Doing Philosophy Personally: Thinking about Metaphysics, Theism, and Antiblack Racism 9780823291410

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doing philosophy personally



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american philosophy Douglas R. Anderson and Jude Jones, series editors

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doing philosophy personally Thinking about Metaphysics, Theism, and Antiblack Racism

 dwayne a. tunstall

fordham u niversity press

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Copyright 䉷 2013 Fordham University Press All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means— electronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording, or any other—except for brief quotations in printed reviews, without the prior permission of the publisher. Fordham University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for external or third-party Internet websites referred to in this publication and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate. Fordham University Press also publishes its books in a variety of electronic formats. Some content that appears in print may not be available in electronic books. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available from the publisher. Printed in the United States of America 15 14 13 5 4 3 2 1 First edition

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To Crystal Eight anniversaries later, and we’re still together

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Contents



Preface xi Acknowledgments xv 1

Introduction 1

Marcel’s Reflective Method

19

2

Transcending Philosophy by Teleologically Suspending Philosophy

34

3

Living in a Broken World

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4

Lewis Gordon on Antiblack Racism

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5

Criticizing Marcel’s Reflective Method

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Conclusion

113

Notes 123 Bibliography 155 Index 173

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warning: If you are here to read a scholarly treatise on Gabriel Marcel’s religious existentialism or on Lewis R. Gordon’s Africana existentialism, then you are reading the wrong book. Please don’t misunderstand me. Yes, this book is a scholarly text. I summarize Marcel’s religious existentialism in the first three chapters of this book. I also summarize Gordon’s notion of teleologically suspending philosophy in the introduction and in chapter 2. Moreover, I provide an explanation of Gordon’s existential phenomenological account of antiblack racism in chapter 4. Even though this book reads like a scholarly treatise in certain places, it is actually a record of my musings on a constellation of topics I have studied for several years. These topics include Gabriel Marcel’s religious existentialism, the depersonalizing forces in twentieth-century Western societies that Marcel criticized in his writings, antiblack racism, and a theism that is opposed to antiblack racism. If you find any of these topics fascinating or worthwhile, please continue reading. Otherwise, you might be better off reading a more traditional scholarly text on Marcel’s thought or Gordon’s thought. This book is the culmination of several years working on three projects. The first project is a reimagining of metaphysics for the twenty-first century, inspired by the traditions of early twentiethcentury American idealism, European existential phenomenology, and Africana philosophy of existence. The three philosophers who have inspired me the most with respect to this project are Josiah Royce, Marcel, and Gordon. This project has led me to the tentative { xi }

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conclusion that axiology, or the theory of value, ought to be considered first philosophy. (Then again, I might not be reimaging anything here. Rather, I might be returning to value theory as practiced by Max Scheler in Germany and Alain Locke in the United States during the early twentieth-century.) Once axiology is considered to be first philosophy, philosophical concepts and theories become the conceptual expressions and refinements of a philosopher’s prereflective presuppositions, intuitions, values, and temperaments. Yet, no philosophical system is reducible just to the intellectual self-concept of the philosopher or philosophers who advances it. Its plausibility depends, to a large degree, on how well it describes some feature or set of features of human existence and, when applicable, of the world. Given this criterion for determining the plausibility of a philosophical system, I cannot help but be drawn to the Kantian transcendental tradition. At its best, this tradition seeks to depict faithfully the experiential dualism many Western peoples experience in their lives: namely, between viewing ourselves as things subject to natural laws and viewing ourselves as ethico-religious persons in late Western modernity. Like some philosophers in the Kantian transcendental traditions (for example, Edmund Husserl, certain readings of Emmanuel Levinas, and David Carr), I think that we should conserve this distinction because without it Western societies tend to depersonalize human existence in general and depersonalize those who live at the margins of those societies in particular. Even though Marcel is not normally associated with the Kantian transcendental tradition, I think that his reflective method fits quite well within that tradition. The second project involves me revisiting philosophers from previous historical eras to unearth and revive some of the wisdom and insights present there. My first book, Yes, But Not Quite: Encountering Josiah Royce’s Ethico-Religious Insight, is an example of how I seek to revisit previous historical eras of philosophy, particularly Western philosophy, for what lessons past philosophers can teach us presently. That book was about Josiah Royce’s philosophy because I think his ethico-religious insight could be a means for theistic people to affirm the importance of interpersonal relationships in a social and cultural

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environment that is too often governed by an impersonal, bureaucratic mindset. Unfortunately, I no longer think that Royce’s ethico-religious insight alone is an adequate response to the impersonal environment in which we currently live. His insight is too dependent on his absolutistic idealism, which obscures the phenomenological richness of his insight in a fog of philosophical postulates. Marcel had criticized Royce for this very reason nearly a century ago in his series of articles on Royce’s metaphysics in Royce’s Metaphysics.1 Following Marcel, perhaps Royce’s ethico-religious insight can be better advanced by associating it with a phenomenologically nuanced religious existentialism. That is how I was led away from studying Royce’s philosophy and eventually began studying Marcel’s religious existentialism, or what I will call Marcel’s reflective method. The first three chapters of this book are the result of my study of Marcel’s reflective method. The third project involves me exploring the philosophical implications of racial identity formation and antiblack racism in a North American and global context. As I studied Marcel’s reflective method, I noticed that Marcel had founded his philosophy on a commitment to combat racism in all its forms. Yet he had neglected to examine one of the most, if not the most, pernicious forms of racism existing in North American and Europe during his time, antiblack racism. This is an oversight that needs to be addressed for Marcel’s reflective method to be faithful to its own foundational commitments, as I interpret those commitments. I did not know how to address this problem in Marcel’s reflective method until I came across Gordon’s philosophy of existence. Gordon’s compatibility with Marcel’s religious existentialism, his work in race theory, and his sensitivity to the Kantian transcendental tradition makes his philosophy the most appropriate means of addressing Marcel’s neglect of antiblack racism. Even though I will outline the central ideas of this book in the introduction, I might as well tell readers upfront what this book is about. It is my attempt to make sense of the following ideas and approaches to philosophy: Marcel’s reflective method, the teleological suspension of philosophy, and a humanistic theism that commits its

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adherents to battle against antiblack racism wherever it is found. It is also my attempt to defend the following two contentions: Marcel’s reflective method can be fruitfully interpreted in terms of Gordon’s teleological suspension of philosophy; and by modifying Marcel’s reflective method to account for the persistence of antiblack racism in contemporary US society, it can effectively criticize and oppose antiblack racism in late Western modernity.

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Acknowledgments



F

irst, I would like to thank Bill Lawson for convincing me in a conversation we had during the 2007 Philosophical Collaborations conference at Southern Illinois University Carbondale that I should be comfortable stating the thesis of this book as I initially envisioned it: This book is an effort to interpret Gabriel Marcel’s reflective method in terms of Lewis R. Gordon’s notion of the teleological suspension of philosophy. Lawson also reminded me that stating the thesis of my book in this way could be considered a political act in the sense that it is still relatively rare that a European or EuroAmerican philosopher’s thought is interpreted in terms of an Africana philosopher. I also would like to thank Randy Auxier, Ken Stikkers, Lenore Langsdorf, Anthony J. Steinbock, and Stephen Tyman who helped and inspired me to transform my ideas into a book I think is worthwhile. I especially thank my mentor and friend, Randy Auxier, for allowing me to write on the philosophical issues that I care about personally and for teaching me how to philosophize honestly during my graduate studies. For better and for worse I have learned more about being a philosopher from him than anyone else. I also would like to thank Lewis R. Gordon for his support for this book and his prompt answers to any questions I had about his philosophy of religion. His answers further substantiated my contention that his philosophy of religion is compatible with Gabriel Marcel’s religious existentialism. In addition, I would like to express my heartfelt gratitude to Bruce Buchanan, Dwight Welch, Tommie Curry, Tanya Jeffcoat, and Jason { xv }

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Hills. I especially would like to thank Tommie for teaching me the basics of critical race theory (CRT) and how CRT in legal studies differs from how most contemporary academic philosophers of race conceive of CRT. Furthermore, I would like to thank my colleagues in the Philosophy Department at Grand Valley State University—especially Coeli Fitzpatrick, Maria Cimitile, Kelly Parker, Eric Chelstrom, Stephen Rowe, and Andrew Spear—for providing me with a supportive environment as I edited and revised this manuscript. I would be remiss if I neglected to thank Helen Tartar, Thomas Lay, and my copy editor, Michael Koch. Their advice has made this book much better than it would have been otherwise. I thank DePaul University for permission to reprint in chapter 3 excerpts from my article ‘‘Struggling against the Specter of Dehumanization: The Experiential Origins of Marcel’s Reflective Method,’’ published in Philosophy Today 53, no. 2 (Summer 2009): 147–60. I also thank the Ohio Valley Philosophical Association for permission to reprint in chapters 4 and 5 excerpts from my article ‘‘Taking Africana Philosophy of Education Seriously,’’ published in Philosophical Studies in Education 39 (2008): 46–55. Moreover, I thank the Caribbean Philosophical Association for permission to reprint in the introduction and in chapter 2 excerpts from my article ‘‘Learning Metaphysical Humility with Lewis Gordon’s Teleological Suspension of Philosophy,’’ published in CLR James Journal: A Publication of the Caribbean Philosophical Association 14, no. 1 (Spring 2008): 157–68. Of course, I thank my family, first and foremost, for tolerating and loving me even when I sometimes acted in a less-than-lovable manner as I wrote, revised, and edited this book. They have collectively paid a debt that I can never repay.

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introduction



So long as we think of philosophy as a set of (one hopes) objective propositions about nature, we will continue to be tempted by notions that philosophy can be a ‘‘science,’’ that there is a correct way of doing philosophy, that a philosophical judgment or body of judgments can be true. If instead we allow ourselves to think of philosophy as expression, these rigid demands seem pointless or vulgar. Yet we surely do not want to reduce philosophy to mere expression, to autobiography or poetry, to ‘‘subjective truth’’ or psychic discharge. Although it is an expression of personal attitude, a philosophical statement is better compared to a piece of statuary than to a feeling or an attitude. The philosopher is a conceptual sculptor. He uses his language to give a shape to his prejudices and values, to give his attitude a life of their own, outside of him, for the grasp of others. . . . The philosopher builds insight onto insight, illustration into argument, joins metaphysical slogan to concrete observation, perhaps using himself as an example, the entire age as a foil. —Robert C. Solomon1

I

occupy many social roles and have undergone many life-shaping events. I am the youngest son of the late James R. Tunstall and Delsie M. Tunstall; the father of two sons, Anthony Elijah and Christopher James; the husband of Crystal Nicole Scott-Tunstall; the uncle of eight surviving nieces and nephews, one of whom has a few children of her own; a friend to fewer than twenty people; an associate and colleague to many more people; an author of articles on a variety of topics, including aesthetics, Africana philosophy, pragmatism, religious ethics, and social and political philosophy; an author of a monograph on Josiah Royce’s ethico-religious insight, Yes, But Not Quite: Encountering Josiah Royce’s Ethico-Religious Insight; an assistant professor at Grand Valley State University; and someone who earned { 1 }

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his Ph.D. in Philosophy from Southern Illinois University Carbondale on August 4, 2007.2 I am a professional teacher of philosophy (and occasional practitioner of actual philosophical inquiries) who has been influenced by years of reading Josiah Royce, William James, Alain Locke, John J. McDermott, Gabriel Marcel, and Lewis Gordon. Lately, I have begun seriously researching Michel Foucault’s archeology of knowledge and his genealogical method alongside Ian Hacking’s writings on the social and human sciences. Reading Foucault and Hacking—alongside studies in social psychology and W. E. B. Du Bois’s perceptive sociological and historical criticisms of antiblack racism, imperialism, and global capitalism in his social science and polemical works—has convinced me of just how much people’s identities and their very lives are shaped by the socio-historical, cultural, and economic circumstances in which they live. Of course, the above list of social roles I occupy and life-shaping events does not even come close to being a comprehensive one. Then again, I am not unique. I have a US Social Security number just like every other US citizen. I have an identification number as an employee of Grand Valley State University, my G Number. My wife and I are identified by our account numbers for our debit cards and credit cards. We are also identified by our account number for our AT&T U-Verse service and for our utilities. These identification numbers objectify me; they transform me into an object that can be identified by some bureaucratic institution or by a corporation’s customer services department. None of my personal identities matter when it comes to being identified by these numbers. Moreover, I am identifiable in terms of my membership in the species Homo sapiens, my height, my weight, my body mass, and other biological and physical characteristics. These social roles and identifying marks can be used to classify me. Often times, these classifications can be used to classify me as easily as they can be used to classify another human being, a nonhuman organism, or a nonliving, middle-sized physical object (for example, a desk). From the standpoint of bureaucracies, I am equivalent to everyone who functions in a similar way within the systems they

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administer. From the standpoint of many engineering fields, finance, and the natural sciences, I am functionally equivalent to anyone or anything that performs a similar role in the system or phenomenon is being studied. I realize the last few sentences are broad generalizations and that someone could provide some counterexamples to each one of those generalizations. Yet there is still a truth in those generalizations that cannot be waived aside: We can be viewed as objects of scientific knowledge and of bureaucratic administration. Our thoughts, our experiences, our emotions—all of these supposedly personal features of our lives can be studied scientifically by transforming them into objects. Here’s a vignette in which an intimate human experience can be studied scientifically by being transformed into an object of scientific knowledge: A twenty-something Franciscan nun prays to God for hours as her head rests underneath an fMRI machine. Minutes prior to her experiencing the Unio Mystica, she signals to the radiologist that she is near the moment where she will experience a mystical union with God. After scanning her brain functioning as she undergoes the Unio Mystica, the radiologist hands the MRI images of the Franciscan nun’s brain to a neurologist. They are in the middle of conducting a study on the neurological basis of human religious experience. They have already scanned the brain activity of numerous Buddhist monks and Carmelite nuns in their effort to substantiate their hypothesis that religious experience is rooted in the bioelectric processes of the human brain. With the latest images in their hands, they speculate on the neurological basis of the nun’s religious experience.3

If we restricted the mystical experiences had by Buddhist monks and Carmelite nuns to the personal realm, we could not study them scientifically. We would be left with qualitative explanations of their religious experience. We might be able to say that Buddhist monks’ and Carmelite nuns’ mystical experiences are the result of people who have participated in an intergenerational, and even trans-historical, community of persons who have experienced a sense of union with

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an all-inclusive Whole. We could describe the mystical experiences of this all-inclusive Whole for Christian mystics as being one in which people commune intimately with the One who is personally responsive to the most ennobling values that human persons experience, for example, agapic and filial love, holiness, hope, and beauty. Such a view of mystical experience is vastly different than attempting to understand mystical experiences from the standpoint that we are biological organisms that somehow have evolved in such a way that we are able to construct elaborate interrelated socio-cultural practices that might have been adaptive at one point, but are now no longer necessary to promote the reproductive success of our species, and, more importantly, of our genes.4 As we think about our ability to objectify and classify ourselves, we should notice something weird about this ability: We can knowingly objectify ourselves and objectify others for the purposes of identification and classification; yet, we remain personally aware of events occurring in the world and act we perform. In phenomenological terms we have the ability to view ourselves as physical objects and to view ourselves as actors in the world. This distinction is paradoxical in the sense that the language we use to describe ourselves as physical objects is irreducible to the language we use to describe ourselves as actors in the world. This is perhaps the weirdest thing about human experience, and I would add human existence. What is even more amazing is that human persons can occasionally view themselves as biological organisms and as actors in the world, simultaneously. Think about when someone undergoes intracranial angioplasty under local anesthesia and mild sedation. That person remains aware of everything the medical team is doing to her or him. Feeling the balloon threaded through one’s arteries and then inflated to open a blocked brain artery, as though one is simultaneously an object to be fixed by a technician or a conscious subject aware of everything that occurs to one’s body. Philosophers in the Western philosophical tradition have attempted to make sense of this peculiar phenomenon at least since Rene´ Descartes’ Discourse on the

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Method of Rightly Conducting the Reason, and Seeking Truth in the Sciences (1637) and Meditations on First Philosophy (1641). Even though there is an extensive body of scholarly literature on this phenomenon, I will not engage it in any substantive manner in this book. Honestly, I am not concerned with entering into the centuries-old back-and-forth among Western philosophers on this subject. I would prefer not to identify my position on this phenomenon in relation to dual-aspect monism, property dualism, substance dualism, nonreductive physicalism, eliminative materialism, or any other conceivable position on this problem imagined by philosophers since this phenomenon acquired philosophical significance in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. I should note that the very existence of this phenomenon, much less being able to recognize its philosophical significance, could not occur prior to the advent of the experimental sciences with their hypothetico-deductive methods in the seventeenth century. This phenomenon seems to be the outgrowth of natural scientists’ and thoughtful laypeople’s awareness that the idea that all spatiotemporal objects could be studied via quantification does not fit well the idea that human self-consciousness is an immaterial phenomenon. Anyone familiar with the history of modern Western philosophy already knows this story and how philosophers attempted to resolve the apparent conflict between these two ideas. As a phenomenologist I care about examining how this phenomenon acquired (and continues to acquire) its meaningfulness for us. As a metaphysician I care about investigating how this phenomenon contributes to our understanding of human existence. As a phenomenological metaphysician, I am compelled to account for this experiential distinction by answering the question: How can we adequately conserve the phenomenological distinction between viewing ourselves and our environing world as a collection of physical objects and events and viewing ourselves as meaning-bestowing and meaningappreciating subjects (particularly as ethical and religious persons) in a way that affirms the personal nature of human existence, but without negating our occasional experiences of ourselves as objects?

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I think that Gabriel Marcel’s reflective method can conserve this phenomenological distinction in a way that affirms the personal nature of human existence, but without denying the reality of us being able to objectify ourselves and others. Marcel’s reflective method can be understood as a philosophical approach to human existence that aims at phenomenologically unearthing the universal (and even the sacred) within our everyday, familiar experiences with other persons and enshrining the eidetic features of these experiences within the framework of a phenomenological ontology. Yet Marcel’s phenomenological ontology is not ontology in the traditional sense, that is to say, a study of what kinds of entities exist in the world. Rather, Marcel’s ontology describes the meaningfulness of those phenomena that enable us to participate in being and remember how and why we are more than merely biological organisms or our social roles. Indeed, one could say that Marcel’s phenomenological ontology is what he calls metaphysics throughout his corpus. Let us put in abeyance Marcel’s notion of being right now. I will explain what Marcel means by being in the next three chapters. At this point many readers might object by saying: ‘‘What sort of metaphysics is being advanced in this book? Marcel’s phenomenological ontology does not resemble any respectable metaphysics as it is being practiced in the early twenty-first century, but resembles a morbid phenomenology masquerading as first philosophy.’’ This objection presupposes a conception of metaphysics that fits the dominant conceptions of metaphysics today. That is, metaphysics either has to seek to cut reality at its joints via symbolic logic or conceptual analysis (contemporary analytic philosophy) or to be a metaphysics of presence where human cognition converts everything to an intelligible object (much of contemporary continental philosophy).5 And since Marcel’s phenomenological ontology fits neither of these conceptions of metaphysics, it is not a legitimate metaphysical position. To contend otherwise we first have to see how the dominant models of metaphysics do not exhaust the meaning of respectable metaphysics.

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Maybe the above description of both contemporary and continental metaphysics is an unfair one.6 So, in order to better contrast how Marcel defines metaphysics with what is understood as metaphysics in both contemporary analytic and continental circles, I should explain in some detail the general nature of contemporary analytic and continental metaphysics. What I mean by contemporary analytic metaphysics is what most contemporary analytic metaphysicians mean by metaphysics, at least according to Michael J. Loux and Dean W. Zimmerman in their anthology The Oxford Handbook of Metaphysics.7 Loux and Zimmerman contend that most contemporary analytic metaphysicians ‘‘are in basic agreement with the Quinean approach to systematic metaphysics exemplified in the work of [Roderick] Chisholm and [David] Lewis. Indeed, it is probably not much of an exaggeration to say that today’s crop of [most American analytic] metaphysicians can be divided fairly exhaustively into those most influenced by the one or the other.’’8 A Quinean approach to metaphysics is one in which metaphysicians advance ‘‘a chastened approach to metaphysics, one that neither shies away from the traditional problems of ontology, nor falls back into the arcane, unfettered system-building that had given metaphysics a bad name.’’9 This is true even though analytic metaphysicians often have different starting points for their metaphysical inquiries and metaphysical conclusions. Regardless of their differences, they hold some version of Quine’s criterion of ontological commitment, which can be summarized in ‘‘[Quine’s] famous slogan, ‘To be is to be the value of a bound value.’ ’’10 This slogan means that ‘‘a metaphysician can determine just what kinds of entities we commit ourselves to by endorsing a given body of statements.’’11 For many analytic metaphysicians who do not accept Quine’s approach to metaphysics, P. F. Strawson’s Kantian descriptive metaphysics most likely influences their approach to metaphysics more than Quine’s criterion of ontological commitment. Loux and Zimmerman define Strawson’s descriptive metaphysics along these lines:

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‘‘According to Strawson, the aim of descriptive metaphysics is the systematic characterization of the most general categorical or structural features of the conceptual scheme in terms of which we talk and think about the world.’’12 But whether one conceives of metaphysics in Quinean terms or in Strawsonian terms, most analytic metaphysicians presuppose that our metaphysical concepts, at least when formulated in an appropriate fashion, approximately describe certain features of our world as they are in-themselves. This, in turn, implies that metaphysicians can know something about how the mind-independent world is structured; that is to say, they are able to acquire some knowledge about the world by investigating it with the appropriate conceptual framework. So whether analytic metaphysicians attempt to describe the world in terms of the ontological commitments one has or in terms of how we talk about and think of the world, each of them ‘‘attempts to tell the ultimate truth about the World, about everything,’’ as Peter van Inwagen puts it.13 Consequently, most practicing analytic metaphysicians attempt to answer the questions, ‘‘What are the most general features of the world and what sorts of things does it contain? What is the World like?’’14 Of lesser importance to most analytic metaphysicians are the traditional metaphysical questions: ‘‘Why does the World exist—and, more specifically, why is there a World having the features and the content described in the answer to [the previous question]? What is our place in the World? How do human beings fit into it?’’15 From a Marcellian vantage point, this approach to metaphysics is an untenable one for at least one significant reason: it thinks that the logical necessity one experiences when working in a formal logicomathematical system sometimes denotes causal (that is, physical) necessity. In other words, it thinks that logical concepts, when formulated properly, somehow represent features of a thoroughly mindindependent world. Indeed, if the dominant approach to analytic metaphysics were the only available one, then perhaps Richard Rorty is correct when he admonishes metaphysicians to end their quixotic endeavor to map the structure of a mind-independent reality and to

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participate as fellow interlocutors in the ongoing, trans-generational conversation that is the Western intellectual tradition.16 However, there is at least one available alternative to the dominant approach of analytic metaphysics, namely, the approach to metaphysics taken up in this book. For many contemporary continental philosophers, metaphysics is at best something to be avoided and is at worst something to be thrown into the dustbin of philosophic history. They criticize metaphysics (that is, the tradition of metaphysics in the West from Plato to Nietzsche and Husserl) as ontotheology.17 As ontotheology, traditional Western metaphysics has continually reduced being itself to a being among other beings; that is, it continually reduces being to a spatiotemporal entity and, in the process, conceals the traditional idea of being itself, namely, as that which sustains finite beings but cannot be completely disclosed to us through human cognition. Consequently, traditional Western metaphysics tends to reduce the significance of everyone and everything to simply their instrumental value, robbing them of their uniqueness and noninstrumental value. This has led many continental thinkers to proclaim that we live in a postmetaphysical world (for example, the later Heidegger and Habermas), dwelling in the ruins of the Western metaphysical tradition. However, metaphysics does not necessarily have to be a metaphysics of presence in the pejorative sense. It does not necessarily have to conceive of being as a spatiotemporally existent thing on par with finite beings. There are approaches to metaphysics in which being (and the divine if one’s metaphysics is theistic) is never a quantifiable entity; rather, being is viewed as the condition for the possibility of the meaningful existence of finite beings. Furthermore, in a phenomenologically based metaphysics, being is what makes our acts of meaning-bestowal possible. The Marcellian metaphysics outlined in this book will conceive of metaphysics in a way compatible with the above-mentioned, nonpejorative sense of metaphysics. Accordingly, a Marcellian phenomenological metaphysician is a metaphysician who would agree with Hilary Putnam that there should be a moratorium on ontology and metaphysics as they have

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been done traditionally, that is, ‘‘the kind of ontological speculation that seeks to describe the Furniture of the Universe and to tell us what is Really There and what is Only a Human Projection.’’18 That is to say, a Marcellian phenomenological metaphysician no longer attempts to examine the essential structures of some mind-independent world, as though we ever could describe the world as it is in-itself. What this sort of metaphysician does, instead, is disclose the essential, invariant structures of our acts of meaning-bestowal (for example, constituting objects of human cognition and scientific inquiry) as well as our acts of appreciating certain interpersonal phenomena (for example, love and faith). Since Marcel is a theist and his metaphysics is a theist metaphysics, a Marcellian metaphysician performs metaphysical inquiries to remind us that we are truly ourselves only to the extent that we commune with other persons in the presence of being’s radiant light, which points to the One who illuminates all creation. This would lead him or her to claim that in the twilight of Western modernity, where an impersonal ethos permeates many aspects of daily life, we have to remember that our lives are precious gifts and that the divine is experienced most intensely in our interpersonal relationships. I think one fruitful way to make sense of what a Marcellian metaphysics entails is to interpret it as an enactment of what Lewis R. Gordon has called in his recent writings ‘‘the teleological suspension of philosophy.’’ Gordon defines ‘‘the teleological suspension of philosophy’’ as follows: In the present, philosophy often stands devoid of teleological import. For some philosophers, there are only arguments, but the purpose of such arguments beyond their validity is open. Yet, one is left at a loss to explain why philosophy without ultimate purpose does not collapse into pseudoscience. What does one do when philosophy itself is at issue? It would seem that, in order to do philosophical work honestly, one has to suspend the centering of philosophy. In effect, it is the suspension of philosophy for the sake of that which, in the end, renders philosophy philosophical.19 While Gordon, to my knowledge, has not given a step-by-step description of how someone can perform a teleological suspension of

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philosophy, I think it is performed in the following manner. A philosopher performs a teleological suspension of philosophy whenever she recognizes that philosophical inquiry is not a self-justifying endeavor and that there must be some extraphilosophical interest or commitment motivating her to philosophize. Teleologically suspending philosophy forces her to bracket the validity of her philosophical argumentation and distinctions and, instead, concentrate on the reasons she philosophize in the first place. Teleologically suspending philosophy also forces her to acknowledge that philosophizing is not a value-neutral activity, but is dependent on the valuations made by the philosopher philosophizing. In the case of metaphysics, when a metaphysician teleologically suspends philosophy, she realizes that her study of the conditions of possibility for having any human discourse at all is always already influenced by the valuations she has made and currently makes. Thus, if metaphysicians would perform Gordon’s teleological suspension of philosophy on their own metaphysical inquiries, they would see just how value-laden their metaphysical speculations really are. Accordingly, this awareness of the value-laden nature of metaphysical inquiry would remind metaphysicians that their inquiries are not universal pronouncements about the world, but creative searches for an adequate narrative or picture of the world as seen from a given human perspective. Marcel’s reflective method is an example of Gordon’s teleological suspension of philosophy, because it is founded on, and motivated by, extraphilosophical commitments, insights, and purposes. In the case of Marcel’s reflective method, the extraphilosophical elements are Marcel’s own adherence to an ethico-religious insight where the highest ontological exigency is to participate in being20 and his commitment to battle against the ever-present threat of depersonalization in late Western modernity21 from a technological, ideological, and bureaucratic world order. So while Marcel’s concepts of problem, mystery, the problematic, and the metaproblematic are philosophical ones, and while his distinction between primary reflection and secondary reflection is a philosophical one, his philosophical concepts and distinctions are the result of his efforts to describe a certain sort

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of ethico-religious experience and a certain form of human experience that is threatened by dehumanization. Unfortunately, despite Marcel’s commitment to battle the everpresent threat of depersonalization in late Western modernity, he neglects to examine what is perhaps the most prevalent threat of depersonalization in Western modernity: antiblack racism. Given Marcel’s professed commitment to battle the forces of depersonalization in late Western modernity, any Marcellian reflective method that is faithful to Marcel’s commitment to combat depersonalization should account for how antiblack racism has affected modern human persons, especially persons of African descent throughout Africa and the African diaspora (that is, Africana persons). Without such an account, Marcel’s own reflective method and anyone’s metaphysics inspired by it is weakened because it cannot live up to its second extraphilosophical commitment. But not just any account of antiblack racism will suffice. The account of antiblack racism that is compatible with a Marcellian reflective method ought to be an existential phenomenological one since Marcel’s own reflective method is an existential phenomenological one. I think that Gordon’s existential phenomenology is a promising candidate for providing this sort of account. Nevertheless, a Marcellian reflective method requires more than an existential phenomenological account of antiblack racism to address how antiblack racism threatens to dehumanized Africana people. It also requires an existential theistic understanding of religious experience that is compatible with a Marcellian metaphysics, once it has been coupled with Gordon’s existential phenomenological account of antiblack racism. At this point one could ask the question: If what makes philosophy significant is its extraphilosophical content, then what, exactly, is left of a philosophical system once one identifies its extraphilosophical content? Since this book focuses a lot on Marcel’s reflective method, we should conceive of answer this question along Marcellian lines. And given the central role of phenomenological distinctions in Marcel’s philosophy, what makes a philosophical system philosophical are

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the conceptual distinctions philosophers make to describe human existence faithfully and adequately. The above-mentioned Marcellian definition of philosophy is somewhat similar to how the American phenomenologist, Robert Sokolowski, defines philosophy when he writes: Philosophy is the intellectual activity that works with distinctions. Its method is the making and the questioning of distinctions. Philosophy explains by distinguishing. This does not mean that philosophy just asserts distinctions and lets it go at that; rather, it works with distinctions, it brings them out and dwells on them, dwells with them, showing how and why the things that it has distinguished must be distinguished one from the other.22

The Marcellian definition of philosophy also would agree with Sokolowski’s definition of philosophy as a human endeavor whose practitioners occasionally deconstruct unjustified distinctions made by philosophers in the past.23 Such deconstructive activity performed by philosophers is not only negative, though. It is also positive whenever it clears a space for philosophers to see ‘‘a distinction that clarifies a situation or a controversy, a distinction that brings out the nature of a thing.’’24 Yet, the philosophical distinctions made by philosophers following a Marcellian philosophy aim not to bring out the nature of a thing, but to make sense of the circumstances and situations in which persons are situated. Philosophical distinctions also can help persons come to understand their lives. These situations themselves are extraphilosophical. For Marcel (and hopefully for Marcellian philosophers as well), then, philosophical inquiry depends upon extraphilosophical phenomena to provide it within concrete content to examine.25 However, the extraphilosophical is a lot broader than the actual situations in which we are involved; it includes the temperaments, concerns, commitments, interests, preferences, and so on, of those who are involved in those situations. Hence, philosophy is parasitic on what transcends philosophical inquiry and its distinctions. What is ironic is that it is the extraphilosophical commitments and concerns that

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philosophers hold that make philosophic inquiry and its distinctions meaningful in the first place. Here is how I intend to accomplish everything stated above. In chapter 1, I will set the stage for understanding Marcel’s reflective method as a teleological suspension of philosophy. I explore how Marcel’s phenomenological distinction between viewing ourselves as objects and viewing ourselves as persons originated in his philosophizing about human existence from the early 1910s to 1925, as recorded in the entries of his Metaphysical Journal and in his seminal 1925 Revue de Me´taphysique et de Morale article, ‘‘Existence and Objectivity.’’ In chapter 2, I will explain how Marcel’s reflective method is a teleological suspension of philosophy through a selective examination of Marcel’s writings about reflection from Being and Having (1935) to his series of conversations with Paul Ricoeur in 1968. In chapter 3, I will examine how Marcel’s battle against the dehumanization of human persons in late Western modernity is an extension of his phenomenological distinction between viewing ourselves as manipulable objects and viewing ourselves as persons. Given how racism and racialism has depersonalized millions of persons in the West, and still threatens to dehumanize many African Americans and other Africana persons living in the West, I think that a Marcellian metaphysics should examine one of the dominant sources of dehumanization in Western societies today: antiblack racism. For the purposes of this book, I will concentrate on antiblack racism primarily from the vantage point from Africana persons, that is, any person who is a descendent of enslaved Africans or is an African who is not of white European, Native American, or Near Eastern ancestry. More specifically, this book concentrates on AfricanAmerican experiences of antiblack racism in the United States of America. I am obligated to make the above-mentioned qualifications concerning antiblack racism because the phenomenon of antiblack racism, as Lewis Gordon understands it, affects more than Africana persons. Antiblack racism is an existential and phenomenological category that describes the experiences of any nonwhite person, and

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even some marginalized ethnicities that could be considered white, who suffer from oppression due to them being deemed less-thanpersons, that is, subhuman.26 I also should note that, for the purposes of this book, the term African American will refer to any person who was born in the United States and has at least one ancestor who was enslaved and sent to the New World colonies and territories that became the United States of America. Other Africana persons of the African diaspora located in the western hemisphere are Afro-Caribbean, Afro-Cuban, AfroBrazilian, and so on will be referred to either by their regional identity or as simply Africana persons. My use of the term African American differs from Africana Studies scholars such as Lewis Gordon. These Africana scholars consider any African person or person of African descent who lives ‘‘in the New World continents [that is, the Americas] and regions of the modern world [for example, the Caribbean Islands]’’ to be an ‘‘African American.’’27 While I am identifying important conceptual distinctions used throughout this book, perhaps I should differentiate racism from racialism at this point. Racism is the actual socio-cultural attitudes and practices that depersonalize a targeted, stigmatized racial group. Apartheid in South Africa and Jim Crow laws in the American South during the last century are paradigmatic examples of racist policies implemented in an institutional manner. Racialism, on the other hand, is understood by many contemporary philosophers to be the intellectual rationalization of socio-cultural assumptions about nonEuropean persons in which ‘‘white and black racial labels describe actual superior and inferior moral characters.’’28 Moreover, these racial labels are supposed to ‘‘[describe] the true ‘nature’ of those who bore the labels.’’29 For example, ‘‘if the English dictionary got the meanings it attributes to the worlds ‘black’ and ‘white’ from everyday speech, [modern Western] philosophers were ready to provide the words and their unreflective everyday usages with sophisticated epistemological and transcendental justification.’’30 In short, racialism is what provides the philosophical justification for racist policies and attitudes.

