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    • Explanation of Husserl’s Phenomenology

      Posted at 12:00 pm by Michelle Joelle, on December 5, 2014

      As the fall semester comes to an end, I’ve once again been a bit too busy to write about philosophy here on this blog. I’ll pick up next week with the fourth installment of my Philosopher Fridays sub-series “Expecting Ambiguity“: Anselm’s Ontological Argument.

      Until then, I invite you to check out Philosophy and Fiction’s treatment on Husserl’s Phenomenology. Writing about Husserl in a blog-friendly way is no easy feat (I – have – tried), and the author’s handling of the Eidos is particularly impressive. Husserl is tricky, but the post worth taking the time to read all the way through to the author’s final explanation:

      “So what we have here is actually a purer kind of empiricism, a Trans-empiricism which does away with philosophical preconceptions, including the traditional rationalist/empiricist divide. Since experience is now cleared of natural biases, philosophical biases, theorizing and abstractions, we can engage in a different sort of enquiry—seeing and describing.”

      If I may rephrase, Husserl is attempting to look objectively at the subjective without reducing its narrative quality to mere rationalism while simultaneously looking subjectively at the objective without reducing its universality to our own limited narrative.

      Diotima's Ladder

      Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy (I)

      Try saying that five times rapidly.

      Reducing such a complex work to a simple blog post is likely to prove a disaster, but I’m gonna try it anyway, keeping the jargon to a minimum. Well, at least explaining the jargon.

      Edmund Husserl’s goal was to do away with the problem of dualism and secure a rigorous foundation for philosophy. In order to see Husserl clearly, it’s important to go back to Descartes, with whom many of you are familiar. He’s the philosopher who brought the problem of dualism into sharp focus.

      Cogito ergo sum—I think; therefore, I am. This grain of truth has great force, but isn’t sufficient to get Descartes “out of his head” to establish the existence of external things, a condition or philosophical position known as solipsism. How do I know this computer in front…

      View original post 1,109 more words

      Posted in The Waste Book | 2 Comments | Tagged husserl, philosophy, reblog
    • Frankz Kafka and Literary Temporality

      Posted at 11:45 am by Michelle Joelle, on July 9, 2014

      Welcome back to my current thematic mini-series on Literary Time Consciousness. In this post, I’m picking up on questions (and a good deal of vocabulary) I raised at the end of last two friday’s posts on Husserl’s Phenomenology of Internal Time Consciousness (here and here). For this post I have drawn heavily from my undergraduate thesis on time, and as such I owe the inspiration to work with Kafka in this way to my excellent advisor.

      When we write and tell stories, we take something internal and subjective, and make it objectively perceivable. When we read, we take someone else’s act of consciousness and internalize it as our own. Literature, in its manipulation of immanent content, can shape our experience of phenomena and undermine the structure in which intention functions. Its ability to reenact perception allows it to add an extra layer of intention removing us even further from our perception of the “real”, thus rendering our intentional experience changeable, rather than static or stable. As our meaning-laden subjective experience obfuscates the “pure truth” or “ideal” of objective reality, a story can override our own personal subjective experience. In a story, the immanent act of consciousness is not just represented – its made manifest.

      If all perceptions are intentional and revisable, then literature is a product of those revisions, and in turn produces new intentions (and revisions), which are then revised as they are perceived by the reader. Reading effectively shows us the shifting nature of what we think is reality, and in this way can suggest what is real – what might be thought of as the “essence” of time, the temporal, meaning experience of sequence as retention and protention, without any fixed intentionality, reflection, or expectation.

