Toward a Phenomenology of
Justice:
Theses on Formal-Pragmatic Perspectivism
Phänomenologie der Gerechtigkeit: Ontologie, Subjektivität, Sprache
1. Insofar as it realizes and fulfills itself qua static, genetic and generative phenomenology, Husserl’s
transcendental phenomenology may be regarded as a proto-hermeneutics. (J. Caputo,
A. Steinbock)
2. Only by means of a phenomenological hermeneutics can we rescue the fundamental sense of ontology, so as to avoid ontic and essentialist reductions (i.e., insofar as Dasein = In-der-Welt-sein, human modes of being, actions and activities overall (praxis) cannot be reduced to a mere theoretical presence-at-hand (Vorhandenheit) or "poietical" readiness-to-hand (Zuhandenheit), like chairs, living beings or stones, world-disclosing, poor in world or worldless.)
3. Deconstruction is a radical hermeneutics: since there is no such a
thing as a transcendental signified we are always already situated in relation
to the very moments of signification in our social reproduction through social
representations, symbolic, cultural, and theoretical concepts and philosophemes
(metaphoricity, différance).
4. The main task of a Phenomenology of Justice is to think the unthought
in the very impossibility of justice (what is justice) within the limits of the
possible (power).
5. By effecting a rapprochement between the procedural conceptions of a reflective equilibrium (J. Rawls) and the lifeworld (J. Habermas) we aim at a hermeneutics of normativity
correlated to the facticity of a democratic ethos inherent in a pluralist, political
culture, capable of integrating semantic and pragmatic aspects of a diversity
of practices and codifications (modus
vivendi) that subscribe to an overlapping
consensus, especially when dealing with universalizable questions of human
rights and public policies.
6. We can thus seek to revisit the conception of a postnational deliberative democracy (Rawls, Cohen,
Fishkin, Habermas) so as to recast the Habermasian problem of juridification (Verrechtlichung),
beyond its original pejorative, negative sense, associated with the economic,
financial, and administrative reductionisms that one might find, say, in a
neoliberal globalization qua technical, systemic colonization of the lifeworld.
A phenomenology of justice rehabilitates in formal-pragmatic terms (or in what has been clumsily dubbed "quasi-transcendental-semantic") a positive
juridification insofar as it articulates a social, political ontology with an
intersubjective struggle for recognition and a grammar of fairness, beyond the
reification of labor and productive relations. (Habermas, Honneth)
7. Following Foucault, Apel, and Habermas, the three paradigms of
ontology, subjectivity, and language (e.g. in natural law, positive rights, and
legal hermeneutics, respectively), are said to be co-constitutive and
interdependent, insofar as they account for the problem of the social
reproduction of the modern, rationalized lifeworld through the differentiated models of a sociological
descriptive phenomenology, of a hermeneutics of subjectivation, and of a formal-pragmatic discourse theory. Just as a Kantian-inspired "transcendental
semantics" accounts for the articulation of meaning ("Sinn und
Bedeutung," in Kant's own terms) in the sensification (Versinnlichung) of concepts and
ideas as they either refer us back to intuitions in their givenness (Gegebenheit)
of sense or are said to be "realizable" (realisierbar) as
an objective reality (since ideas and ideals refer, of course, to no sensible
intuition), a formal-pragmatic
perspectivism recasts, by analogy, the phenomenological-hermeneutical signifying correlation (Bedeutungskorrelation) between ontology,
subjectivity, and language without presupposing any transcendental signfied, ontological
dualism (or Zweiweltenthese), or fundamental
relationship between subject and object, theory and praxis. And yet the very irreducibility of the
hermeneutic circle, together with the incompleteness of its reductions inherent in such a systemic-lifeworldly correlation, seems to betray a quasi-transcendental,
perspectival network of signfiers and language games. The modern phenomenon of juridification (Verrechtlichung) turns out to be a good example of this new version of the same problem of accounting for the normative grounds of a critical theory of society. Habermas's wager is that his reconstructive communicative paradigm succeeds in overcoming the transcendental-empirical aporias through a "linguistically generated intersubjectivity" (PDM 297)
Lifeworld and Reflective Equilibrium:
Toward a Phenomenology of Justice
Nythamar de Oliveira, Porto Alegre, Brazil
Paper read at the SPEP / SPHS annual meeting in Pittsburgh on Oct. 18, 2008.
1. This paper reflects an ongoing research on theories of justice, supported by the Brazilian National Research Council (CNPq) and the Alexander von Humboldt Stiftung. I should like to propose a formal-pragmatic perspectivism as a reconstructive, quasi-transcendental phenomenology of the Lebenswelt by resorting to Jürgen Habermas’s tripartite, intersubjective aspects of the lifeworld oriented toward socially, linguistically shared understanding of everyday practices (verständigungsorientiert handelnden Aspekte: Kultur, Gesellschaft, Persönlichkeit) and to John Rawls’s method of reflective equilibrium, understood in hermeneutic terms, so as to deal with the moral, legal, and political contexts of signification, the problem of a normative conception of the person, and the challenge of perspectivism inherent in cultural relativism (in Rawls’s terms, “given the fact of pluralism” regarding sociocultural normalcy). It is my contention here that both Rawls and Habermas have recast the problem of the normative grounds of a postmetaphysical, critical theory of society by recourse to a semantic transformation of the Kantian conception of practical normativity, which I propose to be programmatically outlined as a phenomenology of justice. One of my guiding, provisional theses is that a normative conception of the person remains one of the best ways to account for normativity itself, insofar as it is articulated within its own co-constitutive lifeworld in reflective equilibrium, conceived as a procedural device between a nonideal theory of human nature (where we find “ourselves” and our considered judgments or common sense intuitions of right and good) and an ideal theory of a public conception of justice that refers to free and equal persons with two moral powers (sense of justice and conception of the good). A second leading thesis is that such a semantic turn may be understood in a not-so-weak transcendental sense (Rawls) or in a formal-pragmatic sense (Habermas) which favors a non-aestheticist perspectivism capable of successfully accounting for the fact of cultural relativism and pluralism, without succumbing to moral relativism or nihilism. My third major thesis consists in recasting such a formal-pragmatic perspectivism as a sustainable program of critical theory that tackles the problem of normativity without recourse to a grand metaphysical system, so that what I dub a phenomenology of justice must be understood in light of a political pragmatism that starts from the social reality of ongoing complex phenomena such as modernization, secularization, democratization, and globalization. The very hype of postmodernist disseminations is thus taken into account as a semantic correlation (Bedeutungskorrelation) of phenomenology, hermeneutics, and deconstruction, together with the paradigmatic correlation of ontology, subjectivity, and language, must be also made explicit through the explorations of such a formal-pragmatic perspectivism. In this paper, I will be confined to a Habermasian, hermeneutic conception of juridification (Verrechtlichung), so as to account for the reflective