Forms of Life and Subjectivity E-Book

Daniel Rueda Garrido

• Herausgeber: Open Book Publishers
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2021

Beschreibung

Forms of Life and Subjectivity: Rethinking Sartre’s Philosophy explores the fundamental question of why we act as we do. Informed by an ontological and phenomenological approach, and building mainly, but not exclusively, on the thought of Sartre, Daniel Rueda Garrido considers the concept of a "form of life” as a term that bridges the gap between subjective identity and communities.

This first systematic ontology of "forms of life” seeks to understand why we act in certain ways, and why we cling to certain identities, such as nationalisms, social movements, cultural minorities, racism, or religion. The answer, as Rueda Garrido argues, depends on an understanding of ourselves as "forms of life” that remains sensitive to the relationship between ontology and power, between what we want to be and what we ought to be.


Structured in seven chapters, Rueda Garrido’s investigation yields illuminating and timely discussions of conversion, the constitution of subjectivity as an intersubjective self, the distinction between imitation and reproduction, the relationship between freedom and facticity, and the dialectical process by which two particular ways of being and acting enter into a situation of assimilation-resistance, as exemplified by capitalist and artistic forms of life.

This ambitious and original work will be of great interest to scholars and students of philosophy, social sciences, cultural studies, psychology and anthropology. Its wide-ranging reflection on the human being and society will also appeal to the general reader of philosophy.

Leseprobe

FORMS OF LIFE AND SUBJECTIVITY

Forms of Life and Subjectivity

Rethinking Sartre’s Philosophy

Daniel Rueda Garrido

https://www.openbookpublishers.com

© 2021 Daniel Rueda Garrido

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Daniel Rueda Garrido, Forms of Life and Subjectivity: Rethinking Sartre’s Philosophy. Cambridge, UK: Open Book Publishers, 2021, https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0259

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Contents

Acknowledgement

vii

Preface

ix

Introduction

1

1.

The Phenomenological Ontology of Forms of Life

35

2.

Forms of Life and Ontological Conversion

69

3.

Habits, Identification and Forms of Life

101

4.

Forms of Life, Imitation and Conscious Will

123

5.

Dialectics, Forms of Life and Subjectivity

147

6.

The Capitalist Form of Life and its Subjectivity

175

7.

Forms of Life and Subjectivities of Other Communities in the Capitalist Era

237

Conclusion

275

Bibliography

305

Index

325

Acknowledgement

This book would not have been possible in its current state without the committed and selfless professional team of Open Book Publishers. I dedicate it to them.

Preface

© 2021 Rueda Garrido, CC BY-NC 4.0 https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0259.09

If we are asked what aform of life is, we may respond abstractly by stating that it is what people in a particular location do and think. If then we are asked to respond more precisely what ourform of life is, we will probably begin to make an inventory of what we do and think on a daily basis.

We would begin, most likely, in a temporal order, from the moment we wake up. We would describe our breakfast in relation to the work we are going to do during the day and how breakfast keeps us energized until the next meal; we would describe our journey by car or public transport to the workplace, the music we listen to as we travel and the people we meet; we would describe a working day, the activities we do and what we are paid for; we would describe our communication with co-workers and with those other people who are not present but with whom we communicate via mobile phone using some Internet application; we would describe how we get along with them, those we dislike, those we admire and those with whom we compete; and we would describe the return home, the leisure hours, perhaps video-conferencing with friends or chatting with a partner or family, perhaps exercising our body in the gym; and we would describe the shopping we have done on the way home in some supermarket or, once there, through some online shop, and how the car or motorbike we see parked next to our building moves us to want to buy a similar one in the future, perhaps when we get the expected pay rise or success in a business we have invested in; and finally, we would describe how, while having a snack, we relax watching a film or TV series to empty our minds of the daily hustle and bustle, and get ready to sleep and come back the next day with renewed energy to do it all over again.

If we were now asked to bracket everything we have just described and answer again the question of what aform of life is, we would undoubtedly have some difficulties in answering. After all, what we have put into brackets is what we consider to be ourform of life, and yet the imagined inquisitive questioner forces us to go further: to describe what a form of life is without resorting to the particular description of everyday action and emotion. This means describing the form of life in what we can call its conditions of possibility; that which makes possible the content we have just put into brackets. This fundamental description must therefore be not of actions but of what makes us perform those actions. We are thus confronted with our consciousness as a whole, whose content we have put into brackets. And yet this whole continues to shape our consciousness. That emptied whole—at least emptied of that which we have brought to reflection—is the principle that governs everything that is between the brackets. Everything, right now, only has a reason to exist because of that emptied whole. The actions between brackets cease to have—temporally—meaning in themselves. What they are is due to that whole that we now stop to contemplate. The content between the brackets cannot exist without this emptied whole. It is that without which nothing of what is described would take place. It is its constitutive or ontological principle. And this is what we can call our first discovery on the way to answering what a form of life is after having put its content into brackets.