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However, some philosophers of race think that not all racialist thinking is bad. Paul C. Taylor is one of those philosophers. He distinguishes between ‘‘good’’ racialist thinking and ‘‘bad’’ racialist thinking.31 He considers essentialist types of racialist thinking to belong to the bad type of racist thinking and social constructivist types of racialist thinking to belong to the good type of racist thinking. Social constructivist racialist thinking is ‘‘good,’’ because it recognizes that ‘‘race’’ is a social construct, and thus historically contingent. It also enables us to redress wrongs committed against persons who belong to historically oppressed racial groups, as determined by their ancestry and the social norms of the place where they reside. This position is contrary to Africana philosophers such as Kwame Anthony Appiah and Emmanuel Eze who think that any type of racialist thinking is bad. Here’s one more thing before I return to outlining the remaining chapters: The existential phenomenological understanding of race advanced in this book differs from the concept of race as defined by some anthropologists, epidemiologists, and geneticists.32 While some anthropologists, epidemiologists, and geneticists conceive of race as a worthwhile concept that identifies a population of persons by the frequency of genes shared by that population, I regard race as a social constituted concept that cannot be analyzed phenomenologically apart from how it has manifested itself socially and culturally in lived human experience.33 In chapter 4, I will explain my Gordon-inspired theory of antiblack. Along the way I will address a few objections racial eliminativists might have to my theory. Of special importance is replying to Naomi Zack’s criticism of my view, since she has advanced an existential argument in which my view would be a justification of living in bad faith. Such an existentialist criticism would be devastating to my position if it were true. In chapter 5, I will explain Marcel’s failure to appreciate the full magnitude on antiblack racism as a system of dehumanization. In addition, I will examine how Gordon’s account of antiblack racism is compatible with a Marcellian reflective method.

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In chapter 6, I will explore how a humanistic theism can be combined with Marcel’s religious existentialism to make an antiracist theism. The anitracist theism emerging from this chapter will not be a robust one. Rather, it will be a finite humanistic theism that takes antiblack racism seriously, but without any hope that anyone other than African-American people themselves, working with one another and with non–African-American people, can end racial oppression. First, however, I should address an obvious metaphysical difficulty with my approach to metaphysics in this book. After reading up to this point, I can imagine some readers asking themselves these questions: How is it possible to construct a phenomenological metaphysics based on the experiences of theistic religious faith and racialized existence? How is it possible to construct an existential phenomenological metaphysics on the regional ontologies of critical race studies, theology, and African-American religious studies? Is a phenomenological metaphysics not rooted in a pure transcendental phenomenology genuinely a phenomenological metaphysics? I think that it is possible to construct a phenomenological metaphysics only after one gives up the pretensions of traditional Western metaphysics, especially its goal of constructing a single meta-narrative that maps the essential features of a mind-independent reality. Constructing a phenomenological metaphysics, then, becomes a live option once we embrace the fact that every metaphysical system is necessarily the construction of a metaphysician who happens to be sensitive to certain features of our being-in-the-world and neglects other features of our being-in-the-world. By viewing metaphysics as Alain Locke views philosophy in general, we can interpret metaphysical inquiry as a systematic articulation of how metaphysicians comprehend their being-in-the-world. Metaphysics, then, is less like a natural science (such as physics) and more like an artistic endeavor (such as storytelling). Accordingly, metaphysical systems, like philosophical systems in general, ‘‘have the creative quality of framed intellectual landscapes, and confront us as significant panoramas of meaning, skillfully composed or happily discovered.’’34

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This does not mean that metaphysical systems are necessarily fictions created to satisfy the whims and fancies of metaphysicians, however. Sometimes metaphysical systems actually attune us to important features of our reality. This occurs because even though metaphysical speculations are rooted in the valuations of metaphysicians, ‘‘reality in its fullness contains and exhibits values.’’35 This means that we experience reality as the realm in which values reside and the stage on which some values are acted upon while other values are rejected, noticed, admired, and the like. Some of these values attune us to reality better than other values, because acting on the better ones seems to enable us to navigate around in our environing world and negotiate with other persons in a beneficial manner. As a result, we could say that metaphysical inquiry, when done well, expresses to others the significance of a certain value or set of values for human being-inthe-world. But this is not because metaphysical speculations necessarily depict certain features of our being-in-the-world. Rather, this is the case because some metaphysicians are fortunate enough to be able to construct metaphysical systems that effectively convey to others how certain values make sense of our being-in-the-world. Accordingly, all metaphysical systems are partial and inherently incomplete. In this book I attempt to outline a phenomenological metaphysical system that effectively conveys how certain ethico-religious values can make sense of staying persons in late Western modernity. If I have failed in my endeavor, then I hope that readers will be motivated to correct the errors in my metaphysical ‘‘story’’ while preserving what is worthwhile in it.

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abriel Marcel’s theistic philosophy traditionally has been labeled as a form of religious existentialism. While this is an accurate description of Marcel’s philosophy, I prefer to describe his philosophy as a sort of reflective method. This way of describing his philosophy allows us to trace it back to its Kantian transcendentalist roots. Once we recognize the Kantian transcendentalist roots of his reflective method, we can better appreciate why he performs a detailed examination of the meaningfulness of human existence through such detrimental, life-affirming, or life-altering events as the death of a loved one, religious faith, despair, communion, hope, and love: To reveal us as beings who are primarily persons.1 As persons we cannot be reduced to being merely objects of scientific inquiry. Who is a person, then? For Marcel a person is a meaningful narrative abstraction that unifies our acts as embodied beings into a coherent self-identity.2 Our personal identities are constructed by imaginatively unifying the most memorable ‘‘episodes’’ of our existence, along with the more unremarkable moments of our existence, { 19 }

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into a ‘‘story,’’ or ‘‘narrative.’’3 This narrative self-identity, in turn, is ideally an ethical construction, which allows us to be responsible for our actions. Marcel does not acknowledge in his published writings that there could be a phenomenologically robust sense to the term person. Yet, given how such phenomenologists as Scheler have interpreted person as a phenomenological concept, we do not have to equate person with Kant’s rationalistic conception of person. Indeed, we can use the term person to describe Marcel’s conceptions of human existence, incarnation, intersubjectivity, and the personal. His philosophy, as a descendent of Kantian transcendentalism, also recognizes that we are sometimes describable as (merely) objects of scientific inquiry. This is the curse and the blessing of Kantian transcendentalism: We are aware that human existence can be described in two often irreconcilable ways. However, this can be the case without presupposing that there are two distinct metaphysical realms— one physical, the other supersensible. This makes Marcel’s reflective method very similar to those types of phenomenology sympathetic to the impetus of Kant’s critical philosophy—namely, to preserve the experiential difference between viewing ourselves as agents in the world and viewing ourselves as objects of scientific knowledge. This chapter seeks to unearth the origins of Marcel’s reflective method in his attempt to preserve the most important insights of Kantian transcendental tradition in a nonidealist milieu. Perhaps the most important insight Marcel retains from the Kantian transcendental tradition is the distinction between phenomenon and noumenon. Indeed, his distinction between viewing ourselves as physical objects and viewing ourselves is precisely the Kantian distinction between phenomena and noumena. To substantiate this contention, I first need to examine how it is plausible to interpret the Kantian phenomenon-noumenon distinction, phenomenologically. I will do that by examining the first article in which Marcel clearly makes this distinction, namely, ‘‘Existence and Objectivity’’ (1925). Then, I trace the phenomenological leading clues Marcel followed that led him to develop that method: that is, our experiences of ‘‘incarnation’’ (or embodiment), objectivity, theistic religious faith, and prayer. This is

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precisely what I will do during my selective explication of his Metaphysical Journal (1927). The phenomenological version of the Kantian phenomenonnoumenon distinction that Marcel originates in a certain interpretation of Immanuel Kant’s critical philosophy, especially Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason and his Critique of Practical Reason. This interpretation of Kant translates his apparently ontological distinction between the phenomenal realm (that is, the realm of empirical appearances) and the noumenal realm (that is, the realm of things as they are in themselves) into a phenomenological distinction between viewing the world as subject to natural laws and viewing the world as an interpersonal moral community. The initial step someone should take to translate Kant’s distinction into a phenomenological one is to reinterpret it as an epistemic one. As I will argue below, it is through the epistemic interpretation of this distinction that the phenomenological interpretation becomes a live option. This epistemic interpretation of Kant’s distinction is sometimes called the ‘‘methodological interpretation’’ and at other times called the ‘‘two-aspect interpretation.’’4 This interpretation of Kant’s distinction between things in themselves and appearances makes Kant’s epistemology intelligible. At least it makes it seem more intelligible than the standard two-worlds interpretation of Kant’s phenomenon-noumenon distinction. For example, under the two-world interpretation, we would have to posit two things: a phenomenal object and a noumenal entity. One of these things, the noumenal entity, would be an unknowable metaphysical entity whereas the phenomenal object would be the only sort of thing we could ever know, empirically. However, this interpretation of Kant’s distinction does not fit with what Kant says about the phenomenon-noumenon distinction in such passages as this one from the second edition of the First Critique: ‘‘The object should be taken in a twofold meaning, namely as appearance or as thing in itself.’’5 Nor does it account for the nontheoretical meaning of noumenon that Kant introduces in the second chapter, first section of the A-edition of the First Critique’s Transcendental Doctrine of Method6

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and emphasizes in the preface to the B-edition. Usually, when Kant mentions noumena apart from human cognition, and thus apart from theoretical reason, he means it in a moral sense. In other words, we should understand him as saying that while theoretical reason cannot conceive of the noumenal world (that is, a moral world), we can still think of ourselves as part of a moral world. This moral world is not some separate ontological realm, but is rather another way that we can interpret ourselves and our environing world. Some post-Kantian philosophers have gone beyond the epistemic sense of Kant’s phenomenon-noumenon distinction and interpreted it, phenomenologically. Like the methodological interpretation of Kant’s distinction, these post-Kantian philosophers normally sidestep traditional metaphysical issues, especially the issue of determining whether the noumenon is a different kind of substance than the phenomenal. In an effort to sidestep these metaphysical issues, the phenomenological interpretation regards the phenomenal realm and the noumenal realm as just two ways of describing ourselves and our environing world. From a phenomenological vantage point, Kant’s distinction becomes a thoroughly experiential distinction. Stated otherwise, from a phenomenological vantage point, Kant’s distinction is a description of the experiential difference between how we cognize objects in the physical world and how we experience the world as one where we have a moral obligation to other persons. A consequence of the phenomenological interpretation of Kant’s phenomenon-noumenon distinction is that Kant’s original description of moral personhood is seen as too rationalistic, given how we experience our own personhood and the personhood of others. To avoid reducing moral personhood to the exercise of one’s rationality as Kant did, some early phenomenologists who accepted a phenomenological version of Kant’s distinction decided to jettison Kant’s rationalistic conception of moral personhood and replace it with a more robust conception of moral personhood. For example, the early twentieth-century German phenomenologist Max Scheler agrees with Kant that ‘‘the person must never be

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considered a thing or a substance with faculties and powers.’’7 Nevertheless, he rejects Kant’s contention that the mark of moral personhood is the exercise of reason, because he thinks that it leads to a vicious impersonalism. This impersonalism bases a person’s worth not on anything that a concrete person does, but on whether he or she acts ‘‘so that the maxim of his [or her] action can become a universal principle for all rational beings.’’8 What this means is that in Kant’s rationalistic ethics there is only one ethical individual, the idealized citizen of the Kingdom of Ends. Of course, this is equivalent to saying that there are no persons, only a suprapersonal principle that ought to govern our moral conduct.9 Yet, Scheler thinks that we can accept Kant’s contention that the person is not describable empirically, and thus accept Kant’s distinction, without its entailing Kant’s impersonalism. Scheler thinks that the way to do this is to argue that the person qua person transcends any and every empirical description, whether that description be a psychological, physiological, or physical one.10 That is to say, a person is other than the empirical categories used to describe the human organism and its desires, biological urges, habits, and psychological dispositions. A person is a creature that experiences the world as a stage on which deeds and actions are performed by oneself and by creatures like oneself. These actions are not just things we do. Ideally, these actions intimate what is worthy of our ultimate concern, holiness.11 In fact, Scheler defines person along the following lines in his 1915 article ‘‘On the Idea of Man’’12: Persons are organisms that transcend their psychophysical origins and regard God (or, more accurately, the holy) as the One that enables them to exist in the first place and deserves to be honored as the ground of their being.13 God, then, is the One who lures us to become who we ought to be, namely one who communes with other humans (and maybe someday certain nonhuman animals) in a spirit of sacred community.14 Independently of Scheler, Marcel forged an antirationalistic philosophy in which Kant’s distinction between phenomena and noumena is reinterpreted along phenomenological lines during the 1910s

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and early 1920s. Unlike Scheler (at least the Scheler of ‘‘On the Idea of Man’’ and Formalism), though, Marcel thought that a phenomenological interpretation of Kant’s distinction could serve as the basis of phenomenological reflective method. This becomes clear once one traces how Marcel presents this distinction in his seminal article ‘‘Existence and Objectivity’’ (1925). In that article, he distinguishes between objectivity and existence. Objectivity, for Marcel, is best interpreted as a phenomenological concept that refers to our experiences of a shared, common world. This experienced, common world is one populated by nonhuman entities and nonorganic things that we encounter together with other people. Moreover, this experienced, common world is the realm where scientific quantification occurs. Whenever we view the world as quantifiable and objectified, we are viewing it from the vantage point of primary reflection. Stated differently, primary reflection is the method by which we are able to objectify ourselves and our environing world for the purposes of scientific inquiry and manipulating our natural environment. Primary reflection is Marcel’s phrase for what many philosophers call theoretical reason. Nevertheless, despite its supposedly impersonal objectivity, primary reflection derives its meaningfulness from and is grounded in our personal experiences in the world. Yet primary reflection does not exhaust how we can view ourselves and our environing world, since even primary reflection is founded upon our personal and interpersonal experiences of the world. One way Marcel describes these sorts of experiences is by using the term existence in a phenomenological sense. Accordingly, existence describes us as creatures who commune with other persons and collectively participate in being, that is, the nongeometrical place of fidelity and the wellspring for all ennobling meanings and ethico-religious phenomena. What Marcel means by fidelity is creative fidelity. In its most spiritual and interpersonal sense, fidelity involves a triadic relation among oneself, another person, and the Absolute Thou. Fidelity, properly speaking, is not something that we can have towards an abstract concept or institution, for example, Wal-Mart or a polity. It,

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instead, involves a genuine interpersonal community, such as an actual church congregation and its specific ideals, goals, and projects. What this means is that creative fidelity involves: Our faithfulness to specific, concrete persons, not to an abstract, ideal persons and institutions. Our hope that the one to whom we have committed ourselves will graciously accept and receive us and that the divine will sustain us in our openness towards that person. We should remember that genuine hope is nonempirical in the sense that it is not grounded in anything that someone has done in the past or an anticipation of what that person will do in the future. Our hope in that person is an act of faith and a gift. It involves accepting the uncertainty of the vow we make to be faithful to that person. Steadfastness in our commitment to the one to whom we have promised to be faithful. And a willingness to respond creatively to specific situations in such a manner that it upholds our promise of fidelity.15

This means that we exist, in the fullest sense of the word, only to the extent that we commune with others in the presence of the divine (i.e., participate in the divine’s life) and avoid regarding ourselves as merely objects. In his later writings, Marcel calls the mode of reflection in which our world discloses itself in its fullest sense, secondary reflection. Once we combine primary reflection and secondary reflection together, we have Marcel’s reflective method. I should halt my cursory explication of Marcel’s reflective method here and concentrate on those journal entries published in his Metaphysical Journal that set the stage for his distinction between objectivity and existence. That way, we can fruitfully trace the phenomenological leading clues that led him to embrace this method together. Following the Leading Clues of Marcel’s Reflective Method In retracing those leading clues Marcel followed in his Metaphysical Journal, we should keep in mind that ‘‘the central theme of the Metaphysical Journal and, of course, of his subsequent works, is precisely

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the impossibility of thinking of being [l’eˆtre] as object.’’16 This means that his phenomenological analyses do not attempt to objectify being; rather, they only allude to being and its significance for us. Yet, the Metaphysical Journal is more than just a critique of objectivity qua excessive objectification; it has a constructive side. James Collins thinks that the constructive side of Marcel’s Metaphysical Journal is to be found in his ‘‘basic notions of communicative being and my body, and his efforts to establish a personal relation of I-and-thou with God.’’17 I will now examine the phenomenological leading clues that led Marcel to embrace the Kantian distinction between viewing ourselves as objects and viewing ourselves as persons. I will begin with the leading clue that caused Marcel to articulate Kant’s distinction in the first place: our ‘‘incarnation,’’ or our experience of being an embodied creature. In his January 19, 1914, entry, Marcel describes the abovementioned Kantian distinction this way: It seems impossible to set aside absolutely the following problem at least. There is an immediate relation between my consciousness and my body in so far as the latter is a datum in space (of course this does not exclude the idea of a construction of the body’s image; what I mean here is that the relation between my consciousness and my body is given as immediate, and that is all we need to take into account).

But between consciousness and body there is another relation inasmuch as my body is a datum given to internal perception (coenesthe´sique); and here, it seems, we are dealing with two absolutely distinct modes of existence. One is by definition objective, that is to say, it applies to any consciousness endowed with conditions of perception analogous to ours; the other is by definition purely individual, that is, bound up with my consciousness. Of course, inasmuch as I abstract from myself as ego and adopt the point of view of a consciousness in general, I identify the reality of my body with what my body is for perception. But that can be regarded as arbitrary. These two modes of existence are irreducibly distinct.18

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Here this distinction is still articulated in an idealistic way by a disillusioned idealist who confronts the limitations of Kantian idealism when it comes to distinguishing between our mental lives and our being physical beings. In an effort to confront these limitations, Marcel embraces the irreducible distinction between our mental lives and our existence being physical beings, yet he recognizes that these two dimensions of human existence are only separable in thought. At this point, though, he has not developed the terminology sufficient to articulate this distinction in experiential, and thus phenomenological, terms. However, we can see how Marcel struggles, even in his idealist period, to articulate this distinction not merely as an epistemic one, but as an experiential one. Even in the above-mentioned excerpt, we can read how he describes our existence in these terms not because we merely cognize our existence in this manner (a` la Kantian critical philosophy), but because we actually experience it in these two ways. And only after we reflect upon how we are aware of ourselves as both psychic selves and physical bodies can we distinguish between these two irreducible modes of human existence. Yet, he could not articulate this phenomenological point using the idealist terminology he learned in the first decade of the twentieth century. It is not until his December 3, 1920, entry that he articulates Kant’s distinction between us as objects and us as persons in way that clearly articulates it. That entry is perhaps the first time that he describes how we can view our bodies as objects and as participants in the world without appealing either to an idealist consciousness or a psychic reality. It is also the first time that he can write that my body qua my body serves the focal point for all possible existential judgments about the world in a relatively clear manner. What this means is that we cannot think of ourselves as disembodied consciousness anymore; we are thoroughly embodied beings who initially feel and somehow participate in constituting the meaningfulness of phenomena (or, for those readers who are comfortable with analytic metaphysics, states of affairs in the world), and then make existential judgments about them.19

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Marcel’s notion of incarnation, as it is expressed in these two entries, is very similar to Edmund Husserl’s analysis of the lived body (Leib). Both thinkers conceive of our bodies not only as object bodies, but also as absolute Heres, or as Husserl describe them in Ideas II, the absolute zero points of spatial orientation.20 Marcel describes the phenomenon in the following manner in his September 29, 1922, entry: In the fact of my body there is something which transcends what can be called its materiality [in more contemporary terms, its physicality], something which cannot be reduced to any of its objective qualities. Here Marcel has nearly found the appropriate terminology to express this dialectic relation between us as objects and us as persons. And the world only exists for me inasmuch as I think it (this expresses it badly), inasmuch as I apprehend it as bound up with me by the thread which also binds me to my body.21

Had Marcel had access to the phenomenological insights that Husserl had in Ideas II, Marcel would not have written the following sentence: ‘‘The world only exists for me inasmuch as I think it.’’ He might have written something along these lines: ‘‘The world presents itself to me to the extent that I participate in co-constituting its meanings.’’ That is to say, the world is meaningful to me insofar as I am mindful of how phenomena appear to me not only cognitively, but also affectively and kinesthetically. This is what Marcel clumsily calls his ‘‘ ‘sensualistic’ metaphysics’’ at the end of his Metaphysical Journal.22 When it comes to the phenomenon of objectivity, he thinks that it makes sense only when coupled and contrasted with our interpersonal experiences. Marcel outlines this distinction in some detail as early as his July 23, 1918, entry. In this entry, he distinguishes between the scientific standpoint and our being involved in a situation, or what he later calls being-in-a-situation. Being involved in a situation means that ‘‘the unity of the situation appears to those ‘involved’ in it as essentially being a datum given [to consciousness], but at the same time as something that permits of and even calls for their active

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intervention [i.e., active participation in the situation].’’23 Being involved in a situation also means that we address our fellow participants in the situation in the second person. What this means is that we consider our fellow participants as beings who are ‘‘susceptible of answering [us], whatever form the answer may take—even if only that of an ‘intelligent silence.’ ’’24 On the other hand, the scientific standpoint comes into play whenever we cannot or choose not to view our world in personal terms. Indeed, to occupy the scientific standpoint is to investigate the world as an object that is separate from our personal concerns, interests, and commitments.25 Despite Marcel’s distinction between being involved in a situation and the scientific standpoint, they are in a dialectical relation to each other. The objectivity implied in the scientific standpoint depends upon the possibility of dialoging with another person as an interlocutor. Such an interlocutor is what Marcel calls thou, or you. Here is an example of this dialectic at work. Imagine that someone (let us call her Diana) loses her keys at work. Then, imagine Diana asking a few of her coworkers outside her office if they have seen her keys. One of her coworkers answers, ‘‘Yes, I saw your keys in the left corner of your office floor half-an-hour ago.’’ She goes back to her office and sees her keys lying exactly where her coworker said they were located. In this example, the objective fact is that Diana’s keys were on the left corner of her office floor. They would have been on her office floor even if no one ever looked and saw them there. However, she learned that objective fact by verifying what her coworker told her in their conversation.26 When it comes to self-questioning about a past event or a state of affairs, Marcel acknowledges that we can be both the one asking the question and the answer to the question. Think about the phenomenon of self-questioning. In such questioning we address ourselves as an interlocutor. We experience ourselves as two persons, namely the one who asks the question and the one who potentially knows the answer to the question. Moreover, there is always the possibility that we could objectify our past selves so that we become objective facts to ourselves.

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Using the phenomenon of self-questioning as a model of interpersonal communication, Marcel creates the following dichotomy between viewing someone as a stranger (or a her/him in Marcellian terms) and viewing someone as a genuine person (or a thou in Marcellian terms). He makes this distinction between someone being a her/him and being a thou to us by discussing a conversation he had with someone on a train.27 At first, his conversation partner is a stranger. Marcel talks to the stranger about the usual polite conversational topics, for example, the weather and noncontroversial current affairs. During the conversation, however, a glimpse of the stranger’s personhood shines forth in her gestures, her countenance, and her intonations. The stranger gives herself to Marcel as more than a publicly available object; she gives herself to Marcel as a thou. And when we converse with other persons in the manner that Marcel converses with the stranger on a train, we not only see those persons as thous, we appreciate that we are thous, too. Moreover, this mutual recognition of our somebodiness bonds us together as fellow participants in a larger community, no matter how briefly that bond lasts. This means that while we are with someone else as a thou, as Marcel puts it, ‘‘we become simply ‘us.’ ’’28 Marcel’s analysis of being involved in a situation clears the way for his analysis of the phenomenon of religious faith, specifically theistic religious faith. A representative journal entry in which he analyzes the nature of theistic religious faith is his December 18, 1918, entry. In this entry, he boldly asserts that ‘‘at bottom it is meaningless to ask someone: ‘Do you believe in God?’ when belief in God is understood not as an opinion on the existence of a person but as ‘mode of being.’ ’’29 If we conceive of God as an absolute Thou with whom we commune, and this motivates us to alter how we live with other persons, he thinks that this conception of God entails the following: ‘‘the belief of somebody else cannot be known by me (it cannot be the object of a questionnaire)’’30 and ‘‘the belief of someone else . . . can only be an object of belief for me, but from the moment that I believe in the belief I believe with [that person].’’31

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Accordingly, Marcel does not think that one can do, say, a study any sort of religious experience that describes that experience adequately without the investigator thinking that the experience in question is a legitimate means of communing with the divine. Otherwise, the investigator risks undermining the significance of the very religious experience he or she is investigating. However, there are entire contemporary disciplines (for example, neurotheology32) where every sort of religious experience is studied in this manner. Marcel’s considerations of the first-person and the first-person plural dimensions of religious experiences lead him to ask the question: If God is personal, then how can we dialogue with God? Marcel gives a traditional Western theistic answer—prayer. Prayer is what unites the believer with God. How does prayer unify believer and God? That is a mystery, that is, something that is not describable in third-person terminology. Yet, it is intelligible because it is an experiential phenomenon. Indeed, prayer can be interpreted as a means of giving oneself over to the One who has always already given so much to us.33 Moreover, we can interpret prayer, as Marcel does in his December 3, 1919, entry, as an act in which we long ‘‘to be more, . . . not to have more.’’ That is, prayer allows us to be more appreciative of our lives with others, and not a means to acquire more possessions.34 Marcel further clarifies what he means by prayer when he describes it this way: ‘‘In the last analysis I pray [to] God for us. In other words I can only pray for someone else when between that someone else and myself there is a spiritual community. . . . To pray for my own soul and to pray for the person I love is doubtless one and the same act.’’35 In an entry written a year after the abovementioned one, he describes the interpersonal dimension of prayer: ‘‘At the basis of prayer there is a will to union with my fellows— without that, prayer would lack all religious value.’’36 Thus, to suppose that God must fulfill one’s request exactly as one request it, like a drive-thru attendant at a fast food restaurant, is to fall into idolatry, because one has converted God into an object that enables one to acquire things.37

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To be precise, such a conception of God would pervert our genuine experience of the divine (or as Anthony Steinbock would call this experience in his latest book, Phenomenology and Mysticism,38 ‘‘the verticality of our religious experience’’). And to deny the intelligibility of prayer on the grounds that the personal dimensions of prayer cannot be an object of scientific inquiry is to be trapped in a vicious realism. This vicious realism views the world in which we dwell as an impersonal one, with no personal values within it except the ones we project onto it.39 It is to expel the possibility of a personal God outright. Once we wade through the murky waters of Marcel’s analyses of incarnation, objectivity, theistic religious faith, and prayer, what we are left with at the end of Marcel’s Metaphysical Journal is the following contention: ‘‘Existence is not a state. . . . This is another way of saying that it is impossible to distinguish between the existent and existence.’’40 This is so because ‘‘in existence [there is] the wherewithal to dissolve the object qua object’’41 and affirm the uniqueness of each and every existent, particularly human persons. Existence, then, is the mode of being that is dialectically opposed to objectification. In Kantian terms, existence is one horn of an antimony, but, like Kant’s third antimony in the Critique of Pure Reason, it is one we must live with given the sort of beings we are. These are the lessons that he learned during his rejection of Kantian idealism. These are the lessons that led him to develop his reflective method. What Marcel leaves for us at the end of his Metaphysical Journal is the following phenomenological insight: That human existence revolves around what he calls an ontological exigency for being, that is, ‘‘an appetite for being.’’42 Marcel likens human existence to ‘‘a sick person who is trying to find a ‘position,’ ’’43 a healthy place from which to let being shine forth. And since we can view our existence in two radically different ways, we are beings who are a mystery to ourselves.44 What Marcel means by mystery is not something unknowable in itself, but unknowable on the level of objective thought, that is, primary reflection. He makes this clear in ‘‘Existence and Objectivity.’’ There he writes the following: ‘‘Inasmuch as my

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metaphysical reflection [that is, what we have called his reflective method] is exercised I appear to myself as a being (X) who interrogates himself about his own existence.’’45 The mystery of our existence, then, is intelligible not to objective thought, but to a nonobjective reflection on being. This insight is what will guide Marcel’s thought for the rest of his life. What we need to do now is examine how Marcel refines his reflective method, especially the dialectical relation between objective thought, that is, primary reflection, and secondary reflection over the course of his career. To clarify some of the remaining conceptual ambiguities in Marcel’s reflective method, I enlist the assistance of Gordon who has recently introduced a notion that sheds light on what Marcel means by secondary reflection: namely, the teleological suspension of philosophy. Once we do that, we will be able to see how Marcel’s reflective method stays within the orbit of a phenomenological version of Kant’s distinction between viewing ourselves as objects and viewing ourselves as persons. This is the task before us in the next chapter.

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n this chapter I will examine how Marcel refines his reflective method, especially the dialectical relation between primary reflection and secondary reflection, over the course of his career. To perform this task, I will assess how Gabriel Marcel refines his reflective method, especially the dialectical relation between primary reflection and secondary reflection, over the course of his career. First, I trace briefly how he refines his reflective method from his January 21, 1933, address to the Philosophical Society of Marseilles, ‘‘Concrete Approaches to Investigating the Ontological Mystery,’’ to his 1968 conversations with Paul Ricoeur published in Tragic Wisdom and Beyond. Second, I provide a Roycean reading of Marcel’s reflective method that further clarifies what he means by primary reflection and secondary reflection. Finally, I reply to what is perhaps the most persuasive critique of Marcel’s reflective method: namely, Paul Ricoeur’s objection that Marcel’s reflection method entails a commitment to fideism. My reply involves reinterpreting Marcel’s reflective method as a { 34 }

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performance of what Lewis R. Gordon calls a teleological suspension of philosophy. While the first full-fledged articulation of Marcel’s secondary reflection was in his 1925 article ‘‘Existence and Objectivity,’’ Marcel did not pair secondary reflection with its dialectical partner, primary reflection, until his seminal essay, ‘‘Concrete Approaches to Investigating the Ontological Mystery.’’1 In that essay, he describes primary reflection as the mode of reflection in which everyone and everything is considered to be ‘‘merely an agglomeration of functions.’’2 In the case of human persons, we are seen as only the sum of our vital functions, our social roles, and our psychological dispositions.3 As nexuses of vital, psychological, and social functions, we are subjected to the bureaucratic scheduling of everything in our lives, either because of the circumstances we are in (for example, being incarcerated), because of the career that we have chosen for ourselves or stumbled into (for example, active military service), or because we have chosen to live in this way. In each of these cases, there is an allotted time for everything we do during the day. We are scheduled to wake up at a certain time, eat breakfast at a certain time, commute to work at a certain time, perform our work assignments at the times scheduled by our supervisor, leave work at a certain time, return home at a certain time, and maybe even complete tasks for work due the following day after eating dinner. We may even schedule to do the most intimate things that a person can do, such as when to have sex with our lovers, spouses, or significant others. Additionally, maintaining the health of our bodies turns into a scheduled task of the same quality as what we do when we take our vehicles in for routine maintenance checks and repair.4 In more Kantian terms, whenever we regard ourselves as merely an agglomeration of functions, we have reduced ourselves to merely empirical selves. As empirical selves we no longer live in the world as persons; rather, we live in a world where we attempt to eliminate the mystery behind those most momentous events in human existence (birth, love, death) and reduce them to ‘‘the psychological and pseudo-scientific category of the purely natural.’’5 The natural, by

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definition, dwells thoroughly in the empirical and excludes anything that is nonempirical from its domain. This exclusive focus on the empirical converts our world into a never-ending series of problems to be solved, for there are cognitive limits to which problems we can possibly solve. Accordingly, there will always be some problems that we can never formulate, much less solve; we have entered the domain of the problematic. From the vantage point of the problematic, we experience everyone and everything as a problem, that is, ‘‘something placed before [us], facing [us], in [our] path.’’6 In other words, we experience everyone as an object, in the etymological sense of the term.7 As Marcel notes, ‘‘The word ‘problem’ should be understood here with its Greek root in mind: problema. There is a problem when anything is placed in front of me, blocking my way.’’8 We could even expand the range of the problematic to include the creation of art and religious worship. Once we have converted the world into a series of problematic situations and objects, we cannot help but conceive of artistic creation and even religious worship in terms of efforts to solve problems. For example, if we interpret prayers of thanksgiving and praise from the vantage point of the problematic, we cannot conceive of them as expressions of our gratitude to God for being God.9 We, rather, would have to conceive of these prayers as, say, a means of satisfying a psychological yearning for self-transcendence and worshipping something beyond ourselves. We need not be stuck in the realm of the problematic, however. We can transcend this level of human existence by reflecting upon our participation in being, or ‘‘what resists—or would be what would withstand—an exhaustive analysis of the data of experience that would try to reduce them progressively to elements that are increasingly devoid of any intrinsic value or significance.’’10 One should remember that, for Marcel, being is neither a substantive entity nor an empirical object.11 Being is more like a nonspatial dwelling place where fidelity abides12 and is the well-spring for all genuinely ethical and religious acts. Marcel thinks that every genuine ethical and religious act is one in which we willingly place ourselves at the disposal

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of someone so that we can commune with that person as a fellow sibling of the divine. He calls such spiritual openness and availability, disponibilite´. But how can we reflect upon this level of human existence? We can do so through what Marcel eventually calls secondary reflection. This mode of reflection is one in which we have to take ourselves into account. We cannot simply see the world as a spectacle that we observe and analyze as impartial, detached analysts. We are always already participating in our environing world with other persons. It also reminds us that primary reflection is only possible if we pretend that we are not part of the situation into which we are inquiring. It is to think of the world as something to be analyzed and critically examined, not as the place where we live and reside. When we inquire about being and our active participation in it, we are inquiring about who we are, and not what we are. That is to say, participating in being is something we do, not something we merely think about. Thus, ‘‘this participation cannot, by definition, be the object of thought; it could not function as a solution [to a problem], but rather is situated beyond the world of problems: it is metaproblematical.’’13 Yet, what does Marcel mean by metaproblematic? The metaproblematic is where ‘‘the opposition between the subject who would affirm being and being as affirmed by this subject’’ is transcended and where they are unified in our very participation in being.14 Nevertheless, this participation is not a Platonic one where we are merely the nexuses of instantiated eidia. This participation is more like us actualizing the most ennobling ethico-religious values (for example, love, fidelity, and hope) in our encounters and relationships with others. If this is any sort of Platonism, then it is ‘‘an existential Platonism.’’15 It should be evident by now that reflecting upon the metaproblematic dimension of human existence is different from reflecting upon the problematic dimension of human existence. For example, when we look at the union between body and mind from a metaproblematical perspective, we do not see them as two separate entities that somehow are conjoint. In reality, they are aspects of an indivisible

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unity at the heart of human existence. From a metaproblematic perspective, perhaps the best way to understand the mysterious union between body and mind is to think of them as two ways that we are given to ourselves, phenomenologically.16 Here is a second example of how the categories of the problematic are not applicable to a metaproblematic view of human existence. From a metaproblematic viewpoint, the phenomenon of genuine love cannot be described as manifestations of such things as will to power, will to live, or libido.17 This is because these things are nothing other than abstractions created to explain the underlying cause of phenomena, in this case the phenomenon of love. None of them adequately depicts how a lover or a beloved participates in an intimate love relationship. These categories cannot depict how the encouraging glance of one’s beloved motivates one to perform acts he or she thought were impossible for him or her to perform. Nor can we explain how I experience myself as being truly myself only in the presence of my beloved. Yet, when we love someone and reflect upon the essence of this love in the metaproblematic, we ‘‘do not have to be concerned about . . . demeaning reductionist interpretations’’18 like the ones mentioned above. This is so because we have transcended the empirical level where these reductive categories are applicable. The categories applicable to such phenomena as (genuine) love are the ones that take into account our involvement with other persons from the first and first-plural person viewpoint. Accordingly, we examine these phenomena as they are experienced and create our metaphysical categories from the lived experience of these phenomena. But in order for secondary reflection to examine these nonempirical phenomena it has to reclaim them from the abstractions of primary reflection. Marcel thinks that we can accomplish this reclamation of nonempirical phenomena from the clutches of primary reflection via acts of recollection. Recollection can be interpreted as Marcel’s version of the Husserlian phenomenological epoche´.19 For him recollection is the only means by which we can detach ourselves from our entanglements in the empirical world. In Husserlian terms,

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recollection enables us to detach ourselves from the natural attitude and examine our experiences as they are constituted by us. He goes a step further than Husserlian phenomenology does, though. Unlike Husserlian phenomenology which usually claims to be ontologically neutral, Marcel thinks that metaphysics is not possible unless we were creatures who can perform acts of recollection.20 Moreover, he thinks of recollection as an act of ingathering.21 It is in the bosom of recollection where we can distinguish between us as empirical objects and us as participants in being. Recollection, in fact, can be understood as that dialectic movement from being aware of ourselves as living creatures to being aware of ourselves as participants in being. However, Marcel thinks that we cannot directly intuit our participation in being, even after performing recollection. We can only intuit our participation in being through a glass darkly. And since our participation in being is not given as a transparent phenomenon, our intuition of it cannot be a transparent phenomenon available for conceptual analysis.22 If we still want to regard such a phenomenon as intuition, we would have to call it a blinded intuition. This blinded intuition cannot be the ‘‘object’’ of any conceptual analysis; rather, it is the condition for the possibility of any conceptual analysis whatever. What this means is that our intuition of being is direct yet mediated. It is the sort of intuition in which we immediately act in accord with being; however, whenever we retrospectively analyze this intuition, our conceptualizations move further and further away from the immediacy of our participation in it.23 Stated otherwise, when we blindly intuit being, in all its multifaceted richness and diversity, we are appreciating being. We speak of ‘‘appreciating being’’ instead of ‘‘perceiving being,’’ since being is not given to us as an object, but as a nonobjectifiable presence in our lives. More specifically, we intuit the awesome (in the archaic sense of the term) radiance of being when we meditate on the ontological exigency at the heart of our being. This ontological exigency is the engrained urge, longing, or yearning within our innermost selves to commune with other persons in the light of being. Stated crudely, this blinded intuition somehow

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plugs us into being.24 And whenever we meditate upon this intuition, we are reminded of the ontological weight of being.25 Indeed, this recognition of being’s ontological weight is what Marcel calls revelation.26 This revelation is very similar, if not identical, to Levinas’s phenomenological notion of revelation in Totality and Infinity. Accordingly, it does not require someone to be an adherent of any positive religion.27 Anyone who is spiritually sensitive to the interpersonal basis of the metaproblematic and mystery can experience this revelation. Anthony J. Steinbock describes the phenomenological mode of givenness involved in Marcellian revelation when he writes: Revelation is a mode of givenness that qualifies a dimension of experiencing as moral. The movement in and through which the person is revealed is interpersonal such that the moral sphere is foundational for political, economic, and social life. Revelatory givenness is the experiential dimension that pertains to exemplarity. By exemplarity, I mean a personal kind of givenness that is both revealing and revealed; it is the ‘‘personal’’ tie between human persons and between human persons and the Holy.28

Perhaps this nonsectarian notion of revelation is what begat another phenomenological distinction in Marcel’s thought that is synonymous with the distinctions between problem and mystery and between the metaproblematic and the problematic. This distinction is the one between being and having. He explicates this distinction most thoroughly in his essay ‘‘Outlines of a Phenomenology of Having.’’29 He introduces this distinction by harkening back to a note he wrote on March 16, 1933: In principle, what we have are things (or what can be compared to things, precisely in so far as this comparison is possible). I can only have, in the strict sense of the word, something whose existence is, up to a certain point, independent of me. In other words, what I have is added to me; and the fact that it is possessed by me is added to the other properties, qualities, etc., belonging to the thing I have. I only have what I can in some manner and within

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certain limits dispose of; in other words, in so far as I can be considered as a force, a being endowed with powers. We can only transmit what we have.30

Such a materialistic and physicalistic view of the world is the one where it is possible to interpret suicide as the disposal of an undesirable object-body. In other words, to commit suicide would be to regard one’s incarnate existence as an object-body that can be disposed of as we see fit.31 Yet, it is also possible for us to refuse to regard our incarnate existence as something that is disposable and instead to see life as a gift which we do not possess in the first place.32 Technically speaking, our bodies are not things that belong to us once we view ourselves as more than object-bodies, that is, empirical selves. The difference between viewing ourselves as disposable objects and viewing ourselves as more than an object-body is how the distinction between being and having is experientially given. We are not yet to the point of explaining what Marcel means by being, though. What we can do now is mention how we initially experience being as the opposite of having. Unlike having something, he asserts that being is experienced as ‘‘irreducible,’’ that is, as something that is never convertible into a disposable object.33 This irreducible, in turn, opens us up to ‘‘a beyond’’ that underlies the distinction between what we have and who we are.34 We cannot know what he means by the last statement until we understand what he means by having. Marcel thinks that we can understand having only by performing a phenomenological analysis of it. Once we analyze the phenomenon of having phenomenologically, Marcel thinks that we would acknowledge that there are two general types of having. The first type of having is having-as-possession. This is the sort of having where we own something else. What we possess is something that exists independently of us. It is the sense in which we have a computer or have a vehicle. The second type of having is having-as-implication. This sort of having involves the characteristics and properties we have. It is the sense in which H2O at a temperature of 80⬚F, at sea level has the property of being a liquid that can dissolve certain crystalline substances (for example, salt).

