Racist or Anti-Racist Phenomenology

This paper looks into a dark chapter in the history of phenomenology. It compares Clauss’s Rassenseelenkunde with contemporary critical phenomenology of race. Clauss, a student of Husserl and a leading Nazi race theorist, understood his race research as style-research. Similarly, the variant of phenomenology of race that builds on Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology of the body can be characterized as style-research. Moreover, both Clauss and Merleau-Ponty referred to Husserl’s Ideas II as a key source. However, despite borrowing aspects of Husserl’s terminology, Clauss’s approach followed those in the early phenomenological movement who advocated unrestricted realism regarding essences. Accordingly, he asserts that races are defined by pure mental essences that need to be grasped through eidetic seeing. By contrast, a phenomenology of race inspired by Merleau-Ponty represents a continuation of the project of the mature Husserl, precisely in those aspects in which Husserl turned against the eidetic realism of his circle of students

Lived experience · Phenomenology (philosophy) · Race (biology) · Racism · Franz Kafka Literary Studies · German Colonialism and Identity Studies · Nietzsche, Schopenhauer, and Hegel

• Revealing Whiteness

  Shannon Sullivan•Revealing Whiteness•2006

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• Visible Identities

  L M Alcoff•Visible identities•2006

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• Habits of Racism

  Ngo Helen•Habits of Racism•2017

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• The Phenomenological Movement

  Open Access•Herbert Spiegelberg, E Spiegelberg•Phenomenological Movement•1994

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• Ideas pertaining to a pure phenomenology and to a phenomenological philosophy

  Edmund Husserl, F Kersten•Ideen zu einer reinen Phánomenologi…•1982

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