Schrader faults Husserl’s curriculum of phenomenological description as being a theory that can never be considered as a complete program for philosophy because Husserl maintains that phenomena are accessible to analysis independently of language. It is Heidegger, in Schrader’s mind, who brings the concept of language to the forefront of phenomenological inquiry, as language is indispensable for the investigation of the world in the phenomenological context.

The application of phenomenological description to Schrader’s quest for a definition of human feeling begins with what he considers to be the fundamental differences between “feeling” and “emotion.” He states that while feeling can be taken to mean “I think” in our language and, thus, is often related to experience, emotion is a distinct kind of feeling, one that is intense, and acts as a part of consciousness. As such, it is also a form of self-awareness. Webster’s dictionary defines feeling (and thus, emotion) as a “state of consciousness considered without reference to an object,” and Schrader is quick to point out how feeling has been regarded as such throughout the history of philosophy and psychology. However, he continues to allude to the use of feeling in our language where typically we use the verb “to feel” in reference to an object. Using the examples of melancholy and anxiety, Schrader shows his readers that while melancholy or anxiety are considered forms of awareness; one can be “unhappy” about the state of affairs in the world or “anxious” about another’s fate.

In order to truly explore the intrinsic meaning of feeling, Schrader believes one must ask the question, “What is feeling the feeling of?” To delve into this question, Schrader chooses to exemplify anger as a feeling that is “primitive.” Is anger a conscious state of the subject through which he is oriented toward an object in his world? Is anger a determinate way in which the subject exists in the world? To an angry man there can be no doubt that words cannot suffice to express the range or intensity of that emotion. For him to have a felt meaning to express, the feeling as immediate must have some measure of determinacy, and that requires it to have some degree of structure. This angry man must then be aware of his anger and of the objects that cause anger in whatever situation has resulted in this “primitive” feeling. Schrader demonstrates how thought and volition are necessary in the development of feeling saying, “An adequate theory of emotion must be able to account for the possibility that anger can become rage and rage can turn into defiance.” Without thought and volition, as key elements above self-awareness, feeling cannot fully occur.

Bringing the concept of feeling and emotion back to Heidegger, Schrader shows us the insistence of Heidegger upon the “mood,” or Gestimmtsein, of the total individual as primary for an understanding of his world. This “mood” is not a mere psychological feeling but a mode of being-in-the-world. The primary understanding of being is through that fundamental mood which characterizes the original being of Dasein. Thus, we must stop associating feeling and emotion with a simple state of self-awareness separate from thought and volition, but must instead develop ourselves as complete human beings, for it is only through interpretation of feeling through thought that one can fully complete his or her world.

Likewise, the context in which we discussed Merleau-Ponty allowed us a discussion on meaning and history. Merleau-Ponty followed in the footsteps of French phenomenology, and thus followed intimately the work of Husserl and Heidegger. His Phenomenology of Perception combined phenomenological and psychological influences, and took on the concept of perception from a phenomenological, and more importantly, embodied perspective. Merleau-Ponty’s work describes the “flesh,” which is opened up as a concept later in his career, and becomes the fabric of a prereflective experience, one in which the body and the world intertwine (l’entrelacs) to form reality.

On the concept of history and meaning, we discovered in Merleau-Ponty’s brief introduction to his course on Husserl, that the Heideggerian notion of inhabitation is not far from what Merleau-Ponty sees Husserl himself doing in his later work. Merleau-Ponty uses the example of the geometer. When Euclid developed geometry, he effectively opened a region in which future geometers can operate, i.e. he created the formal field of concepts that one literally repeats each time one engages in geometry. In this sense, one shares the same thought of Euclid in doing geometry. This is very close to the notion of inhabitation. Merleau-Ponty:

“The main effect of ideation, wich is dated and signed, is to make its lateral repetition superfluous, to launch culture toward a future, to achieve forgetfulness, to be overcome, to outline a futural, geometrical horizon, and to circumscribe a coherent domain.”

