Groundwork of Phenomenological Marxism: Crisis, Body, World 9781793640901

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Groundwork of Phenomenological Marxism

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Continental Philosophy and the History of Thought Series Editors: Christian Lotz, Michigan State University, and Antonio Calcagno, University of Western Ontario Advisory Board: Smaranda Aldea (Kent State University), Amy Allen (Penn State University), Silvia Benso (Rochester Institute of Technology), Jeffrey Bloechl (Boston College), Andrew Cutrofello (Loyola University, Chicago), Marguerite La Caze (University of Queensland), Christina M. Gschwandtner (Fordham University), Dermot Moran (Boston College and University College Dublin), Ann Murphy (University of New Mexico), Michael Naas (DePaul University), Eric Nelson (Hong Kong University of Science and Technology), Marjolein Oele (University of San Francisco), Mariana Ortega (Penn State University), Elena Pulcini (University of Florence, Italy), Alan Schrift (Grinell College), Anthony Steinbock (Stony Brook University), Brad Stone (Loyola Marymount University) The Continental Philosophy and the History of Thought series seeks to augment and amplify scholarship in continental philosophy by exploring its rich and complex relationships to figures, schools of thought, and philosophical movements that are crucial for its evolution and development. A historical focus allows potential authors to uncover important but understudied thinkers and ideas that were nonetheless foundational for various continental schools of thought. Furthermore, critical scholarship on the histories of continental philosophy will also help re-position, challenge, and even overturn dominant interpretations of established, well-known philosophical views while refining and re-interpreting them in light of new historical discoveries and textual analyses. The series seeks to publish carefully edited collections and high quality monographs that present the best of scholarship in continental philosophy and its histories.

Titles in series:

Groundwork of Phenomenological Marxism: Crisis, Body, World, by Ian H. Angus Max Stirner on the Path of Doubt, by Lawrence S. Stepelevich



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Groundwork of Phenomenological Marxism Crisis, Body, World Ian H. Angus

LEXINGTON BOOKS

Lanham • Boulder • New York • London

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Published by Lexington Books An imprint of The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc. 4501 Forbes Boulevard, Suite 200, Lanham, Maryland 20706 www.rowman.com 6 Tinworth Street, London SE11 5AL, United Kingdom Copyright © 2021 by All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote passages in a review. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Insert CIP data The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992.

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for Viviana for many reasons

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Contents

Preface ix Acknowledgements xi List of Abbreviations

xiii

PART ONE: PHENOMENOLOGY AND THE CRISIS OF MODERN REASON    Introduction: Modern Reason, Crisis, Meaning and Value 1  Overview of the Crisis

3 13

PART TWO: OBJECTIVISM AND THE CRISIS OF VALUE 2  Modern Science and the Problem of Objectivism

37

3  Galilean Science and the One-Dimensional Lifeworld

87

4  The Institution of Digital Culture

111

5  Representation and the Crisis of Value

129

   Concluding Remark to Part Two

147

PART THREE: THE LIVING BODY AND ONTOLOGY OF LABOUR 6  Science and the Lifeworld

151

7  Ontology of Labor and the Inception of Culture

177

8  The Regime of Value

231 vii

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Contents

 9  Technology in Living Labor

295

10  Nature and the Source of Value

335

    Concluding Remark to Part Three

353

PART FOUR: TRANSCENDENTALITY AND THE CONSTITUTION OF WORLDS 11  The Paradox of Subjectivity and the Transcendental Field

357

12  Limits of Europe and the Planetary Event

393

13  A  merica and Philosophy: Planetary Technology and Place-Based Indigeneity

419

14  Philosophy as Autobiography: A Thankful Critic

445

15  Excess and Nothing

463

    Concluding Remark to Part Four

483

PART FIVE: SELF-RESPONSIBILITY OF HUMANITY AS TELEOLOGICALLY GIVEN IN TRANSCENDENTAL PHENOMENOLOGY 16  Self-Responsibility for Humanity and for Oneself

487

Bibliography 509 Detailed Table of Contents

525

Index 533 About the Author

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Preface

The following is a philosophical text which attempts to follow through the implications of Edmund Husserl’s Crisis of the European Sciences and Karl Marx’s Capital, Vol. 1 in a manner pertinent to contemporary issues at the beginning of the 21st century. It develops themes relevant to Indigeneity; Eurocentrism; ecology; technology, media theory and digital culture; the monopolization of the social representation of value by money; digital labour; the plurality of (what I call) culture-civilizations; etc. Nevertheless, the main focus is not to address such themes individually but to uncover their philosophical basis and formulate a unified approach to them. In that sense, it is not a work of established scholarly research but of philosophy. While that philosophy will only be fully apparent in the unfolding logic of the text, it is, however, possible to consider the chapters which explicate the specific themes, and intervene in ongoing debates, separately.

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Acknowledgements

I have benefitted from support from several institutions while engaged in this project. I want to thank the Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences at Simon Fraser University for the award of a Shadbolt Fellowship which allowed me one year’s teaching release in 2012. I would also like to thank the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada for grant #435-2012-0209. Some chapters of this text were published in the following locations: chapter 4 is a reprint of the following journal article with small changes: Angus, Ian, “Galilean Science and the Technological Lifeworld: The Role of Husserl’s Crisis in Herbert Marcuse’s Thesis of One-Dimensionality,” Symposium: Canadian Journal of Continental Philosophy / Revue Canadienne de Philosophie Continentale, 21(2), Fall 2017, pages 133-159; chapter 5 includes material from Angus, Ian, “Emergent Meaning in the Information Age” in Raphael Foshay (ed.) The Digital Nexus: Identity, Agency, and Political Engagement (Edmonton: Athabasca University Press, 2016); and Angus, Ian, “Philosophy, Europe, and America: Planetary Technology and Place-Based Indigeneity” in The Routledge Handbook of Philosophy of Europe, eds. D. Meacham and N. De Warren (Routledge, 2021).

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Abbreviations in Citations

WORKS BY EDMUND HUSSERL Add “Addendum XXIII to The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology,” trans. Niall Keane, Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology, Vol. 44, No. 1, January 2013. AW  “Die anthropologische Welt” (Ende August 1936), Die Krisis der europäischen Wissenschaften und die transzendentale Phänomenologie. Ergänzungsband: Texte aus dem Nachlass, 1934–1937, her. Reinhold N. Smid, Husserliana XXIX. Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1993. BPP  The Basic Problems of Phenomenology: From the Lectures, Winter Semester, 1910–11, trans. I. Farin and J.G. Hart. Collected Works, Vol. XII. Dordrecht: Springer, 2006. C  The Crisis of the European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology. Northwestern University Press, 1970. CM  Cartesian Meditations, trans. Dorion Cairns. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1969. CMPV  Cartesianische Meditationen und Pariser Vorträge, Husserliana I. Haag: Nijhoff, 1973. EP  Erste Philosophie. Husserliana VIII, zweiter teil. Theorie der Phänomenologischen Reduktion, her. Rudolph Boehm. Dordrecht, Kluwer: 1959. EJ  Experience and Judgment, trans. James S. Churchill and Karl Ameriks. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1973. EU  Erfahrung und Urteil: Untersuchungen zur Genealogie der Logik. Ludwig Landgrebe (her.). Hamburg: Felix Meiner Verlag, 1997. xiii

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xiv

Abbreviations in Citations

F   “Fichte’s Ideal of Humanity (Three Lectures).” James G. Hart (Trans.). Husserl Studies, No. 12, 1995, pp. 111–33. FTL  Formal and Transcendental Logic, trans. Dorion Cairns. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1969. FUG  Die Frage nach dem Ursprung der Geometrie als intentionalhistorisches Problem, Beilage III, Die Krisis der europäischen Wissenschaften und die transzendentale Phänomenologie. Eine Einleitung in die phänomenologische Philosophie, her. Walter Biemel, Husserliana VI. The Hague: Nijhoff, 1954. FuTL  Formale und Transzendentale Logik, Husserliana VII. Haag: Nijhoff, 1974. Ideas1  Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy. First Book: General Introduction to a Pure Phenomenology, trans. F. Kersten. Collected Works Vol. II. The Hague: Nijhoff, 1982. Ideas2  Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy, Second Book: Studies in the Phenomenology of Constitution, trans. Richard Rojcewicz and André Schuwer. Collected Works, Vol. III. Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1989. Ideas3  Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy, Third Book: Phenomenology and the Foundations of the Sciences. trans. Ted E. Klein and William E. Pohl, Collected Works, Vol. 1. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1980. K  Die Krisis der europäischen Wissenschaften und die transzendentale Phänomenologie. Eine Einleitung in die phänomenologische Philosophie, her. Walter Biemel, Husserliana VI. Haag: Nijhoff, 1954. KE  Die Krisis der europäischen Wissenschaften und die transzendentale Phänomenologie. Ergänzungsband: Texte aus dem Nachlass, 1934–1937, her. Reinhold N. Smid, Husserliana XXIX. Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1993. KEM “Die Krisis der Europäischen Menschentums und die Philosophie.” Abhandlung aus Die Krisis der europäischen Wissenschaften und die transzendentale Phänomenologie. Eine Einleitung in die phänomenologische Philosophie, her. Walter Biemel, Husserliana VI. Haag: Nijhoff, 1954. IP  The Idea of Phenomenology, trans. W.P. Alston and G. Nakhnikian. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1964. LB “Letter to Levy-Bruhl.” Dermot Moran and Lukas Steinacher (Trans. With an introduction). The New Yearbook for Phenomenology and Phenomenological Philosophy, Vol. 8, 2008, pp. 325–54.

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Abbreviations in Citations xv

LI  Logical Investigations, trans. J.N. Findlay. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1970. LU  Logische Untersuchungen. Tubingen: Max Niemeyer Verlag, 1968. OL “Die Ontologie der Lebenswelt und die konkreten Wissenschaften. Schlußteil der Erstfassung der Krisis” (Dezember 1935), Die Krisis der europäischen Wissenschaften und die transzendentale Phänomenologie. Erganzungsband: Texte aus dem Nachlaß 1934–1937, her. von Reinhold N. Smid, Husserliana XXIX. Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1993. OG  The Origin of Geometry included as Appendix VI to The Crisis of the European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology, trans. David Carr. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1970. PA  Philosophy of Arithmentic, trans. Dallas Willard. Edmund Husserl: Collected Works, Vol. X. Dordrecht: Kluwer, 2003. PdA  Philosophie de Arithmetik. Edmund Husserl: Gesammelte Werke, Band XII, her. Lothar Eley. Den Haag: Nijhoff, 1970. PRS  Philosophy as Rigorous Science. In Phenomenology and the Crisis of Philosophy, trans. Quentin Lauer. Harper and Row: New York, 1965. PSW “Philosophie als strenge Wissenschaft.” In Aufsätze und Vorträge (1911–1921), ed. Thomas Nenon and Hans Rainer Sepp, Husserliana XXV. The Hague: Nijhoff, 1987. R “Renewal: Its Problem and Method.” In Husserl: The Shorter Works, eds. Peter McCormick and Frederick Elliston. Notre Dame: Notre Dame University Press, 1981. VEW  Vorlesungen über Ethik und Wertlehre (1908–1914). U. Melle (Ed.). Husserliana XXVIII. Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1988. VL  The Vienna Lecture, originally titled “Philosophy in the Crisis of European Humanity,” included as Appendix I to The Crisis of the European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology, trans. David Carr. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1970. WORKS BY OTHER AUTHORS BT Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. Joan Stambaugh. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1996. Cap1 Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, Vol. 1, trans. Ben Fowkes. New York: Vintage Books, 1977.

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xvi

Abbreviations in Citations

Cap3 Karl Marx, Capital, Vol. 3, (ed.) Frederick Engels. London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1972. DC Karel Kosík, Dialectics of the Concrete, translated by Karel Kovanda and James Schmidt. Dordrecht: D. Reidel, 1976. DK Karel Kosík, Die Dialektik des Konkreten, aus dem Tschechischen von Marianne Hoffman. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1967. GMT Jacob Klein, Greek Mathematical Thought and the Origin of Algebra, trans. Eva Brann. Dover: New York, 1992. Reprint of the MIT edition, 1968. Gr Karl Marx, Grundrisse, Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy (Rough Draft), trans. Martin Nicolaus. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1973. Gr-G Karl Marx, Grundrisse der Kritik der Politichen Ökonomie (Rohentwurf), Dietz Verlag, Berlin: 1974. Guide Dorion Cairns, Guide for Translating Husserl. Martinus Nijhoff: The Hague, 1973. HM Herbert Marcuse, Heideggerian Marxism, Edited by Richard Wolin and John Abromeit. Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 2005. Kap1 Karl Marx, Das Kapital, Erster Band, Buch 1. Berlin: Dietz Verlag, 1957. ODM Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man. Boston: Beacon Press, 1968. OSP  Herbert Marcuse, “On Science and Phenomenology,” in Boston Studies in the Philosophy of Science, Vol. 2: In Honor of Philipp Frank (Proceedings of the Boston Colloquium for the Philosophy of Science, 1962–4), ed. Robert S. Cohen and Marx W. Wartofsky (New York: Humanities Press, 1965). PCL Herbert Marcuse, “On the Philosophical Foundations of the Concept of Labour in Economics” (1933) in Heideggerian Marxism, Edited by Richard Wolin and John Abromeit. Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 2005. PGWA  Herbert Marcuse, “Über die philosophischen Grundlagen des wirtschaftswissenschaftlichen Arbeitsbegriffs,” in Kultur und Gesellschaft 2 (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1965). PHS Jacob Klein. “Phenomenology and the History of Science” in The Lectures and Essays of Jacob Klein, ed. Robert B. Williamson and Elliot Zuckerman. St. John’s College Press: Annapolis, 1985. SZ Martin Heidegger, Sein und Zeit. Tübingen: Max Niemeyer Verlag, 1986.

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Abbreviations in Citations xvii

TE Angus, I. Technique and Enlightenment: Limits of Instrumental Reason. Washington: Centre for Advanced Research in Phenomenology and University Press of America, 1984. Now available at: https:// www.academia.edu/720747/Technique_and_Enlightenment_Limits _of_Instrumental_Reason CONVENTIONS OF CITATION Citations are from commonly available English translations unless the translation is an issue for the interpretation, or unless a key word or phrase’s meaning should be underlined with reference to the original text, in which case the translation is altered and commonly available original versions are cited in addition. Emphases are maintained as they appear in the original text except as stated to the contrary. References to Plato include not only the bibliographic entry but also the name of the dialogue and the Stephanus page number.

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Part I

PHENOMENOLOGY AND THE CRISIS OF MODERN REASON

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Introduction Modern Reason, Crisis, Meaning and Value

Since the late Renaissance, European society and culture has been centrally defined through the mathematical science of nature which has often circumscribed the concept of reason outright. This scientific paradigm contains an inherent connection to technological application. It has been taken as the essential form of reason, its hegemonic form or “exemplary” model (C 63). Thus, it has been at least difficult and often impossible to articulate a concept of reason that is not derivative from mathematical science. In consequence, irrationalist tendencies have often arisen due to the lack of an adequate response by this attenuated model of reason. Even more, the mathematical and formal type of reason has been taken as the highest cultural value in the sense that modern European and European-influenced culture has defined itself as the “culture of reason” and has often differentiated itself from other cultures by judging them as lacking in reason. European modernity is essentially tied to the domination of a certain form of abstraction over knowledge and social organization. Even while such dominance has today become planetary, it is tied to its roots in the science and technology of the European Renaissance and its subsequent developments. This philosophical analysis of the roots and implication of the modern concept of reason is based upon the work of Edmund Husserl and discovers an important convergence with the work of Karl Marx. While it engages in scholarly interpretation of these authors, interpretation is not its main task. The task is to develop a phenomenological Marxism adequate to the cultural and ecological crisis of the 21st century.

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Introduction

01. ABSTRACTION AND LIVED EXPERIENCE Modern reason depends upon a specific form of abstraction due to the centrality of mathematics to the science of nature. The type of abstraction in question may be called “formal” insofar as it is not an abstraction from species to genus—which retains a material component and thus reference to possible concrete instantiations. The difficulties inherent in such application of formal abstraction irrespective of material content has given rise to the call for philosophy to return to the concrete, that is to say, for philosophy to relinquish its alliance with the dominance of formal abstraction and to pose critically the question of the limits and justification of its application to a given material content. Two such attempts to recover the concrete have already become classic in our time. Ludwig Landgrebe’s interpretation of the convergence on the common problem of the need for philosophy to turn to sensuous corporeality by Marx and Husserl concludes that phenomenology “must also take up the problems Marx posed as problems in its theory of crisis, for they deal with the same crisis, though in an earlier form than ours” (1984, 55, 81). The successive crises have led to successive critical analyses of its sources, forms, and consequences. We will see that a third form of crisis has emerged which must be addressed by a reformulated phenomenological Marxism. For simplicity’s sake we may refer to 19th, 20th, and 21st century forms of crisis and critique. We will show that the special science that is the object of critique not only shifts from political economy to mathematical physics to ecology but also that the sense of a return to the concrete correspondingly shifts. Despite many points of agreement with the two previous forms of critique, the third critique outlined here is distinct from them in essence and teleology. Identical to the previous forms, however, 21st century phenomenological Marxism is limited to the critical intellectual-spiritual form of a historical crisis. It makes no promises whatever that the historical crisis itself will be adequately addressed or overcome. From the perspective of the third form, which will become evident in the teleology of the current presentation, the first two forms share a significant focus on the return to the concrete understood as a return to the immediate intuition of concrete individuals. In the contemporary, 21st century form of phenomenological Marxism it is the essential role played by background and horizon in the perception of individuals that motivates and justifies a contemporary turn to ecology as the exemplary special science. The problem of formal abstraction is the generative problem of European modernity and its influence on planetary technology. In Marx, it is shown that the presupposition of technological advance is the expulsion of the owners of labor-power from control of the work-process such that its design focusses

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Introduction 5



exclusively on the end-product and not on the experience of labor itself. In that sense it is a formal organization elaborated independently of its experiential content, an organization of abstract rather than concrete labor. For Husserl, the 20th century crisis of the European sciences was the reduction of knowledge or reason due to its reliance on formal abstraction to a theoretical technique severed from meaning and value in the lived world. A contemporary ecological elaboration of phenomenological Marxism must address the relationship between technological intervention in natural processes and the balance between such processes in an ecological whole. This requires technical invention to be developed from within the active work process and not subsume that process within a formal organization. In this sense the problem of form that defines modernity is outwardly expressed as a problem of technology, but this is not just any technology but specifically technology formally elaborated such that it removes meaning and value from its determinate content. The public face of the problem of form in European modernity is the critique of technologies of subsumption in favor of a recovery of concrete experience and technologies which reinforce concrete lived, experience. Its philosophical face is the critique of formalizing abstraction itself. This text addresses both of these and clarifies their internal relationship. 0.2 MEANING AND VALUE AS GROUNDED IN SUBJECTIVITY Twentieth-century European philosophy has turned its critical intelligence on the role of modern formal reason in European modernity. In my view, the most important book of 20th century philosophy is Edmund Husserl’s The Crisis of the European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology (subsequently Crisis). Husserl explored the role of the mathematical scientific paradigm in generating a “loss of meaning” in human life. As he said, “this is a crisis which does not encroach upon the theoretical and practical successes of the special sciences; yet it shakes to the foundations the whole meaning of their truth” (C 12). The crisis to which Husserl refers is due to the fact that this scientific paradigm “excludes in principle precisely the questions which man, given over in our unhappy times to the most portentous upheavals, finds the most burning: questions of the meaning or meaninglessness of the whole of this human existence” (C 6). Truth, in the sense in which Husserl’s phenomenology demands it, refers to the meaning and value inherent in human practice as it is determined by human reason and thus is as imperilled by the reduction of reason to techno-science as it is by the abandonment of reason for irrational responses.

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Introduction

One key element in Husserl’s response to this crisis was to show that the mathematical science of nature is an abstraction from the ordinary experience that we have of what he called the “lifeworld.” Alfred North Whitehead referred to the same situation which is produced by the substitution of mathematical-scientific concepts for immediate experience with the idea of the “fallacy of misplaced concreteness.” He argued that to take “the simple location of instantaneous material configurations . . . [as] the fundamental fact of concrete nature” was a fallacy and that understanding nature needs to begin from “more concrete facts” (Whitehead 1967, 50–1). One might even define 20th century philosophy by its recognition of this fundamental fact: that science is based upon a more fundamental and concrete experience of the world for which it tends to substitute its own abstract, formal concepts. This fact leads to a demand for a recovery of immediate experience and a re-evaluation of the cultural value that has been placed on science as the paradigm of reason. As impatient as we may be with the central reference to Europe in Husserl’s work, any contemporary engagement of European philosophy in an inter-cultural dialogue requires recognition of the project of a “recovery of the concrete” that European philosophy has itself begun to demand of European culture. One may wonder whether Husserl’s emphasis on tracing the mathematical science of nature back to its inauguration by Galileo has become outdated by contemporary developments in physics. Relativity, quantum mechanics, the probabilistic thermodynamics of temperature, etc. have taken the mathematical science of nature far beyond the classical stage of Newtonian mechanics. If, in his conception of crisis, Husserl had followed the many other critics who pointed to the determinism, time-neutrality, or reductionist physicalism of classical science, this might well be the case. But Husserl’s analysis rests exclusively on the distinction and relation between the mathematical substruction of nature and the everyday lifeworld in which scientists and others live and act. About Einstein, he remarked that relativity remains an exact science in the same sense as classical physics, that it utilizes idealized mathematical formulae and depends upon the prescientific lived world in which we act as human subjects in an identical manner (C 4, 125–6; VL 295). Thus, the features of Galilean science which were deemed significant by Husserl have not been altered by the contemporary mathematical science inaugurated by the breakthroughs of the 20th century. The distinction between science and the lifeworld is not lost on contemporary scientists. The distinguished physicist Carlo Rovelli points to the issue in this way: “What role do we as human beings who perceive, make decisions, laugh, and cry, in this great fresco of the world as depicted by contemporary physics?” (Rovelli 65). Indeed, the question of the being and role of subjec-

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Introduction 7

tivity has become a thematic issue in contemporary science. While there is no need for phenomenology to either anticipate or attempt to adjudicate the scientific theory that aims to explain subjectivity, the phenomenological issue remains: given the distinction between science and lifeworld, how is their relation to be conceived? Rovelli follows the dominant scientific assumption when he goes on to point out that the whole history of science has been to displace humans from the center of the universe. “As our knowledge had grown, we have learned that our being is only a part of the universe, and a small part at that” (Rovelli 66–7). Interestingly, this is the same understanding put forth by Freud when he situated himself and psychoanalysis in the history of modern thought. First Copernicus displaced the earth from the center of the universe, then Darwin displaced humans from the center of the animal world, finally Freud and psychoanalysis displaced humans from the center of their own consciousness (Freud 1917, 1509). However, if human subjectivity is seen in this manner as inevitably displaced from an explanatory role within science, then the lived human world must be interpreted solely as the source of error within science—so that subjectivity, as Husserl claims in the Crisis, cannot be understood scientifically such that issues of value are expelled from reason. While it seems fair enough to interpret the history of science as one of disillusionment with human narcissism, Husserl’s question is different and may even be interpreted as a reflexive question about this history. Husserl is interested, given that humans are no longer at the center of scientific theory, not in how to account scientifically for human subjectivity (which is a perfectly valid scientific question), but in how human subjectivity has been able to accomplish such scientific theory and how the truth of such scientific theory requires being traced back to its origins in the human lifeworld for its meaning and value. There is a paradoxical relation between the displacement of human subjectivity within scientific theory and the persisting human subjectivity that develops and applies scientific knowledge. In short, the interpretation of the history of science proposed by Rovelli, Freud, and many others, does not attain the level of reflection that occurs in Husserl’s distinction between science and lifeworld and grounding of science as an abstraction from the lifeworld. The phrase “meaning and value” which is often used in this text refers to Husserl’s use of the German word Sinn (C 14; K 12). This is a widespread terminology in German philosophy. For example, Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno used the same term to refer to the same issue (Horkheimer and Adorno 1972, 5; Horkheimer and Adorno 1969, 11). Sinn is conventionally translated simply as “meaning” (C 14; K 12). However, it is important to this inquiry that “meaning” in this sense includes “value” in the sense that ongoing practices are meaningful and valuable to their practitioners, indeed that

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Introduction

practices contain evaluations immanently within themselves by virtue of their aims and means (EP 193). As James Hart has phrased the matter, “value has a more fundamental status than an empirical or cultural universal. . . . one reason is that valuing in its manifold forms, eg. of desiring, loving, willing, wishing, delighting in, being enthralled by, admiring, finding pleasing, etc. is an ineluctable and fundamental way that humans exist” (Hart 1997a, 7). Such valuing-in-practice does, of course, not amount to a concrete theory of value nor even a formal axiology. The initial orienting question for The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology is about the role of practical, humanly perceived, meaning and value in a world dominated by scientific concepts. As Dermot Moran has summarized, “persons relate to one another in complex irrational ways, according to their motivations, sedimented traditions, values, beliefs, and desires” (Moran 2012, 158–9). In the lifeworld, meaning and value are immanent in practical orientations and understandings. Thus, while meaning and value are grounded in subjectivity, they are not subjective but rooted in practices that engage subjects with objects. It is with this sense of immanent meaning and value that the term “meaning and value” is used in this text. Prior to a formal axiology one must have access the ongoing practical valuations immanent in practices as objects of reason. The question of meaning and value is not approached directly, as it were, but by way of a crisis in the mode of reason that makes it difficult or impossible to adequately thematize it. 0.3 THEORY OF THE TEXTS There are two main texts upon which this investigation is based. First, Edmund Husserl’s The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology and, second, Karl Marx’s Capital, Vol. 1. That is not to say that an understanding of phenomenology before and after the Crisis, and an understanding of political economy, Marx and Marxism before and after the first volume of Capital, are irrelevant, but such understanding is focused around these two texts because they are arguably the central philosophical texts of the 20th and 19th centuries. Moreover, their immanent connection is uncovered in this text. Husserl’s Crisis has been chosen as the central focus for three reasons. First, his analysis of the loss of subjectivity and project of its recovery through phenomenology is arguably still the best entry into the philosophical diagnosis of the contemporary crisis. Second, its influence on subsequent philosophy has been great, although its phenomenological basis has often unnecessarily been discarded. Third, the scope of the Crisis-text, especially its

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Introduction 9

enfolding of three central areas for investigation, means that it is for heuristic purposes a thorough way to organize an investigation into the contemporary crisis: the critique of the mathematization of nature and the domination of formal reason; the organization of human social motility into large-scale organizations which subsume the activities of individuals within them; and that the perception of things, persons, and nature occur within (what I will call) cultural-civilizational worlds whose relation must be an issue for a contemporary philosophy. It is no accident that these three substantive philosophical issues are intertwined within Husserl’s great text. Within the elaboration of our text, we will discover the immanent, close connection to the central theme of Marx’s thought. We could have begun with Marx but that would raise the considerable issue of Marx’s relation to the philosophical tradition at the outset and also make the connection to Husserl and subsequent philosophy somewhat arbitrary—not to mention tying Marx too closely to his Hegelian origins. By way of contrast, the Crisis is a philosophically erudite and remarkable text, even though it remained unfinished. Our task is nothing less than to finish it.1 Along the way the connection to Marx’s Capital, Vol. 1 appears. It was published in 1867 and is the only finished text that Marx published in his later life. Other works from close to this period, such as The Civil War in France (1871) or his writings on the American Civil War (1861–2), were mainly historical works. Value, Price and Profit (1865) was a popularization of the work underway for Capital. Like the earlier Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy (1859), it is surpassed by the theoretical advances that appeared in 1867. Unlike The 1844 Manuscripts and Grundrisse (1857)—which have both been significant for rethinking Marx’s work—it is not made up of notes to himself. It is a work of rigorous theory and logic directed at the entire history and significance of political economy. Political economy is the science that arose to understand and justify capitalism as an economic and social system. There is no comparable complete work of Marx’s that expresses his mature thought. My interpretation of Marx thus begins and ends with this text and only relies on others when that necessity is pointed to from within the logic of this text. We may note that three significantly different interpretations of the Marxist heritage can be distinguished by what they regard as the foundational level of analysis: class struggle, the “anarchy of the market” to use V.I. Lenin’s phrase, and that which focuses on the labor process—specifically the capitalist labor process. Each of these implies a political project that differs fundamentally from the others and entails significantly different evaluations of socalled “Marxist” political regimes of the 20th century. If class struggle is the fundamental level of analysis, classless society is the political project, such that it remains undetermined what is the relationship of the classless society

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Introduction

to the organization of labor. If the anarchy of the market is the problem, then the solution is state regulation of the economy. Some combination of these two defines the dominant tendency of 20th century Marxism that has in some cases attained political power—even though it might rightly be commented that the classless society has been more ideology than reality. Priority of the labor process implies that the organization of labor is the criterion for revolutionary change. By this criterion no currently or previously existing state has even attempted to become Marxist. This interpretation of Marxism has been least politically successful even while it launches a fundamental critique of the hierarchical organization of labor in both capitalist and Communist societies. Beginning from Capital, Vol. 1 our interpretation focuses on the labor process to develop an ontology of labor which we will show to be Marx’s fundamental philosophical contribution. Interpretation of Marx’s work as an ontology of living labor depends on a view of human being as fundamentally a praxis that manifests itself in organizations of social motility. The interpretation of Edmund Husserl’s and Karl Marx’s work is necessarily adumbrated here due both to the large extent of such work and the exceedingly large volume of commentary. Its selections and emphases are guided by teleological interpretation in the sense given to that term by Ludwig Landgrebe: it focusses primarily not on the words and concepts utilized by Husserl nor Marx but on the emergent dynamic of philosophical articulation within their works. While the formulation of new problems must necessarily rely on terminology with established lineage and meaning, such usage may draw the understanding of such problems back to prior conceptual structures. Teleological interpretation, in contrast, “must be careful not to mistake the preliminary meaning of a name for the intended states of affairs themselves” (Landgrebe 1984, 55–6). It is essential both to phenomenology and Marxism (understood as the continuation of Marx’s critical method) that the investigation is guided by an encounter with the phenomenon as it presents itself and only secondarily by previous investigations into the same or similar phenomena (see Lukács 1971, 1–2). The goal of such an interpretation, with its specific points of emphasis, is to further description of the phenomenon itself— the manifestation of the world through human labor. It is thus not an attempt to attain a “true” reading of Husserl’s, or Marx’s, texts as such but a rigorous reading of two philosophers in an attempt to advance a philosophical inquiry. Such phenomenological interpretation is a philosophical co-questioning that moves from the texts toward the things themselves. It has to set aside a reproductive correctness of interpretation for what Jacques Taminiaux called a “risk . . . bound up with its very manifestation, bound up with the very power of unconcealment that it indissolubly sets to work” (1990, 83). Teleological interpretation is the application of philosophical dialogue to the written work

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Introduction 11



of a philosopher. However great one’s appreciation of the individual’s accomplishments, philosophical interpretation reaches beyond this toward the question itself in which is based such appreciation. It is the risk of the current work that it attempts to complete Husserl’s philosophical work in the Crisis and to provide a contemporary interpretation of Marx in aid of a 21st century phenomenological Marxism. 0.4 STRUCTURE AND TELEOLOGY OF THE WORK The five-Part structure of the text is based upon the structure of Husserl’s Crisis—though with some modification, as is explained in chapter 1. The first and fifth Parts set out the relationship of phenomenological philosophy to the crisis of meaning and value experienced by contemporary humanity and point to the self-responsibility of humanity not only for itself in the community of cultural-civilizational forms but also for nature. Part II is concerned with the mathematization of nature that arose in the Renaissance and the recovery of subjectivity required by its subsequent objectivism. Part III explores the relationship between science and the lifeworld through human motility and its social organization in the labor process. It shows the convergence between Husserl’s conception of the living body and Marx’s ontology of social labor. Part IV is concerned with the relationship between what Husserl called the “transcendental ego” and a concrete ego or subjectivity in the lived world. This was called the “paradox of subjectivity” by Husserl. Our presentation situates concrete subjectivities within cultural-civilizational worlds in order to explore the contemporary crisis as a conflict between planetary technology and place-based Indigeneity. Phenomenological self-responsibility in the form articulated here constitutes a new conception of phenomenology that can guide further research and can root that research firmly in the history of philosophy. It proposes a philosophy that would be phenomenological, in the sense of a recovery of the concrete experiential origin of scientific thinking; that would be ecological, in the sense that it would focus on the concrete relations between different parts that construct a whole; and that would be Marxist, in the sense that it would focus on the dynamics of everyday practice and a social representation of value that does not rely on commodity price. The teleology of the current investigation is toward a philosophy that incorporates phenomenology and Marxist themes but supersedes them in its immanent development toward a radical investigation of the contemporary lifeworld. While it begins from the phenomenological attempt to revitalize meaning and value through a critique of the exemplary, or hegemonic,

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Introduction

character of modern science, it is in no sense anti-scientific. It is precisely an attempt to ground meaning and value in terms adequate to contemporary scientific-technological civilization. The Crisis is both the culmination of Husserl’s philosophy and a new introduction to phenomenology. Through our interpretation and development of the Crisis we expect to advance the teleology of phenomenological philosophy and to explicate a new programme for its execution. NOTE 1.  Scholarship on the Crisis has tended to confine itself to explication of its argument and clarification of its basic concepts. Despite the value of such scholarship, the philosophical task which the Crisis would bequeath to us has not been taken up as such within mainstream phenomenology. The two main exceptions to this rather sweeping judgment are Herbert Marcuse and Enzo Paci (Marcuse 1964; Paci 1972). See chapter 3.

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Chapter One

Overview and Structure of the Crisis

During the last years of his life (1934–8), Husserl was occupied with the texts that have become Crisis of the European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology: An Introduction to Phenomenological Philosophy. This work was provoked by an invitation from the organizing committee of the International Congress of Philosophy (1934) to comment on “the mission of philosophy in our time” (Carr, 1970, xvi). Other than the reading of his letter at the Congress, work on this topic first appeared publicly as lectures. Husserl gave “Philosophy in the Crisis of European Humanity” (also known as the Vienna Lecture) on two occasions in Vienna in May 1935 and lectures on “The Crisis of the European Sciences and Psychology” in Prague in November 1935. The Prague lectures were revised to appear in the journal Philosophia in January 1936. While Husserl continued to work on manuscripts that would continue this text or supplement it, none of it work appeared in print until the Crisis text that was assembled posthumously by Walter Biemel in 1954. The work of this period represents the last stage of Husserl’s phenomenology as a critical history and teleology of reason. Given the centrality of the Crisis to both to the conception of phenomenology advanced here and the substantive theses that it proposes regarding the historical situation of knowledge, this chapter undertakes a preliminary analysis of the philosophical orientation of the Crisis, its three major innovations, their underlying logic, the fundamental assumptions that structure the argument of the text, and the five-part literary form that the philosophical content of the Crisis suggests.

13

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14

1.1 IS THERE A CRISIS OF THE EUROPEAN SCIENCES? Part I of the text of the Crisis, which is divided into seven short sections, addresses the sense in which there may be said to be a crisis of the European sciences. It is necessary to explicate this sense in order to clarify the meaning of Husserl’s critical enterprise in its relation to historical exigency, on one hand, and philosophy, on the other, in order eventually to investigate the sense in which these are tied together in Husserl’s late philosophy. Husserl begins (section 1) by saying that the crisis of a science concerns its scientific character, the task that it sets for itself, and its methodology. Excepting philosophy, due to its contemporary tendency to fall away from reason, and psychology, insofar as it makes philosophical claims, the positive sciences such as mathematics and the natural sciences, as well as the human sciences, are models of success within their own domains. But if the question of crisis is posed from the perspective of the culture in which the sciences are pursued and the role assigned to them within that culture, then the situation is very different. Husserl says that the crisis of the sciences is not concerned with their internal scientific character, but rather “what they, or what science in general, has meant and could mean for human existence” (C 5).1 The crisis in question is a cultural issue concerning the role of science for the meaning of human existence (section 2). This cultural issue concerns psychology and philosophy especially since they deal with the “enigma of subjectivity” (C 4) that pertains to their central subject-matter and method, but this enigma also accounts for “insoluble obscurities in modern, even mathematical sciences” (C 4). The cultural issue thus centers on the problem of subjectivity in a manner that even produces difficulties within successful, positive sciences concerning their cultural role. Positive sciences in their successful functioning produce knowledge of facts and, since they are limited to facts, cannot speak to us as humans formed through freedom and reason. Even human sciences tend to consider values only factually—that is to say, as values that are in fact held by such-and-such a human subject. They do not, Husserl claims, address evaluative questions as such, that is to say, enter into evaluations themselves on the ground of their contribution to human freedom and reason. Insofar as the sciences are restricted from entering into evaluations, and if reason is limited to this restricted conception of science, then “history has nothing more to teach us than that all the shapes of the spiritual world, all the conditions of life, norms upon which man relies, form and dissolve themselves like fleeting waves . . . that again reason must turn into nonsense” (C 7). If factual sciences are divorced from subjectivity, which is the ground for evaluation, the reason that they produce turns into nonsense because the human spirit remains unknown.

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Overview and Structure of the Crisis 15

Husserl then turns to specify that the concept of reason at issue here arose in the Renaissance as part of the reshaping of philosophy at that time (section 3). Modern philosophy modelled itself on ancient philosophy in three aspects: primacy of theoretical philosophy, as a survey of the world unhampered by tradition yielding universal knowledge; recognition of the reason and teleology inherent in the world (a spiritual history); and the practical autonomy that follows upon the exercise of free reason. Philosophy is, in this conception, the unification of all scientific endeavors that gives a role to each science within a culture of reason. “The new philosophy seeks nothing less than to encompass, in the unity of a theoretical reason, all meaningful questions in a rigorous scientific manner, with an apodictically intelligible methodology, in an unending but rationally ordered progress of inquiry” (C 8–9). From this point of view, the positivistic conception of science as confined to facts and incapable of evaluation is a falling-away from the Renaissance conception. The problems of reason that emerge as a result all have to do with the “‘meaning’ (Sinn), of reason in history” (C 9, translation altered; K 7). If it has come to pass that we have lost faith in the efficacy of the new Renaissance science for the direction of human life through its key cultural role, then it must be because there was something wrong, or at least unclarified, about this new beginning that has led it into dissolution (section 4). Husserl clearly asserts that there is a crisis of the sciences insofar as they have become separated from the role that gave them meaning at their beginning: the forming of human historical life in freedom by reason. Without the meaning generated by this beginning there would be no crisis. It is not that the subject-matter and method of specific sciences is lacking, nor that valid results are not produced, it is that the very success of the sciences has been divorced from that which gives them meaning. The imminent danger posed by the Nazi menace at the time of Husserl’s writing, to which he is adverting, suggests that he saw this immediate threat in the context of the crisis of the sciences. There is no doubt that his audience would have understood the connection between the loss of reason to which he refers and the Nazi practice of using science and technology without committing to reason in the larger sense of meaning and value within human affairs. It is not just a matter of the use of science and technology for evil purposes. The point is that the connection between scientific success and the failure to articulate reason as an evaluative historical process is based upon a cultural failure to properly situate the role of the sciences. To this extent, while the indirect reference to the Nazis should be kept in mind, the analysis survives their defeat if it can be shown that we still lack an evaluative culture that can recover the Renaissance synthesis of freedom and reason.

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16

Chapter One

Behind the immediate political dangers that could be identified by Husserl’s audience as an irrationalism promoted by then current political and cultural developments, and the contemporary dangers that we may now be able to identify in a culture that divorces scientific reason from an ethicalhistorical role, Husserl identified an “inner dissolution” (section 5) of modern universal philosophy that could, in his view, account for the emergence and re-emergence of such dangers in the deeper failing of the concept of reason inherited from the Renaissance. He claims that Philosophy became a problem for itself, at first, understandably, in the form of the [problem of the] possibility of metaphysics; and, following what we said earlier, this concerned implicitly the meaning and possibility of the whole problematics of reason. As for the positive sciences, at first they were untouchable. Yet the problem of a possible metaphysics also encompassed eo ipso that of the possibility of the factual sciences, since these had their relational meaning—that of truths merely for areas of what is—in the indivisible unity of philosophy (C 11).

The inner dissolution of modern philosophy began with metaphysics—the determination of what is, as a whole, by reason—and, as a consequence, spread to the determination of reason itself and then to the apparently untouchable special, factual sciences because their “possibility” came into question, a possibility encompassing their “relational meaning” in the “indivisible unity of philosophy.” The unity of philosophy as the telos of the rational determination of human life in history established by the Renaissance is the ground whose relation to the special, factual sciences draws them into the inner dissolution of philosophy. It is in this sense that there is a crisis of the special, factual sciences. Not by virtue of internal failure of subject-matter or method, but due to the claim of science to generate meaning in history through the reformation of human life, the special, factual sciences are brought into crisis. The “cultural role” of science is thus crucial to the claim that the crisis envelops the special sciences; otherwise, it would be confined to a crisis of philosophy. This cultural role was assigned in the Renaissance reshaping of humanity and thus the crisis is a crisis of modern philosophy, reason and its historical role; it is an “inner dissolution” not one based on an external standpoint of evaluation. Notice that the inner dissolution of the Renaissance founding occurs in reverse order to the experience of crisis: as sketched in the above quotation, “inner dissolution” emerges in metaphysics (the fundamental discipline of philosophy since it deals with “what is” in an unrestricted sense), spreads to the concept of reason, and then to the special sciences. By virtue of the cultural mediation it becomes a general socio-cultural crisis. The Renais-

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Overview and Structure of the Crisis 17

sance founding situates the special sciences through the concept of reason and the concept of reason upon a metaphysics claiming to know the whole in a manner that would reform human life. The inner dissolution follows this logic of founding/founded in which the less fundamental is based upon the more fundamental. “Inner dissolution” is an unravelling in which the dissolving foundation increasingly encompasses the secondary and tertiary founded components of the culture. “Crisis,” on the other hand, begins from the founded and most evident components of the culture—such as the Nazi menace evident to Husserl’s audience for his lectures—spreads to encompass the sciences insofar as they are incapable of addressing the underlying issues of this menace, and finally infects the concept of reason and the possibility of metaphysics (that is to say the Renaissance role for reason) itself. “Crisis” is visible, to varying degrees, by those who inhabit the culture, due to its effects on the surface of the culture. “Inner dissolution” is made visible by phenomenological analysis such that the problems of the Renaissance founding are shown to be the origination of secondary and tertiary cultural effects. Phenomenological analysis follows the crisis from founded to foundation, whereas cultural actors perceive this foundation initially through its secondary and tertiary founded effects and must be led by phenomenology toward understanding the inner sources of dissolution. This makes it clear in what sense the special, factual sciences are drawn into the crisis: their functioning is exemplary and untouched; only insofar as they carry within themselves reason’s cultural role in the Renaissance metaphysics of meaning in history do they exhibit the failure of this metaphysics in our time. Why, then, can one not simply abandon the idea that special, factual sciences carry the Renaissance telos within themselves, in which case the analysis of cultural crisis encompassing both special sciences and philosophy that Husserl is proposing would be undercut from the beginning? Does the notion that there is an internal crisis of the sciences not depend upon Husserl’s assertion, which perhaps might be nothing more than an assertion, that these sciences ought to serve a higher goal (for which he mentions a historical precedent)? Why ought we think that the Renaissance telos is more than an historical idea to be accepted or discarded on its own merits? Why ought we think that it is in some yet-to-be-determined sense effective in structuring the culture that succeeds the Renaissance such that appeal to it by Husserl is more than an expression of his own views? It is at this point in the text of the Crisis that Husserl introduces a term of immense significance not only for his enterprise in the Crisis but for his entire late philosophy. Immediately after he has clarified that the special sciences are implicated in the “unity of philosophy” he asks “Can reason and thatwhich-is be separated, where reason, as knowing, determines what is?” (C 11,

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18

Chapter One

emphasis throughout eliminated). He poses the fundamental question of how to investigate the adequacy of the predominant form of reason since one would wish to measure its adequacy in relation to that-which-is (Seiendes, K 9) but that-which-is can only be determined by reason. Is there not a vicious circle here? Reason is surely measured by its adequacy to its subjectmatter whereas its subject-matter can only be determined by reason. This may not be a problem for special sciences in which both the form of reason and the subject-matter as determined within the science may rest on broader conceptions and experiences that might mitigate the viciousness of the circle. But when we are considering reason in its universal form, and not a special science but the idea of reason in an unrestricted sense, then how can the viciousness of the circle be avoided? Husserl goes on to say This question suffices to make clear in advance that the whole historical process has a remarkable form, one which becomes visible only through an interpretation of its hidden, innermost motivation. Its form is not that of a smooth development, not that of a continual growth of lasting spiritual acquisitions, or of a transformation of spiritual configurations—concepts, theories, systems—which can be explained by means of the accidental historical situations. A definite ideal of a universal philosophy and its method forms the beginning; this is, so to speak, the primal establishment [Urstiftung] of the philosophical modern age and all its lines of development. But instead of being able to work itself out in fact, this ideal suffers an inner dissolution (C 11–2; K 9–10).

Husserl sets out here his conception of the philosophical modern age as founded on a beginning which holds sway throughout all subsequent development. To do so, he introduces the term Urstiftung that is translated by David Carr as “primal establishment.”2 This concept expresses the sense of a beginning (Anfang) but also that of a “hidden innermost motivation [verborgenen innersten Motivation]” which underlies historical development in the usual sense of “accidental historical situations [zufälligen historischen Situationen]” and which does not have a smooth development. Nevertheless, it still is operative in structuring the historical process even though it does not work itself out successfully but falls into inner dissolution—a dissolution that is “inner” because the structuring remains within the “motivation” of history. Modern philosophical history contains within itself a motivation—a term that we would normally associate with the consciousness of an individual subject that perseveres throughout several, or many, of its actions thereby to give them an inner, constituent meaning not apparent from any one of the actions taken singly, or even all of them taken as a simple plurality or sum. This meaning of inner motivation is compacted in the use of Urstiftung as a philosophical concept which may also be translated as “primal institution”

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Overview and Structure of the Crisis 19

or simply “institution” as it was by Maurice Merleau-Ponty (Merleau-Ponty 1970, ch. 5).3 The advantage of the term “institution” is that it can be used in two senses, both of which are relevant to the concept: it is both an establishing and a persisting structuring. Something is “instituted” in the primal sense of being brought into being and something is an “institution” in the sense of a persistent organized structure within which intersubjective relations and material culture are organized. Institution in the primal sense refers fundamentally to an enduring formation of temporality that divides a prior from a past state—in the sense that it is different to be born after the introduction of compulsory schooling than before. The meanings of education, learning, teaching, knowledge, etc. are unalterably changed in a manner to which one must come to terms. One must come to terms with the meanings in their second state because the primal instituting persists as an institution that structures subsequent states and the motivation inherent in that institution structures the experience of subsequent actors. It is through the primal establishing and subsequent persisting structuring that an inner motivation constituted within the tradition that can be traced back to the Renaissance is assigned to, and holds sway throughout, modern history. In this manner, the concept of motivation grounds the further innovative concept of a “task” which Husserl uses extensively in the Crisis. The crisis of modern science refers us both to the event of primal institution (Urstiftung) and to its projected completion (Endstiftung). It is through the event which persists in transcendental history that we are “assigned a task” in the diagnosis and recovery of reason (C 72). The critical analysis of reason that Husserl proposes to undertake can thus be rescued from the vicious circle that seems to threaten it. Certainly it is a circle in the sense that it is reason investigating its adequacy to a subject-matter (Being in the unrestricted sense of that-which-is) that itself can only be determined by reason. However, because the concept of reason is neither arbitrary nor free-floating, but rests upon the Renaissance institution of philosophy, the investigation of reason can appeal from the contemporary crisis backward to its origin, and from that relation determine the process of inner dissolution This is what Husserl at a later point in the text calls a method with a “zigzag pattern” (C 57–9). It is fundamental to Husserl’s investigation and procedure that the crisis of which he speaks, which envelops the special sciences because of their relation to philosophy that assigns their cultural role, is not a mere personal evaluation on his part, nor a passing contemporary mood, but a condition that must be confronted. It can be neither stepped around nor ignored but is rather in front of us, as it were. One may perhaps flee, and it is possible to interpret a great deal of cultural activity since Husserl as such fleeing, but in so doing one abandons the project of post-Renaissance modernity; one becomes an exile, albeit

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Chapter One

an internal exile. Philosophy in Husserl’s sense does not allow such fleeing; it must face up to what is in front of it, and what is in front is not a matter of individual choice but of responsibility to face the inner dissolution of the institutions (in the full sense described above) which structure one’s world. It is through this understanding of the inner motivation of modern history due to its Renaissance institution that Husserl claims that “the problem of the genuine ideal of universal philosophy and its genuine method now actually becomes the innermost driving force of all historical philosophical movements” (C 12). Thus, such movements fall into crisis “with regard to the meaning of their original founding as branches of philosophy, a meaning which they continued to bear within themselves” (C 12). Similarly, while the special, factual sciences advance through theoretical and practical successes, the crisis “shakes to the foundations the whole meaning of their truth” (C 12). Because the crisis is founded in the inner dissolution of modern philosophy, it spreads to the special sciences regarding their truth—that is to say, their cultural role as components of the task of putting human life on the path of freedom and reason—and then to the culture as a whole, to “European humanity itself in respect to the total meaningfulness of its cultural life, its total existence” (C 12; K 10, translation modified). Truth refers to the relation of a scientific—and also perhaps other— component to its cultural role in the modern project of freedom through reason. This is not a given state but “a struggle to make oneself true” because “true being is everywhere an ideal goal” (C 13; K 11, translation altered). Since philosophy is oriented to truth in this sense, it must orient itself to the diagnosis of crisis and inner dissolution in order to re-establish the telos given in the institution of modernity. It is tied to the philosophical tradition but in the manner of critique rather than repetition, or, better, repetition through critique. Nothing has yet been said by Husserl about the nature of this re-establishment or in what sense an ideal whose inner form contains the necessity for its dissolution can be re-established. But it is clear that whatever re-establishment may mean, it cannot mean re-establishment of exactly the same form of reason but of a reason teleologically given through the investigation now underway—a reason that includes both the primal establishment and the overcoming of the inner dissolution through a form of reason that enables a critical diagnosis of the necessity of this dissolution. It will be phenomenological reason, of course, but what that means and what is its relation to Renaissance reason remains yet to be determined in the context of the new investigations of the Crisis. It is for this reason that Husserl referred to the Crisis in its subtitle as an introduction to phenomenological philosophy and it is this path that we will follow in pursuing the theme of crisis into a reformulation of phenomenological philosophy.

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Overview and Structure of the Crisis 21

The investigation of the Crisis, though it focuses primarily on modern science and philosophy, is nevertheless an inquiry into the whole culture of modernity, since that culture is formed by its commitment to reason beginning in the Renaissance, and is simultaneously a critique and renewal of that culture. The interplay between critique and renewal, and the impossibility of simply starting again or falling away, is expressed through the philosophical concept of institution that ties the investigation to the Renaissance institution of modernity. The history of modern philosophy is thus, for Husserl, a struggle for the meaning of humanity. Importantly, in this summation of the upshot of his conception of philosophy for culture and humanity, Husserl refers not to the Renaissance inauguration of modernity but to ancient Greek philosophy. He remarks that this “is the only way to decide whether the telos which was inborn in European humanity at the birth of Greek philosophy—that of humanity which seeks to exist, and is only possible, through philosophical reason . . . is merely a factual delusion . . . or whether Greek humanity was not rather the first breakthrough to what is essential to humanity as such, its entelechy” (C 15). The crisis of modern culture is a crisis of European humanity because it extends to the ancient Greek philosophy that Husserl regards as the origin of Europe. When Husserl earlier (section 3) discussed the origin of modern culture, he referred to the Renaissance as a “new shaping” (C 7) referring back to the ancient model such that “according to the guiding ideal of the Renaissance, ancient man forms himself with insight through free reason” (C 8). Which one is it, then, that inaugurated the ideal of freedom through reason? Concerning ancient philosophy, in the context of the Renaissance re-shaping, he comments about the ancient model that it was “recognized at first only by individuals and small groups” (C 8). The role of the Renaissance thus seems to be, for Husserl, not only the renewal of the Greek ideal but its universalization, that is to say, its extension to the whole of culture. He repeatedly refers to modern scientific culture as universal and systematic. Thus, the Renaissance re-shaping allowed what was an isolated ideal within Greek culture to become the instituting of a structuring, all-pervasive, unavoidable ideal within European modernity. So, there are two steps here: it is the universalization of the Greek ideal in the Renaissance that assigns the sciences a cultural role that draws them into the crisis. Without such universalization, we may surmise, in Greek culture a crisis of philosophy—of the struggle for the meaning of humanity—might not have been a crisis of the sciences. Only what is encompassed in the struggle for freedom through reason by the assigning of a cultural role is correlatively drawn into its crisis. So, it seems, in ancient Greek society, philosophical schools could come and go with the waxing and waning of the ideal of freedom through reason without drawing the culture as a whole into

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Chapter One

crisis. Philosophy struggled there externally, one might say, with other claims to establish human meaning, whereas within modernity philosophy struggles internally with its own loss or dissolution since it sits at the center of human meaning within the culture. Thus, in the final word of Part I of the Crisis (section 7), Husserl states that philosophers are the “functionaries of humanity” because “as philosophers, our inner personal vocation, bears within itself at the same time the responsibility for the true being of humanity” (C 17; K 15, translation altered). This function, we should understand, is a modern one which renews an ancient ideal but which, in that ancient form, was an individual struggle that would not have been undertaken “at the same time” as a responsibility for humanity. Similarly, any ancient crisis of meaning would have been an individual crisis not simultaneously one for humanity. 1.2 THE INSTITUTION OF EUROPE AS OPERATIVE CONCEPT A distinction between thematic and operative concepts was drawn by Eugen Fink to distinguish the (thematic) concepts upon which a philosopher concentrates and explicates from the (operative) ones that are used in thematic analyses but which are not explicitly reflected upon. Thematic concepts “are never univocal . . . [but] contain the whole tension of an understanding which is aimed towards the enigmatic character of being as such.” Operative concepts, on the other hand, work within “a conceptual field, in a conceptual medium that they are not at all able to see.” This is, so to speak, the “shadow of a philosophy,” where “philosophy tries again and again to jump over its own shadow” (Fink 1981, 59–60). Fink’s distinction is a fundamental phenomenological distinction for philosophical interpretation since such texts—as is especially true in Husserl’s case—strain towards a truth that is not yet fully captured within them. It would be a mistake, however, to adopt this distinction as if it were an absolute one, or, more exactly, as if it referred to two in principle distinct dimensions of a philosophical text. Since a philosophical text aims at a truth that it does not yet fully contain, the thinking through of that text, that within the text that drives toward a subsequent, more fully adequate, text, demands a thematization of previously operative concepts. As Husserl put it, “we have the truth then, not as falsely absolutized, but rather in each case, as within its horizons—which do not remain overlooked or veiled from sight, but are systematically explicated” (FTL 279). Phenomenology, as process of continuous thematization of what is given in naïve experience, is precisely the gradual conceptual conquering of what is initially operative, or the making-explicit of a conceptual field—even though the operative can

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Overview and Structure of the Crisis 23

never be finally conquered or wrapped inside a purely, self-complete systematic discourse. In any given philosophical text, it will be possible to distinguish these two sorts of concepts. However, considered over a longer term, in the context of the continuous development of a philosophy, it cannot be considered an absolute distinction but rather a philological one, though it has philosophical grounds and consequences. There is no concept, in Husserl or elsewhere, which cannot in principle be reflected upon. But in reflecting, and in inscribing a record of that reflection, concepts are necessarily used that at that time that are themselves not (yet) reflected upon. The further development of the philosophy will often include reflection on concepts that previously remained operative. This is one important way in which a philosophy clarifies its own fundamental assumptions and even perhaps progresses from being a set of assertions about the world to being a philosophy. It is worth signaling at this point in the interpretation of Husserl’s text two key concepts whose status is initially operative but becomes increasingly thematic. Our reflection requires the further thematization of these concepts. The diagnosis of the crisis of the sciences that constitutes Part I of the Crisis-text attempts to establish a key thesis which allows the subsequent Parts of the text to analyze the reasons behind the inner dissolution of the Renaissance ideal of freedom through reason. It argues that there is a crisis and explicates in what the crisis consists. We have seen that the crisis envelops the sciences not by virtue of their practical successes but by virtue of their cultural role in exemplifying the “reason” that the Renaissance ideal requires. The problem with this cultural role is that merely factual, special sciences cannot address issues of meaning and evaluation. As long as they exemplify reason, then reason is barred from addressing such necessary concepts as meaning and value. Meaning and value depend in the final analysis on the “enigma of subjectivity” that Husserl mentioned in the context of the privileged roles of psychology and philosophy in the crisis of the sciences. The necessity for meaning and value is justified by Husserl by historical reference to the Renaissance and Greek inaugurations of philosophy. This historical reference ties his diagnosis to the concept of “Europe” which thereby has a central role in his account. In the Crisis, “Europe” does not refer to a geographical entity but to a spiritual-intellectual (geistig) entity constituted by the ideal of freedom through reason that emerged with the Greeks and was given a universalizing re-formation in the Renaissance. A fundamental element of his account is thus that “Europe” in this sense of an institution of reason is not just another cultural form but a cultural form that has especial significance for humanity as such.

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Insofar as “Europe” as a concept is defined through the teleology of reason for Husserl, it is not just one type of civilization among others. If it could be shown—Part I is of course an introduction to the work as a whole—that modern philosophy contains the historical entelechy of universal reason, Only then could it be decided whether European humanity bears within itself an absolute idea rather than being merely an empirical anthropological type like “China” or “India;” it could be decided whether the spectacle of the Europeanization of all other civilizations bears witness to the rule of an absolute meaning, one which is proper to the sense, rather than the historical non-sense, of the world” (C16).

Notice that the distinctiveness of European civilization is phrased hypothetically to depend upon an account of the self-manifestation of reason that it would take the entire presentation of the Crisis and the full development of a phenomenology adequate to sustain its thesis to substantiate.4 We have here another instance of the circle of self-critical reason in which “Europe” appears as the institution that situates the investigation in history in a manner that escapes viciousness. It is worthwhile to back up from this formulation to the first presentation of the idea of Europe as a philosophical concept in the lecture entitled “Philosophy in the Crisis of European Humanity” usually referred to as The Vienna Lecture (May 1935). There, Husserl stated that “in the spiritual sense the English Dominions, the United States, etc. clearly [offenbar] belong to Europe, whereas the Eskimos or Indians presented as curiosities at fairs, or the Gypsies, who constantly wander about Europe, do not” (VL 273; KEM 318–9). While it may be a mistake to attribute too much to the single word offenbar which means “clearly, obviously, or evidently,” nevertheless the sentence is written as an unambiguously positive affirmation. This affirmation, by the time it is re-worked in the Crisis-text, has become hypothetical— that is to say, anticipated in its content but yet to be proven—because it is dependent on the effective presentation of the thesis of the Crisis as a whole. Between the lecture in May 1935 and the public appearance of the written text in the journal Philosophia in January 1936, a period in which Husserl was working intensively on the latter text, a concept which functioned operatively (and was therefore not thematized) underwent thematization with the consequence that its structuring role in the entire conceptual vocabulary can be appreciated and that, moreover, its validity can be seen to be dependent on the validity of the thesis as a whole. “Europe” is a concept in his prior work that continues to be operative in Part 1 of the Crisis-text. It has achieved a greater degree of thematic explication to the extent that its meaning and role in the entirety of Husserl’s account is rendered explicit. But “Europe” is still

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Overview and Structure of the Crisis 25



not a reflectively justified and circumscribed thematic concept in Husserl’s text and will need become such in the context of our development of the Crisis-thesis (in chapter 12). “Europe” is a concept of spiritual unity in Husserl’s use that explicates the institution of reason as a formation of European modernity as a continuation and re-formation of Greek philosophy. The singularity of Greek philosophy that grounds the spiritual unity of Europe and therefore its distinctiveness from other civilizations is the emergence of the theoretical attitude. But only in the Greeks do we have a universal (“cosmological”) life-interest in the essentially new form of a purely “theoretical” attitude, and this as a communal form in which this interest works itself out for internal reasons, being the corresponding, essentially new [community] of philosophers, of scientists (mathematicians, astronomers, etc.). . . . [This] is finally taken up into the will with the sense of an infinite and common task. The theoretical attitude has its historical origin in the Greeks (VL 280).

We should note that this assertion is justified only with reference to the posterior formation of Europe whose inception it attempts to substantiate. It is an internal necessity, we may say, of the method of historical critique that Husserl is practicing: the institution of Europe refers back to a historical origin. There is no comparative data from other civilizations or their primal institutions introduced, nor even any interest in such data. Despite its comparative implications, which Husserl himself points out and takes to be descriptively valid, the assertion (or some such assertion with similar primal instituting power) is an internal necessity of the critique and teleology of Europe itself and is not arrived at, postulated, justified, nor asserted in a comparative vein. The interpretation in the previous section has shown the fundamental character of the concept of institution (Urstiftung) to Husserl’s account. Indeed, the very character of philosophy as an activity, including the diagnosis of the crisis, the inner meaning of history, and the possibility of escaping a vicious circle in the self-analysis of reason, depend upon the operative concept of institution. As we will see, later in the Crisis there is some reflection on the concept of institution, but at this point it has simply been introduced at a crucial juncture and has served to give order and meaning to the account without any sort of reflective justification. So, the concepts of “Europe” and “institution”—and, especially, their convergence in “the institution of modern Europe”—will prove to be central to a contemporary development of Husserl’s thesis of the crisis of the sciences— which, of course, he calls the “European” sciences. The development and critique of these concepts will have to be postponed until much later since it depends upon the substantive thesis of the sources of the inner dissolution

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of Renaissance reason which we have not yet addressed and which occupies the great majority of the Crisis-text. However, it is important to signal at this point their centrality to the fundamental articulation of the issue of the crisis of the sciences, not least because, in Part IV of our text, this aspect of Husserl’s work will be criticized and revised. 1.3 THREE INNOVATIONS IN THE CRISIS OF THE EUROPEAN SCIENCES Basing ourselves on the aim of the Crisis as expressed in Part I, we need to understand how this aim is articulated throughout the subsequent structure of the text. This will allow us to pinpoint the main accomplishment of the text from which our contemporary evaluation, revision and development will proceed. The main accomplishment consists in three theoretical innovations that break through the otherwise seamless presentation of a historical reconstruction. My interpretation suggests that these breakthroughs are more significant for a phenomenology adequate to the Crisis-thesis than the historical reconstruction, critique and teleology that were apparently Husserl’s direct concern. 1.3.1 The Structure of the Crisis text The text of the Crisis that appeared under the editorship of Walter Biemel in 1954 is substantially the text as it remains today. The English text consists of this edition minus some of the many appendices available in the German. The first two parts of this text consist of Husserl’s revised Prague lectures that appeared in the journal Philosophia (1936). In addition, it includes Parts IIIA and IIIB which Husserl had written and revised but with which he was not satisfied and which lacked a concluding section. Thus, the available version of the Crisis breaks off without conclusion. Eugen Fink made an outline that was approved by Husserl for the termination of Part III and for Parts IV and V (C 397-400). These parts have not appeared as such but the recent (1993) publication of a supplementary volume (KE) consisting of texts written by Husserl between 1934 and 1937 largely fills in the outline and some of the content of the projected complete text. In other words, while the expositions and details remain absent, the structure of the projected complete text of the Crisis is now available to us.5 It would look like this: I. The Crisis of the Sciences as Expression of the Radical Life-Crisis of European Humanity

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II.  Clarification of the Origin of the Modern Opposition between Physicalistic Objectivism and Transcendental Subjectivism III. The Clarification of the Transcendental Problem and the Related Function of Psychology A. The Way into Transcendental Philosophy by Inquiring back from the Pregiven Life-World B. The Way Back into Phenomenological Transcendental Philosophy from Psychology C.  The Paradox of Psychology and its Resolution6 IV. The Idea of all Sciences being taken back into the unity of Transcendental Philosophy V. The Indispensable Task of Philosophy: Humanity’s Responsibility for Itself We can thus surmise that the Crisis-text that we have available would have been continued in the following way: Part III would conclude by resolving the “paradox of psychology” that Fink explained in his outline. Psychology begins as a special science alongside others on the ground of the pregiven world. In the clarification of the method peculiar to it, however, i.e., in the explicit performance of the genuine universal epochē, it suspends the presupposition of the world-ground that was posited in its understanding of its own beginning; it divests itself of the ground on which it established itself; it becomes groundless by its own efforts. But this “groundlessness” exhibits the paradox of psychology (Fink, C 398).

Part IV would undertake a resume of the sciences that brings them back into a unity based on transcendental phenomenology and its recovery of subjectivity that lays a ground for a comprehensive phenomenological metaphysics. This would, we may observe, be the point at which the crisis of the sciences is definitively overcome because the special, factual sciences are once again drawn—this time by transcendental phenomenology—into the comprehensive Renaissance ideal of freedom through reason. Part V would then return to the issues of Part I—philosophy as the struggle for the meaning of humanity—but conclude in an affirmative voice based upon the findings of the text as a whole. Given this outline of the Crisis in its projected completed state, I now want to show that there are three main innovations in the Crisis-text due to its internal structure and orientation. These three innovations will form the starting-point of our appropriation and development of the thesis of the crisis of the European sciences in subsequent chapters. In order to show this, it is essential to begin with an understanding of what the text taken as a whole

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is about and intends to demonstrate—even if such a statement is necessarily abbreviated and open to extensive development and qualification. This is how the text should be understood in its overall structure, argument, and meaning: Parts I and V bracket the whole inquiry with their reference to the role of the philosopher and philosophy in the struggle for the meaning of humanity that has come into contemporary crisis. This struggle culminates in the selfresponsibility of humanity that is brought about through rendering explicit the unthematic course of reason as embedded in history. “There begins a philosophy with the deepest and most universal self-understanding of the philosophizing ego as the bearer of reason coming to itself, . . . in which reason, in obscurity, in elucidation, in the movement of lucid self-understanding, is in infinite progress. . . . it is rational in seeking to be rational” (C 340-1).7 There thus remain three central parts of the proposed completed Crisis that would substantiate the conception of philosophy that brackets them: one (Part II) addressing the problem of objectivism brought about by the modern science of physical nature and the correlative attempt to recover a genuine concept of subjectivity (which is completed in phenomenology); a second (Part III) pertaining to psychology as the scientific field most fundamentally devoted to the problem of subjectivity (and thus of greatest significance for philosophy) which discovers the “lifeworld” as the universal presupposition of the scientific abstractions at the root of special sciences; a third (Part IV) which would survey the field of the sciences as a whole—biology, sociology, anthropology, etc.—insofar as they can be recuperated into a unity based on phenomenology. The procedure of such recuperation would be to identify the idealizations by which a given special science abstracts from the lifeworld, to thus trace back the contributions of given special sciences to an ontology of the lifeworld, and thereby to root them within transcendental phenomenology as the universal science of the lifeworld. The fundamental problem posed by the crisis is thus the problem of objectivism and the fundamental solution to the crisis is the recovery of subjectivity in a new phenomenological form. In the greatest schematic manner, these form the subject-matter of Parts II and III of the text that was published. The critical, encyclopediac, survey of the sciences that would be the subject-matter of Part IV may be supposed to be the consequence of the manner in which the problem of objectivism and the recovery of subjectivity are resolved in the prior parts.8 To anticipate, this is one central respect in which the development of the thesis of the crisis of the sciences in this current work will depart from the solution proposed by Husserl in order to advocate a Socratic phenomenology.

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Overview and Structure of the Crisis 29

1.3.2 The Three Innovations Let us now take a broad look at the structure of the Crisis in its current form. The problem of objectivism is dealt with in Part II through a critical history of philosophy from Descartes through Locke, Berkeley, Hume and Kant that attempts to show that objectivism prompts the necessary emergence of transcendental subjectivity. This brings Husserl’s position very close to that of Kant, and also a Kantian-motivated history of this sort, so that it is not surprising to see that the last two sections propose, first, a preliminary understanding of the concept of the transcendental and, second, a distinction of this concept from that of Kant. Husserl regards the concept of the transcendental as pertaining to “the motif of inquiring back into the ultimate source of all the formations of knowledge, the motif of the knower’s reflecting upon himself and his knowing life in which all the scientific structures that are valid for him occur purposefully, are stored up as acquisitions, and have become and continue to become freely available” (C 97-8). Transcendental inquiry is a critique of knowledge in which knowing is not pursued forward, as it were, toward new discoveries, but backward toward its origins and foundations. Why is this not simply Kantian? Kant was indeed a transcendental philosopher but he never achieved the radical level of inquiry characteristic of Husserl. He did not reach the level where “a more profound concept—the most important of all—of ‘objectivism’ will come to the fore . . . and with it the genuinely radical meaning of the opposition between objectivism and transcendentalism” (C 100). Kant’s critique of objectivism was insufficiently radical because it held to a deeper source of objectivism that phenomenology displaces. At this point in the text Husserl doesn’t actually say what this deeper source of objectivism is, but this is the last word of Part II; the first word of Part III is that Kant presupposed the lifeworld. With this assertion Husserl parted way with the dominant neo-Kantianism of his day. Another way to say this is that Kant confined his investigation to the foundations of positive science but did not investigate the origins of objective science in the lifeworld in which we all live prior to, and apart from, scientific endeavor and truth. We may say that he presupposed the validity and accomplishment of theoria in order to investigate the foundations of its specific form or forms. Phenomenology investigates more radically the origin of scientific truth per se, that is to say, it asks about the origin of theoria itself. To do so, one must set aside the presupposition of the existence of the world—which is a deeper objectivism than that rooted in positive science—through the transcendental reduction. If we characterize Part II as a critical history of modern philosophy, taking note of its generally conventional form as a whole, and we put this alongside the fact that the upshot of the defence of subjectivity in this part is to bridge to the presupposition of the lifeworld with which the next part begins, we

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may observe that the section which stands out as distinctive is the one which has, in fact, drawn most attention by subsequent commentators—section 9 on Galileo’s mathematization of nature. The dualism that every philosophical history of modernity would trace to Descartes is rooted by Husserl in the prior mathematization of nature by Galileo and the failure of subsequent philosophy to wonder at this mathematization and explicate how it occurs.9 We thus locate the first innovation of the Crisis in the account of the mathematization of nature by Galileo in section 9. Part IIIA is concerned to provide a way into transcendental phenomenology by “inquiring back from the pregiven lifeworld” (C 103)—that is to say, to provide a way into the transcendental-phenomenological reduction that departs from Husserl’s previous articulations of it. It begins with a critique of Kant’s presupposition of the lifeworld but aims toward the crucial section 34 entitled “Exposition of the problem of a science of the lifeworld.” Subsequent sections up to section 51 on “the task of an ontology of the lifeworld” deal with various aspects of phenomenology that derive from the specificity of this way in and thus require renewed presentation and revision of the fundamental concepts of phenomenology. The idea of a philosophical-phenomenological science of the lifeworld that would explicate its ontology is thus the second innovation in the Crisis. We are as a consequence presented with a certain sort of duality between transcendental subjectivity as discovered in the transcendental reduction through the bracketing of the presupposition of the existence of the world and subjectivity as it appears within the world, the subjectivity of human subjects among others and objects in the world. Husserl calls this a “paradox of subjectivity” in the sense that everything that is in the world must appear to a subject but that the subject is in the world, or “being a subject for the world and at the same time being an object in the world” (C 178). If transcendental phenomenology is characterized by setting aside the presupposition of the existence of the world, then it must encounter this paradox—that the subject who sets aside the presupposition of the existence of the world by performing the transcendental reduction nevertheless exists as an object within the world. This is the third innovation in the Crisis. It is not an “innovation” in quite the same sense as the previous two. It is not a new topic but rather a topic previously existing within phenomenology, and implicit within previous transcendentalisms like Kant’s, that can be freshly and precisely formulated due to the new way into phenomenology from the lifeworld and the explication of a science of the lifeworld that has itself been made possible by the radical inquiry into modern objectivism undertaken in the Crisis. Husserl believes, of course, that in this way the paradox can be resolved. It is not a contradic-

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Overview and Structure of the Crisis 31

tion. But its formulation and resolution alters and sharpens the conception of phenomenological philosophy that makes it possible. These three innovations—mathematization of nature, science of the lifeworld, and paradox of subjectivity—stand out from the rest of the text which is otherwise confined to a more-or-less conventional critical history of philosophy and an exposition of basic concepts of phenomenology. Part IIIB returns to the opposition between objectivism and transcendentalism but from the perspective of its emergence within psychology and its completion by phenomenology. It contains no innovative breakthrough comparable to the previous three. Furthermore, according to Fink’s outline for the continuation of the Crisis, Part III was projected to end with a discussion of the “paradox of psychology,” in which “psychology begins as a special science alongside others on the ground of the pregiven world. In the clarification of the method peculiar to it, however, . . . it suspends the presupposition of the world-ground” (Fink, C 398). This is a special form of the paradox of subjectivity adapted to the significance of psychology as the science of subjectivity. While interesting from the point of view of the special role of psychology in the survey of the sciences in their abstraction from the lifeworld that is the subject-matter of Part IV, it does not add anything to the fundamental structure of the problems of the crisis of the sciences as they have been worked out by Husserl in the previous sections. 1.3.3 The Logic of the Crisis This parsing of the three innovations of the Crisis has implications for the structure of the text as it now exists. The first innovation concerning the mathematization of nature allows Husserl to determine the presupposition of the lifeworld in Kant that distinguishes his phenomenological transcendentalism from Kant’s still objectivist transcendentalism that is the second innovation. The second innovation allows Husserl to determine the duality between transcendental and worldly subjectivity that is the third innovation. Thus, the three innovations not only circumscribe what is most innovative about the Crisis-text itself but also are internally related such that each one leads to the other. In this sense, the three innovations constitute the underlying structure not only of the logic of the Crisis as a text written by Edmund Husserl but also, and more importantly, of the logic of the crisis itself insofar as it is a crisis of objectivism which projects a recovery of subjectivity within the institution of European reason. This interpretation centring on three innovations in the text and their internal relation implies that the survey of the sciences, including psychology, that was projected to be Part IV, and which proceeds by rooting the idealizations at the basis of the special sciences in

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the lifeworld elaborates the second innovation but does not add anything of a fundamental nature to overcoming the crisis of the sciences by an adequate, phenomenological account of subjectivity. This interpretation also has implications for the very organization of the text if we expect that the text’s organization should follow its conceptual innovations and underlying logic. The first innovation occurs in Part II and the second and third occur in Part IIIA. These Parts of the manuscript may then be said to contain all that is fundamentally innovative in the Crisis. The current Part IIIB should be collapsed with Part IV since both pertain to the rooting of special sciences in idealizations from the lifeworld with the sole distinction being that Part IIIB deals with psychology and the projected Part IV would have dealt with other sciences. Moreover, if it were to escape being an add-on after the main argument, this whole part should be integrated into the text somewhere around the second innovation which is concerned with the science of the lifeworld, since the emergence of special sciences by abstraction from the lifeworld would be a central theme in that section. We would then have a text, apart from an introduction and a conclusion devoted to the role of philosophy in the struggle for the meaning of humanity, divided into three parts based on these three innovations. Such a text would be held together internally by the logic noted above that leads from one innovation to the next. It would be bridged from the introduction of the thesis of crisis to the mathematization of nature by the claim that objectivism is the central problem of modern philosophy; it would be bridged from objectivism to the discovery of the lifeworld by the distinction between subjectivity within the lifeworld and transcendental subjectivity; and it would be bridged from the resolution of the paradox of subjectivity to the conclusion by the claim that only phenomenology, through the transcendental reduction, sufficiently overcomes objectivism to establish the struggle for the meaning of humanity in our time. Our purpose is neither to re-structure other people’s books for them nor to argue a purely literary point. It is to clarify the logic of the argument contained in the Crisis, the fundamental innovations in that text and their underlying logic, in order to set out the parameters of a contemporary reevaluation and continuation of its purpose. From that point of view, the logic of the Crisis can be set out this way: I.    Introduction: The Crisis of the Sciences as a Crisis of (European) Humanity II.  Mathematization of Nature and its Influence on Modern Philosophy in Producing Objectivism and the Correlative Struggle for (Transcendental) Subjectivity

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Overview and Structure of the Crisis 33

III.  The Presupposition of the Lifeworld in Previous Transcendental Philosophy and the Task of a Science of the Lifeworld, including the critique of special sciences as grounded in the lifeworld IV.  The Paradox of Subjectivity and its Resolution: Grounding of Transcendental Phenomenological Philosophy as well as Subjectivity in the Lifeworld V.   The Self-responsibility of Humanity as Teleologically Given in Transcendental Phenomenology It is this logic that I will investigate in the following chapters of this work. Its structure is reproduced in this text. NOTES 1.  There is dispute about whether Husserl meant his thesis of the crisis to pertain to the grounding of formal-mathematical abstractions only or also to a more general cultural crisis. The solution is that the failure of grounding of formal-mathematical abstractions should be understood as the specific cause of a wider cultural crisis. The relation between the specific and general aspects of this diagnosis is to be found in the often-neglected concept of the “exemplary role” of the mathematical science of nature for modern reason (C 63). Husserl does not appear to have given a thorough account of the source of this exemplary role. His analysis suggests that the unprecedentedly formal and universal dimension opened up by modern mathematics is significant. However, this in itself cannot be a complete account of its cultural pervasiveness and hegemonic role which we advance by rooting in practical activity and its formal organization (ch. 3 and Part III). 2.  This is not the first use of the term Urstiftung in Husserl’s work. It emerged during his studies of genetic logic in about 1921 and surfaced afterward whenever it was an issue of genetic constitution. “This means that the individual difference of the point in time is the correlate of a certain primal establishment [Urstiftung] through a mode of givenness which maintains an identical correlate in the continual transformation of the retentions which pertain to a new now; to the change itself corresponds a continual alteration of orientation as a change in the mode of givenness of the identical” (EJ, Appendix I, 383 and remarks by the editor, 5). Insofar as the turning-toward any object as an identical object refers back to the institution of that object as a unity, institution refers to the constitution of the socio-historical world in its socio-historical specificity. In Cartesian Meditations, Husserl pointed out that “every apperception in which we apprehend at a glance, and noticingly grasp, objects given beforehand—for example, the already-given everyday world—every apperception in which we understand their sense and its horizons forthwith, points back to a ‘primal instituting’ [Urstiftung], in which an object with a similar sense became constituted for the first time” (CM 111; CMPV 141). Thereby the historicality of the historical world is constituted by such “similarities” in sense through which objects are categorized through

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the conduct of practical activities as “identical.” Such identities persist temporally to determine the characteristic style of a lifeworld. 3.  In his Guide for Translating Husserl (1973) Dorion Cairns suggests that Urstiftung should be translated as “primal instituting” or “primal institution” in distinction from Stiftung for which he suggests “institution, instituting, something instituted, origination” but not “foundation.” 4. The “if [wenn]” appears twice in the German text as it does in the English translation (K14). 5.  Philip J. Bossert (1974) has shown that Part III is substantially complete as presented in current editions of the Crisis. Anthony J. Steinbock (1994) has shown that the supplementary material from KE can be fitted into the five parts of the planned Crisis-text as outlined by Fink without difficulty and has additionally sorted out what sections of the supplementary material fit into which of the five parts of the Crisis. The upshot is that it may now be surmised what parts IV and V of the Crisis-text would contain in general terms. 6. I have given this title to the four sections which Fink considers separately (C 397–400) since it is clear that the four sections would be in no sense comparable in size to the previous two and introduce material that fit under this general heading. 7.  Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida have suggested in their critiques of Husserl that there is a contradiction, or an impossibility, in splitting the ego in this way between the contingent and the transcendental, or the ego as known and the ego as knower, and conceiving them together as an anthropological doublet (Foucault 1970, 318–22; Derrida 1978, 121; Derrida 2003, 176–8). While there are some difficulties to be sure, there is no such impossibility. As I will suggest below, an unnecessary difficulty is introduced by Husserl’s terminology of calling (what I will term) “transcendentality” as an “ego,” thus making it seem to be like concrete ego. More important, as we will see, Husserl’s distinction is importantly complicated, and arguably resolved, by introducing the third term of “institution” (Urstiftung). 8.  Enzo Paci notes this encyclopediac vision of Husserl’s phenomenology in Crisis as “the problem of the foundation of the ‘formation of meaning’ of logic and the sciences, and to the problem of a phenomenological science as a ‘totalizing’ science of man and world” (Paci 1972, 102). Paci’s Hegelian sense of totalizing leads him, as was also projected by Husserl, into the implication that the return to the lifeworld cannot become operative in the self-responsibility of philosophy until the encylopediac critical survey of the sciences is complete—which would likely postpone it forever. The accomplishment of the sciences may well be an infinite task but it would be disastrous for the project of phenomenology if the task of self-responsibility depended on the completion of a phenomenological resume and critique of this task. 9. The Galileo section was inserted by Husserl at the last moment prior to his submission of the revised manuscript in December 1936, after he had recalled the manuscript sent to the publisher in January 1936 due to his dissatisfaction with it (Bossert 1974, 27). This late insertion would tend to provide corroborative evidence that it is this section, added apparently after the presuppositions or implications of the initial text became clearer to him, that represents a breakthrough in an otherwise largely conventional history. But, in any case, the evidence of the finished manuscript itself supports this interpretation.

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Part II

OBJECTIVISM AND THE RECOVERY OF SUBJECTIVITY

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Chapter Two

Modern Science and the Problem of Objectivism

The crisis of the European sciences is an internal crisis of modern sciences insofar as they are enfolded within the Renaissance institution of human autonomy through reason that is a recovery and transformation of the Greek institution of philosophy. It is thus necessary to define the precise nature of the modernity of modern science. Husserl claims that “what is new, unprecedented, is the conceiving of this idea of a rational, infinite totality of being with a rational science systematically mastering it” (C 22). That is to say, infinity is the core idea to be distinguished from the “finitely closed a priori” characteristic of Euclidean geometry (and all of ancient mathematics) as well as Aristotelian logic (C 21). The new concept of infinity accounts for the universality of modern science, its systematic structure, and the impetus to continuing methodical research. The origin of the new concept of infinity is to be found in the idea of a formal mathematics which is based upon formalizing abstraction (C 22). One central consequence of formalizing abstraction is that universal, systematic, modern science deals with an infinite world of ideal objects whose conceptual availability is “not as one whose objects become accessible to our knowledge singly, imperfectly, and as it were accidentally but as one which is attained by a rational, systematically coherent method” (C 22). The realm of objects to which a science refers is no longer available conceptually as a sum of objects individually available through abstraction from actual bodies—as in pre-modern science—but only through the systematic structure of a method. Mathematics is a method of knowing that, due to the nature of formalizing abstraction, applies as a coherent form to a domain of objects. It is this new form of mathematical scientific method that generates the problem of objectivism. What I have called the “first innovation” in the Crisis occurs in the elevenpart section 9 of Part II immediately after the introductory first section in 37

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which Husserl summarizes these central elements in the modern formation of knowledge. The subsequent section 10 makes the connection to the critical history of modern philosophy that is the ostensive purpose of Part II. Husserl’s main point here is that “the idea of nature as a really self-enclosed world of bodies first emerges with Galileo. . . . Clearly the way is thus prepared for dualism, which appears immediately afterward in Descartes” (C 60). Behind Descartes, Husserl finds Galileo such that the mathematization of nature accomplished by Galileo occurs as an assumption in Descartes so that the subsequent problem of objectivism in modern philosophy repeats but also occludes its origin in the new science. 2.1 THE MATHEMATIZATION OF NATURE Husserl’s discussion of Galileo’s accomplishment of establishing a scientific framework in which nature in its entirety is viewed as fundamentally a mathematical structure has little to do with Galileo as a person in the sense that might be addressed by biography or conventional history. “Galileo” is rather the name for the accomplishment of “the mathematization of nature” itself, for the institution (Urstiftung) of the modern science of nature as mathematical. Significantly, in order to address this institution, he begins by pointing out that our ordinary, pre-scientific experience of the world “is given in a subjectively relative way” (C 23) as accessible through one’s own experiences but that, at the same time, it is given as a world which is the same for all—the world not my world. The “world” in this sense is what he will later in the text call “the lifeworld” (Lebenswelt) even though he does not use the term at this point. Husserl needs to introduce the lifeworld as a way of making the accomplishment of the mathematization of nature thematic as an accomplishment. We live so much under the influence of modern science in this form that we are inclined to assume it as given, whereas Husserl’s purpose is to uncover how it is that this taken-for-granted given-ness has come into being. 2.1.1 Mathematical Exactness and Ordinary Experience In accomplishing the mathematization of nature, Galileo took over the mathematical science of space in the geometry of his time and applied it to nature considered as a whole. Galileo did not institute the science of geometry itself but rather its extensive application to nature as a whole. His interest in this universalizing application meant that “what was implicitly included in his guiding model of mathematics . . . as a hidden, presupposed meaning . . . naturally had to enter into his metaphysics along with everything else” (C 25).

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The presupposed meaning of geometry entered into Galileo’s institution of the modern science of nature in two respects: as science and as measurement. Practical experience of bodies in space does not give quantities of geometrical exactitude. We perceive bodies with our senses and may imagine such bodies as larger or smaller, more or less definite, as transformable in many ways, but they are always sensible bodies as perceived in some form. Nevertheless, out of this practical experience of bodies there arises the idea of a transformation in a different sense toward “limit-shapes” as ideal poles that are, so to speak, “perfections” of what we perceive. Such idealizations are never actualized as such in experience but are an ideal limit in which an exactness never given in experience is achieved. Thus, we have ideas of a perfect circle or triangle that we never experience as such but which can be used to measure those bodies that we encounter in sensuous perception. A similar idealization can apply to experienced time. The art of measuring space and time as experienced is a practical use for idealized geometrical forms. It allows an exactness of measure that is not possible through the direct comparison of bodies or durations. One could speak of larger and smaller, longer or shorter, and so on but exact comparison requires a measure based on an idealization toward a limit that is never given in experience as such. The idealized forms themselves, considered apart from their use in measurement, can then be made the object of a scientific study. Shapes and quantities can be constructed and their relationships rigorously and exactly determined such that “the possibility emerges of producing constructively and univocally, through an a priori, all-encompassing systematic method, all possibly conceivable ideal shapes” (C 27). Geometry in this sense was already advanced by Galileo’s time and was taken over in this form in order to be applied to nature. In so doing, Galileo took over both the achieved science of exact ideal bodies and the application of this science to the measurement of sensuous bodies. This much does not yet suffice to accomplish the mathematization of nature. The world as we experience it prior to scientific idealization has a general style or form. It “hangs together” or “belongs together” in a certain way such that we can make general anticipations of as-yet unknown features of the present, future and past. There is a certain consistency, as it were, even though this consistency is approximate and typical. If one recalls the two aspects of geometry as exact science and practical measurement in this context, it becomes possible to postulate that the general style of the world understood in prescientific experience could be known exactly through science analogously to the way that sensuous bodies are measured by the exact idealizations, or limit-shapes, of geometry. This is a universalization of the practice of measurement in which it is no longer a matter of measuring individual bodies but of postulating that the overall style of the world could be

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known exactly through a scientific method. But if the world in the sense that we experience it as belonging to us all (even though I experience it in a way relative to my own position and history) is knowable scientifically in its general style, then it must be the case also that the specific states and changes of this world can be known exactly too, if they are known through an adequate method. This is the meaning of Galileo’s often-quoted remark from The Assayer (1623) that Philosophy is written in this grand book, the universe, which stands continuously open before our gaze. But the book cannot be understood unless one first learns to comprehend the language and read the letters in which it is composed. It is written in the language of mathematics, and the characters are triangles, circles, and other geometrical figures without which it is humanly impossible to understand a single word of it; without these one wanders about in a dark labyrinth (Galilei, 3–4).

Mathematics is the language of the universe insofar as it explains its persistent style (which becomes determinable with exactness) because it is the method for understanding its specific states and alterations. 2.1.2 Indirect Mathematization of Qualitative Experience For this universalization of measurement through exact science to the whole of nature to be viable, all qualities and relations of the sensible world must be, in principle, amenable to determination mathematically. Mathematization is not only a grand postulate about the language of nature but also a definite procedure of determination in specific instances. All of what we experience in sensuous perception—such as duration, color, size, speed, etc.—must be related in a rigorous fashion to the exactitudes of geometrical idealizations. Husserl refers to this as the “indirect mathematization of the plena” whose strange and unprecedented character is fundamental to Galileo’s institution of modern science. Everything which manifests itself as real through the specific sense-qualities must have its mathematical index in events belonging to the sphere of shapes— which is, of course, already thought of as idealized—and that there must rise from this the possibility of an indirect mathematization, in the fullest sense, i.e., it must be possible (though indirectly and through a particular inductive method) to construct ex datis, and thus to determine objectively, all events in the sphere of the plena. The whole of infinite nature, taken as a concrete universe of causality—for this was inherent in that strange conception—became [the object of] a peculiarly applied mathematics (C 37).

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This universalization of applying mathematics to measuring inexact and qualitative features of the experienced world involves a change in the status of mathematical idealization. When mathematical idealizations are applied to qualitative aspects of the plena with the intention of determining scientifically their reality, the idealizations no longer function as ideal limit-shapes that are in principle incapable of being actual in the experienced world, but rather as determinations of what is actual itself. Geometry functions not as an abstraction but, as Husserl says, what is sensibly experienced was substructed (substruiert) by geometry (C 38; K 37). This means that the geometrical abstraction is understood to be the underlying reality of that to which it is applied. It is no longer understood to be an abstraction from the inexact world but the underlying structure of that world. Mathematization of nature means that nature is fundamentally a mathematical structure not merely that a mathematical abstraction corresponds to it. Mathematics becomes the ontology of nature. It is not only the general language that accounts for scientific knowledge of nature but also the underlying reality to which the science refers. Galilean science proceeds by constructing and testing mathematical formulae that are understood to express the fundamental reality of nature. These formulae, which we moderns have come to accept as the essence of natural scientific knowledge and the reality of nature itself, have a mutual reference: On the one hand, they verify the validity of the Galilean hypothesis that nature is mathematical but also, since the process of understanding nature is an infinite task, the verifications re-establish that Galilean science rests upon the hypothesis of mathematical ontology. The hypothesis of mathematical ontology, of course, is what motivates the verifications. The mathematization of nature is thus driven forward infinitely by the hypothesis-verification inter-relation, or paradox (we might say, though Husserl does not), that constitutes its internal tension, to apply geometry to ever-increasing domains of nature. Through the rigorous correlation of mathematical formulae to inexact sensuous perception, science attains the capacity of prediction, such that having the formula means prediction of future events from a current state. 2.1.3 Crisis as Technization through Emptying of Meaning The institution of modern science through the mathematization of nature by Galileo roots ontology in the abstraction to limit-shapes in which geometry consists by substructing the sensuous world that we perceive by an underlying mathematical reality. Husserl comments that the meaning of these scientific formulae leads to an “externalization of meaning (Sinnveräusserlichung) that

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unavoidably accompanies the technical development and practice of method” (C 44, translation altered; K 43). This is the point at which the analysis of the institution of Galilean science connects to Husserl’s claim in Part I that modern, European science is undergoing a crisis. “Measurements,” Husserl points out, “result not in determined numbers but in numbers in general, stated in general propositions which express laws of functional dependencies” (C 44) and such “numbers in general” can only be properly understood with reference to the modern algebra that has developed since Vieta.1 The formula that force equals mass times acceleration, or f = ma, is not a relation of determinate numbers—like 12 = 6 times 2—but a determinate relation between “numbers in general” like “f”, “m,” or “a” that represent the possibility of application to determinate numbers. Husserl concisely mentions several consequences of this fact. They can perhaps be clarified by being presented as distinct steps: 1.  Modern algebra leads to an expansion of the possibilities of arithmetical thinking such that it becomes systematic, a priori thinking about numbers un-tied to intuition. 2.  This thinking is applied to the entire pure mathematics of spatio-temporal shapes. 3.  Which leads to an “arithmetization of geometry,” a translation of the realm of pure shapes into that of arithmetical relations. 4.  Which in turn leads to the “emptying (Entleerung) of meaning” of geometry since they have become “pure numerical configurations” or “algebraic structures” (C 44; K 44). 5.  Arithmetization is surpassed by formalization, which is the development of organized structures of “numbers in general” in systematic relationships into “definite manifolds,” which “are thus in themselves compossible totalities of objects in general, which are thought of as distinct only in empty, formal generality and are conceived of as defined by determinate modalities of the something-in-general” (C 45). The fundamental problem of emptying of meaning depends upon an understanding of formalization that is simply referred to and taken over in the Crisis from Husserl’s earlier work (C 46, ftn.). (We will have occasion to parse out the elements of this compressed presentation at a later, critical stage of our analysis.) 6.  Formalization leads to “technization” which is an emptying of the meaning of natural science for human life (that was referred to without adequate justification in Part I as the ground of a crisis of modern sciences). Technique is “a mere art of achieving, through a calculating technique according to technical rules, results the genuine sense of whose truth can be attained only by concretely intuitive thinking actually directed at the subject matter itself” (C 46).

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Thus the mathematization of nature, once established by Galileo, leads ineluctably, by virtue of the arithmetization of geometry, to the emptying of meaning from scientific reason such that modern sciences fall into crisis. 2.1.4 The Role of the Lifeworld in the Healing Function of Phenomenology We have seen that geometry grows out of idealizations performed upon inexact intuitive perceptions in the lifeworld and thereby, through the arithmetization of geometry, suffers a loss of meaning, by “emptying” and “externalization.” To such an extent is this so, that Husserl asserts that “to the essence of all method belongs the tendency to externalization in accord with technization” (C 48, translation altered; K 48). Insofar as method allows one to operate upon conceptual material without going back to fundamentals of the production of concepts through idealization from the lifeworld, then it transforms thinking into an external process of a technical nature that produces a crisis of the sciences.2 We can see here that the task of phenomenology with regard to the crisis of the sciences is to trace back scientific idealizations to their origin (in an experiential rather than a temporal sense), thereby re-establishing their meaning and overcoming the crisis. Consequently, one major task of Husserl’s exposition is to trace geometry back to the idealization of limit-shapes grounded on the prior practice of inexact measurement, especially surveying, in the lifeworld. Galileo simply took over the existing geometry of his time without inquiring into its origin. Geometry became, in phenomenological terminology, sedimented. Sedimented structures are those that have passed from immediate, adequate evidence into the temporal stream of experience such that their meaning is simply assumed, taken over from the past. Such sedimented structures may also become, in Husserl’s terminology, traditionalized—that is to say, their assumed validity has become an available tradition which further researches use without investigating. Since geometry was sedimented for Galileo, it could appear that the evidence of geometrical abstractions could itself provide truth. Insofar as it became traditionalized after Galileo, such idealizations became the taken-forgranted language of modern science. For in the case of inherited geometrical method, these functions [of idealization] were no longer being vitally practiced . . . Thus it could appear that geometry, with its own immediately self-evident a priori “intuition” and the thinking which operates with it, produces a self-sufficient, absolute truth which, as such— “obviously”—could be applied without further ado (C 49).

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The evidence that is proper to grasping the operation of geometrical abstractions, in the absence of an inquiry into the origin of these abstractions, could wrongly seem to be an evidence of the applicability of these abstractions to the lifeworld. Thus, the whole issue of the relation of such abstractions to the experienced lifeworld is left out of consideration, simply assumed to be viable without evidence. Even investigations that ask about the relation of scientific inquiry to nature stop too soon at substructed nature and thereby continue to assume the applicability of geometry in its inherited state. Husserl calls this a “garb, or costume, of ideas” (Ideenkleid) that is a “garb of symbols of the symbolic mathematical theories” such that it is “through the garb of ideas that we take for true being what is actually a method” (C 51; K 51–2). Phenomenology requires a more radical procedure of inquiry into the origin of symbolic abstraction from the lifeworld and thereby correlatively will raise the issues of the range and limits of its applicability to the lifeworld. Thereby, it will escape the hegemony of a method assumed as adequate to the determination of truth. It is thus evident that the theme of the lifeworld is that through which a phenomenological overcoming of the crisis of the sciences becomes possible. It also becomes retrospectively clear why Husserl’s investigation of Galileo’s mathematization of nature had to begin with a preliminary characterization of the lifeworld as that of subjective-relative experience that also appears as the one world (C 23). The analysis of technization as an emptying of meaning and value, and of crisis as a loss of meaning—that is to say, living within the emptied meaning without noticing it to be empty—depends upon the lifeworld as the origin of abstraction and that to which scientific theories refer for the meaningfulness of the concept of crisis. A theoretical achievement like that of a natural science (or any science of the world)—which can master the infinity of its subject matter only through infinities of method and can master the latter infinities only by means of a technical thought (technisches Denken) and activity which are empty of meaning—can only be and remain meaningful in a true and original sense if the scientist has developed in himself the ability to inquire back into the original meaning of all his meaning-structures and methods, i.e. into the historical meaning of their institution (historischen Urstiftungssinn) and especially into the meaning of all the inherited meanings taken over unnoticed in this institution, as well as those taken over later on (C 56, translation altered; K 57).

The necessary emptying of meaning that symbolic structures require can only be restored to full meaning through inquiry back into the original institution of modern science, a form of inquiry that is characteristic of phenomenology, so that only such a phenomenological understanding could overcome the crisis of the sciences. This may be called the healing function of phenomenology

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(Angus 2005a). It is operative throughout Husserl’s description and analysis of the crisis as loss of meaning and value which is the negative counterpart to the giving of full self-evidence through phenomenological intuition. Galileo took over the arithmetization of geometry of his time stemming from Vieta into the mathematization of nature so that the arithmetization of geometry became sedimented in later science and traditioned as an assumption of reason. Such cutting-off from evidence and simply being taken-over as effective leads to the emptying of meaning that characterizes a technology. Reactivation is a correlative concept to sedimentation. Since sedimented meanings are operative within the later institution even if unthematized, a special phenomenological investigation must reactivate the original institution in order to wrest the sedimented meanings from their assumed effectivity, bring them to a new, present evidence, to clarify their meaning—as Husserl has done by using the concept of the lifeworld to reactivate the meaning of the mathematization of nature. In the appendix known as “The Origin of Geometry” that fits with the subject-matter of this section, Husserl remarks that without the “what” and the “how” of its prescientific materials, geometry would be a tradition empty of meaning . . . Unfortunately, however, this is our situation, and that of the whole modern age. Thus the whole pregiven deductive science, the total system of propositions in the unity of their validities, is first only a claim which can be justified (in the sense of defended, vindicated, or accounted for [rechtfergtigen]) as an expression of the alleged truth-meaning only through the actual capacity for reactivation. (OG 366–8; K 376–7).

Phenomenological inquiry back into the institution of a science reactivates its original meaning such as to vindicate the science through adequate evidence in the lifeworld. It should be clear that when Husserl declared his admiration for the successes of modern science in the first section of Part I of the Crisis (C 4), which is re-stated in the current context (C 53), it was without irony: the diagnosis of crisis is matched by a procedure of reactivation of meaning that aims at a vindication of the sciences and also of the culture committed to reason that depends upon such a vindication. This is the healing function of phenomenology. However, in the absence of phenomenological healing, mathematization of nature entails “portentous misunderstandings” (C 53) which specify what Husserl means by “crisis.” If the real world of nature is taken to be fundamentally mathematical—which is what is meant by the substruction of nature and the garb of ideas through which we take method for reality—then the world of sense and quality does not belong to the real world of nature. From Galileo on through the history of modern philosophy, experienced sense and quality have been expelled from “real nature” and, under different terminologies,

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regarded as secondary features that must be attributed to human beings themselves in their manner of perceiving reality rather than to that reality itself. In a word, they become “subjective” in the sense of relative features of individual, even eccentric, perception without basis in reality as such. “If the intuited world of our life is merely subjective, then all the truths of pre- and extra-scientific life which have to do with its factual being are deprived of value (devalued, cancelled, or defaced; entwertet)” (C 54; K 54). Insofar as mathematical structures emptied of meaning reign as the model of science, reason, meaning and value are denigrated as unreasonable, irrational. Within the Renaissance institution of modernity, freedom and value are sustained by reason. Therefore, a crisis of reason entails a crisis of value. Of course, values can be simply posited without any relation to reason, but they thereby contradict the Renaissance assertion of the value of humanity of freedom through reason. The crisis of the sciences is thus an internal diagnosis of modernity that shows that crisis provokes an aporia for value. If value cannot be sustained through reason then we are either confronted by a value-less world or, if humans cannot bear living in a value-less world, we are confronted with eruptions of irrational positings of value that both contradict the Renaissance institution of modernity and necessarily emerge within it. This is the crisis: reason proceeds without meaning for human life, while value loses its sustenance in reason. The implication is clear enough. We need a conception of reason that can sustain value and a conception of value based on reason. But this is as yet only an implication, a need, and even a desire—though perhaps it may be a desire that can eventually sustain a philosophical programme. 2.2 INSTITUTION AND HISTORY Husserl’s investigation of the institution of modern science through the mathematization of nature by Galileo seeks to demonstrate how mathematics came to be regarded as the proper symbolic system for understanding nature (an epistemological issue), how it became not only such a method of knowing but was understood to be the underlying structure of nature itself (an ontological issue), how such a conception of knowing and being leads ineluctably to a crisis (a historical issue), and that this crisis consists in the mutual externality of reason and meaning that cannot ground judgments of meaning and value (an axiological issue). Due to these four inter-twined aspects of Husserl’s investigation, the Crisis is not only a new introduction to phenomenology as its subtitle claims but the basis for a thoroughgoing philosophy that can address human meaning and value in contemporary terms. It is this broad reach of investigation that the current text seeks to follow Husserl in establishing.

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Husserl’s analysis proposes that phenomenological intuition has a healing function because it can overcome the crisis by tracing back symbolic abstraction to givenness in the lifeworld, though this functions more as an assumption in Husserl’s analysis in the Crisis rather than a claim that is thematically justified. Nevertheless, the concept of the lifeworld itself is essential to the analysis since it is only with the distinction between lifeworld—as given in a subjective-relative manner but simultaneously one world—that the issue of the mathematization of nature can be posed as a problem for investigation. It is for lack of such a concept of lifeworld that earlier analyses of mathematical science, such as that of Kant, fail to be sufficiently radical since they do not pose the issue of how exact symbolic forms emerge from and are applicable to the inexact ordinary experience of the lifeworld. Several key concepts are deployed in this analysis: the first and over-riding one is “institution” itself—which refers to an original setting-into-place, or primal establishment, of a way of being and knowing that persists through time and structures subsequent experience. The mathematization of nature is such an institution that sets Galilean science into being such that all conceptions of science and reason afterward must reckon fundamentally with it. Modern philosophy and Greek philosophy, as we have seen, are also referred to as institutions (Urstiftungen) in this sense. The concept of institution arose in Husserl’s work in 1919–20 in the context of his research into “genetic logic” to refer to the constitution of an object as a single identity out of the flux of original experience—a chair, for example, as a single, identical chair, as opposed to a plurality of perceptions of color, hardness, material, etc. such that this single identity subsequently can have various characteristics predicated of it: “this chair is flimsy,” for example. Such an identity, which is presupposed by all logical judging about it, is first constituted in experience as an unchanging identity out of a fundamental flux. All subsequent reference to this identity refers not only to its present condition, predicated as such-andsuch, but also back to the original constitution of the identity itself. In the process of original experience . . . a content which is in a continual becoming in the continual flux of changeable givennesses . . . the one and the other enduring individual, or their enduring and their duration, arise. . . . Every new positing (positing as now) posits its content in the form of a new point in time. This means that the individual difference of the point in time is the correlate of a certain primal establishment (Urstiftung) through a mode of givenness which maintains an identical correlate in the continual transformation of the retentions which pertain to the new now; to the change itself corresponds a continual alteration of orientation as a change in the mode of givenness of the identical (EJ 383; EU 462).

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An institution in the sense given to it by Husserl thus refers to an enduring temporal structure in which subsequent experience of the same structure refers back to its original formation. The original formation is thus always operative even if it is not thematized as such. In this way, the presuppositions of Galilean science have formed later science, reason and philosophy often without being brought to the consciousness of those that it has influenced. The originality of Husserl’s approach to the philosophy of history consists in the concept of institution (Urstiftung). He does not reduce the forms of science to history in the ordinary sense understood as consisting of a plurality of contingent facts. “All [merely] factual history remains incomprehensible because, always merely drawing its conclusions naïvely and straightforwardly from facts, it never makes thematic the general ground of meaning upon which such conclusions rest” (OG 371). Husserl rejected the reduction of philosophy to merely factual, contingent history in this sense from early in his career and does not reverse this judgment in Crisis. As he stated in his 1905 essay “Philosophy as Rigorous Science,” “the science of history, or simply empirical humanistic science in general, can of itself decide nothing, either in a positive or in a negative sense, as to whether a distinction is to be made between art as a cultural formation and valid art, between historical and valid law, and finally between historical and valid philosophy” (PRS 126). Husserl’s later tracing back of an institution to its original establishment understands history in a different sense than as contingent fact. The last section on Galileo’s mathematization of nature characterizes the method of historical exposition as a “zigzag pattern” in which “understanding of the beginnings is to be gained fully only by starting with science as given in its present-day form, looking back at its development” (C 58). Because an institution is enduring, its effectivity in the present allows a starting-point such that the origins of what is presently effective can be sought. In turn, clarification of the original institution shows how what has endured was put into place. The history of the institution is therefore not a merely empirical history but “the vital movement of the coexistence and the inter-weaving of original formations and sedimentations of meaning” (OG 371) that we may call transcendental history because it is a “depth-inquiry” (C 373) through which the contingency of factual history may be understood.3 Transcendental history is the internal history of the meaning and value of an institution. The institution of a scientific tradition, indeed of any tradition of reason, depends upon ideal meanings that retain their identity independently of who perceives them or when and where they are perceived. When I prove the Pythagorean theorem for the first time, I prove it for myself by following the steps and perceiving their accuracy at each point, but it is not my theorem, it is the same theorem that others have proven and which I will perhaps prove

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again to convince myself of its validity again after I have forgotten the detail of the proof. Ideal meaning transcends the conditions in which it is perceived because it is an identical meaning throughout the different instances in which it is actualized. For a meaning to be scientific, or to be knowledge, it must be true not only for me, not only here or now, but for any others who follow the steps at any other place or time. This is the very nature of the ideal meaning upon which science depends and through which is constructed a scientific edifice which can be added to, and by which such additions can be traced back to, and fitted into, other ideal meanings. As Husserl says, The originally (ursprünglich) self-evident production, as the pure fulfilment of an intention, is what is renewed (recollected), [such that] there necessarily occurs . . . an activity of concurrent actual production, and there arises thereby, in original “coincidence,” the self-evidence of identity: . . . the self-evidence of the identity throughout the chain of repetitions (Wiederholungskette) (OG 360; K 370).

It is this self-evidence of identity that allows the later investigation access to what the “instituting geometer (urstiftende Geometer)” meant (C 359, translation altered; K 370). This meaning is, as we have established, an institution in transcendental history. Significantly, Husserl comments at this point that this is not enough to establish the ideal meaning in question as objective in a manner that would persist throughout the institution. The objectivity of the ideal structure has not yet been fully constituted ... The important function of written, documenting linguistic expression is that it makes communications possible without immediate or mediate personal address; it is, so to speak, communication become virtual. Through this, the communalization of man is lifted to a new level. . . . The writing-down effects a transformation of the original mode of being of the meaning-structure, [e.g.] within the geometrical sphere of self-evidence, of the geometrical structure which is put into words (OG 360–1).

Writing is essential for ideal meaning to function within a tradition and therefore for the later ideal meanings to be known to have the same meaning as their primal, or even simply earlier, ones. It seems clear that the invention of writing is an event in factual, empirical, contingent history. There were, of course, societies and cultures without writing. It was invented in a certain time and place and then spread through different cultures and civilizations, more than once if we consider the whole world. There are different forms of writing and different languages in which writing occurs. There is also a writing, or script, that pertains to music and another that pertains to numerical and mathematical notation. All of this has

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a complex empirical history. Husserl does not refer to any particular form of writing or inscription of meaning. He is referring to the institution of inscription of meaning itself that preserves ideal meaning as a universal condition of scientific knowledge. If Husserl were to mean, at this point in his analysis of the institution of modern science, that the ideal meanings inherent to that science depend upon an empirical history of writing, then not only would he contradict his earlier assertion that his philosophy of history does not reduce transcendental history to the factuality of contingent history, but also the sphere of ideal meaning itself would be undermined. Ideal meaning would be reduced to factual history such that science itself would no longer contain a claim to truth but would be as contingent as any other historical event.4 This is not Husserl’s claim, but the fact that the supplementary text of The Origin of Geometry, in which this crucial claim is made, was not integrated into the main manuscript of Crisis means that the exact status of this claim is not clear in the specific context of his account of the institution of the mathematization of nature. The specific context in question is the origin of ideal meaning in the limit-shapes of geometry from the inexact spatial categories of the lifeworld. That Husserl can pose the issue of their origin means that he is able to speak of the “instituting geometer” due to the ideal meanings in the subsequent tradition. Who is this instituting geometer? What is his or her name? To ask for a name, a place, or a time is to ask for a first geometer in factual history. Not only is this a difficult factual-historical question that may be inaccessible after so much time, but there is no reason to believe that it was indeed one geometer. Perhaps it was the accomplishment of many, over a long period of time, a collaboration extremely complex to explain in factual history. Indeed, the potential subject of an illuminating empirical history. None of this is pertinent to the question of the instituting geometer, as Husserl means it, in transcendental history. What is pertinent is that since the later tradition of geometry requires that it was first instituted, then there must have been a first institution and it is one institution in the sense that it has given internal unity and structure to the subsequent tradition. That first institution can be described in its essential features with reference “forward” to its effects in the tradition and therefore “back” to what must have been instituted originally. What must have been originally established can be reproduced within the (phenomenological) consciousness that works within the tradition to uncover its institution. So, this is not an argument about what must have been, but a demonstration with self-evidence through the reproduction of the material available from the tradition because the tradition is not reducible to contingent, factual history but contains a necessity due to its scientific structure of systematic relation between ideal meanings.

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The “instituting geometer” is thus a concept of transcendental history that is, in this sense, a single geometer or, perhaps it is clearer to say, the initiation of a single institution in transcendental history. It does not matter whether this instituting geometer were found in empirical history to be a combination of a plurality of actual persons, accomplishing a collective labor over, perhaps, generations, and diffused over an extensive part of the globe. Indeed, such a pluralisation and complication of the instituting geometer when investigated within empirical history is to be expected. The history of discovery and invention is of course complex—and, indeed, fascinating—but all of this is possible because of the institution in transcendental history: the institution of geometry as the science of exact limit-shapes abstracted from the lifeworld and never experienceable as such within the lifeworld (in a first step) and (in a second step) rigorously connected to algebraic equivalents. Transcendental history and factual, empirical history are thus distinct in this sense but they also have a complex inner relation and it is understanding this that will explain Husserl’s reference to writing at this point in The Origin of Geometry. First, it is clear that investigation of the factual history of the institution of geometry depends upon the existing scientific tradition of geometry understood as a tradition of ideal meaning that came into being by abstraction from the lifeworld: the first geometer of transcendental history is the conceptual condition for the empirical investigation that could establish a factual history of the origin of geometry. If one did not know what geometry is, one could not investigate the historical facts that led to its invention and construction. Second, the necessity of writing for the transmission of ideal meaning over time and space—through generations and between cultures with different languages, for example—means that writing must have been invented at some place and time prior to, or coincident with, the first geometer. And, again, this is not an argument, but a claim made with adequate evidence inherent in the institution of a scientific tradition as such. Thus, the writing of factual history depends upon the definition of an institution in transcendental history, for example the institution of geometry in transcendental history. But, even more important: inscription must have been invented within empirical history in order for the institution of geometry to become an institution within transcendental history. Not only does factual history depend upon transcendental history in the first sense but transcendental history depends upon factual history in a second sense: the institution in transcendental history points to a necessary event, such as the invention of writing, within empirical history. This means that factual history in the second sense is not merely contingent but that there is order and priority in historical fact. Factual history is transformed, so to speak, by transcendental history such that it is “lifted out of” contingency and necessary events can

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be found within it. Such necessary events are only lifted out by a transcendental history that is from the viewpoint of factual history subsequent to the necessary event. Since there is science, there was inscription such that inscription was necessary for science. Transcendental history confers necessity retrospectively (from a factual-historical standpoint) on factuality. But it is not, of course, necessary that writing/inscription have been invented when and where factual history says that it was invented. It is necessary that it be invented, not that the invention took place in such-and-such a fashion, for the transcendental possibility of modern science to be actualized. We may thus distinguish between three senses of history: contingent history understood as a mere plurality of facts that can only be narrated in a manner lacking any internal, meaningful structure; transcendental history as the institution that temporally structures experience with reference back toward an original beginning and forward toward an end; the event through which transcendental history incurs into contingent history, retrospectively conferring a structure upon it, such that an event, such as writing, must have occurred within factual history due to the structure of transcendental history. This is the meaning of Husserl’s reference to writing in The Origin of Geometry, but this meaning is neither explained nor explicitly addressed by Husserl. It is left hanging because this manuscript was not integrated into the main body of the Crisis. The account given here of the relation between factual history, transcendental history, and the event of institution is an explication and development of Husserl’s introduction of writing into the account of ideal meaning in The Origin of Geometry through a phenomenological philosophy of history which only the whole body of this work can fully justify but will be addressed additionally below in the discussion of the contribution of Jacob Klein. 2.3 FORMALIZATION AND FORMAL MANIFOLDS Embedded in Husserl’s analysis of the mathematization of nature in section 9 of Crisis is a terse presentation of the origin of symbolic abstraction and its formalization in definite manifolds that is taken over from Husserl’s prior works and is not discussed in any detail (C 46, ftn.). In his view, arithmetization is completed and surmounted in formalization into a mathesis universalis such as that foreseen by Leibniz as “a science of the forms of meaning of the “something-in-general” which can be constructed in pure thought and empty, formal generality” (C 45). Such pure, formal manifolds, which are defined through a “complete axiomatic system,” give a “special sort of totality in all deductive determinations to the formal substrate-objects contained in them”

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(C 45). The completion of the ideal of formalization in formal systems of meaning defined in abstraction from all content is therefore applicable to any defined sphere of objects. This ideal, which is deeply rooted in modern Galilean science, necessarily gives rise to the emptying of meaning that Husserl calls “crisis” because the relation between formal system and concrete application requires a conception of meaning and value that cannot itself be thematized by such a formal conception of knowledge. It thus grounds the claim that modern sciences ineluctably dissolve into a technization that empties their meaning. We will therefore trace the development of the conception of formalization in Husserl’s thought upon which his analysis of arithmetization and formalization in Crisis depends. It should be kept in mind, however, that it is not the intention of this tracing to develop a philosophy of mathematics as such. It is concerned rather with the role of symbolic abstraction, arithmetization and formalization in human reason, including the role of human reason and its restrictions in the contemporary crisis—thus, in short, with the relation of formalization to the lifeworld. In an early presentation of this issue in Logical Investigations (1900), Husserl referred to a division of labor between mathematicians and philosophers, ceding all scientific character to the mathematical treatment of theories of inference. The form of all true theories, in the sense of a development of a universal theory of theory-forms, belongs to mathematics alone insofar as it is itself scientifically established. But, from the viewpoint of philosophy, such a theory of theory forms is a merely specialist, technical construction despite its complexity. In contrast, “the philosopher enquires into the essence of theory and what makes theory as such possible” (LI 245). What such inquiry into theory requires, and what problems it must confront, developed continuously through Husserl’s work, but his conviction that philosophical inquiry pressed beyond specialist domains toward the meaning of scientific inquiry itself remained constant. 2.3.1 Authentic versus Symbolic Number Concepts in Philosophy of Arithmetic The orientation of Philosophy of Arithmetic (1891) was to the “psychic acts” that are utilized in arithmetical apprehensions and operations, such as “collective connection” by which a group is perceived as a group, etc. After Frege’s critical review of the book, Husserl abandoned its “psychologistic” orientation, agreeing with Frege that the form of objectivity connected to mathematics contained a certain logico-normative necessity that could not be reduced to psychological processes. Indeed, his later search for a form of “psychic” intentionality that could not be reduced to a concrete human, or even non-human,

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psyche opened the way for the development of phenomenology and the transcendental reduction. But while Philosophy of Arithmetic is a pre-phenomenological text from this point of view, it nevertheless contained many specific analyses that Husserl did not disavow once their meaning was altered to fit within his mature phenomenology. Two are pertinent to our current theme: the nature of the symbolic abstraction operative in mathematical objectivity and the distinction between authentic and symbolic representations. 2.3.1.1 Mathematical Abstraction as Referring to an “Anything-Whatever” In Philosophy of Arithmetic Husserl defines the nature of mathematical abstraction in the context of the discussion of the manner of perception of a group as a group—a flock of birds or a pile of sand, for example.5 A number depends upon the perception of groups in a more informal sense because “the number is a plurality of units” (PA 15, translation altered; PdA 14). When we perceive a group as a group, the individual characteristics of each member are left aside and only their collective combination into a whole is focussed upon. To disregard or abstract from something is merely to give it no special notice. The satisfaction of the requirement wholly to abstract from the peculiarities of the contents thus absolutely does not have the effect of making those contents, and therewith their combination disappear from our consciousness. The grasp of the contents, and the collection of them, is of course the precondition of the abstraction. But in that abstraction the isolating interest is not directed upon the contents, but rather exclusively upon their linkage in thought—and that linkage is all that is intended (PA 83).

When see a flock of birds, we see the flock as a flock by disregarding each bird individually considered. We do not see: one and one and one, etc. We directly apprehend a flock. However, equally we see a flock of birds. It is a “certain something [irgend etwas]” (PA 83; PdA 79). Any other objects—a bear, a wineglass, anything but a bird—is not included in the flock. The abstraction involved in seeing a group as a group underlies the concept of number. If we see five birds, we abstract from each individual bird in the same way as we do when we see a flock. But there is an additional component. When we consider the number three, it may apply to three things of any sort whatever. They do not need to be all birds, or all sand, or all whatever. I can add a bird, a bear, and a wineglass to combine into “three things.” In numerical abstraction the determinate nature of the group that makes it a group of a certain something is itself abstracted from. “Disregarding the specific character of the particular contents grasped together, one considers and retains each content only insofar as it is a ‘something’ (Etwas) or ‘one’ (Eins)” (PA 86; PdA 82).

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While a flock of birds is “a certain something, a certain one” (PA 83, emphasis removed), a number is simply “a something, or a one.” Husserl claims that “the concept something owes its origination to reflexion upon the psychical act of representing, for which precisely any determinate object may be given as the content” (PA 84). The concept of number refers in an intimate way to the process of representation itself, whereas the grouping of a certain group does not so refer reflexively to itself but to the “certain something” that comprises the unity of the group. What Husserl calls “a something, or a one” in Philosophy of Arithmetic (without the concrete, though indefinite, limitation to a certain something that defines a specific group), he will call in Formal and Transcendental Logic (1929) “an empty anything-whatever,” a terminology which has the advantage of making clearer the distinction between a group, or a number, of specific, determinate things making up a group—a certain something—from the “generic concept of number” (PA 85)—which is a grouping of anything-whatevers consequently applicable to determinate things of differing types.6 The concept of number consists in abstraction to contents of any sort whatever considered in empty universality. 2.3.1.2 Authentic versus Symbolic Abstraction The second aspect of Philosophy of Arithmetic that allows us to develop the concept of formalization and definite manifolds is the presentation of the distinction between authentic versus symbolic abstraction. Husserl begins by commenting on “the fundamental fact that all number representations that we possess, beyond the first few in the number series, are symbolic, and can only be symbolic” (PA 200), thereby indicating that only through an understanding of symbolic representations can we understand the nature of number. “A symbolic or inauthentic representation is, as the name already indicates, a representation by means of signs. If a content is not directly given to us as that which it is, but rather only indirectly through signs which univocally characterize it, then we have a symbolic representation instead of an authentic one” (PA 205). He gives the following example: if we look at a house from the outside, we see the house and have an authentic representation of the house as the house that it is. If someone describes to us a house on a certain corner of a certain street, then we have a symbolic representation of the house. Then he notes that “any description of a perceptual object has the tendency to replace the actual representation of it by a sign-representation” (PA 206). Because characteristics of the object are represented in the sign, such that judgments made about the sign can be carried over to the object, “the symbolic representation serves us as a provisional surrogate for the actual representation, and, in cases where the authentic object is inaccessible, even as a permanent one” (PA 206, emphasis added). The distinction is thus an important one not only

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because there is a difference between seeing the thing itself and representing it through a sign but because the sign-representation has a tendency to substitute for the thing itself. This is true not only of perceptual objects but also of conceptual ones. Husserl points out that “red” can be seen by the eye but also can be defined as a certain wave-length of light. This issue is clearly at the root of the problem that emerged full-blown in the Crisis: if red can be defined symbolically as a wave-length of light, and if such inauthentic representations tend to substitute for authentic ones, then light may be seen as really a wave-length such that our ordinary perception in the lifeworld is disregarded in favor of a substruction of nature by mathematical symbols. We do not want to suggest that the Crisis-thesis is already present at the beginning of Husserl’s work, but rather that the conceptual resources for perceiving and expressing that thesis were developed over a long prior period. Husserl, at minimum, saw at this early point that the problem of arithmetic is the problem of symbolic representation and the tendency of symbolic representation to substitute for authentic presentation of the thing itself. Symbolization allows the expansion of the domain of number far beyond the limited domain in which we can perceive numbers directly: four cats, maybe a dozen eggs, but certainly not fifty-two cards. Could we spread a deck of cards out over a table-top and see with one authentic glance whether one was missing or added? Arithmetic requires that the authentic presentation of numbers be supplemented by their surrogate symbolic representation and thus essentially contains the tendency to substitute the symbolic for the authentic representation. “In a symbolic but wholly determinate sense we can speak of numbers where their authentic representation is forever denied to us; and on this level we are even in a position to establish the Ideal infinity of the realm of numbers” (PA 236). Indeed, only through such symbolism can such infinity be established. “The method of sensible signs is, therefore, the logical method of arithmetic” (PA 272, see also 296). We should note an assumption concerning the relationship between authentic and symbolic representations in Husserl’s account. It is evident in his terminology that symbolic representations are surrogates for authentic ones directed to “overcoming the original limits of our natural mental abilities” (PA 248). It is also evident in his original example of the house represented symbolically versus authentically. It is never doubted in Husserl’s presentation that it is the same house, or, more generally, that symbolic representation and authentic representation refer to the same contents. A number system (as, for example, our decimal system) can accordingly be regarded as the most perfect mirror reflection of the domain of the numbers in themselves, i.e., of the actual numbers, which are in general inaccessible to us.

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. . . Thus we may justifiably regard the indirect formations of the system as the symbolic surrogates of the numbers in themselves (PA 275).

It is because both forms of representation refer to the same objects that the symbolic system can be called a “surrogate” for the numbers as perceived authentically. Thus, x-squared + y-squared = z-squared is the general formula for the Pythagorean theorem, such that it may serve as a surrogate for rightangled triangles with sides 3, 4, 5 or 4, 5, 6.4, etc. But arithmetic requires calculation using such theorems with numbers far beyond our capacity to bring them to authentic, intuitive evidence. Moreover, it requires using such formulae as manipulable signs without specifying any specific numbers at all. In short, arithmetic consists in calculation through symbolic signs (and their relationships expressed in formulae) without reference to specific numbers. But although symbolic representation in the absence of any possibility of authentic representation is the condition for the development of arithmetic, nevertheless Husserl continued to assume that such symbolic representations refer to the same object as the authentic representations even though they are never given as such. What could be the justification for this assumption? In order to say that two forms of representation refer to the same object, it would be necessary to show in what manner each refers to the object, and then to show how these references are (operationally, or theoretically, or in some form) equivalent. But this is precisely what is ruled out by the correct observation that arithmetic depends on a symbolic representation that can never be made authentic. So, it can only be an assumption that guides the analysis, not a claim justified within it. Burt Hopkins has developed a more detailed analysis of Philosophy of Arithmetic that suggests that what I have characterized here as an unwarranted assumption in Husserl’s analysis is actually a consequence of the layered composition of the text, such that there is an emerging appreciation of the novelty of symbolic representation in mathematics alongside an earlier assumption that it can be grounded with reference back to authentic representation. At the operative level of Husserl’s analyses—but not at the level of their reflective thematization—it is the latter, conceptually symbolic numbers and conceptually symbolic calculational operations, that now (in the final analyses of Philosophy of Arithmetic) comprise the foundation for the system of arithmetic. Therefore, the contents of the authentic concepts proper to cardinal numbers and the operations upon them that (in the earlier analyses of Philosophy of Arithmetic) were characterized as the logically equivalent contents of the symbolic number formations are no longer so characterized by Husserl (Hopkins 2011, 147).

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If Husserl has, by the end of Philosophy of Arithmetic, let go of the notion that symbolic representations have the same object as authentic representations so that the former can be considered to have the same legitimacy and validity as the latter, then it means that the issue insists with even greater urgency: to what do the “anything-whatever” forms of arithmetic refer and with what scientific justification and legitimacy? And, in the next step of our pursuit of a concept of formalization, we may ask the same question of the theory-forms that are built upon such symbolic abstraction. 2.3.2 Theory of Theory Forms in Logical Investigations In Logical Investigations (1900), Husserl stated that he regarded Leibniz as “of the closest” of philosophers to himself because he was likewise inspired by “the Idea of the completion and transformation of the sciences” (LI 218). His investigation into “what makes science science” (LI 225), or the essence of science, requires “an a priori, theoretical, nomological science which deals with the ideal essence of science as such” (LI 236). This, in turn, requires a “theory of the possible forms of theories, or a pure theory of manifolds” (LI 239). This may well seem a strange and ambitious idea and it would be good to start by showing why it emerges out of the Galilean institution of modern reason. Recall that mathematics depends upon an abstraction to limit-shapes and that the arithmetization of geometry constructs a mutual translation between arithmetical numbers and formulae and geometrical shapes such that they can be regarded as functionally equivalent. If nature as a whole can be understood through mathematics, then the relationships between natural bodies can be understood as relationships between bodies designated by mathematical “numbers in general” which are uninterpreted signs (usually signified by letters such as “f,” “m,” or “a” in f = ma)—relationships which themselves will take a mathematical form. Both objects and relationships can be expressed mathematically: a body of such-as-such a size, and such-and-such a weight, will fall at such-and-such a speed, and if it collides with another body (of such-and-such, etc.) it will incline at such-and-such a tangent, etc. Natural bodies will be understood as designated by mathematical signs whose relationships appear as formulae—and these formulae will be taken as describing a reality which extends to the whole of nature (at least as a goal to which the infinite project of science is devoted). Any given domain of objects can be known by being fitted into a theoryform: a science covers a certain domain of objects and knows them insofar as it renders the objects into formulae which express their relationships systematically. The whole field of scientific knowledge consists of a plurality of

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such scientific theory-forms such that philosophy, as the comprehension of the human meaning of science, must think not only of a science, or a theoryform, but become a theory of theory-forms, a theory of the legitimate logical forms that given sciences may take. 2.3.3 Generalization and Formalization in Ideas I In Ideas I (1913) Husserl’s conception of reason begins with the idea of an essence. Every object is an object of a certain type and the essence of this type can be defined. The procedure of imaginative variation is used to arrive at an essence. Characteristics of a chair, for example, can be varied in the imagination: it can be made of wood, metal, indeed any strong hard material that can be formed into the requisite shapes, but it cannot be made of spaghetti or mud; it can be higher or lower within a certain range defined by the size of the human body—while it does not have a single definite height, it can’t be ten feet or two inches high. A chair enables a human posture that is intermediate between sitting on the ground, crouching, or squatting and standing upright. Through imaginative variation the essence of a chair as a hard, formed object that enables the human posture of sitting is defined. If someone were to object that there are doll’s chairs two inches high or that models of chairs are indeed made of clay or twigs, this is precisely because they are models, caricatures, or modifications of chairs suited to another body than the human one and thereby not of the essence itself. A single chair is thus an example of an essence “chair.” Indeed, all chairs are examples of the essence “chair.” It has often been inquired what relation this conception of essence has to the Platonic concept of eidos. Obviously the latter has been the subject of numerous interpretations from Plato to our own day, but if one understands an eidos as the form of a thing—and the basic meaning of eidos is “shape”— without ontological claims suggesting that an eidos is more real, or on an ontologically higher level of being, then they indeed are the same.7 Every sort of thing has a shape, in the sense that chairs look like chairs and dogs look like dogs, such that they can be characterized as belonging to the same group and as different from another group: chairs are not dogs because chairs are shaped like, or have the form of, chairs and dogs like dogs. It is a difference of essence which cannot be reasoned in the sense of argued for but which is immediately grasped in intuition by the intellect in confronting the object— not the object as a single irreplaceable object but the object as an instance of a certain type and thus distinct not only from other objects but from other types. Husserl’s method of eidetic variation is simply a way of perceiving the kind, or type, in and through the instance.

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The concept of essence is thus the first step in a categorization of perceived objects into types and thus into a phenomenology of reason. In Ideas I, Husserl distinguished between two kinds of categorization into types (Ideas1 24–5). The kind of categorization of an essence described above is called “generalization.” Any object can be classified through generalization into a graded and ordered sequence of essences from lower to higher. For example, a chair can be considered as a specific individual chair, or an eidetic singularity in Husserl’s terminology, or it can be considered as a “material cultural object,” or as a “physical thing.” It is all of these. These rankings, as perhaps we can call them, are a matter of the degree of abstraction from a specific individual thing to a higher genus (material cultural object) and to an even higher genus (physical thing). Each higher genus is a more universal concept under which a greater number of lower species of objects fall. This is a form of scientific classification that is perhaps most evident in biology: a human being is a human, a mammal, an animal, a living being, a natural being, and a physical thing. Human being can be studied from the point of view of what characteristics it shares with the animals with which it shares a genus (mammals). Or, the human being can be studied from the higher genus of animals in general (not only mammals) or, indeed, of any living thing or even any thing at all. From a scientific point of view these are not alternatives but sit inside each other in a hierarchy. It is only important to note carefully what level of species-genus abstraction is operative in a given case and not to carelessly shift the level of abstraction. Husserl remarks that generalization is a certain kind of part-whole relationship such that the specific individual implies the universalizations built upon it and the universalizations “contain” those more specific of a lower level. Generalization is thus a part-whole relationship of container-contained graded into levels of universality depending on the degree of containment. Formalization is a categorization into a type of a different sort, a type that is especially significant in mathematics. “Generalization is something totally different from that formalization which plays such a large role in, e.g., mathematical analysis; and specialization is something totally different from de-formalization, from “filling-out” an empty logico-mathematical form, or a formal truth” (Ideas1 26). Since generalization and formalization are different types of abstraction, the relationship between the type and the instances of the type are different in each case. In generalization we move from species to genus in a more universal direction and genus to species in “specialization,” or particularization. Formalization and de-formalization are distinct from generalization both in the movement from instance to type and type to instance. Husserl points out that the essence “red” is a species of the genus “sensuous quality.” Also, “triangle” is an essence of the genus “spatial shape.” How-

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ever, “red, triangle, and similarly all other essences, whether homogeneous or heterogeneous, are subordinate to the categorical heading “essence” which, with respect to all of them, by no means has the characteristic of an essential genus; it rather does not have that characteristic relative to any of them” (Ideas1 26). The essence “red” and the essence “triangle” cannot be subsumed under the essence “essence.” They are not instances of a higher genus that enfolds both of them. Even if the essences in question are homogeneous, that is to say, belong to the same species-genus generalization series, they are not themselves instances of a higher genus. Thus, for example, the essences “chair” and “cultural object” are not subordinated to a common essence. In short, the distinctive character of formalization is explained by showing that the idea of “essence” used in species-genus relationships of generalization cannot be understood itself on the model of species-genus generalization. But this is only a negation. A formal abstraction cannot be so understood. How, then, can it be understood? Husserl remarks that to collapse these two forms of abstraction would be “just as wrong as to misinterpret any object whatever (the empty Something) as the genus with respect to objects of all sorts and therefore, naturally as simply the one and only summum genus, the genus of all genera” (Ideas1 26). By the “empty something” Husserl means the idea of any sort of an anything whatever, an idea which may seem to be the widest concept of all things in their species-genus relationships but it is not. The abstraction to an anything-whatever, which can be designated in mathematical terms by an “x” or indeed any uninterpreted sign, is not a highest genus, Husserl maintains. If it were, we may note, the highest universal concept of Being would be empty, but the “emptiness” of abstraction to an “anything-whatever” is of a different sort that does not lie within the “containment” relationships of generalization. Husserl refers to pure logical forms and the transition from space as experienced to a “Euclidean manifold” as examples of formalization. This can perhaps be illustrated more simply. I can take the pencil in front of me and vary its characteristics to achieve an essence; I can place this essence in an ordered sequence of essences; but I cannot vary the characteristics of this object in such a way as to designate it as an “x.” To achieve an “x” I do not vary characteristics to find an invariant; I do not move from a more specific to a more generic essence; I must negate the specific characteristics of the pencil entirely such that I am left with nothing specific at all—only the idea of some undetermined sort of a something. This is the difference. Formalization is a different sort of abstraction that turns out to have a key role in the phenomenology of modern reason.