equilibrium at work in his proposal for a deliberative democracy. From the hermeneutic perspective of social self-understanding, reflective equilibrium belongs thus together with the original position and the well-ordered society, so as to carry out the thought-experiment of a theory of justice as fairness which ultimately meets nonideal needs and capacities in everyday life (A. Schutz, H.G. Mead, A. Steinbock). Although I won’t have the time to elaborate on this point here, I assume that a grammar of fairness must go beyond the procedural, fair distribution of material goods, and must hence be correlated to the fundamental principle of recognition (doing justice to the other) and its implicit moral grammar of social conflicts, as Axel Honneth has brilliantly argued, in order to avoid equating cultural relativism with moral relativism and the postmodernist dissolution of the aesthetic and normative substance of the social lifeworld. My working hypothesis is that such a strategic procedure turns out to favor a hermeneutic phenomenology of justice, insofar as we perform an epoche of the world in its philosophical cosmological, theological, and anthropological dimensions, at once stepping back from special metaphysics and retrieving a properly transcendental, lifeworldly understanding of the sense of justice. Such was the originality of the Heideggerian insight into a radical critique of subjectivity, so as to deconstruct an ontical misconception of ontology (the oblivion of Being) and retrieve by means of a linguistic, hermeneutic turn the co-generative meaning of our practical existence in everyday, worldly dealings. In a nutshell, the main task of a Phenomenology of Justice thus conceived is to think the unthought in the very impossibility of justice (what is justice) within the limits of the possible (power): 1 See Jacques Derrida, A Taste
for the Secret. Polity, 2001. John Caputo, Radical Hermeneutics:
Repetition, Deconstruction and the Hermeneutic
Project. Press, 1993. 2 Kenneth Baynes, The Normative
Grounds of Social Criticism: Kant, Rawls, Habermas. Press, 1992. 3 See Anthony Steinbock. Home and
Beyond. Welton. The Other Husserl: The
Horizons of Transcendental Phenomenology. 4 Axel Honneth, Das Andere der
Gerechtigkeit. Aufsätze zur praktischen Philosophie. 2002. 5 Rainer Forst, Kontexte der
Gerechtigkeit: Politische Philosophie jenseits Von Liberalismus und Kommunitarismus.
Frankfurt/ Main: Suhrkamp, 1996.
i. Insofar as it realizes and fulfills itself qua static, genetic and generative phenomenology, Husserl’s transcendental phenomenology may be regarded as a proto-hermeneutics, that paves the way for any future reconstruction of the social world (A. Schutz, J. Caputo, A. Steinbock)
ii. Only by means of a phenomenological hermeneutics can we rescue the fundamental sense of ontology, so as to avoid ontic and essentialist reductions (i.e., insofar as Dasein unveils and understands itself as In-der-Welt-sein, as human modes of being, actions and activities overall (praxis) cannot be reduced to a mere theoretical presence-at-hand (Vorhandenheit) or “poietical” readiness-to-hand (Zuhandenheit), like chairs, living beings or stones, world-disclosing, poor in world or worldless.)
iii. Deconstruction is a radical hermeneutics: since there is no such a thing as a transcendental signified we are always already situated in relation to the very moments of signification in our social reproduction through social representations, symbolic, cultural, and theoretical concepts and philosophemes (metaphoricity, différance).
2. When one sets out to think what might be the prolegomena to 21st-century research in social phenomenology, justice may well be regarded as the object par excellence of a phenomenology of the lifeworld (Phänomenologie der Lebenswelt). The semantic, linguistic turns of the first half of the last century seem to be in order as environmental ethics, bioethics, human rights, biopolitics, and all the subfields of applied ethics fall short of a reasonable articulation of ontology and subjectivity without falling back into essentialism, skepticism or nihilism. Social justice has stolen the scene and even dominated the ethical-political scenario in the second half of the last century as both continental and analytic philosophy took pains to come up with a reasonable language of morals that could be understood and shared by aliens. To be sure, following Husserl, Wittgenstein, and Heidegger, independent thinkers such as Rosenzweig, Benjamin, Scheler, Sartre, Levinas, and Ricoeur bequeathed to us the Materialen for an ethics of alterity, such as the deconstructionist ones proposed by Derrida, Caputo, Agamben, and Marion, against all imaginable conceptions of ethics1.
“Justice” (dikaiosyne, iustitia, Gerechtigkeit) certainly translates the most felicitous way to deal with the contemporary challenge of doing justice to the otherness of the other and to recast the correlated questions of being, subjectivity, and meaning, after all the crises of humanisms and phenomenological, hermeneutical undertakings to deconstruct traditions and treatises of human nature. For justice nowadays, more than ever, must be rethought in sustainable, phenomenological terms, as both its social-political and environmental-cosmological dimensions must correct the shortcomings of human, all-too-human desiderata. In effect, both Husserl and Heidegger taught us to separate world and earth, being and beings, environment and self, just as we seek to avoid binary dichotomies opposing subject and object, realism and antirealism, theory and practice. Both phenomenology and hermeneutics help us rethink social, political philosophy as a new beginning, to think anew the social world, to responsibly inhabit the earth and make our environment sustainable, responding to its otherly call and the call of each other. In this sense, Dike or cosmological views of a just, harmonious order, like its theological and anthropological, psychological counterparts, had to withdraw, as it were, allowing for the emergence of subjectivity on the scene, as modernity was staged in the wake of the critique of metaphysics. Yet modern conceptions of the humanum were doomed to failure as freedom failed to fulfill its idealized promises and emancipatory ideals: liberty, equality, and community were all unmasked as equally conditioned by historical, socially and linguistically conditioned variables and contexts of meaning. Nietzsche’s aestheticist perspectivism presupposes indeed both Kant and Hegel, as the linguistic-semantic turn only takes place after an epistemic shift from ontology to subjectivity. According to Habermas, humans are now uniquely conceived as both participants (social actors, moral agents, self-understanding, existing beings) and observers of their own social world rather than mere epistemic subjects and objects of a hermeneutic, deconstructive phenomenology, which from Husserl and Heidegger through Foucault and Derrida never ceases to defy transcendental thought, yet without successfully overcoming or naturalizing it. Hence, one of the greatest tasks for 21st-century phenomenology –and for that matter, for any transcendental (or detranscendentalized) philosophy of the future – is to make sense of justice by means of a quasi-transcendental kind of argument, such as, “how is justice after all possible?” In order to recast the question “what is justice?,” at once attending to the empirical complexity of social, scientific analyses of institutions and nature and addressing the deconstructionist, pragmatic suspicion of the impossibility of justice, one must revisit the lasting contributions to contemporary theories of justice by Rawls, Habermas, and their critics, and reexamine the challenges posed by a phenomenology of the lifeworld and a hermeneutical approach to the social sciences.
