Late
afternoon. You had McD’s Egg McMuffins and Cokes for a late lunch. Since you
washed the car yesterday afternoon, it was pleasant to be out and about with
the windows down and the sunroof open. You love a clean car. You did have to
replace a convex stick on mirror on the left outside mirror; the other was worn
and had been on the car since 2005. You took it off with an old steak knife and
Goo-Be-Gone. Carol is watering the front lawn after sweeping the back deck of
leaves. - Amorella
1619
hours. I was surprised that the gunk came off the mirror in less than ten
minutes. I have never had to replace a stick-on convex mirror before. It is
good to have a clean car, especially since it has been in the elements for
about the last month as Kessler needed space for supplies, etc, in the garage.
The old Accord still looks good, no rust, minor dings, good tires. We had the
windows darkened for ultraviolet protection, very good tires, new GPS, great radio,
CD/XM and speakers, nice leather interior, tan interior (rare for Honda, in
fact I’ve only seen one other Accord EX with a tan and fake wood interior,
pretty fancy for Honda in the 2005 era). Basically, we still like the car but
for the mileage in city: 19 – 22; otherwise it is 25 – 30 mpg going to and from
Columbus, etc.
You aren’t paying any attention, orndorff. –
Amorella
1634
hours. Sorry. The car stuff isn’t that important, but it does still clean up well. I was just mulling along and forgetting my fingers are constantly working.
Thoughts are what they are when they are,
boy. Post. - Amorella
You do. The concept dances between
heartansoul, boy, not your mind. - Amorella
You are
sitting in the living room facing northwest eyeing the ceiling corner on your
right, which is mostly facing north. Carol just finished her shower and is
going to bed to read, or so it appears. – Amorella
2104
hours. I do eye that corner from time to time. Subconsciously I suppose, I want
a ‘presence’ to appear, subtly of course, a ghostly bat with red eyes (or
green) flying down at me with a dog-like snarl would not make for a good white
China cup of hot English black tea (milk added). I was going to search ‘presence’ (which I have done before) but
came upon a clearer and more distinct word, phenomenology. (2119)
** **
Phenomenology (philosophy)
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Phenomenology (from Greek phainómenon "that which appears"
and lógos "study") is the philosophical study of the
structures of experience and consciousness. As a philosophical movement it was
founded in the early years of the 20th century by Edmund Husserl and was later
expanded upon by a circle of his followers at the universities of Gottingen and
Munich in Germany. It then spread to France, the United States, and elsewhere,
often in contexts far removed from Husserl's early work.
Phenomenology should not be considered as a unitary movement;
rather, different authors share a common family resemblance but also with many
significant differences. Accordingly, “A unique and final definition of
phenomenology is dangerous and perhaps even paradoxical as it lacks a thematic
focus. In fact, it is not a doctrine, nor a philosophical school, but rather a
style of thought, a method, an open and ever-renewed experience having
different results, and this may disorient anyone wishing to define the meaning
of phenomenology”.
Phenomenology, in Husserl's conception, is primarily concerned
with the systematic reflection on and study of the structures of consciousness
and the phenomena that appear in acts of consciousness. Phenomenology can be
clearly differentiated from the Cartesian method of analysis, which sees the
world as objects, sets of objects, and objects acting and reacting upon one
another.
Husserl's
conception of phenomenology has been criticized and developed not only by
himself but also by students, such as Edith Stein and Roman Ingarden, by
hermeneutic philsophers, such as Martin Heidegger, by existentialists, such as
Nicolai Hartmann, Gabriel Marcel, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Jean-Paul Sartre, and
by other philosophers, such as Max Scheler, Paul Ricoeur, Jean-Luc Marion,
Emmanuel Levinas and sociologists Alfred Schutz and Eric Voegelin.
Overview
In its most basic form, phenomenology attempts to create
conditions for the objective study of topics usually regarded as subjective:
consciousness and the content of conscious experiences such as judgments,
perceptions and emotions. Although phenomenology seeks to be scientific, it
does not attempt to study consciousness from the perspective of clinical
psychology or neurology. Instead, it seeks through systematic reflection to
determine the essential properties and structures of experience.
There are several assumptions behind phenomenology that help
explain its foundations:
1
It
rejects the concept of objective research. Phenomenologists prefer grouping
assumptions through a process called phenomenological epoche.
