Edmund Husserl

This paper aims to utilize elements of the phenomenological method, particularly the notion of the life-world (Lebenswelt), in order to begin an examination of communism and its explosive demise. Edmund Husserl introduced the notion of the life-world into phenomenological philosophy in The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology, defining it as the world of everyday life prior to any scientific knowledge of unquestionably clear things, i.e., as a world of "pre-predicative evidences" (Husserl 1977). Even though this world has a fully anonymous status, it is not immediately recognizable, and we are normally unaware that it exists as a particular world which has been defined and explained within a sociocultural context. For us, it is simply "the world".

Communism and the post-communist situation are not discussed here in terms of psychological, economic or politological description and explanation. Rather, an investigation is begun into how people have been living in the European countries of "real socialism," including the Soviet Union, Romania, Bulgaria, Yugoslavia, Poland, Czechoslovakia and Hungary.

A PHENOMENOLOGICAL APPROACH

The life-world is not some suspended network of meanings. Rather, it has its own space, time, logic and basic meanings, all of which are interconnected. Furthermore, it is extended through time, involving genesis, expansion and decline. These characteristics held true for the phenomenon of communism as well which, in its developed form, created a life-world of its own.

Communism developed in both European and non-European countries, and it was "immersed" deeply within the context of contemporary civilisation. However, the fact that it was highly isolated from the rest of the world is one of its intrinsic charac-teristics. In any case, the communist attitude, the communist idea and the communist phenomena of conscience and action constructed a separate social life-world having their own specific mentality, space and time. "Real socialism" was not simply the domination of one party, a planned economy and a totalitarian system, but was primarily an ethos, a mentality, a phenomenon. It did not disappear after having been rejected by its own institutions, but was then merely transformed into something else insofar as its power, like the power of all energy forms, can only be transformed and not destroyed. The basic meanings and notions that made communism a living reality still exist side by side along with the slowly advancing reform.

The attempt to comprehend communism constitutes a hope for orientation and control in the post-communist period. It is painful and perhaps impossible to change the former system upon the abstract basis of what a "normal" society and what its institutions should be when there is no understanding of the life-world. This problem is compounded when the result is that new institutions are merely transplanted, and thereby weakened, into the still living communist and socialist mentality. Without an understanding of the roots and the life forces that nurtured it, it is not possible to exit communism wisely.

But even if exiting from communism remains a spontaneous process not governed by wisdom, a comprehension of the phenomenon of communism will surely be useful in the face of any other projects that strive to engineer the human life-world. Today these include cloning, genetic control, artificial intelligence, biorobotics and various other tendencies to "rationally organize" life on the planet as a whole.

The phenomenology (more precisely, phenomenological sociology) of communism involves a clarification (Husserl’s Erklärung, Ideation) of meanings, something which cannot be done from an outsider’s position. In The Crisis, Husserl presents phenomenology as a philosophy that, contrary to both pre-scientific and scientific objectivism, goes back to knowing subjectivity as the location where all objective meanings and meaningful validities are formed. Its program is to undertake the task of understanding the world of existence as a mental formation of valid meanings (Husserl 1977). The most adequate paradigm for an "understanding" of the theory of communism is the phenomenological paradigm of the social as a living network of meanings that are intended and discovered by people. This way of comprehending communism (and post-communism) is acquired by people who have lived or still live in such a society. Phenomenological social knowledge is not speculation but rather experience as it has been thematized by means of phenomenological notions that describe the constitution of a great variety of events: life-world, phenomenon, meaning, significance, idea, attitude, vision, mentality, mental form and dynamics.

