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Phenomenology and Existentialism
Course Schedule
Lecture
One: The Horizon[s]
of Phenomenology
Edmund Husserl: the father of modern
phenomenology. The meaning of phenomenology (phenomenon and logos).
Consciousness freed from its box. The concept of intentionality and the
emphasis on the outside-itself nature of consciousness. Resolution of the quasi-problem
of dualism.
Photocopy of Jean Paul Sartre’s essay on
intentionality (from J.B.S.P.).
Lecture
Two: The Method of
Phenomenology
Phenomenology as a methodological conception.
The meaning of the epoché and the different forms of phenomenological
reduction. What is at stake in a methodological form of critique that seeks to
avoid taking up any presuppositions? Unlike the Cartesian procedure of
systematic doubt, which takes up an antithetical position, the phenomenological
reduction is inaugurated in order to avoid taking up any positions at all. The
themes of cutting, suspension, and transvaluative return.
Lecture
Three: Husserl and
Sartre (Part One)
The concept of intentionality and its
appropriation within existentialist discourse. Sartre’s discourse on
consciousness as Being-for-itself (Être pour soi) in Being and Nothingness.
Phenomenological ontology and the question of the Ego. The Transcendence of
the Ego: Sartre’s polemic against Husserl’s phenomenological egology.
Lecture
Four: Husserl and
Sartre (Part Two)
The futural orientation of Sartre’s
existentialism and its negative grasp of the role of the past. The concept of
Bad Faith is the lens piece through which Sartre views the past. Husserl’s
concept of sedimentation and the discourse on the multifaceted dimensions of
ego-functioning give the authentic and affective nature of the past its due.
The ego as substrate of habitualities: a nexus of negotiation between past and
future, which gives an abiding style. The ego as Monad and destiny.
Lecture
Five: Sartre’s Nausea
Being and Nothingness is a kind of elaborate footnote to
Sartre’s novel, Nausea (1939).
1. The nauseous response to the in-itself
as a primordial disclosure of primary ontological phenomena.
2. The question of biography and
autobiography: the meaning of the past.
These themes unearth the contrast between
living and reflecting. For Sartre, it is only upon reflection that a sequence
of events can assume the aspect of an adventure. Adventures only come into
existence through storytelling. Death is an essential component of the
constitution of adventures. They must have an end. Events and circumstances
that can take on the appearance of an adventure, in the telling, are often
simply unpleasant experiences at the time. Adventures are narrative forms that
are comfortably situated after the events that they report. To be presently
experiencing what one may later call an adventure (prior to its end or
resolution) is to be in a state of anxiety or to be in the state of benumbment
that accompanies living-in one’s situation without distance. Pre-reflexive life
just is. Reflection is recuperation of the significance of what has become dead
time. Through reflection, life becomes ideal – and safe. The in-itself
impresses itself upon us in our pre-reflexive mode of being. It is earthy and
base. It simply is. At the level of reflection, the in-itself becomes clothed
in significance and generality, where what is seen is a mere product of
storytelling. The story is a kind of lie, but it is also the midwife of
meaning. The in-itself knows nothing of meaning. The dead subject of biography
also knows nothing of meaning because it cannot be in-itself-for-itself. It is
now merely an objectified in-itself-for Others. However, this is also to say
that the deceased for-itself remains in excess of the history that is written
about it.
The recognition of the malleability of the
significance of the past, since one can always relate to it in another
narrative form (to deconstruct it), is that which restores hope. Recognition of
freedom is equiprimordially the recognition of responsibility. To embrace
contingency is to accept one’s role as author in the writing out of one’s life.
Lecture
Six: Existential Psychoanalysis
and Freudian Psychoanalysis
“Some Elementary Lessons in Psychoanalysis,”
Sigmund Freud; Being and Nothingness, Sartre; The Divided Self,
R.D Laing. Psychoanalysis as deconstruction. What is at stake in the attempt to
establish a dialogue between Freudian psychoanalysis – which manifests certain
essentialist orientations – and that of an existentialist order?
