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The Manifold Concept of the Lifeworld. Husserl and His Posterity

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The Manifold Concept of the Lifeworld. Husserl and His Posterity Doctorado en Filosofía The Manifold Concept of the lifeworld. Husserl and his posterity Academic Term 2nd Semester 2021 Credits 6 Calendar Once-a-week sessions, Tuesdays, 15.30-18.30; September 28 – December 14 Office hours Fridays, 17.00-18.00 Profesor Ovidiu Stanciu Mail [email protected] DESCRIPTION The concept of the world has played a significant role in the phenomenological tradition. By redefining the meaning of the world and proposing a “natural concept of the world” (natürliche Weltbegriff) or a concept of the lifeworld (Lebenswelt), phenomenology was able to make clear the peculiarity of its own undertaking against competing philosophical directions such as Neo-Kantianism, logical positivism or neutral monism (Whitehead, W. James). The first major formulation of the concept of lifeworld can be traced back to Husserl’s last writings, namely the ‘‘Crisis’’-texts. This course aims at unpacking the various ramifications and levels of analysis entailed in this question and at proposing a critical discussion of the ambiguities the concept of “life-world” contains. The basic claim Husserl (and the subsequent phenomenological tradition) is issuing is that although the world is never an immediate object of experience, although it cannot be experienced in a straightforward way as we experience things in the world, it is yet a built-in structure and a necessary ingredient of every experience. In and through each of our particular perceptions and actions we experience not only particular things but also of the world as their ultimate horizon. The correlative thesis is that every experience has an intuitive core and a non-thematic background, which properly understood is that of the world. While the world is not intuited it is nevertheless experientially given. Thus, the entryway into the problematic of the world is provided by the acknowledgement of the fact that we cannot intend things in isolation, detached from their surroundings. Every thing we perceive carries with it references to other objects that are not explicitly intended, and, moreover, to the tacit horizon within which this apprehension unfolds. Moreover, our awareness of the horizon 1 determines the manner in which we perceive the object in the foreground. Thus, on this account, the world appears as the horizon of perceptual acts. However, acknowledging the horizon as a constant dimension of the perceptual experience is more than saying that every thing is given in the midst of other things, and this is because every actual appearance entails references not only to other actual appearances, but also to potential modes of appearance. For it is only because these potential modes of appearance are prefigured in my perception that I can intend things and not just profiles of things. Inasmuch as it comprises this open field of potentialities of experience, the horizon entails also a subjective dimension. When considered from the standpoint of our perceptual experience, the world appears under this double figure of the non- thematic background of every act of every perceptual act and as field of potentialities of experience. However, the inquiry into the meaning of the world-horizon can be carried further if we take into account not only the broader context of every perception but also for the possible conflicts or disappointments experience might bring about. When such an investigation is unfolded, the world will appear as that what is taken for granted in every experience, a system of expectations, which is not thematically conscious, but which nevertheless determine the unfolding of our experience. Indeed, each and every one of our experiential certainties can waver and that we can be drawn to admit that what we first took as firmly established is nothing but the effect of an illusion. However, the fact that certain experiences could culminate in a frustration allows us to unveil the structure underlying any experience as such: namely that it carries with it an anticipatory horizon in virtue of which what has not yet appeared is already invested with a certain sense. It is true that the anticipated sense can prove to be inappropriate to the new appearance and that certain new experiences might break apart the foregoing framework of expectations. What becomes salient with this reconfiguration of meaning is that the cancelling of the initial sense does not leave me floating in a no-man’s land, but proves to be a powerful incentive for a new sense-bestowal. Furthermore, it is important to stress that this disappointment does leave something unscathed, precisely that in virtue of which the correction can be operated, the basis which supports this reconfiguration