Political Phenomenology Essays in Memory of Petee Jung Contributions to Phenomenology

Contributions To Phenomenology 84

Hwa Yol Jung Lester Embree Editors Political Phenomenology Essays in Memory of Petee Jung Contributions To Phenomenology

In Cooperation with The Center for Advanced Research in Phenomenology

Volume 84

Series Editors Nicolas de Warren, KU Leuven, Belgium Dermot Moran, University College Dublin, Ireland

Editorial Board Lilian Alweiss, Trinity College Dublin, Ireland Elizabeth Behnke, Ferndale, WA, USA Rudolf Bernet, Husserl Archive, KU Leuven, Belgium David Carr, Emory University, GA, USA Chan-Fai Cheung, Chinese University Hong Kong, China James Dodd, New School University, NY, USA Lester Embree, Florida Atlantic University, FL, USA Alfredo Ferrarin, Università di Pisa, Italy Burt Hopkins, Seattle University, WA, USA José Huertas-Jourda, Wilfrid Laurier University, Canada Kwok-Ying Lau, Chinese University Hong Kong, China Nam-In Lee, Seoul National University, Korea Rosemary R.P. Lerner, Pontifi cia Universidad Católica del Perú, Peru Dieter Lohmar, University of Cologne, Germany William R. McKenna, Miami University, OH, USA Algis Mickunas, Ohio University, OH, USA J.N. Mohanty, Temple University, PA, USA Junichi Murata, University of Tokyo, Japan Thomas Nenon, The University of Memphis, TN, USA Thomas M. Seebohm, Johannes Gutenberg-Universität, Germany Gail Soffer, Rome, Italy Anthony Steinbock, Southern Illinois University at Carbondale, IL, USA Shigeru Taguchi, Yamagata University, Japan Dan Zahavi, University of Copenhagen, Denmark Richard M. Zaner, Vanderbilt University, TN, USA Scope The purpose of the series is to serve as a vehicle for the pursuit of phenomenological research across a broad spectrum, including cross-over developments with other fi elds of inquiry such as the social sciences and cognitive science. Since its establishment in 1987, Contributions to Phenomenology has published more than 80 titles on diverse themes of phenomenological philosophy. In addition to welcoming monographs and collections of papers in established areas of scholarship, the series encourages original work in phenomenology. The breadth and depth of the Series refl ects the rich and varied signifi cance of phenomenological thinking for seminal questions of human inquiry as well as the increasingly international reach of phenomenological research. The series is published in cooperation with The Center for Advanced Research in Phenomenology.

More information about this series at http://www.springer.com/series/5811 Hwa Yol Jung • Lester Embree Editors

Political Phenomenology Essays in Memory of Petee Jung Editors Hwa Yol Jung Lester Embree Moravian College Florida Atlantic University Bethlehem , PA , USA Boca Raton , FL , USA

ISSN 0923-9545 ISSN 2215-1915 (electronic) Contributions to Phenomenology ISBN 978-3-319-27773-8 ISBN 978-3-319-27775-2 (eBook) DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-27775-2

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Pref ace

This volume is devoted to the memory of Professor Petee Jung, wife of Hwa Yol Jung. I had known and appreciated Hwa Yol around American Phenomenology for decades and instantly agreed when he asked me and the Center for Advanced Research in Phenomenology, Inc. to organize a small conference in memory of his wife, who had died in 2004. How this volume then developed in relation to her deserves telling before I say something about the volume itself.

The Role of Petee Jung

Thomas Nenon, President of CARP, made the arrangements in Memphis for the meeting and most of the people in the picture above came and spoke. Hwa Yol and I fi rst thought that revised versions of the small group of papers might be published in a journal, but before we could arrange that, the word spread about our effort in Memphis, others contacted us about joining in the memorial, and before long the contents of this volume accumulated. It is unusual for a fi gure’s spouse to attract contributions from such a group of others in a focused tendency. Hence, something about who Petee Jung was needs to be told here, something that is necessarily connected with her husband’s career. In response to my questions, he is the source of the following selected remarks. Petee and I met in 1956 at Emory University in Atlanta and got married in 1960 in NYC after my dissertation, God, Man, and Politics: Political Philosophy and Theology of Jacques Maritain (1960), was virtually fi nished. I got permission to marry her from my parents with one important condition: “When you get back home (Korea), we will get you a nice Korean wife.” We had fun typing my 600-page dissertation together. After we knew each other well, one day Petee said, “You don’t look like a ‘Frank’ ” (that was American name given me by the foreign student advisor at Wabash College in Indiana. He named me after the President of the college simply because “Hwa-Yol” was hard to pronounce. So I went back to my original Korean name, following the venerable Confucian hermeneutical principle of the “rectifi cation of names”. (zhengming )

vii viii Preface

Petee and Hwa Yol had two sons. “We were proud of Michael and Eric being radically and ethnically hybrids. When they were babies, we affectionately called them ‘mutts.’ More than before, I am proud of my two sons and four grandchildren being hybrids in this globalizing world of multiculturalism.” Most relevantly here, Petee and Hwa Yol shared their professional lives, beginning with personal connections with key ﬁ gures in American phenomenology during the 1960s, e.g., “During our ﬁ rst visit to Yale in 1966–67, Petee and I invited John Wild and Paul Ricoeur, who was then a visiting professor at Yale, for dinner. I remember Ricoeur was an expert at using chopsticks, whereas Wild tried to use them but he gave up immediately and decided to use a knife and a fork. At Yale, we learned from Ricoeur the importance of hermeneutical phenomenology, which goes back to Heidegger and Gadamer.” The deep friendship of the Jungs with Bill and Angela McBride also went back to that time at Yale. There were other crucial developments: When I decided to do my postdoctoral study, I went to the University of Chicago’s Committee on Social Thought while Petee got a one-year teaching appointment in the Mathematics Department of Northwestern University. I had decided to study philosophy in earnest, so one day Petee got in touch with Northwestern’s Philosophy Department for me. Luckily its chairperson happened to be John Wild, who wanted to escape Harvard and had moved to Northwestern. He welcomed me to sit in his graduate seminar on Heidegger’s Sein und Zeit . While I was sitting in there, Wild suggested that I study Alfred Schutz’s social phenomenology. Further, he suggested that I get in touch with Maurice Natanson, who, incidentally, later succeeded Wild at Yale. I met Natanson in a symposium organized by the American political theorist Henry Kariel at the American Political Science Association after I had published the reader, Existential Phenomenology and Political Theory (1972), for which Wild kindly wrote the Foreword. Petee’s involvement in phenomenology grew along with my interest in it. Without exaggeration, I am sure that until her passing she is the only person who read every word I wrote. Petee and I enjoyed traveling together to conferences sponsored by the World Future Societies Federation, the International Association for Philosophy and Literature, the International Political Science Association, the World Congress of Philosophy, and the American Political Science Association. We enjoyed writing and reading our joint papers at international conferences, which gave us opportunities to travel to Great Britain, Finland, Hungary, Italy, Spain, Germany, Canada, China, Japan, especially Korea, etc. And we jointly published nine papers, including “The Way of Ecopiety: On the Margins of Development” (1999), “Toward a New Humanism: The Politics of Civility in a ‘No-Growth’ Society” (1976), “The Hermeneutics of Political Ideology and Cultural Change: Maoism as the Sinicization of Marxism” (1976), and “Revolutionary Dialectics: Mao Tse-tung and Maurice Merleau-Ponty” (1977). Hwa Yol told me, with pride, about his wife’s career in her own right: Petee was born on March 7, 1933 in Brooklyn, NYC and passed away on October 21, 2004 in Bethlehem, PA when she was teaching mathematics at Albright College in Reading, PA. She received her undergraduate degree in mathematics from Hunter College. She, too, had an equally strong interest in philosophy, but when she went to Emory University it was to pursue graduate studies in mathematics, not philosophy. At Emory she was very close to Charles Hartshorne, who had retired from Chicago. After she received her MA in mathematics, the result of which was published in The Journal of Symbolic Logic (under her maiden name, P. B. Schwartz) (1958), she obtained her doctorate in mathematics from Lehigh University in Bethlehem, PA in 1979 with a dissertation on a topic in topology. She Preface ix

