Phenomenological Reviews
The Phenomenology of Questioning: Husserl, Heidegger and Patocka
Bloomsbury Academic
2023
Paperback
272
Reviewed by: Gabriel Popa (Independent Scholar)
In one of the most quoted introductions to phenomenology[i], Robert Sokolowski was asking about the need for a justification regarding the transition from the natural to the phenomenological attitude. Thus, equating phenomenology and philosophy, the above justification is said to stand for philosophy in general. The interrogation regarding the “why” of transitioning to phenomenology is the “why” of philosophical interrogation in general. Why do we ever need to employ something like a philosophical interrogation and way/s of inquiry? We have, on one part, mathematics and the “real” sciences, which deal with the most objective objectivities in general, and, on the other part, we have the less scientific rules of conduct that served us reasonably well in dealing with mundane activities. So why do we ever have to bother ourselves with something which is pretty much a way of confusing everything? Actually, this line of thinking is followed by any anyone unfamiliar with philosophical inquiry and may be tested by observing the common use of the term “philosophy”, especially its adjectival employment in folk parlance, when it is used to characterize something as lacking any use, as a mean to complicate the issues being discussed, as a distraction from “things that matter”.
In some way, this may be a pretty accurate description or symptom of the completely non-usable character of philosophy during our average dealings with beings in general, to use a famous Heideggerian locution. Even the Cartesian suspension of belief preserved some idées reçues, mainly for conducting our daily behavior. Following Aristotle, philosophy and philosophical interrogation is considered to be prompted by a starkly uncanniness with the way things are, which has been rubricated as wonder. Wonder was elicited in Ancient Greece, when the usual explaining in terms of works of gods and their relationship with the mortals was considered as insufficient or at least worth inquiring. The main issue with this determination is that even if it may have served as the intellectual origin for delivering something like a philosophical way of interrogating, later translated to first principles and metaphysical inquiring, it seems unproductive for the latecomers. We pretty much know or believe that we know what philosophy is long after that an eventual wonder starts crippling our usual way of living. One’s turn to philosophical engagement is not necessarily prompted by an originar, that is genuine, wonder, but by some fascination with a specific way of treatment of some issues that may go from trivial one to insolubilia such as the world in general, life, human being or the divine. But it may be that our startling curiosity, since it starts that way, may be soon tranquilized by the high availability of ready-made answers, or it may be that the sheer amount of these answers, some of them opposed to each other, will prompt us to further the inquiry. In each case, nonetheless, the root of our inquiry is hardly the or a genuine wonder, while we have a lot of philosophical traditions and schools of thought to turn to, while, in time, we develop a preference for one or some of them, based on some reasons that will finally remain unidentified.
If we turn to Hubick’s Phenomenology of Questioning, when considering its title, it may seem that it sets the bar too high, while the task is one that would be impossible to deliver in just a little over than 200 pages, considering the generality of its topic, the tradition and complexity of phenomenological inquiry, even if reduced to Husserl, Heidegger and Patočka, along with the seemingly overextended contemporary range of phenomenological object domain. But actually, the topic itself and the historical considerations are pretty much streamlined to this: that phenomenology is, if not the only, but the most appropriate philosophical line of inquiry able to preserve this sense of originar wonder that may be so soon and so easily covered with predetermined and already worked out answers. By focusing on the interrogation itself instead of answering it as soon as we get a chance, phenomenology is seen by Hubick, both in itself and historically, as prompting, preserving and developing this very sense of a continuous reworking and reshaping of both our experience and its theoretical framing.
How is that phenomenology was and still is able to do such a thing is one of the main directions of the book. The other one is related to the very act of questioning, in a sense of an actual phenomenology of this act. Accordingly, Hubick’s book may be red in both of these ways: as a plea for phenomenology as a certain way of relating to experience while preserving the manifoldness of the objects that are given within it, but also as a reiteration of the acute importance of questioning in philosophy. At the same time, these are not to be understood as separate topics, since the historical dimension is mostly seen as being determined by the particular character of phenomenological research. Scholarship in phenomenology, if we consider only Heidegger and Patočka, is rubricated under the topic of a heretical understanding of Husserl’s phenomenology, where the heretics are the ones who were being able to both preserve the genuine phenomenological insights while departing, in one way or another, from the answers provided by Husserl. This departure is not necessarily seen by Hubick as providing different or even opposed answers, but as a departure from answering itself, as least from the risk of reification of the latter as a definite system of concepts, statements and validities. Not a system, but nonetheless systematic.
