Edmund Husserl (1859-1938)

Prelude to the Twentieth Century
Presentation 12 of 13

Edmund Husserl (1859-1938)
Ideas. The Frozen Reaction, Eidetic Processes of Vision,
and the Phenomenological World-View
Presented by Roger Weir
Thursday, September 20, 1984

Transcript:
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The date is September 20th, 1984. This is the 12th lecture in a series of lectures by Roger Ware on the prelude to 20th century. Tonight's lecture is on Hoosta Raul who lived 1859 to 1938 ideas, the frozen reaction identity processes of vision and the phenomenological worldview.
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Will you come tonight to Edmond who is extraordinarily difficult and who is usually not broached in any lecture theories outside of some of the graduate schools of philosophy and places like the university of Chicago or Harvard. So bear with me tonight. Okay. Usually we have to go into something that is taxing. Unfortunately, this is the third lecture in a row that's been taxing for me. So if I stray a little bit, uh, forgive me, I'll have to just consult the text more often. We've been tracing the roots of the 20th century. I mean, we have found that the 19th century had an undercurrent of almost McCobb premonition of things to come. And throughout the 19th century, though, ostensibly, it was a time of great confidence in materialism. There was, as we have seen in genius after genius,
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They
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Hope that somehow a spiritual insight would be delivered to man to compliment this burgeoning control of nature. By now, our series has led us all the way through the great gyrations of individuals and the artistic world like Strindberg or Monet Goudy. And we come tonight to a philosopher who lived contemporaneously with all of these individuals. And so to understand his drive for clarity, you have to juxtapose him now with the individuals that we have already looked at, these lectures do exist on cassette. And if you get interested, you can always refer back to them and piece them together. In fact, I'm speaking from a standpoint that is outside of the chronological sequence. So even though you experienced it here as a chronology, I'm speaking from a montage pattern of retrospection. And from that retrospection, I would prefer tonight to begin with who's wrong by quoting from his last published work, Withrow born 1859 lived on until 1938.
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And he lived on into the Germany of 1938, whose role was of Jewish parent age. And so he had been hushed up since 1933 and after two or three years of this intolerable strain, this forest Highlands, not only a governmental sign silence, that was forced upon him, not just being banished from the universities, he wasn't allowed to go in, but it was the silence imposed upon him by a developing ediology that saw who still has the archetypical threat to its own stability. Bart was who struggle more than any other person alive at that time in Germany who understood the logical disarray of national socialism. And so it was with great pride and determination that the aging who through age 76, went to the city of Vienna in 1935 outside at that time, the purview of the Nazi authorities. Okay. And he delivered a speech that took two and a half hours to deliver the acclaim was instant international and universal.
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The title of that speech was the crisis of European man. He had hoped to go back to Germany and maintain himself in silence, but the developing international situation called upon him just a month later to go to Prague. And again, whose throat delivered a scathing attack upon the ideational jungle that had come up in the Europe of 1935, these two speeches were put together for publication. And because of the times, their publication could only be the effected in a, what we would call today, a travel log brochure, a little journal for immigrants health. They're all had wanted to add a third part with third lecture to the published work, but it was never sent. He increasingly fell ill and died a few years later in 1938 April, I would like to read to you two paragraphs that constitute the third section. The notes were found after he was dead years later after the war was over, all of his works were saved by a graduate student named Fen Reda who took them to live on in Belgium for the duration of the second world war.
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And after the war was over, they opened up at the university of Lavonne, the historical archives, and they have been translating his work ever since who throat was an extraordinary genius. And his method of thinking was to think out loud on paper. And he literally wrote down every thought for decades. He has worked round to some 40,000 pages of detailed notes, written daily, hourly, so that all of his thought was transferred publicly to paper. Did he learn to special, um, um, grip a shorthand? I think it's called in Germany, the Gable Berger script. It's a stenographic shorthand script. So here are the two paragraphs, the last written things, uh, public import from Edmund hustle.
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Let us summarize the fundamental notions of what we have sketched here. The crisis of European existence, which manifests itself and countless symptoms of a corrupted life is no obscure fate, no impenetrable destiny. Instead it becomes manifestly understandable. Again, the background of the philosophically discoverable Cureology of European history, developing direction scene as a whole, as a pattern, as an emergent evolutionary development, as a presupposition of this understanding. However, the phenomenon Europe used to be grasped in its essential core to get the concept of what is Contra essential in the present crisis. The concept Europe would have to be developed as the historical teleology of infinite goals of reasoning and saying here that in order to understand what has happened to us, we have to be able to envision what is here now. And it is a creation which we could call Europe, which has come into being through an intentional, purposeful activity on the parts of millions of individuals.
