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Encyclopedia of Phenomenology edited by Lester Embree, Elizabeth A. Behnke, David Carr, J. Claude Evans, Jose Huertas-Jourda, Joseph J. Kockelmans, William R. McKenna, I. Algis Mickunas, Jitendra Nath Mohanty, Thomas M. Seebohm, Richard M Zaner

CONTRIBUTIONS TO PHENOMENOLOGY, Volume 18

Kluwer Academic Publishers

$450.00, hardcover, 764 pages, notes, bibliography, index

0-7923-2956-2

CONTRIBUTIONS TO PHENOMENOLOGY: The purpose of this series is to foster the development of phenomenological philosophy through creative research. Contemporary issues in philosophy, other disciplines and in culture generally, offer opportunities for the application of phenomenological methods that call for creative responses. Although the work of several generations of thinkers has provided phenomenology with many results with which to approach these challenges, a truly successful response to them will require building on this work with new analyses and methodological innovations.

ENCYCLOPEDIA OF PHENOMENOLOGY presents phenomenological thought and the phenomenological movement within philosophy and within more than a score of other disciplines on a level accessible to professional colleagues of other orientations as well as to advanced undergraduate and graduate students. Entries average 3,000 words. In practically all cases, they offer select references. The Introduction briefly chronicles the changing phenomenological agenda and compares phenomenology with other 20th Century movements.

The 166 entries can be grouped under seven headings: (1) the four broad tendencies and periods within the phenomenological movement; (2) twenty-three national traditions of phenomenology; (3) twenty-two philosophical sub-disciplines, including those referred to with the formula "the philosophy of x''; (4) phenomenological tendencies within twenty-one non-philosophical disciplines; (5) forty major phenomenological topics; (6) twenty-eight leading phenomenological figures; and (7) twenty-seven non-phenomenological figures and movements of interesting similarities and differences with phenomenology.

This encyclopedia is an example of superb institutional and academic collaboration. Clear writing and well written entries contributes to this works excellence. The work offers important grounding and essential orientation to phenomenology as it has advanced in its first century of development. It is essential to all academic libraries and research institutions. In many ways this reviewer would hope that a more modestly priced edition may be forthcoming as this work would be a valuable work of reference to many students of the discipline.

Although anticipations can be found in the works of Henri Bergson, Franz Brento, Wilhelm Dilthey, William James, and others, the phenomenological movement began in the reflections of Edmund Husserl during the mid-1890s. The phenomenological movement spread from Germany to Japan, Russia, and Spain and also from philosophy to psychiatry before World War I; to Australia, France, Hungary, The Netherlands and Flanders, Poland, and the United States and to education, music, and religion during the 1920s; and to Czechoslovakia, Italy, Korea, and Yugoslavia and to architecture, literature, and during the 1930s. Phenomenology then spread to Portugal, Scandinavia, and South Africa, and also to ethnic studies, feminism, film, and political theory right after World War II; then to Canada, China, and India and to dance, geography, law, and psychology in the 1960s and 1970s; and finally to Great Britain and also to ecology, ethnology, and nursing the 1980s and 1990s. Given its spread into other disciplines as well as across the planet, Phenomenology is arguably one of the most adapted philosophical movements of the 20th Century.

What are the typical characteristics of phenomenology? How does it relate with other philosophical movements? What are its tendencies and stages? Negatively speaking, phenomenologists tend to oppose the acceptance of unobservable matters and grand systems erected in speculative thinking. Furthermore, they tend to oppose naturalism, the worldview generalized from modern natural science and technology that has been spreading from Northern Europe since the Renaissance. However, opposing naturalism is not the same as opposing natural science, as the phenomenological tradition within the philosophy of natural science shows.

Unfortunately, opponents of naturalism (including opponents of behaviorism and positivism in psychology, social science, and philosophy) are often astonishingly eclectic and sometimes consider any form of non-naturalistic thought "phenomenology." This goes too far. Alternatively, some consider only Husserl's transcendental first philosophy to be Phenomenology Given, however, the non-transcendental tendencies within philosophical Phenomenology as well as the great deal of non-philosophical phenomenology, this does not go far enough. The present encyclopedia urges a way between these extremes.

There are five positive features accepted by most phenomenologists, regardless of discipline, tendency, or period: (1) phenomenologists tend to justify cognition (and some also evaluation and action) with reference to evidence, which is awareness of a matter itself as disclosed and adequate way possible for something of its kind; in the most clear, distinct, (2) phenomenologists tend to believe that not only objects in the natural and cultural worlds, but also ideal objects, such as numbers, and even conscious life itself can be made evident and thus known about; (3) phenomenologists tend to hold that inquiry ought to focus upon what might be called "encountering" as it is directed at objects and, correlatively, upon "objects as they are encountered" (this terminology is not widely shared, but the emphasis on a dual problematics and the reflective approach it requires are); (4) phenomenologists tend to recognize the role of description in universal, a priori, or "eidetic" terms as prior to explanation by means of causes, purposes, or grounds; and (5) phenomenologists tend to debate whether or not what Husserl calls the transcendental phenomenological epoche and reductions is useful or even possible.

