IEP 405: Phenomenology and Environment

AWAYMAVE - The Distance Mode of MA in Values and the Environment at Lancaster University

Glossary

This is an evolving Glossary of phenomenological terms begun by the (class of 2002) students of 405 and constantly evolving.
Please send additions and ammendments to Isis.

Body subject

Merleau-Ponty criticizes empiricism's conceptualization of perception as sensation causally aroused by the perceiving action. There is only copy or reflection of the objective world, and one perceiving subject. For them the subject is only one of the objects in the world.
M-P also criticizes the intellectualism's conceptualization of subject as absolute subjectivity, which proposes that all sensation is carried out by the transcendental ego. For intellectualism, the world is also an objective one, and the subject perceives the world by projecting the world to itself in consciousness and the world exist only for consciousness.
For them both, they ignore the phenomenon of perception. In empiricism, sensation is an act without an ego who perceives; while in intellectualism, the world is already fully constituted in consciousness and perception is useless. (ex. Phantom limb)
For M-P, the subject/objective exists as pre-object and pre-subject and our body is the living bond that attaches us to the world. The subject exists as incorporeal subject, as perceiving body in the world. We have our body and are our body, and the lived body is the most fundamental mode of a subject being in the world.
MP emphasises the perceiving lived body as the primordial and fundamental role of the subject, and it is based on the body's pre-reflexive and pre-personal intercorporeality. Such a subject is not an individual one, but always in the implicitly reciprocal interplay between one's and others' corporeal being. (ex. Touching and touched) M-P elaborated this pre-subjective relationship by a metaphor "chiasm" in his later works.

Epoché

Greek (so the accute accent should be a flat line) pronounced epokay with a short 'e'.
Epoche means literally 'abstention' and was used by the Stoics for the suspension of belief. Husserl uses the term to designate a setting aside of our usual unexamined assumptions about things, for example, that objects exist. Epoche is performed by the phenomenologist so that what remains in consciousness is the phenomenon itself and not preconceived notions and assumptions that stem from our natural attitude. Epoche is performed by bracketing (setting aside as not under examination at present) anything about the phenomenon other than as it is in consciousness. Epoche and bracketing are synonymous although they are often refered to in secondary material as if there is one radical epoche and several subsiduary brackets. Thus epoche becomes the performing of all possible bracketing, e.g. the existance of a thing, its historical connotations, its place in a causal framework etc. whereas bracketing is often specific to a particular assumption.
Beware:
assuming that epoche is something easily performed;

Essences

As Merleau-Ponty writes: 'Phenomenology is-the study--of essences'-(PP, p.vii). The phenomenological method aims by bracketing the world, by dismantling and rejecting our natural attitude, to go back to den Sachen Selbst, to go back to, the facticity of things, in order to find and reveal their essences.
The trick is to describe the essence of a thing (i.e. a material or immaterial thing or phenomena) as we, experience it without being -subjective. A -handy memory aid in this is to check every description we-give by asking ourselves the question: Is this aspect really indispensable to describe the phenomena involved?
Intentionality
Intentionality is used to refer to the nature of consciousness. Consciousness is seen in phenomenology as not an object but always directed towards something. We are never just conscious we are always conscious of... Identifying and highlighting the intentional structure of consciousness is attributed to Franz Brentano (1838-1917). His central thesis is that consciousness is intentional (always directed towards something) and that this is what distinguishes the mental from the physical. Husserl, who was taught by Brentano, places even greater emphasis on intentionality by seeing consciousness as activity which identifies itself with that of which it is conscious. This moves intentionality from being an explanation of the causal route from subject to object to the means by which consciousness and that to which it is directed become one thing. In defining the nature of the relationship between consiousness and that of which it is conscious the terms cogito and cogitatum are sometimes used to emphasise that consciousness and its contents are two sides of the one experience.
Beware:

* confusing intentionality with the idea of having an intention to do something. The only thing shared is that both are directed toward something;
* attributing too much importance to the scholastic (11th -16th century) use of the term intentionality. This is the source of Brentano's distinction between the mental and the physical but probably not worth pursuing unless you have interests in that direction;
* fogetting that the things that consciousness can be directed toward include things like justice, ideas, pain and the meanings of words.

