Phenomenology, Engelland

Review and notes on Phonemenology by Chad Engelland, MIT Press Essential Knowledge Series.

Phenomenology enhances perception so we perceive all that is important in wha seems small.

1. To the Things Themselves

• Phenomenology is the experience of experience.
• Key thinkers - Husserl, Scheler, Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty.
• Phenomenology studies the true appearance of things.
• Physicsts and scientists often venture to explain our existnece and to, in essence, dsplace philosophy; yet they leave out wonderment, questions, appearances.
• Modern science cannot locate itslef in the image it generates.
• There would be no science if there were no scientists. So how does science justify itself and its own growth?
• By thoughtfully experiencing experience, we can understand the structures of experience.
• Transcendental reduction - focuses on the relational structure of experience. Phenomenology attempts to understand the general structure of expeirence, how we produce experiences.
• Modern philosophy breaks from classical philosophy in its attention to the experience rather than the essence of things. Phenomenology folds the essence into experience - what things are in terms of how they are experienced, and vice versa.
• Husserl - “philosophy may be paradoxically, but not unprofoundly, called the science of the trivial”
• Nietzsche - becomes deeply suspicious of appearances. We see experience as a fundmaentally neural event.
• Constituting - letting the entity be seen in its objectivity.
• Maxim of phenomenology - ‘to the things themselves’

2. World

• Who was write about perception, the impressionists or Cezanne?
• Cezanne’s painting highlights things as they are experienced.
• The price of presence is absence.
• The present includes the absence: therefore consciousness reaches out beyond what it physically experiences; the positive includes the negative.
• Perception is the activity, rather than passivity, of impressions.
• Intentionality - phenomenological structure. We experience something as something.
• Are intentions in our heads or in the world? Phenomenology suggests appearances are public - they belong to the experiential world which we each share.
• Hume - suggests appearances happen within our heads.
  1. The perception of objects constantly changes.
  2. The real object does not constantly change.
  3. Therefore, we perceive something else - not the real object, but mental images.
• Response from phenomenology: changing perception presents the object in all its reality. That is, variable perception is an attribute of the world itself.
• Adumbrations - the shadows a thing casts as itself as explored by us. The thing does not hide behind appearances, it is its appearance.
• Appearances are fleetinng, but present the reality of the percieved thing.
• Two dimensions of the thing - the spatiality and the temporality. (Physics - these are intertwined)
• Phenomenologists recover the publicity of appearances.
• Three key ideas about everyday experience:
  1. The things that occupy us do so in light of overall interests.
  2. The things that occupy our attention do so through interplay of presence and absence
  3. The play of presence and absence happens due to world - we can shift attention from presence to absence and back. World is not a collection of things or the Earth; it is a realm of possible expeirence. “The site in which we encounter things that we are not.”

3. Flesh

• What do you see when you look at your reflection in the mirror?
• Flesh - the twofold experiential body, which both opens us up to a world and allows us to be a thing which is itself percieved.
• Flesh allows us to connect with fellow explorers of things.
• Presence is always presence to someone.

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