This thesis interrogates the relation between philosophy and the world. I examine the inherence of philosophy within the world, the structure of the world that accounts for this inherence, and the nature of philosophy implied by this account. This interrogation encounters a peculiar difficulty: because the account of this relation is philosophical, it is implicated by the relation it clarifies. Following Merleau-Ponty’s late works, I develop a phenomenology sensitive to its enactment and analyse this relation as hyper-dialectical.
Part One discusses the relation as a general limit phenomenon and criticises Husserl’s and Fink’s phenomenology for lacking the reflexivity to interrogate it. Chapter One shows that Husserl’s transcendental reduction and the resulting phenomena, presented in Ideas I and Cartesian Meditations, are insufficient. Because his reduction lacks the reflexivity to recognise its implication by the constitutive process,...
Show moreThis thesis interrogates the relation between philosophy and the world. I examine the inherence of philosophy within the world, the structure of the world that accounts for this inherence, and the nature of philosophy implied by this account. This interrogation encounters a peculiar difficulty: because the account of this relation is philosophical, it is implicated by the relation it clarifies. Following Merleau-Ponty’s late works, I develop a phenomenology sensitive to its enactment and analyse this relation as hyper-dialectical.
Part One discusses the relation as a general limit phenomenon and criticises Husserl’s and Fink’s phenomenology for lacking the reflexivity to interrogate it. Chapter One shows that Husserl’s transcendental reduction and the resulting phenomena, presented in Ideas I and Cartesian Meditations, are insufficient. Because his reduction lacks the reflexivity to recognise its implication by the constitutive process, transcendental consciousness is not a general limit phenomenon and cannot account for the relation between philosophy and the world. Chapter Two shows that Fink’s Sixth Cartesian Meditation is insufficient because the epoche and the natural attitude are described as lacking reflexivity. This insufficiency leads him to erect a dualism between phenomenology and the world.
The Intermezzo discusses four core concepts in Husserl’s and Fink’s phenomenology: (1) the natural attitude, (2) the epoche, (3) the phenomenological reduction, and (4) the phenomenon. To develop a phenomenology sensitive to its own act, I develop all four notions to include a reflexive moment.
Part Two reconstructs Merleau-Ponty’s position as a response to these difficulties. Chapter Three develops a Merleau-Pontian phenomenology that is sensitive towards its own act. I show how (1)-(3) can be transformed into (1’) perceptual faith, (2’) the double epoche, and (3’) the double reduction. This discloses (4’) the hyper-dialectic, a phenomenon that implicates the very act of phenomenology. In contrast to Husserl and Fink, this hyper-dialectic is a general limit phenomenon.
Because the hyper-dialectic accounts for the relation between philosophy and the world, elaborating it answers my thesis question. However, the double reduction involves an ambiguity and must be specified into three further reductions: the ontological reduction, the eidetic reduction, and the intra-ontological reduction. Each interrogates the hyper-dialectic in increasing order of fundamentality. To answer my thesis question, these reductions must be performed in turn.
Chapter Four performs the ontological and the eidetic reductions, interrogating the hyper-dialectic, respectively, as the dialectic’s phenomenality and essence. However, they cannot interrogate the reversibility between the dialectic’s phenomenality and essence.
Chapter Five performs the intra-ontological reduction, interrogating the above reversibility as the flesh that circulates across all modes of expression. At its most fundamental level, the hyper-dialectic is simultaneously ontological, phenomenal and practical; it is a generality that relates across all philosophies and the world. As circulating across all philosophies, including our clarification, the generality of the flesh is a general limit phenomenon.
Chapter Six looks at recent literature to account for singularity. Interrogating the double epoche shows that the flesh is sedimented into each individual as a relation before generality and locality. This discloses the hyper-dialectic as the singularity that relates across each philosophy and the world. By being sedimented into each philosophy, including our clarification, the singularity of the flesh is also a general limit phenomenon.
By developing the double epoche and the intra-ontological reduction, my thesis shows that the relation, between philosophy and the world, can be understood as general and singular. Generality and singularity account for the senses of “all” and “each”. Because the general relation implicates all philosophies without exception, all philosophies are expressions of the one world. Because the singular relation implicates each philosophy as exceptional, it accounts for the regional aspects of the world. Moreover, generality and singularity reinforce one another. They are merely the outcome of two reflexive ways of approaching the hyper-dialectic, the inherence of philosophy in the world.
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