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Phenomenology

Phenomenology

:This article treats the philosophical movement of phenomenology. For other meanings see Phenomenology (Disambiguation). Phenomenology is a current in philosophy that takes the intuitive experience of phenomena (what presents itself to us in conscious experience) as its starting point and tries to extract the essential features of experiences and the essence of what we experience. It stems from the School of Brentano and was mostly based on the work of the 20th century philosopher Edmund Husserl, and was developed further by philosophers such as Martin Heidegger, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Max Scheler, Hannah Arendt, and Emmanuel Levinas. As such, phenomenological thought influenced the development of existential phenomenology and existentialism in France, as is clear from the work of Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir, and Munich phenomenology (Johannes Daubert, Adolf Reinach in Germany and Alfred Schütz in Austria.

Historical overview of the use of the term

While the term "phenomenology" was used several times in the history of philosophy before Husserl, modern use ties it more explicitly to his particular method.
- Friedrich Christoph Oetinger (German pietist) for the study of the "divine system of relations"
- Johann Heinrich Lambert (mathematician, physician and philosopher) for the theory of appearances underlying empirical knowledge.
- Immanuel Kant used it in a similar vein.
- Hegel can be considered one of the precursors to phenomenology, due to his Phenomenology of Spirit, which prompted the existential work of Søren Kierkegaard and Sartre
- Brentano seems to have used the term in some of his lectures at Vienna.
- Edmund Husserl redefined it at first as a kind of descriptive psychology and later as an epistemological, foundational eidetic discipline to study essences. He is known as a "father" of phenomenology.
- Carl Stumpf used it to refer to an ontology of sensory contents.
- Max Scheler developed further the phenomenological method of Edmund Husserl and extended it to include also a reduction of the scientific method. He influenced the thinking of Pope John Paul II and Edith Stein.
- Alfred Schutz developed a phenomenology of the social world on the basis of everyday experience. He influenced the more popular sociologists as Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann. Later usage is mostly based on or (critically) related to Husserl's introduction and use of the term. This branch of philosophy differs from others in that it tends to be more "descriptive" than "prescriptive".

Husserl and the origin of Phenomenology

Husserl derived many important concepts that are central to phenomenology from the works and lectures of his teachers, the philosophers and psychologists Franz Brentano and Carl Stumpf. An important element of phenomenology that Husserl borrowed from Brentano was intentionality, the notion that the main characteristic of consciousness is that it is always intentional. Intentionality, which could be summarised as "aboutness", describes the relationship between mental acts and the external world. Every mental phenomenon or psychological act is directed at an object — the intentional object. Every belief, desire, etc. has an object to which it refers: the believed, the desired. The property of being intentional, of having an intentional object, is the key feature which distinguishes mental/psychical phenomena from physical phenomena (objects), because physical phenomena lack intentionality altogether. Intentionality is the key concept by means of which phenomenological philosophy attempts to overcome the subject/object dichotomy prevalent in modern philosophy.

Precursors and influences

- Skepticism (for the concept of the epochè)
- Descartes (Methodological doubt, ego cogito)
- British empiricism (Locke, Hume, Berkeley, Mill)
- Immanuel Kant and neokantianism (for Husserl's transcendental turn)
- Franz Brentano (for the concept of intentionality and the method of descriptive psychology)
- Carl Stumpf (psychological analysis, influenced Husserl's early works)

Phenomenology in the first edition of the Logische Untersuchungen (1900/1901)

In the Logical Investigations his first major work, still under the infuence of Brentano, Husserl still conceives of phenomenology as descriptive psychology. Husserl analyzes the intentional structures of mental acts and how they are directed at both real and ideal objects. The Logical Investigations begin with a devastating critique of psychologism i.e. the attempt to subsume the a priori validity of the laws of logic into psychology. Husserl establishes a separate field for research in logic, philosophy and phenomenology, independently from the empirical sciences.

Transcendental phenomenology after the Ideen (1913)

Some years after the publication of the Logical Investigations, Husserl made some key elaborations which led him to the distinction between the act of consciousness (noesis) and the phenomena at which it is directed (the noemata).
- "noetic" refers to the act of consciousness (believing, willing, hating and loving ...)
- "noematic" refers to the object or content (noema) which appears in the noetic acts (respectively the believed, wanted, hated and loved ...). What we observe is not the object as it is in itself, but how and inasmuch it is given in the intentional acts. Knowledge of essences would only be possible by "bracketing" all assumptions about the existence of an external world and the inessential (subjective) aspects of how the object is concretely given to us. This procedure Husserl called epoché. Husserl in a later period concentrated more on the ideal, essential structures of consciousness. As he wanted to exclude any hypothesis on the existence of external objects, he introduced the method of phenomenological reduction to eliminate them. What was left over was the pure transcendental ego, as opposed to the concrete empirical ego. Now (transcendental) phenomenology is the study of the essential structures that are left in pure consciousness: this amounts in practice to the study of the noemata and the relations among them. German philosopher Theodor Adorno criticised Husserl's concept of phenomenological epistemology in his metacritique "Against Epistemology", which is anti-foundationalist in its stance.

Transcendental phenomenologists

- Oskar Becker
- Aron Gurwitsch
- Alfred Schutz

Realist phenomenology

After Husserl's publication of the Ideen in 1913, many phenomenologists took a critical stance towards his new theories. Especially the members of the Munich group distanced themselves from his new transcendental phenomenology and preferred the earlier realist phenomenology of the first edition of the Logical Investigations.