According to Hubick, questioning in Husserl is related to the very possibility of “returning, eliciting and reflecting” on our experiences. Accordingly, both experience and the interrogations it elicits should be constantly revisited, such as the answer provided, as “attempts to clarify the way experience operates”, are always, on some part, only preliminary. Phenomenology and phenomenological attitude, as envisaged by Husserl, is key to the possibility of both opening, but also and not least important, to preserve this openness of the field of experience, instead of covering it with a set of answers, being these a set of descriptions, conceptual framework or a systematics of arguments:
‘Husserl’s project of pure phenomenology is a way for philosophy and science to preserve and explore the ongoing openness of questions while keeping such an infinite procedure in check with the establishment, clarification and the systematic presentation of answers’ (67).
Accordingly, the intentional feature of thought in general, determines not only the fundamental relatedness of consciousness to its objects, but also the fact that experiencing in general may be constantly revived, revisited and described, so as that one may verify on its own if and how descriptions are true to the objects described but also if is there something in the actual experience that has been left out of standard, traditional, depictions of it. An anticipable objections to this seemingly open-ended flux of experiences and the various ways the same object may be given and thus depicted within experience could be that, since phenomenology may value the same any experience as experience of something, any systematic or close to systematic way of relating to these is worthless. The most radical of these objections would follow the line arguing that since experience is always one’s own, it is fundamentally private and, thus, incommunicable, at least in its most relevant, that being private, features. In the best scenario, phenomenology would thus try to make sense of a collection of experiences, working inductively toward some insights that would somehow prompt at least a very general description of the main features of experience and its relatedness to objects, which will, nevertheless, remain short of an accurate depiction of both consciousness and objects. Intentionality as such is the answer that phenomenology would offer to this type of objectioning, as it shows that mind is outward bounded, that, notwithstanding some peculiar traits, consciousness is public by design, as it is oriented to things other than itself. In the same vein, intentionality is meant to answer another set of objections, which would make any object a representation, thus not an object for the mind but an object within the mind, or, at least, it would instill a serious doubt about any way of relating consciousness to something that has a different character.
The second objection has been traditionally posed as the question concerning the difference and relation between the way something really is and the way it appears to us, as being equipped with both intellectual and sensible means or perceiving things. The history of this question is the history of philosophy itself, but what phenomenology does, as devised by Husserl, is to seriously approach and engage with the issue or appearance, while focusing on the very character of this appearing. By its own name, as phenomenology, its main task would be to interrogate phenomena as such. This “as such” would best preserve the character of appearance as appearance, making it a dignified object of research, while, at the same time, approaching if differently, as no more bounded by trying to identify something of whose appearance this appearance is. At least, not first, not before the appearance by itself is made an object of inquiry. Now, this happens under the category of the phenomenon, which, preliminary, would entitle that some-thing, any-thing, is firstly considered as it appears itself (to a conscience, taken itself at the highest level of generality, as any conscience whatsoever), before any further thematization. In Husserl’s words, from the Logical Investigations (LI), as quoted by Hubick: ‘if higher, theoretical cognition is to begin at all, objects belonging to the sphere in question must be intuited’ (72). Maintaining the focus on the questioning side and the phenomenological ability to preserve it as such, Hubick makes here an interesting distinction, that is between the phenomenon as such, which is interrogated in the most proximate experience, and the further conceptualization of it. This openness or clearing if we want to follow Heidegger, of the experiential dimension, will trigger the manifoldness of the way phenomena are perceived (Husserl will say “intuited” in order to highlight its pre-theoretical feature).
In order to better clarify what the phenomenon of phenomenology is about, Hubick will follow through a distinction made by Husserl in his Inaugural Lecture, that is between “Objects in a pregnant sense of the world”, objects as logical predicates and phenomena. To summarize, the first, which are called “Objects in a pregnant sense”, are the natural objects, which are outside the perceiving conscience. The logical predicates may be any objects whatsoever, as long as they are treated as being attributable to some subject. The phenomenon is a higher level of generality, as it means a transitioning to the very way the previous types of objects are given to and within conscience. Moreover, this focusing on the side of “given” feature of the object as such, means that a considerable part of phenomenological inquiry should be devoted to the receiver’s part, that is the conscience and the way it “constitutes the object” (80). Now, the above-mentioned higher degree of generality should not be understood as going beyond what is actually perceived, as in pre-Kantian metaphysics, but neither in the Kantian sense of an inquiry into the (subjective) conditions of experiencing as such, even if Husserl will sometimes name the phenomenological move as transcendental. Transcendental, as in transcendental reduction, would here designate that it is, indeed, a move towards the conscience, but only since it breaks with the Cartesian tradition of an isolated, reified ego, which will only be able to overcome doubt and meet the external being that the world of res extensa or God) by means of some apriori, received truths. The phenomenological conscience, as in Husserl, is made an object of inquiry in such a way as to emphasize its critical relatedness and oriented feature, its “toward-something” dimension. Keeping close to Hubick’s focus on questioning and Husserl’s own programmatic statements, we are advised to constantly maintain the whole picture in front of us, such as transitioning back and forth from the manifoldness of the way objects appears to the modifications that are enacted by these to the way conscience perceive them. Accordingly, even the apodictical is made into an object of interrogation, in Hubick’s words: ‘as each new example of evidence appears and problematize previous understanding, it also provides a source for further reflection and consideration’, while ‘after the discovery of an essence, were a phenomenologist to forsake the original repetitive practices of questioning that yields it […] they would cease to be a phenomenologist and effectively become a metaphysician’ (82).
