Views: 231
Downloads: 160
File size: 424281 kb
Publishers: Nauka, Yuventa, Gallimard, 1999
Hardcover, 608 pages.
ISBN 2-07-029337-8, 5-02-026807-0
Format: 60x84/16

MAURICE MERLEAU-PONTY 1
PHENOMENOLOGY OF PERCEPTION 1
FOREWORD 2
Introduction. CLASSICAL PREJUDICES AND A RETURN TO PHENOMENA 8
I. "FEELING" 8
II. "ASSOCIATION" AND "MEMORY PROJECTION" 13
III. "ATTENTION" AND "JUDGMENT" 18
IV. PHENOMENAL FIELD 30
Part one. BODY 35
I. BODY AS AN OBJECT AND MECHANICIST PHYSIOLOGY 37
II. BODY EXPERIENCE AND CLASSICAL PSYCHOLOGY 44
III. SPATIOSITY OF OWN BODY AND MOTOR FUNCTION 47
IV. SYNTHESIS OF OWN BODY 69
V. THE BODY AS A SEXUAL BEING 71
VI. BODY AS EXPRESSION AND SPEECH 80
Part two. PERCEPTIVE WORLD 91
I. FEELING 92
III. THE THING AND THE NATURAL WORLD 134
IV. OTHERS AND THE HUMAN WORLD 154
Part three. BEING FOR YOURSELF AND BEING IN THE WORLD 163
I. COGITO 163
II. TIME 181
III. FREEDOM 191
LITERATURE 201
APPS 203
M. Merleau-Ponty: from primary perception to the world of culture 204
NOTES1 209
CONTENTS 213

Download Merleau-Ponty M. Phenomenology of Perception

"The Phenomenology of Perception" (1945) - the most famous work of the largest French phenomenologist Maurice Merleau-Ponty - implements the idea of a new phenomenology, which does not come from a phenomenologically understood living body as an integral "I", the subject of perception, thinking, speech, communication and freedom. Widely attracting and analyzing modern psychological data and theories, primarily Gestalt theory, relying on the fundamental concepts, and sometimes the intuition of the late Husserl, Merleau-Ponty creates a completely original philosophy that makes traditional philosophical themes and categories rethink. Written in a lively, dynamic, and at the same time quite strict and academic style (Sartre spoke of him: "softly, carefully, adamantly"), The Phenomenology of Perception, perhaps more than any other work of phenomenology and existentialism, allows us to talk about implementation of the program task set in the last years of his life by Husserl - the development of the ontology of Lebenswelt, the "life world" - and builds a holistic and original image of the human world, based on phenomenological principles and method.

MAURICE MERLEAU-PONTY "PHENOMENOLOGY OF PERCEPTION" Scanning: Janko Slava (Fort/Da Library) Scanning:

Yanko Slava (Fort/Da Library) [email protected] || [email protected] ||

http://yanko.lib.ru || mirror: http://members.fortunecity.com/slavaaa/ya.html

|| http://yankos.chat.ru/ya.html | Icq# 75088656

MAURICE MERLEAU-PONTY

PHENOMENOLOGIE DE LA PERCEPTION

Maurice Merleau-Ponty

PHENOMENOLOGY OF PERCEPTION

edited by I. S. Vdovina, S. L. Fokin

Saint Petersburg

Juventa Science

UDC 14 M. Merleau-Ponty

BBK 87.3 M 52

The publication was carried out within the framework of the Pushkin program with the support of the Ministry of

Foreign Affairs of France and the French Embassy in Russia

Ouvrage realisé dans le cadre du program d "aide à la publication "Pouchkine"

avec le soutien du Ministère des Affaires Etrangères français et de l "Ambassade

de France en Russie

This publication is published within the framework of the program of the Central European University

"Translation Project" with the support of the Center for the Development of Publishing Activities

(OSI-Budapest) and the Open Society Institute.

Assistance Fund (OSIAF-Moscow).

Managing editor: I. S. Vdovina

The design used the work of the artist Dm. Yakovina "Fish"

ISBN 5-02-026807-0 ("Science") ISBN 5-87399-054-9 ("Juventa") ISBN 2-07-029337-8

(Part 2, I, II), A. Shestakov (Part 1), translation, 1999

©D. Yakovin, P. Paley, design, 1999

MAURICE MERLEAU-PONTY...... 1

PHENOMENOLOGY OF PERCEPTION...... 1

FOREWORD.. 2

Introduction. CLASSICAL PREJUDICES AND A RETURN TO PHENOMENA 8

I. "FEELING". eight

II. "ASSOCIATION" AND "MEMORY PROJECTION". thirteen

III. "ATTENTION" AND "JUDGMENT". eighteen

IV. PHENOMENAL FIELD. thirty

Part one. BODY.. 35

I. BODY AS AN OBJECT AND MECHANICIST PHYSIOLOGY.. 37

II. BODY EXPERIENCE AND CLASSICAL PSYCHOLOGY.. 44

III. SPACE OF OWN BODY AND MOTOR FUNCTION.. 47

IV. SYNTHESIS OF OWN BODY.. 69

V. THE BODY AS SEXUAL BEING. 71

VI. BODY AS EXPRESSION AND SPEECH.. 80

Part two. PERCEPTIVE WORLD. 91

I. FEELING. 92

III. THE THING AND THE NATURAL WORLD.. 134

IV. OTHERS AND THE HUMAN WORLD.. 154

Part three. BEING FOR YOURSELF AND BEING IN THE WORLD.. 163

II. TIME.. 181

III. FREEDOM.. 191

LITERATURE.. 201

APPENDICES.. 203

M. Merleau-Ponty: from primary perception to the world of culture.. 204

NOTES1 209

FOREWORD

What is phenomenology? It may seem strange that this question is

half a century after the first works of Husserl appeared; nevertheless he is still

far from resolution. Phenomenology is the study of essences, and all problems

respectively, are reduced to the definition of entities: the essence of perception, the essence

consciousness, for example. But phenomenology is also a philosophy which

places essences in existence* and believes that man and the world can be understood

only on the basis of their "factuality". This is a transcendental philosophy which,

to understand the positions of the natural setting, keeps them suspended

state, but it is also a philosophy for which the world is always "already there", before

reflection, as a kind of irremovable presence, and all its efforts, therefore,

aimed at finding a naive contact with the world in order to give it

finally a philosophical status. This is the claim of a philosophy that fancies itself

"rigorous science", and an account of the "lived" space, time, world. This -

an attempt to directly describe our experience as it is, without referring to

psychological genesis and the causal explanations that may give it

scientist, psychologist or sociologist, although Husserl himself in recent works speaks of

"genetic"1 and even "constructive"2 phenomenology. Is it possible to eliminate these

contradictions, separating the phenomenology of Husserl from the phenomenology of Heidegger? But

"Being and Time"** proceeds from one position of Husserl and is nothing but

clarification

1 Husserl. Meditations Cartesiennes. Paris, 1931. P. 120 et seq.

Cartésiennes) edited by E. Fink, which Mr. Berger kindly informed us about.

definition of "natürlichen Weltbegriff"* or "Lebenswelt",** which Husserl at the end

considered life main theme phenomenology, so that the contradiction is revealed and

in the philosophy of Husserl himself. The hasty reader will not want to deal with

doctrine, which has nothing to say, and will ask if she is worthy

philosophy, which fails to define itself, the noise raised around it, does not

whether we are talking here, rather, about a myth or about fashion.

Even if this is so, then one should understand what is the charm of this myth and

what is the origin of this fashion, and the seriousness of the philosopher regarding such

situation would be reflected in the assertion that phenomenology can be accepted and

practice as a mode or style, it exists as a movement before

reaches full philosophical awareness. She's been on her way for a long time, her adherents

find it everywhere - in Hegel and Kierkegaard, of course, but also in Marx,

Nietzsche, Freud. Philological analysis of texts will lead nowhere: in the texts we

we find only what we ourselves have invested in them, and if history claimed our

interpretation, then this is the history of philosophy. It is in ourselves that we find unity

phenomenology and its true meaning. It's not so much about keeping score

citations, how much is it to define and objectify this phenomenology for

us, thanks to which, reading Husserl or Heidegger, most of our

contemporaries experienced the feeling that they had learned not a new philosophy, but,

Rather, they met with what they had long expected. Phenomenology is only available

phenomenological method. Let us try to deliberately link the well-known

phenomenological themes in the way they themselves are linked in life. May be,

we will then understand why phenomenology remained for a long time in a state of

undertakings, acted as a task and a desired goal.

It is about describing, not explaining or analyzing. This is the first

the direction that Husserl gave to the beginning phenomenology, calling on it

to be "descriptive psychology" or to return "to the things themselves", testifies

first of all about his rejection of science.*** I am not the result or interweaving

many causalities that determine my body or my "psyche", I cannot

think of oneself as part of the world, as a simple object of biology, psychology and

sociology, I cannot close the universe of science. All I know about the world

even through science, I know from my vision or that life

experience, without which the symbols of science would be empty space. The whole universe of science

is built on the life-world, and if we want to think with all

science, with all the accuracy to determine its meaning and direction, we should

first to return to this experience, the secondary expression of which is science.

Science does not and never will have the same justification as

the perceived world, for the simple reason that it is its definition

or explanation. I am not a "living being" or even a "man" or even

"consciousness", with all the characteristics that zoology, social anatomy or

inductive psychology is recognized behind these products of nature or history - I

there is an absolute source, my existence does not come from my predecessors, from

my physical or social environment, it goes to them and supports them,

for my "I" causes to be for me (and, therefore, to be in that one

sense that this word can have for me) this tradition that I decide

continue, or this horizon, the distance to which will come to naught, because

it will not become its property if I do not look at it. scientific views,

according to which I am the moment of the world, are distinguished by naivety and hypocrisy,

because they unconditionally support another point of view - the point of view

consciousness, according to which the world is initially located around me and itself, in its own way

driven, begins to exist for me. To return to the things themselves means

return to this world before knowledge, which knowledge always speaks of and in relation to

which any scientific definition will be abstract, symbolic and dependent: so

geography describes the landscape, in the bosom of which we happened to learn what a forest is,

Valley or river.

This movement is by no means an idealistic return to consciousness,

and the demand for pure description precludes both reflexive analysis and scientific

explanation. Descartes, and especially Kant, gave freedom to the subject, or consciousness,

finding that I am unable to grasp any thing as existing if

I had not previously experienced myself existing in the act of grasping; they showed

consciousness, this

absolute certainty of my "I" for me as a condition, without which

there was nothing, and the act of binding - as the basis of what is connected. By itself

it goes without saying that the act of binding is nothing without the picture of the world that it binds,

the unity of consciousness, according to Kant, arises simultaneously with the unity of the world, and

methodical doubt of Descartes * does not lead us to any losses, since the entire

the world, at least as far as our experience is concerned, is included in the Cogito, is certain

together with him, is marked only with the sign "thinking about ...". However, the relationship of the subject

and worlds are not strictly bilateral: if this were the case,

the certainty of the world in Descartes would have been present from the very beginning, along with

authenticity of the Cogito, and Kant would not speak of a "Copernican revolution".

Reflexive analysis, based on our life experience, goes back to the subject as a

possible and different condition; he shows the universal synthesis as something

without which there would be no world. To this extent, he ceases to belong

our experience, replaces the report with a reconstruction. It is understandable why Husserl reproached

Kant in the "psychologism of the abilities of the soul"1 and opposed to analysis

poetic,** which bases the world on the synthetic activity of the subject,

its “noematic reflection”, which resides in the object and clarifies it

primordial unity, instead of generating it.

The world is already here, before my analysis, and it would be unnatural to take it out of line

generalizations that first relate sensations and then prospective aspects

object, although both are nothing but products of analysis, and should not

exist before it. Reflexive analysis assumes that the path of preliminary

constitution can be traversed in the opposite direction, which in

"inner man" of which St. Augustine,*** can be found

a constitutive faculty that always lives in him. In this way,

reflection drags itself along and moves into invulnerable subjectivity, according to

side of being and time. But this is naivety, or, if you like, defective

reflection, which loses awareness of its own beginning. I started to

reflection, my reflection is a reflection on the non-reflexive, it cannot

1 Husserl. Logische Untersuchungen. I: Prolegomena zur reinen Logik. halle,

remain ignorant of itself as an event, therefore it appears

before oneself as genuine creativity, as a change in the structure of consciousness, and

must recognize on this side of its own operations the existence of a world which

given to the subject insofar as the subject is given to itself. The real must not

construct or constitute, but describe. This means that I

I cannot identify perception with the operations of synthesis, which are related to

plane of judgment, action, or predication. At every moment my

the perceptual field is filled with reflections, crackles, fleeting

tactile sensations that I can’t pinpoint exactly in context

perceptions and which nevertheless I immediately place in the world, in no way

mixing them with my dreams. Every moment I dream in the circle of things,

I imagine objects or characters whose presence is incompatible with

context, and yet they do not mix with the world, they exist

ahead of the world, on the stage of the imaginary. If the reality of my perception

was based solely on the internal coherence of "representations", then

she would constantly hesitate, and, being at the mercy of my assumptions, I must

would instantly destroy the illusory syntheses and regenerate into the real

distorted phenomena, which at first separated from him. Nothing of the sort

no. The real is a strong fabric, it does not wait for our judgments to

to add to itself the most incredible phenomena, or to discard the most

plausible ideas. Perception is not knowledge of the world, it is

not even an act, not a deliberate taking of a position, perception is the basis, on

which all our acts unfold and are presupposed by them. The world is not

the object whose law of constitution I hold in my hands, the world is

the natural environment and field of all my thoughts and all my distinct perceptions.

Truth does not "live" only in the "inner man"1 or, more precisely, there is no

of the inner man, man lives in the world, and it is in the world that he recognizes himself.

When, proceeding from the dogmatism of common sense or the dogmatism of science, I return

to my "I", then I find not the inner hearth of truth, but the subject, doomed

(voué) to be at peace.

1 In te redi; in interiore nomine habitat veritas.* Saint-Augustin.

Here comes through the true meaning of the famous phenomenological reduction. Not

undoubtedly another such question on which Husserl would have spent more

time, trying to understand himself, and the question to which he would more often

returned, because the "problematics of reduction" occupies in unpublished works

a very important place. For a long time and up to the latest

reduction of texts was presented as a return to transcendental consciousness,

before which the world unfolds in absolute transparency, under the influence of

pervading apperceptions, which the philosopher must reconstruct from

from their result. So my perception of red is marked as

manifestation of a certain red color that was passed through the sensation, red color -

as a manifestation of the red surface, and she - as a manifestation of red cardboard, and,

finally, the last - as a manifestation or outline of a red thing, this book.

This, therefore, would be the comprehension of a certain hylè,* signifying the phenomenon of a higher

order, Sinn-gebung, an active value operation that would define

consciousness, and the world would be nothing but a "world-concept." Phenomenological

the reduction would be idealistic in the sense of transcendental idealism, which

interprets the world as a valuable unity that cannot be divided between Paul and Pierre,

in which the perspectives of both intersect and which facilitates communication

between "Pierre's consciousness" and "Field's consciousness", since Pierre's perception of the world is not

is Pierre's business, just as Paul's perception of the world is not Paul's business - in each of them

this is a matter of prepersonal consciousnesses, the communication of which is not a problem,

for the very definition of consciousness, meaning, or truth requires it. To the extent

in which I am consciousness, in other words, insofar as something has meaning for

me, I am neither here nor there, neither Pierre nor Paul, I am no different from

some "other" consciousness, since we are all immediate presences

in the world, and this world, being a system of truths, is by definition one.

Consistent transcendental idealism deprives the world of opacity and

transcendence. The world is exactly what we imagine, not because

that we are people or empirical subjects, but due to the fact that we are all one light

are involved in the One, without dividing it among themselves. Reflective analysis

ignores the problem of the other as a problem of the world, because it generates in me

together with the first glimpses of consciousness, the ability to go the direct path to universal

truth; and since the other is also deprived of being in the world, place and body, then Alter and

Ego* is one in the true world, a connection of minds. It is not difficult to understand how I can think

the Other, since the Self and therefore the Other are not woven into the fabric of phenomena and,

are values rather than existences. There is nothing hidden behind

these faces or these gestures, no landscape beyond my reach,

except perhaps a fraction of the shadow, which would not be without light. For Husserl,

as you know, on the contrary, the problem of the other exists, Alter Ego is a paradox.