This is not only inhabitation, and an utter repetition of the same, but also the possibility of a future, that is, possibility within sameness, or inhabitation to discover the new. Merleau-Ponty is not claiming that mathematicians occupy a space and repeat it endlessly, but that this very occupation contains the possibility of new discoveries. This is markedly Heideggerian.

Natanson, Maurice, “Alienation and Social Role.” pp 255-269. James M. Edie, “Phenomenology in America.” Quadrangle. 1967

Sarte’s work on the visual arts was dominated by the problem of imaginary entities—the aesthetic object being intended to by the artist but distinguished by its non-existence. The resemblance perceived between a representation and plenary reality exemplifies imagination, or intentionality. The problem with this approach arises when the art object contains no figurative elements, as in “modern” art. Kaelin sees Sarte as mistaken, too, in his reduction to the function of imagination, for the artists goal is to “fix”

(43) the imagination and create an object out of absence.

Merleau-Ponty sees the conflict in representation between “realistic” painters (rationalists) and impressionists (empiricists) as originating in the mistaken shared belief of the “primacy of the objective world.”(39) Realistic painters, since the Renaissance have used the convention of perspective to register the world in illusionistic real space. Impressionists use pointalism to depict the sensuous experience of light reflected off real objects. For Merleau Ponty, it is Cezanne who revives painting in an investigation of how objects come appear in our perceptual field in the first place, a project that is surely phenomenological in nature. Cezanne’s objects are pre-rational—they are objects of intention, objects of bodily tension. “When a painter is successful, whether figurative or not, he succeeds in presenting on the sensuous surface of his work the same kind of tension produced in the organism’s phenomenal field when it first becomes aware that an object exists.”

(40)

For Merleau-Ponty the sense of touch is a model for the visual act. Therefore the conflict between figurative and abstract painting is badly put: the object is merely that which is perceived in space and felt by the body as space tension, equally felt in color relationships as well as the anticipation of objects. Therefore all visual elements represent Being, and each one exists in a field of Being.

Kaelin sees both Sarte’s and Merleau Ponty’s theory as bereft in their respective reductions to “the representation of objects, real or otherwise,” (44) and the presentation of a sensuous surface, that ignores the represented objects. In a phenomenological analysis of ten painting, figurative and not figurative, expressive of depth, and surface expressions, Kaelin hopes to surpass these two reductive summaries of aesthetic experience. In his description of these ten works, he explains how all of the elements in the painting have their inherent qualities changed in relationship to the other elements of the painting. All meaning, then is dependent upon the relationships of the elements in the work which Kaelin structures into a hierarchy of phenomena from color space to the depiction of objects in which “real space” can be intuited, and finally the self-contained “idea” in the painting. For Kaelin, it makes no difference whether the object has a natural world correlate or not. “The gamut of visibility may thus be conceived as a series of emergent strands of experience.” (56) Kaelin concludes that the viewer’s aesthetic intuition is completely contained in the “visibility of the things seen,”

(57) the elements of the painting that lend each other meaning in their very appearance.

Kaelin, Eugene, “The Visibility of Things Seen: A Phenomenological View of Painting.” pp 30-59. James M. Edie, “An Invitation to Phenomenology.” Quadrangle. 1965.

Perhaps one of the strongest aspects of this essay is Wild’s effective critique of historical models of value theory. He compares lived experience to dialogue; the action of life is the communication between the subject and its world of other subjects. In a purely subjective model- one that incorporates relativist views- that dialogue becomes a monologue of the subject. Wild uses Sartre to summarize this worldview: “man is nothing other than he makes himself to be.” This value theory only asks action and observance from the subject, never his/her/it’s environment; the subject places meaning on the world purely of their own volition with little to no external influence.

This view is equally as flawed as its opposite, the value theory of objectivist thought. In this ethical model, the environment or world is still seen as a purely separate entity, but in this case it becomes the force monologuing conditions to the subject. An objectivist value theory holds the subject to the responsibility of their physical and factual needs, but largely little else.

