Martin Heidegger is one of the great and most influential philosophers of the 20th century - and he is also one of the most divisive figures in philosophy due to his service to the Nazi party during the 1930s and through 1945. He later explained his affiliation with the Nazis as a matter of circumstances - he did what he had to do in that particular atmosphere.

It's hard to buy that explanation. For a few decades, Heidegger's long-time lover and intellectual defender Hannah Arendt, "helped usher Heidegger back into the intellectual version of polite society, indeed assisted in preventing his ostracism as a Hitlerite, at least by those who considered his notoriously opaque use of philosophical language to offer something of value beneath it—apart from further opacity."

Arendt was 18 when she became Heidegger's lover, and even after the war they maintained a "warm" relationship with him, as the above quote reveals.

As the extent of Heidegger's enthusiastic embrace of Nazism becomes more apparent, and as it becomes ever clearer that the allegiance was not merely opportunistic and careerist but derived from a philosophical affinity with his Fuhrer's effusions, it becomes impossible not to reexamine certain questions. Such as: How much did Arendt know about the depth of Heidegger's allegiance? Did Heidegger lie to her? Did she believe him the way she believed Eichmann? Did she assume his complicity with the genocidaires was something careerist and banal? Or worse, did she know? And did she disingenuously (or self-deceptively) construct her false banal Eichmann from her false banal Heidegger?

Despite all of this, Heidegger remains a major figure in European philosophy, and there are few contemporary philosophers who do not owe him some intellectual dept.

Martin Heidegger Talks About Language, Being, Marx & Religion in Vintage 1960s Interviews

April 18th, 2013


German philosopher Martin Heidegger, whom readers of post-structuralist theory have to thank for popularizing the ubiquitous phrase “always already,” was a very labored writer who coined much of his own terminology and gave many a translator migraines. His prose betrays an obsession with the power of language that many of his students and successors, such as Jacques Derrida and Michel Foucault, inherited in the construction of their own elaborate theories. While Heidegger’s first book Being and Time (1927) had enormous influence on Existentialist and Phenomenological thought, he also wrote extensively on technology, theology, and art and poetics, engaging with the ideas of Edmund Husserl, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, and the romantic German poet Friedrich Hӧlderlin.

In the short film above, see the man himself in excerpts from a lecture and three different interviews. The footage comes from a 1975 documentary called Heidegger’s Speeches. Heidegger first discusses some theory of language, quoting Goethe, then, in an interview, talks about how he came to the central preoccupation of his philosophical career: the “question of being,” or Dasein. The third interview concerns Heidegger’s thoughts on Karl Marx. He quotes Marx’s radical dictum, “philosophers have only interpreted the world; the point is to change it,” and offers a critical perspective based in hermeneutics. In the fourth and final interview segment, Heidegger proffers some thoughts on religion and communism.


For a much fuller picture of Heidegger’s life and work, watch the BBC documentary above, from their Existentialist series “Human All Too Human” that begins with Nietzsche and ends with Sartre. And this page also has video of a number of philosophers discussing Heidegger’s work, which left such a lasting impression on the character of late modern and postmodern thought that it’s hard to find a contemporary philosopher who doesn’t owe some sort of debt to him.

It may be impossible to overstate Heidegger’s importance to twentieth century European philosophy in general, and upon several prominent Jewish thinkers in particular like his former student and lover Hannah Arendt and ethicist Emmanuel Levinas. But it also must be said that Heidegger’s legacy is tainted with controversy. While it’s typically good form to separate a thinker’s work from his or her personal lapses, Heidegger’s lapses of judgment, if that’s what they were, are not so easy to ignore. As the documentary above informs us, Heidegger was a Nazi. A reviewer of a recent biography colorfully sums up the case this way:

Let’s be clear about this: Martin Heidegger, a thinker many regard as the most important philosopher of the twentieth century, was indeed a bona-fide, arm-aloft, palm-outstretched Nazi. Zealously renewing his party membership every year between 1933 and 1945, his commitment to the National Socialist cause was unstinting. Nowhere was this more in evidence than in his public role as rector of Freiburg University, where he praised ‘the inner truth and greatness’ of Nazism in his 1933 rectoral address, and later penned a paean to murdered Nazi thug Leo Schlageter. Heidegger was no token fascist; he was jack-booted and ready. Wearing a swastika on his lapel at all times he, alongside his proud, virulently anti-Semitic wife, also practised private discrimination against Jews, from fellow existentialist philosopher Karl Jaspers to his one-time mentor Edmund Husserl. Not that he was without friends. In fact his friendship with Eugene Fischer, director of Berlin Institute for Racial Hygiene, lasted years.

Heidegger’s Nazi sympathies are hardly evident in his philosophical work, yet it is still difficult for many readers to reconcile these facts about his life. Some refer to a 1966 Der Spiegel interview in which the philosopher explained away his Nazism as exigent circumstances. Sort of what we call today a non-apology apology. Others, like onetime admirer Levinas, don’t find the task so easy. In a commentary on forgiveness, Levinas once wrote, “One can forgive many Germans, but there are some Germans it is difficult to forgive. It is difficult to forgive Heidegger.”

You can find more resources on Heidegger in our archive of free online philosophy courses.

Related Content:

• Friedrich Nietzsche & Existentialism Explained to Five-Year-Olds (in Comical Video by Reddit)
• Walter Kaufmann’s Lectures on Nietzsche, Kierkegaard and Sartre (1960)
• Hannah Arendt’s Original Articles on “the Banality of Evil” in the New Yorker Archive

Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Washington, DC. Follow him @jdmagness

Robert Stolorow - Heidegger and Post-Cartesian Psychoanalysis

From The Humanistic Psychologist, Robert Stolorow published a new article offering a glimpse into his personal and professional development in relation to the philosophy of Martin Heidegger. This article is posted at Academia.edu, on Professor Stolorow's page, in advance of its appearance in the journal.

This article presents an overview of some of the basic ideas in his book, World, Affectivity, Trauma: Heidegger and Post-Cartesian Psychoanalysis (Routledge, 2011).

Full Citation:
Stolorow, RD. (2013). Heidegger and Post-Cartesian Psychoanalysis: My Personal, Psychoanalytic, and Philosophical Sojourn. The Humanistic Psychologist, 41(3): 209–218. doi: 10.1080/08873267.2012.724266

Heidegger and Post-Cartesian Psychoanalysis

My Personal, Psychoanalytic, and Philosophical Sojourn

Robert D. Stolorow

Institute of Contemporary Psychoanalysis

Abstract

The dual aim of this article is to show both how Heidegger’s existential philosophy enriches post-Cartesian psychoanalysis and how post-Cartesian psychoanalysis enriches Heidegger’s existential philosophy. Characterized as a phenomenological contextualism, post-Cartesian psychoanalysis finds philosophical grounding in Heidegger’s ontological contextualism, condensed in his term for the human kind of Being, Being-in-the-world. Specifically, Heidegger provides philosophical support (a) for a theoretical and clinical shift from mind to world, from the intrapsychic to the intersubjective; (b) for a shift from the motivational primacy of drives originating in the interior of a Cartesian isolated mind to the motivational primacy of relationally constituted affective experience; and (c) for contextualizing and grasping the existential significance of emotional trauma, which plunges us into a form of Being-toward-death. Post-Cartesian psychoanalysis, in turn, (a) relationalizes Heidegger’s conception of finitude, (b) expands Heidegger’s conception of relationality, and (c) explores some ethical implications of our kinship-in-finitude.

Here is one section of the paper that I found particularly interesting (because it deals with my work, trauma).

