Introduction to Phenomenology: Reading Husserl and Heidegger 3800-IPHH23-S

The course is meant as a general introduction to phenomenology. The contemporary phenomenology appeared in the specific historical context. It was a reaction to the particular philosophical, and more broadly, cultural currents and tendencies such as psychologism, simplified empiricism of the late XIX century, or scientism in general. It was also motivated by the opposition to metaphysical speculation. All these tendencies led either to skepticism and relativism, or to a distorted, artificially constructed, abstract concept of reality and our experience of it. Phenomenology was driven, therefore, by a radical postulate to „put out of play,” „suspend” all sources (including scientific theories, metaphysical and religious conceptions, common opinions etc.) of such potential distortions in order to „get back to the things themselves”. Thus, its foundational motivation was a genuine care for the truth of human experience of the world and of themselves; a genuine care for „what” really appears and „how” what appears manifests itself in different modi of its appearance. In other words, phenomenology, from its very beginning, announces itself as a radical way of philosophizing which aspires to reach to the very origins of reality. All such attempts reveal the essential, insurmountable entanglement of subject and object, subjectivity and objectivity. In this sense phenomenology is a constantly renewed attempt to answer the question of how the objective reality can be (and is) there for us, how it appears (is constituted), in its different forms, within the field of subjective experience. This leads to a series of tensions, essential to phenomenology, between realism and idealism, fact and essence, factuality and possibility; but most importantly between transcendentalism, which absolutizes subject giving it an ontological priority, on the one hand; and on the other hand, an existential-ontological perspective where the human being is always already determined by his/her life-world and primordial, pre-reflective forms of experience. This latter tension clearly visible in the late works of Husserl – the founding father of the contemporary phenomenology – is suspended in philosophy of Martin Heidegger. In Heidegger’s view a truly radical phenomenological concept of experience leads us to the understanding of the human being as being-in-the-world; that is, as being essentially, and not accidentally, immersed in the world. This facticity is an “absolute” starting point of all human experiences and their thematizations. In this sense the foundational question of phenomenology – concerning the possibility of world’s existence (in fact, no longer contested) turns out to be a more radical question – a question concerning the possibility of the human being.
In the course of the seminar we will analyze the crucial phenomenological concepts, categories and problems on both thematic as well as methodological level. It will be done by means of a thorough reading („sentence-by-sentence”) and interpretation of the foundational phenomenological works. The seminar is meant for two years. In the current year we will analyze the most important works of Husserl, and we will begin analysis of Heidegger’s „Being and Time”.