Sara Heinämaa

This paper clarifies the distinction that Edmund Husserl makes between two different ways of understanding other persons, their actions and motivations: the experiential or empirical way, on the one hand, and the genuinely or authentically intuitive way, on the other hand. The paper argues that Husserl’s discussion of self-understanding clarifies his concept of the intuitive understanding of others and allows us to explicate what is involved in it: not just the grasping of the other’s actual motivations of action but also the grasping of her motivational possibilities. The paper ends by discussing the dynamic character of the personal subject.

This article explores the nature of pain experience, focusing on the long-standing debate concerning its intentionality. The paper challenges two dominant features of qualitative pain research, common to philosophical and empirical approaches: the tendency to treat pain as one unified and homogenous phenomenon and the related tendency to neglect the need for separate analyses of prolonged pain as a phenomenon in its own right. We argue that consciousness of pain can have several different shapes: pain can be both a non-intentional feeling-sensation and an intentional experience, depending on its internal structures, temporal character, and its experiential and motivational role in the subject’s overall situation. Grounded in classical phenomenological philosophy, the paper studies pain-consciousness and its intentionality, embodiment, and temporality in different variants and phases of pain experiences. On this basis, it distinguishes conceptually between three different types of pain-consciousness: (i) immediate pain as a non-intentional feeling-sensation that completely absorbs consciousness and resists thematization and reflection, (ii) post-immediate pain experience in which intentional and attentional consciousness makes sense of pain and its significance to the subject, and (iii) prolonged pain with long duration, variant phases, and stubborn persistence. Prolonged pain is usually characterized by recurrent oscillation between pain-sensations and relief, but here it is theorized as a pre-reflective and comprehensive manner of being in the world, akin to existential feelings in profoundly shaping the subject’s relationships to her own body, agency, and experiential possibilities, as well as to other bodily subjects. Understanding prolonged pain phenomenologically benefits further pain research, both philosophical and empirical, and it is highly significant for all projects of therapeutically managing and treating pain.

The aim of this paper is to investigate, if there is a principal disagreement between Husserl's early concept of expression and his later discussions on gestures. In the early work Logical Investigations (1900–1901), Husserl quite bluntly excludes gestures from the category of meaningful expressions; thirty years later (1928), in the second volume of Ideas, he argues to the contrary that gestures are meaningful and expressive in the very same way as linguistic units, words and sentences. The question of this paper is: What happened in Husserl's thinking in the two decades between Investigations and the last versions of Ideas II? I argue that the disagreement between Husserl's early statement and his later discussion on gestural expressions is due to a refinement in his account of embodiment. I claim that Husserl did not abandon his concept of expression, but dismissed his early analysis of embodiment as simplistic and as motivated by a certain preconception about the relationship between nature and spirit. This change became possible for him as he developed conceptual and methodic tools for distinguishing between different meanings of the body: the physical thing or the mere material body, the perceived body, and the sensuous body. The difference between the body as a physical thing and the body as a sensuous-spiritual unit proves to be crucial to the understanding of gestural expressions.

This paper explicates the concepts of encroachment and seriality, adding these to the analytical-critical toolkit of contemporary phenomenology. This explication is needed to counter the widespread misconception that phenomenological analyses of collective intentionality can only tackle the intentional structures of shared intentions, emotions and beliefs. If this was the case, phenomenology would be incompetent or inefficient in analysing the ways in which human agents’ wills and actions entangle and gear into one another independently of their explicit decisions. The paper shows that the concepts of encroachment and seriality, introduced in mid-20th century by the French existential phenomenologists, are designed precisely for the latter, supposedly neglected purpose. Both concepts depict the non-intended interpenetration of human wills via the materiality of artefacts and infrastructures. They thus allow us to study the ways in which our actions enable and promote—or hinder—the actions of others. This serves social and political philosophy by shedding light on the material conditions of violence, oppression and subjectification.

This paper explicates the concepts of encroachment and seriality, adding these to the analytical-critical toolkit of contemporary phenomenology. This explication is needed to counter the widespread misconception that phenomenological analyses of collective intentionality can only tackle the intentional structures of shared intentions, emotions and beliefs. If this was the case, phenomenology would be incompetent or inefficient in analysing the ways in which human agents’ wills and actions entangle and gear into one another independently of their explicit decisions. The paper shows that the concepts of encroachment and seriality, introduced in mid-20th century by the French existential phenomenologists, are designed precisely for the latter, supposedly neglected purpose. Both concepts depict the non-intended interpenetration of human wills via the materiality of artefacts and infrastructures. They thus allow us to study the ways in which our actions enable and promote—or hinder—the actions of others. This serves social and political philosophy by shedding light on the material conditions of violence, oppression and subjectification.