TRAUMA, ANXIETY, FINITUDE

From a post-Cartesian perspective, developmental trauma is viewed, not as an instinctual flooding of an ill-equipped Cartesian container, as Freud (1926/1959) would have it, but as an experience of unbearable affect. Furthermore, the intolerability of affect states can be fully grasped only in terms of the relational systems in which they are felt. Developmental trauma originates within a formative relational context whose central feature is malattunement to painful affect—the absence of a context of human understanding in which that pain can be held and endured. Without such a relational home for the child’s emotional pain, it can only be felt as unbearable, overwhelming, disorganizing. Painful or frightening affect becomes lastingly traumatic when the attunement that the child needs to assist in its tolerance and integration is profoundly absent.

Two years prior to beginning to study Being and Time (Heidegger, 1927/1962), I wrote a description of a traumatized state that I experienced at a conference in 1992, at which I relived the terrible loss of my late wife, Dede, who had died 20 months earlier. An initial batch of copies of my newly published book, Contexts of Being: The Intersubjective Foundations of Psychological Life (Stolorow & Atwood, 1992), was sent hot off the press to a display table at the conference. I picked up a copy and looked around excitedly for Dede, who would be so pleased and happy to see it. She was, of course, nowhere to be found. I had awakened the morning of February 23, 1991 to find her lying dead across our bed, 4 weeks after her metastatic cancer had been diagnosed. Spinning around to show her my book and finding her gone instantly transported me back to that devastating moment in which I found her dead and my world was shattered,1 and I was once again consumed with horror and sorrow. Here is how I described my traumatized state:

There was a dinner at that conference for all the panelists, many of whom were my old and good friends and close colleagues. Yet, as I looked around the ballroom, they all seemed like strange and alien beings to me. Or more accurately, I seemed like a strange and alien being—not of this world. The others seemed so vitalized, engaged with one another in a lively manner. I, in contrast, felt deadened and broken, a shell of the man I had once been. An unbridgeable gulf seemed to open up, separating me forever from my friends and colleagues. They could never even begin to fathom my experience, I thought to myself, because we now lived in altogether different worlds. (Stolorow, 1999, pp. 464–465)

In the years following that painful experience at the conference dinner, I was able to recognize similar feelings in my patients who had suffered severe traumatization. I sought to comprehend and conceptualize the dreadful sense of alienation and estrangement that seemed to me to be inherent to the experience of emotional trauma. The key that I found that for me unlocked the meaning of trauma was what I came to call ‘‘the absolutisms of everyday life’’ (Stolorow, 1999):

When a person says to a friend, ‘‘I’ll see you later,’’ or a parent says to a child at bedtime, ‘‘I’ll see you in the morning,’’ these are statements . . . whose validity is not open for discussion. Such absolutisms are the basis for a kind of naıve realism and optimism that allow one to function in the world, experienced as stable and predictable. It is in the essence of emotional trauma that it shatters these absolutisms, a catastrophic loss of innocence that permanently alters one’s sense of Being-in-the-world. Massive deconstruction of the absolutisms of everyday life exposes the inescapable contingency of existence on a universe that is random and unpredictable and in which no safety or continuity of being can be assured. Trauma thereby exposes ‘‘the unbearable embeddedness of Being.’’ . . . As a result, the traumatized person cannot help but perceive aspects of existence that lie well outside the absolutized horizons of normal everydayness. It is in this sense that the worlds of traumatized persons are fundamentally incommensurable with those of others, the deep chasm in which an anguished sense of estrangement and solitude takes form. (p. 467)

Some two years after writing these words I read passages in Being and Time (Heidegger, 1927/1962) devoted to Heidegger’s existential analysis of angst, and I nearly fell off my chair. Both Heidegger’s phenomenological description and ontological account of angst bore a remarkable resemblance to what I had written about the phenomenology and meaning of emotional trauma. Thus, Heidegger’s existential philosophy—in particular, his existential analysis of angst—enables us to grasp trauma’s existential significance.

Like Freud, Heidegger made a sharp distinction between fear and anxiety. Whereas, according to Heidegger, that in the face of which one fears is a definite ‘‘entity within-the-world’’ (Heidegger, 1927/1962, p. 231), that in the face of which one is anxious is ‘‘completely indefinite’’ (p. 231) and turns out to be ‘‘Being-in-the-world as such’’ (p. 230). The indefiniteness of anxiety ‘‘tells us that entities within-the-world are not ‘relevant’ at all. . . . [The world] collapses into itself [and] has the character of completely lacking significance’’ (p. 231). Heidegger made clear that it is the significance of the average everyday world, the world as constituted by the public interpretedness of the ‘‘they’’ (das Man), whose collapse is disclosed in anxiety. Furthermore, insofar as the ‘‘utter insignificance’’ (p. 231) of the everyday world is disclosed in anxiety, anxiety includes a feeling of uncanniness, in the sense of ‘‘not-being-at-home’’ (p. 233). In anxiety, the experience of ‘‘Being-at-home [in one’s tranquilized] everyday familiarity’’ (p. 233) with the publicly interpreted world collapses, and ‘‘Being-in enters into the existential ‘mode’ of . . . ‘uncanniness’’’ (p. 233).

In Heidegger’s (1927/1962) ontological account of anxiety, the central features of its phenomenology—the collapse of everyday significance and the resulting feeling of uncanniness—are claimed to be grounded in what he called authentic (non-evasively owned) Being-toward-death. Existentially, death is not simply an event that has not yet occurred or that happens to others, as das Man would have it. Rather, it is a distinctive possibility that is constitutive of our existence—of our intelligibility to ourselves in our futurity and our finitude. It is ‘‘the possibility of the impossibility of any existence at all’’ (p. 307), which, because it is both certain and indefinite as to its when, always impends as a constant threat, robbing us of the tranquilizing illusions that characterize our absorption in the everyday world, nullifying its significance for us. The appearance of anxiety indicates that the fundamental defensive purpose (fleeing) of average every-dayness has failed and that authentic Being-toward-death has broken through the evasions that conceal it. Torn from the sheltering illusions of das Man, we feel uncanny—no longer safely at home.

I have contended that emotional trauma produces an affective state whose features bear a close similarity to the central elements in Heidegger’s existential interpretation of anxiety and that it accomplishes this by plunging the traumatized person into a form of authentic Being-toward-death (Stolorow, 2007). Trauma shatters the illusions of everyday life that evade and cover up the finitude, contingency, and embeddedness of our existence and the indefiniteness of its certain extinction. Such shattering exposes what had been heretofore concealed, thereby plunging the traumatized person into a form of authentic Being-toward-death and into the anxiety—the loss of significance, the uncanniness—through which authentic Being-toward-death is disclosed. Trauma, like death, individualizes us, in a manner that invariably manifests in an excruciating sense of singularity and solitude.

The particular form of authentic Being-toward-death that crystallized in the wake of the trauma of Dede’s death I characterize as a Being-toward-loss. Loss of loved ones constantly impends for me as a certain, indefinite, and ever-present possibility, in terms of which I now always understand myself and my world. My own experience of traumatic loss and its aftermath was a source of motivation for my efforts to relationalize Heidegger’s conception of finitude, to which efforts I now turn.

THE RELATIONALITY OF FINITUDE

It is implicit in Heidegger’s ontological account that authentic existing presupposes a capacity to dwell in the emotional pain—the existential anxiety—that accompanies a nonevasive owning up to human finitude. It follows from my claims about the context-embeddedness of emotional trauma that this capacity entails that such pain can find a relational home in which it can be held. What makes such dwelling and holding possible?

Vogel provided a compelling answer to this question by elaborating what he claimed to be a relational dimension of the experience of finitude. Just as finitude is fundamental to our existential constitution, so too is it constitutive of our existence that we meet each other as ‘‘brothers and sisters in the same dark night’’ (Vogel, 1994, p. 97), deeply connected with one another in virtue of our common finitude. Thus, although the possibility of emotional trauma is ever present, so too is the possibility of forming bonds of deep emotional attunement within which devastating emotional pain can be held, endured, and eventually integrated. Our existential kinship-in-the-same-darkness is the condition for the possibility both of the profound contextuality of emotional trauma and of the mutative power of human understanding.

