The Other at the Threshold: A Husserlian Analysis of Ethics and

Violence in the Home/Alien Encounter

Hora Zabarjadi Sar BA (Allame Tabatabayee University), MA (QUT), MPhil (QUT)

A thesis submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy at The University of Queensland in 2020 School of Historical and Philosophical Inquiry

1 Abstract

In a world where, as Martin Heidegger puts it, ‘homelessness’ has become its destiny, the colonized/Oriental Other that once exclusively constituted and was neglected from the matrix of the Western imaginary has no longer maintained its distance as ‘out there’. Instead it is embodied as a ‘refugee’ appearing on the borders of the ‘home’ with its complex cultural, colonial history. The majority of refugee studies feature the refugee as the outcome of the interplay of the two concepts of the ‘rights of man’ and the ‘rights of the citizen’, who resides on the threshold of nativity and nationality as the limit phenomenon of the nation-state stands before the law in its totality but cannot be classified under any of its provisions. However, this thesis investigates the philosophical underpinnings of the emergence of the phenomenon of the refugee that appears at the threshold of one’s own experience of home as an alien who does not belong to the privileged normative structure of the home.

Drawing on Anthony Steinbock’s approach to the Husserlian phenomenology of generativity, this study phenomenologically examines the possibility of an ethical relation in the Homeworld and Alienworld encounter. Focusing on the mode of givenness of the alien to the home in interpersonal relations, the main question of the thesis is:

If phenomenologically the Other is accessible to home in a mode of inaccessibility, then how can the ‘I’ initiate an ethical relation to the Other?

As the result of addressing this question, building on Edmund Husserl’s late project of ethical renewal and Bernhard Waldenfels’ phenomenological ethics of Responsivity alongside Jean-Luc Marion’s phenomenology of givenness, I develop a new understanding of the experience of violence versus morally experiencing the Other. Although James Dodd contributed greatly to the development of the phenomenology of violence, this thesis gives a new perspective to the concept of ‘violence’ versus the ‘ethical’ from the perspective of types of phenomena and various modes of givenness. From a phenomenological perspective, by analyzing the mode of givenness peculiar to the experience of the Other in the intersubjective realm, I propose that violence is a disposition toward receiving the Other in experience as a denigrated phenomenon. However, an ethical relation to the Other means to receiving the Other as saturated phenomenon that is non-objectifiable.

Chapter One discusses how phenomenology as critique can be a critical reflection on experience in order to justify and turn back to the question that concerns the refugee subject as ‘an alien other’. Applying Besinnung enables me to unravel the meaning structure that is operative in colonial subjectification and de-subjectification and the concept of violence that is embedded in the colonial situation. Dodd’s (2009, 2017) phenomenological account of violence and Giorgio Agamben’s

2 (1998) discussion of ‘the camp’ gives me the opportunity to analyze the current manifestation of colonial violence in Australian offshore refugee detention camps.

Considering various sorts of violence that are operative in the colonial structure, Chapter Two focuses on a specific type of violence that is hidden in the cognitive structure of our consciousness: epistemic violence. Building on Miranda Fricker’s (2007) notion of ‘epistemic injustice’ and Husserl’s phenomenological notion of ‘horizon-structure of experience’ that he proposed in Experience and judgment (1973) I develop a phenomenological analysis of the horizon structure of experiencing two types of epistemic injustice, which are testimonial and hermeneutical injustice.

Phenomenologically thematizing the intersubjective structure of the home, Chapter Three investigates the way the institutional violence of the colonial system can affect meaning constitution. A regressive inquiry into the pregiven lifeworld of the colonial situation as a violent situation that emerges out of the disrupted world of sense, the chapter enquires into the relation of the ‘I’ with the ‘alien’, and asks how does the ‘I’ experience the Other and constitute it as alien? Doing so, I argue that I experience the other as always present in its absence in a way that its presence is withdrawn from the accessibility of home as inaccessible.

Chapter Four examines the mode of experiencing the alien Other by the home as a liminal experience in which the alienworld is inaccessible and incomprehensible to home. Furthermore, building on the work of Emmanuel Levinas and Steinbock, I intend to liberate the phenomenon of the alien from the constitutive conditions of the home by discussing how the Other person is absolved from a disposal (nöematic) relation with me. This is to discover the most profound relation to the other that is given in moral experience.

Chapter Five analyzes the moral experience of the Other in terms of the modality of the givenness of the Other, and in terms of the type of phenomena given in vertical givenness in the intersubjective realm. Reading Steinbock together with Marion, I explore the type of phenomenality of the alien Other who is given in the mode of revelation as a saturated phenomenon. I argue that by abandoning the givenness of the Other as a saturated phenomenon, I open the possibility of violence toward the Other. This way, I propose that the two concepts of violence and ethics are phenomenological orientations toward the reception of the call of the Other as a saturated phenomenon.

3 Declaration by author

This thesis is composed of my original work, and contains no material previously published or written by another person except where due reference has been made in the text. I have clearly stated the contribution by others to jointly-authored works that I have included in my thesis.

I have clearly stated the contribution of others to my thesis as a whole, including statistical assistance, survey design, data analysis, significant technical procedures, professional editorial advice, financial support and any other original research work used or reported in my thesis. The content of my thesis is the result of work I have carried out since the commencement of my higher degree by research candidature and does not include a substantial part of work that has been submitted to qualify for the award of any other degree or diploma in any university or other tertiary institution. I have clearly stated which parts of my thesis, if any, have been submitted to qualify for another award.

I acknowledge that an electronic copy of my thesis must be lodged with the University Library and, subject to the policy and procedures of The University of Queensland, the thesis be made available for research and study in accordance with the Copyright Act 1968 unless a period of embargo has been approved by the Dean of the Graduate School.

I acknowledge that copyright of all material contained in my thesis resides with the copyright holder(s) of that material. Where appropriate I have obtained copyright permission from the copyright holder to reproduce material in this thesis and have sought permission from co-authors for any jointly authored works included in the thesis.

4 Publications included in this thesis No publications included.

Submitted manuscripts included in this thesis No manuscripts submitted for publication.

Other publications during candidature

Contributions by others to the thesis No contributions by others.

5 Statement of parts of the thesis submitted to qualify for the award of another degree No works submitted towards another degree have been included in this thesis

Research Involving Human or Animal Subjects No animal or human subjects were involved in this research

6 Acknowledgements

Thank you to the University of Queensland for the opportunity to do research and complete my thesis, for the Australian Postgraduate Award scholarship, but also for the Career Development Award program that made my residency possible at the Phenomenology Research Center (PRC), Southern Illinois University as Visiting Scholar for five months. I benefited greatly from not only weekly Phenomenology Research Group discussions and Phenomenologizing on the concept of ‘Loving’ and attending lectures on Husserl’s ‘The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology’ by Professor Anthony Steinbock; but also attending and learning a great deal from the lectures on ‘post-colonial studies’ at SIU by Assistant Professor Alfred Frankowski, considerably helped me in framing the concept of ‘Refugee in colonial situation’. Attending the SPEP 2018, at the Penn State University, visiting, and listening to the presentations of many scholars that I have used their scholarly works in my thesis was an invaluable experience. I will not forget our valuable discussions with Professor Steinbock and other fellow postgraduates at the center who taught me how to do phenomenology. I greatly cherish the friendships created at the center, specially I am indebted to Mohsen Saber for his enormous help and support prior, during and after my residency at PRC. I also treasure our amazing discussions on Jean Luc Marion, Derrida, Deleuze and Mysticism with Monireh Taliehbakhsh.

I am grateful to the University of Queensland for funding my domestic and international travels to attend and present at the Australasian Association of Philosophy Annual Conference 2016 in Melbourne, Flight and Migration: 6th Intercultural Interdisciplinary Colloquium, Freiburg, Germany, Australasian Society for Continental Philosophy (ASCP) 2017 in Hobart, Tasmania, Presenting a paper on ‘A Husserlian analysis of the horizon-structure of experience in case of ‘hermeneutical injustice’ and epistemic marginalisation: Seeking the lost empathy’ at the University of Tübingen, Germany 2018. Additionally, I truly appreciate Dr. Niels Weidtmann who invited me to present at the university of Tübingen and welcomed me generously. Also, attending Nordic Society for Phenomenology (NoSP) 2018, Gdansk, Poland, Australasian Society for Continental Philosophy (ASCP) 2019, Melbourne.

I appreciate my supervisors, Associate Professor Marguerite La Caze and Associate Professor Gilbert Burgh for their endless support. I am truly thankful to Marguerite for all her comments, corrections, ideas and for the opportunity to meet and start an amazing friendship with Lisa Guenther. I am indebted to Marguerite for giving me the freedom and courage to follow my heart and be dazzled by Husserl and his legacy. I thank the School of Historical and Philosophical Inquiry and my wonderful fellow postgraduate students and colleagues for arranging, administering and presenting at the Work

7 in Progress sessions, where we could share our thoughts and ideas and become philosophers in practice. Additionally, I appreciate Gilbert Burgh for the opportunity of tutoring and co-lecturing the ‘Introduction to Ethics’ course, using phenomenology in the classroom. I Appreciate Dr. Martyn Lloyd’s for patiently and keenly reading and commenting on my chapters. I truly thank Professor Megan Cassidy-Welch for supporting the last steps of thesis submission.

8 I owe a forever debt of gratitude to my parents whom raised me to be a ‘seeker’. I am grateful to them for their endless emotional support from 14000 kilometers away. And last but not least, I owe every joy and glory, every discovery and astonishment, every courage and adventure I took to my beloved husband who truly ‘raised me up to more that I can be’ with his unconditional love and infinite patience. He made my adventure in the US and PRC attendances possible, albeit his lack of accompaniment. I am blessed with my gorgeous daughters whom cherish the moment of ‘awe’ and I am appreciative of their understanding and endless love and support in the hard times of missing their father when we were in the US.

9 Financial support

Australian Postgraduate Award (APA) 2017-19, $27,596.00 per annum.

Career Development Award (CDA) 2018, 5000$

Keywords Besinnung, Colonization, Edmund Husserl, Epistemic Violence, Generative Phenomenology, Home world/Alien world, Jean Luc Marion, Phenomenology of Violence, Refugee crisis, Saturated Phenomenon

10 Australian and New Zealand Standard Research Classifications (ANZSRC)

ANZSRC code: 220310 Phenomenology, 80%

ANZSRC code: 220319 Social Philosophy, 20%

Fields of Research (FoR) Classification FoR code: 2203, Philosophy, 100%

11 Table of Contents

INTRODUCTION ...... 14

THE PROMISE OF HUSSERLIAN PHENOMENOLOGY IN THE STUDY OF THE ‘REFUGEE SUBJECT’ ...... 14

Introduction ...... 14

Phenomenology as method ...... 19

Thesis Outline ...... 25

CHAPTER ONE ...... 32

ON RADICAL BESINNUNG: A HISTORICAL INVESTIGATION INTO THE ORIGINS OF COLONIAL LEGACY ...... 32

Introduction ...... 32

Phenomenology as Critique ...... 33

Radical “Besinnung”: A historical investigation into the origins of sense-constitution ...... 36

Orientalism and the problem of Colonial Thought ...... 40

The Middle Eastern Refugee, Detention Center and the Colonial Violence ...... 48

Conclusion ...... 55

CHAPTER TWO ...... 57

ON THE HORIZON STRUCTURE OF THE EXPERIENCE OF EPISTEMIC VIOLENCE: A HUSSERLIAN ANALYSIS ...... 57

Introduction ...... 57

An Inquiry into Horizon-Consciousness and Sense-Constitution: ...... 61 The Ontology of Lifeworld ...... 61 Transcendental Phenomenology of the Lifeworld ...... 66

Epistemic Injustice and Phenomenological Disorientation ...... 70

The Horizon Experience of Epistemic Violence ...... 75

Conclusion ...... 78

CHAPTER THREE ...... 80

HOMEWORLD AND ALIENWORLD: THE INTERSUBJECTIVE STRUCTURE OF THE HOME ...... 80

Introduction ...... 80

Phenomenology of Transcendental Intersubjectivity ...... 82

12 The Lifeworld and the Constitution of Home-world/Alien-world ...... 86

Normalization ...... 91

Intersubjective Normativity and the Structure of Homeworld and Alienworld ...... 99

Conclusion ...... 103

CHAPTER FOUR ...... 106

VERTICAL GIVENNESS AND THE MORAL EXPERIENCE OF THE ALIEN ...... 106

Introduction ...... 106

The Liminal Encounter of Home and Alien as Transgression ...... 107

Alien and the Mode of Disclosure ...... 116

Verticality and Revelation ...... 123

Responsivity and the Absolute Ought ...... 127

Conclusion ...... 135

CHAPTER FIVE ...... 137

SATURATED GIVENNESS: ETHICS VS. VIOLENCE ...... 137

Introduction ...... 137

Revelatory Givenness and Saturated Phenomena ...... 140

The Call and Loving ...... 154

Abandoning the Call and Violence ...... 157

Conclusion ...... 164

CONCLUSION ...... 167

TRANSCENDING THE CRISIS VIA THE HUSSERLIAN PROJECT OF ETHICAL RENEWAL ...... 167

REFERENCES ...... 182

Husserl’s Selected Works in German ...... 182

Secondary Resources ...... 183

13 Introduction

The promise of Husserlian phenomenology in the study of the ‘Refugee Subject’

Introduction

Being a migrant from the Middle East puts me in a position that I could experience the identity crisis that forceful dislocation may bring about for newcomers, as phenomenological aliens. No matter why, when, and how, on a plane or a boat, geographical cross-border movement as a gesture of leaving home behind, creates an opportunity to observe the self, naked in front of your eyes: those of agonistic observers. The experience of leaving home cannot be reduced to losing a shelter or even the place of birth; rather it is an intense experience that gives birth to a ‘new type of human being in contemporary history’, as Hannah Arendt suggests: Refugee (Young-Bruehl 1982, 152). Because home is not merely shelter or asylum but is a constitutional whole, that encompasses ‘all the conscious and unconscious’ symbols that are ‘associated with our everyday understanding’ of ‘home-life’ (Steinbock 1995, 198). By a constitutional whole, I mean the whole system of references and meaning-creation that appears as a correlation between ‘experiencing’ and ‘that which is experienced’; this is what Arendt calls: ‘the familiarity of everyday life’ (Arendt 2007, 264). As Jean Améry writes, losing home and the feeling of homesickness is the feeling of self-alienation, knowing that by leaving home [involuntarily] the past is suddenly buried and no one knows who they are any more (2009, 43).

When addressing the self-alienation and homelessness of the refugee, we need to consider that once a refugee leaves their homeland, they remain homeless. As Arendt states, once they leave their state, they remain stateless and they cannot easily assimilate and integrate anywhere (Bernstein 2005, 267). Therefore, homelessness cannot be reconciled by certain re-settlement policies or psychological interventions; such traumatic experience in the course of displacement as a direct outcome of forced detachment and fleeing in the wake of war and violence, soon becomes a kind of Kafkasque state of being.1 Despite one’s struggle to fit in, there is always a force that does not lend itself to the way that one perceives the world. The trauma of leaving the familiarity of the structure of the homeworld does

1 According to UN Refugee Agency (UNHCR), there are seven criteria for refugee resettlement eligibility, which are: ‘legal or physical protection needs, survivors of torture or violence, medical needs, women and girls at risk, family reunification, children and adolescents at risk and lack of foreseeable alternative durable solution’. But even with all these criteria selection, an Australian refugee category visa still requires additional criteria which are more onerous to be met.

14 not seem to reach an end in the new land but just mutates into the state of ‘waiting’. The experience of such ‘waiting’ can be recognized in the poem of refugee poet, Mahmoud Darwish:

We journey towards a home not of our flesh. Its chestnut trees are not from our bones

Its rocks are not like goats in the mountain hymn. The pebbles’ eye are not lilies.

We journey towards a home that does not halo our heads with special sun.

Mythical women applaud us. A sea for us and against us.

When water and wheat are not at hand, eat our love and drink our tears…

There are mourning scarves for poets. A row of marble statues will lift our voice.

And an urn to keep the dust of time away from our souls. Roses for us and against us.

You have glory, we have ours. Of our home we see only the unseen: Our mystery.

Glory is ours: A throne carried on feet torn by roads that led to every home but our own!

The soul must recognize itself in its very soul or die here. (Darwish 2003, 10)

The residency in the state of wait and hope to return to the home, or even the total despair and agony for the home that is lost, makes new type of human condition that is unique to the refugees. By human condition, sociologists refer to a kind of ambivalent position that refugee occupies in relation to the world from the moment they leave home (Bauman, 1991, 2000; Simmel, 1994; Marotta, 2000, 2008, 2009, 2012). It is this ambivalence that makes remapping the new home and the new social identity a hard and ongoing task of the refugee’s life in the host community. Arendt describes this in the experience of the WWII Jewish refugees, as they feel a mysterious failure in themselves in keeping the home normalities, tradition, familiarity, language and the social standards that prevents them from getting along in the host land (2007, 268). This mysterious feeling of failure of maintaining the standards of home, threatens the very existence of boundaries, pre-existing social and cultural norms and the processes that already are accepted by natives in the host communities (Bauman 1991, 58). This characteristic of rejecting and questioning leads to a hermeneutical clash between the stranger and the host.

Hermeneutical clash can be understood as a divergence between normalities of the refugee as stranger in the new land and those of the host, that can result in an emerging misunderstanding from both

15 sides. The misunderstanding or the interpretation gap, that I refer to as a hermeneutical clash between the stranger and the host may suggest that the refugee is reluctant to contribute to the social fabric so that the host perceives refugees as intruders. Subsequently, this gap manifests itself in mistrust and suspicion between natives and newcomers, because they look at each other as intruders and threats respectively in the course of maintaining their cultural and normative heritage. While this ambivalence is the manifestation of the struggle in the refugee’s whole structure of meaning-making, simultaneously it challenges the host’s normative structure of social relations. I call this challenge of making sense of the world the crisis, felt not only by the refugee, traumatized by leaving the home behind, but also by the host. The arrival of the refugee creates a crisis for the host because such arrival challenges the very normative force of the ethical demand for hospitality. The refugee crisis in Europe, the treatment of the refugees by the Australian government in detention centers on Manus Island and Nauru, border control in the US, and separating refugee children from their parents at the US border, are a few of an increasing number of incidents that highlight the challenge that is experienced by the host communities.

There are numerous studies that address the refugee crisis from the point of view of human rights and by criticizing the ‘Rights of Man’ based on a critical reflection on the concepts of state and nation (See for example Agamben 1998; Arendt 1951, 2007; Bernstein 2005; Bell 2018; Jenkins 2004).2 The refugee crisis from the stance of human rights, as Agamben considers is the product of the ‘rotten ambiguity of modern rule of law’ that considers refugee as the limit concept of nation-state (1998, 166). According to Arendt there is a close relation between the rights of man and the nation state, the moment that refugee leaves (voluntarily or non-voluntarily) the nation-state that they used to belong to, they lose all the qualities that the human rights could have been attributed to (1951, 290). In modern politics, birth becomes the passage of transformation of subject to citizen, then subject by birth, even as natural life becomes the bearer of sovereignty (Agamben 1998, 128). When human rights is the ‘representation of the inscription of bare life to the juridico-political order of the nation- state’ then refugee as stateless, who does not belong to the structure of nation-state anymore, has lost all the capacities and specific relations that could preserve in them the human rights (Agamben 1998, 125). This means that refugee resides on the threshold of nativity and nationality and problematizes the order of modern nation-state (1998, 131). This means that, refugee as the limit phenomena of nation-state stands before the law in its totality but cannot be classified under any of its provisions.

2 Both Agamben and Arendt refer to the 1789 French Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen in which the relation of homme (human) and citoyen (citizen) is not totally clear. But they incline to count these two terms as ‘a unitary system that the first is always included in the second’ (Agamben 1998, 126-27). 16 This constant realization of statelessness as being ‘unprotected by any specific law or political conventions’, brings about a profound absurdity of refugee’s Existence (Bernstein 2005, 51).

While there is a deep challenge between humanism and politics in order to separate the rights of human from the rights of citizen, it seems that within current circumstances the subject of human rights discourse is a citizen who belongs to the nation-state, and the discourse of the rights of man is only intelligible within the structure of the nation-state. In this sense, the phenomenon of the refugee as stateless and the one who does not belong to the structure of the nation-state, cannot be addressed as the subject of human rights discourse. Therefore, in the modern politics, refugee always resides at the verge of human right discourse and can never be given within the hermeneutical structure of this discourse.

In order to overcome this limitation, we need to engage with the philosophical underpinnings of the emergence of the phenomenon of the refugee. It is noteworthy that the crisis of the refugee is simultaneously the crisis of the home; That is the struggle of the normative structure of the home where I as the native belong to in the face of refugee who does not belong to this familiar structure. At the very core of the refugee ‘crisis’ we need to reflect back at the very moment of recognition of refugee as the Other who appeared at the border of our home as natives. It would be naïve to think that the refugees landing on our shores has led to this crisis, when this crisis is only the manifestation of a deeper one that the West has been postponing and neglecting for centuries. I can explain this claim by reflecting on the experience of refugees from the Middle East like Afghanistan and Iraq, who are the generations of sufferers of the past two decades, living the gift of ‘American Democracy’ and prior to that, dwelling in the legacy of colonialism.

In this sense, the refugee crisis cannot be pictured solely by the tragic image of Aylan Kurdi, a three- year-old Syrian boy drowned on the second of September 2015 in the Mediterranean Sea. I do not aim to recite the devastation of a journey on leaking boats, rowing through the floating bodies in the darkest of the night on the open ocean. Instead, I give a phenomenological account of the horizon experience of encountering a refugee, who is a hermeneutical subject, born into and lives the ‘Colonial Situation’. I do not elegiacally narrate the ‘disorientation’ in Pacific waters, rather I describe the refugee’s experience as a hermeneutical disorientation in the midst of a colonial situation by providing a phenomenological reflection. This phenomenological account helps me to unravel how I experience the encountering of refugee from the home. This is an effort to phenomenologically engage with the problematic of refugee as the phenomenon of alienness that is appeared on the horizon of home.

17 Since the first-person experience is the only source for meaning making, even when I engage with the analysis of the refugee experience, I can only consider my experience of encountering the refugee subject from within the home. Such phenomenological description brings to the light my disposition toward whatever I experience of me (Myself), the Other and the World around me. In other words, the phenomenological reflection on encountering the refugee can be understood only in terms of ‘how’ I experience the refugee as an alien to me (read it as home) and how this alienness is initiated in the first place. This is an important position taking in studying for example the offshore refugee intake and settlement policies as the current challenge of host countries like Australia. In this manner, it is not enough to narrate and describe the violent treatment of refugees in the Australian offshore detention centers from the human rights perspective but we need to look for the roots of such treatments in a way that the Kyriarchal system of Australian government as a colonial regime constitutes and delimits its identity as sovereign who can decide over the fate of refugee as colonized subject. Behrouz Boochani writes about his experience as a detainee in Manus Island:

From their perspective, we are nothing more than numbers. I will have to forget about my name…. Regardless of who I am, regardless of what I think, they are going to call me by my number. (2018, 96)

Such devastating experience cannot be addressed from a normative ethical disposition either, since this inhuman treatments of the refugees in offshore detention centers is the outcome of the historical disposition of the West in addressing the Other who are not included in the Western imaginary. Thus, to engage with the problematic of the refugee we need to critically investigate the operative logic and the meaning structure that makes detaining a refugee or an asylum seeker on a remote island, intelligible in the first place. Subsequently I discuss how phenomenology as a philosophical method of inquiry can guide us to the origin of meanings that are operative in a certain structure of an experience.

Phenomenology, with its mission of ‘zu den Sachen selbst’ – back to things themselves– is known as a method for describing the things themselves as they are given to us in experience. However, phenomenology does not deal with mere descriptions of our first-person experiences of things, like an autobiography of personal experiences; otherwise it would not be a philosophy. Rather, it aims at describing the universal invariant structures of experience. In this sense, phenomenology has two essential moments: (1) Description of how something is given, and (2) Structural/eidetic analysis that investigates into the essential structures of givenness.

Considering the point of departure for phenomenological analysis as our being in the world, questions regarding the philosophical problem of identity and difference as opposites can be formulated as ‘they

18 bear directly on the dimension of social life’, in a way that ‘questions gain privileged experiential weight because they are framed in terms of our very coexistence as social beings’ (Steinbock 1995b, 1). Social theories in their variant forms have attempted to address these similar inquiries, but they only reflect on the relation between social forms of identity and difference. The phenomenological approach critically investigates the process of the construction of the social identity of the stranger/alien based on a ‘polarity between ontological familiarity and strangeness’ within an intersubjective level (Gadamer 1979, 295; Dallmayr 2009, 28). Such approach cannot be grasped fully by sociology and anthropology. Let me commence this investigation by giving an overview of phenomenological method developed primarily by Edmund Husserl.

Phenomenology as method

Phenomenology begins with a dense description of how things appear to consciousness in lived experience, bracketing the ready-made theories and assumptions with which we typically explain our experience in what Husserl calls the ‘natural attitude’ (Husserl 1970, 37; Luft 2005, 146). The natural attitude is the register of ‘Everyday-ness’. This pre-phenomenological way of experiencing things is characterized by its naïveté and its ‘general thesis’. In this pre-phenomenological life, we live with our uncharacterized presuppositions, the most fundamental of which is the acceptance of an existing world. Then as Husserl puts it, ‘the general thesis of the natural attitude’ is pre-supposing the being of the world and the things in it (Held 2003, 19). However, as we live the natural attitude, we are totally unaware of it and its general thesis. Natural attitude as a pre-phenomenological realm of life only can be disclosed and thematized by a phenomenological reflection on it.

The first method in phenomenological reflection, which is the first shift in the point of view, is called the epoché. To answer the basic phenomenological question of ‘what X is’ or ‘what X means’ one must first inquire into X’s mode of givenness; in what manner X is given to my consciousness. The epoché is not the same as doubting, possibilizing or denying, but rather suspending or bracketing the taken-for-granted presuppositions about the meaning and being of things. In other words, the epoché can be understood as a suspension of the general thesis of the natural attitude. Bracketing or ‘putting into parenthesis’, then, is inquiring into the origins of meaning constitution in and by consciousness. This inquiry needs a transcendental shift in point of view on the meaning of things to the subjective accomplishments, which are responsible for the appearance of things in consciousness. This transcendental shift does not signal a retreat from the world or an abstraction from everyday lived experience, but, rather, a more critical, reflective relation to both. So, the subject is understood as self-temporalizing, as a transcendental Ego who does Phenomenologizing activity.

19 Putting it differently, Husserl begins with bracketing the question of ‘what’ and inquiring into the ‘how’, in order to clarify the what-ness of things. This bracketing is a methodological movement which Husserl calls ‘Reduction’ and the movement from ‘what’ to ‘how’ is known as ‘intentionality’. The reduction discloses the structure of intentionality, that is, getting from sense to sense-constitution. In applying the ‘phenomenological reduction’ to the world, things are not merely ‘what is there’, rather, they are given as constituted by ‘transcendental subjectivity’. In this movement, Husserl takes the subject for granted in its ability of constituting, in its powers and limits of constituting. Doing Phenomenologizing activity, the subject is understood as ‘self-temporalizing’, as the ‘transcendental- Ego’. Transcendental subjectivity is nothing but a human person reflecting on its constitutive relation to the world and its situatedness in history. The transcendental project, for Husserl, is to investigate what makes it possible to have the kinds of experiences we do. With this view, the subjective perceptual experience of things is directed at and refers to objects and goes beyond (transcends) the object itself.

Transcendental phenomenology consists of two dimensions: (1) constitutive analysis and (2) ontological analysis. Constitutive analysis is an investigation into the mode of givenness, the ‘how’ of the appearing phenomenon, a reinterpretation of what is Being (the essence or structure of it). In the structure of intentionality, because of the relationship between the subject and the object of intentionality, objects and whatever appear become ‘living’ as phenomena, and not as appearance that can take the place of opposition to reality (Welton 2000, 21). For example, a water tap is not only a logical substrate for concepts of water, or the long goose neck steel feature, but the drinking water that runs from the tap is alive with significance that can be understood only in irreducible experiential terms. Starting with the natural attitude which is ‘everyday-ness’, doing the reduction and getting back to Being, what we have is the constitutive structure of Being. Through constitutive analysis of how something is given to consciousness, a newly mode of being appears, that is, a ‘psycho-physical’ being or a ‘lived-body’. The lived-body as ‘constituting-constituted’ is given in a different way from that of an object as merely ‘constituted’ is given.

Taking the constitutive analysis of the structure of ‘given’ as a ‘leading clue’, Husserl, in Ideas II, pursues the ontological analysis of the ‘given’ and distinguishes three ontological regions: material nature, the psychic world and the spiritual world (Husserl 1989). However, in his later works, Husserl takes ontology as a leading clue for the purpose of constitutive analysis. His phenomenological investigations always proceed from the simple to the more complex. Hence, pursuing the question of evidence, he begins by analyzing the ‘how’ of givenness at the very present time, ‘Now’. That is a proper way of fulfilling the intentional act at the present moment, which can in itself count as evidence; anything given now is indubitable and adequately evident. As long as we undertake both

20 constitutive and ontological analysis without inquiring into temporality and reflect on what is given now, we do the phenomenological investigation on the ‘Static’ level. Static phenomenology is limited to the constitution of sense in the living present [Lebendige Gegenwart].

However, things endure and the momentary evidence for the Phenomenologizing subject, through self-temporalization and time consciousness, vanishes. Within the stream of consciousness, an object can endure as a ‘nöematic core’, that is the constituted sense, over time ‘for the subject’, so that I can verify its identical existence over time by the aid of memory as retention and protention.3 Retention is a presentation of a temporally extended present that extends beyond the few short milliseconds that are registered in a moment of sense perception. Protention is our anticipation of the next moment; the moment that has yet to be perceived. 4 In this manner, the evidence becomes temporal for me by the very constitution of before and after as remembered in different spatial or temporal registers. Investigating the genesis of sense and meaning through time happens at the level of ‘genetic phenomenology’. According to Donn Welton, while the static analysis offers us ‘the structure of intentionality, genetic method is an effort to articulate this structure without presupposing that the form of intentionality can be severed from the intentional content’ (2000, 231). Genetic phenomenology describes phenomena that exceed the limits of static constitution, such as apperception, kinaesthetic consciousness, self-temporalization and time consciousness, and normality and abnormality. Apperception shows the apprehension of sense impressions that constitute an object for consciousness; it is through apperceptive dispositions that earlier experience of an object or objects similar enough to it, helps my attentive regard in the present experience of an object (Dwyer 2007, 94). Kinaesthesis merely refers to the experience of the subjective capability for movement that unfolds the kinaesthetic systems of possible movements of the subject. For instance, when I turn right to see the boiling kettle, each of my eyes, my neck, my head have their own possibilities of movement and rotation, these are kinaesthetic systems. However, when I experience my body, I cannot simply jump out of my skin and walk around my body to survey it totally, rather I can observe it from certain angels only. Therefore, in order to constitute a three-dimensional, objective, homogenous space I need the other subjects’ contribution. Self-temporalization and time consciousness refer to the phenomenological idea that all experience entails a temporal horizon. Normality and abnormality are constitutional accounts that show the role of the perceiver as constitutive of the normal and the abnormal. I will thoroughly expand these two concepts in the Chapter Three.

3 In Ideas I part 2, Husserl uses the pair of ‘nöema and noesis to refer to corelated elements of the structure of intentionality. While noesis refers to intentional acts or act-quality. Nöema refers to what in Logical Investigations, referred to as act-matter. I will attend to these concepts later in Chapter Four. 4 Husserl uses the example of listening to music. When we listen to music, the direct access to the present note in the melody is the primal impression of the present, but this in not only one note we experience. Simultaneously, we anticipate and protend the subsequent note, and retend the note that are no longer can be heard. 21 However, in both static and genetic phenomenological method, the very personal registers lack the intersubjective concordance that is necessary for the constitution of objectivity; that is asking whether the evidence can endure throughout my life as full evidence. At this level, objectivity becomes equated with intersubjectivity. Hence, Husserl enquires into an objectivity that cannot become full evidence at an intersubjective level. An analysis of evidence leads us to the analysis of the relationship between different kinds of intersubjectivities known as the Homeworld and the Alienworld. While genetic analysis restricts itself to the sense-constitution between the birth and death of the individual, it cannot give an account of the constitutive role of birth and death. Husserl writes that transcendental subjectivity neither is born nor dies; that is, how birth and death, alongside issues such as the home- world/alien-world, the lifeworld, and historicity are given as limit-phenomena is described in genetic analysis. In other words, limit-phenomena are constituted due to presupposing a specific order of givenness or a methodological approach in our phenomenological inquiry (Steinbock 2003, 290-291). While an experience like sleep can be given as a limit-phenomena in static phenomenology, the same experience can be addressed in genetic phenomenology by including the process of self- temporalization. In the same way, while birth and death are given as limit-phenomena in genetic phenomenology, they can only be reflected upon in a generative phenomenological overarching concordance of meaning (Steinbock 2017, 6).

Emerging out of a structured study of a variety of published and unpublished works of Husserl in a regressive procedure, Anthony Steinbock pointed to a shift in Husserl’s terminology, that aims at expanding the constitutional descriptions from the more familiar static framework to a more dynamic temporalizing model of primordial constitution. This is a movement to the constitutive roles of appropriation and renewal of sense that stems from normative territories and traditions: Generativity. In other words, generativity for Husserl implies the process of becoming, and at the same time, a process of generating that occurs over generations. Steinbock asserts that ‘generative phenomenology exceeds the ‘static’ egological account of social existence that can be found in Husserl’s Cartesian Meditations and even the ‘genetic’ methodology that reveals the facticity of the individual and the world of contemporary subjects which emerged in the text of The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology (Steinbock 1995a, 139).

In this approach, ‘homeworld and alienworld become constitutive conditions for the possibility of sense emergence, conditions which are themselves formative of ‘subjectivity’’ (Steinbock 1993, 28). In this way, phenomenology as a normative task can contribute to the ethical becoming of social structures or essences that develop historically. Thus, the chief concern of generative phenomenology is the social and intersubjective structure of the home-world/alien-world that has a critical contrast to the foundational intersubjective structure of ego and alter ego in a foundational approach to

22 phenomenology. Such phenomenology opens the intersubjective sphere of experience and intersubjective relations to the transcendental level. Generally, this can be understood as the co- relativity of the two concepts of home-world and alien-world. According to Steinbock, a generative phenomenology of the social world is a phenomenology that describes the developing structure of existence and co-existence geologically and historically, as well as their respective ‘modes of constitution, without reducing them to mere consciousness or egological subjectivity’ (1995, 4).

Although perception is initially originated in a first-person manner, perceiving subjectivity remains anonymous until we confront others; then we can thematically constitute ourselves as a person (Hua I, 159; Hua IV, 78). While personal constitution is originated in social relations, sociality does not give birth to personal individuation, rather it discloses individual subjectivity; as the subject can delimits itself according to its sphere of ownness (Taipale 2014, 94). Whereas subjectivity is constituted by habitualities and inclinations, through social interactions it gains new features and adopts intersubjective habitualities and epistemic dispositions. As Husserl writes:

…Gaining a personality, it is not enough that the subject is aware of herself as the center of her acts: personality is rather constituted only when the subject establishes social relations with others. (Hua XIV, 175)

This seems more tangible in the experience of living in multicultural societies, where encountering the other nationalities, races and ideological beliefs makes us socially competent subjects. While phenomenology attempts to reveal the historical and geological structure of intersubjectivity and the social world, the concept of belonging to a certain history and a home becomes prominent. But what about the refugee as ‘uprooted’ and who has been denied access to belong to a place? If phenomenology conditions the constitution of subjectivity, intersubjectivity and the objective world, to a history and a home, how does displacement affect a refugee’s experience of the world? Within the intersubjective sphere, how do I experience a refugee as an alien that does not belong to my home?

Generative phenomenology enables me to discover the structure of experiencing the refugee as the Other at the verge of my experience. The refugee appears to me as a phenomenon that I experience in its radical alterity. Although this appearance is not in an abyss, but within a relation, and discovering the structure of relations is the chief concern of phenomenology. Phenomenological reflection on human experience is a reflection on the structure of relations that are instituted between the I, the world and the Other. In this sense, phenomenology lets the relations appear for philosophical reflection. It is the purpose of phenomenology that subverts all pre-established categories and challenges us to think about our relations. It exposes the known to the unknown, like my encounter with the Other (read refugee) that happens at the verge of concealment and what is revealed.

23 Phenomenology opens up the possibility of seeing the refugee as the Other before labelling him/her as ‘a refugee’. Then, as the Other, the refugee becomes so unexpected and unpredictable that they elude my knowledge of them as ‘radically unseeable and unforeseeable’ (Kearney & Semonovitch 2011, 6). A refugee, first of all, is an ‘absolute Other’, a total alterity, and not just other-to-me. Phenomenology enquires into the manners of appearance of the refugee as the Other and also considers the ethical and political meaning of that appearance.

The focus of the present study is to reflect on the initial relation that I initiate with the Other, as the absolute Other and then to the Alien [Fremde] other who is alien to my homeworld. Doing this, I can set free the refugee Other who is constituted as the alien and a stranger to my homeworld from the conditional hospitality that is the outcome of subjective constitution.5 This phenomenological reflection of the total alienness of the refugee enables me to uncover the very possibility of an ethical relation to the alien prior to attributing any condition for reception or rejection of the alien. I aim to show that how actively I would engage with the alien in their reception or rejection, if encountering the alien is an activity at all. Although phenomenology opens up the intersubjective sphere of experience and intersubjective relations, by revealing the geological and historical conditions of sense-constitution, it witnesses the double movement of active and passive synthesis in experiencing the alien. That means although consciousness participates in the constitution of the lifeworld it ostensibly does not determine it: that is, according to Richard Kearney, ‘We stand at the portal of interhuman relations, anticipating and anticipated by the very architecture of experience’ (2011, 18).

Whereas, the careful phenomenological analysis of Husserl’s notion of homeworld and alienworld opens up a space for recognizing the hermeneutical underpinnings of I (read home) and the alien’s (read the alienworld) encounter, it also is an important journey to find the very intrinsic ethical relation that can be initiated between the I and the Other. However, the recognition of this situatedness in the history and the tradition of home becomes the condition for my openness to the alien from home; I refer here to the notion of the experience of the ‘alien as accessible in a mode of inaccessibility’ (Steinbock 1994, 213). It seems that this is the furthest point that Husserl can guide me to, in experiencing the Other as alien to home. Husserl did a great analysis of the structure of the experience of the other, but for him the subject as the transcendental ‘I’ always belongs to a home and the refugee as an alien always belongs to the alienworld. Therefore, my openness and hospitality toward the refugee as an alien is contingent to the normalities of home.

5 While for Derrida, conditional hospitality is what is regulated by the state and the legal apparatus (cited in La Caze 2013, 120), by conditional hospitality I mean a hospitality that is conditioned by the constituting subject in the intersubjective structure of home. As Derrida mentioned ‘it is not for speculative or ethical reasons that I am interested in unconditional hospitality, but in order to transform what is going on today in our world’ (Kearney and Dooley 1999, 70). I will expand thoroughly on this in Chapter Three. 24 If what matters [Sachen] is given to me partly depending on how I as a phenomenologist approach it, then phenomenology can still be my vehicle to reach the destination. Phenomenology provides me with an opportunity to be struck by various modes of givenness of what matters as phenomena. In order to overcome the limitation and contingency of the reception of the refugee as alien, I will need to become open to other modes of givenness that are not privileged by the phenomenological analysis. Levinas has already distinguished the limitation of intentional givenness as the privileged Husserlian phenomenological structure, by stating that, if the Other is to be given in presentational modes of givenness, it can only be experienced as a disruption of this structure. This only leaves us with the acknowledgment of the Other as disturbance who limits me and alienates me from the context that I am most familiar with, the nöema-nöesis structure of intentionality.

There is an important difference between Husserl’s notion of alien and Levinas’ Other as radical alterity. For Husserl, while the alien is always an alien to home, within the homeworld the I co-exist with my home comrades who are co-bearers of the home and are not alien to me. In this picture, the refugee as an alien from the alienworld who arrives at the shore of the homeworld (my homeworld) can never be constituted as a home comrade. However, for Levinas the Other is the radical alterity, an absolute exterior being and the relation to this exterior being is infinity. It does not matter that this Other is my home comrade, a total stranger, my husband or a refugee; the alterity of the Other remains and troubles their very accessibility to me. By reading Levinas and Husserl together, I can move forward in my journey toward an ethical experience of the refugee first, as Levinas’ Other in its radical alterity and then as an alien to me. This way, I will not be held by the incomprehensibility and inaccessibility of experiencing the alien but can move further in the analysis of the givenness of the alien as Other. By recognizing the manner of givenness that is peculiar to the givenness of the Other in interpersonal experience, my initial relation to the Other as given in experience can be revealed; this is the critical moment of ethics. In order to share this journey, following I present a preliminary glance at the chapters of this thesis.

Thesis Outline

In Chapter One, I show how phenomenology as a critique is a critical reflection on experience in order to justify and turn back to the question that concerns the refugee subject as ‘an alien other’. Engaging with the problematic of the refugee is to critically investigate it as a product of a historical situation, with all its assertions and meanings that are operative in that same situation. This phenomenological reflection, which endures a temporal dimension to it, Husserl calls Besinnung. I will assert that, according to Steinbock, Besinnung enables us to show how the implications of intentional life and modes of givenness are responsible for the constitution of phenomenon (1995,

25 83).6 This means that Besinnung helps the phenomenologist to reveal the goals of a given practice and a tradition and discuss what kind of evidence such practices aim to fulfil. In this way I can address the problem of the refugee as a phenomenon that has appeared in a certain historical context with certain operative meaning structure.

As the statistics from the Department of Social Services suggest, the majority of Australia’s refugee intake from Iraq, Syria, Afghanistan and Myanmar (Burma), are people devastated and shattered by the gesture of an American democracy on the aftermath of 11th of September 2001or denigrated for the generations under the colonial regimes. The term ‘West’ in this context, following Husserl, is the spiritual shape of Europe, which includes English Dominions and the United States that more-or-less share the same cultural accomplishments and endeavors (Crisis, 273, see also Gordon 1995, 6-7). Creation of the concept of the Orient, as the main project of the West, has significantly shaped our world and our everyday lived experiences in a manner that gave birth to new concepts of displacement and homelessness in the world that we experience today. Building on Edward Said’s (1978) concept of Orientalism I discuss that the West that constituted the colonial as the Other to Europe, legitimized the constitution of Europe as the subject.

Applying Besinnung enables me to unravel the meaning structure which is operative in the colonial subjectification and de-subjectification and the concept of violence that is embedded in the colonial situation. James Dodd’s (2009, 2017) phenomenological account of violence and Agamben’s (1998, 1999) discussion of ‘camp’ gives me the opportunity to analyze the current manifestation of colonial violence in the Australian offshore refugee detention camps like Manus Island and Nauru. Considering the various sorts of violence that are operative in the colonial structure, the next chapter, focuses on a specific type of violence which is hidden in the cognitive structure of our consciousness: Epistemic Violence.

In order to maintain the phenomenological investigation of epistemic violence, Chapter Two intends to thematize the horizonal structure of the phenomena of epistemic violence and how it affects the victims of such violence through generations and their identity construction on a constitutional level. Building on Miranda Fricker’s (2007) notion of ‘Epistemic Injustice’ and Husserl’s phenomenological notion of ‘horizon-structure of experience’ proposed in Experience and judgment (1973) I develop a phenomenological analysis of the horizon structure of experiencing two types of epistemic injustice which are testimonial and hermeneutical injustice. Using the phenomenological analysis of violence discussed in Chapter One, I claim that since violence is a manifestation of a specific phenomenological orientation entails constitutive properties, it should be considered as a

6 See also Dodd 2004; Geniusas 2012. 26 principle on its own right. In this way, the constitutive power of violence in a deconstructive sense leads us to the origin of sense.

The critical phenomenological investigation of suffering from the epistemic violence is to understand how the subjugated knowledge of the colonized subject, is disqualified as naïve within the context and the history of coloniality and how this has affected the contemporary refugee subject. This phenomenological attitude in studying the meaning structures that emerge from within this situatedness reveals that the Middle Eastern refugee as displaced, ambivalent and disoriented subject, not only fled the ambivalence of war in the name of Western democracy but they bear generations of alienation by the orientalist gaze and a war that make them to unbeknown to themselves.7 Therefore, to investigate how the institutional violence of colonial system can affect meaning constitution, we need to apply a regressive inquiry into the pregiven lifeworld. This enables me to claim that the colonial situation is a violent situation that is created upon the disrupted world of sense. But what can be my relation to this ambivalent alien subject? If the Lifeworld characterizes the personal communicative world, the natural world, the intuitive and aesthetic world of experience, then how does the refugee as an ‘alien’ appears on the horizon of the lifeworld?8

Chapter Three firstly enquires into the relation of the ‘I’ with the ‘alien’, and how does the ‘I’ experience the Other and constitute it as alien? For answering these questions, I argue that the term ‘other’ and ‘alien’ are different in various works of Husserl from First Philosophy (Hua VII; Hua VIII) and Cartesian Meditations (Hua I) to The Phenomenology of Intersubjectivity (Hua XIII; Hua XIV; Hua XV). Reflecting on the concept of Transcendental Intersubjectivity, I show that how Husserl’s question of the Other develops as the ‘alter ego’ in the Fifth Meditation with an egological approach and then transforms into the concept of ‘alien’ by taking a regressive inquiry into the overlooked aspects of our everyday life in The Phenomenology of Intersubjectivity.

Putting it briefly, in Cartesian Meditations, Husserl takes an egological approach to the problem of the givenness of the Other by applying two abstract reductions; first abstraction from historicity, culture, the alien, and so on, and, second from developmental facticity to the ego’s sphere of ‘my ownness’, and by doing so he discloses the ego’s lived-bodylines and world-orientedness (Steinbock 1995, 2004a, b). The egological method with its static constitutional account takes the ego as the sole source of the constitution of sense and dissolves all differences into a ‘sameness’ of the self. By doing so in the Fifth Meditations Husserl provides a provisional description of the alien [das Fremde] and

7 By Middle Eastern refugee mostly I intend refugees from Iraq and Afghanistan who bears a history of orientalism and colonial subjugation. 8 According to Anthony Steinbock in Home and Beyond, ‘Lifeworld here can be used interchangeably with terms like environing-world [Umwelt], everyday-world [Alltagswelt], world of experience [Erfahrungswelt] and the natural concept of the world [natürlicher Weltbegriff]’ (Chicago: Northwestern University Press, 1995, 87). 27 its radical sense of strangeness [das Fremdheit] (CM, 91). The sphere of my ownness belongs to myself, as constituting subjectivity, my lived-body and my psychic being. How can then my ownness sphere be presupposed by the sense-constitution of another psychic being or lived-body? With phenomenological analysis of modes of givenness, the other ego becomes inaccessible; that is, the phenomenological mode that the other ego is given to me is in the mode of inaccessibility. In other words, the other, due to their embodiment is accessible to me as inaccessible (CM, 66).

Husserl’s transitions from the consciousness to the world in search for an internal relation of consciousness to world took place by shifting from static and genetic methods to generative as an account of the mutual development of individual and community; that is the consciousness and the world. In this manner, through generativity, the structure of historical developments of meaning that are pregiven in the lifeworld, can be disclosed. Applying a regressive inquiry into the past as the analysis of the historical and social dimensions of identity and difference we come to the concept of the lifeworld as things appear in it according to their experiential qualities, values and usage opposed to the quantitative world of the positivistic sciences (Welton 2000, 334). From here, I discuss how the lifeworld as the horizon and the ground works as a ‘territory’ that gives us the opportunity to inquire into the constitutive conditions for intersubjective life and personal experience as pregiven. Using Anthony Steinbock’s generative account of Husserl’s phenomenology, I deliberate on the notions of normality and abnormality as liminal notions. Discussing these two concepts in relation to the lifeworld, I claim that the homeworld and the alienworld as liminal concepts are primarily normal and abnormal lifeworlds. Using Husserl’s intersubjective structure of the homeworld and the alienworld I propose that the most critical part of knowing and understanding the other as alien is to recognize the fact that the Other is not given to me in the manner of objective givenness. This means I experience the other as always present in its absence in a way that its presence is withdrawn from the accessibility of home, as inaccessible. In the following chapter I examine the mode of experiencing the alien other and how I can validate this givenness.

As the Other is given to me and is accessible to me in a mode of inaccessibility, what then might be my relation to the Other? I engage with this question in Chapter Four in three steps: first, I discuss what Husserl means by genuine inaccessibility and incomprehensibility of the alien. The alien belongs to the open horizon of my familiar surroundings which is non-intuitable; that is, alienness is accessible but in its inaccessibility. For Husserl, alienness is not something added to the phenomena of the Other as what shows itself, rather the way in which the phenomenon shows itself, the ‘how’ of this showing. Therefore, we can say that the alien is given (1) as an outsider or foreign that is the outcome of shifting boundaries and separating the sphere of accessible and inaccessible; and (2) as

28 whatever belongs to the other, that is stemming from the movement of appropriation which leads to the sphere of belonging and not-belonging.

Second, moving from the deliberation on liminal experience of the alien from home, I suggest that the alien in its radical form is in fact the ‘I-Alien’, that means alien-to-me opposed to what I know as ‘my own’. Here we engage with the alienness as relation, the dynamic of such a relation and the modality of alien-givenness (CM, 100). This way, what alien means to me and what is my relation to alien cannot have a worked-out agenda in advance, but rather it ‘sees’ along with the movement given in the flow of experience as it unfolds.9 The alienness of this I-alien relation bears on ‘a verifiable accessibility of what is originally inaccessible’ (Hua II, 144; Hua I, 114). The alien in its original inaccessibility does not belong to my field of possibilities. According to Levinas, although the alien reveals itself phenomenally, because of the manner of presence as withdrawn from the experience of ownness, they can be characterized as non-phenomenal. If phenomenology all together is about actively dis-positing oneself from the event, that is to dispose the ‘self’ ‘to being struck in whichever way the given gives itself, then we try to liberate phenomena and relieve the engagement of the self on the phenomenal field (Steinbock 2007).

In the third and the final step, building on Levinas and Steinbock I liberate phenomenon and relieve the engagement of the self on the phenomenal field of experiencing the Other as alien. To this end, I suggest that when Husserl talks about the givenness of the alien, as accessible in a manner of inaccessibility, the presupposition is that the only mode of givenness is presentational givenness which is peculiar to sensible and intellectual objects that are ‘dependent upon my power to usher things into appearance, either through the power of my ‘I can’ or my ‘I think’’ (Steinbock 2007, 9). Since there cannot be an intentional relation with the Other, the other person cannot be given in the economy of being-disclosed like an object and it seems to be interruptive of my disposal relation to the world. This means that the Other person is absolved from a disposal relation with me. If my relation to the other person is not initiated in a manner of subject-object relation, then I try to find out what would be the most profound relation to the other which is given in moral experience. Since the moment we mention the experience of the other we enter the economy of moral experience with its own structure that Steinbock calls verticality.10 Such openness toward various types of givenness is

9 These are the outcome of personal conversations and weekly discussions with Professor Anthony Steinbock at the Phenomenology Research Center, Southern Illinois University. 10 Deliberating on Steinbock’s notion of different modes of givenness, in Chapter Four I will thoroughly discuss different types of givenness for various experiences which do not comply with the intentional structure of consciousness, and because of that are wrongly ignored as evidence. The example of these experiences is, the givenness of Holy in religious experience, the givenness of the Other in moral experience and the givenness of nature in ecological experience. 29 an essential move to find a positive ethical relation to the Other that in this case is the refugee subject, not as interruptive and disturbing but as an Absolute ought which is given in moral experience.

