gangle - political phenonomenology

[PT 10.2 (2009) 341-363] Political Theology (print) ISSN 1462-317Xdoi:10.1558/poth.v10i2.341 Political Theology (online) ISSN 1473-1719

Equinox Publishing Ltd 2009, Unit 6, The Village, 101 Amies Street, London SW11 2JW.

Political Phenomenology:Radical democRacy and tRuth

Rocco GangleEndicott College

Philosophy and Religion Department376 Hale Street

Beverly, MA 01915USA

[email protected]

Jason SmickSanta Clara University

Religious Studies Department500 El Camino Real

Santa Clara, CA 95053USA

[email protected]

AbstrAct

In light of the theological turn in recent phenomenology, a question arises for contemporary thought of how the relationships among philosophy, reli-gion, and democratic politics might be recontextualized and understood from a specifically phenomenological perspective. Essential in addressing this question is a critical examination of the method of reduction, or epoche insti-tuted by Edmund Husserl as the original, core practice of phenomenology. Reinterpreting the epoche in terms of its social, historical, and political dimen-sions, later phenomenologists Enzo Paci and Jan Patocka demonstrate how phenomenologys conception of truth is necessarily coordinated with a com-mitment to collective democratic praxis. In Paci, the practice of epoche initi-ates critical resistance to ideological and idolatrous social and political forms through contrast with the infinite openness of truths real universality. In Patocka, phenomenological method as applied to historically-embedded reli-gious and philosophical traditions helps to clarify what in particular distin-guishes democratic from autocratic forms of life. By drawing the insights of Paci and Patocka into conjunction, a new conception emerges of the unique religiothe collective, existential commitmentof phenomenology as such: to express the experience(s) of truth through democratic praxis in collabora-tion with other analogous philosophical, religious and scientific traditions.

Keywords: democracy, epoche, Husserl, Paci, Patocka, phenomenology, reduction.

342 Political Theology

Equinox Publishing Ltd 2009.

Introduction

What some have called the theological turn in contemporary phenom-enology has generated significant debate.1 We feel that this effort within phenomenology to re-engage theology and theological themesfor example, the infinite and its link with the collective origins of worldly sense and beingsignals the return of a possible political theology, or a theologico-political practice, in philosophy as such. Yet such a political theology would no longer be coupled to any particular religious tradition, whether Christian, Jewish, or Hindu. It would therefore not be a politi-cal theology directed toward furthering the cause of a religion. Rather, a theological practicean explicit binding of thought and existential com-mitment in infinite relationwould here be restored to the philosophical tradition qua philosophy. Originating in philo-sophia, this philosophical theology would be characterized by the love of wisdom evident in radical and unlimited questioning regarding the world.2 We understand such a distinctively philosophical political theology and the philosophical tradi-tions to which it is or might be connected as coordinated with certain scientific and religious ends while remaining in principle irreducible to either science or religion themselves. It is the way such a philosophy would conjoin the sense of democratic political practice with philosophi-cal method which we mean to address in what follows. We will do so specifically in relation to the phenomenological school of philosophy and its unique method of epoche. To illustrate our thesis the two sections below examine the work of Enzo Paci and Jan Patocka, two thinkers not often considered part of the theological turn in recent phenomenology. For both phenomenologists, the transcendence of the subject is emphasized and explicitly connected to a political praxis whose aim is to bind (ligare) philosophy to the phenom-ena and to do so in a specific way, one guided by respect for the infinite ends (teloi) granted and borne by humanity. It is this binding of philosophy

1. See, as a helpful starting point, Dominique Janicaud et al., Phenomenology and the Theological Turn: The French Debate, trans. Bernard G. Prusak (New York: Fordham, 2000). 2. The project sketched here may thus be distinguished from phenomenologys theological turn noted above which involves thinkers such as Levinas, Henry, Chretien, and Marion and with precursors in Rosenzweig, Dumery, and others. Rather than working solely within philosophy (although with a eye perhaps towards the religions), these thinkers explicitly link philosophical methods and themes to the religious traditions themselves, and do so from the standpoint of a religion and for a religion. We want to suggest that it is pos-sible to articulate theological themes and practices that serve the ends of philosophy rather than a religion.

Gangle Political Phenomenology 343


to the infinite that leads both Paci and Patocka to articulate phenomenolo-gies linked to democratic practice and the critique of authoritarian and totalitarian ideologies. Both thinkers radicalize what we would claim is a democratizing tendency of phenomenology, its tendency, more or less realized, to extend respect and the basic right to be to an ever-widening circle of phenomena and phenomenality. Before turning to the demonstration of our thesis, it will be helpful to indicate first what we take to be distinctive about the phenomenological school of philosophy. In the 1939 Crisis of European Sciences and Transcen-dental Phenomenology, Husserl contrasts phenomenology with what he calls objective philosophy by distinguishing the ways these two modes of philosophy conceive of the ultimate ground of being. Whereas objective philosophy would identify some one particular ground as finalwhether it be logic, God, efficient causation, or something elsephenomenology would begin by (and consist in) calling any and all such grounds into question. Yet, according to Husserl, the act of calling all final grounds into question inaugurates in fact a new philosophical ground of an entirely different order, one with the creative potential for transforming human understanding and experience of the world. Husserl writes:

[R]ather than having a ground of things taken for granted and ready in advance, as does objective philosophy, [phenomenology] excludes in prin-ciple a ground of this or any other sort. Thus it must begin without any underlying ground. But immediately it achieves the possibility of creating a ground for itself through its own powers, namely, in mastering, through original self-reflection, the nave world as transformed into a phenomenon or rather a universe of phenomena.3

As this passage suggests, the ground that emerges in Husserls phe-nomenology is the world itself, the universe of phenomena. Not one particular privileged and hegemonic phenomenon but rather each and every phenomenon is the concern of phenomenology. Or rather, since there is here certainly one phenomenonthe universe of phenomenaacknowledged as a ground, we will say that the privileged and grounding phenomenon in phenomenology is or can be understood to be open to all. It is our thesis that in the difference between the alternative forms of philosophy described here by Husserlphenomenological on the one hand and objective, or metaphysical, on the othera possibility emerges within philosophical reflection today for a distinct, construc-tive interpretation of the sense of democratic praxis. Phenomenology

