Rosemary R. P. Lerner^[1]

Antecedents

After a five-year delay, part of which has been due to the Covid-19 pandemic, this publication finally sees the light. It contains most of the papers that were presented and read during the Interamerican Phenomenological Workshop that took place at the Pontifical Catholic University of Peru in Lima (July 5–7, 2018) in honor of Lester Embree (1938–2017). Four years before, at the V. Organization of Phenomenological Organizations (OPO) Meeting in Perth, Australia (December 2014), Lester Embree had proposed to hold in the near future an Interamerican (Bridge North-South) Encounter of Phenomenology (on methods and problems) at the Catholic University in Lima, having in view—as was his wont—the aim of fostering phenomenological research among the younger generations, this time to strengthen the ties among young South and North American scholars. Unfortunately, his project could not be carried out during his lifetime, but it was finally realized in his memory with the participation of thirty scholars, six of which Peruvians, and twenty-four of whom flew to Lima not only from North and South America, but also from Asia.

Lester Embree and William McKenna, members of the Center for Advanced Research in Phenomenology (CARP) and the Husserl Circle, were witnesses to the founding of our Latin American Circle of Phenomenology (CLAFEN) at Puebla, México, in 1999. A year later, in 2000, Lester attended the V. International Phenomenological Congress of the Spanish Phenomenological Society in Sevilla, where several of us CLAFEN members met him again. In 2002 he inspired the foundation of the Organization of Phenomenological Organizations (OPO) in Prague––at exactly the same venue where Husserl had read his 1936 Crisis lectures, now a restaurant. He also promoted the realization in 2005 of the II. OPO Meeting in Lima, Peru. That year, both CLAFEN and CIphER (Peruvian Circle of Phenomenology and Hermeneutics) as well as many other Latin American phenomenological organizations, became OPO members. After OPO’s following meetings in Hong Kong, Segovia (Spain), and Perth (Australia), the VI. OPO Meeting took place in Memphis, Tennessee (January 2019), organized by Thomas Nenon who had taken the baton of CARP’s direction after Lester’s passing—the first meeting that took place in his absence and in his country.

Lester was a prolific editor and writer, as well as an international ambassador for phenomenology, fostering a worldwide fraternity of scholars in phenomenology—not only among philosophers but also among experts in many other disciplines and cultural practices, as is testified by his editorial work on the 1997 Encyclopædia of Phenomenology and his innumerable publications and co-editions. Lester was born the year Husserl died (1938). As the editors of the Spanish journal Investigaciones fenomenológicas pointed out in their homage volume to Lester, in 2017, he meant to live until he was 85, still spreading Husserl’s call “to the things themselves” worldwide. Unfortunately, he left us all too soon at 79, precisely the day before Donald Trump assumed office as the 45th president of the United States. Perhaps he was simply unwilling to live even for a day under his régime, so he left us the day before its inauguration, January 19, 2017. May he rest in peace.

Theme

The founder of the phenomenological movement, Edmund Husserl, was well aware that his method and philosophical approach meant radically overturning traditional approaches to the universal scientific and philosophical problems that have always haunted humanity, for it encouraged us to abandon the natural attitude—the attitude in which we had always attempted to deal with such problems, yet left all such attempts still burdened with unsolvable paradoxes. Thus, problems and themes from the past were not to be discarded, but only considered in a new light: namely, that of sense-endowing human experiences. In this way he also foresaw that his phenomenological approach carried “within itself the significance of the greatest existential transformation which is assigned as a task to humankind as such”—a “personal transformation,” comparable “to a religious conversion” (Hua VI: 140 [137]).^[2]

Husserl’s revolution did not discard human rationality (as many of the figures that followed his path deemed inevitable). Instead, it entailed a “renewed theory of reason” that would rise as a heroic phoenix from the ashes of barbarity, despair, and weariness.

From the phenomenological perspective, reason not only allows “for no differentiation into ‘theoretical, ‘practical,’ ‘aesthetic,’ or whatever” (Hua VI: 275 [341]), and thus must be understood as an “interweaving” of all of them. But it must also acknowledge its own finitude, since it is deeply rooted in active and passive embodied experiences, temporal genesis, habits, affection, attention, motivation, and unconscious instincts and drives.

This book’s thematic scope—which includes not only Husserl’s own methodological approach, but also that of many other independent and fruitfully creative phenomenologists in his aftermath—is far from favoring a “cognitive-theoretical” (formal or empirical) angle. Instead, it has attempted to encompass a broad variety of thematic interests such as emotional-axiological problems (including ethical and aesthetic values) and practical problems, among others.

Organization of this volume

Twenty-two of the thirty original attendees to the 2018 Workshop collaborated with this collective volume, with the addition of Anthony J. Steinbock, who generously agreed to contribute to this sui generis homage. Indeed, the format is unusual, for if the editors decided to publish a bilingual text, it was not in the usual sense of providing two versions of the same text. Some Spanish-speaking authors preferred to have their texts published in English. On the other hand, we offered Anthony J. Steinbock the opportunity to publish his text in Spanish, to which he agreed. Each text is preceded by two abstracts, in English and Spanish; the order of their appearance corresponds to the language of the text itself.

