Philosophy notes36

Husserl’s Ideas on a Pure Phenomenology and on a Phenomenological Philosophy Edmund Husserl (1859-1938) was a German philosopher who was born in Prossnitz, Moravia. He taught philosophy at the universities of Halle, Göttingen, and Freiburg.

Martin Heidegger (1889-1976) was among his students and succeeded him as professor of philosophy at Freiburg after his retirement. Husserl had an important influence on Heidegger, on existential phenomenology, and on the philosophy of mind. He died in Freiburg in 1938. His writings included Logische Untersuchungen (Logical Investigations, 1900-01), Ideen zu einer reinen Phänomenologie und phänomenologischen Philosophie (Ideas on a Pure Phenomenology and Phenomenological Philosophy, 1913), Formale und transzendentale Logik (Formal and Transcendental Logic, 1929), andMéditations cartésiennes (Cartesian Meditations, 1931, based on lectures that he delivered in Paris in 1929).

Ideas: General Introduction to Pure Phenomenology (1931) defines phenomenology as a descriptive analysis of the essence of pure consciousness. Husserl defines pure or transcendental phenomenology as an a priori (or eidectic) science (a science of essential being). He distinguishes between pure phenomenology and empirical psychology (and between transcendental and psychological subjectivity), saying that phenomenology is a science of essences, while psychology is a science of the facts of experience. He criticizes "psychologism" (the theory that psychological analysis may be used as a method of resolving philosophical problems), and he says that only an a priori science can define the essential nature of being.

The Ideas are divided into four sections: (1) "The Nature and Knowledge of Essential Being," (2) "The Fundamental Phenomenological Outlook," (3) "Procedure of Pure Phenomenology In Respect of Methods and Problems," and (4) "Reason and Reality."

The first section describes how the realm of essence differs from the realm of facts. The second section describes how phenomenological reduction may be used as a method of philosophical inquiry. The third section describes how noesis and noema may be defined as phases of intentionality. The fourth section describes the relation between consciousness and noematic meaning.

Husserl distinguishes between phenomenology as a science of pure consciousness and psychology as a science of empirical facts. For Husserl, the realm of pure consciousness is distinct from the realm of real experience. Husserl explains that phenomenology is a theory of pure phenomena, and that it is not a theory of actual experiences (or of actual facts or realities).

According to Husserl, essential being must be distinguished from actual existence, just as the pure ego must be distinguished from the psychological ego. Essences are non-real, while facts are real. The realm of transcendentally reduced phenomena is non-real, while the realm of actual experience is real. Thus, phenomenological reduction leads from knowledge of the essentially real to knowledge of the essentially non-real.

Phenomenological reduction is a process of defining the pure essence of a psychological

phenomenon. It is a process whereby empirical subjectivity is suspended, so that pure consciousness may be defined in its essential and absolute being. This is accomplished by a method of "bracketing" empirical data away from consideration. "Bracketing" empirical data away from further investigation leaves pure consciousness, pure phenomena, and the pure ego as the residue of phenomenological reduction.

Phenomenological reduction is also a method of bracketing empirical intuitions away from philosophical inquiry, by refraining from making judgments upon them. Husserl uses the term epoche(Greek, for "a cessation") to refer to this suspension of judgment regarding the true nature of reality. Bracketed judgment is an epoche or suspension of inquiry, which places in brackets whatever facts belong to essential being.

Bracketing is also a neutralization of belief. "Doxic positing" (the positing of belief) may be actual or potential. Doxic positing may occur in every kind of consciousness, because every consciousness may actually or potentially posit something about being.

Facts or realities are the objective data of empirical intution, says Husserl, but essences are the objective data of essential intuition. Empirical intuition may lead to essential intuition (or essential insight), which may be adequate or inadequate in terms of its clearness and distinctness. Empirical or non-empirical objects may have varying degrees of intuitability, and empirical or non-empirical intuitions may vary in their clearness and distinctness. Non-empirical intuitions may apprehend objects that are produced by fantasy or imagination.

Husserl describes consciousness as intentional insofar as it refers to, or is directed at, an object. Intentionality is a property of directedness toward an object. Consciousness may have intentional and non-intentional phases, but intentionality is the property that gives consciousness its objective meaning.

The cogito ("I think") is the principle of the pure ego. The pure ego performs acts of consciousness (cogitations) that may be immanently or transcendently directed.

Immanently directed acts of consciousness refer to objects that are within the same ego or that belong to the same stream of consciousness. Transcendently directed acts of consciousness refer to objects that are outside the ego or that belong to a different stream of consciousness. The objects of consciousness (cogitata) are the embodied or unembodied things that are perceived and consciously experienced.

The difference between immanent and transcendent perception reflects the difference between being as experience and being as thing.1 Things as they exist in themselves cannot be perceived immanently, and they can only be perceived transcendently. The difference between immanent and transcendent perception also reflects the difference in the way in which things are given and presented to consciousness. Givenness may be adequate or inadequate in terms of its clearness and distinctness, and in terms of its intuitability.

Immanently perceived objects have an absolute being insofar as their existence is

logically necessary. The existence of transcendently perceived objects is not logically necessary, insofar as their existence is not proved by the being of conciousness itself.

Consciousness itself is absolute being, but the spatial-temporal world is merely phenomenal being.

Husserl emphasizes that phenomenology is concerned with the essence of whatever is immanent in consciousness, and that it is concerned with describing immanent essences.

To confuse the essences of things with the mental representations of those essences is to confuse the aims of phenomenology and psychology. Phenomenology is a descriptive analysis of being as consciousness, while psychology is a descriptive analysis of being as reality. The difference between being as consciousness and being as reality is also the difference between transcendental and transcendent being.

Every actual cogito has an intentional object (and is a mode of thinking about something).

The cogito itself may become a cogitatum if the principle that "I think" becomes an object of consciousness. Thus, in the cogito, the act of thinking may become an intentional object. However, in contrast to the Cartesian principle that "I think, therefore I am" (cogito ergo sum), the phenomenologically reduced cogito is a suspension of judgment about whether "I am" or whether "I exist." The phenomenologically reduced cogito is a suspension of judgment about the question of whether thinking implies existence. Thus, phenomenology examines the cogito as a pure intuition, and as an act of pure consciousness.

Husserl describes noesis and noema as two phases of intentionality. Noesis is the process of cogitation, while the noemata (or cogitata) are that which is cogitated. Every intentional experience has a noetic (real) phase and a noematic (non-real) phase. Every noetic phase of consciousness corresponds to a noematic phase of consciousness. Noesis is a process of reasoning that assigns meaning to intentional objects. Both noesis and noema may be sources of objective meaning. The noetic meaning of transcendent objects is discoverable by reason, while the noematic meaning of immanent objects is discoverable by pure intuition. Noetic meaning is transcendent, while noematic meaning is immanent. Thus, noesis and noema correspond respectively to experience and essence.  FOOTNOTES 1Edmund Husserl, Ideas: General Introduction to Pure Phenomenology, translated by W.R. Boyce Gibson (London: George Allen & Unwin Ltd., 1931), p. 133.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Husserl, Edmund. Ideas: General Introduction to Pure Phenomenology. Translated by W. R. Boyce Gibson. London: George Allen & Unwin Ltd., 1931.

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What is Existential-Phenomenology?

What is Phenomenology?

"As good a place to begin as any is the meaning of the term phenomenology itself. It is derived from the two Greek words: phainomenon (an "appearance") and logos ("reason" or "word," hence a "reasoned inquiry"). Phenomenology is indeed a reasoned inquiry which discovers the inherent essences of appearances. But what is an appearance? The answer to this question leads to one of the major themes of phenomenology: an appearance is anything of which one is conscious. Anything at all which appears to consciousness is a legitimate area of philosophical investigation. Moreover, an appearance is a manifestation of the essence of that of which it is the appearance.

Surprising as it may sound, other philosophic points of view have refused to make this move."

--David Stewart & Algis Mickunas, Exploring Phenomenology ﾧ, p. 3 "...one can characterize phenomenological philosophy as centering on the following basic themes: a return to the traditional tasks of philosophy, the search for a philosophy without presuppositions, the intentionality of consciousness, and the refusal of the subject-object dichotomy."

--David Stewart & Algis Mickunas, Exploring Phenomenology ﾧ, p. 5 "For Husserl ﾧ, phenomenology was a discipline that attempts to describe what is given to us in experience without obscuring preconceptions or hypothetical speculations; his motto was 'to the things themselves'--rather than to the prefabricated conceptions we put in their place. As Husserl saw it, this attempt offered the only way out of the impasse into which philosophy had run at the end of the nineteenth century when the realists, who affirmed the independent existence of the object, and the idealists, who affirmed the priority of the subject, had settled down into a stalemated war. Instead of making intellectual speculations about the whole of reality, philosophy must turn, Husserl declared, to a pure description of what is. In taking this position Husserl became the most influential force not only upon Heidegger but upon the whole generation of German philosophers who came to maturity about the time of the First World War." --William Barrett, Irrational Man: A Study in Existential Philosophy ﾧ, pp. 190-191 "...Husserl's logic is one bound to the immediacy of all experience itself insofar as phenomena are understood as givens in their immediate and irreducible presentative force. Most simply, Husserl is after the formal qualities of the concrete reality which human beings recognize as their experience, but from here means the essential immanent in the particular: the truth of the given. The history of Husserl's development as a philosopher supports the thesis that throughout his life he was, at various levels, searching for an architectonic of thought . . . which would express and uncover the specificity of the world. If the term 'logic' be understood in its philosophic sense as a

grounding discipline for all reflection, then phenomenology as a logic treats the genesis and development of phenomena from their most primordial roots in prereflective consciousness to their most reflectively sophisticated exemplification in science."

--Maurice Natanson, "Phenomenology and the Social Sciences," In M. Natanson (Ed.), Phenomenology and the Social Sciences ﾧ, Volume 1, pp. 4-5 "Phenomenology is a science of 'beginnings.' The genuine beginner is an adept, not a novice. To begin, in this sense, is to start from the primordial grounds of evidence, from onself as the center (not the sum) of philosophical experience. Such self-centeredness is the opposite of philosophic hubris; it is a confession of humility: the admission that, unless the inquirer has turned to himself in full awareness of his life, he cannot claim to have sought, let alone found, the truth. . .

The genuine beginner is, then, the most sophisticated of all thinkers, for, beyond honoring the Socratic injunction, he is unwilling to admit as taken for granted that which impinges most heavily on his outlook as a man in the world: the root assumption that, though we may be ignorant of philosophic truth, we are, after all, beings in a real world in which philosophic doubt emerges as something worth bothering about."

--Maurice Natanson, "Phenomenology and the Social Sciences," In M. Natanson (Ed.), Phenomenology and the Social Sciences ﾧ, Volume 1, p. 6-8 ". . .one learned what phenomenology is step by step, through reading, discussion, and reflection ... What is needed is rather simple: to learn what is mean by the natural attitude, to practiceepoche, to attempt descriptions of presentations without prejudicing the results by taking for granted the history, causality, intersubjectivity, and value we ordinarily associate with our experience, and to examine with absolute care the fabric of the world of daily life so that we may grasp its source and its direction . . .

There is a legitimate sense in which it is necesary to say that one must become a phenomenologist in order to comprehend phenomenology."

--Maurice Natanson, "Phenomenology and the Social Sciences," In M. Natanson (Ed.), Phenomenology and the Social Sciences ﾧ, Volume 1, pp. p. 8 ". . . at the end of his career, Husserl admitted that the first result of reflection is to bring us back into the presence of the world as wel lived it before our reflection began (Lebenswelt)."

--Maurice Merleau-Ponty, "Phenomenology and the Sciences of Man," In M. Natanson (Ed.), Phenomenology and the Social Sciences ﾧ, Volume 1, p. 54 "During the whole career of Husserl . . . the struggle is on two fronts. On the one hand it is a struggle against psychologism and historicism, in so far as they reduce the life of man to a mere result of external conditions acting on him and see the philosophizing person as entirely determined from the outside, lacking any contact with his own thought and therefore destined to skepticism. But on the other hand, it is also a struggle against logicism, in so far as this is attempting to arrange for us an access to the truth lacking any contact with contingent experience. Husserl is seeking to reaffirm rationality at the level

of experience, without sacrificing the vast variety that it includes and accepting all the processes of conditioning which psychology, sociology, and history reveal. It is a question of finding a method which will enable us to think at the same time of the externality which is the principle of the sciences of man and of the internality which is the condition of philosophy, of the contingencies without which there is no situation as well as of the rational certainty without which there is no knowledge."

--Maurice Merleau-Ponty, "Phenomenology and the Sciences of Man," In M. Natanson (Ed.), Phenomenology and the Social Sciences , Volume 1, p. 57 "The first step in phenomenological philosophy is reflection on the meaning or essence of the experience of consciousness. 'Phenomenological positivism' beings with the facts of experience and is followed by reflection, intuition, and description of the phenomena of consciousness. Husserl sought by the study of the phenomena of consciousness to find the roots of reason in our human experience. So understood, phenomenology as a philosophy is the science of the sciences, providing the principles which validate, a priori, all the sciences.

The concept of the 'intentionality of consciousness' is the foundation of phenomenological philosophy . . . Husserl adopted Brentano's notion of intentionality and refined it.

Husserl distinguished between the act of knowing (noesis) from the object (noema), whether existent or imaginary. To be conscious is to experience an act of knowing in which the subject is aware of an object. A conscious act is an act of awareness in which the subject is presented with an object.

Husserl distinguishes further between perception and intuition. One may perceive and be conscious of the fact that one perceives an object without understanding its essence, what it is, its principle of being and identity. Intuition of the essence of an object is the source of meaning and intelligibility of the particular phenomena. Eidetic intuition (Wessenschau) is insight into essences through the experiencing of exemplifying particulars. Such particulars may be given in either perception or imagination."

--David Bidney, "Phenomenological Method and the Anthropological Science of the Cultural Life-World," In M. Natanson (Ed.), Phenomenology and the Social Sciences , Volume 1, p. 57 "There are two fundamental moments in Husserl's phenomenological epoche which, although they are correlated, can be distinguished: 1) the reduction to the sphere of immanence, and 2) the movement from fact to essence. The first of these . . . requires suspension of the natural attitude and placing in abeyance all belief in the existence of the transcendent world. The second, sometimes call the eidetic reduction, requires a shift to consider things not as realities but as instances of idealities, as pure possibilities rather than actualities. For Husserl, this second reduction is necessary to fuflill the conditions for genuinely rigorous science. Thoser conditions, already announced by Descartes under the heaing of clarity and distinctness, already are apodicticity (that is, the certainty that requires absolute transparency) and univocity (that is, absence of ambiguity). When

science is conceived this way, its objects are no longer worldly things, but rather essences: meanings, categories, ideal types, and laws. For Husserl, rigorous science operates exclusively within the sphere of ideality--and must do so in order to meet the standards of atemporality embodied in what he conceives as the very idea of science.

Although it is not identified as such by Husserl, this is an ancient idea which is generally attributed to Parmenides: only that can be known which is, and that which genuinely is excludes coming into being and passing away. The objects of rigorous science must be atemporal essences whose atemporality is ensured by their ideality.

This Eleatic strain in Husserl's thought culminates in the standpoint that meaning (Sinn) in general is timeless and ideal. The ancient question of how atemporal meanings become instantiated in the flux of everyday actuality can be addressed by calling upon a central distinction in Husserl's theory of intentionality: the distinction between the act of intending (noesis) and the meaning-content (noema) of the object intended. The noetic act is real in the sense that it is a temporal even in which hyletic data (or "sensory contents") are synthesized and apprehended by consciousness as an intentional object. The noema, on the other hand, is ideal: it conveys the atemporal meaning which provides the form (morphe) according to which consciousness synthesizes its mattery or sensory data (hyle). Thus, every intentional act (noesis) is an actualization or realization of a timeless meaning."

