Insight Editions · No. 56
A Companion to Phenomenology and Existentialism
Hubert L. Dreyfus and Mark A. Wrathall (eds.)
Thirty-nine essays present phenomenology and existentialism, tracing their central figures and applying their accounts of lived experience to contemporary questions in mind, science, ethics, art, and mathematics.
A study guide to A Companion to Phenomenology and Existentialism by Hubert L. Dreyfus and Mark A. Wrathall (eds.). Shared free for personal reading; not for sale and not endorsed by the authors or publishers. Please read and buy the original.
The Book in Brief
The argument in brief
- The two movements share one turn. Wrathall and Dreyfus argue that phenomenology's description of lived experience and existentialism's account of the self now form a single canon with four common commitments (ch1).
- Phenomenology is a method for meaning. Crowell, Mohanty, Føllesdal and Lohmar present intentionality, the reductions and categorial intuition as tools for studying meaning as it is given (ch2, ch5, ch8, ch9).
- The subject moves into the world. Wrathall, Siewert and Brough and Blattner follow consciousness and time from Husserl into Heidegger, Sartre and Merleau-Ponty; Sebbah and Jay follow the French turn to excess and the fate of lived experience (ch3, ch4, ch6, ch7, ch10).
- Existentialism answers a conflicted culture. Dreyfus, Tietz, Martin and Wicks trace it from Pascal and Kierkegaard through German existence-philosophy, religious thinkers and Sartre and Camus (ch11 to ch14).
- Its concepts are structures, not moods. Carman, Han-Pile, Hoffman, Olafson, Sherman and Hoy treat authenticity, affectivity, the body, freedom, the absurd and death as formal features of existence (ch15 to ch20).
- The tradition talks to the sciences. Solomon, Bremer, Ratcliffe, Gallagher, DeLancey, Andler and Wertz bring it to emotion, mind, neuroscience, spatial cognition, action, AI and psychology (ch21 to ch27).
- It reaches medicine, nature, technology and the body politic. Svenaeus, Gordon, Thomson, Kadowaki, Brenner, Murphy, Heinämaa, Young, Gillespie and Guignon apply it to illness, science, environment, technology, dignity, sexuality, feminism, meaning, politics and history (ch28 to ch37).
- It even reads paintings and proofs. Martin finds self-consciousness in Dutch vanitas still life and van Atten finds a foundation for mathematics (ch38, ch39).
The volume's argument: one starting point, three strands of method, world and existence, and their reach into other fields.
Chapter map
| Ch | Title and author | In one line |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | A Brief Introduction to Phenomenology and Existentialism (Mark A. Wrathall and Hubert L. Dreyfus) | Two movements, one shared turn from theory to lived experience |
| 2 | Husserlian Phenomenology (Steven Crowell) | Intentionality, evidence and the reduction as a method of meaning |
| 3 | Existential Phenomenology (Mark A. Wrathall) | Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty move the subject into the world |
| 4 | French Phenomenology (François-David Sebbah, translated by Robert J. Hudson) | Levinas, Henry, Derrida, Marion: a phenomenology of excess |
| 5 | Intentionality (J. N. Mohanty) | Act, noema and object, from Brentano to Husserl |
| 6 | Consciousness (Charles Siewert) | Phenomenal character as first-person warrant |
| 7 | The Lifeworld and Lived Experience (Martin Jay) | Was the attack on lived experience fair |
| 8 | Husserl's Reductions and the Role They Play in His Phenomenology (Dagfinn Føllesdal) | Eidetic and transcendental reductions as two separate moves |
| 9 | Categorial Intuition (Dieter Lohmar) | Seeing states of affairs, not only things |
| 10 | Temporality (John B. Brough and William Blattner) | Retention and protention; Heidegger's ecstatic time |
| 11 | The Roots of Existentialism (Hubert L. Dreyfus) | Kierkegaard's self, Dostoevsky, Nietzsche's death of God |
| 12 | German Existence-Philosophy (Udo Tietz) | Jaspers, Heidegger, and a charge of solipsism |
| 13 | Religious Existentialism (Clancy Martin) | Unamuno, Shestov, Barth and Buber after Kierkegaard |
| 14 | French Existentialism (Robert Wicks) | From a mechanistic cosmos to Sartre's and Camus's freedom |
| 15 | The Concept of Authenticity (Taylor Carman) | Ownedness and resoluteness rather than sincerity |
| 16 | Affectivity (Béatrice Han-Pile) | Nietzsche, Heidegger, Sartre: moods as diagnosis or ontology |
| 17 | The Body (Piotr Hoffman) | Sartre's body versus a body that rises toward the world |
| 18 | Freedom and Responsibility (Frederick A. Olafson) | Freedom rose; responsibility was never integrated |
| 19 | Absurdity (David Sherman) | Kierkegaard, Camus and Sartre on meaning without guarantee |
| 20 | Death (David Couzens Hoy) | Being-towards-death and its critics |
| 21 | Emotions in Phenomenology and Existentialism (Robert C. Solomon) | Emotions as intentional, engaged judgments |
| 22 | The Egological Structure of Consciousness (Manuel Bremer) | Lessons from Sartre for analytic philosophy of mind |
| 23 | Phenomenology, Neuroscience, and Intersubjectivity (Matthew Ratcliffe) | Mirror neurons and a bodily togetherness with others |
| 24 | The Intrinsic Spatial Frame of Reference (Shaun Gallagher) | The body schema underlies every spatial frame |
| 25 | Action, the Scientific Worldview, and Being-in-the-World (Craig DeLancey) | Skilled coping as a challenge to mechanism |
| 26 | Phenomenology in Artificial Intelligence and Cognitive Science (Daniel Andler) | From Dreyfus's critique to naturalized phenomenology |
| 27 | Phenomenological Currents in Twentieth-Century Psychology (Frederick J. Wertz) | Gestalt, psychiatry and qualitative method |
| 28 | Medicine (Fredrik Svenaeus) | Illness as unhomelike being-in-the-world |
| 29 | Realism, Science, and the Deworlding of the World (Peter Eli Gordon) | Heidegger's science between realism and deworlding |
| 30 | Environmental Philosophy (Iain Thomson) | Eco-phenomenology and the contested meaning of earth |
| 31 | Ontology, Pragmatism, and Technology (Shunsuke Kadowaki) | Heidegger and Dewey on technology and contingency |
| 32 | The Lived-Body and the Dignity of Human Beings (Andreas Brenner) | Dignity grounded in embodiment |
| 33 | Sexuality (Ann V. Murphy) | Sexuality, corporeal feminism and queer theory |
| 34 | Feminism (Sara Heinämaa) | Beauvoir as phenomenologist of sexual difference |
| 35 | A Life Worth Living (Julian Young) | Camus and Heidegger on whether life has meaning |
| 36 | The Search for Immediacy and the Problem of Political Life in Existentialism and Phenomenology (Michael Allen Gillespie) | Why the turn to immediacy left politics without a footing |
| 37 | History and Historicity (Charles Guignon) | From Husserl's attack on historicism to historicity |
| 38 | Bubbles and Skulls (Wayne M. Martin) | Self-consciousness in Dutch vanitas painting |
| 39 | Mathematics (Mark van Atten) | Phenomenology as a foundation of mathematics |
The two founding parts mirror each other: main movements first, then central concepts
About this book
A Companion to Phenomenology and Existentialism by Hubert L. Dreyfus and Mark A. Wrathall (eds.), 2006. This is a chapter-by-chapter study of the book, with summaries, maps, tables and diagrams; short quotations keep their page references. It is shared free for personal study, is not for sale, and is not endorsed by the author or publisher. Please read and buy the original.
Insight Editions · rajeshrmahapatra.com/insight-editions
A Brief Introduction to Phenomenology and Existentialism (Mark A. Wrathall and Hubert L. Dreyfus)
Mid-century opinion split: Spiegelberg saw "enough affinity for fruitful cooperation"; Asher Moore an "unholy alliance", since phenomenology seeks universal structures and so overlooks individual existence. The two pivot figures disagreed. Heidegger kept faith with the "genuine spirit" of phenomenology but dismissed existentialism as modernism's error, while carrying on Kierkegaard's and Nietzsche's themes (Dasein, guilt, anxiety, death, authenticity). Sartre embraced the label ("the least scandalous, the most austere of doctrines") and subtitled Being and Nothingness "A Phenomenological Essay on Ontology".
Phenomenology as a movement starts with Husserl's demand to describe experience as the "things themselves" demand, shaped by Brentano (intentionality) and Dilthey, then extended by Scheler (emotion), Ingarden (art), Stein (empathy) and Jaspers (psychology). Heidegger grounded act-intentionality in a background grasp of the world; Merleau-Ponty turned to the body; Sartre kept a Husserlian focus on consciousness. Existentialism names itself only in the twentieth century but claims Pascal, Kierkegaard, Dostoevsky and Nietzsche as forebears, with religious (Marcel, Tillich, Buber) and atheist French (Sartre, Beauvoir, Camus) branches, and a strong literary voice.
Concepts may fail the world; humans transcend facticity
The book has three parts: Part I phenomenology (movements, then concepts), Part II existentialism, and Part III contemporary problems treated from either or both traditions: mind and action, cognitive science, psychology, science and technology, ethics, politics, history, art and mathematics.
Lineages, dates and the map of the volume
The word phenomenology has been in philosophical use since Hegel's Phenomenology of Mind (1807); through the nineteenth century it meant a descriptive rather than hypothetical or analytic approach. Husserl (1859-1938) seems to have adopted it in 1890s lectures titled "Phenomenology: a section of Brentano's metaphysics". Brentano (1838-1917) gave him descriptive psychology and intentionality; Dilthey (1833-1911) gave him the case against naturalistic accounts of the psychic. Early followers each took a region: Scheler (1874-1928) emotion and intuition, Ingarden (1893-1970) art, Stein (1891-1942) empathy, Jaspers psychology and psychiatry.
The editors place the later century in this line. Heidegger's students Gadamer (1900-2002) built philosophical hermeneutics and Arendt (1906-75) a politics of the shared public world, while Levinas (1906-95), Foucault (1926-84), Derrida (1930-2004) and Habermas (b. 1929) defined themselves partly against Husserl and Heidegger. Husserl promised a method that would ground knowledge in lived experience "without reducing" it to contingent subjective features, and so make philosophy a rigorous science that could "clarify all species and forms of cognition".
- Pascal (1623-62). Rejected Cartesian rationalism and saw the human being as an essential paradox of mind and body.
- Kierkegaard (1813-55). Usually counted the founder: against Hegel's total rational system he argued for the absurdity of existence and a passionate, faithful commitment to a Christian life.
- Nietzsche (1844-1900) and Dostoevsky (1821-81). Attacked the tradition's stress on rationality for undermining the passionate attachment a worthwhile life needs; Nietzsche's "death of God" shaped the atheist French branch.
- Religious existentialists. Marcel, Berdyaev, Tillich, Bultmann, Unamuno, Shestov, Barth and Buber took up the existential approach to faith (Chapter 13).
- Literary voice. Because existentialism starts from an involved stance, novels, plays and pseudonymous tracts suit it; Camus won the Nobel Prize in 1957 and Sartre was awarded and refused it in 1964.
The descent of phenomenology as the editors tell it, from a word to a movement.
| Part | Chapters | What they cover |
|---|---|---|
| I Phenomenology | 2-10 | Husserl, existential and French phenomenology; intentionality, consciousness, lifeworld, reductions, categorial intuition, temporality |
| II Existentialism | 11-20 | Roots, Jaspers and Heidegger, religious and French existentialism; authenticity, moods, body, freedom, absurd, death |
| III Contemporary problems | 21-39 | Mind and action (21-25), cognitive science (26), psychology (27), science and technology (29, 31), ethics (30, 34, 35), politics (36), history (37), art (38), mathematics (39) |
The existentialist turn in this account is a sequence: start from the existing individual in a particular world; stress the body (Chapter 17) and the affective (Chapter 16); deny essences, often to the point of calling the world absurd (Chapter 19); see death as making life meaningless for Sartre and Camus (Chapter 20); and conclude that only freedom and responsibility (Chapter 18) lived authentically (Chapter 15) can answer. The editors read the two movements as one canon because Part III shows both used side by side on live problems, not because the theoretical dispute was ever won.
Husserlian Phenomenology (Steven Crowell)
What phenomenology is
The received image (Cartesian foundationalism, solipsistic idealism, a philosophy of reflection blind to body and history) comes from how Husserl worked: few published introductions and a vast Nachlass, smuggled out of Nazi Germany by H. L. van Breda to found the Leuven archive. Read through the manuscripts, the "realist", "idealist" and anti-Cartesian phases form one consistent development. Phenomenology is defined by four contrasts. It is descriptive, not theory-building; it aims at clarification, not causal explanation; it is eidetic, seeking what belongs to a kind of thing; and it is reflective, studying our experience of entities, not entities. The last is the most distinctive: like early analytic philosophy it turns to meaning, but it extends meaning "to all acts", not only language, breaking with mentalism.
The breakthrough: intentionality and the norm of truth
Husserl moved from mathematics (doctorate, Vienna 1882) to Brentano's descriptive psychology and the "directedness toward an object". Against Frege, he asked how sentences come to have meaning at all. The Logical Investigations (1900) open with a 200-page attack on psychologism, which makes logic relativist and self-refuting, yet call phenomenology "descriptive psychology". The way out: acts are studied not as mental items but as truth-bearers, normatively oriented claims. Since hallucinations have directedness without an object, an act's content includes the intentional object, the manner of givenness, which works like satisfaction conditions.
Two non-causal relations follow. Founding (Fundierung): memory is founded on perception, judgment ("my coffee is cold and milky") on perceptual content, as an "intentional implication". Fulfillment (Erfüllung): an empty or signitive intention is fulfilled when the thing is given "in person", and the two coincide. Truth as correspondence becomes this synthesis of identification; intuition is "any fulfilling act whatever"; Evidenz is self-givenness, not a clue. Perception mixes presence and absence: the cup's back is co-intended with prescribed fulfillments ("of a cup", not a face).
| Concept | What it names | Example |
|---|---|---|
| Founding | A meaningful dependence of one act on another | Memory of yesterday's cup points back to perceiving it |
| Fulfillment | An empty meaning given intuitively | Tasting the coffee confirms "cold and milky" |
| Evidenz | The thing's self-givenness, by its type | Calculating with insight, not "emptily" |
| Horizon | The co-intended context of any object | The rope's hidden sides; the world as backdrop |
| Noema | The perceived as perceived | This-cup-as-seen-from-here-in-this-light |
| Constitution | How a thing gets its sense in experience | One rock as obstacle, tool, granite specimen |
Transcendental idealism
After a personal crisis in Göttingen ("I must win clarity, else I cannot live"), Husserl's answer came in Ideas I (1913). "Philosophy as Rigorous Science" (1911) names the enemy: naturalism, close to McDowell's "bald naturalism", which cannot house the normativity of intentional relations. In The Idea of Phenomenology (1907) a new, evidential sense of immanence lets the transcendent thing be given, though inadequately, so "bridge building" to the world is superfluous.
The noema is disputed: Føllesdal (followed by Dreyfus, Smith and MacIntyre) reads it as a Fregean sense through which the object is meant; Sokolowski and Drummond as the thing itself as given. The first captures normativity but invites representationalism; the second fits Husserl's aims but struggles to make perceptual relations normative.
The route of Ideas I from the natural attitude to constitution.
The natural attitude carries a "general thesis" of world-belief: the rope can turn out a snake, but "'the' world is always there". The epoché brackets this belief without doubting it, to stop treating intentional correlation as a thing in the world. Heidegger found the reduction unnecessary, Merleau-Ponty a "complete reduction" impossible. The transcendental reduction then shows constitution: not creation, but the sense of a thing as the rule governing its noemata. To take something as a hammer is to be able to use it within internal and external horizons. Whether the resulting idealism is metaphysically neutral (Carr, Crowell), full-blown (A. D. Smith) or neutral with metaphysical implications (Zahavi) remains open.
Genetic phenomenology
Three themes lead from static to genetic analysis. Temporality: an inner-time stream of retentions and protentions resting on an "absolute" self-constituting flow. Passive synthesis: prepredicative unities formed by association (prominence, contrast) from hyletic data, which Merleau-Ponty denied are neutral data. The ego, absent from the Logical Investigations, appears as ego-pole, as non-objectifying self-awareness (Zahavi after Sartre), and as "substrate of habitualities", constituting itself "in the unity of a 'history'", which raises the charge of transcendental solipsism.
The three horizons of Husserl's late phenomenology.
Husserl's path to the Logical Investigations
Husserl was born on 8 April 1859 in Prossnitz, Moravia. He wrote a mathematics doctorate in Vienna (1882), heard Brentano there, and turned to philosophy through the foundations of number, writing a second dissertation on the concept of number in Halle (1887). As a Privatdozent in Halle until his move to Göttingen in 1901, he published Philosophy of Arithmetic (1891), which already breaks with Brentano on one point: Brentano left unclear how the content bound up with an act relates to its directedness toward an object. Crowell notes the word phenomenology had earlier uses in Kant, Lambert and Hegel, but Husserl ignored them; his thinking grew out of debates on arithmetic and logic in Brentano's school, and his heirs run from Pfänder, Reinach and Geiger to Heidegger, Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, Levinas, Gadamer and Derrida.
The paradox of the Investigations is that a book opening with a refutation of psychologism calls its method "descriptive psychology". Crowell resolves it by reading intentionality not as the static presence of a presentation in an Erlebnis but as a normatively oriented claim to validity. Throughout his career Husserl also practised an eidetic reduction: freely varying an example until the limits of its variability show its essence. Crowell stresses that there is nothing distinctively phenomenological about free variation; what is new is its tie to intuition.
- Founding defined. In the logic of wholes and parts, when "an A cannot as such exist except in a more comprehensive unity which associates it with an M", A is founded in M.
- Memory as founded. "Having perceived" belongs to a memory's intentional content even when I am wrong, which is what separates remembering from imagining.
- Categorial acts. Judgment articulates forms such as part and whole that are "not genuinely present in the unarticulated percept" but there as ideal possibilities, constituting a new object, a state of affairs (Chapter 9).
- Coincidence. Fulfillment is a Deckungssynthesis, an overlap of the matter of the empty and the fulfilling act; in calculation I can operate "emptily" with symbols, without insight.
Husserl's route from arithmetic to transcendental phenomenology, after Crowell.
The aporia and the turn to idealism
The Investigations hit an aporia. Husserl said the intentional object is not a second object but the way "the object (period) which is intended" is intended, yet also that "intentional objects, and only intentional objects" are what we attend to. That left the real object outside reflective evidence: in de Boer's image, a circle of light surrounded by a sea of darkness. Husserl came to see this as a lingering psychologism, identified it with the fallacy of naturalism, and abandoned it for a "transcendental", non-metaphysical idealism, worked out in lecture courses from 1905-07 and systematized in Ideas I (1913).
Two steps prepared the reduction. First, the attack on naturalism in "Philosophy as Rigorous Science" (1911): the danger is "the naturalizing of consciousness" and with it "the naturalizing of ideas" and all absolute norms. Second, in The Idea of Phenomenology (1907), a redefinition of immanence.
| Sense | Immanent means | Status of the physical thing |
|---|---|---|
| Metaphysical (forum internum) | Really contained in the act, like an empiricist "idea" | Transcendent: outside the mind, so outside reflection |
| Evidential (Husserl's new sense) | Given with Evidenz, adequately or inadequately | Transcendent in the first sense, yet self-given, so open to description |
How redefining immanence dissolves the aporia without bridge building
Crowell is careful about what this does not achieve: Husserl has not explained how consciousness gets "outside" to the real thing; he has made the question idle. Noematic phenomenology becomes the study of the modes of givenness "precisely of those things that transcend consciousness", and Husserl later sought the origin of logical relations in the perceptual sphere itself (Experience and Judgment). The perceptual noema is "the perceived as perceived"; because it includes moments like "this-cup-as-perceived-from-here-in-this-light", Sokolowski and Drummond find it hard to treat as an abstract Fregean sense, while the Fregean reading was "seized upon by Dreyfus" to charge Husserl with Cartesianism.
Freiburg, the lifeworld and the paradox of subjectivity
Ideas I was to be followed by two volumes on the regions "nature" and "spirit" and on the relation of phenomenology to the sciences. In 1916 Husserl moved to Freiburg as celebrated founder of the movement yet estranged from colleagues by his idealist turn; though writing feverishly, he published nothing until Formal and Transcendental Logic (1929). Welton and Steinbock argue that his methodological reflections ran a step behind his concrete analyses, fitting new insight into old commitments. Crowell sets aside the late personalism of the ego as going beyond anything phenomenological Evidenz can support (Brainard).
The late manuscripts send the movement in an "existential" direction (Natanson). The other appears as an irrevocable absence, and that sense of the radically other attaches to the whole constituted world. The world now called lifeworld carries history: Husserl traced the intentional implications sedimented in mathematized physics, arguing that the model of rationality had become an empty techne cut off from its sources (Hopkins). If constitution runs along a "generative" axis of cultural worlds (Steinbock), the reduction cannot stop at individual consciousness. Yet Husserl insisted that "reduction to the absolute ego as the ultimately unique center of function in all constitution" remains necessary.
The "paradox of human subjectivity" (Crisis) as a chain of late arguments.
Crowell closes on method. If we speak meaningfully of the unconscious, of history or of death, it is because these are self-given in some way, not abstract constructs. The lasting challenge of phenomenology is to stay attuned to modes of givenness, and its best work, in Husserl and his "followers", comes from meeting that challenge.
Existential Phenomenology (Mark A. Wrathall)
None of Heidegger, Sartre or Merleau-Ponty called his work "existential phenomenology", and "existence" differs among them: Heidegger's Existenz is the human way of being, Merleau-Ponty's l'existence includes worldly things, and Sartre's focus on consciousness sets him apart. Wrathall takes Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty as the undisputed paradigms, while counting Arendt, Beauvoir, Levinas, Marion and even Pascal, Kierkegaard and Nietzsche as members of the wider canon.
I. Existential phenomena
All agree philosophy must not start from a detached standpoint. Existential phenomena are real (entities "are, quite independently of the experience ... by which they are disclosed") yet show themselves best when we are not reflecting on them. Wrathall examines three.
Worldly entities. A hammer exists only within a context of nails, boards and building. The Kantian and transcendental view held that an object must be constituted by thought, which would rule out existential phenomena. Heidegger keeps constitution (letting a thing be seen by placing it in an ordered context) but denies it is an intellectual act. Merleau-Ponty's ashtray has a significance that "animates" it and is grasped by knowing how to hold it: "a structure accessible to inspection by the body". Hammering, we have the hammer best when not trying. In the shoemaker's shop we can name everything yet lack the skills to let most things show themselves: "many beings ... have the character of unfamiliarity". Things are equally thinkable but unequally available, which shows their mind-independence: "the thing holds itself aloof from us".
The world. For Merleau-Ponty the world's unity is like a style: we recognize a person's manner before we can state its formula. Approaching a town, we do not bind snapshot outlines together; a perspective is an abstraction from an unfolding whole, "the horizon of all horizons". Heidegger's world is the work world, "that wherein Dasein already understands itself", familiar without being "theoretically transparent".
Being-in-the-world. Dasein "finds 'itself' first of all in what it pursues, needs, expects". Tasting chocolate, I am aware of the world, not of a subjective state. Merleau-Ponty: "I am a field, an experience", "a fresh possibility of situations", "one single temporality ... making itself progressively explicit". "A bare subject without a world never 'is'", so introspection cannot be the primary method.
Reflection threatens to hide what it describes
II. The practice of description
If these phenomena move us without giving reasons, argument and formal logic are "virtually worthless": "there is no proof in phenomenology because it constantly describes" (Heidegger). Nor will a Husserlian focus on isolated sense perception do: it lets "the theme" be "determined by the way it is phenomenologically investigated", making theoretical looking the model of being-in-the-world.
| Description of a house | Purpose | Phenomenological lesson |
|---|---|---|
| "40.225 N, 111.646 W" | Precise but useless without the theory | Correct ascription is not apprehension |
| "Brick, cream trim, green roof, six blocks west" | Finding the house | Fit the reader's capacities to explore |
| "1800 sq ft, four bedrooms, fireplace" | Selling the house | Give a feel for how it affords living |
Phenomenological description is a practice, not a sentence type: "water is H2O" ascribes properties but helps few people apprehend water. Unlike scientific description, which fits a thing into a general theory, it tries to bring about the circumstances under which the thing shows itself. "Presuppositionless" means freedom from those presuppositions that block a phenomenon: the physician Richard Baron's "medicine without patients" shows how clinical detachment, correct as it is, makes suffering invisible. Each kind of thing has its own mode of encounter (Begegnisart).
Existential description: its only test is whether it lets the thing show itself
III. Naming, scope and the three test cases in detail
The labels "existential phenomenology" and "existentialist phenomenology" came into common use in the late 1950s and early 1960s to name what Heidegger, Sartre and Merleau-Ponty shared. Heidegger called Being and Time an "analytic of existence" while denying any tie to existentialism; Merleau-Ponty's preface defines phenomenology as "a philosophy which puts essences back into existence" and starts only from facticity. Wrathall adds Dreyfus's work on skillful coping to the canon.
- Physical objects versus worldly entities. Wood and iron exist whether or not a human world takes them up; a physical object "exists partes extra partes" with only external, mechanical relations. A hammer, by contrast, is what it is only inside a context of use.
- Constitution without intellect. For Kant and the Neo-Kantians an object is given only if brought under categories; Heidegger answers that objectivity "is not a result of the activity of intellectual understanding". This is why Husserl, on Wrathall's reading, could reach no conclusions about the being of entities from within consciousness.
- The in-itself-for-us. Everyday perception alights on things attentively enough to find their familiar presence but not enough to disclose "the nonhuman element which lies hidden in them"; things "hold themselves aloof from us and remain self-sufficient".
- Bodily understanding. "We understand the thing as we understand a new kind of behavior", not by subsumption but by taking up the mode of existence its signs adumbrate; that is why perception gives the thing "in person", "in the flesh".
- Uneven givenness. The usual theory of knowledge, in which a manifold of objects is "homogeneously given", "does not do justice to the primary facts": thinkability is even, availability is not.
Heidegger's "trivial example" and the conclusion Wrathall draws from it.
On the self, Merleau-Ponty says the world "does not require, and even rules out, a constituting subject", because it is never given whole or wholly determinate. The self is an "open and indefinite unity of subjectivity", a field not fully explicit to itself, so the subject is itself an existential phenomenon. Heidegger agrees: Dasein "is there for itself, even when the ego does not direct itself to itself", "without reflection and without inner perception, before all reflection". The tradition from Plato to Descartes grasped one aspect, rational being, and took it for the whole.
IV. Why description, not analysis or explanation
Wrathall reconstructs the rules of the practice. Analytic philosophers count any attribution of properties as description; phenomenology wants only descriptions that equip a reader to discover the thing. Science describes objects by just those properties that let them instantiate a general law uniformly; phenomenology does not try to fit the phenomenon into a preexisting framework. Richard Baron's physicians "look through their patients to discover the underlying pure disease". So "presuppositionless" means freedom from presuppositions that block the phenomenon, not from all presuppositions.
| Approach | What it does with a phenomenon | Merleau-Ponty's verdict |
|---|---|---|
| Analytical reflection (Husserl, much analytic philosophy) | Seeks the acts by which things are constituted for consciousness | "Ceases to remain part of our experience"; offers a reconstruction |
| Scientific explanation | Subsumes the thing under general laws | Excluded as a starting point |
| Existential description | Lifts the thing into relief and returns us to it | Philosophy "is not a lexicon"; no verbal substitute for the world |
Heidegger's first "fundamental maxim" is that description highlights and lifts something into relief, yet what is expressed "is not (always) known phenomenally in its context". Merleau-Ponty adds that the visible and its philosophical explication are not two sets of signs side by side like a text and its translation. Description in this tradition succeeds only when it sends the reader back into an experience that no statement replaces.
French Phenomenology (François-David Sebbah, translated by Robert J. Hudson)
Two families
The Merleau-Pontian family (Maldiney, Garelli, Richir, Barbaras) keeps perception as the first opening and works back to a pre-originary, ambiguous stage before fixed identities, through a reduction that is always incomplete; it arrives at the anonymity of the World. The second family seeks something more originary than the World, which ruptures the visible; hence the violence of its style. Both dismiss the sovereign subject, but the second ends not in anonymity but in a named Self constituted by an ordeal, "the passivity older than all passivity".
| Thinker | What exceeds the World | Relation to the limit |
|---|---|---|
| Levinas | The face; the Infinite, "Illéité" | Tests the limit: a trace that still holds to the horizon it divides |
| Henry | Life as radical immanence, self-revelation | Claims a reversed, "material" phenomenology free of the World |
| Derrida | Trace, specter, the gift | Tests the limit: phenomenology "impossible as such" yet inescapable |
| Marion | Givenness; the saturated phenomenon | Claims a fully successful reduction to donation |
The four
Levinas introduced phenomenology to France and always called himself a phenomenologist. His description "de-formalizes": the face is "out of context", disrupting every horizon and every power of constitution; it summons, and this ethical dimension gives phenomenality its significance. Yet the Infinite appears only as "a trace of that which will have never been present", still bound to the horizon it opens.
Michel Henry (from The Essence of Manifestation) argues that what appears in the "exit outside itself" of transcendence cannot ground anything. The World's ek-static light de-realizes; only Life, self-affecting immanence that "ipseizes" each Living Thing, truly appears. Phenomenology must be reversed into a "material phenomenology" owing nothing to form or essence.
Derrida never accepted phenomenology as such, yet treated the reduction as a "resource of deconstruction". The trace shows the transcendental contaminated by the empirical, so there is never full presence and no "phenomenology as such"; the specter, neither presence nor absence, becomes the paradigm, and the gift is never given purely. One can neither adopt phenomenology naively nor leave it.
Jean-Luc Marion frees phenomena from intentionality and from being: after Husserl's reduction to the object and Heidegger's to being comes a third, to givenness (donation). Phenomena are ranked by degrees: poor in intuition (objects, controllable) or saturated, exceeding what a subject can constitute.
Marion's typology of saturated phenomena as Sebbah reports it.
The reduction and Janicaud's charge
Dominique Janicaud accused this family of a "theological turn", against a "minimalist" phenomenology. Sebbah declines both the charge and its dismissal. Every phenomenologist tears attention from what appears to appearing itself ("the greatest teaching of reduction is the impossibility of a complete reduction"). The second family radicalizes Husserl's drive to the originary but must identify it as the unidentifiable. Hence a double bind: either excess (endless deconstruction of every origin named) or "excess of excess" (declaring success, which risks pseudo-evidence, a naive positing of a being beyond appearance, the capitalized Other and Life that Janicaud mocked). This phenomenology cannot stabilize; Sebbah calls it "sporadic" (clignotante), and its question to readers is "How will you make good use of me?"
