History of Anthropology: special emphasis on Europe

Contents:

History of Anthropology: with special emphasis on European continent. 1

The confusing beginning: 1

The enlightenment: 2

Few early works: 2

The Rigorous Anthropological practice: a possibility. 3

Anthropology in Europe: 3

The British Social Anthropology: 3

The evolutionist paradigm: 3

Diffusionist and historical particularist: 4

The functionalist: 4

Bronislaw Malinowski (1884-1942, Poland-Britain-The United States). 4

Alfred Radcliffe-Brown (1881-1955, Britain). 5

The African Political System: An Anthropological Landmark. 5

The Early post war anthropology: 5

The 1960s: the construction of Mediterranean. 6

The 1970s: expansion and fragmentation – work at home. 6

1980s and 1990s the conceptualization of Europe: 7

Future directions: 7

Further reading: 7

History of Anthropology: with special emphasis on European continent

The word ‘anthropology’ is ultimately from the Greek (anthropos, ‘human’, plus logos, ‘discourse’ or ‘science’). Its first usage to define a scientific discipline is probably around the early sixteenth century (in its Latin form anthropologium). Central European writers then employed it as a term to cover anatomy and physiology, part of what much later came to be called ‘physical’ or ‘biological anthropology’. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, European theologians also used the term, in this case to refer to the attribution of human-like features to their deity. The German word Anthropologie, which described cultural attributes of different ethnic groups, came to be used by a few writers in Russia and Austria in the late eighteenth century (see Vermeulen 1995). However, this usage did not become established among scholars elsewhere until much later.

The confusing beginning:

If we restrict ourselves to anthropology as a scientific discipline, some would trace its roots back to the European Enlightenment during the eighteenth century; others would claim that anthropology did not arise as a science until the 1850s, yet others would argue that anthropological research in its present-day sense only commenced after the First World War. It is beyond doubt, however, that anthropology, considered as the science of humanity, originated in the region we commonly but inaccurately call ‘the West’, notably in three or four ‘Western’ countries: France, Great Britain, the USA and, until the Second World War, Germany. Historically speaking, this is a European discipline, and its practitioners, like those of all European sciences, occasionally like to trace its roots back to the ancient Greeks.

The enlightenment:

The eighteenth century saw a flowering of science and philosophy in Europe. During these years, the self-confidence of the bourgeoisie increased, citizens reflected on the world and their place in it, and would soon make political demands for a rational, just, predictable and transparent social order. As Philosophers like As Hobbes, Locke and Descartes had argued, the free individual was to be the measure of all things – of knowledge and of the social order – the authority of God and Ruler was no longer taken for granted.

Traditional religious beliefs were increasingly denounced as superstitions – roadblocks on the way to a better society, governed by reason. The idea of progress also seemed to be confirmed by the development of technology, which made its first great advances at this time. New technologies made scientific measurements more accurate. Industrial machinery began to appear. Descartes’ purely theoretical attempt to prove the universal truth of mathematics suddenly became a practical issue of burning relevance. For if mathematics, the language of reason, could reveal such fundamental natural truths as Newton’s laws, did it not follow that nature was itself reasonable, and that any reason-driven enterprise was bound to succeed? All of these expectations culminated abruptly in the French Revolution, which attempted to realise the dream of a perfectly rational social order in practice, but was quickly superseded by its irrational opposite: the revolution devoured its children. And then all the dreams, the disappointments, the paradoxes of the Revolution spread during the Napoleonic Wars in the early 1800s to all of Europe and deeply influenced the ideas of society that later generations would develop.

Few early works:

In eighteenth century with the age of reason, it was the beginning of considering anthropology as science. An important early work was by Italian scholar Giambattista Vico’s (1668–1744) La scienza nuova (1725; The New Science, 1999). This was a grand synthesis of ethnography, history of religion, philosophy and natural science. Vico was among the first to embrace the idea of social progress explicitly. He proposed a universal model of social development, arguing that all societies must go through three stages, with particular, formally defined characteristics. The first stage was the ‘Age of Gods’, an age of nature worship and rudimentary social structures, traits that Vico associated with ‘primitive’ peoples. Then came

the ‘Age of Heroes’, with widespread social unrest due to great social inequality – both the European Middle Ages and Vico’s own time have doubtlessly served as models here. The final stage, the ‘Age of Man’ was an envisioned future era ruled by reason.

Baron de Montesquieu’s work on comparative, cross-cultural study of legislative systems uses first hand and second hand data to find out general principles in legal systems. He is sometimes identified as being proto functionalist. It is because he sees polygamy, cannibalism, paganism, slavery and other barbarous customs could be explained by the functions they fulfilled within society as a whole.

Yet another step towards a science of anthropology was taken by a group of young, idealistic French intellectuals. These were the Encyclopaedists, led by the philosopher Denis Diderot (1713–84) and the mathematician Jean Le Rond d’Alembert (1717–83). Their aim was to collect, classify and systematise as much knowledge as possible in order to further the advance of reason, progress, science and technology. Diderot’s Encyclopédie was published in 1751–72, and included articles by illustrious intellectuals like

Rousseau, Voltaire and Montesquieu. The encyclopaedia quickly established itself as a model for later projects of its kind. It was a liberal and wide-ranging, not to say a revolutionary work, which was censored in many parts of Europe for its crude criticism of the Church. One of its youngest contributors, Marquis de Condorcet (1743–94), who was to die prematurely in a Jacobin jail, wrote systematic comparisons between different social systems, and tried to develop a synthesis of mathematics and social science that would allow him to formulate objective laws of social development.

For Rousseau development was not progressive, but degenerative, and that the source of this decline was society itself. Starting from an initial, innocent state of nature, where each individual lived by herself in harmony with her surroundings, people went on to found institutions of marriage and kinship, and settled in small, sedentary groups. Eventually, these groups grew in complexity, and invented priests and chiefs, kings and princes, private property, police and magistrates, until the free and good soul of man was crushed under the weight of social inequality.

Between Nepolian war and First World War Europe becomes ‘modernize’ and in consequence it ‘modernizes’ the entire world. The major change that has taken place is that the Europe has transformed from the an agriculture nation to industrially sound nation. In 1830s the railway was established. A massive social change was on the row. In consequence, several peasant economics have now been transformed to a working class labourers. This social change leaves profound influence over the country at large. Several social thinkers have seen it as something having a detrimental effect over the society at large. the French, Austrian and Italian revolutions in 1848–9, the Paris Commune of 1870, also clearly indicate the potential for violence that industrialisation unleashed. And along with the protests, a new, socialist ideology grew. Its roots go back to social philosophers such as Rousseau and Henri de Saint-Simon (1760–1825), and to the German neo-Hegelians, but its decisive formulation came with Karl Marx.

Around the same time period, Charles Darwin’s massive work “origins of species” appears with a potential for a Global science.