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2.3.4

Definite Manifolds in Formal and Transcendental Logic

The concept of formalization is discussed in greater detail in Formal and Transcendental Logic (1929), though the focus of inquiry is somewhat different. Formalization has arisen in the spheres of both mathematics and logic. Husserl formulated a precise relationship between mathematics and logic with regard to the concept of truth. Truth requires “adequation to the things themselves (Sachen selbst),” that is to say, truth is not only a matter of the forms of judgment but also a bringing of these forms to an adequate judging of a given state of affairs as such-and-such (FTL 65, translation altered; FuTL 70). When we consider the forms of logic from the viewpoint of their truthful judging of things, mathematics can be seen to be the formal ontology of things, or possible states of affairs, whereas logic refers to the forms of judging, or predication. Formal ontology (mathematics) thus appears within formal predication (logic) since judging is always a judging-about certain things, or states of affairs, that are judged to be such-and-such. Husserl calls this the “two-sidedness of formal logic as formal apophantics and formal ontology” that depends upon whether one focuses on the things judged-about or on the judging itself (FTL 105). The consistently followed path of inquiry into the formal conditions for possible truth and finally for true science, the path starting from the propositional structure of a science (that is: from the significational side), led at the same time—precisely by virtue of the sense-relation to objectivities that is involved in the propositions themselves—to an all embracing formal ontology, which is at its highest level defines the name: theory of manifolds (FTL 105, translation altered; FuTL 110).8

When one poses the issue of the relationship of formal logic and mathematics to the determination of truth, Husserl claims that the formal ontology of mathematics appears within formal logic because logic is always a predication of something and mathematics is the formal ontology of precisely such somethings. This relationship is a contested part of Husserl’s late work and its adequacy that I will not address here. The more fundamental point is that formalization has arisen both within logic and mathematics and that in both cases it is but a prior step toward the determination of truth. Truth requires not only formal systems, or theory-forms, no matter how well developed or complete, but the application of such formal systems to the “things themselves,” the state of affairs which is to be determined truthfully. To address this issue of application, which is the issue upon which the thesis of the crisis of the sciences depends, the issue is not relationship between mathematics and logic but the concept of formalization that underlies both of them. Chapter 3 of Formal and Tran-

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scendental Logic, whose title reads “theory of deductive systems and theory of manifolds” (FTL 90, translation altered; FuTL 93) deals precisely with the concept of formalization. It will be useful to follow the argument of this chapter in some detail. Let us prepare for this argument, however, by taking up the emergence of the full idea of the formal in chapter 2—where Husserl’s explicit topic is the relationship between formal logic (apophantics, or predication) and formal mathematics (ontology). Formal abstraction makes its appearance in two different domains: Aristotle’s formal logic and Leibniz’s mathesis universalis. In Aristotle, there is the emergence of a theory of logical judgment that is liberated from its embeddedness in actual arguments. Whereas Plato’s logic was embedded in a subject-matter, as illustrated by the dialogue form, Aristotle’s logic is formal in the sense that “all ‘terms’ in the fundamental apophantic forms (and in the forms that can be constructed out of these) are left as undetermined variables” (FTL 72–3). One can elaborate the idea of non-contradiction, for example, without regard for the contents of what might be subsumed under this law. It is not possible that “S” be both “p” and “not-p.” Or, that “S is p” requires that “it is not the case that S is not-p.” This is formally true entirely independently of what may be designated to be “S” or, for that matter, “p.” Leibniz’s idea of a mathesis universalis was developed, not out of logic, but out of the theory of number in which any object is considered simply an “anything-whatever,” that is to say, in abstraction from all concrete characteristics. The theory of sets built upon this idea of formal objects to give the idea of a relational complex of objects determined only by the form of objects and their relations, or a theory-form, and, then, an “all-inclusive province” and “all-embracing science [of] . . . formations that always go on yielding new formations as constructed in a way that is always reiterable” (FTL 77–8). In short, the idea of formal objects and their formal relations gives the idea of theory-forms and the necessary form of theoryforms as a complete formal science. Husserl comments that within Aristotelian logic it was impossible to make the essential distinction between generalization and formalization (in the sense clarified in Ideas I) and that the development of a mathesis universalis by modern mathematicians fell short of developing “the teleological structures immanent in the final idea of a theory of science” (FTL 73, 75). In other words, the full idea of the formal that is required by a contemporary theory of science was held back by its incomplete development in both these domains. Only a philosophical theory of the formal, which is not limited to the elaboration of either formal logic or formal mathematics, but rather reflects upon the instituting idea of the formal as such is capable of understanding science in its contemporary character. It is this instituting idea of the formal, rather than

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the subordinate thesis of the appearance of formal ontology (mathematics) within formal predication (logic) that is the fundamental level of investigation that Husserl undertook. The full appearance of the idea of the formal emerged slowly from both logic and mathematics as at each step another limitation of the formal to material, or content-laden, assumptions was discarded. Chapter 2 thus concludes with an account of Husserl’s conception of the anythingwhatever as the idea of the formal object as discovered in Philosophy of Arithmetic and the idea of a “theory in the strict sense” as a “formal universality that leaves undetermined every material particularity of the objects or object-provinces to which a theory relates” as elaborated in Logical Investigations (FTL 87–8). The end of chapter 2 in Formal and Transcendental Logic thus brings his argument to the point that Husserl had achieved in his previous work. Chapter 3 contains his final word on the full idea of the formal as it is shown through the idea of a “definite manifold.” Whereas previous logic concerned itself with forms of judgment within a science, the current task of formal logic, according to Husserl, was to investigate the “systematic connexion of propositions in the form of a systematically unitary deduction” (FTL 90), that is to say, a theory-form itself understood as a formal system. On the basis of such a theory of formal systems, one can investigate the construction, formal consistency, and application of such formal systems such that “judgments-systems in their entirety become the theme” (FTL 90, emphasis removed). Euclidean geometry is an example of such a theory-form when it is understood “by that peculiarly logical universalization called ‘formalization’” (FTL 93). In formalization, as we have seen, all determinate contents of the concepts in the theory-form are “converted into indeterminates, modes of the empty ‘anything-whatever’” (FTL 93). Thus, while Euclidean space as understood by Euclid was the theory of perceived space, the formalization of Euclidean geometry gives a theory-form isomorphic with the Euclidean one that no longer refers to intuited space. The form of the theory remains identical but its reference to a determinate content is erased. It becomes simply a manifold (Mannigfaltigkeit) which is “a set whose peculiarity consists only in the circumstance that it is thought with empty-formal universality . . . determined in a deductive discipline having a form derived from Euclidean space-geometry by formalization” (FTL 93; FuTL 97). Once a theory-form is understood, not through reference to intuited content, but by its internal-formal structure, then there is clearly a plurality of such theoryforms and the task of an inquiry into formal logic must address the plurality of theory-forms itself. Husserl credits modern mathematics with the investigation of such theoryforms and their alteration through a process of universalization and particu-

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larization. He immediately points out, in a manner clearly based upon the distinction of formalization from generalization in Ideas I, that this universalization-particularization process does not follow the rules of species-genus generalization but has its own distinctive character. The failure to understand this distinction has produced misunderstanding among mathematicians, logicians, and philosophers (FTL 94). One expects an immediate clarification of the “superordinations and subordinations” specific to formalization (FTL 93), but Husserl’s inquiry goes rather in the direction of the concept of a manifold that constitutes the ideal of a formalized theory-form. If the Euclidean ideal were actualized, it would lead to the concept of a definite manifold where the whole infinite system of space-geometry could be derived from the irreducible finite system of axioms by purely syllogistic deduction . . .; and thus the apriori essence of space could become fully disclosed in a theory. . . . The transition to form then yields the form-idea of any manifold that, conceived as subject to an axiom-system with the form derived from the Euclidean axiom-system by formalization, could be completely explained nomologically, in a deductive theory that would be (as I expressed it in my Göttingen lectures) ‘equiform’ with geometry (FTL 95, translation altered, emphasis removed).9

A definite manifold is thus the idea of a theory-form derived from axioms in which all theorems within the theory-form can be traced as transformations of the axioms. The formal penetration of the axioms over the system-form can be parsed into two different aspects: “the idea that there is no truth about such a province that is not deducibly included in the ‘fundamental laws’ of the corresponding nomological science” (FTL 96). This has traditionally been called completeness. The theory-form is complete in the sense that there is nothing within it that cannot be derived from its axioms. Also, any proposition, or theorem, within the theory-form, “is either ‘true’—that is to say, an analytic (purely deducible) consequence of the axioms—or ‘false’—that is to say: an analytic contradiction” (FTL 96). This is called consistency. Every theorem within the theory-form is either true or false. The idea of a definite manifold is of a theory-form defined by its axioms that contains no theorems either underivable from the axioms or undecidable (as true or false). Mathematicians have shown through the axiomatization of deductive theory-forms that there are an infinite variety of such definite manifolds. This development discloses the idea of the theory of theory-forms which would aim to show all theory-forms as “mathematical particularizations” of this idea and therefore as deducible from it (FTL 98).10

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2.3.5 Summary Characteristics of Formalization and Definite Manifolds At this point I will attempt a short summary of the full idea of the formal as developed in Edmund Husserl’s work presented as a series of steps beginning from the most primitive and ascending toward the most sophisticated: 1.  Objects can be designated formally as anything-whatevers without regard to any determinate content: a, b, c, etc. 2.  The objects enter into formal relations with other objects, relations which are themselves considered formally, and thus objects and relations together take on a theory-form distinct from other theory-forms with different relations: the system of cardinal numbers, for example, or of Euclidean geometry. 3.  A theory can be formalized, or axiomatized, by presenting it as the consequence of a finite series of axioms that are unproven within the system and provide the foundation for higher-level theorems. 4.  The highest idea of a theory-form is the idea of a definite manifold in which, not only are both objects and relations formalized, but the theoryform contains nothing else, i.e. no non-formal remnants, within itself. 5.  A definite manifold is a theory-form that is complete in the sense that there are no theorems within it that cannot be derived from its axioms and consistent in the sense that every theorem within the theory-form can be decided to be either true or false. 6.  The theory of definite manifolds poses a new issue for the theory of science as the theory of theory-forms such that all theory-forms would be particularizations of this all-embracing theory. 7.  While the idea of a definite manifold may not be realizable in fact, it nevertheless stands as the highest idea of the formal. It is this highest idea which philosophy has to investigate to understand the theory of theoryforms and thus to understand and criticize the idea of science as such. Husserl’s account of formalization stops at the point of the ideal of a definite manifold. The copious references to his prior works—primarily Logical Investigations, but also including Philosophy of Arithmetic and Ideas I— indicate that, in his own view, Formal and Transcendental Logic gives a new presentation of an understanding of formalization that was already present in his previous work.11 His last word in the chapter is to note that only analytic, deductive theoryforms are of this type. With reference to psychology, phenomenology, and history, he points out that applying such formal-logical criteria to them says nothing essential because “such a science is an open infinity of propositions that hang together by virtue of their objects and can be united with one an-

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other at least as analytically non-contradictory” (FTL 102). If the unity of a science depends upon its objects, then its objects cannot be considered solely in a formal manner, and its theory-form owes nothing essential to deductive form. Such sciences do not contradict basic forms of logic or mathematics but nothing essential about their content can be derived from this fact. Nonformal objects, non-derivable propositions, a theory-form distinct from a definite manifold: these derive from the essential reference to content-laden objects. All sciences in which reference to content is essential must take a form distinct from the ideal of formalization. This observation returns us to the logic of the Crisis that it is our intention to clarify since the lifeworld is precisely the pre-formal, content-laden, “material” that allows for the critique of formal abstraction and the observation that formalization, when it becomes the reigning ideal of knowledge, necessarily produces a crisis of meaning. 2.3.6 Arithmetization, Formalization and Modern Reason in the Crisis We are now in a position to return to Husserl’s account of the crisis of modern reason in the Crisis to expand his condensed reference to the arithmetization of geometry as the source of the emptying and externalization of meaning that turns modern reason into a technique. Insofar as formalization consists in an abstraction to an undesignated anything-whatever, it is necessarily emptied of meaning, but we should note the subtle elements of the analysis. Let us consider the relationship between four aspects of the analysis: geometry consists in an idealization to limit-shapes; formalizing abstraction in arithmetic consists in abstraction to anything-whatever; the arithmetization of geometry consists in the treatment of idealized shapes through their analogues in arithmetical formulae; formalization, or axiomatization, consists in the development of definite manifolds which are complete and consistent. The emptying and externalization to which the argument in the Crisis refers points most immediately to arithmetic as its source. Indeed, all arithmetic is emptying in this sense but in itself it makes no claim to the understanding of nature. Husserl’s account of the mathematization of nature is essential to universalizing the issue of emptying to nature as a whole. But still more is needed. If mathematics were still understood in pre-modern terms as idealized limit-shapes, then nature would be conceived as the domain of ideal shapes exemplified in concretely intuitable shapes—in very much the way that we may suppose that Plato thought of nature. The arithmetization of geometry reduces concretely intuitable shapes and their ideal limits to arithmetical relationships. Thus, for the emptying characteristic of arithmetic to be universalized to nature as a whole, the “mathematization of nature” whose institution Husserl is explicating must include the arithmetization of geometry

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characteristic of modern analysis so that “the arithmetization of geometry leads almost automatically, in a certain way, to the emptying of meaning” (C 44). Does this mean that formalization is irrelevant to the emptying and externalization of which the Crisis speaks? We have shown that formalization consists of two related components: a formalizing abstraction so that a given object becomes designated as an anything-whatever, and the idea of a complete and consistent system of such objects and their relations in a definite manifold. Obviously, the abstraction to anything-whatever is the fundamental meaning of emptying. Can the idea of a definite manifold be then set aside in the context of the thesis of the crisis of the sciences? No, for three reasons. First, as Formal and Transcendental Logic strove to show, the idea of a definite manifold is the completion, in the sense of the full following out of the consequences, of formalizing abstraction. Second, the idea of a definite manifold raises the issue of the applicability of a formalized system to a concrete domain of knowledge in a new way. It is no longer a question of the applicability of a single formal universalization to a concrete perception—can “5” be specified to this group of objects on the desk?—but a question of the applicability of a formal system of relations to an entire domain of objects: is geometry of the Euclidean form a formal system that can be specified to concretely experienced space? Definite manifolds, by virtue of their self-enclosed and self-referring character, are applicable—when they are applicable—to domains of experience as sign-systems to domains not as a formal sign to a given object. Third, since the emptying characteristic of formalizing abstraction is completed, brought to its final idea, in the idea of a definite manifold, the idea of a definite manifold itself clarifies the emptying characteristic of formalizing abstraction. In other words, the definite manifold clarifies that formalizing abstraction is indeed an emptying and externalization and that it cannot be understood on the model of generalization, or speciesgenus universalization, with which it has been historically confused. Therefore, all four of the elements of the analysis are necessary to the key role of the mathematization of nature in the thesis of the crisis of the sciences. Together, they show why modern reason holds formalization as its highest ideal and therefore necessarily becomes merely technical and encounters an emptying of meaning that makes it impossible to think of meaning and value on its basis. With the importance of the issue firmly in place, we can gather together in summary the threads of the analysis in this section. Husserl emphasized that formalization-particularization was importantly distinct from generalizationspecification because it consists in abstraction to anything-whatever. However, he was mainly concerned with the organized systems, definite manifolds, which could be built upon formalizing abstraction than in the nature of that abstraction itself. Despite his emphasis on the distinction above, Husserl

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assumed that numbers only given as symbolic could be filled in by intuition in the same way as the (smaller) numbers given intuitively (a pair, a half-dozen, etc.). This assumption is the ground for his diagnosis of crisis, yet it may be perceived to contain a contradiction: in the first place, symbolic systems necessarily become externalized and emptied, but also they can become intuitively fulfilled. The healing role of phenomenology is compacted in this difficult, and perhaps contradictory, relation of diagnosis of a necessary emptying, externalization, technization, due to formal, symbolic abstraction and prognosis of restored meaning and value through phenomenological critique of that same formal, symbolic abstraction. Like arithmetic itself, in technically developing its methodology, it [a definite manifold] is drawn into a process of transformation, through which it becomes a sort of technique; that is, it becomes a mere art of achieving, through a calculating technique according to technical rules, results the genuine sense of whose truth can be attained only by concretely intuitive thinking actually directed at the subject matter itself (C 46, latter emphasis added).

We may then well ask, in its most general form, what are the conditions for emptying and fulfilling of meaning? More specifically: Why do formalizations become emptied if they are capable of being restored? (How do we know that the developers of modern mathematics were not also practicing phenomenologists, restoring meaning as they emptied it?) When the meaning of a formalization is restored, how does the practice of modern reason shift? If the loss of meaning due to traditionalizing and taking over results without inquiring into their origins is necessary to modern science as an institution (and not a merely individual failing), then what alteration in the institution is necessary for restoration to occur? In posing these questions it is clear that the diagnosis of the crisis of modern reason and the explication of phenomenological philosophy are inextricably tied together. It is the task of this entire investigation to develop this knot, or paradox, in a satisfactory manner. Two routes for further clarification open up: 1) what is the nature of formalizing abstraction? and 2) what is the explanation for crisis within transcendental-historical reason? The next section of this chapter takes up these issues in detail. 2.4 FORMALIZATION AS THE CORE ISSUE IN MODERN REASON The key issue in diagnosis and prognosis of the crisis of modern reason is thus formal abstraction and its completion in the idea of definite manifolds: Why/

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how is emptying-externalization both necessary and restorable? This section will follow up this issue in detail and justify a departure from Husserl’s account based upon a more thorough account of formalization, its assumptions, and implications. The fundamental difficulty in Husserl’s account is that he treats generalization and formalization as importantly and in principle distinct but also assumes that the specification of species-genus relations in generalization and the particularization of formal abstraction refer to “individuals” in an ultimately identical manner. Indeed, without this assumption it is difficult to see how phenomenological investigation can be supposed to restore the meaning of externalized systems. We will have to approach this question in a different manner. 2.4.1 A Descriptive Phenomenology of the Distinction Between Generalization-Specification and Formalization-Particularization The distinction between generalization, based on species-genus universalizations and specifications, and symbol-generating abstraction, based on formal universalization and particularization, is essential to an account of the role of modern algebra in the crisis of modern reason. In order to give this claim intuitive content, let us present here a descriptive phenomenology of the distinction. I am sitting at my desk with four objects—meant in the widest sense as four things of any sort upon which my attention is directed—on the desk in front of me: a stapler, two apples, and a fly. Three types of generalization are possible. Beginning from the individual stapler, I can generalize it to subsume it under higher species such as mechanical things used in offices, mechanical things of any sort, physical things, and things of attention of any sort whatever (including, for example, ghosts). Similarly, beginning from the individual fly, I can subsume it as a flying insect, an insect, a living thing, a physical thing, and a thing of any sort (again including ghosts). Beginning from either one of the apples, I can subsume it as a fruit, an edible thing, a physical thing, and a thing of any sort. Each individual thing can be placed in a higher-lower, species-genus hierarchy. When I move up to the next higher level, say from the stapler to mechanical things used in an office, one of the other three things might be similarly subsumable such that the two things are of the same species but different genera. Note that, to be exact, we begin initially from this individual thing so that we have to move up to the level of “apple” for the two apples to be subsumed. The specific, intuited, experiences differences of different individuals are progressively shed as we generalize from the individual toward a more universal and inclusive level. Beginning from these four things, the levels of generalization would intersect at differ-

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ent points. The two apples are included as soon as we generalize beyond the specific individual objects (unless, perhaps, they were apples of different sorts—a Granny Smith and a Fuji), whereas the apples and the fly are subsumed under the same species when we reach the level of “organically growing thing” and the stapler is only included at the level of “physical thing.” The whole experienceable world is classifiable in this way through overlapping hierarchical generalizations. What, then, is involved for me to perceive the four things on the desk as “four things”? Fundamentally, they must considered in a manner that abstracts from all of the definite characteristics of the things altogether in one fell swoop. That is to say, I do not ascend up the hierarchy of generalization in each case separately and, when at the top, then connect them all together. The fly is immediately considered an “anything-whatever” and so is the stapler, etc., so that they can be added as “four.” I do not ascend by abstracting from a definite characteristic by subsumption but in a single stroke annihilate all definite characteristics whatsoever. There are many cultural and historical factors that may make it difficult to make such an arithmetical abstraction. First of all, I may be reluctant to consider a fly in the same way as a stapler because a fly is a living being and there may be religious or other reasons for considering it more important. On the other hand, I may consider a stapler useful and a fly a nuisance. In sum, the concrete characteristics of a given thing may motivate me to resist considering it as anything-whatever. But unless I do I cannot count it with another thing of a different sort. My counting may be applied to the two apples, for example, insofar as I consider the two types of apple as irrelevant to current purposes. A generalization allows for an arithmetical abstraction to apply to all things that it covers equally. In such cases, counting is applied only to determinate objects of an identical type or species. Two apples, one stapler, and, in another example, a dozen eggs. But such overlapping examples simply serve to reinforce the in principle distinction. Because generalization, at whatever level, is tied to some definite characteristics, the counting in question is limited in applicability to things with those characteristics. The ability to count four anything-whatevers depends upon a different sort of abstraction. When I abstract to an anything-whatever, I do so immediately. A fly is immediately grouped with a stapler insofar as it is an anything-whatever. The differential hierarchies of generalization are annihilated and replaced with a horizontal counting (but not comparability, since no concrete characteristics remain). One, two, three, four, but no genus nor species. When I count four anything-whatevers, I count what I intend as things and leave aside what I do not intend; that is to say, if the things are on the desk, or wherever they are, I could always find more anything-whatevers to count with these four.

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It could be dust particles, imagined images, indeed, anything-whatever. Not only is the set of countable objects not closed by any concrete characteristics, it is only closed by the intention to close it. Counting can in principle go on forever. When I stop at “four things” it is because I have decided that these four things are where my interest lies, or that the set is limited to things on the desk, and this interest has nothing to do with the abstraction that makes the things countable in this way. It is the grouping only that defines the group. Arithmetical abstraction simultaneously abstracts to anything-whatevers, collects things horizontally, and defines the group only through its actual collection as such, not through any in principle of closure. What then occurs when we return from formalization to particularize? When we specify a generalization, we add a concrete determination to a wider possibility. We specify a fly as a flying insect, for example, and not just any insect; or we specify “fruit” as an apple, or an apple as a Granny Smith. If we decide to apply whole numbers to counting the four things on the desk, we do not specify in this way, but particularize the system of whole numbers to apply to the intended things on the desk so that we may count them. Particularization does not re-concretize like specification but applies a formal system to a field of things. A system is applied to a domain: no individual things with concrete characteristics are returned to at any point such that they are de-grouped (if that is a word). They remain a collection in which it is the connection made between formal system and object domain that is pertinent. Particularization is characterized by this system-domain relationship. 2.4.2 The Unprecedented Character of Formalizing Abstraction In his reference in the Crisis to the arithmetization of geometry Husserl points to the importance of the development of modern algebra since Vieta (C 44). Similarly, in Formal and Transcendental Logic, he traces the discovery of the formal to Vieta’s institution of modern algebra as “the reduction of the theory of numbers and quantities to a deductive technique” (FTL 80). He does not investigate further the meaning of this institution of modern algebra even though it is this modern transformed algebra that is taken over into the mathematization of nature in a sedimented, traditionalized manner. As we have pointed out above, Husserl’s interest in formalization was oriented to the ideal of definite manifolds which it makes possible rather than to the initial formalizing abstraction itself. The work of Jacob Klein, in his groundbreaking text, Greek Mathematical Thought and the Origin of Algebra (first published in two parts in 1934 and 1936) focuses on precisely this institution of modern algebra and in a later essay does so in the context of its significance for Husserl’s phenomenology.

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In “Phenomenology and the History of Science” (1940), Klein credited Husserl with being “the great interpreter of modern thought” due to his analysis of the mathematization of nature and his “reproduction and precise understanding of the ‘formalization’ which took place in mathematics (and philosophy) ever since Vieta and Descartes paved the way for modern science” (PHS 71, 70). He pointed out that modern historical consciousness beginning with Vico is “the twin brother of mathematical physics” and followed Husserl in arguing that the “interlacement of original production and ‘sedimentation’ of significance constitutes the true character of history” (PHS 71, 78). Nevertheless, the latter part of this essay did not follow Husserl’s version but presented an original historical account of the development of modern algebra as a symbolic abstraction based upon his own prior research in Greek Mathematical Thought and the Origin of Algebra. Symbolic abstraction, in Klein’s view, represents an unprecedented culmination of the history of previous mathematics insofar as it leads “ultimately to the substitution of numerical entities, as intended by all Greek arithmetic, by their symbolic expressions” (PHS 83). While the sedimentation of Euclidean geometry led to the “intentional-historical reactivation of the origin of geometry” that was the subject of Husserl’s work, Klein therefore adds the second task of “reactivation of the process of symbolic abstraction” though he does not mark explicitly that this second task constitutes a departure from, and perhaps implies a revision of, Husserl’s phenomenology (PHS 84). His third task, “rediscovery of the prescientific world” reiterates Husserl’s notion of the recovery of the lifeworld (PHS 84), without raising the question of whether his addition of an account of symbolic abstraction requires any revision of Husserl’s conception of transcendental history. Klein’s earlier text narrates the historical background through which the symbol-generating abstraction that emerged with Vieta was constructed.12 Nevertheless, let us leave aside that history here to focus directly on the upshot of that history in characterizing the unprecedented character of symbolgenerating abstraction itself. Klein seeks to explain how the concept of number in Vieta incorporates a new relationship between a concept and a thing. While every arithmos [number in the ancient, or pre-Vietian, sense] intends immediately the things or the units themselves whose number it happens to be, his letter sign intends directly the general character of beings a number which belongs to every possible number, that is to say, it intends ‘number in general’ immediately, but the things or units which are at hand in each number only mediately. In the language of the schools: The letter sign designates the intentional object of a ‘second intention’ (intentio secunda), namely of a concept which itself directly intends another concept and not a being (GMT 174).

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Prior to Vieta, number referred to the units of things. For example, the number 5 would refer to the “five-ness” of the five glasses that sit on the table. The number 5 does not refer to the apples themselves but to the grouping of the apples into a group of five. This is what Husserl called collective combination in Philosophy of Arithmetic. “The representation of a totality of given objects is a unity in which the representations of single objects are contained as partial representations. . . . From here on we shall use the name “collective combination” (kollective Verbindung) to designate that sort of combination which is characteristic of the totality” (PA 21; PdA 20). Number in the nonsymbol-generating sense, which is “prior” to Vieta in the conceptual sense, refers to the collection of objects as a collection. It is already “abstract” in the sense that it does not refer to the glasses themselves but to their connection, or combination, into a group, even though this grouping itself is a grouping of five glasses, or, in general, five objects. Number in this sense refers to the grouping into a totality of concrete objects. In contrast, Klein says that Vieta’s “letter sign intends the general character of being a number.” It does not designate the grouping into a totality itself but rather the possibility of such a grouping, the numbering of the group as a definite but unknown number. The letter sign expresses the fact that the objects to which it might be taken to refer can be grouped as numbers immediately and refers to number as grouping in the first sense only mediately. That is to say, the letters characteristic of symbol-generating abstraction refer directly only to the mere possibility of numbering objects, even though they may be used subsequently in such numbering of concrete objects. Klein explains this distinction through the distinction between first and second intentions. A first intention refers to a being of some sort, whereas a second intention refers to the concept that refers to the being. The object of the second intention is the first intention. If I say “five glasses,” the number five refers in a first intention to the grouping of glasses. If I say “x,” the symbol x refers to the possibility of numbering a group; for example, that there are five glasses: “x” may be filled in as “5,” or indeed any other number: it stands for the very possibility of this filling in with a number, or arithmos, in the sense of a definite number referring to a totality of objects. Klein continues, “furthermore—and this is the truly decisive turn—this general character of number or, what amounts to the same thing, this ‘general number’ in all its indeterminateness, that is, in its merely possible determinateness, is accorded a certain independence which permits it to be the subject of ‘calculational’ operations” (GMT 174). By virtue of being a second intention, by which it refers to concepts that in turn refer to a merely possible grouping of objects, the signs become independent from reference to objects and thus can be manipulated without reference to objects. Calculation in the

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modern sense as the manipulation of signs and their relations takes place without reference to any grouping or domain of objects—even though there remains the possibility that application to such a domain of objects may subsequently occur. This is the very meaning of the symbolic character of the signs in modern algebra—that their being as this mere possibility of determination is the content of their being itself: a symbolic formalism of “formations whose merely potential objectivity is understood as an actual objectivity” is a “finding of finding” in which “the most important tool of mathematical natural science, the ‘formula,’ first becomes possible” (GMT 175, emphasis removed). This is the unprecedented character of modern symbolic formalism. Klein comments further that When we look further back to the Pythagorean and Platonic concept of the eidos of an arithmos as that which first makes the unified being of each number possible and compare it with the concept of the species developed above, we may say that the ontological independence of the eidos, having taken a detour through the instrumental use made of it by Diophantus, here finally arrives at its symbolic realization. This heralds a general conceptual transformation which extends over the whole of modern science. It concerns first and foremost the concept of arithmos itself. As soon as ‘general number’ is conceived and represented in the medium of species as an ‘object’ in itself, that is, symbolically, the modern concept of ‘number’ is born (GMT 175, paragraph separation omitted).

The transformation of number into a symbol-generating abstraction constructs a new conceptuality—a new organization and meaning of concepts and their use—that defines the modernity of modern science itself. Klein remarks that this new conceptuality is usually understood as a greater abstractness, an abstractness of higher degree in relation to the previous concept of number, in a manner that obscures its newness. It is not a matter of abstraction (of whatever degree) but rather a matter of the focus on symbolic objects themselves. “The modern concept of ‘number,’ as it underlies symbolic calculi, is itself, as is that which it intends, symbolic in nature” (GMT 176). Once this concept of symbol-generating abstraction has been discovered, the whole of the history of mathematics is reinterpreted through it. The ancient arithmos, which always referred to a definite grouping of things, is reinterpreted as a number in the modern sense as a mere sign, so that it even obliterates the fundamental ancient distinction between discrete and continuous magnitudes (GMT 178). In obscuring the fundamental difference between ancient and modern conceptuality, it obscures the specific issues integral to modern scientific reason.

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From now on the fundamental ontological science of the ancients is replaced by a symbolic discipline whose ontological presuppositions are left unclarified. This science, which aims from the first at a comprehension of the totality of the world, slowly broadens into the system of modern mathematical physics. Within this discipline the things in this world are no longer understood as countable beings, nor the world itself as a taxis determined by the order of numbers; it is rather the structure of the world which is grasped by means of a symbolic calculus and understood as a ‘lawfully’ ordered course of ‘events.’ The very nature of man’s understanding of the world is henceforth governed by the symbolic ‘number’ concept, a concept which determines the modern idea of science in general (GMT 184–5).

When Klein added the task of “reactivation of the process of symbolic abstraction” to Husserl’s account of the crisis of modern reason (PHS 84), he was referring, in fact, to the work of his own prior text that aimed to explain the nature of symbol-generating abstraction in Vieta and its implications for understanding modern reason, but there was no indication that this addition might entail substantial revision of Husserl’s assumptions in the Crisis or even imply new tasks for phenomenology as its consequence. 2.4.3 The Philosophical Consequence of Klein’s Implied Critique of Husserl on Formalizing Abstraction We have seen that Husserl’s concern with formalization is limited to the issue of definite manifolds as a consistent and complete systematization of “anything-whatevers” and their relations. In contrast, Jacob Klein’s investigation was oriented toward understanding the specific and unprecedented character of the symbol-generating abstraction to an “anything-whatever” in the first place. While Klein, at least from the evidence of his retrospective essay “Phenomenology and the History of Science,” seems to have seen his intentional-historical reactivation of the origin of symbol-generating abstraction as an addition consistent with Husserl’s phenomenological programme, it may rather imply a revision of that programme in one significant respect. We have seen, also, that systematic formalization implies that the applicability of formal systems to domains of experience is precisely through a connection between a (previously abstracted and developed) sign-system and a domain of experience (rather than a single experience itself). Whereas a pre-formal eidos, or generalization—such as the eidos “chair”—applies by specification to a single chair given in experience, the application of a system to a domain does not return to specific evidences given in experience. Consequently, the applicability of modern reason to experience contains unprecedented problems.

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Husserl’s account assumes that formal systems can be brought to adequate evidence of individuals in a similar manner to generalizations. This assumption is the basis for his account of crisis as loss of meaning through emptying and externalization and phenomenology as the restoration of meaning through immediate, intuitive evidence. In his study of genetic logic in Experience and Judgment, Husserl stated that Formal logic can state nothing more about an ultimate substrate than that it is a something still categorically completely unformed, a substrate which has not yet entered into a judgment and taken on a form in it, and which, just as it is self-evident and self-given, becomes for the first time a substrate of judgment. At the same time, however, this implies that such a substrate can only be an individual object (EJ 26, emphasis added).

The character and status of the most fundamental objects to which formal logic applies is not an issue within formal logic itself. However, for a philosophical understanding and critique of formal logic, this issue is crucial. Nonetheless, Husserl claims here that it follows from the fact that formal logic must be applied to a pre-formal domain that that domain (the lifeworld) must be one of individuals. Since all logical judging includes a taking-together of several “individuals” into a judgment that concerns their relation—e.g. “S is p”—the first bringing-together must bring together individual objects. Original substrates are therefore individuals, individual objects, and every thinkable judgment ultimately refers to individual objects, no matter how mediated in a variety of ways. . . . The question concerning the character of objective self-evidence is thus a question concerning the self-evident givenness of individuals. And the self-evidence of individual objects makes up the concept of experience in the broadest sense (EJ 26-7).

But neither reason nor evidence is given for this. The original evidence to which formal logic refers but does not thematize must refer to “individuals” in the sense that it is simple. This much does follow: since formal logic is a complex set of judgments (judgments built upon judgments, etc.) in various modes (certainty, dubitability, probability, etc.), the most primitive, ultimate judgments upon which the edifice rests must be simple cases of unmodalized categorial formations. But there is no reason to believe that such simple, unmodalized categorial formations refer to individual objects in the sense of specific given things in ordinary experience such that, as Husserl says, “experience which takes place in the certainty of being has a special distinction” (EJ 29). The same issue is addressed in Formal and Transcendental Logic, concerning “going back from the judgment to the judgment-substrates, from

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truths to their objects-about-which” (FTL 202). The anythings-whatever that are the subject of formal analytics, in abstracting from specific objects or relations, are determined solely by the syntactical form of judgments themselves. This logical edifice rests upon ultimate substrates which refer to ultimate substrate-objects. At the point at which formal logic does not remain enclosed within itself but refers to judging about things themselves, or states of affairs—that is to say, the point at which formal logic demands philosophical critique—it points to individuals. For mathesis universalis, as formal mathematics, these ultimate substrates have no particular interest. Quite the contrary for truth-logic: because ultimate substrates are individuals, about which very much can be said in formal truth, and back to which all truth ultimately relates. . . . To have insight into it [evidence of truth] one must make ultimate cores intuited, one must draw the fullness of adequation, not from evidence of judgment-senses, but instead from evidence of the ‘matters’ or ‘affairs’ corresponding to them (FTL 203).

Again: for Husserl, at the point at which formal logic is necessarily applied to judging about things themselves, it refers to individuals. It is certainly the case that formal logic, understood philosophically, contains an intention to judge contents and that these contents rest upon simple judgments about states of affairs, but the point in question is that such ultimate states of affairs are simply assumed to be individuals without further justification by Husserl. This assumption is taken over in the analysis in Crisis where the lifeworld is understood to be “a realm of original self-evidences” (C 127) to which higher-level cognitive and spiritual evidences lead back as foundation and justification. All conceivable verification leads back to these modes of self-evidence because the ‘thing itself’ (in the particular mode) lies in these intuitions themselves as that which is actually, intersubjectively experienceable and verifiable and is not a substruction of thought; whereas such a substruction, insofar as it makes a claim to truth, can have actual truth only by being related back to such selfevidences (C 128).

As we saw already in the context of the first innovation, regarding the significance of Klein’s account of formal-mathematical abstraction, Husserl assumes throughout his work that immediate self-evidence, such as characterizes the lifeworld, can be the only justification for the truth claimed by higher-level knowledges based on abstraction from immediate evidence. The relation between the lifeworld and the crisis will be taken up in the section after the next one, which is focussed on the relation between science and ontology regarding the lifeworld

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It is through this possibility of re-situating formal logic upon individuals judged-about that Husserl’s thesis of the crisis of the sciences attempts to sustain both the necessity of emptying and externalization of meaning and its restoration through philosophical critique. But this fundamental element of Husserl’s analysis—from Philosophy of Arithmetic to Formal and Transcendental Logic—is not shown but assumed. Burt Hopkins has shown that this assumption is pervasive in Husserl’s work and rests, not upon phenomenological evidence, but by “an ontological argument” (Hopkins 2011, 478) of the following form: The universalities that compose the formal apriori belonging to formal analytics and the material apriori belonging to the material sciences have an extension that applies to individuals. Therefore, for each apriori, albeit mediately in the case of the formal and immediately in the case of the material, individuals have a foundational role in the genesis of the judgments that yield the universal structures of each apriori (Hopkins 2011, 484).

Husserl’s ontological assumption is precisely that both formal and material universalities can be traced back to individuals or, more daringly stated, that the distinctiveness of formalizing abstraction—or symbol-generating abstraction in Klein’s terminology—has not been appreciated by Husserl.13 Hopkins follows out the philosophical consequence of Klein’s elaboration of the distinctiveness of formalizing abstraction: “Husserl’s articulation of the parts and formal structures of the predicative judgment, however, does not establish their judicative independence from the letter symbols employed in the proposition’s symbolic expression but rather is guided by the very assumption of this independence” (Hopkins 2011, 488). But if the letter symbols are essential to the very idea of formalizing abstraction, as Klein’s de-sedimentation of Vieta’s institution of modern algebra has shown, then the ultimate substrates upon which formalization rests cannot be “individuals” in the sense attributed to them by Husserl—that is to say, individuals amenable to lifeworld experience as the “that-toward-which” formal logic points.14 Since the letter signs, the uninterpreted symbols, are themselves essential to formal logic, the historical-genetic “activity” of forming such symbols cannot be traced back to the evidence of “individuals.” As shown above, the issue becomes the applicability of symbol-systems to a domain of objects. The consequence of the essentiality of the letter symbols to formalization is that no such direct reference to immediate evidence of individuals, nor a mediated version of the same reference, is possible from formal structures. Hopkins’ conclusion is rife with deep implications for the understanding and critique of the concept of number in the history of philosophy.

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The problem of the proper mode of being belonging to the unity of determinate multitudes of determinate units is therefore eliminated and, consequently, the problem of the ‘unity’ of the ‘one and the many’ is also eliminated, for this ‘unity’ is now conceived in terms of the mode of being belonging to the algebraic concept of ‘number,’ that is, the general concepts of twoness, threeness, etc., which, because they are identified with their ‘signs,’ become what to this day are self-evidently identified with the ‘true being’ of ‘natural’ numbers (Hopkins 2011, 534).

The problem of the “reality,” or mode of being, of numbers has been with philosophy since the Greeks. It is most obviously a difficult issue for an empiricism which takes individual objects to be the only “real” existents, since the collective combination of a group of objects into, say, three objects poses the issue of the being of the threeness—which is neither present nor reducible to the individual objects: none of the individual objects contain threeness, so what is the threeness that appears in their combination? But it is no less an issue for an eidetic idealism such as Plato’s. If an individual table is ontologically less ‘real’ that the eidos “table,” then what is the status of the threeness in the collective combination of three tables? This ancient ontological debate is undercut by the development of symbolic mathematics because the reference to individual objects is set aside for signs whose very mode of designation is essential to what they are. An “x” is nothing more nor less than the possibility of attributing a definite number to a group; “three” or “5,” when conceived on this algebraic understanding, is nothing more than a designating sign, that might have been any other sign, that in this case designates this group. The ontological question is cut off by the essentiality of the sign to its content. To return specifically to the current context of the thesis of the crisis of modern reason, the consequence is that the reference to individuals that Husserl’s phenomenology requires to restore meaning is not possible given a full understanding of formalization based on the work of Jacob Klein. 2.4.4 Specification as Yielding Essential Insight into the Impossibility of Intuitive Fulfilment of Formal Abstraction Since the Kleinian critique of Husserl is a crucial point that alters the direction of a phenomenological critique of reason, it is worth justifying it independently through a short phenomenological description of the essential difference between generalization and formalization. Generalization refers to abstraction in the form of a species-genus relationship of subordination and superordination. So, one can generalize from the desk on which I am writing to desks in general, from there to furniture, from there to made objects,

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and finally to objects-in-general. Given any level of this structure, one can abstract to a higher-level concept and specify toward a lower-level concept. Formalization, in distinction, abstracts from any concrete object all at once, as it were, to the concept of an anything-whatever, or an undetermined “x.” The formal universal is reached by a definite kind of abstraction directly from any individual at any level of a genus-species hierarchy. This distinction is clearest when we move from a consideration of abstraction to its correlative return from abstraction by specification to specific examples. The return to examples is essentially different depending upon whether we consider a return from generalization or a return from formalization. Husserl by no means identified these two different forms of specification—which he distinguished as de-formalization and specialization. Indeed, his earlier analysis in Ideas I is referred to in Crisis and taken as the foundation of the analysis of “emptying” and therefore crisis (C 46). “Generalization is something totally different from that formalization which plays such a large role in, e.g., mathematical analysis; and specialization is something totally different from de-formalization, from “filling-out” an empty logico-mathematical form, or a formal truth” (Ideas1, 26). We may specify, or specialize, the genus animal to “mammal,” then as “primate” and then further as “monkey.” Each specification chooses an example from a finite, closed set of possibilities. Instead of “mammal,” the specification could have been “oviparous animal,” then “bird” and further “chicken.” Specification in this sense from a formalization is not possible. From “anything-whatever,” or “x,” we cannot specify toward lower levels of abstraction in anything like the way that generalization requires. Why not? The basic reason is because every specification from a generalization, chooses an example from a closed set of possibilities all at the same level of abstraction—one chooses “mammal” or “oviparous animal” from a determinate and definite set of possibilities for determining the specific kind of animal under consideration. In contrast, every concretization of a formalization chooses from a set of objects of an indeterminate plurality not only of objects but objects at different levels of abstraction. Thus it is not a meaningful set of concrete possibilities. For example, concrete examples of anything-whatever include: a pear, the art theory of Ernst Gombrich, e=mc-squared, the five toenails on my left foot, a photograph of Lake Louise, and a story told to me by my mother in 1953. This is not a meaningful set of objects to which one could specify because there are no features that would close the set nor any features that would hold the set to objects of a similar sort in any sense whatever of “similar.” They are similar only in being objects of any type whatever as are all objects—which is another way of saying that the set of possibilities is not closed, and without a closed set of possibilities at each step

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of specification, the process does not terminate in an immediate intuition of an individual object. Thus, a specification of “x” could be “x,” which is to say that an abstract sign is an anything-whatever that exemplifies the sign anything-whatever as much as a more concrete object. Formal abstraction evades the logic of species-genus in the sense that the genus is not necessarily more formal than the species—which is to say precisely that formal abstraction is not an abstraction of the species-genus type. It is an abstraction in which the specification may be at the same level of abstraction as the formal abstraction, which is equivalent to saying that because the set of possible specifications does not contain a principle of closure the levels of abstraction are collapsed into a distinct form of abstraction in which self-reference is as likely a specification as a more concrete example. In specification of a generalization, the closed set of possibilities excludes certain non-members of the set and thus defines a definite and meaningful set. In contrast, the set of anything-whatever specifications does not exclude anything and is thus the set of everything in general. Therefore, the application of formalizations to contents—whether they be individuals or objects of whatever sort—necessarily contains an arbitrariness insofar as the formal conceptual structure is not rooted in an intuition of contents but rather the contents are simply subsumed under a pre-given form. Now all of this might seem like an esoteric point except for the fact that “to the things themselves,” or the return to lived experience is the watchword of phenomenology upon which its entire critical enterprise rests as well as the constructive phases of its philosophical articulation. The consequence of the distinction between generalization and formalization is to disallow the kind of specification ultimately to individuals that Husserl assumed applied—at least teleologically through the phenomenological restoration of meaning—to both forms of abstraction. It is this phenomenological restoration of meaning with reference to immediate intuition of individuals that Husserl thought could overcome the crisis of modern reason. This leaves us with the question of how meaning and value might be restored if Husserl’s attempt to trace symbolic abstraction back to intuited meaning of individuals is not viable and therefore cannot overcome the crisis caused by formalization. NOTES 1. In Formal and Transcendental Logic, Vieta is credited with the establishment of algebra which led to deductive technique and, through Leibniz, to mathesis universalis (FTL 80). While more complete, this account adds nothing essential to the reference in Crisis.

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2. “Technization” (Technisierung) means making something into a technology. Husserl used “technology” or “Technik” to characterize “something which can be learned and applied without learning the culture behind it” (Cairns 1976, 8f). The English term “technology” is generally a rendering of the German “Technik,” though in some cases Husserl availed himself of “Technologie” (compare FTL 3, 16, 31f. with FTL 7, 20, 35; see also C 28, 46 and K 26, 45). In earlier works and to some extent later also, Husserl used the term “Kunstlehre” which is also usually translated as “technology” (compare LI 56, 72–5, 79, 87, 91, 171f. with LU 8, 28–32, 36, 47, 52, 159f.; see also C 92; K 94). Dorion Cairns suggests “technology” as an English equivalent for both “Kunstlehre” and “Technik” (Cairns 1973). I will use variants of “technology” indiscriminately since there is no conceptual distinction intended here. 3.  Husserl himself seems to have used the term “transcendental history” only once in the C manuscripts of his papers stored at the Husserl Archives in Leuven. Jacques Derrida has pointed out that this expression concentrates all of what is distinctive about Husserl’s approach to history (see Derrida 1978, 121, ftn. 134). 4.  Writing enables the repetition of prior investigation and its matching to present inquiry such that the history of inquiry produces, not a simple multiplicity of insights, but an ordered and progressive field of research. Derrida’s argument for an equivocation in Husserl is based on his supposition of a transcendental-empirical duality in Husserl’s phenomenology. His claim that such equivocations are unavoidable for philosophy are an entry into his own philosophy through the concept of “delay.” He analyzes the supposedly necessary equivocation between empirical and transcendental as delay, connects delay and repetition to writing (as did Husserl), argues that Husserl is caught in a metaphysics of presence based on an auto-affection of the spoken voice, and introduces his own connection of delay to writing and difference (Derrida 1978, 150–3; Derrida 1973, 80–2). None of this follows if one utilizes the concept of institution (Urstiftung). 5.  When Husserl refers to a “multiplicity, or collective whole” in Philosophy of Arithmetic (PA 82), he does not mean “manifold” in the specific sense of a complete and consistent theory-form that it is the concern of Formal and Transcendental Logic to explicate. Husserl’s term is “Vielheitsbegriffes” which can be well translated by “multiplicity,” but in this context might be confused with Cairns’ translation of Mannifaltigkeit as multiplicity (Cairns 1973, 81). “Collective whole” is a good term because it retains a clear relationship to the “collective connection, or combination” as a psychic act that Husserl is concerned to examine here. “Group,” which I am using here, has the advantage of retaining a connection to the ordinary language examples that Husserl uses to highlight the fundamental philosophical problem at issue. 6.  “The theory of the cardinal numbers relates to the empty universe, any object whatever or anything whatever [Gegenstand-überhaupt oder Etwas-überhaupt], with a formal universality that, in principle, leaves out of consideration every material determination of objects” (FTL 77; FuTL 81–2). “The formalness of these disciplines lies, then, in this relationship to ‘any objectivity whatever,’ ‘anything-whatever’ [Gegenständlichkeit-überhaupt, Etwas-überhaupt], with a most empty universality, a universality that leaves every material determination indeterminately optional”

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(FTL 87; FuTL 91; this section of FTL is a direct commentary on the achievement of PA). “What-contents of the concepts—in the case of geometry, all the specifically spatial contents—are converted into indeterminates, modes of the empty ‘anythingwhatever’ [Etwas-überhaupt]” (FTL 93; FuTL 96).   7.  This is the relation between Idea, or kind, and instance that Stanley Rosen presents in his defence of Plato against the Heideggerian critique of metaphysics. If so, it amounts in the present context to saying that Husserlian phenomenology rediscovers and continues the Platonic problematic of essence and instance (Rosen 1993, 112–9).   8.  David Carr, in his translation of Crisis, uses the term “manifolds,” which has been dominant in mathematics since Reimann, to translate Mannifaltigkeiten (C 45; K 45) as does J.N. Findlay in his translation of Logical Investigations (LI 239–43; LU 247–52). In contrast, Dorion Cairns uses “multiplicities” here and elsewhere in his translations (Cairns 1973, 81). Since Cairns’ term fails to capture the close relationship to the development of formalization in mathematics that is present in Husserl’s conceptualization, I prefer, and will consistently use, “manifolds.”   9.  In his presentation of the idea of a definite manifold here, Husserl claims priority in clarifying this idea, relying only on the prior conception of “a complete system of axioms” (FTL 96) taken from Hilbert. The issue of priority, Husserl’s relation to the advanced mathematics of his time, and the relation of his theory to that of Reimann are fascinating issues for the history and philosophy of mathematics. They are not germane to our present inquiry, however, and can be passed over in our account. 10.  I have earlier discussed the role of limitative, Gödelian-type, reflexive theorems in mathematics and logic in showing the actual limitation of this ideal of a coherent and complete theory of theory-forms (TE 26–8). However, despite such actual limitation the ideal can continue to hold sway over modern reason—in the form of an ideal “in the Kantian sense,” as Husserl uses this phrase, or as an asymptotic point at which theory could never finally arrive. Husserl’s phenomenological critique is therefore more radical, even while compatible with such theorems. 11.  Formal and Transcendental Logic was written as an introduction to Husserl’s studies of genetic logic published as Experience and Judgment but, characteristically, became so voluminous that it was published as a separate book (Landgrebe 1973, 4). This fact also serves to underline that the analyses of FTL do not ascend toward the full idea of formalization in order to link it with the thesis of the Crisis, as the present study intends, but rather to lead up to the necessity for a genetic, transcendental logic. 12.  Klein’s original term was symbolische Abstraktion whose English equivalent is simply “symbolic abstraction” and this is the term used in the essay Phenomenology and the History of Science. Nonetheless, Eva Brann’s translation of Klein’s text used “symbol-generating abstraction” because the prior term was ambiguous in that, while the conceptual abstraction that produces the new symbolic object is clearly an activity of thought and thus an abstraction, the symbolic object of that conceptual intention is not itself an abstraction (Brann 2011, xxvii, ftn. 3 and Hopkins 2007, 109). Since Klein approved of this clarification, I will use the amended term from this point on. 13.  I had already pointed out that the relationship of formal logic to individuals is a simple presupposition without appreciating the critique of Husserl that this implied

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(TE 35–8; Angus 2005a) but Burt Hopkins’ meticulous text on the relation between Klein’s work and Husserl’s phenomenology The Origin of the Logic of Symbolic Mathematics (Hopkins 2011) was fundamental to clarifying the difference in grounding required by symbol-generating abstraction and the revision of the project of phenomenology that it implies. 14.  One might speculate that, if the analysis of writing in “The Origin of Geometry” had been integrated into the text of the Crisis, the essentiality of the letter-sign to modern mathematics might have motivated Husserl to see that de-formalization cannot return to individuals in the same manner as specification of a genus.

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Chapter Three

Galilean Science and the One-Dimensional Lifeworld

The crisis of reason, as Husserl understood it, was also a “crisis of European humanity itself in respect to the total meaning of its cultural life, its total existence” (C 12). The linkage between reason and a whole cultural existence in Husserl’s view lay in the historical entelechy of reason in the spirit of Europe (VL 269–75). His inquiry was thus turned away from inquiring into what features of the contemporary lifeworld provoke, reinforce or mitigate, the crisis of reason toward a retrospective inquiry into the rational spirit of Europe. Herbert Marcuse took issue with the notion that phenomenological philosophy, or indeed any philosophy, could heal what he deemed above all a social, economic, and political crisis.1 He provides a crucial link missing from Husserl’s Crisis—why contemporary society cannot simply abandon the Renaissance ideal to which Husserl appeals to ground his critique. Marcuse shows that it is not only, or not mainly, the persisting significance of that ideal as ideal but the maintenance of formal reason through its effects in the practical arrangements of the contemporary lifeworld. It is not only a matter of the intellectual heritage and its decline but the socio-economic forces that structure lifeworld practices so as to reinforce formal reason as the “exemplary” model of reason (C 63). The crisis of reason as explained by Husserl and utilized by Marcuse is an important point of connection between phenomenology and the Critical Theory of Society.2 Any attempt to think through the significance of these two philosophical traditions of critique today must focus on the accounts of crisis of reason whereby they come into contact.3 Marcuse argued that the social configuration of science and technology in late capitalist society has become, not only a mode of thinking as well as practical action, but the encompassing form of a “world” in which “the world tends to become the stuff of total administration, which absorbs even the administrators” (ODM 169). In making 87

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this argument he relied on the Crisis to substantiate his thesis that “science, by virtue of its own method and concepts, has projected and promoted a universe in which the domination of nature has remained linked to the domination of man” (ODM 166). However, despite their utility for this purpose, these methods and concepts do not account for their own dominance or exemplarity. According to Marcuse, that stems from lifeworld practice itself. We will show that, despite his misinterpretation of Husserl’s text, Marcuse’s concept of one-dimensionality offers a valid contribution to the phenomenological critique begun by Husserl. However, resolution of the crisis of reason which Marcuse and Husserl both address requires a more rigorous phenomenological foundation than that provided by Marcuse. I will therefore develop two themes left unresolved in Marcuse’s account: first, an adequate account of the relationship between the theoretical technique of formal sign-systems and the utilization of material techniques in the lifeworld, and, second, of the sense in which concrete intuition and constituent subjectivity (which Marcuse takes over from Husserl) can restore meaning and value to Galilean science. 3.1 MARCUSE’S APPROPRIATION OF HUSSERL’S CRISIS IN ONE-DIMENSIONAL MAN One-dimensionality, in Marcuse’s thinking, refers primarily to the loss of the transcendence of reason over social life such that social life becomes exempt from criticism. This “paralysis of criticism,” as he phrases it, has social, cultural, social-scientific, and philosophical dimensions (ODM ix–xvii). In an early summary of the thesis of one-dimensional man, he claimed that “an entire dimension of human reality is therefore suppressed; the dimension which permits individuals and classes to develop a theory and technique of transcendence by which they might envisage the ‘determinate negation’ of their society” (Marcuse 2011, 132).4 It is not so much a critical theory of society as a meta-critique, that is to say, it attempts to show that the conditions for social critique have been eviscerated. Recovering such conditions is a prior task upon which the practice of critical theory depends. The key chapter 6 of One-Dimensional Man attempts to show that the social analysis of one-dimensional society in the previous chapters does not remain a merely external influence on, but pertains to the internal conceptual structure of, Galilean science. Marcuse turns to Husserl’s Crisis to substantiate his thesis that “modern science is the ‘methodology’ of a pre-given historical reality within whose universe it moves” (ODM 162). His account refers almost exclusively to Crisis section 9h on the lifeworld to make his

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argument because “individual, non-quantifiable qualities stand in the way of an organization of men and things in accordance with the measurable power to be extracted from them” (ODM 164). In Husserlian terms we may say that the lifeworld, understood as the “ultimate substrates” of which we have concrete intuition of individuals as such, is the basis for both a critique of “the garb of symbols of the symbolic mathematical theories . . . we take for true being what is actually a method” (C 51; ODM 168) and a recovery of concrete individuals through immediate intuition (C 226ff.). The “garb of ideas [Ideenkleid]” (C 51; K 51), or “ideational veil” (OSP 286), by which we mistake the method of a mathematical-empirical science for true being is the closest point of convergence between Husserl’s critique of reason and the Marxist concept of reification. Marcuse continues to say that, due to its conceptual formation, Galilean science is “the technic of a specific Lebenswelt, it does not and cannot transcend this Lebenswelt” (ODM 164). Here, Marcuse quotes Husserl’s statement that science leaves the lifeworld unchanged to mean that Galilean science cannot envisage a qualitatively new mode of seeing (ODM 165; Marcuse refers to K 51, or C 51). In other words, under the model of Galilean science, reason has lost the transcendence of empirical reality by which philosophy was able to judge present existence and propose alternatives. While Marcuse admits that this may be an over-interpretation, it is nevertheless used to ground his developing argument that science in its Galilean form and a specific lifeworld are mutually reinforcing so as to construct one-dimensional society in synthesis with one-dimensional thought. Galilean science does not transcend and thus cannot criticize its specific lifeworld and this specific lifeworld calls forth and seems to justify Galilean science. However valid this point may be in itself, this is not an over-interpretation but a misinterpretation. Husserl explains on the same page that his meaning is that there is available to phenomenological intuition a concrete lifeworld with a characteristic style in which “practically all our whole life takes place” (C 51) that remains available despite the reification inherent in Galilean science. In this sense, it is exactly what Marcuse called, as quoted above, “individual, non-quantifiable qualities” (ODM 164). But we should clarify that the lifeworld underlies science in a double sense: the lifeworld is these concrete individuals available in immediate intuition, but it is also the world of practical activity and meaning in which science is one project among others, so that human social organization and communication are presupposed by the scientific enterprise. As Husserl says, “if we cease being immersed in our scientific thinking, we become aware that we scientists are, after all, human beings and as such are among the components of the lifeworld which always exists for us, ever pregiven” (C 130). The lifeworld has at least these

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two meanings: One, immediate intuition of concrete individuals with distinct qualities, and, two, the everyday practical world in which science is one human project among others. In attempting to use Husserl’s concept of the lifeworld, which he renders as a specific lifeworld—meaning a socially and historically determinate one— Marcuse both asserts a self-confirming relation between a specific lifeworld and Galilean science that is consistent with Husserl’s thinking and misses the sense in which Husserl places Galilean science within a larger conception of human projects and organizations in the lifeworld. That is, he agrees with Husserl that Galilean science confirms, and is confirmed by, a truncated sense of experience is which mathematical quantities are substituted for concrete individuals with distinct qualities. He disagrees with, or rather fails to register, the sense in which Husserl uses the lifeworld to assess Galilean science as one human activity among others—which is surprising since one would expect that Critical Theory could make use of such a critical use of the concept of lifeworld. This distinction between two senses of the lifeworld should encourage asking the broader question of why technical, instrumentalist conceptions of practical action tend to dominate lifeworld experience. Ironically, however, this broader question is asked by Marcuse rather than Husserl and constitutes his distinctive contribution to the Crisis-thesis. The rhetoric of a specific lifeworld is used by Marcuse repeatedly without elaboration, though he clearly means some definite socio-economic organization of the lifeworld that has a dominating structure mirroring that of Galilean science. It may be thought that this dominating social structure would be “corporate capitalism,” but that cannot be the case because there is no discernible sense in which corporate capitalism might enter into the conceptual structure of science, despite its widespread selection of research topics and utilization of results. Moreover, One-Dimensional Man as a whole indicts the then contemporary (1964) Communist societies of the East as much as the corporate capitalist ones of the West. Marcuse’s argument is not directed toward a specific critique of a given social structure but toward the loss of the preconditions for such critique. The specific structure of the lifeworld in question refers to its technical nature, so that Marcuse’s thesis is some version of a technocracy thesis as supplanting different social forms such as corporate capitalism and Communism. So, we may say that the specific structure of the lifeworld in question is one in which technical-instrumental action is predominant: a mutually conforming circle such that science cannot criticize the lifeworld and the lifeworld cannot criticize science and that, moreover, the technical structure of the lifeworld justifies the science and the science justifies a technicized lifeworld. Thus, the “garb of ideas” or “reification” that inserts itself between science and the lifeworld has the consequence that

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the lifeworld is rendered as the ontology of a scientific method and the inner conceptual structure of Galilean science projects the lifeworld project of “methodical, systematic anticipation and projection” (ODM 164). A reading of chapter 6 of One-Dimensional Man shows not only considerable continuity between Husserl’s and Marcuse’s critiques of the conceptual structure of Galilean science, but also convergence on the inner linkage between a form of technical action in the lifeworld, its instrumentalist horizon in the lifeworld that renders other activities and perceptions in technical form, and the mathematization of nature in Galilean science that provokes a crisis for European humanity. There is even a kind of convergence on the key idea for the thesis of one-dimensionality that science in the Galilean style is in a mutually reinforcing relation with an instrumentalist orientation in the lifeworld leading to what Husserl called a “revolution in the technical control of nature” and Marcuse called the “domination of nature” (VL 271; ODM 158, passim). Despite this convergence, we may note three important differences in analysis pertinent to both the interpretation of the authors and philosophical analysis of the matters themselves. First, Marcuse’s introduction of the term “domination of nature” serves to make a connection to instrumentalism in the lifeworld in social domains in a wider sense than Husserl’s reference to measurement in scientific practice, but it does not yet show how instrumentalism and scientific method are connected. Nor does Husserl. Both authors merely assume this connection rather than show its foundation. Second, Marcuse’s misinterpretation of Husserl’s statement that the lifeworld remains unchanged by Galilean science serves to obscure a crucial divergence. While there is indeed a sense in which contemporary Galilean reason has lost its transcendence over social reality, as Husserl agrees, Marcuse is wrong to find a source for this thesis in Husserl’s statement. Husserl means that science cannot displace the lifeworld in its status as ontologically prior and pervasive. So that, for example, scientists use lifeworld meanings in their social organization and communications, and the application of scientific technologies affects, and is affected by, lifeworld meaning and value—which would seem to be a meaning useful to the thesis of one-dimensionality. Third, following from this misinterpretation, Marcuse fails to appreciate that Husserl’s dual conception of the lifeworld both as “original selfevidences” (C 127) and as “human formations, essentially related to human actualities and potentialities” (C 130) allows for a conception of phenomenological intuition that both underlies Galilean science as a form of evidence and places Galilean science with its practical technical dimensions within a larger appreciation of concrete human socio-cultural meaning. So, while Husserl’s phenomenology proposes a philosophical solution to the crisis, Marcuse’s vacillates, as he admits, between two contradictory hypotheses:

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that the self-confirming circle of one-dimensionality will persist and that an “accident” may provoke a reversal (ODM xv). The crucial question of the relation between Galilean science and its instrumentalist horizon in the lifeworld remains unresolved. 3.2 MARCUSE’S REVIEW OF HUSSERL’S CRISIS In a paper which amounts to an extended review of Husserl’s Crisis given to the Boston Colloquium for the Philosophy of Science on 13 February 1964, Marcuse pinpoints three aspects of the internal, conceptual relation between Galilean science and the lifeworld in Husserl’s work that allow a more detailed conceptualization of the issues delineated above.5 His summary of them refers to Hegel to suggest that science is an Aufhebung der Lebenswelt (OPS 285)—whose Hegelian terminology means both negated and preserved in a higher form. It is important to clarify that these three aspects of the relation between lifeworld and science are attributed to Husserl by Marcuse and that “this threefold process takes place in the scientific abstraction” (OSP 286). His interpretive step is to discover, or superimpose—whichever word is most adequate here—the Hegelian structure that yields a conceptualization of the unity of the three aspects.6 First, science “cancels the data and truth of immediate experience” (OSP 285) insofar as the object known is apprehended not “in its contingent, particular occurrence . . . but as an exemplification of general objectivity” (OSP 283–4). Galilean science renders the lifeworld in the form of exemplary data that are subsumed under a pre-given conceptual structure. This is the first form of the Hegelian dialectical negation of the lifeworld by science. It corresponds accurately to Husserl’s reference to the purposive reshaping of the lifeworld understood as the subsumption of qualitative experience of individuals under quantitative Galilean science (C 226) that Marcuse framed in OneDimensional Man as the domination of nature, even though the connection to social measurement as a form of domination is less apparent in this text. This characterization adequately captures the sense in which phenomenology and Critical Theory converge on a critique of instrumental reason as the subsumption of experience under mathematical form. It is also what Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno mean in their critique of the “non-specificity of the example” in the culture industry where “the whole and the parts are alike; there is no antithesis” (Horkheimer and Adorno 10, 126). Second, science “preserves the data and truth of experience” (OSP 285) since “the empirical reality [which is Marcuse’s rendering of Husserl’s concept of the lifeworld] constitutes, in a specific sense, the very concepts which

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science believes are pure theoretical concepts” (OSP 283).7 The argument that the structure of the lifeworld enters scientific conceptuality is the core of Marcuse’s reading of Husserl’s work as a critique of the supposed independence of science from the lifeworld. I will discuss this in detail below. Third, the data and truth of experience are preserved, not in their lifeworld form, but in the higher “ideational form of universal validity” (OSP 285). Marcuse says no more here about this higher, Hegelian synthetic form of universal reason, but, from the larger context of his reading of Husserl that he mentions at the outset, we can see that here he is pointing to the idea of the identity of Reason and Being as a project that both Husserl and Hegel would see as the telos of the critique of instrumental reason. Marcuse himself takes a distance from this teleological identity, suggesting in the final word of his paper that philosophy thus understood contains a hubris due to failing to investigate its own origins and thereby failing to promote humanitas (OSP 290). It therefore contains the judgment on philosophy characteristic of his work throughout that philosophy has articulated and preserved the idea of transcendence and therefore the capacity of judging social reality that it is nevertheless not able to carry out in practice due to its own abstraction from practice.8 The Hegelian structure thus consists, first, in the subsumption of lifeworld experience under a Galilean scientific form and a reification whereby Galilean method is taken as reality itself; second, a preservation of measurement in the lifeworld within Galilean science; and, third, a higher form of reason that projects the identity of Reason and Being. Marcuse and Husserl agree about the first problem of subsumption and reification. They also agree that measurement is the lifeworld index of Galilean science, though Marcuse wants to extend this to social measurement and technique, and through the concept of the “domination of nature” to unite socio-technical domination and the domination of nature understood in a Galilean manner. Marcuse claims that, since Galilean science is critical neither of experience nor its reification, the instrumental-technical structure of empirical reality in the lifeworld enters scientific conceptuality. Further, the impact of scientific technologies in the lifeworld is such as to extend technical control in the form of social control and domination (OSP 286; ODM 157–8). It becomes a matter for social critique, whereas, for Husserl, “technization” (Technisierung) is a matter of the internal structure of Galilean science due to its loss of connection to concrete intuition of individuals so that the formal sign-system can be manipulated without regard to content (C 46–8).9 So, while there is the basis for some sort of convergence here, it would be necessary to show that technization in Husserl’s formal sense does indeed support technical control in Marcuse’s sense of social domination. There is no justification here of why this should be so but we provide one below. Finally, whereas Husserl sees the requisite

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constitutive subjectivity in a return to the entelechy of reason in European culture established by philosophy, Marcuse relies on this entelechy but claims that its humanist essence can only be realized through empirical, sensuous, subjectivity in practical activity that goes beyond philosophy.10 Summing up, then, a theoretical convergence of Husserlian phenomenology with Marcuse’s thesis of one-dimensionality would require, first, an adequate account of the relationship between the theoretical technique of formal sign-systems and the utilization of material techniques in the lifeworld. And, second, it would require clarification of the sense in which concrete intuition and constituent subjectivity can restore meaning and value to Galilean science. Let us begin with the latter. 3.3 CONSTITUENT SUBJECTIVITY AND THE PERCEPTION OF NON-QUANTIFIED INDIVIDUALS For Husserl, introduction of the lifeworld into the critique of Galilean science is intended to see through reification and thereby return to the immediate experience of the concrete, qualitative, individual object as more than a subsumption under Galilean scientific method. One meaning of the lifeworld refers to the manner in which it is perceived and conceived exclusively through its technical, measurable quantities when subsumed under science in the Galilean style. A second meaning refers to the practical activities that Husserl notes are presupposed by Galilean science as a world of everyday interaction that, as we have seen, Marcuse misses due to his misinterpretation of Husserl’s statement that science leaves the lifeworld as it is. A third refers to the aim of securing access to those “individual, non-quantifiable qualities” that Marcuse shares with Husserl and which is the basis for his positive reception of the Crisis (ODM 164). The constituent subjectivity that is the final, teleological sense of the lifeworld refers to this third sense of perception and conception of qualities of concrete, individual objects. A lot rests upon keeping these three senses of the lifeworld distinct: technique, everyday interaction, and individual qualities of objects perceived and conceived by an adequate constituent subjectivity. The assumption that such perception of individuals can be discovered as both ground and critique of Galilean science is common to both Husserl and Marcuse. At the third purported Hegelian stage of the relation between science and the lifeworld, Marcuse refers to the identity of Reason and Being as inherent in philosophy as such and sees such identity as the telos of the critique of instrumental reason. Whereas Hegel saw such an identity as already achieved in his present world, for Husserl, it is a project yet to be realized though

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already given as a task. An adequate constituent subjectivity would be the ground for such a philosophical teleology. Marcuse sees this telos as a hubris inherent in philosophy that devalues its humanitas to an ideology. His two critiques of Husserl, presented after this Hegelian interpretation, attempt to sustain his view that neither phenomenology nor philosophy gain adequate access to constituent subjectivity in a manner adequate to overcoming one-dimensionality. Husserl claimed that Galilean science necessarily lost its meaning for the lifeworld due to the arithmetization of geometry (C 44). Marcuse endorsed this analysis in his own voice without reference to Husserl in claiming that “the algebraization . . . replaces ‘visible’ geometric figures with purely mental operations” (ODM 148).11 The move to formalization in method tends to become a technique that operates independently of experiential meaning. Husserl therefore contrasts formalization as a technique that operates with symbolic concepts and whose practice of reflection “stops too soon” to reach back toward the “original thinking” to the “concretely intuitive thinking” that phenomenology can provide (C 46). Put directly, without phenomenology Galilean science breaks with the meaning and value embedded in the lifeworld. Husserl was clear, not only in Crisis but in earlier work, that his critique of formal, technical science as a loss of meaning and value depended upon the re-establishment of this meaning through phenomenological intuition of individuals. He said in Formal and Transcendental Logic, “to have insight into . . . [evidence of truth] one must make ultimate cores intuited, one must draw the fullness of adequation, not from evidence of judgment-senses, but instead from evidence of the ‘matters’ or ‘affairs’ corresponding to them” (FTL 203). Or in Experience and Judgment, “original substrates are therefore individuals, individual objects, and every thinkable judgment ultimately refers to individual objects, no matter how mediated in a variety of ways” (EJ 26). Essentially, this means that access to some level, or form, of non-reified experience underlying scientific formalization is both possible and necessary to the critique of Galilean science. Marcuse agrees with this even though his critique of Husserl claims that phenomenology does not reach such an experiential level prior to reification; it does not actually reach “constituent subjectivity” (OSP 288-9). However we might adjudicate this disagreement, it is based upon an agreement that access to a constituent subjectivity intuiting concrete individuals is indeed the presupposition of a critique of formalizing reason. Husserl assumed throughout his work that such access was possible.12 However, as discussed extensively in the previous chapter, it remained an unredeemed assumption in Husserl’s work that formal reason, or arithmetized geometry, can be grounded adequately in the concrete intuition of individuals. This finding alters considerably the direction of phenomenological

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critique of Galilean science. While the lifeworld can be characterized as concrete intuition of individuals, and one may abstract from such individuals toward higher levels of conceptual universality, one cannot return from conceptual universality of the formal, arithmetized type toward such concrete intuition. In one place in his work, Husserl recognized that a return to the contents abstracted-from in logical systems does not achieve a return to concrete objects but only to “abstract moments in significations” (FTL 298). However, this recognition did not affect his assumption that a return to concrete individuals in phenomenology would cure the crisis of the sciences. Marcuse shared this assumption.13 Marcuse credits phenomenology, and indeed any transcendental philosophy, with being able to see behind reified appearances, but argues that Husserl “stops short of the actual constituent subjectivity” (OSP 289).14 Further, he argues that Husserl’s subjectivity is purely cognitive and does not reach to the active subject in the lifeworld. These two criticisms are not developed further in his presentation on Husserl. However, we can see in them a basis for Marcuse’s later work in which he attempts to recover active, constituent subjectivity as the ground for a critique of one-dimensionality. At the end of One-Dimensional Man, he proposed that “technology may provide the historical correction of the premature identification of Reason and Freedom, [but] the correction can never be the result of technical progress per se. It requires a political reversal” (ODM 234). In this sense, Marcuse’s critiques of Husserl may be seen as continuous with the phenomenological project of a return to the concrete intuition of constituent subjectivity with the adjustment that such subjectivity is to be found primarily in action and only secondarily in reason. While he leaves it as an open question at the end of his presentation whether philosophy itself shares the hubris of science, his earlier essay “Philosophy and Critical Theory” had already asserted that “the untruth inherent in all transcendental treatment of the problem thus comes to philosophy ‘from outside;’ hence it can be overcome only outside philosophy” (Marcuse 1968b, 150). So, we may say that Marcuse’s conception of constituent subjectivity aims to overcome not only the one-dimensionality inherent in Galilean science but the untruth of philosophy itself insofar as it abstracts from sensuous, embodied practice in the lifeworld. Only such sensuous, embodied practice would be a sufficient constitutive subjectivity. There are three phenomena whose inter-relation is the philosophical core of what is at issue between Marcuse and Husserl: the conceptual structure of Galilean science; measurability, or what we might call technical, means-end action in the lifeworld; and an instrumentalist horizon in the lifeworld where what can be measured becomes dominant. The thesis of one-dimensionality claims that these are inter-related in such a manner that the transcendent,

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critical power of reason is lost and the instrumentalist horizon of the lifeworld reduces practical action to technique. Galilean science and technique thus constitute a self-reinforcing world. Through this thesis, Marcuse would explain why the crisis of the sciences becomes a crisis of humanity through reference to the contemporary lifeworld rather than with reference to an entelechy of reason inherent in Europe as Husserl claimed. The considerations in this section show that the common assumption in Marcuse and Husserl that the critique of Galilean reason can appeal to an underlying level of qualitative experience of individuals remained an unredeemed assumption which, as we have seen in the previous chapter, is not a valid one. Moreover, this assumption is by no means unique to these two thinkers. It is rather the dominant assumption that undergirds the claim that phenomenology can resolve the crisis of Marxism through a new basis in subjectivity. Enzo Paci is perhaps the most influential author who has proposed such a phenomenological Marxism through a return to the immediate perception of individuals as individuals in intuitive perception. Paci defined the lifeworld as “the daily world in which we live and have always lived. This world is ‘subjective,’ i.e., it is direct inter-monadic life, the interrelation of presences in the first person” (Paci 1972, 27). This is an unobjectionable, though partial, description of the lifeworld. As we have seen above, there are three meanings of the lifeworld that are pertinent to sorting out the issues between Husserl and Marcuse: technique (the sense in which formal science renders the lifeworld), everyday interaction (both within the socio-historical world generally and in science as a human project in that world), and individual qualities of objects perceived and conceived by an adequate constituent subjectivity (to which self-evidence Husserl, Marcuse, and Paci thought that formal science could be traced back and thereby heal the crisis of the sciences). The constituent subjectivity that is the final, teleological sense of the lifeworld refers to this third sense of perception and conception of qualities of concrete, individual objects which, as we will see below, cannot be attributed to individuals as such but to individuals perceived in relation to the horizon of the lifeworld. The partial description of the lifeworld by Paci commits him to the assumption of the immediate perception of concrete individuals that he shares with Husserl and Marcuse. Thus, he explicates the lifeworld as an experience of the world “where the world has the validity of truly lived being, given with the evidence of the things-themselves” (Paci 1972, 27). While this is true for the phenomenological tracing of theoretical abstractions of the species-genera type back to immediate experience, it is not the case with respect to the formal universals that, according to Husserl, bring about the crisis of the European sciences. Thus, Paci’s phenomenology falls behind the account of Husserl’s Crisis to be applicable only to non-formal sciences. In

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such cases, “the categories can be brought back within original intuition, i.e., to the way that the temporal Lebenswelt is intuitively revealed” (Paci 1972, 54). While the application of this model of phenomenological critique indeed conforms to Husserl’s intentions, it remained an unredeemable assumption. Using such an assumption as if it contained an adequate critique of formal universals amounts to a dogmatic assertion of lifeworld experience against formal reason.15 We will thus proceed to attempt a resolution of the issue without relying on such an assumption of immediate perception of qualitative, individuals. This is a major philosophical difference in which the 21st century phenomenological Marxism developed in this text differs from previous attempted syntheses. The first step in such an account is an adequate description of the relationship between the theoretical technique of formal sign-systems and the utilization of material techniques in the lifeworld so that the different senses in which Marcuse and Husserl used the term “technique” can be reconciled. 3.4 PHENOMENOLOGY OF TECHNIQUE AND THE INSTRUMENTALIST HORIZON We have seen that a theoretical convergence of phenomenology and Marcuse’s thesis of one-dimensionality would require a description of the relationship between the theoretical technique of formal sign-systems (arithmetized geometry) and the utilization of material techniques such that the formal sign-system finds its lifeworld connection in technique, or technical action, rather than concrete intuition of individuals. This is the key issue which will allow resolution of the related issues of constituent subjectivity and the instrumentalist horizon in the lifeworld where what can be measured becomes dominant. In turn, this description will show a constituent subjectivity that can ground the emergent socio-ecological dimension of the critique of Galilean reason. We may recall from the previous chapter that it is formalization, and not mere generalization, that institutes a problematic relation between science and lifeworld characterized by “forgetting of origins” and their putative phenomenological recovery. It is significant that the Frankfurt School of Critical Theory does not, in general, make a clear distinction between these two concepts of abstraction.16 The main referent is mathematics, which is understood as measurement or quantification, so that the issue of crisis as Husserl diagnosed it is misunderstood. For Husserl, measurement is simply the lifeworld index of formalization and the problem of form is “emptying-out” and not quantification. This crucial confusion of two distinct forms of abstraction

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erroneously makes it seem as if it is quantification or scientific conceptuality itself that causes the crisis, whereas it is specifically the hegemony of formal reason that Husserl targets. Thus, only a phenomenological analysis can adequately show the connection between formal reason and technique in the lifeworld. The critique of reason in the Critical Theory of Society is lacking in comparison to that of phenomenology for this reason.17 There are two stages in our resolution of this issue: First, an account of the technical adumbration whereby intuitive evidence is rendered in the requisite adumbrated evidential form such that it may be taken up into formal systems. Second, a phenomenological description of the manner in which formal systems function in the lifeworld as techniques, or technical action. 3.4.1 Technical Adumbration Husserl refers to the definite manifolds developed from formalizing abstraction as techniques. “It becomes a mere art of achieving, through calculating technique according to technical rules, results the genuine sense of whose truth can be attained only by concretely intuitive thinking actually directed at the subject matter itself” (C 46).18 Techniques involve a “superficialization of meaning which unavoidably accompanies the technical development and practice of method [due to] the algebraic terms and ways of thinking that have become widespread in the modern period since Vieta” (C 44). The definition of technique as an art of manipulation of sign-systems without regard to content is thus a statement of the crisis to which the critical, healing role of phenomenology as accomplishment of genuine application through the restoration of the intuitive foundation of sign-systems responds. If, as has been shown, such intuitive fulfilment is not possible, then the relationship between such formal sign-systems and lifeworld experience must be investigated anew. The first step in this investigation is to clarify the adumbrated form of evidence—which we may call technique—that corresponds to the application of such sign-systems.19 Technique is an adumbration of evidence of concrete individuals encountered in the lifeworld that renders such individuals only insofar as they constitute exemplars of the formal sign-system in question. In this respect modern and ancient knowledge proceed differently. Whereas ancient knowledge could trace each concept back to the individual instantiations from which it was abstracted, from eidos to concrete cases, modern formal abstraction cannot so proceed. Applicability of manifolds is to whole object-domains as such not to their adumbrated contents considered separately. Such domains are therefore not comprised of individuals but of systematically-related contents produced by an adumbration. Thus, technical evidence pertains to the

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intuitional content of the lifeworld utilized as a resource through an adumbration producing abstract moments of significations, nodal points in systemic structures (TE 53). Whatever such individuals may be outside of such a rendering is left entirely outside the possibility of modern formalizing knowledge.20 The adumbration of evidence by technique both explains and repairs the omission of experiment in Husserl’s conception of modern science (Ihde 2011). Experiment is not observation. The common misconception that modern science is characterized by observation whereas pre-modern science was dominated by metaphysics fails to grasp what is important here. Aristotle, as well as all pre-modern scientists, observed nature. Modern science is characterized by both mathematization (as Husserl knew) and experiment (which he ignored). And this is not a mere juxtaposition, it contains an internal logic by which formal systems are made effective in technical uses in the lifeworld. An experiment abstracts from, or adumbrates, all-pervasive features of the lifeworld in order to reduce the number of variables that can be observed. Experiment works with controlled conditions and controlled conditions must be produced by excluding certain factors, or adumbrating the pertinent evidence. The mutual dependence of mathematics and experiment in modern science is a function of the discontinuity between evidence and explanation produced by formalizing abstraction. 3.4.2 Technique, or Technical Action Our phenomenological description of the relation between Galilean science and lifeworld technique sustains the rigorous conceptual distinction of formalization from generalization. To put the matter succinctly: how does theoretical formalization connect to lifeworld instrumentalism? Or, how does scientific emptying-out connect to means/end action? A given object in the lifeworld is not encountered in the first place as an “individual object” as both Husserl and Marcuse assumed. When I pick up a pen to write, I pick up an available pen; when I cut wood, I do so with an axe. My practical action requires an apposite instrument and it is of the essence of an organized, established practical activity that it is not dependent on a sole, specific instrument but any one of a given type. Objects in the lifeworld are in the first places objects of a given type which thereby serve for a typical purpose. Such a typical purpose is an end, or goal, which, in accord with traditional terminology, I will call means-end, or technical, action.21 A type is formed from treating an individual object as “one-of . . .” that is to say, under a single given aspect. This predominant aspect is under the sway of a practical interest that defines a technical goal/end.

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The formulation of such a technique requires its abstraction from the surrounding world of practical action such that it can be focused upon as a singular goal from which can be defined relevant means to be organized toward its attainment. When I look at a piece of wood under the aspect of burning, some wood looks better than other. But I may look at wood under the aspect of making a plank for building, which also sorts out the available pieces and what has to be modified about them to render them serviceable planks, but sorts the wood differently according to the purpose or goal that defines the type. Note that if I were to focus on the wood as a concrete, qualitative individual, it would require another constituent subjectivity that would unify these typical, partial determinations of the wood and would thus be beyond any technique or use. It is in this sense, which they did not address, that both Marcuse and Husserl are right to speak of a “second reduction” within lifeworld experience that is necessary for concrete individuals to appear as such (OSP 289; C 137–41). Formalizing abstraction may begin from an element of the lifeworld, such as an axe or pen, in order to designate it as an ‘x.’ The connection between Galilean science and technique thus resides at the point at which a type is thematized either in relation to its surrounding practical world or as an aspect of a theoretical domain of similarly formalized objects. The emptying-out that treats a type as a formal “x” removes the technical end from any relationship to other ends as experienced in the lifeworld and theorizes it strictly formally, that is to say, without any consideration if such an end is valid, good, or just. A technical end is never itself formal since it contains a concrete purpose, such as wood for burning or a pen for writing, that defines adequate means toward that end—which can then be refined to become the most efficient means. The efforts of technological society are oriented to this task of taking available means and constructing the most efficient means, so that practical and theoretical energy is directed away from the ends themselves and the inevitable plurality of ends that exists in any lifeworld. Since the end is emptied-out when theorized formally, burning and writing lose their connection to the whole domain of practical action. In this way, formal science reinforces technical action as an isolated action by removing the material, content-ridden thought that would necessarily place it in the context of other purposes and goals. Emptying-out serves technique by removing the technique from ethical-political deliberation. Formalization in theory becomes one-dimensionality in practice. Quantification, measurement, in itself would not produce such a consequence. Nor would theoretical generalization. Generalization remains tied to a specific species-genus abstraction which is sufficiently concrete to evaluate the purpose of that abstraction in relationship to similar material universals. It is the formalization in the abstraction that

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removes the end from material judgment since the end becomes “any end, or thing, whatever” that can be theoretically designated by an “x.” So, if this is how formal science tends to reinforce technique, how does the technique come to “enter scientific conceptuality” in something like Marcuse’s sense? Measurement and the domination of nature refer to practical mastery of the environment through a plurality of techniques shaped into the unity of a lifeworld. Formal science does not contain a direct reference to such material techniques. This is where Marcuse’s thinking went astray and began to toy with the idea of a science with a different conceptual structure. However, formal science removes the possibility of criticizing such techniques within a wider framework pertinent to the unity of the lifeworld because its formalizing abstraction treats any end in the lifeworld abstractly as an end of any type—that is to say, singly and without reference to its organized practical context. By fixing on one isolated end, available means toward that end can be unambiguously defined and sorted for the “one best way” on grounds of efficiency or cost. The isolation of the end, which is necessary to the construction of means, is established by a formalization that excludes the consideration of a surrounding plurality of ends and the practical domain from which an end is abstracted. In this way, there is a mutual reinforcement between formal science and technique that we may follow Marcuse in calling one-dimensionality. But it is not brought forth by measurement, nor practical domination of nature, alone; it is brought forth by the formalizing that removes from content and thereby isolates whatever end has been stipulated in defining technique. What is needed is not a science with a new conceptual structure but a mode of thinking and acting that relates to the lifeworld as more than a simple aggregate of techniques. The lifeworld understood as a simple aggregate of isolated ends is another way of designating what Marcuse called the instrumentalist horizon that ties scientific advance to “a given universe of discourse and action” (ODM 157), but a way that shows how that horizon can be shown to be limited. Thus, the above linking of formal science to technical action can explain the concept of the “instrumentalist horizon,” which was used but remained unaccounted for in Marcuse’s analysis. The formalized “x” as it appears in the lifeworld should be understood as a technique in the sense of a means-structure oriented toward an abstracted, single end, isolated from practical involvements in the lifeworld. Practical involvement within the lifeworld admits of the abstraction of a plurality of ends. Since techniques depend upon the prior process of abstraction of ends, we may say that practical activity operates within an unthematized field prior to abstraction from which stand forth an indefinite number of technical ends that have been abstracted. Each technical end, by virtue of the clarity attained by its abstraction, is a focus within the lifeworld that organizes human action,

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instruments, and the environment toward the performance of the end. The mere plurality of ends explains the instrumentalist horizon. On the basis of this description of technique, we may understand a technology as a complex of techniques. Say, a carburetor is a technique, as is an automobile, whereas the automobile transportation system including highways, oil fractionation, etc.—indeed, everything necessary for the techniques to be assembled in a manner that functions in a socio-environmental context—is a technology. Clearly, there are many technologies in the contemporary world. Technologies attain an established structure within the lifeworld, though they may be influenced and mutated over time, in part by substituting new techniques. The totality of such technologies thus may be understood as forming the character of a specific lifeworld. We may thus suggest that focusing on the plurality of technologies is an entry into socio-ecological critique founded on the given lifeworld as a whole. Thematizing transversally a plurality of technologies, rather than pointing to a supposed underlying qualitative experience, raises the issue of what elements of the organized system of means might be used for other technologies toward other ends. This suggestion will be followed up in greater detail in chapter 9. It is meant in this context only as a mere intimation of how the transversal issue implied by the analysis of technique may be followed up into a socio-ecological phenomenological Critical Theory.22 3.5 QUALITATIVE INDIVIDUAL AND HORIZONAL CONSCIOUSNESS We have claimed that there is a significant embedded tendency to one-dimensional humanity in the prevailing lifeworld due to the mutually confirming character of formal-mathematical science and technical ends in the lifeworld. For this reason, despite Marcuse’s misinterpretation of Husserl and squeezing him into a Hegelian form, the thesis of one-dimensionality is a valid addition to the crisis of reason in phenomenology. However, this addition can only be developed through the rigorous distinction between generalization and formalization made by Husserl but unappreciated in Critical Theory. In this way the crucial connection between formal science and technical action can be described. This connection grounds the concept of the instrumentalist horizon and manifests the transversal location where an adequate constituent subjectivity may be found. Thus, there is also an emergent tendency within one-dimensionality due to the transversal plurality of technical ends and their combination into technologies that define a specific lifeworld. This tendency

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grounds an incipient ecological consciousness whose motivation can be expected to increase with the proliferation of techniques. In this sense, one-dimensionality is precisely the failure to thematize transversal relations, a failure that Marcuse called the instrumentalist horizon. However, instrumentalism is not itself a horizon as the term suggests; it is precisely the failure of horizonal consciousness. Such horizonal consciousness is the third meaning of the lifeworld that Husserl introduced into philosophy. It remains an important issue, of course, how, when and why such a consciousness may appear within the one-dimensional world. I will not attempt to address that question here. It is a matter for Part IV of our investigation. For the present, it is enough to locate the issue of the emergence of such horizonal consciousness as distinct from a search for an underlying qualitative concretion. Out of such a horizonal consciousness the concrete individual emerges as the focus of a plurality of transversal relations within a horizon. The shining-forth of the individual as individual is dependent on the light reflected from the horizon of the lifeworld. This is the point of emergence of a necessary transversality which may ground an ecological dimension to the crisis of the sciences. Let us consider the transversal field of unthematized relations that constitute the lifeworld in the third sense, since it is here that we may discover the concrete individuals to which Marcuse and Husserl referred in their critiques of Galilean science in another form than the underlying stratum that they assumed. The lifeworld in the third sense of individual qualities of objects perceived and conceived by an adequate constituent subjectivity appears transversally in the relation between the types used in practical action and the horizon of the lifeworld. Husserl explained horizon-intentionality as the implication of an act-validity in other acts due to “the horizon-consciousness surrounding every act. . . . [Such] horizon-intentionality contains very diverse modes of an intentionality which is ‘unconscious’ in the usual narrower sense of the word but which can be shown to be vitally involved and cofunctioning in different ways” (C 237). In this sense, the distinction of three senses of the lifeworld is what makes possible this appropriation of the Marcuse-Husserl debate for a new socio-ecological critique of reason. The crisis is not that Galilean science has lost contact with the lifeworld, it is that Galilean science connects with the lifeworld only as the theorization through which isolated techniques can be developed. Marcuse is right that scientific form and practical domination are mutually reinforcing but shares with Husserl the assumption that concrete individuals are to be found as a rock-bottom stratum in lifeworld experience to which an adequate constituent subjectivity could gain access. However, a transversal conception of practical action that situates it within the horizon of a given lifeworld is an extension of the crisis of the sci-

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ences through social critique into ecological critique that is indebted to Marcuse’s work. It is not being suggested that ecological thought and horizonal consciousness are equivalent but that horizonal consciousness grounds an appropriation of ecology in overcoming the crisis. Similarly, ecological thought may be a practical step toward phenomenological consciousness of every act as within a horizon which would capture the truly concrete individual that both Husserl and Marcuse sought. It is the transversal thematization of a type or a technique in relation to its horizon that the object becomes a qualitative individual (no longer merely a type or technique) and it is consciousness of this qualitative individual that is the constituent subjectivity sought. Such an ecological critique would depend upon the perception of individuals as individuals which is located in the transversal connection of type and technique, through a plurality of techniques and technologies, to the form of a given lifeworld and its horizon. The concrete individual is only accessible as a relation between individual and horizon. How, then, might an adequate constituent subjectivity become available to the phenomenological philosopher or to the social actor? While the plurality of technologies in a specific lifeworld is an entry into socio-ecological critique, it is the lifeworld as unthematized horizon (Umwelt)—the horizon of the totality of technological thematizations—toward which such critique is oriented. Constituent subjectivity is consciousness of the horizon of the specific lifeworld. Such subjectivity is available through a transversal consciousness that connects isolated ends into the definition of a social form. In short, constituent subjectivity appears insofar as technical consciousness of isolated ends is supplanted by ecological consciousness of the totality of ends and their horizon. NOTES 1.  Many commentators have pointed out that Husserl does not investigate social conditions in his analysis of the crisis of reason, usually, on this basis, to conclude that he has nothing much to offer a Marxist social critique (Leiss 1971, 111–2; Abromeit 2010). 2. Dermot Moran has asserted that Husserl investigated what Marcuse termed one-dimensionality without, however, a detailed analysis of Marcuse or his relation to Husserl (Moran 2012, 300). 3.  As we asserted in a footnote to the introduction, phenomenological accounts of Husserl’s Crisis conventionally paraphrase his account without engaging in comparisons with other approaches, thus taking for granted Husserl’s uniqueness or superiority in the critique of reason. Aron Gurwitsch’s first and highly influential account, especially in English, established this convention (Gurwitsch 1966; Dodd

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2004; Gasché 2009). John O’Neill is singular in combining his assertion that Marcuse misunderstands Husserl with a detailed account of Marcuse (O’Neill 1988).   4.  It is interesting that this paper, first published in French in 1960, summarizes the ideas developed in a course at the École Pratique des Hautes Études in 1958–9, and contains no reference to Husserl. One may surmise that it was the addition of Husserl’s Crisis to the analysis that allowed the thesis to appear in finished form in One-Dimensional Man.  5. Since One-Dimensional Man was first published in 1964, the paper and the book clearly come out of the same period of Marcuse’s philosophical reflection. Especially since, as noted in a previous footnote, the 1960 paper “From Ontology to Technology” did not mention Husserl but by 1964 in “On Science and Phenomenology” Marcuse was phrasing his argument in relation to Husserl in an equivalent manner to that in One-Dimensional Man.  6. Aron Gurwitsch, in his comment on Marcuse’s paper, points out that this context of the critique of reason is not the only possible one and questions whether it might not do justice to Husserl’s intentions and the philosophical significance of the Crisis. His comment concludes by summarizing that its contributions to the philosophy of science stem from phenomenology and that its main purpose is as an introduction to phenomenology. In this way he contributed to the “internalist” reading of Husserl’s text and its inoculation from any form of social critique. Thus, he evades evaluating Marcuse’s interpretation and critique explicitly, even though the last sentence that Husserl’s work should “not be mistaken for an expression of an ‘anti-scientific’ attitude” intimates that he sees Marcuse’s position as such (Gurwitsch 1965). In his republication of this comment, Gurwitsch erased any reference to Marcuse (Gurwitsch 1974a). In 1973, after a lecture by Gurwitsch on Husserl’s Crisis, I asked him if Husserl’s critique of reason did not imply some form of social critique, a question which he refused to answer on the ground that it was not his topic in the lecture.  7. Pier Aldo Rovatti is correct that Marcuse “confuses” the Lebenswelt with “empirical reality” and that this is central to his under-appreciation of Husserl. The current parsing out of three meanings of the term in Husserl is what allows a deeper appreciation of the common locus (Rovatti 1968, 115).   8.  See, for example, the claim that “the characteristics of essence no longer need to be stabilized in timeless eternal forms . . . [but] will all have to prove themselves in the practice of the associated individuals” (Marcuse 1968a, 87; cf. Marcuse 1969a, 251–7).   9.  John O’Neill points out that by “technique” Husserl means theoretical technique and Marcuse means social technique (O’Neill 1988, 331, 334). No investigator, as far as I have been able to discover, has entered into an analysis of this difference as this current argument does subsequently, to show that there is a phenomenological basis for a systematic relationship between the two. 10.  To this extent Pier Aldo Rovatti is correct that Marcuse deems Husserl’s a “purely theoretical analysis,” though his argument that this means that Marcuse accepts a traditional distinction between theory and practice seems to mistake the object of the criticism for its presupposition (Rovatti 1968, 113).

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11.  John O’Neill incorrectly claims that Marcuse “ignores” the origin of formalization as described by Husserl (O’Neill 1988, 331). 12.  Taken literally, Marcuse’s thesis of one-dimensionality seems to require that such original relation to concrete individuals is no longer available to us, which poses the difficult question to him of how reification can be shown to be reification if all experience is reified. In the introduction to One-Dimensional Man, he noted that the book vacillated between the thesis that qualitative change could be contained and that forces for change could break through (ODM xv). The problem here is that, even if the prospects for change are small, a theoretical basis for their possibility must be maintained. The conclusion of this chapter states succinctly how it is possible to both assert the thesis of one-dimensionality and show how it can be overcome. 13.  One might fruitfully interpret the history of Marcuse’s work as a continuing attempt to fulfil this assumption in various political forms—nature, aesthetics, women, ecology, the Third World, etc. He picked up this assumption during his studies with Martin Heidegger in the late 1920s rather than in his later use of Husserl. In the present context it is the assumption that he shared with Husserl that is important, rather than the various forms in which he attempted to redeem it. 14.  This failure to see any relevant distinction between Husserl and Kant (OSP 288–9) leads to Marcuse’s later speculation that a new society would develop a qualitatively new science (Marcuse 1967). Marcuse’s vacillation on this point is clear in One-Dimensional Man where he rejects the apparent implication of his argument for a qualitative physics but, on the same page, claims that it would “affect the very structure of science” (ODM 152). Given that he has earlier followed Husserl in describing Galilean science through the mathematization of nature (146) and the algebraization of geometry (148), it is hard to see how both of these statements can be affirmed. Andrew Feenberg has argued convincingly that if Marcuse had maintained the phenomenological conception of the lifeworld as lived nature, instead of abandoning it for a less precise conception of nature based in the early Marx, he would have been able to avoid this vacillation through the distinction between lived nature and scientific nature (Feenberg 2005, chapter 6). 15.  While it may seem a harsh judgment on Paci’s phenomenological Marxism to accuse it of such naïveté, I have suggested that it applies no less to Herbert Marcuse and Edmund Husserl. It may thus be considered more an indication of a historical philosophical epoch than an individual failing. One evidence of the dismantling (Abbau) of this epoch, and its consequent reduction into an ideology, is the use of Paci’s phenomenological Marxism by Paul Piccone to deploy a concept of the lifeworld as “our relation to reality as such, free from any conceptual mediation” in order to set aside in one swoop the alienation of the factory and everyday life—which also, of course, occur within the lifeworld (Piccone 1971, 16). 16. This misunderstanding is operative in Dialectic of Enlightenment, where Horkheimer and Adorno call mathematics “the most abstract form of the immediate [that] holds thinking firmly to the immediate” (Horkheimer and Adorno, 27). If this were so, the crisis as Husserl understands it would never appear because concrete immediacy would be evidently present within the formal sciences. In Eclipse of Reason, Max Horkheimer—who attended Husserl’s lectures, as did Marcuse (Abromeit 2011,

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57–60)—noted that while there is a distinction between subjective, instrumental reason and formalization, nevertheless he would treat them as “practically equivalent” (Horkheimer 1974, 7, cf. 40, 107). Similarly—despite Marcuse’s passing reference to the “algebraization of geometry” (ODM 148)—he asserted that “measurement in practice discovers the possibility of using certain basic forms . . . ‘available as identically the same’ . . . [such that] through all abstraction and generalization, scientific method retains (and masks) its pre-scientific-technical structure” (ODM 163). But any abstraction, including generalization, to a concept makes the concept available as identical in all cases to which it applies; it is not specifically characteristic of the formal abstraction that characterizes modern mathematics. 17.  The recent defence of Marcuse’s approach by Andrew Feenberg misses this crucial point in Marcuse’s appropriation of Husserl’s Crisis, situating the key issue as quantification that leads to instrumentalism. “This new concept of reason is the a priori of science, the precondition of its mode of experiencing and understanding the world. . . . What is the nature of this new a priori? It has two essential features, quantification and instrumentalization. Science does not address experience in its immediacy but transforms everything it encounters into quantities. . . . But values do exist and must have a place in the universe. Hence correlated with the quantified reality of science there is an inner world in which everything associated with value takes refuge. This inner world of subjective feelings is excluded from the objective world science explains. That outer world, now stripped of any valuative features and disaggregated, is exposed to unrestrained instrumental control” (Feenberg 2013, 605). My argument in the text shows how any definition of modern science that does not include formalism cannot adequately describe the connection between science and technique in the lifeworld. 18.  Husserl uses various terms to describe the technical character of modern science. On this page he initially uses the term Kunst and its related forms to refer to ‘technique’ and then in his definition (and in the title for the sub-section) uses Technik and related forms (K 45–6). In the introduction to Edmund Husserl, Formal and Transcendental Logic, while addressing the same issue, he uses the terms Technik and Technologie (FTL 3, 16; FuTL 7, 20). The relation between the terms deriving from art (poeisis, Kunst) versus those deriving from technique (techne, Technik) to describe this phenomenon obviously has a long history. I do not see a systematic distinction or usage in Husserl’s terms and thus usage of ‘technique’ to refer to the phenomenon appears justified. In the same spirit, Dorion Cairns suggests ‘technology’ as the English equivalent for both Kunstlehre and Technik (1973). 19.  This conclusion concurs with my earlier investigation, made without reference to Klein, that formal logic depends upon an ungrounded assumption of its relation to individuals in a double sense. In a sense pertaining to the reference of the morphology of judgments “below” to the “ultimate substrates” (Husserl) that they categorially form, it is assumed that there subsists a truth-in-itself independent of that formation. More important in the present context is the teleological assumption that “truth requires not merely logical form but a relationship of this form to an appropriate individual content . . . The relation to individuals involves the intention of formal logic to bring individuals to determination in knowledge” (TE 37). If this teleological relation

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is not a relation to intuitive fulfilment of individuals as Husserl thought, then the applicability of formal judgment-systems to purported individuals must be understood as a specific kind of adumbration. The term adumbration (Abschattung) is a technical term used by Husserl to refer to the manner in which a perceived object is seen as a whole but always from a given side in an adumbration of the whole (Ideas1 86ff.). This adumbration remains a forming of such contents by technique and therefore may also be called technical action—which was the basis for supplementing Husserl’s analysis with reference to the work of Max Horkheimer and Hannah Arendt (TE, ch. 4 and 5). 20.  Thus, the notion of a “system” is, as Heidegger says, specifically and definitionally modern (Heidegger 1985, 29ff.). It is this phenomenon that grounds the experience of the “retreat of Being,” as Heidegger calls it, that corresponds to Husserl’s concept of crisis in modernity that prompts phenomenology to undertake its healing vocation. Consequently, the circular relation that Hegel attempts to establish between ancient and modern knowledge is not valid since the full concretion as an individual cannot be recovered from the standpoint of systemic structures. It is this invalidity that prevents the phenomenological diagnosis and attempted healing of modernity from simply inscribing itself within the Hegelian-Marxist problematic of alienation. Hegel described this problematic in this way: “Hence the task nowadays consists not so much in purging the individual of an immediate, sensuous mode of apprehension, and making him into a substance, that is an object of thought and that think, but rather in just the opposite, in freeing determinate thoughts from their fixity [als vielmehr in dem Entgegengesetzen, durch das Aufheben der festen bestimmten Gedanken . . .] so as to give actuality to the universal, and impart it to spiritual life” (Hegel 1979, 19–20; Hegel 1952, 30). Due to the nature of formal, symbol-generating abstraction as an “abstraction of abstraction,” not simply as an abstraction, ancient and modern knowledge are not “just the opposite” as Hegel asserts. It is this purported opposition that grounds the alienation-and-return circle. 21.  See Max Weber’s definition, where “the term ‘technical’ applied to an action refers to the totality of means employed as opposed to the meaning or end to which the action is, in the last analysis, oriented” (Weber 1964, 8). I previously engaged in a detailed critical analysis of Weber’s concept of rationality as technical as background to Max Horkheimer’s theory (TE 66–88; Angus, 1983). 22.  Late in his life Marcuse made initial attempts to include an ecological dimension into Critical Theory (Marcuse 1992; Marcuse 1972b). This was done on the basis of a Freudian theory of aggressiveness. Without doubting the validity of this approach, it is significant that he did not see a development from the theory of technology in One-Dimensional Man as a possibility. The current account provides the ground for such a development.

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The Institution of Technique as Digital Culture

For Husserl, the crisis of the European sciences is based upon the mathematization of nature and the arithmetization of mathematics which leads to a crisis of (European) humanity insofar as such humanity is based upon reason. While Marcuse’s conception of one-dimensionality seems to describe a mutuallyreinforcing and inescapable relation between Galilean science and lifeworld practice, we have shown that the relation between Galilean science and technical action requires two key elements: First, a more complex concept of technology as a complex of techniques. the lifeworld is made up of a plurality of technologies, such as the automobile system, the medical system, etc., not of isolated techniques. Second, the perception of an individual object as specifically individual rests upon a horizonal consciousness that situates it within a given lifeworld and implies a transversal ecological dimension to the critique. To conclude this Part of the investigation, we must bring the concern with technique and technology up to the present by considering its digital character. The issue of digital culture and whether it constitutes a contemporary crisis for meaning and value that continues the crisis diagnosed by Husserl devolves upon the role of the algorithm in constituting and structuring cultural meaning. This is the contemporary form of the crisis instituted by mathematization. The relation between formal science and lifeworld is based upon a technical adumbration of the lifeworld as ground that gives rise, in a contemporary context, to culture in a digital form that in which the issue of the loss and restoration of meaning takes the form specified by Husserl. The present chapter will show at what points and in what respects meaning and value would have to appear within digital culture in order for the crisis to be overcome (though we cannot address the conditions for its overcoming until chapter 9 of our text where digitization is considered in the context of human motility and labor). 111

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4.1 WHAT IS THE DIGITIZATION OF CULTURE? In beginning to define the phenomenon of the digitization of culture, we can take a clue from the structure of the word “digitization” itself in which the suffix “ization” means “putting into the form of” where the form in question is “digit,” or, more commonly, “digital.” Digitization is an active process of putting into digital form that which is not initially in such a form. It is also the case that contemporary cultural products may be inscribed directly into digital form, though cultural production in general has not been in digital form. Digitization of culture refers both to the direct inscription of cultural products into digital form and the putting of cultural products not originally in that form into digital form. It is thus both a primary and a secondary cultural process: primary in the sense that it affects the form of some contemporary cultural products in their process of production and secondary in the sense that those which were not so affected in the process of production are affected by being subsequently translated into that form. Digitization not only says something about the leading edge of the contemporary cultural process but also something about how the contemporary cultural process incorporates and transforms cultural production and heritage that does not occur at this leading edge. Digitization is most often defined through the sign system in which the algorithm is expressed. As is well known, the digital form is a series of ones and zeros in a binary code. A complex code, a code with many possibilities for inscription of a signifier, conveys a great deal of information with a very few signs. For example, since the English alphabet contains 26 signifiers, the mere inscription of a single signifier excludes 25 possibilities. A code of several hundred signifiers would exclude several hundred minus one possibilities at each inscription. A binary code, by contrast, excludes only one other sign and thus conveys very little information with each inscription. If, however, a very large number of inscriptions are made, the simple binary code can convey a large amount of information. A cultural product in digital form is a number, that is to say, an abstract formal sign that, like any sign, is understood as such within a certain code. The simplicity of the binary code requires that the number be exceptionally long. It is this combination between a minimal code and very large capacity of storage that defines digitalization in a technical sense. Texts, photographs, etc. in digital form are expressed as extremely long binary numbers and it is the difference between these numbers that expresses the difference between the cultural products. However, application of the theory of number to digitization yields only a technical definition, that is to say, a definition of its internal structure. It does not extend to the use of number in human making or doing, nor, more

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specifically, to the role of digitization in a crisis of human meaning and value. While cultural products are expressed digitally as numbers, they function to give a certain form to culture in its role within human experience. We may call this a cultural definition of digitization that would pertain to its primary and secondary roles in culture and the formation of such culture from human experience. Clearly, in the secondary process, where a pre-existing cultural form is translated into digital form—such as the scanning of a text or photograph and insertion of that scan within a downloadable document—the digital form is a representation of another cultural form in the sense that it both refers back to that prior form and contains the content of that prior form within itself. Furthermore, it refers back in such a way that the content of that form is made available through the digital form so that it is not only a representation of a prior form but also an experiential form which is experienced itself as a cultural content. At least in the case of the secondary process, digitization is both the representation of a cultural form and a cultural form itself. In the case of the primary process of digitization of culture, where a cultural content is inscribed directly into digital form—such as the writing of a text on a computer or taking a photograph on a digital camera and its insertion within a downloadable document—it is clearly a cultural content as an experiential form. However, due to the digital form of inscription, the cultural content is already copied and communicable and therefore represented so that—even though there is no prior cultural form to which it refers—the digital form immediately refers to the cultural content that it itself is. Therefore, the digital form of culture, whether as a primary or secondary process, is both a cultural content and the representation of that same cultural content. The numerical form of digitization, its internal form as captured by a technical definition, when applied to a cultural content expressing human experience, functions to enable an identity of a cultural content with its representation. Digital culture is this making-identical of content and representation through the numerical form described in the technical definition of digitization. Since the content of a cultural expression contains cultural knowledge, and the representation of a cultural content makes that knowledge available in a shared framework, digitization of culture is both knowledge and communication. Because of the identity of content and representation in digitization, knowledge and the communication of this same knowledge become identical. The form of digitization collapses the distinction between knowledge and communication—between what is known and persuasion to utilize what is known, or, in the widest possible optic, between science and rhetoric (Angus, 2005b). The digitization of culture inaugurates the collapse of this classical distinction because the relation that it establishes between numerical form

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and cultural content establishes the representation and thus iteration of this cultural content identically with the inscription of the cultural content itself— an identity of inscription and iteration. The digitization of culture institutes information as iteration of the identical content and representation of culture. In order to understand the concept of information as the central institution of digital culture, we must understand how it collapses both knowledge into the form of information and communication into the form of information, such that information is both knowledge and its communication. Information is the cultural definition of the digitization of culture that raises the question of whether information provokes a crisis for culture by undermining an integration of reason with meaning and value. The ground for an investigation of the institution of digital culture is the contemporary convergence of knowledge and its communication based upon an iterable inscription that is simultaneously the representation of itself. 4.2 INFORMATION AS FORM OF KNOWLEDGE Information is a form of knowledge that consequently refers to an aspect of the world about which it is knowledge. It formulates, or gives a certain form, to that knowledge. That form is distinct from other forms of knowledge about the world—say, in speaking, writing, singing or drawing—even though these other forms can retrospectively be characterized as containing information. Knowledge in the form of information is a historical late-comer that nevertheless can be used to describe some common content of other forms of knowledge. 4.2.1 Information as Cybernetic Circuit The form of knowledge in information conveys two fundamental aspects of knowledge: its quantitative aspect and its relational aspect. Information is knowledge of which one may have “more” or “less,” “enough” or “too much.” It is knowledge understood primarily from the side of its quantity, even though to characterize this quantity it requires a reference to “context,” as we usually say very generally, but more exactly to the relational aspect of that information. One has enough or too much information in relation to other information with a greater or lesser proximity, or relevance, to the information in question. The quantity of information is defined through its relational aspect and the relational aspect is defined through an information system. An information system is an organized array of mutually pertinent information.

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We may recall here that a cybernetic system—such as a house with a heating regulator inside itself—functions as an internally organized, self-steering, self-correcting, system in relation to its environment such that, while the organization of the internal system responds to the external environment, it is its internal organization that defines the nature of this response. Feedback is a method of controlling a system by reinserting into it the results of its past performance. If these results are merely used as numerical data for the criticism of the system and its regulation, we have the simple feedback of the control engineers. If, however, the information which proceeds backward from the performance is able to change the general method and pattern of performance, we have a process which may well be called learning (Wiener 1954, 61).

Internal self-regulation distances each internal component from its environment by routing this relation through the totality of internal organization. Each internal component of the system reacts to environmental influence through the structuring of the whole system and not individually. This internal organization, which thereby achieves a high degree of self-monitoring and self-correction, is constituted as such by each internal component of the system functioning as information for the other components. A person inside a house with an internal heating regulator benefits from the maintenance of the temperature of the house at an approximately even level—say between 20 and 22 degrees Celsius—and does not normally need to pay attention to when the heater is functioning and when it is off. However, should the person feel too cold, then it is possible for that person to raise the temperature of the self-regulating sensor. Ideally, this re-setting of the regulator achieves a new equilibrium at which the person feels more comfortable. Note here two things: that changing the regulating level of a self-regulating system, in this simple case, requires an actor who resets the sensor. If the sensor could reset itself, except on a preset model such as a recording device that regularly resets daytime and night-time sensor temperatures, it arguably becomes a living system because the sensor itself becomes an actor. This circular organization constitutes a homeostatic system whose function is to produce and maintain this very same circular system by determining that the components that specify it be those whose synthesis or maintenance it secures. Furthermore, this circular organization defines a living system as a unit of interactions and is essential for its maintenance as a unit; that which is not in it is external to it or does not exist. The circular organization in which the components that specify it are those whose synthesis or maintenance it secures in a manner such that the product of their functioning is the same functioning organization that produces them, is the living organization (Maturana and Varela 1980, 9).

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In responding as a self-organized system to environmental prodding, such that the sensor re-sets itself differently to monitor the functioning of the system as a whole, the sensor acts as the overseer of the whole information system—the part that regulates the whole in response to environmental prodding. This would be the bottom line of a biological, living system as opposed to the physical, first-order cybernetic one. The second thing to note is that the person who feels cold feels cold. From the viewpoint of the system, the feeling cold functions as information for the re-setting of the regulator. Feeling cold becomes information by being registered within the relational context of other information such that it functions as information. But one can feel cold without it becoming such information. I may simply remain cold because it is not my house to alter or because I can’t afford more oil or gas. Information contains a reference to what I called previously a “cultural content,” or in this case a physio-cultural state of feeling cold, but it is not this aspect of material cultural content itself. This is precisely what is achieved by the intensification of internal organization such that reference to the environment is routed through the totality of the system rather than each component individually so responding. The form of information is quantitative relation to other information within an organized system not directly to states of affairs outside those relations. The development of the concept of information from that of a self-regulating, cybernetic system means that information is simultaneously both the movement of information within a system and the self-monitoring and self-regulation of that system. Practice and the theory of that practice collapse in cybernetic information. Knowledge has become information in a form that converges with its communication. 4.2.2 From Information to Emergent Meaning This preliminary characterization of information as a quantitative and relational form of knowledge allows a more detailed schematization of levels of complexity of information. This schematization elaborates a cultural definition of digitization, which refers to the way number in its digital systematization functions within human experience by inserting this form into the basic process of cultural formation and transmission. The smallest amount of information is the piece.1 A piece of information can only defined as the smallest amount with reference to the topic or theme where it functions as information—that is to say, the relational totality of relevant information. This determination is impossible without a much greater and more complex arrangement of information than the piece itself. There is always more than one piece of information but the relevance of a piece depends upon a totality of information, not its reference to an element of the

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experienced world, and can in that sense only be defined retrospectively, as it were, as a piece of a totality. This totality of information can appear in two forms: as an indeterminate multitude of other pieces of information or as a totality organized by a theme. Here we have, in nuce, the cultural problem of information: there is a great deal of it and it isn’t necessarily organized into a meaningful whole. The problem of the meaning and value of the digitization of culture is, in large part, contained in the issue of how a plethora of pieces of information might be selected and organized to become a meaningful whole. And the cultural failure to be able to institutionalize this process of selection and organization may indeed be called a crisis of meaning and value. We may distinguish three higher-level collections of pieces of information that are built upon this primitive piece. There is a pile of information, which is an unorganized larger collection with indefinite magnitude made up of individual pieces of information. Such a pile exhibits the cultural crisis: we have piles of information without any sense of the relevance of piece to pile or overlap of piles. We are awash in such a plurality of piles such that the coherence that a culture requires to organize its sense of meaning and value is lacking. The crisis is that we don’t know when we have enough information, when we have too much, or whether the information being gathered is of any real relevance. Out of several piles of information, a bunch of information might, under certain conditions, be constituted—and here we would have the first step out of the crisis. I use the term “bunch” here thinking of a bunch of grapes or flowers, or fingers bunched into a fist. It signifies in the first place a significant number—at least a pile, and maybe several piles—but, more importantly, a pile with a certain sort of discernible, though perhaps weak, organization within itself. Flowers are bunched by florists according to their shape and color; grapes are bunched by the logic of growth in their stems; a fist is bunched by its fingers and cannot contain a toe. The transformation of a pile, or several piles, into a bunch involves the problem of emergent organization that can, if sufficiently followed through, lead to the organization of knowledge in the form of information into cultural knowledge pertinent to the organization and persistence of a culture in time and space. If we can determine, in micro-logical fashion, what happens to turn a pile into a bunch, then we begin to address the construction of meaning and value in a culture of information. Bunches of information can be collected into a discourse. By a discourse I mean an organized presentation of bunches of information that elaborates a coherent perspective on a theme. The term “discourse” breaks from the primarily quantitative terminology that precedes it to emphasize the achievement of internal qualitative organization such that cultural meaning

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is expressed and the discourse itself can enter into a wider relation between discourses that address meaning and value. Now, all we have done here is to propose a terminology that aims to aid the definition of the problem of the crisis of meaning and value in the culture of information. The terminology can neither solve the problem nor even assert that the problem can be, in principle, resolved. It does, however, pinpoint where such a resolution is to be sought and what would constitute the possibility of such a resolution. How, out of the combination of higher collections of pieces of information, can a meaningful whole emerge that would be comparable to earlier discourses of cultural meaning and value that did not begin from the quantitative and relational form of information? The fundamental difference that distinguishes this proposed form of emergent meaning from information from earlier meaningful cultural wholes is that such earlier wholes were articulated in the first place as wholes with parts whose place within the whole was thereby determined. Their relative natural worldview, to use Max Scheler’s terminology, was given as a whole whose wholeness expressed meaning and value (Scheler 1980, 74). Their problem, therefore, was to ask how a given situation that implicated a distinct part of the cultural whole could be understood and evaluated in relation to that cultural whole. Questions were oriented, first, to how this situation should be characterized in relation to what distinct parts of the cultural whole and, second, to how the cultural whole determined the meaning and value of the part. Our problem is the inverse, though not the exact inverse: In any situation there is a plethora of information. Any piece of information co-exists with an indefinite, but very large, plurality of other pieces of information. Every piece of information thus appears within an indefinite horizon that may be represented by the internet as the source of multitudes of more information. Our problem is how individual pieces of information within this indefinite horizon can become sufficiently organized to express meaning and value without falling back into the persistent background buzz of accumulating information. Out of this organization, through the process of emergent meaning—if there can indeed be such a process—would be constructed a subject of discourse that could engage in the constitution of cultural meaning and value. The many discourses today that lament the decline of the subject, and the crisis of meaning, basically assume that such a process of emergent meaning is impossible so that contemporary digitized culture cannot be a culture in anything like the sense in which one used to talk about cultural meaning. A contemporary subject of cultural meaning would be an emergent property of higher-level collections of information. Overcoming the crisis of meaning and value produced by the digitization of culture would have to show that an emergent structure that could confer

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subjectivity and meaning is indeed possible under certain conditions even in the age of information. But before addressing this fundamental issue, let us address the second aspect of information brought forward by the collapse of knowledge and its communication: information as a medium of translation between media of communication. 4.3 INFORMATION AS MEDIUM OF TRANSLATION Prior to the convergence of knowledge and its communication in information, one could distinguish between knowledge as a cultural content and its communication, or, in classical terms, philosophy and rhetoric. Communication can be studied from the viewpoint of its cultural content and its influence on the socio-cultural formation or it can be studied from the viewpoint of the medium of communication that conveys the cultural content from place to place, or subject to subject, to exert an influence. If one focuses on the cultural content of communication, the specificity of the medium of communication recedes, whereas if one focuses on the medium of communication, the cultural content recedes in favor of the material relations constituted by the medium. Since the phenomenon of the digitization of culture includes within itself the possibility of the communication of cultural content (knowledge)—that is to say, the dispersal through the internet and related channels—focus on the medium of communication is essential to pose the question of the implications for meaning and value. 4.3.1 Theory of Media of Communication A medium of communication sets up a relationship between a point of origin and a point of termination of the communication that is inscribed within a given medium. For example, a relationship between a speaker, author, or sender and an auditor, reader, or receiver. The nature of this relationship is defined by the specific character of the medium in each case. So that the relationship between speaker and auditor, in the case of the medium of speech, sets up a face-to-face relation that, consequently, includes aspects of appearance, gesture, and timbre. Author and reader are separated by an indefinite distance and therefore do not meet face to face but through a text that is written on paper, papyrus, scroll, or computer screen. Appearance, gesture and timbre are absent but finished, iterable, and portable text allows for an individual distanced from surrounding social relations to be absorbed in the meaning of the text, to reflect upon it, to return to check it, and to later communicate with other readers of the same text (who read it at widely separated

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times and places). The study of various media of communication, their inherent features and interactions, including the way in which they affect social relationships and the circulation of meaning in a culture, is now an established field of study called “media ecology” (Angus 2000b, 37–8). However, in the context of the digitization of culture, the main concern is not the shifting relationships between media of communication, or the media ecology itself, but rather the status of digitized communications within the media ecology. It is often unclear whether the digital medium should be treated as a new medium of communication in principle comparable to other media such as speech, scroll, book, radio, television, etc. or whether it is an influence—perhaps an external influence based in electric or computer technology—that acts on all media. The latter captures something of the truth insofar as any content of any medium can be translated into a digital form. This is why digitization poses a crisis for cultural meaning and value and is not just a shift within the media ecology. But a closer look will allow a more exact definition. If we look at a computer screen as a contemporary user experiences it, we experience in succession written text, recorded speech, diagrams and illustrations, photographs, video, music, musical notation, etc. Each of these might previously have been considered a separate medium. But nowhere do we experience “the digital” as the content of the screen. The computer screen that connects with other computer screens sets up a determinate lateral relation between users. Much has been made of the “network” relation that computer communication constitutes. Enthusiasts often claim that such non-hierarchical networks prefigure a new form of democracy, whereas conservatives wonder whether the speed and immediacy of contact eliminates the space required for reflective thought. The social relationship that inheres in computer communication is indeed of the network kind and this is undoubtedly of significance, but it neither can the fact that other, perhaps all, different media of communication appear on the screen suggests that digital communication is not a medium in the same sense as the other media that it often uses and portrays. Let us note a couple of aspects of this situation: First, while different media and their contents are portrayed, or represented, on the screen as a content, this is done in a manner that re-embeds them within the network social relations of digital communication. As Marshall McLuhan often reminded us (McLuhan 1964, 60), media are not simply separate and in the media ecology the content of a new medium is often an old medium. The huckster, the town crier, and the play appear on television, for example. In so doing, the previous media become content in the sense that they are what is represented while the social relations that were constituted by the old medium disappear in the

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new. It seems clear that this also happens with digital communication: books downloaded to be read appear alongside other digital possibilities and within the network social relations that it constitutes. In this sense, digitization is a medium like previous media in that its constitutive social relations re-situate those of other media as its manifest content. However, we should note also that the fact that these materials appear alongside each other allows for them to be edited and assembled in new ways. Again, we may see an analogy in the way that television allowed selling, announcing and entertaining to enter into new relationships. But there is something more going on with digitization: All of these media forms—including the computer form, if we wish—can be translated into and out of each other through digitization such that digitization is a universal medium of translation of cultural contents. It translates the contents of any medium into itself and thus can, with great speed, edit and re-assemble them, and then re-embed the new content in another medium—either itself or in printed form as a book, a photo, etc. The aspects of representation and constitution are in principle collapsed through a universal medium of translation even though the final content becomes re-embedded in a specific medium where the constitutive social relations of that medium apply. This distinction is not often clear because we tend to assume—living, as we do, within the predominance of the digital medium—that the re-embedding will always be of digital form. This, even though we often print up written texts and use them as if they were written manuscripts in a manner that is in principle no different than happened many years ago. Digitization functions as both a universal medium of translation and also as a specific medium comparable to others in that its specific network social relations prevail when re-embedding is within the digital form.2 Digitization is both a specific medium of communication and a medium of translation between media of communication. While previous media translated other media when appropriate and possible, digitization is distinguished by its possibility of universal translation and also by the fact that, since it obviously co-exists with itself, re-embedding of the translated contents is likely to be within the digital medium. Perhaps we should reserve this latter possibility for consideration of the digitization of culture: not only the translating of all prior cultural content into digital form but the re-embedding of the products of such translation within the digital medium. 4.3.2 Digitization and Cultural Meaning We need then to isolate what aspects of this full digital medium of both translation and communication pose issues for cultural meaning and value. It is no

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secret that the key aspect of digital translation and communication is speed. Conversely, we may say that every form of limited translation between media prior to digitization required an essential delay characteristic of the medium in question. It takes time, for example, for a book to be read into an audio recorder. A culture, which may be defined as a media ecology in temporary equilibrium, can be defined formally by the speed, or delay, in translation between media. It is defined substantially by the cultural content transmitted through the media ecology—which is to say, equally by those silences constituted by what is untranslatable between media of communication in the media ecology. Delay in translation sets the formal boundaries of cultural content and innovation, whereas the cultural content that is itself communicated is simultaneously haunted by the impossible translations of content that construct the cultural unconscious—that which is not sayable within the media ecology or is pushed to its margins by the dominant media. Thus, we may now say that a central structuring feature of digital culture is its nearly simultaneous translation/communication such that the boundaries of previously separate cultures are routinely transgressed. Such transgression means that products of digital culture are necessarily interpreted within different cultural meanings than those that dominated during their production. Digital culture in this sense subverts any established context of interpretation, or “relative natural worldview” (Scheler), and replaces such previously stable contexts with the necessity for an interpreter to establish a context of interpretation.3 Cultural interpretation becomes transversal and abandons the problem of depth. To summarize, while previous cultural productions were produced and interpreted within relatively stable contexts of meaning, so that it was the search for an adequate interpretation that dominated cultural meaning, contemporary digital culture produces the search for a relevant context of interpretation and tends to regard any proffered interpretation as simple one possible interpretation among others (Poster 2006). If we understand culture at least provisionally in this fashion, as defined by the media ecology, then two characteristics of digitization stand out: First, speed of translation and communication means that delay in translation between media is increasingly reduced to zero. Second, digitization as a universal medium of translation means that the silences produced by impossible translations are increasingly reduced to zero. This is the basis of the common observation that information is accelerating beyond all capacity to follow it while the meaning of such information is increasingly hard to fathom. Digitization of culture does indeed pose a crisis for culture because, without delay and silence, culture approximates a pure transparency without relatively stable meaning and value. This transparency is often the subject of either utopian praise or dystopian blame because it undermines any stable context of mean-

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ing, but it is more significant at this point to ask what such transparency does to contemporary possibilities for the interpretation of cultural meaning—for “crisis” understood as both loss and recovery in Husserl’s sense. The form of communication as information through universal translation between media means that communication converges with knowledge. A meta-medium of translation is the basis for defining the specific form of knowledge inherent in each medium. Communication in this form converges with knowledge as self-monitoring to become the form of information. 4.4 INTENSITY, VALUE AND EMERGENT MEANING The difficulty of a diagnosis of crisis is that one has to show how a grave issue arises necessarily, and not merely contingently, within the current situation and simultaneously, through this same diagnosis, how this grave issue can be overcome. Crisis is neither decline nor ascent. It is a moment of decision in which the necessity of decline and the possibility of ascent are grounded in the phenomenon itself such that the diagnosis points the way to a possible solution but does not guarantee an outcome. We have seen that information becomes the central institution of digital culture by collapsing knowledge into the form of information and communication into the form of information, such that information is both knowledge and its communication. The question animating this analysis is the significance of the digitization of culture for meaning and value. We have seen that information is both knowledge and its communication, content and representation; it operates within a self-monitoring and self-regulating network; it is a universal medium of translation of cultural contents which can define the knowledge-boundaries of different media of communication. Our two parallel inquiries lead us to two convergent aspects of the digitization of culture: Since every piece of information occurs within a horizon that includes an indefinite, very large, number of pieces of information, how can an emergent structure appear within a pile of information? Since the speed of digital translation and communication reduces the delay traditionally attached to cultural translation and communication to approximately zero, which means that the silences that constitute the unconscious of a cultural form also reduce to approximately zero, how can meaning and value arise from a transparency of cultural meaning? Recovery of meaning and value through emergent meaning implies that—unlike the subsumption and organization of individual meaning by an overweening “relative natural worldview” in traditional meaning-systems— emergent meanings might contain the possibility of bottom-up meaning construction.

