Living Phenomenology as a Decolonial Practice

Abstract

This paper examines phenomenology as a living form of thought with significance for decolonial epistemic practice. After discussing how phenomenology addresses concerns of living thought, the author outlines disciplinary decadence as a form of colonial epistemic practice and offers his theory of teleological suspensions of disciplinarity among the decolonial epistemic practices that could be devoted not only to the decolonization of thought but also ideas pertaining to normative life.

Reading the title of this talk, the curious may wonder how knowledge could be “colonized”. To know, after all, is to have something disclosed, to make it appear. To colonize is quite the opposite. It involves suppressing, constraining, restricting, and covering over. How, then, could knowledge even be when it is blocked or detained?

Similar considerations emerge when one thinks about normative concepts such as ethics and justice.

Such, however, is the plight of much contemporary thought, which we could think about as well in terms of the living and the dead. As one might guess, there is more of the latter than the former. Yet, they are symbiotically linked because to talk of living thought, one is disposed to ask, “As opposed to what? Dead thought?”.

My answer? “Yes. Quite that”.

Let me illustrate through discussion an area of thought that has received much negative criticism for decades and is also ironically hindered by its defenders: phenomenology. Let’s talk about “living phenomenology”. As I think through it, especially the idea of lived experience, some of the issues regarding the decolonization of knowledge and normative life will become evident.

There is much dead phenomenology, in addition to dead philosophy, about, and if the efforts “to naturalize” phenomenology achieve their goal, the headstone would no doubt be set1.

The problem, however, began before such a project, bolstered as it is by analytical philosophers and researchers of cognitive science in search of new terrain, arose, see, e.g., Peitot, Varela, Pachoud, and Roy (2000) [2]. As many avowed phenomenologists have devoted their time to credentialing themselves, particularly within the framework of so-called “continental philosophy”, which should properly be called European continental philosophy, in an age of what I have elsewhere called “disciplinary decadence”, the project of articulating the world in phenomenological terms fell to the wayside of demonstrating expert knowledge on the thought of canonical phenomenologists, see Gordon (2006) [3]. Cf. also Nelson Maldonado-Torres (2006) [4]. More like intellectual history than phenomenology, a form of textual reductionism emerged in which what appears is of less consequence than what is said to appear. Such is the case.

The concept of disciplinary decadence came about ironically from a phenomenological insight. Phenomenology begins when we commence reflection on phenomena without the worry of their exigency or ontological status. They are, in principle, “there” for us to discover, examine, explore, think about, ponder, and so on, and beyond us, for others to reflect on in similar and perhaps more innovative ways. And beyond both, the realization that “Being” and “beings” aren’t the end-all of how to characterize or talk about reality. We—and by this, I simply mean anyone who takes the time to think or reflect—don’t often realize how odd, perhaps even miraculous, it is that we are able to join a conversation or continue working on problems realized by humanity at least several millennia ago. And even odder: other human beings, and perhaps beings that will not be human, could one day take on the task of where we left off and advance matters further. Phenomenologists know this as acts of bracketing, parenthesizing, or even, as I prefer, suspending the natural attitude or ontological suspension of the world of our ongoing day-to-day existence in which we take the being of things for granted. These acts are a bit tenuous, perhaps even daunting, when we think of the matter in terms of the future; there are possibilities that “will be”, but in a moment of ontological suspension, that becomes a modal matter of free exploration premised on what at present is nothing more than contingent. We need not, in other words, live in the future to think about it.

The threat of decadence emerges when we cease to live thought as a living phenomenon or activity. Things, including ideas, under conditions of decadence, are “settled” or, worse, “closed”. The difference between the two? The former is passive dissociation; the latter is willfully circumscribed. What remains for both is, at best, “application”.

Such an affliction takes many forms in what I will continue to call, oxymoronically, “dead phenomenology”. To be conscious of anything should not be death, true, but being conscious does not mean one isn’t dying or, worse, suffering a living death. On the one hand, the death of phenomenology emerges from eradicating its radical spirit2. The radicality of phenomenology involves the virtue of courage since a phenomenologist must take seriously the possibility that what she or he is doing could be seriously flawed. Its radical challenge pushes things further since there could be a flaw in even our conception of flaws3. Consistency, for instance, dictates that one follows the rules. Any deviation would be, well, inconsistent. But what if the rules of phenomenology were brought into question? What if assessing rules requires putting them to the side, as Frantz Fanon did when he asked whether the rules of thought under colonial conditions were themselves colonized? Every phenomenologist knows that phenomenology cannot be conducted with presumed certainty. To throw oneself into the realm of uncertainty requires, then, a kind of faith, not of the faith-in variety but of the willingness-to kind of action. To risk that requires courage.

