Abstract
Phenomenology is the science of phenomena. This means that it is a description anterior to all theory and independent of all presuppositions, of everything that presents itself to us as existant, regardless of order or domain. Understood as a description, phenomenology implies the rejection of all hypotheses, of all principles having some unifying value, whether real or supposed, with regard to some area of knowledge, and finally, the rejection of a sector of reality which would contain in it a rule of intelligibility as a necessary condition for its existence. Science, it is true, is concerned with going beyond the facts and coordinates them into systems of explanation. But in all cases, the scientific element and the totality, to which it belongs, necessarily refer to a phenomenological datum without which they could have no meaning whatever. Moreover, these elements and these systems themselves exist for us only under the rubric of data. They are juxtaposed in the phenomenological milieu within the very reality which they pretend to explain. [60] By consequence, this reality will never be capable of total reduction, any more than the scientific reality itself in all its forms will be capable of total reduction. Once their explanatory value is put between parentheses (and remains in this condition), these theories penetrate our environment as data.
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References
Edmund Husserl, Ideas: General Introduction to Pure Phenomenology, tr. W.R. Boyce Gibson. (New York: Humanities Press Inc., 1969) 84.
Max Scheler, “Die Idole der Selbsterkenntnis” in Vom Umsturz der Werte, in Gesammelte Werke, III. (Bern: Franke, 1955) 215.
Ibid.
Cf. Ibid. 225.
Edmund Husserl, Cartesian Meditations, tr. Dorion Cairns. (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1969) 48.
Cf. Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, tr. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson. (New York: Harper and Row, 1962) 272.
Martin Heidegger, Holzwege. (Frankfurt-am-Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 1950) 129.
G.W.F. Hegel, The Phenomenology of Mind, tr. J.B. Baillie. (New York: Humanities Press Inc., 1966) 134.
M. Heidegger, Being and Time. 62.
Logos (1913), cited by Scheler in Idole. 246.
Gassendi in “objections Against the Meditations of Descartes”, in The Philosophical Works of Descartes, II, tr. Elizabeth S. Haldane and G.R.T. Ross. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1967) 162–63.
L. Malverne, “La condition de l’être”, in La Revue de la Métaphysique et Morale, January 1949, p. 42.
Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, tr. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson. (New York: Harper and Row, 1962) 139.
Martin Heidegger, The Essence of Reasons, tr. Terrence Malick. (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1969) 131.
Edmund Husserl, Ideas: General Introduction to Pure Phenomenology, tr. W.R. Boyce Gibson. (New York: Humanities Press Inc., 1969) 194.
J.G. Fichte, Die Anweisung zum Seligen Leben, in Sämmtliche Werke, V. (Berlin: Veit; 1845) 440.
Ibid. 441.
Ibid.
Ibid. 462.
Ibid. 442.
Ibid. 480.
Ibid. 509.
Ibid. 402.
Ibid. 512. [Henry’s italics]
Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, tr. Hazel E. Barnes. (New York: Philosophical Library, 1956) 77.
Ibid.
M. Dufrenne, “Heidegger et Kant”, in La Revue de Métaphysique et de Morale, January 1949, p. 16. [Henry’s italics]
Fichte, Die Anweisung…, 402. [Henry’s italics]
Friedrich Hölderlin, Ausgewählte Werke, ed. Schwab. (Stuttgart: 1874) 284.
F. Alquié, “L’Etre et le Néant de Jean-Paul Sartre”, in Cahiers du Sud, XXIII (1945), p. 654.
F. Jeanson, Le problème moral et la pensée de Sartre, (Paris: Editions du Myrte, 1947) 233.
Martin Heidegger, Holzwege. (Frankfurt-am-Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 1950) 161.
J.G. Fichte, Die Anweisung zum Seligen Leben, in Sämmtliche Werke, V. (Berlin: Veit, 1845) 440. [Henry’s italics]
Ibid. 441. [Henry’s italics]
Ibid.
Friedrich von Schelling, System der Transcendentalen Idealismus in Sämmtliche Werke, III. (Stuttgart-Augsburg: Cottascher; 1858) 600. [Henry’s italics]
Ibid. 602. [Henry’s italics]
Ibid. 500.
Ibid. 506.
W. Jankelevitch, L’Odyssie de la conscience dans la dernière philosophie de Schelling. (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1933) 159.
