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The Phenomenology of the Socio-Cultural Object

Escaping the Immanent and Transcendent Framework

Philip Reynor
___________________________________________________________________________

Every inquiry is a seeking. Every seeking gets guided beforehand by what is sought.

Martin Heidegger 1

I.

The main problem with both the immanent and transcendent “takes” on our socio-
cultural world is that neither holds true to our actual experience in that world. As a
result, we have a polarised understanding on the one hand, giving us culture as a
graspable totality, a ‘bird’s eye view’ and on the other, limiting us to a perspective
within an assumed ungraspable totality. Adorno in his Cultural Criticism and Society
agrees that “either calling culture as a whole into question from outside under the
general notion of ideology, or confronting it with norms that it itself has crystallized –
cannot be accepted by critical theory” 2. His criticism of the immanent “take” on
culture revolves around something similar to the Kantian paradox; what he is saying
is that philosophy in the immanent tradition lacks critical capacity, in that, moral and
political norms are loaded against those who might seek to make a case against
contemporary culture. The paradox arises here with the demand that if we are to
impose a norm on our socio-cultural life, one that has not “crystallized” from all
current norms, we must have a reason for doing so. The agent has been forced to self-
legislate. If our reason for adopting a norm outside all norms precedes the establishing
of that norm then that reason cannot be self-imposed, it is not self-legislated. For the
norms of any self-legislating agents to be binding the reason cannot precede the
imposition of the norm, yet, it appears that it must. We see Nietzsche endorse a view
which aligns itself somewhat with Adorno’s position:

1
Heidegger, M; Being and Time; Trans: Macquarrie, J & Robinson, E; Blackwell (Oxford 2005); p.24.
2
Adorno, T. W.; Cultural Criticism and Society in Tallack, D (ed); “Critical Theory”, p. 294.

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[L]et us protect ourselves better from the dangerous old conceptual fantasy which
posits a “pure, will-less, painless, timeless, subject of cognition”…those things which
demand that we imagine an eye which simply can’t be imagined, an eye without any
direction at all, in which the active and interpretive forces are supposed to stop or be
absent – the very things through which seeing first becomes seeing something…The
only seeing we have is seeing from a perspective; the only knowledge we have is
knowledge from a perspective. 3

If all perception is from a perspective, consequently, the possibility of engaging in

transcendental criticism is severely undermined and in attacking these “takes” Adorno
and Nietzsche form a fragile alliance. As Adorno remarks:

The transcendent critic assumes as it were an Archimedean position above

culture and the blindness of society, from which consciousness can bring the totality,
no matter how massive into constant flux. 4

However, in certain aspects of his attack on the immanent critic Adorno moves away
from Nietzsche’s perspectivism and the alliance seemingly dissolves. Adorno
understands the immanent critic as one who threatens, however tenaciously, to lapse
into idealism. Immanent criticism, according to Adorno, “cannot take comfort in its
own idea” since it attempts to express harmony by consuming socio-cultural
contradictories structurally while holding to an idea of a mind that cannot resolve
these contradictions regardless of the quantity or quality of reflection in which it
partakes. 5 In other words, immanent criticism can neither free the mind, or the
subject, of these contradictories through reflection on them nor through immersion in
an object undetermined by the presupposition of the transcendental totality. Thus,
Adorno’s “take” on immanent criticism rests on his understanding of it as a striving
towards harmony; this harmony however contradicts the immanent critic’s conception
of mind, in that, this mind is unable to resolve that which it attempts to harmonise, the
result is inevitably discord. Adorno distrusts the perspective of the perspectivist for its
subjectivism and the totality of the transcendentalist for its objectivism, essentially,
for nausea in the face of consciousness, and finally he distrusts both for propagating

3
Nietzsche, F; The Genealogy of Morals; Essay 3, §12.
4
Adorno, T. W.; Cultural Criticism and Society; p.294.
5
Ibid; p. 295.

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the “Hegelian identity of subject and object”. 6 What Adorno proposes, in his dualistic
mindfulness, is that the “dialectic critic of culture must both participate in culture and
not participate. Only then does he do justice to the object and to himself”. 7 After we
have redescribed the socio-cultural object, in light of a new way of thinking about
that object, we will return to these issues, addressing the notion of “final vocabulary”
in Rorty’s work and finally asking what it is that distinguishes the position of the
critic.