A form of life is thus an ontological principle that constitutes all our daily actions. But should we be satisfied with this finding? —We are asked. Our interlocutor would add that it is also important to bracket this principle, at least to see what happens. And, learning from the first experience, we could also aspire to show what is the foundation or raison d’être of this principle, which, in turn, constitutes our first bracket. Thus inspired by our interlocutor, we bracket that principle which we have found to be constitutive of our form of life. ‘When not only the content or the parts but also the whole itself is put into brackets, what is left?’—We are asked. We are tempted to answer that nothing is left. But let’s think about it for a moment: can anything emerge from nothing? If the whole appears out of nothing, what makes it appear? After meditating, we answer that ‘If we put the whole into brackets, what remains is its possibility.’ Our interlocutor does not show any signs of surprise, and asks us again: ‘What is the difference between nothingness and possibility?’ We meditate for another moment. From nothingness as such, the whole cannot emerge. For it to emerge there must at least be its possibility to do so, and the latter is a mode of being. There must be a difference between nothingness and possibility. If there were not, everything would be possible, even when there is no possibility, that is, when there is nothing. Our interlocutor then invites us to conclude: ‘If it is not nothingness, but rather possibility that remains after bracketing the whole, what is this possibility?’ We become aware that we are about to lay the foundations of the constitutive principle of a form of life. And we meditate one last moment. The possibility of the whole is the whole as a possibility. But as possibility, it is not yet enacted. It is rather the negation of the whole as actuality. We therefore conclude that ‘The possibility of the whole is the negation of the constitutive principle insofar as it is its possibility of being.’ Our interlocutor looks at us with an elusive gaze.

We have reached the second important finding in order to answer the question of what our form of life is. Putting both the content of our daily actions and the whole into brackets, we are left with negation as a possibility. ‘And what exactly does this mean?’ our interlocutor asks us once again. So we meditate on the negation of the constitutive principle of our actions. That the negation of this is its possibility means that in order to be, let us say, in actuality, the constitutive principle of our form of life has had to deny its negation. Our possibility, then, is that which denies us, for only by denying it, in turn, can we be who we are. Before our meditation turns into a string of meaningless tongue twisters or riddles, we meditate and answer our interlocutor: ‘Negation as possibility is the negative constitution of our ontological principle. This means that our form of life as a whole arises from its negative principle. The whole that we have put into brackets is first of all its possibility, and this is its negativity.’ Let us sum up the road we have covered and state now that the content of our first bracket depends on the possibility of our constitutive principle. We would not act as we act if it were not for the fact that with our actions we deny (or flee from) the negation of our constitutive principle.

We think that our interlocutor is now going to leave us alone, having reached our two important findings. But we are wrong; our interlocutor now asks us: ‘What is the difference between the constitutive principle and its negation, if the latter is the possibility of the former?’ We meditate once more and answer: ‘The possibility of the constitutive principle is also, in a sense, the constitutive principle, for without it, the constitutive principle would not be.’ Our interlocutor looks at us patiently. We confront him and reply that ‘Without the possibility, there is no being, but being carries in itself its possibility. Therefore, the negation of the principle is constitutive of the principle itself. It is its original possibility.’ And we conclude that ‘Our form of life is the content of a whole that carries within itself its negation. So our form of life persists in its being without ever moving away from its negation, which, in turn, is its permanent possibility.’ It is like the shadow wanting to move away from our figure or us wanting to stop breathing because the dioxide ages our cells and kills us.

Once again, we are forced to go beyond, and show the consequences of our meditation. If our form of life consists of the actions bracketed and the constitutive principle that grounds them from their own original possibility, who are we? Are we something other than or equal to that form of life? Do we exist outside of it? This meditation is certainly taking us far, and yet we can see that we are still exploring the answer to the initial question of ‘What is aform of life?’ So, we close our eyes and set ourselves once again to meditate. If we admit that we are something distinct from our form of life, because we are that which performs the actions (distinguishing between action and agent), we would have to admit equally that we are distinct from the constitutive principle, for we have found that the form of life is not only those actions we perform but also the constitutive principle in which they are contained as their whole. But are we distinct from the constitutive principle of our form of life? That would mean that whatever it is that we refer to as ‘we’ or our ‘I’ is distinct from both the whole and its possibility. But what is distinct from the whole and its possibility, what is beyond the one and the other? Now it seems that the answer is ‘nothing’. For the whole has in itself its possibility, and the latter constitutes it. Therefore, if there is something that we are, and that we call ‘I’, it must be included in the whole of our form of life, or at least it must also arise from its constitutive principle and its original negativity. Our interlocutor is no longer looking at us. But we are ready to respond and we draw his attention. ‘“We” or our “I” cannot be outside the form of life and its possibility, therefore we conclude that we are our form of life. That is also what we can call our subjectivity.’

The interlocutor makes us reflect for the last time: ‘And are we, then, in the actions we have put into brackets, or in the constitutive principle that governs them, or in both?’ Now we have no more doubts, we reply without fear: ‘We cannot be outside the form of life, and our subjectivity cannot, therefore, be different from it, so our subjectivity is both the constitutive principle and its original negativity and the actions it constitutes.’ The actions between brackets governed by the principle can be considered our habits. And all together this is our subjectivity. Answering now our interlocutor’s question more precisely, we conclude that ‘We are in our constitutive principle as much as in our habits.’ Our interlocutor, acquiescing, then summarizes the journey we have made: ‘In our meditation on the form of life we have accounted for our daily actions, their constitutive principle and the possibility of the constitutive principle or its negativity, and all this has led us to identify the form of life with our habits or principled actions and the latter with our subjectivity.’ And, in an affectionate tone, he encourages us to continue meditating on the particular principle of ourform of life and its original possibility.

The philosophical inquiry to be found in the pages that follow assumes the attitude to which this initial meditation has predisposed us. A meditation, thus, that aims to facilitate the philosophical quest that is presented in this book as arising from our own inner search.