Henry's Christ
In I am the Truth, Henry must explain how each Living Thing gains ipseity from a sovereign Life. His answer is Christ as "First Living" and "Archi-Son", a transcendental event that has always already happened yet is singular. Sebbah asks whether Christ is imported from outside to solve a problem the phenomenology of Life could not solve by its own means: a motif undiminished by the epoché that identifies the originary source of all giving.
Sebbah's diagnosis of the double bind in radical French phenomenology.
Janicaud's charge and Sebbah's reply
Sebbah frames the field through Dominique Janicaud's polemic: on one side a "theological turn" in Levinas, Henry and Marion; on the other a "minimalist" phenomenology, cured of fascination with the originary and of the pretension to be first philosophy. Sebbah accepts the problem but not the verdict. He does not diagnose a simple escape from phenomenology in Henry or Levinas; he tries to show why their desire for reduction pushes them to the edge.
- Merleau-Ponty's lesson. "The greatest teaching of reduction is the impossibility of a complete reduction": the first family brackets in order to return to the horizon of the World, never to an absolute founder.
- Radicalized radicalism. The second family, suspecting with Patočka that Husserl's transcendental subjectivity is a speculative construction left outside the epoché, seeks something more originary, and so subjectivity, now passive and summoned, takes the central place.
- Two risks. Such a reduction can become hyperbolic, transgressing the constraints of appearance; or it can hypostatize at the worst moment, finding a "term" after the break (Janicaud denounced the capital letters of the Other and Life).
- Excess of excess. The desire is contradictory at base: a phenomenology of excess risks falling victim to excess itself.
Why the second family courts the charge of theology, after Sebbah.
Derrida, Marion, the face and Christ
Derrida is significantly absent from Janicaud's list, because his test of the limit never claims to open onto a beyond the phenomenon as Husserl defined it. He could call the reduction a "resource of deconstruction": reduction means receiving phenomena without reservation, which Derrida radicalizes as exposure, "saying yes" to the limitless arrival of what comes. Sebbah follows two threads, the trace and the gift: the specter is neither purely life nor death nor their mixture but originary "survival", all life being survival "from the origin".
Marion's decisive step changes Husserl's "can offer" into "offers". If a phenomenon truly "shows itself" (Heidegger's definition), nothing may precede and condition it, least of all categories of a constituting subject; questions of "What right?" or "What condition of possibility?" miss the phenomenon. Marion builds a typology of saturated phenomena, crowned by revelation as the "paradox of paradoxes", and exempts himself from rational theology (beings and their causal relation to a "super-being"), insisting that revealed theology is a separate matter he does not produce. Sebbah earlier argued against Réduction et donation that Marion validates Janicaud's objection; with the saturated phenomenon that objection seems "exceeded".
| Question | Levinas | Marion | Derrida | Henry |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Does excess return to a positivity? | Yes: ethical language; for Schonfeld "a Jewish God ... of Exodus" | Yes: givenness offers itself fully | No: trace to trace, archi-trace "first" | Yes: Life's self-revelation, felt in suffering |
| Measure of authentic phenomenality | Face: "frankness" and "expression" | Saturation beyond intentional limits | Testing the limit without crossing | Immanent proof of auto-affection |
The face in Levinas has two decisive traits, frankness and expression: it "speaks", so it is given fully and, beyond the visible, as ethical language. Read this way, Sebbah notes, this Levinas would suit Marion; two ways of practicing excess take shape, one that holds to the limit (Derrida, the trace-reading of Levinas) and one that fulfills it (Marion, the speaking face).
Henry turns in I am the Truth to the figure of Christ. He had been reproached for "forcing" Descartes (1985) and Marx (1976) into his phenomenology of Life; with Christianity the question reverses. Sebbah asks whether Henry's phenomenology of Life has been surreptitiously subordinated to a motif foreign to it, while Henry would say he merely recognized in Christianity an exemplary revelation of Life's own movement.
Intentionality (J. N. Mohanty)
Brentano defined mental phenomena (acts: believing, desiring) by the "intentional (or mental) in-existence of an object"; no physical phenomenon has it. Husserl, Brentano's pupil, adopted it only later: in 1894 he overcame Brentano's "immanentism" by distinguishing intuitive from representative presentations, the latter aimed at what is not given and "fulfilled" when it is.
In the Logical Investigations the thesis comes in three stages: a semantic one (an expression means something and refers via its meaning, an ideal species), a psychological one (the Fifth: not all experiences are intentional, sensations are not; and intentionality is not a relation between two things present), and an epistemic one (the Sixth: knowledge as fulfillment, truth as evidence). Perception works by apperception, an act-character that "ensouls" sensory primary contents (later hyle); hence Brentano discovered intentionality but missed its objectifying role.
After the epoché (1905), the act's correlate becomes the noema, with a nucleus of predicates around a unifying X and a thetic character.
| Reading of the noema | What it is |
|---|---|
| Psychological | Total content of the appearing object before the epoché |
| Logical | Ideal Sinn that makes propositions and theories possible |
| Semantic function | From possible worlds to actual individuals |
| Transcendental | The object itself as it appears within the epoché |
Heidegger, "captivated" by the Investigations for fifteen years but set on his path by Brentano's work on the manifold senses of being in Aristotle, attacks two misreadings: intentionality as an extant relation between two extant things, and as something inside the subject. It belongs to Dasein's being, "always already with other beings", and rests on deeper structures. His 1920 lectures split meaning into content-sense, relational sense and enactment-sense (Vollzugsinn), the last the key.
How intentionality deepens across the tradition, after Mohanty.
Merleau-Ponty adds four themes. Operative intentionality is the lived world "as already there" (after Kant's "hidden art" and the late Husserl); feelings and desires are intentional without being acts, reversing Brentano's priority of the objectifying. Bodily intentionality: the body is a "motor project"; reaching for a tumbler is not thought then motion. Degrees of transparency: against Sartre's wholly transparent, contentless consciousness, intentionality never grasps its object whole; absolute positing would be "death of consciousness". And there is no prior gap to bridge: we are "through and through compounded of relationships with the world".
Brentano's formula read closely
Mohanty notes that intentionality antedates Brentano: it is in the scholastics and, further back, in Aristotle, so Brentano's famous sentence has Aristotelian overtones. The full formula speaks of "reference to a content, direction upon an object (which is not to be understood here as meaning a thing), or immanent objectivity", and adds that every mental phenomenon includes an object within itself, "although they do not all do so in the same way". Three questions follow: what counts as mental versus physical phenomena, what "object" means, and how acts can "contain" an object. For Brentano mental phenomena are acts named by gerundial nouns (believing, desiring, hoping), not contents such as images or sense data.
Husserl's three stages, step by step
- Semantic stage (First Investigation). "Each expression not merely says something, but says it of something"; the object "never coincides with the meaning". The Bedeutung is an ideal species whose instances are the acts that intend it. The likeness to Frege is close, but Mohanty warns against concluding Husserl borrowed it.
- Psychological stage (Fifth). Between the widest concept of consciousness (the whole of mental life) and the narrowest (inner perception of one's experiences), Husserl carves a middle region of intentional experiences, the technical "act", freed from any suggestion of willed activity. He drops "mental phenomena" because of the ambiguities of Brentano's inner perception.
- No relation of two things. "Only one thing is present, an intentional experience", and if it is present "eo ipso" the relation to an object is achieved. There is no consciousness first, hooked to an object later: consciousness is already of this object and no other.
- Two-layer act. The act confers sense on primary contents (sensory complexes, later hyletic data) and so objectivates, making an object possible, to which it then refers; "first" and "then" are logical, not temporal.
- Utterances too. A meaning-giving act supervenes on an acoustic primary content, which is interpreted so that the hearer grasps a meaning.
- Epistemic stage (Sixth). Meaning intention and meaning fulfillment become the frame for knowledge, and truth becomes evidence, the experienced coincidence of the meant and the given.
The structure of an objectifying act in the Logical Investigations, as Mohanty reconstructs it.
| Thinker | Where intentionality lives | What grounds it |
|---|---|---|
| Brentano | Mental acts, all of them | Irreducible directedness |
| Husserl (LI) | Acts only; sensations excluded | Sense-giving over hyle; ideal meanings |
| Husserl (Ideas) | Noesis and noema | Transcendental constitution after the epoché |
| Heidegger | Dasein's comportments | Transcendence, being-in-the-world, temporality |
| Merleau-Ponty | Body and lived world | Operative intentionality before acts |
Mohanty's account turns on one move: Husserl made intentionality non-relational, an achievement inside a single experience, and every later deepening keeps that refusal of a gap between mind and world.
Consciousness (Charles Siewert)
Phenomenological accounts are neither causal nor reductive: they are general descriptions one can understand by being someone to whom they apply.
Brentano: consciousness as inner perception
Descriptive psychology ("psychognosy") was to ground genetic psychology, logic, ethics and aesthetics. Mental phenomena are intentional and divide into presentations, judgments and emotional-volitional acts. Every mental act also perceives itself, so all mental phenomena are conscious, and inner perception is infallible. Brentano answers four objections.
| Objection | Brentano's reply |
|---|---|
| Comte: perception needs a split between perceiver and perceived | Inner observation is impossible (attending alters the state), but inner perception is not |
| Infinite regress of perceptions | Inner perception is part of the act it perceives, grasped "incidentally", "secondarily" |
| Unconscious mental states explain more | Case by case, better explanations exist without them |
| One subject's data are not science | Study widely shared types, in critical dialogue with others |
Husserl: the stream and the residuum
Logical Investigation V separates three senses: (a) whatever belongs to someone's stream, (b) the object of inner awareness, (c) any intentional act. Husserl favors (a): (b) threatens regress and assumes an undemonstrable "unbroken activity of inner perception", and (a) includes non-intentional sensations, so it outruns (c). Ideas I grounds this in perception: a cube is given by adumbrations, and seen as cubical only through anticipated further views, its horizon. Since spatial experience never guarantees its object ("the possibility of the non-being of the world is never excluded"), we can judge about experience without positing spatial things; this is the reduction, made possible by insight, not an evil demon. Consciousness is the phenomenological residuum.
Self-givenness differs: a mental process so given cannot fail to exist, so reflection can have adequate evidence. But this awareness is non-positing, like the unattended surround; inner-time consciousness adds retention, which is non-positing and non-objectivating. In the second edition of the Investigations Husserl adds a pure ego: reflection finds not only a unity but a unifier, the source of activity.
Both founders keep Cartesian roots
The existential reception
Heidegger criticized Husserl for neglecting "the being of consciousness", then stopped talking of consciousness, hearing in it Descartes's inner/outer split and an illusory "problem of knowledge"; Dasein's being is practical encounter with equipment. Siewert suggests Heidegger's "ways of showing" and pre-ontological self-understanding could still be read as a theory of consciousness, though Heidegger would see this as a relapse into the old ontology.
Sartre keeps the vocabulary: every positing consciousness of an object includes a non-positing consciousness of itself (counting cigarettes), on pain of an "unconscious consciousness". But, against Husserl, it contains no ego; attributing reflected consciousness to an ego is false. Consciousness "is what it is not", hence radical, vertiginous freedom.
Husserl's case against inner perception, in four steps
Siewert lists the reasons Husserl prefers the stream sense (a) over Brentano's inner awareness (b):
- Regress. If everything conscious in sense (a) must also be conscious in sense (b), "grave difficulties" follow, above all an infinite regress.
- Undemonstrable fix. Brentano's solution assumes an "unbroken activity of inner perception" that phenomenology cannot show.
- Ambiguity. "Inner perception" is ambiguous; taken narrowly as adequate perception (attributing no more than is strictly given) it is philosophically preferable, but still not coextensive with (a).
- Non-intentional contents. Sense (a) includes but is not limited to intentional acts, so (a) and (c) must be kept apart.
Early on Husserl also marks out (a) by Cartesian doubt: what is conscious is what would be untouched by the method of doubt. Experience in sense (a) is necessarily someone's, and the self-concept involved is expressible only by "occasional" (indexical) words such as "I", resistant to rephrasing in general terms. The transcendental reduction goes further than bracketing particular spatial objects; it yields "pure consciousness", and the pure ego found there involves agency.
Two Cartesian-rooted conceptions the existentialists inherited
How the three heirs received the legacy
Heidegger, before Being and Time, charged Husserl with neglecting "the question of the being of consciousness" and the sense of being altogether. He hears in "consciousness" a Cartesian opposition of inner mind and external world that manufactures a "problem of knowledge". Siewert proposes a charitable reading: Heidegger is not ignoring consciousness but rejecting the inner-perception and residuum conceptions, and his ready-to-hand and present-at-hand become the basic classifications of how beings show themselves. Dasein's preontological understanding of its being may continue Brentano's implicit self-perception and Husserl's non-positional self-consciousness.
Sartre keeps the vocabulary. Every positing consciousness of an object includes a non-positing consciousness of itself; otherwise we would have the absurdity of an "unconscious consciousness", as when one is counting cigarettes and inarticulately aware of counting. But in Transcendence of the Ego he denies one is non-positionally conscious of oneself: consciousness is direction to a transcendent object, essentially negative, "what it is not", and so radically free, incompatible with an enduring self of stable character.
Merleau-Ponty treats consciousness piecemeal, in three domains: sensory, emotive and volitional, and intellectual. Perceiving space means anticipating in movement, a "motor-intentional", non-representational awareness whose subject is a body-subject. Contra Sartre, ascribing such a background to the self is not bad faith; sensorimotor skills make intelligible the situations in which choice arises.
Siewert's survey shows phenomenology splitting not over whether consciousness matters but over whether it is a region that can be detached from the world and known without error.
The Lifeworld and Lived Experience (Martin Jay)
The charge
Derrida put experience "under erasure": it "has always designated the relationship with a presence". Foucault contrasted phenomenology's reflective grasp of daily life with the limit-experience of Nietzsche, Bataille and Blanchot, which "tears" the subject from itself; Deleuze praised Foucault for converting phenomenology to epistemology, with no "savage experience" beneath knowledge. Lyotard held that experience presupposes a self-forming I, and that "Auschwitz" ruled out speaking of experience at all.
Husserl: from essences to the lifeworld
The irony is that phenomenology began against an experience-based theory: psychologism, the genetic reduction of ideas to their contexts. Husserl separated genesis from validity and disdained Protagorean "man is the measure". Yet he made a fresh kind of experience the site where essential truths appear, through intentionality, the epoché and eidetic intuition. The question became not "what do I experience?" but "what is my experience?" (Crisis). Experience was widened, as in pragmatism and hermeneutics, but aimed at Platonic-sounding ideal truths, a "logic of experience" (Lauer).
Jay's itinerary of "experience" through phenomenology.
Experience begins "dumb", needing to be brought to expression; indication (a smile indicates joy) differs from expression, a distinction Merleau-Ponty and Derrida later challenged. In Experience and Judgment every predicative judgment is grounded in prepredicative experience and a "retrogression" to the lifeworld. For followers who rejected his scientific ideals, this was the legacy: "we exist before we reflect" (Merleau-Ponty). It fed Merleau-Ponty's Marxism, studies of the Leib/Körper distinction, Fanon's analyses of race, and attention to the practices beneath "value-neutral" science, though seeking specific lifeworlds went against Husserl's essentialism.
Heidegger: from suspicion to Ereignis
Heidegger first distrusted "experience" (even Dilthey's Erlebnis) as an inner event cut off from body and world: moods disclose the world. Schrag judged that he never faced the question squarely. But a different notion emerged, close to Benjamin's revalued Erfahrung: in the 1950 Hegel commentary, "experience is Being"; in "On the Way to Language", to undergo an experience is to be struck, overwhelmed and transformed, "not of our making". Ereignis ("appropriation", "en-owning") is a rupture, linked to danger (Gefahr) and to the "Fahrt" of a journey that does not return home.
| Hegel | Heidegger | |
|---|---|---|
| Experience | A journey of the subject's Bildung | An event that befalls us; Dasein owned by Being |
| End | Recollection, parousia, full presence | Suspended search; commemorates oblivion |
| Lack | Overcome | Confirmed |
The critics' words, and what Husserl actually excluded
Jay quotes the charges precisely. Derrida (Of Grammatology) calls experience an "unwieldy" concept belonging to metaphysics, usable only sous rature, and faults phenomenology's naive belief that "all experience is the experience of meaning". Foucault (The Order of Things) calls phenomenology "a description, empirical despite itself, of actual experience", and in 1978 interviews with Duccio Trombadori describes its experience as a reflective regard on daily life "in its transitory form". Lyotard, once a follower of Merleau-Ponty, says in The Differend (1983) that experience presupposes an I that forms itself (Bildung) by temporal synthesis, and, after Adorno, that one cannot speak of experience in the "Auschwitz" model.
- Psychologism defined. In the 1900 Investigations it meant the genetic reduction of ideas to their contingent experiential context, individual or social; even a species-wide philosophical anthropology was suspect.
- The targets. Protagorean "man is the measure", J. S. Mill's inductive empiricism, and any confusion of conviction with an a priori criterion of truth. The ideal content might be mathematical (Frege), logical, or values (the neo-Kantian Rickert).
- Doxa to episteme. Husserl wanted to transcend everyday doxa for episteme; "true beginnings, or origins, or rizomata panton" stand outside the moment. Self-responsible philosophers accept only what they have directly experienced.
- Existence bracketed. No logical law "implies a matter of fact", not even the existence of presentations or judgments.
- Founded and simple. In Experience and Judgment, "founded experiences" (active reflection) rest on passive "simple experiences", and prepredicative experience is the "self-evidence of objects".
How the concept of experience travels through phenomenology in Jay's account.
De-transcendentalized lifeworlds and Heidegger's reluctance
Grounding judgment in passive experience let phenomenology serve progressive politics: Merleau-Ponty's Marxism (which he later doubted) and, via Sartre and Merleau-Ponty, Frantz Fanon's account of race relations. It was a short step to the historically and culturally specific lifeworlds Husserl's essentialism had tried to deny.
Heidegger at first avoided "experience" altogether. Even Dilthey's Erlebnis, elevated over scientific Erfahrung, suggested an inner event separate from body and world; moods disclose the world rather than express interiority. Calvin Schrag judged that Heidegger never reached a consistent position: Being and Time relegates philosophies of experience to subjectivism; Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics (1929) separates the Critique from a philosophy of experience; only the late Unterwegs zur Sprache ties experience to language.
The turn came in Heidegger's 1950 gloss on Hegel in Holzwege (Hegel's Concept of Experience). He rejects the knowing subject's priority, the recuperation of alienation in the Fahrt of Erfahrung, and parousia, yet keeps Hegel's link: "Experience is Being". Erfahrung is tied to Gefahr (danger), as with technology. In Beiträge (written late 1930s, published 1989) Charles Scott finds a thought "not his to own", exploring without a destination; Bernasconi sums up: Hegel is tied to the rule of presencing, Heidegger commemorates it, "letting the non-apparent appear as non-apparent". Jay compares Heidegger's move to Walter Benjamin's rescue of Erfahrung against Erlebnis.
Jay's conclusion is that phenomenology itself produced the idea of experience without a subject, shared in other vocabularies by pragmatists, Critical Theorists and post-structuralists, so the critics' target was a caricature of one French variant.
Husserl's Reductions and the Role They Play in His Phenomenology (Dagfinn Føllesdal)
"Reduction" in Philosophy of Arithmetic (1891) meant reducing "18 + 49" to the standard form "67". The Logical Investigations (1900/1) have no reductions; from Ideas (1913) through First Philosophy, Cartesian Meditations and the Crisis they are central. Some readers find them so enigmatic that they discard Husserl's whole transcendental philosophy; Føllesdal offers a reading that fits the texts and makes sense.
Noema, noesis, hyle
Husserl's favorite example is a die. We see six sides, some visible, others reachable by moving; squares look like polygons. We are unaware of these anticipations until something goes wrong: if there is no rear side, we reflect, and may restructure the experience (three squares forming a corner). No stage of perception guarantees success.
Against Brentano, Husserl asks about acts with no object (Pegasus, the largest prime) and how an act relates to its object. His answer is a meaning associated with the act, the noema: the structure of all our "anticipations", including tacit cultural and bodily ones, and the recognition that the object is transcendent, exceeding any anticipation. The noema is "a generalization of the notion of meaning to the field of all acts", parallel to Frege's Sinn. The noesis is the meaning-giving experience; the hyle are sensory experiences that fill or frustrate anticipations, causing an "explosion" of the noema when they conflict. Hyle constrain but never fix the object uniquely, as ambiguous Gestalt pictures show; their constraint is what gives perception its reality character, absent in fantasy.
Three reductions
The eidetic reduction shifts from this die (inherited from a grandfather, an eighth of an ounce) to its cubic form: the anticipations become a subset (eight corners, twelve edges, but none about this die), hence "reduction". Eidetic sciences use free variation, mostly in imagination, which Husserl knew from Bolzano and his teacher Weierstrass. The transcendental reduction is a change of focus from object to act, an epoché that brackets the object without doubting it and reveals the noesis, noema, hyle and transcendental ego. Husserl calls these "transcendental", which Føllesdal glosses as "hidden" yet indispensable for our experience, as against "transcendent", "inexhaustible".
| Directed at individuals | Directed at essences | |
|---|---|---|
| Natural / eidetic attitude | 1. Physical objects: natural science | 2. Eide: mathematics and eidetic sciences |
| After transcendental reduction | 3. Noema, noesis, hyle of such acts: "metaphysics" (e.g., death in its uniqueness) | 4. Noema, noesis, hyle of acts toward essences: phenomenology |
Føllesdal's map of the reductions (after Figures 8.1 to 8.3).
The order matters: transcendental then eidetic would yield the essential features of acts directed at individuals, a different domain. Husserl usually goes eidetic first, though a few texts allow either order.
The die, essences and the four quadrants
Føllesdal's die makes the natural attitude concrete: this object weighs about one-eighth of an ounce and was inherited from my grandfather, so I would not swap it for another. But with the same light reaching my eyes I can attend instead to its cubic form, the five dots facing me (arithmetical), its topology, colour or weight. Each such feature is an eidos. An essence for Husserl is shared by many objects, not a unique "individual essence"; any similarity between objects points to one, from colours to "humanity".
- Why "reduction". Aiming at the cube form, I expect eight corners and twelve edges but have no anticipations about this particular die; the eidetic act carries a subset of the anticipations of the perceptual act.
- Tacit anticipations. The noema includes "anticipations" taken over from culture and even bodily settings we could hardly describe; and it includes the recognition that the object outruns them all, which is what transcendent means.
- Frege parallel. Husserl handles objectless acts as Frege handles expressions without reference; in the unfinished Ideas III "the noema is nothing but a generalization of the notion of meaning (Bedeutung) to the field of all acts". Frege was taciturn about Sinn; Husserl discussed the noema at length.
- Noesis and hyle. Noeses are temporal experiences, noemata timeless structures. Hyle constrain which noeses are possible but not down to uniqueness: there is always slack, visible in the Gestalt psychologists' ambiguous pictures, and the constraint grounds the difference between reality and fantasy.
- Two words kept apart. Transcendent means inexhaustible; transcendental means hidden but indispensable for experience. The reductions concern the second.
- Empiricism without physicalism. Husserl calls himself an empiricist but says philosophers jumped too fast to the view that only physical objects exist. Imagined variants serve as well as real ones; variation proves existence results, while negative results need other considerations.
| Quadrant (Figure 8.3) | Objects of acts | Discipline |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Concrete physical objects | Natural science |
| 2 | Eide reached by the eidetic reduction | Mathematics and other eidetic sciences |
| 3 | Noema, noesis, hyle of acts aimed at physical objects | Metaphysics (Føllesdal's label) |
| 4 | Noema, noesis, hyle of acts aimed at essences | Phenomenology |
The four quadrants the reductions open, after Føllesdal's Figure 8.3.
Order matters: transcendental first and eidetic second would give the essential features of acts aimed at concrete objects, not the acts aimed at essences that Husserl calls phenomenology, though a few texts seem to allow either order.
Categorial Intuition (Dieter Lohmar)
In "The book is green", the book and the green can be fulfilled by perception, but what fulfills "being green", or "one", "and", "all", "not"? Simple intuition gives its object "in one blow" and is not founded; categorial intuition is founded (one-sidedly) on simple acts, intends new categorial objects (states of affairs), and has degrees of intuitivity. Husserl analyzes only basic forms (identification, relation, collection, eidetic abstraction) as patterns for the rest.
Three stages
(1) A simple, unstructured perception of the whole (Gesamtwahrnehmung), in which the parts are implicitly intended. (2) Subdividing acts (gliedernde Akte) make a part explicit: the door is intended by way of its blue; this is no new object but a new mode of the same one. In the transition comes a synthesis of coincidence: the same door, and its color is this blue. Both founding intentions are intuitively fulfilled, which secures the "reality" claim and separates knowledge from hearsay. (3) A new categorial act intends the elements synthetically: the door takes the form of a substrate, blue of a quality.
Eidetic intuition and collection
Eidetic intuition (Wesensschau) is categorial intuition founded on running through many blue things, perceived or imagined; the coincidence among them presents blueness. It cannot rest on signitive acts alone, but one real example suffices, since imagination can vary it; later Husserl holds free variation necessary, to avoid contingently shared features. Higher-order essences ("color", "act of consciousness") are built the same way. Collection ("a and b") is the exception: it has no coincidence to rely on, since one can collect "7 and justice and Napoleon"; the act of combining fulfills itself. So collections are not yet knowledge and not states of affairs.
| Form | Founding acts | What fulfills it |
|---|---|---|
| Predication ("door is blue") | Whole and subdividing perceptions | Synthesis of coincidence of partial intentions |
| Eidetic intuition ("blueness") | Series of perceived or imagined cases | Coincidence across the variation |
| Collection ("a and b") | Acts directed at a and b | The synthetic act "and" itself |
Fine points of Lohmar's defence
Lohmar opens against critics who find the theory opaque or simply wrong, and against the suspicion that Husserl later abandoned it. His reconstruction adds several precise points to the three stages.
- Not double apperception. The shift from whole to subdivided perception is not two apperceptions of the same sense contents yielding two objects; it is a different mode of one object (Sonderwahrnehmung), the door "by way of" its blue.
- What coincides. The synthesis of coincidence joins intentional moments of acts, not similar hyletic data (reelle Bestände); sensory overlap may occur but does not carry categorial intuitivity.
- Knowledge must be performed. Everyday life is full of such coincidences, so we "have everything needed" for knowledge, yet we actually carry out the categorial apperception only when it is relevant to practice.
- Founding stays alive. A live question is how far the founding acts' intuitivity and thetic quality (Setzungsqualität) remain present in the third stage; their sensory fulfilment is what licenses the reality claim.
- A hard consequence. If evidence needs intuitive founding, axiomatic mathematics, built wholly in signitive intentions without sensory fulfilment, would not count as evident knowledge.
- Collections. What represents a collection may be the inner perception of performing the collecting act; a collection becomes useful only when we make further judgments about the set.
- Science at stake. Husserl still called the Investigations "descriptive psychology", yet phenomenology was to be no collector of arbitrary facts; its scientific claim stands or falls with eidetic intuition as a justified form of categorial intuition.
Lohmar's three stages of categorial intuition, Sixth Investigation section 48.
Temporality (John B. Brough and William Blattner)
Husserl: the consciousness of time
Husserl called time the most important and most difficult phenomenological problem. His topic is not clock time but time-consciousness. Now, past and future are not containers or parts of objects but modes of appearance. Against the "prejudice of the now", which would lock us in the present, the now is relative ("refers to a 'past'") yet privileged: the point of orientation, the "generative point" open to the new, "the source-point of all temporal positions", and "a continuous moment of individuation". "Time is fixed, and yet time flows."
To hear a melody, each phase of the act must reach beyond the now and modify what it holds, or we would hear "a disharmonious tangle of sound". Hence a threefold intentionality.
| Moment | What it does | Not to be confused with |
|---|---|---|
| Primal impression | Presents a new phase "in person" as now | A point cut off from past and future |
| Retention | Holds the just-elapsed as past, a dependent moment of an act | Memory, an independent re-presenting act; an echo, a weak present tone |
| Protention | Opens to what is coming | Expectation, a full act rehearsing the future |
Acts themselves are temporal objects in immanent time, lived through non-thetically. They are constituted by "the absolute time-constituting flow", absolute as the ultimate stratum, not metaphysically. Its double intentionality constitutes acts in internal time and is aware of itself as one flow; retention does both at once. So my life stays one across "the diaspora of time", and absence is intended as absence, not through surrogates.
Both: temporality is absolute and self-constituting
Heidegger: futural, finite temporality
Heidegger edited the lectures and put temporality at the center of Being and Time. He accepts Husserl's three theses in modified form: temporality as final horizon of intelligibility (Basic Problems), double intentionality (our own being co-retained and co-protended), and the ecstatic-horizonal unity that "carries Dasein away" to a world: "the world ... temporalizes itself in temporality". But for Heidegger Dasein is a social agent, not a consciousness. To understand oneself is to be able to manage being who one is: "pressing ahead", "coming-towards-oneself". Who I am lies in who I am trying to be. The teacher's chalk is made present by pressing ahead into teaching. And this future is finite: self-understanding is an ultimate horizon with no further "for-the-sake-of", and the question whether time is infinite gets no grip on it.
Sartre and Merleau-Ponty
Sartre restates Heidegger in consciousness-friendly terms and wrongly charges Husserl with being trapped in the now; Husserl is centered on the now, not trapped, and only a shift to engaged action escapes that orientation. Merleau-Ponty puts embodiment at the center and connects what Heidegger left unconnected: thrownness, the unity of the ecstases, and freedom.
Further distinctions in the time lectures
- Timeless objects too. The Pythagorean theorem is bound to no moment, yet we intend it as escaping time only against the temporality of the rest of experience; and the act of thinking it is itself a temporal object.
- Why preservation alone fails. Without retaining elapsed tones I would hear a single note; with retention but no modification, a simultaneous tangle. The phases must sink in modified form.
- Collecting versus re-collecting. Memory (last week's dinner in the restaurant) is an independent act that re-presents by running through a constituted perception again; retention "collects" the past for the first time, in immediate relation to the now. It is intentional, "not like the retention of fluids in the body", and "transcends itself and posits something as being, namely as being past".
- Protention's openness. It is essential that there be "an intention directed toward what is to come, even if not toward continuations involving the same temporal object". Husserl says less about it, perhaps because the future is indeterminate.
Heidegger's three theses, inherited and moved
Heidegger was Husserl's assistant and protégé; as an associate professor at Marburg he was asked to edit the lectures. Being and Time makes time "the horizon for the understanding of Being". Brough and Blattner set aside his larger project of an ontology of being in general grounded in Dasein's temporality as alien to Husserl and "less phenomenologically oriented".
| Sense of "absolute" | Husserl | Heidegger |
|---|---|---|
| 1 Ultimate foundation of intentionality | The time-constituting flow | Ecstatic unity of temporality as final horizon (Basic Problems) |
| 2 Self-constituting | Double intentionality of the flow | Our own being co-retained and co-protended (Basic Problems section 19b) |
| 3 Condition of any object-awareness | Time as horizon of object-consciousness | Ecstatic-horizonal unity; Dasein's transcendence (Being and Time section 69c) |
| Orientation | The now, infinite horizons | The future, finite self-understanding |
The teacher example shows the reversal: I make the chalk and lectern present by availing myself of them, and this making-present depends on my pressing ahead into being a teacher. Merleau-Ponty draws on Heidegger's remarks that we "never have power over our ownmost being from the ground up" and have been "released from our ground ... so as to be as this ground".
