Egology

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Egology ( ego , Greek and Latin ' I ' and λόγος lógos 'teaching', 'science') is a neologism that emerged in France in the 18th century for the study of being a subject.

Problem

Epistemologically , Descartes' separation of "I" as a knowing subject and "world" as a recognizable object is at the beginning of modern Western philosophy. This dualism subsequently led to profound and controversial discussions about the type of interaction between subject and object and about the “essence” of the “I”. In linguistic theory , the word “I”, along with words like “here”, “this” and “my”, is one of the indexical expressions that Bertrand Russell called egocentric particulars . Since they are used in a self-centered (egocentric) manner, their use leads to so-called asymmetrical use. The problems that arose in the process led to various interpretations and controversies, for example at the end of the 20th century by Rudolf Haller , Hector-Neri Castaneda and Jesús Padilla Gálvez .

Accesses

Husserl

Edmund Husserl took up the egology at the beginning of the 20th century mainly in his Cartesian meditations and developed it in the sense of his phenomenology and phenomenological egology .

In direct connection to Descartes , Husserl is concerned with an "absolutely subjective science, a science whose object is independent of the decision about non-being or being of the world". According to Husserl, this absolutely subjective science certainly begins "as a pure egology, and as a science which, it seems, condemns us to a solipsism , albeit a transcendental one . It is still impossible to foresee, as in the attitude of reduction others Ego - not as mere worldly phenomena, but as other transcendental ego - as being should be able to be posited, and thus become topics of a phenomenological egology that are also justified. "

Essential for Husserl's egology is his distinction between factual and transcendental ego , i. H. between the worldly, empirical sense of the ego of the human psychophysical and the transcendental, transmundan, indubitable, apodictically evident ME.

The egology initially begins as a monadology of the individual monad , but then moves beyond a solipsistic position via the transcendental reduction (of the transcendental ego) to an intersubjective phenomenology : "According to the order, the first of the philosophical disciplines would be the solipsistically limited egology, that of the primordially reduced ego, only then would the intersubjective phenomenology founded in it come, namely in a generality that first deals with the universal questions and only then branches off into the a priori sciences. "

Wittgenstein

Like his entire philosophy, Ludwig Wittgenstein's egology in the early phase is very different from that of the middle and later creative period. While he initially assigned a special role to the "philosophical I" as a "metaphysical subject", he later tried to "bring words like" I "and" my "back from their metaphysical use back to their everyday use". and then completely eliminate it from the language.

In 1918 in the Tractatus logico-philosophicus he claimed “I am my world. (The microcosm.) ”And“ The I enters into philosophy because the world is my world ”. These formulations brought him close to solipsism at an early stage . At the same time, Wittgenstein distanced himself sharply from the Cartesian idea of ​​the I as a res cogitans , as a subject who perceives the objects of the world and analyzes them with his mind with the sentence “The thinking, representing, subject does not exist.” He also denied that the “philosophical I” denotes a body or a soul, rather it belongs “not to the world, but rather it is a limit of the world”. Note that for Wittgenstein “the world” comprises everything that is conceivable and can be said, and everything outside of this world only “shows” itself, the I in the “Tractatus” takes on a special role - probably following the ideas of Arthur Schopenhauer and Otto Weininger .

Wittgenstein's middle and late phase during his teaching activity at Cambridge is characterized by his fundamental criticism of language, the Pragmatic Turn . Last but not least, this also included the question of a meaningful meaning of the word “I”. Following his new method, Wittgenstein examined the linguistic contexts in which this personal pronoun is used, be it in language games or in everyday speech .

Wittgenstein made it clear that “I” is not a substitute for a personal name, nor does it mean a person “who is speaking now”, nor a body, neither in subjective (self-attribution of feelings) nor in objective use (self-attribution of objective states) e.g. “I have a lump on my head”). Wittgenstein said in the Vienna Circle as early as the end of 1929 : "The word" I "is one of those words that can be eliminated from language." However, until the end of his life he did not clearly determine whether self-attributions such as "I have a toothache" necessarily presuppose a subject as the carrier to which these are related.

