Being and Time (German: Sein und Zeit) is the 1927 magnum opus of German philosopher Martin Heidegger and a key document of existentialism. Being and Time had a notable impact on subsequent philosophy, literary theory and many other fields. Though controversial, its stature in intellectual history has been compared with works by Kant and Hegel. The book attempts to revive ontology through an analysis of Dasein,
or "being-in-the-world." It's also noted for an array of neologisms and
complex language, as well as an extended treatment of "authenticity" as a means to grasp and confront the unique and finite possibilities of the individual.
Background
Richard Wolin
notes that the work "implicitly adopted the critique of mass society”
epitomized earlier by Kierkegaard and Nietzsche. This perspective "was
well-established within Germany’s largely illiberal professoriate in the
early 20th century,“ Wolin writes. Being and Time
is "suffused by a sensibility derived from secularized Protestantism”
and its stress on original sin. The human condition is portrayed as
"essentially a curse.” Wolin cites the work's extended emphasis on “emotionally laden concepts” like guilt, conscience, angst and death.
The book is likened to a secularized version of Martin Luther's project, which aimed to turn Christian theology back to an earlier and more “original” phase. Taking this view, John D. Caputo notes that Heidegger made a systematic study of Luther in the 1920s after training for 10 years as a Catholic theologian. Similarly, Hubert Dreyfus likens Division II of the volume to a secularized version of Kierkegaard's Christianity. Almost all central concepts of Being and Time are derived from Augustine, Luther, and Kierkegaard, according to Christian Lotz.
In terms of structure, Being and Time consists of the
lengthy two-part introduction, followed by Division One, the
"Preparatory Fundamental Analysis of Dasein," and Division Two, "Dasein
and Temporality.” Heidegger originally planned to write a separate,
second volume but quickly abandoned the project. The unwritten “second
half” was to include a critique of Western philosophy.
Summary
Dasein
Being and Time explicitly rejects Descartes' notion of the human being as a subjective spectator of objects, according to Marcella Horrigan-Kelly (et al.).
The book instead holds that both subject and object are inseparable. In
presenting the subject, "being" as inseparable from the objective
"world," "Heidegger introduced the term “Dasein” (literally being
there), intended to embody a ‘‘living being’’ through their activity of
‘’being there’ and “being in the world” (Horrigan-Kelly).
Understood as a unitary phenomenon rather than a contingent, additive
combination, being-in-the-world is an essential characteristic of
Dasein, according to Michael Wheeler (2011).
Heidegger's account of Dasein passes through an analysis of Angst,
"the Nothing" and mortality, and of the structure of "Care" as such. He
then defines "authenticity," as a means to grasp and confront the
finite possibilities of Dasein. Moreover, Dasein is "the being that
will give access to the question of the meaning of Being," according to
Heidegger.
Being
The work claims that ordinary and even mundane "being-in-the-world" provides "access to the meaning, or 'sense of being.' [Sinn des Seins]." This access via Dasein is also that "in terms of which something becomes intelligible as something."
This meaning would then elucidate ordinary "prescientific"
understanding, which precedes abstract ways of knowing, such as logic or
theory.
Heidegger’s concept of Being is metaphorical, according to Richard Rorty,
who agrees with Heidegger that there is no "hidden power" called Being.
Heidegger emphasizes that no particular understanding of Being (nor of
Dasein) is to be valued over another, according an account of Rorty's
analysis by Edward Grippe.
This supposed "non-linguistic, pre-cognitive access" to the meaning of
Being didn't underscore any particular, preferred narrative.
Thomas Sheehan and Mark Wrathall
each separately assert that commentators' emphasis on the term "Being"
is misplaced, and that Heidegger's central focus was never on "Being" as
such. Wrathall wrote (2011) that Heidegger's elaborate concept of
"unconcealment" was his central, life-long focus, while Sheehan (2015)
proposed that the philosopher's prime focus was on that which "brings
about being as a givenness of entities.")
Being and Time actually offers "no sense of how we might answer the question of being as such," writes Simon Critchley in a nine-part blog commentary on the work for The Guardian (2009). The book instead provides "an answer to the question of what it means to be human" (Critchley).
Nonetheless, Heidegger does present the concept: "'Being' is not
something like a being but is rather "what determines beings as beings."
Time
Heidegger
believes that time finds its meaning in death, according to Michael
Kelley. That is, time is understood only from a finite or mortal
vantage. Dasein's fundamental characteristic and mode of
"being-in-the-world" is temporal: Having been "thrown" into a world
implies a "pastness" in its being. "The present is the nodal moment
which makes past and future intelligible," writes Lilian Alweiss. Dasein occupies itself with the present tasks required by goals it has projected on the future.
Dasein as an intertwined subject/object cannot be separated from
its objective "historicality," a concept Heidegger credits in the text
to Wilhelm Dilthey. Dasein is "stretched along" temporally between birth and death, and thrown into its world; into its future possibilities which Dasein is charged with assuming. Dasein's access to this world and these possibilities is always via a history and a tradition-- or "world historicality".
Methodologies
Phenomenology
Heidegger's mentor Edmund Husserl developed a method of analysis called "phenomenological reduction"
or "bracketing," that emphasized primordial experience as its key
element. Husserl used this method to define the structures of
consciousness and show how they are directed at both real and ideal
objects within the world.
Being and Time employs this method but purportedly modified
Husserl's subjectivist tendencies. Whereas Husserl conceived humans as
constituted by consciousness, Heidegger countered that consciousness is
peripheral to Dasein,
which cannot be reduced to consciousness. Consciousness is thus an
"effect" rather than a determinant of existence. By shifting the
priority from consciousness (psychology) to existence (ontology),
Heidegger altered the subsequent direction of phenomenology.