Four phenomenologies of time compared, after Brough and Blattner.
The Roots of Existentialism (Hubert L. Dreyfus)
Greeks and Hebrews
| Greek (Socrates, Plato) | Hebrew / Christian | |
|---|---|---|
| Knowledge | Disinterested theory; timeless truths for all rational beings | Total commitment to a covenant; truth local and historical |
| Ethics | Universal rules; the gods love the pious because it is pious (Euthyphro) | Good because God commands it; Abraham's command was for Abraham |
| Reality | Eternal; history cycles; self-realization, "die to the body" | Everything significant happens in history; rebirth possible |
Other cultures have complementary traditions (Taoism and Confucianism); ours are opposed: one gives us our ability to think, the other our deepest experiences. Christian thinkers tried to put the Hebrew revelation into Greek concepts: Augustine (Platonic) with disastrous results, Aquinas (Aristotelian) somewhat better, until Descartes simply equated the philosophers' God with the God of Abraham.
Pascal
A generation after Descartes, Pascal's overwhelming experience ("God of Abraham, God of Isaac, God of Jacob, not of philosophers"), kept on his person, revealed a living, hidden God (Deus absconditus). Comparing cultures, he saw humans have no essence: "Custom is our nature." The self has no nature but a structure: not a Platonic combination in which one factor is inessential, but an unstable synthesis: "What a chimera then is man! ... What a monster". Greatness lies in "touching both extremes at once", but Pascal says little about how to do it.
Kierkegaard
Against Hegel, the last attempt to synthesize the two heritages, Kierkegaard sharpened the opposition: truth is subjectivity, the individual is higher than the universal, eternity is possible only in time. The self is "a relation that relates to itself", a synthesis of infinite and finite, temporal and eternal, freedom and necessity, established by another.
Kierkegaard's stances of the self (after Figure 11.1).
R1, spiritlessness: Pascal's distraction (tennis, geometry), which Kierkegaard found above all in the anonymous Public Sphere, now in talk shows and internet chat. Negative R2: deny one factor (Plato the body, Lucretius the soul); the mystic cannot bring God to bear on whether to take a walk. Positive R2: try to express both alone; absolute possibility is the aesthetic sphere, absolute facticity fatalism. All end in despair, which, unlike sadness, has "the dialectic of eternity": once it appears, one was in despair all along.
The teleological suspension of the ethical. Kierkegaard alone among existentialists values the ethical (critical rationality overcomes "so-called subjectivity"); yet faith puts the individual above the universal, so in public terms Abraham is a murderer. How tell a Knight of Faith from the killer in Fritz Lang's M, the cortisone-maddened father in Bigger than Life, The Shining, Manson or Hitler? Three negative criteria: the knight must be free (able to repent), must respect the ethical (no "vagrant genius" like Raskolnikov), and must not invent a new universal ("the false knight is sectarian"). Dreyfus's example is a homosexual "lad" in 1850 Denmark. Only a conflicted culture can be truly historical. The "power that established" the self, Dreyfus now argues, is not a super-being but "the fact that everything is possible", incarnate in the God-man, the Paradigm who first revealed that both factors are essential; but the object of a defining relation need not be Christ ("the passion of the infinite is the decisive factor").
Dostoyevsky
| Karamazov | Stance of the heart | Kierkegaard's term |
|---|---|---|
| Fyodor | Drink and women as distraction | R1, unconscious despair |
| Ivan | Detached intellectual: "Ivan's a tomb" | Negative R2, not wanting to be oneself |
| Dmitri | "God and the devil are fighting there" | Positive R2, flipping between factors |
| Alyosha | Defining commitment to Father Zossima | R3, faith "by virtue of the absurd" |
Ivan's "Rebellion" returns his ticket because of children's suffering; the flaw is not the argument but the spectator's stance behind it, since we are all involved and responsible. The Grand Inquisitor is no existential gospel, pace Berdyaev: Catholic "slavery" and a Protestant Christ of total freedom are both wrong, and Book VI "A Russian Monk" offers the Orthodox answer, God as an "ocean of love". Dostoyevsky existentializes the sacraments: the German doctor's nuts and "Gott der Vater" baptize Dmitri; Alyosha founds a church of twelve boys at the stone, with a sacred memory of Ilusha that later events cannot change, ending "Hurrah for Karamazov!"
Nietzsche's account of the death of God as Dreyfus reads it.
Nietzsche, the anti-existentialist
The madman's "God is dead ... we have killed him" means philosophers and scientists found out the truth about God: there is no God's-eye view, "only a perspective seeing". Christian truthfulness destroyed Christianity, and the collapse of "the whole of our European morality" is impending; Ivan's "geological cataclysm" shows Dostoyevsky "invented Nietzsche in order to refute him". For Nietzsche the news is a "new dawn": new gods, values and selves; "convictions are prisons". In refusing any absolute he is an anti-existentialist, though he shares the founders' core: no human nature, history over eternity, commitment over principle, the involved view over detached theory.
Kierkegaard's map of the self, and what each founder offers against despair
Dreyfus fixes the timeline: Augustine (354-430) read Christianity through Plato and could not make sense of creation, the Incarnation or the command to sacrifice Isaac; Aquinas did better with Aristotle; Descartes (1596-1650) simply identified the philosophers' eternal, intelligible God with the God of Abraham. Pascal (1623-62) broke that identity, and two hundred years later Kierkegaard, the first to call himself an existential thinker, turned Pascal against Hegel. At 22 he wrote in his journal that what he lacked was to be clear "what I am to do, not what I am to know"; the Postscript compresses this as "Truth is subjectivity".
Dreyfus's Figure 11.1 simplified: only R3 escapes despair.
- Paradigm shifts. Like Kuhn's revolutions, which presuppose prior commitment to a paradigm, rebirth into a new world needs an unconditional commitment already in place.
- Isolation as test. "The true Knight of Faith is always in isolation; the false knight is sectarian", and the knight lives in "constant tension".
- Universal relativized. Today we no longer share Socrates', Plato's and Kant's single rational moral vocabulary; "universal" can mean the standards of whatever group we respect, yet the Greek and Judeo-Christian worlds still collide.
- Demagicalizing. Across The Brothers Karamazov Dostoyevsky clears magic from miracles, Confession, the Incarnation, Ordination, the Apostolic Succession, the Crucifixion and the Resurrection, angels and devils, while keeping their existential meaning; Father Zossima's middle way is that where two or more gather in love, "a world of living love" forms.
| Thinker | Diagnosis | Source of resistance |
|---|---|---|
| Pascal | Self as unstable synthesis, distraction | The hidden God of the Hebrews |
| Kierkegaard | Despair, the Public Sphere | Unconditional commitment |
| Dostoyevsky | The divided Karamazov heart | Connectedness of all human beings |
| Nietzsche | The Socratic will to truth, Platonism merged with Christianity by Augustine | New gods, values and selves; cheerfulness |
| Kafka, Jaspers | K still longs for the castle's authority | Jaspers's "encompassing" |
Nietzsche's madman says "I have come too early"; aphorism 343, announcing the cataclysm, is titled "The Meaning of our Cheerfulness". He boasts of recognizing Socrates and Plato as "symptoms of decay" and adds that "man alone among all the animals has no eternal horizons". Dreyfus's closing observation: all four founders begin with a self in despair but make Christian bliss or secular cheerfulness the mark of a good life; only in the twentieth century did existential thought turn dark, in Jaspers and Heidegger, Kafka, and Sartre, "the only self-proclaimed existentialist".
Dreyfus's root claim is that existentialism is the West's conflicted inheritance made explicit: without a defining commitment the self falls into despair, and the founders differ only in what they think can hold it.
German Existence-Philosophy (Udo Tietz)
Sartre classed Jaspers as a Christian and Heidegger as an atheist existentialist; both rejected the equation with French existentialism. The term "existence-philosophy" is recent (Fritz Heinemann claimed to coin it), but the ancestor is Kierkegaard against Hegel's panlogicism.
Jaspers
Jaspers came from psychiatry (General Psychopathology, 1913) and made the Psychology of Worldviews (1919) the "birth certificate" of systematic existence-philosophy; it won him the Heidelberg chair in 1921 over Heinrich Rickert's opposition. Existence is "never objectified", the source of thought and action, freedom; it is grasped "in a leap that exceeds the capacity of rational insight". This is not hostility to science: without science "philosophizing becomes immaterial and empty". But science studies beings; philosophy the whole, the Encompassing. In limit situations, before the "nothing", thinking begins to "float" toward transcendence.
| Existence for Jaspers is | Source | Difference |
|---|---|---|
| A non-epistemic self-relation | Kierkegaard's self that relates to itself | Drops "the more conception of God, the more self" |
| A relation to transcendence | The Encompassing of all encompassing | Solitude before the "nothing", not before God |
| A communicative relation to others | Authentic choice includes the other | Unlike Heidegger and Sartre ("hell is others") |
Jaspers learned "Existenz" from Kierkegaard (from 1916) but held equally to Kant's reason. He rejected Heidegger's ontological method: existence is no existential a priori but a call to the authentic. After the war: "Freedom is only in the degree to which all are free".
Heidegger's fundamental ontology
Being and Time replaces Dilthey's hermeneutic of life with an existential analytic of Dasein: "the 'essence' of Dasein lies in its existence"; its characteristics are "possible ways for it to be". Kierkegaard seized the existentiell problem but stayed in Hegel's ontology. Fundamental ontology asks, before "what is there?", about the conditions of possibility of ontology, a transcendental analysis in Kant's sense given an ontological sense. Dasein has an ontic, an ontological and an ontic-ontological priority; being "is" only in its understanding. Understanding is first practical self-understanding ("to be itself or not itself"), then know-how and hermeneutic understanding, with a positive circle.
Tietz's reconstruction of how Heidegger loses the intersubjectivity he gained.
The gain and the loss
The gain. Husserl, constituting the other within a monad, gets only a "community of monads" (Schütz), never a shared "we-world". Heidegger's fourth chapter, a polemic against Husserl, shows "an isolated 'I' without Others" is never given; the world is a with-world; no bridge from subject to subject is needed. Unlike Dilthey's empathy, being-with is "a relationship of being from Dasein to Dasein".
The loss. Yet "the analysis of being-with only reproduces and does not overcome the theory of intersubjectivity" (Theunissen). The others appear as the "one" (das Man), with distantiality, averageness and leveling; the everyday self is inauthentic; authenticity exists only in individualization, measured by the non-relationality of death, "existential solipsism". Tietz grants the thesis of finitude: the unsurpassable possibility of death is constitutive for meaning, against Hegel's sublation; an immortal being would lose interest in lifeworldly concerns (Apel). But the further claim, that the self-understanding of one's own Dasein founds hermeneutic understanding, is backwards: "an intersubjectively shared language is the condition of the possibility of an understanding of 'death'".
So Heidegger has no room for a symmetrical I-Thou relation and opposes the dialogics of Buber, Rosenzweig and his student Karl Löwith, for whom the second person appears "only in the levelled out form of the 'other'". Meaning cannot rest on a "Humpty-Dumpty view" of language; it requires the rule-structure of shared practice. Heidegger saw that Dasein cannot bear the grounding function; the turn is "contained in advance" (Tugendhat).
Tietz on the gain and the loss in Heidegger's account of others
Jaspers and Heidegger: same road, then apart
Jaspers habilitated in 1913 with Wilhelm Windelband on General Psychopathology. He thought that "for a short time" he and Heidegger "were on the same road", which "was, in retrospect, perhaps a mistake"; he had recorded points of difference by 1928. Reason for Jaspers is "the perception into the all-connecting being encountered of every essence and every possibility, of being and of nothing". After the catastrophe of the war he wrote that the individual is himself "only when the other is also himself". Tietz sums up the three determinations of Jaspers's existence: non-epistemic self-reference, reference to the transcendent, and communicative reference to the other.
Heidegger's priorities of Dasein. The ontic priority: Dasein is defined by existence, and the sciences are its ways of being. The ontological priority: Dasein "is in itself 'ontological'", since existence determines it. The ontic-ontological priority: it is the condition for every ontology, for "only as long as Dasein is ... 'is there' Being". Meaning is "that wherein the intelligibility of something maintains itself", and "only Dasein can be meaningful or meaningless". The question of being radicalizes Dasein's own pre-ontological understanding.
Tietz's argument that Heidegger's social ontology falls back into solipsism.
How the critique is built
- From death, four consequences. Being toward death is the condition of authentic choosing; it frees Dasein from possibilities that "accidentally thrust themselves upon one"; the "one" relieves Dasein of the projection that gives identity; and this liberation happens in Jaspers's limit situations, where Dasein is brought back to its "ownmost potentiality-for-being-its-Self".
- Not cultural criticism. Heidegger did not want to write in the line of Nietzsche, Simmel, Klages or Spengler: "the 'they' is an existentiale" belonging to Dasein's positive constitution. Yet his later gloss on sections 27 and 35 calls the public "the metaphysically conditioned establishment" of objectification stemming from the dominance of subjectivity, and the Letter on Humanism diagnoses the "devastation of language".
- Skeptics. There are no "actual" skeptics; a consistent one "has obliterated Dasein in the desperation of suicide" and with it truth. Tietz notes that Heidegger never turns this meaning-critical refutation into a philosophy of language.
- Husserl's shadow. Each Cartesian Meditation "leads back to the transcendental ego", the "one and only absolute ego"; Heidegger's authentic self, "a relationship to itself under which heading nothing further can be conceived", repeats that structure.
- The exit. Being and Time already sets the course for explaining the "essence of language" from the "essence of poetry". In the later work it is being, not Dasein, that discloses worlds, a "subjectless creator of meaning", and the intersubjectivity problem simply lapses.
| Step | Heidegger's claim | Tietz's objection |
|---|---|---|
| Foundation | Understanding of existence founds hermeneutic understanding | The reverse: shared language comes first |
| Authentic speech | Silence restores relation to being | It would be a private language no one could understand |
| Others | Thou only through my transcendence | No symmetrical I-Thou (Buber, Rosenzweig, Löwith) |
Religious Existentialism (Clancy Martin)
Religious existentialism is vast (at least fifteen major figures, "apples from the tree of Kierkegaard"), and even the atheists ask spiritual questions. Gabriel Marcel, credited here with coining "existentialist", refused "Christian existentialist" as redundant.
| Thinker | God | Reason | Way to redemption |
|---|---|---|---|
| Unamuno | Limited and suffering, like us | Finds truths, not meaning | The comic: "Our Lord Don Quixote" |
| Shestov | Beyond all reason | Coercive, lazy, godless since Socrates | Faith as "perfect freedom", a "mad struggle" |
| Barth | Absolute Other, the only certainty | Pride; theology must begin from above | Humiliation, then grace "vertically from above" |
| Buber | "Closer to me than my own I" | The I-It attitude | Meeting: the I-You relation |
Miguel de Unamuno
The Tragic Sense of Life addresses "the man who is born, suffers, and dies ... above all, who dies", not the philosophers' "no-man". Reason can accept death; the person, who wants above all to go on living, cannot. This irreconcilable conflict between desire for immortality and lack of any reason to hope is the religious experience (Catholicism, keeping immortality central, does better than Protestant rational ethics). Reason finds truths; conflict creates meaning. We value what is denied us (complete communication, love that ends loneliness, self-knowledge), so life is insatiable desire and suffering, which makes personality; raised to its pitch it is anguish, the experience of a God who "suffers in each and all of us". We pity God. Redemption is comic: Quixote tilts because "the point is to tilt", creates the love he fights for ("believing is creating"), makes himself ridiculous and so makes us laugh, forgiving others' folly.
All four: Kierkegaardians against Enlightenment reason
Lev Shestov
Shaped by Dostoevsky and Nietzsche (and introduced to Kierkegaard by his friend and opponent Husserl), Shestov treats World War I as God's warning against choosing "science over faith, reason over life". The Serpent "deceived Eve, deceived Adam, deceived Anaximander": we must choose between the tree of knowledge and the tree of life. "Has there ever been a single philosopher who recognized God?" Only Nietzsche. Proofs require God "to submit Himself to the fundamental principles that reason prescribed"; Socrates reduced God to the Good, devalued experienced reality and killed mystery. Freedom, the daily need to choose against the "causal stream" (laziness is easier), shows experience is more than rational. Reason flatters our laziness: "God never uses coercion, but then, truth is not God: it coerces." Rational ethics rests on a prior, non-rational choice. Faith is "perfect freedom", believing because one can.
Karl Barth
The Epistle to the Romans (1919), not the vast Church Dogmatics, is Barth's best philosophical work. Against the nineteenth century's humanized Christ, "man is made to serve God and not God man". The Fall warns against pride, not reason as such; our only hope is to abandon the idea that we can approach God: "When we are blind and dumb, then we see and speak." Paradox is meant to offend reason; the seeker resembles Camus's Sisyphus. Ethics is "gravely misleading"; truth cannot be sought, only granted. Philosophy should give way to theology, which traces God's condescension.
Martin Buber
Ich und Du (1923) is better rendered "I and You". Inauthenticity is trying to control how one seems, which destroys the meeting. Love shows the appeal of the view and a problem: much real love involves role-playing and maneuvering. "Making present" requires "imagining the real"; love of neighbor is mutual recognition, and moral failure (the Holocaust most terribly) is treating others as Its. In a mystical turn, a tree can become a You "if will and grace are joined"; there are I-You relations with persons, nature and "spiritual entities" (Mozart, reading Wittgenstein), and artists serve God by revealing how meetings occur.
Four heirs of Kierkegaard chosen for their differences
The four lives and books in sequence
Martin's chapter opens with Bataille's epigraph, "It is from the viewpoint of night that I am considering the light", and narrows a field of fifteen figures to four whose dates and texts matter for the argument, since all four were marked by World War I.
| Thinker | Dates, origin | Key works named |
|---|---|---|
| Miguel de Unamuno | 1865-1936, Spanish-Basque; poet, novelist, essayist | The Tragic Sense of Life (1911-12) |
| Lev Shestov | 1866-1938, Russian | Good in the Teaching of Tolstoy and Nietzsche (1900); Dostoevsky and Nietzsche (1903); Apotheosis of Groundlessness (1905); Potestas Clavium (1923); In Job's Balances (1929); Athens and Jerusalem (1938) |
| Karl Barth | 1886-1968, Swiss | The Epistle to the Romans (1919); Church Dogmatics (1932-70, nearly 10,000 pages) |
| Martin Buber | 1878-1965, Austrian and Israeli | Ich und Du (1923), better "I and You" than "I and Thou" |
A timeline of the four religious existentialists Martin selects.
Details that sharpen each position
- Unamuno's Quixote. Quixote's greatest strength is self-knowledge; because everything that matters to him lies in his own control, he is incapable of fear. Reason's belief that every problem has a solution is a "pious naivety"; truths stay indifferent to us as persons.
- Shestov's three Socratic results. By identifying the True and the Good and making reason their arbiter, Socrates made God irrelevant, put himself in God's place, and extinguished the mystery of life; Descartes, Spinoza, Kant and even Husserl repeat the mistake. Reason wants us to be creatures of necessity, a mere play of forces, a line Hume drew to its end: "I am nothing". "God never uses coercion, but then, truth is not God: it coerces." We accept rational truth not because it works but because it is easier, a kind of laziness; the believer believes "just because she can believe". Shestov's luck, Martin remarks, was to die in 1938, before the next war.
- Barth's ahistorical God. His epitaph: "Man is made to serve God and not God man". One must never, as Bultmann later would, try to make God make sense for us today. Barth is an "extreme realist": the only thing known with absolute certainty to exist is God. The Trinity is a relationship of revelation: God is the revealer, the act of revelation and the revealed. "When we are blind and dumb, then we see and speak." Conversion in Dostoevsky's characters is a story no one can write, because it is irrational and wholly internal.
- Buber's word-pairs. I-It and I-You are the most basic "word-pairs" we speak; the usual subject-object relation is only one case of I-It, and we can even treat our own inner experiences as Its. Where Barth's God is almost Kafkaesque, Buber's resembles a lover.
Martin's selection shows that "religious existentialism" is a family resemblance, not a doctrine: four Kierkegaardians agree on rejecting rational theology and disagree on nearly everything else about God.
French Existentialism (Robert Wicks)
From clockwork to life
From Descartes to Kant the cosmos was a clockwork, and humans risked becoming mere natural objects. Kant reconciled them by making mechanism a feature of appearance and locating freedom in the thing in itself. Kierkegaard and Sartre kept freedom opposed to nature, but historical awareness made the Kantian two-world solution frustrating; people wanted freedom in this world, in the body. Mechanism atomized the world; the nineteenth century turned to life, growth and time (Hegel's "living concept", Marx's progress, Nietzsche's "yes"). Two world wars broke confidence in rational development; Being and Nothingness, The Stranger and The Myth of Sisyphus appeared mid-war.
Three routes by which the turn to life led to absurdity.
Life made three things salient: instinctual energies (Schopenhauer, von Hartmann, Freud's id, where "the logical laws of thought do not apply"); individual contingency (Roquentin's "gross, absurd being"); and the trap of the present, since the past is gone, "tomorrow never arrives", and otherworldly escape seems fantastic. This is the religious "dark night of the soul". Remedies sought an unconditional quality in this-worldly life, a shift from God-the-Father to the incarnate Son; the winner was freedom. Descartes held the power to affirm or deny "unlimited and divine"; Kant modeled human on divine freedom; Kierkegaard incarnated it as "truth as subjectivity".
Existence before essence
The slogan opposes the planning model of the world, classically Platonism (essence as blueprint; the instance always falls short) and the creation story. Existentialists say the world simply "is" and was not "made". Sartre's "man first of all exists ... and defines himself afterwards" packs two conflicting propositions: we have an indefinable free aspect, and we appear in a prior world that shapes our language and values. Hence attention to the body, sickness, the deathbed where "the sky presumably will still appear to be blue". Merleau-Ponty: the perceived world is "the always presupposed foundation of all rationality", which brings the absolute "down to earth".
| Theme | Sartre | Camus | Merleau-Ponty |
|---|---|---|---|
| Body and world | Superfluous, "In the way"; viscous, nauseating | Cut off (the man behind the glass), yet sunlight on the sea | Immersed; no deep alienation |
| Others | Look or be looked at; "condemned to be alone" | Solitude of the absurd | Primordial connectedness |
| The unconditional | Absolute freedom, the power to say "no" | The present moment | Perception |
| Authenticity | Constant self-questioning against bad faith | Living fully now, like Sisyphus | Not his term |
Morality and influence
Existentialism asks about meaning, not first about right and good. Self-determination recalls Kant's self-legislation, individualized in Nietzsche's master morality, which implies a God of pure will not bound by reason (Abraham and Isaac). Sartre's war "is my war ... I deserve it", since desertion or suicide were always possible. Camus's absurd types (the conqueror, seducer, actor, traveler, imprisoned worker) subordinate morality to intensity, though one "can choose continually to be moral".
Wicks traces later French thought to this source: Derrida's différance as "an offspring" of Sartre's "triple non-being" of the question (along with Saussure), Barthes's resistance to myth and ossified meaning, Foucault's genealogy of "entangled events", Lacan's denial of a permanent thinking substance.
Wicks's genealogy of French existentialism
Dates, texts and further steps of Wicks's argument
Wicks's genealogy from mechanism through life to French existentialism and its heirs.
- The id. Freud (1856-1939), echoing Schopenhauer (1788-1860) and von Hartmann (1842-1906), calls the id "the dark, inaccessible part of our personality", where contradictory drives stand side by side.
- Camus's opening. The Myth of Sisyphus begins: "There is but one truly serious philosophical problem, and that is suicide." The absurd includes the "nausea" of man's own inhumanity and "the stranger who at certain seconds comes to meet us in a mirror".
- French against German. French existentialism of the 1930s and 1940s dwells on the irreducible, unique individual, while German styles give more weight to the social context; hence the French sense of not being at home in the world.
- Sartre's suffering. "The being of human reality is suffering because it rises in being as perpetually haunted by a totality which it is without being able to be it."
- Against the rational animal. For Aristotle good humans act rationally well. Existentialist freedom defies that measure: if one can choose between being rational and irrational, one can say "no" to rationality itself. Beauvoir (1908-86): "Freedom is the book from which all signification and all values spring."
- Authenticity as questioning. Combining Heidegger's being "whose existence is an issue for it" with Descartes's method of doubt, Sartre makes the most authentic mode constant self-questioning; and if "God is dead", everything is permitted and the human condition rests on a non-moral state of affairs.
- "God is" versus "Christ exists". Wicks puts his theological reading in a formula: Sartre's frustration concerns not God's being but incarnation, the impossibility of becoming a Christlike figure; divine incarnation as a social phenomenon is an unrealizable ideal.
- Language heirs. In the 1960s-70s Barthes, Derrida and Lyotard (1925-98) held that literal, literary and narrative dimensions of language "congeal together", so purely literal expressions are false abstractions. Foucault (1926-84) found history a "marvelous motley" sprung from "a host of errors and phantasms", and Lacan (1901-81) denied consciousness any permanent qualities.
Why it lasts. Wicks lists the perennial themes (freedom, personal meaning, alienation, absurdity, individuality, resistance to oppression) and argues that French existentialism remains a main alternative to the Platonistic mentality as long as finitude, bodily presence and the world's incomprehensibility are felt.
The Concept of Authenticity (Taylor Carman)
| Neighbor concept | Source | Why it is not authenticity |
|---|---|---|
| Sincerity | Rousseau's Confessions | Performative: must look spontaneous; deliberate sincerity defeats itself |
| Autonomy | Kant, via Rousseau | Self-legislation by general laws binding everyone |
| Self-realization | Romanticism | Assumes a self capable of wholeness and completion |
Kierkegaard
Faith in Fear and Trembling is unconditional commitment that suspends the ethical. Johannes de Silentio admires and is appalled by Abraham, who, unlike the tragic heroes Agamemnon, Jephthah and Brutus, has no ethical comfort. The pseudonym's failure to understand is the point: faith is opaque to the third person and even to one's own deliberation; the knight of faith looks like a tax collector. But Carman thinks this concept "may be fatally unstable", since nothing can be said of its content, and Kierkegaard later conceded that Abraham's faith is only "the formal definition of faith". The Postscript and A Literary Review contrast inwardness with "reflection" and the leveling "public"; The Sickness unto Death makes the self a synthesis of finitude/infinitude, possibility/necessity, temporality/eternity.
Heidegger: two senses of eigentlich
Heidegger superimposes the two; the descriptive one carries the argument
In the descriptive sense, nothing lies between authentic and inauthentic. In the evaluative sense they are poles of a spectrum with indifference, average everydayness, in the middle. Like Wittgenstein, Heidegger insists all conduct draws on anonymous norms, das Man. Normative authenticity combines resoluteness (a counterpart of Aristotle's phronêsis, sensitivity to the unique "situation") with forerunning into death (exposure to the fragility of one's world and identity), plus the reappropriation of a heritage as fate or destiny. Yet the formal notion does the philosophical work: dying is nonrelational and unsurpassable, mine as my body is mine, while another's death is "demise". As Merleau-Ponty says one would need a second body to see one's body as an object, I would need a second life to see mine biographically. "One dies" and the narrative picture of life both blur this.
The Notebooks for an Ethics (1947-48) define authenticity as holding transcendence and facticity together and renouncing "every project of being courageous ... noble": "the only meaningful project is that of doing (not that of being)", "a radical decision for autonomy".
Separating authenticity from its neighbors
Close readings behind Carman's thesis
- Rousseau's defiance. Apart perhaps from Hamlet, the first explicit ideal of sincerity is the Confessions, which defies the reader and God to second-guess it: "Only Jean-Jacques is in a position to judge Jean-Jacques."
- The pseudonym as argument. Johannes de Silentio admits "when I have to think about Abraham I am virtually annihilated". Johannes Climacus later describes him not as "an existing individuality" but as a reflecting person who "continually bumps his head against the understanding", the lyric springing from the recoil. The texts span Fear and Trembling (1843), the Postscript and A Literary Review (1846), and The Sickness unto Death (1849).
- "Reflection" in Kierkegaard carries deliberation, calculation and dialectical complexity, but also exposure, visibility and publicness; its triumph over commitment is the leveling process.
- Fear and anxiety. Descriptively, fear is inauthentic because it is directed at things outside oneself; anxiety is authentic because it has no external object. But Heidegger then speaks of "cowardly fear" of death perverting the "courage for anxiety", mixing in evaluation.
- Division I and II. The undifferentiated middle, average everydayness, is the neutral start of Division I; Division II turns to the authentic modes (anxiety, guilt, death) for deeper insight.
- Situation versus state of affairs. Resoluteness responds to the unique Situation rather than subsuming it under a "general state of affairs" (allgemeine Lage); forerunning resoluteness (vorlaufende Entschlossenheit) is "a hybrid of Aristotelian phronesis and Kierkegaardian subjectivity". Heritage is "a handing down to oneself possibilities that have come down to one, though not necessarily as they have come down"; fate and destiny are phenomenological, experienced as deeply right, not objectively inevitable.
- Dying versus demise. My dying (Sterben) is mine nontransferably, as my body is; another's death is "demise". As Merleau-Ponty notes that I would need a second body to perceive my own as an object, I would need a second life to assess my own biographically.
Carman: Heidegger's two senses of eigentlich
Sartre's bad faith, step by step
Sartre adapts Hegel's being-in-itself and being-for-itself and adds "the double property of the human being", facticity and transcendence; bad faith misuses one against the other. One can lie to oneself, but cannot be deceived by one's own lies; against Freud, a censor that knows what to repress raises the question "What does this mean if not that the censor is in bad faith?" Bad faith is "an immediate, permanent threat to every project". The only passage using authenticité defines it as "a self-recovery of being which was previously corrupted", and the positive account is deferred to an "ethics of deliverance and salvation" that Being and Nothingness never supplies.
