This article aims to examine sociality’s multipolar and intentional structure beyond an inter-subjectivist perspective; beyond the view that the social world consists of only subjects and their interaction. The article is divided into four sections. First, I present Benoist’s critique of mainstream inter-subjectivist accounts of phenomenology. Second, I introduce Husserl’s concept of Gemeingeist and provide a preliminary definition of it as a “substrate of habits.” Third, I focus on the sociological and ontological sources of Benoist’s critique, specifically Descombes’ reassessment of (...) Hartmann’s distinction between objective and objectified mind. Finally, I revise my preliminary Husserlian definition of “common mind” drawing both from the distinction between objective and objectified mind and Benoist’s account of habituation as a two-sided correlative phenomenon. Although he often tends to phrase his account in intersubjectivist terms, Husserl’s phenomenology offers valuable tools to address the multipolar structure of sociality, which does not only consist of subjects in their interactions, but foremost, in the way the human mind is embedded in institutions and extended in a range of objects that bear social meaning and that guide and bind human life to an extent that is unique among social animals. (shrink)

The article discusses the historical background and transnational context of the dialogue between East-European communist philosophy and Western existentialism. It does so by first outlining the exchanges between Lukács, Sartre and Merleau-Ponty between the late 1940s and the early 1960s. Subsequently three major forums of East–West philosophical dialogue are surveyed, that took place during the 1960s: the ‘Morals and Society’ colloquium, organized by Instituto Gramsci in Rome in May 1964; the Korčula summer school, organized by the Praxis group between 1964 (...) and 1975; and the International Congress for Philosophy organized in Vienna in September 1968. This series of events and the dialogue and confrontations that they engendered prove that, contrary to the exclusively negative reception of existentialism in the socialist camp in the 1950s, but also contrary to the distorted representation, which can be found in dissidents’ recollections and which became dominant after the fall of communism, which excluded any possibility of dialogue between the two sides during socialism, such a dialogue has taken place, and led to mutual appropriations on both sides. (shrink)