But Being and Time misrepresented its phenomenology as a departure from methods established earlier by Husserl, according to Daniel O. Dahlstrom.
In this vein, Robert J. Dostal asserts that "if we do not see how much
it is the case that Husserlian phenomenology provides the framework for
Heidegger's approach," then it's impossible to exactly understand Being and Time.
On publication in 1927, Being and Time bore a dedication
to Husserl, who beginning a decade earlier, championed Heidegger's
work, and helped him secure the retiring Husserl's chair in Philosophy
at the University of Freiburg in 1928.
Because Husserl was Jewish, in 1941 Heidegger, then a member of the Nazi Party, agreed to remove the dedication from Being and Time (restored in 1953 edition).
Hermeneutics
Being and Time employed the "hermeneutic circle"
as a method of analysis or structure for ideas. According to Susann M.
Laverty (2003), Heidegger's circle moves from the parts of experience
to the whole of experience and back and forth again and again to
increase the depth of engagement and understanding. Laverty writes (Kvale
1996), "This spiraling through a hermeneutic circle ends when one has
reached a place of sensible meaning, free of inner contradictions, for
the moment."
The hermeneutic circle and certain theories concerning history in Being and Time are acknowledged within the text to rely on the writings of Wilhelm Dilthey. The technique was later employed in the writings of Jürgen Habermas, per "Influence and reception" below.
Destructuring
In Being and Time Heidegger briefly refutes the philosophy of René Descartes (in an exercise he called "destructuring), but the second volume, intended as a Destruktion
of Western philosophy, was never written.
Heidegger sought to explain how theoretical knowledge came to be seen,
incorrectly in his view, as fundamental to being. This explanation
takes the form of a destructuring (Destruktion) of the
philosophical tradition, an interpretative strategy that reveals the
fundamental experience of being hidden within the theoretical attitude
of the metaphysics of presence.
In later works, while becoming less systematic and more obscure than in Being and Time,
Heidegger turns to the exegesis of historical texts, especially those
of Presocratic philosophers, but also of Aristotle, Kant, Hegel, Plato, Nietzsche, and Hölderlin, among others.
Influence and reception
Upon its publication, reviewers credited Heidegger with "brilliance" and "genius". The book was later seen as the "most influential version of existential philosophy."
Jean-Paul Sartre's existentialism (of 1943) has been described as merely "a version of Being and Time". The work also influenced other philosophers of Sartre's generation, and exerted a notable influence on French philosophy.
Heidegger's work influenced the output of the Frankfurt School including Jürgen Habermas's hermeneutics and Herbert Marcuse's early and abortive attempt to develop "Heideggerian Marxism." Theodore Adorno, in his 1964 book The Jargon of Authenticity,
was critical of Heidegger's popularity in post-war Western Europe.
Adorno accused Heidegger of evading ethical judgment by disingenuously
presenting "authenticity" as a value-free, technical term -- rather than
a positive doctrine of the good life.
Heidegger influenced psychoanalysis through Jacques Lacan as well as Medard Boss and others.
Paul Celan, in his essays on poetic theory, incorporated some of Heidegger's ideas. Being and Time also separately influenced Alain Badiou's work Being and Event (1988). and also separately, the enactivist approach to cognition theory.
Bertrand Russell dismissed Being and Time ("One cannot help suspecting that language is here running riot"). The analytic philosopher A. J. Ayer called Heidegger a charlatan. But the American philosopher Richard Rorty ranked Heidegger among the important philosophers of the twentieth century, including John Dewey and Wittgenstein.
The conservative British writer Roger Scruton called (2002) Being and Time a "description of a private spiritual journey" rather than genuine philosophy. But Stephen Houlgate (1999) compares Heidegger's achievements in Being and Time to those of Kant and Hegel.
Simon Critchley writes (2009) that it is impossible to understand
developments in continental philosophy after Heidegger without
understanding Being and Time.
Related work
Being and Time is the major achievement of Heidegger's early career, but he produced other important works during this period:
The publication in 1992 of the early lecture course, Platon: Sophistes (Plato's Sophist, 1924), made clear the way in which Heidegger's reading of Aristotle'sNicomachean Ethics was crucial to the formulation of the thought expressed in Being and Time.
The lecture course, Prolegomena zur Geschichte des Zeitbegriffs (History of the Concept of Time: Prolegomena, 1925), was something like an early version of Being and Time.
The lecture courses immediately following the publication of Being and Time, such as Die Grundprobleme der Phänomenologie (The Basic Problems of Phenomenology, 1927), and Kant und das Problem der Metaphysik
(Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics, 1929), elaborated some elements
of the destruction of metaphysics which Heidegger intended to pursue in
the unwritten second part of Being and Time.
Although Heidegger did not complete the project outlined in Being and Time, later works explicitly addressed the themes and concepts of Being and Time. Most important among the works which do so are the following:
Heidegger's inaugural lecture upon his return to Freiburg, "Was ist Metaphysik?"
(What Is Metaphysics?, 1929), was an important and influential
clarification of what Heidegger meant by being, non-being, and
nothingness.
Einführung in die Metaphysik
(An Introduction to Metaphysics), a lecture course delivered in 1935,
is identified by Heidegger, in his preface to the seventh German edition
of Being and Time, as relevant to the concerns which the second half of the book would have addressed.
Beiträge zur Philosophie (Vom Ereignis)
(Contributions to Philosophy [From Enowning], composed 1936–38,
published 1989), a sustained attempt at reckoning with the legacy of Being and Time.
