This book outlines the most important points of intersection between early phenomenology and critical theory. It develops extensive analyses’ of specific instruments of the phenomenological method such as eidetic intuition and the procedures of genetic phenomenology. These procedures were both criticized and reappropriated by some of the most notable early critical theorists such as Adorno, Benjamin, Kracauer and Marcuse. As such, the book offers the first extensive account of the important phenomenological heritage of critical theory. This book also attests to (...) the versatility of the phenomenological method, which can be shown to have influenced a wide array of approaches within the critical tradition. The chapters focus on these early critical theorists and also discuss the applications of their methods within the treatment of numerous media-theory issues. In so doing, the book shows how fertile a critically reappropriated phenomenology may prove for tackling contemporary media phenomena such as television, film and advertising. This volume appeals to students and researchers working in the crosshairs of phenomenology, critical theory, and media studies. (shrink)

Ever since the 1960s, media and communication studies have abounded in heated debates concerning the psychological and social effects of fictional media violence. Massive empirical research has first tried to tie film violence to cultivating either fear or aggressive tendencies among its viewership, while later research has focused on other media as well (television, video games). The present paper does not aim to settle the factual question of whether or not medial experiences indeed engender real emotional dispositions. Instead, it brings (...) into play the resources of genetic phenomenology in order to ask how the formation of such dispositions would be generally possible. Thus, it aims to further the discussion by overtly employing the framework of Husserl’s later genetic phenomenology to the field of emotional experience. By posing questions with regard to how fictional emotional experiences contribute to the formation of apperceptions and to the specificities of emotional sedimentation, it also points out some shortcomings in Husserl’s account by drawing from Freud’s dynamic theory of drives and emotions. (shrink)

This paper addresses the question of occasional expressions, as discussed by Husserl in his First and Sixth Logical Investigation in relation to the problem of gestures. It aims to show that gestures are intimately related to the use of occasional expressions and have an indispensible contribution to their understanding. In doing so, the paper points out an important lack in Husserl’s early theory of signification, which has to do with its exclusion of all aspects related to intersubjective communication. The paper (...) begins with a short presentation of Husserl’s interpretation of occasional expressions in the Logical Investigations. Further on it identifies the main source of Husserl’s difficulties in coming to terms with this issue in his problematic treatment of communication, and shows how the consideration of gestures can help overcome these difficulties. Finally, the paper considers some consequences which derive from such a treatment of the issue for Husserl’s theory of fulfillment (Bedeutungserfüllung). (shrink)

This article brings a phenomenological perspective to the question of how bodily and inter-bodily experience is involved in interacting via audio-visual media like videoconferencing platforms. Contemporary discussions in interaction studies point to a certain suspension of bodily involvement in these mediated interactions, which leads to a visible loss of function in the case of gestures. Such observations have led phenomenologists to voice concern as to whether phenomenology is indeed still suited to account for the “digital world” in general. The following (...) article addresses these concerns by first making the case for a phenomenological understanding of gestures, which develops Merleau-Ponty’s notion of intercorporeality by drawing from an intersubjective reading of Husserl’s threefold analysis of the body (aesthesiological, kinaesthetic and orientational). Subsequently, these reflections are used to describe the modifications, which occur when interacting “through” the screen in videoconferences, by showing that they are not just privative in nature. (shrink)

EinleitungDer Begriff Kinästhese ist in der Husserl-Literatur durchaus geläufig. Trotzdem fehlt bis heute eine umfassende Erörterung seiner Bedeutung und seiner Spielformen sowie auch seiner konkreten Entwicklungsgeschichte bei Husserl.Zu erwähnen wären in dieser Hinsicht besonders: Claesges (1964), Claesges’ „Einleitung des Herausgebers“ zu Hua XVI, Drummond (1984), Melle (1983), S. 114–120, Piedade (2001), Przybylski (2006) und Mattens (2009). Vermutlich würde fast jeder Husserl-Kenner – wenn danach fragt – ohne weiteres antworten, Kinästhesen seien jene Bewegungsmöglichkeiten des leiblichen Subjekts, durch die sich seine Wahrnehmungsgegenstände (...) auf ihrer elementarsten Stufe (jene der sogenannten „Sinnesdinge“) konstituieren. Das ist bestimmt richtig, da für Husserl in der Tat Wahrnehmung ihre Gegenstände eben nicht in einer augenblicklichen „Impression“ voll erschließt, sondern sie vielmehr in mannigfaltigen Zusammenhängen von „Abschattungen“, d. h. in zusammenhängenden Sequenzen pa. (shrink)

