Phenomenology
History
The phenomenological method is alluded in Hegel, but the 20th century phenomenology is much more developed and complex. Even if we want to simply talk about existentialism we want to talk about phenomenology. The history goes like this: you have Kierkegaard and Nietzsche in the first phase of existentialism in reaction to the Enlightenment, their work is description, and a kind of introspective psychology of self-discovery, there is no rigorous philosophical method involved, but as you move into the 20th century, you find that influence of Kierkegaard and Nietzsche is combined with the more rigorous phenomenological method that is being developed out of the original Hegelian roots. A phenomenological method that we usually ascribe in its most rigorous form to the German philosopher Edmund Husserl, though it also operates in parallel in a variety of other philosophers in the European tradition. The sort of description of structures of inner consciousness. That combination becomes evident in Martin Heidegger who at one time works with Husserl. And by the same token people like Sartre, who represents this more philosophically rigorous phenomenological method in an existentialist. It’s proper to call Kierkegaard and Nietzsche existential thinkers and Heidegger and Sartre are often delineated from other as phenomenological existentialist, what they use is a method of existential phenomenology, the existential dimensions of human existence, but that’s not what Husserl’s phenomenology was developed to do, he was more interested in the phenomenology of the transcendental ego and his original work is spoken of as transcendental phenomenology to mark it off from existential phenomenology. There are other European writer who also are more influenced by earlier Husserl like French philosophers Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Paul Ricoeur, Hans-Georg Gadamer, the decisive figure of phenomenological hermeneutics.
Introduction
What is phenomenology which as a philosophical method dominates European philosophy. Phenomenology is not a theory, it’s not a system of thought, not a philosophical position, but a method, a project. Phenomenological description goes back to Hegel, and informally in people like Jaspers and some other existential philosophers like Marcel and Boober, but the method as such was formulated by Husserl. Husserl has three primary concerns, one is what he takes to be the failure of philosophical naturalism. He’s using naturalism in the sense of purely the scientific explanations of things. So in terms of trying to find the foundations of logic, on what grounds the law of logic rest, or the foundations of mathematics, or the foundations of natural science, all of which has presuppositions of human knowledge and truth. In trying to provide these foundations, all the naturalist has done is to say they are all due to non rational processes, psychological explanations in terms of certain psychological processes, if you like, Nietzsche and Freud are giving psychological explanations. Or historical explanations, this is the way it happened historically, or sociological explanations, cultural influences. So Husserl is criticizing psychologism, historicism, sociolog-ism, scientism, that claim that everything can be explained through those scientific methods including the foundations of logic, mathematics, science. That’s what Husserl was opposed to, he wants more solid foundations so that logic, mathematics, philosophy can really be founded on unquestionable premises, in other words he wants a new foundationalism. And his idea is that phenomenological method can get us back to those foundations in the very structure of human nature, the structure of consciousness. Dallas Willard gave a series of lectures against post-modernism, against the anti-realism of the day and his argument was drawing on the phenomenological method in order to oppose the post-modernism and the anti-realism of the day, in other words, trying to say that phenomenological description can open up a sufficient understanding of certain structures of the consciousness as to avoid the skepticism and relativism that is involved in that anti-realistic view. The second concern that Husserl has about naturalism is that it perpetuates the subjective objective dichotomy, because it wants to talk simply about objective matters, historical causes, objectifying psychological processes, sociological processes, it’s only interested in objectivist explanations that exclude the role of human subject-hood, there is therefore a loss of the creativity of the constructive contribution of the human spirit that is to say the naturalist is bypassed the Kantian Copernican revolution, so what Husserl wants is a new foundationalism that acknowledges the Kant’s Copernican revolution, it must be a science of the creative constructive activities of the human spirit, in organizing experience and that is why it has to a phenomenology of the transcendental ego, that ego that transcends all of the particulars of concrete experience, that ego which is in Kant, that has the forms and categories all nicely schematized into the transcendental unity of the aperception.
Husserl
Failure of Naturalism
Talking about Nietzsche’s view on knowledge and truth and seeing how he takes the pluralism between different viewpoints to be simply an extension of various underlying emotional tendencies ultimately reducible to will to power and that it’s this Nietzschean approach that is one of the major influences that’s shaping the contemporary post-modernism and for that matter the pluralism of that day. As we are trying to get some acquaintance with phenomenology and particularly Husserl we were noting that his concern is precisely this lack of any firm foundation for the sciences mathematics logic and another other kind of human knowledge. And he blames this on naturalism, naturalistic philosophy, with its attempt to explain human knowledge in terms of purely natural processes, so you got historical explanations, psychological explanations. One of the other tendencies of his day in which he is criticizing is the work of Neo-Kantian philosopher who was interested in philosophical world views and classified world views into three sort, each of which he attributed to some aspect of human psychology.
