There are certain books that make a significant impact upon initial reading but that, over the course of time, reveal themselves to have had a greater impact upon the reader than was immediately apparent. My experience with LaRose Parris’s Being Apart: Theoretical and Existential Resistance in Africana Literature has fit that pattern to a tee.
This excellent work examines several major Africana theorists (David Walker, Frederick Douglass, C.L.R. James, Frantz Fanon, and Kamau Brathwaite) in terms of the existential modality of their theoretical resistance. As such, it offers a broad account of important tendencies in the tradition of Africana thought while at the same time offering a novel existential interpretation of those tendencies.
I found this volume eminently useful upon first encountering it when I was a graduate student. Several years later, I found myself returning to the text and realizing, upon reflection, how much it had shaped my approach as a philosopher and phenomenologist. It is a work that offers extraordinary depth and richness for readers looking to better understand Africana philosophy and literature by examining how its thematic reading of that tradition can be read as an important contribution to existential phenomenology.
I will not here explore these contributions by simply defining existential phenomenology as a fully-formed body of knowledge for which the possible contributions of Parris’s text can be discretely enumerated and deemed novel or redundant. For reasons that I hope what follows will make clear, I find such a view of existential phenomenology—in which it could be reduced to a stock of knowledge—to be intrinsically problematic. If one takes seriously existential phenomenology as a philosophical challenge, it is the sort of matter where even an understanding of its fundaments requires sustained efforts at questioning and revising its supposed foundations. Hence, I will explore Being Apart as a contribution to existential phenomenology by re-examining the meaning of the latter from the ground up in light of challenges put forth by taking seriously the former.
I hope the reader will accept my apologies, then, for my being more concerned with philosophizing in light of what I have learned from this outstanding text than for my repeating, point-by-point, what one may find therein. I shall be derelict of the conventional academic obligation to summarize the whole of a text prior to critically engaging it. To the reader for whom this registers as a disappointment, I have but one counsel: it is far past due for you to read Parris’s book!
Let us start, then, with a reflection on the nature or meaning of existence. As Lewis Gordon often seeks to remind us, the etymological dimensions of the term speak to a notion of standing out. To my students in the classroom, I begin the exploration of “existence,” as such, with Martin Heidegger’s formulation of Dasein as a being for whom its being is an issue. As philosophical terms, then, “existence” demands to be regarded as distinct from “being,” despite the tendency in everyday English language to treat the terms as equivalent. For an existent (that is, one who exists), “being” sticks out as an issue that is relevant to the being of the existent.
As Jean-Paul Sartre argued at the outset of Being and Nothingness, a philosophical treatment of Dasein must take seriously that an analysis of its formulation implies some difference of import between (a) the being present to consciousness as an issue and (b) the being of that consciousness, despite the fact that as my being, the intelligibility of the formulation requires presupposing an equivalence between (a) and (b). How I can both “be” the being at issue and “be” the being for whom that being is an issue is thus a paradox at the heart of existential philosophy. In other words, if I exist, my existence is an object of my consciousness in such a way that functionally I both am and am not identical with that object of consciousness.
In light of such a formulation of existence, Parris’s formulation of “being apart” is one that, from the start, should be seen as potentially having rather foundational significance for any form of existential philosophy. Existence, we might say, characterizes a being that is, paradoxically, a being apart from itself. Crucially, though, we can refine our conception of existence once we add dimensions of sociality to our conception. The Heideggerian contributions here point us to the formulations of being-in-the-world as well as the Mitsein, or being-with-others. If we take these formulae and simply substitute them into our initial treatment of existence, we have a being who is with others in a world in such a way that that being-with-others-in-the-world is a question for it.
In analyzing the import of this formulation, we can note a degree of cleavage between the Heideggerian and Sartrean accounts. Whereas for Heidegger the immanence of “being-in” takes on a primary ontological import, for Sartre, because of the contradictory nature of being-for-itself that a strict analysis of Dasein implies, existence must be understood in a dialectical sense. It is this immanence that sets the stage for an existential analytic of Dasein for Heidegger, but for Sartre the matter of standing in relation to such immanence calls for the primacy of a dialectical treatment of transcendence.