This paper presents a new phenomenology of love, with a fresh analysis of its intentional and temporal structures and a clarification of its affective, axiological and conative bases. The paper begins by questioning the habitual manner of classifying emotions into oppositional pairs of positive and negative ones. The second part focuses on the intentional and temporal structures of love. It demonstrates that love is a personal emotion in the specific sense that it draws from the very core of the intentional subject and is conatively anchored in this core. On the basis of this analysis, the paper argues that the obligation to care for the loved one is transitive: love demands that the lover cares not just for her beloved but also for the loves of her beloved. Utilizing these results, the third part proceeds to study the role of love in ethics. In this interest it develops a novel interpretation of the ‘commandment of love’.

Maurice Merleau-Ponty is well known for the argument that phenomenological philosophy and modern arts share fundamental tasks. More precisely, he claims that the phenomenology of perception and the art of painting join forces in the investigation of the constitution of the perceptual thing. The chapter asks if something similar holds for the art of poetry. It demonstrates that even though Merleau-Ponty does not offer an explicit account of the functions of poetry, he provides enough insight for the articulation and defense of a three-fold thesis: first, poetry shares with the other arts the philosophical task of giving expression to the perceptual thing and the perceptual world; second, it shares with prose the metaphysical task of studying the conditions and possibilities of our being-with-others; and finally it also has its own special task of exploring the limits of the fundamental linguistic being—the being of the speaking word.

The concept of chiasm has played major role in continental philosophy, where it has referred to various phenomenological and hermeneutic structures of reversibility, intertwining, and encounter. In Chiasmatic Encounters: Art, Ethics, Politics, fourteen international contributors representing various fields of expertise analyze this central concept and its significance for contemporary cultural theory. The authors discuss the work of major philosophers like Merleau-Ponty, Beauvoir, Habermas, Levinas, Derrida, and Deleuze, adapting their ideas of chiasmatic relations to cultural analysis. As the internal and external horizons of perception and experience are intertwined and reversed, various cultural texts, like a Vermeer painting, a symphony of Sibelius, a David Lynch movie, or a young girl walking in her summer dress, are seen from new and unexpected angles. The book also addresses the chiasmatic crossing between ethics and politics-- between unconditional ethical responsibility and always conditional political choices. Representing the cutting edge of contemporary cultural theory and interdisciplinary thinking, Chiasmatic Encounters is essential reading for anyone working in continental philosophy, aesthetics, or political theory.

This paper argues that Husserlian philosophy offers a powerful methodology for feminist phenomenology and for any phenomenology with ethico-political aims. I will first explicate the widely spread notion that Husserlian phenomenology is fundamentally inadequate for such critical purposes and incurably distorted by Husserl’s supposedly ideological commitments. I will distinguish the main variants of this view recently put forward in the field of critical phenomenology. The second part of the paper argues that this widespread notion about inadequacy is based on selective readings and misreadings of the sources, Husserl’s own explications as well as Merleau-Ponty’s accounts of them. In the third and final part of the paper, I will introduce the phenomenological method of _Besinnung_ to critically study two current strategies of revising Husserl’s philosophy for contemporary political ends. Both strategies use classical phenomenology for antinaturalistic purposes but delimit its operations on transformative grounds demanded by Critical Theory and/or Foucauldian analytics of power. I will demonstrate that, in addition to these two strategies, there is a third alternative, which does not submit Husserl’s philosophical aims to the neo-Marxist idea of world-transformation nor delimit these aims by such ideas but, in contrast, ventures to suspend the world thesis permanently and _in toto_ and, on this radical basis, proceeds to build its critical and transformative concepts anew.

Maurice Merleau-Ponty is well known for the argument that phenomenological philosophy and modern arts share fundamental tasks. More precisely, he claims that the phenomenology of perception and the art of painting join forces in the investigation of the constitution of the perceptual thing. The chapter asks if something similar holds for the art of poetry. It demonstrates that even though Merleau-Ponty does not offer an explicit account of the functions of poetry, he provides enough insight for the articulation and defense of a three-fold thesis: first, poetry shares with the other arts the philosophical task of giving expression to the perceptual thing and the perceptual world; second, it shares with prose the metaphysical task of studying the conditions and possibilities of our being-with-others; and finally it also has its own special task of exploring the limits of the fundamental linguistic being—the being of the speaking word.

