Edmund Husserl
On Edmund Husserl (1859-1938):
Born second of four children to middle class observant Jewish parents, into Yiddish as his native tongue and in a Moravian hometown renown for Talmudic learning, Husserl was nevertheless sent at ten to Vienna for a secular classic education steeped in German, Greek, and Latin. His early studies (in Vienna, Leipzig, Berlin, and back to Vienna) were in astronomy, mathematics, physics, and philosophy and led to his first doctorate in mathematics (on the theory of the calculus of variations). After briefly teaching in Berlin, he returned to Vienna, catching the philosophy lectures of Franz Brentano (whose work in intentionality and perception deeply influenced both philosophy and psychology), then to Halle to study psychology under Wilhelm Wundt (founder of experimental psychology) and complete his Habilitationsschrift, a second dissertation, on the philosophical concept of number. (His first book, Philosophy of Arithmetic, synthesizes math, philosophy, and psychology.) Both converting to Protestantism, Husserl married Malvine Charlotte Steinschneider and had three children (and lost one to WWI). In 1900-01, his two-volume Logical Investigations was published with phenomenology’s first formulation. It is for this, we most remember Husserl: as the father of phenomenology. Moving to a 16-year teaching post in Göttingen, he published Ideas I explicitly codifying phenomenology as a method, theory, and new school of thought, then developed and refined in all his later books and innumerable, posthumously published papers. Awarded full professorship at Freiburg/Breisgau in 1916, Husserl retired in 1928 (succeeded by his former student and assistant, Martin Heidegger) to widely lecture and publish until Husserl’s Jewish parentage incurred, due Hitler’s 1933 takeover, his humiliation and shunning from the German intellectual community. Refusing to flee, he died in Freiburg in 1938, with his manuscripts immediately smuggled out of Germany to Leuven, Belgium, where his archives of over 40,000 pages are now established.
Born second of four children to middle class observant Jewish parents, into Yiddish as his native tongue and in a Moravian hometown renown for Talmudic learning, Husserl was nevertheless sent at ten to Vienna for a secular classic education steeped in German, Greek, and Latin. His early studies (in Vienna, Leipzig, Berlin, and back to Vienna) were in astronomy, mathematics, physics, and philosophy and led to his first doctorate in mathematics (on the theory of the calculus of variations). After briefly teaching in Berlin, he returned to Vienna, catching the philosophy lectures of Franz Brentano (whose work in intentionality and perception deeply influenced both philosophy and psychology), then to Halle to study psychology under Wilhelm Wundt (founder of experimental psychology) and complete his Habilitationsschrift, a second dissertation, on the philosophical concept of number. (His first book, Philosophy of Arithmetic, synthesizes math, philosophy, and psychology.) Both converting to Protestantism, Husserl married Malvine Charlotte Steinschneider and had three children (and lost one to WWI). In 1900-01, his two-volume Logical Investigations was published with phenomenology’s first formulation. It is for this, we most remember Husserl: as the father of phenomenology. Moving to a 16-year teaching post in Göttingen, he published Ideas I explicitly codifying phenomenology as a method, theory, and new school of thought, then developed and refined in all his later books and innumerable, posthumously published papers. Awarded full professorship at Freiburg/Breisgau in 1916, Husserl retired in 1928 (succeeded by his former student and assistant, Martin Heidegger) to widely lecture and publish until Husserl’s Jewish parentage incurred, due Hitler’s 1933 takeover, his humiliation and shunning from the German intellectual community. Refusing to flee, he died in Freiburg in 1938, with his manuscripts immediately smuggled out of Germany to Leuven, Belgium, where his archives of over 40,000 pages are now established.
“I can see spread out before me
the endlessly open plains of true philosophy,
the ‘promised land’,
though its thorough cultivation will come after me”
--Edmund Husserl, “Introduction (1931),” prepared for the English translation of Ideas I, p. 429.
