Category: phenomenology

Approaching one of the Big Four

I am not sure it is the case with you but for at least a decade or so four books have hung over my head standing out as foundational for particular interests that I have.  These four books are Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, Marx’s Capital, and Heidegger’s Being and Time.  Of course other works jockey for position but these sort of linger, not that I think reading them will necessarily be transformational (or even good) but only that they are required if I want to feel as though I can develop a proper orientation around the questions these works address.

Given my current reading schedule I have now begun one of the four, Being and Time.  It has been tremendously helpful to have read Husserl prior to starting this work (Heidegger was Husserl’s student).  Heidegger also believe that philosophy and so also science has not ‘gone back far enough’.  This is of course a disputable (overthrown?) quest today but I still find it helpful to try and think along the process of thinking being.  As I am still early in the work I thought I would offer a reasonably accessible quote on Heidegger’s concept of phenomenology,

[Unlike other sciences] ‘phenomenology’ neither designates the object of its researches, nor characterizes the subject-matter thus comprised.  The word merely informs us of the ‘how’ with which what is to be treated in this science gets exhibited and handled.  To have a science ‘of’ phenomena means to grasp its objects in such a way that everything about them which is up for discussion must be treated by exhibiting it directly and demonstrating it directly.  The expression ‘descriptive phenomenology’, which is at bottom tautological, has the same meaning.  Here ‘description’ does not signify such a procedure as we find, let us say, in botanical morphology; the term has rather the sense of prohibition – the avoidance of characterizing anything without demonstration.

. . .

What is it that phenomenology is to ‘let us see’?  What is that must be called ‘phenomenon’ in a distinctive sense?  What is that by its very essence is necessarily the theme whenever we exhibit something explicitly?  Manifestly, it is something that proximally and for the most does not show itself at all:  it is something that lies hidden, in contrast to that which proximally and for the most does show itself; but at the same time it something that belongs to what thus shows itself, and it belongs to it so essentially as to constitute its meaning and its ground.

Being and Time [trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson], 59.

A note on fact and meaning

My interest in working through Husserl’s The Crisis of European Sciences has waxed and waned.  This is probably due to the sharp transition I feel in moving from Kierkegaard’s style to the more straightforward work of ‘real’ philosophy.  What has kept my attention though is Husserl’s genuine impression of having discovered something and of its significance and secondly of the fact that in historical context the work he did has had tremendous historical significance.  So what is he doing?  I understand a primary motivation of his work to be a method of thinking subjectivity scientifically.  How can I be included in scientific investigation?  For this reason the natural sciences and mathematics always play a secondary (but certainly not disparaged) role.  These secondary sciences work from the assumptions of a pre-given world that accord with our experience of that world.  These sciences always rest on something prior.  So Husserl is trying to carry out to completion Descartes’s emphasis on the primacy of the ego.  But the ego is not a ‘premise’ from which the rest of knowledge is deduced.

The point is not to secure objectivity but to understand it.  One must finally achieve the insight that no objective science, no matter how exact, explains or ever can explain anything in a serious sense. To deduce is not to explain.  To predict, or to recognize the objective forms of composition of physical or chemical bodies and predict accordingly – all this explains nothing but is in need of explanation.  The only true way to explain is to make transcendentally understandable. (Crisis, 189)

This is not particularly shocking to anyone with exposure to philosophical hermeneutics but it is a helpful reminder for what continues presently to be a common and serious misconception, namely, that scientific findings are self-evidently meaningful.  These findings are framed as such because they give the air of authority and therefore power to various expressions.  While I am not sure I will follow Husserl in his own project I think this point remains sound.

High school wisdom

I have never studied philosophy institutionally.  This is, almost, a fact.  When I was in high school a few students were selected (how I don’t know) to participate in the University of Winnipeg’s Mini-U program which was a week’s worth of classes on a topic of the student’s choosing.  I chose philosophy (why I don’t know).  I remember the basic outlines of certain sessions.  We looked at theories of essence in which a knife was evaluated by its knifiness.  I remember making a comment and the professor saying I was a closet Nietzschian (I remember neither the comment nor do I know why it would have been associated with Nietzsche).  I remember being told that a dog does not think.  I remember some high school bantering about how truth can be known.

