Ridling Zaine. Philosophy: Then and Now. A look back at 26 centuries of thought
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Ridling, Philosophy Then and Now: A Look Back at 26 Centuries of Thought
458
position in regard to all other beings, viz., that of Dasein (literally, “being
there”). By conceiving of Dasein as being-in-the-world, Heidegger made the
ancient problem concerning the relationship between subject and object
superfluous. The basic structures of Dasein are primordial moodness
(Befindlichkeit), understanding (Verstehen), and logos (Rede). These
structures are, in turn, founded in the temporalization of Dasein, from which
future, having-been (past), and present originate. The two basic possibilities of
man’s existing (from the Latin ex and sistere, “standing out from”) are those
in which Dasein either comes to its self (called authenticity) or loses itself
(called inauthenticity); Dasein is inauthentic, for example, when it lets the
possibilities of the choice for its own “ek-sisting” be given to it by others
instead of deciding for itself. Heidegger’s concept of care (Sorge, cura) has
nothing to do with distress (Bekümmernis) but includes the unity of the
articulated moments of man’s being-in-the-world.
The hermeneutic character of Heidegger’s thought manifested itself also
in his interpretation of poetry, in which he discovered a congenial spirit in
Friedrich Hölderlin, one of Germany’s greater poets, of whose poetry he
inaugurated a completely new interpretation; but it manifested itself equally
well in his interpretation of metaphysics, which Heidegger tried to envision as
an occurrence determined by the forgottenness of Being, an occurrence in the
center of which man finds himself and of which the clearest manifestation is
to be found in “technicity,” the attempt of modern man to dominate the earth
by controlling beings that are considered as objects.
The concept of transcendental consciousness, which was central for
Husserl, is not found in Heidegger – which clearly shows how Heidegger, in
Sein und Zeit, had already dissociated himself from Husserl’s
Phenomenology.
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Other Developments
Eugen Fink, for several years Husserl’s collaborator, whose essay “Die
phänomenologische Philosophie Edmund Husserls in der gegenwärtigen
Kritik” (1933) led to a radicalization of Husserl’s philosophical,
transcendental Idealism, later turned in another direction, one that approached
Heidegger’s position and divorced itself at the same time from that of Husserl.
Ludwig Landgrebe, who was Husserl’s personal assistant for many
years, published in 1938 Erfahrung und Urteil (“Experience and Judgment”),
the first of Husserl’s posthumous works devoted to the genealogy of logic.
Among German-language scholars, Landgrebe remained closest to Husserl’s
original views and has developed them consistently in several works.
Dissemination of Phenomenology
Phenomenology in Various Countries
Following upon the work of Husserl, Phenomenology spread into a
worldwide movement.
In France
One of the first French authors to become familiar with Husserl’s
philosophy was Emmanuel Lévinas, a pluralistic Personalist, who combined
ideas from Husserl and Heidegger in a very personal way. Similarly, Jean-
Paul Sartre, the leading Existentialist of France, took his point of departure
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from the philosophies of Husserl and Heidegger. His first works,
L’Imagination (1936; Imagination: A Psychological Critique, 1962) and
L’Imaginaire: Psychologie phénoménologique de l’imagination (1940; The
Psychology of Imagination, 1950), remain completely within the context of
Husserl’s analyses of consciousness. Sartre explains the distinction between
perceptual and imaginative consciousness with the help of Husserl’s concept
of intentionality, and he frequently employs the method of ideation
(Wesensschau).
In L’Être et le néant (1943; Being and Nothingness, 1956), an essay on
Phenomenological ontology, it is obvious that Sartre borrowed from
Heidegger. Some passages from Heidegger’s Was ist Metaphysik? (1929;
What Is Metaphysics?, 1949), in fact, are copied literally. The meaning of
nothingness, which Heidegger in this lecture made the theme of his
investigations, became for Sartre the guiding question. Sartre departs from
Heidegger’s analytic of Dasein and introduces the position of consciousness
(which Heidegger had overcome).
The distinction between being-in-itself (en-soi) and being-for-itself
(pour-soi) pervades the entire investigation. The in-itself is the opaque,
matter-like substance that remains the same, whereas the for-itself is
consciousness permeated by nothingness. The influence of the Idealist G.W.F.
Hegel becomes apparent when the author tries to interpret everything in a
dialectical way; i.e., through a tension of opposites. The dialectic of men’s
being-with-one-another is central: thus, seeing and being-seen correspond to
dominating and being-dominated. The basic characteristic of being-for-itself
is bad faith (mauvaise foi), which cannot be overcome because facticity
(being-already) and transcendence (being-able-to-be) cannot be combined.
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The Phenomenological character of Sartre’s analyses of consciousness
consists in the way in which he elucidates certain modes of behavior: love,
hatred, sadism, masochism, and indifference. Although Sartre sees and
describes these forms of behavior strikingly and precisely, he limits himself to
those modes that fit his philosophical interpretation. The significance of
psychology, recognized by Husserl, emerges again in Sartre and leads to a
demand for an Existential psychoanalysis.
