Phenomenology (In Our Time)

this is the BBC this podcast is supported by advertising outside the UK thank you for downloading this episode of in our time for more details about in our time and for our Terms of Use please go to BBC co dot uk' slash radio for I hope you enjoy the program hello quote back to the things themselves on Kurt this might not sound like much of a battle cry but it's a rallying call of a movement that challenged a long philosophical tradition and changed forever the way some people think we think about what is meant what it means to be human we'll be talking about phenomenology developed by the German philosopher Edmund Husserl at the start of the 20th century phenomenology began as a response to a feeling of crisis in the natural sciences but it soon developed into a powerful method in its own right used to expose and challenge the presumptions of Western intellectual life since Descartes 1596 to 1650 also its proponents thought phenomenology had a profound influence on the course of European philosophy it shaped the works of writers like Martin Heidegger jean-paul Sartre Simone de Beauvoir and it's been extremely versatile phenomenologist have written on many subjects from the foundations of mathematics to the difference between fear and anxiety with me to discuss phenomenology our salmon Glendinning professor of European philosophy in the European Institute at the London School of Economics Joanna Hodge professor of philosophy at Manchester Metropolitan University and Stephen Mull hall professor philosophy and tutor new college at the University of Oxford Stephen mill hall can you give us a brief sketch of the charity what is phenomenology and what sets it apart from other stars our philosophy okay well I I think what unifies the tradition of phenomenology is not so much agreement on doctrines or theories but on a shared preoccupation and a shared conception of method and one way of thinking about the preoccupation is that phenomenologist SAR fascinated and struck by the fact that we grasp and comprehend all of the various entities objects activities and events that the world throws at us in the course of our everyday experience of it more specifically that the world and all things in it present themselves to us in the course of that experience and we understand them we make sense of them they're intelligible to us so what they're interested in is the way that reality manifests itself to ordinary human subjects in that sense it's a version of a very general question that philosophers have been interested in for a very long time it's the relationship between how things appear to us to be and the reality of those things now in modern philosophy that relationship between appearance and reality has tended to generate a certain kind of skeptical anxiety because philosophers worry about the ways in which appearances might mislead us might represent reality as being in some way other than it is or may be mislead us into thinking that there is an independent real world when there isn't in fact any such thing but what interests the phenomenologist is the fact that even when the appearances of the world the appearances of reality misrepresent the way things really are they nevertheless present things as being in a particular way and what the phenomenologist is interested in trying to understand is how is it so much as possible for appearances to be appearances of apparently real objects activities and events I use the phrase back to the things themselves why does that phrase use and what does it mean as far as phenomenologist are concerned well that phrase is one attempt to summarize their methodological assumptions and the thought is that if you want to understand what it is that makes it possible for appearances to be all reality to present reality you have to understand what you might think of as the content of those appearances but since this is the kind of field or medium within which we live in an ordinary everyday way the thought is that we can understand what makes appearances the kinds of things they are by a careful descriptive elucidation of the underlying structure of those phenomena so the idea is that you don't need to build a complicated theory or invoke entities and objects that live the appearance is in order to account for their ability to convey reality to us what you need to do is to pay extremely careful attention to what's really going on when you experience real things when they present themselves to you in your experience and one one aspect of that or the key aspect of life of a cell was the this notion of intentionality can you give us a well I can try it's it's intentionality was an issue that was actually very much discussed in the medieval period but it was revived in the modern period pretty by Franz Brentano and on brentano's account of the matter intentionality was something he regarded as the mark of the mental a kind of defining feature of conscious States part of what made them the kinds of things they are and what intentionality means here is not something to do with the kinds of intentions you carry out in action it has to do with the idea that states of consciousness have a feature of aboutness to them they're directed in a particular way so when you have a thought it's always a thought of something in particular when you have a perception it's a perception of something in particular a tree or a chair or a table when you have an emotion like anger it's always anger about something the bus being late or something of that kind and it's that directedness that phenomenologist SAR trying to capture when they talk about intentionality they're interested in what they call the intentional object of the experience the conscious state what it's directed towards what its content is Joanna