Cf. Infra, Appendix.
This becomes obvious in Sartre, for example, when he sees in the “rupture in the identity-of-Being…” in “a withdrawal by Being in relation to itself and the appearance of presence to self or consciousness.” Being and Nothingness, tr. Hazel E. Barnes. (New York: Philosophical Library, 1956) 620.
Renouvier speaks of “this splitting of representation which is consciousness.” Traité de Psychologie rationelle d’après les principes du criticisme, I. (Paris: Colin, 1912) 286.
Fichte, Die Anweisung…, 441. [Henry’s italics]
Ibid. 440. [Henry’s italics]
Heidegger, Holzwege. 133. [Henry’s italics]
Ibid. 134. [Henry’s italics]
Schelling, System des Transcendentalen Idealismus. 506.
Renouvier, Traité, II. 56. [Henry’s italics]
Schelling, System des Transcendentalen Idealismus. 391.
G.W.F. Hegel, Differenz des Fichte’schen und Schelling’schen Systems der Philosophie, in Gesammelte Werke, IV, ed. H. Buchner und O. Pöggeler. (Hamburg: F. Meiner, 1968) 41.
Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, tr. Colin Smith. (New York: Humanities Press Inc., 1962) 540.
“Consciousness is an abstraction.” Sartre, Being and Nothingness. 3.
Ibid. 618. “The deeper reasons for this affirmation and hence its true significanie will become progressively more evident to us.” Cf. Infra Chapter 28.
Ibid. 4.
Ibid.
This definition of consciousness is accepted by Heidegger. Cf. Being and Time, tr. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson. (New York: Harper and Row, 1962) 170.
Sartre, Being and Nothingness. 177.
Ibid. 179.
Ibid.
G.W.F. Hegel, The Phenomenology of Mind, tr. J.B. Baillie. (New York: Humanities Press Inc., 1966) 426.
Edmund Husserl, Cartesian Meditations, tr. Dorion Cairns. (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1969). “In this connexion furthermore, it must by no means be accepted as a matter of course that, with our apodictic pure ego, we have rescued a little tag-end of the world.” (p. 24) And further on: “This Ego, with his Ego-life… is not a piece of the world.” (p. 25)
Heidegger, Being and Time. 252.
Ibid. 418.
Heidegger, Holzwege. 134.
“The commentators who have penetrated the thought of Heidegger have perceived this identity of subjectivity with the world as such, an identity which constitutes the most profound aspect of ontological monism.” Cf. J. Beaufret: “It is in the closest intimacy that the bursting forth of light is produced which concerns everyone in his most intimate being.” “Heidegger et le problème de la vérité”, in La Revue Fontaine, November 1947, p. 770.
H. Birault also speaks of “light which is at one and the same time both that of Being and that of a being which we are”, in La Revue de Métaphysique et de Morale, January-March, 1951, p. 64.
Sartre, Being and Nothingness. 11. [Henry’s italics]
Cf. J.P. Sartre, Being and Nothingness. 73. This “new conception” is actually the setting free of a very ancient concept pushed to the limit.
Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception. 377. [Henry’s italics]
Ibid. 293. [Henry’s italics]
Lachelier, Psychologie et Métaphysique. (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1949) 54. [Henry’s italics]
Ibid. 56.
John B. Watson, The Ways of Behaviorism. (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1928) 7.
This appeal appears as the leitmotif of the behaviorist critique leveled against philosophy, of consciousness. For example, here is another text aimed more precisely at the classical meanings of memory and image, namely, as fects of consciousness. “But the behaviorist, having made a clean sweep of all the rubbish called conscious ness, comes back at you: ‘Prove to me’, he says, ‘that you have auditory images, visual images, or any other kinds of disembodied processes. So far I have only your unverified and unsupported word that you have them’ “Ibid. 75. [Henry’s italics]
No less naïve and contradictory was the position of CI. Bernard in the last century when he confronted philosophy as an empty if not harmful science, a mere exercise in mental gymnastics, with his fundamental proposition according to which “there is nothing outside of experience.” Philosophy is precisely the science of experience as such. It is necessary, once again, to see that experience constitutes a problem. To bring oneself to understanding this problem is to be a philosopher.
Sartre, Being and Nothingness. 73.
Heidegger, Holzwege. 134.
Cf. Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, tr. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson. (New York: Harper and Row, 1962) 85.