--M. C. Dillon, Merleau-Ponty's Ontology ﾧ, p. 71 Summary: Phenomenology, beginning with Edmund Husserl ﾧ, urges that the world of immediate or "lived" experience takes precendence over the objectified and abstract world of the "natural attitude" of natural science. Science as such, thus, is secondary to the world of concrete, lived experience. Phenomenology, therefore, engages in a process known as "bracketing" in which the "natural attitude" is placed aside such that the researcher may begin with "the things themselves," as Husserl said — or, in other words, in the phenomena as they show themselves in experience. In Heidegger's terminology, phenomenology involves letting things "show themselves from themselves in the very way in which they show themselves from themselves." By definition, phenomenology never begins with a theory, but, instead, always begins anew with the phenomena under consideration. Maurice Merleau-Ponty's ﾧ famous description of phenomenology is quite instructive; as he writes, the phenomenologist returns "to the world which precedes (scientific description), (the world) of which science always speaks, and in relation to which every scientific characterization is an abstract and derivative sign language, as is geography in relation to the countryside."

In Husserlian phenomenology, consciousness is understood as fundamentally intentional.

In this sense, Husserl is, in part, indebted to Franz Brentano's "Act psychology," which held that all mental acts are characterized by "intentionality." Consciousness as an act, that is, is always positing a world; in other words, it is always "of" or "about" something.

Following Brentano, Husserl holds that consciousness is never directed toward itself, but, rather, is always directed toward phenomena in the world. It follows, therefore, that any

abstraction is ultimately based on phenomena in the world, and, thus, are secondary to the primary lived experience of phenomena as they "show themselves."

Husserl brings to this understanding something unique, his phenomenological method, which is characterized by Husserl's "epoche." As mentioned previously, "epoche" is a "bracketing" of the "natural attitude" so that one can attend to a phenomenon as it shows itself. Once the "natural attitude" is "bracketed," one can then attend to what, according to Husserl, are the two poles of experience, noema and noesis. Noesis is the act of perceiving, while noema is that which is perceived. Through this method, for Husserl, one can perform an "eidetic reduction." Noema can be reduced to their essential form or "essence." Husserl's phenomenology, in this sense, is a form of idealism, since it aims toward discovering the ideal form of phenomena, the essence or Eideia(such as with Plato and Hegel). Further, Husserl shares with the idealist a tendency to stress a priori conditions of knowledge (such as with Plato and Kant).

What is Existentialism?

"Existentialism is well known in this country both as a literary and philosophical movement, but its roots in phenomenology are not as widely understood. Historically, the roots of existential philosophy can be traced to the nineteenth-century writings of Soren Kierkegaard ﾧ, Friedrich Nietzsche ﾧ, and Fyodor Dostoyevsky ﾧ. Central to the work of this figures was an emphasis on the existing individual, and a call for a consideration of man in his concrete situation, including his culture, history, relations with others, and above all, the meaning of personal existence."

--David Stewart & Algis Mickunas, Exploring Phenomenology ﾧ, p. 63 "The very notion that existentialism is something that can be defined in a catch phrase, orthat one can merely know about it without understanding it from within, has made it, for some people, into an intellectual fad and robbed it of its proper seriousness. Yet existentialism is not merely a fad any more than it is a single, well-defined movement within philosophy. It is a powerful stream, welling up from underground sources, converging and diverging, but flowing forward and carrying with it many of the most important intellectual tendencies and literary and cultural manifestations of our day. . .

'Existentialism' is not a philosophy but a mood embracing a number of disparate philosophies; the differences among them are more basic than the temper which unites them. This temper can be described as a reaction against the static, the abstract, the purely rational, the merely irrational, in favor of the dynmaic and concrete, personal involvement and 'engagement,' action, choice and commitment, the distinction between 'authentic' and 'inauthentic' existence, and the actual situation of the existential subject as the starting point of thought. Beyond this the so-called existentialists divide according to their views on such matters as phenomenological analysis, the existential subject, the intersubjective relation between selves, religion, and the implications of existentialism for psychotherapy. . .

Insofar as one can define existentialism, it is a movement from the abstract and the

general to the particular and the concrete. . .

The root of 'existentialism' is, of course, 'existence.' That might seem to include just about everything, and by the same token to say nothing, were it not for the traditions in the history of religion and the history of philosophy which have tended to look away from the 'passing flux' of existence to a realm of pure 'Being,' unchanging and eternal, a world of ideal essences or a formless absolute beyond these essences, in comparison with which the particulars of our earthly life are seen as merely phenomena--the shadows in Plato's cave which at best reflect in wavering and unsteady fashion, and more usually obscure, that essential reality which is not directly accessible to man through 'the life of the senses' ...

Insofar as any philosopher has turned away from the tendency to locate the really real in a separate metaphysical sphere of essences in favor of the greater reality of personal existence in the here and now, he stands for an existentialist trend within the history of philosophy . . .

It is in [the] emphasis upon the existential subject that the crucial distinction is found between existentialm and the various brands of empiricism, positivism, and instrumentalism that also emphasize the particular, the concrete, and the here and now.

For these latter the particular is still seen from without, from the standpoint of the detached observer, rather than from within, from the standpoint of lived life."

--Maurice Friedman, The Worlds of Existentialism: A Critical Reader ﾧ, pp. 3-9 Summary: The origin of existentialism is typically attributed to the work of Kierkegaard ﾧ. However, the precursory thinkers who influenced this school of thought are varied, including Pascal ﾧ, Hegel ﾧ,Nietzsche ﾧ, and Dostoyevsky ﾧ, to name a few. One can just as well point back to the Greeks as influences, since Heidegger emphasized a return to the central themes in philosophy — questions pertaining to Being (the ontological) as opposed to beings (the ontic). Nevertheless, it is generally agreed that Kierkegaard is the "father" of existentialism.

Kierkegaard was a critic of the Christian churches of his day, which he felt had contributed to a forgetfulness of "existence." By "existence," Kierkegaard meant the particular form of human existence which is unique. Each "individual" human being is cast into the world unfinished and finite, yet, nevertheless, must take responsibility for his or her choices. Responsibility as such is the result of the "individual's" free choice, yet, characteristic of human beings, these choices are always made in the face of the unknown, our finititude, and, therefore, they lead to "dread." "Dread," in this sense, is the recognition that one's choices our one's own, despite the fact that one can never know for certain whether these choices will bear out in the end. Kierkegaard held great contempt for those who relied on the "crowd" to take responsibility for individual choice. For Kierkegaard, one must answer to God as an individual, naked and apart from the "crowd." Thus, ultimately, our faith must involve a "leap," since the human being is

precluded from finality and certitude.

Existentialism, as such, is actually a 20th century movement, despite its roots in Kierkegaard and others. While Kierkegaard philosophized existentially, which influenced the existentialists of the 20th century, he did not hold to the existential axiom that "existence precedes essence," as Sartre ﾧ asserted. With all of the existentialist thinkers of the 20th century, there are common themes, despite great diversity. Whether one looks to Heidegger, Sartre, Buber ﾧ, Merleau-Ponty ﾧ, or De Beauvoir ﾧ, to name a few, one finds a basic attitude, despite the major differences among these thinkers. These commonalites, which bind these theorists together, can be flushed out — and this, in essence, is what one may call "existentialism." There is some justifiable irony in the fact that most of these thinkers rejected the term "existentialism." This tendency to reject any simple definition is descriptive of existentialism as a whole, since existentialism, as a movement, resists simplistic categories and abstraction. For the existentialist, ‘truth' is found "in-the-world" and, thereby, always begins with the concrete; that is, in existence. And grounded in existence as such, this means that one's thought must necessarily be perspectival and limited. Despite these limitations, the common themes of existentialism include: 1. The human being is a "being-in-the-world." That is, the human kind of being is always already involved in meaningful projects with others and alongside things. As Heidegger would say, the human being is "there being" (Dasein) -- meaning that the human being exists as the projection of possibilities which open up as a world. In this sense, the human being is not "in the world" like a match is in a matchbox. Rather, the human being is "inthe-world" in the sense that one is ‘in trouble' or ‘in a relationship.'

2. As "being-in-the world," the human being is "thrown" into that "world" such that she finds herself in the midst of the ‘givens' of existence. One does not choose one's parents, the place of one's birth or the fact that one will die, yet, despite these circumstances, the human being is faced with the freedom to respond to these ‘givens' of existence. In this sense, human beings can be said to be ‘response-able.'

3. As "being-in-the-world," the human being is always "with others." Even being alone can be said to be a mode of being-with-others, since one cannot be alone unless this is first understood secondarily as a being-away-from-others. Moreover, our being-withothers is always as a relationship of some sort, and, being so, we are both shaped by others and shape those others with whom we relate.

4. Human beings are always "in-the-world" alongside things. Things, in terms of existence, are not mere extension in space. Rather, things exist as meaningful entities which, in one form or another, call to the human being as significant in terms of the human being's projection of possibilities. A thing is a thing when it matters to me in one form or another — when, as a thing, it enters into the clearing by which I am either helped or hindered on my way toward realizing my projects "in-the-world."

5. Human beings are not things. A thing does not exist as a "being-in-the-world," since, as a thing, it has no world. For a thing, nothing matters. Things can only matter for a human

being, since it is only in the world of the human being that things can have meaning.

Nevertheless, it is not uncommon to treat human beings as ‘things,' such as with biology.

To provide an example: A corpse is a thing. A dead person is not a thing, but rather a human being who no longer lives. One can treat a corpse like a thing, but not a dead person. This is clear in terms of our relating to others. When I am with another human being, I fully recongize that I exist as an other to the other person. However, with a thing, say a rock, I do not exist for it — for I fully recognize that the rock does not exist in the sense that a human being exists. The rock is not "in-the-world."

6. Human beings are finite. As a "being-in-the-world," we recognize that death is a "notto-be-outstripped" (inevitable) possibility. Death as such is the possibility of the end of all possibilities. Existence, therefore, is not limitless, but inevitably must face up to the mystery of the "nothingness," that which lies beyond what can be known as a "being-inthe-world." As a "being-towards-death," as Heidegger would say, the human being becomes aware that she cannot have all the possibilities. Faced with the recognition of one's finitude, one also recognizes that one is always faced with choices. In making a choice, I simultaneously eliminate thousands of other possible choices. And, yet, making such a choice, I can never know with absolute certainty that I have made the ‘right' choice. With this freedom to choose, I am faced with the responsibility for my own existence.

7. Faced with such freedom, responsibility and finitude, I am confronted with anxiety and guilt. I am anxious in the face of the fact that my choice may render a death to my world.

Further, in recognition that with my choice I eliminate other choices, I am ‘guilty.'

8. Immediate experience has priority over theoretical assumptions.

9. All experience is both physical and mental: How this is so varies greatly from thinker to thinker.

What is Existential-Phenomenology?

"Failure to see [the] intimate connection between phenomenology and existentialism will result in thinking of existentialism as only a subjective reaction against systematic thinnking and not as a philosophic movmenet with its own set of problems and methods."

--David Stewart & Algis Mickunas, Exploring Phenomenology ﾧ, p. 63 "Whereas Husserl saw the task of transcendental phenomenology to be that o describing the lived world from the viewpoint of a detached observer, existential phenomenology insists that the observer cannot separate himself from the world. Existential phenomenologists followed out more rigorously the implications of the doctrine of intentionality of consciousness. Since consciousness is always consciousness of . . ., the world is not only the correlate of consciousness but that without which there would be no consciousness. Consequently, for existential phenomenology, the modalities of conscious experience are also the ways one is in the world. This shift of the notion of the

Lebenswelt (lived-world) to the emphasis upon being-in-the-world expanded phenomenology in a way that allowed it to consider the totality of human relationships in the world in terms of the individual's concrete existence.

The very terminology itself, being-in-the-world, is existentialism's attempt to avoid reference to human reality in terms either of a thinking substance or a perceiving subject closed in upon itself facing physical objects which may or may not be knowable. Beingin-the-world refers exclusively to human reality in contrast to nonhuman reality, and although the specific terminology has varied among existentialists, common to all is the insistence that human reality is situated in a concrete world-context. In short, man is only man as a result of his actions which are worked out in the world. But there is still the reciprocal relationship that phenomenology insists on: The total ensemble of human actions--including thoughts, moods, efforts, emotions, and so forth--define the context in which man situates himself. But, in turn, the world-context defines and sets limits to human action.

Also central to an understanding of being-in-the-world is the existentialist insistence that this is not a concept that arises only in reflection. Even prior to reflection upon one's awareness of being-in-the-world there is already a prereflective grasp of the basic modalities which are his ways of being-in-the-world. In prereflective experience, the subject and world are not distinct; they are rather the givens of concrete experience which can only be separated by a process of abstraction. Any reflection--whether theoretical or practical--already assumes man's prereflective experience of the world and his activity in the world. The word existence is usually used by existentialists to refer only to human reality, for what it means to exist is to be always engaged in tasks in the world."

--David Stewart & Algis Mickunas, Exploring Phenomenology , pp. 64-65 "Soren Kierkegaard is the founder of existentialism, but one could hardly call him a phenomenologist. Husserl launched phenomenology, but was not an existentialist. Thus there was a time when a distinction needed to be made between existentialism and phenomenology. Today, however, we also speak of existential phenomenology or phenomenological existentialism. So the question may be asked: what is the difference between existentialism and phenomenology, and how did the unified movement of existential-phenomenological thinking arise?

Let us point out first of all that there exists a certain harmony between Husserl and Kierkegaard. It manifests itself in their common resistance to the atomistic way of looking at man and things human. Man is not more or less like an atom. The way in which Kierkegaard and Husserl resisted that view differs: Kierkegaard speaks of man, while Husserl practically limits himself to consciousness or knowledge. Kierkegaard conceived man as 'existence,' as a subject-in-relationship-to-God. Man is not a selfsufficient spiritual 'atom' but, as a subject, is only authentically himself in his relationship to the God of revelation. According to Kierkegaard, 'existence' is absolutely original and irrepeatable, radically personal and unique. His emphasis on the uniqueness of 'existence' implies that a thinker's assertions are applicable only to the thinker himself: in principle, they do not claim validity for others. Thus, Kierkegaard's position is deliberately

anti-'scientific': it cannot do justice to the dimension of universality claimed by any 'science' (we do not use the term here in the sense of positive science). As a matter of principle, Kierkegaard's way of thinkiing cannot go beyond monologue, the 'solitary meditation.'

Kierkegaard's followers resolutely countered the reproach of being 'unscientific' by saying that existentialism may not be a 'science.' Their objection to being called 'scientific' appeared to be largely based on a particular sense of the term 'scientific' as used with respect to man. In scientism and in the philosophy of Hegel--man was 'scientifically' discussed in such a way that the original and unique character of human subjectivity simply disappeared under verbiage. Yet this kind of speaking was supposed to be 'scientific' par excellence. The need to reject a particular conception of 'scientific' thinking, however, does not entitle anyone to claim that philosophical thinking about man must not be 'scientific' in any sense whatsoever. The philosopher can hardly avoid the use of universal and necessary judgments to indicate the universal and necessary structures of man. In this sense he is 'scientific.'

This difficulty hardly existed for Husserl. Originally a mathematician and physicist, Husserl, like Descartes, was disturbed ty the confusion of language and the welter of opinions existing in philosophy. Clearly, philosophy was 'not yet a science,' and this made Husserl launch his phenomenology as an attempt to make philosophy also a 'rigorous science.' He was clever enough to avoid the trap of ascribing to philosophy the same scientific character as belongs to the positive sciences. Philosophy cannot allow physics or any other positive science to dictate its methods, for the simple reason that philosophy is not a positive science. It has to become scientific in its own way in its expression of intersubjective and objectively general truth.

To realize this ambitious plan, Husserl investigated man's consciousness or knowledge.

He conceived consciousness as intentional, oriented to something other than itself.

Whereas Husserl addressed himself to problems in the theory of knowledge, Kierkegaard tried to answer theological-anthropological questions. The distinction between existentialism and phenomenology consisted primarily in the different directions of their concern.

The two streams of thought merged in Heidegger's Being and Time , where they served as the foundation of the philosophy now known as 'existential phenomenology.'

