Brian Hamilton-Vise

Phenomenology and Philosophy

This is the first of quite a few posts on phenomenology, I expect, while I spend the next semester digging into the discipline by way of the work of Jean-Luc Marion (bibliography) in a seminar offered by Kevin Hart. More than my first dig into phenomenology, the course is my first serious foray into philosophy–aside from a few scattered introductory courses in undergrad and the occasional Nietzsche or Wittgenstein I’ve managed to get through without any lasting comprehension. Now I’ll get to read through some of Marion’s most important works, as well as Husserl’s Ideas I and hopefully some Heidegger. I’m doing some preliminary reading now that Prof. Hart recommended, Robert Sokolowski’s Introduction to Phenomenology and William J. Richardson’s Heidegger: Through Phenomenology to Thought, both of which are shaping up to be wonderfully helpful. So enough prolegomena, now the real post:

It’s Richardson that prompted this question, though it’s one that had already arisen occasionally in Sokolowski: what is the relation of phenomenology to philosophy? Richardson, in explicating what Heidegger means by “There-being” (Dasein), emphasizes the inextricable finitude of There-being.

bq. …[T]here is a dependence of beings on There-being that they be (manifest). In letting beings be (manifest), however, There-being obviously does not ‘create’ them, but only dis-covers (ent-decken) them, as what they are. What about beings before There-being discovers them? The question cannot be asked as long as one restricts oneself to the focus of sheer phenomenology. (44)

There is an appropriate humility here. Part of what attracts to me Heidegger and his ilk (or really, as I’m discovering, phenomenology itself) is the persistent emphasis on absence, on concealment. Here, perhaps, Christians can see a detailed philosophical account of the necessity of negative theology: a way to make sense of mystery in revelation or distance in presence. Yet may there also (I wonder) be some false humility here, or an absolutism masquerading as humility, that “restricts oneself to the focus of sheer phenomenology” by brute force? My question is whether, for Husserl or Heidegger or any others in this stream, the phenomenological outlook intends to become the philosophical or theological outlook such that whatever falls outside is purview is off-limits.

Sokolowski warned at one point (p. 24) against making abstracta (non-independent parts of some whole) concrete entities in their own right–a worthwhile warning, unless the parts are only phenomenologically non-independent, which distinction S. does not draw. (I’m thinking, most dramatically, of God and world.) And more to the point, Richardson spoke of the dependence of Being upon Dasein, which I don’t yet understand but seems to demonstrate the danger I have in mind. Phenomenologically, are beings and Being moments of (dependent on) each other, or if beings are a moment to Being but not the other way around, what is the status of Being? Or for a less sweeping example, is a fact a moment with respect to its expression in the same way an expression is a moment of a fact? Even if we can’t conceive of facts independent from expressions, even if we want to insist that facts do not “exist” somewhere apart from their expressions, it seems fallacious to accord the two the exact same philosophical status.

Phenomenology sometimes seems to want to overtake philosophy, to become philosophy, to clarify the whole philosophical project and set it on the right track. If it does, do we lose the ability to distinguish between what comes to us and how or by whom it comes to us? If all philosophy is philosophy according to appearances, do we lose something crucial or do we really put philosophy in the place it should have been from the beginning?

But Richardson also sets Heidegger up in a way that suggests something a bit different. According to Richardson, Heidegger agreed with Kant that to the historic disciplines of special metaphysics must be added another question: what is the human person? This is not to move anthropology itself into special metaphysics, but to acknowledge and examine the peculiar ontological structure of the finite one, always first enmeshed and in some way dependent on other beings for its consciousness, asking questions that far exceed itself into pure metaphysics. Thus Heidegger’s early work (at least) is an attempt at a “fundamental ontology.” If Richardson is right here, phenomenology may in some way be prior to other metaphysical disciplines without overtaking them or even playing arbiter. The phenomenological question is one question among several, “fundamental” but not alone. Though I may be identifying Heidegger’s work with phenomenology too much here; I’m not quite clear on the relation between the two yet.

2 January 2007 | Comments (0)
Tags: Phenomenology