Abstract
This chapter presents some preliminary discussions on the conditions of possibility of intercultural understanding in philosophy from the phenomenological approach. It begins by explaining the double epoché a philosopher of Chinese origin must enact in order to initiate intercultural communication with readers trained in the tradition of Western philosophy. Critical analyses of the Eurocentric nature of Husserl’s idea of philosophy as pure thêoria will be followed by appropriation of works of Derrida, Lévi-Strauss and Merleau-Ponty in view of securing a guiding method for exercising intercultural understanding in philosophy.
“There are some who say, according to Aristotle and Sotion, that the study of philosophy had its beginning among the barbarians.” – Diogenes Laertius (Diogenes Laertius, Lives and Opinions of Eminent Philosophers, Greek text with Eng. trans. by R. D. Hicks (The Loeb Classical Library, London; William Heinemann & Cambridge (Mass.): Harvard University Press, 1925), Vol. 1, pp. 2–3.)
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Notes
- 1.
This chapter is the further revised version of a paper first presented to the International conference “Interculturality and Life-world” held at the Department of Philosophy, The Chinese University of Hong Kong, in April 1996 and first published in Phenomenology of Interculturality and Life-world, special issue of Phänomenologische Forschungen, ed. E.W. Orth & C.-F. Cheung (Freiburg/München: Verlag K. Alber, 1998), pp. 229–249.
- 2.
Edmund Husserl, “Nachwort zu den <Ideen I>”, first appeared in Jahrbuch für Philosophie und phänomenologische Forschung, Bd. 11, 1930, now in Ideen zu einer reinen Phänomenologie und phänomenologischen Philosophie, Drittes Buch, Die Phänomenologie und die Fundamente der Wissenschaften, ed. M. Biemel, Husserliana V (The Hague: M. Nijhoff, 1952), p. 161; Eng. trans. by W. R. Boyce Gibson as “Author’s Preface to the English Edition” of Ideas. General Introduction to Pure Phenomenology (1st ed. 1931, New York: Collier Books Ed., 1962), pp. 20–21; new Eng. trans. in E. Husserl, Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy, Second Book, Studies in the Phenomenology of Constitution, Eng. trans. Richard Rojcewicz and André Schuwer (Dorcrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1989), p. 429.
- 3.
C.f. Husserl’s letter to a close friend, Gustave Albrecht, in 1931: “I owe the greatest debt of gratitude to my young collaborator Fink. … [W]ithout the daily discussion with him I could not carry out what I want to do. When my memory wanes, his youth helps me, he masters every turn taken by the many branches in my phenomenological exposition …, and in conversation with him I often get the best ideas, suddenly I see the long-sought connections, the intrinsic order in which everything fits together beautifully.” Cited by Ronald Bruzina in “Solitude and community in the work of philosophy: Husserl and Fink, 1928–1938”, Man and World, Vol. 22, 1989, p. 289.
- 4.
Eugen Fink, “Philosophie als Überwindung der <Naivität>”, in Nähe und Distanz: phänomenologische Vorträge und Aufsätze (Freiburg u. München: Verlag Karl Albert, 1976), pp. 98–126.
- 5.
C.f. E. Husserl, Logische Untersuchungen, Zweiter Band, 1. Teil (1st ed. 1901, 6th ed., Tübingen: M. Niemeyer, 1980), p. 19; Logical Investigations, Vol. I, Eng. trans. J. N. Findlay (London & New York: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1970), p. 263. However, we know that Husserl’s later position recognizes that philosophy necessarily passes by naïveté, and that even the kind of philosophical objectivism arising out of modern rationalism from the Renaissance to the Enlightenment “is the most general title for this naïveté”. See, for exemple, Die Krisis der europäischen Wissenschaften und die transzendentale Phänomenologie, Husserliana VI, ed. W. Biemel (The Hague: M. Nijhoff, 1st ed. 1954, 2nd ed. 1962, “Krisis” hereafter), p. 339; The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology, Eng. trans. D. Carr (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1970, “Crisis” hereafter), p. 292.
- 6.