Realist phenomenologists

- Adolf Reinach
- Alexander Pfänder
- Johannnes Daubert
- Max Scheler
- Roman Ingarden
- Nicolai Hartmann

Existential phenomenology

Existential phenomenology differs from transcendental phenomenology by its rejection of the transcendental ego. Merleau-Ponty objects to the ego's transcendence of the world, which for Husserl leaves the world spread out and completely transparent before the conscious. Heidegger thinks of conscious being as always and already in the world. Transcendence is maintained in existential phenomenology to the extent that the method of phenomenology must take a presuppositionless starting point - transcending claims about the world arising from, for example, natural or scientific attitudes or theories of the ontological nature of the world.

Heidegger's "phenomenology" and differences with Husserl

While Husserl thought philosophy to be a scientific discipline that had to be founded on a phenomenology understood as epistemology, Heidegger radically changed this view. Heidegger himself phrases their differences this way: :For Husserl the phenomenological reduction is the method of leading phenomenological vision from the natural attitude of the human being whose life is involved in the world of things and persons back to the transcendental life of consciousness and its noetic-noematic experiences, in which objects are constituted as correlates of consciousness. For us phenomenological reduction means leading phenomenological vision back from the apprehension of a being, whatever may be the character of that apprehension, to the understanding of the being of this being (projecting upon the way it is unconcealed). According to Heidegger philosophy was not at all a scientific discipline, but more fundamental than science itself. Therefore, instead of taking phenomenology as prima philosophia or foundational discipline, he took it as a metaphysical ontology: "being is the proper and sole theme of philosophy". While for Husserl in the epochè being appeared only as a correlate of consciousness, for Heidegger being is the starting point. While for Husserl we would have to abstract from all concrete determinations of our empirical ego, to be able to turn to the field of pure consciousness, Heidegger claims that: "the possibilities and destinies of philosophy are bound up with man's existence, and thus with temporality and with historicality". (NB: Heidegger's quotes taken from The Basic Problems of Phenomenology (1954), published by Indiana University Press, 1975. Introduction, p. 1 - 23 reproduced at [http://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/ge/heidegge.htm www.marxists.org].)

Existential phenomenologists

- Martin Heidegger (1889 - 1976)
- Hannah Arendt (1906 – 1975)
- Emmanuel Levinas (1906 - 1995)
- Gabriel Marcel
- Jean-Paul Sartre (1905 - 1980)
- Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1907 - 1960)

Currents influenced by phenomenology

- Hermeneutics
- Structuralism
- Poststructuralism
- Existentialism
- Deconstruction
- Philosophy of Technology

External links

- [http://www.phenomenologycenter.org/phenom.htm What is Phenomenology?]
- [http://www.connect.net/ron/phenom.html About Phenomenology]
- [http://www.husserlpage.com/ About Edmund Husserl]
- [http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/phenomenology/ Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry]
- [http://www.o-p-o.net/ Organization of Phenomenology Organizations O.P.O.]
- [http://www.phenomenology.ro Romanian Society for Phenomenology] Category:Philosophical movements Category:Philosophy of mind Category:Social philosophy ja:現象学

Phenomenology (Disambiguation)

Phenomenology can mean several things:
- Phenomenology is a current in philosophy founded by Edmund Husserl.
- Phenomenology is also a term used in science.
- Phenomenology is a design current in contemporary architecture

Essence

:Alternate uses: see essence (disambiguation). In philosophy, essence is the attribute (or set of attributes) that make an object or substance what it fundamentally is. In grammar, it is a subject's necessary predicate. The notion of essence has acquired many slightly but importantly different shades of meaning throughout the history of philosophy; most of them derive from its use in Aristotle and its evolution within the scholastic tradition. Essence in this sense is contrasted with accident: essential properties are properties that a substance has necessarily; accidental properties are those that it has contingently, those which the substance could have existed without having. Based on such considerations, essence was a key notion of alchemy (cf. quintessence). In the modern period, some philosophers—such as George Santayana—have kept the vocabulary of essences but have abolished the distinction between essence and accidents. For Santayana, the essence of a being is simply everything about it, independent of the question of existence. Essence is what-ness as distinct from that-ness. Existentialism is founded on Jean-Paul Sartre's statement that "existence precedes essence." In as much as "essence" is a cornerstone of all metaphysical philosophy and the grounding of Rationalism, Sartre's statement was a refutation of the philosophical system that had come before him (and, in particular, that of Husserl, Hegel, and Heidegger). Instead of "is-ness" generating "actuality," he argued that existence and actuality come first, and the essence is derived afterward. "Essence," in metaphysics, is often synonymous with the soul, and some existentialists argue that individuals gain their souls and spirits after they exist, that they develop their souls and spirits during their lifetimes. For Kierkegaard, however, the emphasis was upon essence as "nature." For him, there is no such thing as "human nature" that determines how a human will behave or what a human will be. First, he or she exists, and then comes attribute. Jean-Paul Sartre's more materialist and skeptical existentialism furthered this existentialist tenet by flatly refuting any metaphysical essence, any soul, and arguing instead that there is merely existence, with attributes as essence. Thus, in existentialist discourse, essence can refer to physical aspect or attribute, to the ongoing being of a person (the character or internally determined goals), or to the infinite inbound within the human (which can be lost, can atrophy, or can be developed into an equal part with the finite), depending upon the type of existentialist discourse. In contrast to Idealism and Aristotle-derived philosophies that argue for an essence before all actuality or existence, materialism rejects essence altogether. Karl Marx was, along with Kierkegaard, a follower of Hegel's, and he, too, developed a philosophy in reaction to his master. In his dialectical materialism, the zeitgeist of Hegel (an overriding essence) is replaced by a purely deterministic set of material clashes. Marxist philosophy and economic analysis, therefore, is wholly anti-essentialist. There is no "trans-historical" anything, in Marxist thought. Historical moments determine utterly the self. There is no universal human nature, no essence, and no universal essence of objects, either.