Hodge the first major phenomenologist was Edmond herself can you tell us what who he was and what his motive was but more importantly what his motive was for developing this philosophy Edmund Russell his dates 1856 to 1938 to give us a sense of the gap between him and Descartes and his context is very much that of a certain crisis and transformation in the sciences at the beginning of the 20th century and he said that it's going to be useful and necessary to have a transformed account of what the philosophical task is and to set up a new account of the relation between philosophy and science which makes him in some sense is a strong heir to Descartes who had the same thought but conducted the enquiry in a rather different manner and so for her style one of the primary objectives of his inquiries is to set out very carefully a distinction between what he calls a phenomenological psychology and what he calls a phenomenological description so for him the distance between the descriptions produced by psychology and the descriptions produced by philosophy are to be set out in therefore force and clarity and distinctness by this project of a phenomenological inquiry which he he concedes this as a collective almost a scientific program with a group working on the program so that it's not simply a question of a the image of the philosopher sitting in the armchair it's a collective encounter where various individual contributors to the project a phenomenological description meet discuss and ascertain whether their results are heading in the same direction so that sense of it being a modern project and a new way of setting up a relation to science borrowing the notion of a scientific group research culture but heading off in the direction of distinguishing strongly between the philosophical concerns with classical concerns with meaning and truth and the possibility of access to the real verses whatever the concerns of psychology might be thought to be how did you use the idea intentionality in the area mathematics which seems to be a really starting point I think I would perhaps move the question around a bit and suggest that the thought of intentionality arises in order to deal with various problems he's encountered in the attempt to develop a philosophy of arithmetic his first publication in 1890 as part of his doctoral thesis in which he's been concerned with the meaning of number which is a very long-standing concern with philosophers and indeed brings hustle into close contact with two of his important contemporaries Prager and Russell with whom he had disagreements of interesting kinds but the concern about the status of arithmetic India status of numbers had intensified as a result of developments in mathematics in the 19th century so that's where he starts but as a result of the reflections that he and others engage in he then moves back in the direction of thinking that a challenge to any psychologists ik accounts of the meaning of number must be undertaken and that there will be some other form of access to meaningfulness in relation to number and indeed all other domains of meaningfulness in ways that Stephen has just sketched out some England any one of my cells most important ideas well we've got intention ality and we have epoch a or bracketing is sometimes known how does people K work and how do they work together intention ality unique okay it's important to consider in this context that this epic a which I'm going to describe is for hersel something that belongs to the method of phenomenology and so if you're going to conduct phenomenological inquiries properly so that one could investigate these intentional objects that Stephen was describing you've got to first conduct something equals an air pocket and and phenomenologist after him we're gonna disagree but well in this communal enterprise that Joanna's talking about we're all going to be doing this first so what are we going to be doing well this term epoch a comes from Greek philosophy and specifically the skeptics who thought that the fok was a suspension of judgment that took place when he saw that there were as good reasons against a viewers for it now her cells not a skeptic but he he uses it in a related way which is a kind of suspending of normality and the normality that he has in view there is what he calls the natural attitude in the natural attitude we just saw so simply immersed in our lives we are engaged with things as existing things there's a cup of your table in your kitchen there's a steering wheel in your hand if you're driving you there's a car in front of you so you don't have watch out for that too but these this everyday way of being in in the natural attitude bears with it just a presumption of existence now in the air poker it's not going to raise a doubt about the existence of these things but it's gonna as you say bracket it or put it out of play why did you want to do that well what he wants to do by putting it out of play he wants to bring you back to the what what we can now call perhaps the intentional field of experience things as unimportant well it's a stream of experiencing life that is irreducibly related to me and to any me as an experiencing subject why do you want to get there in the first place well partly because what he wants to do in in holding off from the natural attitude is to see the way in which these objects of experience in everyday life of glasses steering wheels and other cars and all these things are constituted as the things they are within the the field of subjective experience so it's a the the glass on the table the steering wheel in your hands are constituted as the things they are within this subjective field rather than thinking with simply encountering things as they are there's a subjectivity that routes