Phenomenology 2010

Derrida alerts us to the significance of the question and the call in Heidegger’s philosophy; he claims that, for Heidegger, these two phenomena are always connected. The question emerges for Heidegger as the question of Being whereas the call is originally the call of conscience. Derrida claims that Heidegger imports unquestioned presuppositions into his investigations. A phenomenological perspective on the question and the call asks how, or in what way the question and the call are issued; it also asks from whom and to whom they are delivered. An investigation of the encounter shows that Heidegger’s text provides responses to at least some of Derrida’s criticism. In the end, the question and the call emerge as two ‘figures of the unconditional’ and thus serve to shed a new light on the unconditional in Derrida’s sense, including its ethical dimension.

From the point of view of Husserlian philosophy, Descartes failed to arrive at a transcendental phenomenological subject. According to Husserl, Descartes’s cogito represents a psychological statement. Michel Henry maintains that Descartes’s “ego cogito ergo sum” implies a full phenomenological subject, not because of its transcendental disposition—on the contrary, because of its pure self-affection. Consciousness according to Henry is not “consciousness of something outside the self,” but the pure consciousness of being affected. This is the real kernel or soul of phenomenology, which can be understood as the Cartesian soul itself. Henry develops this argumentation not only through the formulation of the ego cogito but also by means of art. 26 of Descartes’s latest work, The Passions of the Soul. In this work, the relation between ‘actions’ and ‘passions’ is thought as an early attempt to establish a philosophy of consciousness. According to Henry, this remains fully neglected in the philosophies of Husserl and Heidegger. This not only implies a rehabilitation of the soul as phenomenological object, but also the recapture of phenomenology itself, which begins not with Husserl, but with Descartes.

What does love have to do with sleep? In her philosophical essay The Second Sex, Simone de Beauvoir reflects upon the sleep from the perspective of existentialist feminism, focusing on the French writer Violette Leduc and her novel Je hais les dormeurs from 1948 in which she describes how a woman unloads her hate for a man while he sleeps. These few passages remained widely unexplored within the phenomenological and feminist research. In this article, I explore Beauvoir’s existentialist reading of Leduc and suggest some alternative conclusions.

In his late essays of 1970’s, Patočka investigates the essence of European civilization—its birth in Ancient Greece, its formation in the Christianity of the Middle Ages, its success in producing modern natural science and its fall in the World Wars of the 20th century. He asks what legacy the old Europe left for humankind in the post-European, globalized world. One of the main parts of this legacy is the Christian religion. In my paper, I attempt to explicitly reconstruct how Patočka wants to formulate this religion in a very heretical way so that it may introduce a wholly new era in world history.

The article aims to develop the concept of powerlessness in relation with the notion of self-understanding and always already powerful being in the world presented in classical and hermeneutically oriented phenomenology. As a counterpoint to this classical position a short inspirational text from G. Bataille will be presented. This concerns the experience of transcendence mentioned in the work Inner Experience. This analysis will lead to the post-phenomenological conception of the experience of powerlessness in which the exceeding transgression took place (necessarily in the past) and transformed as such the classical phenomenological scheme of experience.

This investigation addresses the internal experience as a spatial phenomenon. Ascertaining the difference between internal and external experience as a space metaphor leads to the question of the source of the space metaphors in principle. The analogy between time and space and the space metaphors in Husserl’s conception of time are considered. The question of the temporality of consciousness, evidence, and internal experience are brought to the fore by comparing Brentano’s and Husserl’s conceptions. The difference between the direct and indirect modes of consciousness by Brentano, his conception of time as the boundary in the continuum, and his concept of the proteraesthesis proves to be relevant for the concept of internal experience as a spatial phenomenon. The essay calls in question the self-sufficiency of time-experience and the traditional correspondence of time to the internal experience and of space to the external one. The relation of the Here/There- and Now/Then- experience is discussed. I intend to elucidate the experience of boundary as a primary internal experience from which the space-experience arises. In its turn the boundary-consciousness has its origin in the differentiation-experience. In the latter there is no time, the internal one included, but there is a boundary-experience as a primary and indirect experience. In every differentiation there is the experience of “between”, the experience of the difference between boundary and expanse, of hierarchy and openness, as well as of fore- and background where boundary and expanse can change their “place”, thus transforming the primary space of experience.