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The clue here is in the observation that in the construction of a circuit of information “feeling cold” motivates the sensor to re-establish a renewed equilibrium between regulator and environment. “Feeling cold” in this context functions as information for the whole information system even while the “feeling cold” itself is left outside by that system since the perceiving itself is not information but perception. Information is quantitative and relational insofar as it is registered within the system. Whereas, even for a node within the system, the feeling of the “feeling cold” is a state of affairs, or a perception. In other words, the rendering as quantitative and relational renders the specificity of the registering of the state of affairs as irrelevant to quantitative relationality. Note that this “feeling cold” does not refer to a subject outside the information system, but to a node of perception within it. Similarly, we will not appeal to a pre-constituted subject external to the epoch of information but to perceptual nodes constituted within it. Nevertheless, the difference between a registering perceptive state of affairs and its quantitative-relational reckoning within a total information system still applies. The quantitative-relational reckoning may be metonymically indicated by the personal computer, which is a machine which is an objectified form of reason that functions by means of algorithms. As a universal Turing machine, a personal computer is capable of executing any and all algorithms—limited only by storage space and executing time which, for purposes of thought, we can project as approximating infinite space and zero time. An algorithm is an effective procedure for searching, collecting, or calculating connections that produce results. In the internet-connected computer, those results are not only produced but also communicated or transmitted. Information processing in computer use is also a form of voting, one might say, since search engines monitor themselves so that the most common results vote to come up more frequently. In particular, the personal and geographical indexing of searches means that previous results are more likely to appear again (Heersmink 2017). Moreover, the tendency to base public decisions on such algorithmic procedures poses the danger of the undermining of moral and political decision-making by “algorithmic governance” (Danaher 2016). The sum total of such uses constitutes a cultural field structured by a value-hierarchy determined—not in relation to ultimate values such as are expressed in religions, science, or metaphysics—but solely in terms of an internal counting of preferences. Thus, information is not only a system of knowledge and communication but a value-system that determines what we want to have knowledge about. As Ed Finn has put it, “the same processual logic of value that drives Bitcoin is remaking other cultural forms as well. We are learning from, or being influenced by, algorithms and computational systems that elevate process to the status of value” (Finn 2017, 176). Information processing is an

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abstract culture-machine that threatens to become a closed, replicating system and thereby to operate independently of what we used to regard as humanly organized systems of value. The only place at which an externality enters into this system is at the input stage—let’s say, the point at which one decides to input something into a search engine. And note: to the extent that inputs are determined by previous results, or the counting of previous searches collapses your inputs into others, this input itself becomes part of a closed cultural system. Thus we must ask: how can “inputs” be made in a manner that would puncture this closed, self-reproducing field and open it to reflection so that value is not just received but forms emergent meaning? It is the registering node within the information system but also prior to it that, when cancelled or ignored, produces the crisis of digital culture. Similarly, it is the generation of a different form of registering from this registering node that can overcome the crisis. As delay and silence approach zero, the node is cancelled as a registering site to become almost entirely transparently absorbed into the information system as a whole. But this absorption can never be complete. It is in the small and continuous difference between complete absorption and the singularity of the registering site that the crisis and healing of digital culture occur. How does this difference appear and how can it be widened into cultural meaning and value? If the registering at the registering site is accepted as itself a phenomenon of interest, the speed of absorption is slowed and from this delay originates the emergence of structuring of piles of information. This phenomenon may be called intensity. We have spoken in one phrase up until now of “meaning and value” but whereas “meaning” traditionally would be considered prior to a higher-level valuation, I want to suggest that this relation has reversed because of the epochal form of information. The root experience of value is the significance of the singularity of the registering site as a site for interest and investigation to which the term “intensity” refers. The intensity of the registering is the delay of absorption into the information circuit that provides the motive for structuring piles of information that constitutes value and thereby the meaning of such piles as they become bunches and discourses. The intensity producing the input may become the source of overcoming the crisis of value and meaning through a recovery of humanly-grounded value. The subject registers with a specific intensity, a valence we might say, through which certain features of the lifeworld are more or less significant, more or less value-laden, than others. This intensity grounds the subject as actor and therefore the reflective component that may disrupt the selfreproducing circuit. Input may be made with an intensity but is threatened by a subsequent closure and replication such that it comes to be determined by the monitoring of previous results. To the extent that the results are not

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determining but the intensity remains determining, the computer could become an inertial object bound by human value systems. To the extent that the results become determining, through their subsumption to the counting of other results, we are threatened by a crisis of meaning and value. Recovery through reflection comes from a certain open-ness to what makes one a subject, that in which one is already immersed, and a risk that what surges up may be given form by the subject. But this “surging-up” can be neither created nor controlled. One must risk the open-ness to intensity by dismantling the cultural self-protections that attempt to close it off. Such an embrace of the singularity of the registering site focuses on the intensity of the registering as that which in the registering is not taken up into the circuit. It is a localizing move (Angus 2008, 13–36). This intensity becomes structuring as a value which grounds the emergent meaning of bunches of information. It is a risk taken at the registering site, and even by the registering site, which is co-extensive with philosophy itself. Once the node becomes a site or location, and not merely a node in a circuit, as a result of the intensive singularity of its registering, value and meaning emerge to structure information. Such value and meaning institutes delays and silences that form the horizon of a culture. In this way a culture would be instituted that is not digital culture but an emergent culture within digitization. Such an emergent culture is the project of a phenomenological recovery of subjectivity that can ground meaning and value. The essential role of the singularity of the registering site is where the fundamental issue for the recovery and redesign of meaning and value can be located. Its intensity cannot be addressed within the scope of the arithmetization of experience, nor the hegemony of the algorithm, but must await posing that issue in the context of human motility (in chapter 9 of Part III below) where it is a matter not only of representation but of action. NOTES 1.  We previously used the predominant term “bit” but distinguished it from its intra-technical meaning. It now seems clearer to adopt a different terminology entirely for the cultural definition of technology and classification of information (Angus, 2009b, 113–6). 2.  The recognition of this universality of translation that is becoming ubiquitous in contemporary civilization is they key factor that takes media analysis from being a mere catalogue of different forms toward a general theory of culture. “Now that we have extended not just our physical organs but the nervous system, itself, in electric technology, the principle of specialism and division as a factor of speed no longer applies. When information moves at the speed of signs in the central nervous system,

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man is confronted with the obsolescence of all earlier forms of acceleration, such as road and rail. What emerges is a total field of inclusive awareness” (McLuhan 1964, 103). “The general digitalization of channels and information erases the differences among individual media” (Kittler 1999, 1). 3.  This is a universalization of the changed situation of the classical practice of quotation that I have previously analyzed. “There is a reversal here of the relationships of (in)completion as they occur in traditional quotation. In quotation, the single quotation is incomplete in the sense that its complete meaning depends on the whole text—the original text, the new text, and the relation between the two. Incompletion is on the side of the quotation whereas completion is on the side of the whole text. In contrast, a bit of information is complete since it is single and closed upon itself, whereas its proximity to other bits through the infinite addition made possible by the Internet renders it incomplete. The larger structure is now incomplete; the smaller structure is complete. Is it any wonder that knowledge has come to mean bits of information?” (Angus 2009b, 116).

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Chapter Five

Representation and the Crisis of Value

The mathematization of nature, which is the first innovation in the Crisis, poses the issue of the relation between formal abstraction and the lifeworld. The “crisis of the sciences” is neither a matter of the existence of formal abstractions nor of the lifeworld considered separately, but of the grounding of formal abstractions in the intuitive givenness of the lifeworld so that the meaning of science for human life can be formulated and addressed philosophically. The crisis itself is therefore a crisis of culture, specifically a crisis of meaning and value due to the loss of subjectivity in contemporary culture. The healing role of phenomenology consists in the recovery of subjectivity as the ground for meaning and value that can provoke a renewal of culture. As we have seen, the crisis described by Husserl in the 1930s is still with us in more contemporary forms such as digital culture. This chapter will address the manner in which value enters into the philosophical basis of critique in the thesis of the crisis of the sciences and diagnose the manner in which the model of Galilean science discounts the social representation of value in any other form than an unthematized, quantitative aggregate of values. 5.1 THE HEALING ROLE OF PHENOMENOLOGY IN ITS NECESSARY REFERENCE TO VALUE The Crisis articulates a transcendental history of modern reason as a struggle between the loss of meaning due to formalization and the recovery of meaning by phenomenological philosophy. For the crisis of modern reason to be an internal crisis, and not an ungrounded external evaluation, the Renaissance claim to freedom through reason must be an internal component of any science in the modern form. Diagnosis of the “loss of meaning and value” rests 129

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on the institution of modern science as a reformation and universalization of Greek philosophy to become the guiding telos of the socio-cultural form. The institution of Greek philosophy and its reformation in the Renaissance as the central claim to freedom through reason is compacted in Husserl’s account through the reference to “Europe.” “Europe” is the home of this rational selfformation such that any special distinctiveness that it might claim from other socio-cultural forms derives from the institution and reformation of philosophy. Europe thus functions in the diagnosis of crisis as a value and not as a geographically, or even culturally, descriptive term. Europe as value-form is the presupposition of diagnosis which grounds the possibility of recovery. The concept of the lifeworld functions in a similar manner. Husserl’s account of the mathematization of nature requires the concept of the lifeworld to be able to pose as an issue for phenomenological clarification how the idea of a mathematically substructed true world behind appearances could be constructed from the “subjective-relative” evidences of the lifeworld. Paralleling the account of the institution of Galilean science, Husserl claims that grounding formal reason in the lifeworld can restore the meaning that has been lost in emptying and externalization. The lifeworld thus functions, both in diagnosis and healing, as the fundament of meaning upon which phenomenology can account for emptying and restoration of meaning and value. “Meaning and value,” in the manner in which it functions here, does not refer directly to a given specific meaning—that might be characteristic of a given socio-cultural group, or inherent in a praxis, for example. It functions as the locus of meaning and value per se, that is to say, the diagnosis of crisis does not claim that a given, assumed meaning has failed to be incorporated into modern reason. It claims that modern reason, through formalization, has lost its necessary reference to the world of meaning and value as such. “Europe” and the “lifeworld” thus refer to the sphere of value in its relation to reason and experienced meaning. In this broad reference they function as overarching values that link reason, and its multitude of scientific forms, to the transcendental-historical struggle for freedom through meaningful reason. The concepts are distinct, however, in that “Europe” incorporates a reference to the historical institution of a distinct, geographically delimited site, whereas the “lifeworld” is an immediately universal reference to the site of human meaning and value immanent in practical activity. These philosophical concepts base themselves upon meaning and value as encountered within the lifeworld, form meaning in accordance with reason, and in so doing make judgments about the significance of experiences such that certain activities are encouraged. Value bases itself upon the interweaving of meaning and reason that both diagnosis and healing of the crisis of the sciences presupposes, but it requires also significance and praxis. We are concerned with value in

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the sense of the meaning embedded in one’s activities that justify and prefer participation in the lifeworld. “Significance” refers to an order of priority within meaning and, as we have seen, meaning is operative in the lifeworld. “Praxis” refers to activity in the lifeworld that is constituted as meaningful doing. In short, the claim of phenomenology to heal the crisis of the sciences is only possible because the diagnosis of crisis already is a discourse of value incorporating judgments of significance as embodied in practical activity. The three senses of history that we have distinguished—contingent history, transcendental history, and event—are distinguishable because the conceptual vocabulary of phenomenology, and philosophy, occurs within the sphere of value and is compressed in the concepts of “Europe” and “lifeworld.” Husserl’s reflection on the historical character of his investigation a few sections after his account of the mathematization of nature thus claims that “our task is to make comprehensible the teleology in the historical becoming of philosophy, especially modern philosophy” (C 70). This orientation toward a goal that the Crisis articulates is a consequence of the event through which the transcendental, universal, conceptual vocabulary of philosophy becomes a significant praxis whereby modern philosophers become “functionaries of humanity” (C 17; K 15, translation altered, italics removed). This philosophical task is possible because every institution has an instituting beginning and a completing end toward it is oriented such that it structures the experience of those who live within it. But to every institution [Urstiftung] essentially belongs a final establishment [Endstiftung] assigned as a task to the historical process. This final establishment is accomplished when the task is brought to consummate clarity and thus to an apodictic method . . . . At this point philosophy, as an infinite task, would have arrived at its apodictic beginning, its horizon of apodictic forward movement. (C 72, translation altered, emphasis added; K 73)

An institution like nursing, for example, assigns the task of “caring for the sick” within itself due to its initiating and completing moments. The value of “caring for the sick” is taken on by individuals, carried forward by them such that some individuals’ practice may become a model for the practice itself, but the task itself belongs to no individual as individual but to the institution itself. The institution contains a value within itself which is “assigned as a task” to individuals within the institution such that they have something to live up to—such that their activity has significance. So, too, the modern institution of philosophy, has assigned as a task the unity of reason and meaning such that diagnosis of crisis and the vocation of healing are conferred upon phenomenology. The task is the value within the institution that becomes an event within history such that history is no longer merely contingent but

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is becomes the carrying-forward of significance. The text of the Crisis thus not only makes reference to the sphere of value, not only bases itself on the sphere of value, not only attempts to restore the relation between culture and value, but articulates this goal as a task, a significant practice, of the restoration of value in the discourse of reason. We have shown that the Crisis is structured through the claim that objectivism is the central problem of modern philosophy such that the recovery of subjectivity is the central philosophical task and that only phenomenology sufficiently overcomes objectivism to establish the struggle for the meaning of humanity in our time. This understanding grounded our interpretation of the three innovations in the Crisis that has guided, and will continue to guide, our inquiry. We noted that this interpretation suggests a revision of Husserl’s, and Fink’s, projected structure for the Crisis, specifically that it implies that their projected Part IV—which would have been an encyclopediac survey of the sciences showing their grounding in phenomenology. We are now in a position to justify this demotion of the task of a critical survey of the sciences which Husserl and Fink placed after the three innovations upon which we have focused and immediately before the final re-statement of the role of phenomenology in humanity’s self-responsibility. In Fink’s words, the subject of this to-be-demoted section was “the idea of all sciences being taken back into the unity of transcendental philosophy” (C 400). In 1923 Husserl gave one formulation of the relation of non-formal sciences to value. But in the domain of the human sciences, it is not merely a matter of rational ‘explanation,’ as in the case of nature. With the human sciences, a very special manner of rationalizing the empirical domain appears: the normative judgment according to universal norms, which belong to the a priori essence of ‘rational’ humanity. And the guidance of actual practical activity according to the very norms to which the rational norms of practical guidance also belong (R 328).

There is no doubt that the sphere of value plays a more central role in the human sciences than in the formal-mathematical ones. Nonetheless, the role of value in reason, though it is especially pertinent to them, cannot be formulated and justified within the human sciences themselves—not even from an encyclopediac survey of them all.1 The “guidance” of which Husserl speaks in this text refers to the “task” defined within an institution. For such guidance to be brought to the practice of the human sciences, the constitution of a task as an assignment of value must have investigative priority. The assignment of value through relation to the lifeworld regarding any claim of reason must be the more fundamental investigation of phenomenological philosophy. This, we suggest, is the real penultimate moment of the recovery of subjectivity toward self-responsibility.

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In a manuscript from 1922–3 that is quoted by Ulrich Melle from the Husserl-Archives in Leuven (F I 29, 6a), Husserl stated that “the philosophical-scientific doing becomes itself a branch of ethical doing and at the same time a necessary means of each ethical doing in general” (Melle, 1991, 127). This statement fits with the orientation to value as the penultimate stage of the logic of Crisis that we have suggested. A phenomenological account of such an enactment of value would address the fundamental issue of Husserl’s introduction of the concept of the lifeworld into the institution of modern reason: that formal-analytical systems must be grounded in immediate intuition in order to heal the emptying of meaning and technization necessarily entailed by formalizing abstraction. But such an immediate intuition, as we have shown through an appropriation of Jacob Klein’s historical account of formalizing abstraction, cannot be in the form of an immediate intuition of the applicability of formal systems to individuals as Husserl assumed. In contrast, systematic formalization implies that the applicability of formal systems to domains of experience is through a connection between a (previously abstracted and developed) system and a domain of experience. It is this application that we have now anticipated must be formulated as an intuition of value. Such a phenomenology of value will be carried out in detail as the current analysis develops. We can, however, anticipate two issues of that analysis through the central concepts of “Europe” and “lifeworld” which undergird Husserl’s phenomenology of modern reason. “Europe” is a concept of the third sense of history. It is an event within empirical history in which the transcendental necessity of a socio-cultural form committed to reason irrupts into empirical history (comparable to Husserl’s reference to writing in the Origin of Geometry). It is “one” in this sense even though its unity has taken a great deal of contingent history to emerge. Moreover, it was necessary that the irruption of reason into empirical history occur somewhere, that is to say, while in transcendental history reason is pervasive throughout, it must irrupt into empirical history somewhere such that its consequences spread out gradually and contingently. “Europe” is the site of the transcendental necessity of reason becoming instituted within contingent history. For now, we simply note the role of value in this irruption of transcendental history into empirical history through the event. In chapter 12 we will investigate in detail the limitations of “Europe” as a delineation of this event. The concept of the “lifeworld” poses parallel issues. The life world is, as we recall, is the world of subjective-relative experience that nevertheless contains the ungrounded assumption that it is the same world for us all (C 23). This paradox derives from the role of the concept of the lifeworld as referring to the contingent histories of a plurality of cultural-civilizational groups as well as to the necessity, based in transcendental history, that humans live

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in such a plurality of groups.2 Involvement in a cultural-civilizational group involves accepting as valid the assumptions grounded in a way of life that requires certain beliefs and ways of thinking for that way of life to continue. Within such a group, beliefs and thoughts are grounded in a way of life, a form of acting, which is distinct from other such forms. In a complex world, where these cultural-civilizational forms are not simply separate but interact and affect each other, the borders of a cultural-civilizational group involve the interaction between forms of life. The lifeworld is thus both a form of action in a cultural-civilizationally defined way of life (contingent history) and the necessity for humans to be residents of a cultural-civilizational form of life (transcendental history). It contains a universality of address, unlike the concept of “Europe,” because it does not refer to location within contingent history. The concept of the lifeworld thus straddles contingent and transcendental history without addressing the necessary irruption of the latter into the former (as in the cases of “writing” and “Europe”). It thus contains within itself the paradox inherent in the idea of a “science of the lifeworld” that I have called the “second innovation” of the Crisis. We will take up the inquiry from this point in Part III of this text. The crisis of the European sciences is an internal crisis of modern sciences because the Renaissance institution of human autonomy through reason that is a recovery and transformation of the Greek institution of philosophy is the context for their original institution and subsequent development. They are European sciences insofar as they are located within a history of reason that is an activity of socio-cultural achievement within the lifeworld. Together, these two concepts describe the institution of reason through which Husserl can describe the crisis as an internal crisis and not merely as an absence of reason: the absence of reason in contingent, empirical history; the necessity of reason in transcendental history; and the necessity of an incursion of reason into empirical history as an event. Thus, the critique of reason is given to us as a task whose goal, or final completion (Endstiftung), in the making of a full concept of reason active in the lifeworld, defines the present as a crisis in which this task can be abandoned or continued. 5.2 PHENOMENOLOGY OF VALUE The critical locus of Husserl’s thesis of the crisis is the voiding of experienced value in the lifeworld through the universalization of a Galilean scientific paradigm in which value is scientifically non-existent, non-represented within the sphere of reason. Let us draw upon the phenomenology of value,

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understood as a formal axiology, to articulate this thesis specifically with reference to its component of valuation. The term “axiology” refers to the perception of value in the things of the world that underlies the disciplines of aesthetics, economics, and ethics.3 “We shall employ the term ‘value’ as a philosophical equivalent of the goodness, the excellence, the desirability and what not which we attribute to certain sorts of objects, states, and situations: such value is very plainly correlated, and correlated in principle, with attitudes that we call ‘valuations’” (Findlay 1970, 6). Such an axiology is “formal” insofar as it does not justify specific judgments of value but attends to the conditions for such perception of valuable things within the horizon of the world. In Logical Investigations, Husserl described the experience of value-perception with reference to the idea of a “good soldier.” He resolves the statement that “a good soldier should be brave” into the idea that “only a brave soldier is a good soldier,” which means that bravery is a value that inheres in the essence of being a soldier as such (LI 82). Concrete phenomenological description suggests that it is not the case that things in the lifeworld are perceived as value-free things to which values are then added “subjectively,” as it were, as one might think if one were to begin from the abstract sign-systems predominant in Galilean science and political economy. Rather, the perception of a soldier, in its very soldier-ness, involves a judgment of value—that a “good” soldier is brave, whereas a soldier who runs away is a “bad” soldier. Goodness and badness are inherent to the essence of soldiering, such that it is perfectly sensible to say of a soldier who runs away that he or she is not a real soldier, because the “reality” or “essence” of soldiering involves a valueladen practice. As Steven Crowell says, “the normative statement’s validity depends upon a non-normative, purely theoretical, account of what a soldier is (a functional definition)” (Crowell 2002, 49). The essential definition itself contains a set of practical activities endorsing a value to which the object must measure up. Husserl goes on to say that “the sum total of these basic norms plainly forms a closed group, determined by our fundamental valuation,” such that a normative sphere is characterized by a basic norm which is a standard through which all valuation within that sphere is determined and which constitutes its unifying principle (LI 85). Pleasure functions as a basic norm, for example, of a scientific hedonism or utilitarianism. In the first period of Husserl’s ethical and axiological researches, he was concerned to determine the order of rank of values within a hierarchy of presenting, feeling and willing as a parallel to the problem of truth in epistemology (Husserl 1988, 3–4). Winthrop Bell summarized this approach as “the realm of all that which in any possibility ought-to-be is definitely characterized—it is the realm of values. [. . .] The formal laws yield a

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systematic discipline corresponding to formal logic” (Bell 2012b, 312; see also Hart 1997b, 193–4). A second period saw the abatement of this hierarchy and a certain restriction of rationalism insofar as the holding of a value by a person or community came to the fore (Donohoe 2004, 128–9). In Husserl’s later ethics, science itself becomes an ethical enterprise, such that reason is always a striving for reason, and the “rationalization of everything spiritual— according to norms, or according to normative, a priori disciplines of reason, of logical, axiological and practical reason” has a “value-creating significance” (Ideas1 329). This introduces two significant elements that mitigate Husserl’s earlier axiological rationalism. The individual, in being an individual personality, has personal values that are absolute. “With values that receive their personal meaning from the depths of the person and from personal love, there can be no choice and no ‘quantitative’ differences, no differences of weight” (Husserl, manuscript B I 21, 53a quoted in Melle 1991, 131). Such individual values derive from love—which one can attach to the specific way of being an individual person—rather than from reason, since reason as source would prescribe an identical set of values for each individual. Husserl’s prime example of such individual value is the love of a mother for her child. In such an act of mother-love “I do not merely feel joy, but in so feeling posit the act as good and valuable” (Crowell 2013, 270). While the child as person has a value as a person among other persons, for the mother the child has an absolute value and is in this sense not comparable to other persons. As Husserl comments, “my child is the ‘closest’ to me, and therein is contained an irrationality of the absolute ‘ought’” (Husserl, manuscript A V 21, 119b quoted in Melle 1991, 134). This irrationality, in the sense of rational unaccountability, characterizes the distinctiveness of the person and both the form and the specific content of attachment to others and things of the experienced lifeworld. One expression of this unaccountability or absoluteness is the choice of an individual vocation. One person may choose to be a teacher and another a social worker or a scientist; there is no contradiction between these choices, since many vocations are needed and a personal calling underwrites the choice—so that it is not a choice that is mandated for everyone. Yet each of these values is absolute, such that “there is no hierarchy of goods when absolute oughts conflict, precisely because the oughts are absolute. Thus, one ought has to be sacrificed for another” (Donohoe 2004, 135). In such a situation there is no rational basis for choice. An individual value is not simply a value in general, that is, under the tacit condition that a greater value is not in question, a value whose practical feasibility would absorb the lower value in question. Rather, an individual value, a value which exclusively concerns the individuality of the person and the individuality

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of what is valued, can by no means be absorbed, but only sacrificed (Husserl, Manuscript E III 9, 33a quoted in Melle 1991, 132).

Precisely because there is no order of rank between personal values, “the destruction of an absolute value remains a dis-value, it remains a burden on the soul” (Melle 1991, 132). One may say that in making such sacrifices the person becomes the specifically individual person by settling the lived relation between personal values.4 The relation of individual and community thus necessarily rules out a straightforward identity, which would undermine the individuality of the individual. Rather, it entails a conception in which the individual has a certain vocation that fits into the whole in a certain fashion expressing that individuality (Drummond 2000, 40-1; Heinämaa 2014, 207; Donohoe 2004, p. 138). The whole is thus not a mere sum of individuals but a community of qualitatively different parts that expresses a value-laden communal spirit— what Husserl called a “personality of a higher order” and which Karl Marx referred to as the “social individual.” This, as Husserl noted, is because it is a “personal world” in which objects of value have an “intersubjective usevalue” where “subsequently it is further seen as a ‘commodity’ sold for that purpose” (R 197–8). In the interest of brevity, let us summarize three characteristics of a Husserlian description of the essence of value in which, as James Hart notes, “the ‘ought’ is not disconnected from the ‘is’ [. . .] on the other hand, the ‘ought’ is not simply derived from and dependent on what actually is” (Hart 1997b, 217). A thing (noema) is perceived as valuable (eg. useful, beautiful, or worthy of respect) within one’s practical attachments in the experienced lifeworld when it stands out as not only itself but also a structuring force within such practical attachments. A judgment of value operates within practical attachments as one of a plurality of values that, taken as a whole, structure the relative natural worldview of a given group. Such values are always for a person acting within the social group. It takes a person to perceive a value, and to take that value personally, even though values are not created by persons but inhere in things. In being for a person, though existent within a community, a value takes on significance for both person and community through an emotion. “The valuable properties of things, according to Husserl, are disclosed by the emotions or feelings” (Drummond 1995, 170). The degree of personal attachment may be measured by the willingness to sacrifice one value for another. In short, there is a meaningful thing whose value is part of its essence, a purpose situated within the structured order of values, and an emotional intensity determined by the individual’s attachment as a personal value which locates both the value and the person within the community’s structured order of values. A value has meaning, purpose and emotional intensity. The meaning

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and quality of the value is in the thing, whereas its intensity is noetic and registered through sacrifice. The same value can be perceived as a value by different persons but its intensity varies according to its role in the scale of personal values. It is this intensity that locates the role of the person in the maintenance or construction of community. Values are rooted in practical activities and given in immediate intuition with an intensity experienced by a person. The willingness of that person to sacrifice competing values registers that intensity socially. Such decisions register both the irreducible irrationality—that is to say, non-universality or singularity—of that intensity, and its rationality, by making it socially significant and open to universal accounting. The social representation of value, through the “higher-level personality,” or the “social individual,” of a social group, at which the rationalization of such valuations given in intuition aim, is thus constituted by a non-homogenous totality of values determined by the character of the social group. Valuations given in this form are the ground for the concrete integration of individual and community aimed at by both Husserl and Marx, in which the role of the individual is not to take on the social form as such but to emphasize a certain aspect, from a certain direction, based in a personal intensity. A short comparison to Max Scheler’s social theory of value will serve to indicate the ground of the convergence between Marx and Husserl on a critique of the social representation of value which will developed below. Scheler developed the Husserlian intuition that “goods are, according to their essence, things of value” into the concept of the “relative natural world-view,” whereby a social group takes a certain view of the world to be the world as it is in itself: the world-view is taken to be natural by the group though the sociologist of knowledge can see that it is actually relative to that group (Scheler 1973, 9). “To the relative natural world-view of a group subject [. . .] belongs whatever is generally ‘given’ to this group without question and every object and content of meaning within the structural forms ‘given’ without specific spontaneous acts, a givenness which is universally held and felt to be unneedy and incapable of justification” (Scheler 1980, 74). The lifeworld of a given group is an organized but unquestioned structure of value-perception. As we will show in the proximate interpretation of Marx, in capitalist society the relative natural worldview, or system of general value, is reduced to being an unthematized aggregate of individual restricted values registered as prices. Similarly, Husserl’s connection of values to an individual person, such as expressed in a vocation, disallows a simply non-conflictual overall social system of value through the concept of “sacrifice.” Thus, Scheler’s

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phenomenological description of a social value-system can pertain only to pre-capitalist or non-capitalist social forms, while the issue within capitalism is how such a value-system can be thematized at all to become the object of a social representation of value.5 Husserl’s phenomenology of value is a formal axiology whose teleology is in the construction of a community from the specific, distinct contributions of each individual. But this phenomenology of value is articulated in Husserl’s work without reference to his late thesis of the crisis of the sciences that it is our current purpose to pursue. 5.3 CONVERGENCE BETWEEN HUSSERL AND MARX ON THE CRITIQUE OF FORMAL REASON Husserl’s Crisis analyzes the “inner dissolution” of the modern ideal of universal philosophy instituted in the Renaissance into a “theoretical technique” due to its reliance on a “relative, one-sided, rationality, which leaves a complete irrationality on necessary opposite sides” (C section 5; FTL 16–7). Marx’s critique of political economy implies a critique of reason, insofar as a critique of the special science of political economy involves a critique of the form of reason within political economy as well as an implication of a more comprehensive conception of reason that grounds the critique. There is a priority of phenomenology in this convergence since the critique of reason pertains to the conceptual and historical vocation of phenomenology as such, whereas the critique of reason within Marxism is subordinate to the ontology of labor and the logic of capital (which we will take up in Part III of this inquiry). From this convergence it is possible to stage a fundamental encounter of phenomenology and Marxism. We will approach the philosophical topos by which our time is situated in history from the teleology of the critique of reason, a critique that is, of course, simultaneously a struggle for reason. We may now suggest that Husserl’s analysis of the crisis of modern science, when modified by the consequences of Klein’s account of symbolgenerating abstraction, and Marx’s critique of political economy, understood as a critique of the reduction of general to restricted value, singly and taken together aim teleologically toward a phenomenological critique of the social representation of value. In other words, formal axiology is the domain in which the convergence between phenomenology and Marxism on the problem of the relationship of abstract sign-systems to individual objects of value can be effectively addressed.

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5.3.1 Formal Identity of the Critique of Reason in Husserl and Marx While the critique of reason is not the main focus of Karl Marx’s work, a critique of political economy requires a critique of the form of reason in political economy and thereby implies a more comprehensive conception of reason. In this sense, its structure is in formal identity with Husserl’s critique of Galilean science. Additionally, there is a critique of philosophy in Marx’s work that is formally identical to the necessary introduction of the concept of the lifeworld by Husserl in order to perform his critique of modern, Galilean reason. In The German Ideology, Marx and Engels defined ideology as an inversion of the relations between ideas and the social individuals who think ideas. “Individuals [. . .] have been conceived by philosophers as an ideal, under the name ‘Man.’ They have conceived the whole process [. . .] so that at every historical stage ‘Man’ was substituted for the individuals and shown as the motive force of history” (Marx and Engels 1978, 192). Philosophy becomes ideology by creating an abstraction and positing the actual individuals as predicates of that abstraction, such that the historical process appears to be the product of the abstraction Man acting as a force supervening individuals. Thus, ideology tells the story of the history of ideas as if ideas had a history apart from the individuals who thought and expressed the ideas. Since Hegel always represented the apogee of philosophy for Marx, he insisted on distinguishing his dialectical method from Hegel’s: “For Hegel, the process of thinking, which he even transforms into an independent subject, under the name of ‘the Idea,’ is the creator of the real world, and the real world is only the external appearance of the idea” (Marx 1963a, 102). In phenomenological terms, “we measure the life-world—the world constantly given to us as actual in our concrete world-life—for a well-fitting garb of ideas, that of the so-called objectively scientific truths” (C 51). Marx called this garb of ideas “commodity fetishism.” Both Marx and Husserl—the first through the concept of “real individuals” and the second through that of the “lifeworld”— aimed to turn philosophy away from ideology by a recovery of concrete thinking rooted in lived experience. 5.3.2 Critique of Formal Reason in Marx’s Capital, Volume 1 We need to turn from these formal identities toward the actual content of Marx’s critique of reason. His critique of reason is embedded in the account of the logic of capitalist society. Capitalist society is defined as the system in which labor-power has become a commodity and thus commodity relations extend to the whole of society and nature. Insofar as any thing or being appears in the capitalist world it appears as a commodity or an owner of a com-

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modity. This universalization of commodity relations occurs because human labor has become a commodity; for this reason, the analysis of capitalist society is grounded on an ontology of human labor through which human being is formed historically in an interchange with nature mediated by technology. There are necessary limits to the social representation of value according to the first chapter of Capital, Volume 1. This text traces the logic of the “pure” capitalist system, in the sense that it abstracts from the historical admixtures that necessarily comprise an actual social form. In this context, we restrict our discussion of Marx to the social representation of value as price. (His view that the origin of this system is to be found in the commodification of labor will be taken up in Part III of this text—which is concerned with the lifeworld and the living body as the ground of scientific reason.) Capital begins with an analysis of the “immense collection of commodities” that constitutes the form of wealth on the surface level of capitalist society (Cap1 125). A commodity is both a use-value and an exchange-value. A use-value depends on the concrete and specific characteristics of a thing such that it satisfies a human need; it is an “individual object” in Husserl’s sense. Marx sees nothing problematic in use-value as such, since it is simply the appropriation of nature for human use, and he is far removed from any attempt to classify some needs as fundamental and others as superfluous or to restrict human needs to certain goods. The enigma thus resides in exchange. One commodity can be exchanged for a given quantity of another commodity, which gives rise to money as the universal equivalent that mediates the relations between the entire immense collection of commodities. A quantity of money, or a price, signifies the value of a given commodity in relation to another commodity and, since each commodity has a price, to commodities in general. We may then designate the value represented as a price as the restricted value of a given commodity as a fraction of the aggregate value of the entire collection of commodities. Correlatively, we may designate the value of the entire collection of commodities to be the aggregate general value. Since capitalist society registers value through exchange, and in no other fashion, we may conclude that the system of universal equivalence renders the value of a commodity socially as a restricted quantitative measure and the totality as a general aggregate. But the point here is not only the distinction between restricted and general concepts of value but that a commodity price system reduces general value to restricted value. The totality of value present in a given society is only available through the sum of restricted values of specific commodities. The total system of value is present as simple aggregate of restricted values so that it is never addressed as such by any actor, neither pursued nor actualized directly, and is rarely focused upon as such.

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General value is no more than the non-thematic, unintended sum of individual valuations registered as prices. The social representation of value is through a system of exchange whereby the specific, concrete uses of commodities are left aside and left without social representation. Of course, when one buys a specific commodity, one buys it precisely for its specific qualities, but these specificities concern only the user for the act of using and are not registered socially except as a quantity with a given price. As Marx says, “the exchange relation of commodities is characterized precisely by its abstraction from their use-values,” whereas “use-values are only realized in use or consumption. They constitute the material content of wealth, whatever its social form may be” (Cap1 127, 126). Wealth refers to the concrete character of uses that a society produces and distributes; in a capitalist society, wealth takes the form of restricted and general value in a quantitative system of mensuration in which general value is simply aggregate restricted value. The social representation of wealth—or “value” in the wider axiological sense—thus bears no relation to the concrete characteristics that constitute that wealth for the individuals who comprise that society nor to the social sum of individual valuations. Thus, in capitalist society there is always a struggle to represent in socially compelling form one’s use-derived experience of value against its systematic rendering through a system of quantitative mensuration as a restricted quantity of an unthematized general aggregate—for example, the way in which one’s environmental concerns are registered socially through the willingness to pay a higher price for goods with better ecological records. The crucial and much-discussed section at the end of chapter 1 on commodities, entitled “The Fetishism of Commodities and Its Secret” claims that there is a systematic lack of social knowledge by the social actor in the capitalist mode of production. Critique of political economy is thus fundamentally a critique of fetishism and the analysis of fetishism rests upon a critique of the form of reason operative in social action that is carried over into the specialized science of political economy. The fetishism attaching to the commodity form is due to that form itself but, since use is unproblematic, it originates in exchange-value, which is registered by price. The core of the fetishism of commodities is that relationships between humans appear as relations between things. This occurs only in capitalism. Consider, as Marx does, the case of simple commodity production prior to capitalism where producers of commodities make their products independently and then bring them to the market to be sold. In this case it is true that the relations between producers are not established until they exchange their products and therefore that whatever social relation they have is established through the mediation of products. But in capitalist commodity production, production is not by

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independent producers but by an already social process of production such that the equalization of the products of labor in exchange entails the equalization of the independent labors exercised in their production. The independent labors are each a fraction of the total social labor that creates the collection of commodities. But, because the relation between labors appears to be established through that of their products, it is “precisely this finished form of the world of commodities—the money form—which conceals the social character of private labor and the social relations between the individual workers, by making those relations appears as relations between material objects, instead of revealing them plainly” (Cap1 168-9). Commodity fetishism consists in the systematic concealing of the social relations of producers by the quantitative system of mensuration that represents and regulates the relations between products. The social relations of producers thus occur “behind their backs” and cannot be brought under conscious control. This systematic absence of self-knowledge in social action is reproduced in an apologetic scientific form in political economy such that it produces a systematic lack in the social representation of value. Commodity fetishism thus is, in both social action and political economy, the name for a necessary absence in the social representation of value due to the hegemony of the system of quantitative mensuration in exchange. 5.4 INSTITUTION OF REASON IN THE RATIONALIZATION OF VALUES Phenomenological philosophy is the struggle for reason through a critique of limited, one-sided reason that voids meaning and value within a historical crisis of culture. This struggle for reason can only be recovered in the contemporary world through its teleology toward a rationalization of values. Practical activities in the lifeworld generate valuations that are experienced with an intensity through which they aim toward social representation. Marx showed that the value-structure of capitalist society expels qualitative value to subjective use and imposes a homogeneous quantitative standard on the social representation of value. The social representation of value in capitalist society thus intervenes into the constitution of the community by individuals to reduce its relative natural worldview, or system of general value, to the unthematized simple sum of restricted values registered as prices. Thus rationalization of values, while it aims at a system of general value—or a relative natural worldview in Scheler’s terminology—is reduced to the status of an unthematized aggregate by the structure of capitalist society. Relying on Marx at this point, it is clear that in capitalist society the relative natural worldview,

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or system of general value, is reduced to being an unthematized aggregate of individual restricted values registered as prices. Thus, Scheler’s description of a social value-system pertains only to pre-capitalist or non-capitalist social forms, while the issue within capitalism is how such a value-system can be thematized at all to become the object of a social representation of value. The contradiction in our current situation is that critique of one-sided reason aims at social representation of general value while such representation is systematically reduced and blocked from rational accounting. Values are rooted in practical activities and given in immediate intuition with an intensity experienced by a person. The willingness of that person to sacrifice competing values registers that intensity socially. Such decisions register both the irreducible irrationality—that is to say, non-universality or singularity—of that intensity and its rationality, by making it socially significant and open to universal accounting. The social representation of value, through the “higher-level personality,” or the “social individual,” of a social group, at which the rationalization of such valuations given in intuition aim, is thus constituted by a non-homogenous totality of values determined by the character of the social group. Valuations given in this form are the ground for a concrete integration of individual and community aimed at by both Husserl and Marx in which the role of the individual is not to take on the social form as such but to emphasize a certain aspect, from a certain direction, based in a personal intensity. It is this possibility that is systematically discounted by the necessary absence of the social representation of value in any other form than an unthematized, quantitative aggregate of values registered by prices. Recovery of value struggles with an attempt to re-instate a traditional hierarchy of values, on one hand, and the capitalist form of value as an an unthematized, quantitative aggregate of values registered by prices; the value-laden integration of individual and community may emerge through the sacrifice by which individuals form their character and make a contribution to a social recognition of value. Value, in the sense pertinent to overcoming the crisis of the European sciences, will thus be an emergent universalization which integrates individuality and commonality through the perception of individuals in relation to their lifeworld horizon. This emergent universalization aims at what may be called a differentiated community. NOTES 1.  Such a displacement of the encyclopediac orientation does not negate the fact that it is meaningful and significant in the practice of any science to address its foundational abstractions and concepts whereby its relation to phenomenology may be shown and thereby integrated into the self-responsibility of humanity. Nonetheless,

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it does claim that such a task, undertaken in relation to every existent science (as is implied by its placing as the penultimate stage of the logic of the Crisis) is not a necessary route for establishing the task of self-responsibility. Husserl’s Crisis-text, in the structure that Fink and, apparently, he himself projected for it, contains the assumption that an encyclopediac survey of the sciences in the style of the 18th century Enlightenment is a necessary stage for the recovery of self-responsibility. We suggest in contrast that it is the relation between a knowledge-claim and the lifeworld that is fundamental. 2.  The term “cultural-civilizational” refers to the specificity of a way of life within a given lifeworld. It will be justified in chapter 11 in order for it to become a fullfledged concept in Part IV of the text. 3.  The origin of the discipline of axiology is still debated. Most histories refer to Eduard von Hartmann, Grundriss der Axiologie (1908) but Wilbur Urban in his Valuation: Its Nature and Laws (1909) both claims to have constructed the term himself in two articles for The Philosophical Review in 1902 and also refers to Christian Ehrenfels’ System der Werttheorie (1897) (Urban 16, 35ff.). J. N. Findlay attributes the introduction of the term into philosophy to Urban as a translation of Werttheorie whose origins reached back to the Austrian economist von Neumann and philosophers Ehrenfels and Meinong (Findlay 1970, 1). 4.  Jan Patočka has developed Husserl’s concept of sacrifice in a direction that is problematic in the present context. He argues that its mythico-religious origin shows that sacrifice is a binding of oneself to something higher and therefore that the apparent loss is simultaneously, and more importantly, a gain, such that the term “sacrifice” is in the end a misnomer. While it is true that the higher value is not created by the person, it is nevertheless affirmed by the person in a significant manner that I have called “intensity.” Intensity involves the assertion that the value will have a place in the person’s lifeworld. It is thus quite possible that the binding to a higher value comes at the cost of the life of the person—and therefore also the other personal values of that person. If so, it would seem that Patočka’s revocation of the term “sacrifice” is not warranted: the binding to a higher may also be a sacrifice of not only the lower but of other higher values. I say this cautiously in light of Patočka’s own sacrifice, not to disagree with him about the joy of binding to a higher value, but to say that, even so, sacrifice is not revoked because what is lost would only be “lower.” This “lower” is the very condition for the assertion of “highness,” not only this higher but all other highers to which the person is open and whose intensity propagates (Patočka 1989, 336). 5.  It has been recognized by Phillip Blosser that the problem of human agency is a difficult one for Scheler’s purely objective theory of value (Blosser 1997, 163–4).

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Concluding Remark to Part II

Part II has concerned itself with explicating and extending Husserl’s thesis of the crisis of the European sciences with regards to the mathematization of nature. It criticized Husserl’s assumption that the recovery of meaning and value could be found with reference to “individual objects” underlying the formalizations of logic and mathematics—finding this assumption to be operative also in Herbert Marcuse’s and Enzo Paci’s appropriations of Husserl. Marcuse’s thesis of a one-dimensional lifeworld was seen as a valid continuation of the crisis-thesis but as failing to provide the necessary connection between formal science and the proliferation of techniques in the lifeworld. That understanding provoked two concepts—technology and horizonal consciousness—that imply, though they do not yet theorize, an ecological dimension to phenomenology. The crisis of meaning and value was shown to extend to digital culture due to its necessary failure to theorize subjectivity—which would arise in the “registering site” that orients digital responses. Considering meaning and value directly as axiology, it concluded by showing that the goal of individually differentiated community aimed at by both Husserl and Karl Marx is systematically disallowed by discounting the social representation of value in any other form than an unthematized, quantitative aggregate of prices.

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Part III

THE LIVING BODY AND ONTOLOGY OF LABOUR

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Chapter Six

Science and the Lifeworld

Beginning from the mathematical substruction of nature, which is the first innovation in the Crisis, we have outlined in Part II the crisis of reason, value, and culture that results in formal abstraction from meaning and value when such formal abstraction is taken as exemplary for knowledge. While the hegemonic model of formal abstraction disallows an adequate representation of meaning and value, nevertheless the realm of practical activity in the lifeworld provokes an intensity of attachment to value that threatens to unsettle this systematic failure of representation. We showed in an overview of the Crisis that the first innovation concerning the mathematization of nature allows Husserl to distinguish the second innovation of the project of a phenomenological transcendentalism understood as a science of the lifeworld from Kant’s still objectivist transcendentalism. Part IIIA of the Crisis is thus entitled “The Way into Phenomenological Transcendental Philosophy by Inquiring Back from the Pregiven Lifeworld.” Progression from the first to the second innovation is a shift from the issue of representation to one of the lifeworld that, as we shall see, is a world of kinaesthetic action including intersubjectivity, or human community, and its related world of things. The first section in this chapter focuses on uncovering the presupposition of the lifeworld, in the first place in Kant but by extension in all previous philosophy, such that phenomenology can define the project of the science of the lifeworld. The second section delineates the fundamental characteristics of the lifeworld thus uncovered and describes the ground for a synthesis between bodily motility as understood in phenomenology and living labor as understood by Marx. We may recall our conclusion in the Part II of this text that concrete, qualitative individuals are not to be found as simply underlying scientific universalizations, but in an orientation of individual perceptions 151

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and actions to the horizon of the lifeworld. It is now suggested that bodily motility, or kinaesthetic action, is the form of lifeworld subjectivity which constitutes such an individual-horizon relation. Kinaesthetic action in the lifeworld converges with Karl Marx’s concept of social labor. This convergence was noted and explored by Jan Patočka and Ludwig Landgrebe in the context of the rediscovery of Marx’s early Hegelian, or perhaps post-Hegelian, works in the 1930s. At the conclusion of his discussion of the lifeworld in Part IIIA, immediately prior to raising the “paradoxical enigmas” with which Part IIIA ends, and which we have called the third innovation of the Crisis, Husserl speaks not of the science of the lifeworld but of its ontology. This significant shift poses the issue of the relation between science and ontology that is the subject of the third section. The fourth section explains the significance of Marx’s ground-breaking focus on labor as the ontology of the lifeworld for the institution of labor in a Husserlian sense. It sets the scene for the next two chapters which interpret Marx’s ontology of labor as transhistorical and the regime of value as its capitalist form. 6.1 PRESUPPOSITION OF THE LIFEWORLD Paragraph 28 of the Crisis, which begins Part IIIA, is an abrupt statement of the fact (according to Husserl) that Kant’s regressive critique could not reveal the operative function of the “intuitively given surrounding world” even in scientific practice (C 104). While Kant’s critique of previous rationalism showed that it had never asked the question of how an exact science of nature was possible and, consequently, turned to the subjective ground of such knowledge to ground its possibility, nevertheless “from the very start in the Kantian manner of posing questions, the everyday surrounding world of life is presupposed as existing” (C 104). Husserl presents his discovery of the lifeworld as a reflection on Kant’s philosophy—in the first place because Kant’s philosophy is the greatest previous critique of ungrounded rationalism based in the mathematization of nature. This makes all the more sense since the critical history of modern rationalism in Part II ends with the necessity to distinguish his own (Husserl’s) transcendentalism from Kant’s. Here, as elsewhere in his late period, Husserl presents his philosophy as a radicalization of the dominant neo-Kantianism of the time. But a closer look shows the route through Kant to be superficial. First, the presupposition of the lifeworld is merely asserted by Husserl to be an unaddressed assumption in Kant’s work; it is not derived as a critique of the inadequacies or limitations of this work. In this form, it could have been asserted

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as against any other representative of a rationalism built on the assumption of the validity of Galilean science. Kant’s eminence is merely that he is the last, great representative of this tradition, who was especially important after the 19th century “return to Kant” still significant in Husserl’s time, not that he in any sense prepared the way for Husserl’s assertion. Moreover, Appendix 8 of the German edition of Krisis expresses doubt about the reference to Kant and suggests that a revision of this text would give a non-historical, phenomenological exposition of the presupposition of the lifeworld (K 435–45). Thus, it may be suggested that the apparent continuity of the historical critique of European rationalism, which is still maintained in the Crisis-text as Husserl left it, might have been revised, were there enough time, in a manner consistent with the implications of the second innovation. The lifeworld does not emerge out of the history of modern European rationalism, not even through the Kantian critical investigation of its possibility, but as a discovery of what has been covered over and forgotten within that history. To use the terms developed in chapter 1 that distinguished three senses of history, this discovery is not possible as empirical, factual history but is a constitutive feature of the institutional history that is revealed by transcendental history. It is operative within the institution but revealed by a transcendental inquiry. From this point of view, it is the abruptness of Husserl’s introduction of the presupposition of the lifeworld that is most striking, an abruptness that signals its unprecedented nature within European rationalism. In anticipation, we may remark that the discovery of this presupposition depends upon the transcendental-phenomenological reduction—a theme that we will address in Part IV of this text. The first, limited, partial sense of the lifeworld emerges insofar as it is presupposed by scientific inquiry. Every scientific inquiry utilizes the prescientific, intuited practical lifeworld in undertaking the inquiry. The mathematical scientist, for example, or the biologist, or human scientist, communicates with fellow scientists using language, tools, etc. and requires material culture such as buildings, transportation, etc. The lifeworld in this sense is not the subject-matter of the science but is rather pregiven due to the fact that scientific inquiry is a human project that requires the human community and its organization of the practical, material world to be undertaken. As Husserl says, “in this life-praxis, knowledge, as prescientific knowledge, plays a constant role, together with its goals, which are in general satisfactorily achieved in the sense which is intended and in each case usually in order to make practical life possible” (C 121). It may not be surprising that every science is a human activity and thus depends upon the practical organization of the human world to be pursued as a project. However, when this observation is combined with the modern ideal of a universal science amassing knowledge in progression

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toward infinity which is an intrinsic aspect of the very idea of modern science, it becomes clear that a science which presupposes the lifeworld in this manner cannot overcome the crisis since it rests upon unclarified presuppositions. The lifeworld understood in this partial sense pertains to its functioning within the activity of scientific inquiry understood as a human project. There is, however, a more extensive, universal sense of the lifeworld that comes into view when we reflect that all human beings are not scientists and, indeed, even scientists are not always acting as scientists—they may be on holiday or driving to work. The lifeworld is presupposed not only by science as a practical activity but by all humans in their practical activity. If we set aside science as a human project for a moment, we can see that the presupposition of the “straightforwardly intuited world” (C 123) underlies all human activity without restriction. The question then arises as to what is the essence of the lifeworld and form of inquiry appropriate to it. The lifeworld thus appears in three ways. First, as we have seen in the previous Part, it pertains to the sense in which immediate evidences underlie and ground (or fail to ground) scientific evidences. Second, and most universally, the lifeworld functions as the “universal unthematic horizon” (C 145) within which all practical activities occur. All activity, whether scientific or not, is given as taking place “within the world,” that is to say, occurs within a complex of a multiplicity practical activities comprising a form of life. Such activities themselves occur within horizons, so that, eventually, due to the imbedded character of ever-widening horizons, every activity occurs within the universal horizon of the world. Our normal orientation is “toward whatever objects are given, thus toward the world-horizon, in normal, unbroken constancy, in a synthetic coherence running through all acts” (C 144). But once this presupposition of the lifeworld is made thematic, the possibility of a third orientation arises: one may be oriented toward the horizon of the world itself. “The difference between the manner of being of an object in the world and that of the world itself obviously prescribes fundamentally different correlative types of consciousness for them” (C 143). Indeed, a truly universal science that could inherit the post-Renaissance ideal of universal knowledge that could direct practical life must be a science oriented toward the horizon of the world, and thus must investigate the lifeworld that is universally presupposed in all human projects. Phenomenology is this universal science and it is characterized above all by setting aside the presupposition of the world in the transcendental-phenomenological reduction. Phenomenology is thus not only a critique and restoration of modern science—which is its historical role in the period of crisis—but also a philosophical inquiry into the constitution of the world within which all human projects are pursued.

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6.2 THE LIFEWORLD AS BODILY MOTILITY ORGANIZED THROUGH SOCIAL LABOR Husserl’s first remark on the lifeworld is to establish the duality that we as humans experience in our located relation to other things. “In this world we are objects among objects in the sense of the lifeworld, namely, as being here and there, in the plain certainty of experience, before anything is established scientifically. . . . On the other hand, we are subjects for the world, namely, as the ego-subjects experiencing it, contemplating it, valuing it, related to it purposefully . . .” (C 105). We are both physical, biological and cultural objects among other objects and yet have a certain subjective access to the world in the manner in which we experience it. The duality between “an object among objects” and “subjects of validity” pervades our experience and, indeed, structures the way in which we exist with others, material culture, and nature since “everything that exhibits itself in the lifeworld as a concrete thing obviously has a bodily character, even if it is not a mere body, as, for example, an animal or a cultural object, i.e. even if it also has psychic or otherwise spiritual properties” (C 106). The emphasis on bodily character is not meant as a reduction to bodily characteristics alone, but rather to point out that any “higher-level” characteristics are grounded in a form of bodily appearance. They are “emergent properties” to use a contemporary, post-Husserlian term. Thus, a cross, a crescent moon, or a star may indicate symbolically higher levels of spiritual meaning but do so through a bodily “vehicle” that carries and transmits that meaning in the lifeworld. Even mathematics requires some bodily form, such as marks on paper or chalkboard, for the abstract, higher-level meanings with which it works to be operative for practicing mathematicians. 6.2.1 The Lifeworld as Bodily Motility The bodily character of things in the lifeworld is perceived in relation to the living body of the ego-subject. What Husserl calls the “living body” (Leib) is distinguished from the body as seen from outside, perceived and studied as an object among objects (Körper). The perceptive organs of the living body— eyes, ears, hands, etc.—are the means of access to the things of the lifeworld and, indeed, to other ego-subjects considered as objects among objects. These perceptive organs do not function singly but are organized into a synthetic field of perception that is rooted in the kinaesthesia of the human body. “All kinestheses, each being an ‘I move,’ ‘I do,’ [etc.] are bound together in a comprehensive unity—in which kinaesthetic holding-still is [also] a mode of the ‘I do’” (C 106). Perception is primordially a capacity, a doing, rather than a passive receiving, so that the living body is characterized above all by its

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motility, or self-movement. Husserl describes the manner in which the living body locates itself actively in the lifeworld through kinaesthetic synthesis as a “holding sway” (C 107). The Crisis is not the first appearance of the theme of the living body in Husserl’s work. Already in Göttingen during 1911–1914 Husserl’s phenomenology was at a crucial, transitional stage in its development due to the expansion of phenomenological research from epistemology and the philosophy of science into the domain of culture and cultural sciences.1 In this period Husserl was working and lecturing on the texts that became Ideas II—which is concerned with the scientific domains of material nature, psychic reality and the spiritual world—and Ideas III, which is concerned mainly with the relationship of phenomenology to fundamentals of science in psychology and ontology. While he expected that these subsequent volumes would be published rapidly after the first (LI 44), it turned out that neither would appear before the public until their posthumous publication in 1952. It is significant that Husserl expected that the appearance of Ideas II would deepen the understanding of phenomenology presented in Ideas I especially by showing its applicability to a wider range of problems that include the cultural sciences (Ideas1 xxi).2 Section Three of Ideas II deals with the constitution of the spiritual world in which one takes a personalistic attitude to other human subjects.3 One sees them, and interacts with them, as persons with a spiritual life. “In the attitude of the human sciences, the sciences devoted to the spirit, . . . the other spirit is thematically posited as spirit and not as founded in the [living, animate] human Body (Leib)” (Ideas2 214). Bodies are thus not seen in the same way as when regarded as either objects within natural science or even as animate beings within natural science. In the spiritual world the animate human body functions to express its spiritual life such that the process of mutual understanding and communication passes through the bodily expression to the spiritual meaning expressed. “The unity of Body (Leib) and spirit is a two-fold one, and, correlatively, a two-fold apprehension (the personalistic and the naturalistic) is included in the unitary apperception of the human” (Ideas2 259). Such spiritual meanings are constituted within the sphere of the cultural life of human persons as expressed by their living bodies (Ideas2 201, 250). This concept of expression has been broadened from that which Husserl elaborated in Logical Investigations in which it was limited to signs capable of intuitive fulfilment that could ground scientific knowledge. In this earlier text Husserl use of the term ‘expression’ explicitly ruled out “facial expression and the various gestures which involuntarily accompany speech without communicative intent” (LI 275), whereas the concern in Ideas II to describe the constitution of the spiritual world requires an apprehension of the foundation of cultural life and cultural science in a concept of expression in

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which the living body expresses spiritual life (Ideas2 259; see Flynn 2009). It is this conception of the living body as the ground of culture that was appropriated by Husserl in Crisis and extended to become the root-phenomenon of the lifeworld. While the root-experience of the lifeworld is the living body, such that all higher and more complex experiences and meanings are founded on its holding-sway, the living body operates in a social world and a world of objects, that are given as “the world as world for all” (C 109). While the living body is the fundamental mode in which the lifeworld is experienced as the presupposition of all human activity, the living body is always a body among others and also things. This “we-subjectivity” is “constantly functioning in wakeful life . . . in the manifold ways of considering, together, objects pregiven to us in common, thinking together, valuing, planning, acting together” (C 109). In contrast to such we-subjectivity, or community, “we can be for others, and they for us, mere objects,” when instead of performing together acts of immediate interest we observe others from outside as objective facts (C 110). This contrast between community and objectification is grounded in the duality in which one appears in the lifeworld as both an object among objects and a subject perceiving the world. A great deal more could obviously be said to detail the characteristics of the lifeworld and a great deal of phenomenological analysis could go into explicating the way in which human community and its inter-related world of objects are founded upon the motility of the human body. However, in this context the main issue is that the lifeworld as a communal world, including both persons and things, is rooted in the motility of kinaesthesis which underlies and is presupposed by every scientific inquiring. 6.2.2 Bodily Motility as Living Labor Husserl’s description of the world of culture and value as founded upon bodily motility in the lifeworld immediately suggests a productive dialogue, or even synthesis, with Karl Marx’s account of social labor as the ground of human culture and history. Such a project was taken up by Jan Patočka and Ludwig Landgrebe in the 1930s when they were working with Husserl on the subjectmatter of the Crisis. Their appropriation and critique of Marx made clear the nature of his immanentization of Hegel’s dialectic of absolute knowledge. Patočka’s critique of this immanentization, and also that of his close interlocutor Ludwig Landgrebe, relies exclusively on Marx’s early works. In the early 1930s the first publication of Marx’s 1844 Paris Manuscripts and the first complete edition of The German Ideology (1846) appeared, which provoked a re-evaluation of the received understanding of Marx by a

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number of philosophers influenced by phenomenology. For example, Herbert Marcuse turned from his attempt to renovate Marxism with Heideggerian ontology toward the estimation that the sensuous concrete subjectivity which he had been seeking already existed as the early and persisting foundation of Marx’s work (Marcuse 2005). Jan Patočka’s interest in this work was stimulated by Ludwig Landgrebe and shared with Eugen Fink (Tava 2016, 188). Ludwig Landgrebe claimed that Marx was right to understand humanism as the ground-problem of the modern world where the issue is “how man can remain man in view of the historical development of the relations of production” (Landgrebe 1968, 121). This appreciation was shared by Jan Patočka in his investigation of how Marx’s focus on the battle of ideas within actual history might be comparable with Husserl’s expectation that phenomenology might overcome the crisis of European humanity. In Patočka’s view, Marx was concerned with “a real transformation in the Being of Man” whose ultimate goal was “the rebuilding of his social relationships” (Patočka 2007, 94, 96). However, prior to considering the verdict of Patočka and Landgrebe, let us explore the background and significance of Marx’s early ontology of labor itself. 6.2.2.1 Aristotelian and Hegelian Aspects of Marx’s Concept of Social Labor The concept of labor has been discussed in political philosophy since its inception. However, it has usually been considered as a derivative notion, in particular in relation to the concept of freedom, rather than investigated in its own right. Both Aristotle and Hegel considered labor as a means to the realization of freedom. Aristotle operated with a craft model of labor. Technē, or technique, consists in the forming of material in accord with a prior idea existing in the craftsman’s mind. Hegel added a dialectical component to labor. It is described as self-forming as well as object-forming. The laboring experience of dependent labor, often translated somewhat misleadingly as “slave,” is the basis for experiencing the self as productive and worldtransforming. Consequently, labor exercised under dependent conditions is the vehicle for the emancipated laborer’s eventual consciousness of freedom and independence. Aristotle distinguished between two kinds of activities within the realm of human action—technē and praxis. Some activities aim at particular ends, of which there are many. These limited ends are achieved by the productive arts or techniques. Technical arts are distinct from politics—which is the practice that aims at the good for its own sake; in other words, political activity is its own end. The opening passage of the Nichomachean Ethics formulates this distinction.

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Every art of applied science and every systematic investigation, and similarly very action and choice, seem to aim at some good; the good, therefore, has been well defined as that at which all things aim. But it is clear that there is a difference in the ends at which they aim: in some cases the activity is the end, in others the end is some product beyond the activity. In cases where the end lies beyond the action the product is naturally superior to the activity (Aristotle 1972, 3, 1094a; cf. Aristotle 1974, 298, 1328a).

Thus, technical activities are distinct from and presupposed by the political realm since they produce limited goods whose use can only be properly determined by politics. Moreover, the excellence of technique lies in its product, the object envisaged prior to productive activity that guides its execution. The wealth of objects produced by craftsmen is a means to the political good life and thus technical action does not participate in political justice. “For where ruler and ruled have nothing in common, there is no friendship nor any justice either. Thus there is nothing just in the relation of a craftsman to his tool, of the soul to the body, and of a master to his slave” (Aristotle 1972, 236, 1161a). Aristotle describes labor as a technical, object-forming activity. There is no self-formation in the activity; in fact, Aristotle suggests that the craftsman is degraded by his work on nature, that his body is warped by necessity (Aristotle 1974, 13–4, 30, 1254b, 1258b). Hegel’s discussion of labor in the Phenomenology of Spirit occurs within the context of a struggle for mutual recognition by self-conscious individuals. The satisfaction of desire by inanimate objects is inadequate because it can only provide a fleeting sensation of self that disappears with the objects that are consumed. Consequently, self-consciousness searches for acknowledgment of its freedom and independence in the self-consciousness of another. There are two moments which must be experienced and overcome in the course of this struggle. “Self-consciousness is faced by another selfconsciousness; it has come out of itself. This has a two-fold significance: first, it has lost itself, for it finds itself as an other being; secondly in doing so it has superseded the other, for it does not see the other as an essential being, but in the other sees its own self” (Hegel 1979, 111). The dialectic of recognition consists in the supersession of these two moments. First, it must return to itself from externalization in the other; second, it must see the other in its own essential character. This dialectical struggle has a double significance due to the fact that it involves the action of two conscious individuals. Thus, the dialectic of self and other occurs simultaneously from two perspectives and the struggle for mutual recognition is experienced as a conflict in which the consciousnesses play different and unequal roles—lord and bondsman. In order for self-consciousness to assert itself as free and independent of any determinate existence, as transcending any limited content or definition,

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it asserts its independence from life. That is, self-consciousness only exists to the extent that it is free of the constraints of the specific contents of life. Since this occurs with respect to self and other, and since it also occurs with the double significance of both perspectives, the struggle for recognition becomes a life-and-death struggle. In the struggle to the death it becomes apparent that death is an ultimate negation of self-consciousness. While free self-consciousness must be independent of any determinate characteristics of its life, nevertheless it requires life for its freedom and independence. Those who learn this truth stop short of death and are split into the unequal roles of lord and bondsman. The bondsman has a thing-like consciousness due to his attachment to the determinate contents of his life. On the other hand, himself as and independent consciousness. However, the lord’s free consciousness is mitigated by the kind of acknowledgement it can receive from the thing-like consciousness of the bondsman. It is a consciousness existing for itself which is mediated with itself through another consciousness, i.e. through a consciousness whose nature it is to be bound up with an existence that is independent, of thing hood in general. The lord puts himself into relation with both these moments, to a thing as such, the object of desire, and to the consciousness for which thing hood is the essential characteristic (Hegel 1979, 115).

The lord established his power over the world of things by asserting this independence of determinate existence in the life-and-death struggle. But the bondsman is dependent on things and the lord holds him in subjection through them. Also, the lord gains satisfaction from the enjoyment of things (which could not be done in the earlier moment of desire) since he is independent of them. The bondsman’s dependence on things cannot achieve this freedom and enjoyment and he can only negate the world of things in a partial way through work. In this opposition of lord and bondsman the freedom and independence involved in mutual recognition is splintered and incomplete. The lord is acknowledged by the bondsman but, due to the thing-like nature of the bondsman’s consciousness, and his working on things, the lord remains dependent on the world of things. The truth of the independent consciousness is accordingly the servile consciousness of the bondsman. This, it is true, appears at first outside of itself and not as the truth of self-consciousness. But just as lordship showed that its essential nature is the reverse of what it wants to be, so too servitude in its consummation will really turn into the opposite of what it immediately is; as a consciousness

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forced back into itself, it will withdraw into itself and be transformed into a truly independent consciousness (Hegel 1979, 117).

The consciousness of the bondsman escapes dependence for two reasons. In the life-and-death stubble he experienced the fear of death and thus the inessentiality of determinate existence. The lord’s power over him renders this freedom explicit and objective. Alas, by working on the natural world, he bondsman forms the thing that is a permanent testimony to his independence. The permanence of the things formed by work is due, according to Hegel, to the fact that work is desire held in check. That is to say, there is a new relation to the natural world than in the initial appropriation of things by desire. The self-positing and self-affirming character of work dissolves the bondsman’s fear and asserts him as self-conscious mind with a universal power over the world of things. Hegel’s discussion of labor incorporates the technical, form-giving activity described by Aristotle. However, by adding a self-forming component to the analysis of labor he places the interchange between humans and nature within the context of an intra-social struggle for recognition. It is in the struggle to have one’s self-consciousness acknowledged as free and independent that the dependence of the bondsman occurs; the necessity to labor is imposed by another consciousness and becomes the vehicle for the eventual truth of self-consciousness. In other words, it is the performance of labor within the context of social conflict that renders labor self-forming and provides the basis for a mutual recognition of self-conscious individuals. 6.2.2.2 Karl Marx’s Early Ontology of Labor Well aware of these precedents in Aristotle and Hegel, Marx came to view human labor as the foundation of human being and history. He developed this view in a critique of German philosophy in dialogue with French socialism and Engels’ work on the condition of the working class in England between 1842 and 1845 and held to it in its fundamentals to the end of his life. Thus, in the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844, he regarded the achievement of Hegel’s philosophy to be that he “grasps the nature of labour, and conceives objective man (true, because real man) as the result of his own labour,” but, according to Marx, Hegel treated only of “abstract mental labour,” or thought thinking itself, and could not comprehend the negative side of this process as alienation (Marx 1963a, 203). Already by 1843, in The German Ideology Marx had already described the material conditions of human life through the production of the means to satisfy human needs. This process leads to the production of new needs that is the inception of history. Moreover, the humans who so produce—the family and human procreation—must

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be propagated. This self-production of human life is both a natural and social relationship, that is to say, it is a relation to nature organized in a definite social form (Marx and Engels 1978, 155-9). In The German Ideology, alienation into contradictory class interests is derived from “the division of labour in the sexual act” continuously toward the division between mental and manual labor that leads to the false pretension that consciousness is itself active without relation to a material basis (Marx and Engels 1978, 158-9). It is the unequal distribution of labor and the products of labor that leads to private property and thus to alienation, which culminates in the opposition between the property-less mass and “an existing world of wealth and culture” based on a high development of productive powers (Marx and Engels 1978, 161). Again in 1844, Marx points out that political economy begins from private property as a fact that it does not explain (Marx 1963b, 120). The self-activity of individual labors becomes alienated according to Marx because of private property in which the developed human power of the community is turned against itself so that “labour does not only create goods; it also produces itself and the worker as a commodity, and indeed in the same proportion as it produces goods” (Marx 1963b, 121). Thus Marx’s ontology of labor is not only an expression of the necessity for human work to fulfill needs, but also of the self-constitution of human identity and the world of wealth and culture in a historical process driven by labor. It is an account of spirit (Geist) in the sense given to that term by German Idealism but within a generative process in human activity that is subject to partition and contradiction in private property and holds forth the possibility of its reconciliation in communism. The 1844 Manuscripts sketch an ontological relationship between human being and nature mediated through the social labor process that is reversed in the capitalist relations of alienated labor. It is just in his work upon the objective world that man really proves himself as a species-being. This production is his active species-life. By means of it nature appears as his work and his reality. The object of labour is, therefore, the objectification of man’s species-life; for he no longer reproduces himself merely intellectually, as in consciousness, but actively and in a real sense, and he sees his own reflection in a world which he has constructed. . . . Just as alienated labour transforms free and self-directed activity into a means, so it transforms the species-life of man into a means of social existence (Marx 1963b, 128, emphasis in original).

The mediation of humanity and nature by labor is an active and physical process but it is also a conscious process such that the laboring subject comports itself toward the social process of labor as a whole or universally toward other humans and is therefore free activity—all of which Marx calls

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“species-being” (Marx 1963b, 127). Capitalist work-relations reverse this relationship so that, instead of labor being the source of universal and free activity, it becomes merely a means to survival. Instead of being life itself, “the satisfaction of a need,” labor becomes a means to life such that “life” is expelled outside human self-production in practical activity (Marx 1963b, 125). Therefore, in communist society, as Marx put it much later in Critique of the Gotha Program (1875), labor will become “life’s prime want” in the sense that it will become the field for human self-expression (Marx 1978a, 531). The ontology of labor was Marx’s basic philosophical anthropology from 1844 to his last days—even though the precision of its expression developed considerably, notably—as we will see—by adding “instruments of labour,” or technology, as the form by which labor acted as intermediary between humanity and nature in Capital, Vol. 1. Unlike in Aristotle and Hegel, Marx’s account of labor begins from the social relations of immediate producers and discusses the historical development of societies and of class divisions as derivatives of social labor. Thus, human servitude appears in a directly social form, separated from its natural and hierarchical conditioning in pre-capitalist societies. Moreover, the exploitation of labor is the concentrated form of all human servitude so that the overcoming of capitalist exploitations ushers in the realm of freedom. In Marx freedom is a product of the history and contradictions of social production; freedom consists in the maturation of social relations. As a result of this analysis, labor takes on a wide significance for Marxist thought, referring to the complex of human activities in general (although the relations of immediate producers retain a priority in this complex). Since all human activity is condition by the social situation of labor, the realization of freedom depends on the general laboring activities of humanity founded on direct production. The maturation of social relations under capitalism allows the enforced association of producers to appropriate the social productive power. The contradiction between socialized production and private appropriation of wealth is the motive force for the associated producers to transform their enforced cooperation into free association by the elimination of the buying and selling of labor-power. Freedom, as the social association of laborers in transforming nature, incorporates both Aristotelian and Hegelian aspects; freedom is both wealth and equality for Marx. The Aristotelian technical model of labor as object-forming responds to the fact that the reproduction of human society requires labor to transform nature into usable objects. In this sense, labor is a nature-imposed necessity for the production of wealth. Aristotle pointed out that if the instruments of labor could produce without human intervention, there would be no need for slaves, or subjugated labur (Aristotle 1974, 10, 1253b–1254a). Marx refers to

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this passage in Capital, Vol. 1 (Cap1 408) in order to comment that, in fact, automatic machinery has lengthened the working day by removing natural obstacles to sustained work. In other words, the thought of Aristotle—that automatic machines would eliminate subjugated labor—can only be realized on the basis of an alteration of social relations, not merely as a development of machines. Consequently, for Aristotle freedom consists in escaping natural necessity by consigning labor to a subject class. Aristotelian freedom is from labor in order to act outside necessity. In the Hegelian model, the performance of labor within the context of class conflict becomes an essential condition for the liberating potential of labor. By forming objects, labor becomes selfforming and asserts its world-transforming power against a parasitical nonproducing class. The self-forming character of labor implies that freedom cannot be found outside labor as in Aristotle but within the process of transforming nature. Hegelian freedom is in labor, within the productive process. Marx’s concept of freedom incorporates these two aspects. It emphasized the wealth that is required for the reproduction of society. Also, it maintains that labor need not remain self-abnegation to produce objects for consumption, but can become the self-realization of laboring subjects. In other words, communism will achieve both wealth and equality by overcoming the constraints of natural necessity and class domination. Marx does not take over these models of labor unchanged. He criticizes them both by revealing the social relations between laborers that the two models ignore. However, on the basis of the primacy of social relations, the Aristotelian and Hegelian models are incorporated into Marx’s thought—social relations among producers is the secret of labor which underlies natural necessity and class conflict and which provides the basis for realizing freedom as both wealth and equality. Thus, labor becomes an encompassing concept of Marx that refers to the entire selfproductive practice of the human species. The labor process becomes the fundamental characteristic of human history. Consequently, it is a social process of production whose altering modes of social relations (within which the interchange with nature takes place) allow for a periodization of human history.4 With the publication of his early work in the 1930s, it became possible to see that during the early 1840s Marx had undergone a rapid evolution from a critic of Hegel, to a critic of the Young Hegelians, to the development of an ontology of labor that he regarded as both a critique of philosophy and its realization—what we might call “the upshot of philosophy.” This mediated identity of society and nature in social labor is understood to lead to the production of new needs through the Hegelian principle that “every determination is a negation” to produce a dialectic of history. The self-activity of individual labors becomes alienated according to Marx because of private property—later called “dead labour”—in which the developed human power

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of the community is turned against itself so that “labour does not only create goods; it also produces itself and the worker as a commodity, and indeed in the same proportion as it produces goods” (Marx 1963b, 121). Alienated capitalist work-relations reverse the productivity of human labor so that, instead of labor being the source of universal and free activity, it becomes merely a means to survival and private property. Marx’s ontology of labor was understood by him to be both the culmination of the history of philosophy as the development of human freedom through the self-activity of labor but also a critique of philosophy as an exclusively abstract form of thought and not as practical activity. The upshot of philosophy points beyond philosophy to its realization in human practical activity such that spirit (Geist) is rooted within a generative historical process of human activity. 6.2.2.3 Karl Marx’s Early Ontology as an Objectification of Subjectivity Jan Patočka’s appreciation of Marx’s early work was inherently combined with his critique that claimed that the source of its degeneration into ideology was already present in Marx’s formulation of its idea since the dialectic of history as the self-realization of absolute knowledge that had been appropriated from Hegel subsumed the subjective moment within an objective process. The dialectic “transfers the entire process of the Idea out of human inwardness to the things themselves” (Patočka 2007, 95). If the dialectic of history can be represented as an objective process unmediated in its essential outline and direction by human subjectivity, then human subjectivity becomes an immanent element of this process. As an immanent element, human subjectivity contains no opening to a transcendence through which the unfolding of history might be mitigated, redirected, or given another meaning. Following an identical line of criticism, Landgrebe argued that “one cannot under any circumstances view [the actual historical fate of Marxism] as the effect of a perversion of Marx’s original thought . . . but the possibility for this development is already there in the elevation of self-producing human species-being to an Absolute” (Landgrebe 1968, 131). This critique of Marx, which we might call an “immanentization of subjectivity,” is shared by Landgrebe and Patočka and justifies their critique of Marxism’s degeneration from a promise of emancipation into a manipulation of subjects. Though Marx aimed to combat the alienation of humanity within capitalist civilization, he failed to develop a sufficient concept of subjectivity to achieve it due to the absoluteness of human self-production that Marx derived from Hegel’s dialectic of absolute spirit. For this reason, in his later work Patočka treated labor as one of three movements of human life and refused to give it a grounding or pre-eminent status (Patočka 1998, 143–62). With this critique

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in mind, phenomenology might then step in to provide the resources to fulfil the genuine idea of freedom in Marxism. Patočka’s response to his critique of Marx was to develop a concept of technical civilization as immanentization and a correlative concept of transcendence as the difficult emergence of subjectivity within a confining logic of history. His diagnosis of technical civilization in the 1970s claimed that “humans have ceased to be a relation to Being and have become a force . . . a force ruling over all and [which] mobilizes all of reality to release the bound forces” (Patočka 1996a, 116–7). This immanentization of Being can only become open to transcendence by sacrifice, which “represents a persistent presence of something that does not appear in the calculations of the technological world” (Patočka 1989, 337). Sacrifice binds the subject to transcendence and manifests transcendence within the technological world. It is in this sense that dissent consists in care for the soul embodied in a protest against a closed society. While a similar appropriation and critique of Marxism as an “immanentization of subjectivity” can be attributed to Landgrebe and Patočka, their subsequent development diverged significantly. In Francesco Tava’s summary statement “while for Landgrebe it is indeed necessary to acknowledge the breaks and fractures which characterize the historical process, Patočka for his part emphasizes that these fractures should not be simply acknowledged, but even actively provoked by the individual, in order to contrast any linear and one-directional understanding of history” (Tava 2016, 190). Left alone, as it were, history tends toward a self-enclosed dialectical logic, whereas, punctuated by the manifestation of transcendence to subjectivity, it becomes unpredictable. The responsibility of philosophy is to the singularity of this binding of subjectivity to transcendence made possible its puncture by the transcendental-phenomenological reduction. Despite the continuity of Patočka’s appropriation and critique of Marxism through different historical exigencies, in the 1960s there re-emerged in his thinking its more positive side as social analysis and historical possibility, especially in his interaction with younger philosophers of the Prague Spring. He even identified the genuine meaning of Marx with the heritage of Tomáš Masaryk, arguing that “the return to the original meaning of socialism as human liberation proved ever more a return to the innermost presupposition of our national programme” (quoted in Kohák 2008, 158). Using what is clearly Patočka’s terminology, Karel Kosík argued that the category of totality also loses its dialectical character when it is conceived only ‘horizontally,’ as the relations of parts and whole, and when other of its organic features are neglected: such as its ‘genetic-dynamic’ dimension (the forming of the whole and the unity of contradictions) and its ‘vertical’ dimension (the dialectic of the phenomenon and the essence)” (DC, 31–2).

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The vertical dimension in question here is Patočka’s terminology for the transcendental-phenomenological reduction, so that Kosík’s statement amounts to a declaration that Marxism depends upon phenomenology (and not just the rediscovery of Hegel) to recover subjectivity in a manner that does not ultimately subsume it within an objectivist philosophy of history. Ivan Svitak emphasized that Marx’s critique assumed an already-developed bourgeois society and therefore aimed to take human rights to a higher level and not negate them so that “Marxism will again adopt the European values of Marx’s humanism and find a new acceptance in Europe and in the world” (Svitak 1970, 153). Patočka’s 1968 lecture “Intellectuals and Opposition” appropriated a widespread and popularly accepted analysis of the 1960s both East and West to suggest that, in the new conditions of a scientific-technological society, the role of knowledge had become crucial, especially within the institutions that passed on such knowledge to future generations. Thus the youth-led revolt of the 1960s was firmly and strategically located within social structures and especially within universities. Patočka further points out, in an argument consistent not only with the Prague Spring but also with the widespread tendency in the Western opposition at the time that only an alliance of workers and intellectuals can realize the positive transcendence that Marxism proposes (Patočka 2016a, 15; Patočka 2016b, 23). Patočka’s makes two significant observations in this analysis. First, he argues that Marx has only a horizontal concept of transcendence understood as historical transcendence of given social conditions, and that such horizontal transcendence depends upon vertical transcendence understood as a transcendence of immediacy (Patočka 2016a, 10, 15; Patočka 2016b, 24). As we have seen Kosík appropriated this insight and it remains definitive for phenomenological, as opposed to Hegelian, Marxism. Second, the implication of this analysis that the same tendency defines both capitalist and Soviet-style societies is muted by the claim that Western intellectuals tend to disparage human rights as mere ideology, whereas Eastern intellectuals, while they may over-estimate them, are nevertheless clear that human rights are essential to the role of the intellectual due to the binding to vertical transcendence (Patočka 2016a, 19; Patočka 2016b, 25–6). Thus, the binding to vertical transcendence through the life in truth that grounds his later 1970s account of dissent need not be considered a philosophical rejection of the 1960s possibility of horizontal transcendence but rather a historical judgment that that possibility had been foreclosed—a judgment that had its counterpart in the West with the spiraling of the New Left into the stratosphere and the long-term, largely successful, strategy of the corporate Right to stabilize ideology and social protest.5

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The thesis that Marx’s immanentization of the Hegelian dialectic of absolute knowledge leads to a unilinear logic of history which produces a degeneration of the concept of subjectivity that its idea aimed to realize seems unimpeachable. Similarly, the related distinction between vertical transcendence and horizontal transcendence and its significance for the binding of subjectivity are essential to phenomenology. These critiques are well-founded in a Husserlian phenomenological critique of Hegelian totality (Angus 2000a, 67–75, 92–6, 146–52). We thus take it as established that there is a thematic convergence between understanding the lifeworld as intersubjective, bodily motility in the phenomenological sense and Marx’s understanding of living labor as the origin of human economy, society, and culture. Nevertheless, Marx’s early ontology of labor fails to make good on this convergence, as Jan Patočka and Ludwig Landgrebe demonstrate, due to the Hegelian assumption that re-embeds subjectivity within immanent history by objectivizing it within a dialectical determinism. However, it is by no means clear that this critique is valid against the later ontology of labor and critique of the regime of value upon which our interpretation of Marx depends. Marx’s critical acumen was deployed in the 1840s against “private property” [Privateigentum] whereas his later work aims at the specific concept of “capital” (Marx 1968, 510–22 passim). Whereas Marx’s purpose in the 1840s was to develop an ontology of labor, usually called “historical materialism,” he later went on to focus on the logic and history of capital and regarded the early phase as nothing more than preparatory. Similarly, his 1844 quotation of Goethe and Shakespeare to understand money as “the self-alienating species-life of man” is replaced by understanding money as the universal equivalent that equates the various commodities in the system of value (Marx 1963b, 190–1). It is not that there is a radical divide between the early and late Marx (as Louis Althusser claimed), it is just that 20 years of study of the history, concept, and contemporary reality of capital allowed a deeper understanding of the object of his critique that affected the conception and role of the ontology of labor in that critique (Althusser 1970). The phenomenological Marxism which we explore in subsequent chapters takes its bearings from the mature Marx of Capital, Vol. 1 in a parallel manner in which it begins from the late work of Edmund Husserl in the Crisis in order to develop their work teleologically into a contemporary phenomenological Marxism. 6.2.2.4 Our Abandonment of Marx’s Early Ontology The above discussion of Marx’s early ontology of labor has shown the basis for its synthesis with Husserl’s conception of human motility as the ground for subjectivity. Our subsequent investigation accepts without reservation the critique of Marx’s early ontology of labor by Jan Patočka and Ludwig

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Landgrebe. Marx’s early work was an attempt to define the upshot of philosophy and to insert it into the conflicts and resolutions of human history. But it does so too effectively, as it were, in that it inscribes human subjectivity (as discovered and defended by philosophy) within a historical dialectic similar to Hegel’s which finally confines subjectivity within the necessities of materiality. A concept of transcendence, which is achieved by Husserl’s transcendental-phenomenological reduction, is essential for a concept of subjectivity that is not so confined. Nevertheless, this background was necessary in order to show the full meaning of the ontology of labor as the socio-historical development of human capacities in an open-ended historical form that appears in Capital, Vol. 1 (which is the subject of the next chapter). There, the ontology of labor appears in an abbreviated form whose extensive meaning must be chased down by an understanding of its origins and intentions as well as a thorough reading of Marx’s late work. Once fully understood, it opens the way for a new foundation of phenomenological Marxism that has not been previously appreciated—either in its concept of transcendence or in its rejection of the Hegelian filiation. 6.3 SCIENCE OF THE LIFEWORLD VERSUS ONTOLOGY OF THE LIFEWORLD As we have seen, the lifeworld has three inter-related meanings: first, as the concrete intuitive evidences that underlie scientific universalizations (but which become especially problematic in the case of formal universalizations); second, the lifeworld refers to the everyday world within which all practical activities occur; third, as the world-horizon within which such practical activities occur but which remains unthematic in our everyday orientation. The world-horizon becomes thematic through the phenomenological reduction. The previous section has shown how, in a general manner, the lifeworld in the second sense can be seen as bodily motility organized through social labor. It is through the thematic explication of the lifeworld in this sense that the Marxian concept of social labor converges with a phenomenological account of the ontology of the lifeworld. After the paragraphs where Husserl outlines the presupposition of the lifeworld (28–34), and the next paragraphs where he gives a justification of the transcendental-phenomenological reduction in the context of the presupposition of the lifeworld (35–50), a short paragraph addresses “the task of an ‘ontology of the lifeworld’” (51). Immediately after this paragraph Husserl focuses for the rest of Part IIIA on the “paradoxical enigmas” (52–55) that

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arise from the second innovation (as we have termed it in our outline of the Crisis in chapter1). There is in the short paragraph 51 an important explication of the presupposition of the lifeworld that we will find determinative for the subsequent course of our inquiry. Whereas paragraph 34 speaks of a “science of the lifeworld,” which turns out to be transcendental phenomenology itself, paragraph 51 speaks of an “ontology of the lifeworld.” This shift of terminology is significant for explicating the relation between phenomenological science oriented to the lifeworld and an “ontology,” or sense of the being, of the lifeworld. Like the introduction of the presupposition of the lifeworld at the beginning of Part IIA, the ontology is introduced abruptly by a change in the direction of the inquiry. Husserl says, Even without any transcendental interest—that is, within the ‘natural attitude’ (in the language of transcendental phenomenology the naïve attitude, prior to the epochē)—the life-world could have become the subject matter of a science of its own, an ontology of the life-world purely as an experiential world (i.e., as the world which is coherently, consistently, harmoniously intuitable in actual and possible experiencing intuition (C 173).

Against the background of his immediately prior claim (paragraphs 35–50) that only phenomenology is capable of investigating the presupposition of the lifeworld, this abrupt assertion is remarkable. Husserl says here that the lifeworld as presupposition “could have become” (hätte . . . werden konnen) a theme of inquiry (C 173; K 176). I take this to mean that it did not become such a theme even though this was theoretically possible. I will contest in the remaining chapters of this Part III Husserl’s undefended assertion that it did not become a theme by introducing Marx’s late ontology of labor as exactly such a practical ontology of the experiential world. Here we may ask how, or with what orientation, could the lifeworld become a theme from within the lifeworld itself. Husserl remarks, The world of life . . . is, to be sure, related to subjectivity throughout the constant alteration of its relative aspects. But however it changes and however it may be corrected, it holds to its essentially lawful set of types, to which all life, and thus all science, of which it is the ‘ground’ remain bound. Thus it also has an ontology to be derived from pure self-evidence (C173).

Due to the ordered character of the experienced lifeworld, which remains despite changes in its content, the lifeworld can be thematized as a whole. Husserl characterizes his own position as a transcendental phenomenologist who is able to restore the natural attitude after having suspended it in the transcendental-phenomenological reduction. “For our part we, who up to now

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have constantly carried out our systematic reflections within the reorientation of the transcendental epochē, can at any time restore the natural attitude and, within it, inquire after the structures of the life-world” (C 173). While the transcendental philosopher has access to the lifeworld by restoring the presupposition of the lifeworld that he set aside, it is also the case, Husserl says, that this standpoint can be reached from within the natural attitude itself. It is the regularity of “structures” of the lifeworld that can motivate natural, naïve reflection toward its horizon. Note, however, that such universal but naïve, natural reflection does not achieve a science of the lifeworld such as is achieved by phenomenology. It achieves an ontology of the lifeworld, that is to say, it achieves a universal, natural reflection on the regular structures of the experienced world prior to scientific abstraction whose character is such as to work within the assumption of the being of the lifeworld as being such and so in itself. An ontology of the lifeworld does not investigate the presupposition of the lifeworld; being a reflection from within the lifeworld, it partakes in that presupposition. Nevertheless, it takes note of the regular structures of the lifeworld and instigates a universal reflection into the nature of the being of those structures. The science of the lifeworld would not leave that presupposition in place and would therefore not affirm the being, or actual existence, of the lifeworld; it would affirm only that it is lived as being actual by those within it. The science of the lifeworld is thus capable of investigating the various forms in which the presupposition of the lifeworld may be taken to be by the inhabitants of those lifeworlds. It opens the possibility of understanding theoretically and scientifically a plurality of lifeworlds with regular structures lived as actual within their confines—which I will later term “culturecivilizations.” An ontology of the lifeworld clarifies the regular structures of its own world within the presupposition that those structures are necessary structures of the world, the only one it investigates, its own world (as the transcendental philosopher can show). The trajectories of a science of the lifeworld and an ontology of the lifeworld are opposite. An ontology of the lifeworld moves from experience within the lifeworld, to observation of its regular structures, toward a description of the ground of this lifeworld understood as the real world. A science of the lifeworld begins, as does Husserl, from the presupposition of the lifeworld universally, to the plurality of possible lifeworlds, to the structures predominant within a given world—thus, it can define the possibility of an ontology of the lifeworld. “If we return again . . . to the transcendental attitude . . . the lifeworld transforms itself . . . into the mere transcendental ‘phenomenon.’ It remains thereby in its own essence what it was before, but now it proves to be a mere ‘component,’ so to speak, within concrete transcendental subjectivity” (C 174). For an ontology, it is

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the regularity of the experienced world that motivates reflection on its general structure. For a science, it the plurality of possible forms of lifeworlds that motivates an inquiry into what makes possible reflection within a given lifeworld. Husserl comments that the ontology of the lifeworld can define an a priori science of its general, regular features, but that it is a priori in a sense distinct from that of modern science based upon mathematical substruction. “Modern philosophy’s concept of an a priori science, which is ultimately a universal mathematics (logic, logistic), cannot therefore have the dignity of actual selfevidence, i.e., the dignity of essential insight obtained from direct self-giving (experiencing intuition), much as it would like to claim this for itself” (C174). It is only here, in contrasting an a priori ontology of the lifeworld with an a priori formal-mathematical science, that Husserl questions the assumption that grounds his entire critique of that science: that it can be traced back to immediate self-evident intuition by phenomenology. The contrast is to the advantage of the ontology of the lifeworld that can, he says, be so traced back, precisely because it goes back to the regularity of practical life and not to a prior formal abstraction. The a priori which the ontology of the lifeworld investigates has to do with the regular forms of motility, including its forms of community and inscription of the material world, within a given lifeworld. As we will show in the succeeding chapters of Part III, the ontology of social labour utilized by Karl Marx is a prior and effective form the ontology of the lifeworld that Husserl claimed had not been undertaken. The phenomenological science of the lifeworld will investigate not only such structures within a given world but also the presuppositions that form that given lifeworld as such. The issues attendant upon a plurality of lifeworlds will be taken up in Part IV of this text. 6.4 INSTITUTION OF THE ONTOLOGY OF LABOR In this section we will follow the theme of the ontology of the lifeworld further than Husserl’s beginning in Crisis to make explicit the connection between the living body in its social and material (thingly) organization and the role of labor in originating and sustaining the humanly formed lifeworld. It will be recalled that there are three aspects of history that are implicated in an institution: the empirical, contingent history which remains, taken in itself, external to the meaningful structure of the institution; the transcendental history that temporally structures experience with reference back toward an original beginning and forward toward an end with reference to the essence of the institution itself; the event through which transcendental history incurs

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into contingent history, retrospectively conferring a structure upon it, such that an empirical event, such as writing, must have occurred within factual history due to the structure of transcendental history. Taking off from the living body understood in its social and material (thingly) dimensions, we may say that any specific lifeworld incorporates a social and material organization of the living body of human action. The specific character of the living body of human action gives each lifeworld its internal structure that persists throughout changes in empirical content. This is the first sense of history as organized, though contingent, labor as empirically present and variously significant, though taking some form or other in every socio-historical form. When these various empirical forms of labor are thematized as a universal structure human existence as such, the concept of labor is universalized from its particular forms to become an ontology of the lifeworld. It is a universal, but still practical and in the phenomenological sense naïve, orientation to the world-horizon. As we have seen, the term “labor” as understood throughout the history of philosophy and completed in Marx is the name for the motile body of social action understood in this fashion. Labor is thematized, and can thus become an ontology of the lifeworld, in capitalist society because in capitalist society labor is the root form of the exchange of commodities and the regime of value (which will be described in detail in chapter 8). The ontology of labor is thus the lived form of the general structure of the lifeworld insofar as it is available to a universal but worldly, naïvely ontological, orientation to the horizon of the lifeworld that comes about in a determinate historical period due to the event of the organization of labor in a capitalist form. The transcendental essence of labor is the social-material organization of the living body as a necessity for embodied spirit that determines that this essence must have incurred into empirical history as the transformation of the lifeworld by human action. This incursion is the originating event instituting the ontology of labor as the occasion whereby human labor no longer simply existed within the lifeworld but came to form its structure through the living body—thereby giving it a historical form based on the logic of its institution. Capitalism is the name for this event of the universalization of human labor as an organizing socio-economic structure. As we will see in subsequent chapters, these three historical forms of labor are intertwined. Labor in the everyday sense in which it simply fits into an already institutionalized structure within the temporality of the lifeworld exists in all historical forms even though it is not thematized as a crucial feature of socio-economic structure. During the event of capitalism, labor becomes the crucial organizing institution of socio-economic structure since it acts as a structuring force through its objectification as capital. At this point, it was

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possible for Marx to gain insight into the institutional features of this event. Third, labor is a transcendental feature of human existence such that it must have come to transform the meaning of the lifeworld based on the ontology of labor prevailing in a given form. Thus the ontology of labor emerges in Marx’s work as the ground for the transcendentality from which a concrete historical form of human existence is objectified—even though that insight remains limited by the event which determines the limits and validity of its ontology. Our investigation will continue in the next chapter with the ontology of labor. However, it will at a later point have to address how the ontology of labor is grounded in the transcendental science of labor, to use Husserl’s terminology, that links and distinguishes the ontology of the lifeworld from the (phenomenological) science of the lifeworld. The phenomenological science of labor must address the relative grounding of different forms of the living body (or, in Marx’s terminology, modes of production) in the essence of the living body itself, or production abstracted from any specific mode that Marx calls “critique.” Without prematurely asserting any simple identity of Husserl’s phenomenology with Marx’s critique of political economy, it is nevertheless the case that the meaning of critique within both phenomenology and Marxism depends upon the relation between historical forms of the ontology of labor and their transcendental-critical grounding within the essence of human being as such. It is at this point that the possibility of relating oneself to other human beings as objects without a subjective dimension as a priori possibility that Husserl grounds in the transcendental duality of the lifeworld (C 105) meets Marx’s historical analysis of just such objectification understood initially as alienation and later as commodity fetishism. The science of the lifeworld meets the ontology of the lifeworld through the event of the institution of labor. NOTES 1.  The transition involved in this stage of phenomenology can be indicated by the contrast between Husserl’s evaluation of Dilthey’s contribution in Ideas II with that of his 1910 essay “Philosophy as a Rigorous Science” (PRS). While there is no contradiction between the accounts, both of which stress his contribution to the investigation of culture and his non-scientific basis, in the earlier essay the positive assessment functions purely as an introduction to a long critique of relativism, whereas in the later text he is credited with seeing “the problems leading to the goal and the directions of the work to be done” (Ideas2, 181). Nevertheless, Husserl continued to see phe-

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nomenology as a scientific philosophy that could accomplish definitively the work of the human-cultural sciences that Dilthey only began through the genius of intuition. 2.  Karl Schuhmann points out that Ideas II was to provide the “concrete analyses” to follow the focus on “general questions” in Ideas I (Schuhmann 1990, 16). 3.  Jason Bell has shown the influence of Josiah Royce, as mediated by Winthrop P. Bell’s dissertation on Josiah Royce written under Husserl’s direction and accepted in 1914, on Husserl’s expansion of phenomenological inquiry into questions of history, community, and value in this period (Bell 2011). 4.  Marx points out that Aristotle could not have understood the equalization of two concrete articles in exchange because the Greek productive system was founded on slavery. Consequently, the equalization of labour that occurs in the exchange of articles was incomprehensible to him. (Cap1, 151–2). In the Philosophy of Right, Hegel notes that “in fending for himself a member of civil society is also working for others.” (Hegel 1969b, 278). However, he understands this social relationship (which was not present in the Phenomenology) as a system of exchange, as does the tradition of political economy, and thereby misses the fundamental character of social labour as described by Marx. 5.  This judgment has to be qualified to account for the fact that the strategy of the Western Right was not completely successful. Social movements concerned with the environment, women, sex and gender politics developed from the remains of the New Left and continued to influence the public discourse of capitalist society. Nevertheless, these movements did not begin to coalesce into a general opposition until, say, the 1999 Seattle World Trade Organization protests. This oppositional alliance, despite many setbacks, has grown since and may well become a movement threatening transformation of the techno-capitalist system.

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Chapter Seven

Ontology of Labor and the Inception of Culture

It was shown (in chapter 5 of Part II) that there is a parallel between the critiques of reason by Edmund Husserl and Karl Marx that has both a formal aspect in the loss of qualitative, experiential evidence in the representation of value and a material, substantive dimension in the conflict between meaningful, value-laden experience and the failure to adequately represent such experience within the framework of formal reason. Valuations rooted in practical experience are the ground for a concrete integration of individual and community in differentiated community aimed at by both Husserl and Marx. It is this possibility that is systematically discounted by the necessary absence of the social representation of value in any other form than an unthematized, quantitative aggregate of values registered by prices. The crisis of reason—as provoked by Galilean science and political economy—can only be addressed by confronting this contradiction in capitalist society that is not limited to rational representation of the world but cuts deeper to the practical activity that constructs it (which is the subject of Part III). The convergence between Husserl and Marx on the critique of reason (that pertains to the first innovation in Crisis) has a parallel in the convergence between Husserl on motile, kinaesethetic intersubjectivity and Marx on the ontology of labor that pertains to the second innovation. We have sketched some background of this convergence with reference to the work of Jan Patočka and Ludwig Landgrebe in the previous chapter, agreeing with them that the early, Hegelian version of Marx’s ontology of labor cannot maintain a sufficient concept of subjectivity to escape an immanent, deterministic (even though dialectical), version of history. This chapter will take up this convergence between phenomenology and Marx again through a reliance on Marx’s Capital, Vol. 1. This work describes and utilizes a more theoretically developed ontology of labor that does not fall victim to the valid 177

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phenomenological critique of Marx’s first ontology since, as we will see, it contains the ground of vertical transcendence in natural fecundity or excess that is actualized in the freedom of culture (of which the transcendentalphenomenological reduction is a part). In chapter 7 of Marx’s Capital, Vol. 1 (in the English edition) at the beginning of Part 3, Marx sketches an outline of the ontology of labor necessary to the rest of the work (and supplemented theoretically in other parts of the work). The present chapter on the ontology of labor will use this mature formulation by Marx as its primary reference to show that the ontology of labor in Marx’s mature work, and its following through by Herbert Marcuse and Karel Kosík that will be outlined subsequently, does not aim at a delimited theme within social-economic thought, but addresses the construction, maintenance, and transformation of the lifeworld as a whole. The ontology of labor within the Marxist-phenomenological tradition outlined below is precisely the concrete ontology of the lifeworld whose ground Husserl shows in the second innovation of the Crisis. An ontology of labor undergirds an interpretation of Marxism as the emancipation of labor which can advance Husserl’s concept of the social and material organization of the living body that is the content of the second innovation of Crisis. 7.1 KARL MARX’S LATE ONTOLOGY OF LABOR Before addressing Marx’s ontology of labor as presented in Capital, Vol. 1, it is necessary to recall some key features of the systematic character of that text. In the first place, it is a text that attempts to derive the concept of capital from the surface appearance of capitalist society as an “immense collection of commodities” (Cap1 125). Thus, its over-riding feature is its strict logic, which is not only a logic of presentation, but of logical derivation of the concept of capital from that of the commodity. Second, the relation of the concept of capital to history, even the historical contents of the same text, is by no means self-evident—that is to say, the relation of logic and history is an issue that must be determined theoretically on the basis of their prior distinction. Third, the logic of capital consists of the following steps that correspond to the parts of the text: The first part of Capital begins from the commodity and shows how money, and the fetishism of commodities, arises from the exchange of commodities in its role as a universal equivalent. The second part is concerned with how, under certain conditions, money becomes capital due to its capacity to appropriate the productivity of labor. All subsequent parts are about labor since the major thesis of the text has been established that the surface level of commodities depends upon the formation of capital as

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self-expanding value which depends upon the exploitation of labor. The third part deals with the appropriation of absolute surplus-value in the length, or quantitative time, of the working day. The fourth part deals with the intensity of work through the capitalist development of the labor process expressed as relative surplus-value. Part five deals with these two forms of appropriation of labor taken together; part six with wages, part seven with capital accumulation, and part eight with the primitive accumulation that is the historical and logical precedent of capital. Marx’s ontology of labor is succinctly presented in chapter 7 which begins the discussion of labor. Immediately prior, the last chapter of the part on the concept of capital notes that The money-owner must be lucky enough to find within the sphere of circulation, on the market, a commodity whose use-value possesses the peculiar property of being a source of value, whose actual consumption is therefore itself an objectification of labour, hence a creation of value. The possessor of money does find such a special commodity on the market: the capacity for labour, in other words, labour-power (Cap1 270).

Capital requires the appropriation of labor-power in order to expand quantitatively; thus, a labor market is essential to the concept of capital. Through the labor market, labor is as double-sided as any commodity. It has a use-value expressed in concrete activity and an exchange-value expressed as money in wages—its price on the market. Its use-value in the concrete activity of labor in the productive process is the presupposition of capital that enables the logical transition in Capital, Vol. 1 from circulation to production. Labor functions within circulation as an exchange-value with a price whose purchase enables a use in the sphere of production that grounds and explains the self-expansion of capital. As an exchange-value, labor-power is the root issue of what I will address in the next chapter as the “system, or regime, of value.” As a use-value, concrete labor is a transhistorical feature of human ontology. “Labour, then, as the creator of use-values, as useful labour, is a condition of human existence which is independent of all forms of society; it is an eternal natural necessity which mediates the metabolism between man and nature, and therefore human life itself” (Cap1 133). It is this ontological “natural necessity” which is the subject of this chapter. Our account of Marx’s late ontology of labor will emphasize its two features which do not appear in his early ontology and which free the late ontology from the early immanentization of subjectivity and transcendence: technology and surplus productivity.

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7.1.1 Karl Marx’s Ontology of Labor in Capital, Vol. 1 Capital, Vol. 1 describes the labor process in terms of the three factors of human activity, nature, and instruments. These characteristics are transhistorical insofar as they refer to “the labour process independently of any specific social formation” (Cap1 283). Labour is, first of all, a process by which man, through his own actions, mediates, regulates and controls the metabolism between himself and nature. He confronts the materials of nature as a force of nature. . . . An instrument of labour is a thing, or a complex of things, which the labourer interposes between himself and the object of his labour, and which serves as a conductor, directing that activity onto that object (Cap1 283–5).

The dialectical interaction between human labor and nature, mediated by technology, sets up a process whereby each feature is altered through time. Hence we see that whether a use-value is to be regarded as raw material, as instrument of labour, or as product is determined entirely by its specific function in the labour process, by the position it occupies there: as its position changes, so do its determining characteristics. . . . The product, therefore, of individual consumption, is the consumer himself, the result of productive consumption, is a product distinct from the consumer” (Cap1 289).

Labor, with its technical instruments, is the mediation between the object produced, and the human form appropriate to that production, and nature, as both given prior to human activity, used within it, and as transformed in produced objects. Human activity is always surrounded by, encompassed by, nature even as humans transform nature for their purposes. The labour process . . . is an appropriation of what exists in nature for the requirements of man. It is the universal condition for the metabolic interaction between man and nature, the ever-lasting nature-imposed condition for human existence, and it is therefore independent of every form of that existence, or rather it is common to all forms of society in which human beings live (Cap1 290).

Marx’s ontology of labor is thus a phenomenology of the role of human activity in nature. The use of technology defines the ontology of labor as specifically human. In Marx’s words, “the use and construction of instruments of labor, although present in germ among certain species of animals, is characteristic of the specifically human labour process . . .” (Cap1 286).1 Products of labor are reincorporated into subsequent labor processes; plants and animals are gradu-

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ally transformed into domesticated and cultivated forms; humans become the humans specifically demanded by a certain social form of production. The point of mediation between humanity and nature, human labor and technology, has a certain priority in this threefold ontological relation. “It is not what is made but how, and by what instruments of labour, that distinguishes different economic epochs. Instruments of labour not only supply a standard of the degree of development which human labour has attained, but they also indicate the social relations within which men work” (Cap1 286). Technology is the specifically human aspect of labor which is both a product of a previous labor process and operative in living labor. It has a certain priority in mediating the dialectic between humanity and nature due to its inherently historical component.2 The category of technology in the later ontology is interestingly elastic. He says that In a wider sense we may include among the instruments of labour . . . all the objective conditions necessary for carrying on the labour process. . . . The earth itself is a universal instrument of this kind, for it provides the worker with the ground beneath his feet and a ‘field of employment’ for his own particular process. Instruments of this kind, which have already been mediated through past labour, include workshops, canals, etc.” (Cap1 286–7).

This wider sense of technology includes the earth as it has been modified by previous human activity as well as the earth unmodified insofar as it is a necessary condition for living labor—such as water, air, gravity, etc. In this sense, Marx includes what Hegel calls first (unmodified) and second (modified) nature as aspects of technology. Technology, even “in a wider sense,” seems a strange name for this. We would now likely call it the environment, in particular the built environment. By introducing this wider sense of technology Marx aims at a sense of nature, or environment, which may well be altered by human activity but has not been in its totality the object of human activity. It is the cumulative, unintended upshot of that activity which supports and conditions subsequent living labor. Since human activity aims at specific goals, this cumulative historical totality of original nature and built environment modified through technology is not itself the intended product of human action. The whole is not itself planned but only its parts such that the whole is an unintended effect. History in this sense is not an intended product of human self-production as Marx’s early ontology claims, and Patočka and Landgrebe criticized; history is the sum of intended products together with their cumulative unintended outcome. Their critique speaks to the technological progressivism of orthodox Marxism but does not capture the complexity of Marx’s late ontology of labor.3

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Technology is human action which aims at a concrete goal. Nevertheless, its full results and historical impact in the transformation of the labor process, the built environment, and the earth itself are not evident at the time of that action. Technology grounds a historical dialectic through deliberate activity in which the whole of the ongoing human-labor-nature relationship is eventually included. Marx’s late ontology may thus be called an ontology of labor and not a humanist or naturalist ontology. Marx’s ontology of labor is a description of the accomplishment of civilization through the gradual sophistication of human needs in the development of wealth and culture. In introducing this conception, Marx refers to it as “the labour process independently of any specific social formation” and states that “the fact that the production of use-values, or goods, is carried on under the control of a capitalist and on his behalf does not alter the general character of that production” (Cap1 283, italics added). He describes these transhistorical characteristics of labor in preparation for the next chapter of his work which deals with the “valorization process,” which is to say, the process by which this general character of human labor creates surplus value within the capitalist organization of production. From this we may draw several conclusions. First, that the characteristics of labor that he discusses here are meant to apply to all historical forms of social production insofar as they rest on a common ground. Second, that these characteristics express what might be called his “transhistorical theory,” “philosophical anthropology,” or “ontology.” Third, that this ontology is the ground for a higher-level, grounded discrimination of forms of social production, a discrimination which would be made, not on ontological grounds, but from historical features. Fourth, to the extent that the forms of social production emergent from this ontology can be ascribed a historical order, their historical order is produced by this ontology of labor in combination with the historical features of different forms. Indeed, this temporal process of production is the ground and manifestation of history as such. Fifth, civilization is the product of human labor insofar as it produces both wealth—that is to say, use-values—and humans who have been formed to need such wealth, even though it can only be fully realized when it is freed from the capitalist form of social production.4 7.1.2 Presumption of the Surplus Productivity of Labor in Capital, Vol. 1 This account of the ontology of labor in chapter 7 occurs after the end of part II that deals with the exchange-value of labor from which derives wages. As with any other commodity, the value of labor-power is that which it requires for its reproduction. Unlike other commodities, however, since human needs

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vary with “the level of civilization attained by a country,” the value of laborpower contains “a historical and moral element” (Cap1 275). Immediately after the ontology of labor, Marx explains the valorization process whereby the difference between the exchange-value of labor, or the historical determination of wages (primarily through the “moral dimension” mediated by class conflict), and the use-value of labor, or its productivity, is what accounts for the surplus value, or profit, extracted by the capitalist. “But the past labour embodied in the labour-power and the living labour it can perform, and the daily cost of maintaining labour-power and its daily expenditure of work, are two totally different things. The former determines the exchange-value of the labour-power, the latter its use-value” (Cap1 300). The ontology of labor explains the transhistorical, ontological, ground for the exploitation of the difference between the self-maintenance of labor and the productivity of labor through the extraction of profit in the specifically capitalist social form. It is therefore extremely surprising that Marx does not mention a key characteristic of labor when discussing its transhistorical ontology. We may call this characteristic the “surplus productivity of labour,” referring to the ontological fact that labor has the capacity to produce more than it needs for its own maintenance. Marx uses this ontological characteristic when he discusses the difference between the exchange-value and the use-value of labor in the valorization process (which we will take up in the next chapter), but he has, as yet in the logic of his argument, given no account nor description of the surplus productivity of labor itself.5 Indeed, one may say that the account of the ontology of labor is an excursus from the logic that begins with the commodity on the level of surface appearance of capitalist society and ends with the concept of capital that is its essence. It is an excursus because it deals with the transhistorical ontology of labor and not its specifically capitalist form—which determines the logic of the text. But it is a necessary excursus insofar as Marx finds it impossible to account for the difference between the exchange-value and the use-value of labor without recourse to such transhistorical characteristics. The insertion of the ontology of labor into the logic of capital occurs because capital exists through the exploitation of a characteristic of labor that occurs in all social forms of its organization. One may say that the logic of the text mirrors the logic whereby the ontology of labor incurs into its specifically historical form. We may conclude that the logic of capital, that is to say the derivation of the concept of capital from that of the commodity, is not a self-enclosed logic, insofar as it necessarily requires recourse to an ontology that subtends not only this specific form but all forms of production. Moreover, the very feature of this ontology that accounts for the difference between the exchange-value and use-value of labor that explains the capitalist valorization process is the

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one feature that is not mentioned by Marx in his account. As a consequence, the factor to which he attributes the significance of determining historical epochs in this discussion—technology—itself remains unaccounted for, since the development of technology requires the surplus productivity of labor in order for labor to be diverted from immediate subsistence toward the production of tools. This is a key aspect in which the text of Capital, Vol. 1 is not transparent with respect to its philosophical basis. 7.1.3 Ground Rent, or the Fecundity of Nature The surplus productivity of labor is a necessary component of the concept of capital that is not accounted for at this point of the logic of capital where it is utilized. It is addressed only in part IV of Capital, Vol. 3, where the logic of capital demands an account of the ontological basis of the productiveness of labor. The subject of Vol. 3 is the capitalist production process as a whole. It is here that the surplus value derived from the exploitation of labor based in the difference between its exchange and use-values is spread out among the three factors that constitute costs of production at the level of surface appearance of the capitalist system: ground rent, capital, and wages. We have seen in Vol. 1 how the surplus productivity of labor generates the essence of capital understood as self-expansion through the exploitation of labor. Vol. 3 explains the transformation of pre-capitalist landed property into its capitalist form as ground rent, to which one must add wages and capital understood as return on investment, thereby completing the derivation of appearance from essence in capital, since these three appear at the surface level as if they were independent factors. The surplus productivity of labor, that is to say, the ontological feature of labor to produce more than it needs to sustain itself, appears immanently within the logic of capital as the level of exploitation which is the basis for profit. But it also appears ontologically, transhistorically, as the basis of civilization—a surplus which class societies appropriate in a form derived from their class structure and which an egalitarian society would appropriate and distribute differently. The surplus productivity of labor in the end rests on a natural fact that is more evident in agricultural labor due to the more direct interchange between human labor and nature. The natural basis of surplus-labour in general, that is, a natural prerequisite without which such labour cannot be performed, is that Nature must supply—in the form of animal or vegetable products of the land, in fisheries, etc.—the necessary means of subsistence under conditions of an expenditure of labour which does not consume the entire working day. This natural productivity of agricultural labour (which includes here the labour of simple gathering, hunt-

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ing, fishing, and cattle-raising) is the basis of all surplus-labour, as all labour is primarily and initially directed toward the appropriation and production of food (Cap3 632).

The natural productivity of labor is a surplus productivity that allows the development of all higher forms of human civilization and which appears within capitalist society as the surplus labor of the working day that is appropriated by the capitalist. This ontological feature of labor is based, in the final analysis, on a simple fact about nature: that nature supplies not only sufficiently, but plentifully, that labor does not exhaust itself in its own simple reproduction but can build up an excess that is passed on to future generations in the form of culture. Culture and civilization, including the development of technology not utilized in immediate production, depends upon the fact that “the production of the necessary means of their subsistence shall not consume their whole labour-power. The fertility of Nature establishes a limit here, a starting-point, a basis” (Cap3 634).6 It is this natural fact that, in the final analysis, explains the historical role of technology as the product and indicator of the level of civilization attained. It is significant that the explanation of the surplus productivity of labor through the fecundity of nature can only be anticipated in Capital, Vol. 1 due to the absence of the theory of ground rent.7 Once the transformation of communal and landed property into ground rent has been explained through the logic of capital, the ontology of labor can be rooted in the original fact of the fecundity of nature. Capital transforms communal and landed property into ground rent that forms the continuing remnant of the productivity of the earth within capitalist society. The surplus productivity of labor is an ontological fact rooted in the surplus fecundity of nature that I have previously called excess (Angus, 1997, 186-97). 7.1.4 The Role of Marx’s Ontology of Labor in the Logic of Capital, Vol. 1 We have therefore shown that: 1.  The ontology of labor is inserted into the logic of capital that is the subject-matter of Capital, Vol. 1 and that this insertion is necessary to account for the valorization process which is the next step within that logic. 2.  The discussion of the ontology of labor omits its most characteristic feature, which is its surplus productivity. It is this very feature which is presumed and utilized in detailing the difference between the exchangevalue and use-value of labor and which is crucial in explaining the valorization process. Moreover, it is also necessary to explain the historical

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development of technology—which is another new feature of the late ontology of labor. 3.  Explanation of surplus productivity within the ontology of labor awaits the account of the surface process of capitalist society in Capital, Vol. 3 whereby the surplus productivity of labor as exploited by capital in surplus value is divided between wages, capital, and ground rent. This surface process is distinct from the logic of capital in Vol. 1 insofar as it explains the necessary appearance of capitalist society on the basis of the essential logic of capital. 4.  The account of surplus productivity within the theory of ground rent in Vol. 3 refers to agricultural labor as the surest proof, but not the only instance, that the surplus productivity of labor is grounded on the natural ontological fact of the fecundity of nature. This natural fact is essentially operative in Capital, Vol. 1 but not thematic within it. We may conclude this account of Marx’s late ontology of labor by discussing the implications of this way of understanding the relationship between the ontology of labor and the capitalist exploitation of this ontology through the valorization process. This discussion requires a three-way distinction and relation between the special science of political economy that is the apologetic science of capitalist society, the logic of capital which is the basis of the critique of capitalist society,8 and the ontology of labor which understands the distinct features of capitalist society in relation to the transhistorical, anthropological features of human labor on nature mediated by technology. First, insertion of the ontology of labor into the logic of capital shows that the logic of capital cannot be developed without recourse to ontology and is thus not a self-contained logic. Capitalism can only be understood through its ontological presuppositions and these ontological assumptions are not specific to capitalism but are transhistorical—they constitute a further development of the “upshot of philosophy” that Marx articulated in 1842–5. Moreover, since Marx’s account of the logic is also a critique of that logic, the critique of political economy also rests on an ontological foundation— though, by implication, not in the same form of a presupposition by the logic of capital but as an ontological ground which can in principle be clarified within the critique of political economy. Second, we may ask whether the surplus productivity of labor might have been mentioned in the ontological account in chapter 7. Is its omission a mere error subject to correction by commentary? Note here that its inclusion would have meant that a positive ontology of labor was being inserted from outside into a logic of capital and its critique, thereby undermining that logic’s apparent self-enclosure. What are we then to make of the fact that the logic is

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presented as self-contained even while it is not in fact so? On the assumption that this is not a mere error, that the concealing of the ontological incursion is systematic to the presentation of the logic of capital, its explanation must have to do with the relation between the appearance and the essence of capitalism since the apparent self-enclosure within the logic of capital in Vol. 1 is undone in the derivation of necessary appearance in Vol. 3. From this we may conclude that Marx’s text parallels the object of its critique in the following dual fashion: while the essence of capital as the exploitation of labour is being derived from the appearance of an “immense collection of commodities,” the logic of capital appears as self-enclosed, but while the appearance of capitalist society is being derived from the essence of capital, the logic is not self-enclosed but based upon the surplus productivity of labor and, in the final instance, the fecundity of nature. The movement from appearance to essence appears as self-enclosed, whereas the movement from essence back to appearance manifests itself as dependent on the presupposition of an ontology. Logical self-enclosure is a feature of the appearance of capitalism that is mirrored as such both within political economy and within the critique of political economy through the logic of capital. This is an aspect of the dominance of formal abstraction in modern reason criticized by Husserl. Ontological presupposition is a feature of the essence of capitalism that is mirrored as such both in the derivation of appearance from essence and in the critique of political economy. The critique of political economy, which is Marx’s theory itself, contains both the appearance of self-enclosure and the essence of ontological presupposition—much like Husserl’s distinction between the science and ontology of the lifeworld. Third, we may ask whether the ontology of labor can be elaborated independently of the logic of capital and its critique? Not for Marx. To do so would make it a “philosophy” independent of historical forms and not “critique” which is that into which Marx has subsumed philosophy. But this would consist in an incoherent use of the “upshot of philosophy” as transhistorical by Marx alongside a simultaneous distancing from its implications by relativizing them to capitalism. There seems to be no alternative to recognizing that Marx’s immanent historical critique relies upon a transhistorical, ontological dimension. Insofar as labor is central to capitalist valorization, the critique of capital projects a transhistorical ontology of labor that contains an insight into all human history. It would, however, be a mistake to reduce transhistorical ontology to this projected form since there is no principle of closure contained within the historically-located critique of capital that could turn it into a positive philosophy. In short, other critiques of other epochs might project other aspects of transhistorical ontology, even while the ontology of labor is what we need to know now. In short, even while the discovery

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of the ontology of labor could only occur within capitalism, it is not limited to it (nor may it be exhaustive). Fourth, the fecundity of nature, the excess that explains surplus productivity, is both a natural, ontological, fact and a fact discovered from within the critique of a socio-historical form. Excess explains the non-self-enclosure of capital, and the special science of political economy that apologizes for and eternalizes capital. It is indeed ontological—it grounds the surplus productivity of labor—and constitutes a perennial insight into the human condition. The full meaning of this excess and its discovery will not become apparent until we address the grounding of culture in labor below. 7.2 HERBERT MARCUSE’S EARLY ONTOLOGY OF LABOR Between 1928 and 1933 Herbert Marcuse wrote five essays in which he attempted to lay the groundwork for a synthesis of Martin Heidegger’s phenomenological existentialism and a renovated Marxism.9 While he later repudiated this work,10 connecting Heidegger’s philosophy with pseudo-concreteness and decisionism, and turned to an exclusively Hegelian Marxism on which to found his philosophical investigations, his work of this period remains an indispensable reference point for any philosophy that attempts to synthesize phenomenology and Marx,11 since Marcuse attempts on this basis a contribution to the phenomenology of labor. Our appropriation of Marcuse situates it within a Husserlian phenomenological Marxism that avoids the problems attached to Marcuse’s reliance on Heidegger. 7.2.1 Three Characteristics of Labor as World-Making In his essay “On the Philosophical Foundations of the Concept of Labor in Economics” (1933) Marcuse’s aim is to ground the notion of the radical, revolutionary act in an account of labor. Labor is the form of human action and the alienation of labor under capitalism is the otherness that demands dialectical return. “Labor is an ontological concept, that is, a concept that grasps the being of human Dasein itself and as such” (HM 124). Labor is not a specific human activity, but human activity as such. For Marcuse, the key element of a phenomenology of labor is historicity, not just the history of human activity, but the self-moving in time of human existence itself. Motility is the essence of historical happening grounded on “labor as the specific praxis of the human world” (HM 127). Motility occurs through negativity— the “alienation and estrangement of Dasein, this taking-on-oneself of the law of the thing rather than letting one’s own Dasein happen” (HM 138). Thus,

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while labor is the essence of human historicity, all human action is not labor, but only that action which contributes to self-actualization, to “making Dasein happen” (HM 143). Marcuse specifies three characteristics of labor that make a genuine contribution to a phenomenology of labor apart from a Heideggerian connection. Labor is characterized by duration, permanence and its burdensome nature. Labor requires concentration, produces both the things of the world and the laborer, and puts the laborer under the reign of the thing—throws him or her into negativity. Through labor humans become historical because in laboring one has “stepped out of his own personal sphere in order to occupy a welldetermined place in an already organized and differentiated setting that is divided into different corporations, occupations, classes, etc. He has found his specific place as a part in one of these larger settings” (HM 140). Labor is the activity through which humanity is incorporated into the motility of being. In this, Marcuse is at one with our synthesis of Husserl and Marx. Labor is understood by Marcuse as the realm of human self-actualization. Marcuse described this process of objectification through doing in this way: “man ‘objectifies’ himself and the object becomes ‘his,’ a human object” (HM 127). The historical process of self-realization is not seamless, however, but passes through stages of alienation and estrangement. Marcuse asserts, tellingly, that such stages are not equivalent to the resistance that labor always encounters from the material upon which it works and which grounds the experience of nature. These stages rather pertain to the character of labor as burdensome, that is to say, to the way in which the world12 is manifested through labor and humans take a place in history. In Marcuse’s words, one has “stepped out of his own personal sphere in order to occupy a well-determined place in an already organized and differentiated setting that is divided into various corporations, occupations, classes, etc.” (HM 140). This is not quite alienation in Marx’s sense but rather the ontological ground for the possibility of alienation: because humans take a place in the organized world through labor, their self-actualization falls under the reign of its prevailing organization. Labor is essentially motility, negativity, the negation of an existing state for a projected state. It is the futurity, the self-movement, the happening of human being. Thus, Marcuse opposes any account of labor that defines it through “need.” A natural-organic interpretation of man posits labor as based on a “primordial lack,” a need, but this is an inadequate standpoint, whereas Marcuse’s ontology of labor sees labor as man’s historical being. It is this that ties it to the world, to others and to nature, and thus ties human self-actualization to a place in the historical process.13 Both the possibility of alienation-and-return and the thing-orientation of labor are grounded in the ontology of labor that Marcuse sought to understand at this point through the

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Heideggerian concept of motility, or self-movement, and also through the Hegelian concept of dialectical negation. One key question for Marcuse’s ontology of labor is whether these two sources of self-negation can be made compatible. (I will argue in the next sub-section that they cannot.) There are two other key characteristics of labor according to Marcuse. It is essentially duration insofar as labor is a continuous process that is never completed as such. While individual labor processes begin and end, labor itself endures as a central fact of human existence. Moreover, the labor process requires an orientation and concentration from the worker that characterizes work-time (HM 129). Labor is equally characterized by permanence insofar as it is objectifying activity through which labor “acquires an objective form in the happening of the ‘world’” (HM 130).14 The labor process produces a product that outlasts the process itself and goes on to fit into the world. The world that we inhabit is historical in the sense that the natural material transformed by labor becomes a product among other products that collectively constitute the world through their organized relationships and the relationships between those who use these products. Products are historical in this sense derived from human labor. These three characteristics of labor—burdensomeness, duration and permanence—constitute Marcuse’s comprehensive ontology of labor. Labor is not understood as a specific activity among others but as “the doing of man as his mode of being-in-the-world” (HM 126). Unlike play, or, one may surmise, any other type of human activity, which is dependent on another form of doing, labor pertains to the whole historical existence of human beings and is thus ontological. It is a grounding and not grounded activity and essential to human being for that reason. Play is not constrained by the objective world like labor; it is more free in this sense, more directed toward oneself, and does not engage the world in the same sense. Through the ontology of labor “man’s happening is a making-happen” (HM 131). Though Marcuse is mainly concerned with the ontology of human being as such, this implies that Being itself, insofar as it becomes manifest to humans, happens through making in labor. Yet despite this fundamental character of labor to human being, all human doing is not labor according to Marcuse. Only activity that is self-actualization, happening, is human labor. Human activity that simply fits into the given organized structure of the world is not labor in the ontological sense. It seems that by interpreting human activity as labor and labor as human being, Marcuse is required to make a distinction between human activity that attains this level of self-actualization and that which does not. He makes this distinction in a specific way. Marcuse makes a fundamental distinction between “doing in the service of ‘material’ production and reproduction, that

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is, providing, procuring, and maintaining Dasein’s basic necessities” and “the labour that goes beyond these necessities and that is and remains tied to making Dasein happen” (HM 143). Simple material reproduction is not labor, only labor that goes beyond the necessity of production for reproduction makes human being happen. Such self-actualizing labor can “happen freely” because it “has attained a certain distance from the most necessary and immediate things” (HM 148).15 There is a basic problem with this formulation of self-actualization in labor: while labor is continuous with human existence, the vast majority of actual human labor is barred from the self-actualization that defines it ontologically—which may be true enough, but leads to discounting the labor performed within the parameters of contemporary society as even being labor at all. This is surely too much, not only for a phenomenology of labor, but also for Marx—since it would imply shunting aside the hundreds of pages of Capital that deal with the organization of the labor process under capitalism. The characteristics of burdensomeness, duration and permanence themselves add to and elaborate Marx’s ontology. Burdensomeness refers to one’s place in the world of society and history; duration refers to the concentration and continuousness of work; permanence refers to the world-constructing character of objectifying activity. Regarding burdensomeness, it is surely true that human labor does place one within the world that is organized in intersubjective, natural and technological dimensions. One is “under the law of the thing” insofar as one is placed within the historically-focused world. Thus, one’s daily activity is located within a specific form of social organization that grounds the possibility of social critique and transformation depending on the structural pressures upon that daily activity. While this grounds what Marcuse calls alienation and estrangement, it is not identical to them. It is only if what may be called “structural pressures” obtain that one is drawn toward a critique of capitalism, and this must be grounded in an analysis of contemporary capitalism, not in ontology itself. The law of the thing, the dialectic of otherness, is surely an ontological feature of human existence insofar as human activity is intersubjective activity that bears upon nature. In short, the notion of burdensomeness is used by Marcuse to elaborate the worldliness of human being in the direction of a Hegelian “alienation and return” that would ground labour’s function as social critique ontologically (HM 138–9). The missing component here, one that Marcuse certainly recognizes when he discusses Marxism itself, is the analysis of the concrete contemporary conditions of labor. This suggests that the impetus to revolution within current labor organization is an historical and not an ontological issue—a matter of historical conjuncture rather than the nature of being. This is precisely what Marcuse obscures when he interprets the ontology of labor, specifically

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authentic labor, through the radical, revolutionary act. While Marcuse maintains the opposite here, that revolution is an ontological feature of labor, his turn to a Hegelian account of labor immediately afterward suggests that the point that I am making here was in some sense clear to him: a Heideggerian ontology of labor cannot ground an ontology of revolution. What Marcuse calls the permanence of the world of products refers to the constructed world that humans inhabit because of labor and could easily be interpreted more widely through the temporality of produced things. Hannah Arendt’s distinction between objects made for consumption and those that construct a world that can be handed over to future generations can be justified in this way. “It is this durability which gives the things of the world their relative independence from men who produced and use them, their ‘objectivity’ which makes them withstand, ‘stand against,’ and endure, at least for a time, the voracious needs and wants of their living makers and users” (Arendt, 1973, 137). However, the question remains as to whether one should adopt the related position shared by Arendt and Marcuse, and perhaps grounded in the Heideggerian ontology from which they both began, that objects of consumption, and the labor that makes objects of consumption, is deficient in comparison to authentic labor. Marcuse’s denigration of need, scarcity, and reproduction in his account of labor is based in the same conception of labor as inherently world-transforming. One conclusion to be drawn from the demotion of revolution to a historically specific judgment that is suggested here is that labor performed simply within a given historical form—that is to say, labor which is not revolutionizing praxis—should not be regarded as deficient for that reason alone. Negativity, based in motility, does indeed reside in labor insofar as it has both intersubjective and thingly dimensions in the ‘world’ but this does not ground revolution, which is ontic, rather negativity-motility as ontological. The motility, or negativity, of labor that constitutes the self-production of humanity, even insofar as it operates within a given historical form, is the basis of historical self-movement. This motility must be understood as an open-ended self-production. To the extent that one participates in this self-production, the worker can achieve an ontological self-understanding, or authenticity, through the insertion into nature, society and history as an active subject. This ontological authenticity of labor is at its highest point insofar as labor disposes over the whole labor process to the greatest extent—as Marcuse showed in his analysis of labor’s duration. The juxtaposition of these two aspects of labor leads one to ask whether there might be a difference, or even a contradiction, between them. Labor performed within a mode of production has its authenticity, I have argued against Marcuse, but I have agreed with him that authenticity is at its highest point at its greatest disposition over the

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labor process as a whole. There seem to be two aspects to the authenticity in question: One that refers to the insertion of the worker in a given mode of production and another that pertains to the extent of disposition over the labor process. Note that the second of these is not equivalent to revolutionizing praxis as such—even though Marx’s claim in the Grundrisse was indeed that the increase of disposition over the labor process grounds the potential for revolutionary action (Gr 705–6). Thus, the two aspects of the authenticity of labor must be seen as each having a certain legitimacy and as not being reducible to a degree of the other. Insertion into history and the capacity to make history though self-production are simply not the same. 7.2.2 Labor as Necessity and as World-Making The three characteristics of burdensomeness, duration and permanence add significantly to the specificity of Marx’s ontology of labor. They show how labor as an ontological feature of human being constructs a world in the phenomenological sense. Despite the fact that Marcuse leaned on Heidegger for the concept of world, the three characteristics can be straightforwardly appropriated for the phenomenological concept of lifeworld whose organization of human motility may be synthesized with Marx’s ontology of labor. Due to his reliance on phenomenology, Marcuse interprets labor as world-making and not just the fulfilment of necessity (which might ground a conception of freedom as free time outside necessary labor). labor is split, we may say, between its contingent historical meaning as the fulfilment of necessity (Husserl’s first sense of history as contingency) and its constitutive meaning as an ontology of human being in which a world is constructed (Husserl’s second sense of history as transcendentally necessary in the sense of constitutive of human being as such). It can therefore be seen to require the third phenomenological sense of history as an event which is instituted in history. In Marx’s terms, this requires an account of capitalism as the institution of labor in which the transhistorical, transcendental meaning of labor becomes evident and structuring. These three senses can only be properly clarified in the last section of this chapter after the complete characteristics of the ontology of labor have been brought forward. The two senses of labor with which Marcuse’s early ontology operated— necessity (contingent history) and world-making (transcendental history)— are nevertheless sufficient to ground the distinction between technology as specific goal-oriented action and the cumulative effects of technologies as world-making that was introduced above regarding Marx’s late ontology of labor. While this distinction was incipient in Marx’s treatment of technology “in a wider sense,” it was never theorized as such (Cap1 286–7). The

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distinction between labor as necessity and labor as world-making grounds theoretically these two aspects of technology. Whereas technological necessity aims at a concrete goal, the full historical impact of technologies in the transformation of the labor process, the built environment, and the earth itself transform the lifeworld within which human being is situated. It is this distinction, which is made possible through the phenomenological concept of world or lifeworld, that breaks through the Prometheanism of Marx’s early ontology and allows the fulfilment of his incipient recognition of it in the discussion of technology “in a wider sense.” It fully justifies the critique of Marx’s early ontology by Landgrebe and Patočka and establishes the independence of Marx’s late ontology from that critique.16 With this distinction, the technological progressivism of orthodox Marxism has been definitively set aside in favor of a greater appreciation of the cumulative effects of technological transformation of nature especially under conditions of capitalism where it is only individual effects that are considered and cumulative effect is ignored. In this sense, a philosophy of technology, which we take up in part in this text, is implied by Marx’s late work. 7.3 KAREL KOSÍK ON THE INCEPTION OF CULTURE FROM THE ONTOLOGY OF LABOR We have advanced an interpretation of Marx’s late ontology of labor as a fulfilment of the ontology of the lifeworld that Husserl mistakenly thought had not yet been elaborated. The ontology of labor shows that the crisis of representation due to the expelling of meaning and value from scientific reason (demonstrated in Part II) depends upon the organization of practical, kinaesthetic, social organization (which is the topic of Part III). It is not too much to say that 20th and perhaps 21st century philosophy is in its essence praxis philosophy, that is to say, that its starting point is reflection upon human being in its practical activities, such that science, knowledge, and reason become secondary and derived formations. But it is equally the case that, when the derived status of science and reflection in an ontological sense becomes derogation in an ethical sense or relegation to epiphenomenal status, then praxis is understood as a reduction of human being to its given world. What is needed is not a reductionism but a phenomenology of the inception of culture as emergent from the ontology of labor. Karel Kosík phrased this essential problem of the relation of praxis to human being as open-ness. Abolishing philosophy in dialectical social theory transforms the significance of the seminal 19th century discovery into its very opposite: praxis ceases to be the sphere of humanizing man, the process of forming a socio-human reality as well

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as man’s openness toward being and toward the truth of objects: it turns into a closedness: socialness is a cave in which man is walled in. Images, ideas, and concepts that man takes for spiritual reproductions of nature, of material processes and of objects existing independently of his consciousness, are in ‘reality’ a social projection, an expression of man’s social position in the form of science or of objectivity. In other words, they are false images. Man is walled in in his socialness. Praxis, which in Marx’s philosophy had made possible both objectivation and objective cognition, and man’s openness toward being, turns into social subjectivity and closedness: man is a prisoner of his socialness (DC 106).

