One of the philosophical threads of the 19th century Post-Kantian (meaning after Kant but not necessarily Kantian) German traditions is defined as a philosophy of consciousness and ethics of social reality and being in the world. This is seen with the Romantic poets and philosophers, Hegel in The Phenomenology of Spirit, Kierkegaard (Danish), Nietzsche, and with Husserl and the phenomenologists breaking into the 20th century.
And speaking about this in relation to those of us who are contemplating dissonances and dilemmas of our own time, Gadamer’s essay “The Philosophical Foundations of the Twentieth Century” (1962) is great for figuring out what you are trying to do or which task you want to take up: re-establishing/defending a classical dogmatic metaphysics/theology, synthesizing philosophy/theology and science in a philosophy of nature, or a philosophy of consciousness and ethics of social reality and being in the world. We will look at the latter taken up by Hegel, Nietzsche, and Husserl. It’s particularly of interest here how Gadamer focuses on Hegel’s and Nietzsche’s responses and ultimately to the advent of Husserlian phenomenology and methods for the task. The point is we must keep in mind here the relation of what these three figures are doing that is similar. With Nietzsche: critique of consciousness. With Hegel: critique of subjective spirit. With Husserl: the idea of phenomenology and explorations of intentionality.
Gadamer continues the exploration in his essay with the problem of the naïveté of assertion, reflection, and concept in existentialism and hermeneutics: intentionality and the existential responsibility of commitment in the illumination of existence (beautiful expressions, by the way!), authenticity, and the transcendental attitude. For Gadamer the key is the spirit and its counterpart language. He says there is a mutual convergence with Wittgenstein’s critique of semantics and the hermeneutical consciousness. This will return to discussion of the Husserlian lifeworld and the Heideggerian Dasein. It should be noted that regarding these conceptions of lifeworld and Dasein, they point towards the same thing. As Paul Ricoeur noted in his essay “Phenomenology and Hermeneutics”: “[…] this philosophy of the Lebenswelt [life-world] which characterised the period of the Crisis [Husserl’s book], and which was contemporaneous with Heidegger’s Analytic of Dasein. It will suffice to say that the return from a nature objectified and mathematicised by Galilean and Newtonian science to the Lebenswelt is the very same principle of return which hermeneutics seeks to implement elsewhere, on the plane of the human sciences[.]”
It would be good to expand out of Gadamer’s specific consideration of the milieu he is talking about, in this case the modern Western world dominated by scientism (a.k.a. mechanistic scientism/philosophical naturalism), and look at any other milieu from this question of what are we doing. Specifically, looking at the philosophy of consciousness, or any account of the self-in-contexts, such as in literature, and the ethics of social reality and being in the world in any given context, such as in a different context that is not dominated by science, e.g. the works of Dostoevsky and Kafka. I am studying that and will be writing about it later.
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