Phenomenology in France

A Philosophical and Theological Introduction

Steven DeLay

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781351987103
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

This book is an introduction to French phenomenology in the post-1945 period. While many of phenomenology's greatest thinkers—Husserl, Heidegger, Sartre and Merleau-Ponty—wrote before this period, Steven DeLay introduces and assesses the creative and important turn phenomenology took after these figures. He presents a clear and rigorous introduction to the work of relatively unfamiliar and underexplored philosophers, including Jean-Louis Chrétien, Michel Henry, Jean-Yves Lacoste, Jean-Luc Marion and others.

After an introduction setting out the crucial Husserlian and Heideggerian background to French phenomenology, DeLay explores Emmanuel Levinas's ethics as first philosophy, Henry's material phenomenology, Marion's phenomenology of givenness, Lacoste's phenomenology of liturgical man, Chrétien's phenomenology of the call, Claude Romano's evential hermeneutics, and Emmanuel Falque's phenomenology of the borderlands. Starting with the reception of Husserl and Heidegger in France, DeLay explains how this phenomenological thought challenges boundaries between philosophy and theology. Taking stock of its promise in light of the legacy it has transformed, DeLay concludes with a summary of the field's relevance to theology and analytic philosophy, and indicates what the future holds for phenomenology.

Phenomenology in France: A Philosophical and Theological Introduction is an excellent resource for all students and scholars of phenomenology and continental philosophy, and will also be useful to those in related disciplines such as theology, literature, and French studies.

1 Phenomenology as first philosophy

In a lecture series delivered in February of 1929 at the Sorbonne, Edmund Husserl introduced his philosophy of transcendental phenomenology to France. The decision to present his thought as heir to the venerable legacy of philosophia prima, initiated by Aristotle and critically appropriated by René Descartes, was hardly incidental. Husserl himself viewed his phenomenology not only as a renewal, but a consummation, of that high promise. Among those in attendance was a young Emmanuel Levinas, who with Gabrielle Pfeiffer compiled the lectures and published them in a French translation in 1931 entitled Méditations cartésiennes: Introduction à la phénoménologie. The lectures, comprising five meditations, each reminiscent of (yet intriguingly divergent from) Descartes’s own, marked a momentous occasion for many reasons. For one, it signified the arrival of the phenomenological philosophy, already so prevalent in Germany, to France. It in turn set the philosophical agenda for the rest of twentieth-century French philosophy. In one way or another, every subsequent key philosophical movement—structuralism, post-structuralism, and deconstruction included—was a response to phenomenology, often particularly Husserl’s own. But Husserl’s phenomenology not only opened the door to critique from outside philosophical influences. It also sowed the seeds for transformations within phenomenology itself. The agenda begun by Husserl and deepened by Heidegger inspired a first generation of French thinkers such as Levinas, Sartre, and Merleau-Ponty. More still, Husserl’s thought inaugurated a set of problems that many thinkers in France are still today actively working on. It is to that recent and ongoing phenomenological work that this present book will turn.

It is however necessary first to examine phenomenology’s origin in Husserl and the subsequent developments it underwent with Heidegger (the question of Sartre’s and Merleau-Ponty’s own influence will arise later where context demands), since it is this legacy to which French phenomenology currently is productively responding. For Husserl himself, philosophy’s role is at once unique and essential. The singleness of its aim is due to its ambivalent debt to the Cartesian philosophy. Husserl’s transcendental phenomenology, not unlike Descartes’s version of first philosophy, attempts to return philosophy to the status of a royal science, while disavowing most of the actual credos associated with Cartesianism itself. In developing his phenomenological vision of philosophy, Husserl was never particularly interested in accepting, much less defending, famous Cartesian doctrines such as the division of all reality into the two categories of mind and extension, or the associated notion that the mind is a substance. What did interest him was appropriating Descartes’s conviction that philosophy can deliver a kind of knowledge no other inquiry is able, and that it does so precisely and only to the extent that it proceeds according to a method entirely its own, and that it therefore epistemically founds and clarifies—albeit not in the same sense Descartes himself believed—the very possibility of every other kind of inquiry into the world and ourselves. For Husserl, phenomenology was to be the “rigorous science” and hence first philosophy.