II.

In accepting the responsibility of criticism there arises the question of the

intentionally present socio-cultural object. Is it possible to criticise without there
being an object of consciousness or, to put it another way, without there being that of
which we are critical? Why is it that one particular object stands out, displays itself as
shocking or praiseworthy and offers itself up for criticism? What is the relation
between the critic and the object of criticism? These questions amount to an inquiry
into the foundations of criticism, that is, what enables the critic, makes the critic
possible. Needless to say, the critic’s object need not be a material thing, such as a
statue of Joyce or a painting by Cezanne. The object may be a misplaced brushstroke
in a work of art, it may be a state of affairs, an item of technology, the fact that certain
traditions have been let go, ignored in favour of modernity, it may be an artistic
movement, a speech, a book or a set of principles. These objects stand out against the
background of the world they inhabit; they display themselves against our
environmental understanding, the world we are born into. Our conceptual beliefs are
guided by our environment and we engage with this environment on a preconceptual
level, below concepts, in what Wilfrid Sellars called the “space of reasons”; this
understanding is in the interaction between agent and world, consequently it does not
reside ‘inside’ the agent as a sort of mental image or intentional content.

If one were to state in an off-hand manner: “That is just far too costly”. For those
who engage with this statement the possibility arises of being prompted to locate an
object and, as such, to inhabit a perspective. We feel the need to ‘fill’ this statement,

6
Ibid.
7
Ibid; p.296.

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to go beyond the horizons that are presented to us and ‘see’ the statement in a certain
light, give it a reference. Events, or objects, such as these are never meaningless, and
as such, the critic, the enthusiast, the historian, the anthropologist, and the idle talker
finds them intriguing, annoying, frustrating, puzzling, out of place, inconvenient,
marvellous and so on. When we inhabit a perspective on the object, when we ‘find’ it
a certain way, we also inhabit an attitude, in our case, the critical attitude. In addition,
the socio-cultural object always already has preconceptual sense for us against a
background of understanding in our environment, and that which appears as puzzling
is thus not this preconceptual sense but how to ‘fill’ the object, to locate it in an
environment of its own and transcend the horizons of our understanding. This
background environmental understanding is illustrated quite elegantly by Merleau-
Ponty when he says:

[I]t is the darkness needed in the theatre to show up the performance. The
background of somnolence or reserve of vague power against which the gesture and
its aim stand out, the zone of not being in front of which precise beings, figures and
points can come to light. 8

Merleau-Ponty’s meaning here is quite clear: in order for what is fore-grounded – in

this case the socio-cultural object – to assume significance, a sense, it must do so
against a background, which he likens to a “reserve of vague power”. The fore-
grounded object is therefore disclosed as engaging – an aporia – the object is fore-
grounded or shown up through our habitation of this background. It must also be
noted that a characteristic of this ‘filling’ is intentional location, that something-of-
which we intend to ‘fill’, which always already has a preconceptual sense. It is this
preconceptual sense that guides our investigations and our criticism, that effectively
frames our understanding, frames the objects ‘full-filling’ a set of expectations. These
expectations exist in certain worlds for us, such that, we can inhabit these
perspectives, inhabit a certain “take” on the object.

8
Merleau-Ponty; Phenomenology of Perception; p. 115.

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III.

Thus far, a brief attempt has been made to adhere to the epigraph above and in so
doing to bring to the fore the object of the cultural critic, now it is time to bring forth
its phenomenal being. The lack of an intentional object or its meaning for us, leads to
a positing, this positing is an attempt to ‘fill’ the object, a characteristic of this
‘filling’ is prereflectively locating or fore-grounding the object in our background
understanding and taking on, or abandoning, meaning or sense. Now, what is being
asked about here is the world of the socio-cultural critic and this world needs to be
interrogated. How do we perceive the socio-cultural world? Does the socio-cultural
world present itself as a totality? What is the involvement of the critic in the socio-
cultural world? Wittgenstein in the Philosophical Investigations states that “Ein Bild
hielt uns gefangen” 9 and I think this phrase underlies succinctly all the above
questions; in this case, the picture holding the critic captive is the traditional
bifurcation of socio-cultural criticism into immanent or transcendent “takes”: the
notion of a socio-cultural totality that we can grasp as such, or as a totality that we can
investigate only from within. Charles Taylor put it well when he wrote:

