Existential phenomenology

• 1. Introduction

  ›

  Existential phenomenology begins with a provocation: that philosophy cannot escape the life of the philosopher. Martin Heidegger, writing in Being and Time, set out to reframe Edmund Husserl's entire phenomenological project, and in doing so launched a tradition that would draw in some of the most urgent minds of the twentieth century. The questions this tradition asks are not abstract. They press on how a person comes to have a self at all, how much of that self was chosen, and whether human beings can ever truly step outside the world that shaped them. What does it mean to exist before you have defined yourself? What freedom is left once history, language, and society have already done their work? Those are the questions existential phenomenology sets out to answer.

• 2. Husserl's Inheritance

  ›

  Edmund Husserl gave the tradition its starting point, a method called phenomenology that takes experience as the ground for philosophical investigation. What Heidegger did in Being and Time was to bend that method toward what he called fundamental ontology. Where Husserl had spoken of the Lebenswelt, or lifeworld, as the underlying structure beneath all the specialized sciences, Heidegger made the analysis of Dasein, a German word meaning "being-there," the central task. Dasein is not an abstract subject; it is human being as it actually exists in a situation. People are, in Heidegger's striking phrase, "thrown into the world." They arrive in a given situation without having chosen it, and yet they are also what he described as a project toward the future, oriented toward possibility, freedom, hope, and anguish. Maurice Merleau-Ponty drew out a radical consequence of Husserl's own method. He argued that the lesson of Husserl's reduction, the procedure meant to strip away assumptions about the world, is that "there is no complete reduction." Even phenomenologists cannot resist the shaping force of their own history, culture, society, and language. That insight would become one of the tradition's most repeated refrains.

• 3. Existence Before Essence

  ›

  Jean-Paul Sartre built directly on Heidegger's image of being thrown into the world. His own formulation was sharper and became one of the most cited lines in twentieth-century philosophy: "man is a being whose existence precedes his essence." By this he meant that human beings are not born with a fixed nature waiting to be expressed. Identity is constructed within a social, historical, political, and economic situation into which any individual is born. Sartre worked out the implications in Being and Nothingness, published in 1943, organizing his existential phenomenology around the distinction between being-in-itself and being-for-itself. He also replaced Husserl's concept called the epoche with Heidegger's structure of being-in-the-world. Sartre did not treat this as a counsel of despair. Both he and the other thinkers in this tradition stressed in different ways the freedom humans retain to alter their experiences through rebellion, political action, writing, and thinking. If people are constituted by the human social world, then it is only humans who created that world and who could, if they took up the task, create a new one.

• 4. Gender, Terror, and Race

  ›

  Simone de Beauvoir placed her contribution to existential phenomenology at the intersection of literature and philosophy. In The Second Sex, she explored how deeply norms of gender shape the very sense of self that women have, in distinction from men. Her approach to existential phenomenology was woven through her attempts to address problems between the sexes and to reconcile related strands of continental philosophical traditions, drawing on Heidegger, Husserl, Sartre, and the philosophy of history in Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel. Hannah Arendt brought the tradition to bear on political catastrophe. In The Human Condition, she discussed how totalitarian regimes in the twentieth century had produced entirely new regimes of terror that reshaped how people understand political life. Her existential phenomenology also reflected a distrust of mass society and a preference for the preservation of social groups, citing the persecution of Jews as an example of victimization by what she called society's atomizing processes. Frantz Fanon pushed in a different direction, exploring the legacy of racism and colonialism on the psyches of Black men. These three thinkers shared a conviction that the philosophical questions about selfhood could not be separated from the specific historical conditions of oppression in which people actually lived.

• 5. A Diverse Tradition

  ›

  Beyond the most prominent names, existential phenomenology gathered a wide range of thinkers. Max Scheler, Wilhelmus Luijpen, Karl Jaspers, Emmanuel Levinas, Gabriel Marcel, Edith Stein, and Samuel Todes all contributed to a tradition whose defining feature was less a shared doctrine than a shared starting point: that philosophy must begin from experience, and that the temporality of personal existence is the framework for analyzing the human condition. Most of these thinkers built their conceptions of the self in explicit dialogue with, or in criticism of, Husserl's initial views. The tradition was never unified, and those disagreements were productive. Heidegger, for instance, distinguished carefully between two ways of approaching existence. He contrasted the existenzial level, which he took as his own concern, with the existenziell level, which had already been described, in his words, in "penetrating fashion" by Soren Kierkegaard. By marking that boundary, Heidegger acknowledged a predecessor while carving out the precise terrain he intended to occupy.

• 6. Beyond Philosophy

  ›

  Leo Steinberg's essay "The Philosophical Brothel" applied an existential-phenomenological perspective to Picasso's Les Demoiselles d'Avignon, showing that the tradition's reach extended into art criticism. Architectural theory also drew on the phenomenological and Heideggerian approaches to space, place, dwelling, and technology. In literary theory, Robert Magliola's Phenomenology and Literature: An Introduction, published by Purdue University Press in 1977 and reprinted in 1978, was the first book to explain to Anglophonic academics, systematically and comprehensively, the range of literary theories and practices identified with phenomenological literary criticism on the Continent. Magliola covered the practices of the Francophone Geneva School, the work of Swiss-German theorist and critic Emil Staiger, and the influences of Roman Ingarden, the early-phase Heidegger, and Mikel Dufrenne in a treatment running over one hundred pages. The 1978 reprint drew endorsements from Robert Scholes, Eugene Kaelin, Monroe Beardsley, and Ralph Freedman. In psychology, the approach known as existential-phenomenological psychology carried the tradition's insights into the clinical domain. In anthropology, existential phenomenology became central to understandings of life and death, belief and ritual, and the boundary between knowing and not-knowing, most notably in the contemporary work of C. Jason Throop on experience, empathy, suffering, and human will.