Reduction,externalism and immanence in Husserl and Heidegger

This paper argues that the Husserl–Heidegger relationship is systematically misunderstood when framed in terms of a distinction between internalism and externalism. Both philosophers, it is argued, employ the phenomenological reduction to immanence as a fundamental methodological instrument. After first outlining the assumptions regarding inner and outer and the individual and the social from which recent epistemological interpretations of phenomenology begin, I turn to the question of Husserl’s internalism. I argue that Husserl can only be understood as an internalist on the assumption that immanence equates with internal. This, however, is not the case as can be seen once the reduction is understood not as setting aside the existence of the world, but rather a reflection on its meaning. Turning to Heidegger, I argue that his commitment to a form of the phenomenological reduction precludes him from being either a semantic or a social externalist. The place of authenticity and the first person perspective in his work derive from his phenomenological commitments, which can be seen in his accounts of discourse and language and of falling (Verfallen). I then go on to briefly outline a more plausible basis for understanding the difference between Husserl’s and Heidegger’s phenomenologies in terms of their respective emphases on logic and on poetics.     

Heidegger's Early Critique of Husserl

This paper examines Heidegger's critique of Husserl in its earliest extant formulation, viz. the lecture courses Ontologie from 1923 and Einführung in die phänomenologische Forschung from 1923/4. Commentators frequently ignore these lectures, but I try to show that a study of them can reveal both the extent to which Heidegger remains committed to phenomenological research in something like its Husserlian form, and when and why Heidegger must part with Husserl. More specifically, I claim that Heidegger rightly criticizes Husserl's account of 'equipmental objects', and that he is especially unsatisfied with the terminology in which Husserl presents his phenomenological analyses, not only of 'equipment', but of other types of entities as well. However, it will also emerge that Heidegger's own phenomenological work presupposes the performance of what Husserl calls the 'epoch 7 ', the method of 'bracketing' natural knowledge. In this way, Heidegger's sometimes very severe critique must be understood as an internal critique.     

Holism and Horizon: Husserl and McDowell on Non-conceptual Content

John McDowell rejects the idea that non-conceptual content can rationally justify empirical claims—a task for which it is ill-fitted by its non-conceptual nature. This paper considers three possible objections to his views: he cannot distinguish empty conception from the perceptual experience of an object; perceptual discrimination outstrips the capacity of concepts to keep pace; and experience of the empirical world is more extensive than the conceptual focusing within it. While endorsing McDowell’s rejection of what he means by non-conceptual content, and appreciating his insight into the experiential synthesis of intuition and conception (in particular, its role in grasping objects), I will argue that Edmund Husserl presents an even more comprehensive account of perceptual experience that explains how we experience the contribution of receptivity and sensibility and how they cooperate in perceptual discrimination. Further, it reveals “horizons”—a unique kind of contents, surplus content (rather than independent non-conceptual content)—beyond the synthesis of intuitive and conceptual contents through which objects are grasped. Such horizons play a constitutive role, making experience with its conceptual dimensions and justificatory potential possible; they in no way function like a bare given that is to fulfill some independent justificatory role. Whereas McDowell focuses on how experience does not take place in isolation from the exercise of conceptual capacities, Husserl complements his view by situating experience in a more encompassing whole and by elucidating the surplus-horizons that exceed the conceptual content of experience; play an inseparable, constitutive role within it; and indicate the limits of conceptual comprehension.

Husserl,Protention, and the Phenomenology of the Unexpected

Although there has been a great deal said about Husserl’s account of time-consciousness, little attention has been specifically paid to future-consciousness. This article gives an Husserlian account of future-consciousness. It begins by arguing that protention should be understood as a future-directed version of retention and so that future-consciousness should be understood as perception. This account is developed in two ways: (1) the future need not be determinately given in protention and so future-consciousness can be vague; (2) cases when the future turns out to be other than we perceived it to be (cases when the unexpected happens) can be understood as temporal illusions. This account of future-consciousness both illuminates some of Husserl’s more obscure remarks on time-consciousness and (more importantly) provides a means of understanding an often neglected phenomenon of independent philosophical interest: our awareness of the future.     