In Chapter Five, Building on Steinbock and Jean Luc Marion I analyze the moral experience of the Other, in terms of the modality of the givenness of the Other, and in terms of the type of phenomena which is given in vertical givenness in the intersubjective realm (Steinbock 2007; Marion 2002a, b). Reading Steinbock who is certainly interested in enquiring into the structure of experience and modes of givenness of whatever potentially can be given in experience, together with Jean-Luc Marion, who rather focuses on what is being given in experience as phenomenon of experience, helps me explore the type of phenomenality of the alien Other that is given in the mode of revelation. Within the moral sphere if what is given is not given in the manner of objective givenness, then the phenomenon that is given, cannot be constituted as object and cannot be objectified. If what is given in the moral experience is the Other who is not objectifiable; then I as the experiencer and the transcendental ‘I’ do not constitute it as an object. That is a crucial point in this analysis, as it reveals the two vectors of moral experience, the transcendental subject who is not transcendental anymore but a witness who receives, and the Other who is given as a ‘saturated phenomenon’. According to Marion, a saturated phenomenon is the one that is given in excess of intuition, as invisible according to quantity, unbearable according to quality, absolute according to relation, and irregardable according to modality. I will extensively elaborate on these characteristics throughout this chapter.

By accepting the modality of revelation as the modality of moral experience, and the given- what appeared in experience- which is the Other as saturated phenomenon, I propose that, as long as experiencing the Other maintains this structure, we can assume that we have morally experienced the Other, and if not, there is no room for addressing ethics and morality between the ‘I’ and the Other. This means that within the structure of moral experience, the refugee as an alien Other, as an uninvited guest, according to my disposition, can be given as a saturated phenomenon which vertically reveals and discloses itself to me. However, refugee can be experienced as a denigrated phenomenon, which is creatively, historically, restricted in its ability to vertically reveal, manifest, expose, display, disclose. This does not mean that denigrated phenomenon suffers the poverty of givenness, but it shows my poverty in receiving it as saturated phenomenon. Therefore, I can claim that, in experiencing the Other if I am open to receive the Other as saturated phenomenon, I initiate a moral orientation to the Other that cannot be objectified. By abandoning the givenness of the Other as saturated phenomenon, I cannot morally experience the Other and instead I will open the possibility of violence toward the Other.

By understanding two concepts of violence and ethics as phenomenological orientations, I discuss that I can have a moral experience of the Other, only if I receive the Other as Saturated phenomenon.

30 Since violence negates the very integrity of the ethical terrain and the structure of moral experience, this means that violence emerges because of abandoning the reception of the call of the Other to shows itself as saturated phenomenon. Building on the early discussion of James Dodd’s phenomenological analysis of violence in Chapter one, I conclude that, the colonial subject who is born into the violent structure of colonial situation as a reality and the condition in which all the normative system of sense constitution is saturated with violence. A detained refugee in Manus Island, enters a colonial structure of Australian detention camp that is the manifestation of the colonial violence that constitutes the asylum seeker or refugee as an outsider. Violence as the very negation of ethical leaves no room to revive the hospitality and reception toward refugees, unless we reverse our orientation toward the Other in its radical alienness.

The generous reception of the refugee as the alien Other requires an ethical renewal which is the outcome of an ethical epoché to the ground of well-established morals which are taken for granted. The ethical renewal in this case is a universal call in our sorrowful present, when the experience of refugee has just revealed the inner untruthfulness and the lack of meaning of the colonial culture. This renewal must happen within and through us as members of humanity who form and maintain this structure. Observing passively the decline of person as absolute value is the negation of being free- willing subject who is constantly involved in shaping and engaging in the surrounding world.

Let me begin the journey of this thesis by unfolding the operative meaning structure of colonial systems by employing Besinnung and stablishing a critical reflection on the problem of the refugee and the violent structure of Australian offshore refugee processing, in Chapter One.

31 Chapter One

On Radical Besinnung: A Historical Investigation into the Origins of Colonial Legacy

Introduction

The aim of this study is to examine the phenomenon of ‘alienness’ and the experience of the refugee subject from a phenomenological perspective. Central to this approach is the idea that the first-person experience is the only resource for meaning making. That is, if I want to study the refugee subject, I only have access to my experience of a refugee subject. It is not the case that I can evaluate or validate the refugee’s experience of fleeing or displacement. Instead, I need to dispose myself to my experience of the refugee subject. Phenomenology then illuminates this disposition toward whatever I experience of me (Myself), the Other and the world; that is a network of relations and dispositions. Specifically, for the purpose of this study, the focus will be on the relation of the ‘I’ and the refugee as the ‘Other’. However, my reflection on experiencing the Other is a critical one.

To engage in phenomenological reflection as a critical reflection on the experience is to justify and turn back to the question that is already there, and the question in the present study concerns the refugee subject as ‘an alien other’. In this case, the refugee crisis is not about the refugee, but it is about us, it is about the ‘I’ and the experience of ‘I’ of the alien other. Engaging with the problematic of the refugee is to critically investigate it as a product of a historical situation, with all the assertions and meanings that are operative in that same situation. It is to be understood that phenomenological reflection on the question of the other is a critical posture that expands the positing and validity claim of what is given, in order to investigate the manner in which that thing is given; such a posture in fact is to participate in meaning and Being. Critical reflection in Husserlian phenomenology is a methodological and systematic engagement of consciousness in intersubjective community. That is, the generative method of phenomenology that is sensitive to socio-geo-historical normative configurations of meanings, is partly stepping back from practical orientations and attending to the modes of givenness in order to find the origin of what is given. Hence, the sheer description of the ‘How’ of givenness shows the contribution of the subject and therefore the responsibility of the subject in the giving of meaning.

32 Since my contribution is uniquely mine, my responsibility is unique and cannot be prescribed to anyone else.11 In other words, critical reflection on the generative movement of meaning-making through history is illuminating those claims and meanings that are taken for granted in a quasi-present mode, under a shadow of naïveté. Such reflection can lead to developing an explicit awareness of the structure of intentionality and reveals the relation of the ‘how’ of givenness and the constitution of sense. This reveals the participation and the contribution of the ‘I’ within the complexity of meaning and opens up the realm of responsibility toward that constitution. What Husserl regarded as reflection is in fact is a call for self-reflection on the constitutive responsibility of the ‘I’ toward the constitution of sense.

With this methodological overview, in this chapter I try to establish a critical reflection on the problematic of the refugee in order to investigate it as a product of a historical situation, with all the assertions and meanings that are operative in that same situation. This phenomenological reflection has a temporal dimension to it that Husserl calls Besinnung. Besinnung enables us to show how the implications for intentional life and modes of givenness are responsible for the constitution of phenomenon. The historical investigation into the structure of meaning constitution reveals the epistemic underpinnings of various phenomena in relation to refugees, such as the violence that is inherent in the Australian refugee intake policies, and the treatment of refugees in offshore detention centers. Let me commence this by sketching the significance of phenomenological critique as the methodological tool in this investigation. Applying Besinnung leads us to two main conclusion: first, that the Middle Eastern refugee is a traumatized subject under the gaze of the orientalist, Second, the Australian dynamics of border politics is deeply structured according to their inherited colonial system that governs their social attitude toward experiencing the Other as undesirable, uninvited and harmful.

Phenomenology as Critique

Considering Husserl’s main contribution to phenomenology as the transition from descriptive to transcendental phenomenology, it could be said that this contribution is a methodological shift from living in the straightforwardly manner of accepting reality in the ‘natural attitude’ to a clarification of reality through evidence in the transcendental attitude (Steinbock 1993). The natural attitude is just living an immediacy of ‘Being’ and acceptance of ‘being’ as what we know as ‘real’, taking it for granted without considering it. Somehow with the free activity of the spirit one can bracket the natural attitude. In what Husserl calls the Epoché, one brackets Being as taken for granted, and questions the ‘what’ and ‘how’ of that Being without knowing it. The epoché as bracketing the natural attitude is

11 I will expand the concept of ‘responsibility’ further in Chapter Four. 33 the participation of the spirit in the meaning of being. This is to identify subjects’ perceptual and intellectual relations with being as a participation in being as meaningful and sense-filled. This is the moment of Critique for Husserl which means an infinite inquiry into the asserting and discriminating human being as participation in Being. In the natural attitude one posits oneself in the mundane and naive relation to the world, but the critical posture expands the positing, validity assertion of the ‘what’ in order to investigate the manner of givenness, the how, or sense or meaning of givenness, that is the participation in meaning. This happens for Husserl by bracketing our presuppositions and applying them as leading clues for the inquiry; that is, a historical/teleological reflection on those presuppositions to understand our current situation. In Crisis of the European sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology: An Introduction to Phenomenological Philosophy Husserl asks how that, ‘can we live in this world, where historical occurrences are nothing but an unending concatenation of illusory progress and bitter disappointment?’ (Crisis, part I, 7). Therefore, he believes that philosophy is a possibility that humanity has to be self-responsible.

In this manner, applying Husserl’s phenomenology of social subjectivity is to bracket the subject as taken-for-granted and to disclose the limits and power of subject in its ability to constitute meanings and relations. While sociologists have commonly accused phenomenology, claiming that the realm of social existence and social issues are the blind spots of this philosophy, using the generative account of phenomenology, one can acknowledge Husserl’s contribution to the problem of the social world and social ontology.12 Phenomenologizing activity on the problematic of the social world is to question the mundane and naïve relation to the world in the act of positing oneself. In fact, phenomenological reflection is a critical posture that expands the positing and validity assertions of what is given, in order to investigate the manner of givenness that is participation in meaning and Being.

Thus, Husserl’s phenomenology can set up grounds for hermeneutical understanding of social interactions. Phenomenologically speaking, the refugee can be observed as a hermeneutical subject who experiences fleeing and dislocation as an existential projection. By the ‘hermeneutical subject or self’ I mean a subject that is conditioned in language, culture and societal connections. Attending phenomenologically to the refugee experience one can investigate what is presented in the experience and the structural disclosure of its meaning. Then, a refugee as a hermeneutical subject who experiences unwanted fleeing is differentiated from an invited person like a migrant or an expatriate or even an uninvited visitor; that is a guest who comes today and leaves tomorrow. Situated within this context, the main question of this study then is: What type of hermeneutic do we deal with, in

12 See for example, Habermas 1987: Theorie des kommunikativen Handelns. Band 2. Zur Kritik der funktionalistischen Vernunft. 34 intersubjective relations, in the home/alien encounter in the colonial situation? Australia as an example of colonial settlement, with a generation who lived through ‘White Australia’ policy, has a specific hermeneutical encounter with non-white refugees and immigrants.13 I am explicitly interested in phenomenologically investigating this hermeneutical encounter in the framework of the normative structure of home-world/alien-world.

Husserl teaches us philosophers as ‘functionaries of mankind’ who are the heirs of the past goals and methods of philosophy (Crisis, 17). As functionaries of humanity, we need to reflect back in a thorough historical and critical manner in order to provide a radical self-understanding. This must be in the shape of inquiring back to the meaning-origin of our contemporary crisis, naming one the refugee crisis. Inquiring back, that is, regressive inquiry, is to strike through the crust of the externalized ‘historical facts’, interrogating and investigating their inner meaning and their teleology. David Carr, in the introduction to Husserl’s Crisis, explains how Husserl uses the problems and expositions of Galilean geometry as an ‘exemplary’ significance. For the purpose of this study, Husserl’s methodical and systematic recognition of human’s general character of being historical, human’s historicity and the engagement of consciousness in the intersubjective community is, of a high importance.

Recognizing the engagement of consciousness in developing intersubjective communities, we can claim that with a regressive inquiry, social phenomenon like the crisis of the refugee as the Other, understanding the Other, letting the Other in and hospitality, are rooted in tradition. The whole cultural world, Husserl observes, in all its forms, exists through tradition (Crisis, 355). Tradition, for Husserl, precisely arises within our human space through human activities as spiritual accomplishments. Past humans existed and ‘shaped the new out of the raw materials’ or those ‘already spiritually shaped’ at hand. In this way, tradition is open to an infinity of inquiries but leads us ‘to definite answers in accord with their sense’ (355). For example, Nowruz, or Mehregan, which are Zoroastrian festivals, have shaped Persian understanding of nature and how changing seasons directly affected the order of the Persian community.14 These Zoroastrian symbols and festivals were still celebrated as an element of the cultural identity of Persian and Iranians, even after the majority of Persians converted to Islam. This is to say that tradition as the whole of humans’ spiritual accomplishments was once a project and then it became a successful execution. In fact, such historical

13 The term ‘White Australia’ Policy refers to a set of historical policies that aimed to exclude people of non-European ethnic origin, especially Asians (primarily Chinese) and pacific islanders from immigrating to Australia. Governments progressively dismantled such policies between 1949 and 1973. See the Immigration Restriction Act of 1991. 14 Mehregan is a Persian and Zoroastrian festival celebrated to honor the Yazata Mithra, which is responsible for friendship, affection and love. This widely referred to as the Persian Festival of Autumn. Nowruz also is the Persian New Year Festival which rooted in Zoroastrian tradition. It is the day of the Vernal equinox which marks the beginning of spring in Northern hemisphere. 35 reflection is a way to open a critical phenomenological consideration of the spirit of our age through a historical prelude. Critical reflection is not merely imposing a question on to the shoulders of reflection, but critique, which is a mode of questioning that deepens the reflection in the question of justification and turns back to the question that already exists. This is the way of phenomenology as critique that gets us to ‘the heart of the matter’ and for this research the matter is the refugee, but at the heart of it is the question of the ‘Other’ that is unresolved.

To understand the issue of the refugee as Other, we need to critically engage with it through history, and try to critically analyze it as one of the products of our colonial situation. Critical reflection on the colonial situation will shed light on those claims and meanings that are operative in that situation but that are not visible and are taken for granted, that is, they can remain quasi-present and in the shadow of naïveté. The explicit awareness can be developed within the structure of intentionality; that is revelation of the relation of the ‘how’ of givenness and the constitution of sense. This is the awareness of the participation and contribution of the ‘I’ within the complexity of meaning. Discovering the role of the ‘I’ as the contributor to the meaning-making process opens a way to the realm of responsibility and the call for self-reflection as a form of self-responsibility. Husserl calls such historical reflection Besinnung; that is a reflection on historical flowing back to the development of meanings through generations regarding our contribution to that generative meaning. Throughout the thesis I will explicitly expand on how awareness as something that is a motivated act is evidence for us and has a certain ‘grip’ on us, so passively becomes our orientation toward the world. In the following section I discuss Besinnung as a historical inquiry into the origin of meaning constitution. The section after that argues that using Besinnung as a method of inquiry, reveals the traumatic identity of the refugee as a colonial subject.

Radical “Besinnung”: A historical investigation into the origins of sense- constitution

It is important for the purpose of this study to renegotiate most of the common notions held to belong to the issue of the refugee. What I mean by renegotiation is to phenomenologically investigate and reflect on those meanings that are operative in the refugee’s lived experience. As Husserl asserts in The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology, phenomenology as a transcendental turn in philosophy tries to give a comprehensive account of a priori correlation between objectivity and subjectivity.15 Husserl asserts that ‘according to this a priori correlation, the manner in which entities in the world present themselves is always related to the subjective way of

15 Husserl asserts that … ‘the correlation between the world (the world of which we always speak) and its subjective manners of givenness never evoked philosophical wonder (that is, prior to the first breakthrough of “transcendental phenomenology” in the Logical Investigations)’ (Crisis, 165). 36 apprehending these entities’ (Crisis, 165). Putting it into Husserlian terms, in order to investigate the origin of sense-constitution we need to provide a specific reflection or a phenomenological critique of the relation of ‘me’ to every other thing.

In Ideas II Husserl discusses the role of reflection in providing possible access to the origin of sense- constitution.16 Instead of using the term Reflexion, he employs the concept of Besinnung as phenomenological reflection. There is a subtle difference between these two terms: while there is a spatial dimension to Reflexion, there is a temporal dimension to Besinnung. In Ideas I, through Reflexion, Husserl tries to give us an immanent reflection of the entire domain of subjectivity, but then he applies Besinnung as a patient returning inquiry into the various sections of lived experience, mostly those that are ignored in a direct thematization (Geniusas 2012, 145).17 Husserl writes:

The reflection [Besinnung] in question is a particular case of that self-reflection [Selbstbesinnung] in which man as a person seeks to reflect upon the ultimate sense of his existence. We must distinguish between a broader and a narrower sense of self-reflection [Selbstbesinnung]: pure ego-reflection [Ich-Reflexion] and reflection upon the whole life of the ego as ego; and reflection [Besinnung] in the pregnant sense of inquiring back into the sense or teleological essence of the ego. (Crisis, 392)

This reflection is more like an existential self-meditation rather than Cartesian-style inquiry. By Cartesian inquiry I mean a progressive inquiry that aims to establish the possibility of evidence for the subjective experiences, as taken-for-granted.18 Besinnung is a type of reflection that shows how the implications of intentional life and modes of givenness are responsible for the constitution of phenomena (Steinbock 1995, 83). This means that Besinnung as a regressive inquiry broadens the limits of phenomenological givenness by means of navigating the paths of consciousness to the emergence of sense. Hence, instead of looking for phenomenologically legitimate modes of givenness as Husserl proposes, this approach has the ability to criticize the clarity of sense-constitution: ‘Radical sense-investigation [Besinnung], as such, at the same time is criticism for the sake of original clarification’ (Hua XVII, 14).

By original clarification Husserl means, ‘shaping the sense anew, not merely filling in a delineation that is already determinate and structurally articulated beforehand’ (Hua XVII, 14), but signifying a ‘combination of determining more precisely the vague predelineation and configuring the prejudices

16 Edmund Husserl, Hua III: Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy, First Book: General Introduction to Pure Phenomenology, 1982 17 See also, Mirja H. Hartimo. Formal and Transcendental Logic. In The Husserlian Mind, ed. Hanne Jacobs. Routledge. Forthcoming, 2019, 2018; Bachelard 1968; Sokolowski 1974, Dodd 2004. 18 For example, in First Philosophy II and the appendixes text to these lecture-courses, Husserl asserts that ‘the Cartesian path does not clarify how pure consciousness manifests its own temporality; this path only naively presupposes that consciousness, must be temporal’ (Hua VIII, 433). 37 that derive from associational overlappings and cancelling those prejudices that conflict with the clear sense-fulfilment’ (Formal and Transcendental Logic, 10). Then ‘Besinnung is a critical discrimination between the genuine and the spurious’ (Formal and Transcendental Logic, 10). For Husserl, even logic and sciences are experienced as cultural formations that are pregiven to us with their meaning and their sense inherited in them. However, we can hardly get to know the meaning and the sense of them if not empathetically engaging with the community of practice of logic and sciences. Because through the practice we can carry on the sense-investigation and get to know the genuine sense and meaning of that tradition.

Like phenomenology itself, Husserl conveys that the task of Besinnung is to signify and produce the sense ‘itself’. This means Besinnung is an ‘attempt to convert the “intending sense” that is the sense which is vaguely floating before us in our unclear aiming, into the fulfilled, clear sense’ (Formal and Transcendental Logic, 10).19 In the introduction to Formal and Transcendental Logic, Husserl signifies that his method in approaching the exact sciences is radical Besinnung, that is, text- dependent, historically informed and critical commentary on Mathematicians in his time (Hartimo 2018, 260). This is the same approach that Husserl took in his later work, The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology in order to explain the role of transcendental phenomenology in cultural criticism.

As stated by Iso Kern, ‘the radicality of Besinnung can be achieved through transcendental phenomenological investigations’, not by means of phenomenological reduction but through ontology (1976, 141). This process starts with undermining presuppositions of subjective logic and evidences that are goal-directed.20 Husserl in Transcendental and Formal Logic asserts that Besinnung can be regarded as a systematic method of becoming involved more deeply with the scientists’ goals by entering into an empathic community with the scientists. In a broader way. Besinnung is a systematic method of engaging more affectively with the people in question, consciously attempting to understand them. Or as Husserl mentions, ‘Besinnung is a human scientific analogue to the natural theoretical attitude in that it involves an active attempt to understand people’s intentions correctly’ (Formal and Transcendental Logic, 14). In other words, Husserl’s Besinnung is an activity of understanding the goal-directed practices and the intentions of communities and groups, although that is not a form of second-person understanding of other’s motivations. For as I mentioned earlier, this is an empathetic engagement with the practice and not merely questioning. Besinnung, in other words, works in the framework of generativity as an appropriate methodology in human

19 Husserl continues: ‘this is to procure for it-the sense- the evidence of its clear possibility’ (FTL, p. 9) I will elaborate in more depth the issue of evidence in my later chapters. 20 Further I will elaborate on the meaning of goal-directed practices and logic. 38 sciences. By generativity [Generativität] he means the manner in which cultural meanings become established, sedimented, and then handed on from one generation to another.

Let me elaborate more on how Husserl applies such reflection and how this can contribute to our understanding of the issue of the refugee subject. Husserl’s Crisis, I believe, is still strongly relevant to my study because it challenges us as philosophers concerning the nature of our present circumstances.21 He starts by introducing the notion of ‘functioning subjectivity’ [leistende Subjektivität] as operative everywhere in ‘hiddenness’, which is the collective and anonymous intentionality that gives us our sense of the world, with its horizon of future and past (Crisis, 67). With this notion Husserl calls for a historical and critical reflection on the cultural developments of our time. Development here can be read as spiritual accomplishments of our modern era. However, such self-reflection is the remedy for a breakdown, for a crisis. Husserl asserts that the project of the Crisis as a whole, is the ‘task of self- reflection which grows out of the “breakdown” situation of our time’ (Crisis, 58).22

For Husserl, crisis lies in the way that positivist science calls upon reason to set a fixed distinction for ordering human life according to what is meaningful and what is meaningless. Positivist sciences claim rationality is a condition for thinking, that is specific patterns of judgments or assertion, which it calls logical. However, Husserl reminds us that thinking is a necessary condition for human existence, and belongs to human existence, although human existence is not reduced to thinking. This is to emphasize that human life requires evidence and experience of truth that is richer than logical truth propositions. He believes that among all prejudices in the modern era is the most important one that the evidence for human meaning structure is counted as ‘logical’ evidence, which is reduced to deductive and axiomatic and immediate assertive evidence. The claim over what is meaningful and meaningless, in Husserl’s terms, is an existential one with evidence far richer than conditions for rationality and seeking the answer to it through positive sciences is the crisis of our time. If our concern is to understand the origin and the framework of the modern spirit’s accomplishments, then the idea of logic gains weight in the analysis of contemporary humans’ condition. I will use Husserl’s notion of logic and the method he uses to search for the goal-directedness of human endeavors, as a leading clue to inquire into the goal-directedness of colonial tradition and thought.

21 ‘The historical reflections we embarked upon, in order to arrive at the self-understanding, which is so necessary in our philosophical situation, demanded clarity concerning the origin of the modern spirit…’ (Crisis, 57). Further on Husserl asserts that ‘A historical, backward reflection of the sort under discussion is thus actually the deepest kind of self- reflection…Self-reflection serves in arriving at a decision…’ (Crisis, 72, my emphasis). 22 Husserl asserts that ‘the understanding of the beginnings is to be gained fully only by starting with science as given in present-day form, looking back at its development. But in the absence of an understanding of beginnings the development is mute as a development of meaning...They are necessities if we take upon ourselves, as we have said, the task of self- reflection which grows out of the “breakdown” situation of our time, with its “breakdown of science” itself’ (Crisis, 58). 39 Orientalism and the problem of Colonial Thought

In Formal and Transcendental Logic, applying Besinnung as sense-investigation, Husserl signifies that the sciences and logic that we experience are given to us as cultural formations that bear their ‘sense’, their ‘meaning’ in them. Science and logic then, like any other cultural practice, are produced by generations of scientists who practice and maintain them in a continuous striving toward an aim.23 Husserl believes that the task of formal logic as theory of science is to provide a clear and genuine sense of scientific endeavor, and this is what we face initially when we regard our experiences of science. That is, such logic as pregiven holds the essential possibilities and norms of science. Through radical sense-investigation, Husserl claims that there is a one-sidedness that is conditioned by logic in the given sciences, and that one-sidedness determines our specific sense of traditional logic, which is essentially an ‘Objective’ logic (Formal and Transcendental Logic, 10). In this regard, Husserl compares the normative ideals of modern mathematics and formal logic as theories of sciences, and believes that logic has the historical concept of goal-directed sense or meaning that both mathematician and ‘logicians aim at; whereas the former aim at non-contradiction, the latter aim at truth ‘(Hartimo 2018, 250). Therefore, the evidence associated with these goals will match them and will be different.

While the evidence associated with the abstract theory of forms in mathematics is ‘distinctness’ and distinctness is rooted in the ‘unity of a sphere of experience’, additionally logicians aim at the fulfilment of truth through ‘clear [klar] evidence, which in originary intuition is analogously given to ordinary perceived objects’ (Hartimo 2018, 262). Therefore, both ‘mathematicians and logicians seek evidence and they construct theories that can be fulfilled by that evidence’, which are different in kind and belong to different kinds of iterations (Hartimo 2018, 262). This is because for Husserl, logic is not related to all reasonings, rather it is only related to scientific reasoning which is judgmental or formed and connected in a certain manner. Subsequently, that evidence is adopted as norms that guide mathematics and sciences. It is through sense-investigation that Husserl tries to explicitly clarify the goals of a given tradition like the sciences or mathematics, that are viewed as guiding norms for them, in order to change and challenge the habits, customs and norms of such practice. Besinnung as radical sense-investigation can only happen through transcendental phenomenology, that is committed to transcendental Selbstbesinnung in a search for the ‘living intentions’ of those who are engaged in a practice like the sciences. In Formal and Transcendental Logic, transcendental logic is to reveal and clarify the kind of evidence that a specific tradition or practice aims at, as well

23 Husserl believes that ‘for purposes of radical sense-investigation, we may let ourselves be guided by our empathic experience of the sciences, taking them as produced formations through which there runs the unity of an aiming meaning’ (Formal and Transcendental Logic, 9).

40 as expose the presuppositions that are given in that practice, such as mathematics. This eventually leads to an intersubjective transcendental Besinnung seeking presuppositionless-ness as a common goal for co-existing subjects in transcendental world.

Up until now, I have tried to show how Besinnung works as sense-investigation and a revelation of goals of the given practice or tradition and discussed the kind of evidence such practice seeks to fulfil that aim. Similarly, in Crisis Husserl approaches the goal-directed sense of European philosophy and the spiritual achievements of Europe, engaging in a selbstbesinnung ‘within the nexus of the intentional history of transcendental’ philosophy (Hartimo 2018, 263). Doing so, Husserl arrives at the idea that the goal-sense of the exact sciences is in contrast to the goal-sense of transcendental philosophy, that is, objectivism in contrast to transcendentalism. This time Husserl uses the goal- directed sense of transcendental phenomenology to criticize the goal-directed sense of the sciences in order to clarify the sense of modern rationality. In fact, Husserl uses transcendental phenomenology to distinguish the essential structures in order to apply a radical Besinnung to analyze what is happening in his society.24

What Husserl has pictured in his Crisis is an entangled network of relations that clearly led to the present condition of humankind. By distinguishing the essential structure of these relations through transcendental phenomenology, the logic, the aim and eventually the type of evidence that fulfils that aim can be revealed. He mentions that the world becomes understandable to us as a meaning structure that is formed out of intentionalities. This meaning-structure maintains itself by one meaning- formation operating together with one another and constituting new meaning through synthesis. These meanings are nothing but modes of validity, that are related to the manners of subjective intention in modes of validity. Therefore, systematically uncovered, the world is the product of an intersubjective constitution that involves the total system of manners of givenness and modes of validity for egos (Crisis, 166-68). For instance, neither of the two concepts of the ‘Orient’ and ‘Occident’ or ‘East’ and ‘West’ that are heavily shaped our contemporary understanding of politics, economy, sociality and civilization are ontological entities, but as Edward Said (1978), claims in his masterpiece, Orientalism, these concepts are invented. By ‘invented’ he means that these two notions are the

24 In the introduction to Formal and Transcendental Logic, Husserl asserts that, ‘the present condition of European sciences necessitates radical sense-investigation [Besinnungen]. At bottom these sciences have lost their great belief in themselves, in their absolute significance. The modern man of today, unlike the “modern” man of the Enlightenment, does not behold in science, and in the new culture by means of science, the self-objectivation of human reason or the universal activity mankind has devised for itself in order to make possible a truly satisfying life, an individual and social life of practical reason. The belief that science leads to wisdom—to an actually rational self-cognition and cognition of the world and God, and, by means of such cognition, to a life somehow to be shaped closer to perfection, a life truly worth living, a life of “happiness”, contentment, well-being, or the like—this great belief, once the substitute for religious belief, has (at least in wide circles) lost its force. Thus, men live entirely in a world that has become unintelligible, in which they ask in vain for the wherefore, the sense, which was once so doubtless and accepted by the understanding, as well as by the will’ (Formal and Transcendental Logic, 5). 41 outcomes of Western human endeavors in affirming and identifying the Other as non-Western.25 I will deliberate on the concept of Orientalism further on in this chapter.

Following Husserl in Crisis, transcendental phenomenology with a historical perspective can reveal to us the human participation in the communally shared lifeworld. Therefore, we explicitly begin with the pre-given [Vorgegenben] experience of the public world in the natural attitude rather than setting off from the inner consciousness of a solitary subject as an egological self-reflection. This way is to broaden the horizon of phenomenology beyond its ordinary standpoints of cognitive and perceptual acts of consciousness into an engagement with the meaning of various and broader phenomena like the meaning of cultural and historical traditions, the nature of European and non-European cultures and the concept of interculturality and so on.

With this methodological overview, following Husserl, let me unravel and reformulate the problem of the refugee as a phenomenon that has appeared in certain historical context with a certain operative meaning structure. On the one hand, the compulsion of fleeing differentiates a refugee from the invited or even uninvited visitor, a guest who comes today and leaves tomorrow, as the limitation of the stay maintains the rules of hospitality. These are the rules that governs the structure of our encounters with the Other; a ‘world full of riddles’ [diese Welt voll Rätsel], that is not easy to be deciphered (Améry 1999, 47; Zolkos 2019, 65). On the other hand, refugees are not only different from visitors, but also from immigrants who are officially admitted and naturalized. Without a residency permit, they are considered as illegal intruders who threaten the idea of a homogeneous population, that is based on the defense mechanism against the stranger and this always was the case in any political condition. Though, the precarious gesture of refugee that should be decoded by the host challenges the very riddle of hospitality. This precarious gesture imposes new discussions about subjectivity, hostility, interruption of self and limitation of hospitality on the host.

Middle Eastern refugees, like those from Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Pakistan and the rest of that region are those who fled their home seeking the very basic rights of human being that is safety. Here we talk about the Orient and the constitution of the Oriental subject, which at the same time is about the constitution of the Western subject. For Said the Orient is emerged out of a patronizing Western attitude in the service of imperial powers to dominate and represent the Middle East, Asian, and North African countries as static and undeveloped, and constituting the Oriental subject in a manner that can be subjugated and conquered. The contemporary gesture of colonial and imperial act of representation and domination in the Middle East is what Hamid Dabashi calls ‘post- 9/11 syndrome’ in his book Post-Orientalism Knowledge and Power in a Time of Terror (2015, xvii), that addresses

25 See also Dabashi 2015; Yegenoglu 1998; Hay 1957 42 the US invasion to Afghanistan and then to Iraq as a declaration of War on Terror. Therefore, the Middle Eastern refugee is the one who flees from the colonial and imperial structure of domination of ‘war on terror’ into the arms of the colonizer and the oppressor: The irony of survival!

As I mentioned earlier, for Said the notions of the West and the Orient are invented to operate as a process of constitution of some sort of identity. The idea of West as Europe described by Denys Hay implies a collective concept which is created to identify ‘us’ Europeans as against any others who are a subservient non-European (1957). This collective identity as us, Home, is not just working as a delimitation and co-generation of the Other in and through the very constitution of the home world as Europe, but implied as the idea of European culture as superior to all other non-European cultures and the backwards Orient. In this delimitation, there are various types of relations that the West has maintained with the Orient, but all have a hegemonic approach. The hegemonic approach of Orientalism in Said’s words, as an imperialistic approach to coming to terms with the Other as non- European as Dabashi states is a living organism of knowledge production and interpretation (2015,102).

Simultaneously, Orientalism, as noted by Meyda Yegenoglu is a process of the construction of a Western subject; that is, colonial discourse as well as orientalism reflects the process of Westernizing and Orientalizing (1998, 34; Hiddleston 2009). The term ‘West’ in this context, following Husserl is the spiritual shape of Europe, which includes English Dominions and the United States that more-or- less binds them together in their cultural accomplishments and endeavors (Crisis, 273). However, the ‘peculiarity of a colonial discourse such as Orientalism’ resides in the process of Westernization and Orientalization (Yegenoglu 1998, 36). As Yegenoglu mentioned, this is a process of ‘becoming’ a Western subject, not as a member of a pregiven cultural structure, but as being subjected to a process called Westernization and the fantasy of belonging to a Western cultural imaginary. It is notable that the Western subject is historically constituted as a ‘sovereign’ and as ‘universal norm’ (1998, 36, see also Mbembe 2001, 24-66). In this context, any Other rather than the Western subject becomes a deviation from the Norm. While a subject is constituted with such attributes, any other attributes marks a person as radically not a subject. This means, while a subject is constructed as European white male in the patriarchal mode of discourse, at the same time, the Other becomes other than a subject, epistemologically and ontologically:

43 In this humanist trial in which the judge is also the prosecutor, the ‘other’ is born accused: she is made lacking what the subject has and yet is threatening to the stable world of the subject by her radical difference. (Yegenoglu 1998, 6) 26

In colonial and Oriental discourse, the Orient as Other lacks those properties that the West naturally yields such as ‘civil society’ or ‘individuality’. Therefore, the West gains its ‘identity by setting off itself against the Orient as a surrogate and underground self (Said 1978, 11). Therefore, as Said mentioned, through the process of creating the Orient as politically, sociologically, ideologically and imaginatively Other than the West, Orientalist became legitimized to Orientalize the East and speak for the Orient (Said 1978, 5). In this manner, ‘Orientalism as a system of knowledge about the Orient’ (Said 1978, 14) and a system of referencing the Orient by the sovereign Western consciousness has created a huge body of theories and practices and series of possible relations with the Orient through generations. This Orient then becomes an integral part of Western material civilization and culture and introduces new modes of referencing and identifying the Other. Therefore, the orientalist construction of the Orient is the way of securing the Western subject’s identity by mediating through the Other.

Said argues that ‘Orientalism is an apparatus of knowledge with its will-to-truth’ and this can be understood by a thorough observation of the essential relation between representation, knowledge and power (Yegenoglu 1998, 15). The Orientalist ‘style of representation is a discourse that offers an interpretive tool or body of knowledge about other cultures and oriental people’ (Yegenoglu 1998, 15-17). But how can forms of subjugation and administration of other cultures by colonial power prescribe a type of ‘truth’ about Orient? Said suggests that the discursive power of Orientalism formulates the Orient, gives it shape and identity, in a way that recognizes its place in memory, ‘its importance to imperial strategy, and its ‘natural’ role as an appendage to Europe’ (1978, 22). Therefore, such a discourse is homologous to the ‘reality’ of the Orient; that is the realist mode of presentation that creates the Orient.27 The Orient for Said is not a fact of ‘nature’ but it is given by an essentialist discourse of Orientalism that understands the ‘Orient as a world of sensuality, corrupt tyranny, mystical religiosity, irrationality and backwardness and so on’ (Yegenoglu 1998, 17). This essential Orientalist reading of the Orient creates the Orient, the oriental and its world (Said 1978, 40). Putting it differently, the Orient itself is not just an idea but it corresponds to a constituted entity

26 As Yegenoglu mentions from the feminist point of view, ‘patriarchy is the modern mode of humanist discourse, that marks woman as emotional, weak, irrational, dependent, etc. which is the opposite of the subject. Therefore, woman is the natural deviation of the man who is the subject and the sovereign’ (1998, 5). 27 Said discusses that philosophically, ‘the kind of language, thought, and vision that I have been calling Orientalism very generally is a form of radical realism; anyone employing Orientalism which is the habit for dealing with questions, objects, qualities and regions deemed Oriental, will designate, name, point to, fix what he is talking or thinking about with a word or phrase, which is then considered either to have acquired, or more simply to be reality’ (1978, 72). 44 and reality. It is notable that the oriental subject is not just a misinterpretation of truth about it that can be corrected or delineated, but what is at stake here is an Orient that is constituted by the orientalist’s effort and it declares a specific power formation. In fact, orientalization as a discourse produced a body of knowledge of the Orient in the service of colonial power and materialized the Orient as a form of colonial power and control regime. Said believes that:

The Orient was a word which later accrued to it a wide field of meanings, associations, and connotations, and these did not necessarily refer to the real Orient but to the field surrounding the word. (1978, 203)

Thus, the discourse of Orientalism has the power to establish the phenomena that it names and speaks about and that is orientalization. Then the Orient becomes the embodiment of a certain discourse, which produces and maintains certain references and representation and that is why Orientalism leaves no room for the genuine manifestation and appreciation of the Orient as the Other. According to Yegenoglu, ‘Orientalism as a practice constitutes not only the object but also the subjects who are investigated that is an active constitution of subjectivity, enabling and empowering as well as dominating’ (1998, 27). Putting this into Husserlian terms, the meaning structure that is operative in the colonial, Oriental context constitutes a specific validity within the intersubjective realm. This constitutive validity produces a specific subject who maintains all those types of givenness and meaning-making that is related to those modes of validity. For example, when a colonized or an Oriental subject uses the language of the colonizer, they need to express themselves in a linguistic structure that can only manifest the colonizer’s lived experience. Octavio Paz in The Labyrinth of Solitude mentions this constant tension as:

Each time we try to express ourselves, we have to break with ourselves. (Paz 1985, cited in Glissant 1981, xx)

Homi Bhabha, in The Other Question, asserts that in order to understand the productivity of colonial power it is crucial to construct its regime of ‘truth’. This makes it possible to understand the productive ambivalence of the object of colonial discourse that is the ‘otherness’; ‘that otherness which is at once an object of desire and derision, an articulation of difference contained within the fantasy of origin and identity’ (1983, 19).28 Exercising the colonial power of discourse in the construction of the colonial subject as other is articulated within the economy of difference. These differences are in accordance with the mode of representation of otherness. In this way, Bhabha advises, colonial discourse produces the colonized as a fixed reality that is simultaneously an ‘other’ and yet entirely knowable and visible (1983, 2005). It is central to Orientalism that, on the one hand,

28 See also Bhabha & Mitchell 2005 45 the Orient is the site of discovery, practice and learning’, while, on the other hand it is the site of desire, myths, obsessions and fantasies. Said calls this, the two nexuses of orientalism. The first is the manifest orientalism that concerns the stated knowledges and views about the Orient like languages, societies, history, literature, and so on. The other is the latent orientalism, that refers to ‘an unconscious positivity’ about the Orient; ‘the site where all the dreams, desires, images, fears and fantasies of West is rooted’ (Said 1978, 206).

Thus, integral to the West’s identity as sovereign subject is the status of authorship, authority and legitimacy and its power in a discourse such as Orientalism, that is only plausible through creating an absolute and essential Other. Sustaining this identity is recognizing the Other’s culture and their way of being in absolute difference; that is, ‘they should remain different, because I should remain the same’ (Yegenoglu 1998, 57). This difference and infinite dissimulation are not because of the complexity of the Other’s way of being-in-the-world in the eyes of Orientalist and out of respect for the uniqueness of the Other, but in Orientalist logic it is ‘the force of negation that constitutes the Western subject as sovereign’ (Yegenoglu 1998, 102). This authority and sovereignty in defining the West as human, civilized and universal is temporalized by claiming that the history of the Other is backward and traditional and therefore the West is invented as the universal subject of the history and its history as the true human’s story.

The object of colonial discourse as a cultural element is not just an individual but also a certain way of existence and certain perception of the world. The destruction of the native’s cultural values, of ways of life, language, dress and techniques in the systemic oppression of people is the important characteristic of the ‘colonial situation’. In such a situation the systems of referencing are broken, the social imaginary is distorted, and values are emptied and flaunted. Alternatively, as Yegenoglu asserts, the West’s manner of ‘worlding the world’ constitutes the project of global domination by defining the universal norms of civilization and progress (1998, 96). This way, the logic of coloniality and Orientalism in the production of modernity is embodied in negation of the freedom and autonomy of the native culture. Frantz Fanon in The Wretched of the Earth, states that colonialism has a ‘perverted utilitarian logic’ and also borrowing from Yegenoglu, the discourse of the Enlightenment that ‘is characterized by the privileging of reason, truth and progress’ tries to distort, disfigure and destroy the past of colonized people’, as a history of misery and darkness of barbarism (Fanon 2004, 210; Fanon 1967; Yegenoglu 1999, 106, 135). As Fanon offers the following as a way of explaining this in On the National Culture:

At the level of the unconscious, therefore, colonialism was not seeking to be perceived by the indigenous population as a sweet, kind hearted mother who protects her child from a hostile environment, but rather a mother who constantly prevents

46 her basically perverse child from committing suicide or giving free rein to its malevolent instincts. The colonial mother is protecting the child from itself, from its ego, its physiology, its biology, and its ontological misfortune. (2004, 149)

What is at stake here is the Middle Eastern refugee as an Oriental subject with a fabricated history that testifies against its members. Hence, the refugee is not a detached element of the colonial legacy but the continuation of that agony. A refugee who is detained in a camp in a far end of the civilized world, for example in Manus Island resembles the oriental subject who became visible to the Western gaze.29 It is naïve to consider a refugee just as an asylum seeker who fled their war-torn home, in a quest for shelter, cherished by the benevolence of the West. The refugee is in pursuit of the stolen history, the halted culture, and the distorted social imaginary of themselves. Then according to the aforementioned on the experience of the Oriental subject, the experience of a Middle Eastern refugee can be described as a colonized subject who is an object in the hand of an occupying force, the exploited, Orientalized man, a sufferer of the colonial structure with a disfigured and bloated cultural face without means of existing, who is broken in the very depth of his/her substance.30

As I mentioned earlier, understanding the current refugee crisis, which is entailed by a specific ‘historical and political situation, requires the philosophical task of moving beyond the situation’ in order to make sense of sense, or the meaning of meanings that are operative in the discourse about refugees (Dodd 2004, 32). Following Husserl, here the effort is to strike through the externalized colonial situation as historical fact and interrogate its inner meanings and hidden teleology; in this manner, questions that were long unattended, could arise. Besinnung as regressive inquiry in this case reveals the hidden structure of a history that is carried through generations and can now become visible and obvious in its unfortunate situation. Applying Besinnung does not create new questions about coloniality in the case of this research, rather it helps us to reformulate the question of the ‘refugee’ in a different manner.

Under the Oriental gaze one only can be recognized through the oppressor’s eye, and the oppressor’s imposed ‘way of seeing, imagining, dreaming’ and so on in a belittling judgment in respect to their original forms of existence. It is the colonizer who is fabricated and continues to fabricate the colonized subject; the colonized subject derives its validity from the colonial structure of meaning- making. The Middle Eastern refugee as the colonial Other as Sara Ahmed discusses lacks the

29 Manus Island is part of Manus Province in northern Papua New Guinea, was used as one of offshore Australian immigration detention facilities. The Manus Regional Processing Centre was originally stablished in 2001, as part of ‘Pacific Solution Policy’ under the Howard government to stop maritime arrivals of asylum seekers to Australia. From July 2013 Rudd’s government announced that, those who sent to PNG would never be resettled in Australia. 30 See also Bhatia 2019; Bosworth 2008, 2014; Bosworth, Fili, & Pickering 2014; Canning 2017a, b; El-Enany & Keenan 2019; Esposito et al. 2019; Khosravi 2010, 2019.

47 ‘qualities and attributes’ required for a civilized state of existence such as happiness (Ahmed 2010, 125). Behrouz Boochani as a detainee in the Australian offshore detention center describes this wonder in the Australian guards about how detainees can also have the quality and attributes of celebrating sometime:

In the minds of prisoners, it is unnecessary to explain why they are happy and why they want to celebrate; it is unnecessary to answer anyone…We are celebrating for exactly the same reason that others celebrate. (Boochani 2018, 137)

The Middle Eastern subject for the Western spectator became a fantasy and an enigmatic image a long time ago and they were supposed to endorse that Oriental picture. Once and for all the Orientalist endeavored to identify the Orient as a phantasmatic imaginary of dreams and fears but that structure of representation is now subverted by the appearance of refugees at our doors. As I stated earlier, the arrival of the refugee on the borders can manifest the failure of ‘the foil or negative mirror in which Western construction of identity and gender could be positively reflected’ (Al Saji 2010, 3, see also Al-Saji 2019). In this manner, the refugee is not a stranger that the Western gaze has failed to recognize, rather that gaze has already constituted them as a ‘stranger or alien’ in the economy of difference. The Oriental refugee is the ‘fleshed out’ alien that the West is now facing, the embodied fears of the West who pose a danger in their very co-presence in this given situation. The image of the Middle East as ‘radical fundamentalist Islamist’ that once was constituted as ‘constitutive outside’ and as ‘stranger danger’ is now materialized and embodied in the refugee who threatens the very social fabric of the West. For the Australian Government, this threat is an intelligible enough reason to declare an ‘state of exception’ that according to Georgio Agamben is an ‘external and provisional state of factual danger [that] comes to be confused with juridical rule itself’ (1998, 167). In the following section building on Agamben’s theory of ‘sate of exception’, I will try to examine the hidden violent structure of the Australian detention centers that is deeply rooted in the colonial manner of recognizing the Other.

The Middle Eastern Refugee, Detention Center and the Colonial Violence

Australia was established as a British colonial settlement, with all those previously mentioned characteristics of a colonial system as a compartmentalized world. The White Australia Policy is the most obvious example of this compartmentalization and colonial order. The White Australia Policy refers to a set of historical policies that commenced in 1901, to exclude people from non-European ethnic origin, specially Asians, and Pacific Islanders from migrating to Australia. I believe keeping the refugees out of sight by exiling them onto remote islands under the name of ‘regional processing center’ is a current version of such exclusive policies. As Behrouz Boochani conceptualizes in his

48 book, No Friends But The Mountains: Writing from Manus Prison, the Australian border politics operates within the larger context of coloniality that is ‘Indigenous genocide and anti-Blackness’, that is a ‘professional system in which one is registered in a mass of logbooks, mass of numbers, a mass of figures’ (2018, 329, 312).

According to Fanon, the structure of a colonial world, which is developed by the destruction of the indigenous social fabric and demolishing natives’ systems of reference and their ways of being, is a violent structure. The violent structure of Australia’s border-industrial complex, as Magdalena Zolkos mentions, involves ‘techniques of surveillance and carceral organizations of place, architecture and of the detainees’ routines, as well as the violent theatre of degradation and control’ (2019, 71). However, what does it mean that a landscape of an order of relations or a structure can deliver a condition in which violence becomes plausible? In order to answer the question of the intelligibility of a concept we need to find a way to define it; that is delimiting it in a manner that its essence can be revealed. Through the manner in which one delimits the concept of violence one can respond to the demand for evidence.

Boochani Writes, ‘Manus Prison as an ideology hinders or eliminates opportunities to know; to know in nuanced and multi-dimensional ways both about the violent atrocities and about unique lived experiences of the prisoners’ (2018, 362). There are three important elements to the Manus Prison theory: (1) the camp as prison, (2) the intelligibility of violence in the camp, and (3) the hinderance of knowing. I try to cover two of them in the present chapter and the last one in the Chapter Two.31 The Manus Prison, first of all is a ‘camp’ to exclude those people who are undesirable (not genuine asylum-seekers) by the Australian border-industrial complex from possibly becoming Australian citizens. As many witnesses of Nazi camps stated in their memoirs and observations, the two concepts of the camp and violence are deeply entangled.32 As Agamben declares, camp can be regarded as a place where the most inhuman conditions that ever existed can be realized (1998, 166).

The first concentration camps are historically recorded in 1896, stablished by the Spanish in Cuba to suppress the insurrection of the colony (Agamben 1998, 166). Such camps where designed not out of ordinary law but out of the ‘state of exception’ in the name of protective custody. The recent example of such camps are in China, where the Chines government has taken tens of thousands of the Uyghur and other ethnic and religious minorities into custody independently of any criminal behavior, but

31 Chapter Two aims to phenomenologically analyze the concept of ‘Epistemic Violence’ and the horizonal structure of experiencing epistemic violence. 32 See for example: Primo Levi (1989), Elie Wiesel (1973, 1987), Jean Améry (1977,1999), Aldo Carpi, Zdzisław Ryn (1983, 2005), Stanisław Klodzinski (2005), and Wolfgang Sofsky (1999). Medical Review Auschwitz (1961-1991) 49 solely to avoid the danger of extremism and terrorism as well as promoting Sinicization.33 The ‘state of exception’ is the ‘external and provisional state of factual danger [that] comes to be confused with juridical rule itself’ (Agamben 1998, 167). While the state of exception creates a situation in which the fundamental rights and the rule of law is suspended, the camp becomes a space where the state of exception works as permanent law to rearrange new spatial orders independently from juridical control. It is in the state of exception and a legitimate crisis that the hidden foundation of the sovereign appears and comes to the light and the exercise of violence that is rooted in enforceability of the rule of law becomes intelligible (Agamben 1999, 170; Jenkins 2004, 86). Boochani reminds himself that ‘no one can be interrogated by asking them [the system], you bastard, what is the philosophy behind these rules and regulations? Why, according to what logic did you create these rules and regulations? Who are you?’ (2018, 209). Boochani believes that the logic of the camp is not a juridical logic that tries to sustain some rules and regulations, but the as Agamben asserts has a paradoxical nature.

To explain this further, while the camp is placed outside of the ‘normal juridical law’, it is still not quite external to the order of sovereign power. By this I mean that the camp as the state of exception is included the detainees through their exclusion from the mainstream society and withdrawing them the normal juridical processes (Agamben 1998, 170). Anyone entering the camp bears an indistinctive experience of inside and outside, an exception to the juridical law but that exception is the law and order of the camp; that is in the camp human rights and juridical rule make no sense. A detainee or a prisoner of a camp experiences the rule of exception as the fact of their life, as they were stripped of the very political status of being citizen, they are reduced to ‘bare life’ (Agamben 1998, 171).

Bare life is the isolated sphere of the pure being; that is the outcome of the separation and reduction of many forms of being and many sorts of concrete life to one to use it as the sphere of practicing the biopolitics of the sovereign (Agamben 1999). The ‘bare life’ is a life that is potentially exposed to the violence of the state of exception, that is a life excluded from the rights of citizenship but at the same time it is included as ‘not belonging to the nation state’. As Zolkos reminds us, the use of direct violence in the situation of prisoners insubordination is the central factor of the Kyriarchal system, that Boochani asserts that dictates violence and antagonism (2018, 332).34 Kyriarchy is not an

33 The Chinese government’s ‘Xinjiang re-education’ efforts started in 2014 and drastically expanded in 2017. Reports estimated that more than a million Muslims from Uyghur Turkish-speaking ethnic group are detained in camps to force them to pledge loyalty to the CCP and renounce their religion Islam. These camps are called Vocational Education and Training Centers by the government and people of Republic of China, and announced in 2014, as part of ‘People’s war on Terror’ project. These camps are operating out of legal system and Uyghurs have been interned without trial or any charges against them. 34 Boochani borrows that term Kyriarchal system from Schüssler Fiorenza (1992), ‘where kyriarchy functions as a heuristic devise for the analysis of “interconnected, interacting and self-extending” forms of structural domination and submission, that also illuminates, as its etymology suggests’ (Gr. kyrios, meaning “lord, master”), the connection between oppression and power / sovereignty (Magdalena Zolkos 2018, 15). 50 individual superstructure of power and domination, rather it is interwoven into the social systems that sustain oppression and domination.