2
Phenomenology
believes that analyzing daily human behavior can provide one with a greater
understanding of nature.
3
Persons
should be explored. This is because persons can be understood through the
unique ways they reflect the society they live in.
4
Phenomenologists
prefer to gather “capta,” or conscious experience, rather than traditional
data.
5
Phenomenology
is considered to be oriented on discovery, and therefore phenomenologists
gather research-using methods that are far less restricting than in other sciences.
Husserl derived many important concepts central to phenomenology
from the works and lectures of his teachers, the philosophers and psychologists
Franz Brentano and Carl Stumph. An important element of phenomenology that
Husserl borrowed from Brentano is intentionality (often described as
"aboutness"), the notion that consciousness is always consciousness of
something.
The object of consciousness is called the intentional object,
and this object is constituted for consciousness in many different ways,
through, for instance, perception, memory, retention and protention,
signification, etc. Throughout these different intentionalities, though they
have different structures and different ways of being "about" the
object, an object is still constituted as the identical object; consciousness is
directed at the same intentional object in direct perception as it is in the
immediately following retention of this object and the eventual remembering of
it.
Though many of the phenomenological methods involve various
reductions, phenomenology is, in essence, anti-recutionistic; the reductions
are mere tools to better understand and describe the workings of consciousness,
not to reduce any phenomenon to these descriptions.
In other words, when a reference is made to a thing's essence
or idea, or when one details the constitution of an identical coherent
thing by describing what one "really" sees as being only these sides
and aspects, these surfaces, it does not mean that the thing is only and
exclusively what is described here: The ultimate goal of these reductions is to
understand how these different aspects are constituted into the actual
thing as experienced by the person experiencing it. Phenomenology is a direct
reaction to the psychologism and physicalism of Husserl's time.
Although previously employed by Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel in
his Phenomenology of Spirit, it was
Husserl's adoption of this term (circa 1900) that propelled it into becoming
the designation of a philosophical school.
As a philosophical perspective, phenomenology is its method,
though the specific meaning of the term varies according to how it is conceived
by a given philosopher. As envisioned by Husserl, phenomenology is a method of
philosophical inquiry that rejects the rationalist bias that has dominated
Western thought since Plato in favor of a method of reflective attentiveness
that discloses the individual's "lived experience."
Loosely rooted in an epistemological device, with Sceptic roots,
called epoche, Husserl's method entails the suspension of judgment while
relying on the intuitive grasp of knowledge, free of presuppositions and
intellectualizing. Sometimes depicted as the "science of experience,"
the phenomenological method is rooted in intentionality, Husserl's theory of
consciousness (developed from Brentano).
Intentionality represents an alternative to the representational
theory of consciousness, which holds that reality cannot be grasped directly
because it is available only through perceptions of reality that are
representations of it in the mind. Husserl countered that consciousness is not
"in" the mind but rather conscious of something other than itself
(the intentional object), whether the object is a substance or a figment of
imagination (i.e., the real processes associated with and underlying the
figment). Hence the phenomenological method relies on the description of
phenomena as they are given to consciousness, in their immediacy.
According to Maurice Natanson (1973, p. 63), "The
radicality of the phenomenological method is both continuous and discontinuous
with philosophy's general effort to subject experience to fundamental, critical
scrutiny: to take nothing for granted and to show the warranty for what we
claim to know." In practice, it entails an unusual combination of
discipline and detachment to suspend, or bracket, theoretical explanations and
second-hand information while determining one's "naive" experience of
the matter.
The phenomenological method serves to momentarily erase the
world of speculation by returning the subject to his or her primordial
experience of the matter, whether the object of inquiry is a feeling, an idea,
or a perception.
According to Husserl the suspension of belief in what we
ordinarily take for granted or infer by conjecture diminishes the power of what
we customarily embrace as objective reality. According to Rudiger Safranski (1998,
72), "[Husserl and his followers'] great ambition was to disregard
anything that had until then been thought or said about consciousness or the
world [while] on the lookout for a new way of letting the things [they
investigated] approach them, without covering them up with what they already
knew."
Martin Heidegger modified Husserl's conception of phenomenology
because of (what Heidegger perceived as) Husserl's subjectivist tendencies.