For the Heideggerian vantage, a primary mode of immanence—that is, always already being in—means that authenticity stands as a relation to that event—death—through which an exit from the world would be possible. For a Sartrean ontology, though, there is a dialectic of immanence and transcendence, since, at base, consciousness of being-in-the-world stands apart from being-in-the-world, which does not entail that consciousness has exited the world, but, rather, that we may perhaps say that consciousness can be characterized as paradoxically exiting a world from which there is no exit. Authenticity, Sartre argues, would thus stand as a multidimensional ideal irreducible to one’s relation to death.
Now, if that treatment of the fundamental ontological matters is correct, then one of the issues that should arise is: How can it be demonstrated? In other words, where do we go to see that the existent has a dialectical relationship to its immanence—and, hence, a dialectical relationship to its transcendence?
Already, to pose this question suggests a peculiar focus such that we are engaged in questions not only of existential philosophy but of existential phenomenology. That is to say, Heidegger and Sartre are dealing with questions of how being and existence stand as objects of consciousness, without presupposing a commitment to treat these concepts either as noumenal realities—that is, metaphysical truths that can be ideally invoked provided that they are sufficiently well-defined—or as material realities that remain what they are regardless of our efforts to describe and define them.
In fine, existential phenomenology must take seriously that the meaning of existence may not remain the same whether or not one devotes critical attention to what it is, and it may not retain the same significance after such inquiry that it held before it. Indeed, our formulation of existence implies a mode of being conscious of being, and hence, existential phenomenology brings to the fore both the consciousness of being that defines existence and the consciousness of consciousness of being that defines existential philosophy.
If existential phenomenology is concerned, then, with demonstrating elements of the reality of existence, both Heidegger and Sartre stand out as having made exemplary contributions in that regard. Yet their works certainly do not represent the only manner of doing so.
One resource that I regard as essential in explicating the dimensions of existence is Simone de Beauvoir’s work. In particular, her classic The Second Sex offers much on this front, because it is dealing, at least on my reading, with the problem of a transcendence that “becomes” an immanence, even though a phenomenological examination of that immanence, as we are given in Vol. II of that work, reveals that it has never ceased to be a transcendence.
In brief, Beauvoir offered a phenomenological demonstration of conditions under which oppression seeks to vacate the agential dimensions of human lives, producing existents who are conscious of their being in such a way that they function as agents of their non-agency. In line with the Sartrean critique of Heidegger, “authenticity,” under such conditions, would not be merely a matter of being resolute in the face of death but also demand resolve in regard to how one acts upon a world that disavows one’s capacity to act upon it.
If we turn to phenomenological examinations of what Gordon has called Existentia Africana, further dimensions of the dialectic between transcendence and immanence emerge. The literature there is vast—though it is also no secret that, for those who begin with Heidegger, Sartre, and/or Beauvoir, that literature has been at times insufficiently mined for insights, or selectively mined in at times deleterious ways, or even simply undermined (which means not that one has not mined it enough but rather that one has sought to close and obscure the mine).
To those interested in such a project, Parris’s work ought to be recommended in two regards: first, as making an excellent contribution by way of giving a wide-ranging, incessantly insightful, and remarkably accessible overview of Africana treatments of this dynamic through a survey of key representatives; second, as being a contribution to that canon in its own right.
To elucidate that existential dynamic, we can turn to the account of Parris’s discussion of Du Bois. It is not only commonplace but extremely worthwhile to begin an account of Du Bois’s contributions to existential phenomenology with an explication of his formulation of double consciousness, first articulated at the close of the nineteenth century and prefiguring many of the insights of Heidegger, Sartre, Beauvoir, Karl Jaspers, etc. Parris offers a brief discussion of Du Boisian double consciousness in her introduction (12–3), noting the tendency of existential philosophers to credit European thinkers for insights that Du Bois had articulated decades before. But rather than rehash that familiar terrain for treatment of Du Bois’s legacy, Parris focuses instead on a reading of Du Bois’s Black Reconstruction in America alongside the work of C.L.R. James.
Though there are those who read Black Reconstruction narrowly as an application of a Marxist-Hegelian dialectic to the phenomenon of African-American enslavement and its abolition, Parris draws out the many crucial ways in which that text offers a much richer analysis of the existential dialectics of consciousness Du Bois explicates. As Parris shows, Du Bois was concerned in that text—as he was throughout his pathbreaking career as social scientist and philosopher of science—with the ways that white thought placed Black consciousness beyond the domain of human reality. As Du Bois wrote: “for the average planter born after 1840 it was impossible not to believe that all valid laws in psychology, economics and politics stopped with the negro race.”