The Rigorous Anthropological practice: a possibility

It is hardly surprising that anthropology arose as a discipline at this time. The anthropologist is a prototypical global researcher, dependent on detailed data about people all over the world. Now that these data had suddenly become available, anthropology could be established as an academic discipline. So could sociology. If anthropology grew from imperialism, sociology was a product of the changing class relations brought about by industrialisation in Europe itself – all the founding fathers of sociology discuss

the meaning of ‘modernity’, and contrast it with ‘pre-modern’ conditions.

Anthropology in Europe:

Giving an account of the history of Anthropology in Europe is a challenging to task to apprehend, primarily because the anthropological work in Europe is quite complex and often does not follow any linear progression.

The British Social Anthropology:

The British tradition of anthropology is known as "Social anthropology". It is a term applied to ethnographic works that attempt to isolate a particular system of social relations such as those that comprise domestic life, economy, law, politics, or religion give analytical priority to the organizational bases of social life, and attend to cultural phenomena as somewhat secondary to the main issues of social scientific inquiry.

The evolutionist paradigm:

Inspired by enlightenment philosophy of progress based on reason Early anthropologists tend to focus on society and culture in progress. Among the early evolutionists, H. Spencer is an important figure. Like his older contemporary Auguste Comte, whom he admired and to some extent sought to emulate, he set himself the task of covering all the fields of human knowledge, from physics to ethics. Like Comte, he felt the task only possible if he could discover an overall unifying principle. Sometime in the 1840s Spencer decided that this principle was evolution. First enunciated in an essay of 1852, "The development hypothesis," evolution became the guiding thread of a whole "system of synthetic philosophy" that he expounded in a succession of major works stretching over half a century: The principles of psychology (1855), First principles (1862), The principles of biology (1864 7), The principles of sociology (1876), and The principles of ethics (1892 3). In between came a stream of essays on such subjects as population, progress, parliamentary reform, manners, morals, the philosophy of style, the physiology of laughter, and the function of music many of which were collected together by him as Essays: scientific, political and speculative (1858 74). Although these too tended to take evolution as the axiomatic principle, they mostly managed to evade its restrictive and rigid embrace and although as much ignored today as his larger works they contain some of Spencer's most imaginative and interesting ideas. The fundamental argument to his idea was that human society moves from instable homogeneity to relatively stable heterogeneity.

One of the most notable among the evolutionists is E.B.Tylor. The theory, outlined in his two-volume Primitive culture (1871), laid out an idea of progress in which human societies evolved and improved through time. Tylor argued that all human beings had similar intellectual potential. He rejected the notion, common at the time, that contemporary primitive societies had degenerated after a common Biblical origin. As a basis for demonstrating his evolutionary sequences, Tylor employed what he called the "doctrine of survivals." Survivals were obsolete or archaic aspects of culture preserved from one stage of social evolution into another. Living cultural fossils, they could provide clues to the past and proved that contemporary stages of culture must have evolved from earlier ones. Tylor's evolutionism differed from that of SPENCER and MORGAN by concentrating more on such humanist topics as the evolution of RELIGION, particularly ANIMISM, and less on material culture. He defined animism as the belief in spiritual beings and argued it was the basis of all religions, developing an elaborate evolutionary sequence that ran from a multiplicity of spirits to monotheism.

The functionalist paradigm.

Diffusionist and historical particularist:

Franz Boas German anthropologists started his fieldwork investigation in 1883 when Anthropology did not have any solid ground. Boas (1938) argued that although the independent invention of a culture trait can occur at the same time within widely separated societies where there is limited control of individual members, allowing them freedom to create a unique style, a link such as genetic relationship is still suspected. He felt this was especially true in socities where there were similar combinations of traits (Boas 1938:211). Boas emphasized that culture traits should not be viewed casually, but in terms of a relatively unique historical process that proceeds from the first introduction of a trait until its origin becomes obscure. He sought to understand culture traits in terms of two historical processes, diffusion and modification. Boas used these key concepts to explain culture and interpret the meaning of culture. He believed that the cultural inventory of a people was basically the cumulative result of diffusion. He viewed culture as consisting of countless loose threads, most of foreign origin, but which were woven together to fit into their new cultural context. Discrete elements become interrelated as time passes (Hatch 1973:57-58).

The functionalist:

Bronislaw Malinowski (1884-1942, Poland-Britain-The United States)

Bronislaw Malinowski is credited with Functionalism, which explains a culture as an interrelated whole, not a collection of isolated traits. Based on his fieldwork in various areas of the world, particularly the Trobriand Islands in New Guinea, Malinowski established the theory of Functionalism. A culture is composed of many different elements, such as food acquisition, family relationships, and housing. Malinowski believed that all of these elements are connected and work together for one purpose, which is to meet the needs of individuals in the culture. In other words, culture exists to satisfy the basic biological, psychological, and social needs of individuals.

Malinowski is known for his psychological analysis. A classic example is his analysis on magic. In Trobriand Islands, magic was used for various purposes, such as to kill enemies and prevent being killed, to ease the birth of a child, to protect fishermen, and to ensure harvest. Malinowski hypothesized that magic is reliable in domains where there is a limited amount of scientific knowledge. Magic appears to work in these areas because people cannot handle situations with systematic knowledge. For example, the Trobriand Islanders did not practice magic when they fished inside a protected coral reef because they were able to predict catch and safety by weather and the conditions of the sea. In contrast, they did rely on magic when they went ocean fishing because it was difficult to predict unknown dangers and the amount of fish they might harvest. Based on this data, Malinowski argued that magic has a profound function in exerting human control over those dimensions that are otherwise outside of our element. The essential function of magic is to extend control over uncontrollable elements of nature and thereby reduce anxiety.

Malinowski is also known as a pioneer of fieldwork, which is intense and long-term research conducted among people in a particular community. He set criteria for fieldwork and brought this method to a fundamental element of the discipline. His criteria require anthropologists to actually live in communities and to acquire the language of the people among whom they are conducting their researches.

Alfred Radcliffe-Brown (1881-1955, Britain)

Alfred Radcliffe-Brown is credited with Structural Functionalism, which analyzes particular social systems in a wider context of many different societies. Radcliffe-Brown was concerned with what keeps societies from falling apart. He identified similar customs in different societies and compared them in order to discover the customs’ inherent functions. Through this comparative method, he attempted to explain underlying principles that preserve the structure of each society.

For example, Radcliffe-Brown analyzed exogamous moieties in aboriginal societies of Australia, Melanesia and America. An exogamous moiety is a custom in which a population is divided into two social divisions and a man of one group must marry a woman of another. Since these three different aboriginal societies had almost no contact in history, it is surprising that they shared the custom of exogamous moieties. How can this phenomenon be explained? Radcliffe-Brown found that the two social divisions of exogamous moieties within each culture were named after a pair of animals or birds which are similar, such as coyote and wild cat, or eaglehawk and crow. He argued that these animal pairs represent opposing characteristics of a society, for example, friendship and conflict, or solidarity and opposition. According to Radcliffe-Brown, those aboriginal societies incorporate the dual divisions in their kin systems in order to keep the balance between these opposing characteristics. This balance is important for the stability of the whole society.

