Black Issues in Philosophy: Anthony J. Steinbock’s Moral Emotions

by Lewis R. Gordon

Phenomenology, Maurice Natanson often reminded us, is an infinite task of beginnings, of starting over, of re-doing—again and again. A critic may wonder: What is the point?

Phenomenologists, from Edmund Husserl to Alfred Schütz and on now to its contemporary practitioners, such as those in the Phenomenology Roundtable, have offered many responses.  One is that failure to go through what we do leads to taking our practices, convictions, thoughts, and, in this case, affective life and emotions, for granted. A seemingly paradoxical consequence emerge: Doing what is right is not the same thing as doing right; there are ways in which doing wrong—or at least appearing such—could be proverbially so right.

These thoughts are not limited to Husserlian phenomenology and its various descendants in what could be called the Euro-philosophical traditions. Such concerns are ancient, as meditations on them go back to writings from philosophers in Kmt (ancient Egypt) such as Ptahhotep, Antef, and Ani from at least 2,000 years before Hellenic reflection under the guise of Socrates, Protagoras, Plato, and Aristotle.

Their concerns were also at work through the ages in Hindu and Buddhist thought, with their own recent forms of transcendental and existential phenomenological reflections in India (Sri Aurobindo), China (Xiong Shili), and Japan (Keiji Nishitani), and the African line continued through concerns of beginning repeatedly as a task of continued revelation in seventeenth-century Ethiopian philosophy (Zera Yacob) through to a living philosopher and psychologist such as Noël Manganyi and philosopher Mabogo P. More in South Africa.

I offer this introductory genealogy to begin with what would at first seem like a criticism but in fact is an endorsement of Anthony J. Steinbock’s wonderful treatise Moral Emotions: Reclaiming the Evidence of the Heart.

There is at first very little I have read through in this work that I have not seen argued before, yet as those familiar arguments are taken into re-examination, the phenomenological act of thinking-together, of moving through phenomenological explorations with Steinbock, brings forth that important act of suspension advanced by at least those phenomenologists who understand its practice in non-scholastic terms: phenomenological work cannot be reported; it is done.  Or put differently, one does phenomenology.

When that is done effectively, it doesn’t take the form of an appeal to reductio ad absurdum or purely formal arguments through which to dispose of “opponents.”  Instead, it puts to the side the very notion of an opponent and opens up a terrain through which to see, as Kierkegaard argued in Works of Love (1847), what one fails to see, especially in presumed acts of seeing.  A clue to the importance of this insight is in the subtitle of Steinbock’s book, where evidence of the heart is what he avers.

Steinbock brings such methodological reflections to the fore at the beginning of his treatise through outlining and explaining his reasons for bringing phenomenology and ordinary language philosophy together. The primary exemplar of the former is Edmund Husserl (though he explores ideas from European thinkers following, though not slavishly, Husserl’s approach) and those of the latter are J.L. Austin and the later Ludwig Wittgenstein.

In a way, this is not a synthesis, as Austin’s and Wittgenstein’s thoughts on the subjects at hand could be characterized as phenomenological linguistics. It is no accident that their ideas have naturally flowed through my own phenomenological writings, for instance.  A virtue of Steinbock’s discussion of their ideas is not only the clarity with which he summarizes them but also the nuance he brings to ways in which they are often misunderstood.

Take, for example, Husserlian phenomenology. It is easy for a critique to conclude that parenthesizing, bracketing, or suspending the natural attitude is an eliminative act instead of, as Steinbock beautifully summarizes, orienting ourselves toward realizing what we miss through having taken the world for granted. Moving further into such realization leads also to questioning our activities in ways that demand evidence, and even that requires explaining how evidence is made manifest—in short, the evidentiality of evidence.

Ordinary language philosophy performs a similar task in that its goal is not the subjugation of language to the dictates of strict formalism.  Instead, the idea is to bring forth what language reveals, concerns that transcend extensional expectations of truth conditions. The scope of language and our experiential participation in and through language would make such a claim, as Steinbock points out in his criticisms of Bertrand Russell’s critique of ordinary language philosophy, a fallacy of reducing the whole to the part. In ways, Steinbock is alerting us to a form of disciplinary decadence, where the expectation of “reduction” collapses into reductionism: fetishizing a particular method or discipline to the point of rendering its ontological scope “complete.” Responding to this basic incompleteness requires openness to shared perspectives and possibilities through which we could orient ourselves to various phenomena. This is exactly what Steinbock does when he conducts his phenomenological explorations; he draws upon relevant resources from varieties of disciplines and philosophical approaches.

This concern about openness comes to the heart of the normative concerns of Steinbock’s treatise. The earlier, critical point about method addresses what Husserl pointed out in Formal and Transcendental Logic—namely, not only the error of positivism in science but also that of formalism. The latter closes off the deeper conditions through which logic or thought could be logical in a sense beyond form and into the realm of reasonable reflection.

In Cartesian Meditations, Husserl brought these concerns of going beyond form into his discussion of evidence and on to the question of evidentiality through his rejection of analogical alterity. Evidence, he showed, requires an Other.

