The arguments advanced in this paper are the following. Firstly, that just as Trevarthen’s three subjective/intersubjective levels, primary, secondary, and tertiary, mapped out different modes of access, so too response is similarly structured, from direct primordial responsiveness, to that informed by shared pragmatic concerns and narrative contexts, to that which demands the distantiation afforded by representation. Secondly, I propose that empathy is an essential mode of intentionality, integral to the primary level of subjectivity/intersubjectivity, which is crucial to our survival as (...) individuals and as a species. Further to this last point, I argue that empathy is not derived on the basis of intersubjectivity, nor does it merely disclose intersubjectivity, rather it is constitutive of intersubjectivity at the primary level. Empathy is a direct, irreducible intentionality separable in thought from the other primary intentional modes of perception, rationality, memory and imagination, but co-arising with these. In regard to the inter-personal level, the concrete relations with others, primary empathy is both the ground for the possibility of the secondary manifestations—pity, sympathy, perspective taking, etc., and motivates them. Thirdly, it is the movement in the core of subjectivity initially generated by shifting attention between the ‘I’ and ‘we’ perspectives and later ‘solidified’ through affect to become shifting identification, which opens up the intersubjective domain. So we can affirm that we are not only born into sociality but our sociality goes to the roots of our being as Husserl, Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty have claimed. (shrink)

In this essay, I will examine Henri Maldiney’s phenomenological aesthetics, focusing on his claim that “art is the truth of the sensible.” This claim is presented by Maldiney in the context of a two-fold critique of Husserl’s and Heidegger’s respective attempts to phenomenologically elucidate the experience of artworks. According to Maldiney, both Husserl and Heidegger fail to recognize what he, following Erwin Straus, terms the “pathic” moment of sense experience, which is also the key moment of the aesthetic reception of (...) art. Drawing on this concept of the pathic and its way of engaging what Maldiney calls the “transpassibility” of receptivity, I argue that his phenomenology of art can be viewed as an attempt to bring together the two senses of the aesthetic in the Kantian sense, namely as an aesthetics of sense experience and as an aesthetics of art, from within the domain of sensibility itself. I develop this idea by turning to Maldiney’s notion of rhythm and examining how he thinks that it can be applied to the visual arts. Ultimately, I suggest that Maldiney’s aesthetics imbues art with ontological significance, since he takes the rhythmic presence of artworks to be a sensuous manifestation of the rhythmic ground of the world’s constitution. The truth of art, in this sense, is a revelation of the ontological functioning of rhythm. (shrink)

Michel Henry is regarded as one of the most important French philosophers of the second half of the 20th century. Yet, he is still not widely cited as Edmund Husserl, Martin Heidegger, Jacques Derrida and Jean Paul Sartre are. His thought constitutes a philosophy of life, distancing itself not only from the phenomenology of the 20th century, but also from the science and technology inaugurated by Galileo Galilei and Rene Descartes. Furthermore, Leopold Sedar Senghor is an African philosopher whose philosophy (...) has often been misunderstood in both African as well as in most Western philosophical scholarly circles. Critiquing representation in Western thought only makes sense if it is made clear that it is entirely conceivable that this critique squanders its meaning elsewhere, in the East. It is inherent in it. However, very few academics have felt that this should be done. It is essential to make connections, because what Henry discovers puts him in an immediate proximity of the radical approach of Vedanta and the approach of Senghor’s Negritude theory of emotion. The objective of this article is to find significant points of convergence between absolute subjectivity, the idea of affectivity, and Negritude and Vedanta in Henry’s speculative thought. The reading of Henry, Indian philosophy (Vedanta) and Negritude (Senghor) allows for establishing a bridge between Indian philosophy (Vedanta) and phenomenology, most notably a bridge between Negritude and the phenomenology of life. (shrink)

There are two main approaches in the phenomenological understanding of the unconscious. The first explores the intentional theory of the unconscious, while the second develops a non-representational way of understanding consciousness and the unconscious. This paper aims to outline a general theoretical framework for the non-representational approach to the unconscious within the phenomenological tradition. In order to do so, I focus on three relevant theories: Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology of perception, Thomas Fuchs’ phenomenology of body memory, and Edmund Husserl’s phenomenology of (...) affectivity. Both Merleau-Ponty and Fuchs understand the unconscious as a “sedimented practical schema” of subjective being in the world. This sedimented unconscious contributes to the way we implicitly interpret reality, fill in the gaps of uncertainty, and invest our social interactions with meaning. Husserl, however, approaches the unconscious in terms of affective non-vivacity, as a sphere of sedimentation and the horizon of the distant past which stays affectively connected to the living present. Drawing on these ideas, I argue that these two accounts can reinforce one another and provide the ground for a phenomenological understanding of the unconscious in terms of the horizontal dimension of subjective experience and a non-representational relation to the past. (shrink)

In this essay, I will examine Henri Maldiney’s phenomenological aesthetics, focusing on his claim that “art is the truth of the sensible.” This claim is presented by Maldiney in the context of a two-fold critique of Husserl’s and Heidegger’s respective attempts to phenomenologically elucidate the experience of artworks. According to Maldiney, both Husserl and Heidegger fail to recognize what he, following Erwin Straus, terms the “pathic” moment of sense experience, which is also the key moment of the aesthetic reception of (...) art. Drawing on this concept of the pathic and its way of engaging what Maldiney calls the “transpassibility” of receptivity, I argue that his phenomenology of art can be viewed as an attempt to bring together the two senses of the aesthetic in the Kantian sense, namely as an aesthetics of sense experience and as an aesthetics of art, from within the domain of sensibility itself. I develop this idea by turning to Maldiney’s notion of rhythm and examining how he thinks that it can be applied to the visual arts. Ultimately, I suggest that Maldiney’s aesthetics imbues art with ontological significance, since he takes the rhythmic presence of artworks to be a sensuous manifestation of the rhythmic ground of the world’s constitution. The truth of art, in this sense, is a revelation of the ontological functioning of rhythm. (shrink)

A clarification of Husserl's changing conceptions of imaginary consciousness ( phantasy ) and memory, especially at the level of auto-affective time-consciousness, suggests an interpretation of Freud's concept of the Unconscious. Phenomenology of consciousness can show how it is possible that consciousness can bring to present appearance something unconscious, that is, something foreign or absent to consciousness, without incorporating it into or subordinating it to the conscious present. This phenomenological analysis of Freud's concept of the Unconscious leads to a partial critique (...) of Freud's metapsychological determination of the Unconscious as a simple, internally unperceived representational consciousness. It also suggests an account of how a reproductive inner consciousness can free the subject from the experience of anxiety by allowing for possibilities of self-distanciation and symbolic self-representation that protect the subject from traumatic affection by and through its own instinctual drives. (shrink)

