Chapter 7: Transcending situatedness
“A philosophy… must remain open to the developments that will follow. …A philosophy is never a
house it is a construction site.”
Bataille, in Theory of Religion
7.1
Introduction
“The body as one’s presence in the world manifests a subjectivity that also has spiritual aspects,
aspects of transcendence. These are founded in embodiment, we might say, but not reducible to it.”
Simon Glendinning, ‘The Mysterious’, in The Edinburgh Encyclopaedia of Continental Philosophy
In the previous chapter I argued that the meaning which constitutes my singular
identity in the world, setting me apart as distinct from all other animals and causing me to
be distinguishable from all other Questioning Beings, accrues to an interrogative capacity for
being, an evolving adaptive accumulation of audited meaning. Identity is thus emergent
meaning appropriated and audited. This constant flux of being, that scholars from
Heraclitus to Husserl have attempted to elucidate, is lived, and changed as it is lived, within
the constraints of temporality. Whatever freedom to transcend its tetheredness the
Questioning Being attains, will be synonymous with an acquired freedom, or at least an
appearance of freedom, to transcend time.
The human question “Is this all there is?”, might be regarded as the rallying call of
the troublemaker, but the advances made by the Questioning Being in its adaptive dominion
over its environment, rely heavily on this dissatisfaction that interrogates the world for the
possibility of more. For all that dominance however, the Questioning Being is tethered to
time, whether this is Inner Time-Consciousness, as construed by Edmund Husserl,
chronometric time, subdivided in ever-decreasing increments and with increasinglyaccurate apparatus, or the movement between states of life presented as Absolute Time,
such as was posited by Max Scheler.1 The meaning with which we appropriate the world,
and whose accretion to our interrogative human capacity our identity is indebted to, is given
coherence temporally.
Unsurprisingly therefore, philosophical enquiries into the extent of the human
capacity to transcend its world embeddedness must consider the extent to which the
Questioning Being can transcend the manner in which its life is metered out to it. The
Questioning Being transcends time by interrogating the present, and conferring upon its
anticipated future moments, correctives based in part upon an audit of its past. The
Frings, M. S. ‘Scheler’, in (Eds.) Simon Critchley and William R. Schroeder, Blackwell Companion to
Continental Philosophy, Malden, Blackwell Publishers, 1999, 213-214
1
appearance furthermore, in imagination and thought, of a capacity to transcend place,
though currently only possible empirically in science fiction, is derivative of the Questioning
Being’s capacity, such as it is, to transcend time. Both the blessing and the torture of hope
stem from this projection of the Questioning Being’s desire for significance and capacity for
purpose beyond the moment of the now.
I wish to argue that it is in the very moment of experiential realisation that it is
tethered to time, that the Questioning Being finds the capacity to seek release. Life’s
tethering situatedness is both the motivation and clarification, the question and answer, of
what becoming is required to enable one to make one’s way in the world. Indeed,
alternatively put, Karl Jaspers has argued that there is an imperative for humankind to
display transcendence in the boundary situations of life, those circumstances which bring
home the situational constraints of our embeddedness. In such constraining situations we
need to be open to Transcendence itself, or forfeit the truth of our Existenz. The ideal Jaspers
envisages is won attitudinally when we foster ‘the activity of becoming the Existenz we
potentially are’.2 Honest self-realisation, Existenz that is, opens us up to a dialectical balance
between immanent and transcendent being. We must be attuned to Transcendence in the
form of ciphers such as ‘God’, he says, which draw us into personal authenticity and
existential communication between oneself and others.3
Sartre, whose construal of human freedom I have discussed at some length, goes
beyond the qualification of selfhood I delineate in this thesis, and holds that a person’s
profound lack of self-identity is the very basis for their ontological freedom. ‘Man is free
because he is not a self but a presence-to-self’.4 In effect, Sartre is arguing that one’s
transcendence of ‘Self’ is inevitable, but that the path to bad faith is taken under the
misapprehension that we can in any exact way coincide with ourselves, or with the
depiction of us by others. We exist in-situation;5 each person is situated, and so their identity
is defined by the ‘givens’ of their life, in tension with the transcendence or ‘surpassing’ of
those givens resulting from their fundamental elected project(s).
One telling insight Sartre offers, is that problems emerge when we attempt to
consciously align our facticity and our transcendence absolutely. Ironically, though we feel
pinned down and tethered to the world in embodiment, we are mistaken when we think we
can pin down a moment of our being in time or place. The urge to collapse our ekstatic
Jaspers, 1970 (1932), in Salamun, K. ‘Jaspers’, in (Eds.) Simon Critchley and William R. Schroeder,
Blackwell Companion to Continental Philosophy, Malden, Blackwell Publishers, 1999, 218
3 Salamun, ibid, 1999, 218
4 Sartre, 1948a (1943) 440 in Flynn, T. R. ‘Sartre’, in (Eds.) Simon Critchley and William R. Schroeder,
Blackwell Companion to Continental Philosophy, Malden, Blackwell Publishers, 1999, 260
5 Flynn, ‘Sartre’, in Blackwell Companion to Continental Philosophy, ibid, 260
2
temporality into a timeless moment, a common human tendency, is a contradiction in terms
and consequently unachievable.
Nevertheless, as I have argued, the temporal Questioning Being, situated as it clearly
is, by virtue of its interrogatively ekstatic nature, attempts with its interrogative capacity to
surpass all that it is, in order to be a-temporal. Perhaps we know that we cannot fix time and
place, so we attempt to step outside of it, like a child who alights leaving their playmates on
a merry-go-round. We want to live in the now and we want to be timeless in doing so. I
suggest that this is the root of the robust sense of ‘Self’ consciousness most of us sustain.
Ultimately however, the Questioning Being cannot dwell in the situated moment for that is
fleeting, nor can it understand itself satisfactorily in the transience of release, for to do so is
to be without a world.
This idea is well expressed by Simone de Beauvoir, who also questioned the capacity
and the scope of human transcendence and its implications for human freedom. She
contends that the individual is divided, not between mind and body, but between
transcendence, the freedom of being oneself, and facticity, one’s embedded situatedness. She
offers the insight that when an individual fails to harmonise these two elements, bad faith
occurs. One’s facticity describes but does not circumscribe self-identity, for within one’s
situatedness one has an unlimited freedom to recalibrate one’s sense of ‘Self’. My reading of
de Beauvoir then, is that put very simply, the turbulence of human consciousness arises
because the Questioning Being is torn between the posited facticity of its functional identity,
and the auditing of its own significance as identity-sense.
Echoing Sartre, Merleau-Ponty posits in Sense and Non-sense, where he compares the
restlessness of the human with the inanimate which ‘is what it is’, that the Questioning
Being is consigned to unrest, because it cannot reach in actuality what it approximates to in
potentiality; ‘mans’ constant efforts to get back to himself are synonymous with a
determination to transcend any limitation to ‘one or other of his determinations’.
Consciousness cannot retire to obscure thoughtless inertia but is a restless act of surpassing
itself’.6 Something akin to this has emerged in my discussion so far of the relationship
between the Questioning Being’s identity-sense, that audited appropriation of the world’s
meaning, and whatever identity is thrust upon it, or held out as a tantalising possibility in
everyday life.
Consider Winifred Holtby(1898-1935), a feisty campaigner for human rights who
noted with dismay in her ironical history of women that ‘Women have been trained to be
unintelligent breeding machines’. They have even been ‘expressly forbidden to think’, and
Merleau-Ponty, M. Sense and Non-sense, Northwestern University studies in phenomenology &
existential philosophy, Evanston, Northwestern University Press, 1964, 66
6
‘educated to be the pawns in the family game of prestige and alliance, submissive wives and
fertile’.7 She urges women to transcend these purposive prison walls. In her novel The
Crowded Street, an emancipated character, Muriel, insists ‘I can’t be a good wife until I’ve
learned to be a person …and perhaps in the end I’ll never be wife at all. …The thing that
matters is to take your life into your own hands and live it, following the highest vision as
you see it.’8
Thus in the interrogation of a suffocating situatedness, meaning can be released
which transcends that which has accrued as identity. Even so, that meaning must find an
alternative anchorage somehow, in time.
Firstly, if one’s embodied, intersubjectively intentional life, embedded as it is in the
world, is to transcend situatedness, it will require a negotiation between the purposive
facticity of one’s ontic presence in the empirical world and the significance that these ontic
variables have for the Lifeworld foreground of existence.
Secondly, and more fundamentally, it requires a resolution of the ontological tension
I have posited in terms of the Questioning Being’s primordial desire for significance and
capacity for purpose.
Thirdly, the Questioning Being’s transcendence of its ontological situatedness in the
Landscape of Being is dependent upon the play of temporality which, I argue, is that
fundament which makes this resolution imperative, and yet in fact, points the way to its
possibility.
We cannot be complete because of temporal change, paradoxically we can instigate
existential change and participate phenomenologically in it, precisely because we are
temporal beings and incomplete. Also, precisely because we are loosely tethered to time, we
can posit a metaphysical realm of meaning which we populate with ideas and beliefs, a
realm that we can envisage as a-temporal or even eternal. In actual fact however, whether
the eternal realm exists or not, it is my view that what we really envisage is another time, or
series of temporal moments, beyond, or perhaps alongside, that to which we are tethered.
In this chapter I sample that existential negotiation between the purposive facticity of
a person’s ontic presence in the empirical world, and the significance that these ontic
variables have for their Lifeworld foreground. I also point towards the releasing of metatemporal ideas that this process brings about. I will sample that negotiation, in relation to
the ontic markers of race, ethnicity and culture, sex and gender, and age.
7.2
Tetheredness to the temporality of meaning
Holtby, W. Women and a changing civilisation, University of Virginia, John Lane, (Bodley Head),1934,
47-8/175
8 Holtby, W. The Crowded Street, University of Virginia, John Lane (Bodley Head) 1924, 270
7
“The natural sciences have not in a single instance unravelled for us actual reality, the reality in which
we live, move and are… the opinion that they can accomplish this – in principle- has revealed itself to
those with more profound insight as a superstition.”
Edmund Husserl, Philosophy as a Rigorous Science
Assuming that the Questioning Being can indeed transcend time, because it is not
bound to the ekstasis of a particular present, and must do so for identity to accrue meaning,
how does the Questioning Being in fact transcend time? Engaging with this question will
entail, I propose, establishing the validity of the view that meaning is temporal and that the
Questioning Being is to some extent, however loosely, tethered to it.
Of course, one way that we transcend time and challenge our tetheredness to its
accretion of meaning is through the abstracting of meaning itself. We render it a-temporal
when we argue that it is a constant; it is a truth that does not need successively to be won
anew. We do this unsurprisingly in two ways; we argue that the meanings that form the
background or foreground of our lives are factually true as representations of the ‘real’
world we share, and somehow true for all time, even though our species has not
experienced and cannot encompass all time. Factual truths such as the physical ‘law’ of
relativity exemplify this, a truth that is both currently and retrospectively applied. We also
evaluate meanings that form the background or foreground of our lives, and argue that they
are values that are constants and therefore true for all time. The declaration of human
‘rights’ perhaps, which is also both currently and retrospectively applied, provides an
example of this.
One consequence of this abstraction is to furnish ‘Self’ consciousness with the sense
of being a dispassionate bystander. A sense criticised by Husserl, as the consequence of
Galileo’s efforts, and leading to the ‘surreptitious substitution of the mathematically
substructed world of idealities for the only real world’.9 Thus, the ‘invention of idealisation’
it is argued, champions a methodological objectifying determination of idealities which is
profoundly disengaged from the immediately intuited world. Consequently, Husserl
lamented, ‘since then every kind of investigation reaching back to true originary meanings,
have terminated at idealized nature and failed to engage with the prescientific life and its
life-world’.10 Whether or not Husserl is right in this generalisation, the Questioning Being
desires an anchorage in this abstraction of meaning because memory cannot provide such a
mooring, and because paradoxically, as Husserl contends, upon it we have built both the
cult of scientism and the cult of enduring ‘Ego-hood’.
Husserl’s transcendental reduction succumbs to idealisation
Ironically, considering Husserl’s warnings, his own radical reduction promotes
9
Husserl, Crisis, 1970, 48-49
Husserl ibid, 50
10
exactly the type of transcendent stance that Merleau-Ponty took to task. Husserl’s
‘transcendental reduction’ arguably discloses the pregiven world, a self-enclosed universe,
through the development of an attitude which rises above the pregivenness of the validity of
the world, indeed above the universal conscious life, as the field of all life-interests.11 All is
placed under the philosopher’s gaze, purely as the correlate of the subjectivity which gives it
ontic meaning. The philosopher stands as it were ‘above the world’; it has been reduced, to
the transcendental phenomenon ‘world’, the world for me. The Olympian vantage point from
which this is achieved however, is itself an internalised meta-temporal construct.
In opposition, Merleau-Ponty insisted that consciousness does not even begin to exist
until it imposes its wishes on an object, and even the phantoms of ‘internal experience’ arise
as things borrowed from external experience; ‘consciousness has no private life’.12 He argues
that intellectualism renders consciousness self-subsistent, ‘removed from the stuff in which
it is realised’; it portrays us as a non-derivative entity, a spatially-irrelevant presence in the
world; indeed I contend, a temporally world-irrelevant bystander too. Through adopting
this entirely transparent consciousness as a starting point, all that separates us from the real
world – error, sickness, madness, in short incarnation – ‘is reduced to the status of mere
appearance’.13 Husserl’s consciousness has little to identify as its own. There is a
phenomenological path to be found back to reality therefore, between the Charybdis of
abstracting scientism, and the Scylla of abstracted consciousness. This is rendered necessary
because both offer an alleged attainment of meaning, infused with a neutralised longevity
that successfully veils from us from our own existential brevity, and postpones the task of
finding meaning within temporal situatedness.
Does this mean then that there is no metaphysical world? Not necessarily, but this is
not something we can step outside of our temporal indebtedness to prove. For some this is
itself enough, nevertheless, the marvellous descriptions of science are themselves statements
of truth that are situated in a present physical frame and understood in the light of the
regularity of the past; Hume has insisted upon that.
The inductive facts and evaluative judgements that give shape to external
experience, and the derivative inner theatre of consciousness, are themselves inevitably
made or refurbished, within the course of history’s temporal movement. They have a
situated indebtedness of their own, and our appropriation of them tethers us to it, however
loosely. Indeed, though retrospective analysts undoubtedly point to the anomalies or
Note that Husserl does not envisage the ‘transcendental epoché’ as a temporary springboard. It is
meant as ‘a habitual attitude which we resolve to take up once and for all’. Husserl surely creates
thereby not an absolute phenomenological science under which all other sciences are subsumed, but a
science above science, forever parallel to the empirical sciences. Husserl, ibid, 150
12 PP, 1945/2006, 32
13 Ibid. 143
11
exceptions that were overlooked at their inception as an indictment against that milieu,
situated inductive facts and evaluative judgements must be comprehended ultimately in the
light of their own time.
As I have iterated already, the desire for a-temporal truths and values has led us
incessantly to adopt a transcendent position from which to decree how things truly are.
However, ‘In viewing ourselves from a perspective broader than we can occupy in the flesh,
we become spectators of our own lives.’ It is from this untenable vantage point that life
appears absurd,14 and I would argue, if maintained as a form of escape, it ensures that our
progress through the world is arrested.
