From the years 1929 and 1930, Heidegger has left behind the work that marks his break with Husserl and phenomenology and some very clear signs of his embrace of Ernst Jünger and a radical conservative revolution - and an extreme cult "historical" nationalism that Heidegger never renounced and for which he never apologized to its victims - especially the Polish (mourning to Marcuse only the displaced Ost-Deutschen - the theme he likely took with Paul Celan.)
Tarski, on the other hand, left logic with ground-breaking work in each of those years. One reason that I mention this is that Tarski was the teacher of Julia Robinson.
We now know the role that Husserl played in the fate of both Edith Stein and Afra Geiger: Heidegger worked briefly with the former and Hannah Arendt mentions the latter in her correspondence with him. Jaspers reports being with Heidegger at Husserl's home in Freiburg and raising the case of his student, Afra Geiger.
Afra Geiger's fate was to perish in the Ravensbrück death camp.
Had Afra Geiger been accepted by Husserl, had Husserl not written his back-handed letter on Stein to the Göttingen philosophy department (and had they met in the open) both young philosophers might have survived.
When a young philosophy student - about to graduate - remarked to me that his university, having no graduate school, had no course on Heidegger - I tried to explain that this was no loss. Better a course on Jaspers or Cassirer. I should have said: better a course on Twardowski and Tarski.
And what of Cassirer? In 1942, Susanne Langer publishes "Philosophy in a New Key". To read its last chapter and then the gnome's 1943 publication, "Vom Wesen der Wahrheit" is very sobering. Imagine for a moment that Langer had any reason to feel that some lectures of hers in Germany in the early thirties had led to some misplaced enthusiasm for conservative extremism - imagine with what feeling she would have announced a correction, a clarification, in 1943 - or in subsequent editions.
Cassirer, like Paul Valéry, died in 1945 and so was not able to reply to Heidegger when he resumed teaching at Freiburg after his all-too-brief exclusion. Valéry on poetry or Heidegger? Michael Hamburger on Mallarmé or Walter Biemel deferring to the Master?
When Heidegger opens his lecture on Hölderlin and the Essence of poetry, he make a fallacious claim which Tarski would have disposed of immediately. So even there, perhaps better Tarski on Mereology for poetics (which via Kit Fine leads back to the Husserl of the LU) than Heidegger on fate, the people and historical up-rising.
Showing posts with label Karl Jaspers. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Karl Jaspers. Show all posts
Thursday, April 8, 2010
Tuesday, March 23, 2010
Jaspers and the animals
In his 1935 lectures printed as "Reason and Existenz", Jaspers contrasts the animal with the human.
Even at the time of the lectures, the concept of the organism in its environment was evolving (and offering hope to anti-Darwinians such as Heidegger, strangely enough.)
Today almost nothing that Jaspers says about animals in those lectures remains defensible. While not as vulgar as Catholic Peter Geach in his treatment of "brutes" in Mental Acts, Jaspers fails to acknowledge any of the aspects of great apes, dolphins or elephants which now place them on a continuum with what had been seen as distinctively human: a minimal level of self-awareness, a minimal level of social learning, a minimal level of culture - and, in the case of the elephant, almost certainly grief.
What interests me is to see whether Jaspers' overall views of the person and a life with others could be revived and revised in a variant suitable for Alcoholics Anonymous.
By middle-age most of us have friends afflicted with alcohol addiction and among them likely one who has rejected AA for its requirement to acknowledge a higher power. Jaspers thought is far more subtle than typical Christian-inspired theism and is free of the taint of Medard Boss and the Heideggerian "Daseinanalyse" movement.
Even at the time of the lectures, the concept of the organism in its environment was evolving (and offering hope to anti-Darwinians such as Heidegger, strangely enough.)
Today almost nothing that Jaspers says about animals in those lectures remains defensible. While not as vulgar as Catholic Peter Geach in his treatment of "brutes" in Mental Acts, Jaspers fails to acknowledge any of the aspects of great apes, dolphins or elephants which now place them on a continuum with what had been seen as distinctively human: a minimal level of self-awareness, a minimal level of social learning, a minimal level of culture - and, in the case of the elephant, almost certainly grief.
What interests me is to see whether Jaspers' overall views of the person and a life with others could be revived and revised in a variant suitable for Alcoholics Anonymous.
By middle-age most of us have friends afflicted with alcohol addiction and among them likely one who has rejected AA for its requirement to acknowledge a higher power. Jaspers thought is far more subtle than typical Christian-inspired theism and is free of the taint of Medard Boss and the Heideggerian "Daseinanalyse" movement.
Saturday, March 13, 2010
ad hominem: Dufrenne on Ingarden
1) Ingarden as having followed Husserl
2) Ingarden as a "rationalist" (read: "Cartesian")
[before expanding this post I am going to go through the deplorable 1957 article on Karl Jaspers by Paul Ricoeur as published in translation in the Schilpp collection "The Philosophy of Karl Jaspers" pp 611-642 when Ricoeur was at U. Strasbourg - it contains some nasty bits right from the first paragraph (it promises "personal questions" but presents "Critical Remarks" as an alternative to a futile opposition of "argument ... opposed to argument" - Ricoeur had not yet become 'hermeneutical' in his approach. This is not some adolescent rant excused as the errors of the young as we might over-look his stay in Munich or his pamphleteering in the camp: this is at his second university appointment and only one step from the new Nanterre venture - this is the young philosopher attacking Jaspers: the verb "to flee" needs to be checked against the original as Jaspers had not "fled" to Basel and the whole compared to Ricoeur 1947, 1948 and 1954. The Ricoeur paper in Schilpp is entitled "The Relation of Jaspers' Philosophy to Religion" but the title should be "... to Evangelical Protestantism" or, at the most generous, "... to Christian Religion". The 1981 reprint exposes Jaspers on Heidegger in an expanded section interposed between pages 75 and 76 as an extended insert.]