If the “other” is really “for himself”, ** if he is on the other side of his

being for me, and if we are “one-for-another”, and not for God, then it is necessary

so that we appear to each other, so that both he and I have an appearance and

so that he, in addition to the perspective For Myself - my vision of my "I" and

the other's vision of his "I" - would have a perspective For the Other - my vision of the Other

and others' vision of me. It goes without saying that these two perspectives in each of

we cannot be simply side by side, because then the other would see not me, but

I wouldn't have seen him. It is necessary that I have an appearance in order for the body of another

remained himself. This paradox and this dialectic of Ego and Alter are possible only

in the event that the Ego and Alter Ego are determined by their situation, if they are not deprived

co-inherence, that is, if philosophy does not end with a return to my "I",

if, through reflection, I reveal not only my presence to me, but also

the possibility of an “outside observer”, that is, if, again, at that very moment,

when I feel my existence, and up to the extreme point of reflection, I

still lacking this absolute density, which would make me go beyond

the frame of time, and I discover in myself a kind of inner weakness that

prevents me from being an absolute individual and exposes me to the views of others as

a person among other people, or at least as consciousness among others

consciousnesses. Until now, the Cogito has devalued the perception of the other,

taught me that I was only available to myself, because the Cogito determined

me through the fact that I think about myself, that I am alone and can by this thinking

possess, at least if you take it

in this ultimate sense. So that the word "other" is not an empty sound,

it is necessary that my existence in no way be reduced to the awareness

existence, so that it also includes the possibility of consciousness of the "other" and, became

be my incarnation in nature and the possibility of at least historical

situations. Cogito must reveal me in a situation, only under such a condition

transcendental subjectivity can become, as Husserl says,

intersubjectivity. As a thinking Ego I can, of course, distinguish between the world and things

from my "I", because it is clear that I do not exist in the way that things exist. More

Moreover, I must separate from my "I" my body, which is understood as a thing among

things, is a certain amount of physical and chemical processes. But cogitatio*

which I thus discover, although it has no place in objective time

and space, is not devoid of it in the phenomenological world. The world that I distinguished

from my "I" as the sum of things or processes connected by relations of causality, I

rediscover in my "I" as the inescapable horizon of all my cogitationes** and

as a certain dimension in relation to which I place myself. Authentic Cogito

does not determine the existence of the subject through his thinking about existence, does not

turns the certainty of the world into the certainty of thought about the world, does not, finally, replace

peace with the meaning of the world. On the contrary, the Cogito recognizes my thinking as something

inalienable and abolishes any kind of idealism, revealing me as "being in

Because precisely because we are from beginning to end correlated with the world, the only

the opportunity to make sure of this is to suspend it

movement, deny him our complicity (look at him ohne

mitzumachen, *** as Husserl says) or take him out of the game. It's not about

to reject the certainty of common sense or natural attitude, -

they, on the contrary, constitute a constant theme of philosophy - namely, that they,

how the presuppositions of all thought, "taken for granted", go unnoticed,

and we, in order to restore their life and discover them, must from them for a moment

refrain. The best formulation of the reduction is undoubtedly due to the assistant

Husserl E. Fincu **** - he spoke of "surprise" before

1 Husserl. Die Krisis der europäischen Wissenschaften und die transzendentale

Phänomenologie, III, (unpublished).

the face of the world.1 Reflection does not turn away from the world to turn towards unity

consciousness as the basis of the world, she steps aside to see the bubbling

transcendence, it weakens the intentional threads that bind us to the world,

so that they appear to the gaze, only she can be the awareness of the world, since

discovers it as something strange and paradoxical. transcendental

is understood differently by Husserl than by Kant. Husserl reproaches the Kantian

philosophy in that it remains a "world" philosophy, since it uses

our relation to the world, which is the driving force of the transcendental

deduction, and makes the world immanent to the subject, instead of being surprised by it, and

to understand the subject as transcending in relation to the world. All the misunderstandings

which Husserl had with his interpreters, the existential

2011 -> Program of the discipline "Sociology of Management"
2011 -> Department of Personality Psychology (new 2011-2012) Starovoitenko Elena Borisovna
2011 -> General psychology
2011 -> Mandatory minimum content of the basic educational program for the preparation of a bachelor in the direction 080200. 62 "management"

Maurice Merleau-Ponty
PHENOMENOLOGY OF PERCEPTION

Translation from French
edited by I. S. Vdovina, S. L. Fokin
Saint Petersburg
Juventa Science
1999
UDC 14 M. Merleau-Ponty
BBK 87.3 M 52
The publication was carried out within the framework of the "Pushkin" program with the support of the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the French Embassy in Russia
Ouvrage reaise dans e cadre du program d "aide a a pubication "Pouchkine" avec e soutien du Ministere des Affaires Etrangeres francais et de "Ambassade de France en Russie
This publication was published within the framework of the Central European University "Transation Project" program with the support of the Center for the Development of Publishing Activities (OSI-Budapest) and the Open Society Institute.
Assistance Fund" (OSIAF-Moscow).
Managing editor: I. S. Vdovina
The design used the work of the artist Dm. Yakovina "Fish"
ISBN 5-02-026807-0 ("Science") ISBN 5-87399-054-9 ("Juventa") ISBN 2-07-029337-8 ("Gaimard")
(c) Editions Gaimard, 1945
(c) "Science", 1999
(c) Juventa, 1999
(c) D. Kalugin (P. 2, III, IV), L. Koryagin (Introduction, P. 3, Literature), A. Markov (P. 2, I, II), A. Shestakov (P. 1) , translation, 1999
(c) I. S. Vdovina, article, 1999
(c)D. Yakovin, P. Paley, design, 1999

