Husserl & Phenomenology

phenomenology served up in a golden chalice with the very best ingredients the very best recipes the very best accompanying wine I can guarantee that it will never taste this good anywhere else not even if I had Edmund Husserl with me in the studio especially not if I had Edmund Husserl with me in the studio his writings excited a great many people but he was not a very good lecturer from what I gather and he probably would not have made a great radio guest the person who joins me in the studio today on the other hand well he's a proven commodity professor Thomas Sheehan who teaches religion and philosophy in the department of religion here at Stanford is well known to our longtime regular listeners the last time he joined me it was to talk about Martin heidegger's book being in time in addition to his expertise on the work of Heidegger professor Sheehan has worked and written extensively on the philosophical movement known as phenomenology among other things he has edited and translated a formidable book published by Kluwer academic publishers it's called Edmund Husserl psychological and transcendental phenomenology and the confrontation with Heidegger 500 dense and scrupulously annotated pages a truly remarkable feat of scholarship we're going to need someone like him to help us clarify what this movement was all about because from it's very inception the term phenomenology was fraught with many ambiguities controversies and misunderstandings I contribute to those misunderstandings myself on entitled opinions with my liberal use of the word phenomenological on many occasions indeed I prefer my own misguided notion of phenomenology to the Orthodox dogma of its founder Edmund Husserl but we can get into that later or maybe not in any case Tom welcome to the program what nice to have you back with us thanks Rob so as I mentioned the term phenomenological gets used in pretty loosely in all sorts of different discursive context and I mentioned that I'm guilty a little bit of that myself and willfully so I'll admit since I insist on calling myself a phenomenologist of sorts even though I know that my concept of what a phenomenon is does not have any strict bearing on what who Cyril might have meant by phenomenon in any case for me a phenomenologist is someone who allows the phenomenon itself be it a work of literature or a natural object to serve as the ultimate measure or source of what he or she may say or think about it as opposed for example to imposing preconceived or reductionist theories on it in other words close attention to the matter at hand in all its wealth of detail and complexity I take it that Hustle had more than that in mind when he founded phenomenology as a distinctly philosophical discipline so what I and my listeners would like to learn from you today is how the phenomenologist in sensu stricto understood their project and where would be a good place to begin to pursue that question well one place to begin if you don't mind would be with telling a little story specifically about how phenomenology began in France it's taken from Simone de Beauvoir's autobiography called in the prime of life Lafosse the lodge she tells about an encounter in 1929 between southla john passata Beauvoir herself and ramon who had just come back from Germany where he had been reading phenomenology Arana that time was a good friend of Heidegger's they later became rivals but any case Beauvoir writes and I quote this is on a lift in a left bank bar someplace quote we ordered the specialty of the house apricot cocktails and our own said pointing to his glass - vamos share if you were a phenomenologist you could talk about this cocktail glass and make philosophy of it she continues Satya turned pale with emotion at this here was just the thing he'd been longing to achieve for years to describe objects just as he saw them and touched them and extract philosophy from the process unquote a funny place for phenomenology to begin in France in a bar but nonetheless satyr ran down to the nearest bookstore she recounts and bought a copy of levy nasa's book on intuition in who so and that was the beginning if you will of phenomenology in france and what was it that excited Sotka i think it was the do-it-yourself kind of philosophy you didn't have to know all the doctrines in the history of philosophy in fact it was better if you didn't know them just start with your own first-person experience regardless of the subject matter it could be that cocktail glass or it could be your own life that's why as you pointed out earlier phenomenology has lent itself to feels outside of traditional philosophy to literature and so on so you begin by describing what you're experiencing and how you're experiencing it be it a cocktail bar in a cocktail in a bar with friends the point is freedom originality the passion to start over again with your own experience I think this is what the spirit of phenomenology was even though ho Sorrell it seems tried to make it utterly boring but it's what captured a generation granted this as this revolution was not exactly what Edmund Husserl had in mind well that's my suspicion because when I read John Paul saft I say this is these this is the exactly what the spirit of phenomenology is all about where he can write in let go to nail an analysis of the the waiters dance as he serves you know patrons in the bar he can describe the way the Coquette puts her hand on the table or lets her hand be held by her date he can describe you know the the taste of what is of something sugary and and rather disgusting and all this is rich phenomenology of the lived world and so when I read John Paul Sartre I said yes I identify in a certain sense with that kind of phenomenology when I turn to Edmund Husserl as I've done several times because I want to find out who inspired many philosophers whom I admire including Heidegger sod and others I find that it is the as you said in spirit somewhat antithetical to this a long baton that comes with the at least the French phenomenological tradition right the history of who saw us early in phenomenology