Introduction to Phenomenology

The fourth and final class of the Brooklyn Institute for Social Research course took place last night. The course was taught by the historian of philosophy Michael Stevenson. I signed up to learn more about Edmund Husserl, but Husserl led me to the much more interesting figure of Merleau-Ponty. What have I learned? Better understanding of Descartes' method of doubt. Franz Brentano's attempt to distinguish between mental and physical phenomena. Husserl's adoption of one of Brentano's criteria, that of intentionality as the distinguishing mark of consciousness. Consciousness is always the consciousness of something. Husserl's foundationalist attempt to build on Descartes' cogito, ergo sum by innovating the phenomenological reduction, i.e., to treat as irrelevant the "reality" of the outside world and as indubitable the "reality" of the intentional act. Merleau-Ponty's re-interpretation of the phenomenological reduction: the chief lesson of Husserl's phenomenological reduction is the impossibility of phenomenological reduction. To reduce is to cut off from ourselves the "upsurge" of the world. Instead, M-P describes the task of philosophy as the emulation by reflection of unreflective life. Here I'm reminded of Keats's praise of "unreflecting love" in one of his most philosophically searching sonnets "When I have fears that I may cease to be." To reflect is not to abstract from life, but to bring with it the awareness that it is the start of abstraction, and so philosophy is always about examining the beginnings of thought with the emotion of wonder. M-P's introduction of the body into phenomenological thinking. The body as wholly described by neither physiology nor psychology, but somewhere in between, in the phenomenological field. The body as style, self-constituting as a work of art. Cezanne as exemplar. This is as far as I've got.

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