ABSTRACT
Although our actions in everyday life are generally not based on scientific knowledge or any obvious relationship to the dimension of the essence logos, our entire day-by-day activity is an expression of knowledge: when we get up in the morning, wash ourselves, prepare breakfast and eat it; when we walk or drive to work, proceed to work our way through whatever is at hand, chat with colleagues or business partners; when we go shopping, tidy up our apartment or clean it; when we meet with friends for sporting activities, going to a concert, the cinema or theatre; when we, together with many others in our cultural environment, celebrate festivities such as Christmas or Easter, then we know – more or less precisely – what we are to do. In the same way we know how to behave when at school or university, in church, at the doctor or in a courtroom – we know that we speak differently to our boss or colleagues than we would when in the company of friends or in our regular bar. We know that we are to be quiet in a concert, but can go ahead and yell at a sporting event. Sometimes we have a greater or lesser share in such knowledge (e.g. when we are uncertain of ourselves), sometimes we even behave ‘inappropriately’ – that is to say, we act in a manner unbecoming to the situation without actually expressly violating a written rule or contravening scientific knowledge. This type of everyday knowledge is grounded above all in experience and routine – in association with an instinct or feeling for the current situation. Our knowledge of life, that knowledge that guides us through our existence in the world we live in on a day-to-day basis, we subsume under the generic term existence ‘logos’. The knowledge of the existence logos, dealt with as a philosophical topic as early as the times of Plato and Aristotle (384-322 bc), has developed into an important object of philosophical analysis, particularly since the late stages of the nineteenth century. ‘Phenomenology’1 strives to make such knowledge cognisant and transparent in its nature. Only with the emergence of phenomenology was it possible to show to what degree the world, as it takes form through our lives, and provides our lives with their social and intellectual space, differs from what is called ‘world’ in the concepts of the scientific logos. Phenomenology is the science of the logos of phenomena. A phenomenon, in ancient Greek ‘phainomenon’, is ‘that which appears’. Phenomenology deals
with appearances in space and time, not with what Kant calls the ‘things-inthemselves’. It is not interested, however, in appearances as they are derived from the procedures of the scientific logos, but rather with appearances as they concern us in the structures and processes of our everyday world, ones that move us to suffering and joy; to exertion, anxiety, labour and celebration. It does not concern itself, therefore, with the phenomena that have been prepared and dissected into objects of science, but rather with those that exist in our day-to-day dealings. Phenomenology means to become cognisant of our everyday knowledge, without shaping it into the form of objectivising science. The particular characteristic of the phenomenological approach towards the world of life can be illustrated by means of a famous example from Augustine: ‘What is time?’ he asks in his Confessions and continues: ‘As long as no one asks me, I know it, but as soon as someone asks me, and I must explain it, I know it not.’2 Someone asked for an explanation must meet the demands of terminological clarity and logical conclusiveness, things which refer to the horizon of the scientific logos. But the term ‘time’ with all its implications transcends such a framework. Long before the scientific logos attempts to subject time to a definition, however, we understand each other when we say: ‘It’s time to go’, ‘Do you have time tomorrow?’, ‘Our time together passed too quickly’ or ‘There’s no time left for that’. The concern of phenomenology is the communication of the knowledge we express in our daily activity, without expressly owning or articulating it. Both the essence logos and the scientific logos display a tendency to not tolerate the coexistence of any other logos. So not only do they reciprocally dispute each other’s claim to truth, but they are also unwilling to recognise the approach that shall be denoted in the following as the existence logos.
