Discours des Méthodes: The Methods of Philosophy and Realist Phenomenology 9783110329179, 9783110328721

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Josef Seifert Discours des Méthodes The Methods of Philosophy and Realist Phenomenology

Realistische Phänomenologie: Philosophische Studien der Internationalen Akademie für Philosophie im Fürstentum Liechtenstein und an der Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile en Santiago/

Realist Phenomenology: Philosophical Studies of the International Academy for Philosophy in the Principality of Liechtenstein and at the Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile en Santiago Band II/Volume II EDITORS Professor Juan-Miguel Palacios With Professor John F. Crosby and Professor Czesław Porębski ASSISTANT EDITORS Dr. Cheikh Mbacké Gueye Dr. Matyas Szálay EDITORIAL BOARD Professor Rocco Buttiglione, Rom, Italy Professor Martin Cajthaml, Olomouc, Czech Republic Professor Carlos Casanova, Santiago de Chile Professor Juan-José García Norro, Madrid, Spain Professor Balázs Mezei, Budapest, Hungary Professor Giovanni Reale, Milan, Italy Professor Rogelio Rovira, Madrid, Spain Professor Josef Seifert, Principality of Liechtenstein and Santiago de Chile Professor Tadeusz Styczeî, Lublin, Poland

Josef Seifert

Discours des Méthodes The Methods of Philosophy and Realist Phenomenology

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Cordially dedicated

To my dear old friends, the Professors Juan-Miguel Palacios und Rogelio Rovira —

whose deep love for truth and serious pursuit of the ideal of rigorous philosophical thinking are an inspiration and model for me — and

To my dear young Czech and Senegalese friends and colleagues Dr. Martin Cajthaml and Dr. Cheikh Mbacké Gueye —

whose profound commitment to our Academy and to philosophy in the spirit of the IAP have been a tremendous gift to me

Josef Seifert

TABLE OF CONTENTS

DISCOURS DES MÉTHODES THE METHODS OF PHILOSOPHY AND REALIST PHENOMENOLOGY

INTRODUCTION

What is a ‘Method’? .................................................................................. 11 CHAPTER ONE : PHILOSOPHICAL METHODS AS KINDS OF KNOWLEDGE USED IN PHILOSOPHY I. Intuition/Intellectual Vision of Necessary Essences .............................. 18 II. Insight into Necessary States of Affairs Rooted in Necessary Essences .......................................................................... 26 III. Experience, Empirical and a priori Knowledge ................................... 32 IV. Mediated (“Speculative”) Intuitive Knowledge whose Objects are Given “in the Mirror” of Others as a Form of Intuition Distinct from First Order Immediate Intuition of Essences and Immediate Insights .............................................................................. 34 V. Reasoning (Inferring and Demonstrating) and Mediate Deductive Forms of Knowledge as Methods of Philosophy ................................... 37 VI. Intuitive Knowledge of less than Necessary Essences of a Certain Intelligible Kind ............................................................... 42 VII. Immediate Philosophical Knowledge of Real Existence — The actus essendi and Epoché of Essence: A first Break with the Exclusiveness of the Methods of Epoché of Real Existence, ‘Eidetic Intuition (Reduction),’ and Wesenseinsicht ............................ 46

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VIII. The Manifold Methods and Forms of Knowledge of Concretely Existing Beings: A Second Break with the Exclusiveness of the Methods of Epoché and of ‘Eidetic Intuition (Reduction)’ / Wesenseinsicht .............................. 51 IX. Imperfect Understanding and docta ignorantia as Methods of Knowing the Incomprehensible: Apories, Apparent Antinomies, Paradoxes, and the Infinite ................................................................. 61 X. The Importance Experience Holds for All Philosophical/Phenomenological Methods and Its Different Forms and Uses in Philosophy and Empirical Science .................................... 62 CHAPTER TWO: PHILOSOPHICAL/PHENOMENOLOGICAL METHODS INHERENT IN KNOWLEDGE ITSELF AS WAYS TO OBTAIN AND PERFECT KNOWLEDGE CHAPTER THREE: PHENOMENOLOGICAL (PHILOSOPHICAL) METHODS IN THE THIRD SENSE—THE TOOLS (OR TRICKS) USED TO OBTAIN PHILOSOPHICAL KNOWLEDGE I. Abstraction ............................................................................................. 73 II. Free Variation in Imagination ............................................................... 73 III. Methodic Doubt................................................................................... 74 IV. Epoché in the Double Sense of ‘Eidetic Reduction’ of Bracketing Real Existence and of Bracketing Inessential Moments of Essences in Eidetic Reduction......................................................... 78 V. Epoché as Bracketing Opinions of Earlier Philosophers ...................... 85 VI. Transcendental Epoché as an Invalid Method (in the Third Sense) that Presupposes a False Interpretation of the Objects of Philosophical Knowledge .............................................................. 85

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VII. Linguistic Analysis ............................................................................ 87 VIII. Hermeneutics of Texts and History of Philosophy as Tools To Reach Philosophical Understanding of Things — A Transcendental Use of Texts ......................................................... 88 IX. Philosophical Texts and the Things They Speak about ....................... 91 X. The Two Ways in Which the Understanding of Texts Presupposes An Understanding of Things and Can Perform Its Role as Tools for Philosophical Knowledge Only if a “Canon of Transcendence” is Applied in the Hermeneutics of Interpreting Texts ............................... 95 XI. The “Negative Test” .......................................................................... 110

INTRODUCTION

WHAT IS A ‘METHOD’?

The goal of philosophy is to search for the “truth of being,” not just to study the opinions of philosophers.1 But being and truth can only be reached by knowledge; knowledge however, especially philosophical knowledge, requires method and in some sense coincides with method. Therefore, it is clear that the question about the methods of philosophy is of utmost importance for philosophy. This is not to claim that understandding and using an appropriate method would be a sufficient or even the most important precondition of doing good philosophy, as Descartes may have thought and as it might be true for mathematics and some other sciences, or that philosophical knowledge would not require an attitude of openness and wonder and what Max Scheler called an “upsurge” (einen Aufschwung) that also has moral preconditions.2 Nonetheless, the use and understanding of the appropriate method possesses a crucial role for philosophy and it is this theme that shall occupy us in our discours de la méthode or, given the multitude of philosophical methods, in this discours des méthodes. A phenomenological philosophy, i.e., a philosophy in the spirit of the Husserlian maxim and “principle of principles”:3 ‘back to things

1

2

3

As Aristotle and Aquinas put it. See Thomas Aquinas, De Coelo et Mundo, I, 22, n° 9: „Studium philosophiae non est ad hoc quod sciatur quod homines senserint, sed qualiter se habeat veritas rerum.” (The study of philosophy does not aim at knowing what people thought but what the truth of things is.) See Max Scheler, “Vom Wesen der Philosophie. Der philosophische Aufschwung und die moralischen Vorbedingungen.” in Max Scheler, Vom Ewigen im Menschen (Erkenntnislehre und Metaphysik), Schriften aus dem Nachlass Band II, herausgegeben mit einem Anhang von Manfred S. Frings (Bern: Francke Verlag, 1979), pp. 61-99. Edmund Husserl, Ideen zu einer reinen Phänomenologie und phänomenologischen Philosophie I, Hua Bd. 3, ed. H. L. Van Breda, hrsg. v. W. Biemel (Den Haag: Nijhoff, 1950) I, 1. Buch, 1. Abschnitt, § 24:

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themselves, as they give themselves to us,’ requires even more clearly method. For if philosophy is not a mere expression of some subjective originality of our minds, and if we shun doing constructive violence to being, solely intent on discovering being as it gives itself to our mind, we have to be doubly concerned with the right method as a secure way that leads us to a faithful and systematic knowledge of things themselves. And it is such a kind of philosophy, in the degree to which it is faithful to the given, that we call here phenomenological realism or realist phenolmenology.4 Already at this point, we should keep in mind that we do not regard ‘realist phenomenology’ just as a subdivision of a new school born in the 20th century, but much rather as a new and rigorously carried out effort simply to do good and true philosophy that investigates the data in any way in which they are authentically given to philosophical knowledge, staying clear of the host of enemies that easily obstruct our philosophizing in a rigorous and objective, and in a non-reductionistic or an antireductionist, way. It is clear that such an understanding of the task of philosophy is not universally shared and is based on some pre-understanding of the nature of knowledge in general and of philosophical knowledge in particular. Some thinkers understand the task of philosophy precisely as a construction of a system or as an attempt to reduce a plurality of phenomena to a few elements or just to one element, perhaps along the lines of the Presocratics who claimed that everything is water, or air, or fire, etc. Others interpret the task of philosophy according to the lines of Marxism that seeks to reduce philosophy to an expression of class interests, or to a superstructure that would depend on changing purely economic factors, or to a tool in a classDoch genug der verkehrten Theorien. Am Prinzip aller Prinzipen: daß jede originär gebende Anschauung eine Rechtsquelle der Erkenntnis sei, daß alles, was sich uns in der ‘Intuition’ originär, (sozusagen in seiner leibhaften Wirklichkeit) darbietet, einfach hinzunehmen sei, als was es sich gibt, aber auch nur in den Schranken, in denen es sich da gibt, kann uns keine erdenkliche Theorie irre machen. Sehen wir doch ein, daß eine jede ihre Wahrheit nur aus den originären Gegebenheiten schöpfen könnte.

4

As we shall see, we will have to reinterpret this principle differently than Husserl in many ways so as to make it an adequate instrument of doing philosophy proper. See Josef Seifert, “Was ist Philosophie? Die Antwort der Realistischen Phänomenologie”, Zeitschrift für philosophische Forschung 49 H 1 (1995), 92-103.

