1 A PHENOMENOLOGY OF HUMAN RIGHTS Ralph Pettman Phenomenology is most commonly considered today as a synonym for experience. As such, a phenomenology of human rights could be expected to canvass the diverse experiences human rights are predicated upon – psychological, sociological, anthropological, jurisprudential, sacral, and so on. Though it would be appropriate to present this topic by describing such experiences, I would like to attempt something else. I would like to attempt a meta­disciplinarian approach. This approach puts the human rights doctrine in a larger context than the one it typically articulates. Since human rights thinkers find it a struggle to situate what they do in a larger context, involving as it does issues outside their ontological and epistemological purview, I would argue that the human rights doctrine fails adequately to account for our sense of what is moral. 1 It is in a bid to do justice to this sense that I turn to phenomenology. And though this is only one of the ways in which the human rights doctrine might be critically contextualised, it is a neglected one, which arguably does not deserve this neglect. I should say at the outset that I do not intend to discuss the phenomenology of human rights. To do this would involve discussing all phenomenological thinkers, a task far beyond the scope of this chapter. Instead, I will discuss a particular concept of phenomenology, namely, that of the movement’s founder, Edmund Husserl. To do human rights justice, that is, I argue that we must turn, at least in the first instance, to the only Rationalist attempt made so 1 See Anthony Langlois “The Elusive Ontology of Human Rights” (2004) 18(3) Global Society 245, who also thinks the human rights doctrine fails to do our moral intuitions justice.
2 Human Rights Research far to systematically access our intuitions (moral or otherwise), Husserl’s phenomenology. 2 What Are Human Rights? To begin I need briefly to outline what I think human rights are. To do this I use a mapping strategy that was developed to systematise accounts of world affairs as a whole. Though I cannot outline this whole strategy here, 3 I can highlight its most salient feature, that is, the way those who talk about world affairs do so in analytic languages and analytic dialects. The human rights doctrine is a very particular analytic dialect and, as such, is part of a range of dialects that constitute a very particular analytic language. This language I call individualism, though it could just as well be called socio­liberalism, since it is liberalist thinking as it pertains to the politico­ social dimension to world affairs. This language articulates the assumption that human beings are, by nature, essentially calculating. Beside the politico­ social dimension to world affairs, there are the politico­economic and the politico­strategic ones, and the same assumption pertains to them, too. As a consequence we have economic liberalism and political liberalism. There are analytic languages that articulate other assumptions about our essential human nature, such as the assumption that we are essentially bad or essentially good, and the assumption that it is the essential nature of our nurturing practices that matter more, whether material or mental. 4 Critiques of the human rights doctrine come from all such quarters. Critiques are also made by those pushed to the margins of the larger project of which these analytic languages are a part, namely, the modernist project. Feminists, environmentalists, indigenous peoples, post­colonialists, all provide a range of dissenting accounts of the human rights doctrine. Some appeal to the liberalist freedoms and entitlements that this doctrine makes available on a global basis, however, and it is these appeals that are at issue here. 5 2 Edmund Husserl Logical Investigations (Routledge and Kegan Paul, London, 1979[1900­1901]). 3 Ralph Pettman Reason. Culture. Religion. The Metaphysics of World Politics (Palgrave, New York, 2004) 1­47. 4 Ralph Pettman Reason. Culture. Religion, above 20­30. 5 See, for example, J. Ann Tickner Gender in International Relations: feminist perspectives on achieving global security (Columbia University Press, New York, 1992) 71­78.