Penser l'homme et la folie : dans ce recueil d'études où s'est condensée, au fil des dernières années, sa réflexion, Henri Maldiney se propose de penser ensemble l'énigme de l'humanité et l'énigme de la " catastrophe " qui survient à certains d'entre nous. Double décentrement de la pensée, qui la met à la fois hors de l'anthropologie, fût-elle philosophique, et de son envers dans les théories psycho-pathologiques. Double décentrement où s'éprouvent donc au mieux la tradition philosophique - et en particulier (...) celle qui est issue de Heidegger - et la tradition de la Daseinsanalyse et de la Schicksalsanalyse, telle qu'elle est représentée par Binswanger, Straus, Minkiwski, Von Weizsäcker et Szondi. Dans une démarche authentiquement phénoménologique, où il s'agit de retourner à la " chose même " de l'humain et de la folie, de penser en va-et-vient de l'énigme à penser à ce qui en a été dit, Henri Maldiney dégage, par sa conception toute nouvelle de la transpossibilité et de la transpassibilité, une " compréhension " globale du phénomène humain qui le rend moins intraitable que par le passé. Le " séisme " de la folie, montre-t-il, vient d'un énigmatique court-circuit de la transpossibilité et de la transpassibilité, qui est seul propre à les mettre véritablement en relief comme la dimension profonde et cachée de notre expérience : celle de l' "événement " ou de l'émergence du nouveau, de la surprise de l'inattendu. La transpassiblité est une " possibilité " qui nous excède, en ce qu'elle fonde toute possibilité pour nous d'exister, parce qu'elle est en deçà de tout projet, transpossiblité de l'accueil - et de l'accueil transpassible -, y compris de l'accueil par nous-mêmes, de nous-mêmes. " Le réel -répète Henri Maldiney comme un leitmotiv qui traverse tout l'ouvrage -, est toujours ce qu'on n'attendait pas". (shrink)

Si le concept husserlien de passivité a fasciné toute une génération de philosophes (Merleau-Ponty, Landgrebe, Levinas, Henry), il a rarement fait l'objet d'une étude qui adopte la perspective du fondateur de la phénoménologie. Sa célébrité a comme masqué sa spécificité, créant une sorte de doctrine officielle de la passivité qui a, en fin de compte, peu de choses à voir avec la pensée et les intentions de Husserl. En effet, là où les phénoménologues contemporains voient dans la passivité la zone (...) d'ombre où le programme d'une phénoménologie transcendantale et subjective s'effondrerait, Husserl considère, de son côté, qu'elle appartient sans reste à la sphère de la constitution et qu'elle consolide par conséquent son transcendantalisme. Loin d'être un domaine de sens irréductible à la rationalité, elle représente même le fondement des opérations de la pensée catégoriale. C'est en son sein que doivent être cherchées les « sources » des formes supérieures de la logique. Toute passive et préconsciente qu'elle soit, l'expérience antéprédicative appartient sans reste pour Husserl au sujet transcendantal et ne le destitue donc pas de sa position centrale et primordiale. Ce travail s'attache ainsi à suivre cette genèse du catégorial à partir de l'expérience passive et à montrer qu'elle entre dans le projet général, qui a été toujours celui de Husserl, d'asseoir la phénoménologie transcendantale sur le socle originaire de l'expérience du monde. Remerciements Avant-propos Remarques Chapitre premier. Le sens phénoménologique de la passivité Chapitre II. La refondation méthodologique de la phénoménologie Chapitre premier. La formation du concept husserlien de « synthèse passive » Chapitre II. La constitution passive de l'expérience dans les Analysen zur passiven Synthesis Chapitre III. Le rôle de l'affection dans la formation de l'unité sensible Chapitre IV. La phénoménologie de l'inconscient Chapitre premier. Les présupposés fondamentaux de la généalogie de la logique Chapitre II. L'analyse généalogique du jugement prédicatif Chapitre III. L'origine de l'erreur dans la passivité Conclusion.Le conflit des fondements Bibliographie Index nominum. (shrink)

This article begins with Gedankenexperiment proposed in The Adventure of Difference by Gianni Vattimo: Following his suggestion to read Heidegger’s fundamental ontology in terms of Nietzsche’s The Birth of the Tragedy, we attempt to reinterpret the distinction of the authentic and inauthentic existence in the light of the difference between the Dionysian and Apollonian element, which brings us also to a new view on the existential finitude, individuality and co-existence with others. In the background of these existential features we discover (...) the notion of event that breaks the ecstatic unity of temporality and marks the hermeneutical continuity of existence by the radical discontinuity. The image of existence exposed to the power of event is further elaborated with the help of Henri Maldiney who has introduced into the frame of the fundamental ontology the concepts of trans-possibility and trans-passibility that express the existential openness to the event. Such a reformulation of the fundamental ontology, however, brings us into the sphere of heteronomous thought that, instead of preserving its essential autonomy, unity and integrity, becomes other in its relation to the otherness that is encountered in the event. (shrink)