Du Bois was demonstrating the dimensions of antiblack racist consciousness for which the existence (in our strict sense) of Black people was radically called into question: for typical whites, the being of Black people was not an issue for Black people, and not just in the narrow sense that whites thought they ought to dictate the terms of Black being but further in the sense that for them, Blacks are but do not exist, for the latter would require consciousness of their being and antiblack racism avows the radical absence of Black consciousness.
Hence, it is superficial to read Du Bois as simply including African-Americans within a pre-existing Hegelian dialectic of master and bondsman or Marxian dialectic of bourgeoisie and proletariat. Du Bois, as Parris writes, “recognized Marxism’s import for identifying class struggle as the key to ending ruling-class domination, yet Black Reconstruction also reveals Marxism’s limitations in accommodating a ruling class that is both white supremacist and anti-African.”
In the Hegelian dialectic, the master becomes canny of the bondsman’s consciousness through the latter’s productive labor. In the Marxian dialectic, the consciousness of the proletarian is an issue for the bourgeois such that the latter must toil to convert the former into false consciousness. Yet in the dialectics of antiblack racism, the racist commitments of the bourgeois complicate efforts toward the production of false consciousness, insofar as there is radical doubt—what Nelson Maldonado-Torres has called “misanthropic skepticism”—of even the possibility that Black workers could have consciousness such that they could even be mystified.
To inhabit a world in which one’s existence is regarded as non-existence thus raises profound questions. The simple model of the Mitsein, of being-with-others, is complicated if one’s others do not regard one as another. Ergo, Black consciousness of Black being has other existential modalities to account for. For Parris, it is precisely the existential phenomenological challenge that this poses that Black Reconstruction takes up: “Du Bois seemingly uses Black Reconstruction’s critique of Western historiography and radical theory to expand the text’s theoretical focus with an examination of black workers’ phenomenology, their subjective awareness of their own Being. The result is marked existential probing that occurs throughout the text” (80).
Unlike the Hegelian dialectic—in which the bondsman achieves degrees of recognition from the master through his work—the dialectic of antiblack racism is one in which the effort to disavow the enslaved as one capable of recognition are radicalized. Parris calls attention to the way that Du Bois demonstrates how “chattel slave culture was predicated upon the domination of the enslaved by all members of the slaveholding class: man, woman, and child. One example of this was the common practice of white children, some from the moment of their birth, owning adult slaves just as they would own a dog, a cat, or a farm animal” (84).
The women and children who, in a patriarchal framework, have their own existential struggles for recognition from the paterfamilias function as vital cogs in reinforcing—both to white consciousness and to black consciousness—that slaves are within a system premised on the a priori non-recognition of blacks at each level of the system. This effect is recapitulated at the level of black people’s relation to overseers and white workers, both within the framework of chattel slavery as well as the Jim Crow framework that whites would fight to impose as an alternative to reconstruction.
This engenders the question of the degree to which this commitment of the social structure to disavow black existence structures black existence itself. In other words, we have the question of the internalization of antiblack racism. Parris gives her most extensive treatment of this phenomenon in her excellent chapter on Fanon. The black existent is one who confronts a world to which she is immanent but from which she is also paradoxically apart. In such a world, as Parris shows in her discussion of Walker and Douglass, one is regarded as “brute” rather than “man.” As a “thing apart,” rather than an “existent within,” one figures as a co-inhabitant of space but not a co-inhabitant of a world, with the consequence that one functions as an illegitimate presence within any typical place. The black existent perpetually finds herself “out of place,” as indicated by the experience that wherever she is, she is admonished to “stay in her place” with the understanding that the black’s proper place is always elsewhere and never here. Hence, peculiar modes of dislocation structure the foundations of black existence: as a being apart, black being is never where it ought to be.