FOREWORD
What is phenomenology? It may seem strange that this question is raised half a century after the appearance of the first works of Husserl; however, it is still far from being resolved. Phenomenology is the study of essences, and all problems are accordingly reduced to the definition of essences: the essence of perception, the essence of consciousness, for example. But phenomenology is also a philosophy that places essences in existence* and believes that man and the world can only be understood in terms of their "facticity". It is a transcendental philosophy which, in order to understand the propositions of the natural attitude, keeps them in limbo, but it is also a philosophy for which the world is always "already there", before reflection, as an irreducible presence, and all its efforts are therefore directed towards it is to find a naive contact with the world, to finally give it a philosophical status. This is the claim of philosophy, which imagines itself to be a "rigorous science", and an account of the "lived" space, time, world. This is an attempt to directly describe our experience as it is, without resorting to the psychological genesis and causal explanations that a scientist, psychologist or sociologist can give him, although Husserl himself in recent works speaks of "genetic"1 and even "constructive"2 phenomenology. Is it possible to eliminate these contradictions by separating the phenomenology of Husserl from the phenomenology of Heidegger? But "Being and Time"** proceeds from one of Husserl's propositions and is nothing but an explanation of 1 Husser. Meditations Cartesiennes. Paris, 1931. P. 120 et seq.
2 See the unpublished VI Meditations Cartesiennes, edited by E. Fink, which Mr. Berger kindly informed us about.
5
the notion of "naturichen Wetbegriff"* or "Lebenswet",** which Husserl, towards the end of his life, considered the main theme of phenomenology, so that the contradiction is also found in the philosophy of Husserl himself. The hurried reader will not want to deal with a doctrine that has nothing left to say, and will ask whether a philosophy that fails to define itself is worthy of the noise raised around it, whether it is rather a myth or a fashion.
Even if this is so, one would have to understand what is the charm of this myth and what is the origin of this fashion, and the seriousness of the philosopher regarding such a situation would be reflected in the assertion that phenomenology can be accepted and practiced as a mode or style, it exists as a movement yet before reaching full philosophical awareness. It has been on the road for a long time, its adherents find it everywhere - in Hegel and Kierkegaard, of course, but also in Marx, Nietzsche, Freud. A philological analysis of texts will lead nowhere: in texts we find only what we ourselves put into them, and if history demanded our interpretation, then this is already the history of philosophy. It is in ourselves that we find the unity of phenomenology and its true meaning. It is not so much a matter of counting quotations as of defining and objectifying this phenomenology for us, thanks to which, in reading Husserl or Heidegger, most of our contemporaries felt that they had not learned a new philosophy, but rather met with what had long been expected. Phenomenology is accessible only to the phenomenological method. Let us try to deliberately link the well-known phenomenological themes in the way that they themselves are connected in life. Perhaps then we will understand why phenomenology for a long time remained in a state of beginning, appeared as a task and a desired goal.
* * *
It is about describing, not explaining or analyzing. This first indication that Husserl gave to beginning phenomenology, calling it to be a "descriptive psychology" or to return "to things themselves," testifies above all to his rejection of science. or my "psyche", I can't
6
to think of myself as a part of the world, as a simple object of biology, psychology and sociology, I cannot close the universe of science on myself. Everything that I know about the world, even through science, I know based on my vision or that life experience, without which the symbols of science would be empty space. The whole universe of science is built on the life-world, and if we want to think with all rigor of science itself, with all accuracy to determine its meaning and direction, we must first return to this experience, the secondary expression of which is science. Science does not and never will have the same justification as the perceived world, for the simple reason that it is its definition or explanation. I am not a "living being" or even a "man" or even a "consciousness" with all the characteristics that zoology, social anatomy or inductive psychology recognize for these products of nature or history - I am an absolute source, my existence does not come from my predecessors, from my physical or social environment, it goes to them and supports them, because my "I" makes to be for me (and therefore be in the only sense that this word can have for me) this tradition, which I decide to continue, or this horizon, the distance to which will come to naught, since it will not become its property if I do not survey it with my eyes. Scientific views, according to which I am a moment of the world, are distinguished by naivety and hypocrisy, since they unconditionally support a different point of view - the point of view of consciousness, according to which the world is initially located around me and itself, on its own initiative, begins to exist for me. To return to the things themselves means to return to this world to the knowledge of which knowledge always speaks and in relation to which any scientific definition will be abstract, symbolic and dependent: this is how geography describes the landscape in the bosom of which we happen to know what a forest, a valley or river.
This movement is by no means an idealistic return to consciousness, and the demand for pure description precludes both reflexive analysis and scientific explanation. Descartes, and especially Kant, gave freedom to the subject, or consciousness, by discovering that I could not grasp any thing as existing unless I had previously experienced myself as existing in the act of grasping; they showed consciousness, this
7
the absolute certainty of my "I" for me as a condition, without which there would be nothing at all, and the act of binding - as the basis of what is connected. It goes without saying that the act of binding is nothing without the picture of the world that it links, the unity of consciousness, according to Kant, arises simultaneously with the unity of the world, and Descartes' methodical doubt * does not lead us to any losses, since the whole world, at least, as our experience, included in the Cogito, valid with it, marked only with the sign "thinking about...". However, the relationship between the subject and the world is not strictly two-sided: if this were the case, the certainty of the world in Descartes would have been present from the very beginning along with the certainty of the Cogito, and Kant would not have spoken of the "Copernican revolution." Reflexive analysis, based on our life experience, goes back to the subject as a possible and distinct condition; he shows the universal synthesis as something without which there would be no world. To this extent, he ceases to belong to our experience, replaces the report with a reconstruction. It is understandable why Husserl reproached Kant for the “psychologism of the abilities of the soul”1 and opposed poetic analysis,** which bases the world on the synthetic activity of the subject, with his “noematic reflection”, which resides in the object and explains its original unity, instead of generating it.
The world is already there before my analysis, and it would be unnatural to derive it from a series of generalizations that first connect sensations and then perspective aspects of the object, although both are nothing but products of analysis and should not exist before it. Reflective analysis believes that the path of preliminary constitution can be traversed in the opposite direction, that in the "inner man" of which St. Augustine, *** one can find a constitutive ability that always lives in him. Thus, reflection carries itself along and moves into invulnerable subjectivity, on this side of being and time. But this is naivety, or, if you like, incomplete reflection, which loses awareness of its own beginning. I started reflection, my reflection is a reflection on the non-reflexive, it cannot
1 Husser. Logische Untersuchungen. I: Proegomena zur reinen Logik. Hae, 1928. S. 93.
8
remain ignorant of itself as an event, therefore it appears to itself as genuine creativity, as a change in the structure of consciousness, and it must recognize, on this side of its own operations, the existence of a world that is given to the subject insofar as the subject is given to itself. The real is not to be constructed or constituted, but to be described. This means that I cannot identify perception with the operations of synthesis that belong to the plane of judgment, action, or predication. At every moment, my perceptual field is filled with reflections, crackles, fleeting tactile sensations that I cannot pin down to the exact context of perception and which nevertheless I immediately place in the world, without in any way mixing them with my dreams. At every moment I dream in the circle of things, I imagine objects or characters whose presence is incompatible with the context, and yet they do not mix with the world, they exist in front of the world, on the stage of the imaginary. If the reality of my perception were based solely on the internal coherence of "representations", then it would constantly fluctuate and, being at the mercy of my assumptions, I would have to destroy the illusory syntheses and regenerate into reality the distorted phenomena that I first separated from it. There is nothing of the sort. The real is a strong fabric, it does not wait for our judgments to add to itself the most incredible phenomena or to discard the most plausible ideas. Perception is not knowledge of the world, it is not even an act, not a deliberate taking of a position, perception is the basis on which all our acts unfold and it is presupposed by them. The world is not an object, the law of constitution of which I hold in my hands, the world is the natural environment and field of all my thoughts and all my distinct perceptions. Truth does not "live" only in the "inner man"1 or, more precisely, there is no inner man, man lives in the world, and it is in the world that he knows himself. When, proceeding from the dogmatism of common sense or the dogmatism of science, I return to my "I", then I find not an inner hearth of truth, but a subject doomed (voue) to be in the world.
1 In te redi; in interiore nomine habitat veritas.* Saint-Augustin.
9
* * *
Here comes through the true meaning of the famous phenomenological reduction. There is undoubtedly no other question on which Husserl would spend more time trying to understand himself, and a question to which he would return more often, since the "problematics of reduction" occupies a very significant place in unpublished works. For a long time, and up to the latest texts, the reduction was presented as a return to a transcendental consciousness, before which the world unfolds in absolute transparency, under the influence of apperceptions that permeate it, which the philosopher must reconstruct from their result. Thus, my perception of red is noted as a manifestation of a certain red color passed through the sensation, red color - as a manifestation of a red surface, and it - as a manifestation of red cardboard, and, finally, the last one - as a manifestation or outline of a red thing, this book. This, therefore, would be the comprehension of a hye* signifying a phenomenon of a higher order, Sinn-gebung, an active signifying operation that would determine consciousness, and the world would be nothing but a "world-designation." The phenomenological reduction would be idealistic in the sense of transcendental idealism, which treats the world as a unity of values that cannot be divided between Paul and Pierre, in which the perspectives of both intersect and which promotes communication between "Pierre's consciousness" and "Field's consciousness", since the perception of the world Pierre is not the business of Pierre, just as the perception of the world by the Field is not the business of the Field - in each of them it is the business of prepersonal consciousnesses, the communication of which is not a problem, since it is required by the very definition of consciousness, meaning or truth. To the extent that I am consciousness, in other words, to the extent that something makes sense to me, I am neither here nor there, neither Pierre nor Paul, I am no different from some "other consciousness, since we are all direct presences in the world, and this world, being a system of truths, is by definition one. Consistent transcendental idealism deprives the world of opacity and transcendence. The world is exactly what we imagine, not because we are people or empirical subjects, but because we are all one light and
10
are involved in the One, without dividing it among themselves. Reflective analysis ignores the problem of the other as a problem of the world, since it generates in me, together with the first flashes of consciousness, the ability to follow the direct path to universal truth; and since the other is also deprived of being in the world, place and body, then Ater and Ego * are one in the true world, a connection of minds. It is not difficult to understand how the Self can think of the Other, since the Self and therefore the Other are not woven into the fabric of phenomena and are values rather than existences. There is nothing hidden behind these faces or these gestures, no landscape inaccessible to me, except perhaps a fraction of a shadow that would not exist without light. For Husserl, as is known, on the contrary, the problem of the other exists, Ater Ego is a paradox. If the "other" is in fact "for himself", ** if he is on the other side of his being for me, and if we are "one-for-the-other", and not for God, then it is necessary that we appear to each other so that both he and I have an external appearance and that he, in addition to the perspective For Himself - my vision of my "I" and the vision of others of his "I" - would have a perspective For the Other - my vision of the Other and the vision of the Other me. It goes without saying that these two perspectives in each of us cannot simply be side by side, for then the other would not see me, and I would not see him. It is necessary that I have an appearance so that the body of the other remains itself. This paradox and this dialectic of Ego and Ater are only possible if Ego and Ater Ego are determined by their situation, if they are not devoid of mutual inherentness, that is, if philosophy does not end with a return to my "I", if, through reflection, I discover not only my presence for me, but also the possibility of an "outside observer", that is, if, again, at the very moment when I feel my existence, and up to the extreme point of reflection, I still lack this absolute density, which would make me go beyond time , and I discover in myself a kind of inner weakness that prevents me from being an absolute individual and exposes me to the eyes of others as a person among other people, or at least as a consciousness among other consciousnesses. Until now, the Cogito has devalued the perception of the other, taught me that I am only available to myself, since the Cogito defined me through the fact that I think about myself, that I am alone and can have this thinking, at least if you take it
11
in this ultimate sense. In order for the word "other" not to be an empty sound, it is necessary that my existence in no way be reduced to the awareness of existence, that it also includes the possibility of consciousness of the "other" and, therefore, my incarnation in nature and the possibility of at least a historical situation. . The cogito must reveal me in the situation, only under this condition can transcendental subjectivity become, as Husserl says,1 intersubjectivity. As a thinking Ego I can, of course, distinguish the world and things from my self, since it is clear that I do not exist in the way that things exist. Moreover, I have to separate from my "I" my body, which is understood as a thing among things, is a certain sum of physical and chemical processes. But the cogitatio* which I thus discover, although it has no place in objective time and space, is not without it in the phenomenological world. The world that I distinguished from my "I" as a sum of things or processes connected by causal relations, I rediscover in my "I" as the inescapable horizon of all my cogitationes** and as a certain dimension in relation to which I place myself. The true Cogito does not determine the existence of the subject through his thinking about existence, does not turn the certainty of the world into the certainty of a thought about the world, and, finally, does not replace the world with the meaning of the world. On the contrary, the Cogito recognizes my thinking as something inalienable and abolishes any kind of idealism, revealing me as "being in the world."
Precisely because we are related to the world from beginning to end, the only way to be convinced of this lies in stopping this movement, refusing our assistance to it (look at it ohne mitzumachen, *** as Husserl says) or him out of the game. It is not a matter of rejecting the certainties of common sense or the natural attitude - they, on the contrary, constitute a constant theme of philosophy - but precisely that they, as the premises of all thought, "take it for granted", remain unnoticed, and we, in order to restore their life and discover them, they must abstain from them for a moment. The best formulation of the reduction undoubtedly belongs to Husserl's assistant E. Fink **** - he spoke of "surprise" before
1 Husser. Die Krisis der europaischen Wissenschaften und die transzendentae Phanomenoogie, III, (unpublished).
12
the face of the world.1 Reflection does not turn away from the world to turn to the unity of consciousness as the basis of the world, it steps aside to see transcendences that are in full swing, it weakens the intentional threads that bind us to the world so that they appear to the gaze, only it can be awareness world, because it reveals it as something strange and paradoxical. The transcendental is understood differently by Husserl than by Kant. Husserl reproaches Kantian philosophy for remaining a "world" philosophy, since it uses our attitude to the world, which is the driving force of transcendental deduction, and makes the world immanent to the subject, instead of being surprised at it, and understands the subject as transcending in relation to the world. All the misunderstandings that Husserl had with his interpreters, existential "dissenters" and, ultimately, with himself, stem from the fact that, in order for the world to see and perceive it as a paradox, it is necessary to break our habitual relationship with it, and it is precisely this gap that will open us the unmotivated beating of the world. The greatest lesson of reduction lies in the impossibility of complete reduction. That is why Husserl again and again asks the question of the possibility of reduction. If we were absolute spirit, reduction would not be a problem. But since we, on the contrary, are in the world, since our reflections take place in the temporal stream that they try to catch (in which they are, as Husserl says, sich einstromen *), there is no such thinking that would embrace our thought. A philosopher, as Husserl's unpublished writings say, is one who always starts from the beginning. This means that he cannot take as final anything that people or scientists know. It also means that philosophy should not consider itself as something definitive in that it has succeeded in expressing the truth, that philosophy is a renewed experience of its own beginning, that it is wholly and completely reduced to the description of this beginning, which, after all, radical reflection is the awareness of its own dependence on non-reflexive life, which is its initial, permanent and final situation. Far from being, as it was thought,
1 Fink. Die phanomenoogische Phiosophie Edmund Hussers in der gegenwartigen Kritik. S. 331 et seq.
13
basis idealistic philosophy, phenomenological reduction is a formula of existential philosophy: Heidegger's "In-der-Wet-Sein"* is possible only on the basis of phenomenological reduction.
* * *
The same kind of misunderstanding brings confusion to Husserl's concept of "essences". Every reduction, says Husserl, being transcendental, must at the same time be necessarily eidetic. This means that we cannot philosophically examine our perception of the world without ceasing to be one with it and with the interest in the world that defines us, without disengaging from the state of involvement in order to make the world turn into a spectacle, without moving from the fact of our existence to nature. of our existence, from Dasein** to Wesen.*** It is clear, however, that the essence here is not the goal, but the means, that our actual involvement in the world is what needs to be considered and conceptually formulated, clarifying all our conceptual settings. The necessity of this appeal to essences does not mean that philosophy begins to consider them as its object, it means, on the contrary, that our existence is too firmly held together by the world to know itself as such at the moment when it plunges into it, and that it needs a field of ideality in order to cognize and conquer its own facticity. The Viennese school, ****, as you know, stands on the fact that we are dealing only with meanings. "Consciousness", for example, for the Viennese school is not the same we. This is a later and more complicated meaning, which we supposedly should use only with caution and only after clarifying the many meanings that contributed to its definition in the course of the semantic evolution of the word. This logical positivism is the direct antipode of Husserl's thought. What would no matter the semantic changes that we owe to having the word and concept of consciousness in our language, we have a sure way to access what they signify For example, we have an idea of ourselves, of the consciousness that we ourselves are, and it is with this experience that all linguistic meanings are measured, and it is to this experience that we owe the fact that language
14
means something to us. "The point is to bring this still silent experience ... to bring it to a pure expression of its own meaning."1 Husserl's essences must capture all the living relations of experience, just as a net captures quivering fish and algae from the depths of the sea. One cannot, therefore, agree with J. Wahl,2 who asserts that "Husserl separates essences from existence." Entities separated from existence are the entities of language. It is part of the function of language that it makes entities exist in isolation, which, in truth, only appears to be so, since it makes entities rest on the prepredicative life of consciousness anyway. In the silence of the primordial consciousness, it is not only what words mean, but also what things mean, the core of original meaning around which acts of designation and expression are organized.
To seek the essence of consciousness does not mean to concentrate on the "Wortbedeutung" * of consciousness and to escape from existence into the universe of what is said, it means to find the actual presence of my "I" in me, the facticity of my consciousness, which is what the word and concept of consciousness. To search for the essence of the world does not mean to search for what the world is in the idea, reducing it to the topic of reasoning, it means to search for what it is for us in practice, to the point of any thematization. Sensationalism "reduces" the world when it claims that we are ultimately dealing only with our states. Transcendental idealism also “reduces” the world, for, endowing it with certainty, it recognizes it only as a thought or consciousness about the world, a simple correlate of our knowledge, so that the world becomes immanent to consciousness, and the originality of things comes to naught. Eidetic reduction, on the contrary, consists in the decision to show the world as it is before we turn to ourselves, in an effort to equate reflection with the non-reflexive life of consciousness. I look at the world, I perceive it. If, agreeing with sensationalism, I began to assert that there is nothing but "states of consciousness", and tried to separate perceptions from dreams according to some "criteria", then the phenomenon of the world would elude me. For
1 Husser. Meditations Cartesiennes. P. 33.
2 Wah. Reaisme, diaectique et mystere // Arbaete. Automne 1942 (without pagination).
15
I can talk about "dreams" and "reality", wonder about the difference between the imaginary and the real, and doubt about the "real" only because this distinction has been made by me before analysis, because I have experience of both the real and the imaginary; the problem, then, is not to understand how critical thought can acquire secondary equivalents of this difference, but to clarify our original knowledge of the "real", to describe the perception of the world as that which always grounds our idea of truth. Therefore, the question is not whether we actually perceive the world, on the contrary, the whole point is that the world is what we perceive. Generally speaking, the question is not whether our evidences are truths, nor whether, due to some flaw in our reason, what is true for us is an illusion in relation to some truth in itself: for if we speak of an illusion, then we have recognized illusions, which could only be done in the name of some perception, which at the same moment was verified as true, so that doubt or fear of error confirms our ability to expose errors and, therefore, do not separate us from the truth. We are in truth, evidence is the "experience of truth."1 To seek the essence of perception is to declare from the outset that perception is not something supposedly true, but our access to truth. Now if, in agreement with idealism, I want to base this factual evidence, this invincible belief, on absolute evidence, that is, on the absolute clarity of my thoughts, if I want to find in myself that thought that makes the world possible, that would constitute the framework of the world or illuminated it through and through, then I will again betray my life experience and begin to look for what constitutes its possibility, instead of looking for what it is. The evidence of perception is not an adequate thought or evidence apodictic.2* The world is not what I think, but what I live, I am open to the world, I, without a doubt, communicate with it, but I
1 Das Erebnis der Wahrheit. (See: Husser. Logische Untersuchungen. Proegomena zur reinen Logik. S. 190).
2 There is no apodictic evidence, so, in essence, says the "Formae und transzendentae Logik". S. 142. (See: Husser. Formae und transzendentae Logik. Hae, 1929).
16
I do not possess, the world is inexhaustible. "There is a world," or, more precisely, "there is a world," this constant thesis of my life, I have never been given an exhaustive explanation. This facticity of the world constitutes the Wetichkeit der Wet,* such a state of affairs that the world is the world, just as the facticity of the cogito is not some kind of imperfection in it, but, on the contrary, something that confirms me in my existence. The eidetic method is the method of phenomenological positivism, which bases the possible on the real.
* * *
Now we can proceed to the idea of intentionality, which is too often mentioned as the main discovery of phenomenology, although it can only be understood in terms of reduction. "All consciousness is consciousness about something" - there is nothing new in this. In The Refutation of Idealism, Kant showed that internal perception is impossible without external perception, that the world, being an interweaving of phenomena, precedes my unity in consciousness and is for me a means to realize myself as consciousness. From the Kantian attitude to possible object intentionality differs in that the unity of the world, even before being posited in cognition and in the intentional act of identification, is experienced as something already accomplished or already present. In the Critique of Judgment, Kant himself says that there is a unity of imagination and reason and a certain unity of subjects to the object, that in the experience of the beautiful, for example, I experience consistency between the sensible and the conceptual, between my "I" and "other" , which is itself devoid of concept. Here the subject is no longer that universal thinker dealing with a system of strictly connected objects, not the power of positing, subordinating diversity to the law of reason, if it is necessary for him to give the world a form - he opens himself and admires himself as nature, spontaneously conforming to the law of reason. But if there is the nature of the subject, then the hidden art of the imagination must determine categorical activity, not only aesthetic judgment, but also knowledge will be based on it, and it will be the basis of the unity of consciousness and consciousnesses. Husserl joins the Critique of Judgment,** speaking of the teleology of consciousness. Speech
17
it is not about duplicating human consciousness with absolute thinking, which from the outside will prescribe goals to it. It is a question of recognizing consciousness itself as the project of the world, the purpose of the world, which it does not own, which it does not embrace, but to which it is constantly directed, and to recognize the world as this pre-objective individuality, the imperious unity of which prescribes the goal of cognition. That is why Husserl distinguishes between the intentionality of the act, that is, the intentionality of our judgments and volitional positions, which was discussed in the Critique of Pure Reason, and the acting intentionality (fungierende Intentionaitat), which creates a natural and prepredicative unity of the world and our life, reveals itself in our desires. , estimates, landscape more clearly than in objective thinking, and provides the text that our knowledge strives to translate into exact language. In relation to the world, as it tirelessly says in us, there is nothing that could become clearer through analysis: philosophy can only present it to our gaze, offer it to our witness.
Thanks to the extended concept of intentionality, phenomenological "understanding" distinguishes itself from classical "understanding", which is limited to "true and unshakable essences", and phenomenology gains the opportunity to become the phenomenology of genesis. Whatever it is about - about the perception of a thing, about a historical event or about a doctrine, "to understand" means to comprehend the total intention - not only what the "properties" of the perceived thing can be for the representation, the dust of "historical facts", "ideas" introduced into use by a specific doctrine - but also a unique way of existence, which is expressed in the properties of pebbles, glass or a piece of wax, in all the events of the revolution, in all the thoughts of the philosopher. In any civilization it is necessary to find the Idea in the Hegelian sense, that is, not some kind of law of the physical and mathematical type, accessible to objective thinking, but a general formula for a single behavior in the face of the Other, Nature, time, death, in a word, a special way of shaping the world, which the historian needs to be restored and accepted. That's where the dimensions of history are. There is not a single human word, not a single human gesture - even among the most ordinary and involuntary - that would not matter in relation to them. I thought I was silent because
18
fatigue, and that minister thought that he said something only in order to say something, but now my silence or his words take on meaning, because both my fatigue and his empty phrases are not accidental, and expressing a certain indifference, At the same time, they indicate a certain position in relation to the situation. If we consider the event close, at the moment when it is experienced, it seems that everything happens by chance, that everything was decided thanks to some kind of ambition, a successful meeting, a favorable combination of circumstances. But one accident is equalized by another, and now a lot of facts are being collected, a certain way of choosing a position in relation to a human situation, an event whose contours have been determined and about which one can speak, emerges. Should history be understood in terms of ideology or in terms of politics, religion, economics? Is doctrine to be understood in terms of its explicit content, or in terms of the psychology of its author and the events of his life? It should be understood at once through everything, everything has a meaning, behind all relationships we find the same structure of being. All these points of view are true, provided that we do not separate one from the other, that we go into the very depths of history and reach the unique core of existential meaning that makes itself felt in every perspective. It is true, as Marx says, that history does not walk on its head, but it is also true that it does not think with its feet. More precisely, we must deal not with the "head", not with the "legs", but with the body. All economic or psychological explanations of a doctrine are true because the thinker always thinks in terms of what he is. The comprehension of the doctrine will be complete if it manages to connect with the history of the doctrine and external factors, to place the sources and meaning of the doctrine in an existential structure. There is, as Husserl said, a "genesis of meaning" (Sinngenesis),1 which alone tells us in the final analysis what the doctrine "wants to say." Like understanding, criticism must unfold on all planes and, of course, in refuting a doctrine, it is impossible to be content with establishing its connection with this or that accident in
1 This term appears frequently in unpublished works. The very same idea is present in "Formae und transzendentae Logik". S. 181 et seq.
19
the author's life. Doctrine means the outside; neither in existence nor in coexistence is there pure contingency, since both master contingencies, making intelligence out of them. Finally, just as history is indivisible in the present, so it is also indivisible in the future. In relation to their fundamental dimensions, all historical periods appear to be manifestations of a single existence or episodes of a single drama, the denouement of which we know nothing about. Because we are in the world, because we are sentenced to meaning, whatever we do, whatever we say, everything gets its name in history.
* * *
The most important achievement of phenomenology is undoubtedly that it has succeeded in combining extreme subjectivism with extreme objectivism in its concept of the world and rationality. Rationality is exactly commensurate with the experiments in which it emerges. There is rationality, that is, perspectives intersect, perceptions are confirmed, meaning is revealed. However, it is impossible to believe the meaning in isolation, to turn it into an absolute Spirit or into a world of a realistic kind. The phenomenological world is not the world of pure being, but the meaning that manifests itself at the intersection of my experiences and at the intersection of my experiences with the experiences of another; through the interlocking of both, it is therefore inseparable from subjectivity and intersubjectivity, which form a single whole through the renewal of my past experiences in my present experiences, the experience of the other in my experience. For the first time, the thought of a philosopher is realized so as not to put into practice, looking ahead of himself, his own results. The philosopher tries to think the world, the other and himself, to comprehend their relationship. But the thinking Ego and the "disinterested observer" (uninteressierter Zuschauer)1 do not reach any already given rationality, they "establish"2 each other and establish rationality in an undertaking for which there is no guarantee in being and the right to which is based on a real possibility.
1 VI. Meditation Cartesienne (unreleased).
2 Ibid.
20
to accept one's history, which the undertaking endows us with, the phenomenological world is not an explanation of a pre-established being, it is the foundation of being; Philosophy is not a reflection of pre-established truth, it is, like art, the realization of truth. The question arises how this realization is possible if it does not reach in things some pre-existing Mind. But the only pre-existing Logos is the world itself, and the philosophy that translates it into manifest existence does not begin with its possibility - it is actual, it really exists, like the world of which it is a part. No explanatory hypothesis can be clearer than the action itself, in which we accept an incomplete world, trying to reflect on it and give it integrity. Rationality is not a problem, there is no unknown behind it, the existence of which we would have to deduce or prove inductively: we are present at every moment of this miracle of the connection of experiences, and no one knows better than us how it happens, since the knot of these relations is ourselves. . Peace and reason are not the problem; they are mysterious, if you like, but the sacrament determines them, and there can be no question of dispelling it by some kind of "solution", it is beyond any solutions. True philosophy is to learn to see the world again, in this sense a story told can signify the world with the same "depth" as a philosophical treatise. We take our own destiny into our hands, we become responsible for our history through reflection, as well as the decision in which we invest our lives, in both cases it is a matter of a violent action that is tested in execution.
Phenomenology as a revelation of the world relies on itself, or, better, substantiates itself.1 All knowledge is based on the "ground" of postulates and, in the end, on our communication with the world, which is the first establishment of rationality. Philosophy as radical reflection essentially deprives itself of this support. For philosophy is also in history, it also uses the world and established forms of reason. Therefore, it is necessary that she turn the question to herself, which she turns to all sciences, so that she
1 "Rukbeziehung der Phanomenoogie auf sich sebst" - as they say in one unpublished work.
21
bifurcated endlessly to become, according to Husserl, an endless dialogue or reflection; to the extent that it remains true to its purpose, philosophy will not know where it is going. The incompleteness of phenomenology, its fluctuations, are not signs of failure, they were inevitable, since phenomenology sets itself the task of discovering the mystery of the world and the mystery of mind. was a movement. This is painstaking work like the work of Balzac, Proust, Valerie or Cezanne - with the same attention and amazement, with the same exacting consciousness, with the same will to comprehend the meaning of the world or history at the moment of their inception. In this respect, phenomenology merges with the effort of all modern thought.
1 We owe this expression to J. Gusdorf, who is currently (1943 - translation note) in German captivity, although he may have used it in a different sense.
Introduction. CLASSICAL PREJUDICES AND A RETURN TO PHENOMENA
I. "FEELING"
Coming to the study of perception, we find in language a concept of sensation that seems immediate and clear: I feel red, blue, hot, cold. We shall see, however, that the concept is the most vague, that, by accepting it, classical analysis has been deceived in regard to the phenomenon of perception.
By sensation, I could first of all understand the way in which I experience the impact and experience of some of my own state. The gray shroud that comes over me when I close my eyes, the sounds that go through "my head" when I'm drowsy, indicate what pure sensation can be. I will feel, probably, to the exact extent that I coincide with the sensed, to the extent that it loses its place in the objective world and means nothing more to me. It must be admitted that sensation must seek without reaching a qualitatively determined content, for red and green, in order to differ from one another, like two different colors, must form a picture in front of me, although without a completely definite location, thus ceasing to be something in me. Pure sensation is the experience of an indistinguishable, instantaneous and point "strike". There is no need to prove, since all authors agree on this, that such a concept does not at all correspond to what we experience, that the simplest factual perceptions known to us in living creatures such as a monkey or a chicken do not rely on some absolute moments, but on relationships.1 However, there is still
1 See: Mereau-Ponty. La Structure du Comporment. Paris, 1942. P. 142 et seq.
25
An open question is why we consider ourselves entitled to single out a certain layer of "impressions" in the experience of perception. Imagine a white spot on a uniform background. All spot points are united by a "function" that turns them into a "shape". The color of this figure is denser and, as it were, stronger than the color of the background; the edges of the white spot "belong" to it, they do not merge with the background, although they merge with it; it seems that the stain is applied to the background and does not destroy it. Both sides do not so much contain something as proclaim something, this elementary perception, therefore, is loaded with a certain meaning. But if figure and ground taken together are not felt, it seems to us necessary that they be felt at every point. But at the same time, it is forgotten that any point, in turn, can only be perceived as a figure against the background. When the Gestattheorie asserts that a figure against a background is the simplest sense-givenness that we can achieve, it is not a question of an accidental characterization of actual perception, which leaves us the right to introduce the concept of impression into ideal analysis. Before us is the very definition of the phenomenon of perception, something without which no phenomenon can be called perception. "Something" perceived is always in some kind of environment, is part of the "field". A truly homogeneous surface, offering nothing to perceive, cannot give room for any perception. Only the structure of actual perception can show us what it means to perceive. Consequently, a pure impression is not only impossible to find, but also impossible to perceive and, therefore, to think as a moment of perception. It is resorted to, ignoring the experience of perception, it is forgotten, referring to the perceived object. The visual field does not consist of individual views. But a visible object is made up of material fragments, spatial points are outside one another. It is impossible to imagine a separately taken given of perception, unless, of course, we are talking about the mental experience of perception. However, in the world there are both isolated objects and physical emptiness. So, I will not define sensation in terms of pure impression. But after all, to see means to have color or light, to hear means to have sounds, to feel means to have qualities, and isn’t it enough to know what a sensation is, to see something red or hear the sound la? But red and green are not sensations, but
26
perceived, and quality is not an element of consciousness, but a property of an object. Instead of providing us with a simple way of distinguishing between sensations, the perceived quality, when taken in the very experience that reveals it, appears as rich and as obscure as the object itself or the entire perceived spectacle. This red spot that I see on the carpet is red only in view of the shadow that crosses it, its quality is manifested only in relation to the play of light, that is, as an element of spatial configuration. In addition, the color is determined only when it exists on a certain surface, too small a surface remains indeterminate. Finally, this red would not literally be red if it were not the "woolly red" of the carpet.1 Thus, analysis reveals in each quality the meanings that inhabit it. So what, then, to say that it is all about the qualities of our actual experience, combined with the totality of our knowledge, and that we reserve the right to ask ourselves the question, what is the "pure quality" that determines "pure feeling"? But we have just seen that this pure feeling amounts to feeling nothing, and therefore not feeling at all. The so-called evidence of feeling is based not on the testimony of consciousness, but on a naive faith in the world. It seems to us that we know perfectly well what it is to "see", "hear", "feel", because perception has long presented us with colored or sounding objects. When we want to analyze perception, we transfer these objects into consciousness, committing what psychologists call the "error of experience", that is, we immediately assume in our awareness of things what we know is in things. We combine perception with perceived. And since the perceived itself is accessible only to perception, we do not understand, in the end, either one or the other. We are involved in the world, and we can’t tear ourselves away from it in order to move on to understanding the world. If we succeeded, we would see that quality is not directly experienced, that all consciousness is consciousness of something. However, this "something" is not necessarily an object that can be defined. With regard to quality, one can be mistaken twice: firstly, we are mistaken when we make it an element of consciousness, while for consciousness
1 Sartre. L "Imaginaire. Paris, 1940. P. 241.
27