So the view of the agent as being-in-the-world has room for a distinction between
reality and our grasp of it; we invoke this distinction every time we knowingly
correct our view of things. It can distinguish between different, mutually
untranslatable cultural “takes” on reality, but it cannot allow that these are
insurmountable or inescapable. 10

Thus, we have an agent immersed in a world; this immersion is constituted by the

agent’s being-in-the-world, a preconceptual background understanding. The object at
stake here is culture and the critic exemplifies a “take” on that object, yet, there can
only be a “take” if the agent is so immersed in an environment and this immersion
discloses itself as a bond between body and world. This world is, however, an
intersubjective one and as such it is a world for all and in virtue of this we can
entertain these disputes about culture. However, in this context we can interpret
Wittgenstein’s above remark as indicating how our environmental background

9
A picture held us captive, Philosophical Investigations, §115.
10
Carmen, T and Hansen, M (eds); ‘The Cambridge Companion to Merleau-Ponty’; Cambridge
University Press (Cambridge 2005); p.40.

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understanding constitutes a preconceptual sense (see §II), a frame, or a “framework

understanding” to take Charles Taylor’s phrase. Our mode of perceiving socio-
cultural life can become “obvious, unchallengeable, the necessary irreplaceable
context for all our thinking about these matters…In this way it work[s] insidiously
and powerfully”. 11 This insidious force, this framework within which we think of and
criticise our culture, is structured in part by the presence of the immanent and
transcendent “takes”, powerfully shaping and guiding our questions and our thinking,
disclosing the object in a certain light.

IV.

The dual notions of transparency and conspicuousness, as modalities of our

immersion, of our being-in-the-world, can now enter our discussion. With the
explication of transparency the meaning of conspicuousness will hopefully unpack
itself. The point at hand can be illustrated if we take an example from Sartre’s The
Transcendence of the Ego. Sartre forwards the notion of chasing after a streetcar and,
in so doing, brings forth a perceptive experience in which no I is present. What is
meant by this ego-less experience is that “I am immersed in a world of objects; they
constitute the unity of my consciousness…they present themselves with qualities that
attract or repel – but I have disappeared I am nothing.” 12 In running after the
streetcar, I am no longer an issue, I am so immersed or involved in the catching-the-
streetcar that there is no longer an I reflecting on the experience. Alternatively,
conspicuousness is disclosed when, having caught the streetcar, I am unable to open it
– the door is stuck. The task has become problematic and I find myself franticly
involved in a rugged attempt to solve it. The situation has gone from transparent
where I am immersed in the world, to conspicuous where I stand out and seem to
become the locus of the world’s attention. Now, this interaction with the intentional
object is disclosed as a felt normative tension, the object attracts or repels. In the case
of transparency the tension has been reduced to a null – the tension between I and the
world is reduced with transparency or immersion in the world and increased with
conspicuousness, where the I becomes the locus of the environments attention. With

11
Carmen, T & Hansen, B; ‘The Cambridge Companion to Merleau-Ponty’; p.28.
12
Cumming, R. D; ‘The Philosophy of Jean-Paul Sartre’; p. 53-54; [my italics].

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this in mind we will now turn our attentions to the critic’s perception of the socio-
cultural object.

V.

When I perceive any socio-cultural object, contra Nietzsche’s strict

perspectivism, I understand and grasp it as a ‘three dimensional entity’ 13 in a world of
objects, the agent grasps not just what is directly given in sight but also beyond these
horizons. It is through this object-horizon structure that objects can be distinguished
from each other, it accounts for the way in which objects are disclosed in experience,
objects hide behind each other, behind themselves, and for Merleau-Ponty, the
essence of objects as hidden is taken as a positive phenomenon. What is hidden is
present in experience as a “something or other”, in that, “what is behind my back is
not without some element of visual presence”. 14 He goes on to say that “[t]o see is to
enter into a universe of beings which display themselves, and they would not do this if
they could not be hidden behind each other or behind me”. 15 Merleau-Ponty is
describing the horizontal structure where we can perceive beyond what is empirically
or ideally presented. However, his next claim is at first quite counter-intuitive; he
claims in effect that objects ‘see’ each other.