the whole structure of objectivity of our everyday experience does this meld into what he later described us the idea of the life world yeah now how does he do that well it was it was a later development and in fact it will arrive at the same place in a certain way here what he really wants to distance us from is not so much the natural attitude although there'll be something of that in it too but he wants to distance us from a scientific conception of the world what we might call the objective world of science so science belongs inside the natural attitude it's looking positively at the structure of objectivity in its material formation and if we were looking around ourselves now you know we have this familiar world the the world that Stephen noted is sort of just manifest in it in our everyday lives where there are tables and chairs and other people and work sort of stuff science seems to be able to provide a more fundamental account of that reality in its objectivity and hersel went with the idea of a life world as opposed to an objective world wants to say look in in our in our lives as subjects in the world we don't inhabit an objective world of science we inhabit a world of meaning a world where things make sense to us matter to us have significance and so he wants to displace a conception of what it is to be in a world away from the scientific conception of objectivity towards this much more lived I immersive idea of a life world which will be as much cultural and historical as it is perhaps informed by science Stephen Mulhall it comes up with us and what impact does it do I said in the introduction which comes from all your notes and from reading around let you change things and so on can you just briskly say how did you change people around the cross water and other things have changed because of this publication and we must love it that oh we are challenged or whatever what happened well what it what it primarily challenges is a certain assumption of naturalism in the context of philosophy and philosophical method because the the field of significance or sense that is disclosed by doing the Brak operation that Simon was explaining is one which in a certain sense is a condition for the possibility of engaging in a natural way with with real objects and also it's a condition for the possibility of a natural scientific investigation of the world because unless we were capable of grasping and apprehending reality as a meaningful field of objects activities phenomena of various kinds then we couldn't go on and study them with all of the very productive resources of Natural Science but there is a tendency and it's a recurring strain in philosophical thinking to believe that once we've engaged in the natural scientific project then the conceptual resources that are deployed in that project will be enough to account for everything of significance in human life and what phenomenology is as it were staking its claim on is the idea that that simply isn't going to turn out to be possible that these fields of meaning and significance are not the kinds of things that we can properly understand that we restrict ourselves to an idea of an objective world which is understood purely in terms of matter in motion Hideyo went to herself to be a pupil and came out as in a sense an opponent when he argued against much of what her soul had done and the fundament what did he say we were at the stage already at the very beginning where we're not adding to a project one of the curious things about this that every major think if it comes up contradicts the previous one I think that contradicts herself Sartre comes in it doesn't know whether he's Sarah honey vodka and then Merlin so let's just one at a time what did Heidegger bring to the table Heidegger actually agreed with a great deal of what you saw was doing but there was an absolutely central point of disagreement and that was to do with the conception of the subject that who so claimed to have disclosed by means of his reduction his epic a who sell thought that there was something he called transcendental subjectivity and that was the aspect of consciousness that was in volved in the meaning constituting process that Simon talked about a few minutes ago that was what was helping to constitute the intentional field of meaningful objects Heidegger's primary criticism of Rousseau is that he doesn't sufficiently reflect phenomenologically on the distinctive kind of being of consciousness of the human subject Heidegger in effect says that there's a Cartesian aspect to who sells thinking in this respect you know Descartes is famously associated with the cogito argument I think therefore I am and what Heidegger says about who so is that who sell doesn't sufficiently elucidate the I am in that formulation he doesn't think hard enough about what might be distinctive about the way in which consciousness discloses itself to us and inhabits the real world of which it's apart Heidegger says in his main work being in time that he wants returned philosophy to its roots in ancient Greece and rediscover the question of the meaning of being right over to you the claim is an interesting one because it has a double direction it's got a direction against her soul because Heidegger supposes that what's gone missing in the hasari and construction of phenomenology as an account of the unifying nature of being which underlies all the regional ontology is that her soul and his pupils had been so carefully outlining so while it's not explicitly stated in being in time that the question of the meaning of being has also gone missing in her soul it's pretty clear that that is something to which Martin Heidegger was committed and therefore one of the strands of his divergence from her cell and one of his criticisms of