Sartre’s definition of man as a being of possibilities that finds or loses
itself in the choice that it makes in regard to itself refers to Heidegger’s
definition of Dasein as a being that has to materialize itself. For Sartre,
freedom is the basic characteristic of man; thus Sartre belongs to the tradition
of the great French moralist philosophers.
In his later works, as in his Critique de la raison dialectique (1960;
Search for a Method, 1963), Sartre turned to Marxism, though he developed a
method of understanding that was influenced by hermeneutics. Here the
choice made by the individual is limited by social and psychological
conditions. Sartre’s outstanding two-volume interpretation of Flaubert, L’Idiot
de la famille; Gustave Flaubert de 1821-1857 (1971), is an example of this
new method of understanding and interpretation, which combines Marxist
elements with interpretations of a highly personal nature taken from depth
psychology.
Maurice Merleau-Ponty (died 1961), who, together with Sartre and his
associate Simone de Beauvoir, a writer and novelist, was an important
representative of French Existentialism, was at the same time the most
important French Phenomenologist. His works, La Structure du comportement
(1942; Structure of Behaviour, 1963) and Phénoménologie de la perception
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(1945; Phenomenology of Perception, 1962), were the most original further
developments and applications of Phenomenology to come from France.
Merleau-Ponty gave a new interpretation of the meaning of the human body
from the viewpoint of Phenomenology and, connected with this, of man’s
perception of space, the natural world, temporality, and freedom.
Starting from Husserl’s later phenomenology of the life-world, Merleau-
Ponty anchored the phenomena of perception in the phenomenology of the
lived body (the body as it is experienced and experiences), in which the
perceiving subject is incarnated as the mediating link to the phenomenal
world. Such a phenomenology of human “presence” in the world was also to
offer an alternative to the rigid dichotomy between Idealism and Realism, in
which consciousness and world could be reciprocally related. Phenomenology
thus became a way of showing the essential involvement of human existence
in the world, starting with everyday perception.
Although it is true that Merleau-Ponty was originally close to Husserl in
his thought, he later developed noticeably in the direction of Heidegger, a
change that became particularly manifest in L’Oeil et l’esprit (1964; “Eye and
Mind,” in The Primacy of Perception, 1964).
Paul Ricoeur, a student of the volitional experience, whose translation of
Husserl’s Ideen zu einer reinen Phänomenologie brought Husserl closer to the
younger French generation, writes in a Phenomenological vein but with the
intention of further developing Husserl’s conception of Phenomenology.
Ricoeur’s two-volume Philosophie de la volonté (1950-60; “Philosophy of the
Will”) also deals with the problems involved in the theological concept of
guilt.
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Suzanne Bachelard, who in 1957 translated Husserl’s Formale und
transzendentale Logik: Versuch einer Kritik der logischen Vernunft, has
pointed to the significance of Husserl for modern logic; and Jacques Derrida,
an original French thinker on the limits of thought and language, has
combined Phenomenology and Structuralism in his interpretation of literature.
In Germany
After World War II, interest in Phenomenology sprang up again in its
own homeland. The influence of Ludwig Landgrebe in Cologne has been
particularly felt, as have the activities of the Husserl Archives in Cologne,
with editions by Walter Biemel, who also published Philosophische Analysen
zur Kunst der Gegenwart (1968; “Philosophical Analyses of Contemporary
Art”) and essays on the relationships between Husserl and Heidegger. The
circle around Gerhard Funke in Mainz, author of Phänomenologie –
Metaphysik oder Methode? (1966), has also had a positive influence.
In Other European Countries
In Belgium, at the Catholic University of Louvain, are located the entire
posthumous works of Husserl, as well as his personal library. Thanks to the
initiative of H.L. Van Breda, founder of the Husserl Archives, several scholars
worked intensively on the manuscripts for several decades. By 1972, 12
volumes of collected works had been published. Van Breda was also the
director of the Phaenomenologica series – totalling 42 volumes by 1972 – in
which the most important publications in the field of Phenomenology (taken
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in a very broad sense) have been published. Thus, mainly through Van
Breda’s efforts, Louvain has become the most important center for
Phenomenology. Van Breda also organized international colloquia on
Phenomenology. The influence of Alphonse de Waelhens, a Belgian
philosopher of fresh experience and author of Phénoménologie et vérité
(1953) and Existence et signification (1958), also bears mentioning.
In The Netherlands, Stephan Strasser, oriented particularly toward
phenomenological psychology, has been especially influential. And in Italy,
the Phenomenology circle has centred around Enzo Paci. The Husserl scholar
Jan Patocka, a prominent expert in Phenomenology as well as in the
metaphysical tradition, was influential in Czechoslovakia; in Poland, Roman
Ingarden represented the cause of Phenomenology; and there have also been
important representatives in such countries as Portugal, England, South
America, Japan, and India.