Introduction

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struggle. Still other psychologistic and existentialist thinkers interpret philosophy as an expression of feelings or existential interests, or aims of compensation of frustration, etc. None of these interpretations of the nature of philosophical knowledge can attribute to method the same weight and understand it in the same way as a conception of philosophy as a return to things themselves. Of course, in order to justify this understanding of philosophy, in contrast to the many conflicting conceptions of it, the thing itself of philosophy and its object will have to justify rationally our understanding of philosophical method. While such a way to philosophize was intended, and greatly inspired, and even raised to a completely new level of reflective and methodic awareness, by Husserl, we feel more obliged to truth than to him and hence have to seek and to use methods of philosophy that allow us to carry out the original intention of phenomenology to arrive at what gives itself to human knowledge and thus to a corpus veritatis,5 even when things 5

I might here refer to the words of the realist phenomenologist Balduin Schwarz, who puts, in his book Ewige Philosophie. Gesetz und Freiheit in der Geistesgeschichte (Leipzig: Verlag J. Hegner, 1937; 2. Aufl. Siegburg: Schmitt, 2000) Thomas Aquinas as model of a philosopher and a phenomenological realist. My own translation from the German, pp. 120-123: There was a great threat for the spiritual world to break apart, the old appeared worthy of respect but impotent; the new appeared fascinating but disruptive. It is the incomparable merit of Saint Thomas to have approached the situation of his time with no other question than with that of truth. Through the mere defense of a tradition, the mere hint at its greatness, at the authorities which stand behind it, one cannot banish such an elementary event as the becoming apparent of new aspects of reality. Thomas possessed the intellectual “nerves” — if we are allowed to use this term — to distance himself from the safe grounds of Augustinianism. Instead of seeking, in order to save as much as possible, a compromise with the New (i.e., with the Arab and Latin averroistic Aristotelianism), he loved simply the truth and was convinced of its unity, and thus began the gigantic process of the scrutiny of his opponent, the anti-Christian Aristotelianism, and of the clarification, transformation, and new rethinking of Aristotle. Simultaneously he also began a keen examination of the Augustinian teaching, in order to unite everything in the unity of the single great Corpus veritatis. Reneging not the slightest part of truth, never thinking in terms of schools or cliques, ready to learn from everybody, never forgetting the whole over the part, and seeing with incomparable intellectual strength everything in its connection, careful and generous, flexible for every nuance, but keeping his eye unwaveringly directed at the Totum, calm in the progression of thought, never in doubt and caught in details, this became the genius of the Summa, of a high point of human existence. The positive response to a crisis and its mastering probably never was accomplished in such great purity, so wholly convincingly, so universally and forcefully. Without the intellectual deed of Saint Thomas the occident would have been ripped apart and deprived of its inner unity two centuries earlier, because it would not have kept present to itself the unity of being. But now again a whole and inclusive image

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themselves force us to deviate from the ways in which Husserl himself has interpreted phenomenology and its method. According to our view, beginning with his Idea of Phenomenology in 1905 and eight years later in his Ideas (1913),6 Husserl, the great father of phenomenological philosophy and method, has developed highly constructed theories about the phenomenological method and at the same time equally constructed onto-epistemological theories about the transcendental ego, constitution, etc., theories that are neither supported by the given nor lead to knowledge of the selfgiven data and phenomena as “that which shows itself from itself”7 and hence contradict the very essence and logos of phenomenology. Certainly, also in his transcendental phase Husserl has gained a profound phenomeof things was presented, in which everything known heretofore was placed at its right place, possessed its proper weight, as it befitteth the thing; and thereby it became clear in its unity and in its difference from everything else. And at the same time the unity of the living spiritual stream was preserved throughout the centuries…. The golden chain of history linked the present with the past. Thomas may be regarded as the classical type of the genuine liberator from an intellectual crisis. He represents in the history of the mind the good and truly living forces, which a man awakens in himself when he integrates in his life something which he encounters at first as something threatening, or fascinating, but at any rate as something revolutionary and disruptive. Condition [of such an integration] is that he leads the line of life upward, uniting in his vibrant vigilant strength force, audacity and reverence, does not reject anything valuable, but lets it become stronger, does not anxiously repress anything new, but confronts it, resists its assault, banishes its power to fascinate, transforming it into the force of truth and making it part of himself and of his world. One ought to look onto Thomas, to the silent audacity of his intellectual deed, and not on any one of the overbearing revolutionaries without sense of responsibility in the sphere of the intellect, in order to get a sense of the significant truth of the famous saying of Nietzsche: “How much truth does a mind bear, how much truth does he dare? This became for me more and more the real criterion of value. Error is not blindness, error is cowardice... Every achievement, every step forward in knowledge follows from the courage, from the harshness against himself, from the clarity vis-à-vis oneself.”

6

7

See also Balduin Schwarz, Wahrheit, Irrtum und Verirrungen. Die sechs großen Krisen und sieben Ausfahrten der abendländischen Philosophie ed. by v. Paula Premoli/Josef Seifert (Heidelberg: C. Winter, 1996.) Edmund Husserl, Die Idee der Phänomenologie (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1950); The Idea of Phenomenology, transl. William P. Alston and George Nakhnikian (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1964); the same author, Ideen zu einer reinen Phänomenologie und phänomenologischen Philosophie. Martin Heidegger, Sein und Zeit (Tübingen: Max Niemeyer 1963), § 7. Even though I am much more critical of Heidegger’s own phenomenology than of that of the later Husserl, I think his explanation of the meaning of ‘phenomenon’ and of ‘phenomenology’ in § 7 is excellent.

Introduction

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nological grasp and explication of many data; yet a great many of his later theses on the method and objects of transcendental phenomenology are very minimally phenomenological but largely a pure construct, and partly also self-contradictory claims that stand in far sharper contrast to a real unfolding of the given than much of classical, medieval and Cartesian thought. Thus, we have radically to rethink the methods of a phenomenological philosophy whose goal is a return to things themselves and away from all sorts of erroneous misconceptions, reductionisms, and constructions. What then is the method or are the methods that lead to a discovery of truth, to a return to things themselves as they give themselves to our experience, and to a philosophical knowledge that discovers and receives what gives itself to us, instead of engaging in inadequate explanations, premature systematizations and constructed theories? It is not enough simply to practice a method, or to see it in act. It is also important to understand it in general terms. Therefore, an understanding of what the philosophical methods are is a condition of their full, more conscious and more systematic application. Such an investigation of method will show that there is not only one method of phenomenological philosophy but different methods and kinds of method.8 The term ‘method’ means in Greek literally ‘going after,’ ‘following a way,’ pursuing: mæjðodoV, metà $odóV. There is a multiple meaning of mæjðodoV that can likewise refer to activities of plants and animals.9

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Moreover, we will see also that the philosophical interpretation and understanding of the method of philosophy, as well as its application, separates the transcendental phenomenology of the later Husserl, and other forms of interpreting and doing phenomenology, more deeply from realist phenomenology in its encompassing sense than realist phenomenology is distinct from the philosophy of Plato, Aristotle, Augustine, Anselm of Canterbury (Aosta), Bonaventure, René Descartes, Bernard Bolzano, Franz Brentano, Alexius Meinong and many others, who practiced this method in many of their works, even if not systematically and not always. It means any pursuit of something (for example of nymphs); Aristotle also speaks of the method of flying and of the generation of birds, i.e., any way or system according to which any living things, even plants, act; this notion of method is neither restricted to persons nor to knowledge. See Aristotle, On Plants, II, 7:

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Even when restricting the meaning of method, however, to the sphere of persons only, ‘method’ refers to knowledge, acting, making, etc., and thus can have very many meanings.10 The term ‘philosophical method’ is more restricted in its sense, referring always to knowledge,11 but can still signify at least three very different kinds of things: (1) The knowledge itself philosophy uses: such as vision of essences (Wesensschau) and insight into intelligible states of affairs or various forms of knowing real existence. (2) Elements contained in, and required by, a rigorous carrying out of philosophical acts of knowledge: such as analyses of different phenomena and of their essential characteristics and their contrast to their opposites. (3) Special devices, “tricks,” or tools used in order to obtain such knowledge: for example methodic doubt or epoché.

7 · Trees have three different methods of production; they produce their fruit either before their leaves, or at the same time as their leaves, or else after their leaves have grown. We have already described these three methods. 10

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It is not only found in the realm of knowledge but can also refer to making or producing things or even to purely physiological operations which follow a certain rule or system. In the context of knowledge and science, the term ‘method’ refers to the pursuit of knowledge, and here it again has very different meanings: (1) It can refer to the act of knowing; (2) but it also can refer to the mode or system employed in such knowledge, and its elements and special developments. Finally, (3) method sometimes means also a third thing, namely the means by which one obtains knowledge, the modes of treating the subject-matter or even tricks or ruses. Therefore, I encounter great problems with Nathalie Depraz’s “pragmatic phenolmenology,” even if I see many legitimate goals and significant traces of phenomenological realism in her thought. See, among many of her writings, Natalie Depraz, “Concerning Practice,” Chapter 5 of On Becoming Aware: A Pragmatics of Experiencing, Advances in Consciousness Research (43), (Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing Company, 2003); the same author, Lucidité du corps: de l’empirisme transcendental en phénoménologie (Dordrecht/Boston: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 2001.)

CHAPTER ONE PHILOSOPHICAL METHODS AS KINDS OF KNOWLEDGE USED IN PHILOSOPHY Under the ‘method’ of philosophy, then, we can understand first of all the kind of knowledge philosophy uses as its way to get to the things it investigates. While we would not call knowledge as such a philosophical method, because it is a universal way through which we get acquainted with things and therefore common to all types of sciences as well as to everyday knowledge, and, in its universal and indeterminate content, is concretely embodied only analogously on the different levels of human cognition, and hence is not distinctive enough to be called the method of any given field,12 we may very well call a specific kind of knowledge employed in philosophy in order to know its objects ‘philosophical method.’13 We must in fact, broadly speaking, distinguish two different kinds of methods in the first sense: the ones that are specific to a certain field and others that are more general or universal. Certainly, one will observe that some methods of philosophical knowledge and investigation, for example the use of purely formal-logical arguments or deductions from premises according to logical laws, are applicable to all objects and in all sciences (even though they play a very different role in different sciences: in mathematics a more or less dominant one, in literary criticism or history a very subordinate one), while other methods must adapt to the specific nature of the object known and also to the kind and theme of knowledge aspired to in a given discipline or dictated by its formal object. We clearly

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It also exists in so many forms and is therefore such an abstract datum that it is too little determined in its content to be called a method. In this general sense of method, the method of knowing colors would be seeing, the method of knowing mathematical objects intuition and demonstration, etc. Fritz Wenisch speaks of philosophical method in this sense. See Fritz Wenisch, Die Philosophie und ihre Methode (Salzburg: A. Pustet, 1976).

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accept, with Aristotle,14 such a distinction between two kinds of method: universal and particular ones. Nonetheless, even the universal ones such as logical demonstrations, are very different when applied in philosophy, as we shall see, and can therefore, in this form, be regarded as specifically philosophical methods. What then are the different kinds of knowledge we use in a philosophy that undertakes a serious effort to return to things themselves? I Intuition/Intellectual Vision of Necessary Essences The first method of philosophy and phenomenological investigation is a kind of intellectual vision or seeing that refers to essences and to Urphänomene (urphenomena) as such, a term that, as we shall see, not only refers to essences but also to existence. This term Urphänomene (urphenomena) was coined by Goethe, who also made some excellent remarks on the kind of intuitive knowledge by which we grasp them: Even if one were to encounter such an Urphenomenon, there remains the evil that one does not want to acknowledge it as such, and that one is looking behind it and above it for some other thing, whereas we should confess here that we have reached the end-point of such looking.15

14

Aristotle, de Anima I, 1: To attain any knowledge about the soul is one of the most difficult things in the world. As the form of question which here presents itself, viz. the question ‘What is it?’, recurs in other fields, it might be supposed that there was some single method of inquiry applicable to all objects whose essential nature we are endeavouring to ascertain (as there is for incidental properties the single method of demonstration); in that case what we should have to seek for would be this unique method. But if there is no such single and general method for solving the question of essence, our task becomes still more difficult; in the case of each different subject we shall have to determine the appropriate process of investigation. If to this there be a clear answer, e.g. that the process is demonstration or division, or some other known method, many difficulties and hesitations still beset us — with what facts shall we begin the inquiry? For the facts which form the starting-points in different subjects must be different, as e.g. in the case of numbers and surfaces.

