Transcendental phenomenology after the Ideen (1913)
PRESENTATION TOPIC:TYPES OF PHENOMENOLOGY
Transcendental phenomenology after the Ideen (1913)
Some years after the publication of the Logical Investigations,
Husserl made some key elaborations that led him to the distinction
between the act of consciousness (noesis) and the phenomena at
which it is directed (the noemata)."noetic" refers to the
intentional act of consciousness (believing, willing,
etc.)"noematic" refers to the object or content (noema), which
appears in the noetic acts (the believed, wanted, hated, and loved
...).
Transcendental constitutive phenomenology(1) Transcendental
constitutive phenomenology studies how objects are constituted in
pure or transcendental consciousness, setting aside questions of
any relation to the natural world around us.. Naturalistic
constitutive phenomenology(2) Naturalistic constitutive
phenomenology studies how consciousness constitutes or takes things
in the world of nature, assuming with the natural attitude that
consciousness is part of natureExistential phenomenology(3)
Existential phenomenology studies concrete human existence,
including our experience of free choice or action in concrete
situations. Generative historicist phenomenology(4) Generative
historicist phenomenology studies how meaning, as found in our
experience, is generated in historical processes of collective
experience over time.
Genetic phenomenology(5) Genetic phenomenology studies the
genesis of meanings of things within one's own stream of
experience. Transcendental phenomenology after the Ideen (1913)
What we observe is not the object as it is in itself, but how it
is given in the intentional acts. Knowledge of essences would only
be possible by "bracketing" all assumptions about the existence of
an external world and the inessential (subjective) aspects of how
the object is concretely given to us. This procedure Husserl called
epoch.
Transcendental phenomenology after the Ideen (1913)Husserl in a
later period concentrated more on the ideal, essential structures
of consciousness. As he wanted to exclude any hypothesis on the
existence of external objects, he introduced the method of
phenomenological reduction to eliminate them. What was left over
was the pure transcendental ego, as opposed to the concrete
empirical egoTranscendental phenomenologyis the study of the
essential structures that are left in pure consciousness: This
amounts in practice to the study of the noemata and the relations
among them. The philosopher Theodor Adorno criticised Husserl's
concept of phenomenological epistemology in his metacritique
Against Epistemology, which is anti-foundationalist in its stance.
Transcendental phenomenologists include Oskar Becker, Aron
Gurwitsch, and Alfred Schutz.Realist phenomenologyRealistic
phenomenology emphasizes the search for the universal essences of
various sorts of matters, including human actions, motives, and
selves. Within this tendency, Adolf Reinach added philosophy of law
to the phenomenological agenda; Max Scheler added ethics, value
theory, religion, and philosophical anthropology; Edith Stein added
philosophy of the human sciences and has been recently recognized
for work on gender; and Roman Ingarden added aesthetics,
architecture, music, literature, and film. This tendency flourished
in Germany through the 1920s, but also continues todayConstitutive
phenomenologysfounding text is Husserls ["Ideas"] of 1913. This
work extends Husserls scope to include philosophy of the natural
sciences, which has been continued in later generations by Oskar
Becker, Aron Gurwitsch, and Elisabeth Strker, but it is chiefly
devoted to reflections on phenomenological method, above all the
method of transcendental phenomenological epoch and reduction.This
procedure involves suspending acceptance of the pregiven status of
conscious life as something that exists in the world and is
performed in order to secure an ultimate intersubjective grounding
for the world and the positive sciences of it. Use of this method
places constitutive phenomenology in the modern tradition that goes
back at least to Kant, and also characterizes the rest of Husserls
work
Existential phenomenologydiffers from transcendental
phenomenology by its rejection of the transcendental ego.
Merleau-Ponty objects to the ego's transcendence of the world,
which for Husserl leaves the world spread out and completely
transparent before the conscious. Heidegger thinks of a conscious
being as always already in the world. Transcendence is maintained
in existential phenomenology to the extent that the method of
phenomenology must take a presuppositionless starting point -
transcending claims about the world arising from, for example,
natural or scientific attitudes or theories of the ontological
nature of the world.
Existential phenomenologyis often traced back to Martin
Heideggers [Being and Time] of 1927, the project of which was
actually to use an analysis of human being as a means to a
fundamental ontology that went beyond the regional ontologies
described by Husserl.Hannah Arendt seems to have been the first
existential phenomenologist after Heidegger. It is also arguable
that existentialist phenomenology appeared in Japan with Miki
Kyoshi and Kuki Shuzous early work in the late twenties. However,
this third aspect and phase in the tradition of the movement took
place chiefly in France. The early Emmanuel Levinas interpreted
Husserl and Heidegger together and helped introduce phenomenology
into France. This period included Gabriel Marcel and was led in the
1940s and 1950s by Simone de Beauvoir, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and
Jean-Paul Sartre.
This third tendency is concerned with topics such as action,
conflict, desire, finitude, oppression, and death. Arendt
contributed to political theory and the problematics of ethnicity,
Beauvoir raised the issue of gender and old age, Merleau-Ponty
creatively continued the appropriation of Gestalt psychology in his
descriptions of perception and the lived body, and Sartre focused
on freedom and literature
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