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.