Critchley (2002) pointed the way toward a second, essential dimension of the relationality of finitude:

I would want to [emphasize] the fundamentally relational character of finitude, namely that death is first and foremost experienced as a relation to the death or dying of the other and others, in Being-with the dying in a caring way, and in grieving after they are dead. . . . [O]ne watches the person one loves . . . die and become a lifeless material thing. . . . [T]here is a thing—a corpse—at the heart of the experience of finitude . . . [which is] fundamentally relational. (pp. 169–170)

Authentic Being-toward-death entails owning up not only to one’s own finitude, but also to the finitude of all those we love. Hence, authentic Being-toward-death always includes Being-toward-loss as a central constituent. Just as, existentially, we are ‘‘always dying already’’ (Heidegger, 1927=1962, p. 298), so too are we always already grieving. Death and loss are existentially equiprimordial. Existential anxiety anticipates both death and loss.

Support for my claim about the equiprimordiality of death and loss can be found in the work of Derrida (1997), who contended that every friendship is structured from its beginning, a priori, by the possibility that one of the two friends will die first and that the surviving friend will be left to mourn: ‘‘To have a friend, to look at him, to follow him with your eyes, . . . is to know in a more intense way, already injured, . . . that one of the two of you will inevitably see the other die’’ (Derrida, 2001, p. 107). Finitude and the possibility of mourning are constitutive of every friendship.

In loss, all possibilities for Being in relation to the lost loved one are extinguished. Traumatic loss shatters one’s emotional world, and, insofar as one dwells in the region of such loss, one feels eradicated. As Derrida (2001) claimed, ‘‘Death takes from us not only some particular life within the world [but] someone through whom the world, and first of all our own world, will have opened up’’ (p. 107).

1. Borrowing a term from Harry Potter, I call such experiences portkeys to trauma (Stolorow, 2007, 2011).

Interview with Robert D. Stolorow (2011, at Figure/Ground)

If I could study with any living therapist, Robert Stolorow is one of three people I would pay to learn from (the others are Donna Orange [a frequent Stolorow collaborator] and Diana Fosha). [Well, okay, there is a fourth one, another frequent Stolorow collaborator, George Atwood.] Throughout his career, he has emphasized the phenomenological experience of the client in psychotherapy, often invoking philosophers such as Heidegger or Gadamer, and the intersubjective space created in the therapeutic dyad. 

I have read nearly all of his books, as well as a LOT of his articles. There is a near-full listing of his books in the introduction to the interview - of those (any one is a great read), I highly recommend World, Affectivity, Trauma: Heidegger and Post-Cartesian Psychoanalysis (2011), Working Intersubjectively: Contextualism in Psychoanalytic Practice (1997), Structures of Subjectivity: Explorations in Psychoanalytic Phenomenology (2014 [1984]. 2nd ed.), and The Intersubjective Perspective (1994), the latter being a collection of essays edited by Stolorow, George Atwood, and George Brandchaft.

Here is a passage from World, Affectivity, Trauma: Heidegger and Post-Cartesian Psychoanalysis (p. 44):

Trauma shatters the absolutisms of everyday life, which, like the illusions of the “they,” evade and cover up the finitude, contingency, and embeddedness of our existence and the indefiniteness of its certain extinction. Such shattering exposes what had been heretofore concealed, thereby plunging the traumatized person, in Heidegger’s terms, into a form of authentic Being-toward-death and into the anxiety—the loss of significance, the uncanniness—through which authentic Being-toward-death is disclosed. Trauma, like authentic Being-toward-death, individualizes us, but in a manner that manifests in an excruciating sense of singularity and solitude.

And this (p. 55-56):

Trauma devastatingly disrupts the ordinary, average-everyday linearity and “ecstatical unity of temporality” (Heidegger, 1927, p. 416), the sense of “stretching-along” (p. 426) from the past to an open future. Experiences of emotional trauma become freezeframed into an eternal present in which one remains forever trapped, or to which one is condemned to be perpetually returned through the portkeys supplied by life’s slings and arrows. In the region of trauma, all duration or stretching along collapses; past becomes present, and future loses all meaning other than endless repetition. In this sense it is trauma, not, as Freud (1915) would have it, the unconscious that is timeless.

Because trauma so profoundly modifies the universal or shared structure of temporality, the traumatized person quite literally lives in another kind of reality, an experiential world felt to be incommensurable with those of others. This felt incommensurability, in turn, contributes to the sense of alienation and estrangement from other human beings that typically haunts the traumatized person. Torn from the communal fabric of being-in-time, trauma remains insulated from human dialogue.

In the first paragraph, "portkeys" is a Harry Potter reference (that I was unaware of) and are defined as "objects that transported him instantly to other places, obliterating the duration ordinarily required for travel from one location to another."

Anyway, I could go on all day quoting Stolorow's texts and my appreciation for them.

All of this serves as an introduction to an interview of Stolorow from Figure/Ground back in 2011.

Interview with Robert D. Stolorow

© Robert D. Stolorow and Figure/Ground
Dr. Stolorow was interviewed by Laureano Ralón. June 13th, 2011.

Robert D. Stolorow, Ph.D., is a Founding Faculty Member and Training and Supervising Analyst at the Institute of Contemporary Psychoanalysis, Los Angeles; a Founding Faculty Member at the Institute for the Psychoanalytic Study of Subjectivity, New York City; and a Clinical Professor of Psychiatry at the UCLA School of Medicine. He is the author of World, Affectivity, Trauma: Heidegger and Post-Cartesian Psychoanalysis (2011) and Trauma and Human Existence: Autobiographical, Psychoanalytic, and Philosophical Reflections (2007), and co-author of Worlds of Experience: Interweaving Philosophical and Clinical Dimensions in Psychoanalysis (2002), Working Intersubjectively: Contextualism in Psychoanalytic Practice (1997), Contexts of Being: The Intersubjective Foundations of Psychological Life (1992), Psychoanalytic Treatment: An Intersubjective Approach (1987), Structures of Subjectivity: Explorations in Psychoanalytic Phenomenology (2014 [1984]. 2nd ed.), Psychoanalysis of Developmental Arrests: Theory and Treatment (1980), and Faces in a Cloud: Intersubjectivity in Personality Theory (1993 [1979], 2nd. ed.). He is also coeditor of The Intersubjective Perspective (1994) and has authored or coauthored more than two hundred articles on aspects of psychoanalytic theory and practice. He received his Ph.D. in Clinical Psychology from Harvard University in 1970 and his Certificate in Psychoanalysis and Psychotherapy from the Psychoanalytic Institute of the Postgraduate Center for Mental Health, New York City, in 1974. He also received a Ph.D. in Philosophy from the University of California at Riverside in 2007. He holds diplomas both in Clinical Psychology and in Psychoanalysis from the American Board of Professional Psychology (ABPP). In 1995 he received the Distinguished Scientific Award from the Division of Psychoanalysis of the American Psychological Association, in which he is a Fellow.

What would you define yourself as – an author, a thinker, a public intellectual?

Being a weird interdisciplinary creature, I have to define myself somewhat complexly. I definitely think of myself as a psychoanalytic and philosophical thinker and author. Additionally, I am a practitioner of psychoanalysis and a teacher of both philosophy and psychoanalysis. In recent times, I have also been publishing articles and blogs applying my ideas about collective trauma and defensive ideologies to the socio-political sphere, so I guess that might make me a public intellectual too.

Who were some of your mentors in university and what were some of the most important lessons you learned from them?

