Phenomenology, the Body, Freedom, and History: Part Three

Last time out, I discussed the body and freedom, with specific emphasis on what it means to make a decision. I concluded, with Merleau-Ponty, that any decision requires a body in a world. There must be a worldly context for decisions, what he calls a “field.” “Objective” accounts of a world “out there” so to speak, don’t fully account for what it’s like to experience freedom in a body in a world, and “subjectivist” accounts of a “mind” ignore embodiment for a space of pure reason. The former can only explain the body in physiological terms, objectifying it, while the latter often misunderstands the mind as the driver or command center for the body. In that latter case, this happens because we tend to mistake our explicit, ex post facto representations of the world to ourselves with our being in the world, which happens in a “pre-objective” or “non-thetic,” always-embodied experience.

The question for today concerns how this account of freedom encounters history. As we move in the world in and over time, with projects, motives, and intentions, there is, as Merleau-Ponty puts it, “a certain sedimentation of our life; when an attitude toward the world has been confirmed often enough, it becomes privileged for us” (466). If freedom were purely volition, or a free decision the end product of deliberation, then presumably we could break with the world, begin it anew at any and every moment. At the extreme end, this be would something like Augustine’s God, who thinks the world at every moment in an eternal act of constant creation outside of time. We can’t get behind the world in this way, because we’re always already in it, in time, in what, elsewhere, Merleau-Ponty calls a double horizon of past and future as we make sense of things and other myselves.

If I have a serious drinking problem, for example, I’m not likely to stop drinking easily, because I dwell in a world and in a phenomenal body committed to drinking. It’s the “atmosphere of my present” in this way (467). I could resort to statistical (objective) measures of how many alcoholics stop drinking or continue to drink, which tells me very little about what the experience of being likely to stop or continue means. Or I could “think” the “decision” to drink is simply “mind over body” such that all I need do is convince myself to stop, but that doesn’t begin to account for the sedimented experiences occupying my “present atmosphere” and thus my likelihood of stopping or not. Yet the general sense of who stops and who doesn’t, and the likelihood that I will or won’t stop is something I experience as my body gears into the world. As Merleau-Ponty has it, “generality and probability are not fictions, they are phenomena” (467). My freedom in this scenario is my commitment to an existential project I live out. I can commit my whole self to stop, to a different way of being in the world in my bodily projects (in much the same way I commit my entire self to being in love with another), but I can’t simply be a teetotaler immediately because I decide to be one. So in a certain way, there is some truth to the language of rehabilitation, this notion that one is always an alcoholic in some way without ever drinking alcohol again.

I’ve been thinking lately how racism works in a similar way, especially given recent conceptualizing of “anti-racism” by Ibram X Kendi, for example. In this view, anti-racism requires a full commitment, a fundamental change to one’s being in the world that nevertheless bears the sediment of previous experiences. Obviously racism and alcoholism are hardly the same experience, but the general structure of the analogy holds. This is why racism has been described as an “addiction” or a “mystique” to use Howard Zinn’s term for its style or practice among many white people in the Southern United States in the early 1960s.

Class Consciousness and Agency

History is just the broad sense of a “certain sedimentation.” To flesh this out, Merleau-Ponty spends some time discussing class consciousness. Not surprisingly, he rejects both the idea that objective conditions somehow generate class consciousness (statistical, causal forces) and the idea that one must awaken one’s class consciousness (as if a switch turns on in the mind somewhere) in order to foment, say, a revolution.  Rather like E.P. Thompson later on, Merleau-Ponty understood the lived character of socioeconomic class: “Neither the economy nor society, taken as a system of impersonal forces, determine me as a proletarian, but rather society or the economy such as I bear them within myself and such as I live them; nor is it, for that matter, an intellectual operation without any motive, but rather my being in the world within this institutional framework” (469).

A word Merleau-Ponty does not use, but which bedevils historians, is agency. When it comes to phenomena like “class consciousness” or for that matter “race” or “gender” and so on, historians fall in across a broad spectrum of determined or presumably “free” choices when it comes to being in the world in these situations. Historians can be slippery about this concept of agency. We use it often without much thought. We sometimes undertheorize. For the most part, Merleau-Ponty uses the word “freedom” similar to the way many historians use “agency” but with a higher degree of precision and in a different way. Having a body and being a human in the world means having freedom, but not like “free will” in the conventional sense. Most acts of “agency” in the way historians sometimes use such ideas suggest a mind-ordering consciousness that represents its acts to itself. This isn’t surprising because the historical record is very often a catalogue of historical individuals representing to themselves, in letters people wrote, or in published works, for example. Social or cultural historians occupy firmer ground often when they describe human beings living or doing or experiencing things. But as a matter of course, the feeling of freedom is lost to us in the historical record itself, because it can never recover the “atmosphere of the present.” This is the hand we historians have been dealt.

But surely we can recover something meaningful. Certain histories of slavery come to mind here, especially Eugene Genovese’s Roll, Jordan, Roll (obviously inspired by Gramsci’s insights.) In that account, within a system or institutional structure, enslaved people committed themselves to existential projects. They had motives and intentions in an intersubjective world with layers, levels, and degrees. Slaveholder and enslaved “negotiated” situations with one another, or, described rather differently from Genovese, inhabited phenomenal bodies in a shared world such that slaveholders, over time, adapted their practices as enslaved people asserted agency or freedom. The power of “masters” wasn’t absolute, but compromised in numerous ways. This wasn’t necessarily a “conscious” set of choices, but sedimented adaptations developing over time within the context of a horrible but shared, lived system of presumed mastery and brutal oppression. I’ve discussed this kind of scenario with men in prison on a number of occasions. They describe an exploitative world, but one with certain pockets or unavoidable instances of freedom where, say, this or that prison guard adapts to a shared experience. In their experience, prison administrators often describe assertions of freedom by imprisoned men as “manipulation” and make repeated efforts to stamp it out. So the “game” in prison for inmates often means navigating a shared world, finding ways to be free, in a general system of oppression. “Do your time like a man” is a constant refrain.

I also suspect Merleau-Ponty would be amenable to what Robin D.G. Kelley has called the “hidden transcript” of freedom or agency, where, depending upon the situation, what one wears or listens to or does (existential projects) can have political implications. The difference, in that case, is that the actors would have to sense their existential projects “politically” without explicitly representing it them to themselves. They would have to commit themselves fully to living that way in their bodies. The question has always been whether the historian, from some lofty perch, has imposed this kind of being in the world upon historical subjects/bodies or not. Without care, every activity or project can take on a political valence if one imposes that sense onto it. This then expresses that historian’s being in the world, a commitment to freedom at the center of her or his life. Yet, what else have we got?

Merleau-Ponty, as I read him anyway, would also contend that rebellion or revolution is or was possible in different situations because such events could or did develop over time in this shared world, in the sense of being lived, prepared for, or ripened as one begins or began to sense one’s possibilities and projects in different, intersubjective ways amidst things and others. Depending upon the situation (only very roughly what historians call “context”)—that is, the layering and measuring-up people did in a pre-objective, non-thetic way—one could sense, say, stealing a shoat or picking up a farm tool very differently owing to different levels of commitment with or against others in one’s world. In a class context, Merleau-Ponty concludes, “[B]eing bourgeois or a worker is not merely being conscious of so being, it is to give myself the value of a worker or a bourgeois through an implicit existential project that merges with our way of articulating the world and of coexisting with others. My decision takes up a spontaneous sense of my life that it can confirm or deny, but that it cannot annul” (473).

Next time out, I’ll move from this particularist or “micro” account of historical change to consider historical consciousness, the sense we have of history as a whole as we’re in the world.