This article considers the differences between Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger in light of Pascal’s distinction between the esprit de géometrie and the esprit de finesse. According to Pascal, the essential “principles” dominating our perceptual lives cannot be clearly and confidently demonstrated in a manner akin to logic and mathematics, but must be discerned in a more spontaneous or intuitive manner.It is unsurprising that Husserl, originally a student of mathematics, might seem closer to the esprit de géometrie, whereas Heidegger, trained (...) in theology and drawn to poets and poetic thinkers, is closer to the esprit de finesse. This difference is clear from the styles of writing of these two seminal figures. I consider how this stylistic difference is also linked with the substance of their respective philosophies, and with the approaches they recommend for exploring subjective life. A related difference concerns how each theorist responds to what Husserl called the “paradox of human subjectivity” and what Michel Foucault later termed the “empirico-transcendental doublet”: the fact that, in doing phenomenology, human consciousness exists as both the subject and the object of our knowing. Husserl mostly emphasized the advantages, epistemological and existential, that this potential reflexivity can afford. Heidegger was more interested in the obstacles or traps it sets—both for accurate self-knowledge and for authentic living. These issues are discussed in relation to the “natural attitude” and “everydayness,” and to the linguistic grounding of human existence and knowledge—especially as these issues emerge in Foucault’s Les mots et les choses and Eugen Fink’s Sixth Cartesian Meditation. (shrink)

The article is an attempt to define reduction as the beginning of philosophy. The author considers such questions as: What motivates a phenomenologist to do reduction? Can one speak of philosophy before reduction? What is the essence of reduction? To answer these questions the author refers to Husserl, Fink and, Patočka, and tries to show that reduction is to be understood as an unmotivated expression of philosopher’s will to overcome evidence inherent to natural attitude. The author argues that reduction enables (...) one a problematization of the world as such. Finally, reduction is defined as an attempt to take doing philosophy seriously. (shrink)

As a phenomenological concept, absorption refers to the ego's capacity to experience the world from a displaced standpoint. The paper traces the emergence and development of this concept in Husserl...