Perception and the Inhuman Gaze

Perspectives from Philosophy, Phenomenology, and the Sciences

Anya Daly, Fred Cummins, James Jardine, Dermot Moran

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000073669
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophie
• Subtopic: Geist & Körper in der Philosophie

The diverse essays in this volume speak to the relevance of phenomenological and psychological questioning regarding perceptions of the human. This designation, human, can be used beyond the mere identification of a species to underwrite exclusion, denigration, dehumanization and demonization, and to set up a pervasive opposition in Othering all deemed inhuman, nonhuman, or posthuman. As alerted to by Merleau-Ponty, one crucial key for a deeper understanding of these issues is consideration of the nature and scope of perception. Perception defines the world of the perceiver, and perceptual capacities are constituted in engagement with the world – there is co-determination. Moreover, the distinct phenomenology of perception in the spectatorial mode in contrast to the reciprocal mode, deepens the intersubjective and ethical dimensions of such investigations.

Questions motivating the essays include: Can objectification and an inhuman gaze serve positive ends? If so, under what constraints and conditions? How is an inhuman gaze achieved and at what cost? How might the emerging insights of the role of perception into our interdependencies and essential sociality from various domains challenge not only theoretical frameworks, but also the practices and institutions of science, medicine, psychiatry and justice? What can we learn from atypical social cognition, psychopathology and animal cognition? Could distortions within the gazer's emotional responsiveness and habituated aspects of social interaction play a role in the emergence of an inhuman gaze?

Perception and the Inhuman Gaze will interest scholars and advanced students working in phenomenology, philosophy of mind, psychology, psychiatry, sociology and social cognition.

Part I

The Gaze in Classical Phenomenology

Perspectives on Objectification

1 Defending the Objective Gaze as a Self-transcending Capacity of Human Subjects

Dermot Moran

Phenomenology as a Transcendental Science of Subjectivity and Intersubjectivity

What marks out classical phenomenology (Husserl, Heidegger, Sartre, Merleau-Ponty) from other contemporary philosophical approaches, as well as from the methodology of the natural sciences, is its post-Kantian commitment to recognize and retain the ineliminable contribution of subjectivity to the constitution of objective knowledge of all forms. Phenomenology insists on the primacy of the first-person perspective and the critique of any narrow objectivism that ends up being what Maurice Merleau-Ponty calls ‘la vue de nulle part’ (Merleau-Ponty 1945: 82), or what Thomas Nagel elsewhere calls the ‘view from nowhere’ (Nagel 1986). The human capacity to take a stance that transcends our situated, localized, subjective perspective is precisely what makes objective science possible. On the other hand, this very capacity risks occluding the underlying contribution of subjectivity that makes knowledge possible in the first instance and within which human beings necessarily dwell. Nagel summarizes the issue well:

An objective standpoint is created by leaving a more subjective, individual, or even just human perspective behind; but there are things about the world and life and ourselves that cannot be adequately understood from a maximally objective standpoint, however much it may extend our understanding beyond the point from which we started. A great deal is essentially connected to a particular point of view, or type of point of view, and the attempt to give a complete account of the world in objective terms detached from these perspectives inevitably leads to false reductions or to outright denial that certain patently real phenomena exist at all.

(Nagel 1986: 7)

What is left behind, as phenomenology rightly insists, is the irreducible, subjective manner of our experiencing itself, our subjective and intersubjective experiences in the ‘lifeworld’ (Lebenswelt), which is not the same as the world as studied by the natural sciences.

There have been many critiques within the classical phenomenological tradition – perhaps most prominently in Jean-Paul Sartre’s discussion of ‘the look’ (le regard) in his Being and Nothingness (Sartre 1995) – of various forms of objectification that arise from the subject-object structure of human intentional comportment and go on to deny or supress the subjective component. Indeed, on some accounts, every form of objectification has been readily characterized as inherently dominating, distorting, and even as repressive. Kierkgaard’s ‘truth is subjectivity’ is the banner for such anti-objectivist approaches. However, classical phenomenology, especially in the works of Husserl and Merleau-Ponty, has a much more nuanced approach to the capacity of first-person subjectivity to transcend itself through intentionality into gaining a ‘detached, non-participant spectator’ stance, which Husserl sees as essential to the ‘theoretical attitude’ (die theoretische Einstellung, Husserl 1954: 301, 308, 310, 331) that was, he claims in his 1935 Vienna Lecture, inaugurated by the ancient Greeks (Husserl 1954: 326). The subject inescapably occupies a first-person perspective but is also capable of taking a reflective stance of its own conscious life and hence is capable of occupying another stance which gives it self-consciousness of its own experiences and can qualify them with respect to others’ experiences and indeed come to constitute an overall objective stance.

