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Dieses Dokument stellt die drei Typen der politischen Phänomenologie vor. Es ist eine Einführung in die Phänomenologie.
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1 Three Types of Political
Phenomenology
Thomas Bedorf and Steffen Herrmann
The relationship between phenomenology and politics is a difficult one, and there are methodological reasons for this. Since its beginnings, phe- nomenology as a method has been associated with a certain object: the experience structure of consciousness. As Edmund Husserl made clear in Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology (1913), it is not simply a matter of describing and identifying individual contents of experience but exposing their essential structures. Husserl therefore calls phenom- enology a “science of essence” (Husserl 1983, XXII). He refers to “epo- ché” as an important methodical basis for understanding the essence of consciousness. This term, as is well known, describes the bracketing of our natural attitude in which certain assumptions are presupposed with- out further questioning. Through the epoché, Husserl identifies “pure consciousness” as the main object of phenomenological analysis. Insofar as this analysis is descriptive and not normative; however, the question arises about how phenomenology can position itself politically. It is pre- cisely phenomenology’s methodological approach that seems to preclude its political involvement. Husserl seems to acknowledge this himself when he describes his work as “an entirely unpolitical one” (Husserl 1994, 244). Such doubts concerning political phenomenology do not diminish when considering the second founding father of phenomenology, Mar- tin Heidegger. Although he may have opened up phenomenology for the social dimension of existence by transforming Husserl’s transcendental phenomenology into fundamental ontology, his personal political stance only seems to confirm the adverse relationship between phenomenol- ogy and politics. While it has been assumed for a long time that Hei- degger’s notorious rectorate speech was a blunder due to political naiveté (Beistegui 1998), the publication of the Black Notebooks has clearly shown that the problem lies deeper: The fundamental ontological con- cept of being-with is based on the idea of an ethnic destiny closely linked to eliminatory antisemitism (Mitchell and Trawny 2017). In the case of Heidegger, therefore, phenomenology is under suspicion of leading to fatal political views.
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of political episteme. By elaborating upon these approaches, we will show that the phenomenological method itself changes along with the subject in question. This not only suggests that phenomenology can contribute to the renewal of political philosophy, but that political philosophy can contribute to the further development of phenomenology.
The first approach of a phenomenology of the political conceives the political as the institutionalized sphere of the regulation of public affairs. Therefore, the analysis focuses on a series of basic experiences that are constitutive for acting in public, such as trust, power, and authority or dispute, hatred, and resentment. To elucidate this approach more closely in what follows, we will take up a negative experience of politics: the dispute, as described by Edmund Husserl. Although Husserl considers phenomenology value-free and thus apolitical, he is still interested in investigating the constitution of the political space of experience – as long as it can be described value-free. Accordingly, the political space of experience does not take center stage in Husserl’s reflections but repeat- edly appears at the margins of his thought. In the following, we look closely at these side considerations in order to understand those experi- ences that can be described as genuine political experiences. Husserl’s reflections on the foundation of intersubjectivity provide a starting point. In his works and bequest notes on the matter of intersubjectivity, Husserl repeatedly makes it clear that although the epoché allows and guarantees a return to the transcendental ego as constituting ground, this does not imply solipsism. On the contrary, all constitution of meaning has a bodily monad apprehending other bodily egos as a prerequisite. The experience of the “transcendency of the Other” (Husserl 1960, 89), which is not an object in the world but “subject... for this world... experiencing it” (Husserl 1960, 91), prevents the solipsist threat. The lateral connection with others is a condition for shared sense, in other words, objective contents. It is the difficulties of this basic epistemological situation that Husserl will reconsider again and again, without ultimately resolving the tension between egological foundation and lateral-intersubjective experi- ence in a satisfactory way. Starting from the epistemic problem of understanding others, Husserl devotes himself to a phenomenology of intersubjective communities at various points in his work. In the course of this project, three areas are of particular importance: the community of love, the sociality of equal order, and the sociality of subordination (Schuhmann 1988, chapter I). Husserl defines the community of love as a union driven not by desire but by spiritual love: a “penetration of the otherwise separated to a joint personality” (Husserl 1973b, 175). However, the love community is not simply a fusion of two persons into a whole person but the “unity of two
4 Thomas Bedorf and Steffen Herrmann
persons” (Husserl 1973c, 599), which makes it possible to live with and through each other. In the community of love, the individual reaches the highest form of existence through the “delight of coexisting” (Husserl 1973a, 107). These communities must be distinguished from those that come about through a shared external purpose, like trade associations. Husserl calls them “associations of equal order” (Husserl 1973b, 213). Such associations create belonging primarily on the basis of argument and counterargument, question and answer. Husserl, therefore, also speaks of “communicative communities” (Husserl 1973b, 201) that create a com- munity of will. With the admittance into such a community of will comes the adoption of rights and duties by which the individual person merely becomes a functionary. Finally, the sociality of subordination must be distinguished from the sociality of equality. Here, it is not the mediation of the different wills but the subordination of one will to another that is at the center of communitization. It is on this very level that Husserl situates the state, which has the task of resolving the “collision of ends” (Husserl 1973b, 224) that may arise in the community of love and in the community of equals. Accordingly, the reason for the state’s existence is to prevent disputes and to provide compensation where they arise. In this way, Husserl equates the political sphere with the balancing function of the state apparatus whose task is to ensure the harmonious self-fulfillment of the individual in