In Between Being and Nothingness, Thomas Nagy takes stock of contemporary debates about realism and its philosophical bearings as he presents his analysis of phenomenological linguistics and phenomenological philosophy attempts to gain the character of an explanatory science. Beginning with an extended critique of possible alternatives to the existing socio-psychological order, the author reconstructs Edmund Husserl’s “ontological approach” as a parallel to Habermas’ idea of a linguistic community. On the one hand, Nagy contends that we can derive categories of reality from an analysis of language which is causally related to action. On the other hand, the very object of linguistics, the very content of language, cannot be analyzed beyond the Cartesian duality of subject and object.
Unlike earlier works by Nagy, this one is less abstract and even textual, though still rich in substantive content. Though he uses language as the basic medium of phenomenological investigation, phenomenology here takes on a substantially greater significance. Rather than merely offering a detailed description and summary of phenomenological observations, moreover, Nagy suggests that the work should be applied to the study of metaphysics as well. The subsequent chapters cover the nature of linguistic competence, how phenomenology provides a guide to understand the nature of reality, the nature of mental content, and how phenomenology relates to metaphysics.
The first chapter charts the development of phenomenological language and phenomenological grammar. The second chapter traces the development of transcendental cognition. The third chapter analyzes three variants of transcendental consciousness, namely, simple consciousness, complex consciousness, and super-consciousness. A further chapter looks at the relationship between transcendental cognitions and sexual differences. Finally, in order to present the various theories on consciousness, some discussions are made on linguistic competence, linguistic symbolism, and the role of dreams in consciousness development.
While it is true that phenomenology has been criticized on its behalf by linguists such as Ferdinand de Saussure, linguists such as William Bates have denied that phenomenology is to be reduced to linguistics. Instead, phenomenology and linguistics are said to be distinct. However, linguists such as Edward Sapir have denied that language has any intrinsic meaning or use apart from communication. Still, linguists who have worked with phenomenology have pointed out the similarities between phenomenology and linguistics.
Edmund Husserl is not alone in his metaphysics. Parmenides was a native of Phenomenology and, in particular, of JPL. His ideas were later developed by the neo-philis philosophers of Sartre and Leibniz. Descartes too drew on the ideas of Parmenides and sought to provide an objective view of the world through the use of mathematics. Thus both Parmenides and Descartes were deeply influenced by the ideas of Aristotle and further developed these into metaphysics.
It would be misleading to label both metaphysics and phenomenology as mere theories. The differences between the two concepts are as vast as the differences between the physical sciences and philosophy. For a start, although Parmenides is often credited with originating the theory of extension, most linguists would disagree. In fact, linguists argue that the extensions conceived by Parmenides are inconsistent with the ways in which languages are used in reality. The other great strand to Parmenides’ metaphysics is his idea that all reality consists of pure thought, nothing existing apart from it, a thesis that most today consider to be contradictory to the methods of science. As a result, modern philosophers have rejected his ideas on both metaphysics and linguistics, even those of Descartes.
However, Parmenides’ ideas were later taken up by Leibniz, one of the greatest metaphysicians in the history of philosophy. Leibniz took Parmenides’ ideas even further, arguing that all reality consisted of pure thought, an idea that was then taken to new levels of sophistication by the German philosopher Martin Heidegger. In Heidegger’s system of thought, Phenomenology was seen to be a way of understanding the concepts that dominate a subject through the activity of its thought. It was then seen as the framework in which we could understand all of the world around us, including ourselves.
The beauty of phenomenology is that it has the potential to appeal to a wide variety of people, including today’s philosophers. Most have rejected the whole concept of Phenomenology. However, it has been picked up and used in various forms of art, literature and science, especially linguistics, to great effect. In particular, sentences like “I think therefore I am” or “I live in the present” have all been used by phenomenologists to claim that there are no independent realities, but only mind-dependent realities. So even though Parmenides might not like it, his ideas have been picked up and made popular in the modern era.