The Kyriarchal system, embraces various kinds of oppressions and stigmatizations like racism, indigenous genocides, coloniality, xenophobia. The Kyriarchal violence like any other types of oppressive practices, clings onto material and social patterns of existence and dictates certain courses of actions. It seems that camps that are deliberately designed to embody the biopolitics of the sovereign have different levels and strategies to exercise the hidden violence of colonial regime. What Boochani represented in his memoir is the obvious connection between the violence against the detainees as bare lives in the Australian offshore processing camps, like the Manus Prison, and the Australian colonial history.35 In order to have a proper understanding of how the camp can provide an ideal situation to enact the violence, I aim to give a phenomenological account of the concept of violence and how such a phenomenon appears in the experience of the sufferer. This also can thematize how the violent structure of Australian colonial heritage is embodied in the state of detention camps.

According to James Dodd in his book Violence and Phenomenology there are two inclinations in understanding violence either as an expression of a decisive purpose or as mere means that can disappear by our moral vigilance to challenge the political, social, legal and ethical instruments that made that violence happen (2009, 1). In this account, violence is blind and utterly without any direction, that cannot regard as source of meaning. The second approach which is a unique one is in the intersection between life and violence that reflects the spiritual significance of two World Wars in Europe. Philosophers such as Edmund Husserl, Max Scheler, Martin Heidegger, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Maurice Merleau-Ponty were engaged with the manner in which violence and especially war can put selfhood and the very possibility of philosophizing into question.36 Since the task of phenomenology is to reflect on philosophical problems of sense and meaning, it claims that when violence is approached phenomenologically, then it fundamentally becomes the problematic of sense and how it unfolds in our lives. In this approach, violence moves anarchically between sense and non- sense, between clarity and vagueness, so it cannot be reflected upon from the standpoint of cause and effect, but only in a manner in which ‘violence manifests itself within a human situation or world’ (Dodd 2009, 15).

35 See Tofighian 2020; Dehm, in press; El-Enany & Keenan 2019; Vogl 2017, 2015; Giannacopoulos 2013, 2006, 2005; Perera 2009, 2007, 2002 36 See Sartre’s Critique of Dialectical Reason Volume One: Theory of Practical Ensembles, trans. A. Sheridan-Smith (London and New York: Verso, 2004) for his account of violence as the economy of scarcity. 51 Although violence belongs with the world of sense but it manifests its anarchic characteristic on the one hand in our inability to articulate its meaning as the profound absence of sense at the core of the experience of violence, and on the other hand it shows itself as the disruption of objective sense. This means that while violence can associate with the objective sense as the manifestation of an unfulfilled objective orientation, in itself it cannot be pursued as an object of reflection or as a theme for consciousness. Dodd adds:

The question of violence then becomes the question of the potential for the horizon of the interconnected meanings of the world to sustain the “irregularities” represented by violence, thereby lending violence a kind of second-order phenomenality. (Dodd 2009, 148)

In this sense, violence itself is not a distortion of sense, but it manifests an exhaustion and a frustration in the order of consciousness that could come to a sense bestowal. Moreover, as much as negation and frustration, violence can confirm and affirm an idea or even the whole order of meanings as symbols, or a language or a tool for expression. This challenging feature of violence is a testimony to the subjective character of violence that affects the very sense-bestowal capacity of the subject. Put differently, the turmoil that is caused by violence, distorts the subjective-temporal sense-giving at the time of experience itself, therefore even if an order of sense-constitution is in place and there are open possibilities in the situation of experience, at the very flow of lived experience no sense can be articulated. Hence, violence undermines our very ability to function as conscious beings but at the same time, violence itself bears a horizon in the experience; that is, in the total abandonment of sense while the experience lost its ground, the subject still can exist.

Emerging from the first approach that situates violence within the dynamics of social, political and historical contexts there are two concepts of ‘structural’ and ‘symbolic’ violence. Structural violence systematically associates human suffering with the objective inequalities which are embodied in patterns of wealth distribution and access to political and social freedoms (Dodd 2017).37 The core of this concept is an emphasis on the empirical nexus of violence and how social phenomena like poverty and social equality can violently directly or indirectly violently cause collective suffering. This theory tries to provide a comprehensive understanding of patterns of the outbreak of violence in which there are no visible perpetrators involved or a noticeable agency to be blamed. In that way, structural violence refers to a structure that works as an agent who practices violence or leads to mass suffering and destruction. In other words, these structures provide a condition or ground for appearance of

37 Dodd believes that such ‘ethnographic visibility’ (Paul Farmer’s phrase) of individuals who suffer, in recognizing structural violence is just a rhetorical device that provides a reference from which structural violence gains some measure of analytic stability… but we should note that ‘not everything structural violence generates is visible in statistical or other types of quantitative analysis’ (2017, 22). 52 violence. While such structures do not cause the violence per se, they constitute the condition or the empirical pattern that leads to social suffering of a certain group.

While this thematization sounds like an effort to detach violence from the intention of the human agent, structural violence manifests a structure or a system that itself, proves its inadequacy; that is recognizing the condition of a situation of violence in terms of an index of series of failures of structure (Dodd 2017, 23). Although the concept of structural violence contributes in recognizing the kinds of structures that lead to failure more than other structures, but it is ambiguous about the concept of violence that is imbedded in, distributed by and aggravated by those structures. Phenomenologically, recognizing these structures that promote violence will not be sufficient in discussing the intelligibility and ‘how’ of givenness of violence.

What seems missing in the analysis of structural violence is developing a concrete meaning of violence that is more than ‘a wrong that needs to be corrected or an ideal that is fall short’ (Dodd 2017, 24). Prior to developing an idea about violence, we need to reflect on the human condition and experience in which violence is unfolded, and that is searching deeper than just calling for moral urgency and political reform. For example, when addressing poverty as human suffering according to the theory of structural violence, poverty is only a manifestation of an active refusal of the future and limiting the horizon of human possibilities. That means poverty as violence is not just the social and political structure that is failed an ideal of providing and maintaining just and happy community, but it is as Dodd suggests a ‘radical breaking down of possibilities and an extinguishing of life’ the collective sufferers (2017, 44).

Pierre Bourdieu’s concept of ‘symbolic violence’ also tries to articulate the concept of violence within the nexus of social, cultural and political, in which the symbolic or cultural power of dominant social groups is reproduced in forms of the recognition of legitimacy and are known as privilege (Dodd 2017, 25). It seems that Bourdieu engages with the orders of institutionalized violence like racism, class and gender domination; there violence is rooted in practices and patterns of habituation that constitutes the very reality of social fabric. Such violent patterns are maintained and accepted within the cultural consciousness of the society as natural order. Violence in this way, is interwoven in the constitutive structure of social existence in a manner in which it became intelligible and immanent part of the oppressed social habitus. According to Dodd, while the subject within a symbolic structure cannot reject or oppose the domination, they also contribute to maintaining the habitual perception of doxic construction of domination; that is cognitively practicing the objective relations of domination with everything (2017, 26).

53 Symbolic violence can be well addressed in colonial situation when the established systems of power and dominations, economic structures or biological factors are determined to distribute suffering among a given community of colonized. In this regard, the violence of colonial structures does not describe an inter-related manner in which an individual or even collective action wants to destroy or compromise the capacity of other individual or a group. Like the case of structural violence, symbolic violence also maintains an interest to the collective aspect of violence. Again, we have an invisible agency or perpetrator to point to in the symbolic violence, as it has already constituted a society or culture of violence. In this manner symbolic violence does not only concern violent events, but it addresses violence as a situation that is people live in, and it constitutes whole social relations among them (Dodd 2017, 26-27). Violence as ‘situation’ is regarded as part of a world, and something that flows in the freedom of those who inhabit it. This way, violence is not simply a response or a praxis, rather it is a ‘condition’ that there would be no negotiation over intelligibility or unintelligibility of it, or referring to it as capacity or even possibility; that is, violence in this respect is something that one is ‘born into’ (Dodd 2017, 26; 2013). Deep in the colonial situation, the symbolic violence like structural violence, negates the sudden character of violence and understand it as systemic, hidden in the cognitive structure that constitutes the society or culture of violence. Therefore, the violence in a symbolic sense is invisible to sociological analysis since it is hidden within the acceptance of orders. The orders of things are those basic forms that are even more basic than agreements and work on the level of social identity constitution. This type of hidden violence can be traced to the disordered, compromised suborders that are embodied in the doxic structure of social existence.

The Middle Eastern refugee is not just born into a colonial situation that has been structured by symbolic violence but also has fled into such a structure where the symbolic violence is hidden within its accepted order of things, a habitus, even more basic than an agreement. The colonial heritage of Australia leaves no room for questioning the violence and intelligibility of it, in terms of its possibility and living those possibilities. If, in actively orienting and pursuing an end, violence sounds evident as a possible means of its realization, then the motivational structure of subjective conduct can be recognized as one which renders the possibility of violence intelligible, to the extent that it informs the conditions for its appearance; that is creating those structures that enact and sustain the violence.

It seems that in such situation, we need to formulate the relation of ethical and violence in a new manner. That means, if violence is a concept that just opposes the ethical claims, it cannot be excluded from ethical rationality as something ‘outside’, but rather as something that exists ‘within’ the ethical domain as a destructive negation of is very possibility. Thus, we can merely ask about the intelligibility of violence in certain ethical situations, as we can only judge it according to the given standards of intelligibility within the ethical domain. When considering the Oriental refugee who is

54 born into the violent structure of the colonial situation, according to the fact that the condition of sense constitution or the normative structure of sense formation is an ‘interplay of subjective acts of sense-bestowal, intercorporeal processes of sense-formation and symbolic institutions of ideal, collectively shareable unities of sense’, then one should expect that the whole constitution of selfhood of a refugee as an oriental subject has happened in such interactive violent structure (Staudigl 2013, 15).

While the colonial situation is the site of practicing both symbolic and structural violence, in order to thematize the concept of violence as a real phenomenon that belongs to the subjective determination of the possible, it seems essential to understand the manner in which the human as a relational being projects itself towards a pre-given world of possibilities. With this view, the subject belongs with a complex existential structure of self-temporalization and self-understanding of ‘who I am?’ as an inquiry into the existential possibilities. Henceforth, the subject, either the sufferer or perpetrator, can be understood in a modality of transcendence, who belongs to the dynamic structure of life-relations that unfolds in terms of an orientation toward the possible. Within such a complex transcendental structure, violence becomes intelligible as a movement of shaping the subjects’ environing world and also as a possibility within the horizon of possibilities. While it becomes evident to the subject that violence acts as a mean to actualize a possibility, then it becomes a motivational structure of subjective conduct, as well as obtaining the very condition of its being revealed in the first place. Moreover, it is this motivational structure that introduces the specific rules, principles or even goals in the complex relations which sets the desires and motivations of all participants of a lifeworld (Dodd 2017, 30).

For the colonizer, creating a structure that sustains the violence toward the colonial subject, in fact is a type of coming to terms with the irreducible vulnerability of Western identity; that is the fragility of the identification by the notion of alterity. It is the fear of breaking down this socially recognized Western forms that suffices the effectiveness of this identity, which is projected onto the other, who constantly reminds the system of its fragility. If we use this analysis for the case of Manus Prison, then violence is regarded as central to Kyriarchal system of the Australian Border Force. With the colonial logic, the refugee as the bare life who is plausible to be subjected to any form of violence in the state of exception of the camp, in fact is included in the realm of sovereign, but as undesirable that should be excluded.

Conclusion

In this chapter, I started with introducing Besinnung as a phenomenological method of questioning a phenomenon that is the product of a certain historical situation. For the purpose of this research

55 Besinnung investigates into the structure of meaning constitution and the epistemic underpinnings of different phenomena in relate to refugees, such as the violent structure of Australian border policies and the treatment of refugees in offshore detention camps. Such reflection reveals the connection between Australian colonial history and the manner in which they treat refugees in detention camps under the Kyriarchal system.

Phenomenological reflection on ambiguity of the concept of violence that is embedded in the colonial structure of Australian border politics, led us to understand the phenomenon of violence in terms of its belonging to the transcendental intersubjectivity. Through phenomenological lens, not only we can recognize various forms of existence in the wake of violence, also we can reflect on how this phenomenon manifests itself in human relation, social structures or even in the task of interpretation. Inevitably, such reflection is a historical one, since historical analysis reveals the genesis of pervasive legacies of the past like colonialism. It is through an account of history that the traumas that the post- colonial world still has to deal with can be made fully visible and comprehendible. Historical reflection is to question ‘who we are, above all what we must be in the future given what we have become in the wake of the past’ (Dodd 2017, 36). As Boochani noted, the Manus Prison ideology hinders the power to know and transforms detainees into miserable, exhausted and disoriented people who have lost the imagination to envision things and themselves as otherwise and are dispossessed of any hope or possibility to resist. This situation is not peculiar to those who experience detention camps or prisons that are designed to exclude certain group of people from the social fabric of the society. But, the subject’s suppression of capacity to imagine and hope is due to a specific type of violence which is hidden in the cognitive structure of human’s consciousness. Epistemic violence, which is the epistemic underpinning of symbolic violence, belongs to the post-colonial discourse, and refers to the legitimization and imposition of one person or a group's knowledge and way of knowing over and above that of another. The most obvious example of this is imposing the epistemology of the colonizer over that of the colonized (Foucault, 2000; Spivak, 1988).

In the next chapter I aim to phenomenologically investigate the phenomenon of epistemic violence in order to thematize the horizonal structure of this phenomena and how it affects the victim of such violence through generations and their identity construction on a constitutional level.

56 Chapter Two

On the Horizon Structure of the Experience of Epistemic Violence: A Husserlian Analysis

Introduction

Colonialism and colonial discourses first and foremost are the discourses of production and dissemination of knowledge. According to Edward Said, the Orient has a special place in European Western experience, as the Orient is the deepest and most recurring image of the ‘Other’ (Said 1978, 9). As mentioned in Chapter One, Orientalism is the construction of the Orient as ‘the Other’ to the Occident. The Western project of the mastery and dissemination of information about the Orient could be maintained by making an ontological and epistemological distinction between the Orient and the Occident. It was this distinction that made possible the Western way of domination, restructuring and authority over the Orient (Said 1978, 9-11). It is appropriate to use Ramon Grosfoguel’s term epistemicide here, which refers to the colonial epistemic and ontological project of the constituting the Orient (2013, 73-90). As proposed by Linda Alcoff, the knowledge of the colonized subject could be rendered harmless for the colonial project in three ways: (1) by denying that the knowledge of native peoples is true knowledge; (2) by claiming that the knowledge of native peoples is epistemically inferior to Western knowledge, and (3) by appropriating and repackaging the knowledge of native peoples so that it becomes a European invention (Alcoff 2017, 398-9).38 Walter D. Mignolo argues that the Eurocentric paradigm of knowledge is intrinsically imperialistic and, therefore, not disposed to inclusion of the Other (2005).39 Within the Western paradigm, the colonized Other is reduced to a negative, comparative feature of self/not-self, incapable of personhood, rationality or even self-regard (Alcoff 2017, 401). Such a paradigm constitutes a radical form of epistemic injustice that is a structure which lends to the ‘epistemic death’ of its own subject because it does not verify and include the manner of knowing and the epistemic capabilities of the native subject (Medina 2017, 41, 51). Therefore, the colonial paradigm of knowledge production provides the possibility of epistemic violence on the very constitutional level of society.

According to Miranda Fricker, one of the main social epistemic issues is epistemic injustice, that entails two forms: (1) testimonial injustice and (2) hermeneutical injustice. With an overview of the epistemic construction of the colonial world, and building on Miranda Fricker’s conception of

38 See also: Dotson 2014, 2011; Spivak 1987 39 In ‘The Idea of Latin America’ Mignolo argues that: ‘the important observation to make here is not simply whether there are other perspectives about the “same event” but that another paradigm emerges across the epistemic colonial difference. The dominant theo- and ego-politics is being contested by the emerging shift to the geo-politics and body politics of knowledge: knowledge produced from the geo-historical and bio-historical perspective of racialized locations and people’ (2005, 48). 57 epistemic injustice, this chapter shows that identity construction can be understood as a successful and a prosperous intersubjective hermeneutical engagement. What I mean by the hermeneutics of intersubjective constitution is not associated with Paul Ricoeur’s critique of Husserl’s idealistic notion of the monadic ego. Ricoeur argued that ‘Husserl’s analysis of subjectivity reinforces an abstract conception of the ego, that is non-linguistic, pre-social, or “worldless” subjectivity’ (Geniusas 2012, 156). As stated by Ricoeur, on the one hand, ‘phenomenology always remains as the indispensable presupposition of hermeneutics’ but, on the other, ‘phenomenology cannot establish itself without hermeneutical presuppositions’ (1975, 85), because the worldliness of the ego is a co- constitution by all the egos collectively. I argue that the generative interpretation of Husserl’s phenomenology, that is a call to paying attention to the ‘transcendental past’ as concealed accomplishments of the hidden subjectivity, can be counted as an alternative to sociality, linguisticality, historicity and the pregiven world that are of major significance in the project of hermeneutics. By hidden subjectivity, Husserl means all the validities of the pregiven world that are the outcome of traditional and historical achievements of last generations of the home-comrades. In this manner, the concealed pregivenness of the subjectivity can show the historicity of the subject as the transcendental past. Husserl writes:

The transcendence of the world consists in its being constituted by means of others, by means of generatively constituted co-subjectivity. It is through the others that the world acquires its ontic sense as an infinite world. (Husserl 1956, 303)

In order to phenomenologically investigate intersubjective transcendental historicity, first the concept of ‘Horizon’ needs to be addressed. Transcendental intersubjectivity describes the very meaning of subjectivity, as the term shows how subjects are intentionally bound together in communicative interaction to establish the world of sense (Heinämaa 2013, 84).40 Husserl explains:

Thus, subjectivity expands into intersubjectivity, or rather, more precisely, it does not expand, but transcendental subjectivity understands itself better. It understands itself as a primordial monad that intentionally carries within itself other monads. (Hua XIV, 17)

Introducing the notion of Horizon and the question of the origin of Horizon is regarded as the hermeneutical turn in Husserlian phenomenology (Geniusas 2012, 155). In order to understand the different horizonal levels of intersubjective accomplishments we need to question the origin of horizon. This allows us to move beyond the intersubjective horizon of sense. Through

40 I will thoroughly elaborate on the concept of the transcendental intersubjectivity and the lifeworld in Chapter Three of the thesis. 58 phenomenological regressive inquiry, the performer of the epoché takes a hermeneutical turn within phenomenology and surpasses the ban that hermeneutics put on any inquiry that unfolds beyond the horizon of sense itself. Since for hermeneutics this belonging to the intersubjective horizon of sense matters, any inquiry beyond this horizon is deemed unreasonable.

One of the main themes of Husserl’s First Philosophy is exploring the notion of horizon. For Husserl, horizon is a ‘nexus of intentional implications’ that acts as a key element for understanding temporality and the Other. However, the horizon is not an entity beyond a possible present, or a possible experience in the original sphere (Hua VIII, 146-148). Geniusas sees the ‘horizon as a system of references and a system of validity. Moreover, the realization that these two systems of validity and referencing are inseparable from each other gave rise to the complete notion of the horizon of subjectivity’ (2012, 173). In fact, the horizon of subjectivity is the conceptual space within which we legitimately can phenomenologically inquire into the origin of sense-constitution. Therefore, ‘the inquiry into the origins of sense-formation is nothing other than an investigation of the crystallization of the horizon of subjectivity’; that is the horizonality of experience always remains the focus when the question of the emergence of sense-formation is posed (Geniusas 2012, 173). Putting it differently, it is the horizonality of experience that allows us to question the experience’s origin of sense- constitution. The chief aim of this chapter is to analyze the fundamental structure of the experience of hermeneutical harm. As Fricker discusses, epistemic injustice as ‘a situation in which the social experiences of the powerless are not integrated into collective understandings of the social world’, results in the powerless to be ‘unfairly disadvantaged as participants in a collective form of life’ (1999, 23).41

Applying Husserl’s phenomenological notion of ‘horizon-structure of experience’ that is appeared in Experience and Judgement, and the intersubjective characteristic of this notion, I argue that the subject of social understanding as a participant in a shared world-horizon requires an orientation in order to thematize the world itself as a lifeworld for herself/himself (1973, 42). This orientation is the outcome of the intersubjective triangulation of self-Other and the world, in a way that entails the contents and meanings of our experience that all extant in space and time. In order to have a phenomenological analysis of the experience of hermeneutical injustice I use the notion of horizon of experience to explain how it can be a ‘harm in one’s essential attributes of personhood’ (Fricker 2007, 58). Doing so, I claim that epistemic fairness is not just a virtue as Fricker discusses, but it

41 See also Maitra 2010; Koady 2017 59 intrinsically is a ‘pre-supposition’ for the existential and ontological constitution of subjectivity at a transcendental intersubjective level.42

While the history of epistemology has largely focused on the individual knower in isolation, recent decades have seen a shift toward anti-individualism and the recognition that knowledge is social.43 This means one depends on social structures and other people for the acquisition, creation, and dissemination of knowledge, so access to knowledge creation and dissemination (via testimony) is inherently political (McKinnon 2016, 438). Social and individual biases can come into play during the evaluation process of who to believe, and who to ascribe knowledge to. Since epistemic injustice theorizes injustices to someone specifically in their capacity as a ‘knower’, it is distinctively epistemic in kind. In gaining and distributing knowledge, the subject as a knower suffers from one or another sort of prejudice against them qua social type, like race, ethnicity, or religion. If a person or group suffers epistemic injustice in a systematic way, then it will be appropriate to talk of epistemic oppression. As I mentioned in Chapter One, a system or a structure in which the powerful have a kind of peculiar epistemic advantage over the powerless, can sustain a systematic injustice toward the powerless in a way that will affect whole systems of referencing and meaning making.

By showing how every individual makes sense of the world, phenomenology can explain how societal structures operate within and upon individuals in a way that ‘is both beyond their control, and yet for which they remain personally responsible’ (De Roo 2014, 79). A phenomenological account of epistemic injustice considers how the lived experience of social consciousness unfolds. That is, in the co-constitution of a homeworld as a shared collaborative process, me and the Other are in ‘consummate reciprocity’ (Merleau-Ponty 1945; 2002, 413). However, according to Lisa Guenther, within this reciprocal process not every subject is granted the same share of equal power to co- constitute the meaningful home-world (Guenther 2017, 200). This process of exclusion and privileging of an epistemic position or totalization of knowledge now can be understood as epistemic violence that restructures the normative structure of constitution of our lifeworld.

In what follows, using the phenomenology of Husserl, I analyze the horizonal structure of experiencing epistemic injustice in terms of its violation to one’s attributes of personhood. Fricker’s notion of testimonial injustice regards those experiences whereby the hearer of testimony gives a deflated level of credibility to a speaker's word due to social and political sedimented prejudices. This

42 I have presented parts of this chapter as a conference paper: A Husserlian Analysis of the Horizon-structure of Experience in Case of ‘Hermeneutical Injustice’ and ‘Epistemic Marginalisation’: Seeking the Lost ‘Empathy’ at the Nordic Society for Phenomenology (NoSP) April 2018, University of Gdańsk, Poland. https://nordicsocietyforphenomenology.files.wordpress.com/2018/03/nosp_2018_programme.pdf 43 For this historical shift from individualism to anti-individualism special in the field of Feminist philosophy, see Code 2014. 60 lack of credibility can be manifested by silencing or discrediting the words of the ‘giver of knowledge’ in advance, on the basis of their social identity. However, the experience of hermeneutical injustice occurs at a prior stage; that is, when the subject finds a gap in their collective interpretive resources to make sense of their social experiences, that appears as an unfair disadvantage in the constitution of their social identity. Hermeneutical injustice affects someone as a ‘subject of social understanding’ by depriving them of the necessary concepts and contexts for making sense of their own experience and becoming intelligible to others (Fricker 2007, 6).44 I will expand these two concepts and how they affect the sufferer later in this chapter. Testimonial injustice concerns the pool of social knowledge constructed by identity prejudice on the part of the hearer, whereas hermeneutical injustice excludes a certain epistemic disposition from the pool of knowledge and collective hermeneutical resources owing to the structural identity prejudice of the powerful. Therefore, testimonial and hermeneutical injustice both have identity-constructive power in common. In this sense, some people's social experience remains obscure and confusing, even for them, in a way that limits or distorts collective social understanding more generally. When ‘there are systematic relations of power and powerlessness, the social experience of the powerless is most likely to be left out in the hermeneutical cold’ (Fricker 1999, 208). In the case of unequal hermeneutical participation with respect to some significant areas of social experience, members of the disadvantaged group are hermeneutically marginalized (Fricker 2007, 154).

Beginning with first-person experience, we can investigate the fundamental structure of experience and system of significance that is presupposed by perception, thought and language. It is this system of significance and the structure that discloses the conditions for the possibility of testimonial and hermeneutical activity at its most foundational level. Next, I elaborate on those phenomenological concepts that are essential for understanding the structure of the experience of epistemic harm. The second part of this chapter explains the horizonal experience of epistemic harm and how it affects the sufferer’s identity construction.

An Inquiry into Horizon-Consciousness and Sense-Constitution:

The Ontology of Lifeworld

As I argued in the previous chapter, if violence is regarded as a manifestation that entails constitutive properties, then it becomes a principle in its own right. In addition, the constitutive power of violence in a destructive sense will lead us to an origin of sense. Hence, as it appears in the concept of epistemic violence, we are talking about a violence that arises at the level of sense-constitution. In order to

44 See also Shotwell 2017 61 investigate how institutional violence can affect meaning constitution, we need to apply a regressive inquiry into the pregiven lifeworld. The lifeworld is the outcome of an epoché that is the withholding of natural, naïve validities that are in effect. As a methodological step, this is not an abstraction from the natural attitude, but it brackets all participation in the cognition of the objective knowledge of the world, as a critical position-taking toward our habitual direction of interest (Crisis 136).

The lifeworld [Lebenswelt], as stated by Husserl, is the constant valid world into which ‘all accomplishments flow and to which all human beings and all accomplishing activities and capacities always belong’ (Crisis 138). Here, with the lifeworld, Husserl is concerned with the experiential sense of being a subject in the objective world. This ‘world’ entails the subjective lived experience as an integral constituent. This means that in every subjective experience of something in the world, we experience the world as a whole which is available for us as a constant horizon (Crisis, 243). The lifeworld characterizes the personal communicative world, the natural world, the intuitive and aesthetic world of experience, the world as world of experience (Hua XXIX, 130).45 All these characteristics are in contrast to the naturalistic vision of the natural sciences (Steinbock 1995, 86). Husserl writes:

Living toward our ends, which are valid for us habitually, means living in a horizon of the lifeworld. No matter which ends are having their turn; everything that happens and develops here exists in the lifeworld and in the manner of the life-world; but being oriented toward that exists within the lifeworld is not the same as focusing on the lifeworld as the universal horizon, not the same as making thematic the end in view as a being within this horizon, the newly thematic lifeworld. (Crisis, 138)

As stated by Steinbock, ‘lifeworld’ for Husserl entails a series of ‘provisional concepts’ (1995, 87). By provisional, Steinbock means that these concepts of the lifeworld are the outcome of mundane, naïve inquiry and not a radical one. The first concept of the lifeworld, the lifeworld as intuitable, is the outcome of thematization of the everyday presupposed environing-world which is the primary source of validity (Crisis, 106). The lifeworld, then, has an epistemological priority as intuitable. The intuitable world is a preconceptual, prelinguistic and pre-predicative world of experience and what is given in experience, that is, ahead of any explicit conceptualization (Steinbock 1995, 88-9). This prescientific lifeworld, which is intuitable, belongs to a realm of evidence that has a higher dignity than the epistemological certainty that is earned by theoretical-logical idealizations (Crisis 124, 130). The lifeworld, as intuitable, restores the epistemological contribution of intuitive experience. The

45 According to Anthony Steinbock in Home and Beyond, ‘Lifeworld here can be interchangeably used with terms like environing-world [Umwelt], everyday-world [Alltagswelt], world of experience [Erfahrungswelt] and the natural concept of the world [natürlicher Weltbegriff]’ (1995, 87). 62 lifeworld in the first sense tries to go back to the unquestioned, that is, an unthematic inquiry into the everyday epistemological a priori. This lifeworld is the outcome of static analysis and a phenomenology of the natural attitude, that is, without any transcendental interest.

The second provisional notion of the lifeworld, the lifeworld as the foundation of sense, conveys the relational function (Steinbock 1995, 89-91). In the lifeworld as the foundation of sense, the epistemological priority of intuitive experience translates into ontological priority, as pure foundation of objective logical truth. In other words, the epistemological importance of the previous lifeworld now has gained ontological importance as a source for scientific perception, where science is flowing back into the lifeworld, as already accepted as valid for us. For Husserl, ‘the experience of a singular precedes the experience of the world and knowledge of the singular precedes knowledge of universe, or better, of the universe of singularities’ (Hua XXIX, 127). This means, in every experience, I have an experience of something in the world and not the whole world; but at the same time whole world is present in every experience as a constant horizon. In this way, Husserl explains that objective theories which are rooted in the lifeworld also belong to it, just like a building that is built on the ground belongs to that ground. The lifeworld in the second sense is where the empty notion of intuition becomes concrete to entail the scientific experience in a way that transforms the epistemology.

The third notion as suggested by Steinbock is the subject-relative notion of lifeworlds (Steinbock 1995, 92-5). In the first notion, Husserl tries to explain the epistemological priority of lifeworld in terms of its intutablity. In the second move he tries to put a contrast between objective science and the lifeworld in terms of the ontological priority of the lifeworld as a foundation of sense (Steinbock 1995, 92). These two notions act as a springboard for another level of lifeworld, still in a provisional and mundane way. When Husserl proposes these two notions as intuitive and concerning the world of perceptual experience, then the world that we access would be a lifeworld which is interpreted and apprehended in a subject-relative manner. Husserl writes:

The world of which I possibly speak, the world which I possibly consider, is something valid of my own sphere of validity (of actual or hidden holding-as- valid), and its sense is sense within myself, stemming from my own active or passive accomplishments. (Hua XXIX, 118)

Doing so, the world and things gain a cultural sense that is evident in human endeavors, plans, projects and communal activities. This means any lifeworld is organized around an interest, and thus cultural worlds have an interest-structure (Staiti 2014, 248). The world that is apprehended is in many ways a lifeworld of many socio-historical groups. The subject-relative notion of lifeworlds opens up a space

63 for diverse cultural worlds. Since my particular lifeworld is only one amongst other lifeworlds, my objective truths make sense in my lifeworld and Others’ objective truths can only be justified in theirs (Crisis, 141). Hence, there is no way to legitimize one ‘truth’ for all the lifeworlds. It is notable that the plurality of lifeworlds as ‘cultural worlds’ do not suggest any hierarchical relation between them (Crisis, 141). According to Andrea Staiti, in the culturally formed world of humans, we have a world of objects (both empirical and idea) like artefacts, legal systems, institutions, and religious rituals that are the production of the life of individuals and communities (2014, 250). Participating and engaging in these cultural movements in fact is to partake in the flow of life in the lifeworld that precedes me and surpasses me.

Husserl developed a science with lifeworld as its subject matter, which is constituted throughout all its relative aspects as a unity; the universe of lifeworld objects. The science of the lifeworld emerges without any transcendental interest, but within the natural attitude prior to epoché (Crisis, 173). Husserl calls this science an ontology of the lifeworld as merely an experiential world; a world that is coherently, consistently and harmoniously intuitable, in actuality and possibility (173). It is an ontology of the lifeworld that serves as an inquiry after invariant structures, which is all practical structures of the lifeworld, including those of the objective sciences and cultural facts. The practical structures are related to subjectivity by virtue of constant alteration of its relative aspects. But all these variations of subjective structures, Husserl writes, are bound together in ‘essentially lawful types’ (173). By this explanation, he leads us to the fourth provisional notion of lifeworld, namely, the lifeworld as an essential structure (Steinbock 1995, 95-6).

Although the lifeworld in its relative features has a general structure, this general structure to which everything is bound together relatively is not in itself relative (Crisis, 130). This is the same structure that positive sciences presuppose in their abstraction of the world, which is determined through ‘truths in themselves’. All a priori, are essential structures that necessarily refer back to a corresponding a priori lifeworld. This referencing back is the source of essential validity; every a formal a priori truth is rooted in the lifeworld a priori (Crisis, 140).46 In order to understand the manner in which meaning- formation is mediated through a priori reasoning, we need to inquire into how the objective a priori is rooted in the ‘subject-relative’ a priori lifeworld. Steinbock asserts that, in all its relativity, the lifeworld becomes a universal problem and can be regarded in its universality through a process Husserl calls an eidetic reduction. Eidetic reduction discloses the various structures that emerge from

46 Crisis introduces a distinction between ‘objective-logical a priori and the a priori of the lifeworld’. However, this is not a distinction between the formal a priori and material a priori. ‘The material eidos, the essence, is no doubt an objective a priori as much as the formal a priori is. The a priori of the lifeworld is "subjective-relative”, "pre-logical,” it is presupposed by the objective sciences. The a priori of the lifeworld is not itself relative. "We can attend to it in its generality and, with sufficient care, fix it once and for all in a way equally accessible to all’ (Crisis, 139; 140; 141, cited in Mohanty 1985, 106). 64 the relative subjective lifeworlds, while those structures are not relative themselves (Steinbock 1995, 94-95).

In the fourth notion of lifeworld, Husserl tries to suggest a common structure that is shared by all cultural, subject-relative worlds, by applying an eidetic variation method. Through this eidetic method, it remains only a perceptual world that is ‘lifeworld a priori’, different from the objective- logical a priori and all relative cultural worlds are bound to it as a singular world. This lifeworld, as eidetic structures, is a world in which nobody dwells, but everything experienceable is relatively bound to it. The four provisional concepts of the lifeworld are the outcome of a regressive inquiry within the natural attitude without any transcendental interest. The lifeworld, as essential structures, is the principal perceptual structure. In this sense, everyone has a perceptual lifeworld – the eidetic structures that are not relative can be disclosed in various ways. However, through this analysis of the natural attitude one still cannot thematize the world, because the natural attitude essentially is related to the world and such relatedness avoids the thematization of the world. In order to thematize the world, Husserl shifted the project of the lifeworld ontology to another project, namely, the transcendental phenomenology of the lifeworld.

As Husserl puts it, the general task of transcendental epoché is to make evident an essential distinction among the possible ways in which the pregiven world can be thematized for us (Crisis, 142). By shifting from ontology of the lifeworld as a science of life-worldly structures to the transcendental attitude, ‘the lifeworld is transformed into the mere transcendental phenomenon in our transcendental- philosophical framework’ (Crisis, 177). This way, as Steinbock writes, the lifeworld remains what essentially it was, but it can be disclosed as a ‘mere component in transcendental subjectivity’ (Steinbock 1995, 96). When submitting the world to the epoché, the world becomes purely an intentional phenomenon. According to the above-mentioned third meaning of the lifeworld, just as there is one universal nature as a self-disclosed unitary framework, there is only one psychic framework which is a total framework of all psyches (Crisis, 258 f.). All various worlds become the appearances of the world for all as the enduring intentional unity which are correlated to intersubjective framework (Steinbock 1995, 96).

Leaving the lifeworld ontology as the ontic universe of the natural attitude, implying a regressive inquiry with a transcendental interest, the lifeworld is interpreted as presupposed and pregiven. This way, Husserl does not examine the what of the lifeworld, but how a lifeworld is pregiven as already in play (Steinbock 1995, 104). Inquiring into the ‘how’ of the givenness of the lifeworld leads us to investigate the modes in which the lifeworld is pregiven. Such an inquiry reveals that certain experiences like the case of epistemic violence can affect the whole lifeworld horizon of a sufferer.

65 Transcendental Phenomenology of the Lifeworld

Husserl asserts that the ‘world is pregiven to us, the waking, always somehow practically interested subjects, not occasionally but always and necessarily as the universal field of all actual and possible praxis, as Horizon’ (Crisis, 142). To live means always to live-in-certainty-of-the-world, to constantly experience and affect the ontic certainty of the world. The things and objects (always purely in the sense of the lifeworld) are given as being valid for us (in various modes of ontic certainty) ‘only in such a way that we are conscious of them as things or objects within the world-horizon’ (Crisis, 143). In addition, according to Husserl, we are conscious of this horizon only in regard to existing objects. This means that we should have specific objects of consciousness so that this horizon can be actual. By this Husserl means that ‘every object has its possible varying modes of validity that are the modalizations of ontic certainty’ (Crisis, 143). Therefore, living toward a given object is to live toward the world-horizon. This straightforward living toward given objects is to live toward ‘our interests that have their goals in objects, thus, this pregiven horizon includes all our goals and ends, whether fleeting or lasting, flowing in a constant manner’ (Crisis, 144). Moreover, we, as subjects, do not know any goals beyond this world-horizon that our intentional horizon-consciousness implicitly encompasses.

In addressing the Husserlian concept of horizon, Klaus Held believes that what appears to us emerges out of and stands out of an unlit background; our daily encounters with no matter what being do not happen in isolation (1992). Then, to experience an object means ‘to single out that object from other objects in the background, to which consciousness has directed its intention’ (Geniusas 2012, 68). Thus, in each encounter there are various other beings that are related to what appears to us as background.47 The background objects, which coexist with the appeared object, are those already pregiven to the consciousness, prior to any of them being singled out. This pregiven background, according to Held, is ‘an open range of possibilities in which one can attend to other beings that can be thematized, forming in this way a field of vision [Gesichtskreis], a horizon for such possibilities’ (Held 1992, 188). For Husserl, all pregiven objects flow together into an intuitive unity of a conscious field of objects, but in different dimensions of appearance. Husserl names the appearing, singled out object as the ‘thematic objectivity’ of appearance in a mode of self-givenness, and those of co-given objects within the horizon of the appeared object as the ‘potential objectivity’ of appearance in a mode of originary givenness (Geniusas 2012, 68-69).

47 Geniusas claims that these are the metaphors that William James used in his Principles of Psychology as approximations of the fringe of consciousness; then ‘for James the concept of horizon is a psychological one. James talks about the horizon in the sphere of the “inner world of consciousness,” not in the domain of the world-consciousness. That means it is still phenomenological analysis that develops the transcendental dimension of horizonality of experience’ (Geniusas 2012, 42). 66 The concept of horizon belongs to the phenomenological lifeworld as the outcome of performing the epoché.48 The horizon thus neither belongs to ‘the natural world nor to consciousness from the natural standpoint’; it belongs exclusively to the intentional and transcendental consciousness after performing the epoché (Geniusas 2012, 67). ‘Horizon’ as a transcendental concept is a dispensable component of lived experience and of the constituted objects in the experience [Erlebnisse] (Geniusas 2012, 28). In Crisis, Husserl maintains the idea that the world has an entirely different structure than an object, so the world is not like a being (Crisis 143). Husserl asserts that things or objects are given and that we are conscious of objects but in a different manner from being conscious of the world. While the world-horizon is the condition of the appearance of objects, the world-horizon itself can never be given. Rather, objects as understood in the sense of the lifeworld are given as always valid for us in every case of ontic certainty, but we are in a way conscious of them as things or objects within the world-horizon (Crisis 143).49

Steinbock summarizes the following characteristics for horizon: (1) the horizon is neither an object nor a physical body [Körper]. It is never essentially ‘given’ and cannot become ‘phenomena’ in the objective sense. Therefore, (2) the horizon does not admit any identity as an object does, and likewise it does not embrace unities or totalities; and (3) the horizon is a constitutive condition for experience (Steinbock 1995, 99-104). As stated earlier in this chapter the horizon can be characterized as an indispensable component of lived experience that entails two sides: the horizon of the experience that is the nöetic side, and the horizon of experiencing that is nöematic side of the horizon-intentionality (Geniusas 2012, 71). For example, when I want to get a cup to drink some tea, there are certain possibilities to this act that the consciousness co-intends; whether I drink in a glass cup that shows the shining color of tea, or I go with an antique cup to enjoy some memories that comes by drinking in that cup: these are the nöetic side of the experience. If I know what exactly the cup is, I know all the horizon possibilities of that object. This means I as the subject am aware of the power that I have to perceive something. And I can actively decide to what to experience when I drink from a certain cup: this is the nöematic horizon of experiencing the cup. In experiencing, every mode of appearance refers to the whole systems of appearance; those are co-given and are co-intended in the consciousness. According to Held, taking the horizon as a field of open possibilities, each and every possibility refers to another in a continuous manner; every horizon then is both an indicating and indicated referential context [Verweisungszusammenhang], that entails indications to other horizons (1992, 188). This means consciousness in thematizing an object also co-intends its own possibilities; knowing an object means being aware of its horizon. Such an awareness is the first form of self-

48 In Ideas I Husserl uses the terms Horizont (horizon) interchangeably with Hof (halo), and Hintergrund (background) with the same value (Ideas I, 197). 49 See also Welton 2000, 2003. 67 awareness that Husserl’s horizon problematically proposes. The first form of self-awareness is, as stated by Pietersma:

the subject’s awareness of the context of the actual experience that involves awareness of himself or herself; it is awareness of subjective powers that can be activated to actualize what has not yet been perceived. In other words, this is an awareness of the context and the ways in which different objects may appear to the subject according to the moves that the subject may initiate. (Pietersma 1973, 98)

Husserl speaks of consciousness as a teleological structure that creates an epistemic situation that includes an awareness of an appearance is lacking, and the knowledge and the way of fulfilling those lacking appearances (Pietersma 1973, 96). In the example of the teacup, it is me as the subject who decides which cup can fulfil the intention of drinking a tea in the best manner. Depending on my specific aims, I may have enough of an experience and then stop that experience. However, I should have in mind that no determination is the last, and what has already been experienced always still has, without a limit, a horizon of possible experiences of the same. That is to say, that horizon of the indeterminateness is always co-present from the beginning as a realm of possibilities. These consequently belong to the very notion of the transcendence of that experience that at any moment possesses a plurality of co-existing profiles of possible individual experiences (Zahavi 1997, 308). As Husserl writes, the intentional awareness that we possess of the absent possibilities of the same experience as inner horizon of that experience, essentially belongs to it and is inseparable from it (Crisis 161). This is the same for any type of perception; in order for a perception to be a perception- of-an-object, it must be permeated by a horizontal intentionality which intends the absent profiles (Crisis 161, Hua IX, 183), bringing them to a certain appresentation.

As a human being, I am aware of the multiplicity of appearance that belongs to the consciousness of the object of experience. These multiple ways can be more or less appropriate to making the object accessible to me in a manner of full determination; the determination to give the respective object its identity (Held 1992, 189). Out of these multiple ways of appearance, there is a tendency of consciousness to find the optimal one. This tendency, as Husserl calls it, is intentionality, and the optimal desired appearance is evidence (Held 1992, 189). Those fictitiously given profiles of an object, the absent profiles, are determined through their reference to a present actual co-existing possibility that I experience now. In other words, everything that genuinely appears as perception is intertwined and permeated with an intentional empty horizon, ‘surrounded by a halo of emptiness with respect to that appearance. It is notable that this emptiness is not a nothingness, rather, it is an emptiness to be filled out; it is a determinable indeterminacy’ (Husserl 2001; Hua XI, 42). Intentional consciousness forms a nexus of indicating implications that belong to the desired goal (Held 1992,

68 190). In aiming an evidence, Held writes, the intentional consciousness prioritizes a certain nexus of indicating implications and screens out the rest. Due to such limitations, we lose some horizons out of the universal horizons; what is left is what Husserl calls ‘special worlds’ of surroundings (Held 1992,191). Consciousness makes these special worlds habitual for us and accessible to us, but at the same time this special-worldly space of indications constitutes our world, which is determined by interest in objects and restricted to specific special-worlds as our surroundings. As a result, the ‘I can’ becomes limited to the nexus of indicating implications of special worlds, including forming the horizons.

As Husserl mentions in Analyses Concerning Passive and Active Synthesis, every act in the specific sense has the fundamental character of being conscious of something, an ‘intentional lived experience’. The perceptual lived experience is in itself a perception of something. If we take as an example a house, the cognitive lived experience is in itself a lived experience of something known, as when the house is recognized as a residence (Husserl 2001, 19-20). In every judgment there is something judged, a judged state-of-affairs; in every desiring there is something desired; in every willing, something willed. This is the broad concept of the intentional lived experience, that even background lived experiences are intentional. So, the human subject as an epistemic agent comes to the world with the capacity for making sense of the world (to find a meaning in things) as intentional consciousness. The egoic act in the specific sense is a special form of carrying out intentional lived experiences. Therefore, the whole aim of experiencing is a way of relating to ‘the world to which we belong, and upon which we also have a perspective, in a relation of transcendence within immanence’ (Husserl 1973, 42). Additionally, the act of the epistemic subject is continuously going deeper and deeper into an experience within its horizon to expand those of background appearances, which are co-given with the first perception.

Although in the flow of world-experience, of world-consciousness, the ontic sense of ‘world’ remains invariant, the structure of the known and the unknown is a fundamental structure of the world as a horizon of all real things that are capable of being experienced. In this sense, every reality for us as familiar form has its own degree of familiarity, ranging from known to unknown. Then an epistemic subject is actively in transition from unfamiliarity or partially familiar or fully familiar through consciousness of a lived experience. However, Husserl reminds us that the world in which we live, and in which we carry out cognitive activities and judgments, is always pregiven to us as impregnated by others. The world in which we and others live, is the same world in which others’ stores of experience is passed over to us by communication, tradition and education. This pregivenness refers to determined sense according to the horizon of familiarities but also to the horizon-prescription [Horizontverzeichnung] of sense that is pregiven to us as the object of any possible cognition or

69 experience. The process of meaning-making is an intersubjective and intercorporeal practice that has a social dimension. It is this transcendental sociality that is the source of all truth and being (Hua IX, 295, 474). This means that not only we perceive others in the world, we also perceive ‘according to others’. Husserl therefore believes that the experience of Others is a necessary condition for experiencing the objective world (Hua XV, 560).

The intersubjective experiencability of an object acts as an assurance for its real transcendence. Thus, it can be said that my experience of an object on a transcendental level is mediated by my experience of ‘an other’s-oriented-world’ that is the orientation of the pregiven world (Zahavi 2003a, 116).50 In this sense, my ability as a subject to make sense of the world is not the working out of my own sovereignty, but is the outcome of my relationship with the Other (and with others). Within this social intersubjectivity, even objects are given with their horizonal intentionality, which is the horizon of co-existing profiles of an object that may not all be accessible to me at the same moment, so it must refer to those ‘other’ subjects that are simultaneously perceiving that object. Hence, every perception, every experience, has an apperceptive horizon of possible experiences, an open intersubjectivity that entails the horizon of possible experiences by me and others (Hua XV, 497; Hua XIV, 289).

The world that is the subject matter of phenomenology stands open to a human being at the very start, but this openness is covered by the relationships that are determined by the restricted and limited special worlds of our surroundings. The epoché lifts this veil or cover, revealing the pre-intentional world horizon that has led to the constitution of special worlds. This is the revelation of ‘pre-volitional worldliness which precedes interest, forming the a priori of the interest-governed intentional relation to the world’ (Held 1992, 191-192). By pre-volitional Held means the pregiven, pre-intentional horizon-consciousness and field of vision. In order to track down social epistemic harms, this is the place to start to investigate the formation of special-worlds and the respective direction of interest or orientation that constitutes our horizon and field of vision. Phenomenological description can manifest how generational suffering of epistemic harm affects every subject in their subjecthood and in their capacity of knowing in developing their lifeworld. I will now develop this discussion of epistemic injustice.

Epistemic Injustice and Phenomenological Disorientation

As discussed above, Fricker argues that epistemic injustice is a situation in which social experiences are excluded from the shared pool of knowledge that is necessary for proper understandings of our

50 See also Theodorou 2015; Drummond 2003; Welton 2003 70 social world, resulting in unfair disadvantage to participants in the social life (2007, 2-3).51 This is because on a transcendental constitutional level, we all depend on the social structures and other people for the acquisition, creation, and dissemination of knowledge, while this access is inherently political. Fricker’s notion of epistemic injustice examines the ethics and politics of knowledge practices, and I aim to use this ideal in relation to the context of the colonial situation and the refugee’s experience. The concept of epistemic injustice enables me to scrutinize the horizon structure of the experience of epistemic exclusion and how this experience affects the sufferer in the constitution of one’s lifeworld. I show that in colonial structures the experience of epistemic exclusion and the oppression of native ways of knowing and knowledge accusation is a ‘harm done to one’s essential attributes of personhood’ (Fricker 2007, 58; Guenther 2017, 200). As a result, the practice of epistemic injustice is not only an epistemic vice, but more profoundly it damages one’s capacity to practice subjective attributes of meaning constitution. I employ the concept of ‘epistemic violence’ instead of the normative concept of epistemic injustice to show how the epistemic structure of the colonial situation contributes to violent suppression and exclusion of some epistemic perspectives, transforming marginalized people into epistemically miserable and disoriented subjects. Gayatri Spivak uses the term ‘epistemic violence’ to indicate the silencing of marginalized groups that are mostly maintained by the political and economic structure of colonial and racist regimes. I do not apply Spivak’s account of ‘subaltern class’, rather I use her insight to address the type of violence that attempts to eliminate knowledge that is produced by the marginalized communities (1988, 282- 83). Here, epistemic justice not only can be reflected upon in terms of its belonging to the realm of ‘normative ethics’, it is also an intrinsic presupposition for the existential and ontological constitution of subjectivity at a transcendental intersubjective level.52 If phenomenology can thematize the world by observing each being in all its determinations considering how human beings encounter it, then applying a phenomenological method can specifically reveals to us the relation of the subject’s acquisition, creation and dissemination of knowledge to the epistemic attributes of social structures. Doing this, I show how the practice of epistemic injustice can be known as epistemic violence.

As discussed in Chapter One, Said argues that ‘Orientalism is an apparatus of knowledge with its will-to-truth’ (Yegenoglue 1998, 15), and this can be understood by a thorough observation of the essential relation between representation, knowledge and power. As such, the colonial and Orientalist systems as first and foremost epistemic regimes had devastating effects on the epistemic capability of their colonized subjects. Gail Pohlhaus believed that such devastation is epistemic because: (1) it harms a specific subject in its ability as knower, for example in the case of ignoring or suppressing

51 See also Fricker 2017, 2013; Medina 2010, 2012a, b, 2017; Pohlhaus 2017; Wanderer 2017; Kidd et.al. 2017; Dotson 2011; McKinnon 2016 52 See also Fricker 2007; Sullivan & Tuana 2007; Medina 2012, 2013; Anderson 2012; Fricker & Jenkins 2017 71 the testimony of an ethnic minority, (2) it causes epistemic dysfunction by misunderstanding and prevents furthering the inquiry, and (3) both of these harms are implemented and practiced within the institutional structures of colonial and Orientalist regimes (2017, 13-14).53 Fricker also asserts that epistemic injustice may have ontological or existential implications because an essential attribute of constituting subjectivity is to participate in the creation of knowledge and enjoying the respect enshrined in the proper relations of trust that are its prerequisite (Fricker 2007: 58). To be harmed as a knower is to be harmed in one’s essential personhood, affecting the whole structure of a person’s beliefs and meaning making. Therefore, we can say that we are what we know, how we know it, and how others respond to our expression of knowledge. However, beyond the claim that persons are essentially knowers, it is not clear how the epistemic and ontological levels are related. By reflecting on the transcendental structure of experience of the world as the act of making sense of the environing-world [Umwelt] I can demonstrate how doing epistemic wrong can impact the horizonal structure of consciousness and the lived experience of the sufferer.