Some scholars suggest that we have projected this wish for untethered truths and
values into the heavens and so created the disengaged divine in our own image,15 others of
course regard the divine as that element of eternal transcendence that draws us to itself and
beyond ourselves.16 The abstraction of truths about identity is also apparent. Having
integrity, being loyal, knowing oneself, acknowledging one’s roots, retaining one’s faith;
these abstracted qualities are aspects of identity variously deemed desirable, and timeless.
7.3
The temporalizing role of history
“I was walled in: neither my refined manners, nor my literary knowledge, nor my understanding of
the quantum theory could find favour.”
Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks; The Lived Experience of the Black Man
I wish now to extend my description of the primordial drives essential to the
Questioning Being, and to investigate the way that the Questioning Being’s
interrogativeness aids the transcendence of situatedness, in relation to identity derived from
gender, race, and age. In doing so I consider the abstraction of desirable identity
characteristics such as those mentioned above, the cultural weighting that contributes to this
abstraction, and the relationship these criteria have with situatedness transcended. This
undertaking discloses the role that history plays in temporalizing identity, as both the arena
Nagel, T. ‘The Absurd’, The Journal of Philosophy, Vol. 68, No. 20, Sixty-Eighth Annual Meeting of the
American Philosophical Association Eastern Division (Oct. 21, 1971), pp. 716-725
15 Feuerbach, Freud and Durkheim, Marx and even Nietzsche; consider for example, Harvey, Van A.
Feuerbach and the Interpretation of Religion Volume 1 of Cambridge Studies in Religion and Critical
Thought Cambridge University Press, 1997, 31
16 Note the profound dependence Augustine famously expresses as the solution to humanity’s
restlessness when he says of the Divine, ‘You have made us for yourself and our hearts find no peace
until they rest in you.’ Augustine, Confessions, London, Penguin Classics, 1961, 21. Consider in the
same vein Schleiermacher’s notion of ‘absolute dependence’ and his claim that in response to Godconsciousness ‘Life, then, is to be conceived as an alternation between abiding-in-self and a passingbeyond-self on the part of the subject’. Schleiermacher, F. (Eds.) H. R. Mackintosh and J. S. Stewart,
The Christian Faith, London, Continuum -T&T Clarke, 2005, 8
14
in which these identity issues are played out and one’s existential auditing occurs, and the
historical panoply of ideas from which transcendent meaning is assembled.
Phenomenology warns us that the reality sought by each human life will always be
contextually specific. So, as each generation attempts its abstraction of recommended
validities, and situatedness is tacitly assumed to have been transcended, still every
appropriated meaning remains just as indebted to temporal provenance as the accrued
meaning it replaces. Whether conforming or rebelling, ‘a Frenchman’ before and after the
revolution denotes something strikingly epochal, as does ‘an Englishwoman’ before and
after women’s suffrage. Equally, the ‘child’, the ‘teenager’ and the ‘pensioner’ are
denotations that have a historical provenance, and denote profoundly different entitlements,
responsibilities and capabilities from one era, nation or class, to another. Even as they
transcend the situatedness of accrued identity, people are embedded in ‘particular human
worlds’.
Husserl initially dismissed the historically contextual embeddedness of perception as
necessitating the forfeit of timeless truth and the relegation of historical insights to relativity.
Such historicity conflicted with his desire to safeguard the apocdicity of universal truths
immediate to consciousness. But, as I have argued, transcendent consciousness is too
simplistic an abstraction; into which consciousness is Husserl advising a retreat, Robespierre,
Roquentin, Fawcett or Curie, or some other? It seems to me that Husserl would be the first
to nullify the identification of a hollowed-out, anonymously ontic-free consciousness, as in
any way human. How, furthermore, could one have an intuition of the validity of justice
say, or logic, without contextual and thus historical, situation?
Putting this reliance in reverse however, Husserl proposed the notion of the
historically defining idea a nation embodies. This was, as we have seen, epitomised supremely
in the rationalistic questing resolve, or theoria,17 manifested in European humanity, with the
implication that, defined by their ‘Inner history’, all Europeans share in this project which
underlies and supersedes all historical events.
History, pertinent to Husserlian thinking then, is that ‘culture of truth’ which
discloses founding intuitions and meaning-giving acts;18 not the various things actual people
have experienced at various times, but the ‘primal wellsprings’ from which current tradition
was originally drawn.19 This is surely promoting an abstraction of grand a-temporal terms
such as Colonialism, Democracy, Emancipation and Individualism. For Husserl historical
reflection becomes all of a piece with the phenomenological search for the things themselves
Husserl, The Vienna Lecture, Crisis, 1970, 285
Guignon, ibid, 548
19 Guignon, ibid, 549
17
18
and once again ‘man is the measure of all things.20 In this quest something understood
historically… amounts to profound self-reflection, a disclosure of one’s roots conceptualised
and a self-understanding in terms of what we, as historical beings, are authentically
seeking.21 Husserl’s depiction of history, as the movement that encapsulates ‘what we are
authentically seeking’, echoes my assessment of the Questioning Being’s sensibility of human
identity as the embedded desire for significance which often is obliged to transcend that
embeddedness; most importantly however, in contradistinction to Husserl, I insist, such a
historical essence, such a sensibility of identity historically derived, transcends
embeddedness only in the sense of its transference of semantic anchorage to another time or
‘place’. There are no abstracted absolutes only composite universals.
The problem with Husserl’s solution then, is that it presupposes a reduction to pure
immanence; only the meaning-world is historicised, and reflection is limited to the meanings
constituted by subjectivity.22 Indeed, Husserl posits a reflection which is limited to atemporal meanings, constituted somehow by temporal subjectivity. But can the Questioning
Being really transcend its historicity entirely? Heidegger in contrast affirmed that history is
an element of the ‘factical’ thrownness to which we are tethered. Fundamental to Being and
Time is his portrayal of the worldhood of the world, that is, as I have noted, an
encompassing ever-present background of meaningful relations wherein we find ourselves
arbitrarily thrown. As being-in-the-world, Dasein is tethered to a background of acquired
significance and relevance relationships which has temporal provenance, however the
community construe its origins.
For Heidegger this shared world is accessible as I have said, only through the
interpretations and practices of a linguistic community, an indeterminate and anonymous
forum; a community I have identified as those who confer meaning upon the Questioning
Being’s life which must be audited. ‘Dasein is constantly delivered over to this
interpretedness which controls and distributes the possibilities of average understanding
and of the state of mind belonging to it’.23
As a facet of its ontology, the Questioning Being is subject most significantly
therefore, to delivery over to intersubjectivity itself, thus, Robespierre must revolt against
the mores of the elitist community of Europe in the 1700s; Roquentin is made to embody an
Attributed to Protagoras, and imbibed wholeheartedly in Enlightenment thinking Jerome Jordan
Pollitt cites the localisation of this abstracted notion in Pericles Funeral Oration 430/429 BC wherein
Pericles claims Athens is the epitome of it, alternatively the Sophists site this a-temporal truth as
apparent in their own movement. Art and Experience in Classical Greece: Sources and documents in
the history of art series, Cambridge University Press, 1972, 68
21 Husserl, 1970, in Guignon, ibid, 551, italics mine, ‘what we are authentically seeking’ echoes my
sensibility of human identity as the embedded desire for significance which often is obliged to transcend that
embeddedness.
22 Patǒcka, 1996, in Guignon, ibid,
23 Heidegger, BT, ibid, 211
20
author’s negation of a European mindset prevalent in the early 1900s; Millicent Fawcett
strove necessarily against the patriarchal limits of her era, in conflict nevertheless with those
who felt she embodied the subservience society had imposed on women. Marie Curie,
though certainly collaborative, forged ahead with her scientific research, forced into
challenging as she did so the parameters within which women were supposed to contribute to
society. Each Questioning Being inherits a historical situatedness they redefined for
themselves through struggle. To retreat to consciousness, despite the universal truths that
may be observed about it, is always to retreat to a particularised and temporal
consciousness. Indeed, as I reflect phenomenologically upon a conscious sensibility of
human identity, anticipating that it will resonate intersubjectively with the reader, I am a
particular consciousness appealing to particular consciousnesses.
Heidegger argued that socialisation necessitates imbibing the everyday
standardisation of language and practices. Indeed, too often in society we no longer
encounter the things themselves spoken about, but instead a superficial linguistic
commonality, however sophisticated it appears. Though homogeneity is the price paid for
situatedness it should be remembered that linguistic situatedness confers the benefits of
anchorage; if speech is not grounded life is groundless. Herein lies another aspect of the
tension identity-sense must accommodate in appropriating the world.
I am persuaded by Heidegger’s insight that, in community, Dasein is that concernful
being which is directed towards the future in undertaking projects fuelled by a past that has
already been, and ‘making present’ that which it attempts. This temporality is the condition
for the very possibility of history. Dasein is in its ‘happening’ the very locus of historical
unfolding and ‘world history’.24 In Heidegger history takes the form of a ‘tradition’ which
must be appropriated; the ‘calcified set of uprooted and groundless presuppositions’ that
constrain the parameters of judgements and behaviour. Too often this ‘tradition’
overwhelms and obscures those originating ‘primordial wellsprings’ Husserl spoke about.
Thus, a person’s gender, their ethnicity, their age even; all these passed off in each epoch as
neutral and a-temporal meaning-laden facts, are historical elements which, if they are to be
audited and appropriated, must be recognised for what they are. The Questioning Being’s
embodiment, its intersubjective intentionality, embedded as it undoubtedly is in a particular
milieu, is not the stuff of neutral definition but questionable historical validation which must
be tested.
In Heidegger’s divergence from Husserl, discussed already in Chapter Three, he
emphasises the necessary attainment of personal integrity, as the prerequisite for authenticity,
wrested from the public commonality of the linguistic community, whereby in
appropriating it for oneself, calcified ‘tradition’ becomes ‘heritage’. Thus, in Husserl and
24
Guignon, ibid, 552. See above section 3:4
Heidegger, history is essentially, and must be understood per se, the ‘authentic happening of
human existence’ arising out of the future meaning-conferring projects one adopts.25 This
will of course entail the appropriation of words and their meanings, but these adopted terms
are not thus rendered immune to situatedness, instead they are re-situated in the temporal
foreground of one’s life.
My considered view is that contextualised historical significance is a defining aspect
of human identity, and in auditing and transcending it for oneself in one’s identity-sense,
authenticity is gained. I argue furthermore, that no accretion of meaning can be truly
transcended by a collective a-temporal abstraction of terms, for they then forfeit their
legitimising provenance and are subject to the arbitrary determination one has no ownership
of. Without such genealogically connected auditing, the identifying labels ‘revolutionary’,
‘nihilistic’, ‘suffragist’ and ‘pioneering academic’, and those desirable qualities such as
‘determined’,’ honest’ and ‘compassionate’, float away from the world like a kite whose
string is severed.
The problem of course, is that situated truths are malleable and relative, and
therefore lacking in universal authority. We need universal truths, and these require
abstraction if we are to avoid the nationalist and historical requisitioning which goes beyond
warranted appropriation of meaning. Easy edicts must be replaced with painstaking
intersubjective negotiation therefore. In 1925 for example, the Deutschkirche requisitioned the
meaning of Jesus as a Germanic Saviour. The Palestinian provenance of Jesus, and the
subsequent appropriation by the Christian church of a universal Saviour ‘clothed in humility,
pacifism and self-denial’, was replaced with a parochial and Germanic ‘Jesus the hero, the
fighter for God’.26 Thus, the consequent identity marker ‘Christian’ becomes in each age a
cipher, often a disconnected cipher, for something that is clothed in universality but is
essentially arbitrary and revisionist unless explicitly negotiated. This can often mean that ‘I
am a Christian’, ‘I am a Buddhist, ‘I am a Muslim’, are terms appended to identity which
carry assumed allegiances the believer would disown. Similarly, the austere extremism
championed by the Taliban movement, whose requisitioning of any Islamic hermeneutic of
Sharia law prohibits open theological dialogue, re-interprets ‘Muslim’ identity as patriarchal,
violent and culturally introverted.
In the recognition of the fact that there are in existence no uncontested nonmathematical abstractions, only ‘composite universals’, one risks arriving at the ultimate
implication that such desirable landmarks as Justice, Truth and Equality, are merely
expendable relativities. I contest however, that abstracted terms do exist as ideals, although
Guignon, ibid, 553. NB, ‘history has its essential importance… in that authentic happening of
existence which arises from Dasein’s future’. Heidegger, 1962, 438
26 Overy, R. The Dictators, Hitler’s Germany, Stalin’s Russia, London, Penguin Books, 2004, 280
25
these are never successfully neutral or situationless. Even when the universal right to Justice
is declared in The Hague it becomes a situated ideal with a historical provenance. These
ideals furthermore, as opposed to the Platonic Forms, are crafted and evidenced. The ideal of
equality for all human beings, for example, is necessarily one that is crafted in human living
and honed thereby through negotiation and reason; this is something one cannot do with an
absolute abstraction. It is also evidenced scientifically and historically in each situation in
which it is universally tested. Racial and Gender equality therefore, are two ideals in
abstracted form which are both scientifically evidenced and socially appropriated. The fact
that these notions are possessed subjectively and intersubjectively, in a manner revealing
subtle shades of meaning, shows that though it is imperative that we do not circumscribe
human values through reduction to natural laws of physical inevitability or through
historical expediency, the scientific and historical provenance which forms the background
to human living remains.
Consider the abstracted term ‘Justice’ as enshrined in international law. It became
clear during the twentieth century that Soviet and German law was not defined in terms of
‘abstract theories of right’ but as the product of a unique moment in history. This
requisitioning of legal truth gave their dictators, and many similar since, its own
validation.27 Normative law gained its moral law, not from ‘eternal principles’ but from a
revolutionary historical class struggle on the one hand and a sense of Germanic destiny on
the other; elaborate special pleading held that ‘In the Soviet union the revolution was just,
law was promulgated by the revolutionary state, therefore law was also just’. Similarly, ‘In
the Third Reich the highest justice was the preservation of the life of the nation; the nation
was the source of law; hence law was also just’.28 Abstracted rights were consequently
eroded and dismissed with tragic results.
Thus abstraction is a necessary adaptation of historical meaning, but it must be
appropriated through universal negotiation, not requisitioned to serve a minority and
imposed universally. Abstracted terms cannot save us, but composite universals can, if they
are audited, that is, evidenced, and appropriated by intersubjective negotiation.
7.4
Situating and transcending identity: the senses
“Even the ontological investigation which we are now conducting is determined by its historical
situation and, therewith by certain possibilities of approaching beings and by the preceding
philosophical traditions.”
Martin Heidegger, The Basic Problems of Phenomenology
I have been considering the extent to which the Questioning Being may be said to
27
28
Overy, Ibid, 2004, 288
Overy, 2004, ibid, 290
transcend the given features of its situatedness in order to develop and appropriate identity.
I cannot, it transpires, transcend the specificity of my life by applying abstracted terms, as if
these both held me to the world, yet no longer constrained me. I am not ‘English’, ‘Male’,
‘middle-aged’ or ‘academic’ in any sense other than an application of those ‘universal’ terms
whose specificity I own and intersubjective negotiation will allow; if I am defined by others,
the intersubjective beings with whom I share the world, then those meanings are meanings
situated variously in myriad temporal Lifeworlds, and subject to negotiations between them.