On Phenomenology:
Both a celebrated school of contemporary Continental philosophy inaugurated by Husserl and a primarily epistemological method he envisioned as applicable to diverse areas of life and theoretical study. Its grounding premise and goal is that one can reliably capture and describe how an abstracted event (be it observation of a coffee cup, eel, or cadaver, a forest hike, or turning a corner to encounter a riot) is actually a flood of visions, givenness of unique perspectives commonly overlooked in experience.
“living is … in a certain sense, an experiencing.”
- --“So zu leben ist … in gewissem Sinn ein Erleben” (Husserl, Hua 25:144—the Analecta Husserliana: The Yearbook of Phenomenological Research, published first by Kluwer in 1968 (now Springer), is a vast multivolume series of Husserl translations and other scholarly research continuing his phenomenological project; noted by volume: page). In comparison: “I live by tangible experience and not by logical explanation” (Georges Bataille, “The Torment,” in Inner Experience, pp.31-61, trans. Leslie Anne Boldt (New York: SUNY Press, 1988), reprinted in The Bataille Reader, eds. Fred Botting and Scott Wilson, pp.64-91 (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers Ltd., 1997), 64).
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Attention given to the intentional dimension of all experience and respect granted its intuitive dimensions allows one’s knowledge greater certainty and clarity, allows one closer approach to the essence of things. The givenness of experience’s multiple perspectives is reliable evidence allowing us arrival at knowledge’s “solid ground” (fester Boden)--& philosophy is the search for “pure and absolute knowledge,” a calling, vocation, that “teach[es] us how to carry on the eternal work of humanity” (Husserl, “Philosophy as a Rigorous Science,” Ideas I, 3, pp.72-3, German pagination and Hua 25:4).
Phenomenology’s leitmotif (recurring theme, consequential and telling refrain)--the world gives itself to us as we give ourselves to the world—locates the creation of meaning in this communal giving and indicates a mode of experience wherein our presumptions of having an egoistic supremacy over an essentially independent world (in which we are its sole interpreter and judge of its value) are unsettled. This suspension of bias—the epoché—reveals our relation with the world to be more reciprocal than presumed, and lets us see what is essential within this essentially dynamic interaction.
“Perception is not some empty ‘having’ of perceived things,
but rather a flowing lived experience
of subjective appearances synthetically uniting themselves
in a consciousness
of the self-same entity existing in this way or that.”
--Husserl, “Phenomenology: The Encyclopedia Britannica Article, Draft A,” trans. Thomas Sheehan, p. 2.
One does not HAVE a perception or experience of something like a box may have a collection of photographs; perception, experience, the self, meaning, reality, life—these are lived, and living is a flowing, dynamic engagement. Hence, this theory of knowledge’s task is primarily methodological: to let that which shows itself be seen from itself in the very way in which it shows itself. Husserl instructs us to attend to the things themselves; we honor his maxim by engaging the fluidity of perspectives of experience without bias. This method reveals the essential meaning of the world by laying bare the nature of experience--i.e., meaning is founded by our interaction with the world.
- “According to Husserl, philosophy begins with what has been ‘taken for granted’ as ‘obvious’ … in order to make it truly understood. … ‘it is the destiny of philosophy that it must find the greatest problems in the greatest trivialities.’ … The ‘obviousness’ of the world, its ‘acceptance’ by us, has to be made explicitly thematic, a phenomenon to be studied, and this requires putting into question the natural attitude correlated with this ‘obviousness.’ The very manifest appearance of the world—its modes of givenness—has to be explicated in relation to the productive activity of consciousness. … this very ‘obviousness’ … of the world in its givenness to common sense covers up the mystery of its being constituted by anonymous, functioning subjectivity. … It is necessary to dig beneath the obviousness of the world to uncover this mystery” (Dermot Moran, Edmund Husserl: Founder of Phenomenology (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2005), p. 49).
Uncover the mystery covered up by the obviousness our biases cloak over the world--this concealing and revealing is the heart of phenomenology and, according to Husserl’s student Martin Heidegger, its etymological ground: phainomenon + logos reveals things themselves (the essential nature of the world and its contents) come to present a “seeming” that requires a “seeing” and “discourse:” the world seems, thus requiring a subject to see it, listen to it, and participate in its appearance and elaboration, which forms its meaning.[6] Phenomenology is a methodological study of everything that shows itself and explicates itself to us when we turn our focused gaze (our denuding regard) upon it—which, the theory reminds us, we do not often do in the hasty course of daily life.
