You are here: Home / Archives for phenomenology
post

Husserlian Reflection

21/06/2011 By Kelly Cooper

"But phenomenology is also a victory over brute fact by the method of imaginative variation. It is a victory in the direction of the eidos accomplished in such a way that the fact is no longer anything but an example of a pure possibility. Hence, phenomenology will be the theory of the possible ego, of the eidos ego, secured by the example of my transcendental ego on the empirisch-faktisch level. Thus, even the ego must be 'imagined' in order to separate it from brute fact. This backing away from my own contingency is essential to the birth of the ego meditans, just as much as the suspension of belief in the world is. The ego meditans is born from a double reduction: the transcendental reduction of the being of the world and the eidetic reduction of the factual ego. This movement of thought does not proceed without difficulty. The remarkable and strange thing is that this passage to the eidos ego brings into play only variations of my own ego (Selbstvariation meiner Ego) and has no reference to the Other in the second person. Thus, I imagine myself as other without imagining an Other. This is quite necessary, since before constituting the Other, my ego is the only ego.

What, however, is this eidos ego which is not a generalization from me and from the Other and which bridges over the disparity between the positing of myself and the positing of the Other within a subjectivity in general? In short, what is the eidos ego, if it is not my fellow man?… However extraordinary it may be, Husserl is obliged to assume an eidos of the sole and unique ego, an essence which is illustrated only in the variations of my own existence and in the style of 'if I were another…' The essence is the sense 'myself' which resists the circumstantial variations of my factual existence. It requires no reference to a couple or to a community. In this way the eidetic ego definitely has no reference to the similarity between the first and second person and works its variations on the solipsistic plane. Thinking this matter through to its end is not easy; yet the course of Husserlian reflection requires it" (Ricoeur 1999:108).

Ricoeur, Paul
1999[1967] Husserl: An Analysis of His Phenomenology. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press.

Citation Style AAA

Filed Under: Other Tagged With: , , ,
post

“Phenomenology as Descriptive Theory of the Essence of Pure Experiences” (Husserl 1975:191).

24/02/2011 By Kelly Cooper

“As concerns Phenomenology, it aims at being a descriptive theory of the essence of pure transcendental experiences from the phenomenological standpoint, and like every descriptive discipline, neither idealizing nor working on the substructure of things, it has its own justification. Whatever there may be in ‘reduced’ experiences to grasp eidetically in pure intuition, whether a real portion of such experience or as intentional correlate, that is its province, and is a vast source of absolute knowledge for it.

Still, let us see more clearly to what extent really scientific descriptions can be set up on the phenomenological field, with its infinite number of eidetic concreta, and to what services they can be put.

It is part of the peculiarity of consciousness generally to be continually fluctuating in different dimensions, so that there can be no talk of fixing any eidetic concreta or any of the phases which enter immediately into their constitution with conceptual exactness. Let us take, for instance, an experience of the genus ‘imagery of a thing’ as it is given us either in phenomenologically immanent perception or in some other (of course reduced) intuition. The phenomenologically particular object (the eidetic singularity) is then just this imagery of the thing in the whole wealth of its concreteness, precisely as it participates in the flow of experience, with the precise determinacy or indeterminacy with which it lets its thing appear, now in this aspect, now in that, and with just that distinctness or mistiness, that fluctuating clearness and intermittent obscurity, and so forth, which is peculiar to it. It is only the individual element which phenomenology ignores, whilst it raises the whole essential content in its concrete fullness into eidetic consciousness, and takes it as an ideally selfsame essence, which like every essence could particularize itself not only hic et nunc but in numberless instances. We can see at once that a conceptual and terminological fixation of this and every similar flowing concretum is not to be thought of, and that this applies to each of its immediate and no less flowing parts and abstract aspects.

