With these words, toward the end of the Cartesian Meditations, Husserl summarizes in remarkably succinct form his phenomenological program. Let us examine briefly what Husserl is saying in this passage. Three important elements can be disengaged from it.

The word “alienation” carries with it a swarm of vague but pre-dominantly negative connotations concerning the generally deplorable condition of modern man, theme ad nauseam of numerous psychologists, sociologists, theologians, novelists, journalists, and others.1 If these connotations accompany us when we approach Sartre’s study of alienation in Being and Nothingness, we seem called upon to make a decision: either alienation is not so horrible a phenomenon as others have made it out to be, or Sartre is being naïvely optimistic in missing its horror. If we decide in favor of Sartre’s position on the grounds of serious ontological evidence and consider ourselves liberated from the myth of modern man’s misery and then turn to Sartre’s study of Genet, all the horror returns a thousandfold and we feel betrayed: either Sartre has gone over to their side after all, or he was one of them all the time but deceived us earlier.

Alfred Schutz was an exemplary phenomenologist. Chief among the ways in which I am moved to emulate him is the manner in which he related himself in his own philosophizing to that of Edmund Husserl. Schutz was not interested in being a mere interpreter or transmitter of phenomenological doctrines. Rather it is manifest in his writings that he used Husserl’s findings to facilitate his own phenomenological investigations, adopting and adapting those results which he found sound and relevant to his own problematics and revising and extending them where he found them in one or another way wanting. As a tribute then to Schutz, I shall here attempt to treat a part of his theoretical product after that same fashion. Thus while the theme of this investigation was important for Schutz and while my results largely confirm those of Schutz and Husserl which bear on it, I am not so much concerned here with the thought of my phenomenological predecessors as I am with the matters themselves in question and in that respect I claim to have made some philosophically useful advances within constitutive phenomenology.

I feel that I must begin by confessing a prejudice. I find it difficult to take seriously commentators who ascribe a fixed or final position to Nietzsche. By this time Nietzsche scholarship has brought us safely beyond the crudest mis-identifications: Darwinian Eugenicist, Racist, Proto-Nazi, etc. But subtler ones persist. It is still generally supposed that one must identify Nietzsche with such doctrines as the Will to Power, the Übermensch, and the Eternal Recurrence in much the same way The Forms have been identified with Plato and the Categorical Imperative with Kant. I see no way of refuting such notions in one stroke short of reproducing the entire Nietzschean corpus—accurately translated and with careful textual exegeses wherever needed—in such a way that its impact can be felt in one synoptic overview. This being impractical, we shall have to settle for something less.

When Merleau-Ponty presented himself as a candidate for a chair of philosophy to the body of professors of the Collège de France in February, 1952, he furnished them with a comprehensive plan for future research which would, by building on the works he had already published in the fields of the phenomenology of perception, art, and history, proceed to the investigation of the realms of speaking and writing (in a projected work to be called La Prose du monde), of thinking and knowing (in a book to be called L’Origine de la vérité) and which would, after having thus established a theory of truth, culminate in a metaphysical treatise, L’Homme transcendental. As we know, none of these works was completed during his lifetime. He abandoned La Prose du monde (less than half completed) that same year, 1952, and seems to have definitively lost interest in it after 1959. The manuscripts which had been variously entitled “L’Origine de la vérité,” “Généalogie du vrai,” and “Être et monde,” were all put together, after 1959, under the new title, The Visible and the Invisible, the book Merleau-Ponty was working on at the time of his death and which we possess in the posthumous form of a half-completed treatise followed by an intriguing but unfinished.

Sartre is the contemporary philosopher who has most explicitely interrelated the problem of the look, the body and the other. In Being and Nothingness, he devotes one-fourth of his seven hundred and twenty pages to the problem of the body and the other,1 and of that he devotes a total of nearly sixty pages to the function of the look.