Zeit und Sein (Time and Being), a lecture delivered at the University of Freiburg on January 31, 1962. This was Heidegger's most direct confrontation with Being and Time. It was followed by a seminar on the lecture, which took place at Todtnauberg on September 11–13, 1962, a summary of which was written by Alfred Guzzoni. Both the lecture and the summary of the seminar are included in Zur Sache des Denkens (1969; translated as On Time and Being [New York: Harper & Row, 1972]).
Phenomenology (from Greekphainómenon "that which appears" and lógos "study") is the philosophical study of the structures of experience and consciousness. As a philosophical movement it was founded in the early years of the 20th century by Edmund Husserl and was later expanded upon by a circle of his followers at the universities of Göttingen and Munich in Germany. It then spread to France, the United States, and elsewhere, often in contexts far removed from Husserl's early work.
Phenomenology is not a unified movement; rather, different authors share
a common family resemblance but also with many significant differences.
Gabriella Farina states:
A unique and final
definition of phenomenology is dangerous and perhaps even paradoxical as
it lacks a thematic focus. In fact, it is not a doctrine, nor a
philosophical school, but rather a style of thought, a method, an open
and ever-renewed experience having different results, and this may
disorient anyone wishing to define the meaning of phenomenology.
Phenomenology,
in Husserl's conception, is primarily concerned with the systematic
reflection on and study of the structures of consciousness and the phenomena that appear in acts of consciousness. Phenomenology can be clearly differentiated from the Cartesian method of analysis which sees the world as objects, sets of objects, and objects acting and reacting upon one another.
In its most basic form, phenomenology attempts to create conditions for the objective study of topics usually regarded as subjective: consciousness and the content of conscious experiences such as judgements, perceptions, and emotions.
Although phenomenology seeks to be scientific, it does not attempt to
study consciousness from the perspective of clinical psychology or
neurology. Instead, it seeks through systematic reflection to determine
the essential properties and structures of experience.
There are several assumptions behind phenomenology that help explain its foundations:
Phenomenologists reject the concept of objective research. They
prefer grouping assumptions through a process called phenomenological epoché.
They believe that analyzing daily human behavior can provide one with a greater understanding of nature.
They assert that persons should be explored. This is because persons
can be understood through the unique ways they reflect the society they
live in.
Phenomenologists prefer to gather "capta", or conscious experience, rather than traditional data.
They consider phenomenology to be oriented toward discovery, and
therefore they research using methods that are far less restrictive than
in other sciences.
Husserl derived many important concepts central to phenomenology from
the works and lectures of his teachers, the philosophers and
psychologists Franz Brentano and Carl Stumpf. An important element of phenomenology that Husserl borrowed from Brentano is intentionality (often described as "aboutness"), the notion that consciousness is always consciousness of something. The object of consciousness is called the intentional object, and this object is constituted for consciousness in many different ways, through, for instance, perception, memory, retention and protention, signification,
etc. Throughout these different intentionalities, though they have
different structures and different ways of being "about" the object, an
object is still constituted as the identical object; consciousness is
directed at the same intentional object in direct perception as it is in
the immediately following retention of this object and the eventual
remembering of it.
Though many of the phenomenological methods involve various reductions, phenomenology is, in essence, anti-reductionistic;
the reductions are mere tools to better understand and describe the
workings of consciousness, not to reduce any phenomenon to these
descriptions. In other words, when a reference is made to a thing's essence or idea,
or when the constitution of an identical coherent thing is specified by
describing what one "really" sees as being only these sides and
aspects, these surfaces, it does not mean that the thing is only and
exclusively what is described here: the ultimate goal of these
reductions is to understand how these different aspects are
constituted into the actual thing as experienced by the person
experiencing it. Phenomenology is a direct reaction to the psychologism and physicalism of Husserl's time.
Although previously employed by Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel in his Phenomenology of Spirit,
it was Husserl's adoption of this term (c. 1900) that propelled it into
becoming the designation of a philosophical school. As a philosophical
perspective, phenomenology is its method, though the specific meaning of
the term varies according to how it is conceived by a given
philosopher. As envisioned by Husserl, phenomenology is a method of
philosophical inquiry that rejects the rationalist bias that has
dominated Western thought since Plato in favor of a method of reflective attentiveness that discloses the individual's "lived experience." Loosely rooted in an epistemological device, with Sceptic roots, called epoché,
Husserl's method entails the suspension of judgment while relying on
the intuitive grasp of knowledge, free of presuppositions and
intellectualizing. Sometimes depicted as the "science of experience,"
the phenomenological method is rooted in intentionality, i.e. Husserl's
theory of consciousness (developed from Brentano). Intentionality
represents an alternative to the representational theory of
consciousness, which holds that reality cannot be grasped directly
because it is available only through perceptions of reality that are
representations of it in the mind. Husserl countered that consciousness
is not "in" the mind; rather, consciousness is conscious of something
other than itself (the intentional object), whether the object is a
substance or a figment of imagination (i.e., the real processes associated with and underlying the figment). Hence the phenomenological method relies on the description of phenomena as they are given to consciousness, in their immediacy.
According to Maurice Natanson
(1973, p. 63), "The radicality of the phenomenological method is both
continuous and discontinuous with philosophy's general effort to subject
experience to fundamental, critical scrutiny: to take nothing for
granted and to show the warranty for what we claim to know." In
practice, it entails an unusual combination of discipline and detachment
to bracket
theoretical explanations and second-hand information while determining
one's "naïve" experience of the matter. (To "bracket" in this sense
means to provisionally suspend or set aside some idea as a way to
facilitate the inquiry by focusing only on its most significant
components.) The phenomenological method serves to momentarily erase the
world of speculation by returning the subject to his or her primordial
experience of the matter, whether the object of inquiry is a feeling, an
idea, or a perception. According to Husserl the suspension of belief in
what we ordinarily take for granted or infer by conjecture diminishes
the power of what we customarily embrace as objective reality. According
to Rüdiger Safranski
(1998, 72), "[Husserl's and his followers'] great ambition was to
disregard anything that had until then been thought or said about
consciousness or the world [while] on the lookout for a new way of
letting the things [they investigated] approach them, without covering
them up with what they already knew."
