Three points: 1) Thank you how writing this, it’s really good, 2) now I’m compelled to buy Being and Time, 3) I’m glad you referenced Chung Tzu and not Lao Tze. He’s less well known but I think the book of Chung Tzu was the first philosophy book I ever bought. I was around 20. I love the ‘banging drums at funerals’ idea. He was a rebel 🤘
I haven't delved as deep in Chuang Tzu but anything I've read of his I've loved and I have his book staring at me for over a year now waiting to be read. I'll have a look at the banging drums at funerals bit as that sounds like a bit of fun!
<What is really remarkable about Phenomenology is that it is a complete reversal of the course of Western philosophy since Plato.>>
What did Husserl reversed? He was a man of his time; Kant had already separated experience/phenomena from ultimate reality beyond experience; the romantics after Kant challenged Kant on this hard separation/limit and renewed the metaphysical exploration on what could be this ground of experience, Husserl dropped completely any inquiry on the ground of experience and concentrated on experience with not even any attempt to explain why it is so within a wider perspective. He is original in the Western tradition in this respect. Why calling this a reversal? It is not even an argument that the other type of philosophy can be replaced by phenomenology.
<<This representational theory holds that we have incomplete access to reality because our senses are creating a representation of what is real and so we are missing out on this reality because our senses are spoon-feeding us a warped, personalised version of what is real.>>
It is a dominant idea that began in the modern era as an negative consequence of our scientific discoveries on how our perceptions work: how images are optical projection on our retina, etc. So the natural realist attitude regarding the sense as providing reality as it is got eroded but the pendulum as usual switch rapidly to a radical doubt about the senses as reliable connection to reality thus renewing the platonic tendencies to raise abstracted universals derived from philosophical inquiry above the realities of the senses. Kant’s noumenal limit being such extreme case forbidding inquiry beyond the phenomena and their a priori conditions. Husself is in this radical swing preventing going beyound the appearances/experience.
Kant did not think our experience was warped in so far as it was not personal but transcendental; all human experience is the same as it is made possible at all by being filtered through time space and abstract categories such as causality foundational to all or any human cognition at all.
To me Kant never considered multiple interpretations such as what if these mental processes actually corresponded to objective reality? It’s possible but ironically unknowable.
I began this article with an open mind. I wanted to follow the writers argument. As a disclaimer I wrote my Master’s thesis on Edmund Husserl.
The writer has a peculiar idea of what counts as Rationalism. Rationalism refers to a 17th century school of philosophy. Primarily Descartes, Spinoza and Leibniz. In general the Rationalists haven’t fared well in philosophy. They tend to be objects of criticism or sarcasm. Although they still have their defenders.
I certainly disagree that Husserl has taken a different path from the rest of western philosophy. He is very much in the western philosophical tradition. Husserl’s thought can be traced through Plato, Pyrrho, Descartes. Yes Descartes. Definitely Kant; Not Hegel; and Brentano. Husserl is not definitive of phenomenology. The word has a long history. Husserl’s thought changed throughout his career. There is not one Husserl. His philosophy evolved over time.
I won’t detail anything about his methods: phenomenological reduction and eidetic (essential) reduction That would be another discussion. I also disagree with the writer about any similarities with asian thought. I have an extensive background in Buddhist philosophy. For what it’s worth I spent many years as a practicing Lay Zen Monk. That’s also something for another time.
Is there any relationship between Heidegger’s choice of phenomenology and his choice to embrace fascist politics? (He did join the Nazi party, correct?)
There's nothing in phenomenology itself that would lead one to embrace fascism, but Heidegger did find some aspects of National Socialism to potentially align with his thinking on Being in the world. When he became rector of the University he joined the Nazi party, and his passive attitude toward the treatment of his teacher Husserl, who was Jewish, was shameful. I think cowardice, and "going along", best describes how he behaved. Note that that describes how many here and now are behaving relative to one of the moral issues of our time, the ethnic cleansing and genocide of Palestinians.
“Only idealism, in all its forms, attempts to lay hold of subjectivity as subjectivity and to do justice to the fact that the world is never given to the subject and the communities of subjects in any other way than as the subjectively relative valid world with particular experiential content and as a world which, in and through subjectivity, takes on ever new transformations of meaning; and that even the apodictically persisting conviction of one and the same world, exhibiting itself subjectively in changing ways, is a conviction motivated purely within subjectivity, a conviction whose sense—the world itself, the actually existing world—never surpasses the subjectivity that brings it about.”