15

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Goethes Gespräche mit Eckermann (Leibzig: InselVerlag, 1921) p. 448.

Chapter One

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…The scientist should allow [the archphenomena (Urphänomene)] to stand there in their eternal tranquility and glory and the philosopher should let them enter into his region”16

And elsewhere he adds: The highest thing at which man can arrive... is the sense of wonder, and when an Urphenomenon provokes wonder in him, he should be content; for it cannot accord him anything higher than that, and he should not look for anything higher behind it; for here is the limit. But to humans the sight of an Urphenomenon is normally not sufficient, they think, one has to go farther than that, and they resemble children, who, when they have looked into the mirror, turn it right away around, in order so see what is on the other side.17 (My translation)

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Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Zur Farbenlehre (On Theory of Colors) in: Sämmtliche Werke in 40 Bänden (Stuttgart und Tübingen: J. G. Cotta’scher Verlag, 1840), II. Abtheilung, Nr. 177, vol. 37, p. 68. See also Goethe, (ibid., Nr. 175, Vol. 37, p. 67.) “There are many other texts where Goethe speaks of archphenomena.” Goethe speaks of the Urphänomene, saying that they reveal themselves only to an intuitive knowledge and that “nothing on the order of their [self-]appearing lies above them”: Farbenlehre, ibid., Nr. 175, Vol. 37, p. 67. In Farbenlehre, ibid., Vol. 37, Nr. 247, p. 90, he calls light and darkness archphenomena. See also this and other texts of Goethe from his Farbenlehre and Leisegang’s commentary on Goethe’s concept of Urphänomen and Grundphänomen in Hans Leisegang, Goethes Denken (Leipzig: Felix Meiner, 1932), pp. 157-159; 168 f. Goethe also designates life as something “incommensurable” that cannot be captured by mathematical formulas and ratios: Farbenlehre, ibid., Vol. 37, Nr. 752, p. 246. Of the urphenomenon of life he also says that many explanations of it risk “to transform the living into something dead,” (ibid., 752, p. 246), “covering it up and obscuring it”, instead of “elucidating it and bringing it closer to us.” (Ibid., 754, p. 247). See also Goethe, Nachträge zur Farbenlehre, ibid., Vol. 40, pp. 423425. We prescind here from such errors of Goethe as to think that the meteorological phenomena are living. See Goethe’s article “Über den Granit”, and particularly the passage from it quoted by Hans Leisegang, in his Goethes Denken, p. 90. Goethes Gespräche mit Eckermann, p. 448.

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We may call this intuitive knowledge, with Husserl, categorial intuition (kategoriale Anschauung),18 or also an essential vision (Wesensschau, or Wesenserkenntnis).19 This decisive method of philosophical knowledge is an intuititive grasp of essences that is of no less immediacy than sense vision but differs from it by being an intellectual seeing (which scholastic philosophers called at times “first operation of the mind,” simple comprehension, or simple intuition).20 The term ‘simple’ here does neither 18

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See Edmund Husserl, Logical Investigations, trans. J.N. Findlay (from the second edition of LU), vol. I and II [1970], 2nd ed. (London, Boston: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1982), V-VI. This term was especially used and preferred by Max Scheler. See Max Scheler, Formalism in Ethics and Non-Formal Ethics of Values, trans. Manfred S. Frings and Roger L. Funk (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1973); see also Max Scheler, “Vom Wesen der Philosophie. Der philosophische Aufschwung und die moralischen Vorbedingungen”, pp. 61-99. See Anselm of Canterbury (Aosta), Monologion, 10: Frequenti namque usu cognoscitur, quia rem unam tripliciter loqui possumus. Aut enim res loquimur signis sensibilibus, id est quæ sensibus corporeis sentiri possunt [Op. omnia p. 25] sensibiliter utendo; aut eadem signa, quæ foris sensibilia sunt, intra nos insensibiliter cogitando; aut nec sensibiliter nec insensibiliter his signis utendo, sed res ipsas vel corporum imaginatione vel rationis intellectu pro rerum ipsarum diversitate intus in nostra mente dicendo. Aliter namque dico hominem, cum eum hoc nomine, quod est ‘homo’, significo; aliter, cum idem nomen tacens cogito; aliter, cum eum ipsum hominem mens aut per corporis imaginem aut per rationem intuetur. Per corporis quidem imaginem, ut cum eius sensibilem figuram imaginatur; per rationem vero, ut cum eius universalem essentiam, quæ est ‘animal rationale mortale’, cogitat.

See Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica, in: Opera Omnia, vol. III, Q. 59, reply Q1. Summa Theologica, Complete American Edition in Two Volumes, trans. by Fathers of the English Dominican Province (New York: Benziger Brothers, without year): But intellect and reason differ as to their manner of knowing; because the intellect knows by simple intuition, while reason knows by a process of discursion from one thing to another. Nevertheless by such discursion reason comes to know what intellect learns without it, namely, the universal.

Or Thomas Aquinas, Disputed Questions on Truth, The Disputed Questions on Truth, vol. 1 trans. from the definitive Leonine text by Robert William Mulligan, S. J. (Chicago: Henry Regnery Co., 1952; vol. 2 trans. by James V. McGlynn, S.J. (Chicago: Henry Regnery Co., 1953); vol. 3 trans. by Robert W. Schmidt, S.J. (Chicago: Henry Regnery Co., 1954), p. 51. Vol. I, a. 12, resp.:

Chapter One

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intend to exclude the complexity and manifoldness of traits of an essence (such as of knowledge, being, person, freedom, or love) that is the object of such a knowledge nor the complexity and differentiation of this knowledge itself, but rather is meant to throw into relief the fact of the immediacy, intuitiveness and directness of the contact with its object as opposed to inferential knowledge, and its character of an intellectual or rational ‘vision’ and of a grasp of the essence “as a whole” as opposed to the knowledge of single states of affairs about it. Neither in ancient and scholastic thinkers nor in Husserl, however, we find a clear grasp of those essences which alone permit the human intellect such an essential vision that is obviously impossible for us to use in order

The name intellect arises from the intellect’s ability to know the most profound elements of a thing; for to understand (intelligere) means to read what is inside a thing (intus legere). Sense and imagination know only external accidents, but the intellect alone penetrates to the interior and to the essence of a thing. But even beyond this, the intellect, having perceived essences, operates in different ways by reasoning and inquiring. Hence, intellect can be taken in two senses: First, it can be taken merely according to its relation to that from which it first received its name. We are said to understand, properly speaking, when we apprehend the quiddity of things or when we understand those truths that are immediately known by the intellect, once it knows the quiddities of things. For example, first principles are immediately known when we know their terms, and for this reason intellect or understanding is called “a habit of principles.” The proper object of the intellect, however, is the quiddity of a thing. Hence, just as the sensing of proper sensibles is always true, so the intellect is always true in knowing what a thing is, as is said in The Soul. 6 By accident, however, falsity can occur in this knowing of quiddities, if the intellect falsely joins and separates. This happens in two ways: when it attributes the definition of one thing to another, as would happen were it to conceive that “mortal rational animal” were the definition of an ass; or when it joins together parts of definitions that cannot be joined, as would happen were it to conceive that “irrational, immortal animal” were the definition of an ass. For it is false to say that some irrational animal is immortal. So it is clear that a definition cannot be false except to the extent that it implies a false affirmation.

This twofold mode of falsity is touched upon in the Metaphysics. I 7: Similarly, the intellect is not deceived in any way with respect to first principles. It is plain, then, that if intellect is taken in the first sense — according to that action from which it receives the name intellect — falsity is not in the intellect.

Disputed Questions on Truth, Vol 1 Q 1 A 12 Body p. 51: Intellect can also be taken in a second sense — in general, that is, as extending to all its operations, including opinion and reasoning. In that case, there is falsity in the intellect. But it never occurs if a reduction to first principles is made correctly.

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to know the nature of cows, of the human blood circulation, or of the water-molecule H2O, none of which can be known by essential intuition but must be gathered by a complicated set of observations and inductive inferences derived from them, using a set of empirical studies and tests, experiments, and methods which have been interpreted by Popper and others in a way that denies them any capacity of leading to positive knowledge, reducing their results to the mere status of unrefuted and unfalsified hypotheses; Popper and his followers understand scientific methods as nothing but successful or unsuccessful efforts at falsification of hypotheses that are open to empirical falsification and can never be known to be true but may only be defended in science as long as they are not refuted.21 To rescue the dignity of empirical sciences, it is necessary that we show that and how we indeed do get to know reality by means of such empirical methods, but in a less than absolutely indubitable way and in a manner that differs enormously from the essential intuition that is possible only if the object of our knowledge is an absolutely necessary essence. The most important condition of the value of inductive empirical methods in science is to possess good reasons to assume that the repeated observations (apart from their being subject to a set of rules of induction such as that the observations have to be made in a sufficient number of cases, in different places, under different conditions, etc.) deal with something that possesses a form or type, an objective and general nature and that the reason why repeated observations lead to the same result

21

See Sir Karl Popper, Objective Knowledge. An Evolutionary Approach (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1972); see also his The Logic of Scientific Discovery (New York: Harper & Row, 21968). For a critique of Popper’s neo-positivist negation of a positive cognitive value of empirical science see Josef Seifert, “Objektivismus in der Wissenschaft und Grundlagen philosophischer Rationalität. Kritische Überlegungen zu Karl Poppers Wissenschafts-, Erkenntnis- und Wahrheitstheorie” in: N. Leser, J. Seifert, K. Plitzner (Hrsg.), Die Gedankenwelt Sir Karl Poppers: Kritischer Rationalismus im Dialog (Heidelberg: Universitätsverlag Winter, 1991), pp. 31-74; und “Diskussion”, pp. 75-82; the same author, “Wissen und Wahrheit in Naturwissenschaft und Glauben” in: H.-C. Reichel, E. Prat de la Riba (Hrsg.) Naturwissenschaft und Weltbild (Wien: Hölder-Pichler-Tempsky, 1992), and the same author, The Philosophical Diseases of Medicine and Their Cure (New York: Springer, 2004), Vol. 1, Preface and Introduction; ch. 1.

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precisely lies in such a nature. Without such general natures and an objective foundation of empirical knowledge-claims in them, inductively gained knowledge claims could indeed be equated with not yet falsified hypotheses and induction would be worthless because the sheer number of similar observations and the application of Carnap’s and the Vienna circle’s rules of induction and verification would do nothing to suggest the truth of inductive knowledge claims, as Bertrand Russell’s famous turkey-(or chicken-) example and Alexander Pfänder’s profound analysis of inductive inferences as non-formal (material) inferences show.22

22

See Alexander Pfänder, Logik, Mariano Crespo, ed. (Heidelberg: Universitätsverlag Carl Winter, 2000), pp. 241-249. Russell’s “inductivist turkey” example (quoted by Robert T. Liley) reads like this: The turkey found that, on his first morning at the turkey farm, that he was fed at 9 a.m. Being a good inductivist turkey he did not jump to conclusions. He waited until he collected a large number of observations that he was fed at 9 a.m. and made these observations under a wide range of circumstances, on Wednesdays, on Thursdays, on cold days, on warm days. Each day he added another observation statement to his list. Finally he was satisfied that he had collected a number of observation statements to inductively infer that “I am always fed at 9 a.m.’’. However on the morning of Christmas eve he was not fed but instead had his throat cut.