[T]o look at an object is to inhabit it, and from this habitation to grasp all things
in terms of the aspect which they present to it. But in so far as I see those things too,
they remain abodes open to my gaze, and, being potentially lodged in them I already
perceive from various angles the central object of my present vision. Thus every
object is a mirror of all others. 16

So, to return to our previous example, the streetcar is not only seen from the position I
happen to be in when I am chasing it, but the road, the trees, the mechanic, the child,
the critic and so on all ‘see’ the car. This leads to what Merleau-Ponty refers to as the
object as seen “from everywhere…being shot through on all sides by an infinite

13
This is not meant strictly in the materialist fashion, but that we can inhabit various “takes” on the
object.
14
The Phenomenology of Perception; p. 6.
15
Ibid; p.79.
16
Ibid.

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number of present scrutinies which intersect in its depths leaving nothing hidden”. 17
This view from everywhere is not a possible view for me; it is merely the expression
of a norm, an optimum view from which my perspective is felt to deviate. 18 This
normative seeing is present in all perception; it is a felt tension that solicits the agent
to act or to adopt a certain “take” that attracts or repels them. When we reach an
optimum distance the normative tension is null. What we can also take from Merleau-
Ponty’s analysis is that in intending an object we inhabit it, we see the world and all
the co-existent objects from its perspective but we also inhabit the background on
which the central object displays itself and thus transcend the horizons of that object.
The central object is seen from everywhere as the habitation of these abodes reveals
the hidden aspects of that object for us.

This holism forms the bedrock of the critical attitude. The critic is immersed
in a world of socio-cultural objects, in a world of worlds which cohere under the
concept of culture, what was formerly taken to be the object of the critic. Culture can
now be understood as a background environmental understanding on which its
various objects are fore-grounded, being ‘filled’ and taking on meaning. If we must
think of culture as a totality we must think of it as one which we inhabit in grasping
its objects and in order for the critic to achieve a critical capacity s/he accepts the
totality of culture as the possibility of understanding the object, of displaying the
hidden aspects that lie beyond the horizons of any one “take”. Therefore, the culture
that was once understood as the object of the critic must now be understood as the
abode of the critic, we must not take it as our object but as a means of revealing what
has been fore-grounded for us and in this we inhabit the cultural object and grasp its
background in terms of the aspects and attitudes that are presented to it. Adorno
among others failed to describe this bond between culture and its object, failed to note
that we are always already immersed a socio-cultural world and, as a result, the
insidious notions of immanence and transcendence warped all thinking and
questioning, they became the benchmarks of the cultural attitude and the perspective
on its object. On the other hand, Nietzsche’s failure to attend to this phenomenon
resulted in a rigid perspectivism, driven by dissatisfaction with the transcendental

17
Ibid.
18
See: Kelly, S. D.; Seeing Things in Merleau-Ponty in ‘The Cambridge Companion to Merleau-
Ponty’.

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account. The rigid perspective does not allow for the possibility of knowledge from
an optimal position through the habitation of the socio-cultural background and the
intentional object. If we attend only to a single rigid perspective, attitude or “take”
and negate our ability grasp the object optimally we effectively close up the object
itself, it can no longer be seen as an object that displays itself but must be understood
as an object that hides and an object which may never yield up its secrets.

VI.

So what is it that distinguishes the critic? So, far our analysis has yielded a
new way of thinking about how we perceive and understand the socio-cultural object.
This understanding – as the grasp of the object from various “takes” with the aim of
nullifying the normative tension that surrounds our perception of every object and our
background understanding of it – has eliminated the need for talk of immanent and
transcendent criticism. We have escaped the frame of the picture and we can now
begin to understand that which distinguishes the critic, why it is that s/he adopts the
critical attitude. Richard Rorty’s understanding of a “final vocabulary” will act as a
useful guide in forming our answer while bringing out the linguistic aspects of
background understanding and our grasp of the object. First of all, what does Rorty
mean by “final vocabulary” and how does it fit into our discussion? A person’s
vocabulary “is ‘final’ in the sense that if doubt is cast on the worth of these words,
their user has no noncircular argumentative recourse”. 19 To put this another way, if
the terms of a persons “final vocabulary” are brought under the critical scalpel, say by
a redescription in terms of alternative “final vocabulary”, then the individual (a critic
in our case) operating within that “take” is only capable of defending these words in
term of themselves. The critic immersed in the framework of the immanent and
transcendent is, as such, immersed in a “final vocabulary”. In being so immersed s/he
can only criticise the socio-cultural object with recourse to this “final vocabulary”
thus when such a critic offered up their criticism the necessary remainder will always
be a felt normative tension resulting from an inability to achieve an optimal view of
the object. This is essentially the position of the metaphysician for Rorty, always in
search of the essences of their “final vocabulary” thus always remaining within that

