Leswin Laubscher, Derek Hook, Miraj U. Desai (Eds.): Fanon, Phenomenology, and Psychology, Routledge, 2022

Fanon, Phenomenology, and Psychology Book Cover Fanon, Phenomenology, and Psychology
Edited By Leswin Laubscher, Derek Hook, Miraj U. Desai
Routledge
2022
Hardback
304

Reviewed by: Michael Blezy

Introduction

What exactly Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks contributes to the field of phenomenology is difficult to pin down. Although the text conveys its insights in the distinct vocabulary of phenomenology and its description and analysis of experience recognizably parallels the efforts of phenomenologists such as Husserl, Sartre and Merleau-Ponty, it is not immediately clear how Fanon’s work is supposed to relate to these thinkers or the phenomenological tradition he draws from.

For instance, does Fanon take himself to be merely applying, say, Husserlian or Sartrean phenomenology to a new or underexplored domain of phenomena while leaving the basic tenants of their phenomenology intact? Or is Fanon’s work much more ambitious, aiming not only to expand upon or supplement the work of his fellow phenomenologists, but to offer a fundamental challenge to their work? And if Fanon is offering a fundamental challenge to traditional phenomenology, is this challenge supposed to bring about an immanent transformation of phenomenology? Or is it supposed to call into question the very phenomenological enterprise and what it is capable of achieving?

Due to the lack of clarity on these basic issues, scholarly assessments of Fanon’s contribution to phenomenology vary widely. Reaction to Fanon’s phenomenological work ranges from complete neglect (Fanon’s name is not even mentioned in Moran’s (2000) Introduction to Phenomenology) to disparaging (consider Macy’s (2012, p. 132) assessment that “Fanon is not a terribly sophisticated phenomenologist”), to Fanon’s work being celebrated for its importance and originality and for moving the field of phenomenology in an exciting new direction. For instance, Karera (2020), speaking for a number of contemporary scholars that utilize phenomenology to explore issues of race, gender and politics (Guenther 2020; Weiss, Murphy, & Salamon 2020), heralds Fanon as one the key figures whose work ushered in a new era of politically-informed, “critical” phenomenology.

It is with a longstanding interest in precisely pinning down Fanon’s relationship to phenomenology that I eagerly dove into Fanon, Phenomenology, and Psychology, a collection of essays organized around Fanon’s contribution to a number of contemporary philosophical topics. In particular, I was encouraged to see that the editors and contributors took Fanon’s relation to phenomenology seriously, and that one of the editors’ main motivations for bringing together the collection was to shed light on the nature of Fanon’s phenomenology:

[A] rigorous exploration of Fanon’s distinctive uses and forms of phe­nomenology  emerged as one of the foremost motivations for this edited collection. As we began the  literature review that formed the first research task of this book, it quickly became apparent that there have been a number of excellent studies of Fanon’s uses of   phenomenology (many of which we have been fortunate enough to include in the pages that follow). The problem with this literature was not its content, but its distribution: Without dedicated searching and access to suitable academic databases and libraries, this literature remained so scattered and inaccessible that it has seemed, historically, as if it had almost completely fallen through the cracks of Fanon studies … [The] the appeal to experience, and more directly yet, the appeal to the lived experience of the Black man, is   an absolutely irreducible and crucial aspect of Black Skin, White Masks. At the risk of    being dramatic: There would be no Black Skin, White Masks without this method of        description and engagement. Fanon’s uses of phenomenology – which, as several of the     following chapters show, did not leave phenomenology unchanged – proved a condition   of possibility for that book, and, extending our argument, for much of what was most    compelling, visceral, and innovative within it. (2022, p. 7-8)

 

In what follows, I want to draw upon the contributions to Fanon, Phenomenology, and Psychology in order to say a bit more about how it is Fanon stands vis-a-vis phenomenology. I will not offer a summary of each of the articles in the collection. Not only would this be tedious for the reader, but the editors of the collection give an overview of the text and succinctly sum up each of the individual contributions in their introduction (p. 1-10). Instead, I want to specifically draw upon the contributors’ accounts of Fanon’s phenomenology and, further, critically evaluate these accounts, so as to bring new clarity to the relationship between Fanon and phenomenology.

Phenomenology and the Search for Structure

More than simply the fact that scholarly work on Fanon’s phenomenology has been scattered or inaccessible, it is the inherent difficulties with interpreting Fanon’s descriptions of experience and longstanding ambiguities and confusions regarding phenomenology itself that has resulted in a lack of clarity regarding Fanon’s contribution to the field. Black Skin, White Masks in particular, with its semi-autobiographical, fragmented, stream of consciousness way of proceeding, requires a large amount of philosophical reconstruction if something like arguments or positions are to be derived from it (including phenomenological ones).

Fortunately, for my purposes here, an overview of the ways in which Fanon’s phenomenology is characterized by the contributors to Fanon, Phenomenology, and Phenomenology will allow me to quickly get to the heart of the matter. By outlining the ways in which the contributors of the collection characterize (and, unfortunately, mischaracterize) Fanon’s phenomenological approach, the points of contact between Fanon and the phenomenological tradition he engages with will quickly be established.  

Before setting off on such a task, however, I think it will be useful for the reader if I briefly offer an account of how it is I understand phenomenology. By clarifying some of the key characteristics of phenomenology, as well as providing some philosophical distinctions that will allow me to more precisely differentiate between phenomenological accounts, Fanon’s relationship to phenomenology can be more accurately assessed.

In the Introduction to the recently published 50 Concepts for a Critical Phenomenology, the editors open the text in the following way:

Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology of Perception begins with a question: ‘What is   phenomenology?’ Nearly three-quarters of a century later, this question remains  unanswered. (2020, p. xiii)

Despite the inherent difficulties involved in definitively characterizing a field of philosophical investigation that is continually transforming as it critiques itself and finds new areas of application, I think the above claim is an exaggeration. And, frankly, I don’t believe the editors truly ascribe to it. A few pages later in the Introduction to 50 Concepts for a Critical Phenomenology, we are offered the following account of phenomenology which, at least in broad outline, marks out some of the key characteristics that belong to phenomenology:

One of phenomenology’s … methodological commitments is the refusal to accept     the taken-for-grantedness of experience. This commitment entails the perpetual   interrogation of the most familiar features of our everyday experience, not to deny them  but in order to know the better … Phenomenology is marked by a faith that such   descriptions can disclose the most basic structures of human existence … as these structures are brought into relief, our understand of our own experience is transformed, and our deepest assumption about our very being in the world may be challenged. (Ibid.)

Besides the regrettable characterization of phenomenology as marked by a “faith” that its description can disclose fundamental structures (there is no such faith, phenomenology is committed to its descriptions yielding such structures), this account nicely outlines at least three central features of phenomenology. In general, it can be said that phenomenology:

  • Does not accept as true any claim about the nature of our experience unless it is demonstrated by a means of a descriptive interrogation of experience. In part, this is the meaning of Husserl’s call to return to the “things” or “matters” themselves. Only what can be exhibited through the interrogation of experience should be philosophically adhered to.
  • Offers a descriptive interrogation of experience that does not simply lie content with more accurate, or perhaps even more rich and nuanced, descriptions of experience. Its descriptions are undertaken with a certain aim in mind: to reveal the “structures” (indeed, the most fundamental structures) of experience. I will say more about this below.
  • Concretely brings to light the structures of experience – an undertaking that transforms our relation to experience.

I think the main challenge offered by Fanon to traditional phenomenology revolves around a disagreement about how exactly the structures outlined in (2) are to be understood. However, before elaborating on (2), I want to briefly say something about (1) and (3).

Boldly stated, phenomenology’s goal of revealing structures of experience proceeds by way of an interrogative description of experience that concretely makes these structures apparent to the phenomenologist. For this reason, the task of providing better or more accurate accounts of what experience is like is not primary motivated by the goal of simply providing us with more nuanced or insightful accounts of our experience. Rather, phenomenology proceeds with an eye to reveal what makes experiences, and, indeed, experience as such, possible.