What Husserl does is to see in this another kind of naturalistic explanation in which while he is grounding world views in human spirit it’s really in the human spirit understood simply in terms of certain psychological types and how you’re going to overcome if that’s the case. What Husserl is after is not a new foundationalism, but a universal foundation, something that isn’t just account of differences because of different psychological types as in Nietzsche, but rather something about the universal structure of the human self by virtue of which there is a universal foundation that’s what he is after. One of the complains that he has in the same context is that the subject object dichotomy which has dominated thought since Descartes asking for an isolation of the object from all subjective influences in our thinking, that subject object dichotomy is really artificial. After all if you are saying I know something, you’re hardly getting what knowledge is if you just represent object, the I know is an act of the subject, and it’s the loss of the human subjecthood, the loss of an adequate understanding of the human spirit which is what ails the naturalistic philosophy and what therefore underlies the failure of naturalism. So what Husserl wants then is a science of the human spirit, or a science of human consciousness, the science of the I.
Back to Descartes
While Husserl goes back to Descartes, for Husserl’s purposes Descartes was not radical enough in his suspended judgment, he suspended judgment on everything that could possibly be doubted but immediately jumped from I think from the I think to the assertion that he is a thinking thing and with that very brief nod of recognition he leaves the human subject all together and has really not examined what is universal about human consciousness, the I in the I know. On the other hand, Immanuel Kant in asking what is it which orders and unifies our experience, our knowledge, the whole range of human consciousness, it comes up with the transcendental self and talks of a synthetic unity of aperception. That Husserl seems to find more the direction he wants to go, what Kant called the transcendental ego, the transcendental self. Kant in the rational psychology in the section of “Critique of Pure Reason” discusses some of Descartes’ attempt to get to the self and decided those metaphysical speculations did not have adequate grounds. Husserl is not discouraged by Descartes’ failure, what Husserl attempts to do is to go back to Descartes’ foundations and see if he cannot from that starting point elicit something of the universal structure of the transcendental ego.
What he does is to talk about two aspects of the phenomenological method that he wants, first of all bracketing which is simply suspending judgment, the sort of thing Descartes did of all objects of thought. Objects of perception, he uses the term apothe at the time, the term the Greek skepticist used for suspending judgment. Husserl is not doubting the existence of objects, his concern is why we do not have a more well grounded knowledge of their very essence. So in bracketing objects of knowledge, he’s bracketing variables between particular kinds of knowledge. He emphasizes consciousness more than knowledge and he tries to get to the universal structures of consciousness. In beginning of his work, he tries to maintain a purely theoretical attitude, not involving any practical dimensions of human existence like the pragmatists do in talking of human knowledge, but in the later stages of his work he talked of even bracketing that theoretical attitude, recognizing that when I say I know something, what I’m knowing is something part of my overall world view, the overall way in which I live. What I know, how I know is ingredient to my lived world. And what he wants to do is to get to the I in the lived world rather than the I in the abstruse theoretical knowledge of the world. So the I know of a pre-scientific, a pre-theoretical consciousness, I know of the ordinary life. That latter move of his led to attempt of his students to do a phenomenological description not only of I know but to the entire activity of I in my world, and it’s the sort of thing you find in existential phenomenologists like Heidegger.
In other words, put this back to the object subject dichotomy, the naturalists ignores subjectivity in Husserl’s sense and focus only on object, giving objective scientific accounts of how that knowledge is possible. It would be a mistake on the other hand to bracket out the object and just concentrate on the subject, in some sort of introspective fashion. Because there is, in reality, no such thing as I of “I know” without an object of knowledge. So what you’re trying to study is not the subject or object, what you’re trying to study is the hyphen, what is the relationship between these two in which we have knowledge, because the I know something, know is the hyphen. What is the universal structure of consciousness of which knowledge is a phenomenon. The same kind of thing becomes evident in the existentialists when Heidegger says that our existence “Dasein”, is not an isolated being, it’s “being there”, in the world. The same is true is Sartre, well known sentence that we are cast into the world, not of our own making. There is a being in the world, that’s the very nature of human existence, that in-ness. The mistake of Descartes is not that he’s not radical enough in his doubt, in his bracketing, that he didn’t go back far enough, but also that he conceived I as a separate I, that is to say I’m an I whether or not there is a world. And he didn’t know there was a real world until Meditation VI. What Husserl is after is an undertanding of the I as it is concretely, the theoretical attitude of Descartes has to be bracketed.