I earned a doctorate in clinical psychology at Harvard in 1970 and a doctorate in philosophy at the University of California, Riverside, in 2007, and I reaped rich benefits from mentors during both periods of graduate study. My principal mentor at Harvard was Robert White, from whom I acquired an abiding interest in and respect for the uniqueness of each individual’s world of experience. My principal mentor at Riverside was my dissertation chair, William Bracken, who, although relatively unpublished, is perhaps the most brilliant Heidegger scholar I have encountered. I owe him an enormous dept of gratitude for his contributions to my development as a Heideggerian philosopher. Other important mentors at Riverside from whom I learned a great deal were Kantian philosopher Andrews Reath, phenomenologist Charles Siewert, and another brilliant Heidegger scholar, Mark Wrathall.

You trained both as a philosopher and a psychoanalyst. How did the two careers reinforce each other?

Wow, I would have to write an intellectual memoir to address this question adequately! I’ll try to hit the highlights. I first became interested in the interface of psychoanalysis and philosophy as an undergraduate in the early 1960s when I encountered the writings of Ludwig Binswanger, Medard Boss, and Rollo May, early pioneers who recognized the relevance of Heidegger’s existential philosophy for psychotherapy and psychoanalysis. While a graduate student in clinical psychology, I became disillusioned with empirical psychological research, feeling that it stripped psychology of everything humanly meaningful, and toyed with the idea of doing a second doctorate in philosophy (an ambition that had to await several decades before coming to fruition), which at the time I thought could provide tools for cleaning up the mess that was psychoanalytic theory. However, during my clinical internship I found that I really enjoyed psychoanalytic work and, after completing my doctorate, decided to go to New York to pursue psychoanalytic training instead.

A nodal point in my intellectual career occurred in 1972 when, still in psychoanalytic training, I took a job as an assistant professor of psychology at Rutgers where I met George Atwood, who became my closest collaborator. George (an autodidact with an encyclopaedic knowledge of Continental philosophy) and I embarked upon a series of psycho-biographical studies of the personal, subjective origins of the theoretical systems of Freud, Jung, Rank, and Reich, studies that formed the basis of our first book, Faces in a Cloud: Subjectivity in Personality Theory (Aronson, 1979). From these studies, we concluded that since psychological theories derive to a significant degree from the subjective concerns of their creators, what psychoanalysis and personality psychology needed was a theory of subjectivity itself: a unifying framework capable of accounting not only for the psychological phenomena that other theories address, but also for the theories themselves. In the last chapter of Faces, we outlined a set of proposals for the creation of such a framework, which we called psychoanalytic phenomenology. We envisioned this framework as a depth psychology of personal experience, purified of the mechanistic reifications of Freudian meta-psychology. Our framework took the experiential world of the individual as its central theoretical construct. We assumed no impersonal psychical agencies or motivational prime movers in order to explain the experiential world. Instead, we assumed that this world evolves organically from the person’s encounter with the critical formative experiences that constitute his or her unique life history. Once established, it becomes discernible in the distinctive, recurrent patterns, themes, and invariant meanings that pre-reflectively organize the person’s experiences. Psychoanalytic phenomenology entailed a set of interpretative principles for investigating the nature, origins, purposes, and transformations of the configurations of self and other pervading a person’s experiential world. Importantly, our dedication to illuminating personal phenomenology had led us from Cartesian minds to emotional worlds and, thus, from intra-psychic mental contents to relational contexts. Phenomenology had led us inexorably to contextualism.

Once we had rethought psychoanalysis as a form of phenomenological inquiry, a focus on the mutually-enriching interface of psychoanalysis and Continental phenomenology became inescapable, and I began reading phenomenological philosophy voraciously. In 2000, I formed a leaderless philosophical study group in which we devoted a year to a close reading of Heidegger’s Being and Time and another year to Gadamer’s Truth and Method. Philosopher-psychoanalyst Donna Orange had joined the collaboration with Atwood, and she brought to our phenomenological contextualism a perspectivalist hermeneutic sensibility and a view of psychoanalytic practice as a form of phronesis rather than techne.

A second nodal point for me occurred when I turned my attention to the phenomenology of emotional trauma in the wake of the death of my late wife, Dede, in 1991—a massive trauma that shattered my world. The close study of Being and Time in 2000 proved to be critical. On one hand, Heidegger’s ontological contextualism (In-der-Welt-sein) seemed to provide a solid philosophical grounding for our psychoanalytic phenomenological contextualism. Even more important to me at the time, Heidegger’s phenomenological analysis of Angst, world-collapse, uncanniness, and thrownness into being-toward-death provided me with extraordinary philosophical tools for grasping the existential significance of emotional trauma. It was this latter discovery that motivated me to begin doctoral studies in philosophy and write a dissertation on trauma and Heidegger, which eventuated in my two most recent books, Trauma and Human Existence: Autobiographical, Psychoanalytic, and Philosophical Reflections (Routledge, 2007) and World, Affectivity, Trauma: Heidegger and Post-Cartesian Psychoanalysis (Routledge, 2011). In the last book, I showed both how Heidegger’s existential philosophy can ground and enrich post-Cartesian psychoanalysis and how post-Cartesian psychoanalysis, by relationalizing Heidegger’s conception of finitude and expanding Heidegger’s conception of relationality, can enrich his existential philosophy. I feel that in this book I have, in my sunset years, come into my own as a philosopher.

In your experience, how do you think the role of university professor might have evolved since you were an undergraduate student?

Perhaps partly because I have not been a university professor (in psychology) since 1984 when I moved to California, I have not noticed significant changes in the role of university professor. I was very struck by the enormous devotion to teaching, guiding, and mentoring shown by my philosophy professors at Riverside. Perhaps the biggest change for me as a graduate student was the current importance of the internet and the need for me to become computer-literate fast!

How do you manage to command attention during your talks and lectures in this “age of interruption” characterized by fractured attention and information overload?

When I first began lecturing and then presenting in the early 1970s, I learned to bring my affect into my speaking. This has served me well ever since. I have found that the affect-laden quality of my recent work has been especially appealing to young philosophers.

The following guest question was drafted by Professor Iain Thomson: “Do you think all resurrective ideologies necessarily deny human finitude? What about the later Heidegger’s postmodern idea that truly acknowledging human finitude can give us insight into the inexhaustible nature of being?”
This is a great question. There have been two contexts in which I have written about “resurrective ideology.” One has been my effort to extend my ideas about trauma to the socio-political sphere. In my 2007 book on trauma, I contended that the essence of emotional trauma lies in the shattering of what I called the “absolutisms of everyday life,” the system of illusory beliefs that allow us to function in the world, experienced as stable, predictable, and safe. Such shattering is a massive loss of innocence exposing the inescapable contingency of existence on a universe that is chaotic and unpredictable and in which no safety or continuity of being can be assured. Emotional trauma brings us face to face with our finitude and existential vulnerability and with death and loss as possibilities that define our existence and that loom as constant threats. Often traumatized people try to restore the lost illusions shattered by trauma through some form of resurrective ideology.

Consider, for example, the impact on Americans of the terrorist attack of September 11, 2001, a devastating collective trauma that inflicted a rip in the fabric of the American psyche. In horrifyingly demonstrating that even America can be assaulted on its native soil, the attack of 9/11 shattered Americans’ collective illusions of safety, inviolability, and grandiose invincibility, illusions that had long been mainstays of the American historical identity. In the wake of such shattering, Americans became much more susceptible to resurrective ideologies—e.g., that offered by the Bush administration—that promised to restore the grandiose illusions that have been lost.

