Abstract
As humanizations of nature or spiritualizations of sensibility (cultura culturans et culturata) the state and the city are studied in what Husserl called the science of the categorial forms of the pre-given historical world (A V 12 and also A V 10, 43 ff.). Our particular interest is the eidos of the invariant abiding same world’s societal features as they are profiled in the flux of historical-cultural aspects. Both the polis and the state may be said to be empirical universals, i.e., universals or essences which have universal validity for a particular people at a particular time. What follows is an attempt to show, from the vantage point of Husserl’s philosophy, that the polis enjoys a more basic necessity and value than does the state. This theory of the polis, which is much indebted to Aristotle, Hegel, Arendt and the communitarian-political tradition, has occasion to criticize not only Aristotle, Hegel, and Arendt, but also Husserl. Themes in this chapter will serve as a summary and conclusion to much contained in this book. (Unless otherwise noted, the references to Arendt are to The Human Condition; and those to Aristotle are to his Politics; for the Hegel discussion we will follow the provocative reading in Charles Taylor’s Hegel.1)
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Notes
Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958); Charles Taylor, Hegel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975).
Murray Bookchin, Remaking Society (Montreal: Black Rose Books, 1989), 80.
This is intended to be a thin eidetic sketch. For discussions much richer in conceptual and historical detail, see the writings of Murray Bookchin, most recently The Rise of Urbanization and the Decline of Citizenship (San Francisco: Sierra Club, 1987).
Karl Schuhmann, Husserls Staatsphilosophie (Freiburg/Munich: Alber, 1988), 75 and 89 ff. This original and learned discussion mirrors all of Husserl’s philosophy from the vantage point of the theme of the state.
See Murray Bookchin, The Limits of the City (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1974).
See Maria Mies et alii, Woman: the Last Colony (New York: Humanities Press, 1989). See also Vandana Shiva, Staying Alive: Women,Ecology, and Development (London: Zed Books, 1989) and Mechthild U. Hart, Working and Educating for Life (London: Routledge, 1992).
Alfie Kohn, No Contest: The Case Against Competition (New York: Knopf, 1987).
Hannah Arendt, On Revolution (New York: Viking), 267. But even here one wonders how appropriate the council system is if it, from the start, institutes representation ahead of direct participatory democracy.
In an earlier version of this discussion in Louvain, commemorating the fiftieth anniversary of Husserl’s death, John Scanlon emphasized this difficulty.
Cited in Toulemont, L’essence de la société selon Husserl, 199. It’s a pity that Husserl did not have literature available to him which made it clear that the ideals of community, i.e., cooperation, non-violence, mutuality, etc., are often realized to a far greater degree in the so-called primitives than in many modern societies, especially states. See, e.g., the anthology of A. Montagu, Learning Non-Aggression, op. cit.
The essay here referred to is indebted to the wonderful studies by Klaus Held. See his “Der Logos-Gedanke des Heraklits,” in Durchblicke: Martin Heidegger zum 80. Geburtstag (Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, 1970), 93 ff. Also his Heraklit,Parmenides und der Anfang von Philosophie und Wissenschaft (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1980), Part II. Cf. his essay,“Le monde natal, le monde étranger, le monde un,” in Husserl-Ausgabe und Husserl-Forschung, ed. Samuel IJsseling (Kluwer: Dordrecht, 1990), 1–22.
This is a theme which is scattered throughout the writings of Gustav Landauer.
See Taylor’s Hegel, 433–444.
See the very important article of A. Phillips Griffiths, “How Can One Person Represent Another?” in Aristotelian Society Supplementary Vol. XXXIV (1960), 202–203.
Griffiths, 203.
Griffiths, 203.
See the fine Letter to the Editor, New York Times,March 28, 1988, page 20 by Mark P. Petracca.
Cf. J.-J. Rousseau, On the Social Contract, ed. Roger D. Masters, trans. Judith R. Masters (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1978), 52; also, R.B. Perry, A General Theory of Value, 672–673.