M. Heidgger, Sein und Zeit (Tübingen: M. Niemeyer, 15th ed., 1979), p. 150; Being and Time, Eng. trans. J. Macquarrie & E. Robinson (New York : Harper & Row, 1962), p. 191.
- 7.
In his Lectures on the History of Philosophy, Hegel finished his brief examination of Chinese Philosophy in the following words: “to the Chinese what is highest and the origin of things is nothing, emptiness, the altogether undetermined, the abstract universal, and this is also called Tao or reason. When the Greeks say that the absolute is one, or when men in modern times say that it is the highest existence, all determinations are abolished, and by merely abstract Being nothing has been expressed excepting this same negation, only in an affirmative form. But if Philosophy has got no further than to such expression, it still stands on its most elementary stage. What is there to be found in all this learning?” G.W.F. Hegel, Vorlesungen über die Geschichte der Philosophie I, Werke in zwanzig Bänden, Bd. 18 (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1971), p. 147; Hegel’s Lectures on the History of Philosophy, Vol. I, Eng. trans. E. S. Haldane (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1955), p. 121.
- 8.
F.-W. Schelling, Philosophie de la mythologie, French trans. Alain Pernet (Grenoble: Éditions Jérôme Millon, 1994), p. 358. This translation incorporates the pagination of the German edition of Schelling’s collected works known as the Cotta edtion, Sämtliche Werke, 13 vols. (Stuttgart-Augsburg, 1856–1861). The passage in question is found in Band 12, p. 540.
- 9.
Ibid., p. 354; Cotta ed. Band 12, p. 534.
- 10.
E. Husserl, Krisis, p. 331; Crisis, p. 284–285. In the main text of Krisis Husserl stresses the essential difference between “European humanity” which “bears within itself an absolute idea”, whereas “‘China’ or ‘India’” is “merely an empirical anthropological type”, Krisis, p. 14; Crisis, p. 16.
- 11.
Krisis, p. 325; Crisis, pp. 279–280. [After the conference in which this paper was first presented, the author discovered the article “Husserl and Indian Thought” by Karl Schuhmann, well-known for his Husserl-Chronik (Den Haag: M. Nijhoff, 1977), in the collection of articles Phenomenology and Indian Philosophy (ed. D. P. Chattopadhyaya, Lester Embree & Jitendranath Mohanty, Albany: State University of New York Press, 1992, pp. 20–43). Analyzing the same texts, Schuhmann gives even a stronger reading than the one we propose with regard to Husserl’s conception of philosophy as essentially European in nature: “Husserl does not intend to underestimate the importance, validity and greatness of the results … of non-European philosophy… But when measured by the absolute yardstick of philosophy as a rigorous science, all these undertakings sink into insignificance. They are no philosophies at all, but simply world-views … ‘An imperfect science … is no science at all’, such was Husserl’s maximalist device. On this view, it was the prerogative of European thought to have stuck firmly to at least the idea of philosophy, while all other thought-formations, however close they might have come to real philosophy, must be said to have been simply unphilosophical.”(Op. cit., p. 34.) In another article contained in Phenomenology and Indian Philosophy, “Unity and Plurality of Cultures in the Perspectives of Edmund Husserl and Ernst Cassirer”, E. W. Orth raises the same concern on the possible ethnocentric implication of Husserl’s transcendental phenomenology in the following terms: “In Cassirer as well as in Husserl a problem arises: whether particular symbolic forms – i.e. particular cogitative types in Husserl – are arbitrarily and unfoundedly privileged, or a philosophical relativism of cultures really turns up.”(Op. cit., p. 241.) But his conclusion is diametrically opposite to that of Schuhmann: “Here it becomes apparent how close Cassirer’s philosophy of culture as a philosophy of symbolic forms is to Husserl’s late philosophy as an universal anthropology of cogitative types. A presupposition of this concept of philosophy is the assumption that a certain development of culture authorizes considerations which corroborate the unity of the culture of humankind, and which as well respect the plurality of cultural forms of existence of the concrete human being. This means that the consideration does not presuppose a determined culture which is formed in this or that way and which then would be declared absolute in order to measure other cultures by its standards.”(Op. cit., p. 243.) – Note added in Nov. 1996.]
