A History of Philosophy | 70 Husserl and Heidegger

about Nietzsche's view of knowledge and truth and seeing how he takes the pluralism between different viewpoints to be simply an extension of various underlying functional attendances ultimately reducible to the will depower in varying degrees and that it's this Nietzschean approach which is one of the major influences shaping the contemporary post-modernism and for that matter the pluralism of our day and as we were trying to get some acquaintance with phenomenology and particularly hasar oh we were noting that his concern is precisely this lack of any firm foundation for the sciences mathematics logic any other kind of human knowledge and he blames this on naturalism and naturalistic philosophy with its attempt to explain human knowledge in purely terms of purely natural processes so you get historical explanations you get psychological explanations he talks there ever of historicism and psychologism and of course nietzsche would be a prime example of psychologism a psychological explanation of the knowledge claims which people make one of the other tendencies of his day which he is criticizing is the work of a you can't e'en philosopher who we mentioned back then I think vilhelm dill thigh who was interested in philosophical worldviews and classified worldviews into three sorts each of which he attributed to some aspect of human psychology so that you get if you like the the rational mind you get the the value oriented mind you get the empirically concerned individual in fact the three things that Jasper's was trying to pull together in terms of what constitutes the whole of authentic human existence well what her Cyril does is to see in this another kind of naturalistic explanation in which while he's grounding worldviews in the human spirit it's really in the human spirit understood simply in terms of certain psychological types and how you're going to overcome the relativism if that's the case in other words what ha Searle is after is not just a new foundations of new foundationalism but a universal foundation something that isn't just an account of differences because of different psychological types as in Nietzsche and dill thye but rather is something about the universal structure of the human self by virtue of which there is a universal foundation that's what he's after now one of the complaints that he has in the same context is that the subject object dichotomy which has dominated thought since some tea cart asking for an isolation of the object from all subjective influences in our thinking that subject object dichotomy is is really very artificial after all if you are saying I know something you're hardly getting at what knowledge is if you just represent the object the I know is an act of the subject and it is the loss of that human subject hood the loss of a an adequate understanding of the human spirit which is what ails the naturalistic philosophy and what therefore underlies the failure of naturalism so what hasar wants then is if you like and his is what he calls it a science of the human spirit or a science of the human consciousness of science of the eye now that of course is the sort of thing that Descartes attempted at least that's where Descartes started but while Husserl goes back to Descartes back that is to the beginning of universal doubt out of which the cogito emerges I think for Husserl's purposes Descartes was not nearly radical enough in his suspended judgment he suspended judgment on everything that could possibly be doubted but immediately jumped from the I think to the assume that he's a thinking thing and with that very brief nod of recognition he leaves the human subject altogether and has really not examined what is Universal about human consciousness the eye in the eye no on the other hand a manual can't in asking what is it which orders and unifies our experience our knowledge the whole range of human consciousness it comes up with the transcendental self and talks of a synthetic unity of a perception miracle now that her Cyril seems to find more the direction he wants to go what Kant called the transcendental ego the transcendental self the transcendental self Kant in the rational psychology section of the critique of Pure Reason discusses you remember you read it you outlined it discusses some of de cartes attempt to get at the eye the self and decided that those metaphysical speculations simply did not have adequate grounds ha Cyril is not discouraged by Descartes failure what a Searle attempts to do then is to go back to the Descartes foundations and see if he cannot from that starting point elicit as something of the universal structure of the transcendental occur so that brings us down to the need for a more radical styling point I might mention that when he was asked to lecture at the Sorbonne where everybody has to pay homage to take art I mean he's the patron philosopher a patron saint of French philosophy what he did was to present lectures known as the Cartesian meditations Cartesian meditations starting with Descartes literally and trying to describe his methodology in relationship to day cuts well what he does do then is to talk about two aspects of the phenomenological method that he wants first of all bracketing which is simply suspending judgment the sort of thing Descartes did about all objects of thought objects of perception he uses the term a pocke at times that's the term that the Greek skeptics used for suspended judgment so bracketing suspense of judgment Apothic Descartes did it with whatever could be doubted as part of his methodology huh Cyril isn't doubting the existence of objects when he brackets them he never questions their existence his concern is why we do not have a more well grounded and knowledge of their very essence that's his concern the foundations of knowledge so in bracketing objects of knowledge he's bracketing variables between particular bits of knowledge particular kinds of knowledge in fact he emphasizes consciousness sometimes much more than knowledge and brackets all the objects of consciousness consciousness of all sorts not just consciousness and some clearly articulated understanding all states of consciousness and he tries to get at that Universal structure of consciousness all particulars all theories all