19
Rorty, R; Contingency, Irony and Solidarity; p. 73.

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final vocabulary, within Wittgenstein’s frame. The ironist, however, is always

searching for new vocabularies, inhabiting new cultural “takes” in an effort is form an
optimal view of things, always striving to reduce the normative tension to a null.
Thus, we see Rorty’s ironist expressing radical doubts as to the final vocabulary that
she operates within as she is “impressed” by other socio-cultural “takes”. The ironist
also understands the need to inhabit more then one final vocabulary as her “take”
from this perspective can neither “underwrite nor dissolve” her doubts about that
“take”. Rorty also does well to point out that no one “take” is seen as more real then
others, this reflects Merleau-Ponty’s claim “Se demander si le monde est reel, c’est ne
pas entendre ce qu’on dit.” 20 . Thus, one final vocabulary is as good as another,
Rorty’s (and Merleau-Ponty’s) point being that it is not about transcending
appearances towards the real, but “playing the new off against the old”, to put it in
our terminology: the point is to strive for an optimal view and to position oneself in
order to resolve our normative tensions.

VII.

Thus, we can distinguish the critic as one who inhabits the critical attitude,
adopting the critical perspective. This critical perspective is never a single “take” on
the socio-cultural object, it is the seemingly never ending progress through final
vocabularies, in an effort to reduce the felt tension, the anxiety in the face of social
and cultural life. So why does an agent inhabit the critical position? Because, like the
ironist, the critic feels a tension between her final vocabulary and her understanding
of the socio-cultural object. The object stands out as conspicuous as in need of
investigation and as such the normative tension, which Sartre talks of above as
attracting or repelling, draws the individual into the habitation of a critical attitude,
the closer the agent gets to this critical “take” the more s/he feels the lessening of
tension. In inhabiting this critical attitude it forms part of the agents being, the agent
can say that s/he is critical, s/he is being critical, thus adopting this attitude is not
simply a theoretical construct, the critic must actually engage in criticism. As such,
the critic becomes somewhat akin to Rorty’s ironist moving through various final
vocabularies trying to redescribe in order to grasp culture, in order to reduce the

20
To ask whether the world is real is not to know what one is saying.

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tension she feels in awe at the sheer scale of her task. We shall allow Rorty the final
words on the matter.

For us ironists, nothing can serve as a criticism of a final vocabulary save another
such vocabulary; there is no answer to a redescription save a re-re-redescription.
Since there is nothing beyond vocabularies which serves as a criterion of choice
between them, criticism is a matter of looking on this picture and on that, not of
comparing both pictures with the original. 21

21
Rorty, R; Contingency, Irony and Solidarity; p. 80.

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Bibliography:

Heidegger, M.; Being and Time; Trans: Macquarrie, J & Robinson, E. Blackwell (Oxford
2005).

Adorno, T. W.; Cultural Criticism and Society in Tallack, D. (ed) Critical Theory: A Reader.
Harvester Wheatsheaf (Herdsfordshire 1995).

Gardner, S. Kant and The Critique of Pure Reason. Routledge (London 2004).

Nietzsche, F; On the Genealogy of Morals a Polemical Tract. Oxford University Press

(Oxford 1998).

Nietzsche, F.; Beyond Good and Evil; Oxford University Press (Oxford 1998).

Merleau-Ponty, M.; The Phenomenology of Perception. Routledge (London 2006).

Cumming, R. D. (ed) The Philosophy of Jean-Paul Sartre. Vintage (New York 2003).

Carmen, T and Hansen, M. (eds) The Cambridge Companion to Merleau-Ponty. Cambridge

University Press (Cambridge 2005).

Moran, D. Introduction to Phenomenology. Routledge (London 2000).

Rorty, R. Contingency, Irony and Solidarity. Cambridge University Press (Cambridge 1989).

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