CONTENTS:

Preface

Introduction

ACTION—Bernhard Waldenfels

AESTHETICS—J. Claude Evans, Elizabeth A. Beknke and Edward & Casey

ANALYTIC PHILOSOPHY—David Woodruff Smith

ANTHROPOLOGY, CULTURAL, see ETHNOLOGY

ANTHROPOLOGY, PHILOSOPHICAL, see PHILOSOPHICAL ANTHROPOLOGY

ARCHITECTURE—Timothy Casey

HANNAH ARENDT—John Francis Burke

ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE—Hubert Dreyfus

AUSTRALIA—Purushottama Bilimoria

AUSTRIA—Barry Smith

SIMONE DE BEAUVOIR—JeffnerAllen

BEHAVIORAL GEOGRAPHY—David Seumon

HENRI BERGSON—Pierre Kerszberg

LUDWIG BINSWANGER—Aaron Mishara

BODY—Elizabeth A. Behnke

FRANZ BRENTANO—Dieter Munch

BRITISH EMPIRICISM—Richard T Murphy

BRITISH MORAL THEORY—Dallas Willard and Barry Smith

BUDDHISM—Masako Odagawa

CANADA—Linda Fisher

ERNST CASSIRER—Ernst Wolfgang Orth

CHINA—Iso Kern

COGNITIVE SCIENCE—Osborne P: Wiggins and Manfred Spitzer

COMMUNICATION, PHILOSOPHY OF, see PHILOSOPHY OF COMMUNICATION

COMMUNICOLOGY—Richard Leo Lanigan

CONSTITUTIVE PHENOMENOLOGY—Fred Kersten

CONSTITUTIVE PHENOMENOLOGY OF THE NATURAL ATTITUDE—Lester Embree

CRITICAL THEORY—Martin W Schnell

CULTURAL ANTHROPOLOGY, see ETHNOLOGY

CULTURAL DISCIPLINES—Lester Embree

CZECHOSLOVAKIA—Josef Moural

DANCE—Elizabeth A. Behnke and Maureen Connolly

DASEIN—JohnD. Caputo

DEEP ECOLOGY—Michael E. Zimmerman

JACQUES DERRIDA—J. Claude Evans and Leonard Lawlor

WILHELM DILTHEY—Rudolf A. Makhreel and Jacob Owenshy

ECOLOGY—Ullrich Melle

ECOLOGY, DEEP, see DEEP ECOLOGY

ECONOMICS—Gary Brent Madison

EDUCATION—Kate Meyer-Drawe

EGO—James Mensch

EIDETIC METHOD—John Scanlon

EMOTION—Algis Mickunas

EMPIRICISM, BRITISH, see BRITISH EMPIRICISM

EMPIRICISM, LOGICAL, see LOGICAL POSITIVISM

EPOCHE AND REDUCTION—William R. McKenna

ETHICS IN HUSSERL—Ullrich Melle

ETHICS IN SARTRE—Thomas R. Flynn

ETHICS IN SCHELER—Philip Blosser

ETHNIC STUDIES—Stanford M. Lyman and Lester Embree

ETHNOLOGY—James Weiner

ETHNOMETHODOLOGY, see SOCIOLOGY

EVIDENCE—Elisabeth Stroker

EXISTENTIAL PHENOMENOLOGY—John J. Compton

EXISTENTIALISM—Joseph J. Kockelmans

EXPECTATION—William R. McKenna

FEMINISM—Mary Jeanne Larrabee

JOHANN GOTTLIEB FICHTE—Thomas M. Seebohm

FILM—Vvian Sobchack

EUGEN FINK—Ronald Bruzina

FORMAL AND MATERIAL ONTOLOGY—Gilbert T Null

MICHEL FOUCAULT—Stephen H. Watson and David Vessey

FRANCE—Jean-Francois Courtine

GOTTLOB FREGE—J.N. Mohanty

FUNDAMENTAL ONTOLOGY—Theodore Kisiel

HANS-GEORG GADAMER—Rohert J. Dostal

GENERATIVE PHENOMENOLOGY—Anthony J. Steinbock

GENETIC PHENOMENOLOGY—Donn Welton

GEOGRAPHY, BEHAVIORAL, see BEHAVIORAL GEOGRAPHY

GEOGRAPHY, SOCIAL, see SOCIAL GEOGRAPHY

GERMANY—Ernst Wolfgang Orth and Thomas M. Seebohm

GESTALT PSYCHOLOGY—Lester Embree

GREAT BRITAIN—Wolfe Mays, Joanna Hodge and Ulrich Haose

