Читать книгу The Elegance of the Hedgehog - Muriel Barbery - Страница 18

After one month of frenetic reading I come to the conclusion, with immense relief, that phenomenology is a fraud. In the same way that cathedrals have always aroused in me the sensation of extreme light-headedness one often feels in the presence of man-made tributes to the glory of something that does not exist, phenomenology has tested to the extreme my ability to believe that so much intelligence could have gone to serve so futile an undertaking. As this is already the month of November, there are no cherry plums available. At times like this therefore – eleven months of the year in actual fact – I have to make do with dark chocolate (70%). But I know in advance the outcome of the test. Had I but the leisure to bite into the standard metre, I would slap myself noisily on the thighs while reading, and such delightful chapters as ‘Uncovering the final sense of science by becoming immersed in science qua noematic phenomenon’ or ‘The problems constituting the transcendental ego’ might even cause me to die of laughter, a blow straight to the heart as I sit slumped in my plush armchair, with plum juice or thin driblets of chocolate oozing from the corners of my mouth …

When you set out to deal with phenomenology, you have to be aware of the fact that it boils down to two questions: What is the nature of human consciousness? What do we know of the world?

Let’s start with the first question.

For millennia now, by way of ‘know thyself’ to ‘I think therefore I am’, mankind has been rambling on about the ridiculous human prerogative that is our consciousness of our own existence and above all the ability of this consciousness to make itself its own object. When something itches, a man scratches and is aware that he is scratching. If you ask him, What are you doing? he’ll reply: I’m scratching myself. If you push your questioning a bit further (are you aware that you are conscious of the fact that you are scratching yourself?) he will again reply, Yes; thus, ad infinitum to as many are-you-aware-and-conscious questions as you wish. Does this, however, leave man with any less of an itch to know that he is scratching and is aware of it? Can reflective consciousness have a beneficial influence on the order of the itching? Nay, not in the slightest. Knowing that it itches and being conscious of the fact that one is conscious of knowing it has absolutely no effect on the fact of the itching. As an added handicap one must endure the lucidity that results from this wretched condition, and I would wager ten pounds of cherry plums that such lucidity merely serves to exacerbate an unpleasant condition which my cat, for example, can eliminate with a quick flick or two of his rear paw. But it seems so extraordinary to us – no other animal is capable of this and in this way we escape our own animal nature – that as human beings we are able to know that we are in the process of scratching ourselves; this pre-eminence of human consciousness seems to many to be the manifestation of something divine that is able to escape the cold determinism in us to which all physical things are subject.

All of phenomenology is founded on this certainty: our reflective consciousness, the sign of our ontological dignity, is the only entity we have that is worth studying, for it saves us from biological determinism.

No one seems aware of the fact that, since we are animals subject to the cold determinism of physical things, all of the foregoing is null and void.