herself that the question of meaning arises for herself but not the question of the meaning of being now the way what do you understand by the meaning of being a listener sir I got it's father again it's question that's gone missing at the beginning of the history of philosophy oh dear according to high to get such that in the meantime ever since either Aristotle or Plato or possibly even since the pre-socratics the primary originally insight which gets philosophy going in the first place which is what is there or why is there something rather than nothing or how do we have a conception of truth that those questions while initially raised and therefore a question of the meaning of being for being would give us an answer to those questions that that primary moment goes missing in a whole series of failed attempts to answer the individuating questions instead of addressing oneself to the wonder of their being anything at all so the key here is to notice that for Heidegger in a sense there is never going to be a answer a proper answer or even an address to the question of the meaning of being because that's the moment at which the thinking process gets started and it's always receding away from you as you start doing your analysis and producing your answer to your question well that was very rounded and for me extremely helpful so I mean instead of human beings Heidegger talks about design what does he mean by that and why does he use this particular word well it's a it's a great feature of all his writing that and probably a stumbling block for a lot of readers that instead of when he's talking about what we might say the entity that we are he doesn't use this term human being or any other sort of existing label but turns to the word for existence in German das eine and he said in the 1920s when he was first pushing in this direction that he chose it primarily because it's a neutral term and what he means there is that he wants to try to disentangle an inquiry to the entity that we are whatever that is to disentangle it from previous understandings which he thinks have kind of led us astray in Australia well specifically he characterizes the roots of our misunderstanding of ourselves in in two particular sources now it's very interesting he gives these two because they're both very European so his whole attention is to a European way of thinking rooted he says in Greek antiquity where we get a conception of ourselves as the rational animal and Christianity where we get a conception of ourselves as made in the image of God of moving transcending towards God now these conceptions he thinks of as anthropologically they think of us primarily as man to be capital m man and then characterized man as having some distinctive feature now with his so for example being rational or speaking or thinking or being made in the image of God or whatever it is so when he takes the term dar sign what he's trying to is suspend all that it is a kind of suspensive moment at again where we can start afresh think with a neutral term about the entity that we are and the key that he gives us to understanding the who that we are whatever that is is related to straightforwardly related to what Joanna has been talking about in the question of being but he says what we are is the being that is at all only in virtue of having an understanding of being so he's going to give us a distinctive characteristic just like the old stories of man but here instead of being an anthropological conception starting with the presence say of a created thing or an animal of a certain kind we're gonna begin with being and he says that the distinctive characteristic of docile fat without which it would not be dar sign that is we would not be who we are is this understanding of being and we he said of that entity which we are our being is an issue for us can I come to you Stephen Shappell halt because another important idea for Heidegger so I understand it is being in the world now is that the same as the idea that Simon's been talking about it different if it's different how is it different well the way being in time hanukkah's major early work is structured it is that an initial fairly minimal characterization of the human way of being is progressively unfolded and elaborated upon I'm one of the first stages in which had ago starts to add content to the idea of dar sign as a way of picking out the human manner of being is to say that dar sign is being in the world and I think one way of what does that mean you're going to tell it yeah one way of understanding that is to think about it is his way of talking about intention ality really that he's he accepts from who so the idea that human beings are fundamentally open to reality reality manifests itself to them in a variety of ways and in ways which are unified in various ways and he wants to understand how it's possible for that to be the case and what he's in effect arguing in his analysis of being in the world is that one needs a much broader context within which intentional openness to reality is rendered possible if one's going to understand what intention ality really is who Searle he thought had a kind of more isolated understanding of that relationship it's transcendental subjectivity constituting this field of meaning or significance what Heidegger does is suggest that if we if we really want to understand what that field of significance is we have to recognize that our ability to understand objects as the real specific kinds of things they are depends upon a much broader structure of other objects of other people and in particular culturally specific assignments of meaning or significance to the field within which those objects show up so when Hardy was talking about the world when he says that - I is being in the world he