دانلود کتاب پدیده شناسی

Before you started to read this line of text you were doing something else. Perhaps you just came back from surfing and are sitting on a beach chair; perhaps you have just found a spot in the shade and you have 2 hours to sit and read and sip your wine before the concert starts in Luxembourg Gardens; perhaps you have just made a cup of tea and are settling into your armchair in front of your warm hearth. Or maybe you’re in a jet airliner reading this on the latest electronic text-display gadget. In any and all cases you find yourself already situated, in the middle of something, or hav­ing just done something—pulled up a chair, taken a seat—and you are now at a point where you are reading these lines.

Phenomenology begins right here, with one of the oldest problems in philosophy, which is also one of the most contemporary problems in science. It begins with the fact that we, as agents who must act, and as thinkers who try to get a grasp on what we are doing, are always already situated in the world. It’s this problem that leads Aristotle to acquiesce in accepting the inevitable, namely, in this life we can only live in the second-best way—the imperfect practical life, since the very best form of life, the life of self-sufficient contemplation is never fully attainable. We are con­stantly being interrupted by the demands of our physical nature and the distractions of the world. If by enormous effort we turn our attention away from food and sex and survival and attempt to study our rational capacities—our quest for reasons, our natural inclination to know everything (whether by science or gossip)—we are con­fronted with the very first fact, which is that there is no very first fact, and that every fact is preceded by other facts, that every fact, every reason, every thought, every instance of consciousness is already situated in some contingent circumstance.