/lit/ - Literature

the study of phenomena

understanding how we experience being and cooming simultaneously

A field of post kantian philosophy that rejects german idealism but isn’t Schelling based

>>14738858
hehe

>>14738630
basically phenomenology believes that there is a structure to reality that can be discerned by gathering 'phenomena', so that the more phenomena you collect, the greater your grasp of reality (in the same way as the closer you get to completing a puzzle, the clearer the overall structure becomes, even of pieces you havent placed yet)

>>14738890
sounds like mindfulness

>>14738890
so are the writings something like:
>now im chewing the donut
>it is sweet, but loses its sweetness
>i swallow and become thirsty

is it true germans dont use italics but just s p a c e words out instead? whats the phenomenology of that?

German SS (sophisticated solipsism)

Is it worth reading. Will it revolutionarily change the way that I think or is it just intellectual masturbation like so much other modern philosophy?

>>14739106
husserl will be difficult, especially if you have little background in philosophy or formal logic
if you're not interested in the issues around the structure of consciousness, then you'll get very little out of it. there is no lebensphilosophie or ethical system that follows directly from any of the theory. it's highly technical, and often dull.

>>14739132
What if I just want to understand it for Heidegger.

>>14739141
bad idea. husserl is notoriously difficult and there are tons of interpretations of what he meant. read dreyfus’ intro book on heidegger instead

>>14738929
Also curious

>>14739132
>there is no lebensphilosophie or ethical system that follows directly from any of the theory.
Personalism?? Never heard of Scheler?

>>14738630
>sep and wikiepdia arent helpful
Schutz is

>>14739159
i haven't read scheler, no. he's not readily available in english, and my german is spotty. i'm speaking of husserl specifically.

buddhism for germans

>>14738929
Classical phenomenology and analytic phenomenology are. There are other types that are not. For example hermeneutic phenomenology and existential phenomenology.

>>14739229
>he's not readily available in english,
Strange. I've read him in spanish.

>>14739260
you're lucky, friend. i wanted to read him back when i was studying husserl and merleau-ponty, but all of the english translations are (or were, at the time) from the early 20th century, and out of print.

A preface to a book by Husserl I read once said he attempted to (re)make philosophy into a rigorous science once again by distancing oneself from historicizing (Hegel, Marx?) and psychologizing (Nietzsche?) tendencies. (German) Philosophy had gone astray after Romanticism with people downright making crazy shit up and it was necessary to go back to Descartes and figure out what had gone wrong, but with the insights that were made since, specially by Kant. So on one hand Husserl wanted to go to the matters or things (Sache) without the baggage of previous conceptualizations of earlier philosophies (any similarity with Heiddegger is no coincidence), but on the other, he knew, with Kant, that the things themselves could not be know by us, only as they appeared to us, namely phenomena, so he made the study of phenomena the main thing (thus phenomenology).

bump

>>14739488
Based.

The key-difference between Heidegger and Husserl for babby(Op) would be that Heidegger is less object orientated and puts it to something more vague but "lived" I suppose you could say.

Autism

>>14738630
Phenomenology is the study of essences through phenomena.

>>14738630
In simple terms, it is the study of a subject's immersive experience.

>>14738890
Sounds like literal science.

>>14741411
>>14741423
does husserl basically agree with kant then, but have a different method/means of "abstraction"?

>>14741529
you just described all post kant philosophy

>>14739488
That sounds like logical positivism.

>>14741777
I hate this slimy dwarf but Sartre?

>>14739237
Astute

>>14738630
Hey OP, not an expert in phenomenology by any means but I recently took an undergraduate Intro to Phenomenology course at a top 25 university and would be happy to answer some high level questions about it. The Prof specializes in Husserl so we mostly read from Logical Investigations and Ideas II, but we got into Heidegger a bit at the end of the course by way of his departure from Husser's project in History of the Concept of Time. Sokolowski's "Introduction to Phenomenology" was a companion text for the course and a great primer to the subject if you're looking for something deeper than SEP or Wikipedia without reading the primary material, which, as someone else mentioned, is pretty difficult to get through without a background in formal logic and post-Kantian philosophy.