      Kafka’s literature is particularly exemplative of the kind of writing that can change perceptions and undermine the perception of time as a seemingly inexorable force, and so I will look at his short stories, “The Great Wall of China“.

      http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Wall_of_China

      I’ll start with a famous excerpt from this story known as the “Imperial Message.” Even on a literal level, we can see how Kafka challenges teleological authority by negation. Logic tells us that the messenger must necessarily get through the crowded palace, but in the end, the dreamer by the window is left waiting. On a more structural level, Kafka guides the reader through a process of struggle and contradiction. In one sentence, he the messenger pushes his way through the crowd, and then in the next, he has accomplished nothing. At first, the messenger:

      …moves forwards easily, unlike anyone else.

      Yet merely two sentences later:

      Never will he win his way through.

      Readers find themselves in much the same position; oat times you feel like you’re moving through the story, and at others as if you have accomplished nothing, and are, like the messenger, still stuck in the crowd, struggling to make headway. In the end, the reader is put in the position of the dreamer, as the excerpt finishes with a hopeless lament:

      But you sit at your window and dream of that message when evening comes.

      Without the telos, the delivery of the message, the reader is left simply waiting.

      Structurally, the text performs its own message, namely, that there is no message. What the reader makes of it is up to his/her own intention, but the primal impressions of the moment are gone with no illumination of purpose. The whole time, the narrative voice speaks to “you,” the reader, placing “you” figuratively into the story to experience its message. What this does is actively engage the reader into a conscious process while they are reading. It is not simply a passive story, but one of streaming primal impressions that are challenging perception while they are being perceived.

      In the longer work from which this passage arises, the “Great Wall of China,” the validity of teleological temporality is further called into question. In this story, the narrator speaks at length about perceived purpose. When the authorities, who are to the narrator some practically mystical unknown force, decide that they will build a wall around China, they change life for generations of people. For all of the narrator’s life, building the wall has been the higher good. The story begins:

      Fifty years before the start of construction it was announced throughout the whole region of China which was to be enclosed eithin the wall that architecture and especially masonry were the most important areas of knowledge, and everything else was recognized only to the extent that it had some relationship to those.

      The narrator speaks of what he knows, and how memory and time do not matter in the face that which is perceived to be true. Looking simply at the content alone, it is easy to make an analogy to the flexibility of teleology and temporality. I’m put in mind once again of a string of twinkle lights, where one light may, when lit, cast light onto the bulbs to which it is adjacent, suggesting that another bulb has come before it and another will follow but in no way implying which, just as any given moment will be inexorably linked to a previous moment (retention) and then next (protention) without any coherent meaning. It is only through the process of making these moments revisable that we are able to reflect upon a preceding pattern and look forward with expectation – just as it is only after we have watched the twinkling lights that we might be able to construct a meaningful pattern. Says Husserl:

      In any moment no matter what, a greater or lesser fluctuation will always take place, and this the continuous unity with respect to a given moment will be linked to a difference of another moment which provides an indirect separation from the first.[1]

      In this case, there are gaps between the walls as the laborers build them in a segmented fashion. There are many reasons given for this within the narrative, but the undercurrent is that the gaps in the wall are what keep the system in place. If the wall were completed in a linear fashion, then all of the workers would know exactly what was going on, and how they fit together with the final goal of finishing the wall. In this way, Kafka cuts his characters off from any sense of linear teleology, and demonstrates the perspective of those who are not working with the larger goal in mind.

      Instead, the focus of the workers is on their own small piece of the wall; that is their world, focused on a segment rather than the completed line. In a way, this too is a contradiction; it segmenting the wall construction, the authorities are removing the linear functionality of the end goal (which is building the wall) and substituting another, small goal (build this piece of the wall). At the same time, the supposed goal of the wall – protection against aggression – is lost in the shuffle. The gaps in the wall are weak points and yet they are a fact of life for those building the wall. It is as if the telos, and the purpose is lost in the practicality of building the wall. The narrator questions this process early on in the piece:

      But how can protection be provided by a wall which is not built continuously?

      This begs the analogous question, but how can a life be ordered, meaningful, and sensical which is not fulfilled continuously? Looking at Kafka’s writing, we have the answer in more ways than one; the immediate reaction, “In fact no only can such a wall not protect, but the structure itself is in constant danger.”

