Tetapi melemparkan itu di seperti itu rationalistic mendekati ialah adalah konsep belaka daripada pengalaman. Proses menjernihkannya dan memperkembangkan implikasinya diwariskan pada logika dan argumentasi rasional. Dan lalu tidak ada titik dalam membantah tentang sifat struktur empiris karena mereka terlalu tidak jelas dan bingung.
Dengan kedatangan Inggris empiricism, situasi seluruh nampak cukup berbeda, dan keperluan untuk filsafat empiris secara jelas diungkapkan. Tetapi, pemandangan sifat pengalaman pengertian di sini terlalu disederhanakan dan reductive. Tak ada keajaiban yang sudah dibawa ke Hume yang akhirnya menguranginya sampai rangkaian belaka kesan atom, yang kurang semua olehnya relational struktur.
Ini menyiapkan cara bagi Kant ,nya penolakan pengalaman pengertian (“the beraneka sense”) menimbulkan bentuk yang tak empiris lain idealistis rationalism: bentuk sintetis intuisi dan kategori-kategori.
Jika kami sekarang memakai yang modern –and agak simplistic- kategori-kategori Subyek dan Objek, ketegangan di antara subjectivistic dan objectivistic orientasi dalam menceritakan akal sehat manusiawi sampai ketidakstabilan pengalaman sepanjang sejarah filsafat nyata. Filsafat Yunani adalah perjuangan menarik antara kesubyektifan di pengertian platonis pribadi-dialectic reflexivity dan objektivitas di yang dipunyai penggabungan Aristotelian undang-undang dasar alami dannya intelligibility sampai akal sehat manusiawi. Jejak ketegangan seperti itu masih dengan kuat timbul filsafat pertengahan. Dengan Descartes, tetapi, filsafat modern mulai dengan yayasan baru yang sangat subjectivistic, bahwa ialah, kepastian one’s keberadaan. Ini diberi di kelak kemudian hari ganti rugi oleh objectivistic paradigma Inggris empiricism. Dan sedangkan Kant mencoba membuatkan sintesis kedua garis, adalah sebetulnya Hegel yang, di dengki kekurangannya, menyebarkan pendekatan yang lebih radikal toward pengalaman.
Bagi Hegel pikiran terlibat tidak formalisme mencerminkan tetapi dengan pengalaman perkembangan kesadarannya sendiri sepanjang sejarah. Hidup pikiran terdiri secara persis dalam mengenali sendiri di lain ialah, oleh karena itu yang subjektif di tujuan. Pikiran menujukan toward self-pengetahuan wasalam sendiri sediasingkan dari “positive” dan harus belajar menerima nasibnya dengannya, melihatnya sebagainya sendiri, sebagai rumahnya. Di itu perdamaian seperti ini adalah kerja sejarah pikiran, aktivitas sejarah pikiran adalah tak satu pun self-bayangan atau super-sidang dialektis yang resmi belaka self-pengasingan, tetapi pengalaman yang mengalami kenyataan, dan adalah sendiri sebenarnya.
While classical rationalism, British empiricism, and idealism, all discount the world of sense experience, phenomenology and existential philosophy are opposed to all three. They maintain that sense experience cannot be adequately accounted for as a mere confusion, a mere manifold, or the matter for dialectical synthesis, but must be recognized as an ordered world of perception and feeling. What is required is a closer appreciation of the concrete pattern of lived existence. Indeed, in so doing they have been repeatedly charged with subjectivism or even irrationalism. But the fact is that for an existentialist philosopher such as Kierkegaard, for instance, contrary to Hegel and idealistic philosophy in general, being is not contained within a conscious substance or spirit, nor does it result from a dialectical process of pure consciousness which externalizes itself. Instead, being or existence comes first. Thus Descartes’ subjectivistic movement which passes from “I think” to “I am”, for the existentialist is wrong. I do not first think and from this deduce that I exist. I exist first of all, and on this ultimate ground I doubt and think. The primary aim of the existentialist philosophy is to gain understanding of the basic pattern and structures of our primordial experience in this life world.
Apart from Kierkegaard, Husserl’s phenomenology was the basic inspiration for the existential philosophy, as well as for the subsequent development of various philosophical school of the twentieth century.
Husserl’s initial purpose was actually to put philosophy back into a form of rigorous science in the Platonic-metaphysical sense. Ironically, however, it turned out that his phenomenology eventually resulted in most devastating critique of Metaphysics. Two concepts of his philosophy particularly play significant role in overcoming the metaphysics of subject-object , along with its tendency toward foundationalism and representationalism, -the salient characteristics of modernism- namely the concept of ‘life-world” or Lebenswelt and “intentionality”. In the beginning Husserl actually wanted to discover an absolute foundation ( Fundamentum inconcussum) by probing into the realm of transcendental subjectivity.
But this finally led him to the life-world, Lebenswelt, that is, the immediate flow of unreflective life, the world which precedes the modern distinction between subjective and objective, hence all scientific constructs. Thereby the “objective” world of science turns out to be mere interpretation , and not representation, of the real immediate life-world. Later on Heidegger caught the concept of life-world and brought it to further consequences. For him life-world is nothing other than existence, being which exists in history and in the world, that is, in society, tradition and culture.
Another important concept from Husserl was “Intentionality” , a concept which says that our ideas are essentially “of” or “about” something : an inherent interdependent relationship between consciousness and reality. Heidegger also later took up this concept. He shows that our forming representation of reality is made possible by the fact that we are already engaged in it , dealing with it, and at grips with it. This would mean that our representations of things are always grounded in the way we deal with these things. But this “foundation” is basically inarticulate and inexhaustible. Since any articulative project would itself rely on a horizon of nonexplicit engagement with the world.
From this follows that the task of reason is not to find the deepest and unshakable foundation, but rather, to disclose what the basic dealing involves. This would make the notion of the self as a disengaged agent no longer possible. Heidegger then shows how the self ( Dasein) is defined in terms of a life shared with others, as being-together, hence socio-cultural life, with its particular articulation of Being in language.
But it was Merleau-Ponty, in my opinion, who paved a more definite way for philosophy to deal with direct experience. Taking his point of departure in Husserl’s phenomenology of the life-world, he shows that perception is our primordial contact with the world. Perception is the only mode in which the meaning of Being is originally constituted. And for the most part perception is pre-conscious and pre-personal. It is materialized by a bodily ego which is also pre-conscious. Since it concerns the pre-conscious level of existence, phenomenology is a matter of description rather than analysis (Husserl) or interpretation (Heidegger) . The world is the natural field for all my thoughts and all my explicit perceptions.
Philosophers throughout history have tried to solve all problems by pointing either to eternal truths or to apodictic evidence. For Merleau-Ponty, however, we are always already in the realm of truth. And it is the experience of truth, that is, the experience of the world, which is self-evident. The fundamental unity between myself and the world more clearly in our desires, emotion, evaluation and behaviour, than in our objective knowledge.
Thus, Merleau-Ponty shifts the centre of gravity from subjectivity to the world, from pure consciousness to experience. But the world is experienced as inseparable from subjectivity as it is from intersubjectivity. This is the reason why all my experiences in regard to the world find their unity only when I take up my past experiences in those of the present, and other people’s in my own.
All this Husserlian-Heideggerian based tradition which hitherto bears the name of “hermeneutics” (Philosophical hermeneutics), together with phenomenology of Merleau-Ponty, has led to the primacy of experience in today’s philosophy, which finds its culmination in H.G.Gadamer. Taken as a point of departure, it will shed new light on understanding the phenomena of culture, history, tradition and self-identity. Some important corollaries to the primacy of experience are as follows :