the community of love. The purpose of politics is primarily negative: It serves to protect against attacks while pacifying disputes. One may, therefore, argue that dissent is the genuine experience from which the political derives. In Husserl and Transcen- dental Intersubjectivity , Dan Zahavi distinguishes three forms of dissent in Husserl’s theory: the dispute over perceptual phenomena, the dispute over everyday notions of normality, and the dispute over cultural idi- osyncrasies (Zahavi 2001). While the first type of disagreement can be resolved by providing higher levels of perception systems, for example, the sciences, this is not possible in the second and third cases. Even if it is true that we can trace the dispute over normality and cultural expec- tations back to the genesis of our expectations of normality and reflect upon our integration into the collective tradition to understand such dis- putes, this does not guarantee that we overcome them completely. This is only possible through resolution by a higher authority, which, for Hus- serl, is the state. It is clear that Husserl’s “un-political” thinking of the political concen- trates essentially on the phenomenon of dispute. The necessity of the state order results from the experience of an irrevocable dispute that cannot be resolved, only satisfied. This is because Husserl understands the dispute only as a negative force, without considering its productive potential. Husserl could have learned from his contemporary Georg Simmel that conflict does not necessarily lead to dissociation but can also contain integrating and socially stabilizing moments (Simmel 1971, Ch. 6). Thus
6 Thomas Bedorf and Steffen Herrmann
contingent and arbitrary but that the plurality of perspectives gathered in a community is considered, and that public opinion has influence and legitimacy. According to Arendt, power arises when the process of opin- ion formation leads social actors to join together to advocate their con- victions. This is not a “power over” but rather a “power to” – the power to shape our way of life in a certain way (Arendt 1998, 199). It is this empowering potential of political action that allows agents to experi- ence their equality with others and is the first step toward political self- realization. But what about the second condition: difference? For Arendt, this can only be realized if power-building processes are structured in an agonistic way. Where our perspectives lead to different ideas of what the world is and should be there is a conflict that allows individuals to dis- tinguish themselves from one another. It is crucial that this conflict does not represent a deficit for Arendt but is necessary for the self-realization of individuals, since here they can experience themselves in their differ- ence from others. The fulfillment of the two basic conditions of political self-realization results in the experience of “public happiness” (Arendt 1990, 119). As politically committed citizens, we experience ourselves as beings both different from and identical to others – and it is precisely this existential function that leads Arendt to link political action to public happiness. Arendt also extends her phenomenological arguments to a political analysis of her time. Here the decline of the political as described in The Human Condition is seminal: For Arendt the ancient homo politicus has been replaced during the course of history first by the homo faber and then by the homo laborans. This develops alongside the coloni- zation of the political sphere: Once the site of self-government, it has become a place that privileges economic utility. The problem is not that politics deals with economic issues, but rather that political questions are reduced to economic issues. This decline of the political is accompa- nied by the historical genesis of the party system, through which political action is transferred to professional elites. The separation of citizens from the decision-making process not only makes it possible to cede individual responsibility for the common world but also encourages individuals to see themselves only as private individuals. Arendt describes the emer- gence of the “bourgeois” who has lost all interest in public happiness and only thinks of securing personal happiness (Arendt 1994, 130). Arendt certainly sees this transformation of the political sphere flanked by far-reaching historical transformations such as the shift from class society to mass society and the emergence of modern bureaucracy. While massification produces a sense of individual superfluousness that further diminishes interest in the well-being of others, the logic of the adminis- trative apparatus guarantees the dominance of “nobody,” replacing the principle of individual responsibility with organized irresponsibility. For Arendt, the sum of these developments results in a disappearance of the
Three Types of Political Phenomenology 7
political in modernity. This, in turn, culminates in totalitarianism, which eradicates the political by grasping it by its roots: the plurality of people. The suppression of the public sphere and the reduction of the individual to a uniform “bundle of reactions” (Arendt 1979, 441) create a world of universal predictability. Totalitarianism is thus the anti-political par excellence: It is the denial of the fact that human beings exist only in plural. Regardless of how Arendt’s analyses are evaluated in detail, they show us that a genuinely phenomenological approach to the political is possible. Phenomenology does not have to resign itself to the role of a supplementary science for already existing political theories; rather, it can provide an independent perspective on the formation of the politi- cal order on the basis of our being-in-the-world. The basis for this is a methodical transformation, which lies at the heart of Arendt’s work. The shift from political experience to the sphere of the political corresponds to a transformation of phenomenology from a science of essence to a science of existence. The subject matter of the analysis is no longer the transcendental or mundane ego (as with Husserl) but actual existence. The consequence of this is that a deeper layer of intentionality becomes thematic, which is not about individual experiences but about the dis- closedness of the world as a whole. Existential analysis is not about the essence of individual existential realizations but about the ontological structure of existence itself. This approach leads to fascinating and pen- etrating analyses but is also limited because it addresses only very specific political conflicts which then are applied to the respective historical cir- cumstances. Moreover, since historically varying problems are repeatedly traced back to the same basic ontological structures, any historicity itself is in danger of being erased. What existential phenomenology lacks is the ability to reflect on the political foundation of its own concepts. How- ever, this final objection leads us straight to another stage of phenomeno- logical thinking that explicitly addresses the temporality of our episteme.
