Abstract
As an introduction to the present collection of twenty-one essays, five aspects of this first chapter must be emphasized. First, it begins with a brief description of phenomenology as a philosophical movement, which was initiated by Edmund Husserl in Germany in the very beginning of the twentieth century and has now become a worldwide phenomenon. This volume represents for the first time “political phenomenology” as a sub-discipline of phenomenology proper. Second, political phenomenology made its entry to the theory of politics as an alternative paradigm to both political behavioralism and the influential “essentialist” political philosophy of Leo Strauss. As Embree’s contribution in this volume shows, Alfred Schutz constructs reality in a social process, and follows Husserl’s critique of “scientism” and momentous discovery of the life-world (Lebenswelt). Third, in the beginning was embodied sociality. The body is the expressive medium as well as the root of the social world. Fourth is the notion of transversality as the confluence of differences across cultural and disciplinary borders in the age of globalizing pluralism. Fifth, this introductory chapter briefly describes the nature of each of the other 20 chapters in the volume.
I build no towers, I erect bridges.
—Martin Buber
There is no possible point of view from which the world can appear an absolutely single fact.
—William James
A boundary is not that at which something stops but, as the Greeks recognized, the boundary is that from which something [new] begins its presencing. That is why the concept is that of horismos, that is, the horizon, the boundary.
—Martin Heidegger
If we keep on speaking the same language together, we’re going to reproduce the same history.
—Luce Irigary
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Notes
- 1.
It should be noted that in recent decades nobody has been working more diligently than Lester Embree to globalize phenomenology and to make it interdisciplinary. The French interdisciplinary savant and transversalist Roland Barthes is truly instructive in defining what interdisciplinarity means when he writes: “Interdisciplinary studies, of which we hear so much, do not merely confront already constituted disciplines (none of which, as a matter of fact, consents to leave off). In order to do interdisciplinary work, it is not enough to take a “subject” (a theme) and to arrange two or three sciences around it. Interdisciplinary study consists in creating a new object, which belongs to no one. The Text is, I believe, one such object.” The Rustle of Language, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Hill and Wang, 1986), 72. In short, it produces “intertexts.” It should be noted that Jacques Derrida, unlike Barthes, was not deeply engaged in non-Western thought even if he mentioned Chinese grammatology and sampled a few sinograms in his writings. In speaking about university education, however, Derrida mentioned “diagonal or transversal interscientific research,” “comparativism in philosophy,” “philosophy and ethnocentrism,” and “philosophical transcontinentality.” See Eyes of the University: Right to Philosophy 2, trans. Jan Plug et al. (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004), 241.
- 2.
Quoted in François Dosse, Empire of Meaning: The Humanization of the Social Sciences, trans. Hassan Melehy (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998), 308, which is one of those oeuvres which have been somehow overlooked.
- 3.
See “Does Political Theory Still Exist?” in Philosophy, Politics and Society: Second Series, eds. Peter Laslett and W. G. Runciman (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1962), 1–33. In concluding his essay, Berlin pointed out that there is “a strange paradox that political theory should seem to lead to shadowy an existence at a time when, for the first time in history, literally the whole of mankind is violently divided by the issues of the reality of which is, and has always been, the sole raison d’être of this branch of study.”
- 4.
See After Utopia: The Decline of Political Faith (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1957), 25.
- 5.
Ibid., 272–73.
- 6.
See Politics and Vision: Continuity and Innovation in Western Political Thought, expanded ed. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004) (Original ed. in 1960), chapter 9: “Liberalism and the Decline of Political Philosophy,” 257–314. See also Richard Sennett, The Fall of Public Man (New York: Random House, 1988).
- 7.
In the early development of political phenomenology in the United States, we should include contributions from Herbert G. Reid and Ernest I. Yanarella. We would be remiss if we forget to mention the monumental collection on phenomenology and the social sciences in two volumes by Maurice Natanson in memory of Alfred Schutz, who was a mentor of Natanson. The first essay followed by Natanson’s introductory piece was Merleau-Ponty’s “Phenomenology and the Sciences of Man.” In the second volume, there were three entries on “Phenomenology and Political Science,” written by Hwa Yol Jung, Carl J. Friedrich, and John G. Gunnell—in that order. See Phenomenology and the Social Sciences, 2 vols., ed. Maurice Natanson (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1973). They were published in Northwestern University Studies in Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy whose general editor and associate editor were John Wild and James M. Edie, respectively.
- 8.
See Phenomenology of Perception, trans. Colin Smith (New York: Humanities Press, 1962), 28. It seems misleading if not outrightly wrong for the French interpreter of Merleau-Ponty’s ontology Renaud Barbaras to use the term “dualism” in discussing Merleau-Ponty’s “empiricism” and “intellectualism” in The Being of the Phenomenon: Merleau-Ponty’s Ontology , trans. Ted Toadvine and Leonard Lawlor (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2004) in the same sense that Merleau-Ponty’s critique of Descartes’ philosophy of cogito based on the dualism between the mind (res cogitans) and the body (res extensa).