Objective ethics fall short of alignment with actual life for several reasons. Primarily, the idea of a concretely stratified world fails to account for mankind’s ability to modify its environment through free will and the subjectivity of perception and experience. According to objectivism, our self is bestowed on us by the world without our participation – an assertion that dooms us to life without personal authority.

Meanwhile, a subjectivist ethics fails to consider what Sartre calls “a human universality of condition”, that is, certain objects and conditions enable human life itself, and therefore must be universally valued. The contradictions of these traditional value theories point toward a more organic ethics – an ethics that draws from both objective and subjective tendencies, but which is rooted in existence itself.

An existential value theory much more readily approaches the dialogue between subject and world required for authentic living. Through the course of lived experience, emergent possibilities for an existential ethics present themselves simultaneously through and by the subject. Wild further elaborates that “these existential possibilities are not imposed on me by the causal action of alien forces. They are patterns of meaning which act on me only by the appeal of a global significance. But this appeal makes sense only to one who is ready to listen, and requires an active answer to be understood (Wild 68).”

This is perhaps Wild’s thesis for authentic living. While he argues that when “we are concerned to analyze the active-revealing process by which abstract values become norms, and finally bring forth meaningful action,” “there are certain well-marked steps that seem to be essential (Wild 68), these steps are delineated by him soon afterwards in the essay, and appear ineffectual in describing a universal ‘route’ to authentic living.

First, the individual must distance hirself from the roles dictated to them by their culture in order to discover the roles which are authentically their own. They will become dissatisfied with previous roles and viewpoints, and develop a new conception of the range of possibilities before them. In time, if focus is maintained, the abstractions will begin to correlate to real potentials and actions. The subject then experiences a vertigo related to the new motion of their values. Anxious, ze is both repelled and drawn to the new potential life, and must sustain this tension in order to propel hir new convictions. A sense of necessity fills the subject, and ze applies hir new values in a limited fashion. The individual then begins to seek a way to norm hir new abstract values in order to apply them to any situation the world may present. If this search for a dialogue with global meaning is successful, a personal universality will fill the subject’s actions and guide them to a new phase of life.

Wild is eager to point out that authentic living entirely within the terms of an established sociocultural system is only possible provided such a society has an entirely free population and imposes no hierarchical dynamic, but fails to evaluate how an unprogressive or rigid social order makes the sacrifices required of movement towards authentic life unequal for individual subjects. This is seen particularly in his example of Pierre of Tolstoy’s War and Peace, a Russian aristocrat that, through anxiety feels compelled to address the crumbling values around him by helping to drive the invading French army. Had Pierre not had the freedom and privilege to be as of grand assistance to the war effort as he was, that initial anxiety and the subsequent desire for ethical action may never have actually occurred.

While it could be argued that this failure of the proposed nine steps as a common route to authentic living is a failure of Wild’s second goal- a methodology for achieving existential value theory- a much shorter and universal guiding statement can be found earlier in the essay: “Hence we can say that freedom (the gaining of distance from ourselves), the working out of global meanings, responsible action, and temporal integrity are conditions of human becoming that apply to all men (Wild 65).”

Wild, John. “Authentic Existence: A New Approach to “Value Theory”.” An Invitation to Phenomenology. Ed. James Edie. Chicago: Quadrangle, 1965.

Some preliminary notes: Kerszberg is by all indications highly sympathetic to Husserl’s critique of the natural sciences, and in the article Husserl and Kerszberg’s voices often seem to meld into a single argument; which are Husserl’s and which are Kerszberg’s insights is often not clear. For this reason, I propose below not to try to sort out who’s analysis is whose, but rather outline some of the principle ideas presented in the article (whosever they are in the final analysis). While, in my view, Kerszberg’s presentation of these ideas is somewhat turgid and disorganized, the ideas themselves are really fairly straightforward and familiar when boiled down. For the benefit of anyone who might want further explore the contours of Kerszberg’s interesting discussions of the phenomenological critique of modern science, then, I propose to present some of its central ideas in what I hope to be a more accessible manner that.