The main thing Husserl emphasizes is the intentionality of consciousness. It has to do with the conscious external reference which the mind has in knowing something, perception, knowledge, other states of consciousness are teleological acts, acts oriented towards an object. Descartes gives us the image of consciousness is simply entertaining ideas within the mind, and that representational view leaves wide open whether there is any objects the ideas are about. Whereas Husserl is saying is one of universal features, part of the very essence of human consciousness is that it’s always consciousness of. It’s always reference to it, it’s directional, that’s true even in memory. But this is the very nature of the act of consciousness, it’s not a passive sort of thing the way Locke pictured receiving ideas passively. But it’s an active sort of thing. Kant introduced the notion the conscious self as an active kind of knower, that actually contributes to experience, forms that unify it temporarily, spatially and categories that unifies the understanding beyond experience. The language that is used here for describing what intentionality does ranges various things. First it makes object present to me, the object does not present itself to me, passively opening the door, but I, by giving attention to it, make the object present. This is something said a constitutive act, because in the act of knowing I constitute the object and object of knowing. In terms of subject object relationship, there is no object without a subject and no subject without an object. In addition, it’s a constructive act. The very nature of my knowing constructs the overall situation. It’s not just the isolated object, but the whole scene that is interrelated for me, all knowledge is, in that sense, self referential. It is a meaning giving act. The underlying assumption here is that whatever else the act of knowing does in seeing it as the object for me, I give it meaning for me. The confusing thing is that intentionality with its referentiality is itself sometimes called the act of meaning, simply because our meaning is ambiguous. One sense of meaning has to do with referentiality, intentionality, the other sense is more of an existential thing, of giving meaning to something that’s meaningless or giving it certain meaning to have for me. It’s the notion of ordering the objects, ordering the world. Consciousness is not passive but active, it’s not representation, it’s constitutive. Husserl did a phenomenology of time consciousness.
If time is the unifying form of all consciousness, it’s the form that you remember of the internal things, but even our ideas of external sense are known to us in terms of internal sense so they are time organized as well. The world for me is time organized. His earlier works are attempting to establish foundations of universal structures of self of mathematics, of logic. In his book “Phenomenology and the Crisis of Philosophy” contains two essays of his. One is philosophy as a rigorous science, his point being that none of the other sciences are rigorous because none of them underlying foundation that validates scientific method. Not even logic or mathematics does. The second is “The Crisis of European Science and Transcendental Phenomenology”. The crisis of no adequate foundations, the wrong thing in danger of getting relativized, and phenomenology of the transcendental self which will arrest that process and establish adequate foundations.
Heidegger
In Heidegger you have not the transcendental phenomenology, phenomenology of the transcendental self, but existential phenomenology, phenomenology of existence. Heidegger is no longer concerned of to establish a new kind of foundationalism, the problem with Husserl is that the process of bracketing is never completed so that you simply can not strip the transcendental self of the evidence of other kind of object of knowing and catch at its best. It’s as if Heidegger is saying to Husserl what Hume said to Descartes or Locke, who had talked about having a notion of a substantive soul even over and above all of the particular ideas of sensation and reflection in which we were immediately aware. Hume said I never catch myself without any idea, it’s as if Heidegger is saying the same to Husserl. You never catch the hyphen without the object. Instead of what Husserl is doing, what Heidegger proposes to do is to use this phenomenological method of describing structures of things on human existence. Husserl’s method was not only to bracket but also an eidetic intuition, which is an immediate awareness of those universal essences of the universal structures of consciousness. What Husserl wants to do is to describe what one observes in that eidetic intuition. While what Heidegger wants to do is not to focus on some universal structures of consciousness underlying all-knowing but to focus on universal structures of existence, what are called “existentialia”. What he’s trying to do is to distinguish categories of object from the existential qualities of human subject. What are the universal existential characteristic of being in this world. Existential referring to the condition of the subject in this world. The hyphen become not a knowing relationship, but a being in relationship. At the same time, he also has problems with other existentialists, people like Nietzsche and Jaspers. Because what they are doing is simply elucidation of existence. They are trying to elucidate the way in which we feel, the way in which we experience our existence, the elucidation of our existence, or they are trying to elicit some authentic existence. What they are doing is abandoning any traditional philosophical activity. The traditional philosophy all the way back to Greeks was concerned with Being. Being in itself is “sein” and our being in this world is “dasein”, so what Heidegger wants to do is to do a phenomenological description of “dasein”, our being in the world, to see if the ground of being is present to us in our “dasein”. Can we gain some understanding of the ground of being from probing our own being in the world. He has a piece called “What is Metaphysics”. Then he goes about asking questions that has existential moment: “why there is something rather than nothing”. And he tries to capture the existential moment of that question.
But his major work, published in 1927, is called “Being and Time”(Sein und Zeit). What is revealed in this, he’s not saying what can we infer from that, like Descartes did. But do we have a direct awareness of the ground of being in the consciousness of our own existence. His big project in “Being and Time” was the phenomenology of “dasein”, his intention was to describe these existentialier, the universal structures of consciousness that being in this world. He only completed half of the project which has to do with temporality and our being, part two which has to do with temporality and being itself he never got done because he was convinced that this wasn’t the method to use. Granted that something like being itself is disclosed in our conscious being, how are we going to interpret that, how are we going to understand. Time may be the structure of our being in the world, but is it the structure of being itself? So he feels we need a more direct kind of approach towards being itself that’s where he turned to more existential ways like the “why there is something rather than nothing” question. Or to going back to pre-scientific and pre-philosophical vocabulary to see if there is something shows itself in early Greeks and he does all sorts of interesting etymologies.