2) Ingarden as a "rationalist" (read: "Cartesian")
[before expanding this post I am going to go through the deplorable 1957 article on Karl Jaspers by Paul Ricoeur as published in translation in the Schilpp collection "The Philosophy of Karl Jaspers" pp 611-642 when Ricoeur was at U. Strasbourg - it contains some nasty bits right from the first paragraph (it promises "personal questions" but presents "Critical Remarks" as an alternative to a futile opposition of "argument ... opposed to argument" - Ricoeur had not yet become 'hermeneutical' in his approach. This is not some adolescent rant excused as the errors of the young as we might over-look his stay in Munich or his pamphleteering in the camp: this is at his second university appointment and only one step from the new Nanterre venture - this is the young philosopher attacking Jaspers: the verb "to flee" needs to be checked against the original as Jaspers had not "fled" to Basel and the whole compared to Ricoeur 1947, 1948 and 1954. The Ricoeur paper in Schilpp is entitled "The Relation of Jaspers' Philosophy to Religion" but the title should be "... to Evangelical Protestantism" or, at the most generous, "... to Christian Religion". The 1981 reprint exposes Jaspers on Heidegger in an expanded section interposed between pages 75 and 76 as an extended insert.]
Thursday, March 4, 2010
Replying to Husserl: working notes
prima facie case for revisiting Husserl: the merits of Colin McGinn's phenomenology in Mindsight
pdf review
and his treatment of Hume; compare and contrast with Husserl's responses to Hume
...
Iris Murdoch on Husserl in MGM and various in S of G ex: the lack of a telos.
...
Science and the Nations: Raymond Aron (irony, RA introduced J-P S to Huss and Heid)
RA on philosophy of history
the effort to prohibit aerial bombardment through amendments to Geneva conventions
the case for international law
...
1935 Husserl on the gypsies as outside European life though present throughout
wp
In 1934, Reinhardt and Parisian violinist Stéphane Grappelli formed the "Quintette du Hot Club de France"
...
EH and the West - as if there had not been China or India - or Jerusalem. The assimilated Jewry of Europe in shock and dismay at the threat to the "immanent telos" of civil society and academe - and within 2 years he is driven out - within 3 years out of his home - and dead. Q: the fate of his wife and son?
Despite his comment on India, if in fact Jeshua the Nazarene had studied as a Buddhist healer in India, this cultural gap would not be as he imagines - and the fact that these Causcasians are speaking an Indo-European language? But he is looking for his European entelechy (if this had been embraced, would Poland have been spared? Where did Russia stand in this group? )
...
Was his Europe (1935) based more on Greece or more on the Salic laws ? This was not a remnant of a Greek Empire but a Roman Empire - and on its northern fringe, the Salic traditions. That Greek world came ot Europe through Arabia - but to a Europe that already had something of an "ethos" very distinct from that of Ionia or Athens or the Attic. His mathematics - a mix of Greek and Indian and Arab and then European.
...
Science without universals: (contra Husserl's characterization of the actual practice of science)
the particular star, Sol
a particular planet [but one of a family of terrestrial planets, yet the only one with oceans and continents]
plate tectonics
a particular instance of carbon-based life on a planet
DNA/RNA - only one particular form of life
Luna - the moon illusion
Galileo and the one planet Jupiter - Q: a brown dwarf or not? A singluar-historical question?
the one cosmos [cp: Lee Smolin ]
the inability to reduce mathematics to logic
...
the conflation of "appearances" and the "data" of science (the Humean error )
...
Bacon
technical mastery of nature
Leiss "The Domination of Nature"
...
EH on the "validity" of his phenomenological discovery/adumbration of a world as horizon of an experience
IM literary criticism in contrast to physical science: freedoms and constraints, the good and the true
It seems clear that Husserl's views on science in the early 1930's came to colour what was known as phenomenology for decades in the English-reading philosophy world.
In particular, authors such as Charles Taylor have a certain appeal to some readers based on the presumed case against "natural science" where the "human sciences" are concerned. Taylor often refers to Habermas and Habermas takes the Husserl case against natural science as a given - only he goes a step or two further.
A large part of the case against "secularism" hearkens back to the doctrine that an attitude perhaps appropriate in "natural science" is misplaced in the humanities - and in advise to our leaders both political and academic.
In the days when behaviourism and instrumentalism passed as scientific psychology and philosophy of psychology, respectively, in North America, I was sympathetic to this case against "the natural attitude" in considering the prospects for "human psychology". My sympathies have since shifted to the need for a philosophical anthropology which might better inform our assessment of scientific psychology in terms of goals, means and presuppositions.
Quentin Lauer's 1965 translation of a post-1935 "Crisis in Science" essay gave English readers access to what previously had been largely eluded to in the more popular literature on the existential phase of phenomenology
The casual reader of the "Krisis" essay might be advised to realize that Husserl had spent a great deal of time with some of the most prominent thinkers in twentieth century mathematics, such as Cantor at Halle.
Why might this be well-advised? Take for example the 1994 book published by Northwestern U: Lawrence Vogel's The Fragile "We". In his brief treatment of Heidegger's own engagement in politics, there is no mention of Jaspers. The one mention of Husserl is merely in passing, late in the text.
By 1935, on this view, Heidegger had outstripped his master and by 1937 the master would indeed be stripped. This despite the long-standing concern of Husserl for the I and the others. Heidegger, with no background in mathematics or science and impressed by language (the "furrow" of the field is indeed a very old part of "culture" but Heidegger never actually farmed a field or handled a plow - his favoured tools were the pen, the pipe, the walking stick, the Bavarian cap and sturdy hiking boots. Elfride handled the technology of cookery) took his cue from Duns Scotus. Working under Rickert and Husserl (Husserl would take Rickert's chair at Freiburg), Heidegger finds his later themes in an author, Duns Scotus, immensely far removed from the author who most concerned Kant and then Husserl: Hume.