doesn't mean that where one object in totality of objects what he means is that the very possibility of us apprehending objects as objects that possibility depends upon a much broader horizon of significance that we contribute to and that reality as it were presents itself through its in a certain way certainly from who sells point of view this notion of the world was at least analogous to what you sold was trying to pick out by the life world so now we're talking about a historically culturally socially specific horizon within which that apparently isolated relation between comprehending subjects and objects comprehended has to be located if it's going to be properly understood and Jonah Jonah Hodge he just behind a good discusses anxiety and being in time how does anxiety fit in it's just the extension to cultural areas that I was talking about anxiety plays a really key role in the developing phenomenology that Heidegger conducts and being in time and he doesn't affect propose to us a phenomenology of anxiety in which we are invited to follow through the stages of distinguishing between fear of a given object or a given occasion where you know exactly what you're feeling intimidated by and a state in which all connectedness to any entities states of affairs events in the world has gone missing and so what arrives in the full experience of anxiety as analyzed in the HUD Irian phenomenology is the structural world as that which should be providing a sense of meaning orientation individuation identification but those connections have dropped away and there is just the panic-stricken not knowing who what where any of those orienting features of the we're in which one might insert oneself into a set of given connectivity's and referential x' so the phenomenology of anxiety happens in Division one of being in time and then he plays it again in Division two having suggested that world drops out in Division one he suggests that the connectedness to a sense of self arrives when he replays this phenomenology and Division two so one of the peculiar things about being in time is the way that you get an incomplete phenomenology in Division one which is then supposedly rehearse reiterated and to be brought to some fuller account of both what the status of does I might be and it's connection to being but it's perhaps important to remark that being in time was a text that was not published complete and was never completed which may take us onto our next set of discussions timing reading he also discusses Heidegger also because it assigns relationship with others other people seem to be a particular problem for phenomenology that's right if we can track that by going back to the natural attitude that we all begin with as it were and they're not only do we have concrete immersive relations with things objects and so on but also with other people I mean it's just absolutely part of of our everyday experience and it's all well and good to speak about the field within which the structure of objectivity is constituted in an intentional way when we talk about objects but when we're talking about others we can't have a account which says that you know first of all is the constitution of the body and of another subjectivity right there somewhere in this there's a sort of limit to what phenomenology might hope to achieve if we just look at the first two are these other people yes it can be I mean they all try so in in hustle he he takes his point of departure on the living organism that we're presented with and tries to think how through some kind of an analogy with my own living organism and it's embodied the subjectivity in bodies this would be replicated in in the other so we get the idea of an alter-ego through that relation to a living body but I think Heidegger and certainly a lot of other people would think that it's as soon as you've tried to build up a bridge between you and the other in this kind of an illogical way the others going to always be subject to doubt we'll never really know if the other is another at all we just said that were making some leap into the dark here now Heidegger tries to overcome this in a way that Sartre called barbaric because he he he simply defines the problem away in Heidegger this being in the world that Stephen was describing is being with others so full stop there is no problem you know if you are dar sign if you have being in the world as your basic state then you have being with others as as part of your structure too and so he just defines it away but a lot of people would say that that that's simply unacceptable you can't just define the problem away well you to his disart when this argument moves from the Germans to the French very much so and there's a important lecture given by her cell in 1929 as I understand it in Paris which sets off such on the scent of this and he becomes uh sorry about this he becomes a big player Steven over to you what a start to bring well um a lot of people think that Sartre constitutes a kind of regression in the tradition because he looks and sounds and reads in a much more Cartesian way than Heidegger ever managers to do I think that's probably unfair to some extent what I really like about such as intervention in this tradition is the emphasis he puts on negativity on conflict on absence on non-self identity and so and one way of connecting that emphasis to the issues we've been talking about so far this morning is that Sartre account of the subject of the kind of being who's capable of understanding the world around him is one which introduces a gap within that subject so in in de cartes understanding of subjectivity consciousness and self-consciousness come together as part of the same package if you're perceiving an object then you're necessarily simultaneously aware of