In trying to describe “dasein” inevitably he uses the word I, or perhaps the word you. He’s using the word I not as individual but the I conceived as universal, he’s looking for the universal dimensions of I-ness, not the idiosyncrasy but the universality. In Hegel what you find is the I, the individual is the synthesis of the universal and the particular. So the individual is the concretized universal. That is a very important notion. Because if you try to find universal points of reference in response to relativism, what he’s saying is that even though you may examine the individual, there’s something universal about every individual. The universal is not just simply an empirical generalization of particulars, it’s not something you deduce from a collection of particulars, it’s something that appears within the particulars. So the universal and individuals are not separate things, the universal appears in the individual, which is why being can appear within our being in the world. He uses the word facticity to describe the experience of being, of a bear fact, just an object in this world. He uses the term “Vorhandensein” to describe the status of something which is just an instrument used by others. And obviously for human existence they are very inauthentic kinds of existence. He uses the term existentiality to refer to the possibilities inherent in human existence. He speaks of conscious in those terms. The consciousness of our own existence, our own life is a consciousness of being unto death. He speaks of another term “mitsein”, being with. The particular thing that might worth noting is how he regards understanding and language, understanding is a way we have of projecting the meaning of our “dasein” onto objects, so that in the subject object relationship, to say that I understand an object is to say I am making that in my own image. I’m making it an object for me, I project my meaning onto it. For that reason both knowing and uses of the language are simply modes of being in the world. However can you live, exist in a world like this, somebody asks. We live by projecting meaning onto it, by naming things where the name gives it the meaning you want to have and by talking about it in ways more significant for what they reveal about you than what they reveal about the thing. What then is the quest for truth? The truth is the quest for uncoveredness of being. The quest for truth about anything else is simply an indirect way of engaging in the quest for the being which shows itself within my existence. He has that thoroughly post modern view and it is that in Heidegger which is picked up on by Gadamer in his “Truth and Method”, which is the classic of phenomenological hermeneutics.
Jean-Paul Sartre
Relation to Husserl
19th century philosophy is looking through that transcendental self, the self consciousness so unified in order to see reality made in the image of the self. Image of the self means reality is of the nature of mind or spirit and so you get 19th century idealism, and then other things emphasizing concrete human experience organized in various ways. You can see how it’s organized for Whitehead by God’s “superjective” nature coupled with the decision of the new event which brings things into unity and you can see how it’s organized for Dewey, by virtue of problem situation which is experienced, which brings everything into a unity ready for a problem solving decision.
But when you come to Sartre, it’s a different story. If you like you find in Sartre the culmination of a process that Charles Taylor and his recent book on the self calls the loss of the self because the thesis of the transcendence of the ego is that there simply is no transcendental self, there is no unifying core to the self that has any enduring identity. I create myself with every act of thought, with every experience, with every sense perception. But keep in mind that Sartre is doing phenomenology. Sartre explicitly interacts with what Husserl has done with regards to the self. Husserl emphasized the intentionality of consciousness, he tried to bracket consideration of particular object or a particular beliefs of theories, so as to examine the universal structures of consciousness so that they can become object of eidetic intuition. Kant speaks of them, using another of Husserl’s phrases, as phenomenal objects. So when Husserl brackets out all the particulars and tries to concentrate on the universal structures of consciousness of being in the world, that hyphen relationship between subject and object, then that hyphen relationship becomes a phenomenal object. Now intentionality is involved with reference to external object in all of our consciousness but if the external objects are bracketed, what they are in particular is excluded in phenomenological reduction, then the intentionality is directed instead to the phenomenal object which Husserl attempts to describe and his description is of the act of intentionality.
“pour-soi”(being for itself) and “en-soi”(being in itself)
Now Sartre is doing phenomenology, his an existential phenomenologist, so he’s not interested in the transcendental self in order to provide a new foundationalism, to rescue science from its relativizing tendencies, nor is he like Heidegger, doing a phenomenology of human existence, dasein as a key to perceiving sein, being itself. He’s going to do simply a phenomenology of human existence for its own sake in order to gain this clear perception of these universal characteristics of human existence, of being in the hyphen. But rejecting any transcendental ego, all that remains for him to concentrate on is intentionality as such. He says consciousness is nothing but intentionality, nothing but a consciousness meaning of or pointing to objects. Intentionality is a meaning giving act, meaning in the sense of attending to, focusing on that object, making it present to us, so the thing becomes a phenomenal object, having meaning for me. This means that the self is nothing but the act of consciousness. He developed that in another place, “The Emotions”, where he rejects behavioristic psychology outright by which account the self would simply be a product of environmental causes. Behaviorists are pre-Kantian Enlightenment types as if the self is the passive recipient of these behavioral cause effect mechanisms. Rather he’s inclined towards a depth psychology, intentionality is the characteristic of human being, the act of being in the world and towards the world and emotions simply reveals that. Emotion reveals our being in the world, our facticity. For that reason, you couldn’t even in your wildest dreams imagine Sartre debating with Descartes whether an external world exists. It’s as if he says I vomit therefore it exists, but just the experience of being nauseated by something means the external reality is given in the feeling of nausea. By virtue of the intentionality of emotion, our being is being for something, being in relationship to world, the basic term is not I, but I it, not subject, but subject hyphen object, that’s the basic given. That’s the theme and the way in which it relates to Husserl.
