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A Treatise on Phenomenological Essentialism New Key to the Transcendental Eidetic Sciences

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A Treatise on Phenomenological Essentialism New Key to the Transcendental Eidetic Sciences View metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk brought to you by CORE provided by DSpace at Waseda University A Treatise on Phenomenological Essentialism New Key to the Transcendental Eidetic Sciences Shotaro Iwauchi 5615D001-4 January 20, 2018 A doctoral dissertation submitted to the Graduate School of International Culture and Communication Studies Waseda University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Acknowledgments Without Prof. Seiji Takeda, I would not have become interested in phenomenology. I am grateful to him for passionate and critical discussions on the future of philosophy. I would like thank to Prof. Ken Nishi and Prof. Keiko Katsukata for their extraordinary support in this thesis process. Prof. Timothy Seul and Prof. Norimasa Morita always help me discover new horizons, and without thoughtful conversations with them, this study would have been impossible. Finally, I would like to express my appreciation to Prof. Graham Law and Prof. Takashi Aso for their continual encouragement and support. Last but not the least, I would like to thank my family for supporting me spiritually throughout writing this thesis and in my life in general. ii Abbreviations and Explanatory Notes 1) The Husserliana edition is cited in the text and is indicated with the abbreviation “Hua.” 2) Regarding the other works of Husserl not published in the Husserliana, I use the following abbreviations: EU: Edmund Husserl, Erfahrung und Urteil: Untersuchungen zur Genealogie der Logik, ed. Ludwig Landgrebe (Hamburg: Felix Meiner, 1999). 3) I use English translations of Husserl’s works (see bibliography), but I change translations according to the circumstances. 4) I use italics within quotation marks (1) when the original words are in italics; (2) when the original words are Gesperrt in German; and (3) when I specify original German or Latin words. iii Table of Contents Preface The End of Phenomenology? (1) Chapter 1 Husserl’s Phenomenological Reduction (9) 1.1. General Positing of the Natural Attitude and Phenomenological Epoché (10) 1.2. Intentionality, Noesis, and Noema (13) 1.3. Indubitability of the Perception of Something Immanent (16) 1.4. Husserl’s Phenomenological Reduction (18) Chapter 2 Defending Cartesianism in Phenomenology (23) 2.1. Cartesian Doubt and Ideal of Universal Science (24) 2.2. Husserl’s Divergence from the Cartesian Way (26) 2.3. Husserl’s Critique of Descartes (28) 2.4. Contribution of Epistemology to Phenomenology (30) Chapter 3 General and Transcendental Eidetic Science (34) 3.1. Definition of Eidetic Science (35) 3.2. Phenomenology and Essentialism: Dan Zahavi versus Nicolas de Warren (37) 3.3. Entwinement of Eidetic Sciences (41) 3.4. General Eidetic Science and Transcendental Eidetic Science (46) Chapter 4 Miscommunication of Phenomenology: The Case of Martin Heidegger (53) 4.1. The Concept of Phenomenology in Heidegger’s Interpretation (54) 4.2. Heidegger’s Critique of Husserlian Phenomenology (57) 4.3. Heidegger’s Divergence from Phenomenology (60) Chapter 5 Max Scheler’s Essentialism and Metaphysics as General Eidetic Science (66) 5.1. The Phenomenological Reduction of Scheler (67) 5.2. Natural Outlook and Scientific Outlook (70) 5.3. Philosophical Outlook: Moral Conditions of Philosophy (72) 5.4. Mission of Philosophy: Man and the Absolute (76) Chapter 6 Eidetic Seeing and the Teleology of Monads (83) 6.1. The Method of Eidetic Seeing (83) 6.2. The Problem of Circularity in Eidetic Seeing and the Openness of Free Variation (85) iv 6.3. Conciliation of the Controversy Concerning Truth (87) 6.4. Relativity of Intuited Essences (90) 6.5. Eidetic Seeing and the Teleology of Monads (92) Chapter 7 The Phenomenological Language Game: The Original Contract of Goodness (97) 7.1. Language Games (98) 7.2. Family Resemblance versus Morphological Essence (100) 7.3. Eidetic Seeing as a Language Game (104) 7.4. The Philosophical Language Game in Karl-Otto Apel (106) 7.5. The Original Contract of Goodness (109) Chapter 8 The Confrontation between Essentialism and Constructionism (114) 8.1. Essentialism in Tradition: Plato and Leibniz (116) 8.2. Philosophy of Constructionism: Hume and Nietzsche (119) 8.3. Social Constructionism as Modified Relativism (122) 8.4. Phenomenological Essentialism: Intersubjective Confirmation and Mutual Recognition (124) Chapter 9 Essentialism and the Other: Two Vectors of Imagination (129) 9.1. The Role of Imagination in Essentialism (130) 9.2. The Other as Transcendence (133) 9.3. The Subaltern and Strategic Essentialism (136) 9.4. Transformation of Imagination and Essentialism: Toward “Imagine Thyself” (139) Conclusion The Idea of