“All of modern philosophy … is … at least since Kant and Hume, a single struggle between two ideas of science: the idea of an objectivistic philosophy on the ground of the pregiven world and the idea of a philosophy on the ground of absolute, transcendental subjectivity.”
“Nature, in exact natural science, is not the actually experienced nature, that of the life-world. It is an idea that has arisen out of idealization and has been hypothetically substituted for actually intuited nature.”
“A metaphysical residuum is to be found in the fact that natural scientists consider nature to be concrete and overlook the abstraction through which their nature has been shaped into a subject matter for science.”
“[Science] brings into its sphere of inquiry only the constituted object-poles and remains blind to the full concrete being and life that constitutes them transcendentally.”
“Only blindness to the transcendental, as it is experienceable and knowable only through phenomenological reduction, makes the revival of physicalism in our time possible—in the modified form of a logicist mathematicism.”
“To call physicalism philosophy is only to pass off an equivocation as a realization of the perplexities concerning our knowledge in which we have found ourselves since Hume. Nature can be thought as a definite manifold, and we can take this idea as a basis hypothetically. But insofar as the world is a world of knowledge, a world of consciousness, a world with human beings, such an idea is absurd for it to unsurpassable degree.”
“Great difficulties had to be overcome in order not only to begin the method of epochē and [transcendental] reduction but also to bring it to its full understanding of itself and thus for the first time to discover the absolutely functioning subjectivity, not as human subjectivity but as the subjectivity which objectifies itself, [at least] at first, in human subjectivity.”
“[I]t is precisely the result of inquiry within the epochē … that the natural, objective world-life is only a particular mode of the transcendental life which forever constitutes the world…”
“In the absolute and original subject of the [transcendental] reduction the world is constituted, as a world that is constituted as transcendentally intersubjective in every transcendental subject.”
“The intrinsically first being, the being that precedes and bears every worldly objectivity, is transcendental intersubjectivity: the universe of monads, which effects its communion in various forms.”
“[T]he constitution of the world essentially involves a “harmony” of the monads: precisely this harmony among particular constitutions in the particular monads; and accordingly it involves also a harmonious generation that goes on in each particular monad.”
“The path leading to a knowledge absolutely grounded in the highest sense, or (this being the same thing) a philosophical knowledge, is necessarily the path of universal self-knowledge—first of all monadic, and then intermonadic.”
“The Delphic motto, “Know thyself!” has gained a new signification. Positive science is a science lost in the world. I must lose the world by epochē, in order to regain it by a universal self-examination. “Noli foras ire,” says Augustine, “in te redi, in interiore homine habitat veritas.” (“Do not wish to go out; go back into yourself. Truth dwells in the inner man.”)”
This article answers a lot of questions I've had for years. It's plain that Descartes was wrong in that there is a emotional component to every thought.
I'm curious about what you think about Korzybski's Basic Symantics, which appears to me to bring some coherence and languaging to this subject.
Looking forward to diving into this, as ever! Heidegger's been getting higher on my list to read into, so great timing!
Also, gave your publication a shoutout on Substack Shoutout Thread here:
https://on.substack.com/p/shoutout-8?r=twdru&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web
Thanks a million Bruce!
Three points: 1) Thank you how writing this, it’s really good, 2) now I’m compelled to buy Being and Time, 3) I’m glad you referenced Chung Tzu and not Lao Tze. He’s less well known but I think the book of Chung Tzu was the first philosophy book I ever bought. I was around 20. I love the ‘banging drums at funerals’ idea. He was a rebel 🤘
I haven't delved as deep in Chuang Tzu but anything I've read of his I've loved and I have his book staring at me for over a year now waiting to be read. I'll have a look at the banging drums at funerals bit as that sounds like a bit of fun!
Very interesting.
<What is really remarkable about Phenomenology is that it is a complete reversal of the course of Western philosophy since Plato.>>
What did Husserl reversed? He was a man of his time; Kant had already separated experience/phenomena from ultimate reality beyond experience; the romantics after Kant challenged Kant on this hard separation/limit and renewed the metaphysical exploration on what could be this ground of experience, Husserl dropped completely any inquiry on the ground of experience and concentrated on experience with not even any attempt to explain why it is so within a wider perspective. He is original in the Western tradition in this respect. Why calling this a reversal? It is not even an argument that the other type of philosophy can be replaced by phenomenology.