>>14738890
This is a great way to describe phenomenology in a nutshell; Husserl was interested in describing the essential structures of experience so as to be able to carve out a place for the a priori in the face of reductive projects like psychologism while maintaining some semblance of objectivity, which he saw lacking in historical projects like Hegel. His Philosophy as a Rigorous Science is a great place to turn to if you're interested in learning more about the motivations behind phenomenology, but all that you really need to know here is that phenomenology aims to give an account of how things appear in experience with reference to the things themselves, and not empirically verifiable behaviour or whatever explanation Hegel would offer. The fact that you're not able to perceive every side of a cube at once, for example, is one of the ways experience is essentially structured in this way and which Husserl is concerned with giving an exhaustive account of in Logical Investigations.

>>14738929
This is the direction that modern phenomenology has ended up taking, but you'd be hard pressed to find something like this in Husserl. One thing that Husserl is especially interested in is the intentionality of experience, or the idea that every mental state is about something, and he has a detailed story of how mental states are constructed out of other ones. For example, you experience the flavour of the donut through sense perception, and make a judgment about that experience which is founded upon that earlier experience. Later, you might remember the donut, or wish you were eating it now, but all these acts are about the same inentional object in the donut although they very in intentional quality.

I'm going to be doing some work, but I'll try to answer any other questions as best I can. Hope this helps, phenomenology is definitely an interesting field and something worth getting into.

>>14743045
if kant wanted to say that there was some unformed object of sensibility and hegel didn’t think there was a distinction, where did husserl stand?

>>14743045
How did Husserl solve the things in themselves phenomena dichotomy? How did subject and object differentiate, like how the German Idealists like Schelling we’re trying to solve?

>>14743045
>Ideas II
T-There's an I-Ideas II??

>>14743073
the question of the 'ontological status' of the object is set aside. the experience *of* the object is taken as a given, and the investigation is redirected toward the 'structure' or 'logic' of that experience.

>>14743262
>he hasn’t read ideas III
VIII is the best though

>>14743073
>>14743262
This, Husserl famously wants to bracket questions about the existence of the objects of experience so as to focus on the structure of these experiences themselves. The end of this is clarity about the essence of different intentional acts (eg., what makes a judgment a judgment with reference to the phenomenal quality of the act), and Husserl generally is quite reticent about metaphysical speculation.

>>14743240
I'm not actually too familiar with Schelling, but I'll try to answer this question to the best of my knowledge. I don't think Husserl ever tries to resolve the noumena/phenomena dichotomy, or at least succeeds in doing so, but quite a lot in his earlier work is concerned with refuting the idea of an internal subject and external object which we see in Kant and especially in Descartes. At places in Logical Investigation he's committed to the existence of an ego, which is just the thing doing the intending in intentional acts, but later on he'll come to reject this view. His distinction between the natural attitude, where we're a subject existent in the world, and the phenomenological attitude, where we don't get this dichotomy and suspend judgments about the existence of ourselves and the external world, and even their being distinct from each other.

>>14743262
Second volume of Ideen, I guess I could have been clearer.

It is the study of our empirical intuition of Phenomena (things as they appear to the senses) and further how our intuitions and resulting understanding of the world is shaped by our conscious interaction with it. It's the science of subjectivism.

>>14738843

This lol. How is this a hard concept?

ive given a bunch of advice in this thread and ive never opened a philosophy book before ive learned everything based on hearsay

>>14743753
Based. Philosophy shouldn’t be complicated or else you know it’s sophistry/Hegelianism

>>14743753
we can all tell, anon

>>14743832
Really? Then whose posts are his?

>>14743840
>whose
which

>>14743840
>his
yours

>>14743946
>>14743950
Whence

>>14743946
>>14743950
>>14744059
Whomst

>>14744067
>>14744059
>>14743950
>>14743946
>>14743840
>>14743832
>>14743804
>>14743753

>>14744067
>Whomst
I'd've

>>14743045
Sokolowski is great. I haven't encountered anyone else who writes about phenomenology with such clarity.