Phenomenology, in its mature Husserlian formulation, moreover, not only insists on subjectivity as ineliminable but goes much further in defending a transcendental science of subjectivity. It is even – as Husserl puts – an absolute science of transcendental subjectivity. As Husserl writes in the Cartesian Meditations § 13:

A science whose peculiar nature is unprecedented comes into our field of vision: a science of concrete transcendental subjectivity, as given in actual and possible transcendental experience, a science that forms the contrast to sciences in the sense of, positive, ‘Objective’ sciences. Also among the Objective sciences there is indeed a science of subjectivity; but it is precisely the science of Objective subjectivity, the subjectivity of men and other animals, a subjectivity that is part of the world. Now, however, we are envisaging a science that is, so to speak, absolutely subjective, whose thematic object exists whether or not the world exists … at the beginning, this science can posit nothing but the ego and what is included in the ego himself, with a horizon of undetermined determinability.

(Husserl 1950: 68–69, 1967: 30)

Here Husserl characterizes transcendental phenomenology as a science that is ‘absolutely subjective’, and he contrasts this absolute (i.e. fully grounded) science with all positive sciences of subjectivity. Positive sciences of subjectivity, for Husserl, mean chiefly the then-emerging science of empirical psychology, and, presumably, all other human sciences, including the then nascent sciences of sociology and anthropology, but also economics, law, and political science. These ‘positive’ sciences of subjectivity all treat the human being objectively as a ready-made item in nature (as Husserl puts it). One can think of evolutionary studies that trace the origins of humanity from their hominid ancestors, focusing on such objective features as the evolution of a bipedal, upright stance. For Husserl, such positive sciences, while incredibly powerful, have an inevitable tendency to naturalize human existence, understanding it as an animality with specified forms of behaviour that can be studied in more or less the same manner as the observation of animals. For human beings to look at themselves ‘objectively’ as animals among other animals in a material, biological, and zoological world is straightforwardly to objectify the human, and it is also to obscure the nature and origin of this objectifying gaze itself. Even as empirical psychology practices a kind of detachment, it still approaches the human subject in a naturalistic way. While Husserl thinks all such objectification has a legitimate place in the procedures and methodology of the positive sciences, he also thinks this methodological approach is deficient and one-sided and needs to contextualized and clarified by a transcendental science of subjectivity. Husserl argues forcefully there is an urgent need to make the natural and human sciences more aware of the dependence on the subjective dimension. There is a need to recover objectivity-correlated-to-subjectivity. After all, who is the one looking at human behaviour from the objective standpoint? How is this objective standpoint conceivable? It has to come to self-knowledge of itself as a standpoint and hence as an achievement of subjectivity.

For Husserl, the natural and objective sciences, therefore, need a transcendental justification. Or, Husserl puts it, subjectivity (for which Husserl often uses the Cartesian shorthand of the ‘ego’ or the ‘cogito’) is not a mere piece or ‘tag-end of the world’ (Endchen der Welt), as he puts it in his Cartesian Meditations (Husserl 1950: 63, 1967: 24). Subjectivity is, Husserl says, rather ‘for’ the world rather than just ‘in’ it. Husserl speaks of human beings as ‘in the world’ and ‘for the world’. Constituting consciousness is both ‘in itself’ and ‘for itself’. Indeed, ‘the paradox of subjectivity’ – explored in the Amsterdam Lectures (Husserl 1997), in the Crisis (Husserl 1970), and elsewhere – is that human beings are both for the world and in the world. For Husserl, human being is both ‘a subject for the world’ and ‘an object in the world’ (Husserl 1970: 178).¹ Subjectivity is, Husserl insists, more than what is manifested naturally in the world; it is also the transcendental source of all ‘meaning and being’ (Sinn und Sein) for Husserl. That means that the subject is not just an object or a substance but a meaning-source, a vital centre which not only distributes all sense but also confers ‘being’ on its intentional objects in varying ways. Husserl lays out the problem clearly in the Crisis § 53:

Universal intersubjectivity, into which all objectivity, everything that exists at all, is resolved, can obviously be nothing other than humankind; and the latter is undeniably a component part of the world. How can a component part of the world, its human subjectivity, constitute the whole world, namely, constitute it as its intentional formation, one which has always already become what it is and continues to develop, formed by the universal interconnection of intentionally accomplishing subjectivity, while the latter, the subjects accomplishing in cooperation, are themselves only a partial formation within the total accomplishment?

