Kenan Çamurcu

The Georgian philosopher Shalva Nutsubidze (1888-1969) states that thinkers from the Gelati School, who successfully produced philosophical arguments from a synthesis of Jerusalem and Athens, emphasized that intercultural philosophy could emerge at the intersection of thought traditions. According to them, Western philosophers are unable to adequately respond to contemporary trials and challenges due to their infrequent engagement with non-Western philosophies. It's a simple fact that the assumption of philosophy being solely a product of Western thought stems from the legacy of colonial thinking. For this reason, they label Western thought as "philosophy" while referring to non-Western thought as "wisdom" and thereby excluding it from philosophy (Iremadze and Reinhold, 141-142).

Starting with Husserl's critique of the Enlightenment, the philosophical tradition that identified 'the crisis of Europe' argued that this crisis was the unavoidable consequence of the prior philosophy's subject-oriented and monologic nature, rendering it impervious to cultural distinctions and other traditions of thought. Although Husserl and his successors attributed this crisis to Europe's internal dynamics, the real problem was the impasse reached by a way of thinking unaccustomed to intercultural philosophy and polylogue.

Transitioning from the 19th to the 20th century, some philosophers believed their field needed to be redefined and restructured in the face of rapidly advancing scientific disciplines. The phenomenology school pioneered this effort. Husserl, originally a mathematician, vehemently opposed the quantification of life. The crisis in the philosophical world in Europe, societal upheavals, and significant advancements in natural sciences, which led to their detachment from philosophy, caused a kind of identity crisis (Güzeldere 2019).

In the early 20th century, it was the German philosopher Edmund Husserl (1859-1938) who declared that Europe was experiencing political and social turbulence, in addition to being in a philosophical deadlock. Husserl, whose system of thought was built on a critique of the Enlightenment, stated in his 1935 Vienna lectures that European nations were ailing and Europe was undergoing a crisis (Husserl, 270).

The crisis was essentially the shaking of confidence in the rationalism that Enlightenment thought sought to establish. The positivist scientism established by the Enlightenment and its institutionalized form, the French Revolution, was losing its power. What was truly declining, even collapsing, was Kant's reason, which, when it came to the French Revolution, disregarded any opposing views, the terror, and the scandals that occurred. The close link established between the French Revolution and Kant rested on the proximity, or rather a kind of short circuit, between what Kant did in philosophy and what the French Revolution did in politics (Agtaş - Yılmaz 826).

What Husserl saw as a crisis was the distress within modern sciences. It was a crisis of reason that reduced personal experience to scientific experiment and detached the subject from their own experience. Science had been reduced to positivism, and Husserl viewed this as positivism beheading philosophy (Husserl, 9). Husserl was against the natural sciences' claim to objectivity and their mathematicalization of the living world, which eradicated humanity's existential connection to the world and the meaning of the world. For this reason, while distinguishing philosophy from positive sciences with a precise definition of science, he argued that positivism would not grant philosophy the status of a precise science. Husserl contended that the basis of all knowledge was the investigation of the fundamental structure of consciousness, and therefore, pure (transcendental) phenomenology, a truly universal and a priori discipline, formed the eidetic or photographic foundation of the sciences (Gödelek, 18).

Martin Heidegger (1889-1976), Husserl's student, described the crisis in Europe in his 1933 election support letter to Hitler: "We have ceased to idolize baseless, powerless thinking. We see the end of philosophy serving it. We are confident that the clear rigor and appropriate certainty of the simple inquiry into the essence of being will return" (Heidegger, 2018).

Heidegger believed that the Greek philosophy had confronted humans with truth, but the Enlightenment and science had alienated them from it (Delice, 326). However, he diverged from his teacher Husserl regarding the way out of the crisis, stating that the issue was ontological. This was because technology had obscured the truth of being and alienated humans from it, by making them forget about death. For Heidegger, modern man was one who had drifted away from his own essence, that is, from the consciousness of death.