ARON GURWITSCH—Lester Emhree

NICOLAI HARTMANN—Robert Welsh Jordan

GEORG WILHELM FRIEDRICH HEGEL—Frank M. Kirkland

MARTIN HEIDEGGER—Thomas Nenon

HERMENEUTICAL PHENOMENOLOGY—Graeme Nicholson

HERMENEUTICS—Thomas M Seebohm

HISTORY—David Carr

HUMAN SCIENCES—Lester Embree

HUNGARY—Balazs M Mezei

EDMUND HUSSERL—R. Philip Buckley

HUSSERL AND HEIDEGGER—Theodore Kisiel

IMAGINATION—Edward S. Casey Elizaheth A. Behnke and Susumu Kanata

INDIA—J.N. Mohanty and D.P Chattopadhraya

ROMAN INGARDEN—AndrzejPrrylebski

INTENTIONALITY—Fred Kersten

INTERSUBJECTIVITY—Iso Kern

ITALY—Carlo Sini and Fulvia Vimercati

WILLIAM JAMES—Richard Cobb-Stevens

JAPAN—Hiroshi Kojima

KARL JASPERS—Osborne P. Wiggins and Michael Alan Schwartz

IMMANUEL KANT—Frank M. Kirkland

FELIX KAUFMANN—Harry R. Reeder

FRITZ LEOPOLD KAUFMANN—Christine Skarda and Fred Kersten

KOREA—Kah-Kyung Cho and Nam-In Lee

ALEXANDRE KOYRE—Karl Schuhmann

LANGUAGE ANALYSIS, ORDINARY, see ORDINARY LANGUAGE ANALYSIS

LANGUAGE AFTER HUSSERL—Arion L. Kelkel

LANGUAGE IN HUSSERL—Arion L. Kelkel

LAW—William S. Hamrick

EMMANUEL LEVINAS—Adrinan Peperzak

LIFEWORLD, see WORLD

LITERATURE—Michael McDutlie

LOGIC—Thomas M. Seebohm

LOGICAL EMPIRICISM, see LOGICAL POSITIVISM

LOGICAL POSITIVISM—Lee Hardy

GABRIEL MARCEL —Thomas Busch

MARXISM—Algis Mickunas

MATHEMATICS—Richard Tieszen

MEANING —J. N. Mohanty

MEDICINE— Richard M. Zaner

MEMORY —Edward S. Casey

MAURICE MERLEAU-PONTY—Henry Pietersma

MODERN PHILOSOPHY - Suzanne Cunningham

MUSIC - Lawrence Ferrara and Elizabeth A. Behnke

NATURAL SCIENCE IN CONSTITUTIVE PERSPECTIVE—Elisabeth Stroker

NATURAL SCIENCE IN HERMENEUTICAL PERSPECTIVE—Joseph J. Kockelmans

NATURALISM - Lester Embree

THE NETHERLANDS AND FLANDERS—Toine Kortooms

KITARO NISHIDA —Tadashi Ogawa

NOEMA—John J. Drummond

NURSING - John R. Scudder Jr. and Anne H. Bishop

OBJECTIVISM, see NATURALISM

ONTOLOGY, FORMAL AND MATERIAL, see FORMAL AND MATERIAL ONTOLOGY ONTOLOGY, FUNDAMENTAL, see FUNDAMENTAL ONTOLOGY

ORDINARY LANGUAGE ANALYSIS—Suzanne Cunningham

JOSE ORTEGA Y GASSET—Jorge Garcia-Gomez

PERCEPTION AFTER HUSSERL—M. C. Dillon

PERCEPTION IN HUSSERL—William R. McKenna

PH ENOM ENOLOGY, see CONSTITUTIVE PHENOMENOLOGYY. CONSTITUTIVE PHENOMENOLOGY OF THE NATURAL ATTITUDE, EXISTENTIAL PHENOMENOLOGY, GENERATIVE PHENOMENOLOGY, GENETIC PHENOMENOLOGY, HERMENEUTICAL PHENOMENOLOGY, and REALISTIC PHENOMENOLOGY

PHILOSOPHICAL ANTHROPOLOGY—Ernst Wolfgang Orth

PHILOSOPHY, ANALYTIC, see ANALYTIC PHILOSOPHY

PHILOSOPHY, MODERN, see MODERN PHILOSOPHY

PHILOSOPHY OF COMMUNICATION—David James Miller

PHILOSOPHY OF PSYCHOLOGY—Joseph J. Kockelmans

PHILOSOPHY, POLITICAL, see POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY

PHYSICAL EDUCATION—Maureen Connolly

POLAND—Krystyna Gorniak-Kocikowska

POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY—Bernard P. Dauenhauer

POLITICAL SCIENCE —Sonia Kruks

PORTUGAL— Antonio Fidalgo

POSITIVISM, see LOGICAL POSITIVISM

POSSIBLE WORLDS— J. N. Mohanty

POST-MODERNISM— Hwa Yol Jung

PSYCHIATRY—Osborne P. Wiggins and Michael Alan Schwartz

PSYCHOANALYSIS —Hermann Drue

PSYCHOLOGISM—John Scanlon

PSYCHOLOGY—Paul Richer

PSYCHOLOGY, GESTALT, see GESTALT PSYCHOLOGY

PSYCHOLOGY, PHILOSOPHY OF, see PHILOSOPHY OF PSYCHOLOGY READING—Wolfgang Iser

REALISTIC PHENOMENOLOGY—Barry Smith

REASON—Thomas M. Seebohm

REDUCTION, see EPOCHE AND REDUCTION

REGIONAL ONTOLOGY, see FORMAL AND MATERIAL ONTOLOGY

RELATIVISM—Gail Solfer

RELIGION —James C. Hart

RE-PRESENTATION —Eduard Marhach

PAUL RICOEUR —Charles E. Reagan

RUSSIA—Victor Moltchanov

JEAN-PAUL SARTRE —Richard Holmes

SCANDINAVIA—Dagfinn Follesdal

MAX SCHELER —Manfred Frings

FRIEDRICH WILHELM JOSEPH VON SCHELLING—Alan White

ALFRED SCHUTZ —Fred Kersten

SCIENCE, NATURAL, see NATURAL SCIENCE

SCIENCE, POLITICAL, see POLITICAL SCIENCE SCIENCES, HUMAN, see HUMAN SCIENCES

GEORG SIMMEL —John E. Jalbert

SOCIAL GEOGRAPHY—Benno Werlen

SOCIOLOGY IN GERMANY—Martin Endress and Ilja Srubar

SOCIOLOGY IN JAPAN—Hisashi Nasu

SOCIOLOGY IN THE UNITED STATES—George Psathas

SOMATICS —Elizabeth A. Behnke

SOUTH AFRICA —P S. Dreyer

SPACE —John J. Drummond

SPAIN AND LATIN AMERICA—Roberto Walton

EDITH STEIN—Kathleen Haney

STRUCTURALISM—Richard Leo Lanigan

TECHNOLOGY - Don Ihde

THEATER - James M. Edie

TIME—John B. Brough

TRAN DUC THAO—Daniel J. Herman

TRUTH—Dieter Lohmar

UNION OF SOVIET SOCIALIST REPUBLICS —Maija Kule

UNITED STATES OF AMERICA—Lester Embree, James M. Edie, Don Ihde, Joseph J. Kockelmans and Calvin O. Schrag

VALUE THEORY—Robert Welsh Jordan

MAX WEBER—Thomas Nenon

LUDWIG WITTGENSTEIN—Harry P Reeder

WORLD—Donn Melton

WORLDS, POSSIBLE, see POSSIBLE WORLDS

YUGOSLAVIA—Milan Uzelac

Index

EVOLUTION OF THE PHENOMENOLOGICAL AGENDA

Four successively dominant and sometimes overlapping tendencies and stages can be recognized within this century-old, international, and multidisciplinary movement. These can be characterized as (a) realistic, (b) constitutive, (C) existential, and (d) hermeneutical phenomenology. Any attempt to summarize the wealth of views that fall under these headings would certainly be inadequate, but an attempt to chronicle the changing set of issues addressed in the movement, which can be called the phenomenological agenda, may be helpful.

There were later attempts to expand and rearrange the phenomenological agenda, but it was Husserl himself who originally drafted it. His Logische Untersuchungen (Logical Investigations, 1900 1901) is most famous for its attack on psychologism, which is the attempt to absorb logic into empirical psychology. The philosophies of logic and also mathematics, which Husserl considered continuous with logic, are then the first items on the agenda. Language has also been an item from the outset, along with perception and various types of representation such as expectation, imagination, and memory. Finally, where the question of methodology is concerned, that is, how he got his results, Husserl began to reflect from the outset upon what came to be called eidetic method. Because of its reflective, evidential, and eidetically descriptive approach to both encounterings and objects as encountered, as well as because of the issues on the agenda that are thus approached, this inauguration is often called, somewhat redundantly, "descriptive phenomenology." The four main tendencies within the ensuing movement are directly or indirectly branches sprouting from this stem.

(1) Realistic phenomenology emerged in a group of young philosophers at the University of Munich led by Johanes Daubert just after the turn of the century and was then extended principally by Adolf Reinch to include students at Gottingen, where Husserl then taught. This tendency emphasizes eidetic method in the search for universal essences. Alexander Pfander, Herbert Spiegelberg, and Karl Schuhmann and Barry Smith have led successive generations of realistic phenomenology.

In "Die apriorischen Grundlagen des burgerlichen Rechts" (The apriori foundations of civil law, 1911), Reinach added the philosophy of law to the phenomenological agenda. Furthermore, in Der Formalismusin der Ethikund die materiale Wertethik (Formalism in ethics and nonformal ethics of values, 1913/1916), Max Scheler added not only ethics but also value theory to the agenda, and in later works he added philosophy of religion and philosophical anthropology. Moreover, Edith Stein added the philosophy of the human sciences. Finally, Moritz Geiger and Roman Ingarden added aesthetics, architecture, music, and literature during the 1920s and 1930s; the phenomenology of film was initiated by Ingarden in the 1940s.

(2) Constitutive phenomenology’s founding text is Husserl's Ideen zu einer reinen Phanomenologie und phanomenologischen Philosophie I (Ideas pertaining to a pure phenomenology and phenomenological philosophy, 1913). The earlier epistemological focus on logic and mathematics came to include the philosophy of natural science or at least physics, which later predominates in Husserl's last work, Die Krisis der europaischen Wissenschaften und die transzendentale Phanomenologie (The crisis of the European sciences and transcendental phenomenology, 1936). Subsequent generations in constitutive phenomenology of the natural sciences include Oskar Becker, Aron Gurwitch, and Elisabeth Stroker.