According to a broad, well-known definition of justice, people are to receive what they are due, in full agreement with the oft-quoted Roman Ulpian code, “Justice is the constant and perpetual will to render to every person her/his due.” From Husserl and Heidegger through Foucault and Derrida, phenomenology, hermeneutics and deconstruction have systematically raised the intriguing question: “What is properly due to a human being?” The critique of humanism, metaphysics, and traditional conceptions of human nature have not, however, delivered any promise of a social, environmental ethics capable of replacing or accounting for the modernist drive toward emancipation and its persistent claims for recognition, freedom, equality, and justice. In effect, any attempt to retrieve a philosophy of praxis without falling back into subjective-objective dichotomies or theoretical-practical dualisms rejected by Husserl, Heidegger, and Habermas would lead us to revisit the crucial, albeit misleading problem of the liberal-communitarian debate, to wit, the question of normativity being equated with the problem of the self and its contexts of signification: legal, moral, ethical, social, and political. This, to my mind, transcends contextualist and particularist dimensions in a political philosophical discussion, but must be dealt with as paradigmatic perspectives of ontology, subjectivity, and language, adopted by philosophical methods overall, as suggested by Foucault, Apel, and Habermas.
3. Even as one starts today from the fact of reasonable pluralism in a globalized world, one may still resort to procedural devices of representation on the level of multicultural, intersubjectively shared values and norms without hastily identifying the latter with the main source of morality or asserting the primacy of particularized traditions over universalizable normativity – as the communitarian critique of an“unencumbered self” wrongly insinuated. Rawls’s later writings and Habermas’s social philosophy have ultimately raised the question of a concrete ethos, in its rich, cultural complexity and dynamic actualization in everyday practices of socially and linguistically mediated lifeworlds, to unveil the limitations of the Kantian model as one moves from noumenal selves towards the social, political, and economic institutions that render human sociability a meaningful phenomenon. As he recollected his own “way to phenomenology”, Heidegger went as far as to say that “the age of phenomenological research seems to be over”. But he hastened to add that, as long as we no longer conceive of phenomenology as a “school of philosophy”, phenomenology remains “the possibility of thinking... of corresponding to the claim of what is to be thought”. And he concluded, in a 1969 supplement to this autobiographical text, with a lapidary quote from his magnum opus: “The comprehension of phenomenology consists solely in grasping it as possibility [Das Verständnis der Phänomenologie liegt einzig im Ergreifen ihrer als Möglichkeit]” (Sein und Zeit, p. 38) 6. In this sense, one may recast the unfinished project of modernity as the unfinished task of a phenomenology of justice, to wit, to rethink the possibility of “what is to be thought”. By effecting a rapprochement between the procedural conceptions of a reflective equilibrium (J. Rawls) and the lifeworld (J. Habermas) we can reenact, as it were, a hermeneutics of normativity correlated to the facticity of a democratic ethos inherent in a pluralist, political culture, capable of integrating semantic and pragmatic aspects of a diversity of practices and codifications (modus vivendi) that subscribe to an overlapping consensus, especially when dealing with universalizable claims and local action, such as human rights and public policies. We can thus seek to revisit the conception of a postnational deliberative democracy (Rawls, Cohen, Fishkin, Habermas) so as to recast the Habermasian problem of juridification (Verrechtlichung), beyond its original pejorative, negative sense, associated with the economic, financial, and administrative reductionisms that one might find, say, in a neoliberal globalization qua technical, systemic colonization of the lifeworld. A phenomenology of justice rehabilitates in formal-pragmatic terms (or in what can be clumsily dubbed a "quasi-transcendental" discourse) a positive juridification insofar as it articulates a social, political ontology with an intersubjective struggle for recognition and a grammar of fairness, beyond the reification of labor and productive relations. (Habermas, Honneth) Following Foucault, Apel, and Habermas, the three paradigms of ontology, subjectivity, and language (e.g. in natural law, positive rights, and legal hermeneutics, respectively), are said to be co-constitutive and interdependent, insofar as they account for the problem of the social reproduction of the modern, rationalized lifeworld through the differentiated models of a sociological descriptive phenomenology, of a hermeneutics of subjectivation, and of a formal-pragmatic discourse theory. Just as a Kantian-inspired transcendental semantics accounts for the articulation of meaning ("Sinn und Bedeutung," in Kant's own terms) in the sensification (Versinnlichung) of concepts and ideas as they either refer us back to intuitions in their givenness (Gegebenheit) of sense or are said to be "realizable" (realisierbar) as an objective reality (since ideas and ideals refer, of course, to no sensible intuition), a formal-pragmatic perspectivism recasts, by analogy, the phenomenological-hermeneutical signifying correlation (Korrelation) between ontology, subjectivity, and language without presupposing any transcendental signfied, ontological dualism (or Zweiweltenthese), or fundamental relationship between subject and object, theory and praxis. And yet the very irreducibility of the hermeneutic circle, together with the incompleteness of its reductions inherent in such a systemic-lifeworldly correlation, seems to betray a quasi-transcendental, perspectival network of signfiers and language games. The modern phenomenon of juridification (Verrechtlichung) turns out to be a good example of this new version of the same problem of accounting for the normative grounds of a critical theory of society. Habermas's wager is that his reconstructive communicative paradigm succeeds in overcoming the transcendental-empirical aporias through a "linguistically generated intersubjectivity" (PDM 297)
4. According to Habermas, a Heideggerian ontological hermeneutics cannot account for the ethical, political problem that was identified with the emergence of modernity, namely, the ideals of autonomy and emancipation, insofar as its deconstruction of modern subjectivity (like Foucault and Derrida’s) results in a transcendental historicism betrayed by decisionism, relativism, and cryptonormativism. One can thus draw an important, fundamental distinction between an ontological, intersubjective conception of the self (such as the hermeneutic ones proposed by Heidegger and Foucault) from a legal-political, normative conception of the person (the one advanced by Rawls’s “Kantian interpretation”), so as to thematize the lifeworldly background implicit in the reflective equilibrium method, articulating a quasi-transcendental conception of the self with an empirical, nonideal interpretation of political culture (esp. democratic ethos). A non-metaphysical, political conception of justice, such as proposed by Rawls’s theory of justice and Habermas’s discourse theory of democracy, can guide us in this attempt to reconcile the liberty of the ancients with the liberty of the moderns, by accounting for both empiricist and procedural models of political realism and contractarianism in a hermeneutic phenomenology of justice, beyond the aporias of ongoing debates opposing universalists and