Fricker distinguishes between two kinds of epistemic injustice: ‘testimonial injustice’ and ‘hermeneutical injustice’. In order to define these two types, we need to understand the concept of social power as a ‘capacity we have as social agents to influence how things go in the social world’ (Fricker 2007, 1).54 Fricker believes that (1) power can operate actively or passively on social agents, whether a subject, a group or an institution; and that (2) since power is a capacity, and a capacity persists through periods, it exists even while it is not being realized in action (Fricker 2007, 10). Power can be exercised as an agential operation (actively or passively) or operated purely as structural and subjectless. Since power is a structural phenomenon, even agential power is socially situated and any operation of power is dependent upon the context of a functioning social world - shared institutions, shared meanings, shared expectations, and so on (2007, 12). The operation of agential social power is purely practical co-ordination between social agents within the social fabric.

Fricker mentions a specific type of social power that is based on shared conceptions of social identity requiring not only practical social co‐ordination but also an imaginative social co‐ordination (2007, 14). These types of power operations are dependent upon agents to share those conceptions of social identity that are alive in the collective social imagination and rule our social relations in the social fabric, for instance the concept of gender. Fricker contends that any practices of a social power that depend on a significant degree of shared imaginative concept of social identity, is a practice of identity power (2007, 14-16).55 Through identity, power as something non-material works alongside other

53 On the concept of ignorance, see also Pitts 2017; Fricker & Jenkins 2017; Fricker 2012, 2013, 2017 54 See also Medina 2011, 2013, 2017; Anderson 2017 55 See also Dotson 2010, 31; Dübgen 2016 72 sorts of social powers as a totally discursive or imaginative power that operates at the level of shared conceptions of social ‘normalities’. For instance, being ‘a good citizen’ in Sarah Ahmed’s example of Neighborhood Watch is to attain a certain ‘asymmetrical code of practical and discursive conduct’ (Fricker 2007, 15) by the members of a neighborhood that refers back to the shared collective meanings of what it is to be a good citizen.56

Like social power in general, identity power can be agential or purely structural. It can be practiced positively in a way that works in the interest of the agent, or it can be practiced negatively, that is working against the agent’s benefit. Refugee identity and what it means to be a refugee is just one facet of the social identity of a refugee that affects both material implications as well as the imaginative aspect of it. Identity power, as observed by Fricker, is of interest to a discussion of epistemic disadvantage because it is an integral part of the mechanism of testimonial exchange between speaker and hearer (2007, 11). This is the most ethical and important moment of practicing our identity power that impacts on the discursiveness and epistemology of social relations.

In this sense, the concept of stereotyping works as the collective shared conception about something that may be entirely proper or entirely misleading. However, if stereotypes embody some prejudices and limitations that affect epistemic exchanges -like testimony- on the side of the powerless, then it leads to an epistemic dysfunction on the side of the less powerful, and here our concern is with the speaker. It is noteworthy that the experience of an injustice in the epistemic exchange between social agents due to common prejudices is connected to other types of injustices. This means that testimonial injustice works in a systematic way, actually or potentially pursuing all the facets of the sufferer’s social activities, for example their educational, sexual, legal, economic, religious or other activities. Systematic practices of testimonial injustice are ‘utterly disastrous’ for the subject because they impose a persistent injustice on the subject (Fricker 2007, 28). The injustice seems persistent because it is indebted to the prejudices that shaped the social imagination.57 Racialized and colonial society is the site of persistent testimonial injustice for the colonized. While there is persistent and continued injustice, one needs to look for a structure that maintains and makes plausible such harm and oppression. Fanon refers to such a structure as a ‘violent structure’ that undermines the subject’s capacity to articulate meaning for their social experience (Fanon 2004, 51).58

56 This is an interesting case, as it seemingly does not involve any obvious violation of personhood. However, there is a collection of meanings in play in this example which entails the ideas of ‘who the stranger is’ and ‘self-policing and taking individual responsibility for crime’. As Ahmed explains in this example, the neighborhood becomes a social site where every subject adopts the gaze of the Other (Ahmed 2000, 39). 57 See also Young 1990; Dübgen 2012, 2016 58 See also Gordon 1995 73 Before giving a phenomenological description of experiencing epistemic harm, I will briefly introduce the second type of epistemic injustice that Fricker refers to as ‘hermeneutical injustice’. This form of epistemic injustice is embedded in the hermeneutical context of social understanding.59 As previously stated, social power is the power that shapes and constructs the collective forms of social understanding and social imagination. When there is an asymmetry in the systematic operation of social power, exercising social power will have an unfair impact on shaping the collective forms of social understanding in a way that excludes certain perspectives of various social groups from the shared hermeneutical resources to understand social experiences. For example, in the case of a colonial system, those who wield the social power have appropriate understandings of their social experiences in a way that makes sense of their world. At the same time, the colonial community who live in a world that is structured by and for those who wield social power have difficulty in making their lived experience intelligible. Fricker names this gap in collective interpretive resources a ‘hermeneutical lacuna’ (2007, 151). Thus, hermeneutical injustice harms the subject not only in their capacity as knower but also as a subject of social understanding by depriving them of the necessary concepts and contexts for making sense of their own experience and becoming intelligible to others. The concept of ‘intellectual disability’ in Kalman, Lövgren & Sauer (2016), and Schweiger’s notion of epistemic injustice relating to global justice and the experience of ‘global poor’ (2016), also reflect on those who are excluded from the contribution to the social imaginary.

Those who are excluded from the right to practice social power in order to participate in creating collective social interpretive resources are hermeneutically marginalized. Husserl recognizes that the practice of social power in the concept of human sociality changes the manner in which we construct ourselves. He believes that the constitution of personhood originates in social relations; sociality does not give birth to personal individuation, but it does disclose individual subjectivity (Taipale 2014, 94). Just like testimonial injustice, when hermeneutical injustice is systematically practiced and maintained, it is a kind of structural discrimination that is part of a broader social practice. As discussed in the last chapter, this systematic hermeneutical practice toward the powerless is found in Bourdieu’s concept of symbolic violence. The concept of symbolic violence suggests that certain hermeneutical practices become the legitimate and dominant form of recognition, while the rest are marginalized and excluded from the social pool of collective social knowledge.

In a colonial setting, the epistemic harm - either hermeneutical or testimonial - which is maintained by the colonial system violates the most fundamental way that a person or people know themselves; this is the most insidious yet predictable effect of colonialism. This is the violation of the essential capacity of the subject to constitute the objective world in ‘an endless multiplicity of subjects that

59 See also Santoz 2007 as cited in Dübgen 2016 74 harmoniously interact with one another’ (Heinämaa, 2013, 83). Husserl in Cartesian meditations asserts that:

Consequently, the constitution of the world essentially involves the harmony of the monads; precisely this harmony among particular constitutions in the particular monads; and accordingly, it involves also a harmonious generation that goes on in every particular monad. (Hua I, 138;108)

The colonial discourse establishes a subject of its own creation through a schematic production of knowledge and decodes the Other for itself. The epistemically violent structure of the colonial regime deliberately veils and obscures the epistemic resources of the colonized subject. But how can the experience of hermeneutical injustice, that is maintained by an epistemically violent structure, seriously constrain the very development of the self? In the next section, drawing on Husserl’s concept of horizon-experience, I address the experience of epistemic violence on the constitutional level.

The Horizon Experience of Epistemic Violence

Every experience is permeated by an intrinsic horizon, that is, the co-existing profiles of perceptions, the co-given field of vision that can be experienced and is accessible for us. Every experience has a specific direction, orientation or zero point. The zero point, according to Husserl, is the starting point from which that world unfolds (Ideas II, 166). In perceiving and experiencing an object, the consciousness of the epistemic subject has an orientation not only toward the object of perception, but also to the co-intended possibilities. The orientation of an experience in its horizonality is bringing the strange to familiarity as an egoic act. The objects, that appear in the course of a perception as a spectrum of less familiar to more familiar, act as signs of orientation (Ahmed 2006, 30). Considering that, knowing an experience or an object means being aware of its horizon and being aware of the possibilities that co-exist with the intended object. That is what Husserl calls the ‘I can’. The consciousness of the horizon is a vague consciousness of the ‘I’ that can continue in this direction, and ‘I’ can expand its experience and deepen it by correcting or confirming the first experience. According to Geniusas, the ‘I can’ is peculiarly a form of self-perception ‘as a necessary implication of the appearance of transcendent objectivities’ (2012, 73). The ‘I can’ is then the manifestation of our dispositional capacities in the horizonal framework of lived experience (2012, 49). The initial self-manifestation in the manner of ‘I can’ happens in the confines of the transcendent perception. I may claim that it is this orientation that shapes my world, or whatever ‘I can’ reach as experienceable.

Every type of experience entails an orientation whereby the social experience of the epistemic subject has an orientation toward others that shapes the outline of the proximity of objects and others to which

75 I have access (Ahmed 2006, 3). The social world is then constituted as the existence of a fellow- subject and the experiencability of the object by that fellow subject. However, due to the spatial arrangements of the lifeworld, that is, my ‘here’ is your ‘there’, the experience of an individual zone of operation for my fellow subject is different from mine. The same object must be given itself from a different aspect to the Other and the explications of the horizon of objects for the Other and me are different. This provides a realization of interchangeability of standpoints between the Other and me and is the realization of a network of relations between me and the Other in reaching my present intending goal.

Such realization leads to the fact that not only the world that I have experienced is socialized, but the world that is to be experienced is socialized in principle (Schutz and Luckman 1973, 68).60 According to Schutz and Luckman, all experience of social reality that is my experience of the Other varies according to my relation to that Other. The relation to the Other is also arranged according to various levels of proximity, depth, and anonymity in lived experience (1973, 61). The Other in social context can be another subject, or a vague attitude, institutions, cultural structures or all humanity in general. In social relations, although one speaks of the ‘immediate’ experience of another subject, this experience is internally mediated. I can only access the Other’s flow of lived experience as mediated by their movements, their expressions, and their communications as indications of meaningful subjective experiences of an alter ego. The most immediate encounter with the Other is through the ‘We-relation’, that is sharing the conscious life of another subject in the most concrete way (Schutz and Luckman 1973, 64).61

In the social world, the pregiven horizon-consciousness is infused by the Other, that acts as a horizon- prescription of sense toward possible cognition of an object of experience. This is the ‘prescribed orientation’ that is already pregiven to the epistemic subject. In the experience of hermeneutical injustice, when I find myself in a situation in which I seem to be the only one to feel the dissonance between received understanding and my own intimated sense of a given experience, it impacts my faith in my own ability to make sense of the world, or at least the relevant region of the world. In an epistemically violent structure, when an epistemic subject, due to their social identity, race, or political status, is prejudicially responded to by privileged others, they find themselves stripped of being an epistemic agent and being reduced to an object. These subjects are not just reduced to an object of knowledge for others, but reduced to the ontological status of an object, as a thing rather than a consciousness who gives meaning to the world. While the constant presence of the Other

60 See also Luckman 1970; Natanson 2012 61 For the concept of We-Relationship see also Parsons 1973; Brinck, Reddy & Zahavi 2017; León, Szanto & Zahavi 2017; Schmid 2005, 2014; León 2018 76 shapes the horizon-consciousness of reaching an object for the epistemic agent, this other subject also has the capacity to restore the subject as an epistemic agent and ontological subject with their attention, which liberates the epistemic subject from objecthood. Behrouz Boochani speaks about this status as a detainee in Australian offshore detention camps:

Trying to understand the conditions of micro-control and macro-control

Trying to understand the perpetual flux of everything

Trying to avoid tipping over the edge

Trying to avoid tipping into sanity….

It leads nowhere

Nothing

No answer to his futile questions

Nowhere

Nowhere except the threshold of insanity. (2018, 208-10)

The marginalization of the epistemic subject in a hermeneutically violent structure not only cuts off the subject’s access to making sense of the intended experience, it also restricts the subject’s access to the possibilities that are co-given with the intended experience. Experiencing hermeneutical injustice is experiencing the ‘moment of disorientation’. This disorientation is clearly manifested in Boochani’s passage above, where the detained refugee loses the capacity to understand what happens to him. The moment of disorientation is when an epistemic subject cannot situate some of their social experiences in the shared resources of meaning-making and social interpretation in a context that orients subjects and bodies.

In order to encounter objects in meaningful ways and interact with them accordingly, we need to have a familiarity with the orientation that is given. It is assumed that disorientation has not just ‘happened’ to the sufferer of hermeneutical injustice, rather it has been epistemically ‘given’ and continuously is given. Therefore, the victim of epistemic injustice is positioned as a disoriented subject who dwells in a world that is shaped and directed by a particular group of others, whose homeworld outlines certain experiences as ordinary or strange, according to the direction of those ones who are more centrally involved (Ahmed 2006, 159). This experience can be perceived as the experience of being an object between other objects. This is how the epistemic project of colonialism undermines the very capability of personhood of the colonial subject, and the rationality of the Oriental subject.

77 To feel disoriented and regarded as an object also affects one’s whole picture of the world; the world as gathered objects becomes disoriented this way. Hence, according to Guenther, the issue of knowing and being known by others cannot be separated from existential or ontological questions of being- for-itself as a first level of self-awareness of ‘I can’ and Being-for-Others or social existence (Guenther 2017, 202). In other words, when Fricker asserts that you are what you know, how you know it, and how others respond to your knowledge, she refers to the exercising of the identity power within the field of the subject’s epistemic possibilities (Fricker 2007, 53).

Conclusion

The epistemically violent structure of colonial systems is the site of both testimonial and hermeneutical injustice. In testimonial injustice one suffers an oppression in response to one’s knowledge, and in the case of hermeneutical injustice the subject suffers a deficit on the other two legs of the triangle of epistemic capacity of an experiencing subject: that is, what they know and how they know it. In hermeneutical oppression, it is as if the open horizon of possible experiences for the subject who is affected does not seem approachable. At the same time, by neglecting and excluding the sufferer’s perspective in the case of testimonial injustice, the open horizon of possible experiences both for the sufferer and the dominant perspective who practices the testimonial violence is impacted. The open horizon of possible experience can be understood as an orientation of my intentionality for further experiences. Such inaccessibility of open horizon of experience in the side of the oppressor leads to what Medina and Pohlhaus have labeled as ‘active and willful ignorance’ (Pohlhaus 2012; Medina 2013).62 As Fricker and Jenkins explain, on one hand the ignorance that is the result of the prejudice blocks the flow of knowledge in the epistemic system (Fricker & Jenkins 2017, 5). On the other hand, the experience of disorientation is suffered by an epistemic agent in the experience of an oppression in their capacity as knower and making sense of their world. By disorientation I mean those orientations that were missed to confirm and deepen the experience further, or those orientations in experience that are failed to be fulfilled as possibilities that were accessible in the horizon of the experience.

Failed orientation results in losing the track or line of your disposition with whatever is ‘here’ and the future dispositions. By experiencing disorientation more often, it becomes the habit of an epistemic subject; the epistemic subject turns out to be a disoriented subject. In this way, the disoriented subject is someone who has lost the grip of their world that results in the disposition of ‘distance’. Distance is the representation of a certain loss, a loss of grip over the object with its intrinsic horizon that used to be in my reach. It is also the lived experience of ‘slipping away’ of the

62 See also Mason 2011; Dotson 2012; Mills 2007, 2015 78 reachable; it is a moment in which what is within reach becomes out of reach (Ahmed 2006, 166). Distance is the disposition of the colonized and Oriental subject. Building on Dodd’s notion of violence, I conclude that the very notion of violence first and foremost is an epistemic one, as it appears as a problem of meaning and sense bestowal. Although, Fricker and Medina both believe that the discussion of epistemic injustice belongs to the realm of virtue ethics and normativity, I claim that it most profoundly is a violence that disrupts any concepts of ‘ethical’ in the first place because the experience of epistemic exclusion per se harms the essential attributes of personhood as the transcendental constitutive subject. I will return to this claim in the final chapter.

The experience of distance is the manifestation of the disruption of sense in an ambiguous way. The colonial situation is a violent situation because it is built upon this disrupted world of sense. What I argue here, in the case of the Middle Eastern refugees who are in search of a home at our gates, is to reflect on their situation under a new light. This is to be aware of the fact that, when we talk about trauma in the case of a refugee, first we need to consider an epistemic trauma and the turmoil in the refugee’s world of sense that is generated within generations of experiencing distance and disorientation. A Middle Eastern refugee is an ambivalent subject who bares generations of alienation by the Orientalist gaze and a war which commands them unbeknown to themselves.

I commenced this chapter by reflecting on the colonial discourse as an epistemically violent discourse. Using the Husserlian phenomenological concept of lifeworld and experience horizon, I then described how the epistemic violence that is embedded in colonial systems affects the colonial subject’s ability to constitute and maintain their lifeworld, that is, the world that emerged out of their worldly experience on the constitutional level. Keeping the phenomenological concept of lifeworld and world horizon in mind, we can now analyze the issue of the refugee as the problematic of the phenomenological Alien. In my lifeworld, I always deal with things and people that are entities. As Sebastian Luft suggests, I experience entities through multiple but certain attitudes and the multiplicity of these attitudes and their correlative horizons makes my lifeworld (2012, 43). In the next chapter, using Husserl’s concept of lifeworld, I show the structure of homeworld and alienworld and the relation between the two. This will illuminate the certain attitude through which I experience the Other as Alien and answer the question of how the Alien appears on the horizon of my lifeworld.

79 Chapter Three

Homeworld and Alienworld: The Intersubjective Structure of the Home

Introduction

Considering phenomenology as a practice of attending to the unfamiliar in our ordinary experiences, it does this by changing attitudes toward the manner in which something appears, seeing it this time as ‘stranger’. We can, therefore, ask the following questions: Phenomenologically, what is the relation of the ‘I’ with the ‘stranger’? How does the ‘I’ perceive and experience the Other and constitute them as ‘stranger or alien’? What is the manner in which the Other is given to me as an alien? While the ‘alien’ or ‘stranger’ is not identical to the Other, the hermeneutical relation of the ‘I’ constitutes the Other as ‘alien’ or ‘stranger’. This means that my hermeneutical relation to the Other as absolute unfamiliar and unknown constitutes them as ‘alien’. Thus, we encounter the alien at the threshold of our experience; the alien awaits us at the limit of our reach. Residing at the limit of our access, we as ‘at home’ experience the refugee with an unease and in total ambiguity. What is the structure of this experience that is so difficult to handle, and we call it crisis?

In this chapter, I demonstrate how the terms ‘other’ and ‘alien’ are different in various works of Edmund Husserl from First Philosophy (Hua VII; Hua VIII) and Cartesian Meditations (Hua I) to The Phenomenology of Intersubjectivity (Hua XIII; Hua XIV; Hua XV). Then I expand my deliberation on the phenomenology of transcendental intersubjectivity in order to disclose the ‘how’ of the constitution of homeworld and alienworld, and thus the constitutive notion of alien.

As Anthony Steinbock discusses, although Husserl uses the term ‘other’ interchangeably with ‘alien’, each of them carry a special meaning in the theory of intersubjectivity (1995b, 57). Etymological reflection on the term ‘other’ in English and ‘andere’ in German shows that this term has a numerical function to it’ that is the expression of an ordinal number of the ‘second’ that follows the first. This means there is a linear relation in both German ‘andere’ and English ‘other’ with the logical ‘first’. In other words, the other as second follows the first in order of dependence and importance. The Other, in Husserl’s philosophy of intersubjectivity, especially in the language of First Philosophy, is the second ‘I’ which in Latin is alter ego, as the second subjectivity and second transcendental life compared to the original transcendence of the ‘I’ [Ein Zweitestranszendentales Leben] (Steinbock 1995b, 57-58). The Other in First Philosophy, that is the phenomenology of first subjectivity, is founded on the self and maintains a one-sided relation to the first subjectivity as ‘I’. First Philosophy

80 handles the problematic of the ‘Other’ as a second transcendence that is founded on the first subjectivity that is ‘Myself’.63

However, Husserl uses the term ‘alien’ [das Fremde] when he intends to express the novelty of transcendence, its inaccessibility and the unfamiliarity of strangeness within the cultural and historical context (Steinbock 1995, 58). In the German language Fremde derives from the adverb frem, that means ‘being at a distance’, not belonging to and unacquainted or unfamiliar. In The Phenomenology of Intersubjectivity (Hua XIII, XIV, XV), Husserl uses the term alien as an axiological term, where the value of the alien cannot be reduced to the ‘I’, and the alien culture cannot be regarded as a second culture. Instead, the alien stands at the edge and the limit of our knowledge as the hermeneutical challenge of our human condition. This hermeneutical challenge rests upon the original familiarity and the possibility of such familiarity. Bernhard Waldenfels in The Question of the Other explains:

What we encounter as alien is not simply something other or different. [...] Otherness, first analyzed in Plato’s Sophist, comes about through a process of delimitation (Abgrenzung) which opposes the same (ταὐτόν,idem) to the other (ἕτερον, aluid). (2007, 7)

This is to say that the alien in its origin and its dynamic events associated with it is radically different from the Other (Friesen 2014, 69). While the alien can expand and deepen this original familiarity, it may cause harm by alienating us from ourselves, therefore it leads us to resist, avoid and assimilate the alien (Waldenfels, Stähler, and Kozin 2011, 3). The second hermeneutical challenge that identifies the alien as an intruder subjects it to evaluation and judgment that leads us to impose the current moral, political, religious, cultural and intellectual categories on it.

Waldenfels suggests that if we consider the alien as not able to be objectified and to be pinned down, who encounters us at the threshold of home, making us feel not at home even when we are at home, we need to reflect on our peculiar experience of the alien instead of trying to understand it in a practical way (1990, 5). In order to thematize the experience of the alien at the edge of home, we need to understand how the ‘home’ is constituted and ordered. In this sense, home acts as a clue to understand intersubjectivity and the ‘novel web of social relations’ which ‘express and prescribe a unique approach’ to the world and self (Steinbock 1994, 210). Hence, the discourse on home creates a context of belonging in which the very co-existence of human beings gains an experiential significance.

63 ‘Myself’ in this context is the relational sense of the self that is not self-grounding. That is a ‘self’ that is given to itself ‘in relation’. 81 Phenomenological discourse on the ‘home’ enquires into the fundamental structures and conditions for the possibility of sense-constitution of being-at-home. Husserl opens up a possibility for us to expand our constitutional descriptions by taking a generative approach to transcendental phenomenology.64 Steinbock believes that:

Through his [Husserl’s] generative analyses we see a variation in constitutional description, from the more familiar static form-matter schema, to a more dynamic temporalizing model of primordial constitution, to the constitutive roles of appropriation and renewal of sense that stem from normative territories and traditions. Here homeworld and alienworld become constitutive ‘conditions for the possibility of sense emergence’, conditions which are themselves formative of subjectivity. (1995b, 14)

Therefore, we need to inquire into how and in what manner the lifeworld as the resource of all sense- constitutions is given to me as ‘home’. Doing so, I can show where Husserl has started his formulization of the experience of the other ego and how he developed the idea of ‘home’ by applying the phenomenological reduction in the domain of intersubjectivity. Such analysis will help us to get a phenomenological understanding of how the subject makes sense of their home and how losing home that is not only losing shelter affects the whole structure of familiarity for the subject, in this case the refugee.

Phenomenology of Transcendental Intersubjectivity

Husserl raises the question of the Other, in the ‘Fifth Meditation’ of the Cartesian Meditations, asking if phenomenologically ‘the Nature and the whole world that are constituted “immanently” in the ego are only my “ideas” and have behind them the world that exists in itself, then is it possible for me to go out of my ego and reach other egos who are not actually in me but only consciously intended in me?’(CM, 90). This is an inquiry into the possibility of gaining transcendental knowledge of what is beyond my sphere of transcendental experience, that is, the other ego. Husserl begins by asking about all implicit and explicit intentionalities wherein the alter ego is revealed and verified in the sphere of my transcendental ego. This is to question ‘what intentionalities, syntheses, and motivations of the sense of ‘other ego’ appear in my harmonious experience of someone in its own manner’ (CM, 90).

64 See also Costello 2000a, b, 2008; Zahavi 1997, 2001b; Taipale 2014 82 It is noteworthy that in the ‘Fifth Meditation’ Husserl does not try to prove the existence of the ‘other’ from the apodicticity of the ego, instead he tries to describe the constitution of the sense of ‘the Other’ in my intentional life (Steinbock 1995b, 65). While Husserl intended to phenomenologically address the Fremd-erfahrung (alien-experience) in the ‘Fifth Meditation’, the methodology he applied fails to recognize the difference between the Other and the alien (Steinbock 1995b, 65). Husserl’s methodology, that begins with an abstraction from whatever is alien, formulates the intersubjectivity commencing with the apodicticity of the ego, which is the sphere of the ownness of an individual ego. The sphere of ownness, according to Husserl, is ‘what is peculiar to me as ego, my being as monad, whatever is purely in myself and for myself with an exclusive ownness; this includes my every intentionality’, even the one directed to what is other (CM, 94). ‘My animate organism which is uniquely singled out’ as the only Object within my abstract world stratum that I assign to a field of sensations within belongs to this sphere of ownness, where I ‘rule and govern’ immediately (CM, 97). This is to kinesthetically perceive ‘with’ my hands or to perceive ‘with’ my eyes. This is a one-sided relation of founding and constitution of an other’s body that is taken at the passive embodied level (Steinbock 1995b, 66). That means, thanks to this ownness I reduce other humans to what is included in my ownness, which are bodies therein, and ‘I reduce myself as a human and I grasp myself as a psychophysical unity’ (CM, 97). Husserl writes:

‘I’, the reduced ‘human Ego’ (psychophysical Ego), am constituted, accordingly as a member of the ‘world’ within multiple ‘objects outside me’. But I myself constitute all this in my ‘psyche’ and bear it intentionally within me. (CM, 99)

Although Husserl applies a transcendental attitude, firstly he attempts to delimit within the Ego’s horizon of transcendental experience, that is whatever is peculiarly my own, and non-alien [Nicht- Fremde]. This means freeing the horizon of ownness abstractively from whatever is alien and everything that is ‘other-spiritual’ (CM, 95). Then, ‘within and by means of this ownness the transcendental ego constitutes the “objective” world’, that is a universe other than himself or herself, and constituting the Other in the mode of alter ego (CM, 104). By means of this transcendental reduction on the sphere of my ownness, Husserl asserts that ‘I’, as ‘transcendental ego, am given to myself perceptually’ as an object of original intuition. Moreover, ‘I’ is given to me like any other perception, with an open horizon with infinite, ‘undiscovered internal features’ of myself (CM, 101). This is what Husserl calls ‘self-perception’ within the horizon of being that is included in my ownness. This perceptual givenness of myself in the sphere of ownness belongs to my immanent temporality; there my existence is in the form of open infinite possibilities, which is the stream of the subjective process.

83 The self-explication or self-perception is carried out as an act of consciousness in the sphere of ownness and on the stream of the subjective process, which is the stream that I live as an identical Ego. Therefore, the Ego is accessible to me in respect of its actualities and its possibilities; that is, the Ego is accessible to me in terms of its ‘I can’ or ‘ could have’ as a series of subjective processes, like I can drink or I could have exercise. This self-explication is the most original conceivable that is on the basis of self-experience (CM, 101-103). This ‘myself’ as constitutive subjectivity, my psychic being, and my lived body as ‘I can’ and my physical body [Körper], which are given to me in immanent or transcendent originary perception, all belong to the sphere of ownness (Steinbock 1995b, 69). It is noteworthy that the mode of self-consciousness is not the only mode of consciousness, because the experience of something alien, according to Husserl, is present as an experience of an objective world and Others in it, which is the outcome of a reduction to the sphere of ownness (CM, 106). In this reduction an intentional substratum ‘world’ as an ‘immanent transcendence’ appears. The objective world is constantly there and even when there is no experiencing of it, I accept it habitually.

The next level is the one that pertains to the ‘alter ego’ that is excluded from my own primordial being as ego’; in this sense, the ego becomes the source for the sense of the alter ego. Husserl asserts that this other ego as the first non-ego, constitutionally, makes ‘possible a new infinite domain of what is Other, that is, an Objective Nature’ or World to which belongs all other Egos and I myself (CM, 107). Along with this other ego there exists an Egos-community with each other and for each other, including me, that is constituted in my sphere of ownness. Here Husserl clearly describes the manner in which these Ego-communities present themselves:

Ultimately [the] community of monads, which moreover, (in its communized intentionality) constitutes the one identical world all Egos again present themselves, but in an objectivating apperception with the sense ‘men’ or ‘psychophysical men as worldly Objects’. (CM, 107)

This is to say that the other ego that is constituted in and for me is an ego in a derived sense. By describing the communalization of constitutive intentionality as the transcendental intersubjectivity, Husserl introduces the intersubjective sphere of ownness where the Objective world is constituted. This transcendental ‘We’ is the ‘subjectivity for this world and the world of men’(107). It is notable that the basis for this intersubjectivity is the sphere of ownness. Husserl admits that the Objective world that is constituted from the sources of ownness, properly cannot transcend its own intersubjective essence, but rather the ‘immanent’ transcendence is innate to it (CM, 106). In this sense, he accepts that this account of intersubjectivity entails an abstraction from historicity, culture, and developmental facticity which is an ‘inter-monadic becoming’ (Steinbock 1995b, 68). Therefore,

84 his account of intersubjectivity in the ‘Fifth Meditation’ remains state overall, and as stated by Steinbock, even the constitution of the intersubjective cultural community of egos as an original ‘We’ is a one-sided relation of foundation (1995b, 75).

Husserl concludes the ‘Fifth Meditation’, admitting that the experience of the ‘truly existing other’ while applying the transcendental epoché is eo ipso the alter ego, which is demonstrated within the experiencing intentionality of my ego (CM, 148). That is to say, I experience and know the other ego ‘In’ myself; in me he/her is constituted not originally, but appresentatively mirrored. Husserl argues that ‘in my primordial sphere, the other Ego with their organism appears in the mode of ‘There’, still that other ego within themselves are in the mode of ‘Here’. Between these two primordial spheres, mine as original sphere and theirs as appresented sphere for me, there is an abyss that I cannot cross, ‘therefore, my concrete ego and the other concrete ego remain separate’ (CM, 93). My ego constitutes in herself another ego as existent and sees with actual originariness the corporeality over there that is the Other's body itself but seen from my position. Then, according to the structure of ‘sense- constitution in perceiving someone, what is originally grasped as the body of a psyche, is essentially inaccessible to me’ (CM, 124). This is to say, whatever is constituted in the mode of alter ego is accessible to me in a mode of inaccessibility, given the other’s unique lack of primordial givenness. Constitutively, the description of the other’s ‘sense for me’ slips into the constitutional claim that the other receives its ‘sense for me’ from the ego that is the sole constitutive source of sense.

So, the question of how the other is given to me as alien will remain unanswered. We can conclude that the static egological account of social existence and the Cartesian way to phenomenology of intersubjectivity that does not include the ‘becoming’ of the subject, is not feasible in addressing the problems of historical constitution, language, and social existence. Then how can we initiate a reflection on the problem of intersubjectivity if we need to abandon the Cartesian analysis of the intuitive givenness of consciousness? In order to answer this question, as Steinbock claims, through the regressive inquiry to the pregivenness of the world and facticity of the individual, we can overcome the shortcomings of the static and genetic method that Husserl used in Cartesian Meditations (Steinbock 1995b, 79).

The regressive inquiry into the past is the analysis of the process of historical and social becoming/generation. In fact, generative phenomenological inquiry is examining social, historical and material dimensions of identity and differences through ‘generative’ phenomena which are normative, intersubjective, geological and historical’ (Steinbock 1993, 8). Generative phenomenology can explain the developing structure of existence and co-existence and their respective modes of constitution geologically and historically. The generative approach does not reduce modes of constitution to consciousness or to egological subjectivity, rather it looks far beyond

85 the immediate subjective horizonal access. According to Steinbock (1995b, 104), generative phenomenology reflects on the transcendental modalities of the lifeworld [Lebenswelt]; that is the outcome of inquiring back to genesis from the ontological perspective that is ‘questioning back into founding layers of validity and therefore a questioning back into genesis’ (Hua XV, 614). In doing so, Husserl takes the ontological ‘structure of being-sense world in its founding relations of being’ as a leading clue to inquiring back (Steinbock 1995b, 81). That is, the founding relations of possible experience of the mundane and of the world correlatively resemble the founding relations of being. Husserl, in Zur Phänomenologie der Intersubjectivität (Hua XV), asserts that the structure of possible world-experience can be discovered abstractly in the transformation of founding relations of being into validity of being; this then underpins the modes of givenness, the ‘how’ of givenness and the ways of appearance. Thus, this is questioning into ‘the conditions of the possibility of experience’ (Held 2003, 16).65

Since the generative method is sensitive to socio-geo-historical normative configuration of meanings, then the next step is the systematic study of ‘normality’ and ‘abnormality’, that are essential for Husserl in terms of developing the notions of sense constitution, genesis of the lived-body and also the generation of common worlds. This allows speaking of the homeworld/alienworld not just as any lifeworlds but as normatively specific territories. Furthermore, this method leads to examining generative phenomena like birth and death and the role they play in the constitution of the world, in terms of the appropriation of sense and the constitution of normative life-worlds, historicity, and tradition. Generativity is the new absolute in the generative method, that means, generativity is attentive to the fact that the taken for granted ‘self’ that is given to itself, is not self-grounded. In other words, the generative approach to a phenomenon is to discover the historical, co-relative and co- generative structure of home-world/alienworld.

The two notions of homeworld/alienworld for Husserl work as an irreducible intersubjective structure; therefore, any reflecting back on intersubjectivity leads to ‘developing an understanding of what it means to be home and not-home, or put differently, home and alien. Homeworld and alienworld are co-constituted through the process of normalization’ as normal and abnormal lifeworlds respectively (Steinbock 1994, 2018). Next, I will critically analyze the concept of homeworld/alienworld in order to reconfigure my participation in the very becoming of home and alien.

The Lifeworld and the Constitution of Home-world/Alien-world

65 In the last two chapters I implicitly addressed the process of Besinnung and questioning back and the concept of lifeworld. 86 As I mentioned earlier in this chapter, in Cartesian Meditations Husserl takes an egological approach to how the other is given. He commences with a reduction to the ego’s ‘sphere of ownness’ and discloses its lived-bodylines and world-orientedness. The ego then passively transfers this sense to the other, constituting the other as another ego with their own primordial sphere. Proceeding then from the sense of ‘I’ [Ich] into the sense of the Other [das Andere] the other is constituted as a second I, a modification of the first, one-sidedly, which is primordially inaccessible to me. Husserl argues that the ego rationally cannot determine the existence of the Other through analogy or mirroring in the usual sense, rather the Other is there for me conceptually (CM, 125). That is because if the Other were only a reflection, then the consciousness of the Other should be accessible to my immediate intuition, but that is not the case because the other ego’s possibilities are not mine, and the sense of the other’s lived-corporeality cannot be grasped in my primordial sphere (Steinbock 1995b, 66). So, if we abandon the progressive Cartesian inquiry into intersubjectivity we are left with a regressive inquiry into the overlooked aspects of our everyday affairs. Therefore, the basis for such an inquiry is the strata of accomplishments, where the world of life itself is. As I mentioned in the last chapter, Husserl has not introduced the notion of the lifeworld just for the purpose of theorizing intersubjectivity; by treating the lifeworld transcendentally as world-horizon and earth-ground, he unfolds the normative dimensions of the lifeworld on the basis of normality and abnormality. Let me explicitly unfold the two notions of normality and abnormality in generative terms.

In our ‘natural life’ we are just tacitly ‘acquainted with the world’ and the peculiar structure of the world remains hidden and unthematized (Welton 2000, 333). This is the mundane mode of acceptance where we are initially directed to the factual world, that we take for granted in daily living. However, as Husserl asserts, the world that we live in and that we are familiar with in our everyday interactions is not one that is introduced by science. The things that we see firstly belong to the world of intuition [Anschauung]; that is, our perceptual and experiential acquaintances of our everyday things in the environment before they are affected by the interpretations that we call ‘data’. According to Donn Welton, the intuitive world is not the pre-cultural, primitive perceptual world, but it is where things appear according to their experiential qualities, values and usages, opposed to the quantitative world of positivist sciences (Welton 2000, 334). However, Husserl argues that even the world of the sciences is rooted in the intuitive world, and methodologically it is guided by the structure and transformations of the lifeworld. This first account of the lifeworld is not the ‘cultural world’ in which we are all situated but is a prescientific natural world before being refashioned in the hands of positivist sciences. The second account of the lifeworld covers both natural and cultural aspects as a concrete universal whole that contains all the sedimentations of practical and cultural achievements.

87 These two accounts of the lifeworld incorporate the multiplicity of particular worlds that are forged through intersubjective, social achievements relying on various types of discursive interactions to construct their norms and domains and conceptual networks. These networks are contexts. Welton believes that ‘context can be known as socially constructed and inscribed matrices of meaning [Bedeutung] and the constituted relation of facts and affairs-complexes in the context work as referential entailments’ (Welton 2000, 344).66 Referential entailment means a web of functional oppositions and contrasts so that the meaning that we get from an experience results from the place of our perception in that web. Let me put this into an example: take the experience of a Muslim woman arriving at the airport in the US. Wearing hijab, she will face an enhanced screening process and various levels of security checkpoints. In a different context, the same Muslim hijabi woman arriving at a majority Muslim populated country will have a very different experience. This means the same subject in two different contexts makes different sense from the experience of travelling internationally. Imagine that every context entails matrices of meanings like a web, in which there are certain relations between the knots of the web. Each knot can be lit up with a small lamp. When you enter to the web, depending on your place in the web, certain knots in the web light up. Those lights provide you with the meaning that you gain from your experience.

As Husserl puts it, the lifeworld is always already there, being for us in advance, the ‘ground’ for everyone, … The world is pregiven to us as a universal field of all actual and possible praxis, pregiven as ‘horizon’ (Crisis, 145). Therefore, according to Steinbock, the lifeworld as horizon and ground works as ‘territory’ (1995b, 162-69). Husserl used the term territory [Territorium, also Landschaft] in the “Ursprung” when he talks about nature, culture and intersubjectivity. For Husserl, a territory is a distinctive type of life-worldly openness, a spatio-temporal region that has borders [Grenzen] but restricted to human beings (Hua XV, 206). Thus, a territory is a geographical and cultural setting where I come from and it constitutes and constructs what is meaningful for our community; that is, the humanized and historical environing-world that is delimited historically and geographically (Steinbock 1995, 168). Husserl continues by saying that such a territory is built up through tradition, educational institutions, relations of authority and so on as a home-cultural space (Hua XV, 206). According to Steinbock then, the temporal aspect of territory is a historical horizon of meaning that is the horizon of generational historicity which constitutes my communal world, and spatially territory is the geographical ground. In other words, a territory is the genesis of meanings through generations, whether in myth, ritual, or historical events pregiven to me via language or dialect. Territory then works as a historical and geographical boundary or limitation that my ‘I can’ is bound to and limited to (Hua XV, 207).

66 See also Barsalou 1992 88 For instance, in his memoir from Manus Prison, Boochani writes as a Kurdish man in Farsi language, and not Kurdish.67 When he names other detainee nationalities, he calls himself as a Kurdish and not an Iranian among others as Iraqis and Sri Lankans. For him, Kurdistan and the landscape of the mountains is a territory that his creativity and his ‘I can’ bound to and not Iran as a whole. Kurdistan, that geographically is a part of the Western border of Iran and Iraq, Like the entire Western Iranian border were permeated with the violence and misery of Iran-Iraq war during 1980s. For Boochani, Kurdistan is a historical and geographical territory that is anchored to his imagination and childhood:

Where have I come from?

From the land of rivers, the land of waterfalls, the land of ancient chains, the land of mountains. Better to say I’ve come down from the summits. I’ve breathed in the ether up there. I’ve laughed up there. I’ve unleashed my hair into the wind up there. Out of a small village that stood in the middle of forest of old chestnut oaks. (2018, 258)

By now, with the transcendental interpretation of the lifeworld as territory, we have some suggestion about the constitutive conditions for intersubjective life and personal experience as pregiven. That means that the transcendental concept of territory suggests an economy of multiple lifeworlds which exist neither in homogeneous relativity nor dominating hierarchy. In the case of Boochani we can see Kurdistan as territory, but as he writes in Farsi and compose poems in Kurdish, his Iranian lifeworld comes to play as well. However, this interpretation of lifeworld as territory still does not provide us with the constitutive structure of the homeworld and alienworld.

As Husserl writes in The Phenomenology of Intersubjectivity, ‘I’ as a subject know about the alien as a subject of the alienworld which is unanimously experienced by this ‘I’ and ‘We’ (Hua XV, 214). The alienworld is a practical lifeworld of people who have different experiences, different natural surroundings, other life-goals, habits, practical behaviors and traditions. An alien subject is constituted for ‘me’ and for ‘us’ as an alien nation, in a co-relation with ‘our’– that is home-comrades- community [Heimgenossenschaft]- cultural environment and our world of human values. That is to say, within a world for all, there is constituted an expansion of mankind, as a collection of lifeworlds. But first, this expansion is a constitution of ever-continuous acceptance of a new ‘we’ and a new ‘our world’, in a manner that alien humanities and cultures can be accepted as facts. This is notable in the case of a refugee, as they all belong to various geographical places and territories, they all construct a ‘We as refugees’, or ‘We as detainees’ in the camp.

67 Kurds are an Iranian ethnic group native to mountainous region of western Asia where is known as Kurdistan. Kurdistan is spread from Southeastern Turkey, Northwestern Iran, Northern Iraq and Northern Syria. 89 But why, Husserl asks, is it that within this expansion, ‘alien validities’ never can be captured (Hua XV, 216)? Although within this new sphere, it is the commonality of experience that affects the whole reality and all individual realities of fellow humans, the horizonality of these experiences are different for ‘us’ and for the ‘Others’ (my emphasis). This means that I could apperceive those human beings as ‘my’ people of my way of life, who have the ‘one’ individually-real, open spatio-temporal horizon with me; this is given or anticipated as experienced and as an outcome of the unanimity of possible experiences. This open, real spatio-temporal horizon takes different determinations in the case of alien people and their alien environing-world; then the Alien’s Being-horizon can only be known in the form of ‘alien-ness’, and their environing-world can be comprehensible by indirect means and interpreting their very general forms of culture (Hua XV, 226). Take for example tilework in Islamic architecture. For a tourist who is totally unfamiliar to the Islamic art, the intricate, complex patterns, wide variety of tessellations and floral or calligraphic embellishments are just geometric designs and patterns. But Islamic architectural patterns invite the viewer to be attentive to the underlying reality rather than the mere purpose of decoration. Because according to Steinbock cultural artefacts can give themselves in a manner of manifestation which is different from presentational givenness of a mere object (2007, 15). That means they function as an icon that point beyond themselves. I will discuss different modes of givenness in the following chapter.

Husserl continues by arguing that although all of our experiences’ determinations happen within an area of actual shared accessibility which is given through the empathy itself, I cannot experience the alien as a detailed experience (Hua XV, 230). For Husserl intersubjective experience is empathic experience. Empathy [Einfuhlung] as a founding mode, makes possible our objective knowledge of the natural and social sciences.68 By detailed experience Husserl means the personal life and activities, especially the instinct-life, that is reconciled into conscious needs and typical modes of satisfaction of needs. This correlative reciprocal unity of the world in the life-nexus for all human beings, which is the practical environing world for us all, has an impractical, an unexperienced, and an unexperiential horizon, which is not just practically abandoned as ‘out of play’ horizon, but it is a horizon that is not applicable for practice. That horizon is an empty conceptual possibility of further experience, which is regarded as practically infeasible, as it belongs to the Other (Hua XV, 232). It seems that Husserl proposes the idea that ‘I’ narrow down my lifeworld in terms of forming an immeasurable boundary. This narrowed down lifeworld is the ‘homeworld’ that is formed and that simultaneously has happened when further horizons which are other lifeworlds respectively were

68 The Fifth Cartesian Meditations entails Husserl’s social theory of constitution and the function of empathy in this constitution. 90 formed by other people (Hua XV, 232). So, the ‘homeworld’ is a practical closed environing-world that is essentially finite (232).

The question is, how this specific lifeworld, that is the homeworld as optimal, concordant and privileged, has been co-constituted or narrowed down through a geo-historical horizon that belongs to the alienworld, but it is not optimal for us? The aforementioned concept of territory and Husserl’s considerations in the last passage suggests that there is an interplay between subject and the world which leads us to the idea that the alien can be conceived not simply as alien other or an alien subject, but as alienworld (Steinbock 1995b, 240). Husserl asserts that:

The world for us gains new, alien human beings, but human beings, realities, embodied people who live in special communities with each other, forming culture, forming peculiar communities of others, while they are connected by their peculiar convictions, theoretical, axiological and practical according to their peculiar (typically novel) life-purpose configured culture. This is what we understand. (Hua XV, 216, my translation)

Therefore, for Husserl, alien’s Being-horizon can only be known in the form of the alienness and comprehensibility of their environing-world; that means, such alienness that is only indicated, and can only be interpreted indirectly through understanding the most general form of culture, by indirect means. In order to understand how the social life as territory is constituted through an encounter with various types of unfamiliarity of the alienworld, inquiring into the phenomenon of normality and abnormality phenomenology of intersubjectivity unfolds the co-constitution of homeworld and alienworld through the process of normalization.

Normalization

The world of experience is the world of the normal and abnormal in relation to objects, the lived- body, interpersonal relations with the environing-world and so on. Most importantly in the constitution of the lifeworld, the phenomenon of normalization works constitutionally as the modes of givenness and pregivenness; that is normality and abnormality are the modes of constitution. As Husserl writes, important considerations on the method of a systematic interpretation of the world of experience are needed- transcendental aesthetics, ontological and constitutive-subjective, mainly with regard to the levels of normality and abnormality (Hua XV, 227). Therefore, ‘by normal and abnormal, Husserl does not mean medicinal or psychological normality; rather, he evokes a normality and abnormality on a constitutional level, namely, the sense constitution of the lived body, objects, worlds, traditions, and so on, as concordant, optimal, typical and familiar’ (Steinbock 1994, 208). In other words, normality and abnormality are interrelated in an intersubjective realm. In fact, 91 normalization in principle is the process of selection and exclusion in the constitution of optimal environing-world and terrain.

Steinbock believes that the concept of normality in Husserl’s Logical Investigations [Logischeuntersuchungen] is defined as coincidence, but later on he suggests that normality and abnormality belong to the question of perception and evidence (1995, 129-130). However, Husserl asserts that this normality in perception should be addressed phenomenologically within the structure of the perception and not in regard to external situations or the health and sickness of the organ. For example, if I see an apple, the appearance of the apple coincides with the appearance of the apple I touch. The visual perception of the apple as sphere should coincide with the sensation of touching a sphere shape. Therefore, ‘a perception is normal when the presenting complex of sensation is ‘similar to’ or an ‘appropriate portrayal of’ the directly presented appearance’ (Steinbock 1995b, 129). Though for the case of the apple, if I see an apple from one side and by touching it, I find out the other half of the apple is bitten and the apple is not a complete sphere anymore, then I experience a conflict in my perception, and such perception is abnormal.69 As Husserl writes, this abnormality is not reflecting the sense-content itself, but I experience a conflict between the interpretations and the apprehensions (cited in Steinbock 1993, 428).70 With the example of a wax figure, what Husserl pursues is the idea that coincidence and conflict are no longer interpreted as normal and abnormal, but phenomenon like hallucination, illusion, conflict and doubt are ‘modalizations’ of perception (Husserl 2001, 75).

Moving from the idea of normality as coincidence into interpreting normality as concordant, Husserl can give a more dynamic notion of constitution and temporality. Concordance [Einstimmigkeit] is a mode of normality that characterizes the way in which differences fit or pass together and work as a coherent and concordant formation of sense and experience (Steinbock 1993, 130). So, there is a temporal process of identity formation for the object of perception. In Analysis concerning passive and active synthesis Husserl developed the notion of identity and concordant in the context of passive synthesis as the process of the synthetic unity of constitution in and through difference (Husserl 2001, 130). This means, a norm of perception is constituted over time, genetically in experience, in a harmonious interconnection of what is given as presented, retained and protended. With this understanding of normality, then concordance is the basis for the constitution of ‘discordance’ as

69 In Analysis concerning passive and active synthesis Husserl uses the example of a wax figure and a human body: ‘we see a human being there for a time, concordantly and uncontested like other things in our surroundings; they were normal intentions, partly fulfilled, partly unfulfilled, being fulfilled normally in the continual succession of the perceptual processes, without any kind of conflict, without any kind of break. The visual appearance, the spatial shape filled with color, was previously endowed with a halo of intentions of apprehension that gave the sense "human lived-body" and "human as such." And now the sense "dressed up wax figure" is superimposed upon the first perceptual apprehension that was the seeing a human being’ (Husserl 2001, 72). 70 See also Breyer & Doyon 2015 92 anomaly or abnormality. This way of treating the normal can be seen specifically in natural-scientific and mathematical attitudes toward the world. ‘Normal’ for natural science is whatever is ordered according to natural and causal law.

Then, abnormality as discordance is when the synthetic continuity and progressive sense constitution is either ‘inhibited’ from the part of lived-body or there is a ‘rupture’ from the part of the environing- world as to what is experienced. For instance, in a progressive experience of photography, if suddenly a bright flash of light, momentarily blinds my eyes, this appears as a ‘rupture’ in the flow of sense constitution of the experience of photography. This momentary blindness is unfolded as discordance in relation to the experience of photography as concordance. After the sharp flash of light, when the new perceptions and appearances concord with the ones before the flash of light, then I take those concordant appearances as normal, and that isolated blinding flash of light as abnormal or as Husserl calls it as ‘anomal’.71 Sense-bestowal for Husserl is the aesthetic principle of the ego’s ‘I can’, and the whole idea of concordance and discordance that is the concept of normal and abnormal is directly related to sense-constitution. So, any inhibition, rupture or interruption in the sense-bestowal is always anomalous for this constitutive experience (Steinbock 1995b, 134). With this approach Husserl insisted on the relation of the lived-body and its environing-world [Umwelt]; then the lived- body is not the object of normal experience, but it constitutes this normality or abnormality of experience.

The idea of normal as concordant leads us to the fact that normality in respect to the lived body provides us with the world that is given from a certain perspective. According to Husserl ‘the lived- corporeality is a system of good and bad presentations and so to this system belongs the idea of optimal modes of givenness’ (Hua XIV 121). That means there is a qualitative distinction between normal and abnormal when they are constituted developmentally in the lived-body experience. Moreover, the distinction between normal and abnormal is also ‘normative’ in itself, as the constitution of normality and abnormality depends on whether either of them is optimal for the experience. Since the system of appearance ‘presents “most” of the thing with the greatest richness and sharpest differentiation, it is optimal’ (Hua XIV 123-124). By this Husserl means that we always tend to the maximum of richness and focus in perception, that is why too much brightness is as deficient as darkness in capturing an object.