Expectedly, then, Husserl opens his Sorbonne lectures by distinguishing phenomenology from what he viewed to be the sorry condition of current philosophical thought, criticizing it as unsystematic, unserious, and aimless:

Instead of a unitary living philosophy we have a philosophical literature growing beyond all bounds and almost without coherence. Instead of a serious discussion among conflicting theories that, in their very conflict, demonstrate the intimacy with which they belong together, the commonness of their underlying convictions, and an unwavering belief in a true philosophy, we have a pseudo-reporting and a pseudo-criticizing, a mere semblance of philosophizing seriously with and for one another.¹

Phenomenology would instead accede to the true spirit of a genuine philosophy. Autonomous, systematic, and rigorous, it uncovers the foundation of all knowledge, and hence our access to the world, and everything which appears within it. This initial characterization, however, only raises as many questions as it settles. For what precisely is the gateway to phenomenology as first philosophy? Like the phenomenologists who will follow, his philosophical project entails a peculiar conception of what it means to be who we are. In Husserl’s case, to be who we are is to be a transcendental ego:

[T]his world, with all its Objects, I said, derives its whole sense and existential status, which it has for me, from me myself, from me as the transcendental Ego, the Ego who comes to the fore only with the transcendental-phenomenological epoché.²

For Husserl, the phenomenological question of self is entwined with the issue of philosophical method. As he explains in §63 of Ideas (“The Special Importance for Phenomenology of Considerations of Method”), phenomenology as a rigorous science calls for a clarification of its own method:

It has not only to develop its method to win new forms of knowledge from new kinds of material, it has to reach the completest clearness concerning the meaning and the validity of the method which is to enable it to hold its own against all serious criticisms [as first philosophy, it must] realize the completest clearness concerning its own essence, and therefore also concerning the principles of its own method [decisive for its very possibility is an account of] the basic grounds of the method, into that which right from the outset and continuously throughout its whole development have a significance for phenomenology which is quite different from that which analogous efforts could ever have for other sciences.³

A preoccupation with method is not exclusive to Husserl. Heidegger, Husserl’s initial protégée and eventual rival, will himself time and again throughout his own career frame his alternative conception of phenomenology in terms of method: “in its original and initial meaning, [the expression ‘phenomenology’ denotes] a way of encountering something”; strictly dictating the manner in which its object of inquiry is to be investigated, it remains “accordingly only a ‘methodological’ term, inasmuch as it is only used to designate the mode of experience, apprehension, and determination of that which is thematized in philosophy”;⁴ because it “is the name for the method of ontology, that is, of scientific philosophy […] [it] is the concept of a method”;⁵ distinguishable from all other methods and matters of inquiry, “it investigates in accordance with its own method, while it itself no longer lapses into the domain of reflection characteristic of the particular sciences. It is ‘scientific’ because it acquires its own domain and its own method.”⁶ Despite the differences that will separate them, Husserl and Heidegger agree that phenomenology is to be a descriptive discipline that seeks essential truths about experience.

However, there is as mentioned a dispute. Is phenomenology to be an investigation of transcendental consciousness (Husserl) or the meaning of Being (Heidegger)? According to Husserl, the discovery of transcendental consciousness thereby decides the question of philosophy’s proper focus. To discover transcendental consciousness is to at once open and secure a question unprecedented in the history of philosophy: namely, the problem of intentionality. The term is a catchall for a question that proves to be as fundamental as it is vexing: what enables experience to be of something as something? That is the question Husserl poses to his Sorbonne audience. What conditions (or structures) make it possible for entities meaningfully to disclose themselves as what they are?

Initially, the question appears odd, even trivial. Things simply are there, arrayed before us in all their splendor, without any apparent contribution of our own. Husserl admits as much:

The life of everyday action relates to the world. All the sciences relate to it: the sciences of matters of fact relate to it immediately […]. More than anything else the being of the world is obvious. It is so very obvious that no one would think of asserting it expressly in a proposition.⁷

What, we may well wonder, is the mystery? Is it not obvious that we are without further ado always already immersed in a world of events and entities? When I open my eyes from a nap, for instance, I immediately see the room in all its familiarity; I am greeted by the hustle and bustle of daily life drifting through the window, and should I peek outside, I see cars, birds, buildings, and advertisements, and hear the sound of people’s voices echoing from the streets. The world meets us without complication. How is there a philosophical puzzle here? Things appear—and that is all.

And indeed, supposing there even is some question here to address, why think it would be a task for philosophy, as opposed to some other form of intellectual inquiry? Why suggest, as Husserl will insist, that phenomenological philosophy not only rises above other modes of inquiry, but also other philosophical traditions, to the rank of first philosophy? If there was sufficient reason to doubt the possibility of first philosophy already in Descartes’s day, the impressive successes of modern natural science, it seems eminently sensible to conclude, have finally foreclosed the issue of its legitimacy. One might be tempted to conclude that there is no need for philosophy at all, because there is no field of research that remains, by right, its own. With the ascendance of the modern natural sciences, what is the need for philosophy?