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In his analysis of having, Marcel concentrates on the phenomenology of having-as-possession since he thinks that this sort of having is the leading clue to understanding the essential structure of having. He takes our owning a picture as an example of having-as-possession. To make the example more personal, let us make this picture example more concrete by having the picture be of my oldest son at age five. I took this picture to remember my time with him in Virginia during a Fourth of July weekend. From a materialist viewpoint, the picture is just that, a picture. There is nothing special about it. It is an object that is exterior to me, its possessor; we are two distinct entities. If I was to lose this picture, I would still be completely me. However, this viewpoint is a superficial one because it does not account for my attachment to the picture. In the case of this picture, ‘‘it is absolutely certain that there is a link between the qui and the quid, and that this link is not simply an external conjunction.’’35 Marcel would remind us that ‘‘in so far as this quid is a thing, and consequently subject to the changes and chances proper to things, it may be lost or destroyed. So it becomes, or is in danger of becoming, the centre of a kind of whirlpool of fears and anxieties, thus expressing exactly the tension which is an essential part of the order of having.’’36 Relating Marcel’s comments to my picture example: I am able to mourn the loss of this picture, the picture of my son, because it is an extension of me. It reminds me of the specific moment of time in which it was taken. The picture is still a possession of mine, but it is something that cannot be disposed of as I see fit. In actuality, it is this possibility of possession acquiring a meaningfulness that transcends its thingness that reveals what Marcel calls ‘‘a kind of mysterious polarity.’’37 What is of interest to us is that Marcel considers having-aspossession to be phenomenal in nature.38 By associating having-aspossession with the phenomenal, we can understand better what he means by being. As opposed to having, being transcends the empirical, and to the extent that we participate in being, we cannot describe ourselves in phenomenal terms.39 We can interpret this to mean that the more we participate in being, the more we are persons. This is

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because ‘‘we human beings are a species ‘in-between,’ between Being and Non-Being, or even that we are called upon to be—that it is our responsibility to be.’’40 What is also of interest is that we can interpret the human condition in terms of having and being. From this vantage point, we are a paradoxical nexus of being and having, an irreducible union of participant in being and disposable thing. We are now in a position to explicate how Marcel conceives of his reflective method in his later writings, specifically in the first volume of Mystery of Being, The Existential Background of Human Dignity, and Tragic Wisdom and Beyond. Given Marcel’s reflective method, we can say that human experiences that are truer to our ontological exigency for being resemble a liquid solution—say, water—that is saturated with a higher concentration of a substance—say, sugar or salt—than normal.41 We can also say that his method is a means of investigating how us living in the light of being (meaning that we participate in loving, faithful communion with other persons and, consequently, with the divine) is literally a ‘‘fuller, more saturated’’ life than a life that is less saturated by being’s light. Secondary reflection is a means of recognizing this sort of experience without entangling and ensnaring it in a net of abstractions. It allows us to delve into our ordinary experiences—especially hope, love, faith, fidelity, death, and communion—and examine how these experiences express our innermost urgings to live and be in the light of being. Marcel defines secondary reflection as follows: Let it be clearly understood that secondary reflection does not set out flatly to give the lie to these propositions [namely, that my body qua body-object is merely another thing occupying a specific spatiotemporal location and is subject to the same fate as other living corporeal bodies—disease, disorder, death, and decomposition]; it manifests itself rather by a refusal to treat primary reflection’s separation of this body, considered as just a body, a sample body, some body or other, from the self that I am, as final.42

Secondary reflection, then, attempts to investigate human experiences in a personal register. This means that secondary reflection

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bans us from ‘‘tak[ing] up an attitude of radical detachment, of complete lack of interest’’ regarding whatever philosophical inquiry or scientific investigation we are engaging in.43 Consequently, there is no purely objective standpoint from which we can judge the adequacy of our philosophical inquiries; that is to say, there is no intellectual perch upon which we can transcend our situatedness and assume the status of the ideal, impartial spectator. Objectivity, then, is always a matter of degree, and is as a general rule more appropriate for scientific research than metaphysical inquiry. Seen from the vantage point of secondary reflection, we are able to appreciate metaproblematic phenomena like creative fidelity. Accordingly, secondary reflection allows us to distinguish genuine fidelity from moral constancy.44 We are also able to see that, in its most spiritual and interpersonal sense, fidelity involves a triadic relation among oneself, another person, and the Absolute Thou. Fidelity, properly speaking, is not something that we can have towards an abstract concept or institution, for example, Wal-Mart or a polity. It, instead, involves a genuine interpersonal community, for example, an actual church congregation and its specific ideals, goals, and projects. What this means is that creative fidelity involves our faithfulness to specific, concrete persons, not to an abstract, ideal persons and institutions; our hope that the one to whom we have committed ourselves will graciously accept and receive us and that the divine will sustain us in our openness towards that person;45 steadfastness in our commitment to the one to whom we have promised to be faithful;46 and a willingness to respond creatively to specific situations in such a manner that it upholds our promise of fidelity. Teresa Reed reminds us in her article ‘‘Aspects of Marcel’s Essays’’47 that Marcel’s reflective method, specifically his secondary reflection, is structured along the lines of a part-whole logic. By investigating concrete metaproblematic phenomena, secondary reflection can access the plenitude of being itself. Indeed, being cannot be experienced apart from these concrete phenomena, since we have only partial access to the plenitude of being due to our ‘‘brokenness,’’ as Marcel puts in the first volume of The Mystery of Being.

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These concrete phenomena (that is, the part) enable us to ‘‘participate’’ in being (that is, the whole) because they open us up to being. That is, investigating the meaning of these ordinary, all-too-human phenomena in a certain way (namely, as topics of investigation for a metaproblematic inquiry) attunes us to the light of being already illuminating our existence (or, in more Heideggerian terms, beingin-the-world). Basically, being is the most inclusive whole in Marcel’s thought, and the person is the most concrete part in Marcel’s thought; all other ‘‘wholes’’ in Marcel’s thought (for example, love, witness, and fidelity) are, in themselves, partial because they acquire their fullest sense only within the most inclusive whole, being. The same is true of the other parts in Marcel’s thought; problem, objectivity, having, and constancy are meaningful only insofar as an actual, concrete person who participates in being considers these abstractions as meaningful and takes them within themselves. Another way to think about the concrete-abstract, or whole-part, distinction is to consider the concrete as the realm of exploration, growth, and creativity and the abstract as the realm of detachment, analysis, and solutions. Concrete existence opens us up to unforeseen intentional horizons with other persons, while problematic existence views being-in-the-world as a problem to be solved, as though we are not intimately and thoroughly part of the very situations we are attempting to resolve. In problematic existence, then, we attempt to escape our very situatedness in our pursuit to know the world as it is in itself. For Marcel, this attempt to escape our situatedness is unrealistic, not to mention undesirable. To investigate the whole, Marcel continually probes it from the metaproblematic standpoint. Yet each metaproblematic inquiry motivates him to dig deeper into the fertile soil of being. Marcel’s approach to investigating the meaning of being in human experience is similar to our looking at a solar eclipse with special glasses. Marcel’s approach is built on the contention that we are able to investigate being only indirectly. Accordingly, we can experience being only in those moments of self-transcendence that enliven our existence. Our

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task, then, is to describe these moments faithfully, which means that we describe it as we actually experience it. There is at least one alternative way available to us to describe Marcel’s distinction between primary reflection and secondary reflection than the one used in the first section. We can translate Marcel’s distinction between primary reflection and secondary reflection in terms of Josiah Royce’s distinction between the world of description and the world of appreciation. Like Royce, Marcel does not think that the worlds of description and appreciation are ontologically distinct; instead, they are two ways that we can view ourselves, our fellow persons, and our environing world. In Marcel’s reflective method, the realm of primary reflection, which is also the domain of objectivity, is the functional equivalent to Royce’s world of description.48 This type of reflection represents the traditional mode of philosophical inquiry, where we consider ourselves, other persons, our environing world, and even the divine as merely objects of knowledge. Thus, ‘‘the knowledge attained by primary reflection is not only objective but also general, formulated in terms of abstract concepts applicable to entire ranges of similar objects.’’49 Such an inquiry, where we convert concrete persons into abstractions, is pragmatic because it enables us to solve problematic situations better. In short, primary reflection operates on the level of the problematic. On the other hand, Marcel’s secondary reflection is very similar to Royce’s world of appreciation. Secondary reflection is the type of reflection where one inquires into the existential structures of our actual, lived experiences; it is a recuperative act that tries to anchor our abstractions to our actual, lived, and embodied existence. Such a reflection involves a ‘‘phenomenological’’ investigation into the eidetic structures of our lived experiences.50 Among these experiences are our experiences of hope, despair, fidelity, love, parenthood, piety, and being with other persons in community (that is, communion). Accordingly, this reflection requires us to inquire into the concrete, interpersonal dimension of our lived experience and view ourselves as participants in an interpersonal world where we dwell with other

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persons and the divine. Secondary reflection, then, operates on the level of the metaproblematic. Yet, this reflection is not just phenomenological, but also metaphysical in the sense that it does more than simply describe our lived experiences. It is a means that for us to appreciate how when we are spiritually available to or at the disposal of others (disponibilite´), receptive to them in the spirit of hospitality, loving them, and placing our trust in them we are in the presence of the divine. In short, this reflection reminds us that being with others in a personal way transforms our existence in such a way that we can be said to dwell in the presence of the divine. Additionally, Marcel thinks that phenomenological analyses, while important in the initial stages of philosophic inquiry, are only preludes to our ontological investigations.51 That is to say, phenomenological analyses allow us to study carefully the eidetic structures of metaproblematic phenomena as we actually live them and, thus, clear the way for us to recuperate our appreciation for the intimate yearning within us to commune with other persons in the presence of the divine.52 Given how Marcel conceives of his reflective method, it is natural for him to think of primary reflection and secondary reflection as ‘‘two different but complementary forms of reflection.’’53 What I think he should have done is distinguish between two different senses of secondary reflection. Robert Wood, for example, makes the distinction that Marcel should have made between conceptual secondary reflection and participatory secondary reflection.54 Conceptual secondary reflection is ‘‘a movement of retrieval, which consists in becoming aware of the partial and even suspect character of the purely analytical procedure [of primary reflection]. This reflective movement tries to reconstruct, but now at the level of thought, that concrete state of affairs which had previously been glimpsed in a fragmented or pulverized condition.’’55 This makes conceptual secondary reflection still philosophy proper. Nevertheless, it does not lessen the richness and fullness of human experience while it attempts to map the structures of our participation in being.

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Participatory secondary reflection involves orienting ourselves towards being in ways other than conceptual reflection. Marcel thinks that two means of orienting ourselves towards being are drama and music. These means are not, technically speaking, philosophical; they provide philosophy with its existential content. In an effort to clarify the relationship between philosophy, drama, and music in his thought, Marcel depicts them as three concentric circles.56 He envisions music as the innermost circle which the other circles envelop.57 It is instructive that he envisions the heart of his thought to be something that is extraphilosophical. Drama is the circle that immediately envelops music. It is that which portrays incarnate persons in their concreteness.58 This is why Marcel describes drama as the means by which ‘‘metaphysical thought becomes conscious and defines it concretely.’’59 I should note that drama is also extraphilosophical. This means that the two most significant elements of his thought are not, strictly speaking, philosophical. Lowly philosophy, occupying the outermost circle, is where we discuss in general terms the ‘‘questions and challenges affecting the meaning of human life.’’60 With this stated, I have traced the contours of Marcel’s reflective method. It is not enough, however, to simply trace the contours of Marcel’s reflective method. It is equally important to examine what I consider the most forceful critique of Marcel’s reflective method: How can his reflective method remain a philosophic method, possessing the level of analytic rigor and clarity necessary for it to be a legitimate philosophic method, without reducing the metaproblematic phenomena it reflects upon into problems? In other words, how can Marcel’s reflective method not be simply a reassertion of a naı¨ve fideism?61 What makes this critique forceful is that it is formulated by one of Marcel’s most perceptive students and critics, Paul Ricoeur. Indeed, this critique is the problem that haunts Marcel throughout his career. Ricoeur thinks that Marcel’s approach involves a serious selfreferential weakness because it has a tendency of reducing human reason to instrumental and theoretical reason and therefore places our affirmation of being beyond rational thought.62 Hence there is

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no way for Marcel to justify his secondary reflection rationally. What Marcel is left with is a via negativa approach to the metaproblematic,63 which ensnares him in the net of mysticism. From Ricoeur’s standpoint, Marcel has made it extremely difficult, if not impossible, for philosophic inquiry to investigate the metaproblematic dimension of human existence given that philosophic inquiry is rational thought par excellence. I think that Ricoeur is right when he states that Marcel’s reflective method tends to conceive of human reason in instrumental and theoretical terms. He is also right when he states that one could rehabilitate Marcel’s reflective method by conceiving human reason as not being merely analytic, but also synthetic. This synthetic human reason could construct an approach to philosophic inquiry which recognizes the liminal character of any philosophic inquiry that attempts to describe reality exhaustively. This has led some contemporary Marcel scholars to call his reflective method a ‘‘philosophy at the boundary of reason.’’64 Nevertheless, what Marcel calls the metaproblematic even transcends the synthetic capacity of human reason. In order for us to reflect upon being qua being, then, we have to transcend even synthetic reason and its capacity to unify and revive what theoretical reason has torn asunder and vivisected. Hence, conceptual secondary reflection is a necessary but insufficient condition for us to reflect upon our participation in being. To reflect upon our participation in being, we first have to cross over the threshold of human conceptualizations and actually live a life in which our existence aims to be an expression of being. It is only in living and acting in this manner, or at least witnessing someone else living and acting in this manner, that being can be fully reflected upon. This is precisely where philosophy proper cannot go since it can never completely transcend its abstractions. Accordingly, Marcel’s secondary reflection reflects upon phenomena which cannot be completely described philosophically. Or, more accurately, these phenomena can only be alluded to in our philosophic inquiry. Ricoeur thinks that this limitation in philosophic

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inquiry is tolerable only if we can integrate the mythopoetic into philosophy somehow, whereas Marcel thinks that we should embrace this limitation as a sign of epistemic humility. The mythopoetic, in Marcel’s view, is what lies beyond the limits of philosophy and rational discourse generally;65 it is not something that can be included in philosophy, however indirectly we attempt to include it within the realm of philosophical thought. This limitation perpetually reminds us that abstractions are empty apart from the lived experiences they are meant to describe and apart from the extraphilosophical commitments that lead to their creation. This means that for Marcel there cannot be any philosophic method by which we can rationally justify our analyses of such metaproblematic phenomena as fidelity, hope, love, communion, presence, and faith. Not even phenomenological analyses of metaproblematic phenomena are able to escape the limitations of our abstractions. Nor can phenomenological analyses of metaproblematic phenomena transcend the religious, social, historical, and intellectual traditions from which they sprang. As Martin Heidegger rightly notes in Being and Time, any philosophical inquiry that acknowledges it is embedded in, and informed by, a specific socio-historical situation is, by definition, trapped within the hermeneutic circle.66 And Marcel is comfortable with conducting his philosophical inquiry in a circular fashion insofar as the recuperative movement of philosophical inquiry recovers a sense of the metaproblematic dimension of human existence that is neglected, ignored, or obscured by primary reflection. We could even say ‘‘that philosophy culminates precisely in its attempt to stay attuned, and to ‘see’ or to interpret, at the limit, the ultimate significance of the mystery of being.’’67 Accordingly, Marcel is sensitive to the danger of forcing human experiences, in all their richness and variety, into a ‘‘rigorous’’ epistemic framework. Ricoeur might be correct when he criticizes Marcel for not being sufficiently rigorous in his philosophical methodology. However, the desire for philosophical inquiry to aspire to scientific rigor and precision is a questionable one, whether ‘‘scientific rigor’’

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is understood as the type desired by the logical positivists and their neo-positivist descendants in analytic philosophy (for example, W. V. O. Quine) or the type desired by Husserl and some Husserlian phenomenologists.68 Marcel not only questions the scientific mode of philosophic inquiry, but also rejects any and every attempt to construct a rigorous scientific epistemology. He replaces this quest for scientific rigor with neo-Socratism.69 His neo-Socratism is a Socratic approach to philosophizing, but without the eristic dialectic wielded by Socrates in the early and middle Platonic dialogues. Marcel’s neo-Socratic method allows him to examine the eidetic structures of certain personal experiences (for example, hope, fidelity, and love) and to preserve their significance in our lives. So, Marcel’s reflective method, at least his secondary reflection, is an eidetic method. But, as I have mentioned above, it does not engage in any Husserlian quest for a rigorous, epistemic foundationalism. How can we make sense of Marcel’s reflective method, given that it acknowledges that the adequacy of its philosophic descriptions of metaproblematic phenomena ultimately depends upon something extraphilosophical? I think that we can make sense of his reflective method if we interpret it as embodying Gordon’s notion of a teleological suspension of philosophy. However, for us to interpret Marcel’s reflective method as a teleological suspension of philosophy, we have to define what Gordon means by the ‘‘teleological suspension of philosophy.’’ We can define the teleological suspension of philosophy as the willingness to transcend the disciplinary boundaries of philosophy proper, with its argumentation and conceptual distinctions, in pursuit of something extraphilosophical, such as theistic religious experience. A teleological suspension of philosophy can be said to occur whenever ‘‘thinkers . . . are guided by a sense of there being concerns greater than philosophical ones.’’70 This suspension of philosophy might sound novel, but Gordon reminds us that ‘‘the activity it signifies is as old as metaphilosophy, i.e., when philosophy became self-reflective. In the modern world, it emerged from reflections on philosophy by philosophers, religious

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thinkers, artists, and scientists who refused to accept the supremacy of sedimented rationalizations of reality.’’71 He even provides several examples of modern thinkers who performed teleological suspensions of philosophy. Perhaps the modern thinker who provides us with a paradigmatic performance of a teleological suspension of philosophy is Søren Kierkegaard. Kierkegaard performs his teleological suspension of philosophy when he entertains the teleological suspension of the ethical in Fear and Trembling. What Kierkegaard means by the teleological suspension of the ethical is suspending ‘‘the universal/ethical through a leap of faith to the Absolute.’’72 The universal/ethical can be interpreted as the domain of philosophy proper. The result of this teleological suspension of the ethical is the following insight into the metaproblematic: ‘‘That which is absolute is greater than that which is universal.’’73 In other words, such a suspension of the ethical reveals that there is something that transcends philosophic ethics. This does not mean that the ethical is negated, though. As Calvin Schrag notes in ‘‘Note on Kierkegaard’s Teleological Suspension of the Ethical,’’ faith in the Absolute is not a denial of the ethical. What it means is that ‘‘the concrete individual [person] is the foundation and the bearer of the universal, and the universal has validity only insofar as it emerges from the concrete encounters of the existing individual [person].’’74 Stated otherwise, what the teleological suspension of the ethical shows is that the ethical relation is only meaningful insofar as it is rooted in one’s personal relationship with the divine.75 In short, the ethical is ultimately rooted in the religious. Without being grounded on something beyond the ethical, namely the religious, Kierkegaard thinks that our ethical relationships with other persons become nothing more than the enactment of an empty formalism. Throughout the modern period, many other thinkers have performed teleological suspensions of philosophy. Alain Locke, for example, performs a teleological suspension of philosophy when he ventures beyond the realm of philosophical argumentation, that is, beyond the realm where disciplines such as jurisprudence, ethics, and

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physics are seen as being value-neutral, and asserts: ‘‘Man does not, cannot, live in a valueless world.’’76 Some of the other thinkers who perform teleological suspensions of philosophy are Karl Jaspers, Simone Weil, Keiji Nishitani, and Quobna Cugoano.77 Josiah Royce is yet another modern thinker who performs teleological suspensions of philosophy in his thought. Gordon rightly interprets Royce’s Religious Aspect of Philosophy as a work in which Royce is not worried about ‘‘whether he was somehow violating the bounds of philosophical or religious ‘disciplinary’ concerns’’78 when he inquires into the religious insight at the heart of human ethical and religious experiences.79 We can also read Royce’s The Philosophy of Loyalty as a work where he performs a teleological suspension of philosophy. Royce performs a teleological suspension of philosophy in The Philosophy of Loyalty because he uses philosophical argumentation and conceptual distinctions to make sense of how genuinely loyal acts reveal the superhuman wellspring of all ethical acts. Some might object to my description of Marcel’s reflective method as being a teleological suspension of philosophy for the following reasons. If the teleological suspension of philosophy occurs whenever thinkers are guided by a sense of there being concerns greater than philosophical ones, and many philosophers (whether they be Christian, Buddhist, Islamic, Jewish, or even atheist philosophers) think their central concerns are greater than any philosophical concerns, is not Gordon’s teleological suspension of philosophy too broad to be of any use in describing Marcel’s reflective method? Moreover, how does identifying Marcel’s reflective method answer Ricoeur’s criticism that Marcel’s method is a sophisticated form of fideism?80 First, when I state that Marcel’s reflective method involves a teleological suspension of philosophy, I am not attempting to distinguish him from other philosophers. What I am attempting to do is explain how he, like many other modern Western philosophers, performs this teleological suspension. Second, I am not interested in clearing Marcel of Ricoeur’s charge of fideism. If anything, I think calling Marcel’s method a teleological suspension of philosophy gives us a way to see how it is a sophisticated form of fideism. Marcel himself admits to

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the nonrational basis of many of his philosophical commitments, and he recognizes how philosophical inquiry is not a self-justifying endeavor. Indeed, one could read Marcel as holding the position that philosophical inquiry follows from and is the servant of the extraphilosophical commitments that a philosopher holds. We are now in a position to see how Marcel’s reflective method involves the performance of a teleological suspension of philosophy. Marcel’s method involves such a teleological suspension of philosophy because Marcel himself thinks philosophic inquiry is built upon and is dependent on the concrete interpersonal relationships between persons and the interpersonal relationship between persons and the divine. Moreover, his method requires one to teleologically suspend philosophy since he thinks philosophic inquiry would have little to no significance apart from its extraphilosophical content, especially music and drama. Marcel acknowledges how philosophic reflection is dependent on something extraphilosophical in the second lecture of his Gifford Lectures: ‘‘Reflection, interrogating itself about it own essential nature, will be led to acknowledge that it inevitably bases itself on something that is not itself, something from which it has to draw its strength. . . . [I]t may be that an intuition, given in advance, of supra-reflective unity is at the root of the criticism reflection is able to exert upon itself.’’81 Here Marcel intimates how philosophic inquiry cannot accomplish anything unless the inquirer is motivated to philosophize by extraphilosophical commitments, goals, and interests. Accordingly, reflection is always already dependent upon what Marcel calls blinded, or reflexive, intuition in Being and Having. This intuition is what makes it possible for us to escape the stranglehold of primary reflection, allowing us then to recollect being. It also allows us to engage in participatory secondary reflection, which is perhaps best described as a reflection performed when we mindfully do an activity with the aim of dwelling in being’s light. Consequently, participatory secondary reflection is not philosophical; rather, it is the condition for the possibility of philosophical reflection (that is, conceptual secondary reflection and primary reflection).

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Some readers might question the above way of characterizing Marcel’s reflective method. They could agree with me that Marcel’s reflective method performs the teleological suspension of philosophy, but they could yet contend that I have not provided a clear description of the boundary of philosophical thinking and the means of transcending it. In Marcel’s case I have yet to answer questions like the following ones: Is philosophy a means of creating music without sound? Or is philosophy a means of enacting a drama without the stage? My reply to this concern is that asking these sorts of questions is a misunderstanding of what I mean by the teleological suspension of philosophy. Suspending philosophy is not a means of crossing beyond the boundary of philosophy. Rather, it is a means of unearthing the extraphilosophical commitments, goals, and interests that are at the heart of any and every philosophic inquiry. We could say that the teleological suspension of philosophy is a means of seeing and appreciating those commitments, goals, and interests that motivate a philosopher to philosophize about the issues that she or he philosophizes about. Thus, in Marcel’s case philosophy is not a means of creating music without sound; neither is philosophy a means of enacting a drama without the stage. What philosophy is, for Marcel, is a means of describing human existence in conceptual terms, with the concepts used to describe human existence alluding to how we actually experience our existence. More specifically, Marcel thinks that philosophy should aim at describing the most general features of interpersonal relationships, since these relationships are at the heart of human existence. Drama, on the other hand, attempts to portray persons in their singularity and depict how interpersonal relationships either nurture, cultivate, or destroy a person’s singularity. Music is even more concrete than either philosophy or drama, at least according to Marcel, because it provides the most direct access to being. Music provides the most direct access to being, because when we attentively listen to it or create it we are closest to be-ing. There is a notable gap in my account of Marcel’s reflective method as a teleological suspension of philosophy, however. I have discussed

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only one of the major extraphilosophical commitments animating Marcel’s reflective method thus far. I have yet to discuss the second major extraphilosophical commitment animating his method: Marcel’s commitment to battle against the ever-present threat of dehumanization in late Western modernity from a technological, ideological, and bureaucratic world order.82 To discuss this second extraphilosophical commitment in relation to his reflective method means that I will have to discuss the experiential origins of his thought. Along the way, I will examine how his sociopolitical thought fits into his extraphilosophical commitment to battle against the threat of dehumanization in late Western modernity. These will be the topics of discussion in the next chapter.

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ne could interpret Gabriel Marcel’s religious existentialism, or what I prefer to calls his reflective method, as being founded upon at least two extraphilosophical commitments. First, Marcel’s reflective method is founded upon a commitment to an ethicoreligious insight where the highest ontological exigency for human persons is to participate in being.1 Second, his reflective method is an outgrowth of his struggle against the ever-present specter of dehumanization in late Western modernity, as embodied in our current technocratic socio-historical milieu. Chapter 2 has already explored the first extraphilosophical commitments mentioned above. This chapter explores Marcel’s second extraphilosophical commitment. The experiential origins of Marcel’s reflective method can be traced to his response to the sociopolitical milieu in which he lived during the 1910s and 1920s. Given that Marcel’s struggle against the ever-present threat of dehumanization is partially directed at early and mid-twentieth-century technology, I should explain precisely { 57 }

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what Marcel means by technology and how it often dehumanizes those who use it and are affected by it. Then, I will answer a few criticisms of Marcel’s philosophy of technology, especially the criticism that it is just an outward manifestation of Marcel’s technophobia. This will be done by translating Marcel’s philosophy of technology into the philosophical framework of Albert Borgmann’s neoHeideggerian philosophy of technology, as much as possible. I will end this chapter by describing how Marcel conceives of his reflective method in sociopolitical terms as a perpetual struggle against the dehumanizing forces in late Western modernity. By describing Marcel’s reflective method in sociopolitical terms, I will demonstrate how his second extraphilosophical commitment fits into his reflective method. If I had to describe the concrete experiential origins of Marcel’s reflective method in a sentence, I would describe it as follows: Marcel devised his reflective method as a means of conserving the ontological significance of human existence in a technocratic, ideological, and bureaucratic age. This age is one in which many Westerners have, to their own detriment, forgotten their ontological exigency for being. The above statement depicts how Marcel initially describes the experiential origins of his reflective method in his noteworthy essay, ‘‘Concrete Approaches to Investigating the Ontological Mystery.’’ There he diagnoses the origin of dehumanization in late Western modernity (from roughly 1910 onward) as a subtle, often intuitive, unease felt by many Westerners ‘‘for whom any sense of being or the ontological is lacking, or who—more exactly—have lost all consciousness of having had any such dimension to their lives.’’2 He sometimes calls living amid this general sense of unease, living in ‘‘a broken world.’’3 To live in a broken world means to live in a world where human societies are so bureaucratic that everything persons do is subject to regulation. This means that we lose the intimate sense of human existence and replace it with a sense of being a cog in a massive, social machine. Expressed in a more contemporary idiom, to live in a broken world is to be merely a node in a vast, complex neural network.

