Phenomenology and its Discontents

This course examines the structure and development of Husserlian phenomenology and critical responses from later continental philosophers. Phenomenology envisaged itself, like Descartes and 20th century movements such as logical empiricism, as making a radical break with the tradition of philosophy in order to place philosophy and the sciences on a secure foundation. The battle cry, “To the things themselves,” indicates a return to the immediate givenness of phenomena, which, for Husserl, was compromised by the schools of thought prominent at the turn of the century, especially positivism, which reduces mathematics and logic to psychology or consciousness to physical entities, and historicism, which interprets all truth as relative to the historical development of different worldviews. Due to their reductionistic tendencies, these theories rule out the possibility that consciousness, ideal objects, and cultural artifacts have features that cannot be traced back to empirical facts. Husserl sets out to counter this claim through a detailed analysis of intentionality. He argues that philosophy will only become a rigorous and objective science that can provide a foundation for the other sciences when it is grounded in an adequate understanding of the necessary features of consciousness that make sense perception possible.

For most of the semester, we will study Husserl’s thought and his role as the leading figure of the phenomenological movement that emerged at the beginning of the 20th century. We will start by reading selections from the Logical Investigations, focusing on the attempt in descriptive phenomenology to analyze the structure of intentionality, i.e., the act of intending an object and the fulfillment of intentions through perceptual, categorical, and formal intuitions. Husserl’s work inspired other philosophers such as Max Scheler, a group who expanded phenomenology into areas like ethics and the philosophies of psychology, mathematics, and natural science. Next, we will examine how Husserl, through the influence of neo-Kantianism, transforms descriptive phenomenology into a transcendental phenomenology that not only provides a static description of the essential features of intentionality, but also provides a genetic (i.e., constituitive) account of intentionality, grounding it in transcendental subjectivity and temporality. This shift follows from Husserl’s discovery of the phenomenological reduction: According to Husserl, phenomenology should start by bracketing the question of the existence of the objects of intention. Phenomenology should focus solely on issues about which we can attain certainty – the immediate givenness of intuitions and intentions, their essential features, and the way in which intuitions and intentions are constituted by the cognitive processes found in pure subjectivity. We will study transcendental phenomenology by reading The Idea of Phenomenology, Cartesian Meditations and selections from The Phenomenology of Internal Time Consciousness, Ideas I, and The Crisis of the European Sciences.

In the latter part of the class, we will investigate the legacy of phenomenology by taking a look at the criticisms of Husserl developed by Heidegger, Levinas, and Derrida, three philosophers who were heavily influenced by Husserlian phenomenology in the early stages of their work. We will focus on two central criticisms: First, despite the fact that Husserl grants priority to the everyday lifeworld over the natural sciences and provides numerous discussions of ethics and the philosophy of value, his philosophy is grounded ultimately in theoretical claims about the nature of transcendental subjectivity. In contrast, Heidegger, Levinas, and Derrida argue for the primacy of practical issues such as ethics, maintaining that ethical decisions are singular or ‘undecidable’ since ethical normativity cannot be captured in a set of specific principles. As a result, the status and nature of theoretical claims is altered. Second, these three critics each challenge Husserl’s attempt to ground phenomenology in the self-presence of the individual subject, arguing that the subject is constituted at least in part by elements of the social that are external to it. These include history, tradition, a shared world, the relation to the other, and written language. While exploring these criticisms of phenomenology, we will consider the lasting influence that phenomenology has on Heidegger, Levinas, and Derrida, and whether their thought can still be characterized as phenomenological.

Texts:

Husserl – (most from The Essential Husserl) Logical Investigations, Lectures on the Phenomenology of Internal Time Consciousness, The Idea of Phenomenology, “Philosophy as a Rigorous Science,” Ideas I, Cartesian Meditations, The Crisis of the European Sciences

Scheler – Formalism in Ethics and the Material Ethics of Value

Heidegger – Being and Time, “On the Essence of Truth”

Levinas – Existence and Existents, Totality and Infinity

Derrida – Speech and Phenomena, Limited, Inc.

General sources on the phenomenological movement

Herbert Spiegelberg, The Phenomenological Movement

Hans Georg Gadamer, “The Phenomenological Movement,” in Philosophical Hermeneutics

Heidegger, discussions of phenomenology in Ontology: Hermeneutics of Facticity, History of the Concept of Time, and “My Way to Phenomenology,” in Time and Being