Emmanuel Levinas (1906-1995), while criticizing his teacher Heidegger's analysis of being, brought a new perspective and stated that being was a burden for humans. He argued that humans are constantly in a state of flight due to exposure to being or the stifling nature created by being. From this, he arrived at an anonymous definition of being, which he called "existence without existents," contradicting Heidegger. For him, being was a subjectless, rustling silence (Acar, 96).

From its emergence in the 19th century until the end of the 20th century, the internal change or evolution within the phenomenology school is remarkable. Husserl's epistemological and Heidegger's ontological claims of philosophical certainty began to be eroded with Levinas, giving way to uncertainty. The other, the stranger, and their ethics, which began to become prominent in Levinas's thought, would transform into the issue of the legitimate existence of the different in Jean-François Lyotard (1924-1998). Therefore, it can be said that the critique of the Enlightenment, which began with Husserl, was brought to its natural conclusions by the postmodernist thinkers of the phenomenology school.

The Crisis of Western Thought

Until the second half of the 19th century, truth and its knowledge were separated, and it was argued that truth could be reached through manifestations, revelations, reflections, and signs—that is, phenomena. But from the second half of the 19th century onwards, the distinction between truth and manifestation disappeared; it began to be argued that there was no truth other than what was seen and intuited. The role of phenomenology in this change is significant. Although phenomenology perhaps did not reject truth, it reduced it to the visible. The turning point for the denial of truth and the transition to positivism from there is Nietzsche. In a condition where the concept of truth remained in the domain of the church, Nietzsche's declaration of the death of God was a reaction to the knowledge represented by the church.

Heidegger blamed Platonism for the crisis that encompassed Kantian and Hegelian philosophy, arguing that it severed philosophy from its Greek roots. The situation was a crisis of such magnitude that Kant's philosophy, based on Western-Christian metaphysics, could find no way out (Heidegger, 2008: 10).

Heidegger considered Platonism a breaking point in philosophy and metaphysics. Platonism states that we can acquire knowledge by looking at the manifestations and revelations of being. But while we could reach ideas through a chain of stages, in Husserl's phenomenology, the intermediate stages and degrees are abolished, allowing us to access what reason grasps in a single stroke. The condition for this is to bracket and eliminate all assumptions, prejudices, and knowledge belonging to the external world.

In Plato, there is an existence independent of human comprehension. That is, in Platonism, being and essence are central, and humans try to understand them. Descartes, on the other hand, developed a new system based on the idea that there is no being outside what reason grasps, placing reason (human) at the center. Like Platonism, Descartes also relies on objective knowledge. Husserl's difference is that he takes subjective experience as his basis.

According to Kant, we can only have knowledge about what appears, manifests, and is visible. We cannot know the essence and truth. What is known to us through perception and sensation is what is visible. Hegel, in "Phenomenology of Spirit," also described the phenomenon, or what is visible, as various manifestations of the spirit or universal reason or absolute reason in the course of history. The absolute introduces itself as a phenomenon at various stages of history, finally reaching its perfect form of recognition as essence grasped by reason and achieving a state of perfected consciousness. Thus, the phenomenon stands in opposition to the absolute "perfect truth." Its existence is dependent and is among the manifestations of truth.

Kant believed that the realm of a priori knowledge existed in the structure of consciousness. Therefore, for experience to be possible, it had to rely on these a priori principles (Kant, 2002: 53). Husserl changed this, arguing that the a priori realm would be acquired through method (Taşkın, 155). By basing the perception of things on methodically determined a priori principles, and prioritizing experience rather than what is given in advance, there is no doubt that this shift from universality opens up space for the legitimacy of differences (different cultures), because this is a matter related to the life-world. According to Husserl, all science and philosophy emerged in the 7th century BC in Greece as a result of a change in the assumptions and opinions related to the Greek life-world. The world of practical values that forms the historical basis of today's European culture also has its own essence and objectivity (Sözer, 16).