I want to suggest that this is the case no matter how important or meaningful the experiences interrogated may be to us. Indeed, “applied” phenomenology may offer us valuable clarifications and correctives regarding everything from what it like to undergo an emotional state to what it is like to sail a boat, to fall in love, play a video game or even give birth. However, such descriptions of what experience is like, although achieved by a descriptive turn to experience itself, do not necessarily satisfy the phenomenological aim of getting at the underlying phenomenological structures that make these experiences or experience itself possible. Indeed, it is the unearthing of structure that ultimately distinguishes phenomenology from mere psychological description, first-person reporting, or what an artist, poet, novelist or naturalist does when they attempt to depict or faithfully describe some aspect of our being in the world. In each of these instances, there is a turn to “things” or “matters” themselves – and in a loose sense, these things or matters provide the standard by which we judge the description – but they are not strictly speaking “phenomenological” in that the uniquely philosophical aim of exhibiting the underlying structures can fail to be undertaken. 

We can begin to understand phenomenology’s transformative dimension ((3) above) by noting that it can operate at two levels. First, it is common knowledge that undergoing experiences – philosophical or otherwise – results in a change in our relation to experience. Colloquially, we describe experiences as “marking us” or “giving a new perspective on life,” where what we are saying is that undergoing certain experiences transform who and what we are, and to such a degree, that they inform how it is we come to be disposed toward our experience. For instance, illness, the death of a loved one, the profound realizations we have in the face of art or nature – these experiences recontextualize lived experience in such a way that features and dimensions of the world are revealed to us that we had not experienced before. In a similar way, engaging in phenomenological descriptions – casting off our assumptions and theories about experience and paying heed to what it is experience itself offers or makes available to us – can occasion an experiential shift, perhaps even an irreversible shift, in how it is we experience ourself and the world.

However, phenomenology’s transformative power can also operate at a second, deeper level. Insofar as phenomenology is not solely concerned with descriptions of what lived experience is like, but interrogates experience in order to unearth structures, phenomenology involves a methodological maneuver that recontextualizes our relation with experience in a way that is not typically experienced when we are dealing with experience on the first level. Whether this maneuver is Husserl’s epoché, Heidegger’s destructive-hermeneutic analytic of Dasein, Sartre’s unearthing “the being of phenomenon” by descriptively mapping out the parameters of the existential situation (the “phenomenon of being”), or Merleau-Ponty’s expounding the worldly correlates of our bodily flesh, phenomenology involves a methodological re-orientation that, more than simply providing a unique kind of philosophical experience, fundamentally transforms our relation to experience itself.

What I am stressing here is that phenomenology reconstrues our relation to experience by turning it into a special field of philosophical investigation: experience as such and its possibility. By so transforming our relation to experience, the possibility arises not only of securing a whole new source of knowledge (that is, a phenomenological knowledge that would simply exist alongside the forms that concern objects found in experience). Rather, what we discover about ourselves and the world can bring about a change in how our experience of the world at the first level is to be understood, and so potentially motivate us to transform the very way we occupy or navigate such a world.

That what phenomenology interrogates is experience as such and its possibility nicely leads to a discussion regarding the all-important second feature of phenomenology ((2) outlined above): that its main aim is to disclose the structures of experience. Indeed, thinkers like Husserl, Heidegger, Sartre, and Merleau-Ponty have provided different philosophical accounts regarding how exactly it is that phenomenological structures are to be understood (coming down differently on issues such as how it is the structures and what they structure is to be conceived of, the basis or ultimately ground of such structures, the connection between the structures and ontology, etc.). However, each of these phenomenologists are committed to the phenomenological discovery of structures, where these structures are supposed to account for how certain experiences are possible or, more fundamentally, the very possibility of experience.

Fanon and Phenomenology

Phenomenology takes up the task, arguably first initiated and pursued by thinkers like Descartes and Kant, of expounding the conditions of the possibility of experience, where this is to be understood as expounding the a priori conditions of possibility that allow for there to be something like experience as such and without which there would be no experience (and not just the absence of this or that experience). Whether it is such structures as the intentional nature of consciousness or the unity of apperception in Husserl, “attunement” in Heidegger, the “Look” which Sartre’s argues defines our being with others or Merleau-Ponty’s account of the objectivizing structure of perception, phenomenology aims to reveal the fundamental structures that allow for experience (e.g., intentionality, temporality, affectivity, intersubjectivity, perception, language, etc.) and which enables us to navigate the world.

Now, to a certain extent, many of the contributors to Fanon, Phenomenology, and Psychology recognize that the search for such structure is the ultimate aim of phenomenology and that Fanon provides his descriptions of experience in order to ultimately reveal such structure. Miraj. U. Desai, for instance, proposes to read Fanon “phenomenologically,” where this involves, crucially, an “attention to structure”: namely, the “invariant” structures that Fanon himself claims to have discovered in Black Skin, White Masks and which Desai’s article proposes to unearth and interrogate anew (2022, p. 75).

However, it is worth noting that when it comes to actually saying something about these structures, Desai (1) narrowly conceives of them as structures that underlie and make possible particular ways of engaging with objects found in experience (specifically, Desai has in mind the experience of creating an artwork or composing a piece of writing) and (2) identifies phenomenological structures with a range of material determinates (historical, social, political and even geographical) that create personal identity, without clarifying in what sense these determinates are “invariant” or what (if anything) they have in common or how they might work together to make experience possible (Ibid., p. 74). The result is that the account of structure here remains merely at the level of objects of experience and the generation of particular sorts of psychological states, without clarifying the nature of the “invariant” conditions that would underpin these very material determinates. Consider the following passage:

            Fanon’s greatest originality came from examining colonialism via the lens of         psychopathology and personal identity via the lens of colonial violence. Hook (2005, 2012) articulated Fanon’s ‘materialist psychology’ that demonstrated how racist  encounters and gazes strip away a person’s embodied subjectivity and resources for personal and cultural identity … social ills like pov­erty, antisemitism, racism, and colonialism [are not to be] minimized to mere mental states. As was suggested above, Fanonian investigations necessarily connected psychological structures to political,  socioeconomic, and geographical ones. (Ibid., p. 80)

To be perfectly clear: Fanon is keen to demonstrate that various social-historical determinates structure experience and lie at the basis of our psychology and personal identity, as well as bring into being different forms of psychopathology. Additionally, phenomenology can be concerned with the structures that inform particular kinds of intentional states and show how concrete, material reality provides intentionality with the matter to occasion its various states. However, at the deepest level, these structural determinates are not to be understood, following Derek Hook’s interpretation (which Desai quotes approvingly above), in straightforward materialist terms. If Fanon was simply interested in straightforwardly enumerating the material conditions that create our identities in a particular social-historical situation, then (1) his account would be far too specific (and so lack the necessary “invariance”) to be strictly phenomenological, and (2) would risk eliding the phenomenological task of articulating the structural conditions that underlie, inform, and govern any and all instances of material reality. Indeed, as Nelson Maldonado Torres points out, the more basic structures that phenomenologists seek to discover—e.g., embodiment, intersubjectivity, language, etc.—are what make possible our very experience of “being,” regardless of its material makeup in any given point in history or social organization:

            [Specific] cultural and structural analyses are not enough to [exhaustively] explore the … formation of subjectivity … and [in particular] of [phenomenological] structures. For this, Fanon takes a philosophical approach that considers … the formation of subjectiv­ity  as subjects relate to basic aspects of human experience: embodiment, intersubjective contact (via language and love), time, and space … Time, space, embodied subjectivity, and intersubjectivity play a key role in the formation of what is often defined as Being. (Ibid., p. 91)

A Torres stresses, these deep phenomenological structures cannot be straightforwardly identified with concrete material conditions. If Fanon’s descriptions of his lived experience are to be understood “phenomenologically,” then the relation between the phenomenological structure and material reality, as well as the sense in which the latter relate to the former, needs to be exhibited.