Anecdote: some years ago I spent an evening listening to Mahler with a prominent British philosopher - a philosopher specializing in mathematics and space-time geometry. That evening he told me of how impressed he was by his current reading of Arendt on the Nazi in Jerusalem - particularly concerning what he had now learned about the Danish King and the Nazis. Looking back, I see that evening as just one more in a series that led inexorably to his divorce. Philosophers can be fundamentally mistaken about a great many things, especially experts in quite narrow fields. In their wider reading, they may rely much more on the rhetoric, the style, the tone of an author than they would in reading within their specialty. A philos0pher of physics inclined to advocate a humane socialism has little time for casual reading and is likely to eschew writing by known conservatives - the tone, the rhetoric, risks being too aggravating to be suited to a relaxing distraction for the strenuous mental tasks of professional specialization.
Husserl ventured to speak very generally. His rhetoric is not essential to an argument, but it is essential to his having readers of his argument. I would like to consider that rhetoric.
"Philosophy and the Crisis of European Man" begins with a bit of a howler: the analogy we are offered is that concerning scientific medicine versus folk medicine. Why this analogy?
It is not merely that every sort of superstition was flourishing in Europe ... that was nothing new. True, inexpensive printing had created a wider audience for novel variants on old themes, but I suggest, there was nothing really new. What Husserl was addressing was the Heidegger phenomenon.
[ Claude Bernard on medicine; Jaspers and Hans Jonas; current: GC
JB JV C d Fr chaires 2 femmes disparus immortels discours podcasts
CIP JFP CT "the immanent frame" SSRC R & PS S of R JH contra
]
[ la leçon inaugurale M-P I.H.
Anne F-L [Chaire De Philosophie Des Sciences Biologiques Et Médicales - Leçon Inaugurale Anne Fagot-Largeault PDF
Les expressions « sciences de la vie et de la santé », ou « sciences biologiques et médicales », qui sont d’usage courant, sont redondantes. Les sciences médicales font évidemment partie des sciences biologiques.
...
La philosophie des sciences est ma formation première, la médecine une formation seconde.
...
« Il faut transporter la philosophie dans la médecine et la médecine dans la philosophie. »
...
Etre médecin n’est pas neutre philosophiquement.
...
L’évolution scientifique de la médecine, c’est-à-dire l’incorporation à la médecine des impératifs de la recherche, et d’une recherche instrumentée, technologique, est souvent assimilée à une déshumanisation. D’aucuns parlent de « barbarie technoscientifique », de « glissade vers l’enfer biomédical ». Et ce qui est souvent préconisé pour éviter la dérive technoscientifique est un retour en arrière. On cherche dans les médecines dites douces des recettes ancestrales, on rêve d’un « retour à Hippocrate » (thème récurrent et illusoire, car la médecine hippocratique se voulait rationnelle, et elle n’était pas douce).
]
[ R & SS Coll de Fr ]
[attacks on medecine as quackery: Molière, Flaubert]
[ the reality of palliative care; morphine and the death of Freud; thanatology; euthanasia ]
[Mengele and the spectre of medecine; psychiatric abuses in the West and in USSR ]
[ link
[U of C SCNL ]
[ru IP UNESCO World Philosophy Day ]
[Egbert Scheunemann
There is a common view today that Heidegger had somehow brought Husserl to his senses. I am troubled by this view: Heidegger's major contribution to Husserlian phenomenology had been his work with Husserl's assistant, Edith Stein, in preparing "The Phenomenology of Internal Time-Consciousness" lectures for publication. Husserl had a history of dissatisfaction with his own formulations and a history of quasi-new beginnings, more often new forays with the same problematic in mind. Now he was faced with the rising star of Heidegger. No other figure on the intellectual scene had so embraced his phenomenology. I imagine Husserl struggling to grasp what was becoming of his hard-won achievements in regions, passive and active genesis, co-constitution, Urwelt, Mitwelt, Eigenwelt in the metaphysics/ontology rhetoric of Heidegger.
Husserl's next fallacies are double: reductionism and the notion that social institutions are formed of their individual members. Let us being with the latter. Take Heidegger and Arendt's own Marburg: the social institutions of Marburg were in no way disrupted either by the burning of the great synagogue (never rebuilt) in Marburg or the loss of the community of Jews in that university town with its theology college. True, there is no Hermann-Cohen Weg or Strasse - but there is a small plaque at the old university.
[ reductionism ( ex: Freud to Binswanger;) agency, action, causality ]
[ intentionality reference mental-contents ]
[ dasein versus "the person"; public | personal | private ]
[ psychologism ]
[ mechanism and explanation ]
[ mathematical objects ]
[ natural kinds and universals in language and in logic ]
[ history and Dilthey ]
[ cultural artifacts ]
[ intuition and insight ]
[science and the taste of the soup (Einstein)
Zu-Hause-sein
a typical morning at home over coffee with Bach: husband and wife (normal day, unremarkable)
as circumstance to be described, to be explained, to be characterized, to be diagnosed
as narrative
as social "instance" - roles, gender, niveau, privacy, property, stability (peace time), religion
non-remarkable conversation and inconsequential reading
variant example: disclosure of infidelity
objective risk to the spouse (Wien, Prag, Paris or Berlin 1935)
objective assessment of the response of the injured party
jurisprudence
moral assessment, remembering and forgiving
the medical viewpoint (Arthur Schnizler)
as preserved as a poem
as communicated in a letter (family; friend)
social: stigma and reaction of significant others; penalties
]
Take the case of Estonia and its neighbours. The towns do not vanish because their inhabitants have been shipped to Kazakhstan.
Take the case of Poland: a minor pogrom occurred even after World War II had ended.
The simplistic view that societal forms are built on the minds of the individuals found in them negates a century or more of Geisteswissenschaften.
[ Alfred Schütz, Adorno, Marcuse ]
Let's move on to the next rhetorical move: the mentions of infinities. By 1935 some of Husserl's listeners should have known that "infinities" occurring in mathematics are an entirely different concern from "infinities" occurring in formulations in physics. The topic cannot be introduced without a clear demarcation between mathematics and physics. Essential considerations are glossed over.