A Phenomenology of Human Rights As part of the modernist project, the usual Western concept of human rights not only articulates the assumption that human beings are essentially calculating (while determining who is human in this regard has made up a large part of the doctrine’s political history), it also articulates a more fundamental assumption, that is, that we should prioritise reason either as an end in itself, or as the means to a concept of truth that has no preconceptions. The modernist project, in other words, is a Rationalist project, though it is also known as the Enlightenment project, since it is supposed to enlighten the mind of any who take part in it. To know by prioritising the faculty of reason is to be a particular kind of person. Rationalist epistemology requires, in other words, the appropriate ontology. It requires a sense of self that is individuated and objectifying. Indeed, it is only by removing the self mentally from its social context that we are able to talk across to others who have done likewise, and are able to construct the meta­society of the mind in which modernist science is made. This is the same meta­society in which modernist doctrines of social science, like those of human rights, are also made. So: as Rationalists, human rights advocates are first and foremost objectifying individuators. Then they take another step. Having learned to valorise an autonomous sense of self, they become part of that group of analysts who smuggle this sense of self back in as their preferred social value. Rather than remain true to the pursuit of reason as an end in itself, that is, they take the preference they have learned for an abstract sense of human being, to depict social attributes like gender, ethnic identity, or religious identity, as secondary to it. Using their Rationalism they then arrive at the kind of rules the calculative individual is likely to respect most, depicting these as the primary moral entitlements that pertain to all of humankind. As Rationalists, human rights advocates are not only open to the kind of criticisms already mentioned from within the same project, by those who articulate assumptions other than the calculative one. As noted already, they are open to criticism from those who are no part of the modernist/Rationalist/Enlightenment project at all, or who find being part of this project highly problematic. Though each group tells only part of the story, each has the idea that its part truth is able to account for the whole. These include what modernists call pre­modernists (who ostensibly never learned to valorise reason as an end in itself at all), post­modernists (who turn reason back on itself to highlight Rationalism’s contingent and highly
3 4 Human Rights Research particular character), post­structuralists (who highlight how we are trapped inside the meanings coded by our culture into the discourses we use), psycho­ therapists (who see the sub­rational mind playing a much larger part than reason likes to allow), romantics (who retreat from prioritising reason to articulate a dichotomised sense of emotion and feeling), sacralists (who see reason as only one of the faculties the human mind exhibits) and phenomenologists (which is the perspective I want to discuss in the section below). 6 What Is Husserl’s Idea of Phenomenology? As I mentioned at the beginning, I shall not be discussing all phenomenology. I shall be discussing only the phenomenology of its contemporary founding father, Edmund Husserl. Professor Munz, Emeritus Professor of History at Victoria University, recently told me how George Bernard Shaw once asked a rather importunate questioner to shut up, because he knew what the questioner wanted to say better than he did. Having spent the last year reading Husserl (which is not easy given his highly Germanic thinking and writing style) I feel somewhat the same way. It sounds very presumptuous, but I feel that I now know what he wanted to say better than he did. Husserl was a Rationalist, but he was also a Rationalist aware of the limits and distortions that Rationalism entails. He wanted to compensate for these limits and distortions, and the way in which he wanted to do this was to retreat from the distal use of reason that Rationalism requires, not to the realm of emotion and feeling (the romantic realm), but to a dichotomous realm, that of reason used as part of the life­world. He called this more proximal, less distal realm that of the phenomenological. 7 Though he wanted to keep using reason, that is, he wanted to use it while embedded in society, not detached from it. 8 This allowed him to account for the life­world in which he lived. Husserl was not trying to get back to the way we were before we were pushed into pulling away mentally from our social life­world. He was wanting to use reason as if he was in but not of society once more. He was wanting to adopt a mental perspective that was 6 Ralph Pettman Reason. Culture. Religion, above 6­9. 7 Edmund Husserl The Idea of Phenomenology (Nijhoff, The Hague, 1964). 8 Edmund Husserl The Crisis of European Science and Transcendental Phenomenology: an introduction to phenomenological philosophy (Northwestern University Press, Evanston, 1970) 223.
A Phenomenology of Human Rights both Rationalist, and therefore detached from society, and yet embedded again in the social context from which Rationalism derives. 9 This may sound paradoxical, but it only sounds so. In practice, it is not. It is easy to see how one might disagree, but I think that Husserl was trying to articulate a valid alternative to Rationalism, and one that has not been articulated before. This alternative not only applies to all that Rationalism involves, including the doctrine of human rights. It also strives to correct all that Rationalism results in, without eschewing reason. Having created a perspective that uses reason in the context of the life­world, Husserl wants us to intuit the basic mental activities of our own consciousness. These are the activities, he said, that craft our experience of reality. They intend our world, rather than attend to it. They allow us to look at the world and to know the phenomena there for what they are, before we think about them. Or as he put it once, in a key quote: 10 [How] can the world, and human existence in it, truthfully have a meaning if the sciences recognise as true only what is objectively established … and if history has nothing more to teach us than that all the shapes of the spiritual world, all the conditions of life, ideals, norms upon which man relies, form and dissolve themselves like fleeting waves … [How] can we console ourselves with that? Intuiting the “intentional performances” from which Husserl saw everything else flowing requires bracketing off the assumptions and conclusions that is Rationalism, while being careful not to fall into the romanticist’s realm of feeling and emotion. 11 Heidegger, Husserl’s colleague and ultimately his critic, called these “performances” the “basic components of a priori cognition”, and like Husserl, he saw them providing an understanding of the world that was more fundamental than the one that Rationalism provides. 12 9 Edmund Husserl The Idea of Phenomenology, above. 10 Edmund Husserl Logical Investigations (vol 2, Routledge and Kegan Paul, London, 1979 [1900­1901]) 6­7. 11 Edmund Husserl Cartesian Meditations: an Introduction to Phenomenology (Martinus Nijhoff, The Hague, 1960 [1931]) 153. 12 Martin Heidegger The Basic Problems of Phenomenology (Indiana University Press, Bloomington, 1958) 18.