That consistency cannot be assured brings considerable difficulty to what we could call the phenomenological life. As consistency must also be evaluated, phenomenological work requires appealing to that which is other than consistency. We move, then, into the realm of paradoxes, but as courage has already been conceded as a requirement, there is no point holding back. Living phenomenology reveals that consistency, consistently applied, leads to its own radical claims whereby there could be no room for things otherwise. It thus demands a closed system, and under such conditions, where, then, would the world—and beyond that, reality—stand? Collapsed into itself, maximal consistency breeds solipsism. Reality dies.

Now, a charge could be made against phenomenology that to suspend ontological commitments, to bracket the natural attitude, is a form of turning away from reality. Such an indictment faces limitations in that it would ascribe an ontological commitment to the suspension of such commitments. Suspending such a commitment is not, after all, identical to rejecting that to which there is commitment. Deciding to focus on phenomena is not the same as reducing reality to it, especially Being or beings. In effect, then, the admission of bracketing, parenthesizing, and suspending is a concession to incompleteness at the heart of methodological maneuvers. One is able to commit an act of ontological suspension precisely because there is a world from and in which to shift one’s focus.

Such a realization requires giving some credit where it is due. I think this realization about shifting focus and resisting naturalistic reductionism, historical reductionism, and methodological reductionism is one of Edmund Husserl’s insights that led to a discovery that is often overlooked because of what many of his critics imposed on it4. When we think about a transcendental ego—or better, the transcendental ego—we imagine a metaphysical entity or substance behind reality or, worse, constitutive of reality. That, however, emerges from prejudices premised on a peculiar metaphysics—namely, the metaphysics of substance. In that metaphysics, reality consists of things, and each thing is a really real substance on its own.

A problem, however, is this: how could anything be really on its own when it is apprehended as an object of thought? That, in effect, would mean it is in relation to something other than itself, which means, then, that it is not on its own. The problem is already demonstrated in the critique of self-sustained logic, where maximum consistency may not be consistent with its evaluation. Reason, in other words, must be broader than formal consistency. But is reason self-sustainable? Is reason justified? This carries over into related considerations since to raise it in principle offers the adjudicator, the judge, the reasoning agent, and if one rejects subjects and agents, it offers, at least—reasoning. So, this reflection, which we could more formally call transcendental reflection, demands we not take for granted the legitimacy of the reflection itself. Letting go of such a commitment is even more difficult than that of the natural attitude and our ontological commitments. It threatens us with something conceptually difficult—namely, the end of the world5.

Yet even that end is an object of reflection, and it is here that we encounter a profound consideration. It is not an argument, although it is a demonstration through participation. In other words, anyone in doubt need simply try to do otherwise. Try, in other words, to think without thinking of something. Try to evaluate without something about which to reflect. The form of the failure manifested in such efforts is rather peculiar. It is intentionality.

Any act of reflecting on failure requires positing the concept as an object of inquiry. It takes the form:

---->(x)

The parenthesized “x” signifies the failure. Put differently, it signifies “Thinking without thinking of something”. The parentheses signify the act of bracketing, of taking the thought out of the natural attitude. We could also call it an act of ontological suspension, wherein the “being” of thinking without thinking of something” is put to the side. We are focusing, instead, on whether that effort works in any meaningful sense without the preposition “of”. The arrow is the structure of that effort. It is the relation through which the intention is intended. All this culminates in the observation that the arrow is in the structure even when not marked. For example:

(x)

For the reader not to see or think about that “(x)” as an object of consciousness would require its disappearance. Even this last point produces an intentional structure—namely:

( )

Consciousness cannot escape, in a word, relationships to reality without, in effect, disappearing. I won’t bother to add a pictorial illustration since that would be a contradiction already only signified by blackness succeeding a colon.

We now find ourselves in practices of relationality. There is no thinking, no intellectual activity, no reasoning, no logos, no experience, no reflection without a relationship to that which is the focus of such activity. The error in other models, which I have been calling the old-style metaphysics of substance, is the presumption of non-relational thought. We could extend this critique to that of the ego as well. The ego-as-substance model cannot work since all egos must be in relation to other things. But even “things” become problematic here since the constitutive features of things as such are relational, which means a thing is a series of relations through which it is circumscribed as a thing. Applied to the ego, we have a similar consideration: none of us stand, or even could do so, alone. A living phenomenology brings this insight to the fore.

