Phenomenology 2005

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.

The fourth part of L’Essence de la manifestation is devoted to the sentiments and consitute a quite unique sort of treatise on the passions. Through the analysis of this text, I here show why, according to Michel Henry, scientific treatment of Descartes and the contemporary neurobiologists who are his heirs claim to submit the passions is necessarily mistaken ; why the traditional objectivistic discourses of ph are inevitably deficient ; and finally why Henry’s reflection on the sentiments finds at once its expression and fulfillment in literature.

The purpose of the essay is to demonstrate that Plato’s political thought, such as it is exposed in the Republic, played a decisive role in Heidegger’s implication in national-socialism. The demonstration is divided into three stages: 1. the analysis of the Platonist elements regarding politics in Heidegger’s thought before 1933; 2. the development of his views during the years following the famous Rectoral Address of 1933; 3. a critical reflection in the light of Hannah Arendt on the prejudices involved in the Platonist approach of political matters.

In my paper I examine the question of temporality in Merleau-Ponty’s later phenomenological ontology. The aim of this discussion is to show that Merleau-Ponty’s earlier model of temporality, displayed in his Phenomenology of Perception, is not totally rejected but significantly reworked. While in his earlier work Merleau-Ponty maintains the substantial coincidence of temporality and subjectivity, thus bringing together Husserl’s and Heidegger’s analyses into a creative synthesis, in his later development Merleau-Ponty is no longer satisfied with this result. Accordingly he deepens the aspect of passivity and the bonds that attach the subject to (Raw) Being.

In this communication we have tried to underline the main ideas in the constitution of the system of relevances, using as a support Alfred Schutz’s approach. Their importance in the consolidation of experience at the subjective and especially intersubjective level is to be understood as well in terms of a continuous constitution that they engender. They entertain a relation of interdependence with types and the typification processes. This aspect is also important because it confirms the mobility of the significative “organization” of the consciousness, and more than that, the interaction between this one and the surrounding world, where the other subjects are as well to be included.

In this paper, I discuss about two major Romanian philosophers: Constantin Noica and Alexandru Dragomir. I narrate their spectacular biographies, in order to show how powerful can be the resistance through philosophy, even in the hard times of political totalitarianism, as they were, for the Eastern Europe, under the communist dictatorship. It is true that Noica and Dragomir are two of the most infl uential personalities for the history of phenomenology in Romania. However, their lives also seem to be exemplary for the philosophical life as such, which reveals its intrinsic value when facing the asperities of misfortune.

The concept of intersubjectivity has undergone a strong critique for the fact that the other appears to be constituted by a singular ego through extrapolation from its own “sphere of originality.” Our hypothesis is that the difficulty does not regard the theory of constitution itself, but the fact that the other and the community are thought only in terms of representation. In order to transcend the supposed representational framework of Husserl’s phenomenology, we shall consider the concept of intersubjectivity as an interplay of representational and non-representational modes of encounter.

Husserl’s genetic phenomenology is relied on to make sense of the emergence of attention such as it arises, on the one hand, from bodily gestures and, on the other hand, according to the hypothesis of attentionality as a modulation such as it has begun to be developed through the historical and contemporary contributions of psychology and neurobiology. We attempt to show how the static framework initially advanced is in continuity with the genetic logic that allows us to deepen the hypothesis in questions by confronting the empirical analyses of Stumpf, James, Kulpe, and Tichner.