Consequently, I am a middle-aged academic Englishman, in accordance with the auditing
endeavour which creates the foreground of my life against the backdrop of these possible
historically derivative meanings which have a temporal provenance, despite their recurrent
abstraction. As history itself shows, this caveat clearly applies to such emotive markers as
‘immigrant’, ‘negro, ‘religious’ or ‘disabled’. Thus, though abstracted a-temporal terms have
become ubiquitous since the advent of the dictionary, and reinforced in the immediacy of
digital intercommunication, in the real world of human affairs there is always a
misalignment between identity and identity-sense, though both are clothed in necessarily
situated meanings.
But what of the situatedness that derives from our life-defining sensory experiences?
Though the Questioning Being experiences life most keenly in the very operation of its
senses at the surface of its being, Merleau-Ponty has highlighted, perhaps more than any
other philosopher, the habitual nature of this sensing. The constitutive role of the body for
experience is such that it enables and grounds perceptual awareness whilst at the same time
remaining peripheral to it all. Consequently, my body is ‘constantly perceived’, even whilst
it remains ‘marginal to all my perceptions’.29
Even at the habitual level, I have a fundamental embodied sensibility of my
situatedness. My body enables my identity to acquire a tangibility which has a singular
flavour, just as a unique aroma seems to pervade the nutmeg. My body grants continuance to
my situated experience too, and though I regard myself as more than a bundle of sensations,
nevertheless the bundling of my sensations has a unique pattern through which my identity
is sensed. However habitual or peripheral sensibility is therefore, it is situating.
As we have seen, for Merleau-Ponty touch is the reciprocal relation between an
external world and embodied consciousness, the ‘chiasm’ of the touching and the tangible.
Through the primordial and maternal nature of touch identity is nurtured, and must then
extricate itself in a bid for independence; touch which has essence before orality comes into
Merleau-Ponty, PP, ibid, 103-104 Does attention drawn to the body and its senses recalibrate the
meaning those phenomena possess? No says Merleau-Ponty, for ‘consciousness is no less intimately
linked with objects of which it is unheeding than those of interest to it, and the additional clearness
brought by the act of attention does not herald any new relationship, PP, ibid, 32
29
being30. Thus the internality31 and violability32 of touch unfolds in pregnancy.
When we have extricated ourselves from our mothers, touch is indicative of
intentionality even when we are unaware of our intentions. On sensing our pressing against
another in a crowded bar we seek to be excused for the intimacy. When intimacy is sought
with another, we reach out, and a ‘caress’ which forgoes touching as such,33 empowers the
other. In Husserl and Merleau-Ponty touch is the primal means of disclosure of the ‘self’,
though this is not so in Heidegger.
The senses I argue firstly, both tacitly and explicitly, plot the existential co-ordinates
of one’s situated being. Secondly, also tacitly and explicitly, they play a role in the auditing
of meaning accruing to one’s life as identity, and so contribute to one’s identity-sense. I wish
to explore these two roles in the next section; the senses as boundary markers and as
gatekeepers of identity.
7.5
The sensory contribution to embodied identity-sense
“’The worst thing in the world’, said O’Brian, ‘varies from individual to individual’”
George Orwell, 1984
It is always unsettling when a smell brings back into the present an experience from
our distant past. The smell of hot tarmac is perhaps evocative of an alleyway in which one
felt cornered in one’s youth; the smell of newly mown grass evokes the end of the summer
term and weeks of relative freedom. Though unsettling, the evocative potency of smells is
well-known, but their contribution to identity is perhaps more rarely acknowledged.
My contention is that through the senses, meaning is rendered tangible, even
material. Because, as Questioning Beings, we live concernful lives, our senses provide
meaning-components by which we appropriate the world and afford it value. These may be
conceptual meaning-components; they may additionally, be experiential. I might like the
smell of hot tarmac, ironically, because it signifies a distance between me and my youthful
vulnerability, or hate its smell because I relive the panic associated with it. Either way, my
senses pin down experience to a tangible element that can be audited, for its purpose for me
or significance to me.
Irigaray, L. (1993) An Ethics of Sexual Difference in Heinämaa, ‘Feminism’ in (Eds.) Hubert L. Dreyfus
and Mark A. Wrathall, A Companion to Phenomenology and Existentialism, Malden, Wiley-Blackwell,
2009, 509 See also discussion of the same work in Mark Patterson, The Human Touch, in The
Philosophers Magazine, Issue 45, 2nd Quarter, 2009, 55-56
31 Young, I. M. Pregnant Embodiment: Subjectivity and Alienation in the Journal of Medical Philosophy
(1984) 9(1): 45-62
32 De Beauvoir, S. The Second Sex, 1972, in Heinämaa, Feminism, 2009, 509
33 Levinas, E. Time and the Other and additional essays, (Trans.) Richard A. Cohen, Duquesne University
Press, Pittsburgh, 1987 in Mark Patterson, The Human Touch, in The Philosophers Magazine, Issue 45,
2nd Quarter, 2009, 56
30
This is not all however. As Merleau-Ponty has convincingly argued, the precognitive
habituality of embodied living, something parallel perhaps to the swift neural pathways of
intuitive reflex, means that experiential meaning is habituated as a register of preference
against which further experience is measured and curated. I will shun the sensory
experiences that evoke pain or unpleasantness, and so those meanings that find tangible
expression in them will accrue to my identity in a negative sense. In the auditing of my
identity-sense I will come to orient myself in relation to their negative existential coordinates. Similarly, I will assimilate positively the sensory experiences that evoke pleasure
or advancement, and they will accrue to my identity in a positive sense; I will audit my
identity-sense accordingly. Notice here that the recursivity I have described as sustaining
between the body and the world is at work. I give some examples below, of these eidetic
structures whose operation discloses the way that identity arises out of the Landscape of
Being.
Smelling: Each autumn in the English countryside, the rich moist melancholic smell of
newly ploughed fields vies for my attention with their visual demotion from textured gold to
deeply scarred brown; pungency prevails. Visually the autumn fields provide a sobering
check to the sleep inducing glow of summer, but it is the smell of newly-turned farmland,
borne on ever more bracing air, that carries melancholy with it. The autumn sights and
smells render tangible the instinct that ‘all good things must come to an end’, and the yield
of past projects must give way to new endeavours; in my sense of ‘Self’, a melancholic
realism becomes associated with autumn. I regret that nothing is permanent but am attuned
to this truth even so.
Even now, the smell of pipe tobacco conjures up the cardiganed figure of my
granddad and the gramophone sounds of Jim Reeves; the aroma of a bonfire is heady in its
association with childhood’s brotherly camaraderie. Both are indicative to me of belonging
and yet of change. Thus I appropriate the world, temporally, in the form of situated sensual
events. My identity-sense and the facts of the world, i.e. the foreground and the background,
are reciprocally dynamic due to the singular way I deploy my senses, and, both are further
shaped by this reciprocity.
The potency of this olfactory sensitivity we share, and the meaning-components it
makes real to us, furnishes a market place in which the peddlers of expensive perfumes sell
our identities back to us aromatically packaged. We choose to be associated with particular
fragrances, because of the meaning-components we are encouraged to believe they represent
for others, and their consequent reifying power. In turn, whether critically, or
compassionately, we make judgements about the status or wellbeing of those around us,
judgements about their identity, on the basis of how they smell.
Tasting: It is not just in an olfactory form that the senses are commercially exploited;
we package traditions as identity in the tastes that we habitually consume. For example, the
impenetrable and subtle taste of Chinese noodles is elsewhere transposed into the solid and
unpretentious spätzle of German cuisine and the energizing smoothness of Italian spaghetti.
Each culture we find, takes a staple food and gives it a taste suggestive of deployed senses
(preferences of taste), in dynamic reciprocity with the topographical facts of the local world
(climate and crops). In time such habituated preference comes to represent a people group,
is regarded as a meaning-component essential to identity by onlookers, and thus sometimes
stereotypically, identity is conferred on the basis of this accretion of meaning. Taste, though
frequently dismissed as philosophically inconsequential,34 has potency far beyond the literal.
‘You are what you eat’ represents wisdom predating Feuerbach’s use of it.
Touching and Seeing: Though touch embeds us firmly in the world, seeing seems to
release us to float into space.35 Touch anchors us, whether literally or metaphorically, and
we often grasp something or someone for support, when events like bereavement arrest the
flow of our lives. One must bring or allow the world closer in order to touch it; bring it into
the foreground of one’s life and declare oneself, hence the metaphorical acknowledgement
in phrases such as ‘that was touching’ and ‘I felt…’, whose usage is indicative of the
character of the speaker. Sadly too, identity can be judged pejoratively as too fragile with the
phrase, ‘They’re a bit touched’; the world has come too close and left its mark.
Consider the notion of the senses as boundary markers and as gatekeepers of
identity. One can, in intersubjective society, touch, and allow the touch, of certain things and
certain people. These intersubjectively negotiated mores characterise us and shape us. Here
once again is a contextually nuanced composite universal accompanied by penalties which
are imposed on those who get it wrong.
The manner in which we touch others, and things, tangibly signals the values we live
by. “I love you”, “this antique is precious”, “I’ll cherish your gift”, and even “I’m not
hungry” are amplified or negated, as Merleau-Ponty has convincingly iterated, through the
embodiment of identity-sense in touch. The motivation for, and the manner in which, we
appropriate the world, can be eloquently broadcast thereby. The formative power of the
senses to embed the habitual behaviour by which we are defined applies here too. A person
may be understood to be clumsy, cavalier or considerate as a result of touch; equally one’s
identity-sense may refute the identity conferred by others on the basis of this most
immediate engagement with the world. “I am not clumsy declares the model-maker”, “I am
manually dexterous declares the dentist’s assistant”.
In contradistinction to touch, seeing extends us beyond the ‘now’ and is the faculty
34
35
Korsmeyer, C. ‘Disputing Taste’, in The Philosophers Magazine, Issue 45, 2nd Quarter, 2009, 70
Moran, 2009, 86
required for exploration into the unknown. Perception, so profoundly dependent on sight,
indicates our perceiving of the world and its elements; its metaphor dominates and so we
say, ‘every person has a distinctive way of seeing the world’. If used metaphorically, to be
insightful is to possess an approved quality, if used literally, where perhaps one has 20/20
vision, this is both advantageous to oneself, and of benefit to those who follow; both convey
aspects of identity, tacitly promising the capability for discerning and decisive leadership.
But notice also how one’s identity may be conferred on the basis of trite assumptions
regarding one’s sight and how arbitrary meaning-components might accrue as a result. The
archetypes of the ‘bookworm’ or ‘geek’, the ‘boffin’ and the ‘weakling’, are so often derived
from the outward indications of one’s capacity for sight. Audited identity-sense too is
affected; how often might the bespectacled child lament their wearing of glasses when
wishing to appear sporty or suave; ironically, those who have ‘the looks’ can sometimes
adopt glasses specifically for the purpose of gaining the appearance of intelligence.
Inhibitions in social interaction and timidity in the classroom can also stem from shortsightedness, leaving a reticence that persists long after the cause has been remedied.
Hearing: Hearing also shapes us; its capabilities and limitations. Our purposeful
engagement with the world, and our appropriation of its significance, are as dependent
upon our capacity to hear as our capacity to see. Those who are blind and deaf, in addition
to their disadvantage, face the struggle to convince the sighted and the hearing that a
meaningful life can be maintained without these capacities. The marginalisation of the deaf
in particular, has taken many years to be addressed, and yet, we are profoundly ‘deaf’ to the
meaning others convey in most foreign countries we travel to.
Who can deny the profound role of hearing in shaping the identities of Ludwig van
Beethoven and Evelyn Glennie, both in their personal ordeals, and in the tenacious
overcoming on which their dynamic musical accomplishments rested? Both are
distinguished by their capacity to move us through what they cause us to hear. Both
composed and performed, without the capacity to hear, suggesting a profound merit in their
accomplishments which is pertinent to the identity we grant them.
Auditory sense has become analogous to the identity qualities of those who support
and enable. Over and above the sharp hearing one might need for finesse in creativity, or for
stealth in hunting, it has provided us with the metaphor for caring, for the deliberate
employment of it defines a good listener.
All of these sensory indicators, of the manner in which one makes one’s way in the
world, can be construed by society as definitive of identity, and thus conferred as meanings
or experienced as meaningful. They all contribute to the portfolio of purposive and
signifying clues, by which society gauges identity, and by which we appropriate identity-
sense. The senses however are experienced as one’s own senses. I do not hear as such, I hear
through my particular physical apparatus, and in the manner of attentiveness, trained or
instinctive, which is my own. I can transcend the senses I have, I can as van Beethoven and
Glennie did, resourcefully substitute them. To do so however, is to transcend these senses of
my own to another time or ‘place’ which is also singularly mine.
7.6
Transcending situatedness in sex and gender
“Time is not a line but a network of intentionalities.”
Maurice Merleau-Ponty, in Phenomenology of Perception
Around the globe, regardless of cultural variations, sex and gender are highly
significant indicators of a person’s singularity. Because sex and gender have been rendered
such profound signifiers in contemporary discourse, in compensation for the purposiveness
of the past, we are in this sense ‘highly sexed’. Perhaps because of this, in the manner of
Perseus, we approach the ‘gorgon’s head’ of our own procreation shielding our eyes; there is
something repellent in the thought of the generative act from which we sprang. Our own
procreation furthermore, subverts the audacious presumption of the young that it is their
prerogative alone to harness the sexual urge.36 Parents, necessarily sexual before us, are for
this reason ‘the previous generation’. Embodied intersubjective intentionality, embedded as
it is in a shared human world, ensures that we find our procreative history to be the history
of another’s intentionality. In a wider sexual history therefore, we play a cameo role; identity
is molded by this story and identity-sense demands that we appropriate the story for
ourselves.
The Landscape of Being, the generative environment of identity, plays its part in
ensuring that sex and gender are potent identity-markers, elements used as meaningcomponents to confer identity; elements which necessarily require auditing, for these
meaning-components are by no means homogenous. Sexual orientation and gender
therefore, are vital to identity, precisely because, and precisely to the extent that, they are
appropriated in authenticity. Long before we know either our sex or gender, our parents
judge how we will make our way in the world by them, judgements which are determined
by the appropriation of their own intentional surrounding worlds.
Thus it becomes necessary for each Questioning Being to transcend the sexual and
Space will not allow a comprehensive discussion of sexual behaviours or a philosophy of sex.
Robert Gray categorises as sexual human behaviour, acts or activities which ‘give rise to sexual
pleasure’. I will, for this thesis, regard this as a phenomenological rule-of-thumb, though of course
validating sexual conduct will necessitate implicit or explicit meaning-making in each human life,
possibly in relation to a systematised ethical stance such as Natural Law or Situation Ethics. A
philosophical treatment of this subject may be found in Soble, A. and P. Power, N. P. The Philosophy of
Sex: Contemporary Readings, Maryland, Rowman and Littlefield, 2008
36
gender mores of their parents, and in so doing, to reclaim the significance of these elements
for their own time and place. The identity conferred upon a person, biologically and
symbolically, by the actions of parents, tethered as they are to their own surrounding
worlds, must be appropriated by those on whom it is conferred for the sake of authenticity.