interpretations are bracketed I might add that the beginning of his work he tried to maintain a purely theoretical attitude that is to say not involving any practical dimensions of human existence like the pragmatists do in talking of human knowledge but in the later stages of his work he talked of even bracketing that theoretical attitude which is an artificial sort of thing recognizing that when I say I know something you'll see what I'm knowing is something as part of my overall world view the overall way in which I live what I know how I know is ingredient to my labels that my lived world and what he wants to do is to get at the eye of the lived world rather than the eye of some abstruse theoretical knowledge of the world so the I know of pre-scientific consciousness the I know of a pre theoretical consciousness that is to say the I know of ordinary life that's what he wants to get now that Lana move of his led to the attempt of students of his to do a phenomenological description not just of thee I know but of the entire activity of the eye in my life won't and that's the sort of thing you find in the existential phenomenologist slike Heidegger so you can see that they grew out of a soul at precisely that point of bracketing the theoretical scientific attitude and trying to get at the the I who is there within the world in a pre theoretical non theoretical basis put that another way come back to this subject object dichotomy the naturalist ignores subjectivity in her Cyril sense and focuses simply on the object giving objective scientific accounts of how that knowledge is possible it would be a mistake on the other hand to rack it out the object and just concentrate on the subject in some sort of introspective fashion because there is in the life world there is in reality no such thing as the eye of I know without an object of knowledge so what you're trying to study really is not subject not the object in the sense that Descartes said that's a thinking thing that's an extended thing know what you're trying to study is the - yeah what is the relationship between these two by virtue of which we have knowledge because the I know something know is the - yes a so what is that universal structure of consciousness of which knowledge is a phenomenon you see that's the question well that that same sort of thing becomes evident in the existentialists when Heidegger says that our existence design literally being there you see it's not a private isolated being might be it's a being there in the world you think and the the same is true in socks well-known statement that we are cast into a world not of our own making there's a being in the world that's the very nature of human existence that in this being in the world so the mistake then of Descartes was not only that he was not radical enough in his doubt in his bracketing didn't go back far enough but it was also that he conceived of the I as a separated I that is to say I'm and I whether or not there's a world yes I and he didn't know there was a real world until medication six oh that tuck for all that time he may be working just just a tie well meditation three it's I and God yes a but he really has no basis for arguing other finite cells until meditation sex you've got a body and hence some analogous reading in terms of my mind-body relationship and yours that's a very artificial kind of role and what her Cyril is is after is an understanding of the eye as it is concretely the theoretical attitude of Descartes has to be bracketed you cannot abstract the arm from its concrete relationships well then what are we going to say about the - a little thing like a - and the main thing that her soul emphasizes and this is often regarded as his great discovery the one thing is the intentionality of consciousness the intentionality of consciousness now keep in mind the term intentionality as it was used in the late many evils it has to do with the conscious external reference which the mind has in knowing something perception knowledge other states of consciousness are teleological acts acts oriented to wars an object now descartes gives us the image of consciousness and simply entertaining ideas within the mind and that representational view leaves wide open whether they're any objects the ideas are about music whereas what her Cyril is saying is one of the universal features part of the very essence of human consciousness is that it's always consciousness of consciousness of an idea of knowing that it's always reference to it it's directional that's true even in memory you're referring back and dissipation referring on to the future the thinking of some absent member of the class reference toweb there's always that sometimes it's a reflexive act thinking on that thought you see but this is the very nature of the act of consciousness it's not a passive sort of thing the way Locke pictured receiving ideas passively tabula rasa but it's an active sort of thing and this is his debt to yes he can't introduce the notion of the the self becomes yourself as an active kind of Noah that actually contributes to experience forms that unify it temporally spatially and then categories that unify the understanding beyond the experience now this is what her Cyril Wynne is referring to that act of consciousness that does something what does it do and the language that is used here for describing what intentionality does ranges various things first it makes the object present to me yeah the object does not present itself to me passively opening the door yes a but I buy as it were giving attention to get the reference there by giving attention to something putting my mind to it see what we're saying putting my mind to giving attention looking at what I do is to make the object present if I bring the object in this is sometimes said as a constitutive act yes because but in the act of knowing I constitute the object and object an object of knowing in terms of the subject object relationship is no object without a subject how can be an object if it's not an object for some subject any more than reason isn't a subject without an object how can it be a subject if there's not a subject to have some object ya think and so what it does is to constitute the object the object for me that it is you see that's almost canting it in the act of