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But even though this seems like such a large infinite time to try and trace down what has actually occurred, what the present you're really is as an entity, he says, this can be done. There is a methodology. In fact, it spent his whole life developing the very methodology by which man can perceive the transcendental logic of forms, which so astonishingly eclipse, the natural horizon of understanding. And this is what his life's work was all about. That. Now at a time of great crisis, he feels that he must offer this up. And so he says it would have to be shown how the European world was born from ideas of reason. In other words, from the spirit of philosophy, that Europe is an ideal world that has been born from man's reason. It has not grown naturally. It is not a natural phenomenon is not an inevitable course of events, but has been made by an intentional, purposeful direction of reason, which in fact has been impaired and flawed for centuries.
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And now we read the world, wind up this, the crisis could then become clear as the seeming collapse of rationalism still, as we said, the reason for the downfall of a rational culture does not lie in the essence of rationalism itself, but only in its exteriorized nation, its absorption into quote, naturalism and quote. Objectivism does not that man's mind is impaired it's that in its externalization, in its objectified creation, it's seeking to create a suto nature by imposing man's forms upon nature. The world comes into being, and this is not to be seen as a deficient function of reasoning, but that the myth application of reason has brought that he concludes the crisis of European existence can end in only one of two ways since 19 five in the ruin of a Europe alienated from its rational sense of life, fallen into a barbarian hatred of spirit or in the rebirth of Europe, from the spirit of philosophy, through a heroism of reason that will definitively overcome naturalism Europe's greatest danger is weariness let off as good Europeans do battle with this danger of dangers with the sort of courage that does not sure even the endless battle if we do that is from the annihilating configuration of disbelief from the fiery torrent of despair regarding the west mission to humanity from the ashes of the great weariness, the scenics of a new life, a new inner life of the spirit will arise as the underpinning of a great in distance human future for the spirit alone.
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All of it all is in mortal whose role reaching that platform, being able to speak for the mute millions who were trapped, not just by being refused a podium from which to speak, but from having had imposed upon them and missed the education that made it impossible for them to speak with clarity, with the authority of someone who understood he was born in 1859 in what turns out to be now, um, Czechoslovakia pose nets. He will later in life marry a girl Melvina from both, um, who throw born of Jewish parents will convert to Lutheran evangelical Lutheranism in his thirties and increasingly through his life will become religious in the sense that all religions seemed to him to be equally valid and equally invalid at the same time who throw by the age of 17 had shown some promise in intellectual capacities. And so he applied and was received into his first university experience.
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He went to the university of Leipzig for a few years. Then he transferred to Berlin, not the university of Berlin, but to, um, Frederick Wilhelm university in Berlin, and finally would transfer for his graduate work to the university of Vienna while he was in university. His main interest was in mathematics, actually that function of mathematics more properly designated as arithmetic, but they arithmetic for Husserl at this time was an analytical tool, not just the simple arithmetic problems that are given in grade school, but the manipulation of the functions of reason and arithmetic order in order to pursue various technical analytical theses. The development of this led to she has writing of his doctorate dissertation on the subject of the philosophy of arithmetic. His undergraduate education in fact had been undertaken at Frederick Wilhelm university in Berlin, in conjunction with a very famous professor professor. At that time, it was extraordinarily famous, a man named Franz Brentano.
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Now Brentano had been a Catholic priest, but in 1870, when the papel bull was up promulgated that the Pope's judgment was installable Brentano was struck by the impossibility of a human being, having infallible judgment, even the Pope and by 1873, bran Tato gave up his priesthood and became a professor of philosophy. And actually at that time, philosophy and psychology were very close together. Think in your minds now, uh, the American William James, who was a psychologist, but at the same time, it was a great philosophy. So for Brentano began to discover for himself the ways in which thinking processes, reason, logic routes itself, he would describe later on in his famous book of 1874 on the psychology of objective thinking that reason must root itself in the eminent object. We must in order to think clearly how a clear object in mind, what we're thinking about is this purpose of newness of thought that allows it to have a clear structure.
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And so the object of the thought becomes the anchor as it were for an intentional quality in thought. And Brentano then described how the object becomes then an eminent truthfulness. And as we direct our thoughts to an object, whether it is or imaginative or [inaudible], or even abstract, it is the clarity of seeing the object that guarantees us to understand the purposes of our thought. Here is the road that who throw will develop into his phenomenological method. Brentano had a very talented student named Carlos dunk, his oldest student, who had gone on to the university of Vienna Vienna at this time towards the 1880s, 1890s was becoming the center of a culture, an intellectual circle that would in fact, go on into the 1910s and the 1920s Brentano classes were the root of all of the developments that happened in Vienna, among his students, besides Carl Stone and Edmund Husserl were personages like Sigmund Freud and Tomas Massara, who later became the first president of checklists Lavaca.