then taught at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst, the University of Florida in Gainesville, Lehigh University, Northwestern University, and Albright College. As this volume shows, the couple made friends in the many places they studied, taught, and presented papers. Petee was bright and articulate and hence a vivacious conversationalist and knew a great deal not only about phenomenology but also about environmentalism, multiculturalism, and much else. In 1998 she came with her husband to a conference I held on Schutz at Florida Atlantic University and upon greeting her I immediately embarrassed myself by starting to tell her how she might do some tourism while we guys had our conference. Quickly she insisted that she was also there to hear the papers and, by the way, she was a philosopher. Consequently, I have my own extra personal reason to serve her memory here!

Genesis and the Signiﬁ cance of This Volume

When I surveyed the names and essays of colleagues who sought to join this memorial, it struck me that we had quite a collection of senior colleagues of similar back- ground and outlook and that, in effect, a distinct but heretofore unrecognized tendency within our wider phenomenological tradition had crystallized. It needed a name and Hwa Yol and I quickly agreed that “Political Phenomenology” fi t not only the volume but also the tendency. The appended chronological bibliography shows that it has long been developing and includes recent work by the contributors here. The infl uential academic niche of each of them is also found in the biographical notes at the end of this volume. We recognize that at least as many additional colleagues could be counted in this tendency, but we decided that the number making up this spontaneous memorial volume was already enough. We were later pleased to see that the referees for our manuscript recognized that this volume would amply counter the tendency of some to think that phenomenology has nothing to say about the political (similar thoughts used also to be expressed about phenomenological aesthetics and ethics !). And now we will not be surprised if a professional society for political phenomenology is established, of course with a website, and then there are annual meetings and also panels at multidisciplinary societies. Finally, we must deeply regret that Petee did not see what her memory by so many important friends has crystallized. And she would have further been delighted to see that working together on this project has brought Hwa Yol and me from being professional acquaintances to being pals. Otherwise, we thank my research assistant, Elliot Shaw, for, above all, standard- izing the references. And, fi nally, we thank all the contributors in Petee’s name.

Boca Raton, Florida Lester Embree May 2015

Contents

1 Introduction ...... 1 Hwa Yol Jung

Part I Foreground: Staging Agenda for Political Phenomenology 2 Is a Rational Politics a Real Possibility? ...... 35 William McBride 3 Geophilosophy, the Life-World, and the Political ...... 43 Calvin O. Schrag 4 Confrontations with Modernity ...... 49 Thomas Nenon 5 Constructing a Schutzian Theory of Political Science ...... 59 Lester Embree 6 Carnal Hermeneutics and Political Theory ...... 77 Hwa Yol Jung 7 Arendt, Kant and the Beauty of Politics: A Phenomenological View ...... 93 Ralph P. Hummel

Part II The Phenomenology Between Politics and Ethics 8 Liberation Ethics and Transcendental Phenomenology ...... 123 Michael Barber 9 Political Phenomenology: John Wild and Emmanuel Levinas on the Political ...... 145 Richard Sugarman

xi xii Contents

10 Is Heidegger’s Philosophy Ethically Meaningless? ...... 171 Dongsoo Lee 11 Phenomenology of Recognition: Hegel’s Original Contribution to the Politics of Recognition in Global Society ...... 185 Gibung Kwon 12 Levinas and Lukács: Totality and Infinity ...... 205 Richard A. Cohen 13 Toward a Phenomenology of Human Rights ...... 227 Robert Bernasconi 14 Cross-Cultural Encounters: Gadamer and Merleau-Ponty ...... 241 Fred Dallmayr 15 Phenomenology of Public Opinion: Communicative Body, Intercorporeality and Computer-Mediated Communication ...... 259 Joohan Kim

Part III Political Situations and Contemporary Problems 16 “Spaces of Freedom”: Materiality, Mediation, and Direct Political Participation in the Work of Arendt and Sartre ...... 283 Sonia Kruks 17 Transversality and Mestizaje: Moving Beyond the Purification-Resistance Impasse...... 305 John F. Burke 18 Memory and Countermemory: For an Open Future ...... 323 Martin Beck Matuštík 19 When Monsters No Longer Speak ...... 331 Lewis Ricardo Gordon and Jane Anna Gordon 20 Asymmetrical Reciprocity and Practical Agency: Contemporary Dilemmas of Feminist Theory in Benhabib, Young, and Kristeva ...... 353 Patricia Huntington 21 Genocidal Rape as Spectacle ...... 379 Debra Bergoffen Contents xiii

Biographical Notes ...... 395

Chronological-Alphabetical Bibliography of Political Phenomenology (1913–2013): Compiled by Lester Embree ([email protected]) ...... 403

Index ...... 433 Chapter 1 Introduction

Hwa Yol Jung

I build no towers, I erect bridges. —Martin Buber There is no possible point of view from which the world can appear an absolutely single fact. —William James A boundary is not that at which something stops but, as the Greeks recognized, the boundary is that from which something [new] begins its presencing . That is why the concept is that of horismos , that is, the horizon, the boundary. —Martin Heidegger If we keep on speaking the same language together, we’re going to reproduce the same history. —Luce Irigary

Abstract As an introduction to the present collection of twenty-one essays, fi ve aspects of this fi rst chapter must be emphasized. First, it begins with a brief descrip- tion of phenomenology as a philosophical movement , which was initiated by Edmund Husserl in Germany in the very beginning of the twentieth century and has now become a worldwide phenomenon. This volume represents for the fi rst time “political phenomenology” as a sub-discipline of phenomenology proper. Second, political phenomenology made its entry to the theory of politics as an alternative paradigm to both political behavioralism and the infl uential “essentialist” political philosophy of Leo Strauss. As Embree’s contribution in this volume shows, Alfred Schutz constructs reality in a social process, and follows Husserl’s critique of “scientism” and momentous discovery of the life-world (Lebenswelt ). Third, in the beginning was embodied sociality. The body is the expressive medium as well as the root of the social world. Fourth is the notion of transversality as the confl uence of differences across cultural and disciplinary borders in the age of globalizing plural- ism. Fifth, this introductory chapter briefl y describes the nature of each of the other 20 chapters in the volume.