Perhaps it is because Husserl was a Jew converted to Lutheranism that he failed to appreciate the supra-individual nature of a centuries old institution such as Heidegger's Catholic tradition.
Husserl proceeds with a rhetoric of "Theoria" already utterly biased ( a bias that will perpetuate in the work of Habermas) - a rhetoric devoid of the actual historical science required to explicate the rise of scientific medicine, the mathematization of mechanical motion, of optics and the nature of categories and classification in the emergence of modern chemistry.
In 1935, Husserl could not be expected to image that we would one day be obtaining positron-emission tomographs of individual brains during the performance of typical tasks. In 1971, when I took biology with a new textbook, electron microscopes had not yet demonstrated the structural nature of the so-called "cell membrane" in relation to the so-called "nuclear membrane" in typical cells of our bodies. A reticulating structure was named and some partial views offered.
Husserl could not have anticipated, any more than my own philosophy professors in the 1970's, that certain types of phenomena deemed unsuited to scientific explanation due to their "randomness" would fall prey first to catastrophe theory and then be encompassed in the domain of chaos theory (René Thom was only born in 1923.) By the time Kolmogorov visited Gottingen, Husserl was in Freiburg.
What remains in how best to conceive of mind in relation to science. Where Husserl would suspend metaphysics in the sense of "bracketing" ontological commitments which functioned as obfuscating presuppostions, Heidegger was already moving to his radical demolition, demotion, un-founding. Husserl, anxious for a secure foundation for science which would not degenerate into sheer scientism where mathematics and human knowledge were concerned, had somehow abetted the launch of anti-science.
The problem with the rhetoric by which Husserl invites the listener, the reader, to consider his appeal for the need of a pure science of the essence of human spirit is that he has already needlessly undermined science and history in making his case. His later readers would lump the failures of eidetic science with the failures of metaphysics and the greatest failure: science. Husserl's openess to a certain relativism - a relavitism to which his own philosophy would be immune - was one of far too many concessions.
In some ways the very history of Husserl's phenomenology was its own undoing: his early sympathizers could not follow him into an idealism excused by its being "transcendental". In the case of Merleau-Ponty, even the eidetic reduction itself would be rejected and phenomenology would merge into variant of a descriptive psychology only to be displaced by the structures of language and the very temporal, relativized, historicized achievements of aesthesis.
When Husserl urged that we recognize horizons, he could not have imagined the doctrine of our being cast into the historical world. In his own case, it is hard to imagine a figure in philosophy less suited to making the case for a careful reassessment of the spiritual situation of Europe in 1935.
The eventual conflation of science with technique in Heidegger and of science with theoria infected with bias and disguised in social speech acts in Habermas may have slightly different routes, or "paths", Habermas certainly made a serious reading of Husserl on "the natural attitude" but with an entirely different project in re-thinking the use of human knowledge in the social world.
What is perhaps a shame in hindsight is that we have few clues as to what Heidegger might have taught had he been allowed to resume teaching in Berlin or Heidelberg in the new academic year of 1945-46. By that time, with Max Weber dead for a quarter century and had Jaspers been lost in a forced march (which, as it happens, he narrowly escaped) and with Elfride hosting faculty and student soirées, we might have more accounts of the view of the master on the triumph of American technology over the leading people of Europe - and the use that the Asiatic hordes might yet make of the technological devices shipped to them from America and now lurking in the East or of the need to reclaim Ost-Preussen, to restore the eastern border.
We have no idea of what Husserl might have thought and taught in the psot-war, as he had died a few months before Kristalnacht.
During the time that Arendt was hoping to see a Heidegger tome on Logik, no mention is made in their correspondence of the fate of the logicians of Warsaw, no mention of the Jews of Poland- as if this were some Polish issue - this despite the very origins of the family name, Nietzsche.
Where Heidegger had Duns Scotus, the salient philosophers for Arendt were Augustine and Plato - but in 1929, when Husserl was being honoured in the presence of Heidegger and Edith Stein, Arendt was only a student who had graduated with less than full honours the previous year (her dissertation had a routine printing in Berlin in 1929.) Unlike Iris Murdoch [see John Bayley on home with Iris], Husserl and his wife were driven from their home [...]
Heidegger's most curious remarks are that the "Juden" lost were "Ost-Deutschen" - which perhaps he took to include those of Poland and Ukraine [see the exception of Bulgaria.]
[Arendt's 1926 semester under Husserl]
[Jaspers-Heidegger Korr./Briefwechsel ]
[Iris Murdoch on Husserl; on ethics - that an ethics must also point us toward the good and be itself informed by that good; cp Arent and Jaspers on the lack of character in Heidegger (a nice enough chap in his way, not generally offensive, as was his wife, Elfride) ]
[Heidegger's failure to mention Arendt; the lost dedication to Husserl; the break with Jaspers ]
[the rescue of the Husserl papers: imagine if this had been undertaken by Heidegger, or at his behest; Van Breda and the role of the Belgian government and diplomats in the 1938 rescue of the papers; look for corr. with Heid or leading pupil in Frei. or Hdlbrg]
[
Eh characterization of philosophy - without sufficient regard to the Stoics or the role of rhetoric and law;
his neglect of poesis
]
[
EH on a norm within a life (was he thinking of MH here - when he says not developed in every person ??)
]
[EH account of the idea in history - cp. the Tao and Confucianism
the manner in which the Dao became a religion and ceased to be an ethos would not sit well here
the manner in which a religio without temples became the religion of cathedrals (cp the origins of the synagogue
]
[events in Marburg and the failure to rebuild the 1897 synagogue (the only building "lost" in Marburg in 1933-1945]
[
pdf review
and his treatment of Hume; compare and contrast with Husserl's responses to Hume
...
Iris Murdoch on Husserl in MGM and various in S of G ex: the lack of a telos.
...
Science and the Nations: Raymond Aron (irony, RA introduced J-P S to Huss and Heid)
RA on philosophy of history
the effort to prohibit aerial bombardment through amendments to Geneva conventions
the case for international law
...
