Feminist Phenomenology Futures

By Helen A. Fielding and Dorothea E. Olkowski

Distinguished feminist philosophers consider the future of their field and chart its political and ethical course in this forward-looking volume. Engaging with themes such as the historical trajectory of feminist phenomenology, ways of perceiving and making sense of the contemporary world, and the feminist body in health and ethics, these essays affirm the base of the discipline as well as open new theoretical spaces for work that bridges bioethics, social identity, physical ability, and the very nature and boundaries of the female body. Entanglements with thinkers such as Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, Beauvoir, and Arendt are evident and reveal new directions for productive philosophical work. Grounded in the richness of the feminist philosophical tradition, this work represents a significant opening to the possible futures of feminist phenomenological research.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Jun 16, 2017
• ISBN: 9780253030115

Book preview

PART 1

THE FUTURE IS NOW

1 USING OUR

INTUITION

Creating the Future Phenomenological Plane of Thought

DOROTHEA E. OLKOWSKI

INTRODUCTION: USING OUR INTUITION

What is intuition? Both philosophical and psychological understandings of the idea of intuition may have left feminist philosophy with more questions than answers. Is intuition a sixth sense? Is it cognitive or sensory or something else? Michèle Le Doeuff has pointed out that intuition, in classical philosophical language, designates a mode of immediate apprehension, a direct intellectual grasp as opposed to mediated knowledge achieved through reasoning, discussion, internal debate, dialectic, experimentation, deduction, language, or proofs. Given this definition, intuition was once thought to be a valid mode of knowledge. It was thought to cooperate with these various methods of inquiry and to be what sets the process of discovery in motion as well as what completes it.

But today, according to Le Doeuff, intuition is no longer respected. Hegel is charged with having replaced intuition with conceptual analysis. Intuition, he insisted, does not reflect upon itself and so is nothing more than beautiful thoughts. Beautiful thoughts are not knowledge. In this way, intuition was separated from discourse, and that was its demise. For without discourse, intuition ceases to be understood as a precise method or system.¹ It ceases to have usefulness and value. Nonetheless, I am advocating that we consider intuition as a method within a structure, a structure within which feminist phenomenology can make its future as the future of phenomenology.

HOW TO DO THIS

Let us begin, of course, with the situated woman whose thinking sets the process of discovery in motion. The situated woman is an embodied woman. In what is by now a well-known phrase, Simone de Beauvoir asserts that the body is not a thing but a situation.² A body that is a situation and is not a thing changes. So if the body is precisely the situation in which we grasp the world and set the process of discovery in motion, the situated woman is embodied, inter-subjective, shaped by history, culture, and society, and, importantly, actively engaged with the world.³ Thus, the situated, embodied woman’s temporalization is intrinsic to her being, which is not that of an unchanging thing.

And yet in practice the situated woman’s embodiment has yet to be fully recognized as her freedom, her transcendence. She is often seen as embedded in her embodiment. But this understanding can change. We can make use of intuition in a precise and determinate sense to make this change. But first, in order to proceed, let us look more closely at the question of embodiment.

EMBEDDED IN EMBODIMENT

If one were to ask almost any phenomenological philosopher (including those gendered/sexed male) What is feminist phenomenology about? one answer that would invariably be offered is Embodiment, it’s about embodiment. Feminist phenomenology is embedded in notions of embodiment possibly because prior to feminist phenomenology, there was very little discussion in philosophy about embodiment.⁴

It has been well noted that philosophy’s preoccupation with reason and knowledge has recognized only somewhat recently (given its long history) that reason and knowledge were frequently defined in opposition to feminine embodiment, an opposition that demanded exclusion, transcendence, and domination, for embodiment appeared on the philosophical scene as an obstacle to the mind’s absolute demand for clear thinking and the drive for knowledge.⁵ This view had the additional impact (although some perhaps thought benefit) of depriving women of a university education and, even in the case of women who did manage to obtain such an education, of devaluing their work because of their bodies.⁶ For this reason, feminist phenomenologists often found their voice by bringing the body to the mind. In the Continental tradition, Edith Stein, Hannah Arendt, Simone de Beauvoir, and Luce Irigaray are frequently recognized for implicitly and explicitly raising the question of woman’s place in society, politics, and philosophy in a manner that thematizes questions of embodiment.⁷

But as important as embodiment is to feminist phenomenology, its significance raises the question of why embodiment became so important in phenomenological philosophy and less so in others. This in turn raises the question of method and of the plane of thought within which this concept and the method for addressing it have arisen. Of course, feminist phenomenologists remain intensely alert to questions of method.