Kosík aims to restore Marx’s conception of praxis as open-ness, which requires restoring Marx’s relation to philosophy, since philosophy is the practice of open-ness and is, as such, a practice of free reason in human being. Open-ness grounds negation, and thus Kosík’s conception of dialectic, in its reach toward totality that is his very definition of praxis. Such a dialectic of totality presupposes an open-ness by human being to its totality of determinations. The existential open-ness of human being parallels, for Kosík, the task of philosophy, whose open-ness opposes any closing in by a social system.17 In aiming at a recovery and revitalization of Marx’s thought on praxis as the essence of human being, Kosík criticizes the reduction of Marxism to a theory of the influence of the “economic factor” on human life. “The factor theory avers that one privileged factor—economics—determines all other factors: the state, law, art, politics, morals” (DC 64). Such an economic determinism not only occludes the active, world-making ontology of human being but also justifies rule through technical manipulation of this supposed determinism by a bureaucratic elite. Kosík’s critique not only exposes this error but also explains its production as a consequence of the historical dynamic of praxis itself. Capitalist society produces the economic sphere as an abstracted and self-contained sphere that correlatively produces a specific sort of economic knowledge applicable to that society. This abstracted sphere of activity can then be interpreted to determine one-sidedly other aspects of human life. Thus, the “factor theory” of orthodox Marxism is itself a product of capitalist society, such that an historically isolated aspect of human praxis can be hypothesized to determine the whole. Communist society, in operationalizing economic determinism, thus culminated the truncated praxis of capitalist society. The key concept in Kosík’s appropriation of Heidegger and simultaneous recovery of Marx’s theory of praxis is “totality” which accounts for the genesis of social reality through which “the social whole (the socio-economic formation) is formed and constituted by the economic structure. The economic structure forms the unity and continuity of all spheres of social life” (DC 64, italics removed). It becomes an important question if, and how, the

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whole of human praxis can be determined as a “socio-economic-formation” and why this can be explained by “economic structure,” but it is clear that only insofar as it can explain the “unity and continuity” of the entirety of historical human being can it be considered a recovery of Marx’s thought. What is the nature of Kosík’s determination of philosophy as praxis, as labor, and as economic structure, such that it can be framed as “a philosophical answer to a philosophical question: Who is man, what is socio-human reality, and how is reality formed?” (DC 136, emphasis by Kosík). Kosík’s ontology of being human defines human being as praxis, goes on to define praxis as labor, and show that labor is organized in a determinate historical form as economic structure. It is important to understand the nature of this theoretical determination, which moves from the most universal toward the most specific, from praxis through labor to economic structure. Evidently, there are philosophies that are not praxis philosophies; there are praxis philosophies that do not focus on labor; and there are labor philosophies, or more correctly ideologies, that focus on the economic factor rather than economic structure. Kosík begins with the most abstract characterization of his approach to philosophy—praxis versus contemplative—and then at the next step characterizes praxis as labor, and then labor as organized through economic structure. At each point the initial abstract characterization is given greater concreteness due to its increasingly specific theoretical determination. In this way, economic structure is not distinguished from other kinds of structure; labor is not distinguished from other forms of human activity; and praxis is not distinguished from other forms of human being. There are not, as it were, a series of distinct concepts at the same level of abstraction—for example, labor, play, prayer, etc.—from which one is chosen—which would of course raise the question of by what criteria one of several possibilities is deemed more fundamental. There is a logic of increasing specification from universal to concrete, in which each greater determination gives greater content while at the same time requiring that competing concepts which do occur at a given level of abstraction not be simply ignored but rather be founded upon the next specific level. For example, one does not choose labor over play, but shows that labor is a specification of praxis, so that play would also be a form of praxis that is founded upon labor. This logic of determination from abstract to concrete excludes other possibilities through each concretion, so that the specific form of Kosík’s ontology emerges not only from the increasing concretion but also from its justification for the rejection of other possibilities. Thus, to say that the being of human being is praxis is to say that it is not, at least in the first place, or fundamentally, contemplative, theoretical, or artistic; though, for this to be more than a polemical assertion, what is not-praxis

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—the contemplative, theoretical, and artistic—must be shown, in the second or third place, to be a product and mutation of praxis. To say that the essence of praxis is labor is to say that it is not, at least in the first place, or fundamentally, politics, art or philosophy; though, for this to be more than a polemical assertion, what is not-labor—politics, art and philosophy —must be shown to be, in the second or third place, a product and mutation of labor. To say that the essence of labor is economic structure is to say that the historical conditions of labor are such as to organize a distinction between labor and not-labor; it is this not-labor that is founded upon labor that is the origin of culture. Insofar as human being has been determined philosophically as praxis, further determined praxis as labor, and further still as economic structure, which institutes its specifically Marxist dimension, it demands a non-reductionistic theory of the inception of culture from labor. The inception of culture from the ontology of labor is the point at which the open-ness of human being is captured and continued by philosophy as the realization of human being. Kosík’s Heideggerian concept of labor as a happening (Geschehen) in which human being expresses itself is followed through in his theory of culture, or notlabor, where he understands human reality as disclosed though philosophy and art (rather than culture as explained by the economic factor as has been common for Marxists). This logic of specifying determination means that the alternative rejected in the first place—labor, not culture—must be recovered in a not-reductive and non-polemical form. In this sense, accounting for the inception of culture is a crucial test for the adequacy of an ontology of labor. Our interpretation shows that Kosík’s notion of culture as not-labor, defined only by a privative, is an original contribution to a Marxian theory of culture. The foundation of a theory of culture in the ontology of labor shows how the determination of praxis as labor does not diminish its universality but provides a basis for the autonomy of culture—in which human being as open-ness finds expression in philosophy and art, and in which culture can come to the aid of labor by formulating the project of its freedom. 7.3.1 Ontology of Labor as the Ground for Culture Labor is understood by Kosík as the ontological character of human being. Labor in this sense is not accessible through sociological description of forms of labor, nor work processes and activity as such, or different kinds of work (DC 118). “Labor is a happening (Geschehen) which permeates man’s entire being and constitutes his specificity” (DC 119; DK 197). In this context Kosík refers to Herbert Marcuse’s early essay (discussed above) “On the Philosophical Foundations of the Concept of Labour in Economics”

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(1933) to synthesize Marx’s concept of labor with Heidegger’s ontology.18 There, Marcuse defined labor as an occurrence or “happening” following Heidegger’s definition of historicity as “the constitution of being of the “happening” of Da-sein as such” (PCL 127, 137; BT 17; SZ 19–20). It is in this dialogue between Kosík and Marcuse that characteristics of the ontology of labor pertinent to the inception of culture can be brought out. Marcuse’s early essay on the philosophical foundations of labor and Kosík’s account in Dialectics of the Concrete share a common polemical object in the orthodox Marxist reduction of labor to an aspect or factor, then argued to be the significant factor, in human life that determines the rest and which can therefore only be assumed to be a primordial need or biological given. In contrast, when labor is understood ontologically as a happening, or event, that permeates the whole historical human being it shows, according to Marcuse, “an essential excess of human Dasein beyond every possible situation” or that “human being is always more than its Dasein at any given time” (PCL 136, italics added). Labor is the fundamental motility of human being that places it into history and a situation that it can always surpass through its “primordial negativity” (PCL 139). As we have seen, Marcuse specifies the ontology of labor into three characteristics: duration, permanence, and burdensomeness. Duration in Marcuse’s usage refers to the fact that labor surpasses any specific act or process of labor in being an orientation to human life as a whole. Permanence refers to the products that are objectified in the labor process such that the historical form of a human world is constructed. Labor as a burden does not refer to the degree of its difficulty or irksomeness, but to the “law of the thing” under which labor works; labor must respect the nature of its materials and the practical necessities of its exertion to successfully produce its object (PCL 129–30; PGWA 17). Marcuse’s notion of “essential excess” is usually called “surplus productivity” in Marxist terminology and would constitute the first characteristic of reading Marx’s “transhistorical characteristics of labour” as ontology. It is significant that Kosík does not mention this fundamental characteristic of labor, indicating that he is only half-committed to a phenomenological ontology. Kosík generally endorses Marcuse’s specification of the ontology of labor, no doubt because of their common appropriation of Heidegger to recovery Marx’s conception of labor as a happening that permeates the whole of human being. He builds upon the temporal elements of Marcuse’s analysis to analyze the three-dimensionality of time in human being: First, the temporal process of labor is transcended (Aufhebung) in the product which endures through time such that products collectively constitute the human built world.19 Second, in the process of labor the results of past labor are transformed by future intentions (DC 122; DK 203). Human time is thus rooted in objective praxis

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whereby human being transforms the given historically-determined situation through first adapting itself to that situation. Nevertheless, Kosík is critical of Marcuse on one fundamental point.20 Kosík asserts that Marcuse does not distinguish between labor and praxis, that “labor is characterized as the essence of praxis and praxis is defined essentially as labor” (DC 130, ftn. 42). Indeed, Marcuse refers to “this happening itself: labor as the specific praxis of human Dasein in the world” (PCL 127), so Kosík’s characterization is apt enough, but how does Marcuse come to this identity and how does Kosík’s view distinguish between the two? Kosík’s claim that praxis and labor must be distinguished might be interpreted along the lines of the distinction between technē from praxis, or labor from politics, as many commentators—such as Hans-Georg Gadamer, Hannah Arendt and Jürgen Habermas—have done.21 We would thus have two, or perhaps many, forms of human activity and the issue would be how to ground their unity in an ontology of human being, so that it could be claimed that the problem is that Marcuse saw all human doing through the prism of labor and was thereby tied to Marxist productivism. However, Kosík and Marcuse agree that labor is a happening that permeates the whole of human being and, even more, labor is understood as the ground from which human being discloses Being itself. Moreover, Kosík himself determines praxis by labor and labor by economic structure. So, this sort of division of human being by opposing labor to other forms of activity is not a viable interpretation of Kosík’s critique of Marcuse. What is meant by Kosík comes to light in his account of the genesis of culture from labor. Marcuse’s first statement of the identity of praxis and labor (quoted above) occurs immediately prior to his consideration of the possibility that play might be equally primordial with labor in defining human praxis. He argues that play might, though it might not, have an object as does labor though, even in this case, the relation to the object is substantially different. Play does not orient itself to the content and law of the object as does labor but insofar as is possible negates the sway of the object in favour of a humanly created rules of the game—which can in principle be violated but which the players voluntarily recognize. Play in this sense negates the objectivity of the object and thus creates a freedom that is impossible in labor. For this reason, play is an intermittent activity in human life that involves a turning away from the activities that routinely dominate human life. Therefore, “the way that life happens in play is not a happening that is completed in and through itself: it is essentially dependent and points inherently to another doing” (PCL 128). The characteristics of labor that Marcuse then elaborates—duration, permanence, and burdensomeness—are derived precisely from that which is not operative during play. These characteristics explain the historical dimension of human

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being as rooted in the motility of labor as negation of a given state so that “labor presupposes a well-determined relation to time that thoroughly penetrates Dasein and guides its praxis” (PCL 141). While Marcuse distinguishes between labor and play, he does not place play on the same ontological level as labor. The distinction between labor and praxis must be sought then, not as a distinction within praxis into labor versus other sorts of activity, but as a distinction that arises from within labor as praxis itself. There are two aspects of labor, according to Kosík, which were not properly grasped by Marcuse and which constitute the meaning of his remark that Marcuse failed to distinguish between praxis and labor. The first, which can be called hominization, refers to the formation of human being from a prior animal. The second refers to the notion of “metamorphosis in general” that grounds dialectic and which is based on the happening of labor understood through hominization. Such metamorphosis grounds the notion of culture as not-labor—which is the specific contribution of Kosík to a phenomenological-Marxist theory of culture. This dense formulation needs to be spelled out in more detail. Kosík is arguing that the specificity of the specific-universal account of labor can be understood from the viewpoint of the process of hominization. This process is at once a specific process but one that, in creating the human, comes to pervade the whole of human being. This transformation is not only a specific transformation, but is the model for transformation outright, since it is the origin of dialectic as such. “The dialectical mediation of this happening does not balance opposites, nor are its opposites constituted in an antinomy. Rather, in the process of transformation a unity of opposites is formed” (DC 121, emphases by Kosík). Hominization is a specific happening that originates dialectics as the universal process of the happening of labor that grounds historicity and therefore of the later specific historical forms of labor. Kosík does not refer to Engels here but there is no doubt that he is referring to Engels’ Dialectics of Nature in which labor is assigned the role of initiating the transition between animal and human (Engels, 1940, 279–96).22 Whatever may be said in favor of Engels’ theory of hominization, it must be pointed out that it is a specialscientific theory not an ontology. Alternative theories could be mentioned: that the upright posture narrowed the birth canal resulting in more premature babies that had to be held by the mother which thereby initiated face-to-face communication; that a primal murder originated both language and god; etc. Whatever the validity of such theories, they need to be judged in relation to the available evidence within their scientific domains. An ontology of human being is not oriented to the genesis of humans from pre-human animals, but to the essential features of human being once human being is established as such. Kosík is certainly correct to note his fundamental difference from

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Marcuse on this point. The recourse to Heidegger for an ontology of labor that could be synthesized with Marx to ground both a conception of human being and historical inquiry into forms of production of necessity rejects the problem of hominization to address the ontology of human being directly as it is for humans, or in Marx’s words, “labour in a form in which it is an exclusively human characteristic” (Cap1 283–4).23 There is an essential difference between genesis understood in historical-anthropological terms from its meaning as an onto-genetic layering of human experience in ontology. This difference has a further consequence in a difference between how Marcuse and Kosík address the relation between freedom and necessity that is the ground for their accounts of culture. All human doing is not labor in the ontological sense according to Marcuse. Only activity that is self-actualization, happening, is human labor (PCL 143). Human activity that simply fits into the given organized structure of the world is not labor in the ontological sense. By interpreting human praxis as labor and thereby labor as the being of human being, Marcuse is required to make a distinction between human activity that attains self-actualization and that which does not. He makes a fundamental distinction between “doing in the service of ‘material’ production and reproduction, that is, providing, procuring, and maintaining Dasein’s basic necessities” and “the labour that goes beyond these necessities and that is and remains tied to making Dasein happen” (PCL 143). Simple material reproduction is not labor, only labor that goes beyond the necessity of production for reproduction makes human being happen.24 He argues that such self-actualizing labor can “happen freely” because it “has attained a certain distance from the most necessary and immediate things” (PCL 148). In this way, Marcuse associates authentic labor, in Heideggerian terminology, as the highest form of human self-actualization with Marx’s description of the realm of freedom and, correlatively, associates merely ontic labor as material reproduction immersed in immediate things with Marx’s realm of necessity.25 One might be forgiven for thinking that Marcuse’s distinction between labor as ontic and as ontological, which grounds the distinction between necessity and freedom, adequately fulfils Kosík’s demand that labor be understood as “a specific happening or as a specific reality that constitutes and permeates man’s entire being” (DC 123). However, a second look would observe that the relation is rather the reverse in Marcuse: in orthodox Heideggerian fashion, Marcuse begins with the ontological account as the ground for a historical, ontic one, whereas Kosík’s philosophy of labor begins from the specific labor that grounds hominization which then comes to pervade the whole of human being. This ‘before’ is not meant in a temporal sense, but in a logical and ontological one: for Kosík, ontology is grounded on a specific historicalanthropological genesis, whereas for Marcuse ontology is the ground for

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determining historical forms. Thus, Kosík characterizes his discussion of the “ontology of man” as a “digression,” indicating that for him the universal, ontological question is on the way to understanding a historical-anthropological genesis that founds history and ontology (DC 123). Following out this notion of the specific happening of hominization into the genesis of culture, Kosík asks “where is the limit of labour, or the measure of its distinctiveness?” that leads directly to a discussion of freedom and necessity in which art is the activity most characterized by freedom (DC 124). Art is labor as free creation, whereas the “specificity of labor [is] . . . determined by extraneous purpose” (DC 124). This “extraneous purpose” is identical to the “law of the thing” which Marcuse sees as an ontological characteristic of labor that distinguishes it from play (PCL 130). Kosík agrees that labor is determined by necessity so that “one and the same activity can be both labor and not-labor, depending on whether or not it is performed as a natural necessity” in order to conclude that the distinction between freedom and necessity doesn’t fully capture the distinction between labor and notlabor (DC 124; DK 206). In using the term “not-labor” in distinction from labor, Kosík clearly does not want to distinguish what is not labor by any substantive characteristic differing from that of labor, but to say that it is exclusively distinguished from labor only by the negative characteristic that it is not labor. What is labor is determined by the social organization of necessity and what is not-labor is that which is free creation entirely exhausted by the criterion that social organization does not define it as necessary. He goes on to give an account of the realm of freedom as a historical distinction growing out of the realm of necessity, and thus as a historically transient distinction, so that the conceptual juxtaposition of labor and freedom remains captive of this historical moment. Kosík sums up his argument with the statement that “such human doing which is determined only by internal purposiveness and does not depend on natural necessity or social obligation is not labor but free creation, irrespective of the realm in which it is realized. The real realm of freedom thus begins beyond the boundaries of labor, although precisely labor forms its indispensable historical basis” (DC 125). Whereas Marcuse defines labor ontologically as creative happening, and thus subsumes much actually-existing labor under ontic necessity that is not “really” labor, Kosík defines the purpose of a philosophy of labor to be realized in free artistic production, or not-labor, that labor within the realm of necessity makes possible. This is the meaning of Kosík’s remark that “a philosophy of labor . . . is consequently a philosophy of not-labor” (DC 125). While these positions are very close at some points, they are divided fundamentally insofar as Marcuse sees the essence of labor as fulfilled in the realm of freedom, whereas Kosík sees the realm of freedom as not-labor. This difference embodies two

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utterly opposed perspectives toward the “law of the thing” under which they agree labor works: for Kosík, freedom is only beyond this law of the thing, whereas for Marcuse it is not the law of the thing that freedom escapes but necessity as it is socio-historically defined. To sum up in a slogan: Marcuse sees the realization of human being in free labor still working under the law of the thing, whereas Kosík sees freedom as beyond labor—which is indeed properly understood through this law—and therefore in culture as a privative negation of labor. This is why ontology is the ground for Marcuse, but only a digression for Kosík. When Kosík accuses Marcuse of failing to distinguish between labor and praxis, he is aiming at this fact: that Marcuse sees fulfilment within labor, whereas Kosík sees freedom outside it. The realm of freedom, art and culture is thus for Marcuse a realm in which labor comes into its own, whereas for Kosík it is a realm beyond labor that is made possible by labor. Kosík asks: “Does this mean that political activity, science and art are not labor? A sweeping negative answer would be just as incorrect as the assertion that science, politics and art indeed are labour” (DC 124). The footnote to Marcuse indicates that he sees in him such an assertion. While Kosík regards his own answer as not so sweeping, it is most certainly in the negative. Not-labor is grounded in labor and itself grounds culture. Kosík distinguishes praxis from labor because, while labor is the prerequisite of creative freedom, creative freedom—though it is still praxis—is not labor. For Kosík, the inception of culture is at that point in labor that exceeds natural necessity as defined by the prevailing economic structure. Thus, it has no ontological dimension such as Marcuse’s “excess” and Marx’s “surplus productivity.” Culture is consequently defined solely as not-labor, which is a privative characterization devoid of any positive content. What are the advantages of such a definition? Any positive definition of culture, such as Marcuse’s, requires both a justification of that definition against competing alternatives and, insofar as it is a Marxist definition, requires grounding that capacity or possibility in human labor. Such a justification and grounding would itself be a cultural argument, construction, and invention, so that it would need to play the double role of accounting for culture per se, including the competing definitions (even if incorrect), and substantiating itself as correct. This would lead to a hermeneutic circle very much like that which Heidegger describes in Being and Time (BT 5-7), though applied not to Being outright but to culture: in order to justify a conception of culture one would have to use cultural resources made possible by that conception of culture itself. This would mean that any theory of culture would be always-already immersed in a cultural way of life that it could describe and extend but could not theorize from the ground up and would encounter difficult problems in its relation to other cultural

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formations. One could not in this manner give an account of the ontological genesis or inception of culture such as Kosík requires. In this sense, Marcuse is consistent in identifying culture as free creation with labor and denying that the prevailing economic structure is labor at all, so that he cannot really bridge culture and labor even though his notion of “excess” grounds its possibility. This is the first advantage of Kosík’s privative definition of culture: it avoids a hermeneutic circularity by grounding culture solely in the negation of labor in its historically-determined form, such that the justification of culture is not self-referring but refers to labor as both ontological and historically specific. It follows from this definition that the realm of culture does not fulfil the potential of a prior ontology but, by negating its historical form, opens to possibilities not realized in that form. Moreover, the form of activity in culture is not tied to either the form of activity in the ontology of labor nor its negation (in play, for example). The form of activity is left entirely undetermined, which is to say, left to free invention through the activity itself. Kosík’s conception of culture is characterized by open-ness through its privative determination from labor. The realm of culture can be described and justified as a whole since it is determined by labor. This realm determines its own content and form precisely because as not-labor it is not tied in its content to the historically-realized possibilities of labor but opens to that which is unrealized. Its form does not take the form of labor, nor must deny the form of labor, but is free to determine its own appropriate form in the light of its content of unrealized possibilities (DC 124). Marcuse, on the other hand, is caught in exactly this oscillation: while he denies that culture takes the form of play in his early Heideggerian theory, his later theory of culture goes on to identify it with play (compare PCL 136-7 to Marcuse 1962, 165ff.). The privative definition does not say that culture is not labor, it says that culture is not-labor. It is not a negation of the verb but of the noun such that the form and content of culture are not determined by that which they negate but affirmed by what makes them possible. Despite the real advantages of describing the inception of culture as notlabor, Kosík fails to capture the ontological characteristic of labor as surplus productivity or excess that grounds its capacity to produce not-labor. Only because labor does not exhaust all its productivity in sustaining the immediate worker can the inception of culture as not-labor be possible. For this reason, Kosík’s ontology of labor, insofar as he intended to develop one, is lacking by comparison to Marcuse’s.

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7.3.2 Culture as Language Emancipated from Labor In accounting for the origin of culture as not-labor, Kosík lays the groundwork for a non-reductive Marxist theory of culture. However, as will be shown below, this theory is still too tied to Marxist orthodoxy insofar as it understands labor on the basis of Friedrich Engels’ theory of hominization and thereby fails to account for the innovative role of language in culture. The following account shows the origin of this innovative role in its loosening from the goal-orientation of labor in order to suggest that a revised version of Kosík’s non-reductive account of culture could sufficiently account for the autonomy of culture, especially its key themes: individuation, death, and laughter. By grounding the inception of culture in the ontology of labor, the Marxist expansion of Husserl’s return to the living body as the root-phenomenon of the lifeworld accounts for the sense in which Marx’s ontology of labor is made possible by the history of philosophy. Kosík’s theory of the inception of culture from labor (DC 61-86) is presented in three parts: First, an argument against determinism by the economic factor, with a correlative defense of “economic structure” as a non-reductionist conception of the totality of human life understood as praxis. Second, an argument against viewing art as merely the expression of social reality, with a correlative account of its formative role in human reality. Reality is not known prior to culture but disclosed in it. “A work of art expresses an entire world only insofar as it forms it. It forms a world insofar as it discloses the truth of reality. Insofar as reality speaks out through the work of art. In a work of art, reality addresses man” (DC 74). Third, these two theses on the inception of culture are deployed to clarify the famous segment from the final pages of the introduction to Marx’s Grundrisse where he refers to fact that the Greek arts “in a certain respect . . . count as a norm and as an unattainable model” (Gr 111). Since this passage has long been a problematic one for Marxist theory because it appears to run counter both to the historical character of his thought and to the base-superstructure Marxist theory of culture, Kosík’s explanation of this passage can be taken as the nutshell of a non-reductionist theory of culture that forms human reality in a manner that is not shut in by its social production but opens out to become a “timeless” acquisition. Timelessness is not, however, outside human history but is rather the interaction between the work and its audience through history. “The work is a work and lives as a work because it calls for interpretations and because it has an influence of many meanings” (DC 80). The influence of a work contains an event that links audience and work in this history of interpretation. The event of a work is a happening that discloses human reality sufficiently that it can be explored in many ways from different social locations and in different social contexts. A cultural work is seen by Kosík as a disclosive

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happening that is a creative forming of human reality whose meaning is explored historically through a process of totalization. The organization and teleology of this three-part sketch of the inception of culture is structured by its polemical object—a reductive Marxist account of culture as determined by the economic factor and therefore as both explained by, and a clue to, the economic conditions in a given time. In each case the argument moves from this critical object toward an account of culture as formative, disclosive, and persistent through history. Since access to human reality is not given apart from culture, culture becomes the realm in which human meaning, goals, and suffering are articulated. While it is by no means a complete account of culture, it is clear that the location of cultural theory within Marxism has here become central: the role of culture in disclosing the totality of human reality in philosophy and art means that even “economic structure” and “the economic factor” must be understood as cultural productions. Further, it even suggests that Marxism in its true meaning is itself a cultural theory of human reality. Mildred Bakan has argued that Kosík’s Hegelian-Marxist theory of labor lacks an account of the role of language (Bakan 1978, 244–53; Bakan 1983, 87). We put this critical point in positive terms closer to Kosík’s formulation: the not of not-labor consists in a freeing of language from the form it takes within the ontology of labor such that culture constitutes an opening of human being. Language that accomplishes reference to what is absent can itself be taken back to the unique mutuality of intersubjective human address. That opening to Being that Kosík and Heidegger both speak of is also the mutual opening of person to person in terms of the potentiality for speech. And the context of person to person mutuality—the precise context of dialogue—is also the context of oppression as a violation of recognition. . . . The demand for recognition that Hegel grounds in the telos of the absolute idea is itself implicit in speech as the mutuality of personal address . . . (Bakan 1983, 87).

The dialectic of recognition as a failure of mutuality motivating a dialectic of its eventual achievement presumes that the failure can be seen precisely as a failure such that the motivation for continuation can be immanent. The seeing of a failure as a failure of mutuality is grounded in the mutuality of address in language. There is, in this sense, a contradiction in the position of the slave with respect to the master in that the slave must be sufficiently non-human to be the instrument of another’s will that defines a slave but also must be sufficiently human to understand the commands that the master utters. This contradiction, which is essential to the dialectic of recognition as a process of

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immanent negation, can only be seen to be a contradiction through the mutual address implicit in language.26 There is thus a categorial difference between work and speech that must be accounted for within the ontology of labor. Whereas work is oriented toward transforming a given arrangement of things into an imagined future one organized around a product, speech is oriented to the mutuality of understanding. “Insofar as we are open to each other dialogically, we let each other be. . . . To be open to things, however, in terms of work, is to be open to their possible transformation” (Bakan 1983, 88; see BT 250). These are not different activities but different components of the same activity of labor. For clarity we may adopt definitions here: language is intersubjective communication, whereas work is the object-producing transformation of nature. These are two abstract aspects of labor insofar as human labor is social labor and thus incorporates both work and language in every actual instance. Language speaks of the absent with equal facility as of the present. It informs the imagination and therefore grounds temporality. Thus, the imagination of the future product that is constructed in work is impossible without language. Bakan’s argument can be supplemented with reference to the similar analysis by Paul Ricoeur that influenced her.27 It begins from the gesture, which is the point at which doing gives rise to saying. The imperative cry, because it is a call to action rather than immediately action, both initiates and regulates action. Thus, while every word can always be referred back to action—and this is the legitimacy of a Marxist theory of culture for Ricoeur— it simultaneously is a break from immediate praxis initiating “a first reflective withdrawal, which, thanks to the interval, the gap hollowed into the plenum of the gesture in the act of being performed, allows for the projective design of the total gesture” (Ricoeur 1965, 201). While the tool prolongs the body in a manner that tends toward a dormant and customary cycle of use, the spoken word upsets this cycle and, through the imagination, initiates creative innovation. Through imagination of an absent future, the spoken word thus grounds transformation of the tool into a machine and, thereby, to higher forms of technology and science. The role of language oriented to influencing others, which is distinct from work but operative in labor, grounds human being as a signifying being operating within a world of meaning. Signifying is based on distinguishing and denominating, so that “all our action is thus based on distinctions and relations” (Ricoeur 1965, 204). While the first moment of the word is in coordination of activity, its other-orientation flowers when belief is overcome by doubt—should it be done this way, or that?—so that it is “in the world of the dubitative word that there are contestations. It is in the world of contestation that there are affirmations” (Ricoeur 1965, 207). While the word goes

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beyond imperative and dubitative uses, this duality identifies the passage from the ground of signification to a multifaceted world of meaning that is articulated in culture. For Ricoeur, the paradigm of work as the transformation of nature requires for its actual operation the paradigm of language as communication with others. Both of these are enfolded in labor such that labor transforms the world and simultaneously transforms others and the self. We should note the theoretical trajectory of Ricoeur’s argument, which is reproduced in Bakan: on the basis of an understanding of work as the transformation of nature into human products, the necessity of language to the operation of work is noted, and then the emancipation of language from its immediate immersion in work is analyzed, such that language in an extended and mediate sense grounds culture. Bakan’s critique of Kosík is that he does not grasp the importance of language to work (Bakan 1978, 249; Bakan 1983, 87). But is the paradigm of work as object-oriented transformation, which indeed would require the addition of language, sufficient to cover what Kosík means by “labor”? Since Kosík understands “labor as a happening and a doing in which something happens with man” (DC 120) referring to the social being of humans (eg. DC 112, 177), it implicitly assumes a reference to language and communication as the ground of social life even though Bakan’s critique is correct to say that there is no actual theory of language either in Kosík’s ontology of labor (DC 112–27) or in his account of the origin of culture (DC 61–86). He comes closest to addressing this issue when he poses the question of the specificity of human being: he repeats the orthodox Marxist gesture of addressing human specificity by contrasting it with non-human animal specificity. Referring to Hegel and Diderot, and eschewing any reference to Engels’ classic text that influenced all subsequent Marxism on this point, Kosík diverts the question of the specificity of human being in labor to the historico-anthroplogical one of the “transformation of animal appetite into human desire, the humanizing of appetite on the basis and in the process of labour” (DC 121; DK 200). Kosík thus follows Engels in supposing that the specificity of human labor and being is properly described by explaining its origin from animal being. One key aspect of this theory is its derogation of language in favor its derivation from a technical, or object-forming, concept of labor. Engels’ theory of the transition from ape to man runs this way: certain apes encountered a way of life that required their hands to be used differently from their feet; this led to an erect posture and eventually to the ability to fashion tools with the hands; (whereas animals can use objects encountered in the environment as tools, only humans construct them, according to Engels); the hand, and then the whole body, was transformed by the process of labor;

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the development of labor brought greater social organization in coordinated activity, leading to the development of language and the bodily transformations that it required, especially in the larynx and brain (Engels 1940, 279– 85). One should note three major aspects of this theory: 1) it is a theory of hominization that attempts to derive the specificity of human labor from the historico-genetic process of coming-to-be human; 2) that language is derived from a prior labor process which was initially animal and later human—that is to say, it assumes a state of non-linguistic production from which language originates—as Engels says, “first comes labour, after it, and then side by side with it, articulate speech” (Engels 1940, 284); and 3) labor functions in this theory as both the explicandum and as the explicans; specifically-human labor organized through language is explained through its causal origin in not-yet-human labor without language in the transition-period of hominization. In this sense, Engels conflates labor, which is for Marx social labor, into object-production in work lacking social communication, in order to explain the historical origin of social labor from work. This is the sense in which, as Bakan says, Kosík ignores language. Kosík assumes labor to be social and thus linguistic but does not account for this assumption in his ontology. In this sense, like Engels, he subsumes labor under the paradigm of work as object-production, whereas, for Bakan and others such as Ricoeur (1965), labor includes both work and language—both objectproduction and social communication. This is because they are concerned not with the genesis of human labor but with its essential human characteristics, as was Marx in Capital: “We are not dealing here with those first instinctive forms of labour which remain on the animal level. . . . We presuppose labour in a form in which it is an exclusively human characteristic. . . . But what distinguishes the worst architect from the best of bees is that the architect builds the cell in his mind before he constructs it in wax” (Cap1 283–4). This imagination in the mind is, according to Ricoeur and Bakan, grounded in the reflective capacity of language in a manner not addressed by Kosík. It is the mutuality of language that grounds the social aspect of human labor, not its transformative capacity in work as the Engelsian heritage claims. It is not language as opposed to work that is at issue here, but language immediately within labor as the coordination of its social component and, founded upon this, language as emancipated from its immediate embeddedness in labor to form the basis of culture. Language within labor is the basis for the emancipation of language in what Kosík calls “not-labor” that grounds the independence of culture. This absence of language in labor is why Kosík’s account in Dialectics of the Concrete cannot sufficiently ground a theory of culture. Language operative in labor becomes freed from immediate immersion in labor due to the surplus productivity of labor that grounds not-labor.

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Language thus acquires the freedom of language characteristic of cultural creation. Language is in this sense the significant mediation between labor and culture. For Kosík’s half-hearted ontology of labor adequately to capture the inception of culture, it would need to shed its commitment to an Engelsian historico-anthropological theory of hominization in favor of a fully ontological account of labor as surplus productivity and social, that is to say, alwaysalready linguistic. It is in this sense that we speak of the “inception” of culture. There is no a-cultural human being, but since the being of human being inheres in praxis as elaborated in the ontology of labor, the origin of culture from labor is an essential theme in the being of human being. “Origin” in this sense does not mean historical origin, nor even a pre-historical temporal period from which hominization might originate such as in the model proposed by Engels. It is “origin” in a genetico-ontological sense that is at issue here. Culture is generated from labor ontologically in the sense that it is made possible within labor, grounded in labor, but diverges from labor in its essential characteristic. The capacity of labor to originate a split within itself such that it gives rise to culture, a split that is co-extensive with labor historically but describes the ontological dependency of culture, is the fundamental theme of the inception of culture. By “inception” we mean to point to the split within labor that originates culture as non-labor, which is an institution (Urstiftung) similar to Husserl’s usage, specifically referring to the bringing-into-being or originating moment of culture from labor. Since it is not, however, historically located in a determinate event, it can better be named an “inception.” This split is grounded in labor as negation of a given state for an imagined future one, such that surplus productivity negates simple reproduction. This negation within labor grounds the privative negation of labor as not-labor. 7.3.3 Individuation, Death and Laughter Kosík’s account of culture as a privative not-labor is a non-reductive, unique account of the inception of culture from the ontology of labor. However, as we have seen, he slips from maintaining this ontological account in two places, where he relies instead on Engels’ orthodox Marxist account of hominization. In the first place, Kosík substitutes the coming-to-be of labor as historico-anthropological genesis for an ontological account. Marcuse’s theory is more adequate in this respect insofar as the fundamental character of labor as producing an excess shows how non-labor is ontologically generated. In the second place, Kosík resorts to Engels’ theory in order to explain the historico-anthropological genesis of human from animal desire which necessarily subordinates language to labor—labor understood as in the first place

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as without language or pure object-formation in work. It is this that accounts for the absence of a theory of language in Kosík’s account of culture. Insofar as the ontology of labor is concerned with specifically human labor, the social character of human labor requires that language be understood as inherent in labor processes. It also needs to explain how language operative in labor can become freed from immediate immersion in labor to acquire the freedom of language characteristic of cultural creation. Language is in this sense the significant mediation between labor and culture. We may conclude by indicating in brief outline how an ontological account of labor as both object-formation and language can describe the onto-genesis of culture in a manner that opens its content to individuation, the thematization of death, and the liberating possibility of laughter.28 With these themes, the inception of culture from labor is sufficiently grounded phenomenologically. Labor consists of an object-orientation in work and a language component in which the language component is subordinated to, and held in check by, the object-orientation of work. The surplus productivity of labor is the ground for the non-exhaustion of human time in labor. The language component of labor is thereby emancipated from its tie to product-orientation and comes into its own. Rhetoric, understood as form of expression oriented to persuading individuals to adopt a form of life, becomes a major cement for social groups. Speaking is always a speaking-about, and thus oriented to an object—which is the work, but the speaking-to, or other-orientation, comes to the fore with the loss of the domination of object-production. This is the onto-genetic inception of culture as fundamentally language and speaking-toanother within not-labor. One should have in mind here the Marxist account of the increasing historical division of labor with the consequent increased coordination of the divided parts which leads to a greater intensified and differentiated relation between social and individual. But this is confined to the labor process, and can reach the non-labor upon which culture is founded only through the loosening of the tie of language to object-formation due to excess. Loosening of the tie of language to object-formation occurs through excess, grounds individuation, and thereby accounts for the ability of culture to describe the historical differentiation of labor in imaginative forms. Within the realm of creative freedom, play—which can be defined as the invention of rules that bind voluntary social activity—and the invention of genres of play, comes into its own as the expression of human being. This ontological account of the origin of personal identity in culture is compatible with, and requires completion by, a cultural theory of the diversity of relations between individual and social identity in different historical and cultural forms. The origin of personal identity is in the distinction between self and other that grounds this dialectic.29 A self-other dialectic is introduced by play

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whose differentiation takes many different cultural forms, and which allows the development of a conception of the individual as distinct from other humans.30 Awareness of the significance of individual human death arises with individuation and reverberates through culture. Creative freedom outside labor in culture returns toward the realm of necessity to articulate the possibility of creative freedom within the labor process. Marxism can be understood in this sense as the realization of the project of culture within the sphere of labor, the turning of necessity into freedom, and the completion of the odyssey of spirit. Human historical action in “revolution,” or world-transforming activity, aims at the re-appropriation of the ontology of human being through the creative freedom that it makes possible. The ethical principle of this revolution is that every individual within a society take responsibility for the performance of necessary labor and have access to all the forms of culture made possible by necessary labor. Laughter is the realization of the possibility of play brought forth by the activity of labor. By laughter I mean neither simply jokes nor wit but a state of human experience that manifests human being. Laughter is an ability to rise above the being of the world through a negation of the power of its necessity. Labor overcomes reality through transforming it; laughter overcomes reality by short-circuiting it. It is instantaneous, not painstaking. Laughter removes in a flash the burdensome law of the thing and replaces it with the law of magical realization. Labor is the experience of gravity in the weight of the world as against our desires. Laughter is the reversal of gravity. It replaces weight with lightness and fulfils desire immediately, a-temporally. For this reason, it is impossible to locate within history. Laughter is the ahistorical irruption of pleasure in the immediate satisfaction of desire. Thus it is the thorough privative negation of labor and, as such, is at the root of culture. With a specification of the ontological root of individuation, death, and laughter culture is located as the privative negation of labor. Privative negation of specific labor organization opens up spaces for play such that the dialectic between these cultural spaces and those organized by labor grounds a history of individuation. Historical forms of individuation allow for and demand privative thematization of death as the end of the personal identity of an individual. Laughter is a privative negation of the whole sphere of labor insofar as it dismisses the law of the thing in one swoop. Laughter is the most thorough realization of the power of culture as not-labor in that it negates labor not in specific forms but universally and forever. It is that a-temporal, unconditional freedom created, cultivated, and protected within culture whose universal privation of labor allows human being to emerge from its given world and to glimpse the coming into being of lifeworlds themselves.

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7.4 SUMMARY CHARACTERISTICS OF THE ONTOLOGY OF LABOR For clarity, we present a numbered summary of the characteristics of labor that have been uncovered by the preceding discussion of Marx, Marcuse and Kosík. While several of these characteristics are mentioned by more than one of our authors, the names in brackets signify by whom the relevant characteristic is most brought forward. 1.  The ontology of the lifeworld is a social and material organization of the living motile body (Husserl). 2.  Labor understood as socially organized human motility mediates humanity and nature in a dialectical unity such that each element modifies the others (Marx, already in the early work). Since labor acts upon a previous state to transform it, labor is a negation of the given state of the world and the projection of goals both within and beyond it. 3.  Labor takes time since the point of origination of work and the point of its termination do not coincide. Thus, in this difference, time is introduced into human experience and culture by work. Effortful activity is the source of the experience of time. 4.  Technology is the means by which human labor is applied to nature and is its specifically historical element which creates a human environment and world (Marx, Capital, Vol. 1). The source of time inherent in labor (due to the difference between anticipated goal and actual result) is concretized into historical time by the historical element of technology. Thus, labor produces the permanence of the built world as the humanly constructed world so that we do not simply live in nature but in nature as transformed by labor—second nature in Hegel’s sense (Marx, Marcuse). 5.  Labor is constituted by a surplus productivity, based on a natural fecundity, such that it produces an excess above what it needs to sustain itself (Marx, Capital, Vol. 3; Marcuse). Fecundity is an overflowing or surpassing of itself without limit. It is not so much a negation as a going-beyond but it provides the ground for negation. 6.  Labor is under the “law of the thing” in the sense that, in order to labor, one must accommodate oneself to the already-given social-material world in order to construct products from what is given (Marx, Marcuse). Negation in this sense is tied closely to the given state of things that it negates. 7.  Labor is burdensome, or, perhaps better phrased, socio-historical in the sense that, through labor, one steps out of the personal sphere into the intersubjective, material world (Marcuse). This is the ontological basis for the classic Marxian argument that the increase of surplus productivity is

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accomplished by social organization, and comes to a high point in capitalism. While this advantage is ultimately based upon natural fecundity, it also has specific social features in different historical periods. 8.  Labor is an everyday activity characterized by duration in the double sense that it takes time that is distinguished from non-work time and that it is never finally over, or completed, but is continuous with human life (Marx, Marcuse). Labor is the origin of time in this human, everyday sense in which we are immersed in a structure of meaningful projects which is never definitively closed. 9.  The activity of labor requires the development of human capacities and thus a sense of accomplishment in the laboring subject. It is thus the negation of a previous state of a human and the attainment of a future state. When labor is understood ontologically as the fundamental activity that constructs a human world from the given world of nature, its specific historical production of a world of objects is reflected back upon the laboring subject, so that the subject is confident insofar as it aims at a future state which it is able to achieve, and as accomplished insofar as an addition to the human world has been produced by past activity. Due to the sale of labor-power in capitalism, this ontological effect is sociohistorically, contingently suffused within the hierarchical organization of the social whole and an externally-imposed organization of the work process to take this from the laboring individuals and attribute it to a merely abstract social subject. 10.  The activity of labor is effaced in the product, such that the process of labor itself often withdraws from scrutiny. As Marx said, “the process is extinguished in the product” (Cap1 287). Orientation toward producing the product during labor activity means that the characteristics of labor, including both ontological and historically specific dimensions, are not evident during the process of labor itself. The activity of labor is oriented toward making a product under specific socio-historical conditions. This essential fact poses the question of what is the point of view from which it can be properly described (Marx). 11.  Labor is an event that institutes the form of a world (Marcuse, Husserl). A world is not produced as a thing, or commodity, is produced but is the unthematized horizon of a totality of instrumentation, technology, in a specific form. Labor not only is the origin of historical time but also an instituting event of a specific form of labor that constitutes an epoch of human history. Such an event negates the previous world universally as a manifestation of what is new and not as a local negation of a given state by a specific goal.

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Not only a mode of production is created by the event of human labor but a world, a form of life. A form of life is defined not only by its mode of production but its culture. A theory of labor must thus account for culture as produced by the ontology of labor. 12.  The excess of labor grounds culture. The accumulated excess constituting a cultural heritage is constituted through a privative negation of the predominant organized form of labor. Culture is the articulate form in which labor is appropriated and organized, in which new possibilities for human activity are elaborated, and in which the project for overcoming domination within the current organization of labor is formulated (Kosík). 13.  The grounding of culture in labor completes labor by suffusing the openness discovered in culture into the project of the socio-material organization of labor itself (Kosík). This is the sense in which the ontology of labor as discovered within the critique of political economy is not only the upshot of the history of philosophy as human activity (Marx) but also the ground of human culture—which goes beyond laboring activity and extends human consciousness of its world (Kosík). 14.  The freedom experienced in culture may thus return to re-organize the sphere of labor as free, participatory activity. The ethical principle of this revolution is that every individual within a society take responsibility for the performance of necessary labor and have access to all the forms of culture made possible by necessary labor. 7.5 THE INSTITUTION OF LABOR Through a discussion of the crucial contribution of Karel Kosík to the ontology of labor, we have shown that culture is instituted as a privation of labor. Culture is an expanding sphere of “wealth” in Marx’s sense as the development of human capacities and needs outside the limits of the existing social organization of labor. Such development of the wealth of capacities and needs is not only based upon labor, and exceeds the bounds of the historical form of labor organization, but also comes to infuse the process of labor—as well as struggle against the exploitative conditions of labor. Culture produces the negativity from which the existing mode of production may be criticized. So that the labor process, through its privative negation, understood as the development of human needs and capacities, is the ground of value in culture and, through this cultural value, becomes the determinate negation of the existing labor process. By “value,” in this sense, we mean the whole sphere of what

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makes the human world meaningful, and is exhibited with a certain intensity, to those who live it—that is to say, that to which Husserl intended to redirect the European sciences which had lost contact with meaning and value. Culture understood as privation (not-labor) simultaneously manifests the inception of culture by labor and grounds the autonomy of culture. It thereby justifies, as I believe no previous interpreters have done conceptually (rather than as a commentary on the influence of Hegel), Marx’s conception of the standpoint of labor as the upshot of philosophy—even though this justification was not available to Marx himself in the manner in which it has been clarified above. Privation turns culture from the fulfilment of previously given goals toward an open-ness to Being that redefines the essence of humanity. This is a redefinition of humanity through culture even though it does not divide history into a before and after since culture is historically coextensive with labor. Given philosophy’s centrality to culture understood as privation and open-ness, the upshot of philosophy is to return to its origin in labor to manifest this open-ness within the realm of necessity. This is by no means a complete account of culture, especially insofar as it expands to narrate and explicate the whole of human experience, but only an account of the inception of this possibility and the project of its completion. Culture as privative negation of labor grounds the ontological possibility of the transcendental-phenomenological reduction. It is this that would justify the ancient claim that philosophy is the highest form of being human, though not in a hierarchical sense. Philosophy is intensive humanity in the sense that it actualizes culture as the privation of labor that can redeem human labor through subordinating it to goals elaborated in freedom. 7.5.1 Ontology and Science of Labor It was pointed out in the previous chapter that in paragraph 51 of the Crisis Husserl shifts from speaking of the science of the lifeworld that uncovering the presupposition of the lifeworld demands to an ontology of the lifeworld, that is to say, an experience of the immediate, practical, social world as one with a certain form of being—a mode of being or, as one might also say, a form of life. While Husserl characteristically asserts that it is only phenomenology that can explicate a science of the lifeworld, an ontology of the lifeworld can become thematic within the natural attitude, based upon the presumption of the existence of the world, as an experience of the coherence and consistency of what is “harmoniously intuitable in actual and possible experiencing intuition” (C 173). The ontology of the lifeworld remains bound to the in general presumption of being of the lifeworld, but, since every lifeworld is a given, specific lifeworld, ontology remains bound also to the presumptions

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of the specific ways of being of thematic objects within the lifeworld. That is to say, the ontology of the lifeworld thematizes the forms and ways of being of a given practical world from within the presumption that these ways and forms of being are real existents as such and in such-and-such a manner. It is this presumption that the transcendental-phenomenological reduction sets aside in order to open the possibility of a science of the lifeworld—which would necessarily mean uncovering a plurality of forms of the lifeworld (which we will follow up in Part IV of this text). The institution of labor can be understood through the distinction between a science and an ontology of the lifeworld. As was pointed out earlier in this chapter, Marx’s critique of political economy shows that the logic of capital, since it is not a self-contained, closed logic, necessarily posits a transhistorical ontology of labor. This positing is necessary due to the crucial role that labor plays—due to the buying and selling of labor-power and thus the universalization of the commodity-form—in the expansion of capital. It is thus a positing made implicitly by capital that is made explicit by Marx’s critique. The ontology of labor that Marx makes explicit cannot be elaborated independently of the logic of capital. Thus, it is possible to say that Marx’s own theory, understood as a form of critique that renders explicit and criticizes the presumptions of political economy, operates at the juncture that Husserl demarcates as that between an ontology and a science of the lifeworld. In this sense, Marx’s critique is a realization of the task that Husserl attributes to philosophy in its synthesis with the mythico-religious natural attitude which requires “a new sort of praxis, that of the universal critique of all life and all life-goals, all cultural products and systems that have already risen out of the life of man; and thus it also becomes a critique of mankind itself and of the values which guide it explicitly or implicitly” (VL 283). However, Marx’s critique of political economy is tied to its object, which is political economy and the life-form of capitalism that it represents, so that it does not perform the universality of this critique as such but actualizes this claim to universal critique with reference to a determinate and predominant historical life-form.31 It is a form of critique oriented to, in Husserl’s terminology, an ontology of the lifeworld and does not go so far as to elaborate the science of the lifeworld which Husserl demanded, but it enters this realm sufficiently to note that the positing of labor as ontological was significantly determined by its historical epoch. Other historical forms may also provide insight into the ontology of human being. Such ontology may not reveal itself in one fell swoop but only in adumbrations rooted in lived historical forms. While the institution of labor is a foundational event for human being that coincides with hominization as such, it operates as a structuring force only within a capitalist form of the lifeworld that presumes the key role of labor

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while nevertheless failing to account for this presumption—which is only uncovered as a presumption of political economy by Marx.32 In short, we now understand human being through the horizon of the institution of labor. In the end, the merit of this lifeworld is to presume, and thus allow Marx to uncover, the excess produced by the surplus productivity of labor and the given fecundity of nature. Capitalism lives upon but does not reveal this excess, which Marx and Husserl trace to the horizon of its world, to discover there the possibility of other ontologies. We stand within the institution of labor, able to see backward to its beginning in the uniting of human labor as need-fulfilment with labor as worldmaking and forward to the end of labor understood as the entwinement of world-making and need. Within the institution we are assigned the task of carrying labor toward the end of its institution. Marx is the messenger of this task. The institution of labor marshals excess, from surplus productivity and natural fecundity, toward the end of labor. It is that sense a privative negation of the institution from within the institution, a closing that uproots its beginning, and opens new possibilities unforeseen within the horizon of the institution. 7.5.2 Privative Negation as Intra-Institutional Heritage and Task Our theme in this chapter is labor as the institution of the lived body in its relation to technology and nature. An institution in this Husserlian sense comprises a three-way distinction in history: factual, contingent history; transcendental history as the enduring history of essential features within an instituted sphere of meaning; and the event of history as the necessary irruption of essential transcendental features into empirical history. As discussed with respect to Galilean geometry (in chapter 2), the necessary utilization of sedimented geometry in Galilean science requires that there must have been a first geometer who produced the idealizations with which geometry works. As pointed out there, what appears as an event from the viewpoint of transcendental necessity, such as the first geometer, may be a plural, complex evolution from the viewpoint of contingent history. It is only the unity of the event that can confer unity on a contingent historical narration. How can the instituting event of labor be described? Since it is through culture that humans experience their unique open-ness to the world, it is in the moment of the inception of culture that labor begins to become humanized and need begins to become self-and-world-shaping. Since there are no a-cultural humans, this amounts to saying that the institution of labor is a foundational event for human being that coincides with hominization as such.

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Culture is a privation of labor that opens human being to the world as a relation undetermined by the law of the thing. The privative negation occurs within the institution, constituted within it as a negation of its fundamental character. Its operation as privation is a reaction against a prior assertion implicit in political economy—labor as transhistorical necessity. This privation is implicit in culture from the beginning of the institution of labor; culture is not-labor within the institution of labor that foresees the transformation of labor into a form of culture insofar as it may elude the law of the thing. Privation is thus the root of transformation of the institution of labor into something else. Privation of labor as such must be distinguished from the negation of a given material in the transformation of nature by technology into an artefact. Such negation characterizes labor in its basic form as need-fulfilment. Negation of the natural material is operative in labor. Such negation is not merely change, such as when a stone falls to earth or day turns into night, it is constituted by human activity and thus drawn into the sphere of motility. Not only movement but self-movement. Motility negates the given for a purpose but does not of itself escape a circular self-maintenance or reproduction. Labor as world-making goes further through the historical activity embedded in technology. World-making is united with need-fulfilment such as to appear in the event of the institution of labor that grounds privative negation as absence of open-ness to Being in existent labor. Privative negation thus grounds “revolution in the conditions of production” in the Marxist sense. Such negation opens the possibility of world-transformation through the negation of the existing world. Indeed, it encounters that possibility as its task.33 The institution of labor has been uncovered in our inquiry in a manner that parallels Husserl’s account of the institution of Galilean science. The three dimensions of the institution of labor can be distinguished as follows: 1.  Labor in the sense of contingent, empirical history is an activity determined by the need of humans to adapt to nature and to transform nature in a manner sufficient to assure survival on planet Earth. Such contingent need, which is completed and exhausted in the attainment of a given, immediate end comes from the given natural condition of humans in principle comparable, though not identical due to the natural distinction of our species, to that of other animals.34 Contingent need operates through a negation of natural material and its formation into a useful thing. Since it is determined by its aim to achieve a determinate, immediate end, labor, need, and negation form an immediate unity. Negation is immanent to labor understood as need-fulfilment.

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2.  Labor in the sense of transcendental history refers to labor as self-actualizing, world-shaping activity, labor as a process of transformation of human and nature through technology, as described by Marx in his transhistorical ontology of the characteristics of labor. Labor as self-actualizing, world-shaping praxis gradually comes to absorb human need within itself, thereby transforming need into self-shaping and world-shaping, and thereby instituting history as a destiny at which humans can aim. Negation in world-making is not of given natural material but negates the current conditions of need-fulfilment toward a cumulative world-making. While world-making is not the intended outcome of any production, it is the cumulative effect of productions oriented toward negation of current conditions of production. Negation is transcendent to the given state of the world when labor is understood as self-realization. 3.  Labor as an event refers to “what must have come to be in contingent history for transcendental history to appear,” that is to say, human need became subject to an event by which it was transformed into self-actualizing, world-shaping activity. That event is, in a word, capitalism. While that event as event is unique and thus singular, its empirical manifestation may well have been drawn out and dispersed in empirical history. The incursion of transcendental history into empirical history in the event designates an inner motivation in labor such that the institution of labor is assigned a task. The assigned task appears within the institution of labor as a privative negation--a negation of the affirmation presumed by, but not explicit within, the institution. The task that is assigned is the cultural re-appropriation of labor as a fully human self-actualizing, world-shaping activity no longer set limits by, or exhausted in, the immediacy of natural need but operative within that field as transformed into history. By virtue of the institution of labor the temporal horizon of need is expanded to refer to the further future so that history in the sense of a conscious human project emerges to fulfil its final goal (Endstiftung). Negation of the institution of labor means aligning its immersion in necessity with goals elaborated in cultural freedom. Privative negation of necessity within the institution confers a task of completion upon those within that institution. Thus, Patočka’s distinction of vertical transcendence (made possible through the phenomenological reduction) from horizontal transcendence (understood as the Marxist revolution within history) is insufficient to comprehend the third form of transcendence corresponding to the third understanding of history as institution (Urstiftung). Patočka’s distinction allowed him to argue, correctly, that horizontal transcendence depends upon vertical transcendence, that is to say, that Marxist historical revolution depends for its full

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recovery of subjectivity on the phenomenological reduction. But the current analysis has shown that understanding history as institution shows the necessary presence of world-making within the empirical satisfaction of need. It must have come to be in empirical history that transcendental, vertical worldmaking has been embedded in labor as the satisfaction of needs. Human need became subject to an event by which it became historically inseparable from self-actualizing, world-shaping activity. Since the event designates an inner motivation in labor such that the institution of labor is assigned a task. That task is, speaking universally, the privative negation of the labor process as a whole by culture. Speaking specifically, it is the privative negation as an inner motivation of specific labors organized as forms of necessity (heritage) which assign the task of their amelioration or removal. 7.5.3 Institutional Task and Natural Fecundity The immanent historical logic that expels subjectivity which Patočka and Landgrebe criticize depends upon a collapsing of the labor on nature by specific social groups with the cumulative historical totality produced by the interaction between such specific labors in their transformations of nature. In Marx’s late ontology, technology “in the wider sense” as the historical intertwining of earth and the built environment, first and second nature, is not equivalent to technology in the ordinary sense as a mediation of human labor and nature oriented toward a specific task (Cap1 286–7). Moreover, this cumulative historical totality itself depends upon the fecundity of original nature, the earth, due to which labor yields a surplus productivity that grounds both technological advance and cultural expression. These two transcendences answer the critique of immanentization launched by Patočka and Landgrebe. The surplus productivity of labor depends upon the fecundity, or excess, of nature which it diverts into the human, historical world. The ground of the ontology of labor is fecundity, which could be traced through the ontological phrasings of physis, nature, Being, etc. We thus need to revise Landgrebe’s reflection on Husserl’s statement “history is the grand fact of absolute being” to ground the sense in which “each monad unfolds its own history . . . in the context of the community, in which it takes on the experiences of others which have settled as sediment in mutual empathy” to say that the grand fact of absolute being is fecundity which is the ground of human individuation in community (Landgrebe 1974, 118). Landgrebe himself revised his understanding somewhat in order to claim that the genetic phenomenology of history rests upon the absolute “there” of the earth which is “the totality of the conditions which set the boundaries for all the activities of man and

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consequently for his history in the sense of ‘res gestae’” (Landgrebe 1977, 112). However, we need to understand the earth not only as the limit and ground of human action, but also as the excess which passes from the earth through surplus labor into human history and allows the doing of the things done. The absolute fact of fecundity, or excess, enters into historical critique and transcendence but is not enclosed within it. It is the face of being, shown from within capital but not immanent to it, that overflows capital by grounding horizontal transcendence. Such historical transcendence is, Patočka asserted, dependent on the transcendental-phenomenological epochē through which incarnate being discovers its free subjectivity and can thereby ground care for the soul and human rights. “The epochē is nothing other than the discovery of the freedom of the subject which is manifested in all transcendence . . . in our living within horizons which first bestow full meaning on the present and that, in the words of the thinker, we are beings of the far reaches” (Patočka 1996b, 135). However, as we have shown, the epochē as a cultural-philosophical act is possible because the ontology of labor depends upon natural fecundity whose overflowing is ontological open-ness. As Landgrebe pointed out, “the reduction is nothing other than a meditation upon reflection as a recursive relationship” (Landgrebe 1981b, 134). The historical fact of the epochē and thus the historical efficacy of vertical transcendence depends no less than horizontal transcendence on fecundity. Thus, we would have to reject Patočka’s late claim that the first two movements of human life—instinctive anchoring and human labor—are bound to finitude, whereas the third movement of epochē breaks the power of earth toward infinity and futurity (Patočka 1998, 151, 158–61). His view that horizontal transcendence depends upon vertical transcendence is true but insufficient. The actuality of horizontal and vertical transcendence depends ontologically on its ground in excess. Human rights come out of this history as a privative negation dependent on transcendence of both kinds. Thus, with Patočka’s attempt to set human rights aside from history as legitimated by a binding to vertical transcendence is not sustainable as such. It is precisely the horizontal binding of vertical transcendence that grounds human rights. We may thus distinguish between two senses of “ground” which appear in two “logics” investigated in our text: An ontological sense of grounding in being in which human activity and culture are traced back to natural excess. An epistemological sense of grounding in reason which is based in culture (as the privative negation of labor and thus excess) to yield knowledge of human perception, activity and thought. Thus, horizontal transcendence (historical change) is based on vertical transcendence; vertical transcendence is accomplished through the transcendental-phenomenological reduction (human

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knowledge); the transcendental-phenomenological reduction is a completion of the privative role of culture in producing an open-ness beyond a given lifeworld. In this sense, the transcendental-phenomenological reduction is ontologically grounded on the privation of labor in culture and, ultimately, on excess, but the ontology of excess is accessible to human knowledge epistemologically through the transcendental-phenomenological reduction. (While this relationship has emerged at this point in our inquiry, it will be discussed directly in chapter 15 as the relationship between excess and Nothing). If we understand the fecundity of nature in this manner as an ontological foundation distinct from that of the early Marx that influenced Patočka and Landgrebe, and perhaps not entirely clear to the late Marx himself, we may go on to consider the way in which the subservient themes of technology and knowledge may be understood within this revised phenomenological Marxism. Unlike the Promethean self-production of humanity as a self-conscious process (in which Patočka and Landgrebe’s interpretation of Marx was identical with orthodox Marxism), we see here a process in which human labor plays a central role but does not guide the whole process in the way that an artisan guides a single process of production. Human labor is an example of, and a guiding of, ontological fecundity that enters into human society and history only as a cooperation between humanity and Being. Marx’s Promethean understanding of his own work persisted despite the fact that his later ontology undermines it and grounds the possibility of a contemporary phenomenological Marxism that would not fall to the critique elaborated by Patočka and Landgrebe. NOTES 1.  It is now known that animals do indeed construct tools and can learn how to use tools from others (implying culture), so that the apparently absolute distinction between humans and other animals that this passage suggests has been considerably relativized. Nonetheless, the significance of this discovery for understanding specifically human ontology, which is our current topic, is minimal and need not be addressed here. It does, however, imply that specifically human capacities (in the sense of activities which are definitive of human being)—such as tool-making, intelligence and empathy—are not necessarily distinctively human (in the sense of exclusively human vis-à-vis other animals). With regard to the question of the relation between humans and other species this issue is more significant, implying, as it does, that the capacities such as tool-making, intelligence and empathy which exist in humans are in continuity with those capacities in others animals and, perhaps, nature at large. For a full-blown ecology of human being this issue is indeed very important. 2.  The addition of technology into the late ontology of labour requires a revision of the statement in the early ontology as expressed in The German Ideology that

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“production of new needs is the first historical act” insofar as it gives an account of the development of new needs (which he had previously used without explanation) through the inherently historical element of technology in the production and utilization of tools (Marx and Engels 1978, 156). It is technology that mediates nature to human need and mediates human labour to the appropriation of nature—thus explaining the emergence of new needs. It is through technologically mediated human labour that the dialectic of humanity and nature becomes historical such that it transforms and reconstructs the identity of both humans and nature. We may note the delay between imaginative design and later utilization in technology and the alteration of the human subject. Whereas history was previously added-into the labour process as an extrinsic factor, Marx’s later ontology explains the genesis of history from labour through the development of technology. 3.  It is not clear the extent to which the theoretical consequences of these additions to, and alterations of, Marx’s early perspective by the late ontology were apparent to Marx himself since he did not generally reflect on the development of his own work in this autocritical manner. 4.  We may remark here that the ontology of labour explains why the commodification of labour universalizes the fetishism of commodities as the apparent world of capitalism in circulation as well as grounds the caveat that the actual process of labour in capitalism is not itself a realm of fetishism. It is the necessary incursion of the ontology of labour into its specifically capitalist form that justifies the claim that the commodification of labour universalizes the fetishism of commodities such that the whole of capitalist society is dominated by the necessary misleading appearance that it is constituted by the exchange of commodities and not, as is actually the case, the labour process. 5.  One may well wonder why this is the case. Note that later in Capital, Vol. 1 (part 5, chapter 16) Marx does note that “the productivity of labour remains fettered by natural conditions” (Cap1 647). While Marx understood throughout his work that human labour is dependent on natural conditions, he understood those conditions primarily (and even exclusively in Vol. 1) in terms of the hindering of human productivity by natural conditions. He then understands the extent of productivity as based primarily, or even exclusively, on the level of socialization of production—which ultimately reduces productivity to a multiple of distinctively human labour characterized by technology and social relations of cooperation). For reasons are probably sufficient to explain why the positive aspect of nature in human productivity—which I will call “natural fecundity”—is never fully theorized by Marx even while it is necessarily used. 6.  It was noted in a footnote above that Marx did refer to nature as the presupposition of surplus productivity in Capital, Vol. 1 though he understood it only in terms of a hindrance to the socio-technical multiplication of productivity. Even in Vol. 3, it tends to be phrased in similar terms as a “starting-point, a basis” as a lower limit. Nevertheless, the stronger conception that his theory needs also breaks through. If “production of the necessary means of their subsistence shall not consume their whole labour-power,” then, phrased positively, it means that nature does more than provide adequately at a level of simple reproduction when modified by human labour. Marx

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continually phrases natural fecundity as a lower limit to be moved upward by human activity, while the same conception requires recognition that such moving upward is itself made possible by natural fecundity.   7.  If we ask why the surplus productivity of nature does not appear within Vol. 1 even though it must be used there, we may consider Marx’s statement that “the value of means of production which are not the product of labour does not belong here [under the concept of capital] yet, since it does not arise out of the examination of capital itself. They appear for capital, initially, as given, historic presupposition. And we leave them as such, here. Only the form of landed property—or of the natural agencies as value-determining magnitudes – modified to correspond to capital belongs within the examination of the system of bourgeois economy” (Gr 715). If the concept of capital does not apply to ground rent, and yet surplus natural fecundity is most clearly apparent in ground rent, then the theory of capital is not independent of the ontology of labour. It is perhaps this point that Marx did not want to admit.   8.  “The exact development of the concept of capital [is] necessary, since it [is] the fundamental concept of modern economics, just as capital itself, whose abstract, reflected image [is] its concept, [is] the foundation of bourgeois society. The sharp formulation of the basic presuppositions of the relation must bring out all the contradictions of bourgeois production, as well as the boundary where it drives beyond itself” (Gr 331, interpolations by translator).   9.  “Contributions to a Phenomenology of Historical Materialism” (1928), “On Concrete Philosophy” (1929), “On the Problem of the Dialectic” (Part 1, 1930; Part 2, 1931), “New Sources on the Foundations of Historical Materialism” (1932), and “On the Philosophical Foundation of the Concept of Labour in Economics” (1933). See HM for an English collection of these essays. 10.  Many commentators have agreed with Marcuse in this repudiation. Especially influential for the view that there is an utter incompatibility between phenomenology and Marxism was an essay by Alfred Schmidt (1988, original published in 1968) which represents one of the two significant strains of New Left interpretation of Marcuse’s early work. The editors of the English collection of Marcuse’s early essays (HM) share this view (Abromeit 2004; HM xxiv). This interpretation allows John Abromeit to play down Marcuse’s insistence that Heidegger’s embrace of Nazism was a happening for philosophy (Angus 2009a). 11.  Many commentators have asserted that, despite his repudiation, the influence of Heidegger remains in Marcuse’s later work. The essay by Jürgen Habermas entitled “Technology and Science as ‘Ideology’” (Habermas 1970, esp. 85) was very influential in this regard but see also his “Psychic Thermidor and the Rebirth of Rebellious Subjectivity” (Habermas 1988). The account in this latter essay is, however, inconclusive; while it asserts the continuing influence of Heidegger on Marcuse’s work, it does not actually show this influence in its discussions of Marcuse’s later writing. The English translation and collection of Marcuse’s essays quotes approvingly Habermas’ assessment that Heideggerian categories persist in Marcuse’s later Eros and Civilization (HM xi). Other representatives of the view that Marcuse’s later work remained deeply influenced by his Heideggerian period include Paul Piccone and Alexander Delfini (1970) and Andrew Feenberg (2005). As the latter two sources

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indicate, agreement on a continuing Heideggerian influence in Marcuse’s work may contain a radical disagreement on the viability or utility of that influence. 12.  Actually, Marcuse says “the objective world” here, but it would be better to say “intersubjective and natural” at this point since Marcuse means the “world” in the Heideggerian and phenomenological sense. The word “objective” here is confusing since it wrongly seems to flirt with Marxist objectivism, whereas Marcuse means that the work world is shared with others and works upon nature (HM 139). 13.  Marcuse summarizes that labour is burdensome because it is “under the law of the ‘thing’ that is to be done” (HM 130). But note that his account of the thingly character of burdensomeness does not refer to the thing-orientation of labour but to being placed within the human and historical world. The “other” in question here is not materiality but human social organization. 14.  It would seem that the condition of this permanence is that labour subjects itself to “the law of the thing” not in the sense of human social organization referred to in burdensomeness but in the sense of the material [Stoff] which it transforms. It is striking that this basic characteristic of labour is not dealt with under the three characteristics of labour but only appears, or appears to appear, in the general definition of labour as “objectifying doing” (HM 130). 15. In this way, Marcuse associates labour as the highest form of human selfactualization with Marx’s description of the realm of freedom and, correlatively, associates labour as material reproduction immersed in immediate things with Marx’s realm of necessity (HM 148, cf. Cap3 818–20). 16.  One can’t help but wonder what might have happened if Marcuse had stayed in Freiburg after his disappointment with Heidegger and moved closer to Husserl. His insights into labour would then have been available to Patočka and Landgrebe and their appropriation of Marx in the 1930s might have reached deeper into its philosophical significance for our time. 17.  The definition of human being and philosophy in terms of open-ness conceals an ambiguity in Kosík’s reliance on Hegel to illuminate Marx’s conception of totality. It seems that, unlike a Hegelian totality of determinations, totality in Kosík remains more like an indeterminate phenomenological horizon. This may be a deeper influence of Heidegger, or even Husserl, than explicitly indicated within the text. This issue is, as far as I can see, nowhere addressed in Dialectics of the Concrete. Paul Piccone has noted that Kosík’s totality is a horizon and that it therefore corresponded to the open totality of the Prague Spring though it is not clear whether this is a criticism or an appreciation (Piccone 1977, 51). Other of Piccone’s works suggest that he is more inclined to a Lukácsian-Hegelian closed conception of totality (Piccone 1971). I have argued that the distinction between these two conceptions of totality is philosophically fundamental in order to endorse the phenomenological concept of horizon in (Angus, 2000a, 66–70, 93–6). 18.  Kosík refers to its first publication of “Über die philosophischen Grundlagen des wirtschaftswissenschaftlichen Arbeitsbegriffs” in Archiv für Sozialwissenschaft und Sozialpolitik, Bd. 69, 1933, whereas the English translation refers to the first English translation in Telos, 16, Summer 1973. Since this essay by Marcuse, along with others from the same period, is now easily available in English in HM I will

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refer primarily to that edition and use for comparison the established German edition (PGWA). 19.  This character of permanence of the built world was also remarked upon by Hannah Arendt to be the central characteristic of work. “The work of our hands, as distinguished from the labour of our bodies—homo faber who makes and literally “works upon” as distinguished from animal laborans which labours and “mixes with”—fabricates the sheer unending variety of things whose sum total constitutes the human artifice. . . . The durability of the human artifice is not absolute . . . ” (Arendt, 1973 136). The fact that Arendt attributes this world-making character of human artifice to “work” in distinction from “labour,” which is consumed immediately such as food, and “action,” which is political action in the world of others, invites comparison with Kosík’s undifferentiated attribution of it to all forms of labour. This is a central aspect of Arendt’s critique of Marxist ontology of labour. Kosík makes no reference to Arendt in Dialectics of the Concrete. 20.  Kosík actually has three criticisms of Marcuse (not all of which pertain to the article that I discuss here). However, I regard only the first of these, the one that I deal with in the main text, as being genuinely pertinent to Marcuse’s argument. The second criticism is that, for Marcuse, philosophy is surpassed in a dialectical theory of society—which means that the social would become “enclosing” in Kosík’s sense and the open-ness of philosophy undermined (DC 105ff, 128, ftn. 11, 15). While this perhaps fails to adequately appreciate the nuanced nature of Marcuse’s argument (especially as seen from the totality of his work), from the perspective of Kosík’s radical, Heideggerian defence of philosophy, it certainly makes sense. The third criticism, that Marcuse confuses “objectification” (Objektivierung) with “reification” or “estrangement” (Vergegenständlichung), is the standard Marxist criticism of Hegelian Marxism that is so far from being so in Marcuse’s case that it is not worth discussing in any depth (DK 197, ftn. 42; DC 130, ftn. 42). 21.  Kosík’s distinction between labour and praxis is not based on the notion that they are intrinsically difference sorts of activities, an essential and ontological distinction that is rooted in Aristotle’s distinction of technē from praxis, or making from doing, that is perhaps clearest in the opening passage (1094a) of Nicomachean Ethics: “Every art or applied science (technē) and every systematic investigation, and similarly every action and choice, seem to aim at some good; the good, therefore, has been well defined as that at which all things aim. But it is clear that there is a difference in the ends at which they aim: in some cases the activity is the end [i.e. praxis], in others the end is some product beyond the activity. In cases where the end lies beyond the action the product is naturally superior to the activity” (Aristotle 1972,1). This distinction has influenced Western philosophy significantly up to Hannah Arendt (Lobkowicz 1967, 9–15; Arendt 1972, 12–7, 136–44, 175–81). Hans-Georg Gadamer used it to suggest that ancient practical philosophy undertook a prior posing of the dilemma involved in the translation of scientific knowledge into technical innovation (Gadamer 1977b). This distinction has also been used by Jürgen Habermas under the influence of Hannah Arendt and Hans-Georg Gadamer (Habermas 1973, 286, ftn. 4). 22.  This is also the problematic that dominates Georg Lukács’ work The Ontology of Social Being, which struggles repeatedly and without success to explain the process

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of the “leap,” as he calls it, between animality and humanity on the presupposition that this is the main issue of an ontology of labour (Lukács 1980, 15, 20, 21, 31, 35, 43, 50, 65, 67, 79, 135, 136). The inability of this standpoint to explain the “person” is demonstrated by Ernest Joós (Joós 1983). 23.  Marx elsewhere certainly uses labour to demarcate the difference between animal and human, to stress their ontological difference, but feels no necessity to explain a transition between the two, which has its origin in Frederick Engels’ Dialectics of Nature and is the ground for a necessity to explain the “leap.” 24. Marcuse’s essay on the philosophical foundations of the concept of labour in economics ends with a quote from the section of Capital, Vol. 3 in which Marx describes the realm of freedom as beyond necessary labour. The next sentence after the section Marcuse quotes, but with which he would entirely agree, continues that for the attainment of the realm of freedom “the shortening of the working day is its basic prerequisite.” (Cap3 820.) The ground of this distinction in Marx is his analysis of machinery and automation as the form of “the absorption of the labour process in its material character as a mere moment of the realization process of capital.” (Gr 693). This is Marx’s last formulation of the ‘contradiction of capitalism’ in which the growth of the productive forces expels living labour from the labour process and creates the material conditions for human freedom outside labour. The worker “steps to the side of the production process instead of being its chief actor” and, on this basis, orients himself to “the appropriation of his own general productive power, his understanding of nature and his mastery of it by virtue of his presence as a social body” to liberate “the development of the social individual” and the “general intellect.” (Gr 705, 706.) 25.  Even after he repudiated his Heideggerian stage, Marcuse held fast to Marx’s distinction between the realm of freedom and that of necessity and argued that the shortening of the working day, understood as necessary work, was the condition for free labour—which would become more like play in the sense that it is not tied to material conditions and thus becomes self-actualizing. In Eros and Civilization, he associated this stage with “the highest maturity of civilization, when all basic needs can be satisfied with a minimum of expenditure of physical and mental energy in a minimum of time” (Marcuse 1962, 177). This perspective is maintained in CounterRevolution and Revolt (Marcuse 1972a, 30). However, An Essay on Liberation suggests that this dualism could be overcome if the realm of necessary work were re-organized on non-capitalist lines (Marcuse 1969b, 20–1). 26.  This is of course a long tradition of scholarship that has argued that Hegel’s dialectic of recognition dropped the reference to language that was forefront in his earlier work or, alternatively, that the reference to language is still present in Hegel due to the pre-existence of the telos within the dialectic since the Absolute whose odyssey occurs in the Phenomenology is necessarily already accomplished in the thought of the philosopher who writes it. I will not enter these debates here because the point at hand is that this essential reference to language, be it present or absent in Hegel, is absent in Kosík’s appropriation of Hegel. 27.  I consider it likely that Ricoeur’s analysis influenced Bakan in making her argument, even though she does not refer to him, since she was also concerned with his

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work when the review was written. (I was studying with Mildred Bakan as a graduate student at York University at that time.) Bakan’s compressed argument in the review agrees with Ricoeur’s analysis on all points. 28.  Kosík expanded his privative concept of culture as open-ness with specific reference to tragedy and laughter (Kosík 1965, 1995; Tava 2014). 29.  Georg Lukács struggles repeatedly and without success to explain the process of the “leap,” as he calls it, between animality and humanity as if this were the main issue of an ontology of labour (Lukács 1980, passim). The argument by Ernest Joós that Lukács ontology of labour cannot account for the origin of personal identity is instructive at this point given the structuring assumption in Lukács’ ontology that the key problem is the Engelsian one of the historico-anthropological origin of human labour from animal activity. One need not agree with Joós’ last word that the person is essentially a Christian concept to accept his argument that an evolutionist theory in Engelsian-Lukácsian form cannot ground a theory of the person (Joós 1983, 106– 114). Moreover, it is precisely such a grounding, by means of a theory of language, that can effectively root culture in an ontology of labour. 30.  The absence of personal identity, or individuation, has been pointed out by previous critics, but even the most thorough account by Mildred Bakan, who locates it with respect to the concept of teleological totality in light of our split from nature (Bakan 1983, 91–2; BT 253), is not internal to Kosík’s account, whereas it is merely noted by N. Lobkowicz (1964). 31.  The issue of the relation between historical specificity and transhistorical categories in labour has been subject to considerable debate. Moishe Postone denies any suprahistorical, ontological significance to the transhistorical characteristics of labour that Marx elaborates, arguing that they must be taken in the context of his entire presentation in which characteristics that initially seem to be human are reversed to become attributes of capital. Instead of being a purposive action performed by a subject, labour is reversed to become separated from its purpose and the object of production (Postone 1993, 279–81). We have given a different account of the distinction between goal-oriented labour and world-making labour in section 2.2 above. For Postone, this is the crucial difference between traditional Marxism, which is based upon a transhistorical theory of labour and his own value-based theory which interprets Marx’s work as an immanent critique of capitalism (Postone 1993, 388). Note that this is to interpret Marx’s work within the subject-object reversal that is characteristic of his early work based upon Feuerbach’s critique as a reversal of subject and object. While Marx’s work is indeed an immanent critique of capitalism, this account does not take seriously enough that, as we have shown, the immanent critique of value in capitalism requires an excursus into the transhistorical understanding of labour. We should recall that Marx’s theory contains another step beyond mere reversal in showing that the purposive action of capital is itself dependent on the appropriation of the productive power of labour. It is this productive power that allows one to project historically the overcoming of capitalism. Consequently, the transhistorical ontology is not revoked by its surpassing in historical critique as Postone suggests. The ontology is both a necessary preface and supplement to historical specificity. But it remains a simplistic reversal to simply contrast historical specificity and transhistorical universality. It is

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a question of what universality can be glimpsed from within a historical form. And also, whether a critique of that historical form is sufficiently clear about its ontological presupposition. It is true, as Postone asserts, that labour is central to human life only in capitalism and not of previous or subsequent systems (Postone 1993, 385). Nevertheless, it is still the case that the organizing principles of those other systems are made possible on the basis of labour. Postone fails to see this distinction because only a theory of culture as not-labour (which I have developed through an interpretation of Karel Kosík’s Dialectics of the Concrete) can show how cultural forms can be based on labour but not reducible to it. They become emergent forms. 32.  This analysis thus complicates, though it ultimately agrees with, that lineage of Marxist philosophy that departs from the Engelsian universalization of labour in orthodox Marxism which went so far as to account for hominization through the labour process. The classic formulation of the non-orthodox tendency was by the early Georg Lukács, who argued that “the substantive truths of historical materialism are of the same type as were the truths of classical economics in Marx’s view; they are truths within a particular social order and system of production” (Lukács 1971, 228). The phenomenological distinction between the presumption of the system of political economy and the thematization of this presumption clarifies the sense in which Marx’s concepts rely on political economy without his critical concepts having exactly the same status. They operate at the juncture between ontology and science. 33.  It is the relationship between negation and excess that must ground a conception of labour as world-origin and the concept of world-origin that must delimit both immanent negation, or the revolutionary spirit, and the excess of surplus productivity that grounds culture. 34. In The German Ideology, which is the only place that Marx, in collaboration with Engels, addressed the question of the origin of history through labour, they distinguish four elements of the historicity of labour: production of the means to satisfy pre-existing needs, production of new needs, transformation of social life (beginning with the family), and, an observation of a different sort, that such production is always both natural and social (Marx and Engels 1978, 155–7). In this early sketch, labour as need and therefore as reproduction is asserted to be identical with labour as worldshaping and therefore as historical. This position does not actually have any greater basis than assertion, an assertion which was necessary to break through the Hegelian interpretation of labour as spiritual-cultural (geistig) but insufficient to provide justification. Unfortunately, many subsequent Marxists have accepted this reduction of history to need at face value.

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Chapter Eight

The Regime of Value

Reference to the work of Karl Marx thus far in this work has been limited to the interpretation of commodity fetishism as a name for a necessary absence in the social representation of value (in chapter 5 of Part II) and the exploration of his ontology of labor as an extension of Husserl’s account of the living body (in the previous chapter). But Marx’s mature work was, above all, a critique of political economy. The critique of political economy functions primarily through the central concept of value as a product of the specific form of labor in capitalist society, abstract labor. “Value” in this sense is the specific form that human wealth (understood as the development and exercise of human activity and sensuousness) throughout labor and culture takes in capitalist society. Value is the concept underlying exchange, especially the buying and selling of labor-power that universalizes commodity exchange to the form of social production in capitalist society, which is fundamental to Marx’s critique of political economy. This chapter will explore the role of labor as the source of value and value as the central organizing feature of the system of political economy that expresses and regulates capitalist society. The specificity of labor under capitalism is captured by Marx in his concept of abstract labor. He regarded the concept of abstract labor as both the solution to the fundamental problem of political economy and the foundation of its critique. Abstract labor is the basis of the labor theory of value, and thus of the concept of surplus value, which explains and denounces the exploitation of the working class. As he claimed of Capital, Vol. 1 in a letter to Engels of 24 August 1867, “the best points in my book are: 1. (this is fundamental to all understanding of the facts) the two-fold character of labour according to whether it is expressed in use-value or exchange-value, which is brought out in the very First Chapter; 2. the treatment of surplus-value regardless of its particular forms as profit, 231

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interest, ground rent, etc.” Labor-power expressed as an exchange-value is abstract labor. The initial three sections of this chapter explain the centrality of the concept of abstract labor to the role of value in the critique of political economy, the relation between labor and value, and the system of value that defines a theoretically purified capitalist system. It shows that Marx’s critique of political economy is a critique of a science of the Galilean form, parallel to Husserl’s critique of the mathematization of nature in Crisis, whose object-domain may be called “the regime of value.” The fourth section is a critique of Marx which shows that his setting-aside of the question of nature in the concept of abstract labor requires a parallel concept of abstract nature through which distinct characteristic features of the capitalist relation to nature as a source of value can be conceptualized. The final section draws the theoretical conclusions of this critique. 8.1 ABSTRACT LABOR AND THE CRITIQUE OF POLITICAL ECONOMY 8.1.1

The Concept of Capital

We will recall that the first part of Capital begins from the commodity and shows how money arises from the exchange of commodities as a universal equivalent. The second part is concerned with how, under certain conditions, money becomes capital. Capital operates as money that augments its own value. Insofar as commodities are exchanged for money and then money is used to purchase another commodity—that is to say as long as money is merely a medium of exchange between commodities—it exchanges equivalents for equivalents and the purpose of exchange is determined by the specific concrete characteristics of the commodities that are exchanged. There is no augmentation of value and thus no capital. Augmentation is possible only when the circuit is reversed, when money is used to buy a commodity and that commodity sold and as such converted back into money. If equivalents are exchanged here, if the M-C-M circuit produces an identical amount of money at its termination, then there is no economic motive to enter into the circuit at all. The circuit is possible in this form but it is self-cancelling, a sign of failure. Only if the M-C-M’ circuit produces more money at its termination than at its initiation does an augmentation of value take place. In making a profit one is not concerned with the specific concrete characteristics of the commodities in the circuit through which the augmentation of value occurs. However, such augmentation within exchange, or the sphere of circulation, cannot account for a general accumulation of

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value. Insofar as one successfully buys and sells commodities to augment the quantity of one’s money, one is skimming off, as it were, a portion of the total value of commodities through taking advantage in fluctuations in the process of exchange. Or, in the classic form of mercantile capitalism, taking advantage of the relative scarcity of goods at one location and their relative abundance at another, so that the exchange prices differ at two locations. But no new value is produced and therefore augmentation by one buyer-seller is set off against an equal loss by another buyer-seller. As Marx remarks, both interest-bearing capital and merchant’s capital are derivative forms even though they emerge historically before modern capital; neither can account for the self-expansion of value that defines capital (Cap1 267). The condition for capital to augment itself is that it must find on the market, in the sphere of circulation, a commodity which has the capacity to augment value. When labor-power becomes a commodity it takes on a value in circulation such that it can be bought and used in the sphere of production. The use-value of labor-power within production is the capacity to produce value and, specifically, to produce more value than it needs to sustain itself— characteristics of the ontology of labor. Buying labor-power entails appropriation of the productivity of labor so that the invested capital augments itself when the sale of products is realized. Marx concludes: For the transformation of money into capital, therefore, the owner of money must find the free worker available on the commodity-market; and this worker must be free in the double sense that as a free man he can dispose of his labourpower as his own commodity, and that, on the other hand, he has no other commodity for sale, i.e. is rid of them, he is free of all the objects needed for the realisation of his labour-power (Cap1 272–3).

In short, the modern proletariat—owner of its own labor-power but of no means of production to use it—is the historical condition for capital as the self-augmentation of value.1 With the concept of capital Marx provides the explanation for his starting point in the commodity. Wealth appears as an immense collection of commodities because labor-power has become a commodity. Universalization of the buying and selling of labor-power, labor-power as a commodity, is thus the essence of capital, whereas its appearance is “an immense collection of commodities.” The difference between simple commodity production and capitalism is that labor-power has become a commodity and thus that the commodity-relations that indeed characterize simple commodity production become a fetishism based in the necessary appearance of the capitalist system.2 As we have seen in chapter 5, commodity fetishism is, in both social action and political economy, the name for a necessary absence in the social

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representation of value due to the hegemony of the system of quantitative mensuration in exchange. In Marx’s words: The mysterious character of the commodity-form is therefore simply in the fact that the commodity reflects the social characteristics of men’s own labour as objective characteristics of the products of labour themselves, as the socio-natural properties of these things. Hence it also reflects the social relation of the producers to the sum total of labour as a social relation between objects, a relation which exists apart from and outside the producers (Cap1 164–5).

The core of the fetishism of commodities is that relationships between humans appear as relations between things. This occurs only in capitalism. In the case of simple commodity production prior to capitalism where producers of commodities make their products independently and then bring them to the market to be sold, it is true (thus not a fetishism) that the relations between producers are not established until they exchange their products and therefore that whatever social relation they have is established in through the mediation of products. In capitalist commodity production, production is not by independent producers but by an already social process of production such that each labor is always-already part of the whole system of social labor. The independent labors are each a fraction of the total social labor but, commodity fetishism consists in the systematic concealing of the social relations of producers by the money-form developed in exchange that represents and regulates the relations between products. The concept of capital is defined neither by money nor exchange but by its capacity to buy labor-power for a certain duration and thus appropriate to itself the capacity of labor to produce more than it sustains itself. 8.1.2 The Concept of Abstract Labor Abstract labor is labor exchanged as a commodity that is immediately related to the totality of social labor because of the equivalence established in exchange (just as an equivalence between commodities is established by their exchange). It is strictly labor under capitalist conditions where there obtains a necessary absence in the social representation of value due to the hegemony of the system of formal (quantitative) mensuration in exchange, a necessary absence that Marx calls commodity fetishism. The necessary absence in social representation of value is parallel to the organization of value through abstract labor. 8.1.2.1 Three Examples of Abstraction in Marx Since the subsequent critique of Marx will depend on what is meant by abstraction in the move to abstract labor, there is first required a clarification

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of what Marx means by abstraction. I will consider three examples operative in his work: abstraction to essence, or ideal type; abstraction to logic versus historical concretion; and the abstraction from specific historical relations of production in Marx’s formula for the transhistorical characteristics of the labor process (which was considered in the previous chapter). Insofar as these are all examples of abstraction, they have identical or overlapping features, nevertheless they also have distinct features that are significant, especially in the more complex cases. In the preface to the first German edition of Capital, Vol. 1, Marx remarks that his depiction of the capitalist and landowner does not deal with them as individuals but “individuals are dealt with here only in so far as they are the personifications of economic categories, the bearers of particular classrelations and interests” (Cap1 92). While an individual capitalist may also be a Methodist, very tall, unmarried, near-sighted, philanthropic, etc., these aspects of the capitalist are left out of consideration by Marx because he is interested in explaining the functioning of the capitalist system as a system, not the peculiarities of individuals as individuals. There is thus an abstraction from the individuals who are capitalists to the idea of a capitalist who is thereby shorn of all characteristics that are not significant in his/her role as capitalist. Abstraction is made to the identical significant feature from irrelevant individual characteristics. This is a standard abstraction to the idea, or essence, in the sense of Husserl and Socrates-Plato, which has come into social science through Max Weber’s concept of “ideal type.” While this is an abstraction that Marx uses, he doesn’t use the term “abstraction” for it. The second sense of abstraction that we can isolate is the distinction between an actual, historical capitalist system and the idea of a purely capitalist system operating exclusively on the logic of capital that Marx investigates in the majority of Capital, Vol. 1, especially its opening Parts. An actual capitalist system, say for example the capitalism existing in Canada in the early 21st century, may be mixed with remnants of prior economic systems and anticipations of a new economic system.3 An actual, historical capitalist system is not purely capitalist but may contain other elements whose mixture and linkage in the existing system modifies its structure and complicates its analysis. Understanding of the pure logic of capital is oriented to the operation of its key, theoretically-isolated, feature. Abstractive isolation of the feature of capital from actually-existing capitalisms allows a detailed investigation of its internal logic of operation without consideration of complicating factors. Such an abstraction means that the internal logic thus identified is necessarily limited in analyzing an actual, historically-existing, capitalist system and that the replacement of the complicating factors, as well as the forms of understanding that they demand, will be required to understand an actual case.

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This sense of abstraction is similar to the first in the sense that extraneous features are left out of consideration in search of an essence or pure type, but in this case the features abstracted from are not insignificant. Abstraction to capital allows a determination of its strict logic. In an actual historical case this strict logic may be combined with a logic of feudal production and a logic of cooperative production. Proceeding from the abstract logic of capital to an actual historical case thus involves combination with other significant logics. It is the internal logic of capital in this sense that is primarily of interest in our text as a whole and even more presently where the theme is the system of value that emerges from the logic of capital. Let us now reconsider the transhistorical form of the ontology of labor that we discussed in great detail in the previous chapter. Marx here considers “the labour process independently of any specific social formation” so that “the fact that the production of use-values, or goods, is carried on under the control of a capitalist and on his behalf does not alter the general character of that production” (Cap1 283, emphasis added). Abstraction is made from the capitalist form of production in order to consider the features of labor transhistorically, or ontologically, without regard to characteristics that pertain to a specific form of organization of labor. In this sense, it is an abstraction to a generic form similar to the previous examples considered. Marx then goes on to define labor. Labour is, first of all, a process by which man, through his own actions, mediates, regulates and controls the metabolism between himself and nature. He confronts the materials of nature as a force of nature. . . . An instrument of labour is a thing, or a complex of things, which the labourer interposes between himself and the object of his labour, and which serves as a conductor, directing that activity onto that object (Cap1 283–5).

On the next page, he summarizes his discussion. “The simple elements of the labour process are (1) purposeful activity, that is work itself, (2) the object on which that work is performed, and (3) the instruments of that work” (Cap1 284). Thus, the triad labor-technology-nature encapsulates the transhistorical formula of labor. This is obviously an abstraction in the first sense that the terms labor, technology and nature are considered as generic forms, or essences, independently of any specifying factors—such as slave labor, child labor, free labor, associated producers, etc.; technology in the form of shovel, plough, or digital computation; nature in an untransformed state, often called a “natural resource,” or in cooking pasta which itself has a previous history of production. It also incorporates abstraction in the second, logical sense of combination: such combinatory factors are of interest in determining the specific form

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in which this formula is instantiated in a given mode of production—say, industrial capitalism combined with child labor and machine production; or neo-mercantile capitalism combined with relatively autonomous labor and digital technology; etc. A specific, actual, historical mode of production is a complex, concrete, and combined form of the generic formula. But there is a third sense of abstraction here in addition. When we consider any one single factor, such as labor, there are a number of historical and imaginary, or logically possible, forms in which that labor could be organized: capitalist, tribal, state, cooperative, etc. The term “labor” stands for the totality of these possible forms in which labor could be organized and for the fact that any pure logic will be a selection from this totality—capitalism as a mode of production, for example. This is not the same as the previous case where an actual, historical form of capitalism may well, as we have seen, introduce further combining factors such as its intertwining with persisting forms of communal production. The point here is that the generic form labor-technology-nature only ever exists in a determinate historical form such as capitalist, feudal, etc. This is a species-genus abstraction in the sense defined in contrast to formal abstraction in chapter 2. The formula is abstract in the sense that it abstracts from the concrete, determinate forms which instantiate it. Just as one is not a human in addition to being a mammal, but being human is one’s specific way of being a mammal, capitalism is one specific way in which the humantechnology-nature model is instantiated. In this sense, the formula is a useful abstraction because it both expresses a conceptually necessary generic generality and holds out the possibility of greater concretion in specific instances. We might refer summarily to these three forms of abstraction as 1) abstraction from irrelevant individual characteristics, 2) abstraction from complex, combined historical forms to an intrinsic logic of the single factor of capital, and 3) generic abstraction from the specific features of a mode of production to those fundamental elements that are present in every mode of production. 8.1.2.2 Abstract Labor as a Residue Evident in Exchange Let us now examine the meaning of Marx’s concept of abstract labor. Recall that the first chapters of Capital, Vol. 1 contain a strict logic of presentation that aims to reveal the essence of capital as the appropriation of surplus value from labor. The logic begins by stating that a commodity is both an exchange value and a use value. Exchange is characterized by abstraction from use, where use is determined and limited by the concrete characteristics of a given commodity. If we then focus on exchange value, there is only one characteristic that all commodities have in common—that they are products of labor, but not labor of a specific kind. Since all commodities considered as commodities are equally and only commodities, they are characterized in common only by

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the fact that they are nature altered by labor, or products of labor. Parallel to the abstraction from use in the exchange value of commodities, there is an abstraction from the concrete characteristics involved in the use, or practical exercise, of different types of labor to abstract human labor. Abstract labor produces the exchange value of commodities whereas concrete labor in its specific use as exercised produces the use value of commodities. This distinction is the basis for Marx’s rigorous distinction between wealth, which is understood as the concrete world of use produced by human labor, and value, which is expressed by money, that is the abstract accounting of wealth as the possibility of exchange—that is to say, its specifically capitalist form. The concept of abstract labor founds the critique of political economy as well as Marx’s extensive critique of capitalism as a socio-historical system in the whole of Capital. Let us quote the relevant passage at length. If we then disregard [or set aside] the use-value [Gebrauchswert] of commodities, only one property remains, that of being products of labour [Arbeitsprodukten]. But even the product of labour has already been transformed in our hands. If we make abstraction [abstrahieren wir] from its use-value [Gebrauchswert], we abstract [abstrahieren wir] also from the material constituents and forms [körperlichen Bestandteilen und Formen] which make it a useful thing [nützlich Ding]. It is no longer a table, a house, a piece of yarn or any other useful thing. All its sensuous characteristics [sinnlichen Beschaffenheiten] are effaced [ausgelöscht]. Nor is it any longer the product of the labour of the joiner, the mason or the spinner, or of any other particular kind of productive labour. With the disappearance of the useful character of the products of labour, the useful character of the kinds of labour embodied in them also disappears; this in turn entails the disappearance of the different concrete forms [verschiednen konkreten Formen] of this labour. They can no longer be distinguished, but are all together reduced to the equivalent human labour [gleiche menschliche Arbeit], human labour in the abstract [abstrakt menschliche Arbeit]. Let us now look at the residue [Residuum] of the products of labour. There is nothing left of them in each case but the same phantom-like [gespenstige] objectivity; they are merely congealed quantities of homogeneous human labour [unterschiedsloser menschlicher Arbeit], i.e. of human labour-power expended without regard to the form of its expenditure. These things now only tell us that human labour-power has been expended to produce them, that human labour is accumulated in them. As crystals of this social substance, which is common to them all, they are values [Werte]—commodity values [Warenwerte] (Cap1 128; Kap1 42; translation altered).

Abstract labor is not a mental abstraction, at least in the first place, it is a real abstraction produced by and operative within the system of exchange of commodities due to their structuring effect on human action.4 Naturally, due

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to its operative function within exchange, it must also become a concept for understanding the system of exchange as a system regulated by value. The logical step from the dual character of a commodity (use and exchange) to the dual character of labor (use and exchange, or concrete and abstract) can be parsed into six steps: 1] a commodity is useful due to its specific concrete characteristics; 2] if we abstract from these concrete characteristics, so that they can be subject to a common measure in exchange, we are left with only one common characteristic of commodities—that they are products of labor; 3] this abstraction from concrete qualities entails that all material characteristics of the product are set aside; 4] the abstraction from quality affects the labor expended as well as the product; abstract labor produces exchange value, while concrete labor produces useful products; 5] the only common feature of commodities in abstraction from their use-value is that they are products of abstract labor, that is to say, labor solely in its universal and essential characteristic as labor without any concrete characteristics that make it one form of labor distinguishable from another; 6] abstract labor is homogeneous human labor that is measurable only as a quantity, that is to say by time expended, or duration. As a consequence, Marx will elaborate later, socially-necessary labor time thus becomes the only possible ground for measuring the relative exchange-values of commodities: this is the labor theory of value understood as an essential determination of value that underlies the appearance of the circulation of commodities. 8.1.2.3 Abstract Labor as Simple, Homogeneous, Socially-Necessary, Labor-time Abstract labor is the substance of value according to Marx. Since abstract labor is shorn of any concrete characteristics, it can only be measured by duration: time. Value is measured by homogeneous labor-time of a simple given amount. Even so, this would make an identical product produced by a slower labor force—or, let us say, a labor force that had enforced its more relaxed pace by its efforts of unionizing—more valuable, due to using more time, than that of a more intensive work process. So, a similar reduction is necessary from actual labor-time to socially-necessary labor time, which is the labor time required under average and normal conditions to produce the product in a given place and time. “Socially-necessary labour-time is the labour-time required to produce any use-value under the conditions of production normal for a given society and with the average degree of skill and intensity of labour prevalent in that society” (Cap1 129). Similarly, some labor is complex, like that of an electrical engineer, and some is comparatively simple, like that of a ditch-digger or seller of vegetables—even though there is no concrete labor that is entirely shorn of its

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character as a culturally and historically formed mode of human practice. Thus, in order to view abstract labor solely through its duration, it must be assumed that complex labor can be reduced to, or is a quantitative factor of, simple labor. “More complex labour counts only as intensified, or rather multiplied simple labour” (Cap1 135, Marx’s italics). Simple labor refers to the undeveloped labor of an average person—Marx says “average man” (gewöhnliche Mensch) which has the same problems of gender reference as the English text (Cap1 135; Kap1 49) and may well be taken to signal the problems of this reduction in fact. Moreover, such simple labor is itself not an unproblematic concept, since it is clear enough that it differs over place and time. The simple labor of a rural peasant society, say 19th century Russia, is different from that of 20th century Japan and, even while their difference is difficult to discern and certainly measure, since there is no common measure whereby they could be shown to be the same, or even to differ by a definite amount, which this would imply a measure covering both cases and, in principle, all of the history of human labor. Nevertheless, Marx says, “simple average labour . . . varies in character in different countries and at different cultural epochs, but in a particular society it is given” (Cap1 135). That is to say, it can be treated as a given simple quantity, perhaps designated by an “x,” to which all labor in a given society can in principle be reduced. We may thus distinguish four reductions necessary to the concept of abstract labor: from concrete to abstract labor which, being without qualities, can be measured only by the quantity of time expended in labor; to labor-time which is socially necessary; from complex to simple labor; and from the variability of simple labor across space and time to a given simple quantity in a given place and time. With these conceptual components of the theory of value in place, let us determine the meaning of Marx’s theory in a preliminary manner by looking at the history and debates that have attended the theory of value. 8.2 LABOR AND VALUE The distinction between use-value and exchange-value was already wellestablished in classical political economy. The notion that the value of made things was dependent on the use that could be made of them has been known and generally accepted since Aristotle. He described household management as the use of resources in a manner which is essentially identical over two thousand years later where “value in use” is defined by Adam Smith as “the utility of some particular object” (Aristotle 1974, 19, 1256a; Smith 1970, 131). The enigma for Aristotle was in acquisition, which was distinct from

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the natural wealth of household management. While natural wealth is limited by its use and consequently by those by whom it is used, acquisition took the form of retail trade and exchange in which the amassing of money becomes unlimited. Having made this distinction, Aristotle claimed that acquisition was only necessary insofar as it is subordinated to the necessary bounds of household management, and unnecessary insofar as “those of whom we are speaking turn all such capacities into forms of the art of acquisition, as though to make money were the one aim and everything else must contribute to that aim” (Aristotle 1974, 27, 1258a). By the time of classical political economy, this moral subordination of exchange was no longer viable due to the vast expansion of the realm of the market in producing necessities, even while the mystery of value-in-exchange persisted. John Locke referred to money as the “universal measure” and Smith conceptualized this as a double aspect of any particular thing—either as a utility or as “the power of purchasing other goods which the possession of that object conveys” (Locke 1991, 262; Smith 1970, 131). Smith noted that these two senses of value are by no means identical, that water, for example, is of great utility but (at least at that time) had no purchase price (Smith 1970, 132). So, it remained a central problem for classical political economy how to account for the measure that determines price and the double-sidedness of the thing that allows for its exchange-value to be measured. Marx commented on the universality achieved by Smith when he understood “the abstract universality of wealth-creating activity” and thereby “the product as such” and “labour as such”—even though labor was thought of only as “past, objectified labour” and not as living labor (Gr 104). The stage was thus set for understanding the real conceptual relationship between these terms. 8.2.1 Labor Theory of Value Before Marx and its Completion and Critique by Marx Alongside the distinction between use and exchange, several major representatives of classical political economy—such as Locke and Smith—held to a version of the labor theory of value. In Locke’s words, “that of the Products of the Earth useful to the Life of Man are the effects of labour” (Locke 1988, 296). Smith asserted that “labour was the first price, the original purchasemoney that was paid for all things” so that it is “the only universal as well as the only accurate measure of value, or the only standard by which we can compare the values of different commodities” (Smith 1970, 133,139–40). But while labor was recognized as the original source of value, and as the only universal and accurate measure of value, both Locke and Smith knew very well that market price was not determined by labour. Indeed, Smith limited

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the labour theory of value’s actual operation to so-called primitive society where “the whole produce of labour belongs to the labourer” (Smith 1970, 150–1). Nonetheless, the unsuccessful attempt to determine market price—or normal or average price, that price around which local variations revolve— through the labor theory of value was a central preoccupation of classical political economy. In his remarks on Bailey, Marx commented on the attempt to discover an “invariable standard of value” that would make it possible to establish the normal market price of commodities. “If gold and silver or corn, or labour, were such commodities, then it would be possible to establish, by comparison with them, the rate at which other commodities are exchanged for them, that is, to measure exactly the variations in the values of these other commodities by their prices in gold, silver, or corn, or their relation to wages” (Marx 1971, 133). He points out there is no such invariable standard, nor is there any need of one, that any standard will vary according to the totality of commodities. In his own view, the pseudo-problem of an invariable standard of value that could determine market price is “a spurious name for the quest for the concept, the nature of value itself, the definition of which could not be another value, and consequently could not be subject to variations as value. This was labour-time, social labour, as it presents itself specifically in commodity production” (Marx 1971, 134–5). Thus Marx considers his theory of abstract labor, labor performed under conditions of generalized commodityproduction, as the solution to the problem of the measure of value and the determination of price sought by the classical political economists. He claims in Capital, at the point at which he introduces the two-fold character of labor, that “I was the first to point out and examine critically this two-fold nature of the labour contained in commodities” (Cap1 132). This states his contribution to the resolution of dilemmas posed by political economy: Labor expressed as exchange-value is abstract labor which is the explicans for the explicandum of market price, value, and measure in political economy as well as the fundamentum for his own theory of the essence of capitalist exploitation in the extraction of surplus labor and its appearance in the surface forms of profit, wages, and ground rent. Marx thus considered his concept of abstract labor to be both the completion of the science of political economy and its critique. Completion of a science and its critique are inherently connected in Marx’s view. The clearest, and best known, expression of this connection is the passage in Grundrisse, where he states that “human anatomy contains a key to the anatomy of the ape” (Gr 105). Since this comment is inserted into a discussion of the historical development of the concept of labor, it is clearly a metaphor that makes no actual claim about biology or anatomy. It means that the conceptual structure

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of the most highly developed form is the basis for understanding the confused conceptual mixture of the less developed form. Specifically, he can only develop the strict and accurate concept of abstract labor because it stands at the end of a development of confused and mixed forms that produced conceptual fuzziness and incoherence. As he says on the previous page, “with the abstract universality of wealth-creating activity we now have the universality of the object defined as wealth, the product as such or again labour as such, but labour as past, objectified labour” (Gr 104). This means that the capitalist form as an abstract universality allows the development of the conceptual structure that can understand capitalist production and thereby the steps leading to capitalist production. It develops, in particular, the concept of labor “as such” that is to say, without any concrete characteristics differentiating it from other labor, but as an abstract form applying to any and all forms of labor. This concept of abstract labor allows an understanding of the historical development of concrete forms of labor. So, the abstract universal form of labor under capital from which Marx’s work begins determines the conceptual structure of the science that can understand both capitalist production and previous forms of production. In this sense, Marx’s science is the completion of political economy and, as such, can resolve its aporias. But, even more, by recognizing these aporias as aporias, determining the problems posed by political economy that are in principle incapable of resolution by political economy, Marx’s science becomes a critique of political economy and, likewise, a critique of capitalist production. This understanding of the internal connection between completion and critique in both subject (science) and object (mode of production) registers the continuing influence of Hegel on Marx. Hegel’s well-known aphoristic rendering of this understanding, comparable to Marx’s on anatomy, is that “the owl of Minerva spreads its wings only with the falling of the dusk” (Hegel 1969b, 13), but its more precise conceptual formulation is that “in speculative thinking . . . the negative belongs to the content itself, and is the positive, both as the immanent movement and determination of the content, and as the whole of this process. Looked at as a result, what emerges from this process is the determinate negative which is consequently a positive content as well” (Hegel 1979, 36). We would therefore expect Marx’s labor theory of value as expressed through the concept of abstract labor to resolve the issues of the labor theory of value within political economy, though of course not in the form in which those issues are posed within political economy, to propose an understanding of value through labor, and to illuminate conceptually the historical possibility of the end of an epoch that establishes value through labor.

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8.2.2 Four Senses of Value in Marx: Source, Quantity, Form, and Substance The complexity of the concept of value is that it operates as both the central organizing concept of political economy, once political economy is understood as a system, and of its critique—though, understanding political economy as a system is possible only at the moment of its critique. Let us begin by distinguishing four senses in which the central concept of value is used. Labor can be understood as the source of value. Marx held this view in common with the main thinkers of political economy and as such he held it to be rather obvious and unremarkable. When value is understood as the origin or source of value, the distinction between use-value and exchange-value is unclear or irrelevant. As the source of value, value produces both wealth and capital, that is to say, it is a transhistorical source of use-value that thereby also applies to the capitalist form considered as the production of use-values as also exchange-values. Labor as the source, or origin, of value applies to the transhistorical ontology of labor as discussed in the previous chapter. As such, labor produces the wealth of human society and constructs the developed human capable of needing and enjoying such wealth. Labor can be understood as the quantity, or magnitude, of value. Political economists understood value in this sense as that which determines price. It is not market price exactly since it was understood that market prices fluctuate with supply and demand but, nevertheless, it was supposed that fluctuations occurred around a median, mean, average, or “normal,” price that was determined by the quantity of labor expended in producing the product. Marx’s distinction between concrete and abstract labor alters this conception of the quantity of value insofar as the quantity would be determined, not by any of the specific characteristics of concrete labor, but simply by the quantitative measure of homogeneous labor-time. As Marx said in Theories of SurplusValue while commenting on the “disintegration of the Ricardian School” The problem of an “invariable measure of value” was simply a spurious name for the quest for the concept, the nature, of value itself, the definition of which could not be another value, and consequently could not be subject to variations as value. This was labour-time, social labour, as it presents itself specifically in commodity production. A quantity of labour has no value, is not a commodity, but is that which transforms commodities into values, it is their common substance; as manifestations of it commodities are qualitatively equal and only quantitatively different. They [appear] as expressions of definite quantities of social labour-time (Marx 1971, 134–5).

The Ricardian School, and political economy more generally, could not find an invariable quantitative measure of the value of commodities without the

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distinction between abstract and concrete labor and thereby the reduction of labor to a quantity of duration of homogeneous labor. It is this quantity that holds the secret to quantitative commodity values. We will postpone for more extensive discussion in the succeeding subsection the issue of whether Marx thought that he could determine the quantitative value of commodities, which is what political economy sought in the labor theory of value. What is clear here is that Marx thought that the whole sphere of the quantitative determination of value is an expression of, and therefore depends upon, abstract labor. Moreover, quantitative values appear as “expressions of definite quantities of social labour-time.” The very notion of a quantitative measure of commodity value through abstract labor-time determines that quantity “x” in relation to the whole sphere of value produced by the total organization of social labor. A commodity value is a specific fraction of social labor. Marx is not concerned so much with the quantity of value as the form of value such that labor expresses itself in that which it produces. Political economy has indeed analysed value and its magnitude, however incompletely, and has uncovered the content concealed within these forms. But it has never once asked the question why this content has assumed that particular form, that is to say, why labour is expressed in value, and why the measurement of labour by its duration is expressed in the magnitude of the value of the product (Cap1 173–4).

Thus, labor can be understood as the form of value and this form is specific to the capitalist mode of production. This is the sense in which Marx claimed that his work understands value in a manner that could not be understood within political economy. Value in the sense specific to Marx’s labor theory of value is concerned not with economic forms themselves but with the determination of economic forms through abstract labor. The form of value shows how valorization structures capitalist production and thereby points to the possibility of a post-capitalist society in which the law of value no longer rules production. Labor can also be understood as the substance of value. Homogeneous, socially-necessary labor-time, or abstract labor, is the substance of value. Again, this is a meaning pertinent only to a specifically capitalist form of production where the value-form in the previous sense of a predominant regime of value is an expression of the abstract labor. Abstract labor is thus the explicans of the value-form as explicandum. Marx claimed that his distinction between abstract and concrete labor brings out the essence of the value-form that always appears as value.

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Thus, form and substance are the main essential, specific and characteristic components of Marx’s theory of value. Labor as source he shares with political economy and quantity he critiques in political economy and thinks that, in a certain sense to be determined in the following sub-section, his theory can explain (through form and substance). The logic of this theory is developed conceptually in Capital, Vol. 1 by showing that value is operative in the equation of commodities through exchange-values, arguing that the two-sidedness of commodities (use and exchange) must be based on a similar two-sidedness of labor, reducing the complex and variable forms of abstract labor to a simple, homogeneous form, and then showing that abstract labor in this reduced sense is the quantity that mediates a specific commodity as a fraction of the total social economy. Abstract labor explains the system of value. The essential issue of value, then, is why value is expressed as a quantity of abstract labor. 8.2.3 Can “Normal” Price be Determined? Having shown that the major issue in Marx’s labor theory of value is how and why value is expressed as a quantum of abstract labor and that this quantum is a fraction that mediates the system of value as a whole, let us explore for a moment what has often incorrectly been taken to be the major issue—whether Marx’s theory can explain the quantity of value of a given commodity, that is to say, whether Marx’s theory can resolve the issue of value as it was seen within political economy on the terms set by political economy. Alternatively put, is Marx’s critique of political economy a better political economy or does it do something that it essentially different from political economy? Many interpreters have made the point that Marx’s work has been primarily received by both defenders and critics as an attempt to determine more accurately than political economy the magnitude of value, that is to say, the value inherent in a given commodity.5 This presupposes that value is indeed in some sense “in” a given commodity, rather than being, as Marx often asserted, a social relation—and thus residing in the relation between commodities as established by abstract labor. So, does Marx’s theory of value solve the political economist’s issue of natural, or normal, price? First, let us note that the magnitude of value never appears in the regime of value as such. Even if we set aside local fluctuations in prices due to extrinsic factors, the price of a commodity never, in principle, corresponds to its value. Since abstract labor is the source of value, equal amounts of abstract labor in principle produce commodities of equal value.6 But while abstract labor is the sole determinant of value, according to Marx, value in the actual capitalist economy is shared between wages, capital, and

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landed property—known as the “trinity formula.” As Marx put it in Capital, Vol 3, “In capital—profit, or still better capital—interest, land—rent, labor— wages, in this economic trinity represented as the connection between the component parts of value and wealth in general and its sources, we have the complete mystification of the capitalist mode of production . . .” (Cap3 830). Since the actual value produced by a specific quantity of abstract labor is divided between capital, wages, and landed property, the value of the commodity does not correspond directly with the abstract labor that produces it. This is known historically as the “transformation problem” whereby many Marxist economists attempted unsuccessfully to find a way of rigorously relating price to value. This failure has led many interpreters of Marx, especially those for whom explanation of the actual workings of capitalist economy was the fundamental concern, to abandon the concept of value. But it can be seen that the “transformation” of value into price is a problem that in principle cannot be resolved since it is based upon the difference between the essence and appearance of capitalism. For values to be rigorously transformed into prices, there would have to be a common measure of price and value in which this could be expressed. But this is exactly the problem: there is no common measure of the appearance of capitalist society and its essence. The difference between the trinity formula and the productivity of labor cannot be reduced to the difference between socially-necessary labor and actual labor. Two identical commodities, produced under identical conditions and quantities of abstract labor, will not have the same price unless the percentage division into capital, wages, and landed property is also identical. Since this could only be the case under contingent conditions, there is no way to rigorously relate the quantity of abstract labor to commodity prices. In other words, the “in principle” never holds in fact. This essential disparity is due to the difference between the appearance of productivity in capitalist society in the trinity formula and the essence of that productivity in abstract labor. To attribute this disparity to the difference between socially-necessary labor and actual labor is to assume precisely the absent common measure of price and value. The consequence of this is that any correspondence between value and price could not be between individual values and prices, nor between the sum of values and the sum of prices, but has to be in the relation between the sphere of price and the sphere of value—that is to say, in a concrete explication of the appearance-essence relation. Thus, since value never appears within the categories of capitalist society; its validity can only be in the relation between the sphere of prices as a whole and the source of that sphere in the productivity of labor. Therefore, even though value never appears within the sphere of prices as such, it could

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be a valid and necessary concept if it could be shown that the sphere of prices as a whole could only be understood through reference to value. The second issue concerning value pertains to the measure of commodities by the abstract labor-time embodied in them. Such a measure presumes that a reduction can be made between skilled labor-power and simple laborpower—for, if no such reduction could be made, the concrete difference between labors would militate against an abstract standard rendering them comparable. This theoretical reduction is never in fact operative in a manner that would erase the differences between skilled and unskilled labor in a concrete capitalist system. It is impossible to measure quantitatively the difference between any two concrete labors in terms of a multiple of simple labors, let alone all of such differences within an actual economic system. While there might be a motive here for abandoning the postulate of reduction to simple labor if one’s focus were on determining value as a property of an individual commodity, the theoretical postulate that skilled labor represents an exponential value of simple labor can be made credible by the fact that the capitalist system is a system, that similar commodities are equalized in price, such that the system itself presupposes such an exponential relation—even if its exact proportion cannot be determined in any given case. But this is a matter of the system of value not of value as an individual property. Thus, socially-necessary labor-time is a measure that necessarily includes within itself a relation of the individual labor-time of abstract labor to the system of labor as a whole. For any temporal unit of abstract labor to be sociallynecessary, it must be a certain determinate fraction of the whole labor time expended on a given product. It may be impossible to actually measure this fraction, but it is possible to say that the labor-time expended in making 1000 staples, for example, is higher in one productive unit than another. This can be indirectly measured: if we assume that the capital invested, the machinery utilized, landed property rented, and extraneous factors such as transportation are held constant, then the difference between the production prices of two enterprises making staples will be due to the percentage of socially-necessary labor they require. An enterprise making staples utilizing more than the socially-necessary labor will experience a pressure to lower that amount, whereas an enterprise using less will reap greater profit. So there is in the percentage of socially-necessary labor a capitalist mechanism tending to move capital toward enterprises with a lower percentage of socially-necessary labor—thus, a tendency to lower the amount of socially-necessary labor or, alternatively put, a tendency to increase the productivity of labor through improved technology. While socially-necessary labor may be impossible to measure as such, especially due to its dependence on social and historical factors,7 nevertheless it is arguably an abstraction necessary to explain the

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tendency to reduce socially-necessary labor time under capitalism. This tendency is rooted in the comparability that the concept expresses between the individual abstract labor-time in a given enterprise and the average labor-time across the whole system (with regard to a given product). The major reason for a lower quantity of socially-necessary labor than the average in a given enterprise is the development of technology that increases the productivity of labor. Thus, the profit motive constitutes an inherent tendency for technological innovation within production determined by the system of value. What do these conceptual issues regarding value mean for the relation between value and price? Recall: value never appears within the sphere of prices; the reduction to simple labor is a postulate whose proportion can never be determined; socially-necessary labor time represents a postulate concerning the relation between a given labor (part) and the system of labor (whole). The first conclusion seems to be that value and price can only be related as two systems and not as individual prices and values. Second, the concepts of reduction to simple labor and socially-necessary labor-time both postulate a proportionality between the individual production and the social production of a given product and, finally, of the whole production system. If we reject the alternatives of abandoning one or all of these concepts, we are forced to recognize that the concept of value is an underlying concept of essence that could explain the sphere of prices (though no individual price) as a proportional relation between every specific, concrete labor and the whole system of production. We may say that this is exactly what makes capitalist production a system—that every part is related to the whole and the whole is expressed in each part. We therefore may conclude that the transformation problem is an illusory problem brought on by the attempt to make Marx’s critique of the system of value through the concept of abstract labor a theory of value as determining normal price understood as a property of an individual commodity.8 In short, to make Marx a political economist. Such an attempt must necessarily fail. The part-whole relation incorporated into the social proportionality of the social labor process in relation to individual labors is enabled by the structure of capital as value-production. Capitalism is a system precisely because it incorporates into itself a measure that brings all individual labors in relation to the system of labors as such. This is the ground for the concept of abstract labor and of value itself. 8.2.4 Abstract Labor and Surplus Value Marx’s claim that his main contribution is the distinction between concrete and abstract labor grounds his claim that labor produces all value. While, at

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the level of appearance or surface, there are three sources of income—capital, land, wages, or, the trinity formula—at the level of essence abstract labor is the sole source of value. This difference allows the understanding of the capitalist system as the extraction of surplus labor, labor beyond that needed to reproduce the workers, and thus as the exploitation of the working class. The other condition for this exploitation is the formation of the proletariat, and its continued reproduction so that there is no alternative for the worker but to enter the process of capital’s valorization of labor. The exploitation of labor is explained by the difference between the value produced by labor and the value of labor-power. The value of labour-power is determined, as in the case of every other commodity, by the labour-time necessary for its production, and consequently, also the reproduction of this specific article. . . . For his maintenance he requires a certain quantity of the means of subsistence. Therefore the labour-time necessary for the production of labour-power is the same as that necessary for those means of subsistence; in other words, the value of labour-power is the value of the means of subsistence necessary for the maintenance of its owner (Cap1 274).

The system of value, which is the universalization of the commodity-form when labor becomes a commodity, depends upon the difference between labor as the source of value and the value of labor-power as a magnitude.9 This difference explains the inherently exploitative character of the capitalist mode of production. To be sure, the magnitude of the value of labor-power is itself a variable quantity. Even if we take as given the reduction of complex (skilled, educated) labor to simple labor, inherent to the system of value, the magnitude of value required by workers to reproduce themselves as a working class differs historically and geographically. The number and extent of his so-called necessary requirements, as also the manner in which they are satisfied, are themselves products of history, and depend therefore to a great extent on the level of civilization attained by a country . . . In contrast therefore with the case of other commodities, the determination of the value of labour-power contains a historical and moral element (Cap1 275).

The postulation of an undetermined quantity that can never be filled in as such, and which can therefore only be designated by a formal sign, serves as the lynch-pin for the difference between labor-power as incorporated within the system of value and labor as the source of value. The postulation is not by Marx, but attributed by Marx to the system of value, such that it serves as a source of exploitation and its in principle measure—even though that measure can never be determined as an actual number, or percentage. “What was

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really decisive for him [the capitalist] was the specific use-value which this commodity possesses of being a source not only of value, but of more value than itself” (Cap1 300-1). As we have seen in the previous chapter in the discussion of ground rent, the surplus productivity of labor rests on natural fecundity. This complex relation between natural fecundity, which grounds the surplus productivity of labor, and the price of labor-power (wages) in the system of value, not only explains the exploitation inherent in the system of value, and not only shows the ground of its critique, but also demonstrates the persistence of nature within the system of value. 8.2.5 Value and the Forms of Value As we have observed above, value appears in four forms within the system of value: as source, quantity, form and substance. Concrete social labor is the source of wealth and therefore also of the specifically capitalist form of wealth which is value. This is a transhistorical, ontological characteristic of human being for Marx, even though it always takes place in a given determinate historical organization. The form of value is the specifically capitalist form of wealth such that commodities possess both use and exchange values and therefore become subject to a common measure. The substance of value is abstract labor—simple, homogeneous, socially-necessary labor measured solely by its duration. The quantity of value, which for political economy and many subsequent interpreters of Marx was the main issue of value, cannot be determined exactly, or numerically, as a function of abstract labor time, but functions as an underlying norm from which equilibrating tendencies in the system of value operate.10 Value is the mediator between a specific labor and the system of social labor under conditions of capitalism where there is no social representation of value, or worth, directly but only a systemic equalization through value in Marx’s sense that achieves this coordination “behind the backs” of the social actors. The three forms of value which determine the specific capitalist form of wealth—form, substance, and quantity—constitute a unity insofar as each one requires the other. They function together to form a system, or regime, that is to say, a coherent, complete, inter-related, internal organization of elements. Gilles Deleuze is correct to see abstract labour as a “system of ideal multiple connections . . . [which] is then incarnated in the concrete differentiated labours . . . [through] the simultaneity of all the relations and terms which, each time and in each case, constitute the present” (Deleuze 1994, 186). However, he fails to see that Marx first shows the constitution of this abstract multiplicity to be required by the capitalist economy in order to then show why it always fails as such. It is not only a theory of capital but also its

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critique. The system of value as a theoretical object to be understood was not handed down to Marx as a completed concept but was only a potential inherent in the non-systematic investigations of political economy. The completion of the system as a conceptual object by Marx was simultaneously its critique through what undermines the system as a system. Marx had to complete the object of his critique and, for this reason, his critique does not aim at the same conceptual object as that present in vague form within political economy and can therefore not answer the question as it existed in its undeveloped form. This is the fundamental reason why Marx did not, and could not, solve the problem of the magnitude of value as it was posed within political economy. The condition for this system is that labor functions in two ways such the difference between these two ways closes the system as system and shows it as a regime that is exploitative of labor. The duality of labor as concrete source of social production and abstract labor as an exchange value within the system of value is fundamental to understanding the system as a system and the critique of the system as such. 8.3 THE SYSTEM OF VALUE Marx’s labor theory of value is an attempt to show the organizing center of the system of value that structures capitalist society and is incompletely understood in classical political economy. As we have seen, for Marx the form of value is most significant since it refers to the specifically capitalist form in which wealth appears, but his distinctive contribution is that the substance of value is measured by abstract labor. He placed less emphasis on the magnitude of value, regarding it as a typical error of political economy to attempt to determine normal or average price. Understanding Marx’s labor theory of value in this way as the expression of the underlying workings, or essence, of the capitalist system was most classically presented in Isaak Illich Rubin’s interpretation of the system of value. As he said, “the entire system of value is based upon a grandiose system of spontaneous social accounting and comparison of the products of labor of various types and performed by different individuals as parts of the total social abstract labor” (Rubin 1973, 120). The system of value is thus a system which is structured by abstract labor and functions through the concept of value. In a lecture given in 1927, Rubin elaborated that The unity of the form, substance and magnitude of value reflects the unity of labour as social, socially equated and quantitatively divided. In commodity production, the relations of labour and of production are “objectified” and the social characteristics of labour assume the form of “objectified” attributes of

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the product of labour. The “form of value” is the social form of the product of labour, which reflects the particular social character of labour in commodity production. “The substance of value” represents socially equal labour. And finally the “magnitude of value” is the expression of the social division of labour, or more precisely of the quantitative side of the process of division of labour (Rubin 1978, 115).

The only addition we make is to suggest that a fourth understanding of the labor theory of value as the source of value can be added to the above three. This fourth understanding is not original to Marx, since it was already present in political economy, and was therefore not mentioned either by Marx or Rubin. In our present context, however, it bears mention since contemporary economics no longer concerns itself with the ontological issue of the transformation of nature by labor through which commodities are made while, simultaneously, the role of nature in the production of value and wealth has become a critical contemporary issue. Moreover, as has been shown, value understood as the source of value continued to be operative and significant within Marx’s thought even though he did not rate it highly since he took it over from, and shared it with, his predecessors. 8.3.1 Four Reductions that Purify the System of Value In order for value to function as the regulator of the system of value, four reductions of the phenomenal appearance of socio-economic activity are necessary: from concrete to abstract labor which, being without qualities, can be measured only by the quantity of time expended in labor; to labor-time which is socially necessary as opposed to the actual time expended in any given case; from complex to simple labor, that is to say, the reduction of education and skill to an undetermined multiple of simple labor—a mathematical and not a numerical multiple; and from the variability of simple labor across space and time to a given simple quantity of average labor in a given place and time. These four reductions are embedded within each other such that they constitute the abstractions through which the system of labor can appear as a system. The final object of the labor theory of value is a given simple quantity that represents the fractional amount of total social labor invested in the production of a given commodity. That is to say, the value of given commodity “c” represents a specific fraction “x” of the total social labor “sl”. Thus, c = x/sl, but also, since social labor is an undetermined multiple (m) of the value of a given commodity, c = x/mx. Thus, the value of a given commodity can, through these reductions, be treated as a given simple quantity, designated here as “x,” which is a fraction of the total social labor, or 1/m. (This fraction can be used, if one wishes, to derive the fractions of all other

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commodities as multiples of this fraction.) The relation between the value of a given commodity and the total social labor that is expressed by the given simple quantity is what makes the system of value a system—that is to say, it is an organized whole in which each part is in a determinate relation to the whole and, thereby, to all the other parts. It is a quantitative totality in which the given simple labor—let us simply call it “x”—is a fraction of the total social labor, which is a multiple of “x,” or “mx.” But it is a quantitative relation in the sense that the quantity “x” cannot be actually determined as a number, no more than the quantity of total social labor can actually be represented as a given number which is a multiple of “x.” It is a mathematical relation expressed as an unknown quantity rather than a numerical fraction. Insofar as the system of value indicated by this mathematical relation between simple abstract labor and total social labor is, in the capitalist system, the organizing structure of actual social labor, it is a formal totality organizing concrete, qualitative labor—since there are in fact a plurality of labors and labor-times that are only in principle reduced. Marx’s logic in Capital, Vol. 1 runs from qualitatively different commodities exchangeable through a common measure, to qualitatively different labors equitable by a common measure, to the concept of value as the relation between reduced simple abstract labor, to the total system of abstract social labor. This is a logical movement from appearance to essence. The system of value, as the essence of the capitalist system, manifests itself in qualitative forms of appearance which register the mathematical relation, or undetermined quantity “x,” of the essence. It follows from the reductions that allow the system to be expressed as a system that the forms of appearance, such as normal or average price, in principle cannot be given an exact numerical determination. As Marx said, “magnitude of value of a commodity therefore expresses a necessary relation to social labour-time which is inherent in the process by which its value is created” (Cap1 196). So, Marx does not solve the question of normal price as it existed in political economy, he pushes that question aside in order to develop the system of value as a relation between parts and whole and, through that system of value, to criticize the capitalist system itself. The mathematical relation expressed as a fraction that can be designated as “x” cannot be determined as a numerical relation even though it is a conceptual necessity for the system of value. The key to the system of value is thus the relation between simple abstract labor, or “x,” and the total social labor which is an undetermined multiple of “x,” or “mx.” The relation between “x” and “mx” is an equilibrating mechanism. It defines the system as a system and expresses its closure in the sense that anything which cannot be expressed in terms of this relation falls outside the system. It also rules individual production processes

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by tendencies pressuring individual production processes whose fraction is greater than the system average to conform to the average, and motivating processes that function at the average to reduce their fraction of total social labor in order to raise profit above the average. In this sense it is a regime that dominates social labor under capitalist conditions. The relation between “x” and “mx” functions to press any qualitative divergences from equilibrium to adjust to equilibrium, or for any at equilibrium to surpass it. For example, if a technological innovation reduces the amount of socially-necessary labor time required to produce a given commodity, then the system will experience a tendency for the value of that commodity to fall and thus profit to rise—which is to say that production in the new form will be preferred and production in the old form will be less profitable (unless it can increase the exploitation of labor to compensate). This mathematical relation thus can explain certain actual tendencies in the system of value that affect the total social labor process over time. 8.3.2 What does Marx’s Labor Theory of Value Explain? The four reductions produce a model of an isolated system of capital centered by an abstract “x” that represents an indeterminate quantity of simple, homogeneous, socially-necessary labor time. These reductions are performed by Marx’s analysis in order to isolate the theoretical core of capital which he then subjects to critique. The theoretical abstraction of the system of value corresponds to the real abstraction of abstract labor which centers the scientific object-domain of the system of value. Abstraction from actual, concrete labor is produced by the system of value itself, and is thus a real abstraction not only a theoretical one, due to its systematic, equilibrating character that puts all elements into coherent internal relations through exchange-value. Marx’s labor theory of value explains the hidden, static, equilibrating essence of the system of value that is expressed in the tendencies of the appearing capitalist system that alter it through time. Value is, in that sense, the regulator of the system of value. It makes the system into a regime. It is not an actual quantity but a formal mediation expressing the relation between a given commodity and total social labor. This regulator never appears as such, neither in the system of value nor in the capitalist system. It is known solely through its effects. In that sense, it is an “empty x” in a “definite manifold” in Husserl’s sense. It cannot be filled in with concrete content and functions solely through its relations to other aspects of the system of value to determine tendencies that are always experienced in relation to other tendencies. It is an evolving but consistent system in its appearance, which can only be explained through the “empty x” that regulates its essence. In an exact parallel

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to what we have described as the upshot of Klein’s consequence for Husserl’s Crisis, there can be no “intuition of individuals” as an exact quantity but only an uninterpreted sign whose meaning is defined by its organizing function and relations within the system. If abstract labor is a mathematical-relational fraction of social labor, but not a numerical fraction, then the concept of abstract labor is a social concept, as is social labor. The system of value is a social system (of social actors transforming nature). Its regulator is thus a social concept and the root concept of abstract labor is also a concept of social labor. As Marx said in an appendix to the first German edition of Capital, Vol. 1, “the value-form of the commodity is its social form” (Marx 1978c, 130).11 The isolated scientific object-domain of the system of value operates through abstract labor as a centering mechanism by performing a real abstraction on actual, concrete labor. Critique of the system of value thus occurs through the relationship between actual, concrete labor and abstract labor. Actual, concrete labor which produces wealth is the source of value—the specifically capitalist form of wealth—and abstract labor is the substance of value which determines the form that it takes within the system of value and the in principle (due to the reductions) undetermined quantity of value. Labor as exchanged versus labor as performed is the core of the critical standpoint achieved by the theoretical completion of the system of value anticipated by political economy. The critique of political economy shows that its search for a natural price must remain in vain, that the very idea of natural price is a vain search for a specific numerical equilibrating center in the system, and that such an equilibration remains an unknown “x” which can only express itself through tendencies in the concrete appearance of the system as it unfolds in time. 8.3.3 The Galilean Form of the System of Value “Abstract labor” has a function in Marx’s critique of the system of value exactly parallel to that of the “mathematization of nature” in Husserl’s critique of Galilean science. Neither term is entirely unprecedented but in each case it is given a systematic new meaning which pertains to the formal structure of the delimited science. It fixes on a fundamental term without which the system could not function as a system and therefore not criticized as one. So it has a constructive sense in which, through this term, the object of critique appears as a scientific system (and not as a collection of generalizations and separate theorems). It also has a critical sense whereby the complete conception of the system as a system allows its critique.

