Husserl’s first directive to phenomenology, in its early stages, to be a ‘descriptive psychology’, or to return to the ‘things in themselves’, is from the start a foreswearing of science. I am not the outcome or the meeting-point of numerous causal agencies which determine my bodily or psychological make-up. I cannot conceive myself as nothing but a bit of the world, a mere object of biological, psychological or sociological investigation. I cannot shut myself up within the realm of science. All my knowledge of the world, even my scientific knowledge, is gained from my own particular point of view, or from some experience of the world without which the symbols of science would be meaningless. The whole universe of science is built upon the world as directly experienced, and if we want to subject science itself to rigorous scrutiny and arrive at a precise assessment of its meaning and scope, we must begin by reawakening the basic experience of the world of which science is the second-order expression. Science has not and never will have, by its nature, the same significance qua form of being as the world which we perceive, for the simple reason that it is a rationale or explanation of that world. I am, not a ‘living creature’ nor even a ‘man’, nor again even ‘a conciousness’ endowed with all the characteristics which zoology, social anatomy or inductive psychology recognize in these various products of the natural or historical process – I am the absolute source, my existence does not stem from my antecedents, from my physical and social environment; instead it moves out towards them and sustains them, for I alone bring into being for myself (and therefore into being in the only sense that the word can have for me) the tradition which I elect to carry on, or the horizon whose distance from me would be abolished – since that distance is not one of its properties – if I were not there to scan it with my gaze. Scientific points of view, according to which my existence is a moment of the world’s, are always both naïve and at the same time dishonest, because they take for granted, without explicitly mentioning, it, the other point of view, namely that of consciousness, through which from the outset a world forms itself around me and begins to exist for me. To return to things themselves is to return to that world which precedes knowledge, of which knowledge always speaks, and in relation to which every scientific schematization is an abstract and derivative sign-language, as is geography in relation to the country-side in which we have learnt beforehand what a forest, a praire or a river is.
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Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception (New York, Routledge: 1958), ix-x. See also the Nordic Society of Philosophy's 2006 conference Phenomenolgy of Perception 60 Years Later
Merleau-Ponty; continental philosophy; philosophy of science; epistemology; Da-Sein; phenomenology.
I wish I had these summaries when I was trying to teach undergraduate tutorials phenomenology!
ReplyDeletePaul, your encouragement is so...well..encouraging! Where on earth do they teach undergraduates phenomenology?!?
ReplyDeleteIn sociology, the course included much by Peter Berger, perhaps the most well-known phenomenological sociologist in the last 50 years. In the course, it was called "humanistic sociology" though. It was very hard to communicate to the average student though straight from Berger and Luckmann, so I relied in the end on the handy _Penguin Dictionary of Sociology_!
ReplyDeleteIt is interesting to trace phenomenology from Husserl to Ricoeur. Has the whole project of phenomenology become hermeneutics now? As I trace the geneology of phenomenology from Husserl onwwards, I notice that it becomes more and more undistinguishable from hermeneutics.