Affectivity (Béatrice Han-Pile)
Nietzsche: the sickness of feeling
Healthy types (the pre-Socratics) could harmonize inner conflict by ranking drives; they were "attuned" in a double sense, finely tuned and instinctively knowing what to favor. With an "anarchy among the instincts" we have lost this, become passive, and experience life as unbearable pain. Three decadent strategies follow from fear of pain:
| Strategy | Exemplar | What it does to feeling |
|---|---|---|
| War on the senses | Socrates (reason as "counter-tyrant"), Christian asceticism (adds guilt) | Divides the self; consciousness, the "small reason", tries to rule the body |
| Numbing | Buddhism, as Nietzsche reads it | "Hibernation", a minimum metabolism; the worst, most passive form |
| Drowning in excess | Romanticism, Wagner | Ever stronger stimuli for dulled nerves: "Wagner's art is sick" |
| Health regained | Goethe, the noble type, the artist | One dominating passion; harmony by self-mastery; intoxication sharpens perception |
Return to pre-Socratic innocence is impossible once reflection has set in, so the noble type must harmonize far more than the Greeks, by "self-control, self-outwitting"; Goethe "disciplined himself into wholeness". Health is the ability to endure and use pain ("like a bow that distress only serves to draw tauter"). Art is its model: intoxication excites the whole system of emotions yet, unlike the Romantic, the Dionysian artist keeps balance, and "transform[s] things until they are the mirror of your own power".
Heidegger's three marks of mood, and Sartre's split between two moods.
Heidegger: mood as disclosure
In Being and Time §29, Befindlichkeit and Stimmung stand with understanding and discourse among the existentials. Moods (a) disclose thrownness, being delivered over to a world we neither chose nor constitute; "a mood assails us", from neither outside nor inside; no epoché yields a moodless state, and even the scientist's objectivity has a mood; the "One" makes public moods. (b) They disclose being-in-the-world as a whole, prior to cognition and volition, and make directedness possible. (c) They let things matter: boredom is "a hybrid, partly objective, partly subjective". Anxiety is privileged: it has no worldly object, so entities lose relevance and the network of significance itself obtrudes; it reveals our groundlessness and our "being free for" choosing ourselves.
The three made affectivity unavoidable for philosophy, leading to Merleau-Ponty on embodiment and Michel Henry on original affectivity.
Two ways of treating affectivity
Why these three, and what they rehabilitate
Only Sartre was undoubtedly an existentialist: Heidegger rejected the label in the Letter on Humanism, and Nietzsche's status is disputed. What unites them is the primacy of existence over essence and the rejection of reason and consciousness as primary. The rationalist tradition dismissed affectivity on moral grounds (emotions threaten self-mastery) or epistemic ones (they cloud knowledge). The three rehabilitate it because it is constitutive of being human, so the dream of a passionless mind is an illusion whose roots need investigation, and because affects disclose something.
- Nietzsche's threefold programme. (a) Diagnose an age of negative affects, nihilism as "the feeling of valuelessness"; (b) trace genealogically the birth of resentment and guilt; (c) sketch a typology of positive affects that overcome decadence. "The diminution and leveling of European man constitutes our greatest danger."
- Small and large reason. Socrates divided the self like the chariot of the Phaedrus and credited consciousness, the "small reason", with mastering the body, the "large reason". Christianity added a feeling unknown to the Greeks, guilt; the pre-Socratic was "whole", "hewn out of stone".
- Goethe's load. Goethe carried the strongest instincts of the eighteenth century (sentimentality, idolatry of nature, the anti-historical, idealistic and revolutionary) and still "fought against the separation of reason, sensation, emotion, and will". Health is measured by how much one can endure: "distress, want, bad weather, sickness, toil, solitude".
- The artist's perception spans "tremendous distances" and the infinitesimally small; beauty expresses "a victorious will", "an infallibly perpendicular stress".
- Heidegger on publicness. The "One" "not only has in general its own way of having a mood, but needs moods and 'makes' them". The senses can be "touched" only because they belong to a being with affectedness, so we never meet neutral entities onto which we project feeling.
- Anxiety's three marks. Its object is indeterminate; what it faces is "being-in-the-world as such", so worldhood alone obtrudes; and it reveals Dasein's "being free for the freedom of choosing itself".
| Function of mood | Heidegger (Being and Time section 29) | Sartre |
|---|---|---|
| Discloses thrownness, facticity | All moods, especially anxiety | Nausea: the body and contingency |
| Discloses being-in-the-world, freedom | All moods, especially anxiety | Anxiety: nihilation, "a nothingness has slipped into the heart of my relation to myself" |
| Embodiment | Largely disincarnated (Han-Pile) | Central |
| Background influences | Kierkegaard, Christian upbringing | Heidegger, Husserl, Descartes |
Han-Pile on Nietzsche's typology of decadent affectivity and its remedy.
For Sartre, anxiety forces pure reflection and an end to bad faith: the ego is a construct I cannot be identified with; the past is not causally active (that idea is an illusion of impure reflection); "to be is to nihilate the in-itself which it is", and freedom "can be nothing other than this nihilation". Nausea, like anxiety, is inescapable: pain and pleasure, once existed, re-expose facticity against its background.
The Body (Piotr Hoffman)
Both reject Cartesian dualism, which comes from viewing one's own body from the third person. But Sartre calls the body-for-itself and body-as-object "radically distinct" and "incommunicable", treating double sensation (hands touching) as inessential; Merleau-Ponty already in 1945 stresses the hand's "equivocal status as touching and touched", central in The Visible and the Invisible.
The test case: the rock
Two accounts of the obstacle (BN 482, 488; PhP 440-41)
Sartre: a rock is an obstacle only in light of a free project to climb it; for the mere traveler it is neither scalable nor non-scalable. Merleau-Ponty: "Whether or not I have decided to climb them, these mountains appear high to me because they exceed my body's power to take them in its stride"; freedom must be anchored in a field of meaning pregiven by the phenomenal body. Beauvoir replied that Merleau-Ponty ignored Sartrean facticity. Hoffman argues she was off target: Merleau-Ponty saw Sartre's facticity "only too well".
| Issue | Sartre | Merleau-Ponty |
|---|---|---|
| Body as point of view | "The point of view on which I can't take a point of view"; "the contingent form ... of the necessity of my contingency" | Permanent point of view on an oriented world (agrees) |
| Perceived distance | Fixed by "the strictly external laws of perspective"; an "objective center of reference" | The thing "beginning to slip away from the grip of our gaze" |
| The acting body | An instrument "objectively defined by the instrumental field", a "gap" or "hollow" | Coping guided by preobjective "maxima" of sharpness |
| Who surpasses | The for-itself's projects; the body is "perpetually the surpassed" | "I am a body which rises towards the world" |
Hoffman goes one step further. Merleau-Ponty's "je peux" seems a general striving for grip; Samuel Todes (Body and World) completes it with a material subject: needy, so grip serves needs; asymmetrical front and back, which grounds irreversible time; and thrown into gravity, which grounds stable object meanings.
Hoffman's argument in finer grain
- The shared starting point. Both philosophers hold that dualism arises from a natural but derivative attitude: viewing one's own body as "an object among other objects". The remedy is to show the body accessible in first-person experience, so that conscious life appears eo ipso embodied.
- The hand that anticipates. Looking at and touching my inert right hand, at first only "a bundle of bones and muscles", I already "anticipate" its waking into a touching hand; the theme stays in the background in 1945 and becomes central in The Visible and the Invisible (1964).
- Beauvoir's defence. She cited Sartre's "first ontological dimension" of the body: the for-itself is perspectival and embodied, and "loses itself" in the world as much as it surpasses it.
- The eye problem. If the body-subject is "inapprehensible", are we left with Descartes's "thought of seeing"? Sartre answers that the perceptual field abstractly indicates my eye as an object "in the midst of the world".
- Two objectivisms. Merleau-Ponty attacks both the causal account of distance (which tells us nothing about experience) and the intellectualist one (judgment within an objective relational system). Sartre rejects causal laws ("there are no laws of consciousness; only consciousness of laws") but, Hoffman argues, his account is almost indistinguishable from the intellectualist one: my body's location is "objectively defined" by the same laws that fix the car's receding distance.
- Hammer and nail. For Sartre, "the nail is 'to be pounded in' this way or that, the hammer is 'to be held by the handle'": instrument-to-instrument and instrument-to-hand indications are lumped together as objective, governed by "definite rules" from the properties of things.
- Partial versus total objectivity. Sartre's body is never seen from "absolute objectivity", and in that sense alone it escapes objectification; but the shift from point of view to relative center of reference is only from partial to total objectivity.
Hoffman: the first-person body in Sartre and Merleau-Ponty
Hoffman's verdict. Merleau-Ponty did not overlook Sartrean facticity; he saw that Sartre's body, even in its first-person mode, is an element of an objective system, so all transcendence is reserved for free projects. Merleau-Ponty restores transcendence to the body itself, guided by preobjective norms.
Freedom and Responsibility (Frederick A. Olafson)
Husserl: no room for either
Husserl's phenomenology of pure consciousness was not a philosophical anthropology. Where to put freedom: in the empirical ego (part of nature, studied by psychology) or the transcendental ego? When Husserl discusses freedom (Ideas II), it is the empirical ego's, a Hume-like freedom to act from one's own purposes, without real alternatives, which other animals share. The transcendental ego's only action is constitution, and since the noemas just are the objects (a new idealism), that is no conceptual tidying. But we are not aware of performing constitution; language already orders the world for us, passively; and eidetic intuition leaves the ego no more alternatives than a mathematician has. Responsibility appears only as the Cartesian responsibility of the philosopher to judge for oneself, owed to oneself.
| Thinker | Freedom | Responsibility |
|---|---|---|
| Husserl | Empirical: doing what one wants; transcendental: no alternatives | Self-responsibility of the philosophizing subject |
| Heidegger | Openness to possibility; the clearing | Authenticity, with no stated obligation to others; vanishes in the later work |
| Sartre | Absolute, like Descartes's God; "condemned to be free" | Avoiding bad faith: candor, which may be self-regarding |
| Merleau-Ponty | Situated: "before we can say No, we have to learn to say Yes" | Rudiments: the "aura of generality", justification to others |
['Responsibility still lacks a social basis']
Heidegger and Sartre
Heidegger cut the Gordian knot: no split into transcendental and empirical, just entities in the world that transcend themselves toward others and toward possibilities. What is present is "profiled against" what might be or has been; freedom is "being in a position to try", not having the resources to succeed. Authenticity resembles responsibility (owning what one does) but Heidegger never said whether it involves justifying oneself to those affected. Sartre identified Heidegger's non-being with consciousness and made freedom the human essence, choosing as if from all logically possible options.
Merleau-Ponty insists freedom needs "an analogue in the world" (else a prisoner in irons is as free as anyone) and acknowledges an "aura of generality": a situation's import figures in many lives, which allows a reciprocal "We". Morality based on reciprocal recognition was still "à faire".
The tradition's uneven treatment of freedom and responsibility
Olafson's steps in detail
- Why the neglect. Freedom without responsibility "sounds dangerous" and responsibility without freedom is "hard to imagine", yet the tradition neglected their relation. Husserl's phenomenology was not a philosophical anthropology, so the active and social life where both concepts naturally live got "short shrift".
- Pure consciousness. "Pure" meant discarding metaphors drawn from physical processes, such as the "impression", and bracketing the world's existence. The empirical/transcendental distinction is not the body/soul distinction: the transcendental ego is a function, like the Cartesian and Kantian "I think", though Husserl also calls it a "sphere of immanence" containing hyletic data.
- The paradox of naturalism. Husserl opposed naturalism, yet assigned "the great bulk" of human nature to naturalistic treatment in the empirical ego, where freedom and responsibility hardly figure in the sciences.
- Constitution as ontology. Phenomenology was not to leave the world "unchanged, only a little neater": the reduction has ontological, not merely methodological, import. In constituting a perceptual object, a color sensation is upgraded to a property of the object.
- Philosophical self-responsibility. Most people take their cognitive and ethical stance uncritically from tradition or institutions and assign responsibility to a "superordinate authority"; Husserl, a Cartesian, saw taking it upon oneself as full maturity, but owed only to oneself.
- The existential turn. Heidegger, Sartre and Merleau-Ponty sought a unitary concept of human existence: an analytic description of the natural attitude itself. But once the two egos are separated, reuniting them "is not an easy task".
- Facts and negation. Heidegger's clearing discloses a world of states of affairs ("That car is black"), and to grasp something being so is implicitly to pair it with its not being so; hence alternatives. After the turn, "no more is heard of authenticity".
- Sartre's Cartesian God. Sartre admired Descartes, whose God could make arithmetic different; bad faith includes saying we "have no choice" and treating ourselves as a fixed nature. In France, Husserl's influence remained strong long after Being and Time.
- Merleau-Ponty's expressive body is neither the body of neurophysiology nor a constituted object; its movements anticipate situations. The human world is a "knot of relations", saturated with intersubjectivity; his thought, best suited to an ethics, was "tragically cut short" (he died in 1961).
Olafson's ladder: freedom grows, responsibility lags.
Absurdity (David Sherman)
From Descartes to Kierkegaard
Descartes grounded knowledge in subjectivity and estranged consciousness from the world, an omen Pascal heard ("the eternal silence of these infinite spaces frightens me"); God, proved by the reason he had doubted, closed the gap "on the sly". After Hume, Kant made empirical truth necessary through the mind's template, but needed God, freedom and immortality as postulates to shield morality from contingency; his faith does not feel absurd. Kierkegaard first broaches absurdity: "objectively it is absurd; and this absurdity, held fast in the passion of inwardness, is faith". The knight of faith embraces the absurd and partakes joyfully of life; the knight of resignation does not. More broadly, every existential choice of a sphere of existence is ungrounded, since the choice brings reasons into being: a secular "leap of faith".
Sherman's three forms of absurdity and two departures.
Heidegger, Sartre, Camus
For Heidegger, shared practices form a fore-structure that supplies meaning, so absurdity hardly arises; the circle of understanding is no flaw. Yet "there would still remain the question, 'why?'", and "that which is unmeaning can be absurd", as when natural events "break in upon us and destroy us". Anxiety, collapsing familiarity, opens Dasein to Being rather than to absurdity; even oblivion of Being is felt as loss.
| Text | What is absurd | Image |
|---|---|---|
| Nausea (1938), neo-Husserlian | Brute existence of objects: "the essential thing is contingency" | The chestnut root; the circle that does not exist |
| Being and Nothingness (1943) | The contingent self; the project to be God | The ass pulling the cart toward the carrot |
| The Myth of Sisyphus (1942) | The relation of reason to an indifferent world | "Rising, streetcar, four hours in the office ..." |
Roquentin echoes Hume (no necessity in matters of fact; nature's constancy "is only habit") but cannot escape to backgammon: it is skepticism from the first person, a reduction that never returns to the natural attitude. Camus's absurd is the practical analogue of Cartesian skepticism without God, arising "in the shadow of God".
Further steps in Sherman's history
- Definition. Absurdity is groundlessness, contingency or superfluity in those aspects of the human condition that "seem as if they should be open to rational justification". Sartre's "subjectivity must be the starting point" points back to Descartes's "natural light", which would "accept nothing as true which [he] did not clearly recognize to be so", a key step from a Church-based to a humanistic worldview.
- Kant's limit. Kant, like Sartre, starts from subjectivity and limits reason, turning the limit into a virtue: it "makes room for faith". His attacks on the proofs of God show that faith is not rationally grounded, yet it does not provoke absurdity.
- Kierkegaard against the System. The paradox crystallizes in eternal truths with a historical becoming, the Incarnation. Kierkegaard defends the individual's relation to the absolutely other against Hegel's totalizing "horizontal" ethical whole. He cannot argue for Christianity but must "seduce" the reader into it, and he writes pseudonymously so that the reader's choice stays uncoerced. His existential dialectic refashions Hegel's historical dialectic along individual lines: he can explicitly privilege only being an "existing" individual, and the religious sphere only implicitly.
- Heidegger's circle. Thematizing objects without presuppositions is "only a subspecies of understanding". "Only Dasein can be meaningful or meaningless." Natural, as against historical, events may not yet be assimilated into collective understanding and so strike us as absurd. Anxiety reveals that Dasein "is not the measure of all things".
- Roquentin's cogito. "I am, I exist, I think, therefore I am; I am because I think, why do I think?" Words are "divorced" from things: "The world of explanations and reasons is not the world of existence", and "one cannot define existence as necessity". Hume escaped his "philosophical melancholy and delirium" by dining and playing backgammon; Roquentin cannot.
- Sartre after 1943. Consciousness is now intertwined with the world, but its inexorable transcendence of the empirical self is the source of ineradicable freedom; all projects flow from the fundamental project, "the desire to be God", and Being offers no higher meaning to trump the problem.
- Camus's question. Can we "live and create in the very midst of the desert", "live without appeal"? Sisyphus is the prototype of the modern worker; his reason for not choosing suicide is "to preserve the very thing that crushes me". His yes is not the yea-saying of Nietzsche's ass in Zarathustra.
- Derrida's leap. Since the late 1980s deconstruction has turned from its structuralist objectivism to the politico-ethical: a decision determined by facts or reasons loses its ethical standing, so responsible decisions are "radically incommensurable", that is, absurd.
Sherman's genealogy of absurdity from the philosophy of subjectivity.
Death (David Couzens Hoy)
The backdrop is Hegel: death and work are the two conditions of self-consciousness, since seeing one's life negated gives a sense of it as a whole (open to the objection that awareness of death already requires self-consciousness).
Heidegger
Everydayness is falling (like acculturation, a skill) and can become fleeing (conformism). Rilke's Malte had seen the point: "The desire to have a death of one's own is becoming more and more rare"; we die "the death that belongs to the sickness". Death is not like the full moon, ripened fruit, stopped rain or an unfinished road: Dasein always has a "not yet", and death impends as "the absence of any impending at all". Publicly "one dies", "in no case is it I myself"; the dying are "tranquilized", a death is "tactless". Stoic indifference is not Heidegger's ideal but a second evasion, which still shows how much one cares.
Anticipatory resoluteness as Hoy reconstructs it.
Anticipation "shatters all one's tenaciousness to whatever existence one has reached" and lets Dasein act "of its own accord". But resoluteness "does not detach Dasein from its world"; even resolutions "remain dependent on the 'they'". Choosing to be a teacher is not yet authentic; how one configures that career is. Authenticity is effort to bring about genuine change in the social and historical world, not a private inner attitude.
| Sartre's objection | Hoy's reply |
|---|---|
| No one can love for me either; death does not individualize | Heidegger's point is the formal mineness of dying, not uniqueness of tasks |
| I cannot experience my death, so it is a brute contingent fact with no meaning | Heidegger separates perishing, demise and being-toward-death, which is a way to be at every moment |
| Death "in no way distinguished from birth" (like Lucretius) | Nagel: time's direction matters; death deprives, prenatal time does not; born earlier, I would be someone else |
| Death is "the triumph of the Other over me" | Follows only from Sartre's view that social relations are essentially antagonistic |
Hoy's ontological reading of being-toward-death
More of Hoy's case
- Why death matters now. Hoy opens with the genocidal wars and the slaughter of millions of noncombatants in the last hundred years. Being and Time (1927) launched the fascination with death; the Letter on Humanism (1947), rejecting Sartre's reading, opened the door to reactions against existentialism. Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit (1807) stands behind both.
- Falling as acculturation. We are always already "fallen" into a situation we did not create. Falling is like acculturation, how preferences are acquired; fleeing is like conformism. Since one slides readily into the other, Heidegger needs an account of resistance.
- Rilke and Mann. Malte, destitute in Paris, hears the hospital clerk's "Voilà votre mort, monsieur"; Rilke distinguishes the great and small death. Thomas Mann shows funerals where one can "blink at death and not see it". All three hold that refusing death is refusing life. Hoy adds an example of his own: profound grief is not only for an objective loss.
- Nonrelational and not-outstrippable. Idle talk hides that my death is unbezügliche (I must die my own death) and unüberholbare (unavoidable). Heidegger rejects controlling death by "brooding" over it or "expecting" it, both ways of putting it off; even "untroubled indifference" masks concern.
- Certainty and indefiniteness. Because death is certain, one must anticipate it; because it is indefinite as to "when", the "constant threat" pushes one into resolute action. Resolve is not empty advice like carpe diem. Anticipatory resoluteness discloses the concrete Situation "as our own, even if it is not our creation".
- The Letter's warning. "Man is never first and foremost man on the hither side of the world, as a 'subject'"; isolation is due to "the dominance of the modern metaphysics of subjectivity".
- Zu-Ende-sein versus Sein zum Ende. Death means not being-at-an-end but "a Being-towards-the-end", "a way to be, which Dasein takes over as soon as it is". Dasein "can end without authentically dying", yet "qua Dasein, it does not simply perish".
- Sartre's remaining claims. A senseless death makes life senseless; death is not freely determined, so it cannot complete life; it is "radically impersonal". From Kojève's master-slave reading, death is "the triumph of the Other": I lose the power to look back and become "the future prey of the living". "Hell is other people" (No Exit, 1944).
Hoy's path through the philosophy of death.
The point of it all. These debates are "not about how to die, but about how to live". Hoy's closing hope is that the twenty-first century will not cover up the carnage of the twentieth; his fear is that it could be worse.
Emotions in Phenomenology and Existentialism (Robert C. Solomon)
Against "basic emotions" and against essences
Phenomenology must not be ahistorical: emotional worlds change with concepts (the English category "emotion" is only about 150 years old). Neuroscientific views (Le Doux's "icing on the cake", Damasio's "markers", Prinz's perceptions of bodily change) update William James, for whom emotion is a phenomenologically thin sensation of bodily disturbance. Solomon, who once argued that the brain is causally but not conceptually necessary, now concedes that our concepts change with neurology and that emotions were always bodily. So he uses "essential" only in a weakened sense: stable, significant structures, not necessary and sufficient conditions. "From the phenomenological point of view, the essence of an emotion is its phenomenology."
A short history
| Figure | Contribution |
|---|---|
| Aristotle (Rhetoric) | Anger as perception of a slight plus desire for revenge: social phenomenology, kin to perception, tied to action and appraisal |
| Stoics, Seneca's De Ira | Emotions as evaluative judgments; "first movements" vs assent |
| Descartes, Spinoza | Passions of the Soul (Solomon's favorite Descartes); a catalog of one-line descriptions |
| Hume, Smith | Impressions plus ideas (pride's double self); sympathy as a vehicle for understanding others' emotions |
| Brentano | Intentionality as the essential feature; emotions can be "correct" |
| Scheler | "The emotional a priori"; value-feelings against Kant's formalism; intentional feeling, not "blind feeling" |
| Heidegger | Moods directed at the world; being-in-the-world as a "unitary phenomenon" |
| Sartre | Emotions as purposive "magical transformations of the world" |
| Merleau-Ponty | The body as subject of emotion: motility |
Most of these thinkers took the analysis of emotion to be part of ethics; the turn to "scientific" philosophy lost that. Heidegger's moods are no mere "mental weather": an emotion is a narrowed mood, differing in the specificity of its object; angst prompts us to become "ontological". Sartre scores two points against James: emotions are intentional and have finalité. But then he "loses heart", naming only "escape behavior" and calling emotions "degradations of consciousness"; Being and Nothingness corrects this. Against Freud, Sartre substitutes the pre-reflective for the unconscious.
From components to a unitary phenomenon
Intentionality and the formal object
Solomon once said, with the Stoics, that emotions are judgments; now he prefers "engagements with the world", though still permeated by judgments and concepts. Husserl's act/object split tempts us to say love and anger have the same object (Sally). Phenomenologically they do not: the object of anger is experienced as infuriating, the beloved as lovable. The connection is logical, not causal, which is why Hume struggled. The scholastics' formal object (Kenny, de Sousa) captures this: anger needs an offense ("real or imagined"), sadness a loss. The primary/secondary quality debate over whether value is "in" the object or the mind is misplaced.
Feelings and bodily micro-practices
Solomon also corrects his own former intellectualism: as Michael Stocker argued, affect is essential. But feeling is not ineffable. Beyond autonomic sensations there are feelings of the voluntary musculature: Ekman's facial expressions, the clenched fist, Frijda's "action-readiness", George Downing's "bodily micro-practices". Here intention meets intentionality: revenge is part of anger, flight part of fear, and such feelings have Goldie's "borrowed intentionality", so "I feel angry with him" makes sense. We cultivate emotions partly through posture, and noticing those habits "works wonders" in therapy. So calling emotions "cognitive" misleads; they are mostly knowing how. "In phenomenology, we do not always leave that which is described as it is."
Solomon's three structures of emotional experience
The wider cast and the history in detail
Husserl "neither expressed nor exemplified much interest" in the affective side of life, but the existential ancestors, Kierkegaard and Nietzsche, celebrated the passions, and Scheler, Levinas, Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, Marcel and Ricoeur all explored emotions, moods and passions. What we "see" is mediated by historically conditioned concepts: Heidegger "wryly commented that the Greeks did not have experiences", medieval Christians did not share an emotional world with the pagans, and we do not share one with our puritan, Victorian and tribal ancestors. Even if there are universal neurophysiological "affect programs", there is no a priori reason to think the emotional lives of peoples or individuals are "basically" the same.
- Method without metaphysics. Solomon keeps the "Cartesian" language of experience and consciousness without its ontology. All he needs is a first-person viewpoint, Nagel's "what it's like to be": what it is like to have an emotion, as against what one does or what happens in the brain.
- Open questions. Must every emotion have an object, or are there indeterminate objects ("the Unknown")? Are all emotions bodily? Aesthetic emotions and certain moral ones (Hume's "calm passions") seem not to be.
- Seneca and the Stoics. Seneca's "wonderful but somewhat verbose" treatise on anger is phenomenology "made 1,850 years before Husserl" named the discipline.
- Augustine and Descartes. Augustine described his tumultuous emotions in detail. Descartes's Passions of the Soul (1649), his best book in Solomon's view, deals with emotions straddling mind and body (the pineal gland, the animal spirits), yet slips into phenomenology: "love is the desire to be with the beloved object".
- Spinoza and Hume. Spinoza, despite his geometrical style, catalogs emotions in one-sentence descriptions, "some of them surprisingly poignant". Hume splits emotion into impressions and ideas: pride's object is the Self in two guises, as author of an accomplishment and as such. Although he calls pride a sensation that "contains not any representative quality", his analysis shows a conceptual structure. With Adam Smith he analyzed sympathy, which Smith made essential to morality and to human nature.
- Brentano (teacher, more or less, of Husserl and Scheler) gave a "descriptive psychology" of love and hate: emotions can be "correct", as judgments are. James's Principles of Psychology is first-rate phenomenology of sensation and perception, conceptual and in effect intentional. Freud splits "idea" and "affect", much like Hume, to his "considerable grief".
- Scheler rejected Kant's formalism for "value-feelings" (Formalism in Ethics and Non-formal Ethics of Values): our primary awareness of the world is emotional, and emotion is "intentional feeling", not "blind feeling".
Sartre, Freud and Merleau-Ponty
Sartre's Sketch (part of a discarded larger work on "the psyche") ends with emotions as "magical transformations of the world". Like the Stoics, for whom we may refuse to "assent" even to spontaneous judgments, he holds that emotions do not just "happen": they are ways of knowing and transforming the world and ourselves. Against Freud, Sartre rejects psychic determinism and the unconscious: consciousness is "translucent". He explains Freudian phenomena by pre-reflective emotion and replaces defence mechanisms with a pre-reflective refusal to acknowledge facts about oneself, while pursuing an effective psychoanalytic therapy of his own.
Merleau-Ponty, Sartre's co-editor at Les Temps Modernes (founded 1945), "barely broached" emotion but made the needed shift from intentionality to motility. Husserl's act is "almost wholly disembodied"; Merleau-Ponty makes the body the subject of the emotion. That recovers the ancient and Jamesian sense that emotions are bodily without neglecting phenomenology.
Solomon on the formal object of emotion
The formal object, beauty, and levels of awareness
It is contingent that one's beloved is five foot four, but not that she is lovable, a deliberate tautology. The scholastics called this the formal object; Kenny and de Sousa keep the term. All formal objects are "as perceived": one can grieve a loss that never happened, or love someone others find unlovable. Is beauty "in the eye of the beholder"? A police sketch artist records only facial features; the lover's appraisal gives them value. Solomon answers that it "makes no sense" phenomenologically to pry subjective contributions from objective features.
- Label, reflect, control. We label ("I am angry"), reflect ("does he really deserve it?") and control ("I've got to calm down, I'm going to lose my job"). Emotions are more than affect programs and can last years or a lifetime. A phenomenology must include reflection rather than define emotion minimally, as much social and neurological science does.
- Self-reference without reflection. Shame and pride take the self as object yet can be unreflective, visible in how one walks or holds one's head. Recognizing one's shame may bring defiance or more shame; recognizing one's pride may bring shame if one was raised to see pride as a deadly sin. Self-consciousness and reflection should be kept apart; Sartre tends to collapse them.
- Language. Animals and infants show self-consciousness, but reflection may need language, which raises Merleau-Ponty's problem of grasping prelinguistic experience, now "raised to crisis level" by neuroscientists.
- Low road, high road. LeDoux's "low road" and "high road" and Griffiths's split between affect programs and "higher cognitive emotions" (pride, shame, guilt, love) tend to shrink emotion to sensation; Kenny separated emotions (intentional) from feelings (not); Stocker calls affect "ineffable". Solomon denies that it is.
- Thumb biting. In Romeo and Juliet, "Do you bite your thumb at us, sir?" shows a vestigial gesture (Darwin, "once serviceable traits") turned into a culturally loaded insult. As Aristotle argued, revenge is part of anger, not its consequence.
- Knowing how. Nonverbal skills are neglected because animals share them and because knowing how cannot be reduced to knowing that; but it distorts cognition to make propositional knowledge prior to it.
Conclusion. The structures range from autonomic feelings to sophisticated plots and plans. To appreciate the richness of emotional life is "to further enrich them as well as to further complicate them": "In phenomenology, we do not always leave that which is described as it is."
The Egological Structure of Consciousness: Lessons from Sartre for Analytical Philosophy of Mind (Manuel Bremer)
Analytic mockery of "the Self" from ordinary usage ("my I was there, too") is weak: science also redefines terms ("space is curved", "the color of quarks"). And the Self as construct has support: Marvin Minsky's "society of mind" builds a self-image from competing agencies, close to Sartre's ego as a "posited transcendent object" whose spontaneity is "degraded and bastard". The Self is phenomenally real but not the agent in control. The mistake is to overdo the deconstruction and lose the I.
Five phenomena
| Phenomenon | Observation | Lesson |
|---|---|---|
| I: "I" as singular term | I need not identify myself; no misidentification | Self-awareness is not like referring to a table |
| II: the sugar trail | Perry follows the trail, then realizes he is the culprit | De se belief differs from belief about oneself by description |
| III: the I in every act | Whatever I know consciously, I know as known by me | The I is not on the side of content |
| IV: the shift | Absorbed in the cat, I suddenly notice that I am looking | A shift to the Ego that is not explicit reflection |
| V: the humming bear | The humming represents the bear; it is not itself represented | (F): some representations have a phenomenal quality just by being tokened |
From these Bremer distinguishes the Self (biography plus body), the functional I or Ego (2a, focus on the I; 2b, focus on objects), the implicit I of non-conscious but self-attributed processing, and a possible "transcendental ego", the architecture that makes consciousness possible. Sartre's pre-reflexive and reflexive cogito mirror (2b) and (2a).