This type of social knowledge gives rise to a dynamic clarifica-tion of the phenomenon of communism in its development as a living entity of meanings and significances which does not rely upon exclusively causal explanations. While such clarification may be expressed through interpretations of texts and teleologically explained events and "rational actions" (Max Weber), it originates from the idea of the phenomenon as a living and full possession of the object of the intention (Husserl). Communism is precisely such an intended living entity and not an "objective fact" (communism as a non-implemented project remained only a vision within the main meaning). The scientific character of the phenomenological approach has today become widely recognized in the international scholarly community, one result being the development of new areas of research in phenomenological sociology and, in a broader sense, social knowledge as a whole. Prominent examples include the works of Alfred Schütz (constitutive phenomenology of the natural disposition), the ethnomethodology of Harold Garfinkle and the research of the contemporary phenomenologist Richard Gratchoff. Instead of working with "objective notions," this sociology rather utilizes "types" similar to the "Ideal Types" of Max Weber (Weber 1960).

People recognize, understand, and act towards things and events in the life-world with ready norms of significance, and they do not have unique requirements for every fact or event. For the people living in the world of "real socialism," things such as "money," "power" and "dignity" and events like "revolution," "queue" or "shady deal" meant something familiar and specific that was nevertheless unknown to people outside the system. These names contained codes for understanding and action that were valid only for real socialist life, comprising a set of meanings that existed only in a common intersubjective life-world (Husserl 1977; Schütz 1981).

In addition, life is not only a quality but also a form of the life-world and its phenomena. Through its form, life is an organic unity of components and processes that reproduces itself in conditions of spontaneous disintegration and chaos. Life is the reproduction and expansion of order in chaos; it is always a motion towards life, an order and escape from non-life, from chaos. That which is alive is born, grows against entropy and finally dies, disintegrating into chaos. Moreover, every form of life, every biological species or social formation, has its own unique identity that it projects in a unique form (order) of its life-world. Human space, time and logic are specifically human, different from the space, time and logic of the other forms of life.

Communism is a human social form, i.e., it is a concretization of human form in its sociality. The human world in this particular social form is a characteristically human intersubjective world.

LIFE PROJECT AND WORLD PROJECT

What meaning is to be ascribed to the "phenomenon of communism"? This is ultimately the broadest set of mental forms that have given life to the texts, actions and events concerned with the argumentation, planning and realization of communism. This set is both varied and homogeneous, much in the same way as Wittgenstein’s multitude of "family resemblance" forms. I will endeavor to consider those which are most strongly represented and can be idealized as "pure types."

Communism is understandable as a phenomenon of Western civilization that is alien to the mentality and practices of the Middle and the Far East. In addition, certain writers, primarily such Russian historians and philosophers as Geller-Nekritch or Nikolai Berdiaev, have been tempted to describe communism, Bolshevism in particular, as a Russian phenomenon. But while Bolshevism is an historic fact, it does not necessarily carry an understanding of the mental form of communism as a project. In any case, there should be no mixing of the rationalistic phenomena of Western engineering with traditional Eastern societies (Weber), among which Russia is included to some significant degree.

The present investigation into the phenomenon of communism begins with a genetic statement, namely, communism is rooted in the archetype of logos. The vision of the world as a logos, i.e, an objective order that can be presented in words and figures, also contains the vision of the world as an object of technology. The latter involves the demiurgic vision of a "better world" different from ours that can be created by human beings through the use of the world’s laws, its logos.

But communism reached a deadlock and collapsed before it fulfilled its declared design. Furthermore, the effort to realize the communist project brought about huge destruction. Why did communism not succeed? Would it be possible for another such project to survive? Against the background of such questions, the major supporting thesis of the present discussion is that this type of project is doomed to failure because the demiurgic vision of "world creation" is false. The world (the human life-world) cannot be exhaustively grasped and expressed as logos and it is not the object of technology. Realities such as "freedom," "man" and "justice" that are compatible with the human life-world are not technological in nature. Life is not an artifact.