Normal as optimal proposes the idea that optimality enriches the experience in a way that ‘optimal counts as “the thing itself” in the practical contexts’ of intentions and actions; then abnormal can be

71Steinbock explains that, ‘anomality [Anomalität] with respect to the ‘lived-body’ and constitutive experience is ‘inhibition’, that is when the ego’s functions are restricted and inhibitory functions include pain, shame, and disgust’ (1995, 133). 93 understood as not only what makes the perceived object ‘unusual’ but ‘worse’ with diminishing differences (Steinbock 1995b, 139). With this description, abnormal is not just anomalous in respect to concordance, rather it is worse for certain conditions of experience as it is not optimal. Therefore, abnormality is not a descriptive concept but a normative one with a teleology. Teleology refers to the idea the optimal is counted as ‘the thing itself’ in its objective sense and it guides my intentions toward deepening the inner and outer horizon of my perception to the its (optimal) direction. Let’s say in a case of seeing an illustrated artwork, there is an optimal perception of that artwork which can be achieved when you stand within a certain distance from the artwork, under a certain light of a day or light or a gallery’s artificial lightings. So, there is an optimality for experiencing that artwork; by directing my intentional body movement in an optimal manner I can get the optimal experience of that artwork.

Therefore, the optimality is embedded in the experience itself; that is, the optimal as a norm is constituted and generated genetically from within the experience (Steinbock 1995b, 141). This understanding of normal as optimal is of utmost importance for the purpose of my chapter. Talking about normal as optimal, we propose modes of givenness that are optimal. Optimality in experience is the outcome of my perspective and my orientation toward the world, which leads to the idea that by being more open to various modes of givenness of an object, I do not only produce that optimality but reappropriate it as ‘the best’ for my lived-body. When I experience an object in its optimal givenness, that optimal perspective becomes the ‘privileged’ perspective for experiencing that object, and it becomes my ‘normal’. In other words, the optimal normal is the maximum richness and unity in experience compared with other perceptions that I have from a certain object. This way, we can say that there is not just one optimal way of perceiving an object; rather, new optimal modes of givenness can be constituted within the experience. For example, when you have short-sightedness for a long time without realizing it, once you put on a pair of glasses you see everything in its richest and sharpest manner. While your optimal experiences of the surrounding world were dull and blurry, all of a sudden trying new glasses (spectacles), a new optimal is constituted in your experience of the surroundings. Vision in this case is not just normal insofar as it is original, but it is normal because is maximal (Steinbock 1995b, 144).

Sara Heinämaa and Joona Taipale also assert that the concept of normal as both concordance and optimal characterizes the experience of the object and the co-intending horizon of that object (2018, 289, see also Heinämaa 2013). This means, concordance in experience is in respect to other experiences and how harmonious and coherent it is between experiences, but optimality is in respect to the richness, clearness and the quality of the intended object. While normal as optimal is the maximum of richness of givenness of an object, we are always in a process of creating new norms in

94 new situations. This institution of norms is called optimalization. In the example of the spectacles, while we could see the world before wearing the spectacles and that picture of the world was normal vision to us, the spectacles give us a new norm that transcends the previous norm, thought as concordance-abnormal. The result is that optimalization can only occur in a system of an open horizon of experience. This means that new norms in new situations can only be constituted if we have an unfixed and eternal system of teleology of norms (Steinbock 1995b, 146).

Phenomenologically considered, the abnormal experience is a modification or a deviation [Anweichungen] from the normal, the optimal and the harmony within my experiences. Normal as concordance, refers to harmony and coherence between my experiences from an intended object, but this is different in optimality. In optimality, all the various perspectives on an intended object converge into an optimal orientation to give you the richest and sharpest view of that object, that optimal becomes your privileged orientation to that intended object: for Husserl this is the moment of full coexistence with the phenomenon that I one experiences (Steinbock 1993, 484).72 This means that the optimal perception is the point of maturation; that is the maximum articulation of the givenness of the object and most importantly is when the givenness of the object of all different senses orient to a unique point of my intention, that can reveal the maximum of the object for my lived body as a whole. In this way, the optimal gets normativity and genetically becomes a norm.

Normal as optimal is ‘to enrich the content of the world so that it has more determinations that I knew before’ (Hua XIV, 121). This view suggests that normal as optimal is not fixed in advance, but according to various situations new optima can be generated and surpassed in experience; ‘that new optimal becomes a normal and the old one refers to the new optimal as the new normal’ (Steinbock 1993, 488). Adding to that, the lived body optimizes new norms by confronting the anomalies that appeared in the experience, like the optical glasses that provide the richer and sharper perception while that counts as an anomaly in the course of an already concordant normal perception of the world. Hence, the anomalies can innovatively provoke the institution of new norms.

Then it can be attested that the existence of deviation and anomaly offers the institution of new norms as optimal; that is, although the new norm still refers back to what was already a norm, it does not completely assimilate to and incorporated with the previous order of norms. In such a system, the abnormal can be subordinate to what was once normal, and by instituting a new optimal the normal is now called abnormal. From the perspective of the old normal, the new organizations of sense, the

72 Husserl, MS. D 13 XIV: ‘Genetically, a harmonious original constitution must be carried out and must therefore become the norm, and then the normal true world of things, if it serves as a zero system and equilibrium position, all deviations must return to it, although it functions as a reference system, but nevertheless becomes a mere appearance’ (my translation).

95 new perspective on the world can be called abnormal, and as Husserl puts it, ‘this new normal has increased the normality and it is more normal than ever’ [sondernerstrecht normal, gesteigert normal] (MS. D 13 XVII, cited in Steinbock 1993, 492). This suggests an openness toward normative conflicts and normative deviations in order to have an increased normality that can be developed within the course of experience. We can conclude that if the normal as concordance and the optimal are subjective modes of experiencing the world as well as intersubjective modes of experiencing, then an experience which previously was normal (concordant), according to the subject’s situation and context of experiencing, can be discordant in other subjects or community of subjects according to their historical and contextual situation of experiencing (Heinämaa and Taipale 2018, 293).

We may claim that, the continuous emergence of norms in the endless process of optimalization makes possible for the subject to adapt itself to the new situation and context. Within the process of optimalization, we grow out of those previous norms into new ones:

Growth and development of a lifetime takes place by perpetually traversing from the foundations of family life to our times with friends… from friends to other friends… from our city to another city… to another love… and to another life… and to another death. (Boochani 2018, 265)

Yet, how can the experiencing subject have a tendency toward the optimal that appeared within their experience? Husserl believes that there is a tendency in the subject to move toward the optimum, and that tendency he calls the ‘principle of selection’ of practical possibilities. The principle of selection and moving toward the optimum entails both ‘taking up’ and ‘leaving out’ in a given condition of experiencing (Steinbock 1993, 298).73 The principle of selection is a sense constitution process that takes up the pregiven sense and transforms it toward the orientation of the optimum which is the selection of the best possibilities within the given context of the experience. Hence, this process is responsive to the conditions of the experiencing that discriminate among possible optima and select what is best for the experience and excludes the rest. Practical possibilities are those optima that are specific to whatever is counted as possible for certain experiences in a certain context. In this sense, the optimal emerges at the very moment of selection and it was not previously there; that is, the optimal arises within the givenness as self-emergent. At the same time those of non-optima which are subordinate to optimal, exclude possibilities. We should note that while the selection of the optimal of the given practical possibilities are specific to certain context and specific to a certain action at the present, but this optimal can be significant for even the future orientations (Steinbock 1995, 150). Therefore, the principle of the selection of the optimal is the process of instituting a norm within the

73 ‘[am Rande] Tendenz auf das Optimum als Auswahlprinzip der praktischen Möglichkeiten’ (cited in Steinbock, 1993, 298). 96 relation of the subject with their environing-world. Put differently, the normal as optimal is a certain relationship that I have with an environing world. When I pick up that optimal as normal by repeating it, that optimal also becomes normal concordantly; this concordant optimal becomes the style of my life in relation to my environing world and that optimal experience becomes the optimal mode of life for me.

The repeatability of the optimal reflects the ‘genetic density’ of the optimal (Steinbock 1995b, 158). The genetic density is the stylization of interaction between the subject and the environing-world by which the environing-world that the subject corresponds to is predisposed by the optima of the subject. In other words, the concordant repetition of the optimal leads to genetic density and in turn, genetic density becomes the predisposition for the optimal. For example, when some plants like mint grows in a soil, that soil becomes toxic for other species of plants, but at the same time, the mint maintains the situation of developing of itself and similar species. This means that the soil becomes the type that specific plants like mint can grow in. Therefore, concordant repetition of the optimal predisposes a certain type of interaction between the subject and the environing-world which creates a milieu that in turn orients and guides the subject to certain actions. Then a milieu becomes normative for certain actions, and the genetic density of the repetitive optimal becomes a typical and privileged basis and context for a certain kind of life (Steinbock 1995b, 159). This way the concordant repetition of the optimal creates a typical way of interacting between the environing-world and the subject that is a typical lived experience for the subject in relation to its environing-world. In this manner, Husserl explains normality as a ‘typical constancy in the comportment of lived-corporeality’ (Hua XIV, 121).

It is notable that concordant repetition of the optimal as typicality also guides the future of the experience in a way that foreshadows a certain normal life and certain mode of the experiencing world which Husserl calls the typical world. Furthermore, this typical world includes the typical ‘I can’, that is whatever ‘I can do’ becomes my typical normal and whatever ‘I cannot do’ is a relation that I have with my environing-world and that becomes my atypical and abnormal. Steinbock calls this typical world that is a typically familiar milieu, a ‘terrain’. A terrain is a typical milieu which ‘is affective in the experience and the constitutive privileged through the genetic density of the optimal’ (Steinbock 1995b, 162). My terrain is a milieu that I count on as my habitat, not as a natural environment, but my typical environment; that is a typical and familiar environment and situation which bears my normal experience. My terrain is privileged among other terrains because it is pregiven to me in experience as familiar. In other words, a terrain is a familiar environment which is the outcome of my specific relation to the environing-world; thus, it has the structure of my practices, my lived-body and my typical manner. We can find the concept of terrain in Boochani’s memoir about the eight year bloody war between Iran and Iraq during 1980s, when people of the Western border region of Iran,

97 used to find asylum on the cliffs, within dark caves and within chestnut oak forest: ‘Do the Kurds have any friend other than the mountains?’… ‘Again, it is those same chestnuts that became the solace for buried dreams’ (2018, 259).

Those chestnuts were proud

Those chestnuts joined in mourning

Those chestnuts from those mountains

Only those chestnuts know how beautiful the dreams of maidens

Dreams resting on the rocky slopes

Dreams dying between the deep valleys, dying young

There alongside the coarse tree trunks

A short life ending inside dark forests

The flee and flight days

Days of terror

Days of darkness

Days of affliction. (Boochani 2018, 259-60)

However, the familiarity of a terrain is pre-reflective and pregiven, that is our everyday-ness familiarity. According to Husserl, a terrain is a normality that is unique to each species.74 By species Husserl means a group of individuals even with some divergences from each other; they maintain a certain relation to their affective environment. Therefore, the terrain involves certain functions or lifestyle.

One should note that a terrain is not merely a material or a physical location. I may go on daily walks in forest with a friend, but my terrain is different from my friend’s terrain who looks for herbal medicine in the same forest that we both walk in. The familiarity of a terrain is more than our interests or what we perceive, or what we attend to. It is more to do with the specific structure that is the outcome of our normative values that we exhibit in our life. Since a terrain is not a physical location and a geographical place, then we cannot relocate our terrain. This means that we may change locations, but we may not sustain our terrain, because we may not maintain the same normative

74 ‘Die Normalitatbeziehtsich auf die Spezies’ (Hua XV, 155-159). 98 relations in the new place. This is because the lived-body attaches to terrain; when my lived-bodily relation to the new environing-world changes, my terrain can be affected, and that new place can become unfamiliar to me and atypical. Since the terrain is a concordantly optimal environment that bears the normatively familiar experiences, if new relations in the new place are unfamiliar and abnormal to me, then I do not have a terrain.

In order to move to the intersubjective level of the analysis of normalization, we can say if the transcendental lifeworld has a normative significance in the constitution of intersubjective relations, then territory that is the geographical and historical constitutive condition for intersubjective experience can attain normative attributes. Territories for Husserl are geo-historical boundaries that are divided by culture and language (Hua XV, 391). This way territory and terrain have certain relations: (1) terrain and territory may coincide and overlap, like a rainforest terrain that also yields a certain geographical space in Northern Queensland. (2) various terrains may co-exist in one territory. For example, a jogger and a herbal therapist may use a single mountain trail as a territory while they inhabit different terrains. (3) we may have different territories that co-exist in a single terrain. I can think of a refugee camp, where communities from certain territories occupy ‘a refugee terrain’. The example of this is the Gaza Strip that is located on the eastern coast of the Mediterranean Sea bordering Israel and Egypt. The citizens of the Gaza Strip are from different cultural or religious or linguistic territories of Palestine, but they all inhibit a refugee terrain. It can be said that the borders or limits of territory are of a normative nature, therefore, from a generative perspective, the normative territory which is already familiar and privileged can be called the ‘homeworld’[Heimwelt] and the unfamiliar, abnormal normative territory can be called the ‘alienworld’. Henceforth, homeworld and alienworld are geo-historically significant lifeworlds which are yielded by a certain normative economy of intersubjectivity.

Intersubjective Normativity and the Structure of Homeworld and Alienworld

According to the aforementioned, I as a living body have personal relation to the environing-world [Unwelt] which constitutes familiar and typical for me by my concordantly optimal perceptions and experiences: that is my typical lifeworld as my terrain. Thus, my normal and typical lifeworld is what is given to me in my lifeworld as familiar. This way every individual has their own familiar, typical, normal lifeworld, and because of this original concept of normality that everyone of us has, we can recognize the unfamiliar and alien. But when we concern the normalities and familiarities that are pregiven within our lifeworld we focus on those of familiar sense constitutions those are took place through generations, historically and intersubjectively; here I transcend those of normalities that are

99 founded in an egological analysis.75 In the Zur Phänomenologie der Intersubjectivität Husserl asserts that:

In order to clarify the intersubjectivity and the intersubjective lifeworld, we need to place the world in the open endlessness of the lifeworld as the only interesting or the interest-environing world extending from itself. But then within this world, what would be my special lifeworld, our lifeworld? (Hua XIV, 241, my translation)

However, the open, real spatio-temporal horizon of the world which is obtained within different determinations as a result of alien people and the alien-environing-world constitutes an alienworld against our homeworld:

The world which in the first place, all humanity shared, now becomes multiplicities of humanities and lifeworlds, as mere community of home comrades based on their territory and their concrete culture. Now within this new world which is opened from myself, I have alien humanities and cultures those are accepted as facts, although I cannot capture alien validities. (Hua XIV, 226, my translation)

This alienworld has alien human beings, realities and embodied people who live in special communities with each other, forming cultures, forming peculiar communities of others, while they are connected by their peculiar convictions, theoretical, axiological and practical according to their peculiar (typically novel) life-purpose configured culture. Husserl engages with the idea that the world due to the unanimity of experience, having one spatio-temporal horizon and one possible individual-real being, becomes valid for us and everyone. It is this commonality of experience that affects the realities and affects all the real individuality of fellow human beings who are bound to the new sphere, but in a horizontality different from ours. Although in my unanimous experience of the world, I can only be acquainted with those that are already valid to me, but this acquaintance also determines the world in which the other person experiences and I am not acquainted with:

Their Being-horizon can only be known in its alienness and the comprehensibility of their environing-world can only be interpreted through understanding the general forms of their culture by indirect means. (Hua XIV, 226, my translation)

While everything that is directly given to us, makes sense to us, we may have knowledge about those of unknown horizons. However, this knowledge of unknown is not the same as having a real access

75‘Zu einervorgegebenen Welt gehörteine Allheitihrzugehöriger, mit ein anderun mittelbaroder mittelbartätiger Menschen, den ensieals die selbevorgegebenist, als die selbepsychologisch konstituiertist: To each active human being, mediately or immediately belonged a pre-given world with a totality of its belongings that is pregiven and psychologically constituted the same’ (Hua XIV, 227). 100 to them in terms of experiencing them. This open spatio-temporal horizon of the world has been previously anticipated by those who lived before us and we continue according to the previous style but:

Of the possible experiences that people are given or anticipated as the experienced, the people who are apperceived as ‘human beings’ of my people's way of life, have the same corresponding environmental world. (Hua XIV, 241, my translation)

Husserl asserts that the world as correlative reciprocal unity stands for ‘us all’ as human beings directly or indirectly, as the experiencing and practical life-nexus. Husserl suggests that the world as an environment-for-living and also as practical environing-world has also an impractical horizon, an unexperienced, an unexperiential, that not only practically abandoned as ‘out of play’ horizon (that would be practical), but there are some horizons that are not applicable for practice. In other words, the environing-world-for-living for humanity has a finite effect as a practical possibility for experience and that means humanity has some practical impossibilities for any further practice on the environing-world-for-living. So my practical world that is my lifeworld is narrowed down in a manner that entails some empty conceptual possibilities that are regarded as practically unfeasible, such as the lifeworld of an island tribe, which has quite an isolated ‘world-vision’ of their world as a finite environment-for-living (Hua XV, 232). This is because there should be a certain boundary like a geographical border as a condition for the lifeworld; when further horizons or other lifeworlds are formed respectively by people, then a homeworld can be formed. The homeworld is a practical closed environing-world that is essentially finite (Hua XV, 232, my translation).

Let me put this in generative language. When Husserl refers to constitution of the homeworld he mentions a co-relativity in construction of my home and the others’ home that is the alienworld for me. This process of co-constitution is a ‘liminal experience’; that is from my homeworld, as a world of unanimous intersubjective experience with my locals, I and we locals as subjects constitute Others’ homeworld respectively. Though, we know that in order to apprehend the alien there is an even more undetermined horizon of experience to be apperceived. In order to have a real explicit apprehension, and experience of the Other, and to make a complete community-experience that belongs to him, we need to get to know their homeworld and everything that is available for it, respectively (Hua XV, 233). As liminal, homeworld and alienworld arise through a mutual delimitation. Mutual delimitation is a two-fold liminal experience or liminal encounter between home and the Other (Steinbock 1995b, 179-82). In this sense, neither homeworld nor the alienworld are the original sphere, as they are continuously in the process of historical becoming and delimitations from each other; there can be no originality assumed for either of home or alienworld since they are co-generative.

101 The process of normalization and homeworld constitution is in fact is a process of genesis of the self as self-temporalization and the Other in an intersubjective framework. This means I as the habitual subject am constantly in the process of inquiry for developing the habitualities and forming the familiar self (Hua XV, 152). Husserl calls this a ‘living constitutive genesis’ of the concrete world for normal human beings (Hua XV, 233). But the same process of genesis of the self and the genesis of community of comrades also happens for the aliens. ‘This constitutive duet develops through the co-constitution of the alien through ‘appropriative experience’ of the home’ and co-constitution of the home through a ‘transgressive experience’ of the alien (Steinbock 1993, 582; 1994, 208). By appropriative experience Steinbock means that while we constitute a homeworld as a normal and typical familiar world, simultaneously the alien is constituted as unfamiliar, atypical and abnormal. My sense of an alienworld is already appropriated by my home-comrades in the co-constitution of homeworld through appropriation and developing the sense of a normal lifeworld.

Appropriation is a form of sense-constitution known as reawakening of the sedimented sense and actively taking up ‘pregiven sense stemming from a homeworld and its unique tradition’ (Steinbock 1995, 180). As Steinbock explains, this form of sense-constitution that is ‘historical and intersubjective’, is initiated ‘in the co-constitution qua reproduction of the homeworld. The appropriation and reproduction of a homeworld can range from the constitutive function of the length and structure of a working day to practical goals and intentions; from social habits and customs like table manners and dietary regimens to personal events such as anniversaries and birthdays; from religious rituals such as marriages and funerals to secular rituals’ such as Australia day celebrations (Steinbock 1994, 208).

Husserl asserts that, ‘in order for someone to be my home-comrade [Heimgenosse] through appropriation, or for us to share the same homeworld, another person needs not to be someone in my circle of acquaintance. They may be an “unknown home-comrade” [unbekannte Heimgenosse], someone with whom I am unacquainted, but who is nevertheless home with me and familiar to me’ (Husserl 1973, 204, 210). We already ‘participate with others intimately as home-comrades without having to know exactly who each other is, by sharing in the same rituals and customs or by undertaking the same work, by bringing to expression our particular generative historicity’ (Steinbock 1995, 224). According to Husserl, a home-comrade is still a co-bearer of our world and familiar ‘even if I have no inkling’ to whoever are my home constituting comrades (Hua XV, 161-163). ‘In the generative dimension of a familiar tradition, the communal experience of our world extends through the chain of generations, forming a home or "generative bond," indirectly as it were, a bond that extends from those who are known to those who are not known or present at all’ (Steinbock 1994, 209). By developing ‘the homeworld through various modes of appropriation (such as repeating,

102 ritual, communication, narrative, renewal, and so on) an alienworld is simultaneously co-constituted and delimited as such’ (Steinbock 1993, 648).

The liminal constitution of the alien has already been in the process even when the alien present itself; the experience of home embodies the sense of the alien in itself. Then if a human’s world is constituted as a historically enduring community, then their homeworld is historically ‘limited-off [Umgrenzt]’ from other normatively different lifeworlds (Hua XV, 139). My homeworld as a liminal world and as a significant familiar historical community is delimited off from the unfamiliar outside that is ‘generally irrelevant’ or ‘unfamiliar’ or not normatively significant in the same way that the homeworld is for home-comrades (Hua XV, 431; Steinbock 1994, 209). Through normalization in this manner, the alienworld is ‘constituted as not belonging to my conceptual system’, my normality, my values and traditions, and so on (Steinbock 1993, 586; 1994, 209). My homeworld in its generative historicity has a specific world-temporality with a specific horizon of familiarity and unfamiliarity (Hua XV, 431).

One can observe that the generative privilege of home and the unfamiliarity of the alien, home as inside and alien as outside, is not conveying the idea of hierarchy. As stated by Waldenfels, asking about whether the fish is ‘in’ and the bird ‘out’ of the water presupposes an abstract homogenous space and time in which an anonymous surveyor does not participate in a lived spatiality and temporality (1990, 29). Moreover, the liminal structure of homeworld and alienworld means that there are no ‘limits’ already there that one can encounter directly, but the limits arise through liminal encounters. That way we can say constitutively, neither home nor alien can precede each other, as they are co-constituted and co-related. This co-dependence and mutual dependence show the essential relativity of home and alien and how in their ‘uniqueness’ they are delimited from each other. In this manner, the structure of homeworld/alienworld is an intersubjective a priori in a process of co- generation.

Conclusion

The homeworld always remains my normative significant lifeworld and the alien is co-constituted through the appropriation of home for me. But there is another liminal experience that Husserl introduces in the process of the co-constitution and maintenance of homeworld/alienworld, that clarifies the manner in which I belong to home and do not belong to alien. The phenomenology of home and homeworld describes a manner of constitution in which I participate; it has started before my birth and continues after my death by my home-comrades. We can observe that for Husserl birth and death become essential occurrences for generative world-constitution (Hua XV, 171). Therefore, even the most normal and familiar sense constitution that is home-constitution has an intersubjective

103 structure from the very beginning. In other words, the very first sphere of normality, as Husserl said, is the homeworld in which I and my home-comrades do not own a home, but we appropriate a home as belonging to a homeworld. I cannot be home, or I do not own a home, but there is a home ‘to which’ I belong (Hua XV, 138). In this manner, home has a temporal-historical horizon that endures through generations beyond my presence; thus, we can say ‘I am born to the home’ and ‘I die out of it’:

We have on this earth what makes life worth living: on this earth, the Lady of Earth,

Mother of all beginnings and ends. She was called Palestine. Her name later became

Palestine. My Lady, because you are my Lady, I deserve life. (Darwish 2003, 6)

The norms that guide our homeworld are our norms, our way of life that we have accumulated. This way of life can be our bodily postures and styles of movement, or habitualities according to our cultural values. Therefore, I may live in a place for a long time, but I cannot call it home because it lacks the generative density of sedimented traditions that all my senses are rooted in. This is the case for refugees or slaves or the Australian convicts who geographically have a territory, but they cannot call it home, since home cannot be given from an outer source and from an external perspective (Steinbock 1993, 728). An example of this is the feeling of homesickness that functions as an experiential diagnostic of not being at home. I bring the next example from Boochani’s memoir, when he remembers the Iran/Iraq war during 1980s:

In the past, we were weary from the war. The war elephants from the neighboring lands had decided to wage battle for many years inside our vibrant and luscious plantation. Their heavy legs and bulging bellies rampaged; every place was crushed underneath them. That war wasn’t our war. That violence wasn’t our violence. The theatre of war wasn’t our production. War was uninvited…. (2018, 259)

In this passage Boochani shows that a war that imposed on the country (Iran) who was born into, was not his own people’s war. For him, homeworld is not bound to certain nationality and is not limited to a geo-political border and the country he was born into, but to a certain land and a certain ethnicity with long and rich cultural heritage.

According to Husserl, I understand aliens as subjects of their home-society and their homeworld, that is alienworld for me. But to what extent and how far I can take over and understand the aliens’ experience-validities; to what extent can I proceed to a synthesis of their homeworld with mine (Hua XV, 233)? As I discussed earlier, the liminal encounter with the alienworld transforms my homeworld in a manner that the typicality of my homeworld stands out. Through such an encounter I do not lose

104 my home; rather, I gain my home in a more intimate mode of accessibility. How about the alien then? How much of the alien who is the subject of the alienworld can the ‘I’ grasp? It seems that the alien is always present at the threshold of experiences of my home, and the initial presentation of the alien is given to me in my home. However, this constant absent presence of the alien demands a certain hermeneutical relation that I am going to engage with, in the next chapter.

Building on Husserl’s intersubjective structure of homeworld and alienworld in this thesis, I propose the idea that the most critical part of knowing and understanding the Other as alien is to concern the fact that Other is not given to me in the manner that I experience a perceptual object. Rather, I experience the other as a ‘lively absence’; that is, the other is always present in its absence in a way that its present is withdrawn from the accessibility of home and as inaccessible. Husserl asserts that the alienness of the alienworld ‘means accessibility in genuine inaccessibility, in the mode of in- comprehensibility’ (Hua XV, 631). I will elaborate on this mode of experiencing the alien in the next chapter. There I intend to examine the mode of experiencing of the alien other and how I can validate the givenness of the other. If the other as alien is not given to me as an object in a mode of ‘presentation’ then what is the mode of givenness of the other? If the presentational experience of an object has a certain structure, what is the structure of experiencing the other?

105 Chapter Four

Vertical Givenness and the Moral Experience of the Alien

Introduction

In the last three chapters I have tried to establish a phenomenological ground in order to study the current refugee crisis as the problematic of the alien other. I have tried to thematize the deep neo- colonial relations that frame our social and political attitude toward experiencing the refugee as an unacceptable, undesirable, and harmful Other. In order to understand such a structure I applied Besinnung to discover the origin of colonial sense-constitution. This led to understanding that, the Middle Eastern refugee is a colonial subject whose collective identity is shaped by the history of orientalism and colonial violence. While the chief concern of phenomenology is to unravel the relation of the experiencer and what is experienced, applying a historical reflection to the origin of colonial sense-constitution enabled me to scrutinize my relation to the refugee as alien other. As I argued in the last chapter, in order to clarify the ‘how’ of givenness of the alien other, we should thematize the intersubjective structure of homeworld and alienworld. Focusing on the intersubjective structure of home world and alien world means attending to modes of experience or access.

Whereas for me the homeworld is accessible or experienceable to varying degrees, the alienworld is accessible and ‘understandable in the mode of inaccessibility and incomprehensibility’ (Steinbock 1994, 213). Steinbock asserts that the alienworld is ‘accessible in a modality different from the way in which the homeworld is accessible to itself’, that is, as inaccessible (1994, 213). In phenomenology, the concept of modality refers to a way of ‘being’ that pertains to the experienced and the experiencer, the ways in which the experience is lived in a straightforward manner, like the modalities of reality, actuality, the ‘I can’ as the ability-to-do, and so on. (Steinbock 2017, 124). In the presentational mode of givenness that is peculiar to perceptual experience, modalities are necessity, possibility, contingency, motivation and so on, which are the ways of experiencing the object and the ways in which object can be presented in the experience.

In this sense, the alien as a member of the alienworld appears at the threshold of my experience of home in a manner that is withdrawn from the accessibility of home. This inaccessibility can be understood in terms of the manner of appearance and the way that the alien has been given in experience. In this chapter firstly I clarify the concepts of ‘inaccessibility’ and ‘incomprehensibility’ of the alien in comparison to the modality in which the home is accessible and comprehensible for me. Doing so I face the question that if the alien does not fit into any of our categories of interpretation and representation of the home, can we suppose any responsibility or any ethical relation to them?

106 Then I need to answer whether this radical inaccessibility and alterity of the Other as alien can be considered as enabling or disabling for having a moral experience of them? Should we not then assume a different mode of experience that the alien can be given to me, not according to certain measurements, but according to its own validities? And if there is a modality in which the alien other can be given by preserving its own validities and normalities, then how does home survive and maintain itself in the encounter with alien? According to the co-constitutive structure of home and alien, is the alien be a threat to home or not?

The Liminal Encounter of Home and Alien as Transgression

The homeworld is a normal territory that exists in the generative density of a tradition from which all familiar senses stem; this means we experience home temporally as an historical development (Steinbock 1993, 725). In this sense, ‘home’ is the intersubjective sphere of ‘ownness’, which is constituted from our familiar world of historical tradition. Historical tradition in this context is a constant process of becoming and ‘productive formation of sense that integrates the sedimented layer of earlier productive formations’ (Steinbock 1995b, 191).

As I discussed in the last chapter, while the homeworld only opens up through a liminal experience of encountering an alien, alienness is always present and permeates the very experience peculiar to home. Husserl calls this liminal experience: ‘transgression’, which entails the becoming alien of a home (Steinbock 1995b, 246). This means, as stated by Bernhard Waldenfels, ‘just as the perception of temporality implies a becoming temporal of perception, so too does the experience of the alien imply a becoming alien of the experience peculiar to their own’ (1990, 29). Steinbock explains that, ‘not only do we become the other of our own tradition through others, also our own home community and homeworld are co-constituted through a transgressive encounter with an alienworld, such that the homeworld itself is transformed in and through the transgressive encounter’ (1995b, 182). One can experience this becoming alien of the home in traveling. Marco Polo describes the places and cities he had visited for Kublai Khan, as Italo Calvino writes in Invisible Cities:

I arrived here [Dorothea] in my first youth, one morning, many people were hurrying along the streets toward the market, the women had fine teeth and looked you straight in the eye, three soldiers on a platform played the trumpet, and all around wheels turned and colored banners fluttered in the wind. Before then I had known only the desert and the caravan routes. In the years that followed, my eyes returned to contemplate the desert expanses and the caravan routes; but now I know this path is

107 only one of the many that opened before me on that morning in Dorothe. (Calvino 2002, 9)76

Not only does the narrator get to know himself in the face of various cities he enters, but the whole concept of homeworld is impacted by this encounter. Marco Polo acknowledges that cities—I would say homeworlds—are not only places but they are constituted by memories:

The city does not consist of this, but of relations between the measurements of its space and the events of its past:….and the three old men seated on the dock mending nets and telling each other for the hundredth time the story of the gunboat of the usurper, …As this wave from memories flows in, the city soaks it up like a sponge and expands….The city, however, does not tell its past, but contains it like the lines of a hand. (Calvino 2002, 10)

As I discussed in the last chapter, for Husserl, the first step towards the constitution of home is through normality and abnormality which addresses the concerns of identity and difference and how it is that something is familiar to us and common to us. In other words, home is not a naturally designated place or static concept, but it is the outcome of a specific living relation that I, as a member of that relation, have with the world and others; it is ‘my normal’, my familiarity. In other words, home encountering the alien is facing the normality and abnormality of home with that of the other. Unlike psychology, which concerns itself with the individual psyche’s normalities, genetic and generative phenomenology focuses on individual normalities which are normalities regarding lifeworlds, and that are instantiated in the concept of homeworld. In the generative sense, Husserl’s intention is to investigate how the generational movement constitutes normal and abnormal in the intersubjective realm of the geo-historical lifeworld.

Husserl asserts that:

[t]he most original lifeworldly sense is the sense of a historical community, for instance, ‘a community living together generatively in a people with a tradition’ as they are co-foundationally intertwined with the alienworld. (Hua XXIX cited in Steinbock 2017, 56)77

76 Invisible Cities by Italo Calvino consists of prose poems that describes 55 fictious cities by the explorer, Marco Polo. These descriptions allow Marco and the reader to meditate on various concepts of culture, memory, time, death and so on. One of the key moments of the book is when the Khan asks Marco to describe his hometown and Marco answering him that every time, he describes other cities, he also says something about Venice. 77 Husserliana XXIX. Die Krisis der Europäischen Wissenschaften und die tranzendentale Phänomenologie. Ergänzungsband: Texte aus dem Nachlass 1934-1937, Kluwer, Dordrecht. 108 This shows that, for Husserl, the most lifeworldly sense is the one that is constituted intersubjectively in the co-relative structure of homeworlds and alienworlds. Intersubjective sense constitution stems from the tradition of home and not the consciousness of a subject (Steinbock 2017, 56). As I discussed in the last chapter, one of the processes of intersubjective sense-institution is the taking up and appropriation of a pregiven sense of our lifeworld and its tradition. Appropriating the tradition is not simply understanding it, observing it and tolerating it, but is taking it up and contributing to its continuous generation. By taking up, Husserl means reawakening and reactivating the sedimented tradition and the historical past of the home as the intersubjective structure of sense-constitution. Indeed, appropriation is a specific relation that I initiate with others as home-comrades and also constitutes the alien and the alienworld through normalization. Appropriation, then, is the manner of intersubjective constitution of home, in which those who preceded us, the present generation, and those generations that follow us, can be integrated intersubjectively in the process of maintaining home (Hua XIIV, 472-75). It does to not merely mimic the tradition but adopts it and establishes a critical relation to it. Thus, without a critical relation to home and its tradition, I would just contribute to the de-generating of the home and to its death. We could understand appropriation as making myself at home, or as the way that I actively make the home myself. This is the process of creating the feeling of belonging: belonging to a home. Being born to a land with its own native culture, cannot make that tradition or land mine as my home, but my dynamic relation to the home makes me feel at home. In other words, we are not born into a home, but we appropriate a homeworld in such a way that we belong to it as a home.

The question, then, would be: How can we do a critical appropriation? As I argued in Chapter one, Besinnung or critical self-reflection is a critical engagement with the accomplished activities that we cherished and served us as fertile soil for our future endeavors in the lifeworld. In this context, Besinnung can be a self-responsible critical commitment to reflect back on the pregiven sense of home in a way that represents the manner in which the homeworld is constituted in relation to the alienworld. Critical appropriation, therefore, is to question the validities and to de-appropriate the normalities that the home culture has taken for granted. Surely, such an engagement with the pregiven tradition involves a risk taking, that is a risk of being called abnormal in the face of what is the sedimented normal. By not taking the risk of renewal of the home culture, we would be left with a picture that Italo Calvino has presented in his book Invisible Cities:

At times even the names of the inhabitants remain the same, and their voices’ accent, and also the features of the faces; but the gods who live beneath the names and above places have gone off without a word and outsiders have settled in their place. (Calvino 2002, 30-31)

109 This self-responsibility with a critical approach to home constitution is not only a conventional responsibility toward the home as a ‘self’, but it endures a constitutional responsibility toward the alien as well. Why so? Because home becomes home through encountering the alien. Therefore, the wellbeing of home co-produces the wellbeing of the aliens of an alienworld (Steinbock 1995b, 255). Critically flowing back to sedimentations of the culture of the home, one can also approach the alien and the alienworld with regards to the inaccessibility and incomprehensibility of the alien and alienworld. Husserl asserts that, the ‘I’ experiences the alien as initially incomprehensible:

Husserl asserts that, the ‘I’ experiences the alien as initially incomprehensible:

The alien that is now coming or should come into first cognition is not one that is readily understandable in terms of the concrete style, that can easily be updated, and confidently created. Moreover, the alien is initially incomprehensible, has a core of notoriety, without which it could not be experienced at all, not even as something alien. (Hua XV, 432, my translation)78

The experience of incomprehensibility is rooted in an experience of break or rupture in the concordant flow of our normal experience. This means that in the encounter with the alien, the alien is unpredictable and unknown in advance compared to the typicality of experience I can find in the encounter with my home-comrades. The alien resists the typification and normalization of home- worldly types; the alien is incomprehensible according to my home-worldly familiarity. Husserl asserts that every home, that is not only my home but the home of the alien that is an alienworld for me is a closed and finite lifeworld. And every homeworld has a home-worldly style that is relatively modified style of the open exterior. By open exterior, he means the lifeworld that is exterior to the homeworld:

For the time being, however, there is the possibility that this world, as the environment of a closed humanity, is relatively preserved, but human life extensions are motivated and constituted, which modify the style of the open exterior, that is, in a certain way, modalize it. When one encounters with an alien humanity the concrete analogy is broken. It is true that the contrast of home or familiar and alien belongs to

78 ‘Das Fremde, das jetzet in erste Kenntnisnahme kommt oder kommen soll, ist nicht ein ohne weiteres dem konkreten stil nach Verständliches, ohne weiteres aktualisierbar ist und kenntnist schafft. Wielmehr ist das Fremde zunächst unverständliche hat einen Kern der Bekanntheit, ohne das es überhaupt nicht, auch nicht als Fremdes, erfahren werden könnte’ (Hua XV, 432). 110 the permanent structure of each world, and that of a constant relativity. (Hua XV, 431, my translation)79

By this Husserl means that, the concept of an alienworld to a homeworld is relative, that is there is an alienworld to every homeworld. Encountering the alien, I cannot foresee the home-worldly style of the alien, which is the rupture of the concrete analogy of my homeworld. As Husserl asserts, ‘the open, real spatio-temporal horizon is obtained within different determinations as a result of alien people and the alien people-environing-world’ (Hua XV, 215).

The rupture of facing an alien can be a ‘light’ disruption in the flow of the normal experience, like when I am surprised in a case when nothing goes as well as I had planned.80 Or for example, when your normal diet involves eating meat, but as you host a vegan friend, you change your diet due to a respect for her way of life and making her comfortable at your table. Nevertheless, this rupture can be categorized under a normal experience that remains intact. As Husserl puts it, normally human existence remains in its normality despite the specific inhibitions, disruptions and fractures of this normality (Hua XV, 231).81

But there is another type of rupture that puts my power of appropriation into question. This type of rupture Husserl calls ‘heavy’ ruptures.82 For example, a parent losing a child, a spouse losing a co- bearer of their home, or a refugee who has fled the land that they once called home. Such ruptures may change the whole horizon of a person’s interests and, therefore, the mode of their life. The heavy rupture puts the horizon of the ‘I can’ into question, in a way that it enquires into the power of appropriation in me. That leads to the experience of a ‘limit-situation’ [Grenzstituation]. A limit- situation is a ‘turning point’ and a point of break in the flow of normal familiarities and the

79 ‘Fürs aweite nun besteht die Möglichkeit, das diese Welt als Unwelt einer geschlossenen Menschheit zwar relative erhalten belibt, aber im menschleichen Leben Erweiterungen motiviert werden und sich konstituieren, welche den Stil des offenen Draussen modifizieren, nämlich ihn in gewisser Weise, modalisieren. Die konkrete Analogie wird durchbrochen, die Mensch heit tritt in Konnex mit einer fremden menschheit. Zwar gehört der Kontrast von heimisch oder vertraut und fremd zur beständigen Struktur jeder Welt, und zwar un einer beständigen Relativität’ (Hua XV, 431).

80 ‘Grade der Störung dieser Normalität: Einzelnes stimmt nicht, verläuft nicht erwartungsgemäss, aber jedes einzelne hat seinen Horizont der Möglichkeiten, und die Störung ist untergeordneter Art, wenn die Anpassung an die übrigen Möglichkeiten vertraut und wohlgeübt ist und das Totalsystem der praktischen Um welt ungestört verbleibt; der Totalstil unseres jeweiligen Interes senlebens läuft einstimmig weiter: Degrees of disturbance of this normality: Something is not right, does not proceed as expected, but each has its horizon of possibilities, and the disturbance is subordinate when the adaptation to the other possibilities trusts and is well-practiced, and the total system of the practical environment remains undisturbed; The total style of our respective interests lives on unanimously’ (Hua XV, 211, my translation). 81 ‘Normaler weise verbleibt menschliches Dasein in dieser Normalität trotz einzelner Hemmungen, Störungen, Brüche derselben’ (Hua XV, 231). 82 ‘Anders, wenn ein „schwerer Schicksalsschlag’' uns trifft. Schon der Tod eines Kindes verändert den gesamten Interessenhorizont und somit den Lebensmodus, das Zwecksystem der Eltern: It's different when a "heavy stroke of fate" hits us. Even the death of a child changes the entire horizon of interest and thus the mode of life, the purpose system of the parents’ (Hua XV, 211, my translation).

111 consciousness. The Other as alien is experienced either as a light or heavy rupture in accord with how much this experience questions the manner in which I appropriate and normalize my homeworld.

By this explanation, the incomprehensibility of the alien means that I experience foreignness as the way of the alien’s Being or the ‘Being-Horizon’ of the alien in its alienness. Even their environing- world can only be interpreted by indirect means through understanding the most general form of their culture (Hua XV, 216). The question then remains: Can home experience the alienworld in its generative density in any case? Husserl suggests that since members of the alienworld have various life goals, habitualities, practical modes of comportments, and traditions they bear their own cultural world that is valid for them but not for others (Hua XV, 214). Here, Husserl regards the alienworld as the homeworld for aliens which has a generative density to it, just like the generative density that the homeworld has for home-comrades. The generative density is the intrinsic historical and historicizing dimension of any homeworld, even the alien homeworld. The incomprehensibility of the alienworld is because of this generative density that I do not have access to. Therefore, when I experience the alien in the mode of inaccessibility it is not because of the rupture it causes in the concordant normative structure of home, and the alien is not the result of an intentional implication of sense, rather the incomprehensibility is the result of the generative density to which I do not have access. This generative density cannot be accessed even if I simply go and colonize their world and call it my own. The alien has a generative depth to it that is only experienceable in the mode of inaccessibility (Steinbock 1995b, 243). Calvino beautifully put this concept in the dialogue between Kublai Khan and Marco Polo:

The emperor is he who is a foreigner to each of his subjects, and only through foreign eyes and ears could the empire manifest its existence to Kublai… Returning from the missions on which Kublai sent him, the ingenious foreigner improvised pantomimes that the sovereign had to interpret…And yet each piece of information about a place recalled to the emperor's mind that first gesture or object with which Marco had designated the place. The new fact received a meaning from that emblem and also added to the emblem a new meaning. Perhaps, Kublai thought, the empire is nothing but a zodiac of the mind’s phantasms.

‘On the day when I know all the emblems’, he asked Marco, ‘shall I able to possess my empire, at last?’ And the Venetian answered: ‘Sire, do not believe it. On that day you will be an emblem among emblems’. (Calvino 2002, 22-23)

Therefore, as Husserl claims, we experience the alien in a mode that is different from the mode that I experience home. Since home and alien are mutually co-generated, then I can claim that I experience

112 the alien. I have access to the alien but in a modality that is different from how I have access to home. In this way of experiencing the alien, I accept the integrity of the limits of the alien and I do not abstract the alien from the cultural and historical density of the alienworld. This is the acceptance of an alienworld that is home to the alien but not to me. The incomprehensibility of the alien does not convey the meaning that we are blind to the reality of the alien. This means that the co-generative structure of the home and the alien necessitates that when I address the generative density of the alienworld and submit to the integrity of this liminal characteristics of home/alien, this is not occupation [Besetzung]. While occupation is to narrow down or altering the limits of the alienworld, transgression is the manner of approaching the alienworld by crossing over the limits in a manner that the limits are brought to attention. Transgression, then, is a liminal experience of the alien from within home. Simply put, in transgression, there is no tendency of reducing the alienness of the alienworld to the ‘same’ and neglecting the generative density to their world that we do not have access. Marco Polo, as a traveler, recognizes and attends to the limit of home in a new way as he passes through each new city and town:

Arriving at each new city, the traveler finds again a past of his that he did not know, he had: the foreignness of what you no longer are or no longer possess lies in wait for you in foreign. Unpossessed places…Elsewhere is a negative mirror. The traveler recognizes the little that is his. Discovering the much he has not had and will never have. (Calvino 2002, 28-29)

‘Crossing over the limits’ from within the home means that I ‘encounter the alien from the integrity of the home’ but in a manner in which the generative density of the alien keeps me at bay (Steinbock 1995b, 249; 1994, 214). When I travel, visiting lands that are alien to me, tasting the foods that are alien to me, I do not adopt the alien’s perspective and their experiences, but I encounter their experiences from a distance. Even though by traveling I leave the geographical limits of the home, I still respond to the limit claims of the alienworld. The transgressive liminal experience of the alien from within the home is a responsive attitude towards the limit-claim of the alien. In this way, Husserl can carry out the gesture of distancing abstention that is peculiar to his phenomenology, that is, advocating an attitude in which the alien as alien comes to relief. To talk about the transgressive approach to an alien is to preserve the logos of an alien and to express such a phenomenon with its proper sense (Waldenfels and Steinbock 1990, 19).

Denying the limit-claims suggests that the alien is accessible to me and can be reduced to home and be submitted to the normative structure of home. Any forms of patriarchy and colonization are violations of the limit-claims of an alienworld. Violation of the limit-claims are not only a violation of the alien limit-claims and the generative density of their homeworld but are also the violation of

113 the limit-claim of my home and its generative integrity. Colonization not only violates the limits of the alienworld but is also a breach of responsivity to the intersubjective co-relative and co-generative structure of the homeworld/alienworld. In colonization as domination, one can observe that the colonizer tries to redefine a new one-sided access and relation to the alien; that is, reifying new limit- claims that are accessible to the colonizer itself. Jane Hiddleston writes:

The Orient for Said is the conglomeration of images and forms that stand for Europe’s other, the colonialist creates his position of mastery and dominance over that other by claiming to define, categorize and know its difference from the self. (2009, 77)

Therefore, not only is the ‘constitutive maintenance of the homeworld through appropriation’ (Steinbock 1994, 214) necessary, but so is the liminal preservation of the alienworld. As I discussed previously, appropriation is a self-responsibility toward the renewal of home. But ‘critically comporting ourselves to the process of appropriation may entail rejecting certain presuppositions of the homeworld, for example, its values and demands, or may entail the renewal of norms of the homeworld, reviving and refurbishing its internal sense, or even demanding going against the predominant normality, replacing old norms with a new ethical normality in an attempt to realize the homeworld more fully’ (Steinbock 1995b, 255; 1994, 214). For Husserl, our lives as wholes, our actions and volitions, and even axiological acts of feeling, desiring, and believing, all are the objects of ethical reflection (Hua XXXVII, 247-253; Heinämaa 2014, 196).83

Since the homeworld and alienworld maintain a co-constitutive relation, if I have a constitutive responsibility toward home, can I imagine any sort of responsibility towards the alienworld and the alien? Due to the liminality of the alien experience, the concept of the alien restricts any possibilities of acquaintance, and the question of the alien is not an epistemological one. This does not mean that we do not have any experience of the alien, as we have already presupposed the existence of the Other. However, the unfamiliarity of the alien Other is a constitutive unknown; that means this alienness is not something added to the phenomena of the Other, but it is the way in which the phenomenon of alien shows itself, the ‘how’ of this showing. A question is raised: If whatever is inaccessible and not-belonging is alien, how can the co-generative structure of homeworld/alienworld entail a responsibility and responsivity towards the alien from the home? In other words, what makes me responsible and responsive towards the total alienness of the alienworld? We need always to be

83 Seyyed Hossein Nasr in Knowledge and the Sacred, writes that ‘the Truth by which human beings have lived during most or rather nearly all-of their terrestrial history…had to be stated anew and formulated in the name of tradition precisely because of the nearly total eclipse and loss of that reality which has constituted the matrix of life of normal humanity over the ages’ (1989, 66). In the final chapter I will elaborate more on the idea of ethical renewal in Husserl’s account. 114 attentive to the fact that while the homeworld and the alienworld are co-constituted and co-generated, home is given to me in a mode of accessibility, whereas the alien of the alienworld is given to the home in a mode of inaccessibility and incomprehensibility. This means that the home has a liminal experience of the alien and the alien is liminally co-constituted with home. The total accessibility of the home to me means that I as a subject who belongs to my home have an intrinsic self-responsibility toward cherishing and maintaining the home through critical appropriation of sedimented traditions and culture of the home. Exactly due to the co-existence of home and alien, my self-responsibility to maintaining the home simultaneously translates into a liminal responsibility toward the alien. Here I talk about an ethical responsibility that belongs to the very structure of homeworld and alienworld as co-constituted.

I assume that the constitutive responsibility is an attribute toward the sustenance of my home and at the same time toward the alienworld. It is a certain regard towards the health of my relation to the home and to the alienworld. By health I mean a kind of encounter with the alien that can endure the generative density of the alienworld and the inaccessibility and incomprehensibility of the alien. Such an encounter, epistemologically, has a mysterious side to it that challenges any claim to grasp and conquer over the alienworld. This transgressive encounter respects the limit-claim of the alien world and reminds me of the inaccessibility of the alien’s generative density. For example, I can never claim that I understand the alienness of a refugee, because I experience the refugee in its alienness. I am responsible toward this alienness by preserving it and not reducing it to any kind of sameness. This is to maintain the mystery of the alien while being responsible for the health of that mystery. How can we then translate this constitutive ethical demand that is mostly initiated from within the structure of the home, into a moral command? While I do not access the alien in the manner that I access home, can I assume any necessity of the moral command by the alien? While the alien other as a refugee is not the co-bearer of the home with me and as I discussed in the last chapter, it cannot contribute to the structure of home as a home comrade what kind of relation I can initiate with the refugee as alien? Further on, I explore one initial mode of givenness that maintains the epistemological relation between the subject and object, and another mode of givenness that belongs to the givenness of the alien. Recognizing this mode of givenness that is peculiar to the Other helps me to scrutinize the source of moral demand that is initiated from the alien.

The next section can be regarded as the methodology that I need for the analysis of the experience of the Other in terms of the modality of the givenness of the Other in experience. Properly setting the methodology will help us to understand the relations that exist within the experience between the experiencer and what is given in the experience, that is the relation of givenness, the given and the givee (the experiencer). For the case of the present study, in the experience of a refugee Other, the

115 refugee as the Other is the given, I as the member of the home and as the host am the givee and there is a certain manner of givenness that we need to scrutinize in the next section.

Alien and the Mode of Disclosure

Phenomenological reflection on human experience scrutinizes the structure of relations that is instituted between I, the world and the Other. Discovering the structure of relations is then the paramount concern of phenomenology. In this sense, phenomenology lets relations appear to philosophical reflection. This relation is the matter of the ‘I’s’ responsivity to the allure of the world and the Other. What I mean by ‘relation’ is a kind of posture that the ‘I’ takes or the ‘I’ posits itself in response to an affection, an appeal, a call, or a demand. It is this relationship that makes the demander, the one who appeals, a phenomenon for the ‘I’. Thus, reflecting on experience means reflecting on this relation first and foremost and then asking how the demander is given to the ‘I’ as a phenomenon. Inquiring into the ‘how’ of givenness is inquiring into the structure of experience and, primarily, into the relation. For instance, the concept of home may never have been appealing for me if I had never left home as a migrant. Home becomes a phenomenon for us when we have a certain relation to it as ‘something which is lost’. Let me explain this phenomenological relation more thoroughly.

