razorsmile :: philosophy//magic //revolution

Category: husserl

  • Relations and reactions

    Relations and reactions

    dancing+graffiti_40910987In a post on Marx’s dialectical method and Deleuze, Steven Shaviro makes the interesting claim that it is Deleuze’s pluralism that is transcendental.  It is the theory of relations that Deleuze has which underpins his pluralism and this theory of relations, presumably, would be the place to look for a transcendental structure in the sense of a ‘condition of possibility’-type argument (Shaviro makes it explicit he’s referring to a Kantian transcendental when talking of Deleuze’s ‘transcendental pluralism).  Indeed this is plainly the case for Shaviro, since the article begins from the differences and similarities between dialectics and Deleuzian thought in terms of their theory of relations.  He suggests a strong commonality around this area of theory of relations, arguing that:

    “There are definite commonalities. (1) Both the Hegelian/dialectical language of negativity, and the James/Bergson/Deleuze language of virtuality, insist that all those things that are omitted by the positivist cataloguing of atomistic facts are altogether real. (2) Both locate this reality by asserting that the relations between things are as real as the things themselves, and that ‘things’ don’t exist first, but only come to be through their multiple relations. (3) Both construct materialist (rather than idealist) accounts of these relations, of how they constitute the real, and of how they continually change (over time) the nature of what is real.  (4) Both offer similar critiques of the tradition of bourgeois thought that leads from Descartes through the British empiricists and on to 20th century scientism and post-positivism. (numbers in brackets inserted)”

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  • The phenomenological reduction (notes for students)

    The natural attitude contains within it an ability to move, a ‘natural mobility’, and this mobility is going to become the basis for the ‘reduction’ that is the central methodological core of phenomenology. Husserl says: “I can shift my standpoint in space and time, look this way and that, turn temporally forwards and backwards: I can provide for myself constantly new and more or less clear and meaningful perceptions and representations, and images also more or less clear, in which I make intuitable to myself whatever can possibly exist really or supposedly in the steadfast order of space and time” (Ideas: S27 p103).
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  • Phenomenology and the ‘natural attitude’

    Let’s begin by looking at the ‘natural attitude’.  In the ‘Ideas’ (class reader extracts), sections 27, 28, 29 and 30 contain the core outline of the ‘natural attitude’ (NA) that will concern us at the moment.

    Before going any further let me give a ‘pre-philosophical’ definition: the NA is that attitude in which we normally stand, the way in which we go about our life, prior to all questioning of what we are doing or thinking.  The NA is like the unquestioned life, as it were.
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  • Phenomenology and the content of thought

    So in Lecture 2 I talked about the act/content distinction and the way it’s set-up within Husserl, with a view to understanding the critical role of a thought-content for our later investigations into Husserl’s phenomenological method. These are notes from that lecture and are a quite quick and ‘formalised’ account of Husserl. In other words, the account I’m presenting is a specific version intended to guide us in our reading – it is not a detailed nor a particularly critical account. There could be some radical alternatives found in other presentations and there are a number of features – notably to do with what we might call ‘linguistic referentials’ or ‘things the words refer to’ – that I’m glossing over quite heavily here. The point of lectures like this is not to give you a full and finished account but to open up the texts for you to read yourself and develop a critical understanding of. If something I’m saying here and something you think after reading Husserl doesn’t seem to match then ask in the seminars. We will also be returning to some of the same distinctions numerous times as we fill in our understanding through the ongoing discussion of Husserl and the Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty’s development of phenomenology in their own directions.

    Let’s begin then by recalling the elements Husserl draws from Franz Brentano. (Here I am drawing on an account given in the book Husserl by David Bell, Routledge 1990 – for further reading you are welcome to turn here, in particular to the first section of Bell’s book ‘Prolegomenon’).

    Remember, Husserl’s two big influences are the foundations of mathematics (what makes it secure and certain as a form of knowledge) and the newly forming science of psychology. Brentano, then, is part of the psychological legacy within Husserl. Brentano argued that:

    • CLAIM1: all phenomena are mental phenomena
    • CLAIM2: mental phenomena are acts with content

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  • Phenomenology and the question of ‘the given’ – notes from lecture 1 (part1)

    Phenomenology begins with the work of Edmund Husserl (1859-1938). His project develops out of an attempt to understand the basis of mathematics as well as an engagement with the (at that time) newly formed science of psychology. Philosophically, however, it can be seen as a critical point in the development of philosophy. From Descartes onwards, modern philosophy was dominated by something we can refer to as the ‘Epistemological Project’. As its name suggests, this placed the emphasis of philosophy on discovering the forms of knowledge (epistemology – theory of knowledge), but it did this with certain commonly agreed preconceptions. The ‘Epistemological Project’ refers to the attempt to discover the forms of knowledge by searching for two key things:

    • Foundations
    • Certainty (the ‘quest for certainty‘, a notion derived from John Dewey’s work ‘The question of certainty’ from 1935)

    Descartes ‘cogito’, for example, is proposed as an answer to the epistemological problem because Descartes thinks he has discovered the foundation of all knowledge in the certainty of the ‘cogito ergo sum’. The method of doubt reveals that the concern is with certainty in that it rejects anything that can be doubted precisely because it can be doubted. It was not, however, simply the rationalists who were part of the ‘Epistemological Project’ – the empiricists, from Hume onwards, were also constrained by similar concerns even though their attempt to resolve the problems of knowledge used radically different methods.

    Both rationalists and empiricists are located inside the ‘Epistemological Project’ through their concept of ‘the given’ (ie; something that is ‘given to us’ rather than ‘created by us’ and thus liable to distortion by opinion). Something is needed, goes the argument, that can be taken as the ‘absolutely given’ and thus the starting point for building up our knowledge. This ‘given’ is to be found, the rationalists and empiricists think, by examining subjective appearances – in other words, by examining that which is given to the subject.

    • For Descartes and the rationalists the given is thoughts
    • For Hume and the empiricists the given is impressions or sensations

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  • What’s in a ‘distinctive meaning content’?

    I’m generally interested at the moment in the distinction between the theoretical and the practical, a distinction that can be found throughout philosophy and which I increasingly think is a dominant distinction, though often in an unthought way. The interest in this distinction is what underlies my current writing project, a book that’s tentatively titled ‘Practical metaphysics’ (more about that another time). It’s also a distinction that is central to Husserl and Heidegger, albeit in various forms. Heidegger’s concern with ‘technik’ for example stems, I think, from a difficulty with the way in which this kind of practical knowledge closes down our relation to being. Husserl, however, seems to be grappling with this distinction in his early struggles to rid logic and philosophy of psychologistic prejudices. At the moment I’m reading back through the ‘Logical Investigations’ and it becomes increasingly clear that Husserl has a strong theory/practice split underlying his arguments against a psychologistic interpretation of logic. (more…)