The main thesis of this dissertation is that there is an intrinsic connection between Heidegger and Taoism, which may be called "the horizontal-regional way of thinking". This is a middle way extending "between and beyond" the conceptual and the perceptual, and through "pure images" or "techne", being essentially involved into an ontological horizon or region. The nature of this region is what Heidegger calls "appropriation" that is comparable to Chinese "Tao" and ancient Greek "logos". It signifies the primordially mirror-playing (...) and reciprocal belonging, through which opponents are opened to each other and thus win their "ek-sistential" ownership. In the text of Lao Tzu and Chuang Tzu , Tao is neither a law nor an isolated nothingness, but must be understood as the appropriational region of ch'i--the topological regioning and mingling of yin and yang. ;One crucial source in which Heidegger achieves this horizontal thinking is found in his interpretations of Kant's Critique of Pure Reason and Husserl's works on phenomenology. Thus, it can be seen that this non-conceptual thinking is relevant to the deepest concern of western philosophy. This ontological regioning is also the unbroken thread running through all of Heidegger's writings and is manifested in his techne-cal usage of language. Nevertheless, it is trans-formed and relies on various images in the different stages of his career. Similarly, the authors of Lao-Chuang found it necessary to be occupied by the "images without objects", in order to express the regional sense of Tao. It just makes no sense to assert that Taoism in its ultimate understanding of Tao discards language acts as a whole. Actually, by the time of Lao-Chuang's composition, "tao" had derived the meanings of "opening" and especially "saying" from its original meaning of "way". Heidegger's guess, out of the calling of pure thinking, that Tao as the topological Way giving all ways is the origin of "the thoughtful Saying" is anticipatorily accurate. His long-lasting interest in Taoism is profoundly built on thinking itself rather than on any incidental reason. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Philosophy, Psychiatry, & Psychology 8.4 (2001) 299-301 [Access article in PDF] Reading Minkowski with Husserl Bernard Pachoud Eugene Minkowski is generally regarded as one of the main figures of the phenomenological strand of psychiatry in France. However, it is striking that, as a phenomenologist, he very rarely mentions Husserl or Heidegger in his texts. Nor, for that matter, does he use their concepts or rely on their descriptions (except (...) in a few texts entirely devoted to the presentation of the philosophical roots of phenomenology). Actually, the philosopher he most often refers to, and whose concepts he borrows, is Bergson, who is not a phenomenologist. But although Minkowski's framework is not phenomenological in the philosophical sense of the term, his clinical descriptions are certainly based on a genuinely phenomenological approach—in the sense that they deal with the subjective experience of patients and the way in which their experience determines their behavior. It is all the more striking to notice just how much his descriptions of abnormal experiences echo certain Husserlian studies that he seems to ignore. I will focus on some common points between Minkowski's clinical descriptions and Husserlian studies that Minkowski could not, in fact, have known at the time of writing this article (at least in their complete form, since they were developed after 1923).The present text, "A Contribution to the Study of Autism: The Interrogative Attitude," is a typical example of Minkowski's clinical descriptions and theoretical interests. The interrogative attitude of the patient Paul C. is considered by Minkowski to be one of the "schizophrenic attitudes," expressing what he calls "loss of contact with reality," a phenomenon held to be characteristic of schizophrenia. These attitudes are quite simply the modalities of schizophrenic "autism" in Bleuler's sense of the latter term. Minkowski (1925) distinguishes the attitudes of withdrawal that have an affective coloring (morbid daydreaming, sulking, and regrets) from those that are purely intellectual (morbid rationalism, the interrogative attitude, the morbid hypertrophy of geometric and static factors). What gives a pathological cast to Paul C.'s systematically interrogative attitude is that it expresses (following Minkowski's clinical description) the patient's inability to engage in action or to establish any practical relationship with reality. This interrogative attitude can be considered a way to take some initiative and thereby avoid complete passivity, but it is a deficient mode of "position taking" since there is no engagement in real action.This emphasis on disorder of action has a modern sound, for it echoes theoretical hypotheses regarding schizophrenia developed by contemporary neuroscientists (Frith 1992). It also echoes the Husserlian studies of perception, in which the feeling of reality largely depends on the strong connection between perception and voluntary movement (action), kinesthetic sensations playing here a key role (Husserl 1989). There are also some remarkable convergences [End Page 299] with Husserl's studies of the active and passive dimensions of consciousness, to be considered next. Husserl's Studies of the Activity and Passivity of Consciousness The main claim of transcendental phenomenology is that our experience completely depends on what Husserl calls the synthetic activity of consciousness. Everything that we become aware of is constituted by the activity of the mind. In texts written between 1918 and 1926 and gathered together under the title, "Analysis of Passive Synthesis," Husserl (1966) distinguishes different degrees of the activity of consciousness, depending on whether or not the ego has the initiative. Mainly, two kinds of activity are described, one depending on the subject (the ego) and requiring his initiative, the other occurring, so to say, in an anonymous, automatic way, elicited by the object, and labeled for this reason "passive synthesis." In other words, when experience relies on synthetic activity, Husserl distinguishes synthetic acts initiated by the ego (the genuine acts) from those that occur in consciousness in an automatic, passive way. Accordingly, the activity of consciousness turns out never to be a pure activity; it always occurs against a background of passivity. Most often, the act is a response to prior stimulation given passively, and it is through this act that the "I" discovers itself as a... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Journal of the History of Philosophy 42.2 (2004) 234-235 [Access article in PDF] Leonard Lawlor. Derrida and Husserl: The Basic Problem of Phenomenology. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2002. Pp. xii + 286. Paper, $19.95. Ever since Derrida began producing his interpretive critical studies on the giant figures of Husserl and Heidegger, a book of the kind Lawlor offers has been needed. Framing his study by drawing directly from Derrida's (...) texts themselves, Lawlor takes up in detail Derrida's interpretation and critique of Husserl's phenomenology to show how he moves beyond the framework he identifies as Husserl's in developing his "deconstruction."In the course of a study thus primarily internal to Derrida's texts, Lawlor provides one of the greatest strengths of the book, his fine treatment of the way the work of French thinkers subsequent to Husserl helped Derrida develop the distinctive enterprise of "deconstruction": specifically, Jean Cavaillès, Tran-Duc-Thao (ch. 4, parts 1-2), Jean Hyppolyte (ch. 5, part 1), and Emmanuel Levinas (chs. 6-8). Determinative prior to that, however, is the influence Lawlor shows stemming from Eugen Fink's published writings (chapter 1). Impressive as well throughout (though his "internalist" restriction also shows serious faults—mentioned later) is the exegetical subtlety Lawlor exercises upon Derrida's writings, those concentrating on Husserl from 1953 to 1967, together with one on Lévinas ("Violence et métaphysique," 1964/1967) and three later ones no longer dealing with Husserl (principally "Les fins de l'homme," 1972, De l'esprit, 1987, on Heidegger, and "Spectres de Marx," 1993). It is a choice of texts that is eminently justifiable, even if the necessary inclusion of the latter introduces a dimension that needs to be contrasted more incisively with the way the Husserl-centered material is focused.Lawlor is excellent in showing a shift in interpretive focus and character taking place as Derrida moves from his treatment of Husserl in Le problème de la genèse dans la philosophie de Husserl (1953-54) through his "Introduction" to Husserl's Origine de la géométrie (1962) to La voix et le phénomène (1967) (chs. 4-6). Derrida's interpretive critique of Husserl thus begins with the primacy of the problem of "genesis," of "origin," then moves in transition through the second book (via the notable interlude on Lévinas, ch. 6) to the decisive break from Husserl in the third (ch. 7). With this last, La voix et le phénomène, Lawlor writes, "[t]he problem of the sign has come to replace, for Derrida, the problem of genesis" (166). Here instead of the transcendental power of origination being the intuition-effecting subjectivity of Husserl's Ideas I, a double replacement occurs by which a) "the voice" becomes for Derrida the "ultra-transcendental," and b) its constitutive dynamic, "temporality," is cast as a movement of pure "auto-affection" in a process called "archi-writing," unceasingly generating a supply of element upon element in a "supplement"-driven articulation of meaning (192-97)—in sum, différance as co-incident "differentiation" and "deferral" (196-205). This is the burden of the section (chs. 6 and 7) entitled "The End of Phenomenology and Ontology," closing a debate between Husserl—"phenomenology"—and Heidegger—"ontology." With this the new, post-phenomenological, post-ontological effort begins, the era in which Derrida's philosophic work, now after the definitive "deconstruction of metaphysics," gradually moves ethico-political issues into the foreground, though "[d]ifférance and supplementarity" continue as basic concepts (211-12). Here no foundational grounding underlies clarifications in the region of meaning and value, or rather a "non-foundation" subtends any gaining of insight, radically qualifying its claims. One's efforts deploy in ever-renewed consideration of issues guided by something "deeper than being," by a "non-foundational," "non-ontological" "aporia" "experienced" in deconstructive ultimacy as "the unheard-of question" (234).About all this, some reservations have to be raised. First of all, it is quite clear that in fact the question of "genesis" remains; the whole... (shrink)