      Under the previously stated analogy, this would at first suggest that a life without continuous order and a goal in mind would be chaos. However, it can be interpreted in the inverse position. We live our lives, focusing on finishing little tasks with the overall goal in mind – that of attaining some sort of teleological meaning – and in the end we end up shorting ourselves of the meaning that can be attained in the present. In attempting to better accomplish the overall goal of making the wall, life for the workers became segmented into steps that related to the end goal. Broken down into small tasks, life becomes made up of simply finishing the day and the work by the deadline. The narrator states:

      Such masons, of course, were driven not only by the desire to carry out the work as thoroughly as possible but also by impatience to see the structure standing there in its complete final perfection.

      But in the very first paragraph, he says:

      In fact, there are said to be gaps which have never been built in at all, although that merely an assertion which probably belongs among the many legends which have arisen about the structure and which, for individual people at least, are impossible to prove with their own eyes and according to their own standards, because the structure is so immense.

      In the story, the emphasis is not on living, and in so creating this false structure of goals that lead to the telos, life in the present loses its entire function.

      What can be gained from debunking the myth that time order is a path long which we work in order to reach an endpoint? Because, I think, in some twist of irony, in giving meaning to the causal order of things in relation to a temporally viewed goal, we lose the meaning that can be gleaned in the present. If each moment is just a step on a long stair towards a metaphorical platform, then it is as insignificant as the next. What literature can do is open this up. In his critical commentary on Husserl, James M. Edie argues:

      Experience precedes any thought about experience. When we being to reflect on experience and ‘attend to’ it, we discover that consciousness has already been at work ahead of us. We discover an intersubjectively constituted world of meaning and value to whose constitution we have already contributed without knowing it. We discover ourselves as fatally immersed in a world which is already ours.[2]

      Viewing this world differently and discovering ways to understand time differently can open up each moment to new levels of meaning that would otherwise be lost if only viewed in relation to an origin and telos. It is important to know that there can be as much life and meaning in ten minutes as there can be in ten years if we are to appreciate life in a way that makes it worthwhile. We force ourselves to stick to strict timelines and clocks, and we waste time in small increments, because we view such small increments as worthless. As Edie says:

      The irreversibility of time is experienced only in the primary world of everyday life, and not in the worlds of imagination, dreaming, or categorical thought.[3]

      In recognizing this, we have the opportunity to free ourselves of the structure in which we have been so indoctrinated. In literature, we have the opportunity to not only make that recognition known, but to actively subvert that indoctrination.

      —

      [1] Husserl, Edmund.  The Phenomenology of Internal Time-Consciousness. Ed. Martin Heidegger.  Trans. By James. S. Churchill.  Intro. By Calvin O. Schrag.  Bloomington, Indiana University Press, 1964. 113

      [2] Edie, James M.. Edmund Husserl’s Phenomenology: A Critical Commentary.  Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987.  87

      [3] Edie 98

      Posted in Essays, Series | 13 Comments | Tagged husserl, kafka, literary time consciousness, literature, phenomenology, stories
    • Philosopher Fridays: Husserl On Time Consciousness, Part Two

      Posted at 12:00 pm by Michelle Joelle, on July 4, 2014

      Welcome back to Philosopher Fridays. This week, I’ll be continuing to explore Husserl’s Phenomenology of Internal Time Consciousness as a part of my thematic mini-series on Literary Time Consciousness. Last time, I set up some vocabulary terms – specifically “protention” and “retention”, and this time, I’ll be looking at what this means for Husserl in greater depth. Additonally, for this post, I draw heavily from my undergraduate philosophy thesis on time, and as such I owe much of my understanding to the professors who guided me.