Radcliffe-Brown successfully explained many aspects of family structures that other anthropologists viewed as primitive customs. His analysis of social structure and function encouraged anthropologists to look at how a particular custom plays a role in maintaining social stability. At the same time, his analysis was criticized for not considering historical changes of traditional societies, especially those caused by Western colonialism.

The African Political System: An Anthropological Landmark

Influential, branch of political anthropology has its origins in the experience of anthropological FIELDWORK and the very practical concerns associated with locating order in non-Western societies. This was the explicit aim of the founding work in the field, African political systems (Fortes & Evans-Pritchard 1940b). Based on a set of descriptions and analyses of centralized and decentralized systems of governance in Africa, societies were divided into two types: "primitive states" that possessed government institutions and "stateless societies" that did not. This work, and examples of detailed fieldwork on political systems such as EVANS-PRITCHARD'S (1940) among the Nuer and FORTES's (1945) among the Tallensi, inspired a generation of fieldworkers to concentrate on the varied ways in which political order might be embedded in KINSHIP relations, RITUAL practices, AGE SYSTEMS, and other order-keeping institutions that did not require separate institutions of government. Such a focus was of clear concern to colonial administrators anxious to understand how to govern and control "subject" peoples, and the role anthropologists may have played in aiding COLONIALISM has been the subject of considerable debate in recent decades (Asad 1973; Kuklik 1991). It is clear, however, that the results of such work, particularly in Africa, pushed anthropology in a number of new directions.

The Early post war anthropology:

The devastation that brought forth by the Second World War brings immediate challenge of making policies and arranging funding for revival of their economy. One of the immediate responses was the formation of International Monetary Fund an outcome of Bretton Woods’ agreement.

The primary problem encountered by policy makers was to implement the development agenda based on the principles of Modernisation. The modernization theory argued that development can be achieved through Fund Injection based on the principles of Evolutionist paradigm, i.e. society progresses through unilinnear stages of social evolution. In this context, it becomes important to understand the cultural differences and not to take it as unnecessary barrier to implement market economy. In consequence peasant values and their interaction with state becomes a central concern. In USA, studies along this line gains prominence. Redfield (1971, 1956); Foster 1973 (1962); Friedl (1958) find their works as having practical application to policy making and development discourse. The growing interest in peasant societies prompted a number of ethnographic studies, focused initially on Central and South America and on Southern Europe, but rapidly coming to include other areas, and more general discussions and a dialogue between anthropologists and other specialists. Psychological tests utilized by Banfield were also resorted to by other researchers, such as Anne Parsons (1967) in her study of the urban poor of Naples. The anthropologist was concerned not only with defining cultural institutions and values, but also with the enculturation of individuals. In some instances this was linked to the recognition of wider sets of allegiances and a wider cultural context (Benedict 1946a,b; Friedl 1959; Lowie 1954). Although the dominant themes at this time were peasant orientations rather than national cultures (but see Lowie 1954) and 'community', meaning small, homogeneous and relatively self contained groups, there was an increasing awareness of the links between such 'communities' and wider entities and processes. It is in recognition of these connections that, in the Mexican context, Redfield proposed the 'folk-urban continuum' and the distinction between the 'great tradition' and the 'little tradition' (Redfield 1971 [1956]). There was some convergence at this time between the work of US and British anthropologists, although in Britain, owing to its position within the post-colonial world, most anthropologists were not fired with the same enthusiasm over the applicability of their research as were their North American counterparts. Here the agenda was less clear, and the concern with 'applied anthropology' was less prominent at this point. However, the continuing (though increasingly beleaguered) influence of the structural-functionalist paradigm did result in some interesting parallels between cultural and social anthropology - particularly when the focus of study was European societies.

The 1960s: the construction of Mediterranean

In 1959, a conference sponsored by Winner-green foundation anthropologists first discuss on the Mediterranean value of Honour and Shame. Following this, in 1963, several seminars discuss on 'continuity and persistence of Mediterranean modes of thought'. Peristiany (1974 [1966]) clearly finds this meetings as the initial steps in the formulation of a problematic that could define and orientate a Mediterranean field of investigation, based on his belief that the cultural parallels encountered within the area made for the possibility of systematic comparisons. Pitt-Rivers, who in many respects represents a landmark in the development of anthropology of Europe, discusses the concept of Honour in the literature of Western Europe. In spIte of his more general treatment of honour, his discussion reinforces the view, already stated by Peristiany, of honour as a ­ode relevant to a social system which had largely been superseded in North-Western Europe; a value-system associated largely with aristocrats, clergy and poets of former times. Pitt-Rivers suggests that the mobility of the upper classes, combined with urban life in Spain to expose individuals to cosmopolitan influences, and these influences are incompatible Wl­ ­e values of honour and shame. This constitutes a way of defmmg the area of expertise of the anthropologist: the area of study appears to correlate with the relative progress of modernization and of the 'great tradition', restricting research to smaller populations where 'traditional' values might persist. Pitt-Rivers' work as an anthropological account because it is based primarily on direct observation. 'The people he writes about are real people and not figures taken from the printed page of units in statistical tables' (Pitt-Rivers 1971 [1954]: x). What constitutes an anthropological study is, therefore, the specific object of study (a complex set of interpersonal relations and their value systems) and the method of research employed (participatory observation).

The 1970s: expansion and fragmentation – work at home

Changes in the discipline during the 1970s were prompted not only by the limitations and failures of the structural-functionalist paradigm and the modernization perspective, but also by developments in the wider political arena. The late sixties saw a wave of protests and unrest across Europe. The thirdworld perspective was established. The Cold War division of Europe into Soviet and Nato camps was again showing signs of strain. In this situation, Cole (1977) argues that Europe has provided funding to carry our anthropological research on allies and enemies in Europe. Davis (1977) finds Anthropologists lack of interest in doing fieldwork on Europe, as they find it more anthropological to carry out fieldwork in remote corners of African world. Nonetheless, this is perhaps the period when a distinctive anthropology of Europe develops. Freeman (1973) is one of the first anthropologists who attempts to outline the scope and achievements of studies in rural European social Organisation. Analysis of patron-client relations (Wolf 1966b) becomes one of the central concers of Mediterranean anthropologists. Boissevain’s (1975) essay entitled “Towards a social anthropology of Europe” was the first systematic attempt to define an agenda for the emerging “anthropology of Europe”. He further argues that the concepts like equilibrium, corporation, balanced opposition, reciprocity and consensus, developed from the study of Non-Western, Tribal societies were of limited value for dealing with complexity of European societies. Nor was the traditional research technique of participant-observation alone any longer sufficient. For him, anthropologists needed new methods to enable them in studying the liks between different levels of organizations – Local, Regional, National, Core and Periphery. In short they need to focus on the interrelationship between local events and macro social processes of “State formation, national integration, industrialization, urbanization, bureaucratization, class conflict and commercialization (Boissevain 1975).