The theoretical incompatibility between
Husserlian phenomenology and Freudian metapsychology. If consciousness is
always consciousness of something, then how can the concept of an
unconscious be accommodated in phenomenological thought? The deconstruction of
psychoanalytic metapsychology.
Lecture
Seven: Husserl on
Temporality
On The Phenomenology of the Consciousness of
Internal Time.
Edmund Husserl. The lectures that constitute this text explore the deepest
levels of intentional phenomenology. Husserl asks how the living-through
of ‘succession’ is possible. By means of a discourse on the intentional
structures of the temporal intertwining that constitutes the living-present (lebendige
Gegenwart) as a tri-horizonal nexus of retentions, protentions and primary
impressions, Husserl demonstrates that even the linearity of time has to be
constituted. The name of the horizon that constitutes it is Primordial Flux.
For Husserl, the name actually refers to a region for which names are lacking.
The temporal inquiries resolve Hume’s problem concerning the continuity of
experience and provide a rich resource for a phenomenological account of some
of the more exotic phenomena implicated in Einsteins’s theory of relativity.
The use of the expression ‘internal time’ is not to invoke the temporality of a
kind of Cartesian form of solipsism by separating it from an external form of
time. It refers to the subjective counterpart to objective time: the inside
of the outside. Husserl’s text is a phenomenologically descriptive account
of the experiential / temporal phenomena in their intentional interplay
that cosmology seeks to explain in causal terms.
Photocopy of Book 11 of St. Augustine’s Confessions
and a photocopy of John Brough's selected edition of Husserl’s discourse on
time consciousness (Husserl: Shorter Works).
Lecture
Eight: Heidegger
and the Concept of Time
Being and Time, The Concept of Time, and the essay
“Time and Being” (from On Time and Being) Martin Heidegger. Dasein
(Being-there) and temporality. The finitude of Dasein – death as comportment
towards one’s ownmost possibilities. The fundamental structure of Dasein is
Temporality (Zeitlichkeit) as care (Sorge). The shift from the question of
Being to that of time and the shift from time (Zeit) to temporality
(Zeitlichkeit) according to the transcendental orientation of Temporalität.
Time-space and the fourth dimension of absolute time. The disappearance of time
as we usually know it. The problem of transcending the conceptual frames that
organize our discourse about time.
Lecture
Nine: From Space
and Time to the Spacing of Temporal Articulation (Part One)
The first part of this theme examines the
historical background to contemporary phenomenological-existential analyses of
lived temporality. It is a deconstructive exercise in establishing how a more
phenomenological mode of orientation resolves some of the paradoxes that infect
discourse on time. Zeno’s paradox of Achilles and the Tortoise provides the
starting point for a discussion on the ways in which Heidegger, Sartre,
Merleau-Ponty, and Derrida have extended Husserl’s phenomenological studies on
temporality. Their forms of discourse undermine the conception of time in which
it is thought to be constituted from discrete moments and point the way to a
transmutation of the bi-polarity of space and time into the more
chiasmic intertwining of time-space or temporal-spacing. This is the
phenomenological correlate to Einstein’s discourse on spacetime.
LectureTen: From Space and Time to the Spacing
of Temporal Articulation (Part Two)
Being and Time, Heidegger; Being and Nothingness,
Sartre.
The phenomenological analysis of Zeno’s paradox
of Achilles and the tortoise performed the role of providing a strategic means
of entry to the history of Western discourse on temporality and the
structurality of the present. What follows is an examination of the central
core of phenomenological and existential analyses of time. Husserl, Heidegger,
and Sartre share a fundamental perspective on the structure of temporality,
which is rooted in the theory of intentionality. The Living Present overflows
itself. It is the stage of the ekstatic horizon of Being in which beings play
out their life performance[s].
Their respective forms of discourse all
demonstrate the untenability of objective conceptions of time, which define
(and thus reduce) it to a matter of linear successivity – as constituted by a
continuum of discrete moments. The Living Present is not an extensionless
boundary (point) between being and non-being, existence and non-existence, or
time and the non-temporal. It is the theatre of the interplay between that which
is, that which was, and that which is not yet – the horizon in which the
ecstatic dance and the mournful song of Being and non-Being come into play.
