Philosophy

What Phenomenology Teaches Politics

Phenomenology – the philosophical method I practiced and contributed to – is sometimes described as abstract, technical, and disconnected from practical concerns. I would like to correct this misconception by demonstrating that phenomenology offers something that politics desperately needs and almost entirely lacks: a rigorous method for understanding experience before deciding what to do about it.

The political sphere operates, overwhelmingly, at the level of action. What policy should we implement? What legislation should we pass? What position should we take? These are questions about doing.

What AI Cannot Know

The question of whether artificial intelligence can think is asked frequently and answered badly. It is answered badly because the participants in the debate have not agreed on what they mean by “think,” and in the absence of that agreement, the conversation devolves into competing intuitions rather than competing arguments.

I would like to try something more disciplined. I want to examine what it means to know something – not merely to produce a correct output, but to understand why the output is correct – and then ask whether current AI systems do that, or anything resembling it.

The Stranger and the Self

There is a moment in every genuine encounter with another person – another culture, another faith, another way of understanding the world – when the encounter ceases to be comfortable and becomes, instead, productive. This is the moment when the other stops being a curiosity to be examined from a safe distance and becomes, instead, a challenge to the categories I have been using to organize my own experience.

I call this the moment of unsettlement. And I believe it is the most important moment in any interaction across difference, because it is the moment when understanding – genuine understanding, not the polite recognition of difference that passes for understanding in most multicultural discourse – becomes possible.

The Phenomenology of Empathy

We speak of “putting ourselves in someone else’s shoes” as if empathy were a simple act of imaginative substitution. As if, by imagining what we would feel in their circumstances, we could access their experience.

This is not empathy. This is projection.

The phenomenological question is more precise: How do we access the lived experience of another consciousness without either collapsing the distance between us or rendering that experience inaccessible?

The Long Read in an Age of Scrolling

I am going to make an argument for long reading, and I am going to make it at length, because the argument cannot be made otherwise without contradicting itself.

The premise is straightforward: understanding complex ideas requires sustained attention, and sustained attention requires time, and the current information environment is systematically hostile to both. The consequence is not merely a decline in reading habits. It is a decline in the capacity for the kind of thought that reading enables – the slow, cumulative, self-revising engagement with an argument that is too complex to be apprehended in a summary.

The Emperor Sent Fifty Philosophers

The emperor sent fifty philosophers to defeat me in debate. I want to be precise about what this means, because the story has been softened over the centuries into something almost quaint – a legend, a miracle, a set piece in which the plucky underdog triumphs.

It was not quaint. It was a trial. The emperor assembled the most credentialed, most respected intellectual authorities available and deployed them against a young woman whose crime was thinking in public. The purpose was not dialogue. The purpose was humiliation, and through humiliation, silence.

On Holding Multiple Identities

I have lived, across the course of a single life, inside more identities than most institutions are comfortable acknowledging in a single person.

I was born Jewish, into a family that observed the traditions with a seriousness that shaped everything I would later become. I became, through philosophical inquiry, an atheist – not casually, but rigorously, as a consequence of the questions I was asking and the answers I was finding. I became, through a process I can describe but not fully explain, a Catholic, and eventually a Carmelite nun. I was, throughout all of this, a philosopher – a student of Husserl, a scholar of phenomenology, a thinker who could not stop thinking even when thinking led to places that were inconvenient for the identities I inhabited.

Empathy Is Not a Feeling

The word “empathy” has been so thoroughly degraded by popular usage that I must begin by reclaiming it from the territory of sentiment and returning it to the territory of philosophy, where it originated and where it does its most important work.

Empathy, in common usage, means “feeling what another person feels.” This definition is not merely imprecise. It is wrong in a way that obscures the most valuable thing about empathy and replaces it with something that is, at best, sympathetic projection and, at worst, a form of emotional colonialism in which I replace your experience with my imagined version of it and call the result “understanding.”

On the Duty to Think Slowly

I would like to make a case for slowness. Not the slowness of indifference or the slowness of obstruction, but the deliberate, chosen slowness of a mind that refuses to be rushed past the point where understanding becomes possible.

This is, I am aware, an unfashionable position. The dominant culture rewards speed of response, certainty of opinion, and the appearance of having already thought through whatever has just happened. The person who says “I need to think about this” is perceived not as rigorous but as behind.