Griffiths, 203.
Martin Buber, Paths in Utopia (New York: Beacon, 1965), 133.
John Dewey, The Philosophy of John Dewey, Vol. 11, The Lived Experience, ed. John McDermott (New York: Capricon, 1972), 623–623.
See C. Wright Mills, Power, Politics,and People, especially the essays at 187 ff., 236 ff., and 577 ff.
Joseph Schumpeter, Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1950), 269 ff.
Hannah Arendt, On Revolution, 272.
I do not intend this to be an adequate statement of the issues. Here the rich meditations on communal narratives (e.g., by Hauerwas), the still profound discussions of child-rearing by Plato and Aristotle, the topic of the “authoritarian personality” (Adorno), and many other issues besides, are part of the picture. For a good start at a synthesis, see C. George Benello, “Group Organization and Socio-Political Structure,” in The Case for Participatory Democracy, ed. C. George Benello and Dimitrios Roussoppolos (New York: Grossman, 1971), 38–54.
Husserl’s notes and discussions borrow freely from F. Jodl’s Geschichte der Ethik, II, 82–85.
Fichte, Die Staatslehre, in Werke IV, 438.
See, e.g., Fichte, Das System der Rechtslehre, in the Nachgelassene Werke, II (Bonn: Marcus, 1834), 542. I do not know whether Husserl studied such texts as the one here referred to or whether he depended solely on Jodl for his own lecture notes.
See Fichte, Staatslehre, in Werke, IV, 450.
See Jodl, Geschichte der Ethik, II, 83–84.
This theme of Husserl (and Scheler) gives to present day narrative theories of ethics a fundamental consideration which they often seem to lack.
See, e.g., the 1812 Staatslehre in Werke, Vol. IV, 440.
See Das System der Sittenlehre, in Werke II, 314–317.
Paul Natorp, Sozialidealismus (Berlin: Julius Springer, 1920), 70–76.
Karl Schuhmann, Husserls Staatsphilosophie, 166.
See Hannah Arendt, “Truth and Politics,” in Between Past and Future (New York: Viking, 1968), 241–242. Arendt goes to the other extreme from Husserl when she refuses to professional philosophers the disposition or capacity for the necessary rationality of the political realm.
See, e.g., Hua VII, 189–190, 392–395; B IV 9, 19–21; Iso Kern, Husserl und Kant, 297; Iso Kern, Idee und Methode der Philosophie, 333 ff; also my “A Précis…, 106–109. In Schuhmann the references to metaphysics are, e.g., 110 ff. and 194 ff. of his Husserls Staatsphilosophie. At 195–196 Schuhmann seems to confuse the metaphysical theme of the factual relationship between spirit and nature with an exploitation of nature by human thoughtlessness and greed — as if the wanton destruction of the environment was a consequence of a belief in or postulate of a harmonious correlation of spirit and nature. Without wanting to hold that Husserl himself was an ”environmentalist,“ it seems to me that the metaphysical theme of the belief in the correlation of nature and spirit is compatible with an ecological attitude of restraint and even reverence toward nature. Similarly the theme of the humanization of nature does not refer merely to the human appropriation of nature but to the more general and basic theme of the establishing of idealities in sensibility.
Good statements of Schuhmann’s position are on pages 110 ff., 132 ff., 154, 159–161, 170–172, 179 of his Husserls Staatsphilosophie.
Schuhmann, 150.
Schuhmann, 160.
Schuhmann, 173–174.
Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition, 43.
Paul Goodman, People or Personnel (New York: Vintage, 1964), 15–18.
Georg Simmel, On Individuality and Social Forms (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1971), 324 ff.
Cf. Lewis Mumford, The Culture of Cities (London: Secker and Warburg, 1944), 486 ff.
