality of, 6, 12; inwardness
of, 320; presentation of, 304. See also
ego, person, subject
self-consciousness, of blacks, 121 n.43
self-contemplation, Husserl's, 280-282, 285
self-deception, in chronic iIIness, 165 n.18
self-discovery, 315
self-explication, 16-17
self-misunderstanding, philosopher's un-
avoidable, 283, 284, 285
self-interpretation, patient's, 153
self-reflection, 95, 99
354 INDEX

self-reflexivity, 221n therapeutic intent, 302

selfhood, 40, 186. See also authentieity thing, solipsistic, 20-22
semeiosis, 149, 152. See also interpretation Thou, 177, 227. See also Other
seriousness, spirit of, 111, 124-125 time, 46-47, 48, 52, 53; and moral identity,
sex, and gender, 190, 198-199 83; musical, 182
Siger of Brabant, 280 toleration, 139
significance, existential, 242. See also Tolstoy, Leo, 294, 322
meaning trace, 97
signification, non-conceptual, 175, 176-177 tradition, 281, 282, 284
Simmel, Georg, 89, 196,328,332 tragedy, 7, 247, 250
situation, 177, 209; and raeism, 115-118, transcendence, 46, 314, 315, 317-318; of
120; face-to-face, 185; postcolonial, 128 the Other, 29
n.66; theater of, 244-245 Trotsky, Leon, 289
Smith, Page, 309 trust, 156-157, 162
soeial competence, 79-80 truth, 13,60,61, 144; in James, 134, 140;
soeial conflict, 133-134 in theater, 247, 250; in philosophy, 312,
soeial constructions, 76 327
social theory, Sartre's early, 113-114 Tugendhat, Ernst, 83n
soeial world, 179 tuning-in relationship, 177-178. See also
sociality, 214, 332-333 Other
solipsism, 14-15, 17,20,21-22,330,331- typification, 32, 40, 41, 85, 88, 185, 226-
332; and bad faith, 109; and morbidity, 227,323
33; transcendental, 17, 279; truth of, 23, Tyson, Mike, 111 n.13
238
solUY ipse, 33 uncanny,29
Spiegelberg, Herbert, 300 uncertainty, in medieine, 165-166
Stanislavski, Konstantin, 249, 251 unconscious, 242
Storer, Thomas, 297 understanding, 37, 39, 139
strange, the, 19, 23, 28, 35 universality, 102
strangeness, 32, 319 universals, cultural, 80
strangers, 156, 228
Straus, ElWin, 34, 327 validity, 89, 105
Stroud, Barry, 15 values, 81-82, 89-90, 111
structuralism, 171-172,233,321 value predicates, 22
subject, and object, 109; ethical, 249; of value-solipsism, 87
liberation, 111, postmodern, 121 n.44; valuations, 89-91
solipsistic, 22, 23-29. See also ego, Self Verfremdungseffekt, 248
subjectivity, 172,239,317-318,319-320; violence, 95
transcendental, 47, 313-314. See also virtues, 160. See also morality
conseiousness, existence Voegelin, Eric, 277
suffering, philosophical problem of, 328- vulnerability, patient's, 160-162
329
symptom, 149, 151, 154; in history of Waters, Bruce, 298-299
medieine, 147-149 Weber, Max, 178, 304
synthesis, passive, 175-176 Werkmeister, William, 296, 297
wholes, coextensivity of, 270-272
Takemitsu, Tohru, 181, 182 will, and political action, 144-145
talk, 164n, 165. See also conversation, Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 100, 255, 273, 296-
dialogue 297,316,329
teaching, 301, 304 wisdom, medical, 160
theater, 233, 244, 246, 250, 252 world, 18, 53-54, 76, 234, 236; pregiven,
therapy, 41, 150-151,316. See also medi- 281; pre-interpreted, 311-312; morbid,
eine, psychiatry 34; transcendental, 47. See also horizon,
 INDEX 355
lifeworld
world soul, 287
wriling, and indirection, 304-305
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