Plato’s state was moral, perfect and ideal, representing a sensible projection of the idea of justice that exists in a better world, the world of ideas (Plato 1984). Society was to be organized in a holon where each person and action would find its own functional place. Charles Fourier proclaimed that the "human breeding" that was to take place there would be in harmony with the idea of justice, thanks to the radical acquirement of human reason and the discovery of the "four phases of history" (Fourier 1953). Now, for Karl Marx as well, the world must not simply be explained, it must be changed (Marx 1978b). Moreover, communism was to be a "real human history" that would replace the current "pre-history" (Marx 1953a) in that people would come to create their own history in compliance with the laws of history. In doing so, they were to make the "jump from the kingdom of necessity to the kingdom of freedom" (Marx 1953b).

Communist ideology, rather radically expressed in Manifesto of the Communist Party, envisioned a total revolution in which basic values of Western civilization were rejected as class-determined" values and new ones approved, including a new status for the "person" after the "bourgeois person" had been eliminated. The Manifesto puts forward the project of a communist revolution that is to be implemented by means of the expropriation of property and the replacement of the parliamentary order with dictatorship. Revolutionaries in Lenin’s party as well as communists in the rest of the world implemented precisely that project when they carried out their designs for a "new world," a "new life" and a "new man."

Communism was a grand experiment of Western reason that was born from the ancient understanding of the world as "logos" and "idea." According to this view, the world is ordered in a certain manner (logos) and is permeated with laws that are knowable and expressible in words and figures (logos). Furthermore, reality can be changed on the basis of this notion (techné). Consequently, the world is grasped not as a boundless and undefined reality, but rather as a transparent and technological sphere. In the West, only that which is initially logical and profoundly transparent is taken to be reality. To this is added the Western belief, inherited from the Renaissance although somewhat weakened today, that reason is able to construct our world.

However, this view eliminates the difference between a living creature and a non-living artifact. It also renders invisible the human form standing at the basis of the creation of artifacts that would seem to indicate the limit of technology. Logos does not recognize the boundary between the world and man. When logos is made the universal principle of order, all differences and oppositions are eliminated between knowledge and the hidden, the knowable and the unknowable, the attainable and the unattainable. If the Universe is ordered by means of logos, then it is entirely achievable in and through logos, i.e., in and through speech, science and action. Consequently, the world can be designed, or at least reconstructed and changed. This is the general mental form of "demiurgic intention."

When the world apparently escapes explanation and control, a demiurgic adjustment that endeavors to design a world project is solicited. Life is not just; people are not equal. The recognition of this reality gave rise to a grandiose, demiurgic attempt by Western man to take control of life and the world in concordance with the logos archetype. Such is the general mental form of the Utopian project in Western civilization. The term "rationalistic Utopia" is widespread, and where else if not in the West is rationalism the quality of an entire civilization? Now, Max Weber differentiates between, on the one hand, Western rationalistic society and "rationalistic control," and, on the other, Eastern and pre-modern "traditional" and "charismatic" society and control (Weber 1970). A demiurgic project is impossible in the East, where the world as definable in words is empty and unstable, and the unborn and the undisappearing absolute is beyond logic and inaccessible to language, outside of logos (Suzuki). Such a world cannot be subject to technology, at least not in the Western sense.

The ancient Western world prior to the emergence of the logos archetype was not demiurgic, nor is the modern Western world that has been developed by means of contemporary liberal democracy. Neither of them is the fruit of some global plan for world restructuring. On the contrary, both have been based upon the recognition of the inalienable human rights of life, freedom, dignity and property within an accepted world (Locke 1965). Parliaments, separation of powers, private property and its legal guarantees, ship transport and science itself — all of these have emerged through an accumulation of human ideas, practices and attainments within the context of acknowledging human reality as being in itself a value in the Christian spirit. All of these achievements have appeared without a general scheme, like an unfocused net of local projects and spontaneous creative acts (Hayek 1952).