The article speaks of the crisis of modern science being the ever widening gap between the “world of science” and the “world of immediate experience” (188). The world of science as we know it today is the progeny of what Husserl calls the “Galilean project.” It is “the idea of a world existing in itself, fixed and determined, coupled with ideal scientific truths which are also valid in themselves” (196-7). But the question arises from the basic tenets of empiricism (never mind phenomenology) of how we—even in the collective—could possibly have access to this “real” world of science from our inherently subjective “world of immediate experience.” This is the problem of articulating the “bridge” between the world of experience and the world of science, needed by the latter world to ground itself. But this proves a formative and, for the phenomenologist or anti-realist, ultimately futile task. For, even granted the validity of science’s laws—their ability to accurately account for and predict the way the world works—this still can say nothing of the world’s objective existence. To pretend that the confirmation of scientific theories entails the actual existence of the objects they presuppose would be a conflation of methodology and ontology. In the Husserlian analysis, this precisely the artifice involved in the Galilean project, which assumes that the valid scientific truths we derive to describe or explain objects in the (realist) world are equivalent to those objects themselves (191). This trickery at once explains why the Galilean project has succeeded in attaining the hegemony it has (191), but also why it, in the final analysis, remains ungrounded. For once its artifice is uncovered, it becomes apparent that it “fails to secure a proper understanding of its own truths” (ibid); that is, it fails to bridge the gap between its own world of science and the world of experience in which it must be grounded.

The adherent of the Galilean project would certainly not be satisfied here, however. After all, she would argue, scientists are empiricists too(!); all of the scientific disciplines take empirical data (from the “world of immediate experience”) as their foundation, attempting to discover and systematize the principles that underlie this data. She would marshal as evidence science’s celebrated history of “scientific revolutions,” wherein when the principles of science fell out of line, so to speak, with our empirical observations, those principles were overthrown in favor of principles which more faithfully conformed to our empirical observations (189). In this precisely this way, the realist scientist argues, does science “ground” itself in our immediate experience. What else more could we want?

The phenomenological response is this: though “modern science vindicates a higher respect both of, and for, empirical evidence,…at the same time priority is given to a well-defined Idea of the world” (194). So, though this “Idea”—being some combination of the scientific method, the laws the method purports to come upon, and the higher order “form of forms” which is the condition for the possibility of this whole enterprise (194)—is in some respects based upon empirical evidence, it ultimately aims to subordinate all other empirical evidence to its universality. In modern science, that is, the Idea always takes precedence over the empirical data itself, and in doing so it inevitably passes over the complexity of immediate experience “to anticipate its conformity with the overall plan for the world—the form which hangs over all forms” (194).

This is just to say that modern science never escapes from the naïve interpretive framework of the natural attitude (192). And in this sense, the Galilean project is actually not anything so new: it just represents a systemization of the natural attitude into abstractions never previously imagined (ibid). But the naiveté carries over. The natural attitude and the Galilean project, then, both interpret experience through unfounded presumptions, and thereby limit the potential experience as it is given to us in and of itself, “pre-scientifically” (ibid)

This is, of course, where we are motivated to enact the “transcendental turn.” We escape the impoverished existence brought on through the natural attitude by bracketing “any pretension…to the being that things seem to have ‘in themselves’” (192) and thereby “boost the minimum of concrete experience with which we begin” (194). And only then can we undertake the “rigorous science” of phenomenology.

Though Kerszberg never comes explicitly back to the question of the “bridge” between the “world of experience” and the “world of science,” assumedly with the transcendental turn this distinction is collapsed and the need for a bridge that would connect them thus obviated. For the Husserlian phenomenologist, I think, the status of modern science would be at best instrumentalist, though necessarily much more limited in scope than it purports; the phenomenologist might grant that modern science succeeds in accurately describing and perhaps predicting the workings (motion, interaction) of “physical” objects, while denying that it can say anything of the “being” or “essence” of those objects. This latter investigation is the purview of phenomenology (195).