Martin Heidegger
modified Husserl's conception of phenomenology because of what
Heidegger perceived as Husserl's subjectivist tendencies. Whereas
Husserl conceived humans as having been constituted by states of
consciousness, Heidegger countered that consciousness is peripheral to
the primacy of one's existence (i.e., the mode of being of Dasein),
which cannot be reduced to one's consciousness of it. From this angle,
one's state of mind is an "effect" rather than a determinant of
existence, including those aspects of existence of which one is not
conscious. By shifting the center of gravity from consciousness
(psychology) to existence (ontology), Heidegger altered the subsequent
direction of phenomenology. As one consequence of Heidegger's
modification of Husserl's conception, phenomenology became increasingly
relevant to psychoanalysis.
Whereas Husserl gave priority to a depiction of consciousness that was
fundamentally alien to the psychoanalytic conception of the unconscious,
Heidegger offered a way to conceptualize experience that could
accommodate those aspects of one's existence that lie on the periphery
of sentient awareness.
Etymology
Phenomenology has at least three main meanings in philosophical history: one in the writings of G. W. F. Hegel,
another in the writings of Edmund Husserl in 1920, and thirdly,
succeeding Husserl's work, in the writings of his former research
assistant Martin Heidegger in 1927.
For G. W. F. Hegel, phenomenology is a philosophical (philosophischen) and scientific (wissenschaftliche) study of phenomena
(what presents itself to us in conscious experience) as a means to
finally grasp the absolute, logical, ontological and metaphysical Spirit
(Absolute Spirit) that is essential to phenomena. This has been called dialectical phenomenology.
For Edmund Husserl, phenomenology is "the reflective study of the essence of consciousness as experienced from the first-person point of view." Phenomenology takes the intuitive experience of phenomena
(whatever presents itself in phenomenological reflexion) as its
starting point and tries to extract from it the essential features of
experiences and the essence of what we experience. When generalized to
the essential features of any possible experience, this has been called transcendental phenomenology. Husserl's view was based on aspects of the work of Franz Brentano and was developed further by philosophers such as Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Max Scheler, Edith Stein, Dietrich von Hildebrand and Emmanuel Levinas.
Although the term "phenomenology" was used occasionally in the history of philosophy before Husserl,
modern use ties it more explicitly to his particular method. Following
is a list of important thinkers, in rough chronological order, who used
the term "phenomenology" in a variety of ways, with brief comments on
their contributions:
Immanuel Kant (1724–1804), in the Critique of Pure Reason, distinguished between objects as phenomena, which are objects as shaped and grasped by human sensibility and understanding, and objects as things-in-themselves or noumena, which do not appear to us in space and time and about which we can make no legitimate judgments.
G. W. F. Hegel (1770–1831) challenged Kant's doctrine of the
unknowable thing-in-itself, and declared that by knowing phenomena more
fully we can gradually arrive at a consciousness of the absolute and
spiritual truth of Divinity, most notably in his Phenomenology of Spirit, published in 1807.
Carl Stumpf (1848–1936), student of Brentano and mentor to Husserl, used "phenomenology" to refer to an ontology of sensory contents.
Edmund Husserl (1859–1938) established phenomenology at first as a kind of "descriptive psychology" and later as a transcendental and eidetic science of consciousness. He is considered to be the founder of contemporary phenomenology.
Martin Heidegger (1889–1976) criticized Husserl's theory of phenomenology and attempted to develop a theory of ontology that led him to his original theory of Dasein, the non-dualistic human being.
Francisco Varela (1946–2001), Chilean philosopher and biologist. Developed the basis for experimental phenomenology and neurophenomenology.
Later usage is mostly based on or (critically) related to Husserl's
introduction and use of the term. This branch of philosophy differs from
others in that it tends to be more "descriptive" than "prescriptive".
Varieties
The Encyclopedia of Phenomenology (Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1997) features separate articles on the following seven types of phenomenology:
Transcendental constitutive phenomenology studies how objects are constituted in transcendental consciousness, setting aside questions of any relation to the natural world.
Naturalistic constitutive phenomenology
studies how consciousness constitutes things in the world of nature,
assuming with the natural attitude that consciousness is part of nature.
Existential phenomenology studies concrete human existence, including our experience of free choice and/or action in concrete situations.
Generative historicist phenomenology studies how meaning—as found in our experience—is generated in historical processes of collective experience over time.
Genetic phenomenology studies the emergence/genesis of meanings of things within one's own stream of experience.
Hermeneutical phenomenology (also hermeneutic phenomenology or post-phenomenology/postphenomenology elsewhere; see hermeneutics) studies interpretive structures of experience. This approach was introduced in Martin Heidegger's early work.
Realistic phenomenology
(also realist phenomenology elsewhere) studies the structure of
consciousness and intentionality as "it occurs in a real world that is
largely external to consciousness and not somehow brought into being by
consciousness."
The contrast between "constitutive phenomenology" (German: konstitutive Phänomenologie; also static phenomenology (statische Phänomenologie) or descriptive phenomenology (beschreibende Phänomenologie)) and "genetic phenomenology" (genetische Phänomenologie; also phenomenology of genesis (Phänomenologie der Genesis)) is due to Husserl.
