Husserl's Phenomenology

I love studying at NCKU. The Master's program of Foreign Language and Literature has excellent courses about fascinating subjects. All the courses and reading material is in English (thank goodness), but this doesn't make it less challenging. Reading Moby Dick doesn't get smoother just because it's in my native tongue, however, compared to my Taiwanese classmates who are studying the same subjects in English, their 2nd language, I'll admit that it's easier for me than them.

A long with classes in Post-Colonial, Minority, British or American literature, which center on great novels, we also have some classes on Literary Criticism - or the philosophy of interpreting written texts. Right now I have a class on Levinas, examining how his theories of "The Other" have influenced modern novels. And as a pre-cursor to Levinas, we have to study Heidegger, and before we get to Heidegger, we need to be introduced to Husserl.

I'm a philosophy major and so my partner and I were given the first essay to read and report on. (Today is Monday, we have to give the presentation on Thursday.) And I'm not complaining, philosophy is kind of fun - its a lot of old guys who get a high off of sounding more intellectual than anyone else. Every philosopher has had to create a whole new language for himself, giving catchy titles to all of his chief theories, in order to prove that his ideology is really fresh and exciting. And then they write books about things that don't exist and can't be measured. (Levinas writes about "The Other", but also says that "The Other" can never be comprehended. If we understood "The Other", then it would not be "The Other".)

I like to think I'm pretty sharp, but it takes me two or three readings to understand what anybody is talking about. And it's kind of like doing a cross-word puzzle, you have to look for clues in the usage to figure out what the concepts mean, and then apply the meanings into the texts for comprehension. It feels like running in a thick fog, going around in circles, running into trees and rocks. Here's a sample from the assigned reading:

"By making the most arbitrary changes that wholly disregard reality as it is and therefore are best made in our phantasy, the immutable and necessary complex of characteristics without which the thing cannot be conceived is made manifest. All variations have concrete similarities with the same prototype, and the manifold of new instances produced in phantasy is permeated by an invariant and identical content. In terms of this content, all of the arbitrarily performed variations come to congruence, whereas their individual differences remain irrelevant."

Imagine reading 20 pages of that, and then imagine trying to read it in Chinese. That's how hard it must be for my classmates. The professor warned as that it was a challenging course, but its mind boggling to me how any semblance of intelligible meaning can be pulled from a philosophical text, originally written in German, translated into English, and then taught to Taiwanese students who have to convert it into some kind of Chinese equivalent. Incredible.