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So we had a number of very influential students, students who later became influential. Many of them moved to Vienna and Vienna dusk in the early 1880s became a melting pot for all of these different nationalities coming in with the idea of discovering a new method to free man from the jungle, which was in coaching upon him. The jungle at that time was seen to be a dense materialism later on. Of course, when it transformed itself into a ravenous Videology, it was only individuals like Freud and Husserl who had the intellectual acumen to be able to penetrate through and see how the development had based itself upon a misunderstanding poignant misunderstanding of man's nature, who throw, went to Vienna to be an assistant. They called in those days in Germany, the assistant to a professor at private docent was an unpaid assistant, like a teaching assistant, a guest lecturer who was not paid.
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They usually made some preparations for their keep your room and board, but you received no salary. So he became the private docent for Carl stump, who was also working on developing Brent house ideas in terms of psychology, but increasingly stumped came across a barrier. And the barrier was that the nature of classical logic in the west, literally for bay mine to move freely. Yeah. Reflecting back upon his own psychological condition. Yes. He could experiment with someone else. He could experiment with animals. He could experiment in many various vicarious ways, but it was almost impossible for him to reflect back upon himself because there was a conundrum here in the very fin in which Western thought had developed. So withdrawal under some and taking their cue driving. Uh, Brent time has finally, I brought the wrong volume of logical investment. I have to do this from memory.
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Finally worked up a series of papers and brought them in 1900, 1900, 1901. There were two volumes. I unfortunately brought the wrong volume. I had all my notes in volume, one logical investigations in this monumental publication whose role brought together all of the problems and gave a description of the fact that our understanding is limited because we have no sense of bonafide, dependable interior structure upon which we can hang the results of our investigations, psychological investigations, not only psychological investigations, but psychological investigations with a logical form. How do we find some way to organize them so that we can depend upon they're being ordered and staying ordered? What's your role in the logical investigations? One of the truly great works of philosophy. It stands with a dialogues Plato and the various books of Aristotle. He has one of the truly great works in man's achievement. He just covered in a series of, I think it was six logical investigations with a prologue that we have the capacity to locate for ourselves, a dependable structure.
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If we separate ourselves from naive naturalism, if we put in place of our natural response, a pause, a holding of response, which naturally would come about and allow the condition that would elicit that response in our mind to manifest itself as an insightful mental content, by piecing together these mental contents, one could discover the essential structure of the mind it's ordering structure, regardless of what the premium stations were of the historical time, or if the natural condition the mind would eventually deliver of itself a formal structure with a methodological approach. In other words, the logical investigations of Husserl in 1900 developed. What if 10 amount to a Protestant logic, a Protestant yoga logic, which allowed for the ideational current of the time to become destined bodied on acute observer from the confused conditions that promoted it in first place on the basis of logical investigations wrote was offered a chair philosophy.
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He went to Freiburg and brace law, and he stayed there from 1901 to 1916, constantly working. This was a period where the descriptions of who thrill at this time were of a man who seemingly was an endless monologue and the students would come in and they would hear him. And when the lectures were over, his role would go for a walk and the students would go with them and he would keep talking. And, uh, all this time she has a home life. Incidentally was well covered by his wife. He was married in 1887. He had three children, two sons, one of became a mathematician and one, a lawyer and a daughter Elizabeth, who married a very famous art historian, Jacob Rosenberg, who wrote that great, uh, two volume life of Rembrandt among other things, an expert in Dutch painting, she handled the home scene. This was still an age where there were, pardon me, where there were women who tended to toward the life of the family, rather than some, uh, uh, imaginative, uh, journey, which they might take by themselves in tandem with a man's mental journey through life.
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She handled the home scene. This role was never capable. Really. He was the typical absent-minded professor, always talking, always writing, always thinking, but the students loved him because of his honesty, his openness and his insightfulness. And during these years, this will put together a series of little publications, many of them, uh, don't amount to more than 50 or 60 pages. And it cost about $25, a middle paperbacks from home. Uh, there are quite a few of them and, uh, I've managed over the years to pick up almost all at this time she was developing what came to be known as the phenomenological method. The phenomenological method was delineated, a very tiny publication around 19 0 5, 19 0 6 called the idea of phenomenology. So I'll take you into this for just a minute.
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The first page, in fact is not the first page, but a sort of an introduction. Who's thrill being the kind of thinker. He was loved to write introductions to what he was going to say, and then pack everything into the introduction so much so that he would later on have the tendency to write introductions to the introduction, that kind of a thinker very compact, because what he was doing, he was literally crystallizing out of psychological experience and mental structure, and then super crystallizing out of the mental structure, an intuitive point. And that's why later on whose role surprisingly, why always think her phenomenologist says as being the most, a material of all people became a spiritual sphere. So he writes in the introduction and then he refuses to call it an introduction. He simply calls up the train of thoughts in the lectures. This is the train of thoughts from the electric fan.