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However we happen to articulate the nature of this broken world, though, living in such a world means our being is identified with some ‘‘abstract individual all of whose ‘particulars’ can be contained on the few sheets of an official dossier.’’4 We inhabitants of a broken world are left as empty shells, as walking abstraction. Moreover, we are equally abstractions, equally measurable using various quantification methods. Of course, this equality is a detrimental one for it only can be ‘‘obtained by leveling down’’ everything and everyone such that no one is unique in any meaningful sense.5 I will revisit Marcel’s critique of equality later in this chapter when I examine how his sociopolitical thought fits into his commitment to struggle against the threat of dehumanization in late Western modernity. For now, what is important to remember is that living in a broken world gradually eliminates the concrete uniqueness of each and every person. It is interesting that Marcel traces the birth of our broken world to World War I. World War I is the watershed event in which Europeans realized that they lived in a world where human life could be annihilated on a mass scale. It is with World War I that Europeans and their allies worldwide witnessed how apparently absurd human life could be as millions died horrible, gruesome deaths for a questionable cause. World War I was when Marcel first learns to appreciate the uniqueness of each and every human person. More specifically, he became aware of the uniqueness of each and every human person while serving as a volunteer for the French Red Cross. Marcel’s volunteer position involved his assisting family members of soldiers in learning the status of their loved ones.6 He would search the lists of French soldiers wounded, killed, or captured for information on the sought-after soldiers. Sometimes, he was able to learn the status of a sought-after soldier. Too often, unfortunately, he could not learn anything about the status of a sought-after solider. On those occasions, and on the occasions when tragedy had befallen the soldiers, he would comfort those persons who came inquiring about their loved one. Consequently, these soldiers became more than a list of characteristics on a reference card for him; each one of them

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became a thou for him, even though he never met any of these soldiers face-to-face. His experience as a Red Cross volunteer also made him sensitive to the emerging trend in Western societies of degrading persons by converting them into a collection of vital statistics and social roles at most and into disposable waste at worst. Marcel’s sensitivity to this emerging trend, in turn, allowed him to recognize after World War II how the German concentration camps systematically dehumanized entire groups of persons. It also allowed him to observe how systematic dehumanization debased those who had been dehumanized. Unlike the soldiers who died at the hands of chemical weapons and other advanced weaponry in World War I, European Jews and other ‘‘undesirable’’ persons confined to Nazi concentration camps were not even regarded as similar to their tormentors in any way, physiological or otherwise. As a concrete execution of their disregard for the personhood of their ‘‘undesirable’’ captives, Nazi soldiers implemented several techniques of degradation in order to rob these captives of any sense of personhood they had prior to their imprisonment. What Marcel means by ‘‘techniques of degradation,’’ at least the more severe forms of these techniques, is ‘‘a whole body of methods deliberately set out into operation in order to attack and destroy in human persons belonging to some definite class or other their selfrespect, and in order to transform them little by little into mere human waste products, conscious of themselves as such, and in the end forced to despair of themselves, not merely at an intellectual level, but in the very depths of their souls.’’7 For example, one of the severe techniques of degradation applied to Jewish prisoners in the concentration camps was the destruction of community through the use of Jewish spies. Such spies destroyed communities in the camps ‘‘by fomenting among the deported prisoners not only mutual resentment, but mutual suspicion; in short, of poisoning the wells of human relationship so that a prisoner who should have been, to another prisoner, a comrade and a brother, became instead an enemy, a demon, an incubus.’’8 Another severe technique of degradation used on Jewish prisoners involved placing the Jewish prisoners

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in such abject material conditions that they could no longer see themselves as persons, but as caged animals wallowing in their own filth.9 A third severe technique of degradation used to dehumanize Jewish prisoners involved the compulsory wearing of the Star of David on their clothing, marking them as subpersons and thus objects of brutal acts.10 We should remember, though, that other persons besides European Jews underwent similar dehumanization during World War II. The Rom people,11 homosexuals, political prisoners, and the mentally and physically disabled also endured techniques of degradation under the Nazis. But what could motivate such barbaric acts against fellow persons? Marcel thinks that the Holocaust, along with the earlier horrors of the twentieth century, was made possible by many European intellectuals and professionals at the dawn of the twentieth century who ceased conceiving of humans as creatures endowed with life by their Creator.12 This denial of the divine ushered in the death throes of persons. That is to say, once God died as the wellspring of values for persons, all that was left were fragile persons who questioned their own identities. Unlike the intellectuals who sought to reformulate ethics on naturalistic and evolutionary grounds, once they could no longer base ethics on religious sentiments, many nonintellectuals simply considered the human condition to be a thoroughgoing lack, a lack that could never be satisfied. Accordingly, many European persons were left living in an absurd, meaningless world where they alone were responsible for bestowing meaning onto everything in the world, including their own lives. This is what Nietzsche diagnosed as the specter of nihilism haunting late nineteenth-century European societies, and he hoped that subsequent generations of Westerners would not succumb to this life-denying nihilism. Nevertheless, European thinkers at the dawn of the twentieth century could not successfully posit an alternative set of ennobling human values that, if lived by European persons, would exorcize the specter of nihilism. Their failure resulted in a nihilism that drained human existence in the heart of European societies of its ethicoreligious significance.13 In the ensuing moral vacuum, it was easy for

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talented demagogues to dehumanize an entire ethnicity or racial group for the purpose of upholding a vicious form of provincialism. Such a provincialism excludes anyone other than members of one’s region, ethnicity, or race from being a person. Once this position is adopted by a group of persons, there is no reason for them not to dispose of anyone who was not like them in the same manner that they dispose of any other undesirable object. The long history of genocides and large-scale wars in the twentieth century is evidence of how this process of dehumanization takes place, concretely. We should not deceive ourselves, however, into thinking that the above techniques of degradation are the only means of degrading human existence. Besides these extreme forms of human degradation, there are more mundane techniques of degradation. One of those mundane ways is the systematic dehumanization of entire groups of persons, which led to a general sense of rootlessness. This rootlessness is evident in immigrant populations that have to travel from their localities of origin to earn a living. As strangers in a foreign land, these immigrant workers, who are disproportionately unskilled laborers, often experience the world as nomads who dwell in the nether regions of the global economy. These workers neither feel at home in the land they have migrated to for work nor feel tied to the land of their birth.14 Marcel notes how these workers ‘‘carry with them wherever they go an all too understandable resentment against their growing inhuman conditions of life.’’15 These inhuman conditions arise as the significance of place and intimacy among persons is replaced by the economic imperative for businesses to maximize their profits by employing foreign-born or foreign-based workers for less money. These workers recognize that their employers often house them in inadequate facilities and subject them to hazardous working conditions because they are seen as human resources, and not as persons who work for a living and provide for their families. Other times, these mundane techniques of degradation appear so beneficial to us that we do not regard them as degrading us at all. Marcel thinks that this is the case with the prevalence of contraceptives in Western societies. Initially, it seems like a beneficial thing for

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persons to have the technological means for preventing unwanted pregnancies. This seems like a good thing given that there have been far too many persons who became parents who were ill-equipped for the arduous task of parenthood for economic, psychological, or other reasons. He would interpret the declining birthrates among most Western Europeans and North Americans of European descent today (of course, excluding the steadily increasing birthrate of such ethnic groups as Muslim immigrants in Western European countries and Hispanic and Asian immigrants in North America) as evidence that contemporary Westerners regard human life ‘‘less as a gift’’ to be cherished and welcomed and more as ‘‘a kind of incomprehensible calamity, like a flood, against which we ought to be able to build dykes.’’16 Moreover, the prevalence of contraception can be interpreted as an outward manifestation of an attitude in which human persons can actually master their environing world and even their most ingrained physiological processes, including reproduction.17 What makes this attitude of mastery so dangerous is that it causes us to forget our exigency for being and replaces it with an insatiable desire for more advanced technological devices and services. As a consequence of this forgetting of being, we do not view technology as a means for us to better commune with other persons; rather, technology accelerates the dehumanization of persons by making it easier to view ourselves as reducible to material bodies that are dependent on technological devices and services to make their existence intelligible and meaningful. What does Marcel mean by technology, though? Technology, for Marcel, is ‘‘a specialized and rationally elaborated skill that can be improved and taught to others.’’18 Technology is not merely the sum of technological devices that we create and the techniques that enable us to create these devices. Rather, technology is a useful heuristic term that refers to ‘‘human reason insofar as it strives to manage, so to speak, the earth and everything living within it.’’19 Technology, in short, is a particular way of living and being in the world, one which is often dehumanizing.

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However, technology is not a dehumanizing force simply because it is intrinsically impersonal and dehumanizing. On numerous occasions Marcel reminds us that technology is not intrinsically impersonal, but it can lead to the dehumanization of persons if we consider technological advancement to be an end in itself instead of being a means for the material and spiritual improvement of human persons.20 Technology tends to dehumanize us, especially those persons at the margins of Westerner societies, because contemporary Westerners have too often used technological devices and techniques to undermine the sacredness of the human person.21 And, as we have mentioned above, once persons are no longer regarded as sacred, then it is only a matter of time before they are reduced to potentially disposable things. Here I should define what Marcel means by sacred, since it is such a specific phenomenon for him. He is careful not to confuse the sacred with holiness due to the phenomenological distinction between our experience of the sacred and our experience of the holy. Marcel notes that we experience the holy in the mode of divine revelation. Anthony J. Steinbock has called this phenomenon, epiphany.22 At most, persons could experience the holy if they open themselves up to divine revelation and the divine allows them to do so. Experiencing the sacred, on the other hand, does not rise to the level of epiphany, because it can be experienced by persons regardless of whether they intentionally open themselves up to the divine. All that is required is for persons to allow themselves to be ‘‘face to face with something beyond [their] comprehension.’’23 This ‘‘something beyond our comprehension,’’ for Marcel, is most often natural phenomena seen as objects of contemplation.24 By contemplating our natural environment, for example, concentrating on how the sunlight reflects off of a slightly wet maple tree right after the end of a spring afternoon rainstorm, we look past its thingliness. In the act of contemplating our natural environment, we remove it from the realm of the problematic and see it as a mysterious reality.25 That is, we come to see our environing world as our world; as the place where we dwell. Moreover, we come to see our environing world as a vibrant abode

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that continually reveals itself to us as persons do when we have genuine conversations with them. In a very real sense, when we engage our environing world in the mode of the sacred, we see it as someone with whom we can have an interpersonal relationship.26 Accordingly, once we see our environing world as sacred, we feel at home in it; it welcomes us and appreciates our gratitude for dwelling in it. In short, we revere our environing world as a gift that calls upon us to be its responsible stewards.27 We should not neglect the fact that Marcel thinks that the sacred is more than the sense that our environing world is our home and a gift we should cherish and maintain. It is also the phenomenon underlying our sense that our own lives, other persons’ lives, and the lives of every other living creature is a gift. Additionally, the sacred is also what makes it possible to form genuine communities of persons, ones in which persons make themselves available to one another. At this point, we can state Marcel’s critique of technology thusly: Technology can degrade us by robbing us of our sense of the sacred. By using technology to manipulate our environing world and ease the difficulties we encounter living in that world without a corresponding maturing of our spiritual lives, we seem to render our environing world profane.28 We reduce our environing world to an object to be managed as we see fit. As Heidegger puts it, we enframe our environing world so that it is seen as a depository of things available for our consumption.29 This act of enframing opens the door for us even to reduce ourselves to ‘‘human resources’’ that can be used for economic purposes. Once we have converted ourselves into commodities, it is but a small step for us to replace genuine ethico-religious values with consumer values and communal values with the values of ease and utility. What is worse is that this inversion of ethico-religious values and consumer values often leads to the debasing of human life, and reduces it from a divine gift to an inefficient, fleeting product.30 Of course, once we consider human life to be a fleeting product that could be improved, it seems only natural to use such techniques as genetic engineering to ‘‘improve’’ the lives of our descendants. And

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those persons who cannot be sufficiently ‘‘improved’’ are seen as falling below the threshold of being worthwhile and, consequently, are ‘‘regarded as an unprofitable charge on the society which still feels itself bound to care for and maintain [them].’’31 Marcel’s critique of technology in late Western modernity seems to be a legitimate one; however, there is a significant weakness in his critique of technology: that is, the lack of empirical evidence for his contention that it is not only the severe techniques of degradation that contribute to the dehumanization of persons in late Western modernity, but also the more mundane technological techniques and devices that we normally interpret as beneficial to us. Because of Marcel’s failure to substantiate the contention mentioned in the last sentence with empirical evidence, some critics dismiss his angst about apparently beneficial technological techniques as ‘‘only the resentful annoyance of a French bourgeois’’ who detests the feeling he has ‘‘when he has to fill out bureaucratic forms on which the only identity he retains is that of a number in some file.’’32 In more charitable terms, these critics think that Marcel’s critique of technology is based on an unwarranted nostalgia for a previous historical epoch when life was less complex and persons regarded one another, at least those who lived close by, as intimate neighbors.33 Fortunately, for Marcel, his critique of apparently beneficial technological techniques can be substantiated empirically. Indeed, this has already been done by Albert Borgmann in his neo-Heideggerian critique of technology. Like Marcel, Borgmann thinks of technology as a way of life. And like Marcel, he thinks that technology tends to dehumanize persons by reducing everything to a disposable thing. We could continue to list the similarities between Marcel and Borgmann on a superficial level, or we could see how Borgmann’s neoHeideggerian philosophy of technology can serve as an example of how Marcel could have formulated his critique of technology. Let us take a detour from explicating Marcel’s own critique of technology and get acquainted with Borgmann’s philosophy of technology. Since Borgmann thinks that the most emblematic sign of our contemporary technological society is television, let us concentrate on

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explicating Borgmann’s philosophy of technology in terms of his criticism of television. He thinks that television tends to disengage us from reality and our lives with other persons, the two most important factors for maintaining our individual and communal wellbeing. However, Borgmann’s criticism of television is stronger than his critique of our contemporary technological society. Unlike most technological devices, which he considers to be indirect threats to individual and communal well-being, he considers television to be a genuine threat to individual and communal well-being.34 To appreciate why Borgmann disapproves of watching television on philosophical grounds, we first have to appreciate how he views television through the lens of his criticism of technology, as embodied in the contemporary device paradigm. The device paradigm is a description of how technological devices have integrated themselves into the very fabric of ordinary life in contemporary Western societies, especially in the United States. Many contemporary persons have lost intimate touch with reality due to their daily experiences of the world being thoroughly mediated by technological devices. Borgmann thinks that what we late modern persons have lost in the level of intimacy with our environing world we have gained in our ability to subdue temporarily much of the harshness and unpredictability of our environing world. In the process, we have increased the level of comfort and enjoyment in our lives. This is not to say that living in our environing world is no longer dangerous; it is to say, however, that technological devices appear to have liberated most, if not all, of us from many of the burdensome toils and tasks involved in sustaining our lives.35 A paradigmatic example of how technological devices often relieve us from burdensome toils is how a natural gas heater makes warmth available to us at any time of the day, whereas persons in the past had no choice but to undergo the daily routine of creating and maintaining the stove’s warming fire if they desired to be warmed.36 Think of the notable difference between adjusting a thermostat to activate one’s natural gas heater and the familial routine of tending the fireplace. This difference is one involving the quality of our

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engagement with our environing world. It is the difference between a device and a thing. A stove is a thing in the sense that we are bodily engaged in its upkeep; it demands that we exercise certain competencies and skills to maintain successfully the stove’s fire. In the traditional daily routine of creating and maintaining the stove’s warming fire, there were certain competencies that each member of the family had to master in order to maintain the fire. Having the children gather firewood and keep the firebox filled, having the mother build the fire, and having the father cut the firewood—all of these activities foster and nurture what Don Ihde calls ‘‘embodiment relations’’ in Postphenomenology.37 In Borgmann’s philosophy of technology, however, we have to slightly modify Ihde’s definition of ‘‘embodiment relations’’ in such a way that these relations no longer deal with technological devices that ‘‘express [our] straightforward bodily, perceptual relations with the environment;’’38 rather, these relations are reserved for our engagement with things in the world. The distinction between a natural gas heater and a wood stove is a specific example of the distinction between a device and a thing. A device is simply a machine that procures a certain commodity in a relatively effortless manner.39 Indeed, a device is valuable to us only to the extent that it procures the good or service that we desire. A natural gas heater, for example, is valuable only insofar as it produces the desired warmth on command. In the same vein, a MP3 player is valuable only insofar as it plays mp3 music files up to our standards. The actual physical machinery of a device can be altered at will, as long as the new design performs its function better than its former one.40 In addition, as devices improve their capacity to procure whatever commodity we desire from them, they tend to become more ubiquitous in our lives, more concealed, and more complex in their functioning.41 Moreover, we are less likely to acquire the requisite skills, expend the effort, care for, and engage in the upkeep of a device than we would be for a cherished thing.42 A thing, on the other hand, is something that allows us to engage bodily in its world with other people.43 Engaging with things enriches our lives in ways that devices, by their very nature, cannot. Unlike

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using devices, engaging with things enables us to cultivate human excellence, for example, moral virtue and the appreciation of beauty. Things in the world that enable persons to cultivate human excellence are called focal things, and such practices, focal practices. Focal things, then, are those things that orient us toward what technological devices cannot procure, for example, the enjoyment we experience when we partake in a festive, home-cooked meal with family and friends,44 whereas focal practices are those events and activities in which persons gather together to engage focal things. Festive, communal meals are examples of focal practices. Additionally, when we dedicate ourselves to focal things and practices, we nourish ‘‘focal concern[s] . . . [and] shelter [them] against the vicissitudes of fate and our frailty.’’45 Dedicating ourselves to an engagement with the world through focal things and practices allows us to have a relatively stable and meaningful place in the world and an intimate connection with those who uphold the same focal concerns that we do. This means that by committing ourselves to focal things and practices we escape the pervasive shallowness of contemporary Western societies.46 In Crossing the Postmodern Divide,47 Borgmann clarifies what focal practices do in our lives. These practices are the ones where ‘‘eloquent reality,’’ that is, reality as given to us in its inexhaustible plenitude and vitality, speaks to us ‘‘in its own right and in many voices’’48 beyond the hyperreality and simulacra of technological reality. Moreover, this reality ‘‘speaks [to us] in asides and in sermons. At times it troubles and threatens, at other times it consoles and inspires.’’49 Reality, then, is not something that we, in a Deweyan sense, ‘‘control’’50 to yield the most beneficial results from our pragmatic efforts and projects; it is both the stage where the human drama unfolds and, oddly enough, also a participant in that drama.51 There is even a moral significance to Borgmann’s distinction between technological devices and things. In ‘‘The Moral Significance of the Material Culture,’’ Borgmann borrows heavily from the research of social scientists Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi and Eugene Rochberg-Halton in The Meaning of Things to provide the necessary

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empirical evidence to justify his normative distinction between commanding things and disposable things.52 Borgmann sometimes labels this distinction as one between commanding reality and disposable reality. In any case this distinction is almost identical to the one he makes earlier in Technology and the Character of Contemporary Life between technological devices and focal things. Consequently, commanding things are those things ‘‘that [convey] ‘meaning through [their] own inherent qualities and through the active contribution of the thing[s] [themselves] to the meaning process.’ ’’53 Disposable things, on the other hand, are those things that ‘‘are largely treated as semantically pliable material whose significance is shaped through an investment of psychic energy.’’54 These things often separate us from one another and from our environing world.55 Borgmann interprets Csiksentmihalyi and Rochberg-Halton’s research on the place of objects in the American home as providing empirical evidence for his contention that we are more likely to view reality as disposable than to view it as commanding.56 This means that we live in a technological era in which persons of late Western modernity are more apt to live self-enclosed, self-absorbed, narcissistic lives than to engage in focal practices with other persons. Our use of technological devices often breeds an atmosphere of detachment from reality and from other persons. What it also does is foster a sense of ennui in those who have defined the meaningfulness of their lives through technological devices. Gripped by such ennui, ‘‘boredom replaces exhilaration’’57 for persons defined by technology. To ward off our impending boredom we immerse ourselves in more outrageous and tantalizing entertainment venues, seeking more vibrant and stimulating excitement.58 Accordingly, many persons eventually seek ever increasing levels of excitement in engaging in social, moral, and sexual taboos.59 We shuck the shell of traditional morality and sexual mores in search for more enriching and stimulating horizons. We revel in our immorality; better yet, morality is redefined in terms of our acceptance of the device paradigm and whether we are willing to uphold it.

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Moreover, our private conduct is no longer subject to moral judgments since we live in a sphere in which we are permitted to consume whatever commodities suit our fancy, in whatever way we wish, unless our consumption of commodities unjustly harms someone else.60 Borgmann identifies this phenomenon well when he calls it a conflation of private morality with ‘‘the liberty to consume whatever commodities are procured by the machinery [of devices].’’61 In a sense, libertinism is the moral code of the device paradigm; to be moral, then, is to consume well, that is to say, consume in such ways that we enjoy maximally the commodities that devices procure for us. It is from the above interpretative framework that Borgmann negatively judges television to be the paradigmatic example of what is wrong with the device paradigm. Television represents the worst features of the device paradigm. It is a technological device that is thoroughly available and enables us to have access to its contents with just a push of a remote control button. Additionally, it can easily be a medium of solipsistic enjoyment, into which we withdraw from communal and civic life. Unfortunately, television programs, even those programs aimed at informing the citizenry about political and social issues, often do not motivate many viewers to get involved in politics. More often than not, television is seen and regarded by its viewers, or better yet its consumers, as a relaxation device that is used to numb the mind with easily accessible entertainment once we arrive home and isolate ourselves from other persons. This characteristic of most television watching leads Robert D. Putnam, the author of Bowling Alone,62 to conclude that television is a significant component in the decline of participation amongst US citizens in political and civic organizations.63 What is perhaps most ironic about watching television is that it appears to do the opposite of what it actually does. As Borgmann notes, watching television ‘‘appears to free us from the fetters of time, space, and ignorance and to lay before us the riches of the world in their most glamorous form. In the light of this cosmopolitan brilliance, all local and personal accomplishments must seem crude and

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homely.’’64 Yet, as I have mentioned above, television is oftentimes the very technological device that alienates us from other flesh-andblood people and traps us in a solipsistic world of surreal, twodimensional, techno-color visual images and disembodied sounds. Robert Kubey and Csikszentmihalyi’s 2002 article in Scientific American65 offers empirical evidence for the above contention. Now if one replaced television with radio in Borgmann’s critique of Western technology, then one would have Marcel’s critique of technology.66 Moreover, Borgmann works with a distinction that Marcel could have made explicitly in his own critique of technology, namely the distinction between commanding reality and disposable reality. The absence of the distinction between commanding reality and disposable reality as well-established conceptual categories in Marcel’s thought is even more puzzling since this distinction is just another version of his phenomenological distinction between viewing ourselves as disposable objects and viewing ourselves as persons. In any case Borgmann’s distinction is at work in Marcel’s critique of technology, even though it is not articulated in a systematic form. However, we should note the differences between Marcel’s reflective method and Borgmann’s philosophy of technology to make sure no one confuses Marcel’s position concerning technology with Borgmann’s position. Unlike Borgmann who, despite his insightful critiques of the Western device paradigm, accepts a version of scientific realism,67 Marcel rejects scientific realism because of its impersonal character. Marcel’s reflective method also differs from Borgmann’s philosophy of technology in that Marcel would reject Borgmann’s scientific realist distinction between the impersonal, physical universe and the world of personal significance (that is, the universe as lived by human persons in communities).68 Marcel rejects Borgmann’s scientific realist distinction because unlike Borgmann he does not accept the commonly held contention in analytic philosophy that the conceptualizations of the natural sciences, specifically of contemporary physics, actually describe the universe as it really is in itself. If Marcel were to accept Borgmann’s distinction between the impersonal, physical universe and a world of personal significance,

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then that distinction would have to be a thoroughgoing phenomenological one. Reinterpreted as a phenomenological distinction, Marcel would concentrate on how our lived experience of our environing world fosters interpersonal relationships which enable us to participate in being. He would consider the remaining category to be a conception constructed by instrumental reason to handle problematic situations, that is, as means of analyzing ourselves and our environing world objectively. Now we are in a position to appreciate how Marcel struggles against the threat of dehumanization most concretely in his sociopolitical thought. Yet, those familiar with Marcel’s corpus should consider this odd given that ‘‘Marcel never produced a treatise, much less an essay, specifically devoted to political philosophy as such.’’69 The closest that he came to writing a treatise on political philosophy is his book Man against Mass Society. In addition, most Marcel scholars have neglected Marcel’s sociopolitical thought as a subject of study. Nevertheless, Marcel left numerous clues throughout his corpus about how he would philosophize about sociopolitical issues and political principles in a sustained manner.70 We shall leave it to other Marcel scholars, for example, Thomas Michaud, to trace the numerous clues Marcel left about how to philosophize about sociopolitical issues. For the purposes of this chapter, we shall concentrate our attention on how Marcel’s sociopolitical thought is a critique of and protest against the advent of the specter of dehumanization in late Western modernity. Marcel summarizes the specter of dehumanization haunting twentieth-century Westerner persons in a single phrase, ‘‘the spirit of abstraction.’’ Yet, this phrase is a sort of misnomer. What Marcel means by ‘‘the spirit of abstraction’’ is not a perversion of the intellect and its abstractions, but an affective attachment to ill-conceived abstractions.71 This affective attachment is dangerous precisely because persons are willing to act on ill-conceived abstractions (for example, equality) regardless of the consequences for actual persons. All that matters to persons possessed by the spirit of abstraction is the realization of their abstractions at any cost. He thinks that such abstractions are the foundations of such

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political ideologies as the French Revolution, German National Socialism, Stalinism, and Maoist Communism. Consequently, we can interpret Marcel as arguing that such sociopolitical abstractions as the proletariat, the multitude,72 and the wretched of the earth are dangerous because some persons are willing to kill other persons on a mass scale in the name of these abstractions. Furthermore, the persons who are the self-proclaimed champions of these sociopolitical abstractions often systematically dehumanize those who are identified as opponents of these abstractions, for example, the aristocracy and the bourgeoisie. Indeed, the lives of those who are considered enemies of their championed abstractions are expendable to the extent that their deaths will improve the material, psychological, and even spiritual conditions of the ones identified as the proletariat, the multitude, or the wretched of the earth. Hence, the question of whether killing actual persons in the name of a sociopolitical abstraction will actually improve the lives of those who are identified as members of that sociopolitical abstraction is beside the point; loyalty to the sociopolitical abstraction is all that matters. Because of this, Marcel thinks that a serious allegiance to such ill-conceived sociopolitical abstractions cannot help but lead to mass violence and fanaticism.73 Upon reflection, there is something to Marcel’s admonishment against aligning oneself with the cause of upholding a sociopolitical abstraction, given the history of mass violence and fanaticism in the twentieth century committed by persons who have done just that.74 Just because many sociopolitical abstractions are antidemocratic does not mean that democratic ideals are any less ill-conceived and dangerous. Even democratic ideals, for example, egalitarianism, can reduce persons to merely their group identity (in the case of egalitarianism, a rational, self-interested creature), and thus force them to forfeit their concrete personhood. In such a circumstance, persons have precious few opportunities to cultivate a genuine human personality, that is, one in which persons are attuned to their ontological exigency for being. Most often, these persons are living ‘‘in a

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degraded state’’ where the only available option for them is to be socialized so that they can perform their social roles effectively.75 It should come as no surprise, then, that Marcel thinks that modern political egalitarianism in all its forms, including technocratic Western democracies, originates from the spirit of abstraction. What makes political egalitarianism dangerous, even when wearing a democratic veneer, is that it bases human communities on an impersonal sociopolitical abstraction, namely, equality. For example, democratic political egalitarians seriously think that human communities can not only be formed based on some voluntary and rational assent to a social contract, but that ‘‘a democracy worthy of the name is actually nothing else [than a society based on a social contract].’’76 The reason that such a theory of community is dangerous is because it is contrary to how persons actually form genuine communities. Accordingly, due to the unrealistic conception of community formation advanced by democratic egalitarians, egalitarian communities ‘‘tend to desacralize [themselves] and eventually [degenerate] into an agreement that each party tries to use to his own best advantage. Or it may simply become a bureaucratic adjustment that no one actually observes; instead everyone tries to circumvent it as far as possible.’’77 In either case, democratic egalitarianism reduces human communities to societies of atomistic individuals seeking their own advantage, as distinct from a genuine community of persons. Genuine communities, on the other hand, are founded on fraternity, that is, on concrete interpersonal relationships rooted in creative fidelity.78 In fact, conflating equality with fraternity, Marcel thinks, has been one of the major causes of mass violence in the twentieth century, since the only way that equality can be actualized is to demolish the status quo and place everyone on the same level, and such an activity can be accomplished effectively only through violence. As Marcel writes: It is not men [sic] who are equal, for men [sic] are not triangles or quadrilaterals. What are equal, what must be postulated as equal, are not human beings but rights and duties which men [sic] must reciprocally recognize; for if that recognition is lacking, we

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have chaos, we have tyranny with its frightful consequence [for example, the death of millions in efforts to implement social policies aimed at eliminate socioeconomic inequalities].79

Until now I have portrayed Marcel’s sociopolitical thought as simply a way to describe what we as late modern Western persons are up against in a technocratic world. Given that Marcel thinks that philosophers are not usually good at formulating definite sociopolitical principles and implementing policies based on those principles, what can philosophers do to exorcise the specter of dehumanization described earlier in this section and throughout this chapter? Here is where the constructive dimension of Marcel’s sociopolitical thought comes to play. First, philosophers can combat the specter of dehumanization by being ever-vigilant and watchful, especially in historical epochs like post–World War II Western Europe, when the insidious threat of ‘‘technocratic delirium’’ is omnipresent regardless of one’s citizenship.80 Second, philosophers can ‘‘proclaim that we do not belong entirely to the world of objects to which men are seeking to assimilate us, in which they are straining to imprison us.’’81 They can remind us that we also belong to the world of the sacred where persons are appreciated intimately, not converted into objects available for assimilation. But how can philosophers remind us of the sacred in a technocratic and bureaucratic world? Marcel does not think that philosophers or anyone else can specifically do anything to renew the sense of the sacred, because all of our actions are too influenced by the device paradigm.82 Marcel thinks that philosophers can invoke the presence of the sacred in our lives only if they undergo a conversion experience in which we can genuinely appreciate the sacred.83 Appreciating the sacred, however, does not necessarily require one to undergo a religious conversion (in the sense of being converted into a religious faith tradition), even though it must involve a receptivity to divine grace.84 What it does require is a reverence for one’s environing world, or natural piety, a spiritual availability to one’s neighbors, and a willingness to love them, to be faithful to them, to care for their wellbeing (particularly their spiritual wellbeing).

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By practicing piety and spiritual availability to others, philosophers can turn away ‘‘from the oppressive and distressing spectacle that the technocratic view of the world offers’’ to move to reclaim our sense of the sacred.85 This dual movement involves a reestablishment of interpersonal communion between oneself and others and, if one is fortunate, between oneself and the divine.86 Philosophers ought to teach other persons to be receptive to the conversion to the sacred and also ought to assist others in appreciating the sacred. Any other available course of action would still be too wedded to the very technocratic worldview we should seek to transcend.87 Besides, by reclaiming the significance of the sacred in human existence, philosophers are upholding their duty to defend persons against the temptation of technology to dehumanize others.88 This duty is a bittersweet one since it sometimes demands that we criticize fellow philosophers who seem to uphold the dignity of the human person, but whose thought threatens that dignity. This is what Marcel apparently felt that he had to do to Emmanuel Mounier and the French Catholic personalist movement. On the surface, both Marcel and Mounier held similar views concerning the human person. Mounier even acknowledged that Marcel’s thought was one of the forerunners to his own personalism.89 But in order to affirm human personhood in all its concreteness, Marcel thought that he had to criticize Mounier’s political thought due to its commitment to socialism and social justice. Indeed, Marcel was wary of anyone who associated Christianity with any political ideology, no matter how well-intentioned the commitment happens to be or how much the ideology seems to accord with the Gospels. He held this position because he thought that associating Christianity with any specific political ideology lowered Christianity and dragged it closer to the level of ‘‘a pseudo-religion or a counter-religion.’’90 Moreover, Marcel criticized the entire French Catholic personalist movement, because of its Marxist-inspired critiques of socioeconomic inequalities in Western (especially Western European) societies.91 But one could ask, ‘Why does Marcel think that Marxist social theory is incompatible with any philosophy which genuinely affirms

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the dignity of the human person?’ Marcel’s answer would be as follows: Marxist social theory, by its very nature, cannot be confined to the analysis of economic systems and diagnosis of the dehumanizing effects of capitalistic economic systems.92 Its often worthwhile and informative critiques of Western capitalistic systems are dependent on a totalizing ideology, namely a thoroughgoing historical materialism. This ideology is not compatible with upholding the dignity of the human person, because it tends to neglect the spiritual dimension of human life. More specifically, Marxist social theory reduces our exigency for being to a yearning for adequate material conditions to live a fulfilling (psycho-physiological) life. Hence, Marxism cannot help but reduce persons to their material conditions, and inadvertently reduce persons to object-bodies.93 Indeed, we can interpret Marcel’s distrust of any philosophical thought whose political philosophy depends too heavily on Marxist social theory as an implication of his reflective method and his foundational commitments. We can also see how the existential origins of his reflective method inform his sociopolitical thought, especially his critiques of sociopolitical abstractions and Marxist social theory. So Marcel’s sociopolitical thought, coupled with his reflective method, seems to provide us with the phenomenological concepts and the inspiration necessary to combat the specter of depersonalization in late Western modernity. Unfortunately, this is not the case, since Marcel’s sociopolitical thought does not examine perhaps the most noxious form of depersonalization existing in the twentieth century, namely, antiblack racism. The first section of chapter 4 will explain how Marcel’s sociopolitical thought neglects antiblack racism in its examinations of depersonalization in late Western modernity. To conserve what is worth conserving of Marcel’s thought, we will address Marcel’s neglect of antiblack racism by coupling Marcel’s reflective method with Gordon’s invaluable existential phenomenological examination into the depersonalizing effects of antiblack racism on Africana persons. But before I can couple what is worth conserving of Marcel’s reflective method with Gordon’s existential

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phenomenology, I need to explicate Gordon’s existential phenomenological account of antiblack racism and expose the central problem with Marcel’s sociopolitical thought, namely, its insufficiently critical stance with respect to the originating telos of modern Western thought. I will perform these tasks in chapters 4 and 5.

