Continental
Phenomenology: description of acts, configurations of acts and their correlates
Its aim: understanding the processes of consciousness that ’constitute’ the ’sense’ Sinn of our world; which make the world meaningful to us.
We have to bracket the idea that things are done by our psychology purely. Making the thing appears as it appears to us, and then asking back through the consciousness how this comes to be.
An expression is apprehended when a meaning is recognised
Meaning, Bedeutung, is both: the act of linguistic referens to an object or a state of affairs, like ”the door is closed”; and that what is apprehended by the act (and the way it is apprehended).
”Oh the door is closed, the students cannot enter.” The meaning is not the act of believing that the door is close, you would immediately look to the door and see to verify whether it is the case, and secondhand I also believe that whoever said this also believes this to be the case.
Meaning, the act, and what is meant by the act.
Meaning and truth have to be disconnected. Meaning is the precondition for truth and falsity however. Things are not true or false in themselves, only statements about them.
Only in the interplay between the object and the way in which we depict them can there be meaning.
Two kinds of ’acts of meaning’: the empty meaning intention (meaning-conferring acts, Sinngebende Akter) and the fulfilling meaning intention.
If you understand something that is said, you immediately understand the first act. In the second act, you see the thing as that thing which was expressed. It is an act of consciousness. It fills up the intuitiv emptyness of the first act. The first act remains empty until there is an intention to confirm it, or fill it up. The meaning-fulfilling act is also an act of intuition. We see something, and we see it precisely as it is meant. This is where truth lies. Truth is the confirmation of the empty meaning-intention. Truth is the overlapping of a simply meant object, and the given object. This means that already in the empty meaning intention there is already a correlate, but that thing is empty and absent.
To understand a discourse or to read a book, we only very rarely enter into intuitive fulfilment of the meaning intention. Usually it is enough to go with the discourse, and as such never use the meaning-fulfilling act. We don’t always verify things. Consciousness is always out there in the world, concerned with objects, and this is why it is essentially intentional. There is never a consciousness without an object. Meaning is the object meant, but also the meaning-intention as conferring and fulfilling.
The phenomenon of meaning is this entire structure.
If the meant thing is present, then the two acts fuse into one experience.
”In the realised relation of the expression to its objective correlate, the sense-informed expression becomes one with the act of meaning-fulfillment.”
This is important in order to understand his semiotics, his structure of the sign.
Husserlian semantics:
What is the meaning of an expression? Is meaning subjective? Is meaning merely a psychic act? Is all meaning my own meaning?
”If I sincerely say the ”three perpendiculars of a triangle intersect in a point”, this is of course based on the fact that I judge so. If someone hears me and understands my assertion, he likewise knows this fact; he hears me and understand my assertion, he likewise knows this fact; he apperceives me as someone who judges thus. But is the juding here intimated (kundgegeben) the meaning of my assertion, is it what my assertion asserts, and in that sense expressed? Plainly not.”
What is meant and intimated is not my subjective act of judging. It is also implicitly expressed, but not in the first place. As such, meaning is not something subjective or persoanl, but objective in the sense that it is a depiction of a state of affairs.
It is indentically the same for all members of a linguistic community.
Meaning as an ’objective ideality’. It is not subjective, and is not reducible to my state of consciousness. It is insofar as in not being reducible as such, the same for all members of the linguistic community. We are working with objective meaning, and what primes for Husserl here is the object meaning, and not the sense-giving activity as such. This part is actually subjective, but it is not relative or arbitrary to me, it is simply intimated by me. It is not the same individual act, but it is the same universal configuration of the act. To fulfill a meaning, there is one objective act that needs to be fulfilled.
”In this selfsame meaning, of whose identity we are conscious whenever we repeat the statement, nothing at all about judging or about one who judges is discoverable. What we assert in the judgement involve nothing subjective. My act of judging is a transient experience: it arises and passes away. But what my assertion asserts, the content that three perpendiculars of a triangle intersect in a point, neither arises nor passes away. It is an identity in the strict sense, one and the same geometrical truth.”
In our meaning intentions, we rise ourselves to the same ideas that are eternal. The state of affair meant by a statement, is onto something that is purely objective, ideal, as it is.
Here we are working on the structure of the meant object, the referent, and as such a semantics.
It is about that which stands truthfully on a series of a states of affairs. I cannot say anything about a certain thing, there is a scope to which the thing will fulfill or not.
The ideal content is the configuration of a state of affairs, that can be judged about it.
Only a certain latency of acts can be made true by a certain thing that is. In time it can have contradictory ideal content.
”The object never coincides fully with the meaning, it always exceeds the meaning.” More can always be said about something.