- 9.
Ed. Herbert J. Storing (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1962), 305–27.
- 10.
See also the Straussian Eugene F. Miller, “Positivism, Historicism, and Political Inquiry,” American Political Science Review, 66 (September, 1972): 796–817. See Miller’s critique of historicism or historical relativism, i.e., existential phenomenology, 812–14.
- 11.
Thus the French existential phenomenologist and feminist Simone de Beauvoir asserts in The Ethics of Ambiguity, trans. Bernard Frechtman (New York: Philosophical Library, 1948), 34: “the existentialist doctrine [vs. ‘essentialist’ principle] permits the elaboration of an ethics , but it even appears to us as the only philosophy in which an ethics has its place.” Throughout her works, she upholds her existentialist stand against any essentialist abstract principle that the question of good and evil in individual life is never pre-ordained but it is decided by what and how we make, unmake, and remake our life, i.e., what Heidegger calls the “facticity” of existence, or Giambattista Vico called factum.
- 12.
See (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1936), 3.
- 13.
Italics added for emphasis. Experience and Its Modes (Cambridge: At the University Press, 1933), 42. It would be extremely interesting to compare phenomenology with Vico and Oakeshott since, as far as I know, nothing has been written on Vico, political phenomenology, and Oakeshott’s philosophical politics. It is most instructive to take note of Vico’s scrupulous registration of complaint in On the Study Methods of Our Time (1709) against the prevailing pedagogic method of scientific epistemology in his own time. The complaint is very contemporary, i.e., our own time, in its message and thus relevant to the moral education of public conduct which he boldly called the (new) “science of politics.” Political phenomenology is indeed a “new science [scienza nuova] of politics.” Vico observed: “the greatest drawback of our educational methods is that we pay an excessive amount of attention to the natural sciences and not enough to ethics . Our chief fault is that we disregard that part of ethics which treats of human character, of its dispositions, its passions, and of the manner of adjusting these factors to public life and eloquence. We neglect that discipline which deals with the differential feature of virtues and vices, with good and bad behavior patterns, with the typical characteristic of the various ages of man, of the two sexes, of social and economic class, race and nation, and with the art of seemly conduct in life, the most difficult of all arts. As a consequence of this neglect, a noble and important branch of studies, i.e., the science of politics, lies almost abandoned and untended,” trans. Elio Gianturco (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1965, 33). Now we can understand why Vico drew Karl Marx’s attention.
- 14.
Italics added for emphasis. Quoted in Existential Phenomenology and Political Theory: A Reader, ed. Hwa Yol Jung (Chicago: Henry Regnery, 1972), xl–xli.
- 15.
Aron Gurwitsch, who was a colleague of Schutz at the New School University, too, argues for the methodological significance of the historico-sociocultural life-world as the basic of a phenomenological theory of all the sciences and reaches the following conclusion: “All of the sciences, including the mathematical sciences of nature, find their place within the cultural world. For that reason , according to Husserl…the cultural or human sciences prove to be all-encompassing, since they also comprise the natural sciences, i.e., mathematized nature, is itself a mental accomplishment, that is, a cultural phenomenon. The converse, however, is not true. The cultural sciences cannot be given a place among the natural sciences, any more than the cultural world can be reached beginning from mathematized nature, or, for that matter, from the thing-world, while…by taking one’s departure from the cultural world, one can arrive at the thing-world and the mathematized universe by means of abstraction, idealization, and formalization. In general, then, there is a possible transition from the concrete to the abstract, but not the reverse.” See Phenomenology and the Theory of Science, ed. Lester Embree (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1974), 148–49. Schutz’s social critique of knowledge considers scientific knowledge as a social product by focusing on the context of an intersubjective community of investigators as scientific practitioners. As such, scientific activity as a social construction of reality partakes of the social a priori of the life-world itself. See also Embree’s contribution to this volume, Chap. 4, “A Construction of Alfred Schutz’s Theory of Political Science.”
- 16.
Thomas S. Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, 2nd ed., enl. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970), 210.
- 17.
The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology: An Introduction to Phenomenological Philosophy, trans. David Carr (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1970), 51–52.
- 18.
Collected Papers I: The Problem of Social Reality, ed. Maurice Natanson (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1962), 58.
- 19.
“What Is Tradition?” New Literary History, 22 (1991): 1–21 at 11. For the concept of embodiment necessary to sociality or the social construction of reality, see Hwa Yol Jung, “In the Beginning was Embodied Sociality,” in Interaction and Everyday Life: Phenomenological and Ethnomethodological Essays in Honor of George Psathas, eds. Hisashi Nasu and Frances Chaput Waksler (Lanham: Lexington Books, 2012), 41–71.