H. Y. Jung (*) Moravian College , Bethlehem , PA , USA e-mail: [email protected]

1 Phenomenology as a Philosophical Movement

The aim of political phenomenology is to advance by way of phenomenology the understanding of the political or political things (res publica ) and of the conduct of political inquiry as meta-political activity. Phenomenology is that philosophical movement which was initiated by Edmund Husserl in the fi rst part of the twentieth century in Germany and continued, modifi ed, and extended by his followers throughout the entire globe. In other words, it has become global and cosmopolitan beyond the confi nes of its original home in Germany. Phenomenology as a dynamic philosophical movement does not stand still and will never be a fi xed and stagnant set of unchanging dogmas. Its true vitality is pre- served and resides in its capacity to transform itself. 1 Furthermore, the history of ideas does not simply change in a linear fashion. Instead, it moves from the present to the past, as well as lateral or trans-cultural ways, and past meanings may be renewed for the construction of the present and the future. The past as a structure of meanings is never fi nished. The Russian literary proto-phenomenologist Mikhail Bakhtin, whose protagonist is Dostoevsky, is truly radical and profound when he insists that past meanings are “unfi nalizable,” that is, they are recovered and renewed for the future as well as the present. Raymond Aron echoes Bakhtin when he writes: “we must accord to the past the [same] uncertainty of the future.”2 As a perpetual beginner, the phenomenologist is one who maintains the constant vigilance which would not let us forget the source and resource of all knowledge and action in life-worldly experience. To put it in the expression of Merleau-Ponty, the end of phenomenology is the justifi cation of its beginning. On the momentous occasion of dis/covering the importance of the life-world for the mission of phenomenology to overcome the crisis of European humanity and sciences, Husserl considered the philosopher as a “civil servant of humanity” (Funktionäre der Menschheit) and invoked the metaphor of the phoenix rising from the ashes of the

1 It should be noted that in recent decades nobody has been working more diligently than Lester Embree to globalize phenomenology and to make it interdisciplinary. The French interdisciplinary savant and transversalist Roland Barthes is truly instructive in deﬁ ning what interdisciplinarity means when he writes: “ Interdisciplinary studies, of which we hear so much, do not merely con- front already constituted disciplines (none of which, as a matter of fact, consents to leave off ). In order to do interdisciplinary work, it is not enough to take a “subject” (a theme) and to arrange two or three sciences around it. Interdisciplinary study consists in creating a new object, which belongs to no one. The Text is, I believe, one such object.” The Rustle of Language, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Hill and Wang, 1986), 72. In short, it produces “intertexts.” It should be noted that Jacques Derrida, unlike Barthes, was not deeply engaged in non-Western thought even if he mentioned Chinese grammatology and sampled a few sinograms in his writings. In speaking about university education, however, Derrida mentioned “ diagonal or transversal interscientiﬁ c research,” “comparativism in philosophy,” “philosophy and ethnocentrism,” and “philosophical transcontinentality.” See Eyes of the University: Right to Philosophy 2, trans. Jan Plug et al. (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004), 241. 2 Quoted in François Dosse, Empire of Meaning: The Humanization of the Social Sciences, trans. Hassan Melehy (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998), 308, which is one of those oeuvres which have been somehow overlooked. 1 Introduction 3 old. For very good reason , phenomenology is called a radical philosophy of experience which not only means to encounter the actually-given or real-alone, but exer- cises imaginary variations, or the freedom of its luck on the high seas of the human intellect—to borrow the language of Jean-Luc Nancy. To follow the advice of Merleau-Ponty, moreover, the philosophical or conceptual must always maintain its optimal altitude over the mundane, which is primary as the natural landscape precedes conceptual geography, otherwise, the latter ends up with reifying or even falsifying the former .

2 The Decline of Political Theory

In the early 1960s there had been serious concerns with the “decline,” if not the death, of political theory. The noted British intellectual historian and liberal plural- ist Isaiah Berlin, who asked if political theory still existed in 1962, was symptom- atic of the Stimmung of the time.3 Another rising young star in political theory, Judith N. Shklar, earlier spoke of the “decline of political faith” in the backdrop of the Enlightenment optimism of the spiral of continuing progress. Much later, Jürgen Habermas assured us that the Enlightenment is still “an unﬁ nished project.” Be that as it may, Shklar wrote that “The end of the Enlightenment has, in fact, meant not only a decline of social optimism and radicalism but also the passing of political philosophy.”4 Then she concluded that “a reasoned skepticism” is “more justiﬁ able than cultural despair and fatalism.”5 In 1960 Sheldon S. Wolin offered a well- reasoned argument that the decline of political philosophy is really a substantive issue in that the classical architectonic notion of “political man” was overtaken and replaced by “economic man”—the paradigmatic political transformation which began with John Locke’s liberalism.6

3 See “Does Political Theory Still Exist?” in Philosophy, Politics and Society: Second Series, eds. Peter Laslett and W. G. Runciman (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1962), 1–33. In concluding his essay, Berlin pointed out that there is “a strange paradox that political theory should seem to lead to shadowy an existence at a time when, for the ﬁ rst time in history, literally the whole of mankind is violently divided by the issues of the reality of which is, and has always been, the sole raison d’être of this branch of study.” 4 See After Utopia: The Decline of Political Faith (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1957), 25. 5 Ibid., 272–73. 6 See Politics and Vision: Continuity and Innovation in Western Political Thought, expanded ed. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004) (Original ed. in 1960), chapter 9: “Liberalism and the Decline of Political Philosophy,” 257–314. See also Richard Sennett, The Fall of Public Man (New York: Random House, 1988). 4 H.Y. Jung

3 Entry of Phenomenology in American Political Theory

In the late 1960s and the early 1970s phenomenology began its entry in American political theory as a new paradigm that can facilitate and contribute to its transition and renewal. This entry of phenomenology may aptly be described in terms of a stanza of Robert Frost’s poem, “The Road Not Taken”: Two roads diverged in a wood, and I— I took the one less traveled by, And that has made all the difference. It was in the midst of the clash between the classical political philosophy of Leo Strauss and political behavioralism. Strauss knew Husserl and Heidegger in person before he escaped Nazi Germany. Strauss recalled Husserl as telling him that phenomenological reduction (epoché ) can teach him how to bracket God. However, he understood or misunderstood Husserl’s conception of the (pre-scientiﬁ c) Lebenswelt as the primitive world before the discovery of science. Strauss also appreciated Heidegger as a teacher: compared to Heidegger, the reputed teacher Max Weber was just a “child” whose alleged “value neutrality” Strauss later became very critical. An anthology of phenomenological writings relevant to political theorizing entitled Existential Phenomenology and Political Theory: A Reader (1972) edited by Hwa Yol Jung with a Foreword by John Wild, the ﬁ rst of its kind in the English language, had some success in proselytizing political phenomenology. It had selected writings from Husserl, Merleau-Ponty, Schutz, Ricoeur, Sartre, Wild, Maurice Natanson, Gabriel Marcel, and William Leon McBride among others. It had been used as a text in graduate seminars in political theory. By 1986 the German philosopher Bericht von Ernst Vollrath wrote a brief account of the “renaissance” of American political theory in the German Information Philosophie (1986), which included Dallmayr and Jung as representing political phenomenology in the United States. 7 Phenomenology as a new paradigm for the science (Wissenschaft ) of politics may sharply be contrasted with the so-called “behavioralist revolution” beyond the tradition of the “legal-institutional” approach on the one hand and the philosophical approach of Strauss simply adhering to the classical “essentialist” tradition of Plato and Aristotle on the other.

