Introduction Geniusas, Saulius
The Origins of the Horizon in Husserl’s Phenomenology,
06/2012
Book Chapter
This chapter aims to introduce the reader to the central themes explored in the next 12 chapters. With this in mind, the chapter draws a distinction between the horizon as an everyday word and the ...horizon as a philosophical concept. The chapter also provides a brief philosophical history of the horizon by tracing how this notion has been employed starting with the Liber de causis and ending with Nietzsche and Dilthey. I argue that despite the various ways in which the notion of the horizon has been employed in the history of philosophy, Husserl was the first to provide this notion with a specifically philosophical determination. The chapter shows how the notion of the horizon is to be conceived as a phenomenological notion as well as clarifies how the question of origins is to be understood in the subsequent analysis. Finally, the chapter clarifies the structure of the following investigation and explores the motivating factors that underlie an inquiry into the origins of the horizon.
I will discuss the development of Husserl’s concept of the ego by concentrating on two central traits. In the first part I will present the different concepts of the ego starting with the Logical ...Investigations via Ideas I and II up to the first traces of genetic phenomenology. In the second part I will concentrate on the concept of the Ur-Ich (Arch-ego) in late genetic phenomenology. The concept of the Ur-Ich is to be found in the Bernau Manuscripts (1917/18), in the C-Manuscripts (1929-1934) and in the Crisis (1936). The Ur-Ich is still a difficult theme for the interpreters of Husserlian phenomenology because Husserl was not very elaborate in his treatment of this topic. The whole presentation is a kind of “history of the ego in Husserl,” but it is nevertheless quite a complicated story.
This is the first book-length philosophical study of Husserl’s transcendental phenomenology and Freud’s theory of the unconscious. The book investigates the possibility for Husserl’s transcendental ...phenomenology to clarify Freud’s concept of the unconscious with a focus on the theory of repression as its centre. Repression is the unconscious activity of pushing something away from consciousness, while making sure that it remains active as something foreign within us. How this is possible is the main problem addressed in the work. Unlike previous literature (including Ricœur, Merleau-Ponty and Derrida) this book makes full use of the resources of genetic phenomenology and passivity in the attempt to clarify the Freudian unconscious. The central argument developed is that the structure of the lebendige Gegenwart as the core of Husserl’s theory of passivity consists of preliminary forms of bodily kinaesthesia, feelings and drives in a constantly ongoing process where repression occurs as a necessary part of all constitution. The clarification of Freudian repression thus takes place by showing how it presupposes a broad conception of consciousness such as that presented by Husserl’s genetic phenomenology. By arguing that “repression” is central to any philosophical account of subjectivity, this book takes on the most distinct challenge to philosophy posed by Freud.
Is a phenomenology of sleep possible? If sleep is the complete absence of experience, including the self-experience of consciousness itself, how can phenomenology, as a description of lived ...experience, have access to a condition that is neither lived nor experienced? In this paper, I respond directly and indirectly to Jean-Luc Nancy’s challenge that a phenomenology of sleep is impossible. As an indirect response, my sketch of the contours of phenomenology of sleep investigates Husserl’s employment of the distinction between sleep and wakefulness as a metaphor. Specifically, the metaphorical characterization of retentional consciousness is assessed. On the basis of this metaphorical characterization of time-consciousness in terms of sleep and wakefulness, I turn to Husserl’s account of the constitution of sleep. I argue that Husserl’s phenomenology of time-consciousness remains incomplete without an account of “sleep-consciousness” (by which we mean, in a restricted manner, dreamless sleep). In pursuing Husserl’s phenomenological account of sleep, falling asleep and waking up within the context of his genetic phenomenology, I offer a suggestion for how to understand the sense in which consciousness (temporarily) constitutes itself as sleep – as the absence of itself. I conclude with an analogy with Husserl’s investigations into the imaginary: in both instances, consciousness induces within itself its own suspension or self-abstention. In the particular instance of sleep, consciousness disengages itself entirely from the complex of interests while also immunizing itself to the force of affectivity.