communitarians, modernists and postmodernists. To be sure, a phenomenology of justice cannot be confined to a static phenomenology, as if an eidetic intuition of a universal Idea of Justice were ready-made, available for our political judgment of instances supposedly characterized as “just” –for instance, a just society, a just constitution, just relationships and just social, economic, and political institutions. Hence, Habermas’s critical appropriation of Hegelian, Husserlian, and Heideggerian phenomenologies of the Lebenswelt support a historical, socially and linguistically mediated conception of intersubjectivity in pluralistic recognition. I remark in passing that Habermas intuitive rapprochement between this Continental interpretation of the Lebenswelt and Wittgenstein’s analytic sociological reading of Lebensformen inherent in language games is very instructive. In effect, my favorite illustration as a starting-point to approach the Wittgensteinian provocation that “if a lion could talk, we could not understand him” (Philosophical Investigations II: xi, p. 223) is Aesop’s fable of the wolf and the lamb: the impossibility of rule-following among incommensurable socializations betrays the impossibility of an a priori consensus among incompatible lifeworlds. To be sure, whether one resorts to a philosophical anthropology or to a supposedly postmetaphysical normative conception of person and discourse won’t escape a radical hermeneutics of suspicion toward transcendental arguments. Insofar as it is understood as a method to justify general principles (ethical-political principles of justice) on the grounds that they accord with and correct our intuitive judgments about particular cases, the reflective equilibrium is detranscendentalized and can be thus regarded as a phenomenological-hermeneutical device of representation, articulating an ontology of the social lifeworld with a moral grammar of fairness and intersubjective practices of democratic participation, rational deliberation, and social recognition. To be granted, Rawls did not pursue all these dimensions in any explicit sense, except for toleration, while Habermas did elaborate on both deliberative and participatory democracy, and Honneth has been working extensively on the basic conception of recognition for a democratic critical theory of justice4. Now, the main problem to be tackled here is the aporetic shortcomings of any research in lifeworldly accounts of normativity, as exemplified by Habermas’s account of juridification (Verrechtlichung), regarded both as a negative instance of subsystemic colonization of the lifeworld and as a positive resource for a lifeworldly transformation of social structures in a deliberative democratic process.
5. As it is well known, Habermas’s theory of communicative reason proposes to overcome the late capitalist crisis of legitimation, without falling back in the aporias of a critique of ideology and philosophies of consciousness, on the one hand, and avoiding the pitfalls of relativism, skepticism and historicism, on the other, resulting from postmodern criticisms of modernity. Habermas reclaims thus the Kantian legacy of a normative foundation for the political sphere, at the same time that he maintains the separation of morality and legality, and the primacy of a communicative normativity regulated by rational discourse, shared by all and capable of guiding human action in democratic, pluralist societies. Political questions are to be debated, therefore, within the context of a discourse ethics, founded in the form of an argumentative, moral logic, hence both normative and universalizable. The Habermasian theory succeeds in articulating the question of normativity with the political, social question of institutionalization, in the very conception of an integrated model which differentiates the systemic world of institutions (defined by their capacity of responding to the functional demands imposed by the environment/context) of the lifeworld (Lebenswelt, i.e. forms of cultural, societal and personal reproduction that are integrated through the norms consensually accepted by all participants in the social world). In effect, it is the rationalization of the Lebenswelt which renders possible the differentiation of autonomous subsystems, opening thus the utopian horizon of a civil society in which the spheres of action formally organized of the bourgeoisie constitute the foundations of the post-traditional social world of human beings (private sphere) and citizens (public sphere). According to Habermas, the normative thrust of democracy, in a social-theoretical sense, can be expressed in the idea that the satisfaction of functional needs of action systematically integrated must find its limits in the integrity of the lifeworld, i.e. in the demands of the spheres of action which are socially, communicatively integrated. (TKH, vol. 1, p. 307). Although I cannot elaborate on this question here, it is my contention that Sandel’s criticisms addressed to Rawls’s liberalism may as well be applied to the Habermasian attempt to articulate a Kantian proceduralism with a Hegelian-inspired view of ethical life. Indeed, a similar problem lies at Habermas’s procedural formulation of an ideal speech situation, which can be solved with the support of an analysis of civil society’s voluntary associations that secure democratic values against the state and economic colonizations of the lifeworld. In his later formulation of his procedural model of deliberative, participatory democracy in Faktizität und Geltung (Between Facts and Norms), Habermas contends that his theory of communicative action stands as a third way between a systemic-theoretical sociology of law (such as the one advocated by Niklas Luhmann) and a liberal, universalist theory of justice (such as John Rawls’s). After having developed a theory of justice “in vacuo,” says Habermas, Rawls recasts the “old problem of how the rational project of a just society, in abstract contrast to an obtuse reality, can be realized after confidence in the dialectic of reason and revolution, played out by Hegel and Marx as a philosophy of history, has been exhausted—and only the reformist path of trial and error remains both practically available and morally reasonable.”(BFN 57) For Habermas, Rawls’s problem appears as “the return of a repressed problem,” insofar as it recasts the modern model of natural law (social contract) in procedural terms (“original position”). Nevertheless, as Dick Bernstein put it so well, we end up with an epistemic justification paradox of self-referentiality at the very uncoupling of systems and lifeworld: “[Habermas] wants to do justice to the integrity of the lifeworld and social systems, and to show how each presupposes the other. We cannot understand the character of the lifeworld unless we understand the social systems that shape it, and we cannot understand social systems unless we see how they arise out of activities of social agents. The synthesis of system and lifeworld orientations is integrated with Habermas’s delineation of different forms of rationality and rationalization: systems rationality is a type of purposive-rational rationality, lifeworld rationality is communicative rationality.”