Introduction

© 2021 Rueda Garrido, CC BY-NC 4.0 https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0259.10

All forms are alike, and none is quite like the other;

and thus the chorus points to a secret law

[

Alle Gestalten sind ähnlich, und keine gleichet der andern;

Und so deutet das Chor auf ein geheimes Gesetz

]

Goethe, ‘Metamorphosis of Plants’1

1. Sartre’s Dichotomies

This book is a development of Jean-Paul Sartre’s philosophy. And the goal is to make Sartre’s work relevant for issues in contemporary philosophy in a new way. The relevance of the French philosopher for the study of human beings lies in two essential dichotomies that pervade his thought. That is, thedichotomy of freedom/facticity and that of individual/group. If the subject appears isolated in his consciousness in Being and Nothingness (L’être et le néant, 1943), in his next great work, the Critique of Dialectical Reason (Critique de la raison dialectique, 1960), the subject now appears subsumed under society in what Sartre calls serial groups or groups in seriality or sérialité: ‘[the collective] structures the subjects’ relationships of practical entities according to the new rule of the series’.2 The meeting point between the individual and the group does not seem to be found in the French philosopher’s work until his last writings, where the concept of the universal singular appears for referring to the subject, especially in The Family Idiot:Gustave Flaubert, 1821–1857 (L’Idiot de la Famille, 1981). This individual, now taken as universal singular, is an advance towards a holistic consideration of human beings, as one whose being participates in a larger context, in a particular time and place. In Sartre, thus the universal singular refers to a historical-cultural context.3 Compared to a certain solipsism attributed to his early writings, this has the advantage of showing the individual as a temporary being subjected to the changing conditions of society. Thus, the individual, who freely accepts the behaviour of a given social group, tends to be trapped in its constraining and demanding nature: freedom becomes facticity or external necessity, and praxis becomes practico-inert or fixed and repetitive behaviour (le champ pratico-inerte). However, precisely because of this, in this view of the relationship between society and the individual, the possibility of the individual freely maintaining the behaviour dictated by society (or part of the society) is left aside. And precisely the reason for this is the ambiguous and blurred concept of society.

In these pages, I hold that the solution lies in a unitary and ontological conception of culture as a form of life, and society as a plurality of forms of life. In this way, the culture of a society as a particular way of being and acting is limited. And in this limitation, those ways of being and acting that the individual shares with other individuals are highlighted, while in the abstract concept of society the different types of forms of life that it may comprise are not distinguished. From the concept of ‘form of life’, it can be understood that the individual who shares or incarnates it (I will refer to this Sartrean concept below) does so both freely and by duty, or better, by a duty freely assumed. For the form of life as a particular way of being and acting, and not society as a general, abstract concept, is what the individual identifies with. So if this identification takes place, the individual wants to be what he should be. This is the main advantage of postulating a form of life as an ontological unit, namely, that the individual is simultaneously a freedom that imposes on himself what he understood as necessary and a necessity that is continuously and freely sustained. And this allows us to contribute to the search for the longed-for synthesis beyond the dualism between subjectivism and objectivism already advocated by Simone de Beauvoir in ‘What is Existentialism?’ [‘Qu-est-ce que l’existentialisme?’]:4 ‘The fact is that the old labels, idealism-realism, individualism-universalism, pessimism-optimism, cannot be applied to a doctrine that is precisely an effort to surpass [dépasser] these oppositions in a new synthesis, respecting the fundamental ambiguity of the world, of man, and of their relationship.’5 In the form of life as an ontological unit, that is, as a shared way of being and acting, my facticity is freely sustained by me and the freedoms of daily life are given by my facticity; likewise, the shared way of being and acting is my own way of being and acting, and with it, I not only identify myself with a ‘We’, but also I distinguish myself from those who do not share it. This is an attempt to understand our subjectivity not only dependent on intersubjectivity but also on the world as an objective level where our shared behaviours ground our own identity.

2. Forms of Life

The expression ‘forms of life’ has its contemporary origin in the natural sciences and, in particular, in Biology. A form of life in this original context referred to the fundamental characteristics of the organisms of the different biological realms in relation to their environment.

From the scientific field, it then moved on to historical and anthropological studies to refer to the indigenous ways of configuring life in different societies. However, the informative and elaborate works that Giorgio Agamben has carried out in the last decades on the concept of form of life confirm that this expression in its Latin version ‘forma vitae’ was already used in the monastic texts of the first centuries of Christianity to refer to the common life that the monks led in relation to the monastic rule (cenobitic life).6

Wittgenstein was the first to use the term ‘form of life’ (Lebensform) in a philosophical sense. Just as the form of language is logic, and this limits that which can be not only said but also thought (Gedanke or the logical picture of a fact),7 since, according to the isomorphism that the Viennese author assumes—indebted to Bertrand Russell—the limits of our language are the limits of our world,8 the form of life would be the framework that makes possible the flow of our living.9 If the form of language or logical essence does not allow us to think beyond it, our form of life does not allow us to live in a different way, that is, to behave inconsistently with it. This form is the totality of our possible behaviours.10 In Wittgenstein, however, the distinction between form of life and form of language is not entirely clear. Rather, he seems to identify the two, so that the form of life would be reduced to the use of language, as ‘to imagine a language means to imagine a form of life’.11 The form of life would be a language game, or at most a macro language game, that would determine all possible language games in a community.12 This last interpretation would converge with the thesis of those who defend a continuation between the Wittgenstein of the Tractatus and that of the Philosophical Investigations.13

In fact, David Kishik asserts that in the work of the Viennese philosopher just as reference is made not only to different language games but also to human language as thelanguage game par excellence, so ‘we find ourselves speaking not only about different forms of life but also about the form of life, which is what we sometimes call “humanity”’.14 The union of the two is where the ambiguity seems to be created, for it seems that if there is a form of life, it is fundamentally linguistic, i.e. it is a language game. But a language game in Wittgenstein’s radical conception is a type of activity.15 And as such an activity it has to be made possible and constituted by the same underlying foundation as other behaviours we engage in. Language in its use is equivalent to actions that we carry out, such as apologising, greeting, ordering, praying, praising, etc. Therefore, our linguistic behaviour is part of our form of life, which is the totality in which we make sense of it. The form of life is not the language, but the language is born out of the form of life as the constitution of our consciousness and practical experience, of what it makes sense for us to do. In one of the notes to his lecture on private experience and sense data, Wittgenstein himself seems to have realized that his insistence on understanding human experience from language, in its enunciation and communication, led him to ignore the source of that experience, that is, the world of consciousness as a phenomenological totality that makes individual experience (Erlebnis) possible. In these notes, the philosopher seems to understand the need for a phenomenological turn:

But aren’t you neglecting something—the experience or whatever you might call it? Almost

the world

behind the mere words? […] It seems that I neglect life. But not life physiologically understood but life as consciousness. And consciousness not physiologically understood, or understood from the outside, but consciousness as the very essence of experience, the appearance of the world, the world.