Intentionality refers to the notion that consciousness is always the consciousness of
something. The word itself should not be confused with the "ordinary"
use of the word intentional, but should rather be taken as playing on
the etymological roots of the word. Originally, intention referred to a
"stretching out" ("in tension," from Latin intendere), and in
this context it refers to consciousness "stretching out" towards its
object. However, one should be careful with this image: there is not
some consciousness first that, subsequently, stretches out to its
object; rather, consciousness occurs as the simultaneity of a conscious act and its object.
Intentionality is often summed up as "aboutness." Whether this something
that consciousness is about is in direct perception or in fantasy is
inconsequential to the concept of intentionality itself; whatever
consciousness is directed at, that is what consciousness is conscious of. This means that the object of consciousness doesn't have to be a physical object apprehended in perception:
it can just as well be a fantasy or a memory. Consequently, these
"structures" of consciousness, i.e., perception, memory, fantasy, etc.,
are called intentionalities.
The term "intentionality" originated with the Scholastics
in the medieval period and was resurrected by Brentano who in turn
influenced Husserl's conception of phenomenology, who refined the term
and made it the cornerstone of his theory of consciousness. The meaning
of the term is complex and depends entirely on how it is conceived by a
given philosopher. The term should not be confused with "intention" or
the psychoanalytic conception of unconscious "motive" or "gain".
Intuition
Intuition
in phenomenology refers to cases where the intentional object is
directly present to the intentionality at play; if the intention is
"filled" by the direct apprehension of the object, you have an intuited
object. Having a cup of coffee in front of you, for instance, seeing it,
feeling it, or even imagining it – these are all filled intentions, and
the object is then intuited. The same goes for the apprehension
of mathematical formulae or a number. If you do not have the object as
referred to directly, the object is not intuited, but still intended,
but then emptily. Examples of empty intentions can be signitive intentions – intentions that only imply or refer to their objects.
Evidence
In everyday language, we use the word evidence
to signify a special sort of relation between a state of affairs and a
proposition: State A is evidence for the proposition "A is true." In
phenomenology, however, the concept of evidence is meant to signify the
"subjective achievement of truth."
This is not an attempt to reduce the objective sort of evidence to
subjective "opinion," but rather an attempt to describe the structure of
having something present in intuition with the addition of having it
present as intelligible: "Evidence is the successful presentation
of an intelligible object, the successful presentation of something
whose truth becomes manifest in the evidencing itself."
Noesis and noema
In Husserl's phenomenology, which is quite common, this pair of terms, derived from the Greek nous (mind), designate respectively the real content, noesis, and the ideal content, noema,
of an intentional act (an act of consciousness). The noesis is the part
of the act that gives it a particular sense or character (as in judging
or perceiving something, loving or hating it, accepting or rejecting
it, and so on). This is real in the sense that it is actually part of
what takes place in the consciousness (or psyche) of the subject of the
act. The noesis is always correlated with a noema; for Husserl, the full
noema is a complex ideal structure comprising at least a noematic sense
and a noematic core. The correct interpretation of what Husserl meant
by the noema has long been controversial, but the noematic sense is
generally understood as the ideal meaning of the act and the noematic core as the act's referent or object as it is meant in the act.
One element of controversy is whether this noematic object is the same
as the actual object of the act (assuming it exists) or is some kind of
ideal object.
Empathy and intersubjectivity
In phenomenology, empathy refers to the experience of one's own body as another. While we often identify others with their physical bodies, this type of phenomenology requires that we focus on the subjectivity of the other, as well as our intersubjective engagement with them. In Husserl's original account, this was done by a sort of apperception built on the experiences of your own lived-body. The lived body is your own body as experienced by yourself, as
yourself. Your own body manifests itself to you mainly as your
possibilities of acting in the world. It is what lets you reach out and
grab something, for instance, but it also, and more importantly, allows
for the possibility of changing your point of view. This helps you
differentiate one thing from another by the experience of moving around
it, seeing new aspects of it (often referred to as making the absent
present and the present absent), and still retaining the notion that
this is the same thing that you saw other aspects of just a moment ago
(it is identical). Your body is also experienced as a duality, both as
object (you can touch your own hand) and as your own subjectivity (you
experience being touched).
The experience of your own body as your own subjectivity is then
applied to the experience of another's body, which, through
apperception, is constituted as another subjectivity. You can thus
recognise the Other's intentions, emotions, etc. This experience of
empathy is important in the phenomenological account of intersubjectivity.
In phenomenology, intersubjectivity constitutes objectivity (i.e., what
you experience as objective is experienced as being intersubjectively
available – available to all other subjects. This does not imply that
objectivity is reduced to subjectivity nor does it imply a relativist
position, cf. for instance intersubjective verifiability).
In the experience of intersubjectivity, one also experiences
oneself as being a subject among other subjects, and one experiences
oneself as existing objectively for these Others;
one experiences oneself as the noema of Others' noeses, or as a subject
in another's empathic experience. As such, one experiences oneself as
objectively existing subjectivity. Intersubjectivity is also a part in
the constitution of one's lifeworld, especially as "homeworld."
Lifeworld
The lifeworld (German: Lebenswelt) is the "world" each one of us lives
in. One could call it the "background" or "horizon" of all experience,
and it is that on which each object stands out as itself (as different)
and with the meaning it can only hold for us. The lifeworld is both
personal and intersubjective (it is then called a "homeworld"), and, as such, it does not enclose each one of us in a solus ipse.
Husserl's Logical Investigations (1900/1901)
In the first edition of the Logical Investigations, still under the influence of Brentano, Husserl describes his position as "descriptive psychology." Husserl analyzes the intentional structures of mental acts and how they are directed at both real and ideal objects. The first volume of the Logical Investigations, the Prolegomena to Pure Logic, begins with a devastating critique of psychologism, i.e., the attempt to subsume the a priori
validity of the laws of logic under psychology. Husserl establishes a
separate field for research in logic, philosophy, and phenomenology,
independently from the empirical sciences.