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8.3.3.1 What is a Galilean Form? Let us summarize the key features of a Galilean scientific form according to Husserl in preparation for investigating parallel features of Marx’s critique of the system of value. There are three general headings under which these features can be organized: the institution of Galilean science, formalization as the loss of meaning and value, and the lifeworld as the recovery of reason. Each point will be given an initial short phrasing with which it can be identified and thereby compared systematically to Marx’s critique of the system of value in the succeeding sub-section. While the number of points could be argued, they have been divided here in a manner which aims to clearly separate each distinct step in the phenomenological description of institution, crisis, and recovery. INSTITUTION OF GALILEAN SCIENCE 1.  Institution—The concept of “institution” refers to an original event of setting-into-place, or “primal establishment,” of a way of knowing that persists through time and structures subsequent experience. Factual, empirical history is thus lifted out of its contingency because an event must have occurred within factual history due to the structure of transcendental history. The event is the prior to which the diagnosis of crisis and the task of recovery refer. It is through the event which persists in transcendental history that we are “assigned a task” in the diagnosis and recovery of reason. 2.  Mathematization of nature—Nature as a whole is taken to have a fundamentally mathematical structure underlying everyday, qualitative experience. Nature is substructed by Galilean science. 3.  Indirect mathematization—All of what we experience in qualitative, sensuous perception—such as duration, color, etc.—must be related in a rigorous fashion to the exactitudes of geometrical idealizations. 4.  Method becomes ontology—The rational structure of Galilean science, due to the substruction of nature, takes the method of Galilean science to be the ontology of nature as such. This generates the problem of objectivism whereby the subjective accomplishment of science as a human project becomes unknowable and, more generally, the functioning of subjectivity in the human world is systematically unknowable. 5.  Self-enclosed scientific domain—The modern science of nature refers to an enclosed object-domain produced by the abstractive structure of Galilean science and not independently given. The object-domain to which a science refers is no longer available conceptually as a sum of objects individually available through abstraction from actual bodies—as in premodern science—but only through the systematic structure of a method. Mathematics is a method of knowing that, due to the nature of formalizing

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abstraction, applies as a coherent form to a domain of objects, or selfenclosed world of bodies. This Renaissance ideal of knowledge allows for continuous progress of investigation and results within this domain. 6.  Experiment—Husserl’s description of Galilean science ignores one of its key features. It is not only the application of a formal method of knowing to a delimited object-domain but also an experimental science. Experiment is not simply rigorous observation, as in Aristotelian science, but the abstraction of a situation from complicating factors so that a given factor can be measured by formal methods. It is the experimental component that connects Galilean science not only to technique in Husserl’s sense of a theoretical technique but also to techniques as useful practical procedures in the lifeworld. FORMALIZATION AND THE LOSS OF MEANING 7.  Formalization—Mathematics is based upon formalizing abstraction and is not merely measurement, or number. It thus utilizes the symbolic form of what can be called “numbers in general” which can only be properly understood with reference to the modern algebra that has developed since Vieta. Thus, the use of mathematics in Galilean science does not depend on determinate numbers, but on general propositions of relations between numbers in general. The formula that force equals mass times acceleration, or f=ma, is not a relation of determinate numbers—like 5 + 4 = 9—but a determinate relation between “numbers in general” like “f,” “m,” or “a” that represent the possibility of application to determinate numbers. 8.  Arithmetization—Formal abstraction to “anything-whatever,” of an indeterminate x, is completed and surmounted in the arithmetization of geometry whereby formal ideal shapes are rendered equivalent to arithmetical formulae. 9.  Definite manifold—If the Euclidean ideal were to be fully actualized, it would lead to the concept of a theory-form derived from axioms in which all theorems within the theory-form can be traced as transformations of the axioms. The completion of the ideal of formalization in formal systems of meaning defined in abstraction from all content is applicable to any defined sphere of objects. This ideal, which is deeply rooted in modern Galilean science, necessarily gives rise to an emptying of meaning because the relation between formal system and concrete application requires a conception of meaning and value that cannot itself be thematized by such a formal conception of knowledge. THE LIFEWORLD AND THE RECOVERY OF REASON

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10.  Grounding—Insofar as method allows one to operate upon conceptual material without going back to fundamentals of the production of concepts through idealization from the lifeworld, or inquiring into the practical consequences of their application in the lifeworld, then it transforms science into an external process of a technical nature. The form of all true theories, in the sense of a development of a universal theory of theoryforms, belongs to mathematics alone insofar as it is itself scientifically established. But, from the viewpoint of philosophy, such a theory of theory forms is a merely specialist, technical construction. Philosophy cannot be satisfied with theoretical technique but involves a claim to truth that is operative within human life and culture through the grounding of scientific concepts in immediate intuition. It is in this sense that formalization produces a crisis of the sciences. 11.  Lifeworld—Ordinary, pre-scientific experience of the world is subjective-relative as accessible through one’s own experiences but also is given as a world which is the same for all—the world not my world. It is through a return to meaning and value in the lifeworld that there can be a recovery from the crisis of the sciences. 12.  Europe—The Galilean ideal of systematic knowledge of scientific domains summing into a systematic knowledge of the whole of Being has come into crisis whereby reason has become divorced from human culture. Since the ideal of systematic reason was instituted in the Renaissance, the current project of reason is neither and invention nor a discovery but a recovery and revival. Europe, understood in a spiritual sense, is the location of the prior commitment to reason such that a contemporary diagnosis can rely upon the prior institution, discover the recovery of reason as a task, and appeal to the remnants of this tradition for a revival. 13.  No return to individuals—The work of Jacob Klein shows that no return to immediate, intuitive evidence of individuals in the lifeworld, as Husserl supposed, is possible due to the nature of formalizing abstraction. While individuals can be taken up into, understood in the form of, a definite manifold, one cannot return from empty theory-forms to specific individuals given separately from such forms. 14.  Technique—The recovery of meaning and value through phenomenology will thus have to proceed differently than Husserl supposed. The first step in this recovery is to clarify the adumbrated form of evidence—that we call technique—that corresponds to the application of such signsystems to experiential contents. Technique is an adumbration of evidence of concrete individuals encountered in the lifeworld that renders such individuals only insofar as they constitute exemplars of the formal sign-system in question. In this respect modern and ancient knowledge

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proceed differently. Whereas ancient knowledge could trace each concept back to the individual instantiations from which it was abstracted, from eidos to concrete cases, modern formal abstraction cannot so proceed. Applicability of manifolds is to whole object-domains as such not to their adumbrated contents considered separately. Such domains are therefore not comprised of individuals but of systematically-related contents produced by an adumbration. 15.  Formal science and lifeworld—Technique is, however, only one way in which formal science may be related to the lifeworld once the assumption of its applicability to individuals is dropped. The lifeworld also appears as the background of thematized objects and the horizon within which objects appear. Meaning and value must be discovered in relation to these components on lifeworld experience. (This sense of lifeworld as horizon will be taken up in Part IV of our text.) 8.3.3.2 Value-Form as Galilean Form Let us proceed systematically to explicate the parallel between Marx’s critique of the value-system and Husserl’s critique of Galilean science. For reasons of clarity, we will retain the numbering of the points in the previous section and, for reasons of brevity, will refer to the Husserlian points only by their short phrasings. INSTITUTION OF VALUE-FORM AS A GALILEAN SCIENCE 1.  Institution—The institution that Marx investigates is capitalism, which is defined by the universalization of labor as a commodity, that thereby becomes a new era in the history of the production of wealth (understood as the all-round transformation of nature into useful things and the corresponding development of human capacities). 2.  Mathematization of nature—Parallel to the institution of the Galilean science of nature through the mathematization of nature, the institution of capitalism occurs through the substruction of human production and use of objects as exchange-values. When labor becomes a commodity, and commodities are exchangeable on a market, then labor itself becomes the universal form of mediation between commodities. Abstract labor, understood through the four reductions to simple, homogeneous human labor becomes the structuring mediation of the new value-form of wealth. As Husserl discovers Galileo as the institutor of modern science, Marx discovers Aristotle as the founder of political economy in its problematic utilization of, but inability to understand, the concept of value. “Aristotle’s genius is displayed precisely by his discovery of a relation of equality in the value-expression of commodities. Only the historical limitation inher-

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ent in the society in which he lived prevented him from finding out what ‘in reality’ this relation of equality consisted of” (Cap1 152). 3.  Indirect mathematization—Those forms of labor which are not immediately abstract labor—such as domestic labor, coerced and slave labor, private production for use, etc. become mediately abstract labor in the sense that their role becomes defined through, and dominated by, their relation to the dominant value-form. 4.  Method becomes ontology—The categories of abstract labor, especially exchange and value, are taken to be categories of the lifeworld, even of Being, and not those of an abstracted system that has become a historical event. Exchange-value is universalized to be supposed the underlying, “real” essence of wealth. 5.  Self-enclosed scientific domain—The object-domain of exchange-values becomes self-enclosed since all the objects are measured by the single standard of value. This object-domain corresponds to the science of political economy. The objects to which the science refers are no longer available conceptually as a sum of objects individually available through abstraction from actual bodies—which in the case of political economy means as objects whose use is defined through the concrete character of those objects—as in pre-modern science. Such objects are available only through the systematic structure of a method that applies as a coherent form to a domain of objects, or self-enclosed world of bodies, as a whole. It becomes a system, so that the object-domain of political economy is the system of value. 6.  Experiment—Parallel to the experimental component that connects Galilean science not only to technique in Husserl’s sense of a theoretical technique but also to techniques as useful practical procedures in the lifeworld, the categories of political economy are used in practices that alter the lifeworld and thus continuously restructure it in the form of the system of value. In this way it functions not only as a self-enclosed system but as a regime that dominates concrete labor. Marx’s distinction between vulgar and scientific political economy pertains to this practical restructuring. The purpose of vulgar economy is simply to aid in practical intervention in the system of value, whereas the scientific form of political economy aims at knowledge of the system of value. FORMALIZATION AND THE LOSS OF MEANING 7.  Formalization—The congealing of abstract labor in the commodity is not that of a numerical quantity, or definite number, but of a relation in which it serves as an empty “x” from which can be defined tendencies to equilibration of the value-system. It is a “number in general,” the mere

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possibility of being designated as a number, which is thereby necessarily represented as an undetermined sign. 8.  Arithmetization—The “x” that is the value-form representation of the quantity of abstract labor congealed in a given commodity is not a numerical quantity but an undetermined formal-mathematical sign designating an unknown in determinate relations with other unknowns such that their systemic relations can be expressed as formulae in the value-system. The “x” that is the formally-designated “quantity” of the substance of value is the fundamental conceptual core from which can be represented as formulae general proportions between objects in the system of value. 9.  Definite manifold—The system of value is thus represented by formulae which express its internal relations. The “x” functions as an equilibration of the system of value. Use value is systematically dominated by exchange-value in the system of value since the scientific form is based on internal relations rather than reference to individual objects (use). There is an emptying of meaning in the sense that the system of value can neither guarantee nor represent its relations to wealth. THE LIFEWORLD AND THE RECOVERY OF REASON 10.  Grounding—The relation between formal system and concrete application requires a conception of meaning and value that cannot itself be thematized by such a formal conception of knowledge. Marx’s standpoint of the critique of political economy is the inheritor of philosophy. Neither philosophy in Husserl’s sense nor critique in Marx’s sense can be satisfied with theoretical technique but involve a claim to truth that is operative within human life and culture through the grounding of scientific concepts in the experienced lifeworld or concrete labor and use-value. 11.  Lifeworld—The use-value of objects of exchange constitutes the reference of the objects of the system of value to the lifeworld even though this relation to use (wealth) cannot be theorized within the science of political economy itself. Ordinary, pre-scientific experience of the objects produced by human labor on nature is subjective-relative use because it gains no representation within the system of value. Nevertheless, use aggregates in the lifeworld in an unthematized manner to become social wealth although still in a form dominated by the system of value. 12.  Europe—The proletariat as the social position from which the system of value is significant only in its failure to address use and thereby as the progenitor of the return of use-value in a post-value system is the parallel to the concept of Europe required by Husserl’s diagnosis of crisis

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and recovery. Neither are pure conceptual invention but required by the diagnosis of crisis, critique and recovery. 13.  No return to individuals—The upshot of Jacob Klein’s work is that no return to individuals “underneath” formalization is possible. The parallel to this in Marx’s critique of political economy is the inability to determine as a numerical quantity the undetermined “x” that is the unit of simple, homogeneous, labor-time, other than as a sign that determines the relations, and thus tendencies, of the system. 14.  Technique—Formal science alters the lifeworld through the application of techniques. In particular, the technical use of political economy for money-making, which now extends beyond classical political economy to later forms of economics, is a technical transformation of the lifeworld so that exchange-value continues to dominate use, often in increasingly intense forms. 15.  Formal science and lifeworld—The horizon of the lifeworld does not enter the critique of political economy at the level of the logic of capital but only at that of the historical specificity of historical capitalist systems and their embedding in, and disruption of, traditional systems of meaning. (This is a topic to be taken up in Part IV of this text.) The purpose of this schematization has been to demonstrate that there is not only a general similarity between Husserl’s and Marx’s critiques of the formal-scientific model in relation to the lifeworld, but also a specific pointby-point correspondence between the main elements of their critiques. There is no possibility of a direct influence in this matter. It is rather the result of two independent, rigorous and sustained critiques that the central problem of the relation of formal science to the lifeworld has been stated in essentially identical form despite the difference between the two formal sciences that they investigated. It is a convergence on a historical form dominated by formal reason whose critique demands that the presupposed lifeworld, or use, becomes newly central to philosophy. Philosophy can no longer be mesmerized by the attractions of abstraction but must turn to address the role of abstractions in the lived world and their origin from that world. 8.3.4 Why Does Marx Describe Abstract Labor as Physiological? The system of value is the social character of the organization of the production and distribution of wealth in capitalist form which parallels Husserl’s critique of Galilean science as the progenitor of crisis since it cuts off a relation to meaning and value in the lifeworld. The key category in Marx’s isolation and critique of the system of value is that of “abstract labor.” The social

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character of abstract labor hidden behind commodity fetishism is what, for Marx, indicates that social labor could be organized differently than through a system of value. Nevertheless, in his description of abstract labor in the main text, as well as in subsequent editions, Marx resorted to a conception of physiological labor, an average output based on human biological physicality, that seems to occlude its social nature and reduce it to a physical quantity. This is a major mystery that the interpretation of Marx’s critique as a critique of the system of value must confront. In the section where Marx distinguishes between abstract and concrete labor, in order to explain this distinction, he remarks that On the one hand, all labour is an expenditure of human labour-power, in the physiological [physiologischen] sense, and it is in this quality of being equal, or abstract [abstrakt], human labour that it forms the value of commodities. On the other hand, all labour is an expenditure of human labour-power in a specific form and with a definite aim, and it is in this quality of being concrete useful labour that it produces use-values (Cap1 137; Kap1 51).

This reference to physiology to characterize abstract labor is by no means unique. A few pages earlier he used the same characterization to express what is common to different forms of useful labor despite their qualitative uniqueness. If we leave aside the determinate quality of productive activity, and therefore the useful character of the labour, what remains is its quality of being an expenditure of human labour-power. Tailoring and weaving, although they are qualitatively different productive activities, are both a productive expenditure of human brains, muscles, nerves, hands, etc. [menschlichen Hirn, Muskel, Nerv, Hand, usw.], and in this sense both human labour. They are merely two different forms of the expenditure of human labour-power (Cap1 134; Kap1 48).

He later makes what is apparently the same point in the context of discussing the mystical character of commodities under capitalism, though it has a less univocal meaning. The mystical character of the commodity does not therefore arise from its usevalue. Just as little does it proceed from the nature of the determinants of value. For in the first place, however varied the useful kinds of labour, or productive activities, it is a physiological fact [physiologische Wahrheit] that they are functions of the human organism, and that each such function, whatever may be its nature or its form, is essentially the expenditure of human brain, nerves, muscles and sense organs [menschlichen Hirn, Nerv, Muskel, Sinnesorgan usw.] (Cap1 164; Kap1 77).

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Here, Marx subsequently argues that the mystical character derives from the form of value which arises when the social relations of labor appear as social relations between commodities—in other words, the capitalist form of production. The problem that needs to be addressed is why Marx would use physiological terms to describe abstract labor since abstract labor is a fraction of, and therefore a category of, social labor—a social category and not a natural, physiological one. We should note that for interpreters who regard Marx as primarily interested in assigning a quantitative number value to a given commodity due to the quantity of abstract labor congealed in it there is no problem in such a description of abstract labor in physiological, and therefore human-natural, or biological, terms. Indeed, it can serve as a foundation for a naturalization of the problem of value such that Marx’s critique would be supposed not to aim at the system of value but only at the return to the working class from that system. Such an interpretation, it should be obvious, runs counter to that which has been argued for here. It would make Marx a political economist and the critique of political economy merely a supposedly better political economy. It would not aim its critique at the organization of labor under the system of value, which was Marx’s critical object, but merely at the capitalist form of rule—thereby paving the way for another form of rule over labor. We have seen enough over the last century to know where that leads. The oddity of the description of abstract labor in physiological, and therefore human-natural, or biological, terms has captured the attention of many astute observers—notably I.I. Rubin, Michael Heinrich, and Moishe Postone—who have properly understood that it is the system of value that is Marx’s critical object and therefore have followed Marx in asserting that it is the form of value and the substance of value that are the key elements of Marx’s labor theory of value. I will discuss their explanations in that order because it is an order in which the problem is regarded as increasingly serious and its solution correspondingly significant. I.I. Rubin claims that an individual abstract labor must be a social category in its relation to the whole of social labor—“not a sum of actually expended physiological energy, but a number of units of social labor, i.e., a social magnitude” (Rubin 1973, 152). He notes that Marx uses physiology to characterize abstract labor but at times denies outright that it is an appropriate characterization. “Only a few analysts understand that the characteristics of abstract labor do not in any way coincide with a physiological equality of different labor expenditures” (Rubin 1973, 133; see Rubin 1978, 117). Elsewhere, he distinguishes three characterizations of abstract labor as “physiological,” as “socially equated,” and as “the specific form of

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commodity production,” in order to argue that only the latter is a sufficient interpretation. Then, he states that We must add, that the two concepts of labour, physiologically equated and socially equated, are frequently confused, and not distinguished from one another sufficiently clearly. The concept of abstract universal labour naturally implies the physiological equality and the social equation of labour, but apart from these it also contains the social equation of labour in the quite specific form which it takes in commodity production (Rubin 1978, 117).

So, Rubin seems to waver between viewing the physiological characterization as outright wrong and occasionally viewing it as a minor version that follows from but does not capture all of the full idea of abstract labor (Rubin 1973; 133, 146, 152, 153). Social labour in the specific form which labor possesses in a capitalist economy, i.e., abstract labour. . . . [I]t follows that social (namely abstract) labor is expressed in the form of value. Thus value is ‘reified,’ ‘materialized’ labor and simultaneously it is an expression of production relations among people. The two definitions of value contradict each other if one deals with physiological labor; but they perfectly supplement each other if one deals with social labor” (Rubin 1973,153).

This, however, seems wrong. If abstract labor is a category of the capitalist form of social labor, how can it be compatible with describing it in biological terms, not only if one takes the biological as fundamental, in which the contradiction is obvious, but also if one takes the social as fundamental in which case it is unclear what a “social biology” might mean—especially if it is a numerical quantity attached to an individual body? One suspects that Rubin is striving desperately to save Marx’s strange terminology here, especially since in the following sentence he reverts to the denial. Rubin even regards a failure to understand abstract labor correctly as erasing the line between Marxist and non-Marxist thought, an erasure which he attributes as much to supposedly Marxist writers as to non-Marxist ones. Abstract labor is the expenditure of human energy as such, independently of the given forms. Defined in this way, the concept of abstract labor is a physiological concept, devoid of all social and historical elements. The concept of abstract labor exists in all historical epochs independently of this or that social form of production. If even Marxists usually define abstract labor in the sense of expenditure of physiological energy, then we need not wonder that this concept is widespread in anti-Marxist literature (Rubin 1973, 132, paragraph separation omitted).

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But if Rubin treats the matter this seriously, he does not venture any suggestion as to why Marx would use, or even flirt with, a formulation plagued with such misunderstandings.12 And this question, one would think, must be addressed by all interpreters who reject the physiological reading in order to focus on the system of value. Michael Heinrich has a similar point of view though he does develop to some extent the implication of the mis-characterization. The point is not always clearly made by Marx. He speaks of abstract labor as “an expenditure of human labor power, in the physiological sense” (quoting Cap1, 137). The reduction of various types of labor to labor in a physiological sense, however, is a purely mental abstraction, to which any kind of labor can be subjected, regardless of whether it produces a commodity. Furthermore, this suggests that abstract labor has a purely non-social, natural foundation, and has therefore accordingly provoked “naturalistic” interpretations of abstract labor. In other passages, however, Marx expresses himself clearly . . . Abstract labor is a relation of social validation [Geltungsverhältnis] that is constituted in exchange (Heinrich 2004, 50, paragraph separation omitted).

Heinrich suggests that it is simply a matter of unclear expression on the part of Marx, a position which, despite equivocation, seems also to be that of Rubin, but he goes further to assert that labor in the physiological sense is an abstraction simply in the mental sense, not in the sense of a real social process of abstraction that applies to abstract labor (as we have seen). So, it would be possible to regard this physiological sense as applying only to a mental abstraction applicable to concrete, useful labor. Furthermore, Heinrich agrees with Rubin, and indeed with any other theorist of the system of value, one would think, that this misunderstanding is the basis for a naturalistic misreading of Marx. But this again occludes the important interpretive question of why Marx would have been so careless in his terminology if the stakes were that high. Marx was rarely careless and he rightly regarded Capital, Vol. 1 as his masterwork. Heinrich, like Rubin, needs some sort of explanation of why Marx resorted to the description of abstract labor as physiological. To my knowledge, only Moishe Postone has attempted to show why this terminology was required by Marx’s argument even though it is misleading in its implications. He agrees with Rubin, and quotes him, to the effect that the physiological terminology undermines Marx’s main point about the social character of abstract labor, but he goes on to insist that one must also explain “why those relations appear and, therefore, are presented by Marx, as being physiological—as transhistorical, natural, and thus historically empty” (Postone 1993, 145). The issue is, then, to explain why social relations of labor, as represented by value, do indeed appear as natural forms. Postone

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argues that labor has a dual function in capitalism—as an instance of the transhistorical transformation of nature applicable to any mode of production and as the specific form of social mediation in capitalism through value. The transhistorical characteristics apply to pre- and post-capitalist modes of production but the social mediation through value is exclusively capitalist.13 So, he says, “labor’s specific social role in capitalism, therefore must necessarily be expressed in forms of appearance that are objectifications of labor as a productive activity (Postone 1993, 166). In other words, Marx is driven to use a misleading terminology because the natural or transhistorical form is precisely what plays the specific value-function in capitalism. Labor functions as both essence and appearance, so that the essence of capital as expressed in the system of value necessarily has recourse to the transhistorical characteristics of labor to express that essence. The appearance of transhistoricality is utilized to express the essence of value as a social relation. The reason for this, Postone claims, is that “labor is a social essence only in capitalism,” due to its mediating (not objectifying) function, which must appear as labor “itself” in its transhistorical form (Postone 1993, 168). Labor takes the form of both appearance and essence in which essence (value) is expressed through appearance (transhistoricality). This interpretation is consistent with the view that we have advanced above: that it is the difference between labor as source and labor as the abstract substance of value that constitutes the system of value and is the location of its critique. But we might still ask why this source-substance difference, or appearance-essence relation, must have recourse to a misleading terminology. Postone pinpoints this necessity in the starting-point of Capital, Vol. 1 and the logical form with which the text develops its argument. Commodities are social mediations of value insofar as they have exchange-values and this mediation is externalized as money. Nevertheless, to the extent that commodities appear simply as goods and not as values, the labor that produces commodities appears simply as generic labor and not specifically as value-producing labor. Since value-producing labor does not produce value by virtue of any specific characteristic of concrete labor, it seems to do so by virtue of its transhistorical characteristics. That is to say, it is due to the universality of value-production—in the sense that it is not a function of a given type of labor but of labor per se—that value-production seems to be a universal characteristic of labor, and thus transhistorical. There are two different senses of “universal” here which pertain to the essence and appearance of capitalist society differently. Postone argues that this is a necessary equivocation due to the categorial forms in which the logic of capital is developed in Capital, Vol. 1. He remarks that Marx’s “physiological definition of this category is part of an analysis

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of capitalism in its own terms, that is, as the forms present themselves. . . . It is precisely because of this immanent character that the Marxian analysis of capitalism can be so easily misunderstood. . . . The traditional interpretation of Marx and a fetishized understanding of capitalism are parallel and interrelated” (Postone 1993, 170–1). In sum, Postone agrees with Rubin and Heinrich that the physiological terminology is misleading and that abstract labor is indeed a social category, but he asserts that Marx’s logic of critique in Capital, Vol. 1 necessarily produces that misleading terminology because of its starting point in commodities (appearance) and directedness toward abstract labor (essence). The categories of appearance cannot be entirely avoided by an immanent analysis. Even so, if, as he suggests, the categories of appearance must be presented as if they were the categories of essence, then there would be a problem of presentation and, consequently, of logic— which would fault Marx at a very basic level in his presentation of the system of value. This is still not a satisfying explanation since it remains at the level of presentation and not that of theory or its object. However, to confine ourselves to the logic of presentation for a moment, we should recall that the discussion of the transhistorical characteristics of labor occurs at a crucial point in the text in the first part of chapter 7. Chapter 6 concludes with the distinction between the realm of circulation of commodities (including labor-power) and that of consumption or use (also including labor-power). The second part of chapter 7 deals with the valorization process whereby commodity value is determined by the quantity of abstract labor measured by duration. The logic of presentation shows that, in order to proceed from the realm of commodities to that of the production of commodities, one must speak of the transhistorical characteristics of labor. In order to account for the exploitation of labor in the realm of production through the difference between the exchange-value of labor and the value it produces, one must utilize these characteristics—in particular the surplus productivity of labor. In short, what is presented as a mere preface is essential to the logic of presentation. But, contra Postone, it appears in the logic of presentation because it is required by the object of analysis—the production of value. Value, and therefore surplus value, cannot be understood apart from the surplus productivity of labor. Therefore, it is not only a matter of presentation but of logic. Moreover, the logical exposition of value rests on, is grounded by, characteristics of labor which are not limited to the production of value under capitalism. Therefore, these characteristics are ontological and not merely mental abstractions nor revocable abstractions that disappear at the conclusion of the logic. We may therefore term them ontological characteristics of labor that appear transhistorically in any and all historical, specific modes of production.

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Our account suggests, in contrast to the previous commentators, that there is a necessity in Marx’s theory and presentation for a concept of labor as natural and ontological that is generic in that it applies to all forms of labor in their concrete form as use-value. Marx’s use of abstraction to refer to “abstract labor” which is manifested in exchange in distinction from concrete, useful labor which is exercised in definite, distinguishable forms (tailoring, weaving, etc.) apparently locates abstraction strictly in the quantitative move to exchange. It therefore evacuates the space in which concrete, useful labor can be considered in a dual fashion as—in the way that he normally does— specific, concrete labor and as the generic form of specific, concrete labors. Nevertheless, he needs such a concept, as we have seen in his introduction of the “transhistorical characteristics of labour.” It is because of this difficulty that abstract labor is—as we will see, only once—referred to as “physiological” and also that the theoretical status of his utilization of transhistorical categories is unclear, even masked, in his presentation. In order to make this case, let us begin from the last appearance of the characterization of abstract labor as physiological from the three examples quoted above—which are the major quoted examples by all commentators14—where the context is commodity fetishism. In the first place, however varied the useful kinds of labour, or productive activities, it is a physiological fact [physiologische Wahrheit] that they are functions of the human organism, and that each such function, whatever may be its nature or its form, is essentially the expenditure of human brain, nerves, muscles and sense organs [menschlichen Hirn, Nerv, Muskel, Sinnesorgan usw.] Secondly, with regard to the foundation of the quantitative determination of value, namely the duration of that expenditure or the quantity of labour, this is palpably quite different from its quality (Cap1 164; Kap1 77).

In this quotation, while the term “physiological” is used to refer to what is common in various forms of labor, it does so as a contrast to useful labor, so that what is common in the sense of biological and physiological is characterized as abstract. This means that it is abstract in the second sense delineated in the sub-section on abstraction above: abstraction to generic form in contrast to historical concretion (in which the logical form is mixed with other, complicating factors). That is to say, the labor in question refers to any kind of labor in contrast to the specific kinds of concrete labor. In the next sentence, he points out that the quantitative determination of value—which, as we know is determined by the duration of labor-time, or abstract labor—“is palpably quite different from its quality.” The determination of value by the duration of abstract labor time is quantitative, whereas the “physiological fact” is by comparison qualitative.

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So, we may fairly assume that the first point made in the quotation does not refer to abstract labor in the precise theoretical sense. This is clear in Marx’s reference to “quality” where he contrasts the quantitative determination of value by abstract labor to the qualitative aspect of what is common to all labor. Labor as a “physiological fact” of expenditure of the human body is, though general, qualitative. It is a case of qualitative, generic abstraction to a type rather than the formal abstraction to a formal scheme with quantitative, even though undetermined, significance alone. Thus, we may conclude, Marx’s use of the term abstract in this context is misleading because it does not correspond to the use of the term in his central contribution (as he himself claimed) in Capital, Vol. 1 of the concept of “abstract labor.” It is however a valid use of the term abstraction apart from this specific meaning. Indeed, had Marx had access to the rigorous distinction between formal and generic abstraction supplied by Husserl, one might expect that this error could have been avoided. The generic abstraction to labor in general, of any kind, across different historical organizations of labor is not only “transhistorical” in the sense in which he utilizes it later in the text to characterize the relation between humans, technology, and nature but ontological in the sense in which we have referred to an ontology of labor (Cap1 283). If we then compare the usage in this quotation to the other two, it is clear in one case that the meaning similarly refers to useful labor considered not through its specific kinds—tailoring, weaving, etc.—but as human labor as such. Not as abstracted from content to duration as in abstract labor but as abstracted to generic human labor which sets aside the different kinds although in actual practice it is always of such-and-such a kind. “Tailoring and weaving, although they are qualitatively different productive activities, are both a productive expenditure of human brains, muscles, nerves, hands, etc.” (Cap1 134). The usage in this quotation thus reinforces the interpretation of the first quotation. The other quotation is more complex. There, the context is specifically the distinction between concrete and abstract labor. On the one hand, all labour is an expenditure of human labour-power, in the physiological [physiologischen] sense, and it is in this quality of being equal, or abstract [abstrakt], human labour that it forms the value of commodities. One the other hand, all labour is an expenditure of human labour-power in a specific form and with a definite aim, and it is in this quality of being concrete useful labour that it produces use-values (Cap1 137; Kap1 51).

Concrete labor is always labor in a specific useful form—tailoring or weaving, etc. Abstract labor is abstract because it is equal to any other form of labor—that is to say, the abstraction is indifferent to the qualities of concrete

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labor—and it is this homogeneous form of labor measured by duration that creates value. Here, abstract labor is termed “physiological” and it is clearly meant to describe abstract labor in Marx’s specific theoretical sense—the duration of homogeneous labor that produces value. This is the only example in Capital, Vol. 1 where the problem under discussion—the characterization of abstract labor as physiological—is unambiguously present. It is, indeed, at least unclear and at worst wrong (as all three other commentators agree). We have shown that it the misleading terminology in this case is correctly, even though misleadingly, used when it refers to a generic sense of useful labor considered apart from, in abstraction from, the different characteristics of different forms of labor. It is this generic, transhistorical sense of labor in interaction with nature through technology that we have described and used as an “ontology of labor.” In the next section we will address the issue of whether it should be thus named and used or whether it should be considered merely, as Heinrich suggests, with a meaning of “a purely mental abstraction” or, as Postone says, as “transhistorical, natural, and thus historically empty” (Heinrich 2004, 50; Postone 1993, 145). The issue is the relationship between the transhistorical characterization of labor, to which Marx refers, and the historically specific critique of the regime of value at which his work aims. The problem of Marx’s misleading terminology thus takes us to the heart of the issue of what the concept of value is meant to explain. Value is the regulator based on abstract labor which equilibrates all forms of labor in the system of value. The immanent logic leads toward the conception of value while the critical logic aims at the system of value. The misleading terminology thus springs from the relationship between the system of value and its critique and devolves upon the dual character of labor in this system both as a production of wealth (use-values) and the specifically capitalist form of that wealth (value). The mutual imbrication of ontology and specificity of the capitalist form is inherent to Marx’s critique of the system of value. The incursion of the natural category of physiology understood ontologically is a strange and significant element of Marx’s explication and critique of the social system of value. If, as we have suggested, the relation of transhistorical ontology and capitalist historical specificity is posed systemically by the relation between value as source versus abstract labor as the substance of the form and quantity of value, the implication is that the system of value cannot be properly understood nor subjected to critique without reference to a generic concept of concrete labor which should be understood as transhistorical ontology. And, if this is so, the possibility of transcending the system of value cannot rest entirely on its “social” character but must pertain also to labor immersed in nature, ontology, and the source of wealth. Marx’s resort to

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a terminology of physiology to characterize abstract labor is thus what Husserl calls a “transcendental clue” to a significant theoretical issue. 8.3.5 The Necessary Incursion of Nature into Critique of the System of Value Prior to giving our explanation of why there is a necessary recourse to natural, physiological categories in explaining the social concept of abstract labor, let us recall from the previous chapter a similar, indeed corresponding, issue: as a preface to explaining the process of valorization of labor in chapter 7 of Capital, Vol. 1, Marx sketches a transhistorical ontology of labor as the interaction of humanity and nature mediated by technology. The major feature of the ontology of labor that allows for the process of valorization is its surplus productivity—that is to say, that labor produces more than it needs to sustain itself. Otherwise, the difference between these two could not be appropriated as surplus value. Not only is this crucial feature of the ontology of labor not mentioned by Marx in the first part of chapter 7, and not only is it utilized in the second part to account for valorization, but it is only accounted for in the third volume of Capital in the context of explaining ground rent. We have thus called the preface to valorization on the ontology of labor a “necessary excursus” and described the obscured surplus productivity of labor as “natural fecundity,” or “excess.” This excess is manifested in the interaction between labor and nature, not singly by either one, and thus can be considered an ontological concept prior to the distinction between human and non-human nature (see Angus 1997, 186–97). The historically-specific logic of capital that Marx explicates can thus not be considered a self-enclosed logic even though, if labor could be considered only as valorized abstract labor—that is to say, only as a factor of production in principle similar to all other factors of production (as the capitalist and political economist considers it)—it would be such a self-enclosed logic, or formal science. The critique of this logic shows that it is not self-enclosed by showing that abstract labor cannot exist apart from concrete, useful labor. Thus, the necessary excursus addresses the role of concrete labor in human being in a transhistorical manner. Moreover, the actual appearance of capital manifests this ontological dimension in its essential characteristic through the perseverance of nature within capital as ground rent. Why must this necessary dependence on transhistorical characteristics of labor be characterized as “ontological” and not simply as an abstract theoretical category that has no meaning outside of its specific historical forms? Description of the transhistorical categories as if they were simply abstract and therefore inapplicable except as specific instances is taken as sufficient

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reason by Heinrich and Postone for denying any theoretical significance to them because Marx “transforms them from transhistorical categories of the constitution of wealth into critical categories of the specificity of the forms of wealth and social relations in capitalism” (Postone 1993, 56; see Heinrich 2004, 99). In short, if they are critical categories they cannot be ontological ones except in the minimal and revocable sense of an empty abstraction. However, consider the case of a generic abstraction such as “mammal.” A mammal as such does not exist. It can only exist in the specific form of a human, a whale, or a mouse, etc. Does this mean that the category “mammal” is a meaningless abstraction? Of course not. It is the generic case of the specific examples that groups them meaningfully precisely because it does not have the same degree of concretion as the examples. A mouse is both a mouse and a mammal without being two separate objects. Generic categories are general forms of material being. They are abstractions but in a different sense than value or abstract labor is a formal abstraction. The general categories are meaningful but only as and insofar as they are filled in by specific examples. Ontological categories are categories of this generic sort, in particular that of human labor as a transhistorical category of human being. In short, Postone operates with a single distinction between ontological versus historical, whereas the ontological appears, and only appears, in specific, distinct historical forms.15 The necessary incursion of natural, ontological categories within social ones occurs again in the valorization process through the duality between labor as source and labor as substance (and therefore as form and quantity) of value. It shows, once again, that Marx cannot elaborate his critique of capital as a purely intra-social process but requires concepts which can only be understood and justified as ontological ones. This is the index of the fact that the separation of social from natural, presupposed but not proven in political economy, and shown but not proven by Marx in his account of abstract labor as the mediation of the totality of social labor, can never entirely obtain. The re-emergence of nature within social categories takes us to the key point at which the separation of social from natural takes place, both in political economy and in Marx, which is where the concept of abstract nature is elaborated. This point will be taken up in detail in the next section of this chapter. Marx’s recourse to physiology to describe a generic concept of useful labor exhibits the necessary incursion of ontological categories into Marx’s critique. As Marx stated in a letter to Kugelmann a year after the publication of Capital, Vol. 1, Every child knows a nation which ceased to work, I will not say for a year, but even for a few weeks, would perish. Every child knows, too, that the masses of products corresponding to the different needs required different and quantita-

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tively determined masses of the total labor of society. That this necessity of the distribution of social labor in definite proportions cannot possibly be done away with by a particular form of social production but can only change the mode of its appearance, is self-evident. No natural laws can be done away with. What can change in historically different circumstances is only the form in which these laws assert themselves (11 July 1868).

While labor takes on a distinctive form in value-production, investigation and critique of that form requires a conception of labor as, in Marx’s terminology, “natural law,” that is to say, a generic form always filled in by a specific, determinate historical form—but always necessarily present in any social form and thereby an ontological feature of human being. While it is true that the ontological significance of labor could only be discovered in value-producing capitalism, it nevertheless provides insight into a necessary feature of all social forms—which can therefore be characterized meaningfully as “modes of production.” Marx recorded this aspect of the epistemology of critique in the introduction to the Grundrisse where he claimed that “bourgeois economy thus supplies the key to the ancient” once it becomes clear that “bourgeois society is itself only a contradictory form” (Gr 105). The insight into the ontology of labor comes from capitalism but its applicability is transhistorical because it is rooted in the essential conditions of human being on the earth. As ontological, it pervades the surplus hoarded by dispossession and direct domination in pre-capitalist societies, the surplus-value extracted by capitalists, and the privative negation of labor in culture and, in all of these, the dependence of the productivity of labor on natural excess. This explains the fundamental failure of all interpretations of Marx that attempt to make his critique purely historical without reference to ontological categories. There have clearly been naturalistic misunderstandings of Marx in previous forms of Marxism which Marx’s own terminology of “natural laws” can be seen to motivate. While the reduction to natural categories in a manner that would make history a purely natural process and social change a predictable phenomenon is clearly an error, nonetheless, neither can reference to natural, ontological categories be excised from the critique. The four reductions that purify the system of value reduce nature and ontology to purely social categories with a rigorous internal relation equilibrated by value. But critique of this system shows that these reductions are never actually possible and critique of the system shows this impossibility through its necessary recourse to labor as the source of value, the origin of the system. Again, we may see here a rigorous parallel to Husserl. Husserl distinguished and opposed the concept of nature in Galilean science to nature as experienced in the surrounding world. “Nature in ancient Greece . . . is not nature in the sense of natural science but rather that which for the ancient

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Greeks counted as nature, that which confronted them as natural reality in their surrounding world. . . . ‘Surrounding world’ is a concept that has its place exclusively in the spiritual sphere” (VL 272). Nature as experienced as a surrounding world is a concept of the lifeworld that does not belong to natural science but to the historical-cultural life of peoples. Thus, investigation of the crisis of the European sciences can no longer assume that the scientific concept simply surpasses and supplants the historical-cultural one which is immersed in meaning and value but must investigate the difference and relation between the two. Similarly, for Marx, the formal definition of abstract labor that explains the system of value is subject to critique through its difference from and relation to the ontology of human labor in its relation to nature—whose fundamental concept is “surplus productivity” which multiplies and is based upon “natural fecundity” understood as “excess.” 8.3.6 Value as Symbol of the Multiplicity of Excess The ontology of labor describes the transhistorical interaction of human labor through technology with nature to create through history a world of wealth in which both useful objects (in the widest sense, as objects within practical activity) and human capacities are developed in dialectical interaction. The system of value describes the capitalist form of wealth in which the world of useful objects and human capacities are mediated by abstract labor—which is a “reduced” form of human labor shorn of all concrete, qualitative characteristics that can only be measured by duration. Such reduced, abstract human labor is not a number, a numerical quantity, but can be represented as an empty sign “x” which refers to the mere possibility of a determinate quantity in relation to a systematic and integrated whole. This sign “x” is the key term through which formulaic relations can be developed which describe the internal relations through which its tendencies operate within the prevailing system of value over time. The system of value is thus organized through an indeterminate formal possibility of quantity which delivers actual, concrete wealth in the form of value. What must be the case for simple, homogeneous, socially-necessary labor time to be the measure of the system of value? That the multiplicity of excess which is expressed in wealth be condensed into a value-unit that represents the relation of a given commodity to the totality of commodities. Value is the unity the symbolizes within the system of value the multiplicity of social production in its concrete form as wealth and the parts of that system as an undetermined fraction. The sign of the empty “x” represents the unity which makes the system a system as the only sign through which value is registered and the system

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organized. The empty “x” is the unity to which the diversity of the increments of value refer. The empty “x” is the unity that incorporates the diversity of wealth in its capitalist form. The empty “x” is the unity of forms of human praxis insofar as they struggle beyond capitalist appropriation toward the diversity of human production. It is the whole of wealth, captured in the unity of a system, that opens toward the diversity of wealth. It is both the sign of the capture and the site of recuperation of that diversity due to the duality in labor as both source and substance of value. Value is a condensed multiplicity expressed through an empty signifier which requires its difference and relation to concrete labor to release its explosive multiplicity. The ontology of labor cannot be excised from the critique of the regime of value since it provides the ground for the surplus productivity of labor in natural fecundity. One important corollary: the incursion of nature understood as the multiplicity of excess into the regime of value means that the “proletariat” as the subject of abstract labor also becomes a symbol of the multiplicity of excess. Since the surplus productivity of labor performed by the proletariat can be traced back to the natural fecundity of nature, excess traverses the whole train of equivalences through which the regime of value is set up as a system. The system of value remains a valid description of the capture of living labor and living nature within the capitalist system, but it cannot be traced back to a unitary source. This explains why the proletariat has never acted as a unitary subject as Marxist politics has expected, and has consequently turned from a theoretical explanation into a voluntaristic task asserted ever more virulently to the extent that its real historical possibility recedes. 8.4 CRITIQUE OF ABSTRACT NATURE The surplus productivity, or excess, in Marx’s ontology of labor rests fundamentally on the ultimate fact of natural fecundity. In this way the productivity of nature spreads through labor and its enhancement by technology and social organization to ground the development of civilization and culture. In its capitalist form, this excess takes the form of surplus value appropriated by capital. The structure of the capitalist system is such as both to rely on the surplus productivity of labor for its central phenomenon of the expansion of capital and to make that reliance systematically obscure to the appearance of the commodity-form as an “immense collection of commodities” rather than its essence as labor working on nature under the capitalist regime of value. Beneath the surface form of the exchange of commodities reigns the structuring form of social labor that has itself become a commodity. This is Marx’s fundamental discovery whose validity requires incorporation into

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a contemporary understanding of the crisis. The previous sections of this chapter have aimed at a faithful interpretation of this discovery. But, while Marx’s insight into this structure is penetrating and prescient, it nevertheless relies on an abstraction from nature to labor that distorts its meaning. It is this that the present section is meant to elucidate. We will now introduce a new concept—abstract nature—that is derived from a critique of Marx’s concept of abstract labor. 8.4.1 Abstract Nature as Residue Let us recall the key abstraction through which the concept of abstract labor was produced. Distinguishing between the concrete, useful aspects of a thing and its exchange-value, Marx argued that the labor producing such commodities could also be distinguished as concrete versus abstract, and that the residue of labor in exchange, once all concrete characteristics have been set aside, is solely and uniquely abstract labor. “Let us now look at the residue [Residuum] of the products of labour. These things now only tell us that human labour-power has been expended to produce them, that human labour is accumulated in them” (Cap1 128). However, there is a problem with this logic that becomes apparent if we scrutinize the statement that the exchange values of commodities abstract from all the concrete qualities that characterize use.16 Prior to his conclusion, Marx presents his reasoning. If we make abstraction [Abstrahieren wir] from its use-value [Gebrauchswert], we abstract [abstrahieren wir] also from the material constituents and forms [körperlichen Bestandteilen und Formen] which make it a useful thing [nützlich Ding]. It is no longer a table, a house, a piece of yarn or any other useful thing. All its sensuous characteristics [sinnlichen Beschaffenheiten] are effaced [ausgelöscht] (Cap1 128; Kap 1 42).

Abstraction from use, says Marx, is also abstraction from “material constituents” and “sensuous characteristics.” This abstraction applied to commodities is then applied in a parallel fashion to labor so that commodities considered solely as exchange-values are produced by labor considered solely as abstract labor. And, importantly, this is not merely a mental abstraction but a real abstraction inherent in the exchange of labor-power. Thus, he concludes, in abstract labor producing exchange-values, all material characteristics of the product are set aside for the exclusively social character of value, where value is measured exclusively by the duration of abstract labor. But clearly this is not so: the products are all transformations of nature by labor. Commodities considered solely as exchange values are produced by abstract labor but they are not produced by abstract labor laboring on

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nothing at all. To be sure, following the logic of the reasoning, it cannot be the specific natural qualities of definite natural things or energies that are in question here due to the abstraction from concrete quality. Nevertheless, the products are all transformations of “nature in the abstract,” we might say, to parallel Marx’s language. This error is parallel to that discussed in chapter 9 through the distinction between generic abstraction (to the “physiological,” ontological characteristics of concrete labor as such) and formal abstraction (to labor considered without any concrete characteristics and thereby distinguished only by its duration). Both of these are valid abstractions but, as Husserl rigorously described, they are different types of abstraction. When Marx abstracts from the sensuous characteristics of concrete labor, he achieves a generic abstraction—though he erroneously treats it as a formal one. Abstraction from the sensuous characteristics of concrete labor—which make it tailoring, weaving, etc.—achieves a generic universal in which it is considered as labor of any type whatever, but every instance of the ontological characteristic is nevertheless a concrete labor of a given type. Thus, the generic universal itself, while not a labor of a given type, contains a specifying reference of an ontological character to the types that may instantiate it in any given case. A main feature of any concrete labor is that it is labor producing an object through labor performed upon nature. Marx’s abstraction to what he calls “abstract labor” loses precisely this feature. It is labor that has been abstracted from one of the basic ontological features of any labor—that it is performed with instruments upon nature. If it were a formal abstraction (in Husserl’s sense) it would be an abstraction to any “x” at all and for that reason would not be defined by any characteristics at all such that it could be reduced to its duration. But Marx wants it to remain a specific thing—labor— and thereby considered generically, at the same time as he abstracts from all sensuous content—and thereby considers it formally. He does not seem to have a theoretical category pertaining to the generic form of a material content—which is what the category of abstract labor should be. It is precisely this error that led him to describe abstract labor as physiological. To define the term which we introduce here: abstract nature is a generic abstraction which consists in the residue on which human labor works considered not as a specific thing or energy but as simply any sort of thing or energy at all in principle similar to all other such things or energies. So, while all material, sensuous qualities of the product are set aside, as Marx says, this does not entail that the only remaining feature is labor. Labor is always performed upon something; it changes one state of a given something into another state of that given something—as is perfectly clear when Marx lays out the features of his transhistorical ontology of labor. Though that “something” cannot be considered as a concrete thing precisely because abstraction

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has been made from any concrete thing toward what defines their generic character, it is nevertheless never the case that labor considered in the abstract is exercised upon nothing at all.17 Recall that labor in the abstract is not a type of labor; all labor is abstract as well as concrete when it is exercised though an exchange relation with capital. In being considered in its abstract dimension, labor does not lose the characteristic of being performed upon nature, it is merely that this action upon nature must also be considered abstractly parallel to the abstract, exchange character of the product and of labor. The type of abstraction in this case is abstraction from a specific individual to a generic form. The specific individual type of labor drops out for the generic form of labor, so that, equally, the specific individual form of nature should drop out for the generic form of nature. Thus, contra Marx, when abstraction is made from all concrete characteristics of commodities, we are not just left with abstract labor but with abstract labor performed upon nature in the abstract—abstract nature. When we abstract from the specific, concrete aspects of commodities to regard them as simply products of any kind of the exercise of human labor, this does not, as Marx asserts, entail that we abstract from everything other than labor. Labor is always labor upon something, and that something is nature considered widely as that which is given prior to the activity of labor. Abstraction from the concrete aspects of commodities requires abstraction from the concrete aspects of labor and the concrete aspects of commodities. But this does not mean that all that is left of the commodity in this abstraction is abstract human labor. A commodity considered as an exchange value is a product of both abstract labor and what we might call abstract materiality or abstract nature—that is to say, it is a transformation of a prior given state (nature) to a subsequent state (product) by human activity. All of these can be considered abstractly and all are abstracted from in the process of commodity exchange. The error in Marx’s logic consists in confusing generic abstraction from specific, particular characteristics of a material thing with formal abstraction from materiality as such. Notice that his reasoning refers to abstraction from “material constituents and forms [körperlichen Bestandteilen und Formen]” which are treated as equivalent to “sensuous characteristics [sinnlichen Beschaffenheiten].” The abstraction from sensuous, material characteristics ought to be to a non-sensuous materiality-in-general rather than having this term drop out altogether. Abstraction from species to genus takes the form of abstraction from particular characteristics to the genus as having characteristics of an undefined, non-particular sort—the universality of simply having characteristics of a general sort. Abstraction from materiality per se, with which Marx confuses

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the abstraction from particular material characteristics, as Marx presents it here, would mean abstraction from the object of production altogether. If we were to consider labor as just labor—labor abstracted from all its relational components, such as nature, technology, social form, etc.—this would be a merely conceptual abstraction. Perhaps it may be of some use in another context, but in the context of the reasoning behind the concept of abstract labor as a real abstraction, such a merely conceptual abstraction makes no sense at all. It is from the confusion between these two sorts of abstraction that the apparent validity of Marx’s concept of abstract labor is generated. One may abstract from concrete labor that is performed upon concrete nature to abstract labor that is performed upon abstract nature—but not to abstract labor that is performed on nothing at all. In the case of labor, abstraction has been made to the generic form of abstract labor, but in the case of nature, abstraction has been made in the sense that any reference to nature, at any level of abstraction, has been taken out. This is an error. Abstraction must be made to abstract labor that is performed upon abstract nature—nature shorn of its specific, material, sensuous characteristics. If one were to object that this is never true of nature, that nature always has specific, concrete characteristics, this would similarly be an error caused by an un-noticed shift in the level of abstraction. Labor also always has concrete characteristics. Abstract labor is not a different type or kind of labor without concrete characteristics. It is the same labor considered from the side of its exchangeability alone, which is an aspect of labor of any kind whatever. It is both a specific kind and a “kind of any sort,” or just labor. It is this important difference that Marx’s theory brought to the light because it is this difference that equilibrates the system of labor, but he did not notice that all of this can equally be said of abstract nature. It is not a type or kind of nature but nature considered solely as the object of abstract labor: nature-in-general, or nature with any characteristics whatever. Like labor, nature is always both concrete and abstract, and the difference between these two is produced by the system of value. But the system of value itself is characterized by both abstract labor and abstract nature. We will have to consider below what role abstract nature takes, parallel to abstract nature, in the equilibration of the system of value. Therefore, if we return to Marx’s logic at the point where he shifts from the abstract feature of the product that grounds exchange-value to the abstract feature of the labor that produces it, it is clear that a similar modification needs to be made to add the abstract feature of nature. While the specific, concrete materiality of the product is set aside, the fact that it is a transformation of materiality as such remains—abstract materiality or materiality of no definite kind, comparable to abstract labor in that it is an abstraction inherent in the process of social labor. Abstract labor has definite characteristics insofar as

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it is a form of work on nature under the specific conditions of capitalist production that produces a specific product, but when the product is considered generically as any sort of product of human labor, then abstract labor must be similarly considered generically as any sort of labor on nature of any kind. Marx is not correct that nature drops out when abstraction upon product and labor-process takes place. While shoe-making is performed upon leather, shoe-making considered as any sort of labor is performed upon any, but necessarily some, form of nature. Parallel to the abstraction from concrete labor to abstract labor, there is an abstraction from concrete nature to abstract nature. 8.4.2 Why is Abstract Nature Elided by Marx? We should consider why, or how, Marx made this error. The clue is in some of the terminology in the above quotation. Such an explanation must necessarily be less certain than the observation of the error itself. First, as we have seen, Marx inherited from the previous tradition of political economy the assumption that labor was the source of value. More specifically, Marx begins from observation that every useful thing [nützlich Ding] has sensuous characteristics, which he also calls “material constituents and forms” [körperlichen Bestandteilen und Formen] that make it just this thing and not any other. The specificity of the characteristics of a given thing are what he also calls concrete characteristics. Every concrete thing has just these specific characteristics and not others: a shoe is unlike an automobile, which is unlike a desk, etc. This is true not only of immediate perceptual characteristics such as colour, size, hardness, texture, etc. but also of characteristics that manifest themselves in the activity of labor, such as malleability, regularities of shape (such as of a nail, screw or hammer), a tendency to alter shape or lose consistency under pressure, etc. The concrete characteristics of a thing are different from the concrete characteristics of any other thing. This is true not only of use-values which are products of labor, but of use-values which are not products of labor (such as sun, water, wood, etc.), and of natural things which are perhaps of no discernible use (clouds, planets, insects, etc.). When Marx comes to characterize the abstract labor manifested in a thing, or commodity, he refers to its “social substance [gesellschaftlichen Substanz]” (Cap1 128; Kap1 42). Notice that the abstraction from materiality has been equated here with becoming social, with the unacknowledged implication that sociality would be non-material and materiality would be nonsocial. The social substance of value is characterized by Marx as a process of abstraction from the concrete thing. The process of abstraction thus yields an abstract form of the concrete thing, whose mode of being as an abstraction is characterized as social. Exchange, abstract labor, and value are thus seen

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by Marx as exclusively social aspects of the thing or labor. By way of contrast, concrete aspects are characterized by Marx as “sensuous” [sinnlichen] and “material” [körperlichen]. Thus, the distinction between “concrete” and “abstract” is presented as equivalent to the distinction between “material,” “sensuous” and “non-sensuous,” “non-material.” The non-sensuous, nonmaterial would normally be characterized as “spiritual,” one supposes, but Marx does not use this term, nor its German equivalent [geistig]. He uses the term “social,” thereby suggesting that what is neither sensible nor material is of an exclusively social character. Now: using the term “social” does not necessarily present a problem in this context, since it is clear enough that, as Marx argues, exchangeability cannot be a concrete characteristic of a thing and is introduced by the conditions of social production. But conceptually to distinguish what is concrete as sensuous and material does introduce a confusion due to the implied parallelism between concrete/abstract and sensuous, material/spiritual. Marx’s rendering of the implied term spiritual as social does not undo this confusion. It is what underlies his failure to see that dropping labor out of its relation to nature is not an abstraction in the same sense as that operative in the abstraction to abstract labor. So, in the first place, abstract nature is elided because concrete characteristics are associated with sensuous and material characteristics so that abstract characteristics are presented as exclusively social and thereby as having nothing to do with the object itself, only the relations into which it is put. Nature (whether concrete or abstract), since it is not social production, cannot be “social” and so there is a tendency produced by the confusion to characterize nature as material, sensuous. But there is nothing necessarily exclusively material or sensuous about the characteristics of nature that are altered by labor to form a product. A computer programme, for example, may be revised and rewritten to become a different computer programme. If one were to reduce that programme to the marks with which it is signified, then one would lose exactly what is specific about the programme. The specific character of the programme is its ability to execute certain procedures. This ability is what is operated upon by labor when it is transformed into another computer programme. When this labor is considered as abstract, it operates on the computer programme considered as abstract materiality, or, better, abstract nature. It is neither necessary nor useful to enter into a metaphysical argument about what is the mode of existence of physical things or commodities. The point is simply, in the first place, that abstraction from concrete characteristics to abstract ones is not the same as abstraction from material to spiritual (understood as social) characteristics. In the second place, the confusion of these two forms of abstraction (so that abstraction is equated with sociality) allows Marx to make the conceptual mistake that nature does not have an

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abstract form. Thus, nature inevitably and incorrectly drops out in his account of abstraction. Proving this would require only that we determine some concrete characteristics of commodities (things) and labor that are neither sensuous nor material or, on the other hand, abstract characteristics that are material and sensuous.18 For example, an automobile may function not only through the material aspect of providing transportation but may also express the non-sensuous aspect of prestige; such prestige is nevertheless concrete in the sense that it is specifically attached to a Cadillac, for example, and not to a Volkswagen. Or, the abstract characteristic of “being able to take an expensive vacation” is attached to the sensuous and material characteristics of expensive hotels in Saint-Tropez. The point is that the abstract-concrete distinction is not the same as the material-social (spiritual) one. That is why the earlier statement that Marx elides abstract materiality must be understood provisionally toward the accurate statement that it is abstract nature that is elided. Materiality may function as an approximation, but a product is not necessarily material. Labor does not necessarily operate upon a material thing, though it does operate upon some form of prior nature. The question of materiality is, strictly speaking, not relevant to the abstraction in question. It becomes relevant only insofar as Marx confuses the concrete with sensuous material and thereby abstraction with abstraction from materiality. It is this confusion that allows Marx to ignore the abstract role of nature, parallel to the abstract role of labor, when one considers the commodity as both a useful thing and a thing with an exchange value. Even in its exchange value, it is the exchange value of a thing, but not a specific, concrete thing, a thing of any sort whatever: abstract nature. 8.4.3 Abstract Nature and its Fetishism as Resource If this critique of Marx’s initial logical step in the first few pages of Capital, Vol. 1 is correct, then it has significant implications for a revision of Marx’s theory of labor, capital, and value as operative in the sphere of economic exchanges. Let us recall that abstract labor is not just a conceptual abstraction since it is produced by the social process of the exchange of products. The equalization of products through exchange involves an equalization, or homogenization, of the human labor that produces the products for exchange. This begins with independent commodity producers producing for the market but is universalized in capitalist society where labor-power becomes a commodity and all production is for exchange. It has two significant implications. First, every labor is a definite though undetermined fragment of the whole system of social labor; there is an immediate relation of part and whole in labor due to the common measure of all the parts. Second, the economic

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system becomes, precisely, a system, that is to say, it involves rigorous internal part-whole relations based upon a strict delineation, or separation, of economic relations from other sorts of social relations. It is this systematic character of economic relations that establishes the formal identity between the economic system which Marx’s criticizes and the Galilean science that Husserl criticizes. The concept of abstract labor implies that there is a socio-economic history of abstraction in the labor process due to the increasing prevalence of exchange relations introjected into the process of production that comes to an apogee in capitalist society. Our critique of Marx suggests that abstract nature also has a history of abstraction embedded in social production. That history would show the increasing comparability of natural materials in productive processes and the increasing distance from local and specific materials under the conditions of commodity production. For example, a tree becomes a certain quantity of a certain grade of wood-fiber rather than an object rooted in the ecology of a local place with specific features of hardness, appearance, odor, and utility. These features of contemporary capitalism in its world-wide exploitation of nature as resources are not captured by Marx’s history of abstraction applied solely to labor but are essential to the theoretical modification proposed here. Several of the key features of such an abstract conception of nature have been described previously in connection with Husserl’s crisis of the sciences. Nature becomes understood scientifically, through a substruction of the meaningful and value-laden character of experienced nature in the lifeworld, such that it is understood as a closed system of formal elements that can be expressed as formulae. Historical studies of the scientific revolution have shown the loss of natural teleology through the development of modern physics as mathematical, causal, and experimental (Gillespie; Butterfield; Koyré; Kuhn). We will not recount this historical analysis here. In this context, the important point is that abstract labor and abstract nature have developed in tandem through the same fundamental process. As labor has been divided into labor as source and substance of wealth versus labor as the form and quantity of value, so nature has been divided into nature as natural meaningful and value-laden fecundity and nature as a mechanism described by a formal structure in Galilean science. In both cases, it is the lifeworld experience of meaning and value that is the source of the critique and overcoming of the closed systems of nature and value. This parallel process implies, though it does not yet prove, that overcoming the crisis of the sciences—which is also a crisis of labor and of nature—requires also overcoming abstract labor and abstract nature.

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n which humans do or do not labor. It is through working on both of these two elements of nature that the specific pattern of value that constitutes a human society is formed. Fetishism may be defined as both the reduction to general fungibility and erasure of the fecundity and experienced value of nature. These pertain not only to capitalism but also to Marx’s critique of capitalism and thus the forms of socialism and communism that can be imagined as alternatives on its ground. General fungibility persists within capitalism and the alternatives that can be imagined based on Marx’s critique, but undoing the fetishism that consists in the erasure of meaning and value in practical experiences of nature requires a more fundamental transformation. The task of transformation would be to recover nature as the source of meaning and value, and human labor as the giving of specific form to that source. Ecology has become the name of the science, and perhaps also the practical project, of restoring the meaning and value of specific things, both transformed by labor and not so transformed—in relation to, first, the embedded value in which each object is experienced and, second, to the ecological whole in which each object is meaningfully embedded. 8.5 NATURE, LABOR, AND EXCESS Human production can be represented in a formal science if it is subjected to an immanent standard of homogenization which depends upon it being divorced from the ground of human productivity in natural fecundity. Since the regime of value is a system, the natural fecundity upon which it rests cannot be traced to a given productive process versus another but becomes diffused within the system as a whole by virtue of its internal self-regulation. This began in political economy and was continued in Marx’s critique of political economy. The surplus productivity of labor—from which the x-value of a given commodity derives—rests ultimately on natural fecundity which is the source of the production of wealth in any human society. As shown above, the “x” itself within this system operates as an empty signifier for the multiplicity of excess. Its claim to find the tipping-point for this system in the supposed unity of the proletariat fails once the value of “x” is shown to be a place-holder for excess of an undetermined multiplicity of excess that is diffused through the value-system and attributed to labor. In capitalist society, such wealth is masked as value and captured in a formal, closed system of mutual relations and tendencies. Thus, instead of simply posing labor and nature as “tandem” or “parallel” sources of surplus productivity and fecundity, we should begin rather from the more fundamental concept through which their common characteristic, which is only manifested

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in their common operation, is described. This fundamental concept is, as we have already introduced it, is natural fecundity, or “excess.” Excess is manifested in human activity on nature such that both labor and nature produce such excess. Thus, the attribution of surplus productivity to labor and the collective labor of capitalism involves a forgetting of natural fecundity as much in Marx’s critique as in political economy. The very concept of “abstract labor” obscures its origin in natural fecundity, hooks it to a regime in which labor is regimented and replaced by technology, replaces natural fecundity with nature as resource, and attributes the fecundity of nature to labor. The exploitation of labor thus extends also to the exploitation of excess. Excess is the ontology of the lifeworld, that is to say, it is the source of every form of the lifeworld though it is organized in different ways within them. One element of critique is thus how effectively excess is organized in a given form of the lifeworld. As we will see in chapter 10, this is where ecology comes into its own as the science that is closest to approximating this critical judgment. The formal, mathematical system of Galilean science—whether applied to scientific nature or political economy—translates the excess that produces the system into a factor of production within the system. It can be the “force” of gravity, formally defined, in opposition to the observation that heavy things fall. Or, it can be the cost of labor or natural resources as factors of production rather than their immersion in the excess of the human-natural world from which is derived the wealth of human society and culture. Such excess can never be entirely tamed as a factor. Ground rent illustrates the fecundity of nature interpreted as a factor but as still manifesting such fecundity without which value would not be produced. Similarly, Galilean nature cannot proceed in its research toward the infinite ideal of complete knowledge unless the presupposition that it aids the “rationalization” of human life in the lifeworld is maintained. Formal systems never attain the closed-ness and completeness that to which they strive. Their continued relevance stems from this incomplete formalization just as does their critique. Formalization can thus be understood in a manner superseding Husserl as the internalization of excess into a factor within a systemic representation. Such internalization is always incomplete such that the “factor” always becomes more than a factor since it cannot be reduced to being a function of the other factors of the system. The “factors” of abstract labor and abstract nature always reproduce an excess that cannot be defined intra-systemically in spite of the succession of diversions that distance them from that excess. The failed attempt to tame excess as a factor can be recovered by a critique of formalization such as undertaken by Husserl and Marx. Though such critiques often tend to reproduce on aspect of the formal system that they criticize: excess may be seen as one individual thing rather than as the nature understood as

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a complex balance of energy, a fungible differentiated totality upon which humans labor, but which also includes human activity. Insofar as Husserl thought that there could be a return to evidences of individual judgments underlying scientific formalization, and Marx may have thought at times that he had solved the problem of the real price of commodities (instead of replacing this problem with that of the regime of value), their critiques shipwrecked in the formalism to which they were opposed by taking excess as if it had the unity of a factor. Excess is rather the single name for a diverse, differentiated balance of forces, individuals and relations (for which the nearest scientific name is “ecology”). Marx took this unity of origin and displaced force to be such a unity that he could locate it in labor. Thus he thought of the embodiment of labor in the “proletariat” as a unity—and we have waited a long time for this unity to appear as such. Now it is clear that, since formalization understood as the internalization of excess is always incomplete, the excess can never act as a unity in such a manner. Critique of formalism leaves us with the problem of the relation between formal system and the lifeworld as a whole, a lifeworld which cannot be conceived as either a factor or an undifferentiated unity underlying a factor. This is the most basic reason why the ontology of labor, with its implicit reference to natural fecundity, cannot be elided from Marx’s critique of political economy. NOTES 1. The later part 8 of Capital, Vol. 1 on “so-called primitive accumulation” is pertinent to the historical formation of the proletariat as a class that is necessary for capital. The creation of the proletariat requires that humans are “forcibly torn from their means of subsistence” (Cap1 876) in what Rosa Luxemburg called “natural economies.” She asserted, in her own view as a critique of Marx, that “force is the only solution open to capital; the accumulation of capital, seen as an historical process, employs force as a permanent weapon, not only at its genesis, but further on down to the present day” (Luxemburg 1951, 364, 368, 370–1). Mainstream Marxism has indeed tended to see “primitive accumulation” as historically prior to capitalism and overcome by its establishment, so that Luxemburg’s critique is a valid critique of that view. But, both sides of this argument fail to see that Capital, Vol. 1 is not an account of actually-existing historical capitalism but of the concept of capital as such. Marx called primitive accumulation “so-called” [sogennante] precisely because his use of Adam Smith’s phrase questioned Smith’s assumption that it was exclusively historically prior. However, Marx was well aware that the established capitalist system would continue to undermine both historic and present-day alternatives to itself. This is the point of his argument that in the free American colonies, where widespread ownership of productive land admits the possibility of independent citizens engaged in many activities, coercion to wage-labour is accomplished by artificially elevating

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the price of land (Cap1 935–40). Primitive accumulation, that is to say the dispossession of natural economies, is both historically and logically prior to capital. The creation of the logical conditions for capital accumulation is a continuing project oriented toward destroying both previously-established natural economies and emergent “natural economies” based in cooperative ownership. 2.  Roman Rosdolsky claims that Marx’s concept of commodity fetishism was not developed in the mid-1860s but was already present in 1844 (Rosdolsky 1977, 126). He points, however, only to a precursor of commodity fetishism in the remarks on money in Notes on Mill. He could have pointed to other places since there is no doubt that Marx’s critical attitude to money was present from very early on. It is expressed through quotations from Shakespeare in The Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts (Marx, 1963b 189–91). But, while this attitude certainly provided the motive for developing the later theory it is no more the theory itself than the seed is the plant into which develops. Rosdolsky defines the essence of fetishism as “producers in such a society cannot relate to their labour as direct social labour since they have lost control over their own relations of production” (Rosdolsky 1977, 126, emphasis added). Here he wrongly assumes that fetishism applies directly to capitalist society, where workers have alienated their labour-power to the capitalist class, whereas fetishism for Marx clearly pertains also, though differently of course, to all forms of commodity production. Independent commodity producers are precisely in control of their own process of production. Assimilation of the critique of money to the critique of capitalist production—an error which by no means applies to Rosdolsky alone— has immeasurable consequences for the critique of capitalism and the possible form of post-capitalist society. Against Rosdolsky’s interpretation, we should note that there is no corresponding section on fetishism in Marx’s 1859 Critique of Political Economy whose first chapter in other respects closely parallels the first chapter of Capital (Marx 1904). Aside from simple matters of organization and additional detail, the section on fetishism is the most significant difference between these two texts at this early point in their logical development. The theory of fetishism had to have been developed between 1859 and 1867 (the year of publication of the first German edition of Capital, Vol. 1), that is to say, at the point at which Marx attempted the most mature presentation of his theory. 3.  The relation between such remnants and anticipations and the dominant capitalist form has been called in Marxist and post-Marxist theory “articulation,” so that one would speak of the articulation of capitalist accumulation with feudal remnants and socialist anticipations (such as cooperatives) (Laclau 1997, ch.1). 4. Alfred Sohn-Rethel was the first to call this a “real abstraction” in order to emphasize that it is not solely of a conceptual nature (such as the three examples discussed above) but is immersed in practical action which, due to its structuring by an abstract system of exchange, becomes abstract in its performance. “It is in its capacity of a real event in time and space that the abstraction applies to exchange, it is in its precise meaning a real abstraction and the ‘use’ from which the abstraction is made encompasses the entire range of sense reality” (Sohn-Rethel 1978, 28). Nevertheless, the use of the term “abstract” in this sense of a form of social organization rather than a mental abstraction is clear already in Lukács (1971, 87–91).

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5. The classic defender of Marx as primarily a theorist of the value-form, and only secondarily of its quantity, is I.I. Rubin. For example, “critics of Marx’s theory of value usually see its center of gravity in its defining the quantitative equality of labor inputs which are necessary for the production of commodities, and which are equalized with each other in the act of exchange” (Rubin 1973, 87). More recently, Michael Heinrich has claimed that “traditional Marxism was also taken in by the illusion that value was a property of the individual commodity. The substance of value was understood in a ‘substantialist’ way, as a property of an individual commodity. The magnitude of value was also understood as a property of an individual commodity and it was believed to be determined, independent of the exchange process, by the quantity of socially-necessary labor-time expended in the production of the commodity” (Heinrich 2004, 54). Further, Diane Elson has asserted that “it is the interpretation offered by most Marxist economists in the Anglo-Saxon world, that Marx’s theory of value is an explanation of equilibrium or ‘natural’ prices in a capitalist economy. As such it is one of a number of theories of equilibrium price . . .” (Elson 1979, 116). Athar Hussain has claimed that “nearly all critiques of Capital by bourgeois economists from Bohm-Bawerk to Joan Robinson have been based on the assumption that the first chapter of Capital is devoted to the quantitative determination of exchange-value. This particular assumption enables these critics to replace the question asked in the text by another question: what determines the exchange-value of commodities?” (Hussain 1979, 84). 6.  Peter Hudis claims that if we consider the system as a whole “the sum of all prices is equal to the sum of all values,” even though individual prices of commodities always diverge from their values (Hudis 2012, 138). While Hudis recognizes that prices never correspond to values, he attributes this fact solely to the fact that “abstract labour is measured by a social average that is constantly fluctuating and changing, especially because of technological innovation”—which is the difference between socially-necessary labour time and actual labour time in a given instance (Hudis 2012, 138). Hudis’ argument attempts to make the divergence between price and value a matter of this difference only, whereas, as we will see, Marx himself understood it to be an essential feature of the appearance-essence relation under capitalism. 7.  Marx argues that there is a “historical and moral element” in the determination of the value of labour-power unlike in the case of other commodities, where the value of labour-power is the “number and extent of his so-called necessary requirements” which “depend therefore to a great extent on the level of civilization attained by a country” (Cap1 275). But if the values of other commodities are determined by socially-necessary abstract labour, then the value of reproducing labour-power will indirectly determine the values of other commodities and this difference will pertain to the normal commodity prices is different locations of a world system. 8.  G.A. Cohen has argued more generally that the quantity of value can never correspond to socially-necessary labour time because of the difference in time between when the product was produced and when its price is determined at the point of sale. “There are two reasons why the amount of labour which was actually spent on a particular product might differ from the amount now standardly required to produce that kind of product. The first is a non-standard level of efficiency in the actual labour

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process, which can be more of less efficient than the social norm. The second is technological change, which alters that norm” (Cohen 1981, 211). The first factor is true indeed if one does not undertake the four reductions detailed above as essential to the concept of value, that is to say, if one does not distinguish between essence and appearance. The key assumption in Cohen’s argument is the conventional one that “the central claim of the labour theory of value is that magnitude of value is determined by socially-necessary labour-time” (Cohen 1981, 203). Cohen’s argument does serve to clarify that, strictly speaking, the system of value is timeless—or, more exactly, abstracts to a single point of time—but whose equilibrating mechanism produces tendencies such that a new stage of the system is pointed towards, thus introducing a temporal dimension. The second factor, as shown in the text above, is indeed relevant, but it is less an argument against the labour theory of value than an explanation of the tendency within the system of value toward technological innovation resulting in a reduction of labour time.   9.  “Therefore the value of labour-power, and the value which that labour-power valorizes in the labour-process, are two entirely different magnitudes” (Cap1 300). 10.  We noted in a prior context of the determination of normal price that Marx does say that “we know that the value of each commodity is determined by the quantity of labour materialized in its use-value, by the labour-time socially necessary to produce it” (Cap1 293, emphasis added). There, it was pointed out that this was a statement that could not apply to the appearance of capitalist society discussed by political economy and, in this sense, Marx did not resolve the issue of “value” in political economy. Here, we can point out further that the theoretical determination at the level of essence is exactly what allows for its determination in the system of value as a tendency which can only be designated as a formal sign and not a number. 11.  This appendix to the first German edition of Capital, Vol. 1 was not included in subsequent editions. It presents the dialectical development of the simple value-form carefully through all its stages, mirroring Hegel’s Logic, to the money-form where “the money-form proper offers in itself no difficulty at all” because “the simple commodity form is the secret of the money-form” (Marx 1978c, 150). 12.  Patrick Murray attempts to resolve this issue by distinguishing between abstract labour as a conceptual abstraction possible at any historical point and labour which is abstract in practice, so that physiology can apply to the first type in any historical period (Murray 2000, 31, 49–51). But this gets Marx back-to-front. Abstract labour appears in capitalism as a “real abstraction,” or abstract element of labour due to the system of labour-exchange. Thus, a conceptual abstraction is possible, but it does not apply to labour across historical periods, only to the equalizing system of capital. 13.  Thus, Postone claims that “a noncapitalist society is not constituted by labor alone” (Postone 1993, 167). This position was advocated by the early Lukács in his interpretation of Marx’s primacy of the economic as applying only to capitalist society such that pre-capitalist forms have a different constitution in which the political dimension is not simply superstructural (Lukács 1971, 223–55). 14.  In addition to this one, I have found two other minor examples in Capital, Vol. 1 where the term “physiology” is used without reference to abstract labour (Cap1 471, 472).

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15.  Thus, Postone also claims that an ontology of labour makes it impossible to account for the specific category of value-producing labour and thus of the specific social relations of capitalism (Postone 1993, 29). This is what grounds his claim that traditional Marxism was characterized by an ontology of labour (Postone 1993, 388). While Postone regards it as impossible to hold to an ontology of labour and simultaneously criticize the specifically value-producing form, my intention in this text is to show not only that this is not the case but also that the reference to ontology is required precisely by such a critique. 16. As far as I can determine, Robert Paul Wolff is the only author who has pointed out the “notoriously weak” nature of this argument (Wolff 1984, 109). He notes that all commodities also have the characteristic that they satisfy human needs, a point made previously by E. Böhm-Bawerk and which was the point of departure for various theories basing economics on marginal utility. This fact that all commodities satisfy needs—without reference to which needs and thus “need in the abstract” we might say—since they would be dependent on the concrete characteristics of use-value, can actually be derived from the more basic common characteristic of all commodities pointed out here—that they are all transformations of nature. 17. Robert Paul Wolff is concerned with the productive capacity of any input into an economic system, and thus his argument has a more restricted scope than the current one. Wolff shows that, while it is true that labour produces more than it consumes, thus justifying the distinction of labour from labour-power, it is nevertheless true that any other input can be shown to contribute to producing more than itself. This is due to what we call natural fecundity, though Wolff does not give a general account of this. He asks: “Suppose we ask a question that neither Ricardo nor Marx thought to ask, but which does not at all seem precluded by the objective specifications of the model: How much corn is required, directly or indirectly, to produce a single unit of iron, of books, of labor, or of corn itself? In short, what is the ‘corn value’ of a unit of each of the commodities produced in the system?” His conclusion is that “in the price equations, labor appears as an input with a price, and the equilibrium profit rate is construed as a markup on the total cost of all inputs, labor included. Only an arbitrary notational convention differentiates the price of labour from the price of a commodity.” In other words, we may say, within the intra-economic system the distinction between labour and labour-power can be matched by a similar distinction for any other commodity. This distinction, which Wolff merely notes, we have shown to be based upon natural fecundity in its abstract form as abstract nature. As Wolff remarks, “explicit in our initial non-formal discussion of reproduction, and implicit in our move to formalism, was the assumption that labor plays a distinctive role in the process of reproduction, and that wage labour plays a special role in a capitalist economy. But little or nothing of the distinctiveness of that role found its way into the formal structure of our model of a capitalist economy.” (Wolff 1984, 165, 176, 177). We may say that the ontological features of labour do not necessarily enter into the intra-economic system unchanged. We might say on ontological grounds, for example, that the notion of corn-power—or indeed the natural fecundity that underlies any commodity-input into production—appears within the economic system as such as a consequence of the diffusion of the ontological surplus productivity of labour through

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the entire economic system due precisely to the systematic character of the economy. Even so, the isolation of the economy as a system requires that this diffusive effect cannot be characterized as such within the system. In short, it is not possible that labour appears in the same form within an ontological justification and in an isolated systemic representation; the divergence of the two discourses is a necessary effect of the isolation of a system as a system. 18.  There is a connection here to the earlier discussion of why natural categories intrude into social ones in Marx’s characterization of abstract labour as physiological. There what Marx characterized as wholly social (value) was described as natural (physiological). Here what Marx describes as wholly abstract (labour) is characterized as independent, unrelated to a material upon which it works, and thereby as wholly social. In the first case, there is an incursion of natural categories into social ones whereas in the latter case there is the loss of natural reference in social categories. The origin of these equivocations is that at times Marx holds to a strict division between natural and social in the form it which it is established in modern philosophy, whereas at times he undercuts this division with a more fluid relation between nature and history. 19.  Andrew Feenberg has shown through an analysis of Heidegger’s work that the problem of technology in modern society differs essentially from that of Greek technology due to the limiting concept of essence in natural forms, telos, that guides human action for the Greeks and which is absent for moderns. “The modern technological revealing sweeps away all concepts of essence and leaves only a collection of fungible stuff available for human ordering in arbitrary patterns” (Feenberg 2005, 39). We are suggesting that this concept of nature as “fungible stuff” for technological manipulation has a history of increasing abstraction rooted in the historical forms of the ontology of labour parallel to that of abstract labour.

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Chapter Nine

Technology in Living Labor

We showed in Part II of this manuscript through Herbert Marcuse’s extension of the thesis of the crisis of the European sciences that Husserl’s conception of sign-systems as “theoretical techniques” could be supplemented by, and rigorously connected to, a conception of technique as a mode of practical action in the lifeworld.1 Further, we showed how the institution of digital culture provoked a crisis of meaning and value in the lifeworld parallel to the crisis of the European sciences. Moving beyond the representation of meaning and value, Part III deals with perception, action and thought in the lifeworld which is condensed in Karl Marx’s rich understanding of human labor and noted the capture of living activity (labor) within a homogenizing field accomplished by the regime of value. In addition, we have shown beyond Marx’s self-awareness how labor is the means whereby natural excess takes form in the human lifeworld. The regime of value homogenizes and equilibrates production across the whole field of human activity that it covers, thereby bringing a single, unwavering set of requisites to bear upon each production process considered individually. The core abstract systemic determination is the “socially-necessary labour-time” which requires the specific production process progressively to approximate the most efficient production process. It is an internal dynamic structured into an equilibrating system. A process that is less efficient than that socially-necessary garners a lower profit and thereby contains an inner motivation toward greater efficiency. A process that is more efficient gains greater profit and pulls investment toward itself, thereby strengthening its quantity and influence vis-à-vis other processes producing the same product. Thus, “the technical foundations of production are constantly revolutionized, the productivity of labor constantly increased” (Heinrich 2004, 116). For this reason, technology is intrinsic to the developing capitalist mode of production 295

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and its critique. In this context we take up the issue of technology as a form of practical action in living labor—that is to say, the concrete activity of working on nature in a social form. Though Marx’s work was oriented to the critique of the regime of value, he nevertheless laid the groundwork of a philosophy of technology in his historical account of social labor. The first section of this chapter begins from this groundwork but discusses it in the context of the explicit philosophy of technology developed by Gilbert Simondon which allows us to pose the issues of the philosophy of technology in a contemporary context. Through a comparison of the influence of socio-economic on technical development in Marx with the logic of technical invention in Simondon, we sustain the thesis that worker’s democracy is the forgotten political form that offers a viable alternative to both capitalism and Soviet-style Communism, the dominant political regimes of the Cold War period that have not yet been surpassed. We also show that Simondon’s philosophy of technology is a more effective basis for anticipating the technical individuals of digital production with its inherent possibility of workplace democracy than that proposed by either Marx or Marcuse. The second section of this chapter deals with the possibility that the influence of digital technology is instituting a new form of living labor whose cooperative and subjective dimensions are distinct from the real subsumption of labor in what Marx called “modern industry.” The third section will take up the question of whether, or in what way, such a new form of production is restructuring capitalism such that the contradiction between capital and labor is taking a new form.2 In conclusion we sketch the form of planetary technology that corresponds to abstract nature and defines the predominant relation between technology and nature of contemporary capitalism. 9.1 PHILOSOPHY OF TECHNICS 9.1.1 Technics as Mediation, Constitution, and Institution Technics appears in the first place as a mediation between humans and nature. Though, upon consideration, there is no original human outside a relation to nature mediated by tools, and there is no nature within human history (on this earth at least) unmediated by tools and unaltered by humans. This is the legitimate part of the contemporary critique of “humanism” in contemporary thought: humans do not “enter into” a relation with nature through technology as if they were constituted and complete prior to such encounter; humans at any step of their relation to nature can act upon nature only on the basis of their constitution by a previous relation to nature.

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Simondon, Marcuse and Marx agree that the mediation between humans and nature is constitutive of the human relation to nature such that there is no simple nature unchanged by humans nor a human being apart from technical extension and development of human capacities as well as satisfaction of desires. As we have seen, Marx takes this to mean that a given state of technics is an indicator of the social relations that prevail in a given socio-economic period. Simondon makes the same point when he says that “an inter-human relation that is the model of transindividuality is thus created through the intermediary of the technical object” (Simondon 2017, 253). Indeed, for him, the technical object is the original detachment between human and world that allows one to later see it as their mediation (Simondon 2017, 183). The co-constitution of humans and nature through technics is temporal both in the sense of changing its form over time and in the sense in which it itself generates temporal change. It not only occurs in time but generates time as a process of intervention and alteration of its own presuppositions. Moreover, to say that humans act upon nature through technics is not to think that humans are outside nature, but only that the tools whereby humans act upon nature constitute humans as a distinct part of nature. While nature is also altered by non-human living beings, the nature of such alteration achieves neither the scope nor the sophistication of human technics. Technics must be understood not only, or fundamentally, as a mediation but as a constitution of the relation between humans and nature—and it is the form of this constitution that defines the historical state of the relation between humans and nature which thereby define the salient issues for a philosophy of technology. This transhistorical, dialectical interaction of humans and nature through technics was described by Marx as a “metabolism” [Stoffwechsel] in which humanity “confronts the materials of nature as a force of nature” so that it “acts upon external nature and changes it, and in this way simultaneously changes his own nature” (Cap1 283; Kap1 185). He also conferred a central role on technology insofar as “the means of labour [Arbeitsmittel] not only supply a standard of the degree of development which human labour has attained, but they also indicate the social relations within which humans work” (Cap1 286; Kap1 188). It is important that these social relations be understood as a “corporeal organization of these individuals” [körperliche Organisation dieser Individuen], so that the actors are understood as thinking bodies rather than embodied thought and the social relation is understood as a corporeally material one.3 Technology is thus both an indicator and a central element of the social corporeality of labor. This reading of Marx grounds a convergence with a phenomenology of the body especially when the body is understood as an acting body and not only a perceiving one. Thus, as Ludwig Landgrebe points out “one can legitimately speak of a ‘material basis’ but

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only if this is not understood in the sense of a ‘pure’ nature, of which we can know nothing, but only with reference to the corporeally active and in this activity teleologically directed human beings” (Landgrebe 1984, 80). As we have seen in chapter 7, technology had a very wide meaning in Marx’s late work to include the earth as it has been modified by previous human activity as well as the earth unmodified as a ‘ground’ insofar as it is a necessary condition for living labor—such as water, air, gravity, etc. By introducing this wider sense of technology Marx aims at a sense of nature, or environment, which may well be altered by human activity but has not been in its totality the object of human activity. Marx did not draw this conclusion, but it is implied by his expanded conception of technology. Nature and the built environment are the cumulative, unintended upshot of previous labor that supports and conditions subsequent living labor. Since human activity aims at specific goals, this cumulative historical totality of original nature and built environment modified through technology cannot be itself understood as an intended product of human action. Additionally, for a critical account of contemporary technology, one must look at its institution as a specific form of human-technology interaction that defines a historical period—notably our current period, defined as it is by an emergent, digital, technological form. 9.1.2 Tools, Machines and Modern Industry Clearly, every human society uses tools and yet our own society has developed a particular intensive relation to the continuous development of technics. We may start to define the exact nature of this difference through the distinction between tools and machines. Marx’s work is not fundamentally about technics but about the history of modes of production and specifically the critique of the capitalist mode. Nevertheless, he recognized the role of technics in every historical form of production and, in particular, focused on the role of the machine in the transition from manufacture to large-scale industry within the capitalist mode. Simondon’s work, in contrast, focusses on technics as such and tends to relegate other factors that influence technics to the background. Nevertheless, their work overlaps in the distinction between tool and machine. Capitalist manufacture begins by seizing upon the previous form of work which Marx calls as handicraft (Handwerk) in which an artisan, or craftsman, uses a set of tools for a specialized set of tasks within the social division of labor. Trades such as tailors, millwrights, weavers, painters, etc. are practiced through a developed set of related skills and tools appropriate to associated tasks (Cap1 455). Simondon calls this situation one of a human “technical individual” in which coordinating the tasks and tools into a functioning unit

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is achieved through his or her working body. He remarks, in terms that would be seconded by Marx, that there is both a “certain nobility” to the technical individual and also a psychic and somatic deformation: both are due to the organizing function of the human body (Simondon 2017, 77n, 119n, 77–8). Marx shows how the capitalist mode of manufacture seizes upon handicraft production and transforms it. By assembling many workers under one roof and creating a collective worker, the production process ceases to be organized by the separate trades but becomes one unified whole dominating the handicrafts. Thus, overall trade competence tends to be lost and only that part required for one production process retained—that part of a carpenter’s work, for example, that is required for glass-making—which also simplifies the tools required (Cap1 460). Manufacture then combines these separate tasks into a series of connected processes whose time-structure has to be rigorously coordinated and supervised and which can be expanded by taking a simple multiple of the process (Cap1 464–6). Simplification of tools is the major condition for the replacement of the worker by machinery which, in turn, divides the workforce into skilled and unskilled labor—those who perform the remaining simplified tasks and those who supervise and maintain the machinery (Cap1 469–70). Thus, manufacture is not organized by the coordinated skills of trades that can be turned to many tasks but by the unity of a single process of production. It is the machine that overcomes handicraft as the “regulating principle” [regelnde Prinzip] of manufacture and inaugurates large-scale industry as the next stage of capitalist production (Cap1 490; Kap1 387). Unlike the transition from handicraft to manufacture, which is a socio-economic transition based upon the capitalist organization of labor-power, the transition from manufacture to industry is based upon machinery, or the means of labor (Arbeitsmittel) (Cap1 492, translation altered; Kap1 388). It is, in that sense, a technological imperative, but it is one that is based upon the prior social imperative that re-organized labor in manufacture. So, one should say, it is a shift of emphasis within the organization of tools and social labor toward the machine as the active component. To this extent, there is a logic of technics for Marx that is comparable to the logic of technical development in Simondon to which we will turn shortly. While, for Marx, there is no technical logic that leads from handcraft to manufacture, there is indeed a technical logic that leads from manufacture through modern industry to automation. The logic becomes technical due to the socio-economic forces which are embedded within its development. Thus, Marx can define an internal contradiction in the technical basis of manufacture that leads on to the subsequent period of modern industry. He says that “the narrow technical basis on which manufacture rested came into

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contradiction with requirements of production which it had itself created” (Cap1 490). It is not entirely clear from this statement what the nature of this contradiction actually is: the narrow technical basis refers to handicraft and the requirements of production in question clearly refer to machines. However, why can machines not be developed on the basis of a regulative principle of handicraft? The answer is provided by Marx’s distinction between formal and real subsumption of labour under capital. That is to say, the new principle at work in industry is real subsumption, whereas in manufacture labour was formally subsumed under capital but, in his words, the manufacturer “existed only on sufferance, as a dealer in the products of handicrafts” (Cap1 479). The craftsman’s organization in the guilds remained powerful in the organization of production so that the worker and his tools remained closely united. In industry, or the real subsumption of labor under capital, “a technologically and otherwise specific mode of production . . . transforms the nature of the labour process and its actual conditions” (Marx 1978b, emphasis removed, 1034–5). This is a matter of scale of production units, machinery, the total control of the production process by the capitalist, such that cooperation becomes a technical necessity. The capitalist’s ability to control the intensity of the work process through the coordination of machinery works under the regulative principle of “production for production’s sake” (Marx 1978b, 1034–8). In sum, whereas handicraft production operates according to the social regulative principle of guilds, and manufacture breaks down handicraft production into parts of a collective worker that can be recombined into machines while still under the regulative principle of handicraft, industry operates through machines under the regulative principle of production for production’s sake. Marx rejects the common notion that a machine can be defined by its source of energy, regarding a machine as a combination of tools, and demands a historical account (Cap1 490). He divides the machine into three parts: the motor mechanism, the transmitting mechanism, and the tool or working machine, remarking that the working machine contains the tool of the craftsman in an altered form and it is from this part that the industrial revolution developed. Thus, when the tool is taken from the worker and fitted into a mechanism, one has a machine and no longer a tool. The mechanism can operate a number of tools and relies on one power source so that subsequent increase in the size of the mechanism prefers a non-human source of energy. At this point the subjective principle of the division of labor is overcome by an entirely objective process such that detail work processes are isolated and connected by the machinery itself. The division of labor becomes a technical necessity so that it is possible to speak of a logic of technical development. The machine is completed when automatic machinery transforms raw material into finished

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product without the intervention of the human worker through an organized system of machinery based on a single source of energy. So, while the active forces are for Marx in the first place socio-economic, they become technical in the development from handicraft through manufacture to industry. This technical logic of development is such as to gradually displace the initial centrality of the skilled worker, subsume the worker under a technical apparatus, and then displace the worker from the automatic system of machinery. 9.1.3 The Technical Object and Technical Invention Whereas Marx merely remarks that the manufacturing period was the age of great inventions due to the search for reliable sources of energy, Simondon analyzes invention as the imaginative re-assemblage of elements, or parts, of machines and not as a direct developmental lineage of given machines (Cap1 468; Simondon 2017, 71, 74–6.). Simondon certainly agrees that the machine replaces humans as the bearer and director of tools, but limits it to the stage that he calls “thermodynamic,” which corresponds to what Marx calls “largescale industry,” to suggest that a new stage of technics has recently emerged in which information plays an independent and distinct role such that the distinction between technics and life is most salient to understanding it (Simondon 2017, 78, 143–4, 156). Simondon’s analysis, however, occurs through a different conceptual vocabulary. Taking the technical object as the focus of his analysis, he divides the phenomenon into three parts: elements, or parts, of a technical object; the technical individual; and the ensemble of technical objects that are coordinated together. The two limit terms seem simple enough: an element is a part that is integrated into a technical object much in the way that an organ is integrated into a body (Simondon 2017, 66, 187). An ensemble is a collection of technical objects that are not integrated together and perhaps should not be integrated together. Simondon’s favoured example is the laboratory in which the various machines must function separately in order not to interfere with each other, while they are nevertheless all required for the operation of the laboratory itself, such that humans must play an intermediary role (Simondon 2017, 55–6, 150). The principle of conceptual differentiation is obviously the extent to which the technical object is or is not integrated into a higher unity. The element is always so integrated; the ensemble never so. The technical individual is defined by a “principle of individualization through recurrent causality within an associated milieu” in which “the associated milieu exists as a condition of functioning sine qua non” (Simondon 2017, 63). The individualized technical object is characterized by the internal coherence of

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an automatic self-regulation whose functioning makes circular the relation between causality and finality (Simondon 2017, 135, 139). Here we can see Simondon’s debt to cybernetics: the technical individual is defined through its ability to internalize its milieu and thus become self-regulating. There are various levels of individualization and the degree of relative individualization has axiological value as a criterion (Simondon 2017, 64).4 According to Simondon, the technical object begins in an act of invention such that a new line of development is opened and undergoes an evolution from abstract to concrete. Concretization is defined as the integration of functional subsystems into the technical object such that it becomes increasingly similar to a natural object such as a plant (Simondon 2017, 38, 40, 50). While the abstract technical object is characterized by parts with complete functions, the concrete object thoroughly subordinates such functions to its total functioning (Simondon 2017, 27–88, 35, 38). An engine, for example, evolves toward a situation in which the various functions—such as thermal firing, engine cooling, and pressure regulation—are interacting and diverse functions of a unified structure rather than separate elements set alongside each other in a parallel manner. There is an internal technical logic of continuous evolution from abstract to concrete that may never be fully complete but is the basis for socio-economic organizations. Technical invention takes place, of course, upon the ground of previous technical development. But while the development of a given line of technical development tends toward a thoroughly integrated object serving a distinct total function, invention of a new technical object, and therefore the foundation of a new line of development, occurs through the recombination of elements of technical objects in relation to the associated milieu in which it is intended to function (Simondon 2017, 59–62, 74–6). Thus, while a single line of development moves in a definite direction toward full integration of functions, a new line of development occurs through an invention which disaggregates functions and recombines them into a new technical object. Invention thus occurs through a leap rather than continuous development and is a matter of foresight and thought rather than simple improvement (Simondon 2017, 42–3. 60, 62, 252). Whereas Marx treats technics as thoroughly dependent on socio-economic forces, Simondon regards the logic of concretization inherent in technical development as the basis for socio-economic standardization.5 This fundamental difference is complicated, however, in two ways. The main technical development that Marx addresses, from manufacture to modern industry, would fit into Simondon’s schema as a concretization with a definite, linear, logic. One may make two pertinent comments here: First, if Marx’s logic of capitalist technology is a concretization in Simondon’s sense, one would have

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to be wary of the universalization of this logic as inherent to technics outright. Second, since the subordination of the worker to the machine is a function of capitalism, a future emancipated society would appear to require new technical objects. However, since Marx’s theory has no basis for theorizing such a development aside from the linear development of the reduction and exclusion of workers by automatic production (Gr 12), Simondon’s theory of invention as a radical break that founds a new line of development could be very useful in this respect. Despite the large-scale disagreement about causation, the concerns of Marx and Simondon converge significantly on the question of what a qualitatively new technology would look like and also on the political form that such a new technology would both require and concretize. Simondon analyzes the source of the alienation of labor through the concept of technical individuality. In what he calls “non-industrial civilizations,” and Marx referred to as handicraft, the tool-bearer knows what tool to use, when to change tools, and also maintains his own tools such that “human individuality can be used functionally as the basis of technical individuality” (Simondon 2017, 77). With the transition to the machine, the machine becomes the technical individual. However, even in this case, some uses of the machine preserve the human at the center while the machine functions as relay and amplifier; this is especially so in the case of machine-tools (Simondon 2017, 78–9). For Simondon, alienation occurs in the relation of human and machine and not in relations of property nor class. When the machine no longer “prolongs the corporeal schema” there is alienation (Simondon 2017, 133). Both the worker and the industrial boss are alienated insofar as they are either above or below the machine, either supervisor or servant. Neither one is “a being who expresses himself within the technical object . . . [due to] his gesture continuing the activity of invention in this gesture” (Simondon 2017, 257, 254). For Simondon, this is a critique of Marxism—which is likely true of Communist Party Marxism—but, as we have seen, it does not apply to Marx himself. The worker is indeed dominated by the machine in largescale industry and, even though the explanation for this situation is socioeconomic, alienation in the factory has become technical due to the worker’s subordination to, and incorporation into, the machine. Simondon regarded the three major regimes of the twentieth century—National Socialism, American democracy, and Communism—as three political forms increasingly dominated in their actual functioning by the integrated technics upon which they relied (Simondon 2017, 231). This view was shared by Herbert Marcuse, who also argued that contemporary critical theory needed to turn its attention from class to technics, since “the technological society is a system of domination which operates already in the concept and construction of techniques” (Marcuse 1964, xvi).6

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The technical individual thus functions in Simondon’s thought both as an axiological principle whereby the failure of political regimes can be denounced and also as the goal whereby the technical individual can be advanced as a continuation of the founding technical act of invention through the creative work of the human body. Given the failure of the three major regimes of the twentieth century to fulfil, or even pursue, this goal, we can see here a political convergence with those trends of the New Left both East and West that argued that workplace democracy had the potential to reconcile the activity of labor and technical design through democratic decisionmaking over the everyday organization of work. While this political vision has resurfaced periodically in an era of the domination of human activity by large-scale technics, it has never become an orienting principle for an actual political regime. 9.1.4 Excursus: Herbert Marcuse’s Reliance on Gilbert Simondon in One-Dimensional Man This excursus from the major argument concerns the critique of political regimes coincident with a philosophy of technics by considering three places where Marcuse relies upon Simondon in One-Dimensional Man to make his argument that technics plays a key role in sealing us within the given society and undermining the possibility of its transcendence.7 First, Marcuse agrees with Simondon that the machine is no longer a unity enclosed within itself, but has become incorporated into a system of machines such that the worker becomes either the servant or director of a technical ensemble (Marcuse 1964, 27; quoted from Simondon 2017, 157). This quotation is remarkable in that Marcuse does not take up Simondon’s actual emphasis and flattens it to mean only that machines become an interconnected system. Immediately prior to the quoted section, Simondon says that “the opposition between technics and culture will last until culture discovers that each machine is not an absolute unit” but a relation between elements and a technical ensemble (Simondon 2017, 157). Because culture does not understand the distinction between the machine and the technical object, it focusses on the machine as an isolated and closed unity. But for culture to understand technics, it must perceive also the elements of the technical object which are reassembled in the act of invention and the functioning of technical ensembles (Simondon 2017, 158). Marcuse has missed here Simondon’s argument for a redirection of culture toward technics that will later become an argument for a philosophy of technics that can play a healing role in contemporary society. Second, in the crucial chapter 6, Marcuse quotes Simondon’s argument that a philosophy of technics that serves the conquest of nature, though it

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claims to serve human freedom, cannot really do so because it is tied to the categories of domination and servitude by passing on servitude to other humans, animals, or machines (Marcuse 1964, 149 quoted from Simondon 2017, 141). Here, where both agree that technological rationality has become a new form of domination, Marcuse seeks to bolster his argument that technological rationality conceals and supports social domination and the loss of transcendence. But Simondon is actually referring here not to technics per se but a philosophy of technics. His argument is that a philosophy of technics must not focus on the domination of nature by technology but on the distinction between 19th and 20th century technics, or the surpassing of thermodynamic systems by information channels, because “the advent of the use of information-channels that are distinct from energy channels caused a very profound change in the philosophy of technics” (Simondon 2017, 143). Not only does Marcuse refuse to follow Simondon in developing a philosophy of information, but he refuses the demand for a philosophy of technics as such, to draw Simondon’s point back toward the current social issue, in Marcuse’s estimation, of the link between the domination of nature and social domination. True to his fundamental orientation, Marcuse focusses on critique and interprets Simondon silently in accord with his critique of Husserl where he asserted that philosophy can do nothing to address social issues directly (Marcuse 1965, 290). Third, Marcuse argues that the abstraction from final causes that characterizes modern science is no longer valid even in the terms of science itself, because “science and technology has rendered possible the translation of values into technical tasks . . . [where] the new ends, as technical ends, would then operate in the project and construction of the machinery, and not only in its utilization” (Marcuse 1964, 232). He quotes Simondon’s similar argument that a philosophy of technics “through a raising and enlarging of the technical sphere, must treat as technical problems, questions of finality considered wrongly as ethical and sometimes religious” (Simondon 2017, p. 162). Here Marcuse collapses science and technology into the concept of technological rationality in order to argue that, although final causes cannot be reintroduced into science, values can enter into the design and construction of machinery. Summing up, he states that “instead of being separated from science and scientific method . . . formerly metaphysical ideas of liberation may become the proper object of science” (Marcuse 1964, 233). While there is clearly a contradiction here, or at the very least a confusing obscurity, between Marcuse’s simultaneous disavowal and resurrection of final causes in science, it is more significant that Simondon’s statement about final causes applies solely to technics and courts no similar contradiction. The context is Simondon’s argument that culture and technics have become separate but need not be

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so. The purpose of a philosophy of technics is to heal this rupture between culture and technics so that goals and values can leave the isolated domain of ethics and direct the design and construction of technical objects. Arguing with cyberneticist Norbert Weiner, he asserts that homeostatic regulation is not the pre-eminent value in technics, that even living information systems based in homeostasis strive toward self-development. Simondon’s argument for values in technics proposes a self-design of humans based on an understanding of the genesis of technicity. Herbert Marcuse’s quotations from Simondon reduce the emphasis on the active role of culture, that can be understood and expressed in philosophy, to a critique of the extension of the domination of nature to social domination and the eclipse of a transcendent dimension through which society can be criticized. As we have seen, Simondon is equally aware that technics in contemporary society has become an enclosing ideology that repels alternatives, however Marcuse’s flattening of Simondon’s analysis misses the important threads that connect to the original break that inaugurated technics and the information channels of contemporary technology. These threads pertain directly to the goal and value of a philosophy of technology that could bring technical design and construction into harmony with the social human body. 9.1.5 Philosophy of Technics For Simondon, the role of philosophy is to heal the split in culture (Simondon 2017, 222, 225, 234). The split originates in the first break between an undifferentiated background governed by an original magical unity and a thematic focus on a technical figure. The first phase shift originates a cultural split between technics and religion which has persisted in different forms through subsequent phases. Each new historical phase is originated by a state of tension within the system, not simply because of a lack of equilibrium (as cybernetic theory might suggest) but because the state of the system conflicts with its potential development (Simondon 2017, 173–83). Simondon’s analysis thus rules out a direct relation being established between technics and religion or ethics, since they refer to different phases, and poses the question of cultural healing now in terms of the relation between technics and sociopolitical thought (Simondon 2017, 230). Simondon says little about exactly what socio-political thought would be coincident with the new possibilities of technics, but our interpretation of Marx is intended to suggest that it is workplace democracy. A philosophy of technics at the level of elements consists in a theory of invention as an imaginative recombination of elements, neither a linear development of machines nor technical objects. The worker, in order not to be alienated, must

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continue this project of invention through adjusting the machine rather than being either its master or its servant. “The activity of adjustment . . . most naturally continues the function of invention and construction: adjustment is a perpetual, if limited, invention” (Simondon 2017, 255, see also 254, 257). Such technical activity requires use of the machine, but more importantly attention to the machine’s functioning through maintenance, adjustment, and improvement. Such activity ties the worker to the genesis of the technical object and, according to Simondon, thereby heals alienation. This seems to me profoundly true of the relation between skilled worker and machine but it fails to include the element of socio-political thought that he demanded. The worker is also embedded through and around the machine in social relations with other workers. It is this element that would require the addition of a theory of workplace democracy to the technical relation Simondon describes. Though it must be emphasized that Simondon’s analysis here, in adding a concrete analysis of the worker-machine relation, emphasizes an important element of the theory of workplace democracy that is required: the technical relations themselves cannot remain static but must aim toward their potential as continued invention. The other side of a philosophy of technics is not at the level of elements but that of ensembles. Here too, the theory of workplace democracy as the sociopolitical theory of relations between workers is very important. As we have seen, his conception of the the technical individual is defined through its ability to internalize its milieu and thus become self-regulating. Thus, the worker in workplace democracy becomes creative by becoming a self-regulating technical individual. It remains to be determined how such a self-regulating individual can be inventively and constructively related to other workers in the ensemble. How, we might say, can such relations be forms of adjustment in Simondon’s sense. At this point it is Simondon’s use and critique of information theory that is significant. Simondon characterizes “technical philosophy at the level of ensembles . . . [as] an in-depth study of regulations, which is to say of information” in which information is more useful insofar as it “intervenes without delay” in a regulation process (Simondon 2017, 141, 146). Indeed, delay could be minimized by situating regulation in the technical individual in cooperation with other related individuals. But such regulation cannot be limited to the cybernetic goal of efficiency of form in information transmission which is based in the conceptual opposition between information and noise, parallel to the opposition between entropy and negative entropy in thermodynamics, that determines the technocratic value of efficiency (Simondon 2017, 147, 161). Against this concept and value which is based on homeostasis as the measure of perfect information, he proposes “a very different mediation . . . through

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the medium of culture . . . elaborated through the great mass of those who are governed” (Simondon 2017, 161). This new mediation would “put the problems of finality in their place, as technical problems” in order “to develop itself and to continue its coming-into-being” (Simondon 2017, 162), in this way developing the potentialities inherent in contemporary tensions within technical ensembles. Simondon calls this future form the transindividual technical relationship which contains the “weight of pre-individual reality, this weight of nature that is preserved with the individual being, and which contains potentials and virtualities” (Simondon 2017, 253). Again, it seems that there is no better location for determining these potentials than the technical individual immersed in social relations with other technical individuals that constitute the democratic workplace. In Simondon’s view such a transindividual technical activity surpasses the distinction between matter and form which has dominated Western philosophy since the Greeks. He connects it, quite correctly, to the paradigm of work and thus refuses to connect the activity of the technical individual to work. As we have seen, even Marx, when he spoke of the nature of work itself, referred to Aristotle’s definition of technē as an art in which the goal lies beyond the activity itself and in which the goal is therefore superior to the activity. Never mind that Marx’s own paradigm of technology as the active historical mediation between humans and nature itself overcomes the Aristotelian distinction between matter and form that the artisanal paradigm presupposes with a historical interaction of humans and nature through technology that does not allow of any prior imagining outside the process. Never mind, either, that the organization of production in modern industry overcomes completely this artisanal description of labor. In this respect Simondon has seen further into the implications of their common starting-point. As he says, “technical knowledge, on the contrary, starts from what happens inside the mold in order to find the different elaborations that can prepare it by starting from this center . . . [in which] the working man prepares the mediation, but he doesn’t fulfil it; it is the mediation that fulfils itself on its own” (Simondon 2017, 249, two parts of quotation reversed). The worker is enmeshed in a technical process but does not have to remain either a servant or master of it. The worker can experience the socio-corporeality of the technical process as the process of his or her own development and potential. It is this possibility to which we refer under the name of workplace democracy and which corresponds to what Simondon anticipates when he says that “it is around technical activity that the collective group can arise” and reminds us that “the real unity is that of the task rather than that of the tool” (Simondon 2017, 250, 245). This possibility takes us beyond some of the most established categories of Western metaphysics.

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9.1.6 Workplace Democracy through Adjustment and Information Simondon’s analysis of technology as a form of social and political philosophy focusses on adjustment at the level of elements and information at the level of ensembles. Such demands would be best addressed through a theory of workplace democracy. This can be clarified with reference to the history of technologies within the capitalist mode of production beginning from where Marx left off the story. In Marx’s history industrial production stood as the most recent form of capitalism. In that period, the possibility of workplace democracy as a fully functioning form was not possible because the authoritarian control of labor based in the sale of labor-power had been incorporated into the technical structure. The only form in which the liberation of labor could be imagined was automation and thus freedom was understood to be outside socially-necessary labor either as free time or marginal, utopian returns to artisanal production. Even Herbert Marcuse’s conception of freedom was held in thrall by this limit due to his unwillingness to enter the philosophy of technics. Marcuse consistently argued that for the attainment of the realm of freedom, to quote Marx, “the shortening of the working day is its basic prerequisite” (Cap3 820; see Marcuse PCL 150; Marcuse 1969b, 20–1; Marcuse 1972a, 30). The ground of this distinction in Marx is his analysis of machinery and automation as the form of “the absorption of the labor process in its material character as a mere moment of the realization process of capital” (Gr 693). This is Marx’s last formulation of the ‘contradiction of capitalism’ based upon the reduction of human labor by machinery in modern industry such that the growth of the productive forces expels living labor from the labor process and creates the material conditions for human freedom outside labor. The worker “steps to the side of the production process instead of being its chief actor” and, on this basis, orients himself to “the appropriation of his own general productive power, his understanding of nature and his mastery of it by virtue of his presence as a social body” to liberate “the development of the social individual” and the “general intellect” (Gr 705–6). Marcuse held fast to Marx’s distinction between the realm of freedom and that of necessity and argued that the shortening of the working day, understood as necessary work, was the condition for free labor—which would become more like play in the sense that it is not tied to material conditions and thus becomes self-actualizing. In Eros and Civilization, he associated this stage with “the highest maturity of civilization, when all basic needs can be satisfied with a minimum of expenditure of physical and mental energy in a minimum of time” (Marcuse 1962, 177). Marcuse did go further to argue that time freed from industrial production might become like play and become an expression of the human personality, however in both cases the internal structure of the dominant technical process

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itself would remain unchanged. Intervention within the technical process itself was made impossible by the subjection of the worker to the demands of the machine. Attempts at workplace democracy would thus be confined to interventions at the level of management—such as the inclusion of workers’ representatives on boards of scheduling, production quotas, promotion and retirement, and even investment and business strategy. All of these deal with the forms of management of a technical process that remains unchanged in the daily activity demanded of workers. So, Marx, Marcuse and Simondon would agree that the industrial process at this stage is not amenable to workers’ democracy in the sense of repeated adjustment of the technical process itself. In consequence, the goal of socialism at this stage must be, and was, confined to one of contesting ownership of the technical process and distribution of the goods. We may see the split between East and West in the Cold War as resting on the emphasis of one or the other of these possibilities. For Simondon, there are two logics of technical development: One, a continuous logic of concretization through integration of subordinate functions on the model of cybernetic circular causality. Two, a discontinuous logic of invention operating by leaps due to the re-assemblage of elements from existing technical objects into a new object that founds a new line of subsequently continuous development. Marx’s detailed account of the capitalist technical logic from handwork through manufacture to industry is a logic of continuous concretization in Simondon’s sense. Its immanent teleology is the exclusion of living labor through automation such that freedom is understood as free time apart from labor and technical activity. A post-capitalist society would require a conception of freedom in labor, such as that held by the early Marx, that demands a leap from this logic of concretization to a new technical object. Such a new technical object would require workers to engage in technical activity that continues the activity of invention. This activity would therefore be capable of imagining leaps in technical development such that workers would become the social subjects of technical activity. This form of technical development would be consistent with Marx’s early project of making workers the subjects of the production process and exercising their labor in an all-round, creative fashion engaging all their capacities of perception, dexterity, and thought. But Marx could not ground this early project in the historical analysis of modern industry in Capital. The political form of such a mutual emancipation of workers and technics would be workplace democracy. Marcuse’s goal of synthesizing a critique of technological rationality with such a conception of labor as creative self-realization would be much aided by an appropriation of Simondon’s philosophy of technics. Simondon’s possibility of transindividual technical activity and knowledge can be seen as, in socio-political terms, aiming at workplace democracy. In philosophical

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terms, it aims to displace the priority of thought and imagination over activity and to locate both within an ongoing impersonal task which contains the possibility of individual and social self-realization. The question then becomes whether any developments beyond the industrial capitalist form open other possible understandings of workplace democracy such that it might take on a less utopian hue. Is it possible that contemporary technical forms might allow workers to have the knowledge and capability—that is to say sufficient information—to assert a continuous social adjustment of the process of production? On one sense, this is a very broad empirical question that might motivate a multitude of studies of new technologies and the social distribution of knowledge in and around them. We will confine analysis in the following section to the central philosophical question that might orient such empirical researches. 9.2 DIGITAL PRODUCTION AND THE POSSIBILITY OF FREE COOPERATIVE LABOR The insoluble problem of workplace democracy in the age of industrial production is that only a minimum degree of knowledge of the production process is required by workers to perform their role within it. However, it is now widely recognized that industrial production is on the decline and a new form of production in which digital technologies play a central role is on the rise. There have been attempts to do this sort of necessary updating of Marx’s analysis of the labor process before, notably that by Ernest Mandel in 1973, where it was argued that the “acceleration of technological innovation is a corollary of the systematic application of science to production” (Mandel 248). Moreover, Mandel argued that this “third technological revolution” involved the growth of “scientific intellectual labour . . . [which elicits] the massive reunification of intellectual and productive activity, and the entry of intellectual labour into the sphere of production” (Mandel 1978, 260). It seems, however, as if Mandel was thinking primarily of technological innovations oriented to production of material goods. He then found the contradiction of capitalism to be in a “renewed crisis of valorization, and in the growing insurgency of wage-earners against capitalist relations of production, an insurgency which can increasingly spread to intellectual producers as well” (Mandel 1978, 273). He thus saw in the contemporary scientific and technological revolution no need to revise the basic categories of the labor process nor of the form of capital as expressed in the system of value. We need to ask: what is there about digital technologies that might require the worker to accumulate and deploy greater information than previously

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such that continuous adjustment of the technical process might be possible, or even required, in the performance of their work? The key component in such a possibility is that technical digital knowledge might itself include a necessity for communication that undermines the separation of workers from each other under a hierarchical organization of the industrial form. Such lateral communication among workers could provide the technical basis for adjustment of the work process from within the work process itself (as Simondon’s theory demands). It would suggest that, unlike the technical individual of craft production based in the human body (with both nobility and deformation), or the subsumption of the human body under industrial production, the technical individual of digital production is at its core both cognitive and social. Knowledge-production in digital form may well contain a technicalsocial actor with sufficient information to engage in continuous adjustment of the production process. There are some indications that this possibility should be taken seriously. Yann Moulier-Boutang has defined cognitive capitalism as the “exploitation of the inventive force of living labour” in which living labor must be understood as “collective cognitive labour power,” such that the technical computing aspect “cannot be separated from a social accumulation of knowledge and of memory of social organisation.” (Moulier-Boutang 2011, 162, 37, 36). Jeremy Rifkin has argued that “we are now erecting a high-tech global technology platform whose defining characteristics potentially optimize the very values and operational principles that animate this age-old institution. . . . The very purpose of the new technology platform is to encourage a sharing culture, which is what the Commons is all about” (Rifkin 2014, 21). The point is that the conditions of knowledge and social interaction alter with the development of technical objects and that the contemporary conditions of digital production may well approximate those of Simondon’s gesture toward the collective group organized around technical activity more than the subsumption of human activity that Marx saw in industrial production. The possibility of workplace democracy is not evenly distributed across history. It depends upon a form of technical activity as a combination of knowledge and social interaction that can ground democratic social and political structures. In this respect, there may be a greater analogy between digital technology and craft production than either has with manufacture or industrial production. The possibility explored here does not solve all the problems of workplace democracy to be sure. The extractive industries which provide the raw metals for digital technologies, for example, are based on the old industrial form. So, we may well find ourselves in a period of overlapping and inseparable technical forms contained within the contemporary capitalist mode of production. Nevertheless, the emergence of digital technologies with a key role in living

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labor suggests the possibility that the limitations of the industrial form of production that affected even Marx’s analyses due to their historical specificity, determination, and horizon may now become breached by the immanent, emergent development of a communicative-technical form of production which may well spark a renewal of the project of workplace democracy. In this section we will consider the features of what has until now been quickly referred to as “digital production” in order to investigate this possibility systematically. 9.2.1 The “Fragment on Machines” It has become a matter of widespread observation that contemporary capitalism utilizes science and science-based technology to an unprecedented degree. This observation has been the basis for attempts to name the phenomenon that have included: knowledge economy or society, information economy or society, zero marginal cost society (Rifkin), scientific or technological society, digital production or labor, and cognitive capitalism (Moulier-Boutang). The last term has the advantage of emphasizing that the new form of labor and production occurs still within a capitalist framework, though it may well have mutated as a result. We will take up this issue in the next section and confine ourselves here to the new form of living labor and the new possibilities for social re-organization that it may contain. An important and early reference point in this discussion is Marx’s observation in Grundrisse that is worthwhile quoting at length. To the degree that large industry develops, the creation of real wealth [wirklichen Reichtums] comes to depend less on labour time and on the amount of labour employed [dem Quantum angewandter Arbeit] than on the power of the agencies set in motion during labour time [or working hours, die während der Arbeitszeit], whose ‘powerful effectiveness’ is itself in turn out of all proportion to the direct labour time [or immediate working hours, unmittelbaren Arbeitszeit] spent on their production, but depends rather on the general state of science and on the progress of technology. . . . the human being comes to relate more as watchman and regulator to the production process itself. He steps to the side of the production process instead of being its chief actor. . . . As soon as labour in its direct form [or immediate form, die Arbeit in unmittelbarer Form] has ceased to be the great well-spring of wealth [große Quelle des Reichtums], labour time ceases and must cease to be its measure, and hence exchange value [Tauschwert] (must cease to be the measure) of use value [Gebrauchswerts]. . . . The development of fixed capital [i.e. machinery—note added by author] indicates [or, shows, announces, registers, zeigt an, anzeigen] to what degree general social knowledge has become a direct force of production, and to what degree, hence, the conditions of the process of social life itself have come under

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the control of the general intellect [in English in original] and been transformed in accordance with it (Gr 704–6; Gr-G 592–4).

This observation, and to some extent prediction, is in most of its aspects not specifically Marxist. It amounts to the observation that modern industry creates machinery that reduces labor-time tendentially toward zero so that knowledge becomes increasingly important in production processes. In this general form it could be shared with the many commentators since Marx who have made the same or similar observation. There are two aspects, however, which do pertain to Marx’s theory: one, that this development breaks through the regime of value that structures and constrains capitalist production and, two, that the new significance of social knowledge in production augurs a new social form in which the general intellect controls and organizes social production. Both of these pertain to the extent to which Marx’s observation, and by implication those that later make the same observation, isolates a factor that could lead to the transformation of capitalism into a post-capitalist society ruled by the social organization of knowledge through a widespread general intellectual capacity. Let us consider these two aspects of this text in turn. The thesis that the development of automatic machinery and the development of the general intellect breaks through the law of value that structures capitalism has become associated with a group of writers loosely collected under the name Italian Marxism although it does include other writers who cannot be so designated such as André Gorz who has stated the thesis succinctly: knowledge has become the main productive force; . . . as a consequence, the products of social labour are no longer chiefly crystallized labour but crystallized knowledge; and that the exchange of commodities is no longer determined in the last instance by the quantity of general social labour they contain but mainly by their content in terms of general information, knowledge and intelligence. It is now this latter, not abstract social labour, measurable by a single yardstick, that becomes the main social substance common to all commodities. It becomes the main source of value . . . (Gorz 2010, 34–5).

Similarly, Yann Moulier-Boutang asserts that “the economy is not based on knowledge as such . . . but on the exploitation of knowledge” in order to conclude that a “new form of value” is at stake because “the virtually zero marginal cost [here using Rifkin’s phrase] of reproduction of knowledgegoods and information-goods) challenge the principle of the unicity of prices (Moulier-Boutang 2011, 162, 49, 103). In the same manner, Paolo Virno puts the basic point, that “the so-called law of value (that the value of a commodity is determined by the labour-time embodied in it) is regarded by Marx as the armature of modern social relations, yet it is both eroded and refuted by capitalist development” (Virno 2007, 4; see also Vercellone 2007). The key

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assumption in this interpretation of Marx is that the law of value determines the actual price of a given commodity—in an average or general manner— in capitalist society. This is to miss entirely the abstractions that underlie the theory of value which we have discussed in some detail in the previous chapter. The law that the value of a commodity is determined by abstract homogeneous labor-time applies only within the theoretical reductions from concrete to abstract labor which, being without qualities, can be measured only by the quantity of time expended in labor; to labor-time which is socially necessary; from complex to simple labor; and from the variability of simple labor across space and time to a given simple quantity in a given place and time. The inescapable conclusion is that the law of value operates exclusively within these theoretical reductions and not to the surface of capitalist society. If contemporary price of knowledge-commodities in the existing historical capitalist market is determined by knowledge and not labor-time, it is no less the case that nothing substantial has changed within the system of value in question. First of all, actual labor was always often complex. It is only the theoretical simplification oriented to the system of value that claimed to be able to treat complex labor as a multiple of simple labor, and this is no less the case now in the same theoretical sense. The application of knowledge is no less a form of labor than any other. In the concrete sense, Marx well knew that the actual price of commodities was not thus determined but through the concrete differences which are reduced by his abstractions, as well as the necessary separation of surplus value into capital (interest), land (rent), and labor (wages)—the trinity formula. A persisting confusion between political economy and the critique of political economy is behind this false thesis. While the thesis is false with respect to a thorough understanding of the law of value that Marx elaborated in Capital, it is nevertheless the case that Marx stated (without elaboration one may add) this thesis in the Grundrisse “Fragment on Machines” in more or less the same terms that some writers draw upon it today. Why? Michael Heinrich has correctly shown that in the notebooks that make up the Grundrisse Marx had still not developed the distinction between abstract and concrete labor that is the distinct contribution of Capital, Vol. 1 (Heinrich 2014, 203-10). Clearly, without this distinction, the entire theoretical edifice elaborated in Capital would be without its crucial underpinning. The absence of a theoretical distinction between abstract and concrete labor, which are confused when this fragment is used as a commentary on contemporary digital production, is shown clearly in the wording of the fragment itself. At the beginning of the section quoted above, note that Marx says that “the creation of real wealth [wirklichen Reichtums] comes to depend less on labour time.” He uses “wealth” [Reichtums] and neither value

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[Wert] nor valorization [Verwertungsprozess]—which indicates a failure to distinguish between human wealth as a use-value and the valorization of such use through exchange-value, or simple “value.” Moreover, when he later says that “labour in its direct form has ceased to be the great well-spring of wealth [große Quelle des Reichtums], labour time ceases and must cease to be its measure, and hence exchange value [Tauschwert] (must cease to be the measure) of use value [Gebrauchswerts],” we can see a systematic confusion—from the standpoint achieved in Capital—of wealth [Reichtums] with value [Wert or Tauschwert]. For this to express an end to the regime of value it would be necessary for value to no longer be measured by labortime—not “wealth” which is never so measured. And even further, the notion of “direct, or immediate labour time” which Marx uses in this fragment has no discernible meaning apart from the simple expression “labor-time.” (If indirect, or mediate, labor-time such as applied in knowledge were to be discounted as labor, then Marx’s whole explication of labor in Capital would non-sensically apply only to irreducibly simple forms of labor and could not be an analysis of the capitalist system.) Insofar as mediated labor-time—that is to say, labor-time expended on making tools or preparing natural resources for productive use—is distinct from direct labor-time, it is nevertheless part and parcel of the production of value, so that value-production can be in no way associated only with so-called immediate labor-time. Thus we may conclude that the “Fragment on Machines,” while it expresses an early appreciation of the growing role of science-based technology in production, erroneously suggests that the increasing use of machinery, indeed its teleological extension to the removal of the worker from the production process to become its regulator, undermines the rule of value that defines the capitalist system as such. Let us now consider the second thesis developed from interpretation of this fragment that the new significance of social knowledge in production augurs a new social form in which the general intellect controls and organizes social production. Marx’s suggestion, which is not very worked through at all, is that the growth of the significance of scientific technology in production “indicates” the extent to which social production has been subordinated to the general intellect—which is another way of saying that a socialist-communist overcoming of capitalism has occurred. “Indicates” is a good translation insofar as it highlights the meaning of showing, announcing, registering or manifesting [anzeigen] which means that it is a manner of illustrating the level of a historical development not a proof that such a development has, or will, take place. Nonetheless, Marx clearly does think that the immanent development of the replacement of labor by machinery in modern industry augurs, at the very least, a measure for the historical development of the general intellect and perhaps, at most, a lever toward a greater development of it.

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The first question to ask of such a concept of the general intellect is “how general is it?”. Clearly the many tasks operative within contemporary digital production are not identical in the forms and contents of knowledge that they require. Specialist knowledge defined through the division of labor persists. So the general intellect could not possibly mean the overcoming of such specialist knowledges. Nevertheless, it could still be the case that such the acquiring and application of such specialist knowledges now require a background which has been called a “diffuse intellectuality” in the working population (Vercellone 2007, 26–7). A general state of education in the working population of course depends upon a wide variety of factors such as the state of public education, wages, unemployment, etc. Nonetheless, it would be fair to say that a diffuse intellectuality is tied to digital production (considered as a historically leading factor in contemporary capitalism) as the background for the acquisition and application of specialist knowledges. Moreover, as has also been widely argued, such a diffuse intellectuality cannot be reduced to formal knowledge and its acquisition but extends to informal knowledges embedded in the practices of living labor (Gorz 2010, 140–51; Virno 2007, 5). The issue of “diffuse intellectuality” resides in the complex relation between necessary specialist knowledges, formal training, and background informal knowledge. It seems unassailable that an economy and society in which digital technologies are a central emergent force cannot but sustain some form of distinct diffuse intellectuality. It may even be the case that a central contradiction in higher education for the skills and training necessary for advanced technological production is that capitalist forces attempt to confine education to acquisition of skills defined as necessary within the production process whereas such skill acquisition under conditions of advanced technology and its reliance on science contains a universal dimension that we could follow Marx in calling the “general intellect” (Angus 2016). But even if we may define this overlapping realm of specialist knowledges, formal training, and background informal knowledge as central to the actual state of diffuse intellectuality and the realization of a general intellect today, it still requires clarification of its dependent relation to the new characteristics of digital production and its implication for an altered form of capitalism or its surpassing. So it seems best to use the concept of the general intellect as Marx seems to have intended it—as a measure of historical transformation toward a reconciliation between work activity and human thought, as a question to be asked of contemporary developments, and as a possibility in the immanent development of modern industry’s replacement of labor by machines. Though it is well to recall that Marx’s observation in itself is no more detailed or analytical than that of those many commentators who have observed the growth of scientific technology as a productive force.

