Husserl reading

Reading- week 1

Husserl’s phenomenology

His life resembles at crucial points that of Freud. Husserl was born into a Jewish family and attended lectures in Vienna. Like Freud he was devoted part of their lives to a personal project that was intended to be the first scientific study of the human mind. At the end of their lives they both fell to the Nazi’s and the anti-semitism with Freud being driven out of Austria to die in exile along with Husserl’s book burnt by the German troops.

Husserl studied mathematics and astronomy and was not interested in medicine like Freud. Instead he pursued an orthodox academic career in philosophy. His interest in philosophy was awakened by lecturers such as Franz Brentano in Vienna 1884-1886.

Brentano (1838-1917) was an ex priest and an erudite scholar who sought to relate Aristotelian philosophy of the mind to contemporary experimental enquiry in a book ‘Psychology from Empirical Standpoint’ (1874) which was widely influential. The book explained the data consciousness having two kinds physical and mental phenomena. Physical phenomena are things such as smells and colours whereas mental are thoughts characterised by having a content or immanent object.

Husserl studied mathematics specifically the concept of number. His first book ‘Philosophy of arithmetic’ (1891) sought to explain our numerical concepts by identifying mental acts that were their psychological origin. He came up with some unattractive conclusions such as denying that 0 and 1 weren’t numbers. He gave a distinction between arithmetic of small and large numbers. He said the minds eye only sees things in tiny groups and the small part of arithmetic are an intuitive basis. Large numbers move away from intuition and into a symbolic realm.

Reviewers of Husserl’s book such as Freig complained that it contained confusion between imagination and thought. Husserl yielded to the criticism and abandoned his early psychologism. Logical investigators (1990) argued that logic cannot be derived from psychology and any attempt to do so must contain a vicious circle.

Like Frege he managed to contain a sharp distinction between logic and psychology. Husserl followed the continental tradition and saw the psychological side as a rightful home. Frege followed analytic tradition and concentrated on the logical side. They both based their philosophy on an explicit platonic realism.

Gilbert Ryle said that Husserl was under many of the same intellectual pressures as Frege, Peirce, Moore and Bertrand Russell. He said they all were against the idea of psychology that Mill and Hume followed. They all demanded that emancipation of logic from psychology was found in the notion of meaning their escape route from subject theories of thinking. They nearly all championed the platonic theory of meanings i.e. the concepts and propositions which were all demarcated philosophy from the natural sciences allocating factual enquires to natural science and conceptual enquiries to philosophy. The two things that are essential to thought  are the content which should have a possessor and should contain an act of ‘mine’ with a particular matter which is its intentional object.

Husserl made a clear distinction between psychology and logic. The reinvention of psychology was as a new discipline of ‘phenomenology’ which he developed in the 1^st decade of the 20^th century. A group of philosophers at Munich created ‘phenomenological movement’ and by 1913 had published a yearbook full of research. The first volume contained ideas pertaining to a pure phenomenology according to Husserl’s findings.

The aim of phenomenology was to study the immediate data of consciousness without reference to anything that consciousness might tell us about the extra mental world. It makes no essential difference to an object presented and given to consciousness whether it exists or is fictitious or perhaps completely absurd.  ‘My experience is the same whether there is a real table there or if I am hallucinating.’

He made a close study of the psychological phenomena and the world of extra mental objects. The attitude to the existence of that world should be a judgement which Husserl used the Greek word ‘epoche’ to explain this phenomenological reduction. It is beneficial to also point out that phenomenology is not the same as phenomenal ism as Berkeley and Mill explained it to be believing statements about things as material objects have to be translated to statements about appearance.

Husserl deliberately left open the possibility that there is a world of non- phenomenal objects but is no concern to the philosopher. The reason for this is that he said we have infallible immediate knowledge of objects of our own consciousness whilst we have only inferential and conjectural information about the external world.