"Pre-reflective self-consciousness" is Shaun Gallagher and Dan Zahavi's term for Husserl's (1900/1901) idea that self-consciousness always involves a self-appearance or self-manifestation (German: Für-sich-selbst-erscheinens) prior to self-reflection,
and his idea that the fact that "an appropriate train of sensations or
images is experienced, and is in this sense conscious, does not and
cannot mean that this is the object of an act of consciousness, in the
sense that a perception, a presentation or a judgment is directed upon
it".
Husserl's Ideas (1913)
In 1913, some years after the publication of the Logical Investigations, Husserl published Ideas: General Introduction to Pure Phenomenology, a work which introduced some key elaborations that led him to the distinction between the act of consciousness (noesis) and the phenomena at which it is directed (the noemata).
"noetic" refers to the intentional act of consciousness (believing, willing, etc.)
"noematic" refers to the object or content (noema), which appears in
the noetic acts (the believed, wanted, hated, and loved, etc.).
What we observe is not the object as it is in itself, but how and inasmuch it is given in the intentional acts. Knowledge of essences would only be possible by "bracketing"
all assumptions about the existence of an external world and the
inessential (subjective) aspects of how the object is concretely given
to us. This procedure Husserl called epoché.
Husserl concentrated more on the ideal, essential structures of
consciousness. As he wanted to exclude any hypothesis on the existence
of external objects, he introduced the method of phenomenological
reduction to eliminate them. What was left over was the pure transcendental ego, as opposed to the concrete empirical ego.
Transcendental phenomenology
is the study of the essential structures that are left in pure
consciousness: this amounts in practice to the study of the noemata and
the relations among them.
The philosopher Theodor Adorno criticised Husserl's concept of phenomenological epistemology in his metacritique Against Epistemology, which is anti-foundationalist in its stance
Realism
After Husserl's publication of the Ideas in 1913, many phenomenologists took a critical stance towards his new theories. Especially the members of the Munich group
distanced themselves from his new transcendental phenomenology and
preferred the earlier realist phenomenology of the first edition of the Logical Investigations.
Existential phenomenology differs from transcendental phenomenology
by its rejection of the transcendental ego. Merleau-Ponty objects to the
ego's transcendence of the world, which for Husserl leaves the world
spread out and completely transparent before the conscious. Heidegger
thinks of a conscious being as always already in the world.
Transcendence is maintained in existential phenomenology to the extent
that the method of phenomenology must take a presuppositionless starting
point – transcending claims about the world arising from, for example,
natural or scientific attitudes or theories of the ontological nature of the world.
While Husserl thought of philosophy as a scientific discipline that had to be founded on a phenomenology understood as epistemology, Martin Heidegger held a radically different view. Heidegger himself states their differences this way:
For Husserl, the phenomenological
reduction is the method of leading phenomenological vision from the
natural attitude of the human being whose life is involved in the world
of things and persons back to the transcendental life of consciousness
and its noetic-noematic experiences, in which objects are constituted as
correlates of consciousness. For us, phenomenological reduction means
leading phenomenological vision back from the apprehension of a being,
whatever may be the character of that apprehension, to the understanding
of the Being of this being (projecting upon the way it is unconcealed).
According to Heidegger, philosophy was not at all a scientific
discipline, but more fundamental than science itself. According to him
science is only one way of knowing the world with no special access to
truth. Furthermore, the scientific mindset itself is built on a much
more "primordial" foundation of practical, everyday knowledge. Husserl
was skeptical of this approach, which he regarded as quasi-mystical, and
it contributed to the divergence in their thinking.
Instead of taking phenomenology as prima philosophia or a foundational discipline, Heidegger took it as a metaphysical ontology: "being is the proper and sole theme of philosophy... this means that philosophy is not a science of beings but of being."
Yet to confuse phenomenology and ontology is an obvious error.
Phenomena are not the foundation or Ground of Being. Neither are they
appearances, for, as Heidegger argues in Being and Time, an appearance is "that which shows itself in something else," while a phenomenon is "that which shows itself in itself."
While for Husserl, in the epoché, being appeared only as a
correlate of consciousness, for Heidegger being is the starting point.
While for Husserl we would have to abstract from all concrete
determinations of our empirical ego, to be able to turn to the field of
pure consciousness, Heidegger claims that "the possibilities and
destinies of philosophy are bound up with man's existence, and thus with
temporality and with historicality."
However, ontological being and existential being are different
categories, so Heidegger's conflation of these categories is, according
to Husserl's view, the root of Heidegger's error. Husserl charged
Heidegger with raising the question of ontology but failing to answer
it, instead switching the topic to the Dasein, the only being for whom
Being is an issue. That is neither ontology nor phenomenology, according
to Husserl, but merely abstract anthropology. To clarify, perhaps, by
abstract anthropology, as a non-existentialist searching for essences,
Husserl rejected the existentialism implicit in Heidegger's distinction
between beings qua existents as things in reality and their Being as it
unfolds in Dasein's own reflections on its being-in-the-world, wherein
being becomes present to us, that is, is unconcealed.
Some
researchers in phenomenology (in particular in reference to Heidegger's
legacy) see possibilities of establishing dialogues with traditions of
thought outside of the so-called Western philosophy, particularly with respect to East-Asian thinking, and despite perceived differences between "Eastern" and "Western".
Furthermore, it has been claimed that a number of elements within
phenomenology (mainly Heidegger's thought) have some resonance with
Eastern philosophical ideas, particularly with Zen Buddhism and Taoism. According to Tomonobu Imamichi, the concept of Dasein was inspired – although Heidegger remained silent on this – by Okakura Kakuzo's concept of das-in-der-Welt-sein (being in the world) expressed in The Book of Tea to describe Zhuangzi's philosophy, which Imamichi's teacher had offered to Heidegger in 1919, after having studied with him the year before.
