In Our Time - Phenomenology

Episode Date: January 22, 2015

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss phenomenology, a style of philosophy developed by the German thinker Edmund Husserl in the first decades of the 20th century. Husserl's initial insights underwent a radical transformation in the work of his student Martin Heidegger, and played a key role in the development of French philosophy at the hands of writers like Emmanuel Levinas, Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir and Maurice Merleau-Ponty.Phenomenology has been a remarkably adaptable approach to philosophy. It has given its proponents a platform to expose and critique the basic assumptions of past philosophy, and to talk about everything from the foundations of geometry to the difference between fear and anxiety. It has also been instrumental in getting philosophy out of the seminar room and making it relevant to the lives people actually lead. GUESTSSimon Glendinning, Professor of European Philosophy in the European Institute at the London School of Economics Joanna Hodge, Professor of Philosophy at Manchester Metropolitan University Stephen Mulhall, Professor of Philosophy and Tutor at New College at the University of Oxford Producer: Luke Mulhall.

Thank you for downloading this episode of In Our Time, for more details about In Our Time, and for our terms of use, please go to BBC.co.com.uk slash Radio 4. I hope you enjoy the programme. Hello. Quote, back to the things themselves, unquote. This might not sound like much of a battle cry, but it's a rallying call of a movement that challenged a long philosophical tradition and changed forever the way some people think about what is meant, what it means to be human.

We'll be talking about phenomenology. developed by the German philosopher Edmund Husserl at the start of the 20th century, phenomenology began as a response to a feeling of crisis in the natural sciences, but it soon developed into a powerful method in its own right, used to expose and challenge the presumptions of Western intellectual life since Descartes, 1596 to 1650. Also, its proponents thought. Phenomenology has had a profound influence on the course of European philosophy.

It shaped the works of writers like Martin Hedega, Jean-Gon-Port, and Cémer de Beauvoir, and it's been extremely versatile. Phenomenologists have written on many subjects from the foundations of mathematics to the difference between fear and anxiety. With me to discuss phenomenology are Simon Glandinning, Professor of European Philosophy in the European Institute at the London School of Economics.

Joanna Hodge, Professor of Philosophy at Manchester Metropolitan University, and Stephen Mulhall, Professor of Philosophy and Tudor at the University of Oxford. Stephen Mulhall, can you give us a brief sketch of the charity? What is phenomenology and what sets it apart from other styles of philosophy? Okay, well, I think what unifies the tradition of phenomenology is not so much agreement on doctrines or theories, but on a shared preoccupation and a shared conception of method.

And one way of thinking about the preoccupation is that phenomenologists are fascinated and struck by the fact that we grasp and comprehend all of the various entities, objects, activities, activities, and activities, that the world throws at us in the course of our everyday experience of it. More specifically, that the world and all the things in it present themselves to us in the course of that experience and we understand them, we make sense of them, they're intelligible to us. So what they're interested in is the way that reality manifests itself to ordinary human subjects. In that sense, it's a version of a very general question that philosophers have been interested in

for a very long time. it's the relationship between how things appear to us to be and the reality of those things. Now, in modern philosophy, that relationship between appearance and reality has tended to generate a certain kind of skeptical anxiety because philosophers worry about the ways in which appearances might mislead us, might represent reality as being in some way other than it is, or maybe mislead us into thinking that there is an independent, real world when there isn't, in fact. any such thing. But what interests the phenomenologists is the fact that even when the appearances of the world, the appearances of reality, misrepresent the way things really are, they nevertheless

present things as being in a particular way. And what the phenomenologist is interested in trying to understand is how is it so much as possible for appearances to be appearances of apparently real objects, activities, and events. I use the phrase back to the things themselves. Why is that phrase used, and what does it mean as far as phenomenologists are concerned? Well, that phrase is one attempt to summarize their methodological assumptions. And the thought is that if you want to understand what it is that makes it possible for appearances to be of reality, to present reality, you have to understand what you might

think of as the content of those appearances. But since this is the kind of field or medium within which we live in an ordinary everyday way, the thought is that we can understand what makes appearances the kinds of things they are by a careful, descriptive elucidation of the underlying structure of those phenomena. So the idea is that you don't need to build a complicated theory or invoke entities and objects that lie behind the appearances in order to account for their ability to convey reality to us. What you need to do is to pay extremely careful attention to what's really going on when you experience real things, when they present themselves to you in your experience.