In the United States
Phenomenology in the United States has lived a rather marginal
existence for quite some time, notwithstanding the meritorious journal of
Philosophy and Phenomenological Research founded by Husserl’s student
Marvin Farber, who is also the author of The Foundation of Phenomenology
(1943). More recently, however, a noticeable change has taken place, chiefly
because of the work of two scholars at the New School for Social Research in
New York, Alfred Schütz, an Austrian-born sociologist and student of human
cognition (died 1959), and Aron Gurwitsch, a Lithuanian-born philosopher.
Schütz came early to Phenomenology, developing a social science on a
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phenomenological basis. Gurwitsch, author of Théorie du champ de la
conscience (1957; The Field of Consciousness, 1964), came to
Phenomenology through his study of the Gestalt psychologists Adhemar Gelb
and Kurt Goldstein. While in Paris, Gurwitsch influenced Merleau-Ponty. The
essays on Phenomenology published by Gurwitsch in the United States are
among the best. His comprehensive knowledge ranges from mathematics, via
the natural sciences, to psychology and metaphysics. The work The
Phenomenological Movement (2nd ed., 1965), by Herbert Spiegelberg, an
Alsatian-American Phenomenologist, is the movement’s first encompassing
historical presentation.
Phenomenology in Other Disciplines
Of greater significance is the role of Phenomenology outside of
philosophy proper in stimulating or reinforcing phenomenological tendencies
in such fields as mathematics and the biological sciences. Much stronger was
its impact on psychology, in which Franz Brentano and the German Carl
Stumpf had prepared the ground and in which the U.S. psychologist William
James, the Würzburg school, and the Gestalt psychologists had worked along
parallel lines. But Phenomenology has probably made its strongest
contribution in the field of psychopathology, in which the German Karl
Jaspers, a foremost contemporary Existentialist, stressed the importance of
phenomenological exploration of a patient’s subjective experience. Jaspers
was followed by the Swiss Ludwig Binswanger and several others. The
Phenomenological strand is also very pronounced in American Existential
psychiatry and has affected sociology, history, and the study of religion.
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Conclusion
At the turn of the fourth quarter of the 20th century, it remained to be
seen whether Phenomenology could make solid contributions to philosophical
knowledge. To this end, it needed to develop rigorous standards, which had
not always been observed by some of its most brilliant practitioners, such as
Max Scheler, and which were likely to be violated in a philosophy the
ultimate appeal of which had to be made to intuitive verification. With this
proviso, Phenomenology may well be qualified not only to become a bridge
for better international communication in philosophy but also to shed new
light on philosophical problems old and new, to reclaim for philosophy parts
of man’s quotidian world that have been abandoned by science as too private
and too subjective, and, finally, to give access to layers of man’s experience
unprobed in everyday living, thus providing deeper foundations for both
science and life.
Positivism and Logical Empiricism
As a philosophical ideology and movement, Positivism first assumed its
distinctive features in the work of the French philosopher Auguste Comte,
who also named and systematized the science of sociology. It then developed
through several stages known by various names, such as Empiriocriticism,
Logical Positivism, and Logical Empiricism, and finally, in the mid-20th
century, flowed into the movement known as Analytic and Linguistic
philosophy.
The basic affirmations of Positivism are (1) that all knowledge regarding
matters of fact is based on the “positive” data of experience, and (2) that
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beyond the realm of fact is that of pure logic and pure mathematics, which
were already recognized by the Scottish Empiricist and sceptic David Hume
as concerned with the “relations of ideas” and, in a later phase of Positivism,
were classified as purely formal sciences. On the negative and critical side, the
Positivists became noted for their repudiation of metaphysics; i.e., of
speculation regarding the nature of reality that radically goes beyond any
possible evidence that could either support or refute such “transcendent”
knowledge claims. In its basic ideological posture, Positivism is thus worldly,
secular, antitheological, and antimetaphysical. Strict adherence to the
testimony of observation and experience is the all-important imperative of the
Positivists. This imperative is reflected also in their contributions to ethics and
moral philosophy, and most Positivists have been Utilitarians to the extent that
something like “the greatest happiness for the greatest number of people” was
their ethical maxim. It is notable, in this connection, that Auguste Comte was
the founder of a short-lived religion, in which the object of worship was not
the deity of the monotheistic faiths but humanity.
There are distinct anticipations of Positivism in ancient philosophy.
Though the relationship of Protagoras – a 5th-century-BCE Sophist – for
example, to later Positivistic thought was only a distant one, there was a much
more pronounced similarity in the classical sceptic Sextus Empiricus, who
lived at the turn of the 3rd century CE, and in Pierre Bayle, his 17th-century
reviver. Moreover, the medieval Nominalist William of Ockham had clear
affinities with modern Positivism. An 18th-century forerunner who had much
in common with the Positivistic antimetaphysics of the following century was
the German thinker Georg Lichtenberg.
Positivism clearly has its proximate roots, however, in the French
Enlightenment, which stressed the clear light of reason, and in the 18th-