16

According to Wittgenstein’s conclusion, the linguistic approach is insufficient. We need to reveal thebeing of our consciousness in order to understand our behaviour and hence our language as activity. Hence, it seems sensible to hold that the form of life is that totality of our consciousness in which our experiences and possible behaviours are determined. This concept of ‘form of life’ must be related to the phenomenological concept of the ‘life-world’ (Lebenswelt), which originated in Husserl’s work. Husserl conceived this concept as the horizon of our actual and possible human experiences, independent of the subject and object itself: ‘The world is pre-given to us [die Welt ist uns] […] not occasionally but always and necessarily as the universal field of all actual and possible praxis, as horizon [als Universalfeld aller wirklichen und möglichen Praxis, als Horizont vorgegeben]. To live is always to live-in-certainty-of-the-world’ [Leben ist ständig In-Weltgewißheit-leben].17 This quotation from Husserl puts us on the right path to understand human praxis as part of a form of life. To take this step, we must turn to Sartre and his existentialist ontology, which guarantees that the subject as a universal singular depends in its being and acting on a transcendent principle, which, however, the French author will not be able to delimit or characterise sufficiently.

In Being and Nothingness, the above-mentioned concept of facticity (facticité) was defined and explored in relation to that of being-in-itself (things) and being-for-itself (consciousness).18 The being is presented in internal negation, so that from that denial comes the for-itself or l’être-pour-soi as a way of revealing and recognizing the being-in-itself or l’être-en-soi.19 Thus, Sartre accounts for the union while separating things and consciousness. Consciousness as being-for-itself is being in so far as it depends on the being-in-itself. On the other hand, facticity is that which is presented to us as given, that which surpasses us or that transcends us and over which we have no freedom. The concept of facticity thus refers to existence before the for-itself takes on a project, or as Sartre repeats, borrowing it from Martin Heidegger, to the fact that we are ‘beings thrown in the midst of the world’ (in-der-Welt-sein).20 Human existence thus takes its ultimate foundation from that facticity, which is the being-in-itself, that is, ‘the for-itself appears as being born from the world, for the in-itself from which it is born is in the midst of the world’.21 If that is the foundation (because the being-for-itself arises as an internal negation of the being-in-itself), that is where the strength of any philosophy of existence is.

Our facticity is our body, our family, our past, the place where we were born, the place and time in which we live, the environment that forms our immediate reality, other human beings as beings in-itself (which the for-itself objectifies), and so on. None of the aforementioned depends on us to exist (we did not originate them), but, according to Sartre, in order to carry out our life project (leproject fondamental)22 we depend on all of them, it is what enables us but also what limits us in our projects: the for-itself has to count necessarily on its facticity, because it must be noted that, for Sartre,23both being-in-itself and being-for-itself are just one being (although dialectically separated into two elements tending towards an ‘impossible synthesis’),24 in such a way that the project or perspective that the for-itself (or our consciousness) freely gives itself carries the essence of its facticity or its being-in-itself. In this way, our consciousness, as essentially free, reduces the opaque reality to a coherent and unitary world, rendered meaningful for us. But in that world, the essence of the facticity that has been surpassed keeps beating.25 This is an essential idea of his ontological phenomenology, which Sartre keeps until his last works (I elaborate on it in Chapter 1).

What the for-itself makes out of the in-itself is what Sartre properly calls ’situation‘. The situation is not, therefore, facticity but neither it is only the free use ofimagination in terms of image-consciousness. For my claim on forms of life to make sense, I must highlight precisely this aspect of Sartrean philosophy. If it is consciousness that elaborates a sense of its own by surpassing the facticity,26 that sense, which is the project or way in which we understand ourselves and our reality (the image of the man we wish to be of which Sartre speaks in Existentialism and Humanism),27 that sense, I repeat, is intentionally related to that reality (unless one has a pathology, which is studied by Sartre himself as hallucination):28 my facticity essentially is the departure of the project that I give to myself or the way in which I understand myself.

Facticity, or the ‘force of things’, as Beauvoir referred to it,29 is organized through our projects in situations (since the being-in-itself is surpassed). In fact, the way in which the for-itself grasps a situation has to do with the project it embraces and the end that it pursues, maintaining the latent force of things in that project, including the human condition as limitations.30 That force is experienced when there is a change in the facticity, thereby demanding (not causing, because there is no causality between two elements that are not substances) a re-assessment of the situation and prompting a decision regarding the possibility of continuing with such a project in that situation. The example given by Sartre is someone who wants to go to the neighbouring town by bicycle but one of the tyres is punctured on the way.31 The incident, that is, the puncture of the tyre as a facticity, or better, a coefficient of adversity that shows the facticity, does not cause the abandonment of the project of reaching the neighbouring town, but demands a reassessment of the situation and the project (which only will be abandoned or suspended by free decision of the for-itself, which could grasp the situation in a different way altogether and decide to stop a car to help him or else walk to the neighbouring town, but in any case, the for-itself has to deal with an assessment of the situation as it is conditioned by the facticity). Sartre also exemplifies this point with the case of an ill person, ‘who possesses neither fewer nor more possibilities than a well one’: it all depends on how he assumes sickness as his own condition.32 And this assumption of our facticity (in terms of the situation we make out of it) and the role of our projects are both fundamental aspects to understand the possibility of the concept of ‘form of life’ in the ontological sense suggested.