The other context, actually the original one, was a psycho-biographical account of Heidegger’s fall into Nazism, which I wrote in collaboration with Atwood and Orange and incorporated into my 2011 book. There we contended that Heidegger’s enthusiastic embrace of his version of Nazism, whose grandiose quality was chillingly manifested in his Rector’s Address, “The Self-Assertion of the German University” (1933), represented his effort to resurrect his sense of agentic selfhood, which had been crushed by the combined emotionally annihilating impact of three circumstances: His muse and lover Hannah Arendt’s withdrawal from him; his magnum opus Being and Time’s being met by the academic world “by hopeless incomprehension”; and his mother’s essentially disowning him on her deathbed for his having broken with the Catholic Church.

After resigning as rector of Freiburg University in 1934 and disengaging from political involvement, Heidegger largely withdrew into a life of solitary philosophical and spiritual reflection, wherein the “turn” in his thinking gained momentum. I think Iain Thomson is right when he claims that the later Heidegger’s acknowledgment and acceptance of an aspect of human finitude—namely, the historically and temporally embedded limitedness of any understanding of being—gave him insight into “being as such,” the inexhaustible source of all intelligibility that resists any attempt to conceptualize it. And yet, do we not glimpse a trace of the old restorative grandiosity in Heidegger’s self-designation as the agent of a new “other beginning,” the initiator of a new epoch in the history of being?

Other emotional themes in Heidegger’s later philosophy are apparent to a psychoanalytic eye. Heidegger is often rightly criticized for never having openly expressed remorse about his Nazi involvement. Yet the whole tenor of his later philosophizing—wherein the grandiose, aggressive, goose-stepping self-assertiveness of the Rector’s Address is replaced by a view of the human being as the “constant receiver,” the “shepherd” and the protector, of the “gift” of being—can be seen to reflect his recognition of his dreadful, deplorable mistake.

Moreover, there is another dimension of human finitude—the finitude of human connectedness, of our “being-with-one-another”—that goes largely unnamed throughout Heidegger’s philosophizing. In my 2011 book, I claimed controversially (with Critchley and Derrida) that human finitude is relational, that being-toward-death always includes a being-toward-loss of loved others, and that death and loss are existentially equiprimordial. In the chapter on Heidegger’s Nazism, we contended that for Heidegger the threat of loss of connectedness with others was built into the quest for authentic individualized selfhood, as was shown vividly in his wrenching struggles to separate himself from the Catholic Church of his family and in his mother’s deathbed renunciation of him for doing just that. In the poetry of Holderlin, Heidegger found the powerful theme of returning—returning to being-at-home and to the lost god that had disappeared—imagery in which we discerned his longing to restore connections lost in his pursuit of individualized selfhood, such as those with his mother and the Catholic family of his childhood. The later Heidegger returned home.

Returning for a moment to your dual training as a philosopher/psychoanalyst, do you think any insights from the social sciences might help transform the philosophical profession for the better and vice versa? Should fields like philosophy and psychology/sociology remain separate, or are there advantages to bridging the existential and existentielle dimensions of human reality in the spirit of interdisciplinary studies and methodological pragmatism?

Clearly, as an interdisciplinary creature myself, I am an advocate of interdisciplinary cross-fertilization (of which my 2011 book is a clear instance), rather than disciplinary insularity. Heidegger’s Being and Time is filled with examples of the advantages of bridging the existential and the existentielle, the ontological and the ontical dimensions of human reality. It is my view that academic psychology made a big historical mistake when, caught in the grip of modern scientism, it separated itself from philosophy in order to become a “hard science.” I regard psychoanalysis, or at least my brand of it, as being neither a branch of medicine nor of psychology, but as applied philosophy.

You have defined your intersubjective-systems theory as a “phenomenological contextualism.” How is your own brand of contextualism similar and/or different from the relational model put forth by social constructionist thought?

There are of course many similarities, but I think there are subtle differences—differences in sensibility—as well. I would say that my brand of contextualism embraces a hermeneutic rather than a constructivist sensibility. Following Gadamer, I would say that all understanding involves interpretation, and this seems different to me from saying that all understanding is constructed. Interpreting something—i.e., understanding it from a particular perspective—seems different to me from constructing a narrative about it.

I assume you are familiar with Speculative Realism and Object-Oriented Ontology. Since your approach to psychiatry is both phenomenological and contextual, I will quote a passage from Graham Harman’s Guerrilla Metaphysics and ask you to reflect on it: “What I am advocating is a reversal of the familiar social pattern in which everyone proves their adequate philosophical training by jabbing a few more daggers into the corpse of realism. From the flintiest analytic philosopher to the most dashing Francophone icon, philosophy today is united through a shared contempt for any probing of a real world in itself. Like all broad fashions of any era, this disdain begins to take on the character of an automatic reflex, and like all mental reflexes soon decays into compulsion. Given this atmosphere, it is widely supposed that substances are championed only by reactionaries living in an irrelevant past, while innovation seems to be on the side of relations and contexts, not individual things. On a related front, it is supposed to be the reactionaries who believe in substances independent of our perceptions, while the self-proclaimed avant-garde delights in bursting this final bubble of the true believers – a tedious drama of canned iconoclasm playing out across the decades. The champions of wholes over parts and the doubters of independent realities can continue to mock the conservatism of their foes if they wish, but the fact is that they have now largely defeated those foes. Holism and antirealism, their days of novelty long past, have become the new philosophical dogmas of our time. The sole difference is that the old orthodoxies viewed their opponents as dangerous cutting-edge transgressors, while the new ones have so exhausted the field of critique and transgression that they are likely to view their challengers only as conservative throwbacks.” Is metaphysics a thing of the past in your view, or do you tend to agree more with Harman?

I don’t really know whether metaphysics is a thing of the past. Heidegger certainly thought that it was, or wished it to be so. What I would say is that metaphysical questions, like the debate between realism and anti-realism, fall outside the domain of phenomenological inquiry (except insofar as metaphysical systems can be historically contextualized and deconstructed, as Heidegger attempted to do). I think Husserl got it right when he characterized the intentional structure of consciousness phenomenologically as always as if directed toward an object, where the “as if” indicates that the metaphysical question about the reality of the intentional object is not to be asked by the phenomenological inquirer.

In agreement with Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Gadamer, my own phenomenological-contextualist viewpoint holds that all understandings of the “real world” are deeply perspectival. A passage from my 2011 book makes this claim very strongly: “Corresponding to its Cartesianism is traditional psychoanalysis’s objectivist epistemology. One isolated mind, the analyst, is claimed to make objective observations and interpretations of another isolated mind, the patient. A phenomenological contextualism … reunites the Cartesian isolated mind with its world…. Correspondingly, intersubjective-systems theory embraces a perspectivalist epistemology, insisting that analytic understanding is always from a perspective shaped by the organizing principles of the inquirer. Accordingly, there are no objective or neutral analysts, no immaculate perceptions (Nietzsche), no God’s-eye view (Putnam) of anyone or anything” (p.20).

What are you currently working on?

I’m planning a paper elaborating on Heidegger’s use of mood as a bridge between the ontical or psychological and the ontological, a bridge to the “truth of being.” In this paper, I want to counter two criticisms of Heidegger: (1) that he fails to distinguish sufficiently the phenomena of mood, emotion, and feeling, and (2) that he neglects the ontological significance of the body.

Art & Philosophy from Ovi Magazine

[Van Gogh - A Pair of Shoes]

Ovi Magazine regularly posts some of the most interesting and provocative articles on the web, especially around issues of art, philosophy, and the humanities.

Here are two recent articles combing art and philosophy - each offering a look at art through a different worldview, and each interesting in its own way.