Martin Heidegger, Holzwege. (Frankfurt-am-Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 1950) 161. [Henry’s italics]
Ibid. 172–73 [Henry’s italics]
Heidegger, Being and Time. 264.
Ibid. By the ‘world’ Heidegger here means the totality of existents. This is why he puts the word ‘world’ in quotes.
“Descartes,” writes Heidegger, “explicitly switches over philosophically from the development of traditional ontology to modern mathematical physics and its transcendental foundations.” Being and Time. 129.
Ibid. 131.
Concerning this, cf. Heidegger, Being and Time. 266 sqq.
Being and Time. 418.
“This nothing is human reality itself.” Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, tr. Hazel E. Barnes. (New York: Philosophical Library, 1956) 181.
G.W.F. Hegel, The Phenomenology of Mind, tr. J.B. Baillie. (New York: Humanities Press Inc., 1966) 115.
Martin Heidegger, Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics, tr. James S. Churchill. (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1962) 174.
Martin Heidegger, Holzwege. (Frankfurt-am-Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 1950) 190.
Cf. Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, tr. Hazel E. Barnes. (New York: Philosophical Library, 1956) 81–2.
Ibid. 618.
Ibid. xlix.
Ibid. 1.
Ibid. 216.
G.W.F. Hegel, Lectures on the Philosophy of History, tr. J. Sibree. (London: George Bell and Sons, 1888) 181.
Ibid. 198–99.
Kierkegaard says that in Greece sensuality (sensibility) is not culpability but enigma. According to Kierkegaard, the meaning of Greek plasticity resides in the enigmatic character of the sensual (sensible). Cf. The Concept of Dread, tr. W. Lowrie, 2 ed. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1957) 58.
Cf. Appendix, Chapter 76.
A. Koyré, La Philosophie de Jacob Boehme. (Paris: Vrin, 1929) 303–414.
Friedrich von Schelling, System des Transcendentalen Idealismus, in Sammtliehe Werke, III. (Stuttgart-Augsburg: Cottascher; 1858) 365.
Ibid. 390.
Ibid. 380.
W. Jankelevitch, L’Odyssie de la conscience dans la dernière philosophie de Schelling. (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1933) 183.
G.W.F. Hegel, The Phenomenology of Mind, tr. J.B. Baillie. (New York: Humanities Press Inc., 1966) 806.
G.W.F. Hegel, The Spirit of Christianity and its Fate, in Early Theological Writings, tr. T.M. Knox. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1948) 293–94.
Ibid. 295.
Hegel, The Phenomenology of Mind. 760.
J.G. Fichte, Die Anweisung zum Seligen Leben in Sammtliche Werke, V (Berlin: Veit; 1845), 455–56.
Ibid. 456 [Henry’s italics]
Ibid. 457.
Ibid.
Ibid.
Ibid. 471.
Friedrich von Schelling, System des Transcendentalen Idealismus, in Sammtliche Werke, III (Stuttgart-Augsburg: Cottascher; 1858) 391.
Ibid. 396.
Ibid. 345.
Ibid.
“The only immediate object of the transcendental point of view is the subjective [namely, the pure essence, the transcendental, the absolutely non-objective element] the only organ of this philosophy is the inner sense”, Ibid. 350.
Koyré, La Philosophie de Jacob Boehme. 243.
Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, tr. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson. (New York: Harper and Row, 1962) 170.
Ibid. 255.
Karl Marx, Critique of Hegel’s Dialectic and General Philosophy, in Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts, tr. T.B. Bottomore, in Erich Fromm, Marx’s Concept of Man. (New York: Frederick Ungar Co., 1966) 188.
Martin Heidegger, Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics, tr. James S. Churchill. (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1962) 229.
Martin Heidegger, The Essence of Reasons, tr. Terrence Malick (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1969) 127.
Edmund Husserl, Erfahrung und Urteil. (Hamburg: Classen und Coverts, 1948) 159.
Ibid. 259.
Martin Heidegger, What is Metaphysics?, in Existence and Being, tr. R.F.C. Hull and Allan Crick. (London: Vision Press Ltd., 1949) 378.
Martin Heidegger Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics, tr. James S. Churchill. (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1962) 230.
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Henry, M. (1973). The Clarification of the Concept of Phenomenon: Ontological Monism. In: The Essence of Manifestation. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-010-2391-7_2
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