The Other, however, is not, logically speaking, a well-formed formula. The Other is open. Thus, the initial critical position of Steinbock’s treatise comes down to this: admission of the openness of human beings requires placing the strict expectations of formalism and rationality into their proper perspectives as part instead of all of the greater story through which embodied agents could be understood.

Another part—not the whole—is the question of what it means to be a person and how persons live interpersonal lives. This understanding, beyond formal intersubjectivity, is what I think Steinbock intends in his discussion of moral emotions.

Steinbock’s approach addresses a problem not often appreciated in much Euromodern and contemporary academic studies of ethics and moral philosophy—namely, the problem of formalism. This heritage, of which Kant is the main progenitor, regards properly philosophical treatments of these subjects as formal, with the particularities of human existence thrown to the wayside, often derisively, as “moral anthropology.” The well-known result is the an abstract moral subject devoid not only if its humanity but also any features that may make the relevant elements of social life through which normative problems could emerge become void.

It is not only racialized and engendered subjects who lose legitimacy in such an approach but also other ways in which we exemplify our humanity—in Steinbock’s formulation, those features through which human beings become persons. The underlying philosophical anthropology of personhood becomes one of a relational versus monadological and substance-based metaphysics—in short, one open and living in the world, one in relations.

In a beautiful and provocative early passage in which he distinguishes affect from emotion, Steinbock brings these considerations to the fore through questioning placing their domain exclusively in the province of human beings:

For my part, I leave open the possibility that, for example, a wolf, dolphin, elephant, or chimpanzee, while not human, could through emotional acts become ‘person’ in our sense. If we encounter a grieving elephant, an ashamed dolphin, a loving chimpanzee, a trusting wolf—and not simply ‘higher intelligence’—then we might just be confronting ‘person’ here. (16)

In true phenomenological fashion, Steinbock does not offer emotions as a closed lexicographical category but instead explores its disclosure through the contours of human experience.

“By emotions,” he writes, “I understand those experiences that pertain to the domain of feelings (of what some would call the order of the ‘heart’) but which take place or are enacted on the level of spirit” (12).

I love his choice of the word “spirit,” not only because of my preference for the German word Geist, which is often translated as “spirit” or “mind,” though neither is its true equivalence, along with terms from other languages ancient and present, but also the expansion or openness it offers from the often preferred phenomenological term “consciousness.” Exploration of intersubjectivity, and by extension interpersonal relations, aren’t fully captured by consciousness, though such activity is consciously lived.

Steinbock also offers an important critique of positivist conceptions of the emotive aspect of norms. For a positivist such as A.J. Ayer, emotion patently delegitimates the objectivity of norms through rendering them subjective and, consequently, without scientific validity or, worse, fictional.

Steinbock’s response is not to defend norms in such terms, which would concede the validity of the positivist’s rejection by demonstrating their non-emotive status, but instead to affirm the emotional status of at least a specific set of norms.  In other words, emotions are not in and of themselves illegitimate, false, or fictional. They offer a way of looking at normative life and reality in terms that actually transcend the subjective/objective dichotomy.  Moral emotions should be understood, in other words, in their own terms, in what they disclose, instead of with regard to that to which they could be reduced.

Another rich and provocative move is Steinbock’s arguing beyond the formalistic and categorial expectations of academic ethics and moral philosophy through rejecting assessment models in favor of relational explorations of their significance and meaning: “The moral tenor of the motion,” he argues, “is not gauged according to whether it is judged to be ‘good’ or ‘bad,’ or whether the emotion fits accepted standards or conforms to norms.  Rather, the moral tenor of the emotion can be weighed according to how it opens up or closes down the personal nexus”  (14).

This movement affirms transcending disciplinary decadence through rejecting what could be called moralism, which is a form of normative closure; moving ever inward, it pushes the agent out of relations with reality to the point where only her or himself could serve as a standard of legitimacy.  In Steinbock’s analysis, this is a feature of “pride” pushed to its logical extreme: An agent who is full of her or himself.

The rest of the analysis thus builds from three “central rubrics”: relations of self-givenness, possibility, and otherness.  These are separated into moral emotions in three correlative parts: (1) pride, shame, guilt; (2) repentance, hope, and despair; and (3) trust, loving, and humility.

As each receives rich and detailed phenomenological analysis, I encourage the reader to join Steinbock as he works his way through each.  His larger aim is to show how moving from the purely formalistic conception of examining normative life into one of engaging ways in which it is disclosed or opened is tied together in his   culminating meditation on otherness.   His aim is not systematic.  Instead, he reminds us, in going over the path of our normative life, of the extent to which it hangs on a proverbial fine thread of admission versus denial.  In other words, our normative life depends on us.

Steinbock moves into radical normative terrain here, for pushed far enough, we face the abyss of responsibility for which we (interpersonally understood) are responsible.  Such vulnerability requires trust, love, and (in terms of remembering we are not gods) humility.