['A first-order rival to higher-order theories']
The model
Sartre: an "unnoticed consciousness is an absurdity", yet consciousness of consciousness is non-positional; it is no second act, on pain of regress. Chisholm's de se theory: some attitudes are not propositional but self-attributions of properties; the I is not part of their content; direct self-reference is primary. The propositional route ("I believe I am F") fails: a believer is presupposed; the pronoun gives infallible reference but not phenomenal awareness; and a "subjective meaning" of "I" is a contradictio in adjecto.
So let "[S]" (the book prints a smiley-face glyph, rendered here as [S]) be an LOT symbol of immediate self-reference: "[S] F" models a conscious act with content F. The symbol is not perceived: "The symbol is not for me; I am it." A second symbol for the reflected Ego appears when [S] falls in the scope of another [S] (rule R1: only the leftmost is converted, since there is one Ego, even in "I believe that I want that I believe that dogs are green"); a third marks mere self-representation in nested and sub-doxastic states. Rule R2, "[S]F & [S]G ↔ S(F & G)", states unity of content as an architectural constraint, against Sartre's appeal to temporal synthesis alone.
Bremer's separation of Self, Ego and implicit I
The steps of Bremer's argument
- A shared origin. On a well-known account, phenomenology and analytic philosophy both began as anti-psychologism, defending the objectivity of logic (back to Bolzano). Husserl and Frege differed in method, and analytic philosophy "won" because intersubjectively shared language proved a better foundation than pure phenomenology, where practitioners disagree and eidetic reduction has no agreed method. Analytic work on the self, however, consists mostly of reflections on the pronoun "I" and an undifferentiated notion of "the self".
- Sources. Bremer uses The Transcendence of the Ego, the introduction to Being and Nothingness, and the lecture "Self-Awareness and Self-Knowledge". The chapter is explicitly not Sartre scholarship.
- Theoretical posits. If "the I", "Egos" and "the Self" are posits of a theory, a sentence like "The I unites experiences to present the Self to us" no longer sounds strange; deviance in ordinary usage "does not show much".
- Self-denial. One analytic line treats self-awareness as a byproduct of more fundamental events, since "the Self" as an object is dubious. Sartre agrees that the me is a posited transcendent object, "not something active", but not that self-awareness is thereby secondary.
- Downsizing without deconstructing. The Self may represent the whole "society of mind" or hidden cognitive agents, so positing it is no mere illusion. The key is to see it "not as the agent in control but as a (narrative) construct", and then to avoid "overdoing the deconstruction".
- The singular term. "The headless rider" is a singular term that refers to nothing. "I" means "the one speaking", but to identify myself by a description ("the one lecturing on December 18, in lecture hall 3F") I would already have to know myself. In Perry's case the shopper is de facto the messy customer before he knows it.
- Thinking as mine. I am "at" or "by" myself; it is not that "thinking happens to me". The background awareness of myself is like a humming that, on pain of regress, is not represented "as" itself.
| Bremer's term | What it is | Sartre's counterpart |
|---|---|---|
| Self (1) | Biographical, bodily, narrative construct | The me, the ego as transcendent object |
| Functional I (2a) | Focus on the I itself | Reflected cogito |
| Functional I (2b) | Focus on the objects I am aware of | Pre-reflexive cogito |
| Implicit I | Non-conscious, self-attributed processing | No direct counterpart |
| "Transcendental Ego" | Architecture making consciousness possible, absent from consciousness | Rejected as an inhabitant of consciousness |
De se theory and the rules
Chisholm (1981) and David Lewis (1979) developed de se theory (DST). Its axiom (A1): some attitudes are not propositional but self-attributions of properties, so (A1') some contents are properties and the I does not belong to the content. Hence (T1) the primary form of reference is direct self-reference, and (T3) the I is the primary object of my attitudes. Bremer warns that "object" in T3 must not be read as Sartre denies it of the pre-reflexive cogito. Both views share the axiom Bremer calls decisive (his own adjective is stronger) that the I is not part of the content.
- Example sentence. "[S] see red, (percept of) a red telephone such that I am conscious of it": the mode of the act and its object, under the I-operator. The model gives Sartre a working theory background; Sartre gives DST backing for keeping self-awareness out of the contents.
- R1, reflexive ascent. Whenever [S] is put into the scope of another [S], the leftmost inner one becomes the reflected Ego symbol. This Ego is not the biographical Self but the experienced agent that gives acts unity. With Sartre, against some Neo-Kantians, its appearance is not one entity reflected into itself.
- R2, unity. "[S] F & [S] G if and only if S(F & G)": a conjunction principle within the scope of the I-symbol unifies content.
- The propositionalist reply. (P): every attitude, explicit or tacit but cognitively penetrable, has the form "I (ATTITUDE) SENTENCE", for example "I see that the audience is falling asleep". A radical version even makes the natural-language pronoun the symbol that matters. Bremer's principle (E), "That which is experiencing is not itself an experienced object in that act", resists this. He concedes that it is phenomenologically less clear whether self-awareness is non-propositional.
Bremer's levels of the egological structure.
Conclusion. Analytic philosophy of mind has failed to separate the Self as constructed biographical object from the Ego as subject of conscious acts; focusing on the Self shrinks self-awareness to awareness of an object. Keeping them apart supports the thesis that all awareness of something is at once awareness of oneself, and a Sartre-DST synthesis "comes closer to saving the phenomena".
Phenomenology, Neuroscience, and Intersubjectivity (Matthew Ratcliffe)
Two kinds of naturalism
Roy, Petitot, Pachoud and Varela (1999) propose extracting Husserl's descriptions and reconstructing them in cognitive science, so that every property is "continuous with the properties admitted by the natural sciences". This presupposes an epistemological thesis (scientific method is the best route to all knowledge) and a metaphysical one (the world consists only of what science posits). Ratcliffe rejects that package, while accepting a looser continuity of philosophy with science. Phenomenology is not anti-science (Merleau-Ponty's case studies; Husserl's aim to clarify science), but it denies science is our most basic understanding: science presupposes the lifeworld, and naturalism is a "surreptitious substitution of idealized nature for prescientifically intuited reality".
Mirror neurons
Cells in area F5 of monkey premotor cortex fire both when an action is performed and when it is observed. They respond to goals, not movements: mimed actions without objects weaken the response; "broadly congruent" cells track the goal, "strictly congruent" ones the style. F5 is homologous to Broca's area; a human mirror system may support gesture, facial matching and imitation. Gallese and Goldman take this to favor simulation over theory theory.
| View | How we understand others | Ratcliffe's verdict |
|---|---|---|
| Theory theory | A tacit body of knowledge about minds, innate or learned | Treats others as objects to predict; a "spectatorial" stance |
| Simulation | Running our own processes "off-line" in their position | Two steps; presupposes already seeing them as like us |
| Direct perception (Gallagher, Thompson) | "Perception of action is already an understanding of the action" | Supported by mirror neurons and by phenomenology |
Mirror neurons do not explain the self-other distinction; the problem may be less crossing a gulf than distinguishing within an undifferentiated perceptual-motor awareness, Gallese's "shared manifold".
Three phenomenological accounts that the mirror system helps to explain.
Phenomenology of others
Husserl's Fifth Cartesian Meditation reduces to a "sphere of ownness" and finds a passive pairing: like knife and fork grouped in a Gestalt, my body and the other's are associated so that the other's body takes "the sense: animate organism", confirmed in "harmonious behavior" (so not a pairing of static bodies, contra Smith's "over-intellectualized" charge). Mirror neurons show what such analogizing apperception could consist in. Scheler: pity presupposes an already-given other; "It is in the blush that we perceive shame, in the laughter joy"; imitation presupposes grasping gestures as expressions, with "some degree of undifferentiated identification". Merleau-Ponty: infants imitate faces before they could map their own seen body, so perception and proprioception must be linked directly; mirror neurons offer an innate mechanism (Gallagher and Meltzoff).
From mirror neurons to a non-inferential bodily togetherness
The argument in finer grain
- Two theses of naturalism. Epistemological: the standpoint and methods of empirical science are the best way to know every aspect of the world, ourselves included. Metaphysical: the world consists solely of the objects, properties and causal relations that scientific theories posit. Together they fuel exhaustive "naturalization": whatever does not fit must be reinterpreted in objective, physical terms, with no "ultimate appeal to the irreducible character of experience".
- Phenomenology is not anti-science. Husserl's Crisis (1937) makes science draw its meaning from the lifeworld (Lebenswelt) and warns against "a surreptitious substitution of idealized nature for prescientifically intuited reality", while taking the clarification of science as a central task. Merleau-Ponty calls perception the source of "all rationality, all value and all existence", an "openness to something", and uses neuropsychological case studies throughout Phenomenology of Perception (1945). "Science does not contain its own interpretation and naturalism is not sewn into its structure."
- Roy et al.'s "reciprocal movement". They describe their project as two-way, but in practice assume an orthodox naturalization in which phenomenological properties are made "non-mysterious" by reconstruction.
- Evidence base. Since their discovery (dated 1996 in the chapter), mirror neurons have been studied in monkeys by electrophysiology. In humans, single cells cannot be recorded, so studies use MEG, TMS and PET. Cells do not fire when the object is seen without the action, and respond less or not at all when a tool replaces the hand. Some are tuned to general categories ("grasping, manipulating, tearing, holding"), others to the manner of grasp. The human system also responds to communicative gestures without target objects.
- Imitation. Wohlschläger and Bekkering (2002) call the mirror system necessary but not sufficient for imitation. Since "children perceive goals and intentions from a very early age on", a "direct perceptual-motor mapping" lets one see what to do without working it out.
- The theory-simulation debate. The theory view has a tacit body of knowledge, innate (Carruthers 1996) or learned (Gopnik 1996). Simulation runs our own processes "off-line". Gallese and Goldman say motor facilitation in the same muscle groups fits simulation, "nature's way of getting the observer into the same 'mental shoes'". Stone and Davies say that for theory theory others are "objects in our environment". Gallagher's objection: "perception of action is already an understanding of the action; there is no extra step".
Ratcliffe: two phenomenologies of the other that mirror neurons can serve
Husserl, Scheler and Merleau-Ponty on perceiving others
An objective world already contains others: it is a world "there for everyone". Husserl's reduction to the sphere of ownness removes "all constitutional effects of intentionality relating ... to other subjectivity", leaving a pre-objective layer of perception and kinesthesia. Foundational layers may also be developmental ones: "what is foundationally first is also genetically first" (Smith 2003). Smith calls the Fifth Meditation "over-intellectualized", pairing stationary bodies; Ratcliffe replies that Husserl already speaks of "changing but incessantly harmonious behavior", so patterns of movement are paired. Gallagher (2001b) adds that mirror neurons show how an intermodal link between proprioception and the perception of action is possible.
For Scheler we do not understand someone by pitying her; that she can be pitied is already understood. Expressions are not external clues to inner states: experiences are given "not by inference, but directly, as a sort of primary 'perception'", which grounds imitation. Merleau-Ponty rejects the assumption that, lacking access to another's psyche, we must reason by analogy, and asks: "have we the means of systematically comparing the body of the other as seen by me with my body as sensed by me?" He could not explain how such a link is innate; mirror neurons offer a resource.
Wriggling out of naturalism
Phenomenology supplies explananda and an interpretive framework, and science feeds back by clarifying notions like "analogizing apperception". The argument: if no good case shows the primacy of detached type-A processes, then reinterpreting what type-B processes reveal (Y) as X is not warranted. The personal stance toward others is self-engaging; a detached stance would mislead by revealing them as objects. Thompson: both theory and simulation share the presupposition that mind-reading is "a 'spectatorial' process". Trevarthen's "primary intersubjectivity" (spelled "Trevarthan" in the chapter), developed by Gallagher, shows that embodied practices are not merely earlier than theory; theorizing about a "he" is "secondary and peripheral". Why should certain processes have authority? "Because those processes reveal it to be": a troubling circularity. Goldie: "the impersonal stance ... is not the stance of commonsense psychology". Psychology could combine "objective" and "personal" standpoints without reducing one to the other.
The Intrinsic Spatial Frame of Reference (Shaun Gallagher)
Kant: "imagine that the first created thing was a human hand"; it would have to be right or left, so space cannot be merely relational (against Leibniz). Even the best star map is useless unless oriented "by referring them to the sides of our body". Merleau-Ponty: my arm is never "beside the ash-tray" as the ash-tray is beside the telephone; the body's parts are "enveloped in each other".
Frames of reference
| Frame (Majid et al. 2004) | Example | Status |
|---|---|---|
| Relative (egocentric), ternary | "The fork is to the left of the spoon" (from where I stand) | Changes when I turn |
| Intrinsic, here "object-centered" | "The fork is beside the spoon"; "on my left" | Relative to an object, including my body taken as object |
| Absolute (cardinal) | "The fork is north of the spoon"; "an ant on your south leg" | Needs a constant "mental compass"; ultimately relative too |
| Gallagher's intrinsic bodily frame | My right shoulder stays right whatever I touch it with | Innate, non-perspectival, absolute |
Majid and colleagues argue that frames are linguistically determined and that the egocentric frame is a projection of an object-centered parsing of one's own body. Gallagher objects: to parse my body as an object, I need a standpoint, and "I should need the use of a second body". Proprioception (which develops prenatally) gives non-observational awareness of limbs: its order is that of the body itself (O'Shaughnessy); it lacks distance and direction from an origin (Bermúdez): my foot is not "closer to me" than my hand. Contorting the body does not bring two sensations closer on the proprioceptive map, and moving my left hand to my right shoulder does not make it a second right hand.
The order of projections runs back to the body (cf. the book's Figure 24.1, fork and spoon).
The steps of Gallagher's argument
- Epigraphs. "We need an absolute within the sphere of the relative" (Merleau-Ponty 1962) and "The absolute in the relative is what my body brings to me" (Merleau-Ponty 2003) set the theme.
- Inspector Morse. In Colin Dexter's story, Morse finds an arm and hand in an Oxford canal and uses forensic science to learn the victim's gender, possibly race, and DNA. One thing is "absolutely apparent" without science: whether it is a right or a left hand.
- The body as frontier. For Merleau-Ponty, "the outline of my body is a frontier which ordinary spatial relations do not cross"; its parts are "not spread out side by side, but enveloped in each other".
- The traditional pair. The egocentric frame is first-person, relative (turn 180 degrees and right becomes left) and often thought innate. The allocentric frame is third-person: a GPS fix, or "the fork is to the north of the spoon".
- Culture and language. Majid et al. (2004) find frames culturally relative: English speakers keep the absolute frame for geography, while Guugu Yimithirr speakers in Australia use only the absolute frame ("There's an ant on your south leg"). Intrinsic parsing also varies: Tzeltal in Mexico assigns front and back by geometry or volume.
- Binary versus ternary. On Majid's view, "the fork is on the left" (myself and the fork) is still intrinsic, because only a binary relation is coded; it becomes relative when a ternary relation includes the viewer ("left of the spoon").
| Frame | Centered on | Turn 180 degrees? | Gallagher's comment |
|---|---|---|---|
| My body as landmark object (Majid's intrinsic) | My body observed | Changes | Requires an impossible observational stance on my own body |
| Relative, egocentric | Viewer, ternary | Changes | Relative, perceptual |
| Object-centered | A landmark object | Unaffected; depends on the object | Relative to the landmark |
| "Absolute" (cardinal) | Earth bearings | Unchanged | Must be dead-reckoned from the body; magnetic fields shift |
| Proprioceptive (Gallagher's intrinsic) | The lived body itself, no origin | Unchanged: my left hand stays left | Innate (prenatal), absolute, first-person |
Proprioception as the absolute frame
Gallagher borrows Thomas Brown's term "bodily frame". Merleau-Ponty's mid-1950s Collège de France lectures make perception an awareness of motor possibilities, which agrees with neuroscience (Jeannerod 1997). I observe objects with my body, but to observe my body "I should need the use of a second body". So Majid's body-centered frame is not intrinsic. Saying "I am standing in my own body" shows the oddity. Proprioception is non-observational and literally innate, since it develops before birth. As O'Shaughnessy puts it, "the revealed ... constitutes the very system of ordering ... of the revealer". Bermúdez notes a "fundamental disanalogy" with the egocentric space of vision and hearing. Proprioception has no origin and no perspective. If I touch my right shoulder with my left hand, "it does not become a second right hand". "Here", applied to my body, is "the laying down of the first co-ordinates".
Gallagher: how the bodily frame grounds other frames.
Dead reckoning and the words for space
An absolute-frame speaker must run a "mental compass", a constant background computation, and keep mental maps oriented, but Majid et al. "ignore the question of how this knowledge is possible". North is only ever "that way", pointed out from here: facing New York with the coast to my right, north is straight ahead. Gallagher therefore dissents from Merleau-Ponty's claim that "primitive man in the desert is always able to take his bearings immediately". By contrast, I cannot get lost with respect to my own body. Spatial words borrow the body too: "When I say that an object is on a table, I always mentally put myself either in the table or in the object". Stripped of that, "on" is indistinguishable from "under" or "beside". The chapter leaves aside the metaphysics of space. Kant's incongruent hands are still a clue: the body thrusts us into space and gives "the first model of those transpositions, equivalents and identifications" that make space objective, "the ultimate court of appeal ... of all knowledge connected with space".
Action, the Scientific Worldview, and Being-in-the-World (Craig DeLancey)
Two problems for analytic action theory
Take three events: Jones trips and falls (a mere event, computed by mechanics), Jones blinks (behavior, with a purpose), Jones balances her checkbook (an action, guided by rules she could explain). The basic task is to separate events from behaviors; analytic theory has mostly skipped it, separating events from actions by special mental states (Davidson's reasons as causes) or by kinds of description (after Wittgenstein), or reducing purpose (Millikan). But if physics gives sufficient explanations, purposes are superfluous. Norman Malcolm saw the "collision": a man climbing a ladder for his hat cannot be fully explained both by his intention and by a complete neurophysiology.
| Problem | Analytic form | Phenomenological answer |
|---|---|---|
| Basic problem | Purpose looks superfluous given sufficient causal science | The causal view is derivative of being-in-the-world (Heidegger); behavior has irreducible form (Merleau-Ponty) |
| Expertise problem | Mastery has all marks of mere behavior: fast, unreportable, not rule-guided | Action is distinguished by the capacity to see as and question (Heidegger) or by symbolic behavior (Merleau-Ponty), not by causes |
The expertise problem: preparing a difficult new piece, the organist satisfies every standard criterion for action. Mastery, though, means playing correctly and automatically, a non-declarative "implicit memory" stored in distinct brain regions. So most theories imply that only amateur activity is action.
Heidegger
Dasein's world is a system of purposes, not a collection of objects; "self and world belong together in the single entity". Dasein projects onto possibilities: "the projection is the way I am the possibility"; understanding as self-projection "is the authentic meaning of action". Freedom is removed from "self-initiating spontaneity": "being-in-the-world is accordingly nothing other than freedom". DeLancey likens this to agent causation (Chisholm, Taylor): activity that is Dasein's own because it is what Dasein is. The scientific view of the body as occurrent is legitimate but derivative; seeing an organism that way "we are not observing Dasein".
The organist, read through Heidegger: action as the capacity to question.
Heidegger's 1929-30 lectures reject reading Being and Time as saying man's essence is to handle "knives and forks or use the tram". Animals behave (a "driven performing"); humans comport. The animal is "world poor" (after von Uexkull): the bee does not relate to the blossom "as something present or not present". What humans add is encountering beings as occurrent, which also opens the possibility of anxious nihilation, purposes "evaporating", and so of resoluteness. The organist differs from an animal in that she can always see any choice of the composer or her own "as something" and so possibly as arbitrary; authentically, she knows "there is no absolute standard for perfection".
The later Heidegger speaks of action as accomplishment (producere), thinking as the highest action, freedom as "letting beings be", "releasement" beyond activity and passivity, and the wait for a god: a search for a mode between passivity and spontaneity.
The steps of DeLancey's argument
- Why action became a problem. In the modern scientific view, each event is "the unique causal product of past events". The problem sharpened with Descartes' division between a free, rule-following mind and a mechanical world. Heidegger, focused on ontology and unsympathetic to naturalism, rarely took up these questions. Sartre settles them by stipulation: the for-itself must act and is unconstrained.
- Three positions on purpose. Millikan (1984) tries to reduce purposes to mechanism. Davidson's "Actions, Reasons, and Causes" (1963) posits irreducible mental states that cause actions. A later-Wittgensteinian line (Wilson 1989) treats purposes as a different kind of explanation, not causes. All face the "faith" of the scientific worldview that physics will explain every event, which would make purposes superfluous.
- Malcolm's ladder. Norman Malcolm (1968), a student of Wittgenstein, imagines a man climbing a ladder to retrieve his hat from the roof. The intention explanation and a sufficient neurophysiological one, in terms of "electrical, chemical, and mechanical processes", would collide as accounts of one and the same climbing.
- Neglect of behavior. Analytic theory has mostly tried to separate events of type 1 from type 3 (actions), ignoring purposeful behavior (type 2) such as blinking, and whether behavior differs from action at all. Jones can say "I will (not) do this" and then (not) act; that ability to refrain is often taken as the mark of action.
- The organist in detail. Preparing a new experimental piece, Jones reads the special directions, decides what to practice first and could justify each step aloud: every standard criterion of action is met. Mastery means skills that are fast, unreportable step by step, not governed by discrete rules and "resistant to conscious control". The athlete, the musician and the craftsperson all seek this. So expertise runs from action to behavior, the reverse of what the theory expects. Psychology separates declarative from non-declarative implicit memory.
DeLancey: expertise moves from action toward behavior, against the theory.
Heidegger in more detail
World is not the set of physical objects but "the system of purposes" that sets a Dasein's actual and possible interactions. "Transcendence, being-in-the-world, is never to be equated and identified with intentionality"; Heidegger's word is comportment, which includes "automatic" perceptuomotor skills. Freedom is removed from "self-initiating spontaneity, sua sponte", so "Being-in-the-world is accordingly nothing other than freedom". This parallels agent causation (Chisholm 1976, Taylor 1966) without positing a subject. Tools are ready-to-hand (Zuhandenheit) and serve a for-the-sake-of-which. A broken tool turns present-at-hand (Vorhandenheit). For the novice Jones, the organ was at first a strange, recalcitrant object. The bee "does not comport itself toward the blossom as something present or not present". In "What is Metaphysics?" (1929), anxiety's "nihilation" makes "all things and we ourselves sink into indifference", which underlies authenticity. The later Heidegger's turn answers Sartre's "Existentialism is a Humanism". The 1966 interview's "only a god can save us" still asks us to "awaken the readiness of expectation".
Merleau-Ponty's three forms of behavior
| Form (Structure of Behavior, 1942) | What it is | Who has it |
|---|---|---|
| Syncretic | Simple responses triggered by a complex of stimuli | Simplest organisms |
| Amovable | Learning, flexible means to the same end; not symbolic | The most complex non-human animals, bound by the "a priori of the species" |
| Symbolic | Sign relations mirror object relations; varied expressions of one theme; seeing a skill from many perspectives | Humans |
Science's attempt at "an objective science of subjectivity" is, for Merleau-Ponty, built on perception, which is pre-theoretical experience of things as opportunities for action. Habit "expresses our power of dilating being-in-the-world" and is "knowledge in the hands". This knowledge cannot be stated as declarative instructions, because it is qualitatively different. Move the stops and pedals, set the keys higher and farther apart, and the organist still plays. "The true sign represents the signified, not according to an empirical association, but inasmuch as its relation to other signs is the same as the relation of the object signified". No special mental state marks action. Symbolic capacity adds flexibility: the organist can reflect on his playing and consider transcribing the music for other instruments, and so changes his world. DeLancey calls the result a bold, "apparently even falsifiable" set of presumptions for the sciences of behavior.
Phenomenology in Artificial Intelligence and Cognitive Science (Daniel Andler)
Dreyfus's long argument
What Computers Can't Do argued that AI was not progressing, that this was due to mistaken assumptions (H), and that it ignored properties (P) constitutive of intelligence. Dreyfus fought "on its own turf": no dualism, no appeal to the Subject, no hostility to the brain. Hence his efficacy, and hence the irrelevance here of the analytic/continental divide. Many still find his rejection of information processing (H) inconclusive while accepting (P); the central question for Andler is how far one can honor (P) without (H).
GOFAI ("brain dead since the early 1970s", per Minsky) assumed discrete context-free units, symbols manipulated by formal rules, a stored body of facts, and a central module insulated from the world like a sunken command center. Three objections:
| Assumption | Dreyfus's objection |
|---|---|
| Context-free primitives | Meaning varies with context; treating the background as extra information is Heidegger's "metaphysical assumption" |
| Behavior from formal rules | Regress of rules for applying rules (Wittgenstein, Lewis Carroll); rule-describable is not rule-following (the cyclist does not solve equations); experts discard rules "like training-wheels" |
| Common sense as a mass of facts | No end to the facts, and the relevance problem: "at any moment, anything might turn out to be relevant" (the frame problem) |
The constructive side enlarges the mind in three steps: embodied (Merleau-Ponty; "knees don't bend backward"), embedded (Gibson's affordances, Heidegger's "in order to"), and socially situated (equipment is "equipment-for"), summed in Merleau-Ponty's "intentional arc". Intelligent comportment may be matching the situation to a similar stored one. Intellectualism is "not so much utterly false as abstract": it "gets things exactly backward", since detached reflection is a late elaboration on skillful coping.
Andler's "threesomes": three disciplines meet three strengths of phenomenology
Three disciplines, three phenomenologies
"Cognitive psychology" dates from 1967; "cognitive science" took hold in the mid-1970s as Cogsci-1, committed to cognitivism (Haugeland's term); today's Cogsci-2 has no such commitment. AI dropped its "Promethean" goal for cognitive prostheses, software engineering and connectionism; philosophy of mind now entertains every ontology, dualism included.
Phenomenology-1 just attends to consciousness, qualia and first-person reports, often with no reading of Husserl; it is a heuristic (consciousness, emotions, distributed cognition, social cognition, mirror neurons, Tomasello's shared intentions). Phenomenology-2 domesticates phenomenological themes and imposes constraints: action above all (O'Regan and Noë's active perception, Brooks's new robotics, Jeannerod on motor control), raising antirepresentationalism, non-conceptual content, the body, and autonomy. Syntheses: McClamrock's externalism, Auyang, Andy Clark (1997), DeLancey (2002) on emotions. Phenomenology-3 proposes ontological options.
Andler: the split target and the split influence
Andler's reconstruction in more detail
- Origins. AI and Cogsci arose some fifty years before the volume from "a couple of small-scale academic encounters on the East Coast", "wedded together like Siamese twins".
- Three features of the critique. It is not aprioristic: Dreyfus fought AI "on its own turf", like a naturalistic philosopher of science, which explains its efficacy in a "culturally hostile" field. It is a cohesive "long argument", as Darwin saw the Origin. And it aims at a moving target that Dreyfus himself helped displace. The mistaken assumptions (H) and the ignored dimensions (P) met unequal approval, so the question is whether one can honor (P) without siding with (H).
- GOFAI's names. Fodor called it the "Wagnerian phase of AI research", also known as "Promethean AI". Marvin Minsky said it has been "brain dead" since the early 1970s, alive in appearance but with fatal internal injury. Its assumptions still survive among working scientists, so Dreyfus's objections keep "most of their relevance". Intelligence, not then distinguished from "mindedness", was a property of programmed information processors applying formal rules to a "data base" that "represents" the world. Dreyfus saw AI as "a zealous follower of the rationalistic tradition".
- Rule regress. Which rule tells us when to apply a rule? The regress, familiar from Wittgenstein's skeptic, was already noticed by Lewis Carroll.
- Skill acquisition. Hubert and Stuart Dreyfus (1986): beginners' context-free rules are not "automated" below consciousness but discarded like training-wheels on a toddler's bicycle. Expert performance rests on "skillful coping".
- Common sense and relevance. The "factualist" guess that about 10 million items would give a computer common sense is "a wild guess". Even with the facts stored, which few are relevant? Splitting the store into bundles fails twice: bundles must be several orders of magnitude smaller, so finding the right one takes "astronomical time", and real situations cross domains. Flirting in a restaurant stops when the courted one chokes on a fishbone, or at a racist remark from the next table. Life is "Quinean" (Fodor 1983): anything might be relevant. One form is AI's frame problem.
- The intentional arc. Merleau-Ponty: conscious life "is subtended by an 'intentional arc' which projects round about us our past, our future, our human setting". A bridging proposal matches the present situation to a stored repertory of similar ones, giving priority to active perception and pattern matching. It can link to brains directly or through connectionist models. The intellectualist view, as Merleau-Ponty says, is "not so much utterly false as abstract".
Andler on Dreyfus: skill acquisition against the rule-following picture.
The split and the new agenda
The field split into three disciplines that grew "beyond recognition". Cognitive psychology (1967) was a Kuhnian "paradigm" within psychology. Cogsci-1 was an "interdisciplinary matrix" of psychology, linguistics, AI, brain science (not yet "neuroscience") and philosophy. Cogsci-2 is opportunistic, "as mature sciences are wont to be". Its Promethean ambition moved to Artificial Life and Artificial Consciousness. Phenomenology-1 topics include emotions, now an integral part of the mind, so that the divide between "cold" and "hot" cognition should be dropped. Another is theory of mind (apes limited, autistic children impaired), with mirror neurons (Rizzolatti et al. 2001) and Tomasello (1999) on shared intentions. Phenomenology-2 centers on action, "perhaps the single most important factor" in the renewal: active perception, the new robotics and motor control. These raise four open questions: modularity, non-conceptual content, the body, and autonomy. Virtual reality probes "presence". Syntheses include McClamrock (1995), Auyang (2001), Andy Clark (1997), "the best-rounded", and DeLancey (2002) on emotion.
| AI direction | Claim | Phenomenological link |
|---|---|---|
| Connectionism | No classical representation, no central control, massively parallel, self-organizing | Welcomed by Dreyfus, but disembodied programs |
| New robotics (Brooks, MIT) | Start with a body and sensors; the world is its own "best model" | Credits Dreyfus, with O'Regan and Noe |
| Existential AI (Winograd and Flores 1986) | Adaptive tools for working communities, not self-sufficient minds | Thrownness, equipment, commitment; Searle's speech acts |
| Naturalized Husserl (Petitot et al. 1999) | Formal ontology, mereology, intentionality modeled | Kelly on maximum grip; McClamrock on noesis and noema; van Gelder on time |
Strict phenomenology and two puzzles
Formal ontology is being revived from Austrian philosophy with Gibson and Gestalt psychology: mereology (Smith 1982) and studies of places, sounds, holes and shadows (Casati and Varzi, Casati and Dokic). The optic flux has enough structure for mathematical physics to describe its interpretation. Sean Kelly links "maximum grip" to Milner and Goodale and to Walter Freeman's chaotic attractors. Two questions remain. Can Husserl's usable side be peeled apart from his antinaturalism? Petitot and Dreyfus agree that it can, against "a vast majority of Husserl scholars". And will naturalized Husserl succeed? Here Petitot rejects Dreyfus's representationalist reading. Andler closes by asking: since every cognitive scientist starts with rudimentary phenomenology, is it not "misplaced methodological perfectionism" to bar refined accounts?