Kerszberg, Pierre. “Natural Science and the Experience of Nature.” Journal of the Theoretical Humanities 10, no. 1 (2005).

In the next section of the essay, Ahmed provides a reading of Husserl’s discussion of orientations. What she finds most pertinent in Husserl, is the sense that the Body has a position from which it proceeds. For Ahmed, “orientations are about starting points” (545) which create a sense of the around, the familiar. Familiar refers to the environment that is already known, once perceived but in the immediate, unengaged with the senses. Husserl’s example of the writing table provides a location from which “the world unfolds” (246). What is behind the table or beyond Husserl’s immediate perception creates the relegated background, that which is “put out of action” (548) in order to focus on the table and the “flux” of consciousness from the table. The background, thus, is both spatial and temporal. It is not only the physical space the writing table inhabits, but also its circumstances, the “historicity” (549) of its orientation in the world. How the table came to be, and what the writing table requires are concerns that Ahmed brings in using Heidegger’s conception of the table. Heidegger’s table “in order to write” (69, 551) creating an “intimate co-dwelling of bodies and objects” (551). The experience of the philosopher sitting at his table is one that is beyond perception. It evokes something additional to its originally perceivable purpose through its physical intimacy with the body. What is outside the body, then, are horizons made available as actions, labors that are historicized along with the body as ways of being oriented. Implicit in actions then, is the aspiration “for identity” (553), for our actions to give us meaning through occupations, positions in society.

Next, Ahmed discusses specifically sexual orientations with the idea of “becoming straight” (553). Within a space, we dwell, not just in the spatial sense of Heidegger’s “making room” (554) but also temporally. Orientations are not just about the immediate, they guide us in directions; towards what is ahead, based on genealogical and historical tendencies. Straightness, in that sense, is a direction, a line on which we can walk that is both historied and performative. According to Ahmed, the common equation of a child to a smaller version of his father creates a kind of “alignment: the utterance positions the child as the not-yet adult, by aligning sex (the male body) and gender (the masculine character) with sexual orientation (the heterosexual future)” (557). The child is asked to inherit the genealogy in order to continue the horizontal and then vertical straight lines of the family tree. Additionally, Ahmed cites the nearness of objects of love or of heterosexuality in the “conventional family home” as significant to a kind of field of objects from which we are oriented.

Finally, Ahmed addresses the queer subject, and the “queer slants” (560) of a reorientation of perception. She examines Merleau-Ponty’s discussion of the queering effect of a “slantwise” view or entering of a space. She objects to Ponty’s ultimate stance that the body should be a certain way (straight). Rather, she maintains that to enter a queer space is, ultimately, to be oriented towards a strange body. “This contact involves following rather different lines of connection, association, even exchange, as these lines are often invisible to others.” (564). Queer lines, rather than having distinct “points” which form a straight line, are by nature fleeting. Queerness connotes spaces that are in a field, that allow for different lines and varied orientations. It is, fundamentally, disorientation, the disturbance of the order of things and the confusion of familiar and strange that create a queer “oblique” line or object.

Ahmed closes with some postulations towards the politics of a queer phenomenological approach and the problems of “homonormativity”. Ultimately she arrives at the hope that “the table becomes queer when it provides support…to those whose lives and loves make them appear oblique, strange, and out of place.” (570)

Ahmed, Sara, Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others, Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006.

Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson Oxford: Blackwell, 1973.

Martin Heidegger, Ontology — the Hermeneutics of Facticity, trans. John van Buren , Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999.

Edmund Husserl, The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology, trans. David Carr , Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1970

Edmund Husserl, Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy, Second Book, trans. Richard Rojcewicz and André Schuwer Dor- drecht: Kluwer Academic, 1989.

Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Phenomenology of Perception, trans. Colin Smith, London: Routledge, 2002.