Ideen I is, however, largely devoted to demonstrations of and reflections upon phenomenological method. Most constitutive phenomenology relies on transcendental phenomenological epoche and reduction. This procedure involves suspending acceptance of the pregiven status of conscious life as in the world and is performed in order to secure an ultimate intersubjective grounding for the world and the positive sciences concerned with it.

Use of this method places constitutive phenomenology in the transcendental tradition that goes back at least to Kant within modern philosophy, although Husserl related himself primarily to British empiricism. He differs from his transcendentalist predecessors in holding that conscious life in its transcendental status does not need to be deduced as the condition for the possibility of the world because the way in which objects of all sorts are constituted in conscious life can be reflectively observed and described after the transcendental epoche has been performed. The other tendencies within phenomenology have not accepted this procedure.

Husserl had reacted to Dilthey and others in his manifesto "Philosophic als strenge Wissenschaft" (1911) and had thereby begun to reflect on history. The concrete demonstration of constitutive phenomenology, as a tracing of experienced matters, formations, etc., back to the subjective processes, achievements, etc., in which they are encountered, was presented in his Ideen II [1912-15], a text that was not, however, published until 1952, but was known in manuscript form to Edith Stein, Martin Heidegger, Ludwig Landgrebe, and Maurice Merleau-Ponty (but not Alfred Schutz, who nonetheless independently developed a convergent Constitutive phenomenology of the natural attitude focused on social life). Nevertheless, this esoterically known text also added the body to the agenda and showed clearly that the world is originally cultural.

In Formale und transzendentale Logik (Formal and transcendental logic, 1929) and the posthumous Erfahrung und Urteil (Experience and judgment, 1939), Husserl returned to logic and mathematics and thereby the task of the formal unification of all knowledge from the standpoint of transcendental constitutive phenomenology.

(3) Existential phenomenology. The second most influential phenomenologist is Martin Heidegger, Husserl's chosen successor at Freiburg, who published Sein und Zeit in 1927. This incomplete masterpiece attempted to go beyond the regional ontologies sketched by Husserl to establish fundamental ontology and to place it at the top of the phenomenological agenda. Heidegger's work was, however, initially appreciated solely for its account of human existence or dasein and thus not as the intended means to uncovering the meaning of Being (Sein). Existential phenomenology was thus inaugurated by a misinterpretation of the proposed project.

Hannah Arendt seems to have been the first existential phenomenologist. This is evident in her dissertation, Die Liebesbegriffe bei Augustin (The concept of love in Augustine, 1929). Moreover, her essay "What is Existenz Philosophy?" (1946) reflects her acceptance during the 1920s of methods from Husserl—not, however, for philosophy of science, but rather for the problems of human existence already raised in Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, and Karl Jaspers as well as in Heidegger.

With the rise to power in 1933 of National Socialism—which Heidegger supported— German phenomenology was disrupted and the period of chiefly existential phenomenology began in France. Gabriel Marcel independently focused on the problem of the body and made it prominent on the existential agenda, but the main figures in France are Simone de Beauvoir, Maurcice Merleau-Ponty, and Jean-Paul Sartre. Also influenced by Alexandre Kojeve (1902-1968) and Dean Wahl (1888-1974), they expanded reflection on problems of human existence to include issues raised in Hegel and the recently discovered early Marx. Perhaps Emmanuel Levinas also belongs to this tendency and, while the problem of intersubjectivity had also been addressed in Scheler, Husserl, and Schutz, it became central to the agenda for him.

Human freedom was made prominent in L'etre et le neant (Being and nothingness, 1943) by Sartre, who had earlier published books on the phenomenology of emotion and also imagination. He furthermore moved theater and literature higher on the agenda. Other existential issues include action, desire, conflict, the fragility of reason, historical contingencies, human finitude, oppression, and death. The inclusion of gestalt psychology into phenomenology, which had been begun by Gurwitsch, was continued in Merleau-Ponty's Phenomenologie de la perception (Phenomenology of perception, 1945). Merleau-Ponty seems also to have made politics an unignorable item with his Humanisme et terreur (1948). Although Arendt is more famous for her political theory, the problem of ethnicity, which first appeared in her articles such as "Race-Thinking before Racism" (1944) and then in The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951), would seem to be her most original contribution to the agenda. Ethnicity was also addressed in existential perspective by Beauvoir, by Levinas, and by Sartre in Reflexions sur le question juive (Reflections on the Jewish question, 1946), and also in constitutive perspective by Schutz in "Equality and the Meaning Structure of the Social World" (1955). Beauvoir independently and quite influentially placed feminism on the agenda in La deuxieme sexe (1949), asserting one is not born but becomes a woman, although Edith Stein's posthumous Die Frau [1930] shows that Beauvoir was not the first phenomenologist interested in gender. Beauvoir's reflections on old age appear, however, unprecedented.

It is not inconceivable that interest in it could be revived through study of Arendt and Beauvoir. And it is also not irrelevant that the phenomenological tendencies in non-philosophical disciplines have tended to find great affinity with existential phenomenology.