is really the history of its heresies against that beginning there are more points in divergence among phenomenologist than there are convergence around Edmund who so but nonetheless one of the things that is a continuity if you will is the method that's what historian was famous for he wanted to start philosophy over again by investigating the self beginning reground philosophy beginning with the experiences of your own self and it excited this new creative group of young philosophers even though hustle could not channel what he was after which we'll talk about could not channel that in a direction that he wanted to go it was comparable I think and contemporaneous with the explosion of modernism in the beginning of the century in cinema in poetry and novels and painting etc it had more future ahead of it than who Cyril had ever been able to foresee what he did I think they would all agree is he unshackled them liberated them from 19th century style systematic philosophy and set them on their own revolutionary paths that that would be I think what did they hold in common but how it began and how it unfolded does have something to do with the writing style of Edmund Husserl and his publications I guess we could say phenomenology at the turn of the 19th into the 20th century and it began with two fairly stodgy thick tomes written by Edmund Husserl born in 1859 died in 1938 two stodgy tomes called logical investigations for your readers your audience rather I think the best introduction to that is a fairly long ish si that's available that Xhosa wrote called philosophy as rigorous science and that title rigorous science tells you what the logical investigations were really about whose Earl who had been raised as a mathematician really wanted something like mathematical rigor and certitude for philosophy itself he thought that was possible he wanted to put philosophy on the path of a true science that would be based on logical rational principles not based on the psychology of the day not based on historicism which was rampant in the day because these couldn't predict what he want these couldn't produce what he wanted namely apodictic certitude that is to say mathematical like incontrovertible certitude that's what he thought philosophy needed just to progress for a moment with where he went from there after the logical investigations at the turn of the century he published in 1913 ideas volume one which manifested a shift of wholesale towards transcendental philosophy in the neo-kantian mode then in he didn't publish much during his lifetime then in 1931 he published Cartesian meditations which showed his basis in the cart the certitude if you will of the AYGO cogito of descartes and then after that he scribbled away endlessly and produced 45,000 unpublished manuscript pages that eventually many of which eventually were published posthumously in the most famous which had great influence on marital Balti was called the crisis it's long title is the crisis of European sciences and transcendental phenomenology well it turns out that most of these writings of who Cyril were more introductions to phenomenology rather than actually doing phenomenology and that's why the most exciting developments in phenomenology come from the heretics is I've named them Heidegger first of all levy NOS saath mera ponte maybe Chandra Kumar y'all we can add content oh yes right right so philosophy has a rigorous science when for someone like me when I hear that I everything kind of gets kind of take a deep breath and say okay if you will but it doesn't sound exciting to me because the the ideal of a rigorous science is an very old philosophical ideal and so much of modern philosophy is about trying to give this kind of scientific authority to a discourse which I at least don't I think that what is worthwhile in in philosophy is is precisely where it does not coincide with scientific discourse and apodictic certainty and so forth this I don't think can be the real thing that created generated so much enthusiasm among the heretics I so we want to talk somewhat systematically about a few aspects of the theory or to say that the doctrine and phenomenology from whose rules you know point of view one is the method but perhaps you could clarify first what this slogan of phenomenology that everyone was using and everyone kind of interpreted in his or her own way and which led to divergent sort of renderings of what it meant which to that matters themselves or to the things themselves that was the call the kind of battle cry of phenomenology what did that mean that slogan right a good question it meant two big things it meant what phenomenology wasn't and what phenomenology wanted to be first of all what it wasn't it was no longer systematic philosophy which I basically collapsed with the Hegelian system in the middle of the 19th century it wasn't psychologism that is to say the attempt to base logical laws on psychological processes which have only a certain amount of certitude but not the apodictic certitude that he wanted thirdly it wasn't going to be adjudicating all the old fights that philosophy had been through in its history of philosophy and lastly it was not going to be a revival like neo-kantian ism in the 1880s or even new irish-italian ism neo tome ism in the beginning of the 20th century continued up until the middle of this past century that's what it wasn't going to be and that itself was a liberation as I mentioned but his motto suitings Atkins ELPS really means get back to the facts get back to things as you actually experience them in the first person through intuition and by what you contribute to the establishing of these facts in front of consciousness so you would say excuse me for interrupting please the the Zack and the things you think facts is a good word for that I think it'll it'll work for now yeah get to the because facts are in connote in empirical facts and scientific what science does in terms of determining the matters of fact well that's what he actually wants to begin with he's an Aristotelian through his influence by Brentano Franz brentano