- 20.
Rainer Maria Rilke, Rodin, trans. Jessie Lemont and Hans Trausil (London: Grey Wall Press, 1946), 33.
- 21.
Phenomenological Psychology (New York: Basic Books, 1966), 211.
- 22.
Habermas is extremely critical of phenomenology in The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity : Twelve Lectures, trans. Fredrick Lawrence (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1987), see especially Lecture XI entitled “An Alternative Way out of the Philosophy of the Subject: Communicative versus Subject-Centered Reason ,” 294–326, where phenomenology draws his heavy critical gunfire. Habermas includes Merleau-Ponty’s conception of the lived body as subject. I wonder what Habermas thinks of Marshall McLuhan’s communication theory in which the senses have reason of their own. Is Habermas a “disembodied cerebrum”?
- 23.
Existence and the World of Freedom (Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall, 1963), 54. According to Wild, we find four different kinds of phenomenon in the life-world: “man himself [or herself], the realm of nature, other men [and women] and the realm of human culture, and finally, the transcendence.” See “Interrogation of John Wild,” conducted by Henry B. Veatch in Philosophical Interrogations, eds. Sydney and Beatrice Rome (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1964), 177.
- 24.
We should mention here two important works in ethical phenomenology by Critchley: Ethics —Politics—Subjectivity: Essays on Derrida, Levinas and Contemporary French Thought (London: Verso, 1999), and The Ethics of Deconstruction: Derrida and Levinas (Oxford: Blackwell, 1992). We wish to say that ethics as first philosophy is post-ontological . It is worth noting that, for Heidegger, there are the “three basic components of phenomenological method—reduction, construction, destruction—belong together in their content and must receive grounding in their mutual pertinence. Construction in philosophy is necessarily deconstruction, that is to say, a deconstructing of traditional concepts carried out in a historical recursion to the tradition. This is not a negation of the tradition, nor a condemnation of it as worthless; quite the reverse: it signifies precisely a positive appropriation of tradition, because destruction belongs to construction, philosophical cognition is essentially at the same time, in a certain sense, historical cognition. History of philosophy, as it is called, belongs to the concept of philosophy as science (Wissenschaft), to the concept of phenomenological investigation. The history of philosophy is not an arbitrary appendage to the business of teaching, which provides an occasion for picking up some convenient and easy theme for passing an examination or even for just looking around to see how things were in earlier times.” See The Basic Problems of Phenomenology, trans. Albert Hofstadter (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1982), 23. This passage clearly adds an explanation to the importance of “historical consciousness” in Gadamer’s hermeneutics and of Derrida’s deconstructionism which is not a demolition derby or destruction for the sake of destruction.
- 25.
Collected Philosophical Papers, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Dordrecht: Martinus Nijhoff, 1987), 58.
- 26.
For a detailed account of Havel’s responsible politics, see Hwa Yol Jung, “Václav Havel’s New Statecraft of Responsible Politics,” in Phenomenology 2010, vol. 5: Selected Essays from North America. Part 2: Phenomenology Beyond Philosophy, eds. Lester Embree, Michael Barber, and Thomas J. Nenon (Bucharest: Zeta Books/Paris: Arghos-Diffusion, 2010), 177–95.
- 27.
See C. B. Macpherson, The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism (Oxford: Clarendon Press). Anthony Downs’ An Economic Theory of Democracy (New York: Harper and Row, 1957) was once, if not now, a popular text for undergraduate majors in political science. His conception of “positive political science” was preceded by Milton Friedman’s model of “positive economics .” To be “positive,” according to Downs, the model is constructed for the purpose of accurate prediction rather than of accurately describing political reality or understanding of the meaning of political phenomenon under observation. It is constructed by selecting a few crucial variables as relevant while ignoring others which may have a vital influence on and relevance to the real world of politics. Since the accuracy of their prediction rather than the reality of their assumption, the preconceptual reality of how real men and women behave in the real world of politics is immaterial to his conceptual framework. Furthermore, the rationality of human behavior is defined in terms of selfish motives and interests. Would altruistic behavior be irrational?
- 28.
The Human Condition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958), 2.
- 29.
See Hans Jonas, The Imperative of Responsibility: In Search of an Ethics for the Technological Age (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984) and Erazim Kohák, The Embers and the Stars: A Philosophical Inquiry into the Moral Sense of Nature (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984). Kohák clearly states: “To recover the moral sense of our humanity, we would need to recover first the moral sense of nature” (The Embers and the Stars, 13. Italics added for emphasis).
- 30.
Rights Talk (New York: Free Press, 1995). So far this work is the most scathing critique of the subject.