And one aspect of that, or the key aspect of that for Husser was this notion of intentionality. Can you give us a... You're grimacing, yeah? Well, I can try. Intentionality was an issue that was actually very much discussed in the medieval period, but it was revived in the. the modern period, particularly by Franz Brentano. And on Brentana's account of the matter, intentionality was something he regarded as the mark of the mental, a kind of defining feature of conscious states, part of what made them the kinds of things they are. And what intentionality

means here is not something to do with the kinds of intentions you carry out in action. It has to do with the idea that states of consciousness have a feature of aboutness to them. They're directed in a particular way. So when you have a thought, it's always a thought of something in particular. When you have a perception, it's a perception of something in particular, a tree, a chair, a table. When you have an emotion like anger, it's always anger about something, the bus being late or something of that kind. And it's that directedness that phenomenologists are trying to capture when they talk about intentionality. They're interested in what they call the intentional object of the experience, the conscious state,

what its directed towards, what its content is. Joanna Hodge, the first major phenomenologist was Edmund Hussaud. Can you tell us who he was and what his motive was, more importantly, what his motive was for developing this philosophy? Edmund Hussaud, his dates 1856 to 1938, to give us a sense of the gap between him and Descartes. and his context is very much that of a certain crisis and transformation in the sciences at the beginning of the 20th century and he supposes that it's going to be useful and necessary to have a transformed account of what the philosophical task is

and to set up a new account of the relation between philosophy and science, which makes him in some senses a strong heir to Descartes who had the same thought but conducted the inquiry in a rather different manner. And so for Husserl, one of the primary objectives of his inquiries is to set out very carefully a distinction between what he calls a phenomenological psychology and what he calls a phenomenological description. So for him, the distance between the descriptions produced by psychology

and the descriptions produced by philosophy are to be set out in their full, and clarity and distinctness by this project of a phenomenological inquiry, which he conceives this as a collective, almost a scientific programme with a group working on the programme, so that it's not simply a question of the image of the philosopher sitting in the armchair. It's a collective encounter where various individual contributors to the project of phenomenological description, meet, discuss and ascertain whether their results are heading in the same direction. So that sense of it being a modern project and a new way of setting up a relation to science,

borrowing the notion of a scientific group research culture, but heading off in the direction of distinguishing strongly between the philosophical concerns with classical concerns with meaning and truth and the possibility of access to the real versus whatever the concerns. psychology might be thought to be. How did he use the idea of intentionality in the area of mathematics, which seems to be his starting point? I think I would perhaps move the question around a bit and suggest that the thought of intentionality arises

in order to deal with various problems he's encountered in the attempt to develop a philosophy of arithmetic. His first publication in 1891 is part of his doctoral thesis in which he's been concerned with the meaning of number, which is a very long-standing concern with philosophers and indeed brings Hussle into close contact with two of his important contemporaries, Frager and Russell with whom he had disagreements of interesting kinds. But the concern about the status of arithmetic and the status of numbers had intensified as a result of developments in mathematics in the 19th century. So that's where he starts.

but as a result of the reflections that he and others engage in, he then moves back in the direction of thinking that a challenge to any psychologistic accounts of the meaning of number must be undertaken and that there will be some other form of access to meaningfulness in relation to number and indeed all other domains of meaningfulness in ways that Stephen has just sketched out. Simon Glendon, one of herself's most important note

