… and nobody can do anything about it. (pitstop)

“This is the way things are and nobody can do anything about it. It is at the same time true that the world is what we see and that, nonetheless, we must learn to see it – first in the sense that we must match the vision with knowledge, take possession of it, say what we and what seeing are, act therefore as if we knew nothing about it, as if here we still had everything to learn.”

Maurice Merleau-Ponty: The Visible and The Invisible, page 4, Northwestern University Press, Evanston, USA, 1968. Library Thing.

More on pitstops.

Phenomenological Method: 7. Interpreting Concealed Meanings.

 

Herbert Spiegelberg:

 

“It is only with considerable hesitation that I introduce the possibility of a final step in the phenomenological procedure. This hesitation is due not only to the fact that Husserl never encouraged it, although he does not seem to have rejected it explicitly, but that very little has been done to elucidate the nature of the method employed. Its fullest and most explicit demonstration is still to be found in Heidegger’s Sein und Seit.   

Nevertheless, the influence of Heidegger’s hermeneutic phenomenology, its modified application by Sartre and Merleau-Ponty and the increase of emphasis on hermeneutics by Gadamer and Ricoeur make it important to spell out as far as possible what a hermeneutic phenomenology may mean and what it might add to the preceding steps. Needless to say, Heidegger himself did not conceive of it as such an additional step, especially since he did not even mention the preceding steps explicitly; he implied that they are dispensable, if not downright misleading, as was, in his eyes, Husserl’s phenomenological reduction.

Hermeneutics is an attempt to interpret the “sense” of certain phenomena. To be sure, even pre-hermeneutic or “descriptive” phenomenology has not been unconcerned about meaning. In fact, the whole study of intentional structures consists largely in an interpretative analysis and description of the meanings of our conscious acts. For not only our purposive behaviour but our whole cognitive and emotional life, as phenomenology sees it, is shot through with meaning and meaningful intentions. No description can leave them out, even though it may refrain from accepting them at face value. Thus hermeneutic phenomenology must aim at something different and more ambitious: its goal is the discovery of meanings which are not immediately manifest to our intuiting, analyzing and describing. Hence the interpreter has to go beyond what is directly given. In attempting this, he has to use the given as a clue for meanings which are not given, or at least not explicitly given. One might suspect that such an enterprise amounts to the kind of explanatory hypothesis which descriptive phenomenology has set out to abolish, and that it therefore implies a complete abandonment of phenomenological principles. In order to defend its phenomenological right one would have to maintain that hermeneutic interpretation is a matter not of mere constructive inference but of an unveiling of hidden meanings, or at most of an intuitive verification of anticipations about the less accessible layers of the phenomena, layers which can be uncovered, although they are not immediately manifest”.

the phenomenological movement. a historical introduction by herbert spiegelberg, essentials of the method, page 712-713. martinus nijhoff publishers 1984, the hague/boston/lancaster. 

Library Thing. 

 

phenomenological-method

barebones Hall of Fame

Barebones now has its own Hall of Fame Gallery.

Go see it in the blogroll. Present celebrities are:

David Ogilvy

Edmund Husserl

Ferdinand de Saussure

Maurice Merleau-Ponty

Max Wertheimer

Steuart Henderson Britt

William Bernbach

The gallery will of course grow, but it will stay relatively limited. Very exclusive it is

The Hall of Fame Gallery is exclusively for people that have contributed to the barebones communication resources, or in other ways have made their name in neon within the communication area. From philosophy to advertising.

Good luck with it

other than that of their facticity (pitstop)

“What is phenomenology? It may seem strange that this question has still to be asked half a century after the first works of Husserl. The fact remains that it has by no means been answered. Phenomenology is the study of essences; and according to it, all problems amount to finding definitions of essences: the essence of perception, or the essence of consciousness, for example. But phenomenology is also a philosophy which puts essences back into existence, and does not expect to arrive at an understanding of man and the world from any starting point other than that of their “facticity”.

Maurice Merleau-Ponty: ”Phenomenology of Perception”, page vii. Routledge & Kegan Paul. New York 1970, (Translated from the French by Colin Smith). Library Thing.

More on barebones pitstops.

pitstop 05

“The perceived world is the always presupposed foundations of all rationality, all values and all existence. This thesis does not destroy either rationality or the absolute. It only tries to bring them down to earth”.

Maurice Merleau-Ponty: ”The Primary of Perception“, translated by James M. Edie, Northwestern University Press, Evanston, USA, 1964, page 13.  Library Thing

More on barebones pitstops.  

pitstop 04

“Each part arouses the expectation of more than it contains, and this elementary perception is therefore already charged with meaning“.

Maurice Merleau-Ponty: ”Phenomenology of Perception“, translated by Colin Smith, Routledge & Kegan Paul Ltd., New York 1962, page 4. (SBN 710036132). Library Thing. 

More on barebones pitstops.