One of the greatest and oldest of images for expressing living change is that of the movement of waters. Rivers particularly, in their relentless motion, in the constant searching direction of their travel, in the confluence of tributaries and the division into channels by which identity is constituted and dispersed and once more reestablished, have stood as metaphors for movements in a variety of realms—politics, religion, literature, thought.

The essentially different orientations of phenomenology and critical theory have been so much debated in the history of modern thought that one has reason to wonder if there is any historical evidence for a debate at all. To be sure phenomenology and critical theory have been compared, even formally, in recent history with a view to making them at least similar in orientation, if not identical, in their mutual quests for philosophic truth. Equally, or at the same time, critical theorists in particular have attempted to make it emminently clear that there is no relation between phenomenology and critical theory, or if there is, it is a mere appearance. Others have argued that if there is a relationship it is a mere pseudo-relationship since those under the influence of phenomenology (later hermeneutics) and those influenced by critical theory (namely Habermas) are really in the same idealistic camp. Hence, anyone who enters into this quandry of positions and counter positions is to say the least confused by the rich offering from which to choose. My own reflections on the issue, reflections which were at one time under the influence of phenomenology and now are under the influence of social theory, have in some sense attempted to come to terms with these various and conflicting interpretations.

The ontology of Ortega y Gasset crystallized slowly between the years of 1934 and 1945. These were years of exile, years of war and financial insecurity that forced him to move from country to country. His health too was sorely tested on various occasions during this period. Remoteness from intellectual resources, familiar libraries, co-laborers, were doubtlessly disturbing obstacles to his progress. Ortega was fifty in 1933; yet for all these hindrances the next decade of his life was his most ambitiously productive.

Despite the impressive reception that structuralism has enjoyed so far, the fact remains that few “structuralist” thinkers rest easy with the name and fewer still venture more than an exemplarist account of their own innovative methods. Nonetheless, most writers who persist in using the name usually do acknowledge some degree of indebtedness to structural linguistics: specifically, to Saussure and the ensuing tradition. In the case of Lévi-Strauss’ structuralism (perhaps the most “orthodox” variety), this debt is most apparent when he insists on maintaining the strict distinction between synchronic and diachronic analysis. But if this initial distinction is one of the most important for Saussure, it ultimately proves to be one of the most disconcerting doctrines for Lévi-Strauss—disconcerting because, in fact, it is never respected. Even while he argues repeatedly and forcefully for the distinction between synchronic and diachronic analysis, Lévi-Strauss systematically suppresses the diachronic axis. That such a suppression does take place, and that this can be strictly demonstrated across his various texts, will be our present concern. Moreover, this procedure indicates a great deal about the metaphysical tenor of structuralism as such.

Heidegger situates Husserlian themes within the wider context of the question of being, but he does not sufficiently consider the context of political philosophy. And even the question of being appears different if the political context is taken into account. Heidegger advances beyond Husserl by… raising the issue of pulicness in a more appropriate way than Husserl, with his stress on the discourse of science, was able to do. But Heidegger’s conception of the public is not adequate for political life; in terms of the kinds of human association distinguished by Aristotle in Politics I.2—family, village, city—Heidegger’s thoughts are most appropriate for the village, not the city. A village is not based on any kind of constitution or “social contract.”

Many approaches to poetry are conceivable. Indeed many are practiced—historical, sociological, psychological, psychoanalytic, formalist, semiological, for example. I would like to show here that the phenomenological approach is privileged. In a nutshell, the aim of the phenomenological approach is to describe the lived-experience of poetry and to bring out the meaning of poems revealed in the experience. I do not want to say, by calling the phenomenological approach privileged, that it should exclude others. The dogmatic proposal of any one method seems futile to me. Every kind of knowing is in process, not only because of its historicity but also because of the inexhaustibility of its object which imposes a multiplicity of Abschattungen. As for poetry, every step of its process opens up to phenomenology. First, because the phenomenology of poetry lets us take hold of, if not define, the poeticalness of poetry. And secondly, because a phenomenology of poetry leads to an ontology and thus provides a foundation for other interpretations.