Buddhism

Within the Madhyamika school of Mahayana Buddhism, Candrakirti identifies the self as being an essence of things that does not depend on others; it is an intrinsic nature. Indeed the concept of Buddhist Emptiness, is the strong assertion that all phenomena are empty of any essence - demonstrating that anti-essentialism lies at the very root of Buddhist praxis. Therefore, within this school it is the innate belief in essence that is considered to be a cognitive obscuration which serves to cause all suffering. However, the school also rejects the tenets of Idealism and Materialism; instead, the ideas of truth or existence, along with any assertions that depend upon them are limited to their function within the contexts and conventions that assert them, akin to Relativism or Pragmatism. For them, replacement paradoxes such as Ship of Theseus are answered by stating that the Ship of Thesesus remains so (within the conventions that assert it) until it ceases to function as the Ship of Theseus.

Essentiast

Essentiast Thinking, developed by the post-modern philosopher Anastasia, deals with Essence as the pure spirit of action, or emotion, specifically one of great passion. Essentiast thinking believes that one must experience Essence in creative ways, such as through self-expression.

20th century

The 20th century lasted from 1901 to 2000 in the Gregorian calendar. Common usage sometimes regards it as lasting from 1900 to 1999, but this is incorrect since counting of calendar years begins with the year 1. The 20th century is also sometimes known as the nineteen hundreds (1900s). Decades are almost always considered as starting with the "0" year and named accordingly ("1960s", etc.). However, a number of arguments have been used to justify the common usage. One was advanced, erroneously, by Stephen Jay Gould. He claimed that the first decade had only nine years, thus contradicting the definition of decade equaled 10 years. Another argument is that the astronomical year numbering system for years does have a year zero, the year normally known as 1 BC. In 2000 the International Organization for Standardization clarified ISO 8601 to use the astronomical year numbering system, which could be interpreted as retrospectively endorsing all the people who had celebrated the new century a few months earlier. The term is also used to describe various periods that overlap with the calendar definition, most notably the Short twentieth century, which claims that the 20th Century spanned from 1914 to 1989, rendering the pre-WWI 1900s into the 19th Century and putting the 1990s at the beginning of the 21st Century. Indeed, the part of the 20th Century before World War I is quite identical to the late 1800s culturally and technologically and the 1990s decade pointed in many ways (such as the rise of the Internet) to the 21st Century and is seen by some as not being truly a part of the 20th Century.

Overview

The twentieth century saw a remarkable shift in the way that vast numbers of people lived, as a result of technological, medical, social, ideological, and political innovations. Terms like ideology, world war, genocide, and nuclear war entered common usage and became an influence on the lives of everyday people. War reached an unprecedented scale and level of sophistication; in the Second World War (1939-1945) alone, approximately 57 million people died, mainly due to massive improvements in weaponry. The trends of mechanization of goods and services and networks of global communication, which were begun in the 19th century, continued at an ever-increasing pace in the 20th. In spite of the terror and chaos, the 20th century saw many attempts at world peace. As the 35th President of the United States John F. Kennedy said: :What kind of peace do we seek? I am talking about a genuine peace, the kind of peace that makes life on earth worth living. Not merely peace in our time, but peace in all time. Our problems are man-made, therefore they can be solved by man. For in the final analysis, our most basic common link is that we all inhabit this small planet, we all breathe the same air, we all cherish our children's future, and we are all mortal. Virtually every aspect of life in virtually every human society changed in some fundamental way or another during the twentieth century and for the first time, any individual could influence the course of history no matter their background. Arguably, the 20th century re-shaped the face of the planet in more ways than any previous century.
- Death rates
- Infant mortality
- Infectious disease
- Life expectancy
- Maternal death rates
- Battles Scientific discoveries such as relativity and quantum physics radically changed the worldview of scientists, causing them to realize that the universe was much more complex than they had previously believed, and dashing the hopes at the end of the preceding century that the last few details of knowledge were about to be filled in. For a more coherent overview of the historical events of the century, see The 20th century in review. The 20th century has sometimes been called, both within and outside the United States, the American Century, though this is a controversial term.