      For Husserl, the act of knowing is dependent on a temporal construction of consciousness, since meaning is derived only in reflection and expectation and cannot be ascribed to an isolated moment, which in itself has no “real” existence as anything other than a conscious reconstruction of the streaming present. We perceive “real” objects in a stream of primal impressions that exist in a fleeting way, their coherence half dependent on the fact that something came before, and half dependent on the fact that something will come after. It’s like a string of twinkling lights; when one is lit, it casts a dim light on those to which it is immediately adjacent. There is nothing fundamental in this casting that indicates which light will light up next and for how long, nor does it tell you which light came before. It’s not random, but is also is not (while we’re perceiving it) bound by any teleological causal order.

      IMG_5057

      Recalling a past event (or remembering which light came on before), and looking forward to what you expect to happen in the future requires an act of intention. Knowledge only makes sense for Husserl in terms of teleological intentionality, which is the meaningful stringing together of otherwise meaningless moments. What time objectively is and how we intentionally perceive it are two different things, laden with hidden assumptions and assertions, under which we operate every day, and it’s not entirely clear for Husserl whether or not we can read an “essence” of time outside of our own subjective, temporal perception.

      The question, simply stated: Is temporality a mere trapping of the act of consciousness, or does it have objective existence outside of the act of perceiving?   

      In other words, which is more real – some notion of “pure truth” which exists outside of the perceptive quality of duration (i.e.: “the essence of time itself”), or the intention of the act, which is defined by that streaming quality?  When examining the nature of a teleologically structured temporality, under which we all generally operate on a day to day (if we’re to be productive at all) basis, what exactly are we looking at, for Husserl? Are we examining a pure truth?  And further, can such a pure truth exist without the act of consciousness that intends it? When Husserl works to make the “distinction between the temporal act of knowing and the atemporal nature of ideality,”[1] under which category does he place that very temporality?

      The teleological purpose that we give to perceived time is as an “object” of our knowledge, broken free from its streaming perception and held apart from time so that we might examine it, as we examine any object we seek to know. An object of knowledge is in this way atemporal, its durative qualities frozen in favor of some evaluation.

      However, the act of knowing cannot be anything but durative, since it is an act that requires intentionality (reflection and expectation). But this doesn’t mean, for Husserl, that there is no reality outside of our psyches; in fact, he soundly rejects psychologism, which is a method of epistemology that says that all that we know is rooted in the psyche, including those things that are considered to be purely theoretical in nature – math, logic, and ontology.  Husserl says instead that there is a difference between the empirical and what he calls the “ideal,” (the “pure truth”) but he draws the line between empirical phenomena and the objective real in a fairly unique way.  To Husserl, “Real” phenomena are those which can be empirically sensed, while psychical knowing is merely a subjective, nonempirically valid (aprioristic) entity. So far, not so unique.

      However Husserl goes on to argue that the conscious act of perceiving requires both in a way that suggests interdependence, rather than a hierarchy. Dan Zahavi writes in his work, Husserl’s Phenomenology :

      Although the principles of logic are grasped and known by consciousness, we remain conscious of something ideal that is irreducible to and utterly different the real psychical acts of knowing.[2]

      This isn’t – as it is for others with similar views (in his time and before) – something we can overcome by using our rational minds, but a necessary entanglement. The very qualities which allow us to engage in the act of knowing are the same qualities which prevent us from examining our own knowing powers. Its a struggle that can be seen in Augustine’s attempts to know himself as made in the image of God, in Aquinas’ exploration of self-knowledge, and Rousseau’s frustration with philosophy. As the latter says in his Discourse on the Origin of Inequality, “It is by dint of studying man that we have rendered him unknowable.”

      So what does this mean for Husserl’s understanding of internal time consciousness?