Phenomenological Currents in Twentieth-Century Psychology (Frederick J. Wertz)
Two psychologies
Wundt himself kept a non-experimental "folk psychology" for higher processes, but Titchener carried only his structuralism to America, and Boring's textbook wrote the history from that standpoint, on to behaviorism. Europe never wholly identified with physical science: Dilthey separated human from natural sciences, and Brentano's act psychology made intentionality the mark of the mental. Two of Brentano's students went different ways: Freud, whose movement borrowed natural-science models and did not acknowledge its Brentanian roots, and Husserl, who called for a psychology that does not reify mental life.
From Husserl psychologists took the epoché of natural-science theory and of the natural attitude, and free imaginative variation. Wertz's example: vary an instance of anger until it stops being anger, and one may find that anger is an intention to oppose an unjust, unnecessary threat to something the self values. Intentionality includes potentialities: the "I can" is lived as virtualities of my surroundings.
The philosophers who fed psychology:
| Philosopher | What psychologists took |
|---|---|
| Heidegger | A non-Cartesian picture of existence as care; authenticity; the hermeneutic circle as method |
| Sartre | Eidetic studies of imagination and emotion; critique of the unconscious; existential psychoanalysis (Baudelaire, Flaubert, Genet); the progressive-regressive method |
| Merleau-Ponty | The body-subject; child psychology at the Sorbonne; flesh and chiasm |
| Scheler, Marcel, Ricoeur | Ressentiment and sympathy; hope and availability; the narrative turn |
| Bachelard, Levinas, Buber | Elements and reverie; the unknowable Other; I-Thou |
From laboratory to lifeworld: the minority line in psychology
Schools, clinics, methods
The early European schools were thick with phenomenology: Stern's personalism (his Präsenzzeit used by Husserl on time), Katz on color and touch, Rubin's figure and ground, Michotte on perceived causality, and Gestalt psychology (Wertheimer's phi phenomenon, Köhler's insightful apes, Koffka's phenomenal field), with Lewin and Heider extending it to social relations. Nazism and the war broke this tradition; emigrés were absorbed into positivist psychology without their methods.
Psychiatry kept it alive. Jaspers's General Psychopathology (1913) brought in "the whole person"; Binswanger and Boss read pathologies as constrictions of Dasein's openness; Minkowski, after living with a depressed patient, located depression in the collapse of the future; Straus described hallucination as pure passivity, being touched without touching back; Laing read schizophrenia through Sartre; van den Berg founded metabletics, arguing that "neurosis" and even "pain" changed historically. Existence (May et al. 1958) carried this to American therapists.
Wertz's minority history of phenomenological psychology
The narrative in finer grain
- Before Wundt. The psychophysicists Gustav Fechner and Hermann Helmholtz first applied natural-science quantitative methods to psychological phenomena, looking for universal laws. Some phenomenological work did take place in Titchener's Cornell lab (Edmonds and Smith 1923). As mental testing grew in the United States, psychoanalysis and Gestalt psychology were downplayed, and the dialogue with philosophy stayed dormant until the late 1970s.
- Brentano's two students. Dilthey (1833-1911) separated the human disciplines from the natural ones. Brentano's "act psychology" (1838-1917) made intentionality and meaning the irreducible marks of mental life. Two of his students built on it: Freud, and Husserl (1859-1938), "originally a mathematician". Husserl reached transcendental phenomenology through psychology, from the Logical Investigations to the Crisis.
- Sartre's psychology. Being and Nothingness analyzes the gaze, love, indifference, arrogance and masochism, and culminates in "existential psychoanalysis", carried out on Baudelaire, himself, Flaubert and Genet. The Critique of Dialectical Reason gave a "progressive-regressive" method for relating material conditions to freedom.
- Merleau-Ponty at the Sorbonne. He held the Chair of Child Psychology, later succeeded by Jean Piaget, and studied language acquisition, imitation, personality and psychopathology. The posthumous Visible and Invisible gave psychologists "flesh" and "the chiasm".
- Scheler, Levinas, Buber. Scheler was the first to relate phenomenology to psychopathology (self-deception, ressentiment). Levinas stressed the Other's unknowability as a condition of ethical treatment. Buber's I-it and I-Thou is a perennial reference point.
| European school | Figures | Phenomenological contribution |
|---|---|---|
| Leipzig (after Wundt) | Felix Krueger | Psychology of wholeness (Ganzheitspsychologie); Krueger was a Nazi, so it is unlikely to be revived |
| Goettingen | G. E. Mueller, Jaensch, Katz, Rubin, Revesz, Schapp | Eidetic imagery; color and touch; Katz on vibration as a new modality (music enjoyed by the deaf) and on animals; figure-ground reversal; "hardness" and "fluidity" |
| Wuerzburg | Kuelpe, Messer, Buehler, Michotte | Imageless thought from weight comparisons; intentionality in perception theory; meaning to unify schools; perception of causality and object permanence (Louvain) |
| Berlin Gestalt | Wertheimer, Koehler, Koffka, Duncker, Lewin, Heider | Phi phenomenon; whole before parts; insight in apes using branches; Koehler on the board of Philosophy and Phenomenological Research after 1941; functional fixity (a cardboard box as rain hat) |
| Netherlands, post-war | Buytendijk, Strasser, Linschoten | Meanings of sleep, breathing, digestion, pain; dialogical research with participants as partners |
Clinic, emigration and the Duquesne program
Jaspers drew on Dilthey's Verstehende Psychologie (understanding, not explanation), the Logical Investigations, Kierkegaard and Nietzsche. He gave descriptive knowledge of hallucinations, delusions, dreams and gestures. Heidegger's insistence on the structural unity of Dasein let clinicians interpret symptoms within being-in-the-world as a whole, "a scope scarcely approached in academic psychology". Boss read neuroses, schizophrenia, psychophysiological illness and perversions as constrictions of openness. Laing's The Divided Self (1962) and Sanity, Madness, and the Family draw on the early and later Sartre. Van den Berg (1974) argues that "neurosis", "developmental crises" and even "pain" are relatively recent, products of modern pluralism. American interest came through McLeod in the 1930s, Allport (who introduced Harvard students to phenomenology), and émigrés Koffka, Koehler, Tillich and Straus. The turning points were Buber's William Alanson White lectures (1957) and the volume Existence. Heirs include Rollo May, Rogers, Frankl, Fromm, Gendlin, Yalom, and Atwood and Stolorow (1984).
Wertz: how phenomenological psychology became institutional.
Van Kaam, founding editor of the Review of Existential Psychiatry and Psychology, argued in 1961 that all psychology must acknowledge existential foundations. His study of "feeling really understood" (1959) and his "comprehensive theorizing" set up Duquesne. Faculty studied with philosophers Schewer (as printed; usually Andre Schuwer), Sallis, Lingis, Scanlon and Embree. Their work spans Giorgi on learning, W. Fischer on anxiety and self-deception, Von Eckartsberg on social psychology, Barton on psychotherapies, C. Fischer on individualized assessment and Murray on imagination. Giorgi defended verbal descriptions, reliability and validity, and led four volumes of Duquesne Studies (1971, 1975, 1979, 1983). Rennie, Watson and Monteiro (2000) found his Journal of Phenomenological Psychology (1970) the leading venue for qualitative research since the 1970s. The Human Science Research Association has met annually for over twenty years. Larry Davidson's Husserlian program at Yale Medical School on schizophrenia built meaningful communities, agency and an open future after discharge, and rehospitalization "dramatically decreased". Programs run at Duquesne, Seattle, West Georgia, Dallas, Tennessee (Howard Pollio's experimental program), Sonoma State, BYU, Fordham, Quebec at Montreal and Sheffield, plus Saybrook, Fielding and Pacifica institutes.
Medicine (Fredrik Svenaeus)
Meaning, illness and the alien
Phenomenology studies meaning: how an object appears to a subject. Learning that a virus causes chronic fatigue syndrome can be meaningful in two ways, as a place in my life (a cure for my illness) or as a link in nature's causal network; only the first is everyday meaning. Heidegger's chair appears within "totalities of relevance" bound together as "world"; even the forest and the wind are encountered as timber and a favorable wind. The "as" of categorial intuition is already there when I simply use the chair.
Heidegger says only Dasein can be meaningful or meaningless; other beings are unmeaningful (unsinnig), and only the unmeaningful can be absurd (widersinnig), as with "events of nature which break in on us and destroy us". Svenaeus's step: a severe disease is such an event, and science renders it unmeaningful rather than absurd without fitting it back into everyday life. Zaner (the uncanny body), Leder (the body's "dys-appearance") and Toombs (a four-stage objectification of the body) all describe illness as otherness of one's own body.
| Dimension | Health | Illness |
|---|---|---|
| Being-in-the-world | Homelike, transparent, open to new things | Unhomelike; the body resists will and understanding |
| Mood | Unnoticed attunement | Pain, fatigue, nausea, anxiety as breakdown of understanding |
| Time | Rhythmic, inscribed in projecting the future from the past | Focus on the present; past and future "mine and yet no longer mine" |
| Narrative | A continuous life story | A rift demanding retelling (Ricoeur, Frank) |
The time of the body
Heidegger's Dasein temporalizes rather than being in time, and when he admits nature into temporality (day and night, the calendar) it is nature "outside" us. Svenaeus charges that he fails to mention the anonymous time of the body: breathing, digesting, sleeping, and in women menstruation and pregnancy (Leder). Illness is the time of the body no longer fitting the time of the self.
Svenaeus: three dimensions of illness and the task they set medicine
Svenaeus's argument step by step
- A neglected field. Outside psychiatry, phenomenology of medicine "remains largely uninvestigated"; phenomenologists have preferred the arts, humanities and social sciences. Svenaeus does not survey the literature. He seeks the essences of illness and health through the facticity of medicine, following Merleau-Ponty's dictum that phenomenology "puts essences back into existence".
- Meaning and "as". Heidegger's question of being draws on Husserl's categorial intuition and Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics. The "is" in "the chair is yellow" is already present when I simply use the chair, so "as" means "in order to". Objects belong to "totalities of relevance" as tools (Zeuge). A tool need not be an artifact, and the world of phenomenology is "the world of culture", not nature. Being and Time aims beyond naturalism, idealism and pragmatism: Dasein also strives to understand its own way of existing.
- Earlier phenomenologies of illness. Zaner's The Context of Self (1981, from Husserl) on the alien, uncanny body. Leder's The Absent Body (1990, from Merleau-Ponty) on "dys-appearance", the body as an independent creature resisting will. Toombs's The Meaning of Illness (1992, from Sartre) gives a four-stage model in which the lived body becomes the biological organism researched by science. Behind them stand Buytendijk, Jonas, Pluegge and Straus.
- Neither mental nor somatic. Binswanger and Boss saw the patient's whole being-in-the-world, but phenomenology rejects the dualistic cleavage. Illness is attuned: moods "come over us and cannot easily be changed", and illness is "a striking example".
- Death and time. Death is not the organism's end, never experienced as such, but "the utmost possibility". Care is "ahead-of-itself-already-being-in (a world) as being-together-with beings". We live in cycles of breathing, digesting, sleeping; in women this natural temporality is evident in menstruation and pregnancy (Leder).
- Narrative. We make sense of time in stories (Ricoeur 1992). Illness is a rift that forces retelling the past and re-envisioning the future (Zaner 2004). Yet the stories never leave "the silent otherness of our bodies" behind; they are haunted by an alien experience we try to own or cover up (Frank 1995).
Svenaeus: three dimensions along which illness alienates.
Medicine as practice, science and technology
| Term | Meaning in the chapter | Role in medicine |
|---|---|---|
| Phronesis | Practical wisdom about meeting the other and the norms of a flourishing life | The clinical encounter (Gadamer's call) |
| Techne | Skill of making within human praxis | Therapies kept within the patient's world |
| Episteme | Applied scientific knowledge | Biology, which has changed medicine over 200 years |
| Gestell (enframing) | A pattern that shows everything as an economic and physical resource | Technoscience "let loose", a techne no longer of human praxis |
| Physis | Nature's self-showing out of itself | Health as a self-establishing rhythm in the body |
Gadamer's Enigma of Health (1993) returns to Aristotle. Health is "a condition of being there (Da-Sein), of being in the world, of being together with other people ..., of being taken in by an active and rewarding engagement with the things that matter in life". Medicine is not only phronesis. Biological theories and technologies, such as ventilators, psychotropic drugs, plastic surgery and molecular biology, have changed its essence. In The Question Concerning Technology (a speech first given in 1953), Heidegger contrasts the power station exploiting the Rhine with the old wooden bridge, which "lets the river be a river". That essay is more nuanced than Being and Time, where pure nature was merely unmeaningful or absurd: nature can show itself as physis. Enframing "is not a human project at all", and it will come to enframe human beings too. Molecular biology has replaced nuclear physics as the leading science. Foucault's biopolitics shows medicine, in its modern form since about 1800, setting the norms of normal and abnormal life, which fits the Heideggerian analysis through a shared Nietzschean genealogy.
Why the bridge does not enframe. To avoid "a romantic preference for pre-modern tools", Svenaeus says the bridge belongs to a world "still within the reach of phronesis". Modern devices like the CT scanner for brain tumors or the cochlear implant can also belong to such a world. The question is whether a technology is "enveloped in a pattern of phronetic understanding" or let loose as technoscience. Being-with-others carries otherness too, but as "a reserve of new meaning", not alienation; the alienness of culture matters especially in psychiatry. Two questions are left open: how health and illness relate to the good and miserable life, and to authentic and inauthentic existence.
Realism, Science, and the Deworlding of the World (Peter Eli Gordon)
Husserl's two tiers
In Ideas I the natural thesis is not doubted but bracketed, "set out of action", and all sciences that rely on it go with it. The result is a two-tier picture: empirical inquiry into "reality" under the natural thesis, and an a priori science of "world" within transcendental subjectivity. The Cartesian Meditations draw the idealist consequence: "If transcendental subjectivity is the universe of possible sense, then an outside is precisely nonsense", and phenomenology "is eo ipso transcendental idealism".
Heidegger's worldhood and spatiality
Heidegger drops the epoché and describes the natural attitude itself. Worldhood is an existentiale, like a Kantian category but not mentalistic. Our closest dealings (Umgang) meet equipment (Zeug) within a referential totality; "there is no such thing as an equipment". From this comes existential spatiality: nearness by significance, not measure (the soles of one's feet vanish while a distant friend is near); de-severance (Ent-fernung), which Dasein "can never cross over"; and regions with left and right, unlike orientationless Cartesian space.
| Text | Leans idealist | Leans realist |
|---|---|---|
| Being and Time | Idealism "affords the only correct possibility for a philosophical problematic" | Newton's laws reveal entities that "beforehand already were" |
| Basic Problems | The world is "Dasein-ish"; the subject "projects" it | "Nature can also be when no Dasein exists" |
| History of the Concept of Time | Nature is met "in the time which we ourselves are" | Nature is "the unintelligible pure and simple", "the deworlded world" |
Gordon's argument: making Heidegger more consistently Heideggerian
The inconsistency and its repair
Being and Time says space can be studied "purely by looking at it": regions are "neutralized to pure dimensions" and "the environment becomes the world of Nature", a deworlding (Entweltlichung). If science thus reaches non-interpreted nature, Dasein has a non-interpretive vantage, which contradicts its being essentially interpretive. One premise must go, and Gordon keeps "Dasein always casts forth a world". With Kuhn, there is no "neutral, culture-independent set of categories" in the natural sciences either. Heidegger's error may reflect German anxieties about mechanism, parallel to Weber's disenchantment, though Heidegger's tone is "more nostalgic". The later Heidegger does better: nature "remains for the science of physics that which cannot be gotten around", and art and science differ only in that science hides its own worldhood.
Gordon's three affirmations and one denial
The argument in finer grain
- Updike's epigraph. Gordon opens with John Updike's "Dream Objects": "Strangest is their reality", veined pebbles "that have an underside", maps one could have studied "for minutes longer". The question is what the extravagant reality of things adds to their meaning for us.
- Husserl's natural thesis. In everyday life "the real world about me is at all times known ... as a fact-world that has its being out there". The epoché leaves this conviction unchanged: "we set it as it were 'out of action', we 'disconnect it'"; the thesis is lived experience (Erlebnis) "but we make 'no use of it'". The first attitude faces "reality", the second the phenomenological "world". Merleau-Ponty: the reduction lays bare the "intentional threads".
- Husserl's idealism stated. In the Cartesian Meditations (written in 1929), "every imaginable sense, every imaginable being ... falls within the domain of transcendental subjectivity". Phenomenology "is eo ipso 'transcendental idealism', though in a fundamentally and essentially new sense", and without the immanent world there is no sensible talk of a mind-transcendent "true being".
- The sense of Being. Heidegger's Sinn des Seins keeps phenomenological technique, on Frege's model: "the Morning Star" and "the Evening Star" share a reference but differ in sense. Being's sense is the condition under which an object counts as being at all. Unlike Husserl, Heidegger describes the natural attitude itself, though recent scholarship shows the later Husserl anticipated many of his views.
- Being-in, not containment. Dasein's being-in differs from "a ball in a box"; it is an existentiale. Worldhood (Weltlichkeit) is analogous to a Kantian category. We always risk sliding back into reading entities as res extensa facing a res cogitans.
Existential spatiality
Raeumlichkeit is unlike Cartesian extension or Newtonian container space, which make sense only for present-at-hand objects. "Spatiality is different from space" (Malpas 2000; Dreyfus 1991). Equipment has a place through "belonging-somewhere" (Hingehoerigkeit): it is "close" (in der Naehe) without measurable distance. Each item gets a "there or yonder", and the context appears as a region (Gegend). Cartesian coordinates have no left, right, up or down; involvement gives the world a definite orientation. Entfernung (de-severance) is an "undoing-the-far": "In Dasein there lies an essential tendency towards closeness". Hence "no such thing as a 'breakthrough' from existential spatiality to space": Dasein "has rather taken it along with it ... for Dasein is essentially de-severance".
Gordon: existential spatiality and the problem of deworlding.
Metaphysics of presence and the quietist reply
Since Plato, philosophy has been captive to presence: Being as a precinct beyond reality, modeled on time as a series of "nows", with a sharp break between knower and known. That break promises Bernard Williams's "absolute conception of reality", a "view from nowhere". Science challenges Heidegger as it did not challenge Kant: for Kant, objectivity is correlative with the structures of understanding, while Heidegger's existential conditions look "merely subjective and, indeed, contingent". Gordon reads Heidegger as "quietist", dismantling the picture behind the realism-idealism debate (see Dreyfus 2001). Yet his remarks lean idealist: "The world is not the sum total of extant entities ... The world is, so to speak, Dasein-ish" (Basic Problems). He also says nature is "encountered 'in' the time which we ourselves are" (1925 lectures), but that "being within the world does not belong to the being of nature" and "Nature can also be when no Dasein exists". "Original truth" grounds correspondence truth, so truth exists only while Dasein does: before Newton's laws were discovered they were not "true", nor false. World-dependent beings he calls "historical".
| Thinker | Name for science's effect | Verdict |
|---|---|---|
| Early Heidegger | Deworlding (Entweltlichung): regions neutralized to pure dimensions | "Reduction", even "loss"; nostalgic |
| Later Heidegger | "The theory of the real"; nachstellende Sicherstellen, "entrapping securing" (nachstellen can mean "to persecute") | Subject-object relation at its most extreme; but nature's objectness is "only one way in which nature exhibits itself" |
| Weber, "Science as a Vocation" | Disenchantment (Entzauberung) | Only "big children" think astronomy or biology teach the meaning of the world; condescending to longing |
| Kuhn and science studies | Paradigms; scientists in "different worlds" | Science too is world-constituting practice, Gordon's preferred view |
| Dreyfus | "Plural realism" | All entities disclosed on the basis of a world |
Art and science. The later Heidegger thought "the world worlds" (Welt weltet) more fully in art: "The work holds open the Open of the world", "setting up a world and setting forth the earth". Gordon asks what really distinguishes science's world from art's. It is not that science alone deworlds: both disclose within a world. The naive question whether something is "nature" or "culture" partly dissolves once we see we cannot "cross over" our own world. The chapter is dedicated to Gordon's father, a professor emeritus of biochemistry at the University of Washington, on his 75th birthday (February 2005).
Environmental Philosophy (Iain Thomson)
The method and the split
The stakes are stated starkly (Kohák: our civilization "appears to be well on its way to self-destruction"; Diehm: half the forests gone, extinction near a thousand times background). Phenomenology's starting points (Husserl's lifeworld, Heidegger's being-in-the-world, Merleau-Ponty's motor intentionality and flesh, Levinas's il y a) all aim at a pre-differentiated mind-world unity. The motto "Back to the Earth Itself" twists Husserl's "to the things themselves", but "earth" means opposite things:
| Nietzsche | Heidegger | |
|---|---|---|
| "Earth" means | The attainable, against the "otherworldly" (Forms, heaven) | What gives rise to worlds of meaning while resisting exhaustion by them |
| Key text | Zarathustra: "Remain faithful to the earth" | "The Origin of the Work of Art": Van Gogh's peasant shoes |
| Ethical realism | Naturalistic: good is a matter of fact about life | Transcendental: what matters is "being as such", neither fact nor value |
| Perfectionism | Eco-centric: flourishing of life, even against human concerns | Humanistic: cultivating the capacities of all Dasein |
Against naturalistic realism
Brown, Kohák, Diehm, Toadvine and Wood find the lifeworld "always already fraught with values". Read ontically (ripe apples look good), this is relativist, since a surfeited eater or a logging business sees otherwise. So they peel back to an "axiological transcendental": what sustains life is good, what destroys it bad. Thomson's objections: sociobiology lists advantageous behaviors we condemn; Nietzsche and Freud see civilization as repressing life's drives; specific derivations look like rationalizations (Kohák's "homeland": "We are not salmon"); and the logic leads to Embree's call to reduce population "by several billion", Wood's benevolent eco-dictatorships, and Nietzsche's superseding of humanity. Toadvine's life as a self-reproducing "program" even reinscribes Nietzsche's ontotheology.
Two ethical realisms and Thomson's proposed resolution
The sociobiology worry, in his words
Kohák makes "Husserl's phenomenology an anticipation of evolutionism in sociobiology". Thomson notes that sociobiology is "replete" with behaviors advantageous to Dawkins's "selfish gene" that we condemn, and Freud's Totem and Taboo (1913) explains that societies do not prohibit acts no one wants to commit. A naturalistic ethics of life "will not resemble our Judeo-Christian-Kantian value system", says Nietzsche; some worry it may justify no value system at all.
Heidegger, Zimmerman and "being as such"
- Why Heidegger. "Over the past decades, environmentalists have consistently focused more on Heidegger than on any of the other phenomenologists", especially his post-1937 work, for its critique of enframing and its treatments: dwelling and "releasement to things" (Gelassenheit zu den Dingen).
- Zimmerman's reversal. Michael Zimmerman, best known for joining Heidegger and deep ecology, later recanted. Thomson gives two reasons. Politically, his work on the "Heidegger controversy" made him wary of allying with an "unrepentant fascist" a movement already accused of "eco-fascism", especially as (Zimmerman 1997) environmentalism grew up with Nazism. Thomson's thesis is that Heidegger joined the party in 1933 to enact a vision of university reform, his naive hope of a "second, deeper awakening" fed by the hiking German youth movement and its Romantic roots. Philosophically, Zimmerman adopted Thomas Sheehan's claim that "being as such" never differed from "the being of entities".
- The ambiguity of Sein. Thomson calls it "disastrous". It let the early Heidegger take the being of entities for being as such and dream of a fundamental ontology beneath history, a belief that "fueled his political ambitions". It also hid three later insights: being as such makes possible the historical succession of metaphysical understandings; metaphysics as ontotheology forgets it; so metaphysics elides its own condition of possibility and can be deconstructed from within. Without being as such Heidegger could not explain historicity.
- The fourfold. The later Heidegger crosses out "being" but keeps the idea in the fourfold: earth (grounds, including the past, that bear us up beyond our control), heavens (projects opening the future), divinities (what can matter most) and mortals (finite, reflexive entities). "Letting things be" means "allowing them to manifest themselves in terms of their own inherent possibilities"; to dwell is an unheimlich being at home with being as such.
- Levinas. For Levinas "ethics is the other; the other is ethics" (as he told Derrida), and his alterity is close to Heidegger's being as such; his hostility to Heidegger is "an extreme instance of Bloom's 'anxiety of influence'". Wood: "If you're going to be a Levinasian ... you couldn't possibly read Heidegger in the way Levinas reads Heidegger". Diehm (2003) asks Levinas's question, "Can things have a face?", for animal rights.
The continuum of Dasein
Heidegger's tripartite scheme in The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics (worldless rock, world-poor animal, world-forming Dasein) "only inaugurates" finer work. Thomson's nine steps, building on Haugeland's claim that corporations could be Dasein:
Thomson's nine-step continuum of having a world.
Why it matters. The continuum offers a "non-speciesist" way to tell lower from higher forms of life, which eco-centric views and Peter Singer's sensation-centered consequentialism both lack. Full Dasein is defined by reflexive self-understanding, capacity for "immense suffering and sublime elevation" and a life given meaning from within. The resulting perfectionism protects capacities belonging "by right, to all Dasein". It also avoids the problems of the naturalistic approach while drawing "nearer to the loftier eco-centric goals".
Ontology, Pragmatism, and Technology (Shunsuke Kadowaki)
Two readings, and a third
Rorty sets Dewey against Heidegger's nostalgia: pragmatism puts technology "in its proper place" in "the next stanza of Being's poem". Defenders of Heidegger call the vocabularies incommensurable, either because Heidegger's can redescribe Dewey's but not the reverse, or because Heidegger treats the ontological essence (Ge-stell) and Dewey only ontic devices. Kadowaki notes that Dewey is fully aware of the modern ontological turn (nature "ceases to be something which must be accepted... It is now something to be modified"), and that understanding Heidegger's Sein needs pragmatist ideas of skill and practice.
| Category in Being and Time | Relation to context |
|---|---|
| Dasein | Context-forming: commits to roles and possibilities |
| Availableness (Zuhandenheit) | Context-conforming: shows up only within a practical whole |
| Occurrentness (Vorhandenheit) | Context-annihilating: the object of theory, "stripped of context" |
The ontological difference reads as Kant's "conditions of possibility", in Friedman's constitutive sense of a priori. Kadowaki's example: a female Japanese office worker carrying tea to male colleagues relies on world-understanding (involvement) and self-understanding (accepting a role). Her familiarity with norms is like McDowell's virtue, a "reliable sensitivity"; she can interpret it, but it cannot be codified. And "the world must not announce itself" if the available is to stay inconspicuous: contingency is internal to the background.
Where contingency lives decides what technology is
Ambiguity, danger and the saving power
Being and Time is ambiguous: everydayness shows the structures of context, yet as inauthentic it hides them, so availableness gets read as utility. The later account of technology repeats this "isomorphically": ordering (Bestellen) fits equipment into a total functional system (an airliner on the runway, "be-stellt") and "blocks every view into the coming-to-pass of revealing". But because the clearing is pervaded by concealment (refusal and dissembling), the system still depends on a background it cannot control. Kadowaki's example: operators failing to pass on banal skills, as at Tokai-mura. That dependency, newly conspicuous, is the saving power; Heidegger asks us to let devices in yet "let them alone".
Kadowaki's two ontological questions
- Aristotle's questions. Being and Time (1927) answers two questions central since Aristotle: (1) how to tell what really is from what only appears in dependence on it, and (2) what the cause of entities is. Modern philosophy turned (1) into the mind/body problem: first fix a categorical framework (substance/property, event/relation), then place mental and physical phenomena in it. Heidegger refuses this procedure and derives his three categories from the role of contextuality.
- Conditions of possibility as cause. On (2), Heidegger follows Kant: natural causation, whether event causation or Aristotelian generation, cannot explain why an object appears as it does. Kant offered conditions of possibility as a new candidate for cause in the broad sense of aitia. Michael Friedman (2001) separates two senses of a priori: "necessary and unrevisable, true for all time" and "constitutive of the concept of the object of [scientific] knowledge". Heidegger's ontological difference uses the second.
- Not a chess board. The equipment whole is a priori in the sense of ontological dependence: a tool showing up apart from the nexus would have no being in it. But it is not formal "as in the case of the configuration of chess pieces"; it lives in two inseparable directions of understanding.
- The tea tray in detail. The office worker's world-understanding (involvement, Bewandtnis) covers tray-carrying skills, the circumspection to use them, and the assignments tray to tea to the role of a woman employee. Her self-understanding covers steering round obstacles with tray in hand and accepting the role expected of her. Together they make "the understanding of context".
Contingency: Heidegger against Dewey
Kadowaki uses "contingency" for everything devoid of necessity: incalculability, unpredictability, uncontrollability, unavailableness. For Heidegger the familiar world is "a mode of Dasein's uncanniness, not the reverse ... the 'not-at-home' must be conceived as the more primordial phenomenon". For Dewey contingency comes from outside the organism and means only something to surmount. His early essay (1893) says both terms are teleological: "Necessary means needed; contingency means no longer required ... because already enjoyed." So either contingency vanishes into a functional whole or stays external to it.
| Issue | Dewey | Heidegger (on Kadowaki's reading) |
|---|---|---|
| Technology and science | Technology is legitimately extended science; science adopts the view of the useful arts | Would "cordially agree" on this point |
| Application | "Application in" science: "a more extensive interaction of natural events ... an elimination of distance and obstacles" | Ordering (Bestellen) fits everything into a total system |
| Contingency | External; tamed into a new functional whole (engineering, medicine, the social arts) | Internal to the background; refusal and dissembling in the clearing |
| Risk | Ignores the contingency of what makes the whole possible | Enframing hides, but still depends on, that background |
| Response | Build "a fortress" out of threatening forces | Let devices in yet "let them alone": the saving power |
Kadowaki: how technology's dependence on background becomes visible.
Science, the Rhine and Habermas
- Kuhn's matrix. Science focused on occurrentness still needs context. Dreyfus invokes Kuhn's "disciplinary matrix": "scientists need shared theoretical and technical assumptions, explicitly entertained as well as embodied in shared laboratory practices".
- Danger as cognitive. Enframing "endangers the relation to the essence of truth", the clearing (Lichtung). "Refusal" is the noncodifiability of the background; "dissembling" is the disguise immanent in interpreting it. "At bottom, the ordinary is not ordinary; it is extra-ordinary, uncanny." The danger is cognitive: Enframing furthers ignorance of what is concealed and justifies it.