The volume is divided into two major parts, the first one dedicated to methodological problems proper and the second one to applied phenomenology.

The first, briefer, part, “Methodological perspectives,” covers different angles of the wide range of problems that emerge regarding what is known as the “phenomenological method.” The first two chapters (by Luis Flores Hernández, Chile, and Rosemary RP Lerner, Peru) deal with phenomenology’s sui generis “scientific” dimension and its relation to “dogmatic” sciences, both from a Husserlian point of view. The first highlights its eidetic character (drawing extensively from one of Husserl’s less heeded yet minutely precise works, Ideas III), while the second attempts to compare Husserl’s transcendental project and systemic ambitions with a developing, also unifying, scientific paradigm—“the system’s view of life.” In contrast, the third contribution (by Germán Vargas Guillén, Colombia) retrieves Lester’s “reflective analyses” as an attempt to detranscendentalize the Husserlian phenomenological method. The antithesis and later synthesis between the differing yet kindred approaches of phenomenological psychology and transcendental phenomenology are skillfully unraveled in the fourth chapter by Chung-Chi YU (Taiwan). The fifth chapter, authored by Mariana Chu García (Peru), deals with the appropriation and adaptation of the phenomenological reduction within Scheler’s philosophy, as a sui generis application of this central methodological notion in the sense of a “desymbolization and derealization.”

The second part, “Theoretical and Applied Research,” is in turn divided into three distinct sections. The first, introductory section tackles the problem regarding the “Phenomena of phenomenology.” It begins with the sixth chapter authored by Anthony J. Steinbook (USA), leading figure of the twenty-first century’s “emotional turn” within phenomenological research—a turn toward the basic subjective lived experiences comprising the affective dimension of individual and collective experiences. He deals with two types of phenomena, “feelings” and “feeling states,” within what he has christened “the schema of the heart.” Roberto J. Walton’s seventh chapter (Argentina) then takes on the challenge of contrasting two views of phenomenology’s phenomena, Husserl’s and Heidegger’s, stressing their common character as the “coming-to-presence” of beings, yet differing in their views regarding the roles played by subjectivity in the “unconcealment of what is present;” he resolves this difference by turning to Husserl’s complex analyses of horizonality, which demonstrate the inextricable co-implication of subject and context in every “coming-to-presence.”

The second section (“The social and ethical lifeworld”) contains seven chapters dealing with several authors and problems, where Alfred Schutz, Merleau-Ponty, and Ricœur are the main protagonists. The first four chapters draw in different measures from Alfred Schutz’s contributions to social phenomenology. Chapter eight, authored by Michael Barber (USA), draws upon Schutz’s “On Multiple Realities” and transcendental phenomenology, and examines the pervasive dominance of the “pragmatic” lifeworld since our infancy over all other multiple, albeit “resistant,” (non-pragmatic) “provinces of meaning,” emphasizing the role that Schutz confers on theory within this “resistance”—allegedly akin to Husserl’s. The ninth chapter, by Carlos Belvedere (Argentina)—siding with Embree’s attempt to avoid the unilateral individualistic or collectivistic interpretations of social systems—elaborates a many-tiered phenomenological critique of the operative capacity purported by the “theory of social systems,” such as Luhmann’s or Garfinkel’s. The tenth chapter (Carmelo Galioto, Chile) highlights phenomenology’s contributions to the quality of school education as a social and institutional entity, drawing mainly from Merleau-Ponty as well as Schutz and Ricœur; here the focus is on the expressive possibilities of lived-experiences within the framework of intersubjective and intergenerational cultural relationships. In contrast, Alexis E. Gros (Argentina) reflects in the eleventh chapter on the disorienting and defamiliarizing cultural-technological effects of social acceleration (disruption of familiar “typicalities,” expected stability, or “constancy”) brought about upon our life-worlds by contemporary capitalist societies—drawing heavily not only from Alfred Schutz and Hartmut Rosa, but also from Husserl’s, James’s, and Bergson’s accounts of the “subjective experience of temporality.” The twelfth chapter, authored by Katherine Mansilla (Peru), is an original attempt to enrich the mainstream interpretations of Peru’s internal armed conflict that afflicted the country between 1980 and 2000 by incorporating Merleau-Ponty’s perspectives on the phenomena of violence and conflict within the radical frameworks of contingency and vulnerability. In the thirteenth chapter, Esteban Marin (Mexico) offers a new view on sociality, from the perspective of emotivity, drawing on Steinbock’s descriptions of moral emotions such as love and sympathy, hope and trust; however, he also deems it necessary to turn to Husserl’s views on the interwovenness of the doxic, axiological, and practical spheres of consciousness. This section closes with the fourteenth chapter (Graciela Ralón, Argentina), which clarifies the complex relationship among several Merleau-Pontyan notions (notions that are key in his reinterpretation of consciousness): expression and meaning-institution; meaning-institution within the open-ended temporal, historical framework of open-ended transformative events that incessantly re-assume sedimented ones; and finally, the model of pictorial institution as illustrating the instituting-instituted symbolic matrix, which is also manifest in other phenomena.