Fig.1
it is an object when we treat it as a meaningless impression, although it always has some meaning; on the other hand, when we assume that this meaning and this object are both definite and self-sufficient. Both the first and second errors come from a naive belief in the world. With the help of optics and geometry, we build a section of the world, the image of which can be imprinted on our retina at any time. Everything that is outside this perimeter, without being reflected on any tangible surface, affects our visual perception no more than light affects closed eyes. So, we should perceive some area of the world, delineated by clear boundaries, surrounded by a certain zone of blackness, filled without gaps with qualities, supported by the same definite ratios of magnitudes that exist on the retina. There is nothing like this in experience, and based on the world, we will never understand what the visual field is. If it is possible to delineate the perimeter of vision, shifting the side signal lines little by little to the center, the measurement results will vary all the time, and it is impossible to indicate the moment when the seen signal line ceases to be visible. The space surrounding the visual field is rather difficult to describe, it is only clear that it is neither black nor gray. There is a kind of indefinite vision here, a vision of what the hell and, if we go to the end, even what is behind me is not devoid of visual presence. Two line segments in the Muller-Lyer illusion (Fig. 1) are neither equal nor unequal, an alternative arises in the objective world.1 Visual field -

Time is the direction of life (direction - as they say about the direction of the flow of water, the direction of the phrase, the direction of the fabric, the direction of the fragrance).

Kdodel. Poetic art.

Der Sinn des Daseins ist die Zeitlichkeit.*120*

If on the previous pages we have already met with time on our way to subjectivity, then the point here is not that all our experiences, as long as they are ours, are arranged in accordance with "before" and "after", that temporality, in the language of Kant , is a form of inner feeling that it represents the most general characteristic of "psychic facts". But in reality, and without in the least prejudging what the analysis of time will reveal to us, we have already discovered a much more intimate connection between time and subjectivity. We have just seen that the subject, which cannot be reduced to a series of psychic events, cannot, however, be eternal. It remains to recognize it as temporary, but not because of some accident of the human constitution, but because of an internal necessity. We have to create such a concept of subject and time, where they are internally communicated. Now we can say the same about temporality as we said above, for example, about sexuality and spatiality: existence cannot have external or accidental attributes. It cannot be anything - spatial, sexual, temporal - without being completely and completely, without absorbing, without taking these "attributes" into one's own account, without turning them into dimensions of one's being, so that somehow a precise analysis of any of them, in fact, affects subjectivity itself. There are no problems of masters and subordinates here - all problems are concentric. To analyze time does not mean to draw consequences from a pre-established conception of subjectivity, it means to penetrate through time into its concrete structure. If we manage to understand the subject, then not in its pure form, but by looking for it at the intersection of its dimensions. We must therefore consider time in itself, and only by following its internal dialectic will we arrive at a transformation of our idea of the subject.

They say that time passes or flows. They talk about the passage of time. The water that I am watching, a few days ago, when the ice was melting, was gathering in the mountains, now it is in front of me, moving towards the sea, into which it will flow. If time is like a river, then it flows from the past towards the present and the future. The present is a consequence of the past, and the future is a consequence of the present. This famous metaphor is actually quite confusing. For, if we consider things in themselves, the melting of the snows and what follows from it cannot be successive events, or rather the very concept of an event has no place in the objective world. When I say that the water that is currently flowing was made of ice the day before yesterday, I mean some witness who is in a certain place in the world, and I compare his successive visions: he was either present at the melting of the snow and followed the descent of the water, or from the shore river, after two days of waiting, he saw floating pieces of wood, thrown by him at the source. "Events" are cut out by the final observer in the spatio-temporal integrity of the objective world. But if I consider this world by itself, then only one indivisible being remains, which does not change. Change presupposes a position that I take and from where I see how things are going; there are no events unless there is someone to whom they happen and whose ultimate perspective grounds their individuality. Time involves looking at time. It, therefore, is not like a stream, is not some kind of fluid substance. This metaphor has come down to us from Heraclitus only because we furtively place in this stream a witness to its current. We do this already when we say that the stream is flowing, because this suggests - where there is nothing but a thing wholly external to itself - something internal or some individuality that reveals its manifestations outward. But as soon as I introduce an observer, whether he follows the stream or watches its course from the shore, the temporal relations are reversed. In the second case, the elapsed waters do not follow the direction of the future, they sink into the past; the coming is on the side of the source, and time does not come from the past. It is not the past that pushes the present toward being, and it is not the present that pushes the future toward being; the future is not prepared behind the observer's back, it is predetermined before him, like a thunderstorm on the horizon. If the observer, being in a boat, follows downstream, one can, of course, say that he is going down with the stream in the direction of his future, but the future is new landscapes waiting for him at the mouth of the river, and the passage of time ceases to be the stream itself: it is the unfolding of landscapes in front of an observer in motion. Time, therefore, is not some kind of real process, a real sequence, which it is enough for me to register. It is born from my connection with things. In things themselves, future and past exist in a sort of eternal pre-existence and eternal post-existence; the water that will pass tomorrow is already there at the moment (there is also water at the source that has just passed) a little lower, in the valley. What is past and future for me is present in the world in the present. It is often said that in things themselves there is no future yet, the past no longer exists, and the present, strictly speaking, is nothing but a certain limit, so that time crumbles. This is why Leibniz could define the objective world as mens momentanea*121* and this is why St. Augustine demanded for the constitution of time, apart from the presence of the present, the presence of the past and the presence of the future. But let us think carefully about what they want to say. If the objective world is not capable of carrying time, this does not mean that it is too narrow in some sense, that We must add to it the edge of the past and the edge of the future. The past and the future exist in the world only as an excess, they exist in the present. In order to be a temporal being, being itself lacks the non-being associated with "otherness", with "once" and "tomorrow". The objective world is too full to give space to time. The past and the future by themselves leave being and go over to the side of subjectivity in order to find in it not some kind of real support, but, on the contrary, the possibility of non-being that corresponds to their nature. If the objective world is freed from the finite perspectives open to it and posited as being in itself, nothing will remain in it but "now". Moreover, these "nows", being not present for anyone, are devoid of any temporal character and could not form sequences. The definition of time, which is hidden in common sense comparisons, as a sequence of "now",1 is wrong not only because it reduces the past and future to the present: it is untenable, because it destroys the very concept of "now", as well as the concept of succession.

We, therefore, would not gain anything by transferring time from things into us if we repeated the same mistake “in consciousness” by defining it as a sequence of “now”. However, this is exactly what psychologists do when they try to "explain" the consciousness of the past through memories, and the consciousness of the future - through the projection of these memories in front of them. Bergson's refutation of the "physiological theories" of memory,* for example, remains on the basis of causal explanation; it stands on the grounds that cerebral traces and other bodily moments are not an adequate cause of memory phenomena; that, for example, we can find no physiological basis for explaining the order of the disappearance of memories in the case of progressive aphasia. Thus, the ongoing discussion, of course, discredits the idea of bodily preservation of the past: the body is no longer a receiver of residual excitations, but an organ of pantomime, designed to ensure the intuitive realization of the “intentions”2 of consciousness.

But these intentions cling to the memories preserved in the "unconscious", the presence of the past in consciousness remains just an actual presence. It has been overlooked that the strongest argument against the physiological conservation of the past is also a reason to reject "psychological conservation." This argument is that no conservation, no physiological or psychic "trace" of the past can explain the awareness of the past. This table is dotted with traces of my past life, I wrote my initials on it, left ink stains. However, these traces in themselves do not refer to the past, they are present in the present; and if I find in them signs of some kind of “preceding” event, this is because, in addition to everything else, I have the meaning of the past, I carry this meaning in myself. If my brain retains traces of that bodily process which accompanied one of my perceptions, and if the nervous excitation goes back along the paths already beaten, the perception will reappear, I will have a new perception, weakened and unreal, if you like, but by no means present perception will not be able to point me to any past event, unless I have some other view of the past, which allows me to consider this perception as a memory, which contradicts the accepted hypothesis. If we now replace the physiological trace with a “psychic” one, if our perceptions are in the unconscious, the difficulty remains the same: the stored perception remains a perception, it continues to exist, it is constantly in the present, it does not reveal behind us that dimension of escape and absence, which is past. A surviving fragment of the experienced past is nothing more than a reason for thinking about the past, in itself it cannot be recognized by it; recognition, when it is sought to be deduced from any content, always outstrips itself. Reproduction presupposes authentication, it cannot be understood as such unless I already have some kind of direct contact with the past remaining in its place. It is all the more impossible to construct the future with the help of the contents of consciousness, no real content can pass, even at the cost of ambiguity, as evidence of the future, since the future did not even exist and it could not, like the Past, leave its mark on us. If one can thus think of explaining the relation of the future to the present, it can only be done by likening this relation to the relation of the present to the past. Considering a long series of my past states, I see that my Present always passes, I can get ahead of this transition, interpret my immediate past as a distant one, and my actual present ~ as the past, the future then is a gap that forms before the present. Such a prospect would be in fact a retrospection, but the future would be. projection of the past. But even if, due to some impossibility, I could construct the consciousness of the past with the help of a displaced present, this latter, of course, could not open the future to me. Even if we actually imagine the future with what we have already seen, anyway, in order to project what we have seen in front of us, we must first have a sense of the future. If prospection is retrospection, it is in any case an anticipatory retrospection, but how could anticipation be possible if we did not have a sense of the future? We guess, as they say, “by analogy”, that this unique present will pass like all the others. But in order for there to be an analogy between the present past and the present actual, it is necessary that the latter declare itself not only as the present, but that it announce itself as passing away, so that we feel pressure on it from the future, which is trying to displace it, and so that, in a word, the passage of time would initially be not only the transition of the present into the past, but also the transition of the future into the present. If one can say that every prospect is an anticipatory retrospection, one might just as well say that every retrospection is an inverted prospect: I know that I was in Corsica before the war, because I know that the war loomed on the horizon during my journey to Corsica. Past and future cannot be simple concepts formed by means of abstraction from our perceptions and memories, simple designations for a real series of "mental facts". Time is conceived by us before its constituent parts, temporal relations make events in time possible. Accordingly, in order for the subject to be present both in the intention of the past and in the intention of the future, it is necessary that he himself was not located in it. So let's not talk about time, that it is a "gift of consciousness", let's say more precisely that consciousness unfolds or constitutes time. Due to the ideality of time, consciousness finally ceases to be a prisoner in the present.