Husserl and externalism

It is argued that Husserl was an “externalist” in at least one sense. For it is argued that Husserl held that genuinely perceptual experiences—that is to say, experiences that are of some real object in the world—differ intrinsically, essentially and as a kind from any hallucinatory experiences. There is, therefore, no neutral “content” that such perceptual experiences share with hallucinations, differing from them only over whether some additional non-psychological condition holds or not. In short, it is argued that Husserl was a “disjunctivist”. In addition, it is argued that Husserl held that the individual object of any experience, perceptual or hallucinatory, is essential to and partly constitutive of that experience. The argument focuses on three aspects of Husserl’s thought: his account of intentional objects, his notion of horizon, and his account of reality.     

胡塞尔现象学的历史主义批判及其启示

该文从胡塞尔在《哲学作为严格的科学》中对历史主义的批判入手,继而分析他在《欧洲科学的危机与超越论的现象学》中对历史主义问题的阐述,最后对胡塞尔的历史哲学观点及其对我们的启示进行简单的总结。     

Husserl on Hume

ABSTRACT

This article offers an account of the development of Husserl’s assessment of Hume’s position in the history of philosophy. In Husserl’s early treatment of Hume, Husserl’s interpretation was shaped by the anti-Kantian views of his teacher Franz Brentano. Later, however, Husserl concentrated on those themes in Hume’s philosophy that were of relevance for the development of his own conception of phenomenology. His analysis into the a priori structures of intentionality led the Husserl of Logical Investigations (1900–1901) to reject Hume’s nominalism and sensualism, and to criticize Hume’s naturalistic psychologism and fictionalism. Already at this point, however, Husserl appreciated Hume’s metaphysical neutrality as well as his radical starting point in the immediate givenness of consciousness. In the period following Husserl’s transcendental turn in Ideas I (1913), Hume is gradually re-assessed in the context of Husserl’s engagement with Kant as a philosopher who offers important insights concerning concrete problems of transcendental philosophy. For Husserl, Hume ultimately offers the first outline of a pure phenomenology and, indeed, becomes one of the most important forerunners of transcendental philosophy as such.     

The Theoretical Reformer: on Husserl’s Plato (Husserl and the Figures of the History of Philosophy)

ABSTRACT

The present research contributes to the elucidation of an important aspect of Husserl’s interpretation of the history of philosophy, that is, his reading of the beginning of Western thought. In particular, it aims to clarify the sense in which Husserl deems Plato the father of the idea itself of philosophy as a science. As will be maintained, Husserl thinks of Socrates and Plato together as providing the first reform of philosophy, whose overall goal is to give reason (Vernunft) a universal method of self-justification against the general skepticism of the sophists. The analysis will be both systematically and historically oriented, for, it will try to both reconstruct Husserl’s interpretation of the background against which Plato first introduces the idea of philosophy as a science, and to show that what is truly at stake for Husserl is the nature of philosophy itself.     

Husserl on Intentionality as an Essential Property of Consciousness

In the phenomenological tradition intentionality is considered to be an essential property of consciousness. Philosophers from this tradition （Brentano, Husserl, Sartre, etc.） generally share the following two commitments： （i） intentionality is an essential property of consciousness; and （ii） all intentional states are directed at, and are intentionally related to, objects. This view of consciousness has two pressing problems. Firstly, philosophers such as John Searle and David Rosenthal have suggested raw feelings and some forms of seemingly undirected and thus non-intentional feelings as counterexamples to the essential intentionality of conscious states. Secondly, some analytical philosophers and Husserlian scholars inspired by Frege, such as Smith and Follesdal, deny that every intentional state is related to a correlative object. This paper presents a Husserlian view concerning the essential intentionality of consciousness. It will be shown that both problems can be successfully dealt with from an essentially Husserlian and phenomenological perspective.     