One alternative to functionalism was the 'action' approach, pioneered by Barth (1966; 1969), Goffman (1959), and Barnes (1972), and elaborated, in European anthropology, in the work of Boissevain and Bailey and their students. Their work focused on individuals and the stratagems they employ within a given socio-political framework. 'Action theory' covered a variety of approaches, including transactionalism, network analysis, systems analysis and game theory. What united them was an emphasis on the dynamic character of interpersonal exchanges. Instead of looking at the individual as a passive and obedient slave to group norms and pressures, Boissevain stressed that 'it is important to see him as an entrepreneur who tries to manipulate norms and relationships for his own social and psychological benefit' (Boissevain 1974: 6).

For European anthropologists it did provide new research foci and a framework for analyzing elements of the complexity of European societies that had been invisible to functionalist analysis - even if its micro-perspective tended to obscure the wider picture. However, that shift of focus led to the elaboration of a number of new analytical concepts, as well as to a re-evaluation of some old concerns, such as 'patron-client relations', 'micro-politics', 'brokers', 'middlemen', 'informal and non-corporate groups', 'cliques', 'factions and action-sets' and 'instrumental friendship' (d. Banton 1966; Bailey 1971; 1973; Blok 1974; Boissevain 1966, 1968, 1974; Gellner and Waterbury 1977; Wolf 1966b).

1980s and 1990s the conceptualization of Europe:

The economic interdependence among European states and expansion of market economy as well rising increase in contact have made it possible to take Europe as an unit of analyisis. There is political level integration in Europe which brings forth ever increasing consolidation forming the European Union. In this context the study of different religious possibilities including the Catholic-Protestant debate. The nature of anthropological enquiry includes correlation between Protestantism, Liberalism and economic development (MacFarlane, 1978), and Orthodoxy, authoritarianism and economic underdevelopment (Haller, 1990). Anthropological phenomena such as religion, family form and political orientation (Todd, 1985) become the locus and focus of research. Wallace (1990) illustrates the ways in which Europe has been defined in recent years on the basis of shared values, culture and psychological identity (Wallace 1990).

Future directions:

The close of the twentieth century represents a momentous period in the history of Europe, but at present we can only have a hazy picture of what is likely to emerge in the future. As social scientists we have had to confront major international events: the collapse of Communism in Eastern Europe, the end of the Cold War, increasing integration of the economies of the European Union, the breakdown of Yugoslavia and protracted war throughout Bosnia. We have simultaneously witnessed prolonged economic recession and mass unemployment, as well as increasing right-wing violence throughout eastern and western Europe. Yet we face these phenomena often bereft of suitable anthropological categories. Although many' classical' anthropologists have contributed to the issues of nationality and nationalism anthropology as a whole has been limited by its emphasis on small-scale units. Where progress has been made, largely through profitable exchanges with sociologists and social historians, this has been limited to developments appropriate only to the national state.

Further reading:

Barfield, T. (1997). The Dictionary of Anthropology, USA: Blackwell.

Goddard, Victoria A., Uobera, Josep R., Shore, Cris. (1996) The anthropology of Europe. Washington: Oxford.

Erikson, T. H (2004). What is anthropology. Londong: Pluto Press.

Erikson, T. H. and Neilson, F. S. (2001). The history of Anthropology, London: Pluto Press.

Metcalf, P. (2005). The Anthropology Basics. USA: Routledge.

Martin Heidegger

Martin Heidegger____________________

Table of content:________________________________________________
Introduction: 2
Heidegger’s Being and time: 2
Heidegger’s rejection of traditional methods for the study of being: 2
Heidegger’s approach to study of being: 3
Journey to being: 3
The dimension of time: 4
Heidegger’s method: 4
A beginning with Husserl: 5
Against theoretical intuition: 5
Idea of Dasein: 5
Dasein in context: rediness to hand (Zuhandenheit) and presence at hand (Vorhandenheit). 6
Linguistic expression: 6
Phenomenology and hermeneutics – Heideggerian fusion. 7
Further reading: 7