But does it have access to the past and the future? It is no longer haunted by the present and "contents", it passes freely from the past and future, which are close to it, insofar as it makes them past and future, insofar as they are its immanent objects, to the present, which is remote from it, since it exists as present only thanks to the relationships that consciousness establishes between the present, past and future. But does not the liberated consciousness thus lose all conception of what the future, the past, and even the present may be? The time which consciousness constitutes, is it not in all respects similar to real time, the impossibility of which we have discovered? Isn't it again a "now" series that is not presented to anyone because no one is involved in it? Are we still far from understanding what the future, past, present and transition from one to another can be? Time as an immanent object of consciousness is leveled time, in other words, it is no longer time. Time is preserved if it is not unfolded in its entirety, if past, present and future are not in the same sense. The essence of time is to fulfill oneself and not to be, never to be fully constituted. The constituted Time, the series of possible relations according to "before" and "after", is not even time, but its final registration, it is the result of its transition, which objective thinking always presupposes and which it fails to grasp. It is something spatial, insofar as its moments coexist before thought,1 and belonging to the present, insofar as consciousness becomes contemporary to all times.

1 It is neither necessary nor sufficient to expose the transformation of time into space in order to return to true Time, as Bergson does. This is not necessary, since time is incompatible with space only if we consider previously objectified space, and not the original spatiality that we tried to describe and which is an abstract form of our present presence in the world. This is not enough, because even if one exposes the systematic interpretation of time in terms of space, one can remain very far from a true intuition of time. This is what happened to Bergson. When he says that duration "snowballs out of itself" when he accumulates memories of himself in the unconscious, he confuses time with the preserved present, evolution with its product.

It is a different and immobile environment where nothing passes and nothing happens. There must be some other, true time where I can find out what the passage or transition in itself is. It is true, of course, that I could not comprehend the position of time without "before" and "after", that in order to notice the connection of three moments, I must not coincide with any of them, and that time ultimately needs a synthesis. But it is just as true that this synthesis must continually begin anew, and that we deny time if we suppose it to be somehow complete. This is the dream of philosophers - to comprehend the "eternity of life" on the other side of the constant and changeable, where the fruitfulness of time is contained, but the thetic consciousness of time, which subdues and embraces it, destroys the phenomenon of time. If we have to meet something like eternity, it will happen in the core of our experience of time, and not in the timeless subject who would be called to think and posit it. The problem now is to clarify this time at the moment of generation and in the process of manifestation, which is always implied in the concept of time and which is not an object of our knowledge, but a dimension of our being.

It is in my "field of presence", in broad sense words (that moment that I spend in work with the horizon of the past day behind and the horizon of evening and night ahead), I come into contact with time, I learn to know its running. The more distant past also, of course, has its own temporal order and temporal position in relation to my present, but only insofar as it was itself present, was experienced by me "in due time" and lasted up to the present moment. When I revive the distant past, I rediscover time, move to the moment when it still contained the now closed horizon of the future and the horizon of the immediate past, today already distant. Everything, therefore, refers me to the field of present presence as a primordial experience in which time and its dimensions are revealed personally, without intermediate distance, in ultimate evidence. It is there that we see the future slip into the present and the past. These three dimensions are not given to us in discrete acts: I do not imagine my day, it presses on me with all its weight, it is still here, I do not remember the details, although I can immediately remember them, I hold it “in my hands.”1

I do not think about the evening that is approaching, and what will follow after it, but, nevertheless, all this is "there", like the back wall of the house, the facade of which I see, or as a background behind the figure. Our future is formed not only from assumptions and dreams. Before what I see and what I perceive, there is certainly nothing more visible, but my world continues by means of intentional lines that indicate ahead of time at least the style of what will happen (although we are always and undoubtedly right up to the very death, we expect to see the appearance of something else). The present itself (in the narrow sense) is not allowed. Paper, pen here, at my fingertips, but I do not perceive them with all clarity, I rather take into account the surroundings than perceive objects, I find support in household items, I belong to my occupation rather than sit in front of him. Husserl calls the intentionality that binds me to my surroundings protentions and retentions. They do not come from some central self, but in some way from my very perceptual field, which pulls the horizon of retentions behind it and, through protections, "bites" into the future. I don't go through a series of "nows" which I retain an image of and which, lined up one after the other, would form a line. With each coming moment, the previous moment undergoes a modification: I still hold it in my hands, it is still there and, however, is already fading, sinking below the line of the present; to keep it, I need to stretch my hand through the thin layer of time. It is, of course, he, and I am able to reach him as he has just been, I am not cut off from him, but if nothing had changed, he would not have passed; his profile or his projection begins to emerge on my present, when just now he was. When the third moment arrives, the second experiences a new modification: from the retention that he was, he becomes the retention of retention, the layer of time between him and me expands. It is possible, like Husserl, to represent this phenomenon in the form of a diagram, to which, for completeness, a symmetrical perspective of protentions should be added (Fig. 9).

Time is not a line, but a web of intentionality. It will be said, no doubt, that this description and this scheme do not advance us one step. When we go from A to B and then to C, A is projected into A, then into A. In order for A" to be recognized as a retention or Abschattungen*124* A, and A" as a retention of A", and even for the transformation of A into A" to be perceived as such, is there not a need for a synthesis of identification, which would unite A, A", A" and all other possible Abschattungen, and would this not mean that we are again making from A some kind of ideal unity in the spirit of Kant? But by resorting to this kind of intellectual synthesis, we know that there will be no more time. And all previous moments of time will be completely identical for me: I will be saved in a certain sense from time, which makes them slip and mix, but in this way I will lose the true meaning of "before" and "after", which is revealed only thanks to this sliding, and nothing would distinguish the time series from the spatial set. Husserl introduced the concept of retention and said that I still “hold in my hand” the immediate past precisely in order to express that I do not posit the past and do not construct it, starting from some kind of Abschattung really different from it, by means of a conscious act, but I apprehend him in his recent and yet past self. I am not originally given A", A" or A"", and I do not ascend from these "profiles" to their original A, as one passes from sign to meaning. I am given A itself, looking through A, then this combination of A and A, seen through A, and so on, just as I see the pebble itself through the thickness of the water flowing above it. Of course, identification syntheses take place , but only in intentional memories and with conscious resurrection in the memory of the distant past, that is, in derivative modalities of consciousness of the past.For example, I hesitate in determining the date of the memory, some kind of scene looms in front of me and I don’t know which point in time to tie it to , the memory has lost its hold, then I can reach an intellectual identification based, for example, on the causal order of events: I sewed this suit for myself before the armistice, since after it the English fabric could no longer be found.But in this I am not reaching the very past at all When, on the contrary, I acquire the concrete beginning of a memory, it again finds a place in a certain stream of fears and hopes that leads from Munich to war, I reconnect in the morning given time, a chain of retentions and a fan of successive horizons provide a continuous transition. Objective signs, through correlation with which I determine in mediated identification the location of the remembered and the intellectual synthesis, in general, themselves have a temporal meaning only because I am consistently connected with my entire actual past through the synthesis of apprehension. bringing the second to the first. A" and A" are Abschattungen A for me, not because they all belong to the ideal unity A, which would be their common rational basis. Through them, I possess the point A itself in its imperishable individuality, founded once and for all by its transition into the present, and I see how Abschattungen A, A" arise from it. . . . To use Husserl's language, under the "intentionality of the act", which is the thetic awareness of the object and which, for example, turns something into an idea in intellectual memory, we need to recognize the "acting" intentionality (fungierende Intentionalitat*126*),1 which makes the former possible and which and there is what Heidegger calls transcendence.

1 Husserl. Vorlesungen zur Phanomenologie des inneren Zeitbewusstseins. S. 430; Husserl. Formal und transzendentale Logik. S. 208; See: Fink. Das Problem der Phanomenologie Edmund Husserls // Revue Internationale de Philosophic. 1939. No. 2. P. 266.

My present transcends itself towards the immediate future and the immediate past and touches them where they are - in the past itself and the future itself. If we had the past only in the form of intentional memories, we would constantly want to resurrect it in order to make sure of its existence, like the patient of whom Scheler says that he turned around all the time to make sure that objects were in place, - while we feel it behind us as some kind of irrefutable acquisition. In order to own the past or the future, we do not need to unite the series of Abschattungen by means of an intellectual act; they have a kind of natural and primordial unity, through them the past or the future itself is revealed. Such is the paradox of what might, with Husserl, be called the "passive synthesis" of time,1 using an expression which, of course, does not solve the problem, but can designate it.

The problem will begin to clear up if we remember that our diagram represents an instantaneous slice of time. In reality, there is no past, present, future, there are no discrete moments A, B, C, really different Abschattungen A", A", B", there are no many retentions and, on the other hand, many protections. The emergence of a new present does not provoke a consolidation of the past and fluctuations of the future; the new present is the transition of the future into the present and the previous present into the past; time begins its course immediately, in a single movement, from edge to edge. "Moments" A, B, C do not exist sequentially, they are differentiated from one another, and, accordingly, A passes into A, and from there into A. Finally, the system of retentions absorbs with each moment what a moment earlier was a system of protections. We are not dealing here with a multitude of phenomena, but with one phenomenon of outflow. Time is a single movement corresponding to itself in all its parts, it is like a gesture that captures all the muscular contractions necessary for its implementation.When we move from B to C, there is a kind of explosion c, disintegration of B and B", A" and A"; even C, which, when it was supposed to come, announced itself with a continuous emission of Abschattungen, as soon as it comes into existence, already begins to lose its substantiality. “Time is the means bestowed on everything that will be being, so that it will no longer be.”2

It is nothing but the general flight from the Self, the unique law of these centrifugal movements, or, as Heidegger says, "ecstasy." B, becoming C, also becomes B, "at the same time, A, which, becoming B, also became A", descends into A. "A, A", A", on the one hand, B, B" - with the other are interconnected not by a synthesis of identification that would crystallize them at one point in time, but by a synthesis of transition (Uebergangs synthesis), since these moments emerge one from the other and each of the projections is only an aspect of an explosion or a general disintegration. That is why time, in that original experience of it that we have, is not for us a system of objective positions through which we pass, it is a moving environment that moves away from us, like a landscape in a train window. But we do not at all believe that the landscape is moving: the barrier flashed in the blink of an eye, but the hill in the distance hardly moves. Just as if the beginning of the day is already moving away from me, the beginning of the week remains a fixed point: objective time is outlined on the horizon and, therefore, its outline must already be in the immediate past. How is this possible? How does a temporary ecstasy not become an absolute disintegration in which the individuality of the moments disappears? The whole point is that disintegration destroys what was created by the transition of the future into the present: C is at the extreme point of prolonged concentration, which led him to maturation; as it prepared, it signaled itself with less and less numerous Abschattungen, approaching in person. Entering into the present, it brought into this present its genesis, being its limit, and the immediate presence of what was to come after it. So that when the immediate presence is realized and pushes this C into the past, it does not immediately deprive it of being, and its disintegration is always the reverse side or the consequence of ripening. In a word, since in time “to be” and “to pass” are synonyms, an event, becoming past, does not cease to be. The source of objective time, with its locations fixed by our gaze, must be sought not in a timeless synthesis, but in the coherence and interweaving of past and future, in the present, in the very passage of time. Time maintains what it has made to be, at the very moment when it drives it out of being, since the new being was announced by the previous one as coming to being, and since for this last to become present and to be doomed to pass into the past are one and the same. . “Temporality is not a succession (Nacheinander) of ecstasies. The future is not subsequent to the past, and the latter does not precede the present. Time becomes time as the future-going-into-the-past-entering-the-present.”1

Bergson was mistaken in explaining the unity of time by its continuity, since this again leads us to a confusion of the past, present and future under the pretext that we imperceptibly move from one to the other, and as a result, to the negation of time. But he had reason to adhere to the continuity of time as an essential phenomenon. We just need to clarify this phenomenon. Instant C and instant D, arbitrarily close to the first, cannot be indistinguishable, because in this case there would be no time, they pass one into another, and C becomes D, since C has always been nothing more than an anticipation of D as the present and its own. own transition to the past. This means that every present reaffirms the presence of all the past that it represses and anticipates the presence of everything to come, and that, by definition, the present is not closed in itself and transcends its limits towards the future and the past. There is not first one present, then another, following the first in being, there is no present with perspectives of the past and future, followed by another present, where these perspectives are reversed, so that the same observer is needed for the synthesis of successive perspectives; there is a single time that affirms itself, which can bring nothing into being without first grounding it as the present and as the past to come, and which is established instantly.

The past, therefore, is not the past, the future is not the future. They exist only when subjectivity violates the fullness of being in itself, outlines a perspective in it, introduces non-being into it. The past and the future arise when I rush towards them. I am not for myself in the momentary present; I am also at the beginning of the day or in the coming night, and my present is, if you like, this moment, but likewise this day, year, my whole life. There is no need for a synthesis which unites the tempora from the outside into one single time, since each tempora contained outside of itself an open series of other tempora, communicated internally with them, and insofar as the "connectedness of life"1 is given with its ecstasy. I do not think or observe the transition from one present to another, I carry it out, I am already in the coming present, as my gesture is already at its goal, I myself am time - time that "stays" and does not "flow" and does not “change”, as Kant said in some texts.2

Common sense sees this idea of time ahead of itself in its own way. Everyone talks about time - and not like a zoologist about "dog" or "horse" in the sense of a common name, but in the sense of a proper name. Sometimes they even personify it. Everyone believes that there is some single concrete being here, which is fully present in any of its manifestations, like a person - in any of his statements. Time is spoken of in the same way as the existence of a flow of water: water changes, but the flow remains, because the form is preserved, the form is preserved, since each new wave performs the same functions as the previous wave. Pressurizing in relation to the wave it replaced, this wave, in turn, becomes oppressive in relation to some other wave. And all this happens because from the source itself to the mouth, the waves in the stream follow inseparably: a single pressure is maintained, and a single gap in the stream would be enough for it to cease to exist. It is here that the metaphor of the river is justified - not in the sense that the river flows, but in the sense that it forms a single whole. However, this intuition of the constancy of time is lost in ordinary consciousness, because it thematizes or objectifies it, which is in fact the surest way to ignore it. The mythical personifications of time are closer to the truth than the concept of time, presented in the spirit of natural science - as a kind of variable of nature in itself - or in the spirit of Kantianism - as a form, separable in idea from its matter. There is a temporal style of the world, and time remains identical to itself, since the past is the distant future and the recent present; the present - the near past and the near future; the future, finally, is the present and even the future past; that is, because every dimension of time is treated or projected as something other than itself, and because at the very heart of time there is a look, or, as Heidegger says, an Augen-blick*127* and someone, thanks to whom the word "how" can make sense. We do not say that time exists for anyone: that would mean to decompose it again and deprive it of movement. We say that time is someone, that is, temporal dimensions, since they are continuously layered on top of each other and confirm each other, always only reveal what was implicitly contained in each of them, all together express a single explosion or a single pressure - subjectivity as such. . It is necessary to understand time as a subject, and the subject as time. It is quite obvious that this initial temporality cannot be a juxtaposition of external events, since it is the force that holds them together, moving them away from each other. Ultimate subjectivity is not temporary in the empirical sense of the word; if the consciousness of time were formed by successive states of consciousness, one more consciousness would be needed in order to realize this sequence, and so on. We are certainly forced to admit "a consciousness which has no consciousness behind it to be aware of," which therefore cannot be located in time and whose being "coincides with being for itself."2 We can say that the ultimate consciousness "without time" (zeitlose*128*) - in the sense that it is not intratemporal.3

In my present, if I still keep it alive, with all that it hides in itself, there is an ecstasy towards the past and the future, which reveals the dimensions of time - not in rivalry, but in inseparability: to be in the present means to be eternally and forever. Subjectivity is not in time, because it masters or lives time and coincides with the connectedness of life.

