Introduction. Anton Vydra and Michal Lipták

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2 Anton Vydra and Michal Lipták Introduction The second issue of The Yearbook on History and Interpretation of Phenomenology focuses on the intertwined topics of normativity and of typification. The area of their application and specification is relatively broad: from biological questions through various lived experiences and political life to aesthetical judgements. The contributors see normative aspects of human existence as a possibility to act according to inherent or personal values rather than according to some fixed and external rules or even laws. The notion of normativity commonly refers to an axiological sphere of human thinking. In contrast to descriptive modes of thinking, normative tendencies try to be more connected with how-questions (and less with whatquestions). Normative stances enable us to receive more than only ordinary givenness. They constitute the very relation between axiological subjects and various phenomena, including real or possible objects, other subjects, relations between them, etc. Such a relation presupposes the fact that it is a feature of transcendental subjectivity. Thus, to be normative means to proceed primarily from the point of view of transcendental subjectivity. The next point is that normativity seems to be a specific experience of valorization of phenomena. Phenomena are not indifferent or neutral: they are always more or less valuable for us. What we are seeing, experiencing or what appears depends on how we are seeing or experiencing it. We as human and integral beings can see human life not only as a biological or animal process. Human life has more dimensions, more facets. It is more than only biological. In short, our subjectivity lies much more than in the fact that we are receivers of positive facts. Again, the question is not what positively is a fact, but on the one hand how we perceive, imagine, see, experience such a fact, and on the other hand what are the possibilities of being given on the side of the fact itself. Scientists qua scientists must be oriented only towards the positive givenness of facts in the world, because to be a scientist means to be active in some scientific profession. What scientists see in matter can be occasionally needless to say different from that what they see as persons in their everyday lives. Phenomenology tries to integrate the whole experience of humans in order to understand the broader activity of human subjects in what is called, normatively rather than descriptively, the world.

3 10 Anton Vydra and Michal Lipták If it is true that norms are not fixed laws (even natural laws), it seems necessary to assign the feature of variability to them. There is no norm concerning what should be understood by the notion of the world. A norm only says how we may be personally sensible to numbers of worlds with their richness of modes. Thus, normativity seems to be openness of experiential horizons. However, as Sam Cocks writes in his essay opening this collection of works, what is normative and better is not necessarily considered better or augmented in the moral sense. And in relation to Husserl s own thoughts on normativity Cocks adds that what is normal and optimal is by no means limited to perceptual experience it also concerns the ethical (p. 16). Experience is a broader term than only mere perception. It also includes other dimensions ethical, for instance and it develops in the life of subjectivity in various intertwinings which also open the question of configurations of possibility and motivation. Laughter for example points to the field where qualitative (not only quantitative) layering of experiences, its specific configurations (concrescence), affective relief, mood, emotional experiencing, instincts or overall significance for subject come into play, as Jaroslava Vydrová describes in her article. Some of our authors write about normativity in connection with topics such as love or hope (Cocks, Trajtelová), or as the emergence of political in contrast to mere historical facts because as Michal Zvarík writes description of the emergence of the political shows that the political sphere in a certain sense precedes identity with its historically sedimented, uncritically accepted norms. It is through the public space, where a normative background of traditions is brought into focus and scrutinized, and where the contingence of cultural ways of life explicitly appears and decries their alleged absolute and universal character (Zvarík, p. 89). Openness to new norms is always part of all very normative stances. Anton Vydra also touches on this: in his paper he analyses Canguilhem s works on the given theme, showing how all unauthentic, and thus unhealthy normativity is restricted to the only norm. Another example of experience of normativity is the sphere of aesthetic experiences. Michal Lipták shows the error of assuming an objective attitude to works of art and distinguishes normal and aesthetic perception as different modes of aesthetic judgement: the aesthetic value is constituted by aesthetic perception which unlike normal perception is not directed towards the objective world, but is carried out within a neutralized, monosubjective world (p. 112). Similarly, the notion of Umwelt in Elena Pagni s paper is understood not only as an objective, factual or mere biological world of living beings: rather it is a privileged milieu of constitution and interpretation of symbols (p. 68).