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He begins right away. Characteristic natural thinking in science in everyday life is on troubled by the difficulties concerning the possibility of cognition. In other words, we just go out and we think that we're thinking simplest thing well, but we are not. And there's a problem. So he writes philosophical thinking is circumscribed by one position toward the problems concerning the possibility of cognition. Notice the, the innuendo here, not concerning cognition, but only tentatively the possibility of cognition. In other words, we don't know, and it's best to be honest with ourselves and not presuppose that we are in fact, glibly going on, understanding this current of thought, incidentally leads not only directly, uh, in its time to logical positivism in a certain way, but it also leads later on after the social experience of the 1930s in Germany, to a critique of understanding, which is called today, the sociology of knowledge, uh, Carl Manheim's, uh, etiology and utopia would be a classic example of something written in the late thirties, based on this kind of an insight, the sociology of knowledge.
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So he writes who throw REITs, the perplexities in which reflection about the possibility of a cognition that gets at the things themselves becomes entangled. In other words, we would like to think very clearly we need objects for our thought to fix on intentionality here, but we get our intentions all entangled because we confuse the objects. First of all. And second of all, we confuse ourselves because we're not clear about what we're doing. And then to make matters worse. We go along as if we have already established something and we try to live on that basis. And by the time we're 50, we're burned out. We no longer try to make sense of the world. We just hope that they'll leave us alone long enough to rest.
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So they're all writing then how can we be sure that cognition Accords with things as they exist in themselves? How can we know that? What we're thinking is accurately pinned upon the objects of our thought he uses the term in quotation gets at them later on from of his disciples who became existentialists. No phenomenologist would start using hyphenated phrases galore. You tried to read the sign insight being in time and you run across every major word is hyphenated. And by the time you read 200 pages of that, you realize that the language that we're speaking here is your poetry, that human life gets along in a very easy poetic level. And when we try to make specific sense out of what we're actually saying, and actually talking about, we quickly grind to a hyphenated halt.
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What do things in themselves care about our ways of thinking anyway, and the logical rules governing know we're not getting much help from them. Well, wait a minute. Yeah. Thinking about someone else who was thinking about us, we've got, because if I'm the object of your thinking, and you're the object of my thinking, we could at long last, hopefully in some way, hash it out and find a court. And if we cannot, then the problems will disclose themselves quite readily. The thrill later on in his life, we'll talk about horizons that every object is surrounded by a context which we could call its horizon and included in this horizon is a delegated inter subjectivity from math, that every object that we see, every object that we address ourselves to is neatly tucked in the, into this inner subjective horizon that we all share together. And in a way in a very mysterious and yet very scientifically exactly way.
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We live in a community world through which we try to extract ourselves by pseudo thinking by phony thinking leads to all kinds of problems. One of the problems is to think that man could be ethically autonomous from the natural world in which he is occurs. And this of course is one of the brutalizing ideas of national socialism skipping over in here, who throw still writing in the idea of phenomenology writes, then the first step in the phenomenological orientation. And he writes right away, we become dubious, whether such a scientist at all possible. Is there a science of thinking? Is there an order of thinking so exact that we can make a science of it just like physics or just like chemistry so forth. So right away it says we become dubious. Whether it's such a science is at all possible. Yeah. That questions all cognition, free cognition chosen as a starting point.
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This question, how then can it ever begin? This is like a problem of ultimate skepticism. Uh, the classic statement by George Santayana and skepticism animal faith. You can arrive at skepticism as a conclusion, but you cannot begin with it because you're stopped dead in your tracks if you're at all. So he writes, Pulsara writes this however is only specious difficulty in being called into question. Cognition is neither disavowed nor regarded as in every sense, downfall. The question is about some accomplishments, impute it to cognition. Whereas in fact, it is even an open question, whether the, whether the difficulties pertain to all possible types of cognition at any rate, you have to have a theory of knowledge is to concern itself with the possibility of cognition. It must have cognitions of the possibilities of cognition, which as such are beyond question. In other words to begin, we have to have axioms.
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We have to have assumed basis. We have to have working conditions. What are those working conditions, one working condition, which we have, and here he's pointing back. And he says, here are the Cartesian method of doubt, provide a starting point. Rene Descartes. I think therefore I am without dog. There is cookie tail. There is thinking going on. So we can assume that that function is actually happening. We don't have to get ourselves into an infinite regress of saying, is there a possibility that the possibility that we're actually doing it is true. We don't have to do that. We can assume that it's happening. So let's take it from there. So then he writes, these are our first data, our first absolute data.
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What follows naturally is our first question in the theory of knowledge, what distinguishes but certainty in these examples from the uncertainty and other instances of alleged cognition, what is the difference? What is the difference here? Danny goes through and finally comes up to say, involved in the objective sciences is the dullness of transcendence. This is one of the key concepts in, um, who throws, thought what involved in the objective? Science is the doubtfulness of transcendence. The question, how can cognition reach beyond itself? How can it reach a being that is not to be found within the confines of consciousness? There was not this difficulty with the seeing cognition of the Koji Thompson. In other words, if we are thinking, we don't have to be concerned with any metaphysical extension of it right away, these problems will come out and who throw will never shirk them. But from the beginning, we just take the experience of thinking he has a veracity and that beginning thought and thinking actually does take place. Then it has to be themed clearly and here Lucille says we count. Okay, problem.
