Rudolf Bernet

Phenomenologists continually discuss the nature of a phenomenological reduction that must continuously be performed anew. Before one can elucidate how a phenomenological epoché or reduction relates to an eidetic or transcendental reduction, one must clarify how philosophical thinking (in general) relates to natural life. The author claims that the relation between philosophical questions and questions belonging to natural life involves both continuity and a radical rupture. The phenomenological reduction concerns this rupture in both its negative and positive aspects: it liberates the philosopher from the constraints of a natural way of thinking and gives her new freedom to think speculatively (and not just describe) phenomenological phenomena. This freedom entails a new kind of responsibility that concerns both rigorous philosophical thinking and its relevance for natural life. When accounting for how phenomenological philosophy can possibly change natural life, one should keep in mind how the phenomenological reduction marks their difference.

The author wants to show that homesickness is not brought about by the intrinsic appeal of one’s home-ground. Rather wistfulness for bereavement makes home a precious good. From this it becomes understandable why returning home arouses more often disappointment than it relieves one’s sick feelings. Whereas homesickness has mainly a spatial connotation, nostalgia actually concerns the uniqueness of past experience as well as time’s transience. In both cases a further distinction has to be made between brokenhearted aching and mourning renunciation. Remembrance always is a work of mourning too, and therefore pathological forms of homesickness and nostalgia are equally characterized by their inaptitude to remember as well as to live mournfully with a loss. The homesick deprives himself from any bond to a real place. For the disconsolate nostalgic the invocation of “the good old days” has to substitute the lost present and future. Only the one who bade farewell, delights in remembrance. As in a dream the longing for something lost comes there to fruition.

The article approaches the work of Van Breda and De Waelhens with respect to the question of how philosophical thought relates to the problems arising in natural life. Van Breda’s main contribution to philosophy is related to the exceptional natural skills he showed in his rescuing of E. Husserl’s Nachlass and his founding of the Husserl Archives in Leuven. It is lesser known that he also brought E. Husserl’s widow to Leuven and rescued her from deportation by the German occupation of Belgium during World War II. Extensive excerpts from Malvine Husserl’s private correspondence demonstrate her admiration for and gratitude towards Van Breda. This correspondence also gives us a good idea of her daily life during the seven years that she spent in Leuven, her strong character, and the reasons behind her conversion to Catholicism. Less anchored in natural life than Van Breda, De Waelhens nevertheless claimed that philosophy’s main task is to shed light on the problems of bodily human existence in its social dimensions and its relation to a linguistically-structured world. This led De Waelhens into a study first of Heidegger, then to Merleau-Ponty, Hegel and Marx and, finally, to psychoanalysis. But his entire work remained dedicated to a reflection on the relation between “philosophy and natural experiences”. He understood this relation in strongly dialectical terms: philosophy must give natural life a better understanding of itself in order to allow it to play the role of a critical counter-balance to philosophical speculation. The article concludes with some of the author’s personal reflections on what philosophy can and cannot do in order to improve natural human life.

Rudolf Bernet asks what has become of intentionality in Heidegger's phenomenology? He does this by referring to Heidegger's 1925 course "The History of the Concept of Time", where Heidegger discusses Husserl's analysis of intentionality. For Heidegger, however, there is a shift from an epistemological interpretation to an ontological one - to that of being-in-the world or transcendance. Further, Bernet tells us, Heidegger, unlike Husserl, has a hermeneutic conception of truth as "uncovering" rather than one of justification; and again, unlike Husserl, he regards the a priori as ontological and not logical.

... Résumé / Abstract. Sur le statut philosophique de cette expérience de la réalité dont on dit qu'elle est manquante ou forclose dans le vécu délirant du malade psychotique. L'A., s'inspirant de Merleau-Ponty et Lacan, la décrit comme symbolique Revue / Journal Title. ...

Phenomenologists continually discuss the nature of a phenomenological reduction that must continuously be performed anew (da capo). Before one can elucidate how a phenomenological epoché or reduction relates to an eidetic or transcendental reduction, one must clarify how philosophical thinking (in general) relates to natural life. The author claims that the relation between philosophical questions and the questions belonging to natural life involves both continuity and a radical rupture. The phenomenological reduction concerns this rupture in both its negative and a positive aspects: it liberates the philosopher from the constraints of a natural way of thinking and gives her new freedom to think speculatively (and not just describe) phenomenological phenomena. This freedom entails a new kind of responsibility that concerns both rigorous philosophical thinking and its relevance for natural life. When accounting for how phenomenological philosophy can possibly change natural life, one should keep in mind how the phenomenological reduction marks their difference.