If a materialist interpretation of Fanonian structural determinates overlooks and presupposes the fundamental structures that his phenomenology is after, then a Hegelian account also fails to help us see what Fanon is up to. First, Fanon does not conceive of the discovery of phenomenological structure as the outcome of a dialectical process whereby consciousness’ one-sided descriptions of thought/being continually force it to reconstrue itself until it is resolved in identity. Second, for Fanon, capturing the basic phenomenological structures does not necessarily result in consciousness that is capable of overcoming its alienation from being—especially, if overcoming alienation does not simply involve consciousness’ overcoming of its distinction from being, but, ultimately, forms of social alienation and oppression. Consider the following passages from Jean Khalfa and Lou Tuner:

 Black Skin, White Masks could be read as a phenomenology of the colonized   consciousness. ‘Phenomenology’ in a Hegelian sense first: It is the narration of the various stations and figures of consciousness through which mind, in history at large as well as in the history of an individual, first experiences and then endeavors to resolve    the various forms of its own alienation. (Ibid., p. 49)

[Hegel allows us to see that] the ‘fact’ of Fanon’s ‘black skin’… doesn’t remain at the  level of perception, but is instead elevated, in the sense of its determination to appear,  and reflected back in the look of the very subject whose bodily schema had been       racialized. Internal intuition breaks down the ontology of the colonial or racialized situation into a process of becoming wherein the inherent defects of the Manichean  world are also [to quote Hegel] ‘endowed with the impulse of self-development’ … This, in Fanon’s terms, represents the agency of the Negro, or that which becomes the revolutionary process of decolonization in his later works. Internal intuition, in short, is the method and means by which Fanon’s comprehension of the ‘colonial situation’  entails both the logic of its existence, i.e., its phenomenology, and the dialectic of its    overcoming. (Ibid., p. 68)

Although these two scholars draw on very different aspects of Hegel, they are both in agreement that Fanon’s phenomenology should be understood in a Hegelian register. The passages suggest that (1) consciousness in Fanon (or rather a particular form of consciousness, colonized consciousness) will work through various stages until it grasps its experience and, moreover, (2) this process will occasion consciousness’ to overcoming its social alienation, which is to say, that there is an impulse to (revolutionary) self-development built into this process.  

Although what consciousness’ comes to learn about its experience by the end of the Phenomenology of Spirit may overlap in certain respects with Black Skin, White Masks (e.g., it may be the case that, say, what we now call discourse is essential dimension of consciousness’ grasp of the world, including how we interpret skin color), the specific way Fanon reveals these structures via phenomenological description, however, bears little to no resemblance to Hegel’s progressive, dialectical account of consciousness’ overcoming its alienation. What is more, coming to knowledge of phenomenological structures for Fanon does not necessarily awaken in consciousness an impulse, much less a social-political program, to achieve recognition of other subjects.

While Fanon certainly argues that colonial situations are unacceptable and ought and can be transformed, he is not committed to the idea that his phenomenological depictions of the colonized subject’s experience are necessarily “endowed with the impulse of self-development.” Indeed, it may be the case that recognizing the structures that underpin experience as such may give us clues or suggest strategies as to how we can bring about such a transformation (e.g., new forms of representation, the reconsidering of language and its importance). However, there is no clear connection between unearthing phenomenological structures and the transforming of the cultural coordinates that imprison consciousness in certain pernicious social forms and self-conceptions. Indeed, it is entirely possible that a transformation of the culture or political situation informed by a knowledge of its underlying structures may come to imprison subjects in new pernicious forms.

Body and Discourse

If Fanon’s phenomenology is not limited to shedding light on a particular material, social-political set up and what it is like to live in such a set up (with its forms of social and political oppressions and accompanying pathologies), but attempts to lay bare the underlying structural conditions that make experience possible (a knowledge that does not necessarily point in any straightforward manner the way to overcoming an intolerable social-political situation), then what exactly is his contribution to this field of knowledge? And what, if any, are the ramifications or consequences this phenomenological account has for politics (broadly construed) if it doesn’t tell us how to overcome social and political forms of alienation and oppression?

These are big questions to tackle, and I will certainly not be able to provide satisfying answers here, especially when it comes to the thorny issue regarding the relation between phenomenology and politics. However, I think an answer to the first question begins to take shape by taking a look at how some of the contributors to Fanon, Phenomenology, and Psychology helpfully characterize Fanon’s account of two inter-related phenomenological structures in particular: the body and discourse.   

Fanon is certainly not the first phenomenologist to make the case that the body is to be counted amongst the transcendental conditions of experience. Husserl, Sartre, de Beauvoir and, of course, Merleau-Ponty each have offered accounts of the body and its role in structuring the world. More than any other phenomenologist, however, it is clearly Merleau-Ponty that has cast the greatest shadow over Fanon’s thinking about the body. This influence comes through in the very conceptual tools Fanon uses to articulate his insights, as well as in the way scholars depict Fanon’s account of living in a black body under a system of colonialism. Consider the following passages from Jean Khalfa, Derek Hook and Athena V. Coleman:

[T]he body [is] not only … a thing within the world but also as a ‘posture’ or as a condition for a primordial interrogative relationship to the world, a condition for the constitution of the given as world … The system of racism leads to the real loss of    this interrogative body, revealed by phenomenology, which is instantly turned into a thing. (p. 49-51)

            In the white world the man of color encounters difficulties in the development of his  bodily schema … the black man suffers from his body quite differently from the white     man. (p. 117)

In contrast to the universality of the corporeal schema, Fanon discovers a multiplicity of   schemas that shape those subjects and moments excluded by the corporeal schema …     Fanon’s rereading of phenomenology and psychology opens up the question of [what is responsible for] structuring schemas, which structures … our connections to others. (p. 133)

The main idea is that Fanon, following Merleau-Ponty, is committed to the idea that the body plays a structural role in making our experience of the world possible. The body, understood along these lines, is not to be strictly identified with a thing or with anything thing-like. Things are found in or occupy the world opened up by the body. “Corporeal schema” (sometimes translated as “body schema” or “bodily schema”) is Merleau-Ponty’s term for the fundamental “posture” of bodily being that allows for an openness to the world insofar as it enables an array of possible movements and mobilizing projects that extend from us to our surroundings; a pre-reflective structure that lets the world meaningfully appear as the bodily correlate we competently navigate and in which we discover things that we can seamlessly take up and utilize (“interrogate”).

But not only that. This structure, as condition opens us to a world and lets it be experienced, also opens us up to and exposes us to others, that is to say, to the perspective of other similarly constituted bodily beings. To claim then that Fanon’s account of the black body under colonialism demonstrates (1) that the corporeal schema encounters difficulties in its development, and (2) that the bodily perspective that, fundamentally, opens up the world of things is itself made thing-like, is to draw attention to one of the main conclusions of Black Skin, White Masks: the body, or more precisely, the corporeal schema, despite being a condition of possibility of having a world, cannot be straightforwardly universalized.

It is here that the bodily schema needs to be seen as bound up with another condition of possibility: discourse. Although bodily being is pre-reflective in that the bodily integration and engagement with our surroundings does not necessarily involve the intellectual contribution thinkers such as Kant and Husserl would ascribe to it, the body is in each case bound up with a particular discursive context that delimits and shapes the body’s mobilizing projects. “Discourse,” as I am using the term here, is not limited to the linguistic or conceptual; it does not simply refer to a societies’ possibilities of talking or thinking. It extends to the material deposits of a greater symbolic order: images, spatial arrangements, print media, as well as gestures, comportments and other forms of social signifying all contribute to discourse.