Unser Beitrag versucht eine systematische Auslegung des Begriffs der „perzeptiven Phantasie , den Husserl in einigen Aufzeichnungen zum Bildbewusstsein anwendet. Dabei werden drei der wesentlichen Aspekte, die in der Husserl-Literatur das Thema Bild durchgehend bestimmen, einer gründlichen Analyse unterzogen: der Begriff des „Widerstreitbewusstseins , die Idee der „Neutralität und die Scheidung zwischen Impression und Reproduktion. Jedes dieser Themen spielt eine wesentliche Rolle in der husserlschen Auslegung des Bildbewusstseins. Dabei sind aber alle diese Themen, wie wir zeigen wollen, letztlich von einem (...) Einstellungsunterschied bestimmt, der im späteren Nachlass Husserls zwischen Erfahrung und Phantasie besteht. Ausgehend von Husserls Unterscheidung zweier Bedeutungsrichtungen des Begriffs „Phantasie – als „Reproduktion einerseits und als „Modus des Vollzugs andererseits – soll bewiesen werden, dass der Ausdruck „perzeptive Phantasie keineswegs den Beitrag von reproduktiven Akten zur Konstitution der Bildlichkeit betrifft, sondern eben die Tatsache, dass der Bildbetrachtung eine eigentümliche Einstellung, jene des „Als-ob , entspricht. (shrink)

Although most interpreters admit that Husserl was not guided by an interest in aesthetics when dealing with the various issues of image consciousness, his considerations are nevertheless usually interpreted in an aesthetic key. The article intends to challenge this line of interpretation by clearly separating between the neutrality of image consciousness, on one hand, and the disinterest of the aesthetic attitude towards reality, on the other hand, as well as by reviewing the elements in Husserl’s theory that led to their (...) association. (shrink)

The paper addresses the methodological tensions between Husserl’s phenomenology and history by reinterpreting the Addendum III of the Krisis-work in view of genetic phenomenology. Thus, the paper starts out by retracing the traditional criticism against the unhistorical character of Husserl’s phenomenology as voiced by Heidegger, Adorno and others. Afterwards, it moves on to analyse the troubled relationship between static and genetic phenomenology, on the one hand, and between genetic phenomenology and empirical genesis, on the other hand. Finally, it arrives at (...) a step by step methodological reconstruction of Husserl’s considerations on the “origin of geometry”, which are regarded to be an application of the methods of genetic phenomenology to the field of history. (shrink)

In the third book of his Ideas pertaining to a pure phenomenology and to a phenomenological philosophy, Husserl devotes an extensive discussion to the relationship between phenomenology and experimental psychology. In this context, he also addresses the possible use of experiments in phenomenology, by contrasting “phenomenological experiments” to the regular use of experiments in the empirical sciences. The present paper seeks to offer a minute interpretation of this notion. As such, it is structured in three parts. The first part exposes (...) the historical background of Husserl’s conception by specifically analyzing the experimental procedures of the Würzburg school of psychology and their relationship to phenomenology. The second part circumscribes Husserl’s conception of “phenomenological experiments” in difference to the experiments of empirical psychology. The third part relates this conception to the frequently invoked comparison between the phenomenological method and thought experiments, reflecting on the paradoxical status of experience in phenomenology. (shrink)

In several of his research manuscripts from the 1930s, Edmund Husserl considers the concrete life-world to be a world essentially determined by both humans and animals, or a “humanized” and “animalized” world. Husserl bases this claim on two observations. First, in his view, the surrounding objects of the human world are as such marked by cultural practices. Second, he considers that there is a corresponding animal world that similarly bears the existential traces of the animal. The following paper attempts to (...) lay bare the various forms of interplay between these two processes, as they come to the fore in several analyses, especially in Husserl’s reflections on pets. Although Husserl’s treatment of this issue remains rather unilateral and elliptic, the paper attempts to draw from his reflections several consequences that might also be relevant for current debates in animal ethics. (shrink)

Adorno’s intensive criticism of phenomenology is well known, his entire early period during the 1920s and 1930s being marked by various polemical engagements with Husserl. This engagement finds its peak during his work at his second dissertation project in Oxford, a dissertation that was supposed to systematicaly expose the antinomies of phenomenological thinking while particularly focusing on Husserl’s concept of “eidetic intuition” or “intuition of essences”. The present paper will take this criticism as its starting point in focusing on two (...) highly specific aspects of Adorno’s interpretation: the opposition between eidetic intuition and the traditional theories of abstraction and its relationship to genetic phenomenology. In light of this criticism I subsequently show: 1. that, in his later work, Adorno’s understanding of eidetic intuition undergoes a significant revaluation; 2. that he reappropriates key elements of the eidetic method in his own procedure of physiognomic analysis, and 3. that his account of physiognomics is relevant for addressing the aforementioned incongruities of phenomenological eidetics itself. (shrink)

