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Alex Cooke "A New Theory of the New? Natalie Depraz's Reading of Husserl" This paper will explore the question of progress from the point of view of phenomenology. In particular, it will attempt to deal with the problem of the "new" in relation to the broader question of time. Rather than accounting for an objective time which can be measured by scientific instruments, phenomenology asks about how one has an experience of time. The question is no longer of how one measures progress by pointing to the accumulation of scientific facts or of determining how "developed" a nation has become. It is a question, rather, of how one has an experience of progress or the new. This paper will explore the attempts by Natalie Depraz to deal with the phenomenological problem of progress. Depraz critiques the usual conception of temporality ascribed to the founder of phenomenology, Edmund Husserl. It is argued that for there to be the experience of time at all, temporality must be originarily asymmetrical. The future must have a different "effect" on experience than the past. This asymmetry constitutes the experience of progress as such. The implications of this theory of the new will be examined in relation to the objective determination of progress. Biography: Alexander Cooke is a PhD student in the Centre for Comparative Literature and Cultural Studies at Monash University. His general research interests are twentieth century French and German philosophy, and is specifically concerned with the presuppositions of hermeneutics and phenomenology. |
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