Fanon’s idea is that the discursive milieu established by colonialism – with its binaries, asymmetries, and exclusions – ends up carving up, categorizing and segregating bodies along the lines of colonized/colonized or black/white. This comes to be internalized not only at the level of individual psychologies or self-conceptions, but actually informs the very way bodies come to orient themselves and establish relations with things and people in space. Specifically, the black body, having its exploration of space be in each case mediated through an awareness of how it stands vis-à-vis a white world and its occupants – an awareness, mind you, that does not necessary extend in the other direction. The result is not only that the possibilities for bodily exploration and usage are frustrated or limiting, but continually forced to fold back on itself in consideration of a hostile, yet mostly indifferent, white other. As Helen Ngo puts it:

[R]acism not only becomes interiorized but ‘epidermalized’- or in phenomenological  terms, lived and inhabited bodily … embodiment becomes marked by a kind of bodily schema fragmentation … Everything is anticipated, thought out, demonstrated, made the most of. (p. 194-5)

Indeed, Fanon not only uses his phenomenology to put pressure on the notion of a universal bodily schema, his descriptions of bodily being under colonialism also call into question how it is we should characterize the struggle for recognition: to be for the other as fellow subject and not object or thing. The black body is forced to continually turn its gaze back on itself insofar as its bodily being is one that is shaped through a discursive context that forces it to consider itself in relation to a white other that does not repay it in kind. Everything from lighting a cigarette to finding a seat on a bus becomes conditioned by the asymmetrical colonial relationship that reifies the colonized black as it acknowledges the white. Under such social-political conditions, the struggle to be recognized as a subject via the other is not characterized by the unfolding of any sort of progressive logic, but is already predetermined at a level of the body and its worldly conditioning. The discourse of colonialism seemingly precludes the very possibility that the colonized can initiate a relation between subjects with the colonizer. As Lewis R. Gordan nicely puts this point:

[The] racialized schema below the [vicissitudes and outcomes of the] Hegelian [lordship/bondage relation] addresses contradictions that are not of a dialectical kind. The call for [a distinctly] Black Consciousness already demands addressing a ‘lived reality’ … but one that has not been acknowledged as such … The consequence is the retort: At least the other is an other. To become such initiates ethical relations. (p. 223)

Íngrid Vendrell Ferran (Ed.): Else Voigtländer: Self, Emotion, and Sociality, Springer, 2023

Else Voigtländer: Self, Emotion, and Sociality Book Cover Else Voigtländer: Self, Emotion, and Sociality
Íngrid Vendrell Ferran
Springer
2023
Hardback
IX, 245

Reviewed by: Konstantin Hokamp (Europa Universität Viadrina)

In many ways, the volume edited by Ingríd Vendrell Ferran is seemingly set up for failure. That is by no means due to the illustrious list of contributors or the importance of its subject matter, but rather due to the tasks it sets out to achieve – providing a building block towards a „new genealogy” of phenomenology by shining light on the life, philosophical and psychological work, and politics of a little-known figure in the history of phenomenology – Else Voigtländer. As Ferran states in the introduction to the volume, while scholarly efforts have been made to highlight the contribution of women to the history of phenomenology those efforts have been focused on Edith Stein and Hedwig Conrad-Martius. Fittingly, almost everyone who has worked on Voigtländer in recent years contributed to the volume.

Vendrell Ferran hypothesizes that this might very well be linked to two factors among others: Voigtländer did not pursue an academic career after her PhD and as a very early figure in the Phenomenological Movement is rarely cited in the work of other phenomenologists, despite being among the first to publish on the topic of Ressentiment inauthentic feelings. She was omitted from Herbert Spiegelbergs canon-building work History of the Phenomenological Movement and has thus received little attention, even though almost all her work is publicly available in a digital format. The caveat being that there are no English translations.

The volume aims to contribute to rewriting the phenomenological canon and give readers a good entryway into Voigtländer’s thought while dealing with the fact that as an NSDAP member and director of the women’s prison Waldheim, Voigtländer seems like a problematic political figure to say the least. All these goals by themselves are desiderata for the history of phenomenology and the history of Women in the history of Philosophy and Sciences (The Series the volume is published in). They might be too much to achieve in a single volume, but they do make for a good one with a broad range of topics and readings of Voigtländer.

The book is structured in four parts with expert contributions on key aspects of Voigtländers philosophy. The first part is made up of only two articles, while all the other comprise three contributions.The volume is  opened by an article-length introduction by Ingrid-Vendrell Ferran that highlights the themes I laid out and gives an outline of Else Voigtländer’s Life and key philosophical themes and concepts. Ferran stresses the importance of including the Munich School of Phenomenology in research on the history of Phenomenology and the current state of Voigtländer research and sources on Voigtländer. She does a brilliant job juxtaposing Voigtländers published articles with archival evidence, such as her PHD report and correspondence. Only the information on the latter could have been slightly more precise. While the article seems to indicate that there are numerous letters to be found, the known correspondence with Ludwig Klages is limited to a letter by Klages on an editorial issue [cf. DLA Marbach A:Klages, the contents of Letters in the Klages collection may not be publicized at this point], which is likely also the case for her correspondence with Kippenberg which I was not able to access.

Part I: Sources and Influences

The first of four parts engages with Voigtländer’s work by dealing with two „sources and influences”. In „Value in Existence: Lotze, Lipps and Voigtländer on Feelings of Self-Worth” Philipp Schmidt compares Voigtländer notion of Self-Feeling to that of Hermann Lotze and her PhD supervisor Theodor Lipps who both held the position that self-experience is grounded in a feeling of some sorts. He concludes that Voigtländer was largely able to develop her notion of self-feelings by drawing on ideas from the Romantic philosopher C.G. Carus and Friedrich Nietzsche and combining them with the insights of Lotze and Lipps. He reconstructs Lotze’s theory as highlighting the importance of feelings of pleasure and pain as motivators for self-interest, while Lipps broadened the range of what qualifies as a feeling with an emphasis on the fact, that feelings are differentiated from other psychic phenomena by emphasizing that feelings directly constitute the self. He introduces the term ‘Selbstgefühl’ but is unclear on whether they are the result of conscious deliberation or a form of pre-reflective self-appraisal. Schmidt then introduces and explains Voigtländer’s theory of self-feelings as a stratified pre-reflective form of consciousness, that is largely determined by a person’s biological constitution but also subject to intersubjective determining factors like the judgment of others. He then goes on to argue that Voigtländer would not have been able to arrive at this position without drawing on a Nietzschean value-relativism and a vitalistic notion of unconscious life force similar to the Lebensphilosophie of Ludwig Klages and Carl-Gustav Carus. He does so both to indicate the originality of Voigtländers proposal as well as a warning sign against integrating her theory into the canon of phenomenologically informed theories that stress the importance of the affective sphere for cognition all too quickly because the vitalist intuitions undergirding it are closely linked to the development of racial psychology.

The second entry by practising psychoanalyst Thomas Barth attempts to reconstruct Else Voigtländer’s relationship with and impact on psychoanalysis.

Voigtänder was the first German academic psychologist to publish a paper on Freud in 1911, received a letter in return and was a member of the Berlin Local group of the International Psychoanalytic Association from 1912 to 1915. After leaving the group she went on to publish a paper on the notion of unconsciousness in 1916 and dealt with psychoanalysis yet again in a 1928 paper on welfare education in which she highlighted the potential benefits of psychoanalysis. From a critical note regarding Freud‘s lacking appreciation of the importance of innate character to a dismissal of anything unconscious that cannot become unconscious to a recommendation of giving welfare education staff psychoanalytic training Barth reconstructs how Voigtländer „met psychoanalysis with appreciation, ambiguity, and sometimes harsh criticism.” (59) He then goes on to outline the reactions of psychoanalysts to Voigtländers articles as well as speculatively drawing parallels between Voigtländers thought and later developments in psychoanalysis, indicating a potential parallel between her notion of inauthentic mirror-self feelings likening them to notions of Winnicott, Lacan and Helene Deutsch. His final verdict is that Voigtländer mainly used Psychoanalysis to serve as a negative foil to assess her theories and outlines further opportunities for research. One aspect of Voigtländers relationship to Freud that might have been highlighted yet is missing is the analysis Willy Haas, a fellow student of Theodor Lipps who also potentially drew on psychoanalytic concepts yet never explicitly named psychoanalysis as a source in his disserting underwent with Freud. Barth refers to Ulrike May’s work on the subject but unfortunately does not draw a parallel. It is only a minor omission but one that could easily have been avoided.

Part II: Affectivity and Value

The second part focuses on a central theme of many early phenomenologists and works towards the goal of the new genealogy by contrasting Voigtländer’s theory of sentiments with that of Alexander Pfänder and Gerda Walther and her take on Ressentiment, a topic she was the first phenomenologist to publish on with those of Max Scheler and Adolf Reinach. In addition, an entire article is dedicated to the systematic importance of Voigtländer’s view on erotic love. It partially overlaps with the article on sentiments but delves deeper into its subject matter.