Well, we've got intentionality and we have epoch, or bracketing is sometimes known. How does epochre work and how do they work together intentionality in epoch? It's important to consider in this context that this epoché, which I'm going to describe, is for Husserl something that belongs to the method of phenomenology. And so if you're going to conduct phenomenological inquiries properly, so that one can investigate these intentional objects that Stephen was describing, you've got to first conduct something he calls an epoch. And phenomenologists after him are going to disagree,

but for Husserl, in this communal enterprise that Joanna's talking about, we're all going to be doing this first. So what are we going to be doing? Well, this term epochus comes from Greek philosophy, and specifically the skeptics who thought that the epoché, was a suspension of judgment that took place when you saw that there were as good reasons against a viewers for it. Now, Husser is not a skeptic, but he uses it in a related way, which is a kind of suspending of normality. And the normality that he has in view there is what he calls

the natural attitude. In the natural attitude, we're just sort of simply immersed in our lives. we are engaged with things as existing things. There's a cup on your table in your kitchen. There's a steering wheel in your hand if you're driving. There's a car in front of you, so you've got to watch out for that too. But this everyday way of being in the natural attitude bears with it just a presumption of existence. Now, in the epoch it's not going to raise a doubt about the existence of these things, but it's going to, as you say, bracket it or put it out of play.

Why does he want to do that? Well, what he wants to do, by putting it out of play, he wants to bring you back to what we can now call, perhaps the intentional field of experience. Why is that important? Well, it's a stream of experiencing life that is irreducibly related to me and to any me as an experiencing subject.

Why does you want to get there? in the first place? Well, partly because what he wants to do in holding off from the natural attitude is to see the way in which these objects of experience in everyday life, the glasses,

steering wheels and other cars and all these things, are constituted as the things they are within the field of subjective experience. So it's the glass on the table, the steering wheel,

your hands are constituted as the things they are within this subjective field, rather than thinking we're simply encountering things as they are. There's a subjectivity that roots the whole structure of objectivity of our everyday experience. Does this meld into what he later described as the idea of the life world? Yeah. And how does he do that? Well, it was a later development. and in fact, it will arrive at the same place in a certain way.

Here what he really wants to distance us from is not so much the natural attitude, although there'll be something of that in it too, but he wants to distance us from a scientific conception of the world, what we might call the objective world of science. So science belongs inside the natural attitude. It's looking positively at the structure of, in its material formation.

And if we were looking around ourselves now, we have this familiar world, the world that Stephen noted is sort of just manifest in it in our everyday lives, where there are tables and chairs and other people and all that sort of stuff. Science seems to be able to provide a more fundamental account of that reality

in its objectivity. And Husseld, when, with the idea of a life world, as opposed to an objective world, wants to say, look, in our lives as subjects in the world, we don't inhabit an objective world of science. We inhabit a world of meaning, a world where things make sense to us, matter to us, have significance. And so he wants to displace a conception of what it is to be in a world,

world away from the scientific conception of objectivity towards this much more lived, immersive idea of a life world, which will be as much cultural and historical as it is perhaps informed by science. Stephen Mulhall, he comes up with this and what impact does it have? I said in the introduction, which comes from all your notes and from reading around that it changed things and so on, can you just briskly say, how did it change things? People around across the waterfront are things have changed because of this publication and we must look at that or we are challenged

or whatever. What happened? What it primarily challenges is a certain assumption of naturalism in the context of philosophy and philosophical method because the field of significance or sense that is disclosed by doing the bracketing operation that