of meaning. Thus, whatever conflict might emerge in our experience of the world, it could not affect – and thus it could not nullify – the very ground upon which it rests. Husserl’s argument relies on the regional character of negation: Every negation, every deceived expectation is only partial: “every ‘not’ is a ‘not so but otherwise’. While a reflection on the non- atomistic character of the perceptual experience has allowed Husserl to explicate the world as the broader horizon of reference, the open field of experience, now a reflection on the conflicts or the 2 deceptions experience might bring about is the source for a recasting of the world as the basis upon which any conflict takes place and through which any conflict can be resolved, the unmodalizable ground for all modalities of experience. If, in the first sense world is the horizon that embraces every experience, this new insight allows Husserl to characterize the world as the constant ground of validity that undergirds every experience. However, this double determination of the world as horizon and ground, as that which embraces and that which sustains any experience of a thing, as accurate as it may be, may appear to be insufficient for accounting for the world in its full concretion, i.e. as a field that is also historically and symbolically articulated. Indeed, we might wonder whether this understanding of the world can capture the whole breadth of the phenomenon of the world and account for some of the distinctive ingredients of the experience of the world such as possibility of being shared, its intersubjective character, its historicity? Furthermore, can perception be isolated as an autonomous layer of experience, independently of its embeddedness into broader attitudes, cut off from its relation action and affectivity? These are some of the questions that Husserl’s successors addressed to his account of the world and they may appear as an impetus to carry further our inquiry into the field of continental philosophy. These are some of the questions that we will explore during this semester. Schedule 1. Tuesday, September 28 Topic: General introduction Readings: – 2. Tuesday, October 5 Topic: Husserl’s Phenomenology and the Challenges of Neo- Kantianism (I) Readings: Fink, Eugen (2000), “The Phenomenological Philosophy of Edmund Husserl and Contemporary Criticism”. 3. Tuesday, October 12 Topic: Husserl’s Phenomenology and the Challenges of Neo- Kantianism (II) Readings: Fink, Eugen (2000), “The Phenomenological Philosophy of Edmund Husserl and Contemporary Criticism”. 4. Tuesday, October 19 Topic: Husserl’s Concept of Lifeworld and its Ambiguities (I) Readings: Husserl, Edmund (1970). The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology. An Introduction to Phenomenological Philosophy, Transl. David Carr, Evanston: Northwestern University Press, par. 32-35. 3 5. Tuesday, October 26 Topic: Husserl’s Concept of Lifeworld and its Ambiguities (I) Readings: Husserl, Edmund (1970). The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology. An Introduction to Phenomenological Philosophy, Transl. David Carr, Evanston: Northwestern University Press, par. 36-38. 6. Tuesday, November 2 Topic: Landgrebe and the Limitations of Husserl’s Concept of Lifeworld Readings: Landgrebe, Ludwig (1940). “World as a Phenomenological Problem”, transl. Dorion Cairns, Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, no. 1. 7. Tuesday, November 9 Topic: Eugen Fink’s Cosmological Philosophy (I) Readings: Fink, Eugen (2016): Play as Symbol of the World. Trans. Ian Alexander Moore and Christopher Turner. Bloomington/Indianapolis: Indiana University Press. 8. Tuesday, November 16 Topic: Eugen Fink’s Cosmological Philosophy (II) Readings: Fink, Eugen (2016): Play as Symbol of the World. Trans. Ian Alexander Moore and Christopher Turner. Bloomington/Indianapolis: Indiana University Press. 9. Tuesday, November 23 Topic: Jan Patocka’s Appropriation of the Concept of Lifeworld (I) Readings: Patočka, Jan (1985). “Edmund Husserl’s philosophy of the crisis of science and his conception of a phenomenology of the life world”. Translated by E. Kohak, Dordrecht : M. Nijhoff, Husserl Studies, (1985) no. 2. 10. Tuesday, November 30 Topic: Jan Patocka’s Appropriation of the Concept of Lifeworld (II). Readings: Patočka, Jan (2016). The Natural World as a Philosophical Problem, ed. I.Chvatík, L. Učnik. Translated by E. Abrams (Northwestern University Press, 2016), p. 145-180. 11. Tuesday, December 7 Topic: Jan Patocka’s Appropriation of the Concept of Lifeworld (III). Readings: Patočka, Jan (2016). The Natural World as a Philosophical Problem, ed. I.Chvatík, L. Učnik. Translated by E. Abrams (Northwestern University Press, 2016), p. 181-191. 12. Tuesday, December 14 Topic: Concluding remarks and discussion. Readings: – 4 Literature 1. Primary sources Husserl, Edmund
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