3. Edmund Husserl, The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology: An Introduction to Phenomenological Philosophy, trans. David Carr (Evanston, IL: Northwest-ern University Press, 1970), 181.



simultaneously discovers and creates a new kind of philosophical ground through the decision to relate anew to the whole of what exists or might exist. We argue that this philosophical decision and the experiential transformations it evokes indicate at a formal level what is common to genuinely democratic political practices as evident and possible in the world today. The transformation of our everyday disposition towards the world into a transcendental standpoint through which the nave world appears as a universe of phenomena is the philosophical act which Husserl names epoche, or suspension. This subjective act defines phenomenologys essen-tial method and practice. The epoche shifts the appearance of the world into a new registerthat of sheer phenomenaby altering in a fundamental way the basic attitude towards being of the one who philosophizes. In this revised subjective attitude, every phenomenon points beyond its immedi-ate givenness towards its further unfolding and comprehension in an eidos, or dynamical essence. The interwoven field of all such eideimanifest only as an unbound, untotalizable horizonmaps the infinite possibilities of human meaning, or intentionality in general. Our question is: What are the political ramifications of the subjective becoming-phenomenal and becoming-eidetic of the world which the epoche realizes? We will argue that the phenomenological epoche, or reduction, entails democratic praxis. In a basic sense democracy refers to any social order ruled (kratia) by the people (demos).4 In principle at least, such demo-cratic forms of life resist the suppression of the voices of those who con-stitute it. Democracy inhibits the tendency of political communities, and of members of those communities, to permanently institute a single voice over others, whether that voice be the voice of a monarch, a party, or an oligarch. Ideally demos kratia equalizes the members of the community at a foundational level. Whatever the relative differences in ability or birth, the voice of every member constituting the political communitywhether that member be an individual or a community within the larger political bodyis seen and treated as legitimate, each offering its own perspective and possessing rights to have its needs made known, considered, and met. In accordance with this principle, the historical development of democ-racy has involved a movement from forms of democratic life limiting citizenship to one portion of the social body (e.g., free Athenian males) to forms of democracy extending the rights of citizenshipthe right to be and be heardto every member of society, giving even those who are not yet full citizens (e.g., children) or may never be (e.g., the mentally infirm) some degree of consideration and participation.

4. David Held, Models of Democracy (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2006), 111.



In what may be seen as a parallel development in philosophical method, phenomenological reduction works to resist two related tendencies of traditional metaphysics. First, in advancing the cause of all phenomena, it undermines the metaphysical tendency to institute a single phenomenon over others that excludes and, where it does not exclude, subjugates other phenomena. This follows from the equalization of phenomena instituted by the epoche of the natural attitude. Second, the reduction resists meta-physics propensity to occlude the density and depth of the worlds various phenomena and to privilege a single moment or aspect of their plural modes of existence as being authoritative and exhaustive of their essence. The tendency of post-metaphysical philosophies like phenomenology acknowledges not only the basic right to be of every phenomenon that has entered into the sphere of the visible, but asserts also the legitimacy, the right of those aspects of the phenomena that metaphysical practice tries to marginalize, suppress, deprioritize, and delegitimate. Post-meta-physical philosophical thought and practice intends to undermine the attempts, in metaphysics, to coordinate the arche with a delimited, proper content justifying the exclusion of competing sense-contents. This is one reason it deconstructs final grounds while at the same time con-structing a praxis that means to invest experience with the unlimited and ever-unfolding senses that in truth belong to it and which metaphysical thought again and again excludes. Phenomenology attempts as much as possible to let phenomena themselvesand their twists and turns (i.e., the unfolding of new perspectives and meanings)govern its own life and praxis. In this respect, the phenomenological tradition may be conceived through comparisons with scientific and religious traditions. On the one hand, the presence of the ideal in the collective intentionalities of history and culture reveals the basic teleological structure of phenom-enologys desire for truth, this teleological orientation beingas Husserl has shownthe form of science as the orientation towards a convergence of ideal, repeatable accomplishments. On the other hand, because the stakes of phenomenological truth concern not only knowledge in the narrow sense but also questions related to the destinies of human history and meaning in their connection to the experience of infinitude (while at the same time viewing these questions and the answers that can be given to them as originating in a specific tradition) the objects and methods of phenomenology are not easily separated from those of religion. Indeed the paths of post-metaphysical thought as led by the innovations and recon-structions of phenomenology have led in important instances to complex and various rapprochements of philosophy and science on the one hand and philosophy and religion on the other.



We will examine certain of these relations as they appear in the work of Paci and Patocka. In Pacis case we will focus on the relation between phenomenology and the scientific orientation to truth. We will see that the notion of truth as a collective project necessarily entails political con-siderations as well. Our discussion of Patocka will focus on his phenom-enology of religion and philosophy as it relates to the articulation of what we will call a phenomenological religio.5 We will show how Patockas phenomenology implies that the religio of phenomenology must include a commitment both to the infinite and to democracy. We hope that taken together, the political reinterpretations of phenomenology offered in Paci and Patocka may help to clarify and partially to confirm why Husserl would claim in the 1939 Crisis:

Perhaps it will even become manifest that the total phenomenological atti-tude and the epoche belonging to it are destined in essence to effect, at first, a complete personal transformation, comparable in the beginning to a reli-gious conversion, which then, however, over and above this, bears within itself the significance of the greatest existential transformation which is assigned as a task to mankind as such.6

Enzo Paci: Epoche of the Life-World and the Conversion to Praxis

Enzo Paci, like other phenomenologists of the 1960s and 70s, considered the relationship between phenomenological method and political com-mitment to be of paramount concern.7 The political questions raised in Husserls late work had to be extended for this generation of thinkers in light of a new global conjuncture and a different set of social crises. Pacis 1963 study The Function of the Sciences and the Meaning of Man organizes an extended commentary on the political significance of Husserls Crisis. More specifically, it elaborates the politically revolutionary consequences