The third and last section of this publication is the most extensive one, containing nine chapters that deal with the “embodied soul.” It begins with an examination of Sartre’s notion of pre-reflexive self-consciousness as non-egological, thus as not being ruled by modern age’s paradigms of the ego and reflection (Juan Pablo Cotrina, Peru). The next—sixteenth—chapter by Verónica Kretschel (Argentina) deals with Husserl’s increasing difficulties in translating his ever-evolving descriptions of time-consciousness into temporal graphics, especially toward the final C-Manuscripts, thus questioning their hermeneutical efficiency. Henri Bergson’s theory of internal time or durée is examined in the seventeenth chapter, authored by Deborah Motta (Argentina), as influencing manuscripts of the young Alfred Schutz who later criticizes it as entailing “paradoxes,” albeit still holding on to certain Bergsonian notions. Andrés M. Osswald (Argentina) examines in the eighteenth chapter three main concepts (home, alien, and the space in-between) that depict our dwelling space, drawing from Husserl’s, Heidegger’s, and Freud’s oppositions between home/homeworld vs. alienworld, homelessness, and uncanniness (Unheimlichkeit). The nineteenth chapter (by Ignacio Quepons, Mexico) undertakes a phenomenological analysis from a Husserlian perspective (beginning with genetically oriented analyses) of the different levels (horizons) involved in the constitution of the lived body in relation both to the consciousness of its vulnerability and to a phenomenological account of moral attitudes. Luis Román Rabanaque (Argentina) deals with Husserl’s phenomenology of dreams in the twentieth chapter as closely related to the problem of unconsciousness, responding to recent objections to this account. He examines possible methods for this analysis, drawing on Embree’s, Husserl’s, and Fink’s accounts, sketches its most relevant structures, and finally, provides an eidetic typology based on a variety of criteria (including the roles of temporality, the I, and the body). The passive sphere, the unconscious, affection, and egology in Husserl’s phenomenology is the subject matter of the twenty-first chapter, by Martín Rosado (Peru), highlighting the fact that ever since Husserl’s genetic period, the active conscious ego no longer dominates the scene as it did in traditional accounts inherited since the modern ages. The twenty-second chapter, authored by Marcela Venebra M. (Mexico), highlights the phenomenological contribution to biomedical sciences with the notion of an egoic, embodied, lived body. She focuses on case studies such as the genesis of the addictive impulse wherein the body is lived in first-person’s experiences as spiritual flesh, in contrast to the denatured characterization of the flesh in current, materially oriented, scientific research. Finally, the twenty-third chapter, authored by Antonio Zirión Q. (Mexico), broadens the spectrum of embodied subjectivities to embrace nonhuman animals, proceeding in eight steps and highlighting their transcendental, diversely world-related, practical, and even empathetic character. He emphasizes that the human intuitive world has no prerogative regarding the world’s truth and acknowledges the enigmatic reserve that animal life still holds for humans.

Acknowledgements

The completion of this volume, which is the final tribute to the memory of Lester Embree’s memory that motivated the realization of the 2018 Interamerican Workshop, Methods and Problems: Current Phenomenological Perspectives and Research, has been made possible first of all thanks to the collaboration of all of the initial participants who were able to send us the final versions of the papers that they initially read in Lima, enthusiastically taking part in a memorable encounter where Lester’s most lasting legacy was celebrated—that of once again bringing together an international community of junior and senior scholars, in the first “Interamerican North-South Phenomenological Bridge Conference.”^[3] And since the realization of this publication would not have been possible without the Workshop, we also have to thank the Pontifical Catholic University of Peru’s Direction of Research Promotion for the grant it had bestowed to our Research Group, Circle of Peruvian Phenomenology and Hermeneutics (CIphER) for a larger project, part of which funded the 2018 encounter. We are also indebted to Prof. Thomas Nenon and the Board of Directors of the Center for Advanced Research in Phenomenology for offering us additional financial support; to Michael Barber who put us in contact with Erich Garrette and Jochen Drecher, who sent us a photo they had taken of Lester Embree; and, finally, to the staff—then and now—of PUCP’s Center of Philosophical Studies (CEF) and CIphER who helped organize the encounter (mainly María de la Luz Núñez, Bárbara Bettocchi, and Eliana Mera) or who translated part of the material (Alexandra Alván, Rodrigo Ferradas, and Vania Alarcón).

The co-editors of this volume, members of the team that have worked tirelessly on this book’s material since 2019 (Mariana Chu, current CEF’s Director, and Vania Alarcón, former CIphER’s executive assistant), would like to acknowledge the collective efforts of all those whose work has enabled this book to see the light.

   

Lima, August 28, 2023

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