The way in which we understand reality and make a particular situation out of it, as mentioned above, is motivated by our fundamental life project or what Sartre also calls our world (the surpassing of the in-itself as given). And, nevertheless, the fundamental project or world (as a unit of meaning) of the for-itself, although it is born free and spontaneously, does not do so without any link with the in-itself, the facticity, because it necessarily arises from it, although in order to arise, it has to deny it as real or as in-itself.33 This aspect will be developed in more detail by Sartre in the Critique of Dialectical Reason,34 where he recognizes the greater role that social, historical and cultural factors have in that conditioning of our facticity. That is, that the social and cultural behaviour of others as facts that constitute our existence inevitably conditions our projects (and our world), which in turn carry its essence or structure. In this sense, I have called that praxis that is ‘fossilized’ in the facticity, as the practico-inert (le champ pratico-inerte), that is, ‘alienated praxis’ and ‘worked inertia’,35 a ‘form of life’. A form of life is, therefore, that series of actions that defines a community or group and that imposes its structural principle on future projects (or actions) of its members. In this work, I deal with this issue in the chapters dedicated to actions and habits (see Chapters 3and 4).

These projects, according to Sartre, can be fundamental or particular. This distinction is equivalent to the one we can establish between a particular action and a form of life—but with a clarification. The form of life as a project is the set of actions that constitute a type of human being. And in each one of those actions, that form of life is present, as the whole in the part, through our consciousness. The relationship between the particular project and the fundamental project can be translated into the relationship between theaction and its form of life.36 Each individual acts according to a form of life that he has freely adopted, but, as a fossilized praxis and thus part of the facticity of each individual, it is adopted without surpassing it in its essence, which is manifested nevertheless in every action. The way in which individuals accept and adopt that form of life leads us to think about an identification process: the individuals tend to identify themselves with the principle of the actions to which they are exposed. It is as simple as saying that someone, for instance, will not understand himself in harmony with nature if in his environment the behaviour he perceives does not allow such a self-image to be desired (in terms of identification with it). That he identifies with the principle of those actions I take to be the desire to want them performed. Thus I follow Harry Frankfurt in thinking that identification is the coincidence between the subject’s will and second-order volition (my wanting to want something): ‘to want what he wants to want’.37 But this wanting to want is an ontological issue, for it is the desire of being in a particular way. To the identification of the subject with a particular way of being andacting, I devote a section within the chapter concerning the onto-phenomenological structure of the form of life (see Chapter 1) and later on in the section on imitation (see Chapter 4). The concept of the ‘form of life’, although it is an interpretation and adjustment of the broader and richer concept of the life project proposed by Sartre, I consider to be fundamental for the understanding of the union of individual and socio-cultural levels: in the concept of form of life, social and cultural factors enter and constitute the individual domain. Human beings are identified then with their form of life, in terms of the actions and habits they carried out, and specifically with the image of human being that that particular form of life brings about. Or as Sartre put it: ‘Man is nothing else but what he purposes, he exists only in so far as he realizes himself, he is therefore nothing else but the sum of his actions, nothing else but what his life is.’38

In this sense, every form of life is a series of actions that are habitually carried out with a certain meaning for the members of the community who identify with it. Then, the form of life is unitary but has two aspects: the meaning with which the actions are carried out and the actions themselves. Both meaning and action constitute a unity, for an action cannot be understood without the meaning with which it is performed, nor the meaning stripped from the action that it galvanizes. And the same is true of each and every action of a particular community. Each action is indissolubly linked to the other actions that make up a particular form of life, which as an ontological unit, is an organic whole in which all actions partake. And if we understand the action or behaviour of the community as facticity, then we must conclude that at least this type of human facticity is born with a precise meaning, that is, they are principled actions.Moreover, As Eric Nelson and François Raffoul inform us, facticity comes from the Latin factum, ‘which is not an assertion about nature, but primarily associated with human activity and production’.39 Therefore the form of life as facticity is intrinsically meaningful, for it is both outside and inside, in the world and in our consciousness, what we freely and spontaneously do and what we share with other subjects in our community.

An analogy can be drawn between this concept of ‘form of life’ and the behavioural norm, defining a certain class identity that Pierre Bourdieu called ‘habitus’. This would correspond to certain greetings, social manners, forms of dress and consumption habits that define what is reasonable for a certain social group:

being the product of a particular class of objective regularities, the

habitus

tends to generate all the ‘reasonable’, ‘common sense’, behaviours (and only these) which are possible within the limits of these regularities, and which are likely to be positively sanctioned because they are objectively adjusted to the logic characteristic of a particular field, whose objective future they anticipate.

40

This ‘habitus’ is based on empirical data showing a regularity of behaviour associated with a particular social class. And it is claimed that the identity and distinctiveness of this class seems to depend on this ‘habitus’.41 The limitation of this approach, I believe, is precisely that it cannot go beyond showing certain regularities, thus missing the unifying and meaningful principle from which these behaviours arise, i.e. it neither reveals the genesis of this ‘habitus’ nor can it overcome the empirical limit on which these regularities are based. And without an ontological principle or onto-phenomenological unit from whose totality these behaviours freely and spontaneously emerge, the ‘habitus’ can only be a reproduction of meaningless actions. Or in other words, if ‘habitus’ can be taken as habitual behaviours with meaning, it is because they arise from a form of life, and therefore, only as constitutive parts of this form of life and as an actualization of its a priori constitutive principle can ‘habitus’ be the bearer of individual and inter-subjective identity.

