Volumen 3 (2001): Heft 1 (October 2001)

In this paper we deal with a not so slight misunderstanding about Heidegger’s conception of science(s). We try to show that instead of a so-called «anti-scientism» we find rather a critical thought on the part of Heidegger. Critical in two senses: one that implies a questioning and an explicitation of the pre-scientific, non-scientific foundations (or conditions) of science and the analysis of the relation between sciences as «regional ontologies» and philosophy as «fundamental ontology»; another that suggests the «need of another thinking», an alternative (certainly discussible) to the predominant calculative thinking of «the era of science».

With this article we intend to explore the concept of «esthetical object» proposed in Dufrenne’s text entitled La Phénoménologie de l’experience estéthique I.

The potentiality/activity binomial appears as the ground for Dufrenne’s definition of esthetical object as perceived work of art. According to this, the happening of any artwork truly finds its proper place in esthetical experience, which arises as the meeting point of art’s expressive potentiality and the spectator’s perception act. Establishing an accurate distinction between esthetical perception and other kinds of human perception, Dufrenne sees the former as the pure presence of the sensitive. Advocating the inseparability of significant and signification for the esthetical object, the author declares the meaning of esthetical experience as immanent to its own sensitive presentation.

Dufrenne presents authentic esthetical perception as something, which has the power to, engage subjectivity in a radical experience. Under the light projected by the work of art, human beings are enabled to actualise other modes of being-in-the-world. With expression as its proper signifying mode, the esthetical object reveals itself as a world beginning, proposing an affective atmosphere, which opens the subject of esthetical experience to new existential possibilities.

One of the most significant marks of this article is the attempt to establish the idea that a new phenomenological approach is needed for the study consciousness and all it’s features. The point is that the old demand for a scientific approach to consciousness shouldn’t be, as it has been, incompatible with de need to preserve the essential nature of consciousness. Unfortunately, that’s precisely the case in the majority of the proposals related with the study of consciousness. The debate with Fodor is thus quite important, since it brings to light precisely what one must avoid in order to save every single difficulty related with consciousness, and consciousness itself. A new methodology is therefore needed, one that is capable to observe the demands just acknowledged, but one that is capable to point new directions as well. Husserl, as we have seen, has much to say on the subject, but there is yet much to be done.

In the first part of this paper we try to show how the discussion of Meinong’s distinction between distributed and undistributed objects was crucial for Husserl’s thinking about the phenomenology of time consciousness. The criticism of Meinong’s thesis that the representation of a distributed object (temporal object) is an undistributed act is presented as the central point for the development of Husserl’s own thesis about the perception as a continuum of continua and about consciousness as an unitary flux of temporal phases. In a second part, we move to Brentano’s theory about original associations in the constitution of the “presence-time”. Brentano’s position about the function of phantasy as the origin of our representation of time is refused by Husserl and, as a result, the structural composition of time consciousness in phases of primal-impression, fresh memory (later “retention”) and immediate expectation (later “protention”) appears as the core form to the intuition of the present and the constitution of time. In a last section, we follow Husserl’s revision of his own analysis of fresh memory in order to understand his final position about retention as a primitive form of Vergegenwärtigung.