The Givenness of Other People: On Singularity and Empathy in Husserl

Human Studies - Other people figure in our experience of the world; they strike us as unique and genuinely other. This paper explores whether a Husserlian account of empathy as the way in which we...     

Phenomenology and Fiction in Dennett

In Consciousness Explained and other works, Daniel Dennett uses the concept of phenomenology (along with his variant, called heterophenomenology) in almost complete disregard of the work of Husserl and his successors in German and French philosophy. Yet it can be argued that many of the most important ideas of Husserl, Merleau-Ponty and others (and not just the idea of intentionality) reappear in Dennett's work in only slightly altered form. In this article I try to show this in two ways, first by talking in a general way about Dennett's phenomenology, and second by examining his treatment of the concept of the self. In both cases I argue that Dennett should have read his Husserl and Merleau-Ponty more carefully, since in the end his (hetero-) phenomenology is methodologically incoherent and suffers from something like a weakness of will. This emerges especially in his use of the notion of fiction.     

Temporality and the Lyotardian Sublime: Kant between Husserl and Freud

ABSTRACT

While Lyotard's first book was an introduction to phenomenology, most of the work that follows can be said to openly challenge the limits of phenomenological analysis. This is particularly evident in the well-known writings on the Kantian sublime, which Lyotard reads as a “temporal crisis” that undoes the conscious knowing subject and escapes “experience” in the phenomenological sense. Nonetheless, if this allows him to relate the sublime to Freud's “unconscious affect,” this “crisis” only becomes visible in contrast to a figure of subjective temporalization the model of which, I argue, is broadly Husserlian. Approaching the sublime as a temporal crisis thus allows not only for a clearer view of the import of Lyotard's late work on the affect with regard to subjectivity, knowledge, and experience; it also reveals what that work continues to owe to a certain phenomenological analysis.     

Between Minimal Self and Narrative Self: A Husserlian Analysis of Person

The distinction between minimal self and narrative self has gained ground in recent discussions of selfhood. In this article, this distinction is reassessed by analysing Zahavi and Gallagher’s account of selfhood and supplementing it with Husserl’s concept of person. I argue that Zahavi and Gallagher offer two compatible and complementary notions of self. Nevertheless, the relationship between minimal self and narrative self requires further clarification. Especially the embeddedness of self, the interplay between passivity and activity, and the problems of uniqueness and persistence are better understood with Husserl’s analysis of person and its central concepts of position-taking, habitualities, and overall style. The embeddedness of self is elucidated by outlining how person is related to its environment, to other people, and to its past. This relational notion of self is both passively constituted and actively shaped: person mediates between minimal self characterized by perspectival ownership and narrative self based on authorship.     

A Controversy Over the Existence of Fictional Objects: Husserl and Ingarden on Imagination and Fiction

ABSTRACT

This paper explores the structure and elements of the intentional experiences of imagining fictional objects. The author critically examines the argument that whereas Husserl’s theory of imagination cannot do justice to fictional objects, Ingarden’s theory of purely intentional objects provides a basis for the theory of intentionality that explains the status of fictional objects. The paper discusses this argument to show that it is justified only in regard to Husserl’s early account of imagination, and on the condition of understanding contents as the phantasmas. Moreover, the author sketches Ingarden’s theory of imagination, and compares it to Husserl’s later account of imagination in terms of noetic-noematic structures. Finally, the author questions the sharp distinction between Husserl and Ingarden with respect to their theories of imagination and fictional objects by showing that it is hard to classify clearly their theories as content or object theories respectively.     

