SUMMARY DESCRIPTIONS OF PHENOMENOLOGY, HERMENEUTICS, AND THE PROBLEM OF INDIRECT REPRESENTATIONALISM - IN THREE PARTS:

·  PART 1: PHENOMENOLOGY

·  PART 2: HERMENEUTICS - The Contribution of Hermeneutics to Phenomenology

·  PART 3: INDIRECT REPRESENTATIONALISM - Phenomenology’s Response to the Question of Whether the World is Real or Just a Figment of Your Imagination

7/18/2013

L. Hough

Admission:

The text in this summary is, for the most part, lifted directly from Heidegger’s Being and Time, by William Blattner. My contributions are in double braces, {{…..}}, and may not be correct.

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PART 1: PHENOMENOLOGY

{{ Edmund Husserl (German: 1859 - 1938) was a philosopher and mathematician and the founder of the 20th-century philosophical school of phenomenology. He was the teacher of Heidegger.}}

During the 19th century, philosophers sought to distinguish the meaning (content) of a thought from both:

·  The psychological state in which the thought was realized, and

·  The object being thought about.

The meaning of a thought is not identical with the act of thinking. Neither is the meaning of a thought identical with the thing being thought about.

Thus, meaning is something highly unusual; neither psychological nor real.

All thoughts (mental acts) have an object, whether or not those objects, themselves, are:

·  real objects, or

·  non-real objects.

In phenomenology, real objects-- real things existing in the world--are called “transcendent” objects {{following Kant’s definition of “transcendent”}}. They are considered to be “transcendent” because such objects transcend the mind and have reality. In phenomenology, the "transcendent" is that which transcends our own consciousness--that which is objective rather than only a phenomenon of consciousness. Some examples of transcendent objects are coffee mugs, tables, pens, hammers, and Austin, Texas.

In phenomenology, non-real objects are called “immanent” objects. Immanent objects are things that subsist (remain in existence) simply insofar as one thinks about them or intends them. Some examples of immanent objects are ethical norms, political rights, hatred, unicorns, Mordor, and meanings.

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It was Husserl’s great achievement to find a systematic way to resist the error of falling into considering meaning, which is an immanent object of thought, to be an attribute of the objects-in-reality—to reify the immanent object of thought. Husserl’s technique for resisting reification is the “phenomenological reduction.” The phenomenological reduction “reduces” our experience by suspending any interest we might have in either the transcendent object of our thought or ourselves as thinkers. We ignore the question whether the objects of our thinking really exist, and if they do, whether they exist as I experience them. We also ignore questions about the reality and nature of the psychological acts in which we experience the objects. Instead, we focus on the object just as it presents itself; the “object qua object.”

In studying meaning, we are not investigating an empirical object. We are investigating how an object of human experience, whether it is an external physical thing or an internal psychological state, presents itself to us. Phenomenology does not study minds. It studies meaning or intentionality (aboutness).

In focusing on an object just as it presents itself, one does not simply narrate one’s experience. Phenomenology seeks to understand the structure of meaning. For example, it is an idiosyncratic (characteristic peculiar to an individual or group) fact about my experience that the computer at which I am now gazing is located in Texas. It is not idiosyncratic that it has location. Location belongs to the very structure of the presentation of physical objects.

Categorial intuition: For Husserl, “categorial intuition” is the way in which modal aspects of an object present themselves to us. For example, I take in visually that the book in front of me is black, thick, rectangular, and so on. In taking it as a book, one which has the attributes of being black, thick, and rectangular, I am taking it as a unity. Its unity is not a physical feature of the book, in any ordinary sense, however. It is not a sensible feature, but one which my mind adds to it. It is a categorial structure, in my mind, of the book as it presents itself. In order to see the book, one must experience its unity, but the experience of its unity is not a sensory experience. It is an aspect of experience that is latent in and enabling of the ordinary experience. Like the unity of the book, the being of the book is a categorial, rather than real, aspect of how the book presents itself.

{{ It is important, at this point, to understand that we have mental acts (thoughts) about both real (transcendent) objects and non-real (immanent) objects. For both transcendent objects and immanent objects, the thought that forms in the mind is, itself, an immanent object. }} {{Refer to Part 3 of this summary for the Phenomenologists’ answer to the question of whether objects exist in a reality outside of the mind, as opposed to existing only within the mind.}}

PART 2: HERMENEUTICS

The Contribution of Hermeneutics to Phenomenology

{{Martin Heidegger’s (German: student of Husserl) main interest was ontology (the study of being).}} He published Being and Time in 1927, at the confluence of the movements of Phenomenology, existentialism, neo-scholasticism, and hermeneutics.

Heidegger used the phenomenological method that he had learned from his teacher, Husserl, to explore issues at the foundation of meaning and intentionality (the mind’s capacity to represent the world around it)

Heidegger was also influenced by Kierkegaard and Nietzsche, particularly their existentialist strains.

Both

  1. the Phenomenological method, and
  2. the existentialist interest in the everyday and the meanings it embodies

call for some way of mining human practice and revealing its significances.

This call for a method for interpreting meaningful behavior was answered, for Heidegger, by the methodology that Wilhelm Dilthey developed for his theory of hermeneutics.

Dilthey said that the techniques we must use to understand human behavior differ from those techniques that are used in the natural sciences. The natural sciences seek general laws that are applicable everywhere and always. Human activities, behaviors, and expressions are to be understood by putting them into their specific social and historical contexts. Natural sciences aim for generality, whereas human studies aim for context-sensitivity.

Heidegger believed that the ontological being of a human cannot be studied by the empirical method, and that hermeneutics could be used. He believed that in the course of applying the methods of hermeneutics to ontological inquiry, a map or structure of the field of being in general would come into focus.

Heidegger converted Dilthey’s methodological theses into an ontology.

PART 3: INDIRECT REPRESENTATIONALISM

Phenomenology’s Response to the Question of Whether the World is Real or Just a Figment of Your Imagination

According to Indirect Representationalism, objects are announced to us by internal surrogates—ideas or representations. Transcendent objects (objects within the real world beyond the mind) affect the mind by causing representations of them to become present to consciousness (e.g., in a normal visual experience of a coffee mug, the coffee mug interacts causally with our sensory apparatus, and this interaction produces sensory experience of the coffee mug). We are only directly aware of the representation. We must infer the existence of the coffee mug from the representation.

Indirect Representationalism quickly gives rise to skeptical worries. The internal representations of which one is aware might very well not correspond with any transcendent objects within the real world beyond the mind. For this reason, philosophers working within the tradition have felt forced to choose among several unpalatable options:

·  Acquiescing in a sort of skepticism about the external world (as Hume does),

·  Seeking some sort of rational guarantee for the veracity of our representations (as Descartes does), or

·  Trying to “reduce” the external objects to constructions out of our representations {{i.e., claiming that the external world doesn’t exist}} (as Berkeley and other phenomenalists do).

The worry that phenomena are just such representations rests on the covert assumption of Indirect Representationalism. To charge phenomenology with studying appearances, rather than reality, is to load the concept of a phenomenon with representationalist baggage that neither Husserl nor Heidegger accepts.

A phenomenon is not an appearance. An appearance is an indication that there is something else that lies behind the appearance; and that something else does not show itself. A phenomenon is, by definition, something that shows itself. . {{ A phenomenon shows itself directly; an appearance is merely an indication of the presence of a hidden phenomenon.}}