(4) Just as realistic and then constitutive phenomenology chiefly stem from Husserl, not only existential but also the fourth tendency, hermeneutical phenomenology, chiefly stem from Heidegger. According to Sein und Zeit, all of human existence is interpretive and hence there is no access to anything except through understanding of the matters themselves as they appear within context. The beginning of this fourth tendency can be traced back to Hans-Georg Gadamer’s phenomenological interpretations of Greek texts, particularly Platons dialektische Ethik (Plato's dialectical ethics, 1931). The tendency reemerged after the Nazi period and World War II with the publication of his Wahrheit und Methode (Truth and method, 1960), which has had a considerable impact. Other leaders of this tendency are Paul Ricoeur in France (Le conpit des interpretations [The conflict of interpretations, 1 969]), Patrick Heelan, Don Ihde, Graeme Nicholson, Joseph Kockelmans, and Calvin O.Schrag in North America, Gianna Vattimo and Carlo Sini in Italy.

In contrast to existential phenomenology, hermeneutical phenomenology fully appreciates Heidegger's central concern with Being. Technology, which was introduced as an issue for phenomenology in Sein und Zeit, can also be said to be first widely accepted on the hermeneutical version of the phenomenological agenda. Otherwise, the issues of hermeneutical phenomenology include the established concerns of aesthetics, ethics, history, language, law, literature, perception, politics, religion, the philosophy of the natural and especially the human sciences, etc. What is different is how it approaches them, i.e., the method of hermeneutics. Hermeneutical phenomenology has also led to much scholarship on eminent texts of major figures in the history of philosophy and there has been extensive influence within the human sciences.

The periods and geographical centers of the history of the phenomenological movement correspond to when and where each of the four tendencies have received the predominance of attention. Realistic and constitutive phenomenology continue, but their original and strongest periods were in Germany before and after World War I. The existential period extended from the 1930s to the 1960s and was centered in France. Most of the attention during the hermeneutical period of the 1 960s through 1 980s was in the United States, where phenomenologists numbered not in the scores, but in the hundreds.

With the collapse of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, greater contact with the remarkably enduring Eastern European traditions of phenomenology, the growing interest in phenomenology in Latin America and Asia and indeed most nations, and finally, the increase in international travel and communication, it seems plausible to suppose that the period of American phenomenology is waning and that a fifth and global period is beginning. If so, how the agenda might be reordered or otherwise altered during the phenomenological move to meet the second century remains to be seen. Perhaps there will be a return to philosophical anthropology and reflections relating to ecology, gender, ethnic studies, intercultural phenomenology, and religion, as well as ethics, politics, and philosophy of human and natural kinds science.

CONTRASTS WITH PHENOMENOLOGY

Phenomenology arose in ambivalent interaction with neo-Kantianism and is currently contrasted in the Anglo-American world with analytic philosophy and internationally with Marxism and psychoanalysis. Discussion of these connections may shed further light on precisely who phenomenology is.

Neo-Kantianism: Where the NeoKantian are concerned, as early as 1886 Husserl expressed antipathy, to Hermann Cohen (1842-1918) with respect to concepts and principles of mathematics and higher analysis. In 1908, however, he wrote to Jonas Cohn (1869-1947) that he was himself working on a critique of reason in which the transcendental-logical would be grounded in the transcendental-phenomenological, and in 1925 he admitted to Ernest Cassirer that once he had learned to see Kant's thought in his own perspective, he was able to recognize the value as well as the limits of Kant and to profit from reading him and genuine Kantians.

Husserl's correspondence with Paul Natorp (1854 1924) began in 1894 and focused initially on problems in the philosophy of geometry and space. The latter's review of the Logische Untersuchungen affected the transition to the transcendental-constitutive phenomenology of the Ideen I. But there was still a difference between them concerning beginning from the highest epistemic-critical first principles or, as Husserl advocated, starting at the bottom and advancing, step by step, to the higher levels.

Hermann Cohen began from the fact of scientific knowledge. "Experience" for him is given in the form of science. There is thus no need for intuition. The conditions for the possibility of the fact of science are also the conditions for the possibility of objects of experience. There is no need to appeal to consciousness. As Hans Wagner puts it, what we have is pure noematic that is reflection on what is accepted or posited.

Also, for Natorp, the most radical grounding is not subjective but objective in terms of the lawfulness that constitutes objectivity. He agrees with Husserl's purely objective account of logic in the first volume of the Logische Untersuchungen, the Prolegomema zur reinen Logik (1900), but suspects him of psychologism when he attempts to give logic a phenomenological grounding.

Husserl also opposed the tendency of Marburg neo-Kantians to reduce philosophy to the methodology of the exact sciences. In the absence of a concept of the given, they reduce the object of inquiry to an X for endless determinations. Husserl's ramified concepts of intuition and object and the substantive cognition of essences amount to a protest against this notion of philosophy.