Husserlian phenomenology is often characterized in terms of its demonstration that consciousness is always here, such that its efforts to thematize itself outside of itself, as it were, necessarily introduce a variety of philosophical problems. Objects of consciousness are always there, rather than here. Sartre’s existential phenomenology can be viewed as beginning with an effort to radicalize this insight: if I am always here, then the “me” that is encountered in consciousness is always there, and hence, I am not me. The formulation holds whether the “me” at issue is the version of myself that I encounter in reflection—the me that appears when I ask “Who am I?” or “What am I?”—or is, instead, the version of myself that is present to others— the “me” who appears to others. In Sartrean language, this can be stated roughly as follows: I, as a being-for-itself, encounter my being-in-itself such that it appears as a “me” that I am not; and I, as a being-for-itself, encounter my being-for-others such that it appears as a “me” that I am not.
Simply put, we might state the Sartrean formulation as indicating that an existent is a being apart from itself. If we stop the analysis there, we know that Africana philosophy and literature have much to offer in terms of demonstrating the truth of the insights of a Sartrean ontology. As a demonstration of basic insights in existential phenomenology, then, Parris’s work stands alongside classics of Africana literature, including not only those she analyzes but also the likes of Anna Julia Cooper, Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison, Toni Morrison, and many others. In brief, if the reader will indulge my stating a studied conclusion boldly, Parris’s text is part of a corpus of Africana works that any existential philosopher ought to consult in order to better understand and better communicate, in one’s teaching and scholarly works, the basic truths that existential phenomenology seeks to establish. To show black existence as operating within the existential modality of being apart, then we show what it means for an existent to have the qualities of which Sartre, Kierkegaard, and so many others in the European existential traditions wrote.
The analysis, though, does not stop there. It is one matter existentially to be a being-apart-from-itself but it is another matter to also inhabit a world that casts one’s existence into doubt. Hence, the black existent is not only a being-apart-from-itself but can also be conceived as a being-apart-from-the-world. Here we can turn to elements more clearly present in the later works of Sartre—particularly his Critique of Dialectical Reason—as well as the tradition of social phenomenology inaugurated by Alfred Schütz.
Yet, as Parris’s text amply demonstrates, we find many of these insights being articulated in Africana thought decades and even centuries before their European counterparts would catch up to them. The existent inhabiting a social world experiences herself through face-to-face interactions; the being that is at issue for her is a being shaped by the typicality of a “thou-orientation” experienced as quotidian reality. The “me” that is at issue for me is one canny of the reciprocity of its standing before another: I know that I am “me” and you “you” for me, and I also know that I am “you” and you “me” for you.
The schism between a Heideggerian and a Sartrean account of existence might be characterized in terms of the degree to which it is merely immanent to or significantly transcendent of the “world” in which such modes of alterity are typical. That is to say, for Sartre, the transcendence of the for-itself means it can be characterized both in terms of its being-in-the-world and its being-apart-from-the-world; for Heideggerians, the latter formulation is more likely to inspire protest.
However, it is a leitmotif of Africana thought and Africana phenomenology, as Parris deftly demonstrates, that one’s access to quotidian modes of alterity is radically undermined.
At the first level of analysis, this is because one finds oneself in face-to-face interactions with those who do not recognize one’s humanity. To some extent, we can find dimensions of this existential modality present in the Hegelian and Marxian dialectics already discussed. The obstinate master can be seen as seeking to withhold recognition from the bondsman, denying the bestowal of human status upon the worker as a motivational tactic. The haughty bourgeois, likewise, may work within the framework of a class consciousness in which the commitment to viewing the worker as a fellow human being is undermined; her material interests, aligned as they are with the material interests of the bourgeoisie as a class, call for the development of a bourgeois consciousness that serves bourgeois ends even when it is at odds with reality and hence may be accused of being a “false consciousness” (though, on the typical Marxian interpretation, this bourgeois consciousness is not “false” insofar as it serves bourgeois class interests; it is only false if adopted by workers).
The problem, though, is that those modes of non-recognition work within a framework where the action of the subaltern can wrest recognition from the master or the bourgeois: the diligent bondsman or the exceptional proletarian can, in fine, impress their superiors, who may in turn elevate the standing of the subaltern in their own eyes. In the Hegelian and Marxian dialectics, the social world is one composed of subalterns who already stand in dialectical relation to the possibility of their recognition. They may not typically begin as existents who may experience a reciprocal thou-orientation vis-à-vis elites, yet the contours of the world they inhabit is such that their actions contribute to progress or regress on the path toward such reciprocity.
