Phänomenologische Forschungen 2007

Maurice Merleau-Ponty: Causerien 1948. Radiovorträge; Alessandro Delcò: Merleau-Ponty et l’expérience de la création. Du paradigme au schème; Christian Grüny: Zerstörte Erfahrung. Eine Phänomenologie des Schmerzes; Don E. Marietta Jr.: Beyond certainty. A phenomenological approach to moral reflection; Franz Gmainer-Pranzl: Heterotopie der Vernunft. Skizze einer Methodologie interkulturellen Philosophierens auf dem Hintergrund der Phänomenologie Edmund Husserls

Husserl’s transcendental phenomenology which he characterized as an eidetic science of transcendentally reduced phenomena aims at least at material-apriori laws of a special kind, namely eidetic descriptive laws built up from pure descriptive concepts. The paper explicates Husserl’s notion of essence in the broad sense as a state-of-affairs-function (Sachverhaltsfunktion); this noematic function is the objective „correlate“ of the propositional function which we call a „concept“ and which is part of the proposition, i.e. the state-of-affairs-meaning (Sachverhaltsmeinung), in which a state of affairs is projected. Essences in the narrow or pregnant sense are pure essences which Husserl named „Eidé“. The concept of pure essence relevant for the phenomenological descriptive eidetics is elucidated through the explication of Husserl’s notion of a pure descriptive concept, so as to show how these concepts, which are pure type concepts, differ from impure descriptive concepts, especially from concepts denoting natural kinds. Grounded exclusively in pure descriptive concepts, the eidetic descriptive laws (Wesensgesetze) have special truth conditions and a need for special ways of examination. The proper place of the method called „eidetic variation“ is the examination, falsification or justification of presumed eidetic descriptive laws. Starting from familiar exemplary cases of states of affairs which confirm the presumed law, the free variation, which operates in pure fantasy, has the task of constructing possible counterexamples to falsify the presumed eidetic law. The property of being falsifiable by counterexamples constructed in pure fantasy allows for a distinction between empirical laws and the eidetic descriptive laws of Husserlian eidetics. The falsifiability by fictional and factual counterexamples shows that Husserl’s transcendental phenomenology is a scientific enterprise open to intersubjective examination precisely due to its eidetic character.

This contribution attempts to define the relation between phenomenology and philosophy of practice by considering their respective conceptions of philosophy and especially the consequences of modern critiques of metaphysics. The two characteristic perspectives of performative metaphysics and of meaning analysis are used for further critical inquiry into the standpoints of phenomenology and philosophy of practice. As a conclusion, this inquiry is continued in a common area of interest of both standpoints, that is, the relation between personality and embodied being.

In Being and Time the broken piece of equipment (§ 16) or the dead body of an Other (§ 47) were seen as resulting from a process of transition (Übergang) between an original state and a position not so removed from it that one had to do with something entirely different. ‚The Origin of the Work of Art‘ takes a more radical approach: rather than leading toward a ‚no longer, but not yet‘, the movement here is toward a ‚no longer, but already‘. Hence its famous thesis: either art is at work, or it is no longer art and already a mere object of art, a piece of art. Contrary to those of Heidegger’s readers who have suggested that his earlier views on transition would have saved him some of the (i.e. political) trouble the art essay runs into, the present paper aims to show that both the earlier and the later view fail to come to terms with what happens in transition as such. This is illustrated by an analysis of the corpse (ad BT § 47), and of junk (ad BT § 16) and leads us to a different approach to what is at stake in art and in the kind of Darstellung exemplified by it.

This essay explores consonant aspects of the relationship between phenomenology and practice theory. It makes three basic claims. The first is really just an observation, namely, that phenomenology makes incisive contributions to the account of action found in practice theory. The second claim is that practice theory updates an important conception of sociality developed in post Heideggerian phenomenology. And the third claim is that phenomenologies and practice theories can combine to form wider accounts of human life that encompass such phenomena as experience, consciousness, emotions, and the body that phenomenology has well analyzed and practice theory has somewhat ignored.