Let’s consider now the first presumable objection that was mentioned before, regarding the difficulty of delivering a systematic philosophy in a phenomenological matter, that may seriously damage Husserl’s project of a scientific philosophy. What Hubick does, without mentioning explicitly the doubt raised by such category of objections, is to delineate the systematic character of Husserl’s philosophy, while keeping it apart from “theoretical metaphysics or just another philosophical system” (86). Systematicity outside of a system is attainable, according to Hubick, by means of a “non-linear reciprocity”, that would undercut the traditional focus on conceptual analysis while focusing on the experience and its questioning correlate that has initially prompted an eventual conceptual framework that may be used for its understanding, but which, nonetheless has to undergo a continuous validation and re-validation through the works of others. Non-linearity supposedly means here that we will not build, “systematically” (as in a system) or more geometrico, from one set of truths to another, but we will constantly revise our base assumptions by trying to engage “with the things themselves”, keeping thus open the possibility of further confirmation, adjustment of even rejection.
Now, this distinction between system and systematicity is one which is very difficult to preserve, especially since, in Husserl’s own programmatic statements, phenomenology should always be understood in a scientifical sense, while the transition from LI to Ideas seems like building up a system based on previous, thus preliminary, research. According to Hubick, true to his attempt to emphasize questioning instead of answering, this would be the main contentious point between Husserl and Heidegger. The latter will read LI as fundamentally opening a way of doing philosophy whose aim is to destabilize traditionally provided answers, in this case the answers provided within general logic, a discipline whose reluctance to changing and developing is one of the most well documented. Destabilization does not mean here that phenomenology will search and eventually identify some weak chains in the conceptual and propositional architecture of an already constituted discipline, to emphasize their debatable character, even if it may happen to do so at some point. Destabilization is to be understood as reopening the space of experiencing which originated the solidifying of a particular discipline as a set of answers, concepts and propositions, more like an attunement to the instability of phenomena as such.
Instead of logic, Heidegger will turn to history and ontology in order to clarify the way the phenomenological method relates to their actual enactment as established, traditional disciplines. Following Hubick, Heidegger’s phenomenological reworking of history under the rubric of historicity (and temporality, not mentioned here) is meant to “elicit from experience the unstable phenomena via questioning that is then taken to be the ‘material’ worked upon by the ‘scientific work’ of stabilizing the material via answering” (105; italics and inside quotes are Hubick’s). Phenomenology turns into ontology, in the double sense as the meaning of being and Dasein’s fundamental ontology, and further turns into hermeneutics, while phenomenology is devised by Heidegger as a kind of propedeutics for what has been his main concern for the most part of his inquiries, being as such. As Hubick’s emphasizes, by illuminating the structure of the question itself, as Gefragtes, Befragtes and Erfragtes (110), as the what of the questioning, the object domain and what eventually will come up, one is already situated in the proximity of what one searches for. Accordingly, the radicality brought up by phenomenological inquiry is not necessarily that of developing new or original insights about conscience, but to clear and maintain open the space of the experiencing that firstly sourced the questioning, while further elaborating the structure of the latter will prompt the revisiting and clarifying of those experiences, paying attention and attempting to uncover their genuine possibilities.