perceiving that object that's just part of what it is to be a conscious entity what's our argues is that if you take intentionality seriously as the mark of the mental that identity between consciousness and self-consciousness simply cannot be true because ask yourself what's the intentional object of a perception of a glass of water while it's the glass of water what's the intentional object of an awareness of perceiving the glass of water well it's the perceptual state it's not the glass of water so we have two different intentional objects could that be called self consciousness the second one would be the self control yeah what sort of would call reflecting on the perception but since it has an indifferent intentional object it must by definition be a different state of consciousness so when you make the transition from being in the first state of consciousness to the reflective state of consciousness you introduce a gap within subjectivity so negativity or negation becomes partially definitive of what it is to be a subject in such as account and that non self identity just radiates out into every other aspect of his phenomenological account of what you might call the life world this phenomenon phenomenology accord with his existentialism well he wouldn't see any particular inconsistency in that although how happy he would be with those various labels is another another matter the existentialist conception of human being is one that many people see in Harding are already and so one could think of Sartre is expanding or elaborating upon that but in effect what Sartre is saying is a careful phenomenological description of human subjectivity shows that freedom is a constitutive aspect of it it's part of its essence and in fact the non self identity I was talking about the internal gap between the perceiving subject and the reflecting subject is in fact what freedom consistent if you did if you were perfectly identical with yourself if you coincided with yourself then there wouldn't be the kind of freedom that human beings exercise because our freedom tends to be something that we exercise in order to realize a possibility of some kind but that possibility is something that we are not yet it's something that we want to become but isn't something that we are so freedom requires that subjectivity is constantly trying to close a gap between where it wants to be and where it currently is Jonah hood Simone de Beauvoir made particular use of phenomenology and according to what you write about it she was very effectively in her use of it could you develop that yes indeed famously in the second sex in 1949 she takes an intermediary figure to task for a failure adequately think through a connection between temporalities and other nurse so in this famous footnote she addresses Emmanuel Levinas through whom South had become aware of her cells writings and indeed Emmanuel Levinas produced the translation into French of her cells our Cartesian meditations which arose out of the Paris lecture that you mentioned so that in 1931 we have in French a version of her cells Cartesian meditations but not in German and this is the way in which her cell arrives in the French context so Simone de Beauvoir who appears to have read everything had already been reading legen a C's version of her cell which comes out in his monograph on her sales theory of intuition perhaps as early as the early 30s but when in 1949 she comes to write the second sex interestingly prompted by their friend maurice merleau-ponty she sets Levinas up as one of the characteristic figures in the history of philosophy who have for some reason thought it proper to identify the feminine or possibly the female as the citing which is that kind of Adonis from the rational subject position that Simon was talking about so the second sex famously combines this very subtle appreciation both phenomenology and of its history with a whole series of other disciplinary concerns with sociology with history and recently the new translation of Simone de Beauvoir's second sex has made it much clearer just how strongly her appreciation of the transitions within phenomenology as much as the doctrines of phenomenology permit her to make the moves that she makes as well as at the same time criticizing a certain shall we say Andrew centrism in the history of philosophy the second sex being meant ironically or possibly satirically why should I think of myself as the member of the second sex roughly speaking would be a way of glossing the title the the more people talk about the smell of Ponty and so on why don't we stick with sergeant Simone de Beauvoir a lot of Alice doesn't know about them there's much time left so let's just move on you want to take up the point Simon that John is remaking well I think when if we're going back to Sartre I mean there's a there's a great sort of question about who who is to the better more rigorous an interesting thinker and I'm not going to get involved in that at all but here I think both of them are going to be committed to ideas of freedom some way and and of having this idea that you get in in Heidegger that you have your being to be that you don't have some already given nature which as it were determines everything about you but that you your being means something to you and obviously if it's historically located in the way Stephen was talking about these these are meanings which you don't choose so I've in fact a murder of Ponte who would perhaps not going to talk about said that we're condemned to meaning so you have this sort of condition of a meaningful life a situatedness and yet nevertheless this potential for self transformation and I think Sartre is key contribution will be to opening up this idea of human freedom one interesting contrast is the way in which