This essay analyzes key aspects of Heidegger’s critique of the picture (Bild) based on an objection to world-pictures as well as a negative understanding of two other related concepts: Gestell and Vorstellen (representation). The restrictive frames of world-pictures, Heidegger claims, must be opposed by instances of thinking and language use associated with poiesis. For him, the revelation of the world in poiesis results in a subject-less experience of things and words, akin to the experience of art and literature, and presumably (...) outside the representational hold of pictures. I argue against Heidegger’s repudiation of the picture by underscoring the inescapability of Vorstellen. Heidegger’s world may be seen as a world-picture as well as a particular system of representation that we associate with affective uses of language, i.e., a literary system similar to the one discussed by Wolgang Iser. (shrink)

What and how is the work of art? This paper considers Heidegger’s venerable question by way of a related one: what exactly is the essence of the painting? En route to critiquing the Heideggerian conception of the work of art as that which discloses a world, I present Michel Henry’s competing aesthetic theory. According to Henry, the artwork’s task is not to disclose the exteriority of the world, but rather to express the interiority of life’s pathos—what he calls transcendental self-affectivity. (...) To clarify Henry’s view, I examine his analysis of the abstract painting of Kandinsky, after which I illustrate the significance of Kandinsky’s abstractionism by showing how the representational paintings of Paul Signac, Andrew Harrison, Alphonse Osbert, and Henry Ossawa Tanner attempt to express the invisibility of subjectivity. I then reveal how Heidegger’s account of the work of art in terms of world disclosure overlooks the work’s task of exalting life. In closing, I accordingly suggest that Henry’s view of painting—which locates its essence in Life rather than the world—not only presents a competing position to the Heideggerian view of the origin of the work of art worthy of our attention, but one that explains how art can contribute to overcoming our age’s nihilism. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:The Paradox of Subjectivity: The Self in the Transcendental TraditionJeffrey EdwardsDavid Carr. The Paradox of Subjectivity: The Self in the Transcendental Tradition. New York/Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999. Pp. xii + 150. Cloth, $35.00.This book presents a response to contemporary attacks on the concept of the subject. Carr investigates the historical background to the criticisms of the "Metaphysics of the Subject" that are found in French post-structuralist thought (...) and in critical theories descended from the Frankfurt School. In explaining this background, he targets the widely held assumption that the history of modern philosophy can best be understood in terms of a fundamentally unified conception of the subject and subjectivity that unfolds inevitably from Descartes and culminates in twentieth-century phenomenology and existentialism. Those who share this assumption fail to recognize the significance of what Husserl (in the Crisis of European Sciences) called the "paradox of subjectivity," which derives from the necessity of understanding the knowing subject both as a subject for the world and as an object in the world.The origins of contemporary interpretations of the metaphysics of the subject are found primarily in Heidegger's thought. Carr thus devotes the first chapter of this study to the critical assessment of Heidegger's view of modern metaphysics starting with Descartes. For Heidegger, Descartes took over the dominant concept of substance from traditional ontology and transferred it to the human subject. The Cartesian subject, then, was revealed as an underlying hypokeimenon that absorbs or overpowers the world by reducing it to the representational contents of the thinking thing. Moreover, Heidegger maintained that modern thinkers did not go beyond the reductive conception of subjectivity intrinsic to the Cartesian metaphysics of substance. This Heideggerian judgment applies to the major modern thinkers. Even Kant and Husserl figure as representatives of a tradition in which "the knowing subject takes the role of substance; everything is reduced to first properties, whether as immanent in consciousness, object for the subject, or, as in transcendental philosophy, construct and product of subjective activity" (Carr, 31).In chapters 2-4, Carr argues that the Heideggerian interpretation is inadequate with respect to Kant and Husserl. In supporting this position, Carr emphasizes the close affinities between Kant's and Husserl's conceptions of objectivity for consciousness and between their portrayals of subject and self. Specifically, Carr argues (1) that both thinkers were committed to the representationalist view of cognition that is typical of other major modern philosophers; and (2) that both presented parallel, and indeed unifiable, accounts of the relationship between the transcendental and the empirical self.The key to explaining the fundamental agreement between Kant's and Husserl's transcendental theories lies in the concept of intentionality. There are, of course, significant differences between Husserl's phenomenological method and the procedure of inquiry into the possibility conditions of objective experience that Kant follows in the Critique of Pure Reason. Still, Husserl's portrayal of the intentional character of consciousness provides the basis for understanding how Kant's account of transcendental apperception and the original synthetic unity of self-consciousness grounds a non-representationalist theory of the subject's relation to a world of objects. Husserl's portrayal of intentionality also enables us to see how Kant's concept of transcendental [End Page 609] apperception allows for a description of the empirical self as something that is part of the objective world. Conversely, the Kantian distinction between the transcendental and the empirical self, or subject, sheds light on the sense of the distinction that Husserl draws between transcendental and natural reflection. In natural reflection, I "appear to myself as an empirical subject within a world to which I relate in causal-bodily and intentional [i.e., purposive]-motivational ways" (89). On the other hand, the consciousness of self at issue in transcendental reflection involves my awareness of the meaning-constituting cognitive accomplishments by which I am consciousness of the world as the horizon of possible objects and, at the same time, as something transcendent to consciousness.It is Husserl's conception of intentionality, combined with Kant's understanding of the transcendental-empirical distinction, that allows us to grasp the full significance of the paradox... (shrink)

La confrontación entre Heidegger y Husserl que ha dominado hasta fecha reciente la interpretación filosófica debe ser revisada a la luz de las indagaciones de Husserl sobre la protofacticidad: Ella concierne a una ontología del mundo de la vida que es afín a la mundaneidad heideggeriana: Los protohechos constituyen un horizonte de sentido ya instaurado, que el yo debe reconfigurar en su praxis. Esta protofacticidad inmodalizable alberga un núcleo de protocontingencia que da cuenta no sólo de la contingencia fáctica de (...) las categorías experienciales, sino también la del mundo, del ego y de los entes finitos: En tanto procesos o sujetos a cambios cualitativos en sus características esenciales su modo de ser se caracteriza por una permanente apertura esencial. Ambos pensadores sostienen la contingencia esencial del mundo, de la que sólo puede dar cuenta la experiencia fáctica hic et nunc de un ego encarnado y mundano.The confrontation between Heidegger and Husserl, ever present in philosophical debates, should be reviewed in the light of Hus-serl’s late inquiries into protofacticity. Concerning the ontology of the lifeworld, it addresses some of the issues of Heidegger’s characterization of Dasein as being-in-the-world: Protofacts constitute an already given sense-horizon, which the ego must re-configurate in its praxis. This unmodalizable primal facts host a core of protocontingency that accounts for the factual contingency not only of the categories of experience, but of the world, the ego and of finite beings: Understood as processes or subjected to qualitative changes in their essential structures, their mode of being is characterized by an essential openness. Both thinkers sustain the contingency of the world, for which only the hic et nunc factual experience of a mundane, incarnated ego can account. (shrink)

Creation and passibility sketch the new phenomenological style present in the Henri Maldiney’s descriptions. Yet it would be impossible to find a way in the aperture made possible by this new phenomenological practice if some returns weren’t operated towards the first places where phenomenology was born. This paper aims to underline some crossings between the phenomenology of Henri Maldiney and the phenomenology of Edmund Husserl in order to think over about the task of the phenomenological description. Following Maldiney’s example, the (...) construction of a method which occupied Husserl’s main work must be completed by its transformations, to be discovered in its application. (shrink)

Christian Lotz shows in this book that Husserl's Phenomenology and its key concept--subjectivity--is based on a concrete anthropological structure, such as self-affection and the bodily experience of the other. The analysis of the sensual sphere and the lived Body forces Husserl to an ongoing correction of his strong methodological assumptions. Subjectivity turns out to be an ambivalent phenomenon, as the subject is unable to fully present itself to itself, and therefore is forced to allow for a fundamental non-transparency in itself.

