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My son is three and holding his tiny sandals in his hands. He has just come in from playing to discover I’ve put away his remote-controlled truck. He wants it. I say “no.” It’s dinnertime; he can have it after we finish eating. He is irate. “I’m going to throw my shoe at you,” he says. Before I can react, a sandal hits me in the head, his face crumples in tears, and he wraps his arms around me. Anger, shock, and remorse flood through him in the time it takes his sandal to hit the floor. What just happened?

We humans are strange and wonderful creatures. We have a capacity that (as far as we know) no other being possesses. We worry and care about who we are and whether our actions support the kind of person we hope to be. We are, of course, concerned about the practical effects of our actions (e.g. “If I tell my boss the truth, will she fire me?” “If I make this investment, will it pan out?”). However, we also worry about who we become through our actions. If you have a dog or cat, you are probably familiar with the look of “shame” they get when caught doing something wrong. My cat hates being scolded, but only because it’s unpleasant for him. He doesn’t really feel shame or worry that he is, deep down, a bad cat. I, on the other hand, worry all the time about being a bad parent, a bad partner, a bad philosopher, a bad person. Many parents of “spirited” children share the heartbreaking experience of being asked by their young child “Am I bad?” The answer, of course, is no in all cases. But the fact that even very young people can ask that question and be concerned about the answer is special.

This capacity for caring about who we are requires a lot of support. There are many conditions that enable this kind of caring. Often we default to talk about the biological bases of our more sophisticated capacities—explanations invoking neurological and anatomical developments. But reflect for a moment on just how much is required beyond our “hardware” to care about the kind of person you are. Caring about meeting or failing some standard requires the existence of standards to begin with. Furthermore, we aren’t just concerned with meeting some general standard, but fulfilling the standards of certain roles that we value—roles like parent, teacher, friend. So, there must be roles that we can take up or cast ourselves into. These roles don’t appear out of thin air; they are handed down and handed over in a community. Every role also requires unique projects and tasks—bakers make cakes, parents provide for their children, firefighters put out fires and rescue people, and all these tasks require the use of tools and equipment. These are just the broad strokes of what might be required to support caring about who one is or, as Heidegger puts it, a being for whom “that Being is an issue for it” (Heidegger 2008, 32).

The job of existential phenomenology is to unearth with specificity and in detail the conditions that make caring about who one is possible. This task requires precise methods (for reasons that I’ll address in the chapters “The Problem of Standpoint in Phenomenology” and “General Obstacles for Phenomenological Methodologies”), and over the years phenomenologists have made many attempts to develop effective phenomenological methodologies. Husserl is the classical phenomenologist who is most explicit in his exploration of methodology (Husserl 2014). However, both Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty clearly rely on some stable and systematic methodology—even if they don’t always spell it out. More recently, phenomenologists like Lisa Guenther (Guenther 2013, xiv-xv), Duane Davis (Davis 2020), and Havi Carel (Carel 2021) have focused on articulating phenomenological methodologies.

The aim of this book is to argue for a standpoint approach to phenomenology and to present three methodologies that support this approach. Standpoint phenomenology is grounded in feminist standpoint epistemology and the idea that social oppression and marginalization can, in some cases, result in privileged insight. This idea is controversial in the case of epistemology, and it is doubly so in the case of phenomenology. One achieves a standpoint by utilizing insights drawn from the specificity of one’s social situation—it is one’s social position that allows one to develop privileged insight into epistemology. However, the aim of phenomenology is to uncover what is shared and essential to our being—what conditions support in general and for all human beings the kind of being that we share. The classical phenomenological methodologies reflect this focus on the “universal” by systematically eliminating specificity as a means of identifying what is common to all. Husserl’s eidetic intuition, for example, uses imaginative variation to separate the essential from the particular—that which is specific only to the instantiation of an experience under analysis (Husserl 1977, 54, 2014). Heidegger emphasizes experiences of “average everydayness” to uncover what is shared and stable across various experiences (Heidegger 2008, 67ff.). Merleau-Ponty relies on already highly generalized experiences like walking around an apartment (Merleau-Ponty 2013, 209) or talking with a friend (Merleau-Ponty 2013, 131, 428). In the opening chapter, “The Problem of Standpoint in Phenomenology,” I present the methodological “problem” of introducing standpoint to the phenomenological project. However, I also present an example from the work of the critical phenomenologist Alia Al-Saji, whose insights seem to be drawn from the specificity of her experience—that is, her insights occur because of and not in spite of their social specificity. This example makes it at least plausible that such an approach is possible. The rest of the book will be an exploration of the methodologies that make it possible.

