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Politics of critique: A field study of westernity with the case of Husserl's phenomenology

Posted on:2017-08-20Degree:Ph.DType:Dissertation
University:The New SchoolCandidate:Lee, YusukFull Text:PDF
GTID:1455390008968803Subject:Philosophy
Abstract/Summary:
This dissertation is a form of questioning a peculiar political character of the Western philosophical thought. We regard that such politicality is rather inherent in the structure of philosophization, which is most eminently represented by Husserl's phenomenology. The political manifests itself in two respects: in terms of legitimacy-placement theoretically reified in the form of an ontology of place and in terms of justification of power-hierarchy set up through that placement. We specifically call such motivational interest and structural character the geopolitical, as it essentially concerns a configuration and reconfiguration of the boundary of territories and spheres of meaning, by way of which a definite political-ethical power-relation can be implemented and affirmed. Husserl's phenomenology, starting as a theory of knowledge, evolving to a theory of pure subjectivity, is a system of politics as such, which has a specific disciplinary goal and theoretical agenda of such kind; it intends to be the science of reason that can ultimately justify the place of logos, precisely as an ultimate source from which all meanings derives, as the ultimate origin that has the primordial right and capacity to "talk" about meaningfulness of every and all objects from logical object to cultural object. Such notion of absolutely all-encompassing reason leads to the phenomenological idea of critique defined as an absolute grounding first and foremost. Such phenomenological idea of critique develops into the notion of an infinite act of self-reflection in the form of a justification of nothing but the reflective power of pure logos as such. The meaningfulness of the questioning of meaning and self is to be absolutely justified in the end in the first motivation of ultimate justification on the ground of legitimacy production and administration. All this relationship is culminated at the issue of Europe. This dissertation deals with how the philosophically structured and aimed phenomenological relation between different domains of object is directly intimated with the political source-derivative relation between Europe and nonEurope leading to One universal humanity guided by the idea of European-philosophical-religious critique as the most meaningful form of ethics; how thereby phenomenology presents itself as a politico-ethically problematic form of thought.
Keywords/Search Tags:Critique, Form, Phenomenology, Husserl's
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