Genki Uemura attempts to reconstruct Voigtländer’s analysis of benevolence in her 1931 contribution to a Festschrift for Pfänder „Bemerkungen zur Psychologie der Gesinnungen” and compares it to the phenomenological analysis Alexander Pfänder provides in his 1913/1916 work on the subject. He reads Voigtländer as saying that contrary to Pfänder’s view positive sentiments – a term Pfänder uses rather unusually to talk about other-directed evaluative affective phenomena like love and hate or benevolence or malevolence – are made into a category of their own exclusively by features of their respective centrifugal streams of feeling, while their respective acts of unification (Vereinigung) and position-taking vary greatly. While love always entails an attraction to its object, an interest (Anteilnahme) in the affirmation, both are missing for benevolence. Uemura then goes on to argue, that this does not pose a problem for Pfänder’s analysis of actual sentiments but might well be problematic for his theory of non-actual sentiments. Uemura stresses that Voigtländer arrives at these conclusions while staying true to the methodological commitments of Pfänder. He then compares Voigtländer’s position to that of Gerda Walther who takes the unification found in positive sentiments as a fundamental building factor for social communities. He suggests that to most plausibly incorporate Voigtländer’s strong differentiation between love and positive sentiments Walther would have to contend that only love plays this foundational role while other positive sentiments do not. Thereby Uemura wants to show the originality of Voigtländers without claiming that it was intended as an intentional criticism of her contemporaries.

Toru Yaegashi in his more systematic approach aims to develop Voigtländers views on erotic love that Voigtländer criticizing Simmel, strongly differentiates from sexual desire. She holds the sphere of the erotic to be fully distinct from that of the sexual and argues for a phenomenological separability of sexual love and erotic love even in heterosexual relationships. Yaegashi reconstructs Voigtländer’s view on the difference between love and benevolence much in the same way Uemura does but adds that love and hate are less reactive than benevolence and malevolence which tend to fade away once the situation that motivated them has passed. He then goes on to elaborate on the object side of love – the value of the loved object, aiming to work out Voigtländers position in the debate on value realism by comparing her view to that of Dietrich von Hildebrand and Max Scheler – the staunches value realists among the early phenomenologists whose position she reconstructs as being that „we sometimes love correctly and sometimes incorrectly the object whose value is independent of our love”. (94) Voigtländer on the other hand argues, that there are cases, where no value of the beloved is given in experience while love itself is experienced. She differentiates between the qualitative value an object has and three kinds of value bestowed on the object by love. By differentiating these kinds of values, Voigtländer can criticise a rationalization of the idealization involved in love as well as develop a concept of genuine love that acknowledges the flaws of the beloved. Yaegashi concludes that Voigtländer’s forgotten phenomenology of erotic love is both interesting in contrast to the late Husserl’s more ethicized view of love and that it may well prove productive in dialogue with Feminist Philosophy and queer theory because it goes against the grain of connecting love with its reproductive function.

[Both contributions are exquisitely structured and argued and reconstruct Voigtländer’s position quite well. Yet they both could have paid closer attention to Pfänder’s text and especially his position on the necessity of non-actual sentiments and of non-actual love for the continued existence of actual sentiments. This is especially true for Uemura who directly refers to Pfänder’s notion and would have been an interesting way to highlight the differences between Pfänder’s and Walther’s theory.]

Ingríd Vendrell Ferran contributes a text on the Phenomena of Ressentiment and Self-Deception in the works of Else Voigtländer, who was the first phenomenologist to publish on the subject in her 1910 dissertation, Max Scheler who published Über Ressentiment und moralisches Werturteil (unfortunately referred to by the title of a slightly reversed 1915 version „Das Ressentiment im Aufbau der Moralen”) in 1912 and Adolf Reinach who worked on the subject in his Grundzüge der Ethik (1913). She first reconstructs the individual positions and then compares them with a focus on the origins of Ressentiment, its ontology (105) the psychological mechanisms responsible for it. For Voigtländer, Ressentiment occurs due to a person experiencing a lack in her vital self-feeling (the part of the pre-reflective self-consciousness outlined above that is due to the biological constitution) by devaluing others to improve her conscious feeling of self-worth. She reconstructs this as Ressentiment being an „affective background orientation whose main target is the self and which aims at compensating a weakness with an exaggerated, modified and unrealistic self-assessment.” (107) In conceptualizing the process Voigtländer follows Nietzsche by understanding it as involving both a modification of perceived affective states and value experiences and changes in the attention towards the objects of Ressentiment. She also holds that some form of knowledge of the object of Ressentiment’s value remains present. Vendrell Ferran then reconstructs Scheler’s position on Ressentiment as a mental disposition that may turn into a character trait (and not an emotion) resulting from a process, more thoroughly described than in Voigtländer of repression of hostile affective attitudes. She then contrasts it with Reinach, who also viewed Ressentiment as a compensation mechanism for a felt diminishment of the self, that changes the way a subject apprehends values. She then goes on to put the key position of the three early phenomenologists in dialogue with the current literature on the subject. She finds similarities with the Schelerian view (or maybe just his longer elaboration on the ressentiment process) on the etiology of Ressentiment. Current literature usually conceptualizes Ressentiment as a sentiment, which Ferran, following the early phenomenologists, argues to be an inadequate description. Finally, she stresses the importance of the early phenomenologists work for adequately understanding Ressentiment as a non-intentional process leading to self-deception.

Part III: Social Self and Character

The first of three articles in this Salice on Social Self-Feelings gives a slightly different reconstruction of Voigtländer’s theory of self-feelings and criticizes her harsh verdict on inauthentic self-feeling. The second article goes back to evaluating Voigtländer’s notion of inauthentic self-feelings in the light of Voigtländer’s later work. The third article gives a historical overview of different conceptions of character.

Allesandro Sallice first reconstructs Voigtländers theory of self-feelings in general, slightly diverging from other readings by stressing that there is only one ever-shifting vital-self feeling and proposing that her taxonomy is merely a taxonomy of different manifestations of the same vital self-feeling in different situations. He does agree that there are different kinds of conscious self-feelings, which are purely episodic. He differentiates the two types of self-feeling on the phenomenological level by indicating that Voigtländer seems to hold that there is an emphasis on the affective side for the vital self-feeling(s) while there is an emphasis on the side of value judgement for the conscious self-feelings. There is also a difference in intentionality: The object of vital self-feeling is the not truly objectifiable self, while the object of conscious self-feelings is the objectified self.

This leads Salice to criticise Voigtländers notion of inauthentic self-feelings, which he takes to be both morally and epistemically negatively connotated. Against this, he argues that there are indeed cases where the judgement of others is more (or at least not less) reliable than our self-feelings. Yet he holds, that Voigtländer’s theory anticipated contemporary debates on self-knowledge and, given proper scrutiny on the points he criticizes, is highly relevant for modern-day research.

Hilge Landweer’s contribution touches on similar points as Salice’s and is both slightly more critical towards and more favourable to Voigtländer. Landweer praises Voigtländers rich descriptions and agrees with Salice on the fact that Voigtländer seems to negatively evaluate mirror self-feelings (a term Landweer prefers to authentic self-feelings) but problematizes a different aspect – Voigtländer’s notion of an authentic self. Her main point of interest is however the 11-page 1923 text Über die Art eines Menschen und das Erlebnis der Maske in which Voigtländer remains true to her notion of the core of persons but increases the complexity of her understanding of ‘authentic’ and ‘inauthentic’ by turning towards the subject of how the manner of a person – namely the way she appears to others and how this feels to her – while never explicitly rejecting the view held in the dissertation. According to Landweer Voigtländer implicitly holds a topological understanding of personhood, according to which authentic self-feelings are „anchored in the ‘core’  of the person with inauthenticity increasing the further one moves away from this core” with the opinions of others forming the outermost strata. The manner of a person is comprised of both authentic and inauthentic as well as genuine (in the sense of true) and non-genuine actions which others hold to be characteristic of that person. Landweer concludes that the two sets of terms are not mutually interchangeable. Non-genuine self-feelings and actions are always the effects of conscious or unconscious dissimulation while non-authentic self-feelings rely on the impressions of others. Landweer considers the distinction between genuine and non-genuine self-feelings to be systematically interesting albeit needing conceptual clarification. She goes on to problematize the metaphor of the core, suggests a relational reading for it and finally proposes an updated, less normative and fluid reading of Voigtländers concept informed by Heidegger’s notion of inauthenticity. In her view, Heidegger clearly stated what manifests as an implicit tension in Voigtländers theory and rich phenomenological descriptions: The fact that the authentic and inauthentic are never fully separable.