Now, the way one addresses the question is fundamental for both the opening of the intended object domain as it is for the opening of the “subjective” or transcendental dimension, if we limit ourselves to understand by the latter that there is always somebody asking the question, with a specific, that being human, way of perceiving things, some-thing in general. What phenomenology does, not quite surprisingly considering its actual name, and what Heidegger’s analyses will take to its limit, is to double on the ontological status of appearance, which will no longer be relegated to the domain of “mere appearance” or falsehood. Actually, the latter is maintained as one of the possible ways some-thing appears, but the issue becomes increasingly complex[ii], while the instances of appearance are multiplied and made into a dedicate object domain for phenomenological inquiry. In very general terms, what appearance has always considered to do is to stand before perception and the things outside it, as a kind of inter-positioning that prevent or obturates the access to the very thing. Hubick’s analysis of the way Heidegger reworks this issue is one of the most promising in the book, even if not obviously related to its programmatic intentions, focusing on the fourfold dimension of appearance brough up by Heidegger in Being and Time (BT) but also, previously, in the lecture notes delivered in Marburg and collected as the History of the Concept of Time (HCT), as phenomenon, semblance, appearance and mere appearance (120). Moreover, it is in this light that Hubick restates the purpose of Heidegger’s interpretation of Kant, along with the latter’s residual Hume-ism, as emphasizing the proto-phenomenological dimension of the Critique of Pure Reason (CPR) since its main accomplishment would be the revealing of pure intuition as phenomena, thus a proper object for phenomenological inquiry, instead of grounding the very possibility of metaphysics.
Hubick continues to play on the different tones of Heidegger’s well documented, sometimes overstretched, terminological equilibristic regarding various terms such as truth, being, logos and phenomenon, while all the way trying to maintain or to remind the reader Hubick’s own general framework of inquiry, that being the opposition between questioning and answering, with a strong emphasis on the former. Such an example is provided by the analysis of Heidegger’s famous version of truth as unconcealment or aletheia, where it is made to stand for the actual experiencing of phenomena as opposed to the “stabilization of their original fluctuating correlates” delivered by the traditional understanding of truth as correspondence (131).
If Heidegger is the most obvious candidate for the phenomenological relevance of the act of questioning, since he made it into an actual topic during much of his writings, lectures and seminaries, Patočka is the most viable candidate for the idea of a heretical following of Husserl, again, since his he actually characterized (some of) his work as such. There are three main strands informing Hubick’s account of Patočka’s heretical encounters with the phenomenological path developed by Husserl. First, we have the idea of a “lifeworld”, as Husserl used it to denote the pre-scientifical, natural, or the naïve world as it stands facing a conscience which is yet un-informed by a critical approach and a scientific conceptual framework. It is life as it is given in average experiencing, which forms the background and backbone of any ulterior attempts at one’s taking into possession by means of understanding and explaining. But, for phenomenology in general, this explanation is always an “explaining away” of some originar encounter with worldly beings in general, losing touch with the experienced as such. The cornerstone of a phenomenological approach is to give an account of exactly this insight, that it is more into experience that grounding a buildup of a chain of reasoning allowing us to arrive at some definite and definitive statements about the way the world really is. If the latter is meant to dispense with the way the world appears, in order to climb the ladder up to a (more) scientific perspective, being if that of natural of social sciences, phenomenology will constantly drag us down, reminding us that the domain of appearances is not and could not be exhausted by natural and social regularities. Instead of developing vertically, in a Cartesian manner, phenomenology will develop horizontally, as a way on enlarging and renewing the very domain or appearance.
According to Hubick, Patočka revisits this issues that became standard for any phenomenology scholar, while, at the same time, preserving them as genuine interrogations. In this regard, Patočka operates a critical distinction between phenomenology and phenomenological philosophy or the phenomenological as such. While the former is a descriptive manner of referring to an already established way of conducting phenomenological researches, indebted to Husserl and to his already provided answers, the latter is considered as allowing a more nuanced approach, more balanced on the part of questioning. ‘Phenomenological philosophy’ will say Patočka in his Plato and Europe (PE) as quoted by Hubick (146), ‘differs from phenomenology, in that not only wants to analyze phenomena as such, but also wants to derive results from this activity; phenomenological philosophy is not an understanding or a kind of slipping away from the proper problem of the phenomenon as such. The phenomenon must remain the phenomenon’.
For the phenomenological philosophy, the phenomenon must remain problematic, beyond or beside any attempt to thematize it, which, according to Hubick, will bring Patočka in close proximity to Heidegger’s focus on the being’s concealment, while also helping him furthering his own heretical way of practicing phenomenology. Since it is this latter, practical, dimension that will be used by Patočka in order to both emphasize, if not radicalize, the experiential feature of phenomenology and to employ the Heideggerian trope of “primacy of practice” (155, 157), an expression which, while not used by Heidegger, found its way in Heidegger’s scholarship to denote the analysis of the mundane in the first part of BT.