The relationship between sex and gender is a fraught one however, for gender is
‘ubiquitous’ and, along with race and class, it orders most aspects of daily life. ‘Talking
about gender for most people is the equivalent of fish talking about water’.37 Nevertheless,
though gender is a given, its relationship with sexuality is not. Too often for example,
transsexuals, transgendered people, and others at the borders of gender and sex, are like fish
who must forfeit water. The mismatch between their experiences and societal expectations is
a disruption which discloses society’s abstracted meanings, and consequently, the
sanctioned identity conferred on those who fail to comply.38
Of course, no Platonic Forms exist to tell us absolutely what sexual and gender
distinctions are; we cannot provide an abstracted non-contextual norm therefore. One
scholar notes instead that they are social constructs; ‘When I was a little kid, I knew what a
woman was and what a man was… men went to work… women stayed home. I learned that
boys had penises and that girls didn't. Then… my mom got a job, but she was still a woman,
and a lot of men let their hair grow long, but they were still men… Categories are created by
people’.39 Phenomenological scrutiny of the situated constructs which align human sexuality
and gender identity reveals them to be insufficiently flexible to encompass human diversity.
Indeed, audited identity-sense itself subverts the prevailing societal contention that gender
is the behavioural, socially constructed, correlate of sex; that gender is ‘written on the body’.
Consider for example those who undertake gender reassignment. One such
transgender experient notes that, since her transformation it is rare that she doesn’t ‘pass’ as
female. Nevertheless, when she is challenged the point people want to make is, ‘I can see
through you’.40 Their implied outrage may be paraphrased as; ‘You have transcended my
meaning-framework, but you shouldn’t have’; ’You do not live up to my evaluation of you.’
And, as if the fluidity of Questioning Beings could be something determinate, we confer
identity on others in an over simplified form to service our own harmonising purposes.
The analogy of an authentic life-performance helps to arrest our assumption of
absolute determinacy however; the same piece of music may be played by a symphony
orchestra or harmonica, but the music itself does not equate to any particular performance of
Lorber 1994, 13, in Dozier, R. ‘Beards, Breasts, and Bodies: Doing Sex in a Gendered World’, Gender
and Society, Vol. 19, No. 3 (Jun., 2005), 297
38 A thought-provoking discussion of these problematic common conceptions and any attempt at recategorising them is offered by Muehlenhard. Muehlenhard, C. L. Categories and Sexuality, in The
Journal of Sex Research, Vol. 37, No. 2 (May, 2000), 101-107
39 Muehlenhard, Ibid, 106
40 Drusilla Marland, in Julian Baggini, The Ego Trick, London, Granta, 2011, 101
37
it. Similarly, those who undertake gender reassignment ‘are like players who have switched
instrument mid-performance’,41 nevertheless ‘the song remains the same’.42
Careful interviews, with those whose experience resists role categorisation based on
abstracted notions of sex and gender, challenge the characterisation of gender as a
determinant initiated by a person’s physical sex;43 there is no fixed assignation of meaning to
sexual behaviour, and sexual orientation is relative to the sexuality of the persons interacting
with each other. Sexual orientation seems fluid, depending on both the perceived sex of the
individuals, and the gender organization of the relationship. Once again, recursive interplay
can be discerned between what is afforded intersubjectively as identity, and what is
appropriated as identity-sense. They are as interdependent in their radical difference as
North and South are to each other. Transcending one or other variant, however, of the
perspectives people adopt regarding sex and gender, entails transcendence to ‘someplace
else’, not ‘nowhere at all’. If therefore I takes steps to establish that I am not what you
suppose, there is still some relationship between what you suppose and what I am, for
negation implies relatedness.
In medical terms one’s gender identity is one’s personal conception of oneself as
male or female, or rarely, both or neither. Gender roles however, may be defined as the
outward manifestations of personality signifying a particular gender identity.44 If a person
accepts himself as male, and refers to his personal gender in masculine terms, then his
gender identity is male. However, his gender role, as a socially endorsed characterisation, is
male only if he demonstrates socially-endorsed male characteristics in behaviour, dress, and
mannerisms. In most individuals, gender identity and gender role are congruous, but when
they conflict, the issue makes its way to the foreground of ‘self’-definition. These
observations raise the complex possibility that one may transcend the societal expectations
placed upon one’s life, but merely be regarded as failing to meet them, and, because there is
no acknowledgement that identity’s meaning-components are intersubjectively negotiated;
what accrues to one’s life is no role at all.
Clearly the terms ‘sex’ and ‘gender’ are often used interchangeably, but they are not
synonymous. Gender denotes one's own identification, but may also depend upon legal
status, social interactions, public persona, personal experiences, and psychologic setting. Sex
is determined by the reproductive organs, and at birth sex is generally assigned according to
external genital appearance, assuming that this signifies chromosomal or internal anatomic
status. When an intersex condition is noted in a new-born, one sex is often appropriated to
Baggini, 2011, ibid
Ibid
43 Dozier, in Beards, Breasts, and Bodies: Doing Sex in a Gendered World, Gender and Society, Vol. 19,
No. 3 (Jun., 2005)
44 Ghosh, S. Sexuality, Gender Identity
Medscape Reference, http://emedicine.medscape.com/article/917990-overview, accessed 12.27,
accessed 4th January 2012
41
42
simplify social interactions and rearing.45 Meaning accrues to that life and identity is
conferred. Generally sex provides a primary anatomic or physiologic distinction, gender
however is established when individual gender identity and gender role are appropriated. Put
simply, ‘sex is biologically determined, whereas gender is culturally determined’.46
Gender development and sexual development are not interchangeable terms either.
Physiologic sexual development progresses through distinct stages, from the neonatal
period, through infancy, childhood, puberty and adolescence, and adulthood; such
physiologic change is distinguishable from gender-related behaviours throughout. The
sexual identity that emerges beyond childhood is clearly a separate entity from gender
identity. Though physical sexual growth, eroticism, and eventual sexuality are related to
gender, they should not necessarily be used to draw determinate conclusions about a
person’s gender definitions;47 where they are, they can confer an accretion of meaning which
identifies the recipient in a way that conflicts with their own emergent identity sense.
It is not clear that Merleau-Ponty makes any real distinction between sex and gender
in his phenomenological work, although many scholars are inspired by his writing to do so.
In particular there can be found derivative arguments against any ‘naturalistic explanation
of sex and sexuality which assumes that the meaning of women’s social existence can be
derived from some fact of their physiology’.48 Merleau-Ponty contends that all human
‘functions’, ‘from sexuality, to motility and intelligence, are rigorously unified in one
synthesis’.49 Sexuality is only one kind of bodily motility among others. Indeed, the very
human manner of existence itself, ‘is not guaranteed to every human child through some
essence acquired at birth’, rather it must be constantly ‘reforged’ through the hazards
encountered by the objective body’.50 What this prompts us to see is that authentic human
identity is an audited harmonisation of a Questioning Being’s situatedness with their desire
for significance and capacity for purpose. The appropriation of one’s cameo role in an
intersubjective sexual history therefore precipitates the collision of contingency and
initiative.
Kane discusses rearing in this context as ‘gendering’; clearly the gender expectations and
preferences that parents display are indicative of embeddedness within a particular milieu or
‘Lebenswelt’. See Kane, E. W. ‘No Way My Boys Are Going to be like That!’ Parents' Responses to
Children's Gender Nonconformity, in Gender and Society, Vol. 20, No. 2 (Apr., 2006), 149-176
46 Ghosh, ibid
47 Ghosh, ibid
48 Butler, J. 1988, 520, in Ruyu Hung, Living and Learning as Responsive Authoring:
Reflections on the Feminist Critiques of Merleau-Ponty’s Anonymous Body, in Indo-Pacific Journal of
Phenomenology, Volume 10, Edition 1 May 2010, ISSN (online) : 1445-7377 DOI:
10.2989/IPJP.2010.10.1.5.1077
49 Merleau-Ponty, PP, 1945/2003, 197 in Hung
50 MP, PP, 198
45
Echoing the themes of Husserl’s Crisis, Merleau-Ponty concludes furthermore that
‘Man is a historical idea and not a natural Species.’51 We find here also, something of the
Heideggerian theme of appropriation in the midst of thrownness, for he says that in human
existence there is no ‘unconditioned possession, and yet, no fortuitous attribute’.52 The
Questioning Being finds itself tethered to both sex, and gender, and yet must of necessity
find significance in transcending the assumptions by which they are comprehended.
Transcending situatedness is not some luxurious form of self-expression but the manner in
which the Questioning Being acquires some of the most fundamental answers it seeks. And
where does temporality fit in? Human sexuality is a flowing stream whose banks have some
definition but they alone do not determine the direction or manner of its movement through
the Landscape. Sex and gender take time to develop, and their relationship takes time to
resolve as a consequence.
Because Merleau-Ponty does not prioritise sexuality as a basis for understanding
human beings, some feminist scholars take inspiration from him to posit a twofold
understanding of human historicity: ‘firstly, body is not completely predetermined by any
interior essence; secondly, the understanding of bodily expression in the world must be
contextually, historically and specifically understood’.53 For Merleau-Ponty, gender is a
historical category for a person to embody in consciousness, and in turn, also an effect of this
embodiment. Sexuality therefore, is not itself ‘the most crucial element for self-construction’
at all.54 Though I agree in principle with this insight, I am nevertheless inclined to insist on
the stipulation that, whilst sex and gender may not be of paramount importance from the
perspective of identity conferred, for any particular Questioning Being it may certainly be
the most profoundly significant focus of their curated identity-sense.
Just as North and South are each understood by the presence of the other, so the
body comprises, in itself, a fluid being alternating between the private realm and the public
sphere; a sense of ‘chiasm’. Merleau-Ponty’s notion of embodiment, applied here, is that the
lived body is an authoring agent emergent from an ‘embryonic anonymity’.55 In authoring
oneself throughout life, the phronesis of sensitivity, perceptivity and criticality are ubiquitous
if we are not to forfeit singularity and become ‘immersed in anonymous or passive states of
being, ‘a form of ‘social anonymity’.56 Merleau-Ponty is understood therefore to maintain
that, ‘the anonymous body is the primordial and personal base for constructing and
developing the self’.57
It is possible to test these judgements, by returning to the scenario considered in
PP, 198, ibid
PP, ibid
53 Butler, ibid, in Hung, ibid, 5
54 Hung, ibid
55 Hung, ibid, 6
56 Ibid, 7
57
Ibid
51
52
Chapter One. In order to be a ‘young man’, acceptable to the specific society of my family, it
seemed necessary to align my adolescent behaviour to their social norms. And yet
paradoxically, being a young man necessitated, in my view, transcending this tetheredness,
showing independence, and appropriating manhood for myself. These social norms were of
course ‘historically’ contextual. My uncle was a generous but traditional Christian man, born
in the 1920s, and raised in London. To be a young man, it was important to him that I be
strong, moral, reserved and not effeminate.
I knew by then that I was male. Though I wished this gender specific to be accepted,
I would still have been physically male whatever other persons identified as my gender role.
At secondary school, the sexist machismo, apparent amongst my male peers repelled me,
nevertheless I wished to be considered masculine; I did not have a blank canvas on which to
outline my sexual and gender identity. The intersubjectively intentional and embedded
nature of my embodied identity as a young man was not entirely my own to possess; I
framed it in the mirror of others’ recognition and endorsement.
Though our societal concepts of man and woman seem derived from pre-conceptual
perceptions of sexed bodies, they are nevertheless constituted by an active focus of attention.
Indeed, it is not ridiculous to ask of a person, ‘When did you first realise you were male (or
female or intersex)?’ Nevertheless, pre-conceptual structures of perception have a part to
play which is never entirely undone by critical conceptual analysis.58
Most importantly, whatever the legitimacy we afford gender mores in appropriating
our gender, ‘the subjects that constitute the sense of being are not sexually neutral
‘consciousnesses’, they are in some mode or other ‘feminine and masculine persons with
different sensual lives and lived motivations’.59 Sexual difference ‘is not just an ontological
difference but is also a structure in the foundations of ontology’.60
7.7
Transcending race, nationality and culture
“There is a time for everything and a season for every activity under heaven: A time to be born and a
time to die, a time to plant and a time to uproot…”
Ecclesiastes 3: 1-2, The Bible, NIV
In the context of sex and gender I have argued that authentic human identity is an
audited harmonisation of a Questioning Being’s situatedness with their desire for
significance and capacity for purpose. The appropriation of one’s cameo role in an
Heinämaa, S. A Phenomenology of Sexual Difference: Types, Styles and Persons (Google eBook), in
(Ed.) Charlotte Witt, Feminist Metaphysics: Explorations in the Ontology of Sex, Gender and the Self,
Springer, 2011, 131
59 Heinämaa, ibid
60 Kruks, ibid
58
intersubjective sexual history makes it imperative that contingency and initiative be
reconciled. But this is also true in the sense of identity conferred in relation to a geographical
or cultural association, for this contingency, whether national or racial, must be
appropriated. To what extent is an accretion of meaning in the form of national loyalties or
racial characteristics truly indicative of identity anyway? This question is further
complicated, because what emerges from both, and aligns comfortably with neither, may be
an additional identifier; culture or ethnicity. To what extent are any of these, nation, race
and ethnicity, legitimately appended to my life if I do not endorse them? Again this question
is complex because embodied and embedded intentionality is inevitably intersubjective. I
contend that the Questioning Being occupies a ‘chiasmic’ space between conferred identity
and avowed identity-sense, for once again it becomes apparent that we have personal but
not private identity.
A helpful point of departure for assessing the weight to afford these markers is
provided by Merleau-Ponty, for whom the body exists primordially. Before reflection, I am a
singularly embodied being. Because this is the only way that I have the world, and I acquire
culture in an embodied relation to it, acculturation must be understood in embodied terms.61
Whether determined by nationhood, race or ethnicity, Merleau-Ponty’s assessment is clear;
‘The body is the vehicle of being in the world, and having a body is, for a living creature, to
be intervolved in a definite environment, to identify oneself with certain projects and be
continually committed to them.’62 Our intersubjectively intentional embodied ‘projects and
commitments’ identify who we are then, when we own them as our own, and this in my
judgement is the appropriate criterion for evaluating the applicability of these traditional
identifiers too.
Problematising race
Though Race might be construed as immediate and its characteristics borne in the
body as distinguishing identity-markers, this is contestable. It is more likely that we are
merely peddling abstracted a-temporal terms when we speak of the ‘white man’ or the
‘black man’. Who can find a definitive example of either; perhaps ‘The black man is not. Nor
the white’.63 What are these terms when applied to real lives irrespective of that person’s
identity-sense? The Dalit, at the bottom of the Hindu caste system, when he says ‘I am Dalit’,
is not affirming, therefore ‘I am untouchable’. The admission of Polish race does not equate
to an admission of diminished status as ‘Untermensch’. These terms are loaded with
Skuza, J. A. Humanizing the Understanding of the Acculturation Experience with Phenomenology,
Human Studies, Vol. 30, No. 4 (Dec., 2007), 453
62 Ibid, 94
63 Fanon, F. Peau noire, masques blancs, in David Macey, Fanon, Phenomenology, ace, in Radical
Philosophy 95 (May/June 1999), 8 accessed at http://www.radicalphilosophy.com/article/fanonphenomenology-race, 29th July, 2014, 16:19
61
questionable, negotiable connotations; indeed, despite evidence to the contrary, I was at
school as I have noted already, marked as a Jew with the ‘nickname’ ‘Rabbi’. Anti-Semitism
holds Jewishness as a slur one can throw at one’s enemies. Similarly, in addition to the
obviously inaccurate approximation of colour, there is no fact of ‘blackness’ or, by the same
criterion, ‘whiteness’; both are a form of lived experience,64 which stands in the disputed
territory between conferred identity and curated identity-sense.
