Gail Weiss

De-Naturalizing the Natural Attitude: A Husserlian Legacy to Social Phenomenology

This essay focuses on Husserl’s conception of the natural attitude, which, I argue, is one of his most important contributions to contemporary phenomenology. I offer a critical exploration of this concept’s productive explanatory potential for feminist theory, critical race theory, queer theory, and disability studies. In the process, I draw attention to the rich, multi-faceted, and ever-changing social world that can be brought to life through this particular phenomenological concept. One of the most striking features of the natural attitude, as Husserl describes it, is that it is not natural at all, but rather, is a developmental phenomenon that is acquired through, and profoundly influenced by, specific socio-cultural practices. To de-naturalize the natural attitude, then, is to recognize that the natural attitude is not fixed or innate but relative to a particular time period and culture, and therefore always capable of being changed.

Reading/writing between the lines

This paper critically examines the practices of reading and writing through the differing perspectives offered by Kierkegaard, Sartre, Barthes, Foucault, and Derrida. Although Kierkegaards and Sartres respective views on reading and writing do not receive much attention today, I argue that both articulate (albeit in different ways) a notion of shared responsibility between reader and writer that is compatible with their respective emphases on absolute responsibility for oneself, for others, and for the situation. An advantage to both Sartres and Kierkegaards accounts from a postmodern perspective, is that they affirm the simultaneity of individual and co-responsibility without appealing to a fixed or unitary self.

A Genealogy of Women’s (Un)Ethical Bodies

This chapter offers a brief historical overview of the gendered mind/body dualism associated with the rationalist tradition, according to which women’s bodies have been viewed as a threat to reason and to ethics. Taking up critiques of this model offered by Beauvoir and Fanon, I maintain that the body of the Other makes an ethical claim upon us in the form of “bodily imperatives.” I conclude with a critical analysis of contemporary feminist ethics that seeks to move beyond the false dichotomies of mind/body, reason/emotions, transcendence/immanence, and male/female dualisms. Assuming as their starting point the universality of human dependency and the debilitating reality of embodied oppression, contemporary feminist ethicists seek to overturn the sexist, racist, and ableist effects of a philosophical tradition that has always privileged some minds and bodies over others.

Mothers/Intellectuals: Alterities of a Dual Identity

Hybrid identities, especially identities that are usually thought to be oppositional to one another such as ‘mother/intellectual’, can produce confusion and anxiety not only for those who embody them but also for those who witness their co-existence in another person’s life. Linda Martin Alcoff argues that ‘Identities must resonate with and unify lived experience, and they must provide a meaning that has some purchase, however partial, on the subject’s own daily reality’ (42). If it is indeed the case that identities help to make sense of and unify our lived experience, it might seem that the best way to accomplish this would be if our identities themselves were unified. Indeed, our proper names serve symbolically as unifiers of our identity and, as Louis Althusser and Judith Butler respectively maintain, they facilitate our interpellation as singular individuals.1 Both Althusser and Butler emphasize, however, that while it is through interpellation that we become subjects in our own right, at the same time, it is also through being interpellated by others that we are subjected to those others. This process of subjectivation is both enabling and disabling: enabling insofar as it grants us social recognition, disabling because we ultimately lack control over the forms that recognition will take since it issues from others and not from ourselves.2

Toward a Phenomenology of Sexual Difference: Husserl, Merleau-Ponty, Beauvoir (review)

Benhabib concludes her analysis by looking at political developments in citizenship in contemporary Europe. Her thesis is that two forces are causing us to rethink our conception of citizenship: the reconfiguration of the “statecentric” system of the 19th and 20th centuries on one hand and the growth of volatile and fragmented collective cultural identities on the other. She ends her examination with a question rather than an answer: “After the waning of unitary models of citizenship, what form will bounded communities and democratic citizenship assume to enable the exercise of democratic deliberation and experimentation as well as the recognition of diversity?” (184). The issue that Benhabib address in The Claims of Culture is one of the central problems of contemporary politics. Most theorists who address this issue agree, first, that our concept of citizenship is undergoing significant change and, second, that the claims of culture must figure into whatever reconfigured concept emerges. Beyond this, however, there is little agreement on the complex of issues raised in the debate. In the absence of a common ground, it is difficult to assess Benhabib’s position. It is important to note, however, that the culture wars that are now raging arose initially in the context of a critique of universalism. Universalism has, since the beginning of the debate, been defined as the root of the problems that multiculturalism seeks to correct. Thus any defense of universalism is, by definition, suspect in the context of this debate. Benhabib’s argument for a carefully circumscribed universalism is persuasive and well argued. She meets many of the objections that the multiculturalists have raised and offers a cogent critique of a number of multiculturalist positions. But her position is, nonetheless, a universalist one and it will not be acceptable to those who are convinced that the claims of culture are absolute. Perhaps what Benhabib’s book reveals most clearly is the polarization of the debate. The epistemological assumptions of multiculturalism, assumptions Benhabib has labeled errors, preclude an acceptance of her universalism, no matter how carefully crafted. Multiculturalists will not be convinced by Benhabib’s argument any more than she is by theirs.

Simone de Beauvoir: An Existential-Phenomenological Ethics

Thanks to the recent efforts of feminist scholars, Simone de Beauvoir’s fame as the lifelong companion of existential philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre is slowly giving way to a recognition of the originality of her own work as a philosopher, autobiographer, novelist, essayist, editor, and political activist. Her ethics, in particular, has received a great deal of attention, not only because she offers the first formal articulation of an existential ethics in her 1947 book, Pour une morale de l’ambiguite (published in English in 1948 as The Ethics of Ambiguity and hereafter abbreviated as EA), but also because the moral challenges she discusses there and elsewhere in her works seem as appropriate today as they were half a century ago.