Heidegger's philosophy of man does not lapse into the illusions of either idealism or positivism. Influenced by the phenomenological theory of knowledge, existentialism gave up its anti-scientific attitude. Phenomenology, on the other hand, enriched itself and developed into a philosophy of man by borrowing many topics from Kierkegaard's existentialism. In this way there arose the unified movement of existentialphenomenological thinking of which Heidegger, Sartre--though not in every respect-Merleau-Ponty and the Higher Institute of Philosophy of Louvain are the principal exponents."

--William A. Luijpen & Henry J. Koren, A First Introduction to Existential Phenomenology , pp. 18-21

"Heidegger accepts Husserl's definition of phenomenology: he will attempt to describe, he says, without any obscuring preconceptions, what human existence is. But his imagination could not let the matter go at this, for he noted that the world 'phenomenon' comes from the Greek. The etymologies of words, particularly of Greek words, are a passion with Heidegger; in his pursuit of them he has been accused of playing with words, but when one realizes what deposits of truth mankind has let slip into its language as it evolves, Heidegger's perpetual digging at words to get at their hidden nuggets of meaning is one of his most exciting facets. In the matter of Greek particularly--a dead language, whose whole history is now spread out before us--we can see how certain truths are embedded in the language itself: truths that the Greek race later came to forget in its thinking. The world "phenomenon"--a word in ordinary usage, by this time, in all modern European languages--means in Greek 'that which reveals itself.' Phenomenology therefore means for Heidegger the attempt to let the thing speak for itself. It will reveal itself to us, he says, only if we do not attempt to coerce it into one of our read-made conceptual strait-jackets. Here we get the beginning of his rejoinder to the Nietzscean view that knowledge is in the end an expression of the Will to Power: according to Heidegger we do not know the object by conquering and subduing it but rather by letting it be what it is and, in letting it be, allowing it to reveal itself as what it is. And our own human existence too, in its most immediate, internal nuances, will reveal itself if we have ears to hear it."

--William Barrett, Irrational Man: A Study in Existential Philosophy , pp. 191-192 Summary: In ways that, perhaps, are already clear to the reader, existentialism and phenomenology lend themselves to one another quite nicely. With Heidegger, phenomenology, as the study of mental acts (noesis) and their intentional correlates (noemata), becomes grounded in his ontological analysis of Dasein (the human kind of being) as a "being-inthe-world." Ultimately, Heidegger breaks from the Cartesian, subject-object split, still operative in Husserl's thought; as Macann (1993) writes: "In place of the Husserlian procedure which moves from the world of the natural attitude up to a higher, transcendental plane with a view to bring to light the transcendental structures constitutive of the objectivity of the entities encountered in the natural attitude, we find an alternative procedure which moves from the ontic level down to a deeper, ontological plane with a view to bringing to light the ontological structures constitutive of the being of the entities in question." (From Macann's (1993) Four Phenomenological Philosophers , p. 63).

Heidegger, like Husserl, begins with the human being's pre-reflective, pre-ontological, lived understanding of the world, but, rather than seeking the essence of the phenomona, like Husserl, Heidegger is concerned with the ontological ground of the phenomena; that is, what makes the phenomena possible. With this methodology, Heidegger aims to ask the question of Being, theontological, though he must begin with beings, the ontic.

Heidegger's method, therefore, is hermeneutic rather than transcendental. He holds that the human being always already understand the meaning of Being, yet this has been

forgotten or "covered over." Beginning with the pre-ontological, Heidegger aims to discover what the human being already knows pre- reflectively, yet which must be made explicit through the method of phenomenology.

What is the relationship between hermeneutics and existential-phenomenology?

"Hermeneutics [is] the art or theory of interpretation, as well as a type of philosophy that starts with questions or interpretation. Originally concerned more narrowly with interpreting sacred texts, the term acquired a much broader significance in its historical development and finally beame a philosophical position in 20th century German philosophy. There are two competing positions in hermeneutics: whereas the first follows Wilhelm Dilthey ﾧ and sees interpretation or Verstehen as a method for the historical and human sciences, the second follows Heidegger and sees it as an 'ontological event,' an interaction between interpreter and text that is part of the history of what is understood.

Providing rules or criteria for understanding what an author or native 'really' meant is the typical problem for the first approiach. The interpretation of the law provides an example for the second view, since the process of applying the law inevitably transforms it."

--Robert Audi (Ed.), The Cambridge Dictionary of Philosophy ﾧ, p. 323 Methodological hermeneutics: Methodological hermeneutics refers to hermeneutics as a human science, originating in the work of Schleiermacher and Dilthey.

"Schleiermacher's analysis of understand and expression related to texts and speech marks the beginning of hermeneutics in the modern sense of a scientific methodology.

This emphasis on methodology continues in 19th century historicism and culminates in Dilthey's attempt to ground the human sciences in a theory of interpretation, understood as the imaginative but publicly verifiable reenactment of the subjective experiences of others. Such a method of interpretation reveals the possibility of an objective knowledge of human beings not accessible to empiricst inquiry and thus of a distinct methodology for the human sciences. One result of the analysis of interpretation in the 19th century was the recognition of "the hermeneutic circle," first developed by Schleiermacher. The circularity of interpretation concerns the relation of parts to the whole: the interpretation of each part is dependent on the interpretation of the whole. But interpretation is circular in a stronger sense: if every interpretation is itself based on interpretation, then the circle of interpretation, even if it is not vicious, cannot be escaped."

--Robert Audi (Ed.), The Cambridge Dictionary of Philosophy ﾧ, pp. 323-324 Ontological hermeneutics: Ontological hermeneutics finds its expression in the existential-phenomenological work of Martin Heidegger, and is elaborated on by his student Hans-Georg Gadamer ﾧ.

"In Being and Time, Heidegger attacked Dilthey's view that hermeneutics is one among a variety of methods. In Heidegger's philosophy hermeneutics is constitutive of human

being (Dasien). 'The phenomenology of Dasein is hermeneutic in the primordial significatiuon of this word" (Heidegger, 1962, p. 62). Or as Charles Guignon (1983 ) has put it: In our everyday lives we grasp entitites in terms of a tacit understanding of what it is to be, and we are constantly driven to make that understanding explicit and revise it on the basis of passing encounters and collisions. The hermeneutic approach to fundamental ontology, far from being a technique for uncovering meanings in an alient text, is just a more rigorous and explicit version of the kind of movmenet toward clarity and depth which makes up life itself. (p. 71) . . . In the course of the existential analytic of Dasein, Heidegger (1962) advanced the thesis that scientific activity takes place within a context of preunderstanding that derives from a certain situatedness in the life-world and from participation in various activities that include practical dealings with tools and implements. Such practical dealings and understandings are achieved in the course of various customary, everyday transactions with the environment. These occur within a taken-for-granted cultural and historical background that consists of practices, habits, and skills, but cannot be spelled out explicitly and comprehended because it is so pervasive that we cannot make it an object of inquiry. This is the lived-world of what Heidegger called 'Everydayness.'

Heidegger argued that the fundamental mode of human existence--that on the basis of which all other modes must be understood--is not detached knowing but rather, engaged activity. In his view other modes of experience, like the disinterested contemplation of the scientist or the phenomenologist, are preceded, both temporally and logically, by everyday situations of involvement with the world. Thus, for Heidegger everydayness is not just a possible mode of existence; it is a primordial foundation from which other modes derive. And, according to him, a careful, unprejudiced investigation of a typical everyday situation of activity shows the untenability of certain philosophical assumptions that have pervaded Western philosophy at least since the time of Descartes, and have persisted, albiet in disguised form, in the transcendental (as opposed to hermeneutic) phenomenology of the philosopher Husserl. One of Heidegger's standard illustrations of everydayness is the situation of a carpenter hammering a nail.

For Heidegger, the paradigmatic object in the human world is something like the carpenter's hammer--that is, not a mere physical thing or a sensation or an idea contemplated from a position of scientific or philosophical detachment (as the empiricist philosophers would have it), but a tool that is used. Such a tool seems to occupy a kind of middle realm that defies the traditional Cartesian and Platonic polarities. That is, it cannot be equated with either the 'subject' or the 'object' of Cartesian philosophy, nor with the 'quality' or 'substance' of Platonic philosophy. Such objects of equipment are termed by Heidegger ready-to-hand. An entirely different ontology is involved here. An object of equipment that is ready-to-hand is the locus of both subject and object, self and world, quality and substance. Thus, a hammer is not a 'hammer' by virtue of its place in the human world. Nor is its quality of 'hammerness' something that comes from some

subjective inner space and gets 'projected' onto a material or sensory substrate. Thus, in Heidegger's account both the subject-object distinction and the distinction between quality (or meaning) and substance (be it material or sensory) turns out to be misleading.

In the lifeworld of engaged human activity, according to Heidegger, the hammer's 'hammerness' is experienced as out there in the world, inseparable from the substance it imbues, and the external world is 'always already' imbued with human purpose and meaning. The ready-to-hand mode is contrasted with another form that Heidegger called present-at-hand. An object that is present-at-hand is not in a unified, integrated, field-like relation with a subject, but rather corresponds to the isolated perceptual object that is studied by a detached, uninvolved observer.

Just as the unity of subject and object is crucial to readiness-to-hand, so too is the quality of complete interrelatedness. Heidegger emphasizes that a particular item of equipment can never be understood in isolation from other objects that are ready-to-hand, since it only exists as such in a purpose-imbued context of other equipment and their respective uses. Thus, Heidegger emphasizes that the objects in one's world are not separate entities but constituents of a unified field, a field that is itself constituted by the essential unity of subject and object: A hammer is what it is because it fills a slot in the 'equipmental context' of the human lifeworld.

In Heidegger's view, then, human being [Dasein] involves what might be called an implicitly sensed 'ground,' 'horizon,' or 'clearing,' which is the context or totality within which experience occurs. This horizon, which undercuts the Cartesian opposition of subject and object, is in a sense the most important aspect of human existence, for it is the very condition or possibility of anything at all appearing or being known. Moreover, it is the only place where the being of either 'man' or 'world' is disclosed.

The Heideggerian view of human existence is, at its deepest level, opposite to that of the early Dilthey, who took for granted the essential self-transparency or intelligibility of consciousness. In the Heideggerian view, the conscious experience of another person or culture cannot be ascertained in any objective sense. The horizonal character of Dasein makes it impossible to retain faith in the transparency and certitude of phenomenological description. Dasien can known its own being only in an approximate, tentative, and indirect way--not by taking its own ordinary self-understanding at face value, nor through some quasi-scientific method of direct intuition with access to certain and foundational data. For on this view experinece is a kind of text-analogue that needs to be interpreted (hence, Heidegger's is a hermeneutic phenomenology), an intrinsically obscure object with which one must adopt an approximate and metaphoric, rather than quasi-scientific mode of description."

--Robert L. Woolfolk, Louis A. Sass, & Stanley B. Messer, "Introduction to Hermeneutics," In Messer, Sass & Woolfolk (Eds.), Hermeneutics and Psychological Theory , pp. 12-18 What is the relationship between ontology and existential-phenomenology?

In his 1941 lecture, Grundbegriffe (Basic Concepts), Heidegger discusses the

"ontological difference" that is central to his thought.

Here it is summarized by Ernesto Grassi : "Heidegger explains the essential difference between Being (Sein) and beings (Seiendes).

This is what is referred to as the 'ontological difference.' He demonstrates this essential difference by pointing out the impossibility of speaking about Being (Sein) in the form of a being (Seiendes) (in the sense of some object). Every attempt to define Being in this way leads to contradictions.

An initial definition of Being, Heidegger observes, must maintain that Being is that which is most 'empty' since it is predicated of all beings and, hence, is what is most common to all things. The Being of each being is asserted with the verb 'is.' We say of a stone that it 'is,' of an animal, of a house, and of an attitude that it 'is.' Only by virtue of such an 'emptiness' is it possible for us to find Being in everything there is. Being does without any particular distinction in order to appear within every being. In contrdiction to this initial definition of Being as empty and common to everything, we are also forced to recognize that Being can be defined in the opposite way, that is, as 'singular and one.' For we are concerned only with the 'Being' of all the many different things that are. Each such thing is to be understood in terms of 'Being.' Hence, instead of characterizing Being as common the way we did before, Being is also the opposite of this, namely singular, because Being is everywhere, among beings, 'the same.'

A second definition of Being, according to Heidegger, purports that Being is 'what is most understandable' of all to us because it is only upon the basis of Being that beings can be conceived of or spoken about at all. Wherever and whenever beings are experienced, we also take account of Being because Being is connected with our understanding of beings everywhere and at every moment. In this way Being proves to be what is most readily understood. But here too we are faced with a contradiction because we must confront this definition with the fact that Being is also waht is 'most hidden or concealed' (das Verborgenste). Every attempt to say what Being is forces us to define it as a being among other beings which means that we necesarily fail to say what is is asBeing. Being remains hidden as Being and this 'staying hidden' belongs to Being itself.

Heidegger's third definition of Being is directed to the insight that Being is what can be 'most relied upon' (das Verlaeslichte). For how are we even to doubt particular beings in any way, if it is not already certain that we can rely on what it means to be? We refer most frequently to Being since it is named in every noun, adjective, and verb. This expression of what is, is not an expression of an agreement (Zu-sage) to each particular situation, but rather something that 'must already be given before' (Vorgabe) because it is only by virtue of this expression that it is possible to name beings.

This definition of Being is also connected to the opposite insight that Being is what is most abysmal (das Abruendigste) and as such is 'waht is least of all reliable' (das Unverlaesslkichtste). Every attempt to define Being--and so to logically fixate it--fails.

Being, therefore, does not stand firmly as something upon which we can build. Moreover, Being is what is 'most silent' (das Verschwiegenste). Every assertion about Being goes

astray becuase, by the very process of assertaion, Being is relegated to the status of 'a being.' This going astray is unavoidable. On the other hand, Being is what is 'most often expressed' in language since, in every assertion about beings, Being is also spoken about.

It is therefore the wod that breaks the silence.

According to Heidegger's fifth definition of Being, it is what has been 'most of all forgotten,' because the questions that man has raised are directed to beings and not to Being, that is, they are directed to nature, man, and all of those things that affect us directly and urge themselves upon us. But even this definition is contradicted insofar as Being is actually that which is 'most of all remembered.' For if Being were completely eradicated from our recollection, then beings could neither be met with nor asserted as Being. That urgent necessity that we meet with in the experience of things is rooted in the claim that Beings make upon us (in language: Anspruch des Seins).

Finally, Being turns out to be involved in one last contradiction, for it proves to be simultaneously 'what is most necessitating' (Noetigendste) as well as what is 'most liberating' (Befreiendste); it is only by virtue of the claim of Being (Anspruch) that the Being of beings is revealed. Since the subject and object are both beings, they therefore confront each other only through the liberation of Being, that is, through the freedom of Being. More specifically, man comes to himself as a subject in relationship to an object through the liberating action of Being."

--Ernesto Grassi, Heidegger and Renaissance Humanism , pp. 31-35 What is the difference between Heidegger's "ontological difference" and negative theology?

"The essential different between Heidegger's philosophy of unhiddenness and negative theology as found in Dionysius and John of the Cross consists in tehir completely different starting points. They understand divine Being as a Being in and for itself, outside of history, so that it emerges primarily through the theophany of a mystic.

Heidegger, however, claims that Being emerges through the 'clearing' of different, purely historical spaces in which particular gods, institutions, and arts appear historically. For negative theology, as well as for Heidegger, Being (God) is 'sublime,' but in a fundamentally different sense. In negative theology the sublime and elevated nature of God is defined in the sense that it finally can be made visible only by relinquishing those capacities (rational knowledge, memory and will) that make possible the 'day' of rational life.

For Heidegger, too, Being is not exhausted by beings and so Being is sublime and elevated in this sense for him. It remains hidden in its essence in its revelation of beings.

But for Heidegger the rational process of thought remains necessary in the sphere of beings--where Being reveals itself--insofar as this process 'fixes' the order of beings. The giving of grounds establishes and defines beings as the particular things found here and now that announce Being. Beings belong to the revelation of Being and must be 'held to' in their particular historical form, but always in the sign of the 'opening' of Being. Only by remembering Being is the way to the 'new' open, the way to hope.

