EXISTENZ PHILOSOPHY
35
ferent; indifferent also whether by playing with the notion of aspects
they seek to establish a whole more spinozistic in character.
The Phenomenological Attempt at R econstruction
Among the derivative philosophical currents of the last hundred
years the most modern and interesting are pragmatism and pheno–
menology. Phenomenology, above all, has exercised an influence on
contemporary philosophy which is neither accidental nor due only
to its method. Husser] sought to reestablish the ancient relation be–
tween Being
anc~
Thought, which had guaranteed man a home in
this world, by a detour through the intentional structure of conscious–
ness. Since every act of consciousness has by its very nature an object,
I can at least be certain of one thing, namely that I "have" the object
of my consciousness. Thereby the question of reality, altogether ab–
stracted from the essence of things, can be "bracketed"; I have
all Being as that which I am conscious of and as consciousness I am,
in the manner of man, the Being of the world. (The
seen
tree, the
tree as object of my consciousness, need not be the "real" tree, it
is in any case the real object of my consciousness.)
The modern feeling of homelessness in the world has always
ended up with things torn out of their functional context. A proof of
this,
scarcely to be overlooked, is modern literature and a good part
of modern painting. However one may interpret this homelessness
sociologically or psychologically, its philosophical basis lies in the fact
that though the functional context of the world, in which also I my–
self am involved, can always justify and explain that there are, for
example, tables and chairs generally, nevertheless it can never make
me grasp conceptually that
this
table
is.
And it is the existence of
this
table, independent of tables in general, which evokes the philosophical
shock.
Phenomenology appeared to master this problem, which is
much more than merely theoretical. In its description of conscious–
ness it grasped precisely these isolated things torn out of their func–
tional context as the contents of arbitrary acts of consciousness and
appeared to connect these up again with man through the "stream
of consciousness." Indeed Husser! maintained that by this detour
through consciousness and by starting from a complete grasp of all
the factual contents of consciousness (a new
mathesis universalis),
he would be able to rebuild the world which had fallen to pieces.