Phenomenology in the Present (144) Bibliography (152) v A Treatise on Phenomenological Essentialism New Key to the Transcendental Eidetic Sciences Preface The End of Phenomenology? Edmund Husserl, the founder of phenomenology, believed that the phenomenological enterprise would disclose the infinite field of study, including not only the study of consciousness but also the regional ontologies of thing, life, person, and culture. Moreover, many scholars and researchers have demonstrated so far that the phenomenological method effectively works as a method for qualitative research and that phenomenology can also be applied to psychology, sociology, pedagogy, and nursing science,1 and that it enables us to see the essential structures and conditions of lived experiences filled with meanings, emotions, and values, such as the essence of love, nihilism, and sexuality.2 However, Husserlian phenomenology itself has been the subject of criticism from other philosophical camps such as linguistic philosophy, postmodernism, and speculative realism, or even from phenomenologists such as Max Scheler, Martin Heidegger, and Emmanuel Levinas. Furthermore, the term “phenomenology” is, ironically, becoming ambiguous to the extent that we can hardly discover the fundamental idea that unifies individual phenomenological investigations as the number of such investigations has increased under the name “phenomenology of something.” In 1967, for instance, Richard Rorty edited an anthology of linguistic philosophy entitled The Linguistic Turn, which became an emblem of the turning point in the discourse of philosophy from epistemology of traditional continental philosophy to linguistic philosophy on the basis of the view that “philosophical problems are problems which may be solved (or dissolved) either by reforming language, or by understanding more about the language we presently use.”3 Phenomenology as an attempt to revive Cartesian and Kantian transcendentalism seemed already outdated and inept, and was regarded as a part of metaphysics standing to an unverifiable and dogmatic manner from a 1 Amedeo Giorgi, The Descriptive Phenomenological Method in Psychology: A Modified Husserlian Approach (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 2009). Alfred Schütz and Thomas Luckmann, The Structures of the Life-World, trans. Richard M. Zaner and Hugo T. Engelhardt, Jr. (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1973). Max van Manen, Researching Lived Experiences: Human Science for an Action Sensitive Pedagogy (London: The Althouse Press, 1990). Patricia Benner, From Novice to Expert: Excellence and Power in Clinical Nursing Practice (Menlo Park: Addison-Wesley, 1984). 2 Max Scheler, The Nature of Sympathy, trans. Peter Heath (London: Routledge & K. Paul, 1954). Jiro Watanabe, Nihilism: Phenomenology of Inwardness (Tokyo: University of Tokyo Press, 1975). Jacqueline M. Martinez, Communicative Sexualities: A Communicology of Sexual Experience (Lanham / Boulder / New York / Toronto / Plymouth: Lexington Books, 2011). 3 Richard M. Rorty, ed., The Linguistic Turn: Essays in Philosophical Method with Two Retrospective Essays (Chicago / London: The University of Chicago Press, 1992), 3. 1 viewpoint of linguistic philosophy. In this context, phenomenology is considered a dogmatic foundationalism that seeks the potentiality of something absolute. In contrast to The Linguistic Turn claimed by linguistic philosophy, The Speculative Turn4 claimed by speculative realism makes the situation that phenomenology is in more equivocal and interesting. In the logic of speculative realists, phenomenology is regarded as “correlationism” and “fideism.” That is, they claim that phenomenology indeed contributes to relativism and blocks access to the absolute.5 These two symbolic turns shed light not only on the ironic and curious situation of phenomenology but also on the conflicting intortus situation of contemporary thought; linguistic philosophy criticizes phenomenology because of its tendency to dogmatism and metaphysics, but speculative realism determines phenomenology as a sort of relativism and fideism. Both camps do not realize, I think, that the fundamental problem lies in the epistemological aporia that appear between relativism and universalism, or skepticism and dogmatism.6 The discourse of epistemology cannot be replaced by the new discourse of linguistic philosophy or speculative realism, but is to be fundamentally elucidated within the logic of epistemology itself. Further, Husserl indeed has already elucidated the epistemological aporia and presented a new method for developing a new form of essentialism, preparing the potentiality of The Eidetic Turn. However, simultaneously, it can be said that some critiques of phenomenology give a hint of the reasons why phenomenology was misunderstood and why Husserl’s fundamental motive was miscommunicated. For
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