Autor: Lonergan, Bernard J.F.

Buch: Phenomenolgy and Logic: The Boston College Lectures on Mathematical Logic and Existentialism

Titel: Phenomenolgy and Logic: The Boston College Lectures on Mathematical Logic and Existentialism

Stichwort: Bedeutung d. Phänomenologie 1; fruchtbare Anwendung d. Methode in d. Psychologie; Husserl (Abschattung, Horizont), Maurice Merleau-Ponty

Kurzinhalt: So one part of the significance of phenomenology is that it has provided a tool that seems extremely fruitful and that appears in various types of investigations of a psychological character.

Textausschnitt: 2 The Significance of Phenomenology

2.1 Psychological Explorations

269c Secondly, we treat the significance of phenomenology. It has more or less swept the field in a variety of ways, and its first significance is that it provides a technique for the exploration and presentation of whole realms of matters of fact that are important but that have been neglected or treated superficially. In a psychology, for example, that calls itself scientific, there is a bias in favor of outer data, in favor of what can be measured, in favor of events that can be counted. Phenomenology, as contrasted with scientific psychology in that sense, opens up new vistas and possibilities in a manner that is comparable to Freud's discovery of significance in dreams, and far broader in its scope and implications. So phenomenology appears as a break with scientific tendencies in psychology. (Fs)

270a It also appears as a break with some older, more traditional psychologies. When compared to the results of phenomenological research, we find in traditional psychology as represented, for example, by William James or by the Scholastics either rough and ready statements, on the one hand, or on the other hand, when precision is attempted, a tendency to bog down in a set of indefinable 'somethings.' For example, when you start talking about consciousness, just precisely what are you talking about? How do you pin it all down? When you want to draw precise distinctions and get things accurately, there is needed a technique, and phenomenology provides such a technique. (Fs)

270b This may be illustrated by Husserl's distinction between Abschattung and Horizont, but it is found also in entirely different fields and in writers that have no philosophic connections either with Husserl or pretty well anyone else. For example, there is a very short little book written by Buytendijk, on the phenomenology of a meeting. The French translation, which is the only thing I've seen, published by Desclée in 1952, is entitled Phenomenologie de la rencontre.1 The book presents a description of just what is involved psychologically when one person meets another, what appears, what is manifest in a meeting when you really understand what it is for two people to meet. The description is brilliant, and it presents us with the human event, the meeting, in a way that otherwise one could not arrive at. Buytendijk wrote an earlier work, also published in French by Desclée in the same year, I think, or perhaps earlier: La femme, on woman's attitudes.2 Whether his earlier work on the essence and meaning of play, Wesen und Sinn des Spiels (Berlin, 1933), is of this type or not I do not know; I imagine it is but I have not seen it.3 At any rate, he is a representative of the use of phenomenology as a technique in psychological study. (Fs)

271a Again, Stephan Strasser has a recent book called Das Gemüt, which has been very highly praised in a review in The Philosophical Review, a publication from Cornell.4 It is a study of the emotions. He also has an earlier work, the French translation of which is called Le probleme de l'âme.5 It is a study of the respective objects of metaphysical psychology and empirical psychology, a study of how you go about stating just what you mean by the soul and how you investigate the soul. The approach again is phenomenological; Strasser is not a member of some particular philosophic school. (Fs)

271b Next, there is the work of Maurice Merleau-Ponty. He is a leader in the existentialist movement and a professor at the Sorbonne. In 1942 he wrote his Structure of Behavior, La structure du comportement,6 and in 1945 La phenomenologie de la perception, published in Paris by Gallimard.7 He is brilliant, in his account of perception, on the significance of one's own body in one's perceiving. He is, of course, engaged in an attack upon Sartre's sharp distinction between the pour-soi, the conscious, and the en-soi, the mere dead thing. The body is both pour-soi and en-soi at the same time, and it has to be both at the same time; you cannot account for perception without one's consciousness of one's body. In other words, the perceiving subject is spatiotemporal; we have a feeling of space and time, so to speak, in our bodies. This is what Marcel would call incarnation, the incarnate subject: not just the idealist subject or any merely observing subject, but the incarnate subject. The subject has to have a body to perceive. The body enters right into consciousness. Merleau-Ponty's treatment varies time and again, and very convincingly. He has no philosophic commitments, in the sense that he is not tied down to some particular philosophic school. His work offers very useful material, I believe. I am not at all an expert in his views, but I think that anyone interested in psychology would find Merleau-Ponty extremely stimulating and probably very helpful. Again, he presents the incarnate subject, the subject as the subject of feelings in a body, the body of the subject. You cannot have either the body or the perceiving subject as intelligible without bringing the other in; you have to have the body to understand the subject, and the subject to understand the body. What is the human body? It is the incarnation of meaning, of a principle of meaning. And of course this ties in with the old-time axiom that a person by the age of thirty is responsible for his own face. (Fs) (notabene)

272a There has been a study of Merleau-Ponty by de Waelhens in 1951 at Louvain, Une philosophie de l'ambiguité (A Philosophy of Ambiguity).8 It is a study of Merleau-Ponty's existentialism, but in it you get a good deal of his psychology. (Fs)

272b So one part of the significance of phenomenology is that it has provided a tool that seems extremely fruitful and that appears in various types of investigations of a psychological character. (Fs)