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o understand why I criticize Marcel’s religious existentialism for neglecting one of the most prominent forms of depersonalization in the twentieth century, antiblack racism, I should summarize Gordon’s existential phenomenological account of antiblack racism. However, it is not within the purview of this chapter to examine Gordon’s Africana existential phenomenological account of anitblack racism in detail, because doing so would require more than a chapter. Rather, what I will do is explicate some of the central phenomenological concepts used in his account of antiblack racism—namely, antiblack racism, bad faith, and blackness. Furthermore, I shall limit my examination to how he uses them in his early philosophic writings, specifically those writings published between 1993 and 2000. Of those works written between 1993 and 2000, I will concentrate on the following ones: ‘‘Racism as a Form of Bad Faith’’ (1993),1 Bad Faith and Antiblack Racism (1995),2 and Fanon and the Crisis of European Man (1995).3 Along the way, I will examine how Gordon’s account of antiblack racism explains the continued significance of antiblack racism { 80 }

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and blackness in a postsegregationist era in the United States. By the end of this chapter, readers should be prepared to seriously entertain the following contention: A Gordon-inspired existential phenomenological account of antiblack racism is not only compatible with Marcel’s reflective method, but also a welcome addition to it. So what is antiblack racism? Seen from the natural attitude, antiblack racism is the totality of the material conditions, socio-cultural attitudes, norms, and practices that depersonalize persons who have been historically identified as black, specifically Africans and those of African descent living throughout the African diaspora. Given that the genealogical approach concentrates on unearthing the material conditions of the formation of social institutions and socio-cultural practices, it is one of the most common approaches to critiquing antiblack racism. These genealogies of antiblack racism usually begin by tracing how Western European nation-states transformed an entire group of persons into property, which could be used to acquire the material resources (for example, sugar, molasses, and cotton) for industrial factories to produce goods. Therefore, they describe antiblack racism as a means of justifying the European colonization of Africa, the Americas, the Caribbean, and anywhere else on the globe where Western Europeans (and later their most successful former colonies, for example, the United States and Australia) could acquire the material resources to fuel their unprecedented level of industrialization and economic expansion. Antiblack racism also justified why it was morally permissible to enslave, and sometimes even annihilate, entire groups of non-Europeans for the sake of establishing colonies, extracting material resources from colonized lands, producing goods and services, and increasing the financial wealth of the colonial nation-states.4 As part of their critique of antiblack racism, these genealogies document the ways in which Africana persons were defined as being lessthan-persons in Western societies, even after the end of the transatlantic slave trade, due to modern scientific racism in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and the continued prevalence of white aesthetic and socio-cultural norms.5 The genealogies also seek

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to trace how the residue of modern scientific racism and white normativity remain a part of the contemporary landscape, especially in many social science studies on African American communities where African Americans are studies as a ‘‘problem people’’ rather than as persons who have problems.6 Although the conceptual category of blackness usually applies to Africana persons, one could also construct a genealogy of antiblack racism that includes groups of persons who are not identified as Africans or descendents of Africans, for example, Australian Aborigines7 and the dark-skinned, untouchable caste in India.8 Seen phenomenologically, however, antiblack racism is a countless series of self-deceptive choices, individual and societal, where Europeans and persons of European descent act as though their race ‘‘is the only race qualified to be considered human or . . . is superior to other races.’’9 Antiblack racism, then, is simultaneously (a) the consequence of intergenerational choices and practices of depersonalizing targeted groups of persons, specifically Africana persons, due to their racial classification and (b) the originating source of intergenerational acts of depersonalizing targeted groups of persons due to their racial classification. This does not mean that genealogical accounts of antiblack racism are incompatible with an existential phenomenological account of antiblack racism. Indeed, genealogical accounts of antiblack racism can contain many valuable existential phenomenological insights. Yet, an existential phenomenological account of antiblack racism not only focuses on the contingent nature of antiblack racism and its socio-historical and material conditions, but also examines how antiblack racism depersonalizes entire groups of persons and the existential conditions for such depersonalization. In Gordon’s case, his existential phenomenological account of antiblack racism is shaped by his commitment to Africana phenomenology. Africana phenomenology is a type of phenomenology in which phenomenologists investigate those phenomena that constitute Africana existence, particularly the lived experience of antiblack racism by Africana persons and their liberatory efforts to overcome it.10

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Phenomenologists in the Africana phenomenological tradition perform a phenomenological reduction that they consider to be compatible with, if somewhat different from, Husserlian phenomenology. Rather than suspending their existential judgments about the world to clear a space for investigating the invariant meaning-structures of phenomena we experience, practitioners of Africana phenomenology envision the phenomenological epoche´ as a means of bracketing the reality of racial categories. Once the mundane existence of these racial categories is put in abeyance, one can then investigate how these racial categories are constituted by examining the lived experiences of Africana persons. As an Africana phenomenologist, Gordon thinks that any phenomenological method should subject all methods to ‘‘ontological suspension (that is, the rejection of their presumed legitimacy).’’11 Accordingly, ‘‘even phenomenology’s history must be engaged with the cautious eye of ontological suspension. What that means is that its history, whether in its European, Asian, or Africana form, must be seen as factual instances but not as what legitimates phenomenological work.’’12 Gordon holds this position because he conceives of phenomenology as a radical approach to philosophizing and a postcolonial form of thinking, one which is birthed and nourished by ‘‘the spirit of resistance to epistemic colonization.’’13 This is the spirit in which Gordon constructs his existential phenomenological account of antiblack racism. I am now ready to return to my explication of his account of antiblack racism. Phenomenologically speaking, what enables persons of European descent and even many Africana persons to perpetuate antiblack racism? Gordon thinks that it is due to bad faith. In fact, Gordon thinks that bad faith is the leading clue for how antiblack racism is constituted and remains active on both the individual and societal levels. To approach antiblack racism through an examination of bad faith, we have to accept the following assumptions: That human beings are aware, no matter how fugitive that awareness may be, of their freedom in their various situations, that they

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are free choosers of various aspects of their situations, that they are consequently responsible for their condition on some level, that they have the power to change at least themselves through coming to grips with their situations, and that there exist features of their condition which provide rich areas of interpretive investigation for the analysts or interpreter.14

Once we accept these assumptions, or at least see how these assumptions are plausible ones, we can appreciate Gordon’s existential phenomenological account of antiblack racism and explicate it adequately. To facilitate our explication of Gordon’s account of antiblack racism, let us regard Gordon’s assumptions as plausible ones. According to Gordon, bad faith is an effort by human persons to absolve themselves from their responsibility in coconstituting their own lives and their social institutions. The former is individual bad faith, and the latter is institutional bad faith.15 In more Sartrean terms, individual bad faith occurs whenever we deny our role in constituting the meaningfulness of the phenomena we experience. Institutional bad faith, on the other hand, occurs whenever we neglect to recognize how we continually coconstitute with other persons the social institutions in which we live and simply regard these institutions as ready-made entities. In the case of antiblack racism, living in bad faith means that we presuppose that the racial categorical schema from the Western modern era simply exist, and necessarily so. Consequently, in an antiblack society, once persons are classified as black they cannot do anything to transcend their ‘‘ontological blackness.’’16 Even those black persons who apparently transcend their race—for example, Oprah Winfrey, Michael Jordon, and Colin Powell—do so only in circumstances where white persons are willing to grant them the status of ‘‘honorary white person.’’ If these ‘‘honorary white persons’’ step outside the circle of white persons who have granted them this status, then they will be treated like any other black person. This was the case with Oprah Winfrey when she was allegedly stopped from entering Hermes, a high-end luxury Paris boutique, on June 14, 2005.17 Her blackness remained invisible until she entered into a situation in which she was no longer identified as an honorary white person. In that situation her blackness became hypervisible, almost

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blindingly radiant. Nevertheless, Oprah Winfrey the person was concealed underneath the veil of blackness. To be black in an antiblack world, for Gordon, means more than being hypervisible as the embodiment of an abstraction yet invisible as a person, however. It also means that one is burdened with justifying one’s personhood to racist white persons, and to justify one’s personhood is to be present to oneself ‘‘as a given existent,’’18 that is, an object. He describes how black persons often have to justify their very existence to white persons this way: The racist, . . . in making the demand [for the black persons to justify their existence], positions himself as self-justified while asking another human [person] to justify his right to exist. Symmetry is already broken down in a situation that demands symmetry. The racist thus elevates himself . . . above the human to the level of God and the Other below humanity. In effect, he says to the Other, ‘‘The problem with you is that you are not I. Show me that you have a quality that has an equivalence relation with me.’’19

The black Other is not a Levinasian Other (l’autrui) whom antiblack white racists recognize as a fellow person. For the white antiblack racist, the black Other is less than a person while the antiblack white racist occupies the peculiar position of regarding himself or herself as a self-sufficient and self-justifying being, precisely the characteristics traditionally possessed by the divine in the neo-Platonic and Aristotelian tradition and in many forms of Western monotheism. Nevertheless, white antiblack racists know that they are neither self-sufficient nor self-justifying beings. Yet, they are comfortable in asking entire groups of persons to do something they themselves cannot do. This position can be maintained only by ‘‘a misanthropic consciousness’’ in which the humanity of black persons is eliminated by situating them below the threshold of personhood while white racists elevate themselves above the threshold of personhood.20 Fanon articulates this phenomenon concisely in The Wretched of the Earth: ‘‘Because it is a systematic negation of the other, an unreasonable decision to refuse to the other all the attributes of humanity,

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colonialism forces the people it dominates to ask the question constantly, ‘In reality, who am I?’ ’’21 Fanon’s description of colonialism in general is equally applicable to antiblack racism, because antiblack racism demands that black persons ask themselves the same question.22 Moreover, in an antiblack society, black persons often find themselves asking questions related to Fanon’s question, questions such as, Did my employer hire me because I’m qualified or because my employer sought to satisfy EEOC requirements? Did I get into graduate school because I’m qualified or because of their efforts to recruit minority students to their university? These questions haunt many black persons, because antiblack racism has a way of lessening the dignity of black persons, even those persons who have stellar qualifications and experience, by having them second-guess their qualifications and expertise while white mediocrity is excused and tolerated. Unfortunately, black persons in an antiblack world are not only required to justify their existence, but also to justify their existence given that they are a ‘‘problem people.’’ William Bennett’s infamous thought experiment in 2005 is a paradigmatic example of portraying African Americans as a problem people. In his thought experiment, Bennett proposed, for the sake of argument, that ‘‘if you wanted to reduce crime, you could—if that were your sole purpose—you could abort every black baby in this country, and your crime rate would go down.’’23 To his credit, he immediately said that doing so would be ‘‘impossible, ridiculous and morally reprehensible.’’24 Hence, we can agree with columnist Eugene Robison that Bennett did not intentionally advocate the genocidal extermination of African American children in the womb.25 But what led Bennett to propose such a thought experiment in the first place? Bennett explained that he was responding to Steven D. Levitt’s Freakonomics where Levitt ‘‘argues that the steep drop in crime in the United States over the past 15 years resulted in part from the Roe v. Wade decision legalizing abortion.’’26 Eugene Robinson summarizes Levitt’s position on this issue in these words: ‘‘Levitt’s thesis is essentially that unwanted children who grow up poor in

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single-parent households are more likely than other children to become criminals, and that Roe v. Wade resulted in fewer of these children being born. What he doesn’t do in the book is single out black children.’’27 However, this does not explain why Bennett associated criminality with African Americans. Given our examination of Gordon’s account of antiblack racism thus far, we can explain why Bennett associated criminality with African Americans in his argument against Levitt’s position this way: Bennett has uncritically accepted the racist stereotype that African Americans are inherently criminals to such an extent that he did not realize that one of the central premises in his argument presupposed the criminality of African Americans. The perception of black people as a ‘‘problem people’’ extends beyond unintentional white antiblack racists, however. This perception is held by other black persons toward blacks of lower socioeconomic statuses. Indeed, there are many black persons who interpret the behavior of other black persons through the lens of preconceived racist stereotypes, for example, black men are criminals, and black women are sexually promiscuous and welfare queens.28 The view that black persons are a problem people even affects much of the US national media coverage of African Americans. One of the more recent, high-profile examples of this phenomenon is the coverage of Hurricane Katrina and its aftermath in New Orleans. During the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, when many of those left behind went into abandoned grocery stores in search of food, many photographs were taken of them. There were two photographs taken that, if juxtaposed, show how African Americans are depicted as problem people. The first photograph, ‘‘circulated by the Associated Press, showed an African American man, wading through the flood, toting a bag and a case of cola. ‘A young man,’ read the caption, ‘walks through chest deep flood water after looting a grocery store.’ ’’29 The second photograph, ‘‘taken for Getty Images, showed a white couple, also wading through water, and toting a bag and backpacks. ‘Two residents,’ the caption read, ‘wade through chest-deep water after finding bread and

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soda from a local grocery store.’ ’’30 The caption for the African American photograph makes sense given the common assumption in American society that African Americans, especially young African American men, are criminals. This, in turn, reinforces the view of African Americans as a problem people. This is especially true when we compare the African American photograph to the Euro-American couple. Unlike the young African American man, the couple was not seen through the prism of the racial stereotype, ‘‘African Americans are criminals.’’ Instead, their act of theft was deemed acceptable due to emergency circumstances. This phenomenon of black-persons-seen-as-problem-people can be articulated along these lines: To view black people as a ‘‘problem people’’ is to view them as undifferentiated blob, a homogeneous bloc on a monolithic conglomerate. Each black person is interchangeable, indistinguishable or substitutable, since all black people are believed to have the same views and values, sentiments and sensibilities. Hence one set of negative stereotypes holds for all of them, no matter how high certain blacks may ascend in the white world. . . . This problematizing of black humanity deprives black people of individuality, diversity, and heterogeneity. It reduces black folk to abstractions and objects born of white fantasies and insecurities—as exotic or transgressive entities, as hypersexual or criminal animals.31

Antiblack racism does even more than convert black persons who have problems into problem people, however; it embeds racist stereotypes and oppressive practices into the social fabric of Western societies, making it difficult and even extraordinary for a black person to live a mundane life. That is to say, antiblack racism ‘‘make[s] its noxious values so familiar and frequent that they cease to function as objects of observation and reflection; they, in short, become unreflective and so steeped in familiarity that they become invisible.’’32 Gordon compares the ubiquitous nature of antiblack racism in Western societies to fish in water. As fish take being wet for granted, since their environing world is a liquid one, antiblack racists take antiblack

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racism for granted, since it permeates every corner of their social environment.33 Unlike in a nonracist society where ‘‘black presence would be no more unusual than any other presence in the world,’’34 and where black persons could be anonymous in social settings, the very presence of black persons arouses suspicions in an antiblack society. This is not to say that all responses of this kind are unwarranted. There are cases in which it would be prudent for someone to avoid specific groups of African-American men, for example, when they are wielding weapons and hurling obscenities at that person. However, most of the avoidances of young African-American males are unwarranted. Many persons just presume that young African-American males are criminals, and therefore they must be avoided. Young AfricanAmerican males are not the only ones who are considered criminals to be avoided, however. Even professional African-American women who are obviously well-dressed can be suspected of being criminals as they visit a friend living in a luxury condominium in downtown Philadelphia.35 It seems that the mere presence of a black person is sufficient for a Euro-American person or non–African-American person to justify avoiding him or her. We should be mindful that the imperative to avoid black persons is operative not only when there is a group of African Americans present, especially if the group of African Americans consists of young men, but also when there is only a single African-American man in the vicinity. I know of cases in which elderly and middle age Euro-American women have jerked their purses close to their bosom, like young schoolchildren of a bygone era held their textbooks to their chest, to protect their valuables from a well-dressed AfricanAmerican man standing near them in an elevator. I have seen a twenty-something Euro-American woman reach into her purse for her pepper spray as two or three African-American teenagers walk past her vehicle as she stood beside it. These teenagers were so engrossed in their conversation that they barely noticed where they were going; they seemed not even to notice the woman. Yet, their mere presence invokes a sense of alarm and fear in her. The absurdity

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of these instances seems obvious upon reflection. However, these instances of avoiding black presence are normal occurrences in an antiblack society. Indeed, it would be considered abnormal in an antiblack society not to be threatened by black presence. There is a related phenomenon where black presence is interpreted not as something to be avoided, but as something all too visible. I have mentioned this phenomenon earlier in this section, but I should describe how it is constituted phenomenologically. Gordon calls this phenomenon the ‘‘perversion of anonymity.’’36 This phenomenon is one where black persons’ anonymity is sacrificed on the altar of the white normative gaze.37 For example, once antiblack racists say, ‘‘Look, an African American,’’ which often amounts to saying politely, ‘‘Look, a nigger,’’ they have reduced the one identified as African American to the status of an object. As a walking, talking abstraction, the person identified as African American could just as well be any African American, and indeed typifies all African Americans. Nevertheless, the African American’s typicality does not afford her or him a sense of social anonymity as it would a Euro-American. Rather, it revokes her or his social anonymity and makes her or him hyper-visible. Everywhere he or she goes, he or she is an African American. In other words, her or his singularity is obliterated by the white normative gaze. Gordon provides a paradigmatic example of this phenomenon in the following passage, where he describes an incident that occurred while he was a professor at Purdue University: When I was a professor at Purdue University, I noticed that the seventeen black faculty members out of a faculty of two thousand were rarely seen walking across the campus. The situation was so racially hostile that many parked their cars right by the buildings in which they taught. I, on the other hand, decided I wanted to learn about the campus, so I took it upon myself to walk across the campus daily, either from one classroom to another on the opposite side of campus, or to the library at the campus’ center. Within a few weeks, editorials began to emerge in The Exponent, the student newspaper, attacking affirmative action at Purdue

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with appeals to the growing number—nay, deluge—of black faculty there. After a while, it occurred to me that as I passed some faculty and students, my ‘‘appearance’’ triggered an exponential effect in their consciousness. I had become more than a black faculty member; I became black faculty.38

As Gordon’s Purdue experience demonstrates, black persons along with other nonwhite persons are regarded by most Euro-Americans as an ever-present proxy for their entire race, ethnicity, or religious tradition. His experience also demonstrates concretely that objectification is perverse when an objectification, such as race, is regarded as comprising a person’s identity without remainder. At this point, we should see how racial categories were created in bad faith, institutionalized in bad faith, and normally function in Western societies in bad faith. Although racial categories are saturated in bad faith, many efforts to eliminate these categories often are done in bad faith. These eliminative efforts are done in bad faith because they are spearheaded by those who think that by simply eliminating all racial categories the problems caused by centuries of antiblack racism will be solved. These racial eliminativists act as though all we have to do to redress the detrimental consequences of past racial oppression, such as the wealth inequalities between African Americans and Euro-Americans, is to eliminate racial categories. What these racial eliminativists ignore is that while racial categories are socially constituted, their status as social constructions does not lessen their reality. As socially constituted group identifications, they still have palpable, real consequences for persons. For example, some scientists contend that racial categories are useful categories in the life sciences, since these categories enable medical professionals and geneticists to determine which populations of persons are more susceptible to certain medical conditions. This substantiates Gordon’s contention that to conceive of racial categories as fictitious just because they are not natural kinds is to reduce what is real to what exists independently of human agency. And to argue that social categories are not real unless they are of the same nature as natural kinds

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is to pursue an impossible dream. But this is precisely the dream held by racial eliminativists such as K. Anthony Appiah.39 Racial eliminativists have a point, however, when they contend that racial categories are problematic when used to differentiate persons, especially in the life sciences. In fact, this usage of race in the life sciences can be interpreted as controversial for at least two reasons. The first reason why it is controversial to consider race as a reliable indicator of the probability that a certain population of persons are at a greater risk of developing a certain medical condition is that racial categories are utterly context-relative. That is to say, racial categories are not invariant, stable concepts that denote the same referents regardless of when they are uttered by someone. On the contrary, the referents of racial categories are often different from culture to culture, from country to country, from one historical period to another, and even from generation to generation within the same country. Michael Root states this point in these terms: ‘‘Some men who are black in New Orleans now would have been octoroons there some years ago or would be white in Brazil today. Socrates had no race in ancient Athens, though he would be a white man in Minnesota.’’40 A second reason why it is controversial to consider race as a reliable indicator of the probability that a certain population of persons are at a greater risk of developing a certain medical condition is that racial categories reinforce racial hierarchies. These hierarchies, in turn, are detrimental to those persons at the bottom, which, in the United States, is often times urban and rural African Americans. Leonard Harris is one of many critical theorists of race who thinks that racial categories are by their very nature racist, and accordingly should be phased out and replaced with nonracial ethnic identities.41 Examining the issue of the legitimacy of racial categories in the life sciences alongside Harris’s position on racial categories can lead one to ask the following questions: Given the detrimental consequences of racial categories for Africana persons, should we strive for a postracial future? Perhaps a future when race no longer exists and in

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which racial categories are superseded by ethnic and cultural identifications (for example, Appiah, Henry Louis Gates Jr., Clarence Shole´ Johnson, David McClean, and Emmanuel Eze)? Or a future when a postmetaphysical humanism reigns and racial identifications are no longer used, except in cases in which groups of persons would receive psychological and emotional benefits from identifying themselves with a racial category (for example, Lorenzo Simpson)? We could combine all these questions into a single question and phrase that question in Gordonian terms: Can we identify ourselves as racialized persons and not live in bad faith? I am inclined to answer the above question in the affirmative at least in the case of African Americans, given that the process of racialization in the United States annihilated the ethnic particularities of virtually all the enslaved Africana persons, thus forcing them and their descendents to construct their ethnic identities out of their racial identities. Accordingly, contemporary African Americans’ cultural heritage is intimately tied to their constructed ‘‘racial’’ identity. ‘‘African American,’’ then, functions as a designation of a racialethnic identity. So, unlike racial eliminativists such as Johnson and Appiah, I think that it is not only possible to invest the racialized identity ‘‘African American’’ with an authentic cultural significance, but that it has been done to varying degrees of success throughout the history of African Americans in the United States.42 Besides, if African Americans completely relinquished their racial-ethnic identity, there would be no effective means of legally remedying discrimination against African Americans in residential housing, employment, loans, and so forth.43 At this point, I should critically reply to Zack’s existential argument in her 1997 essay ‘‘Race, Life, Death, Identity, Tragedy, and Good Faith.’’44 As I mentioned in the introduction, if Zack’s existential argument is persuasive and true, then my view would be a rationalization for African Americans living in bad faith. I would take such a state of affairs as being devastating to my position. After all, I would

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like this account of antiblack racism and the potential life-affirming features of racial identities to not be the products of bad faith. In ‘‘Race, Life, Death, Identity, Tragedy, and Good Faith,’’ Zack advances an existentialist critique of attempts to rehabilitate racial blackness such that it is no longer than oppressive identity. I think Jason Hill does a very good job summarizing Zack’s existentialism argument in his book Being a Cosmopolitan,45 and I will outline Zack’s argument following Hill’s example. Zack cannot conceive of racial identities as being anything other than third-person classification of persons owing to these identities being dependent on a false biological view of being human.46 Racial identities are false because they do not correspond to any definite biological group of people.47 Nevertheless, racial identities are still a common way to categorize people into groups. This state of affairs is problematic not only because we continue to use an empirically false classificatory system to identify people. It is problematic because racial identifications unnecessarily restrict people’s personal agency. Rather than being able to craft one’s own selfidentity, racial identifications often are imposed on people from the outside. One is born into a particular racial identification, or one is placed into a racial identification depending on one’s phenotype or the phenotype of one or more of one’s ancestors. In an antiblack environment, willingly identifying oneself as nonwhite necessarily limits one’s personal agency. No matter what one does, many people socialized in a racialist environment will view that person to be an embodiment of a racial type, along with all the stereotypes associated with that type. Any attempt to resist the detrimental consequences of being racialized, while simultaneously self-identifying as a racialized person, undermines one’s agency. This is so because rehabilitating a marginalized racial identity requires one to forfeit one’s personal agency to a large degree.48 Zack thinks that there is no way to escape the following conclusion if one seeks to self-identify as a racialized person: Racial identities are pathological and self-defeating with respect to affirming and exercising one’s agency. As Zack notes, ‘‘A

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racialized person cannot effectively resist racism from within a racialized identity. This is perhaps a great irony about racialized existence: one accepts that others have said one is this; one sees that one is not this; one’s resistance in action requires some affirmation of oneself as this one is not.’’49 Zack’s conclusion becomes more evidence when one thinks about the existential significance of death in one’s life. Once one accepts death, really accepts death as one’s inevitable fate, then one will desire to throw off those social roles and commitments that had weighed one down. For people whose identity had been tied to a racial group who has been oppressed and unjustly discriminated against, accepting death would involve that person desiring to live as unencumbered by societal baggage as one could for the remainder of one’s life. To accomplish this goal, one would need to discard such oppressive identities as being racially black, at least in the context of the US.50 Zack thinks that the phenomenon of death exposes the absurdity of willingly accepting being racialized when in the end we are not the embodiment of a race, just as we are not reducible to any of the social roles others project onto us. When faced with our own mortality, we will affirm and live by those identities that we select for ourselves and will enable us to exercise our agency. Racial identities unnecessarily limit our agency; they are indeed unnecessarily oppressive and constricting. Hence, we should actively work to undermine these identities and one day to eliminate them. Only by doing that can we strive to live authenticity, that is, live lives where we can freely choose who we desire to be without being encumbered by oppressive identities. Now, if, say, a person of African descent decides to be an appreciator of the blues, that person should do so not owing to some sense of pride at that music originating from people who happen to be members of one’s racial group, but because that person appreciates listening to that genre of music.51 Cultural artifacts, then, are not the property of any particular racial group, then. Someone who has not historically been racialized as African American can just as easily appreciate the blues as a person who has been racialized as an African American. To say otherwise would be to live in bad faith.

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I would reply to Zack’s existentialist critique of my position along these lines: Zack’s position presupposes not only that being racially identified as black by others is necessarily a bad thing, but also that identifying oneself as being racially black necessarily limits one’s agency. I agree with her account of the origin of modern racial identifications and how identifying people as nonwhite justified the exploitation and oppression of entire groups of people for hundreds of years. However, I think she commits the genetic fallacy in her existentialist argument against identifying oneself using racial identities. In other words, she takes the history of racial identification and uses that history to deny the possibility of rehabilitating racial blackness to mean anything other than being in a subservience and oppressive position with respect to the dominant culture. I would contend that even though Zack is right that black racial identification has been historically tied to being a member of an oppressed group, black racial identities today are not necessarily tied to being a member of a victimized and oppressed group. Black racial identities can actually be legitimate sources of pride and agency for people of sub-Saharan descent whose ancestors were enslaved in the Americas, particularly in the United States. That pride is not necessarily a sign of bad faith; rather, it can be understood as a conscious acknowledgement that while one’s identity is not reducible to one’s racial identity, being proud of being African American in an antiblack world is a legitimate exercise of one’s agency. I think this is a sufficient rejoinder to Zack’s existentialist argument against positions like mine. Let us return to Gordon’s existential phenomenological account of antiblack racism. Once we acknowledge that racial categories are real in the sense that they have socio-historical effects on persons, we can better identify how they function in postsegregation Western societies. In the spirit of Gordon’s existential phenomenology of antiblack racism, I will explain how these categories affect African Americans in the postsegregationist era America to add a dimension of specificity to our analysis. Even in a postsegregationist era when US racial problems are no longer seen exclusively in terms of a black/white binary, but more in

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terms of a white-nonwhite continuum, a de facto black/white binary is still operative. A relatively recent example demonstrating how a de facto black/white binary is still operative is the comments that the then President of Mexico Vicente Fox made to a group of Texas businesspersons on May 13, 2005. While talking to the Texas businesspersons, Fox said: ‘‘There is no doubt that Mexicans, filled with dignity, willingness and ability to work, are doing jobs that not even blacks want to do there in the United States.’’52 Fox knew that in order to portray nonwhite Mexican migrants in a positive light to the American businesspersons he had to highlight their similarity to EuroAmericans. His comments indicate that he thought he could move nonwhite Mexican migrants closer to Euro-Americans by distancing them from African Americans. He accomplishes this by implying that Mexican migrants are willing to do jobs that not even African Americans, who presumably occupy the lowest rungs of American society, would do. This move would identify Mexican migrants as persons who shared the Euro-American work ethic by contrasting them with African Americans who are stereotypically viewed as lazy and unappreciative of the economic opportunities available to them. Fox’s comments are not aberrations; they continue a long tradition of non-Africana and nonwhite persons disassociating themselves from blackness. Efforts by non-Africana and nonwhite persons to disassociate themselves from blackness are at least as old as the nineteenth-century, where some brown (Hispanic) and yellow (Asian) persons attempted to convince the US judicial system that they were legally white, or at least not legally black. Gary Y. Okihiro, for example, notes: ‘‘Between 1878 and 1909, American courts heard twelve naturalization cases that involved applicants from China, Japan, Burma, and Hawaii, along with two petitions of persons of mixed race, and one from a Mexican American. All claimed the cover of whiteness, and all were deemed to be nonwhite.’’53 What is significant about these cases is not that every petitioner failed to be deemed as legally white, but that every petitioner sought to be recognized as white. In all these cases, all petitioners knew it

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was desirable to distance themselves as far from blackness as legally possible. The negative consequences of being identified as black were so horrible in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries that even enslaved Africana persons who did not look phenotypically black legally sought to be identified as non-black. Most often, they sought to be legally declared Native American.54 That is not all; there have been countless instances when light-skinned African Americans have successfully ‘‘passed’’ for whites throughout American history to avoid the stigma of being an Africana person in an antiblack society. Here I should further note that the social stigma associated with blackness is not a relic of the eras of slavery, post-Reconstruction, and Jim Crow. This social stigma survives in the form of what some social scientists call laissez-faire (antiblack) racism. Lawrence Bobo, James Kluegel, and Ryan Smith conceive of laissez-faire racism in these terms: ‘‘Laissez-faire [antiblack] racism involves persistent negative stereotyping of African Americans, a tendency to blame blacks themselves for the black-white gap in socioeconomic standing, and resistance to meaningful policy efforts to ameliorate US racist social conditions and institutions.’’55 Laissez-faire antiblack racism is the sort of racism that arose after the dismantlement of Jim Crow racism, that is, legalized institutional segregation and racial discrimination against African Americans.56 While this sort of racism no longer argues that African Americans are intrinsically inferior to EuroAmericans, it condones ‘‘the institutionalized racial inequalities created by the long era of slavery followed by Jim Crow racism.’’ This is because laissez-faire racists explain contemporary inequalities between African Americans and Euro-Americans in terms of cultural and volitional factors, for example, poor work ethic and a proclivity for criminal behavior amongst African Americans.57 Under laissezfaire racism, African Americans still suffer social stigma, and antiblack racist stereotypes are warranted due the continued existence of de facto institutional racial inequalities after decades-long societal efforts to address historical economic and social inequalities affecting African Americans.58

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An example of present-day lassiez-faire antiblack racism is the decades-long white backlash against affirmative action programs in employment and postsecondary education admissions. Three of the most recent manifestations of this white backlash are the passage of the 1996 California Civil Rights Initiative (Proposition 209), the 1998 Washington Civil Right Initiative, and the 2006 Michigan Civil Rights Initiative.59 This white backlash against affirmative action programs can be interpreted as part of a general backlash in the United States against the waning of white racial hegemony. Some think that this backlash is based on the fear white persons have of losing their privileged status.60 Yet, this white backlash is not fueled by white fear alone; it has also been (and continues to be) fueled by some neoconservative African-American intellectuals, who think that the implementation of race-neutral governmental policies is preferable to continued race-conscious governmental policies devoted to redressing institutionalized racial inequalities.61 Moreover, laissez-faire antiblack racism manifests itself in the tendency among some first-generation Caribbean and African immigrants to the United States to see African Americans as embodying the racist stereotypes held by many Euro-Americans.62 As evidence of this phenomenon, I will recount an incident from my own life. During the first year of my graduate studies in philosophy, I had a Nigerian-born engineering student at the dorm I resided in inform me that I was exceptional, because I did not embody the ‘‘typical’’ African American on my campus: academically lazy, uncouth, and loud. At first, I could not believe what I had heard, but as I thought about his comment for a while, it made sense. I could imagine how beneficial it is for Africana persons who have decided to immigrate to America to hold racist attitudes towards African Americans. That way, they can disassociate themselves from African Americans and (hopefully) shield themselves from the full-brunt of Euro-Americans antiblack racism. By doing so, they can say to Euro-Americans and other non–African Americans, ‘‘We might be Africans or of African descent, but at least we are not African Americans.’’63

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In such an environment, where people of African descent would be willing to disavow being racially black because of the stigma associated with being identified as being racially black, proponents of Marcel’s reflective method, such as myself, need to examine how being racially black is seen by many to be a depersonalizing thing. Moreover, a proponent of Marcel’s reflective method needs to examine how a philosopher who asserted that one of his fundamental commitments is to ‘‘condemn absolutely every kind of racism’’64 could neglect to identify and combat the depersonalizing effects of antiblack racism on Africana persons in his sociopolitical thought. The next chapter is my attempt to address these two issues.

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iven that Marcel asserts that one of a philosopher’s fundamental commitments is to ‘‘condemn absolutely every kind of racism,’’1 how is it possible for Marcel himself to neglect the depersonalizing effects of antiblack racism on Africana persons in his sociopolitical thought? Did not Marcel condemn legalized segregation that African Americans suffered during the early 1960s throughout the American South?2 Michael Novak recalls that while Marcel visited the United States in the fall of 1961: ‘‘He was severely distressed by the situation of the negro in the United States—on trains, in restaurants, in hotels.’’3 Marcel then told Novak that he expected inequality in Hitler’s Germany, but not in early 1960s America, and that ‘‘he could not imagine living at peace with himself in America while that battle remained unwon.’’4 Despite Marcel’s expressed concern over the plight of African Americans, he never engaged, to my knowledge, in any detailed philosophical examination of the depersonalizing effects of antiblack racism on African Americans or anyone { 10 1 }

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else in the African diaspora. This chapter will explain why I think Marcel neglected the effects of antiblack racism on Africana persons in his sociopolitical thought. I think Marcel neglected how antiblack racism depersonalizes Africana persons because he unwittingly accepted what one could call a colonialist logic with respect to Africana persons. When viewed from the vantage point of a colonialist logic, antiblack racism functions as a species of colonialism. When it comes to recognizing the effects of antiblack racism on people, it is fine for a person of European descent (especially Western European descent) to recognize and condemn the unjust discrimination of people of African descent just so long as those persons who are affected by antiblack racism are not the colonized (and racialized) subjects of one’s home nation-state. That is so because recognizing the unjust racial discrimination of another nation-state’s colonized subjects does not disturb the colonial order (or, after the end of official colonial rule, neocolonial order) that one has pledged allegiance. In Marcel’s case, his criticism of Jim Crow segregation does not confront the injustices of French colonial rule of Southeast Asia, central Africa, Madagascar, and the French Caribbean. In short, criticizing Jim Crow segregation does not disrupt French colonialism. This is precisely why Marcel can ‘‘afford’’ to be horrified by Jim Crow segregation in the American South and less able to recognize the systematic racial discrimination of Africana colonized, and later neocolonial, subjects. Indeed, one can plausibly interpret Marcel’s relative silence on the injustices of France’s colonial rule over foreign people, especially in central Africa and in the French Caribbean, as the logical consequence of his uncritical acceptance of a colonialist logic. For example, in his most sustained articulation of his sociopolitical thought, Man against Mass Society, Marcel belittles the detrimental effects of colonization when he writes, ‘‘in some ways a colonizing power can have a beneficial effect on the colonized peoples themselves.’’5 Even if we grant Marcel’s point that colonization can have beneficial effects on colonized persons in some ways—for example, better access to communication devices and an improved health care infrastructure (at

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least in urban regions)—this does not lessen the fact that colonization has depersonalizing effects on the colonized. The most significant of these depersonalizing effects is perhaps the denial of full personhood to the colonized. More specifically, colonized persons are regarded as persons by the colonizer only insofar as they live up to Western European standards of aesthetics, religious belief, rationality, and social organization. Any deviation from these Western European standards makes one less of a person, and since no colonized person can ever live up to these standards perfectly, none of them is ever considered a full person. The depersonalization of the colonized is augmented by the fact that, in the case of France and other Western European nation-states, colonialism was often justified by antiblack racialist reasoning. In its most beneficent form, the antiblack racialist reasoning used to justify colonialism in Africa and the Caribbean argued that the colonization of non-European persons by Europeans and those of European descent could improve not only the material conditions of the colonized, but also improve their moral and spiritual condition. This was one of Hegel’s justifications for the colonization of sub-Saharan Africa. This is also dimly echoed in Marcel’s views about decolonization and the participation of newly independent African countries in the United Nations. He thought that these newly independent nation-states should not have the same voting rights in the UN General Assembly as ‘‘a great power,’’ presumably because they have not earned the right to contribute to international affairs at the same level of, say, the United States or France.6 Accordingly, these nation-states should be guided by more established nation-states, for example, their former colonizers, until they reach political maturity. If not, these wayward, emancipated minors will come under the sway of undesirable role models, for example, Communist China and the Soviet Union. By itself, Marcel’s comment concerning the former French Union countries and their participation in the UN General Assembly is more paternalistic than racist. However, once his opinion is seen as part of a larger sociopolitical thought that is insensitive to

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the concerns of Africana persons, Marcel’s sociopolitical thought advances a weak version of antiblack racialist reasoning. There is further evidence that Marcel neglected the depersonalization of Africana persons in his sociopolitical thought. He does not recognize the problematic nature of his acceptance of the following contention: The former colonized populations of ‘‘Dark Africa’’ resent the fact that they were ‘‘deprived of a revolution, [as well as] frustrated and bitter because they had received as a gift what apparently they would have preferred to snatch, like spoils after a battle.’’7 His stance is problematic because it does not appreciate how decolonization, in and of itself, does not eliminate the detrimental effects of colonial rule. After official decolonization, the formerly colonized still have to reform the economic and governmental infrastructure of their countries in order to remove the depersonalizing remnants of colonial rule. Otherwise, the formerly colonized still would view themselves as less than full persons due to their not embodying the cultural values and societal norms of Western Europe. One could ask: How is the phenomenon of the formerly colonized judging themselves using the standards of the colonial powers related to antiblack racism? Have not many Euro-Americans felt less than full persons when judged by the cultural values and societal norms of Western Europe? For example, Ralph Waldo Emerson critiqued this phenomenon in America in his 1837 address to the Harvard Phi Beta Kappa Society, ‘‘The American Scholar.’’8 Is not Emerson’s critique of Euro-Americans’ attachment to Western European intellectual traditions and values in 1830s America the same postcolonial critique of Western European cultural values and societal norms that I have been advancing in this section? I would argue that, no, it is not the same. While it might be possible to interpret Emerson’s critique of EuroAmericans’ attachment to Western European, especially British, cultural values and societal norms as a ‘‘post-colonial’’ critique, such a critique would not be the same sort of ‘‘postcolonial’’ critique of Western colonialism and Western modernity that contemporary postcolonial theorists perform. That is because Emerson, even though he technically lived in a postcolonial environment, that ‘‘postcolonial’’