knowing the thing in itself becomes a thing for me in knowing I constituted a thing for me yes a well in addition to constitutive it is a constructive act and just as for Kant it is the the time form that schema tars is the understanding so the very nature of my knowing you see constructs constructs the the overall situation pulls it together for me it's not just the isolated object but the whole scene that is interrelated for me all knowledge is in that sense self referential it's like here I stand I can do I can see no other because from where I stand I see it all in these relationships in relationship to me than our whereas from your perspective it might be different but it's constructive but the same token it is a meaning giving act to meaning giving at its not so much a Searle who uses this phrase I think but some of the later writers the underlying assumption here is that whatever else the act of knowing does in seeing it as the object for me I give it meaning for me in that sense I give it meaning the confusing thing is that intentionality with its referentiality is itself sometimes called the act of meaning simply because our word meaning is ambiguous as if I mean something what do I mean when I say it's you I mean but it's you I'm referring to it's you I intend in what I'm saying so one sense of meaning has to do with referentiality intentionality the other sense of meaning is yeah more the existential thing of giving meaning to something that's meaning less or giving it to it a certain meaning that's going to have for me so in the more existential phenomenology you find that notion of they've the meaning giving in any case it's the notion of ordering the objects ordering the world yeah consciousness is not passive but active consciousness is not representational carrying mental pictures of what's out there it's not representational it's constitutive the idea the ideas that I have about something constitute it as that for me yes it's not just representational copies here so intentionality then is the is the key to the whole thing if if you read much about ha Searle you soon discover that he spent most of his energies trying to develop the method and left other people to use it that maybe an overgeneralization he does do for instance a phenomenology of time consciousness time consciousness and time is no ordinary object of thought anything postcard as if time is the unifying form of all consciousness it's the form you're a member of the internal sense but even our ideas of the external sense are known to us in the internal sense and so they are time organized as well so the whole world for me is time organized well what he's trying to do there is to do a phenomena G of that time consciousness which is really getting at the heart of the Kantian sort of thing his earliest earlier works things like the foundations of mathematics and logical investigations are attempts to do the kind of phenomenology which would establish the the the foundations in the universal structure of the self of mathematics that is to say of logic you see the foundations of logic in fact this little book of current of God of hacelle phenomenology and the crisis of philosophy actually contains two essays of his a one is entitled philosophy as rigorous science his point being that none of the other sciences rigorous because none of them has underlying foundation that validates scientific method not even logic does mathematics doesn't so he's calling out for a philosophy which will establish those foundations the second is called let's see full another full title philosophy as rigorous science at sea I wrote it down I wrote it down let's see yeah the crisis of European science and transcendental phenomenology now you can see what he's after there the crisis no adequate foundations the whole thing's in danger of getting relativized and transcendental phenomenology yes a phenomenology of the transcendental self which will arrest that process and establish adequate foundations so that's the overarching concern postural and it inspired a whole following of people inspired a whole following of people I remember back in the when would it be or in the nineteen sixties I guess it was I attended a meeting of the Society for phenomenology and existential philosophy out of Yale and that meeting as people were standing around in the lobby of a meeting place people would come up to you assuming that you were of like mind with them and rave in almost messianic tongues about the project they were involved in increased numbers from last year it looks like we're gaining ground that sort of thing messianic kind of spirit to it that was sort of fascinating to catch that enthusiasm which it's almost a religious enthusiasm it was interesting to see well Hegel pause for comment Hegel herself pause for comment question okay you'll find that Stumpf feels pretty clear on this he's also good on Heidegger so be sure to use them now let me take then the next step from her Cyril to Heidegger himself and here in Heidegger you have not transcendental phenomenology phenomenology of the transcendental self but existential phenomenology phenomenology of existence hiding is no longer concerned to establish a new kind of foundationalism that's not his project the problem with a Searle is that that process of bracketing is never completed so that you simply cannot strip the transcendental self bare oh the evidence of this that or the other kind of object of not and catch it as it were in its best it's as if Heidegger is saying to hustle what Hume said to Descartes or Locke who had talked about having a notion of a substantive soul even over and above all of the particular ideas of sensation and reflection and everything else in which were immediately aware to which humor applied I never catch myself without some idea music well it's as if Heidegger is saying the same to her Cyril you never catch the - without the object as they you never catch the intentional state there unclothed with objects and so he has to part company with Heidegger's optimism about a method of establishing some rigorous foundation you foundationalism incidentally I think hiding is right in that it seems to me that any attempt you might make to bracket presuppositions bracket reference to some particular object is going to be very difficult it's