I think this book, by Leonard Lawlor, Derrida and Husserl: The Basic Problem of Phenomenology, can be of great help for a starting point.

Derrida is certainly a good start, probably in connection with Ricoeur.

However, for a more recent engagement with the possible limitations to the reach of Husserl's epoche in relation to an ever present and ever influencing life-world Marc Richir's 1992 'Meditations phenomenologiques - Phenomenenologie et phenomenologie du language' are probably a very good and rather critical inspiration.

Richir's complex investigations trace the problem of reductive attempts (as envisaged by Husserl) in relation to an intersubjectively generated life-world and proposes a further reaching - a hyperbolic epoche to overcome the limitations of Husserl's proposal.

Richir identifies a) linguistic implications in relation to (Merleau-Ponty's notion of) "wild being" (etre brute), resisting to be subsumed under existing (linguistic) expressions, hence leaving a rest of what "ought to be said"but "cannot be said". Richir conceptualises this along Levi-Strauss' and de Saussure's oevre. For Richir, any analysis of the sense-bestowing act is not an exhaustive account of what is going on.

A second strand of his investigation concentrates upon b) social institutions, i.e. the way we normally, within our cultural environment, understand the world around us and these social institutions, which are more fundamental than the notion of the life-world, cannot - so Richir - be circumnavigated by Husserl's epoche alone.

Unfortunately the book has not been translated into English and the French original is very demanding (there is however a German translation available - if that is any help?).

Dear Mathew

I hope they will be useful for you

1) J Adv Nurs. 2002 Feb;37(3):282-93.

Phenomenology as a method to investigate the experience lived: a perspective from Husserl and Merleau Ponty's thought.

Sadala ML, Adorno Rde C.

2) "Philosophy as Rigorous Science", translated in Quentin Lauer, editor, 1965 [1910]

3) Phenomenology and the Crisis of Philosophy. New York: Harper & Row.

4) Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy - First Book: General Introduction to a Pure Phenomenology, 1982 [1913]. Kersten, F., trans. The Hague: Nijhoff.

5) Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy - Second Book: Studies in the Phenomenology of Constitution, 1989. R. Rojcewicz and A. Schuwer, translators. Dordrecht: Kluwer.

6) Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy - Third Book: Phenomenology and the Foundations of the Sciences, 1980, Klein, T. E., and Pohl, W. E., translators. Dordrecht: Kluwer.

7) On the Phenomenology of the Consciousness of Internal Time (1893-1917), 1990 [1928]. Brough, J.B., trans. Dordrecht: Kluwer.

8) Experience and Judgement, 1973 [1939], Churchill, J. S., and Ameriks, K., translators. London: Routledge.

9) The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Philosophy, 1970 [1936/54], Carr, D., trans. Evanston: Northwestern University Press.

Dear Nelson,

as much as your comprehensive list of (mostly) Husserl's own accounts of the epoche and, in his later work, the life-world - I do nevertheless have my doubts that the - potentially critical - relation between the epoche and the life-world will reveal itself to the reader.

If however Mathew is prepared to engage with Husserl himself, then

The idea of Phenomenology - 5 lectures (as the original account of how Husserl discovered the epoch) and

Eugen Fink's Sixth Cartesian Meditation (regarding methodological problems) may be of interest.

This however requires - as Nelson's list already indicates - an in-depth engagement with phenomenology.

Best

Thomas

Dear Tom

Thank you for your comments

Regards

Thank you for all of these references they will undoubtedly be extremely helpful.

I have read LI, ideas, Cart Med, Phantasy Memory Consc, and I am itching to read Ideas II, and Eugen Fink's Sixth Cartesian, and Crisis. Also Derrida's critique, I know I have to get to that too.

However, do any of you recommend that I read his book on Arithmetic, his first one? I read logical investigations, but something tells me I am missing a vital part of his thinking, and could inform me where his weaknesses might lie in phenomenology. It is quite an undertaking so any green light (go) or red light (stop) recommendations would be welcome.

