Phenomenology and Ancient Greek Philosophy: An Introduction

Abstract

Phenomenology, broadly construed, is the study of the meaningful structure of human experience. It is a philosophical tradition that begins with Edmund Husserl, develops with thinkers like Martin Heidegger and Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and is still practiced today, contributing to diverse disciplines like health studies, education and political science. But while the contribution of phenomenology to the study of the self, the body and the world has been widely recognized, there is also another way in which phenomenology remains relevant today. Both phenomenologists and scholars of ancient Greek philosophy are becoming increasingly interested in examining the ways in which the phenomenological tradition intersects, sheds new light on, and re-appropriates Greek philosophy. It is well known that Heidegger’s thought showed a vigorous interest in ancient Greek philosophy, resulting in unorthodox and even violent interpretations of Greek texts. Notwithstanding the idiosyncratic nature of Heidegger’s interpretations, his phenomenological readings of Greek texts during the 1920s exerted influence on a wide range of philosophers and scholars. Gadamer, for example, writes that he visited Freiburg in 1923 “not so much for Husserl’s phenomenology as to learn about Heidegger’s interpretations of Aristotle”. Strauss, Klein, Arendt and Gadamer are only a few of the philosophers who attended Heidegger’s lectures and who continued to focus on Greek philosophy, albeit in ways that differ significantly from Heidegger’s approach. Heidegger, however, is not the only phenomenologist who sought to incorporate Greek philosophy into his thinking. Husserl, for example, made extensive use of Greek terms (e.g. epoché, noesis, noema, etc.) in order to introduce the innovative elements of his phenomenology. Apart from the appropriation of Greek terms for the explication of his own phenomenological intuitions, Husserl’s work exhibits an interest in the genesis of meaning and its historical development, which brings about an explicit emphasis on ancient Greek thinking. Husserl’s and Heidegger’s understanding of their own philosophical projects as having a peculiar relation to a Greek origin, can be taken as an indication that a good understanding of the phenomenological tradition requires a thorough examination of its relation to Greek philosophy. The invigorating interpretations of ancient Greek philosophy offered by thinkers, strictly or loosely related to the phenomenological tradition, such as Arendt, Fink, Patočka and Levinas, to name a few, reinforces this view. Given the vast number of phenomenologists who have shown an interest in Greek philosophy, one way of doing research on the topic of Phenomenology and Ancient Greek Philosophy is to examine the various – and at times