A similar version is recounted by Massimo Pigliucci in “‘Elementary, dear Watson’ — Thinking About Science,” Skeptical Inquirer, May-June, 2003: Bertrand Russell, with his characteristically dry humor, nicely explained this: he imagined an “inductivist turkey” which is brought to a farm and fed regularly every morning at the same time. The turkey wishes to make predictions about his future, but — being a good inductivist — realizes that he needs a large sample of data before being able to do so confidently. So he collects data on when he is fed, how often, and with what. After 364 days, the turkey feels confident that he has enough particular examples to draw a general conclusion: He will be fed every morning at the same time, with the same amount and type of food. Sadly, the following day was Thanksgiving, and the turkey was instead slaughtered and brought to the farmer’s table. Such are the perils of the non truth-preserving character of induction.

See also Bertrand Russell, The Problems of Philosophy (London/Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1959), pp. 63; 66: A horse which has been often driven along a certain road resists the attempt to drive him in a different direction. Domestic animals expect food when they see the person who usually feeds them. We know that all these rather crude expectations of uniformity are liable to be misleading. The man who has fed the chicken every day throughout its life at last wrings its neck instead, showing that more refined views as to the uniformity of nature would have been useful to the chicken.

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Discours des Méthodes

Essences such as that of the human body that require empirical methods are constituted of highly meaningfully connected elements and moments that are well-ordered, admirable and surprisingly ingenious but are not absolutely necessary, which prevents that they be understood in essential intuition but does not exclude that laws such as that of gravity or the habits of a species of animals possess a certain “natural necessity” which excludes that heavy objects in the free fall move upward or that bees build spider-webs and spiders bee-hives or honeycombs. But because of the lack of absolute necessity and the fact that all these meaningful natures could be different, they do not possess a supreme self-evident intelligibility and can never afford us an essential intuition sufficient to grasp them. Only those essences whose elements hang together in a way that could not be different in any possible world allow the mind to penetrate them in an intellectual essential vision, in a rational intuition, and to gain indubitable certainty about them. Therefore none of these countless natures of plants and animals that surround us or the human body and its circulatory, digestive, respiratory, or nervous systems allow us essential intuition but require painstaking observational and experimental methods to know them. On the other hand, when we deal with numbers, triangles, circles, or knowledge, will, color as such, virtues, personal acts such as hope, we are in front of authentic and objectively necessary essences which allow us this intellectual banquet: rational intuitive knowledge of them. To seek this knowledge by empirical observations, tests, and inductions would be just as absurdly contradicting these intrinsically necessary and intelligible objects as to pretend that the habits and habitat of cows could be known by But in spite of the misleadingness of such expectations, they nevertheless exist. The mere fact that something has happened a certain number of times causes animals and men to expect that it will happen again. Thus our instincts certainly cause us to believe that the sun will rise to-morrow, but we may be in no better a position than the chicken which unexpectedly has its neck wrung. We have therefore to distinguish the fact that past uniformities cause expectations as to the future, from the question whether there is any reasonable ground for giving weight to such expectations after the question of their validity has been raised. The problem we have to discuss is whether there is any reason for believing in what is called ‘the uniformity of nature’. The belief in the uniformity of nature is the belief that everything that has happened or will happen is an instance of some general law to which there are no exceptions.

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intellectual insight into these essences. Phenomenology in its best sense uses precisely as its principal method such a vision of necessary essences, of eide, and penetrates more deeply into them by means of an eidetic analysis that combines the first method of ‘eidetic vision and analysis’ with the second method discussed below. While Husserl began in the 3rd Logical Investigation to distinguish different kinds of essence and of wholes, and differentiates there between what he calls “independent” and “dependent parts”, one meaning of the latter term being “necessary parts” inseparable from an essence,23 he still believed that epoché and the prescinding from existence could transform any essence into an appropriate object of intuitive philosophical knowledge. Not to have distinguished necessary essences from contingent ones and not to have had a clear awareness that there are countless contingent essential unities and natures that only empirical sciences can investigate, was one of the reasons for the method of Wesensschau (intellectual vision of essences) coming into discredit. Not only Husserl, also some of his objectivist and realist followers such as Adolf Reinach, failed to make the crucial distinction between fundamentally different kinds of essence, mistakenly identifying the difference between the objects of empirical and a priori sciences by the question of whether we exercise epoché prescinding from real existence (which would allow us a priori knowledge) or start with the experience of existing beings.24 But this is no adequate explanation at all; we could put in brackets the existence of the brain and concentrate on its essence and still be absolutely unable to understand its essence through rational intuition and insight.

23

24

I developed a critique of confusions of this term in Husserl in Josef Seifert, Back to Things in Themselves. A Phenomenological Foundation for Classical Realism (London: Routledge, 1987), ch. 1; 3; 4. See Adolf Reinach, “Über Phänomenologie” in: Adolf Reinach, Sämtliche Werke. Kritische Ausgabe mit Kommentar, Bd. I: Die Werke, Teil I: Kritische Neuausgabe (1905-1914), Teil II: Nachgelassene Texte (1906-1917), pp. 531-550. English: ‘Concerning Phenomenology,’ transl. from the German (“Über Phänomenologie”) by Dallas Willard, The Personalist 50 (Spring 1969), pp. 194-221. Reprinted in Perspectives in Philosophy, ed. Robert N. Beck (New York: Holt, Reinhart, & Winston, 1961 and 1969).

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Discours des Méthodes

It was only the crucial distinction, first made clearly by Dietrich von Hildebrand, between purely accidental such-being-units, contingent, morphic essences and necessary and supremely intelligible essences (such as of being, person, freedom, knowledge, color, substance, number, space, time, etc.) open to intellectual intuition that allowed to give philosophical intuition of essences a clear basis in such-being experience and to a priori knowledge a firm objective foundation in a certain kind of objects, namely in necessary essences that impose their intelligible laws not only on purely intentional objects of human consciousness but on things themselves and things in themselves. For it is only an essence the moments and elements of which are united in an absolutely necessary and intelligible, and in such a way that they could not be different in any possible world, that permits philosophical and intuitive intellectual vision of essences, whereas the contingent such-being-unities and natures such as that of a cow, of chemical substances, of the circulatory, nervous, digestive system or of the many structures and tissues of the human body, lend themselves only to empirical science because they lack an inner necessary bond between their constitutive elements, such that the claim to know them by purely philosophical intuition would be laughable.25 Moreover, not all of the infinitely many necessary essences that can be objects of objective a priori knowledge (to which, for example, all numbers and basic geometric figures belong) are objects of philosophy but only the foundational, primary, or centrally meaningful ones, such as the essence of time and space, number, life, person, freedom, knowledge, value, moral oughtness, conscience, etc. II Insight into Necessary States of Affairs Rooted in Necessary Essences A second and closely related method of philosophy is a certain kind of the more general phenomenon of knowledge of states of affairs (Sachverhaltserkenntnis), i.e., of the being-a, or not-being-a, of a B, a knowledge to 25

See Dietrich von Hildebrand, Che cos’è la filosofia? (bylingual 4th ed.: engl./ital.), Collana: Testi a fronte n. 46 (Milano: Pompiano, 2001), (with Saggio introduttivo von Paola Premoli De Marchi and Saggio integrativo by Josef Seifert), ch. 4.

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which alone Adolf Reinach assigned the term Erkenntnis,26 and to which, in its superactual form, the concept expressed in the German word “Wissen” corresponds, a term that always refers to states of affairs (in contrast to “Kennen” that can be of things, properties, relations, but never of states of affairs).27 Not any immediate knowledge of states of affairs but only immediate intuition in the more precise sense of “insight into necessary laws and states of affairs rooted in necessary essences,” however, is meant here by this second fundamental method of philosophy. Such an intuitive knowledge of necessary states of affairs does not and cannot have as direct object essences as such, like the first method just expounded, but only states of affairs (Sachverhalte), the “being-a (or not-being-a)-of-B”, and the laws rooted in essences (Wesensgesetze), such as the principle of causality according to which every change and every non-necessary being must have a sufficient efficient cause, or the essentially necessary fact that color presupposes spatial extension, or that willing presupposes consciousness of the object willed, or that moral values and disvalues, unlike aesthetic ones, necessarily presuppose freedom of the agent. Moreover, philosophical knowledge of supremely intelligible states of affairs, rational insight, cannot refer to the countless contingent states of affairs about existence or to states of affairs regarding non-necessary morphic essences, which are only given through observation, induction and other empirical methods, but has 26

27

See Adolf Reinach, Sämtliche Werke, especially “Über Phänomenologie”, pp. 531 ff., and “Zur Theorie des negativen Urteils”, sämtliche Werke. Texktritische Ausgabe in zwei Bänden, Bd. I: Die Werke, Teil I: Kritische Neuausgabe (19051914), Teil II: Nachgelassene Texte (1906-1917), pp. 95 ff. On the notion of state of affairs see Adolf Reinach, “Zur Theorie des negativen Urteils”, in: Sämtliche Werke, pp. 95-140; cf. also Alexander Pfänder, Logic, “The Theory of the Judgment”, trans. Donald Ferrari (Frankfurt: Ontos Verlag, 2008); see also Mariano Crespo, “En torno a los estados de cosas. Una investigación ontológico-formal,” Anuario Filosófico, XXVIII/1 (1995), pp. 143-156; and by the same author, Para una ontología de los estados de cosas esencialmente necesarios, Tesis doctoral. Departamento de Metafísica y Teoría del Conocimiento (Universidad Complutense, Madrid 1995), and Josef Seifert, Sein und Wesen Philosophy and Realist Phenomenology. Studies of the International Academy of Philosophy in the Principality Liechtenstein, (eds.) Rocco Buttiglione and Josef Seifert, Vol. 3 (Heidelberg: Universitätsverlag C. Winter, 1996), ch. 2-3.