A compelling new approach to the problem that has haunted twentieth century philosophy in both its analytical and continental shapes. No other book addresses as thoroughly the parallels between Wittgenstein and leading Continental philosophers such as Levinas, Husserl, and Heidegger.

Beyond Subjectivity and Representation extensively explores a connection in the thinking of Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Merleau-Ponty in relation to the interconnections among perception, creation, truth, and value in a way that allows the work of each author to shed light upon the others' ideas. Deborah Carter Mullen develops a non-dualistic notion of truth and value rooted in embodied, earthly existence, and considers them as ongoing happenings of metamorphosis rather than as static ideas. This idea of metamorphosis leads to an understanding (...) of the relationships among self, other, and world as temporal happenings of the flesh. In an intertwining relationship with one another, I and other, I and world, past, present, and future are considered occurrences of the moment that are redefined in each perception and in each expression, as each questions and responds to the other, creating a "mirror-play of flesh." Mullen proposes that reversibility and metamorphosis give rise to an aesthetic sense of truth and values that are not absolute, but truths that happen as they are expressed and values that occur as they are lived. (shrink)

Behind the phase of cognition analysed by Husserl, there is a phase of affection. In this phase, there are significant mental disorders occurring. Similar to the way in which the phase of cognition is divided into reference, meaning (referent), and representation of words (classification according to Husserl's theory of meaning), the phase of affection is also divided into reference, “meaning,” and figure as sphere of “meaning”. The situation as a reference can allow various predications to form different explanations, i.e. different (...) states of affairs. From the point of view of affection, this reference has another role. The affection of a situation obliges us to produce bodily “meanings,” which is a sign of health. Mental disorders can be described as some distortion in the phase of affection. Healing in this regard occurs through the restoration of creativity for “meanings” which assume the situation. (shrink)

This article considers the differences between Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger in light of Pascal’s distinction between the esprit de géometrie and the esprit de finesse. According to Pascal, the essential “principles” dominating our perceptual lives cannot be clearly and confidently demonstrated in a manner akin to logic and mathematics, but must be discerned in a more spontaneous or intuitive manner.It is unsurprising that Husserl, originally a student of mathematics, might seem closer to the esprit de géometrie, whereas Heidegger, trained (...) in theology and drawn to poets and poetic thinkers, is closer to the esprit de finesse. This difference is clear from the styles of writing of these two seminal figures. I consider how this stylistic difference is also linked with the substance of their respective philosophies, and with the approaches they recommend for exploring subjective life. A related difference concerns how each theorist responds to what Husserl called the “paradox of human subjectivity” and what Michel Foucault later termed the “empirico-transcendental doublet”: the fact that, in doing phenomenology, human consciousness exists as both the subject and the object of our knowing. Husserl mostly emphasized the advantages, epistemological and existential, that this potential reflexivity can afford. Heidegger was more interested in the obstacles or traps it sets—both for accurate self-knowledge and for authentic living. These issues are discussed in relation to the “natural attitude” and “everydayness,” and to the linguistic grounding of human existence and knowledge—especially as these issues emerge in Foucault’s Les mots et les choses and Eugen Fink’s Sixth Cartesian Meditation. (shrink)

We characterize science in terms of nihilism: the nihilism of science is something faced not in what science i mplies, but as the very essence of science as such. The nihilism of science is the birth of the truth of Nietzsche's announcement "God is dead" from within science as it must now face its repressed subjective core. But in truth, as the Psychoanalytic tradition has determined, it is subjectivity itself that is a bottomless searching-the subject is itself born from nothing. (...) In this way it becomes clear that the nihilism of science is in fact the birth of a nothingness as the essence of science insofar as it embraces the nothingness of its own subjectivity. Therefore, we show that the proper determination of the crisis of science is not made via phenomenology, as Husserl attempted in the early 20th century, but can only be made properly in a philosophical-psychoanalytic register. This nihilism is encoded within science in its very modality of thought , as Heidegger well understood: science thinks by means of "representation", and it is this "representational thinking" which prevents the expression of the repressed core of subjectivity. Therefore, by overcoming representation, it is seen that science will no longer be in despair to determine itself as a self, but come to see that this self, grounded in nothingness, in fact becomes its greatest and final expression, that is, as a self rooted not in an unending yearning for the transcendent certainty of a ground, but in a productive desire -self as will-to-create, will-to-power . This transition from the self as rooted in Desire qua lack to a self as determined by an infinitely productive desire is shown to be, in fact, the transition from Lacan to Deleuze. Once this transition is accomplished, it becomes clear that the anti-representational mode of thinking, accompanied by the productive self as will-to-power, determines science not from a transcendent metaphysic , but as an aesthetically determined modality of pure creativity-i.e., as an art . We then conclude by speculating on the proper form of art that this new science should take. We see that anti-representational thinking, rooted in the self as infinite creativity , is determined not by concepts, but by play or performances . Perhaps, then, we should consider music as determining the proper artistic form of this new kind of science? In this way we finally come to see the possibility for the first time of music as a new kind of science. Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:11.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ascii-font-family:Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-fareast; mso-hansi-font-family:Calibri; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;}. (shrink)

It is a study of the phenomenological philosophies of Husserl and Heidegger. Through a critical discussion including practically all previously published English and German literature on the subject, the aim is to present a thorough and evenhanded account of the relation between the two. The book provides a detailed presentation of their respective projects and methods, and examines several of their key phenomenological analyses, centering on the phenomenon of being-in-the-world. It offers new perspectives on Husserlian and Heideggerian phenomenology, e.g. concerning (...) the importance of Husserl's phenomenology of the body, the relationship between the Husserlian concept of "constitution" and Heidegger's notion of "transcendence", as well as in its argument that "being" designates the central phenomenon for both phenomenologists. Though the study sacrifices nothing in terms of argumentative rigor or interpretative detail, it is written in such a way as to be accessible and rewarding to non-specialists and specialists alike. (shrink)