In the following chapter, “Standpoint Epistemology/Standpoint Phenomenology,” I present some background on standpoint epistemology, highlighting in particular three of its key commitments: the thesis of situated knowledge, the achievement thesis, and the thesis of inverted privilege. This chapter articulates these theses in detail and presents an argument for their plausibility before showing how these might be harnessed for a project of standpoint phenomenology. I use Helen Ngo’s work to show how social location can affect one’s ability to interpret and understand phenomenological concepts. In the example I present, Ngo does not uncover a new condition underlying experience, but she draws on her own experience of racism to offer a better way of interpreting and understanding the concepts of habit and sedimentation developed by Merleau-Ponty. In the chapters that follow, I will expand on the idea of standpoint by introducing three methodologies that harness the power of being an outsider-within to produce novel insights into the structures of and relation between Dasein and the world.

The chapter, “General Obstacles for Phenomenological Methodologies,” explores two problems that any phenomenological methodology must address. The first problem is one of distortion, which can occur when one tries to take an experience as an “object” of reflection. The second problem arises as a result of the way many essential aspects of experience are necessarily concealed within that experience. I trace this to the centrality of intentional experience and the foundation of intentional experience on the foreground/background relationship. Much of what shapes human experience serves as background to what is foreground and must remain concealed in the sense of not becoming an explicit object of thought. Attempts to directly interrogate conditions of experience will fail to capture these essential but necessarily hidden features. I discuss these two problems and their origin, because the three methodologies I present have been shaped by and in response to these obstacles.

In the final three chapters, I present three different classical phenomenological methodologies that can and have been used in standpoint approaches to phenomenology.

“The Methodology of Breakdown as a Standpoint Approach” lays out the methodology of breakdown that Heidegger uses (but doesn’t clearly explain) in Being and Time. When something breaks down (e.g. a piece of equipment, a relationship, a person), you catch a glimpse of the reason for the failure—a condition or the conditions that ought to be met for one to experience something as what it is. A piece of equipment, for example, can fail in many ways—revealing the many conditions that must be met for one to experience equipment as equipment. I then show how Frantz Fanon’s work on the historico-racial schema implicitly deploys this methodology by utilizing his experience of a particular breakdown—corporeal malediction—to revise Merleau-Ponty’s concept of the body schema. Corporeal malediction describes experiencing an inhibited body schema due to racist myths and stereotypes. It is a breakdown that is essentially tied to social identity, and Fanon’s use of it to revise a key phenomenological concept illustrates the first thesis of standpoint phenomenology—situated phenomenology. It is important that this represents a revision of an already existing phenomenological concept. Fanon’s own status as what Patricia Hill Collins calls an “outsider within” (Collins 1986) puts him in a position to compare his own insight with those that have issued from the dominant perspective in order to achieve a privileged insight into the phenomenological discipline itself and its flaws and lacunas.

