Abstract
Two dangers seem to plague many attempts to talk about the political philosophically. One is the danger of overestimation, epitomized in the claim that “everything is political,” hence that only political criteria of judgment can be employed without bad faith. The other is the danger of underestimation, failure to distinguish what is properly political from concomitant phenomena such as economic calculation, social engineering, or individual psychology. The tricky thing is to get the political clearly in view, to distinguish it from other facets of life with which it is always entangled and often confused, and to keep the terms that articulate it from becoming a “final vocabulary” or ultimate arbiter in nonpolitical matters as well.
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This essay is dedicated to the memory of Rudy Escobedo (1952–1989)—political thinker, political actor.
In the hands of Husserl and Heidegger phenomenology was resolutely anti-dialectical. A peculiar accommodation with dialectical thought was achieved during the French reception of phenomenology in the highly politicized context of the 1930s to 1950s. This reception, with its persistent attempt to fuse the phenomenologies of Hegel and Husserl, belongs as much to the history of Marxism (and to the question of “praxis”) as it does to phenomenology. A full historiographical account of this reception from a phenomenological perspective does not exist, but see Vincent Descombes, Modern French Philosophy trans. L. Scott-Fox and J. M. Harding (Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press, 1980); Herbert Spiegelberg, The Phenomenological Movement (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1982), 440–442; Jean-François Lyotard, Phenomenology, trans. Brian Beakley ( Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1991 ), 65–69.
Max Weber, “Politics as a Vocation,” in From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology, ed. H. H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills ( New York: Oxford University Press, 1946 ), 78.
Sheldon Wolin, “Democracy and the Political,” Salmagundi 60 (1983): 16, 17.
As Merleau-Ponty, writing of Weber’s stance regarding history, puts it: “Since we cannot be sure that the history within which we find ourselves is, in the end, rational, those who choose truth and freedom cannot convince those who make other choices that they are guilty of absurdity, nor can they flatter themselves with having ‘gone beyond’ them.” Maurice Merleau-Ponty, “The Crisis of Understanding,” in Adventures of the Dialectic, trans. Joseph Bien ( Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1973 ), 2526.
Jean-François Lyotard, The Differend: Phrases in Dispute, trans. George Van Den Abbeele ( Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1988 ).
To this extent, then, there are certain situations in which not even all adults are capable of any form of legitimate political action. In an Absolute Monarchy, for example, where all social behavior is construed as “duty” to the Monarch, only the Monarch has any room for political action. His advisors occupy a dangerous intermediary role, while the common people have no possibility for action at all, apart from subversion.
When Rosa Parks refuses to move to the back of the bus, this might well be a political act. Is it not based on knowledge—if not of what is right, then at least of what is wrong and intolerable? Without claiming to exhaust the issue we might point to the curious status of such knowledge. If it is moral, i.e., based on a clear consciousness of obligation, then it becomes immoral not to act as she did—a harsh judgment on many of her fellow riders. But if it was a judgment that certain social (legal) conventions were wrong, such knowledge does not seem separable from a conviction that another set of (politically negotiable) conventions are more desirable. Her feeling of being wronged is the basis of a political act of resistance that would bring about, as its end, the state of affairs (new conventions) which would allow her feeling to be phrased as a wrong for the first time, i.e., as a violation of her legal rights. My thanks to Marianne Sawicki for posing this question in correspondence.
In contrast to the moral act the political act is, as Weber suggests, like a wager. Hence the political actor, unlike the moral actor, requires “passion”—namely, “passionate devotion to a ‘cause,’ to the god or demon who is its overlord” (Weber, “Politics as a Vocation,” 115). In the face of futural uncertainty, this passion is often generated by indignation,a keen consciousness of current injustice. But knowing that some state of affairs is morally wrong cannot transform the political act “based” upon it—oriented toward a future—into one based upon knowledge of what should be done. This is in part because moral judgments concern individual acts while political judgments always implicate institutions whose relation to individual acts remains essentially indeterminate. On this matter, see the previous note.
Ronald Dworkin, “The Curse of American Politics,” New York Review of Books XLIII (October 17, 1996): 23.
Clarification of this optative intentionality requires a phenomenological account of action in light of acts of valuation (Wertnehmen). Building on the work of Robert Sokolowski, John Drummond has developed fundamental dimensions of these issues in “Moral Objectivity: Husserl’s Sentiments of Understanding,” Husserl Studies 12 (1995): 165–183; “Agency, Agents, and (Sometimes) Patients,” in The Truthful and the Good: Essays in Honor of Robert Sokolowski,ed. John Drummond and James Hart (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1996), 145–157; and “Political Community,” in this volume.
Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Garden City: Anchor Books, 1959), 158: “Without the accompaniment of speech… action would not only lose its revelatory character, but, and by the same token, it would lose its subject, as it were; not acting men but performing robots would achieve what, humanly speaking, would remain incomprehensible. Speechless action would no longer be action because there would no longer be an actor, and the actor, the doer of deeds, is possible only if he is at the same time the speaker of words.” And cf. 174: ‘The Socratic school… turned to these activities [sc. ‘law-making and city-building”] which to the Greeks were pre-political, because they wished to turn against politics and against action. To them, legislating and the execution of decisions by vote are the most legitimate political activities because in them men ‘act like craftsmen’.”