This, though, is not the nature of what Gordon has termed an antiblack world. In an antiblack world, it is not only that the black typically is a being-apart-from-the-white. The black is also a being apart from the possibility of white recognition.
These are the existential circumstances under which the pathologies Fanon analyzed emerge. The problem, in short, is that if the historical “destiny” (that is, that ideal state toward which desire points) of the black is to become the white, in the same way that the destiny of the bondsman is the master and the destiny of the proletarian is the bourgeois, then the black is not merely a being apart from its destiny but is a being apart from the possibility of fulfilling its destiny. The black existent is, by its nature, an “unhappy consciousness,” not because it is unsatisfied but because it is unsatisfiable. The Hegelian bondsman is an unhappy consciousness that, through the historicity of its agency, can overcome this incipient status: there, the subaltern develops into a fellow. Marxism breaks with Hegelianism on this point insofar as the worker’s struggle is a revolutionary one that, rather than achieving a status of equality with the bourgeois, annihilates and abolishes the bourgeoisie.
As Parris’s examination of Fanon shows, this entails that a healthy or mature black consciousness can only emerge where one develops a critical understanding of the existential modality into which one has been thrown. In short, health is imperiled where a being-apart fails to recognize its status as being-apart. Health demands an existential condition in which one’s being-apart is an issue for oneself such that one is not blindly committed to being-with as a paramount object of desire. That we have already seen how the characteristics of any existent can be thematized in terms of a being-apart-from-oneself suggests this formula may be a general one rather than of merely specialized applicability to black or colonized consciousness.
However, the tendency of many European existentialists is to affirm this insight as, essentially, a dialectical resolution of the problem of existence. For such existentialists, authenticity is achieved where the individual realizes that he stands apart from the world and apart from all others. Authenticity, in such terms, becomes equivalent to autonomy. Yet notwithstanding the many points made by Sartre and Beauvoir that suggest why this is insufficient as an existentialist ideal, close attention to the dynamics of the being-apart of black existence shows the naïveté of adopting that philosophical position on existence. The existent who affirms her individuality may affirm she is apart from the world and apart from the others, yet we may nonetheless find that such an individual is an individual just like the others. That is to say, her affirmation of his being-apart-from-the-world does not negate her being-with-others and her being-in-the-world. In short, the affirmation simpliciter of one’s being-apart is a mode of bad faith and inauthenticity.
In short, the black existent finds that it is precisely through her being-apart-from-the-world that she is a being-in-the-world and it is precisely through her being-apart-from-others that she is a being-with-others. That her blackness renders her non-existent is evidence of her existence. It is as a black among other blacks that she suffers her oppression. In that sense, she is not a being-apart-from-other-blacks. Again, this does not negate those dimensions of her existence in which we may show her being-apart-from-herself and her being-apart-from-others. It is to show, rather, a different dimension of existential paradox than that made evident through a Sartrean ontology or even a Beauvoirian ontology.
For Sartre, the existent is a problematic transcendence; for Beauvoir, the existent—at least in the feminine modality—may also be a problematic immanence. The woman in a misogynistic world of the type described by Beauvoir is locked into alterity: she must be-for-others. The black existent that comes into view through Parris’s account, though, is locked into being-for-others for whom she is not another. Hence, the black existent is not emancipated from her condition through the narcissistic negation of her being-apart, as in Fanon’s analysis of Mayotte Capécia in Black Skin, White Masks, nor through the neurotic affirmation of her being-apart, as in Fanon’s analysis of Jean Veneuse in the same text. The former tack involves a denial of the many ways in which the black existent fails to be a being-with-others; the latter involves a denial of the many ways in which the black existent remains a being-with-others.
Parris’s closing chapter on Brathwaite is thus of tremendous value to those seeking to think through the existential matters posed by Douglass, Du Bois, and Fanon. There, Parris attends to Brathwaite’s notion of nation language, which fills out the existential problematique raised by the Du Boisian, Jamesian, and Fanonian accounts of revolution.