Important developments, events and achievements

Science and technology

- The assembly line and mass production of motor vehicles and other goods allowed manufacturers to produce more and cheaper products. This allowed the automobile to become the most important means of transportation.
- The invention of heavier-than-air flying machines and the jet engine allowed for the world to become "smaller". Space flight increased knowledge of the rest of the universe and allowed for global real-time communications via geosynchronous satellites.
- Mass media technologies such as film, radio, and television allow the communication of political messages and entertainment with unprecedented impact
- Mass availability of the telephone and later, the computer, especially through the Internet, provides people with new opportunities for near-instantaneous communication
- Applied electronics, notably in its miniaturized form as integrated circuits, made possible the above mentioned rise of mass media, telecommunications, ubiquitous computing, and all kinds of "intelligent" appliances; as well as many advances in natural sciences such as physics, by the use of exponentially growing calculation power (see supercomputer).
- The development of Nitrogen fertilizer, pesticides and herbicides resulted in significantly higher agricultural yield.
- Advances in fundamental physics through the theory of relativity and quantum mechanics led to the development of nuclear weapons (known informally as "the Bomb" and dropped on the industrial town of Hiroshima and the historic one of Nagasaki), the nuclear reactor, and the laser. Fusion power was studied extensively but remained an experimental technology at the end of the century.
- Inventions such as the washing machine and air conditioning led to an increase in both the quantity and quality of leisure time for the middle class in Western societies.
- Most influential inventions in the 20th century: antibiotics, oral contraceptives, new plastics, transistors, Internet
- More...

Wars and politics

- Democratic nations began to extend voting privileges to all adults.
- Rising nationalism and increasing national awareness were among the causes of World War I, the first of two wars to involve all the major world powers including Germany, France, Italy, Japan, the United States and the British Commonwealth. World War I led to the creation of many new countries, especially in Eastern Europe. Ironically, it was said by many to be the 'War to end all Wars'.
- The economic and political aftermath of World War I led to the rise of Fascism and Nazism in Europe, and shortly to World War II. This war also involved Asia and the Pacific, in the form of Japanese aggression against China and the United States. While the First World War mainly cost lives among soldiers, civilians suffered greatly in the Second -- from the bombing of cities on both sides, and in the unprecedented German genocide of the Jews and others, known as the Holocaust.
- During World War I, in Russia the Bolshevik putsch led to the Russian Revolution of 1917. After the Soviet Union's involvement in World War II, Communism became a major force in global politics, spreading all over the world: notably, to Eastern Europe, China, Indochina and Cuba. This led to the Cold War and proxy wars with the western world, including wars in Korea (1950-53) and Vietnam (1957 - 75).
- The "fall of Communism" in the late 1980s freed Eastern and Central Europe from Soviet supremacy. It also led to the dissolution of the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia into successor states, many rife with ethnic nationalism, and left the United States as the world's superpower.
- Through the League of Nations and, after World War II, the United Nations, international cooperation increased. Other efforts included the formation of the European Union, leading to a common currency in much of Western Europe, the euro around the turn of the millennium.
- The end of colonialism led to the independence of many African and Asian countries. During the Cold War, many of these aligned with the USA, the USSR, or China for defense.
- The creation of Israel, a Jewish state in a mostly Arab region of the world, fueled many conflicts in the region, which were also influenced by the vast oil fields in many of the Arab countries.
- The term Southeast Asia coined.

Culture and entertainment

- Movies, music and the media had a major influence on fashion and trends in all aspects of life. As many movies and music originate from the United States, American culture spread rapidly over the world.
- After gaining political rights in the United States and much of Europe in the first part of the century, and with the advent of new birth control techniques women became more independent throughout the century.
- Rock and Roll and Jazz styles of music are developed in the United States, and quickly become the dominant forms of popular music in America, and later, the world. The Beatles, a 1960s British Rock and Roll band, becomes one of the most successful acts of all time, and is credited, in their experimental later albums, with permanently changing what was thought possible in popular music.
- Modern art developed new styles such as expressionism, cubism, and surrealism.
- The automobile provided vastly increased transportation capabilities for the average member of Western societies in the early to mid-century, spreading even further later on. City design throughout most of the West became focused on transport via car. The car became a leading symbol of modern society, with styles of car suited to and symbolic of particular lifestyles.
- Sports became an important part of society, becoming an activity not only for the privileged. Watching sports, later also on television, became a popular activity.

Disease and medicine

- Although the availability and quality of medicine continued to improve, epidemic diseases continued to spread, aided by modern transportation. An influenza pandemic, the Spanish Flu, killed 25 million between 1918 and 1919, while AIDS is yet uncured and treatments remain too expensive for wide use in developing countries.
- Advances in medicine, such as the invention of antibiotics, decreased the number of people dying from diseases. Contraceptive drugs and organ transplantation were developed. The discovery of DNA molecules and the advent of molecular biology allowed for cloning and genetic engineering.

Natural resources and the environment

- The widespread use of petroleum in industry -- both as a chemical precursor to plastics and as a fuel for the automobile and airplane -- led to the vital geopolitical importance of petroleum resources. The Middle East, home to many of the world's oil deposits, became a center of geopolitical and military tension throughout the latter half of the century. (For example, oil was a factor in Japan's decision to go to war against the United States in 1941, and the oil cartel, OPEC, used an oil embargo of sorts in the wake of the Yom Kippur War in the 1970s).
- A vast increase in fossil fuel consumption leads to depletion of natural resources, while air pollution has led to the develoment of an ozone hole and, many believe, global warming and both local and global climate change. The problem is increased by world-wide deforestation, also causing a loss of biodiversity. The problem of a depletion of natural resources is decreased by advances in drilling technology which led to a net increase in the amount of fossil fuel that is readily obtainable at the end of the century, as compared with the amount considered obtainable at the beginning of the century.