Introduction:
Is is one of the most commonplace words in English language. It sleeps into sentences almost unnoticed. It is difficult to think, write or speak without it. But few people asks –
WHAT IS IS?
This negligence results in not just the neglect of a word but of every resonance that the word might have. Heidegger was an original phenomenologist of the highest rank, who attempted, in his own unique way, to carry out Husserl’s project of getting back to the ‘things themselves’. He spent ten years actively engaging with Husserl’s philosophy before his own Being and Time appeared, which at once claimed phenomenology to be much older than Husserl, as an essentially Greek way of thinking, and also, at the same time, pushed phenomenology beyond Husserl, in that it replaced the study of the intentional structures of consciousness with the more fundamental study of the relation between Dasein and Being itself.
Heidegger’s Being and time:
Heidegger’s main question begins with questioning “IS” or being. What is is? Is is a part of verb to be, the verb of being. That was Heidegger’s central occupation. He argued that Western thought has forgotten the question of being, not just recently but for more than 2500 years. Therefore, he returns to the question “how could being be understood?”
Being and time branches out the question of being in to two distinct tasks:
Part One: the Interpretation of Dasein in terms of temporality, and the explication of time as the transcendental horizon for the question of being.
Part Two: basic features of a phenomenological destruction of the history of ontology, with the problematic of Temporality as our clue.
Heidegger was of the view that a philosopher has only a single deep thought, which he or she constantly struggles to express. In his own case, his whole life’s work was a single-minded attempt to reexamine the question of Being, Thus, in Being and Time (1927) Heidegger announces that he proposes to investigate “the question of Being” that is the “question of the meaning of Being.” Heidegger argues:
If the question of Being is to have its own history made transparent, then this hardened tradition must be loosened up, and the concealments which it has brought about must be dissolved. We understand this task as one in which by taking the question of Being as our clue, we are to destroy the traditional content of ancient ontology until we arrive at those primordial experiences in which we achieved our first ways of determining the nature of Being—the ways which have guided us ever since (Being and time, 1927).
Heidegger’s rejection of traditional methods for the study of being:
Heidegger rejected traditional metaphysical approaches to the question of Being as having misunderstood the nature of beings by understanding them as ‘things’, as what is simply there, as occurrent, as ‘reality’, as present at hand. Traditional metaphysics, which thought it was simply describing things as they are, does not realise that it is constructed on the basis of a certain assumed attitude towards the world, which in fact is not fundamental, but belongs to a distorted way of experiencing due to the way humans are drawn down into everyday existing.
Heidegger’s central insight is that traditional metaphysical understanding is actually a sedimentation of a kind of everyday set of assumptions about reality, and this set of assumptions needs to be shown to be just that, through a deeper exploration of all the ways in which humans relate to the world. In particular the prioritisation of the theoretical, of theoria in the Greek sense, of the contemplative outlook so admired by Husserl, is shown to be a particular effect of tradition and not a fundamental feature of Dasein itself. This leads Heidegger to a radical questioning of the traditional metaphysical definition of human beings as rational animals as well as the traditional scriptural assumptions about human beings being made in the image and likeness of God.
Heidegger’s approach to study of being:
Heidegger argues that human existence must be thought radically in its own terms. There are two sides to this: one is an attempt at an existential analytic of Dasein; the other is an attempt to retrieve the essential meanings of key words expressing existence from beneath the weight of encrusted tradition. To highlight and expose this one-sided partiality of traditional metaphysical accounts (including the medieval Scholastic, the Cartesian, Rationalist, and Kantian approaches), Heidegger favours a new ‘fundamental ontology’, an enquiry into the manner in which the structures of Being are revealed through the structures of human existence, an enquiry, furthermore, which could only be carried out through phenomenology, now transformed into hermeneutical phenomenology, since the phenomena of existence always require interpretation, and hermeneutics is the art of interpretation. Human existence is not an entity which is simply there in the world, accessible from different points of view. Rather human existence is some specific person’s existence; it has the character of ‘specificity’ (Jeweiligkeit) or ‘mineness’ (Jemeinigkeit). So too an interpretation of human existence cannot be neutral, dispassionate, theoretical contemplation, but must take into account the involvement of the enquirer him- or herself in the undertaking.
Human beings are involved with their existence in such a way that hermeneutics must be able to accomplish this movement backwards and forwards between the existence to be examined and the nature of the examining enquirer. Heidegger’s fundamental ontology, in Being and Time, will try to map out the transcendental conditions which made human existence (Dasein) possible, while recognising that humans are individual existing beings whose Being is an issue for them. Heidegger has raised to an ontological level the essential role of humans as questioning beings. It is this fundamental questioning concern with Being which marks out human existence as such. Questioning is prioritised over all other forms of interacting. Understanding what it is to be a questioner reveals the purely human mode of ‘being-in-the-world’ (Inder-Welt-Sein) as a kind of projective caring and involvement in the world.
Journey to being:
Throughout his life, Heidegger restlessly pursued a problem: the term “Being” had meant many different things to those who used it. Out of this was later to arise his first formulation of the being-question: what was the meaning of being? He searched through three major epochs: those of the ancient Greeks, the Medieval Scholastics, and Modern Philosophy. Heidegger worked on all three, reading each in the light of the others.
For Plato, every being had an ideal existence, as a perfect, unchanging form. What we experience as visible, audible, tactile beings are merely imperfect reflections or copies of the ideal beings.
For Aristotle the realm of being would be divided into different types, categories of beings. In the first place being comes either as SUBSTANCES of as ATTRIBUTES. SUBSTANCE is what something is in itself, identifiable and separable from other substances. E.g. Animals and plants, stars and planets
An ATTRIBUTE is some kind of quality or characteristic that substances have. For example a substance may be poisonous, purple in colour, 18cm in length etc. etc. This schema is close to modern, empirically oriented commonsense.
But another statement is possible. THE THING IS… we announce that it exists, that it has its being. And being is neither a substance, nor an attribute. That was Heidegger’s problem.
Aristotle had categorized beings, but offered no satisfactory account of being. Each of the categories marks out a type of being, and how it can be known – but there was no single, unified concept of being as such.
For scholastics it was important HOW the various entities are known: HOW they are thought to exist. For them, Christian theologians’ concept of GOD as something all encompassing and generating all other beings – creating all substances and attributes becomes important. So, God’s being without substance – now became the ground of being, its ultimate origin and its explanation.
The dimension of time:
In Being and Time, Heidegger does not want merely to give an existential analysis of human being. His ultimate aim is to understand the meaning of Being and its relation to time. Heidegger rightly sees that traditional metaphysics and theology had an orientation towards thinking of true Being as timeless, eternal, unchanging. In the metaphysical tradition stemming from Plato and Aristotle, Being has been understood as presence (Anwesenheit, which contains the word ‘Wesen’ which means ‘essence’, the Greek ousia) as that which has some kind of static occurrence. Heidegger, on the other hand, sees human existence as essentially taking place in time, spread out between past and future and radically limited by death and so essentially incomplete. Being must be understood radically in terms of time. Unfortunately, the concepts of time available from the philosophical and scientific tradition are inadequate to the task. Heidegger thus proposes in the second half of Being and Time to run through various fundamental human experiences in terms of their temporal character to try to develop an authentic sense of temporality as a first step towards approaching the problem of time itself and its relation to Being.
Heidegger’s method:
Being and Time is a radical attempt to rethink traditional philosophical approaches to human beings, to Being, to time and history, and, of course, to the history of philosophy itself. The book aims to be both an a priori transcendental phenomenological description of the essential structure of human existence, Dasein, and an appreciation of the temporal, cultural, and the dispersed nature of human historicality. Somehow, Heidegger saw all of these problems as capable of being clarified through a phenomenological approach, although, now, an approach which he had to some extent forged by himself. For, by the time of writing Being and Time, he had come to view Husserlian phenomenology as yet another project of idealist philosophy which had got lost from the essential historicity of human nature.
A beginning with Husserl:
Being and Time first appeared to be a radical deviation from Husserl’s phenomenology, but the publication of the drafts of Heidegger’s lecture courses from 1917 to 1927 shows Heidegger working his way through phenomenology, employing a close reading of Husserl’s texts, and situating his own problematic as emerging from them.
For Husserl, phenomenology was the approach to locate “universally-true” consciousness. By phenomenological REDUCTION. First reduction is to Suspend any attention to mere particulars, “bracket” them out… remove from the scene, and what is left will be the essential, universal structures of the mind. For Husserl, the real objects are not objects in consciousness. Second reduction is the argument that objects to appear in our minds some kind of mental activity, or ACT must be performed, that too must be studied. In Reduction three he argues that objects and acts are of many different types – therefore, they come plural. Therefore, if we can bracket out even the objects and acts, the Transcendental Ego is what remains. This is what Husserl called ABSOLUTE BEING.
Clearly, Husserl, equates being with absolute consciousness. Heidegger was skeptical about this abstract, sovereign consciousness. Did it rule unchallenged? Entities might turn up… but did they turn up only for a purified, disembodied Ego?
He therefore, argues that, one can step in an arithmetic world, as long as one adopts the arithmetic standpoint, bu the ordinary, natural world is always there for me. If the ordinary practical world is there, always, it comes first. It has to be there for someone before they can launch into abstract calculations, theorizing about transcendental egos etc. Husserl, having noticed it, kept putting it back in brackets. But Heidegger set off dramatically new path – towards being as it was encountered and mand meaningful, in PRACTICAL EVERYDAY LIFE.
Against theoretical intuition:
In his lectures of the early 1920s Heidegger had criticised Husserl’s account of intuition as not sufficiently recognising that our original understanding is not theoretical, but grounded in our practical engagements (comportment, Verhalten) with the world. Our understanding is interpretative from the very start and that interpretative involvement with things need not be at a level of intellection or cognition, but more usually comes in concernful, practical dealings.
Idea of Dasein:
In Being and Time, Husserl’s notion of intentionality is replaced by a phenomenological account of Dasein’s practical comportments within the world of practical relations with things (Zuhandensein). This leads Heidegger to revise Husserl’s conception of intentionality and finally to drop it altogether in favour of the conception of Dasein’s transcendence. Heidegger promises to show how intentionality is grounded in the ec-static nature of Dasein, that is, the manner in which human existence always runs ahead of itself in expectation and lingers behind in memory.
Dasein… that entity in its being which we know as human life; this entity in the specificity of its being, the entity that we each ourselves are, which each of us finds in the fundamental assertion: I amDasein in context: rediness to hand (Zuhandenheit) and presence at hand (Vorhandenheit)
In Being and Time he first introduces Dasein in terms of his discussion of the formal structure of the question of Being:
Thus, to work out the question of Being adequately, we must make an entity—the inquirer—transparent in his own Being. The very asking of this question is an entity’s mode of Being; and as such it gets its essential character from what is inquired about— namely, Being. This entity which each of us is himself and which includes inquiring as one of the possibilities of its Being, we shall denote by the term “Dasein”.
Dasein is not an entity that stands on its own, like a stone or a chair; it is always caught up in a world. The fundamental nature of Dasein is always to be in a world. World here means a context, an environment, a set of references and assignments within which any meaning is located Human being is ‘Being-in-the-world’. Furthermore, it is not as if Dasein is somehow sitting side by side with the world. Dasein is world-involved, and as Heidegger will later argue, world-disclosing. Being-in-the-world is such a basic state of Being that it is through it that all the other ‘existentialia’ (Dasein’s equivalent of the categories which apply to inanimate things) of Dasein get determined.
Heidegger explicates this conception of Being-in-the-world through an account of our basic contacts with things in the environment. Traditionally, Heidegger feels, philosophy, including even Aristotle, has prioritised the theoretical encounter with things, things as they are to sight.
Sight stands at a distance and seeing does not tamper with the thing seen. Against this traditional metaphysical view, Heidegger emphasises that our initial contact with objects is in terms of their use and availability to us for certain assigned tasks, tasks generated by our interests. We tamper with and manipulate things as determined by our interests and our goals. Things initially present themselves with this kind of available being, what Heidegger calls Zuhandensein, ‘readiness to hand’, or what Hubert Dreyfus renders as ‘availability’.10 Normally we reach for an object to act as a hammer, we see a tree as a source of wood or shelter from the rain, and so on. Heidegger’s descriptions give a certain priority to these kinds of ‘workworlds’ —the work-world of the carpenter, for instance (BT § 26). Only subsequently, and by a separate act of intention—one which is much more theoretical—do we see the tools as things in themselves, as things standing on their own, available for inspection. This theoretical way of viewing things leads to science, to the pure interest in examining things as they are, bracketed from their connections and engagements with our interests. Things seen in this theoretical mode are vorhandene—present at hand, simply there.
Linguistic expression:
According to Heidegger Husserl’s conception of intentionality is not sufficiently tuned in to express our practical engagement with the world. Much more than Husserl, Heidegger is interested in the linguistic dimension of intentionality. Our whole comportment towards things is expressive, and this expression can appear as linguistic assertion (Aussage).
Heidegger says:
It is not so much that we see the objects and things but rather that we first talk about them. To put it more precisely: we do not say what we see, but rather the reverse, we see what one says about the matter.
Understanding is not just a matter of having a sensory input, conceptualizing it, and reacting to it. The sensory dimension of the experience falls short of what the assertion says about it: I say the chair is yellow but I do not literally see the being-yellow of the chair. ‘Being’, ‘this’, and so on are not in the subjective reflection, but are correlates of the act. Heidegger develops Husserl’s notion of categorial intuition into his account of the experience of being and truth. Heidegger is coming to see that the essential disclosure of things takes place through Dasein’s concernful dealing with things in the environment, that it takes place essentially in expression. Relating to things, disclosing them, always relates to our concerns in advance, our relation is primarily interpretative, or hermeneutical.
Phenomenology and hermeneutics – Heideggerian fusion
Heidegger gives Husserl’s account of practical intentionality an entirely new shape by connecting it with the tradition of hermeneutics. Heidegger later recalled that he had first encountered hermeneutics as a branch of theological interpretation during his Catholic seminary days. By ‘hermeneutics’ Heidegger does not just mean the method specific to the historical and cultural sciences, but the whole manner in which human existence is interpretative. All our experience is interpreting and encountering what has already been interpreted by ourselves and by others.
Heidegger calls this way of approaching things the “existentialhermeneutical as”; it is a kind of approach which gets pushed into the background when we adopt the more neutral view of a thing as an entity with specific properties. All neutral understanding of things, for example scientific understanding, presupposes our existential encounter with things and our original interpretation of them in the light of our concerns and dealings with the world. If this is forgotten, according to Heidegger, we end up with a theory of truth as judgement instead of an experience of truth as revelation. Heidegger then is seeking to replace the traditional view of knowledge as a kind of intellectual representation with a new view which sees knowing as a sub-species of a kind of concernful dealing with the world. In Being and Time Heidegger struggles to develop a new vocabulary to express this kind of relating to the world, using terms like ‘Umsicht’ (circumspection) which suggest a connection with ‘Umwelt’ (environment).
Further reading:
Mortan, D. (2000). Introduction to phenomenology. London: Routledge
Macann, C. (1993). The four phenomenological philosophers: Husserl, Heidegger, Sartre, Merleau – Ponty. London: Routledge
M.Heidegger, “A Dialogue on Language”, trans. Peter D.Hertz, On the Way toLanguage (New York: Harper and Row, 1971), pp. 9–10.