”An expression only refers to an objective correlate because it means something, it can be righly said to signify or name the object through its meaning.”
Sense for Frege is the mode of givenness of an obejct in language. The referent is the object that is given in this mode. The morning star and the evening star are different modes of givenness, but refer to the same referent. Husserl uses the same kind of distinction. For Frege it is important because it means cognitive expressions has a kind of value; we can know that there is a value to knowing that the evening star and morning star share the same identity. For Husserl, though, it is rather in the inverse sense. Sense is the fulfilling of the meaning-intention. The meaning-intention is here the Bedeutung. He sort of inverses the notions in a sense. The idea is still that it has to be possible to talk about the same thing in different ways. Things are as such not reducible to language, because the thing itself always eludes language. For Frege, there is no further debate between the link between sense and consciousness; there is no subjectivity behind it, but rather a descriptive ontology.
Expressions can be varied in respect to their meaning and to their objective correlate.
”Two names can differ in meaning but can name the same object.”
”One name can differ in objects it names”
Different meanings can also be attributed to the same intuitive object. The same thing is categorically apprehended in a different way. What Husserl calls categorical intuition is the intuition of a state of affairs; this means about a certain thing, standing in a logical relationship. If we have a fulfilment of different states of affairs, we talk about categorical intuition.
Categorical intuition is through foundation, the foundation between different acts that are superimposed upon one another, constructing mega-objects. This is what the sciences do. They construe lots of objects upon immense amounts of acts. Categorical intuition is the intuition of a meaning structure.
Husserl had a very particular way of working, writing in stenography.
Husserl saw that everything around us are infinities, and had been inspired by Cantor’s calculation of the infinite.
The three dimensional object always escapes our gaze. To explain the threedimensional object, we must explain it as the infinite showing itself on all sides. As such it is a small infinity. Phenomenology as a description is completely infinite. There is too much to describe.
Husserl wants to achieve a kind of philosophical system, not a deductive one, but a system of description or topography. When he goes into the description, the phenomena always somewhat escape him. He always struggles with the ideas he wants to put onto the world and the world that constantly escapes those idealisations.
Merleau-Ponty
Died in a car-accident in 61. Did not finish the visible and the invisible.
The phenomenology of perception is his most important otherwise.
He is the phenonomonologist of the body, he was inspired by Husserl, and went to Leuven in the 50s to consult the Husserl archive during his studies.
Nevertheless, the body by merleau-ponty is discussed in close investigation with the human sciences.
The Structure of Compartment, about animals. Was a professor of child-psychology, was a developmental psychologist. Merleau-Ponty really institutes a new kind of phenomenology, which is closely connected with the sciences.
Was part of the 1st generation of phenomenologists who studied with Husserl in Freiburg.
Sartre and Merleau-Ponty both have the specificity of reading Husserlian phenomenology in close relationship with Heidegger. The French readers of Husserl didn’t know about all the problems in Germany, and so consulted Heidegger a lot. This was not the case so much with Levinas, Koyre and Hering.
What comes out is a kind of French existential phenomenology. They circle around a phenomenology of experience, and a phenomenology of existance; ie. A kind of mix between Husserl and Heidegger.
Both were engaged in the resistance against the Germans. They grew intellectually during WWII. After the war, they had a huge intellectual as well as moral backup. They were immediately well-respected intellectuals, and were both political thinkers. Worked at the Sorbonne, and got a position at the college de France, was there before Foucault.
Existence for MP = concrete bodily, sensorimotor and affective.
The understanding of the world is bodily anchored.
Interdisciplinary approach with human sciences: between philospphy and empirical approaches.
Husserl & Heidegger do not consider the role of the living body. Heidegger’s existance is concerned with processes of understanding and interpreting the world, the hermeneutics. The existance tries properly to understand the world and its way out of it; there is no body.
Husserl does take into account the body, but the way Husserl understands intentionality in his published writings always bring it very close to knowing and cognition; so there seems to be a forgetting of the affective side; as such he focuses too much on the problems of epistemology.
MP reevaluates the role of the living body (Leib, as distinguished from Körpe). The living body enacts the world in which we live. There is a direct correlation between the living body and the world. This distinction cuts through cartesian dualism, as there is now matter which is alive, there is matter which lacks death. The physical and the psychical are intertwined. MP works with the Leib. Parts of the body can become Körper, like saliva when it is spat out, I don’t eat my spat out saliva.
There is a clear complexity between what our body is, which exteriorises and integrates new things into itself. The Leib can make more into Leib. The stick of a blind person is an extention of the blind person which is integrated into the Leib. The Leib has a dynamic capacity to extend itself beyond physical boundaries.
