Early Twentieth-Century Continental Philosophy (Studies in Continental Thought)
Leonard Lawler
Language: English
Pages: 296
ISBN: 2:00272711
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
Early Twentieth-Century Continental Philosophy elaborates the basic project of contemporary continental philosophy, which culminates in a movement toward the outside. Leonard Lawlor interprets key texts by major figures in the continental tradition, including Bergson, Foucault, Freud, Heidegger, Husserl, and Merleau-Ponty, to develop the broad sweep of the aims of continental philosophy. Lawlor discusses major theoretical trends in the work of these philosophers—immanence, difference, multiplicity, and the overcoming of metaphysics. His conception of continental philosophy as a unified project enables Lawlor to think beyond its European origins and envision a global sphere of philosophical inquiry that will revitalize the field.
trait (an experience of sympathy, for example) and then I can reunite all the fragments of the whole of my psychic life, of “the whole of my personality [l’ensemble d’une personnalité] (CENT: 1403/CM: 169). Notice that Bergson says “un trait continu” and “une intuition.” The singularity of the trait given in one intuition implies a relation to a whole (l’ensemble or le tout). It is from a part of the duration that I can follow a “continuous trait” to find the whole of the duration. The
dynamic, not structures. Finally, we have (4) the term “I” designates a new direction for research, in reference to the essential forms of habituality. The fourth task indicates that the “I” or “ego” is historical; it relies in its “convictions” on past acquisitions. Husserl calls these four kinds of investigations “static” investigations, the static descriptions of essences. But such static investigations lead to an all-pervasive genesis (which itself is eidetic) that governs the whole life and
of the totality of beings” (GA 9: 109/PM: 86). The definition of the nothing implies that the totality of beings is given and then we negate it; it implies that there is an act through which the nothing would manifest itself. As Heidegger points out, the definition still seems to make the act of negation be more original than the nothing. But even if we set aside this concern with the relation between the nothing and negation, another question arises: How should we who are “essentially finite”
Heidegger states that the old proposition ex nihilo nihil fit contains another sense appropriate to the problem of Being itself: ex nihilo omne ens qua ens fit (from the nothing all beings as beings, that is, as such, come to be) (GA 9: 120/PM: 95). As Heidegger says, “Only in the nothing of Dasein do beings as a whole, in accord with their most proper possibility—that is, in a finite way—come to themselves” (GA 9: 120/PM: 95). This claim means that things come to an end, that nothing is eternal,
idealizes space. The idealization is even necessary according to Merleau-Ponty, if thought is too empirically dominated. Descartes was right to make space clear, manageable, and homogeneous so that thought is able to survey it. “His mistake,” according to Merleau-Ponty, “was to erect it into a positive being, beyond all points of view, all latency and depth, devoid of any real thickness” (OE: 48/MPR: 364). Something about space evades our attempts to survey it from above.20 “Yet” (cependant)—this