Phenomenology, Meaning, and Measure

Abstract

Listen

Translate article

§1. Thinking PhenomenologicallyIt is a privilege to have been read so generously by two such capable and distinguished philosophers.1 I owe Thomas Sheehan and Maxime Doyon a great debt, not only for doing me the honor of participating in this exchange, but for participating as phenomenologists, as philosophers who value what that particular approach to philosophical questions can contribute and who care about its future enough to open it up to dialogue with philosophical movements quite foreign to it. The essays that constitute Normativity and Phenomenology in Husserl and Heidegger were originally written for many different occasions, but all were motivated by the same question: What does it mean to practice phenomenology today? Before addressing some of the issues raised by Doyon and Sheehan, then, it might be useful to say a word or two about the philosophical situation in which that question arises.My book presents itself under the aegis of two classics of Husserl and Heidegger, but while I try to be faithful to the texts themselves (as Theodore Kisiel once put it), I also engage those thinkers through questions that they themselves did not raise, or did not raise in quite the way I do. This is because I want to explore a potential in their work to speak to currents in philosophy that did not exist, or were not a force to be reckoned with, when they were writing-above all, the analytic philosophy that has come to dominate our philosophical world. I don't believe that analytic philosophy has some sort of divine right to call the shots about what real philosophy is, but I'm thoroughly convinced that unless phenomenology engages in constructive dialogue with analytic philosophy it will die out.I can't claim to have made much progress on that front. Too set in my ways to translate the genuine insights of analytic philosophy into a form that would enable a productive engagement with I nevertheless take a stab at it here and there in a book that is otherwise devoted to uncovering an internal relation between the thought of the two philosophers invoked in its title. Nevertheless, I see signs everywhere-both on the side of those interested in an Husserlian version of phenomenology and on the side of those who follow a more Heideggerian line-that a fruitful dialogue with analytic philosophy is happening. This is not a dialogue between two camps, Analytic Philosophy and Continental Philosophy. Whatever may be meant by continental philosophy, it is certainly not equivalent to phenomenology, and it is only with the latter that I am concerned here. And I am well aware that the impulse to critical dialogue does not always run in both directions. Institutionally, there is little motivation for analytic philosophers to care much about what phenomenologists are saying. But this only means that phenomenologists must make their work indispensable to those who do not initially think it necessary to investigate the phenomenological aspects of the questions they are interested in. The alternative is to continue to talk only to another until, squeezed out by the institutions in which we now find ourselves, there is no leftto talk to.It is partly for this reason that I have highlighted the role of normativity in the writings of Husserl and Heidegger. The initial reaction to my claim that what is central to phenomenology is neither an investigation into consciousness nor a renewal of the ancient problematic of being, but rather an inquiry into the normatively structured space of meaning is often of incredulity. Neither Husserl nor Heidegger makes normativity, in my sense, a sustained theme of investigation, no matter how much (as I argue) the issue pervades their thinking on the things they do take up-notably, the problem of intentionality. It appears, in the words of recent reviewer of my book,2 that I am importing one of contemporary Anglo-American philosophy's buzzwords into and to this I plead guilty. …