The article shows that the apparently range-external acoustic volume is a matter of independent instances of sound. Given the particular occurrence of the acoustic volume, the reference sources prove to be inadequate or unessential conditions of the acoustic effect. The affinity to the dimensions of the felt body allows for a more detailed conceptual identification of the acoustic volumes.

Even though our primal concern is strictly philosophical, this article has also relevance for psychiatry and psychotherapy, as it is focused on the application of Heidegger’s existential analysis in the area of mental disorders. After a critical examination of the works of Ludwig Binswanger, Medard Boss and Alice Holzhey-Kunz who based their psychiatric and psychotherapeutic conceptions on the ontological fundament laid by Heidegger’s existential analysis, we try to uncover new thematic possibilities relevant to psychopathological phenomena in the ontological frame of the existential analysis. This brings us to the notion of the third mode of temporality that differs both from the temporality of the authentic existence and from the temporality of the inauthentic existence. Finally, we come to the possibility of the temporal disintegration of Dasein, in which we find the very core of the psychopathological phenomena. The phenomenon of temporal disintegration of Da-sein, however, shows the whole ontological structure of Dasein in a new light which is why it brings us to a fundamental revision of Heidegger’s existential analytics.

One can find a very strong objection against many kinds of philosophical thematizing of suffering: this objection criticizes and entertains suspicion that these philosophical efforts adopt an arrogant and cynical position toward the sufferer. In the context of the question of theodicy one e.g. criticizes approaches which practice a functionalisation, relativization and depotentialization of the evil and suffering: Toward them one basically objects that these approaches finally result in a rationalisation and instrumentalisation of the annoying and scandalizing moment of suffering. First of all, the distance from the suffering and the sufferer seems questionable, alarming and dubious. This implies the more general and more fundamental question of the relation between experience (concernment) and reflection (consideration) of suffering. The following attempt to reflect philosophically the suffering will thematize this relation and point out some specific limits of the philosophical reflection which will become evident thereby. The central starting point of the following phenomenological considerations is the assumption that suffering represents a paradigmatic boundary-phenomenon of human reality and that this phenomenon departs from the stringent proposition forms of philosophy and thereby limits and denies a philosophical access. By keeping in mind this awareness of the problem, the question to be asked is: What essentially characterizes suffering?

In the history of modern art impressionism and cubism are usually opposed to each other. The work of the impressionist is held to be based on sensation, that of the cubist on form. Essentially, however, in both the same revolution takes place. The motif of the enveloppe in the work of Monet in his later life and that of an espace tactile in the cubist experiments of the young Braque provide evidence of the search for a more authentic and original image space than the perspectival. In this respect the discovery of the papiers collés in 1912 can be conceived as the turning point in a mystical night, where the traditional outlook dies, to give way to a new image space, the direction whereof is entrusted to an emptiness that has been released from the confines of perspectival space.

When Ives Tanguy painted his mysterious imaginary landscapes he realized in artistic form a tableau that shows never-seen, quasi-real imaginary things within a quasi-real imaginary space. The imagination that presents such things is totally free—accompanied by “the feeling of an absolute freedom,” as Tanguy said—, whereas the product is a world that not only looks as if it were real but appears as a coherence of facts put together with unshakeable necessity. The imagination is free because it undertakes the ultimate challenge: it creates imaginary products in a way that they give the impression of being real. This imagination realizes itself like the dreaming I but in a state of not-bounding-itself (better to say: as an imaginative force that both reveals and confirms the self-bounding imagination); and it realizes a kind of world experiencing with correlative objects that seem to be real (comparably to a trompe l’oeil) although they can never be found within the real world (contrary to a trompe l’oeil).

In this paper, I will investigate the temporal structure of photographic images. According to a common understanding, photographic images open up a direct access to what has been recorded in the past. In contrast to this view, I will show that photographs have to be conceived in terms of a higher temporal complexity. Referring to Derrida’s reflections upon trace, representation, and the temporal mode of the futur antérieur as well as his involvement in photography, I will understand the temporality of photographic images not as unidirectional relation of presence and past, but rather as an ongoing process of temporalization.

Georg Cantor, the originator of set theory, distinguishes between two kinds of actual infinity: he separates the transfinite from the absolutely infinite. Whereas the transfinite is the proper object of set theory, the absolutely infinite remains inaccessible to mathematical inquiry. In Cantor’s writings, the absolutely infinite seems to have both a positive and a negative aspect. It is shown in this paper how Cantor’s remarks on his forerunners in the history of philosophy—and especially on Nicholas of Cusa—help us to understand the inseparability of these two aspects.