In contrast to this spontaneous order, which August Hayek called an extended order, communism has sought to produce a planned and thoroughly controlled order in accordance with an all-encompassing theory and scenario of epochal proportions. This has been the case in all the countries where communism became dominant without exception. This type of order corresponds to the vision that Marx and Engels outlined in such works as "Theses on Feuerbach", The German Ideology, the Manifesto, "Critique of the Gotha Program," "The Development of Socialism from Utopia to Science," Feuerbach and the End of German Classic Philosophy and Anti-Düring. The Lenin doctrine on revolution and proletarian dictatorship as presented in State and Revolution comprises a power monopoly project that is consistent with this view in all important respects.

But what shall we say about "capitalism"? Is it too not a logos project? Does it not design a world? Although Western capitalism is rational as a state and as an economic process (Weber), this rationality concerns only institutions and not control over social life (Hayek). Capitalism and liberal democracy comprise techonolgies for controlling non-living structures, such as state institutions, laws and market rules, not technologies for controlling life. No one within the tradition of liberal democracy has yet intended to construct some grand vision of a social system of life through utilizing the forces of society as a whole. What has instead been done is to establish a legal order that rests upon the idea of human rights.

Western scholars of totalitarianism have drawn, albeit not very clearly, this important distinction between liberal democracy and communism. For them, totalitarianism is a form of utopian engineering that differs from more gradual types of social engineering only by its restriction of criticism and its scale, not by its attitude to life (Popper 1962; Fukuyama 1992). The communist project may thus be regarded entirely rationally and critically, just as may be done with any other human project. It is, although borderline, a mental and active experiment that aims at radically changing the world. If it would succeed in creating a new world, a new human life and, moreover, a new human form at a higher level of life ("happiness, welfare, freedom"), then it would be false to maintain that the world and the human forms which correlate with it are unattainable. If, on the other hand, it would lead to the destruction of a human or world form, then it would be false, weak and lifeless. In the latter case, chaos would conquer a new space within peoples’ life.

Any rational project orients and fixes the spontaneous movements of life towards wholeness and expansion. But if it is possible to create cities and states, cannons and machines, theories and poems, philosophy and religion, then why should it be impossible to create a whole new world for human beings? What is impermissible here?

It is one thing to build cities or write poems, but it is an entirely different thing to breathe, laugh and feel pain and enjoyment, i.e., to live spontaneously. Can we design our life the way we design artifacts? Since each creation is a definition in itself, it is a distinction within a living context that itself remains undefined. If and when we seek to define the "world as a whole," does this mean that we are capable of rationally enveloping and controlling it?

No. The latter effort would comprise both an intention and a practice that are inconsistent with the form of life itself. When people intend to create a new society and a new human being, they set themselves a task that cannot be completed because it "transcends" the limits of human form and thereby falls into absolute impossibility. Such an effort wrongfully renders life as an object of technology and design, and mistakenly identifies life as an artifact.

The fundamental distinction from the perspective of the present examination between a "world project" and ordinary human actions is that the linguistic structure of the former is ontologically inconsistent. Life is a forward movement of living form against chaos and towards re-synthesis; life "emerges" from the ocean of chaos by means of its own activity. The world is precisely this and nothing more. (This situation is analogous to the structure against entropy of open systems in physics). Life is a movement of the preservation and expansion of life, and it possesses a teleological form (the form of entelechia). Life is vigorous only so long as it succeeds in compensating for its spontaneous disintegration and in creating a redefined form for itself.

Human beings neither choose nor deliberately design human form, nor do they design the life-world in the way they design their machines. Neither human form nor the life-world is subject to technology. On the contrary, the life-world is discovered by the human being who has been born into the world, who has already become shaped into a human and cultural form. A human being first preserves the world s/he has found, then expands it, and finally loses it in death. Human consciousness is one moment of human life, and it moves in the same direction as that life, continually re-synthesizing itself against its own loss. A human being cannot make human form subject to one or another distant realization and objectivation. If one were to do this, one would somehow have to step outside of human form, come to know it and then exercise one’s influence upon it. But this would mean to step out of the only world that belongs to a human being as such, namely, the human life-world. The human life-world thus permits all human actions, but none of these actions, insofar as they possess a human form, refer to some "transcendent" intention and practice whereby human form as such could be deliberately altered. When human beings design machines, write poems and create science and religion, they do not change human form, but rather only project it and expand the horizons of the life-world.

