Phenomenology 2005

In this article I will examine Stein’s discussions on alterity. In her early writings Stein develops the theme of alterity mainly in relation to the concept of empathy (Einfuhlung) and thus in relation to the other person. In her later writings the theme of alterity mainly relates to God. I will discuss the continuity and discontinuity between these two areas. I will claim that alterity in her early writings can be understood as invisibility within visibility whereas alterity in her later writings can be understood as visibility within invisibility.

In this paper I attempt to connect Heidegger’s analysis of human existence in Sein und Zeit with important themes of Russian concerning the concept of personality and inherited from Byzantium Theology and Greek Patristic

Th e paper gives a short biography of Jan Patočka, remembers his personal contacts with Husserl and reviews his position within the phenomenological movement by explaining what sort of criticism on Husserl he develops in his concept of an “a-subjective” phenomenology. It also gives a list of his papers concerning this topic.

“The temple of consumption as a postmodern myth and the materialized utopia of post-history” deals with imaginary motifs connected with the shopping mall, which is currently called in German “temple of consumption.” A mall makes real somewhat the mythical Schlaraffenland (pays de Caucagne) of the late Middle Age. The architecture of the mall is postmodern, while that of the classical department store, is modern. Time manifests itself fourfold: as the subjective duration of shopping, the qualitative calendar of celebrations, the prohibition of history and the folding up of the past, present and future into the present. Finally, the customers’ behaviour expresses an escapist desire to desire and a perverted katharsis.

Martin Heidegger was the famous reviver of philosophical anthropology based on the phenomenology of Edmund Husserl. In his critique of the European anthropological tradition he conceptualizes human being as “Existenz” and “Dasein.” Following Heidegger, Eugen Fink (1905-1975) and Heinrich Rombach (1923-2004) developped a pluralistic anthropology within the concept of basic phenomena. For Eugen Fink there are five existential and co-existential phenomena: death, love, work, power and play, which are dialectically connected. These five phenomena are the transhistorical and transcultural constant factors of human persons as individual and social beings. Despite Fink’s criticism of Heidegger’s anthropological formalism, his anthropological conception can be defined as existential-ontological anthropology. Heinrich Rombach deepens this conception. There is no fixed existence of the basic phenomena for each person. Rombach argues, that each person has to find his own basic phenomenon. These phenomena are different in each historical epoch and culture. For example, love in the Roman Empire is totally distinct from love in postmodernism. There is no fixation on five basic phenomena, though each phenomenon can have the function of a basic phenomenon for a human being. Finally, Rombach makes the distinction between basic individual and social phenomena. While Rombach’s philosophy is focussed on a functional and processual ontology, which he himself calls structure ontology, his anthropological conception can be characterised as a structure anthropology at all.

The article deals with three questions: What is to be understood by the undefinability of man? In which sense do worldviews have limits? What is meant by the “and” between undefinability and the limits of worldviews? A distinction is to be drawn between comparative and absolute undefinability. The former means that sciences have not yet come to an acceptable definition of man, the latter means that undefinability is the ground of existence of man, as it is experienced in border experiences (“Grenzerfahrungen”). A worldview can be understood as the apprehension of a meaningful coherence of man and world. A worldview is anthropocentric and is distinct from others in respect to the existential standpoint from where the connection of world and man is apprehended. From an unreflected lived worldview can be distinguished a reflected worldview. It is possible that it discovers a radical break between man and world. In quite different ways this is done by Dilthey’s interpretation of the border experiences of birth and death, by Nietzsche’s concept of the soul of nations (“Volksseelen”), and by Kant’s concept of “unsociable sociability.” The assumption of an absolute undefinability of man can be understood as the ground of a universal solidarity by which the antagonistic contradictions of different worldviews seem to be reconcilable, because it limits the claim on absoluteness of worldviews.

Th is paper examines Franz Kafka’s perception of Being as it is portrayed in his novel Der Prozess against the background of Heidegger’s fundamental ontology, particularly as outlined in Sein und Zeit. More specifically, it examines the notion of guilt as it focuses on the similarities and differences between Heidegger and Kafka’s project. Whereas Heidegger holds out the possibility of a non-alienated being-in-the-world, Kafka seems to suggest that this is not obtainable; that the ontological difference between beings and Being, the gap that exits between our everyday empirical knowledge of the world and a primordial truth, is beyond our reach.

Human being considered as enigmatic relation to itself and the world centers in carnality. The carnal body as constituent of life is a challenge for our categories of human life, since its own self-awareness backs away from conceptualization. Along with carnality as a theme speaking in Merleau-Ponty’s and Levinas’ implicit dialogue, this article considers a “shared” carnal humanity given in sensual proximity, language and the diachronic style of alterity. Thus, carnality might be a threshold between ontology and ethics, where traces of Levinas’ and Merleau-Ponty’s thoughts might intertwine in structures of being together in a world.

The problem of truth in existential phenomenology is analyzed. The author maintains that the concept of truth is inseparable from the concept of reality. In the phenomenology of Lebenswelt (Husserl) and Dasein (Heidegger) reality is the human whole, which changes while an existential project is created. The phenomena are real as much as they take part in our being towards death. The author calls this creation of the existential whole noesis, which embraces both the harmony of human view and disharmony in the light of new project.