5. Religio can refer to a relation to something characterized by exactness, scrupu-lousness, or meticulous care. It is thought to be closely related to another Latin word, religare. This term can mean to tie fast or bind. It also means to re-read. While its origin is Latin, religare has also been traced back to the Greek ale-gein, which can mean to heed or to care for. Drawing on the history of the term, but also creatively reinterpreting that history, religio will be used here to refer to a devotion or commitment that includes at once the act of binding, the meticulous care for what one is bound to, and the ongoing re-reading of that to which one is bound. 6. Husserl, Crisis, 137. 7. Among others, Merleau-Ponty, Lukacs, Sartre, and Tran Duc Thao engaged in parallel investigations at around the same time. Unlike these often more familiar think-ers, however, Pacis phenomenological work develops primarily within a long and distin-guished tradition of Italian humanism which, inflected through the Marxism of Labriola and Gramsci, passes through Paci to contemporary figures such as Antonio Negri.



of sections 35 through 44 of the Crisis which revise the notion of transcen-dental epoche with respect to its basis in the common life-world (Lebenswelt). Paci understands this crucial shift in Husserls thinking of the epoche to reveal a twofold political imperative for phenomenology: (1) the actual practice of epoche must be reinterpreted in historical terms as a collective temporal operation inserted between conditioning and freedomthus phenomenology has to become political; and (2) in a corresponding way, the infinite eidetic field disclosed by epoche needs to be conceived starting from its concrete, social realization in creative praxisthus politics must become phenomenological.8 As indicated by the title of Pacis work, it is to be the function of science as realized in the diversity of human, natural, and formal sciences to undergird and carry through this reciprocal activity of phenomenology and politics. Pacis reading of Husserl leads the practice of epoche itself back to its origins in the concrete, elemental, and inescapable nature of human expe-rience. Paci thus shows that phenomenology, correctly understood, is far from being an esoteric or abstract method artificially imposed on the world in the name of systematic, objective knowledge. Instead, phenomenology works to make evident how the life-world is itself already phenomeno-logically (and not only phenomenally) structured. The human Lebenswelt must be understood as essentially epochal. The philosophical discipline of phenomenology only makes explicit at a higher order of reflection and rigor what is taking place always already in human social activity as such, namely the creative unfolding of complex networks of theoretical and practical intentionalities. Due to its essential continuity with Lebenswelt processes, phenomenology must be understood as a natural outgrowth of the very form of common social life.9

It is important to note that Paciby emphasizing the continuity of phenomenological method with the common life-worldis in no way reducing phenomenological experience to the everyday. Instead, Paci should be understood as attributing the transcendental-eidetic character

8. Enzo Paci, The Function of the Sciences and the Meaning of Man, trans. Paul Piccone and James E. Hansen (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1972), 252. 9. Husserls conception of the a priori primacy of the life-world to all possible objects and systems of science is made explicit in passages such as the following: A certain ideal-izing accomplishment is what brings about the higher-level meaning-formation and ontic validity of the mathematical and every other objective a priori on the basis of the life-world a priori. Thus the latter ought first to become a subject of scientific investigation in its peculiarity and purity, and then one ought to set the systematic task of understanding how, on this basis and in what manners of new meaning-formation, the objective a priori comes about as a mediated theoretical accomplishment. Crisis, 140. Paci argues that this foundational Husserlian science of the life-world is political critique and transformation.



of phenomenological experience and its potential for radical subjective transformation to the reality of everyday life and its collective forms of organization. The transcendental epoche thus reaches fulfillment in and through the life-world since the life-world, charged and suffused with powerful idealizations and active projects, must be recognized as both the real source and the ultimate end of phenomenological theory and practice. What, then, distinguishes phenomenology proper from life simply lived as is? Phenomenology as a specific form of philosophical practice brings to light the world itself in its essential being as the common creative work of all. Paci recognizes elements, tendencies, and characteristics of phenomenological praxis in all human activity; phenomenology proper simply makes the essentially universal orientation of such praxis rigor-ously explicit. Human activity points to the universality of the common life-world as to a goal: The transcendental attitude does not negate the Lebenswelt and the pregiven world. Rather, it denies that it should be accepted as already done and accomplished.10 Phenomenology thus raises the unrealized political teleology of the life-world to disciplined and universal consideration. The passage from phenomenological epoche to the revisioning of the life-world in light of universal praxis may be schematized as a movement internal to the epoche itself. We will outline this movement here in terms of a succession of four stages: contact, suspension, reflection, and praxis. While the terms of this schema are not Pacis own, it is hoped that such a (re)construction will be helpful for delineating how and why in Pacis thought the development of phenomenology should invoke a coming-to-awareness of revolutionary exigency in the passage from the nave life-world to the struggles of a philosophically-informed politics. The Pacian epoche properly understood would include and unite the four stages or elements offered here, and thus the essential continuity of these stages should be carefully thought through.

(1) ContactThe phenomenological epoche begins in the encounter with some phenomenon, the touch that summons awareness, the experiential X of a determinate though indefinite something. In further experiential acts elaborating this something, aware-ness becomes sharpened and a meaningful phenomenon thereby comes into view. The importance of this initial stage rests in the recognition that all subsequent reduction of phenomena origi-nates necessarily in a realm of precategorial experience which points in turn to an ineluctable rootedness of reflective thought in presubjective, prepersonal being and its internal forces.

10. Paci, Function, 66.



(1) SuspensionHusserl took the Greek word epoche, meaning pause or suspension, to name the basic act of phenomenological con-sciousness, echoing while radicalizing the Cartesian method of systematic, subjective doubt. With this methodologically rigorous act of suspension emerges the phenomenological I.11 At the same time, the eidos of whatever contacted phenomenon is revealed according to its own unique self-giving character on the basis of the correlative structure of intentional consciousness. No longer precategorial, an experiential science of the life-world becomes possible at least in outline at this stage in conjunction with the appearance of a subject who for the first time can comprehend and desire the meaning of the truth of life.12 As entailing such an orientation to truth, the moment of suspension already indicates a necessary path through and towards collective, teleologically-directed transformation.