Whereas Husserl conceived humans as having been constituted by states of
consciousness, Heidegger countered that consciousness is peripheral to the
primacy of one's existence (i.e., the mode of being of Dasein), which cannot be
reduced to one's consciousness of it.
From this angle, one's state of mind is an "effect"
rather than a determinant of existence, including those aspects of existence
that one is not conscious of.
By shifting the center of gravity from consciousness
(psychology) to existence (ontology), Heidegger altered the subsequent
direction of phenomenology. As one consequence of Heidegger's modification of
Husserl's conception, phenomenology became increasingly relevant to
psychoanalysis. Whereas Husserl gave priority to a depiction of consciousness
that was fundamentally alien to the psychoanalytic conception of the
unconscious, Heidegger offered a way to conceptualize experience that could
accommodate those aspects of one's existence that lie on the periphery of
sentient awareness.
. . .
Varieties of phenomenology
The Encyclopedia of Phenomenology (Kluwer Academic
Publishers, 1997, Dordrecht and Boston) features separate articles on the
following seven types of phenomenology:
(1) Transcendental constitutive phenomenology studies how
objects are constituted in transcendental consciousness, setting aside
questions of any relation to the natural world.
(2) Naturalistic constitutive phenomenology (see
naturalism) studies how consciousness constitutes things in the world of
nature, assuming with the natural attitude that consciousness is part of
nature.
(3) Existential phenomenology studies concrete human existence,
including our experience of free choice and/or action in concrete situations.
(4) Generative historicist phenomenology (see historicism)
studies how meaning—as found in our experience—is generated in historical
processes of collective experience over time.
(5) Genetic phenomenology studies the emergence/genesis
of meanings of things within one's own stream of experience.
(6) Hermeneutical phenomenology (also hermeneutic
phenomenology or post-phenomenology/postphenomenology
elsewhere; see hermenueutics) studies interpretive structures of experience.
(7) Realistic phenomenology (also realist phenomenology
elsewhere) studies the structure of consciousness and intentionality as
"it occurs in a real world that is largely external to consciousness and
not somehow brought into being by consciousness.” . . .
Intentionality
Intentionality refers to the notion that consciousness is always
the consciousness of something. The word itself should not be confused
with the "ordinary" use of the word intentional, but should rather be
taken as playing on the etymological roots of the word. Originally, intention
referred to a "stretching out" ("in tension," from Latin intendere),
and in this context it refers to consciousness "stretching out"
towards its object. However, one should be careful with this image: there is
not some consciousness first that, subsequently, stretches out to its object;
rather, consciousness occurs as the simultaneity of a conscious act and
its object.
Intentionality is often summed up as "aboutness."
Whether this something that consciousness is about is in direct
perception or in fantasy is inconsequential to the concept of intentionality
itself; whatever consciousness is directed at, that is what
consciousness is conscious of. This means that the object of consciousness
doesn't have to be a physical object apprehended in perception:
it can just as well be a fantasy or a memory. Consequently, these
"structures" of consciousness, i.e., perception, memory, fantasy,
etc., are called intentionalities.
The term "intentionality" originated with the
Scholastics in the medieval period and was resurrected by Brentano who in turn
influenced Husserl’s conception of phenomenology, who refined the term and made
it the cornerstone of his theory of consciousness. The meaning of the term is
complex and depends entirely on how it is conceived by a given philosopher. The
term should not be confused with “intention” or the psychoanalytic conception
of unconscious “motive” or “gain.”
Intuition
Intuition in phenomenology refers to those cases where the
intentional object is directly present to the intentionality at play; if the
intention is "filled" by the direct apprehension of the object, you
have an intuited object. Having a cup of coffee in front of you, for instance,
seeing it, feeling it, or even imagining it - these are all filled intentions,
and the object is then intuited. The same goes for the apprehension of
mathematical formulae or a number. If you do not have the object as referred to
directly, the object is not intuited, but still intended, but then emptily.
Examples of empty intentions can be signitive intentions - intentions that only
imply or refer to their objects.
Evidence
In everyday language, we use the word evidence to signify a
special sort of relation between a state of affairs and a proposition: State A
is evidence for the proposition "A is true." In phenomenology, however,
the concept of evidence is meant to signify the "subjective achievement of
truth."