In the next chapter, “Signs and Standpoints,” I examine a phenomenological methodology built around the experience of signs. A sign is a piece of equipment that, unlike most equipment, remains conspicuous in use while also drawing explicit attention to certain relations within the environment—making it a valuable starting point for phenomenological interrogation. I present Sara Ahmed’s work on queer phenomenology and point out that many of the “orienting devices” Ahmed discusses are, in fact, signs. I argue that her work uncovers new phenomenological insights about how signs themselves operate in experience. Although these signs work on all of us—queer and straight alike—their workings are felt keenly by those who experience them as an attempt to reorient them. I argue that phenomenologists like Ahmed, who work from experiences of marginalization, are especially sensitive to signs because they are the site of disorientation; signs become a problem in particular ways, a source of friction and discomfort, which makes certain (normally backgrounded) aspects of the sign especially salient. Additionally, members of oppressed or marginalized groups must sometimes pay especially close attention to signs; heeding signs—even very subtle ones—can be a matter of survival. As a result, marginalized individuals are sometimes especially attuned to signs and their meanings, which, I argue, provides a greater experiential base from which to launch phenomenological inquiry. Ahmed’s work is a socially situated use of the methodology of sign; it also exemplifies the thesis of inverted phenomenological privilege. Ahmed recognizes that her own phenomenological insights have the potential to unsettle the classical tradition: “A queer phenomenology might turn to phenomenology by asking not only about the concept of orientation in phenomenology, but also about the orientation of phenomenology” (Ahmed 2006, 544). Ahmed understands that critically examining the distance between her own insights and those of classical phenomenologists can provide a privileged standpoint from which she might assess the phenomenological project itself—identifying and diagnosing the distorting background presumptions of classical phenomenology. Her work thus provides a key illustration of how Heidegger’s methodology of signs can be deployed in a standpoint approach to phenomenology.

The final methodology I discuss in the chapter, “Art as Standpoint Method,” is the revelatory experience of art and “wonder.” Heidegger argues that the work of art opens a world to its audience. For example, Van Gogh’s painting of peasant shoes reveals them in their usability, in their place within the peasant’s world as equipment. In these shoes we see the “toilsome tread of the worker,” the “tenacity of her slow trudge,” the hope and fear surrounding harvest (Heidegger 1977, 159). Although particular and specific to the “world” of the peasant, the basic relations of significance are those that structure all human experience. The work of art “sets up” those relations, and it does so in a way that allows us to contemplate them, because there is always an opacity to art works—a medium that both attracts its audience and keeps them at a remove. Unlike equipment that tends to disappear into our projects, the materiality of the work of art confronts us even as we move beyond it to what the work is “about.” Pigment “shines forth,” in the art work, the poet “uses word—not, however, like ordinary speakers and writers who have to use them up, but rather in such a way that the word only now becomes and remains truly a word” (Heidegger 1977, p. 173). It is this captivation that brings us into and keeps us distanced from the work; that inspires a mood of wonder that allows consideration of the structure of the world of human experience itself. This is the essence of art, the disclosing of truth through the setting up of a world at a distance that allows contemplation. In this way, art can reveal conditions for human experience though a distanced captivation that allows for phenomenological inquiry. More than this, I will argue, art that grows out of specific social situations and identities can, using this methodology of wonder, offer insight into shared background conditions of human experience. Socially situated art can reveal shared structures of experience that are revelatory, again, because of and not in spite of their socially specific starting point. Feminist art provides one example. However, I also use Eva Hesse’s work to make this point. I show how her understanding of and depiction of existential absurdity is shaped by her experiences as a Jewish woman and also by her chronic and terminal illness.

The goal of this book is to introduce a standpoint approach to phenomenology. However, one motivation for this project is to add to the work of contemporary phenomenologists who advocate for a more communal approach to the phenomenological project as a whole—one that requires input from a wide spectrum of human experiences and especially values contributions from those who have traditionally been absent from the discipline. Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, and Husserl are all explicitly committed to ontologically interdependent subjecthood.Footnote 1 Our bounds are permeable; who we are is deeply shaped by our community, our world, and the others around us. All subjectivity is intersubjective; we are, as Husserl puts it, “co-transcendental” (Husserl 2014, 21). Given our communal and social identity, it makes sense that the project of unearthing the structures required for human being and for caring about who we are would be a communal project. It’s intuitive that we’d need to draw on more than just our own experiences to find out what it means to be a creature like us. However, need for diversity of experience at the methodological level is rarely highlighted in the classical texts. In recasting the methodologies of breakdown, sign, and wonder as compatible with a standpoint approach to phenomenology, I hope to emphasize their productive potential when deployed at the communal level—drawing on a wide variety of experiences in different cultures and starting from different social locations. Diversity of experience itself is desirable, but (as I hope I have shown by the end of this book) phenomenological analysis starting from experiences of social marginalization is especially valuable.