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environment was already entertaining colonial ambitions in the Western Hemisphere. Moreover, it had already practiced colonial techniques of subjugating the native populations for over a hundred years by the time Emerson gave his ‘‘American Scholar’’ address. Additionally, by 1837 the United States had constructed a seventeenth-century British-style system of racialized colonialism of Native Americans and of racialized slavery in the American South that rivaled any racialized colonialism Britain practiced during the early 1800s. Fanon attacks the above-mentioned mentality directly in the Wretched of the Earth. In that work, Fanon depicts this mentality as a process where ‘‘the colonized often usurp the demeaning stereotypes of the colonizer and reshape them into the stereotypes that define their self-images.’’9 Leonard Harris notes how these stereotypes, refurbished to bolster the bourgeoisie’s self-esteem and privilege, ‘‘are used to make traditions that have little to do with the real distribution of power.’’10 The ruling elite in these former colonies, in turn, cultivate the Western image of non-Europeans as exotic beings in order to promote tourism, while they neglect to construct a viable government and national economy that benefits their populace. Moreover, the ruling elite in these former colonies crave the material comforts of Western modernity, but without assuming responsibility for providing these material comforts to a majority of their populations in a nondemeaning manner. Fanon puts this point bluntly in this excerpt from The Wretched of the Earth: The national bourgeoisie establishes holiday resorts and playgrounds for entertaining the Western bourgeoisie. This sector goes by the name of tourism and becomes a national industry for this very purpose. We only have to look at what has happened in Latin America if we want proof of the way the ex-colonized bourgeoisie can be transformed into ‘‘party’’ organizer. The casinos in Havana and Mexico City, the beaches of Rio, Copacabana, and Acapulco, the young Brazilian and Mexican girls, the thirteen-year-old mestizas, are the scars of this depravation of the national bourgeoisie. Because it is lacking in ideas, because it is inward-looking, cut off from the people, sapped by its congenital

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incapacity to evaluate issues on the basis of the nation as a whole, the national bourgeoisie assumes the role of manager for the companies of the West and turns its country virtually into a bordello for Europe. Once again we need only to look at the pitiful spectacle of certain republics in Latin America. U.S. businessmen, banking magnates and technocrats jet ‘‘down to the tropics,’’ and for a week to ten days wallow in the sweet depravity of their private ‘‘reserves.’’11

It should be obvious by now that Marcel’s sociopolitical thought cannot accommodate a Fanonian critique of the process of Africana depersonalization, for he does not recognize how race-based colonialism is a form of depersonalization. Yet another example of how Marcel’s sociopolitical thought neglects the depersonalization of Africana persons is that when Marcel denounced ‘‘the widespread torture by the French army in the Algerian war,’’12 he did so not on behalf of the Algerians who were tortured. He did so only because these acts of torture against the Algerians insurgents and non-combatants were unbecoming of French citizens. That is, he seemed less concerned about the depersonalizing effects of the torture on Algerians than about maintaining the supposed elevated moral status of France.13 In addition, Marcel uncritically accepts some of the blatantly racist stereotypes of Africana persons held by most white Western European (and Euro-American) persons of his era. His uncritical acceptance of blatantly racist stereotypes of African persons is most evident in the autobiographical essay he wrote for The Philosophy of Gabriel Marcel. Of course, he himself does not write anything obviously racist concerning Africana persons in that autobiographical essay. Nevertheless, in that essay he recounts a conversation he had on a suburban train in the mid-1940s after he had delivered a lecture in Lille. This is how Marcel recalls that conversation over twenty years later: I had given a lecture in Lille during which I had spoken, by way of criticism, of Sartrean existentialism. In the suburban train going back to Paris, one of the listeners congratulated me, but her

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companion cried: ‘‘Sir, what a horror, existentialism! I have a friend whose son is an existentialist; he lives in a kitchen with a Negro woman!’’14

Given Marcel’s professed commitment to combat racism in all its forms, he should have criticized that person’s racist comments immediately after they were uttered. Marcel should have questioned the association of ‘‘Negro woman’’ with ‘‘a woman of disrepute.’’ Marcel’s silence on this matter is problematic enough. It is even more problematic that Marcel did not criticize that person’s racist comments when recounting the conversation over two decades after it occurred. Rather than using that conversation as an illustration of how racist stereotypes depersonalize certain groups of persons by devaluing them, he offered this conversation as an illustration of why he was warranted in disassociating himself from the label, ‘‘Christian existentialist.’’15 One could argue that Marcel’s uncritical acceptance of racist stereotypes is just a case of ignorance on issues concerning antiblack racism, and not an example of blatant racism. Hence, we should excuse Marcel’s failure to critique the woman’s racist comments. Such reasoning does not excuse Marcel’s uncritical acceptance of racist stereotypes, however. Instead, it serves as an example of how even someone who is committed to battling racism can fall into the trap of colonialist logic. If what we have mentioned earlier was not sufficient to judge Marcel’s sociopolitical thought as not upholding Marcel’s professed commitment to combat racism in all its forms, here is another illustration of how his sociopolitical thought fails to uphold that commitment: Marcel complains more about the supposed depersonalization of white French citizens than the systemic depersonalization of African persons (and others who are considered non-white). Next, I will explain why this demonstrates Marcel’s failure to combat racism in all its forms. Marcel often complains in such texts as Man against Mass Society about how the French under the German occupation were depersonalized in the sense that they were regarded as barely more than ‘‘index

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card[s] that can be sent to a central office and whose entries will determine the further treatment of the individual.’’16 Marcel even equates such a situation as a particular manifestation of technological enframing, which is equivalent to ‘‘an unrestrained, even hyperbolic colonialism.’’17 Here Marcel does sound like an annoyed French bourgeois, given that at least he was still regarded as a person. Of course, the French middle class was denied many civil rights as inhabitants of an occupied country and subject to labor conscription; in short, they were conquered persons.18 Nevertheless, they were still regarded as persons. Marcel ignores the fact that those persons who are considered black in an antiblack world are not considered to be persons at all, not even conquered persons. They are seen at best as potential persons who could achieve the status of honorary persons only if they were willing to convert themselves culturally, aesthetically, and psychologically into white persons. Unfortunately, Marcel’s position is an unwittingly weak version of this position. Given my explication of Gordon’s existential phenomenological account of antiblack racism in chapter 4, one can see why Marcel’s critique of Western modernity is an inadequate one: Marcel never addresses a major source of depersonalization in Western modernity, namely antiblack racism. Gordon’s existential phenomenology of anitblack racism, on the other hand, gets there by exposing the ‘‘underside of modernity,’’ as Enrique Dussel calls it, where the original telos of modern Europe (in Husserl’s spiritualized sense of Europe in his Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology19) included, from its birth, the spirit of abstraction and its tendency to depersonalize persons along racial lines, with the racial lines often expressed in terms of ‘‘culture.’’20 So Marcel is right to worry about Western modernity’s tendency to devalue human personhood. However, he is blind to the fact that the conditions he had worried would befall Western Europeans in late modernity had already been in existence for centuries. Marcel’s dread at living in a depersonalized world had already been a reality for centuries prior to his birth in the lives of enslaved and colonized Africana persons. This depersonalized world has been described by Gordon in this passage describing how an Africana slave child in the eighteenth

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or early nineteenth century might have experienced the underside of Western modernity: A child is born on a plantation. He receives love, kindness, and nourishment from his mother. He doesn’t see her for many hours during the day except when it’s time to be fed. One day, when he is old enough to walk and speak, he decides to pursue his mother and discovers a peculiar point in the distance. As he attempts to reach it, he hears the crack of the whip. He attempts to continue anyway, but this time the whip lashes across his back and tears open his flesh.21

After he tells this narrative, Gordon interprets it in terms of JeanPaul Sartre’s distinction between human transcendence and human facticity: [The slave boy’s] situation becomes clear: his factical horizon— that is, where his liberty extends—is different from others’ factical horizon. His horizon stops short of the point in the distance, but others roam them freely. He becomes conscious of his situation as a slave. . . . Yet the slave is also simultaneously aware of not fully being a slave; he is, after all, conscious of the beyond.22

Given Gordon’s interpretative framework, the child could not help but experience his existence as a personal one despite being aware that he is regarded by his ‘‘owners’’ as chattel property. He could not help but experience himself as a person, even though he is regarded as an object, as he remembers his mother’s caress; the taste of her milk; the sound of her voice; and the slightly sweet, musty, earthy smell of her skin. Not even the slave owner’s whip could thoroughly negate the personhood of the slave boy. Neither can contemporary antitblack racism thoroughly imprison black persons in the penitentiary of abstractions. Gordon’s account of antiblack racism not only exposes the underside of Western modernity, but also exposes the paradoxical character of modern Europe’s telos. Given Gordon’s account, he would agree with what West writes in the following passage: ‘‘The great paradox of Western modernity is that democracy flourished for [Western] Europeans, especially men of property, alongside the flowering of the

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transatlantic slave trade and New World slavery. Global capitalism and nascent nationalism were predicated initially on terrors and horrors visited on enslaved Africans on the way to, or in, the New World.’’23 This should come as no surprise, for the ‘‘I conquer’’ of fifteenth-century Western Europe and its colonization of the western hemisphere and Africa is the precursor to the seventeenth-century Cartesian ‘‘I think.’’ Indeed, one cannot utter the Cartesian ‘‘I think’’ without presupposing a sense of mastering the non-I, which in turn cannot be conceived of apart from the colonial desire to dominate foreign lands and physically master non-European person.24 This desire to ‘‘colonize the lifeworld’’25 of non-Europeans motivated Western Europeans at home and abroad to negate the meaningfulness of non-European personhood, as evidenced by the enslavement of African persons, the colonization of Asian lands, the genocide of indigenous persons throughout the Americas, and the erosion of the moral status of those Africans who participated in the transatlantic slave trade by selling their fellow Africans to European traders. The decades-old, poststructuralist ‘‘end of Man’’ discourse in continental philosophy can be understood as an advanced symptom of the diseased telos of European thought. In fact, it can be understood as what happens when those previously sheltered from the depersonalizing effects of Western modernity discover that the modern Western ideas of humanity and person are built on contradictory foundations, foundations built as much on the corpses of indigenous persons, the exploitation of colonized subjects, and the enslavement of millions upon millions of Africana persons as they were built on life-affirming, Renaissance, humanistic values. Sartre remarks on the foulness of these foundations in this lengthy passage from his preface to Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth: You know full well we are exploiters. You know full well we have taken the gold and minerals and then oil of the ‘‘new continents,’’ and shipped them back to the old metropolises. Not without excellent results in the shape of palaces, cathedrals, centers of industry; and then when crisis loomed, the colonial markets were there to cushion the blow or deflect it. Stuffed with wealth,

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Europe granted humanity de jure to all its inhabitants: for us, a man means an accomplice, for we have all profited from colonial exploitation. This pale, bloated continent ended up lapsing into what Fanon rightly calls ‘‘narcissism.’’ Cocteau was irritated by Paris, ‘‘this city that never stops talking about herself.’’ And Europe, what else is it doing? And that super-European monster, North America? What empty chatter: liberty, equality, fraternity, love, honor, country, and who knows what else? This did not prevent us from making racist remarks at the same time: dirty nigger, filthy Jew, dirty Arab. Noble minds, liberal and sympathetic— neocolonialists, in other words—claimed to be shocked by this inconsistency, since the only way the European could make himself man was by fabricating slaves and monsters. As long as the status of ‘‘native’’ existed, the imposture remained unmasked. We saw in the human species an abstract premise of universality that served as a pretext for concealing more concrete practices. . . . Our beloved values are losing their feathers; if you take a closer look there is not one that isn’t tainted with blood.26

We can interpret Sartre’s comments above as affirming the truth of Fanon’s often-quoted passage: ‘‘The disaster of the man [sic] of color lies in the fact that he was enslaved. The disaster and the inhumanity of the white man [sic] lie in the fact that somewhere he has killed man [sic].’’27 In other words, Western civilization has robbed ‘‘humanity’’ of any significance by systematically negating the personhood of nonEuropeans. This is so because by systematically negating the personhood of non-Europeans, one has negated the dignity and worth of personhood in general, including the personhood of Europeans and their descendants. This is what Gordon means when he writes in the last chapter of Bad Faith and Antiblack Racism: To be an unwavering antiblack racist ‘‘is to capitulate to others’ dehumanization and one’s own.’’28 We should remember, though, that Gordon does not reject Western modernity in toto. He just rejects its false universality and its exclusion of Africana persons and other non-European persons in its quest for universality. Gordon explains the character of his critique of Western modernity as follows: I am not so much antimodern as I am anti-Eurocentrism. There are elements of modernity that I avow and elements that I reject.

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To reject Eurocentrism is not identical to rejecting European civilization in toto or rejecting modernity, and it is a seriously racist form of reasoning that would make white people the only bearers of a modern consciousness. One would have to conclude, in fact, that black people are incapable of being modern or developing their own forms of modernity or alternatives beyond premodernity, modernity, and postmodernity. What is to be made of the work of Sylvia Wynter, for example, which is a form of poststructuralism that is not postmodern? If modernism can be seen as an effort to decenter European hegemony over the past through the development of an alternative future, then Wynter’s effort to develop a semiotic order that is neither modern European nor postmodern European, but instead Africana critical modernism, is a modern project indeed.29

What should we take from Gordon’s existential phenomenological account of antiblack racism? We should heed Gordon’s admonishment that most modern European and Euro-American philosophers, including Marcel, traditionally have relegated most, if not all, nonEuropean persons to the periphery of their philosophical concerns. This state of affairs is to be expected given the prevalence of antiblack racism in modern Western societies. One could object that given the fallibility and limitations of humans and their philosophic thought, no European or Euro-American philosopher could ever be concerned adequately with every sort of human person in the world. Nevertheless, in the case of Marcel, for him to say that one of his philosophy’s central commitments is to combat racism in late Western modernity, and for him not to describe the depersonalization of Africana persons at all, is unacceptable. This is especially true, given that Western Europe’s global dominance, during what Cornel West calls the Age of Europe (1492–1945), was built on the backs of depersonalized Africana persons, along with depersonalized indigenous, nonwhite peoples throughout the Americas, Australia, and Asia. At last we come to the question: What would Marcel’s reflective method coupled with Gordon’s existential phenomenological insights concerning antiblack racism look like, at least in outline form? This question will be answered in the conclusion.

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conclusion Imagining an Antiracist Humanistic Theism

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think that we are now in a position to outline, in very broad strokes, a Marcellian reflective method that takes seriously Gordon’s existential phenomenological account of antiblack racism. Such a modified Marcellian reflective method is still a phenomenological metaphysics. What I mean by phenomenological metaphysics is a metaphysics in which one refuses to investigate the essential structures of a mind-independent reality and concentrates, instead, on examining those ethical and religious values (for example, hope and faith) that enable persons to be closer to one another in a spiritual sense. Yet, metaphysics in this sense transcends philosophy proper; it involves performing a teleological suspension of philosophy. To avoid falling into the spirit of abstraction (or, in Sartrean terms, the spirit of seriousness), a Marcellian metaphysics regards values as potencies with normative force that do not technically exist until persons actualize them in their actions. Hence, values do not exist in a Platonic realm. What this sort of metaphysics advances is an existential Platonism in which values are nonexistent in a spatiotemporal { 11 3 }

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sense (that is, as things), but could potentially be acted upon by persons given the right circumstances and our willingness to act on them in those circumstances. As nonactualized potencies, values tug at us, but we have the freedom to refuse them and often times the freedom not to even acknowledge their normative force. The same holds true of the divine, given that it is the wellspring of ethical and religious values. Yet this freedom is circumscribed by our facticity. So there is a perpetual dialectical tension between viewing ourselves as agents in the world (that is, persons) and viewing ourselves as object-bodies, or objects subject to deterministic natural forces. Due to its recognition of the significance of personhood in human existence, a Marcellian phenomenological metaphysics seeks to combat depersonalization wherever and whenever it occurs. In late Western modernity, there are at least two prevalent means of depersonalizing persons, namely, technological advances and antiblack racism. A Marcellian metaphysician battles the depersonalizing tendencies of technological advances by reminding others that neither they nor the environing world are merely natural resources to be used. A Marcellian metaphysician aims to remind us that we can also view our world as a sacred realm where personhood is of the utmost importance and where persons are responsible for health and sustainability of our environing world. Since personhood is of the utmost importance for a Marcellian metaphysician, and he or she lives in an antiblack world, he or she is obligated to oppose and actively combat the detrimental effects of antiblack racism on Africana persons. One way he or she can do so is by affirming the personhood of Africana persons, regardless of where they reside or regardless of their ancestry. But in order to affirm the personhood of Africana persons, the Marcellian metaphysician first has to unveil the centuries-old efforts to depersonalize Africana persons and show how these efforts still operate in late modern Western societies. This also leads him or her to reinterpret Marcel’s ethico-religious values in such a manner that they serve to affirm the personhood of Africana persons and the siblinghood of all humanity.

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What underlies the Marcellian metaphysician’s battle against depersonalization in late Western modernity is a theologico-political imperative, an imperative where one is obligated to oppose the unjust discrimination and oppression resulting from African Americans living in an antiblack society. Yet, there are no definite guidelines for how one should act in accord with this imperative. Alas, this is the curse of any metaphysical thought, given its indeterminate and teleological nature. The inherent vagueness of metaphysical thought itself complicates any attempts to conduct oneself, and even implement societal policies, in accord with this theologico-political imperative. This leaves us with the problem of practical indeterminacy in actualizing the telos of an antiracist theologico-political imperative. Regretfully, metaphysical reflection alone cannot solve this problem. In just the African-American religious tradition alone, where this theologico-political imperative has been explicit for centuries, its telos has been manifested in a variety of ways. There have been AfricanAmerican religious thinkers who have understood this theologicopolitical imperative as demanding that African Americans embrace a cultural nationalism or struggle for the formation of a black political state. These political positions acquire a religious significance when articulated by such thinkers as David Walker, Martin R. Delay, Edward Wilot Blyden, Alexander Crummell, Henry McNeal Turner, Maria W. Stewart, Elijah Muhammad, Louis Farrakhan, Marcus Garvey, and El Hajj Malik Shabazz (Malcolm X). Other AfricanAmerican religious thinkers have understood this same theologicopolitical imperative as a call to uplift humanity by liberating black persons from the yoke of antiblack oppression, yet they also interpreted that call as one according to which they are obligated to demand that white persons live up to their most ennobling values. These thinkers include Frederick Douglass, Howard Thurman, and Martin Luther King Jr. Other African-American thinkers interpret this theologico-political imperative as a call not only to uplift humanity, but also as a prophetic call to speak truth to power via cultural criticism. More recent examples of this sort of thinker include Cornel West and

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Michael Eric Dyson. Both of them critique not only antiblack oppression, but also the regressive, socially conservative elements in many traditional African-American religious communities (for example, sexism and homophobia). Yet other African-American religious thinkers have interpreted this same theologico-political imperative as a call to engage in political activism. Notable thinkers in this tradition include George Washington Woodbey and Jesse Jackson Sr. Woodbey was an early twentiethcentury socialist activist and organizer, whereas Jackson is a longtime Democratic Party activist, community leader, and occasional politician. Still other African-American religious thinkers have interpreted this theologico-political imperative as a call to redefine traditional (Christian) African-American religion so that it is no longer merely a survival religion, but a religion of liberation. Among the most prominent thinkers in this tradition are James H. Cone, one of the founders of black liberation theology, and Jacquelyn Grant, one of the founders of womanist theology. Yet, there are other African American religious thinkers who interpret the same theologicopolitical imperative as a call to leave African-American Christianity for religious traditions more amenable to black liberation or human flourishing. These thinkers include Anthony B. Pinn, who left Christianity altogether and decided to mine sources for black liberation from marginalized African-American religious practices (for example, religious humanism and Voodoo), and Victor Anderson, who seeks to build a constructive African-American religious thought that combats antiblack racism by dismantling the ontological blackness that white persons created and that promotes human flourishing by recognizing the complexities of African American existence. When we then consider other religious traditions and their efforts at combating antiblack racism, broadly defined (for example, Latin American liberation theology), it seems even more difficult to determine how to implement this theologico-political imperative in concrete circumstances from the vantage point of metaphysical reflection. However, this practical indeterminacy should remind the Marcellian metaphysician that he or she should be ever-vigilant and

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mindful that his or her actions, if at all possible, should not undermine the pursuit of human liberation that fosters the healthy cultivation of human personality. It also should remind the Marcellian metaphysician that her or his battle against antiblack racism, or any other form of racism for that matter, should not block her or his efforts to (re)awaken the exigency for being in those who have had it extinguished by the impersonal, indeed antipersonal, ethos of contemporary Western societies. Here we have reached the philosophical limits of a Marcellian reflective method and of how a Marcellian metaphysician can battle against antiblack racism. I am not satisfied with this position, however. It ignores a problem I find with Marcel’s metaphysics and his reflective method even after Gordon’s existential phenomenological account of antiblack racism is introduced: Neither of them adequately addresses the danger that Marcel’s ethico-religious values and sensibilities are grounded in a religious tradition that has perpetuated (and continues to perpetuate) antiblack racism in Europe, the Americas, and Africa. The religious tradition about which I write is Europeanized Christianity, or what William R. Jones calls Whiteanity1 in Is God a White Racist? In the context of US society, Whiteanity is constituted by the following phenomena: ‘‘Whiteanity’’ is shorthand for the religious ideology of white supremacy, e.g., [Carter G.] Woodson’s description of a religion/ theology of oppression: The Negro ‘‘has borrowed the ideas of his traducers instead of delving into things and working out some thought of his own. . . . We must remember that the Negroes learned their religion from the early white Methodists and Baptists who evangelized the slaves. . . . The American Negroes’ idea of morality, too, were borrowed from their owners. . . . It is very clear, then, that if Negroes got their conception of religion from slaveholders . . . there may be something wrong about it, and it would not hurt to investigate it.’’2

In such a social context, we need to ask the same question Jones asks in Is God a White Racist?: Is it warranted for African Americans and other black persons to be theists in an antiblack world? He answers

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that question with a qualified yes. Yes, it is warranted for African Americans and other black persons to be theists in an antiblack world, but only if the theism in which they believe recognizes the functional ultimacy of persons with respect to their oppression and liberation.3 This is precisely what humanocentric theism does when it assigns ‘‘an exalted status to [humans], particularly to human freedom, but this status . . . is the consequence of God’s will, and it conforms to [God’s] ultimate purpose and plan for [human]kind.’’4 While Jones is the one who developed humanocentric theism, he himself is a religious humanist5 who has foresworn any theism, especially the Christianity of his youth. In 1973, he criticized some of the founders of black liberation theology, especially James H. Cone, for not sufficiently questioning the antiblack presuppositions of Whiteanity. He especially criticized them for contending that their theological contention, ‘‘God is on the side of the oppressed,’’ is an empirically verifiable proposition.6 Jones thinks that such a theological contention is not warranted empirically, given how many millions of Africana persons were enslaved, suffered, and died under the watchful eye of a supposedly omni-benevolent and omnipotent God. If anything, if we based our conception of God on empirical evidence and human history, especially in the last five centuries or so, then it would be warranted for us to conceive of God as a white racist, or at least on the side of preserving white privilege. By assigning human persons functional ultimacy, humanocentric theism envisions human persons as being cocreators with the divine of their ‘‘reality’’ and leaves them completely responsible for how they live their lives and treat other persons. Such an understanding of the relationship between human persons and the divine means that we have to redefine the traditional Western theistic conception of divine omnipotence in such a way that God’s power is no longer understood in terms of coercion and physical causation, but in terms of persuasion.7 Accordingly, Jones thinks that a humanocentric theism, in an antiblack world, should advance the liberation of black persons by emphasizing the centrality of human freedom as ‘‘an indispensable

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ingredient of a theology of liberation,’’8 ‘‘removing God’s overruling sovereignty from human history,’’9 and reminding black persons that, as cocreators of their reality,10 they unwittingly coconstitute the very antiblack world in which they reside and, therefore, are responsible for combating the social institutions and societal norms that oppress them.11 In this humanistic theological framework, African Americans cannot depend on the divine to liberate them; at most the divine lures African Americans and non–African Americans who are sympathetic to their plight to fight for their liberation.12 This is all the divine can do, given the divine’s phenomenal absence and the divine’s apparent inability to act on the behalf of black liberation in human history. Due to the divine’s phenomenal absence and apparent inability to act on the behalf of black liberation, Jones’s humanocentric theism contends that unless ‘‘an effective theodicy’’ is constructed that answers the charge of divine racism, ‘‘the choice is between (a) a black hope based on God as a white racist and (b) one based on God as functionally neutral relative to human affairs [in terms of a causal agent acting on the behalf of black liberation].’’13 Jones’s humanocentric theism sides with the latter alternative. So, we can understand humanocentrictheism as Jones’s means of sidestepping the traditional theodicy problem that black (Christian) liberation theologians face— that is, the problem of answering the question: How is it possible for an omnipotent, omni-benvolent, omnipresent divine to sanction the oppression of Africana persons? In short, Jones’ humanocentric theism seeks to suspend the theodicy issue, as traditionally understood,14 ‘‘and move on to the question of human liberation.’’15 This humanistic theism views the religious lives of Africana persons, especially African Americans, as ‘‘an assertion of being in the face of oppressive essentializing and dehumanizing [that is, depersonalizing] forces.’’16 Furthermore, it serves as a means of motivating Africana theists and non-Africana theists alike to combat antiblack racism, since it is only through human effort that antiblack racism can be confronted and be potentially overcome, letting God’s will work in human affairs through the actions of human persons. This is

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similar to Royce’s understanding of God in his December 2, 1909, letter to Agnes Boyle O’Reilly Hocking: The ‘‘work’’ of each finite God-representative is, more or less consciously, blindly, instinctively, or explicitly, a practical expression of the prayer: ‘‘Thy will be done on earth . . . as it is in heaven.’’ . . . In no other sense than as thus incorporated in and through the personal deeds of finite beings, can God just now ‘‘work.’’ He ‘‘joins’’ us in so far as we join him. The deed is ours, and is his through us. . . . Our fortunes are the material for our duty, our opportunity to win for ourselves union with God—not themselves providentially determined.17

As such, Jones’s humanocentric theism is a theological alternative to black liberation theology, especially of the James Cone variety, because it is perhaps the only one to depict God in a manner that is compatible with African-American experiences of oppression and racial discrimination in the United States while not making God culpable for antiblack racism. God would not be culpable for any of the unjust discrimination and oppression resulting from black persons living in an antiblack society because this God is not omnipotent; hence, this God is not able to work by himself, herself, or itself to resolve the oppression and racial discrimination suffered by African Americans. Of course, Jones himself thinks that humanocentric theism is an inadequate response to the desire of African Americans to be liberated from their oppressive circumstances. I am bothered by humanocentric theism as well. However, I think its problem is that it does not identify interpersonal relationships that ennoble, enriches, enliven, and liberate humans as constituting the essence of the divine. So when we act divinely (for example, act morally and assist others in flourishing as moral persons), we are embodying God; or, in cruder terms, when we act divinely we are God. In more theological terms, God is an evaluative ideal that we actualize whenever we act in a divine manner. Such an ideal of God opens up the conceptual and theological space for a conception of religion—more specifically, an orientation toward ultimate meaning and significance that is primarily ethical in

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nature—that is humanist without forsaking theism. This humanistic conception of religion, in which God is the most significant ethical ideal available to humans right now, would return us to Immanuel Kant’s philosophy of religion. However, we would not need to accept Kant’s contention that ‘‘we must assume the existence of God if we want to judge about the first causes of everything contingent, chiefly in the order of ends which is actually present in the world.’’18 We could just identify God with the ideal of the Beloved Community both Josiah Royce and Martin Luther King Jr. envision and write about—namely, it is an impossible ideal that we still struggle to actualize, however partial our actualizations of it might be.19 Developing such a humanistic theism would take more than what I have been able to do in this book. I am fine with that. Every book has to end somewhere. I think this place is as good as any to stop for now.

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Notes

 preface 1. Gabriel Marcel, Royce’s Metaphysics, trans. Virginia Ringer and Gordon Ringer (Chicago: Henry Regnery Co., 1956). introduction 1. Robert C. Solomon, ‘‘Introduction,’’ in Existentialism, 2nd ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), xii. 2. I should add that Saturday, August 4, 2007 is not personally significant date just because I earned my doctorate that morning. My niece, Victorya Charis Tunstall, died that afternoon. 3. This vignette is loosely based on a March 4, 2004, article in the Science and Technology section of The Economist on spiritual neurology, ‘‘A Mystical Union,’’ Economist.com, http://www.economist.com/PrinterFriendly .cfm?story_id⳱2478148 (accessed December 1, 2012). 4. This evolutionary view of human existence has been popularized by contemporary philosophers such as Daniel Dennett and biologists such as Edward O. Wilson. 5. I realize I have excluded a couple of more recent continental approaches to metaphysics that do not fit this model. For example, this model of continental metaphysics excludes Graham Harman’s objectoriented ontology, in which entities have their own integrity apart from our cognitive and affective relations with them. Harman would argue that the dominant model of continental metaphysics mistakenly privileges humanworld relations over all other ontological relations existing in the universe, and even model all ontological relations between things on the humanworld relation. Maybe Harman’s realist metaphysics or some other realist metaphysics will become the dominant continental mode of doing meta{ 12 3 }

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physics in the near future. However, realist metaphysics is still a marginal approach in North American continental circles as of January 2012. 6. Most of the subsequent paragraphs in this section are excerpts from an early draft of my article ‘‘Learning Metaphysical Humility with Lewis Gordon’s Teleological Suspension of Philosophy,’’ CLR James Journal: A Publication of the Caribbean Philosophical Association 14, no. 1 (Spring 2008): 157–68. 7. Michael J. Loux and Dean W. Zimmerman, introduction to The Oxford Handbook of Metaphysics, ed. Michael J. Loux and Dean W. Zimmerman (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003), 1–7. 8. Ibid., 7. 9. Ibid., 4. 10. Quoted in ibid., 2. 11. Ibid. 12. Ibid. 13. Peter van Inwagen, Metaphysics, 2nd ed. (Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 2002), 3. 14. Ibid., 4. 15. Ibid. Some of the notable contemporary analytic metaphysicians who regard these questions as of the utmost importance are Robert Adams, Alvin Plantinga, and Peter van Inwagen himself. 16. For Rorty’s sustained assault on analytic metaphysics in particular and analytic philosophy in general, see his Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1979); Consequences of Pragmatism (Minneapolis, Minn.: University of Minnesota Press, 1982); Contingency, Irony, Solidarity (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989), chapter. 1–4; and Philosophy and Social Hope (London: Penguin Group, 1999). 17. For a concise definition of what Heidegger means by ‘‘onto-theology,’’ see Mark A. Wrathall, ‘‘Introduction: Metaphysics and Onto-theology,’’ in Religion After Metaphysics, ed. Mark A. Wrathall (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 2–3. 18. Hilary Putnam, Realism with a Human Face, ed. James Conant (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1990), 118. 19. Lewis R. Gordon, ‘‘Making Science Reasonable: Peter Caws on Science both Human and ‘Natural,’ ’’ Janus Head: Journal of Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature, Continental Philosophy, Phenomenological Psychology, and the Arts 5, no. 1 (Spring 2002): 3, http://www.janushead.org/5-1/Gordon.cfm (accessed December 2, 2012).

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20. To participate in being is to commune with other persons in a spirit of love and spiritual availability. What this means exactly will be discussed in chapters 1 and 2. 21. I write ‘‘late Western modernity’’ rather than ‘‘post-modernity,’’ because I, like Jean-Franc¸ois Lyotard, regard ‘‘postmodernity’’ to be more like a hyper-modernism than an entirely different way of conceiving the world. This is because postmodernity appears to be a transitional historical phenomenon for which most Europeans and persons of European descent worldwide recognize that Eurocentrism and the modern European quest for global hegemony are no longer realistic projects. In short, it is a deconstructive intellectual movement, not a constructive one. I would like to reserve the term postmodernity, if we should keep it at all, for the intellectual paradigm that transcends Western modernity. 22. Robert Sokolowski, ‘‘The Method of Philosophy: Making Distinctions,’’ Review of Metaphysics 51, no. 3 (March 1998): 516. 23. Ibid. 24. Ibid. 25. Gabriel Marcel, Mystery of Being, Volume 1: Reflection and Mystery, trans. G. S. Fraser (1950; repr., South Bend, Ind.: St. Augustine’s Press, 2001), 38. 26. See, for example, Lewis R. Gordon, Bad Faith and Antiblack Racism (Amherst, N.Y.: Humanity Books, 1999), 2–3. 27. See Lewis R. Gordon, ‘‘African-American Philosophy, Race, and the Geography of Reason,’’ Not Only the Master’s Tools, ed. Lewis R. Gordon and Jane Anna Gordon (Boulder, Colo.: Paradigm Publishers, 2006), 5. 28. Emmanuel Chukwudi Eze, Achieving Our Humanity: The Idea of the Postracial Future (New York: Routledge, 2001), xiv. 29. Ibid. 30. Ibid. 31. See Paul C. Taylor, Race: A Philosophical Introduction (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2004), chapters 1–3, and Paul C. Taylor, ‘‘Does Hip Hop Belong to Me? The Philosophy of Race and Culture,’’ in Hip Hope and Philosophy: Rhyme 2 Reason, ed. Derrick Darby and Tommie Shelby (Chicago: Open Court, 2005), 85–87. 32. For a concise characterization of race and the debate raging in these disciplines over whether race is a useful concept, see David J. Rothman and Sheila M. Rothman, ‘‘Race without Racism?’’, New Republic Online, http:// www.tnr.com/article/race-without-racism (accessed December 2, 2012). 33. The conception of race used in this book is somewhat similar to the one Ian F. Hanley Lo´pez has advanced in his article, ‘‘The Social Construc-

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tion of Race: Some Observations on Illusion, Fabrication, and Choice,’’ Harvard Civil Rights-Civil Liberties Law Review 29 (1994): 1–62. However, I differ with Lo´pez about how a socio-historical conception of race should be applied to combating racial discrimination. He thinks that racial categories are discriminatory by nature and cannot be conceived of in such a manner that they can positively affirm the heritage of those racialized. Hence, they should be contested legally, even though the efforts of contestation probably will amount to naught. I, on the other hand, think that certain racial categories could possibly be rehabilitated so that they are not associated with a racist hierarchy. I even think that certain racial categories can be reconceived in such a manner that they can positively affirm the heritage of those racialized, and perhaps the racial category most amenable to such (re)conceptualization is ‘‘African American’’ since it already functions as a racial-cumethnic identity. Lo´pez disagrees with me on this point and acknowledges that those who would most likely disagree with his position would be African Americans. 34. Alain Locke, ‘‘Good Reading,’’ in The Philosophy of Alain Locke: Harlem Renaissance and Beyond, ed. Leonard Harris (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1989), 105. 35. Alain Locke, ‘‘Value,’’ in The Philosophy of Alain Locke: Harlem Renaissance and Beyond, ed. Leonard Harris (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1989), 126. chapter o ne m a r c e l ’s reflective m ethod 1. For readers not familiar with Marcel’s existential concept of the personal, the personal refers to our embodied situatedness with others in the world (John B. O’Malley, ‘‘Marcel’s Notion of Person,’’ in Philosophy of Gabriel Marcel: Library of Living Philosophers, vol. 17, ed. Paul Arthur Schilpp and Lewis Edwin Hahn [La Salle, Ill.: Open Court, 1984], 279). John B. O’Malley summarizes Marcel’s existential concept of the personal in relation to Marcel’s method of philosophizing in this passage: ‘‘To philosophise [sic] in the personal key, which is Marcel’s authentic style, involves continual conversation (never degeneratively reduced to impersonal verbal or conceptual commerce) with my situated self, with the world in which I am situated, and with those others I encounter in that shared situation’’ (280). The personal, then, points to a specific quality of our lived interpersonal experiences, namely, the sense of intimacy, appreciation and gratitude that we feel when we commune with other persons.