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9.2.2 Characteristics of Digital Production We have characterized digital production in a preliminary manner as a technical application within living labor which is exercised through a complex interaction of specialist knowledges, formal training, and background informal knowledge. This bears a relation to Marx’s “general intellect” but is more fundamental insofar as it pertains to living labor in its exercise and not only the knowledge of regulation by a watch-keeper removed from the production process—which is an immanent development of the exclusion of labor, especially knowledge as imbedded in labor, from immediate production by machinery. In a similar manner, the characteristics of digital production at issue here are based upon the characteristics of the institution of technique as digital culture which we explored in chapter 4 but are altered and developed by their role in the living labor process. 9.2.2.1 Recall of the Standpoint Achieved at the End of Part II We showed in chapter 4 that digital culture engenders a crisis that is a contemporary version of Husserl’s crisis of the European sciences insofar as higher unities of cultural meaning and value cannot be brought into coherence. Information, understood as both pieces of information and their transmission, cannot accumulate into the required coherence insofar as the traditional boundaries and hierarchies that allowed the definition of meaning and value have been overcome by sheer multiplicities of information. Were coherence to be possible it would require a new form of emergent meaning from such multiplicities. As we concluded in chapter 4: The danger of pure transparency is lack of meaning or value. Let us state in summary form the characteristics of information by means of which it can be understood as the institution of digital culture: information is both knowledge and its communication, content and representation; it operates within a self-monitoring and self-regulating network; it is a universal medium of translation of cultural contents which can define the knowledge-boundaries of different media of communication. The current state of culture was described as a technical situation in which the multiplicities of information are translated through a digital medium such that speed of translation approaches infinity and thus delay approaches zero. Similarly, silences or the unconscious within a culture that is made necessary by the establishment of stable meaning are reduced to zero. This is the central factor that undermines traditional boundaries and hierarchies. The key factor of transversality due to the collapsing of knowledge with its communication undermines any stable context of interpretation which could initiate emergent meaning and value. Contemporary digital culture is in crisis because it ap-

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proaches a pure transparency without delays or silences that could initiate emergent meaning. While chapter 4 investigated information as both the content and representation of culture in which content is absorbed into its representation, the current context of the use of technics as information within living labor contains the possibility of coherence required by the healing function of phenomenology. It depends upon the capacity of living labor to unify multiplicities and define delays/silences. Only thereby might it define a horizon from which meaning and value could be determined. This possibility was only pointed to abstractly in chapter 4 due to the limitation of the inquiry to the representation of meaning and value. There, we concluded that it is in the small and continuous difference between complete absorption and the singularity of the registering site that the crisis and healing of digital culture occur. Even the representation of an information system requires a registering site, though its singularity is reduced to a near-zero degree of absorption into the information system. The registering site of meaning and value, we saw in chapter 5, depends upon an experiential intensity. The alternative to absorption thus consists in living labor as the generation of an intensity that, through delays and silences, may develop an emergent culture with a distinct horizon. 9.2.2.2 The Potential of Digital Production for Free Cooperative Labor We have learned from Gilbert Simondon that adjustment and information are the central aspects of a new potential for workplace democracy. It is essential that the worker have sufficient information about the labor process to be able to intervene in that process and adjust its technical structure. Adding to Simondon, we have shown that workplace democracy requires in addition a social, communicative relation between workers. It is now possible to see that these basic prerequisites are present in digital production: workers with a working knowledge of their tools and tasks; workers with a direct social relation through digital technology that is not established through a hierarchy dependent on capital. There are two main characteristics of digital production that ground the possibility of workplace democracy: 1) direct cooperation between workers (unmediated by capital) through the digital network, and 2) the inventiveness required by digital production such that the subjectivity of the worker is engaged in the work process. The transversality of the network that allows cooperation between workers is built into digital technology understood as information—both knowledge and its communication (Vercellone 2005, 10; Rifkin 2014, 15, 156, 178; Moulier-Boutang 2011, 57, 66, 77, 117). This generates a new horizon for living labor that exceeds the immanent teleology of a reduction of living labor to a minimum of “watchman and regulator” that defined industrial capitalism and

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contains a potential for living labor to become its own adjustor and organizer within living labor itself. The horizon of digital production is thus free, cooperative labor within the technical process. Digital labor also requires inventiveness of the worker in contrast to fitting into a labor process pre-structured by capital such as prevailed in the industrial era. “The more the elements of objectified knowledge come to be absorbed by cyber organization . . ., the more irreplaceable the role becomes of sharing in networks, collective creative intelligence, of attention and of the management of the fuzzy logics of language” (Moulier-Boutang 2011, 77; see Gorz 2010, 16–9). It is such inventiveness that grounds the ability of the worker to engage in re-designing the work process while it is underway. Inventive transversality, we may say, is the technical possibility of digital production. The digital worker is in an important sense a new worker, a worker whose subjective dimension is relied upon and developed in the work process, and who, as a consequence, can imagine the possibility of a work process that is not organized and exploited by capital. Insofar as the next production process relies on the subjectivity altered in this one, the production of subjectivity through continuous learning is integral to digital labor (Gorz 2010, 7–14; Moulier-Boutang 2011, 48). Inventive transversality is the living component of living labor that rescues the possibility of workplace democracy in digital production. In the terms of chapter 4, the complete absorption of the registering site that institutes a crisis of digital culture can be undone through the living digital labor that demands the singularity of the registering site due to the significant production and transformation of subjectivities in their collective organization that registers. This registering within the digital system is the effect of the experiential intensity of the subjective dimension of living labor. The healing potential is that this intensity could operate within a free cooperative work process that would initiate delays and silences through its practical adjustments and thus contains the further potential to develop a wider emergent culture saturated with meaning and value. 9.3 THE CAPITALIST FORM OF DIGITAL PRODUCTION The potential of free cooperative labor is in tension with the process of exploitation and appropriation by capital. Any actually-existing capitalist system is an articulation of various forms of capital and processes of labor, so emerging digital labor co-exists with other forms of labor from the craft, manufacture, and industrial stages. The current purpose is not to evaluate the complex interaction of these components within the contemporary capitalist system as a whole, it is rather to isolate the specific form of capitalism

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entwined with digital labor alongside the potential for its overcoming. What form of capitalist appropriation of surplus value corresponds to digital labor? Marx distinguished between the formal and real subsumption of labor under capital. Formal subsumption corresponds to manufacture in which the labor process was still organized through crafts and trades even though they are beginning to be affected by those parts which combine in a single production process. Capitalist exploitation was oriented primarily to the lengthening of the working day (absolute surplus value). During the process of the re-organization of labor by machines in modern industry, the knowledge inherent in crafts and trades was increasingly objectified in machinery. The real subsumption of labor in modern industry structured the detailed performance of labor through the machinery and appropriated the surplus primarily through the intensity of the work process (relative surplus value). We need to ask whether, and in what way, digital production implies a new form of capitalist appropriation—which we will call “neo-mercantilism.” Further, inquiry is required into whether the regime of value that Marx utilized to describe and critique capital still applies in the same manner to neo-mercantilism. Directly correlated to this question is that of whether the site of conflict between capital and labor has shifted. In manufacture the knowledge embedded in crafts meant that workers could imagine their control of the production process, while this possibility was countered by the threat of unemployment, laws against trade unions, and direct physical repression. In modern industry, the workers were subject to the machine process; if they could imagine the absence of capital at all, they were still haunted by the monstrous and impermeable structure of the machine. They could imagine freedom not as control of the work process but as the gradual shrinking of the hours of necessary work under its thrall. As we have seen, the digital worker can once again imagine the absence of capital, though we need to pinpoint more exactly where this struggle is situated. 9.3.1 Neo-Mercantilism We have defined digital labor through the concept of inventive transversality. Since inventiveness and transversal social relations are intrinsic to digital labor, capitalist appropriation recedes from control of the labor process and moves toward the product. Capital neither enforces working hours nor the intensity of work, but claims the product. Thus we see that many corporations engaged in advanced digital networking leave workers largely free in the time and space of their labor as long as the product contains sufficient inventiveness or novelty to be marketable. Appropriation moves toward the product

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and away from the labor process itself. Several features of contemporary capitalism have been observed to pertain to this shift. Carlo Vercellone has argued that “the control of the labor process and the modalities of appropriation of the surplus are founded, in the first instance, on mechanisms external to the directly productive sphere, as, for example, in the model of the putting-out system” (Vercellone 2007, 20). The “puttingout system,” which is sometimes known as “domestic industry,” refers to a method of production in which, prior to the concentration of production in one large space which led to manufacture proper, capitalist merchants sold or loaned out materials such as textiles or raw wool to workers who worked in their own homes and were paid a given rate for the finished articles that they produced. The labor process remained unsupervised in length and intensity apart from its “retrospective” regulation through the price of the finished product. One aspect of regulation through the product was, of course, that no more than an average amount of material was wasted or lost. One of the key areas of struggle between workers and capital was over this average rate; workers attempted to “appropriate” or “steal” (depending on one’s view of the matter) some of the raw materials so that they could use or sell some of the product themselves and not yield it to the merchant. Despite the similarity of digital labor to the putting-out system due to the focus on the product as the source of appropriation and class struggle, digital labor is distinct since, as we have stressed, it is already social, cooperative labor unlike the separate and individual, or sometimes family, labor of the putting-out system. Since the product becomes the site of capitalist appropriation and class struggle, the relation of the product to the market becomes central to the social significance of digital labor. Yann Moulier-Boutang has used the term “capture” to refer to appropriation of “the innovation present in the interactive cognitive processes of social cooperation and of tacit knowledge” (MoulierBoutang 2011, 51). Capturing is the activity of recovering, through the commodification and marketability of the product, the process of production as a capitalist process. Unlike the direct subordination of labor in industry, the free cooperative nature of digital production creates the possibility of a similarly free and cooperative product offered to “the commons.” Capturing is a clawing-back, as it were, of a product that contains a tendency to escape its commodity form and, through commodifying the product, enacts a retrogressive capturing of the prior labor that produced it. There is thus created a tension between workers viewing themselves as cooperative producers of the commons and as entrepreneurs producing a product; they are encouraged to valorize themselves—to use for their own advancement the collective inventiveness of digital labor—because their activity contains the possibility of an alternative (Gorz 2010, 19; Roggero 2011, 129). The struggle for free

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cooperative labor thus becomes a struggle to view oneself in other terms than a subjective capacity to produce commodities through introjection of the market mentality into individuated subjectivities. In this, the struggle of ideas operative in subjectivities becomes important. If these new features sufficiently outline a new form of capitalism corresponding to changes in the labor process, we must ask how, in general terms, this form of capitalism may be characterized. I want to suggest that it may well be termed a form of neo-mercantilism.8 Classical mercantilism was treated by Marx as a transitional period between pre-capitalist modes of production and the full-blown capitalist form of manufacture. Due to the process of appropriation of materials by domestic workers—in our day coyly called “shrinkage”—in the putting-out system, it was to the advantage of the capitalist to concentrate the workers under one roof so that they could be supervised more successfully. From this point, alterations in the labor process and technology became possible by combining the individual labor processes into larger-scale supra-individual processes. Weaving looms, for example, were no longer restricted in size due to the proportions of the human body but became very large operations undertaken by several workers performing different functions. In this way the putting-out system can be considered transitional between pre-capitalist and capitalist modes of production (Gr 509–12). However, classical mercantilism not only operated on a domestic front through the putting-out system. It operated on an international front, from where it derives its name, through the buying-andselling of finished materials and transporting them from one part of the world to another (Cap3 335–6). Goods that were rare in England, such as spices and silk, could command monopoly prices, whereas they could be bought from their source of production at a local low price due to their ubiquity. Profit was made in the sphere of exchange by buying low and selling dear, the formula for which is M-C-M’—money exchanged for commodities and sold for a greater amount of money (Cap3 325–31). In the case of the silk trade, and other characteristic mercantile adventures, there were all sorts of additional and inexact costs—such as those for bribes, warding off pirates or mutinies, etc.—and the enterprise might well bring about the bankruptcy of the merchant if it were to fail. The key factors in mercantile enterprise were the distance over which goods were transported (thus ensuring their rarity) and the time that such transport might take (perhaps endangering the state of the goods through degeneration or piracy). Transportation and its intrinsic factors of space and time were essential to profit in the sphere of exchange. Once trade routes became well known, and stabilized by control of sea-routes, the risk was lowered and profit fell.

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We want to suggest that the new forms of emergent cognitive capitalism are located within what one might call a neo-mercantilist socio-economic form—though without the historicist assumption dominant in Marx’s analysis that it is a transitional form toward manufacture and modern industry. Each individual, group, cooperative, corporation or alliance attempts to maximize its access to the common knowledge pool in order to use and transform it into a commodity that can claim a price on the market and thereby a portion of the social wealth. Unlike traditional mercantilism, which was based on buying cheap and selling dear by monopolizing a market and/or taking advantage of great distances and barriers, the “neo” here would be that the commodity for sale is still scarce, but now usually because of its newness (which is a kind of temporary rarity), so that its advantage would tend to decay over time—not unlike what happened to a mercantile monopoly once trade routes became widely known, established and safe. The temporal decay of commodityrecuperation of common knowledge is a central factor requiring analysis in the contemporary form of capitalism. While there would remain capitalist class relations inside some enterprises, the struggle of the working class in such industries would not necessarily be to transform them as such, but to exit to become an independent, self-defining enterprise. In this way, the transversal relations established by commodities would predominate over the class relations within enterprises. It also means that independent enterprises (individuals, small groups, or cooperatives) can operate without internal capitalist class relations and that “progressive” capitalist enterprises can be forced to compete for workers by relaxing control of the labor process. This would be a form of capitalism coordinated through commodification and circulation and not primarily through control of the work process—so that emergent tendencies in the current form are in this respect more like formal subsumption of labor in the putting-out system: ubiquity of the commodity and market but greater flexibility in the process of production, precisely because the process of production is dominated by realization in controlled conditions of sale. Neo-mercantilism is a product-oriented form of appropriation in which the time required to bring the commodity to market is essential, since in digital production space considerations tend toward zero. Insofar as the commodity arrives to market ahead of other similar products, it commands a monopoly price, but monopoly price decays as similar products arrive to market. It may even decay sufficiently that ownership of one specific type of similar product is no longer significant and the product slips from being a commodity into the realm of common goods—such as an old word-processing program for example. Inventiveness of concrete labor is the key factor in minimizing the time required for production. Thus the relative inventiveness of an enterprise’s

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workforce—what is often today erroneously called “human capital”—is the key to survival and prosperity in the market. In this sense the subjective factor of the labor process is central—much as the skill of one’s ship’s captain or navigator was for merchant capital. The skilful worker thus commands a good wage, especially through the threat of flight to another (perhaps one’s own) enterprise. Since the site of appropriation and struggle for digital labor is the product in relation to the market, it can be seen as a contemporary modification of mercantile capital. Having enumerated its characteristics, we may now ask whether the neomercantile form of capital involves a different form of the subsumption of labor under capital than its formal subsumption in manufacture and real subsumption in industry? Emanuele Leonardi, has suggested that the concept of impression might serve such a function. Impression is not configured as the purely formal act which consists in drawing an immaterial border; on the contrary, it presents itself as a direct tool for governing life, as a biopolitical dispositif aimed at selecting subjective trajectories ‘potentially’ functional to capitalist valorisation. I say ‘potentially’ because, although the negative injunction occurs ex ante, its economic validation, its inclusion in the circuits of accumulation cannot but manifest itself ex post, at the end of the process, when the unpredictable but not unlimited outcome actually appears (Leonardi 2010, 259).

We may take this to mean that the terrain for struggle has become that of subjectivity due to its central role in living concrete labor. Since digital labor occurs through transversal inventiveness, it can imagine its exercise outside capitalist domination. Such domination therefore requires the direct governing of life in order to make it amenable to the production of commodities. However, the effective production of commodities, especially in a manner that is successful in a decaying market, cannot be guaranteed in advance but can only be confirmed after the fact. The struggle between capitalist capture and the free cooperative potential of digital labor is played out in the prior selection of subjective trajectories—that is to say, in a struggle over the subject one is, wants to be, and the subject one is pressured to be within the horizon of an indeterminate future in which their upshot will become known. The diffuse intellectuality within which digital labor is exercised resides in the complex relation between necessary specialist knowledges, formal training, and background informal knowledge. Impression is the new form of the subjection of labor to neo-mercantile capital exercised through the product. Since this subjection applies to subjectivity, it is the basis for the extension of the struggle for autonomy from workplace democracy to a potential democracy pervasive throughout the social form—in the end, a

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struggle over who we are and who we want to be—that is, a direct struggle over meaning and value. 9.3.2 Neo-Mercantilism and the System of Value We have suggested that digital labor, due to its inventive transversality, contains a potential for free cooperative labor and that, since the terrain of conflict between capital and labor has become the subjectivity that underlies inventiveness, the potential of free cooperation is extended from the workplace to the social whole. Further, we have claimed that the form of capitalism that captures digital labor can be termed “neo-mercantilism” and that the subjection of labor takes a new form (beyond formal and real subsumption) that can be termed “impression.” Neo-mercantilism impresses labor and the social form through its capture of the product of labor—which distinguishes it from industrial capital where real subsumption occurs through the buying and selling of labor power on the market and its concrete use in production. Marx’s critique of the system of value depends fundamentally on the concept of abstract labor. It is through the concept of homogeneous labor measured solely by its duration that the system of value equilibrates all the labors in social production. In Marx’s critique, the system of value, through the distinction between abstract and concrete labor, explains the source of surplus value in labor and its appropriation through the buying of labor-power and payment in wages, though it obscures the diffusion of natural fecundity throughout the system of value by attributing it to labor. In contrast, the inventiveness of digital labor appears to militate against its theoretical reduction to a multiple of simple labor. Also, subsumption of labor to capital that occurs through the product appears to take a different form than that oriented to the exchange of labor-power. Thus, we need to undertake a retrospective assessment of the viability of Marx’s analysis of the system of value to digital production. Does neo-mercantilism require revision or rejection of Marx’s critique of capitalism based on the system of value? First of all, capture of labor through its product undermines the basic premise of the fetishism of commodities. Commodity fetishism consists in the notion that the relation between workers and the relation between labor and capital appear to be relations between products whereas they are actually social relations—the relation between workers established by the capitalist ownership of machinery and that of capital and labor between those who own the means of production and those who do not. If digital labor is characterized by inventive transversality then the relation between workers is a direct (unmediated) cooperation which contains the potential of free cooperative labor precisely because it is not mediated through capital. If, in neo-mercantilism,

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the subsumption of labor to capital is through the product, then it is not a fetishism but a fact that it appears to be a relation between products. So, the relation between labor and capital, which remains fundamental to capitalism in neo-mercantilism, is no longer shrouded in a systemic mystification but is apparent as what it is—a cooperative labor process engaged in a struggle over the ownership of the product with the external force of capital. Does this mean that neo-mercantilism overcomes the utility of the concept of abstract labor? Let us consider two characteristic forms of labor organization. If the worker remains a worker paid by a time-unit (hour, week, month) that is a component of a wholly-owned labor process, then there is no substantial difference from the situation described by Marx and one would expect all of the categories of the system of value to pertain. The inventiveness of labor, since it is one aspect of a complex process, can be theoretically considered as a multiple of simple labor in the same way that an engineer’s work may be so considered in an industrial process. But there is clearly a tendency in digital production to treat each worker as a sub-contractor, a self-employed entrepreneur, such that each worker becomes both worker and capitalist in one section of the work. Or, in any case, for the capitalist to leave the work process relatively unsupervised and render the worker accountable only through the final product. This tendency is clearly allied to the significance of inventiveness—since inventiveness can neither be effectively demanded nor supervised, it is neither the monitoring of labor nor its duration that is significant but its product. In this case, the relation between the workers is established by their self-produced product. Even while cooperation in the work process is still required, it is the cooperation of owners of labor-power whose cooperation is through their products. This case is in one sense similar to that of simple commodity producers—in that each worker is simultaneously owner and that their relation is established through their products—but it is different insofar as the complete labor process requires the collaboration of several owner-workers. It is not that some make films and some are blacksmiths. In designing a computer game, for example, the work process is cooperative in that one part of it—say designing the appearance of the characters or the terrain on which they operate—is essentially cooperatively related to the others. There are two competing tendencies: the first tends to overcome the commodity fetishism of industrial capital because the social relations are indeed established by products, and the second tends to see them as directly social relations because of their role in the work process. This is another way of phrasing the struggle over the impression of subjectivity in neo-mercantilism where capital struggles for the image of the entrepreneur and digital laborers potentially struggle for an impression of cooperative labor. In short, to the extent that the work-time model is overcome by a product-oriented one

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subject to decay, the utility of the concept of abstract labor recedes. Thus, there is reason to believe that neither commodity fetishism nor abstract labor are concepts that apply meaningfully to digital labor or, at least, its teleological development. Time-decay of the product and impression of the subject are concepts that pertain to the essence of digital labor. Does this mean that the system of value as an explanation of the structure and movement of capital needs to be dismissed? Or, to put the issue in another way, do the theoretical simplifications which allow Marx to construct the system of value as an explanation of the hidden structure of capital retain any contemporary viability? Stated universally, is the system of value as abstract homogenization of any importance in understanding digital production? Recall the four simplifications, or reductions, that underlie the system of value: concrete to abstract labor which, being without qualities, can be measured only by the quantity of time expended in labor; to labor-time which is socially necessary; from complex to simple labor; and from the variability of simple labor across space and time to a given simple quantity in a given place and time. All of these are theoretically applicable because abstract labor—labor considered only from the viewpoint of its duration—is the fundamental structuring aspect of the system of value, and abstract labor can be structuring only if the exchange of labor-power is the center of the system. To this extent it is clear from what has been said that there is a tendency within digital labor toward a system in which all workers are entrepreneurs in control of their own labor process and related through their products. This tendency contains an immanent teleology toward the nullification of the explanatory power of the system of value. Moreover, while natural fecundity is homogenized in abstract nature within the regime of value to appear as a function of the system as a whole (which is then attributed solely to labor), in neo-mercantilism the focus on the specificity of the product makes natural fecundity thematic through the concrete characteristics of the product. However, there is another tendency within digital production that is generated from the relation of the product to the market. As we have shown, it is the newness of the product on the market that determines its value and this monopoly price tends to decay with time. Speed in the production process is thus essential in being first to the market with a product. Greater inventiveness, greater access to common knowledge, better cooperation between workers, etc. all contribute to success. There is thus a tendency retrojected from the product to the labor process for the labor process not to be an average, simple equivalent to a similar labor process but to be a better-than-equivalent so that it can speed the production and marketing of the product. The equilibrating component of the system of value congruent to neo-mercantilism would thus not be a simple, homogeneous, unit of labor-time, but a minus-

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factor of such a simple unit. If the average simple labor-time of a given process is ‘x’ then a new production would only be viable if its average simple time was faster—that is to say x-minus. How much minus would depend on the specific process and its average conditions and well as the speed of inventions becoming available to the common stock of knowledge. In sum, there is a retrojection of the temporal decay of the market-price toward a subtraction of necessary labor-time in production which produces a shadow-price for labor-time such that neo-mercantilism’s focus on the product does not entirely elude the system of value. 9.3.3 Neo-Mercantilism as the Capitalist System of Digital Labor Let us then state in summary form the character of the contemporary capitalist system considered exclusively from the side of the organization of digital labor. The shift provoked by the inventive transversality of labor from the labor process to the product implies two distinct tendencies on the neomercantilist system: 1.  A shadow-value of labor retrojected from the product in its market milieu toward the labor process which, while not vigilated in detail, is comparable to other labor processes due to the competition of their products. Shadow-value requires a similar shadow-concept of abstract labor. The shadow-character originates from the fact that the labor process has become derivative of the market rather than the reverse in the industrial capitalism that provided Marx’s model of the highest stage of capitalism. 2.  A monopoly price commanded by the uniqueness of the product which is subject to a temporal decay and tendency for the product to sink into common knowledge without price. Note that the first tendency deals with value but the second deals with price. We are suggesting that the price of the product is the leading edge of the system, whereas with increasing delay there follows a tendency toward value and the labor process. Also, the fecundity of nature comes to the fore due to the primacy of the product. These two tendencies are intertwined: First, the shadow-value of labor derives from the competition of products on the market and therefore depends upon their relative availability—but not complete availability which would destroy their marketability. It pertains to a median state of production in which the product is not utterly unique (in which case its incomparability would retroject to the specific labor process rather than a shadow-value of homogeneous labor) but neither is it utterly available (in which case it would

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command at best a nominal price and its retrojection to the labor process would be marginal with respect to other products). Thus, we may say that shadow-value is limited to a median state of temporal decay. Second, the monopoly price commanded by a unique product demands access to, and disposition of, necessary resources of nature and labor through a struggle for an entrepreneurial impression of society and economy. In sum, while the neo-mercantilist system tends to decay into a system of shadow-value, it is driven forward by neo-mercantilist products that function as exemplars of entrepreneurial impression and unique specific production processes. 9.4 PLANETARY TECHNOLOGY In this chapter we have considered several aspects of a contemporary philosophy of technology: Marx’s account of the technical structure of modern industry; Simondon’s account of the role of technical invention in workplace democracy; the inventive transversality that contains a possibility for workplace democracy in digital labor; and the neo-mercantilist capitalist form that keeps that possibility in check. In conclusion, we will present a summary account of the planetary technology that corresponds to abstract nature which is the dominant form of technology-nature relations in contemporary neo-mercantile capitalism. We have shown above that digital production contains an inherent possibility of workplace democracy due to the transversal relations that technically predominate in its exercise. However, this possibility is held in containment, as least for the present, by the capitalist form in which digital production takes place. This capitalist form is no longer that which Marx analysed but has been superseded by a neo-mercantilist form in which temporal decay is the main source of differential price. To some extent, this neo-mercantilist form is pulled back into a capitalist form structured by the regime of value due to the retrojection of such temporal decay through the market suggesting a subtraction of necessary labor-time in production which produces a shadow-price for labor-time. Nevertheless, it is possible to outline an emerging neo-mercantilist form which depends upon temporal decay and in which the specific fecundities of nature tend to prevail over the systemic diffusion of fecundity by value. This emergent neo-mercantilist form focusses on the product and not on the labor-exchange. Therefore, the concrete difference of the product depends not only upon labor but also on the specific nature that has been transformed as well as the nature that must be traversed between production and consumption. Such nature is not abstract but concrete and therefore the reduction of

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the fecundity of natural excess to the abstract nature of systemic representation (discussed in the previous chapter) must be a key element of its critique. Focus of the system of value on the exchange-value of labor allowed abstract nature to be removed from the homogeneous system of equivalences and tendencies. Since neo-mercantilism focusses on the product and not on the laborexchange, the concrete difference of the product depends not only upon labor but also on the specific nature that has been transformed. Such nature is not abstract but concrete and therefore the fecundity of natural excess becomes a salient feature of neo-mercantilism. The neo-mercantilist form of contemporary capitalism demands both the recovery of abstract nature and its distinction from natural fecundity, as well as ecology, since the experiential timeplace orientation of concrete experience is essential to mercantilism. Abstract nature grounds a critique of contemporary capitalism as planetary technology in a neo-mercantilist form which, as we will see in Part IV, confronts ecology and place-based Indigeneity. It is the underlying structure of the regime of value—understood also as a critique of Marx—that produces the relation between abstract nature and planetary technology that currently exemplifies the leading tendency of the capitalist system. Thus Marx’s critique is not an adequate critique of the contemporary capitalist form of planetary technology operating on abstract nature. Nature is reduced to a fungible resource devoid of value subsumed by an always-and-everywhere planetary technology. Nevertheless, there is an emergent contradiction between abstract nature and natural fecundity underlying specific products. Alongside nature as resource, there is a similar universalization of technology from its previous ties to place and time due to the specific character of natural fecundity upon which it worked. Technology becomes planetary, in the sense of applicable to all times and spaces in coordination. Planetary technology is a universal subsumption of place and time, now rendered as abstract nature, under the transformative power of technology whose limitation in natural ends has been severed. Planetary technology is disrupted by emergent natural fecundity. The concept of planetary technology depends upon a phenomenological interpretation of Marx’s transhistorical characteristics of labor since the phenomenological concept of “world” allows an understanding of how technologies operative in the lifeworld become universalized to a technological form of a world (recalling here Marcuse’s extension of Husserl’s diagnosis of crisis). It grounds a distinction between specific technologies and the cumulative effects of technologies in a technological world that was emergent but not theorized in Marx’s late ontology of labor. The technological world has become “autonomous” from social or ecological limitations in the sense that it has no external limits—it is an expanding sphere of technological innovation

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exploiting nature as general fungibility. This expanding sphere operates upon abstract nature (as described in the previous chapter). There is, however, what might be called an “internal limit” in the sense that abstract nature is formed as an erasure of the experienced meaning and value of nature (natural fecundity) and human labor as the giving of specific form to that source. The critique of Marx’s elision of abstract nature thus yields a terminology that grounds a set of conceptual relations fundamental to 21st century phenomenological Marxism: abstract nature is the form that natural fecundity or excess takes within the regime of value as a reduction to general fungibility; planetary technology operates upon abstract nature without restriction in place or time. Planetary technology refers to the cumulative effect of technologies in a world which, as shown in the previous chapter, is distinct from the goal-oriented action of each technology considered separately. There is an emergent contradiction between abstract nature and natural fecundity. To anticipate, ecology and place-based Indigenous knowledge are forms of understanding nature through lived temporality and place-situated motility of lifeworld practices which contrast with the formal abstractions of abstract nature and planetary technology. We will address in the next chapter ecology as the science most capable of overcoming the crisis of the sciences in Husserl’s sense by restoring the meaning and value of concrete nature (both transformed by labor and not so transformed) in relation, first, to the embedded value in which each object is experienced and, second, to the ecological whole in which each object is meaningfully embedded. These themes will be pursued further in Part IV of this text where they can be brought into relation with the embedded meaning and value of lifeworld practices that inhere in cultural-civilizational worlds. The present context simply shows their point of emergence in an appropriation and critique of Marx’s theory of abstract labor. The concept of planetary technology might conventionally be traced to Heidegger’s account of technology in “The Question Concerning Technology.” Heidegger correctly describes the character of contemporary technology as “a challenging which puts to nature the unreasonable demand that it supply energy that can be extracted and stored as such” (Heidegger 1977a, 14). Nature understood as supplying energy is what has been called above a “general fungibility” characteristic of abstract nature. He goes further to claim that such technology is a revealing of the world, a manifestation of being in the contemporary historical period. Again, this agrees with the above account which shows that the concept of a technological world is emergent in Marx and grounded by a phenomenological reading of Marx’s late ontology. However, there are two deficiencies of Heidegger’s account which are overcome by the derivation from Marx presented in this text. First, Heidegger, in order to assert that technology is a revealing is required to deny the anthro-

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pological definition of technology as a human activity oriented as a means to an end. Such a definition applies only to pre-modern handwork technology whereas contemporary technology is entirely new and different (Heidegger 1977a, 4–5). He therefore undercuts and denies any attempt to show a continuity between pre-modern and contemporary technologies, whereas the problem is to show how modern technology emerged from, and universalized, traditional technology into a technological world. Our account, rooted in Marx’s historical analysis of the development of modern industry from handwork, provides just such a description of historical emergence without ignoring the definitively new features of planetary technology. The second, related, deficiency is that, in being regarded exclusively as a form of revealing, technology is presented as utterly separate from human action “no merely human doing” and therefore as a fate encompassing “the inevitableness of an unalterable course” (Heidegger 1977a, 19, 25). Technology becomes a pure human receptivity to manifestation and severed from any form of human action whatever. Now, it would certainly require much more than the reform of particular technologies to alter the horizon of the technological world, but it is excessive to rule out such altering a priori. The distinction between particular technologies and the technological world should not go so far as to rule out any interaction between them. The concept of abstract nature from the previous chapter thus complements that of planetary technology in this chapter to define the dominant form of neo-mercantilist capitalism. Unlike the classical capitalism what was the object of Marx’s theoretical critique, contemporary capitalism encounters several concepts of nature pertinent both to its operation and critique. Natural fecundity (excess) is an ontological feature which survives within the regime of value only as the general fungibility of abstract nature. Abstract nature abstracts from concrete experiences of meaning and value in nature though the emergent form of neo-capitalism tends to re-assert natural fecundity. It is to the issue of meaning and value in nature and whether ecology might be the exemplary science in which such meaning and value is preserved and which therefore might overcome the crisis of the European sciences that we now turn. NOTES 1.  This same connection was established in a parallel manner with reference to Max Horkheimer’s conception of instrumental reason and Max Weber’s conception of technical action in an earlier text (TE chapter IV). 2.  These two issues are often not clearly separated in the burgeoning literature on “cognitive capitalism” or the “information society.” Despite the tentative and often

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confused nature of much of this contemporary discussion, it is an essential area of research into the nature of contemporary labour within the capitalist form and the possibility that it presents a new contradiction that might explode that form. These two issues are separated in sections below. 3.  This important phrase has been imperfectly rendered into English in the available translations as “physical organization of these individuals.” This phrasing obscures the fact that the social relation is not only material or physical but is formed from the material interaction of bodies and thus constitutes an inter-bodily motility. The thinking that such social interaction requires is thus founded upon social corporeality (Marx and Engels 1978, 149). Joseph Fracchia has made this important point though he misrenders Marx and Engels’ phrase as “körperliche Organisation der Menschen” instead of “körperliche Organisation dieser Individuen” (Fraccia, p. 39, ftn. 13). This can be checked in any German edition. 4.  Simondon gives only one example of such axiological value: the way in which the different technical individuals of a laboratory function best as an ensemble when they have the same level of relative individualization. However, the cybernetic principle of self-enclosure and self-regulation has a broader axiological function in Simondon’s work through his deployment of the concept of the technical individual. We will show this below through his portrayal of the non-alienated state. 5.  Directly contrary to Marx, Simondon asserts that “an effort to discover the reason for the formation of specific types of technical objects within the transition from artisanal production to industrial production would mistake the consequence for its condition; the industrialization of production is rendered possible by the formation of stable types” (Simondon 2017, 29). 6.  Marcuse’s persisting judgment was that Western capitalist society and Sovietstyle Communism are both caught in a domination by technics (Marcuse 1964, chapter 2; Marcuse 1961, xi–xvi). 7.  There are actually four places where Marcuse refers to Simondon but the first reference is not pertinent to the current argument. It pertains to the nature of the contemporary technical milieu where Marcuse documents the physical pain attached to labour to claim such that, despite changes due to mechanization, the worker’s body is still subjected by mechanical rhythms. In this, his account contains neither disagreement from Simondon nor pertinent nuance (Marcuse 1964, 24; quoted from Simondon 2017, 119ftn.). 8.  We proposed the term “neo-mercantilism” some while ago in order to name a shift from a society primarily organized around capital-labour relations to one organized around market-community relations (Angus 1997, 181–5).

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Chapter Ten

Nature and the Source of Value

We have identified the second innovation of the Crisis to be the identification of the presupposition of the lifeworld that underlies all previous inquiries into the critique and justification of science, most specifically Kant’s transcendental inquiry into the ground of science and reason. The crisis of the European sciences can be projected to be overcome through understanding the lifeworld as the subjective enacting of bodily motility, or kinaesthetic action in an organized social form. Part III of our text has been oriented to elaborating how kinaesthetic action is the ground of a convergence between the phenomenological concept of the lifeworld and Karl Marx’s concept of social labor. The final chapter of Part II on “representation and the crisis of value” concluded by showing that, while the hegemonic model of formal abstraction disallows an adequate representation of meaning and value, nevertheless the realm of practical activity provokes an intensity of attachment to value that always threatens to unsettle this hegemony. Such intensity is rooted in kinaesthetic action. Thus, it might well be suggested that a focus on kinaesthetic action in the lifeworld would adequately overcome the crisis of the European sciences. Husserl indeed held to such a thesis based upon his estimation that the subjective sense of life of the inquirer is the ground for a scientific sense of life in biology such that there is a continuity between lifeworld experience and scientific conceptuality that does not pertain in physical science due to the mathematization of nature. We will, however, demur from this characterization, instead suggesting that the account of the work of Karl Marx presented in previous chapters shows how kinaesthetic action can itself be held within a Galilean form of systemic representation and organization that disallows not only a representation but a practical realization of value in the sense of the wealth of sensuous human capacities and appetites. Human production can be represented in a formal science if it is subjected to an immanent standard of 335

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homogenization (Marx) and divorced from the ground of human productivity in natural fecundity. Therefore, the crisis as described by Husserl must be amplified by the crisis as described by Marx. Critique of the regime of value has shown that the kinaesthetic experience of the intensity of value can nevertheless be discovered underlying and within the regime of value. Intensity of value rooted in the surplus productivity of labor and its ground in natural fecundity provides the ground for overcoming the crisis of the sciences. 10.1 BEYOND THE EXEMPLARY ROLE OF FORMAL SCIENCES We have sustained throughout that formal systems cannot be applied to individuals as Husserl’s supposed. Rather, since individuals are perceived as individuals of a certain type against a background shading off into an indefinite horizon that constitutes a lifeworld, the reference of formal systems to the lifeworld consists in individuals whose background context shares in the constitution of its meaning and whose lifeworld horizon delimits the extension of that meaning. Similarly, “wealth” in Marx’s qualitative sense of an amount of use-values is not to be found in a sum of individual useful objects alone but in the relation between a given use-value to the background in which it actually becomes useful and the worldly horizon within which such wealth creates the capacity for concretely enjoying life. The recovery of the concrete is not through an “underlying” individual, sensuous, qualitative experience but a “transversal” relation toward the individual’s background and horizon. In addition, we have noted that it is transversal relations that are the main distinctive feature of ecological thinking. The assumption of a reference of formal abstractions to concrete individuals explains an unresolved issue in the history of Marxist theory. The attempt by “Marxist” political economists to use the theory of value to determine the prices of individual commodities is not only a similar residual empiricism to Husserl’s but a regression of the critique of political economy into a supposedly better political economy. The theory of value is articulated as a critique of capitalism and it remains relatively undetermined in the less theoretically complete works of Marx what concrete alternative is possible. Consider the historical question of the relation between socialism and communism understood as the relation between the principle of equality and the principle of need. Socialism was understood by Marx as superior to capitalism because of the absence of exploitation of surplus value and as ruled by the principle of “to each according to their labour.” Such a principle of equal right is still lacking since it treats unequals—or, more exactly, incomparables—as measured by a single standard. Thus, in his words, “unequal individuals . . . are

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measurable only by an equal standard in so far as they are brought under an equal point of view . . . taken from one side only” (Marx 1978a, 530).1 Communism, as is well known, would be a higher system ruled by the principle of “from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs.” The superiority of need derives from its consideration of individuals as whole individuals and not under a single aspect that can be represented as a measure. This is the identical assumption that underlies Husserl’s attempt to uncover the concrete intuition of individuals underneath Galilean science. It is a fundamental issue that one would expect 21st century phenomenological Marxism to pose differently than either Marx or Husserl. The perception of individuals as individuals through their background and horizon is thus the final point of convergence between a 21st century phenomenology and Marxism from which one could expect a recovery of the concrete that would justify their identical critique of formal systems. There are two inter-related issues here: What motivates a dissatisfaction with formal abstraction and a desire to return to the concrete? What is the meaning of “concrete experience” that one is trying to recover? Let us begin by noting the residue of empiricism in Husserl’s description of immediate perception of an identical object (noema) that resides in the distinction between substratum and attributes. In a manner reminiscent of Locke, Husserl understood a substance as distinct from its attributes since the qualities of attributes cannot subsist unless they inhere in something that is not an attribute. If “this raincoat is grey,” for example, it must be the case that the raincoat is distinct from the greyness. And if “this object is a raincoat,” it must be the case that the object is distinct from its being a raincoat. In this sense, an objective unity is distinct from any and all predicated attributes. Since every determination can be expressed as an attribute, the thing itself can only be called a “pure x” devoid of predicated attributes. As Husserl said, “it is the central point of connection or the ‘bearer’ of the predicates, but in no way is it a unity of them in the sense in which any complex, any combination, of the predicates would be called a unity” (Ideas1 313). If the sense-bearer cannot be a unity of predicates, and must be distinct from them, then, Husserl thought, it must be a “pure x” devoid of determinations. Such a “pure x” recalls an empiricist substratum or a Kantian indeterminable “thingin-itself.” Aron Gurwitsch criticized this aspect of Husserl’s description as a theoretical construct and showed that “though they must be distinguished, substratum and attribute cannot be severed or separated from one other” (Gurwitsch 1974, 249). Gurwitsch found the distinction and relation between predicate and identical thing to reside in “the form in which the pertinent noemata are organized with respect to each other, on the specific form of unity prevailing in the

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group or system which they compose and to which they belong” (Gurwitsch 1974, 250). He described the identical object of perception as a Gestalt whole in which the constituent elements belong to a whole that is itself nothing other than the contextual whole present in the determinate relationships between constituents and thereby also co-present in each of its constituents. The perceiving glance does not perceive a property alone, but perceives it as the property of a thing such that “the thing appears as an undifferentiated unity” (Gurwitsch 1974, 257, emphasis throughout removed). In explication of the original global perception, a single property may be thematized which is then predicated of the global whole. In Gurwitsch’s terms, “in explicating contemplation, the perceptual noema may be characterized as a differentiated unity” (Gurwitsch 1974, 260). In this way, the identical object of which predications are made is nothing other than the prior undifferentiated whole that is continuously explicated to become a differentiated whole. A predicate does not stand apart from the unity of the object but consists in its thematization as against the whole of which it remains a part. In this way, Gurwitsch showed that the empiricist residue of Husserl’s theory of perception can be replaced by a Gestalt part-whole relation without reference to an underlying substance or substrate. He also points to the unacceptable consequence that Husserl’s account of a pure undeterminable substrate means that all such substrates of perceivable things must be identical, thereby taking an important step toward the recovery of concrete specific difference (Gurwitsch 1974, 252). It is through the differentiation of an originally undifferentiated unity of the perceived object that what Husserl calls the “internal horizon” of the object can be made intelligible through inferences and anticipations. Such anticipations extend not only to the determination of the object but, beyond the object, to an “infinite, open, external horizon of objects cogiven” that refers to a “totality of typification belonging to the total horizon of the world in its infinity” (EJ 33, 36, emphasis throughout excised).2 Every object of perception is perceived in distinction from an unthematized background that shades off indefinitely toward the horizon of the world. When formal abstraction is practiced on a concretely experienced object in the lifeworld, the background and horizon are eliminated. In order for an object to be designated by an uninterpreted sign such as “x,” the background that is essential to its singularity and the horizon that unifies these backgrounds into a world-horizon are not designated at all: formal abstraction can only operate as such through the elimination of background and horizon. Indeed, the loss of the qualitative, sensuous individuality of the unity is accomplished precisely through the elimination of background and horizon. For Marx, the motive for the recovery of the concrete was the historical experience of concrete labor and its degradation within the regime of value due to its register-

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ing as abstract labor. For Husserl, the motive was the irrationalism provided by the dominance of formal abstraction over the exercise of reason. In each case, it is the actual concrete experience of labor or reason in the lifeworld that motivates critique of the hegemony of formal reason. Similarly, the role of background and horizon in the actual exercise of formal abstraction in the socio-historical lifeworld is what motivates recovery of the concrete for 21st century phenomenological Marxism. Return to concreteness must now be understood as a return to an individual against a background shading off into a horizon. In this case, motivation for a critique of formal abstraction comes from a loss of concreteness in a sense dependent on background and horizon. Marx aimed to recover the concrete through a critique of the science of political economy, Husserl through a critique of mathematical physics. The phenomenological foundation for the relation of part and whole in ecology can be sought in the concepts of individual, background and horizon in a manner that makes it the leading science for a 21st century phenomenological Marxism. As we will see below, Husserl considered biology as a science not subject to crisis due to the concept of “life” operative within it. Nevertheless, we need to consider whether the science of ecology captures “life” more exactly and concretely because it focusses on the interaction between life-forms and the worlds that they inhabit which constitutes the “life” of the lifeworld. Scientific ecology began with precisely this distinction between biology as a morphological science of characteristics of species considered independently and ecology as a science of the interaction between several species and also non-living forms. The science of ecology would, in this case, contain an important element of the concreteness sought by previous phenomenological Marxism. Nevertheless, a critique of ecology would be required to show the way in which phenomenology might justify the application of, and also demonstrate the limits of, an ecological model of reason which would require a critique (but not rejection of) ecology as a science of energy flows that can be measured mathematically. 10.2 BIOLOGY AS EXEMPLARY SCIENCE? While the vast majority of Husserl’s late work was focused on a critique of the formal-mathematical paradigm of the physical science of nature, at several points the possibility of biology as the exemplary science is raised to suggest that the absence of a reliance on formal-mathematical conceptual language would mean that a “crisis of the European sciences” would not occur in such a case. This of course could not mean that a continual process of conceptual clarification and grounding in experience would not be necessary (as it is in

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the development of every science). It would mean that the specific problems for meaning and value that derive from the paradigm of mathematical physics might not be relevant to the paradigm of biology. Though Husserl’s consideration of this possibility is brief—confined to one text and a number of brief remarks—it is nevertheless significant. It pertains to whether the crisis of the sciences that Husserl diagnosed is still relevant today, whether the leading scientific paradigm for philosophy has shifted from physics to biology (or indeed to another special science), and more generally to the role of philosophy in relation to a plurality of specialized sciences in which the project of reason is dispersed. Responses to such issues is crucial for articulating the task of phenomenological philosophy in our present circumstances. We need to consider Husserl’s reasons for thinking that biology would not engender a crisis since its conceptual structure foregrounds a conception of “life” unlike mathematical physics. (It is always this comparison that is foremost in Husserl’s mind.) We will later suggest that a paradigmatic role for ecology might more adequately address this expectation due to the manner in which it conceptualizes “life” in comparison to biology. Nevertheless, ecology is not itself a transcendental science, so that the question of the relation between a specific exemplary science and transcendental phenomenology is not fully resolved even in the case of ecology. We are not concerned here phenomenologically to ground biology or ecology in the manner of Fink’s proposed resumé of the sciences that brings them back into a unity based on transcendental phenomenology (that he projected for Part IV of the Crisis) but to inquire about both in the context of Husserl’s thesis of the crisis of the European sciences. If, as Husserl suggests, biology or any other science were to be free of systemic crisis brought on by the conceptual reliance on formalmathematical abstraction, the absence of such a crisis would not be sufficient to ground such a science but would only be a negative condition for so doing. The theme for this chapter is what would be involved in such an adequate continuity between scientific abstraction and lifeworld not to establish that such adequate continuity actually pertains. The text of the Crisis seeks this continuity in psychology. But, as Husserl phrases it in the context of a comparison of physicalistic science to biology and psychology, “a type of being is ascribed to the soul which is similar in principle to that of nature; and to psychology is ascribed a progression from description to ultimate theoretical ‘explanation’ similar to that of biophysics” (C 63). The candle then passes to biology. The most salient characteristic of biology pertinent to the thesis of the crisis of European sciences is the negative one that biology does not have a formal-mathematical structure due to the absence of abstraction to a closed sphere of physical nature. Husserl often notes this when he introduces biology in comparison to the mathematical

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science of nature (Add 6–7; C 63; OL 156). The most salient positive characteristic is with regard to the concept of “life” in biology. The concept of life necessarily pertains to the object-domain of biology, thus distinguishing it universally from non-living things. “Life” is experienced subjectively by the biological scientist both during scientific activity and in ordinary life. As Husserl phrases it, “biology is essentially guided by its humanity, which is experienceable in a truly original manner; there alone life is given in an original way and in the most authentic manner through the self-understanding of the biological dimension” (Add 6). It is not that the concept of life in biology and that experienced by the biological scientist and other humans is identical. Sciences of necessity create concepts that go beyond those used in or applicable to everyday life. Nevertheless, there is a correspondence between these two concepts of life such that their relation can be straightforwardly posed as an issue. Thus, the grounding of the scientific concept in concrete intuition poses no in principle problems. This has three consequences which Husserl expresses in condensed form. Biology’s proximity to the sources of evidence grants it such a proximity to the depths of the things themselves, that its access to transcendental philosophy should be the easiest and with it the access to the true a priori to which the world of living beings refers, in its greatest and most constant generalities which cannot be captured without question in their a priori nature (as unconditionally universal and necessary) (Add 7).

It is worth spelling these out. First, biology has access to “the depths of things themselves” insofar as its concept of life keeps it in communication with life as experienced in concrete intuition. Life as a scientific concept remains connected to the lifeworld in Husserl’s sense of “straightforward experience, in which the lifeworld is given, [which] is the ultimate foundation of all objective knowledge” (C 226). Second, in consequence of this communication, biology should lead effortlessly toward transcendental philosophy. This effortlessness defines the absence of a crisis of foundations in biology that differs from the necessary crisis of mathematical physics due to its reliance on formal abstraction. The leading-on of biology to transcendental phenomenology should be motivated within biology: the grounding of biological concepts on immediate intuition inherent to biology parallels the “principle of principles” characteristic of transcendental phenomenology. Biology appears as a special case, we may say, of an originary grounding of which transcendental phenomenology is the universal case. Third, through this access of biology to transcendental phenomenology, biology leads on to the constant generalities of the living world to which transcendental philosophy refers. Such generalities are distinct from

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those of the formal sciences insofar as they are neither universal nor necessary but rather describe the shape of a lived world in its definite contents. These aspects of biology suggest that, were it exemplary for the idea of science, it would produce no crisis but a continuous, self-critical elaboration of the experienced lifeworld. As Darian Meacham has pointed out, this does not mean that the conceptual structure of biology, as any other science, cannot lose contact with its sources of evidence and thereby require a critical return to them; what it means is that the conceptual structure is not in principle cut off from immediate evidence in the manner necessary to formal abstraction (Meacham 2013, 20). Meaning would thus inhere within the special science and its continuous elaboration into the idea of science and, further, transcendental philosophy without rupture between scientific concept and immediate intuition. While biology has been denigrated vis-à-vis mathematical physics due to its apparently merely descriptive character, Husserl asserts that it is not merely descriptive, but rather its description contains a naïve ontology such that “biology is concrete and genuine psychophysics” whose explication can “attain the degree of explanation in the sense of an understanding based on ultimate sources of evidence” (Add 8, 7). If biology presents the possibility of a crisis-free science that would embrace meaning and value within scientific striving through its leading-back to sources of immediate intuition in the lifeworld, then an implication of Husserl’s thesis of the crisis of the European sciences is that biology must replace mathematical physics as the exemplary, paradigmatic science. One may further ask whether the exemplary science has shifted since Husserl’s time and how it might be judged whether such a shift has taken place. In the context of the crisis-thesis Husserl speaks of the necessary recovery of “subjectivity [Subjectivität]” within reason, whereas in the context of biology he speaks of “life [Leben]” (C 5; K 3; Add 6; K 482). Despite this difference, “life” best seems to fulfil the recovery that is at issue in the loss of immediate evidence in formal abstraction since it refers to subjectivity as expressed in kinaesthetic motility. Similarly, in the former context the issue is phrased in terms of psychology, whereas in the latter it refers to biology. Moreover, in defense of the universal reach of biology, he remarks that it “only appears to be limited to our small and insignificant world, and as anthropology, to this negligible creature called the human being” (Add 8). In Ideas II, he similarly refers to zoology and anthropology as sciences of subjectivity which are correlates of the personal sphere (Ideas2 401, 381). What is at issue for Husserl in these remarks is not the specific features of each of the sciences but their centrality to the issue of the crisis of European sciences and the grounding of transcendental phenomenology in the striving for reason. “Life” may be taken to include “subjectivity” but has the additional virtue of making evident

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the grounding of subjectivity in embodied activity. In the lifeworld, Husserl claims “my own living body, and never an alien living body, can be perceived as living . . . [through] the kinesthetic . . . primarily through seeing, hearing, etc.” (C 107–8). The formation of such embodied subjectivity in human culture may be considered to be the subject-matter of anthropology. The motility of human and non-human bodies in the lifeworld is the foundation for these sciences which all have a non-formal conceptual universality. They exhibit the continuity of immediate intuition and scientific conceptualization necessary to surpass the crisis and provide an entry into transcendental inquiry. In several texts, Husserl took biology to be the index of such a theoretical form, but he often referred to other sciences for the same purpose, so it is not biology as such that is at issue. It is the elaboration of the evidential, lifeworld basis of a crisis-free science and its intrinsic relation to philosophy through an intimate and continuous relation between a naïve immediate experience of the animate body and a “personal” scientific form that conceptualizes animate, embodied subjectivity within itself. There are three characteristics of biological knowledge of the lifeworld that Husserl judges as pertinent: First, biology is based upon the human experience of life such that this experience confers the possibility of understanding the scientific concept of life. Second, this human experience and concept of life is the basis for an analogical transfer through which understanding of life in other forms (eg. animal, plant) is possible. Third, a general biology is a universal science of the lifeworld in the sense that “as genuinely universal biology, [it] embraces the entire concrete world, and thus implicitly physics too, and in the examination of correlations it becomes a completely universal philosophy” (Add, 8 emphasis added). To the extent that other sciences such as psychology, anthropology, sociology, etc. are likewise non-formal sciences in continuous elaboration of selected aspects (depending upon their specific object-domain) of experienced “life,” or motile, embodied subjectivity, they perform the same role that Husserl attributed to biology. With respect to the third characteristic, Husserl remarks that “this universal task gives it an infinite horizon, which, articulated into further horizons, does not assign it, as a conceivable aim, comprehensive knowledge of laws, reaching from here into infinity, in the same sense [as in physics]” (Add 8). It is the universal task situated within biology that gives it a horizon which aims at a knowledge of the “entire concrete world,” in a different sense than physics. Since physics deals with a closed world of nature substructed by mathematics, its continuous research extends to a teleologically complete knowledge of this closed sphere. Biology, in contrast, is not so enclosed. It could be completed teleologically only by a knowledge within ever-greater horizons aiming at the lifeworld as a whole. While it aims at such a completion, it

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remains incomplete in a different sense from physics: the boundaries of what is known define an incompleteness due to horizons beyond what is known that may place those boundaries into question. To put it somewhat crudely, physics is intensively incomplete within settled boundaries, while biology is extensively incomplete within unclarified horizons. The infinite horizon upon which biology ultimately devolves is transcendental phenomenology. Transcendental phenomenology is inquiry into the ultimate, originary sources of the lifeworld as a whole. There is therefore an important demarcation issue here regarding the project of a scientific biology and the inception of transcendental inquiry. Though biology might be continuous with philosophy, it is not itself philosophy. It remains a special science and must be distinguished from other non-formal sciences of embodied, motile subjectivity such as psychology, anthropology, sociology, etc. However, this demarcation would be different in principle from that between mathematical physics and philosophy insofar as the latter is only possible through a diagnosis of crisis that can reinstate transcendental phenomenology as the healing of crisis. As Husserl puts it, “the world is the self-objectification of life in the form of plants, animals and humans, who are born and die” (AW 334). Biology would be, in this understanding, the explication of the objective forms of life that populate the world and transcendental phenomenology would be the originary inquiry into the world as a unity such that it contains forms of life. However, despite the apparently crisis-free smooth connection that Husserl sought to establish between subjectivity as experienced in the lifeworld and subjectivity as thematized and conceptually fixed in biology, there is a systematic discontinuity constituting a crisis between these two termini which can be explained with reference to Karl Marx’s critique of the regime of value understood as systematic capture of kinaesthetic action whose homogenizing and equalizing structure parallels that of formal-mathematical abstraction pertinent to the Crisis. It thus creates a closed sphere of abstract labor-life parallel to the closed sphere of nature in mathematical physics that creates a similar crisis with respect to its grounding in the lifeworld (concrete labor). Husserl’s conception of the crisis brought into being by the hegemonic form of mathematical abstraction can thus be extended to biological life understood as the subjective experience of kinaesthetic action. Contrary to Husserl, we assert that the subjective experience of kinaesthetic action is not continuous with biological concepts. This is not meant as a statement about the concepts of biological science considered internally. It is meant to show, through one key case of discontinuity and rupture due to mathematical abstraction upon the ground of kinaesthetic action, that beginning from the subjective experience of kinaesthetic action is not sufficient, as Husserl

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thought, to establish a crisis-free conceptual form. Our expanded concept of Galilean science allows us to establish this significant theoretical position due to the parallelism of the Marxian and Husserlian critiques as instances of this concept.3 In both cases, the critique of Galilean form points to an experience of kinaesthetic action that escapes mathematical abstraction. In addition to the parallelism established between the closed spheres of physical nature (Husserl) and abstract labor (Marx), our account has shown also that Marx’s critique elides abstract nature as the ground for the production of value. In this sense, abstract nature is the fundamental critical category of our phenomenological Marxism which can be counterposed to the discovery of natural fecundity as an excess that underlies all human productivity and culture. The capture, homogenization, and equalization of excess within formal science and the regime of value stabilizes an organization and restructuring of knowledge and activity on the model of exchanges between in principle undifferentiated quantities. Excess explains the equilibrating activity through Galilean science such that quantifiable tendencies hover around a mean that necessarily remains an unknown “x.” Excess is for this reason, although masked within Galilean science, the source for its ongoing functioning—an ongoing activity required by the unknown-ness of the unknown “x.” Excess is effective within Galilean science because it is its source. It is the source of Galilean science because it is the subjective life of the lifeworld. Not an individual, nor a human, life, but life-ness itself, the groundless, selfovercoming activity upon which human perception, action, and thought rest. Translated into the human world through labor and culture (as the privative negation of labor) excess becomes the intensity with which the subjective life of humans is attached to meaning and value. It is through this intensity and the forms of knowledge which may express it that we can overcome the crisis of the European sciences. 10.3 ECOLOGY AS EXEMPLARY SCIENCE? Let us consider whether ecology might be a science in continuity with lifeworld experience of subjective life in the manner that Husserl expected from biology and which we would expect as a form of knowledge appropriate to natural fecundity. Ecology is like biology a science of life but it takes a different conceptual form, so it is worth considering whether ecology might be the crisis-free conceptual form which we seek. In neither a formal nor a generic manner, ecological abstraction considers a species (not an individual) in its relation to non-living, and living, beings in its environment. It is exchanges between

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such beings of different kinds such as to achieve a temporary balance between them to which ecological knowledge is directed. These relations are transversal and not hierarchical. Note that it is not a knowledge of individuals as such. It is oriented to an individual only insofar as it is of a certain type—a frog, but not this frog; a human, but not this human—to other individuals also considered as of a certain type. Thus, ecological thought is not concreteness as such but a form of abstraction in which it is the relations between types within a certain boundary that is at issue. The totality of such relations constitutes a whole, or a certain type of totality, that is not of individuals of the same type (classification), nor individuals of any type (formal abstraction), but of different types and their exchanges within a given whole. As Husserl showed, the experience of life is the basis for the science of biology and the human experience of life is the basis for analogical transfer that can conceptualize life in others forms such as animals, plants, and, at least ideally, cases further afield such as silicon-based forms of life, etc. Each embodied, motile subject is a perceptual, practical, and thoughtful unity that interacts with its environment through organs specific to its life-form. A scientific concept of life involves, at minimum, the distinction of an inside from an outside such that the inside consists of a system of internal relations which as a totality interacts with the outside through distinct organs that render the outside in a manner pertinent to the inside (Maturana and Varela 1980, passim.). Husserl observes that every animal has the social horizon of its species, to which we might add that it has also a similar perceptual, practical, and thoughtful horizon. Dogs perceive like dogs, act like dogs, and think like dogs, such that the social interaction between dogs is specifically dog-like. And so on for other animals and, though in a restricted sense, plants also. As Neil Evernden also pointed out, synthesizing phenomenology with the biology of Adolph Portman and Jacob von Uexküll, one can understand biology as a “heterogeneity of worlds” in which “the subjective world or Umwelt of the species is as unique a part of the creature as any of its visible (that is, morphological) components” (Evernden 1985, 80). Moreover, dogs appear within the world of human perception, action, and thought as well as vice-versa, so that the lifeworld specific to each species contains also other species as well as non-animal things. “Thus [Husserl concludes], one already has the beginnings of a real, and not altogether paltry, animal ontology from the inside and the outside. Yet what one has lies in an infinite horizon as of an unknown ontology prefigured in its infinity” (Add 8, ftn. 3). This is a considerable expansion of the concept of the lifeworld which was introduced first in reference to the “original self-evidences” that underlie scientific, especially formal-mathematical, abstractions. However, this usage does not refer specifically to the lifeworld as a world of life understood as embodied,

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motile subjectivity. Nevertheless, it might be plausible that this concept opens up an understanding of the lifeworld as an interpenetration of life-forms and even ground transcendental phenomenology as an epochē of the lifeworld. It is this expansion that is opened up by the possibility that biology has become exemplary for scientific striving. However, if biology is concerned with the specificity of life-forms and their worlds, then it does not seem to adequately capture the interaction between these life-forms and worlds that constitutes the “life” of the lifeworld. Scientific ecology began with precisely this distinction between biology as a morphological science of characteristics of species considered independently and ecology as a science of the interaction between several species and also non-living forms. We might consider as a transitional observation Gregory Bateson’s point that the unit of evolution is not the species but species plus environment since any species that destroys its own environment, or whose environment is otherwise destroyed, will die out (Bateson 1972, 499, cf. 451). In a classic paper published in 1935, the British ecologist Arthur C. Tansley discussed the ecological realities of the world: ‘Though the organisms may claim our primary interest, when we are trying to think fundamentally we cannot separate them from their spatial environment with which they form one physical system. It is the systems so formed which from the point of view of the ecologist are the basic units of nature on the face of the earth’” (Rowe 1990, 45).

The observation that every species has a specific environment (Umwelt), leads to the issue of the relation between these environments because each species appears in the environment of all the other relevant species. It seems that this would be much closer to what Husserl might have expected from an “animal ontology.” Ecology is generally accepted to be the science of such relationships. The parts of an ecological whole, such as species, live in a set of inter-connected and mutually influencing relationships. Stan Rowe calls such a local ecosystem a community, a term which has the advantage, I think, of emphasizing that it cannot be a ‘system’ in the rigorous sense. “The community is an aggregate of objects whose primary bond is common occupancy of area. This area basis confers a degree of apparent substantiality on the community, for once the area is bounded a spatial unit appears” (Rowe 1961, 426). A community is thus established by a set of relationships between beings of different animal species, plants, and non-living beings in a definite place. Such a community affects the meaning of the parts of a community, since the relationships in which they are embedded are essential to what the parts are in themselves. The place of a given ecology is defined by a boundary indicating what is inside the set of relationships and thus immediately effective and what is outside

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or what is effective only in a distantly mediated fashion. Such a boundary can only be drawn pragmatically since exchanges between the inside and outside of the boundary still take place even while they may be pragmatically negligible in comparison to the intense relations of the inside. The set of relationships within a pragmatically delimited place constitutes a whole through achieving a certain balance between its interacting parts. It is this concept of balance which most clearly adds to the biological concept of life to which Husserl reverted in seeking a concept of scientific striving not bound to the exemplary role of mathematical physics. The interdependence and balance of different life-forms that incorporate their physical environment within a given place captures the living quality of life as a series of balanced interchanges much more securely than an individual or a species considered in abstraction from its conditions of self-reproduction and therefore life. Speaking teleologically, we may say that the concept of an ecosystem is a way of conceptualizing the Whole that is the universe of all that is through relationships of dependence and maintenance by the community of all beings. Humans, as one species of these beings, depend upon this Whole. A particular grouping of humans, humans within a larger community of beings in a given place circumscribed by an elastic boundary, develop the specifics of their culture in relation to the specifics of the local ecology. As Arne Naess has phrased it, Modern ecology has emphasized a high degree of symbiosis as a common feature in mature ecosystems, an interdependence for the benefit of all. It has thereby provided a cognitive basis for a sense of belonging which was not possible earlier. Family belonging, the tie of kinship, has a material basis in perceived togetherness and cooperation. Through the extension of our understanding of the ecological context, it will ultimately be possible to develop a sense of belonging with a more expansive perspective: ecospheric belonging (Naess 1990, 168).

Indeed, insofar as humans are dependent on an ecology for their life, and, as Husserl asserted, humans understand other life-forms by analogical transfer from their own sense of life, human understanding of the sustaining balance of other life-forms seems to be essential to the meaning of humans themselves and to thereby confer a sense of intrinsic worth on that ecology. Ecology as a limited but encompassing science stands at the threshold of a reconsideration of, not only embodied subjectivity, but also worth and ethics insofar as humans are dependent on it. “The argument . . . for moving from the homocentric to the ecocentric ethic is an argument for broadening values. It does not deny high human evaluation; it adds to traditional humanism a deepened appreciation of the surrounding world with which people must, sooner or later, work out a cooperative symbiosis” (Naess 1990, 168). Ecology would thus

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appear to have a greater claim than biology to being a science in continuity with lifeworld experience. It would therefore not only be crisis-free but would motivate conceptual abstractions that aim at scientific understanding of living relationships. Such conceptual abstractions would be specific and qualitative, based on the specific and qualitative relations between species and environment in the lifeworld, and thus would not introduce any in-principle discontinuity between science and its lifeworld origin and effect. In this sense, we suggest that ecology indeed can claim an exemplary status as the model of a crisis-free science. Insofar as ecology may claim an exemplary status for a contemporary phenomenology of science and the lifeworld, it is a privileged scientific site for passing into phenomenological philosophy. 10.4 NATURE, VALUE AND THE TASK OF PHENOMENOLOGY Husserl hypothesized that biology could provide the model of a crisis-free science because of a theoretical continuity between the naïve experience of the living human body in the lifeworld and the conceptual understanding of living bodies (whether human or not) in biological science. “Subjectivity,” in this understanding, is not simply an internal feeling or state, but refers to the human body as a living organism. We have suggested that ecology may be a better model in this respect due to the relationship between different species and the incorporation of the non-animate world within the wholes that it studies. It incorporates not only the subjective experience of life but its relational conditions in a complex of living and non-living beings. The scientific conceptualization of such wholes maintains clear continuity with the presence of such relationships in ordinary human experience. If the problem of subjectivity in the crisis of European sciences could be addressed by biology, as Husserl suggests, in a manner that grounds an in principle (but perhaps not factually) crisis-free science in the experienced life of embodied subjectivity, then it is likely that the more extensive, encompassing, and practical concept of life in ecology could effectively surpass biology as the exemplary case of scientific striving for transcendental phenomenological philosophy. There are two distinct issues here: First, whether biology or ecology might replace the model of mathematical physics due to the more grounded conceptual abstractions upon which they rely. Second, whether the exemplary, hegemonic, or paradigmatic role of physics has now passed in favor of biology or ecology— and how might such a historical judgment be made. Even if the suggestion that ecology become the exemplary science for phenomenological philosophy be deemed acceptable, there still remains a demarcation issue between the special science of ecology and transcendental

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phenomenology. The phenomenological foundation for both biology and ecology is, as Husserl insisted, in the subjective experience of embodied lifeactivity from which, by analogical transfer, the life of other organisms can be understood scientifically. Since the pertinent concept in ecology is not the species but the ecosystemic set of relationships, the demarcation issue devolves upon a clarification of the concept of totality understood as ecosystem within ecology and understood as the world, or horizon, in transcendental phenomenology. Insofar as anthropology can be considered a science referring to distinct yet comparable human societies grounded by formations of embodied, motile subjectivities, anthropological forms distinct from the European may well contain forms of thought that are crisis-free in the sense that Husserl attributed to biology and which I have here argued applies better to ecology. Ecology could be taken up, as it were, into cultural-anthropological formations in different but mutually clarifying manners, in particular the relation between what one might call a lifeworld ecology and a scientific ecology. To the extent that current phenomenological research regards scientific striving, coincident with Husserl’s consideration of biology, as founded in embedded, embodied, enactive, and extended subjectivity, it would need to understand the organism as, in Darian Meacham’s words, “an ecology of relations manifest as a set of capacities” (Meacham 2015, 13). Transcendental reflection will need to extend further to incorporate, as Lenore Langsdorf has argued, “the ethical dimension of the doing and undergoing that pervades constitutive interrelationality” (Langsdorf 2016, 124). In short, the transcendental reduction as a reflexive ethical striving operative upon a lifeworld of ecosystemic totality may be the new starting-point for phenomenological philosophy that may overcome the crisis of meaning and value that Husserl diagnosed. Part IV will follow up these dimensions—ecosystem/world, cultural-anthropological forms, and ethical striving in order to address the tasks which we inherit from Husserl’s late crisis-thesis. As Part II of the text concluded with the failure of a social representation of value due to the abstraction to a formal system from the lived dimensions of meaning and value, the current Part III finds its end in an extended critique of formal homogenization of living kinaesthesis and the problem of renewal as directed, not only toward the lifeworld, but toward the fecund excess of nature. This points to, but does not yet justify, an attempt to relocate and rediscover meaning and value in lived nature, a lived nature that would encompass human labor, and project a form of knowing that would liberate excess from its entrapment and domestication. Yet the pre-cultural ontology of excess that lies at the origin of all cultural-civilizational forms cannot itself contain an explication of meaning and value even though it is their source. Meaning

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and value find their explication in the anthropological cultural-civilizational forms which natural excess takes within human culture (through the privation of labor) and whose heritage contains the record of freedom. NOTES 1.  Marx considers a socialist system also in Capital, Vol. 1 in order to show that the regime of value applies only to the capitalist system (Cap1 172). Stanley Moore argues that Marx’s philosophical commitment to communism, undertaken in his early life and never renounced, could not be sustained by his late critique of political economy—that only the superiority of socialism can be thus shown (Moore 1993). My current argument agrees with Marx that communism would be a higher system— or, more exactly, a higher principle of justice—but shows that it is not possible as a system—which any complex society with a high division of labour seems to require. Thus, the current argument implies but does not develop an argument for market socialism. We have argued elsewhere that there can be no system of need in this sense of addressing exclusively the concrete needs of individuals as such because their actual incomparable difference would allow no systemic comparable reckoning. Only a state of unlimited abundance could satisfy such a criterion and it may well be that Marx was led into this problem due to such an assumption (Angus 1997, 188–93). 2.  See also Husserl’s reference to “the horizon-consciousness surrounding every act.. . . [Such] horizon-intentionality contains very diverse modes of an intentionality which is ‘unconscious’ in the usual narrower sense of the word but which can be shown to be vitally involved and cofunctioning in different ways” (C 237). 3. We previously introduced the term systemic representation to describe and name the phenomenon under consideration here. By systemic representation was meant a closed scientific system that represents conceptually a form of kinaesthetic action (Angus 1997, 186–93). However, the current text gives “systemic representation” a fundamental phenomenological grounding in the concept of Galilean science, whereas it was previously based on an interpretation of the common ground of Marx and Heidegger.

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Concluding Remark to Part III

Part III concerned itself with socially-organized human motility, or kinaesthetic action, in lifeworld practice that is experienced with immanent meaning and value in a certain intensity. For this reason, Husserl thought that biology, as the science with a conceptual continuity with such experienced subjectivity, could overcome the crisis of the sciences. We have followed through the convergence of kinaesthetic activity with an ontology of labor. Unlike Jan Patočka and Ludwig Landgrebe, who considered and rejected Marx’s early Hegelian ontology for this role, we have shown that the ontology of labor in Capital, Vol. 1 suffices to ground the surplus productivity of labor and its privative negation in culture. Surplus productivity, which is grounded in the ontology of labor, can be traced back to its origin in natural fecundity, or excess. It showed that Husserl’s expectation for biology cannot be fulfilled since the regime of value homogenizes and limits meaning and value. The formal science (political economy) of living labor does not escape from crisis since it expresses value only as homogenized numerical expression of an unthematized totality. Thus we proposed that the science of ecology has a better case for exemplarity, not only due to its continuity between lived subjectivity and scientific conceptuality, but as a parallel to the phenomenological conception of lived perception of objects as against a background and within a horizon. Meaning and value can thus be found in the intensity of experiences of nature, which are elided through their equalization in the regime of value, that propose an overcoming of the regime of value. Such experiences are eroded by nature conceived as abstract which is operative in both political economy and its critique. The concrete, living ecology of value—which we will take up in the Part IV—contains meaning and value within cultural-civilizational practice. 353

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Part IV

TRANSCENDENTALITY AND THE CONSTITUTION OF WORLDS

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Chapter Eleven

The Paradox of Subjectivity and the Transcendental Field

Our original schematization of the three main innovations in the text of the Crisis claimed that they were related in a logical fashion: The first innovation concerning the mathematization of nature allows Husserl to determine the presupposition of the lifeworld. The presupposition of the lifeworld motivates a phenomenological science of the lifeworld which is the second innovation. The condition for a science of the lifeworld is the transcendentalphenomenological reduction which institutes a duality between transcendental and worldly subjectivity that is the third innovation. The third innovation is, strictly speaking, not an innovation original to the Crisis since the phenomenological reduction had been distinctive of Husserl’s philosophy since 1905.1 Nevertheless, the Crisis intimates a new way into the transcendentalphenomenological reduction from inquiring back into the pregiven lifeworld. In the context of the crisis as instituted by the objectivism of the modern age and its origin in the exemplary character of the mathematical science of nature, this innovation concerns the recovery of subjectivity that can overcome the crisis. Subjectivity appears in two guises: concrete subjectivity within the lifeworld and transcendental subjectivity as opened up by the transcendental reduction. The issue of their relation poses a paradox—that subjectivity is an object in the world and a subject for the world. Sorting out the difference and relation between concrete and transcendental subjectivity is thus essential to the recovery of subjectivity to which the Crisis-text is teleologically oriented. Part IV of our investigation is concerned with the third innovation that is succinctly referred to in the Crisis as a “paradox of subjectivity.” We will begin by considering the actual place of this reference in the text of the Crisis published posthumously in 1954, then turn to the formulation and resolution of the paradox of subjectivity as suggested in that text. Subsequently we will consider the transcendental-phenomenological reduction directly in order to 357

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explicate the innovation involved in the way into the reduction sketched in the Crisis. Finally, we will present our understanding of the relation between the transcendental field and the lifeworld and indicate the role of subjectivity in overcoming the crisis. 11.1 THE ROLE OF THE “PARADOX OF SUBJECTIVITY” IN THE CRISIS-TEXT Given that the Crisis-text is an unfinished text, and given that the third innovation is a concluding one whose understanding determines the teleology of the Crisis, let us begin with a consideration of the location and significance of the “paradox of subjectivity” within the text itself. The phrase “paradox of subjectivity” occurs in the title to section 53 of the text toward the end of Part IIIA. Part IIIA begins with Kant’s unexpressed presupposition of the lifeworld that we described as the second innovation and proceeds to develop the idea of a science of the lifeworld (that we investigated in Part III of our text). Immediately afterward, in section 35, Husserl addresses the transcendental epochē as the “method of access to the new science’s field of work” (C 135). Part IIIA concludes with section 54 on the resolution of the paradox of subjectivity and section 55 on a correction in the understanding of the epochē. We may therefore say that the subject of the third innovation is dealt with in the second half of Husserl’s Part IIIA in sections 35 to 55. His published text does not end there. The subsequent Part IIIB is entitled “the way into phenomenological transcendental philosophy from psychology.” Part IIIA is entitled “the way into phenomenological transcendental philosophy by inquiring back from the pregiven lifeworld.” It would therefore be logical to conclude, on the basis of the text in its given organization, that the way into transcendental phenomenology from psychology—understood to mean that the subjectivity explored by psychology as the science of concrete individual subjects in the lifeworld as an entry-point to the transcendental subjectivity revealed by the reduction—is implied as a resolution of the dual sense of subjectivity brought forward by the science of the lifeworld. Or, to explicate the textual implication even further, that the science of the lifeworld that is a central accomplishment of the thesis of the crisis of the European sciences points toward the way into transcendental phenomenology from psychology as an adequate, and possibly superior, form of the epochē to that of Husserl’s prior work and also any other form presented or implied in the Crisis-text itself—in particular that one essentially related to the uncovering of the presupposition of the lifeworld.2

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The understanding of the “paradox of subjectivity” and of the ways in to transcendental phenomenology, including any possible superiority one or another way may have, presented in this chapter takes issue with this implication in a parallel manner to which the organization of the Crisis-text was subjected to criticism in our original overview of the Crisis. There are two aspects to this contestation: One, that the way in from phenomenological psychology is not superior to the way in from the lifeworld from the viewpoint of the thesis of the crisis of European sciences and European humanity. Two, that there is a way in from the lifeworld that is intimated but not thoroughly justified in the Crisis which can, with appropriate development beyond the letter of Husserl’s work, fulfil this task. This contestation leads to an affirmation that is fundamental for the conception of phenomenology in Part IV of our current text. We will recall that the critical, encyclopediac, survey of the sciences that Fink projected to be the subject-matter of Part IV may be supposed to be the consequence of the manner in which the problem of objectivism and the recovery of subjectivity are resolved in the prior parts.3 The conception of phenomenology defended here takes leave from this encyclopediac conception and, on the basis of the way in from the lifeworld, articulates a Socratic one such that inquiring motivated within the lifeworld leads to an epochē in which the duality of subjectivity as transcendental field and as concrete ego within a cultural-civilizational world can be explicated as the embodiment of philosophical self-responsibility. 11.2 CONCRETE AND TRANSCENDENTAL EGO IN THE CRISIS The difference and relation between the concrete and transcendental egos expressed in the paradox of subjectivity comprises sections 35 to 55 of Part IIIA of Husserl’s text. Section 34 concludes with the statement that “as soon as the empty and vague notion of intuition . . . has become the problem of the lifeworld . . . there occurs the great transformation of the ‘theory of knowledge’ . . . whereby . . . science as a problem and as an accomplishment loses its self-sufficiency and becomes a mere partial problem” (C 134–5). Section 35 announces without preamble that the “method of access” to the task of explicating the lifeworld is through the transcendental epochē, that it consists in a number of steps, each of which involves “a withholding of natural, naïve validities and in general of validities already in effect” (C 135). Such abstaining from belief in validities in order to investigate their self-givenness, constitution and field of applicability requires, says Husserl, a universal formulation. He describes his previous investigation in the first half of Part IIIA (sections 28–34) as a first step in this direction insofar as it has uncovered the

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presupposition of the lifeworld in previous philosophy and the necessity of a science of the lifeworld. A second step consists in setting aside the positive sciences and the theoretical interests that animate them. The third step, that renders the suspension of belief a universal transcendental epochē, is a setting-aside of belief in the lifeworld understood as a “world-horizon as a horizon of possible things” (C 138). Immediately a problem arises: the experience of things within a worldhorizon appears within what we will term a “cultural-civilizational world.” As Husserl says, “[for] Negroes in the Congo, Chinese peasants, etc. . . . the facts that are for them are fixed, generally verified or verifiable, are by no means the same as ours” (C 139).4 It might seem as if “anthropological world” might be a better name for this phenomenon of a world of meaning. As Husserl puts it in a preparatory text for the Crisis entitled “the anthropological world,” “the world is the self-objectification of life in the form of plants, animals and humans, who are born and die” (KE 334). However, not only would this term tie the phenomenon too closely to the special science pursued under that name, but it might obscure the contemporary phenomenon of the encounter and mixing of such worlds that will have to be investigated in this context. The issue here is that facts, insofar as they seem self-evident or can be determined as evident on the basis of investigation, appear within forms of cultural-civilizational worlds that structure the meaning and value available within them and which are delimited by a world-horizon. Nevertheless, Husserl immediately adds that despite these relative features the lifeworld also has a universal structure. The task, as he provisionally describes it, is as follows: What is needed, then, would be a systematic division of the universal structures— universal life-world a priori and universal ‘objective’ a priori—and then also a division among the universal inquiries according to the way in which the ‘objective’ a priori is grounded in the ‘subjective-relative’ a priori of the life-world or how, for example, mathematical self-evidence has its source of meaning and source of legitimacy in the self-evidence of the life-world (C 140).

The life-world has universal apriori structures pertinent to all the culturalcivilizational worlds. Let us immediately note three important aspects of Husserl’s posing of this issue. First, unlike most contemporary thinkers in our own time, the “subjective-relative” character of cultural-civilizational worlds does not mean that there are no universal features of such worlds. Second, by “subjective-relative” Husserl is referring to large-scale cultural-civilizational forms or worlds encompassing the differences between Europe, China, India and Africa. They are not “subjective” in the sense of referring to the differences between individual human beings. Rather, the pertinent differences be-

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tween human beings are referred to types “relative” to cultural-civilizational forms. That is to say that “facts” appear as such within a cultural-civilizational world which forms a normal type of human being to which such facts appear. Third, Husserl emphasizes that, not only is there a difference between the a priori structures of cultural-civilizational worlds and the universal a priori of the life-world, but that the universal a priori is one-sidedly founded on the subjective-relative cultural-civilizational worlds. Even mathematics, which might seem to be the exemplary form of knowledge independent of a culturalcivilizational world, is grounded in such a world for “its source of meaning and source of legitimacy.” In this sense, the ground for a universal science of the life-world that pertains to all “subjective-relative” cultural-civilizational worlds, and which is thereby not limited to any one of them, nevertheless appears in exactly such “subjective-relative” cultural-civilizational worlds. This is another way of stating the paradox of subjectivity—that the subject is an object in the world and also the subject for the world. Universal knowledge of the lifeworld attains a certain independence of the lifeworld, at least of a given structure of a cultural-civilizational world, even while its source of meaning and legitimacy are in precisely such a world. Moreover, the motive for the transcendental-phenomenological reduction that opens the universal apriori of the lifeworld is rooted in the concrete ego of the philosopher as a member of a given cultural-civilizational world. As a concrete ego the philosopher is a normal member of a given cultural-civilizational world dependent on the facts of that world, whereas as a transcendental ego the philosopher has access to a transcendental field in which the possibility of a plurality of cultural-civilizational worlds is given and facts are relative to a given such world in a manner that their constitution can be explicated as well as the normal human type for which they count as facts. Universal knowledge of the structure of the lifeworld depends upon achieving a philosophical standpoint upon such lifeworlds and is thus not confined to them such that they may described and investigated as such. The transcendental-phenomenological epochē is precisely such a method of access. The epochē puts out of action, with one blow, the total performance running through the whole of natural world-life and through the whole network (whether concealed or open) of validities . . . We thus have an attitude above the universal conscious life (both individual-subjective and intersubjective) through which the world is ‘there’ for those naïvely absorbed in ongoing life, as unquestionably present, as the universe of what is there, as the field of all acquired and newly established life-interests (C 150).

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By ceasing to believe in the validities that structure the world and give it meaning, it is possible to investigate such structures and meanings. The word “belief,” that Husserl often uses in this context, is open to ambiguities. The philosopher, in order to gain access to the lifeworld which is to be investigated, puts out of play any belief in the validities of the lifeworld—otherwise, the investigation would be compromised by assumptions smuggled in as verities without examination. Thus the transcendental ego of the philosopher, if we may put it that way, has suspended belief in the existence of the world, but the concrete person whom the philosopher is cannot fail to continue to believe in the verities of the inhabited lifeworld. The paradox of subjectivity thus re-appears in the philosopher who investigates the meaning of the lifeworld and in so doing must set aside belief in it and who is also a human being whose belief is always operative in some form. The motive for such a radical reduction by a concrete person must therefore be one of the topics for a phenomenology of the reduction, which we will take up later in the chapter. The epochē results in what Husserl calls “the discovery of the universal, absolutely self-enclosed and absolutely self-sufficient correlation between the world itself and world-consciousness” (C 151). That is to say, a concrete ego directs itself toward beings of all kinds in the lifeworld. The lifeworld is such a correlation between worldly subjectivity and things or beings in the world. In order to see it as such, the philosopher requires a standpoint, in Husserl’s metaphor, “above” this world of correlations. The concrete ego is a worldly subject immersed in a practical world of actions, perceptions, etc. which therein takes the subject-object (noesis-noema) correlations as its subject-matter for investigation. The transcendental ego, as Husserl calls it, which can undertake the descriptions of lifeworld correlations, is “above” this entailment of concrete subject and beings in the world. In this sense, he says that one can “recognize humankind [Menschheit] as a self-objectification of transcendental subjectivity” (C 153, translation altered; K 155). Put differently, the lifeworld of any cultural-civilizational group can be glimpsed as one possibility among others from the transcendental standpoint. In concluding this discussion Husserl explains very succinctly that his reflections here amount to a new way of understanding the transcendentalphenomenological reduction compared to his earlier work, which he characterizes as “beginning anew, starting purely from natural world-life, and by asking after the how of the world’s pregivenness” (C 154). This has conventionally after Husserl been called “the way in from the lifeworld” (Kern 1977). He remarks that it is superior to the “Cartesian way” characteristic of Ideas I (but also of other prior texts) because the Cartesian way attains the transcendental ego in one leap such that the transcendental ego appears to be without content. By implication, this statement suggests that the way from the

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lifeworld shows, first, that one is left with the content of correlations between subject and object forms characteristic of a lifeworld and, second, that the reduction is not accomplished in one leap but in several steps. Further implications of this critique of the Cartesian way will be taken up in the discussion of the transcendental-phenomenological reduction in the next section. At this point the text of Part IIIA of the Crisis shifts focus. From the above theme of the universal science of the lifeworld and its condition of possibility in the epochē, Husserl begins a consideration of the universal features of the lifeworld. This consideration takes him through sections 45 to 51 and concludes in sections 52 to 55 in a statement of the paradox of subjectivity and its resolution. The universal features of the lifeworld are illustrated by the example of perception. There are several main aspects of his description: While a thing is seen from different perspectives, in which shapes and colors often shift, nevertheless the thing is experienced as a unitary thing. The “apriori of correlation” by which such perspectives mesh to form a whole depends on an “unfolding of horizons” (C 159). The unitary object is constituted through a stream of consciousness whose temporal structure includes a now-point, retention of past profiles and anticipation of future ones. By displaying the intentions operative in such profiles we can see that “without them the objects and the world would not be there for us and that the former exist for us only with the meaning and the mode of being that they receive in constantly arising or having risen out of those subjective accomplishments” (C 160). Here we have the first intimation of a suggestion that is not clearly marked in Crisis and never clearly followed through: that the analysis of perception and, in general, lifeworld experience discloses a new motive for the transcendental reduction understood as a way in from the lifeworld.5 This suggestion emerges on two nearby subsequent occasions in the discussion of sense-perception. He had previously remarked that “what I attribute to the thing itself . . . is again something which exhibits itself in manifold ways” (C 158). Later, he remarks again that “the correlation between the world (the world of which we always speak) and its subjective manners of givenness never evoked philosophical wonder” (C 165). This suggests that the reduction can be seen as a form of philosophical wonder originating with the Greeks and might be motivated by the duality between shifting profiles of perception and the unitary character of the perceived object. This would explain why Husserl’s exposition apparently deviates from section 44 where he is still discussing the reduction and the way from the lifeworld in distinction from the Cartesian way to section 45 where he begins discussing sense-perception. The apparent discontinuity in the text can be explained if we see Husserl as suggesting that the way in from the lifeworld might be motivated by wonder at the meshing of manifold perspectives with a unitary thing. However, this

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suggestion is not followed up in the text of the Crisis that was assembled and published in 1954. The published text, as we have emphasized, ends Part IIIA with a discussion of the “paradox of subjectivity” and then goes on in Part IIIB to discuss the way in from phenomenological psychology. In short, the incipient way in to the transcendental reduction from the lifeworld which is opened up by the Crisis is not made explicit in the discussion of senseperception and is covered up by the subsequent implication that the way in from psychology is the superior way from the viewpoint of the Crisis. Let us then come to Husserl’s resolution of the “paradox of subjectivity” at the end of Part IIIA. The paradox consists in the fact “that the human [Mensch], and in communalization humankind [Menschheit] is subjectivity for the world and at the same time is supposed to be in it in an objective and worldly manner” (C 262, translation altered; K 265).6 First, Husserl remarks that his previous, pre-Crisis interest in the subject-object correlations of the natural world obscured the fact that the “I” had undergone a change of signification.7 In its changed signification, the “I” also implies others so that the prior terminology of an ego or a subject obscures its intersubjectivity. In the natural world “subjectivity” appears not only as an individual subject but more primordially as an intersubjective community since the world which is intended as existing for all of “us” who are members of that world and not as a purely individual world. This raises the necessity for phenomenological descriptions of the constitution of levels of communal subjectivity that Husserl calls “personalities of a higher order” and which include interpersonal dyads and small groups, mass social groups, crowds, states, nations and communities of all kinds (C 188; CM 132ff.). This comprises an immense amount of material for phenomenological psychology, sociology, anthropology and political science to investigate in detail. Without going into such investigations, it is possible to say that all existing subjectivities are worldly in presupposing shared meanings oriented to characteristic objects within a horizon which determines the limits within which those meanings are operative. The most encompassing sense of such communal subjectivity is that which we have termed a “cultural-civilizational world.” As a consequence of the recognition of such subjectivities as worldly, it follows that in the transcendental ego there is nothing of such constituted worldly subjectivity. “In the epochē and in the pure focus upon the functioning ego-pole . . . nothing human is to be found, neither soul nor psychic life nor real psychophysical human beings; all this belongs to the ‘phenomenon,’ to the world as constituted pole” (C 183). David Carr summarizes the issue succinctly: As given in natural reflection the empirical ego or Ich-Mensch relates in both intentional and real-causal ways to the world but in any case, as we saw, as part to whole. As given in transcendental reflection, in contrast, the pure or transcen-

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dental ego relates purely and exclusively intentionally to the world, not as part to whole but as subject to object—or rather, as subject to horizon of objects” (Carr 1999, 90–1).

Thus the concrete ego is to be understood as a worldly, human, multi-dimensional, constituted communalization and, in that sense, a part of the world which is a whole through its horizon. In contrast, the transcendental reduction opens up an unworldly, non-human realm that is the source of worldly subjectivity which can therefore be considered as “a self-objectification of transcendental subjectivity” (C 153). As a source, transcendental subjectivity is not only different from worldly subjectivity but is also essentially related to it and, in a certain sense, identical to it in the form of a self-objectification. This difference and identity is another way of phrasing the paradox. Second, Husserl refers to the “primal ego” which is the ego of the epochē as an “essential equivocation.” Since humankind and all “personal pronouns” become constituted phenomena in the epochē, the ‘I’ that I attain in the epochē, which would be the same as the ‘ego’ within a critical reinterpretation and correction of the Cartesian conception, is actually called ‘I’ only by equivocation—though it is an essential equivocation since, when I name it in reflection, I can say nothing other than: it is I who practice the epochē, I who interrogate, as phenomenon, the world which is now valid for me according to its being and being-such . . . it is I who stand above all natural existence . . . it is I who, taken in full concreteness, encompass all that (C 184).

Husserl’s first observation differentiates the concrete ego (including all personalities of a higher order) from the transcendental realm. His second observation pertains to their identity, an identity which is essential since it is an actual human subject who undertakes the transcendental epochē and thereby becomes the philosopher who describes concrete worlds from a transcendental point of view. To that extent it is impossible to avoid the equivocation that attributes to the transcendental an “ego” which, as such, will appear to be in some manner “like” a concrete ego.8 We may note that the equivocation arises because the transcendental reduction is something actually performed by an existing human being even though there is nothing of an actual human being in transcendentality itself. We will postpone any attempt to deal with this central aspect of the paradox for later consideration except to point out that it overlaps with the issue of which of the several “ways in” to the transcendental reduction better reflects this duality and the essentially related issue of the motive for performing the epochē. On the basis of these two aspects of Husserl’s resolution of the paradox, he articulates a correction of the “first application” of the epochē—which refers to the Cartesian way into the epochē since that is the context of the resolution

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of the paradox as a “new way to the reduction” superior, at least in some aspects, to the Cartesian one (C 154). He characterizes this correction as a “conscious reshaping of the epochē through a reduction to the absolute ego as the ultimately unique center of function in all constitution” (C 186). He notes that the world is always pregiven, in the middle of which the I of the cogito orients itself to things of the world, and asks what is needed methodologically for this obviousness to become evident and understood. The method now requires that the ego, beginning with its concrete worldphenomenon, systematically inquire back (zurückfragt), and thereby become acquainted with itself, the transcendental ego, in its concreteness, in the system of its constitutive levels . . . In this systematic procedure one first attains the correlation between the world and transcendental subjectivity as objectified in humankind (Menschheit) (C 187, translation altered; K 191).

This is the essence of the way into the transcendental reduction from inquiring back into the pregiven lifeworld. The lifeworld consists in subject-object correlations within a cultural-civilizational horizon; the reduction opens transcendental access to the descriptions of such concrete worlds; the method of such inquiry is systematically inquiring back. Such transcendentality (as we may call it) is not and cannot be any form of constituted human subjectivity but it is nevertheless termed a “subjectivity” by Husserl through an essential equivocation due to the motive required for a concrete subject to perform the reduction and therefore for transcendental descriptions to enter the history of philosophy and the history of humankind. We will recall that Husserl suggests that lifeworld experience, due to wonder at the relationship between objects given in profiles and the unitary character of the object, discloses a new motive for the transcendental reduction understood as a way in from the lifeworld. That suggestion, however, was never fully explicated by Husserl. It depends upon how one understands the paradox of subjectivity—the difference and unity of the concrete and transcendental egos—and, especially, the motive for the transcendental reduction which unites the concrete, reflecting, human subject to the realm of transcendentality. At this point in the Crisis-text Husserl’s explication of the paradox of subjectivity breaks off inconclusively at the end of Part IIIA and Part IIIB begins on another foot by considering the way into phenomenological transcendental philosophy from psychology. We will attempt to complete Husserl’s suggestion of a way in to transcendental phenomenology from the lifeworld by first considering the transcendental reduction in a wider perspective in his work, noting some illuminating critiques, and then proposing an understanding that we will follow out in later chapters of this work.

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11.3 THE TRANSCENDENTAL-PHENOMENOLOGICAL REDUCTION The question of various ways into the transcendental-phenomenological reduction and the evaluation of the relative merits of these ways goes back, as we have already seen in one passage in the Crisis, to Husserl himself. Comparison of the various ways inevitably includes comparison of the motive or motives for enacting the transcendental-phenomenological reduction in each case. Subsequent interpreters have systematized and pursued this question beyond the investigations of Husserl such that it is now one of the basic contentious questions for the conception of phenomenology. To investigate the question of ways into the transcendental-phenomenological reduction would itself require extensive inquiry (Perkins 2017). Our current project, however, simplifies the inquiry somewhat. Since our task is to understand the aim and expression of the Crisis in order to modify and extend it for a contemporary phenomenology, it is not necessary to consider the merits and demerits of each way separately. Our concern is simply with the concept and adequacy of the way in from inquiring back into the pregiven lifeworld. The leading thread that we may take from the Crisis is Husserl’s suggestion that the way in from the lifeworld may be contrasted to the Cartesian way and found to be superior in some respects that require a “conscious reshaping” of the idea of the epochē itself (C 186). We will recall the two aspects of that superiority to consist in the fact that the transcendental-phenomenological reduction is not accomplished in one leap but in a number of steps and that it is not without content but consists in the content-filled correlations that inhabit a given cultural-civilizational world. 11.3.1 An Orienting Sketch of the Cartesian Way In Husserl’s Göttingen lectures of 1907, which were not published until 1950, his first presentation of the necessity of the transcendental reduction occurs within the Cartesian motif of finding a certain foundation from which may be built up an edifice of scientific knowledge that, due to the certainty of its foundation and basic elements, constitutes an organized, consistent and coherent representation of truth about the world which can be improved upon systematically toward infinity. After a survey of the difficulties of knowledge of the natural world in the first lecture, the second lecture begins with the necessity of the epochē to the critique of cognition: since all natural knowledge depends upon judgments about the world, and all judgments are doubtful concerning their validity, then the only non-prejudicial starting-point is doubt concerning every judgment and perception—indeed every doxic positing of

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a state of affairs in the world. Allying himself with Descartes, Husserl finds that it is indubitable that one is doubting. However, Husserl distinguishes between the experience of a mental process (of whatever sort) and the reflective apprehension of that mental process. While I may well doubt the nature and significance of the givenness in the mental process—and scientific cognition certainly requires the rigorous exercise of such reflective inquiry—it is nevertheless the case that the existence of the mental process as such is an “absolute foundation” in the sense that “this perception is, and remains as long as it lasts, something absolute, something here and now, something that in itself is what it is, something by which I can measure as by an ultimate standard what being and being given can mean . . .” (IP 24). Thus, while dubitability pertains to any of the judgments of the scientific edifice, both to judgments of fact and deductions or extrapolations from judgments of fact, there is in a certain sense an indubitability to the experiential stream to which scientific judgments refer and about which they judge. This indubitability is of course not that any perception, or mental process of any kind, is true insofar as it is judged about. Rather it is existent as the necessary reference of any judgments whatever. In this sense, it is the stream of experience as a whole that is the indubitable foundation of science. Husserl uses this distinction to point out that “all cognition of the natural sort, and especially the pre-scientific, is cognition which makes its object transcendent” (IP 27). That is to say, the mental process is directed towards a state of affairs in the world that is taken to be precisely in the world and not within the mental process as such. While we may doubt reflectively whether the state of affairs is really such as it appeared at first glance, the stream of experience prior to such reflection intends objects which are in the world (in whatever mode of psychic, physical, etc. being that may appear) and not in the perceiving consciousness. Here resides, in Husserl’s view, the basic problem of scientific cognition to which Descartes’ reflections pointed: how is it possible for the mental process of the immanent stream of consciousness to achieve adequate connection to objects which are transcendent to it such that true judgments may be made? After expounding the problem of knowledge in this radical form, Husserl states the necessity and procedure of the transcendental-phenomenological reduction in the initial form in which he discovered it. The difficulty of arriving at true judgments about transcendent objects is “a sufficient and complete deduction of the epistemological principle that an epistemological reduction has to be accomplished . . . [in which] everything transcendent that is involved must be bracketed, or be assigned the index of indifference, of epistemological nullity” (IP 31). The carrying-out of this reduction consists in a refraining from accepting the transcendence of objects of cognition to the

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immanent stream of consciousness. “Every postulation of a ‘non-immanent actuality,’ of anything which is not contained in the phenomenon, even if intended by the phenomenon, . . . is bracketed, i.e., suspended” (IP 35). We must note that for Husserl this does not mean an unrestricted scepticism. In the first place, as mentioned above, the stream of experience in which objects are given, and which is independent of the existence of transcendent objects, remains as an absolute datum. Moreover, the objects intended by immanent experience, even after we as reflective subjects have reduced their claim to transcendence, present themselves as having such a transcendence. That is to say, while I may epistemologically suspend my belief that this desk in front of me actually exists independently of the stream of experience in which it is presented, nevertheless my concrete experience continues to point to such an independence. We may perhaps call this an immanent claim to transcendence that is given as such within the presentation of the object. So, in the second place, the suspending of belief in transcendence is not a denial of such transcendence. Rather, it opens up the possibility of describing the givenness of objects such that they present themselves with immanent claims to transcendence. Transcendence is no longer within the sphere of ungrounded assertion or denial but becomes a field for investigation. It is precisely in this way that phenomenology can become a critique of cognition that establishes the legitimacy and limits of legitimacy pertaining to scientific judgments. Husserl italicized this consequence: “Phenomenology proceeds by ‘seeing,’ clarifying,’ and determining meaning, and by distinguishing meanings” (IP 46). The accomplishment of scientific judgments, their legitimacy and limits to applicability, and the critique of cognition thus become the thematic concern of a specifically philosophical method. By ceasing to either affirm or deny transcendence the scientific effort to determine truth becomes open to rigorous description of its meaningful accomplishment. We should note several features of this early presentation of the phenomenological reduction. It is characterized as an epistemological reduction due to its origin in the Cartesian goal of securing the foundation of the sciences. It is presented as a decision by the philosopher to abstain from assertions, or denials, of the transcendence of intended objects. Moreover, such abstention is presented here, in distinction from later presentations, as a one-by-one affair; each and every claim to transcendence—perhaps considered collectively but as a collection of single claims—is suspended in its individual transcendence. And, finally, a large effort of phenomenological investigation into the accomplishment of scientific knowledge as a meaningful edifice is opened up in a manner that suggests that phenomenology can indeed justify that evidence and thus fulfil the Cartesian goal.

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The first product of the transcendental reduction, as we have seen, is to reveal the stream of immanent consciousness as absolute in the sense that its existence is certain and that only it can be the recourse to establishing the legitimacy of higher-level reflections, inferences, or theories. Unlike the transcendence of the objects intended, the immanent experience of those objects is given absolutely as such. In his lectures of 1910–11—which developed a largely similar conception of the reduction with the exception of dropping the term “epistemological reduction”—Husserl pointed to the “ontological privilege of experience over the natural object” (BPP 35ff.). Whereas the existence of a feeling such as pleasure or pain is known as existent and as it is in the perception itself, the empirical thing contains no such guarantee and its existence is always in principle dubitable. This difference is, of course, the basis for the suspension of belief in the transcendence of the object that characterizes the transcendental-phenomenological reduction. Thus, after the reduction, while the object is given solely as a “phenomenon” with its claim to existence bracketed in order to open a field for the investigation of the meaning of such claims, the psychic side (the perception or feeling itself) is given as absolute. The phenomenological attitude thus reveals objects-asmeant without ontological positing. “If I, as a phenomenologist suspend all empirical judgments in the usual sense, my phenomenological statements will remain unaffected by this, even if I, as a natural thinking human being, will again make empirical judgments, lend credence to natural science, and so forth” (BPP 44-5). The psychic side presents no such problem of transcendent existence with regard to the intending gaze directed toward objects, but the phenomenological attitude does affect the psychic side in a certain way. It is not only the case that every positing of whatever else there is of nature with the things in space and time, including the positing of one’s own body and the psycho-physical relations of experiences to it, must remain inoperative, but it is also the case that the positing of the empirical I, conceived as a person joined to the body, must remain inoperative, and this is not only true for all other I’s, but also for one’s own empirical I (BPP 40).

Thus, while the immanent stream of experience is given absolutely, this is not the natural experience of a human with a body nor of a person whose identity transcends the immanent stream of experience that intends objects. Here we have the origin of the paradoxical relation between concrete subjectivity and transcendental subjectivity as it is later described in the Crisis. Even if we focus the phenomenological attitude upon those experiences in which I am given to myself as a person living in the natural lifeworld, the description of those experiences requires a phenomenological reduction to what Husserl

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came to call a “transcendental ego” from which point of view those descriptions can be made. Husserl’s early accounts of the transcendental-phenomenological reduction were reprised in the classic formulation of Ideas I. As in The Idea of Phenomenology and The Basic Problems of Phenomenology, the first statement concerns the natural world. He terms the natural world the world of the natural attitude. We should take note of this apparently simple first step. To characterize the world which we take as natural, in which we perceive objects, pursue our goals, and live with others as constituted by an “attitude” is already to describe it from outside. We are not conscious of inhabiting an attitude when we pick up a glass with the non-thematic expectation that it is solid, light, and non-porous hidden within the thematic expectation that we may fill it with water and drink. To call it an “attitude” is to thematize these non-thematic expectations which contain ontological, transcendent claims. Thus, the first step of the characterization of the natural world as a natural world depends upon Husserl the thinker, the writer, having already performed the reduction that he explains to the reader. It is a description of the reduction from within the reduction. Indeed, the very idea of the natural world is only possible because its standpoint has been suspended and become open to description. Thus, it can appear as a “standpoint” or an “attitude” and not simply as the things and processes of the world itself. Indeed, Husserl’s next step is to characterize the natural attitude as occurring through a “general positing” in which the world is given as factually existing such that it is not affected by any limited doubt about specific data within that world. The natural world has been characterized first in its general structure, second as an attitude, and third as a general positing of existence. These increasingly specific characterizations, which in terminology imply an explicit consciousness but in fact refer to a non-thematic living-in, are only possible retrospectively. It is this prior performance that has made explicit the living-in that is characteristic of the lifeworld. Its characterization as determined by an “attitude” is co-extensive with its understanding in the later terms of the Crisis as a “self-obectification” of the transcendental ego. These characterizations lead toward his “proposal to alter it [the natural attitude] radically . . . [to] put out of action the general positing which belongs to the essence of the natural attitude” (Ideas1 57, 61, emphasis removed). The setting aside, parenthesizing, or suspension of the general positing of the existence of the world is a free act that “completely shuts me off from any judgment about spatiotemporal factual being” (Ideas1 61, emphasis removed). Most notable about this change of attitude, which is the change that opens up phenomenology as a distinctive form of philosophizing, is the abruptness with which it is introduced and the single act in which it is

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performed. Should the reader follow Husserl in this proposal, the true significance of his prior description of the natural world will become evident. The strange terminology of a non-thematic belief in the existence of the world being characterized as an attitude and a positing becomes justified once the experience of suspension shows it to be precisely something like an attitude or a positing that holds it in place. The reflexive character of the description of the reduction that accounts for the strangeness of Husserl’s description in the first place is justified when the reader enacts the proposal in the first person. In the Cartesian Meditations he sought to ameliorate this strangeness and abruptness to some extent by showing that the Cartesian search for an indubitable foundation for knowledge comes upon the pervasive assumption of the existence of the world and yet has to accept that “the non-being of the world is conceivable” (CM 17). The logical development from doubt about specific evidences to radical Cartesian doubt to awareness of the general positing that sustains the natural attitude and then the possibility of suspending that positing to which Husserl alludes in Cartesian Meditations appears to be very like the train of thought that he himself underwent in 1905 and reported in The Idea of Phenomenology in 1907. Yet this conceivability in itself is not sufficient to capture the reflexively paradoxical character of any description of the transcendental-phenomenological reduction: the description of the natural attitude prior to its suspending is only justified from the standpoint achieved by the suspending itself. The explicitness of a general positing sustaining the natural world is not possible within the natural world where it remains unthematic. Thematization of the general positing is accomplished through the reduction itself. The presentation in Ideas I is thus exemplary in that it presents the reduction as achieved in one fell swoop and sets aside the thorny issue of the motivation for such a radical act. The Cartesian way into the transcendental-phenomenological reduction is dominated by the issue of the foundation of the sciences and the attempt to find an indubitable starting-point upon which a scientific architectonic can be built. Such an indubitable starting-point can only be found within the immanent stream of consciousness which intends transcendent objects not in transcendent objects themselves of any type. In the development of phenomenology this opened up a large field of investigation of such immanent consciousness of perception, time, intersubjectivity, etc. However, the down-side of the Cartesian way is that the “transcendental ego” in which the correlation between immanent consciousness and its intended objects appears too much alike the subjective concrete ego of the philosophizing subject. When Husserl remarks in a moment of retrospective self-criticism that it “brings the ego into view as apparently empty of content” (C 155), he expresses the kernel of a more extensive criticism. The transcendental ego appears as without content

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because it appears excessively identical to the immanent consciousness of the concrete subject which cannot be doubted to perceive as it appears to perceive. Thus, the ubiquitous criticisms of phenomenology as a subjective idealism will necessarily appear to be justified even though they are not. As Saulias Geniusas has shown with specific reference to the reduction as described in Ideas I, “what establishes the conceptual space within which the horizon reveals itself in its phenomenality is exactly what suppresses its full manifestation” (Geniusas 2012, 81, italics removed). He claims that the account in Ideas I “fails to inquire into the horizons of transcendental subjectivity just as it fails to uncover the world-horizon” (Geniusas 2012, 13). Husserl does not go quite so far as to suggest, as we have done, that transcendentality is not sufficiently distinct from concrete immanence, nor, as Geniusas has done, that the world-horizon is obscured. Nevertheless, one can see these two claims as latent in Husserl’s self-criticism. In failing to adequately distinguish transcendentality from the concrete ego, it becomes understood on the model of the psychological ego and yet without content so that it appears with neither the appearing content of its worldliness nor the worldly horizon within which it appears. We should note that this would also be true of the psychological reduction insofar as it begins from the worldly psychological ego of the individual subject. As mentioned, it is not our purpose to develop a thorough critique of the Cartesian way into the transcendental-phenomenological reduction but only to indicate the sense in which this way in might be deficient in comparison to the way in from the lifeworld. In general, this deficiency consists in a too-near identity with the concrete ego and its psychological enclosure that loses its worldly character which is determined by the search for an absolute foundation for scientific knowledge. Husserl himself, prior to the Crisis, had noted that the formulation in Ideas I contained a certain naïvité that required questioning. In the 1923–4 lectures published in First Philosophy he began to question the idea of an absolute science, not to reject it, but in order to investigate how such an idea arose within the history of philosophy and, in particular, how such an idea could become a guiding and motivating one for the philosophizing philosopher. He claimed that “whoever wants to be a philosopher in the highest sense, according to the Platonic and Cartesian idea of a universal science of self-justification” must accomplish this through “self-reflection” and through “rational self-formation and self-knowledge” (EP 5). A second reflection thus revealed that the Cartesian ideal itself requires justification and that such justification rests ultimately on the rational self-formation of the philosopher in the first person—although it subsequently affects the history of philosophy and thereby history outright. Both Ludwig Langrebe and Iso Kern point to First Philosophy as the text in which

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Husserl began to inquire deeper into the transcendental-phenomenological reduction as the ground of the idea of an absolute and all-encompassing science as it had been presented earlier in Ideas I (Landgrebe 1981a; Kern 1977, 134–7). The Cartesian way, due to its search for an absolute epistemological grounding, necessitates a paradoxical description since it depends upon the reduction for a description of the “attitude” that the reduction reduces.9 As such, it obscures the difference of transcendentality from the concrete ego and the world-horizon within which the concrete ego and its intended objects are situated. When one questions the ground for such an epistemological search, one is led toward the “individual resolve” of the philosopher in undertaking the transcendental-phenomenological reduction and the horizon of the lifeworld in which such a resolve takes effect (Landgrebe 1981a, 72, quoting EP 19). As Landgrebe has summarized, it is not so much an issue of knowledge but of the justification of the striving for knowledge as such (Landgrebe 1972, 43–6; Angus 2000a, 196–201). This striving has important punctual stages in the history of philosophy but it is renewed originally in the striving of every individual philosopher. 11.3.2 The Way from the Lifeworld The Cartesian way into the transcendental-phenomenological reduction is not rendered illegitimate by the way from the lifeworld but is rather transformed into a special problem of epistemological grounding within the context of the overarching issue of the origin of philosophy. As Husserl became aware, the Cartesian way performed the transcendental-phenomenological reduction in one fell swoop and thus presented the transcendental ego as without content. By implication, this criticism suggests that the transcendental-phenomenological reduction as performed as a way of inquiring back from the pregiven lifeworld is not accomplished in one leap but in a number of steps and that it is not without content but consists in the content-filled correlations that inhabit a given cultural-civilizational world. Such correlations occur within the horizon of a cultural-civilizational world which is one of an indeterminate number of objectifications of transcendentality. Let us then pick up Husserl’s suggestion that the plurality of adumbrations of a perception of a unitary object suggest a new form of the transcendentalphenomenological reduction distinct from the Cartesian one. As I perceive a yellow-orange bunch of leaves lying upon the grass in the near-distance, I may come to wonder whether my first perception is accurate. For example, in referring to that bunch of leaves to someone else, the response may be “which bunch?” or “where?” or “do you mean that pile of sticks?” Such doubts may be introduced by others or by my own subsequent perceptions and the dif-

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ficulty of synthesizing them with my first perception. Often my immediate reaction to such doubts is to shift my bodily location or to shield my eyes from the sun in order to get a different perspective on the object. Perceptions are rooted in the motile body and the ongoing synthesis of perceptual unity rests on its role. Any ordinary perception begins with a thematic positing of a such-and-such but may be re-visited due to doubts about the character of the original positing bymotivated difficulties in ongoing synthesis. Without such difficulties, the ongoing stream of experience continues without doubtinduced retracing. When my second perception poses the question “is it a pile of leaves or is it perhaps . . .?” then the reflective consciousness thematizes the previously unthematic aspects of the original perception. For example, if I begin with a perception of a pile of leaves in connection with the active intention “that pile of leaves needs to be picked up,” the subsequent reflection sets aside the question of whether they need to be picked up—what we might call the internal pragmatic horizon of the perception—in order to ask “is it a pile of leaves?” The internal pragmatic horizon that accompanies most, if not all, of our perceptions is suspended so that the original positing of “that is a pile of leaves” which was not originally thematic may be investigated through motile shifting. Note that thematic positing in an epistemological manner is not the original stance of ordinary perception but is brought about through a suspension of the internal pragmatic horizon that allows a single positing to be isolated as such. When so isolated, the question “is it a pile of leaves?” brings forth motile shifting in an attempt to answer the question. If it is affirmatively answered, the internal pragmatic horizon may be reconstituted and followed through. If not, then an alternative internal pragmatic horizon is brought into play: “That’s a pile of dog mess! Where are the bags?” When the epistemological question is being engaged, I ask “is that . . .?” in a manner that requires that I suspend the positing that “it is a pile of leaves” that was embedded in the original perception within an internal pragmatic horizon. This suspension may be called an incipient phenomenological reduction, though it is not transcendental since it does not pertain to the world as such nor to the existence of objects that populate a world. It does not suspend the existence of the world, nor the natural attitude that constitutes the world, but only the existence as such of an object within the world in order to perhaps modify it into a different modality of existence. Nonetheless, determining whether an object “really is” such-and-such is a normal aspect of worldly perception due to the fact that we do not perceive objects in their entirety all at once, as it were, but in profiles within the limits of our perception and its malleability. Husserl’s suggestion that there may be a new way into the transcendental-phenomenological lifeworld depends upon the manner in which

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the everyday epistemological questioning that we have briefly described may be said to lead toward a suspension of the natural attitude itself. When I question “is that a pile of leaves?” both the character of the perceived object and the “attitude” of the perceiver are brought into relation and together suspended. When I alter my bodily attitude, for example, I set aside the previous perception with its subjective certainty in favor of a correlation between the object (now considered as problematic and yet-to-bedetermined) and the subject (now considered as perhaps subject to a distortion due to partial perception). The epistemological moment thus contains the correlation of the previous subject-object, perceiver-perceived, noesisnoema, in a suspended fashion within a new space of inquiry. For this reason, it may be characterized as the reduction in an incipient manner. We have emphasized in this description that ordinary perception cannot be separated from bodily motility. Indeed, it is bodily motility that both reveals the possibility of correcting perception in the ongoing synthesis of experience and also raises doubt about the original unthematic positing within an internal pragmatic horizon. But this point can be taken further. While Husserl grounded intuition in the lifeworld in kinaesthetic action—the doing of the living body (C 106)—his reference to a new way into the transcendental-phenomenological reduction was posed exclusively with reference to perception (C 157ff.). As Jan Patočka and others have insisted, the lifeworld must also be seen as an intersubjective world of activity and thought (Patočka 1989, 233–5; Patočka 2016c, 183–7). Action in the intersubjective world raises similar issues of suspension and correction as those of perception. An action aims at a certain end by presupposing certain regular features of action and belief among a community of persons. If such action fails to achieve its purpose, these features can be held up to scrutiny to see if they are really such as they appeared non-thematically to be. Such scrutiny requires that the assumed manner of being of these features be suspended in order for a description of their manifestation to be undertaken. And, similarly again, we suppose others of our community to hold similar beliefs and thoughts to ourselves which may become questionable in the ongoing synthesis of experience. So, speaking universally, the ongoing synthesis of experience in the lifeworld presents examples of perceptions, actions, and thoughts which were supposed to be such-and-such but have been suspended in order to question the real nature of their existence and ultimately to restore the ongoing synthesis of experience. Not only perceptions, but also actions and thoughts, as they occur within the lifeworld are adumbrations of a unitary object. Lifeworld experiences are located in motile bodies which perceive, act, and think toward unitary objects that appear in profiles or adumbrations. It is these adumbrations that ground the necessary corrections of experience. Every questioning, even of

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a mundane sort, in the context of the ongoing synthesis of experience in the lifeworld is an example of an incipient reduction due to these four fundamental features: One, asking whether the experienced object (noema) is indeed as it has presented itself requires a suspension of belief that that object is as it has heretofore been presented. Two, such suspension reveals a correlation between the subject and the object (noesis-noema) as it appeared which can be investigated in greater detail. Three, the horizon of the correlation appears thematically. Four, there is a new perspective opened up from which this subject-object correlation can be viewed. These four features account for the fact that the correction of perception, action, and thought in the lifeworld may be seen as an incipient transcendental-phenomenological reduction. Even though Husserl did not follow through with concrete analyses his suggestion in Crisis that there was a new way into transcendental phenomenology from the lifeworld, the above analysis suggests sufficiently that there is a structure parallel to the transcendental-phenomenological reduction in the ongoing synthesis of experience in the lifeworld. If the transcendental-phenomenological reduction is incipient in such an ongoing correction of experience, it remains to be shown in what way such ongoing corrections can be radicalized into a suspension of the natural attitude or the naïve positing of the existence of the world—a radicalization whereby “the different modes of presentification in general enter into the universal investigation we are undertaking here, namely, that of inquiring consistently after the how of the world’s manner of givenness, its open or implicit intentionalities” (C 160). As the preceding short description indicated, a straightforward perception in the lifeworld occurs within a horizon, most often an internal pragmatic horizon, within which it makes sense and whose non-thematic boundaries determine the sense of the perception. For example, when I see “a pile of leaves” it is within the internal pragmatic horizon of the necessity for raking them up. Only at the point of suspension when asking “is that a pile of leaves?” do the non-thematic elements of that internal pragmatic horizon become thematic. I am not asking “are there enough leaves to constitute a ‘pile’ as opposed to a ‘bunch’ or a ‘few’?” or “are they ‘leaves’ or are they ‘needles’ because they come from a pine tree?”. The internal pragmatic horizon is concerned neither with the amount of leaves that may be said to constitute a pile nor the definition of leaves as opposed to other rakeable detritus. It is concerned with whether that “pile of leaves” is such as to require raking. In the moment of suspension the horizon of the original perception appears thematically as such. Such horizons are overlapping and mutually embedded such that the world appears as the “horizon of horizons.” The question of how an incipient reduction may be radicalized into the transcendental-phenomenological reduction may then be posed in this way:

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how does it occur that the incipient reduction manifest in the ongoing correction of experience be taken to apply to the natural world as a whole such that it can be characterized as sustained by a “natural attitude”? From his earliest work to the Crisis, Husserl thought of the investigations of philosophy as due to a non-pragmatic “theoretical interest” (PRS 137, C 155). While it is no doubt the case that the radicalization in question is loosened from any pragmatic horizon, nevertheless the idea of an incipient reduction suggests that the “theoretical interest” is not another interest entirely separate from the pragmatic, but a perception of the loosening of horizons in incipient reductions taken to their teleological formulation. In short, there is not only a radical break between the natural world and the transcendental reduction, but also a certain continuity which we have isolated in certain features of ordinary correction that parallel those of the transcendental reduction. Since each naïve suspension reveals a subject-object correlation within a horizon, it is universalized when the subject-object correlation is taken to be that of all beings in the lifeworld and the horizon to be the lifeworld as a whole. Thus, another perspective is revealed that Husserl called “the transcendental ego.” This occurs when the process of ordinary correction in the lifeworld is itself taken as the phenomenon. That is to say, when the process of ordinary correction as described above is considered in itself and subjected to correction, one is not concerned with specific objects but being-an-object itself, nor specific horizons but having-a-horizon. This reflective stance discloses the correlation between objects and concrete subjects within a world and the horizon of horizons that constitutes the natural world. At this point one can isolate a “natural attitude” that sustains both the idea of the subject as subject and the object as object. It is a second reflection on the process of correction that constitutes the continuity between ordinary correction and the transcendental-phenomenological reduction. As Ludwig Landgrebe, synthesized the issue “the reduction is nothing other than a meditation upon reflection as a recursive relationship” (Landgrebe 1981b, 134). Once the elements of the corrective process are themselves thematized as such, the key concept of the “natural world” as a world of correlations appears such that it can be thought as a whole and taken to be predicated of an “attitude.” As we have seen, this concept is logically prior to the classic expression of the reduction in Ideas I. Inquiring back into the pre-given lifeworld is thus a new way into the transcendental-phenomenological reduction because it builds that reduction out of a reflection upon the ordinary corrective process and thereby presents transcendentality as full of concrete subject-object correlative content and not as an evidence nor an ego apart from the world. The transformation of the incipient reduction within the lifeworld into the transcendental-phe-

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nomenological reduction oriented toward a suspension of the world itself thus devolves upon the motive for the thematization of recursivity as such. 11.3.3 The Motive for the Way from the Lifeworld In its Cartesian formulation, the transcendental-phenomenological reduction appears as unmotivated in a simple “we put out of action . . .” (Ideas1, 61). The continuity between ordinary correction and the reduction in the way in from inquiring back from the pre-given lifeworld mitigates such absence of motivation, but it does not explicate the motivation for reflecting upon ordinary correction as such. It does not account for reflection on recursivity. The crucial difference is this: we all engage in recursive reflection, the transcendental-phenomenological reduction is a (recursive) reflection on recursivity as such. The question of the motive for enacting the transcendental-phenomenological reduction necessarily arises from the paradox of subjectivity because one cannot rest with the difference between concrete worldly subjectivity and transcendental subjectivity, but must also describe the identity between worldly subjectivity and transcendentality. This is because access to the realm of transcendental subjectivity must necessarily be through the act of performing the transcendental reduction by a concrete subjectivity and, inversely, since transcendental subjectivity is the source of the possibilities of various forms of worldly subjectivity, such that humanity can be seen as a “self-objectification of transcendental subjectivity” (C 153). The paradox of subjectivity, while inherent in previous formulations of the epochē, nevertheless becomes especially clear and urgent in the context of the way in from the lifeworld. The way into the transcendental-phenomenological reduction by inquiring back from the pregiven lifeworld requires an answer to the central issue of the motive for the reduction. This way in devolves upon the motive for an “inquiring back” such that “starting purely from natural world-life” one may ask about “the how of the world’s pregivenness” (C 154). From accepting the given as obvious and therefore unremarkable, the motive consists in finding such obviousness remarkable precisely in its obviousness. What is the motive for finding the obvious remarkable? In this, we have a phenomenological reformulation of the Greek idea that philosophy begins in wonder. In outlining the way in from inquiring back into the pregiven lifeworld we can distinguish six steps in the transcendental-phenomenological reduction. First, prior to the transcendental reduction itself, one must occupy a lifeworld in which some experiences are given with a claim to knowledge inherent to them. If there were no claim to knowledge with which to refer, then one would not be able to reflect upon it based upon the reflexive question of

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whether the knowledge is adequate. At the zero-point of experience where no knowledge is claimed or investigated, there is no originating motive for specifically philosophical wonder. One may be amazed by the simple existence of what exists, and this experience may well be a profound and important one, nevertheless the “what is?” question that is essential to philosophy requires a starting-point in a claim to knowledge within the naïve experience of a given lifeworld. This is the sense in which Socrates realized that he must begin his search for knowledge by questioning “all those who had any reputation for knowledge to examine its meaning” (Plato 1997a, 21; Apology 21e). Husserl, being a late modern philosopher, encountered a lifeworld permeated by sciences of various sorts and reputations wherein the project of science held the highest prestige for establishing knowledge. It is for this reason that science, and the project of science as systematic knowing, was always at the center of Husserl’s philosophy—even after it was radicalized into the question of the striving for knowledge as such. Philosophy presupposes prior to its beginning proper an investigation into established claims to knowledge and the process of ordinary correction inherent in such knowledge-claims. Second, there is a thematization of those established knowledge-claims which pass initial scrutiny and therefore remain as bench-marks in subsequent inquiry. Socrates found that, unlike the politicians and poets, the craftsmen had “knowledge of many fine things.” In many subsequent investigations, he had occasion to point out that, while the craftsmen knew what they did and did not work automatically or unconsciously like the poets, they had the same failing as the poets in that “each of them, because of his success at his craft, thought himself wise in other most important pursuits” (Plato 1997a, 22; Apology 22d). Thus, it is essential to the practice of philosophy to point out where a viable claim to knowledge in the lifeworld extends past its own practice to intrude upon matters upon which it cannot pronounce. Similarly, Husserl fixed early upon the key element of mathematics, the element that produced the rigor of knowledge since it had become the fundamental language of science since Galileo. But he was equally interested to ground mathematics, to show the basis for its legitimacy in immediate intuition, and thereby be able to mark the limits of its validity. In a third step, reflection upon the practice of viable knowledge in the lifeworld undergoes an intensification. It goes beyond that knowledge itself to ask about the ground and validity of knowledge as such. As Husserl said in his early presentation of the transcendental-phenomenological reduction in The Idea of Phenomenology, “the unproblematic manner in which the object of cognition is given to natural thought to be cognized now becomes an enigma” (IP 15, emphasis added). In this way, philosophy goes beyond its lifeworld examples of viable knowledge to ask about knowledge as such.

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Reiner Schürmann is certainly right that craft knowledge reigned as the paradigmatic form of knowledge over Greek philosophy, but was incorrect to conclude from this fact that “the gist of Western philosophy is thus a metaphysics of handiwork” (Schürmann 1987, 104). The intensification of second-order reflexion universalizes the question of knowledge such that its forms need not conform to the initiating example and, indeed, philosophy probes not only other forms of knowledge but also the edges of knowledge itself when it finally reflects on its own activity. To limit recursive reflection to its originating example is to engage in a myth of origins that philosophical recursion upsets. Descartes initiated this reflection when he noticed “how many different opinions learned men may hold on the same subject, despite the fact that no more than one of them can ever be right.” As an early modern philosopher (unlike Socrates), who lived in a lifeworld in which philosophy was understood to be the ground of all the sciences, he knew that the sciences “took their cardinal principles from philosophy” and concluded “that nothing could have been built on so insecure a foundation”—bearing in mind, of course, that by “philosophy” he meant, as he had experienced it, “to talk with an appearance of truth about all things, and to make ourselves admired by the less learned” (Descartes 1956, 6, 4). The third step of intensification of a central viable claim to knowledge and marking its limits is the initiation of a reflection characteristic of philosophy in distinction from the viable claims and corrections that one experiences in the lifeworld. The philosopher in that intensification engages in a questioning of, and therefore a doubt about, the adequacy of first-order knowledge and correction such that it begins to ask about knowledge as such. It is this reflexive “as such” that unhinges philosophy from its beginning in ordinary viable claims to knowledge. The activity that initiates a philosopher is thus becoming too-serious, as it must appear in the natural attitude, about first-order claims to knowledge. It suspends the pragmatic horizon within which such claims operate and asks about such claims “in themselves” apart from their instantiation in pragmatically viable knowledges. From this perspective the philosopher may retrospectively characterize the lifeworld in which such first-order claims operate as a “natural condition” whose naturalness is constituted precisely in contrast to the exorbitant, unhinged question of the philosopher. However, this is not yet a “natural attitude” in Husserl’s sense that requires reference to the consciousness oriented to the lifeworld as existing in itself. A fourth step is initiated when the intensification is subject to an infinitization. The perception of infinity is as an “and so on” such that at any point another step can be taken. It can be limited at no given point. Infinitization occurs when the question “what is knowledge as such?” is reflected upon and shown to be the activity of a seeker after knowledge placed within a world.

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When the question about the character of knowledge as such that appears through intensification is itself reflected upon it is revealed that knowledge pertains to a lifeworld which has meaning. Knowledge and its pursuit is situated within a world that is taken to exist separately from the questioning activity of the philosopher. It is in this step that we encounter the transcendental-phenomenological reduction discovered by Husserl as a completion of the recursive questioning of philosophy. Infinitization occurs through subjecting the possibility of knowledge as such produced by intensification to a recursive questioning that shows that knowledge presupposes a referent that is not constructed by itself which it attempts to determine. As Husserl said in Ideas I, “we parenthesize everything which that positing encompasses with respect to being: thus the whole natural world which is continually ‘there for us,’ ‘on hand,’ and which will always remain there according to consciousness as an ‘actuality’ even if we choose to parenthesize it” (Ideas1 61). Infinitization is the step of the reduction proper in which the natural world appears as such as the presupposed referent of all, even the most exorbitant, claims to know. As we saw in the discussion of the classic version of the reduction in Ideas I, the reduction is a retrospective description that can only be described by someone who has performed it. The positing inherent to the natural attitude is not a positing like any other positing. It is rather a horizonal positing inherent in any normal positing. Any positing of any object posits it as existing in a certain manner within the horizon of the world. Infinitization consists in the conversion of the horizonal intentionality into an explicit, thematic positing that we call “the natural world” and which, thereby, can become the prior referent of a posterior description by one who has already performed the transcendental-phenomenological reduction. The fifth step would often not be distinguished from the fourth since it also pertains to the performance of the transcendental-phenomenological reduction but its difference and specificity requires underlining because it pertains to the “who?” of the performance. Reflection on this “who?” is a significant element of Part IV of this text. With the conversion of the horizonal intentionality, through which every object is perceived as belonging through its background and horizon to a world, into a thematic positing (such that that positing can be set aside and neutralized), the performer of the transcendental-phenomenological reduction stands out as distinct from the subject-object correlations that make up the world. The transcendental perspective, or simply transcendentality, which Husserl named in a manner that I believe misleading “the transcendental ego,” is outside the world of correlations insofar as it constitutes a perspective on that world. Moreover, it is in some sense a “subjectivity” in the sense that it is a perspective upon the world and not a worldly thing—an intending and not an intended object—even though it is

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an intending of subject-object correlations as noemata and not objects simpliciter. In this sense, transcendentality completes the search for an adequate recovery of subjectivity that, as we have seen, is the fundamental quest of the Crisis. To call transcendentality an “ego” is to over-emphasize its identity with the concrete ego and to under-estimate the difference whereby this nonworldly subjectivity belongs to no concrete ego at any level—neither person, group, nor cultural- civilizational lifeworld. In the fifth step, the concrete ego performing the transcendental-phenomenological reduction is reduced along with its world to a meaning intended transcendentally. That concrete ego remains in existence, as it were, even though it is no longer posited as within a world. In this moment, the concrete ego becomes an access-point to transcendentality understood as a perspective on the concrete ego embedded in its world. The sixth distinctive step is that the concrete ego undertakes a decision that this access to transcendentality is significant and determinative for its life. Said differently, the concrete ego decides that itself as access-point to transcendentality is significant and determinative for its concrete life. It becomes and will remain a point at which transcendentality intersects with and transforms concrete life. This decision institutes, in Husserl’s sense of institution, a philosopher (see Angus 1997, 105ff.). In this sense, the transcendental-phenomenological reduction is a decision to become a philosopher. The singularity of “a” philosopher is important here. It is not just that the concrete ego will encounter and perform philosophy (understood as access to transcendentality) but that the decision transforms the concrete ego such that its role as access-point becomes paramount. One normally thinks of the concrete ego and its decision as a “person” in the sense that Husserl undertook the transcendental-phenomenological reduction as described in Ideas I in order to ask about the motive that that person—Husserl or another—had for the performance. Indeed, the terminology of a “decision” may sound as if this decision is made by a human individual but this is only one among several cases. The decision is an institution of philosophy in Husserl’s sense and may occur with regard to any person or higher-level person. In particular, “Europe” is a concrete ego that was transformed, as Husserl showed, by the Renaissance incorporation of philosophy into its identity due to the interpenetration of philosophy and the sciences. And, further, the Renaissance reshaping was based upon the prior institution of philosophy in ancient Greece. In this way, philosophy is instituted at various levels of person, group or culture-civilization by coming to permeate the practice of a concrete ego due to its decision. It is due to this decision in favor of the concrete ego’s formation as an access-point that the natural condition or “natural world” that was thematized at the fourth step can be characterized as an attitude. The natural

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world is held together by an attitude insofar as the decision to form oneself as an access-point reveals an alternative. It reveals that the natural world may be lived in another way—not as the “real world existing independently from oneself” but as an “accomplishment of transcendentality” or, as Husserl put it, “a self-objectification of the transcendental ego.” It is only after the decision that institutes the philosopher that the retrospective characterization of the natural world can be claimed to be held together by an “attitude” capable of being set aside or put out of play. The decision through which the concrete ego becomes a philosopher such that transcendentality enters and transforms concrete life is an ethical decision undertaken in self-responsibility. With this six-step description of the performance of the transcendentalphenomenological reduction as a manner of inquiring back from the pregiven lifeworld, we have illustrated the key features of this way that improve upon the defects of the Cartesian way that Husserl identified: it can be described as a gradual process and not a one-step fiat; it does not appear as content-less but as at every step filled with the subject-object correlations of the lifeworld. But, beyond Husserl’s self-criticism, we have shown also that transcendentality should not be characterized as an ego but as a field or realm to which the concrete ego is an access-point; how and why the natural world can be conceived to be sustained by an “attitude” of which no concrete ego is aware; and that the perception of the world-horizon can be shown to be an infinitization of ordinary perceptual corrections. The transcendental-phenomenological reduction is thus shown to be a thematization of the recursion which is an essential feature of subjectivity.10 11.4 CONCRETE SUBJECTIVITY, CULTURAL-CIVILIZATIONAL WORLDS AND TRANSCENDENTALITY As we have seen, the problem of subjectivity may be posed at a number of levels including mediating groups of various kinds such as clubs, work organizations, social classes, etc. The constitution of such groups in the context of the identity and difference between concrete subjectivities and transcendentality is an immense and productive open terrain for social-scientific phenomenological research. Nevertheless, the most important subjectivities pertain to what we might call the termini of this continuum: the individual person whose decision to become a philosopher constitutes the motive for the transcendental-phenomenological reduction and “Europe” as the culturalcivilizational form in which facts about the world are meaningful and verifiable. The latter is especially significant because, as the whole of the Crisis has investigated, “Europe” made a decision in the Renaissance to commit to

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a life of reason (including the centrality of mathematics as the superordinate exemplar of formal reason). The decision is thus an aspect of the concept of “institution” insofar as it determines a before-and-after structure in which, in the first case, a life in the pursuit of reason as an ethical task and, in the second case, a society in which reason (in a given determinate form) comes to organize organizations and goals. From the preceding description, we may see that a main problem with the Cartesian way is that transcendentality appears as an ego due to the first-person meditation with which it originates and therefore cannot shake off a misleading similarity to the personal ego. We have emphasized the decision in order to show how the concrete ego becomes an access-point to transcendentality, even while transcendentality thematizes the concrete ego and its world. This structure remains paradoxical in the sense that it thematizes the moment of recursivity as such and thereby cannot escape the interweaving of two distinct levels of experience and reflection. Thus, while the decision of the concrete ego is essential, it is also the case that the second level of reflection reaches into the concrete ego with a “call.”11 We may say that the possibility of transcendentality haunts every non-transcendental or pre-transcendental experience and reflection. This reaching-down, as it were, is what the Cartesian heritage calls doubt. While Socrates was enough of a conventional Greek to assume the wisdom of the oracle when it proclaimed him the wisest Greek, it did not provide him with an answer but a quest to understand its meaning (Plato 1997a, 21; Apology 20e). The decision is a response to a call which, since it is not in one’s world, is in a sense, from nowhere. This nowhere is the possibility of seeing the binding of oneself and one’s world in its truth from a standpoint that we generally have come to call “higher.” Such a decision is a risk that cannot be forsworn.12 The question of the motive for the transcendental-phenomenological reduction can only be answered in this sense: we described above the six steps into which the transcendental-phenomenological reduction may be parsed in such a manner as to stress both the possibility and motivation (in the sense of goal). However, no account of motive is possible which would show the transcendental-phenomenological reduction to be foreseeable, necessary, unavoidable, or determined in any sense. It remains an act of our freedom and creativity that can be motivated only by its “pull” and never its “push.” There are three sources in the motive for the call to transcendental-phenomenological reduction understood through the way in from the Crisis: the crisis of meaning and value in the received tradition of reason even while the intensity of the lived world contains meaning and value; the wonder at the world in which objective unities are given partially in profiles; the encounter with other worlds of meaning and value that do not correspond to one’s own and thereby problematize one’s world. All of these question the obviousness

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with which the experience of things such as “stones, animals, plants, even human beings and human products” can be taken as given facts such that their newly-discovered problematic character motivates the reduction. Such facts are then shown to occur within a world-horizon that is relative to a “community of life” [Lebensgemeinschaft] in which one can determine “‘secure’ facts” [“sicheren” Tatsachen] which we term a cultural-civilizational form (C 138; K 141). These sources motivate the experience of wonder since the movement of life is forward toward greater unities and projects, whereas this is a reverse movement of “inquiring-back,” an unwinding or dismantling (Abbau), which is a regressive inquiry (Rückgang) that reverses the movement of life (EJ 47–51; C 57–9, 353–6). Such tracing back to origins, or birth, will occur under the sign of death or Nothing. In the transcendental-phenomenological reduction, the science of the lifeworld becomes “the genuine and most universal problem” in which philosophical reflection seeks to understand the necessary objectification of transcendentality in specific lifeworlds (C 134). The plural is important here. It is not just that transcendentality must be objectified in the sense of being lived-through in a manner in which objects, concrete subjects, and facts are taken to exist in themselves, but also that the possibility of such objectification determines that it can take place in more than one lifeworld. That is to say, there are different universes of meaning and value containing objects, concrete subjects, and facts depending upon the horizon through which a given lifeworld is determined. The true and universal problem of the lifeworld thus corresponds to the relationship between lifeworlds as different objectifications of the same transcendentality. It was pointed out in the last section of chapter 6 that Husserl distinguished between the science of the lifeworld and the ontology of the lifeworld (C 173–4). In that context, the issue was to show how an ontology of labor pervades the lifeworld of capital. Nevertheless, it was granted that, even though one may posit a transhistorical ontology of labor from within capital, that does not mean that the ontology of labor plays the same role in every lifeworld. That is, there is an insight into every lifeworld, through its opening to transcendentality, that is rooted in the experience of a given world. In particular, the ontology of the lifeworld depends upon the fecundity of nature and the fecundity of nature is a feature of every lifeworld—even though it may not be thematized as such. Here, our investigation is focused upon the universal science of the lifeworld in which the issue is the necessary plurality of lifeworlds, the relation between them, and, finally, the character of transcendentality as such. It is the science of the lifeworld that will be able to evaluate the role of the ontology of labor within a given lifeworld.