Nicolai Hartmann and Cassirer were in fact influenced by Husserl. Cassirer places great emphasis on the concept of Sinn or meaning, takes the Husserlian hyle-morphe distinction over into his theory of the "symbolic pregnance" of all experience; and uses the phenomenological idea of meaning-fulfillment to discuss the sensuous form of meanings. Hartmann departs from the neo-Kantian conception of philosophy as methodology of science and works out a phenomenologically-oriented ontology. He recognizes the great value of phenomenological method, but supplements it with a method of aporia, which recognizes a metaphysical core of insoluble problems.

Turning now to Martin Heidegger and the neo-Kantians, there is a detailed critique of Natorp in the early Marburg lectures. In particular, Natorp natural psychology is characterized there as "formale Phanomenologie," and Wilhelm Dilthey’s work is said to be close to the origin, while Natorp is far from it. Also on Heidegger's view, Heinrich Rickert (1863-1936) is closer to phenomenology than the Marburg school because, largely under the influence of Emil Lask (1875-1915), Rickert recognizes the undeniable but ultimately irrational aspects of the contents of consciousness, e.g., blue and red as seen patches of color, which cannot be reduced to concepts.

Of all the South German neo-Kantians, Lask stood closest to phenomenology, tried to incorporate Husserl's theory of ideal meanings into his own theory of judgment, and seem to have had a considerable influence on Heidegger's early thinking, especially with his emphasis on irreducible "historical facticity." Although Heidegger profoundly acknowledges the importance of Lask for his own thought, Husserl's response to Lask is less clear; he inclines more toward Rickert.

Basically, transcendental phenomenology and neo-Kantianism had different understandings of Kant, especially of Kant's theory of consciousness, and also of the Kantian transcendental deduction. For phenomenology, the subjective deduction is the more valuable part; for the neo-Kantians, the objective deduction is the core of the argument. Finally, it must be mentioned that there is a different complex relationship in France between existential phenomenology and especially the neo-Kantianism of Leon Brunschvicg (1869-1943), a relationship that has yet to be fully analyzed in the scholarly literature.

 

Analytic philosophy: While neo-Kantianism is the movement that phenomenology chiefly related to in its original development, the major alternative at the end of the 20th century is analytic philosophy. Neither position has a homogeneous doctrine, but there are shared ways of doing philosophy within each. In the case of analytic philosophy, the common assumption is that philosophy has to do with language, while nonlinguistic facts do not belong to its domain, and the treatment of language is often called "analysis"—hence the designation "analytic philosophy." It is analysis either of usage or of meaning; its concern is either with ordinary language or with ideal language (which perspicuously reflects the logical structure of ordinary language); and its goal is either to dissolve philosophical problems ("by letting the fly out of the fly bottle") and thereby to act as a kind of therapy, or to provide, through the analysis of meanings, the foundation for the sciences.

From its inception, phenomenology shared the anti-metaphysical spirit of analytic philosophy, shared a belief in the importance of logic and mathematics for philosophy, and inspired a sort of minute, careful, "ground level" fieldwork avoiding large generalizations. In a letter to Nature of March 14, 1897, Husserl wrote, "Ich bin ein langsamer Denker und bin nicht zufrieden, solange die grosse Noten und Wechsel nicht in bearer Munze in Kleingeld umgesetzt sind" ("I am a slow thinker, and am not satisfied as long as the large banknotes and bills are not turned into small change").

Despite their shared interest in language, meaning, and careful analysis (and in making distinctions), phenomenology and analytic philosophy go their different ways. What divides them is, in the first place, a difference in philosophy of language and meaning. Analytic philosophy, at its inception, subscribed to some variety or other of the verification theory of meaning; then, with the demise of logical positivism, pursued a theory of meaning as use (such as in a language game); and, in its latest phase, has abandoned "meaning" altogether in favor of a purely referential theory or a pragmatist account.

Phenomenology incorporates language into a larger theory of intentionality, so that the meaning of signs is derivative from the meaning of intentional acts. The proximity to Frege has created the impression of a more general proximity of phenomenology and analytic philosophy, the differences notwithstanding. As analytic philosophy abandoned meanings for split references in possible worlds, interpreters of Husserl found their way to construe Husserlian "horizons" as "possible worlds." And as Fregeans in England downplayed the Sinn and came up with a Russellian reading of Frege, some Husserlians downplayed the "noema" in favor of a realistic reading of intentionality. Nevertheless, while some thus tried to relate Husserl and Frege, most of phenomenology continued on its part to tackle larger problems of "the transcendental ego," "constitution of the world," "time," "dasein," etc., in terms that, for analytic thinkers, were too metaphysical, but for phenomenology were intimately involved in all its investigations.

Marxism is another large, global philosophical movement with which phenomenology, initially very different in orientation and origin, came into fruitful contact. Husserl himself does not seem to have had any interest in Marxism. The materialistic underpinning of Marx's thinking provided by Engels must have appeared antithetical to his position, just as the reductionism of much of Marxism and the naively of the Marxist theory of knowledge could not be welcomed by phenomenology. Likewise, the individualistic, ego-centered, transcendental thinking could not but be opposed to the primacy of nature, society, and economics.