If you ever read his little essay “Existentialism is a Humanism”, it’s there he defines existentialism as saying “existence precedes essence”. And he’s talking particularly about the self, my existence precedes any essence, I have to create my own nature, my own self, there is no transcendental ego. It’s in that essay he cites Dostoevsky that if God is dead then anything is possible. But he enlarges that to if there is no universals then anything is possible, if there is no transcendental self then anything is possible, because there is no fixed points of reference, no fixed entities, no fixed universal structures of the self, it’s just intentionality. That is developed much more systematically in his major work, “Being and Nothingness”, where he develops the dialectic for which he’s well known, that seems to echo the master servant relationship of Hegel. If the intentionality makes an object into a phenomenal object, an object for me, that he’s going to be saying that any person in the world in relating to any other person or object is seeking to make that person part of what is for me, trying to make that into a phenomenal object. In his well known play “No Exit”, in that room from which these three people can not get themselves to escape, one start to trying to relate to another, but in that for me fashion. The same is true in his play “The Flies”.
“For itself” is the phenomenal object, and the “In itself” is the noumenal object. When what is in itself regardless of me doesn’t respond to my intentionality. In Sartre, knowing is a mode of being in the world, that’s obviously the starting point because knowledge is a mode of intentionality. Knowing something is an intentional act. The “for itself” has being by not being the “in itself”, how does the servant has its being as a servant, by not being a master. The “for itself” has its being by not being the other, the “in itself”. So that by being conscious of something other than myself, I now see myself. I realize my own being as not that other. He goes on to say that this removes the illusion of having objective intellectual knowledge of things exactly as they are, the illusion of Enlightenment knowledge is removed. Because what I know is always identified as what is not, if I’m talking about the inner self, what I know is that it’s not the “for myself”. So what I know is nothing but what I intend, what I mean. So there is my being which is other than that and nothingness of what is in itself. Therefore the title of the book is “Being and Nothingness”, being means finding my being in relationship to others, and nothingness, the “in itself”, which is nothing but what it is for me. So in trying to determine Enlightenment style what it is, the essence, all that I’m actually doing is determining what it is for me and nothing else. So knowledge is not representational, that’s an invention of philosophers he says. Knowledge is simply being present for me, knowledge is intentionality.
Transcendence of the Ego
For most philosophers the ego is the inhabitant of consciousness, some affirm its formal presence at the heart of “lived throughness”, the German equivalent of concrete experience, the notion we found both in Whitehead and Dewey, concrete experience is in here existentialized. Some affirm its formal presence as an empty principle of unification. Others, psychologists for the most part, claim to discover its material presence, as the center of desires and acts in each moment of the psychic life that sounds like a behaviorist. We’d like to show here that ego is neither formally as a transcendental structure, nor materially in consciousness, it’s outside in the world, it’s a being of the world like the ego of another. There’s no hidden soul tucked away within, and all the self refers to is in the world, being in the world. He formulates the question arrive from Descartes’ cogito, is the I that we encounter in our consciousness made possible that synthetic unity of our representations(Kant’s position) or is it the I which in fact unites the representation to each other. If we reject all the more or less false interpretations of I think that offered by post Kantians, wish to solve the problem of existence in fact of the I, we meet our path to the phenomenology of Husserl. So to Husserl and Husserl’s attempt to a scientific kind of phenomenology he turns. Husserl gives his reply, having determined in his logical investigations that the me is the synthetic transcendent production of consciousness and he reverted in ideas towards a new phenomenology and phenomenological philosophy to a classic position of the transcendental I. This I behind each consciousness would light up each phenomenon presented in the field of attention, its transcendental consciousness becomes thoroughly personal.