Ever since Plato declared imagining to be mere pseudo- or shadow-knowing—a form of eikasia, the lowest species of mental activity—Western philosophers have striven to put imagination in its place: a strictly subordinate place. With the exception of isolated figures such as Vico, Collingwood, and Bachelard, philosophers have denounced imagining for its digressiveness and excoriated it for its evasiveness, though sometimes surreptitiously admiring it for these very qualities. At the same time, and as part of the same tactic of impugning, invidious comparisons have been instituted between imagining and supposedly superior psychical activities. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, for example, the paradigm was pure thinking, over against which imagining appeared as deceitful and mendacious—as “the mistress of falsehood and error” in Pascal’s classic complaint. Even Kant, for all of his attention to imagination as a source of synthesis, considered the image to be “a mere set of particular qualities, determined by no assignable rule”—in contrast with the determinacy and rule-bound character of pure concepts.

A question always has a beginning. That, of course, is not remarkable. But what is strange, perhaps even uncanny, is the way that frequently, as one progresses into a question, one learns how the question-provoking situation itself has already set the main features of one’s work upon a solution; so that one finds oneself drawing out ever further the implications of that original moment. It is with this in mind that I wish to begin here by recalling the situation that for me provoked the question I wish now to explore.

Why is consciousness so difficult to explore? Are we not all, non-philosophers included, experts in this matter? Yet we do not even seem to know whether consciousness is one or whether it is divided into several distinct kinds.

When called upon to comment upon Professor Wilfrid Sellars’ contribution to the symposium on “Consciousness,” I could not but accept the invitation, for I knew that a paper by Wilfrid Sellars must offer what any commentator would want—substantial and provocative philosophical thought; the temptation to respond to that sort of challenge was too strong to resist. On reading his paper, I was comforted that like me he did not see an unbridgeable gulf between phenomenological analysis and conceptual analysis; amazed by the skill with which he has practised phenomenological reduction by gradually “thinning out perceptual commitments”; and intrigued by some of the theses that he seems to me to be defending. In these remarks, I will first turn to three such theses. With two of them, I find myself in substantial agreement, so I will spend some time in elaborating them in the way I would like them to be understood. With the third I disagree, I will briefly say why. That I pick out these three theses is partly due to the fact that they have struck me as being singularly important and also as being basic both to his methodology and substantive position.

The recent cultural background of the problem of psychopathology and evil is what Phillip Rieff calls the triumph of the therapeutic. His thesis is that modern politics, psychology, and religion are now pervaded with a dominant cultural type, psychological man, whose basic posture is the pursuit of well-being without considerations of good and evil. The triumph of the therapeutic rests on a conflation of various forms or dimensions of human misery. Misery as onto-logical insecurity and anxiety in the face of the threatening contingencies of life, misery in the form of mental disorder or psycho-pathology, and misery in the form of human evil all turn out to be one thing. What follows represents an attempt at a theory of differentiation which argues that the psychopathological and human evil are different kinds of responses to the problematic and threat which is constitutive of life itself, and they are marked by quite different dynamics. Obviously, a theory of differentiation requires both an eidetics of the sphere of the psychopathological as well as of human evil. This paper is little more than a summary sketch, an outline, in which such an eidetics is attempted. At the same time it should offer sufficient detail to make the theory plausible.

What follows is an attempt to appraise phenomenologically some “structuralist”1 themes present in Michel Foucault’s The Order of Things as they are rooted implicitly or explicitly2 in Nietzsche’s philosophy. The main part of this essay will expose and expand on these themes in as neutral a way as possible, the question of their validity being provisionally bracketed. At the end of the essay, the brackets will be lifted; however, in order for the debate between phenomenology and “structuralism” to be productive, it should not restrict itself to a one-way process. It is my contention that the questioning of “structuralism” by phenomenology can prove to be most fruitful if the latter is also ready to let itself be questioned by the former.