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as objects essentially necessary states of affairs. Insight into necessary states of affairs, then, is a second fundamental form of philosophical knowledge (and thereby a second method of the first kind). This method is dependent on the first one. In order to understand, for example, the states of affairs that moral values necessarily presuppose freedom, can be borne only by persons, entail responsibility, etc., or that willing necessarily presupposes some conscious awareness of its object (nil volitum nisi cogitatum), we need first to gain an intuitive grasp of the essence of moral values, of freedom, willing, and responsibility, and can then grasp the supremely intelligible and necessary bond between them, a bond that requires that any moral value necessarily depends on freedom and entails responsibility, or that any act of volition is preceded by some awareness of its object, and countless other essentially necessary laws and states of affairs. These two methods have been used by all philosophers from Antiquity on and may be called the main forms of philosophical knowledge. We find their relatively clear theoretical recognition in Plato’s doctrine of the vision of ideas,28 in Aristotle’s analysis of immediate knowledge of principles that cannot be proven but must be intuitively known, a knowledge to which Aristotle gives the highest praise as being primary, more certain, more foundational, etc. than any knowledge by demonstration.29 Likewise, we 28

29

See especially Plato, Phaedo, and Republic Books 6 and 7, The Collected Dialogues of Plato including the Letters, ed. by Edith Hamilton and Huntington Cairns (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1961, 10th Printing 1980). See also Josef Seifert, Ritornare a Platone. Im Anhang eine unveröffentlichte Schrift Adolf Reinachs, hrsg., Vorwort und übers. Von Giuseppe Girgenti. Collana Temi metafisici e problemi del pensiero antico. Studi e testi, vol. 81, (Milano: Vita e Pensiero, 2000). See Aristotle, Posterior Analytics, trans. by G. R. G. Mure, Part II: Syllogism there may indeed be without these conditions, but such syllogism, not being productive of scientific knowledge, will not be demonstration. The premisses must be true: for that which is non-existent cannot be known — we cannot know, e.g. that the diagonal of a square is commensurate with its side. The premisses must be primary and indemonstrable; otherwise they will require demonstration in order to be known, since to have knowledge, if it be not accidental knowledge, of things which are demonstrable, means precisely to have a demonstration of them. The premisses must be the causes of the conclusion, better known than it, and prior to it; its causes, since we possess scientific knowledge of a thing only when we know its cause; prior, in order to be causes; antecedently known, this antecedent

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find in Descartes’ idea that whatever he sees clearly and distinctly in intellection is true,30 some understanding that there is an original and intuitive knowledge in which objective necessary essences and truths that are not and cannot possibly be made or invented by the mind disclose themselves to us. Descartes’ intention to see clear and distinct ideas, however, as expressed in his earlier writing Discours de la Méthode, while intending no doubt such necessary essences and essential laws rooted in them, uses a much distorted notion of “ideas” found “in our mind.” The Cartesian, historically disastrously fateful, conception of these “ideas” being “innate” in, or placed by God into, our minds in a similar way to which an artist leaves his signature in a work of art, is an immanentistic conception of knowledge that does not at all do justice to the subject-transcendent receptive and intentional essence of knowledge in which we grasp some intrinsically neknowledge being not our mere understanding of the meaning, but knowledge of the fact as well. 30

See René Descartes, Meditations, 9th printing, in two volumes, trans. by E. S. Haldane and G. R.T. Ross (Cambridge/London/New York: Cambridge University Press, 1973), VI, 2: I remark in the first place the difference that exists between the imagination and pure intellection [or conception]. For example, when I imagine a triangle, I do not conceive it only as a figure comprehended by three lines, but I also apprehend these three lines as present by the power and inward vision of my mind, and this is what I call imagining. But if I desire to think of a chiliagon, I certainly conceive truly that it is a figure composed of a thousand sides, just as easily as I conceive of a triangle that it is a figure of three sides only; but I cannot in any way imagine the thousand sides of a chiliagon [as I do the three sides of a triangle], nor do I, so to speak, regard them as present [with the eyes of my mind]. And although in accordance with the habit I have formed of always employing the aid of my imagination when I think of corporeal things, it may happen that in imagining a chiliagon I confusedly represent to myself some figure, yet it is very evident that this figure is not a chiliagon, since it in no way differs from that which I represent to myself when I think of a myriagon or any other many-sided figure; nor does it serve my purpose in discovering the properties which go to form the distinction between a chiliagon and other polygons. But if the question turns upon a pentagon, it is quite true that I can conceive its figure as well as that of a chiliagon without the help of my imagination; but I can also imagine it by applying the attention of my mind to each of its five sides, and at the same time to the space which they enclose. And thus I clearly recognize that I have need of a particular effort of mind in order to effect the act of imagination, such as I do not require in order to understand, and this particular effort of mind clearly manifests the difference which exists between imagination and pure intellection.

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cessary essences and laws. In sharp contrast to the bulk of Cartesian epistemology of inborn ideas, we understand clearly, upon turning our mental eye to the urphenomenon of knowledge, that knowledge is not of this nature as if our minds were a container inside of which ideas exist. The object of objective a priori knowledge are not subjective inborn ideas created in our minds by God,31 but objective natures and essences characterized by an inner, absolute and highly intelligible necessity known with evidence and certainty, as Descartes himself understands them in some absolutely classical texts on the subject in his Meditations V, and elsewhere.32 31

See René Descartes, Discourse on the Method of Rightly Conducting the Reason, and Seeking Truth in the Sciences, (Discours de la Méthode, in: Oeuvres de Descartes, ed. by Charles Adam & Paul Tannery, VI, 1-78), II, 4: By these considerations I was induced to seek some other method which would comprise the advantages of the three and be exempt from their defects. And as a multitude of laws often only hampers justice, so that a state is best governed when, with few laws, these are rigidly administered; in like manner, instead of the great number of precepts of which logic is composed, I believed that the four following would prove perfectly sufficient for me, provided I took the firm and unwavering resolution never in a single instance to fail in observing them. The first was never to accept anything for true which I did not clearly know to be such; that is to say, carefully to avoid precipitancy and prejudice, and to comprise nothing more in my judgement than what was presented to my mind so clearly and distinctly as to exclude all ground of doubt.

For the in many ways misleading and disastrously immanentistic notion — substituting for the immutable essences of which he speaks in his much later work, Meditations — of the clear and distinct ideas immanent in the subject and caused and placed in our minds by God, see ibid., ch. 4: But if we did not know that all which we possess of real and true proceeds from a Perfect and Infinite Being, however clear and distinct our ideas might be, we should have no ground on that account for the assurance that they possessed the perfection of being true. 32

See René Descartes, Meditations V, 5-6: 5. And what I here find of most importance is, that I discover in my mind innumerable ideas of certain objects, which cannot be esteemed pure negations, although perhaps they possess no reality beyond my thought, and which are not framed by me though it may be in my power to think, or not to think them, but possess true and immutable natures of their own. As, for example, when I imagine a triangle, although there is not perhaps and never was in any place in the universe apart from my thought one such figure, it remains true nevertheless that this figure possesses a certain determinate nature, form, or essence, which is immutable and eternal, and not framed by me, nor in any degree dependent on my thought; as appears

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The method of intuitive knowledge of necessary essences requires, in its strict form, an object to which it is appropriate, which lends itself to such a method. This touches the general principle that the object determines the kind of knowledge (method) appropriate to it: colors need to be seen and cannot be heard, music cannot be seen but must be heard, etc. That each method, as the appropriate form of knowledge, must be adequate to its object is an old principle formulated by Aristotle.33 Objects of intuition of from the circumstance, that diverse properties of the triangle may be demonstrated, viz., that its three angles are equal to two right, that its greatest side is subtended by its greatest angle, and the like, which, whether I will or not, I now clearly discern to belong to it, although before I did not at all think of them, when, for the first time, I imagined a triangle, and which accordingly cannot be said to have been invented by me. 6. Nor is it a valid objection to allege, that perhaps this idea of a triangle came into my mind by the medium of the senses, through my having seen bodies of a triangular figure; for I am able to form in thought an innumerable variety of figures with regard to which it cannot be supposed that they were ever objects of sense, and I can nevertheless demonstrate diverse properties of their nature no less than of the triangle, all of which are assuredly true since I clearly conceive them: and they are therefore something, and not mere negations; for it is highly evident that all that is true is something, [truth being identical with existence]; and I have already fully shown the truth of the principle, that whatever is clearly and distinctly known is true. And although this had not been demonstrated, yet the nature of my mind is such as to compel me to assert to what I clearly conceive while I so conceive it; and I recollect that even when I still strongly adhered to the objects of sense, I reckoned among the number of the most certain truths those I clearly conceived relating to figures, numbers, and other matters that pertain to arithmetic and geometry, and in general to the pure mathematics.

The most impressive text of René Descartes on the objective necessity of essences which are discovered and not made by the mind is related to his defense of the ontological argument in Meditationes de Prima Philosophia, Oeuvres de Descartes, ed. by Charles Adam & Paul Tannery, Bd. VII (Paris: J. Vrin, 1983), 1561, V, 10: Atqui ex eo quòd non possim cogitare Deum nisi existentem, sequitur existentiam a Deo esse inseparabilem, ac proinde illum reverà existere; non quòd mea cogitatio hoc efficiat, sive aliquam necessitatem ulli rei imponat, sed contrà quia ipsius rei, nempe existentiae Dei, necessitas me determinat ad hoc cogitandum: neque enim mihi liberum est Deum absque existentiâ (hoc est ens summe perfectum absque summâ perfectione) cogitare, ut liberum est equum vel cum alis vel sine alis imaginari.

33

See also collections of his most relevant texts cited in my Sein und Wesen; and Gott als Gottesbeweis. Eine phänomenologische Neubegründung des ontologischen Arguments (Heidelberg: Universitätsverlag C. Winter, 1996). The most significant text to this effect in Aristotle is Nichomachean Ethics (London: University Press, 1962), I, 2:

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essentially necessary states of affairs are those states of affairs that are rooted in strictly necessary essences. And it is only these necessary essences that lie at the root of the second kind of philosophical method, namely the insight into absolutely necessary states of affairs and essential laws rooted in them. A similar method of rational intuition and insight is found in classical mathematics but could never be applied to the contingent and non-necessary objects of natural science or to the far less necessary facts of history.34 III Experience, Empirical and a priori Knowledge It has been a crucial discovery of phenomenology that experience, with which human knowledge starts, is a far larger domain than mere sense experiences, let alone mere “sense-impressions” or a “chaos of sensations,” as some philosophers assumed without any deeper investigation of the wealth of the notion of experience. It is in no way so that what is given to us concretely in experience would only be some unformed sense data and all the rest our minds would contribute without them being given and received in experience and in the knowledge based thereon. Not only does

Our discussion will be adequate if it has as much clearness as the subject-matter admits of; for precision is not to be sought for alike in all discussions, any more than in all the products of the crafts.

See also Aristotle, Prior Analytics, I, 31: It is clear that it is neither possible to refute by this method, nor to deduce about an accident or property of a thing, nor about its genus, nor in cases in which it is unknown whether it is thus or thus, e.g. whether the diagonal is incommensurate or commensurate. For if he assumes that every length is either commensurate or incommensurate, and the diagonal is a length, he has deduced that the diagonal is either incommensurate or commensurate. But if he should assume that it is incommensurate, he will have assumed what he ought to have proved. He cannot then prove it; for this is his method, but proof is not possible by this method. (Let A stand for incommensurate or commensurate, B for length, C for diagonal). It is clear then that this method of investigation is not suitable for every inquiry, nor is it useful in those cases in which it is thought to be most suitable. 34

There are many other forms of cognition that correspond to other kinds of objects, for example to works of art, other persons, and even to some dimensions of the knowledge of forms and species-plans in nature.