- 31.
See The Promise of Phenomenology: Posthumous Papers of John Wild, 159–68. Wild wrote “Introduction” to the English translation of Levinas’ magnum opus Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1969) (see 11–20). See also Seyla Benhabib, The Rights of Others: Aliens, Residents and Citizens (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004) in which her slogan is: “No human is illegal.”
- 32.
The anthropologist Michel-Rolph Trouillot made remarks in 1991 that would characterize the cosmopolitan outlook of the world by way of transversality and globalization. He gave us interesting samples of the world becoming more and more hybrid and thus global when he wrote: “ ‘We,’ here, is the West, as in Michael Jackson and Lionel Richie’s international hit, ‘We Are the World.’ This is not ‘the West’ in a genealogical or territorial sense. The postmodern world has little space left for genealogies, and notion of territoriality are being redefined right before our eyes…It is a world where black American Michael Jackson starts an international tour from Japan and imprints cassettes that make the rhythm of Haitian peasant families in the Cuban Sierra Maestra; a world where Florida speaks Spanish (once more); where a Socialist prime minister in Greece comes by way of New England and an imam of fundamentalist Iran by way of Paris. It is a world where a political leader in reggae-prone Jamaica traces his roots to Arabia, where United States credit cards are processed in Barbados, and Italian designer shoes are made in Hong Kong. It is a world where the Pope is Polish, where the most orthodox Marxists live on the western side of a fallen iron curtain. It is a world where the most enlightened are only part-time citizens of part-time communities of imagination .” See “Anthropology and the Savage Slot: The Poetics and Politics of Otherness,” in Recapturing Anthropology, ed. Richard G. Fox (Santa Fe: School of American Research Press, 1991), 22.
- 33.
Anthony Pagden, “The Effacement of Difference: Colonialism and the Origins of Nationalism in Diderot and Herder,” in After Colonialism, ed. Gyan Prakash (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995), 414.
- 34.
J. G. Herder on Social and Political Culture, trans. and ed. F. M. Barnard (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1969), 199.
- 35.
New York: Longmans, Green.
- 36.
Modern Social Imaginaries (Durham: Duke University Press, 2004), 23.
- 37.
Convergence amidst Difference: Philosophical Conversations across National Boundaries (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2004), 76. This gem of a small book sums up the quintessence of his work on transversal rationality across cultural and disciplinary borders in particular.
- 38.
Experiences between Philosophy and Communication: Engaging the Philosophical Contributions of Calvin O. Schrag, eds. Ramsey Eric Ramsey and David James Miller (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2003), 26.
- 39.
Dilemmas and Connections: Selected Essays (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2011), 38.
- 40.
“The New Cultural Politics of Difference,” in Out There, eds. Russell Ferguson, Martha Gever, Trin H. T. Minh-ha, and Cornel West (New York: The New Museum of Contemporary Art, 1990), 19. For the confluence of ethnic and cultural differences, besides reading Chinese fortune cookies, the factor of migration, whatever motives and circumstances might have been, is most significant, e.g., Germans, Italians, the overseas Chinese and Indians, Jews in diaspora, all around the world. See Thomas Sowell, Migrations and Cultures: A World View (New York: BasicBooks, 1996). Even the sign language of gestures migrates from one place to another.
- 41.
See Ernest Fenollosa and Ezra Pound, The Chinese Written Character as a Medium for Poetry, eds. Haun Saussy, Jonathan Stalling, and Lucas Klein (New York: Fordham University Press, 2008), 153–65. After some time past, there appeared another American philosopher’s work appeared: F. S. C. Northrop, The Meeting of East and West: An Inquiry Concerning World Understanding. Interestingly, Northrop characterized, though oversimplified, Eastern culture as “aesthetic” while Western culture as “scientific.” We can say that what he called “world understanding” is the confluence of cultural differences between East and West by way of globalization that would lead to hybridization or fusion.
- 42.
For a detailed account of Glissant’s transversal world, see Hwa Yol Jung, “Edouard Glissant’s Aesthetics of Relation as Diversality and Creolization,” in Postcolonialism and Political Theory, ed. Nalini Persram (Lanham: Lexington Books, 2007), 193–225, which included a few quoted passages in this text.
- 43.
In reading works on hybridity in Latin American countries, Joshua Lund’s edited volume drew our attention to the eye-catching phrase “impure imagination .” See The Impure Imagination toward a Critical Hybridity (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006).
- 44.
Caribbean Discourses: Selected Essays, trans. J. Michael Dash (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1989), 64.
- 45.
French original, 1945; English translation, 1962.
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Jung, H.Y. (2016). Introduction. In: Jung, H., Embree, L. (eds) Political Phenomenology. Contributions To Phenomenology, vol 84. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-27775-2_1
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