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The necessary plurality of lifeworlds may be illustrated with reference to the problem of language within the transcendental-phenomenological reduction. Language is immersed in the practicalities of life and, through its denotations and connotations, refers to specific objects, concrete subjects, and facts insofar as they are determined within a specific lifeworld. When the philosopher begins to speak from within the performance of the transcendental-phenomenological reduction, it is necessary to use language. Language is necessary but it is used in a different manner than it is used in ordinary experience.13 Its denotations and connotations are suspended, as it were, and often used metaphorically, to speak of experiences that are not available prior to the transcendental-phenomenological reduction. Especially when the philosopher speaks to those who have not performed the reduction, the necessarily dual character of language poses an obstacle that must be removed through the painstaking following of an inner logic—an inner logic that teleologically refers to the reduction itself. This problematic character of language is especially thematic for the philosopher when speaking of education or politics, precisely because these are cases in which, not only can it not be assumed that all have or will perform the reduction, but in which it can be known that there are some who will not do so. In this way, the issue of rhetoric arises within philosophy. The necessary plurality of lifeworlds means that lifeworlds, as objectifications of transcendentality, encounter each other in at least two ways: as different lifeworlds in which the objects, concrete subjects, and facts of one world are not correlative to another whereby the subjects in a lifeworld may be motivated to ask about meaning as constituted in another lifeworld and the limits of their own world of meaning. And, they may also encounter each other as different objectifications of transcendentality in which the access-points of each lifeworld to transcendentality allow a thematization of transcendentality as such. However, because of the issue indicated by the problem of language, there is no direct transcendental-to-transcendental speech. Indeed, there is no thematization of transcendentality that escapes its origin in a given lifeworld. There thus appears a philosophical task that has perhaps only come fully to light in our own time: an inter-worldly dialogue about transcendentality as such. As we have seen, such an inter-worldly dialogue must focus on: meaning and value as embedded in the practical activities of lifeworlds; natural fecundity and its expression in labor (including ecology as the scientific form to which natural fecundity is closely related); the striving for reason (including its expressions in formal reason and science); determinate features of given lifeworlds that form the striving for reason and its relationship to surrounding meanings and values; access-points within cultural-civilizational worlds that

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respond to the call to transcendentality; dialogue between cultural-civilizational worlds as made possible by their common reference to transcendentality; the thematization of transcendentality as such (which can only be performed with the resources of a given lifeworld or its dialogue with another). These extensive tasks laid out for a new direction for phenomenology cannot be fully addressed in this text. We will confine ourselves to the horizon expressed in the text and project of the Crisis: the recovery of subjectivity through the two termini of the individual person who performs the transcendental-phenomenological reduction and the institution of the lifeworld of modern Europe as the home of reason to which a recovery of reason refers. These references express an autobiographical component of phenomenological philosophy that has not heretofore been apparent. The philosopher not only philosophizes as a “functionary of humanity,” as Husserl said, but also must account for the concrete individual subjectivity that accomplishes the transcendental reduction and philosophical reflection. Thus, the practicing phenomenologist not only recovers meaning and value for humanity as such but also as an individual. This autobiography of the realization of philosophy in subjectivity will be investigated in the succeeding chapters in the following manner: First, we criticize the key role assigned to Europe in Husserl’s attempt to recover reason from its destitution, with reference to the way in which the specific institution of the New World is occluded in his description, in order to open a general discussion of the inter-cultural-civilizational situation of contemporary philosophy and how a dialogue between culturalcivilizations can be achieved. This current institution for the recovery of subjectivity we call a planetary event. In the next chapter we turn to the interplay between the European and the Aboriginal presence in the institution of the America in order to suggest that this interplay is crucial in the contemporary planetary condition. To concretize this direction for phenomenology, we enter a dialogue with Leroy Little Bear, an articulate representative of the Blackfoot culture-civilization with specific reference to ecology and the relationship of humans to their natural condition. In the next chapter, we turn to the existential background of the philosopher who performs the transcendental-phenomenological reduction. Focusing on my own journey, we show how the inter-cultural-civilizational character of the planetary condition becomes evident within an existential path in a given lifeworld. It provides the existential warrant for the decision for philosophy that is essential, though often occluded, in the practice of philosophy. The final chapter of Part IV considers how transcendentality as such is glimpsed through the horizon of one’s lifeworld and the recursion of transcendentality into a given lifeworld grounds a practice of Socratic phenomenology which we claim to surpass the encyclopediac conception inherent in Husserl’s conception.

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11.5 TRANSCENDENTALITY AS SUCH AND SOCRATIC PHENOMENOLOGY Without the experience, or, considered from within a lifeworld, the nonexperience—insofar as experience is a subject-object correlation within a world-horizon—of transcendentality, there is no philosophy. Transcendentality is beyond any cultural-civilizational form even though it is available only through the categories inherent in a cultural-civilizational form. This reaching-beyond is as essential to philosophy as the recognition that every articulation of this beyond is painted with the categories of a cultural-civilizational form. In this sense, transcendentality is not an experience, nor the flow of experience itself, but the beyond of non-experience out of which experiences emerge. We reach beyond a given form to touch transcendentality, where transcendentality reaches toward us in the giving of form. This is the ultimate paradox of which Husserl’s paradox of subjectivity is one articulation. Reaching-beyond itself is without categories, formless, from which emerges an objectification in multiple forms. This is the apeiron (ἄπειρον) of which Anaximander said that “the Non-Limited (apeiron) is the original material of existing things; further, the source from which existing things derive” (Freeman 19). While the sun, Plato’s image of the Being which encompasses all the things of the world, “not only provides visible things with their power to be seen but also with coming to be, growth, and nourishment, although it is not itself coming to be,” the objects of the world that can be known owe both their being known and their Being as such to the Good, insofar as “the good is not being, but superior to it in rank and power” (Plato 1997e, 1129–30; Republic 509b).14 Being is the form of a cultural-civilizational world, but the apeiron is transcendentality itself—which Plato asserts to be the Good beyond Being. However, as I will attempt to show in chapter 15, the Good is not exactly beyond Being but is transcendentality in its incursion into a cultural-civilizational world. The good occurs in the limitation and objectification of the unlimited. Transcendentality as paradox—as outside but only visible with the terms of an inside—is exemplified in the reflexivity of experience. Reaching-beyond experience to transcendentality is reflected in a reaching-beyond in each experience. Each experience contains the possibility of reflexivity. When one reflects systematically and thoroughly on this reflexivity, the transcendentalphenomenological reduction appears as a possibility in which all forms of subject-object correlations are suspended. From out of the touching of transcendentality, philosophy brings the origin of form from the formless into human experience.15

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Socratic phenomenology hovers on the edge of form and formlessness, experience and transcendentality, in order to indicate the implication of human experience in formlessness and pay homage to the form which it inhabits and thus the good which we may come to know. This good will illuminate our entire lifeworld. It is for this reason that the Greek philosophers were correct to say that philosophy is the form of human life par excellence. NOTES 1. Dermot Moran dates Husserl’s discovery of the transcendental reduction to 1905 by relying on the research manuscripts known as the Seefeld pages [Seefelder Blätter] which were written during the summer of 1905 and his first public announcement of this discovery to his 1906-7 lecture course on Logic and the Theory of Knowledge (Moran 2012, 22–3). It was a major theme of his 1907 Göttingen lectures published as The Idea of Phenomenology in 1950. 2.  If we recall Fink’s outline for the continuation of the Crisis, and note that this continuation is consistent with the structure of the text as it now exists, Part III was projected to end with a discussion of the “paradox of psychology,” in which “psychology begins as a special science alongside others on the ground of the pregiven world. In the clarification of the method peculiar to it, however, . . . it suspends the presupposition of the world-ground” (Fink, C 398). We showed in our original outline of the logic of the crisis that this is a special form of the paradox of subjectivity adapted to the significance of psychology as the science of worldly subjectivity and that it does not add to the fundamental structure of the problems of the crisis of the sciences as they have been worked out by Husserl. 3.  Enzo Paci agrees with this encyclopediac vision of Husserl’s phenomenology in Crisis as “the problem of the foundation of the ‘formation of meaning’ of logic and the sciences, and to the problem of a phenomenological science as a ‘totalizing’ science of man and world” (Paci 1972, 102). 4.  Since the term “negro” is now often taken to be an offensive term, it is worth remarking that this was a conventional term in Husserl’s time and no denigration is implied by its use here. In the next paragraph Husserl instead refers to “normal Europeans, normal Hindus, Chinese, etc.” (C 139). In both cases, Husserl is just mentioning a short exemplary list to illustrate what he means by the lifeworld of a particular cultural-civilizational group. 5.  Donn Welton has shown that the consensus on the meaning of transcendental phenomenology between analytic and deconstructive thinkers has resulted in a dominant “standard picture” which fails to account adequately for Husserl’s later genetic phenomenology in order to propose an interpretation of an “other Husserl” (Welton 2000, 1–2, Appendix). Significantly, his account begins with the wonder provoked by the “perceptual lack” that “is an unsettling wonder in the presence of things, which themselves come to us through certain modes or manners that are not themselves objects” (Welton 2000, 13). His “new Husserl” evidently stems from taking what we

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have determined as the new suggestion for the phenomenological reduction in the Crisis as a starting-point for interpretation.   6.  There are three points in the Crisis-text where Husserl gives a succinct and universal statement of the paradox of subjectivity (C 178–81, 202, 262). This quotation is from the latter, where Husserl returns to the paradox after a consideration of the way to the transcendental-phenomenological reduction from psychology. It is the last section of the English text and is succeeded in the German original only by a separate manuscript inserted by Biemel which Carr claims belongs properly in Part I (Carr 1970, xx). So, it may be considered the last word of Husserl’s unfinished text and to indicate that the paradox of subjectivity reappears in the context of the way in from psychology (and is not resolved by that way).   7.  It may well be that Husserl’s failure to adequately underline this change of signification motivated Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida to reject “the empiricotranscendental doublet” (Foucault 1970, 319; see Derrida 1978, 121; Derrida 2003, 176–8). But it is likely more deeply rooted in the prior existential tendency of French phenomenology (Sartre, Merleau-Ponty) to conflate Husserl’s transcendental ego with the concrete (Angus 2000a, 54–7).   8.  Thus, David Carr considers in some detail that the transcendental ego might be called a “theoretical fiction” but decides in conclusion that there is no way of going beyond the duality within the transcendental tradition (Carr 1999, 119–24, 135).  9. It is unclear to what extent it was clear to Husserl in his earlier work that the concept of the “natural world” itself depended on the prior performance of the transcendental-phenomenological reduction. Dermot Moran claims that it is in the 1931 afterthoughts on Ideas that this becomes explicit and that this clarity grounds the replacement of the concept of the “natural world” with that of the “lifeworld” (Moran 2013, 113). Thus, we may add, the problem of the performance of the reduction becomes more deeply complex. 10. There is thus no need to characterize the transcendental-phenomenological reduction as “unmotivated” nor to speculate on an external motive or influence on the model of religious conversion (Landgrebe 1972, 49–50; Heinämaa 2019). Even though Husserl himself uses the comparison to religious conversion, it is limited to the similarity that it is a “complete personal transformation” and “the greatest existential transformation which is assigned as a task to humanity as such” (C137; K 140, translation altered). These latter characteristics are certainly consistent with my description. 11.  This is why Eugen Fink stresses that there is no motive for the transcendentalphenomenological reduction from within the natural attitude (Fink 1970, 105). 12.  As we have put it previously, in the moment of decision “one cannot suppose that the exigencies of one’s own situation have already been brought into the tradition of thought, nor that the received divisions and boundaries of thought are adequate to one’s task” (Angus 1997, 105). In this sense the call to philosophy is solitary and mysterious. 13.  Eugen Fink was especially sensitive to the problem of language as used from within the transcendental-phenomenological reduction and as necessarily problematic in communication (Fink 1970, 143–5; Bruzina 2004, ch. 8).

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14.  The meaning of this notoriously difficult passage in Plato has been long disputed. I think it likely that Plato meant exactly what I am saying here, that is to say, that he did not objectify the Beyond as simply beyond but referred to the Beyond in its incursion—which is the only form in which it can become visible to us. But the Unlimited itself cannot, it seems to me, be called Good insofar as Good retains some reference to the good that we understand within a cultural-civilizational world. It is, of course, not terminology that is important here. All terminology is at this point only ostensive and illustrative. 15. The origin of worlds has been understood through the metaphor of fire by Heraclitus (fragment 67) and Marx or a game by Heraclitus (fragment 52), Heidegger, Fink, and Axelos (Freeman 1962, 29; Marx Gr 361; Freeman 1962, 28; Heidegger 1996, 111–3; Fink 2016; Axelos 1979).

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Chapter Twelve

The Limits of Europe and the Planetary Event

Diagnosis and healing of the crisis of the European sciences depends in Husserl’s formulation upon the institution of reason in the European Renaissance and that, in turn, depends upon its universalization of the prior founding of philosophy in Greek antiquity. As we saw in the last chapter, lived experience is such that “things” appear to a “normal” member of a cultural-civilizational world with its own specific horizon. Our continuation of the philosophy implied by the crisis needs to revisit the limitation to Europe, understood in a spiritual [geistig] sense, and set forth the contemporary necessity to understand the renewal of philosophy and its role as a task of interculturalcivilizational reason due to the planetary event of the domination of placebased knowledge and dwelling. We begin by criticizing Husserl’s reliance on Europe as the ground for meaning and value in order to open up a contemporary ground in the planetary event that motivates intercultural-civilizational philosophy. This event can be understood through a double horizon: the planetary character of scientific-technological civilization defines the context of the inter-action of cultural-civilizational forms and the inter-action of cultural-civilizational forms defines the context for the planetary expansion of scientific-technological civilization. This is the motivating event for critique and collection of traditions that constitute a cultural-civilizational form. 12.1 DIAGNOSIS OF CRISIS AND THE CONCEPT OF EUROPE In 1923 Husserl already referred to the need for a renewal of European culture, tracing the malaise back to the First World War, and seeking the solution in the “value-creating significance” that reason offers to humanity 393

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(R 327). Indeed, his concern with devastation, decay, crisis and renewal can be traced back to the period of the First World War itself when Husserl began to re-think the tradition of German Idealism in order to confront “the exigency of our times . . . [with] the divine spirit of the Idea” (F 131). The theme of crisis had been growing in significance within Husserl’s work since the First World War alongside and a philosophical diagnosis of the European failure to address its devastation with a cultural renewal of meaning and value. The concept of “Europe” for Husserl refers to the ideal of universal philosophy that allows for the diagnosis of crisis and the project of renewal. It is not an assertion that Europe in its current state is superior to another cultural-civilizational form (Cameron 2009, 107; Gasché 2009, 21–2). In the Vienna Lecture (1935), he discounted Papuan people, the Inuit, the Indigenous peoples of the Americas, and the Romani, and includes America, in defining spiritual Europe in the sense that he wishes to recover. We saw in chapter 1 that this discounting and dismissal became hypothetical in the Crisis—dependent on the outcome of the investigation. Here, we will go further to show that in order for phenomenological philosophy to fulfil its role as the critical consciousness of modernity, and to formulate what phenomenology must become now, this fundamental gesture of discounting and dismissal must be replaced with a concept of intercultural-civilizational dialogue. Since the internal diagnosis and recovery required an essential definition of spiritual Europe that tied it to reason, it depends upon a distinction of this spiritual-cultural form from others. Let us return to the notorious phrasing in the Vienna Lecture: We pose the question, ‘How is the spiritual shape of Europe to be characterized?’ Thus we refer to Europe not as it is understood geographically, as on a map, as if thereby the group of people who live together in this territory would define European humanity. In the spiritual sense it is clear that the English dominions, the United States, etc., clearly belong to Europe, whereas the Eskimos or Indians presented as curiosities at fairs, or the Gypsies, who constantly wander about Europe, do not. . . . ‘The spiritual image of Europe’—what is it? [We must] exhibit the philosophical idea which is immanent in the history of Europe (spiritual Europe), or, the teleology which is immanent in it, which makes itself known, from the standpoint of universal mankind as such, as the breakthrough and the developmental beginning of a new human epoch—the epoch of humanity which now seeks to live . . . through ideas of reason, through infinite tasks (VL 273–4; KEM 318–9; paragraph separation removed; my italics; translation altered).

We may make four observations about this statement: First, Husserl’s claim for the uniqueness of Europe depends upon no comparative data. His claim that the infinite task of the idea of philosophy is immanent in the history of

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Europe may well be established by an inquiry into Greek philosophy and its Renaissance renewal, but the notion that it is a breakthrough into a new human epoch requires that it also be shown that philosophy, or something essentially equivalent or comparable to philosophy, is not equivalently immanent in other cultural unities. Indeed, he would have to show that it is immanent in no other cultural form—a comparative task beyond anyone’s ability, one would think.1 Second, not explicit in Husserl’s text but constituting the articulating critical moment of the European cultural form that motivates his inquiry: in referring to “Europe,” rather than any of the separate nations or cultural regions of Europe, Husserl’s inquiry moves to a higher level of universality than the prevailing aggressive nationalism of Nazi Germany (Moran 2012, 62). It is, even as inquiry and not yet as result, a posing that hooks the crisis of reason to a shared European destiny at a higher level of universality. Third, the distinctiveness of a cultural unity requires that some other such cultural unity not be included. The exclusion, or border, of the essence is intrinsic to its definition. While different does not necessarily mean lesser, when difference is combined with Husserl’s other statement that the European spirit constitutes a universal, epochal human breakthrough, a hierarchical ordering seems to be a necessary consequence. Last, there is what we might call an external inclusion of the former colonies of the British Empire that, as settler societies, have displaced and marginalized the Indigenous inhabitants. Husserl’s inclusion of settler societies into spiritual Europe fails to interrogate the colonial history of this integration and thereby invites the question of how it should be understood by phenomenology.2 This passage demands that we ask whether Husserl’s notion of the spiritual essence of Europe commits phenomenology to a Eurocentrism that necessarily denigrates other culture-civilizations and attempts to justify philosophically a claim to European superiority? If the claim to Europe as the home of reason is essential to the recovery of reason, it might serve at one point in time—the 1930s and the Nazi threat—to criticize destruction and irrational ethno-centrism only by establishing an idea of phenomenology that at another point seems to justify philosophically the hegemony of Europe, the denigration of supposedly lesser peoples within its borders, and its colonial expansion beyond them (Moran 2012, 42, 63, 300; Derrida 2003, 154–7; Cameron 2009, 107, 111).3 What would phenomenology look like if it were explicitly to shed such justification? This question must be asked if we are to take seriously Husserl’s conception of phenomenology as self-responsibility and the philosopher as the functionary of humanity. However, what happens to these issues when they advance in Husserl’s reflection beyond the level achieved in his lecture to their hypothetical role in the Crisis?

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Because “Europe” does not function as a geographical or limiting concept, gaining meaning only as the location of an infinite spiritual striving for reason, Husserl’s increasing depth and extent of reflection from letter, to lectures, to book-length manuscript involves also an increasing depth of the concept of Europe. We can distinguish three ways in which the analyses of Crisis surpass those of the Vienna Lecture. One: adding the unprecedented Renaissance idea of “a rational infinite totality of being with a rational science systematically mastering it” (C 22) to the Greek beginning of philosophy in accounting for the European telos of reason. Two: “Europe” shifts from being an operative to a thematic concept (to use Eugen Fink’s distinction) in the Crisis (which is what renders the earlier Eurocentrism hypothetical). If the entelechy of modern philosophy were to become fully conscious of itself, “only then could it be decided whether European humanity bears within itself an absolute idea, rather than being merely an empirical anthropological type like ‘China,’ or ‘India’” (C 16). Three: the concept of institution (Urstiftung) is introduced.4 These three innovations appear simultaneously in the constitutive analysis of Europe. 12.2 THE CONFLATION OF AMERICA WITH EUROPE IN THE VIENNA LECTURE Husserl’s claim in The Vienna Lecture that “in the spiritual sense it is clear that the English dominions, the United States, etc., clearly belong to Europe” (VL 273) does not appear in the Crisis. The inclusion of the Renaissance mathematization of nature alongside the Greek origin of philosophy suggests that only the resolution of this crisis could settle the issue of whether Europe is distinct from other civilizational types due to bearing within itself an “absolute idea” (C 16). One consequence seems to have been that America and the remnants of the British Empire are no longer mentioned at all. But, logically speaking, we can say—parallel to Husserl’s remark about China and India— that their inclusion in the European entelechy of reason should also become a question pending resolution by the overcoming of crisis. So, we may ask, in what sense does the European crisis of reason implicate America and the British Commonwealth? From now on, I will use the name “America” for all of these new nations and states on the continent once called the New World. Mexican historian Edmundo O’Gorman has shown that the idea of the discovery of America is incoherent, since one cannot discover what one is not looking for, and that the invention of America refers us to the European cultural heritage within which it took on meaning.

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America was no more than a potentiality, which could be realized only by receiving and fulfilling the values and ideals of European culture. . . . This way of conceiving the historical being of the new lands found expression in the name of ‘New World,’ . . . The meaning of these two designations is now evident. If World in its traditional sense means that part of the earth providentially assigned to man for his dwelling, America was literally a ‘new’ world, which offered the possibility of enlarging man’s old cosmic home by adding a new portion of the universe conceived as capable of becoming another Europe (O’Gorman 1961, 139).

Clearly, to the extent that these regions were, are, and remain European in the spiritual sense, they must share in Husserl’s analysis of both the European entelechy of reason and its crisis. And, to the extent that they are not, they do not share—or do not necessarily share—either. As a repetition of Europe, America could be drawn backward to the old dominations or could be pulled forward to realize the hope of freedom dreamed within the old dominations. But as America realized its own potential, the distinction between New and Old Worlds fell away, creating a new spiritual unity that O’Gorman calls “Euro-America” (O’Gorman 1961, 145). It is this new spiritual unity to which Husserl must have been referring when he unproblematically included the United States and the English dominions into spiritual Europe. But understanding America as a repetition of Europe comes upon a limit. It was, and still is, populated by non-European people. There is one great historical fact—let us postpone for a second whether it is an empirical historical fact, a transcendental fact, or an event—by which America is tied to Europe but not identical to it: the displacement, encirclement and sometimes destruction of native peoples, European (and other) immigration, and the construction of settler societies and states. From the Indigenous point of view, one might use Enrique Dussel’s concept of an “originary trauma of being dominated” (Dussel 1992, 55) or what appears to be the Aztec concept of “disaster” (Beardsell 2000, 55). Simply including America inside Europe, as Husserl did in The Vienna Lecture suggests that there is no issue of the European entelechy raised by this displacement. If there is no issue raised, then America shares both the European crisis and the possibility of overcoming it. In this case, the Indigenous peoples would share neither the entelechy of reason nor its crisis and their displacement would raise no questions for the spiritual meaning of Europe. Nelson Maldonado-Torres has put succinctly and clearly the ironical role of Husserl’s critique of reason in the context of America as “oriented more by the challenges posed by the barbarism of irrationality than by the barbarism of missionary Eurocentric rationality” (Maldonado-Torres 2008, 44).

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Let us consider in a preliminary manner the meaning of this historical fact before returning to the meaning that America might be considered to have within the questioning expressed in Husserl’s Crisis. At the epistemic level the question is whether the New World constituted merely a repetition of the Old World or whether this repetition produced something essential to the spiritual meaning of the Old World itself—whether, as Walter Mignolo has asserted, “the term and the concept of a New World played in an interesting way since the very concept of modernity was defined in complicity with the Old World” (Mignolo 2002, 943). So that, perhaps, Husserl’s concept of European modernity as a crisis-embedded entelechy of reason would not have been possible as a purely endogenous phenomenon. Enrique Dussel has argued that “modernity appears when Europe affirms itself as the ‘center’ of a World History that it inaugurates; the ‘periphery’ that rounds this center is consequently part of its self-definition. . . . According to my central thesis, 1492 is the date of the ‘birth’ of modernity, although its gestation involves a preceding ‘intrauterine’ process of growth (Dussel 1993, 65–6). If 1492 is the instituting event of European modernity, as Dussel argues, then the Indigenous peoples of the New World could be written out of the spiritual meaning of America, so that it constitutes merely a repetition of Europe, only by a denial of an entelechy of reason to non-European culture-civilizations. Mignolo calls this an “epistemic privilege” whereby European spirituality becomes an epistemic enunciator, a speaker or subject of knowledge, in the same moment that non-European spirituality becomes only the enunciated, the spoken or object of knowledge (Mignolo 2002). The enunciation produces science and philosophy of a subject capable of speaking truth, whereas the enunciated is known through anthropology as an object of knowledge. The distinction between a universal locus of enunciation and a regional one is precisely what is at issue in Husserl’s recourse to spiritual Europe as the prior event of reason that explains the entelechy upon which rests the diagnosis of the crisis of reason. “Europe” is split into its merely empirical, contingent meaning as geographical and cultural fact and its transcendental meaning as the home of reason, whereas other culture-civilizations lack epistemic privilege and are limited to geographic and cultural fact. These considerations suggest that the European modernity upon which Husserl relied for the entelechy of reason was itself constituted exogenously in relation to an outside represented by the New World and its non-European inhabitants—in other words, that those peoples that Husserl names as without reason are essential to his definition of Europe as the spiritual home of reason. We do not take these considerations as definitive at this point but as the basis for a questioning of the role that America might take in the crisis of the European sciences as described by Husserl. With the disappearance of explicit

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mention of America in the Crisis due to a thematic consideration of Europe, the unproblematic inclusion of America into European entelechy must also disappear and, in its place, emerge a series of questions concerning the meaning of displacement and the origin of settler societies—questions that take us to the spiritual meaning of America and its entelechy. 12.3 THE INSTITUTION OF AMERICA Let us state this question in a universal manner, emphasizing that in the European “prior” that grounds Husserl’s diagnosis of crisis: Does a new cultural context add nothing to a prior task elaborated elsewhere? Specifically, does America not add anything essential to the European entelechy of reason? What is the status within phenomenology of the great historical fact of displacement, and even genocide, of the Indigenous peoples of America by which its history is inseparable from that of Europe. If it is merely a contingent historical fact, then it does not affect the essence of the European commitment to reason, which would be understood as an internal European institution. Husserl, in tracing the European entelechy of reason to the Renaissance mathematization of nature and the Greek beginning of philosophy, silently treats “the disaster” as contingent and therefore unworthy of discussion. And, we may also say, so do subsequent Husserlian phenomenologists, especially in America, who use the analysis of the Crisis but do not investigate its implications. Neither could this historical fact be considered transcendental since in that case it would be an essential, constitutive aspect of the historical genesis of any society whatsoever. Is it then possible to view the historical fact of conquest-disaster as a historical fact in the third sense of an event, or institution (Urstiftung) which must have happened within empirical history in order for the spiritual meaning of America to repeat (at least partially) that of Europe? Such an instituting event is one event, in the sense of Husserl’s “original geometer,” even though it was of course spread out in time and space and included different European nations who were at many times in conflict among themselves. The conquest-disaster is an event that gives meaning to this assemblage of contingent historical facts by referring to the beginning of an ongoing institution that remains with us to this day and points toward some sort of resolution or final goal (Endstiftung). We live within this institution and it assigns us a task. The conquest-disaster is an event constituted by at least three essential elements: One, humans of different cultural-civilizational types encounter each other and must come to some reckoning of the humanity, and type

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of humanity, of the other.5 The purely Eurocentric option does its best to deny this encounter by denying full humanity to the Indigenous and follows through this denial with policies of genocide, displacement and encirclement. Two, the European is given new form through this encounter (as is also the Indigenous). The world which each inhabits has become larger in the sense of containing more possibilities and smaller in the sense of making one’s own culture-civilization one possibility among others. Three, the event essentially can be viewed and interpreted from two opposing points of view. What is institutionalized is a conflict, a polemos, and this conflict structures the task that we are assigned to complete. One completion would be the utter destruction and silencing of the Indigenous so that America would become thoroughly and simply an extension of spiritual Europe. The project of this genocidal completion has been within the New World since its origin. Sadly, Husserl’s quick and thoughtless words on America are complicit with this horrible task. Such a Eurocentric completion attempts to deny the originality of the event of encounter itself. This is not the place to recall important elements in the long empirical history of the instituting event. We may simply mention the Two Row Wampum (1613), in which a birch-bark canoe and a European ship are depicted as sailing down the same river, that honors a 1613 treaty between the Dutch and the Mohawk (Haudenosaunee) people (Kahnawake Education Center 2013). Europeans could not actually ignore the encounter with other human culture-civilizations and peoples that the New World involved and thereby entered into agreements with the original inhabitants. Such treaties are significant punctual points in the history of the institution of America. Another completion becomes visible if we view the event as an encounter between two culture-civilizations in which each is changed by the encounter, and from which the encounter itself can be regarded in two ways—as conquest and as disaster. This other task appears when the instituting event is recognized as new, precisely as instituting in the sense of bringing-into-being, and thereby as persisting afterward in a manner that structures experience such as to assign a task. The subsequent task of we Americans is to carry through this encounter toward its completion in a manner that respects the duality of the encounter, and its persistence, but turns it toward a genuine encounter with the other. The productivity of the institution of America is that fragments of old Europe in interaction with other culture-civilizations, under conditions dominated by European empires, have conveyed to us a task that was present in no previous history. Thus, while the original encounter was of specific European nations with other culture-civilizations, it has become inseparable from the instituting event that the settler population is from many parts of Europe and indeed the world, so that there is an issue throughout the New World of whether such heterogeneous groups can form new nations.

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This institution has become our ‘prior’ as we address the current crisis and destiny of reason. We may refer quickly to the example of Canadian philosophy that is characterized by a persistent, characteristic Hegelianism (Burbidge 1994; MacGregor 1994; Meynell 2011; Sibley 2008). As Leslie Armour and Elizabeth Trott have shown, Canadian Hegelianism is characterized by a doubt about final reconciliation of conflicting views in the Absolute Idea and has tended to characterize it as a kind of agreement or consensus that leaves difference as difference, a “rationalist pluralism” that is skeptical that a single community possesses the truth entire but accepts that it expresses some part of, or perspective on, the truth (Armour 1997; Armour 1994; Armour 1989; Trott 2000; Trott 1996). Canadian Hegelianism takes the form that it does because it is an attempt, adequate or not, to address the institution of America, especially with regard to some features that have shaped the Canadian experience. It is always possible, and has been done often enough, to argue that Canadian Hegelianism is not an accurate rendering of Hegel, especially with regard to the Absolute Idea. But the guiding assumption in all such attempts is that the original beginning of a philosophy is determinative for all subsequent uses and therefore that understanding is a return to beginnings. On the other hand, if one wants to understand the Canadian experience through Canadian philosophy, and contribute to understanding that experience philosophically, then what becomes interesting is not Germany’s or Hegel’s Hegel but precisely Canada’s Hegel. What is important is precisely that which differs and must differ from its origins. We might call this the productivity of the new institution. If we focus on the productivity of the new context, three related phenomena come forward as eventually included in the institution of America: the original disaster-conquest with its Indigenous-settler duality, the mixing of immigrants in a settler society that may or may not solidify into a new people, and the changing nature but persistence of the structures of empire from the original encounter to contemporary capitalism (Angus 1997; Angus 2008). The risk of philosophy depends upon a recognition of its place within an ongoing institution. The task of philosophizing “America” requires a return to an instituting original event not only parallel to Husserl’s but made possible precisely by the concept of event inaugurated by Husserl’s new investigation of history and crisis. Husserl’s discounting and dismissal allows a purely internal investigation to justify a claim for spiritual distinctiveness that then allows the extension, or indeed denial, of that spiritual internality to other cultural forms. The failure to investigate the institution of America in our contemporary context is a failure to circumscribe accurately the institution of the crisis. The leap to including America within spiritual Europe is able to pass over

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in silence the original institution of America because of the presumption of endogeny in his analysis of spiritual Europe. However, such endogeny cannot account for the institution of America nor of the contemporary planetary condition. The concept of institution that Husserl introduces in the Crisis to account for that which is primally instituted, temporally persistent, and assigns a task toward completion requires a notion of encounter to account for the newness in the institution of America. In this spirit we may return to our original question: in what sense does the European crisis of reason implicate America? We may answer: the event of conquest-disaster constitutes an event for reason insofar as the encounter includes elements previously absent in the European entelechy with the consequence that America cannot be simply included within Europe; the crisis of reason stems from the European side of the encounter; thus, while America cannot be straightforwardly included in Europe, neither can it be simply excluded. A phenomenological philosophy for America must clarify its original institution through that encounter and undertake a different risk in following it to its final institution (Endstiftung). As we have seen, Husserl’s appeal in the 1930s was an appeal over irrationalist nationalism toward a higher cultural unity containing a shared prior commitment to a common European entelechy of reason. We have suggested the possibility that it is not the ultimate truth of the claim to distinctiveness that is most important, but precisely the move to a “one higher” basis of shared meaning defined in this case as a commitment to reason. Given the essential connection of phenomenology to experiential validation, and also the crisis-prone nature of a discourse on universality that is not experientially rooted, one can say that the decisive phenomenological move in a historical crisis is “one step up” which maintains a ground in an established lifeworld but appeals above toward a greater universality that is yet to be established. In investigating the institution of America, we have found it to be characterized by a polemical event of conquest-disaster, so that “our” institution is not that of Husserl. For “us,” the event of America assigns the task of seeking a cultural renewal that understands other culture-civilizations and questions them for the nature of their prior commitment to reason—which will, as it did with Husserl, mean a questioning of the concept of reason itself. To do so, one must address the question of the institutionalization of reason in non-European culture-civilizations, especially in the context of its relation to meaning and value. A comparative study of the relation of the prior entelechy of reason to meaning and value in the lifeworld will need to investigate the contextual embeddedness of reason alongside neighboring concepts. The specificity of such embeddedness is equally important to the concept of reason itself. The enactment of phenomenological philosophy as self-responsibility and the role of the philosopher as a functionary of humanity consists in the enactment of

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the universalizing step up to one higher level of commonality between different communities. Such a universalizing move is an essential component of the phenomenological concept of critique. The encounter between Europe and Indigeneity that institutes America has now become the becoming-planetary of the crisis of reason. This planetary crisis refers to the reason understood as technology that is based on formalmathematical science as the origination of crisis and phenomenological reason as the renewal of meaning and value through a recovery of a relation to the lifeworld. Meaning and value must be generated, not simply from looking back to prior institutions, but from events constituted by the planetary encounter of culture-civilizations that motivate an appeal upward one step toward greater universality. 12.4 PHENOMENOLOGY OF THE INSTITUTING EVENT We will recall (from chapter 1) that an advantage of the term “institution” is that it can be used in two senses, both of which are relevant to the concept here. A tradition is “instituted” in the sense of being brought into being and is an “institution” in the sense of an organized set of human relationships within which intersubjective and material relations are organized. It is mainly a temporal structure in the sense in which it is different to be born after the introduction of compulsory public schooling than before it, but it contains a spatial dimension in the sense that such an introduction begins in some places before others whose “uneven development” then exerts an interactive “push and pull” between them. One can direct attention to the primal establishment or inauguration of an institution in order to point to its coming into being and therefore to the original temporality that it institutes. One can direct attention to its character as a social-cultural institution in order to point to the continuing shaping that it exerts over subsequent experience. One can point also to the final completion that such an institution anticipates. Thought and action must take up the task that is inherited within the institution and it does so with a risk that the intervention will carry forth the institution in an exemplary manner. The institution of “America” assigns a task of understanding the relationship between at least two cultural-civilizational formations of reason. Intercultural understanding and intercultural philosophy has often been understood through the lens of hermeneutic philosophy—which places the problem of understanding texts that are initially at a distance at the center of its problematic. It does this with the concept of tradition. Our account will show the superiority of the phenomenological concept of institution through a critique of the hermeneutic concept of understanding a tradition. We may

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understand a tradition in the hermeneutic sense as that which is constituted by an institution in the phenomenological sense when it is stripped of the correlative concepts of origination and completion such that one cannot speak of a tradition as such but only operate within a tradition. Whereas hermeneutic philosophy operates as a component of culturecivilization to carry forward a tradition, phenomenological philosophy requires the critique of tradition through a tracing-back of its institution that allows the presentation of its completion in the mode of a task. Hermeneutic “immanent criticism” relies on the meanings inherent in a tradition to carry that tradition forth beyond its actual limitations. Immanent criticism obtains its effect precisely to the extent that it builds upon an already-accepted basis and speaks to those to whom it contains an already-established significance. Phenomenological critique of a tradition, however, criticizes the institution/ completion dyad that constitutes tradition as such.6 Hermeneutic understanding operates within a tradition, and the ongoing revision and extension of a tradition, and has therefore often been taken as the jumping-off point for a theory of intercultural understanding. In contrast, phenomenological philosophy investigates the constitution of traditions and the collection of traditions that forms a culture-civilization. Hermeneutic understanding functions as a stitching-together and carryingforward of a culture-civilization from within that culture-civilization by means of self-interpretation grounded in a form of life and encompassing its expressive and knowledge-forms. Insofar as it claims universality, hermeneutical understanding binds philosophy to a culture-civilization as the highest expression of its self-understanding and in productive dialogue with its other scientific, artistic, etc. expressions. Two key elements of the concept of tradition cannot be understood on the basis of hermeneutical understanding: the inception, or institution of a tradition and its destitution, or completion. Since philosophical reflection in the hermeneutic mode is enclosed within, and acts within, a tradition, it cannot reflect upon, nor therefore understand sufficiently, how a tradition begins and how it ends. The constitution of a tradition as such is outside the realm of hermeneutic universality since it requires reflection upon the binding-together process that makes a tradition from the standpoint of its inception and destitution. 12.4.1 The Temporal Structure of Hermeneutic Interpretation The original situation of hermeneutical interpretation is the confrontation of a reader by a text that is readable in a basic, or minimal, sense but whose meaning in a more extended sense is opaque. The minimal conditions for the reading of a text is that it is preserved in a medium of some sort (preservation and

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legibility), that it is in a language that is understood by the reader (linguistic competence), and that it is constructed in such a way as to be read (composed of units of meaning, or sentences, which are not too fragmentary). A reader sufficiently able to read minimally such a text may confront a higher-level difficulty in understanding the text in a deeper, or more extended, fashion insofar as it contains aspects of structure, allusion, metaphorical description, reference, etc. whose significance in understanding the text is not clear to the reader. Such higher-level understanding is the object of hermeneutical interpretation. The reader is confronted with a text which is not doubted to be a text, to express a meaning, and to be in principle understandable, but which is not in fact interpretable by the reader as a unity super-ceding problematic aspects of higher-level meaning. The purpose of hermeneutic interpretation is thus to remove these barriers to a unified, higher-level understanding through an interpretation of the problematic aspects based in a methodology which removes their obscurity, establishes their significance, and grounds their connection in a unified understanding. The historical origin of this original hermeneutical situation in European intellectual history is in specific, localized issues in modern Biblical interpretation, classical philology, and law but what Hans-Georg Gadamer calls the “universalization of the hermeneutical problem” turns hermeneutic understanding into a general approach to the social sciences and humanities because, as Paul Ricoeur says, “all regional hermeneutics are incorporated into one general hermeneutics” (Gadamer 1977; Ricoeur 1981b, 43–4). The key element in the universalization of hermeneutic understanding was Martin Heidegger’s description of human being as essentially self-interpretive. “Understanding is the existential being of the ownmost possibility of being of Da-sein in such a way that this being discloses in itself what its very being is about” (BT 135). Interpretation is thus not primarily of texts but of the manner of human being itself. All regional interpretations thus become founded on this universal problem of self-understanding. Interpretation is only secondarily a matter of knowing and primarily a matter of being. Textual interpretation is thus founded on self-interpretation and the specific projects of the social sciences and humanities are folded into the philosophical task of knowing oneself. Though developed with written texts in mind, with appropriate modifications hermeneutic methodology can be applied to the interpretation of musical works, dance, oral and gestural works, and social-historical events (to the extent that hermeneutic methodology can encompass without rejecting the structural, demographic and empirical elements of the social sciences). The tradition stitched together by hermeneutical understanding is a form of life passed down through history to be recovered and renewed toward a projected future. It need not be self-enclosed in the sense of impervious to

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outside influences, but such influences are brought inside by incorporation into the form of life. Hermeneutic interpretation is a recovery of meaning, a moment of renewal and carrying-forward within a tradition, as it faces its future. Hermeneutic understanding is a project of recovery of lost meaning. It begins with a guess about what is the meaning of the whole text (Ricoeur 1976, 75–9), the higher-level meaning, and proceeds to refine this guess by dialectically relating specific parts to the whole. Such refinement of understanding works through a logic of better-or-worse, more-or-less, rather than a logic of true-false or yes-no. It thus involves appropriation by the interpreter in relation to the contemporary situation which the interpreter must define in its actuality and future possibility through an analysis of identity-anddifference in relation to the situation of the text. This requires both cultivation of the interpreter and an increasing approximation to the whole of the text and its role in cultural-civilizational history. The hermeneutical interpreter is a late-comer within a tradition that is no longer self-evident but is not (yet) exhausted whose activity of interpretation stitches the cultural-civilizational tradition together to hold sway across time. The temporal stitching constructed by hermeneutical interpretation occurs through linking the horizon of the reader with the horizon of the text. For example, if I read, Plato, Cicero, or Montaigne on friendship, I bring my own pre-judgments, prejudices, about the phenomenon of friendship and the scale of values that it organizes to the statements made by the author in question. Comparing these statements with each other, and putting them into relationship with my prejudices, I gain an understanding of where my view of friendship differs from the author—I might assume that friendship is a purely personal relation without implications for whole families, generations, or politics, for example. Scrutinizing individual statements of the author, I can determine places where such assumptions are not operative in the text and by collecting these together I form an idea of both prejudices and articulations of friendship in the text. In so doing, the text questions my prejudices about friendship and a dialogue is constructed between reader and text. Gadamer referred to this dialogue as a “fusing of horizons” which in the case of historical understanding “means that as the historical horizon is projected, it is simultaneously removed” (Gadamer 1975, 273). Concretely, as I understand that Plato’s exploration of friendship occurs within the horizon of the search for knowledge, or philosophy, I realize that my assumptions, shared by many in the world of my time and place and perhaps taken over uncritically, tend to associate friendship more with intimacy than a passion for truth. Nevertheless, in this very thought the possibility arises for me that the passion for truth is a more fitting horizon for the phenomenon of friendship. I am at the very least drawn into a dialogue between truth and intimacy as potential horizons.

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It is a matter for argument within hermeneutic theory the extent to which fusing occurs or, perhaps better phrased, the extent to which difference is maintained within the unity constructed by dialogue between horizons. Ricoeur claims that “we exist neither in closed horizons, nor within a horizon that is unique” (Ricoeur 1981a, 75), suggesting that the fusing cannot create an absolute horizon in the form of Hegel’s absolute knowledge nor remain in the radical incommunicability of Nietzsche’s pluralism. The critical point in this discussion is his claim that Gadamer’s conception of fusing tends in the direction of a Hegelian unified horizon even though the terminology of horizon and the phenomenon itself make such a conception impossible. It remains debatable between these authors to what extent horizons fuse or there remains a difference. Thus, the theme of friendship is known through the dialogue between, or fusing of, horizons which, as an act of understanding, creates a temporal unity that can place both past text and present interpreter within a tradition. The dialogue between horizons illuminates the theme, even though the prior identity—or perhaps one should say more cautiously the “similarity”—of the theme is necessary for the interpreter to know that the phenomenon being interpreted is friendship—and not alliance, or kinship, or neighborliness, or the commonality that one has with a fellow citizen. This is the meaning of hermeneutic interpretation as a late-comer within a tradition: there has to be already enough temporal continuity for there to be a unity of theme in order for the interpretation to get going, but there has to be enough of a break that the text is not immediately clear. It is this break that requires the dialogue between horizons as a means to understanding the text. This final understanding is a new unity to the extent that the horizons become actually fused, and contains an irreducible remnant of difference to the extent that there remains, in Ricoeur’s words, a “contrast in virtue of which one point of view stands out against the backcloth of others” (Ricoeur 1981a, 75). It is such a dialectic of identity and difference that defines the late-comer’s task of stitching together the tradition across time and allows it to occur in two modes: a restoration of unbroken tradition characteristic of Gadamer’s hermeneutics or a remnant of difference in the present horizon that can ground critique of that tradition which Ricoeur wants to defend. Immanent critique inhabits tradition as the inability to fully stitch together temporal difference. On this model of immanence hermeneutic philosophy cannot address the issue of intercultural-civilizational understanding. 12.4.2 Tradition and Intercultural-Civilizational Understanding Hermeneutic philosophy can ground immanent critique of a tradition, that is to say, its reformation/restoration dialectic in carrying itself both backward

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to its origin and forward toward completion because a tradition carries within itself a telos that assigns a task to those who inherit it. It inhabits the task of completion that is given in the present. Phenomenological philosophy, by investigating the constitution of a tradition as such through its institution/ completion, clarifies the constitution of what is given as being “assigned as a task” that is the active form in which a tradition is carried forward. The task is assigned as a value to the inheritor of a tradition and hermeneutic philosophy in this sense occupies the position of an inheritor. The value of the task can only be inquired into, the character of the assignation can only be uncovered, if the constitution of the tradition becomes questionable as such. The problem of intercultural-civilizational understanding must then be addressed beginning from the motivating event within the life-world which gives rise to a critique of tradition. A culture-civilization can be defined phenomenologically as a collection of traditions. Collection takes the form of organization, in some respects super- and sub-ordination, though within an indefinite horizon in the sense that the relation between traditions is often not thematic for the actors within a culture-civilization. For example, I may inherit belonging in a tradition of education that assigns formal education such as a university degree a positive value. I may also inherit a tradition that values deep involvement in a place, a place in which perhaps “my people” have a long history. I may live for a long time without ever having to address thematically the relative values assigned within these two traditions, even though a critical event may at any time occur which requires me to choose between these two values and thus to pose exactly this issue. At the point at which the issue is posed, through my determination of the relative values, I become not only an inheritor but a definer of the culture-civilization, not only carrying out an assigned task but defining the task that is assigned.7 Intercultural-civilizational understanding implies an understanding of another collection of traditions that would begin from a critical event that dislocates, or disrupts, the established relation between knowledge-form and experience, or pre-predicative judgment. Before addressing the event of dislocation, it is first necessary to discuss empirical-historical forms of intercultural-civilizational interaction at least in a schematic manner. Perhaps one should begin with a zero-degree of cultural interaction in which several independent culture-civilizations exist in the world but there is no interaction between them. Without contact of some sort, intercultural understanding is obviously impossible and intercultural critique similarly so. The historical starting-point is thus that any form of intercultural understanding requires a constituting cultural practical inter-action as its experiential ground. A first form was developed through traveler’s stories and reached its apogee in anthropological accounts. In this form, a person reaches maturity within

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a given culture-civilization and then moves outward to encounter another culture-civilization that is itself, in an identical manner, given as independent. Culture-civilizations are understood in this way to be self-enclosed and selfsubsistent, so that the relation between them is a kind of “travelling” in which one culture-civilization is left in order for another to be entered. Encounter with an alien culture-civilization in this form can have two consequences: the alien culture-civilization can be denigrated as less human, or less civilized, so that a hierarchical relation between culture-civilizations can be posited. Often this is done by thrusting the alien culture-civilization into the past so that it is seen as an earlier form of human society doomed to pass away (Fabian 1983). Denigration leads to a conception of culture-civilization that is not only alien but also inferior. The opposite alternative is also possible, and has some, though fewer, historical precedents: the alien culture-civilization may be seen as superior and as a basis for the critique of one’s own culturecivilization. A classic literary example of the latter form of intercultural critique is Montesquieu’s Persian Letters. A more sophisticated possibility is that the existence of a coherent alien culture-civilization can motivate a self-reflection that understands one’s own culture-civilization as a specific form of culture-civilization (and not the simply given form of humanity as such)—perhaps a specific form that requires its own immanent criticism. This is actually how Montesquieu’s Letters should be understood: it is a self-reflective immanent criticism masquerading for imaginative reasons as the voice of a superior alien culture-civilization, and doing so ironically, for political reasons, in the voice of a culture-civilization generally considered inferior. To simplify, we can say that when culture-civilizations exist largely separately and are connected by the external relations established by travelers, their relationship is of the us-them variety in a mode of curiosity about the alien: isn’t it strange, interesting, repugnant, or enlightening, that they do not do things the way we do? The empirical-historical scheme could be continued at much greater length. Culture-civilizations have come into relation in a number of ways: travelers and explorers, colonialism and imperialism, treaty and federation, immigration and exile, to name a few. Indeed, one can argue that the very concept of culture, used in this anthropological sense, is necessarily linked to a plurality of culture-civilizations, since one’s own culturecivilization could not become visible as such without comparison to another. Leaving the empirical-historical scheme to one side for the moment, let us investigate the motivating event in our own life-world from which emerges the possibility of a critique of traditions and therefore cultural forms. This event is pointed to by the question of the possibility of intercultural understanding itself: the inter-action between culture-civilizations within scientific-technological planetary civilization occurs within the horizon of

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the difficulty of articulating a rationality of meaning and value that could sustain a culture-civilization. It is this that gives rise to a persistent anxiety concerning cultural-civilizational homogenization (Angus 2013). These two horizons are mutually defining insofar as the planetary character of scientifictechnological civilization defines the context for inter-action of culturecivilizations and inter-action of culture-civilizations defines the context for the planetary expansion of scientific-technological civilization. This is the motivating event for critique of traditions and the collection of traditions that constitute a culture-civilization. It is the experiential ground for a transcendental history of intercultural-civilizational understanding. The next two sections will take up in turn each of these mutually defining horizons of the contemporary planetary event. 12.4.3 The Horizon of Scientific-Technological Civilization Scientific-technological reason constitutes a tradition that can be incorporated into different culture-civilizations. Its planetary reach defines the horizon within which different culture-civilizations come into contact. Philosophy, when it is understood in hermeneutic form as the carrying-forward of a tradition, will either carry forward the scientific-technological tradition directly itself or it will encounter the scientific-technological tradition as the horizon of the tradition which it does carry forward. Insofar as the scientific-technological tradition is the horizon for the encounter of different traditions and their collections into culture-civilizations, its universality tends to render such other traditions and culture-civilizations as merely local and particular. Phenomenological philosophy, since it reaches outside a tradition to its originary and completing moments, is capable not only of encountering the horizon of scientific-technological tradition but also of laying bare its constitution. One immediate empirical-historical consequence of this transcendental history is that there is no universal language that could encompass the relation of philosophy to the different culture-civilizations. The values expressed in traditions within culture-civilizations are not capable of discursive totalization. The transcendental history through which the phenomenological philosopher surveys culture-civilizations and their horizon of connection in scientific-technological reason returns us to the point in Plato’s Republic where Socrates asks Glaucon to survey “as from a tower” the many political forms in which human virtue struggles for its clarity. Stanley Rosen comments on this passage that here Plato discovers the Nietzschean perspective, which he claims is the truly philosophical one, that “the philosopher surveys the whole and in so doing stands beyond or outside of nature” (Rosen 1993, 132). But, as Rosen himself notes, for Plato “now that we have come to this height of

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argument I seem to see as from a point of outlook that there is one form of excellence, and that the forms of evil are infinite” (Plato 1997e, 1077; Republic 445c). If only one of the forms is good, then it is not a Nietzschean perspective “beyond good and evil” as Rosen claims but a lynch-pin from which the many forms can be ordered and the temporal succession of regimes resolved into a coming-toward or falling-away from the good—which amounts in the end to an ordering of culture-civilizations from a virtue/value that subtends them all. There is neither chaos nor abyss here but an order based in a unique intuition that subtends the many forms of human politics and culture. We are returned to the hermeneutic perspective from which philosophy carries forward a given tradition on the condition of being barred from investigating its constitution. Without such a unique intuition of the good it might seem that there is no alternative to the Nietzschean abyss—pure plurality not only of culture-civilizations but also of virtues/values in which any ordering is a pure positing based on nothing more than the power of the one who posits the leading value. But the perspective of transcendental history described here opens another possibility. The relationship between pure plurality of values and the groundless positing of a leading value becomes clearer when put into relationship with another, apparently contradictory, statement of Nietzsche’s that “the value of life cannot be estimated. Not by a living man, because he is a party to the dispute, indeed its object, and not the judge of it; not by a dead one, for another reason” (Nietzsche 1968, 30). Where would one stand to estimate the value of life? Nietzsche asserts that one can stand neither inside, without simply assuming that the values one lives are the reigning values tout court, nor outside because the question is no longer a live one. From the perspective of a “philosophy of life” [Lebensphilosophie], Nietzsche concludes that the value of the whole of life, a value that would subtend all cultural-civilizational worlds and their differences, cannot be estimated or judged. But he does not say that it cannot be asserted and this is what the one higher than mere humans do. The Nietzschean choice is only between passive and active nihilism. It is at exactly this point that phenomenological philosophy through its critique of traditions and their collection into culture-civilizations demands a “view from the tower” which maintains the plurality of cultural-civilizational forms and values at the same time that it undermines their externality through the horizon of scientific-technological reason. It is necessary to make a distinction between the view of the totality “as from a tower” which philosophy requires and the “fact” that there is no universal discursive language that could encompass the relation of philosophy to the different culture-civilizations. The discursive expression of philosophy is necessarily split by the plurality of culture-civilizations even though the view

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from the tower is itself enabled by the plurality of discursive forms in which it can be expressed. This paradox is an empirical-historical consequence of the transcendental history motivated by the mutually defining horizons of the contemporary planetary event. The values expressed in traditions and civilizational-cultures are not capable of discursive totalization but they are capable of intuitive survey.8 It is such intuitive survey that grounds dialogue between the necessary plurality of languages in which such intuition must be expressed. The philosophical concept of totality is necessarily understood by phenomenological philosophers attending to the constitution of traditions in various cultural-civilizational forms. Expressed in religious terms, one might say that even if there is one God humans necessarily interpret God in various ways. For an individual, this means that one’s conception of “all that is” must take a certain determinate form. Nevertheless, this concept is accompanied by the awareness that the determinate form is not itself ultimate but is one of many expressions of the ultimate. Thus a certain distance is introduced between the ultimate itself and the language in which it is expressed. At the same time, the condition for recognizing the legitimacy of other expressions of the ultimate is satisfied. If philosophy could be expressed as a pure un-situated universality in a formal logic, it would contain no reference to the cultural-civilizational specificity of the philosopher. However, in order for philosophy to form human conduct through reason, it must engage with the cultural-civilizational, historical and traditional parameters that the philosopher shares with others. The collection of traditions that constitutes a culture-civilization is the ground from which philosophy begins and which cannot be entirely taken up nor cancelled in the practice of philosophy. This is what I mean by saying that philosophy has no universal language by which its relation to culture-civilizations can be expressed. It is a consequence of the universality of scientific-technological reason because the form of that reason abstracts from cultural-civilizational contents and yet requires such contents for its planetary reach. While phenomenological philosophy need not imagine, as does scientific-technological reason, that cultural-civilizational contents are merely particular and local, it does need to accept that there is no straightforwardly universal but still encultured language à la Hegel that can express the relation between philosophical reason and its situated origin and effect. In short, it is necessary that there are many languages of philosophy. Humans are constituted such that they do not know automatically how to live, as we may presume other animals do. A presumptive answer to the philosophical question ‘how should humans live?’ is contained within the institutions of a cultural-civilizational form. The necessary fact that there are many languages of philosophy means that that there is no discursive knowledge of

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the whole from which the question of the true political virtues/values—the good for humans—could be definitively decided. While there may be intuitive knowledge of the whole, its political expression must enter into discourse and thus be compatible with more than one form of expression. This may be called a skeptical truth as long as it is clear that it does not deny the possibility of a philosophical answer to the question of how humans should live but only of a fully discursive answer to the question that could finally incorporate or cancel cultural-civilizational contents. To deny this skeptical truth one would have to assert the validity of a discursive conception of the whole, like that proposed by Hegel, in which the discursive articulation of the forms of experience culminates in a conception of the whole that can be displayed as a material logic. An intuitive account of totality like that of Plato, in contrast, requires recourse to mythical expression precisely because it is not amenable to discursive presentation. For phenomenology, Plato’s myth is now dispersed among the planet’s many civilizational cultures and its meaning and value is expressed in many languages. Philosophy’s search for truth cannot replace the way of life inherent in a cultural-civilizational form nor can it legitimate a specific form as against all others. Thus, philosophy is always dependent on a form of life outside itself for its own existence. The plurality of forms of expression of the truth—even if they were several forms of the same truth—means that a plurality of culturalcivilizational forms is compatible with the same truth. Caught in this situation, each of us must ask which cultural-civilizational form best incorporates a given value but, since each form is not total and therefore in some respect lacking in other values, rational disagreement will occur about the respective merits of cultural-civilizational forms. It is at this point, which grounds both intercultural-civilizational learning and intercultural-civilizational criticism, that intercultural-civilizational understanding can genuinely begin. It must occur in this rational inquiry that different aspects of the best form of life are highlighted by different cultural-civilizational forms. The plurality and diversity of multiculturalism in our contemporary world is for this reason basic and not merely a matter of accommodation to minorities. These multiple forms could themselves be articulated as a political-ethical theory only if a rigorous (discursive) account could be given of their relationship. Such an ordering would reduce the dispersed multiplicity to a pattern whose form could establish the superiority of one order. In this respect, the skeptical truth of philosophy takes the form philosophy of an evaluation of the superiority of Socrates’ inconclusiveness over Plato’s theory of the whole. The skeptical truth of transcendental history thus has two dimensions: An anti-Hegelian one based on the distinction between intuitive and discursive accounts of the whole and an anti-Platonic one based on the impossibility

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of ordering the necessary multiplicity of forms. But neither of these two aspects of the skeptical truth implies that there is no true answer to the question about how humans should live that could be expressed in philosophy, so that the descent into Nietzsche’s abyss is rather a failure of philosophy not its completion for the phenomenological investigation of the horizon of scientific-technological civilization. 12.4.4 The Horizon of Intercultural-Civilizational Understanding Through a double horizon, scientific-technological civilization defines the context of the inter-action of culture-civilizations and the inter-action of culture-civilizations defines the context for the planetary expansion of scientific-technological civilization. A second immediate empirical-historical implication of this transcendental history is that the inter-action of culturecivilizations can no longer be based on the traveler’s model as an us-them relationship between independent and self-enclosed culture-civilizations established by movement in space. Rather, a culture-civilizations must be seen as existing from the start in relationship with other culture-civilizations, constituted by what it brings inside from other culture-civilizations to make its own, and continued as much by its productive effect on other culture-civilizations as by continuing in the same form. The success of a culture-civilization may well be constituted less by its ability to continue in the same form as by its ability to translate its traditions into other cultural-civilizational forms. The possibility of intercultural-civilizational understanding will depend on this possibility of translation. This is the key question: How is translation of values between culturecivilizations possible, or, how is a value from a different culture-civilization understood? In order for something foreign to be understood, it must be translated by some means into the particular cultural-civilizational form that one inhabits. Moreover, it must be translated in such a manner that the difference of that value is preserved and it is not reduced to being measured simply by one’s own criteria. The first condition, as described in the previous section, opens a distance between one’s own ultimate values and ultimate values themselves that grounds the possibility of such translation. In addition, in order for translation of values to occur we need to consider two cases. First, if there is nothing even remotely comparable to the value requiring translation, then translation is obviously impossible. While such a case cannot be ruled out in principle, it would require the further condition that the telos of universality-in-difference be abandoned and therefore that the whole attempt at intercultural-civilizational critique would fail. For there to be a comparable value that is not identical, such that translation can overcome foreign-ness

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while maintaining difference, as we might phrase it, there must be some common element but that common element not have the same place, or role, within each cultural-civilizational form. Here it is useful to recall that when Claude Levi-Strauss argued that Western scientific thought was not the only scientific form but that there were two different and equally valid forms, he made this comparison by reference to the French experience of the bricoleur or, as we might say, of the handy-man, in contrast to the engineer who stood for the mode of knowing of Western science. “Unlike the engineer, he does not subordinate each of them to the availability of raw materials and tools conceived and procured for the purpose of the project” (Levi-Strauss 1966, 17). Rather, the bricoleur’s “universe of instruments is closed and the rules of the game are always to make do with ‘whatever is at hand,’ that is to say, with a set of tools and materials which is always finite and is also heterogeneous because what it contains bears no relation to the current project . . . but is the contingent result of all the occasions there have been to renew or enrich the stock or to maintain it . . .” (LeviStrauss 1966, 17). Through this contrast Levi-Strauss sought to do two things: to open a distance between Western science and science in other possible forms and to show that the people of his anthropological studies had such another form of science. The example of the bricoleur already existed and was comprehensible within French culture but it was not previously considered to be comparable to science. By analogizing the mytho-poetical (as it had been called) thought of non-Western people to French bricolage, that thought could be understood as a form of rationality comparable to Western science and also, it should be noted, bricolage within French culture also could be understood as a rational form whose subordination had been achieved by the very same Western science that denigrated the “mytho-poetic thought” of non-Western people as non-scientific. This is a logic of the center-periphery: by bringing a concept from the periphery of French culture to its center, the rational content of both French bricolage and non-Western science could be understood. This is the logic of translation between cultural-civilizational values such that their difference is preserved at the same time that their comparability is established. It performs a critique of Western science by showing that it is only one form of reason in the same moment that it allows a revaluation of both bricolage and mytho-poetic thought. The condition of cultural-civilizational plurality which gives rise to the problem of identity and difference can issue in intercultural-civilizational understanding through translation by means of center-periphery comparisons. It is not an immanent criticism but a criticism of immanence that is possible since cultures and their value-forms are not non-communicating vessels but remain open to the creative act of comparison. The key to hermeneutical

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understanding of another culture-civilization has thus been shown to consist in the nature of the closure whereby a culture-civilization is constituted as such: the first “traveler’s” stage consists primarily of “spatial” closure through temporal revitalization whereas the second “multicultural” case consists in “spatial” open-ness (cultural borrowing, hybridity, etc.) through temporal forgetting. Since any such closure can only be temporary and partially effective, translation may well be, as Ricoeur suggests (Ricoeur 2006, 23–9), a model for all hermeneutical understanding—even that within a given tradition—but it could be so only through an investigation of the constitution of the tradition itself, including the manner of its closure. To this extent, the empirical-historical forms of intercultural-civilizational contact set the framework within which the motivating event for transcendental history emerges. Whereas hermeneutic interpretation carries forward the understanding imbedded in a tradition, phenomenology investigates the constitution of traditions and can thereby address intercultural-civilizational understanding through a center-periphery logic that by displacing the assumptions inherent in one’s own culture-civilization as a collection of traditions opens one up to potential disclosures from assumptions rooted in other cultures. By building on the access points to transcendentality within culturecivilizations an inter-culture-civilizations philosophy can begin whose task is to investigate the contemporary crisis brought about by planetary scientifictechnological civilization and to propose a recovery of meaning and value from the intensity of practices dispersed in culture-civilizations. 12.5 THE PLANETARY EVENT The contemporary planetary event can be approached from the location of America whose institution occurred through the (at times violent, but not always) interaction between Indigenous and European culture-civilizations. Intercultural-civilizational dialogue concerning natural fecundity, or excess, and transcendentality may occur through departure from an access-point to transcendentality within a given culture-civilization and, from that transcendentality as expressed in a given culture-language, to other culture-civilizations. The planetary event consists in the apogee of scientific-technological culture (which provoked the crisis) in its conflict with place-based Indigenous thinking and practice.

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NOTES 1.  Insofar as Husserl’s 1935 letter to Levy-Bruhl indicates that his anthropology was one of the sources of Husserl’s concept of lifeworld, this concern gains greater justification. Levy-Bruhl’s conception of non-Western people as “pre-logical,” “primitive” and “without history” suggests a hierarchical relation that Husserl might have seen himself as giving a philosophical foundation with the idea of Europe as philosophy’s home (LB). In historical-intellectual terms, it is probably some such combination of 19th and early 20th century anthropology with the 19th century idea of progress that motivated Husserl’s view. But no such ease is available to us at this juncture. 2. Rodolphe Gasché goes so far as to assert that all critique of Eurocentrism depends on a European concept of critique, a position that not only fails to address directly the issue at hand but associates critique exclusively with European reason and re-asserts the Husserlian position as if it were unproblematic (Gasché 2009, 7). 3.  As Dermot Moran has shown, Husserl does not in principle deny the possibility of critical reason to non-European peoples. Rather, “Husserl undoubtedly embraced the view that all cultures begin in some kind of non-historical, practical mythic stage before becoming historically differentiated. . . . there is no evidence that Husserl thinks that Indian or Chinese civilizations are essentially incapable of making the breakthrough from myth to the theoretical attitude, originally performed by “a few Greek eccentrics.” It is the great and irrational “fact” of history that this breakthrough took place only in Greece” (Moran 2011, 493–4). 4.  The majority of commentators analyze the question of Eurocentrism in The Vienna Lecture with reference to the empirical-transcendental, or contingent-necessary, distinction, usually in order to defend Husserl since his sense of Europe has a transcendental meaning, thus failing altogether to see the new concept of history that is introduced by Husserl in accounting for the geometry taken over by Galileo through the concept of institution (Urstiftung) (Cameron 2009, 107; Gasché 2009, 57). The work of Jacques Derrida has been significant, and highly influential, in arguing that an equivocation between reason as constituted in history and given only as its telos defines Husserl’s turn to history. This argument for equivocation rests on the duality of empirical-transcendental, or contingent-necessary, that the concept of institution overcomes (Derrida 2003, 176–8; Derrida 1978, 121). 5.  Enrique Dussel objects to the term “encounter” because “the new syncretistic, hybrid, predominantly mestizo culture was born neither from a freely entered alliance nor from steady cultural synthesis, but from an originary trauma of being dominated” (Dussel 1992, 55). While Dussel is correct to say that “encounter” does not capture the essence of the historical event insofar as it was not an “encounter” of equals, we are using it as a way of opening up a free variation of the possibilities of the event without denying the originary trauma in order to open contemporary rethinking and, perhaps, alternatives. 6.  This sentence slides over an important question that requires separate investigation: to what extent does Husserl simply assume that phenomenology completes the tradition because the tradition fundamentally in question for him is Western rationalism

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(as carried onward by mathematical science) and this, indeed, phenomenology continues and attempts to complete. “This final establishment is accomplished when the task is brought to consummate clarity and thus to an apodictic method which, in every step of achievement, is a constant avenue to new steps having the character of absolute success . . . At this point philosophy, as an infinite task, would have arrived at its apodictic beginning, its horizon of apodictic forward movement” (C 72). My presentation attempts to illuminate, albeit briefly, that while Husserl himself does make this assumption, the logic of the phenomenon requires that critique of tradition extend to its completion—even the completion of the tradition of reason. 7.  This short description is indebted to Max Scheler’s (Scheler 1960, 60–3; Schutz 1971, 242) conception of “the relative natural conception of the world” which refers to the ordering of values within the domains of a cultural form by an over-riding principle that defines the cultural form itself. However, my description seeks to recognize that the notion that a culture is defined by a single overweening value is not tenable and that the relation between the values that comprise a culture is not always thematically clarified. 8.  The ground of this assertion is an acceptance of Eugen Fink’s revision of the consequences late Husserl’s conception of the transcendental reduction. If “language stands ready as anticipatory ontological grasp, as an antecedent preinterpretation of being,” then one must ask whether “the antecedent grasp is a definitive interpretation, or one that is annulled or modifiable” in getting back to “the forgotten protosituation” which motivates understanding (Fink, quoted in Bruzina 2004, 455). Language is formed by living-in and –toward Being and thus must be used differently within the phenomenological reduction which sets aside Being in order to investigate its constitution. The current presentation does not need to decide on the difference between Husserl’s recognition of the “doubleness” of linguistic meaning versus Fink’s stronger sense of its “transformation” (Bruzina 2004, 576– 81) since it relies only on the basic point that the discursive knowledge available in cultural forms cannot be the basis for the intuition of the plurality of cultural forms themselves. This is the significance of my use of the term “discursive” in the text to mark this difference.

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Chapter Thirteen

America and Philosophy Planetary Technology and Place-Based Indigeneity

The existence of limits to the recourse to Europe as the home of reason motivating and sustaining the critique of one-sided rationality invites a further exploration of that limit further by putting the recourse to place in European philosophy into dialogue with selected Indigenous accounts of the relation between place and reason. A reflection on the role of America in contemporary philosophy must first justify the reference to a particular place, albeit a very large one, in philosophical discourse which is necessarily oriented to universality. Reference to place in philosophy in a manner essential to the philosophical argument is rare, though present, in the history of philosophy. It is more often simply taken for granted. The primary reference to place in philosophy, at least in European philosophy, is to Europe and any reference to America is usually derived from its reference to Europe. If place becomes significant in a philosophical discourse oriented to universality it cannot be through abandoning universality but in situating or locating it within the ongoing spiritual-intellectual life of a people such that philosophy can influence such a life. In teaching and in political conflict, especially at crucial moments that threaten or shift spiritual-intellectual life, the attempt at influence enters into the content of the philosophy itself. That is to say, that despite its universality, philosophy is not an attempt to construct an internally consistent, complete and self-referential discourse but leaks toward, and necessarily incorporates elements from, a spiritual-intellectual tradition. Nevertheless, the orientation to universality does not simply subsume philosophy into teaching or politics but aims at a clarification and orientation of human spiritual-intellectual life as a whole through such reference. Therefore, references to place which have been crucial to the content of a given philosophical discourse at a certain time can become significant in other places and times. Here we encounter 419

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the philosophers most often referenced in this work (Socrates, Hegel, Marx, Heidegger, Husserl) in the light of their significant references to place. Such reference has been shown to be essential due to Husserl’s concept of institution (Urstiftung) and its necessary reference to Europe, and European modernity, as explored in the preceding chapter. 13.1 EUROPE AND AMERICA When, in a philosophical discourse, conceptual reference is made to “Europe” within which philosophy operates and through which philosophy has a wider socio-historical influence, “Europe” to an established intellectual-spiritual (gestig) tradition. Nevertheless, if all reference to place were extinguished, the reference outside philosophy to a wider intellectual-spiritual tradition would be meaningless. Moreover, such an intellectual-spiritual tradition, in its reference to place, suggests a relation to an economic and political regime dominant in that place, which presents the danger, given philosophy’s inherent connection to universality, that philosophy would in the end degenerate into an ideology of economic or political power by presenting as universal the particular interests of a given regime. If “Europe” is not just a place, so that others in other places may enter into the intellectual-spiritual tradition, still it is some sort of place in the sense that it has borders on the other side of which would be other places with different intellectual-spiritual traditions. The borders of Europe and its spiritual tradition have mutated with time, advanced and retreated, and, even more important, this advance or retreat is not always nor most importantly retreat or advance of an economic or political regime in space but the incorporation, or failure to incorporate, other intellectual-spiritual traditions. Complicating this issue, “America” is often considered part of the European spiritualintellectual tradition. While on the one hand, this inclusion clarifies that it is an intellectual-spiritual reference that is at issue, on the other it muddies the necessary reference to borders and even may suggest that the reference to place is irrelevant. I will use the name “America” to refer to the whole continental place (North and South) which Europe first called the New World and which was populated by other peoples with other intellectual-spiritual traditions at the time of contact and continues to be so peopled today. Let us take this preliminary sketch of issues as motive for a questioning that asks, in the first place, why reference outside philosophical discourse as such to place and an incorporation of an intellectual-spiritual place into philosophical discourse might be necessary. Further, let us use certain key references to Europe in philosophical discourse as clues to what the inclu-

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sion, or exclusion, of “America” as an intellectual-spiritual place might mean. Using “Europe” in this way as a clue to “America” is by no means arbitrary. After all, America is a European invention. As Mexican historian Edmundo O’Gorman has pointed out, “if World in its traditional sense means that part of the earth providentially assigned to man for his dwelling, America was literally a ‘new’ world, which offered the possibility of enlarging man’s old cosmic home by adding a new portion of the universe conceived as capable of becoming another Europe” (O’Gorman, 139). America was a dream of Europe not a discovery of a territory. One can discover only what one is looking for and the explorers were looking for the Orient. The encounter of America as a barrier to that discovery initiated an intellectual-spiritual place that both connected America to Europe and marked a difference from it. The intellectual-spiritual meaning of this difference can be referred to as “Indigeneity.” America was populated by human communities that have since been violently displaced, encircled, and sometimes annihilated. Treating America as an intellectual-spiritual place that can be enfolded within the intellectualspiritual meaning of Europe implies the insignificance of the difference of America from Europe as manifested by the intellectual-spiritual meaning of Indigeneity. In contrast, recognizing this difference reveals a border to the intellectual-spiritual meaning of Europe. In the third place, then, we need to ask whether such a border is significant for philosophy. The current chapter thus explores an opening and a risk for European philosophy toward a dialogue with Indigenous spiritual-intellectual traditions. 13.2 THE UNIVERSALITY OF PHILOSOPHY AND ITS PARADOXICAL APPEAL TO A PARTICULAR PLACE OF MEANING In the formation of the quest for universality in philosophy stands the classic task of Socrates to discover a universal eidos, or form, instantiated in every particular case of an activity such as justice, piety, or courage. Such a search for universals, though not necessarily their discovery, is characteristic of philosophy and ties the fate of philosophy to universality. In facing the corrupt demagogy that condemned philosophy for its disruptive questioning in this manner that showed that those who claim to know do not know, Socrates appeals to his commonality with the demos in two ways. Such commonality indicates that philosophical universality is nevertheless grounded in specific belonging—a commonality of philosophy and non-philosophy. It is both a political self-defense of philosophy and an attempt at teaching and as such requires courage.

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Socrates appeals to the statement by the Oracle at Delphi that there was no one wiser than himself, a statement which sent him on his way inquiring of politicians, poets, and craftsmen what they knew (Apology 21a–22d). The Oracle was a Panhellenic religious authority, although a notably ambiguous one, and thus hard for the demos to dismiss. Later, he taunts those who will decide on his fate by recalling that he fought for Athens with their fathers and grandfathers, that he remained at his post facing death then, and that he will do no less in the service of philosophy (Apology 28d–29a). These references were not necessary when he was undertaking his annoying questioning into the eidos of piety, courage, justice, beauty, etc. but become so when justification of the questioning itself was required. The relevance of these references outside philosophy to what philosophy shares with non-philosophy emerges with the self-justification of philosophy whose articulation will decide (at least in part), and participate in, its destiny—which will decide, ultimately, whether philosophy is subject to a fate that it cannot affect or whether it has a destiny affected by its self-justification. Such a commonality with non-philosophy is rooted in the spiritual-intellectual place that philosophy shares with non-philosophy—in this case the Panhellenic religion and the military self-defense of Athens. It is a place of meaning and value in the sense that it has borders—other places where such meaning does not hold sway and where any justification of philosophy whose articulation decides its fate would have to appeal to different meaning and proceed differently. The place of meaning and value emerges within philosophical discourse as a self-justification that puts it within a world alongside non-philosophy in which a struggle determines its destiny. The universality of philosophy appeals to the non-universality of a place to intervene in its destiny. Insofar as philosophy is not only universality but a self-justification in the face of non-philosophers and a teaching to those who are not yet philosophers, it must appeal to a place of meaning which it shares with non-philosophy. Such a place is particular so that, to this degree, the universality of philosophy depends upon its articulation within this particularity. It is this fundamental philosophical necessity that Husserl repeated when he appealed to Europe. Hegel commented upon this relation between universality and particularity in the person of Socrates in order to claim that “what is higher than both [the oracle and conscious thought], however, is not only to make deliberation the Oracle for a contingent action, but in addition, to know that this deliberate action is itself something contingent on account of its connection with the particular aspect of the action and its advantageousness” (Hegel 1979, 432). Hegel thought that speculative philosophy could bridge the gulf between Socratic self-consciousness and the “utterance peculiar to the god who is the Spirit of an ethical nation [which] is the Oracle” (Hegel 1979, 431). The

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task of speculative philosophy would therefore be to mediate and sublate the division between philosophy and non-philosophy into a knowledge that would be simultaneously universal and particular: both philosophy as active universality and non-philosophy as a particular place of meaning. It seeks a happy time which would not require courage to sustain critique, nor the death of the philosopher, nor even the confrontation of the community by the philosopher. Such a speculative philosophy would consequently escape the tragedy of Socrates’ confrontation with the demos that requires a choice between ethical, unconscious community and reflective critique. The medium of this escape would be another form of the self-justification of philosophy. This time not as tragedy but as history. 13.3 HISTORY AS THE INCLUSION OF THE PARTICULAR PLACE OF MEANING INTO PHILOSOPHY The modern world, in Hegel’s view, differed from the ancient world insofar as the ancient world needed to construct the idea of the universal whereas the modern world needs to descend from the accomplished universal to the concrete. “Hence the task nowadays consists not so much in purging the individual of an immediate, sensuous mode of apprehension, and making him into a substance, that is an object of thought and that thinks, but rather in just the opposite, in freeing determinate thoughts from their fixity so as to give actuality to the universal, and impart it to spiritual life” (Hegel 1979, 19–20). Such a descent into concretion from abstraction occurs in time such that logic unfolds in time as history. Through historical logic, the God of unself-conscious meaning that resides in the ethical spirit of a nation, combined with the conscious thought, would produce a fusion of universality and particularity in history that, for Hegel, “through cognition of the Universal and Particular— comprehends God Himself,” which is the “true Theodicæa” (Hegel 1956, 322, 457). In Hegel’s view, ancient philosophy as a whole, and therefore Socrates, is stuck in the prior moment of the construction of universality, with the consequence that it comes into conflict with the ethical life of the people. In this sense he regards the judgment that the Athenian people rendered to Socrates a just one: “because Socrates makes the truth rest on the judgment of inward consciousness, he enters upon a struggle with the Athenian people as to what is right and true. His accusation was therefore just” (Hegel 1974, 426). Though it’s a bit more complicated because Athens produced Socrates. Socrates is the subjective and reflective turn in Athenian ethical life, so the conflict between Athens and Socrates is a conflict within Athens, a revolution in which “in place of the oracle, the personal self-consciousness of every

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thinking man has come into play” (Hegel 1974, 435). Hegel’s judgment on ancient philosophy condemns a purported dualism between self-conscious universality and the particular ethical life of a people and, in doing so, it both elides the recourse to the ethical life of a people as a particular place of meaning brought forth by the self-justification of philosophy and proposes a synthesis of universality and particularity. Since philosophy, according to Hegel, is in the first place universality opposed to particularity, and in the second place universality encompassing particularity through a historical logic, the new synthesis claims to overcome the opposition between philosophy and non-philosophy: the particular life of a people becomes not merely particular but a particular lifted up and incorporated into universality; universality is not a bare universality without content but a universality manifested in the ethical life of a people. There is no longer any non-philosophy, at most a not-yet-incorporated-into-philosophy, so that philosophy itself must have come to an end since it does not stand as selfconsciousness in opposition to an unconscious, traditional, place of meaning. This is why Hegel must fail to understand the necessary reference to a place of meaning and value inherent in Socrates’ self-justification of philosophy: Socrates’ philosophy is indeed a self-conscious construction of universality, but it is one that understands its own dependence on a place that is nevertheless external to itself. Philosophy is not only universality. It is also the teaching of non-philosophers who may become philosophers and confrontation with those who will not. Both Socrates and Hegel recognize an externality to philosophy, but Hegel thinks that it can be converted into an internality and thus he ultimately destroys the distinction between philosophy and the spiritual-intellectual life of a people rooted in a place. Thus, universality is ultimately located in one spiritual-intellectual place that denies any claim to universality in other spiritual-intellectual traditions. Hegel cannot accept the validity of Socrates’ self-justification of philosophy except in a limited, partial sense in which it is enfolded within the ethical life of a people. To follow Socrates at this point is to say that the struggle for philosophy is indistinct from philosophy, that universality is articulated through but never incorporates its externality, that the tragic choices which characterize philosophy cannot be reconciled and overcome by the comfort of wisdom. 13.4 THE MODERN STATE, CAPITAL, AND THE MEANING OF AMERICA Modern wisdom operates through the state which, it is claimed, reconciles particularity and universality so that “the result is that the universal does

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not prevail or achieve completion except along with particular interests and through the co-operation of particular knowing and willing; and individuals likewise do not live as private persons for their own ends alone, but in the very act of willing these they will the universal in the light of the universal, and their activity is consciously aimed at none but the universal end” (Hegel 1969b, 160–1).1 Only through the state does the logic of history aim teleologically at the end of philosophy and also at the end of non-philosophy in the sense that non-philosophy might conflict with universality. This is why Hegel judges that America enters into neither philosophy nor history. Not philosophy, because philosophy is concerned with the universal; not history, because history deals with the past. America is a “land of desire for those weary of the historical lumber-room of Europe,” the “Land of the Future” (Hegel 1956, 86–7). The future, one would think, would elicit progress or destruction, desire or renunciation, hope or despair, and, due to these unresolved possibilities, be open to tragedy in a manner closed off to Hegel’s modern philosophy. North America is an open outlet for colonization, which relieves the discontent of the masses, and has no neighboring states to fear (since Canada and Mexico pose no obstacle), so that European states can send their surplus population to America (Hegel 1956, 86, 82). These two conditions mean that America is not a state in the proper European sense since “for a real State and a real Government arise only after a distinction of classes has arisen, when wealth and poverty become extreme” (Hegel 1956, 85). The prior condition for this opening of the European closure is that the Indigenous people have “gradually vanished,” “or nearly so,” and been “driven back” so as to create this opening (Hegel 1956, 81, 82, 81). As a consequence of this coloniallyachieved open-ness, neither the original Indigenous people nor the settlers who found themselves surplus to the requirements of the European states can fit the role of a particular spiritual-intellectual life of a people in the sense in which it can be taken up into universality according to the ideal of modern philosophy proposed by Hegel. For this reason, America has a European form imposed upon it by colonization, as Hegel quite realistically asserts, but it is a deficient European form since the state is not a state proper and the peoples not peoples in the requisite sense. If one were to step back from the self-evidence of the Hegelian analysis to Hegel himself, while still accepting its analyses of its difference from Europe, one may remark that this account of America may actually be a place of tragedy in something like the Socratic sense: the universality of the universal is not yet established and the particularity of the particular is driven back rather than incorporated. But this opposition of universal and particular has an even more radical sense: the universal is imposed, rather than invented/discovered in Socratic form. We may ask whether the particular is successfully driven back, as Hegel asserts, or whether it retains a persistence in

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the custom, law, and practices of subjected peoples. At this point a difference between Indigenous and settler with regards to the particularity of spiritualintellectual life would emerge. The Indigenous retains its difference from the European with the price of being driven back, whereas the settler can import the straightforwardly European (simply adapting it to local conditions) or can confront its co-existence with indigeneity in a form that would no longer be European. In such a confrontation the question of whether the state is really, as Hegel asserted, the pinnacle of the philosophical relationship to a particular spiritual-intellectual place will necessarily surface. Marx’s view of America evaluates rather differently these two aspects— absence of extreme inequality and absence of international conflict—that led Hegel to deny a state in the real (European) sense to America. He points out that “in the colonies the separation of the worker from the conditions of labour and from the soil, in which they are rooted, does not yet exist, or only sporadically, or on too limited a scale” (Cap1 935). The separation between the laborer and the means of production, including the land, which defines the proletarianization of labor in Europe is incomplete in America, so that the laborer can avoid—or at least hope and try to avoid—the proletarian condition. The “constant transformation of wage-labourers into independent producers, who work for themselves instead of for capital . . . reacts very adversely on the conditions of the labour-market” so that the wage-labourer “loses the feeling of dependence” (Cap1 936). The dream of independence through escaping proletarianization is the reason that the surplus population of Europe often went willingly to the New World, especially when its conditions of indentured servitude were relaxed or absent. Even when the proletarian condition could not be avoided, these conditions had the consequence that “the labour-market is always understocked” so that proletarians could often enjoy better conditions than available in Europe and thereby dream of escaping that condition in the future. So, as Hegel surmised, America may be the land of the future, of hope rather than history, precisely because, as Marx shows, the stripping of the proletarian from the conditions of production was not yet complete. For Marx, this discovery was “the secret discovered in the New World by the political economy of the Old World” that capitalist production, accumulation, and property “have for their fundamental condition the private property which rests on the labour of the individual himself” (Cap1 940). America is in this sense the place of meaning where the truth of Europe becomes widely manifest: the proletarian condition is a miserable one to be avoided and escaped wherever possible. The truth of European capital, state, and civilization is in this misery. Again, at this point, philosophy reverts to tragedy due to the historical inability to realize in America the freedom of which Europe dreamed.

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In order for this European misery to be exported, however incompletely, to the New World through the making of colonies, the Indigenous people of the New World, as well as their non-proletarian conditions of production must be, as Hegel said, “driven back,” through the destruction of clan-based communal production, where “the clan community, the natural community, appears not as a result but as a presupposition for the communal appropriation” (Gr 472).2 In communal production, “the earth is the great workshop, the arsenal which furnishes both means and material of labour, as well as the seat, the base of the community” (Gr 472). The separation of the people from the earth, or the soil, is thus the first condition for the emergence of private property and the proletariat. So, while the relative freedom of the settlers compared to their European cousins depends upon the fact that “the bulk of the soil is still public property,” this public property has itself been created through driving back the communal production of Indigenous people (Cap1 934). Marx had already observed this process of displacement of communal production in the case of Scotland, which provided the main example for the separation of people from earth that allows the process of capitalist accumulation to take place. “The last great process of expropriation of the agricultural population from the soil is, finally, the so-called ‘clearing of estates,’ i.e. the sweeping of human beings off them” (Cap1 889). In this case, as in others, the fate of the New World had already been foreseen in the Old. The secret manifested in the New World is that dispossession and colonization is the precondition of both state and capital. The forcible separation of people from their earth enables the export of the miserable proletarian condition to America. But, surviving alongside this European misery, is the remnant of what Rosa Luxemburg called “natural economy” in the spiritual-intellectual tradition of Indigenous people (Luxemburg 1951, 364). 13.5 SUBSUMPTION OF PLACES OF MEANING AND VALUE UNDER PLANETARY TECHNOLOGY The separation of people from earth, or the destruction of natural economy, institutes a more fundamental situation for the role of a place of meaning and value within philosophy. The modern project of mastery of the earth brings segments of humanity into conflict over who shall be its masters. Some humans will become masters and others will be resources in principle like other resources of the earth used by masters (using the word “resource” to refer to the earth considered as a pile of utilities subject only to the will of the masters). Heidegger’s response to this situation can be divided into two stages.

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The first stage of Heidegger’s questioning of the relation of people and earth is dominated by Nietzsche’s question “how shall the earth as a whole be governed? And to what end shall ‘man’ as a whole—and no longer as a people, a race—be raised and trained?” (Nietzsche 1967, 501, aphorism 957). It is in this context that Heidegger made his infamous statement that the “inner truth and greatness” of National Socialism is the “encounter between global technology and modern humanity” (Heidegger 2000, 213). Heidegger judged that National Socialism could master global technology better than either Soviet Communism or American Capitalism in the great competition for world mastery that defined the twentieth century. For Heidegger, it was a forgetting of Being that inaugurated the age of planetary technology in which the earth is reduced to a pile of resources. Reason is reduced to manipulation which occurs without limit since it has lost its ground in earth, so that the only remaining question appears to be who can ascend to mastery of the whole earth. Both Communism and Capitalism assert that the human good is served by subsumption of the earth and the utilization of resources, though, paradoxically, these elevations of humans to the highest value rebound by subsuming individual humans under a bureaucratic-industrial complex justified by that elevation. The aim at mastery ends in a reduction to resources. “Philosophy in the age of completed metaphysics is anthropology . . . [which] occurs in such a manner that one kind of humanity is previously pitted against another, humanity is acknowledged as the original force, just as if it were the first and last element in all beings, and beings and their actual interpretation were only the consequence” (Heidegger 1973, 99).3 But, once one reflects that the most interesting aspect of the battle for the mastery of planetary technology is not whom might win that battle but why the era manifests itself in such a battle, a shift to a more fundamental level of questioning is required. This is why he stated that “this world war has decided nothing—if we here use ‘decision’ in so high and wide a sense that it concerns solely man’s essential fate on this earth” (Heidegger 1968, 66). One can perhaps grasp here the intimation that the essence of human living on the earth is only in a deficient mode anthropological and must contend more fundamentally with how that living comports itself toward the earth in such a manner as to question the separation of people and earth that Marx explained to be the root situation that made capitalist exploitation possible. The transition to Heidegger’s second response occurred when Heidegger realized that none of the three 20th century attempts at mastery altered the fundamental situation that gave rise to the problem of mastery as such: the emergence of planetary technology due to the forgetting of Being. It is this forgetting that leads to the impression that the epoch is one of anthropology— which will turn out to be a necessary illusion. The Nietzschean situation

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in which the battle for mastery occurs through a positing of values without ground in Being or earth is set into place by an interpretation of Being as presence which comes to its apogee in its utilization as resource. To Nietzsche’s statement that “to stamp Becoming with the character of Being—that is the supreme will to power” Heidegger adds “why is this the supreme will to power? The answer is because will to power in its most profound essence is nothing other than the permanentizing of Becoming into presence” (Heidegger 1984, Vol. 3, 156). The epoch of planetary technology appears through the interpretation of Being as a time-defying full presence such that it can be predicted, controlled, and manipulated. This understanding was most clearly put in Heidegger’s essay “The Question concerning Technology.” The first half of the essay repeats the explanation of modern technology as a mode of revealing the world as constant presence such that it is a challenging of Being to reveal itself in the form of resources. Then, it asks who accomplishes this challenging. The obvious answer seems to be humans since, apparently, humans use resources for their own purposes. But, Heidegger asserts, humans do not have control over what shows itself or withdraws from showing. Revealing, or the manifestation of Being, is not under human control or, more accurately, humans can only challenge Being if humans have already been challenged themselves to so do. “Since man drives technology forward, he takes part in ordering as a way of revealing. But the unconcealment itself, within which ordering unfolds, is never a human handiwork, any more than is the realm through which man is already passing every time he as a subject relates to an object” (Heidegger 1977a, 18). While human activity in its technological form in a certain sense elevates humans to mastery, the elevation itself is not a human work but is brought forth by a manner of revealing of Being. In the challenging of Being to reveal itself as resource, the human “merely responds to the call of unconcealment even when he contradicts it” (Heidegger 1977a, 19). Modern technology is planetary domination but the essence of modern technology is in the responsive relation of humans to the manifestation of Being. Thus, says Heidegger, it demands that we think of “essence” differently, no longer as the enduring Being of an Idea, but as a historical destining of Being. The danger of planetary technology is that humans may appear as masters of their fate so that the unique vocation of humans, listening to the manifestation of Being, may be forgotten. The second interpretation does not so much revoke the first as dig down into what makes the first possible. However, in so doing, it does revoke human mastery as fundamental and also shows why mastery is the necessary form of appearance of human Being in the epoch of technology. Thus, the conflict of claims to mastery is no longer significant, but a surface phenomenon.

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A precise specification of Heidegger’s logic here shows that, while displacing the conflict for mastery, the second interpretation still allows for a significant difference in the necessary appearance of technology—the difference between humans as masters and humans as resources, a difference that has class dimensions but is also significant in the psychology of individual humans. What does become significant in the second interpretation is attunement to the manifestation of Being. This can be accomplished only by letting go of mastery—moving from the “will to will” to the “shepherd of Being.” In the conclusion to “The Question Concerning Technology” this takes the form of “the piety of thinking,” but it is later specified and transformed to become “releasement” (Gelassenheit) (Heidegger 1977a, 35; Heidegger 1966, 79ff.). The separation between people and earth that gives rise to technological mastery has been rooted in the destining of Being to which the history of philosophy bears witness. There is an ambiguity in Heidegger’s situating of this issue in the history of philosophy. On one hand he traces it back to the philosophy of presence that occurred in Plato’s work. The argument here is that Being understood as pure presence, apart from becoming, leads to a static concept of essence as Idea through which the diversity of Being can be conceptually mastered and technologically transformed. “Socrates and Plato already think the essence of something as what essences, what comes to presence, in the sense of what endures. But they think what endures as what remains permanently” (Heidegger 1977a, 30). In this respect it is at one with Nietzsche’s critique of philosophy as Egyptianism (Nietzsche 1968, 35), which reaches back as far as Greek philosophy and is, in the end, a critique of philosophy as such. On the other hand, Heidegger focusses on Descartes and modern philosophy as the specific historical turning in which science takes on the conceptual form of technology. “Because modern science is theory in the sense described, therefore in all its observing the manner of its striving-after, i.e. the method of its entrapping-securing procedure, i.e., its method, has decisive superiority” (Heidegger 1977b, 169). Heidegger’s awareness of this ambiguity leads him to characterize the relationship of modern to Greek philosophy as “the decisive working out of a tendency” (Heidegger 1977b, 157). History is not a fate but a destiny in the sense that its course is not a necessary unfolding but a manifestation in which one moment gives way to another. Indeed, the connection between modern and Greek philosophy is in great part thought through the destiny that guides our current situation which has placed modern philosophy after, and in an interpretive relation to, its source. Nevertheless, it remains ambiguous where the accent must fall in these two historical steps toward planetary technology. As we have seen, for Edmund Husserl the accent lies definitively on the side of the Renaissance in the diagnosis of the “crisis of European sciences.” His

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approach serves to explain two aspects of Heidegger’s analysis which remain problematic or perhaps indeterminate. Insofar as he traces the philosophy of presence that, it is claimed, explains planetary technology as a loss of attunement to Being, then it is a problem more or less coincident with “Europe” itself, at least in the sense that the spiritual-intellectual unity of Europe can be traced back to the institution of reason in Greek philosophy. This implies that the problem of planetary technology, as Heidegger understands it, does not depend primarily upon European modernity and its intimate relation to a new mathematical science and practical technology of world-transformation but was set into place much earlier. Also, when the origin of technology is traced to Plato, the critique of technology as a loss of attunement to Being encompasses philosophy in its essence. Philosophy must be surpassed, therefore, by a thinking which no longer asks questions but rather begins to set us in place. “We must first turn, turn back to where we are in reality already staying” (Heidegger 1971, 85); “neither the poets nor everyday language, not even philosophy see themselves confronted with the task of asking how truth, that is, the correctness of statements, is granted only in the element of the opening of presence” (Heidegger 1972, 70). The turning toward place and the critique of objectivist reason as a subsumption of the lifeworld in a Heideggerian optic thus runs the danger of a rejection of reason outright, especially its universalizing dimensions, and a rejection of philosophy as the possibility of thinking the turning as a renewal by, and transformation of, philosophy itself. Localizing the origin of objectivism in Renaissance mathematical science, in contrast, allows for both a renewal of philosophy and an expansion of reason from what Husserl called its “relative, one-sided, rationality, which leaves a complete irrationality on necessary opposite sides” toward a reason capable of investigating the meaning and value inherent in lifeworld activity (FTL16–7). From the viewpoint of a recovery of place understood as the location of a spiritual-intellectual tradition, and a transformation of reason understood as the exploration of meaning and value in the lifeworld, exclusion of other places as containing sufficient potential for reason poses a fundamental problem. As we saw in the last chapter, unquestioning inclusion of America into Europe fails to investigate to what extent other, older, spiritual-intellectual places contain the potential for reason. A renewal of philosophy will first need to explain the emergence of planetary technology through a subsumption of the lifeworld under the scientific, formal objectivism of post-Renaissance philosophy and explain its connection to practical technology. Then it must begin an exploration of the turn toward place by delineating the contemporary conflict between planetary technology and place-based knowledge, action, and thought. So it must be interested in such place-based knowledge, action, and thought and its manifestations in the lifeworld, especially in America.

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13.6 A PHILOSOPHICAL ENCOUNTER WITH INDIGENEITY AS PLACE-BASED KNOWLEDGE Philosophy is the risk of a thought that can speak adequately to the historical moment of an intellectual-spiritual tradition even though its universalizing aspect goes beyond this location to propose an understanding of the human condition as such. When Husserl treats America unproblematically as belonging to the European spiritual-intellectual tradition, he erases the instituting fact of America as an encounter between arriving and settling cultures and those Indigenous cultures that pre-exist the encounter in America. However, as we have seen in the previous chapter, another completion becomes visible if we view the event as an encounter between two cultures in which the encounter itself can be regarded as either, or both, conquest or/and disaster. The newness of the instituting event is a bringing-into-being and afterward persisting structuring of experience such as to assign a task. In the institution of America fragments of old Europe interact with Indigenous cultures, under conditions dominated by European empires, such as to pass on to us a task not present in previous history. The risk of such new philosophical thinking is to bring the philosophical tradition to bear upon this defining institution of America and to undertake whatever departures it may provoke. Let us recall the steps in our reflection on the philosophical tradition. Socrates: the threat to any particular community posed by the universality of philosophical questioning; the courage required to stand against that community at the same time as an appeal to what is shared with that community to justify the philosophical quest. Hegel: the hope that the characteristics of a particular community may through history be reconciled with universality and locate universality at the level of the state. Marx: the entwinement of the modern state with capital and the exploitation of the proletariat as the source of the power of state and capital; the desire to escape the proletarian condition by European emigration and settlement which encounters Indigenous natural economy that resists proletarianization. Heidegger: the rise of planetary technology through the loss of attunement to Being; the loss of such attunement as rooted in, or having an influence on, European philosophy; a gesture toward thinking place. Husserl: the clarification that it is the mathematization of nature by modern, post-Renaissance reason that accounts for objectivist reason and planetary technology; the renewal of philosophy through a clarification of the lifeworld that does not abandon the project of reason. But also, explicitly in Husserl, the erasure of Indigenous spiritual-intellectual life as a project of reason that is an issue for the philosophical tradition as a whole. To summarize the issues associated with these names far too quickly: courage, history, freedom, planetary technology, and reason. We have used

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“America” as the title for the necessary recourse to place within a tradition that claims universality and the risk of a philosophy that would encounter place-based thinking without discounting it beforehand. We have thus finally arrived at our theme: the risk of thinking America through a project of reason understood to be an investigation of the lifeworld that encounters a spiritual-intellectual tradition of place-based thinking guarded by Indigenous people. Insofar as philosophical discourse must appeal outside of itself to the spiritual-intellectual tradition of Europe, and insofar as Europe invented the project of America from within its spiritual-intellectual tradition, and further that in America the European spiritual-intellectual tradition encountered Indigenous spiritual-intellectual traditions, thinking America philosophically means thinking the encounter of Indigenous spiritual-intellectual traditions and European philosophy. We have focused European philosophy through the themes of justice, civilization, freedom, and reason and will need to find a dialogical encounter with Indigenous spiritual-intellectual traditions through these themes. Any characterization of Indigenous spiritual-intellectual tradition is bound to be lacking and provisional for several reasons: there are many such traditions and it would be an over-simplification to treat them as homogenous; it would be easy to misunderstand such traditions by placing them into the categories of European philosophy; the present writer is neither a member of an Indigenous spiritual-intellectual tradition, nor trained in one, so the possibility of an individual failure of understanding and adequate education cannot be discounted. These difficulties cannot be simply overcome but they may be mitigated by the following factors: we will not treat here of the whole of a given Indigenous spiritual-intellectual tradition, but only of several features that appear to be common to such traditions; this is an attempt to listen to Indigenous spiritual-intellectual tradition with certain categories of European philosophy in mind, not a claim to have accomplished a synthesis; Indigenous writers will be used as sources for the description of Indigenous spiritual-intellectual tradition; the established value of critique in European philosophy calls for this account to be measured, limited, and/or replaced by other thinkers who accept the same task, especially writers from Indigenous spiritual-intellectual traditions. In a manner parallel to Edward Said’s universalizing interpretation of Freud as characteristic of a diasporic thinking that is no longer specifically Jewish but has become a general condition that applies also to Palestinians (Said 2004, 53-5), I interpret Indigenous thought as a place-based spiritual-intellectual tradition that expresses the need of many traditions to recover their relation to place in an age of planetary technology. We will understand Indigenous spiritual-intellectual traditions in this partial and provisional manner as place-based spiritual-intellectual traditions

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comprised of knowledge, spiritual tradition and ethical action, significantly oriented by a concept of nature.4 The form of knowledge is not primarily abstractive but holistic, relational, “participatory and experiential” and characterized by “interactive harmony” and diversity. (Little Bear 2012, 520; Henderson 2009, 268–9). Unlike the centrality of abstraction in European science, which is visible in the predominance of mathematical form, Indigenous knowledge is focused on the interrelationships of various experienced contents. Leroy Little Bear has said, “land is important because the earth is considered our Mother. The earth is the giver of life. Because of the inter-relational aspect of the Blackfoot paradigm, the Mother Earth cannot be separated from the actual being of Indians” (Little Bear 2004, n.p.). Marie Battiste and James [Sa’ke’j] Youngblood Henderson define Indigenous knowledge as “the expression of the vibrant relationships between the people, their ecosystems, and the other living beings and spirits that share their lands” (Battiste and Henderson 2000, 42). Rather than abstraction from a given content toward a more universal concept, Indigenous knowledge starts from the relationships between experienced contents and seeks a pattern in such relationships. Spiritual tradition is not primarily based on belief but upon traditional stories that are told from within the historical experience of a people. Leroy Little Bear says “the place acts as a repository of the stories and experiences of both individual and the tribe. In Blackfoot the word for the English word ‘story’ literally translates as ‘involvement’ in an event” (Little Bear 2004, n.p.). Stories are thus located in, and organized by, significant places. As he has explained, “the trouble may come in the form of a loss of identity brought about by the loss of stories, songs, and ceremonies that arise out of Mother Earth. . . . It may be a loss of the songs, the stories, and ceremonies that happen at certain places. In other words, the trouble referred to may manifest as the Mother Earth not recognizing you” (Little Bear 2004, n.p.). Ed McGaa consistently connects native knowledge to the relational form of ecosystemic wisdom, in order to remind us that “when a society stops honoring the guidance of the Great Spirit, especially in ceremony, its people become excessively selfish and manipulative toward each other and Mother Earth” (McGaa 2005, 130). By suggesting that ceremony connects traditional knowledge to social practice, he shows that Western-style societies have no institution through which to mediate ecological knowledge with community action. In a similar vein, Linda Hogan reminds us of the “spiritual fragmentation that has accompanied our ecological destruction” (Hogan 2009, 118). Nature is understood not as a causal network of objective forces but as an interaction of living, personal relations.5 “Traditional knowledge is about the spiritual and livingness of the natural world and the role of humans in

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it” (Little Bear 2012, 522). James (Sákéj) Youngblood Henderson says “aboriginal knowledge is not a description of reality but an understanding of the processes of ecological change and ever-changing insights about diverse patterns or styles of flux” (Henderson 2009, 265). Increasingly Indigenous writers seem comfortable with using the word “ecology,” a science with a clearly defined place in European science, as a translation of the relational character of their natural wisdom. Henderson goes on to state that aboriginal knowledge “reflects the complexity of a state of being within a certain ecology” and explains that “experience is the way to determine personal gifts and patterns in ecology. Experiencing the realms is a personal necessity and forges an intimate relationship with the world” (Henderson 2009, 264–5). Such a local ecology is the source of individual identity, which is the meaning of Leroy Little Bear’s quotation of the Blackfoot Elder who stated that “I am the environment” (Little Bear 2004, n.p.). This connection between ecology and identity is explained by Battiste and Henderson: “most Indigenous spiritual teachings and practices flow from ecological understandings rather than from cosmology. . . . In Indigenous thought, ecologies are considered sacred realms, and they contain the keepers that taught Indigenous ancestors the core of Indigenous spiritual practices. . . . Such beliefs deny the distinction between the sacred and the profane, since all life processes are sacred” (Battiste and Henderson 2000, 99–100). It is clear that the three aspects distinguished here—knowledge, spiritual tradition and ethical action, and a concept of nature as ecology—are not simply added externally but are aspects of a complex whole such that a relational knowledge-form, cemented and passed on by ceremonial spiritual tradition and ethical action, is expressed as an ecology encompassing humans and other life-forms. This is the form of place-based Indigenous intellectualspiritual tradition which European philosophy encounters in America and which it must risk encountering in our own era which is dominated by planetary technology. But there is one more important aspect that has to do with the history of the encounter between European peoples and Indigenous ones, rather than an internal characteristic of the latter. While the dictionary definition of “indigenous” refers simply to “originating or occurring naturally in a particular place, or native,” in the sense that “coriander is indigenous to southern Europe” (Oxford English Dictionary), the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples has recognized “that indigenous peoples have suffered from historic injustices as a result of, inter alia, their colonization and dispossession of their lands, territories and resources, thus preventing them from exercising, in particular, their right to development in accordance with their own needs and interests” (UNDRIP 2007, 2). Including colonization and denial of internal development into the very definition of

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Indigeneity suggests that, not only the difference between planetary technology and place-based intellectual-spiritual traditions has been registered, but that planetary technology has emerged through the domination of place-based intellectual-spiritual traditions, and that, perhaps, the philosophy of our era is charged with the necessity of finding a new relationship.6 When philosophy finds it necessary to appeal outside its universality to a spiritual-intellectual tradition upon which it can rely for meaning and value, and when Europe becomes the name for this tradition, it is necessary to look into what other spiritual-intellectual traditions have also been represented within European philosophy. America is one such spiritual-intellectual tradition that incorporates not only European philosophy but the encounter with place-based spiritual-intellectual traditions that have been dominated by European tradition. For philosophy to not be merely a defense of such domination, it must engage dialogically with those place-based spiritual-intellectual traditions and ponder their legitimacy—as well as those factors from within the European tradition that have aided and abetted the domination of placebased spiritual-intellectual traditions. To the extent that the critique of planetary technology has become a theme in European philosophy, it must explore both its European roots and the possibility that place-based spiritualintellectual traditions pose an alternative to those roots. Indigeneity is a key issue for a philosophy that attempts to come to grips with our time. Indigeneity may be considered a spiritual-intellectual tradition that rejects the proletarian condition through resisting the separation of humans from earth which has given rise to planetary technology, that sees reason and freedom in the ecological harmony of that earth, and that rejects the historical teleology of universality in one given people in favor of spiritual-intellectual diversity on an ecological model. Philosophy encounters place in the courage of its political self-defense and educational mission. Indigenous meditation on place may appeal to philosophy as a similar meditation that does not take the form of tragedy as it does in European philosophy but as defense of Indigenous tradition. Thinking these together is the task of a philosophical inquiry into America. 13.7 AN ECOLOGICAL DIALOGUE WITH LEROY LITTLE BEAR We have emphasized that the prior institution of reason through which the phenomenological response to crisis can be seen as a “recovery” can not only be traced back to its European form in the mathematical, Galilean science of nature but also to institutionalized reason in other cultural-spiritual forms. America, we have suggested, must be understood as the institution of

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a dual formation in which indigenous forms of culture and reason co-exist with European ones—though in an unequal manner defined by colonialism. Moreover, we have suggested in chapter 12 that, if ecology were to become the exemplary case of science for phenomenology, the scientific crisis which Husserl addressed would not engender a cultural crisis at all. A science which incorporated organized social motility and its sustaining ecology within itself would pass crisis-free into the transcendental reduction and phenomenological explication of the horizons of lifeworlds. With this background, a dialogue between an Indigenous world-view and an ecological model of science becomes a necessary part of recovery and surpassing of the crisis of European sciences. 13.7.1 Ecology as an Open System Unlike Galilean Science It is clear that a system of sufficient complexity to register relative prices of all commodities cannot be consistent and complete in a formal sense. Consistency would refer to the demand that every price could be determined in relation to every other price. Completeness would refer to the demand that each and every commodity had a value registered as a price. The system of commodity representation of value as an aggregate of prices cannot exhaust values in nature. This can be shown to be impossible because the qualitative differences of an ecosystem’s parts, produced by the totality of qualitative relations of the ecosystem as a whole, cannot be mirrored within a system in which there is only one quantitative measure. This quantitative measure would illegitimately measure different qualities by summing quantities over different qualities in a way that would render invisible the different qualities that are essential to the notion of ecosystem as such. The point here is twofold: First, that not all elements of an ecosystem can be registered within a price system—that externalities always remain, and, second, that the notion of totality, or system, is different in each case. The totality of a price system is an aggregate, a sum, and therefore can legitimately be called a “system” because it aims at being self-enclosed and self-regulating—even though it cannot achieve this ideal in practice. The totality of an ecosystem cannot be a system in this sense, because, while it is self-regulating it cannot be in principle self-enclosed. Its boundary is always a pragmatically drawn, and never absolute, limit. It is a Whole given in the form of a horizon that stands behind each part but is not thematically present as such. Once the boundary is defined, it is surpassed by another unthematic boundary. An ecosystem preserves qualitative relations at the price of its boundaries, limits, and purpose becoming indeterminate.

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The paradigm of modern biological science was empirical and began from the classification of individual organisms into species-genus hierarchies. A new departure began with the science of evolution insofar as it meant that, in Stan Rowe’s words, “ecology tells us that what we call organisms and environment are inseparable, except as words” (Rowe 1990, 104). Nevertheless, this recognition took a long time to prevail and it was not until the formulation of the science of ecology that the focus shifted from the makeup of individual organisms to the relationships between organisms, including also non-organic features of the environment. Ecology is the science of relationships, the dependence of individuals on relationships, and the contribution of the individual to sustaining relationships. As Arne Naess has explained The expression ‘ecology’ is infused with many meanings. Here, it will mean the interdisciplinary scientific study of the living conditions of organisms in interaction with each other and with the surroundings, organic as well as inorganic. . . . The aspect of the science of ecology that is most important is the fact that it is concerned first of all with the relationships between entities as an essential component of what these entities are in themselves. These include both internal and external relations. Example: when a bird eats a mosquito it gets in an external relation to that mosquito, but eating is an internal relation to its environment. . . . This approach can have application in many fields of inquiry—hence the growing influence of the subject of ecology outside its original biological domain (Naess 1990, 36).

While ecology began with a strictly scientific meaning, it has come to take on also a popular meaning with the emergence of ecological problems such as environmental diseases, pollution, habitat degradation and climate change that stem from the paradigm of techno-scientific application to individual problems while ignoring wider contexts and relationships. Through this interplay between scientific meaning and relevance to socio-cultural issues, ecology might well be considered the leading science of our time. Ecology studies ‘wholes’ made from and sustained by the interaction between their parts. A ‘whole,’ or local ecosystem, is distinguished from its outside by a boundary such that the interactions inside can be considered its defining features. Place is thus a basic concept that specifies the where of the set of relationships that define a whole. The boundary that circumscribes a place-based community is therefore a plastic concept. A given bay, or the Burrard Inlet, can be considered an ecosystem since it has a boundary that intensifies interactions between the community resident in that place while de-emphasizing interactions between that community and the outside beyond its boundary. But the Inlet, or bay, or even city, considered as an ecosystem for some purposes nevertheless is itself embedded within larger contexts.

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The Lower Mainland, or the Pacific Coast, for example. One may say that the largest ecosystem is the Earth Ecosphere since it contains within itself all of the relationships that sustain life on Earth.7 Even so, the Earth ecosystem requires incoming energy from the Sun across its atmospheric boundary. In the end, ‘ecosystem’ is a way of conceptualizing the Whole that is the universe of all that is through relationships of dependence and maintenance by the community of all beings. Humans, as one species of these beings, depend upon this Whole. A particular grouping of humans, humans within a larger community of beings in a given place circumscribed by an elastic boundary, develop the specifics of their culture in relation to the specifics of the local ecology. It is from this point of view that we understand Leroy Little Bear when he says “the place acts as a repository of the stories and experiences of both individual and the tribe. In Blackfoot the word for the English word ‘story’ literally translates as ‘involvement’ in an event.” 13.7.2 Indigenous Knowledge of Dwelling Translated as Ecology The development of ecology as a science and as a leading idea for contemporary world issues thus brings European-derived science into dialogue with Indigenous conceptions of Mother Earth. Some Indigenous thinkers use the term ecology as a translation of Indigenous knowledge of dwelling in a place. For example, James (Sákéj) Youngblood Henderson says “Indigenous knowledge is not a description of reality but an understanding of the processes of ecological change and ever-changing insights about diverse patterns or styles of flux” (Henderson 2009, 265). With co-author Marie Battiste, they say that “most Indigenous spiritual teachings and practices flow from ecological understandings rather than from cosmology. . . . In Indigenous thought, ecologies are considered sacred realms, and they contain the keepers that taught Indigenous ancestors the core of Indigenous spiritual practices. . . . Such beliefs deny the distinction between the sacred and the profane, since all life processes are sacred” (Battiste and Henderson 2000, 99–100). Here, then, is one problematic aspect of this translation between Mother Earth and ecology: can the relationships that constitute an ecosystem be considered a sacred, spiritual system that provides ethical direction for human life? Is this a further step that those drawn to ecology might be inclined to make? The eminent Canadian ecologist J. Stan Rowe also posed this question: Ecology is the science of context, a counterbalance to explanations of phenomena that look inward to their parts. A useful ecological viewpoint places every system of interest in the context of an enveloping system, in the relationship of part to whole. From this, a different kind of explanation than provided by reduction emerges, perhaps better called ‘comprehension.’ In the relating of

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phenomena to the supportive systems of which they are components, it goes by various names: ‘roles,’ ‘niches, ‘significance,’ ‘meaning,’ and the disgraceful ‘P’ word: ‘purpose’ (Rowe 1998, 428-9).

Rowe’s ironic reference to the “disgracefulness” of the idea of purpose refers back to the scientific origins of ecology and, as I read it, contains his hope that ecology can indeed come to reintegrate purpose into science and thereby reverse the expelling of ethic and spirit accomplished by the mathematical science of nature. As Leroy Little Bear has explained, “for the Blackfoot the ensoulment of the land results in a web of relationships with the earth, animals, plants, inorganic matter, and the cosmos. The ensoulment is captured in the stories, songs, and ceremonies” (Little Bear 2004, n.p.). Ecology, understood in the widest sense, perhaps contains the hope of an integration of knowledge and value that would justify an inter-cultural dialogue with the guardians of Mother Earth or Pachamama. 13.7.3 Value in Nature But we cannot forget the fact that Stan Rowe had to express himself with irony. In arguing that placing phenomena into the supportive context of the Whole might be called “purpose,” he advocates an immanent conception of spirit very much like Leroy Little Bear’s statement that “everything is animate, that everything is imbued with spirit.” But is it really the case that ecology can reverse the dualism of nature and spirit that dominates European culture and expels spirit from scientific discourse? The separation between nature and spirit stems from the Biblical creation story in which God is understood as the prior cause of nature. The resemblance of human spirit to God is understood as an addition to something that is lacking in nature. This question takes us back to the relationship between Athens and Jerusalem in European culture. Only if it were possible to subtract the concept of transcendent creation could an immanence of spirit be accepted.8 There have been, of course, several prominent thinkers who have elected for this pantheistic option—but it has been understood by the dominant tradition as a pagan heresy. Ecology, understood as both a scientific paradigm and a cultural project, wavers between the hope for incorporation of spirit into nature and resignation to its impossibility. This would suggest some caution against using the term ‘creation’ in place of ‘Being’ or ‘the Whole.’ It is from the spirit of the Whole that humans could find their place and from the lack of this Whole that contemporary problems of identity may stem. As Leroy Little Bear has explained, “the trouble may come in the form of a loss of identity brought about by the loss of stories, songs, and ceremonies that arise out of Mother Earth. . . . It may be a loss of the songs, the stories,

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and ceremonies that happen at certain places. In other words, the trouble referred to may manifest as the Mother Earth not recognizing you” (Little Bear 2004, n.p.). It seems to me that an ecological conception places value on the Whole and on each part insofar as it sustains the Whole. But it would not seem to imply that any single part is essential to the Whole or, to come to the point, that humans are a necessary part of Being. To that extent, it could not ground human action and value within nature. But what if one begins from the other side of the issue? If one’s own life is perceived, or taken, to be of value, and if something like the ecological account of relationships is true, then it is rational to act to preserve the ecosystem upon which one depends. This thought does not prove its premise. It is always a logical possibility to deny that human life has meaning. But if one does suppose that human life has meaning then so does the Whole that it needs to live. Something like this is being slowly perceived to be true, it seems to me, and it is this perception that grounds the contemporary dialogue between ecology and Mother Earth. But to the extent that this perception cannot be proven, there remains still an inherent tendency to despair that the ecosystem, and one’s own life, are of meaning and value at all. It is not too much to say that an ecological ethic grounded in European philosophy and culture contains a hope for the integration of knowledge and value that can find meaning in the Whole of Being, but it would be too much to say that it is more than a hope because this hope corresponds to the indeterminacy of the Whole understood as a horizon that applies to ecology. A philosophy that would be ecological, in the sense that it would focus on the concrete relations that construct a Whole; that would be Marxist, in the sense that it would criticize a social representation of value that relies on commodity price; and that would be phenomenological, in that it would ground value in lifeworld action and intuition, is a possibility that would enact this hope. It would not depend upon an encyclopediac survey of the sciences but rather a connection between a given scientific sphere and the lifeworld—with special emphasis on the specific nature of this connection, for it is through such connection that meaning and value can become operative within a scientific domain and thereby overcome the crisis. NOTES 1.  Emil Fackenheim concludes his extensive exploration of Hegel’s inability to accept the separate existence of the Jewish spiritual-intellectual tradition with the observation that “the actual existence of one specific historical world is the cardinal condition without which, by its own admission and insistence, the Hegelian philosophy cannot reach its ultimate goal. This specific world may be called—with

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reservations—the modern bourgeois Protestant world” (Fackenheim 1970, 232). From the present perspective, the accent here is not on the specific world in which universality is deemed to have been instantiated, nor on its exclusion of the Jewish spiritual-intellectual tradition, but on the singularity of the instantiation of universality as such. 2.  We overlook here the problematic aspect of Marx’s work that regards forms of production as a linear progression (derived from Hegel), so that communal clanproduction is seen as a “first form” more or less inevitably to be overcome through the sequence of ancient despotic states, feudal forms, capitalist production, socialist and communist forms. In this, the influence of Hegel remains strong. Later in his life Marx began to reconsider this linear progression both because of his greater anthropological knowledge and because of his estimation that the Slavic commune could be the basis for a transition to a post-capitalist economy without passing through the capitalist “stage.” While this aspect of Marx’s work, and Marxism, is important in other contexts, it does not affect the argument at this point. 3.  The only difference of National Socialism from this general tragedy of the 20th century, one might comment, is that it did not aim to elevate humans universally, but selectively on the principle of race, and thus, instead of a universal subsumption under the resource model, attempted to utilize the resource model for a master race. One does not know how this possibility might have turned out, thankfully, but it may have affected Heidegger’s determination of a difference of National Socialism from Communism and Capitalism. The resort to fascism is rooted in the fact that, in the absence of a realistic universal alternative to planetary technology, attempts by one group to make itself master by subjecting others repeatedly occur. 4.  It has been suggested by Vine Deloria, Jr. that there is a unanimity between Aboriginal nations concerning views on the natural world and the human place in it and a diversity between Aboriginal nations based on the different places where they live and learn (Henderson 2009, 259–60). James (Sákéj) Youngblood Henderson claims that there are four aspects to the Aboriginal worldview: language, knowledge, unity between diverse consciousnesses, and social order (Henderson 2009, 261). Leroy Little Bear distinguishes ontology, epistemology, methodology, and axiology: “Culture . . . is what structures how a person determines ontological, epistemological, methodological, and axiological aspects of his/her very life and being. Ontology, generally, speaks to the nature of reality. . . . Epistemology speaks to theories of knowledge: how we come to know. How we come to know, in essence, is a methodology or a validation process. For Aboriginal peoples knowledge is validated through actual experience, stories, songs, ceremonies, dreams, and observation. Axiology speaks to what knowledge is important and worthy of pursuit. As stated above by differing authorities, spirituality, relationships, language, songs, stories, ceremonies, and teachings learned through dreams form the axiology of Aboriginal knowledge” (Little Bear 2009, 10). We claim no comprehensiveness for the three aspects distinguished here, only that they are significant aspects in the present context, especially since we leave out language—about which we can say nothing. 5.  This description refers fundamentally to the objectivist Galilean science that was the object of critique by Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger. It therefore

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leaves open the possibility of a convergence between less objectivist and determinist currents of 20th century science and Indigenous spiritual-intellectual traditions (Battiste and Henderson 2000, 122–5). 6.  One aspect of this domination is that the very category “Indigenous” is a result of colonialism (Alfred 2018). Prior to European expansion into Turtle Island, there were simply different nations in their own territories with multiple histories, political orders and laws, and treaties concerning their relations with neighbouring nations. Unification into the category “Indigenous” depends upon their common relation to a colonial power. It therefore contains a problematic homogenizing element which nevertheless cannot be entirely removed as long as one contrasts Indigenous knowledge with Western knowledge. 7.  “[Here is] the essential insight of the ecosystem concept: that all life participates in a complex and interactive system where boundaries between living and non-living are vague or non-existent. The largest ecological system, the Earth Ecosphere, is the reality of which people are one part; they are embedded in it and totally dependent on it. Here is the scientific source of the environment’s intrinsic value” (Rowe 1990, 118). 8.  The well-known argument by Lynn White Jr. in his influential and often republished essay “The Historic Origins of the Ecological Crisis” is the classic statement of the argument within ecological literature that the Christian concept of creation underlies the domination of nature in European modernity (White 1967). A more thorough and philosophically convincing account is given in William Leiss (1972).