Husserl, unlike his teacher Brentano, held that intentionality was not an empirical-psychological concept but indicated an a priori, ideal structure applicable to all matters of consciousness. It is because intentionality is defined in this way that Husserl could assert that the entire world is constituted in our consciousness (Taşkın, 157). The subject's identifying with and containing within themselves the object they are directed towards, rather than seeing it as something ready-made outside themselves, will more than suffice for the empathetic emotional experience that will best regulate social relations.

In Husserl, phenomenon gained a new meaning. According to him, phenomena exist in the being of essence/quiddity. They are grasped by reason without any assumptions or prior mental constructs. The empirical intuition of reason is what is observed in essence and quiddity. Its essential characteristic is related to the mind's reflection upon it and its directedness towards it.

Husserl used phenomenology to emphasize the modes of intentionality of the mind and to organize epistemology. His phenomenology examines human consciousness by distinguishing between indirect and direct consciousness, studying it as mental phenomena that are immediately apparent in the mind and may even lack objectivity.

Husserl believed that every mental activity had a specific "mode of intentionality." That is, what our mind reflects upon occurs at a certain moment due to a specific mental orientation. However, that being might not be an objective being through mental contemplation. For Husserl, the subject of philosophy and awareness is precisely these matters: everything we experience, whether it exists or not.

Husserl called the shift of control from philosophy to science a "crisis" and stated that European culture was experiencing a crisis because it had lost its existential purpose. However, we might consider that he overlooked the fact that phenomenology itself was one of the architects of this crisis. Because if the spirit of Europe is philosophy, and philosophy is the science of everything, why would philosophy be necessary under the dominance of phenomenology? If phenomena describe quiddity and essence, is there a need for any tool other than natural sciences to discover being?

It is true that Husserl changed the Enlightenment's acceptance of certainty and introduced the idea that phenomena reveal the essence of being, thus making the pure ego the realm of certainty. According to him, the essence of the world was dependent on consciousness. Therefore, the essence of all objects could be accessed in pure consciousness. In this case, the pure ego denoted absolute being and also the realm of essences. Since the pure ego was the realm of essences, it was the realm of certainties, and phenomenology, by finding a method to reach pure consciousness, would have fulfilled its claim to be a precise science if it could 'constitute' essences in transcendental consciousness (Taşkın, 152).

According to Husserl, human sciences and social sciences, that is, concrete humanistic disciplines, when they treat humans as a mere fact, isolate them from their individual life, history, and subjectivity. This restricts their reason-based aspects and creates blindness regarding the meaning of human existence (Husserl, 2). Positive sciences, with their claim to objectivity, ignored meaning and aimed to quantify, measure, and formulate everything they dealt with. According to Husserl, this was the source of the crisis caused by positivist sciences in Europe. Sciences focused solely on facts produced people focused solely on facts (Husserl, 6).

Heidegger hoped to develop a suitable transcendental philosophy. However, Heidegger was against the idealism of the Neo-Kantians, whose Platonism was quite evident. He also criticized the idealistic aspect he saw in Husserl. Heidegger was seeking to design a transcendental philosophy that was neither idealist nor realist (Dostal, 277).

In fact, Husserl and Heidegger's opposition to objectivism and their replacement of it with subjectivism were expected to prevent this course. But the assertion that the existent reveals itself as it is, placed them in the same position as the objectivists.

Nevertheless, it is also true that Husserl's epoché method, by refraining from judgment, could open the way for understanding different cultural existences without prejudice. Levinas used the method of refraining from judgment to establish respect for the other. This can be described as a prophetic compassion and love (Simmons, 428).

Husserl's phenomenology, which argues that things are what they are as they appear and thus does not allow for ontological distinction, accepts differences and the other in social relations as they are, defining them as they define themselves. It does not seek another existence beyond what is apparent and prevents discrimination that would create attributed ontological reality for differences. This is the same as Heidegger's objection to Plato's idea that the place of truth is not in appearance but in the "thing" itself (Dostal, 281).

