Fragments on Sartre, Heidegger and Continental Philosophy
Fragments on Sartre, Heidegger and Continental Philosophy
See, what happened in Continental philosophy - the thumb nail sketch - is Kant developed a sort of proto-phenomenology in the critique with the transcendental aesthetic - try and imagine a shape without any space either around it or making up it's body. Those sorts of arguments, and he develops the a priori structures for the possibility of experience, that is, the limits of what it is possible to experience. The structures that preface experience, structures in our perceptual faculties without which we wouldn't be able to have our experiences of the world, like time, space, causation &c.
Husserl then builds on this and develops the epoche, which is where you bring consciousness before itself in a systematic series of exercises to learn something about it, like the relation between a part to the whole, psychologistic notions of number and space. Bergson who's contemporary with Husserl is doing much of the same sorts of things in Time and Freewill.
Heidegger then kills phenomenology. He thinks our mode of being in the world is more 'organic' I suppose. We're not interested in formal properties of shapes or colours to universals but projects and endeavors. Husserl's neo-Kantian method reveals a world made up of blocks and shapes, Heidegger thinks the world's a bit more like a rat's warren.
I'm some of his lectures and papers like his lectures on boredom in The Fundamental Metaphysic of Morals he's doing bits of Husserlian phenomenology with a 'worldly' edge to them, but in other stuff like his lectures on Human Freedom and Being and Time he's gone over to what the Semioticians might call a diachronic and synchronic analyses, the English would call 'etymology' - it's the German philology influence from Nietzsche and something new, a sort of search for the idealized meaning of words to describe existence
What Sartre does is sort of comes back and looks at ways we can deal with 'domestic space' rather than the idealized space of the conditions for possible experience, which he thinks is a mistake inherited from Kant and
phenomenology of the everyday world, the space we live in and apprehend objects. That's the real world for Sartre, that's the
interesting is in the Anglo-philosophical world, most people are just discovering Heidegger, or haven't quite got past him. Serious scholarship into Husserl is
parallels between what happened in Anglo-Analytic literature with the Ordinary Language movement and Sartre with phenomenology, is philosophers suddenly became interested with the type of world people live in and the domestic conditions of the human condition. The
transcendental apperception of the I. The residual experience after exploring the structures that holt together the unity of our perceptions of time and space, behind the apperception of the I is one of those things that has always disorientated me. When I come out of the meditative trance induced by exploring Kant's phenomenological structures I always