[20] Or as James Bohman remarked, “Habermas’s criticism of modern societies turns on the explanation of the relationship between two very different theoretical terms: a micro-theory of rationality based on communicative coordination and a macro-theory of the systemic integration of modern societies in such mechanisms as the market” (Habermas 1987). To be sure, there is no clear-cut separation of lifeworld and systems rationalities, since it is precisely because of the systemic colonization of the lifeworld that social actors can have more and more access to its general structures and are urged to seek integration amid all complex differentiations, with a view to attaining emancipation and understanding. Hence, to the structural differentiation of the lifeworld in its social integration, cultural reproduction and personal socialization, there must be an interactive differentiation of the systemic institutions steered by money and power (economy and bureaucratic administration). What is at stake, after all, is the institutionalization of the social world, beyond traditional accounts of society and state. It is in this sense that Thomas McCarthy went as far as to observe that much of Habermas’s writings can be understood “as a protracted examination of, and barriers to, the implementation of practical discourses.”(KCR 48) Hence the proceduralist conception of deliberative democracy parallels that of Rawlsian reflective equilibrium, as the discourse ethics marks out the conditions of discourse as the procedure or form of discourse as the central praxis of democracy. More specifically, this proceduralist conception “applies the idea of justification by appeal to generally acceptable reasons to the deliberations of free and equal citizens in a constitutional democracy.” The central focus and example of such deliberation is “the institutionalization of political autonomy, that is, of the public use of reason in the legal-political domain.” In this domain, reasoned agreement involves three sorts of practical reasoning, “pragmatic discourse about how best to achieve our ends, ethical discourse concerned with goods, values, and identities, and moral discourse concerning what is just, fair, or equally in the interest of all.” Such an agreement will further require “negotiation and compromise which, if the agreements arrived at are to deserve to be called reasonable, will themselves have to be regulated so as to ensure a fair balancing of interests.” As McCarthy sums it up, “Thus the normative conception of democratic deliberation that Habermas proposes weaves negotiations and pragmatic deliberations together with ethical and moral discourses, under conditions that warrant a presumption that procedurally correct outcomes will be ones with which free and equal citizens could reasonably agree. He conceives of the basic principles of the democratic constitutional state primarily as a response to the question of how such conditions of rational deliberation can be implemented both in official governmental arenas and in unofficial arenas of the political public sphere.” (KCR 48f.) McCarthy finds here an initial divergence between Rawls and Habermas, in that the latter defines “public reason” so as to include the “unofficial arenas of the political public sphere.” Indeed, these unofficial arenas, “independent public forums, distinct from both the economic system and the state administration, having their locus rather in voluntary associations, social movements, and other networks and processes of communication in civil society - including the mass media - are for Habermas the basis of popular sovereignty.”(KCR 49) Ideally, not only are these unofficial forums “translated via legally institutionalized decision-making procedures --for example, electoral and legislative procedures -- into the administrative power of the state,” but also as McCarthy adds, “In this model of a deliberative decentering of political power, the multiple and multiform arenas for detecting, defining, and discussing society’s problems, and the culturally and politically mobilized publics who use them, serve as the basis for democratic self-government and thus for political autonomy. (KCR 49) Rawls’s concept of “public reason,” on the other hand, excludes such unofficial forums - i.e., the unofficial arenas of public discourse which for Habermas are the source of democratic self-rule and political autonomy (PL Lecture VI: The Idea of Public Reason, § 1-3). McCarthy concludes by noting that Habermas’s proceduralist conception of democracy, as rooted in the ongoing processes of public reason, remains formal and empty of content: “The constitution is viewed as a “project” that is always incomplete and subject to the ongoing exercise of political autonomy, as shifting historical circumstances demand. Because the public use of reason is ineluctably open and reflexive, our understanding of the principles of justice must remain so as well. It is for this reason that Habermas limits himself to reconstructing the conditions and presuppositions of democratic deliberation and leaves all substantive questions to the public use of reason itself. His discourse theory of deliberative democracy focuses exclusively on the procedural aspects of the public use of reason and derives the system of rights from the idea of legally institutionalizing it [i.e., the public use of reason]. It can leave more questions open because it entrusts more to the process of rational opinion- and will-formation.” (KCR 49)
6. Now, as I set out to investigate to what extent Habermas’s discourse-theoretical conception of deliberative democracy accounts for the moral-epistemic problems of justification I have found that both juridification and economic reductionisms inherent in globalization can be quite helpful to tackle this paradox, as they can be regarded as surface effects of a technical, systemic colonization of the lifeworld and are inevitable evoked in order to carry out the emancipatory claims of a deliberative democratization. By resorting to his conception of a transnational, democratic ethos grounded in popular sovereignty, Habermas’s theory succeeds in rescuing the normative thrust of globalization by means of irreducible human values, such as freedom, dignity, and human rights, intrinsic to different, incompatible self-understanding accounts of lifeworlds. As Catherine Audard suggested, it is only by recourse to deliberation and the right to be included in all public forums of discussion that human rights can be legitimized.(AUDARD, 2005, 36f.) Beyond facile characterizations of natural law and positivist models, Habermas has shown that societal relationships between morality, law and politics have not only become problematic in proportion to the more and more complex differentiations between the legal, political, and economic spheres of social institutions, but also that the very conception of a democratic state falls short of justification and legitimacy within its constitutional foundations. In effect, both Rawls and Habermas resort to recursive or reflective arguments in a radical attempt to break away, on the one hand, from a Kantian, transcendental “fact of reason” that accounts for the moral foundations of law and politics, and on the other hand, from the historicism and positivism inherent in neo-Hegelian and neo-Marxist communitarians (RAWLS, 1996; HABERMAS, 1999) The reflective equilibrium between an abstract, idealized conception of persons or communicative reason (original position, ideal speech situation) and the concrete facticity of everyday practices, norms and values in a given political culture and lifeworld mutually influence both ways as persons and institutions model each other, guaranteeing also a control of constitutionality by the reflective deliberation among the three branches of government. The word “person” must be understood here in a post-metaphusical sense, correlated to the human individual and citizen (homme et citoyen, as in the French declaration of human rights), without ontological, subjective presuppositions. In effect, a semantic, pragmatic transformation of the Kantian conception of transcendental subjectivity, in particular of his ideal of personality (Persönlichkeit, Personalität), underlies the normative conception of the person so as to implement the procedural device of reflective equilibrium, together with the “original position” and the “well ordered society”, in response to communitarian criticisms of liberalism as a comprehensive doctrine. Accordingly, both political constructivism and the formal-pragmatic reconstructive theory of justice refer to a coherentist model of justification, beyond the reification of juridically determined relations that reduces the individual to a mere “juridical person”, in a juridification of freedom as a subsystemic colonization that undermines the emancipatory thrust of democratization. (FLICKINGER, 2006; HONNETH, 2007) By resorting to a radical conception of a transnational democratic ethos grounded in popular sovereignty, Habermas’s theory seeks to rescue the normative thrust of globalization by the irreducibility of moral values such as freedom, human dignity and human rights, inherent in the most diverse and incompatible forms of self-understanding (Selbstverständnis) and lifeworlds. A normative conception of intersubjective recognition is also to be found at the bottom of communicative-performative structures of everyday relations, lived experiences (Erlebnisse) and practices, both in factical terms of social acceptance (soziale Geltung) and in counterfactual validity (Gültigkeit) ideals. (HABERMAS, 1998, p. 4)