Though much of what Steinbock argues, describes, and analyzes has been done in similar ways by varieties of Euro-phenomenologists (many of whom he cites) and phenomenologists from the Global South, not all of his discussions are such. I cannot spell out all the original moments in this short discussion, but I should like to stress the importance of his linking love and humility. In his words:

Loving and humility are intimately related….Loving is an immediate and direct opening to another—any other—in the integrity of what it is and toward the fullest realization of what it is with respect to its own sphere—be it a person, a tool, a work of art, living beings other than human, or inorganic object…. Humility is this openness and dynamic movement, but where the experiential resonance is on how I spontaneously receive myself as Myself, that is, as who I am from another. (231)

The dialectic here should be apparent:  Where there is no humility, the self is closed to others as others. They will at best be analogues of the self.   Humility entails an admission of one’s limit in a way that not only opens the door to others but also opens the self in relation to others.  Thus, with humility one embodies oneself as a person instead of a solipsistic being—that is, a god.  It humanizes the person through an admission of living in a world with others.

This symbiotic realization of an inwardness born from openness is what Steinbock makes clear through its linkage to love.  I cannot help thinking here of the etymological significance of the term and its related ideas.  Humility is after all from the Latin humilitatem (in effect meaning to be brought down to size), which has clear links to humanus (of man), which in turn is from homo  (think also of humus—that is, earth, soil), which leads to homunculus (basically, of the ground but not god).

All this is connected, further, to the Hebrew adamah (ground—though, specifically, red clay), reminding us of the earth-boundedness of what it means to be a human being facing the openness of the heavens. This archaeolinguistic analysis brings to the fore how right Steinbock is on this point. Loving empties us of self-investments that collapse into pride by establishing our relationship with others.  This relationship results in a new “self,” one that is relational instead of locked in the bad faith of self-subsistence. But more, as Steinbock subsequently argues, openness is also a manifestation of freedom.  If closed, possibility and potential are lost. Thus, humility as linked to love becomes also a fundamental feature of normative life, as responsibility is also an expression of freedom.

At this point, some concluding remarks are in order.  The first is to hint at an implication of Steinbock’s analysis with which I expect him to be sympathetic: His discussion of trust, love, and humility place, through moral emotions, a normative expression of phenomenology. In effect, he argues that phenomenology, properly understood, is an act of love, as it moves from the natural attitude into a relationship with phenomena premised on its evidentiality as an expression of the necessity of the other as other.

Put differently, the phenomenon is respected as what it is through an act of love and respect for reality (whether intersubjective or interpersonal). Pushed to a radical transcendental conclusion, one arrives at a conception of the transcendental ego not as a closed thing but as a relationship that emerges when one does not impose regulative ideals onto the conditions of thought but instead exemplify one’s humility as directed at thought, idea, or others themselves. This directedness is nothing short of intentionality.

The second is how detractors may read these selections of moral emotions. Steinbock’s concerns are not with virtue ethics, but my suspicion is that such critics would read these as lists of vices and virtues. How, they would ask, is this ultimately different from virtue ethics?

I think Steinbock has offered his answer in various points of the text—basically, that even as virtues they are expressions of the three emotive relations of self-givenness, possibility, and otherness. In other words, formulating them as vices and virtues tell only part of their story; going deeper, their layers reveal orientations to the self, time, and social reality that suggest a more radical conception of norms—indeed, the normativity of norms (in the way Husserl raises the question of the scientific dimensions of science beyond its manifestations in naturalism, logic, history, and other related orientations of the natural attitude).

The third is the problem of bad faith at work in the investments of self-closure, blocking of possibilities, and rejection of otherness. They are similar to reductionisms of thingification or “pure” facticity, anti-transcendence, and solipsism.  Or, if we will, the familiar existential treatments of sadism, masochism, and the denial of the social conditions through which both could be made manifest.

In this regard, I’m surprised that Sartre emerges in the text only in terms of discussions of hope, pride, and shame. I argued in Existentia Africana that Sartre’s discussion of bad faith cannot work without sociality since denying others’ points of view and rejecting one’s own point of view could only be bad faith if their opposites were possible—in short, if there were a social world. This would make opposition between existential phenomenology and transcendental phenomenology a false dilemma. I think this addition would in fact offer support for Steinbock’s overall argument.

Finally, though not exhaustively, Steinbock’s portrait of moral emotions raises questions central to heavily contentious manifestations such as homophobia, racism, and sexism.  In each of these, there are layers of pride, shame, guilt; repentance, hope, and despair; and trust, loving, and humility, all culminating in an understanding of homophobic, racist, and sexist phenomena as also acts of depersonalization, as, in other words, assaults on interpersonal relations.

Lewis R. Gordon is Executive Editor of Black Issues in Philosophy and Professor of Philosophy at UCONN-Storrs; Honorary President of the Global Center for Advanced Studies; the 2018–2019 Boaventura de Sousa Santos Chair in Faculty of Economics of the University of Coimbra, Portugal; Honorary Professor in the Unit for the Humanities at Rhodes University, South Africa; and chair of the Awards Committee for the Caribbean Philosophical Association.  His recent books include, with Fernanda Frizzo Bragato, Geopolitics and Decolonization: Perspectives from the Global South (London, UK: Rowman & Littlefield International, 2018).