Our success or failure to hold ourselves open to the new gives us the possibilities for beginning or ending historical process. 'When the unhiddenness of Being does not present itself, it dismisses the slow disappearance of all that can offer healing to beings. This disappearance of what heals takes with it the openness of the holy. The closed nature of the holy darkens the luminescence of the divine' (Heidegger, Nietzsche, pt. 1 ﾧ, p. 394)."

--Ernesto Grassi, Heidegger and Renaissance Humanism ﾧ, pp. 90-91 Back to Existential-Phenomenology Page ﾧ Back to Mythos & Logos Home Page ﾧ Webmaster: Brent Dean Robbins ﾧ ﾧ .....................

Heidegger vs Husserl: Phenomenological choices

In the course of my research towards developing a framework for a Visual Communication Phenomenological Methodology, I have now followed literature back to Nursing sources. Several recommended papers have been useful, and in turn they have also pointed to other possibly useful nursing sources.

Lopez and Willis (2004) help to clarify the different philosophical underpinnings to a Phenomenological study, and the importance of positioning the study clearly within one of the two philosophical schools of Phenomenology.

I'm basing my study on Moustakas' (1994) guidelines, but those are merely generic and non-partisan. As Lopez and Willis state "implementing a method without an examination of its philosophical basis can result in research that is ambiguous in its purpose, structure, and findings" (p726). So I will need to position my research methodology firmly within either the eidetic or hermeneutic schools.

Eidetic Phenomenology is descriptive of the phenomena, and is Husserlian in its philosophical roots. Hermeneutic Phenomenology is interpretive and owes its philosophical roots to Heidegger, a student of Husserl. Where the importance of choosing the philosophical school for a study resides is in how its findings are generated and used.

Both schools deal with this differently. Hence the importance of not being generic in the design of the methodology, but philosophically specific.

In Eidetic (Husserlian) research it is important for the researcher to absolutely 'bracket out' prior personal knowledge and biases, to achieve "transcendental subjectivity". This results in the researcher holding in "abeyance ideas, preconceptions, and personal knowledge when listening to and reflecting on the lived experiences of participants"

(p728). From these lived experiences features or essences that are common under Phenomenological scrutiny emerge that represent the phenomena's true identity. This is so so that a generalised description can be made, through a foundationalist approach, with a belief (reflecting scientific values) that these essences "can be extracted from lived experiences without a consideration for context" (p728).

In the Hermeneutic philosophical school (or even movement) its application has predominantly been in Theology, and its purpose is to go beyond mere descriptions of core concepts, or essences, "to look for meanings embedded in common life practices" (p728) to bring out what is normally hidden in human experience. Its focus therefore is on what humans experience rather than know within what Heidegger termsbeing-in-theworld. This situates the experience within a context of alife-world, which all sounds comfortably similar to what Dourish (2004) and Suchman (1987) discuss in part of their respective theses.

As Lopez and Willis discuss "Heidegger asserted that humans are embedded in their world to such an extent that subjective experiences are inextricably linked with social, cultural, and political contexts" (p729). In Hermeneutic Phenomenology its foundational aspect is on the "interpretation of the narratives provided by participants in relation to various contexts" (p729), meaning that unlike Eidetics, the context remains crucial to understanding through interpretation. A fundamental divergence in approaches between the two schools lies in the act of 'bracketing'. In Hermeneutic Phenomenology making any preconceptions on the part of the researcher explicit and explaining their use within the research has a long tradition. Absolute 'bracketing out' that prior knowledge is inconsistent with an interpretive approach. This is a crucial difference I need to build into MY methodology.

Finally Lopez and Willis summarise that an interpretative approach is "useful in examining contextual features of experiences that might have direct relevance to practice.

Moreover, a critical hermeneutic framework can enable the researcher to bring to light hidden features of an experience that would be overlooked in a purely descriptive approach" (p734). They urge for careful consideration of which school to choose to inform the analysis. Naturally I feel my framework approach to the methodology is more interpretative, and that will be more useful within design (more on this in a future post).

References used: DOURISH, P. (2004). Where the Action Is: The Foundations of Embodied Interaction.

Cambridge: MIT Press.

LOPEZ, K.A., and WILLIS, D.G. (2004) Descriptive Versus Interpretive Phenomenology: Their Contributions To Nursing Knowledge. Qualitative Health Research, 14(5), pp726-735.

SUCHMAN, L. (1987). Plans and Situated Actions: The Problem of Human-Machine Communication. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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Is Heidegger's departure from Husserl due to Heidegger's turn to metaphysics? If so, doesn't that make Heidegger's critique of Husserl irrelevant?

Husserl makes it quite clear that phenomenology is not metaphysics, and as such Husserl only tends to the structures that idealism provides, and the incorporation of real experience into said structures that could lead us towards a transcendental intersubjectivity. Husserl's phenomenological reduction allows existence to be whatever it may be, and it would not change the structures of such consciousness. So Heidegger's metaphysical tendencies makes his criticism completely irrelevant since it comments on Husserl's science as though it were a philosophy, when pure phenomenology is designed and intended not to be a philosophy, but rather the science of philosophy which is a world of difference. Or did I get this all wrong?

Very briefly: for Heidegger, being is as it appears, therefore phenomenology is the same as ontology. For Husserl, the correlation between phenomena and reality is a problem that does not exist for Heidegger. It is not true that Husserl merely describes the contents of consciousness: he brackets the natural attitude that adscribes an external correlation to phenomena and hopes to regain the outside through a study of pure phenomena (eg, The Idea of Phenomenology); therefore Husserl does have ontological aims. Both Husserl and Heidegger have ontological aims, and have a radical disagreement on whether being=phenomena.

Apr 21, 2014 Ronnen Paytan Ronnen Paytan ¡ Independent Researcher Hi Mathew, The bottom line first: I believe that the words 'departure' and 'turn' do not necessarily reflect the true nature of the penomenological perspectives on phenomenology of Husserl and Heidegger in their final form. The word may be more reflective of the natural need to differentiate and label in order to avoid complexity.

As Heidegger once said, we need to be very selective in our use of words as, rightly or wrong, they frame our mindset and tunnel our thinking. You used in your question the words 'departure' and 'turn' that are part of the natural scholarly attitude toward phenomenology, at least from the historical 'who said what to whom' perspective. As suggested by Fink, Husserl's latest student, and practically embraced by Husserl in his last years and by Heidegger after the war, phenomenology in its core is the transcendence of methodology regardless its scientific, mathematical, philosophical, religious, cultural, political, and/or artistic origins. This means that phenomenology and phenomenological discussions are better off applying phenomenological practices on themselves. As Heidegger mentioned in the last pages of being and time, phenomenology is well suited to vicious circle type problems, we just need by trial and error to find the entry point.

Furthermore, as documented by GĂśdel in his philosophical oriented works, unlike mathematically-oriented methodologies that break by necessity when applied on vicious circle problems, phenomenology excels when applied on itself and from the perspective

of this discussion, it would be better to conduct a phenomenological investigation on phenomenology in order to get to an acceptable answer.

This cannot be done here and must be done individually by each interested individual, but here is the rudementary and incomplete set of cues that I can provide to the discussion following my own 5 years journey: 1. Husserl's and Heidegger's works should be regarded in their whole as part of the scholarly milieu of their time and not as isolated components.

2. Both had initial fallacies or incompletenesses that were discovered in later iterations and refinements of applying their emerging views of phenomenology on the views themselves: Husserl got into phenomenology while researching the mathematical natural attitude and Heidegger was initially interested in the theological natural attitude from a Germanic perspective - both, for different reasons, expanded gradually their horizons of interest.

3. The books that they published reflected their views at specific times and were partly shaped by and were subject to the political and sociocultural turmoil of the first half of the 20th century - in some cases their notes may better representatives of their thoughts than their books.

4. Heidegger's and Husserl's major disagreement of the 1920s-1930s regarding the interrelation between the natural and the transcendental attitudes faded as both scholars understood the need for continuous process of forming and unforming applied on a specific topic of interest while maintaining simultaneous awareness of the transcendental and the natural.

5. Heidegger's critique of Husserl in his die grundprobleme der phänomenologie in 1927 relates to the early purely transcendental views of Husserl and not his more mature views.

6. I recommend for further reading the following books: (a) Husserl: 'analyses concerning passive and active syntheses', 'the sixth cartesian meditation' (edited/written with/by Fink and therefore controvertial, but nevertheless very important), 'the fifth' and 'the crisis' (read again after the previous books were read); and (b) Heidegger: 'the basic problems', 'what is called thinking', 'the principle of reason', and 'identity and difference'.

Not sure if it is clear enough, 100 years of phenomenology prove that, unless inhumanly complex structures are used, words are limited in their ability to express concepts of being.

HTH, Ronnen Jul 9, 2013 ALL ANSWERS (27)

Mathew Cohen Mathew Cohen 路 The University of Calgary Because Husserl makes no claims to existence and starts with what we know, how is it possible that anyone - namely Heidegger/Sartre - can refute this position? After all, isn't any claim or knowledge about existence-of-being presuppose one to abide by the 'logic' that Husserl is uncovering? To refute anything that Husserl says by ontological reasoning one first has to show how one is able to arrive at said 'knowledge' from a sound base?

Husserl's sound base is Descarte's "I think therefore I am" for any doubting of this claim presupposes the very claim it means to object hence rendering itself to contradiction and thus false.

Any claims about existence no matter how convincing they are, no matter how obvious the axioms, have to follow a particular structure of relations of consciousness between the noematic-noetic phases, the doxic, modalities and so forth. i believe Husserl means to say that it is based on this structure of consciousness that one can be made aware of existential features and arrive at existential claims, and therefore because it rests on these structures that were built apodeitically it serves only to show the flexibility and strength of pure phenomenology not its weakness.

To speak of existence here and now is to point to something that can only be known in terms of something ideal, and thus anything truly KNOWN follows a phenomenological construct. And in order to do that, Husserl's phenomenology has to be expanded upon from where he left off.

Anyways, since I am reading the above works independently it is hard for me to get feedback on whether I understand it well enough or not, so I had put forward these questions to the community to help verify or challenge my understanding. So by no means do I assume I am an expert. In fact, I believe myself to be the opposite, and I am in need of direction.

Jul 3, 2013 Herman Schurmans Herman Schurmans 路 Werkgroep 18e Eeuw Show metaphysics out by the door, the metaphysical reenters by the window.

Jul 4, 2013 Neal O'Donnell Neal O'Donnell 路 Fort Hare University I wonder if it could be seen to be the child going off in a new direction. While Heidegger and the later phenomenologists may be seen to be refuting the master, is this the case, I ask. Is it not more a question of adding new dimensions to Husserl's groundbreaking work?

Jul 4, 2013 Ken Casey Ken Casey 路 Independent Researcher I know just enough about Husserl to be dangerous--however regarding Edith Stein and some of the phenomenological school--I am on better ground. I think Husserl's position is ever evolving and that many of his early students Stein, Reinach etc felt that Husserl's

abandonment of metaphysical realism (sometime between Ideen 1 and Ideen 2 which Stein was helping to edit) was the cause of a big philosophical break with many of Husserl's students. I learned a lot from Alasdair MacIntyre's book on Edith Stein--it is more about ealry phenomenology than it is about Edith Stein.

I guess what I am saying is that the presupposition of your question fails to distinguish between early and late Husserl. Early Husserl may have been a metaphysical realist and saw phenomenology as having a complex dialectical relation to metaphysics.

Jul 4, 2013 Jozef Piacek Jozef Piacek · Comenius University in Bratislava Herman issue is important in terms of otherness Husserl's and Heidegger's philosophy: both are metaphysical philosophy in the traditional sense, each one is different, original.

Heidegger's philosophy was an original philosophy, although Heidegger came from Husserl. The problem is a criticism to be replaced by syncriticism, i. e. by nonreductive bringing both philosophies in relationship. Heidegger by his critique of Husserl only made oneself distinguished from Husserl; Heidegger created a different philosophy and sense has only to compare the two. http://www.jozefpiacek.info/2013/06/syncriticism-summary/ Syncriticism (summary) | Pomocný slovník filozofa slovenska filozofia, synkriticizmus, kultura, civilizacia, kriza civilizacie, kriza, laska, smrt, vychova, bezcasie, atemporalita Jul 4, 2013 Anatoli Tchoussov Anatoli Tchoussov · Lomonosov Moscow State University it seems to me that this question needs to define an ontological (and ontical - too) difference between physics and metaphysics; such a difference can be made by a definition of sorts of givenness (Arten der Gegebenheiten); it's a pity, but those differences (and differances too) were not explicitly stated nor by Husserl nor by Heidegger (imho) Jul 4, 2013 Mathew Cohen Mathew Cohen · The University of Calgary Right, but by the very admission that you and Arten der Gegenbenheiten indicate that the difference can be made by sorts of givenness, is parallel to the very noema that Husserl talks about as arising out of its noetic correlate. In other words, whatever meaning that is given from a particular phenomena is based on a particular, or a set of particular, noetic phases that allow it to be meant as 'such and such'. Each 'givenness' has its manner in which it is given. So while one may say that Husserl is making an existential claim as to the relationship between the noetic and noema, I believe Husserl would say that they only exist insofar as they are built upon other noetic and noematic relationships that ultimately can be deconstructed to ego cogito ego sum and the manner which this is experienced.

And while I agree that Husserl does not explicitly state these ontilogical differences between physics and metaphysics (from my preliminary assessments of reading L.I, Ideas I, and Cart Med, and Phantasy, Image Cons, and Memory - I have yet to read his other books) I feel it is because he has to spend the bulk of his time like Moses "mapping out the desert" so to speak, and is unable to precisely to lead us into the "promised land". So much time is spent defending and articulating what he means that he fails to make progress in bringing us to the familiar terrain of philosophy and empirical sciences.

So basically I am saying that Husserl would probably agree with you that he doesn't spend a lot of time on this, but I believe he would also say that his sole purpose was to show that the difference CAN be become "known" by phenomenology. Thus if even existence may contradict our facts, Husserl would have little care whatsoever about this, because he is only interested in understanding what we can and how we can KNOW (ex: how we can know of metaphysical propositions), which is different from knowing what exists. [And while this threatens to position him ever so dangerously close to the dualism that he objects to, I acknowledge that it does and that I lack the ability to articulate myself out of this conundrum to the same level of conviction that Husserl is able to do.]

All in all, I guess, I make the argument: that anything that bases itself on a metaphysical premise cannot be considered to be a phenomenology (as by Husserl's standards). And I am looking for either affirmation or criticism regarding this because I believe my entire understanding on Husserlian thought rests on this. And as I get sucked into more of my own world and ways I would like to know if I have been navigating the terrain accurately or if I am way off course. Much thanks to all of your contributions so far. I look forward to reading more.

Jul 4, 2013 Anatoli Tchoussov Anatoli Tchoussov · Lomonosov Moscow State University @Mathew: m.b., in a development of a Rickert's direction, the early Heidegger (1915) had distinguished 3 realms of being (such ideas routed also in L.I. (1900-1901) but are more explicitly made in L.I.(1912)); imho, the main purpose of Husserl and Heidegger was laid in a sphere of construction of a world (as an unique construction); but their constructions - for me - are non-satisfying (but very important) Jul 4, 2013 Yuling Yeh Yuling Yeh · Wenzao Ursuline University of Languages I have a neuroscience doctor friend who once told me, she would never marry to a personal who also possess a PhD degree because 'too much opinions" simply about everything and non-sense!, or, she perhaps would be willing to marry to a PhD guy who obtains totally different academic specialty.

Jul 4, 2013 Ananda Mishra Ananda Mishra · Banaras Hindu University

One must not judge a philosopher by what he claims but only by what he actually does.In spite of all their claims Husserl or even Sartre were trapped into metaphysical speculation.A clear idealistic tendency is visible everywhere in Husserl's later works.Similarly contrary to his claim Sartre remained realist throughout his career.