<<This representational theory holds that we have incomplete access to reality because our senses are creating a representation of what is real and so we are missing out on this reality because our senses are spoon-feeding us a warped, personalised version of what is real.>>
It is a dominant idea that began in the modern era as an negative consequence of our scientific discoveries on how our perceptions work: how images are optical projection on our retina, etc. So the natural realist attitude regarding the sense as providing reality as it is got eroded but the pendulum as usual switch rapidly to a radical doubt about the senses as reliable connection to reality thus renewing the platonic tendencies to raise abstracted universals derived from philosophical inquiry above the realities of the senses. Kant’s noumenal limit being such extreme case forbidding inquiry beyond the phenomena and their a priori conditions. Husself is in this radical swing preventing going beyound the appearances/experience.
Kant did not think our experience was warped in so far as it was not personal but transcendental; all human experience is the same as it is made possible at all by being filtered through time space and abstract categories such as causality foundational to all or any human cognition at all.
To me Kant never considered multiple interpretations such as what if these mental processes actually corresponded to objective reality? It’s possible but ironically unknowable.
I began this article with an open mind. I wanted to follow the writers argument. As a disclaimer I wrote my Master’s thesis on Edmund Husserl.
The writer has a peculiar idea of what counts as Rationalism. Rationalism refers to a 17th century school of philosophy. Primarily Descartes, Spinoza and Leibniz. In general the Rationalists haven’t fared well in philosophy. They tend to be objects of criticism or sarcasm. Although they still have their defenders.
I certainly disagree that Husserl has taken a different path from the rest of western philosophy. He is very much in the western philosophical tradition. Husserl’s thought can be traced through Plato, Pyrrho, Descartes. Yes Descartes. Definitely Kant; Not Hegel; and Brentano. Husserl is not definitive of phenomenology. The word has a long history. Husserl’s thought changed throughout his career. There is not one Husserl. His philosophy evolved over time.
I won’t detail anything about his methods: phenomenological reduction and eidetic (essential) reduction That would be another discussion. I also disagree with the writer about any similarities with asian thought. I have an extensive background in Buddhist philosophy. For what it’s worth I spent many years as a practicing Lay Zen Monk. That’s also something for another time.
Thank you for this clear explanation. I wonder if you could also explain Merleau- Ponty in this context?
Re phenomena and phenomenology, there's always this classic by the Muppets: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dnk0Be4a0aw
Is there any relationship between Heidegger’s choice of phenomenology and his choice to embrace fascist politics? (He did join the Nazi party, correct?)
There's nothing in phenomenology itself that would lead one to embrace fascism, but Heidegger did find some aspects of National Socialism to potentially align with his thinking on Being in the world. When he became rector of the University he joined the Nazi party, and his passive attitude toward the treatment of his teacher Husserl, who was Jewish, was shameful. I think cowardice, and "going along", best describes how he behaved. Note that that describes how many here and now are behaving relative to one of the moral issues of our time, the ethnic cleansing and genocide of Palestinians.
I'd rather know what is "omenolgy"?
“Only idealism, in all its forms, attempts to lay hold of subjectivity as subjectivity and to do justice to the fact that the world is never given to the subject and the communities of subjects in any other way than as the subjectively relative valid world with particular experiential content and as a world which, in and through subjectivity, takes on ever new transformations of meaning; and that even the apodictically persisting conviction of one and the same world, exhibiting itself subjectively in changing ways, is a conviction motivated purely within subjectivity, a conviction whose sense—the world itself, the actually existing world—never surpasses the subjectivity that brings it about.”
“All of modern philosophy … is … at least since Kant and Hume, a single struggle between two ideas of science: the idea of an objectivistic philosophy on the ground of the pregiven world and the idea of a philosophy on the ground of absolute, transcendental subjectivity.”
“Nature, in exact natural science, is not the actually experienced nature, that of the life-world. It is an idea that has arisen out of idealization and has been hypothetically substituted for actually intuited nature.”
“A metaphysical residuum is to be found in the fact that natural scientists consider nature to be concrete and overlook the abstraction through which their nature has been shaped into a subject matter for science.”