1935 Husserl on the gypsies as outside European life though present throughout
wp
In 1934, Reinhardt and Parisian violinist Stéphane Grappelli formed the "Quintette du Hot Club de France"
...
EH and the West - as if there had not been China or India - or Jerusalem. The assimilated Jewry of Europe in shock and dismay at the threat to the "immanent telos" of civil society and academe - and within 2 years he is driven out - within 3 years out of his home - and dead. Q: the fate of his wife and son?
Despite his comment on India, if in fact Jeshua the Nazarene had studied as a Buddhist healer in India, this cultural gap would not be as he imagines - and the fact that these Causcasians are speaking an Indo-European language? But he is looking for his European entelechy (if this had been embraced, would Poland have been spared? Where did Russia stand in this group? )
...
Was his Europe (1935) based more on Greece or more on the Salic laws ? This was not a remnant of a Greek Empire but a Roman Empire - and on its northern fringe, the Salic traditions. That Greek world came ot Europe through Arabia - but to a Europe that already had something of an "ethos" very distinct from that of Ionia or Athens or the Attic. His mathematics - a mix of Greek and Indian and Arab and then European.
...
Science without universals: (contra Husserl's characterization of the actual practice of science)
the particular star, Sol
a particular planet [but one of a family of terrestrial planets, yet the only one with oceans and continents]
plate tectonics
a particular instance of carbon-based life on a planet
DNA/RNA - only one particular form of life
Luna - the moon illusion
Galileo and the one planet Jupiter - Q: a brown dwarf or not? A singluar-historical question?
the one cosmos [cp: Lee Smolin ]
the inability to reduce mathematics to logic
...
the conflation of "appearances" and the "data" of science (the Humean error )
...
Bacon
technical mastery of nature
Leiss "The Domination of Nature"
...
EH on the "validity" of his phenomenological discovery/adumbration of a world as horizon of an experience
IM literary criticism in contrast to physical science: freedoms and constraints, the good and the true
It seems clear that Husserl's views on science in the early 1930's came to colour what was known as phenomenology for decades in the English-reading philosophy world.
In particular, authors such as Charles Taylor have a certain appeal to some readers based on the presumed case against "natural science" where the "human sciences" are concerned. Taylor often refers to Habermas and Habermas takes the Husserl case against natural science as a given - only he goes a step or two further.
A large part of the case against "secularism" hearkens back to the doctrine that an attitude perhaps appropriate in "natural science" is misplaced in the humanities - and in advise to our leaders both political and academic.
In the days when behaviourism and instrumentalism passed as scientific psychology and philosophy of psychology, respectively, in North America, I was sympathetic to this case against "the natural attitude" in considering the prospects for "human psychology". My sympathies have since shifted to the need for a philosophical anthropology which might better inform our assessment of scientific psychology in terms of goals, means and presuppositions.
Quentin Lauer's 1965 translation of a post-1935 "Crisis in Science" essay gave English readers access to what previously had been largely eluded to in the more popular literature on the existential phase of phenomenology
The casual reader of the "Krisis" essay might be advised to realize that Husserl had spent a great deal of time with some of the most prominent thinkers in twentieth century mathematics, such as Cantor at Halle.
Why might this be well-advised? Take for example the 1994 book published by Northwestern U: Lawrence Vogel's The Fragile "We". In his brief treatment of Heidegger's own engagement in politics, there is no mention of Jaspers. The one mention of Husserl is merely in passing, late in the text.
By 1935, on this view, Heidegger had outstripped his master and by 1937 the master would indeed be stripped. This despite the long-standing concern of Husserl for the I and the others. Heidegger, with no background in mathematics or science and impressed by language (the "furrow" of the field is indeed a very old part of "culture" but Heidegger never actually farmed a field or handled a plow - his favoured tools were the pen, the pipe, the walking stick, the Bavarian cap and sturdy hiking boots. Elfride handled the technology of cookery) took his cue from Duns Scotus. Working under Rickert and Husserl (Husserl would take Rickert's chair at Freiburg), Heidegger finds his later themes in an author, Duns Scotus, immensely far removed from the author who most concerned Kant and then Husserl: Hume.
Anecdote: some years ago I spent an evening listening to Mahler with a prominent British philosopher - a philosopher specializing in mathematics and space-time geometry. That evening he told me of how impressed he was by his current reading of Arendt on the Nazi in Jerusalem - particularly concerning what he had now learned about the Danish King and the Nazis. Looking back, I see that evening as just one more in a series that led inexorably to his divorce. Philosophers can be fundamentally mistaken about a great many things, especially experts in quite narrow fields. In their wider reading, they may rely much more on the rhetoric, the style, the tone of an author than they would in reading within their specialty. A philos0pher of physics inclined to advocate a humane socialism has little time for casual reading and is likely to eschew writing by known conservatives - the tone, the rhetoric, risks being too aggravating to be suited to a relaxing distraction for the strenuous mental tasks of professional specialization.
Husserl ventured to speak very generally. His rhetoric is not essential to an argument, but it is essential to his having readers of his argument. I would like to consider that rhetoric.
"Philosophy and the Crisis of European Man" begins with a bit of a howler: the analogy we are offered is that concerning scientific medicine versus folk medicine. Why this analogy?
It is not merely that every sort of superstition was flourishing in Europe ... that was nothing new. True, inexpensive printing had created a wider audience for novel variants on old themes, but I suggest, there was nothing really new. What Husserl was addressing was the Heidegger phenomenon.
[ Claude Bernard on medicine; Jaspers and Hans Jonas; current: GC
JB JV C d Fr chaires 2 femmes disparus immortels discours podcasts
CIP JFP CT "the immanent frame" SSRC R & PS S of R JH contra
]
[ la leçon inaugurale M-P I.H.
Anne F-L [Chaire De Philosophie Des Sciences Biologiques Et Médicales - Leçon Inaugurale Anne Fagot-Largeault PDF
Les expressions « sciences de la vie et de la santé », ou « sciences biologiques et médicales », qui sont d’usage courant, sont redondantes. Les sciences médicales font évidemment partie des sciences biologiques.
