Phenomenology 2010

In this essay, I extend my conception of emotional trauma as a shattering of the tranquilizing “absolutisms of everyday life” that shield us from our finitude and our existential vulnerability, to a consideration of collective trauma. Using the collective trauma of 9/11 and its aftermath as my prime example, I illustrate how traumatized people fall prey to “resurrective ideologies” that promise to restore the sheltering illusions that have been lost. I suggest that an alternative to these grandiose illusions can be found in our “kinship-in-finitude.”

French philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty and American novelist and journalist James Agee are credited with inspiring a novice in phenomenological research inquiry to see the lifeworld freshly. Insights derived from their works were particularly relevant to nursing studies of ill persons whose bodies had become obstacles rather than enablers and whose worlds had shrunk to windowless hospital rooms. Both Merleau-Ponty and Agee provided guidance regarding genuine dialogue with other persons, discovering deeper meaning in the words and phrases spoken by interviewees, and the vibrant writing that “opens a new field or a new dimension” to the reader of the research report.

Stipulating that human being-in-the-world lies at the basis of phenomenological psychiatry, we move from the phenomenological notion of the correlation of experiencing subject with his or her experienced world to the level of the organism-environment relationship. Fundamental agreements between Hans Jonas’s and George Canguilhem’s philosophical biologies are shown. These agreements lie in elaborations of the “dynamic polarities” that relate the organism to its environment and the “norms” that preside over this relatedness. Three constituents of this relationship as explicated by Jonas are summarized: (1) since the organism is always threatened with nonbeing, it must of necessity always re-achieve its continued being by its own activity, (2) organisms are both enclosed within themselves, while they are also ceaselessly reaching out to their environments and interacting with them, and (3) organisms are both dependent on their own material components at any given moment and independent of any particular collection of these components across time. Since these three constituents of the organism-environment relationship are governed by norms the organism is also seen to valorize certain aspects of its environmentand not others.In accordance with Canguilhem’s conception of pathology as both restricting the organism’s possibilities and causing pain and suffering, we examine two personality types, the anti-social personality and the type that H. Tellenbach and A. Kraus call typus melancholicus. Changes in social environments greatly alter what can be termed the “pathology” of these personality types.We conclude by invoking Erwin Straus on the differences between norm and pathology of I-world relationships.

Reflecting upon these fifty years of wandering experiences among multiple psychologies, the author attempted an explication of the values that governed his wanderings and identified some thirty insights regarding their essential meanings. Every psychology student today has to live with the chaotic multiplicity of psychologies. How could a novice, a teacher, a researcher and/or a theoretician live with it? Advices from a few sages were consulted. The theoretical problem of integrating the multiple psychologies emerged. The author proposes that phenomenological psychology is capable of and thus responsible for contributing toward creating a cosmos among the multiple psychologies.

After presenting a brief history of my involvement in clinical settings during my twenty-some odd years at Vanderbilt, I turn to some of the specific questions ingredient to that involvement as a phenomenologist. Every such encounter is not only context-specific, structured by every participant’s biographical situation. Gurwitsch’s analysis of context provides a key way to understanding this complexity. Among the clearest challenge is understanding the presence of multiple narratives, most of them only partially unfolded but all of them situationally determined. This feature makes prominent the serious question of writing about the unique and individual: the delicate process of negotiation and compromise that characterizes human relationships in general and in particular underlies any clinical interaction. This leads to a brief analysis of the ethics consultant’s involvement, which is at once therapeutic and diagnostic: figuring out what’s going on and on that basis, determining how best to be helpful in resolving whatever problems are eventually identified and clarified. A brief historical excursus is presented to help clarify this complex of issues. Ethicists are hunters and gatherers at the same time, listeners and collectors of the almost always partial stories which make up any and every clinical encounter. Beyond attending to these stories, ethics consultants are also witnesses and guarantors, ensuring that every clinical narrative has its chance to be told and receives its appropriate hearing, that every “voice” has its chance to be heard.

Merleau-Ponty’s appropriation of Husserl’s reference to the lived body as a “remarkably incompletely constituted thing” transforms the sense of the phrase. My aim is to recover Husserl’s original sense by turning not only to his writings, but to the relevant experiential evidence. I show that any attempt to account for the constitution of the body as a thing necessarily presupposes a body that is constituting rather than constituted, then suggest how “constitution” can be understood methodologically rather than metaphysically, concluding with some reflections on how descriptions produced through Husserlian phenomenological practice both sustain and outrun specific positions in phenomenological philosophy.

Beginning from the equivalence of “A warrior ought to be courageous” and “A courageous warrior is good” in Husserl’s Prolegomena, the attempt is made to show how what these statements refer to are constituted in processes especially of valuing and are justified.