Being primarily epistemological, phenomenology seeks to yield essential descriptions of the world and humanity’s interrelationships to produce better, truer knowledge. But, this epistemology is not a removed, objective study; it is the knowledge of lived experience, of an embedded, aware subject actively engaged with her environment. Husserl writes:
“Finally, the possibility of a boundlessly all-inclusive, purely subjective mode of consideration must be clarified, one which consistently recognizes as subjective all producings carried out in subjectivity, including the objectivizing ones—by means of the inseparable unity of producing with the produced formations—a mode of consideration which thereby includes in ultimately encompassing subjectivity all objectivity precisely as a product to be shaped in subjectivity."
--Husserl, Hua 9:150.
To divide the world into subjects over here (me, you, people, active things), objects over there (passive stuff, mere substance) is to fall prey to one of two biases: either to egoistically presume everything revolves around us and we give it all meaning and value, or to apathetically assume everything is its own little solipsistic, monad-ish bubble loaded up with inherent meaning essentially granted through no work at all. Instead, Husserl is telling us, what is, is lived; what has meaning dynamically makes meaning. This making of meaning requires activity by both the subject and object—hopefully revealing to us that everything is both subject and object. It is only through subjectivity that objectivity is made, and objectivity is inherent in the subject who makes him/herself subject by engaging with all other subjects giving themselves forth to him/her. This is always already happening; this is life; this is the forever-ongoing-formation of meaning—and phenomenology is calling us to see this, for without grasping this basic truth, we will have no true knowledge. As the Husserl scholar Dermot Moran sums it up: “Phenomenology would become a transcendental science of subjectivity, which seeks overall to bring the whole of human rational life to transparency.”[8]
This emphasis on lived experience permitted the predominately French, first existential and later critical post-structuralist adopters to render the method both ethical and inspirationally pragmatic. Its demand for the attentive focus of our gaze cultivates multi-dimensional observation that inspires us to see potential while suspending preconceived ideas. Its resultant contemplation gives us an ethical goal and reveals the steps along a path from reality to the attainment of that ideal.
In his Crisis of the European Sciences, Husserl elaborates this idea of a dynamic, complicated world as the Lebenswelt, the life-world or the world of lived experience, in contrast to a world constituted by a mathematization of nature.[9] Galileo geometrized nature as Descartes and Leibniz arithmetized it wherein, according to the scholar David Carr’s reading, “nature becomes a mathematical manifold and mathematical techniques provide the key to its inner workings.”[10] Science, Husserl argued, sought to find in nature a precision and uniformity that is lacking in its everyday experience. This exactness is achieved, first, by abstraction from the appearances given to perception and, then, by their interpretation. The result is that science imposes on nature a precision foreign to any actual experience of it. Further gilding this faux-precision, Husserl argues, science imposes an ontological claim, to be is to be measurable, and then extrapolates, as consequences, even further various epistemological claims, ultimately abstracting nature further and further from actual dirt, weather, and wildlife.[11] Science that begins from such a mathematized foundation bases all its subsequent theories of knowledge upon an abstraction from reality that presumes the world to be uniform and predictable. Strains of contemporary science reject these presumptions, but any simple encounter with nature—be it wilderness, a park, or a bunch of daffodils growing amidst urban rubble—plainly shows the experience of nature to be of events neither uniform nor predictable, but certainly full of meaning, one that extends far beyond the empirically measurable.