Noema

Within the transcendental attitude, the experience of being conscious of something has two interrelated parts: the noesis and noema. Husserl introduced the terms in his thinking about the nature of intentional experiences [Ideas 1: 1912]. The noesis is the act of thinking, the intentional act itself in its modes of perception, imagination, memory, and such. The noema is what is thought, the object as we are aware of it, the object of intentionality as it is considered in the phenomenological attitude. The acts of consciousness and the objects of consciousness are internally related; they can only be understood in reference to each other.
Having bracketed the natural world, a noematic description describes the object - a tree, another person, a painting, a unicorn - as it appears to the consciousness which perceives it. The noema is not a mental 'representation' of the object as it is in the natural world. The noema is the object as it is perceived in transcendental reflection. The noema has no spatial existence.
A 'full noema' is a complex of noematic moments - for example, a die as it is tossed, or a musical note as it is played and then remembered. There is something, some meaning which remains the same throughout the different intentional acts, something which is given, but there are also elements which vary through the moments. There is only one noema in each mental act; it is the noema that supports the changes in the modes of 'givenness' which allows that our experiences are of the same object. In Husserl's terms, this is a 'noematic nucleus.'
By then giving a noetic description of the modes of consciousness experienced in the act of perceiving the object, and of the temporal order of the moments of appearances of the object to consciousness, one can describe what constitutes the object, and how the conscious processes are involved in constituting it.
Be wary:
These terms are not meant to describe the relation between thought and an object in the natural attitude. Traditionally, in that attitude the perceiving consciousness is separate from the perceived, and there are only ever 'representations' of objects, and not direct experience of them.
This definition comes from secondary sources, and they all disagree as to what constitutes the noema.
Ready to hand
This is a property of equipment that can only be appreciated when that equipment is subordinate to the act for which it is used (but that is just the time when you are unable to appreciate it!!!!!!). When we ride a bike we think about getting from A to B and how fast we want to get there. With a well designed, properly maintained bike we do not concentrate on the bike but rather on the journey. The bike is subordinate to the task and is said to be ready to hand.
However, there are wider implications. In any piece of equipment there are other related aspects that are also implicitly ready to hand. These include Nature itself as being the source of the raw materials from which the bike and the road are made. It also includes the people for whom the bike was made to fit and provide transport for. There is a depth of connections within the tern ready to hand that is always there but not at all explicit.

Present at hand

This is a property of equipment that can only be appreciated when we are not able to fulfil our objective. There are three ways that this property can manifest itself
1. If a piece of equipment is broken it manifests as being present at hand and this is termed conspicuousness. It is its unreadiness-to-hand that lets us "see" it in its present-at handness. Once repaired the present at hand withdraws and the equipment becomes ready to hand again. When we have a puncture a bike is no longer ready to hand and becomes a rather oddly shaped piece of equipment that is fairly difficult to manipulate. Once repaired we can set off on our journey again.
2. If a piece of equipment is absent such as when my bike was stolen one day, it was then unready -to-hand and this is termed obtrusiveness. It is not the bike that is obtrusive but the empty bike-stand which seems to scream at you its own ready-to-handness in the absence of what you want to be ready to hand. The fact that I was 20 miles from home made the bike being-just-present-at hand and no more all the more intense!
3. Finally, some objects that are ready to hand get in the way of achieving our goal. They must be used or removed before we can proceed. Obstinacy is the term used to describe this type of present-at-hand. Since 1 bought my new bike after the disaster of the theft, I invested in a sturdy fixed D-lock. This is not flexible and so requires reaching down to undo the lock from a slightly difficult to reach angle. The lock performs perfectly the function for which it is designed but it gets in the way of my journey. It is experienced to some degree as present at hand even though it is ready to hand, not absent and not broken.