First up:

Art as Indefinable and Deconstructable: Weitz and Derrida
by Emanuel L. Paparella

“Is aesthetic theory, in the sense of a true definition or set of necessary and sufficient properties of art, possible? If nothing else does, the history of aesthetics itself should give one enormous pause here. For, in spite of the many theories, we seem no nearer our goal today than we were in Plato’s time.” -- Morris Weitz (“The Role of Theory in Aesthetics”)

“And this thread is the work, the fact that there are works of art. Repetition of the Hegelian gesture in the necessity of its lemma: there are works which common opinion designates as works of art and they are what one must interrogate in order to decipher in them the essence of art. But by what does one recognize, commonly, that these are works of art if one does not have in advance a sort of pre-comprehension of the essence of art? This hermeneutic circle has only the (logical), formal, derived) appearance of a vicious circle. It is not a question of escaping from it but on the contrary of engaging in it and going all round it: ‘We must therefore complete the circle.’” --Jacques Derrida (The Truth in Painting)

In his essay “The Role of Theory in Aesthetics,” Morris Weitz (1916-1981), a philosopher of aesthetics, adapts a Wittgensteinian view of language to the concept of art and argues that the very nature of art as a practice makes a definition of art impossible. Similarly, the French philosopher Jacques Derrida (1930-2004) in his book The Truth in Painting also critiques the unacknowledged presuppositions that have structured the debate about the nature of art. Both philosophers are less interested in providing an account of what art is than in exhibiting the various misguided assumption that have guided theorizing about art within the Western tradition.

As hinted above, Weitz was influenced by the philosopher of language Ludwig Wittgenstein who shaped the debate in the 20th century on analytic philosophy. In his Philosophical Investigations, Wittgenstein argues that philosophers had misunderstood the nature of language, believing that every word had an associated, sharply defined meaning. Wittgenstein proposed that instead we think of words on the analogy of family. If we look at an album of a large family over several generations, we will soon notice that there is no single particular characteristic, not even a small set of characteristics, such as having a large nose or curly hair, shared by all family members. What we will find is a set of overlapping but different resemblances. Similarly, words are governed by the logic of family resemblance. We can see a set of overlapping but differing criteria that explain how a word functions in a language.

In adapting this view of language Weitz argues that the very nature of art makes a definition impossible. This is so because art inherently evolves; innovative artworks constantly disrupt prior categories. This happens in science too as Thomas Khun also argued in his The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. The changing categories (what Khun call paradigms) cannot be settled by appeals to definitions. Rather, they call for a decision based on one’s understanding of the works and their relation to a tradition.

Read the whole article.

Now this one . . . by the same author.

Martin Heidegger's Conception of Art as Truth
by Emanuel L. Paparella

“Art is historical, and as historical it is the creative preserving of truth in the work. Art happens as poetry. Poetry is founding in the triple sense of bestowing, grounding, and beginning. Art as founding, is essentially historical. This means not only that art has a history in the external sense that in the course of time it, too, appears along with many other things, and in the process changes and passes away and offers changing aspects of historiology. Art is history in the essential sense that it grounds history…The origin of the work of art—that is, the origin of both the creators and the preservers, which is to say of a people’s historical existence, is art. This is so because art is by nature an origin: a distinctive way in which truth come into being, that is, becomes historical.”
--Martin Heidegger (“The Origin of the Work of Art”)

Heidegger (1889-1976) remains one of the most influential of continental philosophers, despite his tarnished reputation due to a brief flirting with the Nazi party. He begins his analysis of art with this question: What is the origin of the work of art? What is being asked becomes clear once one understands Heidegger’s answer: “art is the origin of the work of art.” To understand this puzzling answer which sounds like a mere tautology one has to keep in mind that Heidegger has a holistic view of art. That is to say, every aspect of that complex phenomenon known as art is equally crucial to the understanding of what art is. Those aspects are fourfold: 1) the art object itself, 2) the artist (or in Heidegger’s terminology the “creator”), 3) the audience or viewer (or “preserver”), and 4) the work (in the sense of effect) of art.

Heidegger never mentions any specific theory of art, nevertheless he is implicitly critical of any theoretical account that privileges one or the other of art’s four components as the essential one. So, for Heidegger the work of art, itself an ambiguous term which refers both the art object and to its effects, can be understood with reference to its role in that complex phenomenon. Once this holism of Heidegger is grasped, it becomes easier to analyze his more specific claims. The most important of those claims is the assertion that art reveals the truth of Being. From time immemorial philosophers have linked art and truth, but Heidegger’s unique conception of truth as the disclosure of Being is essential for understanding his view of art.

Heidegger begins his complex analysis by first asking what distinguishes an artwork from other types of things, especially from what he calls “equipment.” An item of equipment such as a pencil or a hammer, undoubtedly plays a role in the various purposive projects which we undertake such as writing, building, etc. Superficially, equipment and artwork may appear similar. Both are created items of form and matter. A statue is a piece of marble on which a sculptor has impressed a form. A pencil is composed of wood and graphite, joined to make a useful object of writing. Heidegger agues that such a superficial view ignores the essential nature of the artwork: its ability to reveal truth.

This begs the question: how does an artwork reveal truth? By getting us to see objects outside their customary settings, revealing the broader contexts within which they exist. Heidegger provides some examples; three of them are the painting Shoes by Vincent van Gogh, an ancient Greek temple, and a poem about a Roman fountain. Although the “worlds” disclosed by each of these works are different from one another, they make available to their viewers the specific worlds, the historical cultures in which they were produced. As such, each work is an example of the essential nature of the artwork.

Read the whole article.

Personally, I'm not very well educated in art theory, but the vision of Heidegger offers much more for someone like me to work with. I really don't give a rat's ass about Derida's belief that philosophers are wrong to assert that there are "undoubted works of art." Until the last 30-40 years, Western Civilization has been built on a common agreement as to what constitutes great art and literature. Relativism is useful in some limited ways as an intellectual exercise, but not in understanding the historicity of art, and why we can so often agree on what is "artistic."

Heidegger is offering an integral understanding of art by highlight the various "domains" in which/as which a work of exists - 1) the art object itself, 2) the artist (or in Heidegger’s terminology the “creator”), 3) the audience or viewer (or “preserver”), and 4) the work (in the sense of effect) of art.

These are valuable ways of looking at art -- relativism adds little to the conversation between artists and works of art that is the foundation of what we do as creators.

Tags: Ovi Magazine, Art, history, Philosophy, Art as Indefinable and Deconstructable, Weitz, Derrida, Emanuel L. Paparella, aesthetic theory, Martin Heidegger's Conception of Art as Truth, integral, relativism

Heidegger on Our Existential Situation - The Partially Examined Life, Episode 80

From The Partially Examined Life podcast, an interesting discussion of Heidegger and his views on humanism, Being, and ethics. Part of his argument is that we get too caught up in our relationships to beings (people, objects, etc) and neglect our proper relationship to Being.

From the introduction below:

He wrote this essay (Letter on Humanism, 1949) as a response to a question about whether his philosophy was a type of humanism, meaning an ethics based on relieving suffering and other evidently human interests. He responds that humanism is based on bad metaphysics that ignores Being in favor of beings, and it’s in fact that humanistic viewpoint that enables so much inhumanity in the first place. If you’d just get right with Being, you’d have wisdom and ethics and the rest of it would come naturally to you.

Perhaps this is why Heidegger never appealed to me as a philosopher.

Episode 80: Heidegger on our Existential Situation

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 2:01:36 — 111.4MB)

On Martin Heidegger’s “Letter on Humanism” (1949).

What’s our place in the world? What is it, really, to be human? Heidegger thought that being human hinges on having a proper relationship to Being. What is Being? Well, it’s something more basic than particular beings like people and tables and such, yet it being so close, Heidegger thinks it’s hardest to see, and that we too often get sucked exclusively into engagement with particular beings: into worldly goals and temptations.