- The Rhine. The network that shows the Rhine as dammed hydroelectric power, rather than the river of Hoelderlin's hymn, presupposes the noncodifiable. In Enframing "the innermost indestructible belongingness of man within granting [das Gewaerende] may come to light". Even a plant engineer or an electricity consumer appears only within a social network of roles, so Enframing holds plural modes of revealing.
- Where control fails. Treating unpredictability as subjective ignorance works sometimes, but fails where matters depend deeply on background: "wars against colonized countries, the design of Artificial Intelligence, and aid for 'developing' nations".
- Habermas in two answers. In late capitalism steering media (Steuerungsmedien) of money and power supplant the lifeworld's communicative resources, the "technicizing of the lifeworld" (1989); liberation comes when we develop communicative rationality for idealized democratic discourse. Heidegger would accept "colonization" of an analogue of the lifeworld. But Kadowaki objects that if systems were externally uncontrollable they would not touch meaning; tracing them to enlarged instrumental reason "simply displaces" the problem.
- No last word. Articulation can defend or criticize inherited ways of life, redefine an epoch, adjust old norms. Futurist praise could reorganize a society's vocabulary; ecologists' critiques could give nature a new context. Heidegger's theory is itself an articulation, and "we still lack the profound confidence to divine" what context it will engender.
The Lived-Body and the Dignity of Human Beings (Andreas Brenner)
Kant's divided self
The humanity formula ("always as an end and never as a mere means") is, for Brenner, a complete definition. Kant's grounding is both more demanding (dignity needs the reason that gives universal law) and poorer (it abstracts from "feelings, impulses, and inclinations"). The "physical man" is "compelled to revere" the moral human within him, so the law is not his own. Kant's suicide example makes it worse: one part of the person becomes a means to preserve the other. Yet Kant himself drew back in two places: "On Servility" forbids making "oneself into a worm" without dividing the self, and the pre-critical Dreams of a Spirit-Seer says "I am just as much in my fingertips as in my head."
The lived-body and shame
On Oxford Street I see many bodies but only one lived-body, my own. Husserl's double sensation (one hand touching the other) shows the body constituting itself in perception; "der Leib leibt". Basal stimulation therapy with comatose patients conveys sensations to them and lets therapists sense theirs, which "suspends the concept of unconsciousness". Merleau-Ponty: "I am not in front of my body, I am in it, or rather I am it."
| Case | Brenner's reading |
|---|---|
| Torture and rape victims | Shame as the signal of injury suffered through others |
| Mr. Taylor fails to greet a "neighbor" who was not his neighbor | Shame is still justified: he fell short of his self-image |
| The shameless | Often the trace of a grave past injury (psychoanalytic reading) |
| Defamation unknown to the victim; embryos, premature babies, the severely ill | Dignity injured without shame, so shame is not sufficient |
Brenner's argument, step by step
- The four-part plan. Originally published in German as "Des Menschen Leib und Wuerde" (Studia philosophica 63, 2004), the chapter (1) sets out the point of departure, (2) criticizes Kant, (3) proposes the lived-body alternative and (4) sketches bodily authenticity. Everyday consciousness has "almost no doubt" about what dignity is: we inherit it at birth, so it must not be "taken", and its bearer must not be instrumentalized.
- Why Kant's ground is "purer" to Kant. From Kant's side the abstraction from empirical characteristics is not poverty but purity: unique individual traits are "insufficiently qualified for the act of giving oneself a universal law". Brenner calls this suppressing "the multiplicity of the concept of self" that everyday respect for each person "for his or her own sake" expresses.
- The price of reverence. The "physical man" earns "the feeling of his inner worth (valor)", above any "price (pretium)", an "inalienable dignity (dignitas interna)". But since the law is not his own, autonomy is heteronomous for him, and dignity survives only by being ascribed to a transcendental Self "untouched" by physicality.
- Servility as the better clue. In "On Servility" Kant forbids self-humiliation, including some forms of religious reverence and all "bowing and scraping". This gives dignity ex negativo, a test of whether someone has kept or distorted it, without splitting the self: the self tries "to preserve the unity by remaining 'itself'".
- Two demands. A sound concept must (1) preserve the unity of the human being, which (2) experiences its dignity in immediate self-realization, not by a detour through transcendental self-legislation. Everyday phenomenology supports this, since the gravest injury to dignity is to "life and limb".
Body and lived-body
Koerper and Leib. The human body is three-dimensional, but the lived-body is "more than" that: it is a question of perspective. Political history ignored the lived-body; even habeas corpus, an early human-rights document, treats bodies "in merely their corporeal sense". To feel one's body as one's own constitutes it as lived. The double sensation is not only a matter of touch: the lived-body is "always already perceived before every touch", and self-touch reassures us of a body that threatens to sink into diffuse perceptions. Hence "a lived-body that is not perceived is not a lived-body". Its being (Leibsein) shows itself in embodying (Leiben, Heidegger 1994). Basal stimulation (Bienstein and Froehlich 1991; Froehlich 1998) opens "a bodily communication" in two directions: patients receive self-sensations "concealed in a deadened, dormant present", and therapists sense their patients' perceptions through their own. "The lived-body knows no alternative, it is subjective or not at all."
Brenner: from corporeal body to bodily dignity.
Shame in detail
| Feature of shame | Brenner's description |
|---|---|
| Two sources | Humiliation suffered through others, versus shame at one's own misconduct, where one identifies oneself as aggressor (Landweer 1999) |
| What is singular | Not affectedness (all feelings have it) but its intensity and "indeceivability", which leave no escape |
| Bodily form | Wish to "evaporate or sink into the ground"; contraction, oppression, depression (Schmitz) |
| Direction | Regressive: reverses development and unfolding; the ashamed person "becomes someone other" |
| Legitimacy | Irrelevant: others insisting there is no reason to be ashamed does not make shame "illegitimate" |
| Logical status | A strong but not sufficient sign: no shame without injured dignity, yet injury without shame (the defamed, embryos, the severely ill) |
The shameless. People who "openly inflict significant harm" without hesitation are called "undignified", either because the act fits ill with an office or because it is generally unworthy. Brenner uses them to show shame is "to a considerable degree a reliable indicator" but not universally sufficient.
Authenticity at the close. "Second, post-Husserlian" phenomenology shows the lived-body is self-contained: a self outside the body "can be maintained only as a fiction". As pre-reflexive self-knowledge is presupposed by reflexive self-consciousness, authenticity is presupposed by autonomy. Shame announces dignity reflexively "in the way of negation". Authenticity points further, to a safeguarded self-possession or "presubjective subjectivity" (Blume 2003) that "defends itself against foreign determination". Brenner's thesis therefore replaces Kant's transcendental route with a natural orientation rooted in experience that is radically subjective.
Sexuality (Ann V. Murphy)
The Cartesian legacy
Sartre: the body is "either a thing among other things, or else it is that by which things are revealed to me. But it cannot be both at the same time"; double sensation is contingent, the two levels "incommunicable". His third ontological dimension, "I know myself as a body known by others", describes internalized norms (beauty standards) and fed Fanon's "crushing objecthood". Beauvoir says biology fixes no destiny, yet describes menstruation as "obscure and alien" and morning sickness as revolt against the "invading species"; she rejects anatomical fate for lesbianism yet calls it something one might be "doomed" to, and calls love between women "more contemplative". Murphy reads this with Zakin, Chanter and Deutscher: the ambivalence describes a culturally prescribed immanence ("not by her hormones... but by... the action of others"), and its tensions are best left intact rather than charged to an "out of control" author.
| Thinker | The sexual body | Legacy |
|---|---|---|
| Sartre | Thing or revealer, never both; body known by others | Analyses of objectification (Fanon) |
| Beauvoir | Immanence, culturally imposed; woman as becoming | Equality and difference feminism both claim and fault her |
| Merleau-Ponty | "Ambiguous atmosphere... coextensive with life"; speech accomplishes thought | Corporeal style, habit, iteration |
| Butler | Gender "a doing, though not a doing by a subject" prior to the deed | Performativity; charged with both voluntarism and its opposite |
From existential embodiment to queer phenomenology
Performativity as existential practice
Performativity inherits two existentialist tenets: existence precedes essence, and identity is a project achieved before others. It differs from performance, which presupposes a subject. The model is iterative and forward-looking, like Merleau-Ponty's habit. Butler is accused both of a too wilful subject and of foreclosing agency; Murphy finds in this incommensurability the very tie to Beauvoir, who sought agency under norms that cripple it (Schrift on the proximity).
Murphy's sources and the corporeal turn
- Neglect and appropriation. Husserl, Heidegger, Sartre and Merleau-Ponty were criticized for "elision and/or outright neglect" of sexuality, yet their work was "enthusiastically, if critically" appropriated by later thinkers.
- The 1990s canon. Corporeal feminism took shape in Judith Butler's Gender Trouble (1990) and Bodies that Matter (1993), Susan Bordo's Unbearable Weight (1993), Elizabeth Grosz's Volatile Bodies (1994) and Moira Gatens's Imaginary Bodies (1996).
- Why not essentialist. Corporeal feminism attacks the assumption that mind and body, reason and emotion, can be readily dissociated. It treats the body as culturally and historically specific, "far removed from the idea of a natural or essential body that prefigures culture".
- Three texts of the 1940s. Sartre's Being and Nothingness (1943), Merleau-Ponty's Phenomenology of Perception (1945) and Beauvoir's The Second Sex (1949) treated embodiment unevenly, but sexuality "was prevalent in them all".
Sartre's "transcended transcendence"
Sartre calls the body a "transcended transcendence": never an object like an inanimate thing, but an object insofar as its possibilities are restricted by the situation and by others. Murphy is careful: it "may be disingenuous" to say Sartre held absolute notions of agency, but his texts gave readers that impression. Caught in the Other's gaze, "one experiences one's transcendence transcended". The same structure appears in Fanon's Black Skin White Masks (1952), where the colonized are "sealed into crushing objecthood".
Beauvoir's lesbian chapter in detail
| Beauvoir's claim | Murphy's comment |
|---|---|
| "Sexuality is in no way determined by an anatomical 'fate'" | Yet homosexuality is something one might be "doomed" to (405) |
| Lesbianism is an attempt to "reconcile her autonomy with the passivity of her flesh" (407) | Reads corporeality as a hindrance to transcendence |
| "Homosexuality is no more a perversion deliberately indulged than it is a curse of fate"; every eroticism "expresses some general outlook on life" (417) | Her aim is not to pathologize, "quite the contrary" |
| Love between women is "more contemplative", their carnal affection "more even" (420) | "Somewhat outrageous": at best presumptuous, at worst essentialist |
| "Woman is determined not by her hormones or by mysterious instincts, but by ... the action of others" (725) | The key: immanence is culturally prescribed, not an unchanging reality |
Reading the ambivalence. Chanter and Deutscher argue Beauvoir's work is best received with its contradictions "left intact and unresolved". Deutscher warns that calling Beauvoir "out of control" of her inconsistencies "may work to infantilize" her as an incompetent author. Butler notes that some queer theorists drew from "one is not born, but rather becomes a woman" the idea that becoming itself realizes gender, a lineage reaching back to Beauvoir's 1949 definition of woman as "a becoming".
Merleau-Ponty's sexual being
For Merleau-Ponty, "humanity" is a historically embedded, evolving idea. "Neither body nor existence can be regarded as the original of the human being, since they presuppose each other, and because the body is solidified or generalized existence and existence a perpetual incarnation." Sexuality "without being the object of any intended act of consciousness, can underlie and guide specified forms of my experience". The corporeal schema is the lived-body as taken up by the subject, "neither grasped intellectually, nor understood objectively", foreshadowing the chiasm of The Visible and the Invisible. In "The Body as Expression and Speech" thought and language are constituted together, so "there is no thought apart from its expression in the flesh", a critique of the cogito and of idealism at large.
Murphy: how Butler revised performativity after Gender Trouble.
Butler's worry about Beauvoir, and the transgender debate
- Construction as choice. Butler applauds "one is not born a woman", but worries that Beauvoir's "rhetoric of volition and intent" reduces construction to choice, assuming an agent who precedes the subject. Ironically, Butler is then accused of assuming "too wilful a subject" herself, and answers in Bodies that Matter (1993) and Undoing Gender (2004).
- Femininity as effect. "Femininity" is not "the exteriorization of some innate and inherent essence" but "the effect of certain gendered performances culturally coded as feminine", "malleable and impermanent".
- Why transgender narratives matter. Feminist theory evolved as arguments over "the degree to which one's body is decisive" for gender. Some read the wish to inhabit a different body as valorizing the traditional match of identity and body; others see transsexualism pushing sex "quite beyond the body".
- Prosser (1998). Subjects construct identities "as much as they are constructed". Poststructuralism forsook "valences of cultural belonging", celebrated fluidity and forgot the "ongoing foundational power" of gender categories, rendering the body a mere locus of "language, power, and science". He rejects the claim, which he links to Butler and Beauvoir, that sex is "really gender all along".
- Salamon (2004). She rejects Prosser's return to the "simplicity of materiality": embodied experience is essential to subject formation, but nothing in that licenses "a return to a body beyond discourse".
Feminism (Sara Heinämaa)
Living body, person, style
In Ideas II the living body is first given as expressive, the zero point of orientation, an indivisible whole "like works of art". Cartesian Meditations makes the self a person with a genesis and a unique "style of life", which, when it changes, does so "in a characteristic way". So masculinity and femininity can be understood as two types of personal style, not as properties of organisms (sex) or artifacts (gender). Husserl himself lists "the problem of the sexes" among genetic transcendental problems in the Crisis.
Merleau-Ponty applies this. Causal accounts presuppose sexuality's meaning; it must be grasped from the desiring subject's side (the patient who lost sexual significance, the girl who stopped speaking and eating). Sexuality "is not an autonomous cycle" but stands with motility and cognition "in a relationship... of reciprocal expression". A woman passing by is "a certain manner of being flesh... in the simple shock of her heel on the ground". Identity forms by imitation and repetition, never by choice, which would be an intellectualist fallacy.
Heinämaa: three contributions of a phenomenological feminism
Beauvoir: the self, the other, and hierarchy
Beauvoir charges that male writers took their bodies as universal instruments, so phenomenology's eidetic descriptions rest on a male paradigm: "There is a whole region of human experience which the male deliberately chooses to ignore". Her mottos set Pythagoras's "bad principle" against Poulain de la Barre: men "are at once the judge and the party".
| Paradigm case (Husserl, Sartre) | Pregnancy (Beauvoir, Kristeva, Irigaray) |
|---|---|
| The other is "there", at a variable distance | The other is "here", in permanent proximity |
| Given visually | Given in tactile sensation |
| Symmetric reciprocity of gazes | No reciprocity yet; the maternal body is the child's whole tactile field |
| Body as closed volume | Body as a fold opening an inner space for another |
Heinämaa's framing: two dilemmas and a two-way relation
- The classical questions. Can women and men be judged by the same standards (equality), or does a principal difference require two (difference)? This is the equality-difference debate, rooted in Renaissance and early modern discussions of human nature. A second problem asks whether sexual identity is inborn or learned: the nature-nurture dilemma, reformulated in the 1970s as the sex-gender controversy.
- What phenomenology adds. It investigates the "transcendental foundations" of both dilemmas by explaining how objectivities are constituted: identities, values, things, artifacts, sexes, bodies. It distinguishes the living body given in perception and affection from the physical body of natural science, and argues that the perceived body is more primary than science's "extrapolated objects".
- Stein before Beauvoir. In the 1930s Edith Stein wrote phenomenological treatises on personality, embodiment and intersubjectivity and on "the woman question". Both she and Beauvoir used phenomenology against prevailing views, and feminism against philosophical orthodoxy.
- A sexed foundation? Since phenomenology locates the transcendental foundation in intersubjectivity, not solitary subjectivity, and since Husserl's person and Heidegger's Dasein have geneses and habitualities, one can ask whether there are "two principally different types of personality". Irigaray's thesis is the best-known form; Husserl lists "the problem of the sexes" in the Crisis (1936-7).
The expressive body in detail
We perceive bodies not "as biomechanisms or as cultural artifacts" but as expressive means, moved by sensations and feelings, directed by purposes, responsive to affects and appeals. My own body is the field of sensations and the only "thing" I can move immediately and spontaneously; others' bodies express feelings "irrecoverably beyond my reach". Expressivity has two aspects: the body expresses a stream of experiences, and that relation binds parts into an indivisible whole. Bodies are thus "like works of art": classifiable by style, never interchangeable. Merleau-Ponty studied Husserl's manuscripts at Louvain; Beauvoir learned the view through him and through Sartre, Levinas, Heidegger and Fink.
Heinämaa: how phenomenology reframes the feminist dilemmas.
Beauvoir's sources and the pregnancy argument
- Feminist forebears. Christine de Pisan, Poulain de la Barre, Mary Wollstonecraft, John Stuart Mill, Virginia Woolf and Colette disclosed experience missing from philosophy and the sciences. From Kierkegaard and Nietzsche she took ideology critique: woman "as we know her" is a male creation that relieves man's anxiety about his own carnality and finitude.
- Nietzsche's suspicion. The Gay Science (1882): "The unconscious disguise of physiological needs under the cloaks of objective, ideal, purely spiritual goes frighteningly far ... philosophy has been no more than an interpretation of the body and a misunderstanding of the body."
- Two neglected areas. To open phenomenology to concrete experience, The Second Sex singles out eroticism and pregnancy. "In the becoming mother the opposition between subject and object is abolished." Heinämaa grants the "strong negative tone" of Beauvoir's descriptions but locates the core in the claim that we still lack an unbiased philosophy of the living body.
- Kristeva and Irigaray. Kristeva's "Motherhood according to Giovanni Bellini" (1980): "Within the body, growing as a graft, indomitable, there is an other ... 'It happens, but I am not there' ... Motherhood's impossible syllogism." Irigaray's An Ethics of Sexual Difference (1984): "the one who is still in this night does not see ... And the other who sees cannot see him."
- Not Levinas's objection. Their point is not Levinas's principled claim that no other can be replaced, but "the difficulty of imagining oneself taking the place of someone who lives in me", which raises new questions about ownness. The paradigm of reciprocal gazes runs from the fifth Cartesian Meditation to Sartre: contact with the other-as-subject refers back to "my permanent possibility of being seen by the other".
The origin of values and the hierarchy argument
Beauvoir argues that inequality has "no basis in nature or in any historical telos"; it is established and re-established by human practice, so "we ourselves are responsible". Her theory of value appears earlier, in Pyrrhus et Cineas (1944) and The Ethics of Ambiguity (1947). In "Destiny" she weighs three explanations: biological (strength), psychological (virility) and practical-economic (tools). None suffices, "even when combined". Her ethics, long read as borrowed from Sartre, has its own sources in Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Husserl, Heidegger, Levinas, Merleau-Ponty, Wollstonecraft and Woolf. She rejects all absolutist theories of value, naturalist and historicist alike: "It is human existence which makes values spring up in the world". Applied to sex: "It is by exercising sexual activity that men [humans] define the sexes and their relations". Psychoanalytic explanations must therefore be examined for their implicit privileging of the phallus (Heinämaa 2005b).
Later work and the Foucauldian challenge
| Line | Who | Contribution |
|---|---|---|
| Motility and spatiality | Iris Marion Young; Bigwood (1991), Grimshaw (1999), Mullin (2002) | "Throwing like a girl"; pregnancy; being "breasted" |
| Natality | Kristeva to Christina Schües | Rethinking finitude, mortality, love and desire from birth |
| Desire and pleasure | Irigaray, Cixous (ecriture feminine, 1970s-80s); Bergoffen (1997), Holveck (2002) | Women's sensual pleasure and enjoyment |
| Critique of cognition | Readers of Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty | Primary relation to the world is practical and affective; science serves domination |
| Genealogy | Butler (1990), Gatens, Grosz, Braidotti | Identities as effects of external forces; phenomenology charged with essentialism |
Heinämaa's two replies to the cognition critique. First, Husserl never claims the disinterested view is our primordial relation to the world, only one possibility. Second, "rigorous science" is not a description of actual sciences but the sense that motivates every scientific enterprise.
A Life Worth Living (Julian Young)
Three absurdities, one that matters
The absurd is neither in the world nor in us but in their confrontation, and it follows the death of God. Camus actually names three unmet needs:
| Need | What Christianity offered | Young's verdict |
|---|---|---|
| A meaning of history | A last judgment (Marxism keeps it as a "new mystification") | A fiction: after Schopenhauer's point that heaven leaves only boredom, no one truly wants an "end of time" |
| Intelligibility of reality | A God who made mind and world alike | Reduces to the third: a wish for unity with nature against being "so alone" |
| Non-finality of death | "Pretty little speeches about the soul" | The real problem: death as summum malum, "hideous", an object of "horror" |
The absurd hero has integrity (no "leap", which Camus calls "philosophical suicide") and revolt: "the certainty of a crushing fate, without the resignation that ought to accompany it". Sisyphus, "proletarian of the gods", is all of us on our daily round. Yet he is also happy because "the myriad wondering little voices of the earth rise up": the source of the "ethics of quantity" of Don Juan and the actor, and of the Algerian lyrical essays ("not to be built up but to be burned up").
Young's repair of the absurd hero, step by step
Two corrections
First, Camus wrongly excludes Bildung. Schopenhauer rightly mocks the life lived "ad interim", but Nietzsche's will to more power suggests that growth is part of living fully in the present; Don Juan learns nothing and so is "boring". Camus himself left Algeria for Paris and "a purpose". Second, revolt must go: persevering in a dead marriage or endless chemotherapy just to "not be a quitter" is foolish, since unconditional courage is not a virtue (Socrates in the Protagoras). What is left is joie de vivre grounded in awareness of the nothing, but a nothing that both blights and delights yields only the vanitas still life's bittersweet view (compare Martin, Chapter 38), too weak to refute suicide.
Young's reading of The Myth, in finer grain
- Why suicide becomes a question. For pre-modern believers life's worth was settled; "for modern humanity, however, this is not the case". The feeling of the absurd ("as a writer of today [Sartre] calls it", nausea) brings weariness, a saying "no" to life, "a longing for death". The absurd arises from the confrontation of "human need" with "the unreasonable silence of the world".
- Marxism as religion. Camus files Marxism as a "new mystification" for its spurious claim to science and its cruelty; Young notes he was defending himself against Sartre and the French Marxist intelligentsia.
- No narrative without conflict. Schopenhauer saw that once Christian writers had put every trial into this life, only boredom was left for heaven. Margaret Atwood says the same: "there is no narrative without conflict". Hence no one truly wants an "end of time".
- A death-visited book. James Wood calls The Myth "an extraordinarily death-visited work". Death is "man's worst enemy", "the supreme abuse", and "the very image of the human is the man condemned to death". Camus's word for the nothing is "the night".
- The leap as self-mutilation. The leaper (Kierkegaard) sees that reason says there is no God, fears despair, and rejects reason. Camus, "strangely indifferent" to whether belief can be chosen, calls this amputation of our one ennobling attribute an insult to "pride" and "dignity", indeed "philosophical suicide".
- Sisyphus as worker. Not the immortal (an odd patron for a suicide essay) but the "proletarian of the gods", the assembly-line worker. His self-appraisal borrows Oedipus: "despite so many ordeals ... the nobility of my soul makes me conclude that all is well". Young calls this hero "macho", "virile" in Camus's word, judging himself by intelligence, scorn for lies and courage.
Rapture: Don Juan, the actor and Algiers
Having "silenced all the idols", Sisyphus finds that "the myriad wondering little voices of the earth rise up"; his rock becomes "his thing". Young pictures him as a fitness enthusiast in a great outdoor gym, trading the "un-music" of indoor gyms for nature's silence. "There is no sun without shadow, and it is essential to know the night." Don Juan seduces more women in an evening than most men in a lifetime; the actor lives a whole life "in three hours", a "heretical multiplication of souls" (a dig at the Church's disapproval of actors). "Life is not a rehearsal." Lyrical essays near The Myth ("Summer in Algiers", "The Minotaur", "Helen's Exile"), written amid wartime and post-war Paris, recall Algiers where "whoever is young and alive ... finds occasions for triumph everywhere", every summer morning "the first in the world".
| Figure | What gives life value | Young's verdict |
|---|---|---|
| Sisyphus in revolt | Dogged perseverance without resignation: "man's sole dignity", "majesty" | Drop it: unconditional courage is not a virtue |
| Sisyphus in rapture | Sensuous joys of the earth, seen against the night | Keep it, but it contradicts revolt |
| Don Juan, the actor | Ethics of quantity, "excess", "dispersion" | Learns nothing, so "boring"; Plato's "democratic soul", Toad of Toad Hall |
| The "man with a purpose" | Bildung, a Bildungsroman life; Hegel: only the modern city lets mind know itself | Wrongly scorned; Camus himself left Algeria for Paris |
| The Heideggerian dweller | Elegiac sense of ephemerality; the good death | Young's answer |
Why the vanitas is not enough
Camus also speaks of the Greeks' "gilded calamity" and beauty's "stifling quality", and stifling air is just what speeds decay in the Dutch still life ("dead nature" in French). In Dylan Thomas's "Do not go gentle into that good night / Rage, rage against the dying of the light", "good" is presumably sardonic. Young asks Camus to "negate" not the non-existence of God and immortality but the idea that they are our deepest spiritual need. Camus often slips into using "absurd" simply for the nothing: "happiness and the absurd are two sons of the same earth".
Intelligibility as a wish for unity. Galilean astronomy is mere "games" beside suicide, so why want intelligibility? Because "understanding" is "reducing to the human". Reality's refusal shows "a nature foreign and irreducible to us": the "inhumanness" of the hills and sky, the stranger in the face of the woman one once loved, a "primitive hostility" that "leaves one so alone". Young diagnoses an "obsessive" clinging to the ego, which makes death hideous.
Young's postage-stamp account of Heideggerian truth.
Truth on a postage stamp. Point at a river and say "you'll never bathe in that again": you, planning a swim tomorrow, disagree, but I meant the body of water now visible. The example is "far-fetched and, as philosopher's examples usually are, tedious", yet shows that different horizons disclose different ranges of fact. Our ultimate horizon is language. Each disclosure reveals a "facet" of Being while concealing "a reservoir of the not-yet-uncovered". So death is "the mystery of Being itself", and confusing self with ego is an error both in Lebensweisheit (life-wisdom) and in philosophy. Mortals dwell when they "initiate their own nature, their being capable of death as death, into the use and practice of this capacity"; "What are poets for?" says the abyss leaves us unable to read "death" "without negation". Young's last move: taking away death's bitterness does not take away life's savor, because what makes the present precious is knowledge "not [of] the abyss, but rather departure".
The Search for Immediacy and the Problem of Political Life in Existentialism and Phenomenology (Michael Allen Gillespie)
Against Hegel's mediation
Descartes and Hobbes both represent the world as a picture; Kant confines us to an "island of truth" that is only an island of appearances. Hegel was communitarian but by mediation: individual, community and absolute have their being in the rational bureaucratic state, whose officials (professors and pastors included) are the home of spirit. His successors found this world "banal, bourgeois, philistine".
| Stage | Thinkers | Stance toward politics |
|---|---|---|
| 1. Early existentialism | Dostoyevsky, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche | State as obstacle: "the coldest of all cold monsters"; Kierkegaard's solitary relation to God; Nietzsche's artist-tyrant and "great politics" |
| 2. Phenomenology | Brentano, Husserl | Late Husserl: Europe's telos from Greek theory; community on the model of the contemplative garden; distant from praxis |
| 3. Phenomenological existentialism | Heidegger, Jaspers | Turn to phronêsis reconceived as a revelatory "moment of vision"; National Socialism; later "only a god can save us" |
| 4. French existentialism | Sartre and Kojève's hearers | Hegel and Marx revived; permanent resistance; collective authenticity |
The four stages
For Kierkegaard, choosing in dread among aesthetic, ethical and religious lives reveals the ethical's inadequacy; the state separates man from God. Nietzsche offers the last man or the overman, overcoming revenge by amor fati and eternal recurrence, against Hegel's redemption on "the slaughtering bench of world history" and Ivan Karamazov's refusal. Husserl, after World War I and again under Hitler, saw only phenomenology saving Europe from naturalism: "all the beloved expressions about community spirit... are so much romanticism and mythology". Either Europe's ruin or its rebirth "through the heroism of reason".
Heidegger read Aristotle's intellectual virtues with theory as a moment of praxis and phronêsis preeminent, reconceived (via Augustine and Luther) as historicity. Dasein is Mitsein and zôon politikon. In 1933 only National Socialism seemed to rest on phronêsis; Hitler "is alone the present and future of German reality and its law". The rector's failure taught him only that he had underestimated metaphysics and technology; Hölderlin took the place Hitler had held, Tiresias for Oedipus.
Gillespie's four stages of the search for immediacy in politics
Gillespie's argument in finer grain
- Two modern projects. "To the things themselves!" sums up both movements, but its political meaning is "elusive"; both reach politics only "indirectly and secondarily". Modernity has two founders: Descartes, for whom concrete things become abstract objects and experience "a system of mathematical relationships", and Hobbes. Both movements think the modern project, "especially in its final Hegelian form", closes off authentic experience. Unlike Marxists or liberals, they scarcely consider a political solution "until the 1930s".
- Hegel's double refusal. Hegel criticized German Classicism for reviving the immediacy of the ancient polis and the Romantics for seeking a folk community. Political philosophy sits in objective spirit as the philosophy of right.
- Passions over reason. In place of idealism's rational individual, Nietzsche and Dostoyevsky stress subconscious passions, affects and drives. For Nietzsche morality is a tool of the weak against the strong; for Kierkegaard ethical life beats aesthetic life but cannot reach real goodness, "which depends on God alone".
- Family and estrangement. Kierkegaard's choice of a single life over marriage mattered centrally to him. For Dostoyevsky the corruption of the family is the premise of The Brothers Karamazov (1879-80), and the Underground Man is the type of estrangement. Zarathustra sees the gulf between himself and the "last men", "devoid of love, creativity, longing, and wonder".
- Revolutionaries too. Dostoyevsky's Devils (1871-2) attacks revolutionary immorality and ineffectiveness; Zarathustra calls revolutionaries "overthrow-devils" whose success would only strengthen the state. For Nietzsche Staat and Kultur are always at odds: since the German state was formed, German culture has declined. Kierkegaard dislikes the Hegelianism of the Danish Church as a step toward paganism, subordinating God to dialectical rationality.
Nietzsche's artist-tyrant
Where Hegel held up the philosopher and Kierkegaard the saint, Nietzsche presents the artist. The death of God offers two outcomes: "bovine hedonism" or a new order of rank and the overman beyond good and evil. The decision is not free choice but the "unconscious force of life" in the genius. Destruction is usually reactive, the spirit of revenge against the past's dead hand, so transfiguration needs amor fati and the eternal recurrence: affirming a world in which suffering is "eternally not redeemed". The goal is "Caesar with the soul of Christ", whose "great politics" needs new wars to breed a people for new values; in the present Nietzsche "can only long" for it.