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The problem is that we are naive about our thought and we aren't, uh, naive exactly to this extent that the first step toward clarity now is lift the genuinely eminent or what we would mean here. The adequately self given beyond question that, which is transcendent, not genuinely eminent, I may not use. Therefore we make a distinction and he calls this the phenomenological reduction that we have to spend our acceptance or our commitment to any transcendental implications and reduce ourselves down to the purely phenomenological objectivity of the moment he writes. I must exclude all that is fundamentally positive. Yes, it's there. Yes. It's functioning all the time. Yes, it's important. But in order to get back to it, we're going to have to go along way around and we're going to have to go by a scientific method whose role will develop a geometry of meaning.
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Literally it'll take him a long time. He worked on it through 1916 and then was appointed to the chair of philosophy in Holland at the university of Guttman kin. And he was there until his retirement in 1928. And then after his retirement, he spent the next seven or eight years trying to refine his work and he left quite a legacy. So here we have the beginning and he will call this phenomenological reduction. And I dedic abstraction my dedic coming from the Greek ideas that there are clear and distinct perceptions. And that in order to think we're going through now have to bracket, as he says, what we are thinking about and hold it suspended as it were, we're going to have to do what the aestheticians tell us to do to have the childlike, openness suspend all our presuppositions and just hold our perceptions as it were in suspension.
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So that we have to imagine to ourselves that we're just going to bracket whole phenomenologically. What the object of our thought is, which means that we're going to have to be clear enough to see that we're thinking about one thing, that there is a meaningfulness that becomes focused and pointed this right away. It begins to just glove the yoga like method of booster. So Western yoga very, very effective. So he writes towards the end of this introduction, thus this marvelous correlation between the phenomenon of cognition and the object of cognition reveals itself everywhere. There is a correlation. What we keep in mind thus clearly actually does exist in the natural world. So he writes now let us notice that the task of phenomenology or rather the area of its time and inquiries is no such trivial things as merely looking merely opening one's eyes already in the first and simplest cases and the lowest forms of cognition, the greatest difficulties confront pure analysis.
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And the inspection of the essences is easy to talk of correlation in general, but it is very difficult to clarify the way in which an object of cognition constitutes itself in cognition. Because when we suspend all of the implications, all of the idealizations, all the transcendent, functionings, and associations that would normally come in, if we discipline ourselves committed, we realized that there's a very peculiar correlation that happens that man's mind, whatever it is, is a very accurate recorder of this world can be trained to be almost let's use a political term picture. Perfect. We can see this world exactly as it is accurately, whose role later on will make a great deal on this capacity. And the task is just this within the framework of pure evidence, the object itself within the framework of pure evidence, or given us to trace all forms of give enough at all correlations and to conduct an, the Luther a Dory analysis.
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So he means to say, we now have before us a single dependable procedure, now we have to extend that procedure and rotate that procedure throughout the world of meaningful things, meaningful acts, this he will describe. And finally, in the second lecture on the idea of phenomenology one may now construe transcendence in one sense or the other, or at first even ambiguously both together, but transcendence is both the initial and the central problem of the critique of cognition. That is when we do this enough, we see that the problem that we came up to at first is in fact, the central problem of the mind that it tends to one to transcend the object all the time. It's a universal characteristic of the mind. Now we have to discipline ourselves to keep ourselves phenomenologically reduced that the very natural tendency again and again, even with the disciplined mind is to seek the transcendental levels, to seek the horizon, which surrounds the object, almost like a horse, going to what Booth's role will never ignore this.
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And well, eventually when we come back from the break, write a very powerful work on the transcendental object, which is in the mind, let's take a break and whose role riots then thus to each psychic process, their correspondence one, my right at last, the device of phenomenological reduction, a pure phenomenon, which exhibits its intrinsic eminent essence as an absolute tagine each eclipse process have a core identifiable core. And we now have a method that we can get at that core acquaintances at this time were mainly students, obviously a man thinking seriously on these lines year in and year out, uh, finds very few individuals that he can talk to.
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One of the individuals that he could talk to who influenced her thrill at this time greatly was William [inaudible] very famous historian, famous in Europe, unheard of in United States pattern and meaning and history, thoughts on history and society. [inaudible] influenced thought to reflect on the historical situation. What is continuing psychic look process that we have history deal thigh. In fact, writing and the chapter in here entitled meaning in history, Southern title, and this section, the order of the human world, very, very profound. He writes it's as follows. And this would have been the type of content that whose role was getting at the same time as he was writing. These works on phenomenological method. Delphi writes everything in an age, derives its meaning from the energy, which gives it its fundamental tendency. Thus, this expresses itself in stone or on canvas and deeds or words. He had objectifies itself in the constitution and legislation of the nations hill by the historian comprehends former ages.