(2) ReflectionRevealed from the standpoint of the epoche is a new cat-egory of thought sui generisthat of intentional relations as such, thus opening the field of the eidetic and its corresponding infinite tasks. The world itself appears transformed now into a concrete nexus of meaningful intentions. Reflection notes that these inten-tions have been always already at work, operative constitutively throughout the life-worlds past in myriad concrete ways. Various forms of actual subjectivity appear now in terms of the complex networks of forces and habits that have structured individual and collective bodies. Among these, the personal ego is seen to have emerged from the conditioned matrices of already constituted social and political practices.13 In this light, Paci emphasizes how in contemporary life the ideological structures of commodi-fication may now appear as negating and objectifying forms of intentionality that have circulated virally throughout the social field, inhibiting dynamic and creative powers still latent in the life-world itself. Reflecting on this truth, the subject of phenom-enological epoche is thus called to critical responsibility, and such coming-to-consciousness of the self-responsible subject holds an

11. Paci writes, The aim of the epoche is to make everyone recognize himself for what he really is. It is the epoche that compels every ego to free himself from the theory of the ego or subject, so that he can discover himself in the first person (Function, 94). 12. Paci, Function, 253. 13. See, for instance, Paci, Function, 373. For Paci the subject of the epoche appears as the ego rooted in the empirical life-world where it performs all its operations. These are the operations of social and historical praxis upon which science and philosophy are based (Function, 247).



intrinsic political orientation; it is, for Paci, a necessary moment in the revolutionary movement.14

(3) PraxisThe world itself becomes manifest in the epoche through what Husserl calls universal correlation, namely the insight that all experiences are ultimately common in the practical and intentional eidei they involve and that they are thus in the last instance coordi-nated to a universal aim.15 This implies for Paci that what begins in individual experience tends, through the transformations of epoche, towards collective expression and action. The structure of collec-tive subjectivity thereby appears on the basis of a praxis passing from individual presence to the index of a common eidos.16 Potentially, this passage then becomes the generative moment of a revolutionarily cooperative politics of truth in common.

The four stages of epoche sketched here thus culminate in a constructive image of revolutionary democratic praxis oriented towards truth. While the liberal conception of democracy would take democratic praxis to be essentially coordinated with compromises required by conflictual finite desires, for Paci phenomenologically democratic praxis appears instead in light of the epoche as a virtual, veritable, and teleological presencing of the infinite within conditions of finitude. On such a basis, democ-racy becomes critical of conceptual idolatry and consumerist fetishism through a positive experience of the infinite which shares nothing whatsoever in common with irrationalist enthusiasmsindeed, to the contrary.17

Science itselfboth its essential impulse as well as the habits, practices, and institutions to which it gives riseare here brought into relation with the ideals and norms governing social and political praxis. Paci shows that phenomenology coordinates a philosophical critique of idolatry not to the properties of some given object, but to the very form of the human need and experience of truth. Phenomenology thus understood manifests a religious dimension whose faith is not blind but rather is oriented

14. Paci, Function, 335. 15. See Husserls discussion in sections 46 and 48 of the Crisis, 15960, 1657. 16. See Paci, Function, 468: All that I experience is correlated and can be assumed as a model. Every individual implies the others and, although unique, is connected to all real and possible relations. The analysis of the relations starts from an individual presence which, as such, is non-repeatable, but which, as an index, is typical and essential. 17. This includes in particular a critique of the fetishization of the nation-state. See Paci, Function, 270. In this regard, the United States in particular may indeed be ready for its Third Great Awakening which would be rational and philosophical at its core. See Pacis remarks on the foundations for a phenomenology of religion in Marxs own work, in Function, 393.



in a critical and scientific spirit to understanding the actual and potential meanings of the manifest world:

Generally speakingor, better yet, phenomenologically speaking[scienti-fic] comprehension itself is a religion. It teaches man that each action and part contains a meaning, or a negation of a meaning, even if no partand this is essentialcan ever exhaust the meaning and present itself as the whole.18

Paci calls this guiding principle for phenomenological praxis faith in intentional rationality.19 To this principle corresponds an anthropology Paci expresses in the following way: Each man contains the principle of truth. Yet no man can ever be the truth; this would be idolatry.20 By distinguishing the universal character of truths principle from every particular ontic, or existent truth, Paci thus maintains a commitment to Husserls notion of scientific truth as an infinite task. To contain and to express the principle of truth essentially while just as essentially to reject the possibility of truths final instantiation in any single historical or cultural formsuch for Paci is at once the universal human eidos and humanitys critical-creative telos. Human being concerns truth, and the idea of science expresses this concern in a way that links finite reality to infinite idealization. What is at stake is not only the content of the human telos but, more importantly, the relation between that telos and the forms of praxis towards which it disposes human beings. The critical and scientific disposition is rightly understood as religious insofar as it guides collective action and cultivates a commitment to truth in excess of any possible finite instantiation. Science, like religion, pursues an infinite telos. How does the infinite character of the scientific telos imprint itself on the political activi-ties it might inspire? The answer is: through a necessary consequence of self-critique. Political praxis, like science, must be critical, open, and self-correcting. Posited here is thus an infinite dialectic of weakness and strength as it appears within scientific and political practice in light of phenomenology. As the later Italian thinker Gianni Vattimo has argued, philosophy in the wake of phenomenology and hermeneutics entails a weak ontology.21 Yet such weakness is far from surrender; it is rather a weakness that is both openly declared and declared openly as universal. Thus the strength of a weak ontology entails that self-critique extends to other-critique within

18. Paci, Function, 345. 19. Ibid. 20. Ibid. 21. See Gianni Vattimo, The End of Modernity, trans. Jon R. Snyder (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991), 858.