The latter would allow us to better understand both the phenomenon of social distinction and that of class struggle, for both are nothing but phenomena within the same form of life that everyone in a community (social, national, religious, professional and so on) aspires to fully incarnate. Think that there would be no class struggle if the oppressed did not identify somehow with the form of life of the oppressors, or if a certain homogeneity was not assumed between them. That is, for two elements to be considered as opposites, they must be understood under the same criteria: ‘no antithesis […] without synthesis’.42 Thus, there is no struggle between two social groups if both do not pursue the same essential end. Likewise, the fixation in the social class according to the data of the owned capital (including economic, social and human capital), makes us lose sight of the fact that individuals, in principle ascribable to different social classes, can lead the same form of life. That is, some in the fullest sense and others with the predicaments that lead to protest or resignation. Note that the austerity movement, for example, is in this sense no less capitalist than those towards whom the protest is addressed. Both classes of individuals are incarnations (subjects) of the same form of life with different degrees of integration. Here, integration is understood as the process by which subjects incarnate their form of life with progressive perfection, and I take it in Sartre’s sense:

In so far as, in a synthetic unification, the part is a totalization of the whole (or of the overall totalization), incarnation is an individual form of totalization. Its content is the totalized ensemble or the ensemble in the process of being totalized […] It realizes itself in a very real and practical sense

as

totality producing itself here and now

.

43

The subjects are individual totalization because they gradually include more practical aspects of their lives under the same totalizing principle, and therefore contribute to the totalization of the form of life in which they are contained. The subjects thus incarnate in degrees the totalizing ontological principle that drives the universal totalization, the latter being theform of life of the community with which they identify.

The question of whether a certain action can go against a form of life still needs to be asked.44 And if the answer might well be that any action that arises as a particular project of a form of life has to be accommodated in principle to the latter, nevertheless, there might be cases in which an action in a singular situation by participating precisely in that form of life ends up denying it and suggesting its suspension or abandonment. I will briefly examine these cases in the chapter devoted to conversion (Chapter 2). In the rest of the cases, in what we can call ordinary situations, it seems that individuals act by identifying situations in accordance with their form of life. Thus, from a form of life as a freely adoptedproject, the action of the individual arises, an action that thereby will be part of the structure of the reality as practico-inert, contributing to the integration of the individual with his community in the mentioned form of life.

Nonetheless, one of the main points I want to make throughout this book is that although the consciousness is shot through by facticity in terms of the principle that constitutes our image of human being, the form of life with which we identify ourselves and from which we receive our identity, does not make us less free. Moreover, it seems that, in a fundamental way, to be free is precisely to be able to act motivated by our own form of life, and more specifically by the image of human being that is enacted by that form of life (see Chapter 3, on actions and habits). However, this identification with a form of life from which the actions of the individual arise can be understood as a result of a spontaneous and free adoption of the principles that drive the actions to which we are exposed at the factual level. But, in fact, all identification seems to exclude any other alternative, in the sense that the subject acts freely even if he has only one option, as long as that option is the one he wants and with which he identifies (see Chapter 4, on conscious will andsocial conditioning). This proves to be a challenge to the concept of authenticity defended by Sartre. For him, to be authentic would be to recognize precisely that our form of life is superfluous, not necessary, and that, although it is freely chosen, it does not determine us as a whole. Accordingly, inauthenticity would be precisely to act as if that form of life were essential to me or my profession, to my community, my group or my nation, just like the Sartrean example of the waiter who is acting as if that were his essential way of being,as if he were nothing more than a waiter.45 That is to say, inauthenticity and, by the same token, the self-deception in which the former is based, consists in the negation of a primordial freedom beyond our particular choices.46

Here we can see that for the Sartrean ethics, freedom is an essential element that is opposed to facticity, from which it flees and with which it can never be identified. But, I claim that it seems that it is in that form of life, whose fundamental principle guides me in my actions, that I can say that I am free. Freedom does not require the possibility to act otherwise. Thus, a compatibilist approach to free will emerge from these arguments (see Chapters 3). Consequently, the actions that are considered moral in my environment will be moral prescriptions for me, and I will shape the situations in which I am involved according to them. If so, these actions will be free and the form of life from which they arise can be said to have been freely chosen by the individual, because, incidentally, despite the exposure to particular behaviour and environment, it is the individual who spontaneously abides by that form of life and the principle that drives it, for as Sartre put it: ‘Man is nothing else but that which he makes of himself.’47

Thus, my claim is that these Sartrean dichotomies that have been mentioned maintain a rationalist and artificial dualism that distances us from an all-encompassing conception of human beings. For Mark Meyers, this all-encompassing conception is conveyed in what he calls ‘liminality’: ‘an ontological position that might straddle and thus mediate between the dichotomous positions of being-for-itself and being-in-itself as theorised by Sartre’, for ‘Sartre, at least in Being and Nothingness, implicitly engages the problem of liminality but does not allow it to overturn the dualism at the heart of his ontology.’48 To suppose that subjects are somehow independent of their facticity, which they can surpass and deal with freely, or that they are independent of the community to which they belong by self-identification, is a misrepresentation no more than to think the opposite, namely, that they are determined by the external demands and impositions of their society. This shift away from Sartre means, among other things, capturing that common experience by which subjects, while acknowledging that a behaviour is mandatory, do not feel less free to carry it out. This indicates that the subjects feel integrated into their form of life. The subjects may become aware of the obligatory nature of certain behaviours (not having or being allowed an alternative option), but if they identify with their form of life, they will want to maintain this obligatory nature. Thus, those who identify with a religious form of life will want to maintain their habits and traditions on certain dates, such as Christmas or Easter in the West, and in the same way those who identify with a capitalist life will defend the need to maintain economic competitiveness and consumerism as purchasing power, something that will be understood as a desired necessity at the same time (see Chapters 6and 7 regarding the subjectivity of the capitalist form of life).