Are we not thus returning to a certain kind of eternity? I continue to be in the past and, through the continuous stratification of retentions, I preserve my oldest experiences; I do not possess any duplicate or image of them, I keep them themselves exactly as they were. But the same continuous linking of the fields of the present, which provides this access to the past itself, is characterized chiefly by the fact that it is carried out only gradually and little by little; each present, by its very nature, excludes juxtaposition with other present, and even in the distant past I can cover some segment of my life, only unfolding it anew, according to its own tempo. The time perspective, the mixing of distances, a kind of “shrinking” of time, the limit of which is oblivion, is not an accident of memory and is not an expression of the degradation in principle of total awareness of time to the level of empirical existence, it is an expression of its initial ambiguity: to hold means to hold, but to keep on distance. And again, the "synthesis" of time is the synthesis of the transition, it is the movement of life that unfolds itself, and there is no other way to carry it out except to live this life. There is no place for time, time carries itself and launches itself. Only time itself as a continuous pressure and as a transition makes time as a successive multiplicity possible; at the source of intratemporality we posit constitutive time. When we just described the stratification of time upon time, we could interpret the future as the past only with such an addition - the coming past; and the past as the future, with only such an addition, is the future that has already happened; that is, at the moment of time leveling, it was again necessary to affirm the originality of each perspective and to substantiate this quasi-eternity on the event. It is the transition of time that does not pass in time. Time resumes: yesterday, today, tomorrow - this cyclical rhythm, this constant form can, of course, create the illusion that we can master it at once and completely, just as the flow of water gives us a sense of eternity. But this generality of time is only a secondary attribute of it and does not convey its true image, since we cannot perceive the cycle without resorting to a temporal distinction between the starting and ending points. The feeling of eternity is deceptive: eternity feeds on time. The flow of water remains identical to itself only due to the continuous pressure of water. Eternity is the time of sleep, but sleep is related to wakefulness, from which it borrows all its structures. What is this waking time in which the roots of eternity lie? This is a field of presence in a broad sense - with a double horizon of origins of the past and the origin of the future and an open infinity of past or possible fields of present presence, there is time for me only insofar as I am located in it, that is, insofar as I open myself already involved in it, since the whole being is not given to me personally, and, finally, because one aspect of this being is so close to me that it does not even form a spectacle for me, and I cannot see it, just as I cannot see my own face. There is time for me "because I have the present. It is by becoming the present that a moment of time acquires that indelible individuality, that "once and for all", which allow it to pass through time in the future and inspire us with the illusion of eternity. Not a single dimension of time can be derived from others, but the present (in the broadest sense, with its horizons of original past and original future) has the advantage of being the zone where being and consciousness coincide. to my friend Paul, who is in Brazil, it is clear, of course, that I mean this past itself, in its place, and the Field itself, which is in the world, and not some intermediate mental object. representations, unlike presented experiences, are really present in the present: it is perceived, while those are only presented. The idea has appeared to me, it must be brought into being by some primary consciousness, which here is my inner perception of memory or imagination. It has already been said above that it is necessary to reach a consciousness that no longer has any other consciousness behind it, which therefore grasps its own being and in which, finally, "to be" and "to be aware" are one and the same. . This primary consciousness is not an eternal subject that perceives itself in absolute transparency, for such a subject would be unable to plunge into time and would therefore have nothing to do with our experience; it is the consciousness of the present. In the present, in perception, my being and consciousness are one thing - not that my being is reduced to my knowledge of it and is clearly presented to me, on the contrary, perception is not transparent, it rushes into use my sensory fields and my primitive ways of communicating with the world, lying below the level of the conscious, just "to be conscious" is no different here from "to be in. ..", and my consciousness of existence coincides with the actual act of "existence".1 It is through communication with the world that we undoubtedly communicate with ourselves. We hold time entirely, and we are present for ourselves because we are present in the world.

If this is the case, and if consciousness is rooted in being and time, residing there, how can we describe it? It needs to be a kind of global project or a vision of time and the world, which, in order to reveal themselves, to become explicit from the implicit, that is, consciousness, must find development in the manifold. We do not have to separately realize either the indivisible faculty or the various manifestations of consciousness; consciousness is not this or that, but both at the same time, it is the very movement of temporalization and "fluxion", as Husserl says, a movement that anticipates itself, a flow that never leaves itself. Let's try to describe this better with an example. The novelist or psychologist, who does not go back to the origins and takes time ready-made, considers consciousness as a plurality of mental facts between which he tries to establish causal relations. Proust, for example,2 shows how Swann's love for Odette entails jealousy, which in turn modifies love, since Swann, constantly worrying that someone does not steal Odette from him, spends all his time watching her.

In fact, Swann's consciousness is not an inert environment in which psychic facts provoke each other from outside. In reality, there is not jealousy caused by love and then changing it, but a certain manner of loving, in which the whole fate of this love is immediately read. Swann is drawn to Odette, to this "spectacle" that she is, to her manner of looking, smiling, speaking. But what does it mean to reach out to someone? Proust speaks of this in relation to other love: it means to feel excluded from another life and to want to penetrate it, to occupy it entirely. Swann's love does not cause jealousy From the very beginning it is jealousy. Jealousy does not cause a change in love: the pleasure that Swann received in contemplating Odette carried this change, since it was the pleasure that Swann alone contemplated her, a number of psychic facts and causal relations give only an external expression of Swann's certain view of Odette in a certain manner be with someone else. Swann's jealous love, on the other hand, should be correlated with other lines of his behavior, and then, perhaps, it would turn out to be a manifestation of an even more general structure of existence, which is possibly Swann's personality. Accordingly, any consciousness as a global project emerges for itself in the actions of experiments, “psychic facts”, in which it recognizes itself. This is where temporality clarifies subjectivity. We will never understand how a thinking or constituting subject can posit or perceive itself in time. If the I is Kant's transcendental I, we will never understand how it can mix with its trace in inner feeling and how the empirical I can still be my "I". But if the subject is temporality, then self-positing ceases to be a contradiction, since it expresses exactly the essence of living time. Time is “an affectation of oneself by oneself”1: what excites is time as pressure and transition to the future; what is excited is time as an unfolded series of present moments; excitatory and excited are one and the same, since the pressure of time is nothing but the transition from one present to another. This ecstasy, this projection of an indivisible ability into its ultimate point, is subjectivity. The primary current, says Husserl, does not simply exist: it must of necessity “reveal itself to itself (SelbsterscheinungX), otherwise we are forced to place some other stream behind it in order to realize the first one. It "constitutes itself as a phenomenon in itself",2 the essence of time is to be not just actual time or time that flows,

but also time that knows about itself, for the explosion or opening of the present to the future is an archetype of the relation of oneself to oneself and outlines some inner, or selfhood. a being whose whole being, like that of light, consists in making visible. It is thanks to time that the consistent existence of selfhood, meaning and reason is possible. This can be seen already in the ordinary concept of time. We delimit the phases or stages of our life, we, for example, consider as an integral part of the present everything that has a semantic connection with what occupies us at the moment; we implicitly acknowledge, therefore, that time and meaning are inseparable. Subjectivity is not a fixed identity with oneself: for it, as for time, it is important to open up to the Other and go beyond one's own limits. The subject should not be presented as constitutive, but the set of its experiences, or Erlebnisse, as constituted; one should not interpret the transcendental I as a true subject, and the empirical "I" - as its shadow or trace. If the relationship between them were such, we could hide in the constitutive, and such reflection would mean the death of time, it would have neither time nor place. If, in fact, even our purest reflections turn out to be for us retrospectively in time, if our reflections on the flow are involved in this flow3 - this means that the most accurate consciousness of which we are only capable always finds itself as if struck by itself or given to itself, and that the word "consciousness" has no meaning outside of this bifurcation.

Nothing is false from what is said about the subject, it is true that the subject, as an absolute presence for itself, is resolutely incontrovertible and that nothing can happen to it except what it carries in itself, it is also true what it finds for itself. symbolic expression in succession and variety, and that these symbols are himself, for without them he would be something like an inarticulate cry and could not even achieve self-consciousness. What we previously called passive synthesis finds its clarification here. A passive synthesis is a contradiction if the synthesis is a composition and if the passivity consists in the perception and not in the composition of some variety. When it was said about passive synthesis, it was meant that the diversity is imbued with us and that, however, we do not carry out its synthesis. But temporalization, by its very nature, meets these two conditions. It is clear, in fact, that I cannot consider myself the author of time, as well as the beating of my heart, I am not the initiator of temporalization, I did not choose whether to be born to me, and as soon as I was born, time flows through me, so that I did not. And yet this passage of time is not a mere fact that I undergo, I can take refuge from it in itself, as happens when I make some binding decision, or in an act of conceptual fixation. Time takes me away from what I was going to be, but at the same time gives me a vehicle for self-degradation and self-realization. What is called passivity is not our perception of some reality alien to us and not a causal influence on us from the outside: it is our involvement, our being in a situation before which we do not exist, which we constantly renew and which is constitutive in relation to US. Spontaneity "acquired" once and for all,1 which "by virtue of this acquisition perpetuates itself in being" - this is the exact meaning of time and the exact meaning of subjectivity.

It is time, because time, which has no roots in the present and therefore in the past, would no longer be time, but eternity. Heidegger's "historical time", *132* which flows from the future and which, by virtue of an immutable decision, has its future in advance and saves itself once and for all from dispersion, there is an impossibility, according to Heidegger's own thought: if time is ekstase, and the present and the past - the results of this ecstasy, then how can we completely stop seeing time from the point of view of the present and how can we finally get out of inauthenticity? We are always focused in the present, precisely from the center

our decisions come from the present; they can therefore always be related to our past, they are never devoid of motives, and if they open some completely new cycle in our life, they must still be renewed afterwards; they save us from dispersion only temporarily. There can be no question, therefore, of deriving time from spontaneity. We are temporary not because we are spontaneous and, as consciousnesses, we break away from ourselves; on the contrary, time is the basis and measure of our spontaneity, the ability to go beyond, to the “non-antization” that lives in us, which we ourselves are, is itself given to us with temporality and life. Our birth, or, as Husserl says in the Unpublished, our "begottenness," justifies at once both our activity, or individuality, and our passivity, or community, this inner weakness that all the time prevents us from reaching the fullness of the absolute individual. We are not activity, incomprehensibly combined with passivity, not automatism, transcended by will, not perception, transcended by judgment, we are completely active and completely passive, since we are the emergence of time.

We set ourselves the task of understanding the relationship of consciousness and nature, internal and external.

It was also a matter of linking the idealistic perspective, according to which there is nothing that would not be an object for consciousness, and the realistic perspective, according to which consciousnesses are woven into the fabric of the objective world and events in themselves. Finally, it was about finding out how the world and man are accessible to two types of knowledge - explicative and reflexive. In another work, we have already formulated these classical problems in a different language, bringing them to the most important; the ultimate question is to understand in us and in the world the relationship between meaning and meaninglessness. Does that which is in the world from meaning come and be produced by the combination or collision of independent facts, or, on the contrary, is it only an expression of absolute reason? It is said that events have meaning when they are presented to us as the realization or expression of some single idea. Meaning exists for us when one of our intentions is fulfilled or vice versa, when some variety of facts or signs is ready for us to accept and understand them, in any case, when one or many definitions exist as ... representations or expressions something different from them Idealism tends to admit that all meaning is centrifugal, that it is an act of meaning, or Sinn-gebung,1 that there is no natural sign. To understand means always, in the final analysis, to construct, to constitute—actually to carry out the synthesis of an object. An analysis of one's own body and perception reveals to us a relation to the object, a meaning deeper than that held by idealism. A thing is just a meaning, it is the meaning of "thing". Let it be. But when I understand some thing, for example, a picture, I do not actively synthesize it, I go out to meet it with my sensory fields, perceptual field and, ultimately, a typical of any possible being, a general attitude towards the world. In the voids of the subject itself we found the presence of the world, so that the subject was no longer to be understood as a synthetic activity, but as an ecstasy, and every active operation of signification, or Sinn-gebung, turned out to be derivative and secondary in relation to that saturation of signs with meaning, which could be the definition of the world. Under the intentionality of the act, or thetic intentionality, and as a condition of its possibility, we discovered intentionality active, already working to any positing or judgment, "the Logos of the aesthetic world",2 "art hidden in the depths of the human soul", which, like any art known only by its fruits. The distinction between structure and meaning, which we introduced elsewhere,3 has since become clear: the difference between Gestalt"oM and the meaning of the circle is that the meaning is recognized by the understanding, which generates it in the form of a set of points equidistant from the center, and the Gestalt - a subject related to his world and ready to comprehend the circle as one of the modifications of this world, as the "physiognomy" of the circle.

We can only know what a picture or thing is by looking at them, and their meaning is revealed if we look at them from a certain point of view, from a certain distance and in a certain direction - in a word, if we put our proximity to the world. The words "direction of the flow of water" mean nothing unless I mean a subject looking from one place in the direction of some other place. In the world itself, all directions, as well as all movements, are relative, which means that they do not exist in it. There would be no real movement, and I would not have the concept of movement, if in perception I did not consider the earth "soil"1 of all states of rest and all movements on this side of rest and movement, since I am its inhabitant, and there would be no direction without a creature that lives in the world and designates the first direction in it with its gaze. Likewise, the "direction of the cloth" is understood only by the subject, who can approach the object from one side and the other, and the cloth has some direction only because of my appearance in the world. Similarly, the "direction of a phrase" is what it says, or its intention, which again implies a starting point and an ending point, an aim and a point of view. Finally, the “direction of vision” is a kind of readiness for logic and the world of colors. In all uses of the word "direction" we find the same fundamental concept of being oriented or directed towards what it is not, and we therefore return again to the concept of the subject as ecstasy and to the relation of active transcendence between the subject and the world. The world is inseparable from the subject, but the subject, which cannot be anything other than the project of the world, and the subject is inseparable from the world, but the world that it itself projects. The subject is being-in-the-world, and the world remains "subjective"2 because its texture and its articulations are outlined by the movement of the subject's transcendence.

We thus discovered - by discovering the world as the cradle of meanings, the meaning of all meanings and the ground of all our thoughts - a means of overcoming the alternative of realism and idealism of chance and absolute reason, meaninglessness and meaning. The world as we tried to show it - as the primary unity of all our experiences in the horizon of our life, as the only guideline for all our projects - is the invisible deployment of the constitutive Thinking, the non-random connection of parts and, of course, not the operation of the dominant Thinking over the inert mothers, this is the birthplace any rationality.

First of all, the analysis of time confirmed this new concept of meaning and understanding. Considering time as an object, we should say about it the same thing that was said about other objects: it makes sense for us only because "we are it." The word "time" only makes sense to us because we exist in the past, present, and future. Time is literally the direction of our life and, like the world, is accessible only to those who are located in it and who accept its direction. But the analysis of time was not merely a pretext for repeating what we have said about the world. He clarifies the previous analysis, because he shows the subject and the object as two abstract moments of a single structure - presence. We think of being through time, because it is through the relationship of time-subject and time-object that one can understand the relationship between the subject and the world. Let us apply to the problems with which we began the idea of subjectivity as temporality. We have asked ourselves, for example, how to understand the connection between soul and body, and attempts to connect "for itself" with a certain object "in itself", the causal effect of which it should experience, have proved hopeless. But if "for itself", the discovery of oneself to oneself is only that void where time is created, and if the world "in itself" is only the horizon of my present, then the problem is to know how the being that must come and already passed, possesses also the present. That is, it is abolished, since the future, past and present are connected in the movement of temporalization. It is as essential for me to have a body as it is for the future to be the future for a certain present. It comes to the point that scientific thematization and objective thinking cannot detect a single bodily function that would be strictly independent of the structures of existence,1 and, on the other hand, not a single “spiritual” act that would not be based on a bodily infrastructure. .

1 What we argued for a long time in La Structure du Comportemenl.

Moreover, it is essential for me not only to have a body, but also to have this particular body. Not only is the concept of the body, through the concept of the present, necessarily connected with the concept of "for myself," but the actual existence of my body is necessary for the existence of my "consciousness." Ultimately, if I know that “for myself” crowns the body, then this is possible only through the experience of a single body and a single “for myself”, the experience of my presence in the world. Here they will object to me that I could have other nails, ears, lungs, but my existence would not suffer from this. But my nails, ears, lungs, if taken separately, do not have any existence. This science teaches us to consider the body as a collection of parts and, of course, as an experience of its decomposition in death. It is clear, however, that a decomposed body is no longer a body. If ears, nails, lungs find a place for themselves in my living body, they will no longer seem like random details. They are not indifferent to the idea that others have about me, they contribute to the formation of my appearance or my manner of behaving, and perhaps tomorrow's science will someday express in the form of objective correlations the necessity for me of just such a device for my ears, nails, light or, on the other hand, for me to be dexterous or clumsy, calm or nervous, smart or stupid, to be myself. In other words, as we have shown elsewhere, the objective body is not the truth of the phenomenal body, the truth of the body as we experience it is only an impoverished image of it, and the problem of the relationship between soul and body is not about the objective body, which has only a conceptual existence, but bodies of the phenomenal. It is only true that our open and personal existence rests on some primary support of a found and frozen existence. But it could not be otherwise, since we are the essence of temporality, for the dialectic of the acquired and the future of the o-axis presupposes time.