the bounds of a rigorous parity: other traditions may and must be called to account for claims extending beyond the bounds of phenomenality, just as phenomenology itself must be called to account when and where it exceeds its epochal limits.22 It is only within such a horizon of common accountability to truth that democratic ideals of human dignity and equal-ity become understandable in the first place. On this view it is not status which confers human value, but rather an act of critical and creative ek-stasis, a recognition of the intrinsic limits of finite forms combined with a re-ordering of such forms relative to infinite ideals. It is in light of such ideals that we commit ourselves to the following practical truth: the idols of our world need not necessarily be destroyed, but their power to inhibit collective questioning and creative revision must be compelled to withdraw. In Pacis reading of the late Husserl, the transcendental character and function of the epoche is made at once the essential element of historical humanity and the basic, counter-ideological structure of creative praxis. Here, the Hobbesian homo homini lupus [man as wolf to man] becomes the phenomenologico-democratic homo homini mundus [man as world to man]. The human world as such becomes understood as co-constituted through collaborative praxis and as therefore essentially open and untotalizable.23 In Paci there is thus a convergence of phenomenology, science, and socio-political praxis: not only is phenomenological science conceived as intrin-sically practical; more importantly, creative praxis is seen to be essentially phenomenological and thereby coordinated to the (philosophical) infinite. Such an orientation entails a necessarily open future of potentially unend-ing collective transformation:

Essentially, since truth as the meaningful direction of being can never be possessed, intentionality is infinite and its goal is unreachable. The goal has always been, is, and always will be present as a demand in the world; but it is not the world. It is the meaning of truth that is inexhaustible in the world. The inexhaustible demand is such that the movement is perennial and the becoming immortal.24

22. Indicating the need for phenomenological self-critique and its link to epoche, Paci writes: Phenomenology is neither an ideology nor a world-view, but this does not exempt it from the analysis of its origin and its function as a world-view. The analysis is all the more necessary if each philosopher must begin anew (Function, 241). 23. One might compare this line of thought constructively to that pursued by Jean-Luc Nancy in The Sense of the World, trans. Jeffrey S. Librett (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1997) and The Creation of the World or Globalization, trans. Francois Raf-foul and David Pettigrew (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2007). 24. Paci, Function, 2023, emphasis his.



Jan Patocka: The Religio of Phenomenology

The work of the Czech philosopher and phenomenologist Jan Patocka can be understood as an analysis of Husserls claim, cited earlier, that the total phenomenological attitude and the epoche belonging to it are destined in essence to effect[an] existential transformation of humanity on a philosophical basis.25 However, the implication of Patockas work is that the religious traditions also bear within themselves analogous resources to effect such a transformation. His work reveals important lines of con-vergence and bases for dialogue and cooperative action among the philo-sophical and scientific traditions and the religious traditions. We will argue that the line of convergence Patocka makes manifest that is most relevant to the question of religion, philosophy, and politics is that of democratic praxis. Though inflected differently by different traditions, for Patocka the existential transformation that Husserl envisioned can be said to come by way of the promotion of democratic practices in theoretical and practical contexts so as to counter the autocratic, or monological, tendencies of cultures, whether those cultures take religious, philosophico-scientific, or other forms. In this section we will draw on Patocka in order to elaborate more fully what we will refer to as the religio of phenomenology. Phenomenological religio, we will argue, entails a commitment to democracy and democratic practice. However, in order to understand the specificity of phenomeno-logical religio and its connection to democracy and democratic practice, we first need to gain a sense for Patockas understanding of religion and philosophy per se. Patockas democratic phenomenological practice is closely related to his phenomenology of religion and philosophy. He argued that democ-racy emerges, in varying degrees of radicality, with religion and philoso-phy and the histories they unfold.26 Yet this is not the only possibility that

25. Patocka devoted a number of important studies to Husserls work. See, e.g., his An Introduction to Husserls Phenomenology, trans. James Dodd (Chicago, IL: Open Court, 1999); Masaryks and Husserls Conception of the Spiritual Crisis of European Humanity, Hus-serls Transcendental Turn: The Phenomenological Reduction in The Idea of Phenomenology and in Ideas I, Edmund Husserls Philosophy of the Crisis of the Sciences and His Con-ception of the Phenomenology of the Life-world (Warsaw Lecture, 1971), The Natural World and Phenomenology, Cartesianism and Phenomenology, and The Dangers of Technicization in Science according to E. Husserl and the Essence of Technology as Danger according to M. Heidegger (Varna Lecture, 1970), all in Jan Patocka: Philosophy and Selected Writings, ed. and trans. Erazim Kohak (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1989). 26. Though Patocka attributes the birth of democracy per se to the time in which philosophy was bornin ancient Greecehis phenomenology of religion clearly implies



emerges with them. They toothey perhaps more than any other set of traditionsunfold autocratic and monological histories. This is in no way due to their being wholly and irredeemably autocratic. Rather, Patockas work implies that philosophical and religious autocratism is the result of complex historical decisions that have seen both forms of tradition mar-ginalize their own democratic possibilities. We will show that Patockas phenomenological religio is an extension and radicalization of religious and philosophical forms of life. More specifically, we will argue that his phenomenology can be seen as an attempt to recollect the democratic impulses of philosophy and the religions as against the autocratic.27

In order to demonstrate these claims, we first need to gain a sense for several key aspects of Patockas phenomenology. The first is what might be called his phenomenology of cultural life. For Patocka, the life of a culture is defined by three movements. The first movement is related to the acceptance of life as a project with all the difficulties attendant on this project. The second is defense. This refers to the production and reproduction of human life and what it needs in order to continue to be relayed (traditio) over time. Taken together, Patockas elaboration of these two movements constitutes a reinterpretation of the natural, everyday world as Husserl and Heidegger conceived it. The movements of accep-tance and defense consolidate and protect a given social, intellectual, and political order. Within any distinct cultural world, they presuppose

that these tendencies are at work in an inchoate form in religion, both before and after the emergence of the philosophical form of life. What religion manifests and sets to work through myth, philosophy clarifies and sets out in concepts. But what both do is explicitly mark, preserve, and promote the experience of possibility. More importantly, both religion and philosophy experience new possibilities of life in such a way that the foreclosure of the democratic process through which they become manifest cannot be undertaken in good conscience. Or, more precisely, with the emergence in the world of religion and philosophy, sub-traditions within these traditions simultaneously emerge that attempt to continually reveal the democratic nature of the movement of truth and articulate practices that preserve it. We should note that here and throughout we will substitute democracy for politics. It is politics that Patocka wants to argue is born simultaneously with philosophy. But since what he means is that a form of life emerged which was able to realize the philosophi-cal necessity of listening to a diversity of voices and creating a context within which these voices could enact dialogues, we will instead construe him as claiming a close association between philosophy and democracy. See Patockas Heretical Essays in the Philosophy of History, trans. James Dodd (Chicago, IL: Open Court Press,1996), 13944. 27. Though Patocka primarily has in mind the Abrahamic traditions when he dis-cusses religion, we believe that the democratic practices and ideas that he finds in them can also be discerned in Eastern traditions. For example, the Buddhist notion of sunyata or the plethora of divine names in Hinduism suggest a fundamental equality among the determi-nations of any being (Buddhism) or of the highest being Brahman (Hinduism).



