Steven Crowell

Taking Maurice Natanson's posthumously published book, The Erotic Bird: Phenomenology in Literature, as its point of departure, the essay argues that "fictive reality" is the specific content of transcendental-phenomenological reflection. Elaborating this concept allows us to see how phenomenological concepts such as constitution, horizon, and the "transcendental" have a tropological, rather than a psychological, meaning. Specifically, the article considers the metonymical structure of reality's "spatial horizon" and the metaphorical structure of reality's "temporal horizon." This latter is demonstrated on Natanson's analysis of Thomas Mann's concept of the "leitmotiv" in The Magic Mountain. The essay concludes by pointing toward the ontology of metaphor entailed by Natanson's analysis, while suggesting the difference between phenomenology, as the "poetic essence" of philosophy, and philosophy itself, as the categorial elaboration of what phenomenology uncovers.

In a recent paper1 which critically examines and rejects several suggestions that have been made for “bridging the gap” between Husserl’s phenomenology and neuroscience, Rick Grush concludes on a positive note: It should be obvious enough that while I have been highly critical of van Gelder, Varela and Lloyd, there is a clear sense in which the four of us are on the same team. We all believe that an important source of insights for the task of understanding of mentality is what Lloyd describes as “analytic phenomenology,” even if we disagree about how to go about harvesting these insights.

This paper explores, from a phenomenological perspective, the conditions necessary for the possession of intentional content, i.e., for being intentionally directed toward the world. It argues that Levinas's concept of ethics as first philosophy makes an important contribution to this task. Intentional directedness, as understood here, is normatively structured. Levinas's ‘ethics’ can be understood as a phenomenological account of how our experience of the other subject as another subject takes place in the recognition of the normative force of a command. This supplies a condition that—as the paper shows by examining Husserl and Sartre on how our experience of the Other constitutes an ‘objective’ world—earlier phenomenologists have misunderstood, because they have treated ethical experience as ‘founded’ on a prior theory of representation (‘ontology’ in Levinas's language). Ethics is first philosophy because it is only by acknowledging the command in the ‘face’ of the Other that we can account for the sensitivity to the normative distinctions that structure intentional content. Throughout, the paper shows how Levinas's analyses, in Totality and Infinity, draw upon and develop the analyses of Husserl and Sartre.