CRITICAL CONCEPTS IN PHILOSOPHY

Other titles in this series

PHENOMENOLOGY
Critical Concepts in Philosophy

APPLIED ETHICS
Edited with a new introduction by
Ruth Chadwick and Doris Schroeder Edited by
6 volume set
Dermot Moran and Lester E. Embree
POSTMODERNISM J
Edited with a new introduction by With the assistance of
Victor E. Taylor and Charles E. Winquist
4 volume set
Tanja Staehler and Elizabeth A. Behnke

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r;YY)bNUL Phenomenology: Central Tendencies and Concepts

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 INTRODUCTION TO VOLUME I

In this volume, we have selected key articles on phenomenology's central

tendencies and concepts. In Part 1, Edmund Husser} is introduced as the
founder of phenomenology through classic readings from a French, an
American and a German phenomenologist. Various stages in his develop-
ment are distinguished, and some of his key concepts are explicated.
The selections in Part 2 have been chosen to show the main stages and
continuing tendencies in the phenomenological tradition that has
developed over the century. We have selected texts that illustrate early
realist phenomenology, transcendental phenomenology, the turn to exist-
ence and life-world, and the development of hermeneutical phenom-
enology.
The selections in Part 3 introduce central methodological notions, Le.,
intentionality, intuition, evidence, epoche, reduction, constitution, passiv-
ity, horizon, and life-world. With some understanding of the various tend-
encies and central concepts of phenomenology, the reader will be
prepared for the study of the themes and issues in the subsequent four
volumes.
Husserl was a restless philosopher who constantly questioned his own
positions and starting-points. His philosophical outlook evolved and
changed over the years between the publication of the Logical Investiga-
tions in 1900-1901 (which announced phenomenology) and his death in
1938. The French philosopher Paul Ricoeur shows how Husserl's phenom-
enology is to be located with respect to German Idealism, the phenom-
enology of Hegel, and the empiricism of Hume. He also gives a clear
explication of how phenomenology focuses on sense or meaning - 'the
sense which determines presence, just as much as the presence fulfils the
sense'. As the Russian phenomenologist Gustav Shpet puts it (in a selec-
tion we have included in Volume V): 'Apparently, it turns out that "sense-
bestowal" belongs to the very essence of consciousness, that is, to be
conscious of something means to give a sense to it.'
In Part 2, we have chosen articles to illustrate the well-recognized
stages and tendencies of the tradition, that is:

9
 INTRODUCTION
a Realistic Phenomenology developed from the Logische Untersuchun-
gen (1900-1901), and by the so-called Munich school (Alexander
Pfander, Scheler, and others) and here exemplified by Husserl's assis-
tant Adolf Reinach (1883-1917), whose brilliant career was cut short
by his death in World War I;
b Husserl's mature position of Transcendental or Constitutive Phenom-
enology, first introduced in his Ideen I (1913);
c Existential Phenomenology, which focuses on the 'thrownness' and
'situatedness' of human existence and which began with Heidegger's
Sein und Zeit (1927); and
d Hermeneutical Phenomenology, as developed by Heidegger,
Gadamer, Ricoeur, Kockelmans, and others.
In addition, as we shall explore in Volume IV, phenomenology has
recently branched into such new or renewed areas as ethnicity, ecology,
gender, and religion, and appears to show a fifth stage of the tradition
emerging at the end of the twentieth century, which might be called cul-
tural phenomenology.
Part 3 of our first volume begins its analysis of central methodological
notions with intentionality (Intentionalitiit) as revived by Brentano from
the Scholastics. This becomes Husserl's central theme and remains by far
the most important concept for the whole of phenomenology, even if
perhaps also the most misunderstood. Intentionality is far more than pur-
posiveness. It refers to the manner in which all conscious awareness is
about something. directed at something, means something, or is conscious-
ness of . .. This concept once and for all makes possible the rejection the
representational theory of ideas of the modern philosophical tradition
stemming from Descartes. Intentionality emphasises the correlation
between subjective attitudes and the objective world as revealed.
After intentionality, the next most important concepts in phenom-
enology are those of intuition (Anschauung) and evidence (Evidenz). The
concept of 'intuition' has a long history in philosophy. Descartes saw intu-
ition as the foundation of all knowledge, but it has often been treated as
highly suspect by philosophers who see it as a vehicle for introducing
untested assumptions, hunches, prejudices, subjective certainties, and so
on. Husserl used it in the following sense, as interpreted by Robert
Sokolowski, in the essay by him that we have selected:
By 'intuition' Husserl simply means the achievement of making the
object we think or talk about actually present to us, as opposed to
thinking or talking about it in its absence. For example, actually
seeing a football game is intuitive in contrast to daydreaming about
the game we wish we were seeing ... This is the formal difference
between what Husserl calls empty intentions and fulfilments.
10
INTRODUCTION
Husserl went beyond the Kantian restriction of intuition to the grasping
of sensory particulars and instead defended the possibility of the intuition
of abstract objects and indeed articulated a new kind of categorial
intuition, the intuition of those elements that make up what Sokolowski
calls the syntax of our thought. This broadening of the concept of intuition
leads to a rejection of nominalism because ideal objects, including univer-
sal essences or eide, as well as significations, categories, and theories, are
accepted.
Closely related to the concept of intuition is the concept of evidence
(Evidenz). Evidence as the term is used in phenomenology refers not to
things and testimony presented in court but to a mental process of seeing
in a broad signification (from the Latin video; Husserl says, 'Evidenz is!
Erlebnis', evidence is experience). This evidence is what justifies or con-
firms or corroborates believing, valuing, willing, acting. Husserl is often
thought to be an epistemological foundationalist in the Cartesian manner,
in the sense of assuming that there is a fixed, infallible starting-point from
which the rest of our knowledge can be built up. But, as Dagfinn F¢llesdal
shows in our selection, Husserl in fact had a more sophisticated position, a
more 'holistic' approach that more closely resembles that of contemporary
philosophers such as Goodman and Rawls, which allows for corrigibility.
Next we provide selections on the nature of the transcendental epoche
and reduction, which involves a change of attitude and of our normal rela-
tionship with the world. Under the epoche I become, as Husserl and Elisa-
beth Stroker put it, 'an on-looker on myself'; I stand back from the belief
that my consciousness is a part of the natural world. I abstain from natu-
ralistic assumptions. The world then appears as an achievement of my acts
of consciousness. Husserl saw this reduction as the fundamental form of
transcendental phenomenological method and came to recognize several
ways in which to perform it.
Husserlian phenomenology places great stress on the manner in which
objects are constituted in and for consciousness. He borrowed the term
'constitution' (Konstitution) from the Neo-Kantians, but he meant much
more than the categorial formation of sensuous objects. He saw constitu-
tion as fundamentally involving primary and secondary pre-predicative
syntheses of sensuous and other objects. In sensuous perception, physical
objects are constituted as possessing more sides than the side currently on
view, and as possessing a stability which allows them to continue through
successive temporal moments. They are also constituted in layers from the
most basic kind of physical object to cultural objects and animate beings
including human persons.
Husserl furthermore recognized that there is a layer of 'passive' synthe-
sis at the very basis of our experience. Husserlian phenomenology consid-
ers constitution to be a kind of 'creation' of the object in the sense that the
object has to be prepared in a certain way in order to be recognized as
11
 INTRODUCTION

sllch by consciollsness. After our initial encounter with a new object, it

enters into our frame of reference as something already constituted, as an
acquisition of consciousness in a certain sense. More fundamentally, not
only is every object of consciousness constituted, but the perceiving con-
sciousness itself has to be constituted as an abiding perceiver in the flux of
time-consciousness. Moreover, individual consciousness does not consti-
tute itself on its own but is generated out of contact with other selves in
the nexus of the pre-given of cultural life.
Husserl borrows the concept of horizon (Horizont) from Kant but, in
his later philosophy, gives it an important semantic twist that makes it
extremely important for the hermeneutical phenomenology of Heidegger,
Gadamer, and Ricoeur. RusserI's account of perception already recog-
nizes that objects are experienced within certain internal and external
horizons. Each profile or adumbration of the object appears against a
background horizon of other possible profiles, and the object itself appears
in a variety of possible contexts (e.g. a screw-driver is presented differently
when it is used to open a tin of paint). Horizons are not just spatial and
temporal but provide the meaning background in which they can be
encountered. Every object is nested inside horizons, and the ultimate
horizon Husserl calls 'world'.
One of phenomenology's central discoveries, articulated especially in
Husserl's late Crisis of the European Sciences, is the conception of the
'life-world' (Lebenswelt), a development of the 'natural world-concept' of
Avinarius. In the first selection in Volume V, Hans Georg Gadamer has
called it 'the most powerful conceptual creation of the later Husserl'. The
life-world is recognized as the foundation for the cultural as well as the
naturalistic sciences. Prior to science but within the scientifically informed
technological world we now inhabit, the life-world is the primary context
of human living. It includes the cultural world with its historical heritage.

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