What Sartre goes on to do is simply to repudiate that. It’s certain that phenomenology does not need any appeal to any such unifying and individualizing I, by intentionality consciousness transcends itself, it unifies itself by escaping itself. In the intentionality of dealing with something new, I am transcending what I already am and become something different. It’s as if Whitehead or Dewey says each experience, each event and each problem adds to the experience that is the continuing core of you, what constitutes personal identity after all in the empiricists tradition, the continuity of consciousness born by memory. But as Hume pointed out those memories are atomistic, fragmented, so there is actually no continuity of consciousness and for Sartre each moment of intentionality is anew. And it’s the focus of attention in this new experience that my consciousness is unified once more. It’s consciousness that unifies itself concretely by a play of transversal intentionality which are concrete and real retentions of past consciousness. I grab on a past experience and in the intentionality towards that past experience I’m incorporating this new unity which is me the past as well as the present and the emerging future. When I run after a street car, when I look at the time, when I’m absorbing and contemplating a portrait, there is no I, there is consciousness of the street car having to be overtaken. In fact I’m plunged into the world of object, it’s they that constitutes the unity of my consciousness, it’s they that presents themselves with values, attractive qualities, but me, the self, I’ve disappeared, there is no self awareness in that process, if you are really concentrating on the street car that’s got to be overtaken, at the same time you’re self conscious in the process of doing it thinking of the spectacle you’re making to all the people who are watching you. In the absorption of the street car I’ve annihilated myself. There’s no place for me at this level, it’s not a matter of chance due to a momentary lapse of attention but happens because of the very structure of consciousness. The I is the ego as the unity of actions, the me is the ego as the unity of conscious states. The distinction between these two aspects of same reality seems simply functional, grammatical. Ego is constituted of actions, states and qualities. Hatred is an enduring state of mind. By state he’s trying to express the passivity which is constituted of hatred. Action is the transcendent, is the concrete realization of something. The ego is the spontaneous transcendent unification of states and actions. So we begin with the undeniable fact that each new state is fastened directly to the ego as its origin, this mode of creation is creation ex nihilo in the sense that the state is not given as having formerly being in the me, I make it for me. So the unifying act of reflection fastens its new state to the concrete totality, the me. Reflection isn’t confined to apprehending a new state as attaching to this totality as fusing with it, it intends a relation which traverse time backwards and gives the me as the source of the state. Phenomenology will understand without difficulty that the ego may at the same time be an ideal unity of states majority of which are absent and a concrete totality wholly giving itself to intuition, a tree or a chair exists no differently, it’s a concrete totality of states. What radically prevents the acquisition of real cognitions of ego is the very special way in which it’s given to reflective consciousness. Here he’s making a distinction that runs pretty well throughout the book, between reflective and non-reflective consciousness. The ego never appears except when one’s not looking at it, the reflective gaze must be fixed on the lived experience insofar as it emanates from the state then behind the state, at the horizon, the ego appears out of the corner of the I, as soon as I turn my gaze to it and try to reach it, it vanishes, this is because in trying to apprehend the ego for itself as the direct object of the consciousness, I fall back onto the unreflecting level.
The ego disappears along with the reflective act whence that vexing sense of uncertainty that many of philosophers expressed by putting the I on this side of the state of consciousness and affirming consciousness must return upon itself in order to perceive the I which is behind it and so Descartes looked inside and said I think therefore I exist, even said I have a notion of the self as mind. Notion is an unclear, un-distinct idea. Sartre said that you don’t get it because it’s not something to be in there, the self is being unified, created, formed in each act of reflection or un-reflection of intentionality. The I we find here is the support of the actions that I do in the world. For example the wood has to be broken into small pieces for the fire to catch it, objective relationship of the wood to the fire that has to be lighted. The action is realized in the world, the objective and empty support of the action is the I concept. This is why the body and bodily images can consummate the total degradation of the concrete I of reflection to the I concept by functioning for the I concept as an illusory fulfillment. When I say I feel the wood and I see and feel the object, body engaged in breaking the wood, the body there serves as the visible and tangible symbol for the I. Body is my being in the world, that’s what it is as a phenomenal object. So we see a series of refraction and degradation which an ego-ology would be concerned, reflective and unreflective.
We may therefore formulate our thesis. Transcendental consciousness is an impersonal spontaneity, it determines its essence at each instant without our being able to conceive anything before it. Existence precedes essence. The before-it is mere existence from the stand point of this new essence. Thus each instant of conscious life reveals to us a creation ex nihilo, not a new arrangement, but a new existence. There’s something distressing for each of us to catch in the act this tireless creation of existence of which we are not the creators at this level, the men has impressions of ceaselessly escaping from himself, trying to be something else, the creative process continues. When Sartre says if God is dead, if there’s no transcendental ego, anything is possible, what he’s saying is that in this creative act of spontaneously becoming a new self, there is absolute freedom, because your freedom to act in any way in the world is what is going to create the new you. What we have here is what he regards as absolute freedom, now he argues backwards from this, if there is absolute freedom, there can be no transcendental ego, because if there were transcendental ego it wouldn’t be absolute freedom, it would be pre-structured by the transcendental ego. If there is absolute freedom there can be no God, because then the ego would be structures by what God makes possible, so what he does with the Dostoevsky account is this: if God is dead, then anything is possible, anything is possible, therefore God is dead. It’s the fallacy of affirming the consequent. But he’s not trying to argue logically, he’s trying to phenomenologically to show this is the case, after all if it is the case that there is a God, or there is transcendental ego, then there couldn’t be that absolute freedom. It’s as if his argument is more if there is a God there couldn’t be absolute freedom and there is absolute freedom, so there isn’t a God, which is an appropriate modus tollens argument.
Some people pointed out that what you have in Sartre is the absolutization of freedom, a process that began in the Enlightenment with its emphasis on freedom from tradition and authority, enlarged in Kant with his assertion of freedom of will, the autonomy of the will, enlarged in Hegel with the whole of the history as a gradual manifestation of freedom more and more fully and now culminating in Sartre where in his words its a dreadful freedom, the romanticist rubs his hands in glee the freedom for complete self expression, but Sartre brings his hands in despair at the dreadfulness of the fact that something I do could blow up the entire universe, anything is possible. The heart of that is the concept of the self.
