Reflexivity and Social Phenomenology Benjamin K
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UNF Digital Commons UNF Graduate Theses and Dissertations Student Scholarship 2011 Reflexivity and Social Phenomenology Benjamin K. Hoffman University of North Florida Suggested Citation Hoffman, Benjamin K., "Reflexivity and Social Phenomenology" (2011). UNF Graduate Theses and Dissertations. 130. https://digitalcommons.unf.edu/etd/130 This Master's Thesis is brought to you for free and open access by the Student Scholarship at UNF Digital Commons. It has been accepted for inclusion in UNF Graduate Theses and Dissertations by an authorized administrator of UNF Digital Commons. For more information, please contact Digital Projects. © 2011 All Rights Reserved Reflexivity and Social Phenomenology by Benjamin K. Hoffman A thesis submitted to the Department of Philosophy in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Masters of Practical Philosophy and Applied Ethics UNIVERSITY OF NORTH FLORIDA COLLEGE OF ARTS AND SCIENCES July, 2011 CERTIFICATE OF APPROVAL Reflexivity and Social Phenomenology Ben Hoffman Date Signature Deleted (/~/!I ( J Signature Deleted Signature Deleted Erinn Gilson, Assistant Prof of Philosophy Signature Deleted Coordinator, Philosophy Dept MA Program Signature Deleted ~ 7 Hans-Her~ o{;g]ef Chairperson, Department of Philosophy Accepted for the College: Signature Deleted Barbara HJriC Dean of COlle{e of Arts and Sciences Accepted for the University: Signature Deleted Dean of Graduate School ii Abstract This thesis develops an account of human understanding on the basis of an analysis of German philosopher Martin Heidegger’s Being and Time, and in relation to the thought of the Kyoto School philosopher Watsuji Tetsurô. The aim is to describe shared human intelligibility as founded upon a historical tradition and maintained by concrete practices, and yet as expressed only by interpretive projections, and therefore always open to revision. An analysis of the significance of anxiety and authenticity in Being and Time, as aspects of the existential interpretive process of our lives, is accompanied by a philosophical description of everyday acts, which finds that the world is interpreted in relation to the others with whom the world is co- inhabited. This social relatedness between, on one hand, authentic, ‘individualized’ interpretation, and on the other hand, the everyday basis of intelligibility, is shown to support a potentially radical philosophy of social transformation. The first half of the text discusses the central significance of interpretation for Heidegger’s phenomenology, and argues for a reading of authenticity as a contextual, practical and individualized project. The second half develops an account of social existence in reference to Watsuji’s phenomenological ethics, and concludes with an examination of social opposition movements and the revision of the ground of intelligibility provided by a tradition and expressed in social practices. iii Acknowledgments I would like to thank first of all my advisor, Dr. Hans-Herbert Kögler, for not only his invaluable support of this project, but for first inspiring my interest in hermeneutics, Heidegger and, to a large extent, philosophy in general. I can’t envision the development of this work without his contribution to its initial inspiration, and he has been more dedicated to its progression than I could have reasonably expected or hoped. Our conversations about themes addressed here, continued across many meetings, were essential to this project. I wish to thank also the other members of my thesis committee, Dr. Erinn Gilson and Dr. Andrew Buchwalter, whose suggestions significantly improved the completed work. I should express my gratitude to Dr. John C. Maraldo for introducing me to Watsuji and the Kyoto School, and for bringing social phenomenology to my attention. And thanks to Andrew Vleck for the ongoing dialogue, for our disagreements no less than our agreements, through which much of the thought expressed here developed. I hope with this work to provoke him to further heated discussions. iv Contents Introduction: Genealogy, Reflexivity, and Phenomenology . 1 I. Preliminary Notes on the Question of the Meaning of Being 1 - The question posed and the problem of under-standing . 11 2 - Questioning and circularity . 14 3 - Finitude and the opacity of the question . 16 4 - Methodological comments on phenomenology and hermeneutics . 17 II. Being as Intelligibility and Significance: Ontological and Pre-ontological Interpretation 1 - Interpretation, understanding, and projection . 19 2 - Interpretation as projected understanding . 21 3 - The hermeneutic circle . 23 4 - Pre-ontological interpretation . 24 5 - Ontological Interpretation . 32 III. Interpretation and Authenticity 1 - Interpretation and understanding as authentic and inauthentic . 