He made a distinction between immanent perception (immediate acquaintance of our own current mental acts and states) and the transcendent perception (fallible) and is my perception of my own past, acts and states. He also said that only consciousness has ‘absolute being.’

Existentialism of Heidegger

He was  pupil of Husserl (1889-1916) and published a book that claimed phenomenology had been half hearted up until now. He examined the data of consciousness with the idea of ‘subject’, ‘object’ and ‘content’ which he inherited from earlier philosophy. He accepted the framework of Descartes and the two correlative realms of consciousness and reality.

He studied the concept of Being (Sein) first as he believed that this was the most important of Heidegger’s coinages which was Dasein. Dasein is a primitive element and means ‘being in the world’. There is only one way of engaging with the world and acting upon it and reacting to it which are least as important elements. Dasein was prior to distinction between thinking and willing or theory and practise. Dasein is caring and we should think of it not as a substance but as the unfolding of our life.

‘Throwness’ explains the idea that we were all once thrown into this world of cultural and historical context which he called the ‘facticity’ of Dasein. The future has priority over the past and present. Occasionally the past brings guilt and anxiety and we should ignore the past.

‘Ready to hand’ are the entities that we cope with where the consciousness gets in the way of concentration and engagement with reality. The activity of Dasein has three fundamental aspects:

1.     Attunement which are situations that determine our mood and the way that we respond to things.

2.     Discursive which operates in a world of discourse such as the language and the culture that we share.

3.     Understanding which relates to activities directed towards a goal which will make more sense of a whole life within cultural context. It also corresponds to the past, present and the future.

He was seen as the father of ‘existentialism’ with the essence of Dasein being its existence.

Seminar Notes

Kant doubted Cartesian inversion as the phenomenal is the only the last part of  Kant left. There is no noumena now as it doesn’t matter all that is concentrated on is the phenomena. Nothing is not something as when you are conscious you cant image nothing as it doesn’t actually exist.

Intentionality is a mental phenomena and directed to object. The target of your thoughts are how you see what you need to see. The idea of something in your consciousness exists and it doesn’t matter if it’s an hallucination or if you can actually see the object e.g. a table.  The future doesn’t exist as it shouldn’t be thought about,. This is known as ‘throwness’ and is similar to Schopenhauer and his ‘will’.

The content and the possessor is an individual thought and not a subject.  When watching a film it feels like you really are there and what you see on the screen is really happening. Unless of course you are thinking in media terms of how the film is really made which ruins it for you. The Cartesian and Kantian way is the contingent mind and body duality which according to Heidegger doesn’t exist. During the metaphysical stage the modern age of philosophy started with Descartes.

The idea of the Dasein is arguable one of the important. The thoughts on the future are the most important whereas the past is irrelevant and should be forgotten. The future will bring dread and anxiety of the non existence and should not be thought about.  It is believed that the past brings guilt as we wish we had done things a certain way. The present is what we should live in as much as possible.

The idea of death is what scares people about the future however this shouldn’t be thought of as it doesn’t exist in life. Dreaming is consciousness but a different form compared to when you are awake. It is best for us if we have good attunement and feel ok with what you think of as your past. Facticity is a choice of constructing yourself as an entity. We are what we want ourselves to be only to a certain extent. You cant ‘will’ yourself to be taller as we are stuck with our facticity.

The ideas at this period of time highlight how completely normal it is to be a Nazi and follow the Nazi regime. Any killings or bad behaviour was seen to be in the past so it longer mattered as we need to ‘get over’ our past and move on.

Sartre

His book was called ‘the imagination’ and relates to the world rather than eternal images. It was condemned to be free and if he believes it then he literally means it. He was viewed as the nausea of freedom as he had a fear of making a decision and having to commit to it. His play ‘no exit’ has three characters one is a lesbian women who fancies a hetro-sexual women but she fancies a man who fancies the lesbian women. All of these people are immortal and in a room with no windows or doors. They don’t really talk and literally resent each other. Another play ‘the flies’ is where he tried to get inside the consciousness of flies in Algeria.