Dermot Moran, “The Destruction of the Destruction: Heidegger’s Versions of the History of Philosophy”, in K.Harries and C.Jamme, eds, Martin Heidegger. Politics, Art and Technology, op. cit., pp. 175–196.

Phenomenology and Edmund Husserl

Phenomenology and Edmund Husserl


Introduction: 2
Brief views: 2
A simplified understanding of phenomenology: 2
Phenomenology of Edmund Husserl 4
Husserl’s central concern – consciousness. 4
Husserlian phenomenological method: 4
Presuppositionless starting point: 4
Getting towards Intuition – the pure form of knowledge. 5
The suspension of natural attitude: 5
Rethink the lifeworld: 6
Unearth the structure of intentionality: understanding the consciousness. 6
Principal concepts: 7
Life world: 7
Natural attitude: 7
Introduction:
Though there are a number of themes which characterise phenomenology, in general it never developed a set of dogmas or sedimented into a system. It claims, first and foremost, to be a radical way of doing philosophy, a practice rather than a system. Phenomenology is best understood as a radical, anti-traditional style of philosophising, which emphasises the attempt to get to the truth of matters, to describe phenomena, in the broadest sense as whatever appears in the manner, in which it appears, that is as it manifests itself to consciousness, to the experiencer. As such, phenomenology’s first step is to seek to avoid all misconstructions and impositions placed on experience in advance, whether these are drawn from religious or cultural traditions, from everyday common sense, or, indeed, from science itself. Explanations are not to be imposed before the phenomena have been understood from within.
Brief views:
Most of the founding figures of phenomenology emphasised the need for a renewal of philosophy as radical enquiry not bound to any historical tradition; and they advocated a rejection of all dogmatisms, a suspicion of a priori metaphysical premises and earlier accounts of the nature of knowledge, especially as found in Neo-Hegelianism and in positivism, and a steady directing of attention to the things themselves. Phenomenology was seen as reviving our living contact with reality, and as being remote from the arid and academic discussion of philosophical problems found in nineteenth-century philosophy, for example in the Neo-Kantian tradition.
Ø Husser’s Logical investigations – a fresh start of traditional logical problems
Ø Heidegger’s students of the 1920s claimed the experience of thinking came to life in their classes, as both Arendt and Gadamer have confirmed.
Ø This call to renew philosophy went hand in hand with an appeal to return to concrete, lived human experience in all its richness.
Ø In the 1930s, both Sartre and Merleau-Ponty saw phenomenology as a means of going beyond narrow empiricist, psychological assumptions about human existence, broadening the scope of philosophy to be about everything, to capture life as it is lived.
Ø Sartre sees phenomenology as allowing one to delineate carefully one’s own affective, emotional, and imaginative life, not in a set of static objective studies such as one finds in psychology, but understood in the manner in which it is meaningfully lived.
Ø Emmanuel Levinas’s phenomenology is closely attentive to the way in which other human beings inhabit the horizons of my experience and present themselves as a demand to me, a call on me to get outside the sphere of my own self-satisfaction, my own preoccupations.
A simplified understanding of phenomenology:
Husserl envisaged phenomenology as the descriptive, non-reductive science of whatever appears, in the manner of its appearing, in the subjective and intersubjective life of consciousness. He was fascinated by what he regarded as the 'mystery of mysteries': namely, the life of consciousness (Bewusstseinsleben), with its unique, inner temporal flow and its ability to gain objective knowledge of what transcends it. Phenomenology is therefore, the study of consciousness as experienced from the first-person point of view.
By etymology, phenomenology is the study of phenomena, in the root meaning of appearances; or, better, the ways things appear to us in our experience, the ways we experience things in the world around us. We practice phenomenology (with or without the name) whenever we pause in reflection and ask, “What do I see?,” “How do I feel?,” “What am I thinking?,” “What do I intend to do?,” answering in the first person, specifying the way I experience what I see, feel, think, and so on. We produce a phenomenological description of an experience as we declare, attending to our own experience, “I see that fishing boat in the fog,” “I feel angry about what was just said,” “I think that Husserl read Hume,” “I intend to sweep the patio tomorrow.” Phenomenology thus characterizes a given form of consciousness from the person’s own subjective, first-person perspective. By contrast, neuroscience studies how consciousness is produced in a person’s brain, characterizing his neural-mental state from an objective, third-person perspective. Thus, where a brain scan (an MRI image) shows which parts of the brain are most active (burning glucose), a phenomenological description characterizes what the person is experiencing (“I see a fishing boat” or “I feel a pain in my left foot”).
We practice phenomenology, most basically, when we give first-person descriptions of various types of conscious experience. Here are some elementary forms of such descriptions:
I see that fishing boat on the edge of the fog bank rolling in on the Pacific.
I hear that helicopter whirling overhead.
I think that the whales are migrating south along the coast.
I desire a warm cup of green tea.
I feel exhilarated at the sound of the aria I hear being sung in the opera.
I recall the look on her face – I can see it right now (in vivid memory).
I imagine driving into the traffic at the Etoile roundabout in Paris.
I intend to make that phone call in just a minute.
I am walking briskly up the stairs to get to the noon meeting.
I am hitting a spin serve to his backhand, springing upward with my legs.

Such characterizations of experiences we may call phenomenological descriptions. Each characterizes a particular act of consciousness from the subject’s point of view. If carefully crafted, as the subject attends to his or her own experience, the description captures the essence of that type of experience.
In practice, phenomenologists develop much more elaborate accounts of experience, analyzing complex structures of consciousness and interpreting their roles and significance in our experience. However, it is important to recognize the basic domain of study that is indicated by such simple descriptions of experience. Here our understanding of mind begins, and it is only by abstracting from such elementary phenomenological descriptions that we begin to develop the science of phenomenology as Husserl advocated it.
Phenomenology of Edmund Husserl
Husserl is considered by many as the founder of phenomenological movement. He was born is Prossnitz – then part of the Austro Hungarian Empire, now under Czech republic, on 8th April, 1859. His university education was done in Leipzig. His primary interest was is astronomy, mathematics, physics and philosophy.
Husserl’s central concern – consciousness
Consciousness is the basis of all experience and its mode of appearing seemed to be inextricably linked to the nature of time itself. Indeed, no experience would be possible without time consciousness; it enters into every experience. Somehow, out of this living flux of consciousness come the ‘achievements’ of ideal, timeless meanings, the graspings of transcendent objects and truths. For Husserl, objectivity was always a particular ‘achievement of consciousness’ and he was fascinated by the miracle of this process. Furthermore, consciousness was always particularised as someone’s consciousness and so the process of investigating this ‘originary sphere’ of meaning-origination must begin with oneself, with the rigorous self-examination which Husserl characterised as the standpoint of “transcendental solipsism” in the Cartesian Meditations.