7 In the early development of political phenomenology in the United States, we should include contributions from Herbert G. Reid and Ernest I. Yanarella. We would be remiss if we forget to mention the monumental collection on phenomenology and the social sciences in two volumes by Maurice Natanson in memory of Alfred Schutz, who was a mentor of Natanson. The ﬁ rst essay followed by Natanson’s introductory piece was Merleau-Ponty’s “Phenomenology and the Sciences of Man.” In the second volume, there were three entries on “Phenomenology and Political Science,” written by Hwa Yol Jung, Carl J. Friedrich, and John G. Gunnell—in that order. See Phenomenology and the Social Sciences, 2 vols., ed. Maurice Natanson (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1973). They were published in Northwestern University Studies in Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy whose general editor and associate editor were John Wild and James M. Edie, respectively. 1 Introduction 5

Phenomenology as a new paradigm may be taken as the Middle Way between Strauss’s “essentialism” on the one extreme, and political behavioralism on the other extreme. As a critique of the two, the phenomenological approach kills two birds with one stone, as it were. Here we take a cue from a passage from Merleau- Ponty’s Phenomenology of Perception which reads as follows: Where empiricism was deﬁ cient was in any internal connection between the object and the act which it triggers off. What intellectualism lacks is contingency in the occasions of thought. In the ﬁ rst case consciousness is too poor, in the second too rich for any phenomenon to appeal compellingly to it. Empiricism cannot see that we need to know what we are looking for, otherwise we would not be looking for it, and intellectualism fails to see that we need to be ignorant of what we are looking for, or equally again we should not be searching.8

3.1 III.1.1

For Strauss, political philosophy is a branch of philosophy. As philosophy is the quest for the eternal truth, political philosophy is the quest for the eternal truth about political things. Classical philosophers, according to him, made no distinction between the philosophy and the science of politics; this distinction is a contemporary invention, particularly with the rise of logical empiricism. The enemies of political philosophy thusly deﬁ ned are for Strauss, “positivism” and “historicism.” The high tribunal in which they are on trial is classical political philosophy or science whose standard bearers are Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle who came to an end with Machiavelli, who is considered by Strauss to be the founder of modern political science. Political philosophy is for Strauss radically “unscientiﬁ c” and “unhistorical”— the judgment derived from his interpretation of the classical tradition that seeks knowledge ( epistemé ) of the good . The very crisis of contemporary thought is a direct result of the denial of philosophy as a quest for the timeless good. Strauss’s mood of crisis is reminiscent of that of Husserl, who was also critical of the “fact- minded” positivism (scientism) that decapitates philosophy. While for Husserl it is positivism that is the enemy of philosophical thought, for Strauss it is historicism. For, according to Strauss, historicism is the Geist of our time, and positivism is necessarily transformed into historicism when the understanding of the latter becomes the necessary precondition for an empirical science of politics.

8 See Phenomenology of Perception, trans. Colin Smith (New York: Humanities Press, 1962), 28. It seems misleading if not outrightly wrong for the French interpreter of Merleau-Ponty’s ontology Renaud Barbaras to use the term “dualism” in discussing Merleau-Ponty’s “empiricism” and “intellectualism” in The Being of the Phenomenon: Merleau-Ponty’s Ontology, trans. Ted Toadvine and Leonard Lawlor (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2004) in the same sense that Merleau-Ponty’s critique of Descartes’ philosophy of cogito based on the dualism between the mind ( res cogitans) and the body ( res extensa). 6 H.Y. Jung

Political science is, for Strauss, the moral science par excellence since it seeks the most complete good (i.e., the political good). All political action , he empha- sizes, aims for either preservation or change. When desiring to preserve, we wish to prevent a change for the worse; when desiring to change, we wish to bring about something better. The idea of the better or worse implies thought of the moral good . Strauss further contends that neither positivism nor historicism is capable of answering the question of the good political society: the “value-neutrality” (or even nihilism) of positivism ignores and subverts from the very start the question of the good, and the “value-relativity” of historicism is incapable of answering it. So the target of Strauss’s attack on political behavioralism is the formula of value- neutrality, or the conception of political science as “value-free” as is, he also alleges, Max Weber. The target of Strauss’s criticism became an all-out and concerted effort against political behavioralism is found in a collection of Essays on the Scientifi c Study of Politics (1962) that Strauss himself sealed with an “epilogue,” writing: Only a great fool would call the new political science [i.e. political behavioralism] diabolic: it has no attributes peculiar to fallen angels. It is not even Machiavellian, for Machiavelli’s teaching was graceful, subtle, and colorful. Nor is it Neronian. Nevertheless, one may say of it that it fi ddles while Rome burns. It is excused by two facts: it does not know that it fi ddles, and it does not know that Rome burns.9 The above critique understandably infuriated political behavioralists. From the perspective of phenomenology, what must be challenged in Strauss’ conception of political philosophy is its ontological determinism: the idea that “to be” is “always and everywhere to be”—the formula that once discovered as true is forever to be true. 10 Strauss, Gadamer contends, stresses the unity of classical philosophy so much so that he fails to notice the existence of the extreme contrast between Plato and Aristotle (e.g., between the former ’s eidos and the latter’s phro- nesis). Moreover, Gadamer correctly intimates that to be rigorous, true thinking must take into account its own historical consciousness. To be sure, historicism must be overcome historically. Strauss, according to Gadamer, only points out that the classical philosopher thought “unhistorically,” that is, the ancients thought dif- ferently from the moderns—but he says nothing about the possibility of thinking “unhistorically” today, since any rethinking of classical philosophy is necessarily a historical thinking. There is always the possibility that Strauss might say that he is not an interpreter, but only a messenger, not unlike Jacques Maritain, who refused to be called a “neo-Thomist” and instead preferred to be called a “paleo-Thomist.” Insofar as time itself is ineradicable, the question of what is “transhistorical” must be sought within, rather than without, the concept of history; that is, within the framework of time. Human reality understood as a historical project is the affi rmation of the essence of being human against both the naturalistic interpretation of being human simply

9 Ed. Herbert J. Storing (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1962), 305–27. 10 See also the Straussian Eugene F. Miller, “Positivism, Historicism, and Political Inquiry,” American Political Science Review, 66 (September, 1972): 796–817. See Miller’s critique of historicism or historical relativism, i.e., existential phenomenology, 812–14. 1 Introduction 7 as part of nature on the one hand, and the conception of being as a permanently fi xed set of qualities on the other. To say that being human is absolutely time-bound is to say that our being is not only fi nite, but also contingent. This contingency is denied by Strauss’s ontological determinism (or “essentialism”) based on the permanence of human nature as the necessary ground and precondition for determining objective and universal knowledge. Precisely because being human is a project or task to be accomplished, we human beings are indeed incomplete beings in an incomplete world. Ultimately, this affi rmation of human fi nitude and contingency is not a denial of meaning or purpose in life, but rather what makes possible an ethics in which human culpability is no longer reduced to error, and the good is by no means pre- ordained by something more or less human. The ethical becomes meaningful precisely because there is ambiguity (ambi-guity) between good and evil. The good is not what is given as “human nature,” but what we make of it, it is a factum . To say that the human condition is ambiguous is to assert that its meaning is never fi xed, but constantly achieved by choice.11