The following paper addresses the experience of reality in video-calls. To this extent, it first draws from Edmund Husserl’s phenomenological reflections that connect the question of reality with that of interaction and that of intersubjective communication. These reflections set the larger theoretical framework for sketching out ten theses with regard to the specific case of video-calls. To this extent it addresses issues like the public-private divide, the specific image-form of contemporary video-calls, the mutual intersubjective relations they involve, as well as (...) their specific spatiality and temporality. (shrink)

Pre-theoretical experience and the lifeworld are traditionally seen as a key reference for phenomenology. In the present paper I intend to point out their relevance for critical theory as well. To this extent, I start off with a brief overview of phenomenological approaches to pre-theoretical experience and their relationship to empirical research. In sketching out some of the overlaps between phenomenology and early critical theory in this regard, I then specifically focus on Adorno’s reflections concerning the role of an extended (...) concept of experience in both his sociological and his philosophical work. Outlining Adorno’s methodological appropriation of “unregimented experience” in the guise of what he terms “physiognomic interpretation” – a procedure intended as a corrective to both rigorous empirical research and philosophical aprioric reasoning – I try to show wherein Adorno’s own approach to the pre-theoretical diverges from phenomenology. Finally, I conclude with some reflections concerning the different functions experience acquires in traditional phenomenology and critical theory. (shrink)

In a late notation from 1932, Husserl emphasizes the fact that a broad concept of “apperception” should also include, alongside his usual examples, the apprehension of objects as bearers of an individual or inter-subjective past, specifically “indicated” with them; thus, he distinguishes between apperceptions “appresenting” a simultaneous content (co-presentations), anticipatory apperceptions pointing to future incidents, and retrospective apperceptions referring to “ad-memorized” ( hinzuerinnert , ad - memoriert ) features and events. The latter sort of apperceptions are involved not only in (...) our apprehension of historical traces and relics, but also in that of causal relations, familiar objects, and cultural objects in general. Following several later notations of Husserl concerning the topic of “apperceptions,” this paper outlines the specific intentional structure of retrospective or evocative apperceptions, analyzing their various possible forms. (shrink)

In his Ideas II , Husserl interprets the apprehension of cultural objects by comparing it to that of the human “flesh“ and “spirit.“ Such objects are not just “bodies“ ( Körper ) to which a sense is exteriorly added, but instead they are, similarly to human bodies ( Leiber ), entirely “animated“ by a cultural meaning. In fact, this is not just an analogy for Husserl, since, in several of his later notations, he comes to show that cultural objects are (...) actually understood as such by means of an apperception employing empathy, as sediments of subjective acts and performances. Understood as cultural objects, images also point towards a previous subjective doing, and it is precisely by grasping this “pointing“ that we comprehend them in their proper significance as artifacts. In my paper, I would like to explore the nature and forms of this empathic “pointing,“ focusing on the possible use of Husserl's conception for an interpretation of non-figurative art. (shrink)

Alexandru Dragomir became widely known in Romania as a philosopher 2 years after his death, in 2004. He had no prior publications and only a few of his close acquaintances were even aware of his work as a thinker. The editors of the five volumes of his posthumous papers have from the onset tried to present Dragomir, a former doctoral student of Heidegger, as a phenomenologist, while this interpretation is today well-established. The following paper tries to submit this interpretation to (...) a closer scrutiny, on the one hand, by addressing the history of Dragomir’s publication and reception in Romania and abroad, and on the other hand, by analyzing several aspects of his oeuvre which do indeed hold close resemblance to aspects of the phenomenological method, even though they actually have quite different motivations. (shrink)