his teacher in Vienna philosophy begins with empiricism he once even said we phenomenologist tsar the true empiricists but then what he did with those facts was the important thing all this stuff I've been reading up on where at least one source in the encyclopedia of philosophy that I was consulting said that the first thing you have to understand about phenomenology is that it's that phenomenology doesn't its statements are not empirical that's a founding principle and it keeps insisting that they're the the statements of phenomenology are not statements of facts in this empirical sense but of a different order that have kind of validity beyond the empirical sphere so is science and empiricism the same thing when when you say that philosophy as a rigorous science does it does it can't mean that philosophy is going to become a form of scientific empirical inquiry positivism it says yeah and the article you referencing by Richard Schmidt is I think over emphasizes the pureness of pure phenomenology it does begin with this dator intuition he says that giver of the beginnings of phenomenology but then what he adds to that if you will or what he what he integrates those facts into is a whole new theory of consciousness we'll have to talk about intentionality in a moment but getting to the facts for him had a broad and then we can get to the specifics a broad sense of first of all establishing solid what he calls scientific foundations but not positivistic naturalistic science foundations so let's see what that means it meant originality of experience that is to say don't begin with theories don't begin with metaphysics begin with what you're living with right here and now and with your investment in that right so it's not just confronting you so that you stare at it but you want to find out why you're interested in it concerned about it invested in it and how you bring it up to disclosure in consciousness what he calls constitution you constitute it as a an object of consciousness and then thirdly getting to the facts now scientific foundations Ridge analogy of experience the third thing was the method which is really what the phenomenologist who follow share to a certain degree they'll even be heresy there of course but as I say he studied mathematics in Berlin yes in Berlin in Leipzig in Vienna and that remained his first love and so he wanted that kind of rigor and I think what you're pointing out is that he was about a fool's errand in effect it was a futile last effort to you get a perfectly rational system of philosophy which continues today in certain forms of philosophy across the quad across the quad for example and it's done well there in its own vein but it was something else that he was after he wanted foundations on rock solid foundational certitude which would come with the most obvious certitude of all consciousness the cogito of descartes even though he often said he was influenced by descartes influences not determinism but it was they shared that in common it was a common factor but then the originality of experience part is that when you start with that indubitable solid rock foundation and begin with sense intuition you have to see what intentionality adds to that but the result it's important to realize that from the logical investigations up through the crisis published posthumously written in the mid 30s what he was about was a science of all possible science what he calls a vision shafts later a theory of science what Heidegger calls a Bedoya tongues later and that means how can we ground all the other sciences on something which the natural positivistic science don't take into account which is consciousness right then thirdly the method which we'll have to spend some time on I would say but that's your right I mean it was a last-ditch effort and perhaps a futile one as recognized by his followers and so phenomenology has taken an entirely different direction towards description and things of that nature well I guess let's talk about the method I suppose the consciousness is a trouble term I was about to ask is it possible that for all the heresies those people who are associated with the term phenomenology all share some kind of investment commitment to consciousness and then I thought of Heidegger and I said no it can't be if we're including Heidegger their consciousness is maybe not a scenic quinone of doing phenomenology although for SOT it was I guess from a loop on Tia was and Latinas and so forth right well I think Heidegger underplays consciousness and it's there implicit in his writings but he's interested in maybe we can get into this when we discuss Heidegger he's interested in what he will call the ontological structural foundations of consciousness so if consciousness is subjectivity he wants the subjectivity of subjectivity as he put in one place but yes I do think that consciousness awareness is part of it all and Heidegger as it were drops down a level if we can put it that way and adequately and tries to get to the ontological roots of how it is possible for us to be conscious good and so Tom going to the method now before we discuss the different aspects of the method very briefly again remind our our artists ours what was the methods goals it was to arrive at what you call apodictic certainty namely indubitable truth in a at a philosophical level which was not necessarily empirically referenced but yeah so the method was crucial in this whole operation right for getting to that goal the word that's most identified with method and whose role is reductions and I think the etymology of the word is the clue to understanding what a reduction is it's not reductionism reducing things to nothing but X or Y reduction in Latin ray do Caray means to lead back to so he wants to lead the gaze of the investigating phenomenologist back from a naive into a thematically reflective stance now that's pretty abstract let me see if we can can break that down he calls the naive attitude the natural attitude the German word is einstellung it could mean engagement the natural engagement that we have with things is in his view and