Papers by Niclas Rautenberg
Philosophy and Social Criticism, 2024
According to a broad historical and contemporary consensus, ideology resides in the mind, as a so... more According to a broad historical and contemporary consensus, ideology resides in the mind, as a sort of belief system gone wrong. Recently, however, a minority view has challenged this cognitivist consensus by highlighting ideology’s social function. This group of authors, including Rahel Jaeggi, Karen Ng, Robin Celikates, and Sally Haslanger, underline the importance of analyzing ideology through the lens of our social practices. We think these challengers move the conversation about ideology in the right direction, but their views still suffer from some weaknesses – weaknesses that we think an existential-phenomenological account of ideology can overcome. We develop such an account here. We conceive of ideology as a set of modes of being-with that attack our normative competence by placing us under unwarranted normative pressure, changing our normative stance to benefit some political group. We offer a four-fold account of normative competence and illustrate how ideology, understood in our terms, attacks it. Finally, we show that our approach shares the strengths but not the weaknesses of the minority view.
Making Room for the Solution: A Critical and Applied Phenomenology of Conflict Space
International Journal of Philosophical Studies, 2023
This essay discusses the normative significance of the spatial dimension of conflict events. Draw... more This essay discusses the normative significance of the spatial dimension of conflict events. Drawing on qualitative interviews conducted with political actors – politicians, officials, and activists – and on Heidegger’s account of spatiality in Being and Time, I will argue that the experience of conflict space is co-constituted by the respective conflict participants, as well as the location where the conflict unfolds. Location and conflict parties’ (self-)understandings ‘open up’ a space that enables and constrains ways of seeing and acting. Yet, a purely transcendental phenomenology will remain oblivious to the quasi-transcendental, societal structures of power that shape a person’s conflict experience. To illuminate these facets of the phenomenon, phenomenology has to join forces with critical theory. Introducing Garland-Thomson’s feminist distinction of fit/misfit, I will illustrate how power shapes conflict space in manifold ways. The essay thereby fills a gap in the philosophical literature that rarely analyses political conflict as a phenomenon sui generis.
Journal of the American Philosophical Association, 2024
This article investigates the structure of racialized conflict experience. Embarking from a confl... more This article investigates the structure of racialized conflict experience. Embarking from a conflict event in Ta-Nehisi Coates's autobiography Between the World and Me and contrasting the work of Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Alfred Schutz with insights from Black phenomenology, I argue that Coates's experience discloses conflictual, but intertwined, modes of being-in-the-world. Further, it presents an instantiation of a particular kind of conflict, i.e., corporeal conflict. Corporeal conflict applies whenever the body is politicized, i.e., when it becomes the marker for traits representative of a rival political group. Understood this way, racialized conflict is always political. I conclude the article with some remarks on the shortcomings of two dominant conflict theories in political philosophy and the potential for an alternative, phenomenological approach that enables new ways of engaging the other in conflict. The analysis is preceded by a meditation on the role of the Whi...
Jonathan Dancy's moral particularism is intended to replace principled moral reasoning and theori... more Jonathan Dancy's moral particularism is intended to replace principled moral reasoning and theorizing. But as any other moral theory, moral particularism has to answer the questions considering what moral knowledge consists of and how to acquire it, as well as by which mechanism we are to distinguish between correct and incorrect moral judgment. In this paper, I claim that the answers given in Dancy's Ethics without Principles are unsatisfactory. This follows from Dancy's unconvincing implementation of an agent-relative epistemic filter; neither the notion of an epistemic filter nor Dancy's related conception of agent-relativity are plausible. In turn, I discuss several possible escape routes which all in turn prove defective themselves. The result is the need for further theoretical refinement on Dancy's side and the (at least) temporary incapacity of his moral particularism to rebut skeptical challenges.
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Papers by Niclas Rautenberg