Existential Phenomenology and the Problem of Race

Abstract

Lewis Gordon's Bad Faith and Antiblack Racism1 is the latest original contribution to the mushrooming field of African-American Philosophy. It is crucially significant in that, unlike the commonly expected treatment of issues in this tradition, it adopts an existential phenomenological approach. This use of phenomenological method is not antagonistic to the more common rights-based analytical approaches. This text is also ground breaking to the extent that it does not focus on the philosophically token issues of civil rights and black economic equality. Unlike earlier works in African and African-American philosophy, it is not concemed primarily with the question of how best to integrate blacks within the existing political and economic system. It also breaks rank with the common philosophical treatment of race. Most philosophers, acting as geographers of reason, often banish race to the philosophical jungle of the irrational and, consequently, exclude race from serious philosophical consideration. When not treating race as an irrationalism, they treat it as an epihenomenon, as impotent explanatorily. Some philosophers even claim that race has little claim for autonomous theoretical status. And finally, there is a certain popular, cultural view of racism. prevailing view concerning racism is that it is something that belongs to the past. Where it is taken to occur at all, it is considered as socially anomalous, as unusual, as individual aberration or institutional hangover placed in check as soon as its occurrence is noticed. Anyone extending racist expression a greater place in contemporary culture than this picture warrants is bound to be considered paranoid.2 Race, on Gordon's view, cannot be so easily dismissed. He seeks to show how race, among other things, survives as an existential reality. In acknowledging Gordon's text as existentialist in orientation, we need to be clear about what Gordon means by existential phenomenology. Descriptive ontology or existential phenomenology, correctly characterized, is the study of the basic structures of human existence and, unlike traditional ontology, is not primarily concerned with the study of what is or what exists; it simply describes the structures of human reality. The overwhelming presence of Sartrean phenomenological ontology in this text requires familiarity with Sartre's views. The main tenet of Sartrean existentialism is the freedom of human consciousness, i.e., the freedom to act, along with freedom to value and the freedom of self-creation. Consciousness, however, itself does not qualify as an object of consciousness. Consciousness is nothing more than intentional activity. Here, intentional activity should be understood in the sense that every act of thinking is directed towards an object; every act of consciousness has a corresponding object. However, consciousness is not an object for itself. Sartre posits two different kinds of being. First, he posits the being of objects for consciousness, which he calls being-in-itself. Being-initself refers to all that is not human consciousness. So, for example, a stone is a being-in-itself, for a stone is a physical thing. Being-in-itself, according to Sartre, is complete, fulfilled and, thus, has no possibilities. Put differently, being-initself is not free; we do not talk about a stone exercising its freedom. The second type of being is the being of consciousness, what Sartre calls being-for-itself. Being-for-itself is human consciousness. Now since consciousness is a nothing, namely not a thing, not an object, it is incomplete, lacking, and unfulfilled and, thus, full of possibilities. Understanding being-for-itself as designating the human individual, each individual human being, unlike physical objects, is condemned to freedom, meaning that human beings are not things; they are not substances. Things, objects, and substances are being-in-themselves. But a human being, being-for-itself, possesses possibilities, that is, freedom to choose, freedom to act, freedom to define oneself, etc. …