• berrytopylus [she/her,they/them]
    ·
    2 years ago

    I just looked this up and maybe I'm misunderstanding but it seems to start off simple like "Studying subjective experiences" and then descends into a bunch of nonsense that isn't really necessary to be saying in the first place.

    A second use of “phenomenology” common in contemporary philosophy names a property of some mental states, the property they have if and only if there is something it is like to be in them. Thus, it is sometimes said that emotional states have a phenomenology while belief states do not. For example, while there is something it is like to be angry, there is nothing it is like to believe that Paris is in France.

    Like this is a ridiculously drawn out and nonsensical way to just say "Emotions are experienced differently than one experiences beliefs about the outside world", holy shit I hate philosophers.

    • ReformOrDDRevolution [comrade/them]
      ·
      2 years ago

      ngl that second definition is weird af and really simplifies but also confuses what phenomenology is. Even Wiki has better definitions:

      For G. W. F. Hegel, phenomenology is a philosophical (philosophischen) and scientific (wissenschaftliche) study of phenomena (what presents itself to us in conscious experience) as a means to finally grasp the absolute, logical, ontological and metaphysical Spirit (Absolute Spirit) that is essential to phenomena. This has been called dialectical phenomenology (see Hegelian dialectic).[10]

      For Edmund Husserl, phenomenology is "the reflective study of the essence of consciousness as experienced from the first-person point of view."[11] Phenomenology takes the intuitive experience of phenomena (whatever presents itself in phenomenological reflexion) as its starting point and tries to extract from it the essential features of experiences and the essence of what we experience. When generalized to the essential features of any possible experience, this has been called transcendental phenomenology (see Varieties).[12] Husserl's view was based on aspects of the work of Franz Brentano and was developed further by philosophers such as Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Max Scheler, Edith Stein, Dietrich von Hildebrand and Emmanuel Levinas.

      tbh, the only interesting work I have (partially) read on the second definition is Ahmed's Queer Phenomenology, which has an interesting section critiquing Husserl's imagined table as divorced from material and domestic reality and she ties in Marx and Derrida on commodity fetishism to do it. But that's more affect and queer theory stuff than phenomenology "proper".

      I literally don't understand any of Hegel, or what the fuck his form of phenomenology is or how it is useful. Respect to Marx for even understanding it lmao

    • ReformOrDDRevolution [comrade/them]
      ·
      2 years ago

      Its almost as good as that Hegel copypasta about someone's husband

      spoiler

      My husband and I are both academics. We've been married for 3 years, and been together for 6. He is an academic philosopher and I am a physicist. He has recently expressed displeasure that I've never seriously engaged with his work. Now, I've read a bit of the classics of philosophy, but my husband's work is more in what I'm told is called the "continental" tradition. Unfortunately, everything he's shown me has just seems completely insane.

      Here's the problem: his work apparently involves claims about physics that are just wrong, and wrong in a very embarrassing way! I'll admit, I'm a terrible person, but I had never read his thesis before. I tried reading it and it's riddled with talk about for instance the necessary relationship between matter having "extension" and possessing mass. He also talks about the "shape" of fundamental particles. This is obviously nonsensical/wrong; electrons have mass and are point particles (they don't take up space really). In the thesis and some other papers he wrote he seems to think of himself as "scientific" and a "materialist" but his entire idea of what these words mean is stuck in like, outdated 19th century ideas about atoms as little billiard balls flying around in space. I've gently tried to help him and explain how he might start to engage seriously with contemporary physics (he has never read a book on the subject and is by his own admission "bad at math"), but he just gets angry with me and explains that Hegel's system is presuppositional and the basis for all possible rational thought so there is no need at all to read other texts in the first place (I have no idea what this means). He will throw out terms like "speculative propositions" but when I ask him to explain what this means or give me examples he just starts giving me more inscrutable jargon that makes no sense. On top of that, he will repeatedly say German phrases or terms that he uses (and pronounces) incorrectly (I am a native speaker) or nonsensically. He claims to understand the language (he doesn't) and tells me that Hegel can only be understood "in the original German" but he clearly can't read the language and when I've tried to read the original texts they make even less sense.

      On top of this, his obsession with Hegel himself has reached the point of creepiness At one point he literally told me that all other work either agrees with Hegel so is redundant, or disagrees with Hegel and is wrong. He keeps a framed picture of Hegel on the nightstand in our bedroom. In fact, he even changed his phone's background from a picture of me to this same picture of Hegel. I feel like I am competing with a 200 year old philosopher for my husband's attention.

      Recently we got in a huge fight because he was trying to demonstrate an example of the Hegelian concept of the "unity of opposites" (whatever that means) by claiming that right and left hands are opposite but also identical. I told him this is just wrong and that right and left hands are not "identical" in any meaningful sense (chirality is a basic concept in geometry/group theory: left and right hands are not superimposable). He kept putting his hands together and tried to show how they were "identical" and kept failing (because they're not) and then got angry and stormed out of the house. I haven't seen him since (this was about a day ago) and texted him and haven't heard back.

      What do I do Reddit? Do I just let this go? It's immensely frustrating that my account of my own field is not being taken seriously. He asked me to engage with his work, so I did. But it seems like he won't repay me in kind. He has told me repeatedly that Hegel makes empirical science unnecessary and implied that my work is a waste of time and that I should just be studying German idealism instead and read people like "Fichte" and "Schelling" (who are apparently very popular in Germany but I've never heard of them). Why is it okay for him to belittle my field but I can't offer mild criticism of his?

      TL;DR: My husband's academic work is embarrassingly wrong and can't take any criticism.

  • jabrd [he/him]
    ·
    2 years ago

    I love phenomenology and I hate everyone who’s ever written about it, including myself

  • ElGosso [he/him]
    ·
    2 years ago

    "First thing smashes into second thing and both are different at the end of it" :hegel: that's all I got

  • emizeko [they/them]
    ·
    2 years ago

    aimixin explains talks about the dialectic

    Marxism is dialectic, it rejects absolute pure categories. Things sort of exist on a spectrum but sort of don't. The way Marxists use categories is to understand that everything is connected to each other through a series of quantifiable interconnected steps, but that something is always dominant, and this dominant aspect is what determines the overall quality of the thing in question.

    If you're trying to shove everything into a pure category of absolutely worker, absolutely capitalist, then this is just a useless endeavor. When we talk of "worker" or "capitalist," we don't mean it as if these are pure categories, where a worker can't ever own capital, or that a capitalist can't ever do labor. They may do these things, they may exist somewhere in between. But clearly at some point, certain characteristics become dominant over others. Clearly Jeff Bezos's class interests are not the same as a minimum wage worker, as the latter likely has next to no capital while the former has far more capital than he could ever, by his own labor, afford.

    There is no reason to try and shove this person you're describing into a specific absolute box. If they're a salaried worker who runs some very small business / self-employment on the side as supplemental income, you could just say they're a worker with petty bourgeois characteristics. You don't have to say they're absolutely "petty bourgeois" or a "worker". You can just describe that they have characteristics of multiple categories. No reason you cannot do this.

    • silent_water [she/her]
      ·
      2 years ago

      it's not the dialectic though until you talk about the motion of opposing forces. this is a good explanation of the composite nature of reality and a good jumping off point for the need to avoid reification.

  • StalinistApologist [he/him]
    ·
    2 years ago

    Try the podcast philosophize this maybe

    Philosophize This!: http://www.philosophizethis.org

    dank