4 Introduction 11 In this introduction we would also like to mention another aspect of normativity and typification which arises in Husserl s phenomenology and is implicitly present in the author s articles as well. Two main topics of that issue were left by Husserl in an unfinished state, but that is not the only reason why they are amongst the most intriguing issues for the next generations of phenomenologists. The main reason is that these issues naturally and logically stem from the main issue of Husserl s phenomenology: how to ensure that we can actually achieve truthful knowledge. Originally, Husserl imagined that phenomenology would provide ground for the sciences, especially natural sciences. Husserl calls the natural sciences dogmatic because they never question their overall attitude towards the world, they never doubt that they are indeed describing and explaining the world as it is. However, Husserl did not criticize them for this dogmatism; rather he sought to explain why they are entirely justified in being dogmatic. But problems ensued. Firstly, the descriptive task of phenomenology of disclosing the essential structures of consciousness proved itself limited, and at some point it could no longer avoid the problem of how content is generated in the consciousness. This issue was tackled by the notions of type and typification, and this actually concerns a question that has haunted Western philosophy ever since Plato: how to derive apodictic knowledge solely from contingent givens. When we do not want to recourse to Platonic hypostases, we are left with one possibility only: to look at how we work with the contingent givens and recognise that we can only proceed to knowledge through idealizing abstraction, ordering and organizing the contingent givens. On the subjective level this issue is tackled under the rubric of motivation. But because we ultimately want to ground the science as trans-generational, historical activity (and science also only makes sense as such activity), we are led to take a look at the motivation of science as such, and this leads to the notion of normativity. Normativity is then disclosed as a basic feature of human life as such, and the primacy of natural sciences as a way to truthful knowledge is then seen differently from at the beginning: not only are natural scientists those who, due to their undoubted attitude, see, interpret and organize facts, and thereby sources of knowledge, but, what is equally decisive, they are also perceived as those who see, interpret and organize facts, and thereby exist as the ultimate sources of knowledge, by the whole society; they are recognized and supported as such. The crucial aspect of a natural science: that a scientist s explanation can never be dismissed as just a subjective opinion but has to be disproven, results ultimately from this recognition in society, but not from science itself.

5 12 Anton Vydra and Michal Lipták This recognition then proves itself to be as equally decisive as the natural scientific attitude. But the dogmatism of natural scientists is now also cast in a different and less favourable light: they are dogmatic not only because they believe that the world is there (and thus do not perform Cartesian doubting), but because they cannot tackle the normativity grounding them. The light is less favourable because now the natural sciences either acknowledge their limits thereby undermining their reputation as an ultimate source of knowledge or widen their reach to normativity itself, and by doing so they are distorting and harmful. If they recognize their limits, a gap is opened to arbitrary, esoteric solutions to the problems of human life which are normative in character. If they reach out, they distort this normativity, because they cannot do otherwise than reduce ought to is, a value to physical properties, a decision-making to causal physical processes. In doing so, natural sciences exercise their authority gained by their recognition in society rather than actually act as science; and in the end they provide solutions which are no less esoteric, because they are ultimately dependent on society s faith in natural sciences. The ultimate task of phenomenology originally motivated by justifying the dogmatism of natural sciences is, in the end, to approach underlying normativity directly. But in the same way that such phenomenology has refused Platonic ideas as an ad hoc solution and introduced the notion of typification to combat such a solution, it has to interpret science and human life in general, as teleological activity without recourse to eschatological solutions. In the last 200 years, natural sciences have been so successful in doing what they are supposed to do that they have sometimes seemed to be the only access to truth, unwittingly creating an illusion that the areas of social sciences, art and politics are the realms of caprice and arbitrariness, necessarily incapable of finding the truth until they receive natural scientific treatment in the future. In practice, though, every reference to the infinite to-do list of natural sciences only acts to shut down any sort of social, political or artistic discourse that does not humbly recognize its supposed arbitrariness and solipsism (thereby recognizing that there is no discourse at all), and instead it dares to propose solutions and claim the access to truth. But rather than providing solutions, the phenomenology of normativity and typification should show why such natural scientific treatment can in principle never arrive and try to restore society s faith in social sciences, art and politics, disclosing them as equally teleological activities, thereby encouraging them to find their own methods of finding truth, so they can contribute, in cooperation with natural sciences, to complex, global self-understanding of mankind.

6 Introduction 13 We believe that a certain division of labour is possible in phenomenological philosophy, and the current issue of The Yearbook presents articles which realize the abovementioned tasks in particular fields of study. Normativity and typification are here, so to say, studied in their natural habitats. Together with all contributors we hope that readers of this issue will find many interesting stimuli and inspirations for their own thinking on normativity and typification. We would like to thank to Jonathan Gresty for his help proofreading this issue as well as Prof. Georg Schuppener for his proofreading of the German contribution. Last but not least, we are also grateful for the support of the VEGA grant-funded project No. 1/0272/13 from the Ministry of Education, Science, Research and Sport in Slovak Republic.