In the Hegelian schema, the existent seeks recognition through a struggle to the death, and this is perhaps echoed in the Heideggerian schema, though there such recognition may issue not from another but from oneself. In the Marxian schema, such struggle is not for recognition as such but for the abolition of a bourgeois consciousness. Though the desire for the abolition of a white consciousness is a matter much discussed in Africana thought, what all of the figures that Parris deals with took seriously is the necessity of existential commitments dealing with desirable states of existence that fall short of such abolition. That is to say, though one may articulate a world free of antiblack racism as an ideal, one may need, nonetheless, to make commitments about how to live in a world in which racism has not been eradicated. Hence, Africana thought has long been concerned with questions of how to build and sustain resistant communities. In short, such communities furnish healthy modes of being-with-others for people whose existence is defined in fundamental ways by the modes of being-apart imposed by an antiblack racist world.
Fanon’s famous contributions on this front are in his timely and timeless reflections on the problem of national consciousness. Put simply, a colonized people confronting their being-apart in an antagonistic world have to find a way to be-with each other without collapsing into an account of the isolated individual or the hive-minded Herrenvolk. A people trying to recognize its freedom must take seriously both the ways in which the freedom of the individual depends upon the agency of her fellows as well as the ways in which it stands apart from them. The nation, then, must define itself in novel terms, such that it stands apart from others, at the same time that it must affirm the humanity of its members in such away that they stand in common with the rest of humanity.
As Fanon had shown, though, the constitution of an antiblack world involves the saturation of the lifeworld and its typifications with the negation of black existence. That is to say, a normal person in an antiblack world, whether black, white, or any other racial designation, learns to regard blacks as beings-apart prior to ever attaining an adult consciousness of that world. The tragedy of the adult is that, absent great struggle, she will retain a childish antiblack consciousness—which, for the black adult, may portend a pathological self-aversion. The basic modes of communicability, through which the existent is intelligible to herself, to others, and to the world (and through which the world, the others, and herself are intelligible to her) are structured by typifications that facilitate the taking-for-granted of black nonexistence.
The question emerges, then, of how communities may foment a national culture in which a national consciousness resistant to antiblack racism may emerge. Parris’s discussion of Brathwaite is, in this regard, an indispensable contribution. Though there are many more dimensions of this discussion worth examining, let me here focus on its relevance to the problem of the presence of black consciousness to black consciousness.
As Parris argues, the typical framework for discussing racism and colonialism presupposes the hegemony of the Euromodern world in totalizing fashion. It is presumed that the black existent is a being-in-a-white-world, and, hence, a being shaped through and through by its immanence to the typifications of a colonial lifeworld. On such a picture, there is no exit from thinking in the categories imposed by imperial languages and their racist presuppositions. But the line of analysis put forward by Brathwaite suspends such presupposition by making space for attention to the many ways in which black communicative modes retain dimensions of African communicative forms. That is to say, the efforts of empire to impose a hegemonic tongue are not total; “untamed” spaces perdure. This point does not negate the force of colonization nor the specific modes of being-apart that it inaugurates. But it does imply that existential resistance to antiblack racism has always involved the retentions of pre-colonial existential resources, even if quite often their status as retentions of a pre-colonial past is unwitting or even at times disavowed.
Nation language, though, is not merely a retention of pre-colonial symbolic forms. It can be understood as a synthesis of an African consciousness and a black consciousness that emerge under conditions of the hegemonic imposition of a white consciousness. African consciousness, in such terms, precedes colonization and enslavement and is partially retained in spite of them; black consciousness, by contrast, only emerges through the experience of racial domination. Nation language, then, can be conceived in terms of an Africana consciousness that emerges where a black consciousness seeks to reckon seriously with its African inheritances and the potential they promise in creating and sustaining oppositional consciousness vis-à-vis white hegemony. Black consciousness seeking its liberation from white oppression produces Africana consciousness where its concern for a black past vivifies dimensions of a consciousness that preceded the imposition of blackness. Hence, black people reckoning critically with their being-apart-from an African past may forge communicative forms that saturate their lifeworld with healthy modes of being-with-Africana-others. The nation is forged neither through a return to a pristine past nor a total abolition of a hellish present but through a commitment to producing healthy modes for building livable futures.
Hence, nation language can be read as showing something fundamental about existential phenomenology. Phenomenology is, by its nature, a communicative endeavor. Indeed, even what it reveals about existence points to its communicative dimensions: the existent is a being that, by virtue of putting its being into question, already stands in a communicative relation to itself. Hence, part of what existential phenomenology must interrogate is, simply, how we make sense of ourselves.