Lecture
Eleven:
Merleau-Ponty and Chiasm
The Introduction to Phenomenology of
Perception, “The Primacy of Perception” and The Visible and the
Invisible. The intertwining of immanence and transcendence. The essential
transcendence of signification and the lived immanence of that which is given.
The concept of chiasm as Ineinander, the flesh. Chiasmic time. Intentionality
and the lived-body – motility.
Photocopies of selected working notes from
Merleau-Ponty’s last, unfinished text, TheVisible and the Invisible.
Lecture
Twelve:
Phenomenology and Deconstruction
Jacques Derrida’s Introduction to Husserl’s
“Origin of Geometry” and its flip-side, Speech and Phenomena.
Deconstruction as a critique of the metaphysics of presence. Derrida’s dialogue
with Husserl and Heidegger. The deconstruction of phenomenology and the
phenomenology of deconstruction. The substitution of the expressions time and
spatiality by, spacing, temporizing, tracing, arche-writing. Différance, as a
quasi-concept and strategy, marks the erasure of the difference between
temporality and spatiality through a discourse on the play of deferral and
difference. The stratagem of différance and the erasure of the origin.
Photocopy of Derrida’s essay, “Différance” (Margins
of Philosophy).
Seminar: The Myth of Sisyphus (The
Human Condition)
What happens in that moment of resolve in the
face of the futility of existence that makes Sisyphus actually return to his
pointless task again and again? What does this say about the human condition at
the beginning of the new millennium? Are we left with nihilism or something
else?
Is the theme of the contingency of meaning and
the consequent recognition of unbounded pluralism the signature of the death of
truth?
What of hope?
Postmodernism: as endless reiteration or
transformation? How can this be related to Husserl’s call for an eternal return
to beginnings? What kind of epoché could inaugurate the evolution of a
more meaningful and compassionate epoch?
Photocopy of The Myth of Sisyphus.
Albert Camus.
Note:
The texts that are given in the General
Bibliography below are key works for the themes that are adumbrated in this
series of lectures. Take a look at some of them and see if you get some kind of
feedback. The important thing is to gain some familiarity with the basic themes
that are discussed here. To this end, any secondary text on phenomenology will
be useful. Phenomenology is a notoriously difficult field when it comes to the
availability of good introductions. Try to find some kind of introductory text
to this field with which you feel comfortable. The situation improves when it
comes to secondaries on the more popular field of existentialism. For the first
few weeks of this course, the point is to develop a basic awareness of the
principal themes in phenomenology that extend into existentialist writing. The
book list will become more specific as we move into the latter sphere.
General Bibliography
Confessions. Trans. R.S. Pine-Coffin. Penguin.
Guide for Translating Husserl.
The Fall. (1957). Translated from the French (La Chute) by Justin O’Brien. Published by Alfred A. Knopf.
The Myth of Sisyphus. Penguin.
Derrida, Jacques
Edmund Husserl's
"Origin of Geometry": An Introduction by Jacques Derrida. Translated with a preface
and afterword by John Leavey, Jr. University of
Margins of Philosophy. Trans. Alan Bass. The Harvester
Press. 1982. Marges de la Philosophie.
Speech and Phenomena. Trans. David B. Allison. [Preface
by
Descartes, Rene
Discourse on Method and The Meditations. Translated with an introduction by F. E. Sutcliffe. Penguin.
Article: "Phenomenological Deconstruction: Husserl's Method of Abbau." The British Society For Phenomenology. Vol.21. No.1. January. 1990.
Heidegger, Martin
The Basic Problems of
Phenomenology.
Trans. Albert Hofstadter.
Being and Time. Trans. J. Macquarrie and E. Robinson (7th edition). Blackwell. 1962. Sein und Zeit Tubingen: Max Niemeyer. 1927.
Poetry, Language, Thought. Trans. Albert Hofstadter. (Copyright 1971 – Heidegger).
Hume, David
A Treatise of Human
Nature. Analytical
index by L.A. Selby-Bigge. Second Edition with text revised and notes by P.H.