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And from its point of view, the philosopher tries to interpret the meaning of the world. All the expressions of the energy, which determines the age are akin to each other, same fabric, fabric and meaning, but task of analysis, he has defined the unity of valuation and purpose in different expressions of life. We have to find out what that purpose was. That's central synthesizing purpose and discover the calibrated measurement by which the valuation delegated from that purpose in fuse the age with meaning, and this is the task of analysis and right still fi as the expressions tend towards absolute valuations and goals, the circle in which human beings of that age are enclosed completes itself. As we get more to the ultimate, the more profound we see that the age not only has a pattern, but it has a shape. It has a whole shape for in it.
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The opposite tendencies are contained as well. We saw how the age imprints it's stamped on them as well and how the dominant tendencies inhibit their free development becomes powerful. And we think we move casually until we understand our age until we understand the sheep of purpose of the energy of our time. And then we say, we are not the free as we thought. That's the whole system of interactions of the age is determined from within, by the length between life, the world of feelings, valuations, and goals, every activity which becomes part of this context is historic cool.
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This is very powerful because yields in the 20th century, finally, the understanding that we're going to have to understand our history great before we know what we are, that there is no, no way to tell outside of history where we are. We have to develop an orientation in terms of history, the context forms the horizon of the age and through it. Finally, the meaning of every part in the system of the age is determined. This is the century of ages and APAC on themselves in which the problem of the meaning and significance of history is solved. Very powerful idea.
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So strong taking this in realizing slowly through the years that these are real problems. One does not just simply talk about nature in mind, but there's ongoing flow of context here of history. And increasingly for him as he realizes, this is the fact that we interiorize meaning through a historical process. And that in fact, a real object to direct the phenomenological method. Two is the internal sense of time consciousness. And this becomes a real threshold, a gateway through which who throws clot finally like a searching beam eliminates a whole dusty pyramid of presuppositions functioning almost like on automatic in Western civilization conditioning, the inner man. Now we never even knew it was there. We had forgotten all about it. And that had been put there positive. They're kept there from millennia in our psyche and left running. And we never knew it. We could never see it.
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And yet we were reliving it over and over again in 1913, in order to catch himself up published the first volume of the work, which eventually become ideas, general introduction to pure phenomenology. The procedure here. If you can, you can see he's writing the idea of phenomenology. He's writing introductions to the logical investigations after the logical investigations, he's writing ideas and introduction to phenomenology. In other words, he's like a professor who, as he learns more, goes back over the same ground again and tightens it up. He's rejecting now by implication the earlier he saying, no, no, I didn't have it right. I hadn't thought this through. There's much more there. So he goes back and ideas is the first time that we catch withdrawal coming back to his material and reshaping it on a major scale. He writes up how everybody knows that natural knowledge begins with experience. We know that, but it remains within experience. Thus in that theoretical position, which we call the natural standpoint, the total field of possible research is indicated by a single world single word, which is world. We can never move beyond that. And in fact, we'll see in the last lecture, in this series, the end of Western thought, cause we're getting very close to the end of Western thought here, consigned we'll begin. The track taught us logical philosophical with the first statement. The world is everything. That is the case
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Is the
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Ultimate beginning of any logical system for the Western mind because the Western mind, or to move beyond that has to become universal. We have to shed those Western clothes and be naked under the stars. And we're moving there because who Thoreau is guiding us first class exactly through the corridors that we had been moving rather unconsciously for centuries and showing us where it leads and unbelievably just like a fairy tale as this was being done. The world was living out this nightmare
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More and more day
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By day, year by year until it reached. And the late 1930s, they had popped the OSIS of evil. So he is writing here then that they largest form of the real, which we come to phenomenologically can be summed up in the phrase, being in
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The world
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As it is in this being in the world as an event, as an object of thought that all meanings, coincide there, whatever meaningfulness, whatever purpose nest that we could discover. And in individual acts of thinking all come together at that. So that the shape of our being in the world phenomenologically reduced and seeing becomes the navel through which a real psychology would flow following the logical method of Hooterville. And in fact, existential psychotherapy comes into being from just this insight carried on by individuals like Ludvig Ben inspire her and made our boss right up until our own day. Um, just graphically. One of the insights
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I, the central therapy is that we have an orientation and of the orientation. Yes, not fully center. It turns into a neurotic pattern increasingly.
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And because of its unstability tends to revolve upon itself and produce shapes, which we
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Never intended them to have, but which come to dominate.