      Essentially, it means that we don’t just perceive time as it is – first we intend it. In order for us to know time as an object, it must be held separately from its “pure truth”, which is inescapable as we perceive ourselves in act, and then it becomes something which we then perceive. As Husserl puts it, “a value has no position in time,”[3] and so any time we take a perception and add something to it, we remove it from its position and effectively reposition it as a new perception for our knowing selves. Says James M. Edie in his critical commentary on Husserl:

      This is the realm of fundamentally experienced and irreversible temporal synthesis (phenomenal time) on the basis of which we objectify our perceptual realities….[4]

      All recollections and expectations are made up of the content we have perceived in this way, requiring some conscious revision in order to allow us to take that which is perceived and make it into an object of our knowledge. The notion of time as an inescapable measure of the perceptual world is still just a part of the perceptual world.  According to Barry Smith and David Woodruff Smith in The Cambridge Companion to Husserl:

      …whatever apodicity might seem to be present in reflection on experience, all phenomenological analyses of structures of experience are in principle revisable.[5]

      While the process itself is ontologically fixed and passively received, that which is objectified by the teleological structuring of recollection and expectation is not. It is important to note the inherent revisability of objectified perception. It isn’t simply a single revision, that is to say, this does not mean that there is a “real” version and then we make up a new one. Instead, there is a “real” version that has no fixed meaning that we passively receive as an impression, and then as we come to know it, we turn it into something that is fixable by our own active determination. No valuations are “real” and as such cannot be passively received – only built. And naturally, the same can be said for our perception and examinations of time itself, giving rise to the distinction we create between fixed time and streaming temporality.

      However, that doesn’t mean we can override this passive streaming – our internal time consciousness is what sets us up for us a model which we can follow intentionally through reflection. Even as is causes a separation between the “real” that we perceive and the “object” that we know, Zahavi says:

      It is, as [Husserl] writes, because of the retention that consciousness can be made into an object.[6]

      Through the act of knowing, we are able to reflect on past acts of knowing as atemporal bits of knowledge because of the linear model. Reflection is dependent on this relationship with passive retention and protention, and is indeed made by it. Because of our internal streaming temporality, we are able to construe “objects in subjective time,” and according to Zahavi:

      It is only the moment we start to thematize these acts, be it in a reflection or recollection, that they are constituted as object in subjective, sequential time.[7]

      We use one to create the other within our conscious flow, leaving room not for wholesale rejection (as many philosophers argue) of our temporal nature, but for suggestibility. The very revocability that our streaming consciousness enables is one that can be reapplied to itself, leaving us somewhat in control of how we perceive that very streaming.

      And I wonder: could we construe a subjective reality and intentionality without expanding the streaming model to a thematically teleological phenomenon? Could we exist in the present moment (as I suggest in my dance example from last week’s post and as is promised by proponents of meditation) and allow ourselves respite from the inexorable march of active revision? Does the subjectivity of time, so dependent on our conscious intention diminish the power of its hold on the way we live our lives, and the way we think and write, leaving the possibility open for more than just the deadline driven, phase driven, clock driven, order driven experienced reality?

      And that’s that for Husserl! *phew*. I’ll continue this exploration next Wednesday, when I will tackle these questions in terms of literature, and in particular, the literature of Franz Kafka.

      —

      [1]  Dan Zahavi.  Husserl’s Phenomenology.  Standford : Standford University Press.  2003.  9

      [2] Zahavi 9

      [3]  Edmund Husserl. The Phenomenology of Internal Time-Consciousness. Ed. Martin Heidegger. Trans. By James. S. Churchill. Intro. By Calvin O. Schrag. Bloomington, Indiana University Press, 1964. 126

      [4] James M. Edie. Edmund Husserl’s Phenomenology: A Critical Commentary. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987. 97

      [5] Barry Smith, and David Woodruff Smith.  “Introduction.”  The Cambridge Companion to Husserl.  Ed. By Barry Smith and David Woodruff Smith. Cambridge : Cambridge University Press.  1995.  35

      [6] Zahavi 89

      [7] Zahavi 89

      Posted in Series | 1 Comment | Tagged husserl, internal time consciousness, literary time consciousness, phenomenology, philosopher fridays, philosophy, temporality, time
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