While there are several occasions where Heidegger mentions an engagement with foreign ideas, specifically Greek, Ma and van Brakel argue that it is not until the 1950’s that Heidegger really begins to engage with the possibility of an East-West thought exchange. Ma and van Brakel critique other examiners of Heidegger who take his earlier mentions of Chinese, Japanese, and even Indian philosophy out of context of his larger philosophical goals. According to them, many Heideggerian scholars incorrectly quote statements from Heidegger concerning the East to mistakenly support arguments of a stronger connection between him and Eastern thought than truly exists. They point to Heidegger’s failed collaboration with Paul Shihi-yi Hsiao in 1946 and their attempts to translate passages from Laozi, (his most persistent commitment to ancient Chinese thought), to show his hesitancy in committing to a full and fruitful engagement with Eastern thought. As Heidegger says about his project with Hsiao:

I remain skeptical where I am not at home in the language; I became even more
skeptical when the Chinese, who is himself a Christian theologian and philosopher,
translated with me a few words of Lao Tze. Through questioning, I came to
realize how alien the whole nature of language already is for us; we then gave up
the attempt (Ma and van Brakel 533).

While they never deny his interest and curiosity in investigating Eastern thought as he believed in its potential to help him in his philosophical inquires, Ma and van Brakel argue that his investigations lead to a stand still where a further dialogue would offer no help because of the irrefutable barrier of language. As Heidegger later says in an interview with Der Spiegel: “thinking can be transformed only by a thinking that has the same origin and calling” (Ma and van Brakel 545). Heidegger consistently states a necessity to carry on a dialogue with and inhabit past thinkers, and in this way he turns towards Eastern thought as a possible portal to reach answers pertaining to metaphysics and the beginnings of philosophy. His attitude towards these Eastern thoughts however turns apathetic, as these ideas prove unattainable to him because of their foreign origins. Ma and van Brakel maintain that there is a connection between Heidegger and Eastern thought, certainly as Heidegger attempted to find answers in its history, but uphold that it does not hold the philosophical significance that others so willingly give to it.

Ma, Lin and van Brakel, Jaap, “Heidegger’s Comportment Toward East-West Dialogue.” Philosophy East and West. Vol. 56, Issue 4, 2006.

Aloneness encompasses the fundamentals that define loneliness and isolation. The main difference is that it is possible to experience aloneness without feeling alienated. Distance in time and space grounds Gotesky’s description of aloneness. Distance can occur in time and space in, to name a few, physical, psychological, intellectual, or social experiences. A psychological separation in time is usually distinguished by “age, training, tradition, and value-differences” (217). Socially, it is easy to feel distant from someone who is sitting right next to you if you have different habits, ideologies, or conceptions of nature (217). Most of the time, these separations or disconnections do not affect us. We do not feel alienated from our children as parents because of the distance in age or from a stranger that we sit next to on a plane ride. Thus, aloneness is a condition that can be inhabited in what Gotesky says is a “neutral” (215) state. These experiences must evoke distressed emotions for alienation to arise.

Loneliness occurs on two conditions. The first, a person must feel rejected or excluded by others, the second is that the rejected or excluded person wants to be accepted or included (219). Loneliness is a state of alienation that is “deeply rooted in permanence” (222). Often, a bond that was unexpectedly disconnected by another person inflicts loneliness. Gotesky explains that time and knowledge can heal the alienation felt in loneliness. However, obtaining the knowledge or waiting the length or time in order to learn why someone broke up with you so that you know when and how to get back together with that person, is nearly impossible. We feel particularly alienated when we create a relationship by sharing our thoughts, truths or needs with person who, without warning, breaks the engagement (226).