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And the more that we feed energy into these shapes to try to stabilize herself, the more the archetypal negative comes in and dominates us. You. And we'll cover this from a psychological standpoint, in his great essay on vote town, that there comes a point when a culture cannot help itself has already succumbed and is manipulated from within no one is in charge. No one is at home. It is then that the individual, my stand-up, he has a, a deal late in his life. The world is the totality of objects that can be known through experience known in terms of orderly, theoretical thought on the basis of direct presence experience. We look at this, then there is a psychophysical nature, physiology, psychology, and so forth. All the mental sciences also come under this head history, the cultural sciences, the sociological disciplines of every kind whereby we provisionally. Leave it an open question. Whether we are to be held similar to the natural sciences are placed in opposition to them be themselves accepted as natural sciences or sciences of an essentially new type sciences of experience. He will write an idea of are sciences of fact, the acts of cognition, which underlie are experiencing posit the real in individual form. This is why the individual accounts is
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The individual that has to do this.
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Only the individual, actually in fact, posits the real in the world. And if no one does this, it does not happen if only one person does it, it happens. Thus, the individual is actually the savior of the real regardless. Well, how many millions live in abrogated fantasy? Who's thrilled then in ideas says the basic move in this method is the suspension of the natural standpoint, that there is a thesis. This was a Greek use of the term thesis of viewpoint. A standpoint get up. The ordinary standpoint of the individual is a natural one, but we have seen that the natural standpoint naive way leads to all kinds of complications and under the pressure of uncontrollable historical avalanches. If we simply take it's natural, we will be crushed in a jungle of absurdity so that we have to take control. That's basically take control of our own possibilities, our own existential life and order it by a rigorous Bree thinking.
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And re-experiencing it is then he writes an ideas, did a page 1 0 3. It is then that we have an ordered being in the succession of time when we put this world together, right? Then we have an ordered succession, an ordered being in the succession of time. This world now present to me and in every waking. Now, obviously. So how's its temporal horizon input in both directions. It's known and unknown, intimately alive, and it's on alive, past and future moving freely within the moment of experience, which brings what is present into my intuitional grasp letter writers. We'll call this Western. Then I can follow up these connections of the reality, which immediately surrounds me. I can shift my standpoint in space and time look this way. And that turn temporarily forward and backwards. In other words, he's saying, man is free to change his life and make an ordering of it.
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And then being mobile, what's that integrity and actually do something in this world, actually do it really do it, not speculatively, not fantasizing way, not under the pressure of controlling other illnesses, but in authentic life. We may now do that. I can shift my standpoint in space in time and look this way. And that turn temporarily forwards and backwards. I can provide for myself constantly new and more or less clear, meaningful perceptions and representations and images. Also more or less clear in which I make intuitive will to myself, whatever can possibly exist really or supposedly in the steadfast order of space and time in this way, when consciously awake, I find myself at all times, and without my ever being able to change this, that's in relation to a world which through its constant changes, remains one and ever the same because the authentic establishment of one's being in the world established is not only the voracity of one's being, but the veracity of the world.
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And that veracity maintains itself, even though the exterior presentation of it seems to change. Thus man perceives truth suffers through the premiere stations with integrity because he can see the true Joe, like all the arguments are not convincing because one simply knows it is thus continually present for me and I, myself am a member of it. I belong to this world. Therefore this road is not there for me as a mirror world of facts and affairs, but with the same immediacy as a world of values, they world of goods, a practical world, and thus ethics becomes a practical science without further effort. In my part, I find the things before me, furnish not only with the qualities that benefit their positive nature, but with value characters such as beautiful or ugly, agreeable, disagreeable, pleasant, unpleasant, so forth things in their immediacy. Stand there as objects to be used the table with its books, the glass to drink from buffets, the so forth, these values and practicalities.
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They too belong to the constitution of the actually present objects, as such as learning to see the real learning, to piece it together, learning the responsibility that he must be real unto himself. And thus the objects in the world are not played things, especially the values that he holds are not just little roles that he would play. They actually exist. They're true. He can actually make this world have veracity. So writing in this vein and I have to skip over everything. Now he uses the Greek term on page one, two again, 12 ideas, and then I'll leave this book aside. He uses the Greek term that Pokay, um, Epsilon PI will make her cry. Um, new P O C H E L K. We can now let the universal application and the sharply defined a novel sense. We have given it step into the place of the Cartesian attempt at universal doubt, but on good grounds, we limit the universality of this apple, okay.
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Through this method of bracketing, we put out of action, the general thesis, which brought us to the essence of the natural standpoint. We have to learn to suspect the natural well natural standpoint in a disciplined way we placed in brackets, whatever it includes, respecting the nature of being this entire natural world, therefore, which is continually there for us present to our hand and will remain. There is a fact world of which we continue to be conscious, even though it pleases us to put it now in brackets. If I do this as I am fully free to do, I do not. Them deny this world as though I were a sofas. I do not doubt that it is there as though I was a skeptic, but I use the phenomenological EPO, K, which completely bars me from using any judgment that concerns spatial temporal existence that's uses the German term here does, which is the central German Heidegger's philosophy, not all sciences, which relate to this natural world though.