There are also recent signs of the reception of phenomenology
(and Heidegger's thought in particular) within scholarly circles focused
on studying the impetus of metaphysics in the history of ideas in Islam and Early Islamic philosophy such as in the works of the Lebanese philosopher Nader El-Bizri; perhaps this is tangentially due to the indirect influence of the tradition of the French Orientalist and phenomenologist Henri Corbin, and later accentuated through El-Bizri's dialogues with the Polish phenomenologist Anna-Teresa Tymieniecka.
In addition, the work of Jim Ruddy in the field of comparative philosophy,
combined the concept of "transcendental ego" in Husserl's phenomenology
with the concept of the primacy of self-consciousness in the work of
Sankaracharya. In the course of this work, Ruddy uncovered a wholly new
eidetic phenomenological science, which he called "convergent
phenomenology." This new phenomenology takes over where Husserl left
off, and deals with the constitution of relation-like, rather than
merely thing-like, or "intentional" objectivity.
Approaches to technology
James Moor has argued that computers show up policy vacuums that require new thinking and the establishment of new policies. Others have argued that the resources provided by classical ethical theory such as utilitarianism, consequentialism and deontological ethics is more than enough to deal with all the ethical issues emerging from our design and use of information technology.
For the phenomenologist the 'impact view' of technology
as well as the constructivist view of the technology/society
relationships is valid but not adequate (Heidegger 1977, Borgmann 1985,
Winograd and Flores 1987, Ihde 1990, Dreyfus 1992, 2001). They argue
that these accounts of technology, and the technology/society relationship, posit technology
and society as if speaking about the one does not immediately and
already draw upon the other for its ongoing sense or meaning. For the
phenomenologist, society and technology
co-constitute each other; they are each other's ongoing condition, or
possibility for being what they are. For them technology is not just the
artifact. Rather, the artifact already emerges from a prior
'technological' attitude towards the world (Heidegger 1977).
Heidegger's
For
Heidegger the essence of technology is the way of being of modern
humans—a way of conducting themselves towards the world—that sees the
world as something to be ordered and shaped in line with projects,
intentions and desires—a 'will to power' that manifests itself as a
'will to technology'. Heidegger claims that there were other times in human history, a
pre-modern time, where humans did not orient themselves towards the
world in a technological way—simply as resources for our purposes.
However, according to Heidegger this 'pre-technological' age (or
mood) is one where humans' relation with the world and artifacts, their
way of being disposed, was poetic and aesthetic rather than
technological (enframing). There are many who disagree with Heidegger's account of the modern technological attitude as the 'enframing' of the world. For example, Andrew Feenberg argues that Heidegger's account of modern technology is not borne out in contemporary everyday encounters with technology. Christian Fuchs has written on the anti-Semitism rooted in Heidegger's view of technology.
Dreyfus'
In critiquing the artificial intelligence (AI) programme, Hubert Dreyfus
(1992) argues that the way skill development has become understood in
the past has been wrong. He argues, this is the model that the early
artificial intelligence community uncritically adopted. In opposition to
this view, he argues, with Heidegger, that what we observe when we
learn a new skill in everyday practice is in fact the opposite. We most
often start with explicit rules or preformulated approaches and then
move to a multiplicity of particular cases, as we become an expert. His
argument draws directly on Heidegger's account in "Being and Time" of
humans as beings that are always already situated in-the-world. As
humans 'in-the-world', we are already experts at going about everyday
life, at dealing with the subtleties of every particular situation; that
is why everyday life seems so obvious. Thus, the intricate expertise of
everyday activity is forgotten and taken for granted by AI as an
assumed starting point.
What Dreyfus highlighted in his critique of AI was the fact that
technology (AI algorithms) does not make sense by itself. It is the
assumed, and forgotten, horizon of everyday practice that makes
technological devices and solutions show up as meaningful. If we are to
understand technology we need to 'return' to the horizon of meaning that
made it show up as the artifacts we need, want and desire. We need to
consider how these technologies reveal (or disclose) us.
Proteins are generally thought to adopt unique structures determined by their amino acid
sequences. However, proteins are not strictly static objects, but
rather populate ensembles of (sometimes similar) conformations.
Transitions between these states occur on a variety of length scales
(tenths of Å to nm) and time scales (ns to s),
and have been linked to functionally relevant phenomena such as allosteric signaling and enzyme catalysis.
The study of protein dynamics is most directly concerned with the transitions between these states,
but can also involve the nature and equilibrium populations of the states themselves.
These two perspectives—kinetics and thermodynamics, respectively—can be conceptually synthesized in an "energy landscape" paradigm:
highly populated states and the kinetics of transitions between them can
be described by the depths of energy wells and the heights of energy
barriers, respectively.
Portions of protein structures often deviate from the equilibrium state.
Some such excursions are harmonic, such as stochastic fluctuations of chemical bonds and bond angles.
Others are anharmonic, such as sidechains that jump between separate discrete energy minima, or rotamers.
Evidence for local flexibility is often obtained from NMR spectroscopy. Flexible and potentially disordered regions of a protein can be detected using the random coil index. Flexibility in folded proteins can be identified by analyzing the spin relaxation of individual atoms in the protein. Flexibility can also be observed in very high-resolution electron density maps produced by X-ray crystallography,
particularly when diffraction data is collected at room temperature
instead of the traditional cryogenic temperature (typically near 100 K).
Information on the frequency distribution and dynamics of local protein
flexibility can be obtained using Raman and optical Kerr-effect
spectroscopy in the terahertz frequency domain.