Ichology

Following his criticism of the concept of the ego , according to which the Germanized word ego has now almost exclusively assumed the semantic content of the factual ego in the language games of the 21st century and thus undermines Husserl's central egological difference , Andreas Mascha used the concept of Ichology for suggested the designation of an absolutely subjective science .

literature

To Husserl

see individual evidence

To Wittgenstein

  • Rudolf Haller : Ambiguity about the I or "I", Ludwig Wittgenstein . In: Révue internationale de Philosophie 2 (1989) '', pp. 249-263.
  • Rudolf Haller : Contributions to Wittgenstein's egology . In: B. McGuinnes, R. Haller (eds.): Wittgenstein in Focus - In focus: Wittgenstein . Amsterdam 1989, (= Grazer Philosophische Studien 33/34), pp. 353–373.
  • Jesús Padilla Gálvez : The use of the word "I" in L. Wittgenstein. A language-analytical sketch on the self-referentiality of self-confidence . Wittgenstein studies 1/1995, file 06-1-95.TXT.
  • Jesús Padilla Gálvez : Is there a metaphysical subject in language? . In :: Contributions of the Austrian Ludwig Wittgenstein Society / = contributions of the Austrian Ludwig Wittgenstein Society 3, Kirchberg am Wechsel 1995, pp. 97-104.
  • Wilhelm Vossenkuhl : Solipsism and language criticism. Contributions to Wittgenstein , Berlin 2009. ISBN 978-3-937262-45-1 .

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ R. Haller, Unklarheiten , p. 251. Example: People A and B stand together, C further away. A says: "B is here", C says: "B is there". So A and C use different words for the same thing; they behave asymmetrically.
  2. ↑ R. Haller, ambiguities , pp 255-258 and 262-263. Ders, Egologie , pp. 370-371. See also the work of Castaneda and Padilla-Gálvez.
  3. ↑ Edmund Husserl : Cartesian Meditations. Edited by Elisabeth Ströker, 3rd ed. Meiner, Hamburg 1995. ISBN 978-3-7873-1241-2 ( online )
  4. ↑ See: Jan Broekman: Phenomenology and Egology. Factual and transcendental ego in Edmund Husserl , The Hague 1963 (Phaenomenologica 12)
  5. ↑ See: Natalia Carolina Petrillo: The immanent self-transgression of the egology in the phenomenology of Edmund Husserl. Würzburg 2009. ISBN 978-3-89913-727-9 , p. 347
  6. ↑ Edmund Husserl : Cartesian Meditations. Edited by Elisabeth Ströker, 3rd ed. Meiner, Hamburg 1995. ISBN 978-3-7873-1241-2 ( online )
  7. ↑ L. Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, 116.
  8. ↑ L. Wittgenstein, Tractatus 5.63 and 5.641.
  9. ↑ In detail on this R. Haller, Solipsismus und Sprachkritik .
  10. ↑ L. Wittgenstein, Tractatus 5.631.
  11. ↑ L. Wittgenstein, Tractatus , 5.632.
  12. ^ R. Haller, Egologie , pp. 353–358.
  13. ↑ L. Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations 410. L. Wittgenstein, Das Blaue Buch (work edition, Vol. 5), pp. 106-107. R. Haller, Unklarheiten , pp. 254-255.
  14. ↑ Ludwig Wittgenstein and the Vienna Circle (work edition vol. 3), p. 49.
  15. ^ R. Haller, Unklarheiten , pp. 260-261. As an example, Wittgenstein dealt particularly extensively with the self-attribution of toothache; R. Haller, Egologie , pp. 262-270.
  16. ↑ See: Andreas Mascha (Ed.): Ichologie. Volume 1: Basics. Munich 2012. ISBN 978-3-924404-95-6 , p. 16 ( online ; PDF; 343 kB)
  17. ↑ In this regard, cf. also the contributions by Harald Seubert , Wolfgang Peter and Michael König in: Andreas Mascha (Ed.): Ichologie. Volume 1: Basics. Munich 2012. ISBN 978-3-924404-95-6