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human experience entail many forms of inner experience of ourselves and of our conscious experiences and acts as well as many experiences of structured and inteligible objects in the world given to the senses both of which are infinitely more than mere “sense impressions.” Experience does not only comprise in addition the experience of other persons through manifold channels of language, of facial expressions of inner feelings and acts, and of the revelation of persons through their acts, but what is given in philosophically relevant experience includes also pure, ideal, and profound essences which are only very partially embodied in concrete objects and persons. Experience has two fundamentally different dimensions both relevant to philosophy: (1) the single or repeated experience of existing beings that is crucial for empirical sciences and to some extent also for philosophy, as we shall see; (2) Experience of essences and such-beings which can occur even in dreams or imagination or fictional objects of works of art. And while pure essential or such-being experience is never enough for empirical knowledge of the historian or scientist who always must make sure whether the contingent facts or natures he investigates are really existing, otherwise his science would be deprived of any objective ground, in philosophy the pure essential experience, the pure such-being experience given with the experience of existing beings or independently of it, is enough as long as one (the philosopher or the mathematician) investigates necessary essences, because these essences are in themselves so potent and filled with meaning that they are autonomous with regard to the question whether we discovered them in an experience of embodied and existing examples or understand them in purely cognitive intellectual manner. The experience of essence from which a philosophical knowledge of essences starts and with which philosophical knowledge partly coincides includes also the rational, cognitive act itself through which we access these pure essences which transcend their concrete embodiments in the world, especially when they possess an ideal perfection rarely or never encountered in our surrounding world, in which we look in vain for perfect justice or love, the essence of which we nevertheless understand sufficiently to use them as criterion to recognize the imperfections of human love and justice.

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Discours des Méthodes IV

Mediated (“Speculative”) Intuitive Knowledge whose Objects are Given “in the Mirror” of Others as a Form of Intuition Distinct from First Order Immediate Intuition of Essences and Immediate Insights While all necessary essences that are objects of philosophical knowledge must be given in some form of such-being experience, it would be wrong to believe that there be not a great differentiation regarding the mode and kind of immediacy or mediacy, or “mediated immediacy,” with which necessary essences and necessary states of affairs rooted in them are given to our experience and philosophical intuition.35 Not all data are so conspicuously and clearly present in our such-being-experience as the phenomena of motion, of color, or even of soul and will, or cognition. It is a common prejudice to believe that a phenomenological philosophical method cannot relate to mediate forms of knowledge and must only consider the immediately given. There exists also indirect knowledge in which other, originally hidden essences, are reflected and co-given in what is more immediately present to us, sometimes as their perfect form, other times as their intelligible ‘opposites’, as we can experience great injustices in our lives but get to know, in this very same negative experience, the essence of justice.36 The most significant and positive form of “mediated immediacy” of knowing necessary essences lies in the knowledge of pure perfections (such as being, existence, person, freedom, justice, goodness, love, unity, etc.) of which we experience immediately in the existing world only finite forms but understand that they themselves permit infinity and that they are even only purely themselves in their infinite form. This ideal perfection of pure perfections is not incarnate in the immediate objects of our concrete experience; therefore they are in some way less intuited than con-intuited

35

36

I have investigated these problems, in part in form of a critical dialogue with JeanLuc Marion, in Josef Seifert, Gott als Gottesbeweis. See William Marra, “Creative Negation”, in B. Schwarz, ed., Wahrheit, Wert und Sein. Festgabe für Dietrich von Hildebrand zum 80. Geburtstag (Regensburg: Habbel, 1970), pp. 75-85.

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or contuited, as Bonaventura put it very profoundly.37 Infinite being, wisdom, truth, justice, love, freedom, knowledge, etc. are not directly given in our experience but we can understand clearly that the essential (or existential) identity of these pure perfections possesses its complete identity only in its infinite form. While an infinite dog, man, stone, etc. would be absurd because infinity contradicts the ratio formalis of these mixed perfections, the opposite is true about pure perfections: only infinite knowledge is truly knowledge unmixed with ignorance, only infinite being is truly being unmixed with non-being and nothingness, only perfect justice is justice itself, only unlimited goodness is goodness itself, etc. Their formal essence is not only compatible with infinity, while the natures of all animals, plants and humans are incompatible with it, but pure perfections only are they themselves when they are infinite.38 This discovery of pure perfections and of their infinity is one of the most stunning discoveries philosophical knowledge is capable of making, and yet the perfect form of the pure perfections is only co-given to our human mind with the finite and imperfect forms of them which we experience immediately. There are also more mysterious, indirectly given data which are not the ultimate fulfillment but the opposite to the characteristics of those beings which we experience directly. For example, we grasp in view of our temporality and that of the world, eternity as a perfect mode of duration in the light of which we then understand the immense imperfection of being and reality in being-in-time. We perceive and intuit the essence of eternity, 37

38

See Kateryna Fedoryka, “Certitude and Contuition. St. Bonaventure’s Contributions to the Theory of Knowledge”, in: Aletheia VI (1993/94), pp. 163-197. See Allan Wolter, The Transcendentals and their Function in the Metaphysics of Duns Scotus (St. Bonaventure, New York: Franciscan Institute Publications, 1946); see also Josef Seifert, Essere e persona. Verso una fondazione fenomenologica di una metafisica classica e personalistica (Milano: Vita e Pensiero, 1989), ch. 5 and 9; the same author, “Essere Persona Come Perfezione Pura. Il Beato Duns Scoto e una nuova metafisica personalistica,” in: De Homine, Dialogo di Filosofia 11 (Rom: Herder/Università Lateranense, 1994), pp. 57-75.; the same author, “The Idea of the Good as the Sum-total of Pure Perfections. A New Personalistic Reading of Republic VI and VII”, in: Giovanni Reale and Samuel Scolnikov (eds.), New Images of Plato. Dialogues on the Idea of the Good, (Sankt Augustin: Academia Verlag, 2002), pp. 407-424, and Gott als Gottesbeweis. Eine phänomenologische Neubegründung des ontologischen Arguments.

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following very rigorous methods, by the mediation of its opposite, temporality, that is immediately given to us and necessarily presupposes its opposite (being-in-time is absolutely impossible without an eternal being sustaining it in existence). Also in many other cases, particularly in our knowledge of God, the positive opposite of characteristics immediately accessible to us such as being in time, are co-given: both as the objective and intelligible metaphysical, logical, ethical or anthropological condition of their possibility and as their source or cause, and also as the only standard in the light of which we perceive the imperfection in which these pure perfections are embodied in this world; we con-tuit and understand eternity because we experience immediately time and because, in virtue of the necessary relations between the (non-self-explanatory) temporality of our being and eternity, eternity is co-given to us with temporality, as the perfect mode of life and being which we encounter in ourselves only in an imperfect, fleeting, and temporal mode. In a similar fashion, we can understand the Urgegebenheit of a necessarily existing being indirectly, in a certain “mediated immediacy,” to give a very different meaning to a Hegelian term, namely as reflected in contingent, non-necessary being, as its sole possible ultimate cause, model, and ground, and as incomparably more perfect, nay, as the only true being that could not not be, compared with which non-necessarily existing being is a sheer nothing.39 Thus the need for a speculative metaphysical phenomenology (that is just as attentive to the mediately given as to the immediately given) is one of the chief advances beyond Husserl made in realist phenomenology regarding the philosophical method (as a form of knowledge).40 39

40

To have seen this, though mixed with false ideas, was the tremendous achievement of the Presocratic Parmenides. See Josef Seifert, Essere e persona, ch. 10 ff., and the same author, Gott als Gottesbeweis, “Prolegomena.” Jean-Luc Marion has recognized the need for such a speculative phenomenology, even though he understands it, I believe, in an insufficient manner because he does not see the fundamental importance of the transcendentals, especially of being, of pure perfections and of analogies. See Jean-Luc Marion, Dieu sans l’Être (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1982); the same author, “The End of the End of Metaphysics”, Epoche (1994), 2 (2), pp. 1-22, and “La percée et l’élargissement. Contribution à l’interprétation des Recherches Logiques,” Philosophie 2 (1983),

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V Reasoning (Inferring and Demonstrating) and Mediate Deductive Forms of Knowledge as Methods of Philosophy Philosophy cannot solely rest on immediate cognition (including the type of “mediated immediate” knowledge we just have discussed), but it also has to use forms of more distinctly indirect knowledge: knowledge by proofs and demonstrations. The need for this method of demonstrative knowledge and reasoning is chiefly due to the fact that not all essences and states of affairs that are of high interest to philosophy are open to direct intuitive human knowledge or Wesensschau; certain states of affairs cannot be known immediately by us; they are not self-given to human insight but must be inferred from our immediate, or likewise demonstrated, knowledge of other states of affairs by means of logical arguments and demonstrations. A strict philosophical logical demonstration has to take its ultimate starting point in evident premises that are immediately grasped in insights into essentially necessary states of affairs; it has then to proceed from there by means of evidently valid logical forms of inference. A philosophical argument can also take its starting point in false premises and prove their falsity by drawing from them patently false conclusions, a method the Socratic dialectics employs countless times. Moreover, it may proceed from just one premise (immediate inferences, which often, but not always, make an unspoken assumption of a second premise), or, in the form of syllogism, from at least two premises, but can also be based on many premises from which the same conclusion can be derived, reach more than one conclusion and use different forms of logical inferences. Such polysyllogisms also play a significant role among the methods of philosophy. In order for a positive logical argument (I prescind here from the mentioned reductio ad absurdum arguments which show the falsity of premises by logically drawing patently false conclusions from them) to be pp. 67-91. For a critique, see my Gott als Gottesbeweis, 2. Auflage, Anhang, “Vorwort für den arabischen Leser.” See also Josef Seifert, Allah Ka Bourhan Ala Oujoudi Allah. Tarjamat Hamid Lechhab. (Adar Al Bayda, Al Maghrib/ Bayrouth, Lobnan: Afrikya Achark, 2001).