Significant people

Martin Heidegger

Martin Heidegger (September 26, 1889 – May 26, 1976) was a German philosopher. He studied at the University of Freiburg under Edmund Husserl, the founder of phenomenology, and became a professor there in 1928. He influenced many other major philosophers, and his own students at various times included Hans-Georg Gadamer, Hans Jonas, Emmanuel Levinas, Hannah Arendt, Leo Strauss, Xavier Zubiri and Karl Löwith. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Jean-Paul Sartre, Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, Jean-Luc Nancy, and Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe also studied his work more or less closely. Beyond his relation to phenomenology, Heidegger is regarded as a major or indispensable influence on existentialism, deconstruction, hermeneutics and postmodernism. He attempted to reorient Western philosophy away from metaphysical and epistemological and toward ontological questions, that is, questions concerning the meaning of being, or what it means to be. He was also a prominent academic member of the Nazi Party.

Early life and education

Heidegger was born to a rural family in Meßkirch, Germany, and raised to be a clergyman. He was influenced as a teenager by Aristotle mediated through Christian theology. The concept of being, in this traditional sense, dating back to Plato, was his first exposure to an idea he would plant at the core of his most famous work Being and Time (1927). His family was not wealthy enough to send him to university and he required a scholarship, which itself required he study for the religious order. Mathematics was also his early major. During his time as a student he left theology for philosophy as he gradually found other academic funding. He wrote his doctorate thesis on a text then thought to be by Duns Scotus, a 14th century ethical and religious thinker, but later attributed to Thomas of Erfurt. Heidegger was originally a phenomenologist. To oversimplify, phenomenologists approach philosophy by attempting to perceive experience unmediated by prior knowledge and abstract theoretical assumptions. Husserl was its founder and major exponent. In fact, Heidegger studied under Husserl and it was this that persuaded him to become a phenomenologist. Heidegger became interested in the question of being (or what it means to be). His famous work Being and Time is characterized as phenomenological ontology. The idea of being dates back to Parmenides and has traditionally served as one of the key thoughts of Western philosophy. The question of being was revived by Heidegger after being eclipsed by the metaphysical tradition from Plato to Descartes, and more recently in the Enlightenment. He tried to ground being in time, and thus discover its real essence or meaning, that is, its intelligibility for us. Thus Heidegger began where being began — in ancient Greek thought, resurrecting a lost, under-appreciated issue in contemporary philosophy. Heidegger's great opening was to take Plato seriously again, and at the same time undermine the entire Platonic world by challenging the core of Platonism — treating being not as timeless and transcendent, but as immanent in time and history. This is partially why Platonists such as George Grant regard Heidegger as a great thinker, even if they disagree with his analysis of Being and conception of Platonic thought. Although Heidegger was a supremely creative and original thinker, he also borrowed heavily from Friedrich Nietzsche and Søren Kierkegaard, the latter of whom goes mostly unacknowledged by Heidegger. Heidegger can be compared to Aristotle, who took Plato's dialogues and systematically presented them as treatises and concepts. Similarly, Heidegger extracted Nietzsche's unpublished fragments and interpreted them as the culminating expression of Western metaphysics. Heidegger's published lectures during 1936 on Nietzsche’s Will to Power as Art are less scholarly commentaries than original philosophical works in their own right. Heidegger's concepts of angst and Da-sein draw on Kierkegaard's notions of anxiety, the importance of subjective relation to the truth, existence in the face of death, the temporality of existence, and the importance of passionate affirmation of one's individual being-in-the-world. Martin Heidegger is regarded as one of the most significant philosophers of the 20th century. His prominence is rivaled only by Bertrand Russell and Ludwig Wittgenstein, and his ideas have seeped into an incredibly large number of research areas. It is because of Heidegger's discussion of ontology that he is often cited as one of the founders of existentialism and his ideas inspired some great philosophical works, such as by the philosopher Sartre who adopts many of his ideas from Heidegger (although Heidegger insists that Sartre misunderstood his works). His philosophical work was taken up throughout Germany, France, and Japan and has gained, since the 1970s at least, a strong following in North America as well; it was scorned as rubbish, however, by contemporaries such as the Vienna Circle, Theodor Adorno, and British philosophers such as Bertrand Russell and Alfred Ayer. Heidegger's refusal to adopt current concepts such as the fact-value distinction, his criticism of modern science and technology, and his refusal to offer an "ethical" component to his theory, claiming such a suggestion was a fundamental misunderstanding of his thought, often puzzled and confused philosophers. Attacking him seemed like the only thing to do, especially since his private behavior was morally and politically ambiguous.