5 6 Human Rights Research Intuition like this is something one has to do. Husserl’s phenomenology is ultimately a method. One arguably does not even have the right to critique it, unless one has attempted the bracketing and intuiting it involves for oneself. Having asked myself the questions Husserl raises, I eventually found my intuition providing a number of what seem to be my own “intentional performances”. These I call deferring, clumping, conflicting, caring, craving, maturing and moralising. I cannot describe these mental activities any further here. They are the focus of my research elsewhere. But the human rights doctrine does seem to be part of what gets constituted by the last of them. It seems to be part of what happens when my mind reaches out into the world to make humans right. And this I will talk about, to show why we need a Husserlian phenomenology of human rights. A Phenomenology of Human Rights Our experience is fundamentally normative. Though our minds continually reach out to describe and explain the world, they are continually reaching out to moralise about it as well. 13 My sense of wanting a moral order to the world seems to be one of my primal mental attributes. I warrant it is one of yours as well. We see this wanting at work when we cull an account of those things we merely desire, to determine what we think we actually need, and when we cull an account of these needs to determine further what we think we are entitled to claim as of right. 14 We also see it at work when we posit a thought experiment, like the one where we have to write the rules for a society we are about to join, even though we do not know what kind of person we will be when we get there – male or female, young or old, brown, green, or pinko­grey. As a Rationalist doctrine, the human rights doctrine goes on to cast the moral order of the world in terms of the objectifying individual. 15 It valorises that particular form of the self, and its capacity to arrive at rules using reason. It downplays, by contrast, a communalist sense of self, and the capacity to arrive at rules by more traditional means. 13 Chris Brown International Relations Theory: new normative approaches (Harvester Wheatsheaf, Hemel Hempstead, 1992). 14 Ralph Pettman Teaching for Human Rights (Hodja, Melbourne, 1984) 35. 15 Ralph Pettman World Politics: rationalism and beyond (Palgrave, New York, 2001) 1­3.
A Phenomenology of Human Rights As a non­Rationalist doctrine, Husserl’s phenomenology returns to a point of view in the pre­Rationalist life­world, but not of that pre­Rationalist life­ world. 16 From this viewpoint it critiques the human rights doctrine, as it critiques all attempts to articulate a Rationalist conception of the world, for being a distal, and second­order one. It brackets off this conception in favour of one more proximal and primal. 17 This is to ground our moralising in a rational account of our intuition, not a rational account of our reason. It is to ask us to eschew human rights in favour of a more radical, more private, less public, and less Rationalist awareness of the world. This is to invite, in turn, all of the arguments for which Rationalism was constructed in the first place. Rationalists do respect intuition, but they consider reliable knowledge to be only what we can cast in falsifiable terms, and can empirically test, not what we intuit alone. 18 The Husserlian phenomenologist responds by arguing that this reduces knowing to Rationalism again. It is neither to practice phenomenology, nor to put Rationalism in its primary context. It is to capitulate to Rationalism, not to compensate for its limits and distortions. It is to accept the doctrine of human rights, for example, as a Rationalist/individualist one, without compensating for the way this doctrine not only emancipates but also incarcerates, not only enlightens but also blinds. 19 The basic problem is that the Rationalist perspective aspires to an objectified form of truth, one that is sought outside ourselves by highly individuated versions of ourselves, and that this way of being and knowing makes possible not only enormous amounts of new and reliable knowledge, but industrial and ultimately military technology far in advance of anything we have had before. This industrial and military might then gets used to pursue other forms of what is deemed right. These subsequently become the purpose of the whole enterprise, and the Grail of a truth without preconceptions gets lost. 16 Edmund Husserl The Crisis of European Science and Transcendental Phenomenology, above 68. 17 Edmund Husserl The Idea of Phenomenology, above. 18 Karl Popper The Logic of Scientific Discovery (Hutchinson, London, 1968). 19 Ralph Pettman Commonsense Constructivism, or the making of world affairs (M.E. Sharpe, Armonk, 2000) 6.