In any kind of experience, the manner in which the phenomenon gives itself to the ‘I’ is solicited by the relation of the ‘I’ to it. This relation could be described as a disposition that is ‘evoked by the very givenness of the things themselves’ (Steinbock 2003, 290). This means that the relation or the disposition provides a specific contour to the phenomenon; the subject according to its power of the ‘I can’ can achieve the phenomenon. In this sense, the way the ‘I’ responds to the affection or a demand manifests the contour of the ability of the ‘I’ to access and approach the demander. With this understanding, we can recognize the types of approaches that the subject can initiate to the demands and the allures of a phenomenon, that is, inquiring into the modes of accessibilities or modes of givenness of the phenomenon.

Husserl presupposes a specific mode of givenness that, following Steinbock, I call the mode of ‘presentation’ (Steinbock 2007, 7). Givenness in the manner of presentation [Gegenwärtigung] or even presentification [Vergegenwärtigung] is a givenness that is initiated by an object or has an objectlike structure. So, here we focus on the relation between the ‘I’ and the world of objects. This manner of givenness depends highly upon the ‘I’ to bring things to appearance either with the power of ‘I can’ or ‘I think’. When the ‘I’ intends an object, ‘the object gives itself to the consciousness in such a way that it guides on new ontic themes and new horizons’ (Steinbock 2017, 17). Although

116 givenness in the mode of presentation is not tied one-sidedly to the subject, as within the perceptual structure of experience, the affective force of the object works as a lure that can provoke my intention. Let me elaborate more on the presentational givenness and the structure of perceptual experience. I need to provide the description of the structure of presentational experience in order to recognize whether different experiences and specially the experience of an encounter with the alien Other can have a peculiar mode of givenness and different structure to the presentational experience.

For the purpose of investigating the structure of givenness of an object, Husserl specifically enquires in the Fifth and Sixth Investigation of the Logische Untersuchunge into the concept of consciousness and what it means to be conscious of something. Husserl’s phenomenological reduction formulates this question in terms of objects that are presented to us as ‘correlates of experiences that have certain interests, concerns, and constitutive characteristics’ (Drummond 2003, 70).84 Thus, Husserl’s concern is with the relation of an object (which is intended by consciousness) and consciousness as the subject of perception and how presented objects have a certain significance for the subject. Within this relation, the object has a perspectival appearance (Hua III, 89), that means that the ‘object never appears in totality’ but only in a certain perspective, and the object itself always transcends its appearance (Zahavi 2003, 15). So, the perceptual experience entails a horizon (a nöematic horizon), that is a nexus of referential implications. For example, when I reach for an apple in the fruit basket on the kitchen counter, I only have access to certain angles-perspectives of the apple that is showing itself. While the apple sits beside the bananas and oranges in the basket, I cannot see the apple totally. I know that apples are mostly spherical, that is the nöematic horizon of the apple, however, what I can see from my perspective is just a part of that whole sphere. This perspectival appearance of the apple dictates to me how much I should open my fingers and from what distance my hand can grab the apple from the basket.

Moving from an open horizon of perceptual experience, for Husserl, the relation between consciousness and the intended object is called intentionality. This relation can only be obtained if both of the ‘relata exist’ (Zahavi 2003, 15). Although the object may not ‘always exist as real, therefore, intentionality should be understood as a relation to an intra-mental object’ (Zahavi 2003, 15). This means that intentionality is not an external relation ‘when consciousness is affected by an object, but it is an intrinsic feature of consciousness’. For ‘intentionality occurs in the existence of an experience with the appropriate internal structure of object-directedness’ (Zahavi 2003, 21).85 Every

84 I discussed the concept of phenomenological reduction in the Introduction and Chapter One of this thesis. See also Welton 1983, 1999, 2003 85 ‘That a presentation refers to a certain object in a certain manner, is not due to its acting on some external, independent object, directing itself to it in some literal sense, or doing something to it or with it, as a hand writes with a pen. It is due to nothing that stays outside of the presentation, but to its own inner peculiarity alone’ (Hua XIX/451; Husserl 2001, [603]). See also Drummond 2003; Elveton 1970; Mohanty & McKenna 1989 117 intentional experience has three sides: (1) an immanent content of the act [reelle] that is the act of sense giving, or what Husserl calls noesis; (2) the meaning of the experience that is intentional content, or what Husserl calls nöema; and (3) the intentional object that is the object of consciousness. According to Drummond (2003), for Husserl, the term nöema is a technical term that encompasses the following meanings: ‘(1) nöema is a sense [Sinn] which is ‘broader than the linguistic meaning [Bedeutung]; (2) nöema is the intended object as intended’, that is, the perceived as perceived; (3) nöema also is that ‘through which consciousness relates itself to its intended object’; and (4) the innermost moment of nöema is the intended object itself, that is, the ‘objective something’ to which consciousness is directed’ (73).86

For instance, when I have a perceptual experience of a cup, the intentional content or nöema of this experience provides the consciousness with an immediate awareness of the cup that is intended. In the very same perception, the ‘cup’ is given not as two-dimensional stretches of color or space, but as a three-dimensional object that has other sides and depth, that can be explored and determined. In this sense, the cup transcends the perceptual information that is given in the intending act or the intention of it that can be required in a given nöema. Therefore, we can say that the cup has a ‘nöematic horizon’, which entails a ‘how of determinations’ or the descriptive senses that can be intended and experienced in further investigations. I do not aim to exhaustively speak about the nöema-nöesis structure of perceptual experience, but what follows gives us a better picture of intentional content (nöema) and intentional event.

When we want to ‘investigate the ways in which an act can intend an object, not only can the quality and the matter of the act vary, but also, the mode of givenness of an object can vary’ (Zahavi 2003, 28). In Logische Untersuchunge [Logical Investigations] Hua XIX, Husserl distinguishes three modes of givenness of an object: signitive, imaginative, and perceptual modes of givenness. Other important ones are phantasy and recollection. Putting the first three modes into an example, I can talk about the lavender flowers in my back yard (imaginative), but I can also see pictures of the purple-blue lavender blooms (signitive), also I can perceive the lavender bush by seeing and smelling it (perceptual). For

Husserl, these modes have a hierarchical relation to each other. This means these modes of givenness ‘are ranked according to their ability to bring the object to my consciousness as directly, as originally, and as optimally as possible’ (Zahavi 2003, 28). These modes are also ranked according to their epistemic function or the signitive act. For example, the linguistic act is the lowest and the emptiest

86 Husserl clarifies ‘the nöema: The tree pure and simple, the physical thing belonging to nature, is anything but [nichts weniger] this perceived tree as perceived which, as perceptual sense, inseparably belongs to the perception. The tree simpliciter can burn up, be resolved into its chemical elements, etc. But the sense—the sense of this perception, something belonging necessarily to its essence—cannot burn up; it has no chemical elements, no forces, no real [realen] properties’ (Hua I, 205 cited in Drummond 2003, 73).

118 way that an object can appear to me. Next is the imaginative act that has certain intuitive content but can appear as an object indirectly to me. The highest rank is the perceptual givenness that can present the object directly to us, as it is the only type of intention that presents us with the object itself in its bodily presence (Hua XIX, 646; Hua III, 90-91). Therefore, all types of re-presentations [Vergegenwärtigung] are originated by some ‘acts that refer to a proper presentation [Gegenwärtigung]’. Thus, proper presentation is that mode of givenness which gives the ‘object directly, originally, and optimally’ (Zahavi 2003, 29).

When Husserl speaks about the object being ‘bodily present in perception’ or that ‘the perception gives us the real object itself’, he means the intentional object is in specific mode of givenness, namely, intuitively present (Zahavi 2003, 29). Moreover, when the object of intention is given ‘intuitively just as I intended it to be, my belief’ about the object is true, and ‘I am in possession of knowledge’ about the object (15). Or as Husserl puts it, knowledge can be understood ‘as an identification or synthesis between that which is intended and that which is given’ (Hua XIX, 539), and ‘truth as an identity between the meant and the given’ (Hua XIX, 651-652). Thus, we can conclude that the ‘evidence’ for Husserl ideally is a perfect synthesis of fulfillment, where a:

Signitive existence-positing intention (typically a claim) is adequately fulfilled by a corresponding perception, thus providing us with the very self-givenness of the object; even when the object is no longer merely intended but also given intuitively (just as it is intended), it is given evidentially. (Hua XIX, 651; Hua XVII, 166 cited in Zahavi 2003, 32)

Then, evidence in the perceptual experience entitles ‘the originary, that is the original and optimal givenness’ of the object (Zahavi 2003, 33). Sketching the structure of perceptual experience, as experiencing an object in a mode of presentation, leads us to the core of the problem of alien- experience. As Drummond puts it:

We ordinarily think of the knower and the known as two, as externally related to one another in the world. At the same time, however, we recognize that the object is in some sense given in’ the experience, that the experience in some sense grasps hold of and ‘possesses its object, that the knowing ‘contains’ what is known. From this perspective, the experience and its object are not externally related but internally united. (2003, 65)

In other words, the intentional object of experience is given to the knower or experiencer as phenomenon and it is a sign that ‘makes the essence of the object present to consciousness’ (MacAvoy

119 2005, 109).87 In fact, the phenomenon allows’ the subject to glide over the object’ and move onto its singular universal meaning, within the domain of intentionality. That means that the meaning of the ‘phenomenon lies in its presentation to consciousness’ (110) that depends on the subject’s orientation toward the phenomenon and discloses itself in varying degree to the subject. Sometimes, in the economy of concealment and appearance that governs the mode of presentation and disclosure, the object resists my force of intending in my perceptual horizon of ‘I can’, and thus I find the object exceeds my ‘I can’ or ‘I think’ and I experience this resistance as ‘I cannot’ and ‘I cannot think’. However, even in these cases, this resistance challenges my relation and my orientation to the object and requires me to change my point of departure in order to let the object show itself in its presentation (Steinbock 2007, 9).

In the economy of ‘disclosure’ or ‘presentation’, the ‘outside’ world-the objective world is constituted and produced through various primordial modes of experience. This means the ‘outside’ world as constituted has a subjective density or materiality to it (Steinbock 2005, 121).88 However, we should note that both vectors in the subjective-objective relation in the structure of intentionality are active. That means the world’s affection on me with its nexus of referential implications demands a specific response from me. This conveys that the ego and the world can both be initiators of sense in the intentional structure of meaning-constitution.89 The ‘constitutive duet’ of my ‘I can’ and the affective pull of the object, the intersubjective orientation to the world, belongs to the mode of presentation which has its own systematic rules and interconnections (Steinbock 2007, 9).90 Thus, whatever meaning is constituted within the sphere of presentation, cannot be out of the structure of consciousness, and for the constitutive subject no meaning lies beyond consciousness (MacAvoy 2005, 110).

What about the alien? If the perceptual experience of the objective world -outside world- has a structure of intentionality, then how can phenomenology thematize the experience of the Other as alien? According to Husserl the alien cannot be perceived in the manner of neither a spatial object, like the backside of a cup that is perceived as co-present, nor as a temporal one, ‘like past events that were present at one time, or a future event that may be present at some point in time’ (Steinbock 2005, 122). Since the alien is accessible in a mode of inaccessibility and incomprehensibility, it can never be given in a presentational manner to the consciousness. The experience of the alien is not given

87 See “Enigma and Phenomenon,” In Emmanuel Levinas: Basic Philosophical Writings, ed. Adriaan T. Peperzak, Simon Critchley, and Robert Bernasconi (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996), 65–77. 88 Steinbock mentions that, ‘enjoyment and labor as primordial modes of experience that have the structure of intentionality in the constitution of the outside world’ (2005b, 120-121). 89 As stated by Levinas in Totality and Infinity, ‘this active-active structure which is called intentionality is in the entire sphere of “disclosure”. Disclosure is the sphere of practicing the Same’ (In Steinbock 2005b, 121). 90 See also Levinas 1993, xix-xxi 120 within the structure of intentionality as subject-object co-relation, which means the relation to the alien is not an epistemological one. The resistance of the alien to submitting to the economy of disclosure or presentation, makes it ‘incomprehensible’.

The incomprehensibility of the alien means that it cannot be-disclosed by the structure of intentionality. The appearance and the experience of the alien Other disrupts the sphere of disclosure in a way that calls into question the spontaneity of intentionality and denies the access of consciousness. For, the subject whose primary epistemic relation to the world is the disposal that is the subject-object correlation, the reversibility of the structure of experiencing the Other disrupts this correlation in a way that questions the subject’s freedom of access and approach (Steinbock 2005, 122). The subject in the economy of intentionality, with the power of cognition, is sovereign in wielding power over the objective world. That is because cognition belongs in the relation of the sign and signified, whereas the order of disclosure, the being of beings unfolds as certain objects. However, the alien resists the structure of consciousness and signifies itself as an ‘enigma’. Emmanuel Levinas, in Enigma and Phenomenon, explains that an enigma is ‘not beyond the finite cognition, but [beyond] all cognition’ (Levinas 1996, 71). In other words, the enigmatic characteristics of the alien disrupts and disturbs the order of the economy of disclosure and confounds and challenges the intentionality that aims at it:

Disturbance is a movement that does not propose any stable order in conflict or in accord with a given order; it is movement that already carries away the signification it brought disturbance disturbs order without troubling it seriously. (Levinas 1996, 66)

The enigmatic figure of the other puts consciousness into question in a way that it turns away the intentions that aims at it in order to hold it. Thus, intentional movement gets frustrated as it cannot fulfil and grasp the object of the intention. Unlike the perceptual experience of an object where I could fulfill my experience of an object by changing my point of departure or correcting my orientation towards it, the incomprehensibility of the alien cannot be overcome in this manner. For the ‘I’ as the transcendental subject with sovereignty rooted in the power of consciousness in possessing the object and constructing the outside world, questioning the consciousness will produce a radical challenge to sovereignty (MacAvoy 2005, 113). We may experience this challenge when encountering a person who does not speak the same language as we do or has a specific diet that is not familiar for us. However, the issue of understanding and experiencing the Other cannot be overcome by learning the language of the alien to become accustomed to its tradition. Husserl and Levinas both suggest an incomprehensibility and inaccessibility that can never be bridged; and that is a constitutional in-accessibility.

121 As is evident in Levinas’s words, the disturbance is not only a break-up in the category of order, but it is more than that; the experience of disturbance in the economy of disclosure is not the experience of irrationality or the absurd. The alien disturbance brings about another order that cannot accommodate itself within the order of disclosure, as the order of appearance of the alien is different from the appearance of things to consciousness in the relation of sign and signified (Levinas 1996, 67).

Although Husserl believes that the alien is not given to me like an object in presentational givenness, he believes it is sufficient to mention that the alien is given in experience as inaccessible and incomprehensible. Unlike Husserl, Levinas opens up a new mode of givenness that belongs to the alien, and it can preserve the ‘absoluteness’ of the Other while separating it from a presentational relation. In this way, Levinas offers a new modality that belongs to the enigma; a modality that is not expressed in terms of being unveiled by the force of cognition. This modality maintains the foreignness of the alien to cognition in the manner of an absolute. Although Levinas’s concern in root is phenomenological, he dis-appropriates and re-appropriates the Husserlian terminology in order to introduce new ways of understanding human experience. Indeed, this new mode of givenness offers an opportunity to readdress the alien in a positive fashion and further establish a positive ethical relation to the alien. In Being Given, Marion asserts that when Husserl discusses the givenness of the object, he means that:

And it is not at all a matter of establishing as givens just any apparitions whatsoever [Erscheinungen als gegeben], but of bringing into view the essence of givenness and the self-constitution of the different modes of objectness. That the object can also give itself does not imply that the given must always or first of all be objectified. That objectness offers one mode of givenness does not authorize assimilating all modes of givenness to modes of objectness. (2002, 32)

Levinas calls this new mode of givenness that is peculiar to the Other the ‘revelation’ [Offenbarung]. It is radically different from givenness as disclosure or presentation [Offenbarkeit]. It is noteworthy that the modes of disclosure and revelation are not parallel modes of givenness, but disclosive givenness founded in revelation (Steinbock 2007, 125). Revelation is the manner in which the Other is given in experience; the Other is either Holy or the other human being.

Here, I can reformulate my previous question about the ethical demand of the alien: While the alien is expressed as a disruptive force, and the one that challenges the order of disclosure, how can I have an ethical relation to it?

122 In order to answer this question, I need to analyze the experience of encountering the Other not in the structure of intentionality and disclosure, but in a structure that is peculiar to the givenness of the Other in experience; that is revelation. As long as we emphasize givenness as disclosure and the privileged mode of givenness, the alien remains disruptive to intentional givenness and that means the alien can only be negatively addressed. If this is so, how can I exceed my ethical relation to Other as disruption? Is there any possibility of finding morality in the economy of disclosure, at all?

I believe by breaking off from the restriction of givenness as presentation, we can thematize various matters that are given in experience as phenomena. For example, the alien can still be addressed as phenomenon and experienceable, but not as an object of intention that is given in the mode of presentation, but as absolute value given in the mode of revelation. Being open to various modes of givenness conveys the idea that an epistemic subject submits to the experiences that are not given in a manner different from the givenness of the object as ‘having of things’. Also, it is to accept that not everything that is given within the nöema-nöesis structure of intentionality is ‘evidence’. Simply by accepting other modes of givenness in experience we do not just open ourselves to broader possibilities that are out of the horizonal givenness of perceptual experiences but also is an introduced to new validities and evidences within the experience. Those experiences that surpass the horizonal structure of perceptual experiences sustain different dynamic movement, orientation, and meaning structure from the perceptual experience (Steinbock 2007, 12-13). These are experiences that have an ‘upright’ movement with a vertical order of governing them; experiencing the other person in a manner of revelation is of those experiences. In other words, while the horizonal structure of presentational givenness maintains whatever is reachable, graspable and controllable, the verticality of experience suggests mystery and reverence (Steinbock 2007, 13). If there is any hope of proposing a positive ethical relation to the alien rather than rupture and disturbance, we need to open a space to the vertical givenness of the Other as revelation. I shall elaborate on this mode of givenness following in the next section.

Verticality and Revelation

To challenge the dominance of the traditional Husserlian account of givenness as manifestation and presentation, and to expand the concept of human experience, phenomenology needs to be open to other modes of givenness which do not have an intentional structure of presentation. This is because the Husserlian account of givenness as presentation cannot thematize the givenness of the Other in experience and places the phenomenon of the Other on the limit of the experience of ownness. I would argue that the openness to other modes of givenness is the only way to thematize the ‘how’ of givenness of the Other in experience. As long as the alien is accessible in a mode of inaccessibility and incomprehensibility, we can only have a liminal relation to it, as the alienworld is liminally co- 123 constituted with the homeworld. Openness to various modes of givenness simultaneously broadens the field of evidence that the phenomena has to be validated according to. The distinction between givenness as revelation [Offenbarung] and presentation (disclosure or manifestation) [Offenbarkeit] after Husserl are presented by Max Scheler, Levinas, Jean Luc Marion, and some others (See for example Scheler 1960, 1987, 1973a, b; Marion 1991, 2002a, b; Levinas 1986, 1991, 1996, 1999; Moyn 2005).

As the term revelation suggests, revelatory givenness is a way of being given of phenomena that is unpredictable, non-domesticable, and spontaneous. Revelation can be understood as a mode of verticality that signifies those experiences that have a unique structure of their own, bear their own kinds of evidence and their own specific manner of givenness (Steinbock 2007, 14). This is unlike the presentational givenness of an object, which their phenomenality ‘derived from the intentionality and intuition’ that subject bestows on them (Being Given, 30). Vertical givenness takes the subject beyond itself by provoking awe and wonder in the subject; in this way it is the testimony to the radical presence of the ‘absolute’ within the human experience (Steinbock 2007, 14).91 By absolute we can understand a presence that is so unique, which cannot be predicted and foreseen. Therefore, the phenomenality of what is given in verticality as revelation is not constituted within the subjective intentional structure, but such phenomenon is given as an absolute experience. An absolute experience is the experience of a fully developed phenomenon that appears without yielding previous conditions. I will elaborate more fully on the conditions of perceptual phenomena in the next chapter.

According to Marion:

Kant indicates…the postulate of the possibility of thing requires that their concept of things should agree with the formal conditions of an experience in general. Clearly the possibility of the phenomenon results not from its own phenomenality, but from an authority that is marginal, other, if not external: that of the conditions of experience for and by the subject. (Being Given, 181; Mackinlay 2009, 59-60)

As I stated earlier, in the presentational givenness, the experience of an object sustains inner and outer horizons that can be fulfilled according to my intentional acts. Whether the givenness of an object can be fulfilled or not, merely relies on my ability to usher it in to show itself. In this case, a fully developed phenomenality of an object is, therefore, conditioned by the subject’s relation to it and subject’s participation, authorization, or clearance. However, in the revelatory experience, a

91 In Wonder and Generosity: Their role in Ethics and Politics, Marguerite La Caze discusses the concept of Wonder and the passion the follows it in the experience of the ‘difference’. Building on Luce Irigaray, La Caze believes that ‘against the background of an enormous neglect of otherness and difference, it is important to emphasize attitudes such as wonder’ (2013, 34). 124 phenomenon appears by itself without the clear participation of the subject and, therefore, is not ruled by a priori concepts that regulate the intuitive phenomena. It is important to understand that verticality gives an absolute freedom to the given—the Other—in experience, in order to overcome the relation of power or control in the intentional structure of presentational givenness.

Steinbock explains three main spheres of absolute experience, to which there belong unique manners of givenness that bear their own internal coherence and regulations, evidence, modalizations, and deceptions. These three spheres of experience are:

(1) The religious experience that is the site of experiencing the Holy, and the specific modality of experiencing the Holy is epiphany that has its own possibilities and evidences.

(2) The moral sphere of experiencing the Other person as absolute, and revelation as mentioned earlier, is the manner of the givenness of the Other in moral experience. Revelatory givenness has two dimensions: (a) the interpersonal dimension in which the Other as person is given as absolute value and in its uniqueness; and (b) the givenness of self as Myself as absolute value. Myself is the way in which I receive myself from the Other as not self-sufficient and self-grounded (Steinbock 2017, 130). I will come back to this idea shortly. Manifestation is also a mode of givenness of cultural products and artefacts in vertical givenness in a way that there are icons that manifest the Holy or the Other as human person. Here we should note that an icon is not an object because it manifests beyond itself, for unlike presentational givenness that object affects the ‘I’ to present itself; the allure of the icon stems from elsewhere which evokes absolutes (Steinbock 2007, 17).

(3) The ecological experience which is the site of vertical givenness of the Earth as aesthetic ground. Steinbock calls the manner in which the Earth as absolute ground [Boden] is given in vertical givenness, Disclosure (2007, 15-17). The Earth is never presented as an object for us, but it always discloses itself as absolute ground in perception, that is, the Earth is a ground (Erdboden) and the constitutive structure of our experience of spatiality. The Earth discloses itself as absolute ground for our bodily orientations, moving and resting, as a spatial origin of the very structure and possibility of bodily existence, without which movement and rest would not be possible. I believe that this would be the proper site to discuss Environmental Ethics and climate change issues. Because in this modality nature will not be given as objects that are constituted by the subject and the subject does not have a constitutive relation—nöematic relation—to the nature.92

If we claim that in the revelatory givenness of the Other in moral experience, the Other is given to me as a person and not an object, then we need to have a solid understanding of ‘person’.93 Within

92 See for example Bannon 2016; Toadvine 2017; Gardiner & Thompson 2017; Brown & Toadvine 2003; Melle 2010. 93 See Heinämaa 2014; 2017. 125 the sphere of vertical givenness, a ‘person’ is a ‘dynamic movement and orientation that lives through acts that unfold at the level of spirit’ (Steinbock 2014, 11). This means a person is the one who enacts certain orientations in their life. In this account, a person is not identified with the formal constitution of self as ‘minimal self’, or even as a narrative self that is culturally and linguistically constituted, but in a more general sense as a ‘spiritualization of the concrete lived whole of a human being’ (11-12). Thus, in the sphere of moral experience, a person is given as absolute value in their uniqueness and irreplaceability. In this regard, Husserl discusses the uniqueness of the person due to the creative manners of enactment of certain possibilities. A person as an ego or as a subject, lives in acts and can reflect on acts as a member of the social world. In Ideas II, Husserl suggests that a person is a center of an environing-world who does not merely exist in relations of motivations, but as a subject constitutes the world of spirit in relations of mutual understanding and communication (Husserl 1989, 172-211). A person as absolute does not mean that a person is released from a relation but is released from a relation of being as a ‘thing’ or as an ‘object’. In this sense, a person is already creatively enacted as ‘interpersonal’ (Steinbock 2014, 13). The creative enactments of motivation and orientation are also meaningful within the interpersonal relations.

Interestingly, central to the notion of the ‘self’ as inherently interpersonal, is the idea that within the field of moral experience I experience myself as given to me, as intrinsically situated in a relation and not self-grounded. That means the moral experience is not restricted to the givenness of the Other to the ‘I’, but it can also be understood in terms of how I receive myself as given in a relation. Steinbock calls this robust dimension of a person that is inherently relational as ‘Myself’. An example of this is experience in which I receive myself in certain manner is the experience of ‘shame’. In the experience of shame, I am given to myself – thrown back on Myself relation in a revelatory manner as disoriented on the basis of a more basic or profound orientation which is always positive.94 This positive and profound orientation that shame presupposes is the self-love; the orientation toward my unique becoming of myself.95 As Husserl puts it, loving in an entirely personal manner that is at the level of personhood is an openness to an absolute value of my uniqueness (Hua XLII, 397 as cited in Steinbock 2017, 131).

In this sense, if personhood is inherently relational, what is the first and foremost relation within this relational network between I and the Other? What is the most profound relation that can be reflected

94 According to Giorgio Agamben in Remnants of Auschwitz: The Witness and the Archive, ‘shame is fundamental to human subjectivity because the subject has no content than its own de-subjectification; it becomes witness to its own disorder, its own oblivion as a subject. This double movement which is both subjectification and de-subjectification is shame’ (106). See also Steinbock’Moral Emotions: Reclaiming the evidence of the heart (2014, Chapter 2); Steinbock 2018b. 95 See for example Steinbock 2019. 126 upon within the sphere of moral experience? Following Bernhard Waldenfels in the next section I propose that responsivity establishes an initial relation to whatever is elsewhere.

Responsivity and the Absolute Ought

Bernhard Waldenfels, in the Phenomenology of Alien, discusses how one of the basic traits of human beings is responsivity (2012, 425).96 The use of the terms ‘responsive’ and ‘responsivity’ in the German language commenced in the mid-20th century by Gestalt Psychologists and other ‘behavior theorists’ as well as in 19th century studies of medicine. In their usage, the term responsivity accentuates a ‘non-cognitive, unmediated response to the world or the environment’ that exceeds the cognitive and practical modes of human comportments (Friesen 2014, 72).97 Indeed, we respond with all registers of our bodily experiences: by our senses, by our intentions, expectations, emotions, or even through speaking and actions. As such, responding is an answer to a demand, an inquiry, or an appeal (Waldenfels 2012, 424). For example, in an objective experience, in the structure of intentionality, I perceive an object, with a certain attention that is the outcome of a certain direction and orientation that I have taken in my life. This certain direction and orientation is the response to the object’s allure or affection on me. When I type on the keyboard, I perceive the keyboard as the object of my intention because it makes me able to write and type on the virtual paper. I respond to the allure of the keyboard because I expect that it can allow me to do a certain thing. In other words, responding presupposes a demand, an attraction, an incitement that is initiated from elsewhere. If a human being constantly engages in responding by different registers and within different modes, then responsivity goes deeper than normative structures of communication and we should look for it on a pre-normative level of human experience (Waldenfels 2012, 425). By normative structures of communication, I mean traditional moral discourses that ask, ‘what ought we to do?’ or ‘what is wrong to do?’ What comes prior to normativity and normative communication is the reality that the subject has been already struck by the demand, whether incited by an object, or initiated as a call from the alien. The manner in which the subject responds to the demand or the allure on the constitutional level reveals the type of relation that is initiated between the subject—as the receiver of the demand—and whatever or whoever elsewhere that is the demander. However, for the purpose of this study my focus is the demand that is initiated by the Other as person and as absolute in the interpersonal sphere of experience. Therefore, the interpersonal experiences are the outcome of certain manners of responsivity that I have taken toward the demand or the call of the Other.

96 See also Waldenfels 1996, 2003, 2006, 2007, 2009; Leisel 2016 97 ‘All perceptions begin with something that comes to my attention, imposes itself on me, attracting or repelling me, affecting me. Gestalt theoreticians like Kurt Lewin and Wolfgang Köhler speak of how one is attracted by the general appeal of things. The phenomenon of attention forces on us the assumption that something occurs between me and objects, between me and others, which has no one-sided origin in me’ (Waldenfels, Stähler & Kozin 2011, 63-64). 127 Within the structure of responsivity, I as the receiver of the demand can take various positions, either refusing or accepting. For example, even when I refuse to recognize the Other’s uniqueness and reduce them to the same, I respond to the demand of the Other and its unique call by my rejection. In other words, we are bound to be responsive to demands, calls, challenges, and so on. However, the interpersonal nexus of responsivity has dynamic modalities. Phenomenologically examining the very attitude of accepting or refusing a demand, we may claim that both accepting and refusing are certain orientations toward the demander. So, whatever attitude that the ‘I’ as a human being can have attributed to in the interpersonal nexus is a dynamic movement that ‘I’ initiates in my responsivity. Attitudes as dynamic movements of responsivity are dispositions and postures that I put myself in, and in my responsivity, I enact some postures. Thus, any type of responsive posture toward the demand is a sort of engagement with the demand and initially with the demander.

The inevitability of responding is rooted within the very structure of the I-alien relation. As I stated earlier, it is at the moment that a human being as a liminal being delimits a self-boundary that an alien emerges. This does not mean that I have created the Other, but the act of delimitation reveals the Other to me. The moment I start to set my boundaries as to who I am, everything elsewhere becomes Other to me. However, Waldenfels believes that unlike the Other, the:

Alien does not arise from a mere process of delimitation [of self and other]. It emerges from a process which is realized simultaneously as an inclusion (Entgrenzung) and an exclusion (Ausgrenzung). The alien is not opposed to the same, rather it refers to the Self (αὐτόϛ, ipse), to myself or to ourselves, including the “sphere of ownness” ...from which it escapes. What is alien does not simply appear different, rather it arises from elsewhere. (2007, 7)

Furthermore, delimitation as exclusion can be seen as instituting a ‘relation’ between me and the other; of creating a domain of ‘belonging and not-belonging’ or the sphere of ‘ownness’. In this way, the alien is ‘withdrawn’ from the sphere of ownness in the sense that it does not belong to the experiences of ownness; it cannot be experienced or re-experienced in its originality. This means the alien is present in the experience although not in the sphere of ownness that I have access to. As Husserl puts it, ‘unlike subjective perceptual experience where no things and no aspects of things are denied my access, the alien in its original inaccessibility does not belong to my field of possibilities; the Other is himself before us there, in person, nothing belonging to his own essence comes to original givenness’ (Hua II, 139; Hua I, 109). Such inaccessibility suggests a certain manner of givenness that does not have the structure of intentionality.98

98 See for example Marion 2002a, 181 128 As I mentioned earlier, within the moral realm of experience, the demand can be received from Myself, that is the relational notion of myself. Myself is the manner in which I receive myself from the Other as already relational and not self-grounded. Examples of such demands can be experienced as existential questions like: ‘Who am I?’ or ‘What am I doing with my life?’ or ‘Can I keep doing this or I will lose myself?’ As Steinbock reminds us, these experiences emerge out of situations in which we face conflicting choices that affect who I am and who others are (2017, 119).

In Limit-problems of Phenomenology [Grensprobleme der Phänomenologie], which is known as Husserliana No. 42, Husserl addresses these existential experiences that are experienced as demands and are received from Myself in a phenomenological manner. Husserl believes that the concern of this type of experience is the matter of Vocation (Calling). The concept of vocation belongs to the interpersonal realm where the person is given to me in the manner of absolute ought (Steinbock 2017, 122).99 The absolute value of a person in the moral experience is given as vertical givenness in the modality of absolute ought. In this sense, the revelatory experience of the Other in the moral sphere in fact is the manner I respond to the absolute ought. Also, whatever is given in the modality of verticality gives itself fully, completely (Steinbock 2017,150) and as Marion calls it, in excess (2002b). In this way, vertical modes of givenness are de-limiting and whatever is given, gives itself as ‘absolute’, either the givenness of the Other person or Myself (Steinbock 2017, 130). I will expand on the types of phenomena according to the manners of their givenness in the next chapter. For the moment, it is sufficient to say that since whatever is given in a revelatory manner is given fully, then it is ‘absolute’. Thus, even the demand and the call that is initiated in the interpersonal sphere, because it is given in verticality, is given as absolute, and that is why Husserl refers to the experience of the call as ‘absolute ought’.

The concept of ‘absolute ought’ emerged in Husserl’s late ethical deliberations. For Husserl absolute ought is one’s calling to realize unconditioned values that ‘I and only I’ can realize, and if I do not realize them, I renounce the deepest sense of myself (Hua XLII, 289-420 as cited in Hart 2015, 257).100 In this way, the absolute value of a person can only be given in a manner of an absolute ought. An absolute ought is a genuine, unique personal calling, that can reveal the core of the person, but it only bears on me uniquely and no other. An absolute ought that pertains to all persons in their unique ways, involves actions and beliefs that only every individual can enact if they want to live as who they fundamentally want to be and called to be (Hart 2015, 258). The way that I and an individual enact and respond to the absolute ought, individuates me and identifies me as unique. As Husserl believes, if a person is to be realized as the absolute value, this absoluteness requires the absolute

99 See also Heinämaa 2020 100 See also Hart 2006; Heinämaa 2014, 2020 129 ought (Hua XLII, 201). It is my reception or the manner in which ‘I’ receive or ‘respond’ in my constitutional responsivity to the call of the absolute ought that makes me who I am uniquely. In other words, if responsivity is the basic trait of human beings, and if human being becomes a ‘person’ according to the manner in which they respond to demands, then I would suggest that the most fundamental demand and call of the human person is the absolute ought. Husserl writes:

Corresponding to the absolute demands of the ought is an absolute in the personhood [of the person], a centrality of the [personal] essence. (Hua XLII, 377)

This is the most initial ethical position-taking by a person; it is an ethical posture that occurs in responding to the innermost calling of an absolute ought, and a vocational experience. The moral experience is a vocational experience because it is the outcome of the active ethical orientation of a person, regarding the absolute ought [absolute Gesollte]; an ethical responsivity to the call of an absolute ought, ‘that transforms the whole life of a person into an ethical one’ (Melle 2002, 239; Heinämaa 2014 ). Heinämaa argues that Husserl’s approach to the ethical life is the person’s spiritual activity that reflects self-responsibility and self-shaping [Selbstgestaltung] towards one’s openness and incompleteness of person’s spiritual life (2014, 197). This is why, for Husserl, pursuing one’s vocation gives one’s life a higher value of dignity (Hua XLII, 353). What makes a person’s life meaningful and genuine is this active involvement and pursuit of the absolute ought, which Husserl calls the ‘absolute life’ (Hua XLII, 408). What I want to emphasize here is the matter of responsiveness to the call of the Other in the interpersonal sphere. Husserl mentions that creatively engaging with the call or the demand of the Other makes us unique. This asserts that, while I experience the Other as alien to me, I still receive a demand and an absolute ought from the Other to which I uniquely respond. This interpersonal engagement is much deeper than a normative ethical obligation that moral theories discuss about. Such a dynamic of responsivity is built into the vertical experiencing of the Other.

However, there is a question we need to ask: What is this absolute ought so that the manner in which I creatively engage with, individuates me uniquely? In other words, what is a ‘person’ such that its orientation toward the call distinguishes it as an absolute value? As Sophie Loidolt observes:

Husserl’s new ethical approach not only calls for an elaborated phenomenology of the person (which was not part of his earlier ethics), but also fundamentally changes the concept of how a value is ethically given and what are the decisive elements of preference for one value over the other. (2012, 5)

Husserl believes that a ‘Person’ has three main characteristics:

130 First, ‘persons make themselves into what they are by their free choices and chosen acts, and, as such, they are responsible to their being’ (Melle 2002, 243).101 In the third volume of Ideas Husserl asserts that:

Originally, I am actually not a unity of associative and active experiences (if experience means the same as it does in the case of the thing). I am the subject of my life, and the subject develops in living[…] The ego does not originally stem from the experience, in the sense of an associative apperception in which are constituted unities of manifolds of a nexus- but from life (it is what it is not for the ego, but it is itself the ego. (Hua IV, 252-264; Heinämaa 2018, 100)

All human persons’ habits, characteristics and dispositions are formed by their ‘spontaneous acts of thinking, valuing, and willing’ (Hua IV, 253-257/266-269; Melle 2002, 243; Loidolt 2012, 10-11). These acts do not vanish after the actual performance to give space for new acts, rather they sustain as lasting convictions, evaluations, and decisions. In this way, new acts can weaken and change the previous acts or reaffirm and confirm them. However, a person is not fully spontaneous and free in acting. Persons are subject to two dimensions of passivity; ‘original passivity and secondary passivity’. Melle suggests that ‘original passivity is the ground of spontaneity and rational activity of the ego that always has a tendency and general will toward rational self-creation and world-creation’ (2002, 243). This can be understood as meaning constitution in the structure of intentionality that I deliberated on in the previous chapters. The secondary passivity is the sphere of sedimented previous spontaneous acts that made some patterns or routines of responding and acting (Melle 2002, 243). This means, as Loidolt observes, while the subject has tendency to constitute life-enduring intentions that can become habitualized, the subject also can revitalize those habitualities in an intention of renewal (2012, 10). In both cases, for Husserl, a person has a passivity to be receptive to the unique experience of the ethical call.

Second, rooted in the first aspect, persons are historical beings. A person is concerned about their life as a whole, insofar as they can question what they can do in specific situations, and how to transform their lives in order to have an ethical life. Being attentive to history in fact is an ethical concern. This ethical concern can be enacted through what Husserl call an ethical epoché. An ethical epoché brackets a person’s previous life that was a disoriented, or a naïve life that guided by the unquestioned and uncritical pregivenness of traditions. This phenomenological attitude in the interpersonal sphere, as the ethical epoché is oriented toward a radical ethical renewal that encompasses a radical self-

101 According to Ullrich Melle, Husserl’s later ethics is founded upon an ‘ontology of person’, that is both individual and of the ‘collective person’, and ‘since human personhood is related to a community, individual and social ethics are inseparable’ (2002, 242-243). 131 determined and a self-responsible life by rational position taking which is completely based on one’s own insight (Melle 2002, 244. See also Borràs 2010). When Husserl mentions ‘one’s own insight’, he means that I cannot prescribe certain ethical projects that can work universally for every person and every nation. I can only apply an ethical engagement with home when I have access to it and to its generative density. So, Husserl does not prescribe any sort of ready-made normative prescription for a person to remedy the moral failures of human history. According to a manuscript from 1931, for Husserl, the notion of rational position taking and the ideal of a ‘rational life, is a life of a person who is absolutely true to themselves’ (244): Rooted in the first aspect, persons are historical beings. A person is concerned about their life as a whole, insofar as they can question what they can do in specific situations, and how to transform their lives in order to have an ethical life. Being attentive to history is in fact an ethical concern. This ethical concern can be enacted through what Husserl call an ethical epoché. An ethical epoché brackets a person’s previous life that was a disoriented, or a naïve life that guided by the unquestioned and uncritical pregivenness of traditions. This phenomenological attitude in the interpersonal sphere, as the ethical epoché is oriented toward a radical ethical renewal that encompasses a radical self-determined and a self-responsible life by rational position taking which is completely based on one’s own insight (Melle 2002, 244. See also Borràs 2010). When Husserl mentions ‘one’s own insight’, he means that I cannot prescribe certain ethical projects that can work universally for every person and every nation. I can only apply an ethical engagement with home when I have access to it and to its generative density. So Husserl does not prescribe any sort of ready-made normative prescription for a person to remedy the moral failures of human history. According to a manuscript from 1931, for Husserl, the notion of taking a rational position, and the ideal of a rational life, is a life of a person who is absolutely true to themselves:

The 'I' must be able to look at, survey, and appraise its entire active life in such a way that all the decisions that it accomplishes and has accomplished can be continually affirmed in the will. (Ms. AV 22, 22a)102

Third, a person is who they are most inwardly taken by their love and calling (Melle 2002, 244). This means that a person has their own ethical ideal that is received from the depth of their personhood. For Husserl, a person can do the best in terms of axiological ethical standpoint, but this is not yet to do what ought to be done, because ‘one can do the best without any moral disposition’ (Melle 2002, 240; Loidolt 2012, 4). It is the call of an absolute ought as the call of the absolute value that makes a person’s ethical ideal. It is noteworthy that Husserl believes that everyone has an ethical ideal that is informed by the absolute ought of that person that points to that person’s absolute value. The genuine experience of the ‘ought’, firstly calls me into question as a moral person, and secondly, unlike the

102 Husserl’s unpublished manuscript on Mundane Phenomenology 132 Kantian experience of pure reason, the experience of the ought is not an universal structure, rather is a personal experience of being called by a special value or vocation which individuates the person (Loidolt 2010, 4). The call for ethical renewal, in fact is a plea to an engagement with the absolute ought in a manner in which I can recognize me or the Other as an absolute value. Husserl writes, ‘to go against this value is to be untrue, to lose oneself, to betray one's true “I”, that amounts to an absolute practical contradiction’ (Ms. B I21, 53a. cited in Melle 2002, 244). You see that the only ethical obligation for a person to respond responsibly to the absolute ought, is the self-love and that is the love of true self as absolute value.103

The ethical importance of the ought manifests itself firstly in personal involvement and secondly, it lies in a demand to be expanded as an ethical imperative as an autonomous self-normalization over/above/across a whole life (Hua XXXVII, 247; Loidolt 2010, 6). The vertical experience of absolute ought, first and foremost is the experience of the call or the vocation for a genuine self-love, that is a call for openness to Myself as who I truly am and who to become (Steinbock 2017, 133). Through lovingly receiving the absolute ought, the value of love gives dignity to my life. For Husserl, the life that is activated by loving and in which I acted according to my absolute ought is a genuine life (Hua XLII, 395-397, 423-424). Thus, the core and the absolute value of a person is their pure love that is given to them in a manner of the absolute ought. As Husserl explains:

A distinctive feature, however, is that the I is not only a polar and centering inwardness, thereby accomplishing meaning and value and deed out of itself, but that it is also an individual I, who, in all its presenting, feeling, valuing and deciding, has a deepest center, the center of love in the distinguished personal sense; the loving I who follows a “call”, a “vocation”, an innermost call, which strikes the innermost center of the I itself and which is raised to new decisions, new responsibilities and justification of the self. (Husserl Ms. B I 21, 55a; Loidolt 2012, 10)104

Loving as absolute value is different from objective values. By objective values I mean those values that are given as the objective character of the object, like the value of a cup for drinking tea as instrumental value. The same cup can be given in the experience through the love of the subject, for example, the cup gains its value as it is a gift from your beloved. In this manner, love is ‘an active’

103 We should note that Husserl’s deliberations on the concept of ethics, was a reflection on Europe’s political and existential situation of the 20th century and thus his phenomenological ethics manifests a broader motivation other than his personal impulses and theoretical obligations (See for example Loidolt 2012; Dodd 2017). 104 ‘Ein Besonderes ist es aber, dass das Ich nicht nur polare, zentrierende Innerlichkeit ist, dabei aus sich Sinn und Wert und Tat leistende Innerlichkeit, sondern dass es auch individuelles Ich ist, das in all seinem Vorstellen, fühlend Werten, Sichentscheiden noch ein tiefstes Zentrum hat, das Zentrum jener Liebe im ausgezeichneten personalen Sinne, das Ich, das in dieser Liebe einem ‘Ruf’, einer ‘Berufung’ folgt, einem innersten Ruf, der die tiefste Innerlichkeit, das innerste Zentrum des Ich selbst trifft und zu neuartigen Entscheidungen, zu neuartigen ‘Selbstverantwortungen’, Selbstrechtfertigungen bestimmt wird’. 133 personal decision of an active heart and not a mere feeling, as it entails the factor of choice (Ms. B 121. cited in Melle 2002, 244). The active personal decision of an active heart for Husserl means that subject who receives a certain vocation needs to answer it willingly to dedicate one’s whole life to the call and orienting toward it totally (Loidolt 2012, 9). The values of love take ‘precedence over the objective values’, and all absolute values of persons are equally absolute as they imply the uniqueness of the Other (Melle 2002, 244).

If an ethical responsivity to the call of Myself and the Other is to receive the absolute ought in loving, then we can conclude that initiating a loving relation to the Other is the utmost ethical orientation and behavior that a person can take. As Levinas also mentions the phenomenon of being called and been addressed by a demand requires my responsivity and responsibility toward the call (Loidolt 2010, 12). In this sense Husserl talks about ethical community as a loving community in which every member mutually helps others to realize their true selves. This is because loving ‘is a dynamic movement toward the emergence and flourishing of what is possible within the movement of being as becoming, given through value’ (Steinbock 2018).105 Loving as a movement is both revealing and revealed. This means that, in loving, a person becomes individualized and particularized through their creative and free acts on the level of spirit and in the scheme of the heart.106Also in loving as a revelatory experience in the moral sphere, the Other is revealed fully and as good-in-itself and not according to normative structures of the sphere of ownness.107 However this dynamic movement is not a context and situation dependent, and it exceeds the situatedness of the other person. Where the person as the bearer of value is concerned, their value is not context dependent and the absolute value of a person is above any context. Loving in the manner of absolute ought [absolute Gesollte] is a formal call of ‘to-be-loved’ the person as absolute value. The absolute ought does not have to do with the content of loving or any context or situation, as it can thrive and flourish in creative and unique ways. The experience of such absolute value is a subjective experience that surpluses any objective positive value, as it is the subject itself that is called by this value (Loidolt 2012, 12).

It seems that Husserl’s later ethical deliberations are an effort to make the subject free of the conditions and the normative discourse of home in order to make her/him receive the Other, not as

105 This passage mostly is the outcome of weekly discussions with Professor Steinbock at the Phenomenology Research Centre. 106 According to James Hart, ‘in Hua XLII, especially Numbers 14 and 30 and Hua XI pp. 214 ff., and 226 ff. there are important roles that are assigned to the heart (das Gemüt). For Husserl, ‘heart’ is where the living present’s ongoing synthesis of affections and strivings gives form to a sensibility attuned to values through feelings. The heart is wherein the passive and active syntheses happen and are stored but are ready to come into play and at the right time, release the appropriate feelings in the face of corresponding values’ (2015, 257-258). 107 In his later works on ethics, Husserl is seeking to provide a teleological understanding of the self. This means, for Husserl the self has a rational tendency to have a blessed life of perfection and harmony. This only achievable by answering the call of the true self to become a part of ‘godly person of a higher order’. It is such a call as a regulative ideal that even informs and shapes our practical life-horizon (Hart 2006, 226). 134 an alien to the home, but as an absolute value. Husserl assumes that in the interpersonal sphere of experience, in loving, the subject has an ethical relation to the Other that has released the subject from the constitutional relations of homeworld and alienworld. Husserl does not clearly discussed how loving can makes the subject free of the conditions of home in receiving the Other as absolute value, but I claim that reading Jean-Luc Marion alongside Husserl, we can scrutinize this concept. In other words, we should ask how does loving movement reveal the Other fully as absolute value to the ‘I’ that is deeply rooted in the condition of home? I have used Husserl’s account of ethics as leading clue for reading Marion; that is ‘for Husserl ethics begins with taking position towards an instinct in conscious and autonomous acts of willing, in denying or affirming’ the call (Loidolt 2012, 11).

If loving orientation reveals the Other to us as absolute value, then it follows that loving as the ethical orientation is the manner in which I ought to receive and experience the refugee as the Other unconditionally. By unconditional reception I mean, since loving is not context and situation dependent, then the ‘I’ becomes free from the conditions of the normative structure of home in receiving the refugee as Other. I will expand and discuss this thoroughly in the next chapter. Before reflecting on these questions, I will conclude this chapter in the next section.

Conclusion

In this chapter I have discussed the notion of the givenness of the Other as alien in human experience. Examining experience as the way or the manner in which something is ‘given to’ me, I have discussed the mode and how of the givenness of the Other as alien to me as home. Commencing with an analysis of the mode of givenness of the object and the nöema-noësis intentional structure of experiencing an object, and building on Levinas and Steinbock, I proposed that the Other as a person and as an absolute is not given in a presentational manner of objective experience and that a person does not submit to the mode of objective disclosure. Otherwise, the person would be at the limit of my experience as a limit phenomenon and accessible in a mode of inaccessibility. Such a relation to the Other as withdrawal and as an interruptive force is a negative ethical relation. In order to have a positive ethical relation to the Other, we need to be open to various modes of givenness by broadening human experience.

In order to preserve the enigmatic and mysterious feature of the alien Other, following Steinbock, this chapter proposed that the Other is given as vertical experience in a mode of revelation. In this manner, revelatory givenness belongs to the moral sphere of human experience and is interpersonal. There are two sides in the interpersonal sphere of moral experience, one is Myself that is the manner whereby I receive myself from the Other and there is the Other who is given in experience as revealed. This means that the revelatory experience is both revealing and revealed; it is revealing of Myself to me

135 and what is given in the revelatory manner is revealed. Following Husserl on practicing the ethical epoché, we left the ground of well-established morals as taken for granted to reflecting on moral experience as genuinely responding to the absolute ought, which pertains to every person, but in their unique way and their uniqueness. This analysis concerned one vector of the moral experience, which is the ‘I’ as the receiver and the experiencer. However, in order to discuss how in loving reception of the absolute ought the Other is revealed fully in the moral experience we need to reflect on the type of phenomena that can be revealed in excess. Because, in phenomenology by changing the manner of givenness from presentation to verticality, what is given as phenomenon in experience will have different characteristics than the object which given in an intentional manner. Based on Jean-Luc Marion’s notion of ‘Saturated phenomena’, in the next chapter I will elaborate more on the Other who is given in revelatory experience in the moral sphere as revealed fully and given in excess.

136 Chapter Five

Saturated Givenness: Ethics vs. Violence

Introduction

Engaging phenomenologically with the problematic of the refugee has enabled us to critically investigate the crisis of the refugee as a product of a historical situation that has its own assertions and meaning structure. This engagement is a critical posture of studying the validity claims of what is given in experience by seeking the manner in which something has been given. While scrutinizing the manners of givenness in experience shows how the subject participates in meaning-constitution, it also discusses how the subject becomes responsible towards this participation in meaning. As I argued in the last chapters, the transcendental subject participates in the process of meaning constitution in the transcendental intersubjective realm. However, in the constitution of the sense of the objective world, only normal subjects can contribute (Hua XV, 177-178; Hua XXIX, 68-69). By normal subject Husserl means those subjects who are co-bearers of the homeworld and share the normative structure of the home. As Sara Heinämaa explains:

in Husserl’s understanding, the world is essentially a common field of all conscious, experiencing and intentional beings, but the experience of this communality and sharing of the world is not equally possible for all. (2013, 85)

Therefore, my contribution to the meaning structure of the homeworld is uniquely mine and the responsibility toward this contribution only bears on me. Thus, the only ethical responsibility that can be negotiated in this manner is the responsibility toward ‘home’ where my own generativity is immediately accessible (Steinbock 1993, 772). However, as I maintained in the last chapters, the co- generative structure of home and alien entails an axiological asymmetry that enables us to define a new logic of responsibility wherein home cannot take over the responsibility of the alien (Steinbock 2005, 247-8). Axiological asymmetry suggests that the homeworld and the alienworld are irreducible structures that are co-constituted and co-generated through a process of mutual de-limitation. Using this approach, due to the non-symmetrical intersubjective relation, responsibility is not reciprocal; I am only responsible for the Other without expecting and anticipating reciprocal responsibility from the Other toward me. As Emmanuel Levinas puts it:

I am responsible for the Other without waiting for reciprocity, even if I were to die for it. Reciprocity is her affair. It is precisely insofar as the relationship between the

137 Other and me is not reciprocal that I am subjected to the Other; and I am "subject" essentially in this sense. (Levinas 1984, 195)

Due to the irreversibility of the structure of homeworld and alienworld, and because the generativity of home and alien is not interchangeable, my responsibility for the alien can be understood through my responsibility for home (Steinbock 1995b, 253). This is because I always encounter the alien from the home and from within the normative structure of the home and the alien is only accessible to me in the mode of inaccessibility. Such inaccessibility demands that the home respects the limit-claims of the alienworld. Since homeworld and alienworld bear a co-generative structure, breaching the limit-claims of the alien world simultaneously is the negation of the limits of the home. This means the home establishes a one-sided relation to the alienworld and does not maintain the limit claims of home while it does not respond to the liminal experience of the alien. Such a biased relation also suggests that the home has the privilege of accessing the perspective of the alien in a way that can speak for the alien by claiming that the alien is ‘at my disposal’ and is accessible to me as I access home (Steinbock 1994).