Guillaume Frechette approaches Voigtländers’s theory of self-feelings more historically by situating it within the sub-discipline of characterology, the systematic study of personality. A field to which Voigtländer considered herself to be contributing. He contrasts what he calls the „Austrian Account” (e.g. 168) of character traits originating in the work of Franz Brentano and later developed by Emil Utitz and Kraus. He reconstructs it as conceptualizing character traits as mental dispositions to act in specific ways in certain situations and take pleasure in acting that way, which entails that character traits can only ever be hypothesized about. [Critique because of the failure to capture enduring states] He contrasts with the view prevalent of phenomenology, which he considers Voigtländer to be exemplary for. Frechett stresses Voigtländer’s method is based on the thesis that the essence of a person’s personality can be intuited from her realistic mask, a view he attributes to Alexander Pfänder based on lecture notes by Voigtländer fellow student Johannes Daubert. He tries to reconstruct Voigtländers epistemology of self-feelings based on a Lippsian notion of Einfühlung [„courageousness is simply expressed in corresponding gestures, and you get to feel courageousness by perceiving these gestures”] (173) and the thesis that individuals have privileged access to themselves. Frechette finds merit in both theories, holding that the Austrian Account is more economical while failing to accommodate character traits like being anxious which are closer to emotional phenomena. Frechette pleads for furthering the phenomenological analysis and not reducing character traits to either of the two accounts. In a longer piece on the issue, it could have proven very fruitful to look at the work of Alexander Pfänder on characterology (scattered through notes in the Pfänder Nachlass) and address Voigtländer’s thesis of the stratification of self-feelings in relation to her characterology.

Part IV – Gender and Politics

The last part of the volume is devoted to Voigtländer as a theorist of gender, politics and as a political actor and the contributions do justice to the complexity of the subject by the variety of their approaches, ranging from a focus on her views on gender, her applied philosophy, and her life as a political actor.

Ute Gahlings opts for rewriting the history of phenomenological approaches to gender, replacing Edith Stein with Else Voigtländer as the pioneer of the field, drawing on texts written by Voigtländer after she had completed her dissertation and – not being permitted to pursue an academic career as a woman – moving towards psychology as her specific field. She reconstructs the points on gender made in an experimental study that Voigtländer conducted with Fritz Giese and three texts co-authored by Voigtländer and Adalbert Gregor, the latter of which contain both strong statements confirming sexual differentiation as well as a few subtle observations on the female experience. Gahlings indicates that the relationship between Voigtländer and Gregor still needs to be researched further and points towards Voigtländers contributions to a dictionary and journal of sexual science as the best source for Voigtländers views on gender, painting a picture of Voigtländers statements as „the awakening of a gender theory which is differentiating between sex and gender” (187), dealing with epistemological issues regarding how gender difference may be addressed, rejecting metaphysical constructions as the base of sexual difference and opting instead for a culture-based approach. Gahlinger then goes on to reconstruct the views of Edith Stein, which according to here were founded not in psychology but philosophical anthropology and with a more ethically driven impetus and leaning slightly more towards essentialism than Voigtländer’s. She pleads for including Voigtländer in „the canon of classical writings” (195) while calling into question how Voigtländers’s critical mind could have served under the Nazis.

Sophie Loidoldt and Petra Gehring find less inconsistency here than Gahling.  They evaluate  Voigtländer’s application of her psychology of character in a study on mass psychology, a text written together with Adalbert Gregor on the relation between gender and neglect as well as a talk on the problem of gender difference based on her contributions to the Dictionary of Sexual Studies. The article is polemical in tone, stating that the text on mass psychology is „a miserable failure” (205) judging by Voigtländer’s self-proclaimed standard of value-neutrality. They instead diagnose a vulgar Nietzschean preference for vital values and authoritarian politics, while being unable to clearly explain how the political views she criticizes connect to the character of those she judges and resorting to cliché-laden racial psychology in the end. (208) They have much the same verdict on the article written with Gregor, criticizing that her value-neutral approach is perfectly compatible with sterilization practices. Additionally, they take Voigtländer to be, essentializing gendered traits despite arguing against metaphysical essentialism. The evaluation leads to the conclusion that „not every theory of difference that is not immediately and obviously sexist, is therefore already emancipatory” (219), concluding that there is at the very least no logical discontinuity between Voigtländers theoretical work and her position in the NSDAP regime.

George Heffernan bookends the section reader with a more positivistic approach to Else Voigtländers politics starting with textual evidence from her dissertation and giving more context to her work on mass hysteria written in 1920 from the standpoint of a member of the German National Party, her nationalist family background as well as her work with racial-hygienicist Adalbert Grego. He then fills out a missing link in the evaluation of Voigtländer by carefully compiling reports on her performance as director at the women’s prison of Waldheim as well as the official documents regarding her NSDAP membership and contributions to party organizations.  Based on his sources, which cannot be given justice to within the scope of this review, he arrices at the preliminary verdict that „Voigtländer was, if not an enthusiastic or a fanatical Nazi, a reliable Mitläuferin and Unterstützerin of the National Socialist Regime.” (237)

Heffernan’s text makes for a fitting ending to a volume that shows that Voigtländer merits scholarly attention as an original contributor to the philosophy of emotions and personality and a historical figure that may be seen as exemplary for her time. For readers not familiar with Voigtländer’s work a differently structured approach to the compilation of texts might have been beneficial, seeing as especially the section on sources and influences already lays the groundwork for some of the more critical approaches in the latter sections, yet there is no indication that that is the case. The structure of the individual parts leaves little to be desired, providing the reader with a plurality of perspectives on Voigtländer’s philosophy, juxtaposing more historically oriented and more systematic approaches. The contriubutions touch on all key aspects, with the rather unfortunate but understandable exception of her work on the aesthetics of nature in the short text Zur Phänomenologie und Psychologie des alpinen Erlebnisses. I have outlined a few interesting points for further inquiry in my summary of the individual articles, but there are numerous more to be found.

The volume’s biggest problem is due to the state of Voigtländer research. There are no standard translations for essential terms in Voigtländer’s philosophy. That makes it somewhat harder to put some of the contributions in dialogue. That is hardly the fault of the contributors and only serves to underline Vendrell-Ferrran’s plea for an English translation of Voigtländer’s works in the introduction. The volume is invaluable for anybody who wants to engage with the history of phenomenology in general or Else Voigtländer in particular.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Jean-Luc Marion: Revelation Comes from Elsewhere, Stanford University Press, 2024






Revelation Comes from Elsewhere Book Cover




Revelation Comes from Elsewhere





Jean-Luc Marion. Translated by Stephen E. Lewis & Stephanie Rumpza





Stanford University Press




2024




Hardback




532

Andrew Feenberg The Ruthless Critique of Everything Existing: Nature and Revolution in Marcuse’s Philosophy of Praxis

The Ruthless Critique of Everything Existing Book Cover The Ruthless Critique of Everything Existing
Andrew Feenberg
Verso Books
2023
Paperback
256

Reviewed by: Dana S. Belu (California State University)

 

The new sensibility, which expresses the ascent of the life instincts over aggressiveness and guilt, would foster, on a social scale, the vital need for the abolition of injustice and misery and would shape the further evolution of the standard of living.” (Marcuse, Essay on Liberation)

 

Andrew Feenberg’s The Ruthless Critique of Everything Existing: Nature and Revolution in Marcuse’s Philosophy of Praxis is a tour de force of Marcuse’s philosophy. It is multilayered and dives deep into the phenomenological-existential dimensions of Marcuse’s work. The book is energetic, ambitious and offers timely insights into the nature of technological rationality as the origin of the current environmental crisis.

The first chapter takes the reader through Feenberg’s personal reminiscences of his professor at UCSD and then on the frontlines of the May 1968 events in Paris. One gets the sense of a continuity between Marcuse’s personal values and his political and philosophical commitments. His integrity underscored his philosophy and endeared him to his students. Chapters two through six switch gears from the personal to the philosophical and weave a complex Marxist, psychoanalytic and phenomenological narrative that advocates for a life-affirming socialist rationality, an antidote to the ongoing hegemony of technological rationality. Marcuse is cast as the philosophical forerunner of the environmental movement and other social justice movements. I will focus on chapters five and six where Feenberg explicitly takes up the relationship between Marcuse’s and Heidegger’s critiques of technological rationality and expands Marcuse’s proposal for overcoming it through the aesthetic cultivation of a life affirming form of reason.