The living body is the heart of the world, it beats the rythm of the world and acts it. This is because there are multiple sense-giving operations at stake which our Leib uses, and which creates a coherence of the configuration of our world. There is a dynamism that allows consciousness to extract itself from the world, because the body take care of a lot of things for it, and so consciousness can move back.
Ex-istence (ex-sistere) = movement of creative exteriorisation: the body projects itself upon the world and makes it ’familiar’. The transcendental function, the thing that allows us to transcend towards the world is the Leib.
MP starts his discussion on language by critiquing the cartesian interpretation of language. Cartesian language divides the Res Extensa and the Res Cogitans, the extented thing and the mind.
Linguistic meaning in such a framework is simply a mental occurance internal to the speaker. Words are superfluous exteriorisations of mental meanings. They are just the name-bearers for the meanins. We can think in this framework without relying on physical signs. (in the chapter on Husserl, there is a paragraph on the soliloquy, where he tries to eliminate the physical signs in his approach – and signs are based on physical inscriptions. Husserl wants to eliminate the physical side of the sign by talking about the soliloquy – language can be reduced to something completely mental – though Husserl also wants to focus on the fact that language plays a specific role) [For Derrida this is called logocentrism, or Phonocentrism. Philosophy is a logocentrism because what it focuses on is the sphere of rationality supported by sole meanings, and if it takes into account of language, it only takes into account the nonmaterial side of it. Since Plato, there is a hierarchy of language, starting from the sensible of the written sign, which is a sign of the voice, which is a sign of the occurance of the soul – the ides. There is a hierarchy of a loss of purity. What philosophers do is to focus on the purely grasping part of language] MP also criticises this approach to language. Derrida grounds his whole philosophy on this critique.
The cartesian focus on language is on the nonmaterial parts of language.
Language originates not in the self-transparent realm of consciousness but in a n always implict and vague corporeality. Its ground, the body, is affective & anonymous. The body is the way in which our subjectivity reaches out to the world, and reaches into the things. For MP the Leib is however not entirely my own. It constantly escapes me, and does as it wishes. This is why the unconscious is located in the body. There are zones of the body that escape me, and I experience these constantly, such as when going to bed. Every time I go to bed I seem to be someone completely different from my personal life.
Living corporeality reveals to us an ambiguous mode of existance. It incorporates elements which are cognitive and carnal, mental nad sensorial, subjective and objective. There is another agency in my body that I cannot fully master. It is anonymous, and this is a ground of our existance.
Wants to ground linguistic meaning and thinking in the bodily act of expression itself.
Husserl reduces expression to linguistic expression, to the expression of Bedeutung, as semantically put. MP subverts the intepretation of Husserl by saying that the first paradigmatic phenomenon to consider is not Bedeuting but the bodily expression of language. He goes the inverse direction from Husserl.
”The thinking subject must have its basis in the subject incarnate.” It is a huge problem that we think that thinking can be disconnected from the body.
The cognitive sciences today are still highly cartesian, as the body is not considered in its role to grounding and founding courses of thinking.
Enactive approach by Thompson and Varela, implemented Mps paradigms in the cognitive sciences. Cartesianism is everywhere. As much as we are naive aristotelians, we are naive cartesians.
Saussure distinguishes language and speech (langue and parole).
Language is the system of phonetic and semantic differneces.
Speech is the concrete use of language by an individual in communication. What is important for Saussure’s linguistics is language as a system, and structure. MP subverts this approach and gives more emphasis to speech, to concrete language.
Saussure favours language over speech, MP opposite.
”The spoken word is a genuine gesture, and it contains its meaning in the same way as the gesture contains its. Thisis what makes communication possible.”
In a gesture, something is displayed. Immediately, when you see it, the meaning is immediately displayed in the gesture, there is no later interpretation of it.
[Temple Grandin, Thinking in Pictures: if she sees a dog, she has to go through all her catalogue of a dog and a cat in order distinguish this thing as it is, it becomes very difficult to discern through catalogue what it is one is perceing; the sense dynamism in autism is differently construed; the phenomenon of foreground and background are not necessarily there in autism; for MP it is the body that is at work here, because the body configuration is changed, and if the body is not configured so as to deal with a certain dynamism, it won’t deal with it well; so different configurations of the body and consciousness can alter the gestalt relationship. The living body as a world-constituting dynamism is what is at stake in providing the answer.]
Meaning is not something internal; not a purely mental & intellectual process
No interpretation, no representation is required to understand the other’s expressions. The bodily expressions are not secondary indicators of an emotion, but they are the emotion themselves. The meaning as an expression is enacted and realised by the body. This is what MP applies to language in general. The linguistic meaning lies in the phonetic chain itself. It is the verbalisation that is at the same time so neatly intertwined with the abstract expression.