Here, in an aside, the linguistic effect of phenomenology can be considered the death of hermeneutics. The tendency to see what we observe in the literal text of a sacred scripture as also its meaning gained strength with phenomenology.

For Levinas, the issue, unlike for Heidegger, was to exit from being. In "On Escape," he speaks of the human desire to escape the burden of being. For him, human being is about existential characteristics that cannot be changed. Considering that his existence was targeted during the Holocaust as a Jew, he did not have Heidegger's ease in identifying being. For him, being was the state of being nailed to one's own body. He said, "The weight of being falls upon us" and emphasized the impossibility of being otherwise.

Levinas had realized that universalist and objectivist thought could not prevent racism. Enlightenment thought is therefore not safe for minorities. Only subjective thought can give this security to humans. According to Levinas, the error of European philosophy was to make a mind-body distinction and to identify the Self with thought. However, the Self was identical with the body. By identifying the Self with the body, he took an important step in the fight against racism (Direk, 141).

Phenomenological Multiculturalism

Husserl, in order to save philosophy from its decline against positive and experimental sciences, proved that it too could be a science capable of attaining certainty, but he could not break away from the Enlightenment's problem of certainty. Lyotard, while opposing meta-narratives, was in fact also objecting to universal and general discourse. He even stated that the modern project's meta-narrative of progress had cost humanity dearly enough (Kılıç, 116). Thomas Bauer, in The Culture of Ambiguity, explains that Western thought shifted towards certainty-driven thinking from the 19th century onwards, and that the certainty-driven fundamentalism in the Islamic world was also influenced by this (Bauer, 49). This adventure resulted in outcomes detrimental to humanity. Cultural pluralism suffered a major blow. Political pluralism and democracy, however, remain nominally intact.

In the model of Habermas, the living representative of the Frankfurt School, the unitary nature of the public sphere where public opinion is formed is essential. In The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, while he spoke of the democratic foundation of the public sphere, he did not attribute structural value to cultural pluralism. The feminist Nancy Fraser, who believes in the cultural pluralism of democracy, therefore began by objecting to the unitary model of the public sphere and instead proposed multiple public spheres. According to Fraser, the remedy for social injustice is not the redistribution of political or economic goods, but cultural recognition. If this is achieved, all forms of mis-sharing and mis-distribution will spontaneously disappear (Fraser, 19).

We understand from his student Heidegger's assertion that the real problem is ontological, that Husserl's epistemological method would not be sufficient for exiting the Enlightenment's universalist and certainty-driven paradigm. But perhaps out of concern that Heidegger's ontology also could not provide a solution to the problem concerning the existence of the other and the different, Levinas placed ethics first and drew particular attention to the problem of otherness (Bernet, 236).

It is evident that Heidegger's ontology created power. Levinas objected to this and advocated for ethics. Because ontology is violence. This truth can be seen in the correspondence between Heidegger and his student Herbert Marcuse (1898-1979), who wrote to his teacher from the USA, where he had fled and sought refuge from Germany.

In the correspondence, which began with Marcuse's letter to Heidegger in August 1947, continued with Heidegger's reply in January 1948, and concluded with Marcuse's final letter dated May 1948, Marcuse appealed to his teacher: "Nazi ideology and philosophy are irreconcilable. If you are a Nazi supporter, then you are not a philosopher. But the teacher from whom I learned philosophy between 1928-32 is the same person as in 1933-34. So, which is true? In 1933 you sided with the Nazis and later did not retract. Shouldn't you openly declare in public that you are against Nazi ideology? I am writing this letter despite the opposition of my friends. For years we waited for an explanation from you that would free you from the Nazi label. Because we cannot separate the philosopher-Heidegger from the human-Heidegger. But you always remained silent. Do you truly want to be remembered like this [as a Nazi supporter] in the history of thought?"