an opening to possibility. This is to say that the birth of cultural worlds requires an experience that opens up a possibility of life. If this possibil-ity of life is affirmed and taken up, and if it differs significantly from the form of life within which it first emerges, such an experience can even-tuate a departure from an existing world and give rise to the creation of a new one. The process whereby possibilities of life become manifest and open up new forms of life is the third movement of human cultural worlds. Patocka calls this movement the movement of truth. He is here drawing on Heideggers claim that truth is linked to disclosure.28 For Heidegger, histories are constituted by events of truth. Within the context of the cre-ation of a culture, an event of truth signals that a distinct and sometimes new set of ideas and practices has been disclosed. A given cultural worlds status as taken for granted is disrupted when the ways of a world are called into question by other ways of organizing life. These other pos-sibilities of life are themselves revealed through events of disclosure. The disclosure of new forms of life then sets in motion processes of determi-nation. Should a world remain as it is? Should it open itself to another form of life? Answering such questions entails a process of determining which possibility or set of possibilities ought to be pursued. Such large-scale, communal decisions are ordinarily exclusionary. The devotees of the existing order seek, as it were, to marginalize and suppress whatever threatens those aspects of its culture which are regarded as sacred. Like-wise, the devotees of the world that has newly emerged attempt to undo the existing order and exclude what inhibits the realization of the emer-gent form of life and the sacred phenomena attached to it. What both sets of devotees presuppose is the movement of truth. For Patocka, only certain types of cultural worlds actually catch sight of and integrate the movement of truth explicitly into a form of life. The difference between a world that explicitly recognizes the movement of truth and one that does not can be understood as the difference between a world whose experience of the sacred leads to a positive valuation of possibility as such and one that instead attempts to institute one determi-nate and exclusionary possibility over others. It is this positive valuation of possibilityand the transcendence and freedom that open humanity to possibilitythat, in Patockas view, distinguishes religious and philo-sophical worlds from other cultural worlds. In phenomenological terms,

28. Patocka, Heretical Essays in the Philosophy of History, 58, 5051; see also his Plato and Europe, trans. Petr Lom (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2002), 2026. Com-pare Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1962), 25669.



prior to religion and philosophy the natural attitudes tendency toward consolidation and exclusion and the experience of the sacred as ultimate and absolute mutually reinforce one another. The result is that much of what is offered in and through the movement of truth is concealed, repressed, or destroyed in the interest of creating and/or preserving a uni-vocal cultural order. Patocka argues that the birth of religions is coextensive with the emer-gence of worlds linking the experience of the sacred to responsibility. For him this means that religion is given figures of the divine which rather than causing humanity to abdicate responsibility to its own mode of being, call on it to care for this mode of being. Since this mode of being includes above all a capacity for truth, this means that religion is religious to the extent that it identifies and cultivates the human capacity for freeing itself from existing possibilities through a movement of transcendence. As Patocka says in relation to religion, this

bringing into relation to responsibilityis probably the kernel of the history of all religions. Religion is not the sacred, nor does it arise directly from the experience of the sacral orgies and rites; rather, it is where the sacred qua demonic is being explicitly overcome.29

The demonic here can be understood as a being-possessed by a single, closed vision of the universe of phenomena that dissimulates the worlds inherently plurivocal character. For Patocka, religious and non-religious cultural worlds are born out of and borne along by an experience that gives rise to a possession.30

Patockas phenomenology of religion asserts that the distinctive nature of religious traditions lies in their attempt to overcome what we would call autocratic or monological possessions. By this we mean a way of being committed to a form of life that does not include a commitment to the movement of truth but rather to merely one instance of what the move-ment of truth produces. With the birth of religion, a new way of relating to those sacred phenomena comprising a given cultural possession emerges. Religious traditions are distinctive in that they bear within themselves the possibility of being-possessed of a vision of the phenomena that is plurivocal and democratic in character. Hence, religion makes possible a new relation to the sacred and to humanity. This new relation, and the world it creates, cultivates transcendence and freedom for possibility as ends in themselves. And it does so because the sacred is interpreted as itself calling for or requiring that the human capacity for freedom and

29. Patocka, Heretical Essays in the Philosophy of History, 101. 30. Patocka, Heretical Essays in the Philosophy of History, 98100.



self-transcendence in relation to the plurivocity of the world is identified, valued, and cultivated.31

Patockas phenomenology of philosophy moves along similar lines. The inception of philosophy also signals the birth of a tradition that is devoted to transcendence, freedom, and truth. But where religion pri-marily articulates the movement of truth through mythical narratives and ritual, philosophy realizes this movement in concepts and political life.32 According to Patocka, philosophy is born out of a shaking of all possessions as well as the certainty of those possessions with respect to the meaning of the world as such and as a whole.33 In philosophy the movement of transcendence, freedom, and truth that emerges out of this shaking is universal and, in principle at least, infinite. Philosophy expresses the project of realizing transcendence, freedom, and truth in the world as care for the soul. For the soul is that in us which is capable of truth.34 In Patockas view, care for the soul was realized in the social realm in ancient Greece as democratic openness to the voices of the citizens that constituted the polis.35 Thus, philosophys effort to articulate an explicit conceptual understanding of transcendence, freedom, and truth occurs at the same time that a form of politics emerges encouraging inquiry and dialogue among competing voices, namely democracy. Care for the soul can be understood as a philosophical practice oriented to cultivating a capacity and desire for transcendence, freedom, and truth.