This is not an attempt to reduce the objective sort of evidence
to subjective "opinion," but rather an attempt to describe the
structure of having something present in intuition with the addition of having
it present as intelligible: "Evidence is the successful
presentation of an intelligible object, the successful presentation of
something whose truth becomes manifest in the evidencing itself."
Noesis and noema
In Husserl's phenomenology, which is quite common, this pair of
terms, derived from the Greek nous (mind),
designate respectively the real content, noesis, and the ideal content, noema,
of an intentional act (an act of consciousness).
The Noesis is the part of the act that gives it a particular
sense or character (as in judging or perceiving something, loving or hating it,
accepting or rejecting it, and so on). This is real in the sense that it is
actually part of what takes place in the consciousness (or psyche) of the
subject of the act.
The Noesis is always correlated with a Noema; for Husserl, the
full Noema is a complex ideal structure comprising at least a noematic sense
and a noematic core. The correct interpretation of what Husserl meant by the Noema has long been
controversial, but the noematic sense is generally understood as the ideal
meaning of the act and the noematic core as the act's referent or object as
it is meant in the act. One element of controversy is whether this noematic
object is the same as the actual object of the act (assuming it exists) or is
some kind of ideal object.
Empathy and intersubjectivity
In phenomenology, empathy refers to the experience of one's own
body as another. While we often identify others with their physical
bodies, this type of phenomenology requires that we focus on the subjectivity of
the other, as well as our intersubjective engagement with them. In Husserl's
original account, this was done by a sort of apperception built on the
experiences of your own lived-body.
The lived body is your
own body as experienced by yourself, as yourself. Your own body
manifests itself to you mainly as your possibilities of acting in the world. It
is what lets you reach out and grab something, for instance, but it also, and
more importantly, allows for the possibility of changing your point of view.
This helps you differentiate one thing from another by the experience of moving
around it, seeing new aspects of it (often referred to as making the absent
present and the present absent), and still retaining the notion that this is
the same thing that you saw other aspects of just a moment ago (it is
identical). Your body is also experienced as a duality, both as object (you can
touch your own hand) and as your own subjectivity (you experience being
touched).
The experience of your own body as your own subjectivity is then
applied to the experience of another's body, which, through apperception, is
constituted as another subjectivity. You can thus recognise the Other's
intentions, emotions, etc. This experience of empathy is important in the
phenomenological account of intersubjectivity. In phenomenology,
intersubjectivity constitutes objectivity (i.e., what you experience as
objective is experienced as being intersubjectively available - available to
all other subjects. This does not imply that objectivity is reduced to
subjectivity nor does it imply a relativist position, cf. for instance
intersubjective verifiability).
In the experience of intersubjectivity, one also experiences oneself
as being a subject among other subjects, and one experiences oneself as
existing objectively for these Others; one experiences oneself as the
noema of Others' noeses, or as a subject in another's empathic experience. As
such, one experiences oneself as objectively existing subjectivity.
Intersubjectivity is also a part in the constitution of one's lifeworld,
especially as "homeworld."
Lifeworld
The lifeworld (German: Lebenswelt) is the
"world" each one of us lives in. One could call it the
"background" or "horizon" of all experience, and it is that
on which each object stands out as itself (as different) and with the meaning
it can only hold for us. The lifeworld is both personal and intersubjective (it
is then called a "homeworld"), and, as such, it does not enclose each
one of us in a solus ipse.
Husserl's Logische
Untersuchungen (1900/1901)
In the first edition of the Logical Investigations, still
under the influence of Brentano, Husserl describes his position as
"descriptive psychology." Husserl analyzes the intentional structures
of mental acts and how they are directed at both real and ideal objects. The
first volume of the Logical Investigations, the Prolegomena to Pure
Logic, begins with a devastating critique of psychologism, i.e., the
attempt to subsume the a priori validity of the laws of logic under
psychology. Husserl establishes a separate field for research in logic,
philosophy, and phenomenology, independently from the empirical sciences.
Transcendental phenomenology
after the Ideen in 1913
Some years after the publication of the Logical
Investigations, Husserl made some key elaborations that led him to the
distinction between the act of consciousness (noesis) and the phenomena
at which it is directed (the noemata).
•
"noetic"
refers to the intentional act of consciousness (believing, willing, etc.)