“[Science] brings into its sphere of inquiry only the constituted object-poles and remains blind to the full concrete being and life that constitutes them transcendentally.”
“Only blindness to the transcendental, as it is experienceable and knowable only through phenomenological reduction, makes the revival of physicalism in our time possible—in the modified form of a logicist mathematicism.”
“To call physicalism philosophy is only to pass off an equivocation as a realization of the perplexities concerning our knowledge in which we have found ourselves since Hume. Nature can be thought as a definite manifold, and we can take this idea as a basis hypothetically. But insofar as the world is a world of knowledge, a world of consciousness, a world with human beings, such an idea is absurd for it to unsurpassable degree.”
“Great difficulties had to be overcome in order not only to begin the method of epochē and [transcendental] reduction but also to bring it to its full understanding of itself and thus for the first time to discover the absolutely functioning subjectivity, not as human subjectivity but as the subjectivity which objectifies itself, [at least] at first, in human subjectivity.”
“[I]t is precisely the result of inquiry within the epochē … that the natural, objective world-life is only a particular mode of the transcendental life which forever constitutes the world…”
“In the absolute and original subject of the [transcendental] reduction the world is constituted, as a world that is constituted as transcendentally intersubjective in every transcendental subject.”
“The intrinsically first being, the being that precedes and bears every worldly objectivity, is transcendental intersubjectivity: the universe of monads, which effects its communion in various forms.”
“[T]he constitution of the world essentially involves a “harmony” of the monads: precisely this harmony among particular constitutions in the particular monads; and accordingly it involves also a harmonious generation that goes on in each particular monad.”
“The path leading to a knowledge absolutely grounded in the highest sense, or (this being the same thing) a philosophical knowledge, is necessarily the path of universal self-knowledge—first of all monadic, and then intermonadic.”
“The Delphic motto, “Know thyself!” has gained a new signification. Positive science is a science lost in the world. I must lose the world by epochē, in order to regain it by a universal self-examination. “Noli foras ire,” says Augustine, “in te redi, in interiore homine habitat veritas.” (“Do not wish to go out; go back into yourself. Truth dwells in the inner man.”)”
— Edmund Husserl
Husserl, Scheler, and Ingarden rather than “Husserl and Heidegger”…
現象学は、
「経験はどのように現れるのか」
を深く見る。
空はさらに、
「経験する者と経験されるものは、そもそも独立して存在しているのか」
まで問い続ける。
そして面白いことに、その問いを徹底すると、
「私が世界を見ている」
という日常的な構造が少しずつほどけて、
見ることのなかで、私と世界が同時に生まれている
という景色が現れてきます。
これを一枚の図にするなら、
デカルト 「私｜世界」
↓
フッサール 「私 → 世界」
↓
ハイデガー 「私 ─ 世界」
↓
縁起 「私 ⇄ 世界」
↓
空 「私も世界も、その関係もまた固定的実体ではない」
となるでしょう。
そして私は、この文章でいちばん面白いところは最後の地点だと思います。
空は「すべて幻だ」と言っているのではありません。
むしろ逆です。
桜が独立した固定的存在ではないからこそ、春、光、雨、土、見る者、記憶という宇宙全体が、一輪の桜として現れる。
私も同じです。
「私」という固定した核がないからこそ、出会った人、読んだ本、土地、傷、喜び、身体、時間、歴史が、この瞬間の「私」として現れている。
だから無自性は虚無ではない。
無自性だから、世界は関係することができる。 関係するから、変わることができる。 変わることができるから、慈悲も自由も可能になる。
現象学が「現れているものへ帰れ」と言うなら、
空はその耳元で、もう一言付け加えるのかもしれません。
「そして、現れているものを掴むな。」
見る。 しかし所有しない。
感じる。 しかし固定しない。
「私」を生きる。 しかし「私」に閉じこもらない。
その地点で、epoché（判断停止）は単なる哲学的方法から、執着をほどく生の作法へ変わる。
この記事を空から読むと、そこがいちばん美しい接続点だと思います。
This article answers a lot of questions I've had for years. It's plain that Descartes was wrong in that there is a emotional component to every thought.
I'm curious about what you think about Korzybski's Basic Symantics, which appears to me to bring some coherence and languaging to this subject.