The point I want to make is that the solution to Sartre’s dilemma between individual and socio-cultural factors lies in thinking of that relationship as one of ontological unity, whereby subjects share or incarnate the same way of being andacting that they feel is obligatory in order to be who they want to be. This implies an approach whereby the form of life constitutes the subjects who freely impose the former upon themselves. Thus, the form of life becomes that unit in which the opposites of that dichotomy are synthetically united. The subjects freely give themselves a way of being andacting that constitutes their facticity. The latter, understood as a duty, is in close solidarity with desire and subjectivity. They form a unit. In a word, the form of life explains that paradoxical experience by which we want to be the one we are obliged to be, but also the resistance to act and be with respect to a form of life with which we do not identify. Hence, the separation of the two is not even possible when the subjects actually identify with their form of life as a way of being andacting shared by a community. In this sense, what society does to me can either be understood as a denial of my community as a shared way of being andacting, which I experience as a denial of my own being and identity and I resist it; or it can be understood as what one does to oneself, if by society we take the hegemonic form of life with which I identify and in which I integrate (see Chapter 5 on the concepts of hegemony and integration into the form of life).

Simone deBeauvoir soon understood that we are not absolutely free to surpass our facticity and, compared to Sartre, she tried to elaborate that synthesis by which freedom and facticity are kept in tension, as in the Hegelian dialectic: ‘Perhaps the starkest difference between Beauvoir’s views and those of Sartre lay in her growing conviction, evident at least as early as Pyrrhus and Cineas (1943), that human freedom is boundless only in principle. In reality, she was coming to see, people’s choices are often hopelessly constrained by their unpromising circumstances.’49 For this reason, she maintains in The Second Sex that the situation of women is one of oppression and that their own freedom is set against them:

Society in general—beginning with her respected parents—lies to her by praising the lofty values of love, devotion, the gift of herself, and then concealing from her the fact that neither lover nor husband not yet her children will be inclined to accept the burdensome charge of all that. She cheerfully believes these lies because they invite her to follow the easy slope [

Elle accepte allégrement ces mensonges parce qu’ils l’invitent à suivre la pente de la facilité

]: in this others commit their worst crime against her; throughout her life from childhood on,

they damage and corrupt her by designating as her true vocation this submission, which is the temptation of every existent in the

anxiety of liberty

[

on la corrompt en lui désignant comme sa vocation cette démission qui tente tout existant angoissé de sa liberté

].

50

The important thing is that here we can see already submission and freedom—I would add freedom of identification—as correlative and simultaneous. This is an advance towards a more realistic and complex vision of the relationship with our environment. The revelation of the form of life as an ontological unit underpins this relationship, because when facticity and freedom are understood as an inseparable and constitutive unit, one obtains either an attitude of voluntary ‘submission’ to the way of being andacting with which one identifies, by which one wishes to maintain the relationship of dependence between woman and man; or one does not identify with the form of life established as hegemonic and that shapes its facticity, in which case, the woman feels not only constrained in herfreedom of action but denied in her own subjectivity, that is, in the being that she has freely given to herself. None of the latter is felt or experienced by the woman in the first case, in which what is considered to be dependence on the male is part of her form of life, with which she identifies and in which she wants to continue to integrate: in a word, she does not want it to change. Nonetheless, Beauvoir thinks that ‘it must be admitted that the males find in woman more complicity than the oppressor usually finds in the oppressed. And in bad faith they take authorization from this to declare that she has desired the destiny they have imposed on her.’51 But this description seems to erase the perspective of women who identify with that form of life and that, in fact, it is a destiny that they have freely imposed on themselves, or rather, that each subject of the entire community has imposed on them as the desiredway of being andacting.52 The attitude condemned by Beauvoir can be seen, however, in emotions that are still maintained today, as, for example, the amae in Japan, which consist of being proud of and valuing dependence on someone.53

If women and men learn to be women and men, it means that they do so within a form of life, and that only outside that form of life can it be challenged. In fact, it is from the outside that one can see the behaviour of the other form of life as that of those who damage and corrupt girls54 by taking as the essence of the human being one’s own form of life, which is nothing but a freely adopted way of being and acting with respect to one’s own environment. Therefore, the key to understanding ourselves and others is not the notion of facticity that imposes over freedom, or the difficulty freedom has to surpass and change facticity; rather, it seems, and this is the argument of this whole book, that it is the radical notion of a form of life as an ontological unit that explains the subjectivity and the negation of it. It is from the form of life that we can understand that even what is considered as a dependency or oppression, seems to be an attitude freely adopted and desired by the subjects of that form. An attempt to change such a situation is an attempt at resistance from an alternative, non-hegemonic form of life, which struggles not to be assimilated, and the success of its struggle depends on the ‘persistence’ in its being, which in turn depends on other subjects following suit.