Research on brain or cognitive/affective processes, culture, social interaction, and structural analysis are overlapping but often independent ways humans have attempted to understand the origins of their evolution, historical, and contemporary development. Each level seeks to employ its own theoretical concepts and methods for depicting human nature and categorizing objects and events in the world, and often relies on different sources of evidence to support theoretical claims. Each level makes reference to different temporal bandwidths (milliseconds, seconds, minutes, hours, days, months, (...) years, decades, and centuries) and focuses on different spatio-temporal activities and controlled and non-controlled stimulus conditions. Biological mechanisms and environmental pressures for survival simultaneously created a gradual intersection and enhancement of cognitive/affective skills, cultural practices, and changes in collaborative social interaction and communicative skills. The evolution of a given level of analysis is assumed to have been incremental and overlapping. These innovative and independent ways humans have learned to characterize their brain or cognitive/affective and social/economic/political life often depend on unexamined, representational re-descriptions or cognitive/affective and socio-cultural devices and forms of communication that facilitate the depiction of practices and beliefs we attribute to respondents or subjects and research colleagues. (shrink)

Husserl left many unpublished drafts explaining (or trying to) his views on spatial representation and geometry, such as, particularly, those collected in the second part of Studien zur Arithmetik und Geometrie (Hua XXI), but no completely articulate work on the subject. In this paper, I put forward an interpretation of what those views might have been. Husserl, I claim, distinguished among different conceptions of space, the space of perception (constituted from sensorial data by intentionally motivated psychic functions), that of physical (...) geometry (or idealized perceptual space), the space of the mathematical science of physical nature (in which science, not only raw perception has a word) and the abstract spaces of mathematics (free creations of the mathematical mind), each of them with its peculiar geometrical structure. Perceptual space is proto-Euclidean and the space of physical geometry Euclidean, but mathematical physics, Husserl allowed, may find it convenient to represent physical space with a non-Euclidean structure. Mathematical spaces, on their turn, can be endowed, he thinks, with any geometry mathematicians may find interesting. Many other related questions are addressed here, in particular those concerning the a priori or a posteriori character of the many geometric features of perceptual space (bearing in mind that there are at least two different notions of a priori in Husserl, which we may call the conceptual and the transcendental a priori). I conclude with an overview of Weyl’s ideas on the matter, since his philosophical conceptions are often traceable back to his former master, Husserl. (shrink)

Husserl left many unpublished drafts explaining (or trying to) his views on spatial representation and geometry, such as, particularly, those collected in the second part of Studien zur Arithmetik und Geometrie (Hua XXI), but no completely articulate work on the subject. In this paper, I put forward an interpretation of what those views might have been. Husserl, I claim, distinguished among different conceptions of space, the space of perception (constituted from sensorial data by intentionally motivated psychic functions), that of physical (...) geometry (or idealized perceptual space), the space of the mathematical science of physical nature (in which science, not only raw perception has a word) and the abstract spaces of mathematics (free creations of the mathematical mind), each of them with its peculiar geometrical structure. Perceptual space is proto-Euclidean and the space of physical geometry Euclidean, but mathematical physics, Husserl allowed, may find it convenient to represent physical space with a non-Euclidean structure. Mathematical spaces, on their turn, can be endowed, he thinks, with any geometry mathematicians may find interesting. Many other related questions are addressed here, in particular those concerning the a priori or a posteriori character of the many geometric features of perceptual space (bearing in mind that there are at least two different notions of a priori in Husserl, which we may call the conceptual and the transcendental a priori). I conclude with an overview of Weyl’s ideas on the matter, since his philosophical conceptions are often traceable back to his former master, Husserl. (shrink)

Understanding phenomenology as a philosophical approach in which human-world relationships are analysed, as well as the constitution of subjectivity and objectivity within these relationships, this paper addresses some issues related to the transcendental dimension in the phenomenology of Edmund Husserl. An attempt is also made to re-address some issues related to phenomenology and its transcendental dimension as understood by adherents of hermeneutical phenomenology such as Paul Ricoeur. In essence, the focus of the paper is on exploring the following issues: what (...) is this transcendental turn in Husserl’s philosophy? Is this an ‘unfortunate turn’ toward a neo-Kantian brand of transcendental idealism? What is the significance of this transcendental dimension in Husserl’s phenomenology? Is there any distinctive phenomenological programme that, despite their differences, is common to both Husserl and Heidegger? This line of questioning proceeds from the observations made by Paul Ricoeur that, “with the development of his ‘hermeneutics of facticity’, Heidegger rejected Husserl’s neo-Kantian brand of transcendental phenomenology in favour of a de-transcendental and historicized way of doing philosophy, that Heidegger understood the subject to be ‘factic’, in contrast to Husserl’s pure ego as the source of the world constitution”(Hahn, 1995). Ultimately, however, the thrust of this exploration is towards understanding the transcendental way of doing philosophy and the so-called historicized way of philosophizing as two distinct ways to reach one common goal, the transcendental dimension of meaning. Indo-Pacific Journal of Phenomenology , Volume 7, Edition 1 May 2007. (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: Husserl Heidegger.

Le devenir-autre de l'existence est une étude phénoménologique à la fois systématique et historique. En prenant pour fil conducteur un problème systématique, celui de l'événementialité de l'apparaître et de la subjectivité, elle confronte cinq représentants majeurs de la phénoménologie contemporaine française : Maldiney, Romano, Marion, Barbaras et Richir. L'étude entre dans la phénoménologie avec Husserl avant de présenter plusieurs concepts-clés forgés par les deux générations de philosophes qui jalonnent la voie menant à la phénoménologie contemporaine (Heidegger, Sartre, Straus, Merleau-Ponty, Patocka, (...) Lévinas). Puis elle se focalise sur la phénoménologie de l'événement de Maldiney et de Romano qui envisagent l'existant et le monde dans leur coappartenance : l'événement est considéré avant tout comme co-naissance du sujet et du monde. Or, puisque l'existence qui devient-autre est nécessairement une existence finie radicalement séparée de la transcendance métaphysique du monde, on est conduit à intégrer à la discussion trois autres philosophes : d'abord Marion dont l'adonné est conçu comme limite de la donation, puis Barbaras et Richir qui thématisent la subjectivité au sein d'une métaphysique"--Page 4 of cover. (shrink)