Unser Beitrag versucht den Widerhall gewisser Husserlscher Begriffe und Fragestellungen in den frühen Freiburger Vorlesungen Heideggers zu verfolgen. Zu diesem Zweck wird vornehmlich der Begriff Bekundung in Erwägung gezogen, den Husserl im zweiten Buch seiner Ideen anführt, und den Heidegger seinerseits, in seiner Freiburger Vorlesung Grundprobleme der Phänomenologie , prägnant einsetzt. Diesem Begriff wird sowohl in Husserls Lehre zur Konstitution der Materialität und der kausalen Realität, als auch in seinen Untersuchungen zum personalen Selbst nachgegangen, wobei eben die Spannungen zwischen diesen (...) beiden Perspektiven mit Nachdruck betont sind. In weiterer Folge soll gezeigt werden, dass Heideggers Gebrauch desselben Begriffes, im Zusammenhang seiner Freiburger Vorlesung des WS 1919/20, in etlichen Hinsichten als ein Versuch angesehen werden kann, gewisse Bedenken des Husserlschen Ansatzes zu lösen. Damit soll zugleich ein Einblick in die konkrete Arbeitsgemeinschaft des Freiburger phänomenologischen Kreises, in den frühen zwanziger Jahren, gewonnen werden. (shrink)

This paper discusses the phenomenological method’s reliance on imaginative procedures in view of ethnomethodological research. While ethnomethodology has often been seen in continuity with Alfred Schütz’ phenomenological sociology, it mainly parts ways with phenomenology by stressing that the decisive details structuring mutual understanding (gestures, bodily expressions, or the myriad trifles that regulate casual conversation) are „not imaginable, but can only be found out”. This paper reflects from a phenomenological perspective on what such a claim entails by first delineating this line (...) of criticism from other objections raised against the use of imaginative procedures in phenomenology and by showing how this line of questioning departs from the core philosophical debates concerning imaginabilitiy and unimaginability in the Kantian tradition. Further on, the paper offers an in-depth interpretation of the aforementioned ethnomethodological claim in order not only to outline its methodological implications for phenomenology, but also to show that it involves possible key insights for understanding interaction, which phenomenology needs to take into account despite its eidetic scope. (shrink)

Heidegger’s doubts concerning the concept of “empathy” are unequivocally proven not only by his general tendency to avoid it, but also by his sharp critique of this term, as presented in both Being and Time and the lectures from the Summer Semester 1925, History of the Concept of Time. However, the concept of empathy is used by Heidegger in a positive, albeit rather allusive fashion, in three consecutive lectures of his early Freiburg period: Basic Problems of Phenomenology, Phenomenology of Intuition (...) and Expression and The Phenomenology of Religious Life. The present paper analyzes these three passages of Heidegger’s early lectures in close detail, revealing their connection to the conceptions of empathy found in the works of both Dilthey and Scheler. Thus it aims to connect Heidegger’s rather idiosyncratic conception of intersubjectivity with some of the discussions on that topic in the phenomenological millieu of the early 1920s. (shrink)

Most historical accounts of the relations between phenomenology and film take their departure from essays written by Merleau-Ponty and Roman Ingarden after 1945. Thus, they completely ignore the period before the outbreak of World War II. However, if one indeed has difficulties finding any detailed analysis of cinema among the writings of “early phenomenologists,” the subject is nevertheless referred to by authors such as Husserl, Heidegger, Eugen Fink, Moritz Geiger, Felix Kaufmann or Oskar Becker. The present article attempts to reconstruct (...) the implicit conception of cinema which circulated in the phenomenological movement during the interwar period and thus arrives at some significant conclusions regarding the conservative tendencies of phenomenology. (shrink)

The article discusses the historical background and transnational context of the dialogue between East-European communist philosophy and Western existentialism. It does so by first outlining the exchanges between Lukács, Sartre and Merleau-Ponty between the late 1940s and the early 1960s. Subsequently three major forums of East–West philosophical dialogue are surveyed, that took place during the 1960s: the ‘Morals and Society’ colloquium, organized by Instituto Gramsci in Rome in May 1964; the Korčula summer school, organized by the Praxis group between 1964 (...) and 1975; and the International Congress for Philosophy organized in Vienna in September 1968. This series of events and the dialogue and confrontations that they engendered prove that, contrary to the exclusively negative reception of existentialism in the socialist camp in the 1950s, but also contrary to the distorted representation, which can be found in dissidents’ recollections and which became dominant after the fall of communism, which excluded any possibility of dialogue between the two sides during socialism, such a dialogue has taken place, and led to mutual appropriations on both sides. (shrink)

The following paper is grounded on a reflection found in Walter Benjamin’s Arcades Project, opposing Martin Heidegger’s conception of historicity to the one put forth in the writings of the surrealists. By interpreting Benjamin’s own view of the surrealists’ approach to history and its core motifs, on the one hand, and his interpretation of Heidegger as sketched out in several other brief passages, on the other hand, we wish to show that Benjamin did not share the facile view on Heidegger’s (...) conception of history held by Adorno, Habermas or Marcuse, but instead his critique proves a very nuanced reading of Heidegger, allowing us to outline the fundamental opposition between an existential and a political approach to the philosophy of history. (shrink)

Different approaches in this case, intended to clarify the problematic pages "phenomenological description", involves a review of the method, but not in sense of austere specialization.