It is in this sense then that Frantz Fanon wrote, as a man born into a world where the
black man was tethered to his blackness, and the white man his whiteness. He found as he
emerged from childhood, that his identity awaited appropriation; ’I am a Negro but
naturally I don’t know that because that is what I am.’65
As a black Martinican, and French citizen rather than colonial subject, Fanon found
himself situated curiously within the racial hierarchy. By way of example he says, ‘One of
the island’s more peculiar exports was the French-educated black civil servant who
‘administered’ black subjects in the African colonies, and who was in a sense neither black
nor white’.66 Illustrating the disjunction between abstracted identity-markers and one’s own
identity-sense, Fanon experienced this anomaly as a young soldier at the end of WWII:
though neither ‘native’ nor ‘white man’ he did not think of himself as black.
Describing his eventual awakening to the sense of being ‘black’, Fanon makes
retrospective reference to Sartre’s intersubjective structure of the gaze and consequent
shameful apprehension of ‘self’ in the disapproval of the Other. Residing in Europe, and
apprehending at last that he is for the other a caricature of the admired and feared
Senegalese colonial regiments recruited in Africa, and at the same time ‘the grinning
tirailleur advertising Banania’, he embraced ‘blackness’.
Fanon reminds us angrily, that race is an idea; the black man is obscured by ‘the myth
of the negro’.67 The Negro who has ‘passed his baccalaureate’, and has studied at the
Sorbonne ‘to become a teacher of philosophy’, is erased, instead, when one thinks of the
Negro ‘one thinks of sex’.68 This identification of the man with his ‘race’ negates his singular
identity. The myth of the black man’s biological prowess resonates with the white man’s
fixation concerning his anxiety about sexual inferiority.69 Race then, identified in such
imprecise terms as ‘black’, ‘white’, ‘coloured’, ‘Asian’, ‘Jewish’, is precisely that abstracted atemporal notion that fails to adequately represent any person assigned it. The reason it fails,
as I have argued, is that it cannot function as an abstract identifier because there is no such
Macey, D. ibid.
Fanon in Macey, ibid
66 Fanon in Macey, ibid
67 Fanon, F. Black Skins, White Masks, London, Evergreen Black Cat Book, 1967, 203
68 Fanon, Black Skins, White Masks, in (Eds.) Paul du Gay, Jessica Evans and Peter Redman, Identity a
reader, London, SAGE Publications, 2000, 208
69 Ibid
64
65
thing. Only symbols whose provenance is situation-specific, and whose abstraction is
acknowledged as a negotiable composite universal, can be audited, and therefore just.
Fanon goes on to contend that just as the Negro symbolises ‘biological danger’, the
Jew symbolises ‘intellectual danger’.70 Imposed identity comes replete with connotations
one’s identity-sense cannot assimilate, such connotations tell us more about the conferrer
than the recipient, and so the Jew is feared because of his potential for acquisitiveness;71 but,
which Jew is feared? Every time a Jew is persecuted, ‘it is the whole race that is persecuted in
his person’ Fanon says.72 Why so? Fanon’s answer reveals his own tetheredness to the very
problem he desires to transcend.73 ‘Projecting his own desires’ onto the other, on the Negro,
unbridled sexual prowess, on the Jew, megalomaniacal avarice, ‘the white man behaves ‘as if’’
the Jew or Negro really has them’.74 But, I am prompted to ask of Fanon’s diatribe, which
white man? The Other demeans what it perceives as a threat; recursively it confers identity
upon the other, revealing as it does so the manner in which its own identity-sense is
harmonised with the world. Like the punter who pushes the world away in order to travel
up stream, the manner in which we appropriate the world determines the style in which we
travel through it. It is for this reason that dominant societies afford only those identities to
others that give traction to their own sense of being.
From whence moreover, did we get the naïve assumption that racial exclusivity ever
existed? Rather than race we should speak of identity streams in which the tributaries of race,
nation, ethnicity, culture, and indeed gender, comingle. But to apply these composite
universals accurately imposes a burdensome interpretive task; instead, society employs
approximate symbols, so that history’s story may be relayed simplistically. It has been
contended accordingly that when ‘racial’ groups interact a hegemonic struggle ensues over
identity and power, beginning at the symbolic or discursive level, where identities-and-thusdifferences are negotiated.75 Discourse about black or white identities does not refer to two
separate things; ‘one constitutes whiteness through the exclusion of blackness’.76
Acknowledging a black person’s identity-sense when conferring identity thus requires
‘destabilizing the category of whiteness…’77 It is not simply a matter of a dominant group
sharing its advantage; we must destabilize those categories of dominance.
Fanon, in du Gay et al, ibid, 210
Ibid, 207
72 Ibid, 209
73 It is unclear for example Fanon’s attitude towards black women or his analysis of their treatment
from this text.
74 Fanon, ibid, in Paul du Gay, ibid, 2000, 210
75 Drew, J. The Politics of Persuading: Ernesto Laclau and the Question of Discursive Force, Journal of
Advanced Composition, Vol. 19, No. 2 (1999), 292
76 Ibid
77 Laclau in Drew, ibid,
70
71
Nowadays perhaps, ‘black’ signifies a transnational grouping which crosses
geographical and cultural boundaries, a group whose common inheritance is the potential
experience of racism and the legacy of colonialism. But which is the more salient feature of
identity: the racial marker of being black, and therefore a target of prejudice, or the ethnicity
which has inherited a specific historical experience of slavery?78 Maybe the salient feature of
identity is neither, but instead the appropriation of victimhood, or solidarity perhaps, in the
furnace of exploitation or indeed of emancipation, as owned intersubjective identity-sense.
Let us take a step back from the individual. For all its hegemonic provenance and
fluidity, Race, an abstracted term, serves as a concrete descriptor of social identity, an
identity marked on the body via our ‘learned perceptual practices of visual categorization’,
with societal significance, and psychological import.79 Ethnicity, likewise a never-neutral
though abstracted term, refers to groups demarcated by historical events, cultural practices,
and structural formations. Ethnic identities are recognisable despite the fact that such
narratives and practices are fluid.80 Race may be marked on the body, like gender, but
meaning must be made of these signs. Both race and ethnicity may be conferred temporally,
but unless over time they are appropriated, it is another thing to say they are owned or truly
applicable.
Descriptions of Caribbean immigrants arriving in New York reveal the fluid
relationship between racial categories, ethnic differences and the experience of racisms. For
example, the ethnic category ‘Puerto Rican’ has become racialised as a signifier of shared
essential and inherent traits. When the symbolism of race is applied, a cultural, rather than
biological grouping is interpreted as the grounding for innate characteristics.
Puerto Rican’s are ethnically defined as Latino, as are Mexicans. Some social
commentators fuel fears that Latino, and in particular Mexican, immigration dilutes AngloSaxon values in America. Latinos must assimilate, they argue, ‘linguistically, culturally, and
politically’, otherwise democratic values will be undermined. ‘There is no Americano
dream’, one critic has remarked, ‘only the American dream created by Anglo-Protestant
society. Mexican Americans will share in that dream and in that society only if they dream
in English’.81 It is assumed by some however, that Latinos cannot remain Latinos
authentically and appropriate democratic values, the rule of law, or a work ethic, because
these are antithetical to Latino cultures. This equates the ethnicity ‘Latino’ to race, and
accords it intractable tendencies and dispositions. One implication this study presents is a
reiteration yet again, of an observation made in a previous chapter; ‘identity’ may be
Alcoff, L. M. Comparative Race, Comparative Racisms,
http://www.alcoff.com/content/comprace.html, accessed 1 st November, 2012, at 16:48
79 Ibid
80 Ibid
81 Huntington, S. Who are We? The Challenges to America’s National Identity, New York, Simon and
Schuster, 2004, 256
78
personal, but it is neither privately owned nor personally controlled. It is unsurprising then
that the Questioning Being must attempt to transcend its situatedness, whether this meaning
accrues in terms of sex, gender, race or ethnicity. Such an auditing imperative is the basis of
identity-sense itself.
Problematising nationality
Contrary to the predictions of eminent scholars, nations and nationalism persist into
the twenty first century.82 Nevertheless, it is interesting to ask whether in fact a person can
belong to a nation; to what extent can a person have nationality? Are these identity-markers
conferred through family lineage or possession of a current passport, or something else
entirely? Establishing what is intended by ‘nationality’ is problematic, for so far, ‘attempts to
develop ‘terminological consensus’ have resulted in ‘grand failure’.83
Nations, it seems, have an ‘intangible essence’, and the notion ultimately tends
towards abstract conceptualisation against subjective and psychological criteria.84 Consider
for example the obsession regarding Aryan supremacy encountered already. This is
rendered all the more complex because the terms ‘nation’ and ‘state’ are often deemed
synonymous. However, many communities who hold themselves to be a nation do not have
a state, or are spread across different states, and many states contain within them more than
one nation. One subjective definition holds that a nation is ‘a body of people who feel that
they are a nation’.85 Can one belong collectively to an intangible essence? Is it possible that
one’s identity-sense can be joined intersubjectively to another’s? Does a nation cease to exist
when its people feel drawn to an allegiance elsewhere?
Phenomenologically speaking, nationality seems to be a visible but inconclusive
indicator of affiliation.86 As I stood, newly arrived in Bangkok,87 alongside the heavily
polluted Ramkhamhaeng Road and awoke to my difference, my ‘whiteness’ which drew the
The continued adherence to national boundaries and identities in the 21st century contradicts the
postnationalist predictions of a range of prominent commentators, for example, Bhabha 1990;
Hobsbawm 1990; Appadurai 1996 and also so-called primordialist approaches account for the
persistence of nations by reference to their historical and cultural continuity and ethnic potency, for
example, Armstrong 1982; Smith 1995; Hutchinson 2000. In Croucher, S. L. Perpetual Imagining:
Nationhood in a Global Era, International Studies Review, Vol. 5, No. 1 (Mar., 2003), 2
83 Valery Tishkov (2000:627) in Croucher, ibid, 2
84 Conner 1978, in Croucher, ibid, 3
85 Rupert Emerson, in Croucher ibid
86 During the 2012 Olympics in Britain an ‘unprecedented number’ of foreign-born athletes were
recruited by Britain including a triple jumper from Cuba who competed for Sudan at the 2004
Olympics, and a German-born cyclist86. Disapproval of this opportunism has labelled these athletes
‘plastic Brits’, but, if a person’s significance in life is one of excellence in sport, rather than nationality,
perhaps that person’s identity-sense owns allegiance first to Sport and secondly to nationhood. Claire
Bigg, Athletes Switching Nationalities In Spotlight At London Olympics,
http://www.rferl.org/content/athletes-switching-nationalities-in-spotlight-at-londonolympics/24645792.html, July 15th 2012, accessed 3rd November 2012, 09:09
87 August 2007
82
stares of pedestrians, was a difference which did not convey Englishness as such. Nor did I
sense, ‘I am English’, but rather, regretfully, ‘I’m not like you and I don’t belong here’.
Perhaps nationality is the veil we draw across such vulnerability, the identity label we
append to indeterminate identity-sense.
For some nevertheless, nationality is a vital identity-marker invoking intense
loyalties. My compatriots in Thailand regarded Englishness as an implicit bond, a mutual
indebtedness, to be cashed-in if needed, which superseded other ex-patriot alliances. Despite
national identity’s apparent geographical, political and historical facticity, one historian has
declared, ‘I am driven to the conclusion that no ‘scientific definition’ of the nation can be
devised; yet the phenomenon has existed and exists’.88 I am convinced that it is the very
malleability of nationhood, ‘both in its content and form’, that explains its persistence.
Nations are useful symbols for pragmatic alliances.89
The sense of belonging invoked by nationality is tied up with commitment to a
particular community and its perceived values. There can be wide divergences of opinion
however as to their nature. The nation consists of its people, a membership never complete.
Additionally, the people are not simply ‘an aggregate’ of those living in a particular area;
they are those for whom that area is by tradition a heritage and a homeland.90 National
identity is conferred by birth typically, though some nations consider it determined not just
by where one is born but to whom. However, if as the British government has recently
intimated, it might be necessary to strip nationality from people suspected of involvement in
terrorism by revoking their passport,91 are they then truly dispossessed, or is that again
merely the removal of a convenient handle with which persons are manipulated by external
forces? Whatever the existential weight of nationhood, it is significant that The British
Nationality Act 1981 forbids the home secretary from rendering a person stateless in such a
way.92 It is a sobering development too that, thirty three years later, one UN refugee agency
finds it necessary to launch a campaign to end statelessness worldwide within 10 years,
warning that at least 10 million people are currently stateless having neither nationality nor
passport.93
The most visible forms of nationalism are typified by violent struggles for national
Hugh Seton-Watson, 1977, in Croucher, ibid, 2
Croucher, ibid, 21
90 Poole, R. ‘Chapter 8; Patriotism and Nationalism’, in (Eds.) Igor Primoratz, Aleksandar Pavković,
Patriotism: Philosophical and Political Perspectives, Aldershot, Ashgate Publishing 2008, 130
91 Casciani, D. Immigration debate over powers to deport foreign criminals, BBC News UK, 30th
January 2014, at http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-25961409, accessed 10th July 2014, at 15.44
92 ibid
93 UNHCR seeks to end statelessness in 10 years, http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-29891562, 4
November 2014, last updated at 05:23, accessed 5th November 2014, at 22.12
88
89
liberation and political autonomy. More discrete and mundane perhaps are those everyday
tokens of nationalism; ritual, and practises such as national holidays and accompanying
traditions; the symbols and rhetoric of public life, such as the flag, the currency, regional
foods and political customs; the literature underpinning the nation’s sense of origin and
coherence, such as chronicled history and school text books.94 All of these tokens, as
accretions of meaning with temporal significance, can be abstracted and homogenised as
indicative of identity; they can also be appropriated, or transcended, at least in the sense of
escape to another sphere of significance through the auditing work of one’s identity-sense.
The contention I am making here, is that one’s life is only rendered singular and concrete to
the extent that abstract nationalistic terms are both aligned to temporal meanings, and also
cohesively appropriated; indeed, these abstracted terms remain irrelevant to the extent that
they are not audited and owned by those to whom they are appended. There was a time in
England when the Union Jack was hijacked by its public association with right wing
nationalists, my affection for it waned; more recently it has been threatened by the proposed
democratic break-up of the United Kingdom, my affection for it was rekindled. These
historical twists and turns had the capacity to undermine or reinforce, and certainly disclose,
the potency of the symbolic relationship between the Union Jack and my Britishness.