31. Patocka has in mind here the way in which the Abrahamic understanding of God articulates a relation to humanity that does not, in principle, subject it arbitrarily to the will of God. Rather, that will cares for humanity in each of its different forms since every human being and every human culture is understood as a child of God. It is in this sense that religion is, in Patockas view, structurally democratic. See Patockas Heretical Essays in the Philosophy of History, 1069. 32. Patocka, Heretical Essays in the Philosophy of History, 43, 635. Patockas view of reli-gion is in this respect somewhat traditional. It does not take into account, and could not, recent developments in both the religions and philosophy that undermine a sharp differ-ence, at least in this respect, between religion and philosophy. We have in mind the work of the Society of Scriptural Reasoning and the Radical Orthodoxy movement, and Der-ridas discussion in his Faith and Knowledge: The Two Sources of Religion at the Limits of Reason Alone, of the sense of faith in philosophy. See Religion, eds Jacques Derrida and Gianni Vattimo (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998), 178. 33. Patocka, Heretical Essays in the Philosophy of History, 141. 34. Patocka, Plato and Europe, 367. 35. Of course, in ancient Greece not all members of the community were citizens. Patockas claim is not that democracy flourished there in its most radical and inclusive form but rather that the possibility of a form of life that incorporated the desire for truth, its attainment through free dialogue and research, and political freedom for a group of indi-viduals whose voices were regarded as fundamentally equal was born at the time.



This practice of freedom and transcendence in connection with recogni-tion of the movement of truth is, we would argue, a transmutation of phenomenological epoche. For Patocka, worlds can be said to emerge out of an experience of contact with the sacred. If this contact shakes the cer-tainty and accepted character of the world, such experience suspends the hold of a given world-view on at least certain members of that world. This leads to reflection. If reflection leads to the affirmation of newly emergent possibilities of life, it can lead to the re-evaluation and, in varying degrees of radicality, the rejection of an existing cultural world. This, in turn, can set in motion a reconstruction of the world on the basis of the set of sacred ideas, figures, and texts that have become visible through the event of disclosure. In other words, the construction of a new world requires the deactivation of an existing possession and the birth of a new possession with a corresponding set of practices and institutions that realize and maintain it. Following Patockas lead, we would suggest that democracy is the politi-cal form that corresponds to human being understood as a being open to possibility. It is never a question of humanity being closed off entirely to possibility. The question is how a community responds to the movement of transcendence that opens up new possibilities of life. Historically, many cultural traditions respond by suppressing what is given through an event of truth. Autocratic cultural worlds reassert the completeness of the exist-ing order and the adequacy of its way of understanding and relating to what possesses it. They do not see, or do not want to see, that humanity is constituted by freedom, the ability to transcend a given political and social order in pursuit of another one. This is what religion and philosophy see, preserve, and cultivate in different ways. However, philosophy, like the religions, has tended to regard the movement of truth as a project that must issue in truths valid in per-petuity. Philosophy can itself create closed worlds defined by autocratic and monological possessions that try to silence the structural plurivocity of human life. This is to say, in a different idiom, that philosophy has metaphysical tendencies. Patocka discusses what recent Continental phi-losophy has stigmatized as metaphysical philosophy under the heading of positive Platonism.36 So understood, the metaphysical form of philosophy, like its cultural and religious analogues, takes the desire for truth to be a desire for a truththe truthrather than a commitment to the movement of truth as such. This monologism in the theoretical domain also implies

36. Patocka, Negative Platonism: Reflections Concerning the Rise, the Scope, and the Demise of Metaphysicsand Whether Philosophy Can Survive It, in Jan Patocka: Phi-losophy and Selected Writings, 1812, 1957.



the desertion of democracy and democratic praxis in favor of the stability of a political order that strives for univocity. This twofold desertion marks philosophys abandonment to its own autocratic tendencies. What distinguishes autocratic from democratic forms of philosophy is neither the experience of contact, nor the occurrence of epoche. It lies rather in how each of these philosophical forms of life responds to the shaking of certitude induced by contact and epoche. Whether it is enacted by an individual or small group, or set to work by the shaking of a world as a whole, the epoche is an experience of both transcendence and freedom. It marks the possibility of transcending a given order of thought and life. Metaphysical philosophies attempt to resolve the disquiet of the epoche by way of an autocratic assertion of one possibility over others. More precisely, they try to set one possibility that recognizes no other possibili-ties over others, whether that possibility be one possible object of cultural veneration, or one possible understanding of a phenomenon accepted as sacred and ultimate.37 Phenomenology, by contrast, wants to preserve this experience of uncertainty and the need for dialogue and openness made possible by the shaking of a world. For Patocka, transcendence and freedom can only be adequately realized in the world if human being and its capacity for transcendence, freedom, and truth is recognized, preserved, and cultivated within a democratic political order that respects different voices. This is why Patocka claims that democracy and the non-metaphysical form of philosophy imply one another.38 Only where you have a social order that permits inquiry and open dialogue do you have a political order that recognizes, preserves, and cultivates democratic praxis. Patocka contrasts the Greek polis with what he calls the household. Household here refers to the traditional, hierarchically-ordered family whose primary mission is the preservation of a figure of truth and a form of life produced by the movement of truth. The birth of a politics founded on dialogue and the creative, peaceable conflict of voices (i.e., democracy and democratic praxis) undermines the household model of social and political life. Through it monologism is stigmatized and resisted through the assertion of the values of care for the soul, freedom, transcendence, and the movement of truth.39

The implication of Patockas phenomenology, like that of Paci, is that philosophy is not simply an intellectual technique or form of discourse. Though philosophy is theoretical in character, philosophical theory is

37. The democratic form of life is of course one possible form of life. But it is one that is constitutively plurivocalthis is its ironic univocity. 38. Patocka, Heretical Essays in the Philosophy of History, 413, 142. 39. Patocka, Heretical Essays in the Philosophy of History, 1526, 368.



bound to social and political life. In its phenomenological form, philoso-phy is devotion to the movement of truth, transcendence, and freedom. At the same time it is devoted to their realization in the world through the construction of democratic forms of life. We believe the exhibition of these aspects of human life as well as their transmission and practical realization constitute the basic impulse and task of the religio of phenomenology.