Phenomenology is, of course, also an abstraction; indeed, its central most important insight is a method of abstraction: the epoché:
The Epoché is a transitioning act—it is something that shifts us from one attitude (an everyday one he calls The Natural Attitude) to another (a philosophical one he calls The Phenomenological Attitude)—it is a “method of parenthesizing,” that is, a method of bracketing out of consideration all of our biases and presumptions.[12]
“We put out of action the general positing which belongs to the essence of the natural attitude; we parenthesize everything which that positing encompasses with respect to being: thus the whole natural world which is continually ‘there for us,’ ‘on hand,’ and which will always remain there according to consciousness as an ‘actuality’ even if we choose to parenthesize it.”[13]
In other words, the epoché is an act to not consider all the everyday assumptions that we make (e.g., something’s history, scientific classification, natural laws it is subject to, psychological presumptions, etc.). We neither deny nor reject nor falsify any of these presumptions; we simply just bracket them from our observations.
Thus, while phenomenology is an abstraction, it is acutely aware of its own nature and avoids abstraction’s traps. That is to say, precisely because it employs a method of abstraction, it cannot overlook its origin in and the meaningfulness of the Umwelt, the world that is intuitively given and from which one can then abstract all the secondary qualities of appearance. Husserl names this the “pre-scientific life-world” and, instead of fearing the elusive and vague, non-uniform appearances, it is a perspective that seeks to take in the vagaries and be moved by them.[14] All that is, is a nebulous flux of appearances, but it is also a world; grasping the cohesion of difference is to give it meaning:
“Perception does not consist in staring blankly at something lodged in consciousness,
inserted there by some strange wonder … Rather for every imaginable ego-subject, every objectlike existence with a specific content of sense is an accomplishment of consciousness.”[15]
Everything that is, everything that has meaning is and is meaningful by this “accomplishment of consciousness”—neither by an one-sided bestowal as a human names the rock, affixes to it a value, nor by a realist apathy that presumes everything already fixedly and essentially has meaning, but as an event that happens, an event wherein the rock gives itself to us and we give ourselves to it, our “givings” being the intentionality of all perception (“Intentional experience always transcends itself towards the object; its character is a ‘pointing beyond itself towards something’”[16]), and without the cooperation, neither is anything. Hence, our attention (our intentional directedness) to the immediately given reveals that the world is neither an abstraction, nor reducible to formula, and certainly not a mere, static mental image. Instead, the mathematized world of the early moderns is just one perspective of the world amongst many, from merely one attitude, one mode from the plethora possible in/by perception.
In addition to the mathematical attitude, Husserl differentiates two further, more fundamental modes of perception: The Natural Attitude and The Phenomenological Attitude.
The Natural Attitude is the one we have in the everyday world in which we live—the natural, everyday world is the perfect correlate to this particular natural attitude in which we mostly live.[17] In this world, I get up in the morning, make coffee, go to school; I know how to drive a car, which directions to take, etc., all without thinking about it. This is the everyday lived experience we have of the world; nothing herein is shocking. In this everyday attitude we are not doing philosophy, science, or any theoretical study; we are just living … although it is a world/attitude already overladen inherently with conceptions of reality. Like any and every other attitude we could adopt, philosophy begins in this natural attitude because it is our root, because we need to recognize the world in which we live. Living in the world gives us great knowledge, pieces of information and presumptions and biases (e.g., when I wake up, I am not shocked that the sun is up or the floor is solid beneath my feet). But, what it doesn’t give us is the recognition that the sum of the natural attitude is merely an attitude—it is naïve—to recognize the everyday as an attitude is to have already stepped out of it. And, in order to study any of the knowledge given us by the natural attitude, we must step away from it, from these value judgments (no matter how mundane or truthful or pure fact they seem to be)—and this stepping away is the epoché (the parenthesizing, reduction, or bracketing act):
“the transcendental epoché and reduction releases transcendental subjectivity from its self-concealment and raises it up to a new position, that of transcendental self-consciousness.”[18]
And, we then find ourselves in The Phenomenological Attitude: I move from a recognition of the everyday world to a recognition of the world as an object of study—but, importantly, I am no detached outside observer, instead, I am, myself, too, an object of study within that world. This is an attitude wherein we have child-like eyes, pure, full of wonder, free from presumptions. We are not blind and dumb herein; instead, we become acutely aware of what is essential to things. Specifically, our experience, intentionality, and reflection all undergo purification (described below).