Simon was explaining is one which in a certain sense is a condition for the possibility of engaging in a natural way with with real objects, and also it's a condition for the possibility of a natural scientific investigation of the world, because unless we were capable of grasping and apprehending reality as a meaningful field of objects, activities, phenomena of various kinds, then we couldn't go on and study them with all of the very productive resources of natural science. But there is a tendency, and it's a

recurring strain in philosophical thinking, to believe that once we've engaged in the natural scientific project, then the conceptual resources that are deployed in that project will be enough to account for everything of significance in human life. And what phenomenology is, as it were, staking its claim on is the idea that that simply isn't going to turn out to be possible. That these fields of meaning and significance are not the kinds of things that we can properly understand if we restrict ourselves to an idea of an objective world which is understood purely in terms of matter in motion. Haydiger went to Husser to be a pupil

and came out as, in a sense, an opponent. He argued against much of what Husserl had done and fundamental. What did he say? We were at the stage already at the very beginning where we're not adding to a project. One of the curious things about this, every major thinker that comes up

contradicts the previous one. Heidegger contradicts Husser. Sartre comes in. It doesn't know whether he's Husser or Hidinging. I'd be Boboq and then Mullen. So, let's just one at a time. What did Huyter bring to the table? Heidegger actually agreed with a great deal of what Hussel was doing,

but there was an absolutely central point of disagreement. And that was to do with the conception of the subject that Husserl claimed to have disclosed by means of his reduction is epaque. Hussel thought that there was something he called, transcendental subjectivity, and that was the aspect of consciousness that was involved in the meaning constituting process that Simon talked about a few minutes ago. That was what was helping to constitute the intentional field of meaningful objects. Heidegger's primary criticism of Fussel

is that he doesn't sufficiently reflect phenomenologically on the distinctive kind of being of consciousness of the human subject. Heidegger, in effect, says that there's a Cartesian aspect to Husserl's thinking in this respect. You know, Descartes is famously associated with the Cogato argument, I think, therefore I am. And what Hidalegas says about Husserl is that Houssel doesn't sufficiently elucidate the I am in that formulation. He doesn't think hard enough about what might be distinctive about the way in which consciousness discloses itself to us and inhabits the real world of which it's a part. And Joanna Hodger

says in his main work Being in Time that he wants to return philosophy to its roots in ancient Greece and rediscover the question of the meaning of being. Right. Over to you. The claim is an interesting one

because it has a double direction. It's got a direction against Husser because Hidalegu supposes that what's gone missing in the Husserlian construction of phenomenon is an account of the unifying nature of being which underlies all the regional ontologies that Hussel and his pupils had been so carefully outlining.

So while it's not explicitly stated in being in time that the question of the meaning of being has also gone missing in Hussol, it's pretty clear that that is something to which Martin Hardiger was committed and therefore one of the strands of his divergence from Husser on one of his criticisms of herself that the question of meaning arises for herself but not the question of the meaning of being.

Now, the attempt to... What do you understand by the meaning of being? Our listeners are a gap. It's the question... They've got this far, there are a gap. It's the question that's gone missing at the beginning of the history of philosophy.

Oh dear. According to Heidegger, such that, in the meantime, ever since either Aristotle or Plato or possibly even since the pre-Socratics, the primary originally insight, which gets philosophy going in the first place, which is what is there, or why is there something rather than nothing,

or how do we have a conception of truth? That those questions, while initially raised and therefore a question of the meaning of being for being would give us an answer to those questions, that that primary moment goes missing in a whole series of failed attempts to answer the individuated questions instead of addressing oneself to the wonder of there being anything at all. So the key here is to notice that for Heidegger in a sense there is never going to be a answer, a proper answer, or even an address to the question of the meaning of being,

because that's the moment at which the thinking process gets started and it's always receding away from you as you start doing your analysis and producing your answer to your question. Well, that was very rounded and for me extremely helpful. Simon Gleyn, instead of human beings, Heidegger talks about dacine. What does he mean by that and why does he use this particular word? Well, it's a great feature of all his writing and probably a stumble block for a lot of readers that instead of when he's talking about what we might say the entity

that we are he doesn't use this term human being or any other sort of existing label but turns to the word for existence in german darsine and he said in the 1920s when he was first pushing in this direction that he chose it primarily because it's a neutral term. And what he means there is that he wants to try to disentangle an inquiry into the entity that we are, whatever that is, to disentangle it from previous understandings, which he thinks have kind of led us astray in coming to terms. Well, specifically, he characterises the roots of our misunderstanding of ourselves in two particular sources. Now it's very interesting he gives these two because they're both very European.