Immanuel Kant, Grounding for the Metaphysics of Morals,trans. James W. Ellington (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 1993), 27–28. A political example: What it means to build a bridge is sufficiently determined; what it means to bring about justice (or “to build a bridge to the twenty-first century”) is not—though what it means to get some particular candidate elected is,and hence this is in principle a technical problem.
For an alternative position which argues that political rationality is not compromised by the fact that the idea of the good is “indeterminate,” see Drummond, “Political Community.”
Weber, “Politics as a Vocation,” 115.
Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (New York: Harper, and Row, 1962 ), 116–17.
Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition,177–78, 185–87.
Niccolò Machiavelli, The Prince, in The Prince and the Discourses, ed. Max Lerner ( New York: Modern Library, 1950 ), 65.
Compare Weber’s neo-Machiavellian distinction between an “ethics of ultimate ends” and an “ethics of responsibility.” One who would take up politics as a vocation “lets himself in for the diabolic forces lurking in all violence.” Weber, “Politics as a Vocation,” 125–126. In another direction, the possibility of distinguishing between the moral and the political suggests a reformulation of Kierkegaard’s idea of a “teleological suspension of the ethical” in the direction of revolutionary praxis, where the State no longer possesses a higher ethical claim—as it does in Kierkegaard’s Hegelian account of Agamemnon as tragic hero—but the destruction of the State has a higher political claim. Soren Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling,trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1983), 54–67.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Social Contract, trans. Donald Cress (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1987 ), 73.
Heidegger, Being and Time,116: ‘The ‘for the sake of’ always pertains to the Being of Dasein,for which, in its Being, that very Being is essentially an issue.” Thus the context of significance, including its instrumentalities, is a function of the fact that “Dasein has assigned itself to an ‘in order to’… in terms of a potentiality-for-Being for the sake of which it itself is” (119; my emphasis).
What is the difference between philosophy and politics then? To put elliptically a matter into which we cannot enter here, the two are distinguished as are the temporalities of questioning,on the one hand, and deciding on the other. Thus, as shall be suggested in the conclusion of this essay, every political decision opens up a crevice through which the philosophical (transcendental) shines through.
Alfred Schutz, “Symbol, Reality and Society,” in Collected Papers Volume I: The Problem of Social Reality,ed. Maurice Natanson (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1973), 315ff.
On the kinds of anonymity at issue here, see Maurice Natanson, Anonymity: A Study in the Philosophy of Alfred Schutz ( Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1986 ).
In an article analyzing how the secret ballot replaced open voting in Britain and the United States, Robert Bemasconi shows the connection between the raised arm and the political production of solidarity when he notes that “open voting in the course of an election meeting could mould a dispersed mass into an effective political body conscious of its power.” Hence even while it protects the individual from coercion, adopting the principle of secret ballot also means reducing the political act to a private affair, thus further atomizing the political sphere. With regard to the newly enfranchised masses it thus “broke through the bonds that united a class of people and enabled them to see their power,” i.e., it made solidarity invisible. Robert Bemasconi, “Disembodying the Body Politic: The Ballot Box and the Price of Democratic Reform in Britain and the United States,” River City: A Journal of Contemporary Culture 15 (1995): 69.
This point is elaborated by David Carr, Time, Narrative, and History ( Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1986 ).
For a development of these points see my “Mixed Messages: The Heterogeneity of Historical Discourse,” History and Theory 37 (1998): 220–244.
This suggests why civility is a fundamental value of our political culture. For it makes possible institutions in which conflict can be managed discursively, thus political institutions that are equal to the challenge of culturally pluralistic democracy. The political actor is not obliged to be civil (politics is not a sphere of obligation), but civility’s contribution can be gauged phenomenologically. It is not equivalent to respect; I do not have to respect my opponent’s views, but without civility the political act always verges on violence. And for similar reasons civility also seems politically prior to tolerance, for it is required if we are to deliberate on the meaning of the value of tolerance itself. That such deliberation is needed is shown in T. M. Scanlon, “The Difficulty of Tolerance,” in Toleration: An Elusive Virtue,ed. David Heyd (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996), 226–239.
Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self ( Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989 ), 518.
Weber, “Politics as a Vocation,” 117ff.
One who has taken up these problems explicitly in many essays over the years is Karl-Otto Apel. See, for example, his Diskurs und Verantwortung ( Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1988 ).
Weber, “Politics as a Vocation,” 125f.
Joshua Miller shows how a similar problem emerges for William James’s pragmatism when the psychological support for action derived from belief in a fixed, absolute truth collides with the idea of a “pluralistic universe” which can contain no such absolutes. Joshua Miller, “Truth in the Experience of Political Actors: William James on Democratic Action,” in The Prism of the Self Philosophical Essays in Honor of Maurice Natanson, ed. Steven G. Crowell ( Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1995 ), 131–146.
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Crowell, S.G. (2000). Who is the Political Actor? An Existential Phenomenological Approach. In: Thompson, K., Embree, L. (eds) Phenomenology of the Political. Contributions to Phenomenology, vol 38. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-2606-1_3
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