Isolation differs from loneliness in that it requires acceptance of loneliness as an inescapable condition of life (214). We have to realize that our relation to others will in some way let us down for some unknown reason at some point in time. It is a permanent mode upon which we have little control. Isolation is not a place to only suffer in anguish because, as Gotesky points out, through what he calls, “attainment-isolation” (229) we can accomplish work, create ideas, solve problems, or practice skills. Due to law, intolerance, and prejudice we have had to learn how to keep secrets. “Survival-isolation” allows us to safely be who we are authentically so that others will want to punish or “destroy us” (230). For instance it is necessary for “criminals, political revolutionaries, nonconformarmists, opposionists of all sorts” (230) to hide a part of themselves in order to survive. When others discover hidden parts of ourselves, we feel alienated.

Solitude “is that state of living alone…without the pain of loneliness or isolation” (236). Gotesky believes that few people have been able to reside in solitude (239). Interactions with, what Heidegger refers to as, the ‘they’, tempt us to a dishonest entanglement in which we have become alienated. Gotesky emphasizes a point made by Berdaeyev who believes, “that men at one time did not experience alienation in our terms of loneliness and isolation” (235). We have lost a pure self now diluted by others. The long lost person in solitude who “hates no one and yearns for no one” (237) is no longer free to be content in loneliness.

Gotesky, Rubin. Aloneness, Loneliness, Isolation, Solitude. (226) (217) (215) (219) (222) (226) (214) (229) (230) (236) (239) (235) (237)

In saying “ordinary language philosophy,” Tehennepe references a movement that has its roots in Moore and Wittgenstein. The central claim of this movement is that an understanding of words calls for a regard to their use in context, a notion that breaks with the epistemological tradition of positivism and atomism. In this respect, ordinary language philosophy is pre-theoretical, recognized in a primary perspective and put “back to work.” In this way, “it shifts the philosophical task from one of justification or ‘reconstruction’ to one of description and clarification” (139). Natanson emphasizes ordinary language philosophy as locating meaning in the “linguistic instrument,” a break from continental philosophy locating meaning in “the activity of an intentional consciousness.” In continental philosophy’s direction of attention towards understanding the contexts of use in language, a matter closer to an “activity of intentional consciousness,” Tehennepe suggests that we should move away from labels and “look to the substance of the view, rather than the idiom used to convey it” (141). Using Austin’s idea of prying words off the world to realize their in adequacies and arbitrariness, Tehennepe maintains that our ability to understand language is dependent on not only identifying the “familiar” but also the “unfamiliar”–what may be concealed in language. Wittgenstein points to the battle of philosophy as one against the “bewitchment of our intelligence” which is by enacted “by means of language” (142). Inherent in the words, “ordinary language philosophy,” lies a danger that may lead us to forget our familiarity toward language–a tendency that calls for a methodology in overcoming this familiarity in seeking a presentation of meaning in the “grammar” of language.

Tehennepe responds to Natanson’s behavioral distinction by affirming that behaviorism’s inherency in phenomenology, proved by Heidegger’s “Dasein,” is the same in the sense that language philosophy may also be analyzed in terms of behavior with regard to context and use. The remaining element of “therapy” in language philosophy is there because it continually addresses the problem of “familiarity”–because our forms of language “are always there to lead us astray” (144). The case of Schneider in Merleau-Ponty points to how philosophical insight or truth is often distorted and “sick”–inauthentic. These words may be used as weapons against other philosophical viewpoints and serves the same critical and persuasive function as a word such as “therapy”–a word that indicates a methodology that is meant to repair our misunderstandings of the language inherent in theories and ideas.

In closing, Tehennepe insists that ordinary language philosophy does, in fact, have an existential dimension, although it is still “too much concerned with the analytic side of philosophy and too little concerned with the imaginative” (145). This existential dimension relies on decision and the ethical chain of reasoning that leads to it. In completing this chain, we arrive at a “choice of worlds” which gives us the traditional notion of freedom of will. In accordance with language philosophy, there is also an existential freedom that lies in a choice of words or grammar used by the author, and vice versa for the reader, within whose mind a meaning or implication is derived from “getting back to the things themselves” (Husserl).

Tehennepe, Eugene. The Life-World and the World of Ordinary Language. (132-146).