Philosophy

Being and Time

Heidegger's most important work is the dense and challenging Being and Time (German Sein und Zeit, 1927). Although the book as published represents only a third of the total project outlined in its introduction, it marked a turning point in continental philosophy. It has been massively influential and remains one of the most discussed works of 20th century philosophy; many subsequent philosophical views and approaches, such as existentialism and deconstruction, have been strongly influenced by Being and Time. In this work, Heidegger takes up the question of the meaning of being: what does it mean to say that an entity is? This is the fundamental question of ontology, defined by Aristotle as the study of being qua (Latin, tr. roughly as 'as', or 'in the capacity of') being. In his approach to this question, Heidegger departs from the tradition of Aristotle and of Kant, both of whom, despite the vast difference between their respective philosophical positions, approach the question of the meaning of being from the perspective of the logic of propositional statements. Implicit in this traditional approach is the thesis that theoretical knowledge represents the most fundamental relation between the human individual and the beings in his surrounding world (including himself). Explicitly rejecting this thesis, Heidegger instead adopts a version of the phenomenological method, purged of what he regards as the residue of Aristotelian/Kantian cognitivism still present in Husserl's formulation of this method. Like Husserl, Heidegger takes as his starting point the phenomenon of intentionality. Human behavior is intentional insofar as it is directed at some object or end (all building is building of something, all talking is talking about something, etc). Intentionality was an activity termed by Heidegger as "Sorge" (care) and reflected a positive aspect of Angst. Sorge, or caring, as the fundamental concept of the intentional being, presupposed an ontological significance that distinguishes ontological being from mere ontic being (thinghood). Theoretical knowledge represents only one kind of intentional behavior, and Heidegger asserts that it is founded on more fundamental modes of behavior, modes of practical engagement with the surrounding world, rather than being their ultimate foundation. He divides the understanding between the existentiell understanding, which understands existence through existence itself, and existential understanding, which is the theoretical analysis of what constitutes existence. An entity is what it is (i.e., it has being) insofar as it "shows up" within a context of practical engagement (Heidegger calls such a context a 'world'), not because it has certain inherent properties ascertainable by disinterested contemplation. A hammer is a hammer not because it has certain hammer-like properties, but because it is used for hammering. This also necessitated a rejection of the Cartesian, disembodied 'I': that is, an 'I' as a purely thinking object. Instead, Heidegger insisted that any analysis of human behaviour should begin with the fact that we are in the world (not viewing it in an 'abstract' fashion): therefore the fundamental fact about human existence is our 'being-in-the-world'. Human beings, Heidegger insisted, were embodied beings who acted in the world. He also said that the world was a characteristic of Being in the World, "Da-Sein." He therefore rejected the 'subject-object' distinction assumed by most philosophers since Descartes. Things are meaningful to us in terms of their use in certain contexts, which are defined by social norms. However, all of these norms are radically contingent. Their contingency is revealed in the fundamental phenomenon of Angst, in which all norms fall away and beings show up as nothing in particular, in their essential meaninglessness. (Contrary to some existentialist interpretations of Heidegger, this does not mean that all existence is absurd; rather, it means that existence always has the potential for absurdity.) The experience of Angst reveals the essential finitude of human being. The fact that beings can show up, either as meaningful in a context or as meaningless in the experience of Angst, depends on a prior phenomenon: that beings can show up at all. Heidegger calls the showing up of beings "truth", which he defines as unconcealment rather than correctness. This "truth of beings", their self-revelation, involves a more fundamental kind of truth, the "disclosure of being in which the being of beings is unconcealed." It is this unconcealment of being that defines human existence for Heidegger: the human being is that being for whom being is an issue, that is, for whom being shows up as such (Heidegger's word for such an entity, which could conceivably have non-human instantiations, is Da-sein). This is why Heidegger begins his inquiry into the meaning of being with an inquiry into the essence of human being; the ontology of Da-sein is fundamental ontology. The unconcealment of being is an essentially temporal and historical phenomenon (hence the "time" in Being and Time); what we call past, present, and future correspond originarily to aspects of this unconcealment and not to three mutually exclusive regions of the homogeneous time that clocks measure (although clock-time is derivative from the originary time of unconcealment, as Heidegger attempts to show in the book's difficult final chapters). The total understanding of being results from an explication of the implicit knowledge of being that inheres in all human behavior. Philosophy thus becomes a form of interpretation; this is why Heidegger's technique in Being and Time is often referred to as hermeneutical phenomenology. Being and Time, being incomplete, contains Heidegger's statement of this project and his interpretation of human existence and its temporal horizon, but does not contain the working out of the meaning of being as such on the basis of this interpretation. This ambitious task is taken up in a different way in his later works (see below). As part of his ontological project, Heidegger undertakes a reinterpretation of previous Western philosophy. He wants to explain why and how theoretical knowledge came to seem like the most fundamental relation to being. This explanation takes the form of a destructuring (Destruktion) of the philosophical tradition, an interpretive strategy that reveals the fundamental experience of being at the base of previous philosophies. In Being and Time he briefly destructures the philosophy of Descartes; in later works he uses this approach to interpret the philosophies of Aristotle, Kant, Hegel, and Plato, among others. This technique exerted a profound influence on Derrida's deconstructive approach, although there are very important differences between the two methods. Being and Time is the towering achievement of Heidegger's early career, but there are other important works from this period, including Die Grundprobleme der Phänomenologie (The Basic Problems of Phenomenology, 1927), Kant und das Problem der Metaphysik (Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics, 1929), and "Was ist Metaphysik?" ("What Is Metaphysics?", 1929).