Before offering some elaboration of a living phenomenology, I want to dwell for a moment on my use of the word “stand”. To do such, one needs, at minimum, to be somewhere. But how could one be somewhere without the conditions of emplacement or location? We arrive here at an important phenomenological insight—namely, there cannot be a point of view without a, in a word, point, and that location is no less than a perspective from which, through which, and of which this whole exercise could take place. I am here talking, of course, of what is often characterized as “the body”.

“The body” is a rather impersonal way of talking about what is at stake. For the body could be any body. In that sense, it suffers from a form of anonymity that presents the illusion of a nowhere. If the question is raised from nowhere, there would be a performative contradiction since there is no coherent from through which nowhere could even make sense. That preposition requires orientation. Thus, implicit in its emergence is somewhere, which makes the proper question—that of relationality—also about the conditions by which here could be articulated as a relationship with there, and vice-versa. No one could, in other words, live nowhere, and as experiencing, feeling, thinking, and so forth are forms of living, they, too, are done from somewhere. That somewhere, as a perspective, cannot but experience itself as paradoxically “whole” and “incomplete”. It is whole in the sense of always extending into and from its location. Even a dot, if able to experience its point of view, does so as a full-sized being. It is incomplete because it extends beyond itself: It, as here, reaches for there.

The extensionality of experiential life is no less than embodiment. We are, in other words, not only the body but also the living body, the experiential body, the body asserting itself in the world. This raises the possibility of body-to-body relations, where realizing a there that is also a here leads to a here that is also a there. What, however, does it mean to be here? A reductive view would simply state a point in space, but that is not so simple when speaking of consciousness since that point would also become an object of intention by virtue of which consciousness also transcends it. There is consciousness of sensing that of which one is conscious, but sensing requires a medium of connection to activities, which requires nerves, flesh, surfaces, and other interactive elements. Moreover, can one be here without lying, sitting, or standing on something? Even while freefalling before parachuting, one is interacting with air, experiencing resistance, which expands the meaning of here. The notion of here is expansive. It could be one’s bed, one’s room, one’s house or building, one’s block, one’s neighborhood, one’s city, one’s state or province, one’s country, one’s planet, one’s solar system, one’s galaxy. It is thus both contextual and fluid. Beyond the physical, it could pertain to concepts and acts of imagination—what would or could be.

A fact of human reality, however, is that our embodiment is fleshy. Embodiment, in this regard, is thus, at least for human beings, enfleshed consciousness or consciousness in the flesh. By this, I don’t mean that consciousness must only be in the flesh. Exoskeletal consciousness poses a host of other considerations on embodiment, as many of us experience in calcified regions of ourselves such as our teeth, fingernails, and toenails, or if we were to imagine being locked inside armor. There could possibly be more considerations as we move from flesh, exoskeletal extension, to gaseous considerations. These, however, affect peculiar ways of living embodiment. They do not negate the premise of embodiment. Each exemplifies a relationship with the world through which itself emerges as a point of view and an object of other points of view.

Thinking about there carries similar considerations. The reflection on here reveals an expansiveness of connection by virtue of which here faces the possibility of being shared. Thus, in stating “there”, one is also positing the possibility of another here that reaches one’s initial here. This ability to reach there without physically going to such a point or place transcends physical movement through imaginative acts of coordinating thought. For the non-physical—such as a reflection of the meaning of a thought or concept—location and thought are not separated, although the act of thinking has a specific somewhere in which it takes place—namely, the embodied consciousness of this reflection. The content or that which is thought, however, is not properly a location. Through understanding, as well, it emerges as a shared there for all who can be conscious of it.

These orientations could take many forms and commitments, including those of disorientation and dissociation. As embodiment, intentional in structure, reaches forth, it could also take the form of immobilization, of turning away from reaching forth while simultaneously rejecting its role in such activity. I have elsewhere written about this phenomenon as a particular manifestation of bad faith—namely, the body in bad faith, see Gordon (1995) [13]. The body, in bad faith, denies itself as a living reality. It retreats either to pure corporeality (a thing without a point of view) or disembodiment (a view without a body, which, in effect, is a view that is not a point of view).