Habermas’s theory of communicative action, and particularly his discourse theory of democracy, has arguably been characterized as a social phenomenology of the lifeworld. (WELTON, 2000; STEINBOCK, 1996) Furthermore, recent reconstructive works on the unity of Habermas’s monumental sociological and philosophical opus have pointed to its hermeneutical thrust.( HORSTER, 2001; PINZANI, 2008) If one seeks to make explicit what is properly a phenomenology of the lifeworld in Habermasian terms, one may conceive of a hermeneutics of self-understanding (Selbstverstehen) between social actors who resist systemic imperatives and different, subtle forms of subsystemic colonization in the diverse levels of lifeworldy social reproduction, by exploring, say, the role of the midia vis a vis public opinion, political party propaganda (esp. during elections), political and partisan lobbies and many other forms of conflicting interaction between differentiated levels of the public sphere (Öffentlichkeit) that refer us to communicative reason in the co-constitution of the social fabric of such lifeworlds and steering mechanisms.
7. By effecting a rapprochement between the procedural conceptions of a reflective equilibrium (J. Rawls) and the lifeworld (J. Habermas) we aim at a hermeneutics of normativity correlated to the facticity of a democratic ethos inherent in a pluralist, political culture, capable of integrating semantic and pragmatic aspects of a diversity of practices and codifications (modus vivendi) that subscribe to an overlapping consensus, especially when dealing with universalizable questions of human rights and public policies. We can thus seek to revisit the conception of a postnational deliberative democracy (Rawls, Cohen, Fishkin, Habermas) so as to recast the Habermasian problem of juridification (Verrechtlichung), beyond its original pejorative, negative sense, associated with the economic, financial, and administrative reductionisms that one might find, say, in a neoliberal globalization qua technical, systemic colonization of the lifeworld. A phenomenology of justice rehabilitates in formal-pragmatic terms (or in what has been clumsily dubbed "quasi-transcendental-semantic") a positive juridification insofar as it articulates a social, political ontology with an intersubjective struggle for recognition and a grammar of fairness, beyond the reification of labor and productive relations. (Habermas, Honneth)
Following Foucault, Apel, and Habermas, the three paradigms of ontology, subjectivity, and language (e.g. in natural law, positive rights, and legal hermeneutics, respectively), are said to be co-constitutive and interdependent, insofar as they account for the problem of the social reproduction of the modern, rationalized lifeworld through the differentiated models of a sociological descriptive phenomenology, of a hermeneutics of subjectivation, and of a formal-pragmatic discourse theory. Just as a Kantian-inspired "transcendental semantics" accounts for the articulation of meaning ("Sinn und Bedeutung," in Kant's own terms) in the sensification (Versinnlichung) of concepts and ideas as they either refer us back to intuitions in their givenness (Gegebenheit) of sense or are said to be "realizable" (realisierbar) as an objective reality (since ideas and ideals refer, of course, to no sensible intuition), a formal-pragmatic perspectivism recasts, by analogy, the phenomenological-hermeneutical signifying correlation (Korrelation) between ontology, subjectivity, and language without presupposing any transcendental signfied, ontological dualism (or Zweiweltenthese), or fundamental relationship between subject and object, theory and praxis. And yet the very irreducibility of the hermeneutic circle, together with the incompleteness of its reductions inherent in such a systemic-lifeworldly correlation, seems to betray a quasi-transcendental, perspectival network of signfiers and language games. The modern phenomenon of juridification (Verrechtlichung) turns out to be a good example of this new version of the same problem of accounting for the normative grounds of a critical theory of society. Habermas's wager is that his reconstructive communicative paradigm succeeds in overcoming the transcendental-empirical aporias through a "linguistically generated intersubjectivity" (PDM 297)
To the extent that it systematically seeks “to liberate human beings from the circumstances that enslave them” (Horkheimer 1982, 244), the social philosophy of praxis associated with the Frankfurt School, known as Critical Theory (Kritische Theorie), as opposed to “traditional” theory, can be fairly characterized as a liberationist critique of totalitarianism and late capitalism’s structures of oppression and social pathologies. It is no wonder that several thinkers relating to the Frankfurt School, such as Benjamin, Bloch, Fromm, and Marcuse, were such a decisive influence upon Latin American liberation theologians in their struggles for recognition amid military dictatorships and authoritarian violation of human rights in the 60s, 70s and 80s. The arduous paths leading from authoritarian to democratizing lifeworlds in Latin America attest to the normative thrust implicit in the so-called "transition to democracy," whose structural transformation properly deserves to be described and understood in critical-theoretical terms as an alternative to both revolutionary and reformist models. The grassroot movements associated with third-world struggles for liberation transcended theological circles and Latin American territories, as attest the educational, social, and political activism led by Paulo Freire, Franz Fanon, and then metal worker leader Lula da Silva (Brazil's current president). The liberationist appropriation of Frankfurt thought is quite problematic, to say the least, and the equation of the theological movement with a supposedly relevant "philosophy of liberation" is, to my mind, sheer nonsense. As I have shown elsewhere, the ongoing democratization of emerging societies and developing countries is a complex process that has engaged diverse segments of civil society, and still has a long way to go. After all, a radical deliberative model of democracy is to be accomplished not only by social movements (such as the landless workers and the liberationist ecclesial communities, from below) let alone by governors, the elites or intellectuals, as it were, from above, but ultimately by civil society as a whole and its reflective commitments to solidarity and networks of social cooperation. It is in this sense that both Habermas and Honneth remain two of the major social philosophers in our own search of a new way of doing social phenomenology.
