Timothy Mooney

Repression and Operative Unconsciousness in Phenomenology of Perception

The notion of repression as active forgetfulness already found in Nietzsche and systematised by Freud and his successors is employed in a distinctive manner by Merleau-Ponty in Phenomenology of Perception. By showing how we appropriate our environment towards outcomes and respond to other people, he contends, we can unearth hidden modes of operative intentionality. Two such modes are the motor intentional projection of action and the anonymous intercorporeality that includes touching and being touched. Each of these is an aspect of a past that was never a present. Merleau-Ponty does have something to say about pasts that were once present and that linger on in human life. Yet he shows little interest in the unconsciousness of psychoanalysis for its own sake. Psychoanalytic accounts of repression are assimilated into his theory of the body itself, serving merely as means for illustrating the latter. I suggest that this move follows on a conception of an integrated existent whose past acquisitions are remarkably enabling and untroubling.

Derrida's empirical realism

A major charge levelled against Derrida is that of textual idealism – he effectively closes his deconstructive approach off from the world of experience, the result being that it is incapable of being coherently applied to practical questions of ethics and politics. I argue that Derridas writings on experience can in fact be reconstructed as an empirical realism in the Husserlian sense. I begin by outlining in very broad strokes Husserls account of perception and his empirical realism. I then set out some of the major criticisms of Derrida proffered by Dallas Willard and Peter Dews and counter them with evidence from Derridas texts themselves. I conclude by presenting his account as a variant of Husserls, which does not discernibly develop on or depart from the latter.

Dilthey, Wilhelm (1833–1911)

A pivotal influence on modern European philosophies of interpretation and existence, Dilthey differentiates the human sciences of understanding from the natural sciences of explanation. He explicates life as a flow of lived experience and as an individual and sociohistorical nexus of knowing, feeling, and willing. In his middle period, he sees descriptive psychology as the foundational approach for understanding lived experience, but subsequently emphasizes the hermeneutics or systematic interpretation of outer expressions of life, from politics and law to literature and architecture. His insights into the temporality, historicity, and finitude of life are developed further in his philosophy of worldviews.

Pragmatism and intolerance: Nietzsche and Rorty

Richard Rorty’s muscular liberalism and pragmatic intolerance draw sustenance from Nietzsche as well as from the earlier American pragmatists. We set out the ways in which Rorty adopts and adapts their ideas. We go on to suggest that the cultural ethnocentrism that he advocates carries certain risks, and can be divorced all too easily from his own qualifications, particularly in the post-9-11 scenario. It is our contention that Isaiah Berlin’s case for a pluralist liberalism warrants serious consideration as an alternative.