A-T. Tymieniecka (ed.) Analecta Husserliana The Yearbook of Phenomenological Research Phenomenology and Existentialism in the Twenthieth Century Book III. Heralding the New Enlightenment 10.1007/978-90-481-3785-5_1 Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2010
Abstract
Caught as we are within the stream of life, absorbed by its experiential and intellectual currents and eddies, we need a distance from past turns in its course in order to understand their significance with perspective. Instantaneous evaluations and interpretations can only be limited. With some distance from lived stimuli, impressions, we can extricate a movement from its moment. Stepping back from the immediacy of its day, we can search out its not so obvious causes, reasons and, what is even more valuable, can learn from its consequences. In our pondering, those reasons, influences, and hidden sources are brought to our questioning attention. Perspective is also gained from appreciating the long past impacts a movement had, its successive consequences. Just when a movement has spent itself and is set to dissolve into other movements, like the circles made on a surface of water by the impacts of stones thrown upon it, we can trace its approximate lineage.
Caught as we are within the stream of life, absorbed by its experiential and intellectual currents and eddies, we need a distance from past turns in its course in order to understand their significance with perspective. Instantaneous evaluations and interpretations can only be limited. With some distance from lived stimuli, impressions, we can extricate a movement from its moment. Stepping back from the immediacy of its day, we can search out its not so obvious causes, reasons and, what is even more valuable, can learn from its consequences. In our pondering, those reasons, influences, and hidden sources are brought to our questioning attention. Perspective is also gained from appreciating the long past impacts a movement had, its successive consequences. Just when a movement has spent itself and is set to dissolve into other movements, like the circles made on a surface of water by the impacts of stones thrown upon it, we can trace its approximate lineage.
From the distance of a century, we may now, indeed, see the striking anticipations of the explosive revival of Kierkegaards intuitive thought and appreciate Husserls tortuous struggle as he wended his way through the numerous debates of his time over the naturalistic/positivist outlook. We may see as well how the first adherents of existentialism and phenomenology developed the major foci for thematization and so channeled what became the mainstream of each movement. This is what we attempted to capture in our first volume on phenomenology and existentialism. In the second, we progressed to the mutual phenomenologico-existential unfolding of philosophical inspiration. We singled out the great individual thinkers who, drawing from and amalgamating both of these streams of inspiration, framed powerful and personal philosophical theories compassing the philosophical orbit and saw too how these inspirations impinged on the cultural imagination of the day much more than did other lines of thought and given insights.
Seeing how the full-fledged phenomenologico-existential project came to suffuse literature, the arts, science, and social theory, and since the manuscripts of Husserl and his closest disciples Heidegger, Sartre, Scheler, Merleau-Ponty etc. have received scholars exhaustive attention, completing the inventory of phenomenologys original insights and directions, it could seem that both existential philosophy and phenomenology have spun the entire gamut of their marvels and that we now need simply to draw upon their insights and pursue them further.
Not so. First of all, the final principles proposed by these great thinkers as they arrived at definitive philosophical visions of reality, principles like brute being, Being and Nothingness, Dasein, God, etc., conflict with each other. Secondly, none of these philosophies has found an Archimedean point providing purchase on the architectonics of the All. Thirdly, even though the philosophical field has been renewed by phenomenology and existentialism and the constant flux of ever nuanced thought bedazzles us and ever new perspectives beckon, and though scholars have now provided us with access to Husserls and existential philosophers novissima, phenomenology as such has strikingly remained in itself an open question. The questions of its ultimate foundations, of the phenomenology of phenomenology its unconditional positioning as the source of sense are left yet to be answered. Phenomenologys claim to be the first and last foundation of knowledge is yet to be established. What has been brought into light far after Husserls demise is that the late Husserl was deeply dissatisfied in his failure to give ultimate philosophical concerns adequate elucidation through the lines of inquiry he had thus far pursued. He remained still at loss when it came to the validation, justification, final foundation of the phenomenology he had scrupulously unfolded (on this, see herein Verduccis study of Husserl and Fink, infra p. 19).
But in this conundrum in which we find ourselves, there is gathering a wave of thought that is regenerating philosophy. The deepest phenomenologico-existential wave, driven by a prompting logos, is undertaking a new critique of reason (see Verducci, infra p. 19), apprehending the pivotal role of Imaginatio Creatrix (see Egbe, infra p. 131), realizing Jean Wahls importance as an early precursor of the quest after ultimate meaning (see Kremer-Marietti, infra p. 97), finding a new point of departure or all phenomenology in the ontopoiesis of life and so stablishing the sought for first philosophy encompassing all (see Haney, infra p. 77), and is clarifying the Logos of the Moral Sense (see Cozma, infra p. 123), in fine, is fructifying the coalescing reformulations of issues found in the phenomenology/ontopoiesis of life I have plumbed. We have here a powerful ferment we may call the New Enlightenment.
Anna-Teresa Tymieniecka
A-T. Tymieniecka (ed.) Analecta Husserliana The Yearbook of Phenomenological Research Phenomenology and Existentialism in the Twenthieth Century Book III. Heralding the New Enlightenment 10.1007/978-90-481-3785-5_2 Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2010
As is frequently lamented, with todays explosive geometric growth in scientific knowledge and technology, a development underway now for centuries, we are facing a real upheaval in our view of the world and in our approach to life and its conditions. Unprecedented events like our probes sent to other planets, extraordinary inventions transforming human life in time and space like the aircraft shrinking the globe for us, instant telecommunication, and the many appliances easing and accelerating the pace of everyday life have not only transformed in numerous ways our existence but also have us on the alert for further wonders and shocks. All humanity simply expects and is in some dread of a never ending, advancing transformation of life.