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Philosophy 324 phenomenology
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PHILOSOPHY 3241. PHENOMENOLOGY AND
EXISTENTIALISM
The concept of phenomenology is stressing and focusing on lived experience. My lived experience
can reconcile rationalism and empiricism
Phenomenology is a method for the description and analysis of consciousness
MOTTOS
Motto 1
“Phenomenology and existentialism attempt to relocate the origins of meaning in our lived
experience prior to the impersonal “objectivism” of a narrow scientific attitude.“ - Richard Kearny
- Empiricism says natural knowledge is the only source of knowledge
- This objectivism is highly reductive. It reduces whatever can be said about a thing to just what is
inside it
• Eg a bottle of water. A scientist would reduce it to sipping H2O
• But surely there’s more of a subjective experience? When you drink water, you’re also
quenching your thirst
• The bottle of water has a lot more value if you’re in the middle of a marathon
- If you’re of an empirical nature, you think you can know something through measurement
• If we take the empiricist view to the full, we are right back to eugenics
• We reduce people to things, and objectify them
Motto 2
“Phenomenology is a method for the description and analysis of consciousness, through which
philosophy attempts to gain the character of a strict science.” - Ludwig Landgrebe
- Phenomenology is not psychology. We don’t want to follow the reductionist method
- We need to give a description of phenomena and how it appears in our minds
Motto 3
“Edmund Husserl captured in his phenomenology something of the temperature of his time; which,
when carefully analysed, can help us to grasp something of the temperature of our time and our
lives.”
- The targeting of Jews came to such a point that Husserl could not even get on and lecture on
campuses
• One of the things he as a philosopher stood by was the freedom to investigate the things
imposed on you by society
- When he did philosophy, it was not just a physical act, it was also a moral task and responsibility
to think and question freely. Moral autonomy was one of the biggest things Husserl could take on
board
- One more task was to put things in a different light and he says the best way to do so is to
become aware of how we become aware
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,THE START OF PHENOMENOLOGY
- Started with Edmund Husserl (1859 – 1938)
- Wrote earlier about mathematics, numbers, arithmetic (PhD on
calculus in 1882)
• Looked for the source of our basic concepts of formal thinking
• He used numbers and algorithms to calculate things, but what is a
number, or a variation of a calculation?
• What frustrated him was why do we do what we do in mathematics?
- The main question in Husserl’s phenomenology was how the Greek inspired ideal of absolute
certain knowledge can be realised in the daily work of the European (i.e. Western) scientist.
• To realise this ideal, Husserl criticised the way the empirical sciences of facts monopolised the
practice and evaluation of the human attainment of knowledge in modern Western culture
- Logische Untersuchungen (1900-01) Logical Investigations
• He didn’t write a book about logic, but rather the foundations of logic
- Most influential book – 1936 (translated into English in 1970) The crisis of European Sciences
and Transcendental Phenomenology
- Predominantly in an effort to resolve the tension between Empiricism and Rationalism (on the
epistemological question)
- At he same time an effort to establish a new humanity in an inhumane world (dominated by
science, national socialism, pragmatism, moral corruption)
• It’s not only empirical science that was the problem, it was also the
ideologies of the time
Martin Heidegger was Husserl’s best-known student and the most original
philosopher of all of them. According to him the phenomenological way of
thinking served quite a different purpose. He used the phenomenological
method to rehabilitate philosophical ontology as discipline from its negative
evaluation since the 19th century
For Maurice Merleau-Ponty phenomenology was the type of reflection through
which we gain access to the original dimension of human experience, i.e. the
original occurrence or appearance when reality becomes meaningful and
accessible. The task of the phenomenologist is the effort to be present at the
original confluence of the experiencing subject and experienced world.
THE EPISTEMOLOGICAL QUESTION: AN
EXISTENTIAL CHALLENGE
- We accept that we build our existence and our culture on reliable knowledge
• There are very few people who would say that they build their cultures on lies and deceit
- We accept that our knowledge is genuine, valid and true
• But how do we know we have a solid basis for our knowledge
- What guarantees do we have that our knowledge is genuine, that our cognition is valid, that we
actually can know the truth and meaning of things?