Within the natural attitude, one is within the everyday, automatically directed through pre-given frameworks of intentional relations by which one naturally accords independent existence to the correlates of consciousness or things intended. That is, I take myself to be the central perspective, but also a mere actor in a staged world where the set has meaning, even without me around. For example, I purposefully cut across the busy street (my stride reveals I am not questioning the reality of the solid pavement, actuality of the event being real and not a dream, or of gravity and laws of motion); I am the subject of this world, taking it on presumption that cars will stop because their light is red (hence, that the world is governed by rules as much as physical laws), I can walk across the crosswalk and can enter the café and order an espresso (hence, not unnerved by sensual judgments of taste) from a person standing behind its counter, because that is his or her job (hence, presuming norms) to make and sell espresso: that is how the world works. In the natural attitude, I take each element (cars, crosswalk, café, barista) to have independent, objective existence and predetermined meaning.
In contrast, in the phenomenological attitude, one redirects one’s attention from the objects themselves to the intentional relation in and through which one posits the objects as such. In this attitude, I reconsider my relation to and with the environment, my presumptions about the universality of laws and conventions, the complexity involved in what is an ‘everyday’ action or communication.
With the exception of the flowering tree, described below, Husserl, a good German academic, never really gave us lush descriptions of what this phenomenological ‘viewing’ was like … so, let me turn to Sartre, a good Frenchmen, whose pen loved lush descriptions, even if their flourish betrays a bit of precise rigor. This comes from his novella, Nausea:
“There is a white hole in the wall, a mirror. It is a trap. I know I am going to let myself be caught in it. I have. The grey thing appears in the mirror. I go over and look at it, I can no longer get away. It is the reflection of my face. … I can understand nothing of this face. … I cannot even decide if it is handsome or ugly. I think it is ugly because I have been told so. But it doesn’t strike me. At heart, I am even shocked that anyone can attribute qualities of this kind to it, as if you called a clod of earth or a block of stone beautiful or ugly. … My glance slowly and wearily travels over my forehead, my cheeks: it finds nothing firm, it is stranded. Obviously there are a nose, two eyes and a mouth, but none of it makes any sense, there is not even a human expression: perhaps I am too used to my face. … What I see is well below the monkey, on the fringe of the vegetable world, at the level of the jellyfish. It is alive, I can’t say it isn’t; but this was not the life that Anny contemplated: I see a slight tremor, I see the insipid flesh blossoming and palpitating with abandon. The eyes especially are horrible seen so close. They are glassy, soft, blind, red-rimmed, they look like fish scales. … nothing human is left. Brown wrinkles show on each side of the feverish swelled lips, crevices, mole holes. A silky white down covers the great slopes of the cheeks, two hairs protrude from the nostrils: it is a geological embossed map. And in spite of everything, this lunar world is familiar to me. I cannot say I recognize the details. But the whole thing gives me an impression of something seen before which stupefies me. I slip quietly off to sleep.”[19]
This passage’s melodrama gets carried away from Husserl’s strict reduction, but it shows us the radicalism of the perceptual break from normal (Natural Attitude) experience: the character Roquentin is enacting an epoché and consequent phenomenological description of his face—he strips away the law and norm impositions of the Natural Attitude (he cannot even make an aesthetic judgment thereupon), he strips away the what is deemed more YOU than your face? Most all humans (excluding the sight impaired, but very few other exceptions) identify one another predominately and almost exclusively by the face. For another eminent existentialist, Emmanuel Levinas, the face (and necessarily connected: the face-to-face encounter) is First Philosophy—it is the most fundamental science within philosophy; the face is a force, it interrupts us, it calls to us, it makes demands, it institutes responsibility, and any and all transcendence can only, only happen from and through being before the face of another. Roquentin. Now, obviously, not all Phenomenological Attitude demands the existential drama herein. We can conduct the epoché and subsequent description of a coffee cup on the desk and not crush our souls one bit … Husserl does admit:
“it is a long and thorny path that leads from purely logical insights, from insights into the theory of meaning, from ontological and noetic insights, likewise from the usual normative and psychological epistemology to the apprehension of immanently-psychological and then phenomenological givenness in the genuine sense, and leads finally to all the essential connections that render transcendental relations intelligible to us a priori.”[20]
But his long path might concern more the rigor and work required thereupon versus the barbs of existential crisis. Nevertheless, Sartre’s account helps us to see the very import of this most basic, fundamental phenomenology method.