•
"noematic"
refers to the object or content (noema), which appears in the noetic acts (the
believed, wanted, hated, and loved ...).
•
What we observe is not the object as it is in itself, but how
and inasmuch it is given in the intentional acts. Knowledge of essences would
only be possible by "bracketing" all assumptions about the existence
of an external world and the inessential (subjective) aspects of how the object
is concretely given to us. This procedure Husserl called epoché.
Husserl in a later period concentrated more on the ideal,
essential structures of consciousness. As he wanted to exclude any hypothesis
on the existence of external objects, he introduced the method of
phenomenological reduction to eliminate them. What was left over was the pure
transcendental ego, as opposed to the concrete empirical ego.
Now Transcendental Phenomenology is the study of the essential
structures that are left in pure consciousness: This amounts in practice to the
study of the noemata and the relations among them. The philosopher Theodor
Adorno criticised Husserl's concept of phenomenological epistemology in his
metacritique Against Epistemology, which is anti-foundationalist in its
stance. . . .
Realist phenomenology
After Husserl's publication of the Ideen in 1913, many
phenomenologists took a critical stance towards his new theories. Especially
the members of the Munich group distanced themselves from his new
transcendental phenomenology and preferred the earlier realist phenomenology of
the first edition of the Logical Investigations. . . .
Existential phenomenology
Existential phenomenology differs from transcendental
phenomenology by its rejection of the transcendental ego. Merleau-Ponty objects
to the ego's transcendence of the world, which for Husserl leaves the world
spread out and completely transparent before the conscious. Heidegger thinks of
a conscious being as always already in the world. Transcendence is maintained
in existential phenomenology to the extent that the method of phenomenology
must take a presuppositionless starting point - transcending claims about the
world arising from, for example, natural or scientific attitudes or theories of
the ontological nature of the world.
While Husserl thought of philosophy as a scientific discipline
that had to be founded on a phenomenology understood as epistemology, Martin
Heidegger held a radically different view. Heidegger himself states their
differences this way:
For Husserl, the phenomenological reduction is the method of
leading phenomenological vision from the natural attitude of the human being
whose life is involved in the world of things and persons back to the
transcendental life of consciousness and its noetic-noematic experiences, in
which objects are constituted as correlates of consciousness. For us,
phenomenological reduction means leading phenomenological vision back from the
apprehension of a being, whatever may be the character of that apprehension, to
the understanding of the Being of this being (projecting upon the way it is
unconcealed).
According to Heidegger, philosophy was not at all a scientific
discipline, but more fundamental than science itself.
According to him science is only one way of knowing the world
with no special access to truth. Furthermore, the scientific mindset itself is
built on a much more "primordial" foundation of practical, everyday
knowledge. Husserl was skeptical of this approach, which he regarded as
quasi-mystical, and it contributed to the divergence in their thinking.
Instead of taking phenomenology as prima philosophia or a
foundational discipline, Heidegger took it as a metaphysical ontology: "being
is the proper and sole theme of philosophy... this means that philosophy is
not a science of beings but of being." Yet to
confuse phenomenology and ontology is an obvious error. Phenomena are not the
foundation or Ground of Being.
Neither are they appearances, for, as Heidegger argues in Being and Time, an appearance is
"that which shows itself in something else," while a phenomenon is
"that which shows itself in itself."
While for Husserl, in the epoché, being appeared only as a
correlate of consciousness, for Heidegger being is the starting point. While
for Husserl we would have to abstract from all concrete determinations of our
empirical ego, to be able to turn to the field of pure consciousness, Heidegger
claims that "the possibilities and destinies of philosophy are bound up
with man's existence, and thus with temporality and with historicality."
However, ontological being and existential being are different
categories, so Heidegger's conflation of these categories is, according to
Husserl's view, the root of Heidegger's error. Husserl charged Heidegger with
raising the question of ontology but failing to answer it, instead switching
the topic to the Dasein, the only being for whom Being is an issue.
That is neither ontology nor phenomenology, according to
Husserl, but merely abstract anthropology. To clarify, perhaps, by abstract
anthropology, as a non-existentialist searching for essences, Husserl rejected
the existentialism implicit in Heidegger's distinction between being (sein) as
things in reality and Being (Dasein) as the encounter with being, as when being
becomes present to us, that is, is unconcealed. . . .