He wrote this essay as a response to a question about whether his philosophy was a type of humanism, meaning an ethics based on relieving suffering and other evidently human interests. He responds that humanism is based on bad metaphysics that ignores Being in favor of beings, and it’s in fact that humanistic viewpoint that enables so much inhumanity in the first place. If you’d just get right with Being, you’d have wisdom and ethics and the rest of it would come naturally to you. But of course, most of us won’t do that, because we’re too corrupted by modern society and philosophical history starting with Plato to even understand what in blazes he’s talking about. Bah!

Read more about the topic and get the text. Listen to Seth’s introduction.

End song: “Into the World” by the MayTricks (1993). Read about it.

Please support the podcast by becoming a PEL Citizen or making a donation. Citizens can listen to a whole extra discussion of this text by Seth and some smart PEL listeners.

Related Posts

• Topic for #80: Heidegger on our Existential Situation
• Episode 32: Heidegger: What is “Being?”
• Precognition of Ep. 80: Heidegger
• The Not School Discussion of Heidegger’s Letter on Humanism
• Consciousness (Intentionality) as Transcendent

Phenomenology - Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy

From yet another entry from the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy, here is an excellent overview of phenomenology, which is both the name of a movement in 20th century philosophy (formed around Edmund Husserl) and a term used for the "property of some mental states, the property they have if and only if there is something it is like to be in them."

In essence, phenomenology is the study of "the structural features of experience and of things as experienced. It is primarily a descriptive discipline and is undertaken in a way that is largely independent of scientific, including causal, explanations and accounts of the nature of experience." One of the classic texts is Thomas Nagel's "What Is it Like to be a Bat?" (1974). Other classic texts, beyond those by Husserl, include Jean-Paul Satre's Being and Nothingness (1969) and Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology of Perception (1962).

Phenomenology

In its central use “phenomenology” names a movement in twentieth century philosophy. A second use of “phenomenology” common in contemporary philosophy names a property of some mental states, the property they have if and only if there is something it is like to be in them. Thus, it is sometimes said that emotional states have a phenomenology while belief states do not. For example, while there is something it is like to be angry, there is nothing it is like to believe that Paris is in France. Although the two uses of “phenomenology” are related, it is the first which is the current topic. Accordingly, “phenomenological” refers to a way of doing philosophy that is more or less closely related to the corresponding movement. Phenomenology utilizes a distinctive method to study the structural features of experience and of things as experienced. It is primarily a descriptive discipline and is undertaken in a way that is largely independent of scientific, including causal, explanations and accounts of the nature of experience. Topics discussed within the phenomenological tradition include the nature of intentionality, perception, time-consciousness, self-consciousness, awareness of the body and consciousness of others. Phenomenology is to be distinguished from phenomenalism, a position in epistemology which implies that all statements about physical objects are synonymous with statements about persons having certain sensations or sense-data. George Berkeley was a phenomenalist but not a phenomenologist.

Although elements of the twentieth century phenomenological movement can be found in earlier philosophers—such as David Hume, Immanuel Kant and Franz Brentano—phenomenology as a philosophical movement really began with the work of Edmund Husserl. Following Husserl, phenomenology was adapted, broadened and extended by, amongst others, Martin Heidegger, Jean-Paul Sartre, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Emmanuel Levinas and Jacques Derrida. Phenomenology has, at one time or another, been aligned with Kantian and post-Kantian transcendental philosophy, existentialism and the philosophy of mind and psychology.

This article introduces some of the central aspects of the phenomenological method and also concrete phenomenological analyses of some of the topics that have greatly exercised phenomenologists.

Table of Contents

1. Introduction
2. Phenomenological Method
    a. Phenomena
    b. Phenomenological Reduction
    c. Eidetic Reduction
    d. Heidegger on Method
3. Intentionality
    a. Brentano and Intentional Inexistence
    b. Husserl’s Account in Logical Investigations
    c. Husserl’s Account in Ideas I
    d. Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty on Intentionality
4. Phenomenology of Perception
    a. Naïve Realism, Indirect Realism and Phenomenalism
    b. Husserl’s Account: Intentionality and Hyle
    c. Husserl’s Account: Internal and External Horizons
    d. Husserl and Phenomenalism
    e. Sartre Against Sensation
5. Phenomenology and the Self
    a. Hume and the Unity of Consciousness
    b. Kant and the Transcendental I
    c. Husserl and the Transcendental Ego
    d. Sartre and the Transcendent Ego
6. Phenomenology of Time-Consciousness
    a. The Specious Present
    b. Primal Impression, Retention and Protention
    c. Absolute Consciousness
7. Conclusion
8. References and Further Reading

1. Introduction

The work often considered to constitute the birth of phenomenology is Husserl’s Logical Investigations (Husserl 2001). It contains Husserl’s celebrated attack on psychologism, the view that logic can be reduced to psychology; an account of phenomenology as the descriptive study of the structural features of the varieties of experience; and a number of concrete phenomenological analyses, including those of meaning, part-whole relations and intentionality.

Logical Investigations seemed to pursue its agenda against a backdrop of metaphysical realism. In Ideas I (Husserl 1982), however, Husserl presented phenomenology as a form of transcendental idealism. This apparent move was greeted with hostility from some early admirers of Logical Investigations, such as Adolph Reinach. However, Husserl later claimed that he had always intended to be a transcendental idealist. In Ideas I Husserl offered a more nuanced account of the intentionality of consciousness, of the distinction between fact and essence and of the phenomenological as opposed to the natural attitude.

Heidegger was an assistant to Husserl who took phenomenology in a rather new direction. He married Husserl’s concern for legitimating concepts through phenomenological description with an overriding interest in the question of the meaning of being, referring to his own phenomenological investigations as “fundamental ontology.” His Being and Time (Heidegger 1962) is one of the most influential texts on the development of European philosophy in the Twentieth Century. Relations between Husserl and Heidegger became strained, partly due to the divisive issue of National Socialism, but also due to significant philosophical differences. Thus, unlike his early works, Heidegger’s later philosophy bears little relation to classical Husserlian phenomenology.

Although he published relatively little in his lifetime, Husserl was a prolific writer leaving a large number of manuscripts. Alongside Heidegger’s interpretation of phenomenology, this unpublished work had a decisive influence on the development of French existentialist phenomenology. Taking its lead from Heidegger’s account of authentic existence, Sartre’s Being and Nothingness (Sartre 1969) developed a phenomenological account of consciousness, freedom and concrete human relations that perhaps defines the term “existentialism.” Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology of Perception (Merleau-Ponty 1962) is distinctive both in the central role it accords to the body and in the attention paid to the relations between phenomenology and empirical psychology.

Although none of the philosophers mentioned above can be thought of straightforwardly as classical Husserlian phenomenologists, in each case Husserl sets the phenomenological agenda. This remains the case, with a great deal of the contemporary interest in both phenomenological methodology and phenomenological topics drawing inspiration from Husserl’s work. Accordingly, Husserl’s views are the touchstone in the following discussion of the topics, methods and significance of phenomenology.