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Chapter Fourteen

Philosophy as Autobiography The Thankful Critic

It is no accident that every philosopher writes the history of philosophy through the activity of philosophizing, and that activity, being a human activity, not only takes place in a certain place and time, but is formed by this spiritual-intellectual location, even if it can only be meaningfully described through that philosophy. Therefore philosophy includes a necessary reference to autobiography as the ground of its reflexive and self-constituting activity. By autobiography, we mean not only a certain time and place but also the meaningful description and narrative of that time and place which, though it does not precede philosophical activity, means that philosophy is, at least in one of its essential aspects, a located, existential struggle for meaning. 14.1 RUPTURE I can remember standing on the deck of the Queen Elizabeth II on April 19, 1958, the day after my ninth birthday, staring in awe at the Laurentian Shield as its snowy banks rose from the icy waters of the Gulf of St. Lawrence. I had never seen anything its like. I was an English boy in short pants, who had grown up with stories of the war, drinking the milk newly available at school thanks to Aneurin Bevan and the Labour Party, part of a large extended family in London only recently released from a Victorian tenement. The decision to leave was not mine, of course, I followed as a child follows his parents, with a mixture of caution and trust. It is out of such mixed emotions that I encountered Canada. In the immigrant west end of Toronto, where kids were welcomed back to their homes after school in a jumble of languages, mostly European, I was held down by a few boys while one stuffed dirt into my mouth: “This is Canada! How do you like it?” My mother was determined 445

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that we would not only live in Canada but would embrace Canada, would become Canadians. This decision took me a long time to make for myself. Like many immigrants I harbored the secret phantasy of an unknown life that might have occurred had I remained in the old country. When I went back in my 20s I found, partly to my surprise, that I was Canadian—more Canadian than I had imagined. Much later, that discovery, which had become a decision, affected my passion for philosophy. 14.2 SOCRATES’ REFUSAL OF EXILE A philosophical autobiographical narrative is recounted by Socrates in his final dialogue with Crito. It is not a general account of birth, life, and death as autobiographies generally go, but a condensed account focused on the single question of whether he should allow Crito to arrange his escape and exile or should stay and face execution. Socrates’ refusal to accept exile is expressed through an imaginative representation of the laws speaking to him. They claim to have given him birth and education so that he is obliged to observe them as a servant to a master or a child to a parent. He must endure what they ask him to endure, even wounding or death in war. Moreover, he has agreed in action to such respect by never leaving Athens. Thus, respect for the law over-rides concern for his own life. As it stands, he has been wronged by men in their judgment in the law court, but not by the laws themselves. Whereas, if he were to escape, he would undermine the law itself and the judgment against him would indeed be a just one, so that “all who care for their city will look on you with suspicion, as a destroyer of the laws” (Plato 1997b 46; Crito 53b). Since Socrates has been condemned for practicing philosophy, we may take this as a reverence of philosophy for law and a belonging of the philosopher to the city that nurtured him. During the trial itself Socrates had recalled that he had fought for Athens and that he was no more afraid of his judges, or for his own fate, than he had been as a warrior for their city against its enemies. He reminded the judges that “I remained at my post like anyone else and faced death” and asserted that he could do no less in his pursuit of the philosophic life (Plato 1997a, 27; Apology 28e). The courage of the citizen and the courage of the philosopher are similar enough, both being courage, that the citizen can understand the commitment of the philosopher without sharing it. When Socrates enquires into the courage of the citizen-warrior in Laches, the inquiry founders and comes to a close when courage cannot be distinguished from virtue as a whole—courage seems to be both a part and the whole of virtue (Plato 1997c, 684; Laches 199d–e). Perhaps citizens cannot make this distinction

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or, at least, perhaps citizen-warriors cannot make it properly. The philosopher understands the courage of the citizen and both its similarity and difference from courage in philosophy because the philosopher is a citizen as well as something else. When the laws address Socrates they do so to assert their claim over him that extends even to his life. This would not be a great claim if his life were worth nothing or nearly nothing. In Plato’s later, middle-period, re-telling of this story, Socrates says “philosophers are nearly dead” and that in the afterlife “those who are deemed to have lived and extremely pious life are freed and released from the regions of the earth as from a prison [to] live in the future altogether without a body” (Plato 1997d, 55, 97; Phaedo 64b, 114c). This is the origin of the Platonic-Christian tradition that has exercised a constant conservative influence on Western philosophy that Nietzsche denounced.1 But Socrates, before he has been sufficiently massaged by Plato in Phaedo, admits in Apology “it [death] is one of two things: either the dead are nothing . . . or it is, as we are told, a change and a relocating” (Plato 1997a, 35; Apology 40c). Socrates does not know what awaits us after death, if anything, and so must value life and the body, which Phaedo and the later Plato teaches us to despise.2 Like his fellow-citizens, Socrates does not believe that he is “going to a better place,” which means that his courage is really courage not a disguised form of release. When the laws address Socrates, he has condensed history and imaginatively reconstructed it to show his utter dependence on the laws. We may take “the laws” in this context to mean not only explicitly written laws but also customs, practices, and traditions; in short, the whole regulated life of a people.3 Socrates’ dependence on the laws means the embeddedness of philosophy in a way of life which it can address but not master.4 It is in this sense that Edmund Husserl said he “had to work out the concept of Europe as the historical teleology of the infinite goals of reason . . . [so that] the ‘crisis’ could then become distinguishable as the apparent failure of rationalism” (VL 299, emphasis removed). Critique requires embeddedness in history. Both ancient5 and modern6 tradition have claimed that the Athenians soon repented their judgment on Socrates. Nonetheless, their action could not be undone and the most significant measure of repentance would be their course of action at the next such testing. Critique, whether successful or not, requires an embeddedness for its justification that can only be articulated through reasons or principles implicitly present, though often obscure or obscured, in historical life. This embeddedness of philosophy in the historical life of a people is imaginatively condensed by the philosophical mind to become an explicit voice and claim but what it refers to is prior to such explicitness. It refers to the prior

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belonging of philosophy in the historical life of a people through the body and life of the philosopher who is both a member of that people and something else. The law is sacred in the sense that it voices an ultimate claim so that articulation of an imaginative condensation of that claim is a significant philosophical task. Philosophy is not just reason but the becoming-reason of the historical life of a people. 14.3 BELONGING, EXILE, AND COMMUNITY While in Crito Socrates speaks of the sacredness of the laws in a manner that is indistinguishable from that of his fellow citizens, in Apology the specificity of his philosophical debt is clear in his reference to the Oracle at Delphi that set him on his course. The sacredness of the Oracle was a part of the common mythico-religious Greek heritage and as such a component of the life of the Athenian people. So when Socrates refers to his birth and education in Crito, it includes the tradition which sent him on the restless inquiry that irritated many of his fellow citizens and culminated in his statement that “the unexamined life is not worth living for men” (Plato 1997a, 33; 38a). It is this inquiry that justifies his imaginative, condensed personification of the laws which address him. Because the laws allowed him, even encouraged him, to philosophize, Socrates is a member of the historical life of a people but he is also something else insofar as he has been enabled to enquire of them in a manner that many find irritating. Thus critique rests on belonging and belonging is justified by critique even though belonging precedes critique ontologically. Hegel claimed that “the spirit of the people in itself, its constitution, its whole life, rested, however, on a moral ground, on religion, and could not exist without this absolutely secure foundation” and therefore found the accusation against Socrates just (Hegel 1974, 426). Socrates attempted, so Hegel tells us, to replace the Greek religious foundation with subjective mind as the principle of truth and was therefore wrong at the time but prefigured the reconciliation of subjective and objective truth in the modern world. “The utterance peculiar to the god who is the Spirit of an ethical nation is the Oracle, which knows its particular affairs . . . [while] universal truths, however, because they are known as that which possesses essential being are claimed by conscious thought for itself” (Hegel 1979, 431). In Hegel’s view it is only in the modern world that the previous conflict between particularity and universality can be adequately mediated. Such mediation therefore holds out the promise that philosophical critique can be reconciled with the belonging of the citizen in a way that overcomes the ancient conflict. Leaning to the side of the citizen, Hegel thought the

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ancient spiritual life of the people right as against the incipient claims of subjective, conscious thought, but sought a time and place where this conflict did not have to appear as such. He sought a happy time where the tragedy of philosophy would not need to occur. Such a time would not require courage to sustain critique, nor the death of the philosopher, nor even the confrontation of the conscious continuation and critique of a tradition with its unconscious, sacred, uncritical, foundation. The philosopher would not have to refuse exile because he would be clasped to the bosom of community. 14.4 IMMIGRATION Socrates’ refusal of exile expresses the necessary foundation of philosophy in unconscious belonging. Hegel’s hope is that unconscious belonging, which always has the last word if it is confronted by conscious critique, can be entirely mediated with and taken up into philosophy. This continuity of unconscious belonging in a spiritual-intellectual community is broken by immigration. Instead of the present-past-future temporal hermeneutic of unconscious community becoming a step more conscious due to a motivation for reflection at a moment of decision, one is confronted with a before-after temporal structure constituted by a decision that issues in a temporal break. Whatever the motives for immigration, the difference of the situation afterwards from that before is sufficiently radical that it can never be adequately bridged temporally. Whatever interpretive threads can be drawn across the rupture, they remain partial and do not mediate a community but the irreversible loss and tentative reconstruction of community. The individual not only strives to become a member of a new community but remains an absent member of a previous community, so that belonging is irrevocably divided. The immigrant retains a memory, which oscillates between a critique of the old inequalities that motivated immigration and a nostalgic utopia of a full, unbroken belonging—so completely untested that it may imagine a coherence of individual and community that has rarely, if ever, existed. The new community, by contrast, cannot be based on any prior unconscious belonging which has become tentative at a decision point, but tends toward becoming a purely rational community such that the individual could opt in or out through decision alone. Especially if the immigrant was a child, brought to a new land by the decision of others, so that there was no conscious decision to let go of the old community and the decision to enter the new one is more a non-negotiable demand than a decision. Thus the immigrant harbors within an often unspoken desire to return and yet, upon returning, usually discovers something that has become alien and wonders if

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there is anywhere in this world that one can belong. Because of the beforeafter temporal structure, the desire to return is both geographic and temporal: it is well known that New World languages often remain more antique than the older ones from which they divided, the older ones having had the luxury of changing temporally without losing their roots. The newer ones struggle to retain their roots and so become antique because they can retain them only at the price of refusing, at least imaginatively, the break that is their origin. Immigration is being cut off from one’s origins which motivates the desire to regain them by healing the duality of places and times which make most problematic the present—a present which has lost its hermeneutic center as mediation of past and future and become a radical question of the possibility of belonging. It is through this radical question that the immigrant’s predicament can become philosophical. Such a philosophical questioning will be more personal than that of Socrates. Despite the resurgence of his common belonging with the Athenian people at crucial moments, his search itself was straightforwardly for universals: justice, piety, virtue. Not only because the immigrant inhabits Hegel’s modern world in which the truth of subjectivity requires that universalities be rooted in particulars, but also because the immigrant’s condition is suffered personally. If the new community can offer some encouragement of philosophy, it will be not only because the community contains some appeal to universals but also because the particular fates of immigrants have been protected. This will mean a theme in philosophy not of piety, nor belonging in the undivided hermeneutic sense, but of a thankfulness to a particular human community that was not one’s own, may become one’s own, which is a sufficiently welcoming place that thanks are due. A secular thankfulness that would include an encouragement of the role of critic. The new community contains a multiplicity of such immigrant groups and individuals. Each divided by a before-after but in each case a different one. Each entering into a new community with a different past, a different tradition from which they have become distanced. They must thus encounter their common condition in a set of problems that have been labelled “multiculturalism.” Moreover, this common immigrant condition, in its problematic unity, as it becomes conscious of itself as new, and where this newness takes place, becomes aware that not all are immigrants, that the land was continuously populated by Indigenous nations that have not experienced the beforeafter of immigration but remain within the present-past-future of continuous tradition. Thus, their true condition is not only as immigrants but as settlers. If autochthony is living undivided from one’s roots, the immigrant is both individually and collectively aware of the division that defines immigrant deracination and the lack of such division in Indigenous autochthony. The New

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World poses the question of what will come to pass, what may come to pass, between these two communities and two experiences. Still, Indigenous communities have themselves been divided, though not by a decision from within, but by a break from outside. The Old World Empires that claimed the New as their own constituted a colonial intrusion into Indigenous tradition that has made their own hermeneutic continuity difficult to say the least. The temporal and spatial break that defines the immigrant constitutes also a demand and an opportunity for philosophical reflection. Such a philosophical reflection encounters an ancient precedent in Socrates’ refusal to be exiled from his city and would have one ask what the Canadian philosopher shares with the people and their place given this complex new community with which one is faced.7 14.5 NATION: IMMIGRANT, MULTICULTURAL CITIZEN, SETTLER Various features have been proposed as defining a nation—ethnicity, bloodlines, race, religion, language, cultural values, history, geography, psychology, etc. (Angus 1997, 11–20)—but these have more often to do with the self-image of a nation rather than its actual constitution, so much so that some analysts, such as Eric Hobsbawm and Winthrop P. Bell, have concluded that there is no way at all to distinguish nations from other social entities (Hobsbawm 1991, 5; Bell 2012a, 56). The best that can be done is usually to repeat the oft-quoted phrase by Ernest Renan that a nation is a “daily plebiscite, as the individual’s existence is a perpetual affirmation of life” (Renan 1970, 6). The feeling of belonging to a nation is distinct from the condition of being subject to a state. There is at least an element of voluntary election and pre-rational feeling in belonging to a nation or a people with a distinct way of life, whereas a state is an objective, coercive social structure defined apart from any subjective or cultural belonging. In Canada, the creation of a state preceded any question of whether it was a nation. Despite some similarity in culture and history based on a common origin as colonies of the British Empire, those colonies were administratively aligned without the consent of the peoples that they affected. Even today, the differences between the Atlantic Provinces and the Prairies or West Coast are significant to the peoples that inhabit them and it remains a question to what extent there is really a way of life held in common. Many indicators of Canadian-ness refer to factors such as Medicare or tolerance for social diversity, which are at least as much matters of legislation and statehood as nationhood. From the beginning, there were at least two—French and

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English-Canadian—national ways of being Canadian compatible with statehood. To a large extent, even after 150 years, it is one of the main roles of the Federal state to create, promote and celebrate a purported national consciousness. The established distinction between state and nation is therefore of special importance in Canada: State refers to an administrative unit, an organization of objective socio-economic forces, which, as Max Weber adapted from Trotsky, “(successfully) claims the monopoly of the legitimate use of physical force within a given territory” (Weber 1976, 78). A nation is a people with a particular way of life extending over time and expressing itself in customs, forms of popular arts, norms of civility, etc. A people also occupies a place even if it is not as definitively marked as that of a state. During the First World War, Winthrop P. Bell defined a nation as “a form of super-individual life” which “grows into being,” thereby creating a unity which “has shown itself historically capable of surmounting differences of race and language, and national diversity is clearly capable of resisting the unifying tendencies of both” (Bell 2012a, 55). This definition is clearly superior to that of Renan for at least three reasons. First, because a nation is not merely a sum of individuals but a social identity encompassing individuals with its own characteristics. Moreover, the constitution of this social identity is not a matter of the will of individuals, which is suggested by the reference to a plebiscite, but a consequence of growth or development. Third, the unity of the nation is created by surmounting differences not by eliminating them. Thus, analysis of a particular nation would be a matter of pinpointing relevant differences and analyzing whether and in what manner they have been surmounted. The manner of surmounting differences accomplished by a nation is expressed in a national tradition which “affect[s] the individuals but . . . [is] borne only by the super-individual being” (Bell 2012a, 55). It is this national tradition which Socrates’ imaginative condensation allowed to speak to him in order to remind him of his civic responsibilities as a philosopher. The issue in Canada is thus whether and how this administrative state might become a nation which would be a New World tradition, since none of the fragments of immigrant traditions are whole or continuous, and would thus be accomplished by a mixture. As Bell put it, “the question is what sort of a people will the mixture produce, or if no mixture results, what effect will this body of people with diverging types of feeling and thinking have on questions where the common sentiment and united communal instinct of the nation are thought to be the deciding factors” (Bell 2012a, 52–3). Since Bell’s time, it has generally been accepted that mixing in Canada is not likely to be complete in the sense of publicly surmounting the cultural differences of all relevant groups such that remaining differences would be exclusively individual.8 Insofar as the cultural differences of distinct peoples retain public

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significance, the mixture in question would be multicultural. The question then becomes what sort of surmounting of differences is compatible with retention of the public significance of cultural differences. Charles Taylor’s influential account is based on a conception of such surmounting which has two main elements. He argues that each cultural group can find its own reasons for belonging in a higher unity, that the reasons do not have to be identical for each group (Taylor 1993, 181–4; Taylor 1994, 58–61). This seems to me a necessary implication of the public significance of particular cultural belongings and we will not take issue with it. He develops this argument through a hermeneutic model of inter-cultural understanding based on Hans-Georg Gadamer’s notion of “fusing of horizons” in which “we learn to move in a broader horizon, within which what we have formerly taken for granted as the background to valuation can be situated as one possibility alongside the different background of the formerly unfamiliar culture” (Taylor 1994, 67). Gadamer’s model of hermeneutic understanding was first developed to overcome the problem of historical, temporal difference in understanding old texts whose contexts had disappeared. The fusing of horizons across a temporal divide “means that as the historical horizon is projected, it is simultaneously removed” (Gadamer 1975, 273). Applied to intercultural understanding this model is doubly problematic in the context of a multicultural polity. First, it begins from a we/they formulation and, second, it implies that overcoming the we/they difference is the goal of understanding. The “we” who sallies forth to understand “them” is therefore placed in a centered position, whereas the “they” is out there, as it were, to be understood. But in a multicultural society, one would assume, there is no “we” group that has superior access to national belonging. The “they” position applies much more to the recent arrival who needs to shed difference to become one of “us.” The surmounting of public cultural differences in the nation must also be a maintenance of those public cultural differences. This is the conundrum of a multicultural society that would also be a nation. The solution here is to see that there are two forms, or levels, of belonging that are at issue (Angus 1997, ch. 6). One belongs to a cultural group, or people, as one of “us” and also to the “we” of the nation. Moreover, one belongs to the “we” through the “us.” There is no “they” who is outside and to be brought in by becoming like “us,” but an “us” which is from the start within a plurality that is each a different “us”—the multi—that could together perhaps surmount the singular horizon of the “us” to be situated also within the horizon of “we”—the unity of the nation. There is no contradiction between unity and difference if they are seen as referring to two different dimensions or levels of belonging. While this would be the model of a multicultural nation, that is not to say that it has yet been achieved. It is enough to say, however, first that the hermeneutic model

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of we/they assumes a specific group as the host at the center whose task is to bring in the guest at the periphery, which guest must shed the characteristics that distinguish itself from the host in order to gain acceptance, and, second, that one can imagine a multicultural polity which is not organized around a centering identity but through a decentered relation between different identities whose relation constitutes their identity. This latter possibility can perhaps be formalized through a discoursetheoretic account of what one may call a multicultural and postcolonial speech act. Such a speech act relies upon a cultural tradition to be meaningful, but, since no one cultural tradition would be hegemonic, its context of interpretation implies other cultural traditions in which its meaning may be given a different nuance, related to different neighboring acts, or even judged critically. The speech act may thus have the effect of bringing into relevance or question aspects of other cultural traditions. This process would occur within a multicultural context, that is to say, a culturally plural context in which the possibility of such cross-cultural interpretations is known during the performance of the speech act itself. A discourse can be said to be multicultural insofar as the cultural tradition upon which a given speech act draws for its legitimation is not the only relevant cultural tradition upon which a responding speech act can draw. A discourse can be said to be postcolonial insofar as the institutional tradition within which a speech act occurs is open to debate about the rules on which it is based, not only the practices that refer to the rules (Angus 2008, 82).

The idea of such a decentered speech act implies a separation between the cultural tradition that establishes meaning and the multicultural context that accepts and even proposes a response that does not accept that cultural tradition as the only source of such meaning. The relation between meaning and cultural tradition would cease to become a one-sided dependence and become a self-referential paradox. Cultural tradition establishes meaning in the first place but meaning may put cultural tradition into question in the second place. An ongoing history of such speech acts would be the creation of a common tradition in a multicultural society that has shed the colonial legacy of the superiority of one cultural tradition of interpretation. The political expression of such a decentered speech act is one of Proudhonian federation that avoids its subsumption into a larger political entity by insisting that a treaty or alliance limits itself to “one or several determinate aims” and is therefore never all-encompassing (Proudhon 1969, 106-7). Since it does not aim at a central state overweening its different parts, treaty or alliance recognizes the borders whereby its own people’s place encounters others.

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Since the rules of interaction of such a federation would be open to legitimation only by the history of interaction, because rule would be always open to renegotiation, it is fair to call this an anarchist ideal. No doubt such an anarchist ideal conflicts with, and is critical of, the persisting legacy of Empire, state, and other such centrisms in Canadian history, but it has also arisen from that history.9 Thus, when Louis Riel and his comrades found themselves abandoned by the Hudson’s Bay Company, they declared that “this land has become natal to our children” (Riel et. al 1985, 78). Such inhabitation was also the foundational claim of the 1910 Declaration of the Lillooet Tribe: “We have always lived in our country; at no time have we ever deserted it, or left it to others” (Declaration 1989, 268). The spirit of a people is rooted in this sense of inhabitation. The idea of such a speech act thus allows a precise definition of what stands in the way of its realization—whether such a barrier takes the form of empire-colony, majority-minority, or host-guest.10 Working toward this realization is the aim of what I have previously called a “locative thinking as a leading-home that gives a new approach to universalization” (Angus 2008, 31). Locative thinking seeks a place that would settle its borders through treaties without subsumption. A centering force allows the other to speak but controls the rules of interaction between speakers such that the context is monopolized. The core idea of a multicultural and postcolonial speech act is thus that the rules of interaction are open to no other legitimation than that constructed through the history of such speech acts. There are two deeply inter-wound themes in one history that pertain to whether Canada is or might be a nation in the sense of a people with a distinct way of life: the well-known continuity of Empire, state, and centering forming a tradition of deference to authority (which is so well known that I have said nothing about it here) versus encounters with a primal freedom based on inhabiting places and limited treaties that resist their subsumption under a center. Imaginative condensation of this history can focus it as the continuous struggle of a decentering tendency against the legacy of Empire. It suggests that we can become a nation precisely to the extent that we can shed the legacy of Empire and embrace the decentered, anarchist principle that throws the rules of interaction open to fundamental debate and creates a history in a place. Immigrant, multicultural citizen, settler—caught in a continuous history of rulers and a precarious logic of decentering. This is the nation that makes up the imaginative condensation of the philosopher and demands that the philosopher respond to its law.

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14.6 THE PHILOSOPHER AND THE LAW The task of philosophy when it faces the community is responsibility to the cultural-civilizational tradition which has made philosophy possible and necessary. Such responsibility cannot be disentangled from the autobiography of the philosopher. To discharge that responsibility philosophically is to render conscious the value inherent in the tradition and propose the possibility that the community itself might render rationally defensible the value that inheres within it. To that end, the philosopher constructs an imaginative condensation of the cultural tradition with which a dialogue becomes possible. The figure of the immigrant discloses a philosophical motive for understanding community as decentered alliances. We have attempted to sustain that within Canadian history there is a value of decentered, anarchist social interaction that has often lain dormant and occasionally surfaced to confront the continued legacy of imperial domination. It is this dormant possibility that would need to become conscious for us to become a nation. Only then could we speak in terms of genuine equality with the Indigenous nations that preceded us here. Otherwise, it remains likely that we remain a mere plurality unified by a monopolization of the rules of interaction over and above the peoples that have mingled here. Philosophy cannot, of course, decide this question but it would shirk its responsibility if it did not clarify it. If such an imaginative condensation makes sense, it does so at the price of being one such in the face of a dominant narrative of continuity, compromise, order, and authority—that is to say, monopolization of the rules of interaction between communities. When the community allows of two defensible interpretations in this manner, then the imaginative condensation must become polemical. Thus, the community and the philosopher are not reconciled in Hegelian fashion because the community is not reconciled with itself. Philosophy becomes political not only in the sense of proposing a conscious assumption of tradition but also in the polemical sense of proposing one version of community over another. 14.7 ADDENDUM: STATEMENT TO THE COURT The following is a statement to the court before receiving a $500 fine for criminal trespass at the site of the gates of Trans Mountain Corporation along with approximately 200 other defendants in Spring 2018.

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Statement to the Court before Sentencing (7 May 2018) by Ian Angus I would like to begin by acknowledging that the City of Vancouver, where this court is situated, lies on the traditional and unceded territories of the Tsleil-Waututh, Musqueam, and Squamish First Nations. Having heard the recommendation of the Crown regarding my guilty plea to the charge of Criminal Contempt for “physically obstructing, impeding or otherwise preventing access” (Court File, #9). to the Burnaby Terminal of Trans Mountain (Kinder Morgan) on 24 March 2018, I would like to make the following clarification, explanation, and request for an altered penalty. I have been encouraged to do so in the first place by the Provincial Court information on sentencing11 and in the second place by the response of Judge Affleck to my question to him in court on 23rd April when he said that I would be allowed to explain the “context” of my action. I do not deny that I was physically present at the place in question at the time in question. My understanding of civil disobedience is that one commits a certain act for definite and considered reasons, one admits to the act, explains one’s reasons, and accepts the penalty. The purpose of the act is to bring a state of affairs to the attention of the public and the authorities with the intention and hope that it may serve to correct an error in justice. Through this procedure, even though one may break a given law, or in this case an injunction issued by a court of law, one does not express disrespect for law in general. This understanding was clear to me prior to the event and very much on my mind on that day. Positive law is always flawed as human beings are flawed. It is also flawed insofar as it serves interests which are not required by public safety but are nevertheless entrenched in the unequal power structure of the social order. A social order in which citizens follow the law simply because it is the law, in which they do not asses the practice of the law with their own critical faculties, could not be called a democracy. The critical intelligence of citizens is essential to a non-repressive social order. Indeed, it is only through acts which test the practice of law in specific cases that law can be revised more closely to approximate justice. Justice is above law. It is how we assess and revise law. It is what we are fitted for, what can make us most human, that for which we must continually strive. The classic understanding of civil disobedience is complicated in our own time and place. Since we are living in unceded territories whose formal economic, social and political structure is a consequence of a colonial past and present, the dominant law represents such a colonial structure. There is also another law that has been established by the traditions and institutions of the Indigenous people of this place. Why are we not subject to that law also? I have lived for the last 26 years with my wife and daughter beside the

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Burrard Inlet. It is of great concern to me that this beautiful and fecund place be preserved for our children and grandchildren. I felt proud to be able to join my near neighbors, the Tsleil-Waututh people, who have cared for this place for thousands of years, in order to oppose a project that puts our common inhabitation in grave danger. I respect their law. Our country is in a difficult time. There is much talk, both official and popular, about reconciliation with Indigenous people. After all, they have suffered greatly from government policies, and collaboration in rendering that suffering by dominant institutions, that have tried to extinguish their cultures and their peoples. Many citizens have come to feel, knowing more than we used to about their suffering and the role of our institutions in causing it, that it is time to put an end to this legacy and to start anew. But for reconciliation to be more than symbolic, it has to make a difference in our actions. The Kinder Morgan pipeline is one important case in which real actions can make a difference. The action in front of the Kinder Morgan gate is, in my opinion, a case of real reconciliation that goes beyond mere lip-service. Not only our country but the whole planet is in a difficult time because of the ravishes of industrial production and consumption. The foreseeable, near future of the human species, and also species of many other kinds, is threatened by the effects of climate change in destabilizing the ecological balance upon which we depend. Radical and immediate action is necessary to realign priorities in order even to begin to address this problem. Yet we look to our elected leaders in vain for any real action. They continue to put in place mega-projects of industrial infrastructure that deepen the problem and make it more difficult to change direction. If we do not place economic activity within an ecological context soon, the future of the human species, and the other species with whom we share the earth, looks very bleak. For about 40 years, I taught in various institutions of higher education— most recently, at Simon Fraser University, whose location near the proposed expanded tank farm would put its population at grave risk in case of an accident. My vocation as a teacher, scholar and writer has been to think as widely and deeply about natural and human issues as I can, and to communicate with the younger generation about the lessons of the past and the challenges of the future. I have tried to discharge that responsibility to the best of my ability, stressing independent and critical thinking, social and ecological responsibility, and, perhaps most difficult of all in recent years, finding sources of hope that can orient our living-toward-the-future. This spring I felt that this responsibility had to be taken beyond the seminar room, lecture hall, and written word to a site where all of these concerns converge. The convergence of issues of reconciliation with Indigenous nations, environmental and ecological danger, and social inequality due to the rapacious

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pursuit of private profit has made this not only a difficult time but one of crisis. The forces who wish to maintain the current system have come together to oppose those who seek a new future. When a new future appears on the horizon, the repression of this future, the fear of change, expresses itself in more and more desperate attempts to hang on to the errors of the past. The Kinder Morgan pipeline is an important example of a desperate coalition of government, industry and finance attempting to retain and even expand the past industrial economy with increasingly dangerous consequences. But, as creatures of thought, creativity and hope, human beings will always seek to address, in any form that they can muster, the gravity of the crisis and to push for something new and better. There is a future struggling to be born in which environmental and ecological responsibility, social justice and equality, and reconciliation with the ancient claims of Indigenous peoples, each play their part. The old forces are arrayed against its emergence. Thus we are here today. I was there. I did it. I meant to do it. The Crown has proposed a penalty of a fine of $500.00. I propose an alternative penalty of a fine of $1.00. The fact of a fine would be an acknowledgement that I broke the law in disobeying the injunction. Its amount would be an acknowledgement that my reasons for doing so mean that the act amounts to the exercise of a civic, human and natural responsibility. NOTES 1. “In the great fatality of Christianity, Plato is that ambiguity and fascination called the ‘ideal’ which made it possible for the nobler natures of antiquity to misunderstand themselves and to step on the bridge which led to the ‘Cross’” (Nietzsche 1968, 106). There are defensible historical reasons for this compaction between Plato and Christianity which tend to reinforce the ‘philosophical’ reason given by Nietzsche—otherworldliness. Werner Jaeger has documented the crucial role of Greek paideia in transforming Christianity from a late Jewish sect into a universal force and the revival of Plato, in particular, as the mediation that preserved Greek paideia within Christian civilization (Jaeger 1961). 2.  The point at which Plato accepts the necessity of a universal justification of the search for eide is that at which his theory of the forms emerges and he leaves Socratic philosophy behind for a Platonic one. Forms, eide, become the theory of forms, and the theory of forms is ontologized to become a hierarchy of Being. The same point is reached by Socrates in Apology where he does attempt a justification of his search for eide, but this does not take the form of a universal justification but a political and educational confrontation with the Athenian people. It attempts to justify philosophy in an encounter with the outside of philosophy in its relation to the spiritual-intellectual life of a people.

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  3.  The Greek word is νόμοι, or nomoi, which can equally be translated as custom, code, or rule as law. (The utilization of “state” to translate polis contains related problems.) The important point is that laws issue from what I have called here “the historical life of a people” which cannot be reduced to its articulated statements or rules and certainly should not be identified with a modern state which intends to monopolize such rule-making.  4. This involves much more than the conventional claim that Socrates is an incipient social contract theorist. First, Socrates explicitly connects his “agreement” to the conditions of his birth and education; it is not the agreement of a putatively independent adult that is the model here. Second, the agreement is not between putatively independent adults but between Socrates and the laws themselves—that is to say, the spirit (Geist) of the community not the individuals who comprise it. Third, the community is pre-constituted to Socrates’ agreement, not derived from it—even in a logical sense.   5.  Notably, Diogenes and Diodorus Siculus (Diogenes Laertius 2002, 19; Diodorus Siculus, XIV, 37).   6.  For example, R. Hackworth who dismisses the claims by Diogenes and Diodorus but follows E. Horneffer in suggesting that Crito (48c) itself provides evidence of Athenian repentance (Hackworth 1933, 49).   7.  The immigrant condition is fundamental to the spiritual-intellectual (geistig) history of America. We started with the immigrant child because of the current context of autobiographical philosophy but it certainly does not exhaust that spiritualintellectual history.   8.  Nevertheless, some, such as Gary Madison, argue that “the liberal consensus . . . now fully dominates Canadian discourse” and that such liberalism allows for cultural rights as “simply variants of basic human rights guaranteeing individuals the right to free association and freedom from discrimination.” In this version, Canadian philosophy is essentially indistinguishable from English-speaking liberalism internationally whose Canadianism derives only from the fact that it permeates Canadian mores. Such a position asks neither if it is well-grounded in Canadian history nor whether it is adequate to understanding existing practice and thus fails to question whether it is a genuine philosophy or only a comforting ideology (Madison 2000, 21, 39).   9.  James Watson’s rosy view of the Commonwealth as “self-governing colonies [which] lead their own individual life, absolutely undisturbed by the dictation of the mother country,” not only ignored the Imperial forces that had brought the colonies into being originally but also did not ask whether this principle could be applied to the creation, and subsequent continuation, of Canada itself (Watson 1919, 273). 10.  A popular use of the term “people” different from that of “nation” is that of the many as against the privileged few. Though I have not discussed it here, this usage can be reconciled with the one that I have deployed insofar as colonization is a form of capitalism that dispossesses the many. One key example of this usage in Canada is by William Lyon Mackenzie who said in 1837 that “the contest is now between the privileged and the unprivileged and a terrible one it is. The slave snaps his fetters, the peasant feels an unwonted strength nerve in his arm, the people rise in stern and awful majesty, and demand in strange tones their ever despised and hitherto denied

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rights. They rise and swear in a deep and startling oath that Justice Shall Reign . . .” (Mackenzie 1960, 218). 11.  In “Types of sentence available in Canada” posted on the website of the Provincial Court of British Columbia (available at http://provincialcourt.bc.ca/enews /enews-08-06-2016), it is stated that: “If a person charged with a criminal offence pleads guilty or is found guilty after a trial, they will be sentenced. In determining a fit sentence, the judge must consider all the information presented in court about the offender and the crime, including: The offender’s personal circumstances (e.g. age, work or school, family situation); The type of crime; The way the crime was committed; The offender’s criminal record, if they have one; The impact on the victim; Any other relevant information.”

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Chapter Fifteen

Excess and Nothing

The investigations of the previous chapters of Part IV have shown the meaning and value that inheres in the lifeworld experience of the concrete subject. Practices in the cultural-civilizational world embody meaning and value that are lived with a certain intensity—an index which manifests their significance for a given subjectivity within the field of meaning and value inherent to the cultural-civilizational world. This intensity shows the manner in which that subject would live its role in a diverse but integrated differentiated community of meaning and value were it not reduced by the formal homogenizations of knowledge-representation, (abstract) labor-practical action, and (abstract) nature-ecology. Meaning and value are given structure and history such that they become a heritage within a cultural-civilizational form. The ground of meaning and value, however, is not in the cultural-civilizational form itself but in the natural fecundity, excess, which gives rise to the plurality of such forms. The critical role of philosophy is to liberate meaning and value from domination by formal reason, restore their heritage to the active subjects, and return meaning and value to their source in the ontology of excess. 15.1 TRANSCENDENTALITY AS THE GROUND OF CRITIQUE The concrete subject is constituted in several distinct layers containing their own heritage of meaning and value: specific individual, social group, ecological whole, cultural-civilizational horizon. At this point, the crisis of the European sciences is overcome philosophically, as it were, in the sense that philosophy is no longer pervaded by crisis and its investigations can address directly the issues of meaning and value as they pose themselves. Nevertheless, the cultural milieu of each distinct concrete ego is not thereby purged of 463

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philosophical issues. As a consequence, the philosopher remains in principle in potential conflict with the actual constitution of the given community. The philosopher’s grasp of the meaning and value inherent in a given community allows a mirror to be held up to the community through the clarification of its own immanent meaning and value.1 It is in this sense that Marx’s account of the regime of value is a truth-telling about the meaning and value immanent, even though disavowed, in the epoch of planetary technology structured in a capitalist form. The philosopher goes one step beyond, due to the opening to transcendentality, to perceive, through the interaction of the pertinent concrete ego with other actual and possible concrete egos, subjectivity itself unlimited to any concrete form—that is, subjectivity as it would be without its necessary limitation to a given concrete ego and thus a specific form of meaning and value. In this way, the activity of the philosopher allows criticism of given cultural-civilizational forms—indeed any level of specification of the concrete ego—with reference to the unlimited, or infinite, character of transcendentality. However, transcendentality never appears simply as itself, but must become Socratically instantiated within a given cultural-civilizational form. In previous chapters of Part IV, we have criticized the limitation to Europe as the institutional home of reason; the institution of America and the conflict between planetary technology and place-based Indigeneity that defines our epoch; and the existential journey of the concrete individual self that motivates the phenomenological-transcendental reduction. Transcendentality is beyond any subject-object correlation even though it is available only through the categories inherent in a given subject-object correlation. Whereas in chapter 11 we were concerned to describe the motive for the performance of the phenomenological-transcendental reduction, here we must account for the motive for a return from transcendentality to operate within a given subjectobject correlation. This is not exactly a return since, as we have emphasized, the philosopher only has access to transcendentality through inhabiting a given subject-object correlation. The age-old temptation of an unchanging ideal world which would provide escape from mortality and limitation is a misinterpretation of the data of philosophy brought about by a failure of courage. As Socrates argued against Protagoras, courage is the essential philosophical virtue that holds the other four (wisdom, piety, justice, temperance) together (Plato 1996, 40, 49–51; Protagoras 349, 359–60). Even without a definitive exit from subject-object correlation, a return motion is necessary to motivate and allow action within that correlation. This is the Socratic component of phenomenology that enacts critique in the relevant correlation. It finally justifies the re-organization of the Crisis-text that we advocated in chapter 1—that Husserl’s version of recovery through an encyclopediac sur-

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vey of the sciences must be supplanted with a Socratic return to the lifeworld (as individual, background and horizon) from any given knowledge-form or socio-kinaesthetic organization. 15.2 WHAT IS THE CRISIS? We began with the crisis of the European sciences and of European culture as described by Husserl: the loss of meaning and value necessitated by formal abstraction due to the mathematization of nature extends to the culture as a whole as a consequence of the hegemonic role of mathematical physics. That diagnosis has not been revoked in the development of our text but it has been considerably supplemented. Through Herbert Marcuse we showed that the crisis is not only motivated by the difficulties of theoretical reason but by practical life, especially as manifested in the proliferation of techniques in the lifeworld such as to repel other forms of action. Karl Marx’s critique of the representation of value exclusively through exchange (money) shows that the goal of an incipient differentiated community which he shares with Husserl is systematically reduced so that meaning and value is only registered as a relation between a given single value and the simple aggregate of general value. Part II dealt with the formal representation of knowledge, such that we may now say that the crisis of formal knowledge is not only the loss of meaning and value within knowledge but also its systematic failure to illuminate meaning and value in practical life such that differentiated community is undermined. Part III of our manuscript shifted from knowledge as a representation of the world to the socially-organized bodily motility that constitutes the practical world. In showing the identity of Marx’s critique of the regime of value and Husserl’s critique of the mathematization of nature as Galilean sciences, we were able to extend the concept of crisis from knowledge to the formal organization of practical life. Not only in the proliferation of techniques but more fundamentally through the homogenization of labor-powers, the capitalist organization of the practical world subsumes the concrete lifeexperiences of the actors (such as is evident in the structure of modern industry). The crisis of practice brought about by the formal organization of socially-organized kinaesthetic activity in everyday life thereby both supplements the crisis of knowledge with which we began and explains the exemplarity of formal reason. While our presentation relies on Marx for the extension of the critique of formal reason to labor, it engages in a fundamental critique of Marx’s concept of abstract labor that uncovers the presupposition of abstract nature. The formal reduction of concrete nature, or natural fecundity, to the abstract

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nature utilized in modern production is systematically obscured by Marx. To that extent, his critique of political economy only criticizes the capitalist form of modern production but not its reduction of meaning and value in nature to malleable stuff. Here, we pinpoint the complicity of Marx’s critique with the unlimited manipulation of nature without reference to its inherent meaning and value. Thus, we conclude that it is not only the capitalist form of that production but the character of that production itself that requires critique. This is the meaning of our substitution of “capitalism” with “planetary technology” in our subsequent critique. The discovery of natural fecundity, or excess, as a presupposition of the critique of political economy has allowed us to determine the crisis as directed, not only toward the lifeworld, but toward recovery of the fecund excess of nature that grounds the plurality of lifeworlds. It justifies an attempt to recover meaning and value in lived nature, a lived nature that would encompass human labor, and whose best representation in reason is the science of ecology. Yet the pre-cultural-civilizational ontology of excess cannot itself contain an explication of value even though it is the source of value. Excess is an ontology of the lifeworld, that is to say, it applies to every culturalcivilizational form though it is organized in different ways. This is where ecology comes into its own as the science that is closest to approximating a critical judgment of the cultural-civilizational organization of excess. In Part IV of our text, we addressed the transcendental-phenomenological reduction that is the starting-point for the practice of phenomenological philosophy in order to show both the cultural-civilizational form within which the concretely experienced things of the world appear and the journey of the individual subject that performs the transcendental-phenomenological reduction. Added to Husserl’s sense of crisis in which the philosopher acts as a functionary of humanity is the existential loss and recovery of meaning and value by the human individual. Since the things of the lifeworld appear as concrete individuals in relation to their background and within the horizon of a cultural-civilizational lifeworld, meaning and value find explication in the cultural-civilizational forms which natural excess takes within human culture. The understanding and organization of excess becomes a cultural heritage within a cultural-civilizational form through the privation of labor by culture. A key focus of critique is how well natural fecundity is organized in a given cultural-civilizational form through its cultural heritage. This heritage is established through the privation of labor and contains the record of freedom. It guards the opening to transcendentality within a cultural-civilizational form. The concept of crisis is thereby considerably expanded from that delineated by Husserl. To the phenomenological concept of crisis as based in the hegemony of formal reason, we have added Marx’s concept of crisis as the

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hegemony of formal organization of concrete practical activity, and the ontological concept of crisis as the formal domination of planetary technology over natural excess. The major contemporary form of ontological crisis is the conflict between the domination of nature through European formal science and the place-based knowledge and dwelling of Indigenous civilizational-cultures. As a consequence of the expanded concept of crisis, Husserl’s concept of renewal is expanded and criticized in three respects: 1) We have shown that previous syntheses of phenomenology and Marxism have been based on their identical attempt to recover full concrete individuality “underneath” formal abstraction. Our emphasis on the role of background and horizon in the concreteness of the things of the lifeworld shifts attention from the critique of formal reason and the critique of political economy to the science of ecology as the nearest scientific paradigm of ontological excess which implies its leading role in overcoming the crisis. 2) We have shown, contra Husserl, that there is indeed an ontology of the lifeworld in Marx’s labor theory of value and have developed this ontology to show that ecology is a more adequate exemplar of a crisis-free science than biology. 3) We have shown that what Husserl called the “transcendental ego” is not a concrete ego of any sort and have substituted for it the term “transcendentality,” putting all concrete subjectivity in tandem with objectivity in the subject-object correlations that are manifested through the transcendental-phenomenological reduction. That aspect of our text dependent on Marx is no less expanded and criticized. 1) Underneath Marx’s concept of surplus productivity, we have discovered natural fecundity, or excess, as the ground for modes of production and the plurality of cultural-civilizational worlds. The dialogue between such worlds called forth by planetary technology must reckon fundamentally with the cultural heritages which express, understand and preserve excess. 2) Basing ourselves on Karel Kosík, we have shown the origin of culture to be in the privative negation of labor. The inauguration of philosophy through the transcendental-phenomenological reduction is the fulfilment of this privative negation rooted in the excess of natural fecundity. 3) We have shown that Marx’s abstraction to simple, homogeneous, socially-necessary labor measured solely by duration occludes the ontological fact that labor works upon labor and suggested that abstract labor works upon “abstract nature.” Abstract nature is the fungible stuff that corresponds to planetary technology. 4) Whereas excess was related directly to the specific characteristics of nature worked upon in pre-systematic, pre-capitalist production, the regime of value distributes excess throughout its coordinated, homogenizing system. It apparently has no definite origin and subsists merely as a generalized excess. The multiple origins of this generalized excess correspond to the inability to

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define a unity to the proletariat. To the extent that there is an emergent neomercantilist form of capitalism focused on the product rather on abstract labor, excess returns to its definite origin in the specific characteristics of given productive processes. While it may be useful to consider the phenomenological philosophy developed in these pages a “phenomenological Marxism,” it is so in a manner that is orthodox with respect to neither of its sources nor to syntheses previously offered under than name. Our presentation and development of Husserl’s Crisis has been based on the three innovations of Husserl’s Crisis-text that were set out in chapter 1. As we argued there, these innovations are internally related in Husserl’s text. The first innovation concerning the mathematization of nature uncovers the presupposition of the lifeworld that is the second innovation. The second innovation determines the duality between transcendental and worldly subjectivity that is the third innovation. At this point we may say that these three innovations are not only related textually, nor in Husserl’s thinking, but—as we have shown—internally related to the phenomenon of crisis and healing itself that defines phenomenology. The representational form of knowledge, the organization of practical activity, and the cultural-civilizational form within which things appear are increasingly radical clarifications of the sedimented grounds of human experience. The crises of knowledge and practice are ultimately grounded in cultural-civilizational forms and the crises that appear when they are not adequately informed by natural excess. Formal reason reduces the lived meaning and value of cultural-civilizational practices to residues but it does not eliminate such residues. What Marxists called the “contradiction of capitalism” can now be seen to be a conflict between these residues and capital. It is not a contradiction within capitalism as such but a conflict between the residues of meaning and value and the capitalist organization of value. These residues may motivate a recovery of meaning and value sufficient to motivate opposition to capital and, one may hope, the displacement of the regime of value. Stimulation of these residues and re-ignition of their intensity depends upon the cultural-civilizational world as defined through its horizon. This horizon can be known through its encounter with other such cultural-civilizational worlds and their residues but it can only be definitely activated through the transcendentality to which they all point. 15.3 SOCRATIC PHENOMENOLOGY Parallel to the beginning of Part IV, where we were concerned to explain and justify the transcendental-phenomenological reduction, our conclusion

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of this Part needs to show that the practice of critique requires a return from transcendentality to operate within a given cultural-civilizational form. This is what is meant by Socratic phenomenology. The “method” of Socratic phenomenology is to return within a constituted subject-object correlation in light of transcendentality—that is to say, in light of what constitutes that subject-object correlation as such (including its cultural heritage crystallized in institutions)—in order to operate critically to turn the constituted subjects toward transcendentality. 15.3.1 The Socratic Method Our conception of Socratic critique begins from Gregory Vlastos’ parsing of Socrates’ method which distinguishes Socrates(E) of the early aporetic dialogues from Socrates(M) of the middle dialogues—that he takes to be representative of Plato’s own views in that period. It rests on a periodization of Plato’s writings that reveals three stages in the internal development of the problematic established at the first stage.2 The periodization is the basis for an argument that the elenctic method of inquiry that characterizes the early Socratic, aporetic dialogues is replaced by the mathematical method in Plato’s middle period that provides the basis for the metaphysical doctrine of the forms.3 The philosophical periodization thus rests on the assumption that the method of inquiry is a fundamental characteristic of Socrates and Plato’s philosophies and, by implication, that method is fundamental to philosophy.4 Vlastos defines ten features of Socratic philosophy in distinction from the positions adopted by Plato, though put into the mouth of Socrates to be sure, in the middle period (Vlastos 1991, 47-9). Here, only two of these features are salient. First, the dialogues of Plato’s middle period defend a metaphysical theory of the forms, and a theory of recollection whereby the soul comes to know the forms, whereas Socrates has no such theory.5 Second, while the middle dialogues seek and find demonstrable knowledge, Socrates seeks knowledge elenctically and expresses consistently his failure to find such knowledge. Vlastos claims that the theory of forms is only possible through the substitution of the mathematical method for that of elenctic inquiry. “It was in the course of pursuing such [mathematical] studies himself and to a great extent because of them that Plato had reached the metaphysical outlook that characterized his middle period” (Vlastos 1991, 108). The only proof of this claim that Vlastos adduces is a citation from Republic (521c10–523a3) in which Plato himself makes the claim: “What is that study, Glaucon, that pulls the soul away from becoming to being? . . . It seems to belong to that study we are now investigating which naturally leads to insight, for in every way

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it draws us towards reality, though no one uses it aright” (Plato quoted in Vlastos 1991, 109). But Plato’s assertion, which Vlastos takes at face value, does not establish the truth of his claim that the theory of forms derives from the shift to a mathematical method. This claim is rather a consequence of Vlastos’ assertion that method is fundamental to philosophy. Such an assertion itself needs to be held up to scrutiny. Leaving this issue aside for the moment, it is nevertheless clear enough that the shift to mathematical method and the theory of forms emerge both contemporaneously and in close theoretical relation in Plato’s middle period. This co-emergence is what is central for a critique of the conflation of Socrates and Plato and the clarification of a specifically Socratic practice of philosophy. The essence of the Socratic elenctic method is the search for the relevant eidos, a practice that may be called “essential definition,” through the dialogical examination of proffered answers. The “what is x?” question—what is piety, justice, friendship, etc.—provokes answers that often confound specific examples of “x” with the essence that is being sought (though the answers can also be wrong in other ways). Dialogic inquiry requires the assertion of Socrates’ ignorance, since, if he knew the relevant eidos already, the better course would be to ask him or for him to volunteer to tell. Similarly, the claim of the interlocutors to know underlies the proffering of answers. The elenctic method is given expression in the aporetic form of Plato’s early dialogues and the depiction of the way of life of a philosopher who has to live with the failure of the search for knowledge. The elenctic method is not reflexively justified in the early dialogues. Vlastos points out that “he asks: What is the form piety? What is the form beauty? And so forth. What is form? He never asks” (Vlastos 1991, 58). Nevertheless, Socrates’ method rests upon a rule of dialogue upon which Socrates consistently insists. “Say only what you believe.” It is this rule which distinguishes the elenchus from eristic and, if one may generalize, Socrates from the Sophists. It is not just that Socrates is contentious, but that his contention is driven by a search for an adequate answer. Socrates rules out what we have come to call Devil’s-advocate arguments as well as surmises which the interlocuter will not assert as his beliefs. Thus, Vlastos proposes this definition of the elenchus: “The Socratic elenchus is a search for moral truth by question-andanswer adversary argument in which a thesis is debated only if asserted as the answerer’s own belief and is regarded as refuted only if its negative is deduced from his own beliefs” (Vlastos 1994, 4). Elenctic questioning contains an extraordinary assumption which can be isolated if one keeps in mind that Socrates does expect to discover truth in this way. At least, if one accepts his expressions of disappointment at face value, the elenchus is not an exercise in which the experience of aporia is

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the intended result—unlike, for example, the arguments intended to produce equipollence and suspended judgment, or epochē, for the skeptic. As Sextus Empiricus put it, “the term ‘suspension’ is derived from the fact that the mind being held up or ‘suspended’ so that it neither affirms nor denies anything owing to the equipollence of the matters in question” (Empiricus 1990, 74). In this respect, the current exploration of Socratic phenomenology suggests that Husserl’s appropriation of the skeptical term epochē contains the assumption of a priority of disinterested knowledge that sustains his conception of the lifeworld primarily, or even exclusively, through perception to the detriment of action and thought. Our appropriation of elenctic dialectic to explain Socratic intervention in lifeworld practices does not presuppose such disinterestedness or equipollence but builds itself from thematization of the meanings and values inherent in lived subject-object correlations (including perception, action, thought) in order to critically examine them in the light of the horizon of that lifeworld and transcendentality. The intended result of elenctic inquiry is knowledge of essential definition, though aporia is ubiquitously the actual result which must be incorporated into the life of the philosopher. If one assumes, as Socrates does, that the answers proffered can either be brought to contradiction or can be shown to state a truth, then it is supposed that, in Vlastos’ words, “side by side with all their false beliefs, . . . interlocutors always carry truth somewhere or other in their belief systems” because, if they did not, then false beliefs could not, without didactic interruption, necessarily be shown to entail contradictions (Vlastos 1991, 114). This supposition could have, at most, inductive evidence. Vlastos uses this supposition as a clue to what Socrates might have meant in disclaiming knowledge (Vlastos 1991, 114). It amounts to assuming that no person, at least no one that Socrates might encounter, can be supposed to live an entirely mistaken moral belief-system. Socratic phenomenology requires a similar belief that no subject-object correlation can be criticized without participating in the meaning and value inherent in it. 15.3.2 The Role of the Instance in Socratic Essential Definition The distinction between Socrates and Plato that Vlastos’ scholarship justifies derogates what we may call “the Platonic tradition” (which is a legacy of Plato’s middle period defined by the ontologization of the forms and the doctrine of immortality) to make space for a non-metaphysical conception of philosophy stemming from Socrates’ aporetic dialectic. However, this would be without merit for an alternative conception of philosophy if it were the case that the aporetic Socratic dialogues allowed of only one logical and coherent development—that put in place by Plato during his middle period. We may

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suggest Socratic phenomenology as another credible line of development of Socrates’ philosophy other than that established in Plato’s middle period. We may begin from a general observation about the practice of essential definition. There is an ambiguity in the notion of essential definition, an ambiguity which pervades both Socrates and Plato’s accounts. The ambiguity is whether searching for an eidos refers to apprehending the eidos itself or giving an account of the eidos. In other words, is it apprehension of essence or definition of the essence that is at issue. In Plato, for example, apprehension of the essence is taken to be equivalent to, or the necessary and sufficient condition of, giving a definition of the essence. In other words, the giving of an account is not thought as distinct from the apprehension. Thus, when one cannot give an account, it motivates the judgment that the essence is not apprehended. Similarly, the giving of a definition, suffices as proof of the apprehension of the essence. This must seem less compacted to us than to either Socrates or Plato. Let us return to the point in Republic where philosophers are distinguished from the lovers of other spectacles. “The lovers of sights and sounds like beautiful sounds, colors, shapes and everything that fashioned out of them, but their thought is unable to see and embrace the nature of the beautiful itself” (Plato 1997e, 1102; Republic 476b). The apprehension or non-apprehension of the beautiful itself that allows its enjoyment is here attributed to thought. But is it valid to collapse the apprehension of an essence with an ability to give an adequate discursive account of it? “He, then, who believes in beautiful things, but neither believes in beauty itself nor is able to follow when someone tries to guide him to the knowledge of it” (Plato 1997e, 1102; Republic 476b). Not believing in beauty itself here is taken as, not exactly equivalent to, but necessarily connected to not being able to follow an account. Not being able to follow an account is, of course, a lesser criterion than not being able to produce one. One may then say: The one who does not apprehend beauty itself can neither produce nor follow a definition of the beautiful. The compaction between apprehension of the eidos and being able to define it does not originate with the ontologization of essence in Plato’s middle period. It is already present in the early Socratic dialogues. Consider the end of the Euthyphro, where the failure of the search for the eidos of holiness leads Socrates to remark “For if you didn’t know clearly what holiness and unholiness are there’s no way that you would have taken it upon yourself to prosecute your father” (Plato 1993, 26; Euthyphro 15d). Here, being unable to give a definition is taken necessarily to involve an inability, or unwillingness, to act in such a way that contains the assumption that one apprehends the essence. The lack of apprehension of the eidos is taken as a sufficient criterion

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for inability or unwillingness, not only to follow an account, but to act as if such an account had been given. The compaction between apprehension and definition thus extends to action. To be sure, this comment by Socrates is ironic, given that Euthyphro is engaged in the prosecution of his father and is thus acting exactly as if he had the knowledge in question. Indeed, he believed at the outset of the dialogue that he had such knowledge. Does he believe it at the end? The situation is more equivocal. There is no reason to believe that he has renounced the claim to know, since he does not explicitly do so. However, he does rush off when asked to begin again, indicating that he does not think it likely that he can define his knowledge and defend it successfully in dialogue with Socrates.6 It is thus unresolved whether the dialogue has had any effect on Euthyphro’s claim to know or his willingness to act as if he did know. Nonetheless, Socrates’ point that he would have “both been worried about the gods and ashamed before men” if he acted without knowledge is meant as a conclusion from the failure to define the eidos (Plato 1993, 26; Euthyphro 15d). The point here is that the compaction of apprehension and definition is compelling for Socrates and that he tries to urge it upon others in elenctic inquiry. This compaction is thus one of the assumptions of elenctic inquiry. This is partly recognized by Vlastos when he notes that one of the consequences of the rule of elenctic inquiry—say only what you believe—is that it has an “existential dimension” which is “a challenge to his fellows to change their life” (Vlastos 1994, 9). This challenge is prior to the elenctic inquiry itself. It depends upon the decision to become a philosopher (see chapter 11). Compaction of apprehension of an eidos with giving a satisfactory account of it, such that the process can be called “essential definition” in both Socrates and Plato, can be disambiguated in Socratic phenomenology. The practical living within a subject-object correlation involves the perception of an eidos, whereas its definition requires thematization of the correlation as such—a step toward transcendentality. The Socratic aporetic dialogues do not move beyond the instances, or correlations, which animate them, whereas it is the purpose of Plato to do exactly that. For Socratic phenomenology the non-compaction between the apprehension of an essence and being able to give an account for it is expressed in the difference between a subject-object correlation when experienced as “reality” and the same subject-object correlation when transcendentally reduced and regarded as a phenomenon. There is a difference from experiencing in giving an account, and such an account depends upon the decision to become a philosopher that opens a nonontological transcendentality.

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15.3.3 Not Method, but Fidelity to Instances If we recall that Vlastos’ distinction of Socrates from Plato rests on the assumption that the method of inquiry is a fundamental characteristic of Socrates and Plato’s philosophies and, by implication, that method is fundamental to philosophy, it is significant that the present inquiry, while beginning from Vlastos’ distinction, has come to define the difference through a fidelity to instances—the instances of subject-object correlation where essences are apprehended. Vlastos subtitled his essay on the Socratic elenchus “method is all” (Vlastos 1994, 1). The present exposition suggests that, not only is method not all, it is not the main thing. Vlastos notes that elenctic method is not reflexively justified in the aporetic dialogues, that “the search for those general properties of forms which distinguish them systematically from non-forms is never on his elenctic agenda” (Vlastos 1994, 58). Vlastos’ interpretation of Socrates at this point seems to waver. On one hand, the question of method is the crucial difference that allows him to distinguish Socrates from Plato. On the other hand, the question of method is never explicitly addressed by Socrates, though it is by Plato.7 If one wishes to argue for the superiority of the elenctic method to the mathematical one (as Vlastos clearly does), then one would suppose that the failure to articulate it as a method, or to reflexively justify it, is a significant failure. The present conception suggests in contrast that it is no failure to downgrade method. While an elenctic method can be abstracted from Socrates’ search for knowledge as depicted in the early aporetic dialogues, it is misleading to use this method—which has been abstracted by the interpreter, was never articulated by Socrates, and was never associated by Socrates with his practice of philosophy—as a mark of the specific difference between Socrates and Plato. Similarly, while Husserl’s works, especially his early ones, contain a detailed reflection on method such that phenomenology has often been taken to be distinguished by method, method is actually subordinated and displaced in phenomenological inquiry. It is fidelity to what is given in a subjectobject correlation alongside the transcendental view on such correlation that is at issue: instance plus transcendental description. As noted above, Vlastos claims that the theory of forms is only possible through the substitution of the mathematical method for that of elenctic inquiry. What he proved, however, was only their co-emergence. It is likely that the difference between Socrates and Plato would be better marked by the difference in substantive philosophy. The difference in substantive philosophy consists in the two characteristic Platonic doctrines that emerge concidentally with, and are justified by, the turn to a mathematical model of knowledge: the theory of forms (established through the ontologization of essence) and the doctrine of immortality (based upon the theory of forms due to the higher reality of mind than

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body). Socrates, by contrast, is not committed to the doctrine of immortality. In the early dialogue Apology (40b-d) he refers to it merely as one of two possibilties and impossible to know, whereas in the middle dialogue Phaedo (63b, 64a, 114d) he presents it as a true doctrine. It is thus more likely that the doctrine of immortality provides the motive for the theory of forms, the mathematical method, the ontologization of essence and the theory of recollection that would account for them. Or, more precisely, that the move beyond “mere” matter to spirit emerged simultaneously in these methodical and ontological realms. The ontologization of essence is not primarily a failure of method but of a lack of courage, of the desire for the would-be philosopher to escape the lifeworld experience of change and death in order to reside in a static, changeless, impermeable world of ideas. Socratic phenomenology refuses the consolation of a world beyond change by insisting on the role of courage in the decision to become a philosopher—as Socrates also insisted in his debate with Protagoras (Plato 1996, 40, 49–51; Protagoras 349, 359–60). Socratic phenomenology is necessarily and actively embodied. The joy of Socrates is constant surprise, the necessity to begin every inquiry again with the appearance of a new interlocutor or new topic—which is identical to the principle of principles that defines phenomenology: “that everything originarily . . . offered to us in ‘intuition’ is to be accepted simply as what it is presented as being, but also only within the limits in which it is presented there” (Ideas1 44, emphasis altered). Philosophy is allied at its core to this newness, this lack of protection, this call to engage in the presence of the lived world as it is lived. 15.4 EXCESS AND NOTHING We have elaborated two senses of “ground” which appear in two “logics.” First, an ontological sense of grounding in being in which human activity and culture are traced back to natural excess. Second, an epistemological sense of rational grounding based in culture which accomplishes the transcendentalphenomenological reduction. While the reduction, and thus philosophy, is ontologically grounded on the privation of labor in culture and thereby on excess, the ontology of excess is accessible epistemologically only through the transcendental-phenomenological reduction. The ontological movement of natural fecundity or excess which is given form through social organization and technology and multiplied to become the surplus productivity of human labor, is a movement of life and its expansion, an overflowing of limits. Culture is the privation of the surplus productivity of labor, its liberation from the goal-orientation of labor, to

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reveal and expand the free expression and development of human perception, activity, and thought as not-labor. The reverse movement of recursivity in human experience moves in an opposite direction to ontological fecundity in tandem with the privative origin of culture to thematize previously unthematically lived experiences. Subject-object correlations are revealed by a stepping-back movement which at its apogee becomes the transcendentalphenomenological reduction. Each correlation is a thematic assemblage of Being, a “what-is” become thematic through recursion. The recursive movement can thus be characterized as no-thing by contrast, not an absence of Being but its privation, that has a certain affinity with death.8 The “and” between these two opposite movements of natural fecundity and recursive thematization originate from the unlimited, to use Anaximander’s term (apeiron). The “and” of “excess and nothing” is not really an “and” but prior to the division into opposites that characterizes any given lifeworld. The unlimited (apeiron) is perceived only in the liminal space between lived correlation and recursion, Being and transcendentality. When something is set-aside, put on the shelf, or put within brackets, there must be something which is thus set aside. That something is a subject-object correlation of “experiencing a thing in the world.” In every experience of the world, there is that in the world that is of the world that is experienced and there is the experiencing. The experiencing itself is often muted or invisible because experiencing is intentional in Husserl’s sense, that is to say, directed toward something (in the broadest sense in which experience brings an object of whatever ontological status before itself) in the world. In being so directed, the experiencing may be non-thematic. Nevertheless, an immediate and naïve reflection, in the sense of a reflection that remains within the presupposition of the world as existing independently, reveals that for every something in the world to appear as such, it must appear to an experiencer. Thus, the something that transcendental inquiry reflects upon is not a thing, nor the world within which the thing appears, nor the experiencing. It is all three in a mutually related structure, the correlation “experiencing a thing in the world.” The transcendental reduction puts out of play, suspends, puts within brackets, or sets aside precisely this structure of correlation. It therefore allows an investigation of the correlation itself as well as the various different forms in which the correlation is manifested. Insofar as a thing, in the broadest sense of an intentional object (noema) of any sort, always appears to an experiencer within a world, the existence of the entire correlation is set aside in the transcendental reduction. What is “reduced” is precisely the independent or presupposed ontological status of any part of the correlation, or the structure of correlation itself. After the transcendental-phenomenological reduction,

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the correlation presents itself as a three-part structure of experiencing-thingworld without ontological status. Prior to the reduction, the experiencing and the world are not things in that they are not the objects of thematic consciousness. The experiencing is not thematic and is only made so by a second but still naïve, in the sense of pre-transcendental, reflection that shows that the thing only appears as a thing when it appears to an experience. The world is not a thing because it is a usually unthematic horizon behind the thing. As background behind a thematic object, or a wider horizon shading of to encompass the world as a whole, the world allows the thing to stand forth but is not itself a thing. Nevertheless, the experiencing and the world, as non-thematic correlates to the thing, appear in and through the thing. In this sense the thing remains the organizing feature of the structure of correlation. The transcendental reduction does not appeal to the no-thingness of the experiencing and the world in the sense that they are not thinglike within the structure of correlation. They remain thinglike within the correlation in the sense that they appear within the correlation due to the organizing feature of intentional directedness toward a thing. They are thinglike in a derived sense, as it were, even though they are not things. The natural, pre-philosophical world can only be defined ex post facto by the philosopher as a world purportedly lacking the call from transcendentality. It is a step toward thematization of that call but it could not really be absent within a given lifeworld without that lifeworld being closed to the access to transcendentality that seems essential to being human as such. It would mean a cultural-civilizational world in which the meaning and value inherent to established practices is the only claim to meaning and value present in that world—a pure immanence. The practice of philosophy has constructed such a conception of the “natural world” as lacking access to transcendentality on the basis of its own access to transcendentality in order to clarify that such access is the very condition of philosophy and that, in that sense, philosophy is the practice of being human as such. In suspending the ontological positing, the transcendental reduction succeeds in bringing the whole structure of correlation into view. The thing is considered not as an ontological reality of whatever sort but as a phenomenon whose only “reality” is in being that toward which an experience is directed. The previously echo-like secondary thingness of experiencing and world is suspended such that they may be investigated in their own right—though not forgetting that their appearance is such only through the correlation. The object of transcendental reflection is the three-part correlation in its totality. Therefore, what we may call “transcendentality itself” (which Husserl called the “transcendental ego”) is no-thing. Nothing is the “standpoint” of transcendentality because it is not a standpoint but that from which all standpoints

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appear as phenomena. A standpoint, as meant here, is the situation or location that is inherent in any concrete correlation where the experiencing-thingworld structure applies.9 Transcendentality may thus be characterized as Nothing, as a withdrawing from any correlation in order to describe it as such. Better, it is a “making into nothing” or a “nothingizer.” The transcendentalphenomenological reduction is the practice of Nothing. From this nothing all things come, not in an ontological sense but in the sense of being a possible object of experience. The philosopher inhabits and practices this nothing and thus the correlation experiencing-thing-world appears to the philosopher in its entirety. When we speak of “transcendentality as such,” we mean this practice of Nothing. While philosophy enters the realm of death, or Nothing as not-Being, it is not thereby the practice of dying as such. Socratic phenomenology operates at the point at which transcendentality reaches back toward the lifeworld. Indeed, in this liminal passage between lifeworld correlations and transcendental nothingness are situated the most essential practices of philosophy: the recursive practice that culminates in the transcendentalphenomenological reduction as a withdrawal from postulations of Being and the Socratic practice of looking back from and acting within the lifeworld from transcendentality. Philosophy takes leave of the ordinary or natural world and aims toward an extra-natural origin. Then arrives the crucial issue of what sort of relation this other world has to the world which the philosopher retrospectively names as the natural world. Plato used the image of the cave and the sun to speak of the ascent from shadows into the light and spoke of the philosopher’s necessity to return to the cave as being compelled or forced (Republic 539e). It would seem that the philosopher as philosopher has no motive to return. The compulsion might be interpreted as fear—the fear that the philosopher will be put to death by the many as was Socrates—in which case the politics of the return will be confined to safeguarding the well-being of the philosopher. Or it may be interpreted as pity for the many—which would open up the way for a Christian, or otherwise charitable, Platonism. There are no doubt many other interpretations of the motive for return but there is no explanation given by Plato himself. For Hegel, the inverted world is a supersensible world above the world of sensuous perception such as the unchanging law of the constant changes in the sensuous world. This is overcome when we overcome this separation of change and stasis by understanding that the inverted world is not simply other than the sensuous world. The inverted world contains the sensuous world as its inversion. “It is itself and its opposite in one unity. Only thus is it difference as inner difference, or difference in its own self, or difference as an infinity” (Hegel 1979, 99). Thus it is inversion and reversion that

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must be thought by the philosopher, or contradiction, which means that the very process of creation of the other world is also the dissolution of its otherness. There is therefore no separate problem of return for the philosopher in Hegel and more than in Plato. For Husserl, the duality of lifeworld and transcendental ego returns effectively from transcendentality to the clarification of the meaning and value inherent in the practices of the lifeworld but it consistently fails to provide a motive for the transcendental-phenomenological reduction in the lifeworld. It takes philosophy as given, tracing it back to it reformulation in the Renaissance and to its Greek institution and in this sense fails describe its origin. In consequence, neither does Husserl give account for intervention in the given lifeworld even though his own intervention in writing the Crisis aims at “the indispensable task of philosophy: humanity’s responsibility for itself” as Fink expressed it in the title he gave to the fifth and concluding Part of the Crisis (Fink in C 400). Socratic phenomenology answers the question of the philosopher’s motive for return by clarifying that transcendentality is Nothing and that the philosopher as living human must always partake in living subject-object correlations. The re-immersion of transcendentality into a given cultural-civilizational world is the condition for the recovery of meaning and value and the displacement of the regime of value from a monopolization of the representation of value. Transcendentality as such is without limitation to any form of representation or any cultural-civilizational lifeworld. It is glimpsed through the horizon of one’s lifeworld and becomes active within that lifeworld through a Socratic intervention. Only through such re-immersion does transcendentality encounter meaning and value in lived experience. Transcendentality as such is withdrawal from any subject-object correlation in which meaning and value are imbedded. The limit of such withdrawal is Nothing. The focus of Part IV of our text on the “paradox of subjectivity” has brought us to this formulation of the ancient problem of Being and Nothing: Being as ontological excess that is reversed in the privative negation of labor that is the incipience of culture. Culture as recursivity whose apogee is transcendentality as Nothing. The “and” of Being and Nothing is the unlimited apeiron whose limitation provides the source of the separation between Being and Nothing and thus the origin of lifeworlds. Our contemporary epoch is defined by the opening of a world in conflict between planetary technology and place-based Indigeneity through the limitation of the apeiron. The philosopher can name the unlimited but cannot live there and must thereby return from this naming to the correlations which structure lived experience in order to act within them through a Socratic manifestation of transcendentality.

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NOTES 1.  One may sympathize with Heidegger’s rejection of the terminology of “values” because it implies that a value is somehow added onto a thing and not co-experienced in the presence of the thing itself which is the meaning with which I use it here (BT 91–2). Nevertheless, attempting to subsume value entirely within Being eliminates the sense in which value transcends its instantiation in a given lifeworld. Not only is such a position ethically irresponsible but it constitutes a failure to connect access to transcendentality to the recovery of meaning and value—a failure that is the most egregious error of Heidegger’s philosophy. 2.  Vlastos’ argument makes a distinction between the Socrates of the early elenctic dialogues (Apology, Charmides, Crito, Euthyphro, Gorgias, Hippias Minor, Ion, Laches, Protagoras, Republic I) and the Socrates of the middle dialogues (Cratylus, Phaedo, Symposium, Republic II-X, Phaedrus, Parmenides, Theaetetus), referring also to a transitional period between early and middle dialogues (Euthydemus, Hippias Major, Lysis, Menexenus, Meno) and a late period (Timaeus, Critias, Sophist, Politicus, Philebus, Laws). While we refer, for the sake of simplicity, simply to a distinction between Socrates and Plato, Vlastos’ rendering pays careful homage to the fact that both Socrates are artifacts of Plato’s dialogues. The simplicity of my terminology does not, in the present context, obscure the detailed point being made by Vlastos (Vlastos 1991, 46–7; cf. Vlastos 1994, additional note 1.1, p. 135 where the transitional period is not yet distinguished from the early one). 3. As we have argued in detail elsewhere, it is the metaphysical theory of the forms of Plato’ssecond period that is the proper object of critique by Nietzsche and Heidegger. Their critique of metaphysics does not touch the practice of philosophy undertaken in Socratic form (Angus 2005c). 4.  Vlastos has pointed out that, in distinction from the middle dialogues where reference to method is common, the early dialogues make no reference to a special method of philosophical inquiry. “They are constrained by rules that he does not undertake to justify,” that is to say, the question of method has become a thematic issue for Plato in the middle period. This is not to say that the Socrates of the early dialogues has no method, but only that its reflexive justification is not posed as an issue, that “Socrates’ inquiries display a pattern of investigation whose rationale he does not investigate” (Vlastos 1994, 1, 36). 5. Vlastos argues that “the irreconciliable difference between Socrates(E) and Socrates(M) could have been established by this criterion even if it had stood alone” (Vlastos 1991, 53 italics throughout removed). It is pertinent to my later argument for the non-priority of method that this major stand-alone criterion is that of the theory of forms not that of method. 6.  One might claim that Euthyphro is rushing off to withdraw his suit because he has, under Socrates’ influence, come to realize its injustice. This would not affect the point that I am making here since such a realization would also be predicated on the coincidence of not being able to give an account, not apprehending an account, and not being able to act as if an account were given.

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7.  Moreover, as Vlastos shows, there is a sense in which Plato’s theory of recollection is a solution to the grand assumption in elenctic inquiry that false beliefs can always be brought into conflict with true beliefs that the answerer holds. The answerer can never be entirely wrong in the conduct of one’s life, as it were, even if the answers to specific questions are (Vlastos 1994, 29). 8.  Eugen Fink was aware of this element of the transcendental-phenomenological reduction. His conception of mēontology was derived specifically from the transcendental reduction as a method of thematizing Being; his interpretation of its aspect as mēon was indebted to the work of Hermann Cohen (Bruzina, chapters 6 and 7). Nishida Kitarō had a similar conception. “From the above considerations, then, although we can maintain that absolute nothingness is the ultimate transcendental ground of our experience, it cannot be called a “subjectivity” that is said to “constitute” objects. For absolute nothingness is the transcendental ground that determines reality in complete self-negation” (Ishihara 2019, 76). The conception of phenomenology expressed in this chapter can rightly be termed a form of mēontology or nothingness, where “meontic philosophy is not a flight into the Nothing but rather fidelity to the world” (Fink, quoted in Bruzina 383). 9.  The restriction of the concrete ego to a constituted subject-object correlation and the characterization of transcendentality as nothing, meaning also not-an-ego, is the answer to the criticism that Jean-Paul Sartre mentions—that phenomenology becomes an escapist idealism by placing the “I” beyond worldly involvements (Sartre 1957, 105). However, his characterization of transcendentality as an “impersonal spontaneity” does not adequately describe it as a product of reflection, as we have done (Sartre 1957, 98). The spontaneity of which Sartre speaks is to be found, in contrast, in the excess of natural fecundity, which is an ontological fact and not a reflective product.

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Concluding Remark to Part IV

Part IV of our text, in contrast to Husserl’s anticipated encyclopediac critical survey of the sciences in their relation to the lifeworld, was a tracing back of scientific knowledge-claims to their lifeworld origins. Such tracing back allows us to thematize both the origin of philosophy in the transcendentalphenomenological reduction and Socratic interventions in the lifeworld that the access to philosophy (transcendentality) makes possible. The transcendental-phenomenological reduction is a reflection on the recursivity of experience as such. Every “reality” is a subject-object correlation that can be reflexively thematized once its ontological claims are suspended. The decision to become a philosopher is enacted within a given subjectivity as a step-by-step recursive reflection on that subjectivity and its world. We were therefore required to follow through not only the origin of contemporary philosophy in the crisis of the European sciences, as did Husserl, but the origin of philosophy in the individual journey of that subjectivity. The philosopher is not only a “functionary of humanity” but an individual subjectivity involved in a search for meaning and value that may motivate the decision to become a philosopher. Experienced “things” of all kinds are experienced within a lifeworld, which is a cultural-civilizational form constituted by its horizon. The relevant horizon for Husserl was “Europe” due to its Renaissance institution of formal-mathematical reason. We have shown the limits of Europe as the ground for a recovery of meaning and value and pointed toward a dialogue between cultural-civilizational forms as the next historical stage of philosophical inquiry. The planetary event that has emerged in our own time, which has become our philosophical task (that we must undertake with full consciousness of its risk), is the confrontation of scientific-technological subsumption with place-based knowledge as exemplified in Indigeneity. In this confrontation, ecology has a crucial role as the special science crucially situated at the cultural heritage of excess in the dialogue between culture-civilizations. 483

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Part V

SELF-RESPONSIBILITY AS TELEOLOGICALLY GIVEN IN TRANSCENDENTAL PHENOMENOLOGY

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Self-Responsibility for Humanity and for Oneself

The transcendental-phenomenological reduction is the infinitization of ordinary doubt as it occurs in perception, action and thought within the determinate projects of a given lifeworld. Infinity is the “and so on . . .” that can be perceived as an interminable iteration performed upon at minimum two examples. Two cases in which subject-object correlations are reflected upon are sufficient for infinitization. That is not to say that every time two such cases are performed the transcendental reduction is necessarily performed. There is not, nor can there be, any necessity for such performance which requires thematization of the “as such” of the “and so on . . .” and a decision to follow such thematization through all its consequences. Transcendentality is in this sense unworldly since it shows the possibility of the manifestation of lifeworlds. Philosophy is not only transcendentality but requires access to and return from transcendentality in a given lifeworld. As access it provides the motive for the transcendental reduction—becoming philosophical. As return it becomes Socratic phenomenology as an intervention into its lifeworld— enacting philosophy through self-responsibility. 16.1 ETHICS OF RULES VERSUS ETHIC OF RESPONSIBILITY Every form of life within a lifeworld requires, enacts and enforces an ethical code which governs ordinary activity and defines certain activities as extraordinary, unacceptable, or illegal. Perhaps the word “code” is too restrictive. While there is a certain coherence to the ethical rules existing in a given lifeworld, so that they do not produce flagrant contradictions, neither is it the case that the given set of rules is utterly consistent. There may be grey areas 487

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or overlapping jurisdictions within a relatively coherent body of rules of conduct, some of which have the sanction of law while others do not. A large part of our childhood is given over to learning these rules and the sanctions pertinent to each one. It is by no means arbitrary to think that the subject-matter of ethics deals with rules for conduct. As our apprenticeship in following rules comes to maturity, we learn to take responsibility for the choice and application of rules themselves. One can ask what rules are appropriate, when they are appropriate, how they interact, which rules predominate over others, and so forth. It is a key part of philosophy that one approaches rules of conduct not merely as a follower but also as a formulator and legislator of rules. Thus, rule-following gives way to self-responsibility for the rules and, at times, must break the rules. Rules are, on the whole, handed down from the past because they have worked well enough thus far. They are traditional within a given lifeworld. They are formulated in the third-person in the grammatical sense; they pertain not to me as a specific individual but to me insofar as I am any adult, any teacher, any member of the relevant class. In a degenerate time, to use Nietzsche’s terminology, the rules that we have are not experienced as compelling but as merely imposed by power. They are not authentic—that is to say, one experiences rules as impositions on one’s behavior not as necessary guideposts in forming it correctly. They are not indisputable; nowadays as soon as someone says that a certain ethical experience is commanding or universal someone else will immediately reply with reference to some group that does not think so. This is the moral relativism which, however problematic as theory, is the fundamental background ethical experience of our time due to the crisis of meaning and value combined with increased awareness of the difference between cultural-civilizational lifeworlds. In this situation, the limitation of any rule-oriented ethics becomes both palpable and concrete. No rule can have written within it when it is a good moment to apply, or suspend, this rule. No rule can say when, in a case of conflict between two rules, which rule should preclude the other. Since rules are prescribed universally and in the third person, they never contain the conditions for their own application to here-and-now situations. Consequently, the question of whether any of the rules validly apply here-and-now often extends to a universal skepticism that rules—indeed ethics outright—are nothing more than projections of power: the problem of nihilism. In Nietzsche’s words “that the highest values devalue themselves” (Nietzsche 1967, translation slightly altered). To a rule-oriented ethic can be contrasted an ethics of responsibility. An ethic of self-responsibility is formulated in the first person in the present tense. It is precisely concerned with the question “why should I in this hereand-now situation act in such-and-such a way?” Thus, it also must address

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the question “who am I?” Consequently, it cannot avoid the question of why should I be ethical at all: should I respond to my desires, my appetites, my fears, or should I focus in clarity upon the question “what should I do?” It must address the question of nihilism, not by proposing a rule, but by confronting my own existence and giving a reason, an apology, for answering in the way that I do. An ethics of responsibility is not concerned with rules as such and, indeed, if pursued with some diligence cannot help but undermine an ethic of rules since it “is not a matter of formulae. It is a matter of maieutics” (Huertas-Jourda 1970, 170)—that is to say, of Socratic inquiry. Self-responsibility is the ethic of philosophical inquiry and its practice in confronting the rule-following inherent in lifeworld practices. 16.2 THE FUNCTIONARY OF HUMANITY AND THE EXISTENTIAL JOURNEY The role of philosophy in generating self-responsibility both for the individual philosopher and for the civilizational-culture itself depends upon the recognition of philosophy as an anti-traditional force. “If he is to be one who thinks for himself . . . he must have the insight that all the things he takes for granted are prejudices, that all prejudices are obscurities arising out of a sedimentation of tradition . . .” (C 72). The task of philosophy is to uncover the assumptions inherent in practical activity and bring them to clarity. Its goal is thus the replacement of tradition with knowledge, the replacement of the domination of the past with an insight grounded in the present. Seeingfor-oneself what is manifested, letting the manifestation manifest itself as it is, according to the limits within which it is given: this is the ethos of the philosopher. It rests on a decision taken by the philosopher as a concrete subjectivity (at the level of human individual or cultural-civilizational world) not simply to swim within the current of practical activities, accepting their sedimented meanings as such, nor to simply accept the traditional legitimations of such sedimented meanings, but to accept only what presents itself, as it presents itself, within the limits within which it presents itself. “Self-reflection serves in arriving at a decision and here this naturally means immediately carrying on with the task that is truly ours . . . set for us all in the present” (C 72). Such a decision tears the philosopher away from both practical activities and tradition as sources of validity. Of course, the philosopher still lives within the world of practice, tradition and power but the decision that institutes the philosopher as philosopher deprives these of any claim to be sources of insight. They become merely factual components of the philosopher’s situation. The decision to become a philosopher occurs

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with the transcendental reduction whose “epochē creates a unique sort of philosophical solitude which is the fundamental methodical requirement for a truly radical philosophy” such that the philosopher is saddled with both transcendentality and a concrete ego and the difficult problem of their difference and identity (C 188). The self-responsibility instituted by philosophy is directed both to “humanity” (which we have explicated as the dialogue between culturalcivilizational worlds) and to the individual concrete ego. At the end of the first part of Crisis Husserl claims that “the quite personal responsibility [persönliche Verantwortung] of our own true being as philosophers, our inner personal vocation, bears within itself at the same time the responsibility [Verantwortung] for the true being of humanity” (C 17; K 15, translation altered). While Husserl uses the word “responsibility” here, though qualifying it in one case as “personal,” the more common word for this concept is self-responsibility (Selbstverantwortung)—whose recursive component is important (EP 193-202; VL 283; K 329). It is the reflection of self (as reflecting) upon self (as constituted in a subject-object correlation) that is the distinctively philosophical sense of such self-responsibility. Philosophical reflection creates a communication between these selves in different thematized subject-correlations and routes them towards their highest unity in transcendentality. It is this recursive communication that makes possible the investigation of the crisis of European sciences as both a cultural crisis for humanity and an existential crisis for individuals. The philosophical call constitutes and enacts a new form of selfresponsibility which derives from what we may call the communicability, or embeddedness, of the various levels of subjectivity with each other. The recovery of subjectivity upon which the healing function of phenomenology rests terminates at this revealing juncture: all the subjectivities of subjectobject correlations communicate with each other through the thematizing recursion that culminates in transcendentality. Transcendentality is the ultimate field of possibility through which the subjectivities of concrete subjectivities enact themselves with self-responsibility. It is one and the same philosopher who must account for its existential journey to philosophy and the culturalcivilizational crisis that demands philosophy. These communicating subjectivities are revealed in their difference and relation by the decision to become a philosopher and the attachment to the lived world in its particular instances that motivate Socratic intervention.

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16.3 PHENOMENOLOGY BEYOND THE GNOSEOLOGICAL HORIZON For Husserl, the decision instituting a philosopher was exclusively a decision for knowledge as such. Knowledge, science, was the essence and ideal of philosophy. In his programmatic essay Philosophy as Rigorous Science (1911), which summed up the ethos of his earlier researches into the foundations of arithmetic and logic, Husserl criticized the temptation to slip into ideals from outside the theoretical sphere in response to demands from the social and historical situation of the philosopher. Already aware of the “lack of meaning” into which scientific civilization has fallen, he counselled patience in the face of pressing demands, insisting that “for the sake of time, we must not sacrifice eternity” and that “only science can definitively overcome the distress that has its source in science” (PRS 141, translation altered; PSW 337). The decision that turns the philosopher toward insight resting exclusively on a seeing-for-oneself initiated for Husserl an impersonal seeing, a seeing valid for anyone who looked without prejudice and was, in that sense, science. The rigors of science must prevail of the concerns of the moment. Indeed, the rigors of science were all that, in the end, could adequately address the concerns of the moment. This ethos developed and radicalized in Husserl’s work, but it was never abandoned. As we have seen, by the time of his last work on The Crisis of European Sciences, he was more concerned with the striving for knowledge than knowledge itself, more intensely aware of the waiting that the impersonal edifice of science demanded. He described his own “plight” of “existential contradiction” as a “faith in the possibility of philosophy as a task, that is, in the possibility of universal knowledge, [which] is something we cannot let go” (C 17). Universal knowledge presupposes that the separate contributions made by individual researches can be summed-up, as it were, into an scientific architectonic in which every piece has its place. It is, as Husserl recognized, an infinite task, an idea (in the Kantian sense) to which modern science and philosophy contribute but which one will never see entire. The idea of a scientific architectonic, which Husserl took over from the founding of modern philosophy in the Renaissance, grounds the presupposition in Husserl’s work that the crisis of the European sciences can and must be overcome by a new metaphysics. Metaphysics in this sense of “one all-encompassing science, the science of the totality of what is” (C 8) has come into crisis in our time and can, in Husserl’s view, only be overcome by a similar, phenomenologically grounded knowledge of the totality of being. This encyclopediac conception of phenomenology implies, on the grounds of

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the exposition of this text as a whole, that Husserl’s conception of overcoming the crisis is limited by a gnoseological horizon which must be abandoned in favor of a Socratic conception of phenomenology as the essence of its selfresponsibility for humanity. When the essence of knowledge has been recognized as the striving for knowledge, as Husserl does in the Crisis, such that the actual edifice is never complete, to be asked to postpone infinitely concerns embedded in practical involvements can be maintained without contradiction, only at the price of severing philosophy from ever addressing practical concerns. Postponing practical involvements for the certainty of science is only viable if the knowledge will one day arrive. Even so, one may well wonder whether it will arrive in time. Socratic phenomenology recognizes the necessity for action before all the scientific evidence is in. Gnoseology consists in an ethic in which only knowledge itself is of worth to philosophy, no longer knowledge that will eventually also serve the needs of practical life. Such a striving for knowledge for its own sake, while not without its own grandeur, is cut off from self-responsibility, which requires that the striving for knowledge return to orient practical action. For this reason, Husserl’s phenomenology tragically succumbs to the crisis of European humanity that it intended to diagnose and address—loss of the meaning of science for human life. Here phenomenology encounters again the basic problem of philosophy articulated by Socrates: how to act when one’s activity is structured by the desire for knowledge but without knowledge itself. This is the point at which Husserl’s encyclopediac conception of philosophy encounters its gnoseological horizon. The characterization of Husserl’s phenomenology as a gnoseology emerges as a critical circumscription of its orientation to the theory of knowledge. The term has been deployed by Emil Lask and Jan Patočka, for example, in order to distinguish the orientation toward a theory of knowledge, or judgment, from an aletheological orientation toward manifestation (Crowell 2001, 39, 50). Patočka uses the term ‘gnoseology’ specifically to refer to “a theory of cognition” which does “not speak about manifestation as such” (Patočka 2002, 38). However, it is not just the difference of these two orientations that is at issue. It is the dependence of a theory of judgment on the manifestation of the world and the things within it that is paramount. Thus, Patočka argues that “the foundation of manifesting itself, the foundation of the manifestable—that the world not only is but also shows itself—does not result from any activity, does not result from this activity of judgment. The action of judgment must tie into this primeval fact, to the primeval situation that the world shows itself” (Patočka 2002, 39). While our use of the term gnoseology draws from this characterization of its dependence on manifestation, usually drawn from Heidegger’s criticism of Husserl, it actually requires a more specific rendition.

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Husserl’s gnoseology can be illustrated by a passage from paragraph 50 of Formal and Transcendental Logic where his concern is, as the title suggests, “the broadening of the concept of sense [Sinn] to cover the whole positional sphere.” Remarking that the entire sphere of doxic reflection is oriented toward a thematic sense [Sinn], or meaning, of some sort—whether it be perceptual, valuational, or practical—he claims that “identifying synthesis in the sphere of judgment has as its analogues identifying synthesis in the other positional spheres. . . . Thus, the formal logic of certainties can not only be enriched by taking in the form of modalities, but can also absorb, in a certain manner, the modalities of emotion and volition” (FTL 121). Husserl’s claim is that the various positionalities of the doxic sphere can be incorporated into a theory of judgment because “any extra-doxic sense can at any time become the theme of a doxic act and thus enter the doxic sphere—and, in particular, the apophantic sphere” (FTL 121). He compares this to modalized judgments of the sort of possibility, probability, etc. and claims that this is similar to the case of the beautiful or the good. In short, Husserl claims that aesthetic and moral positionings, as well as practical judgments, can be treated as modalities of judgments of certainty. This “opens up the possibility of broadening the idea of formal logic to include formal axiology and a formal theory of practice” (FTL 121). Husserl’s explicit concern in this passage is to extend the theory of judgment to include the entire sphere of doxic positings of whatever sort and thus to take the theory of judgment beyond straightforwardly logical concerns toward those traditionally designated as aesthetic, moral, and practical. Let us make two observations about this move, which is fundamental to his late, critical conception of phenomenology. One, the extension of the model of judgment, through an enlarged conception of modalization, to cover doxic consciousness as a whole is asserted to apply “in a certain sense.” Other modalities can be treated as if they were doxic positionings, but this qualification of “in a certain sense” is not clarified any further. It is not asked whether anything is lost, or transformed in a problematic manner, by this treatment. Second, a more subtle issue concealed by the focus on the enlarging of judgment is obscured. It is not asked whether these other modalities of doxic positioning which are manifested in phenomena of will, morality and beauty might contain different relations to the extra-doxic or pre-doxic spheres or whether such a relation might be constitutive of the fact that this enlargement pertains only “in a certain sense.” To put it polemically and thus one-sidedly: The broadening of the concept of judgment still begins from the concept of judgment modelled on science and fails to ask whether its description of the doxic sphere in these terms does indeed render other phenomena to be like

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judgments in all relevant respects and thus miss other, perhaps at times more relevant, respects in which they differ. Husserl’s broadening of the concept of judgment thus serves (in the absence of any critique based on other cognate investigations of volition, morality, and practice) not only to disparage specific differences between these ‘modalities,’ but also to render irrelevant the issue of their relations to extradoxic or pre-doxic experience. The use of the term gnoseology by Lask and Patočka pertains solely to the Heideggerian claim that Husserl’s phenomenology was restricted to the theory of cognition and obscured the dependence of judgment on manifestation. It amounts thus to a straightforward assertion of the superiority of the standpoint of Being and Time. In the present context of an exploration of the ethic of philosophy, even the dependence of a theory of judgment on manifestation does not comprehend fully the phenomenon that we designate as the “gnoseological horizon” of Husserl’s phenomenology. Our use of the term gnoseology is intended to capture more specifically the sense in which Husserl’s phenomenology can be said to be circumscribed with respect to the ethic of philosophical inquiry. We use it to refer to the function of a theory of knowledge that has come to substitute for a connection to action. This substitution occurs both through the “broadening” whereby specific characteristics of practice are left uninvestigated by the expanded theory of judgment and also through the absence of investigation of the doxic sphere, including these specific characteristics, to that of manifestation. The present claim is not, like that of Lask and Patočka, the global one that judgment depends on manifestation. It is specific to the ethic of philosophy. Selfresponsibility, when it is based on a striving for knowledge rather than its possession, cannot fail to thematize the relation between this striving and the requirements of practice. Without such clarification the expectation that the striving for knowledge leads to self-responsibility is groundless. This groundless belief is the gnoseological horizon of Husserl’s phenomenology. The groundless belief is that an encycopedia of the sciences could be sufficiently complete to determine the demands of practice in itself. It is, of course, deeply rooted in European philosophy prior to phenomenology. What is important here is that it is this gnoseological horizon that prevents Husserl’s phenomenology from resolving the crisis of the European sciences, a task which it set itself, and from which emerged its ethic of philosophical practice. Not that philosophy can ever be severed from the striving for knowledge. Gnoseology, in my usage, does not refer simply to the theory of cognition, but rather consists in putting off achieving a productive relationship between the striving of knowledge and all other human pursuits until the striving is satisfied. As we have seen with reference to the five Socratic virtues (in the previous chapter) this is a failure of courage. The arrival of complete and coherent

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knowledge is always delayed and philosophical intervention in the lifeworld is required prior to its arrival. Philosophical exploration of the concept of the lifeworld certainly does not mean the abandonment of the striving for knowledge but it does mean that such striving occurs in a world in which meaning and value cannot be reduced to knowledge. Gnoseology consists in the denial and denigration of practical concerns within philosophy such that they can be addressed only unphilosophically as merely practical without any relation to the striving for knowledge. The task, therefore, is to think practical concerns in fundamental relationship with the striving for knowledge such that they can be addressed from within the striving itself without awaiting the arrival of completed knowledge. This is the Socratic core of the ethic of philosophy whose practice we have attempted to demonstrate in Part IV. 16.4 FROM APEIRON TO THE RIVEN SPACE Non-encyclopediac, Socratic phenomenology occurs at the point of re-incursion of transcendentality into a given lifeworld. Socratic phenomenology is concerned with circumspect action by the philosopher in the face of the meanings and values of a given lifeworld. Such given meanings can be subjected to elenctic dialectic. Transcendentality itself, however, though it is only accessible through the horizon of a given lifeworld, is the non-limited apeiron from which cultural-civilizational worlds are made. Lifeworlds may be subject to a slip into metaphysics, whereby an assumed ontology of essence grounds a hierarchy of goods reaching toward a spiritual, bodiless, myth of a real world behind the experience of motility and decay. Since Socratic phenomenology is tied to the critique of metaphysics due to its refusal to postulate such an “Egyptianism,” the space of manifestation which discloses a given lifeworld must be understood in other terms than a Platonic hierarchy of Being. The nonmetaphysical space of manifestation is a space riven by opposites in which neither opposite can be put above another so that the other might be termed lacking in Being. Thus, a critique of metaphysics as hierarchical ascendence can justify a Socratic practice within the riven space of opposites opened from the unlimited (apeiron) to make a world. The riven space of manifestation comes from the apeiron as a lifeworld of such opposites and it is within such a space that Socratic phenomenology must perform its circumspect action—which is necessarily without the comfort of a religious or metaphysical type of a world of ideas beyond appearances with which philosophy has often consoled itself. It is a world of Heraclitus’ opposites. Our contemporary world is the riven space between planetary technology and place-based Indigeneity manifested through the limitation of the apeiron.

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Heidegger’s shift of attention within phenomenology toward Heraclitean oppositions stems from a rejection of a Platonic hierarchy of Being. It grounds his subsequent (1931–2) argument that Western metaphysics began with Plato’s transformation of truth from unhidden-ness into “the correctness of apprehending and asserting” (Heidegger 1998, 177).1 The conception of truth as unhidden-ness, aletheia, in early Greek philosophy was replaced by truth as idea by Plato. As idea, truth is a constant presence that is given over to subjective representation, determination and assertion as a way of thinking about being rather than as a mode of being itself. Nevertheless, in a certain way Plato has to hold onto “truth” as still a characteristic of beings, because a being, as something present, has being precisely by appearing, and being brings unhiddenness with it. But at the same time, the inquiry into what is unhidden shifts in the direction of the appearing of the visible form, and consequently toward the act of seeing that is ordered to this visible form, and toward what is correct and toward the correctness of seeing (Heidegger 1998, 177).

This is the ambiguity of a transition in which something unsaid structures what is said in such a manner as to leave a trace within what is said. Given his critique of metaphysics as a shift from coming-into-presence to full presence under the light of the idea, Heidegger proceeded to uncover the prior meaning of being in early Greek philosophy. From the many discussions of Greek philosophy and art in Introduction to Metaphysics, we may here single out Heraclitus’ fragment 532 which reads “War is the father of all and the king of all, and some it shows as gods, others as men; some he makes slaves, others free” (Kirk and Raven 1966, 195). The first word, translated as “war” by Kirk and Raven, is the Greek word “polemos” that can also be translated as strife, conflict, confrontation or struggle. We may use the word “strife” as the general term, because “war” can be misleading. It is not that strife cannot be expressed at times as war, for it can. It is that strife is not always war, or, as Heidegger said, “the polemos named here is . . . not war in the human sense” but “allows what essentially unfolds to step apart in opposition” (Heidegger 2000, 47). The paradox of fragment 53 requires one to think together both “what essentially unfolds,” or the apeiron, transcendentality, and “opposition,” or the riven space of manifestation. Strife is father and king, origin and ruler, that which holds all together in tension. This holding together creates division into relationships which are mutually defined and thus cannot exist separately. Two examples, perhaps more than examples, are given of such relationships: the division and relationship between gods and humans and the division and relationship between slaves and free humans. Division between divine and mortal beings, given

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first, and division between humans, given second, on the ground of that which makes them most human—freedom or its absence. All humans are distinct from gods and are human in their relation to the gods. Free humans are distinct in that they give the rule to themselves and are not given it by another. Strife is the name for this distinction and relationship that stands at the origin and rules the course of our lives. When Heidegger interpreted Heraclitus in 1935, he began from phusis understood as “the emergent self-upraising, the self-unfolding that abides in itself” in which “rest and movement are closed and opened up from an originary unity” (Heidegger 2000, 47). This originary unity, phusis, names coming-to-presence, manifestation in its manifesting, or Being. He then translated fragment 53 in this way: “Confrontation is indeed for all (that comes to presence) the sire (who lets emerge), but (also) for all the preserver that holds sway. For it lets some appear as gods, others as human beings, some it produces (sets forth) as slaves, but others as the free” (Heidegger 2000, 47). Polemos is thus the unifying division-and-relation in coming-topresence which “allows those that struggle to originate as such in the first place,” which “first projects and develops the un-heard, the hitherto un-said and un-thought” which is later “sustained by the creators, by the poets, thinkers and statesmen” such that they “capture in this work the world that is thereby opened up” which becomes authentic history (Heidegger 2000, 47). Authentic history is the becoming of a world originally opened as strife. It is in and through strife that manifestation manifests. Later in the text, Heidegger returns to polemos to remind us that confrontation “sets the essential and the unessential, the high and the low, into their limits and makes them manifest” (Heidegger 2000, 87). The divergence from Husserl could not now be more complete. Instead of an encyclopediac, gnoseological accumulation of knowledge of manifested entities toward infinity, we have a manifesting that sets forth humans as humans, grounds the activity of creators, and opens up the authentic history of a world.3 What becomes of human action in the world that opens up into strife? Knowledge does not simply add up, but is drawn into the opposition between humans. Action is not simply human, but is drawn into this same opposition. Humanistic education, to the same extent, inhabits the world riven by tensions and cannot ascend above human conflict. Human activities become factors in the oppositions that define our world, that stem from the strife presiding over its inception. But beyond this, human activity and philosophy can attempt to sustain and address the strife itself, to speak of the origin and ruler that sets forth our world, thereby to address “what essentially unfolds.” If Being is manifested as polemos, what possibilities remain for philosophy? If being is manifested as strife, then it appears that the striving for knowledge

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in philosophy, and in all humanities education insofar as philosophy is crucial for the humanities, cannot be summed up into an acquisition for all, but will rather enter into the strife itself, and even perhaps be consumed in that strife. It is this question that we must consider by coming finally to the embodied ethic of philosophy as circumspection. Is philosophy drawn into the strife between opposites that is opened up in manifestation? Has it become, will it become, can it do no more than become, agonistic? Since the transformation of Greek paideia into Roman tradition under the reign of a commanding and shared origin, and continued into modernity as a faith in the accumulation of scientific knowledge, it has attempted to mute, even stand above, conflict regarding this origin, reducing strife to the best result that contributes to the continuing re-appropriation of the origin. This Roman transformation was prepared for by Plato and Aristotle who represented the end of Greek philosophy not its culmination. Strife in Heraclitus’ sense was rotated, as it were, from a horizontal conflict within which all human reality takes place (the riven space), to a vertical “divided line” in which appearance has a lesser reality than truth (through the ontologization of essence). Conflict can subsequently appear as a prelude to a passage upward in which conflict is in principle, teleologically, surpassed. This upward goal, the pure being contemplated by the philosopher, is matched by the Roman origin that holds philosophical ascesis within tradition. Heidegger’s rediscovery of polemos in the manifestation of being destructures this articulation of philosophy, presence and tradition. It should lead us to ask why, and whether, we expect the humanities to lead us toward a reconciliation of conflict and the re-appropriation of tradition. It demands that we confront the ubiquity of human conflict in the world in which we teach and learn. While “humanism” is a term that dates only from 1808, the root term humanitas goes back further (Snell 246). The connection of humanism to the end of polemos is made in Heidegger’s Letter on Humanism. Humanitas, explicitly so called, was first considered and striven for in the age of the Roman Republic. Homo humanus was opposed to homo barbarus. Homo humanus here means the Romans, who exalted and honoured Roman virtus through the ‘embodiment’ of the paideia [education] taken over from the Greeks. These were the Greeks of the Hellenistic age, whose culture was acquired in the schools of philosophy. It was concerned with eruditio et institutio in bonas artes [scholarship and training in good conduct]. Paideia thus understood was translated as humanitas. The genuine romanitas of homo romanus consisted in such humanitas. We encounter the first humanism in Rome: it therefore remains in essence a specifically Roman phenomenon which emerges from the encounter of Roman civilization with the culture of late Greek civilization (Heidegger 1993, 244).

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Thus, the problem remains: how can a post-humanist conception of judgment resist the dissolution of philosophy into a sheer plurality of polemical jousts without a metaphysical hierarchy to hold human activity within bounds? Is the only alternative the humanist evasion of polemos (from which we cannot except Husserl’s gnoseology) or a post-humanist general rhetoric which abandons the question of truth? (Angus 2000a, chapter 8). There are two answers to this question. My first answer will be a simple “yes” to strife, or, perhaps more to the point, a “no” to the late Greek loss of polemos for presence, later transformed by the Roman commanding origin into tradition and humanitas. A negation: this traditional formation begun in late antiquity and persisting into modernity is an illusory escape from conflict that serves to hide the role that our institutions, including educational institutions, play in conflict. Every statement that one makes, including or even especially statements about the whole, enter into the strife of opposites which constitute the world. To expect otherwise is to dream of death with all the advantages of living. There is no escape from polemos and philosophy is wrongly understood if it is understood as such an escape, which is founded on a fixation with presence at the expense of coming-into-presence. Consider fragment 80, “One should know that polemos is universal and right is strife and everything comes about by strife and necessity” (Kirk and Raven 1966, 195; Freeman 1962, 30). Everything comes about by strife and is drawn into strife. Remember, Socrates was a warrior and referred in his Apology to the virtue of warriors as constitutive of philosophy (28d)—he needed courage to hold the other virtues together. Right, legitimacy, justice come into being by strife and are drawn into strife. Learning, knowledge, the humanities come into being by strife and are drawn into strife. Thus, the future of philosophy and the humanities is to be drawn into the strife with which our world presents us and if there is to be another, subsequent, world it will come from strife. Genuine philosophical teaching, we must conclude, does not teach one to stand above the strife but to enter into it with eyes wide open, to embrace it in the search for justice itself, to use one’s intelligence to determine what is the defining strife of one’s time. The second answer, which is different but neither retracts nor ameliorates the first, can perhaps be introduced through recalling Heraclitus’ fragment 67. “God is day-night, winter-summer, polemos-peace, satiety-hunger. He undergoes alteration in the way that fire, when it is mixed with spices, is named according to the scent of each of them” (Kirk and Raven 1966, 191; Freeman 1962, 29). The opposites which originate and hold sway over a world are God itself and even God is not simply self-same but changes in the way that fire changes with the admixture of spice, such that God is named according to this admixture, has different scents and a plurality of names. The second

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answer with respect to the strife of opposites, and the world brought forth by opposites, has to do with the fire that reigns in, and over, the strife. Fragment 66: “Fire, having come upon them, will judge and seize upon all things” (Freeman 1962, 29). Fire, which is mentioned many times in the fragments that remain from Heraclitus, is the clue to the logos which is said to be “common to all” (fragment 2) and so deep that “you could not in your going find the ends of the soul though you travelled the whole way” (fragment 45, Freeman 1962, 24, 27). God, fire, logos does not appear apart from polemos, as an escape from the universality and ubiquity of strife, but as the law of strife itself. We may hear an echo of this in the nineteenth century, as the metaphysics instituted by Plato began to be dismantled, when Karl Marx claimed that “labour is the living, form-giving fire . . . the transitoriness of things, as their formation by living time” (Gr 361). Fire is not normally form-giving, but form-destroying. To assert that it is form-giving is to discover form-giving in form-destroying and through form-destroying, which is to displace the primacy of form in favour of the strife from which form is made and into which it disappears. The second answer, in speaking of the universality and ubiquity of fire, in no way retracts the first answer that pulls philosophy, because it pulls all of human life, into strife. But it does add, and that which it adds, it adds in and through the human capacity to speak of the strife of opposites from within that strife, to speak of the fire even as we are consumed by it. In this resides the ecstasy of humans in their access to transcendentality. 16.5 A NECESSARY SELF-REFERENTIALITY Our final word will be to take issue even with Heraclitus. Fragment 130 asserts that “it is not proper to be so comic that you yourself appear comic” (Freeman 1962, 34). Comedy, like other effects, is not equally visible from all locations within the disposition of opposites, but, from the perspective of my writing-desk, the comedy of my present discourse is palpable and I cannot maintain what is proper. Is it but an accident that Aristophanes, who made fun of Socrates in The Clouds, nevertheless appears in Symposium, and in a not unflattering light? This is not the place to digress into the ‘hey nonny nonny’ whose profundity Shakespeare revealed in Much Ado About Nothing, but only point out that even Heraclitus, for whom everything was manifested in the strife between opposites, ruled out the reference of comedy to oneself, thus safeguarding the seriousness of the speech about polemos. But polemos might also be a joke and “the dark one” still too surrounded by light to be properly seen. The danger of opposites is cancelling self-reference. It seems that this danger even Heraclitus was determined to expel. The scandal of the Greeks

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was the Cretan who said “all Cretans lie.” In this, Heraclitus anticipated by 2400 years Bertrand Russell’s attempted exorcism of self-referential paradox by his theory of logical types that would ban classes from being members of themselves. The second answer cannot postpone any longer some reflection on the reflexive paradox that would speak of fire as the law of strife from within the strife itself. Ecstacy, comedy, tragedy: all enter into philosophy as it seeks its speech of the whole. Philosophy cannot escape polemos but does speak of the fiery essence of manifestation. Notice that the opposites of Heraclitus, and also the other pre-Socratics, are substantive. They are opposites not contradictories. Thus, there is a pull in each direction upon the human riven space in between rather than a simple fullness at one side and a mere absence at the other. If substantive opposites are understood wrongly as contradictories, such that the riven space is stretched only between fullness and absence, then the metaphysics of presence is secretly re-instated. In contrast, substantive opposites speak of day and night, not day and not-day, not night and not-night, as a merely logical opposition would. Substantive opposites each exert a pull upon the human riven space, a pull dependent on its own specific content. The logical concept not-day has no content of its own to set in opposition to day. Night is not merely the absence of day; it is the substantive opposite of day and, as such, exerts an influence on day such that day is not merely day but comingfrom-night and turning-into-night. Thus day is not just the presence of what is manifested but coming-into-presence and retreating-from-presence, not just what is manifested but the essence of manifestation. Substantive opposites, in their pull upon each other, open a space riven with tension such that one can speak of this tensional space itself as fire, as sacred. But this fire, and speech about fire, this speech touched by the sacred that is philosophy, is the riven space itself and promises no escape from strife. At the beginning of Hegel’s Logic, Being is confronted not with its substantive opposite but its contradictory Nothing. Indeed, it is so presented because Being itself has been purged of any substantive Being to become a merely empty concept of Being. “Being, the indeterminate immediate, is in fact nothing; and neither more or less than nothing. . . . Nothing is, therefore, the same determination, or rather absence of determination, and thus altogether the same as pure being” (Hegel 1969a, 82). Empty Being and its contradictory Nothing are sublated, transcended and preserved (Aufgehoben), into Becoming such that no return to either Being or Nothing ever occurs. Contradictory opposites promise becoming, change, progress, with philosophy on the side of this progress without any pause for the un-progressive, the forgotten, lazy existence. Though conflict generates becoming, it is left behind as becoming becomes. Not so with substantive opposites. Their pull on each other can

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never be merged and harnessed. It is a tension without direction, a tension within which all directions appear and are pursued. And remember, opposites are themselves multiple: day-night, wintersummer, polemos-peace, hunger-satiety. Day-night might be inscribed within winter-summer, as winter is the night of the year, but not without remainder. Hunger-satiety could also be so inscribed: winter is the hunger of the year. The remainder is more apparent here. What I call the ‘remainder’ refers to the heterogeneity of the pairs of opposites. The whole world can be put on a continuum between wet and dry. Similarly, it can be characterized throughout by hot-cold. But wet-dry and hot-cold are heterogeneous. The manifold dimensions of the world emerge from the indefinite plurality of such pairs. But the pairs are neither merely external, incomparable to each other, nor fold into one grand encompassing opposition. They can speak of each other, but in becoming comparable, the substantive content determines a remainder—that which would have emerged if the comparability had been manifested in a different comparison. Opposites, being substantive, can say something substantive about other pairs of opposites if they are allowed to speak of them by addressing the whole. To address the whole from within opposites is to address it with opposites, or with a member of a pair. This is the problem of Husserl’s “transcendental subjectivity” which “is actually called ‘I’ only by equivocation— though it is an essential equivocation” (C 184). The concept of an “essential equivocation” has not yet influenced the conception of philosophical language in phenomenology—though this discussion provides its ground. It finds its place in necessary self-referentiality. The equivocal nature of the philosopher’s “I” is that the philosopher speaks as this person immersed in these conflicts and allegiances here and now and simultaneously as philosophy itself apart from any particular philosopher. Fire speaks the whole, and the sacredness of the whole, but it cannot be insulated from its death by water. Thus emerges the conflict and the uncertainty: should one speak of the whole as fire, or as water as Thales had it? Polemos intrudes upon the whole. The fire advocates versus the water ones, no longer simply parties in conflict, but armed with the whole as their emblem, they fight not only as opposites but in the name of the tensional space itself. So culture-civilizations may and do conflict. And this cannot be simply avoided, because there is no speech of the whole that does not draw from the language of opposites and use the substantive content of the opposites to give content to the manifestation of the whole. One may conclude, and this conclusion is part of the second answer: Any concept of philosophy that understands its language as the only correct or possible language for philosophy fails to incorporate the task of philosophy into the form in which this task is given expression. One cannot exempt

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Husserl’s technical, encyclopediac language of philosophy from this judgment. Nor Heidegger’s attempted separation of terms between ontological and ontic. Nor Heraclitus’ expulsion of comedy. The language of philosophy can never escape an essential equivocation which is based upon its necessary self-reference. Let us finally turn to the pair polemos-peace. Polemos speaks of the nature of the tensional space itself, of the relation between the opposites that fill it and give it substantive content. It thus bears a close relation to fire, which speaks of the scent of the whole itself, though it is not the whole but the strife between opposites through which, and in which, the whole is manifested. Can the strife, polemos, between opposites of fragment 53 also be called a “peace,” according to the pair polemos-peace in fragment 67? Or, we may even ask, can the right or justice of polemos mentioned in fragment 80 be also spoken as injustice, as it appears in the one surviving fragment of Anaximander, since even justice, as every other appellation, takes its meaning from its opposite (fragment 23)? With what circumspection is a word that itself is a member of an oppositional pair taken to refer to the relation between oppositional pairs itself? Is this circumspection the ethic of philosophy itself? Is this why metaphysics is an inevitable residue of philosophy that comes to degrade it from within? That the riven space within which opposites appear can only be described in terms calling upon one of these opposites and will thus seem (to those who do not follow the access to transcendentality) to be only polemical. The second answer concerning the relation between philosophy and polemos is this: in speaking of the whole with a language formed within the strife of opposites, philosophy addresses the essence of manifestation and as such touches the sacred, though this touch cannot be expressed without profaning that very sacred. It is within the limitation of such necessary profanity that philosophy operates. When being is manifested as strife, the striving for knowledge in philosophy cannot be summed up into an acquisition for all, but will rather enter into the strife, though is not consumed in that strife insofar as it speaks of the strife itself with responsible circumspection. Philosophy is the circumspection to address the whole through that within the opposites that most needs to be said. In order to discuss this circumspection, we have to speak of its style or manner, and the pairs within which its speech of the whole is manifested. For this reason, one may venture in our time to speak of the tensional space as peace, of a setting-free of opposites to be substantively opposite and of pairs to be heterogeneous, of a necessary maintaining of the world through such peace, in a world where strife has come to mean a war of elimination, an elimination that would eliminate the ground of strife itself. This is the warning bequeathed to us by Jan Patočka who noted that the

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twentieth century is “an epoch of the night, of war, and of death [in which] humans glimpse . . . something like the end of all of the values of the day. . . . No sooner do humans confront the shaken world than they are . . . mobilized for a new battle. . . . The war against war . . . uses in the service of the day what belonged to the night and to eternity” (Patočka 1996b, 120, 126, 127). Patočka grasped the mobilization that metaphysics in the form of technology imposed on polemos such that the striving for peace engenders the war machine and the war machine operates in the name of peace. This demonic mobilization depends upon metaphysics for the separation of day from night as opposed to their mutual opposition and intermingling in manifestation. If day is only day, it can be mobilized against night. If night is only night, one can dream of expelling it from human affairs. To step out of this cruel intermingling, in which philosophical dialectics is not innocent, one must allow again a releasement into substantive opposites as opposites such that they may clear a world. The first answer is an abandonment of the attempt at redemption from the world. Such redemption, in philosophy, is called metaphysics and results from a failure of courage. This clearing of a world through releasing substantive opposites may be the “hidden harmony” of which Heraclitus speaks in fragment 54 (Freeman 1962, 28). To understand the relation between opposites as a peace, one would have to part company with the view of peace in Kant which defines war as the natural state and peace simply negatively as the absence of war, as “the end of all hostilities” (Kant 1963, 85, cf. 92). Of all modern philosophers, only Spinoza had a positive concept of peace as grounded in freedom and as “guided more by hope than fear” (Spinoza 1951, 314). Peace would have to be understood as the beginning of a harmony that sets opposites into the tensional field such that they can manifest the human world as riven by such opposites and the manifestation of Being through these opposites. Such peace requires the acceptance of polemos, even of conflict, as a condition of human existence. Philosophy speaks of the opening of a world as polemos so that those within the world address its conflicts without the possibility of escape from the risk that is politics. The second step, the second answer, is addressed to those who follow the path of thinking without reservation, who seek to speak the logos while consumed by its fire. They experience truth as coming-into-presence and Being as the tensional space of opposites where one cannot ascend to one’s “true home” but remains on an interminable path. They speak of fire as they are consumed by fire. This is their ecstasy. The path of thinking must continually be won and protected against those who would subsume it into tradition. Self-responsibility, manifestation, polemos, circumspection: circumspection incorporates and completes this trajectory. Circumspection must judge how

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to speak the whole from within the strife of opposites without denying the strife of opposites. Circumspection in the speech of the whole is on the interminable path that is the responsibility of the philosopher to thought. It is brought forth by the split within the self that is co-extensive with the decision that institutes a philosopher, a decision which is not one and for all but continually renewed, so that, in Husserl’s words, “true being is not something he always already has, with the self-evidence of the ‘I am,’ but something he only has and can have in the form of the struggle for his truth, the struggle to make himself true” (C 11). But after gnoseology, the struggle will require a continually renewed encounter with the foundation of the essential equivocation: the struggle with, through and in clarification of “what is mine as mine” to discover “what is true as such”—the ineluctability of both the individual philosopher’s decision and existential access to transcendentality and transcendentality itself (which has nothing of the individual in it). The split in the philosopher’s “I” instituted by the decision that institutes a philosopher renders the struggle for truth a struggle for oneself—oneself speaking for oneself and oneself as speaking the truth—that is the way the unity of opposites comes to form the philosopher. Transcendentality and concrete ego, comedy and polemos, cannot be simply divided once and for all without a fall into gnoseology, humanitas, metaphysics—some form in which the struggle is set aside for certainty and security. Here we face the paradox from which the philosophical ethic emerges: philosophy demands decision and action precisely so that that which is subject to neither decision nor action may become manifest, and simultaneously, philosophy gives voice to that which is not subject to decision and action precisely to free decision and action for politics. The struggle to negotiate this paradox, understood this way, may be called circumspection. It encompasses the ethic of responsibility to the appearing of that which appears that inheres in the unity of phenomenological manifestation and points to the divided voice that speaks both within and of the polemos. This divided voice splits the identity of the philosopher in a constitutive paradox (Angus 2000a, 36–49, 51–2, 161–2). Despite the manifestation of Being as polemos that is uncovered in Heidegger’s work, there is a systemic misunderstanding of its significance for philosophy. The first and second answers to the question of the meaning of polemos for philosophy attempt to separate, in a manner whose expression will always be necessarily equivocal, the political acceptance of conflict within the riven space from the philosophical orientation toward the manifestation of the riven space itself. Without this separation, philosophy would simply become polemical and surrender its speech of the whole, that is to say, philosophy would come to an end. This tendency, the submergence of philosophy into rhetoric, politics, must be counted one of the major tendencies

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of our time—a tendency which reveals what our time itself is. Heidegger succumbs to this tendency and thus fails to capture the task of philosophy in our time when he understands philosophy itself as conflict (Auseinandersetzung). Philosophical interpretation, as my second answer suggests, orients itself to the manifestation of Being in the substantive opposites that characterize the riven space, that give it the specific form and remainder which constitute a world. Heidegger suggests, however, that philosophical interpretation is polemos itself, not the speech of the world within which polemos appears.4 But there is no such strife. Strife occurs between the two faces of that which emerges into unconcealedness. Heidegger’s view of philosophical interpretation confuses polemos and the manifestation of Being as polemos and thus inserts polemos into the manifestation of Being. But philosophical interpretation must hold to the manifestation of Being in the words and actions of philosophers. Dialogue between philosophers as philosophers is thus not a confrontation.5 When confrontation appears it is because philosophers are not only philosophers, but are necessarily and inescapably also beings within polemos. While philosophy does not rise above the polemos, neither is it confined to it insofar as it speaks of the polemical space itself. The two answers with which one must respond to the question posed by the demise of metaphysics express more fundamentally the divided voice of circumspection which holds more faithfully to the ethic of philosophy. In Plato’s institution of metaphysics, strife in Heraclitus’ sense was rotated from a horizontal conflict within which all human reality takes place, to a vertical “divided line” in which appearance has a lesser reality than truth, such that conflict can subsequently appear as a prelude to a passage upward in which conflict is in principle, teleologically, surpassed. A hierarchy of Being as presence displaces the tensional space of the strife between opposites. Recall that this late Greek transformation was the condition for the transformation of Greek paideia into Roman tradition and humanitas. We must now say that this transformation, though it came to predominate with Roman dominance, is a primordial possibility of philosophy. Indeed, the notion that a “fall” could occur at a determinate point within philosophy, prefiguring a “redemption” from such a fall, is at bottom incoherent. The danger of metaphysics is co-extensive with philosophy. Philosophy is rent at its origin by these two possibilities which exclude each other: a tensional space versus a hierarchical ladder. One attempts to escape the essential equivocation that derives from the necessary self-referentiality of philosophy through the establishment of the quasi-religious discourse of metaphysics. The other embraces the necessary profanity of philosophy in order to preserve intact its contact with the sacred. That this is a conflict does not present any problem for the philosophical life which I have attempted to articulate, though it would for an ad-

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herent to the hierarchy of Being. Circumspection does not evacuate the riven space of concrete-transcendental, ontic-ontological, comedy-seriousness, day-night, male-female as it speaks of the manifestation of their unity that opens the space itself. This is the philosopher’s ecstasy. NOTES 1.  According to Heidegger, manifestation becomes correctness of representation with Plato such that the new German inception must reach behind Plato to confront the early Greek manifestation of Being as polemos. In “The End of Philosophy and the Task of Thinking,” published in 1969, Heidegger retracted this reading of Plato as the institution of metaphysics, saying that “it is often and justifiably pointed out that the word alethes is already used by Homer only in the verba dicendi, in statement and thus in the sense of correctness and reliability, not in the sense of unconcealment,” and admitting that “the assertion about the essential transformation of truth, that is, from unconcealment to correctness is also untenable” (Heidegger 1972, 70). To say that truth is experienced equiprimordially as unconcealment and as presence does not require abandonment of the thesis that metaphysics consists in the transformation of unconcealment into presence. It requires only that one abandon the thesis that this transformation occurred at a determinable point within the history of philosophy and thus the thesis that the institution of metaphysics occurs originally in Plato. One may still maintain that the institution of metaphysics occurs in Plato, though not originally, and that the institution of metaphysics co-exists with unconcealment at the origin. Plato’s transformation of truth becomes thus an instance of a primordial transformation of truth co-extensive with philosophy itself: a metaphysical temptation that undercuts philosophy from within philosophy. 2.  I will follow Diels’ classic numbering of the fragments throughout. 3.  This interpretation was for Heidegger itself a polemos, one designed to understand the first, Greek inception of philosophy toward the possibility of its second, German one. His later rejection of the possibility of a new inception aims toward releasement, letting-be (Gelassenheit), which surpasses not only certain engagements but engagement itself. The inadequacy of these two alternatives indicate the failure of the ontic-ontological relation (in Heidegger’s terminology), a failure of circumspect action in the riven space, or Socratic phenomenology. Does this fact explain the curious absence of any reference to fragment 53 in the post-war works? (Heidegger and Fink, 1977; Heidegger 1975). 4. In seminar notes on Schelling from 1941-3, refers to “interpretation as discussion [Aus-einandersetzung]” (Heidegger 1985, 189). Similarly, in his book on Parmenides he refers to “the essential domain of the strife between concealedness and unconcealedness” (Heidegger 1982, 237). Already in Introduction to Metaphysics, he characterized his relation to Greek philosophy as a confrontation (Heidegger 2000, 54).

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5.  It is Heidegger’s failure of circumspection—that grounds the shift from unconcealedness-concealedness understood as strife to its understanding as Gelassenheit, releasement. The “too great proximity” to National Socialism, apparent even in this shift away from it, consists in the confusion of philosophical interpretation with polemos—a confusion which is still negatively evident in his turn to releasement. The style or manner of this shift is such as to obscure the inter-twining of polemos and manifestation, politics and philosophy, and to substitute an either/or in which one or the other must prevail. They are degraded from substantive opposites to mere contradictories. The double pull is reduced to a choice. The riven space is in either case evacuated.

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Detailed Table of Contents

PART ONE PHENOMENOLOGY AND THE CRISIS OF MODERN REASON 0.  Introduction: Modern Reason, Crisis, Meaning and Value 0.1  Abstraction and Lived Experience 0.2  Meaning and Value as Grounded in Subjectivity 0.3  Theory of the Texts 0.4  Structure and Teleology of the Work 1. Overview of the Crisis 1.1  Is there a Crisis of the European Sciences? 1.2  The Institution of Europe as Operative Concept 1.3  Three innovations in the Crisis of the European Sciences 1.3.1  The Structure of the Crisis text 1.3.2  The Three Innovations 1.3.3  The Logic of the Crisis PART TWO OBJECTIVISM AND THE CRISIS OF VALUE 2.  Modern Science and the Problem of Objectivism 2.1  The Mathematization of Nature 2.1.1  Mathematical Exactness and Ordinary Experience 2.1.2  Indirect Mathematization of Qualitative Experience 2.1.3  Crisis as Technization through Emptying of Meaning 2.1.4 The Role of the Lifeworld in the Healing Function of Phenomenology 2.2  Institution and History 2.3  Formalization and Formal Manifolds 525

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2.3.1 Authentic versus Symbolic Number Concepts in Philosophy of Arithmetic 2.3.1.1 Mathematical abstraction as referring to an “anything-whatever” 2.3.1.2  Authentic versus Symbolic Abstraction 2.3.2  Theory of Theory Forms in Logical Investigations 2.3.3  Generalization and Formalization in Ideas I 2.3.4  Definite Manifolds in Formal and Transcendental Logic 2.3.5 Summary Characteristics of Formalization and Definite Manifolds 2.3.6 Arithmetization, Formalization and Modern Reason in the Crisis 2.4  Formalization as the Core Issue in Modern Reason 2.4.1 A Descriptive Phenomenology of the Distinction Between Generalization-Specification and FormalizationParticularization 2.4.2  The Unprecedented Character of Formalizing Abstraction 2.4.3 The Philosophical Consequence of Jacob Klein’s Implied Critique of Husserl on Formalizing Abstraction 2.4.4 Specification as Yielding Essential Insight into the Impossibility of Intuitive Fulfilment of Formal Abstraction 3.  Galilean Science and the One-Dimensional Lifeworld 3.1 Marcuse’s Appropriation of Husserl’s Crisis in OneDimensional Man 3.2  Marcuse’s Review of Husserl’s Crisis 3.3 Constituent Subjectivity and the Perception of Non-Quantifiable Individuals 3.4  Phenomenology of Technique and the Instrumentalist Horizon 3.4.1  Technical Adumbration 3.4.2  Technique, or Technical Action 3.5  Qualitative Individuals and Horizonal Consciousness 4.  The Institution of Technique as Digital Culture 4.1  What is the Digitization of Culture? 4.2  Information as Form of Knowledge 4.2.1  Information as Cybernetic Circuit 4.2.2  From Information to Emergent Meaning 4.3  Information as Medium of Translation 4.3.1  Theory of Media of Communication 4.3.2  Digitization and Cultural Meaning 4.4  Intensity, Value and Emergent Meaning

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5.  Representation and the Crisis of Value 5.1 The Healing Role of Phenomenology in its Necessary Reference to the Sphere of Value 5.2  Phenomenology of Value 5.3 Convergence Between Husserl and Marx on the Critique of Formal Reason 5.3.1 Formal Identity of the Critique of Reason in Husserl and Marx 5.3.2 Critique of Formal Reason in Marx’s Capital, Volume 1 5.4 Institution of Reason in the Rationalization of Values Concluding Remark to Part Two PART THREE THE LIVING BODY AND ONTOLOGY OF LABOR 6. Science and the Lifeworld 6.1 Presupposition of the Lifeworld 6.2 The Lifeworld as Bodily Motility organized through Social Labor 6.2.1 The Lifeworld as Bodily Motility 6.2.2 Bodily Motility as Living Labor 6.2.2.1 Aristotelian and Hegelian Aspects of Marx’s Concept of Social Labor 6.2.2.2 Karl Marx’s Early Ontology of Labor 6.2.2.3 Karl Marx’s Early Ontology as an Objectification of Subjectivity 6.2.2.4 Our Abandonment of Marx’s Early Ontology 6.3 Science of the Lifeworld and Ontology of the Lifeworld 6.4 Institution of the Ontology of Labor 7. Ontology of Labor and the Inception of Culture 7.1 Karl Marx’s Late Ontology of Labor 7.1.1 Karl Marx’s Ontology of Labor in Capital, Vol. 1 7.1.2 Presumption of the Surplus Productivity of Labor in Capital, Vol. 1 7.1.3 Ground Rent, or the Fecundity of Nature 7.1.4 The Role of Marx’s Ontology of Labor in the Logic of Capital, Vol 1 7.2 Herbert Marcuse’s Early Ontology of Labor 7.2.1 Three Characteristics of Labor as World-Making 7.2.2 Labor as Necessity and as World-Making 7.3 Karel Kosík on the Inception of Culture from the Ontology of Labor 7.3.1 Ontology of Labor as the Ground for Culture

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7.3.2 Culture as Language Emancipated from Labor 7.3.3 Individuation, Death and Laughter 7.4 Summary Characteristics of the Ontology of Labor 7.5 The Institution of Labor 7.5.1 Ontology and Science of Labor 7.5.2 Privative Negation as Intra-Institutional Heritage and Task 7.5.3 Institutional Task and Natural Fecundity 8. The Regime of Value 8.1 Abstract Labor and the Critique of Political Economy 8.1.1 The Concept of Capital 8.1.2 The Concept of Abstract Labor 8.1.2.1 Three Examples of Abstraction in Marx 8.1.2.2 Abstract Labor as a Residue Evident in Exchange 8.1.2.3 Abstract Labor as Simple, Homogeneous, Socially-Necessary Labor-time 8.2 Labor and Value 8.2.1 Labor Theory of Value Before Marx and its Completion and Critique by Marx 8.2.2 Four Senses of Value in Marx: Source, Quantity, Form, and Substance 8.2.3 Can “Normal” Price be Determined? 8.2.4 Abstract Labor and Surplus Value 8.2.5 Value and the Forms of Value 8.3 The System of Value 8.3.1 Four Reductions that Purify the System of Value 8.3.2 What does Marx’s Theory of Value Explain? 8.3.3 The Galilean Form of the System of Value 8.3.3.1 What is a Galilean Form? 8.3.3.2 Value-Form as Galilean Form 8.3.4 Why Does Marx Describe Abstract Labor as Physiological? 8.3.5 The Necessary Incursion of Nature into Critique of the System of Value 8.3.6 Value as the Symbol of the Multiplicity of Excess 8.4 Critique of Abstract Nature 8.4.1 Abstract Nature as Residue 8.4.2 Why is Abstract Nature Elided by Marx? 8.4.3 Abstract Nature and its Fetishism as Resource 8.5 Nature, Labor, and Excess

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  9. Technology in Living Labor   9.1 Philosophy of Technics   9.1.1 Technics as Mediation, Constitution, and Institution   9.1.2 Tools, Machines, and Modern Industry   9.1.3 The Technical Object and Technical Invention   9.1.4 Excursus: Marcuse’s Reliance on Gilbert Simondon in One-Dimensional Man   9.1.5 Philosophy of Technics   9.1.6 Workplace Democracy through Adjustment and Information     9.2 Digital Production and the Possibility of Free Cooperative Labor   9.2.1 The “Fragment on Machines”   9.2.2 Characteristics of Digital Production   9.2.2.1 Recall of the Standpoint Achieved at the End of Part II   9.2.2.2 The Potential of Digital Production for Free Cooperative Labor   9.3 The Capitalist Form of Digital Production   9.3.1 Neo-Mercantilism   9.3.2 Neo-Mercantilism and the System of Value   9.3.3 Neo-Mercantilism as the Capitalism System of Digital Labor   9.4 Planetary Technology 10. Nature and Value   10.1 Beyond the Exemplary Role of Formal Sciences   10.2 Biology as Exemplary Science?   10.3 Ecology as Exemplary Science?   10.4 Nature, Value and the Task of Phenomenology Concluding Remark to Part Three PART FOUR TRANSCENDENTALITY AND THE CONSTITUTION OF WORLDS 11.  The Paradox of Subjectivity and the Transcendental Field   11.1 The Role of the “Paradox of Subjectivity” in the Crisis-text   11.2  Concrete and Transcendental Ego in the Crisis   11.3 The Transcendental-Phenomenological Reduction      11.3.1 An Orienting Sketch of the Cartesian Way    11.3.2 The Way from the Lifeworld    11.3.3 The Motive for the Way from the Lifeworld

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  11.4 Concrete Subjectivity, Civilizational-Cultural Worlds and Transcendentality   11.5 Transcendentality as Such and Socratic Phenomenology 12. The Limits of Europe and the Planetary Event   12.1  Diagnosis of Crisis and the Concept of Europe   12.2  The Conflation of America with Europe in the Vienna Lecture   12.3  The Institution of America   12.4  Phenomenology of the Instituting Event    12.4.1 The Temporal Structure of Hermeneutic Interpretation      12.4.2 Tradition and Intercultural-Civilizational Understanding    12.4.3 The Horizon of Scientific-Technological Civilization    12.4.4 The Horizon of Intercultural-Civilizational Understanding   12.5 The Planetary Event 13. America and Philosophy: Planetary Technology and Place-Based Indigeneity   13.1 Europe and America   13.2 The Universality of Philosophy and its Paradoxical Appeal to a Particular Place of Meaning   13.3 History as the Inclusion of a Particular Place of Meaning into Philosophy   13.4 The Modern State, Capital, and the Meaning of America   13.5 Subsumption of Places of Meaning and Value under Planetary Technology   13.6 A Philosophical Encounter with Indigeneity as Place-Based Knowledge   13.7 An Ecological Dialogue with Leroy Little Bear    13.7.1 Ecology as an Open System Unlike Galilean Science    13.7.2 Indigenous Knowledge of Dwelling Translated as Ecology    13.7.3 Value in Nature 14. Philosophy as Autobiography: A Thankful Critic   14.1 Rupture   14.2 Socrates’ Refusal of Exile   14.3  Belonging, Exile, and Community   14.4  Immigration   14.5  Nation: Immigrant, Multicultural Citizen, Settler   14.6  The Philosopher and the Law   14.7  Addendum: Statement to the Court

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15. Excess and Nothing   15.1 Transcendentality as the Ground of Critique   15.2 What is the Crisis?   15.3 Socratic Phenomenology    15.3.1 The Socratic Method    15.3.2 The Role of Instance in Socratic Essential Definition    15.3.3 Not Method, but Fidelity to Instances   15.4 Excess and Nothing Concluding Remark to Part Four PART FIVE SELF-RESPONSIBILITY AS TELEOLOGICALLY GIVEN IN TRANSCENDENTAL PHENOMENOLOGY 16. Self-Responsibility for Humanity and for Oneself   16.1 Ethic of Rules versus Ethic of Self-Responsibility   16.2 The Functionary of Humanity and the Existential Journey   16.3 Phenomenology Beyond the Gnoseological Horizon   16.4 From Apeiron to the Riven Space   16.5 A Necessary Self-Referentiality   Bibliography Detailed Table of Contents Index About the Author

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About the Author

Ian H. Angus is Professor Emeritus in Humanities at Simon Fraser University (Vancouver, Canada). A first book, Technique and Enlightenment: Limits of Instrumental Reason (1984), proposed a synthesis of Edmund Husserl and Max Horkheimer on the “instrumental reason” that legitimates the modern advance of technology. His study of Canadian social and political philosophy, A Border Within: National Identity, Cultural Plurality and Wilderness (1997), was widely reviewed in both the academic and popular press, and followed by Identity and Justice (2008). In (Dis)figurations: Discourse/ Critique/Ethics (2000) and Primal Scenes of Communication: Communication, Consumerism, Social Movements (2000) he developed an original approach to contemporary political philosophy and communication studies. Two non-specialist books engaged current social issues: Emergent Publics: An Essay on Social Movements and Democracy (2001) and Love the Questions: University Education and Enlightenment (2009)—which has recently been translated into Spanish as Amar las Preguntas (2019). The Undiscovered Country: Essays in Canadian Intellectual Culture (2013) collected his essays on Canadian intellectuals and Canadian Studies. A Festschrift edited by Samir Gandesha and Peyman Vahabzadeh has recently been published: Crossing Borders: Essays in Honour of Ian H. Angus (2020). Some of his work is available at: https://sfu.academia.edu/IanAngus

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