However, Heidegger-Sartre objections to the Husserlian phenomenology are valid I think.

Husserl presupposes "the ghost of Ego" which is fully illegitimate as phenomenoly claims to centre only on that which appears to consciousness and not to that which grounds from within.It was in fact a return to the old metaphysical speculation.On the other hand Heidegger's fundamental ontology could better explain that the the theory of intentionality does not permit us to bracket any thing which is given to our consciousness.And hence the worldly existence cannot be bracketed.

Jul 5, 2013 Herman Schurmans Herman Schurmans ¡ Werkgroep 18e Eeuw Joseph, I assume we all have to learn from a master. This relationship is much as one between father and son. Do we have to kill the father to take his place? But it often hapens in philosophy, and elswere. A good fat(her wishes to be surpassed by his son. This is a most tragic task for most uf us. So we can be a good son, and a good or bad succesor.

The kind of philosopher you are depends on the kind of man you are (Fichte) . .

Jul 5, 2013 Neal O'Donnell Neal O'Donnell ¡ Fort Hare University this is turning out to be a rather interesting debate. I agree with Herman in that there is a sense of satisfaction in watching a son (or daughter, in my case) do better. I also agree with Ananda: it is extremely difficult to enter into true 'epoche'; however, being conscious of one's background is helpful in being open to the discussion, it is also a huge learning curve, as I found when doing psychotherapy with sexually abused women.

In my Heideggerian studies (on the relevance of care in medicine and nursing) I am finding that it is essential to read Husserl and his students (Stein, for instance) in order to 'see' what Heidegger is on about. But reading Husserl does not necessarily entail studying him. It is background like reading Brentano and Nietzsche.

Jul 5, 2013 Mathew Cohen Mathew Cohen ¡ The University of Calgary So would I be correct in generalizing most of the answers here as saying: "Mathew, you cannot have such a restrictive umbrella that determines what is and is not phenomenology. Phenomenology is like everything else. It grew out of a set of thoughts, and gives birth to another set of thoughts, which in turn go on and on and on. Husserl arrived at his position because of his history and ethos, and therefore his phenomenology does not deserve privilege amongst the rest. To try to excise out only that which is his phenomenology is like brain surgery and will likely cause damage to both what is phenomenological, and all its surroundings since they are all attached. It is simply part of a body of work, and therefore the question about distinguishing his from others is both trivial (insofar that everyone's can be expediently distinguished from others) and is also invalid in itself (since in truth it bares the DNA of its sire and cannot be separated therefrom) ."

If this is the meaning that everyone seems to be articulating then it is one that I can fully respect, and slowly coming to agreement with - (notwithstanding, there being a hesitation I feel, as though I am missing some other argument). Thank you all for your participation and help. Please do not hesitate to continue to respond. I have gained so much, and look forward to more of your insights and experience.

Jul 5, 2013 William Springer William Springer ¡ University of Texas at El Paso Merleau-Ponty, I think, had it right. What Husserl's epoche (bracketing) shows is that it cannot be done. It reminds me of Bertrand Russel's address to his fellow philosophers-he is convinced that solipsism is true, but out of respect for his listeners he will believe that they are listening to what he is saying. I think as Heidegger did say, that the scandal of philosophy is not that it tried and failed to solve the problem of the external world but that it regarded it as a problem. The very fact that I continue to write what I am writing right now assumes that I am doing something that others will be able to read and discuss.

Humans do communicate hence they can share their thoughts. I believe that his apparent mystery is generated by philosophy.

We try to understand vision as if it were caused by "impressions" for example. We do not realize that this is the beginning of a pseudo physics, which will not provide us with any real understanding . I am as certain that my visual consciousness EXISTS as I am that it would be a calamity for a me if I were blind. Visual consciousness is visual being-in-theworld. This is the human condition and I think it seems mysterious because we try unwittingly to understand it as if it were explainable as part of physical nature .

Consciousness is as consciousness does-- my visual being-in -the-world is simply a natural condition of a living human being. If this is metaphysics, then we are metaphysical beings. To deny the reality of visual consciousness is a world historical absent mindedness.

Jul 7, 2013 Mathew Cohen Mathew Cohen ¡ The University of Calgary Thank you for your post, as it raises some important questions, but unfortunately the questions that it invokes in me threaten to vere the discussion way off course (not that your comments were off course, but rather the questions I now have will spur new discussions, and as I would like to learn from all the contributors here I would like to keep the discussions linear so that I know what subject/question people are referring if/when they answer). So you should be able to find and answer these questions through my profile. I look forward to hearing your opinion on the questions below.

Question (1): What is the point of Husserl's epoche? how is it supposed to accomplish this?

Question (2): Is it possible to perform Husserl's epoche? and why/(not)? ... not to sound to repetitive, but for those who wish to continue to contribute to this discussion please do, but know that i have two other threads now as well.

Jul 7, 2013 William Springer William Springer · University of Texas at El Paso I would comment as follows: Question (1): What is the point of Husserl's epoche? how is it supposed to accomplish this?

Question (2): Is it possible to perform Husserl's epoche? And why/(not) To question (1) I would comment :My Husserl scholarship, if it can be called that , is very rusty. I have not read him for years so when I venture to say anything about the epoche I may be speaking nonsense. As I recall Husserl was adamant about trying to put all presuppositions on hold. As I understood it he regarded any presuppositions not only a danger to his pure phenomenology but an outright rejection of it. If I am not mistaken the terms “bracketing” and “reduction" are other names for this suspension (epoche) of presuppositions. Husserl believed he was starting something radically new in philosophy.

Since Heidegger, Sartre, Merleau-Ponty and so many others owe so much to him, and hence to much philosophy in the western world he was probably right.

To Question (2) I would comment: In the preface to his Phenomenology of Perception Merleau-Ponty makes some acute observations about the “reduction”. What I gathered from what he said there is that the reduction is anything but a return to idealism for instead of making the world immanent to the subject it teaches us be filled with wonder at its being there for us. Most memorable sentences for me in that preface were that “the most important lesson which the reduction teaches is the impossibility of a complete reduction.” and above all that “Heidegger’s being-in-the-world appears only against the background of the phenomenological reduction .”

I would put it this way. The natural attitude is that the world is there just as I find it, and the epoche done effectively brings to our attention that the astonishing fact is that being a human being is being someone who makes the world be seen, and heard , and touched, and tasted and cared about, and known. Human beings are an uncanny animal that are barely beginning to know what they are. Human embodied consciousness is a tremendous reality-- awesome, grand, noble, pathetic, brutal. Sadly, for the most part Dasein ist Verfallen as Heidegger observed which is the truth at the heart of that the myth of the Fall. Can humanity save itself?

Jul 8, 2013 Ronnen Paytan Ronnen Paytan · Independent Researcher Hi Mathew, The bottom line first: I believe that the words 'departure' and 'turn' do not necessarily reflect the true nature of the penomenological perspectives on phenomenology of Husserl and Heidegger in their final form. The word may be more reflective of the natural need to differentiate and label in order to avoid complexity.

As Heidegger once said, we need to be very selective in our use of words as, rightly or wrong, they frame our mindset and tunnel our thinking. You used in your question the words 'departure' and 'turn' that are part of the natural scholarly attitude toward phenomenology, at least from the historical 'who said what to whom' perspective. As

suggested by Fink, Husserl's latest student, and practically embraced by Husserl in his last years and by Heidegger after the war, phenomenology in its core is the transcendence of methodology regardless its scientific, mathematical, philosophical, religious, cultural, political, and/or artistic origins. This means that phenomenology and phenomenological discussions are better off applying phenomenological practices on themselves. As Heidegger mentioned in the last pages of being and time, phenomenology is well suited to vicious circle type problems, we just need by trial and error to find the entry point.

Furthermore, as documented by GĂśdel in his philosophical oriented works, unlike mathematically-oriented methodologies that break by necessity when applied on vicious circle problems, phenomenology excels when applied on itself and from the perspective of this discussion, it would be better to conduct a phenomenological investigation on phenomenology in order to get to an acceptable answer.

This cannot be done here and must be done individually by each interested individual, but here is the rudementary and incomplete set of cues that I can provide to the discussion following my own 5 years journey: 1. Husserl's and Heidegger's works should be regarded in their whole as part of the scholarly milieu of their time and not as isolated components.

2. Both had initial fallacies or incompletenesses that were discovered in later iterations and refinements of applying their emerging views of phenomenology on the views themselves: Husserl got into phenomenology while researching the mathematical natural attitude and Heidegger was initially interested in the theological natural attitude from a Germanic perspective - both, for different reasons, expanded gradually their horizons of interest.

3. The books that they published reflected their views at specific times and were partly shaped by and were subject to the political and sociocultural turmoil of the first half of the 20th century - in some cases their notes may better representatives of their thoughts than their books.

4. Heidegger's and Husserl's major disagreement of the 1920s-1930s regarding the interrelation between the natural and the transcendental attitudes faded as both scholars understood the need for continuous process of forming and unforming applied on a specific topic of interest while maintaining simultaneous awareness of the transcendental and the natural.

5. Heidegger's critique of Husserl in his die grundprobleme der phänomenologie in 1927 relates to the early purely transcendental views of Husserl and not his more mature views.

6. I recommend for further reading the following books: (a) Husserl: 'analyses concerning passive and active syntheses', 'the sixth cartesian meditation' (edited/written with/by Fink and therefore controvertial, but nevertheless very important), 'the fifth' and 'the crisis' (read again after the previous books were read); and (b) Heidegger: 'the basic problems', 'what is called thinking', 'the principle of reason', and 'identity and difference'.

Not sure if it is clear enough, 100 years of phenomenology prove that, unless inhumanly complex structures are used, words are limited in their ability to express concepts of being.

HTH, Ronnen Jul 9, 2013 Cj Nev Cj Nev ¡ Northwestern University Useful and excellent synopsis, Ronnen, thank you. What I believe would simplify your/the admittedly "inhumanly complex structures," would be (under publication in 2014) the very self-referential or iteration, fractal structure of nature or of all (yet-to-be proven) phenomena, for which Husserl has laid the groundwork on the method, drawing transcendentally from both the sciences and philosophy as no one ever has before or since. Further expounded upon, a fractal approach would then allow for a valid, even concrete/tangible, so-called entry point (again to be published in 2014), which I have found Heidegger has unfortunately only naysayed and then unoriginally redundantly in merely a scholarly fashion gone off (setting back I am sorry to say) in the usual selffulfilling vicious circles with no entry point to add.

Jul 9, 2013 Mathew Cohen Mathew Cohen ¡ The University of Calgary Ronnen, Thank you for your analysis, and recommended readings. I had Fink in mind for my next reading, but also Husserls Arithmetic. And I have Crisis on my shelf but will do as you recommend and read it afterwards.

I am in complete agreement with what you spoke about regarding doing it individually, and nor do I deny that my use of "departure" to explain Heidegger's position represents the naturalistic attitude. My own "crisis", and reason for asking this question, came about in reading up on phenomenological research and being confounded by the methods that to me seem so far removed. As you said, phenomenology is to be conducted individually.

Understanding this, but reading contradicting research studies like Giorgi and Ashforth I felt compelled to bring this discussion forward. Moreover, to compound my confound, since Giorgi and Ashforth seem to prefer Heidegger's "rendition" of phenomenology, I thought I would read into Heidegger a bit more (Being in Time - quite quickly however) and instead of finding the Husserl and Heidegger in opposition, I found they were really not incompatible at all. It seemed that Ashforth and Giorgi (among others) seemed to be reading into Husserl's statements and Heidegger's criticism from a metaphysical stand point. Thus the word "departure" and "metaphysical" in the question only served to bring to a head what I felt was the interpretation of thinkers in line with the above researchers.

So, this is a long way of saying your critique brings me relief.

Lastly, your comments regarding the relationship between Heidegger and Husserl make

sense to me. I will continue to hold those points as a frame of reference as I continue to study their work ( I have so much more to go). And your words about using phenomenology for self-referential matters resonates deeply with me. It is out of a process I have created called the Dendrite Process that I am now back in school to formally develop it. It was in trying to find a theoretical framework that included the merits of geometry, topology, and n-euclidean space that I fell in love with Husserl.

And with that said, CJ, I'm quite fascinated with fractals for perhaps similar purposes.

Can you recommend any readings by any chance?

Thanks for both your contributions and help.

Jul 9, 2013 Cj Nev Cj Nev ¡ Northwestern University Mathew, Because fractals are new on the scene (1970s), the literature is sparse and gradually growing here and there, so off the top I would recommend references you may already be familiar with: (a) PBS Nova-Fractals-Hunting the Hidden Dimension at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LemPnZn54Kw (b) The father of fractals, Benoit Mandelbrot, website http://users.math.yale.edu/mandelbrot/ or http://classes.yale.edu/fractals/ (c) Challenging yet hugely worthwhile, Manfred Schroeder's "Fractals, Chaos, Power Laws" (d) Also, an excellent comprehensive account -- Kenneth Falconer's "Fractal Geometry: Mathematical Foundations [of] and Applications" (e) Lastly, for a primary source I should not fail to mention Benoit Mandelbrot's "Fractals and Chaos" The field of fractals needs to be expanded upon for solving problems present maths cannot cohesively solve (e.g., see Reimann Hypothesis at claymath.org, Lecture by Jeff Vaaler at the University of Texas (video)). I look forward to reading your views and findings as you pursue the topic, as true it is most fascinating.

Jul 10, 2013 Ronnen Paytan Ronnen Paytan ¡ Independent Researcher Hi Cj, Husserl described phenomena at 3 levels: the constituted world (subconscious/conscious passive/active structures of awareness stemming from specific life experience of a specific individual), the structures of the lifeworld (superposition of constituted worlds within a specific sociocultural network), and the natural attitude (superposition of all

lifeworlds in specific distinctive aggregate of sociocultural networks). This fairly complex superstructure is hard to explain and grasp, and its best partially equivalent is the current concept of unstructured big data clusters. If you are interested in the analysis of the lifeworld, I would refer you to the notes of Schutz who developed them in interaction with Husserl. I have an unedited text for a book or series of articles on the subject. nevertheless, I will be interested to learn about your suggested application of fractal theory as a representation/visualization means. Yet, I encourage you to learn more about previous attempts from Husserl to present time to use mathematical methods in areas they inherently cannot address (i.e. Gödel's work). The dimensional modeling, either fractional (fractals) or natural (integer multidimensional) most probably falls under this category Thanks for the note, Ronnen Jul 10, 2013 Cj Nev Cj Nev · Northwestern University Dear Ronnen, Refreshing to hear your derivation of Husserl's work, which will prove helpful to me and I will use (print and place with Husserl's 'stuff') when I return to include him in construction of a publication I am working on presently, due out in 2014.

Thank you as well for pointing out Husserl's efforts concerning time that I will also incorporate as I go, corresponding fractals with, as you well explain, Husserl's third level of phenomena: "The natural attitude (superposition of all lifeworlds in specific distinctive aggregate of sociocultural networks)." Thanks also for your reference to the notes of Schutz and for appreciating/your interest and encouragement in the possible connection between fractals and Husserl's I consider breakthrough work. The "fractal theory" would not stop there, it is merely a viable means that supports concrete/tangible unification of many in fact all seemingly dichotomous phenomena.

Jul 14, 2013 Germán Bula Germán Bula · Universidad de La Salle Very briefly: for Heidegger, being is as it appears, therefore phenomenology is the same as ontology. For Husserl, the correlation between phenomena and reality is a problem that does not exist for Heidegger. It is not true that Husserl merely describes the contents of consciousness: he brackets the natural attitude that adscribes an external correlation to phenomena and hopes to regain the outside through a study of pure phenomena (eg, The Idea of Phenomenology); therefore Husserl does have ontological aims. Both Husserl and Heidegger have ontological aims, and have a radical disagreement on whether being=phenomena.

Apr 21, 2014 Rachel Anne Kornhaber Rachel Anne Kornhaber · University of Tasmania, Rozelle Campus Nazism and Heidegger did influence the state of play during Nazi Germany and the role that the University of Freiburg played in anti Jewish sentiment and what influence this played in phenomenology.