a kind of abstraction thinking of the - relationship and abstraction but the very nature of thinking abstract Lee abstract ideas is it it always takes off from particulars and such particulars become symbols of something much greater than that yes sir so that the the difficulty involved there is the difficulty in abstract thinking that does not have some point of reference which makes possible meaningful symbolic language well instead then of what Husserl is doing what Heidegger proposes to do is to use this phenomenological method of describing structures of things to use this on conscious existence on human existence to a phenomenology of human existence that is to say what her soul's method involved was not only the bracketing but I see I rubbed it off eidetic intuition eidetic having to do with ideas where I dare are you remember was Plato's too for the forms the ideals the universals the essences so eidetic intuition is an immediate awareness of those universal essences of the universal structures of consciousness and what her soul was wanting to do is to describe what one finds what one observes in that eidetic intuition like intention out well what Heidegger wants to do is to focus not on some Universal structure of consciousness underlying all-knowing but to focus on universal structures of of existence what are called existential iya existential eeeh now what he's trying to do is to distinguish categories of objects distinguish categories of objects from the existential qualities of the human subject and see what are the universal existential characteristics of being in this world existential referring to the conditions of the subject in this world so that the - becomes not a knowing relationship but a being in relationship with all the existential qualities of that entails now at the same time as he's dissatisfied with her Searle he's also he also has problems with other existentialists people like Nietzsche even Jasper's he refers to all sorta because what they are doing he called simply the elucidation of existence there they're trying to elucidate the way in which we fail the way in which we experience our existence the elucidation of our existence oh they may be trying to elicit some authentic existence the elucidation and eliciting of existence in other words what they're doing is abandoning any traditional philosophical activity the traditional philosophy all the way back to the Greeks was concerned with being capital B not just elucidating our existence in the world so that the Greeks were interested in the RK the basic stuff if you like in the ground of all being you'll see in the ground of being so what Heidegger wants to do is to look at our own incidentally this ground of all being is known as zine being itself as distinct from being for me being itself and our existence a being in the world is design ok so what Heidegger wants is to do a phenomenological description of desire our being in the world to see if the ground of being being itself the ground of being appears you--they is present to us in our design in our being in the world can we gain then some understanding some awareness of the ground of being from probing our own being in the world for instance he has some let's see he has a piece called what is metaphysics that was published in 1929 what is metaphysics where he says of course it's about sign being rather than design and then he goes about asking questions that have existential moment why is there something rather than nothing good question why is there something rather than nothing and he tries to capture the existential moment of that question as if you are hanging over the edge of a cliff a bottomless precipice and on the edge of nothingness they're asking why something rather than nothing in other words how can I be on this verge of nothingness can I ever survive guilty so looking through the existential but dread terror anguish to ask what it uncovers and similarly in some of the other of his writings similar sorts of things but his major work published in 1927 is called being and time notice how significant the Tigers if a being and time so the title is sign on site now being sure he wants to get at the nature of being time or the temporality of our existence of our conscious existence in this world that's what's likely to uncover the existential qualities and stir of up nothing and in any case in the county and revision it's time which structures our conscious existence of anything so what then is revealed in this now when I say in our being what is revealed in that he's not saying what can we infer from it Descartes style you say it's not that he's trying to take mental representations into a causal inference no but do we have a direct awareness of the ground of being in the consciousness of our own existence is it when you hit rock bottom is there something that that's what he's asking well his big project in being in time then was a phenomenology of design his intention was to describe these existential eeeh the universal structures of consciousness that being in this world universal aspects of it revealing structures he only completed half of the project part one which has to do with temporalities and our being Daz i part two which was to have to do with temporality and being itself zine he never got done why not well I it usually said because he became convinced that this wasn't the method to use and so it was only half done the question seems to have been something like this even granted that something like being itself is disclosed in our conscious being how are we going to interpret that how are we going to understand it time maybe the structure of our being in the world but is it the structure of being itself however would we know yes I and so he feels that we need to get a more direct kind of approach towards being itself and that's where he turned to more existential ways like they wires or something than nothing question or to going back to all pre scientific and pre philosophical vocabulary to early Greek before the rise of philosophy to see if there's something that shows itself in the language of the early Greeks and he does all sorts of interesting etymologies trying to get a pen for instance he asks himself in a little essay called on the essence of truth what is truth and the the etymology