Hi Mathew,

As Fink writes in his/Husserl's 6th, phenomenology has to be experienced, not read. He goes on to emphasize that reading rather experiencing leads to the bewildering feeling of looking at a bedazzling text written queer language that does not yield any clarity or understanding. Furthermore, Husserl's body of work represents a process of experimenting with phenomenological thinking rather than a coherent system of thought and this might be proved as confusing even more. Here are my $.02 on how to start, they represent my own experience and yours is likely to be different and reflective of your natural attitude and lifeworld. Husserl's starting point was mathematics and the origin of logic and he devoted most of his energy to dissect the roots of logical thought. Since you are most interested in the methodological aspects of phenomenology (which Fink considers as the theory of method) I recommend that you start with Husserl's 5th, continue with Heidegger's basic problems of phenomenology and then move to Fink's 6th. Fink attempted to close the gaps in Heidegger's and Husserl's views of phenomenology and built a better (my personal view) platform combining both. As a companion text, I would look at Bruzina's excellent research on Husserl and Fink and peek at Schutz's investigations of the lifeworld. In any case, my recommendation is start your own reduction as soon as possible and as you read the texts so that you will be thinking and swimming at the same time. The longer path in the natural realm is the shortest in the transcendental. Pending on your level of interest and dedication, this might take longer than you think so take a deep breath and prepare for a marathon.

Good luck and hope it helps,

Ronnen

PS

I would wait with the French phenomenological offspring until completing the above.

Ronnen, that was excellent. Thank you very much!

Dear Tom, Mathew and Nelson,

I think about Nelson and I agree that these books, articles and reviews must be experienced more than a simple read.

Husserl's phenomenology is a fantastic way to emphasize the phenomenon (here a real experienced life) as a definer of dasein.

Regards

Marcelo

Perhaps, Husserl's contention about the nature of consciousness, as a phenomenon, limited the ecological dimensionality of his theory. As a contemporary in Japan, Shoma Morita wrote on a 'peripheral' consciousness, in ways that resonated with indigenous views globally -- with a less anthropomorphic orientation. Without comparing theories in this space, perhaps a limitation (problem) is found in an analysis of the culture, politics and geography of scholars in that time.

Hi Peg, very interesting response, I will definitely take that up.

Hi Peg,

It's very complete response.

And it demonstrates that the phenomenon is a singular way to define the nature of consciousness, not at all on ecological approach, but on a real approach (it is singular, local, a-timed reality).

Thanks!

One of the clearest recent accounts of Husserl's phenomenology, esp. epoche, is psychologist Jim Morley's "It's always about epoche," which I attach as a PDF, since the volume its published in is hard to locate. Here's a summary that I wrote for another article:

"One aim of phenomenological research is to disclose and describe the various lived structures and dynamics of the natural attitude and lifeworld—for example, the mostly unnoticed importance of the lived body and places in peoples’ daily lives. In working toward a self-conscious understanding of the lifeworld and natural attitude, Husserl aimed toward the possibility of epoché—a liberated mode of encountering and understanding whereby we realize that experience and the world of that experience might be otherwise, both for ourselves and for others with similar or vastly different lifeworlds and natural attitudes. Phenomenological psychologist James Morley suggested that the epoché is ‘a profoundly challenging and painfully difficult undertaking’, the aim of which is to ‘hold back our existential commitment to the very existence of the world, i.e., the reality-positing power at the very core of consciousness itself”.

Drawing on phenomenological sociologist Alfred Schutz, Morley pointed out that there is, paradoxically, an epoché of the natural attitude whereby the experiencer naively assumes that the world can only be the way he encounters and understands it: ‘What he puts in brackets is doubt that the world and its objects might be otherwise than it appears to him’. This epoché of the natural attitude presupposes, for each person, a range of assumed worlds, each ‘distinguished from one another through a sort of amnesiac barrier that is the natural attitude’. Morley wrote:

Like soap bubbles, each region of meaning is self-contained until contact with another region pops one bubble into another. There is the world of aggressive office politics that bursts when one enters a place of religious worship, a world of fantasy or daydreaming that ceases when I am forced to attend to the car I am driving….

The intellectual device Husserl developed to circumvent the natural attitude and thereby to bring lifeworlds to more articulated presence is the phenomenological reduction, which refers to ways to facilitate understanding whereby the phenomenon of interest can be spotlighted in stronger and stronger light. On one hand, Husserl spoke of eidetic reductions, whereby one suspends as completely as possible all assumptions about the phenomenon or considers its nature from a particular thematic or disciplinary point of reference (as I will do shortly in regard to the lived body and place). On the other hand, Husserl spoke of a broader, deeper, lived understanding of the phenomenon—what he called the transcendental reduction, whereby I seek to suspend my taken-for-granted standpoint as a cognizant being and place myself in a more comprehensive and empathetic encounter with all phenomena and with my own existence as I live it.

