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Phenomenology of Phenomenology

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2020

Eugene F. Bertoldi
Eugene F. Bertoldi*
Affiliation:
Wilfrid Laurier University
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Extract

Husserl and others have spent a great deal of time writing introductions to phenomenology, and in trying to explain its nature. One thing that becomes clear from these efforts is that phenomenology claims to have a method for analyzing the essential structures of “mental events” (erlebnisse). This raises the possibility of phenomenology turning back on itself, for surely the analysis itself must consist of “mental events”. Hence, at some point in its investigations, phenomenology itself could become what phenomenologists seek to analyze. Husserl foresaw this when he suggested the possibility that:

transcendental phenomenology itself then becomes a theme for constitutional and critical inquiry at a higher level, for the sake of conferring on it the highest dignity of genuineness: the ability to justify itself down to its roots.

What becomes apparent here is that phenomenology's self-reflection is necessary, not merely possible: without self-reflection phenomenology would lack final “genuineness” or the “ability to justify itself down to its roots”. Unfortunately while Husserl, here and in other places, signals the necessity of this sort of reflection, he nowhere seems actually to carry it out at length.

Type
Research Article
Information
Canadian Journal of Philosophy , Volume 7 , Issue 2 , June 1977 , pp. 239 - 253
Copyright
Copyright © The Authors 1977

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References

1 Husserl, E. Formal and Transcendental Logic, trans. Cairns, D. (The Hague, 1969). (Hereinafter referred to as FTL) P. 275;CrossRefGoogle Scholar also p. 249.

2 Merleau-Ponty, M. The Phenomenology of Perception, trans. Smith, C. (London, 1962).Google Scholar (Hereinafter refered to as PP;, I have made some corrections in the translation.) Pp. viii, xxi, 62, 63, 241-2, 365.

3 Ibid., pp. 364–5, 428-30.

4 Spiegelberg, H. The Phenomenological Movement (The Hague, 1965), pp. 533- 6.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

5 PP, p. viii.

6 Ibid., p. XX.

7 Ibid., p. ix.

8 Ibid., p. xiii..

9 Ibid., p. XV.

10 Ibid., p. xviii.

11 Ibid., pp. 57–58.

12 Merleau-Ponty, M. The Structure of Behaviour,trans. Fischer, A. (Boston, 1963).Google Scholar (Hereinafter referred to as Structure.), P. 220. This formulation would seem to owe as much to Bergson as it would to Husserl; see the former's Introduction, to Metaphysics, (New York, 1949), p. 32.

13 PP, p. 58: “ … it is of the essence of consciousness to forget its own phenomena thus enabling ‘things’to be constituted … ”.

14 FTL, pp. 270–1.

15 PP, p. viii.

16 PP, p. 365: “To phenomenology understood as direct description must be added a phenomenology of phenomenology.“

17 This is one of the meanings of “transcendental” operative in PP, where it is generally equivalent to “radical“; see p. 63.

18 Structure, p. 220.

19 Ibid., p. 224.

20 PP, p. xxi.

21 Ibid., pp. 62–3.

22 in The Primacy of Perception,ed., Edie, J. (Evanston, 1964), pp. 72-3.Google Scholar See also PP, p. 63.

23 Husserl, E. Ideas, trans. Gibson, W.R. Boyce (New York, 1962), pp. 9–10.Google Scholar

24 See, for example, the discussion of motion, PP, pp. 267–80.

25 For a discussion of this see my “Time in the Phenomenology of Perception”, Dialogue, 13 (1974), pp. 773–85.

26 PP, pp. 330–1, 365.

27 Ibid., p. 344.

28 Ibid., pp. 38, 41, 54.

29 Ibid., pp. viii, 355, n. 1.

30 See, for example, Husserl's discussion of the “fundamental law of intentionality“ FTL, p. 160. While there may be differences in the modes of evidence (see, e.g., FTL, p. 287) of genetic/static descriptions, Husserl nowhere suggests that the one describes what appears while the other argues back from what is given to its necessary conditions.