However, points of contact between the two movements soon developed. For this to be possible, Marx's own thinking, especially in his early works, had to be separated from the later works and from the ideas of Engels, and the official, dogmatic Marxism of Lenin and Stalin had to be rejected in favor of the hermeneutic strand within phenomenology, the later critique of positivistic science, and the Notedness of science in the lifeworld.

In this Auseinandersetzung, the early work of Gyorgy Lukacs (1885-1971), the existential phenomenology of Sartre, and the radical phenomenology of Enzo Paci naturally came together. Husserl's later conception of history as a practical teleology rooted in the bodily-social activity

of the subject and Marx's emphasis upon "sensuous activity" are brought together by Ludwig Landgrebe. The Marxist struggle against the fetishism of commodities and Husserl's critique of the objectivism of the sciences are brought together by Paci. If the task of phenomenology is to reinstate the genuine subjectivity of human beings, freed from every fetishism and every mask, then the goal of Marxism may be interpreted as restoring to humankind its authentic humanity.

Sartre, in his late work Critique de la raison dialectique (Critique of dialectical reason, 1960) regards Marxism as the "untranscendable philosophy for our time" and tries to reconcile it with his own phenomenological starting point. Simone de Beauvoir characterizes Marxism, at its best, as a "radical humanism," while Merleau-Ponty recognizes and appropriates the Marxist discovery of social existence as the most interior dimension of human subjectivity.

It has also not escaped the notice of many discerning critics that Marxism, at its best, has always been a hermeneutic philosophy that aims at going behind the seeming evidences of direct "seeing" in order to discover the hidden meaning in the historical and social stratum of work, need, and labor.

PSYCHOANALYSIS: Phenomenology's relation to psychoanalysis is not very different from its relation to Marxism. However, in this case, one shall mention that Freud and Husserl were fellow students in Brentano's classes on psychology. Even if Husserl does not speak about Freud, he did come to recognize "unconscious intentionality," and left much room for phenomenology's coming to terms with psychoanalysis. This has happened in many different ways—if we leave aside Sartre's early rejection of the unconscious. Thus one may read psychoanalysis as an "archaeology of the subject" (Ricceour), or follow its lead to dig beneath language for preobjective meaning structures in "expressive flesh" (Merleau-Ponty), or, rejecting a realism of unconscious intentionalities, one may use the Husserlian idea of giving meaning to hyletic data to understand the nature of psychoanalytic therapy. Thus a phenomenological reading of psychoanalysis tends to free psychoanalysis from its self-understanding as a natural science, it rejects a mechanical account of mental life in terms of "repression," and it does not want to posit the unconscious as a theoretical entity for explanatory purposes. The task then has been to open an experiential access into the unconscious, by returning to pre-affective Urassociation within the hyletic field that "awakens" the ego and stimulates it into activity. The other line of approach is to find in Freudian thinking a discovery of the ontological grounding of consciousness, with its intentionalities, in the pre-conscious being of 'desire' through the process of the hermeneutics of "suspicion." Thus, in a variety of ways, phenomenology has contributed, especially amongst French philosophers, to new and creative interpretations and appropriations of Freud's thinking.

ARTICULATIONS OF PHENOMENOLOGY

The word "phenomenology" not only stands for a substantive philosophy (as in the writings of Husserl, in some of Heidegger's works, and in Sartre and Merleau-Ponty), but for a distinctive approach that, applied to a specific domain X, gives rise to what may be called the "phenomenology of X." Thus we have phenomenology of religion, phenomenology of natural science, phenomenology of human science, phenomenology of literature, phenomenology of perception, and so forth.

Then again, sometimes an existing discipline or specialty receives the modifier "phenomenological" when the approach, or even some results of phenomenological philosophy (such as the thesis of intentionality), are adopted or adapted in that discipline. Thus we have phenomenological geography, phenomenological psychiatry, phenomenological sociology, and so forth. These "phenomenological" disciplines vary according to which component they adopt (eidetic description, phenomenological epoche, meaning constitution etc.)

The same sorts of variations occur in the "phenomenology of. . " disciplines. Thus the phenomenology of religion may be descriptive of the essential structures of all religious experience as well as of religious objects; it may be a search for religious meaning and so presuppose a phenomenological reduction; it may be an inquiry into what religions mean for Dasein's being-in-the-world and authenticity, etc.

What is common to these is an experiential approach that does not first decide what the world, or the nature of things, is like and then seeks to fit phenomena to that conception either by reductive or explanatory hypotheses. Instead, it first focuses on the phenomena, on how matters are encountered precisely as they are encountered' and then if needed construes the world so that the phenomena are saved.

And while most of the special employments of phenomenology (both Phenomenology of . . ." and "phenomenological ...") remain satisfied with a reflective and descriptive approach, be it eidetic or an empirical, one should not suppose that the constitutive tendency is a purely philosophical discipline. Schutz's work shows that it does not need to be.

Finally, if an important test of the power of a philosophical movement is how fruitful it has proven in fields other than pure philosophy, then the history of the phenomenological movement bears testimony to the enormous fecundity of phenomenology—compared to which the other philosophical currents of today seem barren.

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