Embodiment also poses profound considerations for what could be called communicability. If, in other words, we collapsed, solipsistically, into ourselves, there would be no mode of differentiation of the self. Here would lose all coherence since even to posit itself would require another point of view of which or from which consciousness of here can emerge. In effect, it would be an act of communicating, for if that were not possible, even evidentiality of reflection would disappear. The basic thematization of commonality—a basis of communication—would, in other words, be forestalled and, as a consequence, so, too, an important condition of possibility of meaning. The short of it, then, is that to be everywhere is to be nowhere; to be somewhere sets the condition of possibility of communication through there being an elsewhere to and through which communication becomes possible. Elaborating this observation would take up too much space here, but it connects to an additional point: embodiment is significative (points to something, signifies), and in the human world, it transitions, as Ernst Cassirer showed, from sign to symbol (a form of meaningful reality in which forms of life live) in the richness of language, see Cassirer (1953–1955) [14]. Embodiment is the revelation of us not simply being users of language but also living language6.

I was once asked why I use the term “living thought” in my critique of decadence. The contrast is straightforward: “decadence”, from “decay”, pertains to death and dying. It is opposed to life. Death begins where life retreats. There is a reaching-out implicit in the latter, as I just illustrated in terms of embodiment. It is, to draw on a mythic analogy, Icarus’ flight. That we cannot live forever means that even though we reach for the sun or the stars with our wax-sustained wings, we eventually fall back into the sea, or at least what the metaphor of such return—the amniotic fluidity of life also being an eventual place of death—suggests. But that in no way de-legitimates the flight. Life, in other words, is teleological (with small “t” intended) in the sense that it seeks purpose and reaches out in the form of a relationship with reality, which, for conscious beings, includes each other. But reality is so much bigger than every living thing, perhaps even paradoxically itself if we think of reality as without limit but living. This means that each act of reaching out carries us a little farther into a drama of incurred responsibility for such an effort. We could call this our responsibility for responsibility.

The context in which I often talk about decadence is the study of disciplines. It pertains, however, to much more, as so many thinkers from Rousseau to Nietzsche to Du Bois to Aurobindo to Fanon to Nishitani and others such as Robert Ginsberg, Jane Anna Gordon, and I have shown, see Gordon and Gordon (2009) [12]. At the level of disciplines, the point is particularly acute since their purpose, so to speak, is to produce knowledge. When they no longer reach out to reality and thus collapse into themselves as the world and as reality, they cease to produce knowledge except about themselves. Even more, they take on a theodicean grammar of self-deification, where the outside is rejected in order to maintain the purity of the system7. And more: as the method of the system becomes a methodology, it becomes so through the presupposition of omniscience, perhaps even omnipotence, of the discipline’s initial upsurge. In effect, the discipline becomes not only a god but also G-d. A pretty decadent prospect, no?

A way out of this is a teleological suspension of disciplinarity8. The connections between this act and phenomenological reductions or ontological suspensions are palpable, except that the concept of purpose remains. One enacts a teleological suspension for the sake of remaining in touch with reality. Unlike the project of naturalizing phenomenology, this move does not presume the ontological priority of nature or naturalism, especially as a form of physical reductionism. Reality, after all, could be broader in scope than the natural (controversial though this consideration may be for nominalists or, in what has become vogue, “deflationists”) and the ontological9. As Nishitani observed regarding the latter, being unfortunately covers reality, Nishitani (1982, p. 16) [24]. It also involves the meaningful relationship we have with natural and (if possible) unnatural things10. Suspending ontological commitments for the sake of reality brings, additionally, the admission of humility to methodology, for it becomes clear that the disciplinary standpoint is not—indeed, could not—be isomorphic with any portion but a part, segment, or focus of reality. In effect, it brings back to the method itself the recognition that the ontologizing of the method would not only be an act of hubris but also be delusional. It would be a confusion of a part of reality for its whole11. This is a living phenomenological realization, but we should notice that it is arrived at instead of presumed. Much could be learned from this.

For one, this approach challenges the old conflict between existential phenomenology and transcendental phenomenology. That the discoveries are arrived at—i.e., are ostensive—through transcendental queries while admitting that the outcome should not (and perhaps could not) be presupposed without contradiction, which is a peculiarly existential admission, means that the rejection of essence preceding existence, especially with regard to any subject complex enough to evaluate itself, offers itself as a meeting of transcendental and existential thought. This compatibility makes sense if we take seriously the rejection of the yoking of reality to instrumental models of rationality. As exemplars of reason, it means our reach is such that we must also be self-evaluating, which makes our scope paradoxical: we endeavor, in the interest of radical or at least unencumbered investigation, the transcendence of ourselves.