Morley pointed out that post-structuralists and social-constructionists have incorrectly interpreted the transcendental reduction ‘as an absolute standpoint that [is] itself another variation of the foundationalism (or the metaphysics of presence) of scientism on the one hand or romantic idealism on the other’. Grounding his argument in the most-recently published Husserl texts, Morley contended that this postmodernist interpretation is erroneous because Husserl’s ‘transcendental’ did not involve ‘an isolated disembodied ego extending at a distance above the lived world of perceptual experience’. Rather, especially in his later work, Husserl’s transcendental reduction presupposed a field of existence always engorged in the bodily dimensions of human life: ‘corporeal experience is itself, for Husserl, the transcendental ground…. [T]he living present, which is the carnal presence of the body, is a spontaneously self-generating act’. As Husserl wrote,

How the consciousness originates through which my living body nevertheless acquires the ontic validity of one physical body among others, and how, on the other hand, certain physical bodies in my perceptual field come to count as living bodies, living bodies of “alien” ego-subjects—these are now necessary questions.

I think the problem with Husserl phenomenology is the fact that its phenomenological reduction brings to pure consciousness, while phenomenology is based on intentionality, which means a consciousness is a consciousness of something. so Husserl brings us back to an idealist stance although he has declared that phenomenology goes beyond the sterile debate between objective and subjective reality.

Hi Nihel,

I am not quite sure, as far as I understood Husserl's account he is interested in the a priori conditions of the possibility for the subject-object relation, i.e. to be conscious of something. He does indeed utilise the intentional relation (conscious of something) as a starting point, but the idea seems to be 

a) to trace the working of the transcendental ego - quite opposite to Kant's account - within the acts of being conscious - i.e. to trace the conditions of the possibility, while

b) trying to minimise every possible positing (Daseinssetzung) via the epoch and to describe the phenomena as they appear to consciousness to

c) achieve a reductive account that reveals the essential necessities of this subject-object relation.

As - especially within Ideas II - Husserl links these experiences to the body, albeit he is not interested in the physical functioning that may or may not facilitate these experiences (he speaks of real parts of the stream of consciousness), his focus are the reeelle parts - i.e. the phenomenological parts of the stream of consciousness.

That links the experiences to the body, but Husserl's position is not a naturalist one, nor an anti-naturalist one, he just remains ambitious in the question, as he takes his phenomenology to undercut the divide between idealism and naturalism.

Of course, Husserl can be accused that he starts with the intentional relation somehow presupposes being and that such an investigation will remain culturally influenced, but especially when it comes to his latter work (Analysen der passiven Synthesis) it becomes clear that the intentional object relation is a guiding beacon to facilitate investigations way beyond the intentional object.

Best

Tom

Hi,

Yes intentionality was a starting point but through the reductions he made he ended up by bringing everything to the consciousness. and so his idealist stance which is close to Hegel is disturbing that is why Heidegger focus on phenomenology as ontology. For Husserl, we must disengage ourselves from our involvement in our everyday life in order to free our consciousness to grasp the truth

For Heidegger, understanding is a mode of being and not a mode of knowledge

Hi again,

 as you rightfully say, intentionality was Husserl's starting-point. He wanted to capture that what is immanent to consciousness, i.e. the phenomenological experience as experienced. Based upon these experiences Husserl wanted to investigate what pre-conditions are necessary to constitute objects as the appear while still being based upon these experiences - which are always only provide the adumbrated aspects of the object under consideration. Husserl perceives this as a true science regarding the experiences. It is of course possible to regard any kind of account that utilises a constituting element as some form of idealism and thus disregard it, but I don't know if that actually correctly captures what Husserl was intending. Heidegger addresses a different question, while Husserl concerns himself with the a priori nature of the subject-object relation, Heidegger focuses upon the fundamental-ontology of being.

Husserl can of course - depending on how far wants to construe the concept of idealism - be accused of presupposing the existence of the object in the first place, however, Heidegger to make his account work, has to presuppose being in its most basic form...

I guess - depending on how both are approached - both have their shortcomings, which is - at the end of the day - Mathew's question, and I guess - depending on what sort of concept of idealism is applied - both would probably be captured by this critique. Nevertheless, the question remains as to whether a strictly physicalist account of life can ever be sufficient to capture the most well-known aspect of human life, which is to have a point of view.

Best

Tom