In this sense, my responsibility toward the alien and for the alien is the outcome of a transgressive approach from within the limits of the home.108 I am responsible immediately toward the moral generation of home and also towards the alien in terms of preserving the generative density of both in their irreversibility. Due to the irreversibility of the structure of homeworld and alienworld I am responsible toward maintaining this non-interchangeable generative structure by respecting and responding to the enigmatic feature of the alienworld. As I explained in the last chapter, due to the initial responsivity of human subject, the encounter with the Other’s demand can be unfolded in various ways according to the manner in which the Other is given to me and accessible to me as home. This means that responsivity precedes any responsibility toward the Other; that is, my responsibility toward the Other can be enacted through the responsivity and the manner in which I receive the Other’s call or the demand of the Other. First and foremost, within the intersubjective realm, my responsibility toward the Other can be endorsed by the manner in which I receive the demand of the Other. Thus, I can suggest that the moment of the Other’s call is the critical moment for establishing an ethics of the alien Other within the structure of the home. Bernhard Waldenfels regards such an understanding of responsivity as the basis for his ‘responsive ethics’, and he believes that in responsive phenomenology the phenomenological notion of intentionality has been transformed into responsivity (Waldenfels 1997, xvii). He asserts that:

108 I introduced the concept of transgressive encounter in Chapter Four of this thesis. 138 Responsivity goes beyond every intentionality because responding to that which happens to us cannot be exhausted in the meaning, understanding, or truth of our response. All this is not restricted to the affective background of our cognitive and practical modes of comportment; it concerns these modes in their essence. (Waldenfels, Stähler & Kozin 2011, 28)

Husserl’s account could help us to understand the constitutive structure of the homeworld and alienworld and how the alienworld always remain inaccessible to home. Within such a constitutive relation, the Other is constituted as alien to the home based on the normative structure of the home. However, the problematic of the refugee as alien Other cannot be overcome, and the refugee will always remain at the threshold of the experience of the home. As I discussed earlier, Husserl explained that the Other cannot be given in the manner that the object is given to the consciousness. Thus, the alien’s demand transgresses the sphere of presentational givenness of an object, and it is not given to me within the structure of intentionality. It interrupts and challenges the familiar formulation of the affects and allure of an object in the structure of intentional givenness (Waldenfels, Stähler & Kozin 2011, 36). Recognizing the alien as an interruption to the most familiar epistemological structure for the subject, we can only establish a negative relation to it as an interruptive force. Therefore, we need to reflect on the phenomenological relations within the experience of the Other; that is, to examine the relation of the ‘I’ with the Other in experience.

In the structure of experience, we have two elements that maintain certain relations to each other: first, the ‘I’ who is the experiencer or the receiver, and second, the experienced, or what is given in experience as phenomenon. The relation between these two is in fact the manner in which what is given in experience, is given to the receiver. When I assume that the Other in experience is not given in the manner of the givenness of the object, I ought to expect that the Other does not bear the characteristics of the objective phenomenon. In the experience of the alien Other I, as the receiver, remain the same. If the modality of the givenness changes, then what is given in experience as the phenomenon of experience ought to change respectively. That is why by expanding the modes of givenness to include verticality, the ‘I’ can initiate a new orientation toward the phenomenon of the Other in which the Other’s enigmatic feature can be preserved.

The task of this chapter is to elaborate on the experience of the Other as revelation, the manner in which the alien Other can be given fully as good-in-itself. This examination will enable me to show how receiving and responding to the alien in its alienness can be approached phenomenologically as an ethical disposition. I will do this by considering the characteristics of a phenomenon which is given in a revelatory mode of givenness in contrast with a phenomenon which is given in a presentational givenness through the structure of intentionality. Drawing on Jean-Luc Marion’s account of saturated

139 phenomena that is firstly appeared in his Reduction and Givenness and then a more richer account of this concept reappeared in Being Given, and then in the In Excess, I can study certain phenomenon that does not manifest itself as objects do in presentational mode of givenness, yet still it appears in experience; like the Other (Marion 1998, 2002a, b, 2007; Mackinlay 2010; Gschwandtner 2014). Reflecting on the interpersonal experience and what is given in revelatory manner in the moral sphere, I will claim that the phenomenon that appears in a revelatory manner, is given in saturation of intuition and as a saturated phenomenon that does not submit to the structure of consciousness of the constituting ‘I’. Therefore, the experience of the Other is the matter of accepting or rejecting the demand and the call of such saturated givenness that is unobjectifiable. Then, I will assume that the transcendental ‘I’ by practicing the free will can decide whether to accept the call or abandon it. Abandoning the call means not to receive the Other in saturated givenness and instead tries to denigrate it in a manner that can be constituted as an object; I will call this manner of responding in rejecting, violence. Let me now elaborate on each part of the claim step by step.

Revelatory Givenness and Saturated Phenomena

As mentioned earlier, in order to study the structure of our meaningful experiences, we need to inquire into ‘how’ meanings are given in our experiences, that is, we need to examine the modes of givenness of different phenomena. In perceptual experience, the objects or aspects of objects come to appearance due to a certain relation that they maintain to the perceiver or the knower. Objects that appear to consciousness are given through functions and acts that are suitable to the modality or the manner of givenness, namely as perception, moving, thinking, believing, remembering, anticipating, and so on (Steinbock 2004c, 160). The object entails a horizon of possibilities into which it can appear, according to the relation that it has with the perceiver. However, as I explained in the Chapter Four, the whole presentational experience of an object cannot be reduced to the subjective acts and intentional functions, since the object itself has a certain allure or affect that motivates the subject’s movement toward it. In phenomenology, reducing the human experience only to presentational experiences, and restricting givenness to the mode of presentation, neglects those matters that potentially can be given but are not submitted to, or are not accessible to, the structure of perceptual givenness. It is to abandon them at the limit of phenomenological givenness as not being able to be given (Steinbock 2004c, 161). Restricting givenness only to the mode of presentation and disclosure has two unfortunate outcomes. First, applying the structure of presentational givenness to whatever can potentially be given in experience—like the Holy in religious experience, or other people, or animals other than humans in ecological experience and in aesthetic experience—is to narrow down the whole concept of experience to one specific model and denigrate and reduce them to one type of mental attitude of intentionality. As Max Scheler explains:

140 And there is nothing more disastrous for all of epistemology than to establish at the beginning of one’s methodological procedure a too narrow, restrictive concept of “experience”, to equate the whole of experience with one particular kind of experience and with that mental attitude that is conducive [only] to it, and then to refuse to recognize as “primordially given” anything that can- not be reduced to this one kind of experience. (Scheler 1945, 250. Cited in Steinbock 2007, 6)

Second, not attending to various ways of givenness, some elements of specific experiences, those that are not accessible through the structure of presentation as disclosively given, like the experience of the alien, can be only described paradoxically (as inaccessible and incomprehensible) and as a disturbance of the privileged intentional structure of presentational givenness as accessible in a mode of inaccessibility, or not being able to be given as phenomenal experience (Steinbock 2007, 9-10). Notwithstanding, various human experiences become accountable as ‘limit phenomena’ of phenomenology and are excluded from the phenomenological discourse.

Like Levinas and Scheler, Jean-Luc Marion also argues that the phenomenality of an object always sustains two unbreakable limits (In Excess, 109). First, although in spite of the infinity of approaches that consciousness can take in regard to an object, the object always imposes the finitude of itself to the phenomenon in a way that affects the infinity of lived experience. Second, the object also imposes the limit of finitude of intuition (fulfilment) to the phenomenon. This means that regarding the constitution of the objective phenomena, there is a poverty of intuition that is imposed by the restriction of the horizon of the object itself (In Excess, 109). Therefore, in a constitutional sense- bestowal and phenomenological constitution, the object appears with a degree of visibility, which entails some degrees of the ‘unseen’ [l’invu] (In Excess, 108).109 By visibility, Marion means how what is given as phenomenon shows itself in its givenness. This new aspect to givenness calls for a phenomenology that concerns phenomena as not already given and constituted, but in terms of the concealed and still invisible [nicht gegebnsind].

Openness to various modes of givenness also entails expanding the sphere of ‘evidence’ in a way that sustains those experiences that are not given in the manner of presentation and as perceptual experiences. As previously explained, moral experience that concerns the givenness of a ‘person’ and religious experience, which bears the givenness of the holy, have their own unique structure of givenness and their own set of evidences that are distinct from the evidence in presentational givenness. Although, phenomenologically, moral experience has a distinct meaning orientation and

109 Marion explains three ways in which the visibility of constituted phenomena give rise to the unseen: (1) according to space that concerns the impossible incompatibility of sketches, (2) temporality that concerns the undefined nature of lived experiences given by the original impression, and (3) constitution which concerns the irreconcilable plurality of aims. 141 life-experiential quality from that of a religious experience, both belong to the vertical sphere of givenness, which is testimony to the presence of the ‘absolute’ within human experience. In this sense, the manner of givenness is accentuated in each case according to what is supposed to appear and the phenomenon which gives itself. To give itself in experience, therefore, means to show itself and it is givenness that unfolds the ‘given’.

In the last chapter, using Anthony Steinbock’s analysis of modes of givenness, I reflected on the manner of givenness that is peculiar to the experience of the Other in moral experience. However, when in a certain experience the modality of the givenness changes, the phenomena that is given will have peculiar features that is suitable to the modality in which it has been given in experience. Thus, in moral experience of the Other, when we talk about vertical givenness, or the manner in which the Other is revealed in the experience, what type of phenomena we are dealing with? What kind of phenomena is the Other that is given in moral experience? In order to address this concern, in this chapter, using Marion’s formulation of ‘degrees of givenness’, I approach phenomena by inquiring into the type of phenomena and then argue that the mode of givenness is suited to the type of phenomena that it unfolds (Being Given, 179-247).110

Marion reminds us of the two principles of phenomenality that is known as ‘principle of duality’ and that Husserl introduced in his Ideas I (Hua III, 196; Hua XVII, 257). The principle suggests that in every experience: (1) the possibility of phenomenon is unconditioned within its horizon, and (2) it is irreducible to an ‘I’ (Being Given, 189). Let me briefly explain the concept of possibility that Marion refers to in Being Given. Building on Kant’s concept of metaphysical definition of possibility that suggests a close relation between possibility and phenomenality, Marion argues that:

Possibility does not follow from the phenomenon but, by contrast, from the conditions posited for every phenomenon. A formal requirement is therefore exerted not on behalf of but over and against possibility… (Being Given, 181)

In this regard Kant asserts that:

Whatever agrees with the formal conditions of experience (in accordance with intuition and concepts) is possible. (Critique of Pure Reason, A218/B265)

Marion writes that the phenomenon can be manifested if it submits itself to the conditions of experience by and for the subject, that is to accept first and foremost the formal conditions of experience that arises ‘before the very form (eidos) of the phenomenon’ (Being Given, 181). These conditions give reason to both the ‘possibility’ and the ‘appearing’ of phenomenon; this is to say that

110 See also Gschwandtner 2014. 142 phenomenality is initially conditioned by the subject. But we can see in Idea I Husserl criticizes Kant’s principle of possibility by asserting that:

Every originarily giving intuition [Anschauung] is a source of right for knowledge, that everything that offers itself originarily to us in ‘intuition’ is to be taken simply as it gives itself, but also only within boundaries in which it gives itself there. (Idea I, S24; Hua III, 54)

Husserl tries to set phenomenality free of conditions of possibility that Kant supposed earlier for it, as aforementioned. When Husserl suggests that phenomenon is unconditional within its horizon, he means that within the horizon of apparition, phenomenon unconditionally (in Kantian sense of condition) is possible.

Every phenomenon entails a horizon of apparition of that phenomenon and also needs a constituting ‘I’, who either opens the field of phenomenality or instead decides on its closure (Being Given, 189). The principles of phenomenality help us to investigate the possibility of phenomena by reflecting on these two concepts of horizon and the constituting ‘I’. To reiterate, Husserl’s principle of duality of phenomena reflects the essential correlation between the appearing and the appeared as the constitutive duet in the structure of nöema-nöesis or the structure of intentionality and its intention- intuition correlation. It is evident that Husserl’s chief concern in developing the principle of phenomenality only reflects the possibility of the appearing of the objective phenomena in the mode of presentation.

Nevertheless, in his book In Excess, Marion suggests that in the case of an object that is constituted in the sensible world, intuition, which is the amount of fulfillment, always remains within the bounds of intention (signification). This boundedness to intention limits the amount that an object can show itself as phenomenon (In Excess, 112).111 In this sense, the intentional structure of the givenness of the ‘object forces the constitution to choose, decide, and exclude considerable parts of the intuition that concerns’ the object (In Excess, 111). In Being Given, Marion writes:

111 For Husserl, the notion of ‘evidence’ concerns the idea of ‘ultimate fulfilment’ in the privileged case of perception. He asserts that the evidence for an objective truth to be subjectively accomplished can be considered in experience as ‘adequation’. For Husserl, ‘adequation is realized when the objectness meant is in the strict sense given in our intuition and given precisely as it is thought and named’ (Hua VI, 762). By critically engaging with this notion of adequation, Marion suggests that ‘adequation between intention and intuition is merely a limiting default. Because it is only in the case of mathematics and logic which deal with ideal object - an object which barely gives itself in appearing- can reach adequate evidence. Therefore, adequation can only be realized when we consider phenomena with either zero degree of givenness (the case of ideal objects) or those phenomena that require very poor or weak intuitive requirements’ (Being Given, 191). 143 Intuition is (almost) always (partially) lacking to intention, as fulfillment is lacking to signification. In other words, intentions and signification surpass intuition and fulfillment. (Being Given, 191)

Because Husserl also in Logical Investigations VI asserts that:

A surplus in meaning [ein Ueberschuss in der Bedeutung] remains, because the realm of meaning is much wider than that of intuition. (Hua XIX/2, 775,825)

This shortage of intuition is partially due to the horizon of an object, as Husserl explains in Experience and Judgment:

There is always more co-intended apperceptively than actually is given by intuition- precisely because every object is not thing isolated in itself but is always already an object in its horizon of typical familiarity and pre-cognizance. (Husserl 1973, 122)

However, this poverty, needfulness and deficiency affirms permanence and certitude of the object as phenomenon, because:

The less the object calls for lived experiences, the more easily intention can find its confirmation, and the more continuously it can repeat its aim in an object which from that point is quasi-subsistent. (In Excess, 111)

In this sense, if in the perceptual experience of an object, the infinite intuition is limited by human finitude to give us a definite sensible intuition (the object), then what would be the case for those matters – phenomena – that are not to be given in the manner of objects and demand indefinite intuition or nonsensible intuition to appear? For instance, the experience of natural beings, historical events and the face of the Other (Being Given, Book IV). Putting this question differently, we must ask: If we consider phenomenality in terms of the degree to which they demand appearing, then what is the type of phenomena that does not appear as a lack and with a deficit of intuition? To address this question, we must understand that any phenomenon that appears in an intentional structure, first has submitted to the finite ‘I’ to constitute it as an object, and second it has been reduced to the status of a finite object that entails a horizon. In this sense, can we still talk about phenomena that are given not with a lack of intuition as an object, but as full, or saturated — that are given in an intuition that gives far more that what can be intended or expected (Being Given, 197)?

In the last chapter, I argued that in loving orientation, and when we respond to the call of absolute ought, we receive the Other as ‘fully’ and ‘good-in-itself’. In this section I try to read Marion and Husserl together in order to reflect on the phenomenality of the Other in revelatory givenness. In Being Given, Marion cites Kant’s example of the ‘aesthetic idea’ that, it can never be ‘knowledge’,

144 as an aesthetic idea ‘is an intuition (of the imagination) for which a concept can never be found adequate’ (198).112 This means that the phenomenon that is given in aesthetic experience because of the excessive intuition cannot be constituted as a visible object. However, the failure of the constitution of a visible object is not the outcome of a shortage of givenness or the lack of intuition, but an excess of givenness (198).113 An excess in givenness can be understood as a saturated intuition that does not submit to the constitutive structure of intentionality and thus it prevents the saturated idea like the aesthetic one from constituting an object within the limits of a concept. The excess of intuition does not succumb to the limits and the finitude of the consciousness and thus what is given in excess cannot be perceived and constituted as mere object.

If saturated givenness no longer constitutes an object, then we can conclude that a phenomenon that is given in excess of intuition can show itself without being objectified. This is an important consideration if we want to recognize some types of phenomena that can be given but are given in an excessive manner that overflows the intention. In order to know the characteristics of the phenomenon that cannot be objectified due to the saturated givenness, Marion tries to invert the traits of phenomena that are given in a lack of intuition as an object, by questioning the principles of phenomenality.114 Marion describes the features of saturated phenomenon by comparing it and in its relation, to categories that are defined by Kant in the Critique of Pure Reason, as a priori rules for organizing the sensory manifold. Kant distinguishes twelve pure concepts of understanding which are divided into four categories or classes of three: Quantity (Unity, Plurality, and Totality), Quality (Reality, Negation, and Limitation), Relation (Substance and Accident, Cause and Effect, Reciprocity) and Modality (Possibility, Existence, and Necessity) (Kant 1999).

If we recall Husserl’s principle of duality that I mentioned earlier in the chapter, every object that is given in perceptual experience and maintains the structure of intentionality has a horizon within which it is given unconditionally, and such experience also needs a constituting subject as transcendental ‘I’. Using this principle as a guideline, Marion argues that saturated phenomenon, the phenomenon that is given in excess of intuition, has four characteristics. The first three of them puts the objective sense of ‘horizon’ into question and the last one challenges the sense of the transcendental constituting ‘I’.

1) A saturated phenomenon is Invisible according to quantity. A saturated phenomenon is invisible in the sense that it cannot be aimed at and it is impossible to predict. This is so

112 Kritik der Urteilskraft, Vol. 5, 218 113 According to Marion in Being Given, Kant formulates this excess of intuition in the case of an aesthetic idea as ‘inexponible representation of imagination’, that is, the aesthetic idea gives more intuitively than any concept can expose (Book IV, 198). 114 See also Shane Mackinlay: Interpreting Excess: Jean Luc Marion, Saturated Phenomena, and Hermeneutics. (Fordham University Press, 2009) 145 because the saturating givenness that gives the phenomenon is not limited to existing possible concepts and surpasses the possibilities; thus, its excess cannot be measured, and it is incommensurable. Invisibility in terms of quantity suggests that a saturated phenomenon cannot be given adequately in parts in a way that fits the finitude of the intention. Such phenomena are given in an enormity of limitless quantity so that the rules of successive synthesis should be abandoned for them (Being Given, 200). By successive synthesis, I mean a synthesis – constitution – that is reducible to the sum of possible parts of a phenomenon which is given in its finite parts, such as perceiving an object, wherein a synthesis occurs without complete knowledge of the object but simply by predicting and anticipating its other parts. For example, when I perceive a curved surface of a cup, I synthesize and constitute the whole object as a cup, by predicting the back side of the object as curved. However, this is not the case for saturated phenomenon, as it cannot be foreseen as the sum of its finite possible parts (Being Given, 200-202). Marion believes that an historical event is given as a saturated phenomenon with its intrinsic trait of saturating the category of quantity (Being Given, 228; Steinbock 2010, 121). An historical ‘event’ is a phenomenon that cannot be limited to an instant or a place and it is unpredictable by its singularity; even those who are part of an historical event cannot claim a privileged point of view.115 In other words, an historical event overflows the singularities of those whom experience it. Due to the plurality of points of view and horizons, the phenomena of an historical event cannot be constituted as a singular object as it demands an endless hermeneutic in time. By plurality of horizons, we may understand the immensity of lived experiences that happened, which are only accessible via endless modified significations and endless hermeneutics. As Marion suggests, the hermeneutic of a saturated historical event is in itself enough to create a historical community due to difficulty in achieving agreement (Being Given, 228-229).

2) A saturated phenomenon is Unbearable according to quality. In perceptual experience, the constituting subject can anticipate the intensity of perception; that means the concept of quality allows intuition to fix a degree of reality for the object by limiting it (Being Given, 202). This is because according to Kant’s principle, all intuitions have a degree of influence on senses, but there is a point at which we cannot tolerate the intensity of the intuition that our senses receive and that is bedazzlement (Mackinlay 2009, 118). When saturated intuition overflows the ordinary measurements of conceptual anticipations it does not submit to the magnitude of what appears simply within the horizon of visible. Take for example staring at

115 In Kaiso articles, Husserl put the example of ‘history’ as belonging to the realm of spirit that its ‘spatio- temporal form has an essentially different sense than it has in physical nature, it should also be pointed out that every single spiritual reality has its own inwardness, a self- contained life of consciousness which is related to an “I”’.

146 the sun during midday. We cannot see the whole shape of the sun, not because it has a lack of intuition but because it exceeds the intensity of our usual perception; that is to say we are bedazzled by it surpassing the degree that is bearable for our gaze (Being Given, 204-206). For Marion the example of saturated phenomenon in terms of unbearability and bedazzlement is the Idol.116 In this sense, the work of art, like a painting or piece of a music, are idols, as in them intuition overflows the intended and proposed concept. The intuition which gives the idol as phenomenon of experience, demands that we individually engage with it through seeing it at our own pace by changing horizon and concept. The idol shows itself to ‘me’ by arriving at me and this arrival individualizes me radically (Being Given, 230).

3) A saturated phenomenon appears as Absolute with respect to relation and it cannot be assumed by an analogy of experience.117 Such a phenomenon might impose itself on perception without conveying a substance that can reside in it, or it is not an accident or an effect of a cause or even a result of a communicative interaction. By this Marion means that there are certain phenomena – saturated phenomena – that do not maintain any relation to other phenomena (Mackinlay 2009, 130). In this sense, saturated phenomena evade the analogies of perceptual experience in a manner that is not inscribed by any relational network that can assure its cause or its substratum (Being Given, 208). Therefore, such phenomena is free of any a priori determinations that a common experience imposes on phenomenon, like any object of experience whatsoever (Being Given, 206-209). Being free of Kant’s analogies of experience means that ‘a phenomenon receives an intuition that exceeds the conceptual and signifying frame that it aimed at, in a way that not even a slight gap would remain in the horizon of the nöematic core of the known’ (Being Given, 209). In the case of an object, the concept and signification of the object exactly matches the limits of its horizon, in a way that intuition attains an adequation with intention. However, in the case of saturated phenomenon, the excess of intuition not only attains the limits of signification and concept in terms of adequation, it also fulfils every gap of the yet unknown, and that is surpassing the horizonal delimitations. In this sense, a saturated phenomenon gives itself as absolute, and independent of any horizon in a Husserlian sense that can objectify it as comprehensible. Marion suggests that saturated phenomenon do not depend on the usual conditions of objectified phenomenon and thus they are an unconditioned phenomenon (Being Given, 212). For Marion, The Flesh is a phenomenon that appears as absolute to any relation. This means, my own flesh appears

116 See In Excess, Chapter 3: ‘The Idol or radiance of the painting’. (Fordham University Press, 2002) 117 Marion criticizes Kant’s analogy of experience, ‘firstly that the phenomena must submit to the unity of experience as they appear to the subject. Second, Kant’s analogy of experience is regulative and is restricted to elaborating the structures of consciousness and what appears in it. Thirdly, for Kant all phenomena must appear in the horizon of time’ (Mackinlay 2009, 134-136). 147 to me in a way different from the manner of givenness of a constituted object. Flesh appears immediately as strict auto-affection, a sensation that I feel in my flesh that are my sensations (Mackinlay 2009, 157). This view of the immediacy of experiencing of one’s own flesh is argued for by many others.118 For example In Ideas II Husserl describes the touch sensations and how our own body can touch a physical object and at the same time can feel it has been touched (Hua IV, 145). When I touch a hot surface, I feel the heat not as an additional property to my body, but as the property of my body as flesh. For Husserl flesh is ‘originally constituted in a double way’ as sensing and being sensed (Mackinlay 2009, 142-143). Marion recognizes himself more inclined to Michel Henry’s account of flesh as auto-affection.119 Henry’s account suggests the immediacy of sensation and affection that is raised by Husserl. For Henry, the concept of the auto-affection of flesh is a kind of self-revelation of life that makes other ways of openness to the world possible (Mackinlay 2009, 146).

By now, Marion tries to show how a saturated phenomenon is unconditioned according to the horizon of perceptual givenness. The last characteristic of saturated phenomenon in fact is related to the way in which experiences are lived in a straightforward manner, that simply the manner in which the subject accepts the givenness: Modality.

1) A saturated phenomenon is Irregardable according to modality. Modality determines neither the object of experience in terms of quantity and quality nor the mutual relation of quantity and quality, but it concerns the relation of the object of experience to the experiencer. Instead, modality identifies the type of relation between the knower and known. In this way, modality indicates how an object of experience submits to the power of knowing. Indeed, the amount of agreement between the object of knowledge and the power of knowing demonstrates the phenomenon’s possibility of being known. Marion explains that:

The phenomenon is possible strictly to the extent that it agrees with the formal conditions of experience, therefore with the power of knowing that fixes them, therefore finally with the transcendental ‘I’ itself. (Being Given, 212)

This suggests that modality is the condition or a scene that is set by the constitutive ‘I’ as a transcendental director in order that the phenomenon not just gives itself but becomes staged and shows itself as visible. Or as Shane Mackinlay puts it, the irregardability of saturated phenomenon

118 On one hand there are Husserl’s discussion of body and flesh [Körper und Leib], Merleau-Ponty and his discussion of the flesh and the world in ‘Eyes and Mind’, Michel Henry and the concept of flesh and auto-affection. On the other hand, there are Rudolf Bernet (Une vie intentionnelle sans sujet ni objet?) and Claude Romano (Le miroir de Narcisse: Sur la phe ́nome ́nologie de la chair) who believe that, the immediacy of flesh’s affection always has an underlying relatedness to the world (Mackinlay 2009, 141). 119 See for example, Michel Henry, L’essence de la manifestation (1963), Phénomenologie matérielle (1990) and C’est moi la vérité (1996). 148 makes it irreducibly invisible, which prevents it from being looked at like an object (2009, 159). In the presentational mode, the phenomenon that is given with a lack of intuition, as a poor phenomenon, exercises a conditioned phenomenality (Being Given, 213). What then about a phenomenon that does not agree or correspond to the power of the knowing and constituting ‘I’? According to the presentational mode, such a phenomenon cannot be given or appear at all. Nevertheless, the case for saturated phenomenon is different in the way that the constituting ‘I’ undergoes a disagreement between the potential phenomenon and the constitutive condition of the subject, and the result is that the object of experience cannot be constituted at all. This failure in objectification does not mean that nothing will appear, but instead, as suggested earlier, saturated intuition renders as invisible, unbearable, and absolute a phenomenon in an irregardable mode.

How does this irregardable modality affect the subject or the experiencer of a saturated phenomenon? Whereas the saturated phenomenon is considered as non-objective and non-objectifiable, what is the relation between the subject and what is given in experience? Simply put, if a saturated phenomenon gives itself insofar as it remains irregardable according to modality, then what is given in experience does not submit to the subjective condition of constitution (Being Given, 214). Such a phenomenon escapes all the relation to the thoughts that are imposed on it and makes itself free from any reference to the ‘I’ and categories of modality: The Icon (In Excess, 112; Being Given, 232; Mackinlay 2009, 159). The irregardability and the irreducibility of the irregardable phenomenon can be understood in terms of its rejection of the gaze of any spectators. Mackinlay recognizes two different notions of the irregardable in Marion: the first account suggests an inversion of intentionality; that means, instead of me looking at the phenomenon, it looks at me. This is what Marion calls ‘counter-experience’; that is ‘the experience of what irreducible contradicts the conditions for the experience of objects’ (Being Given, 215). By conditions of experiencing an object, he means that, what is given in saturation resists the gaze as of a mere object and does not have any conformity with objectness. The second account suggests that while the phenomenon cannot be looked at within the structure of consciousness, its appearance requires me to have a certain orientation toward it (2009, 159-160). For instance, the anamorphosis, that is a distorted drawing or project, only appears if I can position myself in the right direction in relation to it. Marion takes a Levinasian turn here in describing the experience of the face of the Other as saturated phenomenon that the face of the Other only appears ‘if I venerate it or when I ‘envisage’ him or her with an openness and “faith”’ (Mackinlay 2009, 160).120 As Marion asserts about the appearance of the Icon, the irregardable phenomenon imposes its own manifestation on me from itself: ‘It manifests itself from itself, on the basis of itself and as itself’ (In Excess 121, 146).

120 For Levinas the face of the Other appears as ‘epiphany’ and not as a phenomenon. However, by phenomenon he means the objective phenomenon.

149 However, the first account of irregardability speaks about a phenomenon that refuses ‘my look’. There is a difference between ‘to see’ and ‘to gaze’: To gaze, as the term suggests, means re-garder, to garder, to keep an eye on something, to conserve, to keep it in sight. To gaze is not merely to see, as seeing is more than perceiving by the sense of sight; it is to receive a phenomenon as it shows itself as visible on its own initiative and its own rhythm and pace (Being Given, 123-124, 214). In order to see, one must become curious, available to submit to the demand of what is to be seen. This only happens if we posit ourselves as a disengaged spectator who let visibility be organized and dictated by the saturated phenomenon itself (Being Given, 124). However, to gaze is to keep the seen under the control of the seer, that is, to keep or maintain the visible under the conditions and initiatives of the visibility which the seer inscribed. In the gaze, the spectator conserves the visible by keeping it in permanent presence, transforming it into a visible object to keep it to the limits of a concept, meaning that the gaze guards the visible in conformity with objectness (Being Given, 214). In this sense, a saturated phenomenon that is given in excess of intuition – the Icon - withdraws itself from the gaze and cannot be reduced to the conditions of experience of an object. Thus, the saturated phenomenality cannot be seen with the eyes, and should be regarded as a non-object that ‘resists the conditions of objectification’ (Being Given, 215-300).

The ‘Icon’ as irregardable, as Marion believes, entails all the traits of the aforementioned saturated phenomena of event (in terms of invisibility), idle (in terms of unbearability) and flesh (in terms of absolute). The icon, as a historical event, cannot be reduced to the horizons and lived experiences that it narrates, as it happens without an assignable end to the hermeneutics of it; thus, it offers a teleology in itself. Also, the icon ‘demands to be seen and to be re-seen’ like a work of art as an idol, appearing in a manner that overflows the proposed and intended concepts. The icon shares the privilege of the flesh whereas the flesh feels by feeling (as givenness) itself, and the icon gives itself ‘to be seen in seeing itself’ (In Excess, 113). Marion’s account of the face of the Other as icon is deeply Levinasian, in God without Being he asserts that ‘every face is given as an icon’ (1991,13).121 The face of the Other does not give itself in a manner that just displays itself like an object among others. The ‘face does not allow itself to be constituted’ (In Excess, 117), as it appears to me as not being able to be gazed at. The Other in return has an invisible look at me and weighing upon me, from which I receive the experience of Myself. In fact by this analysis, in order for the Other person to appear to me, I firstly need to expose myself to them, and this happens when I do not intend to master or constitute the Other as an object but let them show and express themselves without conceptual signification (In

121 Building on the Levinasian account of the ‘face as infinite’, Marion provides a detailed analysis of phenomenality of the face in his books, Being given and In Excess. ‘The face is an organ that expresses the spirit. The expression of the face expresses an infinity of meanings. While the lived experiences of the other remain totally foreign to me and these lived experiences are too complex and intermixed to be put into statements’ (In Excess, 119-122).

150 Excess, 122). This expression without signification does not mean that the face is an unintelligible phenomenon to me. The lack of conceptualization is not the result of a lack of meaning in the face, but it is due to the excess of intuition. Such an excess in the face requires me to see less and to wait more; that is, waiting for the Other to accomplish their effectivity (In Excess, 122). The other person, if they are going to be given as a saturated phenomenon, shows themselves to be unconditioned by my constitutional modalities as self-revelation. By self-revelation we may understand that the face of the Other is a possible phenomenon that is stripped away of any impossibilities and becomes free of all prerequisites that can limit the exercise of phenomenality. Therefore, the Other as a saturated phenomenon suspends all impossibilities (in regard to presentational mode of givenness) by submitting to the possibility of revelation.

As I mentioned in the last chapter, revelation is the manner that the person as absolute gives itself as revealed. Now we can understand that the person as absolute means the person as saturated phenomenon. Such an absolute phenomenon annuls all the relations as it saturates the possible horizons that are foreseeable and initiates its own relation anew (Being Given, 236-238). Revelation then is the modality of givenness of the saturated phenomenon that cannot be constituted as an object or sustain objectified appearance. Saturated phenomenality in its givenness exceeds the very concept of the horizon of the maximum and leaves no gap to be covered. The saturated intuition marks a givenness that exceeds the subjective intentions of meaning-making; however, in itself it has the power of affecting and transforming the subject. Here it is important to explore the manner that transforms the subject as the transcendental ‘I’ into a receiver.

As I discussed in the last chapter, the revelatory givenness is both revealing and revealed. But how can the modality of givenness affect both vectors of the experience, that is experiencer and the experienced? In Being Given Marion asserts that the revelation not only suspends the phenomenon’s subjection to the I, it also inverts it (216). I should note that Marion suggests that the ‘revelation’ in itself is a saturated phenomenon and not a mode of givenness (Being Given, 234; Mackinlay 2009, 178-215). Mackinlay and many others like Dominique Janicaud criticized this notion of revelation in Marion, as they believe by introducing revelation as saturated phenomenon Marion enters the theological realm.122 They argue that this theological turn contradicts Marion’s claims that he does phenomenology and not theology. Although I believe that as long as Marion provides a rigorous phenomenological analysis by applying reduction to human’s experience, does not matter this is

122 See for example ‘Theological turn of French phenomenology’ by Dominique Janicaud’. In Phenomenology and the "Theological Turn": The French Debate (Fordham University Press: 2000).

151 religious experience or a moral experience, he can still be known as phenomenologist and not a theologian.123 In On the Eternal In Man, Scheler writes:

We are no more led by a 'causal inference' from these stirrings to God's existence than we are led to the existence of a red ball by a 'causal inference' from its extended red appearance. But in both cases, something is presented in the act of experience: something transcending the medium of presentation, yet nevertheless apprehended in it. (2017, 35)

However, for the purpose of this study I still use Levinas and Steinbock’s concept of revelation in terms of a mode of givenness that is peculiar to the givenness of the Other in moral experience, that I introduced in the last chapter. I continue using revelation as mode of givenness of saturated phenomenon.

In revelatory experience, while the saturated phenomenon cannot be objectified and constituted by the transcendental ‘I’, it is the ‘I’ that experiences itself as constituted by it as a ‘witness’. The witness ‘I’ is still the worker of the truth as receiver not as the producer (Being Given, 217). Being a witness, the subject loses the transcendental rank as the meaning-maker. This is because the meaning that a saturated phenomenon conveys overflows the available meanings that hermeneutics which is practiced by the finite ‘I’ can offer. The transcendental ‘I’ cannot dominate an intuition that submerges him/her and cannot initiate or master the structure of manifestation anymore. The ‘I’ finds itself witnessing an event that cannot be objectified as a thing. The encounter with a saturated phenomenon leaves its trace on the ‘I’ in a manner that the ‘I’ receives itself from it. This enclosure of the saturated phenomenon constitutes the ‘I’ by what it receives. In moral experience, for instance, when I encounter a person in need on the sidewalk of a busy street, there are certain ways that I can respond to in this encounter: in the first scenario, I can approach that person with a smile on my face, give him some money. Through such an encounter I ‘receive myself’ as helping and generous. In the second scenario I pass the person neglectfully, not recognizing his/her demand. Through such a response I find myself as ‘careless’. As you see, within the moral experience both vectors of the experience are affected by the givenness: the given shows itself through the receiver, and the receiver finds himself as showing the given.

Such a constitutive relation in the revelatory experience recalls Husserl’s notion of the absolute ought: that the manner in which the ‘I’ responds and receives the ought as reception, individualizes the ‘I’

123 Michael Gubser also suggests that: ‘phenomenology shares enormous characteristics with religious belief, including an ethical orientation to fixed values, an emphasis on non-relativity of truth, a concern about modern moral and cultural decay, a desire to embed anomic individuals in communities of purpose. Even the central phenomenological concepts of intention, fulfillment, and transcendence afford ample room for a religious interpretation that finds glimmers of the eternal in the experiences of man’ (2014, 12). 152 (Hua XLII, 353-408). Through revelatory givenness not only the ‘I’ receives what is given in experience as ‘what it shows itself’, it also receives itself (the Myself) from the given phenomenon.124 Thus in the revelatory experience, to receive means to ‘accomplish the givenness’ of the saturated phenomenon by manifesting it (Being Given, 264). That is to act like a prism, like a mediator to let what it gives itself, show itself, manifest itself as visible. Revelatory givenness, first and foremost transforms the receiver to what it can manifest of the given but has not yet been shown. It is the givenness and the gift that constitutes the ‘I’ as receiver and as gifted; I receive myself as gifted and become a receiver as I am affected by the givenness. Imagine how old cameras used to work. When the film, which was covered by emulsion, was exposed to the light, the chemical solutions were affected by the open shutter and the light passed through and created an image. That piece of film was not an image prior to the givenness of the light, just as the receiver that is born out of the very arriving of the phenomenon, which is given in a revelatory manner, and affected by the event (Being Given, 264-6).

As I stated in the last chapter, Husserl’s notion of ‘absolute ought’ is one’s calling to realize unconditioned values that I and only I can realize and if I do not do so, I renounce the deepest sense of myself (Hua XLII, 289-420. Cited in Hart 2015, 257). This way, the absolute value of a person can only be given in the manner of absolute ought. Now with Marion’s framework of saturated phenomenon we will have a better understanding of how the calling of the absolute ought shows the absolute value of the Other person. As the receiver of the vocation of the absolute ought, as a genuine, unique personal calling, the saturated phenomenon that came to the ‘I’ as absolute ought can reveal the core of the ‘I’ as a person. According to Marion, calling of the saturated phenomenon individualizes the ‘I’ in a manner that the ‘I’ that receives itself from what has come to it (the I) (Being Given, 267-8). I receive myself from this arrival of the call, in a way that gives me Myself without giving me anything (an epistemic object) whatsoever (Being Given, 269).

Let’s consider this call as the appeal of the Other: the impact of the Other as the saturated phenomenon of the icon can be realized as a call, appeal, or demand. If as, according to Levinas, the ‘responsibility for Other, [is] going against intentionality (Levinas 1991, 141), then the call and summon of the Other opposes the intentionality by which the ‘I’ aims at and posits an object, that means the call acts as counter-intentionality. The appeal of the Other as icon inverts the intentionality, constitutes the transcendental ‘I’ as barely a witness, by the element of surprise. By surprise Marion conveys that, the arrival of the icon promises no object to appear and contradicts the ‘ecstasy’ of knowledge. While knowledge brings ecstasy with it as it enables the subject to be the transcendental constituting ‘I’,

124 I introduced the concept of ‘Myself’, as the self that I receive from the Other in the realm of moral experience in the last chapter. 153 experiencing the icon overwhelms the ‘I’ by its unknown claim and demand, it is like standing at the verge of an abyss: the ‘I’ who is gifted by the arrival or givenness of the icon ‘ gives all his attention to an essentially lacking object; he is open to an empty gap’ (Being Given, 268). In the moral experience of helping someone in need that I gave earlier, I do not receive anything tangible or objective like in the experience, I do not learn anything of knowledge, but I only find myself as generous or careless. I become a witness to how the demand of the Other gives me as something or bearing a certain trait.

There remains the question of how the ‘I’ can prepare itself and open itself up for this surprise? What kind of a relation between the ‘I’ and the Other can result in this reception? Can we call such a relation a moral one? And is there any chance for establishing a moral relation other than this openness and willingness to receive? These questions are the focus of the next section.

The Call and Loving

Let me commence to these inquiries by looking at the call and types of relations that the ‘I’ can stablish vis-à-vis the call. As we read in the last chapter, Husserl’s later deliberations on the ethical lead to introduction of the concept of absolute ought that reveal the absolute value of the person. However, Husserl does not really scrutinize the way in which the call can reveal the person’s inner and absolute value. In Otherwise than Being Levinas assert that ‘the call is heard in the response’: this means, as the call appeals for manifestation, it is the ‘I’ as receiver that lends itself to its reception and maintains its impact as an event (Being Given, 287). In fact, the call appears within a horizon of visibility that is initiated by the receiver, and what gives itself as call or appeal shows itself in and through the response to it by the ‘I’ as the receiver. Although due to the finitude of the receiver as the operator, the given, the call, gives itself fully, the given cannot show itself fully to the receiver, but always in limits and in reserve. This is an essential poverty of the receiver due to their finitude. Again, in the example of encountering a person in need, what I receive in the experience of approaching the person in generosity, what can be given in experience is the totality of the trait of generosity. But this infinite generosity can be shown in me in a small manner of giving some money to the needy person, and not more than that. In moral experience, whatever is given, is given in excess, but I can only show it partly according to my limitations and due to my essential poverty.

However, there is another poverty that has more historical and ethical significance. This poverty concerns the process of ‘admitting’ and ‘disposing’ oneself to receive the call as given. When one choses or decides ‘to see’ in terms of giving oneself over to the given, in order to show itself, this choice of the ‘I’ transforms the call into what shows itself to be seen and to be heard (Steinbock 2018, 97). This is an ‘immanent decision’ to dispose oneself and to lend oneself to the given to arrive and

154 speak through us and to show itself through us: the ‘wanting’ to see the saturated phenomenon through responding to the call of arrival. The lack of wanting and responding to the call in refusing and the lack of self-disposal, is not just rejecting seeing and manifesting the appeal, but more than that, it is a refusal to receive oneself from the call in an interpersonal nexus. In the example of approaching the person in need, the rejection of the appeal of that person, in fact is the rejection of the given as generosity. By refusing to help or even neglecting or being careless about that person, it is me that first and foremost is going to be affected. It is me that has decided not to find myself in generosity.

Thus, there is no cure for the blindness that is the result of not wanting to see, because prior to any understanding is the inclination of the ‘will’. As stated by Marion, the scope of the will is wider than that of the understanding and thus, prior to any disposal it is ‘will’ that determines what appears and what understanding can attain (Being Given, 305). Admitting the arrival and wanting to receive oneself from what gives itself is disposing oneself to what is given in order to see what shows itself. Therefore, the will to respond precedes the possibility of seeing and understanding.

Even though in this wanting the responder does not know what exactly it wants, an immanent decision to see and then to know is first necessary. This is a decision to find oneself in charge of receiving or denying the given, in order that the given shows itself; this is to be in charge of the opening or closure of the flux of phenomenality (Being Given, 307). What underpins this receiving and manifesting is not an intentional constitution of the call of saturated phenomenon according to an anticipatory determination, but it is the ‘will to see’. By this immanent decision, the ‘I’ becomes responsible to all that is given in the call and to transforming it into the visible. Marion asserts that this immanent decision is the existential situation of the receiver of the call, in a way that one is condemned to dispose oneself to the Other person as icon and to receive oneself from this disposition (Being Given, 307). In order to see the Other as given in the call, one needs to lend oneself to the given, like a phenomenological prism to transmit the unseen light and manifest the colorful lights. We are condemned to practice the free will to choose and this existential situation makes us responsible towards ourselves and the Other.

It seems that reception and the willingness to see requires an orientation toward what gives itself in the call. In the interpersonal sphere, in order to open the flux of phenomenality the ‘I’ needs to initiate a certain relation to the call of the icon. The willingness to receive and to see makes the ‘I’ responsible towards the call and consequently to the Other. Therefore, the orientation toward the call is initially an ethical position-taking, in which the ‘I’ actively participates with the Other by lending itself to the saturation of the call-of-the given in order to show itself. I will not call such participation a passivity as it is the result of an active position-taking and active orientation. As the call arrives, the ‘I’ actively

155 orients itself in a manner in which it participates with the given in order to manifest what gives itself. This ethical disposal transforms the ‘I’ and individualizes it from being the transcendental constituting subject, into a witness whose whole life will become an ethical one. Such an orientation can be known as ‘loving’.

As I mentioned in the last chapter, for Husserl loving as absolute value is an ethical responsivity to the demand and the absolute ought that reveal the uniqueness of the person. In loving, the ‘I’ orients itself toward the Other as bearer of absolute value, as what is given in excess of intuition. In this sense, loving is not contextual, but itself creates the loving situation and context. For Husserl, loving is a movement, an orientation that is both revealing and revealed. It is in loving that the call of the icon can reveal itself through me in order to manifest it in its givenness. Since the ’I’ lends itself to the given, the given individualizes the ‘I’ as the receiver in its unique way. If the ultimate goal of the phenomenon is that ‘what gives itself, shows itself’, then loving as moving and orienting oneself is a movement toward the perfection of the given.

While loving is a movement toward perfection and perfecting the Other, the ‘I’ receives itself from within such a relation of perfecting. That means that the active and creative orienting toward the given in excess is not to constitute the Other as normal, concordant, or according to a pregiven set of norms and goals, but it is directed toward the Other in their uniqueness and saturation. In loving as moral experience I receive myself and the Other in the interpersonal sphere as the be-loved. In the interpersonal sphere, loving orientation, as the disposition towards the acceptance of the call, in saturation originates moral value-qualities that creatively open oneself to the depths and modulations that may have never previously been experienced and known in the life of a person. In that sense, in loving as a vertical and revelatory experience, we cannot speak of proper or adequate loving, because loving is not measured according to presumed norms. Loving is a never-ending, infinite movement that can reach deeper intensity and depth, but never constitutes the beloved as normal and concordant or discordant. In the movement of loving, I am oriented toward the Other or (Myself as beloved) in terms of their own way of being as bearer of absolute value. In loving as vertical experience, the Other as beloved is not given as an anticipated or pregiven goal, but it is given according to its own value-essence.

Thus, having a moral experience of the Other in the interpersonal sphere can only be achievable while the ‘I’ orients itself in the movement of loving toward the call with an open reception. Thus, moral experience of the Other in the interpersonal sphere can only be achievable while the ‘I’ orients itself in the movement of loving toward the call with an open reception. Finding oneself responsible for and in charge of manifesting the Other who is given in saturation as icon, in one’s willingness to see, is to initiate a moral relation to the Other. It is only in the movement of loving that we initiate a moral

156 relation to the Other as bearer of the absolute value that cannot be given as object. What is ‘revealed’ in the saturated givenness of the Icon is founded in loving and such an experience of the Other is led by the very way of givenness itself that is verticality. Initiating the loving orientation is an active engagement and participating with the Other makes it possible for what is given through revelation to be manifested and made visible by and through the receiver. In the loving relation, the ‘I’ as witness is given the gift of absolute value of a person by the saturated givenness. In fact, the moral responsibility of the ‘I’ emerges in the moment of the immanent decision of the willingness or not wanting to see the gift. Taking up the call is to accept the responsibility toward the Other in the orientation of loving and abandoning the call is to reject the responsibility and neglect the reception of the given in excess as bearer of absolute value. Thus, it seems to me that to abandon the call is to leave the moral sphere of experience and initiate a subject-object relation to the Other as denigrated phenomenon. I expand this claim further in this chapter.

Abandoning the Call and Violence

In the last four chapters, I tried to examine the experience of encountering the refugee as alien Other. First, applying Husserlian Besinnung, I claimed that what a detained refugee experiences in the Australian border control system is rooted in the colonial history of the country. To establish this claim I deliberated on the co-generative concepts of homeworld and alienworld and showed that the constitution of the concept of home is the outcome of the normalization process. In this sense, the home is the normal lifeworld and the most familiar structure that one knows. The person always encounters the Other as alien from within the familiar structure of the home, and thus the hospitality and the reception of the Other as alien resides at the threshold of the home. This means that hospitality toward the refugee as alien to home is conditioned by the normative structure of the home. In order to overcome this limitation, I had to move one step backward to the moment that the ‘I’ encounters the Other: this is a moment prior to the transcendental constitution of the alien by the home. Within that moment I can encounter the Other as absolute value, as good-in-itself. The orientation that I initiate toward the Other as absolute value is ‘loving’, that I discussed in the previous section. However, if I resist receiving the Other as the bearer of absolute value, then I will not experience the Other in their uniqueness and therefore I do not have any ethical relation to the Other. Here I aim to expand this claim by examining another type of attitude toward the Other that is not loving.

Phenomenologically, any attitude that can be attributed to the ‘I’ as a human being in the interpersonal nexus, is a dynamic movement that the ‘I’ initiates in its responsivity to the demand of the Other. If loving is a dynamic movement toward the Other as bearer of absolute value, then it seems that it is

157 only in such a relation and orientation that the ‘I’ accepts showing and manifesting the given in the call as saturated phenomenon. I also noted that the reception of the call and willingness of the ‘I’ to dispose itself to the given can be manifested through the ‘I’ always happens in limits and in reserve due to the essential finitude of the ‘I’. However, this shortage of showing and manifesting as an essential poverty of the finite ‘I’ cannot be regarded as an unethical disposition toward the givenness of the Other. As Marion asserts:

Givenness often gives the given without measure, but the gifted always keeps within its limits. By excess or by default, givenness must in many cases renounce appearing- be restricted to abandon. Phenomenality always admits limits, precisely because givenness, which transgresses them, gives itself over only to my finitude. (Being Given, 319)

The essential poverty, which is peculiar to every kind of ‘seeing’ or ‘receiving’ due to the finitude of the receiver, is not something that we can cure, and we should consider it as the essential structure of the ‘I’, and therefore, such poverty as Steinbock discussed may not be called poverty as such (2018). As I mentioned earlier, there is another kind of poverty that is related to the willingness of the subject to receive the saturated phenomenon in revelation. In dismissing a reception of the call and not wanting to dispose oneself to the Other to receive it in saturation as the bearer of the absolute value, we notice another poverty that is different from the initial existential finitude of the subject as receiver. Not wanting to dispose oneself to the call of the absolute ought and receiving the phenomenon of the Other in saturation, is a disposition and an orientation in revelatory experience to cut short what could be given vertically as revealed. In this manner, the negation of reception is to deprive the ability of the saturated phenomenon to give itself fully in revelatory manner. In such experience, the subject, instead of receiving what is given, in saturation, perceive it as a ‘denigrated phenomenon’. A denigrated phenomenon is in fact what it gives itself in excess but the ‘I’ does not dispose itself to receive it in its saturation. This is to say that the poverty of the experience of the denigrated phenomenon does not belong to the structure of the givenness of the given, but it is the outcome of a subjective exercise over the givenness.