Heidegger, in his reply, translated the superiority of ontological meaning into political language: "I had believed that National Socialism would cause a spiritual awakening and protect Western civilization from the disaster of communism. Today, I am of the opinion that only a few lines from my speeches of that day were incorrect. I resigned from the rectorship in 1934, but it is true, I said nothing critical of the Nazi regime. If I had, it would have been the end of me and my family. After 1945, I also remained silent because former Nazi supporters had switched sides, and I did not want to associate with them. Similar crimes against humanity that you say the Nazis committed against the Jews were committed by Allied soldiers against Germans at the end of the war. The difference is that the German people were kept unaware of what the Nazis did, but you know about the crimes of the Allies. I hope you do not believe in false propaganda and rumors that distort the truth. I hope that one day you will rediscover the philosopher whose student you were in my works" (Güzeldere, 2019).

In his call to action for the 1933 elections, Heidegger also referred to the law of existence: "Not ambition, not the pursuit of fame, not blind obstinacy, not a lust for power, but on the contrary, only this manifest, unconditional will for self-responsibility in taking up and mastering the destiny of our people, has forced the leader to withdraw from the League of Nations. This is not a turning away from the togetherness of these peoples; quite the opposite: with this step, our people are complying with the self-law of human existence, which every people, if it still wishes to be a people, must first obey" (Heidegger, 2018).

In Time and the Other, Levinas speaks of the necessity of pluralistic philosophy (Bernasconi, 269). This is a break from the Parmenidean tradition—to which Heidegger belonged—which states that being is one and nothing can be spoken of outside of being (Levinas, 2005: 62). Levinas wanted to build pluralism by breaking away from the One. He started the thought that makes the Other possible from here. Because philosophies that favored the One assimilated the Other into the Same (Levinas, 2003: 134). If they couldn't assimilate, they found a way to reduce it. Levinas sought a way to go from the same to the other, accepting this as the possibility of the opening of time. The past is a now held alone, and the future is a coming now (Levinas, 2003: 253). Phenomenological time, as opposed to ordinary time, is also the method of Husserl and Heidegger.

An example of Heidegger's attempt to make space for different cultures in philosophy, despite his commitment to ontology, is his interest in Buddhism. According to the recollections of his students and critics, in the 1920s, while working on Being and Time, he was familiar with classic texts of Chinese Taoism and Japanese Zen Buddhism and established personal connections with thinkers from the Far East (Wei, 160). Heidegger posed the question: "Is it necessary and legitimate for East Asians to follow European conceptual systems?" (Wei, 162).

Heidegger pursued this project through language. He used the metaphor of "the house of being" to describe the relationship between being, language, and the people who speak it, stating: "Language is the house of being, in which being dwells by taking up lodging. In this, man belongs to being by guarding the truth of being" (Wei, 163).

According to him, humans find a suitable dwelling for their own existence or being in language. Thus, the ontological status of language challenges the common assumption that people own language in the same way they own their homes. Language is not like a simple accommodation built and owned by an individual. Language is a collective historical and linguistic accommodation that already owns or claims this individual, even before they learn to speak their own language (Wei, 163).

The phenomenological "life-world" forms the theoretical basis for the openness of the world. The constitutive relationship between the individual and the world, the interactive relationship at the intersubjective level between different cultural worlds, the free nature of truth and its existence in the open world, and the formation of the structural life-world—all these topics demonstrate the open nature of the world in a phenomenological way.

Starting from these ideas, "phronesis" as "reflective judgment" and "fear" as an ethical emotion based on family experience become a practical stance consistent with phenomenology's understanding of the "life-world." Thus, the features of publicity and intersubjectivity of the open world are preserved. This stance, in the face of a multicultural world, emerges as a brand new practice of intercultural philosophy, differing from centralism within a monistic framework and comparative philosophy within a dualistic framework. Such a practice of intercultural philosophy is "polylogue." That is, it is based on the principles of difference and equality and seeks "overlapping consensus" in multi-participant discussion. Through polylogue, the harmonious life of the human community is built (Jun, Abstract).

Translated by Gemini

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