3.2 III.1.2

Unlike Strauss’s ontological determinism , the methodolatry or scientism of political behavioralism is seriously fl awed because the natural-scientifi c method governs its way of inquiry. It may be said that the methodological tail wags the ontological dog. In short, behavioral scientism may be called methodological determinism . Logical empiricism is the Godfather, as it were, of political behavioralism. The latter was surfi ng on the high waves of the former . For them, value statements, unlike factual statements, are “meaningless” because they express personal preferences and as such they cannot be (empirically) verifi ed. “The study of politics,” the Dean of political behavioralism, Harold D. Lasswell, wrote in Politics: Who Gets What, When, How (1936), “is the study of infl uence and the infl uential. The science of politics states [factual] conditions: the philosophy of politics justifi es preferences.”12 The so-called “myth of fact” as given is too naïve, simplistic, and even untenable. According to the eighteenth century Neapolitan philosopher, Giambattista Vico, “verum ipsum factum,” that is, truth is what we make, as well as unmake and remake. Etymologically, factum is not simply given, but made or inter- preted, and as such fact, or even so-called “hard fact,” needs a justifi cation as much

11 Thus the French existential phenomenologist and feminist Simone de Beauvoir asserts in The Ethics of Ambiguity, trans. Bernard Frechtman (New York: Philosophical Library, 1948), 34: “the existentialist doctrine [vs. ‘essentialist’ principle] permits the elaboration of an ethics , but it even appears to us as the only philosophy in which an ethics has its place.” Throughout her works, she upholds her existentialist stand against any essentialist abstract principle that the question of good and evil in individual life is never pre-ordained but it is decided by what and how we make, unmake, and remake our life, i.e., what Heidegger calls the “facticity” of existence, or Giambattista Vico called factum . 12 See (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1936), 3. 8 H.Y. Jung as value. The British political philosopher Michael Oakeshott is Vichian and phenomenological when he writes: Fact, whatever else it may be, is experience; without thought there can be no fact. Even a view which separates ideas from things must recognize that facts are ideas. Fact is what has been made or achieved: it is the product of judgment. And if there be an unalterable datum in experience, it certainly cannot consist of fact. Fact, then, is not what is given, it is what is achieved in experience. Facts are never merely observed, remembered or combined: they are always made. We cannot “take” facts, because there are none to take until we have constructed them. And until fact is established [or “justifi ed”], that is, until it has achieved a place in a coherent world, it is no more than a hypothesis or a fi ction. 13 Alfred Schutz, who was engaged in the social construction of reality with the disciplinary fusion or border-crossing of sociology and phenomenology, would agree with Merleau-Ponty, for whom the disciplinary boundary between phenomenology and politics is thin and blurred, when he elegantly affi rmed that human existence is coexistence (Gaston Bachelard uses the term “coexistentialism”): [Our] political task is not incompatible with any cultural value or literary task, if literature and culture are defi ned as the progressive awareness of our multiple relationships with other people and the world rather than as extramundane techniques. If all truths are told, none will have to be hidden . In man’s co-existence with man, … morals, doctrines, thoughts and customs, laws, works and words all express each other; everything signifi es everything [else]. And outside this unique fulguration of existence there is nothing.14 Conversely, Merleau-Ponty would agree with Schutz in the concluding remarks of his phenomenological critique of the positivist “unity of science” movement. As far as we are aware, this revolutionary or paradigmatic suggestion has escaped our serious attention. Let us quote Schutz’s paramount yet unexplored lengthy passage in full:

13 Italics added for emphasis. Experience and Its Modes (Cambridge: At the University Press, 1933), 42. It would be extremely interesting to compare phenomenology with Vico and Oakeshott since, as far as I know, nothing has been written on Vico, political phenomenology, and Oakeshott’s philosophical politics. It is most instructive to take note of Vico’s scrupulous registration of complaint in On the Study Methods of Our Time (1709) against the prevailing pedagogic method of scientiﬁ c epistemology in his own time. The complaint is very contemporary, i.e., our own time, in its message and thus relevant to the moral education of public conduct which he boldly called the (new) “science of politics.” Political phenomenology is indeed a “new science [ scienza nuova] of politics.” Vico observed: “the greatest drawback of our educational methods is that we pay an excessive amount of attention to the natural sciences and not enough to ethics . Our chief fault is that we disregard that part of ethics which treats of human character, of its dispositions, its pas- sions, and of the manner of adjusting these factors to public life and eloquence. We neglect that discipline which deals with the differential feature of virtues and vices, with good and bad behavior patterns, with the typical characteristic of the various ages of man, of the two sexes, of social and economic class, race and nation, and with the art of seemly conduct in life, the most difﬁ cult of all arts. As a consequence of this neglect, a noble and important branch of studies, i.e., the science of politics, lies almost abandoned and untended,” trans. Elio Gianturco (Indianapolis: Bobbs- Merrill, 1965, 33). Now we can understand why Vico drew Karl Marx’s attention. 14 Italics added for emphasis. Quoted in Existential Phenomenology and Political Theory: A Reader, ed. Hwa Yol Jung (Chicago: Henry Regnery, 1972), xl–xli. 1 Introduction 9

It seems to me that the social scientist can agree with the statement that the principal difference between the social and the natural sciences do not have to be looked for in a different logic governing each branch of knowledge. But this does not involve the admission that the social sciences have to abandon the particular devices they use for exploring social reality for the sake of an ideal unity of methods which is founded on the entirely unwarranted assumption that only methods used by the natural sciences, especially by physics [i.e. phys- icalism], are scientifi c ones. So far as I know, no serious attempt has been made by the proponents of the “unity of science” movement to answer or even to ask the question whether the methodological problem of the natural sciences in their present state is not merely a special case of the more general, unexplored, problem on how scientifi c knowledge is possible at all and what its logical and methodological presuppositions are. It is my personal conviction that phenomenological philosophy has prepared the ground for such an investigation. Its outcome might quite possibly show that the particular methodological devices developed by the social sciences in order to grasp social reality are better suited than those of the natural sciences to lead to the discovery of the general principles which govern all human knowledge.15 In The Structure of Scientifi c Revolutions (1970), Thomas S. Kuhn founds his most infl uential formulation of paradigms on the social-scientifi c model of political institutions which, somewhat ironically, is at odds with the positivist aspiration of establishing a unifi ed theory of knowledge on the model of the natural sciences, particularly that of physics, to which Schutz’s aforementioned suggestion is a phenomenological counterproposal. More importantly, Kuhn later explicitly acknowl- edged the role of hermeneutics , or of the hermeneutical method in his work. In passing here, it is worth noting that Gadamer’s Truth and Method (1991) is an affi r- mation of the primacy of hermeneutical ontology over any methodology whatso- ever. For it, what truth means in the human-cultural sciences has grave consequences for philosophical hermeneutics, and it is in theme that an answer to the question of truth must be found. The model of his hermeneutical method is the human-cultural sciences rather than the natural sciences, the modern origin of which can be traced back to the Neapolitan philosopher Vico, who clearly saw science as a human