...
La philosophie des sciences est ma formation première, la médecine une formation seconde.
...
« Il faut transporter la philosophie dans la médecine et la médecine dans la philosophie. »
...
Etre médecin n’est pas neutre philosophiquement.
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L’évolution scientifique de la médecine, c’est-à-dire l’incorporation à la médecine des impératifs de la recherche, et d’une recherche instrumentée, technologique, est souvent assimilée à une déshumanisation. D’aucuns parlent de « barbarie technoscientifique », de « glissade vers l’enfer biomédical ». Et ce qui est souvent préconisé pour éviter la dérive technoscientifique est un retour en arrière. On cherche dans les médecines dites douces des recettes ancestrales, on rêve d’un « retour à Hippocrate » (thème récurrent et illusoire, car la médecine hippocratique se voulait rationnelle, et elle n’était pas douce).
]
[ R & SS Coll de Fr ]
[attacks on medecine as quackery: Molière, Flaubert]
[ the reality of palliative care; morphine and the death of Freud; thanatology; euthanasia ]
[Mengele and the spectre of medecine; psychiatric abuses in the West and in USSR ]
[ link
Georges Canguilhem : Philosophie et Médecine
10/06/2005, Collège de France, Paris
]
[Collège de France - Recherche en psychiatrie : pathologies multiples, modèles communs ? link ]
[Conférence "Merleau-Ponty, Le corps en acte" Collège de France (Inv. by Bernard Andrieu) link]
[U of C SCNL ]
[ru IP UNESCO World Philosophy Day ]
[Egbert Scheunemann
"Habermas‘ Philosophie ist der Versuch, das Projekt der Moderne, also die Entwicklung
der modernen Zivilisation, als – in der Tradition Kants – dreigestaltige Rationalitätsentfaltung
zu begreifen: als Prozess der Differenzierung der kognitiv-instrumentellen, der
normativ-praktischen und der ästhetisch-praktischen Vernunftsdimension sowie der immer
weiteren Ausdifferenzierung dieser Dimensionen entsprechend immanenter Logik."] PKR
There is a common view today that Heidegger had somehow brought Husserl to his senses. I am troubled by this view: Heidegger's major contribution to Husserlian phenomenology had been his work with Husserl's assistant, Edith Stein, in preparing "The Phenomenology of Internal Time-Consciousness" lectures for publication. Husserl had a history of dissatisfaction with his own formulations and a history of quasi-new beginnings, more often new forays with the same problematic in mind. Now he was faced with the rising star of Heidegger. No other figure on the intellectual scene had so embraced his phenomenology. I imagine Husserl struggling to grasp what was becoming of his hard-won achievements in regions, passive and active genesis, co-constitution, Urwelt, Mitwelt, Eigenwelt in the metaphysics/ontology rhetoric of Heidegger.
Husserl's next fallacies are double: reductionism and the notion that social institutions are formed of their individual members. Let us being with the latter. Take Heidegger and Arendt's own Marburg: the social institutions of Marburg were in no way disrupted either by the burning of the great synagogue (never rebuilt) in Marburg or the loss of the community of Jews in that university town with its theology college. True, there is no Hermann-Cohen Weg or Strasse - but there is a small plaque at the old university.
[ reductionism ( ex: Freud to Binswanger;) agency, action, causality ]
[ intentionality reference mental-contents ]
[ dasein versus "the person"; public | personal | private ]
[ psychologism ]
[ mechanism and explanation ]
[ mathematical objects ]
[ natural kinds and universals in language and in logic ]
[ history and Dilthey ]
[ cultural artifacts ]
[ intuition and insight ]
[science and the taste of the soup (Einstein)
Zu-Hause-sein
a typical morning at home over coffee with Bach: husband and wife (normal day, unremarkable)
as circumstance to be described, to be explained, to be characterized, to be diagnosed
as narrative
as social "instance" - roles, gender, niveau, privacy, property, stability (peace time), religion
non-remarkable conversation and inconsequential reading
variant example: disclosure of infidelity
objective risk to the spouse (Wien, Prag, Paris or Berlin 1935)
objective assessment of the response of the injured party
jurisprudence
moral assessment, remembering and forgiving
the medical viewpoint (Arthur Schnizler)
as preserved as a poem
as communicated in a letter (family; friend)
social: stigma and reaction of significant others; penalties
]
Take the case of Estonia and its neighbours. The towns do not vanish because their inhabitants have been shipped to Kazakhstan.
Take the case of Poland: a minor pogrom occurred even after World War II had ended.
The simplistic view that societal forms are built on the minds of the individuals found in them negates a century or more of Geisteswissenschaften.
[ Alfred Schütz, Adorno, Marcuse ]
Let's move on to the next rhetorical move: the mentions of infinities. By 1935 some of Husserl's listeners should have known that "infinities" occurring in mathematics are an entirely different concern from "infinities" occurring in formulations in physics. The topic cannot be introduced without a clear demarcation between mathematics and physics. Essential considerations are glossed over.
Perhaps it is because Husserl was a Jew converted to Lutheranism that he failed to appreciate the supra-individual nature of a centuries old institution such as Heidegger's Catholic tradition.
Husserl proceeds with a rhetoric of "Theoria" already utterly biased ( a bias that will perpetuate in the work of Habermas) - a rhetoric devoid of the actual historical science required to explicate the rise of scientific medicine, the mathematization of mechanical motion, of optics and the nature of categories and classification in the emergence of modern chemistry.
In 1935, Husserl could not be expected to image that we would one day be obtaining positron-emission tomographs of individual brains during the performance of typical tasks. In 1971, when I took biology with a new textbook, electron microscopes had not yet demonstrated the structural nature of the so-called "cell membrane" in relation to the so-called "nuclear membrane" in typical cells of our bodies. A reticulating structure was named and some partial views offered.