If now there is no question of an unambiguous determination of eidetic singularities in our realm of description, it is quite otherwise with the essences at a higher specific level. These are susceptible of stable distinction, unbroken self-identity, and strict conceptual apprehension, likewise of being analysed into component essences, and accordingly they may very properly be made subject to the conditions of a comprehensive scientific description” (Husserl 1975:191-192).

Husserl, Edmund
1975[1931] Ideas: General Introduction to Pure Phenomenology. W.R. Boyce Gibson, trans. New York, NY: Collier Books.

Citation Style AAA

Filed Under: Phenomenology Tagged With:
post

Husserl and Phenomenology

24/01/2011 By Kelly Cooper

“To sum up, phenomenology’s overall task is, for Husserl, to secure an ‘ultimate grounding’ of meaning in a ‘questioning back’ (Rückfrage) to the origins of our intuitive experience. The ultimate grounding is a self-grounding in that it presupposes nothing and so is absolutely original and scientific in a genuine sense, for it obviates all those speculative abstractions which naively mistake themselves for ultimate reality.

Phenomenology is therefore a science of science; it criticises the pseudo-scientific pretentions of naturalism for ignoring the fundamentally intentional nature of the ‘experience’ it purports to invoke as a principle of empirical verification. As Paul Ricoeur, one of Husserl’s most distinguished disciplines, put it: ‘Phenomenology is not situated elsewhere, in another world, but rather is concerned with natural experience itself, in so far as the latter is unaware of its meaning’ (‘Phenomenology and Hermeneutics’ in Hermeneutics and the Human Sciences, 1981). In short, the suspension of the natural attitude which sets the phenomenological analysis in motion, is not a departure from our worldly experience into some Platonic heaven of immutable essences. On the contrary, it solicits a greater fidelity to our natural and temporal experience so that we may come to grasp its concealed depths, to re-cognise, as it were, the giving acts of intentional consciousness behind the givens of the natural attitude. To put it another way, we could say that phenomenology seeks to uncover the positing acts of human subjectivity which originally produce the positum of any so-called objective fact.

In several of his works, particularly Ideas and The Cartesian Meditations, Husserl seems to have believed that such a self-grounding of knowledge could only be achieved in the pure immanence of a transcendental subjectivity, unadulterated by the contingencies of empirical experience. Indeed some of Husserl’s disciples would regard his ‘transcendental reduction’ to the absolute interiority of a spiritual consciousness existing in and for itself, as a relapse into another form of idealism-and this in spite of all Husserl’s efforts to surpass previous idealist philosophies, Platonic, Cartesian, Kantian, Gegelian etc. There are indications in his late writings, however, and particularly in The Crisis of the European Sciences, that Husserl himself was becoming aware of the dangers of a transcendental solipsism and sought to overcome them by showing how all subjective consciousness is in fact grafted upon an intersubjective community which opens up the transcendental ego to a life-world of existential communication. The following pass age from The Crisis is a good case in point:

In our continually steaming perception of the world we are not isolated but rather stand within it in contact with other men…. In living with one another each can participate in the life of the other. Thus, in general, the world does not exist for isolated individuals but for the community of men; and this is due to the communalization of the straightforwardly perceptual…. It is only by making oneself understood that we have the possibility of recognizing that the things which ones sees are the same as those which the other sees.

This passage would seem to suggest that we arrive at an intuition of universal meanings not from within the solitary resources of transcendental subjectivity (as the early more ‘Cartesian’ Husserl tended to argue) but by means of a communal validation wherein each subject reciprocally corrects or confirms the other’s phenomenological description of his experience. Essences are therefore disclosed by the later Husserl as being neither eternal ideas nor a priori constructs of an autonomous ego. They are the result of an historical harmony of communication between human subjects. This is why phenomenology remains an endlessly open and collective enterprise, a proposal rather than a self-contained system, a task rather than a solution” (Kearney 1986:22-23).

Kearney, Richard
1986 Modern movements in European philosophy. Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press.

Citation Style AAA

Filed Under: Phenomenology Tagged With: ,