Monday, August 6, 2012

non-correlationist phenomenology: is it a possibility?

It's often been supposed that phenomenology is at odds with those speculative realisms which oppose themselves to correlationism, simply for the fact that phenomenology is mistakenly understood to be a strictly Husserlian affair.  In other words, phenomenology, it is said, couldn't be realist enough because it is an activity which involves descriptive reportage of (mere) mental experiences/appearances that always and necessarily reference a specifically human observer.

In response I've challenged that it may be premature to claim that a.) there is an "end" to phenomenology if we go by attacking just Husserl's version of it only, and that b.) phenomenology is implicitly correlationist.  So I've identified several non-correlationist phenomenologies (not an impossibility, methodologically speaking) which attend to the "exhibitive display of the real" whether in modal, mathematical, or pre-objective terms (e.g. Peirce, Hartshorne, the later Merleau-Ponty, or in limited respects Schelling).  The strongest example, however, comes from literature (see my post HERE), and following Ernst Juenger, I call such a non-correlationist phenomenology "magical realism" or "steroscopy."  Regarding art and literature, specifically painting, I believe there is a forthcoming chapter in The Barbarian Principle which points in a like direction in a discussion of Merleau-Ponty's thoughts about painting with respect to a phenomenological (speculative) magical realism.  But back to Juenger...

This new volume by Ernst Juenger, due out through TELOS press, seems to make the case well.

The 1938 version of Ernst Jünger's The Adventurous Heart: Figures and Capriccios must be considered a key text in the famous German writer's sprawling oeuvre. In this volume...Jünger assembles sixty-three short, often surrealistic prose pieces—accounts of dreams, nature observations, biographical vignettes, and critical reflections on culture and society—providing, as he puts it, "small models of another way of seeing things." Here Jünger experiments with a new method of observation and thinking, uniting lucid and precise observation....He calls this method stereoscopy, a form of perception by which our commonplace understanding is extended to include a simultaneous awareness of additional dimensions of sense or value in the object observed. But equally important to Jünger is an intuitive receptivity that comprehends matter directly at the midpoint of matter...