they set up the question of ethics and Simone de Beauvoir has this text called the ethics of ambiguity which you don't have to read too much between the lines to see this is a taking up a certain distance from the notion of absurdity and ethics of absurdity to which such is supposed to be committed whether he is or not of course would be another question so one way in which to develop a difference between their responses to the interconnections between phenomenology existentialism ethics politics is to pursue the difference between a notion of absurdity and a notion of ambiguity what's the state very briefly Steven I'm sorry about this how is minimum long as you considered by philosophers today well I think it's there are certainly plenty of work being done under that label or a myth a whole range of authors particularly in the French tradition in the light parts of the 20th century and up into the early 21st where work is being is being done it has the same kind of eccentric relation to the mainstream that's something like ordinary language philosophy has to the mainstream of analytic philosophy because of its methodological objection to theorizing and naturalism well I'm sorry but we have to end our thank you to Stephen Mull Hall John Hodge salmon and inning louboutin but few Sydney's ancient Greek historian thank you very much for listening and the in our time podcast gets some extra time now with a few minutes of bonus material from Melvin and his guests all the stuff that you I know you're gonna say which a pity we didn't talk about ex-wife III think it would have been very interesting to have been able to talk about loving us I think one of the things that Joanna said about him in passing was that he was the person through whom phenomenology goes to France and so the way in which he first encounters Cassell and Heidegger is really profoundly important for the way in which it gets taken up in France so that's one important thing that he's the via it's also the case that he takes up the connection between time and other nurse and thereby he takes up transforms and reverses the direction of intentionality so it's a truly radical rewriting of phenomenology yeah he introduces this notion of alterity whereby instead of consciousness being consciousness of something the something is the initial moment which draws our attention and the whole vector is reverse such that the mysterious other calls me into being in some mode or other as provoked not to provoke oh I think that's something else as well that just as Heidegger seems to define the problem of the other away in talking about the MIT sign I think leaveners defines the problem in by talking about the other as as essentially beyond phenomenality and so beyond phenomenal you know I think that's fascinating too yeah I don't think hard-to-get defines the problem of the other away because the strategy the structures the structures of meaning and significance that turn out to be the foundation of being in the world inherently public intersubjective available in principle to more than one person so when so that the way Heidegger manages the transition from saying da son is being in the world to saying da sign is being with being with other da sign is by pointing out that the kind of world we inhabit is an inherently into subjective one that objects when they manifest themselves to us as real and available for use for example or in principle available for anybody to use and the structures of meaning or significance that make it possible for them to present themselves to us are socially culturally specific but socially comes the same idea you've got a kind of idea of into subjectivity from the start but that doesn't mean they're giving good accounts of the encounter with the other person that's all those things there's a very important difference between the way which hersel sets up the account of the other is always going to be structurally like me and the way in which Heidegger supposes that in the first instance design is an anonymous mode of being in a current cultural practice and only as a result of going through the phenomenological procedures do we arrive at a sense of identity so the structure of being in time is really interesting because he starts by saying that those liners are being in then he reveals by doing the phenomenology on world that it is a being weird that I cannot make sense of anything unless somebody will refract back at me whether it's making sense or not and we gradually arrive at the better account so we move beyond our initial stupidities to something a bit well lizard and then he has this really interesting third notion ever being towards a directed 'no switch invokes the future in which we can make things other than they now are and so this notion of another nurse as the other of the world the other of the other person and the other of the future as bringing in a whole new way of imagining a philosophical interaction brought in Luke the producer who and Victoria who's going to even offer us tea of geography thank you very much thank you there are many more radio for arts and discussion programs to download for free find these on the website at BBC kuat UK radio 4

Channel: BBC Podcasts

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Keywords: phenomenology, philosophy, heidegger, martin heidegger, edmund husserl, philosophy (field of study), husserl, dasein, being and time, existentialism, consciousness, funny, existentialist, of, sol, heidegger phenomenology, phenomenology crash course, time and phenomenology, phenomenology and time, time and consciousness, introduction to phenomenology, being and time by heidegger, interest, semiotics, cartesian, heidegger's concept

Id: 0_aGbAojy-M

Length: 46min 41sec (2801 seconds)

Published: Sat Aug 11 2018