Husserl’s central insight was that consciousness was the condition of all experience, indeed it constituted the world, but in such a way that the role of consciousness itself is obscured and not easy to isolate and describe. Husserl therefore constantly sought to explain how to overcome prejudices which stood in the way of the recognition of the domain of pure consciousness, leading to a new beginning in philosophy.
Husserlian phenomenological method:
in his mature years, Husserl thought phenomenological practice required a radical shift in viewpoint, a suspension or bracketing of the everyday natural attitude and all ‘world positing’ intentional acts which assumed the existence of the world, until the practitioner is led back into the domain of pure transcendental subjectivity. Without this leading back, this reduction, genuine phenomenological insight would be impossible in Husserl’s eyes; at best it would be no more than a naturalistic psychology of consciousness, which treated consciousness as just “a little tag-end of the world”.
Presuppositionless starting point:
Right from the outset, Husserl laid great stress on phenomenology’s principle of presuppositionlessness (Husserl, 1975). That is, the claim to have discarded philosophical
theorising in favour of careful description of phenomena themselves, to be attentive only to what is given in intuition. Phenomenology, at this stage, is a kind of conceptual clarification which is to form part of a wider ‘critique of reason’. But the key feature of this conceptual analysis was not that it engaged in an examination of the role of concepts in a language, but rather that it relied on the self-evident givenness of insights in intuition. The clarion cry of phenomenology, “back to the things themselves” (Husserl, 1975: 252) first announced in Husserl’s Logical Investigations, summed up this dependence on intuition. Indeed, this emphasis on the importance of ‘intuition’[1] in philosophy was, of course, in line with the mood of the times.
Getting towards Intuition – the pure form of knowledge
Husserl’s understanding of phenomenology grew out of his attempt to understand the nature of mathematical and logical truths, and from his more general concern with a critique of reason whereby all the key concepts required for knowledge would be rigorously scrutinised as to their essential meanings, their validity, and justification. Intuitions are the highest stage of knowledge and as such are hardwon insights, akin to mathematical discoveries. When I see that ‘2+2=4’, I have as clear an intuition as I can have. Husserl thought, however, that similar intuitive fulfilments occurred in many types of experience, and were not just restricted to the truths of mathematics. When I see a blackbird in the tree outside my window under normal conditions, I also have an intuition which is fulfilled by the certainty of the bodily presence of the blackbird presenting itself to me. There are a wide variety of different kinds of intuitive experience. Husserl was led by reflection on these kinds of experience to attempt to develop a classification of all conscious experiences, with an eye to considering their essential natures and the kinds of intuitive fulfilment which were proper to them.
In his mature works, Husserl called these intuitions ‘originary giving’ or ‘presentive’ intuitions. Thus, even after his transcendental turn, first publicly announced in Ideas I (1913), Husserl retained the primacy of intuition. In Ideas I, he announces his principle of all principles:
…that every originary presentive intuition is a legitimizing sourceof cognition, that everything originarily (so to speak in its “personal” actuality) offered to us in “intuition” is to be accepted simply as what it is presented as being, but also only within the limits in which it is presented there.
The suspension of natural attitude:
In works written subsequent to the Logical Investigations, Husserl came to believe that the scrutiny of the structure and contents of our conscious experiences was inhibited and deeply distorted by the manner of our engagement with experience in ordinary life, where our practical concerns, folk assumptions, and smattering of scientific knowledge all got in the way of a pure consideration of experience as it is given to us. In order to ensure against theoretical stances creeping back in to the phenomenological viewing of the phenomena, Husserl proposed a number of steps, most notably the phenomenological epoché, or suspension of the natural attitude, as well as a number of methodological reductions and alterations of viewpoint (including the so-called ‘eidetic’ and ‘transcendental reductions’), in order to isolate the central essential features of the phenomena under investigation. This bracketing meant that all scientific, philosophical, cultural, and everyday assumptions had to be put aside—not so much to be negated as to be put out of court (in a manner not dissimilar to that of a member of the jury who is asked to suspend judgements and the normal kinds of association and drawing of inferences in order to focus exclusively on the evidence that has been presented to the court). Thus, in considering the nature of our conscious acts, we should not simply assume that the mind is some kind of a container that memories are like picture images, and so on. Nor should we assume any scientific or philosophical hypothesis, for example that conscious events are just brain events. Indeed, in genuine phenomenological viewing, we are not permitted any scientific or philosophical hypotheses. We should attend only to the phenomena in the manner of their being given to us, in their modes of givenness.
Rethink the lifeworld:
Focusing on what is given intuitively in experience led Husserl, in his late writings such as Experience and Judgment (1938),20 to focus on what he termed “prepredicative experience” (die vorprädikative Erfahrung), experience before it has been formulated in judgements and expressed in outward linguistic form, before it becomes packaged for explicit consciousness. As Husserl put it, all cognitive activity presupposes a domain that is passively pregiven, the existent world as I find it. Returning to examine this pregiven world is a return to the life-world (Lebenswelt), “the world in which we are always already living and which furnishes the ground for all cognitive performance and all scientific determination” (Husserl 1938: 38). Husserl claims that the world of our ordinary experience is a world of formed objects obeying universal laws as discovered by science, but the foundational experiences which give us such a world is rather different: “This experience in its immediacy knows neither exact space nor objective time and causality” (Husserl, 1938 p. 41). Returning to the life-world is to return to experience before such objectifications and idealisations (Husserl, 1938, p. 44).
In attempting to rethink the life-world, one has to understand the impact of the scientific world-view on our consciousness. Phenomenology has to interrogate the supposedly objective view of the sciences, what has been termed the ‘God’s eye’ perspective, or the ‘view from nowhere’. Husserlian phenomenology did not dispute the possibility of our gaining a ‘view from nowhere’, understood as the aperspectival, theoretical, ‘objective’ understanding of things.
Unearth the structure of intentionality: understanding the consciousness
The basic insight which allowed Husserl to explicate this conception of objectivity-for-subjectivity was his radical understanding of the intentional structure of consciousness. sserl took this basic structure of intentionality and, having stripped it of its metaphysical baggage, presented it as the basic thesis that all conscious experiences (Erlebnisse) are characterised by ‘aboutness’. Every act of loving is a loving of something, every act of seeing is a seeing of something. The point, for Husserl, is that, disregarding whether or not the object of the act exists, it has meaning and a mode of being for consciousness, it is a meaningful correlate of the conscious act. This allowed Husserl to explore a whole new domain—the domain of the meaning-correlates of conscious acts and their interconnections and binding laws—before one had to face ontological questions concerning actual existence, and so on. Phenomenology was to be true first philosophy. While it is true, then, that phenomenology turns to consciousness, it is proposing above all to be a science of consciousness based on elucidating the intentional structures of acts and their correlative objects, what Husserl called the noetic-noematic structure of consciousness.
Principal concepts:
Life world:
Of all the basic ideas that phenomenology developed, perhaps none is better known or widely appropriated across a number of disciplines than the concept of lifeworld. Most general sense of the word, lifeworld is itself derived from the problamitcs of a prior notion, that of the world. In fact Husserl had developed the notion of world in a transcendental register before he enriched it with his notion of the lifeworld. The life-world is a world as phenomenon, as correlative of our intentional experiences. Especially in his researches around Ideas II, Husserl gradually began to see the life-world as a layer to be inserted between the world of nature and the world of culture (or spirit). The life-world is the world of pre-theoretical experience which is also that which allows us to interact with nature and to develop our own cultural forms. Though, in the Phenomenology of Perception, Merleau-Ponty presented the life-world as a turning in Husserl’s thought away from transcendental idealism, it is more accurate to view the layer of life-world as one more constituted layer of meaning uncovered by Husserlian reduction and itself constituted by the anonymous transcendental ego.
Natural attitude:
In his mature work, from 1905 onwards, Husserl distinguished between the 'philosophical' or 'transcendental' attitude and the 'natural attitude' (Husserl 1983: 17), according to which we accept the world and its forms of givenness as simply there, 'on hand' for us. The philosophical attitude arises when we recognize the natural attitude as one of naive. Borrowing from the Greek sceptics, Husserl terms this disruption or break with the natural attitude, epoche (literally 'check' or 'suspension', but used by ancient Greek philosophers to mean 'suspension of judgement'). He characterizes it as a 'certain refraining from judgement',12 an 'abstention' (Enthaltung), 'bracketing' (Einklammerung) or 'putting out of play7 (ausser Spiel zu setzen). According to this epoche, the objects and contents of our experience are now treated simply as phenomena: 'Thus to every psychological experience there corresponds, by way of the phenomenological reduction, a pure phenomenon that exhibits its immanent essence (taken individually) as an absolute givenness' (Husserl, 1983: 45).
[1] Bergson defines intuition in his Introduction to Metaphysics (1913) as “By intuition is meant the kind of intellectual sympathy by which one places oneself within the object in order to coincide with that which is unique in it and consequently inexpressible.”