Later works

Although Heidegger claimed that all of his writings concerned a single question, the question of being, in the years after the publication of Being and Time the focus of his work gradually changed. This change is often referred to as Heidegger's Kehre (turn). In his later works, Heidegger turns from "doing" to "dwelling." He focuses less on the way in which the structures of being are revealed in everyday behavior and in the experience of Angst, and more on the way in which behavior itself depends on a prior "openness to being." The essence of being human is the maintenance of this openness. (The difference between Heidegger's early and late works is more a difference of emphasis than a radical break like that between the early and late works of Wittgenstein, but it is important enough to justify a division of the Heideggerian corpus into "early" (roughly, pre-1930) and "late" writings.) Heidegger opposes this openness to the "will to power" of the modern human subject, who subordinates beings to his own ends rather than letting them "be what they are." Heidegger interprets the history of western philosophy as a brief period of authentic openness to being in the time of the pre-Socratics, especially Parmenides, Heraclitus, and Anaximander, followed by a long period increasingly dominated by nihilistic subjectivity, initiated by Plato and culminating in Nietzsche. In the later writings, two recurring themes are poetry and technology. Heidegger sees poetry as a preeminent way in which beings are revealed "in their being." The play of poetic language (which is, for Heidegger, the essence of language itself) reveals the play of presence and absence that is being itself. Heidegger focuses especially on the poetry of Hölderlin. Against the revealing power of poetry, Heidegger sets the force of technology. The essence of technology is the conversion of the whole universe of beings into an undifferentiated "standing reserve" (Bestand) of energy available for any use to which humans choose to put it. The standing reserve represents the most extreme nihilism, since the being of beings is totally subordinated to the will of the human subject. Heidegger does not unequivocally condemn technology; he believes that its increasing dominance might make it possible for humanity to return to its authentic task of the stewardship of being. Nevertheless, many of Heidegger's later works are characterized by an unmistakable agrarian nostalgia. Heidegger's important later works include Vom Wesen der Wahrheit ("On the Essence of Truth," 1930), Der Ursprung des Kunstwerkes ("The Origin of the Work of Art," 1935), Bauen Wohnen Denken ("Building Dwelling Thinking," 1951), and Die Frage nach der Technik ("The Question Concerning Technology," 1953) and Was heisst Denken? ("What Is Called Thinking?" 1954).

Influences and difficulties of French reception

Heidegger, like Husserl, is an explicitly acknowledged influence on existentialism, despite his explicit disavowal and objection, in texts such as the "Letter on Humanism," of the importation of key elements of his work into existentialist contexts. While Heidegger was banned from university teaching for a period shortly after the war on account of his activities as Rector of Freiburg, he developed a number of contacts in France who continued to teach his work and brought their students to visit him in Todtnauberg (see, for example, Jean-François Lyotard's brief account in "Heidegger and 'the jews': A Conference in Vienna and Freiburg," which discusses a Franco-German conference held in Freiburg in 1947, a first step in bringing together French and German students after the War). Heidegger subsequently made efforts to keep abreast of developments in French philosophy by way of recommendations from Jean Beaufret, who was an early French translator, and Lucien Braun. Deconstruction as it is generally understood (i.e., as French and Anglo-American phenomena profoundly rooted in Heidegger's work, with limited general exposure in a German context until the 1980s) came to Heidegger's attention in 1967 by way of Lucien Braun's recommendation of Jacques Derrida's work (Hans-Georg Gadamer was present at an initial discussion and indicated to Heidegger that Derrida's work came to his attention by way of an assistant). Heidegger expressed interest in meeting Derrida personally after the latter sent him some of his work. (There was discussion of a meeting in 1972, but this did not happen.) Heidegger's interest in Derrida is said by Braun to have been considerable (as is evident in two letters, of 29 September 1967 and 16 May 1972, from Heidegger to Braun). Braun also brought to Heidegger's attention the work of Michel Foucault. Foucault's relation to Heidegger is a matter of considerable difficulty; Foucault acknowledged Heidegger as the philosopher whom he read but never wrote about. (For more on this see Penser à Strasbourg, Jacques Derrida, et al, which includes reproductions of both letters and an account by Braun, "À mi-chemin entre Heidegger et Derrida"). One feature that garnered initial interest in a French context (which propagated rather quickly to scholars of French literature and philosophy working in American universities) was Derrida's efforts to displace the understanding of Heidegger's work prevalent in France from the period of the ban against Heidegger teaching in German universities, which amounts in part to rejecting almost wholesale the influence of Jean-Paul Sartre and existentialist terms. In Derrida's view, deconstruction is a tradition inherited via Heidegger (the French term "déconstruction" is a translation of Heidegger's "Destruktion" - literally "destruction"), whereas Sartre's interpretation of Dasein and other key Heideggerian terms is overly psychologistic and (ironically) anthropocentric, consisting of a radical misconception of the limited number of Heidegger's texts commonly studied in France up to that point (namely Being and Time, What is Metaphysics?, and Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics). Derrida, on the other hand, is at times presented as an ultra-orthodox "French Heidegger," to such an extent that he, his colleagues, and his former students are made to go proxy for Heidegger's worst (political) mistakes, despite ample evidence that the reception of Heidegger's work by later practitioners of deconstruction is anything but doctrinaire "Heideggerianism". The work of Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe may be taken as exemplary in this regard and was often commended as such by Derrida, who further contrasted Lacoue-Labarthe's extended work on Heidegger with Foucault's silence. Having earlier mentioned the contributions of Derrida, Lacoue-Labarthe, and Lyotard to scholarship on Heidegger and National Socialism, it is worth noting that Heidegger's relation to the Holocaust and Nazism was the subject of great and occasionally fractious debate across various "deconstructions". These included the extent to which specific practitioners of deconstruction could entirely do without Heideggerian deconstruction (as Lyotard in particular may have wished) or were - rather - obliged to further (and in the cases of many mis- and uninformed criticisms, recall) already extensive criticisms of Heidegger which considerably predated (in the case of Derrida, by decades) the broad recognition of Heidegger's activities as a National Socialist. The latter were precipitated by press attention to the Victor Farias book "Heidegger et le nazisme" (Farias was an ex-student of Heidegger) and extensive treatments of the Holocaust and its implications. These included for example, the proceedings of the first conference dedicated to Derrida's work, published as "Les Fins de l'Homme" (the essay from which that title was taken), Derrida's "Feu la cendre/cio' che resta del fuoco", or the studies on Celan by Lacoue-Labarthe and Derrida which shortly preceded the detailed studies of Heidegger's politics published in and after 1987.