Second, this insight offers much for human science or, less pretentiously, human study. The “human” here is not reductionistic since it refers to more than a species designation. (In truth, there really isn’t an equivalent in English. The German expression Geistwissenschaften and a variety of African expressions, such as the study of Sunsum among the Akan, may be more appropriate.)12. The human becomes that which transcends itself because of its axiological reach. Value, in other words, entails valuing. But that is a reaching forth, which means being responsible for any identified value. The result is a philosophical anthropology of incompleteness, as human reality, lived through relations always reaching beyond the current constellation of relations, is one of possibility.

Third, the radical reach of teleological suspensions means there is always an underside of thought, a neglected term, that enables the reflective assertions to make sense. I have elsewhere called this “the blackness of thought”, where theory, radically understood, must engage its contradictions, see Gordon (2010) [15]. Another term for this is “double consciousness”, where there is the simultaneous dominant and dominated reality through a lived experience13. Addressing the contradictions pushes double consciousness, dialectically, into “potentiated double consciousness”, which is the realization of the limitations of any system that suppresses a critique of its avowed ontological status14. The theodicean model, of which I was critical above, simply attempts to eliminate the contradictions through delusions of complete or pure positivity. That would require non-relational thought (the resolution or elimination of all negations). There is no relation without negation since all relations require reaching beyond a stream of interconnectedness. In prosaic terms, reaching-for is always also an act of emerging-from where one has been.

Fourth, as the disciplinary challenges raise the question of epistemic and ontological transcendence, of, paradoxically, going beyond as a manifestation of living thought—for example, philosophy beyond philosophy—the axiological question of valuing beyond values also comes to the fore in what could be called the decolonization of normative life15. I say “decolonization” because the methodological decadence of which I was critical is also a form of epistemic colonization. It is a yoking of reality to methodological presuppositions instead of liberating thought in a stream where methods would have to adjust to reality’s challenges. Colonization and other imperial efforts do manifest themselves in epistemic terms, where the preservation of disciplinary presuppositions supervenes over reality. The question of whether normative presumptions follow the same path is worth considering, especially since the metacritical movement of phenomenological reductions in effect also demands what Nelson Maldonado-Torres calls a decolonial reduction16. The admission here is that living phenomenology is a decolonial practice.

Decolonizing normative life suggests that we, for the most part, live in a restricted field of values and their construction of norms. A norm, after all, is a standard or form of measurement. Where the norm becomes a self-imposed status of some over others, the question of whether those who represent the standard are ultimately appealing to lower standards comes to the fore. By what standard should they be judged? To be able to raise the question locates one as an adjudicator of standards, which brings the question back, metacritically, to this: by what standard are we or am I able to stand, with legitimacy, as a standard? I show elsewhere, for example, that justice is actually a particular conception of institutional virtue instead of, as John Rawls claims, the primary virtue of social institutions17. Much of this emerges from the presumed translatability of justice as completely isomorphic with the norms of non-Western societies. Where there is a breakdown, the presumption has been that justice is the broader, presumably more universal, term. But what if justice is a particular term and the other terms, such as Ubuntu in South Africa, dikaiosunē in ancient Hellenic societies, or even MAat, signified by the delicate balancing challenge of the feather of ancient Kmt/Egypt, are of broader scope and normative significance? What, in other words, if justice were necessary but insufficient, if, that is, it simply isn’t enough? What are the normative resources to which we should appeal under such conditions? Could not there be the paradox of the maintenance of justice leading to a form of systemic unjust justice (as we see in many Euromodern societies with regard to people of color)? And could a just justice be a normative ideal beyond justice? How do “we”, by which I mean those of us nurtured on the hegemony of justice, even make this move? A clue rests in, as Corey Anton and Kwasi Wiredu have argued, a position to which I subscribe: our already-given capacity to communicate and learn new words, new concepts, and I here submit, develop new values, see Anton (2011) [38], Martinez (2011) [39], and Wiredu (1996) [40].

We could consider more possibilities, but I think it is sufficient to say at this point that a living phenomenology, with the intersubjective relations of social life and the meaning it embodies, offers much for new directions of thought, which means there is so much proverbially to be done. It is, indeed, the work of, as Maurice Natanson described Edmund Husserl’s projects, “infinite tasks”, see Natanson (1973) [41]. The courage required to take on what is worthwhile but can never be completed is paradoxically humbling, but such humility, arising from an awareness of relating to reality instead of the hubris and futility of conquest, is also liberating.