The last phenomenological approach to the political focuses neither on the experience nor on the ontology of the political, but rather on its epis- teme. Following Foucault, we understand episteme to designate a rela- tion between the basic concepts and practices in which the world reveals itself and becomes accessible to our experience (Foucault 2002, 211). The scope of what is understood as “the political” is thus extended once again: Neither state politics (as with Husserl) nor the broader realm of our political being-in-the-word (as with Arendt) is at issue; rather, what is at stake is the political institution of our worldliness as such. In this sense, not only are the institutions of political legislation or the spheres of public affairs political but all our relationships with ourselves, others,
Three Types of Political Phenomenology 9
are now decisive for the articulation of political demands. First, there is the logic of linkage: According to Laclau, political articulations create so-called chains of equivalence (Laclau and Mouffe 1985, 130). These allow various political concerns to be connected. Necessary for such a linkage are “empty signifiers” (Laclau 1996, 36) that subsume different requirements. The political signifier “liberal,” for example, encompasses policies of gender diversity, pacifism, and ecology. Through empty signi- fiers, differences in discourses may be bridged by equivalence formation. At the same time, however, empty signifiers also have a contrasting effect, which brings us to the second logic of meaning explained earlier. Here, the political signifier “liberal” stands in contrast to that of “conserva- tive.” It is precisely this opposition that allows the empty signifier to be used internally to produce equivalence. Thus, for example, the various previously-mentioned concerns can be united under the signifier “liber- als” as a way to distinguish themselves from “conservatives” – who, in turn, identify with concerns such as state security, militarism, or free mar- kets. The political signifier “conservative” is the constitutive outside of the signifier “liberal.” If for Laclau discourse theory is productive for a description of the political, what place does the concept of hegemony occupy? The answer is that hegemony, in the sense of supremacy, is the goal of the respective political actors. It is necessary to make one’s own position the politically dominant position. Such supremacy is achieved by using empty signifiers to produce the longest possible equivalence chains (Laclau 1996, 40). The longer the chain of equivalence, the more political demands can be gathered under one’s own banner. The downside of this process, however, is that an empty signifier can only become hegemonic by discarding any content. Accordingly, as the democratic discourse becomes hegemonic, the concept of democracy itself threatens to become nothing more than an empty shell. However, it is less this hegemonic paradox that concerns Laclau but, rather, the fact that hegemonic discourses feign objectivity and, thus, unchangeability. It is precisely at this point in his theory that he draws upon Husserl. In his late publication The Crisis of European Sciences , Husserl places the critique of objectivism at the center of what he had earlier called “genetic phenomenology” (Steinbock 1998). The task of genetic phe- nomenology is to investigate the origin and development of the differ- ent forms of intentionality that constitute our life-world. In the Crisis , Husserl puts this concept of genetic phenomenology at work by attempt- ing to show that objectivism is a specific mode of intentionality that covers the world with a “well-fitting garb of ideas” (Husserl 1970, 51). Hus- serl situates objectivism’s origins in Galileo’s mathematization of nature. He argues that abstractions used methodically to understand the natural world increasingly lose their representative character with the develop- ment of science, so that, ultimately, the purely mathematical archetype,
10 Thomas Bedorf and Steffen Herrmann
rather than the object experienced in the life-word, stands in for real- ity. Husserl refers to this as a “theoretical-logical substruction” (ibid.,
12 Thomas Bedorf and Steffen Herrmann
this analysis, as we have seen with Arendt, emerges a genuine phenomeno- logical conception of the human condition that allows us to address the normative character of the political. (iii) Finally, the analysis of political episteme is based on a genetic analysis , which allows us to uncover the social and historical situating of self, other, and world. The genetic analysis of institutional events makes it possible to understand the space of experi- ence itself as a result of political struggles, so that in this last variation of political phenomenology our worldliness as a whole becomes the scene of political disputes. It becomes clear from this final perspective that the nor- mative nature of the political is not simply given but rather the result of a historical process that produces such normativity in the first place. Moving through the three methodological variations of political phe- nomenology may appear to be a linear progression. In reality, however, this is merely an extension of its subject area. While initially only indi- vidual experiences were considered to be political, our entire episteme ultimately emerged as the result of political disputes. Against this back- ground, it becomes clear that the sequence of the three methodical varia- tions of political phenomenology is not a kind of teleological succession but, rather, all three refer to each other. Each of the forms of analysis is itself at risk of losing sight of a decisive motif. Where the focus on certain types of experience threatens to lose sight of the constitution of the space of experience itself, the mere analysis of political episteme is in danger of being blind to the ways in which the political is institutionalized.
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