- 12.
Idem, the inverted commas are those of Husserl himself.
- 13.
Krisis, pp. 325, 331; Crisis, pp. 280, 285.
- 14.
Husserl, anticipating the objection raised against his version of the purity of the Greek philosophical tradition, developed already a counter objection in the Vienna Lecture : “Here we encouter an obvious objection: philosophy, the science of the Greeks, is not something peculiar to them which came into the world for the first time with them. After all, they themselves tell of the wise Egyptians, Babylonians, etc., and did in fact learn much from them…” (Krisis, p. 325; Crisis, p. 279) When Husserl said this, he probably had in mind the opening sentences of Diogenes Laertius’ Lives and Opinions of Eminent Philosophers: “There are some who say that the study of philosophy had its beginning among the barbarians. They urge that the Persians have had their Magi, the Babylonians or Assyrians their Chaldaeans, and the Indians their Gymnosophists; and among the Celts and Gauls there are the people called Druids or Holy Ones, for which they cite as authorities the Magicus of Aristotle and Sotion in the 23rd book of his Succession of Philosophers. Also they say that Mochus was a Phoenician, Zamolxis a Thracian, and Atlas a Libyan.” (op. cit., pp. 2–3) It is commonly held that Diogenes Laertius lived between 200 and 500 A.C. R. D. Hicks, the English translator of the Loeb edition, believes that “there are good grounds for not placing Laertius as late as the fourth century” (op. cit., p. xii), whereas Robert Genaille, the French translator of Vie, doctrines et sentences des philosophes illustres, I, (Paris: Garnier-Flammarion, 1965, p. 9), thinks that Diogenes Laertius probably lived at the beginning of the third century A.C.
- 15.
Hu Shih, “The Scientific Spirit and Method in Chinese Philosophy”, in Philosophy and Culture: East and West, ed. Charles A Moore (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1962), pp. 191–222.
- 16.
M. Heidegger, “Das Ende der Philosophie und die Aufgabe des Denkens”, in Zur Sache des Denkens (Tübingen: Max Niemeyer Verlag, 1969), pp. 61–80; revised Eng. trans. by Joan Stambaugh, “The End of Philosophy and the Task of Thinking”, in Martin Heidegger. Basic Writings, revised and expanded edition, ed. by D. F. Krell (London: Routledge, 1993), pp. 427–449.
- 17.
J. Derrida, Introduction et traduction de L’origine de la géométrie d’Edmund Husserl (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1962); Edmund Husserl’s Origin of Geometry: An Introduction, Eng. trans. J. Leavy (York Beach: ME, Nicholas Hays, 1978); La voix et le phénomène (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1967); Speech and Phenomena and Other Essays on Husserl’s Theory of Signs, Eng. trans. D. Allison (Evanston: Northwestern University Pess., 1973); De la grammatologie (Paris: Minuit, 1967); Of Grammatology, Eng. trans. G. C. Spivak (Baltimore: John Hopskins University Pess, 1975).
- 18.
C. Lévi-Strauss, La pensée sauvage (Paris: Plon, 1962); Eng. trans. The Savage Mind (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1968).
- 19.
C. Lévi-Strauss, Mythologiques, I, Le cru et le cuit; II, Du miel aux cendres; III, L’origine des manières de table; IV, L’homme nu (Paris: Plon, 1964–1971); Eng. trans. by John and Doreen Weightman as The Raw and the Cooked (New York: Harper & Row, 1969); From Honey to Ashes (London: J. Cape, 1973), The Origin of Table Manners (London: J. Cape, 1978), The Naked Man (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990).
- 20.
M. Merleau-Ponty, “De Mauss à Claude Lévi-Strauss”, in Signes (Paris: Gallimard, 1960), p. 152; Signs, Eng. trans. R. C. McCleary (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1964), p. 121, translation modified.
- 21.