1. Se assumimos uma definição tradicional
da hermenêutica como uma ciência ou teoria que investiga a natureza e os
métodos da interpretação de textos, tradições e práticas da cultura humana, já
estamos antecipando um dos problemas fundamentais da hermenêutica moderna, a
saber, como articular ontologia, subjetividade e linguagem. A hermenêutica
pré-moderna, como sabemos, consistia sobretudo na interpretação de textos
bíblicos, sobretudo nas tradições rabínicas do Judaísmo (o Talmude
compreendendo interpretações da Mishnah, Lei Oral, e exposições éticas e legais
da Gemara) e nas interpretações neotestamentárias do Antigo Testamento, a
partir dos Padres da Igreja. Como Paul Ricoeur observa, o problema fundamental
da hermenêutica neste sentido mais amplo é o da transferência de significado, especialmente de um sentido literal a um
sentido figurado, através de vários níveis de simbolismo mais ou menos
profundos, ocultos, "espirituais", de forma a desvelar ou revelar
algo que não era inicialmente compreendido pelo leitor ou ouvinte. Tal problema
coincide com o que Ricoeur denomina de "nível semântico" da hermenêutica. Todavia, este nível semântico
não poderia ser reduzido unicamente a suas dimensões propriamente filológicas
ou da exegese de textos bíblicos ou clássicos, na medida em que os próprios
contextos semânticos seriam estendidos a elementos não-lingüísticos, como já
encontramos em diferentes interpretações do fenômeno religioso e seus símbolos.
O fato de sermos obrigados a delimitar em que consiste exatamente uma tarefa
propriamente filosófica da hermenêutica em oposição, por exemplo, a outras
concepções semânticas como as de uma "fenomenologia da religião"
(teologia e estudos interdisciplinares da religião), uma "interpretação de
sonhos" (psicanálise) ou de uma "hermeneutics jurídica"
(direito) tem a ver com a própria ambiguidade da hermeneutics filosófica
enquanto interpretação da interpretação, ou seja, como discurso de segunda
ordem sobre compreensão, significado e linguagem. Neste sentido, a contribuição
de Ricoeur é notável, na medida em que busca dialogar com contribuições da
chamada filosofia analítica da linguagem (esp. Frege, Wittgenstein, Austin,
Black) e das tradições continentais oriundas do idealismo alemão, da
fenomenologia husserliana e do estruturalismo francês (esp. Heidegger,
Merleau-Ponty, Sartre, Foucault, Saussure, Benveniste).[i]
2. O problema da hermenêutica moderna,
geralmente vinculado a Friedrich Schleiermacher[ii]
(1768-1834), consiste em não apenas evitar mal-entendidos e fazer jus à
intenção do autor de um texto, mas em reconstruir os contextos semânticos que
viabilizariam uma compreensão do texto melhor ainda do que o próprio autor.
Tanto o romantismo quanto o idealismo alemão, particularmente a crítica de
Hegel a Kant, contribuem para o florescimento de uma hermenêutica moderna,
inseparável do paradigma da subjetividade. De resto, Schleiermacher advoga a
universalidade da hermenêutica, aplicada não apenas a textos bíblicos, mas
também ao direito e à literatura universal.
3. É sobretudo a partir de Wilhelm Dilthey[iii] (1833-1911) que as dimensões históricas e lingüísticas da subjetividade são
explicitamente articuladas através do contraste entre compreensão (Verstehen) e explicação (Erklären), opondo nossa cognição
interpretativa de fatos históricos, sociais e culturais (as chamadas ciências
humanas e sociais, Geisteswissenschaften)
da forma de cognição propriamente científica, neutra ou isenta de juízos
valorativos (wertfrei) que
caracteriza as ciências naturais (Naturwissenschaften).
4. Tanto Schleiermacher quanto Dilthey nos remetem ao problema kantiano do
anti-realismo em ontologia, a saber, como articular o idealismo transcendental
com o realismo empírico de forma a responder ao desafio do "ceticismo"
humeano (indução, causalidade, bundle-theory),
notadamente através de uma solução semântica a priori. Grosso modo, a solução
kantiana consiste em contrapor natureza e liberdade (ou fato e valor, como
seriam tematizados pela hermeneutics moderna) sem reduzir causas observáveis de
fenômenos naturais a propriedades reais num sentido ontológico nem descartar a
idéia de liberdade por se tratar de algo que, estritamente falando, não
encontramos na natureza. Kant antecipa o problema semântico da fenomenologia geral
(phaenomologia generalis, ainda
concebida como "ciência puramente negativa"), ao introduzir em
filosofia a correlação entre a representação do sujeito cognoscente (Vorstellung) e o objeto a ser conhecido
(Gegenstand).[iv]
5.
Husserl se apropria da terceira via kantiana justamente para evitar os
reducionismos contrapondo subjetivismo e objetivismo, racionalismo e empirismo,
logicismo e psicologismo, relativismo e positivismo. A correlação
noético-noemática entre o ato intencional cognitivo e o conteúdo do objeto
significante compreende, desde sempre, a correlação semântica entre o
intéreprete (interpretans) e o que é
interpretado (interpretatum) na hermenêutica.
A hermenêutica se redescobre em suas dimensões ontológicas pelo desenvolvimento
da própria fenomenologia transcendental husserliana, através de seus momentos
de pesquisa fenomenológica estática, genética e generativa, podendo ser
definida, ela mesma, como uma proto-hermenêutica.[v]
6.
Embora Husserl tenha preparado, em grande parte, o que seria concebido como uma
articulação hermenêutica entre ontologia, subjetividade e linguagem, Martin
Heidegger formulou de modo explícito a tese central de que somente pela hermenêutica
podemos recuperar o sentido fundamental da ontologia que foi erroneamente
confundido com abordagens ônticas e essencialistas da metafísica tradicional. Tanto
Heidegger quanto Ricoeur operam, com efeito, uma verdadeira guinada semântica entre
uma fenomenologia transcedental e uma hermenêutica fenomenológica, de forma a revisitar
o problema do círculo hermenêutico, a saber, da pré-compreensão, não apenas na
interpretação implícita ou previamente subentendida da parte com relação ao
todo (de um texto ou de uma ação humana) mas na própria pressuposição de uma
delimitação do contexto, do âmbito de significação ou da recursividade de
significantes, por exemplo, em jogos de linguagem ou de uma "forma de
vida" (ou "mundo da vida", Lebenswelt)
a outras, problematizando a comunicação e a tradução. É neste vasto campo de
uma fenomenologia do mundo da vida que eu proponho-me a revisitar a teoria do
agir comunicativo de Jürgen Habermas, entre o intento original de uma
fenomenologia transcendental em Husserl e Ricoeur e a deconstruction do sujeito
transcendental em Foucault e Derrida.