Criticism

Heidegger's importance to the world of continental philosophy (which he largely created, there being no distinction between analytical and continental philosophy prior to him) is probably unsurpassed. His reception amongst philosophers of the analytic school, however, is quite another story. Saving a somewhat favorable review by Gilbert Ryle in the journal Mind of Being and Time at the time of its publication, Heidegger's contemporaries from the analytic tradition (which was still young, but already quite sharply delineated from other branches of philosophy) generally regarded both the content, insofar as they believed there to be any at all, and the style by which he delivered it, as evidence of the worst possible way of doing philosophy. The analytic tradition values clarity of expression, whereas Heidegger thought that "making itself intelligible was suicide for philosophy." Apart from the charge of obscurantism, analytic philosophers generally considered the actual content that could be gleaned from Heidegger's work to be either trivially false, non-verifiable or uninteresting. This view has largely survived, and Heidegger is still spoken of with derision in most quarters of analytical philosophy, and his influence is considered to have been disastrous for philosophy, in that a clear line can be traced from it to most varieties of postmodern philosophical thinking.

Heidegger and Nazi Germany

Heidegger joined the Nazi Party on May 1, 1933, before being appointed the rector of the university in Freiburg. He resigned from the rectorship in April 1934. During this time Heidegger's former teacher Husserl, who was Jewish, was denied the use of the university library at Freiburg because of the racial cleansing laws issued by the Nazi Party. Heidegger also removed the dedication to Husserl from Being and Time when it was reissued in 1941. Heidegger later claimed that this was due to pressure from his publisher, Max Niemeyer. Additionally, when Heidegger's Introduction to Metaphysics (lectures originally given in 1935) was published in 1953, he declined to remove a reference to the "inner truth and greatness of this movement [die innere Wahrheit und Größe dieser Bewegnung]," i.e. National Socialism. Instead of deleting or altering the text, he merely added the parenthetical gloss, "(namely, the confrontation of planetary technology and modern humanity) (nämlich [die] Begegnung der planetarisch bestimmten Technik und des neuzeitlichen Menschen)." Many readers, notably Jürgen Habermas, came to interpret this ambiguous remark as evidence of his continued commitment to National Socialism. Critics further cite Heidegger's affair with Hannah Arendt, when she was a doctoral student of his at the University of Marburg. This affair mostly went along in the 20s, some time before Heidegger's involvement in Nazism, but it did not end when she "fled" from him and moved to Heidelberg to continue with Karl Jaspers, and she later spoke on his behalf at his denazification hearings. Jaspers spoke against him at these same hearings, suggesting he would have a detrimental influence on young German students because of his powerful teaching presence. Arendt, who was Jewish, resumed their friendship, if extremely cautiously, after the war, despite or even because of the widespread contempt that Heidegger was held in for his political sympathies, and despite his being forbidden from teaching for a number of years.

Der Spiegel interview

Some years later, hoping to quiet controversy, Heidegger gave an interview to Der Spiegel magazine, in which he promised to discuss the issue provided it was published posthumously. It should also be mentioned that the published version was not a real interview, but the protocol had been largely "corrected" on Heidegger's demand. In this interview, Heidegger's defense of his Nazi involvement runs in two tracks: first, he argues that there would have been no alternative; he says he had tried to save the university (and science in general) from being politicized and had to make compromises with the Nazi administration. Second, he saw an "awakening" ("Aufbruch"), something which might help to find a "new national and social approach". From 1934 on, he says, he would have been more critical towards the government. Heidegger is evasive on some questions in this interview. For example, when he talks about a "national and social approach" in national socialism he links this to Friedrich Naumann. But Naumann's "national-sozialer Verein" was not at all national socialist, but liberal. This confusion seems to be deliberately created by Heidegger. Also, he changes between his two arguments quickly, disregarding their contradictions. And his statements often tend to take the form "others were much more Nazis than me" and "the Nazis did bad things to me, too", both of which are true, but miss the point. Also, the Der Spiegel interviewers did not bring to question Heidegger's quote from 1949 where he compares engineered food production to the Holocaust ("essentially the same"); in fact, they were not in possession of much of the evidence for Heidegger's sympathies towards Nazism which is known today. To further evaluate this issue, read "Only a God Can Save Us," Der Spiegel interview with Heidegger (1966) and Jürgen Habermas, "Work and Weltanschauung: The Heidegger Controversy from a German Perspective." translated by John McCumber, Critical Inquiry 15 (Winter 1989): pp. 431-456.

Obligations and unsplendid silence: Celan at "Todtnauberg"

Shortly after giving the Spiegel interview and following Celan's lecture at Freiburg, Heidegger hosted Paul Celan at his chalet at Todtnauberg. The two walked in the woods. Celan impressed Heidegger with his knowledge of botany (also evident in his poetry), and Heidegger is thought to have spoken about elements of his press interview. Celan signed Heidegger's guest book. In his Poetry as Experience, Lacoue-Labarthe advanced the argument that, although Celan's poetry was deeply informed by Heidegger