In chapters two through four Feenberg explains Marcuse’s appropriation of Hegel, Marx Freud and the early Heidegger. His critique of Marx’s notion of subjectivity is especially significant. While many readers of Marcuse may already be familiar with the influence of psychoanalysis on his thought, the phenomenological legacy is less well known. His focus on the significance of Heidegger’s phenomenology of world (46-56) for Marcuse’s understanding of Marx’s ontology of labor is especially insightful, as he shows how Marcuse concretizes this world as a capitalist world.

Chapter four “The Politics of Eros” revisits Marcuse’s “performance principle” as an alternative to Freud’s reality principle where the repression of pleasure in favor of work is no longer a natural given but is socially determined. The socialist revolution will release the working body from its desexualized dedication to labor. Feenberg should have emphasized that the emphases on labor, technological production and the desexualized “dedication” to work- in equal measure social coercion and individual compulsion – were life denying terrors under communism and not just under capitalism. By the late 1960s Marcuse was critical of the communist regimes in Eastern Europe and China. Including his specific criticisms of communism would have helped to further clarify Marcuse’s proposal by distinguishing it from technological thinking in communist societies. Moreover, noting the difference between a socialist rationality and the rationality at work in contemporary socialist countries (Scandinavian countries) could have helped to further clarify Marcuse’s call for a new aesthetic sensibility and a new concept of reason that corresponds to it.

In Chapter 5:  The Critique of Technology Feenberg clarifies the Marxist, Weberian and Heideggerian legacies in Marcuse’s account of technological rationality, especially in his One Dimensional Man (1964). This chapter does an excellent job of acknowledging many similarities between Heidegger’s “The Question Concerning Technology” and One Dimensional Man, noting similarities in structure and in their phenomenological retrieval of the Greek notion of potentiality versus the denial of potentiality by modern science. Feenberg shows that by privileging quantification, precision and planning, modern science and technological rationality eliminate potential (150-2) Moreover, he shows how Marcuse incorporates Heidegger’s notion of a “ground plan,” a concept developed in “The Age of the World Picture,” and Husserl’s notion of the life world. And by combining phenomenological ontology with Marxism, Marcuse uncovers a political dimension that drives Marcuse’s thinking forward along a path not taken by either Heidegger or Husserl.

With Feenberg’s help, Marcuse can be seen to recast capitalism as a lifeworld defined by  “projection” (Vorhaben), a way of pushing into one’s possibilities, as Heidegger describes it in Being and Time. The futural temporality of technological rationality could have been fruitfully explored in relationship to the other two temporal ekstases discussed in Being and Time, thrownness and falling. (Heidegger 1996, section 68) The existential inertia of falling renders the tendency to conform to what is present (or actual) almost inevitable. This phenomenological-ontological insight supports Marcuse’s capitalist concretization of “projection.” As he shows, under capitalism, the possible collapses into the reproduction of the actual and the same. (158) Furthermore, both capitalism and communism “expose nature to both representation by science and control by technology” (150) so that neither sees nature as a process latent with potentialities. They see it through the lens of technological rationality, as a mere resource for production and modernization.

But here Marcuse’s position seems even closer to the later Heidegger than Feenberg acknowledges. For instance, Marcuse’s call for a critical appraisal of the technical age put him at odds with the technophilic, liberalist and Marxist camps that extolled the virtues of mechanized progress, and with the technologically reactionary camp, the technophobes, who feared technology and called for its banishment. Marcuse’s proposal for a third way beyond this false dilemma echoes Heidegger’s own ontological injunction in “The Question Concerning Technology” (154) that we don’t relate to technology in a reactionary way by either loving it or hating it, seeing it as “the work of the devil.” (Heidegger 1977, 25)  Marcuse’s call for a new beginning or what he calls a new sensibility from within the provenance of art also echoes Heidegger’s call for the saving power of art at the end of “The Question Concerning Technology” and elsewhere. Unlike Marcuse, however, he does not call for the liberation of our repressed subjectivity but for the cultivation of receptivity. Feenberg’s interpretation helps us see how the two calls complement one another.

Like Heidegger, Marcuse insists that technology is not neutral.  The first of his three theses about the non-neutrality of technology claims that technology has become a “total system and a world” that justifies capitalism. (137) The second thesis states that technology is not value neutral because “even though it serves generic ends such as increasing the productivity of labor, their design and application under capitalism imposes top-down control in production and social life generally.” (137) The third thesis states that, “scientific-technical rationality is a priori adapted to the maintenance of social domination.” (137) This echoes Heidegger’s ontological a priori of technology that runs deeper than social domination. It extends its reach into the past and foreseeable future, since it blocks our awareness of technical rationality as a clearing of being, a mode of presencing and the source of this presencing itself.[1]

The extent to which this reduction is a capitalist domination is left undetermined by Heidegger but he is clear that in the technological epoch (or clearing) the potentialities of people and nature are harnessed only to be cut to order, not allowed free expression. For Marcuse, the suppression of potentiality shows up starkly in capitalism’s devastating treatment of nature, the negation of its free potential. (Feenberg 2023, 142) Two prominent examples are mass deforestation for cattle ranching and logging, both of which raise carbon dioxide and, worse, methane levels in the atmosphere. 

 Feenberg sees Marcuse as one of the first environmental philosophers, one who sees in the environmental movement an erotic and life affirming resistance against the destruction of nature. This movement, exemplified today by organizations like 350.org and Extinction Rebellion among many others, discovers marginalized potentials in nature and society. This discovery is not value neutral but projects a world of harmony and peace, potentials that can be seen once we tune in to “creative receptivity instead of repressive productivity.” Creative receptivity is a condition of the promised socialist rationality. In a socialist society, a new erotic reason will harness potentialities without domination. (169, 177) Unfortunately, the emergence of this erotic reason is threatened on all sides by scientific-technological rationality and its offsprings: exploitation, overproduction and control in all sectors of life, including our moral lives.  This rationality replaces normative rationality as every form of injustice and harm is transformed into a problem in search of technological quick fix. (141) Technology then feeds the death drive rather than the erotic drive and so shapes a society based on competition or strife, essentially a violent society that subordinates most values to the value of profit making. (125) Like Heidegger, Marcuse sees scientific-technological rationality “as complicit in the concentration campus, atom bombs and media propaganda – all the disasters of the twentieth century.” (Feenberg 2023, 148) He sees them as the materialization of life-denying capitalist values. However, contra Heidegger, who dismisses values as subjective, Marcuse recasts values as “objective realities that guide technical practice.” (153) He disagrees with his former teacher that values are technological products that merely “correlate” with technology. Marcuse is less abstract, more philosophically granular. He analyzes actual “social procedures that reduce potentialities to values, to operational components in the bureaucratic and technical systems of capitalism… [and shows that] certain values have a transitive content indicating the blocked potentialities of the society.” (154, my insert)

Marcuse’s profound insight, according to Feenberg, is that only dialectical logic (not formal or transcendental logic) works with substantive or social universals to reveal the bias of formal reason at work in technical rationality. Feenberg’s exposition of this non-neutrality of formal reason is one of the most innovative and exciting contributions of the book, especially for phenomenology and critical theory.  As Feenberg explains it, social universals such as peace, freedom and justice (161) among others, have meanings (essences) that don’t refer simply to their present instantiation but “to a history and to a social context that requires interpretation.” But technological rationality, shaped by formal universals, marginalizes dialectical thinking, the seeing of substantive universals and latent possibilities. Technological rationality prefers the actual, the present-at hand. (162) It ignores social context and history. When the dialectical logic of substantive universals is suppressed the internal contradictions inherent in things are papered over leaving only reified, one dimensional consciousness in play. As a result, social change is blocked and real subjective consciousness is stunted so that what is actual and present is mistaken for what is fundamentally real.

