Kenneth Knies - Crisis and Husserlian Phenomenology

Crisis and Husserlian Phenomenology

Crisis and Husserlian Phenomenology

A Reflection on Awakened Subjectivity

Kenneth Knies

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First published in Great Britain 2021

Copyright Kenneth Knies, 2021

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Knies, Kenneth, author.

Title: Crisis and Husserlian phenomenology : a reflection on awakened subjectivity / Kenneth Knies.

Description: London ; New York : Bloomsbury Academic, 2020. |

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2020019586 (print) | LCCN 2020019587 (ebook) |

ISBN 9781350145214 (hb) | ISBN 9781350145221 (ePDF) | ISBN 9781350145238 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: Husserl, Edmund, 18591938. | Crises (Philosophy) | Phenomenology. | Subjectivity.

Classification: LCC B3279.H94 K57 2020 (print) | LCC B3279.H94 (ebook) | DDC 142/.7dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020019586

LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020019587

ISBN: HB: 978-1-3501-4521-4

ePDF: 978-1-3501-4522-1

eBook: 978-1-3501-4523-8

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Contents

I am grateful to have known so many insightful and patient conversationalists who never tire of talking philosophy. Without their companionship, it would have been difficult to continue believing in the importance of ideas that dont make anything run. I am especially indebted to two former colleagues, Ed Papa and Marcello Kilani, for keeping me focused on this book. I am also mindful of the many people who made it possible for me to continue professionally in philosophy by giving generously of their time, advice, and resources. Special thanks in this regard to Donn Welton and George Heffernan. Finally, I want to acknowledge an anonymous reviewer from whose thoroughness I benefited greatly.

Consider the experience of realizing something that had previously escaped notice. Such realizations bring to light a strange kind of failure. It is not just that I did not notice something that I now notice. Instead, I am aware that what I now realize was previously noticeable for me but somehow inaccessible. I was blind to something that I now see to have been available all along. Of what I now realize, it seems true both that I was able and that I was unable to notice it before. It is as if I were kept from grasping something within my reach. In the experience under consideration, nothing external kept me from noticing what I now realize. I who realize hold myself responsible. We call navet this peculiar way of failing to notice and awakening the process of discovering this failure.

Reflecting on the awakening to navet raises difficulties about subjectivity and responsibility of special concern to phenomenology. We can anticipate these difficulties by noting that phenomenology is at once a philosophy of consciousness and a philosophy of crisis. Phenomenology is a philosophy of consciousness not in the sense that it is the philosophical study of a particular topic, consciousness. Phenomenology is rather a philosophy according to which the philosophical study of any topic proceeds via the study of consciousness. It is through actual and possible consciousness that whatever is not consciousness is what it truly is. This insight that consciousness functions transcendentally for all objectivity is the epicenter from which phenomenological researches radiate. Having established this insight, phenomenology has access to its subject matter in a unique way. Everything that exists in the material, animal, and spiritual realms can be elucidated in its being with reference to conscious activities that are open to reflection for the one who takes these things to be. Some consciousness is clear and some obscure. But they are both equally available as what they are to reflection. If consciousness is, nothing needs to happen for it to be available. The methods that make manifest its contents move within the availability of consciousness to itself.

Phenomenology is a philosophy of crisis because consciousness emerges from a life of transcendental navet. This is a philosophy according to which philosophical thinking begins by disengaging the default attitude of all human existence. In this natural attitude, the transcendental function of consciousness is concealed such that it has to be realized in the sense described above. Taking responsibility for transcendental navet ultimately involves reflections quite different from those that elucidate philosophical subject matter from the perspective of consciousness. The availability of that subject matter is itself the result of an awakening. And this awakening requires the phenomenologist to reorient herself to the history in which she stands. This history is not external to phenomenology. It is the history that phenomenology makes as philosophy. Phenomenology is of historical significance insofar as it necessitates the transformation of human projects that cannot achieve their aims in transcendental navet. To be in crisis is to face the practical necessity of this transformation, the impossibility of going forward without it. In clarifying the crisis, the phenomenologist regards herself as an agent of the projects she critiques. As such, she attempts to discern what these projects are and who she has become by sharing responsibility for their fate.

This study tries to understand how phenomenology is at once a philosophy of consciousness and of crisis. We will develop both dimensions of philosophical concern beginning from an examination of presuppositions. We define a presupposition as a necessary condition that is realized in an awakening to navet. The one who realizes a presupposition takes responsibility for her navet by regarding herself as the subject of a past act of presupposing. This thought that it was I, the awakened I, who presupposed opens an appropriative relation to my own history. To resume wakefully what I was doing naively, I have to comprehend the course of my nave activity from the perspective of its previously inaccessible condition. We will explore these dynamics beginning from presuppositions realizable within the natural attitude. This exploration will prepare us to see how the phenomenological attitude is founded on the realization of consciousness as the universal presupposition of natural-attitude life. This account of the phenomenological attitude will, in turn, prepare an argument for the perennial importance of the crisis problematic to the philosophy of consciousness. Thinking through the crisis is the only way to appropriate certain ultimate presuppositions that condition that philosophy.