Abandoning the call, in this sense, means to limit the experience in such a manner that what can be given itself in excess is realized in a horizontal relation to the subject (Steinbock 2007, 237). A denigrated phenomenon then is deprived of its verticality as saturated phenomenon and is realized in the structure of presentational givenness. I understand this abandonment and negation of disposing oneself in revelatory experience as an orientation that opens up possibilities of violence vis-à-vis the Other. As already stated, initiating a relation to the Other as given in vertical experience is a result of the immanent decision to dis-pose oneself either to see or to not be willing to see. Therefore, we can

158 assume this inclination of the will as a creative and an initial movement that bears a generative density to it. By this I mean that issuing an initial relation of negation and dismissal toward what is given in revelatory givenness is a creative response that I may call it ‘the movement of violence’ per se. Violence as movement tries to reverse the vertical relation to the given in saturated givenness.

Owing to the preliminary trait of the ‘I’ that is responsivity, it is misplaced to talk about a ‘neutral position’ vis-à-vis the call (Steinbock 2007, 211). In our everyday interpersonal experiences, we are constantly in the process of making relations toward the Other that are given in revelatory givenness; that is, in the interpersonal sphere, the subject is not self-grounded, but it is already in relation to others. In this sense, assertions of neutrality in relation cannot be justified, because in the revelatory experience we are either oriented vertically toward the call, in reception, or we just ignore it by not disposing ourselves to the given so the given is manifested by and through us. Again, I want to emphasize the idea that, in the experience, we are always affected by givenness, and the manner in which we receive the given in givenness is either acceptance or rejection—there is no in-between. It is in the structure of verticality and un-objectifiable givenness that our experiences, our actions and behaviors gain their essential sense. In fact, the history of interpersonal wellbeing and interpersonal calamity is the history of the generative movement of the immanent decision of reception or abandonment of the call that is givenness in excess.

In the light of such an analysis we may suggest that even this uniquely personal orientation that arises within the context of vertical givenness as a ‘lived moment’ entails a generative power, in a way that the immanent decision of abandonment has become the privileged attitude toward the interpersonal givenness throughout history (Steinbock 2007, 212). The history of colonization, Orientalism, the Holocaust, all the examples of ethnic cleansing throughout history, including the genocide of Muslims in Myanmar or in the Bosnian war, the massacre of Iraqi Kurds by Saddam Hussain, and so on, are the manifestation of the immanent decision to neglect and abandon the call of the Other as the phenomenon that is given in saturation. So as to have a better understanding of violence as a movement, I need to reflect on my earlier discussions of phenomenology of violence in the first chapter.

In Phenomenological Reflections on Violence, James Dodd asserts that, reflecting on various concepts of violence, like structural or symbolic violence, leads us to the realization of how violence is manifested throughout history as humanity’s situation (2017). As I argued in the first chapter what we know as violence are just manifestations and some of many faces of violence, like homicide, domestic violence, or ethnic cleansing. However, Dodd introduces two main concepts of violence that gained more attentions in recent studies of violence: (1) structural violence, and (2) symbolic

159 violence.125 The ‘structural violence’ that is rooted in the liberation theology of 1960s tries to put the focus of the study on the structures that regulate our everyday relations like political, social, and economic structures (Dodd 2017, 18-25). In this way, instead of recognizing violence in individual or even collective actions and behaviors, we need to reflect on the structures or contexts that our actions and relations are set within. With this new focus, the concept of structural violence concerns a distinctive failure in a structure, or manifestation of irregularities in a given context. Thus, structural violence can only be realized as manifestations of anomalies and failures. Dodd writes:

Instead of describing the violence of individuals or groups that intentionally seek to destroy or compromise the capacity of other individuals or groups to function (as in, for example, economic warfare), “structural violence” describes how phenomena such as poverty, political chaos, social inequalities, and historical trends compromise those same potentialities, directly or indirectly causing suffering. (2017, 18)

The second concept is Pierre Bourdieu’s theory of ‘symbolic violence’ that regards violence as the symbolic or cultural power of dominant social groups that is reproduced in forms of the recognition of legitimacy (Dodd 2017, 25-29). Violence in the symbolic manner is rooted in practices and patterns of habituation or culture that constitute the very reality of the social fabric. To put this into a phenomenological perspective, we can recognize culture firstly as a ‘systems of ideas’ and as a historical nexus of human achievements; and second, as a ‘geo-historical communal setting’ that is experienced within an interpersonal sphere (Steinbock 2004c, 161). Culture in the second sense is the manifestation of the communal dynamic orientation and directedness of the people who co- experience the homeworld, like the home comrades. Thus, culture can be better understood as ‘ethos’, that is, a concrete system of value orientations, value preferences, and value depreciations (Steinbock 2004c, 165).126 What can be disclosed through analyzing a unique history of ethos, is not just value orientations and orders of affection, desires, needs, customs, failures, and achievements, but more importantly, the ‘core’ of a person, individual or collective, and how a person morally navigated their own life over time (Steinbock 2004c, 164). However, so as to understand how violence in Bourdieu’s account affects our experience of culture, we should analyze the experience of culture in terms of its manner of givenness.

Cultural experiences belong to the interpersonal sphere that are given in a modality different from presentational givenness. In interpersonal experience, the finite person is given as absolute value and

125 On the concept of structural violence see for example: Johan Galtung, Structural Violence: Hidden Brutality in the Lives of Women (Albany: SUNY, 2012). Paul Farmer, 2004. “An Anthropology of Structural Violence.” Current Anthropology, Vol. 45, No.3. 305-325. 126 Max Scheler, “Ordo Amoris,” in Selected Philosophical Essays, trans. David R. Lachterman (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1973), 98–99. 160 never as relative, in the mode of revelation. Since culture, as a collective of human interpersonal experiences, has a historical nature, it cannot be given as an object. Just like historical events, culture is given in experience as a saturated phenomenon of ‘event’.127 In this sense, the givenness of culture as systems of ideas and as collective personal achievements is beyond the givenness of an individual person, although an individual person is a member of it. The generative density of the collective person prevents an individual from experiencing the culture fully; there are always some aspects of culture as historical event that will be missed in experience. Thus, culture as a historical event is given in excess of intuition as a saturated phenomenon. If culture is the manifestation of the collective dynamic movement of value orientation, in the case of symbolic violence we can observe that violent culture is the very movement toward the Other that becomes the privileged mode of receiving the Other in experience. For instance, in a racist culture, the only manner in which the Other can be received in the experience of that collective is as denigrated phenomenon. In a racist culture, the privileged mode of interpersonal experiences is the neglect and abandonment of the call of the Other who is given in saturation.

Therefore, observing the concept of violence from the perspective of givenness, we can show how violence is interwoven in the constitutive structure of social existence. In a violent culture, violence as movement toward receiving the absolute ought in rejection, can be found as intelligible and immanent part of both the oppressed and the oppressive social habitus. Violence in a symbolic manner sustains an essential structure of the a priori that is given in the experience of reality and the world.

In Formalism in Ethics and Non-Formal Ethics of Value, Max Scheler explains the a priori as:

All those ideal units of meaning and those propositions that are self-given by way of an immediate intuitive content in the absence of any kind of positing [Setzung] of subjects that think them and of the real nature of those subjects, and in the absence of any kind of positing of objects to which such units of meaning are applicable. (Scheler 1973, 48)

In this manner, violence as a priori, is not a product of reason and understanding but it is ‘given’ independent of the quantity of experience, in and through the experience (Steinbock 2004c, 170). Violence as cultural a priori can only be given in a ‘phenomenological experience’ or ‘phenomenological intuition’. Because what is given in phenomenological intuition is self-evident as self-given and cannot be observed in the givenness of objects and traits (Scheler 1973, 48). By this I mean that in symbolic violence the violence is given in the very existence of the oppressed as a priori and not as an object that can be traced or easily shown. Violence in the symbolic sense is the essence

127 I have introduced the idea of ‘event’ as saturated phenomenon earlier in this chapter. 161 of what is given in interpersonal experience, not as an object, not as a sign or symbol, but as the totality of all signs, instructions and determinations. Therefore, the givenness of the violence within the intuition can only be realized through phenomenological experience that is in principle non- symbolic. Deep in experience, violence is given as what is ‘meant’ and it is not made in the process of subjective meaning-making. This is intrinsic for proper recognition of violence in the experience of a colonial subject or the experience of a refugee as detainee in the colonial structure of Australian border security.

Violence in the colonial situation cannot be described properly in an inter-related manner in which an agent (individual or even collective) wants to destroy or compromise the capacity of other individuals or a group; violence in this context is experienced as invisible in a way that no one can really point out an agency as a perpetrator. The violence in the colonial system is given in the experience of the oppressed as a priori and as an essential structure that guides the whole sphere of their experience. In this sense, it is this violence that gives meaning to whatever sign, symbols, and instructions that oppressed people experience. It seems that Dodd is right to regard the concept of violence as belonging to the ethical sphere, only by negation of the very integrity of the ethical terrain and as a destructive rejection of its very possibility (Dodd 2013, 15). In this manner I can add to Dodd’s analysis that violence is in fact the total negation of initiating an ethical relation to the Other by abandoning the call of the Other in loving orientation.

While Dodd believes that the anarchy of violence in the world of sense undermines our capacity to articulate its meaning: ‘as if we always come up short, revealing the depth of articulating the absence of sense at the heart of the experience of violence itself’ (2013, 15), I claim that violence as orientation is a manner of receiving the phenomenon in experience and as I argued earlier, in this sense, violence not only gives ‘meaning’ to experience, but as a priori it is what is meant. In fact, the human incapacity to articulate a sense of the experience of violence reflects the very concept of violence as orientation. When we consider violence as an orientation that reverses the ethical relationship to the Other by neglecting the call of the saturated phenomenon, then we receive the Other not as a person who bears an absolute value that can constitute meanings, but as a denigrated phenomenon that may have only use value for me. In this sense violence can be seen as a defense system.

As I mentioned earlier in the chapter, in loving movement the ‘I’ has a will to see and to receive the call of the absolute ought that is given in saturation. This willingness to see or the immanent decision to accept the givenness in its saturation is the willingness to accept the vulnerability of the self in face of the unknown that strikes the ‘I’ with surprise. The unbearability, the invisibility, the absoluteness, and irregardability of the Other as saturated phenomenon, transfers the transcendental constituting ‘I’ into a witness who participates with the Other in loving movement. However, this transformation is

162 founded in the immanent decision of ‘wanting to see’ and this simultaneously is the acceptance of vulnerability of the ‘I’ in face of the Other.

The irreducible vulnerability of the self can be understood in terms of the fragility of the transcendental ‘I’ and its power of objectification in the experience of the Other as icon. While the ‘I’ anticipates things according to the style in which it has been given to it, in the experience of the Other as icon, the Other does not correspond to any expectations of the constituting ‘I’. Violence seems the only option, as the reversal of this surprising encounter, in which the ‘I’ can preserve its power of radical freedom to control the encounter. Whereas the transcendental ‘I’ belongs to the dynamic structure of relations of life that unfold in terms of the orientation towards the possible, violence as a possibility within the horizon of possibilities emerges immediately by the denying the reception of the call. Whereas violence becomes intelligible as a movement towards shaping the subjects’ environing world, those acts that can actualize that possibility that becomes evident for the subject. Violence as the possibility that can preserve the transcendental constituting characteristic of the subject can shape the motivational structure of subjective conduct as well as acquiring the very condition of its being revealed in the first place. In this new violent motivational structure, violence introduces the specific rules, principles, or even goals in the complex relations that sets the desires and motivations of all participants of a lifeworld.

Whatever human conducts, rules, principles, institutions, and social structures that emerge out of violent movement only enact the violence that constitute the reality in which the subject dwells, including whoever co-experiences this reality. Behrouz Boochani writes in his memoir from Manus prison, suggesting how the experience of violence as the a priori, as what it meant by its very givenness, restructures the whole reality for those experiencing it:

I can do nothing else but accept the reality. And the reality on this day is that they have determined to exile me to Manus Island, exile me nice and peacefully, somewhere out in the middle of the ocean. (Boochani 2018, 73)

In this sense, the colonial subject, who is born into the violent structure of colonial situation, has been born to the reality and the condition in which all the normative systems of sense constitution are saturated with violence. In a structure that is emerged out of the violence as movement toward the Other, no relation other than violence can be traced. The experience of refugees who are detained in remote detentions camps, away from the Australian shores, and the Kyriarchal system of the Australian border complex, are only some of the manifestations of a phenomenological attitude toward the givenness of the Other in experience, that we know as violence. Boochani who adapted Elisabeth Schussler Fiorenza’s formulation of Kyriarchy refers to a ‘system that creates webs of privilege and exclusion’ (Conley 2019; Fiorenza 2001). A detained refugee in a Pacific island

163 detention center is not only affected by the Australian border security regulations but is victimized as an outsider who experiences the aggression, guilt, and the violence of a colonial system. As Boochani unpacks in his memoir the many ways that detention centers on Manus and Nauru (also onshore detention, community detention, and temporary visas) employ systematic violence manifests the colonial heritage of the Australian government: ‘those imprisoned on Manus are themselves sacrificial subjects of violence’ (2018, 97). The Australian immigration policies in the case of asylum seekers use the socio-political contexts of exile, torture, and imprisonment to keep the asylum seeker ‘out of touch’ with the world.128

What we observe as the brutal and inhumane treatment of refugees and asylum seekers on the borders of the Western world can only be reflected upon within the context of colonialism. By this I mean that the colonial situation has a certain normative structure that is embedded in the manner in which the colonizer encounters and receives the Other in their collective experience. This means that the violence that is experienced by a refugee in detention camps is neither programmed nor determined by instincts; rather the whole structure of normative conducts of such a system is the outcome of normalizing the immanent decision of rejection and abandonment of their absolute ought. Thus, in order to provide an explanation for the manner in which the Other as refugee is treated in the new land, we cannot only reflect on the normative prescriptions of the home. The point of departure for any ethical inquiry goes back to the moment of recognition of the Other in interpersonal experience. In this sense, the colonial history is the generative account of the privileged mode of receiving the Other in experience, not as saturated phenomenon and in bedazzlement, but recognizing the Other as an object that is constituted by the colonizer as the transcendental subject. As I mentioned earlier in the chapter, the ethical relation is a peculiar relation to the being of the Other that the ‘I’ initiates out of free will and by an immanent decision to either receive the Other in saturation or not. If we philosophers, as functionaries of humankind, miss the proper reflection on the point of departure, whatever ethical reform we look for would be only an upgrading of the quality of mirror that we look into with a hope to show the most beautiful image of us. However, the better-quality mirror shows even clearer the distorted face of the colonial heritage we have in a sharper manner.

Conclusion

While the last chapter examined the structure of interpersonal experience, focusing on the mode of givenness of the phenomenon as revelation of the Other as revealed, the present chapter tried to approach the structure of interpersonal experience from a different angle, examining the type of

128 See for example: Khorana 2018; Briskman, 2013, 2020; Zion, 2019b; Fleay, 2017; Hartley & Fleay, 2017; Coddington, 2017; Briskman & Doe, 2016. These works reflect on the experience of detention by refugee and asylum seekers in Australia and criticize the Australian border security policies that try to dehumanize those who arrive in Australia by boat.

164 phenomenon that appears in revelatory experience. Using Jean-Luc Marion’s rigorous phenomenological analysis of givenness, I claimed that what appears in moral experience of the Other is given in saturation and in excess of intuition. What is given in saturation does not submit itself to the structure of consciousness of the transcendental ‘I’ to be constituted as an object. The disposition of the ‘I’ in this experience can be unfolded through an immanent decision, whether to accept or reject the phenomenon that is given in excess of intuition. This immanent decision is a manifestation of human’s practice of the free will to choose; however, this time the decision to receive the phenomenon of the Other as saturated icon transforms the constituting ‘I’ into ‘the witness’. The witness is the one who accepts the being of what arrives as invisible and accepts the arrival in a straightforward manner as Irregardable. The witness is the one who is ready to be dazzled by the unpredictable arrival of the icon and does not measure it according to the subject’s normalities and value structure of its home. The witness then is the one who initiates a loving relation to the Other in its total alterity, to receive it as absolute value.

And if the transcendental ‘I’ as free human being decides not to receive the phenomenon in saturation, and rejects the unpredictability and surprise of such an arrival, the ‘I’ abandons the call of the absolute ought and initiates a certain relation to the Other that I explained as ‘violence’. In this sense, violence is a movement in interpersonal experience that rejects the reception of the Other in saturation. Through this lens, I tried to analysed James Dodd’s phenomenology of violence that I have already discussed in chapter One. Then I could claim that whatever violence that we can name—such as racism, ethnic massacres, religious brutality and so on—are the outcome of an orientation toward the Other that rejects the givenness of the Other as absolute value. It is the immanent decision to abandon the call of the saturated givenness that opens the possibility of violence to us as a way of Being. The history of humans’ suffering and violence is in fact the generative manifestation of the privileged mode of experiencing the Other that is the rejection and abandonment of the call of the absolute ought.

While the very concept of violence necessitates the negation of the ethical, we cannot hope to remedy the violent behavior and policies toward the Other like refugee by only reflecting on political concepts like human rights, since even the concept of human rights is a reflection of a certain attitude and belief structure that we have toward the Other in interpersonal sphere. The proper recognition of the birthplace of a possibility like violence as an attitude is a call for ethical renewal that, as wisely put by Husserl, is the universal call in our sorrowful present day, where the experience of asylum seekers has revealed the inner untruthfulness and lack of meaning of our colonial culture. This renewal must happen within and through us as members of humanity who live in this world, forming the world and being formed by it. Observing passively the decline of the person as absolute value is the negation of being freely-willing subjects who are actively engaged in their surrounding world, constantly

165 involved in shaping it. Husserl does not ask for attaining ethical ideas but for taking up the ethical challenge, as that challenge elevates a person to the level of true humanity. Not taking up the ethical challenge means to actively share and contribute to the brutality of the violent system that gives meaning to our reality and shapes us all. The ethical renewal in fact is a call to reconfigure our sense of being as not self-grounded but already thrown into the interpersonal relations. The renewal of sense constitution is to actively participate in what is given in excess in revelatory givenness. Since the revelatory givenness in the interpersonal experience, is both revealing and revealed, we can assume that the moral experience of the Other who is given in revelation shows itself by transforming me to attain certain attributes. Therefore, the call for ethical renewal, is more than a call for empathy or benevolence, but is a plea to self-renewal and finding our true self.

Although a discussion of Husserlian ethics is not the primary focus of this study, it is important to realize that the whole project of transcendental phenomenology for Husserl is emerged out of his concern for an enlightened ethical humanism (Hua XXVIII. Cited in Loidolt 2018, 698). In this sense, the ‘call’ for ethical renewal rests at the core of Husserlian phenomenology. While this ‘call’ inverts the structure of intentionality, it constitutes us as ethical beings. Thus, Husserl proposes an ethics that is not founded on values that can be cognized, but on realization of the universal telos of an ‘ethical humankind’ (Loidolt 2018, 702-3; Hua XLII, 301-13). The community that Husserl idealizes as an ethical community is a community that not only each and every member of it realizes their own inner call as their vocation but helps others to realize their calls and act on it. Such community is a loving community whose values are not constructed or created but given to their subjects in experience in moral experience of the Other.129

129 For contemporary readings on the Husserlian phenomenological ethics see Drummond & Embree 2002; Gubser 2014; Heinämaa 2014, 2020; Hart 1992, 2006, 2015; Melle 1997, 2002; Loidolt 2012, 2018) 166 Conclusion

Transcending the Crisis via the Husserlian Project of Ethical Renewal

Michael Gubser, in his book The Far Reaches: Phenomenology, Ethics, and Social Renewal in Central Europe, mentions that phenomenology ‘called on philosophy to renew European societies facing the crises of the twentieth century, from World War I and interwar totalitarianism to postwar communist dictatorships’ (2014, 1). Although Husserl’s phenomenology is mostly well-known as the ‘philosophy of consciousness’, many other Husserlians like Max Scheler, Adolf Reinach, Edith Stein, Jan Patočka, Karol Wojtyła, and Václav Havel found phenomenology an auspicious methodology to delve into the persisting social and ethical questions of their feverish times. I also believe that phenomenology in its very core is the philosophy of the ‘Crisis’, and the phenomenologist is the one who feels the pain of humanity in their bones and tries to disclose the origins of our critical situation ‘by the way of a teleological-historical reflection’ (Crisis, 3; Carr 1974, xxii). Gubser states that:

We might see in phenomenology an almost desperate quest, taken under the sign of crisis, to connect human beings to the surrounding world, a quest that pulled it in two contradictory directions: on the one hand, it sought a reality beyond the claustrophobia of mind, an assurance of the existence of a world beyond human fabrication; on the other, it celebrated human dignity by elevating man as a transcendent being over other objects and beings. (2014, 7)

While for Husserl the ‘crisis of European sciences’, as suggested by David Carr, can be read as an ‘expression of the radical life-crisis of European humanity’ (Crisis, xxv), by applying teleological Besinnung this thesis tried to reflect on the crisis of the ‘refugee’ as the problematic of our postcolonial time. While the majority of refugee studies try to approach the phenomenon of the refugee from the perspective of human rights discourse, I believe that so long as a refugee is denounced as ‘stateless’ in accord with the applicable codes of ‘nation-state’, the refugee always remains at the threshold of human rights discourse and is experienced in the related studies as the ‘limit phenomenon’ (Agamben 1998; Arendt 1968, 2007). However, we should note that the crisis of the refugee is the anguish of belonging and the home; that is, the struggle to belong to a certain normative structure as home, to which I belong, and refugees do not belong. Applying phenomenological analysis to the refugee crisis is to reflect back on the moment that ‘I’, as the home, recognizes and constitutes the Other as an ‘alien’ who does not belong to the familiarity of the home

167 I know, and how this alienness is initiated in the homeworld and alienworld relation in the first place. The struggle of belonging to a homeworld is presented clearly by Mahmoud Darwish in the following quotation:

To break the rules, I have learned all the words needed for a trial by blood. I have learned and dismantled all the words in order to draw from them a single word: Home. (Darwish 2003, 7)

Phenomenology, as the ‘rigorous science’ of experience, brackets the pre-established cultural, political and ethical dispositions that we take for granted in analyzing our experiences of the world and of the Other, and leaves the general thesis of the natural attitude behind. Such a critical attitude urges us to look for the ‘relations’ in which the Other ‘appears’ to us as a refugee other. James Hart asserts that the critical reflection on experience is:

To go back to a more basic sense of appearing as manifestation, which is the showing of the thing, the self-givenness of the thing to the honest investigator. There is no getting beyond manifestation, truthful disclosure. (Hart 2020, 28-9)

Applying Besinnung, I claimed that the crisis of the refugee is yielded by the ramifications of the pervasive colonial legacy of the Western World that they decided to neglect for so long, and I also maintained that a Middle Eastern refugee is the ambivalent hermeneutical subject who is born into that colonial situation of our time. With this perspective, criticizing the violence of the Australian border security complex and its Kyriarchal exclusive system cannot be alleviated through challenging the dominant normative ethical dispositions of Australia in treating the refugees.130 Instead, we need to expose the historical disposition of the West in identifying the Other who does not belong to the normative structure of the West; that is, disclosing the logical structure of meaning-making of the main project of the West: Colonialization and orientalism.

In this thesis, the West is the spiritual shape of the European and the English Dominions and the United States that share almost the same subjective accomplishments and endeavors. The picture of our world is designed and created through a specific realization of our possibilities as transcendental constituting ‘I’ and a certain disposition of this ‘I’ toward the objective world, nature and the Other. It is through the eidetic analysis that we can identify human possibilities and their social implication (Gubser 2014, 51). Besinnung as a historical reflection enabled me to trace back the violent structure of Australian border security to its colonial heritage as a manifestation of the violent structure of meaning constitution, subjectification and de-subjectification of the Other. This led me to phenomenologically describe the obscurity of the concept of violence and how violence belongs to

130 Kyriarchal system is a social system that is based on oppression, domination and exclusion. See Fiorenza 2001. 168 transcendental intersubjectivity, which can be manifested in various forms in interpersonal relations and social structures. I used James Dodd’s argument that, while the concept of violence belongs to the world of sense, our senses come up short in trying to capture it. However, in its destruction of the sense, violence becomes the origin of sense by actively constituting sense according to its new norms and principles.

We can observe that orientalism as the project of the mastery and dissemination of information about the Orient is an epistemic discourse that made possible the Western way of domination, restructuring and authority over the Orient (Said 1978, 9-11). In Chapter One I argued that This colonial paradigm produced and constituted the Other as not capable of personhood and self-regard and reduced the epistemic Other to an object of Western epistemic discourse. That is the most fundamental type of violence that concerns the essential epistemic capacities for social contribution and prosperous intersubjective hermeneutical engagement. In Chapter Two, using the Husserlian phenomenological notion of the horizon-structure of experience, I argued that the subject’s social understanding depends on free participation in a shared world-horizon in order to thematize the world as a subjective lifeworld for themselves. The concept of the horizon-structure of the experience of epistemic violence illuminates the ways that the deprivation of the necessary concepts and contexts for making sense of our own experience and becoming intelligible to others can affect our capacity to be a transcendental constituting subject (Fricker 2007, 6). That means that the phenomenological horizon of the ‘I can’ or ‘I think’ for the victim of the epistemic violence is essentially damaged in a way that there are no possibilities available for deepening and fulfilling their social experiences and contributing to the social pool of knowledge.

Phenomenologically analyzing both types of epistemic violence - testimonial and hermeneutical - that are embedded in the violent structure of colonial system, also in Chapter Two I discussed how, by neglecting and excluding some perspectives from contributing to the social pool of knowledge, the open horizon of experiencing for both the sufferer and the one who practices the epistemic wrong done can be affected. The open horizon of possible experience is the orientation of the subject’s intentionality for further experiences. On the one hand, the practice of epistemic violence leads to what José Medina and Gaile Pohlhaus Jr. (2013) called ‘active and willful ignorance’ on the side of the oppressor that blocks the flow of knowledge in the epistemic system’ (Fricker & Jenkins 2017, 5). On the other hand, the experience of epistemic oppression by the marginalized subject is the experience of disorientation in terms of undermining the capacity of the knower to make sense of their world. The experience of disorientation for the marginalized subject who dwells in the violent structure of the colonial system, becomes that habit. Disorientation as habit makes the epistemic subject lose the grip over the objective world and its intrinsic horizon that used to be in their reach;

169 that is the lived experience of ‘slipping away’ from the reachable (Ahmed 2006, 166). The experience of distance is the manifestation of the disruption of sense that is caused by the violence that is embedded in the epistemic structure of the colonial society. Thus, the discourse of epistemic injustice, due to its capacity to disrupt the world of sense, by deteriorating the subject’s transcendental constitutive attributes, undermines the very concept of the ethical in the first place.

Discussing the phenomenological aspects of experiencing epistemic violence enabled me to follow the trace of such experiences in maintaining and constituting the victim’s lifeworld. This is the experience of a Middle Eastern refugee as the epistemic subject who is born into the violent structure of the colonial situation and as the Oriental subject their perspectives and their native epistemic ways are neglected and excluded from the ‘privileged’ Western paradigm. With refugees appearing on the borders of the Western world, the Oriental subject who once was exclusively constituted and was neglected from the matrix of the Western imaginary has no longer maintained its distance as ‘out there’, but they are at our doors with their complex cultural and colonial history. It seems that such an unpredicted appearance of the colonial past in the everyday lived experience of the Western subject has seriously interrupted the fantasy of belonging to an exclusively Western cultural imaginary (Yegenoglu 1998; Mbembe 2001). The crisis of the refugee is the crisis of this Western image of us that can be examined through reflecting on the most fundamental dynamic intersubjective structure that Husserl knows as homeworld and alienworld. The phenomenological analysis of the structure of homeworld and alienworld is to thematize the attitude through which I experience the Other as an Alien that appears on the horizon of my familiar lifeworld.

Enquiring into the hermeneutical relation of the ‘I’ to the Other, Husserl asserts that the ‘alien’ or ‘stranger’ is not identical to the Other, as the transcendental ‘I’ constitutes the Other as ‘alien’ or ‘stranger’ in relation to the homeworld. We encounter the alien at the threshold of our experience; that means that the alien awaits us at the limit of our reach with its total ambiguity. I commenced the analysis of the structure of experience of the Other at the verge of home by addressing Husserl’s phenomenology of transcendental intersubjectivity. This enabled me to surpass the discourse of how we understand the Other, and to ask what my peculiar experience is of the Other as alien. In other words, in order to understand the structure of alien-experience, firstly we need to thematize the structure of the homeworld as the fundamental structure and conditions for the possibility of sense- constitution of being-at-home.

Applying the phenomenological reduction in the realm of intersubjectivity, in Chapter Three I discussed that Husserl formulates the experience of the ‘alter ego’ by abstracting from whatever alien that does not belongs to the sphere of ownness. The sphere of ownness is ‘what is peculiar to me as ego, my being as monad’ (CM, 93). My animate organism belongs to this sphere of ownness that I

170 can directly rule on and govern. This way, Husserl delimits within the ego’s horizon of transcendental experience whatever belongs to the sphere of ownness, and the rest is all alien. It is through such a ‘reduction to the sphere of ownness’ that the transcendental ego constitutes the objective world and the Other in the mode of alter ego (CM, Fifth Meditation). The experience of self-perception, thus, is an act of consciousness and as a subjective process belongs to the sphere of ownness. Thus, the ego is accessible to me with respect to its actualities and possibilities that can be translated into a subjective process like ‘I can’ or ‘I could have’. While the Myself as the constitutive subjectivity is given to me in immanent or transcendent originary perception, the alter ego as the first non-ego is derived from the sense of ego as accessible. With this formulization of the alter ego, Husserl introduces the community of constitutive intentionality as ‘We’ that is the subjectivity for the Objective world and the World of human beings. Husserl asserts that such an understanding of community of constitutive subjects is the outcome of abstraction from culture and historical developments and was an egological account of social existence and phenomenology of intersubjectivity.

However, I argued that according to Anthony Steinbock, applying regressive inquiry as an inquiry into the pregivenness and the facticity of the world, Husserl could have surpassed the shortcomings of static and genetic method that he introduced in Cartesian Meditations in regard to thematizing the becoming of the subject. The regressive method of generative phenomenology enables us to reflect on the social, historical and material dimensions of identity and difference. This means that, the generative phenomenon is constituted as a normative and intersubjective, geological and historical one. While the generative method is sensitive to the socio-geo-historical and normative structure of meaning constitution, it allowed us to systematically reflect back on two notions of ‘normality’ and ‘abnormality’, which underpinned the normative configuration of not only sense-constitution, but the genesis of the lived body and the common world. Emerging out of the generative analysis of the normative structure of the lifeworld, we can see that the two concepts of homeworld as normal lifeworld and alienworld as abnormal lifeworld are co-constituted through the process of normalization.

The process of normalization for Husserl was the process of selection and exclusion in the constitution of the optimal environing-world and normal and abnormal referred to the modes of constitution of the sense of objective world and the interpersonal relations in regard to the environing-world. As a result, the homeworld becomes the typical, familiar and normal as optimal lifeworld that is co- constituted with the alienworld through mutual delimitation. We could conclude that for Husserl, the liminal constitution of the homeworld always embodies the sense of alien in itself; that is, my homeworld as historically significant, familiar lifeworld is delimited off from the unfamiliarity of the

171 alienworld. The alienworld, in this sense, does not belong to the homeworld’s normative conceptual and value system and in return, the generative density of the alienworld that is the alien’s specific world-temporality and specific horizon of familiarity and unfamiliarity is not accessible to my homeworld. However, we can see that the generative privilege of the familiarity of home does not convey a sense of hierarchy, as neither homeworld nor alienworld constitutionally can precede the other as they are co-constituted and co-dependent.

The co-dependent structure of homeworld and alienworld suggests that even the most normal and familiar sense-constitution, that is the sense of home, has an intersubjective structure. Whereas through encountering the alienworld the typicality of the homeworld stands out, I realize that I have access to my homeworld in a more intimate mode of accessibility. However, the alien always presents at the edge of the experience of the home as not accessible in the manner that I can access my home. As Husserl writes, this lively absence of the alien in the experience of home suggests that the alienworld ‘is accessible in genuine inaccessibility, in the mode of incomprehensibility’ (Hua XV, 631).

Appearing on the verge of the experience of home, the alien has withdrawn from the experience of familiarity and typicality of home that I genuinely access. Being at the threshold means the alienworld is accessible and ‘understandable in the mode of inaccessibility and incomprehensibility’, in a way that I cannot feel the home-worldly style of the alien, which is the rupture of the concrete analogy of my homeworld (Steinbock 1994, 213). By submitting to the idea that the alienworld and the alien people are inaccessible to the home, Husserl seems to emphasize that when encountering the alien, we need to accept the integrity of the alien limits and its generative density that is incomprehensible to the home. The incomprehensibility of the alienworld does not mean that we are blind to the reality of alienworld, but it is to consider and respect the limit claims of the alienworld. Due to this co- generativity of the homeworld and the alienworld, my responsibility toward maintenance of the home by appropriation necessitates a liminal responsibility toward the alienworld. Such an ethical responsibility toward the integrity of the alienworld, as I suggested does not have a normative nature, rather it belongs to the co-constitutive structure of the homeworld and the alienworld. This constitutive responsibility regards an attitude toward the home and simultaneously toward the alien through which not only do we sustain the limit claims of home, the alien world can endure its generative density. I concluded Chapter Three, proposing that the transgressive encounter has a mysterious side to it that challenges our epistemological mastery over the alienworld; that is becoming responsible to sustain the mystery of alienworld.

In order to answer the question of whether such constitutive responsibility can be translated into a moral obligation toward the alienworld, in Chapter Four, I analyzed two modes of givenness; first,

172 the perceptual modes of givenness that maintain the epistemological relation between the subject and the world of objects, and second was a distinct mode of givenness that is peculiar to the givenness of the Other in the experience. In all kinds of experiences, the manner in which the phenomenon is given to the experiencer is the reflection of a certain relation that they maintain with that phenomenon, that we know as a disposition. The subjective disposition in the course of experience of the given phenomenon manifests the power of the ‘I can’ to access and respond to the allure of the phenomenon. In the perceptual experience of the objective world, the givenness of the object to the intentional structure of the consciousness mostly relies on the ability and the subjective power of ‘I can’ and ‘I think’ to usher the phenomenon to appearance. The intentional object that appears to the consciousness, as I discussed, is in fact the sign that makes the essence of the object available to consciousness; that is, it is the phenomenon that allows the subject to glide over the object and enters into the domain of intentional meaning-making about that object. I also argued that in the economy of disclosure or perceptual experience, the meaning of a phenomenon lies in its presentation to the consciousness that depends on the subject’s orientation toward the phenomenon that discloses itself in a varying degree to the subject. Although the constituted objective world has a subjective density to it, in the structure of intentionality both the subjective power of ‘I can’ and the affection of the object are active in meaning-constitution. This constitutive duet of the subjective ‘I can’ and the allure of the object, only belongs to the presentational mode of givenness in the epistemological experience. It is notable that whatever is constituted in the intentional structure of consciousness exists only in the consciousness and there is no meaning that can be constituted by the subject beyond consciousness.

However, as argued by Husserl, we cannot perceive the alien Other in the manner that we experience the outside world of objects. That experience of the alien cannot be given in the presentational modality to the consciousness, and thus, the relation between the subject and the alien other cannot be an epistemological one. The incomprehensibility of the alien is due to its resistance to submitting to the intentional structure of consciousness and exceeds the subjective power of ‘I can’ or ‘I think’. I discussed how, according to Emanuel Levinas, the alien challenges and disturbs the most essential attribute of the transcendental constitutive subject, that is exercising the cognitive power of ‘I can’ over the objective world. While the enigmatic feature of the Other as alien resists succumbing to the intentional structure of consciousness, the incomprehensibility and inaccessibility of alien cannot be bridged and there is no epistemological relation that can be achieved between the transcendental ‘I’ and the alien Other.

In order to find a way out of this dead end, I suggested that we need to investigate a distinct type of modality that is peculiar to the givenness of the Other in experience. Following Levinas and

173 Steinbock, I called this distinctive mode of givenness the mode of Revelation [Offenbarung], that has its own experiential structure and set of evidence. Whatever is given in the modality of revelation is given as an absolute value and cannot be objectified. Accepting the modality of revelation, not only we can be open to a set of experiences that are not given in the horizonal structure of intentionality, we can be introduced to new validities and evidences that are peculiar to revelatory experience. I also discussed that revelatory givenness is the manner in which the Other is given in moral experience and it is interpersonal. Interpersonal realm of experience is the realm of the I- Alien encounter, that we are interested in. The revelatory experience is both revealing and revealed; this means, in an interpersonal experience, I receive Myself from the Other, the other is revealing myself to me, and the Other can be revealed in the experience. In revelatory givenness, like the presentational givenness of the object, there is an affection or an allure that demands a response from me as the subject. In fact, any kind of experience is in accordance to this dynamic of demand and response. Following Bernhard Waldenfels and his notion of ‘responsivity’, I could suggest that within the structure of responsivity, I, as the experiencer, can take various positions, either acceptance or rejection, towards the demand of ‘what can be received’ or ‘what is appearing’ in the experience. In the interpersonal realm of experience either acceptance or refusal is a certain disposition toward the call of the Other. Since both of these dispositions are manners of responsivity to the call and the demand of the Other, we may suggest that the inevitability of responsivity is embedded in the very structure of the I-Alien relation. As I discussed earlier, in revelatory givenness the Other is given as an absolute value and as good-in- itself. In moral experience, the Other can be given as absolute value in an active responding to the ‘absolute ought’.

Husserl asserts that the absolute ought is a genuine and unique personal calling that can reveal the core of a person by only addressing me uniquely and no other. That means, as Sara Heinämaa mentions, the absolute ought has an egoic depth that reveals the core of the person in a continuous self-intensifying and self-disclosing’ manner (2020, 2). The manner in which we respond to the unique call of the absolute ought individualizes us as distinct human beings. I could claim then, this is the most profound ethical position-taking that happens in terms of responsivity towards the absolute ought. And as Ullrich Melle pointed out, the ethical responsivity towards the call of the absolute ought ‘transforms the whole life of a person to an ethical form of life’ (2002, 239). Husserl believes that a person can do their best in terms of axiological ethical position- taking. However, it may not be enough as the person has not done what ought to be done. For Husserl, attentiveness to our moral dispositions is the manifestation of our attentiveness toward the call of the absolute ought. It is our disposition toward the absolute ought that guides us in our ethical life and creates the ethical imperatives across our whole life (Hua XXXVII, 247). As a result, we can understand that what we know as normative ethics emerged out of certain dispositions toward the absolute ought.

174 I argued that, for Husserl, the call of the absolute ought is the call for genuine self-love, or as Heinämaa describes it, the true call speaks through love (2020, 6). Loving is a value-oriented dynamic movement toward the flourishing of what is possible within the movement of becoming (Steinbock 2018). Through loving, the call of absolute ought individualizes a person in accord with the manner in which the person creatively responds to the call and freely acts on the level of spirit. In order to thematize how through loving the reception of the call can reveal and individualize a person, in Chapter Five I used Jean-Luc Marion’s notion of ‘Saturated Phenomena’ to analyze how by changing the mode of givenness in experience the characteristics of the phenomenon will also be different. By accepting a new mode of givenness in revelatory givenness, we need to examine the characteristics of a phenomenon that is given in such experience. Doing so, I argued that for Husserl whatever appears in experience that is originally given by intuition, firstly gives itself unconditionally in its horizon of apparition, and secondly every phenomenon that appears needs a transcendental ‘I’, who either opens the field of phenomenality or prefers its closure. This is what we call the constitutive duet that is the correlation between the appearing and the appeared. However, all this theory is true for the correlation of intentional structure of nöema-nöesis and in the perceptual experience of the objective world.

The discussion of Marion reminded us that by leaving the world of the object and its presentational givenness, we enter the realm of non-objectifiable phenomenon that surpass the structure of intentionality. While in the objective, sensible world the amount of fulfilment that is intuition remains bounded to and is limited to the intention, in the revelatory experience we have an intuition that surpasses the limitations of the intention, in such a manner that we will experience a surplus in meaning. In other words, what is given in a revelatory mode does not submit to the finite transcendental ‘I’ to constitute it as an object that has a horizon. Therefore, what is revealed in the experience entails distinct characteristics from the objective phenomenon. Marion calls the phenomenon that is given in excess of intuition, unlike the objective phenomenon, a Saturated Phenomenon. What gives itself in saturation may have all four features of Invisibility, Unbearability, Absoluteness and Irregardability together like the phenomenon of the Other, or it may have just one characteristics of saturated phenomenon.

In short, a saturated phenomenon can be Invisible according to quantity; that means, what is given in saturation surpasses the possibilities that are assigned to the appearance of the objective phenomenon. A phenomenon that appears in excess of intuition is Invisible as it cannot be given in parts to fit the limitations of the intention, as a finite object can be given. The historical event can be regarded as saturated phenomenon that is given as invisible, since it cannot be broken into moments and certain

175 point of views; that means a historical event cannot be grasped by its singularity and there is always endless hermeneutics of it.

A phenomenon of the Idol, such as a work of art or piece of a music is the one that is given in saturation of intuition as unbearable according to quality. Unbearability regards the inability of the constituting subject in fixing the degree of reality of the phenomenon according to the limitation of the intention. This means the Idol that is unbearable to intention bedazzles the subject and overwhelms the receiver due to the unprecedented degree of givenness. However, with respect to the relation and analogy of perceptual experience, the saturated phenomenon is absolute. This means that in revelatory experience we encounter a phenomenon that does not maintain any causal relations to other types of phenomena and thus, it exceeds the signifying frameworks of meaning-making. Marion suggests that the immediacy of experiencing of one’s own flesh makes it absolute with respect to relation.

As I discussed, while modality refers to the manner in which the knower and the known relate to each other, and how much the object of knowing submits to the knowing power of the knower, the saturated phenomenon is irregardable to such subjective power of constitution. Simply put, what is given irregardable to the constitutive power of the subject does not submit to the constitutive conditions of the transcendental ‘I’ and thus, it cannot be constituted as an object by the constitutive subject. Such disagreement between the given and the receiver changes the whole experience of the subject as the transcendental subjectivity. The face of the Other as the Icon for Marion is the example of irregardability, as it manifests itself from itself, on the basis of itself. However, while the icon entails all other traits of saturated phenomenon, for Marion the face of the other as icon is Levinasian in core. Therefore, the face of the Other does not manifest itself as an object between other objects, but it can only show itself as itself if and only if I envisage him or her in in an openness and faith (Mackinlay 2009, 160).

As I argued, the openness toward receiving the saturated phenomenon changes the manner in which the subject receives itself in the interpersonal experience. In this regard, the saturated phenomenon gives itself in a modality in which the subject receives itself as constituted by this saturation as a ‘witness’. Being a witness, the subject loses the transcendental traits of constitution that are the most profound attributes of personhood. The subject as witness finds itself incapable of predicting and constituting the phenomenon by exercising the epistemological power of ‘I can’ over it. The openness toward the givenness in excess means to be open to the realm of mystery where the transcendental epistemological power is totally on a leash. That is how one receives oneself in revelatory experience as constituted by the appearing phenomenon in a unique way that cannot be predicted or foreseen. To be constituted as witness is to accomplish the saturated givenness in a

176 manner in which the phenomenon shows itself through us. The witness is the one who is gifted by receiving and constituted by the phenomenon. I gave the example of a prism that colorless light can show itself through it in diverse colors. Rumi, the 13th century Persian poet and Sufi mystic uses a similar example to show that the whole of creation is the appearance of the singular unique truth, like an array of light that is manifested through a prism as this colorful world of ours:

We were one substance, like the Sun; we were knotless and pure, like water

When that godly light took form, it became number like the shadows of a battlement. (Rumi M I, 686-688)

The demand and the call of the saturated phenomenon to show itself can only be accomplished if the ‘I’ decides to lend itself to the phenomenon to show itself through the ‘I’. I claimed that this immanent decision to accept or reject the demand of the saturated phenomenon, is a decision to listen to the call of the absolute ought that reveals the absolute value of the person. Here Levinas thoroughly addresses this notion that ‘the call is heard in response’; that means, the Other can only manifest itself if the ‘I’ decides to respond to its call and disposes itself to the phenomenon to show itself through the ‘I’. The intrinsic ‘wanting’ to see and appearing of the phenomenon through us first and foremost is embedded in the human’s practice of ‘free will’, so I suggested that the will to see precedes the possibility of manifestation of the phenomenon, in a way that this immanent decision becomes the condition for appearing the phenomenon.

The willingness to see and to dispose oneself to the arrival of the saturated phenomenon is to actively orient oneself toward receiving the Other in loving in which the Other can show itself as itself on the basis of itself as bearer of the value. I then could assert that the movement of love toward the Other is to establish an ethical relation to the Other in the interpersonal sphere and experiencing the Other as absolute value. However, abandoning the call is the manifestation of the unwillingness to receive the phenomenon in saturation. In this regard, I could conclude that if we want to receive the Other as an absolute value and not to constitute it as the alien in relation to the normative structure of home, we need to reflect on the immanent decision of the subject to accept or reject the demand of the arrival of the saturated phenomenon. Abandoning this demand and the call of the absolute ought is to decide to constitute the Other as a denigrated phenomenon who is deprived of its verticality and its saturation.

I also suggested that, when the privileged mode of interpersonal experience in a certain culture is to receive and constitute the Other as denigrated phenomenon then we can talk about a culture of rejection and denigration that is interwoven with the constitutive structure of social existence. With respect to the phenomenological analysis of violence in Chapter Two, I contended that unlike a loving orientation toward the Other to receive them as absolute value, abandoning the call of the Other and

177 unwillingness to dispose ourselves to the Other in order to show itself through us, is a violent movement toward the Other that tries to constitute them as denigrated phenomenon. In this sense, violence as a denial of receiving the phenomenon in saturation becomes an a priori that gives itself as what it meant. Therefore, instead of claiming that violence disrupts the world of sense, we can claim that violence can give the sense and meaning to our world. Whatever we experience and is given in the experience is the outcome of a certain relation that we have towards the world and the Other. This orientation provides us with a certain point of view for meaning constitution. In the interpersonal sphere, it is this orientation and movement that constitutes our social reality and social co-existence. An example of this is the colonial situation in which the only social reality that the colonial subject dwells in, is emerged out of the violent movement of the colonizer toward the Other in the interpersonal experience.

Reflecting phenomenologically on the human condition as suggested by Husserl, I could thematize our relations and dispositions toward the call of the absolute ought, and the call of the Other. The ethical values in a community in which every member of it follows their inner vocation and helps the other in loving orientation are not constituted and regulated according to the optimality and the norms of certain community, but values are given in the moral experience of the Other, in a manner that the Other can show itself through us as witness and not a constitutive subject. The rigorous analysis of encountering the Other in the interpersonal experience enabled this thesis to propose that as long as the home constitutes the Other as an alien refugee or even as stateless person who is at the threshold of our experience of home, we can barely expect the home and the home comrades to be unconditionally hospitable toward the demand of the refugee other. Unconditional hospitality is the outcome of willingness to receive the call of the Other in saturation and letting the Other bedazzle us with its manifestation.

The following passage by Rumi can clearly manifest this disposition in mystic tradition. In the story of The Chinese and the Roman Artists, we read:

‘The Chinese and the Romans challenged each other before the Sultan as to which of them were the better painters. In order to settle the dispute, the Sultan assigned to each of them a house to be painted by them. The Chinese acquired all kinds of paints and colored their house in the most elaborate way with their unique talent. The Romans, on the other hand, used no colors at all, but contented themselves with cleansing the walls of their house from all filth, and burnishing them till they were as clear and bright as the heavens’ (M1, Section 157).

When the two houses were offered to the Sultan's inspection, the house that was painted by the Chinese was much admired; however, it was the Roman house that won the heart of the Sultan, as all the colors of the other house were reflected on its walls with an endless variety of shades and shadows.

178 Those Romans are our mystic, know my worthy friend:

No art, no learning; study, none: but gain their end.

They polish well their bosoms, burnish bright their hearts,

Remove all stain of lust, of self, pride, hate’s deep smarts.

The purity of the mirror is, beyond doubt,

The heart which receives images innumerable.

The endless formless form of the Unseen,

Shone from the heart’s mirror on Moses’ chest.

Although that form is not contained in Heaven,

Nor on the throne, nor earth, nor sea, nor Pisces.

Because they have a boundary and a number,

The mirror of the heart is free of limits.

The mind is silenced here or led astray.

Because, the hearts with Him, or is Himself.

No image is eternally reflected. as one or many except within the heart.

Each image newly formed upon it forever, appears in it with no concealment there.

The burnishers are free from scent and color;

Each moment they see instantaneous beauty.

They left behind the form and husk of knowledge,

And raised the flag of certainty itself.

Mere thought is gone. They have attained to light;

They’ve got the strait and sea of recognition. (M I, Section 157)

179

As we can observe, Rumi thoroughly implies notions like study, learning, the extasy of knowledge (husk of knowledge) and limited mind in contrast to the Unseen, unlimited heart, appearing without concealment to show how the transcendental constituting subject is limited to restrictions of consciousness, while in the realm of spirit one should only be a witness and disposes oneself to the arrival of the saturated phenomenon to show itself in various colors and shapes.

This study tried to open new possibilities to study the phenomenon of the alien and Otherness, not in terms of solving the puzzle of the Other, rather to guard the mystery of the Other and let the Other arrive to constitute us as a loving human being. While phenomenology as the critical study of human experience tries to thematize the manner in which the hermeneutical subject constitutes meanings in its worldly encounters, it does not regard itself as a practice of developing normative ethical commands. Instead, phenomenology provides us with a new perspective to question the hermeneutics of the I-Other encounter. That means instead of proposing certain normative framework to morally address the Other, we may examine interpersonal experience in terms of an educational experience [Bildung] in which both the ‘I’ and the Other are in the process of becoming. This is to say that experiencing the alienness and mystery in encountering the Other is the existential trait of such experience and cannot be altered. Thus, the practical-existential sense constitution in the intersubjective realm of experience is to come to terms with this ‘not-knowing’ and ‘not-knowing- how’ in regard to the Other. Dealing with the alienness and insecurity that the ‘not-knowing’ brings about is an educational process that concerns different interpretations of difficulties that can open up new possibilities in each and every situation.131

131 See for example Eugen Fink (1970) and Heinrich Rombach (1979) and the theory of structural phenomenology and phenomenological perspectives on the lived experience of Bildung. 180

181 References

Husserl’s Selected Works in German

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182 Husserl, E. 2004 Wahrnehmung und Aufmerksamkeit, Texte aus dem Nachlass (1893–1912), Husserliana XXXVIII (Hua 38). Edited by T. Vongehr and. R. Giuliani. Dordrecht: Springer. Husserl, E. 2013. Grenzprobleme der Phänomenologie: Analysen des Unbewusstseins und der Instinkte, Metaphysik, Späte Ethik, Texte aus dem Nachlass (1908–1937), Husserliana XLII (Hua 42). Edited by R. Sowa and T. Vongehr. Dordrecht: Springer. Husserl, E. 2020. Studien zur Struktur des Bewusstseins, Teilband II: Gefühl und Wert. Texte aus dem Nachlass (1896–1925), Husserliana XLIII/2 (Hua 43/2). Edited by U. Melle and T. Vongehr. Dordrecht: Springer.

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