15 Aron Gurwitsch, who was a colleague of Schutz at the New School University, too, argues for the methodological signifi cance of the historico-sociocultural life-world as the basic of a phenomenological theory of all the sciences and reaches the following conclusion: “All of the sciences, including the mathematical sciences of nature, fi nd their place within the cultural world. For that reason , according to Husserl…the cultural or human sciences prove to be all-encompassing, since they also comprise the natural sciences, i.e., mathematized nature, is itself a mental accomplishment, that is, a cultural phenomenon. The converse, however, is not true. The cultural sciences cannot be given a place among the natural sciences, any more than the cultural world can be reached beginning from mathematized nature, or, for that matter, from the thing-world, while…by taking one’s departure from the cultural world, one can arrive at the thing-world and the mathematized universe by means of abstraction, idealization, and formalization. In general, then, there is a possible transition from the concrete to the abstract, but not the reverse.” See Phenomenology and the Theory of Science, ed. Lester Embree (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1974), 148–49. Schutz’s social critique of knowledge considers scientifi c knowledge as a social product by focusing on the context of an intersubjective community of investigators as scientifi c practitioners. As such, scientifi c activity as a social construction of reality partakes of the social a priori of the life-world itself. See also Embree’s contribution to this volume, Chap. 4, “A Construction of Alfred Schutz’s Theory of Political Science.” 10 H.Y. Jung

institution (in the etymological sense of the term) as a communal enterprise, or an “academy” that has its own history. It is in Gadamer’s focus on historical consciousness or effi cacy (wirkungsgeschichtliche Bewusstsein) that we fi nd the imprint of the human sciences (especially history) on his philosophical hermeneutics. Its radi- cality lies in the assertion that the human sciences contribute to the self-understanding of philosophy itself—an unusual and rare admission from a philosopher. Thus the two complementary circles of a single issue is (1) the relevance of hermeneutics to the conduct of social and cultural inquiry, and (2) the relevance of social and cultural inquiry to the self-understanding of philosophy. In this respect, hermeneutical phenomenology, with an emphasis on language as an institution or communal achievement, envisions the ultimate unity of philosophy and the human and cultural sciences (and the humanities). The epicenter of Gadamer’s hermeneutics and Kuhn’s theory of scientifi c paradigms is the effi cacy of historical consciousness. In an attempt to clarify his position in response to his critics, Kuhn wrote a postscript in 1969 to The Structure of Scientifi c Revolutions. In his concluding remarks, we fi nd a revealing passage whose idea has repeatedly been stressed in his later writings: “Scientifi c knowledge, like language, is intrinsically the common property of a group or else nothing at all. To understand it we shall need to know the special char- acteristics of the groups that create and use it.”16 The importance of viewing science or language as an institution is essentially twofold. First, scientifi c knowledge is the product of a socio-politico-cultural process, or what Kuhn calls a communal activity. Second, like language as the instrument of human communication, scientifi c truth is not “value-free” nor devoid of normative judgments in the way the positivist philosophers of science understand the term with their focus on the ahistorical “logic of explanation.” On the contrary, Kuhn insists that scientifi c theorizing always involves “an inextricable mixture” of descriptive/explanatory and normative judgments. Neither “value” nor “logic” is a tetragrammaton. Insofar as mathematical and scientifi c construction is a product, and also a project, of the human mind and a socio-cultural phenomenon, the function of phenomenology is to clarify the conditions under which scientism actually depends on the life-world as the conceptual infrastructure of all meanings—that is, to show how scientism is indeed the “garb of ideas” (Ideenkleit ). For Galileo, nature is written in the language or letters of mathematics. To understand it we must reduce it to a mani- fold of mathematical or geometric fi gures (i.e., triangles, squares, circles, etc.). Scientism, according to Husserl, is fallacious because it is foremost a conceptual garb whereby what once was (or was intended to be) true in the mathematical formalization of nature as a method has gradually been taken, or mistaken, for reality itself: “What in truth is a method and the result of that method comes to be taken for reality.” Husserl continues to explain: Mathematics and mathematical science, as a garb of ideas, or the garb of symbols of the symbolic mathematical theories, encompasses everything which, for scientists and the edu- cated generally, represents the life-world, dresses it up as “objectively actual and true”

16 Thomas S. Kuhn, The Structure of Scientiﬁ c Revolutions, 2nd ed., enl. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970), 210. 1 Introduction 11

nature. It is through the garb of ideas that we take for true being what is actually a method — a method which is designed for the purpose of progressively improving, in infi nitum , through “scientifi c predictions, those rough predictions which are the only ones originally possible within the sphere of what is actually experienced and experienceable in the life-world.17 Scientism in the social sciences today is the blind transference of this methodolatry to the social construction of reality, not just the construction of social reality: social reality has turned into a captive of scientifi c methodolatry rather than becom- ing the ontological foundation of scientifi c methodology. Ontology must precede methodology. As for prediction which has been the hallmark of the natural sciences, the physical sciences, it is a hazard and inaccurate guesswork for human behavior because humans are conscious and self-conscious beings who can defy or counter- act prediction. There is indeed a radical difference between how natural objects move and how humans behave or act . Often the so-called “prediction” has a boo- merang effect, or in common sports parlance, “Monday morning quarterbacking.” It turns out to be not pre-dicting but post-dicting. Be that as it may, phenomenology is now capable of disclosing, or undressing, the cloak of scientism in which, unaware of its origin, methodology replaces or takes place prior to ontology or the social construction of reality. Scientism is mistaken because, as Schutz puts it succinctly: The concept of Nature…with which the natural sciences have to deal is, as Husserl has shown, an idealizing abstraction from the Lebenswelt, an abstraction which, on principle and of course legitimately, excludes persons with their personal life and all objects of culture which originate as such in practical human activity. Exactly this layer of the Lebenswelt , however, from which the natural sciences have to abstract, is the social reality which the social sciences have to investigate.18 Thus, political phenomenology—unlike political behavioralism as a form of scientism—attempts to develop the methodology of studying politics or the political on the basis of its ontological insights that the world of politics, unlike the world of physical objects, is constructed as the world of meanings whose subjects or creators (including the body as sentient subjects) are conscious human actors on the social scene.

3.3 III.3

We exist as body, as ﬂ esh, and we co-exist ﬁ rst as intercorporeal subjects. In the beginning is indeed embodied sociality. Strauss’s classical philosophy is totally ignorant or dismissive of the connection between embodiment and sociality in general, and political action in particular. For Strauss, embodiment is a forgotten or