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a philosophical demonstration or proof, it has to fulfill several conditions, some of which are general elements and conditions of any proof, while others apply only to philosophical proofs. General Elements/Conditions of a Proof (Demonstration): (1) The premises have to be true. (2) The premises have to be known to be true. (3) The logical form of inference by means of which we proceed from the knowledge of the truth of the premises to knowing the truth of the conclusion has to be correct. (4) The logical form which we use to arrive from the premises to the conclusions has to be known to be correct (and hence to allow a valid inference). Further Requirements of a Specifically Philosophical Proof: (5) The logical correctness of the form of such a syllogism must be examined critically and clearly understood to be valid; (6) All of the premises of a proof have to lend themselves to essential or existential knowledge of the sort philosophy requires of its specific objects; ideally speaking they have to be evident. (7) The philosophical demonstration must be based on evident logical laws and their principles and not just on hypothetically assumed logical ‘systems’ that are not thoroughly examined, nor on mere hypothetical logical assumptions or arbitrary logical systems, whereas such presuppositions may be starting points in other, more ‘playful’ sciences including mathematics where proofs with questionable and constructed premises have a legitimate place and where their results can be applied in the real world. In properly philosophical demonstrations definitions and assumed rules that are not evidently true have no place, even though analytic philosophy is full of them. Mathematics, which ideally speaking is also founded on evident cognitions, may be satisfied with this, not philosophy. However, perfect mathematics that is deeply akin to philosophy rests as well on evident premises and logically correct foundations, as Euclid and most classical mathematicians, but also Descartes, Leibniz, Pascal, etc. tried to establish. A science totally contrary to philosophy is a form of mathematics based on more or less arbitrary premises and logical assumptions and deduces from them conclusions, treating of mathematics more or less as a game and not

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as a science based on true intuitions. Adolf Reinach thinks that this is essentially the case in mathematics and it might be most frequently the case, but I think that it is in no way part of true mathematics of the sort that Plato used as archetype of knowledge.41 (8) Moreover, all of these things have to be understood “clearly and distinctly,” in a clear philosophical prise de conscience. Thus, to be a philosophical demonstration, the correctness of the logical form and the truth of the premises have to permit the highest degree of evident and critical human knowledge and fulfill philosophy’s quest for thematicity of knowledge.42 If one or more of these conditions are absent or only imperfectly obtainable, we may have good philosophical or other kinds of arguments but no strict philosophical demonstrations. Phenomenology must in no way reject such an indirect deductive knowledge, and in fact did not do so. Not only do we have excellent examples of exploring the deductive methods and the principles and foundations of logic in phenomenology, but we find also excellent applications of formal logic in phenomenology.43 We can and must also apply — wherever needed, for example in the cosmological and other arguments for the existence of God, or in the proofs of the existence and immortality of the human soul — methods of inference, deduction, and other dialectical methods to lead us back to things themselves.44 Such logical inferences and proofs, and other dialectical methods that are proofs of a position through 41

42

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44

A very profound way to show the contrast between such a mathematics and phenomenological philosophy is found in Adolf Reinach, “Über Phänomenologie”, pp. 531-550. If the premises and validity of the logical form of argument are not evident, we have no philosophical proof. See for example, besides Edmund Husserl’s Logical Investigations, the masterwork of Alexander Pfänder, Logic. See Josef Seifert, Das Leib-Seele Problem und die gegenwärtige philosophische Diskussion. Eine kritisch-systematische Analyse (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 21989); the same author, “Das Unsterblichkeitsproblem aus der Sicht der philosophischen Ethik und Anthropologie”, Franziskanische Studien, H 3 (1978); “Die natürliche Gotteserkenntnis als menschlicher Zugang zu Gott,” in: Franz Breid (ed.), Der Eine und Dreifaltige Gott als Hoffnung des Menschen zur Jahrtausendwende, (Steyr: Ennsthaler Verlag, 2001), pp. 9-102; and “Gibt es ein Leben nach dem Tod?” in Forum Katholische Theologie, 5, Heft 4, 1989.

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disproofs of the contradictorily opposite position, showing the latter’s internal contradictions or its contradictions to other evident truths by a reductio ad absurdum argument and other arguments are important also within phenomenology; Edmund Husserl, Adolf Reinach, and others applied them in masterful ways, while Heidegger, in a wholly unjustified way, calls such arguments plumpe Überrumpelungsversuche (primitive attempts to throw the opponent a curve and to take him by shock and surprise). In mathematics, we are confronted with a largely demonstrative science sui generis in which (apart from the general principles and first axioms) all theorems require proof, even though the specifically mathematical logic, which takes to some extent account of the special characteristics of mathematical objects, is not identical with the universal logic that applies to all sciences. In mathematics, as in philosophy, there are many interesting cases where some immediately evident propositions can also be known indirectly by demonstration. The same applies to many parts of philosophy including a philosophy of God, at least if the existence of God can be known both in mediated knowledge, for example by the cosmological proofs, and more immediately in the ontological argument.45 Regarding the coexistence of immediate evidence and demonstrability of the same proposition, we find sometimes a confusion, as the famous case of the fifth Euclidean postulate demonstrates. Mathematicians, who also tried, for centuries, to achieve other demonstrably impossible things such as a purely geometric method of squaring of the circle, wrongly believed for two millennia that the fifth Euclidean postulate can be demonstrated from the preceding four postulates, a task that was proven to be impossible in the 18th century. When Giovanni Girolamo Saccheri (5.9.1667 - 25.10.1733) discovered the independence of the fifth postulate (according to which parallel lines never intersect) from the preceding four, he concluded correctly that a geometry that replaces the fifth postulate by 45

See Franz Brentano’s critique of the ontological argument and defense of cosmological arguments in Franz Brentano, Vom Dasein Gottes, hrsg. A. Kastil (Hamburg: F. Meiner, 1980); see also Josef Seifert, “Kant y Brentano contra Anselmo y Descartes. Reflexions sobre el argumento ontológico” in Thémata 2 (Universidades de Málaga y Sevilla, 1985), pp. 129-147.

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others is logically consistent with the first four postulates but absurd, because it is evidently true that parallel lines will never intersect; this follows from their necessary essence. To have not only discovered the indemonstrability of the fifth postulate and the pragmatic usefulness of introducing non-Euclidean geometries but to have rejected the evident truth of the fifth postulate became not only the origin of playful though very useful non-Euclidean geometries but also the source of a profound crisis of the philosophical-mathematical foundations as soon as such playful constructs have been confused, after Saccheri, with true axioms in the classical sense of the term.46 Moreover, while mathematics can very well construct geometries and build useful systems on evidently false assumptions, or develop logically consistent theories without investigating the truth of its basic axioms, philosophy must never do this. A similar procedure in philosophy would constitute an abandoning philosophy proper, because the full thematicity of truth in philosophy forbids such “games,” except in a reductio ad absurdum refutation in which one proceeds from false assumptions in order to prove their falsity, a procedure also found in mathematics, for example in Euclid’s Elements. A reductio ad absurdum argument and disproofs deliberately based on false assumptions in order to demonstrate their falsity stand in the service of showing indirectly some truths that are also immediately evident. Of equal or even greater importance, however, are those philosophical proofs or demonstrations that are based on true principles and premises and seek to prove a positive truth, not just the falsity of a position (though even here the purpose is to demonstrate the truth of its contradictory opposite). There is still an important difference between reductio ad absurdum arguments or positive demonstrations in the case of propositions the truth of which is also immediately evident, and other cases in which logical proofs are the only available method because there is no immediate insight possible. It would be stubborn stupidity to refuse the use of deductive methods where they are the only appropriate methods, i.e., in all cases in which something cannot be known immediately and intuitively, but only indi46

See Morris Kline, Mathematics in Western Culture (London/Oxford/New York: Oxford University Press, 1974).

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rectly by deductive arguments, such as the immortality of the soul. But it would likewise be stupid to want to demonstrate everything in philosophy because without truths given in immediate insights demonstrations are absolutely impossible. Just keep in mind that demonstrations always presuppose and never can replace the methods of immediate intuition. This was also seen by the skeptic philosopher Wolfgang Stegmüller; even if he denied (mistakenly) the objectivity and validity of such intuitions, he made it very clear that they are presupposed for any demonstration.47 VI Intuitive Knowledge of less than Necessary Essences of a Certain Intelligible Kind It would be wrong to believe that philosophy, inasmuch as it studies the essences of things, only has to do with the analysis of necessary essences and the states of affairs rooted in them, rather than also having to analyze less than necessary but still highly intelligible natures, such as, for example, femininity versus masculinity, the essence of the child,48 or even the nature of specific historical epochs without which philosophy of history cannot accomplish all its tasks. Speaking of contingent objects of philosophical knowledge, we do not speak here of the methods of a history of philosophy which is largely an empirical hermeneutical science that interprets contingent texts and hence its purely historical and hermeneutic methods are not part of philosophy proper. Nonetheless, especially because philosophical texts partake positively or negatively in the intelligibility of the objects of philosophy and include, or are judged by, certain necessary objects of philosophical knowledge, and hence cannot be interpreted without reference to things

47

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See on this Wolfgang Stegmüller, Metaphysik, Skepsis, Wissenschaft (München: Piper, 1970). See likewise my discussion of this in the afterword of Erkenntnis objektiver Wahrheit. Die Transzendenz des Menschen in der Erkenntnis (Salzburg: A. Pustet, 21976). On François Fénelon’s philosophy of the child, see Robert Spaemann, Spontaneität und Reflexion (Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 1968).

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themselves,49 their study can partake in properly philosophical knowledge and use properly philosophical methods inasmuch as the history of philosophy is done philosophically and not mindlessly, investigating critically not just the opinions of philosophers but their discovery of being or their failure to do so. Nevertheless, the main methods of a history of philosophy qua history are historical and empirical and not philosophical, which does not exclude that specific philosophical systems and ideas possess a certain degree of higher intelligibility, logical consequence or coherence than the objects of purely empirical sciences. This higher intelligibility is derived from that of necessary essences, though often only negatively — by a philosopher contradicting them — but still includes many much more contingent and empirical historical elements than the knowledge of highly intelligible though contingent essences such as those of femininity or masculinity that are a fully valid object of philosophical knowledge even though they lack, or at least seem to lack, a strict essential necessity and require a “softer” philosophical method which opens up to finer distinctions that even ultimately escape purely conceptual thought and in this respect are cognate to those innumerable and not sharply delineated ideal rules which the artist has to detect without being able to express them completely in conceptual language. Moreover, to these essences correspond “ideas” that we have distinguished elsewhere from (absolutely necessary) eide.50 Also in the analysis of some phenomena in the arts (the essence of the baroque, for example), or in philosophy of history which, unlike the history of philosophy, is a real part of philosophy, we investigate, besides purely necessary essences, such as what history is or its relation to time, to linear and not cyclically recurring events or to freedom, or the essence of what is 49

50

See Josef Seifert, “Texts and Things” in: Annual ACPA Proceedings (1999), Vol. LXXII, pp. 41-68. For a more detailed investigation of the manifaceted structure of the methods to be used to grasp these less than absolutely necessary essences such as that of femininity and masculinity, see Josef Seifert, “Über die Frau: Wesen — Würde — Zerrbilder”, in: Enrique Banús (Ed.), Studia Euopea Navarrensis, Volumen 2, El espacio social femenino/Women’s social space (Navarra: Centro de Estudios Europeos — Universidad de Navarra), pp. 7-40. On the difference between eidos, idea, ideal object, and ideal rules see also Josef Seifert, Sein und Wesen, ch. 1.