Manfred Sommer’s discussion of authentic culture in his Husserl und der frühe Positivismus (Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, 1985), 123–151 ff. is the stimulus for my meditation on these matters. See Sommer’s discussions for the references to Hua XII and Hua XXI.
I wish to thank Phil Buckley for calling this text to my attention.
See especially the writings of Murray Bookchin, “Towards a Liberatory Technology,” in his Post-Scarcity Anarchism (Montreal: Black Rose Press, 1986), 105 ff. See also his Toward an Ecological Society (Montreal: Black Rose Press, 1986) and The Ecology of Freedom (Palo Alto: Cheshire Books: 1982).
Taken from Utne Reader, N. 38, March/April (1990), 52–51; much of the issue is devoted to a defense of Neo-Ludditism. For the complete text, see What are People For? (San Francisco: Northpoint, 1990).
Günther Anders, Endzeit and Zeitwende (Munich: 1972), 35 ff. cited in R. Bahro, Logik der Rettung: Wer kann die Apokalypse aufhalten? (Stuttgart: Weitbrecht, 1989), 125. I am basically in agreement with Bahro who argues that because the megamachine is so encompassingly destructive we can morally permit nothing of that which we make or use in the framework of the given structure of our civilization. Therefore we must now create alternative communities outside the system.
See Cairns, Conversations, 35.
Cf. my 1991 SPEP paper, “`We,’ Representation, and War-Resistance: Some Para-Husserlian Considerations.”
See Ullrich Melle, “Tiere in der Ethik. Die Frage nach der Grenze der moralischen Gemeinschaft,” Zeitschrift für Philosophische Forschung 42 (1988), 247–273 and Arne Naess, Ecology, Community and Lifestyle (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), especially 163 ff.
Most recently in Remaking Society, (Montreal: Black Rose Press, 1989), 41–74.
Lewis Mumford, The Culture of Cities, cited in Patterns of Anarchy, ed. L. I. Krimerman and L. Perry (New York: Anchor, 1966), 347.
See Kirkpatrick Sale, Dwellers in the Land: The Bioregional Vision (San Francisco: Sierra Club, 1989; order from New Society Publishers), 42 et passim. This is the most detailed effort to work out the bioregional utopia. Its value is not merely in its being a completed vision, but serving as the point of departure for hard critical thinking.
Bookchin, Remaking Society, 194.
See, e.g., Elinor Ostrom, “How Inexorable is the `Tragedy of the Commons?: Institutional Arrangements for Changing the Structure of Social Dilemmas,” (Bloomington: Indiana University Distinguished Faculty Research Lecture, 1986); also Michael Taylor, The Possibility of Cooperation, 27–28; cf. also the conclusion of Chapter VI. Ostrom and Taylor both refer to “commons” for villages existing for seven-hundred years wherein there was no such “tragedy.”
For good arguments, based on anthropological and political considerations, that the state is not necessary, see Michael Taylor, Community, Anarchy and Liberty (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982). For a good survey of the tensions between the centralist and communitarian poles, see Louis Rene Beres and Harry R. Targ, Constructing Alternative World Futures: Reordering the Planet (Cambridge, Mass.: Schenkman, 1977).
See A. Montagu’s anthology of anthropological studies on non-violent communities in Learning Non-Aggression, op. cit. See also the thoughtful study of “primitive” social organization freed of statist prejudices by Pierre Clastres, Society Against the State (New York: Zone Books, 1989).
See Ullrich Melle’s “Husserl and die Überlebenskrise,” unpublished lecture, held in Freiburg 31 January 1990 of which Werner Marx rightly said that never had anyone before spoken so beautifully of Husserl. On the topic of authentic culture, see also, see my “The Rationality of Culture…” and “The Entelechy and Authenticity of Culture.”
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Hart, J.G. (1992). The Political Life of The Godly Person of a Higher Order. In: The Person and the Common Life. Phaenomenologica, vol 126. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-015-7991-9_5
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