This chapter offers a new explication of the main parameters of Simone de Beauvoir’s political philosophy. The chapter argues that Beauvoir develops her central political-philosophical concepts—the concepts of encroachment, oppression, and violence—in parallel with her phenomenological ontology and existential ethics. More specifically, it demonstrates that Beauvoir’s understanding of the structures of human embodiment and human action lays the ground for her critique of oppression and her original approach to the philosophical problems of violence. The guiding idea of all her analyses is in her conception of human existence as world driven and futural and thus necessarily intersubjective and fundamentally embodied.

This paper clarifies the distinction that Edmund Husserl makes between two different ways of understanding other persons, their actions and motivations: the experiential or empirical way, on the one hand, and the genuinely or authentically intuitive way, on the other hand. The paper argues that Husserl’s discussion of self-understanding clarifies his concept of the intuitive understanding of others and allows us to explicate what is involved in it: not just the grasping of the other’s actual motivations of action but also the grasping of her motivational possibilities. The paper ends by discussing the dynamic character of the personal subject.

The chapter studies the ethical dimensions of Beauvoir’s existentialism and Irigaray’s ontology of difference. It argues that Irigaray builds on one central but largely neglected result of Beauvoir’s moral philosophical argumentation: the claim that fundamentally sexual subordination constitutes an ethical problem that cannot be adequately solved merely through social reforms, political interventions, or theoretical reflections. By comparing Beauvoir’s concept of erotic generosity to Irigaray’s discussion of wonder and love, the chapter demonstrates that both philosophers conceive of male privilege as an ethical issue that must be worked out between individual women and men in their concrete encounters. The task is to reform and cultivate not just human behaviors, actions, beliefs and cognitions, but also one’s own emotions and desires.

The chapter explicates the central resources that classical Husserlian phenomenology and its contemporary elaborations offer for the study of psychic disorders. We shall first discuss the phenomenological principles that enable analysis of the conditions and limits of experiencing and sense-constitution. We shall then clarify the concepts that phenomenologists have developed for the discussion of the normality and abnormality of experiencing—optimality and concordance—while also paying heed to the types of phenomena that classical and contemporary phenomenologists have tackled while developing their methods. In this vein, we will emphasize methodological factors that separate phenomenological studies of intentional experiencing from empirical studies of human behavior and psyche, on the one hand, and from alternative philosophical studies of the mind and consciousness, on the other hand. In sum, our chapter shows that phenomenology offers powerful tools for the systematic investigation of several different types of experiential disorders (such as depression and psychosis).

This article investigates the emotional undercurrents of Tove Jansson’s Moominvalley in November. I argue that one of the main characters of Jansson’s book is the autumn forest that surrounds the abandoned Moomin house. The decomposing forest is not just an emblem of the inner lives of the guests that gather in the house but is an active character itself: an ambiguous life form that creeps in the house and must be expelled from its living core. I further demonstrate that the emotion of disgust has a crucial role in Jansson’s narrative, and that an adequate analysis of the intentional content of disgust allows us to see what is at issue in the relations between the characters. In my reading, the main insight of Tove Jansson’s last Moomin book is not about loss or sorrow but is about the human capacity to begin anew by composing novel wholes from scraps.

The past decade has witnessed a notable turn in philosophical orientation in the Nordic countries. For the first time, the North has a generation of philosophers who are oriented to phenomenology. This means a vital rediscovery of the phenomenological tradition as a partly hidden conceptual and methodological resource for taking on contemporary philosophical problems. The essays collected in the present volume introduce the reader to the phenomenological work done in the Nordic countries today. The material is organized under three general headings: metaphysics, facticity, and interpretation. The first part, "Metaphysics", asks if phenomenology is, or could be taken as, a metaphysical inquiry. It studies this possibility in a systematic as well as in a historical perspective. The second part, "Facticity", focuses on the double character of the philosophizing subject, on the one hand, as a worldly being bound by a cultural and historical situation, and on the other hand, as the one who thinks this condition and gives it an interpretation. It studies four aspects of facticity in particular: language, dwelling, alterity, and generation. The third part, "Interpretation", clarifies the different notions of interpretation central to phenomenology, understood as hermeneutics.

The aim of this volume is to offer an updated account of the transcendental character of phenomenology. The main question concerns the sense and relevance of transcendental philosophy today: What can such philosophy contribute to contemporary inquiries and debates after the many reasoned attacks against its idealistic, aprioristic, absolutist and universalistic tendencies—voiced most vigorously by late 20th century postmodern thinkers—as well as attacks against its apparently circular arguments and suspicious metaphysics launched by many analytic philosophers? Contributors also aim to clarify the relations of transcendental phenomenology to other post-Kantian philosophies, most importantly to pragmatism and Wittgenstein’s philosophical investigations. Finally, the volume offers a set of reflections on the meaning of post-transcendental phenomenology