- What in our world validates our knowledge?
• Social media / newspaper / first hand experience / logic / religion / culture ?
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,If nothing finally validates our knowledge, we are left with:
- Uncertainty
- Contingency
- The abyss of having no guarantees and no foundations
- The epistemological question: what possibly can guarantee genuine knowledge, valid cognition
(as the foundation of existence and culture)?
The epistemological question has been asked through the ages, but when Husserl asks this
question again, he tries to resolve the tension between rationalism and empiricism
The epistemological question has been asked through the ages and ‘answered’
• Plato (Eidos)
• Descartes (Ego cogito, ergo sum)
• Locke, Berkeley, Hume (Reason and experience)
• Kant (How reason works)
• [Hegel (Reason unfolds in
history – over time)]
• Husserl (founder of phenomenology) (Consciousness)
PHENOMENOLOGY (LITERALLY)
- The study of phenomena
- Description of phenomena (Husserl)
- For Husserl, the description of what appears in his consciousness, is a theoretical and scientific
reflection, but with a rigour much more than science. He wants to lay out the foundation of all
possible science and philosophy.
• This includes what makes science possible (including experience)
• The kind of evidence is apodictic (beyond dispute)
- The opposite of this is based on assertion only
- Greek: Phainomenon - what appears (an appearance in consciousness)
- A theoretical/scientific reflection on how “things” appear in consciousness
- He doesn’t try to become a psychologist and put consciousness on a pedestal
- A critical questioning of consciousness/experience, its nature and structure
PHENOMENOLOGY (PHILOSOPHICALLY)
It’s difficult to say exactly what phenomenology is
- Husserl says its a study of phenomena: a critical questioning of consciousness/experience, its
nature and structure
- It’s not a school of thought with one consolidated, uniform research programme
- Rather, it is a method of philosophising; an approach to philosophy; a form of introspection; a
form of critical questioning of lived experience
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, It was a revolutionary break-through in philosophy
- Initiated by Edmund Husserl
- Taken up by existentialist philosophers: Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty
- Still practiced in philosophies of the “lived experience”
- Taken up in social sciences, especially psychology
- Taken up in critical social theory
- Taken up in philosophy of mind
Phenomenology was different to different phenomenologists
- Husserl: questioning of consciousness (epistemology)
- Heidegger: investigates concrete existence (ontology)
- Merleau-Ponty: focus on body as “subject of perception”
• Currently one of the most influential phenomenologists
Husserl in a hashtag
- “back to the things themselves”
- A response to the crisis of European science and culture
• The idea of science has been monopolised by the empirical sciences
• Legitimised by the philosophy of logical positivism
• Both work with a very narrow view of experience, knowledge, and truth
• This distorts and glosses over a fundamental dimension of human existence that is “forgotten”
• Which is lived experience: the meaning of things before they become objects of conscious
reflection
• After WWI, he said the old Europe died. Because of this, he said he would have to redo his
philosophy
Central concepts in Husserl’s phenomenology
- Contingency
- Phenomenological reduction (bracketing, epoché, Einklammeruna)
• Bracket it, and think of an endless amount of possibilities that it could also have been
- Bracketing leads to the eidetic reduction / science / eidetic reflection
- Apodictic evidence (un-doubtably evident)
- The ego and the transcendental ego
- Intentionality
• The directedness of the ego/consciousness towards things in the world. Things don’t just
‘appear’. They come as there is some kind of directedness
• Eg two men walking in the desert find a well. The well appears in the mind as a lifesaver. The
second man wants to kill the first man, so he sees the well as the perfect instrument to kill
him.
- Horizon
• The well appears against the horizon of many other things (the dunes/sky/etc), and this all
centers around the world view
• There is also an outside to the horizon that we cannot see as we are in the natural world
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