Groundwork of Phenomenological Marxism

Beginning from the program for phenomenology set forth in Edmund Husserl’s The Crisis of the European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology, Ian H. Angus investigates the crisis of reason in a contemporary context. In Groundwork of Phenomenological Marxism: Crisis, Body, World, Angus connects the late work of Marx to human motility, natural fecundity (excess), and ecology. Angus’s overall conception of phenomenology is Socratic in that it is concerned with the presuppositions and application of knowledge-forms to their lifeworld grounding. He argues that the crisis produced by the formalization of reason creates an inability to foster differentiated community as expected by both Husserl and Marx and that the formalization of human motility by the regime of value reveals the ontological productivity of natural fecundity (excess) and shows the priority of ecology as the contemporary exemplary science. Husserl’s idea of Europe as the home for philosophy is surpassed. Angus further argues that the contemporary task for Socratic phenomenology is in the epochal confrontation between planetary technology and place-based Indigeneity. He demonstrates that community and labor depend upon natural fecundity (excess) and locates their realization in the dialogue between civilizational-cultural lifeworlds, especially with respect to their ecological formation and access to transcendentality. This book lays out the fundamental concepts of a systematic phenomenological Marxian philosophy.