If one moves beyond a static view of the framework for communicability—a view in which language is simply an inheritance into which one is thrown—then one can begin to deal with the reality of the existential struggle to rename and to reinvent the ways in which one knows and represents oneself (whether to oneself, to others, or to the world). Taking seriously this dynamic suggests that existential phenomenology is misunderstood where the framework is taken to be merely the description of existence through an extant language. Because existential phenomenologists suspend the presupposition that the ready-made typifications that precede them are adequate to describe existence, they are engaged in a struggle of rearticulation that calls, ultimately, not only for novel vocabularies but for what can rightly be termed novel languages for describing human existence.
Unfortunately, existential phenomenology faces a challenge on this front. There are many who maintain that existential phenomenology can only be done within the vocabularies established by a Hegel, a Kierkegaard, a Heidegger, or a Sartre. Similar to those who, like Heidegger, see philosophy as a project for which only Greek and possibly German are adequate, many see existential phenomenology as a project that is inevitably and immutably immanent to French and German linguistic expression and the philosophical cultures born of those tongues. Indeed, for many, existential phenomenology is and must be a subfield of “Continental Philosophy,” where the latter is defined as a study of French, German, and Austrian philosophers and maybe the occasional Italian, Spaniard, or Slav (whose thinking will likely be seen as derivative of the great French or Germans anyway).
Crucially, this means that Continental Philosophy so understood is not the province of Francophone or Germanophone thinkers as such; Fanon, for instance, is on this framework only smuggled into the designation by virtue of being seen as a derivative of the French tradition regardless of the many ways in which his thinking and writing clearly reflect elements of creolization in which novel nation languages had emerged and were emerging in Martinique and Algeria as products of centuries of anti-colonial resistance.
Put simply, other languages in which existential phenomenology can be performed both exist and persist. Indeed, if I am correct, existential phenomenology would not be existential phenomenology if it did not stand in relation to the existential capacity to transform the language through which one articulates consciousness of phenomena.
In short, the health of existential phenomenology as a domain of inquiry may require it taking seriously the ways in which its performance in other languages, defined broadly in the manner of Brathwaite, allows for novel insights and discoveries.
Furthermore, this implies that the matter of linguistic agency beyond simple linguistic diversity is a matter of the utmost importance for existential phenomenology. If we may speak of “Existential Phenomenology Nation,” similar to how sports fans speak of a “Red Sox Nation” or “Raider Nation,” then we see that a nation language of sorts has already been part of the project of existential phenomenology. The question, though, is whether it does so within the existential modality of a white nationalism, in which its national existence is understood as demanding the negation of non-white existence. For too many phenomenologists, I submit, such dynamics clearly remain operative.
In fine, Africana thought offers many resources through which the language of existential phenomenology can transform and evolve; efforts to assert the being-apart of Africana thought from existential phenomenology portend the latter’s decay and irrelevance.
To conclude, then, I will state a truth and a prescription. The truth is my avowal that I, as an existential phenomenologist, have been profoundly shaped by my efforts to reckon with the challenges laid forth by Parris in Being Apart and that these have fundamentally shaped my capacity to discover and communicate realities of human existence. The prescription derives from my conviction that the rigor of existential phenomenology demands that communities of its practitioners must seek incessantly to revise (or, as Brathwaite’s critique would suggest, re-sense) the modes with which they communicate consciousness of existence. That demand entails that engagement with other worlds and, hence, other “languages” is part and parcel of their phenomenological project. An engagement with Africana existential and theoretical resistance, I contend, is indispensable to that project. And, I would like to close by suggesting, it follows that an engagement with Being Apart is of profound importance if existential phenomenology is to fulfill its implicit premise of helping existents not only understand but seize their existence and the freedom that it implies.
Thomas Meagher
Thomas Meagher is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Sam Houston State University. He specializes in Africana philosophy, philosophy of race, phenomenology, political theory, existentialism, and philosophy of science. Meagher earned his PhD at the University of Connecticut in 2018 and has previously been a Visiting Assistant Professor at Quinnipiac University, Visiting Assistant Professor of Philosophy at the University of Memphis, and a W. E. B. Du Bois Visiting Scholar Fellow at University of Massachusetts, Amherst.