Eastern thought
Some researchers in phenomenology (in particular in reference to
Heidegger's legacy) see possibilities of establishing dialogues with traditions
of thought outside of the so-called Western philosophy, particularly with
respect to East-Asian thinking, and despite perceived differences between
"Eastern" and "Western". Furthermore, it has been claimed
that a number of elements within phenomenology (mainly Heidegger's thought)
have some resonance with Eastern philosophical ideas, particularly with Zen
Buddhism and Taoism. . . .
Technoethics
Phenomenological approach to technology
James Moor has argued that computers show up policy vacuums that
require new thinking and the establishment of new policies. Others have argued
that the resources provided by classical ethical theory such as utilitarianism,
consequentialism and deontological ethics is more than enough to deal with all
the ethical issues emerging from our design and use of information technology.
For the phenomenologist the ‘impact view’ of technology as well
as the constructivist view of the technology/society relationships is valid but
not adequate (Heidegger 1977, Borgmann 1985, Winograd and Flores 1987, Ihde
1990, Dreyfus 1992, 2001). They argue that these accounts of technology, and
the technology/society relationship, posit technology and society as if
speaking about the one does not immediately and already draw upon the other for
its ongoing sense or meaning. For the phenomenologist, society and technology co-constitute
each other; they are each other's ongoing condition, or possibility for being
what they are. For them technology is not just the artifact. Rather, the
artifact already emerges from a prior ‘technological’ attitude towards the
world (Heidegger 1977).
Heidegger’s approach (pre-technological age)
For Heidegger the essence of technology is the way of being of
modern humans—a way of conducting themselves towards the world—that sees the
world as something to be ordered and shaped in line with projects, intentions
and desires—a ‘will to power’ that manifests itself as a ‘will to technology'.
Heidegger claims that there were other times in human history, a pre-modern
time, where humans did not orient themselves towards the world in a
technological way—simply as resources for our purposes.
However, according to Heidegger this ‘pre-technological’ age (or
mood) is one where humans’ relation with the world and artifacts, their way of
being disposed, was poetic and aesthetic rather than technological (enframing).
There are many who disagree with Heidegger's account of the modern
technological attitude as the ‘enframing’ of the world. For example, Andrew
Feenberg argues that Heidegger's account of modern technology is not borne out
in contemporary everyday encounters with technology.
The Hubert Dreyfus approach (contemporary society)
In critiquing
the artificial intelligence (AI) programme, Hubert Dreyfus (1992) argues that
the way skill development has become understood in the past has been wrong. He
argues, this is the model that the early artificial intelligence community
uncritically adopted. In opposition to this view, he argues, with Heidegger,
that what we observe when we learn a new skill in everyday practice is in fact
the opposite.
We most often
start with explicit rules or preformulated approaches and then move to a
multiplicity of particular cases, as we become an expert.
His argument
draws directly on Heidegger's account in Being and Time of humans as beings
that are always already situated in-the-world. As humans ‘in-the-world’, we are
already experts at going about everyday life, at dealing with the subtleties of
every particular situation; that is why everyday life seems so obvious.
Thus, the
intricate expertise of everyday activity is forgotten and taken for granted by
AI as an assumed starting point. What Dreyfus highlighted in his critique of AI
was the fact that technology (AI algorithms) does not make sense by itself.
It is the
assumed, and forgotten, horizon of everyday practice that makes technological
devices and solutions show up as meaningful. If we are to understand technology
we need to ‘return’ to the horizon of meaning that made it show up as the
artifacts we need, want and desire. We need to consider how these technologies
reveal (or disclose) us.
Selected and
edited from Wikipedia
** **
2225 hours. This article has taken some time
to read and edit. This article fills the basics in terms of my concepts of
reality. I have read many of the major philosophers in the above article though
it was mostly during the 1960’s. I see the above in bits of world theatre/literature
as well as in modern films and plenty of it between the lines in the whole of
this EIM blog and my Merlyn books. – rho
Well, orndorff, you are pumped with external
intellectual reinforcement; something not too common in your line of thinking. Enjoy,
and have a good sleep. Post. – Amorella
2232
hours. I understand the article above; I understand it beyond the words.
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