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We should note here that Marcel often shies away from using the term person because he thinks that ‘‘since Kant’s day [it] has tended to take on too formal and juridical a sense’’ (Man against Mass Society, trans. G. S. Fraser [Chicago: Henry Regnery Co., 1962], 164). And when he uses the term person in a philosophic sense, he regards it along the lines of a Kantian moral agent. In fact, Marcel performs a philosophic examination of the term person only once, to my knowledge, and that is performed in his essay, ‘‘Observations on the Notions of the Act and the Person,’’ in Creative Fidelity, trans. Robert Rosthal (New York: Fordham University Press, 2002), 104–19. 2. See O’Malley, ‘‘Marcel’s Notion of Person,’’ 278 and 286. 3. See Thomas Busch, ‘‘Marcel, Gabriel,’’ in Encyclopedia of Phenomenology, ed. Lester Embree et al. (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1997), 433. 4. Here we should be cautious about identifying the epistemic interpretation of Kant’s distinction with the two-aspect interpretation, because the most respected proponent of the methodological interpretation of Kant’s transcendental idealism, Henry E. Allison, is cautious about this identification. If all one means by the ‘‘two-aspect interpretation’’ is that ‘‘the transcendental distinction between appearances and things in themselves [is] understood as holding between two ways of considering things (as they appear and as they are in themselves) rather than as . . . between two ontologically distinct sets of entities (appearances and things in themselves)’’ (Kant’s Transcendental Idealism: An Interpretation and Defense, rev. and enl. ed., [New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2004], 16), then Allison thinks that the identification of the two-aspect interpretation with the epistemic interpretation is acceptable. 5. Immanuel Kant, Cambridge Edition of the Works of Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, trans. and ed. Paul Guyer and Allen W. Wood (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998), Bxxvii. 6. Ibid., A797/B825–A804/B832. 7. Max Scheler, Formalism in Ethics and Non-Formal Ethics in Values, trans. M. S. Frings and R. L. Funk (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press. 1973), 371. 8. Ibid., 492. 9. Ibid., 371–72. See also ibid., 492. 10. See, for example, ibid., 386–93. 11. See ibid., 292–95. 12. Max Scheler, ‘‘On the Idea of Man,’’ trans. Clyde Nabe, Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology 9, no. 3 (1978): 184–98.

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13. Ibid., 193; See also ibid., 194. 14. See ibid., 197. 15. See Marcel, ‘‘Creative Fidelity,’’ in Creative Fidelity, trans. Robert Rosthal (New York: Fordham University Press, 2002), 147–74. 16. Gabriel Marcel, Metaphysical Journal, trans. Bernard Wall (Chicago: Henry Regnery Co., 1952), viii. 17. James Collins, Being and Having: An Existentialist Diary, ed. Torchbook, trans. K. Farrer (New York: Harper Torchbooks 1965), xiii. 18. Marcel, Metaphysical Journal, 19. 19. See ibid., 274–77. In his May 26, 1921, entry, Marcel decouples his notion of existence from the one prevalent in his philosophical milieu, that is, existence as denoting existing entities in an objective way. Existence is transformed into an affective dimension of our being. 20. This is how Husserl describes the lived-body (Leib) in such places as § 41a of Essential Husserl: Basic Writings in Transcendental Phenomenology, ed. D. Welton (Bloomington, Ind.: Indiana University Press 1999), 150–56, esp. 154. 21. Marcel, Metaphysical Journal, 287. 22. Ibid., 316. 23. Ibid., 137. 24. Ibid., 138. 25. Ibid., 137–38. 26. See ibid., 140–43, for Marcel’s own examples of the dialectical relationship between the scientific standpoint and being in a situation. 27. The following example is a paraphrase of Marcel’s example in Metaphysical Journal, 146. 28. Ibid. 29. Ibid., 153. 30. Ibid. 31. Ibid. 32. Neurotheology is an emerging interdisciplinary discipline where researchers examine the relationship between religious experience and the human brain. Two representative works in this recent discipline are Eugene d’Aquili and Andrew Newburg, The Mystical Mind: Probing the Biology of Religious Experience (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1999) and Andrew B. Neuburg, Eugene G. d’Aquili, and Vince Rause, Why God Won’t Go Away: Brain Science and the Biology of Belief (New York: Ballantine Books, 2001). D’Aquili and Newburg examine mystical experience and the neurophysiology and neuropsychology of the persons who report having mystical experiences.

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D’Aquili and Newburg seem to be among the most sympathetic interpreters of religious experience of those who engage in neurotheological research. 33. Marcel, Metaphysical Journal, 159. 34. Ibid., 224. 35. Ibid. 36. Ibid., 265. 37. Ibid., 160. 38. See Anthony J. Steinbock, Phenomenology and Mysticism: The Verticality of Religious Experience (Bloomington, Ind.: Indiana University Press, 2007). 39. See Marcel, Metaphysical Journal, 161–62. 40. Ibid., 314. The last entry in the Metaphysical Journal is dated May 24, 1923. 41. Ibid., 315. 42. Ibid., 290. 43. Ibid. 44. Ibid. 45. Ibid., 330. chapter two transcending philosophy by teleologically suspending philosophy 1. Gabriel Marcel, ‘‘Concrete Approaches to Investigating the Ontological Mystery,’’ in Gabriel Marcel’s Perspectives on The Broken World, trans. Katherine Rose Hanley (Milwaukee, Wis.: Marquette University Press, 1998 [1933]), 172–209. 2. Ibid., 173. 3. Ibid. 4. For Marcel’s comparison of our bodies to something we maintain like a machine, see Gabriel Marcel, Man against Mass Society, trans. G. S. Fraser (Chicago: Henry Regnery Co. 1962), 71. 5. Marcel, ‘‘Ontological Mystery,’’ 174. 6. Gabriel Marcel, The Mystery of Being, Volume 1: Reflection and Mystery, trans. G. S. Fraser (1951; repr., South Bend, Ind.: St. Augustine’s Press, 2001), 46. 7. The English term object (along with the French term objet) is derived from the medieval, fourteenth-century Latin terms objectum, obicere, and jacere, meaning respectively ‘‘thing presented (to one’s sight),’’ ‘‘present, throw against,’’ and ‘‘to throw’’ (‘‘Object,’’ Encarta World English Dictionary,

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2005). Marcel associates problem with object because ‘‘the Greek roots of the word ‘problem’ are perfectly correspondent to the Latin roots of ‘object’ ’’ (Kenneth T. Gallagher, The Philosophy of Gabriel Marcel [New York: Fordham University Press, 1962], 31). 8. Marcel, Man against Mass Society, 66–67. 9. This is how Marjorie Hewitt Suchocki characterizes prayers of thanksgiving and praise in her book In God’s Presence: Theological Reflections on Prayer (St. Louis: Chalice Press, 1996), 123. 10. Gallagher, Philosophy of Gabriel Marcel, 175. 11. Marcel held this position even prior to his conscious move away from Kantian rationalism. In an unpublished essay entitled ‘‘Notes, 1912–1913,’’ he asserts: ‘‘Being . . . is neither substance nor representation. It can only be conceived as that in which thought participates’’ (Philosophical Fragments, 1909–1914, trans. Lionel A. Blain. [Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Norte Dame Press, 1965], 84). 12. See Gabriel Marcel, Being and Having: An Existentialist Diary, trans. Katherine Farrer (New York: Harper & Row, 1965), 41. See also Gabriel Marcel, ‘‘An Essay in Autobiography,’’ in Philosophy of Existentialism, trans. Manya Harari (New York: Carol Publishing Group, 1995), 127. 13. Ibid., 178. 14. Ibid. 15. Gallagher, Philosophy of Gabriel Marcel, 117. 16. Marcel, ‘‘Ontological Mystery,’’ 179. One should not be alarmed that Marcel writes soul instead of mind in the above passage. Normally, Marcel uses the terms soul and mind interchangeably. They both refer to the nonempirical qualities of being humans, that is, those qualities of human existence where we intimately participate in our environing world with other persons. 17. Ibid. 18. Ibid. 19. Someone objected to my comparison of Marcel’s recollection with the Husserlian epoche´ in an earlier version of this chapter. That reviewer thought that such a comparison over-intellectualizes recollection and downplays how recollection is similar to ‘‘the habitaresecum of the great spiritual masters.’’ If I were thinking of the epoche´ as Husserl normally describes it in his writings, then I would agree with the referee’s criticism of my comparison. However, I am in agreement with such thinkers as Colin Wilson and Anthony Steinbock who regard phenomenology to be closer to a spiritual (more specifically, a mystical) discipline than an intellectual method. In that

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sense, I think I am warranted in comparing Marcel’s recollection to the Husserlian phenomenological epoche´. 20. Ibid., 181. 21. Ibid. 22. Ibid., 182. 23. Marcel, Being and Having, 118. 24. See ibid., 98. 25. Ibid., 103. 26. Marcel, ‘‘Ontological Mystery,’’ 196. 27. Ibid. 28. See Steinbock’s introduction in Phenomenology and Mysticism, 1–20. 29. Gabriel Marcel, ‘‘Outlines of a Phenomenology of Having,’’ in Being and Having (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1965), 154–74. 30. Ibid., 155. 31. Ibid., 156. 32. Ibid. 33. Ibid., 157. 34. Ibid. 35. Ibid., 162. 36. Ibid. 37. Ibid. 38. Ibid., 167–68. 39. Ibid., 169. 40. Gabriel Marcel, The Existential Background of Human Dignity (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1963), 77. 41. Marcel offers this analogy in Mystery of Being I, 67–68. 42. Marcel, Mystery of Being I, 114. 43. Ibid., 113. 44. Marcel makes this distinction between fidelity and moral constancy in Creative Fidelity, trans. Robert Rosthal (New York: Fordham University Press, 2002), 153–56. 45. See ibid., 166–67. 46. Ibid., 163–64. 47. Teresa I Reed, ‘‘Aspects of Marcel’s Essays,’’ Renascence: Essays on Values in Literature 55, no. 3 (Spring 2003): 211–27. 48. Note the similarities between Marcel’s explication of Royce’s world of description in chapter 8 of Royce’s Metaphysics and his notion of ‘‘objectivity’’ in ‘‘Existence and Objectivity’’ and his descriptions of primary reflection in Being and Having and chapter 5 of Mystery of Being, I.

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49. Gary Gutting, French Philosophy in the Twentieth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 99. 50. See Paul Ricoeur, ‘‘Gabriel Marcel and Phenomenology,’’ in The Philosophy of Gabriel Marcel, ed. Paul Arthur Schilpp and Lewis Edwin Hahn (La Salle, Ill.: Open Court Press, 1984), 471–94. 51. See Hebert Spiegelberg, ‘‘Gabriel Marcel as a Phenomenologist,’’ in Phenomenological Movement: A Historical Introduction, 2nd ed. (The Hague: The Martinus Nijhoff, 1965), 424. 52. See Marcel, Being and Having, 141–42 and 150–52. 53. Gabriel Marcel, Tragic Wisdom and Beyond, including Conversations between Paul Ricoeur and Gabriel Marcel, trans. Stephen Jolin and Peter McCormick (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1973 [1968]), 15. 54. Robert E. Wood makes this distinction in his article, ‘‘The Dialogical Principle and the Mystery of Being: The Enduring Relevance of Martin Buber and Gabriel Marcel,’’ International Journal for Philosophy of Religion 45, no. 2 (April 1999): 83–97. 55. Marcel, Tragic Wisdom, 235. 56. Katharine Rose Hanley, Dramatic Approaches to Creative Fidelity: A Study in the Theater and Philosophy of Gabriel Marcel (1889–1971) (Lanham, Md.: University Press of America, 1987), 3. 57. Ibid. 58. Ibid. 59. Marcel, ‘‘Ontological Mystery,’’ 183. 60. Hanley, Dramatic Approaches to Creative Fidelity, 3. 61. This is roughly how S. H. Clark phrases Ricoeur’s critique of Marcel’s reflective method on page 19 of Paul Ricoeur. Of course, Ricoeur’s critique is stated less harshly in his study of Marcel’s thought in Gabriel Marcel et Karl Jaspers, especially on pages 38 and 405ff of that text, than it is in the above question. 62. See Thomas W. Busch, ‘‘Marcel, Gabriel,’’ in Encyclopedia of Phenomenology, ed. Lester Embree et al. (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1997), 434. 63. See Paul Ricoeur, ‘‘Gabriel Marcel and Phenomenology,’’ in The Philosophy of Gabriel Marcel, 490 and Thomas W. Busch, ‘‘Secondary Reflection as Interpretation,’’ Bulletin de la Socie´te´Ame´ricaine de Philosophie de Langue Franc¸aise 7 (Fall 1995): 180. 64. Patrick L. Bourgeois, ‘‘Marcel and Ricoeur: Mystery and Hope at the Boundary of Reason in the Postmodern Situation,’’ American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly 80, no. 3 (Summer 2006): 421. 65. Ibid., 424–25n4.

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66. See, for example, §32 and §63 of Martin Heidegger, Being and Time: A Translation of Sein und Zeit, trans. Joan Stambaugh (Albany, N.Y.: State University of New York Press, 1996). Marcel describes his own method of philosophizing as involving a sort of hermeneutic circle in his earliest published article, ‘‘Les conditions dialectiques de la philosophie de l’intuition,’’ Revue de Me´taphysique et de Morale 20, no. 5 (Sept. 1912): 638–52, esp. pp. 641 and 643. Even though Marcel later denounced his early idealist, dialectical approach, he still philosophized in a hermeneutic circle. That is precisely what secondary reflection does; it examines the underlying meaningfulness of certain experiences we have, and once we have let these structures reveal themselves to us in a second-level reflection, these experiences acquire a renewed significance in our lives. In a way, we simply return to original experience, but it has been transfigured. Accordingly, we better appreciate how these experiences constitute us and shape how we interpret ourselves, other persons, and our environing world. 67. Bourgeois, ‘‘Mystery and Hope at the Boundary of Reason,’’ 430. 68. One could object that there are more types of scientific rigor than the ones I mention here. For example, scientific rigor could ‘‘depend on an open-ended practice’’ where every philosophic and scientific proposition is subject to intense rational scrutiny (Lewis R. Gordon, Her Majesty’s Other Children: Sketches of Racism from a Neocolonial Age [Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield, 1997], 146). Consequently, this rational scrutiny is not limited to the domain of primary reflection, where everything is reduced to a quantifiable entity. It includes metaproblematic phenomena. Moreover, such a rational scrutiny could prevent itself from devolving into primary reflection by upholding an imperative to describe adequately whatever phenomena enter its purview. If the description of some unfamiliar phenomenon entails that its descriptive categories should be altered, then so be it. It is the nature of such an open-ended practice to be fallible and self-corrective. Hence we have not provided any sufficient reasons for rejecting scientific rigor in itself, only a certain variety of it. This is true, perhaps. Nevertheless, Marcel’s reflective method would probably confine scientific rigor to the domain of primary reflection. This is so because, for Marcel, scientific inquiry is a form of inquiry aimed at describing phenomena from the third-person viewpoint. Thus, any inquiry that aims to describe phenomena in the first person or first person plural perspectives is not scientific inquiry proper. For the purposes of this article, I will accept Marcel’s restriction of scientific inquiry to the domain of primary reflection.

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69. Thomas W. Busch reminds us in his article, ‘‘Secondary Reflection as Interpretation’’ (1995), that in ‘‘the ‘avant propos’ of the French edition of The Mystery of Being, Vol. 1 . . . Marcel identifies the life of reflection as une veritable anamne`se, and claims for his work the label ne´osocratisme’’ (179). Marcel also identifies his thought as a type of neo-Socratism on page xiii of his Preface to the English Edition of Metaphysical Journal. 70. Lewis R. Gordon, ‘‘Making Science Reasonable: Peter Caws on Science both Human and ‘Natural,’ ’’ Janus Head: Journal of Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature, Continental Philosophy, Phenomenological Psychology, and the Arts 5, no. 1 (Spring 2002): n.p., http://www.janushead.org/5–1/Gor don.cfm (accessed December 7, 2012). 71. Lewis R. Gordon, ‘‘Introduction: The Call in Africans Religion and Philosophy,’’ Listening: Journal of Religion and Culture (Winter 2001): 7. 72. Lewis R. Gordon, Disciplinary Decadence: Living Thought in Trying Times (Boulder, Colo.: Paradigm Publishers, 2006), 44. 73. Ibid. 74. Calvin O. Schrag, Philosophical Papers: Betwixt and Between (Albany, N.Y.: State University of New York Press, 1994), 30. 75. Ibid. 76. Alain Locke, ‘‘Values and Imperatives,’’ in The Philosophy of Alain Locke: Harlem Renaissance and Beyond, ed. Leonard Harris (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1989 [1935]), 34; quoted in Gordon, ‘‘Introduction: The Call,’’ 7. 77. Ibid., 8–9. 78. Gordon, Disciplinary Decadence, 44. 79. For more on Royce’s religious insight, see Josiah Royce, Religious Aspect of Philosophy (Boston: Houghton, Mifflin & Co., 1885), chapter 12. I also examine Royce’s ethico-religious insight at length in part 1 of Yes, But Not Quite: Encountering Josiah Royce’s Ethico-Religious Insight, especially chapters 1–3. 80. This objection originates from a reviewer report on an earlier version of this chapter. 81. Marcel, Mystery of Being I, 38. 82. This extraphilosophical commitment on Marcel’s part is evident in many of his writings, from ‘‘Ontological Mystery’’ (1933) to several essays published in Tragic Wisdom and Beyond (1968). chapter three living in a broken world 1. To participate in being (l’Eˆtre), for Marcel, is to commune with other persons in a spirit of love and spiritual availability. For a few places in Mar-

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cel’s corpus where he describes being along these lines, see Gabriel Marcel, Being and Having: An Existentialist Diary, trans. Katherine Farrer (New York: Harper & Row, 1965 [1935]), 41. See also Gabriel Marcel, ‘‘An Essay in Autobiography,’’ in Philosophy of Existentialism, trans. Manya Harari (New York: Carol Publishing Group, 1995), 127. 2. Gabriel Marcel, ‘‘Concrete Approaches to Investigating the Ontological Mystery,’’ in Gabriel Marcel’s Perspectives on The Broken World, trans. Katherine Rose Hanley (Milwaukee, Wis.: Marquette University Press, 1998 [1933]), 172. 3. See Marcel, Mystery of Being I, 18–38. Marcel even wrote an entire dramatic play portraying the consequences of living in such a broken world on persons. He aptly entitled the play, Le Monde Casse´ (published in English as The Broken World, in Gabriel Marcel’s Perspectives on The Broken World, trans. Katharine Rose Hanley [Milwaukee, WI: Marquette University Press, 1998]), 31–52. 4. Marcel, Mystery of Being I, 29. 5. Ibid., 31. 6. The subsequent description of Marcel’s volunteer position in the French Red Cross is based on pages 20–21 of ‘‘An Autobiographical Essay,’’ in The Philosophy of Gabriel Marcel. 7. Gabriel Marcel, Man against Mass Society, trans. G. S. Fraser (Chicago: Henry Regnery Co., 1962), 30. 8. Ibid., 32. 9. See ibid., 31–32. 10. Ibid., 32–33. 11. I have chosen not to use the term Gypsies to refer to the Rom people, because it is considered be to a derogatory term by the Rom people. Reading page 185 of Clarence Shole´ Johnson’s essay, ‘‘(Re)Conceptualizing Blackness and Making Race Obsolescent,’’ in White on White/Black on Black, ed. George Yancy (Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield, 2005) informed me of the derogatory nature of the term Gypsies. 12. Marcel, Man Against Mass Society, 193. 13. Ibid., 49. 14. See Julia Kristeva, Strangers to Ourselves, trans. Leon S. Roudiez (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991), chapter 1, for a contemporary description of the rootlessness experienced by many migrant workers. 15. Marcel, Man Against Mass Society, 70. 16. Ibid., 70. 17. Gabriel Marcel, Searchings, ed. Wolfgang Ruf (New York: Newman Press, 1967), 44–45.

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18. Ibid., 42–43. 19. Ibid., 43. 20. See, for example, Gabriel Marcel, Tragic Wisdom and Beyond, including Conversations between Paul Ricoeur and Gabriel Marcel. trans. Stephen Jolin and Peter McCormick (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1973), 245–47. 21. Ibid., 247. 22. See Anthony J. Steinbock, ‘‘Introduction,’’ in Phenomenology and Mysticism: The Verticality of Religious Experience (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2007). 23. Marcel, Searchings, 50. 24. Marcel, Tragic Wisdom, 110. 25. Ibid. 26. Ibid., 118. 27. Ibid., 114. 28. Marcel, Man Against Mass Society, 40–42. 29. See Martin Heidegger, ‘‘The Question Concerning Technology,’’ in The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays, trans. William Lovitt (New York: Harper & Row, 1977), 3–35 and Martin Heidegger, ‘‘The Turning,’’ in The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays, trans. William Lovitt (New York: Harper & Row, 1977), 36–49. 30. Marcel, Man Against Mass Society, 44. 31. Ibid., 71. 32. Robert D. Cumming, review of Metaphysical Journal, The Mystery of Being II: Faith and Reality, and Man against Mass Society, by Gabriel Marcel, Journal of Philosophy 50, no. 23 (November 5, 1953): 702. 33. Ibid., 701. 34. See Albert Borgmann’s ‘‘The Moral Significance of the Material Culture,’’ in Technology and the Politics of Knowledge, ed. Andrew Feenberg and Alastair Hannay (Bloomington, Ind.: Indiana University Press, 1995), 90. 35. See Albert Borgmann, Technology and the Character of Contemporary Life (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), 41–42. 36. Ibid. 37. See Don Ihde, Postphenomenology (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1993), 107. 38. Ibid. 39. Borgmann, Technology, 42, 48. 40. Ibid., 43. 41. Ibid., 44.

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42. Ibid., 48. The reader should note that Borgmann defines a thing differently than I have done throughout this chapter. A thing for Borgmann is something that functions as the focal point of genuine interpersonal relationships, rather than the byproduct of our acts of objectifying the world. Whenever the term thing is mentioned in relation to Borgmann’s philosophy of technology, think of Borgmann’s definition of thing unless I state otherwise. 43. Ibid., 41. 44. Ibid. 45. Ibid., 207. 46. Ibid., 208. 47. Albert Borgmann, Crossing the Postmodern Divide (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992). 48. Ibid., 119. 49. Ibid. 50. For an excellent description of what John Dewey means by ‘‘control,’’ see Larry A. Hickman’s Philosophical Tools for Technological Culture: Putting Pragmatism to Work (Bloomington, Ind.: Indiana University Press, 2001), 155–56. On page 156, Hickman, echoing Dewey, defines technological control in terms of managing natural resources, not dominating them. 51. See Borgmann, Crossing the Postmodern Divide, 119–20. 52. Borgmann, ‘‘Moral Significance,’’ 87. 53. Ibid. 54. Ibid. 55. Ibid., 92. 56. See ibid., 88–91. 57. Borgmann, Technology, 140. 58. Ibid., 140–41. 59. Ibid., 141. 60. By ‘‘unjustly harm’’ I mean that whenever the consequences of one’s conduct harms someone else against his or her expressed consent that conduct is considered immoral. Otherwise, that conduct is acceptable morally, even though it physically or psychologically harms someone else. 61. Borgmann, Technology, 141. 62. Robert D. Putnam, Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2000). 63. Putman seems to be less charitable than I have been in my characterization of television. In a 1995 article, for example, Putnman asserts: ‘‘I have discovered only one suspect against whom circumstantial evidence can be

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mounted, and in this case it turns out, some directly incriminating evidence has also turned up. . . . The culprit is television’’ (quoted in ibid., 133n2). See also ibid., 127–28. 64. Borgmann, Technology, 142. 65. Robert Kubey and Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, ‘‘Television Addiction Is No Mere Metaphor,’’ Scientific American 286, no. 2 (February 2002): 74–80. 66. See Marcel, Man Against Mass Society, where Marcel criticizes the radio for virtually the same reasons that Borgmann criticizes the television, but without the empirical evidence that Borgmann has to substantiate his position. 67. Albert Borgmann, Holding On to Reality (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), 11. There he affirms a commonly held contention of scientific realism: ‘‘Science has shown that reality is structured all the way down. At bottom it consists not of ‘atomless gunk’, or perhaps four types of gunk— earth, water, air, and fire—but rather of a finite number of definite particles, lawfully related to one another’’ (ibid.). 68. Borgmann outlines this distinction throughout Holding On to Reality. 69. Thomas A. Michaud, ‘‘Gabriel Marcel’s Politics: Theory and Practice,’’ American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly 80, no. 3 (Summer 2006): 435. 70. Ibid. 71. See Marcel, Man Against Mass Society, 3. 72. By ‘‘multitude’’ I mean those persons who are economically and socially disadvantaged by the emerging global, neoliberal empire as defined by Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri’s Empire (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2000) and Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire (New York: Penguin Press, 2004). 73. Marcel, Man Against Mass Society, 2, 8. Also see ibid., chapter 3, ‘‘The Spirit of Abstraction, As a Factor Making for War,’’ 114–21. 74. One should not read Marcel as condemning political revolutions and riots per se, however. What he condemns are the political revolutions and riots based on ill-conceived sociopolitical abstractions (see Marcel, Man against Mass Society, 8). 75. Marcel, Man against Mass Society, 8. 76. Marcel, Searchings, 51. 77. Ibid., 51–52. 78. See Marcel, Man against Mass Society, 120. 79. Marcel, Man against Mass Society, 120. 80. Marcel, Searchings, 3–4.

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81. Marcel, Man against Mass Society, 16; italics in original. Marcel most likely formulated this conception of the philosopher in the late 1930s partially under the influence of Husserl’s The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology, trans. and ed. David Carr (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1970); see Marcel, Searchings, 78–79, for Marcel’s approving reference to Husserl’s Crisis text and Husserl’s conception of the philosopher as a functionary of humanity). On page 79 of Searchings, Marcel summarizes what he learned from Husserl’s Crisis this way: In order to identify correctly the predicament of contemporary (European) persons and then improve it we have to remember that ‘‘humanity in general essentially means being human in generatively and socially connected human communities’’ (translation slightly modified). Hence, once we remember that we are persons who create our institutions for the purposes of better human existence, we can better combat the forces of scientism, which is an outgrowth of late Western modernity’s tendency to dehumanize human persons. For more on what Husserl meant by generativity, see Anthony J. Steinbock, Home and Beyond: Generative Phenomenology after Husserl (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1995), and see parts 1 and 3.A. of Husserl’s Crisis text for Husserl’s critique of modern scientism and its neglect of lived human existence. 82. Marcel, Man against Mass Society, 142. 83. Marcel, Searchings, 52–53. 84. Marcel, Man against Mass Society, 142. 85. Marcel, Searchings, 53. 86. Ibid. 87. Marcel, Man against Mass Society, 142–43. 88. Ibid., 193. 89. See, for example, Emmanuel Mounier, Personalism, trans. Philip Mairet (Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 1952), xxvii. 90. Marcel, Man against Mass Society, 165. 91. Mounier himself acknowledges the Marxist influence on French personalists’ critique of capitalism in Personalism, 9, 12–13, 103–6, 115. Also see Jean-Franc¸ois Fourny, ‘‘Personalism,’’ in The Columbia History of TwentiethCentury French Thought, ed. Lawrence D. Kritzman (New York: Columbia University Press, 2006), 85, for how ‘‘Mounier attempted to integrate Marxism into his harmonious view of personalism and existentialism’’ until his death in 1950. 92. Marcel, Tragic Wisdom, 11. 93. Marcel, Man against Mass Society, 134. I do not question the accuracy of Marcel’s interpretation of Marxist social theory. I simply aim to describe faithfully how Marcel interprets Marxist social theory.

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notes to pages 80 – 81 chapter four lewis g ordon on a ntiblack racism

1. Lewis R. Gordon, ‘‘Racism as a Form of Bad Faith,’’ American Philosophical Association Newsletter on Philosophy and the Black Experience 92, no. 2 (1993): 6–8. 2. Gordon, Bad Faith and Antiblack Racism. 3. Lewis R. Gordon, Fanon and the Crisis of European Man: An Essay on Philosophy and the Human Sciences (New York: Routledge, 1995). 4. Cornel West describes the economic justification of transatlantic slavery well in the following passage: After a few decades of transracial slavery—in which whites, blacks and reds were owned by whites—this ancient form of subjugation became an exclusively black and white affair. This racialization of American slavery was rooted in economic calculations and psychocultural anxieties that targeted black bodies. Thus, the profitable sugar, tobacco and cotton plantations of the New World were housed and husbanded by African labor, with the result that African men, women and children defined the boundaries of European culture and civilization. In fact, the human family was carved into modern ‘‘racial’’ pigeonholes—white, black, red, brown, yellow—in order to control, confine, discipline and dishonor Africans. Racialized persons and racist practices were systematized and canonized principally owing to the financial interests and psychic needs that sustained the slave trade and the New World slavery. The fundamental meaning of this white-supremacist ideology is this: New World Africans enter European modernity cast as disposable pieces of property, as commodifiable bits of chattel slavery subject to arbitrary acts of violent punishment and vicious put-down. In short, legalized terror and institutionalized hatred, in the name of white supremacy and Western progress, rendered black peoples economically exploited, politically oppressed and culturally degraded.’’ (‘‘The Ignoble Paradox of Western Modernity,’’ in Spirits of the Passage: The Transatlantic Slave Trade in the Seventeenth Century, ed. Rosemaire Robotham [New York: Simon & Schuster, 1997], reprinted in Cornel West Reader, 51–52.)

5. For a good and concise account of how antiblack racism achieved scientific legitimacy in the latter half of the nineteenth century as a result of Darwinian evolutionary theory, see Richard Weikart, From Darwin to Hitler: Evolutionary Ethics, Eugenics, and Racism in Germany (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), especially chapters 6 and 10. This does not mean that Darwinian evolutionary theory necessarily entails antiblack racism, eugenics, genocidal activity in Africa, and the Holocaust. Nevertheless, Darwinian

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evolutionary theory did provide much of the intellectual justification for these activities in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Germany. Something similar could be said of other Western European societies and, to some extent, the United States, South Africa, Australia, and New Zealand. For representative genealogies of how white aesthetic and socio-cultural values are central features of antiblack racism, see Cornel West, ‘‘A Genealogy of Modern Racism,’’ in Prophesy Deliverance! An Afro-American Revolutionary Christianity (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2002 [1982]), 47–65, and George Yancy, ‘‘A Foucauldian (Genealogical) Reading of Whiteness: The Production of the Black Body/Self and the Racial Deformation of Pecola Breedlove in Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye,’’ in What White Looks Like: African-American Philosophers on the Whiteness Question, ed. George Yancy (New York: Routledge, 2004), 107–42, especially pp. 107–22. 6. For more on this issue, see Lewis R. Gordon, ‘‘What Does It Mean to Be a Problem?,’’ in Existentia Africana: Understanding Africana Existential Thought (New York: Routledge, 2000), 62–95. 7. Gordon, Bad Faith, 2, 95. 8. Ibid., 96, 194n5. 9. Ibid., 2. 10. Paget Henry, ‘‘Africana Phenomenology: Its Philosophical Implications,’’ CLR James Journal 11, no. 1 (Summer 2005): 82. Henry describes the central extraphilosophical commitments of Africana phenomenology this way: ‘‘the governing telos Africana phenomenology has been racial liberation and the problems of racial domination from which it springs’’ (ibid.). 11. Lewis R. Gordon, Disciplinary Decadence: Living Thought in Trying Times (Boulder, CO: Paradigm Publishers, 2006), 103; see also Lewis R. Gordon, ‘‘Fanon and Development: A Philosophical Look,’’ Africa Development 29, no. 1 (2004): 85. 12. Ibid. 13. Ibid. 14. Gordon, Bad Faith, 5. 15. See ibid., ch. 8. 16. ‘‘Ontological blackness’’ is a phrase from Victor Anderson, Beyond Ontological Blackness: An Essay on African American Religious and Cultural Criticism (New York: Continuum, 1995). 17. See Erin Texeira, ‘‘Store’s Shunning of Oprah Angers Many Minorities; Poor Treatment While Shopping is Common, Sociologist Says,’’ Telegraph-Herald http://search.proquest.com.ezproxy.gvsu.edu/docview/ 368687703?accountid⳱39473, June 29, 2005 (accessed November 23, 2012).

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18. Gordon, ‘‘Racism as a Form of Bad Faith.’’ 19. Ibid. 20. Ibid. 21. Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, quoted in Gordon, ‘‘Fanon and Development,’’ 91n15; this is Gordon’s translation of Fanon’s text. 22. Gordon, Fanon, 42. 23. Quoted in Eugene Robinson, ‘‘A Specious ‘Experiment,’ ’’ Washington Post (Tuesday, October 4, 2005), A23, http://www.washingtonpost.com/wpdyn/content/article/2005/10/03/AR2005100300952.html (accessed November 23, 2012). 24. Quoted in ibid. 25. Ibid. 26. Ibid. 27. Ibid. 28. While this section does not examine specifically the ways in which black women are objectified by white men, white women, and even black men in an antiblack world, the reader should know that Gordon has written on this topic. For Gordon’s examination of how sexism and racism are conjoined in an antiblack world, see chapter 4 of Gordon, Her Majesty’s Other Children. For an informative discussion of how antiblack racism converts black women into exotic, hypersexual beings that is compatible with Gordon’s position on this topic, see Janine Jones, ‘‘Tongue Smell Color black,’’ in White on White/Black on Black, ed. George Yancy [Lanham, Md.: Rowman& Littlefield, 2005], 217–32). For an instructive discussion of how black women are portrayed in a misogynistic manner in American society, esp. in American popular culture, see Andrea Queeley, ‘‘Hip-Hop and the Aesthetics of Criminalization,’’ in The New Black Renaissance: The Souls Anthology of Critical African-American Studies, ed. Manning Marable (Boulder, Colo.: Paradigm Publishers, 2005), 183–97, especially pp. 192–95. 29. Quoted in Timothy Chambers, ‘‘ ‘They’re Finding Food, but We’re Looting?’: A Two-Ethics Model for Racist Double Standards,’’ in American Philosophy Association Newsletter on Philosophy and the Black Experience 6, no. 1 (Fall 2006): 7n2. 30. Ibid. 31. Cornel West, ‘‘Black Strivings in a Twilight Civilization,’’ in The Future of the Race (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1996), repr. in Cornel West Reader (New York: Basic Civitas Books, 1999), 104. 32. Gordon, Fanon, 38. 33. Ibid., 39.