7. Este seria, de resto, o problema da metaforicidade que foi reativado pela
radicalização da hermenêutica como desconstrução, comumente associada ao nome
do filósofo argelino-francês Jacques Derrida. A minha última tese consiste em
revisitar a deconstruction enquanto hermenêutica radical, fechando assim a
minha breve exposição do círculo hermenêutico: como não há um significado
transcendental nós estamos desde sempre situados com relação aos próprios
momentos que visamos englobar através de representações, teorias e filosofemas,
tudo é desde sempre um efeito da différance.
8. A tese central do perspectivismo pragmático-formal corrige e reconstrói uma semântica transcendental, podendo ser
provisioriamente reformulada nos seguintes termos: as relações possíveis de se
articular entre a ontologia social e a intersubjetividade inerentes a uma fenomenologia
do mundo da vida nos remetem a três perspectivas epistêmicas ou paradigmas
defensáveis quanto à relação entre teoria e práxis, sem serem exaustivas
nem excludentes quanto aos outros dois paradigmas, mas inevitavelmente pressupondo
uma correlação entre ontologia, subjetividade e linguagem. Seguindo Foucault,
Apel e Habermas, os três paradigmas em questão poderiam ser respectivamente
denominados de paradigma ontológico, paradigma da subjetividade e paradigma da
linguagem, na medida em que buscam dar conta do problema da reprodução social
do mundo da vida em três modelos diferenciados de uma fenomenologia sociológica
descritiva, de uma hermenêutica da intersubjetividade e de uma teoria
pragmático-formal do discurso [juspositivismo,
jusnaturalismo e semântica jurídica]. O perspectivismo pragmático-formal, assim como sua variante semântico-transcendental, se propõe, portanto, a reformular a problemática da articulação entre
ontologia, subjetividade e linguagem sem pressupor nenhuma relação fundamental
entre sujeito e objeto, nenhum dualismo ontológico ou tese de dois mundos. Trata-se de reconstruir em termos hermenêutico-formais o que seria um pragmatismo político que lança mão das transformações semióticas
da filosofia transcendental e da semântica analítica, sem incorrer, todavia,
num tipo de idealismo, psicologismo, logicismo ou positivismo lógico, e sem
sucumbir aos reducionismos decorrentes da polarização entre filosofia analítica
e filosofia continental. A hipótese de trabalho do perspectivismo
pragmático-formal é de operar um retorno pós-hermenêutico à crítica de Hegel a Kant, tal como encontramos nos trabalhos seminais de Habermas e Honneth. De resto, o problema de diferenciar entre uma argumentação transcendental, quase-transcendental e destranscendentalizada (como propõem esses autores) termina por nos remeter ao problema central da modernidade, a saber, se a justificativa de seu conteúdo normativo, uma vez deslocado da subjetividade transcendental em direção a uma intersubjetividade histórica e lingüisticamente socializada, situada e contextualizada, não seria redutível a um pseudoproblema naturalista ou cairia sutilmente em outra forma de argumentação transcendental (ou quase). Assim, permanece o desafio de revisitar os argumentos desenvolvidos numa semântica transcendental, tal como tem sido desenvolvida pelas pesquisas de Zeljko Loparic, à luz das contribuições
seminais de autores como Husserl, Wittgenstein, Heidegger, Tugendhat, Apel e
Habermas. Nesta perspectiva, trata-se de articular
o significado (Sinn und Bedeutung) na sensificação (Versinnlichung) de conceitos e idéias que nos remetem,
respectivamente, a intuições na dação (Gegebenheit) de sentido ou são
realizáveis (realisierbar) enquanto realidade objetiva (posto que idéias
e ideais não se referem a nenhuma intuição sensível).
Foi
sobretudo à luz da reapropriação da crítica de Hegel a Kant por Habermas que
foram abertas novas possibilidades de fundamentação pós-metafísica, no sentido
de resgatar a universalização normativa em meio a processos de reconhecimento e
de mudanças estruturais da razão pública, não apenas em casos nacionais mas
também supranacionais e de relações internacionais. A partir de tal
perspectivismo, torna-se defensável uma reformulação do cosmopolitismo que mantenha,
por um lado, a correlação entre universalizabilidade e dignidade humana, e por
outro lado, a referência constante a contextos socioculturais de tradições
comunitárias, compatibilizando a complexa coexistência de mundos da vida
diferenciados, conflitantes e co-constitutivos de normas procedimentais. Propõe-se
deste modo uma releitura pragmático-formal para ser contraposta ao que teria ainda de semântico-transcendental, de forma a contemplar as
contribuições universalistas e comunitaristas, visando uma articulação
defensável entre direitos fundamentais, universalizabilidade e humanidade,
assegurando as reivindicações concretas de liberdade, igualdade e
solidariedade, pela transformação histórico-social das condições materiais da
humanidade pelo reconhecimento e trabalho.
Nythamar “Nita” de Oliveira was born in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, and got a Licence and Maîtrise en Théologie from the Faculté de Théologie
d’Aix-en-Provence, France (1985, 1987), a Master’s in Philosophy from Villanova University (1990), and a
Ph.D. in Philosophy from the State University of New
York at Stony Brook (1994). He was a postdoctoral
Visiting Scholar at the New School for Social Research (1997-98) and was awarded
an Alexander von Humboldt Fellowship to conduct postdoctoral research at the London School of Economics and the
Universität Kassel (2004-05). He has been Associate Professor of Phenomenology,
Ethics and Political Philosophy at the Pontifical Catholic University at Porto Alegre, Brazil, since 1999, and is
currently a Visiting Professor at the University of Toledo, Ohio. He was co-founder and first secretary of the Brazilian Society for Phenomenology. He authored
3 books and co-edited 5 volumes, and has published over 15 articles in
philosophical journals, such as Zeitschrift
für Deutsche Philosophie, New
Nietzsche Studies, International
Studies in Philosophy, Rivista
Internazzionale di Filosofia del Diritto, Manuscrito, Veritas, and Filosofia Política.