(Husserl 1970: 179)

Husserl maintains, then, that phenomenology is a transcendental science that must trace every objective entity and event, that is, every sense-formation, back to the transcendental ego (at least according to the ‘Cartesian way’), that is, to transcendental subjectivity, or, more generally, to transcendental intersubjectivity. Everything is constituted by the transcendental ego. Husserl writes in Cartesian Meditations:

In the absolute and original ego of the reduction the world is constituted, as a world that is constituted as transcendentally intersubjective in every transcendental Ego.

(Husserl 1950: 239, 1967: 64, § 29 (addition))

For Husserl, then, transcendental subjectivity, working within the network of transcendental intersubjectivity (and the interconnection between these two calls for a further clarification of intentional constitution), is a source of our consciousness of the objective world and its contents, so transcendental subjectivity cannot be simply another extant part of the world.

Transcendental Subjectivity and Intersubjectivity (The ‘We-Community’)

Husserl proclaims in his Crisis of the Human Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology § 50 (Husserl 1970) that transcendental subjectivity can only be thought within an overall context of intersubjectivity. This passage may very well be the inspiration for Merleau-Ponty’s claim that ‘The Cogito must find me in a situation, and it is on this condition alone that transcendental subjectivity will, as Husserl says, be an intersubjectivity’ (Merleau-Ponty 2012: lxxvi). Husserl writes:

[S]ubjectivity is what it is – an ego functioning constitutively – only within intersubjectivity. From the ‘ego’ perspective this means that there are new themes, those of the synthesis applying specifically to ego and other-ego (each taken purely as ego): the I-you-synthesis and, also, the more complicated we-synthesis [Wir-Synthesis].

(Husserl 1954: 175, 1970: 172)

The mature Husserl, struggled many times to elucidate the relationship between transcendental subjectivity and intersubjectivity, often – as in the Cartesian Meditations – resorting to the Leibnizian conception of a ‘monadology’, transcendental subjects belong to a sphere of transcendental intersubjectivity (see Schutz 2010; Zahavi 2001, 2005). For instance, Husserl writes in the Crisis § 69:

But each soul also stands in community [Vergemeinschaftung] with others which are intentionally interrelated, that is, in a purely intentional, internally and essentially closed nexus [Zusammenhang], that of intersubjectivity.

(Husserl 1954: 241, 1970: 238)

The individual subject, the solus ipse, the self on its own, is at best a thought construction and an abstraction – what is concrete is transcendental intersubjectivity. In his 1928 Amsterdam Lectures, Husserl is insistent that everything has to be traced back to transcendental intersubjectivity as the sole ‘absolute ground of being’ (Seinsboden):

Transcendental intersubjectivity is the absolute and only self-sufficient ontological foundation [der absolute, der allein eigenständige Seinsboden]. Out of it are created the meaning and validity of everything objective, the totality [All, cosmos] of objectively real existent entities, but also every ideal world as well. An objectively existent thing is from first to last an existent thing [Seiendes] only in a peculiar, relative and incomplete sense. It is an existent thing, so to speak, only on the basis of a cover-up of its transcendental constitution that goes unnoticed in the natural attitude [aus einer in der natürlichen Einstellung unmerklichen Verdeckung der transzendentalen Konstitution].

(Husserl 1968: 344, 1997: 249)

It is not my intention here to delve further into the tricky problematic of the relation between subjectivity and intersubjectivity in Husserl’s oeuvre. This would require an entirely different line of investigation. Here I am introducing transcendental subjectivity as an intersubjectivity...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• List of Images, Figures, and Tables
• Introduction
• Part I The Gaze in Classical Phenomenology: Perspectives on Objectification
• Part II Vision, Perception and Gazes
• Part III Psychiatry, Psychopathology, and Inhuman Gazes
• Part IV Beyond the Human: Divine, Post-human, and Animal Gazes
• Part V Sociality and the Boundaries of the Human
• List of Contributors
• Index