Conclusion: Of and For a Democratic Praxis in Religion and Philosophy

What constellation of philosophy, religion, and politics becomes visible in Paci and Patocka taken together? Paci links the scientific impulse to truthboth its origin in the processes of the common life-world and its end in the creative transformation of humankindto a uniquely philo-sophical understanding of traditionally theological notions such as faith, the infinite, and the critique of idolatry. Patocka demonstrates an intimate link between philosophy and democratic politics, doing so with explicit reference to what philosophy and religion hold in common as well as what differentiates them. Importantly, both philosophers coordinate their theses with and within the particular philosophical tradition of phenom-enology, a tradition they thereby reinterpret politically. Philosophy as phenomenology appears in both thinkers in terms of a practical project, a devotion, commitment, or, as we have called it, a religio. Taken in conjunc-tion, the thought of Paci and Patocka reveal what could be described as the scientifico-religious character of phenomenological philosophy manifest as such in the political commitment to democratic praxis. Phenomenological praxis involves responsibility to the experience of the movement of truth so as to avoid ideological fixation on any single truth. In this regard, phenomenology has its own distinctive relation to a phenomenon that bears all the traits of Ottos theologically-inflected mysterium tremendum et fascinans. For phenomenology this mysterium is the world itself. This phenomenon is greater than us, withdraws from us yet perpetually fascinates philosophical attention. Here lies no doubt the impulse to science and to the charitable regard for the phenomena, includ-ing other traditions, that characterizes philosophy at its best. In its care for the given worlds phenomena, philosophy as phenomenology appears as a praxis in the ancient sensea form of life that is not only, to paraphrase Pierre Hadots formulation, a form of discourse but a collective form of life that acts on and shapes the world.40

40. Pierre Hadot, Philosophy as a Way of Life, trans. Michael Chase (Oxford and Cam-bridge: Blackwell, 1995), 5661.



In our view, one of the most significant implications of this study is that if philosophy is to remain faithful to the movement of truth, its mode of being in the world requires a commitment to democratic praxis at the same time that it requires a reconsideration of the sense of such praxis. The key to understanding this complex relation between philosophy and democracy may be foundas in both Paci and Patockain the practi-cal reinterpretation of phenomenological method. Paci demonstrates the steps of the process through which phenomenological epoche eventuates in political praxis. Patocka inscribes phenomenological methodcontact, epoche, reflection, and praxisonto the terrain of history itself. In both thinkers, phenomenological practice reproduces the distinctive features of human life lived in the common world, and where thematized and set to work in various theoretical and practical contexts, it has the potential for democratizing humanitys relation to itself and to the world. A model of phenomenological practice has thus been articulated that is devoted to the cultivation of a subject (individual and collective) seeking to heighten its engagement with the sense of the worldits plural truthrather than to diminish it via metaphysical reductions to univocity understood as the proper end of political life. Understood as a creative, infinite praxis devoted to the movement of truth, phenomenology has been revealed as one sub-tradition within Western philosophy that may bear relevant structural resemblances to other such democratizing philosophical, scientific, and religious sub-traditions. We believe it is in terms of such formal similarities that an opening may be made today for the constructive transformation of inter-religious and cross-cultural praxis. For it is in the recognition of this most basic of possibilities and this most basic of strugglesautocracy vs. democracythat a solidarity becomes possible of those who, to paraphrase Patocka, have been shaken of their certainty. A solidarity of the shaken is one way of conceiving a relation among those varied philosophical, religious, scientific, and cultural sub-traditions that seek, each in its own way (some in theoretical contexts, some in practical ones, some in both) to cultivate democratic practices so as to ensure that the attempts to resolve uncertain-ties produced by the movement of truth do not end in the marginalization, suppression, or destruction of the communities that constitute humani-ty.41 The meaning of truth, as Paci might say, must become a practice of idolatry-critique and infinitely creative telos. It is, we believe, by cultivating such critical-creative praxis that the religio of phenomenology may con-tribute to a genuinely democratic politics in cooperation with other tradi-tions. It is through its commitment to truth that phenomenology may

41. Patocka, Heretical Essays in the Philosophy of History, 1345.



help to address and to mitigate in its own way and within its own limits the current conflicts between democratic practices in the sense indicated here and those autocratic, monological forms of life that threaten defini-tively to undo the plural possibilities of life given today in and for our common world.

Rocco Gangle has a PhD in Religious Studies from the University of Virginia, and his publications include work on early modern and con-temporary Continental philosophy, political philosophy and theology, and philosophy of science. His translation of Franois Laruelles Les Philoso-phies de la Diffrence will appear in 2010, published by Continuum. He is a co-founder of the philosophical organization Synousia.

Jason Smick is an Academic Year Lecturer in the Department of Religious Studies at Santa Clara University. He holds degrees in Philosophy (AB, University of California, Berkeley), Theology (MA, Graduate Theological Union), and Religious Studies (PhD, University of Virginia). He special-izes in philosophical and sociological theories of religion, nineteenth- and twentieth-century Continental philosophy, phenomenology of religion, modern religious thought, and sociology of religion. His current work focuses on outlining a rationale for incorporating the history of philoso-phy into the history and phenomenology of religions. Along with Rocco Gangle and J. Thomas Higgins, he is co-founder of Synousia.

bibliogrAphy

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to Phenomenological Philosophy, trans. D. Carr. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1970.

Janicaud, D., et al. Phenomenology and the Theological Turn: The French Debate, trans. B. G. Prusak. New York: Fordham, 2000.

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Patocka, J. Jan Patocka: Philosophy and Selected Writings, ed. and trans. E. Kohak. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1989.

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An Introduction to Husserls Phenomenology, trans. J. Dodd. Chicago, IL: Open Court, 1999.

Plato and Europe, trans. P. Lom. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2002.Vattimo, G. The End of Modernity, trans. J. R. Snyder. Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins

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