>... 1) Use is not an issue. It's not supposed to be useful. 2) Heidegger
> is trying to undermine the whole idea underlying the
> concepts of the "individual subject," the "mental,"
> and "reality." Heidegger is describing the structure
> of experience. In actual existence, I have never
> experienced myself as an "individual subject" with
> some kind of "mental" apparatus that is impinged upon
> by "reality." These are concepts that are derived from
> lived experience. In actual experience, one never sees
> "individual subjects," "minds," or "reality." These
> are, again, deivative concepts.
Chris: Two questions with a long preface:
What you have stated here is an accurate statement about Heidegger in particular and the phenomenological method in general as I understand it.
It is precisely this that has always made me think that phenomenology is simply a philosophers way of describing what might be called a "romantic-realism of consciousness." I mean this as a description of the phenomenological method in general. This seems to me equally true of Husserl, Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, and Sartre. The reason I describe it in these terms ("romantic-realism of consciousness.") is because it seems to match the development of a certain desire to account for consciousness and the experiential from the inside that matches the projects of many poets and novelists from Wordsworth through to Flaubert, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Conrad, Joyce.
But what if what we can show that the method of phenomenology actually undermines an understanding of experiential phenomena? What if the only way to do phenomenology is through creative art? What if the attempt to build a philosophical method of phenomenological experiences actual makes those structures linear, where the only phenomenological account of experience can be holistic in an artistic sense? In some sense Heidegger would have seen where I am going with this because along with many other "philosophers" he is to a large extent an "anti-philosopher."
Do you see what I am saying? I think historically, phenomenology of all kinds is a sort of parasite on fictional-literary projects of presentation of human consciousness. This itself is not a criticism but an observation. At the same time all attempts to express this fictional-literary project in straight philosophical terms tends to denude the artistic enterprise without adding anything extra in form of theoretical models or simple understanding. Finally, a phenomenological method of describing the structure of experience in each specific case (that apricot brandy, this computer screen, my sense of duration in time) may only lead to higher illusions about the structure of experience, simply because we can only think through our limited and limiting senses/mind/brain and when speaking philosophically can only put those experiences down in a linear fashion.
This brings me to my "biological" critique. (Now please stick with me) What if our phenomenological perceptions are shown to be at root non-experiential? What if the non-experiential simply overwhelms what knowledge we can gain about ourselves from the _non-theoretical_ and _non-artistic experiential_. In other words our experiential world from which we construct a phenomenological ontology is not at all experiential in the way we think it is. Our reflections on the experiential world (when unaided by theory or art) can only lead us into skewed conclusions about our experiential world. Thus philosophical attempts at phenomenology by reflecting on the experiential world and trying to construct an ontological structure of experience actually delude us in a similar way that "common sense" often deludes us. Both science and art are needed to correct these delusions but phenomenology is an abstraction of the process that leads us to such delusions.
For example, we know that some slight biological damage can take away our perceptions of other minds, of the existence of "other minds". This brings me to the conclusion that the very concept that their are "other minds" like my own and beside my own, the very concept that their our separate "selves" from me (no matter how we label these terms), is a derivative phenomenological structure dependent and perhaps even _created by non-experiential structures_ in our mind-brains.
Another example: It seems that the whole experiential phenomena that we are the authors of our own limb movements is built into the mind/body as a separate module. It is a non-experiential part of the mind-brain-body, separate from what actually controls the movement of limbs. Thus a person can have nothing wrong with what controls the movements of her body, and nothing wrong with her five senses themselves, yet that person will not even be able to perceive that her limbs are her own, or recognize her limbs as her own when she looks at them. This would be because of damaged areas in her brain that effect proprioception.
My final example is from the fact that in the early 1960s we learned that the "signal" from our brains that effected the actual movements of our limbs, was separate from the signal for the decision for moving our limbs. This is not surprising except that the signal for moving the limbs was a fraction prior to the signal for the decision of moving our limbs. In other words, our biology is quite logically constructed to give us the illusion that we are moving of our own "free will" even though somewhere "in" our non-experiential the movement of the limbs was already occurring. (One can construct a just so story of why all mammals are like this but I will leave this behind.) It is in fact the experiment that discovered this phenomena that led to the basis of our discoveries of proprioception.
These are all examples where our most basic experiences of the world may lead us to construct a phenomenology that may be called "myths of the experiential."
So my question is: If our phenomenological experiences on such a basic level are "necessary biological illusions", why should we trust phenomenology at all as a way of understanding? Does trusting phenomenology as a way of understanding simply leads us to delusions and illusions?
My other question I will phrase as a statement, but please treat it as a question, and has to do with the heart of any philosophical project of this sort.
Perhaps phenomenology leads to such delusions because it is _a way of "understanding"_ that deludes itself that it is _a method of "knowing"_ ?
This is where my first observations about literature come into the mix. Poetry, novels, art in general, give to the person open to it, real-life experiential understanding of the world around her in ways that we as limited human organisms are unable to theorize. (I think Heidegger would have agreed with this but used other terms.) But phenomenology actually falls into the trap of constructing something like a quasi-theory (disguised as a method of describing the structure of experience) out of the qualitative world, a world which is not beyond artistic experience, but is beyond "linear" methodology.
The questions of the biological basis of phenomenological experience is not irrelevant to the whole method of phenomenology simply because biology might show the limits of what we accept as the experiential structure of the world.
Jerry Monaco