razorsmile :: philosophy//magic //revolution

Category: phenomenology

  • Phenomenology and typewriters

    saturntypewriter So today I’m talking to the students in my existentialism class about the phenomenological moment, the encounter with the given which is presupposed in any account of how we encounter the world and which gives us back the world from a skeptical move which might try to doubt it or suggest it’s an illusion.  As part of this I was saying that the world, the self, thinking are all primarily ‘just given’ and then we need to explore on top of that the how of the giving of the world, the self, thinking.  This is to say, the world is, but how it is has still to be described.  On the basis of this, of course, phenomenology offers us descriptions of this how the world is given, and can come up with some strange, some beautiful descriptions – and so here’s an example, the phenomenology of typewriters by Richard Polt.  I’m not going to say anything directly about Polt’s essay in this post, maybe later, but this is for my existentialism and phenomenology students…

    http://staff.xu.edu/~polt/typewriters/typology.html

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  • bordering on coherence

    bordering on coherence

    [NOTE TO ANY READER: this post is a classic example of pinball thought, ricochet rather than writing, a ‘thinking out loud’.  Beware of any apparent seriousness and discussion.]

    In a recent post on his blog Poetix discusses the ‘object oriented’ philosophy of Graham Harman.  I have only recently come across Harmans’ work, primarily because I have only recently returned to work on Heidegger and his various books began appearing in 2002, when I was deeply immersed in Deleuziana.  His approach looks fascinating and is one I hope to more familiar with by the end of the year.

    Poetix begins his post with the claim that an object cannot be fully understood through relationality because it must maintain an unrelatable element.  It must maintain this ‘occult’ aspect of an unrelated element because if it did not then “there would be no object as such, but only the differential field of appearances itself“.  The use of the phrase ‘differential field’ here immediately enables a connection to Deleuze’s philosophy (amongst others perhaps), not least because of his Nietzschean inspired claim that an object is nothing but a conjunction of forces (cf NP).  For Deleuze, then, an object is nothing but that which is produced by a differential field of forces.  It looks like we might have two very different answers to the problem of object-ness at work here, two different answers to a question such as ‘is an object nothing but the relations which constitute it?’  When you can get two clearly different solution vectors to a specific question then there is an opportunity to think a problem (in this case that of the object-ness of objects) through conceptual confrontation, through the tensions of thought.

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  • Hearing Touches

    Hearing Touches

    A former undergrad student of mine, now busy in his postgraduate studies, requested a copy of an article I wrote a while ago with a mate and so I’ve scanned this in because it wasn’t previously available in an electronic form. The files are rather large, I’m afraid – I could do with getting a proper copy of Acrobat working on my laptop but in the meantime this is a kind of workaround. The article developed from some discussion I had with Ben regarding deafness, partially resulting from the way in which the ‘worlding’ of Heidegger – and phenomenology generally – takes the sound as something given within an interpretative stance, a position I always found rather difficult to accept, even though the arguments in favour quite often seem strong. My resistance would be framed in a rather different way now, probably by using something like the clear-confused notion of Deleuze, the infinitesimal perceptions of Leibniz and the like, and I think the problem I have with the over-arching interpretative priority that seems central to phenomenology arises from a resistance to idealism. Anyhow, the 2 PDF files are here and here, both of them quite large I’m afraid.

  • The breath as an organ

    The breath as an organ

    DSC01951_33860634The snoring man on the train, just behind and to our left, revolts us. Their noise is more penetrating, more cutting, even though it is lower in decibel than the irritating child a few seats in front with their high pitched and hyperactive voice testing the patience of the father figure accompanying them. The snoring man is filthy in his activity, that rasping breath, that grasping for life calling out to be silenced and with its silence comes death. The sound of the breath is a broken tool that reveals its function, its equipmentality as Heidegger would call it, precisely by being heard. That filthy, contaminating breath, no gentle rythmn of life but a crushed, rushing in-out-in-out intimacy that brings the Other too close, too far within the experience of living together that repulses us within our modernity, repulses us because of its forced confinement amongst each other.
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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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