Hans Jonas's diagnosis of nihilism: The case of Heidegger

This paper is concerned with the implications of Husserl's phenomenological reformulation of the problem of error. Following Husserl, I argue that the phenomenon of error should not be understood as the accidental failure of a fully constituted cogito, but that it is itself constitutive of the cogito's formation. I thus show that the phenomenon of error plays a crucial role in our self-understanding as unified subjects of experience. In order to unpack this 'hermeneutical function' of error, I focus on three inter-related notions which are recurrently used by Husserl to refer to the central aspects of error apprehension: explosion (Explosion), replacement (Ersatz), and cancellation (Durchstreichung). My discussion, however, does not remain committed to the Husserlian framework as such. This is not only because Husserl's notion of explosion proves itself untenable, but because the Husserlian paradigm does not make room for a linguistic dimension intrinsic, in my view, to the realization of error. Hence, I proceed by reconstructing the Husserlian terms as tropes of realization, as narratological devices in the 'language game' of error. I argue that these hermeneutical devices are necessary for maintaining what Nietzsche would call the self's 'semblance of unity'. The assumption of one single subject is perhaps unnecessary; perhaps it is just as permissible to assume a multiplicity of subjects, whose interaction and struggle is the basis for our thought and our consciousness in general? (Nietzsche, The Will to Power #490)     

No Empathy for Empathy: An Existential Reading of Husserl’s Forgotten Question

ABSTRACT

Empathy is a term used to denote our experience of connecting or feeling with an Other. The term has been used both by psychologists and phenomenologists as a supplement for our biological capacity to understand an Other. In this paper I would like to challenge the possibility of such empathy. If empathy is employed to mean that we know another person’s feelings, then I argue that this is impossible. I argue that there is an equivocation in the use of the term ‘empathy’ which conditions the appropriation of the Other as we think that we know how the Other feels. To claim that we do know an Other’s feelings – or any kind of their intentional experience – means to appropriate their experience through our own. I will first reveal the equivocal use of the term ‘empathy’ and, then, I will explore Husserl’s use of the term. In Husserl, the understanding of an Other as empathy is only partial. I shall conclude by reiterating a thesis from philosophy of existence and feminist theory according to which to know another person comes from creating a community with them and not because we have a biological structure that can mirror each other’s feelings.     

The ego, the Other and the primal fact

Japan has absorbed many western ideas since the late nineteenth century, but Japanese philosophers have often been reluctant to accept the western idea of the “I” in its entirety. The I transgresses to the Other more easily than western philosophies think and imports what belongs to the Other as his own. How is this possible? Husserl attempted to explain the constitution of the Other by the intentionality that goes from the I to the Other, mediated by the body. However, Husserl later discovered that the constitution of both the I and the Other is more of a two-way movement. This double-movement is essential for all constitutions and departs from a deep (primal) dimension that is not yet egological. Even in the self-reflection of the I, a similar double-movement between the primal and egological dimensions can be seen. The I is supported, but at the same time threatened, by this movement.     

How experienced phenomena relate to things themselves: Kant,Husserl, Hoche,and reflexive monism

What we normally think of as the “physical world” is also the world as experienced, that is, a world of appearances. Given this, what is the reality behind the appearances, and what might its relation be to consciousness and to constructive processes in the mind? According to Kant, the thing itself that brings about and supports these appearances is unknowable and we can never gain any understanding of how it brings such appearances about. Reflexive monism argues the opposite: the thing itself is knowable as are the processes that construct conscious appearances. Conscious appearances (empirical evidence) and the theories derived from them can represent what the world is really like, even though such empirical knowledge is partial, approximate and uncertain, and conscious appearances are species-specific constructions of the human mind. Drawing on the writings of Husserl, Hoche suggests that problems of knowledge, mind and consciousness are better understood in terms of a “pure noematic” phenomenology that avoids any reference to a “thing itself.” I argue that avoiding reference to a knowable reality (behind appearances) leads to more complex explanations with less explanatory value and counterintuitive conclusions—for example Hoche’s conclusion that consciousness is not part of nature. The critical realism adopted by reflexive monism appears to be more useful, as well as being consistent with science and common sense.