Nidditch.
Husserl, Edmund
Cartesian Meditations. Trans. Dorion
The Crisis of European
Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology. Trans. David Carr. Northwestern University
Press. Hua VI: Die Krisis der
Europäischen Wissenschaften und die Transzendentale Phänomenologie.
Experience and
Judgement: Investigations in a Genealogical Logic. Revised and edited by Ludwig Landgrebe.
Trans. James S. Churchill and Karl Ameriks. Introduced by J. S. Churchill and
Lothar Eley. Northwestern University Press. 1973. – Erfahrung und Urteil. Edited by Ludwig Landgrebe.
Husserl: Shorter Works. Edited by Peter McCormick and
Frederick Elliston. Foreword by Walter Biemel. Copublished by
The Idea of
Phenomenology.
Trans. W.P. Alston and G. Nakhnikian. Martinus Nijhoff. 1950. [lectures of
1907]. Hua II: Die Idee der Phänomenologie.
Edited by Walter Biemel.
Ideas: General
Introduction to Pure Phenomenology. Trans. W.R. Boyce Gibson. Collier/Macmillan. [first translation 1931]
Original German text – 1913. Hua III.1:
Ideen zu einer reinen Phänomenologie und phänomenologischen Philosophie: Erstes
Buch. Edited by Karl Schuhmann.
The Phenomenology of Internal Time Consciousness. Edited by Martin Heidegger. Trans. J.S. Churchill. Indiana University Press. 1964. [Lectures of 1905-1910]. See also: On the Phenomenology of the Consciousness of Internal Time. Translated by John Barnett Brough. Kluwer Academic Publishers. 1991. Hua X: Zur Phänomenologie des inneren Zeitbewusstseins (1893-1917). Edited by Rudolph Boehm. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1966.
Kant, Immanuel
Critique of Pure Reason. Trans. Norman Kemp Smith. 1929 Macmillan. [Original German text – 1787].
Kockelmans, Joseph [editor]
Phenomenology: The Philosophy of Husserl and its Interpretation. Doubleday & Co. Inc. [Anchor Books]. 1967.
Landgrebe, Ludwig
The Phenomenology of Edmund Husserl. Edited by Donn Welton [various translators] Cornell University Press. 1981.
Levinas, Emmanuel
The Theory of Intuition in Husserl's Phenomenology. Trans. Andre Orianne. Northwestern University Press. 1973. [First published in France – 1963].
Merleau-Ponty, Maurice
Phenomenology of Perception. Trans. Colin Smith. R.K.P. 1962.
The Primacy of Perception. Edited, with an Introduction by James M. Edie. Northwestern University Press. 1964.
Mohanty, J.N.
Edmund Husserl's Theory of Meaning. Martinus Nijhoff. 1969.
Murphy, Richard T.
Hume and Husserl: Towards a Radical Subjectivism. Martinus/Nijhoff. 1980.
Ricoeur, Paul
Husserl: An Analysis of his Phenomenology. Trans. E.G. Ballard and L.E. Embree. Northwestern University Press. 1967.
Sartre, Jean-Paul
Being and Nothingness. Trans. Hazel E. Barnes. Methuen. 1958. [Original French text 1943].
Existentialism and
Humanism. London: Methuen, [1965].
Nausea. Trans. Robert Baldick. Penguin. [Originally published in 1938].
Sketch for a Theory of the Emotions. Trans. by Philip Mairet. Preface by Mary Warnock. Methuen. 1962.
The Transcendence of the Ego. Trans. Forrest Williams and Robert Kirkpatrick. Octagon. 1972. [Original French text, 1936-7].
Sokolowski, Robert
Husserlian Meditations. Northwestern University Press. 1974.
Wood, David
The Deconstruction of Time. Humanities Press. 1989.
Derrida: A Critical Reader. Edited by David Wood. Blackwell. 1992.
"Différance and the Problem of Strategy." [from Derrida and Différance.] Parousia Press. Edited by David Wood and Robert Bernasconi.1985.
Philosophy at the Limit. Unwin/Hyman.1990.