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They stand never. So firm to me though, they fill me with wondering admiration though. I am far from any thought of objecting them to them. In the least degree, I disconnect them all. I make absolutely no use of their standards. I do not appropriate as approval. One of the propositions that enter into their systems, even though their evidential value was perfect. I take none of them. No one of them serve me for a foundation so long. That is, as it is understood in the way the sciences themselves understand it as a truth concerning the realities of this world. So we have that a modified consciousness, the possibility of a modified consciousness of an ethically alert, exacting consciousness, which if need be, can stand free from the entire world, that whatever cultural pressures they exert, no influence, whatever the political scale. I have no effect, whatever the neurotic syndromes of the age and the individuals there without any kind of a connection in this Western here, yoga man philosophically has learned to be free from the Whirlpool of the world and to see quite accurately for himself in terms of universal structures, consciousness has become like a mathematical mind, mobile accurate, true, and builds them a whole new relationship with the world and this relationship of building.
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Yes, but how Digger we all develop in formal and transcendental love in 1929. I don't have time to go into what I felt like for you here. This is an apical making bomb. The formal entrance had dumped a logic of 1929, completely eclipses all of the other work of history and sets up then a building capacity for man on a transcendental level. Not on speculation, not on him as metaphysics of just hopefulness, but an exact science of logical form, which relates to his true spirit. And in this way, this will prepare a wife or a man, even in a world, totally gone mad to discover himself in his truth and to carry on. We're having to leave out the famous Cartesian meditations of 1931. He began traveling in the thirties until the 1933. He forbidden to speak forbidden to give lectures. He was virtually and literally a danger to the national socialist state.
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He was a very famous man. He was known throughout Europe. He was known as a man of impeccable integrity and he refused to buckle under because he had already perfected a method by which they had no effect on him whatsoever. And then you could speak as peace and dead. He begins and we'll begin here and AMD here where the house crisis of European man speech, 1935 in this lecture, I will venture an attempt to wake a new interest in the offs treated theme of the European crisis by developing the philosophical historical idea of European man. And so far as in dust developing the topic, I bring out the essential function that philosophy and its ramifications in our sciences have to perform in this process. The European crisis will also be given added clarification. And then he writes in here, the European nations are sick. Europe itself, they say is in critical condition, nor in this situation, are they lacking all sorts of nature therapies?
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We are in fact, quite overwhelmed by the torrent of naive and extravagant suggestions for reform. But why is it that? So luxuriantly developed human sciences here failed to perform the service that in their own sphere, the natural sciences performed. So competently, those who are familiar with the spirit of modern science will not be embarrassed. We're an answer. The greatness of the natural sciences consists in their refusal to be content with an observational empiricism sense for them, all descriptions of nature are, but methodological procedures for arriving at exact explanations, ultimately physical, chemical explanations. They are of the opinion that merely descriptive sciences tie us to the finite attitudes of our earthly environment world. And so he will introduce the fact what is to be said then if the whole mode of thought that reveals itself in this presentation rests on fatal prejudices and is in its results, partly responsible for Europe sickness plan convinced that is the case.
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And in this way, I hope to make understandable that herein lies in essential source for the conviction, which the modern scientist has, that the possibility of grounding, a purely self contained and universal science of the spirit is not even worth mentioning with the result that he flatly rejects. It, it is in the interest of our European problem to penetrate a bit more deeply into this question and expose the above at first glance, lucidly clear argumentation and goes on then to develop the theme that the [inaudible] world is a concept that has its place exclusively in the spiritual that's fair. And that order from, and to understand this, he has to be able to climb a veritable ladder of, um, packable evidence to that sphere because only there can, he then understand what was always called truth and which in terms of historical time has been still bent out of shape.
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Anyone trying to live in purely natural life, simply unconsciously the commons to the sickness of the age who throw towards the end of his life. The last year was concerned only with dying like a proper philosopher. And he oriented himself towards trying to finish up his writings and reviews. Of course, all of the invitations to recap which the national socialist government extended to him continue. It was late, you know, they, your house and talk to you again and again, and again, this role, but not give in. And when he died in April 21st, 1938, it was a signal to many individuals that the ethic of integrity had come to some faithful bend and curve. And of course it was just about 18 months later with the invasion of Poland. The one that the rest of us reap the whirlwind, which he had seen, it would be a little difficult to begin with the 20th century by ending with our prelude, with some of Michael's room.
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So I have, as a good teacher should prepared a slice of cake to end the lecture series because not at all. And so for call tragic as this, in fact, we have one more individual Marcel Proust, who, and he has great, wonderful, epic work about human consciousness, shows us with the grace of the great epic poet, how to say it quite easily, beautifully indelibly, so that once you have the flavor of it, you never forget it. And if you are unable to go through a difficult philosophic, rigorous scientific development, you can always listen to the songs of an Arctic Bard and appreciate that life is true as well as beautiful. So we'll see the honorable Marcel approves. Now [inaudible].

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