Other Phenomenologists
Gabriel Marcel
Gabriel Marcel is a French Catholic philosopher, one of those that are called religious existentialist, though he renounces the term existentialist because associations and called himself a philosopher of existence, trying to avoid the connotations. Marcel does quite a lot in describing the phenomenology of inter personal relationships, the phenomenology of hope. His complaint about Sartre is his dialectic of for itself and in itself is just overdrawn, the idea of the constant negation, whereby the one is always negates the other, there’s always alienation fails to distinguish between negation and simply disengagement, where there is no act of turning against or overcoming the other, that’s simply drifting apart. So the dialectic is exaggerated and the result picture is distorted. His point is: in any kind of relationship: there are two poles that are possible: alienation and love, and in between those two poles the relationships may move to and from. Marcel present a more positive description and is more optimistic.
Maurice Merleau-Ponty
Maurice Merleau-Ponty was the most distinguished philosopher in the 50s and 60s, he rejected Kant’s view of the self as only intentionality, he was willing to accept the description of intentionality of consciousness but the thing the book “The Transcendence of Ego”, where he denies any transcendental ego and reduces self to simply that which I create by the act of intentionality. That’s what Merleau-Ponty repudiates because it eliminates the subject of the subject object relationship, so if there is no subject pole, there can be no relationship. There can be no object without a subject. And just from phenomenological stand point, he wants to maintain that there is a least some personal identity, some continuing personal identity that isn’t being created over and over again. So he tries to do a closer phenomenology of the other aspects of the subject object relationship. Particularly as far as Merleau-Ponty is concerned, our lived concrete experiences are lived bodily experience and whatever more there is to self identity and to the nature of the self that at least that lived body that is given in experience is something with enduring identity and he’s not satisfied with reducing it all with the act of intentionality.
Paul Ricœur
Paul Ricœur has been very interested in a phenomenological hermeneutic in the interpretation of various aspects of human life. What do we make of the voluntary and involuntary, how do we interpret the experience of freedom, what about the phenomenology of guilt, the phenomenology of language. He’s trying to get at the essential structures of these aspects of our being in the world. Our language, our sense of being free, our sense of guilt, of finitude so forth.
Paul Tillich
Paul Tillich is a Protestant theologian whose approach to theology has really involved a phenomenological method. He has a book called “The Dynamics of Faith”, which is a phenomenology of faith. The act of faith is a centered act in which the whole being comes into unity in its intentionality towards the object of faith. He has a book called “The Courage to Be” which is another way in which he talks about faith. So he does a phenomenology of this existential courage in contrast to the lesser kinds of courage. If you look at his massive three volume “Systematic Theology” about which somebody has said it’s the only theology in which there are no biblical texts. What he’s doing is a phenomenology of the human condition, so as to pose the existential questions and then what he does is to address the heritage of the Christian thought to those existential questions. He calls it a theology which answers those questions and in that sense it is apologetic theology. He does it in the Heideggerian fashion like Heidegger’s “Being and Time”. If the existential condition one of the ultimate concern and God is the object our our ultimate concern. Phenomenologically we see the intentionality and ultimate concern, then what is the object for which we are leaning, that’s what we call God. So in effect he has an argument from religious experience and religious experience described phenomenologically points to God.
Hans-Georg Gadamer
If you want to tap into the mainstream of contemporary hermeneutical thought up through Gadamer, take a look at the book by Richard Palmer called “Hermeneutics”. Back up in your thinking to the Enlightenment, in the 18th century, there the emphasis was on the objectivity of our knowledge and understanding, not only of physical objects, but also of texts, written material, other people’s actions, the objectivity of understanding. So interpretation is a purely objective activity in which one examines the objective data and draws logical conclusions, kind of an inductive method. By the time you get past Kant, the Copernican revolution, all that changes. The Copernican revolution is going to say we bring our grids to reading, to interpreting anything and that becomes increasingly evident, the initial step following Kant could be Schleiermacher who was one of the German Idealists around the time of Hegel. In as much as we impose our subjective grids on what we think and do, Schleiermacher gets interested in the subjective intention of the author, that is to say he’s not thinking of the grid that the reader brings, but rather the subjective grid of the author. So for Schleiermacher the function of any interpretation, any hermeneutic is get behind the text that the author has written and to discover the author’s own intention. Schleiermacher being a monastic idealist thinks that there is one overall creative spirit, all-encompassing divine spirit that is imminent within any individual. This is that imminentistic theology that can panenthism and so this creative divine spirit that runs through all things like Hegel’s absolute is what is manifest in the author’s intention, in the author’s subjectivity, so in getting at the intention of the author you are getting at the overall intention of the divine spirit and in that sense there’s something of inspiration in everything that’s written. But his emphasis is on getting the subjective grid of the author, the subjective intention. Meaning is not the same as intentionality in Schleiermacher sense, where intentionality is a much more pervasive direction in which things are working out in the course of history. Watch the phrase authorial intention, which has a different use than Schleiermacher’s notion of the intention of the author. Schleiermacher is simply interested in the subjectivity of the author because of his idealism, an unconscious intentionality of author.