Heidegger shares this view it a matter of just staring at things as if through a window so that your involvement with those things is not operative it's not noticed it's not and it's not brought to the fore and it means that the natural attitude has no regard for the correlation between what you're experiencing and the experiencing of it and what who Cyril wanted to do was get away from this naive idea that things are just out there now real he wants to find out how I disclosed them as what they are so it's correlation research let's see if we can get inside the correlation between the experienced and the experiencing without ever without ever doubting that things do exist out here that they're real but I just want to find out what my investment is in them and where that investment comes from and so on so from the natural attitude to this reflective phenomenological attitude by turning the gaze back on my right between the experiencing and the experienced and finding out how that is operative and that's a major move of host role he abstains from talking about things without regard for the person in gauged with them right he abstains from that in the Greek word for that is epic a to refrain or restrain the view and the gaze so that is often another term technical term used with reductions now once you're in the phenomenological attitude what you're focused on is the relatedness therefore between you and things I think that's often overlooked in popular notions of phenomenology where you just describe things as they show up the description has to be the description of an experience right so he calls these things once they are looked upon within the phenomenological attitude not things but phenomena things insofar as they're appearing and being constituted in their appearance by me in some way you can see a kind of a neo-kantian transcendental philosophy operative they're beginning with the ideas in 1913 so basically he's treating things only insofar as they are present to mind without ever climbing back into some closet inside the head consciousness is always exterior it's always outside it's there's no inside right and so therefore relatedness to the self is utterly essential to the description of phenomena which are experiences I have to remember that and after one last thing after the phenomenological reduction now that I'm talking about my relations with things the only questions for phenomenology and I argue for Heidegger and leve now San justo et cetera and Mello Ponte and also closer etc is meaning significance what does this thing have to do with me what is its relation to me so phenomenology is a science not of the being of things as it were naively out there but of their relation allottee their significance their meaning that self which is supposed to be constitutive of the meaning and of the phenomenon in it does it include the whole individual with body historicity situatedness and so forth or is it a Cartesian ego that is largely abstracted from the embodied world of time history matter and so forth is it a pure consciousness I think jean-paul Satre must have thought so because he was quite committed to the idea that consciousness is a the pulse wise and not it's a no thing it's it's something that can is radically alien or feels alienated from its body from its world not is it the same for host role that the self which the reduction the phenomenological reduction brings things back to is a disembodied self more the latter in the option that you gave is it a psychophysical self with a body or is it a pure consciousness it's more the latter although whose role still makes noise about still talks about the psychophysical self in fact the title of the book that you mentioned so kind of psychological as well as transcendental phenomenology so we can do a phenomenology of the interplay of body and mind but it's mostly the latter so he is interested in so certain kind of contemporary researchers in brain and neuroscience and and so forth they would not necessarily they would misunderstand Hodel if they take them to be their hero I would think so because they want to bring reduce things back to an actual physical organ called the brain which and then make consciousness and who knows the so-called hard problem in philosophy of consciousness today is how do you how do you distinguish or do you want to distinguish brain and mind but whose role meat would not would not want to go down that road and and locate in the in the actual organ of the brain the source for the constitution of meaning in the phenomenon and I think that as you mentioned earlier he began in the logical investigations with a critique of psychologism which wanted to reduce logical laws to psychological laws and and goodness knows we live in in a moment of rampant reductionism of this sort if not even worse because it's it's reduction to neurons and other things but anyway so this it's more the latter you said it's more of a self which is a pure consciousness and what does that consciousness do in order to correlate with its object right intention right good question the real correlation would be the nature of consciousness as intentional it was going back to what you just were saying it was a common phrase among the students of both Husserl and Heidegger when they both were teaching at Freiburg that Horrell is Plato and Heidegger is Aristotle you know the one as as it were dealing with a somewhat disembodied pure consciousness and Heidegger on the other hand talking about moods involvement in the world practical activity and such a things of that - your bangs hi-yah death anxiety all these things that rarely come up in and who so you know he has a brief passage in one of his 45,000 pages of manuscripts about hunger and is absolutely hilarious when he talks about what he thinks the phenomenon of hunger is you know intentionality I guess is what we have to deal with as the form of consciousness and intentionality is another one of the things like method that everyone else takes over following host role even if they don't follow his path intentionality is a recovery of an