"Naiveté as Critique. The present paper addresses the similarities between the concept of “critique” used in phenomenology and the one put forth by critical theory in analyzing their corresponding understanding of “naiveté”. While Husserl develops a broad concept of naiveté in his reflections regarding the phenomenological reduction, where he characterizes the natural attitude as such as “transcendentally naive”, this concept becomes more nuanced when considering the unavoidable naivetés of phenomenology itself, on the one hand, and the complications brought to the (...) mutual relationship between naiveté and critique with his turn towards the life-world. This turn, the paper shows, can be seen as a metacritical reinvestment of naiveté that can also be traced in the works of Adorno. Keywords: Husserl, Adorno, life-world, metacritique, physiognomics. ". (shrink)

The paper discusses Husserl’s conception of empathy by contrasting it to the classical interpretation of empathy as a phantasy transposition. I start by sketching out a brief historical overview of the classical conception of empathy, which Husserl encountered through its formulation in the work of Theodor Lipps. Following Husserl’s often employed analogy between empathy and memory, I try to work out the distinction between intuitive and non-intuitive empathy. Through this distinction, I will show that, in his later notations, Husserl was (...) inclined to regard the fulfillment of empathy not as an actual reproductive intuition, but as a coherent succession of mere apperceptions. (shrink)

The article comments upon Husserl’s attempts to outline, in a brief text dated 1922/23, the concept of Quasi-Konstitution. With its help, Husserl wishes to address the way objects are and can be constituted in the realm of pure phantasy. In discussing the various strata of their constitution, he reaches several problematic issues, concerning concordance, individuality, inter-subjectivity or reality. However, the chief aspect that governs Husserl’s reflections is the questionable relation between phantasy and the manifold senses of “possibility”.

The article intends to explore the young Heidegger’s attempt to reconfigure Husserl’s methodological conception of phenomenology by analyzing his position towards description. Thus, we wish to show that, while first following Paul Natorp’s overt critique of phenomenology in its pretension of offering accurate descriptions of our lived experiences, Heidegger gradually came to give a new meaning to phenomenological description by reinterpreting both phenomenology’s understanding of intuition as well as that of its conceptual expression.

In his famous essay, The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, Walter Benjamin compares the daily experience of buildings with the perception of films. His comparison relies on the peculiar concept of “tactile reception“, he opposes to the optically oriented traditional attitude towards art. The concept encompasses two essential traits: on the one hand, it designates the fact that films do not require a contemplative, focused attention, but a habitual, distracted approach, similar to that by which we (...) perceive buildings in our everyday life-world. On the other hand, Benjamin’s concept points to a particular “chock-effect” produced by cinematic experience, through its constant change of perspectives and points of view. By this, it challenges precisely the same form of ambient perception required in numerous situations of our daily life in the modern city. The two determinations sketch out a unitary concept that shows obvious similarities to the phenomenological idea of a “life-worldly circumspection” , a specific manner of sight guiding everyday practical life. (shrink)

ZusammenfassungUnser Beitrag versucht den Widerhall gewisser Husserlscher Begriffe und Fragestellungen in den frühen Freiburger Vorlesungen Heideggers zu verfolgen. Zu diesem Zweck wird vornehmlich der Begriff Bekundung in Erwägung gezogen, den Husserl im zweiten Buch seiner Ideen anführt, und den Heidegger seinerseits, in seiner Freiburger Vorlesung Grundprobleme der Phänomenologie, prägnant einsetzt. Diesem Begriff wird sowohl in Husserls Lehre zur Konstitution der Materialität und der kausalen Realität, als auch in seinen Untersuchungen zum personalen Selbst nachgegangen, wobei eben die Spannungen zwischen diesen beiden (...) Perspektiven mit Nachdruck betont sind. In weiterer Folge soll gezeigt werden, dass Heideggers Gebrauch desselben Begriffes, im Zusammenhang seiner Freiburger Vorlesung des WS 1919/20, in etlichen Hinsichten als ein Versuch angesehen werden kann, gewisse Bedenken des Husserlschen Ansatzes zu lösen. Damit soll zugleich ein Einblick in die konkrete Arbeitsgemeinschaft des Freiburger phänomenologischen Kreises, in den frühen zwanziger Jahren, gewonnen werden. (shrink)