So his whole attention is to a European way of thinking. Rooted, he says, in Greek antiquity where we get a conception of ourselves as the rational animal and Christianity where we get a conception of ourselves as made in the image of God, of moving, transcending towards God. Now these conceptions, he's. thinks of as anthropological. They think of us primarily as man, the big capital M man, and then characterize man as having some distinctive feature. Now with his, so for example, being rational or speaking or thinking or being made in the image of God or whatever it is. So when he takes the term

darcine, what he's trying to do is suspend all that. It is a kind of suspensive moment again where we can start afresh, think with a neutral term about the entity that we are. And the key that he gives us to understanding the who that we are, whatever that is, is related to, straightforwardly related to what Joanna's been talking about in the question of being, because he says what we are is the being that is at all only in virtue of having an understanding of being. So he's going to give us a distinctive characteristic, just like the old stories of man. But here, instead of being an anthropological conception, starting with the presence, say, of a created thing or an animal of a certain kind, we're going to begin with being. And he says that the distinctive characteristic of Darsine, that without which it would not be Darsine, that is we would not be who we are, is this understanding of being.

and we he says of that entity which we are our being is an issue for us can I come to you Stephen Mill Hall because another important idea for Heidegger so I understand it is being in the world now is that the same as the idea that Simon's been talking about which is different if it's different how is it different well the way being in time Heidegger's major early work is structured is that an initial fairly minimal characterization of the human way of being is progressively unfolded and elaborated upon. And one of the first stages in which Hadega starts to add content to the idea of Darsine as a way of picking out the human manner of being is to say that Darsine is being

in the world. And I think one way of... What does that mean you're going to tell us? Yeah, one way of understanding that is to think about it as his way of talking about intentionality, really, that he accepts from Hussol the idea that human beings are fundamentally open to reality. Reality manifests itself to them in a variety of ways and in ways which are unified in various ways. And he wants to understand how it's possible for that to be the case. And what he's in effect arguing in his analysis of being in the world is that one needs a

much broader context within which intentional openness to reality is rendered possible if one's going to understand what intentionality really is. Hussle, he thought, had a kind of more isolated understanding of that relationship. It's transcendental subjectivity constituting this field of meaning or significance. What Heidegger does is suggest that if we really want to understand what that field of significance is,

we have to recognize that our ability to understand objects as the real, specific kinds of things they are depends upon a much broader structure of other objects, of other people, and in particular, culturally specific assignments of meaning or significance to the field within which those objects show up. So when He was talking about the world, when he says that Darsin is being in the world,

he doesn't mean that we're one object in a totality of objects. What he means is that the very possibility of us apprehending objects as objects, that possibility depends upon a much broader horizon of significance that we contribute to and that reality, as it were, presents itself through. It's in a certain way, certainly from Hussaud's point of view, this notion of the world was at least analogous to what Hussaud was trying to pick out by the life world. So now we're talking about a historically, culturally, socially, specific horizon within which that apparently isolated relation,

between comprehending subjects and objects comprehended has to be located if it's going to be properly understood. John O'Hodge, He discusses anxiety in being in time. How does anxiety fit in? It's just the extension to cultural areas that

Simon was talking about. Anxiety plays a really key role in the developing phenomenology that Heidegger conducts in being in time and he does in effect propose to us a phenomenology of anxiety in which we are invited to follow through the stages of distinguishing between fear of a given object or a given occasion where you know exactly what you're feeling intimidated by and a state in which all connectedness to any

entities, states of affairs, events in the world has gone missing. And so what arrives in the full experience of anxiety as analysed in the Heidegirian phenomenology is the structural world as that which should be providing a sense of meaning, orientation, individuation, identification, but those connections have dropped away and there is just the panic-stricken not knowing who, what were any of those orienting features of the normal way in which one might insert oneself into a set of given connectivities and referentials. So the phenomenology of anxiety happens in Division 1 of Being in Time and then he plays it again in Division 2, having suggested that World drops out in Division 1.