Following Derrida’s early claim from Voice and Phenomenon that Husserl’s phenomenology was a philosophy of life, the article focuses on the second of two aspects that there are to such a claim. While the first one – which amounts to revealing negatively (as Derrida does) that the Ego in Husserl is immortal, that Husserl is unable to grasp the temporal structure of the Ego in its dependency from its finitude and thus from death (which supposedly only Heidegger did), and so forth – is well-known and widely debated, the second one has been mostly ignored so far: Is Derrida not also implying – positively, as it were – that Husserlian phenomenology does indeed have the potential to show a way to a philosophy of life escaping the pitfalls of transcendental egology? Might deconstruction (an „affirmative business“ after all, as the later Derrida kept reminding us) not be an attempt to a critical, i.e. a non-naïve, philosophy of life and thus a re-appropriation (under better circumstances, as e.g. the knowledge of Husserl’s later and latest works and notes) of motifs known from Georg Misch’s 1930 pioneering project of an approximation of phenomenology and philosophy of life, re-arranged in Derrida and others around the decisive shift of view from death to birth, from being singular to being plural – to the community?

Two forms or rather perspectives of observations appear alongside practice theories: The first perspective can be called the „theatre perspective“: practice here is observed as a regular, spatiotemporally ordered, socially structured, and therefore recognizable historical form of „practical doings and sayings“, in which participants are understood as mere carriers of practices and their bodies as the raw material for processes of formation. In the other perspective, understood as the perspective of the participants themselves, practices come into view as ongoing, conflictual, and contingent accomplishments, in which participants occur as intelligently collaborating contributors with so called „lived bodies“. These bodies are affectable, sites of experience, and media of a sensitivity that allow an embodied self to orientate itself (with)in a practice. This paper proposes a methodological mediation of both perspectives by taking into account both a sociological analysis of discipline, formation, or adjustment, and the reflexive sensing in action, which can be modeled phenomenologically. Thus, a „lived-body-in-accomplishment“ comes into view that serves the material basis of subjectivation procceses, i. e. the (self-)formation of a constitutionally conditioned (political) agency.

This paper discusses Hans-Georg Gadamer’s account of what he sees as a major change in the approach to the Western philosophical and aesthetic traditions that began in the second half of the eighteenth century, and the results of this change today. According to Gadamer, these traditions ceased to be binding at this time and became objects of historical research. Instead of being seen even as potential sources of insight, traditional knowledge claims and works of art were subjected to historical and aesthetic analysis. And Gadamer holds that these approaches have partially come to encompass the present as well. Thus, modern art has often downplayed cognitive and pedagogical tasks in proceeding in a purely aesthetic, playful way. And the study of history has been seen as providing insight into the contextually determined nature of presuppositions, those of the modern age included. According to Gadamer, this unduly limits the possibilities of both art and history to provide learning.

The materiality of bodies is crucial for establishing theories of practice. To unfold the ‘black box’ of the performing body some theorists have implemented the difference between the lived body and the material body (Leib/Kçrper) in practice theory. This corporeal difference finds one systematic origin in phenomenology. It has come under attack for naturalising and subjectivising the lived body as a primordial category, and thus being unable to integrate to practice theory. It will be argued that critics can be refuted insofar as the corporeal difference is taken serious as a bodily experienced difference which is never to be reduced to some kind of objectivity.

Gadamer’s hermeneutics is no discipline or simply a foundation of the Humanities, but addresses the fundamental problem of phenomenology: how things show themselves and can be attained. It does so, however, not in Husserl’s terminology but in its “ontological turn”. In elaborating on the ontology of language, Gadamer equates the accessibility of things and their Being, a move eminent in the “speculative character of language” discussed in the third part of Truth and Method. For Gadamer as well as for Heidegger, ontology is possible only as phenomenology. How things show themselves, however, cannot be understood in relation to an absolute consciousness or understanding Dasein, but, following Plato, from the “evidence of the beautiful” in an hermeneutics of the artwork. Gadamer’s phenomenology thus describes the accessibility of things as the coming to pass of their truth and presence, much as the later Heidegger does in relation to physis and openness. Hermeneutical reflection of the fundamental problem of phenomenology also reveals the displacement in the continuity of coming to pass as the “space between words” opened in the manifold of interpretations.

Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology of the body has so far been widely neglected in the debate on practice theory. This failure is surprising considering Merleau-Ponty’s early contribution of a number of fundamental insights – including bodily practice as a theoretical basic unit, the priority of “practical sense” and “implicit knowledge” over consciousness, and the collectivity of practice. The article addresses these approaches in detail, examining them relative to corresponding concepts from Bourdieu and Foucault. It turns out that both theorists owe more to their teacher than they were willing to admit. Revisiting Merlau-Ponty also offers the opportunity to both supplement practice theoretical vocabulary with the aspect of implicit perceptual knowledge and refine it with regard to the question of individual deviation from order.

According to Lévinas, art is an ambiguous phenomenon. He shares this conviction with Plato and bases it on Platonic arguments. Lévinas often refers to the Platonic critique of writing in the dialogue Phaedrus and employs it to support the thesis that all works, especially all artworks, are subject to misunderstandings and misinterpretations. Art is lacking the immediacy of the ethical encounter with the Other, and it allows us to evade reality. In this article, I will turn to the ambiguity of art and show that the diagnosis of an ambiguity is convincing, yet might not necessarily yield a rejection of art.

Joseph Rouse is one of the most distinctive and innovative proponents of practice theory today. This article focuses in section I on two extended elaborations with systematic intent from Rouse’s corpus over the last two decades regarding the nature of practices, highlighting in particular the concept of normativity. Toward this end, this article explains why Rouse argues that we need to bring about something like a Copernican revolution in our understanding of the intrinsic normativity of practices as an essentially interactive, temporal, contestable, and open-ended process. In section II, this article then examines some commonalities and apparent divergences of Rouse’s practice theory from the existential phenomenology of the early Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty. The article draws to a close by considering two apparent divergences between Rouse’s conception of practices and existential phenomenology: (1) the degree of compatibility between the claim of existential phenomenology to reveal necessary enabling background conditions of our lived experience and Rouse’s normative conception of practices; and (2) the compatibility of “quasi-transcendental” constitution, as this is at work according to existential phenomenology, and Rouse’s argument that it is wrong to understand practices as exclusively centered on the activities of human beings.

Concerning the modern discussion about the relation between event and narration and “Time and Narration” (Paul Ricoeur) the author asks about the relation between entanglement and narration in Wilhelm Schapps philosophy of stories. The philosophy of stories does not approve a systematisation of the topic but does allow its discussion under various aspects. Among those, the author chooses the existence of narrations in the stories of the entangled, the silent speaking, the entanglement in a positive world and the relation between the story of one’s life and poetry. The essay also is a contribution to basic questions of narrative ethics.

In the contemporary theory of practice, there is an increased awareness about the necessity of focusing on corporeality as a fundamental feature of practice. In this respect, there is a discussion about reflections on the phenomenology of the body, in particular as it is developed in the work of Merleau-Ponty. In the present study, we would like to broaden the discussion and answer some of the criticisms expressed by the theory of practice, such as an exaggerated focus on the first-person‘s perspective, or a too strong concept of consciousness, supposedly marking the ,classical‘ theory of the lived body in Merleau-Ponty. We consider here the later period of Merleau-Ponty’s thinking, in particular after he became a professor at the Collége de France in 1952 onto his death in 1961. In this period, he deepens consistently his understanding of the notion of ,body schema‘, which clearly becomes the key to his approach to practice, affectivity, and to the phenomenon of sociality. His focus thereby was to depart from a traditional philosophy of perception and move on to a philosophy of ,expression‘, which would uncover the ambiguity of corporeal practice as the difference between institution and sedimentation of sense. The unconscious in the sense of a social phenomenon surprisingly becomes a field of encounter between the later philosophy of Merleau-Ponty and the schizoanalysis of Guattari and Deleuze.