The chapter studies the reception that Gestalt psychological theories were given by phenomenologists in Germany and France in the first half of the twentieth century. The aim is to study, in ...particular, the reactions of two phenomenologists, Edmund Husserland Maurice Merleau-Ponty. The chapter focuses on these two thinkers in order to explicate the main idea of the phenomenological-transcendental critique of psychological theories. The interpretative claim is that Merleau-Ponty followed Husserl in defining phenomenological philosophy by its radical task in providing a transcendental basis for all experience and knowledge. He thus came to argue that psychological theories, Gestalt theories included, must be submitted to a phenomenological-transcendental critique. Despite their apparent differences, Merleau-Ponty and Husserl agreed that no empirical or wordly knowledge – psychological, anthropological or natural scientific~– can overrule radical philosophical reflections in the grounding of the positive sciences. Before entering into Gestalt-theoretical and phenomenological sources, the chapter briefly discusses the historical relations between the two fields of research. The connections are to be found in common conceptions of parts and wholes, both approaches being influenced by Brentano’s distinctions between different kinds of parts. The disparity concerns the role of consciousness in the institution and establishment of meaning.
In the first part, the author will discuss Husserl’s understanding of “time” and “genesis” in the Logical Investigations (around 1900), and the possible relation of “time” and “genesis”, though in ...that work Husserl himself did not put the two into any kind of relationship – not even one of opposition. Only through some fragmental statements can we realize Husserl’s focus on “analyses of time” and his exclusion of “analyses of genesis”. In the second part, the author will represent Husserl’s attitude toward the analysis of “time” and “genesis” in the Lectures (around 1917). Unlike the period of the Logical Investigations, Husserl discussed these themes together in the lectures, and he tried to grasp their immanent relationship. Part Three discusses Husserl’s thought of “time” and “genesis” in the period of the Cartesian Meditations (around 1928). This thought in his manuscripts in 1921 found its expression in a discussion of the relationship between static phenomenology, which takes “transverse intentionality” (Querintentionalität) as its theme, and genetic phenomenology, which takes “horizontal intentionality” (Längsintentionalität) as its theme. It is likely that this thought led Husserl to consider “time” as “the universal form of all geneses of egology” in the Cartesian Meditations. Starting from here, in the fourth part, the historical dimension came into Husserl’s horizon. First and foremost, the historical dimension concerns the way and the sphere in which history is studied, i.e., studies of the universal form of history and the constitution of history for the ego. The fifth part is a further investigation of Husserlian phenomenology of history, especially clarifying the immanent relationship between history, time and genesis in Husserl’s late thought. This part also includes a general review of the theory and practice of his phenomenology of history, and the possible connection and difference between the “form” and “content” of his phenomenology of history.
There are many forms of subjectivity and intersubjectivity and this constitutes a complex problem in the phenomenology of Edmund Husserl and in the philosophy inspired by it as well. This essay will ...look at this problem in the connection to the phenomenological reduction as methodological access to it, and to the interpretations of the thesis that subjectivity is intersubjectivity. This text will consider three ways of reading this thesis. The first and the most common possibility is to look at it from the side of subjectivity; the second possibility presents the argument from the side of intersubjectivity. The third way is paradoxical: to try to stay in the middle, to see that the ego and the other (alter) are connected inside and out, from the side of subjectivity and intersubjectivity. Then this essay will consider practical issues that are very important (existential) for key tasks of life of man among others, such as the phenomena of plurality, limit, alterity, and solitude, the absence of other on the one side, and on the other side density, the crowd, and the reduction of people to a summary, by which they lose their own uniqueness.
The problem of the infinite regress and the key to the solution of this problem are quite characteristic features in the development of Husserl’s analysis of time consciousness. Although I believe ...the solution is in principle already given in Hua X (“Zur Phänomenologie des inneren Zeitbewusstseins”), Husserl persistently strives to deepen his analysis of this problem. The central concern of his analysis seems to be the proper interpretation of the character of retentional intentionality as passive egoless intentionality. Such an interpretation must continue to maintain the distinction between egoic and egoless intentionality. This distinction leads to the latter distinction between egoic and intermonadic temporalization of the temporal stream of the living present given in the C-manuscripts. The final solution is found in the concept of the reciprocal awakening between the empty shapes of drive intentionality as primal affection and the primal impression (primal hyle) in the process of intermonadic temporalization. This unconscious temporalization in genetic phenomenology can establish a cooperative, but limited relation between phenomenology and neural science.
The chapter addresses the question of origins in the framework of Husserl’s phenomenology. I argue that both the sense and the methodological justification of the phenomenological question of origins ...derive from the problematic 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 to other potential modes of appearances. I interpret the phenomenological question of origins as the question that traces the concealed sense-accomplishments, 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.