He suggests that the connectedness to a sense of self arrives when he replays this phenomenology in Division II. So one of the peculiar things about being in time is the way that you get an incomplete phenomenology in Division 1, which is then supposedly rehearsed, reiterated, and to be brought to some fuller account of both what the status of does and its connection to being. But it's perhaps important.

important to remark that being in time was a text that was not published, complete and was never completed, which may take us on to our next set of discussions. Simon, for Simon Grinning, he also discusses, He also discusses Dau's relationship with others. Other people seem to be a particular problem for phenomenology. That's right. If we can track that by going back to the natural attitude that we all begin with, as it were. and there not only do we have concrete immersive relations with things, objects and so on, but also with other people.

I mean, it's just absolutely part of our everyday experience. And it's all well and good to speak about the field within which the structure of objectivity is constituted in an intentional way when we're talking about objects. But when we're talking about others, we can't have an account which says that you know, first of all, there's the constitution of the body and of another subjectivity, right? Somewhere in this, there's a sort of limit to what phenomenology might hope to achieve. Now, if we just look at the first two people... The cut off is other people, is what you're saying.

Yes, it can be. I mean, they all try. So in Husserl, he takes his point of departure on the living organism that we're presented with and tries to think how through some kind of... analogy with my own living organism and the subjectivity embodies, this would be replicated in the other. So we get the idea of an alter ego through that relation to a living body. But I think Heidegger and certainly a lot of other people would think that as soon as you've tried to build up a bridge between you and the other

in this kind of analogical way, the other's going to always be subject to doubt. We'll never really know if the other is another at all. We just, as we're making some leap into the dark here. Now, Heidegger tries to overcome this in a way that Sartre called barbaric because he simply defines the problem away. In Heidegger, this being in the world that Stephen was describing

is being with others. So full stop, there is no problem. you know, if you are Darsain, if you have being in the world as your basic state, then you have being with others as part of your structure too. And so he just defines it away. But a lot of people would say that that's simply unacceptable. You can't just define the problem away. Well, you took us to Sartre, and this argument moves from the Germans to the French, very much so.

And there's an important lecture given by Husserl in 1929, as I understand it, in Paris, which sets off Satra on the scent of this. And he becomes a... Sorry about this. He becomes a big player. Stephen, over to you. What does Sartre bring? Well, a lot of people think that Sartre

constitutes a kind of regression in the tradition because he looks and sounds and reads in a much more Cartesian way than Hidalegar ever manages to do. I think that's probably unfair to some extent. What I really like about Sartre's intervention, in this tradition is the emphasis he puts on negativity, on conflict, on absence, on non-self identity, and so on. And one way of connecting that emphasis to the issues we've been talking about so far this morning is that Sartre's account of the subject of the kind of being who's

capable of understanding the world around him is one which introduces a gap within that subject. So in Descartes' understanding of subjectivity, consciousness and self-consciousness come together as part of the same package. If you're perceiving an object, then you're necessarily simultaneously aware of perceiving that object. That's just part of what it is to be a conscious entity. What Sartre argues is that if you take intentionality seriously as the mark of the mental, that identity between consciousness and self-consciousness simply cannot be true. because ask yourself, what's the intentional object of a perception of a glass of water? Well, it's the glass of water.