A
network of alternative conformations in catalase (Protein Data Bank
code: 1gwe) with diverse properties. Multiple phenomena define the
network: van der Waals interactions (blue dots and line segments)
between sidechains, a hydrogen bond (dotted green line) through a
partial-occupancy water (brown), coupling through the locally mobile
backbone (black), and perhaps electrostatic forces between the Lys
(green) and nearby polar residues (blue: Glu, yellow: Asp, purple: Ser).
This particular network is distal from the active site and is therefore
putatively not critical for function.
Many residues are in close spatial proximity in protein structures.
This is true for most residues that are contiguous in the primary sequence,
but also for many that are distal in sequence yet are brought into contact in the final folded structure.
Because of this proximity, these residue's energy landscapes become coupled
based on various biophysical phenomena such as hydrogen bonds, ionic bonds, and van der Waals interactions (see figure).
Transitions between states for such sets of residues therefore become correlated.
This is perhaps most obvious for surface-exposed loops, which
often shift collectively to adopt different conformations in different
crystal structures (see figure). However, coupled conformational
heterogeneity is also sometimes evident in secondary structure. For example, consecutive residues and residues offset by 4 in the primary sequence often interact in α helices. Also, residues offset by 2 in the primary sequence point their sidechains toward the same face of β sheets and are close enough to interact sterically, as are residues on adjacent strands of the same β sheet.
Some of these conformational changes are induced by post-translational
modifications in protein structure, such as phosphorylation and
methylation.
An
"ensemble" of 44 crystal structures of hen egg white lysozyme from the
Protein Data Bank, showing that different crystallization conditions
lead to different conformations for various surface-exposed loops and
termini (red arrows).
When these coupled residues form pathways linking functionally important parts of a protein,
they may participate in allosteric signaling.
For example, when a molecule of oxygen binds to one subunit of the hemoglobin
tetramer,
that information is allosterically propagated to the other three
subunits, thereby enhancing their affinity for oxygen.
In this case, the coupled flexibility in hemoglobin allows for
cooperative oxygen binding,
which is physiologically useful because it allows rapid oxygen loading
in lung tissue and rapid oxygen unloading in oxygen-deprived tissues
(e.g. muscle).
Global flexibility: multiple domains
The presence of multiple domains in proteins gives rise to a great deal of flexibility and mobility, leading to protein domain dynamics.
Domain motions can be inferred by comparing different structures of a protein (as in Database of Molecular Motions), or they can be directly observed using spectra
measured by neutron spin echo spectroscopy.
They can also be suggested by sampling in extensive molecular dynamics trajectories and principal component analysis. Domain motions are important for:
One of the largest observed domain motions is the 'swivelling' mechanism in pyruvate phosphate dikinase.
The phosphoinositide domain swivels between two states in order to
bring a phosphate group from the active site of the nucleotide binding
domain to that of the phosphoenolpyruvate/pyruvate domain.
The phosphate group is moved over a distance of 45 Å involving a domain
motion of about 100 degrees around a single residue. In enzymes, the
closure of one domain onto another captures a substrate by an induced
fit, allowing the reaction to take place in a controlled way. A detailed
analysis by Gerstein led to the classification of two basic types of
domain motion; hinge and shear.
Only a relatively small portion of the chain, namely the inter-domain
linker and side chains undergo significant conformational changes upon
domain rearrangement.
Hinges by secondary structures
A study by Hayward
found that the termini of α-helices and β-sheets form hinges in a large
number of cases. Many hinges were found to involve two secondary
structure elements acting like hinges of a door, allowing an opening and
closing motion to occur. This can arise when two neighbouring strands
within a β-sheet situated in one domain, diverge apart as they join the
other domain. The two resulting termini then form the bending regions
between the two domains. α-helices that preserve their hydrogen bonding
network when bent are found to behave as mechanical hinges, storing
`elastic energy' that drives the closure of domains for rapid capture of
a substrate.
Helical to extended conformation
The
interconversion of helical and extended conformations at the site of a
domain boundary is not uncommon. In calmodulin, torsion angles change
for five residues in the middle of a domain linking α-helix. The helix
is split into two, almost perpendicular, smaller helices separated by
four residues of an extended strand.
Shear motions
Shear
motions involve a small sliding movement of domain interfaces,
controlled by the amino acid side chains within the interface. Proteins
displaying shear motions often have a layered architecture: stacking of
secondary structures. The interdomain linker has merely the role of
keeping the domains in close proximity.
Domain motion and functional dynamics in enzymes
The
analysis of the internal dynamics of structurally different, but
functionally similar enzymes
has highlighted a common relationship between the positioning of the
active site and the two principal protein sub-domains. In fact, for
several members of the hydrolase superfamily, the catalytic site is
located close to the interface separating the two principal quasi-rigid
domains.
Such positioning appears instrumental for maintaining the precise
geometry of the active site, while allowing for an appreciable
functionally oriented modulation of the flanking regions resulting from
the relative motion of the two sub-domains.
Implications for macromolecular evolution
Evidence suggests that protein dynamics are important for function, e.g. enzyme catalysis in DHFR,
yet they are also posited to facilitate the acquisition of new functions by molecular evolution.
This argument suggests that proteins have evolved to have stable, mostly unique folded structures,
but the unavoidable residual flexibility leads to some degree of functional promiscuity,
which can be amplified/harnessed/diverted by subsequent mutations.
However, there is growing awareness that intrinsically unstructured proteins are quite prevalent in eukaryotic genomes,
casting further doubt on the simplest interpretation of Anfinsen's dogma:
"sequence determines structure (singular)".
In effect, the new paradigm is characterized by the addition of two
caveats: "sequence and cellular environment determine structural
ensemble".
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