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CHAPTER 4 Prolegomena to Any Future Phenomenological Ecology JOHN LLEWELYN What Is Phenomenology? Is phenomenology a help or a hindrance to a philosophical ecology or a philosophy of the environment? It might seem to go without saying that before this question can be answered definitively, the terms in which it is posed would have to be definitively defined. But not even provisional definitions are easy to give at the outset for some of the terms. Recall, to begin with, Merleau-Ponty’s acknowledgment in the preface to Phenomenology of Perception that no definitive answer has been given to the question , What is Phenomenology? It may well be that phenomenology is essentially resistant to being defined, if to define is to deliver an account of an essence understood as a statement of necessary and sufficient conditions . So that if phenomenology is, as is sometimes said, the science of the essence of what appears, there would apparently be no essence of phenomenology and no phenomenology of phenomenology. But if, as is commonly said, phenomenology is a descriptive science, then its findings need not be essences understood as necessary and sufficient conditions for something. If we still want to say that what it seeks to describe are essences, essences will have to be more flexible, for example clusters of features of which a more or less wide number will belong to what instantiates the concept in question, no particular one of the cluster being bound to belong to each instance. It is not surprising that the concept of phenomenology has to be understood as a family resemblance if it includes phenomenology of conception, phenomenology of perception, and phenomenology that comes to exceed both conception and perception in the 51 course of the history of the word’s use by, to go no further back in the history of philosophy, Hegel, Husserl, Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, Levinas, and so on. As the bearer of the first of these proper names would insist, given that there is a historical dimension to the logic of the Concept as such, there is a historical dimension to the logic of the concept of phenomenology. According to the construal of essence as family resemblance, historical circumstances play a part in determining which features belong to the cluster of those from which different selections are made in different exemplifications of a concept. This historical dimension of conceptuality is acknowledged in the appeals to etymology that are made in the style of phenomenology practiced sparingly by Heidegger in Being and Time and more sparingly in the style of thinking, no longer called by him phenomenology , to which he later turned. Making an appeal both to the etymology of a concept and to the concept of etymology, it is illuminating to note that the Welsh word usually translated as “essence” or “quintessence” is hanfod. The second syllable of this verbal noun is a mutation of bod, which is equivalent to the verbal noun “being.” The first syllable, deriving perhaps from an obsolete preposition, has the sense of descent, as in hanes, history or story, and the further sense that what the story would tell is clandestine, something concealed. This last notion is conveyed in Latin and Greek by the prepositional components of substantia and hypostasis. It is the notion of property, propriety, or properness conveyed by ousia. This ontological notion corresponds to the phenomenological notion that to get to the truth of something is to unconceal, as suggested by the Greek a-lêtheia. According to Heidegger there is more than correspondence here. “Ontology is possible only as phenomenology.”1 “Phenomenological ontology” is a pleonasm. That this is so is spelled out in the words Sein and Dasein. “Sein braucht Dasein.” Being needs and uses Dasein. The Da is the where and opening of the appearing and concealing of being. Of course, one immediately wishes to interpolate, what is hidden may be a ground or it may be a causal or historical antecedent; of course, it goes without saying that we must distinguish chronological or temporal genesis from logical origin or ground. But the two words “of course” themselves sometimes hide what is not a matter of course and does not go without saying. If the principle of all principles of phenomenology according to Husserl is self-evidence,2 the self-evident must be scrupulously distinguished from what only appears to be self-evident. Here we strike again upon one of the features that belong to that selection of features highlighted in Heidegger...

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