Maurice Merleau-Ponty, somewhat subversively, called phenomenological method a style—for example, the style in which this particular essay is written. It is deliberately styled so as to draw attention to certain concepts. Such alterations are unexpected in academic work but sanctioned by the methodological concept of style and the phenomenological importance of lived expression addressed by this discourse.⁸

Edmund Husserl was profoundly attuned to the meaning of his phenomenological method. Provocatively, it has been noticed that for Husserl "phenomenology slows down the stream of consciousness," and without this slowdown, we lose our focus on the fullness, the depth and the complexity of things, and also on the fullness of events in the world.⁹ This brings us to ask what it means to slow consciousness down and how this method, this slowdown alters the naïve experience of embodiment.

Bringing the body to the mind may be more complicated than constructing a syllogism, more difficult than habituation. In our daily lives, we are often expected to play certain embodied roles. As I have noted elsewhere, Mostly we feel joy and happiness when we are expected to, and we feel sorrow and sadness when it is required of us. Illuminating an interruption or an interval in which we can slow down or refrain from these demands is exhausting and troublesome; fragile states require separation and cushioning.¹⁰ But taking our cue from Husserl, we may not be able to carry out the slowdown of consciousness by looking directly at embodiment. It may be that looking directly is like looking at the sun—we burn our eyes.

Husserl shows us through the epoché that looking directly does not accomplish a slowdown. For example, in the current philosophical climate, the temptation to substitute naïve psychological assumptions—those of neuroscience, for example—for philosophical ideas looms over us and threatens to produce reductive imperatives about the seemingly true nature of consciousness—and so also about embodiment, the body that is brought to mind.

This is not a slowdown. It does not give us the time to grasp our consciousness as embodiment. A true epoché would give us the opportunity, not to objectify the body, but to recognize, as Sartre argued, that consciousness exists its body.¹¹ The connection is existential, meaning lived; no thematization is necessary to bring the body to the mind if it is already a contingent point of view from which it is impossible to withdraw. From this point of view, the body is not an object; the body is the translucent matter of consciousness, a revelation for consciousness, a condition of consciousness, suffered as pleasure and pain, love and hate.¹² What need is there to bring this body to consciousness?

So is it not also the case that as much as phenomenology must engage with, take its orientation from, the human and natural sciences, and now more than ever from technological sciences, we might be cautious about the kinds of claims coming from these so-called rivals?¹³ To start with, the human sciences, especially sociology, wanted to replace . . . [philosophy]. . . . Then it was the turn of epistemology, linguistics, or even of psychoanalysis and logical analysis.¹⁴

But even bigger claims come from the disciplines of communication, information science, technology, medicine, and neuroscience, all of which clamor for the title friends of the concept so that the simulacrum, the copy of the copy of the concept, has overtaken the philosophical concept, claimed its place. The simulacrum indicates a society of information services and engineering.¹⁵ In a situation where anyone can claim to be an authority, the Idea, the philosophical concept interrogates each claimant, exposing the simulacra, which is to say the perversion of or deviation from the Idea.

Of course, feminists have shown again and again that without non-philosophy—politics, culture, the arts and sciences—engaging with philosophy, it becomes moribund, reflecting only on itself and losing its revolutionary impetus. But if a simulacrum is all philosophy can be, then its concepts are ghostly.