In what follows, I address the question of origins in the framework of Husserlian phenomenology. I argue that both the sense and the methodological justification of the phenomenological question of origins derive from the problematics of the horizon. I show that Husserl’s notion of the horizon entails two dimensions of sense: the horizon is a horizon of reference and of validity. As a system of reference, the horizon embraces all the implications that each appearance draws to other appearances. The qualification of the horizon as a system of validity entails a further realization that an actual appearance entails references not only to other actual appearances, but also, and even more importantly, to other potential modes of appearances. I interpret the phenomenological question of origins as the question that traces the concealed senseaccomplishments, which qualify the sense of any appearing objectivity. On the basis of what is stated above, I argue that (1) the horizon as a system of validity clarifies the sense of the question of origins, and that (2) the possibility of the question of origins is secured by the horizon as a system of reference.

In The Crisis of the European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology (1936) Edmund Husserl describes how the crisis of the European sciences represents a crisis of European humanity, which in turn involves a crisis of human identity. In Violence and Identity: The Illusion of Destiny (2006) Amartya Sen explains how some human beings get others to see themselves in terms of a singular unique identity instead of in terms of their disparate but shared identities. This paper investigates Husserl’s and Sen’s approaches to human identity and diversity and explores their respective applications to and implications for humanity, rationality, and solidarity.

Max Scheler’s late work takes a peculiar turn toward a more speculative approach to phenomenology, particularly the work carried out under the titles of philosophical anthropology and metaphysics. I argue in this paper that this shift in Scheler’s approach does not render this late work as abstract, but rather deepens his investigations into the meaning the most fundamental and concrete human act, the act of love. Scheler’s late work ultimately demonstrates that loving is the task of being human.

The paper evaluates two theses central to Max Scheler’s philosophy of religion: that essential knowledge of God is universal to humankind, and that this knowledge is irreducible to any experience outside itself. We examine the phenomenology of the fivefold process whereby we obtain knowledge of the Absolute. The conclusion is that the first thesis is plausible, and the second less so. However, the defense of the second thesis led Scheler to a fruitful phenomenology of religious experience as seeing the world in the light of God. The paper evaluates this world-view as an alternative to the scientific Weltanschauung.

This small essay is part of a book project called “Early Twentieth Century Continental Philosophy: Towards the Outside” (under contract with Indiana University Press). Examining key texts in Bergson, Freud, Husserl, Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, and Foucault, the book lays out a kind of narrative. The narrative aims to show that these thinkers contain conceptual components from which emerges a research program. There are four components: the overcoming of metaphysics (understood as Platonism); the starting point in immanent, subjective experience; the transformation of immanence into multiplicity; and a new form of thinking adequate to multiplicity. The crucial component is the transformation of immanence into multiplicity. Multiplicity is the outside.

Heidegger’s turn to Being-in-the-World accentuates how human beings have access to the world. Heidegger’s destructive retrieval makes possible the unveiling of hidden Being and the recovery of community that Husserl’s solispsism overlooks. Through Ereignis, Vorsicht, and the falling silent of language on the way to Being, Heidegger’s later thought can achieve the synthesis of multiplicity and unity that Hegel and Derrida were unable to find.

“Hell is other people,” but the absence of the Other, rather than being paradise, would be its own kind of hell: the fatalism of dreams, in which a possibility is no sooner conceived than it is realized. Freedom of action requires a resisting world and a temporal gap between intention and outcome, which requires that things be other than they are for consciousness, which requires the presence of the Other.

Sartre’s Being and Nothingness intends to establish a “phenomenology of action,” where being-for-itself is structured by the law of consciousness and intentionality. Choice organizes the situation while being determined by the limitation of facticity. Anguish and nausea are twin structures that concern the breakdown of the for-itself’s relation to its freedom and to objects as meaningful, respectively. Sartre’s The Imaginary clarifies the central conceit of the novel Nausea. Finally, the discussion of anguish and nausea provide central insights into Sartre’s theory of subjectivity and phenomenology of action.

This essay argues that Sartre’s notion of bad faith cannot be adequately understood, unless one takes the latter half of Being and Nothingness into serious consideration. Sartre employs a Cartesian methodology; consequently, his analysis proceeds from abstract simples to complex, concrete wholes. As his analysis becomes progressively concrete, Sartre revises two abstract claims made early in the text. Only after one appreciates that Sartre, strictly speaking, abandons a non-egological view of consciousness and an absolute view of freedom can one make sense out of several especially vexing features of bad faith.

In this paper, I suggest that Merleau-Ponty’s discussion of anonymity in the Phenomenology of Perception bears a strong resemblance to Luce Irigaray’s discussions of the elemental. I argue that reading these two accounts together helps to counter some of the critiques waged by feminists against the language of anonymity, because anonymity—like the elemental—does not in fact function as a positive substratum that would shore up sameness and prevent the rupture of difference. Instead, anonymity names the way in which the subject is always already disrupted by its encounter with and belonging-to the natural world.

This essay compares artistic and phenomenological methods to show how Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s artistic examples develop his method as a distinctly active and transformative phenomenology. This reverses one view that artists complete something like a phenomenological reduction in order to more adequately express the given. Instead, Merleau-Ponty turns to artists who manipulate, torment, and deflagrate being. Rather than avoiding presuppositions, artists employ them through passively constituted habits to see how they change and are reciprocally changed by their materials. Finally, rather than identifying certain artists or works as phenomenological, this recognizes Merleau-Ponty as ushering in a distinctly aesthetic method of phenomenology.