What's the intentional object of an awareness of perceiving the glass of water? Well, it's the perceptual state. It's not the glass of water. So we have two different intentional objects. Could that be called self-consciousness? The second one would be the self-consciousness, yeah. What started would call reflecting on the perception. But since it has an different intentional object,

it must, by definition, be a different state of consciousness. So when you make the transition from being in the first state of consciousness to the reflective state of consciousness, you introduce a gap within subjectivity. So negativity or negation becomes partially definitive of what it is to be a subject in Sartre's account. And that non-self-identity just radiates out into every other aspect of his phenomenological account

of what you might call the life world. How does his phenomenology accord with his existentialism? Well, he wouldn't see any particular inconsistency in that, although how happy he would be with those various labels is another matter. The existentialist conception of human being is one that many people see in Hardiger already, and so one could think of Sartre as expanding upon or elaborating upon that. But in effect, what Sartre is saying is a careful phenomenon, nomenological description of human subjectivity shows that freedom is a constitutive aspect of it.

It's part of its essence. And in fact, the non-self identity I was talking about, the internal gap between the perceiving subject and the reflecting subject, is in fact what freedom consists in. If you did, if you were perfectly identical with yourself, if you coincided with yourself, then there wouldn't be the kind of freedom. that human beings exercise. Because our freedom tends to be something that we exercise in order to realize a possibility of some kind. But that possibility is something that we are not yet. It's something that we want to become,

but it isn't something that we are. So freedom requires that subjectivity is constantly trying to close a gap between where it wants to be and where it currently is. Joanna Hodge, Simon de Beauvoir, made particular use of phenomenology and according to what you write about it, she was very effective in her use of it.

Could you develop that? Yes, indeed. Famously in the Second Sex in 1949, she takes an intermediary figure to task for a failure adequately think through a connection between temporality and otherness. So in this famous footnote, she addresses Emmanuel Lebanon

through whom Sartre had become aware of Husserl's writings, and indeed Immanuel Lavinas produced the translation into French of Husserl's Cartesian Meditations, which arose out of the Paris lecture that you mentioned, so that in 1931 we have in French a version of Husser's Cartesian meditations, but not in German, and this is the way in which Hussel arrives in the French context. So Simone de Beauvoir, who appears to have read everything, had already been reading Levinas's version of Hussel, which comes out in his own monograph on Husserl's theory of intuition,

perhaps as early as the early 30s. But when in 1949 she comes to write the second sex, interestingly prompted by their friend Maurice Meloponte, she sets Levinas up as one of the characteristic figures in the history of philosophy who have, for some reason, thought it proper to identify the feminine or possibly the female as the citing which a certain kind of otherness from the rational subject position that Simon was talking about. So the second sex famously combines this very subtle appreciation, both of phenomenology and of its history, with a whole series

of other disciplinary concerns with sociology, with history. And recently, the new translation of Simone de Beauvoir's second sex has made it much clearer just how strongly her appreciation of the transitions within phenomenology as much as the doctrines of phenomenology permit her to make the moves that she makes, as well as at the same time, criticizing a certain, shall we say, Andro-centrism in the history of philosophy, the second-sex being meant ironically

or possibly satirically, why should I think of myself as the member of the second sex, roughly speaking, would be a way of glossing the title. The, the, there are more people talk about, there's Milo Ponte and so on. Why do we stick with Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir? A lot of our lists don't know about them.

There isn't much time left. So let's just move on. Do you want to take up the point, Simon, that Joanna's been making. Well, I think if we're going back to Sartre, I mean, there's a great sort of question about who is the better, more rigorous and interesting thinker, and I'm not going to get involved in that at all.

Not here, anyway. I think both of them are going to be committed to ideas of freedom in some way and of having this idea that you get in Hidegger, that you have your being to be, that you don't have some already given nature, which, as it were, determines everything about you, but that your being means something to you, and obviously if it's historically located in the way Stephen was talking about,

these are meanings which you don't choose. So, in fact, Merle Ponte, who perhaps not going to talk about, said that we're condemned to meaning. So you have this sort of condition of a meaningful life, a situatedness, and yet, nevertheless, this potential for self-transformation. And I think Sartre's key contribution will be to opening up this idea of human freedom. One interesting contrast is the way in which they set up the question of ethics.