Accordingly, and this will constitute the second contentious, that is heretical, strand, Patočka seems to object to Husserl’s “objectification” of conscience in two ways: as to the possibility of the making conscience into an object of reflection but also as to the considering the conscience solely under its traditional, that is Husserl’s, intentional dimension. Akin to Heidegger, Patočka will ask if these modes of an objective apprehension of conscience and its objective correlates constitutes the actual way that objects are given in the most proximate experience.
While dispensing with the entire idea of conscience, Heidegger will turn these questions into his ontological-hermeneutical analysis in the first part of BT, focusing on Dasein’s average understanding of being which is for the most part some kind of a practical one. The so-called “primacy of practice” in Heidegger has proved itself to be both a promise and a locus of potential confusions, both on the part of scholars and Heidegger himself, while the hermeneutical dimension of Heidegger has somehow receded under the weight of his further inquiring into the history of being, not to mention the political record of his thought. Nevertheless, for both Patočka and Hubick, this approach is able to stimulate the furthering of questioning of the manifoldness of experiencing and appearing, while preserving the core assumptions, even if mainly methodological, of phenomenology.
The third strand of Patočka’s phenomenology, as accounted in Hubick’s book, is constituted by the former’s incursions in the phenomenology of history. Time is divided, according to Patočka’s Heretical Essays (HE), in three main divisions, from the unhistorical to proper historical, interceded by a glimpse into history, the prehistorical. The main criteria for this division is the relation life, human life, has with itself an with the life of others. While, for the unhistorical, life is only concerned with its own preservation, appealing to an entire plethora of transcendent entities, the glimpse into proper history if offered by the imposition of others and the need for a structuring, if not yet regulating, of life in common. The critical component of the preservation of life is labor, while it is the latter’s transitioning into work (following Harendt) that best captures the irruption of the second category, the prehistorical.
The proper historical is only born at the intersection of political and philosophical thought, when living in the mode of polis develops alongside the abandonment, least in part, of the traditional insurance provided by the divine, thus bringing forth the shaking of the prehistorical naïve and absolute meaning (Patočka, HE, 3rd essay). While living within the polis transcends its orientation toward own preservation, philosophical interrogation and the ontological fracturing of the identity between meaning and being led to furthering the attempts to understanding and explicitation into the unsuspected and unforeseen (idem). This constitutes fertile ground for the reiterating Hubick’s main these, as questioning and mainly philosophical type is closely connected to the irruption of history as the shaking of previously agreed meaning. Proper, that is philosophical interrogation could only come about within the space/ clearing created by the loss of a total meaning, while, at the same time, meaning is preserved mainly as the horizon of the partial, localized attempts. It is within this dialectics between a complete loss of the total meaning and the push for constantly renewed attempts to recover fragments of it, as a polemical dialogue between day and night, uncovering and concealment, that life becomes problematic, prompting philosophical questioning as and open ended task, worthy of pursuing even within the ‘recognition of a very dire, even hopeless, situation, wherein one remains simultaneously fully cognizant of one’s bleak situation and yet persists to ask more questions and remains undaunted by it’ (165).
The concluding chapter, focused on the logos of questioning, streamlines the main findings of the previous historical considerations, while restating the general premises of the Hussein’s general inquiry, mainly the focus on the destabilizing dimension of questioning against the stabilization provided by answers, the preeminence of experience for phenomenological research and the particular place of the latter within the history of philosophy, as featuring both questioning and experience as prime movers. The constant return to experience, being able to overcome the burden of the already provided answers, may be seen as a kind of a remake of what originary prompted something like a philosophical inquiring, namely wonder and its truth-searching correlate. Moreover, in these terms, the relation between teacher and student/ master and apprentice is constantly reshuffled, while since the eventual answers and solutions provided by the former are nothing more than pushes for the latter to take over the attempt to validate the same experiences while, during the process, other facets of the same experiences or experiences previously unaccounted for may be considered and further thematized.
As an overall introduction to phenomenology, by stressing and, sometimes, overstressing, the role of questioning in phenomenology and philosophy, while sometimes undermining the specific difference between these, Hubick’s book may stand alongside more famous others. On the other part, for a more versed reader in phenomenology, its added value is mostly debatable, since, for the most part, it stops short of a more rigorous and thorough exegesis. Nonetheless, its particular stance and point of observation may prove valuable in redirecting the reader, any reader, to shake the dust off such a seemingly inconspicuous figure as questioning and reassess its role within the history of philosophy, being that phenomenology.
[i] R. Sokolowski. 2000. Introduction to Phenomenology. Cambridge University Press.
[ii] Of which Jean Luc Marion’s analysis of the given is probably the highest degree.