Let’s return to the important technical details Husserl’s seminal work Ideas I elaborates in this epoché shift by delineating the three key perceptual dimensions per each attitude through his (only rich example) experience of a blossoming apple tree. His example illustrates the transformation that consciousness undergoes concerning experience, intentionality, and reflection as a result of adopting the transcendental stance of the phenomenological attitude:
The experience of the tree in full flower, in the natural attitude, is as Erfahrung: you experience a presentation of the tree as a substance possessing properties of one kind or another—it is a Macintosh, an old, established one, healthy and abundant. In the phenomenological attitude, experience becomes Erlebnis, lived experience: a dynamic encounter wherein the ego (the conscious regard of the phenomenological subject) is engaged in meaning formation—the tree moves me, its beauty affects me—as opposed to passively receiving a static, predetermined presentation of the tree.
Intentionality, in the natural attitude, is presented as if the ego posits the tree as existing entirely distinctly and independently of the consciousness. In the phenomenological attitude, the positional consciousness becomes explicitly intentional, wherein it is not the object itself so much as it is the intentional relation to the object that now becomes the focus of attention.
Reflection, in the natural attitude, intervenes only as a specific re-direction of attention from the object to the subject—I pause my deduction that its cultivar is Macintosh to think about whether or not I like Macintosh apples. In the phenomenological attitude, one becomes aware that all consciousness is implicitly reflective in character—I am instantly and intuitively aware of the reflexive, meaningful relation between the tree and me, my every ‘seeing’ is already a relation bearing likes, memories, wishes, etc.. The instantaneousness of this phenomenological awareness is intense: this mode of perception suspends its presumption of lived experience as happening as delimited by time, that is, lived experience ‘happens’ ‘beyond’ time itself.[21]
Shifting from the natural to the phenomenological attitude is becoming aware of the world as potential as well as actual. Reflection is part of the activity of consciousness, thus, when we see the tree, we also “see” its left, right, back side, bottom, top, past and future possibilities, even if these are technically concealed from our line of vision—this is Perspectival Viewing: a thing may present us its one horizon, but our minds naturally and automatically fill in all the others based upon experience or reason (I have encountered trees before and they have had backsides; biology lessons have taught me that there are roots, currently invisible, beneath the tree; my knowledge and memories fed by current dispositions feed futural envisioning). These other perspectival horizons may be right or wrong; we can always make mistakes (the tree may be a painted stage prop); such realizations simply give us new knowledge with which we modify our description of the experience.
Thus, phenomenology provokes a concise shifting of my attention from the tree or the street, crosswalk or café, to my interrelation with them on these many levels. This shift transforms reflection into an awareness of how relation is an implicitly interwoven, yet overlooked, feature of all consciousness. And, while to know anything about these things around me I invoke my past experiences, phenomenology’s epoché permits me to come to know them more essentially without bias. I no longer think of the street as busy, the cars as obedient to colored lights, the barista as a mechanism to get espresso, but think, instead, of how I give myself to the street or café and how they give themselves to me. Phenomenologically, my encounter spurs ideas of activity, tempo, and caffeination. My natural interrelation with it was one of ignorance; as busy street melded with the crosswalk’s white stripes, eliminated was all spark, passion, life, and color from the surroundings, I ignored its existence until something pulled me from my mechanized ignorance, sparked the act of epoché—I could sit down at my desk and perform an act of epoché in order to study something, or some event in the world could happen and jolt me into the act, for example, it could be something big and absurd, like a polar bear suddenly appearing from around the corner, or something little, catching a rift from that song last played ay my friend’s wedding, or maybe the barista says they are all out of espresso—and re-colored my experience.