Husserl could not have anticipated, any more than my own philosophy professors in the 1970's, that certain types of phenomena deemed unsuited to scientific explanation due to their "randomness" would fall prey first to catastrophe theory and then be encompassed in the domain of chaos theory (René Thom was only born in 1923.) By the time Kolmogorov visited Gottingen, Husserl was in Freiburg.
What remains in how best to conceive of mind in relation to science. Where Husserl would suspend metaphysics in the sense of "bracketing" ontological commitments which functioned as obfuscating presuppostions, Heidegger was already moving to his radical demolition, demotion, un-founding. Husserl, anxious for a secure foundation for science which would not degenerate into sheer scientism where mathematics and human knowledge were concerned, had somehow abetted the launch of anti-science.
The problem with the rhetoric by which Husserl invites the listener, the reader, to consider his appeal for the need of a pure science of the essence of human spirit is that he has already needlessly undermined science and history in making his case. His later readers would lump the failures of eidetic science with the failures of metaphysics and the greatest failure: science. Husserl's openess to a certain relativism - a relavitism to which his own philosophy would be immune - was one of far too many concessions.
In some ways the very history of Husserl's phenomenology was its own undoing: his early sympathizers could not follow him into an idealism excused by its being "transcendental". In the case of Merleau-Ponty, even the eidetic reduction itself would be rejected and phenomenology would merge into variant of a descriptive psychology only to be displaced by the structures of language and the very temporal, relativized, historicized achievements of aesthesis.
When Husserl urged that we recognize horizons, he could not have imagined the doctrine of our being cast into the historical world. In his own case, it is hard to imagine a figure in philosophy less suited to making the case for a careful reassessment of the spiritual situation of Europe in 1935.
The eventual conflation of science with technique in Heidegger and of science with theoria infected with bias and disguised in social speech acts in Habermas may have slightly different routes, or "paths", Habermas certainly made a serious reading of Husserl on "the natural attitude" but with an entirely different project in re-thinking the use of human knowledge in the social world.
What is perhaps a shame in hindsight is that we have few clues as to what Heidegger might have taught had he been allowed to resume teaching in Berlin or Heidelberg in the new academic year of 1945-46. By that time, with Max Weber dead for a quarter century and had Jaspers been lost in a forced march (which, as it happens, he narrowly escaped) and with Elfride hosting faculty and student soirées, we might have more accounts of the view of the master on the triumph of American technology over the leading people of Europe - and the use that the Asiatic hordes might yet make of the technological devices shipped to them from America and now lurking in the East or of the need to reclaim Ost-Preussen, to restore the eastern border.
We have no idea of what Husserl might have thought and taught in the psot-war, as he had died a few months before Kristalnacht.
During the time that Arendt was hoping to see a Heidegger tome on Logik, no mention is made in their correspondence of the fate of the logicians of Warsaw, no mention of the Jews of Poland- as if this were some Polish issue - this despite the very origins of the family name, Nietzsche.
Where Heidegger had Duns Scotus, the salient philosophers for Arendt were Augustine and Plato - but in 1929, when Husserl was being honoured in the presence of Heidegger and Edith Stein, Arendt was only a student who had graduated with less than full honours the previous year (her dissertation had a routine printing in Berlin in 1929.) Unlike Iris Murdoch [see John Bayley on home with Iris], Husserl and his wife were driven from their home [...]
Heidegger's most curious remarks are that the "Juden" lost were "Ost-Deutschen" - which perhaps he took to include those of Poland and Ukraine [see the exception of Bulgaria.]
[Arendt's 1926 semester under Husserl]
[Jaspers-Heidegger Korr./Briefwechsel ]
[Iris Murdoch on Husserl; on ethics - that an ethics must also point us toward the good and be itself informed by that good; cp Arent and Jaspers on the lack of character in Heidegger (a nice enough chap in his way, not generally offensive, as was his wife, Elfride) ]
[Heidegger's failure to mention Arendt; the lost dedication to Husserl; the break with Jaspers ]
[the rescue of the Husserl papers: imagine if this had been undertaken by Heidegger, or at his behest; Van Breda and the role of the Belgian government and diplomats in the 1938 rescue of the papers; look for corr. with Heid or leading pupil in Frei. or Hdlbrg]
[
Eh characterization of philosophy - without sufficient regard to the Stoics or the role of rhetoric and law;
his neglect of poesis
]
[
EH on a norm within a life (was he thinking of MH here - when he says not developed in every person ??)
]
[EH account of the idea in history - cp. the Tao and Confucianism
the manner in which the Dao became a religion and ceased to be an ethos would not sit well here
the manner in which a religio without temples became the religion of cathedrals (cp the origins of the synagogue
]
[events in Marburg and the failure to rebuild the 1897 synagogue (the only building "lost" in Marburg in 1933-1945]
[
The Nazi Persecution
of the Gypsies
of the Gypsies
Guenter Lewy
OXFORD
UNIVERSITY PRESS
2000
]
[T4 link with Marburg
"
Physicians, the most highly Nazified professional group in Germany, were key to the success of "T-4," since they organized and carried out nearly, all aspects of the operation
"
Marburg-related documents: (1) + ease with which NS psychiatrists came to Uni Marburg after WWII
[T4 link with Marburg
"
Physicians, the most highly Nazified professional group in Germany, were key to the success of "T-4," since they organized and carried out nearly, all aspects of the operation
"
Marburg-related documents: (1) + ease with which NS psychiatrists came to Uni Marburg after WWII
Monday, March 1, 2010
Another candidate for U. Chicago: Ernst Becker
Becker did not live to get an appointment at U. Of Chicago - but he had his sights set judging from his 1974 Pulitzer (General Nonfiction) prize-winner, "The Denial of Death".
I happened to find an article in the German wikipedia that seemed so incomplete that I looked to the English wikipedia and found a piece in praise of Becker. Oh vey.
I have posted a note to the discussion at that page and linked the page to the Norman O. Brown page and vice-versa.
