Meditation on Persons and Values in Pragmatic Phenomenology

by J. Edward Hackett

When I had decided to write Persons and Values in Pragmatic Phenomenology: An Exploration in Moral Metaphysics, I had no idea of the result. I had published several papers with two thinkers in each: James correcting Husserl, Scheler correcting Heidegger, an aspect of Heidegger helping us with Scheler, Scheler correcting James, and James correcting Scheler. In these explorations, I suddenly found the possibility of the title by bringing these essays together; I am forming a system out of both Jamesian pragmatism, and the phenomenological tradition.

At the point when you discover you are systematizing yourself it’s a very weird experience. That moment is the closest you can come to disembodied state of consciousness. You begin to look down on your own self as if you floated above your own philosophical life. Then, you can move the various pieces of your beliefs and commitments around, adjusting them as you see fit to address the existential and pragmatic needs of life—both for yourself and whoever you think will be listening to your thoughts.

I discovered a few things.

First, I have never given up on the role intentionality plays in concrete life, and this is undoubtedly Husserl’s influence in me. However, Husserl only indicated the absolute need in every description of consciousness is a consciousness-of. Paul Ricoeur’s dictum of Husserl remains true for all time—the history of phenomenology is “the history of Husserlian heresies.” Everyone must start with Husserl, but nobody remains with him for very long unless, of course, they want some level of systematization that doesn’t exist in the rest of Continental philosophy.

Second, Scheler’s contribution to metaethics is unacknowledged in analytic philosophy, but then again, there’s no patience for sustained descriptions of the primordiality intentionality plays in concrete life (or what we might call doing phenomenology with a capital “P”). That’s the insight I took from Scheler. Scheler provides a type of phenomenological dictum to all moral theorists and ethicists alike. Before all moral theorizing can occur, we need to engage in a phenomenological description of persons, values, and otherness. These are the three concepts I see at the basis of all ethical inquiry, and we need to understand exactly how each concept is situated in the most concrete way. In this way, we should seek to describe the conditions under which these concepts are given in the modalities of experience: self-to-self relation, self-to-other relations, self-and-temporal-horizon, and self-to-nature-and-God. Currently, we could say these are the architectonic assumptions of what lies behind my commitments to personalism and pragmatic phenomenology as a method of doing philosophy.

In the first, we might think of the Socratic impulse to “Know Thyself,” and perhaps Kant’s duties of self-perfection. Next, the self-to-other relationship is at the heart of it a commitment to the radical belief about the absolute uniqueness of every person that resonates in Scheler, but ever more lively in Levinas’s phenomenology of the face-to-face relation, and what Buber called the I-thou relationship. An entire work could be done on this level of philosophical engagement with the ethical. The self-and-temporal horizon is what limits our ability to transcend the very conditions of being subjects unfolding and living out the structures of experience in time. To some extent, Heidegger, but more importantly, James’s radical empiricism articulates this within-time-ness the best.

Finally, I put self in relation to nature-and-God. Nature and God can stand in for ideas of unified totality, and if these two are exclusive then we should try to find out exactly what it means to relate to the entire whole. Philosophical anthropology, then, is an attempt to articulate the most general interpretation of human beings in relation to a conception of the totality of reality within the bounds of unified experience. Questions of philosophical anthropology are not settled, and I am cautious when talking about really big ideas of totality and unity. Practically speaking, the manner in which someone believes they are in relation to reality of the whole—whether that is Nature or some ideas of the Divine like God (and what could be meant by God and even collapsing the distinction between Nature and God), these are metaphysical interpretations that become culturally sedimented in human practices and daily life, which is the brilliance of Husserl’s Crisis in the European Sciences. Imagine various interpretations of human beings and the cosmos as a whole: Greco-Roman humanism, Judeo-Christian traditions, and the scientific materialism of the human person. Scheler rightly understood that in the 20^th century we’ve forgotten ourselves much like Heidegger thought we have forgotten the question of being, but also how to frame the very question of our being—being a person. The success of Scheler over Heidegger is that values saturate our very existence, and Heidegger so divorced values from action that his Nazism is no surprise to me. His fundamental ontology does not have a place for the absolute uniqueness and dignity of persons to be felt at all, and every Heideggerian I meet is guilty of a flirtation with fascism because of the dearth of values in the heart of Heidegger’s fundamental ontology.

Currently if I were to commit a digression, I might say that my colleagues in English, Cultural Studies, and more worldly engaged humanities are thinking through the devastation of the environment. For them, this is the age of the Anthropocene, a term invented to signify that human civilization has altered the very geophysical situatedness of the planet, and a thorough exploration of how we got here can be traced to the Judeo-Christian religious tradition in thinking that God provided nature for human beings to do with what they saw fit with it rather than perceiving the interdependency of all living things. Christianity and capitalism proved to be a dangerous combination. In this way, a proper pragmatic phenomenology might align itself with those engaged in philosophical genealogies of Nietzsche and Foucault and try to understand both how the Anthropocene started philosophically in the habits of the past and what new possible understandings of the human person in relation to the cosmic whole are necessary to affect change. If the environment is already ruined, then it stands to reason we should lessen our impact. I know that I have left us far afield from where I started so let me return now to the discoveries I previously mentioned.

Third, unlike Husserl, Scheler regards moral values and non-moral values to be rooted in intentional feeling. Intentional feeling is itself not a type of rational logic motivated by epistemic concerns that inaugurated the development of both the epoché and reduction in Husserl’s thought. Instead, the ordo amoris, as Scheler called it, has its own logic, and it precedes all other epistemic motivations. In this way, Scheler’s interpretation of phenomenology is that it discerns essences in the interconnections between feeling acts and the value-qualities that form the object of those feeling acts. To understand, then, the metaphysics of value, which is the heart of my current thinking and what Persons and Values in Pragmatic Phenomenology is about, is to understand the very phenomenological relation with the world. For me, Scheler’s affective intentionality is the answer both to the metaphysics of value question but more importantly a guiding principle to answer how phenomenologies always become ontologies themselves. I also see this in Scheler’s later concern with philosophical anthropology and his sociology of knowledge. The very core of his phenomenological ethics is never abandoned, the same value-rankings and respective hierarchy are maintained. It’s a more difficult question about whether or not he is phenomenological in his later works.

Fourth, the type of ontologies you get in pragmatism tend to be a metaphysics where phenomenological essences activate in relation to the objects of experience. I know that sounds a bit vague, so let me explain. If all ideas functionalise as Scheler put it, then they unfold in relations, the metaphysics of value are what phenomenologists describe, but we shouldn’t just take phenomenologists at their word. Part of the problem of phenomenology is that after you describe the world and open up eidetic seeing, you’re essentially done with the philosophising. Pure phenomenological descriptions are inert if we don’t ask what effects those descriptions have in our experience. These descriptions can be tested by seeing how they harmonise in action pragmatically and what their conceivable effects are. I saw this union when James and Scheler both gave primacy to felt relations and the essences and/or habits such relations entail. When I saw that, that’s when I decided to place them together in dialogue. Persons and Values in Pragmatic Phenomenology is a consequence of that insight.

The fifth and final discovery is that James’s radical empiricism might just be the best form of phenomenology ever to be developed. I have yet to explore or develop this insight, and it would require juxtaposing James in relation to every major phenomenologist to see if such a working hypothesis has any traction. As a consequence of Persons and Values in Pragmatic Phenomenology, I may be returning to James more fervently than when I started. What’s clear to me, however, is that you can do more with James, but it’s not clear that phenomenologists alone can do much without pragmatism.