The article briefly reports how Father Van Breda brought Edmund Husserl’s unpublished manuscripts and also his widow to Louvain and saved them from the persecutions by German National Socialism. Quotations from the many letters Malvine Husserl wrote during the seven years she stayed in Belgium give us a good picture of her semi-clandestine life in war time at a monastery near Louvain.

Investigating the nature of the phenomenological reduction to phenomena and the limits of Husserl’s transcendental phenomenology, this article pleads in favor of an interrogative, intuitive, and world-oriented style of phenomenological research. Such a phenomenology is required by phenomena that do not lend themselves to an analysis in terms of a constituting transcendental ego and of an eidetic science directed at the apodictically necessary structures of a pure consciousness. The phenomenological method must thus allow, besides a transcendental and eidetic phenomenological science, for a quasi empirical phenomenology of events and historical traditions.

What does it mean to be in pain and to express pain? Is there a difference between the experience of pain and the experience of suffering? How do human subjects relate to and comport themselves towards their feelings of pain and sufferance? How can and should human subjects relate to and comport themselves towards the suffering of other persons? This article suggests that the traditional (Cartesian) conception of an egological subject which reflects on its own suffering as a cogitatum is not only philosophically problematic, but that it easily leads to behavior in which the pathos of suffering is denied. The conception of the suffering subject should not be imposed upon, but rather derived from a phenomenological description of the experiences and expressions of pain and suffering, passion and compassion. Taking into account that the experience of human suffering is both passive and active, and that any activity of the subject presupposes here a relation to the pain it passively endures, it becomes increasingly clear that this relation cannot be a matter of a distanced, unaffected attitude or position. Similarly, compassion with somebody else’s sufferance cannot mean that my feeling for the other is conditioned by my representation of his or her pain.

The major part of this paper is devoted to the task of showing that Husserl's account of knowledge and truth in terms of a synthesis of fulfilment falls prey neither to a form of “metaphysics of presence” nor to a “myth of interiority” or mentalism. Husserl's presentation of the desire to know, his awareness of irreducible forms of absence at the heart of the intuitive presence of the object of knowledge and his formulation of general rules concerning the possible accomplishment of a synthesis of fulfilment are therefore carefully examined. Special attention is also given to the fact that the determination of knowledge and truth provided by the Sixth Logical Investigation rests on an account of an original interweaving between the thing, consciousness, and language. Unlike in Husserl's earlier and later works, no attempt is thereby made to subordinate any of these three elements involved in all knowledge to one of the others.

The concept of subjectivity notoriously plays a crucial role in Modern philosophy. Parallel to the introduction of the modern concept of subjectivity, the problems related to inter-subjectivity have also become a major philosophical issue. In Modern philosophy, the inquiries into intersubjectivity are not limited to the epistemological and ontological questions concerning the knowledge and the existence of others, which derive from Descartes’ approach in the Meditations. Rather, they also extend to the affective forms of intersubjective relatedness, explored in Descartes’ Passions of the Soul. Spinoza radically differs from Descartes and most of his contemporaries in providing an account of intersubjectivity that involves no egological subject or human being understood as an autonomous substance. The encounter with others precedes the awareness one has of oneself, and this self-awareness is no longer a matter of an individual consciousness. Mental representations and feelings also become mere translations, expressions or ‘ideas’ of bodily affections. This explains why, in Spinoza, the mind cannot work on bodily passions, and why Descartes’ ‘passions’ become ‘affects’ for him. Adopting his geometrical method in the study of affects, Spinoza aims at demonstrating that the different types of social relations depend on how a human being’s conatus is either passively affected from the outside by similar forces belonging to other human beings it only imagines, or actively from the inside by its own intellectual insight into the network of interdependent human beings. The article surveys the many forms psycho-physical social affects can adopt in sexual desire, love, and friendship. Special attention is given to the imaginary processes of identification or imitation in ordinary social relations, and to how true, active knowledge, together with the active affects of nobility and friendship, can create a peaceful society of free citizens. For Spinoza, a rational State is not an artificial compound of coerced independent individuals. It is rather the expression of a state of Nature, i.e., of what citizens, liberated from their illusionary imaginary feelings and desires, have in common.