Husserl's route to a political phenomenology
| Step | Husserl's position |
|---|---|
| Origin | Brentano opens the field; early Husserl calls his thought realism, then (to his students' astonishment) transcendental idealism |
| Method | Suspend the natural attitude; phenomenological reduction (object to process), eidetic reduction (that it is to what it is), transcendental reduction (a priori structures) |
| Normativity | No facts "out there": facts mean within a framework set by an intention; consciousness is law-giving and teleological (Velkley 1987) |
| After 1900 | Intersubjectivity; the communal world as "the accretion of all past attempts to give it meaning" |
| Against Dilthey | Rejects historicism as relativism, which misses humanity's "intrinsic infinite end" |
| After WWI and 1933 | Only phenomenology can save humanity from naturalism, positivism, historicism; a historical reduction strips sediment to the lifeworld |
| The Greek break | Wonder breeds an unpractical love of theory, an infinite cosmos and a community modeled on the philosophic group; Galileo and Descartes replace theory with technical concern and lose Europe's telos |
Gillespie: the ambivalent politics of existentialism and phenomenology.
Heidegger's theology of the moment
Heidegger turned to Paul, Augustine and Luther, historicism, Kierkegaard and then Nietzsche. Like Dilthey and Nietzsche he denied an unchanging reality reachable by reduction. Rejecting naturalism and idealism alike, he dropped "consciousness" for Dasein. Aristotle divides things that change from things that do not; theory ends in contemplation and "produces no human action". Heidegger made phronesis "a revelatory insight into what is necessary here and now", closer to "divine revelation than to everyday prudence", which gives his politics its millenarian character. Being appears as "no-thing", always a question; Dasein meets it "affectively" in moods: anxiety before death in Being and Time, later "great joy" and existential boredom. Death does not isolate but "propels him toward his people and generation". The bureaucratic state was a technical apparatus of "Hegelian/Weberian bureaucrats" who thought themselves masters of technology but were its servants. The early 1930s collapse was not a theoretical crisis, as Husserl thought, but one caused by "the hegemony of theory". Heidegger thought Hitler had "awakened this will in the entire people and welded it into a single resolve". In Introduction to Metaphysics the true leader wields Being's uncanny power, yet like Oedipus is apolis, "both a beast and a god".
Sartre and the end of the chapter
- Kojève's audience. The French existentialists of the 1940s and 1950s were largely those who heard or read Kojève's lectures of the 1930s: a Hegel read through Marx and Heidegger, speaking to a generation marked by World War I and the Russian Revolution. Their goals were "radically different" from liberalism's.
- Sartre's freedom. Humans fashion themselves by "spontaneous and thus groundless acts of will", guided by aesthetic sense: "I am creating a certain image of man as I would have him be". We are "condemned to be free"; evasion is bad faith. Scarcity breeds conflict (Marx), and classes must go because they engender role-playing. He rejected Machiavellianism and democratic centralism: "more a libertarian socialist than a Leninist", committed to a society where all freely set and actualize their ends.
- The closing image. Interests, institutions, rights and constitutions are "tainted" by everyday banality and hypocrisy. These thinkers believe "tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms further, until one fine day ..." (Gillespie quotes, without naming, the last page of Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby).
History and Historicity (Charles Guignon)
Husserl's inner history
Dilthey grounded history in lived experience: "We are historical beings before we are observers of history". Husserl at first feared such "worldview" philosophy. From the 1935 Vienna lecture he changed course: Europe is defined by a telos, theoretical knowledge of "the totality of beings", born in Greek wonder, which makes philosophers "functionaries of mankind". The Crisis tells modernity's "two epochs": Descartes discovers apodicticity but falls into objectivism (as Galileo did); Hume, despite "absurd skepticism", shakes objectivism; Husserl's return to the "primal ground" opens the second epoch.
"The Origin of Geometry" models inner history. We use a ready-made, sedimented geometry "inauthentically", yet have implicit knowledge of its grounds. Regressive inquiry seeks not "some undiscoverable Thales" but the founding (Stiftung) that was also the founding of a goal. Language and writing turn a private intuition into ideal objectivity, at the cost of the "seduction of language". Method zigzags between present and past, and the "historical a priori" undercuts relativism, since relativism presupposes it. Löwith saw in this Hegel's cunning of reason.
| Husserl | Heidegger | |
|---|---|---|
| What is retrieved | The founding acts of reason (geometry, philosophy) | Primordial experiences of being; words' "birth certificate" |
| Telos | One project of reason for all humanity | No single project; a first beginning re-thought in a new one |
| Where history lives | Immanent in transcendental subjectivity | Thrownness: subjectivity a "side effect" of history |
| Authentic relation | Reactivating genuine (echt) meanings | Tradition received as heritage (Erbe); shared destiny (Geschick) |
Guignon: from historicism rejected to history as the medium of understanding
Heidegger and after
The "anyone" speaks by "passing the word along" until "things are so because one says so", so tradition "delivers it over to self-evidence" and blocks the wellsprings: hence destructuring. In §74 authentic Dasein meets public possibilities as heritage and its life as part of a people's destiny. Heidegger fuses Nietzsche's monumental, antiquarian and critical histories, which Nietzsche thought irreconcilable, into one futural historiography.
Guignon's account in finer grain
- The reversal Gadamer named. Husserl's 1911 "Philosophy as Rigorous Science" told phenomenology to describe how things show up, not how beliefs came to be. With Being and Time (1927), says Gadamer, "the whole idea of grounding itself underwent a total reversal": "Heidegger's thesis was that being itself was time". Husserl's genetic turn in the mid-1930s was partly a response.
- Dilthey's picture. Everyday life is made of "life-experiences"; the whole (Zusammenhang) of a life comes from reflection (Besinnung), the stock-taking in which we "make sense". We are "bearers" and "carriers" of history whose facticity can never be made fully explicit. Husserl feared this led to "worldview" philosophy.
- Europe's sending. Europe is a "sending" (Sendung) for all humanity, distinguished from "merely empirical anthropological type[s] like 'China' and 'India'" by its "being toward a telos". To find this hidden "entelechy" one must "strike through the crust of externalized 'historical facts'". (The Eurocentrism here is Husserl's, reported, not endorsed, by Guignon.)
- Objectivism defined. Descartes, like Galileo, reduces "the infinite task of knowing to the mathematicophysical knowing" of science, treating reality as res extensa and the "I" as a psychological ego rather than the absolute ego. The new epoch is a "reappropriation of the Cartesian discovery, the fundamental demand of apodicticity".
Heidegger's temporality, step by step
Because we are always in a context we cannot master, Husserl's ideal of all-embracing "theoretical reason" is untenable. Idle talk "has lost its primary relationship-of-being toward the entities talked about", so Dasein's initial lack of rootedness (Bodenständigkeit) worsens into complete groundlessness (Bodenlosigkeit). Three existentials define Dasein as care: situatedness ("already-in"), discursiveness ("among" entities) and understanding ("ahead-of-itself"). Care's meaning is temporality: projecting, out of a past it "always already is", amid "making present". Dasein is a "happening" (Geschehen), and so world-history is possible. The past "'happens' out of its future", and it "is not something which follows along after Dasein, but rather ... something which already goes ahead of it".
Guignon: from Dasein's existentials to authentic historicity (Being and Time).
Nietzsche's three histories, fused
| Mode | Nietzsche (Use and Abuse of History) | Heidegger's authentic historiography |
|---|---|---|
| Monumental | Great models; fictive, one of three irreconcilable views | Futural: projects monumental possibilities as enduring models of a life |
| Antiquarian | Reverent preservation, which can sap life | Preserves the past as "a reservoir of assets" for judging what goals are worthwhile |
| Critical | Judges and condemns the past | Criticizes public interpretations to free possibilities grounded in history's own projects |
| Overall | Detached curiosity "saps our ability to live fully in the here and now" | One approach that makes destruction and retrieval possible |
Guignon names two differences from Husserl. Heidegger needs a telos to select what is relevant, but no single project of reason underlies all European history; and the shared project belongs to "a community, a people", so there is "no need to posit what Husserl calls an 'absolute spirit'" above real people.
The successors, more fully
- Gadamer stresses not futurity but the past "assimilated in ever-new ways". Constructive prejudices ("prejudgments") let us question inherited texts and hear the past answer the present. Our being is "belongingness to something greater than what can be comprehended within subjectivity".
- Ricoeur: following a story means (1) anticipating a conclusion and (2) making sense of events in light of it.
- Ortega y Gasset (1930s) rejects a "pregiven nature" from "physicomathematical reasoning". By maturity we map a program of life; choice is limited by a "repertory of usages" and by our own past. Life and history are dialectical: each step gains meaning by negating the last, grasped by "historical reason", "a substantive reason constituted by what has happened to man".
- Sartre: the War Diaries (1939-40) answer Raymond Aron's 1938 thesis, which rejected historical facts. Action internalizes the "past" of a situation and externalizes the agent; its product is the work (oeuvre). Events are ambivalent, both in-itself and for-itself, and become other than intended as a community gives them meaning, part of history's "inertia".
Bubbles and Skulls: The Phenomenology of Self-Consciousness in Dutch Still-Life Painting (Wayne M. Martin)
A primer: politics, money, Calvin
Three facts shape the tradition. The Union of Utrecht (1579) led to a tolerant republic that drew refugees (Descartes, Spinoza's family). And predominantly Calvinist distrust of worldly goods removed the Church as patron while a vast private market arose ("scarce an ordinary tradesman whose house is not decorated" with pictures, 1641). Workshop competition put a premium on virtuosity: crystal, lace, reflective surfaces. The paintings pull two ways, celebrating wealth while questioning its worth: dialectical polysemy.
| Subgenre | Example | Counter-theme |
|---|---|---|
| Banquet piece | Beert, Dishes with Oysters and Sweetmeats (1615) | Shells point to the risky seafaring behind the wealth |
| Breakfast piece | Van Schooten, Breakfast (1640) | Solitary diner; a knife; broken crust as bodily decay |
| Trompe l'oeil | Van Hoogstraten (1666-8) | The senses deceive, a Cartesian theme |
| Floral piece | Van der Spelt (1658) | Variegated tulips produced by a virus: beauty and mortality |
| Vanitas theme | Van Oosterwijk (1668) | Hourglass, butterfly, skull |
Mottos can close the meaning (Torrentius: "That which is without measure is immeasurable evil"), but a skull leaves it open: Christian hope or a first visual exploration of nihilism.
Bubbles: the Cartesian sphere
Book figure 38.1: David Bailly (1650), Vanitas Still Life with Portrait. Herbert Johnson Museum of Art, Cornell University (as printed in the book).
Emblem books made bubbles mean transience: Goltzius's Quis Evadet? and Homo Bulla Est ("Man is a bubble"). De Gheyn's 1603 vanitas, probably the oldest surviving Dutch still life, uses the bubble as a medium of its own: it reflects a crown, a scepter and the rack, a comment on Spanish Catholic power. Above it, Democritus laughs and Heraclitus weeps (after Seneca), ancient materialists voiding the hope that the rising bubble is a soul.
Book figure 38.2: Jacques de Gheyn the Elder (1603), Vanitas Still Life. Metropolitan Museum, New York.
In Claesz's Still Life with Römer and Tazza the bubble-like goblet becomes the centerpiece. The olive, the one truly elliptical object among dozens of painted ellipses, is an ironic nod to the painter's art of deception, and the painter's silhouetted head appears in the Römer's reflection "as if from inside the bubble".
Book figure 38.3: Pieter Claesz (c.1633), Still Life with Römer and Tazza. "Staatliche Museum, Berlin" (as printed).
The Getty's 1634 Vanitas Still Life confirms the reading: the painter sits at his easel inside a spherical mirror, a self enclosed in a representational medium whose distortions follow an intelligible order. This is a solid, enduring bubble, symbol of the Cartesian hope for an immortal representing self. Clara Peeters (1612) had already painted herself in a cup's protrusions.
Book figure 38.4: Attributed to Pieter Claesz (1634), Vanitas Still Life. J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles.
Book figure 38.5: Clara Peeters (1612), Ceremonial Cups and Flowers in a Jug (detail). Staatliche Kunsthalle, Karlsruhe.
The "historical elephant": the Discourse appeared in 1637 and the Meditations in 1641. Martin turns this into support for the Hegel, Marx, Heidegger, Taylor and Dreyfus thesis that philosophers distill views already at work in cultural practice.
Two phenomenologies of self-consciousness in Dutch still life
Bailly's double self-portrait
Book figure 38.6: David Bailly (1651), Vanitas Still Life with Portrait of a Young Painter. Stedelijk Museum de Lakenhal, Leiden.
Bailly, a portraitist (the trade of "putting people in bubbles", oval frames), painted this at 67 after his wife Agneta van Swanenburgh fell gravely ill or died. More than fifty objects, nearly all doubled; a young painter holds an oval portrait of himself aged. The wall's corner marks the present, the candlestick divides the living from the dead, and the objects re-enact episodes of his career. Against Descartes's present-instant cogito, self-knowledge here is narrative and diachronic, and intersubjective (a bearded man's gaze, Hals, the wife). The anomaly shows time running two ways, forward from the past and back from a looming future: Heidegger's existential concept of the future.
Martin's case in finer grain
- Phenomenology in oil. The usual product of phenomenology is words: "Lots of them, preferably in German, or French, or academic English". Martin anticipates the complaint that treating art as "some kind of cognitive science" diminishes it, and is "undeterred". In one sense the thesis "borders on the trivial": painters make studies (so called) of how things appear. The result is not logos as words but an articulation in Heidegger's sense, "a disparting display".
- Timing without influence. Descartes first visited with the army in 1618 and lived in the Netherlands from 1630 to 1649; the oil still-life tradition began around 1603 and peaked during his residence. "Aside from one minor detail", Martin claims no direct influence.
- Still means not-living. The objects are "still" chiefly "in the sense of not-living": a coin or candle, or once-living things such as a cut flower. The masters of the genre (de Heem, de Gheyn, Torrentius, Claesz-Heda, Claesz) are obscure beside Rubens, Rembrandt and Vermeer.
- Wealth on a new scale. Schama's The Embarrassment of Riches (1988) names perhaps "the greatest concentration of wealth on the planet until the emergence of Wall Street" in the late nineteenth century. Calvinism taught preordination of the select, salvation by grace and distrust of worldly goods.
The olive and the Getty sphere
Painters' tools in a vanitas can express modesty, "a key Calvinist and Stoic virtue": the painter counts his own work among ephemeral goods. In Claesz's 1633 breakfast piece, painted with a vanitas's somber, almost monochromatic palette, dozens of circles appear as ellipses (ten in the base of the tazza alone), and the olive is "the one object which is actually elliptical in life", a reminder that the representations "are themselves deceptions". Martin admits he first advanced the silhouette claim "somewhat fancifully". The Getty panel hangs "(of all places) in the French galleries", probably by an advanced apprentice with the master's composition. Its right side is symbolically settled: shells for seafaring and trade, ledger, quill and sealed contracts for commerce, skull and bones for death. At left the sphere shows the painter "hidden but unmistakable", brush in hand. The device goes back to van Eyck's Arnolfini Portrait (1434).
| Object (Bailly 1651) | Life event it reenacts or marks |
|---|---|
| Copy of a Hals lute-player | An earlier copy made as a novice; homage to Hals, his near-exact contemporary and fellow Antwerper, still living |
| St. Sebastian | A figure likely met on his Grand Tour; a third-century martyr under Diocletian, linked to the Great Plague's "random arrows" |
| Oval of Agneta | An idealization of the portrait made at their wedding; echoed by a ghostly portrait on the wall |
| Young painter, unused oval palettes | His youth and the career still ahead |
| Oval self-portrait aged | Bailly at 67, the true present |
| Paper halted in flight | The painter's power to stop time (one rival reading) |
Martin's route through the temporal anomaly of Bailly's two self-portraits.
Solving the temporal anomaly
Two readings exist, "curiously opposed": the portraits as ephemerality, the artist modestly among the vanities; or "an arrogant celebration" of the painter's power to overcome death. Neither resolves the anomaly. "At the risk of rather dramatic anachronism", Martin uses Wordsworth's motto to Intimations of Immortality: children produce the adults they become, so the young man displays "in prospect his own progeny", the mature artist and his works. The rest of the motto, "And I could wish my days to be / Bound each to each by natural piety", names the knitting of a life into a whole. The self is "embodied, situated among things, and under the gaze of others": the bearded man looks straight into young Bailly's eyes. Heidegger's ekstatic temporality completes it: experienced time runs both ways, past to future and from a future "available for this or that" that comes "inexorably toward the present moment" (Heidegger 1982: §19b; 1962: §§67-71). On what follows death the painting keeps a skeptical balance: the saint bathed in light with Agneta gazing on it, while the other figures face away, the lute player and bearded man again Democritus and Heraclitus split by a bubble.
Alpers and Hals's Descartes
Alpers read Dutch painting as answering Bacon's call to squeeze a thing's nature into view, alongside the fledgling Royal Academy (Martin's phrase; the body meant is presumably the Royal Society). The Louvre's Descartes in Gallery 27 copies Hals; a smaller, more "disheveled" Hals study recalls Hals's lost "The Boy in the Bubble".
Mathematics (Mark van Atten)
Three connections, one focus
Husserl took his doctorate in mathematics (1883, under Königsberger) and knew Cantor, Frege, Hilbert and Weierstrass; his "torment" over uniting "the purely logical and... actual consciousness" drove phenomenology. Later he lost touch, writing before meeting Brouwer in Amsterdam that he would disappoint him. One can also contrast the two sciences (Ideas I §§71, 75), as Gödel did, combining philosophical analysis with mathematics, for example to justify new axioms. Van Atten focuses on the third connection, phenomenology of mathematics, and on foundations, since an unbeautiful theorem is still a theorem: newer topics such as beauty and explanation presuppose an idea of what mathematics is.
The usual objection, that eidetic variation does not match what doing mathematics feels like, is met by Husserl's distinction between having an ability and describing it. With Gödel, realism and idealism become branches of one subject, things considered versus processes of knowing. Gödel told Kreisel he formed this view reading Husserl. Formal rigor is not the only rigor: Kreisel's informal rigour devised every axiom, and Wesensschau is that old method made conscious. Formal results can refute philosophies too: Gödel against Hilbert's formalism, Tarski's complete elementary geometry against Kant's claim that geometric proofs always need intuition.
| Stance | Philosophy's right over practice | Who |
|---|---|---|
| Non-revisionism | Describes only | Naturalism: mathematics "takes care of itself" |
| Weak revisionism | Tests, may reject parts | Husserl: without philosophy, mathematics is "a mere technique" |
| Strong revisionism | May limit and extend | Van Atten's reading of Husserl's principles; Brouwer's intuitionism |
Six cases where reflection on evidence shaped the foundations of mathematics
Six examples
Heyting, after reading Husserl's student Oskar Becker, read a proposition as an intention and its assertion as fulfillment ("Euler's constant C is rational" expresses an expectation), which gives the proof interpretation and the failure of excluded middle for open problems. Choice sequences, "always becoming and never finished", give a continuum whose parts are like the whole (Husserl's "extensive" wholes) and force intuitionistic logic: after three 0s there is no fact whether all will be 0. Brouwer's bar theorem analyzes what any proof of its antecedent must be like, treating proofs as infinite mental objects. Hilbert's Program raises the nature of finitary evidence; Gödel's incompleteness refutes it and Carnap's syntax view; the Dialectica interpretation (1958) answers "how much evidence" with computable functionals of finite type: more than finitary, less than intuitionistic proof.
Van Atten's argument in finer grain
- The epigraph. The chapter opens with Kant (B753) on mathematicians who would "philosophise in regard to their mathematics (a hard task!)". Husserl knew the work of Cantor, Frege, Hilbert, Kronecker, Schröder and Weierstrass, and in the early 1920s heard of new developments from Hermann Weyl and Oskar Becker. His letter to H. J. Pos (26 December 1927) said he "no longer could speak about the foundations"; yet he soon published Formal and Transcendental Logic, which van Atten thinks might have been "somewhat less programmatic" had he caught up.
- Kant's distinction, Gödel's combination. Kant (A713): philosophy analyses concepts, mathematics builds them up. Where Kant saw a distinction Gödel saw a choice: solve a problem by philosophical analysis plus easy mathematics, or by subtle constructions. There is also "The pernicious influence of mathematics on philosophy": modeling philosophy on mathematics does harm.
- A recognition test. Tragesser (1973): something is a mathematical object "if it can be recognized that it can be completely thought through mathematically".
- Why the old questions stay. Recent philosophy of mathematics studies applicability ("the unreasonable success of pure mathematics in physics"), explanation, probabilistic reasoning, visualization, beauty and analogy (see Rota 1997). Van Atten holds that shifting emphasis is "shifting one's grounds", and the grounds are asymmetric: "an unenlightening proof is still a proof; a theorem that is not beautiful is still a theorem". One also needs a prior idea of what mathematics is to select the data: someone who rejects certain Cantorian infinite sets will not count them in a study of mathematical beauty (though they may still be beautiful "in the way fictional objects can").
- Possibility, not actuality. Gödel: mathematical objects can be known "without using the senses", since they concern "possibilities and impossibilities". Bernays: mathematics is "the science of possible idealized structures". Husserl's Sixth Investigation correlates the conditions of categorial intuition with those of categorial objects. Gödel also remarked that "Husserl and Freud" both considered "subconscious thinking", so phenomenological analysis deepens, rather than competes with, mathematical analysis.
| Question: how much evidence for consistency? | Answer |
|---|---|
| Hilbert's hope (classical analysis) | Only as much as finitary mathematics: finitely many concrete, surveyable objects, like primary-school arithmetic |
| Gödel 1931, first theorem | Any consistent formal system containing arithmetic leaves propositions undecided, and they can be specified |
| Gödel 1931, second theorem | One undecidable proposition expresses the system's own consistency: finitary evidence cannot suffice |
| Against Carnap | Mathematics as conventional syntax fails: proving the rules consistent needs intuition of equal power, so non-empirical content cannot be eliminated |
| Dialectica (1958) | More than Hilbert's finitary reasoning, less than the intuitionistic notion of proof |
The examples, with their mechanics
Brouwer's arithmetic. That 2 + 2 = 4 is true means: construct 2 by abstracting all content from the passage from one "now" to another, leaving pure form; construct it again; join them; construct 4 and see they coincide. For 2 + 2 = 5 the constructions cannot be made to coincide, so its negation is true. Logic for Brouwer is "first of all an empirical science", though eidetic insight into constructions yields essential laws.
The continuum. Since Aristotle it has been known that a line as a set of discrete points isolates them. A choice sequence is a potentially infinite sequence chosen "at will, one after the other" by the individual mathematician. Phenomenology does two jobs here: it recognizes the line as an extensive whole (Logical Investigations III §19), and it analyzes construction to show choice sequences are genuine objects with identity conditions, though classical mathematicians reject them. Following Husserl's genetic analysis (developed in Tragesser 1977, ch. IV), different domains carry different logics.
Bar theorem and Hilbert. Brouwer's 1927 theorem says roughly that if a "bar" exists in a tree, it contains a small tree built in an orderly way; it rests on the structure of proofs as mental objects, horizons and intentional implication (van Atten 2004b, ch. 4), and Brouwer saw it as his main argument against Hilbert's formalism. Hilbert's method of ideal elements stands close to Husserl's "Double Lecture" in Göttingen (1901).
Van Atten: the two steps of Godel's Dialectica consistency proof.
Dialectica in two steps. The 1958 paper, "On a hitherto unutilized extension of the finitary standpoint", first uses Gödel's 1933 translation of classical arithmetic into Heyting Arithmetic (Peano's axioms with intuitionistic logic); the translation of 1 = 0 is just 1 = 0. It then interprets Heyting Arithmetic by computable functionals of finite type (type 0 the natural numbers), objects abstract like proofs but "less so". Gödel: one may doubt "whether we have a sufficiently clear idea of the content of this notion ... but not that the axioms ... hold for it". The 1972 revision adds detail on evidence, perhaps sharpened by the wide reading in phenomenology Gödel began after 1958.
Main Points
Main Points
- Phenomenology and existentialism are one canon. The quarrel between the movements has been settled in practice; they share four commitments, and existentialism adds anxiety, absurdity and authenticity (ch1).
- Meaning is the proper topic of philosophy. Husserl's founding move is to study meaning reflectively as it is given, not to explain it away (ch2, ch5).
- Some phenomena show themselves only to the engaged. Existential phenomena are pre-objective, so the method must be a description that keeps the right involvement (ch3, ch25).
- The body is the subject of perception. The proprioceptive bodily frame is innate and absolute, and every egocentric, object-centered or cardinal frame rests on it (ch17, ch24).
- We perceive others directly. Neuroscience and phenomenology converge on a bodily togetherness with others that needs no inference from behavior (ch23).
- Detached theory is a late, derived stance. The tradition's critique of the detached knower reappears in action theory, AI, science and politics (ch11, ch25, ch26, ch29).
- The reductions are two separate moves. The eidetic reduction turns from a particular to an essence; the transcendental reduction turns from the object to the act (ch8).
- We intuit states of affairs, not only things. Categorial intuition fulfills the "being" in "the door is blue" through a synthesis of coincidence (ch9).
- Time-consciousness underlies every object. Retention and protention explain how we perceive what endures; Heidegger turns time into the meaning of care (ch10).
- French phenomenology pushes past the visible. Levinas, Henry, Derrida and Marion practice a phenomenology of excess, tested by how far each endures the limit of the method (ch4).
- Existentialism answers a conflicted culture. Greek detached reason and Hebrew involved commitment pull the West apart; Pascal, Kierkegaard and Dostoyevsky answer with an existentialized faith (ch11, ch13).
- Authenticity is formal, not a virtue. Its lasting core is the first-person structure of existence, not sincerity or self-realization (ch15).
- Moods disclose before they judge. Heidegger and Sartre read affectivity ontologically; Nietzsche reads it as a symptom of sick or healthy life (ch16, ch21).
- Freedom rose; responsibility lagged. The tradition's non-psychological freedom was never integrated with being answerable to someone for something (ch18).
- Death is a way to be. Being-toward-death individualizes without subjectivizing and frees resoluteness to act (ch20).
- The absurd follows the split of subject and world. Absurdity is the by-product of modern subjectivity once no God mends the gap (ch19, ch35).
- The self is not one thing. A pre-reflective egological structure differs from the narrative Self, and Sartre helps analytic philosophy of mind see it (ch22).
- Illness is unhomelike being-in-the-world. Health is a self-concealing rhythm; illness makes the body an other within me (ch28).
- Dignity can rest on the lived body. Grounding dignity in autonomy splits the person; shame shows dignity rooted in bodily self-possession (ch32).
- Sexual identity is a style of an expressive body. Feminist phenomenology escapes both naturalism and constructionism, and asks whether the transcendental self is sexually neutral (ch33, ch34).
- Technology is an ontological question. Heidegger sees danger where Dewey sees a fortress built from threatening forces; the difference is where contingency lives (ch30, ch31).
- A search for immediacy leaves politics without a footing. Revolts against mediation treat institutions as obstacles (ch36).
- History moved from enemy to center. A method that began against historicism came to put historicity at the heart of being (ch37).
- Paintings can do phenomenology. Dutch vanitas still lifes stage self-consciousness as mortal, reflexive and painted (ch38).
- Phenomenology can found mathematics. Reflection on evidence produced intuitionistic logic, choice sequences and Gödel's Dialectica work (ch39).
Threads the depth pass brought forward
- Rival pictures of the self run through every part. Claesz's self inside a representational bubble and Bailly's narrated, observed self (Martin, ch38) restage the quarrel between the Cartesian cogito and Heidegger's ekstatic Dasein (Crowell, Carman, Guignon). Chapter 22 on the egological structure of consciousness supplies the theory that the paintings show in oil.
- Politics without mediation is a standing risk. Gillespie (ch36) reads the movements as a search for immediacy that treats institutions as obstacles. Read with Tietz on German existence-philosophy and Murphy and Heinämaa on Beauvoir, this explains both the 1933 disaster and the feminist insistence on concrete situations as the corrective.
- Death and meaning are argued as well as felt. Young (ch35) moves from Camus's "night" to the later Heidegger's "shrine of the nothing" and an "elegiac sense of ephemerality"; Brenner (ch32) on shame and Kadowaki (ch31) on practice show how the same descriptive method yields ethics.
- History and mathematics test the method at its limits. Guignon (ch37) shows phenomenology turning from rejecting historicism to retrieving heritage, while van Atten (ch39) shows it deciding real questions in the foundations of mathematics, from Heyting's "logic of intentions" to Gödel's Dialectica.
| Late chapter | Method applied to | Main yield |
|---|---|---|
| 35 Young | Death and the good life | Rapture over revolt; death as the averted side of life |
| 36 Gillespie | Political life | "All or nothing" politics; a voice of dissatisfaction |
| 37 Guignon | History | Destruction and retrieval; heritage over tradition |
| 38 Martin | Painting | Two phenomenologies of self-consciousness in oil |
| 39 van Atten | Mathematics | Phenomenology as a standard for foundations |
Frameworks and mental models
| Name | What it says | Use it when |
|---|---|---|
| Intentionality | Every act is directed at an object through a meaning | Separating what is meant from what exists |
| Eidetic and transcendental reduction | Turn from fact to essence, and from object to act | Asking what any case of X must be like |
| Categorial intuition | Structures like "being" and "and" can be seen, not only inferred | A claim about form looks merely verbal |
| Retention and protention | The present holds the just-past and the about-to-come | Explaining melody, speech or any duration |
| Being-in-the-world | We cope skillfully before we represent | A model assumes a detached knower first |
| Body schema | A pre-reflective bodily frame organizes space and action | Studying skill, disability or spatial cognition |
| Authenticity as ownedness | Existence is mine, first-person and asymmetrical | Telling sincerity apart from owning a life |
| Mood as disclosure | Feelings open a world before judging it | Treating emotion as mere sensation or bias |
| Unhomelikeness | Illness as the body turned other within me | Taking a patient's experience seriously |
| Weak versus strong revisionism | Philosophy tests, or also extends, a practice | Deciding what philosophy may demand of a science |
One line of descent: from a method for meaning to its reach beyond philosophy
- Phenomenology and existentialism are one canon. The quarrel between the movements has been settled in practice; they share four commitments, and existentialism adds anxiety, absurdity and authenticity (ch1).
- Meaning is the proper topic of philosophy. Husserl's founding move is to study meaning reflectively as it is given, not to explain it away (ch2, ch5).
- Some phenomena show themselves only to the engaged. Existential phenomena are pre-objective, so the method must be a description that keeps the right involvement (ch3, ch25).
- The body is the subject of perception. The proprioceptive bodily frame is innate and absolute, and every egocentric, object-centered or cardinal frame rests on it (ch17, ch24).
- We perceive others directly. Neuroscience and phenomenology converge on a bodily togetherness with others that needs no inference from behavior (ch23).
- Detached theory is a late, derived stance. The tradition's critique of the detached knower reappears in action theory, AI, science and politics (ch11, ch25, ch26, ch29).