17 The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology: An Introduction to Phenomenological Philosophy, trans. David Carr (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1970), 51–52. 18 Collected Papers I: The Problem of Social Reality, ed. Maurice Natanson (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1962), 58. 12 H.Y. Jung abandoned orphan child of philosophy presumably because philosophy is the function of the mind alone. On the other hand, the behavioralist understanding of the body and human behavior is objectifi ed from an observer’s standpoint. Thus there is a radical difference between the behavioralist “having a body” (as an object) and the phenomenological “being a body” (as a subject). Neither political behavioralism nor psychological behaviorism (i.e., B. F. Skinner’s psychology) knows the body as a subject: for them, the human body is an object among others, and consciousness is likened to being a ghost in a machine. We often take for granted that the body is our foothold in the world. As it is a location in space, without it we can neither imagine nor conceptualize space; without the body and space, there would be no sociality. In other words, the body is the primor- dial mode of our being-in-the-world, both social (Mitwelt ) and natural (Umwelt ). Gabriel Marcel contends that the body (as subject) is the central problem of human existence and everything else depends on its solution. As such the body is related to everything we do and think: the carnal landscape is the presupposed foundation of all conceptual geography. To put it in the phenomenological language of Merleau- Ponty, perception precedes conception: the perceived world is the always presupposed foundation of all knowledge, as well as all action , since the body is the lived fi eld of perception. Perception and the world (we perceive) are made of the same stuff. By and large, the body has been an orphan child of philosophical discourses in Western modernity , as if the philosopher is, or can be “a disembodied cerebrum” (a phrase of Brand Blanshard, who was one of the fi rst philosophers to write a critique of Skinnerian behaviorism). The modern legacy of Descartes’s “epistemocracy,” or his epistemological regime of philosophy of the cogito , is marked with and marred by the bifurcation of mind (res cogitans ) and body (res extensa ). As it is the act of the disembodied mind as “thinking substance,” the cogito is inherently egocentric— the epitome of an “invisible man” in isolation from others, both other minds and other bodies. As a thinking substance, the mind is independent of the body: it needs nothing more than itself to exist. The literary hermeneuticist, Gerold L. Bruns, speaks elegantly and critically of “Descartes’s jealousy of the subject,” that is, “the subject’s desire to seal itself off or to keep its thinking pure or uncontaminated by the horizon of the other.” 19 Descartes himself confessed that any sort of intellectual peregrination (not even to speak of globetrotting), real or imaginary is anathema to philosophizing. For him, instead, the foundational knowledge of philosophy is to be had nowhere else but in the philosophizing ego in its disembodied solitude. Once the self and the other are viewed as disembodied substances, two self-contained substances, egocentrism—or even solipsism in extremis—is inescapable. In short, Descartes’s philosophizing ego is anathema to reality as social process or the social

19 “What Is Tradition?” New Literary History, 22 (1991): 1–21 at 11. For the concept of embodiment necessary to sociality or the social construction of reality, see Hwa Yol Jung, “In the Beginning was Embodied Sociality,” in Interaction and Everyday Life: Phenomenological and Ethnomethodological Essays in Honor of George Psathas , eds. Hisashi Nasu and Frances Chaput Waksler (Lanham: Lexington Books, 2012), 41–71. 1 Introduction 13 construction of reality. His twentieth century compatriot Auguste Rodin’s two sculptural masterpieces The Thinker and The Cathedral depict otherwise the rite of both embodied thinking and sociality. The famed German poet Rainer Maria Rilke, who was a one-time assistant to Rodin, sculpts a few words of wisdom about The Thinker as one who “sits absorbed and silent, heavy with thought: with all the strength of an acting man he thinks. His whole body has become head and all the blood in his veins has become brain.”20 As for Rodin’s The Cathedral, it depicts the sacramental rite of coexistence when two right hands coming together in the towering structure of a cathedral. All in all, the phenomenologist, Erwin W. Straus, caps the importance and necessity of the body for sociality when he writes: “the body of an organism is related to other bodies; it is a part of the physical universe. The mind, however, is related to one body only; it is not directly related to the world, nor to other bodies, nor to other minds.” 21 The body is the umbilical cord to the social world. To be social is fi rst and foremost to be intercorporeal. Besides, the body is the only open window through which we can peep, for better or worse, into the inner condition of our mind or soul. The face, as Ludwig Wittgenstein expresses, is the “soul” ( Seele) of the body. The mind becomes a relatum only because the body is populated in the world with other bodies. It is necessary that we exist as body, as fl esh, in order to be social, and thus, ethical . Jürgen Habermas, who is a towering fi gure in contemporary social and political philosophy, turns his deaf ears to the body as fl esh, to the subjective or, better, the phenomenological body by cutting off or uprooting our umbilical cord to the social and political world or, better to use his favorite word, the world of communicative praxis .22

3.4 III.4

Harold Lasswell, as we have noted above, divides the theorizing of politics into political philosophy as profession of subjective “preferences” on the one hand and political science as stating or describing only “conditions” on the other. Political philosophy belongs to the realm of values whose truth is unverifi able, whereas political science is relegated to the realm of verifi able facts. We have hinted at above, the separation of values from facts is too naïve, simplistic, and even untenable. It is even a facile escapism to tackle or resolve the diffi cult problem of both values and facts.

20 Rainer Maria Rilke, Rodin, trans. Jessie Lemont and Hans Trausil (London: Grey Wall Press, 1946), 33. 21 Phenomenological Psychology (New York: Basic Books, 1966), 211. 22 Habermas is extremely critical of phenomenology in The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity : Twelve Lectures, trans. Fredrick Lawrence (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1987), see especially Lecture XI entitled “An Alternative Way out of the Philosophy of the Subject: Communicative versus Subject-Centered Reason ,” 294–326, where phenomenology draws his heavy critical gunﬁ re. Habermas includes Merleau-Ponty’s conception of the lived body as subject. I wonder what Habermas thinks of Marshall McLuhan’s communication theory in which the senses have reason of their own. Is Habermas a “disembodied cerebrum”? 14 H.Y. Jung

This section will argue for an intimate and necessary connection between ethics and politics, that is, for politics as ethics. Value is an integral and constitutive ele- ment of everyday existence. “In the Lebenswelt ,” John Wild stresses, “value is not a later addition. It is constitutive of the thing. … A human culture is not a neutral structure with approvals and disapprovals added on. It is of approvals and disapprovals.” 23 The British ethical phenomenologist, Simon Critchley, deconstructs politics as ethics in the venerable tradition of Emmanuel Levinas. Levinas, we believe, has succeeded, in making a paradigmatic ethical turn in phenomenology in the twentieth century in which morality is the sinew of human co-existence based on the conception of ethics as “fi rst philosophy” (prima philosophia or philosophie première ). Levinas’s construction of ethics as fi rst philosophy is “otherwise” than Heidegger’s Being or ontology . In a nutshell, as Critchley elegantly puts it, politics devoid of ethics is “blind,” as much as ethics devoid of politics is an “empty” abstraction. 24 Thus, ethics and politics are inseparably interfaced or intertwined. For Levinas, ethics as fi rst philosophy and a philosophy of dialogue implicate or entan- gle each other because a philosophy of a dialogue is necessarily an ethics and, as Levinas’s states, “cannot not be an ethics.” In the fashion of Levinas’s ethics as fi rst philosophy, furthermore, we can take up the issue of “responsibility as fi rst ethics,” which is anchored in the primacy of the other, of alterity (i.e. “altarity”—to use Mark C. Taylor’s neologism where the other is placed at the altar or higher place over the self (ipseity). Altruism for its name sake, therefore, is exemplary of responsibility. As the “you” or “we” is not a plural