And Simond de Beauvoir has this text called The Ethics of Ambiguity, which you don't have to read too much between the lines to see. this is taking up a certain distance from the notion of absurdity and ethics of absurdity to which Sarch is supposed to be committed, whether he is or not, of course, would be another question. So one way in which to develop a difference between their responses to the interconnections between phenomenology, existentialism, ethics, politics is to pursue the difference between a notion of absurdity

and a notion of ambiguity. What's the state very briefly, Stephen, I'm sorry about this. How is the nominology considered by philosophers today? Well, I think there are certainly plenty of work being done under that label. There are a whole range of authors, particularly in the French tradition in the late parts of the 20th century and up into the early 21st where work is being done. It has the same kind of eccentric relation to the mainstream that something like ordinary language philosophy has to the mainstream of. philosophy because of its methodological objection to theorising and naturalism.

Well, I'm sorry, but we have to end there. Thank you to Stephen Mulhall, Joanna Hodge, Simon Gondinning. Next week we'll be talking about Fucydides, the ancient Greek historian. Thank you very much for listening. And the In Our Time podcast gets some extra time now with a few minutes of bonus material from Melvin and his guests. All the stuff that you're, I know what you're going to say, which is a pity we didn't talk about X, Y, They always say that. They'd just have why, then.

I think it would have been very interesting to have been able to talk about Levinas. I think one of the things that Joanna said about him in passing was that he was the person through whom phenomenology goes to France. And so the way in which he first encounters Hussel and Heidegger is really profoundly important for the way in which he,

gets taken up in France. So that's one important thing, that he's the via. But it's also, isn't it, the case that he takes up the connection between time and otherness and thereby he

takes up, transforms and reverses the direction of intentionality. So it's a truly radical rewriting of phenomenology. He introduces this notion of alterity, whereby, instead of consciousness

being consciousness of something, the something is the initial moment which draws our attention and the whole vector is reversed such that the mysterious other calls me into being in some mode or other as a response. So consciousness is provoked, not the provoker.

And I think that's something else as well, just as Heidegger seems to define the problem of the other away in talking about the Mitzine, I think Levinas defines the problem in by talking about the other as essentially beyond phenomenality and so beyond phenomenology and I think that's fascinating too. Yeah, I don't think Heidegger defines the problem of the other away.

Because the structures of meaning and significance that turn out to be the foundation of being in the world are inherently public, intersubjective. available in principle to more than one person. So when, so the way Heidegger manages the transition from saying Darsine is being in the world to saying Darsine is being with being with other Darsine is by pointing out that the kind of world we inhabit is an inherently intersubjective one. That objects when they manifest themselves to us as real and available for use, for example, are in principle available for anybody to use. And the structures of meaning or significance

that make it possible for them to present themselves to us are socially, culturally specific, socially culturally constituted. You've got a kind of idea of intersubjectivity from the start, but that doesn't mean they're giving good accounts of the encounter with the other person. That's all I was saying. There's a very important difference between the way which Husser sets up the account of the other is always going to be structurally like me, and the way in which Hidegger supposes that in the first instance, Darzine is an anonymous mode of being in a current cultural practice and only as a result of going through the phenomenological procedures do we arrive at a sense of identity.

So the structure of being in time is really interesting because he starts by saying that Darzine is a being in. Then he reveals by doing the phenomenology on world that it is a being with that I cannot make sense of anything unless somebody refract back at me, whether it's making sense or not, and we gradually arrive at the better account, so we move beyond our initial stupidities

to something a bit more lucid. And then he has this really interesting third notion of a being towards a directiveness which invokes the future in which we can make things other than they now are. And so this notion of anotherness as the other of the world, the other of the other person,

and the other of the future, as bringing in a whole new way of imagining a philosophical interaction. On the doors open and brought in Luke, the producer, and Victoria, who's going to you can offer us tea or coffee. Thank you very much. Thank you. There are many more Radio 4 arts and discussion programmes to download for free.

Find these on the website at BBC.co.uk. Thank you.