If you have met someone enlightened by reading Becker and you have ever met someone enlightened by reading Ayn Rand then you will know what I mean: for one, the death anxiety and the hero-denied; for the other, selfishness denied and again, the hero-denied. Set aside history, science, philosophy, economics cuz we have hit Insight.
What follows is an edit to my post at the site for Paul Chen's film on the "great man" and the "great book":
I think that most people praising this film may not have read the book with as much care as they might - especially what he in fact says in the lengthy treatment of fetish.
Few viewers will then take the time to visit a university library and then read the referenced articles of Phyllis Greenacre.
Even fewer will then investigate the science, first, as cultural anthropology and its lack of actual field work, its inaccurate demographics let alone the problems with this "just so" story from an evolutionary standpoint.
The index to The Denial Of Death as originally published was hopelessly inaccurate. The "facts" presented about various aspects of normal and abnormal child development were wholly anecdotal.
For all the books reliance on Tillich, the book had not so much as a footnote on Jaspers. For all the references to Medard Boss, not a single reference to Ludwig Binswanger.
More references to Rousseau than to Sartre.
The chapter on Kierkegaard is perhaps the weakest in the book (Dostoievsky is notable for his absence.)
Not a single dissenting view on female psychology (1973 ! ) was presented - not even in his account of sexual frigidity. Not de Beauvoir. Not even Betty Friedan.
What is a science documentary when the science is human science? What could this book mean with nothing from Max Weber (good friend to Jaspers - they all knew Tillich.)
Unlike most Viennese gents of Freud's day, one suspects that Becker was never in a brothel and did no field work with homosexuals and certainly none with lesbians, transexuals or bisexuals. His account of depression ( 1973 ) is appalling. While he mentions Searles, his account of schizophrenia is completely sophomoric - devoid of any reference to ongoing work in VA hospitals across the US - pitiful.
His bold claim to offer a general theory of mental illness, today, in light of current knowledge of genetics and brain imaging and realization of the total inadequacy of the existing diagnostic nomenclature - well it is a sad anti-science joke reminiscent of Tom Szasz.
Had Becker done any field work with those with a known short life expectancy - and done it cross-culturally - he might have been able to make a small contribution to human science.
But Becker felt that science had become overwhelming - in his own words - "clinical closure" was now possible. Wrong.
His own heroic gesture was a refusal to recognize his own limits as a social scientist. He had to proclaim what we are - what we essentially are.
Oddity: I recall no reference to Hans Jonas, who had recently delivered the Arendt eulogy, if memory serves.
Back to this blog: what is so surprising is that the internet has no sign of what Becker actually wrote in "The Denial of Death" - it is as if most readers skipped page after page on homosexuality, fetish, the relation of religion to psychiatry. What I suspect is that this book is still on the reading lists at liberal colleges (it could be used in Iran or Saudi Arabia, no problem.)
Oh, yes - I must be in denial. Not.
I happened to find an article in the German wikipedia that seemed so incomplete that I looked to the English wikipedia and found a piece in praise of Becker. Oh vey.
I have posted a note to the discussion at that page and linked the page to the Norman O. Brown page and vice-versa.
If you have met someone enlightened by reading Becker and you have ever met someone enlightened by reading Ayn Rand then you will know what I mean: for one, the death anxiety and the hero-denied; for the other, selfishness denied and again, the hero-denied. Set aside history, science, philosophy, economics cuz we have hit Insight.
What follows is an edit to my post at the site for Paul Chen's film on the "great man" and the "great book":
I think that most people praising this film may not have read the book with as much care as they might - especially what he in fact says in the lengthy treatment of fetish.
Few viewers will then take the time to visit a university library and then read the referenced articles of Phyllis Greenacre.
Even fewer will then investigate the science, first, as cultural anthropology and its lack of actual field work, its inaccurate demographics let alone the problems with this "just so" story from an evolutionary standpoint.
The index to The Denial Of Death as originally published was hopelessly inaccurate. The "facts" presented about various aspects of normal and abnormal child development were wholly anecdotal.
For all the books reliance on Tillich, the book had not so much as a footnote on Jaspers. For all the references to Medard Boss, not a single reference to Ludwig Binswanger.
More references to Rousseau than to Sartre.
The chapter on Kierkegaard is perhaps the weakest in the book (Dostoievsky is notable for his absence.)
Not a single dissenting view on female psychology (1973 ! ) was presented - not even in his account of sexual frigidity. Not de Beauvoir. Not even Betty Friedan.
What is a science documentary when the science is human science? What could this book mean with nothing from Max Weber (good friend to Jaspers - they all knew Tillich.)
Unlike most Viennese gents of Freud's day, one suspects that Becker was never in a brothel and did no field work with homosexuals and certainly none with lesbians, transexuals or bisexuals. His account of depression ( 1973 ) is appalling. While he mentions Searles, his account of schizophrenia is completely sophomoric - devoid of any reference to ongoing work in VA hospitals across the US - pitiful.
His bold claim to offer a general theory of mental illness, today, in light of current knowledge of genetics and brain imaging and realization of the total inadequacy of the existing diagnostic nomenclature - well it is a sad anti-science joke reminiscent of Tom Szasz.
Had Becker done any field work with those with a known short life expectancy - and done it cross-culturally - he might have been able to make a small contribution to human science.
But Becker felt that science had become overwhelming - in his own words - "clinical closure" was now possible. Wrong.
His own heroic gesture was a refusal to recognize his own limits as a social scientist. He had to proclaim what we are - what we essentially are.
Oddity: I recall no reference to Hans Jonas, who had recently delivered the Arendt eulogy, if memory serves.
Back to this blog: what is so surprising is that the internet has no sign of what Becker actually wrote in "The Denial of Death" - it is as if most readers skipped page after page on homosexuality, fetish, the relation of religion to psychiatry. What I suspect is that this book is still on the reading lists at liberal colleges (it could be used in Iran or Saudi Arabia, no problem.)
Oh, yes - I must be in denial. Not.
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