For further discussions on the intercultural implications of Lévi-Strauss’ structural anthropology and Merleau-Ponty’s appraisal of it, c.f., infra, Chapter 9: “Lévi-Strauss and Merleau-Ponty: from Nature-Culture Distinction to Savage Spirit and their Intercultural Implications”.
- 22.
J. Derrida, “La structure, le signe et le jeu dans le discours des sciences humaines”, in Ecriture et différence (Paris: Seuil, 1967), p. 421; Writing and Difference, Eng. trans. A. Bass (London & Henley: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1978), p. 288.
- 23.
J. Derrida, De la grammatologie, op. cit., p. 232; Of Grammatology, p. 162, translation modified.
- 24.
Idem. By contrast, Merleau-Ponty has a very positive evaluation of Lévi-Strauss’ method of anthropological research : “Thus research feeds on facts which seem foreign to it at first, acquires new dimensions as it progresses, and reinterprets its first results in the light of new investigations which they have themselves inspired. At the same time, the scope of the domain covered and the precision of factual knowledge are increased. These are the marks of a great intellectual endeavor.” Signes, p. 157; Signs, p. 125.
- 25.
For the very concept of “operative concept”, c.f. E. Fink, “Les concepts opératoires dans la phénoménologie de Husserl”, first published in Husserl : Cahiers de Royaumont, Philosophie no. III (Paris : Minuit, 1959), pp. 214–230; now as “Operative Begriffe in Husserls Phänomenologie”, in Nähe und Distanz, op. cit., pp. 180–204.
- 26.
J. Derrida, Ecriture et différence, p. 421; Writing and Difference, p. 288.
- 27.
J. Derrida, De l’esprit. Heidegger et la question (Paris: Éditions Galilée, 1987), pp. 94–96, n. 2; Of Spirit: Heidegger and the Question, Eng. trans. G. Bennington & R. Bowlby (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), pp. 120–122.
- 28.
We share the concern with the possible pitfalls of Derridian and Heideggerian deconstruction expressed by Françoise Dastur in her short but penetrating essay “Three Questions to Jacques Derrida”, in Ethics and Danger. Essays on Heidegger and Continental Thought, ed. by A. B. Dallery, C. E. Scott & P. H. Roberts, (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1992), pp. 25–41.
- 29.
M. Heidegger, Sein und Zeit, op. cit., p. 51; Being and Time, p. 76.
- 30.
E. Husserl, Krisis, p. 319; Crisis, p. 273.
- 31.
M. Foucault, Folie et déraison. Histoire de la folie à l’âge classique (1st ed. Paris: Plon, 1961; 2nd ed. Paris: Gallimard, 1972; 3rd ed. Gallimard, Collection TEL, 1976). The first English translation by R. Howard, Madness and Civilization (New York: Pantheon, 1965), covers only one third of the French original, is thus a poor version of the original master work. A full English translation by Jonathan Murphy and Jean Khalfa appeared 40 years later as History of Madness (Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge, 2006).
- 32.
E. Husserl, Krisis, §§ 10–21, pp. 60–86; Crisis, pp. 60–84.
- 33.
For a further discussion of Husserl’s Idea of philosophy with reference to the ethical telos underlying the methodological practice of the phenomenological epoché, cf. infra, Chapter 8, “Self-transformation and the Ethical Telos: Orientative Philosophy in Lao Sze-Kwang, Foucault and Husserl”.
- 34.
E. Levinas, “Détermination philosophique de l’idée de culture”, in Philosophie et Culture. Actes du XVIIe Congrès Mondial de Philosophie, Montréal 1983 (Montréal: Éditions du Beffroi & Éditions Montmorency, 1986), p. 76, now in Entre nous. Essais sur le penser-à-l’autre (Paris: Éditions Grasset & Fasquelle, 1991, Le Livre de Poche, biblio essais n. 4172), p. 186; “The Philosophical Determination of the Idea of Culture”, in Entre nous. On Thinking-of-the-Other, Eng. trans. Michael B. Smith and Barbara Harshav (London: The Athlone Press, 1998), p. 180.
- 35.