23 Existence and the World of Freedom (Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall, 1963), 54. According to Wild, we fi nd four different kinds of phenomenon in the life-world: “man himself [or herself], the realm of nature, other men [and women] and the realm of human culture, and fi nally, the transcen- dence.” See “Interrogation of John Wild,” conducted by Henry B. Veatch in Philosophical Interrogations , eds. Sydney and Beatrice Rome (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1964), 177. 24 We should mention here two important works in ethical phenomenology by Critchley: Ethics — Politics—Subjectivity: Essays on Derrida, Levinas and Contemporary French Thought (London: Verso, 1999), and The Ethics of Deconstruction: Derrida and Levinas (Oxford: Blackwell, 1992). We wish to say that ethics as fi rst philosophy is post- ontological . It is worth noting that, for Heidegger, there are the “three basic components of phenomenological method—reduction, construction, destruction—belong together in their content and must receive grounding in their mutual pertinence. Construction in philosophy is necessarily deconstruction, that is to say, a deconstruct- ing of traditional concepts carried out in a historical recursion to the tradition. This is not a nega- tion of the tradition, nor a condemnation of it as worthless; quite the reverse: it signifi es precisely a positive appropriation of tradition, because destruction belongs to construction, philosophical cognition is essentially at the same time, in a certain sense, historical cognition. History of philosophy, as it is called, belongs to the concept of philosophy as science ( Wissenschaft), to the concept of phenomenological investigation. The history of philosophy is not an arbitrary appendage to the business of teaching, which provides an occasion for picking up some convenient and easy theme for passing an examination or even for just looking around to see how things were in earlier times.” See The Basic Problems of Phenomenology , trans. Albert Hofstadter (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1982), 23. This passage clearly adds an explanation to the importance of “historical consciousness” in Gadamer’s hermeneutics and of Derrida’s deconstructionism which is not a demolition derby or destruction for the sake of destruction. 1 Introduction 15 of the “I,” ipseity alone renders responsibility as fi rst ethics impossible. Indeed, ipseity alone defaces or effaces the ethical . It is the primary presence of the other that makes responsibility as fi rst ethics, if not the ethical itself, possible. Thus, Levinas holds that human plurality is not a multiplicity of numbers, but is predi- cated upon a radical alterity of the other, that is, heteronomy. The idea of “altarity” elevates the world of the other, and transforms it into an elevated ethical text. In the elevated ethical text of “altarity,” responsibility is fi rst ethics . Levinas’s heteronomic ethics confi rms conscience never for itself but only for an “other” ( pour l’autre ): it is my responsibility to the other that makes me an individual “I” or the very mode of subjectivity is knotted to responsibility as fi rst ethics . Although responsibility without freedom is a sham, freedom or autonomy is ancillary, not contrary to responsibility simply because we can be free without being responsible, but we can never be responsible without being free. “Existence,” Levinas declares, “is not condemned to freedom but judged and invested as a freedom. Freedom could not present itself all naked. This investiture of freedom constitutes moral life itself, which is through and through a heteronomy.” 25 From the existential standpoint of Levinas’s heteronomy the very idea of existence has been profoundly misunderstood among its antagonists as well as protagonists: as its etymology suggests, what is really central to it is not the centrality but the eccentricity (ex-centricity) of the self toward the world of others (Mitwelt ) and other nonhuman beings and things (Umwelt ). The human as eccentric is a being who is already always exposed to and reaches out to the outside world of what Levinas himself calls “exteriority.” Thus the motto of existence must be: do not go inside, go outside. Existence is coexistence: to be alone is not to be. Be a responsible agent fi rst, not an epistemological subject. Individual existence is authenticated not by egocentricity, but only by heteronomy or an open dialogue of eccentric agents. To sum up: the idea of existence as coexistence promotes responsibility as fi rst ethics which refutes both egocentrism and anthropocentrism (or speciesism). Václav Havel’s politics of “living in truth” and the “Charter 77” group in Czechoslovakia, whose intellectual pillar was Jan Patočka—once an assistant of Husserl and a student of Heidegger, who died during a police interrogation—thor- oughly vindicates the moral effi cacy of the “jesterly” against the “priestly” (to use the dialogical language of the exiled Polish Marxist Leszek Kolakowski)—politics of totalitarianism, of “the power of the powerless” (the title of Havel’s essay dedi- cated to Patočka), of the existential politics of conscience, and of the success of nonviolent resistance for the creation of a “post-totalitarian” political order. After reading Levinas closely in his prison years, Havel regarded responsibility as the innermost secret of moral humanity, which would be capable of encompassing the nonhuman realm of nature.26 Havel rejected in toto Machiavelli’s Realpolitik or

25 Collected Philosophical Papers, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Dordrecht: Martinus Nijhoff, 1987), 58. 26 For a detailed account of Havel’s responsible politics, see Hwa Yol Jung, “Václav Havel’s New Statecraft of Responsible Politics,” in Phenomenology 2010, vol. 5: Selected Essays from North America. Part 2: Phenomenology Beyond Philosophy, eds. Lester Embree, Michael Barber, and Thomas J. Nenon (Bucharest: Zeta Books/Paris: Arghos-Diffusion, 2010), 177–95. 16 H.Y. Jung power politics known as the “art of the possible.” He demonstrated in both theory and practice the ethics of responsible politics as what he called the “art of the impossible.” For Havel, violence or carnage is anathema to genuinely dialogical politics: his jesterly dissident is a true Albert Camus’ “rebel” or Mikhail Bakhtin’s “dialo- gist,” not a “dialectician,” who senses and cultivates his allegiance to human solidar- ity with no intention of obliterating the other. He/she is able to say that “ I rebel, therefore we exist.” Havel also talked about the role of an intellectual as a perpetual “irritant” rebel (or gadﬂ y) who is self-consciously capable of detaching himself/ herself from the established order of any kind and who is constantly vigilant to and suspicious of taking the “winning side.” Rebellion or nonviolent subversion stands tall in the midway between silence and murder in refusing to accept what we are. The rebel or dissident willingly acknowledges a dialogical interplay between the ethical principle of culpability and the epistemological principle of fallibility, whereas the revolutionary thrives on the monological absoluteness of inculpability and infallibility however noble his/her cause may be. Epistemological dogmatism and moral absolutism have no niche in Levinas’s ethics of responsibility based on heteronomy and Havel’s statecraft of responsible politics which always recognize the ever-present, porous moment and zone of ambiguity that resides in between complete doubt that paralyzes action and absolute certainty that inﬂ icts suffering, terror, and death on ordinary humanity. For Havel, to repeat in conclusion, morals are the basic fabric of all politics. Thus politics is never a four-letter word precisely because it is deeply rooted in, and insepa- rable from, the moral makeup of common humanity. For him, politics without ethics “bear a tyranny within itself.” Havel also speaks of politics as “morality in practice,” “practical morality,” and “anti-political politics.” For him, politics as ethics, it is worth mentioning again, is the “art of the impossible,” while Machiavelli’s power politics devoid of ethics that promotes “living in untruth,” that is, in manipulation, image-making deception, and above all violence as the “art of the possible.” We would even contend without a moment of hesitation that in the age of geophilosophy as ultima philosophia and of the globalizing world of multiculturalism, “taking responsibility seriously” is far more important than “taking rights seriously” (the rights theorist Ronald Dworkin’s expression). For Locke, the sole function of civil government in his theory of social contract is to protect and preserve individual property which is a composite of life, liberty, and estate which Thomas Jefferson in the Declaration of Independence rephrased as “the pursuit of happiness.” Estate is nothing but the product of labor, which is the centerpiece of Locke’s structuration of property. Locke meant to create a society of acquisitive individuals, which is called by the Canadian political theorist C. B. Macpherson “possessive individualism.”27

27 See C. B. Macpherson, The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism (Oxford: Clarendon Press). Anthony Downs’ An Economic Theory of Democracy (New York: Harper and Row, 1957) was once, if not now, a popular text for undergraduate majors in political science. His conception of “positive political science” was preceded by Milton Friedman’s model of “positive economics .” To be “positive,” according to Downs, the model is constructed for the purpose of accurate prediction rather than of accurately describing political reality or understanding of the meaning of political phenomenon under observation. It is constructed by selecting a few crucial variables as relevant