Ce qui a fait naitre l'emerveillement des premiers penseurs grecs, c'est qu'il y a quelque chose plutot que rien, et c'est la ce qui a donne le coup d'envoi a cette pensee de l'etre qui s'est developpee de Parmenide a Aristote et qui constitue le fondement de la philosophie occidentale. On trouve cependant, deja dans la pensee grecque, une denegation de la possibilite d'un discours sur l'etre, d'abord chez Gorgias, contemporain de Socrate, puis chez le fondateur de l'ecole sceptique, Pyrrhon. (...) Et a l'epoque meme ou Parmenide ecrivait son poeme, une pensee de la vacuite et du neant commencait a se developper en Orient dans le cadre du bouddhisme, laquelle met profondement en question la notion meme d'ontologie. Or c'est precisement cette pensee du rien qui resurgit en Occident a la fin de l'age classique, avec ce premier philosophe veritablement moderne qu'est Kant, dans son Essai sur les grandeurs negatives et cette Table du Rien qui, dans La Critique de la raison pure, clot l'Analytique transcendantale. Et c'est le concept de negativite qui va former chez Hegel la matrice meme de la pensee dialectique, alors que celui du neant constituera le coeur de la critique du nihilisme qu'entreprendra Nietzsche, avant de redevenir, avec le Heidegger de Qu'est-ce que la metaphysique?, avec le Sartre de L'Etre et le neant, et avec le dernier Merleau-Ponty, auteur de ce livre inacheve qu'est Le Visible et l'Invisible, un theme fondamental de la pensee de l'apparaitre.Une telle pensee du neant et de la negation traversant la frontiere qui separe l'Orient de l'Occident, il s'agira donc, en prenant comme reference majeure la pensee heideggerienne, d'en interroger les diverses figures, d'abord chez Gorgias et Pyrrhon, puis chez Nagarjuna, le plus grand penseur du bouddhisme indien (ii-iiie siecle) et chez Nishida (1870-1945), representant fameux de l'ecole de Kyoto et du bouddhisme zen, avant d'en venir a l'idealisme allemand avec Kant et Hegel, a la question du nihilisme europeen avec Schopenhauer, Nietzsche et Heidegger, puis a la phenomenologie avec Husserl, Sartre, Merleau-Ponty et Maldiney. (shrink)

Ostensibly, Heidegger’s notion of Befindlichkeit isn’t one of the really enigmatic concepts in his oeuvre—for everyone knows that on Heidegger’s account, this phenomenon, which bears at least some connection to what we normally call emotion, provides a basic disclosure of “the Dasein’s” worldly engagement. Nonetheless, there are enigmas here, given that Heidegger connects the phenomenon of Befindlichkeit with the disclosure of the Dasein’s past, as well as to its “thrownness” and its cultural heritage, none of which seems transparently true of (...) emotions. Some clarification is called for, then—and as I attempt to demonstrate in this article, this is possible only by interpreting the notion of Befindlichkeit in the context of an element of Husserl’s account of time- and self-consciousness that Heidegger incorporated as a central feature of his own, amended account of temporality—namely, Husserl’s notion of the protentional fulfillment that, on his reckoning, lies at the heart of this consciousness. Interpreting Heidegger’s account of Befindlichkeit in this fashion, I also show how, so interpreted, it can help us to make headway in both contemporary emotion studies and the currently developing critical theories of affect. (shrink)

현상적 지향성 이론(phenomenal intentionality theory)은 주체(subject)의 현상적 상태를 통해 주체의 지향적 상태를 설명하는 이론이다. 현상적 지향성 이론의 한 가지 문제는 모든 지향적 상태가 고유한 현상적 상태를 동반하는 것은 아니라는 점이다. 멘델로비치(A. Mendelovici)는 이러한 문제를 해결하기 위해 이른바 ‘자기귀속주의(self-ascriptivism)’를 제안한다. 자기귀속주의에 따르면, 주체는 그가 가지는 현상적 상태가 무엇을 의미하는지 생각하는 성향을 가지고, 이러한 성향을 통해 다양한 지향적 상태들이 일어난다. 하지만 자기귀속주의는 주체의 지향적 상태를 그것에 관한 주체의 반성적인 생각을 통해 설명한다는 점에서 근본적으로 잘못되었다. 다른 한편 후설(E. Husserl)의 현상학에 근거하여 이러한 문제를 (...) 일으키지 않는 현상적 지향성 이론을 전개할 수 있다. 이러한 이론에 따르면, 주체가 가지는 현상적 상태는 주체가 아직 가지지 않는 이러저러한 현상적 상태들에 대한 기대를 일으키고, 이러한 기대를 통해 다양한 지향적 상태들이 일어난다. 그리고 이러한 기대는 이러저러한 현상적 상태들이 일어나면 만족하고 그렇지 않으면 실망하는 성향이다. 이러한 현상적 지향성 이론은 자기귀속주의에 있는 문제를 일으키지 않는다. 나아가 그것은 감각적이거나 감정적인 현상들로부터 구별되는 새로운 종류의 인식적 현상(cognitive phenomenology)을 필요로 하지 않는다. (shrink)

In this article, I will elaborate what kind of theory of subjectivity is implied in the practice of mindfulness. This article attempts to explain Husserl’s accounts of the constitution of selfhood (as the person) and of affection in our lifestream of consciousness to develop a more complete view of “who we are” in the practice of mindfulness. The practice of mindfulness provides a path to the well-being of the person’s emotional life. What underlies the practice of mindfulness is a particular (...) image of the human mind, which is not just a brain, but a whole person with a psychic life that includes various types of activity, passivity, and embodied emotion. Moreover, the person’s habituality can still be transformed through mental exercise. If we thoroughly understand the relevant relationships between attention, emotions, and affective feelings in our living experience, we can then further confirm, from the Husserlian phenomenological point of view, the benefits of practicing mindfulness for emotional regulation. Emotion is not only a matter of affective feeling, but is also cognitive and is combined with the function of reason. (shrink)

‘‘Quid est ergo tempus? si nemo ex me quaerat, scio; si quaerenti explicare velim, nescio’’. Augustine’s statement made 1,600 years ago still rings true. Paul Ricoeur goes so far as to assert that it is impossible to grasp time conceptually (Ricoeur 1984: 11 ff.). Nevertheless, or perhaps due to these aporias, time remains one of the most significant and intriguing themes for human imagination and philosophy. Nearly a century ago Edmund Husserl raised the hopes for a comprehensive philosophy of time (...) with his Phenomenology of the Consciousness of Internal Time, published much later in 1928 by Martin Heidegger (but put together in most part by Edith Stein). Husserl’s subsequent steps on the stairway to a philosophy of time remained unpublished until the recent volumes Husserl (2001, 2006). These publications have awakened new interest in Husserl’s philosophy of time, and two recent monographs reconstruct and interpret it with a focus on subjectivity. (shrink)

In this article, we attempt to explore Husserl’s transcendental subjectivity and its relation to the world. Our focus is on the question of whether Husserl’s transcendental subjectivity can be seen as transcendental ‘being-in-the-world,’ in response to critical examinations made by philosophers such as Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, Patočka, and Biemel. While their critiques have complex implications and are subject to debate, they contribute to our understanding of the intricate relationship between transcendental subjectivity and the world. It is important to clarify that this (...) article aims to defend Husserl’s perspective rather than provide an exhaustive analysis of the critiques. We argue that, according to Husserl’s transcendental phenomenology, transcendental subjectivity is, in fact, integrated within the world’s transcendental structure. This argument is supported by three main points. Firstly, Husserl’s transcendental subjectivity and its internal consciousness are not secluded but remain open and intentionally related to the external world. Secondly, Husserl clarifies the sense of transcendental ‘being-in-the-world,’ with subjective constitution revealing its sense. Lastly, Husserl proposes the notion of transcendental person as an attempt to address how transcendental subjectivity exists concretely in the life-world. This holistic perspective sought to provide a comprehensive understanding of transcendentally grounded subjectivity and its embodied existence in the world with the essential state of ‘being-in-the world.’. (shrink)