* * * * *

8. References and Further Reading

• Ayer, A. J. 1946. Phenomenalism. Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 47: 163-96
• Bernet, Rudolf, Iso Kern, and Eduard Marbach. 1993. An Introduction to Husserlian Phenomenology. Evanston, Ill: Northwestern University Press.
• Brentano, Franz. 1995. Psychology from an Empirical Standpoint. Ed. Oskar Kraus. Trans. Antos C. Rancurello, D. B. Terrell, and Linda L. McAlister. 2nd ed. London: Routledge.
• Carman, Taylor. 2006. The Principle of Phenomenology. In The Cambridge Companion to Heidegger, ed. Charles, B. Guignon. 2nd ed. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
• Carman, Taylor. 2008. Merleau-Ponty. London: Routledge.
• Cerbone, David R. 2006. Understanding Phenomenology. Chesham: Acumen.
• Crane, T. 2006. Brentano’s Concept of Intentional Inexistence. In The Austrian Contribution to Analytic Philosophy, ed. Mark Textor. London: Routledge.
• Dreyfus, Hubert L. 1991. Being-in-the-World: A Commentary on Heidegger’s Being and Time, Division I. Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press.
• Embree, L. 2003. Husserl as Trunk of the American Continental Tree. International Journal of Philosophical Studies 11, no. 2: 177-190.
• Frede, Dorothea. 2006. The Question of Being: Heidegger’s Project. In The Cambridge Companion to Heidegger, trans. Charles, B. Guignon. 2nd ed. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
• Gallagher, Shaun, and Dan Zahavi. 2008. The Phenomenological Mind: An Introduction to Philosophy of Mind and Cognitive Science. London: Routledge.
• Gennaro, Rocco. 2002. Jean-Paul Sartre and the HOT Theory of Consciousness. Canadian Journal of Philosophy 32, no.3: 293-330.
• Hammond, Michael, Jane Howarth, and Russell Keat. 1991. Understanding Phenomenology. Oxford: Basil Blackwell.
• Heidegger, Martin. 1962 [1927]. Being and Time. Trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson. Oxford: Blackwell.
• Heidegger, Martin. 1982 [1927]. The Basic Problems of Phenomenology. Trans. Albert Hofstadter. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
• Hume, David. 1978 [1739-40]. A Treatise of Human Nature. Ed. L. A Selby-Bigge, rev. P. H. Nidditch. 2nd ed. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
• Husserl, Edmund. 1960 [1931]. Cartesian Meditations: An Introduction to Phenomenology. Trans. Dorion Cairns. The Hague: Nijhoff.
• Husserl, Edmund. 1973 [1939]. Experience and Judgement: Investigations in a Genealogy of Logic. Evanston: Northwestern University Press.
• Husserl, Edmund. 1977 [1925]. Phenomenological Psychology: Lectures, Summer Semester, 1925. Trans. John Scanlon. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff.
• Husserl, Edmund. 1982 [1913]. Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy. Trans. F. Kersten. The Hague: Nijhoff.
• Husserl, Edmund. 1991 [1893-1917]. On the Phenomenology of the Consciousness of Internal Time (1893-1917). Trans. John B Brough. Dordrecht: Kluwer.
• Husserl, Edmund. 1999 [1907]. The Idea of Phenomenology. Trans. Lee Hardy. Dordrecht: Kluwer.
• Husserl, Edmund. 2001 [1900/1901]. Logical Investigations. Ed. Dermot Moran. 2nd ed. 2 vols. London: Routledge.
• Jackson, Frank. 1977. Perception: A Representative Theory. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
• James, William. 1981 [1890]. The Principles of Psychology. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press.
• Kant, Immanuel. 1929 [1781/1787]. Critique of Pure Reason. Trans. Norman Kemp Smith. London: Macmillan.
• Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. 1989 [1945]. Phenomenology of Perception. Trans. Colin Smith. London: Routledge.
• Moran, Dermot. 2000. Introduction to Phenomenology. London: Routledge.
• Polt, Richard F. H. 1999. Heidegger: An Introduction. London: UCL Press.
• Sartre, Jean-Paul. 1972 [1936-7]. The Transcendence of the Ego: An Existentialist Theory of Consciousness. New York: Noonday.
• Sartre, Jean-Paul. 1989 [1943]. Being and Nothingness: An Essay on Phenomenological Ontology. Trans. Hazel E. Barnes. London: Routledge.
• Sartre, Jean-Paul. 1970 [1939]. Intentionality: A fundamental idea of Husserl’s Phenomenology. Trans. J. P. Fell. Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology 1, no. 2.
• Smith, David Woodruff. 2007. Husserl. London: Routledge.
• Smith, David Woodruff, and Amie L Thomasson, eds. 2005. Phenomenology and Philosophy of Mind. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
• Sokolowski, Robert. 2000. Introduction to Phenomenology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
• Wider, Kathleen. 1997. The Bodily Nature of Consciousness. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.
• Zahavi, Dan. 2003. Husserl’s Phenomenology. Stanford: Stanford University Press

Author Information

Joel Smith
Email: joel.smith@manchester.ac.uk
University of Manchester

Last updated: March 27, 2009 | Originally published: March/27/2009

Omnivore - Kill the Philosopher in Your Head

From Bookforum's Omnivore blog, another collection of philosophy links for your consumption. 

“We knew that he had expressed anti-Semitism as private insights, but this shows anti-Semitism tied in to his philosophy,” says Peter Trawny, director of the Martin Heidegger Institute at the U. of Wuppertal. - Jens Grossmann/Laif for The Chronicle

Of particular note here is a review of the new Black Notebooks from Martin Heidegger. These notebooks show the real, very angry Heidegger from the 1930s and 40s, and it shows him as an anti-Semite once and for all.

"In the late 1930s and early 1940s, Heidegger was very angry," says Mr. Trawny. By then, he says, the philosopher realized that both Nazi ideology and his own philosophical mission, which was predicated on a national revolution and Germany’s dominance in Europe, were going to fail. "In this anger, he makes reference to Jews, including some passages that are extremely hostile. We knew that he had expressed anti-Semitism as private insights, but this shows anti-Semitism tied in to his philosophy," says Mr. Trawny.

The editor says Heidegger’s references to a controlling "world Jewry" and to a collusion of "rootless" Jews in both international capitalism and communism are essentially the logic that informs the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, the infamous, early 20th-century, anti-Semitic forgery that claims to show a Jewish conspiracy for global domination. "He doesn’t say he’s read The Protocols," says Mr. Trawny, "but that’s not necessary to share a certain kind of anti-Semitism with the Protocols. Nazi propaganda was full of exactly this kind of anti-Semitism."

Of course, there are other good links below, but that one stood out.

Kill the philosopher in your head

Mar 12 2014
3:00PM

• The inaugural issue of Crisis and Critique is out, including Slavoj Zizek (Ljubljana): The Impasses of Today’s Radical Politics; Frank Ruda (FU Berlin): The Indignant of the Earth; Panagiotis Sotiris (Aegean): Alain Badiou and the Aporia of Democracy within Generic Communism; Yuan Yao (Pensee): Lacan and Rational Choice; Srdjan Cvjeticanin (EGS): The Necessity of Philosophy; Jana Tsoneva (CEU): Communism is Wrong; Daniel Tutt reviews Enjoying What We Don’t Have: The Political Project of Psychoanalysis by Todd McGowan; Andrew Ryder reviews Badiou and the Philosophers, ed. Tzuchien Tho and Giuseppe Bianco. 
• Marcus E. Green (Otterbein): On the Postcolonial Image of Gramsci. 
• Jan Slaby (FUB): Affectivity and Temporality in Heidegger. 
• Peter Costello (Providence): Arthur Miller and Jacques Derrida: A Friendship Through Death. 
• Daniel Colucciello Barber (ICI-Berlin): Nothing to Do With Philosophy/Stop, Think, Stop. 
• Sara R. Farris (Goldsmiths): Althusser and Tronti: The Primacy of Politics versus the Autonomy of the Political. 
• Kill the philosopher in your head: Anne Boyer on how Althusserianism has always been a Marxism for those who prefer their class struggle as philosophy. 
• Revisiting a scholar unmasked by scandal: The Double Life of Paul de Man, by Evelyn Barish, is the first full biography of the Yale literary theorist who helped turn deconstruction into an insurgent force in American intellectual life. 
• Release of Heidegger’s Black Notebooks reignites debate over Nazi ideology. 
• You can download Heidegger and the Thinking of Place: Explorations in the Topology of Being by Jeff Malpas (2012).