The notion of “dance technique” is so widely used among dancers that it cannot be ignored. A few different meanings of technique are encountered in a dance practice: (1) techniques of the preparation for a dance, (2) dances might be considered as techniques for some other purposes, and, obviously, (3) the dance is distinguished from other dances by implementation of the particular technique. In this essay, the question concerning dance technique is raised following Heidegger’s reflections. Dance technique is the mode of revealing, and cannot be renounced in dance as the profanation of the sacred pureness of it. But the dance vanishes, when there is a non-conscious marionette left, instead of Consciousness of Dance as the Medium between the Music and the Body.

At the very beginning of my article I explain the concept of intentionality in the realm of Husserl’s transcendental phenomenology. In this explanation I analyse the phenomenological concepts of noesis, noema, sense, appresentation, object and try to show the relationship between intentionality, temporality, and intersubjectivity as transcendental structures of experience. Than I review a tendency in phenomenological literature (namely in the works of Heidegger, Sartre, Hildebrand, and Schmitz) which lead to a radical transformation of the concept of intentionality. In the last part I examine a possibility of usage of this transformed concept in the conception of Alfred Schutz’ finite areas of meaning.

Th e eradication of the subject in serialism and aleatory composition leads to the elimination of music itself. Proposing a way out this “empty music”, Adorno pleads for a restoration of the subjective elements at work in composition. But since his notion of subjectivity is ambiguous (sometimes it is universal, sometimes he considers it from an objectivist standpoint, that is, as psychological, arbitrary and opposed to objects) his argument fails. Against his objectivist notion of subjectivity, this article proposes a phenomenological reading of the antinomies contemporary music is confronted with, by replacing Adorno’s arbitrary subject with the universal a priori of transcendental subjectivity.

This research sets for itself to show up Husserl’s early theory of action in its two forms—as scientific ethics and theory of values and as phenomenology of will. The author focuses his attention on two points: a problem of parallelism between logic and ethic and the question of how independent from the conceptual and methodical presuppositions of transcendental phenomenology is Husserl in his comprehension of ethical problems and in the elaboration of the idea of practical reason—or, on the contrary, how dependent he is on these presuppositions.

The purpose of this paper is an attempt to interpret Architecture from the point of view of Phenomenology. We consider that the work of architecture reacquires it self such a way of approaching. We will take Husserl’s phenomenology as the reference because of his extraordinary attention to the senses, the sensibility, the perceptual world, the body and its movements; these are the “materials” the architect works with. We will also study some relevant aspects of Le Corbusier’s Ville Savoie—a masterpiece of the XX Century Architecture—which will serve us as an exemplary case study.

This article tries to distinguish several types of “social ontology,” i.e., several types of answers to the question of the essence of social reality. As phenomenology and the social sciences are both concerned with this problem, it seems interesting to follow the historical sequence that links Husserl’s transcendental phenomenology, Schutz’s theory of the lifeworld, and Garfinkel’s ethnomethodology. These theories help to identify or to illustrate tree types of social ontology: philosophical ontology, common and ordinary knowledge ontology, and sociological ontology.

The essay discusses the role played by touch in relation to sight within Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy of the body. In particular this issue will be analyzed in the context of Merleau-Ponty’s aesthetics of painting, taking into consideration his criticism of Berenson’s concept of “tactile values,” volumetric feelings of a third dimension that painting should be able to arouse in spite of its bi-dimensional nature. In rejecting Berenson’s tactile values Merleau-Ponty’s position appears rather closer to the German theorists of pure visibility (reine Sichtbarkeit) in insisting on the exclusive optical destination of painting, a real “total part” which monadologically expresses “la folie de la vision.”

It is our aim in this essay to acknowledge a debt we owe to Aron Gurwitsch. In fact, we aim to recall the important contribution he made to phenomenology during his years of exile in France (1933–40). While there, he introduced the thought of Kurt Goldstein, and was the first to understand that a new approach in the human and social sciences was emerging and converging with Husserl’s new phenomenological philosophy: a tendency toward things as they are lived and handled by subjects. Th is spirit of confluence between phenomenology and the sciences is something he passed on to his younger colleague, Merleau-Ponty—who, however, failed to acknowledge Gurwitsch as a major “source of inspiration” for his thought. Some evidence of Merleau-Ponty’s unpaid debt to Aron Gurwitsch is presented in this essay.

The essay confronts the objective conception of reality with the phenomenological one in order to observe the implication of imagination in the constitution of our sense of the real. Though fantasy seems to be the opposite of the real perception, as Jean-Paul Sartre showed it in his book “L’imaginaire”, the paper argues, following the arguments of Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Henri Maldiney and Marc Richir – but also the ancient argument of Aristotle concerning the sensible appearance – that it participates in an active and necessary way at the subjective foundation of reality.

This essay proposes a phenomenological interpretation of Konrad Fiedler’s philosophy of art. He’s a Nineteenth century German philosopher who’s theory of visibility (die Sichtbarkeit) and body (der Leib) comprises, in many aspects, a phenomenological view avant la lettre. We compare Fiedler’s account of visibility with Husserl’s phenomenology of the visual representation and we argue that the artistic visibility and the activity of the body proposed by Fiedler may be considered as a phenomenological solution for the problem of artistic creation. Finally, we underline the conceptual affinity between Fiedler’s theory of the body implicated in the making of artistic works and the Merleau-Ponty’s own view of it.