Different from the Derridian deconstruction, Heidegger’s deconstruction is understood as one of the three essential constitutive moments of the phenomenological method, the other two being reduction and construction. See Martin Heidegger, Die Grundprobleme der Phänomenologie, Gesamtausgabe, Bd. 24 (Frankfurt-a.-M.: V. Klostermann, 1975), § 5, pp. 26–32; The Basic Problems of Phenomenology, Eng. trans. A. Hofstadter (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1982), pp. 19–23.
- 36.
C. Lévi-Strauss, Anthropologie structurale, Deux (Paris: Plon, 1973), p. 413; Structural Anthropology, Vol. II, Eng. trans. M. Layton (London: Allen Lane, 1977), p. 355.
- 37.
C. Lévi-Strauss, Anthropologie structurale, Deux, p. 414; Structural Anthropology, Vol. II, pp. 355–356.
- 38.
M. Merleau-Ponty, Le visible et l’invisible, ed. C. Lefort (Paris: Gallimard, 1964), p. 113, n.1; The Visible and the Invisible, Eng. trans. A. Lingis (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1968), p. 81, n.14, translation modified.
- 39.
Merleau-Ponty, Le visible et l’invisible, p. 114; The Visible and the Invisible, p. 82.
- 40.
Merleau-Ponty, Le visible et l’invisible, p. 114; The Visible and the Invisible, p. 82.
- 41.
Merleau-Ponty, Le visible et l’invisible, p. 112; The Visible and the Invisible, p. 80.
- 42.
Merleau-Ponty, Le visible et l’invisible, p. 112; The Visible and the Invisible, p. 80.
- 43.
Merleau-Ponty, Le visible et l’invisible, pp. 114–115; The Visible and the Invisible, pp. 82–83, translation modified.
- 44.
Merleau-Ponty, Le visible et l’invisible, p. 114; The Visible and the Invisible, p. 82.
- 45.
First published under the title “Grundlegende Untersuchungen zum phänomenologischen Ursprung der Räumlichkeit der Natur”, in Philosophical Essays in Memory of Edmund Husserl, ed. M. Farber (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1940), pp. 307–325; Eng. trans. by F. Kersten, “Foundational Investigations of the Phenomenological Origin of Spatiality of Nature”, in HUSSERL. Shorter Works, ed. P. McCormick & F. A. Elliston (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1981), pp. 222–233.
- 46.
M. Merleau-Ponty, Phénoménologie de la perception (Paris: Gallimard, 1945), p. 85, n. 1; Phenomenology of Perception, Eng. trans. Donald A. Landes (London & New York: Routledge, 2012), p. 73, n. 5 (the content of this note is on p. 512); Signes, pp. 223, 227–8; Signs, pp. 177, 180; Résumés de cours (Paris: Gallimard, 1968), p. 116; Themes from the Lectures at the Collège de France 1952–1960, Eng. trans. J. O’Neill (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1970), pp. 82–83.
- 47.
Merleau-Ponty, Le visible et l’invisible, pp. 172ff; The Visible and the Invisible, pp. 130ff.
- 48.
C.f. the discussion of Merleau-Ponty himself in “De Mauss à Claude Lévi-Strauss”, Signes, pp. 143–157; Signs, pp. 114–125.
- 49.
Merleau-Ponty, Le visible et l’invisible, p. 116; The Visible and the Invisible, p. 84, translation modified.
- 50.
For a discussion of the intercultural implications of Merleau-Ponty’s ontology of the flesh, cf. infra, Chapter 10: “The Flesh: from Ontological Employment to Intercultural Employment”.
- 51.
Signes, p. 151; Signs, p. 120, modified translation.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2016 Springer International Publishing Switzerland
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Lau, KY. (2016). Para-deconstruction: Preliminary Considerations for a Phenomenology of Interculturality. In: Phenomenology and Intercultural Understanding. Contributions To Phenomenology, vol 87. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-44764-3_2
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-44764-3_2
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-319-44762-9
Online ISBN: 978-3-319-44764-3
eBook Packages: Religion and PhilosophyPhilosophy and Religion (R0)