May 7, 2014 Carlos Eduardo Maldonado Carlos Eduardo Maldonado ¡ Universidad del Rosario Well, certainly Heidegger is strongly inclined to metaphysics - something that is already clear since his doctoral dissertation and almost immediately afterwards with his habilitation thesis (on Duns Scoto).

However, the real turn away from Husserl was "discovered" later when in 1979 were first published his "Prolegomena zur Geschcihte des Zeitbegriffs", a seminar Heidegger gave in 1925 (summer semester). Only then was it clear that it was exactly the interest on time what created a distance between Heidegger and Husserl.

(I shall not mention that Husserl gave Heidegger his text: "Zur Phänomenologie des Zeitbewusstseins" (from 1905) in order to be published and Heidegger kept it for himself for a long while before he published it, eventually).

Heidegger's critique of Husserl is not irrelevant, at all. Let me, en passant, tell you this anecdote: Husserl was invited to give a lecture in London. Heidegger accompanies his professor and friend to the train station in Freiburg. As the were walking, Husser was telling Heidegger what he was planning to teach in London (namely, the Cartesian Meditations).

Then, suddenly Heidegger asks Husserl: "Dear Professor, and what about history?". And Husserl replies: "Oh, history! I forgot about it!".

I worked for five years on these subjects while being in Leuven (at the Husserl Archives), some years ago...

Jun 18, 2014 Gordon Gates Gordon Gates Thank you for your wonderful post, Carlos; it brings philosophy to life.

No one's critique of anything is irrelevant; we all have something to say that adds to the discussion. Ronnen says in his initial post above that "unless inhumanly complex structures are used, words are limited in their ability to express concepts of being." I would agree that words are inadequate to express concepts of being; more than that, being may be impossible to capture in concepts. I would also add that the more structured, conceptual, and linear the articulation the further from being the words take us. That is why I prefer the work of Merleau-Ponty to Husserl or Heidegger, although MerleauPonty would not be the same if it were not for the thinkers who came before him. I prefer work that not only argues and articulates, but also evokes. ....................

Between Husserl and Heidegger 

…phenomenological origins…

Feeds: Posts ﾧ Comments ﾧ « Idealism, Noesis/Noema, and Goodbye to Husserl ﾧ Solicitation, Dasein and World ﾧ » Heidegger and Phenomenology October 10, 2007 by jonathanziemba ﾧ Class on October 10th… Welcome back from break, everyone. Today we started Heidegger, sections 8-12 of The History of the Concept of Time. John began by a quick introduction to Heidegger himself. As we learned when we began Husserl, Heidegger was Husserl’s prize student, and was taken under his wing as the greatest second-generation phenomenologist. Heidegger’s Being and Time (1927), released in Husserl’s yearbook (like an academic journal) was perceived by Husserl as a betrayal of the principles of phenomenology, and hurt their academic and personal relationship. This was only aggrivated when Heidegger, after having joined the National Socialist Party in 1933, removed Husserl, a Jewish convert to Lutheranism, from the University. Whether Heidegger’s philosophy is reflective of, or can be understood within, a Nazi ideology is a point of contention in Heidegger studies.

Despite this tension, indeed break with Husserl, Heidegger was rooted in phenomenology. Any critique of phenomenology materializing in the few pages we have read is not a critique from without, that is, an attack on phenomenology from outside of its own bounds and with an alternative philosophy in mind, but instead an “immanent” critique. Heidegger tells us : “We are making no deduction from the idea of phenomenology but are reading the principle from its concretion in the research work.” and later, in part b of ¶8, that the understanding of phenomenology comes from “the research itself, in the direction of its ownmost maxim, ‘to the matters themselves’…” So we see that Heidegger understands phenomenology in its “deformalized” form, its concrete aspects. This implies a notion of “habitation,” as John mentioned, that is crucial to the notion of understanding and interpretation in Heidegger, and will be present in almost all of the texts we read (especially the What is Metaphysics? lecture of 1929). This is also important in understand the “Abbau” and its logic, the “destruction” of the history of philosophy that is called for in Being and Time.

We mentioned the maxim “to the things themselves!” As John noted, we are working with the German word “Sache” here, not “Ding.” This is better translated as “matters.” I think this distinction is important if we want to keep the World of the phenomenologist open; Husserl doesn’t limit the objects of phenomenological study to “things” “out-there” in the world, but addresses “matters,” all things that can be objects of consciousness,

from a tree to freedom to ethnicity. What are these matters for Heidegger? Well, they are phenomena, as the title of our science indicates. Phenomenology seems to mean the “science of phenomena,” if we break up “phainomenon” and “logos,” the two Greek words that make up the name. But Heidegger, following his logic of habitation, sees an obscurity in the translation of “logos” as science of, and recaptures what he sees as a more original translation: legein meaning “making manifest” or “letting be seen.”

Aristotle, Heidegger claims, understands legein as discursive, making manifest what is talked about to another party (“I have a cold” “Look at this dot”) Heidegger, however, doesn’t want to get hung up on words and the voice as the essence of logos, and orients himself to the “making manifest” that is implied in the Greek discursive meaning of the word. He doesn’t want to think of logos as necessarily leading to the “theoretical apprehension” of an entity by an utterance, but wants to study the very selfpresentation/manifestation required for such an apprehension. So, when Heidegger talks about logos apophantikos versus logos semantikos (the two names in Greek in the section beta of part a of ¶9), he claims that the former is the sense most proper to the logos of phenomen/ology, as “pointing out and letting be seen.” Apophansis has a wider meaning than simply verbal propositions; Heidegger takes it to mean a certain approach that allows an encounter with beings. On the side of phenomenon, phainesthai, the Greek verbal root of phainomenon and phenomenon, Heidegger interprets as “showing itself,” making the phenomenon “that which shows itself.” Showing can mean several things, as we discussed in class, and most noted among its meanings are the seemingly opposed definitions of manifestation and semblance. Is appearing in the phenomenal sense of the word merely a semblance of something that lies behind the scenes? Heidegger’s answer is clear: “…only because phainesthai means ‘showing itself’ can it also mean ‘merely showing itself as,’ ‘only looking like.’ Only insofar as something in its sense makes a pretense of showing itself can it pass itself off as…” (p. 81) Since Heidegger does not take the road of epistemology, which, for him “lives off the confusion” between appearance and semblance, he tasks himself exclusively to understanding the phenomenon as that which presents itself.

Phenomenology is therefore “letting the manifest in itself be seen from itself.” (85) This letting-be and self-revelation implies a “covered up” phenomenon, one that must be let seen by itself, from itself, and how it is in itself. Heidegger works with such a covering up, as we will see in the essay on the Essence of Truth, where he claims that all revealings are also concealings. Phenomena can be totally undiscovered or buried. This latter sense of concealement is where Heidegger begins his Being and Time, in which he claims that the sense of the word Being has been forgotten, covered up, across the history of philosophy. Phenomenology, if we can understand it in the Heideggerian sense we have just established, is the way of unfolding, breaking apart, and, ideally, revealing what is concealed about this, or any other, phenomenon.

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Solicitation, Dasein and World ﾧ Fink!ﾧ Descartes, World, Vor- and Zu-handenheit ﾧ In "Heidegger" Posted in Heidegger ﾧ, Husserl ﾧ | 5 Comments 5 Responses on October 11, 2007 at 1:33 pm ﾧ | Reply

ﾧ noah37

I’m unclear on precisely how Heidegger’s conception of phenomena differs from a Husserlian one; and I assume this is an important site of Heidegger’s departure from Husserl.

Partly, this uncertainty is because I’m not sure that I fully understand what Heidegger means in claiming that phenomena “show” or “don’t show themselves” to us. The language makes it sound as if phenomena not only have some degree of autonomy in and of themselves, but also that they have a certain agency or even agenda to allow or not allow themselves to be seen. (If this is what Heidegger claims–though I’m not convinced it is–then it seems quite counter-intuitive to me.)

Would it be correct to say that Husserl, on the other hand, doesn’t give such a degree of autonomy to phenomenon? But how does he account for them? Does this have to do with the inseparability of fact/essence? Does Husserl want to say that a phenomenon is merely constituted by its fact/essence relationship, and thus the phenomenon cannot be conceived of as autonomous from our bestowal of sense upon it? But then doesn’t his concept of Noema bestow some autonomy on objects/phenomenon (are these synonyms?): the object is one thing that can be thought of in many different ways and “that persists amidst our noetic changes” (to quote from Jonathan’s 10/4 post)?

on October 15, 2007 at 7:24 pm ﾧ |

Reply ﾧ Desirée

I didn’t notice your comment until just today, Noah, but maybe it’s not too late.

Anyway, the way I see it, the difference between Husserl and Heidegger’s conception of phenomena is pretty much exactly how you articulated it in your comment. That is to say, in Husserl’s world, objects have no autonomy whatsoever: we (via sense-bestowal) determine the meanings of “objects.” For Heidegger, I think a certain kind of sensebestowal exists AND objects/phenomena also have autonomy. The concept of “it gives” is useful here because, for Heidegger, objects/phenomena reveal their meaning inasmuch as we give them their meaning.

What interests me about your question is that, for you, Husserl’s account of how we give

meaning to things in the world is more intuitive. Could you elaborate on that a bit? I was just thinking earlier this morning about the question of which view makes more “intuitive sense” (and, I think intuitive sense matters since, you know, we all participate in this “lived experience” thing — we should have some sort of account of what it is like). I had previously read Heidegger for another class, and, at that time, it made perfect intuitive sense. And then, after reading Husserl, like you, I was more inclined to believe that I alone determined the meaning of “objects.” In any case, I don’t have any commitments yet. But, I am wondering: if, for Heidegger, objects can “give” meaning to me, does that mean that he has a hidden commitment to some sort of metaphysical claim about how objects “are” (in an objective sense) in-the-world? I suppose for me, there is some (obvious) tension between what Husserl claims the aim of phenomenology is and how Heidegger re-figures that claim.

on October 19, 2007 at 7:28 pm ﾧ |

Reply ﾧ noah37

Yeah, it does seem that Heidegger’s autonomous objects are in some sense metaphysically objective, at least as long as we’re talking about physical objects (I’m not sure if anyone could make a plausible case for the objectiveness of the contents of my memory, for instance.) But, upon further consideration, such a status of physical objects does seem more intuitive to me. This comes from the consideration that we can’t (unless, perhaps, we try really hard) bestow any sense upon any object (which in this view would itself be merely a bestowed sense); we don’t fabricate the world around us from *nothing*. And it is not that our experience of the world is *only* a product of our collective or individual conditioning either. Such a view just couldn’t account for the fact that (I assume) there has been a fairly standard vocabulary to describe color in every language ever. Unless somebody has a really smart alternative story to tell (though please no brain-in-a-vat-s), this would show that the difference between the blue and red is something objective; not just an arbitrary sense that we have decided to bestow. In this sense, objects that are blue and objects that are red “give” this sense of themselves to us.

(Perhaps some of us, like our beloved professor, have an impaired faculty for receiving such senses.) And this seems right. But does Husserl really think that we can make blue red?

on October 20, 2007 at 7:10 pm ﾧ |

Reply ﾧ demographer

Dreyfus at Cal is podcasting his readers are interested:

undergrad course on Heidegger, if

http://webcast.berkeley.edu/course_details.php?seriesid=1906978475 ﾧ

on October 24, 2007 at 10:55 pm ﾧ |

Reply ﾧ Desirée

Noah, I largely agree with you — but… to your question, “Does Husserl really think that we can make blue red?” is interesting. I’m hoping to address this issue in my paper — not the specific example of course, but how/why Husserl might say that we can have similar accounts of the same phenomena even though we all “bestow” our own accounts of objects unto them. I don’t think he’d give objects any autonomy the way Heidegger does, but as far as I can tell, he does seem to think that there is, in fact, some sort of Objectivity out there and he seems to locate that in Others…I could be totally mistaken about this, of course, but I’ll have more to say later. ..................

2014.07.35 Search FRIEDRICH-WILHELM VON HERRMANN

Hermeneutics and Reflection: Heidegger and Husserl on the Concept of Phenomenology Friedrich-Wilhelm von Herrmann, Hermeneutics and Reflection: Heidegger and Husserl on the Concept of Phenomenology, Kenneth Maly (tr.), Toronto University Press, 2013. xxx + 152pp., $50.00 (hbk), ISBN 9781442640092.

Reviewed byThomas Nenon, University of Memphis This book consists of three essays in which the author presents Heidegger's "hermeneutic phenomenology" (in contrast to what he calls Husserl's "reflective phenomenology"), as developed in two early lecture courses that have now been published as Volumes 56/56[1] ﾧ and 17[2]ﾧ of the Gesamtausgabe and in §7 of Being and Time[3]ﾧ. The first, by far the longest, essay is a reading of the 1919 lecture course; the second relies on the 1923/24 lectures; the third is an interpretation and commentary on the Heidegger's well-known description of phenomenology in the "Introduction" to BT. In each of these essays, the guiding theme is the contrast between Heidegger's phenomenology, which is an enactment of lived experience itself as "the a- and pretheoretical domain, which keeps itself closed off when we are theoretically oriented" (13), and Husserl's phenomenology. It recounts how Heidegger's hermeneutic phenomenology takes as its starting point the concrete involvement of what will come to be called Dasein in the world as a significant whole in contrast to what von Hermann calls reflective phenomenology, which he describes as still trapped within the prejudices of traditional modern philosophy that is oriented primarily toward theory, which culminates in scientific knowledge and hence focuses primarily on perception as opposed to the fullness of engaged practical life. Heidegger's hermeneutic phenomenology is

introduced in each of the essays by way of contrast to Husserl's reflective phenomenology with a slightly different emphasis in each of them, while they all at the same time follow Heidegger in acknowledging the key role that Husserl's phenomenology played for Heidegger in the development of his own positions.

In the early 1919 lectures, as laid out in the first essay, such hermeneutical phenomenology is described as a form of "understanding looking" (21) that is fundamentally different from "theoretical knowing, whose known is only things, what is reified, or what is ob-jectified" (21), including consciousness itself as an object of reflection. What makes Heidegger's phenomenology hermeneutic is the fact that "Understanding lookingaccompanies the sense of enactment of living-experience and is thereby capable of interpreting the pre-theoretical essence that is own to livedexperience" (22). It is attuned to the things with which we concern ourselves as they present themselves to us against the backdrop of lived experience that is the most basic or original "event" or "Ereignis" from which hermeneutic phenomenology proceeds.

The contrast is then drawn to Husserlian reflective phenomenology that (a) remains oriented on theory and thereby misses the crucial practical dimensions of lived experience (20, 67), so that it (b) assumes that the primary access to the things around us is perception upon which all of the other ways in which we encounter things are founded (32-33, 36, 50), and (c) is enacted by a "pure ego pole" that "ob-jectifies" instead of living in the acts of lived experience as consciousness (30, 51). The positive example of such a lived experience that von Herrmann uses is Heidegger's description of the lectern that I recognize as such immediately upon entering the classroom. I do not see first of all a brown object of a certain size and shape and then later, in a subsequent act, add a layer or practical relevance to it, which is what he says Husserl's phenomenology would suggest, but rather, in lived experience, I recognize it immediately and from the outset as the lectern, a recognition that it is not founded upon some previous and independent act of (theoretical) perception, but rather precedes any subsequent abstractive focus on its physical properties as presented in perception.

The second essay contrasts Heidegger's notion of phenomenology as one that takes a different path than Husserl's phenomenology does in his middle period where it "has de facto become descriptive, eidetic science of transcendentally pure consciousness" (91).

