Sara Heinämaa

From Decisions to Passions: Merleau-Ponty’s Interpretation of Husserl’s Reduction

This paper focuses on Merleau-Ponty’s understanding of Husserl’s philosophical method. It argues against interpretations that claim that Merleau-Ponty abandons Husserl’s reductions: the phenomenological-transcendental reduction, the eidetic reduction, or both. The paper shows that Merleau-Ponty’s critical comments are not directed against Husserl’s methodic ideas but against intellectualist interpretations of them. For Merleau-Ponty, the phenomenological reduction is not an intellectual operation effected by will or by decision. It is a specific form of passivity: something invites us to depart from our natural and habitual ways of responding to the world and allows us to notice these relations.

Merleau-Ponty's modification of phenomenology: Cognition, passion and philosophy

This paper problematizes the analogy that Hubert Dreyfus has presented between phenomenology and cognitive science. It argues that Dreyfus presents Merleau-Pontys modification of Husserls phenomenology in a misleading way. He ignores the idea of philosophy as a radical interrogation and self-responsibility that stems from Husserls work and recurs in Merleau-Pontys Phenomenology of Perception. The paper focuses on Merleau-Pontys understanding of the phenomenological reduction. It shows that his critical idea was not to restrict the scope of Husserls reductions but to study the conditions of possibility for the thetic acts. Merleau-Ponty argued, following Husserls texts, that the thetic acts rest on the basis of primordial pre-thetic experience. This layer of experience cannot, by its nature, be explicated or clarified, but it can be questioned and unveiled. This is the recurrent task of phenomenological philosophy, as Merleau-Ponty understands it.

Woman — Nature, Product, Style? Rethinking the Foundations of Feminist Philosophy of Science

Phenomenology questions the foundations of knowledge and science in a specific sense. It studies the meanings of the phenomena measured and generalized about in the empirical sciences: What do we mean, for example, by “natural processes”, by “nature”, “fact”, “culture”, “human being”, etc.? And it studies the meanings of concepts basic to science: knowledge, objectivity, mistake, false belief, etc. Understanding the philosophy of science broadly, we can say that phenomenology is a specific viewpoint or approach within it; it critically attends to the basic concepts at work in both the natural and human sciences.

Selfhood, Consciousness, and Embodiment: A Husserlian Approach

311 Several misconceptions about phenomenology stem from the notion that Husserl’s transcendental self is a solitary creator of all meaning of objectivity – the meaning of the world and all beings included in the world: natural entities, physical things, living beings, human artifacts, works and tools, linguistic signs and mathematical objects, as well as all conscious subjects or other selves, as we may call them. Two misinterpretations come together here. First Husserl is believed to argue that the constitutive basis of all meaning is in one universal transcendental subjectivity, shared equally and in some mysterious way by all rational conscious beings. Second, it is supposed that the constitutive subject that Husserl discloses is a-temporal and non-changing. These misconceptions make Husserl’s transcendental self look very much like Kant’s – and it seems to me that many commentaries and critiques still suffer from the habit of reading Husserl through Kantian eyes.1 I will argue in this chapter that Husserl’s transcendental self is not universal but individual, not stable but in constant change, not beyond time but temporal through and through. With this understanding of the ego, it becomes easier to see why Husserl and his followers insist and argue again and again that the constitutive basis of all meaning of objectivity is not in one transcendental self but is in the community of such selves, in transcendental intersubjectivity. As Merleau-Ponty puts it in his Phenomenology of Perception (Phenomenologie de la perception 1945): “Transcendental subjectivity is

The Living Body and its Position in Metaphysics: Merleau-Ponty’s Dialogue with Descartes

The Cartesian idea of the human body as a human non-closed, open inasmuch as governed by thought—is perhaps the most profound idea of the union of the soul and the body. It is the soul intervening in a body that is not of the in itself [...], that can be a body and living—human only by reaching completion in “view of itself which is thought [...] (Merleau-Ponty 1964b, 288/234).1The Cartesian idea of the human body as a human non-closed, open inasmuch as governed by thought – is perhaps the most profound idea of the union of the soul and the body. It is the soul intervening in a body that is not of the in itself (...), that can be a body and living – human only by reaching completion in “view of itself” which is thought (...) (Merleau-Ponty Le visible et l’invisible, 288/234).

