Lyotard's Phenomenology

Katie O'Donnell

Jean Francois Lyotard’s Phenomenology
Introduction

Lyotard, most widely known for his elaboration on the postmodern condition, was a student of Merleau-Ponty and of phenomenology, and in his first book of philosophy he is concerned with explicating and critiquing phenomenology as both a style and a system. Written in 1954, Phenomenology is a document of the political and philosophical climate in postwar France, and its conclusions have seemingly little claim on Lyotard’s later work. Indeed, in his monographic work Lyotard: Writing the Event Geoffrey Bennington writes only that this early work was “criticized and displaced” (1) in Lyotard’s next major work, Discours, Figure. In a three-volume collection of Lyotard scholarship, the task of mentioning Phenomenology as part of the Lyotard corpus is left to the editor, Derek Robbins, who makes a relatively brief reference to the work in his introduction. Yet in the introduction to the text itself, Gayle Ormiston maintains that this work is a preliminary piece to Lyotard’s more well established ideas, emphasizing the episodic character of history that “signifies the necessity of linking, making connections, and noticing it could be otherwise” (13), and appropriating the language of The Differend to explain Lyotard’s philosophical approach within the text. Though I am certainly no Lyotard scholar, I opt for the middle ground, as it seems evident that while Lyotard is not, as Ormiston occasionally seems to claim, anticipating conceptual work that remains twenty years in the future, the concepts at play within Phenomenology, as well as phenomenology itself, exerted an influence on Lyotard’s work beyond this particular study.
Phenomenology is structured explicitly to examine both the status of phenomenology as a critical tool (like Marxism) and as a philosophical system. Lyotard writes, “that philosophy must not only be grasped as event, and ‘from the outside,’ but worked through as thought—that is, as problem, genesis, give-and-take movement of thought” (31). It is this temporal, historical nature of phenomenology that attracts Lyotard and motivates his desire to situate phenomenology itself within history. As Derek Robbins writes, “What Lyotard likes in phenomenology, or what he adds to it and in part derives from it, is that it represents the complete antithesis of static, systematic philosophy” (xvii). With its intentional consciousness and focus on lived experience, phenomenology is involved in a process of recovering humanity itself, in legitimating our application of the description “human sciences” to disciplines like psychology, sociology, and history. To attempt this recovery phenomenology proposes an, if not new, than at least philosophically revolutionary conception of the human subject in which subject and object are entangled in a mutually defining relationship of intentionality. Though Husserl’s phenomenology may suffer too strong a Cartesian influence, the fluidity of the relation between self and world, self and other, self and society, at least provides a needed stepping stone for Lyotard’s later assertions concerning the decentering of the self. However, in Phenomenology Lyotard is still concerned with the unity of the subject. He uses this conception of the phenomenological subject to critique relativist notions like psychologism and historicism, and to combat objectivism. Our historicity is not a problem to be dealt with in order to achieve an objective account of history; rather, it is the condition of our being able to do history, to recognize the historical.
Though the phenomenological style proves a useful tool for clarifying the role of lived experience within the human sciences, Lyotard is unsatisfied with the “philosophy of history hastily constructed by Husserl in Crisis” (133), specifically, with phenomenology’s ambiguous nature. He argues that phenomenology poses an ambiguous history and thus imposes its own ambiguity on history, which ends in manifesting the actual ambiguity of phenomenology itself (133). According to Marxism. Which is an approach much better suited to thinking history politically and concretely, since, as Lyotard asserts, Marxism will never strip matter of its meaning, since matter is already meaning. He argues that because the “phenomenality of the phenomena is never itself a phenomenal datum” (134) phenomenology is unable to phenomenologically explain the decision to identify being and phenomena and thus needs to “establish the right to do phenomenology” which can only be established, according to Lyotard, by philosophical systematization. As Lyotard writes in his “Note on Husserl and Hegel,” “This double proposition—that Being is already meaning and that there is no origin which founds knowledge—permits a clear distinction between the Husserlian and Hegelian positions, apart from their common criticism of Kant” (66). While Husserlian phenomenology agrees with the first part of this proposition, but refuses to give up on the originary, formulating an originary lifeworld that comes close to resembling a transcendence similar to that of the Kantian in-itself. No discourse can “properly say anything about it” (67). Thus Husserl is, throughout his philosophical career, engaged in a “battle of language against itself aimed at attaining the originary” (68), a battle which philosophy can never win since “the originary, once described, is as described no longer originary” (68). Phenomenology as proposed by Husserl can never live up to its own standards, though its attempt to recover humanity remains noteworthy in Lyotard’s eyes, and its return to lived experience remains essential to explicating the human sciences.





Possible Discussion Questions
-All that being said, what role do the concepts of “radical beginning” and “originality” play within phenomenology, to either its benefit or detriment?
-In her book Beyond Postmodern Politics Honi Fern Haber writes that, “All political theories begin from assumptions about the nature of the person and society. A political theory will be judged useful or true or convincing to the extent to which it matches one’s background beliefs regarding the quiddity and parameter of the self and society” (9). In this book Haber is examining the structuralist/poststructuralist accounts of the self. How does phenomenology articulate the self? Is this articulation sufficient?