Aristotelian position intentionality is a feature of consciousness the feature of consciousness an intentionality means that consciousness always has an object so to go back to Aristotle through brentano in his book on the soul - book 3 chapter 8 he says in effect consciousness is somehow everything in greek ponta posts somehow it is everything but how so means we're in touch with everything through this consciousness that's what intentionality means it's usually described as directedness toward something but I like to think of it as immediate contact with something rather than having to take a path out of an inner self to some outer thing almost with the idea that then you'll bring it back captive to the closet of consciousness Sattler says famously the mind is not a stomach you don't feed data into it so that it will get metabolized into representations in your head which are a pure mystification good no time consciousness is spread out over everything it's painted on the world it has the world is in - put it in those terms it's the whole self in touch with things through their meanings you can't have physical contact with everything but it's the significance of it that you have the contact with Heidegger is very clear on this in his courses on Aristotle so being in touch with things in terms of their meaning their significance to me is what intentionality is about and again that's against the closet of the mind the mind as something inside the head etc you have to see that difference in order to understand although time and attention I can't resist in interjecting here example say at least content a character in jean-paul sartre novel nausea who he's in touch with things but what he finds that rather than them having meaning they were completely absurd so he is an immediate touch with a meaninglessness of things in an intentional way so until that experience of February 20th in the park where all of a sudden he says I see that it's precisely ones involvement with things that lends them their meaning and and so on but that's a that's a great example and a fabulous novel I think for philosophical purposes especially but once you say that intentionality is is immediate contact with things you have to add and this is what categorical intuition meant in horse roll you're in touch with the meaning of things you don't have to argue to the meaning of things it's an immediate experience content said we have only sensuous intuition we can touch spatio-temporal data right and he had denied any such intellectual intuition to the transcendental self who Cyril breaks with the Canton tradition and he says no we do have a categorical intuition an intuition of the essence of something the intuition of to use Heidegger's words the being of something I mean what something is what something is how it is you know on all of that and that's right now that's why I Heidegger was so excited about this doctrine that shows up in logical investigations the second book investigation six chapter six called categorical intuition where all of a sudden he sees a breakthrough we can now talk about what things really are in an intuitive way rather than having to deduce or go through representations and concepts in order to kind of decide what's something so categorical intuition is different from something like a Kantian notion of either categories a categorical imperative we were thinking you know not categorical imperative but you know for Kant there there are things out in the world that you need to access through intuition and then consciousness it imposes or superimposes you know the kind of meaning that they will have this object substance cause and effect and all this that whole apparatus of meaningfulness is in the side of consciousness or you're saying that for her Cyril there is a category you have an intuition of what the essence of a thing which is not consciousness is in the world see again we have to remember that the field in which he's operating is a correlation correlation so that what I'm really talking about is the experience of my relation to that thing and that's the essence that he feels that I'm really knowing it's not like an Aristotelian sort of staring at something long enough and abstracting from it it's non it's essential rather than non-essential properties even though sometimes it seems close to that he spoke of the intuition of essences a phase and Chou and that's a different thing than categorical into it's actually they're actually related I think categorical intuition becomes phase and Chao intuition of essences in ideas Volume one in 1913 it's not as clear in nineteen in 1901 when the first bought the second volume was published but Heidegger sees that connection right away and that becomes that's that's the excitement of Sato you can actually make philosophy out of description because we're describing not just sense contact but we're describing our whole relationship with it and what that thing is for me at the moment if I may go just a little to the side here Heidegger uses Heidegger talks about being and people think it means some white cloud that encompasses everything and keeps them going in the cosmos which is wrong Heidegger speaks of being which is sign in German as thus gave a leg a sign the sign at this very moment of something so that a hammer usually is for driving in nails but if you change the situation the being of the hammer can change and can become a missile a weapon or it could be used to weigh down papers in the wind or something like that so the being of something the meaning of something is changeable momentary and so on this looks like relativism and Heidegger said we have to confront that relativism you know that's the way it is so that the essence of something is really below whose rule doesn't fully recognize this it's a historical temporal momentary givenness of something to the interests and concerns of the moment see I think Heidegger would say what who Searle missed in all of this talk of intentionality is that all things come in context and the context influences the meaning of things context of carpentry makes this into