Husserl knew such doubts would weigh heavily on the minds of his audience, just as they do ours. The deliberate invocation of Descartes, then, is not a rhetorical strategy designed to ingratiate himself with an otherwise incredulous French audience. On the contrary, he chooses to present his phenomenology in a fittingly Cartesian arc, so as to initiate, and thereby hopefully convince, his listeners that there is every reason to see that, even today, there is a role for philosophy in the field of human knowledge. Like Descartes’s own Meditations, he accordingly orchestrates the action into three steps: first, an act of epistemic suspension; next, a turn to the subject; and finally, a return to the world, though one radically altered.⁸ In the opening of the Meditations, readers will recall, Descartes begins by noting that he is seeking a firm basis for knowledge. Facing the humbling realization that much of what he had taken to be true was in fact false (or else at least less than certain), he wants to guard himself from future error. Because the prize for Descartes was a scientific regime that delivered certainty, he decides to refashion the sciences anew, an overturning that would require a rearrangement of the order of knowledge from the very ground up. As the Meditations contend, that is precisely the task of first philosophy. Husserl, too, as a former mathematician, saw a “crisis” at work in the twentieth-century empirical sciences, and he took the crisis to be evidence that they lack a sound epistemic grounding. There must be a form of inquiry, he thus surmised, that would complete, by accomplishing, a mode of rational inquiry that could reassure us that the world we take for granted is true. This crisis at the heart of the modern natural sciences, according to Husserl, is not however only one of knowledge. For, insofar as it is an attack against the very legitimacy of reason itself, the epistemic groundlessness of the sciences undermines our confidence in the very value of theorizing itself. Although the natural sciences have progressed remarkably, there is a question of foundation which Husserl saw they were unable to address: why are we amassing all of the information that we are? How does this information superstructure hold together, and to what purpose are we bothering to add to it? As Husserl presciently saw, the epistemic crisis of foundations in reason is essentially an ethical one, a fact the Second World War was shortly to attest in horrendous fashion.

Hence, the epistemic (and ethical) groundlessness of modern scientific theory was not only a concern for scientists and other intellectual laborers. It is a crisis that cut to the very heart of culture itself. Thrust into these stormy historical times, Husserl’s phenomenology was seen, at least by its founder, as a crucial intervention in a world that had lost its way, because it had lost any coherent sense of its rational purpose. Seemingly bereft of any guiding rational telos, the world hung in the balance.

The parallels with Descartes are again striking. Equally daunting circumstances had given rise to Descartes’s quest for a first philosophy. The rise of Enlightenment natural science had produced a rational crisis of its own, one that radically recast our understanding of the world and our place within it. But where for Descartes this revolution in knowledge required a remedy whose initial response was radical doubt—everything, including the very existence of the world itself is thrust aside as uncertain in the First Meditation—Husserl, facing his age’s own upheaval, begins slightly differently. It is still an issue of suspending our everyday epistemic assumptions, but not quite in the straightforwardly skeptical fashion Descartes had. For Husserl, the aim is not to doubt the world’s existence, but rather to in some sense finally notice the world itself as a phenomenon in need, not of a proof as the skeptic demands, but of further investigation into its evidential and meaningful structures. For Husserl, the question is not so much whether there is a world, but instead how it is possible for the world to be revealed to us as it is. The point, thus, is not to doubt the existence of the world, but to cease taking its appearance for granted, and instead to turn our gaze to how it manifests itself in the full range of conscious experience.

Like Descartes again, Husserl contends that a solution to the question concerning our access to the world will require an examination of the subject—the cogito. But first there is the methodological issue of working ourselves into the proper epistemic frame of mind to bring to light the questions that phenomenology brings in tow. The attitude at work in Husserl’s phenomenology might initially be difficult to appreciate. This is understandable, because it expects from us a frame of mind we are not at all accustomed to inhabiting. According to Husserl himself, no one in the history of philosophy had as yet properly formulated the right attitude until him. Prior to transcendental phenomenology (or at least before Kant) only two possibilities presented themselves. Either on...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1 Phenomenology as first philosophy
• 2 Emmanuel Levinas
• 3 Michel Henry
• 4 Jean-Luc Marion
• 5 Jean-Yves Lacoste
• 6 Jean-Louis Chrétien
• 7 Claude Romano
• 8 Emmanuel Falque
• 9 The future of phenomenology
• Index of names