Not only is building a world a project that is ontologically problematic, it is a type of nonsense similar to that of trying to create a perpetuum mobile. The world has a human form insofar as it is a projection of human form. This transcendental perspective shows us that every attempt to create a life-world can actually be reduced to the creation of something within this world that does not change the form of the latter. Moreover, such an attempt is in fact destructive because of its disintegrative affect upon certain basic structures of our living social body. We can never create the world, just as we can never create the human form. Every act of creation is rather a dynamic within this form.

The outcome of communism in Eastern Europe and its deep crisis outside of Europe (except in China, where a communist economy no longer exists) together comprise the implosion of a world that human beings sought to build according to a demiurgic plan. There has hardly been a more drastic change in Western history than the change to post-communism, and even today no one knows how it will turn out. None of the post-communist countries has reached a state of equilibrium that can be compared with the equilibrium of Western democracies, nor is it clear whether any future equilibrium might correspond to the criteria of modern society. Indeed, it might very well be the case that post-communism is a type of chronic disease that will never lead to equilibrium. The best possible scenario is that any future equilibrium that may emerge will bear deep traces of communism.

The post-communist storm has resulted from the powerful gradients for imbalance that existed within communism. An unsound system was destroyed because of the destructive tensions within it. But precisely what tensions did the catastrophic end of communist release? What forces has the catastrophe set free, what kind of genie has been let out of the bottle? Perhaps more importantly, what tensions have been created by the subsequent partial stabilization? Any attempt to predict what might happen demands a deep insight into communism, but only time is capable of giving us answers. The fact is that economic, political and cultural meanings and texts are now rapidly changing. However, any false stability that may be attained can be forcibly maintained only for so long before it will implode, unleashing more violent forces. Such a dynamic state is so uncertain that it can only be defined as a shock.

What will the consequences be of this shock? Will a normal market economy, normal democracy and a sound mind emerge in the foreseeable future? The deformations into which communist forms have been transformed comprise the cost of any future equilibrium, but it is still not yet clear precisely what they are. And if this equilibrium will itself be fraught with anomalies and the sources of new disequilibrium, what will these be?

The "ship of democracy" is sailing in the storm of post-communism. Reform is carried out as a series of actions by state power in order to create a system of market economy and democracy. What chances does the ship stand? How do the existing "unhealthy" tensions effect the attainment of the goals of reform? Perhaps the waves of the storm displace forces and meanings in a way that is essentially independent of the goals of government and essentially anomalous in a "normal" state. Unfortunately, such anomalies may be chronic in the absence of forces capable of neutralizing them in the foreseeable future.

Post-communism thus appears to be a period of intensive recovery complicated with vestiges of communist anomalies and forces for destabilzation, the effects of which are unique and unprecedented in history. Post-communism is indeed unique. Never before has there been such a phenomenon and there is no theory that adequately describes it. No one knows where post-communist transitions are leading, just as no one knows what the effects of a series of earthquakes will be. In this regard, our understanding of post-communism is in phase with its movement.

Post-communism is essentially chaotic and undefined. It is analogous to the "dissipative" structures and processes that lead to "metastable states" in Prigogine’s sense. Such a dissipative process is one effect of an explosion B, the explosion of highly tensioned communist totalitarian society. The result is some future metastable state B at some unknown distance from thermodynamic equilibrium, from absolute chaos. There are forces and flows in this dynamic — forces of wealth, power and mentality, and flows of money, political actions and social thinking. In this non-equilibrium, the positive forces of the reform, i.e., the actions of the government, are in contraphase with the negative forces of free fall, illegal money making, unhealthy and inadequate policy, and the conservative mentality of a closed society. In such a period, certain new forms of mentality, power and wealth arise that can be understood only as a network of rational actions (Weber).