In the same way we would answer questions about the world before man. When we said above that there is no world without Existence, which bears its structure, it might be objected to us that the world, however, preceded man, that the earth, apparently, is the only inhabited planet and, therefore, philosophical views are incompatible with the most reliable facts. In reality, only the abstract reflection of intellectualism is incompatible with poorly understood "facts". What exactly do they want to express when they say that the world existed before human consciousnesses? For example, that the earth originated from a primary nebula, where the conditions necessary for life have not yet been combined. But after all, each of these words, like any physical equation, presupposes our prescientific idea of the world, and this reference to the experienced world helps to establish them. positive value. Nothing will ever allow me to understand what an invisible nebula is. The Laplace Nebula is not behind us, at our source, it is in front of us, in the cultural world. And, on the other hand, what do they want to say when they say that there is no world without being in the world? Not that the world is constituted by consciousness, but that, on the contrary, consciousness always finds itself already at work in the world. On the whole, it is true that there is a nature - not the nature of natural science, but the nature as perception shows it, and that even the light of consciousness is, as Heidegger says, a lumen naturale*133* given to itself.

In any case, they will tell us again, the world will exist even after me, other people will perceive it when I am no longer in it. But is it possible at all to perceive other people in the world after or even during my lifetime, if indeed my presence in the world is a condition for the possibility of this world? From the perspective of temporalization, the remarks that were made above regarding the problem of the other become clearer. In the perception of the other, we said, I overcome in intention that infinite distance that will always separate my subjectivity from another subjectivity, I overcome the conceptual impossibility for me of another “for myself”, for I ascertain a different behavior, a different presence in the world. Now that we have better understood the notion of presence, connected presence in oneself with presence in the world, and identified the Cogito with involvement in the world, we better understand how one can detect the other at the possible beginning of his visible actions. Without a doubt, the other will never exist for us exactly as we exist, he will always be our smaller brother, under the pressure of gmporalization we never abide in him as in;. But two temporalities are not mutually exclusive as two: of knowledge, because each becomes aware of itself only by projecting itself into the present, and because in the present they can tangle. How my living present is open to the past (which, however, I no longer experience, and to the future, which I | can’t experience and perhaps never will experience, (it can open to other temporalities that I don’t (live, and have a social horizon, so that my (world expands to the size of a collective history, which |my private existence picks up and takes over. (The solution to all problems of transcendence lies in the thickness of the pre-(objective present, where we discover our corporeality, [sociality the pre-existence of the world, that is, the starting point of "explications" in what is certain in them, and at the same time we find there the foundation of our freedom.

Views: 2874
Category: »

Maurice Merleau-Ponty.

Phenomenology of perception.

OCR: Allan Shade

/shade/socio.htm

// If you find any typos, report them to [email protected]

BBK 87.3 M 52

The publication was carried out within the framework of the Pushkin program with the support of the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the French Embassy in Russia.

Ouvrage realise dans le cadre du program d "aide a la publication "Pouchkine" avec le soutien du Minisfere des Affaires Etrangtres fran^ais et de I "Ambassade de France en Russie

This publication was published within the framework of the program of the Central European University "Translation project» with the support of the Center for the Development of Publishing Activities

(OSI- Budapest) and the Open Society Institute. Assistance Fund" (OSIAF- Moscow).

Managing editor: I. S. Vdovina

The design used the work of the artist Dm. Yakovina "Fish"

ISBN 5-02-026807-0 ("Science")

ISBN 5-87399-054-9 ("Juventa")

ISBN 2-07-029337-8 ("Gallimard")

FOREWORD

What is phenomenology? It may seem strange that this question is raised half a century after the appearance of the first works of Husserl; however, it is still far from being resolved. Phenomenology is the study of essences, and all problems are accordingly reduced to the definition of essences: the essence of perception, the essence of consciousness, for example. But phenomenology is also a philosophy that places essences in existence*1* and believes that man and the world can only be understood in terms of their "facticity". It is a transcendental philosophy which, in order to understand the propositions of the natural attitude, keeps them in limbo, but it is also a philosophy for which the world is always "already there", before reflection, as some kind of irremovable presence, and all its efforts, therefore, they are aimed at finding a naive contact with the world, in order to finally give it a philosophical status. This is the claim of philosophy, which imagines itself to be a "strict science", and an account of the "lived" space, time, world. This is an attempt to directly describe our experience as it is, without referring to the psychological genesis and causal explanations that a scientist, psychologist or sociologist can give him, although Husserl himself in recent works speaks of "genetic" 1 and even "constructive" 2 phenomenology.

1 Husserl. Meditations Cartesiennes. Paris, 1931. P. 120 et seq.

Is it possible to eliminate these contradictions by separating Husserl's phenomenology from Heidegger's phenomenology? But “Being and Time”*2* proceeds from one position of Husserl and is nothing else than an explanation of the “naturlichen Weltbegriff”*3* or “Lebenswelt”,*4* which Husserl at the end of his life considered the main theme of phenomenology, so that the contradiction is also found in the philosophy of Husserl himself. The hurried reader will not want to deal with a doctrine that has nothing left to say, and will ask whether a philosophy that fails to define itself is worthy of the noise raised around it, whether it is rather a myth or a fashion.

Even if this is so, one would have to understand what is the charm of this myth and what is the origin of this fashion, and the seriousness of the philosopher regarding such a situation would be reflected in the statement that phenomenology can be accepted and practiced as a mode or style, it exists as a movement before it reaches full philosophical awareness. It has been on the road for a long time, its adherents find it everywhere - in Hegel and Kierkegaard, of course, but also in Marx, Nietzsche, Freud. A philological analysis of texts will lead nowhere: in texts we find only what we ourselves put into them, and if history demanded our interpretation, then this is already the history of philosophy. It is in ourselves that we find the unity of phenomenology and its true meaning. It is not so much a matter of counting quotations as of defining and objectifying this phenomenology for us, thanks to which, reading Husserl or Heidegger, most of our contemporaries experienced the feeling that they did not learn a new philosophy, but rather met with what they had long expected. Phenomenology is accessible only to the phenomenological method. Let us try to deliberately link the well-known phenomenological themes in the way that they themselves are connected in life. Perhaps then we will understand why phenomenology remained for a long time in a state of beginning, acted as a task and a desired goal.

It is about describing, not explaining or analyzing. This first indication that Husserl sent to the beginning phenomenology, calling it to be a "descriptive psychology" or to return "to the things themselves", testifies, first of all, to his rejection of science. which determine my body or my "psyche", I cannot think of myself as part of the world, as a simple object of biology, psychology and sociology, I cannot close the universe of science on myself. Everything that I know about the world, even through science, I know based on my vision or that life experience, without which the symbols of science would be empty space. The whole universe of science is built on the life-world, and if we want to think with all rigor of science itself, with all accuracy to determine its meaning and direction, we must first return to this experience, the secondary expression of which is science. Science does not and never will have the same justification as the perceived world, for the simple reason that it is its definition or explanation. I am not a "living being" or even a "man" or even a "consciousness" with all the characteristics that zoology, social anatomy or inductive psychology recognize for these products of nature or history - I am an absolute source, my existence does not come from my predecessors, from my physical or social environment, it goes to them and supports them, because my "I" makes to be for me (and therefore be in the only sense that this word can have for me) this tradition, which I decide to continue, or this horizon, the distance to which will come to naught, since it will not become its property if I do not survey it with my eyes. Scientific views, according to which I am a moment of the world, are distinguished by naivety and hypocrisy, since they unconditionally support a different point of view - the point of view of consciousness, according to which the world is initially located around me and itself, on its own initiative, begins to exist for me. To return to the things themselves is to return to this world before knowledge, which is always is talking knowledge and in relation to which any scientific definition will be abstract, symbolic and dependent: this is how geography describes the landscape in the bosom of which we happen to know what a forest, a valley or a river is.

This movement is by no means an idealistic return to consciousness, and the demand for pure description precludes both reflexive analysis and scientific explanation. Descartes and especially Kant gave freedom subject, or consciousness, finding that I am unable to grasp any thing as existing unless I have previously experienced myself as existing in the act of grasping; they showed consciousness, this absolute certainty of my "I" for me as a condition, without which there would be nothing at all, and the act of binding - as the basis of what is connected. It goes without saying that the act of binding is nothing without the picture of the world that it binds, the unity of consciousness, according to Kant, arises simultaneously with the unity of the world, and the methodical doubt of Descartes * 6 * does not lead us to any losses, since the whole world, at least as our experience, included in the Cogito, valid with it, marked only with the sign of "thinking about...". However, the relationship between the subject and the world is not strictly two-sided: if this were the case, the certainty of the world in Descartes would have been present from the very beginning along with the certainty of the cogito, and Kant would not have spoken of the "Copernican revolution". Reflexive analysis, based on our life experience, goes back to the subject as a possible and distinct condition; he shows the universal synthesis as something without which there would be no world. To this extent it ceases to belong to our experience, it replaces the report with a reconstruction. It is understandable why Husserl reproached Kant for the “psychologism of the abilities of the soul” 1 and opposed noetic analysis,*7* which bases the world on the synthetic activity of the subject, "noematic reflection" which resides in the object and clarifies its original unity, instead of generating it.

1 Husserl. Logische Untersuchungen. I: Prolegomena zur reinen Logik. Halle, 1928. S. 93.

The world is already there before my analysis, and it would be unnatural to derive it from a series of generalizations that first connect sensations and then perspective aspects of the object, although both are nothing but products of analysis and should not exist before it. Reflective analysis believes that the path of preliminary constitution can be traversed in the opposite direction, that in the "inner man" of which St. Augustine, *8* one can find a constitutive ability that always lives in him. Thus, reflection carries itself along and moves into invulnerable subjectivity, on this side of being and time. But this is naivete, or, if you like, incomplete reflection, which loses awareness of its own beginning. I have begun reflection, my reflection is a reflection on the non-reflexive, it cannot remain ignorant of itself as an event, therefore it appears to itself as genuine creativity, as a change in the structure of consciousness, and it must recognize the existence on this side of its own operations. world, which is given to the subject insofar as the subject is given to itself. The real is not to be constructed or constituted, but to be described. This means that I cannot identify perception with the operations of synthesis that belong to the plane of judgment, action, or predication. At every moment, my perceptual field is filled with reflections, crackles, fleeting tactile sensations that I cannot pin down to the exact context of perception and which nevertheless I immediately place in the world, without in any way mixing them with my dreams. At every moment I dream in the circle of things, I imagine objects or characters whose presence is incompatible with the context, and yet they do not mix with the world, they exist in front of the world, on the stage of the imaginary. If the reality of my perception were based solely on the internal coherence of "representations", then it would constantly fluctuate and, being at the mercy of my assumptions, I would have to destroy the illusory syntheses and regenerate into reality the distorted phenomena that I first separated from it. . There is nothing of the sort. The real is a strong fabric, it does not wait for our judgments to attach to itself the most incredible phenomena or to discard the most plausible ideas. Perception is not knowledge of the world, it is not even an act, not a deliberate taking of a position, perception is the basis on which all our acts unfold and it is presupposed by them. The world is not an object, the law of constitution of which I hold in my hands, the world is the natural environment and field of all my thoughts and all my distinct perceptions. Truth does not "live" only in the "inner man" 1 or, more precisely, there is no inner man, man lives in the world, and it is in the world that he knows himself. When, proceeding from the dogmatism of common sense or the dogmatism of science, I return to my "I", then I find not an inner hearth of truth, but a subject doomed (voue) to be in the world.

1 In te redi; in interiore homine habitat veritas. *9* Saint-Augustin.

Here comes through the true meaning of the famous phenomenological reduction. There is undoubtedly no other question on which Husserl would spend more time trying to understand himself, and a question to which he would return more often, since the "problematics of reduction" occupies a very significant place in unpublished works. For a long time, and up to the latest texts, the reduction was presented as a return to a transcendental consciousness, before which the world unfolds in absolute transparency, under the influence of apperceptions that permeate it, which the philosopher must reconstruct from their result. So my perception of red noted as a manifestation of a certain red color passed through the sensation, red color - as a manifestation of a red surface, and it - as a manifestation of red cardboard, and, finally, the last one - as a manifestation or outline of a red thing, this book. This, therefore, would be the comprehension of some hyle *10* signifying phenomenon of a higher order, Sinn-gebung, an active signifying operation that would determine consciousness, and the world would be nothing but a "world-designation". The phenomenological reduction would be idealistic in the sense of transcendental idealism, which treats the world as a unity of values that cannot be divided between Paul and Pierre, in which the perspectives of both intersect and which promotes communication between "Pierre's consciousness" and "Field's consciousness", since the perception of the world Pierre is not the business of Pierre, just as the perception of the world by the Field is not the business of the Field - in each of them it is the business of prepersonal consciousnesses, the communication of which is not a problem, since it is required by the very definition of consciousness, meaning or truth. To the extent that I am consciousness, in other words, to the extent that something makes sense to me, I am neither here nor there, neither Pierre nor Paul, I am no different from some "other consciousness, since we are all direct presences in the world, and this world, being a system of truths, is by definition one. Consistent transcendental idealism deprives the world of opacity and transcendence. The world is exactly what we imagine, not because we are people or empirical subjects, but because we are all one light and participate in the One, without dividing it among ourselves. Reflective analysis ignores the problem of the other as a problem of the world, since it generates in me, together with the first flashes of consciousness, the ability to go straight to the universal truth; and since the other is also deprived of being in the world, place and body, then Alter and Ego*11* are one in the true world, a connection of minds. It is not difficult to understand how the Self can think of the Other, since the Self and therefore the Other are not woven into the fabric of phenomena and are values rather than existences. There is nothing hidden behind these faces or these gestures, no landscape inaccessible to me, except perhaps a fraction of a shadow that would not exist without light. For Husserl, as is known, on the contrary, the problem of the other exists, Alter Ego is a paradox. If the “other” is in fact “for himself”, * 12 * if he is on the other side of his being for me and if we are “one-for-the-other”, and not for God, then it is necessary that we be a friend friend, so that both he and I have an external appearance and that, in addition to the perspective For Myself, my vision of my “I” and the vision of others of it "I am" - would have a perspective For the Other - my vision of the Other and the Other's vision of me. It goes without saying that these two perspectives in each of us cannot simply be side by side, for then the other would not see me, and I would not see him. It is necessary that I have an appearance so that the body of the other remains itself. This paradox and this dialectic of Ego and Alter are possible only if Ego and Alter Ego are determined by their situation, if they are not devoid of mutual inherence, that is, if philosophy does not end with a return to my “I”, if, through reflection, I discover not only mine presence for me, but also the possibility of an "outside observer", that is, if, again, at the very moment when I feel my existence, and up to the extreme point of reflection, I still lack this absolute density, which would make me go beyond time , and I discover in myself a kind of inner weakness that prevents me from being an absolute individual and exposes me to the eyes of others as a person among other people, or at least as a consciousness among other consciousnesses. Until now, the Cogito has devalued the perception of the other, taught me that I am only available to myself, because Cogito determined me through the fact that I think about myself, that I alone can have this thinking, at least if we take it in this ultimate sense. In order for the word "other" not to be an empty sound, it is necessary that my existence in no way be reduced to the awareness of existence, that it also includes opportunity consciousness of the "other" and, therefore, my incarnation in nature and the possibility of at least a historical situation. Cogito should reveal me in the situation, only under this condition can transcendental subjectivity become, as Husserl says, 1 inter-subjectivity.

1 Husserl. Die Krisis der europaischen Wissenschaften und die transzendentale Phanomenologie, III, (unpublished).

As a thinking Ego, I can, of course, distinguish the world and things from my "I", since it is clear that I do not exist in the way that things exist. Moreover, I must separate from my "I" my body, which is understood as a thing among things, is a certain sum of physical and chemical processes. But the cogitatio*13* which I thus discover, although it has no place in objective time and space, is not without it in the phenomenological world. The world that I distinguished from my "I" as a sum of things or processes connected by relations of causality, I rediscover in my "I am" as the inescapable horizon of all my cogitationes*14* and as a certain dimension in relation to which I place myself. Genuine Cogito does not determine the existence of the subject through his thinking about existence, does not turn the certainty of the world into the certainty of a thought about the world, does not, finally, replace the world with the meaning of the world. Against, Cogito recognizes my thinking as something inalienable and abolishes any kind of idealism, revealing me as "being in the world."