that he uses repudiates the conventional view of truth as the correspondence between thought and thing or as Aquinas put the ad equation of thought to thing repudiates that and etymologically looks at the greek word la Thyer says there's the Alpha primitives that negates and here's the word for a stone or a rock so truth is saying something about no stone yeah that is to say the rock the stones are all rolled away and now you can see what's under them so truth is the nature of something that shows itself you see that is the thing what appears the being that appears to you in your own existential moment that is true and interestingly how that coincides with our phrase a moment of truth a moment of truth B in which you were forced to reveal the sort of person you were you revealed it to yourself in that moment of truth well let me come back to being in time however and a few comments about some of the things he does there which I think are particularly important one of the things that immediately becomes evident is that in trying to describe design one's being in the world one's conscious existence inevitably he uses the word I yeah as any of us would he's first person or perhaps the word you but he's using the word I not in the sense of a unique individual but the eye is conceived as universal that is to say he's looking for the unil universal dimensions of i-ness of the - the universality layer not the idiosyncrasy sink recei but the universality the eye as universal now you say that's odd not if you've read Hegel because in Hegel what you find is that the eye the individual is a synthesis of the universal and the particular remember in his logic you moved from particular now you move from universal to particular to individual so the end of vigil is the concrete alleys the universal what Hegel called the concrete Universal Universal possibilities Universal characteristics concrete eyes din the individual so the eye is universe now seems to me that's a very important notion because if you're trying to find universal points of reference in response to relativism pluralism and so forth what he's saying is that even though you may examine the individual there's something Universal about every individual now the universal is not just an empirical generalization about particulars you'll see it's not something you deduce from a collection of particulars it's something that appears within the particulars so that you can say that there are certain universal human characteristics of a skeletal thought which get fleshed out in particular ways so the universal and the individual are not separate things the universal appears in the individual which is why being can appear within our being in the world because as is a particular manifestation of being itself the eye is a concrete universal he uses the word facticity to describe the experience of being sort of a bear fact insignificant just an object in this kind of world he uses the term he uses the term for and insane to describe the status of something which is just an instrument a tool used by others for hand and sinus to be on hand something that's on hand just there to be used and obviously for human existence they are very inauthentic kinds of existence he he uses the term existing she allottee to refer to the possibilities inherent in human existence possibilities inherent in human existence the freedom to be avert is contained in human existence he uses the term of fourth Atia and fallens to speak of the experience of forfeiting the kinds of possibilities that human existence involves he speaks of conscience in those terms and the term being unto death significant as if this intentionality in all consciousness than the consciousness of our own existence of our own life existence is among other things a consciousness of being unto death time's running out for all us yes the existential quality there being under death he he speaks of MIT's I there's another such universal feature MIT zine is literally being wheels together nurse yeah that's prior to being alone well we're basically relational beings are conscious existence is always related our identity is always related to that of others mitzvot as Martin Buber says I thou - eat it is prior to I mid sign is prior to just itself but the particular thing that might be worth noting is that he regards how he regards understanding and language because here you get that postmodern thing coming through again understanding is a way we have of projecting the meaning of our design onto objects so that in the subject object relationship to say that I understand an object is to say I am making that in my own image I'm making it an object for me I protect my meaning onto it and for that reason both knowing and uses of language are simply modes of being in the world however can you live survive exist in a world like this somebody asks oh by projecting meaning onto it for me and by naming things where the name gives it the meaning you want it to have nothing and by talking about it in ways that are more significant for what they reveal about you than what they reveal about the thing you think what then is the quest for truth well the quest for truth is the quest for the uncovered nosov being no stone quest for the uncovered nurse of being so the quest for the truth about anything else is simply a indirect way of engaging in the quest for the being which shows itself within my existence in how I can ever exist in a world like this yes and it shows itself therefore in my uses of language so on and so forth so he has that thoroughly postmodern view and it is that in Heidegger which is picked up on by gadamer in his some truth and method which is the classic of phenomenological hermeneutics it will be talking about later well question/comment you'll find almost the same view of knowledge in John Paul Sartre not in the book you're reading but in his larger work which parallel to Heidegger is called not being in time but being and nothing less Being and Nothingness okay now next time I want to talk about Sun would you bring the suck book transcendence of the ego with you and hopefully you will have given it a first reading I say a first one because I think you'll have to do a couple to get the hang of

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Published: Thu May 14 2015