Existential Phenomenology

The development of existential

phenomenologyFrom its 19th-century forerunners

to Husserl and Heidegger

Painting by Caspar David Friedrich (1774-1840)

Prepared by Noelle Leslie de la Cruz, Ph.D.Philosophy Department, De La Salle University

Forerunners in the 19th century

Existential phenomenology

{ Subject: The individual } { Method: The mind/consciousness }

Kierkegaard & Nietzsche:The individual and Christianity

Kant:Categories of the understanding

Individual subjectivity

Søren Kierkegaard (1813-1855)

Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900)

• The emphasis of existentialism on the individual is a reaction to religion, specifically Christianity

• Both Kierkegaard and Nietzsche objected to Christianity, but arrived at different conclusions. Kierkegaard merely sought to critique it, while Nietzsche rejected it altogether

Individual subjectivity

Søren Kierkegaard (1813-1855)

Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900)

• Contemporary existentialists may thus be divided into two camps (in Sartre’s classification): 1.The theistic existentialists – Karl Jaspers, Martin

Buber, Gabriel Marcel2.The atheistic existentialists – Martin Heidegger,

Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Albert Camus

Forerunners in the 19th century

Existential phenomenology

{ Subject: The individual } { Method: The mind/consciousness }

Kierkegaard & Nietzsche:The individual and Christianity

Kant:Categories of the understanding

Kant’s a priori concepts

• For Immanuel Kant (1724-1804), our knowledge of the world is always filtered through our mental categories, or the a priori concepts


• The a priori concepts come before experience, and make knowledge possible. E.g.

Clouds: Quantity - Unity, plurality,

totality

Traffic lights: Quality

- Affirmation, negation, limitation

Tree: Modality- Possibility,

actuality, necessity


• Kant’s view of knowledge thus emphasizes the role of the mind as a filter for how the world appears to us

• This led to the distinction between phenomena (how things appear to us) and noumena (the things in and of themselves)

• For Kant, we can only know phenomena; the noumena or things-in-themselves are inaccessible to us

The phenomenological tradition

Edmund Husserl1859-1938

Martin Heidegger1889-1976

Jean-Paul Sartre1905-1980





Sartrean existentialism: Shift of focus from existence per se to the freedom entailed by our existence

Heideggerian phenomenology: Study of Being and the existential structures of Dasein, i.e. what it means to be human

Husserlian phenomenology: Emphasis on presuppositionless or transcendental knowledge

“Back to the things themselves!”

• Husserl was the father of phenomenology. He was concerned with the search for a truly “presuppositionless” philosophy

• He exhorted philosophers to go back to the things themselves. Through the use of the phenomenological method, he believed that we can arrive at the essences of things (which Kant claimed were inaccessible to us)

• Phenomenology is based on the Greek word phainomenon, meaning “to appear”

• In the phenomenological method, we restrict ourselves to how things appear in consciousness, bracketing everything else


from Simone de Beauvoir, The prime of life (1960):

“…. Raymond Aron was spending a year at the French Institute in Berlin and studying Husserl simultaneously with preparing a historical thesis. When he came to Paris he spoke of Husserl to Sartre. We spent an evening together at the Bec de Gaz in the Rue Montparnasse. We ordered the specialty of the house, apricot cocktails; and Aron said, pointing to his glass:

Raymond Aron

You see, my dear fellow, if you are a phenomenologist, you can talk about this cocktail and make a philosophy out of it!


from Simone de Beauvoir, The prime of life (1960):

“Sartre turned pale with emotion at this. Here was just the thing he had been longing to achieve for years—to describe objects just as he saw and touched them, and extract philosophy from the process.”

The problem of Being

• Philosophy since the time of Plato has neglected the problem of Being, because of the following three propositions:– That Being is the most universal concept– That the concept of Being is indefinable– That Being is of all concepts the one that is self-evident


“The question of the meaning of Being must be formulated. If it is the fundamental question, or indeed the fundamental question, it must be made transparent, and in an appropriate way.”

• Heidegger’s new contribution to philosophy is the asking of this question


• Heidegger refers to the human being as Dasein, which literally means “there being”

• Dasein is the only being for whom Being is an issue. Of all entities, only the human being or person cares about the question or issue of existence


• Furthermore, for Heidegger, Dasein becomes inauthentic when he or she forgets Being, by living unreflectively under the influence of other people (“the they”)

• Thus, Heidegger—like Kierkegaard and Nietzsche (whose writings he revived)—emphasized individual subjectivity








To be discussed in detail under a separate topic

Summary and conclusion

• Existential phenomenology thus unites two strands of thought from the 19th century:

1. The emphasis on individual subjectivity, which can be traced back to Kierkegaard and Nietzsche

2. The relationship between mind or consciousness and the world, which can be traced back to Kant

• The main issues in the philosophy of the person are those that were important to the existential phenomenologists writing in the 20th century

Summary and conclusion

• In the main areas of philosophy, we ask questions like: What is real? Does God exist? What and how do we know? What is the good?, etc.

• Meanwhile, in the philosophy of the person, the questions have more to do with one’s existence as a being-in-the-world: Am I free? What are the implications for me of God’s existence or non-existence? How am I to relate with others? Does life have any inherent meaning?

Existential Phenomenology

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