But the further thing which comes into play is Husserl with his doctrine of intentionality, so that what reading or giving attention to anything is a meaning constitutive act. So in the act of reading, trying to interpret something, what I’m doing is bringing my meaning to that and making it for me. The subjectivity of the reader gets stronger until in Heidegger, who said understanding itself is a way of being in the world, it’s a mode of “dasein”. So that how I understand something is simply an expression of my subjective grid of my intentionality. So Heidegger is not doing a hermeneutic of any objective text, but hermeneutic of the reader. What you get from this is the recognition that there is a subjective intentionality on the part of both writer and reader, both of the author and the interpreter, so you have two subjectivities, an interpretation then becomes very much like an interpersonal dynamic. An I thou relationship. The thing is however in interpreting historical materials there is a great big gap, a time gap so that the mutual understanding is significantly harder to achieve. The procedure that the Gadamar proposes is essentially the same. There must be a dialogue which provides and encounter between the two subjectivities, between the two horizons, the two perspectives. So that in practice what happens is that you come to some text asking questions of the text out of your own subjective grid, which he calls our pre-understanding, a pre-judgment. In dialogue with the text you find that your questions becomes reshaped, recast, your understanding gets modified and as the dialogue continues so the two horizons begin to come closer, the one to the other. Questioning the text, the text answering and changing meet the questions and I come again and says again as it were, and as you live with text, interacting with the text so the historical gap is narrowed and the two horizons begin to merge. Notice that’s essentially the way it is with interpersonal relationships. What makes this possible is that the two subjectivities share a common history, a common cultural tradition that is carried by a common language. So it is by means of that historical connection, the cultural connection the linguistic connection, the dialogue is possible and we get what he calls effective history.
You might that’s Sartre’s language with Kantian basis of the thing for me and the thing in itself is simply a guise for another representational theory of knowledge to which not so because in this phenomenological tradition the intentionality gives you the existence of the object, makes it present to you, so this phenomenology is more of a critical realism, not a naive realism, but not an anti-realism. Critical realism with its claim that we know that object exist but what it is we have to be subject to correction, there is no infallible interpreter if you like. So the representational thing is not really correct.
Jacques Derrida
However, as subsequent hermeneutical theory develop after Gadmar, the problem begins to develop. Because people like Jacques Derrida, the deconstructionist seems to be an anti-realist so that the text becomes inscrutable in the sense that you cannot get at any fixed meaning, why is this? For Derrida the language that is used has a structure that is given to it by the author, but the structure is unconsciously given which simply never gets completely uncovered, the idea going back to structural linguistics is that language is an artificial structure that is imposed on things and what the deconstructionist is doing is trying to take apart in the structure and show it doesn’t work whatever interpretation you give, what is supposed to refer to something just doesn’t seem to refer consistently. So any interpretation, any construction that you put onto it seems to fail. Your interpretation is as much an artificial superimposition as is the language the writer himself has used is an artificial imposition and therefore it’s impossible to understand what is happening. The dialogue is useful but what precisely the reference of the language is that cannot be understood by rational means. In that sense Derrida is an anti-realist about interpretation. And maintains that plurality of interpretation is legitimate, it’s possible and so a relativism of the whole plurality. In as much as that kind of deconstructionism is applied not only to the reading of a particular text but also to the understanding to the phenomenon of religion, it applies to religious pluralism and so the kind of relativism of the plurality of religious traditions reflects the same kind of emphasis that we cannot see what all this makes because the structures we put upon it vary from subjective grid to another.
Richard Rorty
This European tradition that has developed out of the Kantian Copernican revolution through the notion of intentionality into deconstructionism has been picked up in Anglo-American philosophy even though it’s European tradition. So the work of Richard Rorty entitled “Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature” appeals as much to this phenomenological tradition to Heidegger as it does to the pragmatic tradition of Dewey as it does to the Wittgenstein’s tradition and bringing these together and comes up with the claim that we simply are unable to get at the truth about anything. The “mirror of nature” refers to a representational theory of knowledge, so that we have mental images within our mind that are copies of. He is arguing with this subjectivist tradition coming out of Kant, with the instrumentalist phenomenologist tradition, people like Dewey. What he’s doing is arguing that any such realistic mirror, representation is just impossible. What he does is essentially what skeptics about knowledge have done through history, is to say that I can’t know exactly and with certainty, I’ll be a skeptic about that. So he advocates simply engaging an interesting dialogue rather than trying to settle questions. What this boils down to is a skepticism resulting from exaggerated epistemological expectations. Remember the pre-Socratic philosopher Gogias, who said nothing exists, if anything exists I couldn’t know it, if I knew it I couldn’t talk about it. You find skepticism extended not only to whether something exists, not only to knowing about something, but also to the viability to any language, linguistic skepticism.