If one does audit and own the temporal signifiers above, as a Briton, to what is one
allied; does one belong to an intangible essence? Is nationalism appropriated in an
adherence to the traditions of Christmas and Easter, anglicised cuisine and so on? This
existential mooring is evidently problematic, for Eid al-Adha, Vesak and Yom Kippur are
just a few of the alternative holidays celebrated in Britain by British people, as British
events.95
Most of my own childhood was spent in rural Suffolk, England. Traditions like MayPole dancing had disappeared, though harvest festivals had not. My family celebrated the
meaning of Easter, my peers at school consumed Easter eggs. I ignored Halloween, my peers
did not. Television viewing and attendance at local church or local pub were all
distinguishing practises variously participated in among my family and our neighbours.
Nationality I find, comprises a loose community of people, thrown together and bound by
little more than the necessity of law, and the necessities of life. Having said this, over time
the necessity of law and life’s necessities are fundamental temporalities.
As I have iterated already, when my existential preferences are challenged,
awakening my sense of ‘self’, I am pressed into re-harmonising my life with the environing
world. In order to make meaning of that fractured harmony and to make it whole and
Poole, ibid, 2
As Poole notes, while nations such as the USA ‘expects some degree of assimilation by new
members, it usually allows considerable internal diversity’. That there will be agreement on this
flexibility is a vain hope. Poole, ibid
94
95
viable, I must consciously transcend the situation by acknowledging other possibilities and
making them actual.96 This ‘possibilising capacity’ to transcend the given particularities of
my life, whether physical, social or psychological, describes the way I advert to a problem in
order to restore harmony,97 auditing the given particulars in order to transcend them; thus,
‘roaming the field of possibles’ is just this free variation in fantasy that probes actual or
possible exemplicated affairs’.98 As I have already intimated, once I have seen things for
what they are, I must think about how I am to orient myself, and move forward.
How is it that I am able to conceive of other possibilities beyond my personal
experience; an experience that might reflect a closed system? Closed systems such as an
ideological monopoly like communism, a religious hegemony such as a strict modern
Islamism, or the worldview I imbibe from my historical epoch such as one which insists that
women are possessions to be possessed, or even, received wisdom which decrees that the
world is flat? My contention is that imaginative and transcending possibilities arise because
interrogativeness is essential to the ‘natural attitude’ of the Questioning Being.
Even though in effect I advocate reinstating the ‘natural attitude’ Husserl distanced
phenomenology from, the later Husserl’s thinking is helpful here. Typical of my natural
state as a Questioning Being, is an engagement with the world in the form a variable
givenness which is dependent upon the features of particular situations. The things I
perceive can only present to me one side at a time. In order to see the thing in its entirety I
must observe it from successive angles, that is, ‘perspectivally’. A fundamental
phenomenological insight therefore, is that this scrutiny makes me aware that each
‘adumbration’ or manner of givenness, not only does not exhaust its possibilities, but
promises more. Thus, in my intentional, lived experience, I ascribe an existence to the object
which transcends its changing givenness, its difference from situation to situation.99 Because
this is true however, it also holds that in addition to an existence that unifies a things’
perspectives, lived experience also prompts an anticipation of the other adumbrations of
which that extant thing is constituted.
What is prompted in the Questioning Being’s interrogativeness is ‘precisely the will
to seek’, that is, ‘to search for what makes sense’.100 As we have seen, ‘free variation in
Zaner, in At Play in the Field of Possibilities, (2012) describes ‘possibilising’ as an ‘active researching
by the alertful self’; It is a questing.’ This essential questioning is ‘directed by and toward the
resolution of or the accounting-for the different’ that disrupts. Zaner, ibid, 160. Echoing MerleauPonty, Zaner notes that in this provocation to think a conscious response to the impasse my life
encounters body-patterns should also be included as ‘modalities of this thinking’.
97 Zaner points out that the ‘act of possibilising’ arises because and during ‘concrete upsets’. These
essential aspects of human life provoke with urgency one to ‘think otherwise’; so assess and reassess
and so to reveal the self which is ‘at stake’. Zaner, ibid, 96
98 Zaner, ibid, 175
99 Held, K. Husserl’s Phenomenological Method, in (Eds.) Don Welton, The New Husserl; A critical
reader, Bloomington, Indiana University Press, 2003, 18
100 Zaner, ibid, 174-175
96
fantasy is at the very root of thinking’.101 Meditative thinking aligned with one’s holistic
sensibility of oneself in the world enables possibilising, that is, a projective thinking which
moves one forward in a world that is at all times observed. Because, in Husserlian mode, we
are considering things in the world as objects of consciousness, let me go further and insist
that concepts and ideas also have this manner of givenness too. I can conceive that it is
possible to be more than ‘male and masculine’, something other than English, and therefore
‘conservative and white skinned’. The Questioning Being cannot of course ‘change its spots’
in some physiological or spatio-temporal respects, nevertheless, at least in our existential
audit of the meanings that accrue to life regarding gender, nationhood and age, it can and
will transcend them.
I wish now to revisit the more rarefied air of Husserlian thinking concerning the
nation as merely one strata of communalised life, and to consider the way that a community
might transcend its notional ‘culture’. In his Vienna Lecture, Husserl explains that the term
‘life’ refers not to the physiological aspect of human being, but rather signifies purposeful
life.102 In this context then, the nation is one of the stratified forms of purposeful life in which
culture is created in the sense of historical development as a unified idea. A variable mode
of community in which the defining identity of a people, ‘culture’, comes into being. Notice
how fluid this description is and accordingly how fundamentally temporal is its provenance
and one’s appropriation of it.
What then is the most fundamental form of human living? It is necessarily
characterised as communal, for generative reasons, in forms such as family, tribe and nation.
‘The Nation’ constitutes a straightforwardly lived, unembellished embeddedness, in the
closed horizon of relativity and necessity.103 To break out of this, a new horizon, one which
applies the processes I have considered above, and so looks beyond, is required.
Husserl’s use of the term nationality occurs against the backdrop of the German
National Socialist emphasis on racial particularism as the index of human worth and
identity.104 This emphasis held that individual identity could be reduced to race. In
particular, the so-called Aryan race, considered biologically and culturally superior, reaches
its zenith in the Germans as the ‘master race’. The German nation was therefore of optimum
Zaner, ibid, 175
Husserl, E. The Vienna Lecture, in Crisis, (Trans.) David Carr, Evanston, Northwestern University
Press, 1970, 270
103 Husserl, ibid, 281
104 I am indebted to Dermot Moran for his lucid and comprehensive research. Moran, D. “Even the
Papuan is a Man and not a Beast”: Husserl on Universalism and the Relativity of Cultures, Journal of
the History of Philosophy, vol. 49, no. 4 (2011), 464
101
102
racial stock and the mixing of races caused the superior to be corrupted by the ‘inferior’, thus
undermining racial purity.105
This context helps to explain the tension, between Husserl’s commitment to the
universality of reason,106 and his conviction regarding the ‘plurality and relativity of
particular peoples and nations’.107 Peoples, he held to be often enclosed in their own
particular ‘socialities’ or communal worlds, and historical trajectories or ‘historicities’.108
Some of these Husserl admits are completely ‘self-enclosed’, with no recognisable concept of
history. Into this classical world of closed cultures, the ancient Greeks introduced a form of
universality which generated a concept of idealisation. This idealisation in turn enabled them
to break through the finite horizons of their own environing world, conceiving additionally,
a sophisticated concept of the ‘true world’ beyond.
Husserl’s concept of universality entails that the same reason functions in every
human as animal rationale, ‘no matter how primitive’;109 a firm conceptual rejection of racial
particularism.110 In addition, Husserl opposed as do I, all forms of naturalism which reduced
human nature to a merely biological explanation.111 Every human shares an unmistakable
humanness, or ‘regional essence’, despite local ethnic differences, and anthropological
variations. Husserl’s ontology holds furthermore, that the basic rationality apparent in all
cultures can be enhanced through Philosophy. I am inclined at this point to interject, that I
find the sad occurrences of neglect which render children feral, do not negate the universal
presence of this humanness. For, as Merleau-Ponty pointed out, though possessing
humanness, no human is born equipped to express that humanness without dependence on
intersubjective engagement.
For Husserl, the breakthrough to philosophy arises as the Greeks recognise their own
world as a particular world with its own particular world-view. They see their worldview as
one of a range of possibilities, or adumbrations, the interpreted world offers. Such an
Moran, ibid, 464, World history was conceived furthermore as a perpetual war between the races
for living-space or Lebensraum. As we saw in the previous section, the tendency to equate a person’s
worth and potential with the negative validity afforded their race is an insidious undercurrent in
global relations even today and still contributes to territorial disputes.
106 The universality of reason as the historically defining idea of European humanity, derived from the
Greek ‘breakthrough’ to philosophy and Science, Husserl, in Moran, ibid, 469
107 Ibid, 464
108 Ibid
109Husserl, Origin of Geometry, Crisis, 378/ Hua. VI.385, in Moran ibid, 464
110 The influence of Kant is apparent in the background of Husserl’s thought here.
111 It is in this context Moran explains that we read in Husserl’s Vienna Lecture the often
misunderstood statement that ‘there is, for essential reasons, no zoology of peoples’, Crisis, 275/
Hua. VI.320. Husserl is seeking to repudiate race-based evaluations of human worth. In this context
too we read, ‘According to the good old definition, man is the rational living being, a sense in which
even the Papuan is man and not beast. He has his aims, and he acts with reflection, considering
practical possibilities …just as man (and even the Papuan) represents a new level of animality—in
comparison with the beast—so with regard to humanity and its reason does philosophical reason
represent a new level. Crisis, 290/Hua. VI.337–38, in Moran, ibid, 477
105
awakening grasps the very concept of ‘one’s own world’, as a perspective in contrast with
the ‘world in itself’. Philosophy facilitated Greek consciousness of the relative validity of the
world; a consciousness able to distinguish between a ‘world-representation’, and the world
as it is.112
According to Husserl’s genetic account, ‘self-enclosed’ worlds are the fundament
against which more open cultures may be evaluated. These represent a second-stage of
historicity, the breakthrough to science through the theoretical attitude. Open nations differ
greatly, in their specific senses of history and indeed their institutions. In contrast to this
openness, he describes the Papuan as one example that, though possessing a form of
rationality, nevertheless possesses no biography, life-history, or ‘history of the people.’113
Such primitive life he says is life lived without history’s trajectory, ‘a temporality that
extends indefinitely in both directions’. Life is lived always in the present; past and future
have no teleological sense. The primitive know their world only as the actual world, lacking
as they do, a conceptual distinction between apparent world, and true world. One must
assume here, that a self-enclosed primitive world with its imposed hereditary roles and
hierarchies, can be just as existentially straightjacketing as a so-called sophisticated world, in
which roles and their relative values, are conferred according to the values of everyman, or a
religious or ideological tradition. With regards to the former, one might have a case for
arguing that consequent inauthenticity is not pressingly apparent in communities where one
does not experience a heightened sense of being singular or individual. Nevertheless, I have
to conclude that collective consciousness is a largely romantic notion, punctured for
example, the moment one steps on a sharp stone and another does not, when one is in
competition for a mate, one’s children are victims of cruelty, or when one is demoted from
the heights of privilege and so on. Though the cultural world of the primitive ‘is an
exemplary type of closed environment’, it does not capture the essence of the Lifeworld, for
this according to Husserl has an essence of openness to plurality and universality.
Alongside this universality of reason, which bridges disparate human communities,
relativity is a fundamental fact of human cultural life too. For example, the African, Chinese,
or indeed Papuan worlds are, as Husserl affirms, to outsiders, alien worlds. How then might
a European understand an ‘alien world’, such as he or she finds in Thailand? In the slums of
Khlong Toei, people live in shipping containers beside toxic canals, but their children attend
school in pristine and well-fitting uniforms. To truly understand these people one must
grow up in their world. Alternatively, one can grasp those things in their worlds that are
typical for us too, schoolchildren, homes, canals, realising that their cultural specificity is
112
113
Husserl, Hua. XXVII.188, in Moran, 481
Husserl, Hua. XXIX.57, in Moran, ibid, 490
beyond us. We recognise what we are perceiving ‘but in an alien way’.114 When we occupy
an alien world, be it Bangkok or London, we must grasp, and acknowledge that we grasp, ‘I
don’t understand this’. In my view this is another clue to the necessity of an auditing
identity-sense. The spirited child, liberated from the humid heat of the day by a swim with
friends in the local Khlong, is probably unaware, and maybe quite unmoved by the fact, that
her actions identify her, in their indifference to hygiene, as a member of an ill-informed
underclass.
Husserl clearly espouses a notion of cultural development ascending toward
attainment of universality, rather than emergence of a higher race.115 As I have shown, he
also speaks of an ‘essential history’, ‘a pre-delineated meaning-trajectory’ to which societal
values and society’s resources are committed. This is problematic however. No ‘essential
history’ can represent adequately the habitualities and their meanings each singular human
is defined by. Many Germans for example, after the tragic blunders of National Socialism,
would argue that the national meaning-trajectory of the Third Reich perverted their own
community commitments.116 Each nation may embody an essential history, and it may be
desirable that each attain the theoretical attitude, but unless this movement is appropriated
for oneself as ‘heritage’, one will be merely standing by the rail of the sinking Titanic
discussing lifeboat design. It seems that Heidegger is right. Even a cultural strength must be
appropriated; one must identify with it.
Wittgenstein’s thinking regarding language games adds weight to Husserl’s
compelling proposition that, whatever its scale, every community has ‘its world, a world in
which everything fits well together, whether in mythical-magical or in European-rational
terms.117 What is not clear however is what exactly tethers us to that world, and what
warrant there is for making it an identity-marker? My initial question raised above, is
therefore a related one; is this primordial community and one’s necessary identity with it,
primarily national or racial? Ultimately, one’s identity-defining situatedness must be the
culture or ethnicity to which one is committed.
The essence of human identity does not lie then in the abstractions of Race, Ethnicity,
or Nationality. These markers are but inevitable symptoms of a collective primordial desire
for significance, to attain it and to confer it, in the appropriation of situatedness. The
allegiances and commitments they engender are likewise, but profound symptoms of our
capacity for purposive living with others. Our authenticity herein discloses human singularity
as audited identity-sense.
Husserl, Hua. XXXIX.159, in Moran, 491
Moran, ibid, 493
116 Similarly many Americans distanced themselves from the ‘War on Terror’, some leaving the
country to do so.
117 Husserl, Crisis, 373/Hua. VI.381–82, in Moran, ibid, 493
114
115
7.8
Transcending the passing of time and the cultural situatedness of age
“Call the world if you please 'The Vale of Soul- making. Then you will find out the use of the world'
John Keats, Letter to George and Georgiana Keats 1819
I have explored a number of ways in which embodiment situates us in the world; a
world situatedness we interrogate, and attempt to transcend either tacitly or explicitly, in
performance of appropriated identity-sense. I have considered the appropriation of identitymarkers such as gender, sex and sexuality and, in turn, history, and Husserl’s concept of the
unitary defining idea a nation embodies which provides its historical trajectory. I observed
that for Heidegger, any abstracted comprehension of history must be authenticated as
‘heritage’ in the Questioning Being. This means that one’s cultural alignment must be
appropriated to be truly indicative of identity. In Husserl also, culture as a ‘we-horizon
achieved through language’, passed down in a tradition that ‘holds for everyone’,118 must
nevertheless be continually affirmed as one’s own.