Husserl envisions this epoché, the break or abstraction from the everyday, as a scientific method—his “science” being Wissenshaft, a rigorous science, what philosophy essentially is, wherein seeing is neither by microscope nor reducing lived experience to numbers, but an essential visioning as phenomenological investigation. The goal is to describe all that appears to us free from our presumptions and biases. What we thus find is that we are not all-powerful subjects for whom the world exists as a mute object; instead, we see how we are fluid beings who engage the world and are engaged by it.
Engage the Epoché:
a Phenomenological Exercise:
Think about how you can experience the world perspectivally and through three modes—Experience, Intentionality, and Reflection—which vary in the Natural and Phenomenological Attitudes:
In the natural attitude:
- You experience [Erfahrung] things as presentations, taking them as objects, substances with properties.
- You posit these things to exist independently of you (so if you leave, they still persist).
- You then reflect on them, specially re-directing your attention from them (object) to yourself (subject).
In the phenomenological attitude:
- You experience [Erlebnis] things dynamically, as opposed to statically.
- Consciousness, instead of positing, is intentional (implicitly aware of consciousness’ “of,” e.g., you are conscious of the tree—of the relation between you and it.
- You realize that all consciousness is implicitly, if not explicitly, reflective in character.
(1) Describing your surroundings.
(2) Reconsider your description.
What therein is described in terms of the natural attitude?
How do these descriptions work?
What therein is described in terms of the phenomenological attitude?
If none are described as such, how do you develop a natural attitude description phenomenologically?
(3) Reflect on the advantages and disadvantages of these two attitudes.
When would each be a benefit?
When would each be unnecessary, detrimental, or even harmful?
Notes:
[6] Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. Joan Stambaugh (New York: SUNY Press, 1996), Introduction II, §7, pp. 23-34.
[8] Moran, Edmund Husserl, Op. Cit., p. 50. Husserl situates this requirement within the history of philosophy by identifying philosophy’s fundamental aim as captured by the Greeks--n.b. Plato’s Parmenides: “Philosophy seeks to clarify being via a reflection on one’s thinking about entities”—but abandoned by us since for heightened abstraction and superficial divorce of entities from everything else; thus, “The fundamental insight into the necessity of the return to consciousness” is now sought, “the radical and explicit determination of the path of, and the procedural rules fro, this return; the principle-based determination and systematic exploration of the field that is to be disclosed in this return—this we designate as phenomenology. It stands in the service of the guiding philosophical problematic, namely, the question about the being of entities in the articulated manifold of its kinds and levels”—all for and sought within consciousness, our consciousness of entities (Husserl, with Martin Heidegger, “Phenomenology,” Encyclopedia Britannica Article, Draft B, trans. Thomas Sheehan, 256).
[9] Husserl, Crisis of the European Sciences, trans. David Carr (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1970), pp. 23 ff.
[10] David Carr, “Husserl’s Problematic Concept of the Life-World,” pp. 202-12, in Husserl: Expositions and Appraisals, ed. Frederick Elliston and Peter McCormick (Notre Dame, IL: University of Notre Dame Press, 1977), p. 205.
[11] Husserl, Crisis, Op. Cit., pp. 51 ff.
[12] Husserl, Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy, first book [Ideas I], trans. F. Kersten (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff Publishers, 1983), §32.
[13] Ibid.
[14] Husserl, Crisis, Op. Cit., p. 43.
[15] Husserl, Hua 11:19.
[16] Moran, Edmund Husserl, Op. Cit., p. 53, quoting Husserl, Hua 25:144.
[17] In Heidegger’s Being and Time, this is the exactly what he casts as being-in-the-world.
[18] Husserl, Hua 34:399.
[19] Jean-Paul Sartre, Nausea, trans. Lloyd Alexander (NY: New Directions, 1964), 16-7.
[20] Husserl, Ideas, §87 (pp.172-3).
[21] Husserl, Ideas I, §88; on time, esp. 284/273.