34 2 - Existential interpretation . 37 3 - Anxiety and existential interpretation . 39 4 - Anxiety, thrownness, finitude . 45 5 - Unintelligibility and authentic projection . 47 6 - Individual interpretation / the individual as such . 48 7 - Possibility, nullity and projection . 50 8 - Essence, existence, ek-stasis. 53 IV. Preparation for the Development of a Hermeneutical Ethics: Social Phenomenology, Heidegger, and Watsuji 1 - Ethics and ontology . 59 2 - Being with, Being alongside, and the publicness of the world . 61 3 - Thinking as private and public . 64 4 - The everyday body . 67 5 - ‘Sensations’ . 70 6 – State of mind; emotion . 72 7 - The primordiality of sociality. 78 8 - Emptiness and the absolute . 84 9 - Being and interbeing . 88 v V. Intelligibility, Ethics, and the Phenomenological Priority of the Question of the Meaning of Being 1 - Introduction . 91 2 - The question of Being; questioning as an everyday way of being . 92 3 - The priority of the question of the meaning of Being . 97 4 - Individualized interpretation, individuality, and community . 99 5 - Two conceptions of the call of conscience: intelligibility, goodness, badness, and evil . 101 6 - Revaluation and the being to whom conscience calls . 106 VI. Reflexivity, Social Self-Transformation, Opposition 1 - Introduction . 109 2 - Reflexivity and objectification, absorption and interruption: Mead, Foucault, Benjamin . 112 3 - Death and the space of death: healing, and folk mythology as critique . 123 4 - ‘Existential communitarian’ revaluation . 128 Conclusion: Interpretation and Sociality . 134 Works Cited . 153 1 Introduction: Genealogy, Reflexivity, and Phenomenology Nietzsche writes in The Dawn: “How did reason come into the world? As is fitting, in an irrational manner, by accident. One will have to guess at it as a riddle.”1 In looking toward its own origins, reason guesses at itself, finding in its fundamental self-reference a riddle that it cannot overcome. If we turn toward our past, and identify that from which we emerged to be ‘irrational’ or purposeless, a constellation of accidents and contingent details, we can yet do so, and consider legitimate such an understanding of these accidents and details, only insofar as we ‘posses’ reason. Reason, that on the basis of which such a discovery is first possible, seems in that case to undermine its own legitimacy through its self-reference. On what basis can reason, finding itself to have arisen from an ‘irrational’ history, being an accident itself, proclaim its legitimacy? And yet, in the absence of such legitimacy, can reason even coherently make a claim against its legitimacy? Reason, finding the ‘irrational’ as its foundation, encounters this riddle, and can only ‘guess at it.’ In a section of The Order of Things titled “The Analytic of Finitude,” Foucault describes the first appearance of ‘man’ through the episteme of modernity: “Man appears in his ambiguous position as an object of knowledge and as a subject that knows; enslaved sovereign, observed spectator.”2 ‘Man,’ that is, ‘appears’ as a subject-made-object, or an object-made-subject. Knowledge, in the modern episteme, depends on a knower, who is also the object of ‘his’ own 1 Friedrich Nietzsche, The Portable Nietzsche, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Viking Press, 1960), 81. 2 Michel Foucault, The Order of Things (New York: Vintage Books, 1994), 312. 2 knowledge.3 Foucault identifies the subject here constituted as the necessary center of knowledge; as the precondition for knowledge; but also as presenting limits to knowledge.4 In The Order of Things, one might identify the subject as a necessary presence, appearing in the modern episteme as it emerged out of the classical episteme, for reasons that seem not entirely arbitrary, but determined by contradictions implicit in the latter. But the modern episteme creates only a new set of contradictions, in particular, in the dilemma of the subject as both the initial condition and the limit of knowledge. The foundational self-understanding of this subject confronts this dilemma: In its reflexivity, the subject objectifies itself, and so undermines its own subjectivity; but it is only as subject that self-objectification is possible. In Foucault’s genealogical analyses, he turns toward examinations of the history of practices as constitutive of particular modes of subjectivity. In a statement of his methodology, “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History,” Foucault writes: A genealogy of values, morality, asceticism, and knowledge will never confuse itself with a quest for their ‘origins,’ will never neglect as inaccessible the vicissitudes of history. On the contrary, it will cultivate the details and accidents that accompany every beginning; it will cultivate the details