I have shown how lived experience establishes that Culture is the temporal
appropriation of history and the world is historical due to the ‘inner historicity’ of the
human. This sense of appropriation, which transforms ‘thrown’ situatedness into one’s
heritage, emerges from Heidegger’s emphasis upon authenticity, though as I have said, for
Heidegger the all-embracing unified idea is ‘untenable’.119 The Being of Dasein is ‘Care’, and
‘Care’ is grounded in temporality. So, for Heidegger, ‘temporality is also the condition
which makes historicality possible…’120 Temporality is disclosed in that kind of living
towards the future authentically, which Heidegger characterises as ‘anticipatory
resoluteness’,121 that is, the desire to find significance in the face of one’s inevitable death.
Temporality
I wish in this section to illuminate one way in which all humans are brought face-toface with temporality, literally;122 the observation of phenomenological time in the process of
one’s own ageing.123 On the page this thesis has an abstracted and fixed quality which is
analogous to the false assurance of life captured for all time in photographic technology.
Guignon, 2009, ibid, 549
Guignon, 551
120 Heidegger, BT, 2006, 41
121 Heidegger, BT, 2006, 434
122 I pay particular attention to Husserl’s meticulous and ground-breaking analysis of Time in Chapter
Six
123 Whether one regards ageing as the exploration of the third age or a waiting for the end, the
disruption to life’s habitualities provides a heightened sense of identity ‘the deepest kind of selfreflection’.
118
119
Nevertheless, even as the words arrive on the page, digitally or in ink, the life of the author
has been swept inexorably on, by time. So too, the people captured in photographic images
are no longer the people so captured, even a moment later. What is more, just as the life of
the author of this thesis has changed over the course of its writing, the world in which it has
been written has changed, so too the consequent accretion of meaning, and the import of
those accrued meanings, has been temporally affected. Time, as they say, is of the essence,
and so I discuss briefly here the convergence in Husserl and Heidegger regarding
temporality as the phenomenon foundational to this ontic aspect of embodied and
embedded intentionality; age.
Regardless of chronometric time and its apparatus, we measure the passing of time
in our bodies with immediacy, privileging the present throughout our lives. Time has a
sensual and conceptual fluidity as shown by the things we say, such as, ‘I’m five and three
quarters, mummy’, or ‘Time is money’. Its fluidity is discernible in experience; consider an
hour spent in the dentist’s waiting room compared with an hour with the beloved. Time is
also manifested in our changing height, varying vocal range, the accumulation and loss of
hair, and the topology of skin that envelopes us.
For Husserl, time was ‘the most important of all phenomenological problems, and
also the most difficult’.124 Our bodies, as temporal objects of perception, ‘endure, succeed
one another or exist simultaneously, and display themselves in temporal modes of
appearing’.125 Though we live in the moment, life is not framed exclusively in the present
however. The now, he explains, though it demands our attention, ‘always has its fringe or
horizon of past and future.’126
Husserl nevertheless accords the Present ‘privileged status’,127 and describes the
‘now’ as the generative point, open to the new, which orients experience so that in relation
to this point we sense the passing of experience and experience’s approach.128 The ‘now’
generates each new ‘object point’ in which the richness of experience occurs, and is also the
‘source point of all temporal positions.129 Each ‘now’, creates a new time point in creating
that object point, because whatever appears will be experienced as succession in relation to
the ‘now’ in which it occurred. Whatever object or experience appears in the new time point
will remain forever fixed to that point as it slips into the past.
Once an object or experience has presented itself in the now it will retain the status of
‘something that came before’ and ‘something that followed after’. It finds its inviolable place
John B. Brough, J. B. and Blattner, W. ‘Temporality’, in (Eds.) Hubert L. Dreyfus and Mark A.
Wrathall, A Companion to Phenomenology and Existentialism, , Malden, Wiley-Blackwell, 2009, 127
125 Brough and Blattner, ibid
126 Ibid, 128
127 Husserl, 1991, 26, in ‘Temporality’, Brough and Blattner, ibid, 128
128 Husserl, ibid
129 Husserl, ibid, 74, in Brough and Blattner, ibid,
124
on the ‘production-line of time’, and the now point which introduces components of
experience to this line individuates it; thus it is, according to Husserl, experienced as a
‘continuous moment of individuation’.130
For Husserl, ‘each momentary phase of the perceiving act possesses threefold
intentionality: primal impression, retention, and protention.’131 Primal impression is the
momentary consciousness of something new on the production-line in the ‘now’. Retention is
an impressional consciousness of the fading away of the perceptive component as it moves
away from the now,132 and Protention is the impression of the future, the shadow as it were,
of a new perceptive-component falling onto the now point of consciousness. Common to all
our perceptions is consciousness, but how are we able to stand in the now, with a sensibility
of consciousness as a unity, rather than as of a tangle of these temporal perceptions?
According to Husserl, the ‘ultimate stratum of conscious life’ is a flow of consciousness
which constitutes itself and the experience of immanent temporal unities.
Under the influence of Husserl, Heidegger places temporality at the centre of his
philosophy too. In fact, it is the very horizon, or lens, through which Dasein can be
understood.133 Although ever-critical of Husserl, Heidegger is indebted to him for three
defining themes which he adapts.
Firstly, time-consciousness is the ultimate foundation for intentionality. Secondly, it
is also characterised by ‘double intentionality’ which means that it brings with it awareness
of itself. Additionally, time-consciousness is the basis of any perception at all.134 It is this
point in particular that I have been stressing. Were we to conceive of eternity it would be as
an expanding ‘now’. When we transcend the temporal givenness of the meanings that
accrue to our lives, however ostensibly abstract, we transcend to another temporal meaning
and its implied place of time-consciousness.
Heidegger’s acceptance of Time’s fundamentality is explicitly affirmed as the final
horizon of intelligibility and ontological understanding in the form of the ‘ecstatic unity of
intentionality.’135 The adopted idea of ‘double intentionality’ is concisely expressed as the coprotending and co-retaining of our own being in every protention and retention of objects.136
Heidegger’s acceptance of temporality, as the condition on which perception of objects
depends, is expressed as the enabling of Dasein’s reaching out or transcending; its ‘stepping
over’ to a world that is there beyond itself.137 My point is that for the Questioning Being,
Husserl, ibid, 67, ibid
Brough and Blattner, ibid, 129
132 This is not to be confused with the recall of memory Husserl warns.
133 Heidegger, 1962, 39, in Brough and Blattner, ibid, 131
134 Heidegger, ibid, in Brough and Blattner, ibid
135 Heidegger, 1982, 308, in Brough and Blattner, ibid, 131
136 Heidegger, 1962, §19b, in Brough and Blattner, ibid, 131
137 Heidegger, 1962, §69c, in Brough and Blattner, ibid, 131
130
131
tethered as it is to this spatio-temporal world which it is driven to interrogate nevertheless,
‘stepping over’ is necessarily stepping in to another time. In the belief systems and cultures
of many Questioning Beings, that alternative time is abstracted as eternity, and time will tell
whether in fact such an existence can be.
The convergence between Husserl and Heidegger is not complete of course. Whereas
for Husserl the primal ‘now’ is the point of ‘motivation’ for our conscious lives, for
Heidegger this role is fulfilled by the future. As has been apparent already, this is because of
Heidegger’s emphasis on the embeddedness of human life, not as a transcendent
consciousness, but a concrete social agent. Rather than a dispassionate observer, Dasein is a
concernful participant in a thrown existence.
The phenomenology of age as performance
One phenomenological study138 concluded surprisingly, that people may not
encounter temporality as a sense that they are aging but instead, indicative of Husserl’s
‘privileged’ present, feel they are continuing to move from moment to moment existentially:
‘...I don't feel that I'm aging, I feel that I'm living and increasingly gaining
experience’.139 Thus as I have said, faith in a beneficent eternity may be understood as faith
in an ever-unfolding and enriched existential now. Maybe this is also why one repeatedly
finds confirmed in people’s experience the realisation that one never feels ‘25’ or ‘50’,
‘young’ or ‘old’. These abstracted milestones are places one never arrives at, rather they are
something travelled towards.
Challenging the characterisation of old age, as physical and psychological decline
and a distancing from the social world, respondents when asked displayed ‘singularity’,
fulfilling Heidegger’s description of a state of absolute freedom attained in appropriating
one’s ‘having to be'; experiencing the progression of time ‘for themselves’, these senior
citizens appropriated the responsibility and weight of being ‘launched into the world’, even
facing old age ‘as a golden age for pleasure and achieving postponed dreams.’140 ‘I play with
my grandson, I have my money, I get a retirement benefit... I'm living.’141 Nevertheless, the
pain of accepting one's own aging emerged too; confirmed in concept and felt in the flesh.
‘When you reach a certain age, like me at the age of 83, then we feel that our joints are
harder, our bones are heavier’.142 Reference to death however, tended to be reference to the
Researchers interviewed elderly people attending two Elderly Community Centres in urban
Central-Western Brazil. The phenomenological interviews pursued the following question: What is it
like to reach this age? To live so many years? Maria da Graça da Silva and Magali Roseira Boemer, The
experience of aging: a phenomenological perspective, Rev Lat Am Enfermagem. 2009 May-Jun
;17(3):380-6., at http://www.scielo.br/pdf/rlae/v17n3/16.pdf, accessed 29 th December 2014, 13:56
139 Alice 9, 66, in da Silva et al, 2009, 383
140 da Silva, ibid
141 Barbara, 8, 73, in da Silva, ibid, 383, italics mine
142 Helena 13, 83, in da Silva, ibid
138
death of others.143 Intersubjective dependency was found to be a sustaining support in the
face of temporality. Contact with peers and intergenerational relationships individuated
healthy old age; ‘my family lives close… I live alone, but my people are with me’.144 Perhaps
this universal eidos, intersubjective dependency, experienced as a network of significant
relationships, is accomplished more markedly in old age.145
It is certainly apparent that ‘age’ is a description of experienced temporality rather
than a confirmation of abstracted fact. As a result age involves much more than the number
of years since one's birth and because of the role appropriation plays therein, temporal life
constitutes a performance. This notion can be found diversely in the works of Husserl,
Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty.
For Husserl genuine phenomenological knowledge of the human condition requires
clarification of intentional activity which he cautiously terms ‘performance’.146 Similarly,
Merleau-Ponty contends that understanding one’s life is not a matter of mental clarity, but
of experiencing harmony between the intention and the performance.147 Early in his thinking
Heidegger identified in our situatedness a sense of performance, of content, and of
relationship. Life derives its fundamental and intrinsically historical sense then, when it
grasps itself in its performance.148 The passing of time does things to one’s embodied being,
and in the receipt of that experience, one’s age must be appropriated in the form of an everchanging re-alignment.
Consider the way we remonstrate with children in order to encourage independence;
‘You're a big girl now, act your age’. Similarly ‘Act your age’ might be addressed to an
irresponsible adult too. Indeed, 'Act your age; you're no longer young,’ might be said to an
elderly person taking too many risks. The injunction ’Act!’ implies performance in all these
cases. ‘When we say ‘act your age,’ we press for behaviour conforming to normative roles.149
Of course, the implicit assumption socially, is that one can adopt a behaviour typifying a
certain abstracted role in life. We should play accordingly, to the gallery, and whether we do
it well or not, or satisfy dominant rules knowingly or not, ‘our accomplishment of age,
indeed age itself, is always collective and social’.150
The fact that age, like gender, is not fixed in nature, suggests it may be cultural and
learned. With biology setting the ‘outer limits’, age-expectations projected by culture, and
Though finiteness was avoided, faith was manifested in expressions of gratitude to God; ’ ... at 72
years of age, thanks God, I'm happy I've gotten this far’. Here is old-age transcended.
144 Abraham 2, 78, in da Silva, ibid
145 Heidegger, Being and Time, in da Silva, ibid
146 Husserl, CM, ibid, 85n Husserl admits that this is an uncomfortable term
147 Merleau-Ponty, PP, 1945/2006, 167.
148 Heidegger, Pure Phenomenology Lectures, winter semester 19190-20, in Otto Pöggeler, Martin
Heidegger’s Path of Thinking, (Trans.) Daniel Magurshak and Sigmund Barber, New York, Humanity
Books, 1991, 17
149 Laz, C. Act Your Age, Sociological Forum, Vol. 13, No. 1 (Mar., 1998), 86
150 ibid
143
learned through socialisation, entail that ‘children become teenagers; teenagers become
adults; adults become elderly’.151 On this model, age becomes an attribute, learned,
internalised and aligned with particular roles. But this normalises abstracted notions of age
problematically, as an objective characteristic individuals can actually have, and so gives an
incomplete account. Within feasible boundaries, cultural expectations must be audited, as
the lived sample of an encounter with my uncle revealed.
Like gender, age is accomplished as something appropriated and curated. In
accomplishing age we create and maintain our identities intersubjectively in a way that
allows us to ‘participate in and constitute’ a shared cultural world, so making meaning with
age ‘in ways that influence but transcend us as individuals.’152
So predictable is our habitual socialised enactment of our temporality however, that
the phenomenon of age is often concealed153 requiring disruptive events such as birthdays,
parental bereavement, physiological changes or ill-health to bring it to the surface.154 Central
to Husserl, Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty is the idea that eidetic insights about the human
condition are gained from such rupturing moments in our lives. At these moments, age is
momentarily denaturalised; suddenly its meaning cannot be taken for granted.155
From a Heideggerian perspective the sensibility of ‘age’ is a temporally updated
disclosure of one’s thrownness, furnishing yet another call for authentic appropriation and
distinction from the ‘they’. My view is that Husserl is right in his assessment that the
accomplishment or appropriation of age, springs from one’s culture; ‘the ‘tool kit’ of
symbols, stories, rituals, and world-views, available in varying configurations to solve
different kinds of problems’.156
In Summary
Whilst presence is primordially disclosed in the physical markers of ‘race’, ‘sex’, and
‘age’, and identity is fabricated from meanings conferred by one’s surrounding culture
which encodes these markers, identity-sense demands an audited appropriation of that
culture for oneself. To be oneself knowingly, one must be able to identify and articulate that
audited identity; one must also be able to perform it with authenticity.157 This conscious path
Laz 1998, 94
Laz, 1998, ibid, 100
153 Laz, 1998,
154 Eisenhandler, 1991, and Karp, 1991, in Laz, 1998, 100
155 Laz notes that in the 1970s feminists referred to moments when gender or sex in-equality was
foregrounded in individual consciousness as a ‘click’. ‘Clicks’ signify the point at which one can no
longer take existing knowledge, relations, and practices as ‘givens’. Laz, ibid, 100
156 Swidler, A. ‘Culture in Action: Symbols and Strategies’, American Sociological Review, 51 (April
1986), 273
157 This does not however necessarily imply strategic ‘self’-consciousness; authenticity may be tacitly
embodied in unembellished simplicity. A fascinating exploration of this authenticity in knowing
151
152
to oneself is the purposive appropriation, or if necessary, transcendence, of the cultural
history one’s life is tethered to; what one is showing in the process is the desire for significance
beneath.