Yet even if we evade the ghostly simulacrum: Possession of the concept does not appear to coincide with revolution, the democratic State, and human rights.¹⁶ How can this be? As for us, we possess concepts—after so many centuries of Western thought, we think we possess them—but we hardly know where to put them because we lack a genuine plane. . . . The Greeks . . . possessed the plane that we no longer possess.¹⁷

We contemporary feminist phenomenological philosophers need to be clear about the plane of thought within which our concepts are placed. Our cherished concept of embodiment is acquired by reflecting upon the situatedness from which we ourselves arise. But on what plane of thought is that situatedness itself located? What is a plane of thought, after all? A plane of thought has been defined as a milieu populated by concepts and methods.

Gilles Deleuze asserts that the plane of philosophy has only two facets: thought and nature or speech and bodies—two facets, two faces of the same plane of philosophy. Were we to embrace this line of thought, our philosophical plane would be immanent; it would consist of a potentially infinite field of fractals, both physical molecular fractals and molecular crystalline thoughts that are attributes of bodies.¹⁸ For example, ordinary persons caught in a shop by an armed, masked individual may find themselves in the type of situation that transforms them from shoppers into hostages. This, Deleuze claims, is an incorporeal transformation on the order of a speech act.¹⁹ It allows for a clear distinction between nature and language—that is, between the actions and passions of bodies, and the speech acts that express this in language. Since language does not penetrate bodies, language is merely attributed to bodies. Nature and language—is this all we need: a material assemblage of bodies and an abstract machine of language?

In this model, each I is an Other. Each I is the affection of a passivity that experiences its own intelligence, an intelligence operating upon it but not by it.²⁰ It is a fractured, two-faceted, fractal I, a passive self, always an Other, always an effect of determinations acting upon it and so never itself. Thus situated by nature and thought, passive and fractured, situated embodiment is out of its reach. The I am that is Other does what it must. It thinks what it might. It cannot intuit nor can it create.

In nature and thought this is a beautiful image, an aesthetic image of a field of fractals and crystals. This field would constitute embodiment as an assemblage of physical forces or as a thought concept, but not as a lived assemblage and a lived expressed concept—not as situated, and not as a consciousness that exists its body.

THE PLANE OF IMMANENCE AND THE LIVED SELF

If, as Deleuze maintains, every philosophy has its place, its mental geography, then Deleuze constructs and connects his concepts on a plane of immanence. This means they do not refer to anything outside of the plane. There is no reference to an outside. Instead, on this plane the concepts associate with one another as they respond to a problem posed by thought, and they are attributed to things.

When sensibility is the problem posed by thought, it serves as the condition or form of experience in general and aesthetic experience in particular. Sensation is felt but only as an effect of the harmony or disharmony of our mental powers, in the pleasure or displeasure of our mental functioning. This distinguishes it from intuited sensibility ensconced in our senses.²¹ Thus, intuition is an easily overwhelmed sensation, and it fails to produce the Idea, the concept. Only language can do this.

By contrast, Sartre proclaimed that desire is one of the great forms assumed by the revelation of the Other’s body.²² Our passion for the Other comes to us, not from the pleasure or pain arising with our mental states, but from the world, from the light of the stars, from the temporal relations of a multiplicity of occurrences in the world, and such events reflect on us, leaving their trails, their memory images.

But we are able to localize this array of emanations in the pleasure and pain of our own body:

In sensing ourselves subjected by the spatio-temporal arrival of events emanating through the body of the other, we feel our own body as well, our absorptions and emanations, our light and our transparency, our own skin and muscles, our own heart beat and breath, we feel them as states or images or passions engaged by the world, in danger in the world, lived as some strange, pure feeling, consciousness making itself the body which it already exists.²³

But one is only engulfed by passion when fully engaged.

Very soon, according to Jean-Paul Sartre, what disrupts the passionate revelation of the Other’s body—the engagement in sensible embodiment—is a purely cognitive awareness, as only a for-itself is able to choose itself while remaining indifferent and unchanged. This is why in the end Sartre is praised by Deleuze for having abandoned the perceptual and affective lived body, the body of the self and the body of an Other, in favor of the impersonal event, which takes place in nature and is conceptualized by thought.²⁴ In the end it is, for Sartre, an illusion to believe that one is not becoming in-itself or for-itself each time one is enveloped by a new circumstance, a new event.