In this truncated reality techno-scientific rationality breaks up the world into problems to be solved and then reduces the problem solving to the use of technical devices. Thus “social crises and injustices no longer call for fundamental change but instead are interpreted as technical problems” (164) In other words, social and environmental injustices are not understood historically but managed by abstract forms of technological rationality that value production, calculability and control regardless of the ends that are served. In sum, under capitalism the value neutrality of technological rationality, as it encroaches upon the social sphere, covers up the possibility of seeing that the very neutrality with respect to bias is its bias and that this bias legitimates domination. Amplifying Marcuse’s insight, Feenberg states that “it is the very neutrality of science that supplies the link between instrumentalism and domination.” (165)  Marcuse refers to this link as “[science’s] neutral character which relates objectivity to a specific historical Subject – namely, the consciousness that prevails in the society.” (165) Only a new form of reason, an aesthetic reason, can de-reify this consciousness and save humanity from itself. By the conclusion of chapter five Feenberg shows that Marcuse and Heidegger agree about the diagnosis of modern technological societies but not about the prognosis. Feenberg aligns himself with Marcuse’s prognosis. Instead of waiting for art to give us a new god or what amounts to the same thing for Heidegger, a new clearing, Feenberg underscores the timeliness of Marcuse’s call for a new form of reason.

Chapter 6: A New Concept of Reason? renews the call for a dialectical understanding of nature grounded in the lifeworld, a scientific socialist rationality that will bridge the gap between, what Marx’s two forms of nature, “sensuous consciousness and sensuous need.” (169) According to Marx, the senses themselves are mediated or humanized by history and culture, i.e., by labor.  Expanding this insight, Marcuse claims that since science relies on the senses, the basis of science is already cultural despite science’s attempt to enforce cultural neutrality. Thus, scientists are never merely “indifferent observers, but are active beings informed by culture” who live in a “historical epoch that objectifies nature in accordance with a specific social a priori.” (169) Whether all human senses have “evolved” into their current civilized form, as Feenberg claims, is somewhat debatable. According to the book Marcuse’s complaint is against a widespread sensuous repression and stultification, not a sensuous evolution.  Marx, in the 1844 Manuscript, describes a classist humanization of the senses, patchy and uneven. The poverty and exploitation of the proletariat condemned them to continuous sensuous deprivation but it does not do this to the bourgeoisie who benefitted from that exploitation and notoriously indulged their senses. Today, the middle class is not the only class addicted to a compulsive cycle of work and consumption that desensitizes the feeling for nature and beauty. This is the result of the instrumentalist a priori that Marcuse criticizes. He suggests that a “socialist a priori, in contrast, recognizes nature as a subject in its own right. Nature’s potentialities are its own, even as it serves human needs.” (170) He hopes that socialist rationality will reclaim the everyday experience of nature as the atelic unfolding of potentialities, from the formalizing clutches of science. This reclaiming requires a return to the lifeworld of everyday experience and to the criterion of life affirmation that together will help us to recognize and bridge the gap between “the existential and the mathematical truths” of nature. (171) One problem with applying this criterion is its relativity. What is life enhancing for a technocrat is experienced as domination of nature by the sustainable farmer. Marcuse’s account does not always help us to decide who is right.

Chapter 6 explains that bridging the gap depends on cultivating a feeling for the beautiful where the beautiful is thought analogically with Kant’s aesthetics, as a singular experience that lacks a concept. Just as for Kant the feeling for the beautiful is a harmony between the interplay of the imagination and the understanding, a feeling for the “furtherance of life” (Kant 1987, 98), so for Marcuse the feeling for the beautiful points to the harmony between the individual and nature. The analogy is limited because Marcuse’s harmonization serves an ultimate purpose, the “pacification of existence” – a social good. This goal, however, is blocked by the current split between science and technology on the one hand, and art and philosophy, on the other hand. The split ensures that reality is reproduced mechanically by the former while the latter develops beautiful and imaginative yet impotent alternatives.

Feenberg leads the reader through three stages of (176-179) Marcuse’s work where he attempts to rethink the bridge between artistic and technological rationality under a socialist rationality. Feenberg incisively targets the limitations and flaws in Marcuse’s plan for a “successor science” – the embodiment of a socialist rationality. (181) Despite shortcomings, Feenberg sees tremendous promise in Marcuse’s phenomenologically informed attempt to return science to “its original logos, the service of life” (183) and works hard to bring it out. To do this he underscores Marcuse’s use of Gilbert Simondon’s concept of “translation” as “the materialization of values … the redefinition of values in technical terms, as elements in the technological process.” (181) The question is how an aesthetic revolution will connect the experiences of nature with the formal facts about nature provided by science? The gap remains, for instance, in persistent denials of climate change, i.e., many people refuse to connect rising global temperatures with global warming supported by science. The scientific reports and predictions are value neutral in the sense that they can serve climate mitigation or harmful industry, though the scales lean in favor of the status quo, the perpetuation of harmful industries. But Feenberg is hopeful that the continued work of environmental groups will correct this default bias. He points out that environmental groups have already reshaped our conceptions of nature from within the lifeworld, just as Marcuse hoped for, so that it is now seen as an organism in need of protection (save the planet!) instead of as a heap of fungible, raw material for further exploitation. Moreover, new disciplines such as environmental science and sustainability studies have grown out of this new conception of nature. Feenberg points out that this is a revitalization of the “epistemic status of concrete experience.” (186)

Furthermore, newly emerging technosciences such as “postnormal science” also support Marcuse’s call for an aesthetic socialist rationality. Postnormal science is fruitfully unstable because it is in constant contact with the public, with social and political concerns (190). Feenberg expands the domain of postnormality to all “disciplines that have immediate effects on the social world and vice versa.” He cites the example of pharmaceutical research where the gap between theory and practice disappears since the “science and the commercial product emerge simultaneously from the lab – the research is the technological application.” (190) Here the existential and the scientific dimensions converge. Moreover, other fields such as “medicine, engineering, and ecology are more and more constrained to construct their objects in terms of norms imposed by social movements, regulation, and public opinion without abandoning scientific methods.” (197) For instance, once a technological concept, “pollution” is no longer an exclusively scientific-technological object of study.  The public’s concern with dirty air and water injected normative criteria into the specialized study of nature and opened new environmental ways of seeing potentialities for cleaning and protect nature.

Environmental science and technology increasingly support the translation of the public’s existential concerns with environmental health and security into concrete earth friendly innovations. The plastic tax and the increased production of electric cars are just two examples. Feenberg recounts others, perhaps the most striking of which is the history of nuclear energy in the U.S.. While it was once considered the highest sign of progress, the mass publicity of several nuclear accidents scared the public and the technology went into abatement. Public safety and security won out over progress and the scientific transcendence of limits. This was a small revolution that transformed a local world. Today, most scientists agree that nuclear energy is a good alternative to the devastation caused by fossil fuel and that it is safer to use than it was in the 1950s. It remains to be seen how the dialogue with a still skeptical general public will go. But one thing is clear, scientists and activists are both moved by normative concerns from within the lifeworld and by a desire for the flourishing of life on earth (not Mars). They are not neutral observers but desiring agents who seek harmony with nature not its domination. And if Marcuse and Feenberg are right then they also seek beauty.


[1] First, according to Heidegger’s “The Question Concerning Technology,” the essence of technology is “nothing technological” but “a mode of revealing,” a historical dispensation, a world. (Heidegger 1977, 16) The technological era continues to unfold under the imperatives of control, order and optimization whose authority is self-legitimizing and derives from the ubiquity of these imperatives. Second, in its essence technology is not merely a value neutral tool, a means for a subject to control objects. Although devices appear neutral means in the hands of subjects, they conceal the way that users are driven to produce more and more tools to maximize their output. This drive is out of control. Finally, since technology’s essence reveals the real as historically a priori and describes this a priori as a relationship between an attitude of challenging-forth and a world that it reduces to a resource (Heidegger 1977, 17), the essence of technology sums up the reduction of nature and things to “standing reserve” or resources.

Bibliography

Heidegger, Martin. Being and Time. Translated Joan Stambaugh. SUNY Press, 1996.

Heidegger, Martin. “The Question Concerning Technology” in The Question Concerning  Technology and Other Essays. Translated William Lovitt. Harper & Row Publishers, 1977.

Immanuel Kant. Critique of Judgment. Translated Werner Pluhar. Hackett Publishing Co, 1987.

 

 

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