Husserl's phenomenology, von Herrmann says, with reference to a quote from Heidegger's text, is guided, "by the predominance of an empty and thereby fantastical idea of certainty and evidence" (93). The basic issue, according to Heidegger, is not something specific to Husserl but to Western philosophy in general, going back not just to Descartes, but to Aristotle, namely whether the starting point for investigations into being should be oriented primarily on beings that do not have the character of the "possibility of Dasein for a human life" (GA 17, 42) or Dasein itself. This anticipates, of course, Heidegger's claim later in BT that the history of philosophy is characterized by a kind of

self-forgottenness of Being due above all to the mistaken starting point in the search for the structure of being in terms of categories that apply specifically to things that Dasein is not. He proposes instead that phenomenology should begin with the experience of our own existence and derive the structures of that existence, existentials, from it in order to see how Dasein's understanding of the kinds of beings that it is not depends above all on its own self-understanding and how the fundamental structures of those kinds of beings must rather be explicated in terms of temporality as Dasein's most fundamental possibility.

In fact, von Herrmann himself points out that Hussserl's Logical Investigations represent more a breakthrough than a simple continuation of the unquestioned orientation on certainty and evidence as pursued by the tradition (94). Husserl's contribution was to address very directly and refute naturalistic tendencies in interpreting consciousness, for instance in his well-known essay "Philosophy as a Rigorous Science" from 1911, but Heidegger finds Hussserl's refutation of historicism in the same essay lacking. Von Hermann cites Heidegger's observation that, because of Husserl's preoccupation with securing valid knowledge, "human Dasein as such is excluded from the possibility of being encountered" (97). By contrast, hermeneutic phenomenology, as what Heidegger in 1919 had called "the pre-theoretical primordial science of living and living-experience" and in the 1923/24 lectures is now called "the scientific origin of factical life, ontological phenomenology, and hermeneutic of facticity" (101), is directed squarely to human life and its concerns as such in its very historical being. Von Herrmann follows Heidegger in acknowledging the crucial role and positive role that Husserl has played in opening up the possibilities of phenomenology as Heidegger pursues them, but in this brief essay von Herrmann still associates Husserl more with the tradition than with the new direction Heidegger is taking. Particularly with regard to this essay, in order to show just how much Heidegger's emphasis is on the continuities instead of the differences, it would have been helpful to quote Heidegger's unequivocal statement that what is called "reflection" in Husserl is far different from what Descartes or others in modern philosophy mean by it: Heidegger notes that, One must pay attention to what reflection is about: about consciousness with the fundamental character of intentionality. Reflection is not about psychic [i.e., mental, TN] events but rather about ways of relating to the objective world. It is therefore a fundamental confusion to characterize Husserlian phenomenology as a transcendental psychology, as Scheler does . . . . Phenomenology is directed not to acts in the old sense, but to new domains, to the way one relates oneself to things so that that to which the self-relating is directed is present in it (GA 17, 262).

Moreover, this "way of relating oneself to things" is nothing other than what Heidegger will call "comportment" in BT.

What Heidegger does object to, but does not emphasize in his recognition of Husserl as opening up phenomenology as a possibility, is the way Husserl intends to develops it as a "science of reason," (GA 17, 263) that still preserves too much of the legacy of the scientific orientation on evidence, even for the most basic kinds of truths, like "the truths of religion or art," where truth is something much more basic than adequacy (GA 17, 98).

Von Herrmann alludes to this point when he notes that, even in Husserl's final work on the Crisis of European Sciences,[4] Husserl still reserved a special place for human beings as rational agents (102).

Most of the third essay follows Heidegger's own lead in §7 of BT in describing the continuities as much as the differences between their approaches to phenomenology, while at the same time emphasizing just how significant those differences are. Heidegger follows Husserl much of the way in his explanation of the nature of phenomenology as a philosophical method. Where they depart, as von Herrmann recounts it, is in Husserl's determination of phenomenology not only as a method, but also as related above all to a specific topic. Von Herrmann describes Husserlian phenomenological philosophy as an analysis "at first . . . of lived-experiences of pure consciousness, then phenomenology of lived-experience of transcendental consciousness, namely, transcendental subjectivity" (110). Heidegger, he says, accepts Husserl's formal conception of philosophy as a method but differs in two main ways. The first is related to what von Herrmann sees as the consequences of Husserl's conception of subjectivity. It is not something that Heidegger says directly, but von Herrmann reads Heidegger's emphasis upon allowing the things to show themselves as they are in themselves as a rebuke of what von Herrmann has referred to in the first two essays as Husserl's failure to overcome the modern assumptions associated with science as a theoretical enterprise. Von Herrmann states, "The thematic object of Husserlian phenomenology is the life of consciousness with its lived-experiences, namely acts, and with that which in the acts of consciousness are given objectively in consciousness" (125), and he reminds the reader that, According to his basic approach, Husserl comprehends the pre- and outsidescientific ways of access as those which he in summary calls simple sense experience (also life-world experience): the present-related and making present perception and its presentiating modifications of the present-related memory of the present, the past-related recollection, and the future-related anticipation (expectation). In contrast, Heidegger, on the basis of his Dasein-approach, calls for, as pre-scientific ways of access, that which he designates terminologically as comportments of circumspect caring-for -- of the caring dealing with beings near which we always reside. (117) The second main difference is closely related and is one that Heidegger is himself very explicit about in §7. It concerns not the method but the appropriate subject-matter for phenomenology. Von Herrmann describes it as Dasein in "its existential constitution of

being and of the self-related-ecstatic-horizonal disclosure of being in general" (135), even though these are not the words Heidegger uses in this section yet, since these are terms that will be subsequently introduced only in the course of the work itself. What Heidegger in this early section does say is that the proper topic of phenomenology is precisely that which for the most part does not show itself and is most properly in need of elucidation, namely not beings but the Being of beings (SZ 35) that for the most part remains concealed. As we have noted above in our discussion of von Herrmann's second essay, Heidegger comes to the view early on that the kind of Being that, for the most part and precisely, we do not face is our own Being, that of Dasein, and the project of BT is to show how Dasein's Being is above all and most basically a form of self-relation that is normally concealed to us but is at the same time the ground of how everything -- we ourselves and the beings within the world that we are not -- shows up for us.

In this essay, von Herrmann refers to these structures more than he explains them, and he assumes that the reader is familiar with at least the basic outlines of the analyses that Heidegger presents in BT just as the other two chapters focus more on presenting differences between Husserl and Heidegger than on explaining to the uninitiated what the various terms mean that Heidegger introduces along the way as he attempts to avoid pitfalls associated with standard philosophical terms like "objectivity," "subjects," "knowledge," and "consciousness," with which most philosophical readers are more familiar. So, although these studies will be clear to scholars already steeped in Hussserlian and Heideggerian terminology and familiar with their basic positions, they do not serve as ready introductions to the texts and topics they discuss. Other books by this author that the translator cites in his introduction serve that purpose much better.

There is no doubt that von Herrmann is one of the world's most knowledgeable scholars and careful and sympathetic readers of Heidegger. I should also note that I learned much from his thoughtful readings of Heidegger, Fichte, and Kant in many seminars he held in Freiburg that I had the privilege of attending. Hence it is no surprise that his presentations of Heidegger's project and the steps along the way in its development as traced out in these essays are accurate and compelling. However, his readings of Husserl are a little less charitable than Heidegger's own statements about Husserl in the texts that von Herrmann interprets in this book. I use the term "charitable" advisedly because the nature of Husserl's work lends itself to so many different interpretations. Husserl's work is pivotal not just in the sense that it had a great impact on so many subsequent thinkers in twentieth century philosophy, including perhaps most notably Heidegger, and because his starting point was traditional in just the ways that von Herrmann outlines, but it is also pivotal in the sense that there are important turning points within his thinking as he constantly expands the range of the topics his phenomenology addresses and introduces new distinctions and refinements along the way that end up taking him in a very different direction than the tradition he began with. Heidegger himself was well aware of this. So, for instance, it is true that Husserl in the Logical Investigations presents his work as

exercises in the grounding of science, and the model is clearly the natural sciences.

Throughout his early work, he continues to present phenomenology as the philosophical basis for an Erkenntnistheorie, an epistemology or theory of knowledge whereby the kind of knowledge that is meant here is theoretical knowledge and the most powerful example of it is the kind of knowledge produced in modern natural sciences. The most common examples of knowledge he presents not just in his early works but throughout his career are descriptions of perceptions of physical objects ("Dinge" or "things," as he calls them).

So when von Herrmann points to Husserl's phenomenology as still in the sway of modern philosophical assumptions about knowledge, perception, and objectivity, he has more than enough passages in Husserl's works to which he can point. Moreover, even in his latest work, Husserl retains the traditional language of subjectivity, consciousness, and reflection that at the very least bring with them the connotations and assumptions from the history of modern philosophy that Husserl himself often finds himself struggling to work against. Heidegger from the very outset has decided to avoid these terms and attempt to come up with new ones that better fit the phenomena as he sees them.

On the other hand, though, Husserl's phenomenological investigations took him in directions fundamentally different from those of modern natural science as he began to take seriously some of Dilthey's insights into the differences between the natural and the spiritual (geistige) worlds. By the time Husserl was composing the manuscripts that would be published only after his death as the Ideas II,[5] he had come to see that in the attitude in which we live our daily lives, the "personalistic attitude," the things we encounter within the "surrounding world (Umwelt)" are encountered not primarily in terms of their bare perceptual properties, but rather in terms of their relevance, their uses and values to us. The surrounding world of our daily lives is a world in which a person is not primarily interested in theoretical knowledge for its own sake, but rather conducts himself as an acting human being in practical life, makes use of the objects of his Umwelt, shapes them to his purposes, and thereby evaluates them according to aesthetic, ethical, utilitarian viewpoints, or in which he engages in a communicative relationship to his fellow human beings, talks to them, writes letters to them, reads about them in the newspaper, associates with them in common acts, makes promises to them, etc. (Ideas II, 181-2) It contains not mere things (Dinge), but use-objects (clothes, household utensils, weapons, tools), works of art, literary products, items used in religious or legal actions (seals, official necklaces, coronation insignia, ecclesiastic symbols etc.); and it contains not only individual persons: the persons are rather members of communities, of higher-order personal unities that lead their lives as a whole, maintain themselves as individuals, continually enter or leave the communities

across time, which have their own communal characteristics, ethical and legal orders, their own ways of functioning, their dependencies on circumstances, orderly patterns of change, their ways of developing or remaining constant over time depending on the circumstances. (Ideas II, 182) One could easily include lecterns here as well.

Hence the differences between Husserl's phenomenology in the Ideas II and Heidegger's descriptions of our encounters with things around us in lived experience are at this stage not nearly as great as the first essay would suggest, and since Heidegger had access to the manuscripts on which the subsequent publication was based, he knew this. This is perhaps why Heidegger himself refers to Natorp, Rickert, and Windelband much more often and critically than to Husserl in these lectures. He does say that Husserl would describe the experience of the lectern any differently than he does.

In the Ideas II, Husserl still does employ the notion of Fundierung and says that cultural objects like lecterns and tools and that persons are founded upon physical aspects of those objects. However, this does not mean that we encounter them first independently in terms of their perceptible properties and only subsequently recognize them as tools or people, but rather that we must see something with some specific shapes and sizes consistent with being a hammer or being a human being if we are going to recognize them as tools or as persons, but not that what it is to be a tool or a person is in any way reducible to the physical properties of those things. The perceptible properties are strata, moments, nonindependent components of the experienced things that are nonetheless an essential part of experiencing them, even if we never experience them on their own except through abstraction.

Husserl is also very clear that the process of "naturalizing" objects, "objectifying" them in the sense of modern science is just such an "abstraction" (Ideas II, 25) from the concrete experience of a thing that includes, instead of excluding, their practical and aesthetic characters prior to this abstractive process. In this sense, the naturalistic attitude is not our natural attitude, but rather an abstraction from it. This is also consistent with fundamental themes from Heidegger's work. Why then does Heidegger, especially in the 1923/24 lecture, continue to criticize Husserl's over-reliance on perception as a model for our comportment not just in the theoretical sphere, but in the axiological and practical spheres as well?

I do not think it is because he believes that Husserl holds the view that the only genuine properties of things are their physical, perceptible properties. I also do not think it is because he believes that Husserl does not recognize the priority of the practical and evaluative aspects of experience in our daily lives. Rather, I think the answer is that Husserl continues to use the model of intention and fulfillment/disappointment through intuitions according to the model of perceptual experience in his grounding of values and

goods. Husserl's relatively recently published lectures on ethics from 1920 and 1924[6]ﾧ -- precisely the period in which Heidegger was holding his own lecture courses in Freiburg as well -- make this point very explicitly. So when Heidegger recognizes that Husserl's conception of evidence "is vastly superior to everything else that has ever been said about it" (GA 17, 272) and acknowledges that Husserl sees that each domain of objects, including values and goods, has a specific evidence corresponding to its content (GA 17, 273), he still thinks that there is a problem because Husserl's orientation on confirmation and facts about these kinds of issues along the lines of the perceptual model misses "understanding life itself in its authentic Being and responding to thequestion concerning the character of its Being" (GA 17, 274-75), not as a series of position-takings to be confirmed or disconfirmed through intuitions, as Husserl would have it, but as a project a self-relation in which Dasein projects itself in a way that facts-of-the-matter cannot ground, as a being with Existenz as its basic form of Being. This is a genuine difference between Heidegger and Husserl,[7]ﾧ and I think that this is the real point that Heidegger is aiming at both in the 1923/24 lecture and in §7 of BT. In sum, then, I think that von Herrmann is correct in the way he outlines how Heidegger is attempting to chart out an entirely new course for phenomenology that is indeed different from Husserl's, even on the most charitable reading of Husserl, and that the contrast between Heidegger's phenomenology and many of the most basic assumptions of modern philosophy is indeed as stark as von Herrmann portrays it. However, I also think that Husserl's phenomenology in many ways in his middle and later periods was also well on the way to overcoming some of these assumptions on its own, and that Heidegger was able to recognize this in spite of what he maintained were nonetheless crucial limitations that Husserl himself was ultimately never able to overcome. ﾧ [1]ﾧ Martin Heidegger, Zur Bestimmung der Philosophie: Frühe Freiburger Vorlesungen, Kriegsnotsemester 1919 und Sommersemester 1919, in Gesamtausgabe, Volume 56/57, ed. Bernd Heimbüchel. Klostermann: Frankfurt am Main, 1987. References to the Gesamtausgabe will be cited as GA followed by the volume, then the page number.

[2]ﾧ Martin Heidegger, Einführung in die phänomenologische Forschung: Marburger Vorlesung, Wintersemester 1923/24 in Gesamtausgabe, Volume 17, ed. by Friedrich Wilhelm von Hermann. Klostermann: Frankfurt am Main, 1994.

[3]ﾧ Martin Heidegger, Sein und Zeit. Niemeyer: Tübingen, 1972. The page numbers of this and subsequent editions of this work are included in the margins of the translation of this work into English as Being and Time and in its publication as Volume 2 of the Gesamtausgabe, so this work will be cited as BT followed by the page number.

[4]ﾧ Edmund Husserl, Die Krisis der europäischen Wissenschaften und die transzendentale Phänomenologie,Husserliana, Band VI (den Haag: Martinus Nijhoff

1962). Translated by David Carr as The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology (Northwestern University Press: Evanston, 1954).

[5]ﾧ Edmund Husserl, Ideen zu einer reinen Phänomenologie und phänomenologischen Philosophy. Zweites Buch. Husserliana, Band IV (den Haag: Nijhoff 1952). Translated by R. Rojcewicz and A. Schuwer as Ideas pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and Phenomenological Philosophy, Book II (Kluwer: Dordrecht, 1991). Citations will follow the page numbers of the German edition, which are listed in the margins of the English translation.

[6]ﾧ Edmund Husserl, Einleitung in die Ethik, Vorlesungen Sommersemester 1920/1925, Husserliana Volume XXXVII, edited by Henning Peucker. Dordrecht: Kluwer 2004.

[7]ﾧ For a fuller treatment of this point, see: Thomas Nenon, "Martin Heidegger and the Grounding of Ethics," in: Lester Embree and Thomas Nenon (eds.), Husserl's Ideen.

(Dordrecht: Springer, 2013), pp. 176-193. .......................

Phenomenology - Martin Heidegger

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Martin Heidegger (1889–1971) was a student of Husserl. Before that, he was a theology student, interested in much more concrete matters of human existence than his teacher, and his questions concerned how to live and how to live "authentically"—that is, with integrity, in a complex and confusing world. His use of phenomenology was subservient to this quest, although the quest itself soon transcended the phenomenological method.