this tool a hammer the context of a belligerency makes this tool a weapon and so on and so forth and where the fok have called for the suspension of context then in a certain sense context doesn't come up for who Searle he speaks of horizons within which we mean things but the horizon doesn't have that in my reading doesn't have that determining influence on the meaning of things it's just sort of the range of what you can see at a given moment whereas Heidegger would insist that first we know the context and that's why something could become a telephone right so Tom a question here about you you mentioned jean-paul Satz saying that philosophy could become purely descriptive descriptive phenomenology is hugely important for whose role as well phenomenology is begins at least at so the two-part question what is relationship between description and and the method namely reduction is is reduction of form description or conversely is description in the phenomenological method only a one stage of a process that then goes on to other parts of the method first of all the reduction is the entree to the description that's bracketing out things as seen apart from me so then finally now I'm in bed with things as it were and I can begin to discuss their relationship to me secondly descriptive operates at two levels if you will the description of just the thing as it appears seemingly you're just talking about the physical and so to us yeah but then there's also description of how that is present to me which is what the essence of something is I think who saw wasn't as clear on that as Heidegger who Cyril spoke of at least three reductions the terms are often mixed together and but the three that that I think you can isolate are a phenomenological reduction the adjective always tells you what you're reducing to you're reducing things to phenomena phenomenological reduction the so called eidetic or essence reduction the word a dose in Greek means essence so eidetic means reducing things to their essence then the transcendental reduction reducing the whole game back to the source of meaning the transcendental pure consciousness in who so and design in Heidegger and so on and so forth it's that second one the eidetic reduction where who Cyril follows Brentano and Aristotle and thematize --is what he calls a getting to the invariant so you vary something you look at a telephone you say what can I take away that would still leave it a telephone which means that I have to know what a telephone is in the first place if I'm already taking away things to know what a telephone is in itself but nonetheless this method of variation wants to get to the invariant essence of something now Heidegger substitutes for that but he calls transcendental Constitution which is how does that thing relate to me let's see what is essential to it so it's still descriptive right more descriptive I would argue then whose rules etiquette reduction is the howl of presence is the essence and that tells me though what of something how its present in this context at this moment to these people so before moving to Heidegger there what he might call that move in his own in his own terminology so for host role you have a phenomenological reduction which now you're in bed with things as you say and you can start describing them and perform this kind of variation using examples and to try to determine what the essence of something is by using a method whereby you keep taking away from a particular example of what a thing is take away color from the via take away and until you get to that point where if you remove one of these something else it's no longer the thing it is and then now you know what a thing is in its essence not as an empirical thing but you know the essence I think that's beautiful I can apply it to a literary work and have done so and so because everything has a certain amount of properties that you some of them you can take away the thing is still what it is at a certain point if you take away you know for from Dante's Vuitton over the fact that it's prosy met room form it's no longer the text it is and so you could say okay that's you're getting to the essence of the book okay so this is eidetic reduction I like that the transcendental reduction though is where a lot of people part company with a postural because there he becomes yeah platonic it becomes metaphysical it's this you have to commit to a transcendental ego which is the same old story of Western metaphysics isn't it yeah that would that was definitely the break beginning with Heidegger on that what is a transcendental ego in hoster oh that's the class it's a very very good question Bert Hopkins who's real scholar has written a whole essay on this just describing what it's not but nobody believes all of what it's not you know he tries to make it into kind of an existential subject which it isn't transcendental has many many different meanings and the meaning that whose role is engaged with is that which gives meaning to thing right the bottom line for giving meaning that which transcends everything else and is the source of meaning for something now mu Tottie's mu tondee's changing things appropriately we can say that there is a transcendental reduction in Heidegger to the source of meaning right and he'll find that in the collusion of human being with the meaning process what he calls the being process right well there's where meaning arises and there's a been a whole movement beginning with Steven Crowell and other scholars and I consider myself part of that in Heidegger to read him as a transcendental philosopher at that level not the idea of transcending all bodily and natural facts as it were in the fashion of who Cyril who in ideas vol 1 says even if the world goes away the transcendental ego is still present and will leave Horrell to try and describe and define what he means by all of that it's been a quite a puzzle for scholars since he wrote that but that's how platonic he would get as it were but no the transcendental giver of meaning if you will becomes the subject of Heidegger and all of the the rest not