7 8 Human Rights Research The whole modernist project becomes subverted in the process by the kind of politics that modernist power makes possible. Particularist values get brought back in, and pursued in reason’s name. The sense that human beings are essentially calculating, for example, gets smuggled back in to predispose world affairs liberalism in all of its different forms, including the human rights one, to our moral benefit, of course, but to our moral bane as well. 20 Husserl saw his phenomenology reinstating the primacy of the pursuit of truth. He eschewed Rationalism to pursue an objectifying kind of subjectivism. He invited leaders and led to stop putting the world at a mental distance, where only formal principles need apply, and to acknowledge the extent to which they are personally implicated in the world, in the way their awareness constructs that world. 21 In principle, human rights advocates are Rationalists. As such, they are agents of truth. In practice, they advocate a dialect of an analytic language that articulates a specific assumption about human nature. They thereby promote a part truth about human beings as the whole truth. They promote what is part right about how we should behave, as all of what is right universally. And as Langlois argues, “[p]articularism in the guise of universalism is not a sufficient basis for human rights.” 22 It may be necessary, but it is not sufficient. In practice, Husserlian phenomenology may be seriously compromised, too, since how can we say that our intuitions are not illusions? Our primal awareness may be anything but. Our re­assertion of the significance of the life­world may no more than a fudge concept for repression and suppression. In principle, however, Husserlian phenomenology is asking us to articulate the concept­systems that are prior to reason­as­manifest­as­social­science, and to appreciate in the process how much we are implicated in how the world works. 23 Germane to this perspective comes not only a greater sense of social embeddedness, but arguably also a greater sense of social duty as well as a greater sense of individual right. 20 Ralph Pettman Reason. Culture. Religion, above 24­6. 21 Edmund Husserl, The Crisis of European Science and Transcendental Phenomenology, above 222. 22 Anthony Langlois “The Elusive Ontology of Human Rights”, above 255. 23 Edmund Husserl, The Idea of Phenomenology, above 262­4.
A Phenomenology of Human Rights In short, Husserl’s phenomenology shows us how responsible we are. It shows us how one­sided modernist/Rationalist liberals are when they claim their human rights. It provides one way in which we might compensate for the normative limits and distortions of this doctrine, by highlighting the primacy of human responsibilities. Nor does the story stop there. To give the human rights doctrine global grunt, “theorists must be prepared to forge a new case … based on engaging the big metaphysical questions …” 24 These are old questions, but they have not gone away just because Rationalists say they have. They are still there, waiting to be reconstituted in this contemporary time. For example, the Rationalism that is the cultural context to the human rights doctrine arose in the context of European Christianity, and bears the marks of its historical origins. 25 The individuated individual that makes Rationalism possible, and whose autonomy and wellbeing is so comprehensively valorised by the Rationalist/liberalist concept of human rights, is identifiably Christian. It may not signify this particular sacral context any more, but the idea of a singular self, responsible for its deeds and morally answerable for them, is recognisably derivative of this context. As it has gone out into the world, Rationalism has encountered radically different ways of being and thinking. 26 Because of the hegemonic character of this project, these other ways of being and thinking have had to come to terms with the human rights doctrine that it articulates. They have done so in their own ways, however. These ways provide hybrid versions of the rights doctrine. Their various articulations deploy the same terminology, but to radically different effect. Some notable articulations of this sort include the Universal Islamic Declaration of Human Rights (1981), the Cairo Declaration on Human Rights in Islam (1990), and the Arab Charter of Human Rights (1994). 27 24 25 26 27 Anthony Langlois “The Elusive Ontology of Human Rights”, above 261. Ralph Pettman Reason. Culture. Religion, above 80. Ralph Pettman Reason. Culture. Religion, above. See Paul Morris “Dignity, Difference and Divergence: religious and cultural alternatives to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights” in Paul Morris and Helen Greatrex (eds) Human Rights Research (Victoria University, Wellington, 2003); also Ralph Pettman Reason. Culture. Religion, above 109­110.
9 10 Human Rights Research To devout Rationalists, the sacral purpose of Islam is not commensurable with their own, since it posits ultimate reality in the form of God, and the truth about that reality as revealed. They posit a truth without preconceptions, and ultimate reality as not yet determined. To devout Muslims reason is God­ given, and the search to know is the search to know the mind of God. They posit any suggestion otherwise as heresy. I am not about to attempt to arbitrate in such a profound dispute. It does indicate that a phenomenology of human rights is only the beginning of the radical recasting this doctrine invites. It seems that it is far from the end.