7.9
Transcending temporality itself
“Time is to identity what air is to the lungs: invisible, ubiquitous and absolutely necessary.”
Eva Hoffman, in Time
Heidegger states in his History of the Concept of Time that time has a ‘distinctive
function to play’, it is our ‘guiding clue’; time distinguishes ‘kinds of being’; temporal,
supratemporal, and extratemporal being.158 His critical investigation leads him necessarily
beyond Husserl’s intentionality founded in consciousness to answer the critical question
‘What is meant by being?’
Whatever being is, time is central to it. Nevertheless, as T. S. Eliot intimates, though
we appear swept along in the ‘current flow of time’ we can occasionally seem to brush
against something beyond past, present and future.159 In a way that reveals something of the
phenomenon which seduced Descartes and Husserl, Eliot hints in Burnt Norton that
somehow the Questioning Being, though tethered to the temporal world, feels that it
transcends it; he writes:
“Time past and time future
Allow but a little consciousness.
To be conscious is not to be in time
But only in time can the moment in the rose garden,
The moment in the arbour where the rain beats,
The moment in the draughty church at smokefall
Be remembered; involved with past and future.
Only through time, time is conquered.”160
It is as if we abstract ourselves from the specificity of temporal moments in order to
live conscious lives, and we are necessarily, variously torn from, or drawn back into, the
temporal lived moments of our lives wherein appropriated identity-sense finds anchorage
for its audited significances. We do not actually transcend time by denying it however, for
identity can be found in the award winning fictional work by Daniel Keyes which narrates a person’s
journey from mental retardation to genius and back. Daniel Keyes, Flowers for Algernon, London,
Gollancz, 1994
158 Heidegger, M. History of the Concept of Time: Prolegomena, (1979) Trans, Theodore Kisiel.
Bloomington, Indiana UP, 1985/1992, 140
159 ‘East Coker’ in Sokolowski, R, Phenomenology of the human person, Cambridge, Cambridge
University Press, 2008, 129
160 Eliot, T. S. Four Quartets, London, Faber and Faber, 1970, 15
this would be to adopt an unchanging mode, we transcend time by possibilising a vantage
point of supratemporality which recovers the revisited time in another time. This means that
whilst rational creatures are essentially tethered to temporality, they nevertheless attempt to
construct meanings or propositions which are omnitemporal. Ultimately this cannot be, for
any appropriation of meaning must be cashed-in temporally, just as for example the
apparently omnitemporal meanings ‘young’, ‘gifted’ and ‘black’ were memorably
appropriated by Aretha Franklin in 1972.161
It has been noted that many Husserlian comments regarding temporality savour of
Platonic idealism. Mental objects are unities in time he insists, but also include temporal
extension in themselves; a temporal object may be beautiful, pleasant, or useful, all within
determinate time. Beauty and pleasantness, however, have no place in nature or in time;
these qualities are not what appears in presentations and presentifications.162
One scholar has suggested that objects of consciousness such as Pythagoras’ theorem
may be classed as omnitemporal;163 others insist that only against the backdrop of the
temporality which pervades all we know do we perceive objects as escaping time.164
Furthermore, ‘the act of thinking the Pythagorean Theorem is a temporal object, even if the
theorem itself is not’.165 Essentially, whatever is harnessed for the foreground of my life, is
appropriated temporally, whatsoever nature it was characterised by in the background
world. And, because this is a shared world, but conscious engagement with things cannot be
a collective consciousness of them, shared realities are abstracted in discourse but must be
translated into temporal objects in individual acts of appropriation.
The notion of omnitemporal concepts is a contentious one. Merleau-Ponty also enters
the dispute briefly, acknowledging that the epochal tethering of ‘truths’ to their moment of
provenance is a simplistic understanding, the truth if proven in a temporal context,
nevertheless spans that context; later proofs, themselves contextualised, would not annul the
Pythagorean Theorem but return it to its place as a partial, and abstract, truth. We do not
find here then a timeless truth but rather ‘the recovery of one time by another time’.166 Time
offers us the possibility of amendment, indeed we are ourselves revised, as are the truths
within our grasp, it does not however deliver the ‘the idol of absolute knowledge’
concerning such truths.167
We do not therefore transcend time or temporality by the optimistic assertion of
Aretha Franklin appropriated these terms, deservedly in my opinion in the situated context of an
album with Atlantic Records, which was released on January 24, 1972.
162 Husserl, 1966, 126
163 Sokolowski, R. Phenomenology of the human person, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2008,
129
164 Brough and Blattner, in Sokolowski, 2008, ibid
165 Ibid, 130
166 Merleau-Ponty, M., The Primacy of Perception and its philosophical consequences, in Moran and
Mooney, 2002, 442; (citing Merleau-Ponty, M. The Primacy of Perception, (Ed.) James Edie, 1964)
167 Moran and Mooney, ibid, 442-443
161
atemporal abstract truths, but by the projection of our presently situated meanings into
future ones or by overlaying past meanings with them. In the transcendence therefore to a
spiritual realm, the Questioning Being anticipates that the present significance adduced in
audited identity-sense will be recovered in another time and place, albeit one whose spatiotemporal rules may not be the same.
As we have seen, Husserl concludes that the ‘flux of consciousness’ constitutes its
own unity.168 Consciousness’ flow is attributed successive phases; pre-actual, actual and
post-actual, accompanied by the intentional moments of primal impression, retention and
protention. Every shading-off of consciousness of the ‘retentional’ kind has a double
intentionality: one is auxiliary to the constitution of the immanent Object. The other is
constitutive of the unity of this primary remembrance of the flux.169 What Husserl posits
then is one unique ‘flow of consciousness’ in which the unity of the act in immanent time
and the unity of the flow of consciousness become constituted at once.170
The flow of consciousness thus elaborated in Husserl’s terms, indicates how the
unity of my conscious life coheres, despite the multitudinous experiences I undergo. I live
through innumerable finite acts, even so, their incessant beginnings and endings do not
fragment my intuition of unity and identity. ‘At the deepest level of my conscious being I am
a flow, I remain one and the same being across the diaspora of time’.171 As a consequence of
my accommodation of purposiveness and significance, in this ‘flow’ I am able to harmonise
my conscious existence even as I audit the worth of its accrued meanings. It seems to me
that one of the unthought implications of Husserl’s thorough time consciousness analysis, is
that I experience time through the whole of my being, and whilst I can possibilise a vantage
point from which to evaluate it, even this point is a temporal extension of myself which
recursively accrues meaning to my being. Temporality is both the encompassing fabric of
my situated being and the ladder I climb to peer over its wall.
In The Primacy of Perception and Other Essays, Merleau-Ponty presents as incontestable
the observation that I dominate the stream of my conscious states, and am even unaware of
their temporal succession. He insists that it is nevertheless also incontestable, that this
domination of time is a thought construct and thoughts are apt to deceive.172 Perception and
thought, both typically fluid, possess a future and past horizon and share the characteristic
of appearing temporal to themselves, though they do not move at the same speed or in the
same time. Ideas can be considered ‘true’ precisely to the extent that we keep them open to
the field of nature and the fluidity of culture which they must express and which we are a
Ibid
Ibid
170 Husserl, 1991, in Brough and Blattner, ibid
171 Brough and Blattner, 2009, 106
172 in Moran and Mooney, 2002, 442
168
169
part of because of our temporality.173 It occurs to me consequently, that my stream of
consciousness is indebted to the temporality it transcends, but we are ill-advised to despise
the consciousness that emerges from this dialectic, for this open-endedness truly describes
the way that we ‘know’.
In Phenomenology of Perception furthermore, Merleau-Ponty proposes that our
groundedness, a Heideggerian concept, establishes our freedom. This we would forfeit if the
present and future swung free of the past, indeed it would occur if we were truly capable of
transcending the situatedness of our lives to somewhere beyond time and place; every
decision made would have to be repeatedly made and so we would also lose that traction on
the world which aids our existential progress. If we were not grounded in the passage of
time no decision or resolution could count as a reliable achievement as we press forward
into being who we are.174 We carry time with us, ‘Time is therefore not a real process, not an
actual succession that I am content to record. It arises from my relation to things’.175 Indeed,
time itself is one of those things I stand in relation to, for temporality temporalizes itself.
Here is intimated the profound Heideggerian insight, the spanning of inside/outside,
consciousness/other. As one scholar explains, ‘It is only with the characterisation of our
being in terms of time that Heidegger is able to understand fully the meaning of factical life
as being-outside-itself-and-towards-something’.176
Lived life for Heidegger is, contra Husserl, less the life of consciousness more the life
of a ‘concrete social agent’. Heidegger rejects speech about subject and object for Dasein and
world. Authenticity must be achieved through existential understanding of who we are. We
have an identity to acquire, and in Heidegger’s understanding, this task requires the knack
or capacity to press ahead to its attainment. As has become apparent in the course of this
phenomenological investigation, my identity is not primarily a matter of where I come from
or what I have done, nor is it essentially evident in what I am like right now in terms of
gender and age, rather it resides in who I am trying to be and my appropriation of the
world’s meaning to this end. Significantly too for Heidegger, this who is futural not
present.177 My observation however at this point is, that if, as Heidegger argues, being is
time, he has eroded the distinction between Husserl and himself at this point. I contend that
in the existential realm of my identity-sense the who that I am is a futural who, which has
appropriated the past and is owned in the now.
Experiencing the now stems from primordial futural temporality; as a teacher
Ibid, 443
Brough and Blattner, 2009, 134
175 Merleau-Ponty, PP, 1945/2006, 478
176 de Beistegui, M. The New Heidegger: Continuum studies in Continental philosophy, London,
Bloomsbury Publishing, 2005, 76
177 Brough and Blattner, 2009, 132
173
174
therefore my professional equipment is ‘taken up’ and made present by my purposive
acquisition of it for my use. This ‘making-present’ stems from my ‘futural pressing ahead
into being a teacher’ which renders the implements relevant to me; they can be purposive
because I confer significance on them, and they can become significant because I have a
purposive need for tools. The ‘now’-dominated functional perception and use of things, is
grounded in future-dominated self-understanding. “Heidegger thus grounds the now, the
reference point of consciousness, in the future, the reference point of self-understanding”.178
A distinct difference has become evident, in these phenomenological readings of
temporality, between the locus of time-consciousness and that of the structure of agency.
Whether or not a synthesis is possible here, the profitable question regarding identity’s
locus, and the rousing force of temporality pertinent to this thesis, receives some stimulus.
Heidegger insists that the three ecstasies of existential temporality that form the
unity of our being are themselves united. Simultaneously, we are ahead of ourselves in
pressing forward into ‘Self’-understanding; we are already situated in a world concernful to
us in determinate ways, and objects available for use and observation are present to us.
According to one scholar, Dasein lives towards the destination of its authentic ‘Self’realisation. Suspended as it is in an array of possibilities towards which it moves, ‘Dasein
chooses its possibilities, it orients itself to these chosen possibilities as a makeshift array of
binding commitments’.179
Waiting for itself to come closer, as yet indefinite and indeterminable but
nevertheless unavoidable like an ambush approached, Dasein holds itself before itself and
each expression of ‘now’ has a ‘forward indexical function’. Heidegger is emphatic: Dasein’s
temporality is far from linear. Neither the present, nor this having-been, is therefore a fixed
quantity. Human identity is always ‘on the way’, with existence always being temporalized
in view of the thrown dissemination of existence, and its self-interpretation.180 This is why
perhaps, though we can transcend the dominant ‘now’ of our lives, we must move from it to
the past as we perceive it now or the future as is now become relevant. Human identitysense is the current auditing of past, present and future validities, in order to find
equilibrium between a desire for significance and capacity for purpose. As Merleau-Ponty
says; ‘I am myself Time’.181 It is as time that I transcend time and the situatedness that
attends to it. To employ a different metaphor, I am tethered to the world, a world that is in
motion, and like a balloon, I am able to float above it and transcend the point of anchorage
that tethers me.
Ibid
Luchte, 2008, 146
180 Ibid, 148
181 Merleau-Ponty, PP, London, Routledge, 2006, 489
178
179
7.10
Summary conclusion
“And what do you benefit if you gain the whole world but lose your own soul?”
Jesus, in Mark 8: 36, The Bible, NLT
In this chapter I have elucidated the Questioning Being’s tendency to try and carve
out an ostensibly atemporal permanence with abstracting language and to dwell therein.
Though the universals of science seem to belong to such a realm, the Questioning Being does
not. Seeking ‘being’ rather than ‘becoming’, the Questioning Being finds furthermore that it
can neither dwell in the situated moment for that is fleeting, nor in the transience of release,
for to do so is to be without a world.
I have argued that the Questioning Being is thus ‘consigned to unrest’ because it
cannot realise in actuality what it approximates to in potentiality. Despite the abstracting
language we use to transcend the specificity of history, language strikingly evident in
Husserl’s Cartesian abstraction of the ego, consciousness cannot retire to obscure
thoughtless inertia, but is a restless act of surpassing its specific temporal ‘itself’, as itself.
I have shown that our existential incompleteness, unresolved by recourse to
abstraction, nevertheless empowers us to curate and authenticate our lives over time,
precisely because we are temporal beings and incomplete. Whatever significance the
Questioning Being is to be understood by therefore, must be found within the course of
history’s temporal movement. We are embedded in contextual meaning, and though we
may transcend the situatedness of accrued identity, we are nevertheless embedded in an
alternative particularity in doing so.
I have noted the way that history arises in the Questioning Being and must be
appropriated without violence to its provenance. Thus abstracted meanings and historically
derived value-judgements cannot be assumed infallibly binding on all; they must instead be
appropriated through universal negotiation.
An implication of this is that conferring of meanings, in the form of diverse identitymarkers such as ‘Catalan’, or ‘disabled’, must retain a sense of their provenance and their
significance for the recipient. In addition to these conceptual identity-markers I have
explored the tacit and explicit faculty of the senses and their role as both boundary markers
and as gatekeepers of identity.
I have noted how approximate yet potent are the identity-markers used to indicate
sex and gender. Each identity, I have contended, is part of a wider story of genesis and
intimacy, and molded by this story; identity-sense demands that we appropriate the story
for ourselves. In similar fashion, Race and Age are precisely those abstracted a-temporal
notions that fail to adequately represent any person assigned them. Neither can function as
an abstract identifier because there is no such thing, only symbols whose provenance is
situation specific and whose abstraction is acknowledged as a negotiable composite
universal can be audited and therefore just.
Finally, with regards to transcendence of time itself, I have contended that my
accommodation of purposiveness and significance in consciousness’ ‘flow’, allows me to
harmonise my conscious existence even as I audit the worth of my identity’s accrued
meanings. Temporality as I have said ‘is both the fabric of my situated being and the ladder
I climb to peer over its wall’. The Questioning Being therefore, is embedded in the world. It
would forfeit this groundedness however, if the present and future swung free of the past,
and if we were truly capable of transcending the situatedness of our lives to some abstracted
somewhere beyond time and place. Ultimately, our necessarily ‘now’-dominated functional
perception, our use of the world’s past and current meaning-components, and the identitymarkers these represent, is grounded in the world in a future-dominated ‘Self’-understanding.