The Phenomenology of Questioning

In my thesis entitled 'The Phenomenology of Questioning', I trace the development of questioning through the presentations of phenomenology in Edmund Husserl, Martin Heidegger, and Jan Patočka. Beginning with Husserl's motto 'to the matters themselves', now reinterpreted as a questioning means to re-experience the things themselves, I highlight the important distinction between the content of phenomenology (the collection of descriptions, concepts, structures, etc.) and the practice of phenomenology (using questions as a means to return the phenomena themselves in order to re-experience them anew). Following this legacy, Heidegger is shown to follow Husserl's phenomenology as presented in the Logical Investigations over and against its later development as it is presented in Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology. In so doing, Heidegger develops phenomenology into a philosophy of possibility that preserves questions while also answering them. Continuing this questioning philosophy, Patočka explicitly develops what remains more implicit in the work and thought of both Husserl and Heidegger, namely, phenomenology as understood a collection of preserved questions that elicit original experiences for further consideration. In light of the work Husserl, Heidegger, and Patočka have done in interpreting and in the development of the activity of questioning in their work, I draw from phenomenology a way of 'thinking in questions' in general. I claim that the activity of questioning represents a powerful way to interact with possibility in thinking and experiencing as a means to stabilize and destabilize our experience, ideas, and claims. Despite the fact that all three thinkers hold different and, in some cases, incompatible answers, their reflections can all nonetheless be unified under the same phenomenological questions: such as 'what is phenomenology?', 'what is the phenomenon?' and 'what is experience?'. Furthermore, this unity of questions does not collapse the individual differences between Husserl, Heidegger, and Patočka but in fact reveals the source of their philosophies: the wonder of experience, perception, and appearance. Instead of providing a system of philosophy, phenomenology preserves questions and answers: the former represents a practice that the beginner must undertake and master in order to fully experience for themselves, and thereby fully understand, the latter.status: publishe