always under those terms you know Heidegger will sort of avoid that term now back on the eidetic reduction the one the one thing that doesn't seem to work with an eidetic reduction is how would I know that by taking away this last quality I no longer have a tree or the Vita Nuova so you must have some pre knowledge of what the Vita Nuova was so as you say there's the last straw now it's no longer the Vita Nuova and so Heidegger comes in with his pre knowledge pre having of the object pre understanding of the meaning of it which comes with this context you know what's the role on the other hand would say we do have an intuition of essences because we're but we just have access to so we know it and now it's just a question of knowing what we already know yeah we're using the method in order to get to those essences right uh in any case all of this goes back to your question about description and is it one stage and so on there's two elements of description which really interview interlink with each other description of the thing is it's showing-up but in doing that you're describing how it is present to me now dossier viola designed the current momentary meaning or essence of this thing so talking now about Heidegger let's talk a little bit about his most illustrious student I'm going to claim uncontroversially that Heidegger was for maybe not that uncontroversially but Heidegger goes to study with whose role becomes whose roles favor student dedicates his being in time to host role and was teaching at the same time as you as you mentioned at the University of Freiburg and yet even while he's teaching even before publishing being in time the students in those who are taking both of their seminars knew that the guy the younger one was doing something quite radical and different from you know the master so what was going on what was heidegger's on his debt on the one hand to his role and then the way in which he he became one of the heretics master Herod yeah the the chief disciple becomes the heretic in chief you know well first of all a little bit about their history it was actually who Cyril came to Heidegger in a certain sense Heidegger was a graduate student and who Cyril came to teach at Freiburg and then they had a relationship by correspondence only during World War one and who so became enamored of this of the the letters that Heidegger was writing about the force of phenomenology and the passion of it and so on and so forth so he adopted him as his assistant and gave him teaching courses lectures and seminars but Heidegger was only a lecturer at that time an unpaid lecturer HOSA would give him money and he would collect some money from his students but he was definitely the minor figure nonetheless whorls said to him in those years up till 1924 you and I are phenomenology imagine so Heidegger then goes off to Marburg some hundred miles couple hundred miles away and in that separation from the master he finally breaks out and can say in effect what he didn't say in front of the master in Freiburg eventually he'll come back in horrible will with some hesitation appoint him his successor and get him that job but um Heidegger first of all was only interested in the logical investigations he was not interested and the philosophy is rigorous science which is an introduction to that he was not interested in the ideas Volume one or in the Cartesian meditations because for him that was moving too much in the direction of neo-kantian ISM and Cartesian is a subjectivity subjectivity right without getting to the subjectivity of subjectivity which is what he wanted so everything he not only was he only interested in the early host role secondly he brought two who Searle a very well established and and radical understanding of Aristotle I was able to somehow combine a phenomenological method with Aristotle and that in a sense I still think is the basic core of Heidegger's work Aristotle phenomenologist and then taken forward as it were so every one of the main doctrines that Horrell that he thought Heidegger thought who Cyril had come up with in the logical investigations he changed so instead of intentionality as a form as a aspect or the essence of consciousness he said intentionality is the essence of the whole human being right down to our very being now he gave it a different name he called it for a while transcendence and here's what that really means for him human being is code word for human being is being in the world now the world doesn't mean the spatio-temporal world it means the world of meanings right so you say somebody lives in a different world from me that means they have a different set of meanings for the things that we look at so for him a world was meaningful and he says that in the German Bedoya Tom Kyte so by being in the world he meant human being as a priority for we even get to consciousness is inevitably bound up with meaning the human being is I'll say primal hermeneutical but as I say cannot meet anything that it can't make sense of has to make sense of everything so intentionality becomes not just my awareness of thing becomes existential it becomes existential in his sense of the term existential meaning having to do with the very existence of a thing right existential in that sense essential gets used in different term in different ways by later followers that Heidegger refused the meaning of but extension means structural in this case here straw but it also means it because you said that if you take Aristotle and phenomenology and you put them together way you have Heidegger dude that's the essence of Heidegger but the great excitement around being in time was that it it it uses an existentialist kind of structure to use your word where he's talking about mood he's talking about guilt he's talking about being unto death talking about the the in authenticity of the day selfie and all these kinds of things where it's it's really seems like the whole person rather than just you know Aristotle with a little bit of an you know viscerally in phenomenology so the whole thing is transcendent so it can be a world of meanings but