In 1931 Husserl writes and publishes the Epilogue to his Ideas, where he aims to explain the core of his work. Aware that this is his a legacy which must be carried forward, he seeks to preserve it from what he calls “the mistaken views” found in the new ways of conducting phenomenology. Our text underlines the polemic side of Husserl’s project, which is basically but tacitly against Heidegger, and sustains that this auto-interpretive piece is a fundamental key within Husserl’s (...) corpus, where he defines the direction of his phenomenological project. At the center of the controversy are the answers to the objections of intellectualism and solipsism, and the disavowal of all forms of anthropologism in the conception of subjectivity. (shrink)

In his late writings Husserl emphasizes how the semiotic properties of writing, and of mathematical formulae and diagrams, are crucial for the historical, cross-generational survivability of meaning and specifically indispensable to the operation of scientific knowledge. However, the demand for objectivity, exactitude, and repeatability insidiously interferes with the meaning that such signs seek to express. This leads to a duality of objectivity encapsulated in the notion “the sedimentation of meaning”. On this view, the transmission of objectivity established in an original (...) sense-constituting act cannot survive unless being deposited in some external form, which at the same time risks the original sense being irrevocably lost in a web of signification that amounts to nothing more than empty and meaningless symbol manipulation. I discuss Husserl’s analysis and propose that it is limited by its one-sided focus on the negative impact of modernity. I compare Husserl’s account with Heidegger’s even more radical critique of modern society as one where a so-called “technological” mode of “revealing” reigns supreme at the expense of eradicating other, and more authentic ways to apprehend the world. I critically reconstruct the respective position of both thinkers and show how they point not only to a criticism of the instrumentalization and formalization of knowledge in modern society, but that they are just as importantly highlighting essential semiotic properties of signs. (shrink)

The aim of the paper is to show the role and meaning of Descartes’s philosophy in the context of Heidegger’s way of philosophizing, focusing on his metaphysics of subjectivity. According to Heidegger the latter is marked by a transformation in understanding the being of existence. By this he meant the fact, that the in representation of being is determined by the subject. What really is and is valid as existing, is only the object in the re-presentation of the re-presenting person. (...) Heidegger argues that the modern history of being, from its understanding as re-presentation up to the will to power can be conceived as the history of metaphysics of subjectivity. For Heidegger Descartes’s metaphysics is an instantiation of thinking which is limited by the existence without recurring to the most fundamental aspect, namely its being. (shrink)

In the current study we look at whether subjective and proprioceptive aspects of selfrepresentation are separable components subserved by distinct systems of multisensory integration. We used the rubber hand illusion to draw the location of the ‘self’ away from the body, towards extracorporeal space , thereby violating top-down information about the body location. This was compared with the traditional RHI which drew position of the ‘self’ towards the body . We were successfully able to draw proprioceptive position of the limbs (...) in and out from the body suggesting body perception is a purely bottom-up process, resistant to top-down effects. Conversely, we found subjective self-representation was altered by the violation of top-down body information – as the strong association of subjective and proprioceptive factors found in the In Condition became non-significant in the Out Condition. Interestingly, we also found evidence that subjective embodiment can modulate tactile perception. (shrink)

In this article, we attempt to explore Husserl’s transcendental subjectivity and its relation to the world. Our focus is on the question of whether Husserl’s transcendental subjectivity can be seen as transcendental ‘being-in-the-world,’ in response to critical examinations made by philosophers such as Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, Patočka, and Biemel. While their critiques have complex implications and are subject to debate, they contribute to our understanding of the intricate relationship between transcendental subjectivity and the world. It is important to clarify that this (...) article aims to defend Husserl’s perspective rather than provide an exhaustive analysis of the critiques. We argue that, according to Husserl’s transcendental phenomenology, transcendental subjectivity is, in fact, integrated within the world’s transcendental structure. This argument is supported by three main points. Firstly, Husserl’s transcendental subjectivity and its internal consciousness are not secluded but remain open and intentionally related to the external world. Secondly, Husserl clarifies the sense of transcendental ‘being-in-the-world,’ with subjective constitution revealing its sense. Lastly, Husserl proposes the notion of transcendental person as an attempt to address how transcendental subjectivity exists concretely in the life-world. This holistic perspective sought to provide a comprehensive understanding of transcendentally grounded subjectivity and its embodied existence in the world with the essential state of ‘being-in-the world.’. (shrink)

This paper offers a further look at Husserl’s late thought on the transcendental subject and the Husserl–Heidegger relationship. It attempts a reconstruction of how Husserl hoped to assert his own thoughts on subjectivity vis-à-vis Heidegger, while also pointing out where Husserl did not reach the new level that Heidegger attained. In his late manuscripts, Husserl employs the term ‘transcendental person’ to describe the transcendental ego in its fullest ‘concretion’. I maintain that although this concept is a consistent development of Husserl’s (...) earlier analyses of constitution, Husserl was also defending himself against Heidegger, who criticized him for framing the subject in terms of transcendental ego rather than as Dasein. Husserl was convinced that he could successfully respond to Heidegger’s critique, but he did not grasp that Heidegger’s fundamental ontology was an immanent development, rather than a scathing criticism, of his own phenomenology. (shrink)

Steven Crowell has been for many years a leading voice in debates on twentieth-century European philosophy. This volume presents thirteen recent essays that together provide a systematic account of the relation between meaningful experience and responsiveness to norms. They argue for a new understanding of the philosophical importance of phenomenology, taking the work of Husserl and Heidegger as exemplary, and introducing a conception of phenomenology broad enough to encompass the practices of both philosophers. Crowell discusses Husserl's analyses of first-person authority, (...) the semantics of conscious experience, the structure of perceptual content, and the embodied subject, and shows how Heidegger's interpretation of the self addresses problems in Husserl's approach to the normative structure of meaning. His volume will be valuable for upper-level students and scholars interested in phenomenological approaches to philosophical questions in both the European and the analytic traditions. (shrink)

While classical phenomenology, as represented by Edmund Husserl’s work, resists certain forms of representationalism about perception, I argue that in its theory of horizons, it posits representations in the sense of content-bearing vehicles. As part of a phenomenological theory, this means that on the Husserlian view such representations are part of the phenomenal character of perceptual experience. I believe that, although the intuitions supporting this idea are correct, it is a mistake to maintain that there are such representations defining the (...) phenomenal character of low-level perception. What these representations are called on to explain, i.e., the phenomenal character of perceiving objects in their full presence, can be more parsimoniously explained by appealing to certain affective states or affect schemas that shape the intentional directedness of low-level perceptual experience and define its phenomenal character in a non-representational way. This revision of the Husserlian view, it is shown, also helps us understand the normative character of perception. (shrink)