Phenomenology and phenomenological intuition, from this point of view, naïvely yields "perceptions and affections that would awaken us to the world . . . as, by right, beings whose proto-opinions would be the foundations of this world.²⁵ In other words, the phenomenological plane of immanence is immanent to a subject whose perceptions are the basis of opinions and clichés but not concepts. Yes, such a subject is criticized for possessing only opinions, because the determinations of the phenomenologist are based on sensible intuitions, her perceptions and affections, and not on thought.

Phenomenology is also cited negatively for confusing the scientific idea—the function—with the philosophical concept, a point we must also consider. Let us approach this by examining the plane of philosophy envisioned by Merleau-Ponty. It is a form, a mental geography that demands three specific types of milieu. They are not facets, but milieus, and not two—nature and thought or language—but three: the physical, the vital, and the symbolic. What happens in each field is influenced by what happens in the others, and each local effect depends on its function, value, and significance in the whole.²⁶

Three milieus are posited because a purely physical explanation of behavior supposes that physical forms already possess all the properties of biological and mental relations and so they are not needed.²⁷ But there are relevant differences between the three milieus. If there are no differences, if physical forms (nature) and their thought effects count for everything, then consciousness is indistinguishable from the brain and becoming conscious has no meaning whatsoever; it adds nothing at all to physical structures.

The physical milieu is powerful, for the notion of form is defined by Merleau-Ponty according to the mathematics of vector fields. It is defined on the model of an ensemble of physical forces in a state of equilibrium or of constant change such that no law can be formulated for each part taken separately and such that each vector is determined in size and direction by all the others.²⁸

But the physical form does not already exist in a physical universe and serve as an ontological foundation for perceptual structures.²⁹ For every natural law is an instrument of knowledge. It is an idea. Yes, it is an idea common to an ensemble of molecular facts.³⁰ So there are laws in the physical structure, but there are also structures in the laws of physics. For this reason form can never be taken as a real element in the world, but only as a limit, something that knowledge tends toward without ever completing its journey.³¹ Each form, the physical, vital, and symbolic, is a field of forces—physical, vital, or symbolic—whose law has no meaning outside of its own dynamic structure and assigns its properties to each internal point, so they belong to the system, not to individual elements or particles within the system.

But if we are to understand embodiment as a lived phenomenon and as a concept, there must be a vital realm in relation to which embodiment takes its form. Without this, there are only two facets—nature and language—ensuring that the body is either an effect of nature’s forces or an effect of the attribution of language.

VITAL FORM

What is vital form? Physical form is the Idea of real and present physical conditions and physical systems. Vital form is the plane of the virtual. Every living body is subject to certain constraints, certain real and present physical conditions. There are sensible and motor thresholds for affectivity, perception, body temperature, and blood pressure. The organism as material is an assemblage of real parts juxtaposed in space . . . which exist outside of each other as the sum of physical and chemical action.³² But in addition, every organism differs as it measures the action of things upon itself [and] delimits its milieu by a circular process which is without analogy in the physical world.³³ Each organism and its milieu constitute a realm of vital significance.

Current neuroscience has shown that tracing a stimulus to the cerebral cortex, which triggers a destabilization of the entire sensory cortex, results in an explosive jump from one spatial pattern of activity to a new one. The pattern expresses the nature of the class of stimulus, but it also expresses the meaning of this activity for the subject rather than for the event itself.³⁴ Evidence for this lies in the recognition that the ability to search for something that is rapidly changing in a context of uncontrolled and uncontrollable backgrounds has never been mechanically duplicated.

As vital and not merely physical, the organism’s actions and reactions are addressed to a milieu. Every organism is a molecular entity whose analysis produces a series of physical and chemical processes attributable to any organism whatever of its type. But each organism taken as an ensemble responding to and engaged with a milieu is expressed as an Idea. It is the Idea of life. It is the expressed of its own biological functions in a physical world and "an idea, a reason in knowledge (Erkentnissgrund) in virtue of which all the particular facts become