3. Cultural Phenomenology

Going beyond Sartre and Beauvoir, the relationship between the individual and society with respect to their freedom and their being has been the central theme of numerous investigations both from philosophy and from the empirical sciences. Since ancient times this question has been directed towards the search for personal identity, either through intellect, like Plato, or through faith, like St Augustine. Both solutions understood the individual as a separate or separable entity from the community. Along with them another tradition, that of cultural determinism, reached Johann Gottfried von Herder in the eighteenth century, and would feed the Romantic conception crystallized in the work of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel by which the individual is a blind instrument of the development of Being or Idea (Geist) through the nation (culture) and the state. In the last century, many studies have promoted one position or another with respect to the relationship between the subjects and their culture. This came mainly from the hands of social thought and emerging sciences such as anthropology and social psychology. The character or identity of the individuals in some of these accounts had a certain creativity with respect to their culture, as in the case of Edward Sapir, who ‘argued that culture should never be seen as a superorganic entity existing over and above individuals, but could be understood only through the perceptions and responses of the various personality types who are constrained by, yet continually act upon, their world’.55 However, in other accounts, it was the culture that dictated various modes of identity or character different from those constituted by other cultures. The latter is defended by Franz Boas’ disciples, Ruth Benedict and Margaret Mead. They considered culture as a totality. Individuals were determined in their own being by that totality. The feelings, actions and character of the individual were proper to and inseparable from that culture. ‘Whatever the reasons for the evolution of a particular cultural form, Benedict’s main point was that “most human beings take the channel that is ready made in their culture” and become the character types already provided for them.’56 This line of thought from Sapir to Mead, together with the relativist thought that will come strengthened by Wittgenstein’sPhilosophical Investigations (and especially by Richard Rorty, one of the most popular supporters of cultural incommensurability)57 and, in some way or another, associated with the phenomenological tradition initiated by Husserl, comes to set the background of what today is considered cultural phenomenology.

The latter has sought to combine the efforts of the cultural and phenomenological perspectives, that is, the study of group conditioning and the analysis of individual experience. Such an approach can be seen as one of the serious attempts in the contemporary intellectual landscape to examine the human beings in inextricable union with their culture. For this reason, it is from this perspective that a rethinking of Sartrean philosophy for the study of human beings is proposed. However, first we need to elaborate a little more on what cultural phenomenology consists of and how its own current disposition requires the introduction of the ontological notion of ‘form of life’ for a more comprehensive understanding of human behaviour and subjectivity. Therefore, taking as our departure the contemporary uses of the term ‘cultural phenomenology’, I aim to examine and identify the roots of it in the phenomenological tradition.

According to my sources, the term ‘cultural phenomenology’ only made its appearance a few decades ago, in the field of cultural and anthropological studies.58 Nevertheless, its principles and serious implications go back to the first studies of phenomenology and, in a loose way, to certain advances in the relativistic proposals of the nineteenth century, supported by the linguistic relativism of Wilhelm von Humboldt and the Volkgeist (spirit of the nation) of romantic nationalism. As such, the label of cultural phenomenology does not appear in any of the usual textbooks of phenomenology or history of philosophy. I have not found any entry on this sub-discipline in any encyclopaedia and not even in the online encyclopaedia of philosophy at Stanford University, which can certainly be highlighted by the breadth of its entries and the sophistication of the information it provides. My initial surprise at such an absence was unfounded when I realized that such a branch of study, although it deploys the phenomenological method (or certain variants of it, not always well understood), comes mainly from the empirical sciences, that is, from psychology, psychiatry and anthropology. In this sense, as one of its pioneers asserts, its first vague echo dates back to a text by Sapir, in which the renowned anthropologist recommended the collaboration of psychiatry and anthropology in the study of cultures.59 This was intended to indicate that the empirical study of social relations, traditions and other cultural factors could only be understood in combination with how they were processed and experienced psychologically by individuals. Psychiatry approached phenomenology in this first definition, but, obviously, it moved away from it as it consisted of an empirical study of symptoms, causes and effects.

The epigones of this first attempt to study culture from the individual and the individual from culture are those that today write about cultural phenomenology. Fundamentally anthropologists and psychologists, they are producing interesting and stimulating research in which interdisciplinarity leads them to take a novel perspective, with testimonies of individual experiences that confirm hypotheses about cultural forms or individual experiences on which general patterns of explanation are induced.60 In parallel, in cultural and literary studies, Steven Connor, a University of Cambridge professor, has also developed a certain concept of cultural phenomenology.61 According to his website, the term came to him in the 1990s, showing a certain claim to authorship.62 The sense in which Connor seems to take the term ‘cultural phenomenology’ has to do with cultural phenomena and is fundamentally artistic-literary, through which it is possible to study the features of the culture to which those phenomena belong. Thus, culture would condition what is written or done to such an extent that the reality lived and expressed by the author or agent is cultural. The cultural in a broad sense is lived as a substantial reality. To reveal the ultimate meaning of what is expressed individually by the author would require certain discrimination of that cultural meaning which constitutes it. There is no claim to a specific method or procedure in Connor’s work. In his articles, he does show in a certain way what his understanding of cultural phenomenology would be, in a sense close to the existentialist literature of Sartre.

In both the literary-artistic and the anthropological-psychological versions, the term phenomenology is taken loosely regarding (linguistic) transcriptions of individual experiences of different phenomena such as sickness, depression or even their personal identity. The researcher examines in isolation the data of the informant’s experience, thus depriving them of any relation to the cultural domain as a whole, which is supposed to make possible the experience. The purpose of this experience, nevertheless, is neither to reveal the ultimate meaning of the phenomenon (or object of the experience) nor to show it in its being and fundamental structure. Rather, especially in anthropological use, it serves as a complement to certain theories or social forms inferred from empirical study, or at most as a reflection at the individual psychological level of certain socio-cultural factors. In any case, the phenomenological component is reduced to psychological data with a quasi-empirical value. But, focusing on particular experiences as quasi-empirical data can never disclose the essence or constitutive principle. In Sartre’s words, getting to the essence by cumulating accidents is equivalent to ‘reach[ing] 1 by adding figures to the right of 0.99’.63 The cultural phenomenology in these