Precisely because we are related to the world from beginning to end, the only way to be convinced of this lies in stopping this movement, refusing our assistance to it (look at it ohne mitzumachen,*15* as Husserl says) or else withdraw him out of the game. The point is not to reject the certainties of common sense or the natural attitude - they, on the contrary, constitute a constant theme of philosophy - but precisely that they, as the prerequisites of all thought, "take it for granted", remain unnoticed. , and we, in order to restore their life and discover them, must abstain from them for a moment. The best formulation of the reduction belongs undoubtedly to Husserl's assistant E. Fink*16* - he spoke of "surprise" in the face of the world. one

1 fink. Die phänomenologische Philosophic Edmund Husserlsin der gegenwärtigen Kritik. S. 331 et seq.

Reflection does not turn away from the world to turn to the unity of consciousness as the basis of the world, it steps aside to see transcendences that are in full swing, it weakens the intentional threads that bind us to the world so that they appear to the gaze, only it can be the awareness of the world, because it reveals it as something strange and paradoxical. The transcendental is understood differently by Husserl than by Kant. Husserl reproaches Kantian philosophy for remaining a "world" philosophy, since it uses our relation to the world, which is the driving force of the transcendental deduction, and makes the world immanent to the subject, instead of being be surprised, and the subject is to be understood as transcending in relation to the world. All the misunderstandings that Husserl had with his interpreters, existential "dissenters" and, ultimately, with himself, stem from the fact that, in order for the world to see and perceive it as a paradox, it is necessary to break our habitual relationship with it, and it is precisely this the gap will reveal to us the unmotivated beating of the world. The greatest lesson of reduction lies in the impossibility of total reduction. That is why Husserl again and again asks the question of the possibility of reduction. If we were absolute spirit, reduction would not be a problem. But since we, on the contrary, are in the world, since our reflections take place in the temporal stream that they try to catch (in which they are, as Husserl says, sich einstromen * 17 *), there is no such thinking that would encompass our thought. A philosopher, as Husserl's unpublished writings say, is one who always starts from the beginning. This means that he cannot take as final anything that people or scientists know. It also means that philosophy should not consider itself to be something definitive in that it has succeeded in expressing the truth, that philosophy is a renewed experience of its own beginning, that it is wholly and completely reduced to the description of this beginning, which, in the end, Ultimately, radical reflection is the awareness of its own dependence on non-reflexive life, which is its initial, permanent and final situation. Far from being, as it was believed, the basis of idealistic philosophy, phenomenological reduction is the formula of existential philosophy: Heidegger's "In-der-Welt-Sein"*18* is possible only on the basis of phenomenological reduction.

The same kind of misunderstanding brings confusion to Husserl's concept of "essences". Every reduction, says Husserl, being transcendental, must at the same time be necessarily eidetic. This means that we cannot philosophically examine our perception of the world without ceasing to be one with it and with the interest in the world that defines us, without disengaging from the state of involvement in order to make the world turn into a spectacle, without fact our existence to nature of our existence, from Dasein*19* to Wesen.*20* It is clear, however, that the essence here is not an end, but a means, that our actual involvement in the world is what must be considered and conceptually formulated, clarifying all our conceptual installations. The necessity of this appeal to essences does not mean that philosophy begins to consider them as its object, it means, on the contrary, that our existence is too firmly held together by the world to know itself as such at the moment when it plunges into it, and that it needs a field of ideality in order to know and conquer its own facticity. The Viennese School*21*, as is well known, stands on the principle that we are dealing only with meanings. "Consciousness", for example, for the Vienna School is not the same as we are. This is a later and more complicated meaning, which we supposedly should use only with caution and only after clarifying the many meanings that contributed to its definition in the course of the semantic evolution of the word. This logical positivism is the direct antithesis of Husserl's thought. Whatever the semantic changes that we owe to the fact that we have the word and concept of consciousness in our language, we have a sure way to access what they denote, we have an idea of \u200b\u200bourselves, of the consciousness that we we ourselves are, and it is against this experience that all linguistic meanings are measured, and it is to this experience that we owe that language means something to us. “The point is to bring this still silent experience ... to a pure expression of its own meaning.” 1 Husserl’s essences must capture all the living aspects of experience, just as a net captures trembling fish and algae from the depths of the sea. One cannot therefore agree with J. Wahl, 2 who states that "Husserl separates essences from existence."

1 Husserl Meditations Cart&iennes. P. 33.

2 Wahl. Realisme, dialectique et mystfcre // Arbalete. Automne 1942 (without pagination).

Entities separated from existence are the entities of language. The function of language is that it makes entities exist in isolation, which, in truth, only seems so, because thanks to it, entities still rest on the prepredicative life of consciousness. In the silence of the primordial consciousness, it is not only what words mean, but what things mean, the core of original meaning around which acts of designation and expression are organized.

To search for the essence of consciousness does not mean concentrating on the "Wortbedeutung"*22* of consciousness and running away from existence into the universe of what is said, it means to find the actual presence of my "I" in me, the facticity of my consciousness, which is , which ultimately means the word and the concept of consciousness. To search for the essence of the world does not mean to search for what the world is in the idea, reducing it to the topic of reasoning, it means to search for what it is for us in practice, to the point of any thematization. Sensationalism "reduces" the world when it claims that we are ultimately dealing only with our states. Transcendental idealism also “reduces” the world, for, endowing it with certainty, it recognizes it only as a thought or consciousness about the world, a simple correlate of our knowledge, so that the world becomes immanent to consciousness, and the originality of things comes to naught. Eidetic reduction, on the contrary, consists in the decision to show the world as it is before we turn to ourselves, in an effort to equate reflection with the non-reflexive life of consciousness. I look at the world, I perceive it. If, agreeing with sensationalism, I began to assert that there is nothing but “states of consciousness”, and tried to separate perceptions from dreams according to some “criteria”, then the phenomenon of the world would elude me. For I can speak of "dreams" and "reality," wonder about the difference between the imaginary and the real, and doubt the "real" only because this distinction has been made by me before analysis, because I have experience of both the real and the imaginary. ; the problem, then, is not to understand how critical thought can acquire secondary equivalents to this difference, but to clarify our original knowledge of the "real", to describe the perception of the world as that which always grounds our idea of truth. . Therefore, the question is not whether we actually perceive the world, on the contrary, the whole point is that the world is what we perceive. Generally speaking, the question is not whether our evidences are truths, nor whether, due to some flaw in our reason, what is true for us is an illusion in relation to some truth in itself: for if we speak of an illusion, then we have recognized illusions, which could only be done in the name of some perception, which at the same moment was verified as true, so that doubt or fear of error confirms our ability to expose errors and, therefore, do not separate us from the truth. We are in truth, evidence is the "experience of truth." 1 To seek the essence of perception is to declare from the outset that perception is not something supposedly true, but our access to truth. Now if, in agreement with idealism, I want to base this factual evidence, this invincible belief, on absolute evidence, that is, on the absolute clarity of my thoughts, if I want to find in myself that thought that makes the world possible, that would constitute the framework of the world or illuminated it through and through, then I will again betray my life experience and begin to look for what constitutes its possibility, instead of looking for what it is. Evidence of perception is not an adequate thought or apodictic evidence. 2 *23* The world is not what I think, but what I live, I am open to the world, I, without a doubt, communicate with it, but I do not possess it, the world is inexhaustible.

1 Das Erlebnis der Wahrheit. (Cm.: Husserl. Logische Untersuchungen. Prolegomena zur reinen Logik. S. 190).

2 There is no apodictic evidence, so, in essence, it says in Formate und transzendentale Logik. S. 142. (See: Husserl. Formale und Iranszendentale Logik. Halle, 1929).

"There is a world" or, more precisely, "there is a world", this constant thesis of my life, I can never give an exhaustive explanation. This facticity of the world constitutes Weltlichkeit der Welt, *24* such a state of affairs that the world is the world, just as facticity cogito is not some kind of imperfection in it, but, on the contrary, something that confirms me in my existence. The eidetic method is the method of phenomenological positivism, which bases the possible on the real.

Now we can proceed to the idea of intentionality, which is too often mentioned as the main discovery of phenomenology, although it can only be understood in terms of reduction. "All consciousness is consciousness about something" - this is nothing new. In The Refutation of Idealism, Kant showed that internal perception is impossible without external perception, that the world, being a web of phenomena, anticipates my unity in consciousness and is for me a means to realize myself as consciousness. Intentionality differs from the Kantian relation to the possible object in that the unity of the world, even before being posited in cognition and in the intentional act of identification, is experienced as something already accomplished or already present. In the Critique of Judgment, Kant himself says that there is a unity of imagination and reason and a certain unity of subjects. to the object that in the experience of the beautiful, for example, I experience a concordance between the sensible and the conceptual, between my self and the other, which is itself devoid of a concept. Here the subject is no longer that universal thinker dealing with a system of strictly connected objects, not the power of positing, subordinating diversity to the law of reason, if it is necessary for him to give the world a form - he opens himself and admires himself as nature, spontaneously conforming to the law of reason. But if there is the nature of the subject, then the hidden art of the imagination must determine categorical activity, not only aesthetic judgment, but also knowledge will be based on it, and it will be the basis of the unity of consciousness and consciousnesses. Husserl joins the Critique of Judgment,*25* speaking of the teleology of consciousness. It is not about duplicating human consciousness with absolute thinking, which from the outside will prescribe goals to it. It is about recognizing consciousness itself as the project of the world, the destination of the world, which it does not own, which it does not embrace, but to which it is constantly directed, and to recognize this world in front of objective individuality, the imperious unity of which prescribes the goal of cognition. That is why Husserl distinguishes between the intentionality of the act, that is, the intentionality of our judgments and volitional positions, which was discussed in the Critique of Pure Reason, and the acting intentionality (fungierende Intentionalitat), which creates a natural and prepredicative unity of the world and our life, discovers itself in our desires, estimates, landscape more clearly than in objective thinking, and provides the text that our knowledge strives to translate into an exact language. In relation to the world, as it tirelessly says in us, there is nothing that could become clearer through analysis: philosophy can only present it to our gaze, offer it to our witness.

Thanks to the extended concept of intentionality, phenomenological "understanding" distinguishes itself from the classical "understanding", which is limited to "true and unshakable essences", and phenomenology gains the opportunity to become the phenomenology of genesis. Whatever it is about - about the perception of a thing, about a historical event or about a doctrine, "to understand" means to comprehend the total intention - not only what the "properties" of the perceived thing can be for the presentation, the dust of "historical facts", " ideas” introduced into use by a particular doctrine, but also a unique mode of existence, which is expressed in the properties of pebbles, glass or a piece of wax, in all the events of the revolution, in all the thoughts of the philosopher. In any civilization it is necessary to find an idea in the Hegelian sense, that is, not some kind of law of the physical and mathematical type, accessible to objective thinking, but a general formula for a single behavior in the face of the Other, Nature, time, death, in a word, a special way of shaping the world, which the historian needs to be restored and accepted. That's where measurements stories. There is not a single human word, not a single human gesture - even among the most ordinary and involuntary - that would not matter in relation to them. I thought that I was silent because of fatigue, and that minister thought that he said something only in order to say something, but now my silence or his words take on meaning, because both my fatigue and his empty phrases are not accidental, and expressing a certain indifference, at the same time they indicate a certain position in relation to the situation. If we look at the event closely, at the moment when it is experienced, it seems that everything happens by chance, that everything was decided thanks to some kind of ambition, a successful meeting, a favorable combination of circumstances. But one contingency equalizes another, and now a lot of facts are being collected, a certain way of choosing a position in relation to the human situation emerges, event, the contours of which were determined and about which we can talk. Should history be understood in terms of ideology or in terms of politics, religion, economics? Is doctrine to be understood in terms of its explicit content, or in terms of the psychology of its author and the events of his life? It should be understood at once through everything, everything has a meaning, behind all relationships we find the same structure of being. All these points of view are true, provided that we do not separate one from the other, that we go into the very depths of history and reach the unique core of existential meaning that makes itself felt in every perspective. It is true, as Marx says, that history does not walk on its head, but it is also true that it does not think with its feet. More precisely, we must deal not with the "head", not with the "legs", but with the body. All economic or psychological explanations of a doctrine are true because the thinker always thinks in terms of what he is. The comprehension of the doctrine will be complete if it manages to connect with the history of the doctrine and external factors, to place the sources and meaning of the doctrine in an existential structure. There is, as Husserl said, a "genesis of meaning" (Sinngenesis), 1 which alone tells us in the final analysis what the doctrine "wants to say."

1 This term appears frequently in unpublished works. The very idea is present in Formale und transzendentale Logik. S. 181 et seq.

Like understanding, criticism must unfold on all planes and, of course, in refuting a doctrine, one cannot be content with establishing its connection with one or another accident in the life of the author. Doctrine means the outside; neither in existence nor in coexistence is there pure contingency, since both master contingencies, making mind out of them. Finally, just as history is indivisible in the present, so it is also indivisible in the future. In relation to their fundamental dimensions, all historical periods appear to be manifestations of a single existence or episodes of a single drama, the denouement of which we know nothing about. Since we are in the world, since we sentenced to meaning, whatever we do, whatever we say, everything gets its name in history.

The most important achievement of phenomenology is undoubtedly that it has succeeded in combining extreme subjectivism with extreme objectivism in its concept of the world and rationality. Rationality is exactly commensurate with the experiments in which it emerges. There is rationality, that is, perspectives intersect, perceptions are confirmed, meaning is revealed. However, it is impossible to believe the meaning in isolation, to turn it into an absolute Spirit or into a world of a realistic kind. The phenomenological world is not the world of pure being, but the meaning that manifests itself at the intersection of my experiences and at the intersection of my experiences with the experiences of another; through the interlocking of both, it is therefore inseparable from subjectivity and intersubjectivity, which form a single whole through the renewal of my past experiences in my present experiences, the experience of the other in my experience. For the first time, the thought of a philosopher is realized so as not to put into practice, looking ahead of himself, his own results. The philosopher tries to think the world, the other and himself, to comprehend their relationship. But the thinking ego and the "disinterested observer" (uninteressierter Zuschauer) 1 do not reach any already given rationality, they "establish" 2 each other and establish rationality in an undertaking which has no guarantee in being and the right to which is based on the real possibility of accepting one's history, which the undertaking endows us with, the phenomenological world is not an explanation of a pre-established being, it is the foundation of being; Philosophy is not a reflection of pre-established truth, it is, like art, the realization of truth.

1 VI. Meditation Cartesienne (unreleased).

The question arises how maybe it is a realization if it does not reach a preexisting Mind in things. But the only pre-existing Logos is the world itself, and the philosophy that brings it into manifest existence does not begin with its opportunities - it is actual, it really exists, like the world of which it is a part. No explanatory hypothesis can be clearer than the action itself, in which we accept an incomplete world, trying to reflect on it and give it integrity. Rationality is not problem, behind it there is no unknown, the existence of which we would have to deduce or inductively prove: we are present at every moment of this miracle of the connection of experiences, and no one knows better than us how it happens, since the knot of these relations is ourselves. Peace and reason are not the problem; they are mysterious, if you like, but the sacrament determines them, and there can be no question of dispelling it with some kind of “solution”, it is beyond any decisions. True philosophy is to learn to see the world again, in this sense a story told can signify the world with the same "depth" as a philosophical treatise. We take our own destiny into our hands, we become responsible for our history through reflection, as well as the decision in which we invest our lives, in both cases it is a matter of a violent action that is tested in execution.

Phenomenology, as the revelation of the world, relies on itself, or, better, substantiates itself. one

1 "Rukbeziehung der Phanomenologie auf sich selbst" - as stated in one unpublished work.

All knowledge is based on the “ground” of postulates and, in the end, on our communication with the world, which is the first establishment of rationality. Philosophy as radical reflection essentially deprives itself of this support. For philosophy is also in history, it also uses the world and established forms of reason. Therefore, it is necessary that it turn to itself the question that it turns to all sciences, so that it divides itself endlessly, so that it becomes, according to Husserl, an endless dialogue or reflection; to the extent that it remains true to its purpose, philosophy will not know where it is going. The incompleteness of phenomenology, its fluctuations - these are not signs of failure, they were inevitable, since phenomenology sets itself the task of discovering the mystery of the world and the mystery of the mind. one

"We owe this expression to J. Gusdorf, who at present (1943 - note translation.) is in German captivity, although he may have used it in a different sense.

Maurice Merlot Ponty Phenomenology of Perception. Download Merleau-Ponty M. Phenomenology of Perception

Download Merleau-Ponty M. Phenomenology of Perception

Year of the Yellow Dog (2018): characteristics, forecasts of astrologers What to expect from the year horoscope

How to send a registered letter with notification?