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34. Ibid., 43. 35. Taunya Lovell Banks, ‘‘Two Life Stories: Reflections of One Black Woman Law Professor,’’ in Critical Race Theory: The Key Writings that Formed the Movement, ed. Kimberle´ Crenshaw, Neil Gotanda, Gary Peller, and Kendall Thomas (New York: New Press, 1995), 331. 36. Gordon, Fanon, 58. 37. See West, Prophesy Deliverance!, chapter 2, where West describes how this white normative gaze functions in an antiblack society. 38. Lewis R. Gordon, ‘‘African-American Philosophy: Theory, Politics, and Pedagogy,’’ Philosophy of Education 1998, http://ojs.ed.uiuc.edu/index .php/pes/article/view/2082/777 (accessed November 23, 2012). 39. For Gordon’s critique of Appiah on this matter, see Gordon, Bad Faith, chapters 12 and 13; Gordon, Her Majesty’s Other Children, chapters 3 and 6; and Gordon, ‘‘African-American Philosophy,’’ 36–37. 40. Michael Root, ‘‘How We Divide the World,’’ Philosophy of Social Science, Supplement 67 (2000): 631–32. 41. See Leonard Harris, ‘‘Postscript: What, Then, Is Racism?’’, in Racism, ed. Leonard Harris (Amherst, N.Y.: Humanity Press, 1999), 437–50. Also see Lo´pez, ‘‘The Social Construction of Race,’’ for an articulation of this position. In his 2007 Journal of Social Philosophy article ‘‘Three Things Realist Constructionism about Race—or Anything Else—Can Do,’’ Joshua Glasgow advances an idea of racial categories that would lessen the danger of using racial categories in the life sciences. He suggests that we interpret racial categories through the lens of a modest ontological localism. With a modest ontological localism, the context-relative nature of racial categories is not nearly as problematic as it would be if racial categories were understood to be static ontological entities. All a life scientist or medical professional has to do is specify what localized concept of race will be used in their research or medical treatment. 42. See, for example, Robert Birt, ‘‘Blackness and the Quest for Authenticity,’’ in White on White/Black on Black, ed. George Yancy (Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield, 2005), 265–73, and Kal Alston, ‘‘Knowing Blackness, Becoming Blackness, Valuing Blackness,’’ in White on White/Black on Black, ed. George Yancy (Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield, 2005), 297–308, for suggestions about how to re-image the racial identity of ‘‘African American,’’ or ‘‘Black’’ as Birt and Alston call African Americans, in such a way that it conveys an authentic cultural identity, that is, an identity where one takes pride in being a certain race or ethnicity without devaluing anyone else’s ethnic and racial identity.

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43. See Darren Lenard Hutchinson, ‘‘Progressive Race Blindness? Individual Identity, Group Politics, and Reform,’’ UCLA Law Review 49 (2001–2): 1455–80. 44. Naomi Zack, ‘‘Race, Life, Death, Identity, Tragedy, and Good Faith,’’ in Existence in Black, ed. Lewis R. Gordon (New York: Routledge, 1997), 99–109. 45. Jason D. Hill, Becoming a Cosmopolitan: What It Means to be a Human Being in the New Millennium (Lanham, Md.: Rowman and Littlefield, 2000). 46. Ibid., 70. 47. Zack, like most present-day philosophers of race, contend that racial identities are not biological kinds. This is the case even though these identities, as a self-report of ancestry, along with other personal and familial information (for example, close relatives’ medical histories), have been demonstrated to be effective means of stratifying populations and identifying variations in health risks for different diseases between races (and ethnicities). Nevertheless, some contemporary philosophers of race and biomedical scientists would contest Zack’s contention that racial identities have no relevant biological basis. They would contend while racial identities are not static natural kinds, these identifications are still natural kinds. These identities would be fluid ones, such that the same individual might be considered a member of one racial group with respect to one disease and a member of a different racial group with respect to a second disease, given that person’s genetic makeup and multiethnic/multiracial ancestry (see Michael Root, ‘‘Stratifying a Population by Race,’’ Journal of Social Philosophy 41, no. 3 [Fall 2010]: 260–71; see also Neil Risch et al., ‘‘Categorization of Humans in Biomedical Research: Race and Disease,’’ Genome Biology 3, no. 7 [July 2002]: 1–12). This is not the place to debate whether race exists in a biological sense, though. I just wanted to state that not all philosophers of race take it for granted that racial identities are not natural kinds. I have my own concerns about the feasibility of the very concept of natural kinds; however, I hopefully will explore that topic in a subsequent publication. 48. Zack, ‘‘Race, Life, Death, Identity, Tragedy, and Good Faith,’’ 107. 49. Ibid., 104. 50. Ibid., 103. 51. Ibid., 108. 52. Quoted in ‘‘Mexican leader criticized for comment on blacks,’’ CNN .com (Sunday, May 15, 2005), http://www.cnn.com/2005/US/05/14/fox.jackson/index.html (accessed November 23, 2012). 53. Gary Y. Okihiro, ‘‘Cheap Talk, er, Dialogue,’’ in The New Black Renaissance: The Souls Anthology of Critical African-American Studies, ed. Manning Marable (Boulder, Colo.: Paradigm Publishers, 2005), 133.

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54. See Lo´pez, ‘‘Social Construction of Race,’’ 1–2. The case in which an American slave sought to be recognized as legally nonblack that Lo´pez discusses is Hudgins v. Wright (1806). Actually, Hudgins v. Wright involved three Africana women who were sisters. A Virginia judge ruled that they were, in fact, Native Americans due to their apparently Native American facial complexion, hair texture, and nose width. 55. Lawrence Bobo, James R. Kluegel, and Ryan A. Smith, ‘‘Laissez-Faire Racism: The Crystallization of a Kinder, Gentler, Antiblack Ideology,’’ in Racial Attitudes in the 1990s: Continuity and Change, ed. Steven A. Tuch and Jack K. Martin (Westport, Conn.: Praeger, 1997), 16. 56. Ibid. 57. Ibid. 58. See, for example, ibid., 41. 59. For an informative account of how California Proposition 209 became law, see George Derek Musgrove, ‘‘ ‘Good at the Game of Tricknology’: Proposition 209 and the Struggle for the Historical Memory of the Civil Rights Movement,’’ in The New Black Renaissance: The Souls Anthology of Critical African-American Studies, ed. Manning Marable (Boulder, Colo.: Paradigm Publishers, 2005), 113–24. 60. See, for example, Lucius T. Outlaw Jr., ‘‘Rehabilitate Racial Whiteness?,’’ in What White Looks Like: African-American Philosophers on the Whiteness Question, ed. George Yancy (New York: Routledge, 2004), 164–67. 61. Justice Clarence Thomas, Thomas Sowell, Larry Elder, Shelby Steele, Ward Connerly, John H. McWhorter, and Walter E. Williams are just several of the African-American thinkers and cultural critics who are African American neoconservatives. In fact, many African-American neoconservatives prefer to be called ‘‘black Americans’’ rather than ‘‘African Americans,’’ because they think that the later term should be reserved for contemporary African persons who have immigrated to the United States. These African-American neoconservatives hold the same cultural presumptions that Euro-Americans hold, namely ‘‘(1) Each person should work hard and strive to succeed in material terms; (2) Those who work hard will in fact succeed; (3) Those who do not succeed (for example, poor people) have only themselves to blame: their laziness, immorality, and other character defects’’ (Joe R. Feagin, Herna`n Vera, and Pinar Batur, White Racism, 2nd ed. [New York: Routledge, 2001], 204). They fuel the white backlash against affirmative action policies, because, like their Euro-American counterparts, they argue that continued institutional racial inequalities are caused by the cultural and individual problems in the many urban and rural African-

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American communities, not by such things as institutional racism. A representative collection of African-American neoconservative essays arguing against the existence of institutional racism is Black and Right: The Bold New Voice of Black Conservatives in America, ed. Stan Faryna, Brad Stetson, and Joseph G. Conti (Westport, Conn.: Praeger, 1997). A somewhat sympathetic critique of the African-American neoconservative phenomenon is Cornel West’s Race Matters, chapter 4. 62. For a concise discussion of this phenomenon, see Gordon, Her Majesty’s Other Children, 117. 63. Of course, African Americans are not immune from being the perpetrators of black antiblack racism on other Africana persons. ‘‘In Europe, the North American black is used to downgrade the black European and African and Caribbean permanent residents there’’ (Gordon, Her Majesty’s Other Children, 117). 64. Marcel, Tragic Wisdom, 248. chapter five criticizing marcel ’ s r e f l e c t i v e me t h o d 1. Marcel, Tragic Wisdom, 248. 2. Michael Novak, ‘‘Marcel at Harvard,’’ The Commonweal (October 5, 1962), reprinted in American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly 80, no. 3 (Summer 2006): 340 3. Ibid. 4. Ibid., 341. 5. Marcel, Man Against Mass Society, 81; slightly modified translation. 6. Marcel, Tragic Wisdom, 99. 7. Marcel, Existential Background of Human Dignity, 118. 8. See Ralph Waldo Emerson, Selections from Ralph Waldo Emerson: An Organic Anthology, ed. Stephen E. Whicher (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1960), 63–64. 9. Leonard Harris, ‘‘The Horror of Tradition or How to Burn Babylon and Build Benin While Reading a Preface to a Twenty-Volume Suicide Note,’’ in African-American Perspectives and Philosophical Traditions, ed. John P. Pittman (New York: Routledge, 1997), 105. Fanon makes this argument in the ‘‘The Trials and Tribulations of National Consciousness’’ chapter of The Wretched of the Earth, trans. Richard Philcox (New York: Grove Press, 2004), and not in the chapter ‘‘On National Culture’’ as Harris contends. 10. Ibid. 11. Fanon, Wretched of the Earth, 101–2.

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12. Marcel, Tragic Wisdom, 23. 13. It would be interesting to examine Marcel’s support for France’s occupation of Algeria, given his occasionally anti-Islamic remarks in Man Against Mass Society. At one point in Man Against Mass Society, Marcel equates Islam with tyranny, intolerance, domination, and a totalizing universalism and equates Western technocratic democracies with ‘‘an Islam converted to materialism’’ (179). In short, Marcel has equated Islam with fundamentalist Islam of the Wahabist variety. This is odd given that in that very text he regards Islam as a respectable religion. It is even odder given that in Tragic Wisdom and Beyond he asserts that one of the philosopher’s responsibilities is to combat religious intolerance (248). 14. Marcel, ‘‘Autobiographical Essay,’’ Philosophy of Gabriel Marcel, 48. 15. Ibid. 16. Marcel, Man Against Mass Society, 135. 17. Marcel, Tragic Wisdom, 194. 18. Marcel, Man Against Mass Society, 136. 19. See Husserl, Crisis, 273–74, 289. 20. To Husserl’s credit, he did identify the depersonalizing telos in modern European rationalism in the Crisis, esp. in part 2, and in his May 1935 Vienna lecture ‘‘Philosophy and the Crisis of European Humanity’’ (originally entitled, ‘‘Philosophy in the Crisis of European Mankind;’’ published in English in Husserl, Crisis, 269–99). He just did not appreciate how detrimental this telos had been for non-Europeans, especially Africana persons, for centuries before the 1930s. 21. Gordon, Bad Faith, 16. 22. Ibid. 23. West, Cornel West Reader, 52. 24. See Enrique Dussel, The Underside of Modernity: Apel, Ricoeur, Rorty, Taylor, and the Philosophy of Liberation, trans. Eduardo Mendieta (Atlantic Highlands, N.J.: Humanities Press, 1996), 20, where he writes: ‘‘Modernity was born in 1492 with the ‘centrality’ of Europe [;] eurocentrism originated when Europe was able to dominate the Arab world, which had been the center of the [European] known world up to the 15th century. The ‘I,’ which begins with the ‘I conquer’ of Herna´n Corte´s or Pizzarro, which in fact precedes the Cartesian ego cogito by about a century, produces Indian genocide, African slavery, and Asian colonial wars. The majority of today’s humanity (the South) is the other face of modernity.’’ (Quoted in Gordon, Her Majesty’s Other Children, 45n1; square brackets in Gordon) 25. This phrase originated in Ju¨rgen Habermas, The Theory of Communicative Action, Volume 2: Lifeworld and System: A Critique of Functionalist

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Reason, trans. Thomas McCarthy (Boston: Beacon Press, 1987), esp. pp. 196, 325–27, 391–96. Habermas often uses the noun phrase, ‘‘colonization of the lifeworld’’ rather than the infinitive phrase, ‘‘to colonize the lifeworld.’’ Henry provides a concise description of what Habermas means by colonization of the lifeworld: ‘‘For Habermas, the ascendancy of technocratic reason has resulted in ‘the colonization of the lifeworld’ by systems of instrumental action. This domination has brought with it the technocratic colonization of identity, raising the cybernetic automaton or cyborg as the real model of the human that will emerge from Western modernity. Habermas argues that this conquest of ‘the lifeworld’ and personal identity has destroyed the conditions necessary for the renewal of ethical and other traditional cultural practices upon which Western societies depend for motivation.’’ (Caliban’s Reason, 169) Habermas’s critique of technocratic, or functionalist, reason is similar to Marcel’s critique of modern technology and instrumental reason. However, Habermas would probably critique Marcel for apparently abandoning modern Enlightenment rationality. Habermas would also critique Marcel for accepting the Kantian phenomenological distinction between us as objects and us as persons (see, for example, Ju¨rgen Habermas, Philosophical Discourse of Modernity: Twelve Lecture, trans. Frederick G. Lawrence [Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1987], 297–300). What makes our conception of colonization of the lifeworld different than Habermas’ is that we are willing to admit that even a communicative rationality can have the taint of antiblack racism, given that the modern Western European lifeworlds in which this sort of rationality was birthed was (and continues to be) antiblack. Without being aware of the antiblack racism at the heart of Western modernity, Habermas has no means of preventing communicative rationality from being used as yet another tool to depersonalize Africana persons. 26. Jean-Paul Sartre, preface, The Wretched of the Earth, trans. Richard Philcox (New York: Grove Press, 2004), lviii–lix; translation slightly modified by author. 27. Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Mask, trans. Charles Lam Markmann (New York: Grove Press, 1967), 231. 28. Gordon, Bad Faith, 183. 29. Gordon, Her Majesty’s Other Children, 102–3. conclusion Imagining an Antiracist Humanistic Theism 1. Jones, preface to Is God a White Racist?: A Preamble to Black Theology, 2nd ed. (Boston: Beacon Press, 1998), viin1. Jones defines Whiteanity as fol-

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lows: ‘‘ ‘Whiteanity’ is shorthand for the religious ideology of white supremacy, e.g., [Carter G.] Woodson’s description of a religion/theology of oppression: The Negro ‘has borrowed the ideas of his traducers instead of delving into things and working out some thought of his own. . . . We must remember that the Negroes learned their religion from the early white Methodists and Baptists who evangelized the slaves. . . . The American Negroes’ idea of morality, too, were borrowed from their owners. . . . It is very clear, then, that if Negroes got their conception of religion from slaveholders . . . there may be something wrong about it, and it would not hurt to investigate it.’ ’’ 2. Ibid. 3. Ibid., 87. 4. Ibid. 5. Jones distinguishes his ‘‘black religious humanism’’ from the antireligious, secular humanism of Paul Kurtz and the Council for Secular Humanism (Is God a White Racist, 215–16n4). Jones’s position on this issue apparently runs counter to Anthony B. Pinn’s position. Pinn is a contemporary African-American theologian who is a religious humanist. Unlike Jones, he thinks that African-American religious humanism can be associated with the secular ethics advanced by Kurtz and the Council for Secular Humanism (‘‘Introduction: Humanism in the U.S. Context,’’ in By These Hands: A Documentary History of African American Humanism, ed. Anthony B. Pinn [New York: New York University Press, 2001], 7–10). 6. See James H. Cone, Black Theology of Liberation, 20th anniversary ed. (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1999 [1990]), especially chapter 6, and James H. Cone, God of the Oppressed (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1975), especially chapters 4 and 8. Of special importance is the twenty-third note on pages 267–68, where Cone affirms that God is on the side of the oppressed given the ‘‘historical’’ events of God’s liberation of the Hebrew Exodus from Egypt and Jesus Christ’s crucifixion and resurrection. 7. Ibid., 191. Some readers might wonder whether Jones’s concept of divine lure is influenced somehow by the tradition of process theology, as represented by the philosophies of Alfred North Whitehead and Charles Hartshorne. In Is God a White Racist?, Jones’s concept of divine lure is the result of a critical reading of the theologies of Richard Rubenstein, Paul Tillich, Howard Burkle, Martin Buber, and Harvey Cox through the lens of mid-twentieth-century French existentialism. Nevertheless, his concept of divine lure is similar to the concept of divine lure in Whiteheadean process theologies as long as we restrict ourselves to how it affects human persons.

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Once we move beyond the realm of human persons, the theological differences between Jones’s humanocentric theism and Whiteheadean process theologies are pronounced. For instance, Jones’s humanocentric theism is not concerned with the cosmic significance of the divine lure for nonhuman organisms and inorganic entities whereas process theologies would not be intelligible apart from the significance that the divine lure has not only for humans, but also for nonhuman organisms and inorganic entities throughout the universe. 8. Ibid., 194. 9. Ibid., 195. 10. Ibid. A similar point has been made by the heretical (legal) critical race theorist Reginald Leamon Robinson in his articles, ‘‘ ‘Expert’ Knowledge: Introductory Comments on Race Consciousness,’’ Boston College Third World Law Journal 20 (Winter 2000): 145–82; ‘‘Poverty, the Underclass, and the Role of Race Consciousness: A New Age Critique of Black Wealth/WhiteWealth and American Apartheid,’’ Indiana Law Review 34 (2001): 1377–1443; ‘‘Human Agency, Negated Subjectivity, and White Structural Oppression: An Analysis of Critical Race Practice/Praxis,’’ American University Law Review 53 (2004): 1361–1419; and ‘‘The Sacred Way of Tibetan CRT Kung Fu: Can Race Crits Teach the Shadow’s Mystical Insight and Help Law Students ‘Know’ White Structural Oppression in the Heart of the FirstYear Curriculum? A Critical Rejoinder to Dorothy A. Brown,’’ Michigan Journal of Race and Law 10 (Spring 2005): 355–425. I should clarify what I mean when I call Robinson a heretical (legal) critical race theorist, or Race Crit. As of January 2012, many African-American Race Crits accept a version of critical race theory (CRT) that upholds the reality and legitimacy of racial categories. Robinson, on the other hand, is an African-American Race Crit who is a race eliminativist. I place the term legal in parenthesis, because there is another type of CRT in which Robinson’s race eliminativism would be more mainstream. This second type of CRT is advanced by many contemporary African American philosophers of race. It is one where ‘‘CRT’’ is equivalent with ‘‘critical theories of race’’ (see Lewis R. Gordon, ‘‘Short History of the ‘Critical’ in Critical Race Theory,’’ American Philosophical Association Newsletter on Philosophy, Law, and the Black Experience 98, no. 2 [Spring 1999]: 23–26; see also Paul C. Taylor, ‘‘Ecce Negro: How to Become a Race Theorist,’’ in Critical Affinities: Nietzsche and African American Thought, ed. Jacqueline Scott and A. Todd Franklin [Albany, N.Y.: State University of New York Press, 2006], 110–11, and Charles W. Mills, From Class to Race: Essays in White Marxism and Black Radicalism

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[Lanham, Md.: Rowman and Littlefield, 2003], chapters 7–9). Despite the disagreements between race eliminativists and noneliminativists in AfricanAmerican philosophy, both sides agree that the term critical in ‘‘critical race theory’’ involves the analytical examination of ‘‘the ways in which race has operated and continues to operate in cultures around the world but particularly in American contexts’’ (Jacqueline Scott and A. Todd Franklin, ‘‘Introduction: The Art of the Cultural Physician,’’ in Critical Affinities: Nietzsche and African American Thought, 1–13, eds. Jacqueline Scott and A. Todd Franklin [Albany, N.Y.: State University of New York Press, 2006], 8). Both sides also agree that CRT ‘‘endeavors to see what, if any, type of theory of race might allow for healthier [psychological, material, and maybe even spiritual] individual identities and more liberated communities’’ (ibid., 8–9). Stated differently, both sides agree that CRT is the critical examination of race or how race shapes our experiences and identities. Nonetheless, unlike the CRT of legal studies, requesting legal redress for those who are subject to housing discrimination, loan discrimination, employment discrimination, and so on, based on their racial identities is not the primary goal of the philosopher’s CRT; rather, it concentrates mostly on altering how persons talk about and understand ‘‘race.’’ Robinson’s position would not be heretical in this second sense of CRT. Indeed, Robinson’s critique of racial categories and his rejection of their legitimacy place him closer to the second tradition of CRT than the one that was originated by legal scholars (for example, Derrick Bell and Richard Delgado) who were dissatisfied with the post–civil rights era status quo during the 1970s and 1980s. On the other hand, many of the second generation of legal Race Crits seem to be closer to the second type of CRT than the first type of CRT (see Richard Delgado, ‘‘Crossroads and Blind Alleys: A Critical Examination of Recent Writings About Race,’’ Texas Law Review 82 (2003): 121–52). Delgado sometimes calls this second generation of Race Crits, the idealist school (ibid., 122–23). Other times, he calls this second generation of Race Crits, the discourse school (ibid., 135–36). Delgado’s characterization of the second generation of Race Crits is an apt one, I think, and it fits Robinson well. 11. Unlike Robinson, however, Jones does not discount the difficulty of dismantling structural white oppression. And unlike Robinson, Jones does not simply say that since we cocreate an antiblack world, we rather have God-like ability to coconstitute with others the sort of reality we deem fit (see Robinson, ‘‘Poverty,’’ 1417–27, 1432–38; Robinson, ‘‘Human Agency,’’ 1416–18; Robinson, ‘‘Sacred Way of Tibetan CRT Kung Fu,’’ 423–25). Jones

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recognizes the historical constraints in which the social construction of (human) reality occurs. Unlike Jones who is a well-balanced existential phenomenologist, Robinson flees completely from our facticity and wholeheartedly embraces our capacity for transcendence, thus living in bad faith with respect to contemporary antiblack racism in the United States. Given that Robinson sometimes approvingly cites Sartre to substantiate his position, my contention that Robinson is living in bad faith with respect to antiblack racism is a harsh criticism. Unfortunately, it seems to be the case that Robinson is living in bad faith by overemphasizing the agential possibilities of African Americans in contemporary American society and underemphasizing the constraining power of antiblack structural forces built into the American social, political and economic systems on the life opportunities of many African Americans. Robinson’s position in the above-mentioned articles is also problematic because he advocates that ordinary African Americans take up a Kantian view of human subjectivity (see, for example, Robinson, ‘‘Human Agency,’’ 1413–16). The same criticisms I made with respect to Kantian rationalistic conception of human personhood in chapter 1 are equally applicable to Robinson’s Kantian view of human subjectivity. By emphasizing our capacity to be rational subjects and coconstituters of (epistemic) reality, Robinson does not offer ordinary African Americans a means to ‘‘achieve [the] liberation that CRT promises and that antidiscrimination practices seek’’ (ibid., 1416). Rather, what he offers ordinary African Americans is a rationalistic existence, where ‘‘their thoughts, emotions, and imaginations’’ do not lead to liberation, but to epistemic solipsism and its accompanying world in which whatever ‘‘they encounter is simply an extension of their own thoughts’’ (ibid). In a very real sense, the concrete person is lost in Robinson’s recommendation for how to liberate ordinary African Americans from antiblack racism. We are left with empty abstractions or, worse yet, superhuman, earthly gods who create reality at their whim. This is not the occasion to critique the problematic theological underpinnings of Robinson’s CRT position, particularly as it has been articulated in ‘‘Poverty.’’ I hope to critique thoroughly the theological underpinnings of Robinson’s CRT position in a subsequent work. 12. Jones, Is God a White Racist?, 196. 13. Ibid., 197. 14. The sort of traditional theodicy that Jones rejects is ‘‘the attempt to exonerate and justify God’s purposes and works in the face of contrary evidence’’ (ibid., xxiv). However, there is a second sense of theodicy: theodicy

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as the attempt to explain the causes of human suffering, especially the suffering caused by oppressive circumstances, and how the divine is either somehow responsible for that suffering or the one who motivates us to annihilate it (ibid., xxiv–xxv). This second sense of theodicy is the one that serves as an essential feature of humanocentric theism in particular and all theologies of liberation in general (ibid., xxv). 15. Gordon, e-mail correspondence with author. 16. Anthony B. Pinn, ‘‘ ‘Black Is, Black Ain’t’: Victor Anderson, African American Theological Thought, and Identity,’’ Dialog: A Journal of Theology 43, no. 1 (Spring 2004): 60. 17. John Clendenning, ed. The Letters of Josiah Royce (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970), 537. 18. Immanuel Kant, ‘‘What Does It Mean to Orient Oneself in Thinking?’’ in Kant: Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Religion and Other Writings, trans. and ed. Allen Wood and George Di Giovanni (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 8. 19. For more on my interpretation of Martin Luther King Jr.’s and Josiah Royce’s ideal of the Beloved Community, see chapter 6 of my monograph Yes, But Not Quite: Encountering Josiah Royce’s Ethico-Religious Insight (New York: Fordham University Press, 2009).

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Index

 absolute Thou, 24, 30, 44 African American, definition of, 15; neoconservatives, 145–46n61; religious traditions, 115–16; term identifying cultural heritage, 93, 97, 126n33, 143n42 Africana persons, 12, 14 Allison, Henry E., 127n4 Anderson, Victor, 116, 141n16 Appiah, Kwame Anthony, 16; as racial eliminativist, 92–93

Collins, James, 26 colonialism (racialized), in Francophone Caribbean, 102–3; in subSaharan Africa, 103; in the Americas, 105–6, 110–11. See also Fanon, Frantz colonialization of the lifeworld, 147–48n25 Cone, James H., 116, 118, 120, 149n6 creative fidelity, 24–25, 44, 75, critical race theory, 150–51n10 disponsibilite´ (Marcel), 37, 47 Douglass, Frederick, 115 Dussel, Enrique, critique of Western modernity and imperialism, 108–10, 147n24

bad faith, 16, 80, 83–84, 91–96, 111, 152n11; individual bad faith, 84; institutional bad faith, 84, 91 Beloved Community, ideal of, 121, 153n19 black religious humanism, as opposed to Kurtz’s humanism, 149n5 Borgmann, Albert, as scientific realist, 138n67; neo-Heideggerian critique of technology, 58, 66–72; technological devices, 63–67; thing, as understood by, 68–70, 137n42 Busch, Thomas W., 134n69

egalitarianism, Marcel’s criticism of, 75 Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 104–5 existential phenomenology, as practiced by Gordon, 82–83, 108; as practiced by Marcel, 6, 38–39, 51, 130–31n19. See also Gordon, Lewis R., phenomenological account of antiblack racism; reflective method

{ 17 3 }

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118; and theodicy, 119, 152–53n14; God as divine lure, 149–50n7 Husserl, Edmund, 9, 51, 108, 130– 31n19, 139n81, 147n20; lived body, 28, 128n20

extraphilosophical commitments, in Marcel, 13, 48–54, 134n82; in Royce, Josiah, 53; of Africana phenomenology, 141n10 Fanon, Frantz, 85–86, 105–6, 110–11, 146n9 fidelity, 24, 37, 43–46, 50–51; abides in being, 36; different than moral constancy, 131n44. See also creative fidelity fraternity, in Marcel’s sociopolitical thought, 75 freedom, 83–84, 118; circumscribed by facticity, 114

idealism in Marcel’s early philosophy, 26–27, 133n66 Is God a White Racist? (Jones), 117 James, William, 2 Jones, William R., 117–20, 148 Kant, Immanuel, 20, 33, 121, 153n18; distinction between phenomenal and noumenal, 20–23; epistemological interpretation of, 21–22; phenomenological interpretation of, 22–24. See also Allison, Henry E.; Levinas, Emmanuel; Scheler, Max Kantian transcendental tradition, 19–20 King, Martin Luther Jr., 115, 121, 153n19 Kierkegaard, Søren, and teleological suspension of the ethical, 52 Kristeva, Julia, 135n14 Kurtz, Paul, 149n5

genuine communities, 75–76 Gordon, Lewis R., 2, 10; and black people as ‘‘problem people,’’ 82, 86–88; hypervisibiity of black people, 84–85; phenomenological account of antiblack racism, 81–91; Purdue University anecdote, 90–91 Habermas, Ju¨rgen, 9, 147–48n25 Hanley, Katharine Rose, 132nn56, 60 Harman, Graham, 123–24n5 Harris, Leonard, 92, 105, 143n41, 146n9 Heidegger, Martin, 9, 50, 133n66; and onto-theology, 125n17; enframing environing world, 65, 136n29 Henry, Paget, 141n10, 147–48n25 Hill, Jason, 94, 144n45 holy, 23, 40; experienced as divine revelation, 64 humanocentric theism, 120; and functional ultimacy of persons,

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laissez-faire antiblack racism, 98–99. See also racism late Western modernity, 11–12, 14, 18, 56–59, 66, 73, 78, 112–15, 125n, 139n. See also Western modernity Levinas, Emmanuel, 40, 85 Locke, Alain, 2, 17, 52 Lo´pez, Ian F. Hanley, 125n33 Marcel, Gabriel, 2; being, 25–26, 36, 45; broken world, 58–59; critique

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neurotheology, 31, 128–29n32 noumenal, 21–22. See also Kant, Immanuel

of Islam (Man Against Mass Society), 147n13; critique of Marxist social theory, 77–78; critique of technology, 64–66, 72–73; ethico-religious insight, 11; existence, 25, 32–33, 128n19; God, 30–32; incarnation, 26–28; learned from Husserl’s Crisis to criticize scientism, 139n81; metaproblematic, 36–38, 49; mystery, 32–33; neglecting depersonaliziation of Africana persons, 102–10; neo-Socratic thinker, 51, 134n69; object, 129–30n7; objectivity, 24–30; ontological exigency for being, 11, 32, 39–40, 43; participate in being, 39, 134–35n1; phenomenology of having, 41–43; prayer, 31; problematic, 35–36, 41, 46, 73; revelation, 40; sacred, 64–65; soul, 31, 60, 130n16; sociopolitical thought, 73–78, 138n74; techniques of degradation (Man Against Mass Society), 60–61; technology, definition of, 63 metaphysics, analytic metaphysics, 7–8; as conceptual storytelling, 17; continental metaphysics, as envisioned by late Heidegger and Habermas, 9; Marcellian metaphysics as phenomenological metaphysics, 6, 8–10, 17, 113–14 Michaud, Thomas A., 73 Mounier, Emmanuel, 77, 139n91 multitude, the, 138n72

O’Mallery, John B., 126n1 Okihiro, Gary Y., 97, 144n53 Person, in Kant, Immanuel, 22; in Marcel, Gabriel, 19–20, 126–27n1; in Scheler, Max, 22–23 Pinn, Anthony B., 116, 149n5, phenomenal, 21–22, 42; divine’s absence as an entity, 119. See also Kant, Immanuel philosophy, Sokolowski, Robert’s definition of, 13 race, 16 racial eliminativists, 16, 91–93 racialism, 14–16 racism, 15, 61–62, 100–1; antiblack racism, 81–82, 88–90, 97–98; honorary white person, 84. See also laissez-faire antiblack racism Reed, Teresa I., 44 reflective method, 6, 11–12, 19, 47, 51–55, 58, 78, 133n66; primary reflection, 11, 24, 32, 37–38, 43, 46, 131n48, 133n68; secondary reflection, 37, 43–50, 54–55. See Marcel, Gabriel Ricoeur, Paul, criticism of Marcel’s reflective method, 48–49, 132n61 Robinson, Reginald Leamon, as heretical critical race theorist, 150–52nn10–11 Royce, Josiah, 2, 53, 120–21, 131n48, 134n79, 153n19; world of appreciation, 46; world of description, 46, 131n48

neocolonalism, 102, 111. See colonalism

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West, Cornel, 112, 115; economic justification of transatlantic slavery, 140n5; representative genealogical account of white normative gaze, 140–41n5; sympathetic critique of AfricanAmerican neoconservative phenomenon (Race Matters), 146n61 Western modernity, depersonalization during, 11, 104–5, 108–12, 114; Eurocentric, not necessarily, 111–12. See also colonialism (racialized); Dussel, Enrique white normative gaze, 90–91 Whiteanity, 117, 148–49n1 Winfrey, Oprah, Hermes incident, 84–85 World War I, Marcel’s volunteering in the French Red Cross during, 59–60, 135n6 World War II, 60–61 Wretched of the Earth, The (Fanon), 85, 105, 110

Sartre, Jean-Paul, 109–11 Schrag, Calvin O., 52 scientific racism, 81–82, 140–41n5 situatedness, 13, 44–45; 126n1 situation, being involved in, 13, 28–30, 37, 45, 83–84, 128n26 social construction of race, 16, 91 spirit of abstraction, 73–75, 138n spiritual availability, 37. See disponsibilite´ (Marcel) teleological suspension of philosophy, defined, 10; Gordon, Lewis R. and, 10–11; Kierkegaard’s teleological suspension of the ethical as, 52; Marcel’s reflective method as a, 11–12, 54–55; Royce, Josiah and, 53 transcendence, 109. See also freedom value, as nonactualized potencies, 114; ethico-religious, 4, 37, 65, 113–14, 117

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Zack, Naomi, 93–96, 144n47

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american philosophy Douglas R. Anderson and Jude Jones, series editors

Kenneth Laine Ketner, ed., Peirce and Contemporary Thought: Philosophical Inquiries. Max H. Fisch, ed., Classic American Philosophers: Peirce, James, Royce, Santayana, Dewey, Whitehead, second edition. Introduction by Nathan Houser. John E. Smith, Experience and God, second edition. Vincent G. Potter, Peirce’s Philosophical Perspectives. Edited by Vincent Colapietro. Richard E. Hart and Douglas R. Anderson, eds., Philosophy in Experience: American Philosophy in Transition. Vincent G. Potter, Charles S. Peirce: On Norms and Ideals, second edition. Introduction by Stanley M. Harrison. Vincent M. Colapietro, ed., Reason, Experience, and God: John E. Smith in Dialogue. Introduction by Merold Westphal. Robert J. O’Connell, S.J., William James on the Courage to Believe, second edition. Elizabeth M. Kraus, The Metaphysics of Experience: A Companion to Whitehead’s ‘‘Process and Reality,’’ second edition. Introduction by Robert C. Neville. Kenneth Westphal, ed., Pragmatism, Reason, and Norms: A Realistic Assessment—Essays in Critical Appreciation of Frederick L. Will. Beth J. Singer, Pragmatism, Rights, and Democracy. Eugene Fontinell, Self, God, and Immorality: A Jamesian Investigation. Roger Ward, Conversion in American Philosophy: Exploring the Practice of Transformation.

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James M. Albrecht, Reconstructing Individualism: A Pragmatic Tradition from Emerson to Ellison. Mathew A. Foust, Loyalty to Loyalty: Josiah Royce and the Genuine Moral Life. Cornelis de Waal and Krysztof Piotr Skowron´ski (eds.), The Normative Thought of Charles S. Peirce. Dwayne A. Tunstall, Doing Philosophy Personally: Thinking about Metaphysics, Theism, and Antiblack Racism. Erin McKenna, Pets, People, and Pragmatism. Sami Pihlstro¨m, Pragmatic Pluralism and the Problem of God. Thomas Alexander, The Human Eros: Eco-ontology and the Aesthetics of Existence.

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