Date: Tue, 21 Apr 1998 13:50:25 -0700
From: Mike Staples <mstaples-AT-argusqa.com>
Subject: Re: Thinking Phenomenologically


Ok Henry, I need to heave this around in the stomach for a while.


> In other words, where Husserl's method
> >might suggest a step back, away from direct involvement in the world
> >(and I realize this reading of the epoche might be controversial),
> >Heidegger might suggest a step toward direct involvement. Is that the
>
> >difference, not so much in their theoretical structue, but in the way
>
> >these two men might suggest I go about thinking the world
> >phenomenologically?
>
> still no

How come I get a "No" on this one? Do you really mean "No" or just "Not
exactely", or "That's not the whole story"?

> i am still stuck with heideggerian thinking; yet to move to:
> 1) thinking "about"   or even 2) thinking "about the world"
> much less 3) thinking "about the world phenomenologically?"

Alright. I like "thinking about the world phenomenologically". But it
makes a certain amount of sense to distinguish between the way heidegger
thinks about the world phenomenologically, and Husserl thinks about the
world phenomenologically...no?

> i think heidegger critiques husserl's phenomenology in his discussion
> of phenomnology in the intros to B&T, or early there in the first
> division.
>
> >Might the
> >Husserlian "chalk" example (you know, walking around the piece of
> chalk,
> >gathering perceptual evidence from different angles until all of a
> >sudden you realize that its a piece of chalk) be a nice vehicle for
> an
> >explanation here?

> i can't see how.  the most radical difference has to do with the
> theoretical stance; where husserl finds truth and the really real.

Yeh...but, throughout Heidegger's writing there is the suggestion, is
there not, that there is a "better" way of "seeing" the world...as in
"interpreting" what one is seeing. And heidegger demonstrates this with
his wonderful reversals like, "We do not see because we have eyes, we
have eyes because we see." With the emphasis on meditative thinking,
again Heidegger attempts to differentiate ways of thinking about the
world...presumably with a phenomenological position. And it does seem as
though there are certain prescriptions Heidegger is putting on the table
in this regard. He admonishes those ways of thinking about the world
that fall to categories of "calculative" thinking. He suggests that it
would be "better" (in the way Dreyfus suggests there is a 'better' or a
'worse') way of thinking. So I'm not asking for something outlandish if
I ask what that "better" way of think is, am I?

> heidegger finds this {bracketing} theorizing, representational
> thematizing to be the most poverty-stricken understanding of
> anything.  (you know this michael, or've heard me singit in
> various keys, complete with textual citations).

Indeed I know this.

> our premordial (best) understandings of things are
> at their most radically pracitical and useful and, therefore,
> transparent.

I'm sure you are right on this, Henry, but I have to chew this a bit.
"Best" understanding, as I understand it, equates to the lighting up or
disclosedness of the phenomena of the world. I don't quite see the
argument that that which is the best understanding of things is the most
transparent or practical or useful.

>  so the chalk-user knows the chalk, and knows
> it best when she/he's not even thinking about it (when the
> use of the chalk is completely transparent; when the use of
> the chalk, the chalk-user and the event of chalk-using is all
> the same.)

Same thing here. I would think that the best understanding of a
phenomenon would be something more like the more varied and profound
understanding of the varied meanings associated with that phenomenon. So
that if I understand the meaning of having eyes as only "to provide an
organ so that we can see", this is a worse understand than if I
understood having eyes in the sense of Heidegger's reversal mentioned
above.

What you think, eh?

Michael Staples




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