Heidegger's phenomenology is most evident in his first (and greatest) book, Sein und Zeit (1927; English trans. Being and Time, 1962). Like his teacher Husserl, Heidegger insists that philosophical investigation begin without presuppositions. But Husserl, he says, still embraced Descartes's basic picture of the world, assuming that consciousness, or "the mind," was the arena in which phenomenological investigation took place. Such a

philosophy could not possibly be presuppositionless. So Heidegger abandons the language of mind, consciousness, experience, and the like, but nevertheless pursues phenomenology with a new openness, a new receptivity, and a sense of oneness with the world.

Heidegger's early work is defined by two themes: first, Heidegger displays a profound anti-Cartesianism, an uncompromising holism that rejects any dualism regarding mind and body, any distinction between subject and object, and the linguistic separation of "consciousness," "experience," and "mind." This also demands a reconsideration of the Cartesian thesis that our primary relationship to the world is one of knowledge. Second, Heidegger's early philosophy is largely a search for authenticity, or what might better be described as "own-ness" (Eigentlichkeit), which we can understand, with some qualification, as personal integrity. This search for authenticity will carry us into the now familiar but ever-renewed questions about the nature of the self and the meaning of human existence.

To ensure that we do not fall into Cartesian language, Heidegger suggests a new term (the first of many). Dasein (literally, "being-there") is the name of this being from whose perspective the world is being described. Dasein is not a consciousness or a mind, nor is it a person. It is not distinguished from the world of which it is aware. It is inseparable from that world. Dasein is, simply, "Being-in-the-World," which Heidegger insists is a "unitary phenomenon" (not being the world). Thus, phenomenology becomes ontology (the nature of being) as well.

Being-in-the-World is not primarily a process of being conscious or knowing about the world. Science is not the primary concern of Dasein. Dasein's immediate relation to the world is better captured in the image of the craftsman, who "knows his stuff," to be sure, but might not be able to explain it to you nor even know how to show it to you. What he can do—what he does do—is engage in his craft. He shows you that he knows how to do this and that by simply doing it. This knowing how is prior, Heidegger tells us, to knowing that. In effect, our world is essentially one extended craft shop, a world of "equipment" in which we carry out various tasks and only sometimes—often when something goes wrong—stop to reflect on what we are doing and look at our tools as objects, as things. They are, first of all, just tools and material to be used, and in that sense we take them for granted, relying on them without noticing them. Our concept of "things" and our knowledge of them is secondary and derivative.

Thus the notion of Dasein does not allow for the dualism of mind and body or the distinction between subject and object. All such distinctions presuppose the language of "consciousness." But Heidegger defends an uncompromising holism in which the self cannot be, as it was for Descartes, "a thinking thing," distinct from any bodily existence.

But, then, what is the self? It is, at first, merely the roles that other people cast for me, as their son, their daughter, their student, their sullen playmate, their clever friend. That self, the Das Man self, is a social construction. There is nothing authentic, nothing that is my own, about it. The authentic self, by contrast, is discovered in profound moments of unique self-recognition—notably, when one faces one's own death. And so Heidegger's

phenomenology opens up the profoundly personal arena of existentialist phenomenology.

Read more: Phenomenology - Martin Heidegger - World, Self, Dasein, and Mind - JRank Articles ﾧ http://science.jrank.org/pages/10640/Phenomenology-MartinHeidegger.html#ixzz42bJ4Sy5Z ﾧ ....................

Phennomenological Heidegger & Husserl Updated on October 18, 2011

Phenomenology is a method used by Husserl and then his student Heidegger to carry out philosophy. Their approach though is extremely different. Husserl, like Rene Descartes, thinks we need to start philosophy from a firm foundation without presuppositions; from there we can gain universal knowledge. Husserl is focused on epistemology. Heidegger believes that ontology is more fundamental. To analyze things-in-themselves and being first. Phenomenology is the study of the origin of phenomena (things) in our lived experience. Husserl thinks we are capable of being unbiased, neutral and impartial when we study things. Heidegger believes this to be impossible. For Heidegger, humans always have an interest, words already carry a world of meaning, and thus we are always in a context.

Husserl

Husserl’s definition of phenomenology is “’a descriptive theory of the essence of pure

transcendental experiences… which has its own justification.’”, (Macann, Christopher. P. 31.). Thus for Husserl the phenomenological method “is a method of transcendental reflection, and a considerable amount of time is spent establishing and justifying the relevant concept of reflection.”, (Macann, Christopher. P. 31). Reflection in the sense where the self becomes an object of reflection. In phenomenology we are then to look at our looking. We do not just look at the object, but look at our looking at the object.

Scientists do not look at their presuppositions and biases. This attempt to find ‘how to know’ involves consciousness. He is referring to the fact that ‘consciousness’ is consciousness of something. Consciousness is “the foundation of reality in its entirety.”, (Macann, Christopher. P. 32). Consciousness is always directed towards something and it is always an act. Thus we must look at the nature of consciousness and how it directs itself and at the interrelationship between subject and object.

We can look at ‘things’ in the external world, try to be objective, describe its characteristics and properties. The important use of phenomenology is that it goes one step beyond that and looks at how we are looking; looks at how the acts of consciousness works. Any act of consciousness can be looked at whether it be memory, perception or dreams. In regards to memory, phenomenology would be the “bringing to light the meaning-bestowing activity of remembering rather than focusing on the memory as such.” (Macann, Christopher. P. 34).

“I ask myself how the object in question comes to be posited with the meaning which adheres to it as an object… I make the act of imagining or remembering the object of a specific phenomenological investigation with a view to specifying the essence of imaginative or memorial consciousness.”

This involves the epoche; a state of suspension, bracketing and setting aside all presuppositions. “It is the ego which, while it suspends all beliefs about the reality of the world on the grounds that these are not indubitable, discovers itself as the only apodictically certain being.”, (Paris Lecture, p. 4). The phenomenological epoche “is the methodology through which I come to understand myself as that ego and life

consciousness in which and through which the entire objective world exists for me.”

(Paris Lectures. P. 8). “Everything in the world, all spatio-temporal being, exists for me because I experience it, because I perceive it, remember it, think of it in any way, judge it, value it, desire it.” (Paris Lecture. P. 8).

Starting with an absolute foundation seems only logical. That this foundation is the ego also makes sense since it is really hard to deny that which basically creates existence for us. Without consciousness there would be no ‘I’ and thus nothing else. Therefore it is important to acknowledge the ‘I’ as the interpreter of all things, you cannot escape the fact that it is your subjective person that thinks about anything. If we can take anything from Descartes, it is the idea that the ‘I’ is fundamental and undeniable. Husserl also has a valid point that consciousness is an intentional act. This appears to be an adequate description of how the consciousness is, and it is vital that we look at these acts as objects as well when considering how we know things at all. Of course the ego that we are has been socialized and has naively absorbed vast amounts of interpretation given to us, has may presupposition and biases. The phenomenological reduction then is vital to look at things more clearly. The attempt to eliminate all presuppositions, biases and so forth is very important when looking at anything. However, it does not seem conceivable that we could eliminate all of them, as we could not possibly be aware of all of them.

Nevertheless, the process is important in eliminating all the clutter and letting us become as objective and neutral as possible.

This is contrast to everyday existence which Husserl states is naïve for it is “the immersion in the already-given world and consists of experiencing, thinking, valuing, acting.” (Paris Lecture. P. 36). All of which do not “explain the intentional acts from which ultimately everything originates.” (Paris Lectures. P. 36). “In the natural attitude, experience is taken to be a presentation of the object (or the world) as it is in itself, that is, of the object as a substance possessing properties of one kind or another.” (Macann, Christopher. P. 33). We can see then when it comes to knowledge and to the gaining there of (for the sciences) Husserl’s phenomenological method makes us look at how he know things, and makes us acknowledge and bracket presuppositions to be more objective.

Thus phenomenology according to Husserl is useful in gaining any knowledge. It is refining our ability to reason, and expanding it to reflect on our own thought process.

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Heidegger

Heidegger’s phenomenology is concerned with ontology. It has no real application in improving the method of how we gain knowledge, because Heidegger believes the question of Being is more fundamental than how we know things. For Heidegger phenomenology is “to let that which shows itself be seen from itself in the very way in which it shows itself from itself.” (Macann, Christopher. P 69). All ontology of the past, “no matter how rich and tightly knit a system of categories it has at its disposal, remains fundamentally blind and perverts its innermost intent if it has not previously clarified the meaning of Being sufficiently and grasped this clarification as its fundamental task.”

(Being and Time, p. 53). Most ontology theories start with an assumption of Being and go from there, and never really delve into Being itself. According to Heidegger most ontology theories cover over Being, to the point that Heidegger states “Ontology is possible only through phenomenology.” (Being and Time, p. 84).

To relate to this question of Being though he believes we must look at it through our own

being-there or Dasein. Since questions are “a seeking. Every seeking takes its direction beforehand from what is sought (Being and Time,p. 45), the questions also say something about those who ask them. An important aspect of our Dasein is that fact that we question. Dasein “is ontologically distinguished by the fact that in its Being this being is concerned about its very being.” (Being and Time, p. 54). In our average-everydayness we have a pre-understanding of Being because we are part of it. This natural attitude is here our starting place.

“In place of the Husserlian procedure which moves from the world of the natural attitude up to a higher, transcendental plane with a view to bringing to light the transcendental structures constitutive of the objectivity of the entities encountered in the natural attitude, we find an alternative procedure which moves from the ontic level down to a deeper, ontological plane with a view to bring to light the ontological structures constitutive of the being of the entities in question.” (Macann, Christopher. P. 63.)

Part of our being-in-the-world is throwness. We find we are always in a context which already has meaning attached to it, a particular time, place and so forth. It is important to Heidegger to look into the structures that make us human. “Only when the fundamental structures of Dasein are adequately worked out with explicit orientation toward the problem of Being will the previous results of the interpretation of Dasein receive their existential justification.” (Being and Time, p. 60).

Heidegger begins by looking at our average everydayness, to reveal how Dasein is in-theworld. Dasein is unique in that it has death awareness and therefore has the perception of time. Death being the possibility that cancels all possibilities which then causes fear and anxiety. In response to this we alienate ourselves and let ourselves become detached.

Technology as a way of revealing being brings us farther away from ourselves and thus from Being. Heidegger, unlike Husserl, thinks Descartes helps Being become hidden with the centre focused on ‘I’.

Inspecting our Dasein and how we live is a useful thing to do. Out of this analysis comes his ideas on how we relate to technology, art and the environment. Art reveals Being, but

reflects our being as well. For Heidegger we cannot be completely objective and get ‘out’ of ourselves. Later Heidegger realizes that looking through Dasein might not be the way to find Being, but it does help us understand ourselves. He then talks about how we should let Being reveal itself to us, as in through art. Like a poem that ‘speaks’ to you.

We fall into everydayness when we hide from Being. What we should be doing is living in Care. Being ‘at home’ in our environment, and taking care. This element as stated above is rather existential in nature; mostly because he does talk about how we are in the world. Death awareness gives our awareness of time. This being aware of the future and looking to the future makes us have concern or Care for it. Things that disrupt us out of everydayness and make us wonder about things are the failure of tools, certain moods, and death awareness. We can probably all relate to these as being accurate to our human nature. It is part of our nature (instrumentality) to just use tools. I for instance use a computer directly for all my papers. I choose to do so, because typing flows with my consciousness, (Heidegger would point out that we should not limit our possibilities when we choose a piece of technology). When my computer fails (as it did recently) this startles me out of my flow of awareness. Death awareness, as when someone you know dies or when you are confronted with an ailment that makes you aware of your mortality naturally that is when fundamental questions smack you in the face. As do moods; depression makes almost anyone philosophical. All these make you step back and reflect on things. This is not like Husserl’s transcendental reflection though, you don’t pull yourself out of being and look down at yourself objectively. You are startled out of your everydayness and feel the need to re-evaluate everything.

In this evaluating of lived experience Heidegger outlines what is authentic and inauthentic. Authenticity is recognized in our temporality and anxiety and moving into a mode of caring as a result. Inauthenticity gets caught up in time, flees as a result of anxiety and falls into everydayness. When one is in the mode of caring one recognizes the possibility of choices out there and has concern over how to interact in the world. When one is caught in everydayness, they take the meaning given to them, and fall into calculative thinking which does not have a concern for the environment around them.

Thus we can see how technology in everydayness can have negative consequences as opposed to taking a caring approach where one is naturally concerned with the

environment, as it is their environment, their home. This comes out in his notion of dwelling, which he uses the word in away that brings out the aspect of our making ourselves at home. It is not really impractical, in that these are both modes that we take; both are possibilities. Sometimes it is easy to agree that technology, fixed ideas, and abstract entities bring us away form lived experience. They almost kill the lived experience. Thus talking in the way Heidegger does through our lived experience, describing what is common to Dasein reveals more about how we actually are than does flat theories. On the other side though, as pointed out above, Husserl’s phenomenology aides us in broadening the way we gain knowledge, and to look at that whole process.

One tells us about how we are, and the other how we know. The fact that we do not find Being should not disillusion us, since the searching itself reveals our being (as does art, poems, music). And reflection on our being aids us in how we live and relate to other beings. Which is important in that we are always in relation to other beings.

Also an important element in Heidegger’s phenomenology is language and the analysis thereof. It is an example of how we are born into a context, all the words we use to describe thing have a set meaning, and a personal meaning to ourselves that evolves.

Thus it is an important process to understand how we use these words and what there meaning is. So Heidegger is very particular of the words he chooses, and there history.

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Conclusion

Both Heidegger and Husserl use the phenomenological method, but each for a different purpose and going in different direction. One, however, really does not have to exclusively choose epistemology over ontology or vice versa. They can be done together, and thus both reveal interesting valid views. Both describe what they are discussing; Heidegger describes the nature of Dasein, and Husserl the nature of consciousness. Both carry out an analysis of these aspects quite well. Both are going through lived experience, looking at things-in-themselves, and view things thus empathetically. Husserl diverges into a more detailed into the theory of intentionally, the acts of consciousness as that is his base. And a main difference is Husserl’s belief in the eidetic reduction, which Heidegger think is not possible. Heidegger as Dasein is his base, goes more into Dasein’s nature. He thinks the reduction is useless since we are already in a ‘world’ we must look through ourselves to see what makes us the way we are. Thus both are useful in broadening the perspective in different areas. Phenomenology, as a method, is useful in that it looks through things as the lived experience. And really, we must acknowledge that how we see things and how we know things comes from our being or our ego; therefore it is only logical that we look through things that way. But while looking though our humanness, we must be aware that we are doing so. Phenomenology is great for looking at things in a more useful angle, and broadens our perspective on things. It can be used for any human experience. Its only limitation and our limitation anyway, are that it cannot claim to evaluate anything out of our human experience. We cannot claim to know for instance what it is like to be a tree, like some environmentalists claim to attempt (They criticize people for being to anthropocentric.). It really is the only way we can view things whether we like it or not. Any theory we create is created from our lived experience, and then logically stretched to the rest of the universe- which is an assumption. Phenomenology merely recognizes the limitation and does not stretch its analysis beyond it. It also though pays critical attention to its own process to prevent such assumptions.

"Phenomenology, a 20th century philosophical movement dedicated to describing the structures of experience as they present themselves to consciousness, without recourse to

theory, deduction, or assumptions from other disciplines such as the natural sciences. ...

What Husserl discovered when he contemplated the content of his mind were such acts as remembering, desiring, and perceiving, in addition to the abstract content of these acts, which Husserl called meanings. These meanings, he claimed, enabled an act to be directed toward an object under a certain aspect; and such directedness, called intentionality, he held to be the essence of consciousness. " "Literally, phenomenology is the study of “phenomena�: appearances of things, or things as they appear in our experience, or the ways we experience things, thus the meanings things have in our experience. Phenomenology studies conscious experience as experienced from the subjective or first person point of view."