Transcendental Intersubjectivity and Normality: Constitution by Mortals

For Husserl, the sense of the world is an intersubjective accomplishment. The individual ego does not establish this sense by itself but constitutes it in community and communication with other egos. However, in his manuscripts, Husserl argues that the community that gives the world its full sense only includes normal subjects. This paper clarifies the role of normal subjects in world-constitution. I start by identifying the criteria that Husserl uses in delineating the community of constitutors. This allows us to study the different types of anomalous subjects that are excluded from this community. I focus my discourse on two special cases of anomality: the infant and the animal. I argue that mortality, generativity, and the practice of writing have a crucial role in Husserl’s exclusion of infants and animals from the constitutive activity that gives the world its full sense. Both infants and animals lack the sense of themselves as members of a generation and as members of an open series of generations. This deprivation hinders them from taking part in the activity that provides the world with the sense of a temporally continuous infinity. Thus, Husserl’s arguments about infants and animals differ in an interesting way from the traditional Cartesian arguments still dominate contemporary philosophy of mind and language: infants and animals are not anomalous to us because they would lack thinking, cogito, or self-awareness, but because their understanding of themselves as communal beings is severely limited.

Phenomenological Responses to Gestalt Psychology

The chapter studies the reception that Gestalt psychological theories were given by phenomenologists in Germany and France in the first half of the twentieth century. The aim is to study, in particular, the reactions of two phenomenologists, Edmund Husserland Maurice Merleau-Ponty. The chapter focuses on these two thinkers in order to explicate the main idea of the phenomenological-transcendental critique of psychological theories. The interpretative claim is that Merleau-Ponty followed Husserl in defining phenomenological philosophy by its radical task in providing a transcendental basis for all experience and knowledge. He thus came to argue that psychological theories, Gestalt theories included, must be submitted to a phenomenological-transcendental critique. Despite their apparent differences, Merleau-Ponty and Husserl agreed that no empirical or wordly knowledge – psychological, anthropological or natural scientific~– can overrule radical philosophical reflections in the grounding of the positive sciences. Before entering into Gestalt-theoretical and phenomenological sources, the chapter briefly discusses the historical relations between the two fields of research. The connections are to be found in common conceptions of parts and wholes, both approaches being influenced by Brentano’s distinctions between different kinds of parts. The disparity concerns the role of consciousness in the institution and establishment of meaning.

The Soul-Body Union and Sexual Difference from Descartes to Merleau-Ponty and Beauvoir

In feminist philosophy, Descartes has long been attacked as an androcentric thinker, par excellence. The common notion of many feminist critics working in traditions as different as analytical philosophy, Marxism, and theoretical psychoanalysis has been that Cartesianism is merely, or mainly, a hindrance to feminist concerns. Recently, several Descartes scholars with feminist orientations have challenged this view. Lisa Shapiro (1997, 1999a, 1999b), Martina Reuter (1999, 2000, 2004) and Lilli Alanen (2002, 2004) have argued to the contrary that Descartes’ intellectual heritage contains a variety of powerful critical resources. The work of these philosophers shows that we find in Descartes not just ideas and arguments that have been crucial to feminist thought and movement, but also intellectual resources whose power has not yet been fully utilized or even realized. For one, Descartes explicates and develops the concept of equal reason which is central to feminist arguments for women’s education and scholarship. Second, his arguments against dogmatic philosophy and stagnated practices and habits of thinking are paradigmatic of any philosophical enterprise emphasizing criticism and self-inquiry. But even more interestingly, Descartes scholars argue that we can find in Descartes works, especially in his correspondence with Princess Elisabeth of Bohemia, a rich and fruitful notion of the unity of mind and body as well as promising ethical reflections.

On the Complexity and Wholeness of Human Beings: Husserlian Perspectives

Abstract At the beginning of Being and Time, Heidegger rejects Husserl’s classical phenomenology on three grounds: he claims that Husserlian phenomenology is impaired by indeterminate concepts, by naïve personalism, and by obscurities in its account of individuation. The paper studies the validity of this early critique by explicating Husserl’s discourse on human persons as bodily-spiritual beings and by clarifying his account of the principles by which such beings can be individuated. The paper offers three types of considerations. After a summary of Heidegger’s early critique of Husserl, the second section of the paper distinguishes between two dimensions of Husserl’s discourse on human persons. It argues that Husserl does not put forward one analysis of the being of humans, but explicates two different accounts and then studies critically their mutual relations of dependency: on the one hand, the naturalistic account of human beings as layered beings and on the other hand the personalistic account of human beings as peculiar kinds of unified wholes in which the mental and the bodily are inextricably intertwined. The third section of the paper clarifies Husserl’s theory of individuation and its consequences for our discourse on human persons. Finally, the fourth section explicates the conceptual means by which Husserl develops his account of human beings as persons. The paper ends in drawing some conclusions for contemporary philosophical anthropology.

Introduction: Aristotelian Challenges to Contemporary Philosophy—Nature, Knowledge, and the Good

New Perspectives on Aristotelianism and Its Critics traces Aristotelian influences in modern and pre-modern discourses on knowledge, rights, and the good life. The contributions offer new insights on contemporary discussions on life in its cognitive, political, and ethical dimensions.