Abstract
Phenomenology has always extended into a vast array of questions that are the primary concern of other disciplines, including fields such as psychiatry and medicine, education, literature, architecture and design, theology, and ethics. This chapter focuses on a relatively newly defined area of application: critical hermeneutics, which concerns social and political issues. After reviewing some early social and political thought in phenomenology, the chapter explores the concept of critical phenomenology, some classic works by Franz Fanon and Iris Marion Young, and the recent analysis of solitary confinement by Lisa Guenther. We conclude by discussing the role of phenomenology in critical phenomenology.
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Notes
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It’s not the first use of the phrase. The year before, Kennedy (1986) published a widely cited article entitled ‘Freedom and constraint in adjudication: A Critical phenomenology’, but there is very little of phenomenology in this article, and the term ‘critical’ has the general significance of the term as it is used in critical legal studies. A much better candidate for a first mention of ‘critical phenomenology’ can be found in a couple of articles published a decade earlier by Harold Reid. ‘American social science in the politics of time and the crisis of technocorporate society: toward a critical phenomenology’ (1973), and ‘Critical phenomenology and the dialectical foundations of social change’ (1977). I think his project comes close to the senses of critical phenomenology as it is currently understood. It’s possible that Reid, in the social science context devised the phrase after reading John O’Neill’s, 1972 article, ‘Can phenomenology be critical?’
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There is some debate about Fanon’s stance on violence. Hannah Arendt writes: ‘Sartre, who in his preface to Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth goes much farther in his glorification of violence …, farther than Fanon himself, whose argument he wishes to bring to its conclusion…. I am using this work [Wretched of the Earth] because of its great influence on the present student generation [the 1960s]. Fanon himself, however, is much more doubtful about violence than his admirers. It seems that only the book’s first chapter, ‘Concerning Violence’, has been widely read. Fanon knows of the ‘unmixed and total brutality [which], if not immediately combatted, invariably leads to the defeat of the movement within a few weeks’ (Arendt, 1970, On Violence, p. 11, 14). Homi Bhabha, in the Forward to the English translation of The Wretched of the Earth, notes that Bobby Seale and Huey Newton’s reading of Wretched in 1966 inspired the founding of the Black Nationalist Party and the Black Panthers. Steve Biko, in Durban, South Africa circulated the Wretched to his friends. Bobby Sands (the IRA hunger protester) read Fanon’s book in the H-block prison in Belfast. And Ali Shariati, a leader of student militants in Iran (supporter of the Iranian revolution led by the Ayatollah Khomeini) translated the Wretched into Persian (Bhabha in Fanon 2007). Finally, Lisa Guenther argues: ‘The Wretched of the Earth is often read as an endorsement and justification of anticolonial violence, in part because of Sartre’s preface to the book…. But Fanon’s own views on the role of violence in revolutionary action are much more complex than this. While violent force may be a necessary, or at least an inevitable, response to the brute force of colonialism, it is by no means sufficient for the creation of a new humanity and a new humanism. What is needed, in addition to strategic acts of violence, is a transformation of the collective consciousness or “brain” of the people. This is a cultural and artistic project as well as a material one’ (Guenther, 2013, 58–59). Also see Kebede (2001).
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Gallagher, S. (2022). Critical Phenomenology. In: Phenomenology. Palgrave Philosophy Today. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-11586-8_10
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