What I remember most, though, was coming across Zeno’s paradox.  I will go from memory so I don’t need to worry about accuracy.  Zeno’s paradox explores the nature of two simultaneous and seemingly conflicting processes.  As I remember it the paradox was described (either in the original context or taught as an example) as a race in which the runner has a clear start and finish.  However, during that run a mathematical process also occurs or can at least describe the runner.  Mathematically the space can be divided into halves.  Halving a finite space, however, is an infinite process.  A half can always be mathematically halved.  How can an infinite mathematic process be completed within a finite progression?  I am probably stating this horrendously.  However, Zeno’s paradox came back to mind as I am reading Husserl in which he attempts to outline the faulty thinking of science in assuming that objective and abstract processes can be the basis for all knowledge, when in reality “the objective is precisely never experienceable as itself.” So Husserl attempts to move back into understanding what a science of the subjective could be.

And more than this Zeno’s paradox came to mind with this image from a newly added blog to my feed, Fuck Theory.

Finally we meet

You know, you just don’t here this kind of confidence anymore.  Here is the final paragraph of Part I of Husserl’s The Crisis of European Sciences.

Yet, over and above this, the more concrete critical analyses of the conceptual structures of the Kantian turn, and the contrast between it and the Cartesian turn, will set in motion out own concurrent thinking in such a way as to place us, gradually and of its own accord, before the final turn and the final decisions.  We ourselves shall be drawn into an inner transformation through which we shall come face to face with, to direct experience of, the long-felt but constantly concealed dimension of the “transcendental.”  The ground of experience, opened up in its infinity, will then become the fertile soil of a methodical working philosophy, with the self-evidence, furthermore, that all conceivable philosophical and scientific problems of the past are to be and decided by starting from this ground.

I for one am looking forward to coming face to face to the ‘transcendental’.  I hope it lives up to the hype.

A learned twaddler

I am into the thick of the final volume of my Kierkegaard reading project.  It looks like I may even finish ahead of schedule by a few days.  I already have an outline for my next reading plan as this one really seemed to focus my time and attention to accomplish an amount of reading I can’t imagine I would have been able to under ‘normal’ circumstances.  In any event part of the next reading project will include a stint in phenomenology.  I have for some time sensed a ‘call’ towards phenomenology.  If there is one thing I have learned about my style of critical engagement is that I can easily move into ‘poetic’ gestures or expressions.  I certainly don’t mean this comment to belittle the role of the poetic in communication only that for me it was a space I attempted to inhabit when I really did not know what I was talking about.  In communicating this way I hoped that the frills were distracting or persuasive enough to keep from further scrutiny.

My rudimentary view of phenomenology is of a process by which someone learns the simple task of description.  I don’t assume that description will be neutral of course only that a certain form of content can be developed and articulated that will provide a more decisive engagement and understanding of a given context or idea.  I am simply working at trying to be more specific and honest.  I think honesty does have potential currency to it, not in some heartfelt intention but in clarity.  When Kierkegaard responded to the real or imagined question ‘What do you want?’ in a local periodical he replied, ‘honesty’.  Much of his writings in his so-called ‘Attack on Christendom’ have to do with being honest about why Christianity exists as it does and how that relates to the text of the New Testament.

In The Book Adler Kierkegaard gives an aside with regards to how it often seems to easier for people to talk about immeasurably more complex topics than specific ones.  His sentiments reflect some of the motivation behind my own development.

A learned twaddler who at bottom knows nothing can seldom be got to deal with anything concrete; he does not talk of a particular dialogue of Plato, that is too little for him – also it might become apparent that he had not read it.  No, he talks about Plato as a whole, or even perhaps of Greek philosophy as a whole, but especially about the wisdom of the Indian and the Chinese.  This Greek philosophy as a whole, the profundity of Oriental philosophy as a whole, is the prodigiously great, the boundless, which advantageously hides his ignorance.  So also it is easier to talk about an alteration in the form of government that to discuss a very little concrete problem like sewing a pair of shoes; and the injustice towards the few capable men lies in the fact that by reason of the prodigious greatness of the problem they are apparently on a par with every Peer, who ‘also speaks out.’  So it is much easier for a dunce to criticize our Lord than to judge the handiwork of an apprentice in a shop. . . . But our Lord and his governance of the world is something so prodigiously great that in a certain giddy abstract sense the most foolish man takes part in gossiping about it as well as the wisest man, because no one understands it.

I am trying in my own way to be honest about what I know and what I do not know.  This is not about knowing completely but simply in how I can talk about specifics.  In this way much of the theology I currently touch on (and it is less and less these days) seems to fall under the final line in the quote above and I am left wondering if it is a wise or foolish person who is speaking.