The basic intention of this paper is to approach the phenomenon of violence from the perspective of Jan Patočka’s “a-subjective phenomenology.” As I argue, violence is a “boundary phenomenon” that has not yet been analyzed adequately in the phenomenological tradition. Its analysis requires a revision of phenomenology. However, such a revision can not only be found in recent positions, but already in Patočka’s conception. Thus, I propose to reassess his basic ideas that are derived from both a strong criticism of Husserl’s subjectivism and Heidegger’s anti-intellectualism. In this context, I use Patočka’s respective insights concerning the “phenomenal field” and the “movement of human existence,” to develop a phenomenological analysis of the various ways violence affects our selves: As I argue, it does so by destroying incorporated patterns of understanding, by oppressing the meaningful frameworks of our pregiven life-world, and, finally, by undermining our primordial trust in the other.

This empirically oriented contribution focuses on different data- and body-practices in the specific fieldof self-tracking. Based ona phenomenological differentiation between body (Körper in German) and embodiment (Leib in German) following Plessner and Merleau-Ponty, we reflect on the machine-like-body, the cybernetic control loop, the data-like-body and most of all practices of habitualization. In a multi-perspective approach, we do not only examine bodies and body-values, but also the manipulation of the body (e. g. in the field of biohacking), the relation between the body and experiences in epigenetics, as well as the emergence of new bodily perceptions and senses. Thereby, we observe both tendencies towards alienated embodiment and possibilities to gain new accesses to the world by including embodied performances.

Starting with an analysis of Michel Foucault’s notion of biopower as defining feature of modernity, the present essay moves on to discuss different interpretations of “life” in the political theories of Giorgio Agamben and Hanna Arendt. The aim is to understand what transformations biopower has undergone since Foucault’s first studies. According to Jürgen Habermas biopower today has turned into liberal eugenics and bioengineering is replacing the natural origin of man causing a crisis of subjectivity, whereas from a Heideggerian point of view, the attempt to redesign human nature by means of biotechnology marks the summit of reifying subjectivism.#

The theory of practice is according to its self-conception a poststructuralistic research program. It is proceeding on the assumption of a body, that performs his material arrangement with artefacts on the basis of a social habitus in the sense of Bourdieu. In view of recent diagnosis of an affective turn in the social sciences the article fathoms on the basis of Michel Henry’s phenomenology the possibility to understand the (living) body as a body of mood or what he calls flesh. The body which is always in a special mood thus has an influence on acting. In a further step this assumption will broaden the scope to the entire room of interaction, where the practices take place. This includes next to the body of mood, collective moods of social groups and atmospheres as further parameters.

The paper examines the relationship between praxeology and Schutzian phenomenology. It does so by tracing and comparing the conceptualizations of sense and sensemaking in both approaches. In a first step the phenomenological concept of mental and subjective sense and meaning is discerned. Subsequently, different disengagements from this concept within interpretative sociologies are reconstructed. It is argued that those disengagements, which seek to replace the understanding of sense and meaning as private, ,inner’ entities with notions of the ,publicness’ of practical social sensemaking are crucial for advancing a praxeological perspective in social theory.

The problem of practice in phenomenology including the political and ethical consequences of phenomenology has long been the focus of my personal interests and my philosophical, that is to say, phenomenological research. The guiding principle is that taking phenomenology as a description of the experiences of a subject rooted within experience is not only concerned with the theorisation of the experience but also necessary with the practices of the subject. In France, the “mainstream”-reading of a phenomenology which orientates itself towards logic, mathematics and transcendental philosophy prevailed for far too long, with the result that the interest in social sciences, psychology and neurobiology (the so called “cognitive sciences”) is often still met with scepticism. Instead I want to understand phenomenology as a practice through exercise which as practice has political and ethical implications.