that world of meanings doesn't have to be distinct from the actual world that we share in common when we might live in different worlds but but we might bump into the same chair when I write leaving the office now right right you've put your finger on what I think is a major defect in heidecker's being in time he begins by making a distinction between the structural and the personal your human nature if I can use that term and what you do every day right and he calls the one existential with an al existence II all we say in German and the other the personally calls existense e l now this isn't this is a almost oh it looks like wordplay but it's actually a very important distinction trouble is he doesn't maintain that as you pointed out throughout the book and he often blends the two and you're not sure whether he's talking about the personal or the structural when he's describing onst for example he's describing a personal experience that you have that have put you in touch with your existential structure as but that's not our Tom we talked about this in our previous show on Hydra that structure is dynamic and it's grounded in temporality human temporalities would you say that for Heidegger who surles intention what whose role intended by intentionality becomes Grosso modo temporality and Heidegger it does the only problem is with that is that Heidegger says later and many many times oh by the way when I was talking about temporality I really meant the openness the world the clearing he actually says that I meant the openness of a world in which things appear but that openness is predicated on the the intrinsic dynamic of example of a self-transcending finitude of designs you know and the way he does that is he says if you look at if you look at the the traditional God he's perfectly self coincident needs nothing outside of himself itself herself what are you going to say right but the human being by being stretched into possibility is open that openness is where the game of meaning is played and you think that's in in sympathy with whorls get back to the things themselves let's get back to this correlation of the self and and for not and and things that that would be the phenomenon everything that as I say everything he picks up from Husserl he changes and so who Cyril used the plural get to the things themselves Heidegger says he uses the singular sources AHA Zeb's get to the real issue underlying all of this which for him is bound up with that would take us another hour to go into this the question of being and so on and so forth but yet he also uses that same method Heidegger uses a phenomenological reduction but it's too them to the being of things as he says and so on and so forth but what would be the future of all of this we were talking about earlier you know in a sense phenomenology has just become another another stock-in-trade of philosophy today doesn't have that passionate excitement it does when people use it as you do and as I try to do in the classroom maybe but in effect there's no more people doing creative phenomenological work in within philosophy it's become the the the locus of reflection by other philosophers doing their philosophy by philosophizing about who is right or about Heidegger so I don't know enough about the the German afterlife of phenomenology but I do know that France was particularly hospitable to Husserl's part brand of it because you know daddy's now writes his first book I got an office first or a second but - no men is his analysis of logical investigations the origin of geometry or in the right sub-tree there's Jean Paul sat as you mentioned living as there's a Madeon of course you're on T so Mike I guess one concluding question would be had Heidegger not existed as you know one of the illustrious disciple one-time disciple of who Cyril would whorls phenomenology have had the same sort of importance for at least this group of French thinkers that were so important in that we can only a century we can only guess I mean this is about a futuristic as it were it's true that Saturn in the 30s picks up on hotel he is a looser lien but then he during concentration camp or prisoner of war camp II reads Heidegger and all of a sudden is no longer a who's early and and I don't think that you could have had existentialism obviously without that twist that turned in sattva and notice that Derrida even though he writes on who Searle is really a high to Gary and totally says he's standing on Heidegger's shoulders maybe punked in merleau-ponty is the one professor Lee and I would say and one may be the one pure descriptive phenomenologist he's brilliant phenomenology of perception and so on but I think Heidegger really set the heresies in on their paths as it were without him phenomenology wouldn't have existed as long as it does as well I have to say that I am I'm not regretful that Heidegger introduced that kind of heresy into it because it it liven things up a great deal and opened up the possibility for creative misunderstandings and as I mentioned in my opening I'm the first one to be guilty of a creative misunderstanding I would say one last thing if I could that you can't understand how to here without phenomenology people have tried to do that by doing ontology only but that's the crooks that's the core and what and that's really only now beginning to come out into the literature Heidegger as a phenomenologist that's great Tom another very valuable show from our guest professor Thomas Sheehan from the Department of Religious Studies here at Stanford have a good one tom we will look forward having you back in the future thank you

Channel: Philosophy Overdose

Views: 59,159

Rating: 4.8640094 out of 5

Keywords: Philosophy, Husserl, Phenomenology, Intentionality, Heidegger, Existentialism, History of Philosophy, Consciousness, Edmund Husserl, Martin Heidegger, Continental Philosophy, Merleau-Ponty, Idealism, Transcendental Ego, Subject-Object, Epoché, Transcendental Reduction, Phenomenon, Experience, Lifeworld, Sartre, Being and Time

Id: TKFEboZSlN4

Length: 56min 21sec (3381 seconds)

Published: Wed Dec 21 2016