>>14738630
Just shut your eyes and think

>>14738630
>In ordinary experience and in our naturalistic, scientific investigations of
the world, we are conscious of things and states-of-affairs outside us and
indeed within us – an itch, a pain, a hunger pang. This is the ‘natural
attitude’. Phenomenology does not investigate these matters. It investigates
consciousness itself. To focus just on the nature of consciousness requires
a ‘reduction’, a withdrawing of attention from anything other than
consciousness itself so that only it is under examination. One does this by
the epoche or suspension of attention to everything that is not
consciousness itself, by ‘bracketing’ all considerations of the
representational content of consciousness or what it is related to.
‘Bracketing’ is not a denial of the reality of things, but a way of holding
them in abeyance so that they do not distract attention from the invariant
features of consciousness, which is what the phenomenological reduction
is seeking to make visible. This marks a sharp distinction between
psychology as an empirical science from phenomenology as a ‘pure’
science in the Kantian sense, that is, which addresses only the nature and
conditions of consciousness as such, shrived of any considerations of what
it represents or connects with.

Do do do dodo
>phenomena
Do dodo do
>phenomena
Dodo do do do

>>14738890
The problem with phenomology is that the bridge can never be crossed

>>14738630
Probably the most lucid semi-introductory text I've read on phenomenology as suc has been Merleau Ponty's preface in The Phenomenology of Perception.

>>14738630
You know, the man wrote a short book precisely on that.
The short answer is that phenomenology is epistemautism pushed to its final form of logical idealism. It's 100% correct but the autism is strong even for me.

>>14743240
Husserl doesn't believe in things in themselves. The object is always the object as thought, and thought is always thought of an object. By its very structure it cannot be any other way.
In strictly logical terms, it shows into his writings on representation and the theory of judgement. The object can be a referral to another object but Husserl says that this process, to maintain object identity, need always be the fulfillment of an intentional act. That is the meaning of the 'go back to things themselves'.
In this view, things in themselves are impossible, you always face the things themselves to have an objectal identity. Claiming that the phenomena are embassadors of unknowable 'true' object instead of the things themselves is not doable if you accept his theory of judgements and representation based on fulfilled intentionality.

>>14745861
Kek

>>14743262
There's even a III which is a thorough btfo of empiriotardism.

>>14743240
Husserl is a transcendental philosopher, he doesn't deny the external world but brackets it when studying consciousness. He specifically sees his project (at least by the 1910s and 1920s) as a continuation of Kant's, and Kant had more or less the same perspective. The noumenal is out there, we know that it's there insofar as it impacts us, but we are concerned (at least within phenomenology) with the phenomenal.

Only the post-Kantian idealists tried to solve the dualism of subjective-phenomenal being forever cut off from objective-noumenal reality by naturalizing the (individual) subject to some kind of objective over-subject. This isn't necessarily an invalid approach but it's not one that Husserl concerned himself with. Or Heidegger for that matter.

>>14746972
>The noumenal is out there, we know that it's there insofar as it impacts us
Husserl explicitly refuses 'absurd things in themselves' and noumena. Read The Idea of Phenomenology.
Bracketing means there is no position of being, as trenscendent thetic judgements are neutralized. This doesn't mean the noumena are 'out there'.
Husserl's philosophy does not says that the question of noumena is unresolved. It says that within the study of phenomena, the phenomena are shown to be the things in the flesh. The topic is further elaborated in his lectures on passive synthesis (as he calls it).

>>14738843
What about Noumenology?

>>14747143
can you eleaborate on this phrase, "passive synthesis", it's in deleuze too. do they imply there's a method of 'synthesis' outside of the concepts?

>>14747143
This is a highly idiosyncratic reading of Husserl. It has occasionally been mooted that he was a subjective idealist, but almost nobody thinks this. Dan Zahavi for example categorically dismisses it. It may interest you to know that his earliest followers were realists more in line with Brentano and fairly hostile to neo-Kantian transcendental philosophy, and when Husserl (loudly) declared himself as a transcendental philosopher, i.e. explicitly not a phenomenal realist, they were baffled and even felt betrayed.

It's fine if you think Husserl can be fruitfully read as a subjective idealist but you should be aware that most people disagree with this.

>>14738630
Stick to the things/phenomena as they are given/experienced, not matter anything else.

>>14746590
>doesn't believe
I see. The problem with these kinds of philosophioes is that we know that the universe exited prior to there being any perceiving subject (unless you posit a universal Mind), so things in themselves are a given. You can say that we must remain forever agnostic about them, and that can be logically coherent within the given system, but this can never be fully satisfying.