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a historical epoch as such (which still coincide with, or are at least close to, what we termed “necessary essences”) also contingent but highly intelligible objects such as: the essence of a specific or individual historical epoch, for example the age of enlightenment or of “modern philosophy”; or the “second voyage” of which Plato speaks;51 or the “seven voyages” Balduin Schwarz analyzed,52 which certainly do not possess a necessary essence but contain many non-necessary elements and yet are valid objects of a philosophy of the history of philosophy; the reasons for a crisis in world history and in the history of science and philosophy; the quasiphilosophical concepts of Europe, Asia, or Africa, or of specific nations, such as the ‘mexicanidad’, etc.53 We encounter here objects that are sufficiently intelligible to be open to philosophical or to partly philosophical, partly historical analyses, although they are lacking strict essential necessity.54

51

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53

54

See Plato, Phaedo, in: Plato, ibid., pp. 40-98; see Giovanni Reale; Verso una nuova interpretazione die Platone, 20th ed. (Milan: Jaca Book, 1997); see also the same author, Storia della filosofía antica, II (Milan: Vita Existenz Pensiero, 1995). See Balduin Schwarz, (Paula Premoli/Josef Seifert ed.), Wahrheit, Irrtum und Verirrungen. Die sechs großen Krisen und sieben Ausfahrten der abendländischen Philosophie (Heidelberg: C. Winter, 1996); See also Josef Seifert, “Die ‘Siebte Ausfahrt’ als Aufgabe der Internationalen Akademie für Philosophie im Fürstentum Liechtenstein (1986-1996). Rede zur 10-Jahres-Jubiläumsfeier der Internationalen Akademie für Philosophie im Fürstentum Liechtenstein am 26. Oktober 1996” in: Mariano Crespo (Hrsg.), Menschenwürde: Metaphysik und Ethik (Heidelberg: Universitätsverlag Winter, 1998), pp. 19-55. See Edmund Husserl, The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology. An Introduction to Phenomenology, trans. David Carr, (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1970). See also Balduin Schwarz, Ewige Philosophie. Gesetz und Freiheit in der Geistesgeschichte; Josef Seifert, op. cit. See also Jan Patoþka, Platone e l’Europa, curato da Giovanni Reale, trad. Martin Cajthaml and Giuseppe Girgenti, (Milan: Vita e Pensiero, 1997). See also Agustín Basave Fernández del Valle, Vocación y estilo de México. Fundamentos de la mexicanidad (México DF: Noriega, 1990). See Rocco Buttiglione, Augusto del Noce. Biografia di un pensiero (Casale Monserrato: Piemme, 1991); the same author, “Dietrich von Hildebrands Philosophie der Geschichte”, in: Truth and Value. The Philosophy of Dietrich von Hildebrand. Aletheia Vol. V (Bern: Peter Lang Verlag, 1991).

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Thus there is a need of identifying methods adequate to these kinds of objects, in many ways similar to intuition into necessary essences but in other ways dissimilar to it, because their objects, while containing a certain inner intuitive understandability, cannot be claimed to possess a necessary essence, wherefore we have to rely also on the experience of many existing facts to know these essences; for example, in order to understand the essence of femininity, at least one method of doing so requires also to consider the analogies between the idea of femininity and biological and psychic characteristics of women, their different relation to the life of children, etc., all of which are more marvelously meaningful “inventions” than necessary essences. Therefore, an understanding requires what Blaise Pascal distinguished as an esprit de finesse from an esprit de géometrie, i.e., a kind of finer and softer method of understanding that bears some similarity to the empathy by means of which we understand other persons and their thought, or to the understanding of the core meaning or “form” of a literary work of art, of which T.S. Eliot and other “Southern Agrarians” have spoken,55 or to understanding the spirit of a poet or of a musical composer’s work.56

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On this notion so important in Southern Criticism, T.S. Elliot, and others, see Thomas Stearns Eliot, The Sacred Wood (London: Methune, [1920]; Bartleby.com, 1996); see also Louise Cowan, The Fugitive Group: A Literary History (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1959). A biased form of reading Eliot seems to be presented in Anthony Julius, T. S. Eliot, Anti-Semitism, and Literary Form (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995). On such a quasi-philosophical analysis of the essence of a certain composer’s work, see Dietrich von Hildebrand, Mozart — Beethoven — Schubert (Regensburg: Josef Habbel, 1962) or his Ästhetik. 2. Teil. Über das Wesen des Kunstwerkes und der Künste. Nachgelassenes Werk. Gesammelte Werke Band VI (Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 1984).

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Immediate Philosophical Knowledge of Real Existence — the actus essendi and Epoché of Essence: A First Break with the Exclusiveness of the Methods of Epoché of Real Existence, ‘Eidetic Intuition (Reduction),’ and Wesenseinsicht Most important for realist phenomenology, besides the analysis and intuition of objectively necessary or highly intelligible essences, are, among the phenomenological methods in the first sense (as the kind of knowledge that brings us into contact with objects), those forms of cognition that give us access to the really existing world. The idea that philosophy can never be interested in the actual being, in the actus essendi as such, or in the actual real being of the world, of the self, of freedom, of an immortal life after death, or of God — is in my opinion one of the most fatal errors not only of transcendental phenomenology but also of many parts of the early essentialistic phenomenological objectivism that took only one first step towards phenomenological realism.57 And on this point I am wholly in agreement with Étienne Gilson, when he chastises the “essentialism” of many philosophers, noting that a great forgetfullness of being has occurred in philosophy, when it abstracted from, or showed disinterest in, this topic of the actus essendi.58 (In minimizing the role of essence, however, I believe that Gilson goes against many other evidences and errs profoundly.59)

57

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Even in the great father of realist and objectivist phenomenology, Adolf Reinach, we find practically no word on the existential themes of philosophy except perhaps in his last fragments written during the war before his untimely death. See his “Concerning Phenomenology.” See Étienne Gilson, Being and Some Philosophers, 2nd ed. (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1952); God and Philosophy, 7th ed. (New Haven/London, 1970). See my “Essence and Existence. A New Foundation of Classical Metaphysics on the Basis of ‘Phenomenological Realism,’ and a Critical Investigation of ‘Existentialist Thomism’”, Aletheia I (1977), pp. 17-157; I, 2-3. (1977), pp. 371459, ch. 2-5. See also the same chapters (2-5) of my more extended version of this work, Sein und Wesen.

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In realist phenomenology, largely born from its encounter with Thomas Aquinas and Thomistic authors, but also with sources in Augustine, Anselm of Canterbury (Aosta) and Descartes, a completely new discovery of the radically different forms of knowledge by which we reach, (a) on the one hand, the meaning of existence as such, and, b) on the other hand, existing beings, has taken place. Let us first turn to a brief exposition of the irreducibility of the methods that allow us to know existence to eidetic analysis or intuition into essences: (a): The method and form of knowledge used to understand existence cannot be intellectual vision of essences (Wesensschau). Rather, in order to understand this unique actuality of existing as a most real predicate (which Kant overlooks), 60 but indeed as distinct from any essential predicate (as Kant saw), we have to look precisely at this principle of being which is not what and how a thing is but “that it is”, however not in the sense of the state of affairs that it exists (with which Reinach seems to have identified existing) but its “ising,” understood to be an active principle of an absolutely unique kind, a urphenomenon distinct from essence. In fact, instead of an epoché of existence being here the required phenomenological method in order to grasp this Urphänomen of real existence, we have much rather to perform a sort of epoché of essence, in order to grasp this unique act that we call being or existing and that separates the real world from all infinite merely possible worlds. Of course, the fascination with esse in its distinction from essence should never make us lose sight of the unity between essence and existence and of the absolute impossibility of an existence without essence, as assumed by Gilson.61 In fact, doing justice to the true distinction of existence from essence demands that we always keep 60

Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Norman Kemp Smith (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1965), B 627, 628: ... Otherwise stated, the real contains no more than the merely possible. A hundred real thalers do not contain the least coin more than a hundred possible thalers […] By whatever and by however many predicates we may think a thing — even if we completely determine it — we do not make the least addition to the thing when we further declare that this thing is.

61

See Josef Seifert, “Esse, Essence, and Infinity: a Dialogue with Existentialist Thomism”, in: The New Scholasticism, (Winter 1984), 84-98.

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the essence of a being in mind when we seek to comprehend its existence and to understand the immensely different sorts of existence and the overwhelming gradation within real existence that depend on what exists. Edith Stein coined the excellent term of an “ordination between essence and existence” to designate this profound unity between essence and existence.62 The analysis of the unique actuality of real existence (actus essendi) can gain much from considering the immense difference between a real and a merely possible being, recognizing that in all finite beings there is a “real distinction” of existence from essence in a special sense, i.e., an actual separability of essence from existence in the sense that what I am could have remained nothing. Understanding the urphenomenon of real existence also requires that we distinguish sharply the unique inner actuality of existing from many other acts and actualizations which already presuppose the existence of the being that acts or in which actualizations take place. Moreover, this actus essendi can only be understood if we comprehend the gradation of real existence depending on the essence of the being that exists: real existence is a very different “thing” according to whether we deal with a (self-existing) substance that possesses esse, or with an accident that possesses only in-esse. In another direction, real existence or the actus essendi profoundly differs according to whether a piece of matter, a plant, an animal, a human person, an angel, or, again in a radically different way, God exists. The depth of actuality in these distinct real beings differs so much and so profoundly that these different beings have real existence only in an analogous way, in an analogia esse or essendi. The datum of real existence is further thrown into relief if we distinguish it from the radically different forms of existence that refer to the other modalities of being; we distinguish: (1) real being of matter, plants, animals, human persons, angels, or God, the arch-form of being; (2) ideal being and its different kinds: such as eide, ideas, ideal objects, ideal rules, 62

See Edith Stein, Endliches und Ewiges Sein. Versuch eines Aufstiegs zum Sinne des Seins in: Edith Steins Werke, Bd. II, Hrsg. L. Gerber, 2. Aufl. (Wien, 1962); 3. unver. Aufl. (Freiburg: Herder, 1986); See also Augusta Spiegelman Gooch, “Metaphysical Ordination: Reflections on Edith Stein’s Endliches und Ewiges Sein” diss., University of Dallas, 1982.

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etc.; (3) purely intentional beings that exist only by the grace, and as objects, of intentional acts such as dreaming, imagining, opining or, in a derived form, as purely intentional objects in the stratum of represented objectivities in literary works of art;63 (4) purely logical being/ens rationis (such as of concepts, propositions, etc.), and (5) Purely possible being. To each of these modalities of being different forms of being or existing correspond. The actual (real) existence as such, distinct from essences, is a fundamental topic and question of philosophy: What is that — to exist, what is this esse that demanded to be rediscovered in its absolute irreducibility to essence? By investigating this question, realist phenomenology separated from purely essentialist interpretations of many philosophers, both phenomenologists and others, and from several reductionist and inadequate forms of understanding esse, for example found in Gilson, who performs a type of isolation and absolutization of esse at the expense of essence,64 but also encountered in a number of prominent phenomenologists. In Husserl and Heidegger, for example, real existence (Sein), or more precisely the world of really existing beings, is wrongly identified with temporality or rather with being-in-time, which is false for two reasons: (1) Temporal being has only an immensely deficient form of possessing reality, given that even its only real mode, the present, “is” only by fleeing to nonexistence, as Augustine puts it: But in what sense can we say that those two times, the past and the future, exist, when the past no longer is and the future is not yet? Yet if the present were always present and did not go by into the past, it would not be time at all, but eternity. If, therefore, the present (if it is to be time at all) only comes into being because it is in transition toward the past, how can we say that even the present is? For the cause of its being is that it

63

64

See on this Roman Ingarden, The Literary Work of Art, trans. by George G. Grabowicz (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1973). See Étienne Gilson, Being and Some Philosophers, and my critique of this work in Josef Seifert, “Essence and Existence. A New Foundation of Classical Metaphysics on the Basis of ‘Phenomenological Realism,’ and a Critical Investigation of ‘Existentialist Thomism’,” and in Sein und Wesen.

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Discours des Méthodes shall cease to be. So that it appears that we cannot truly say that time exists except in the sense that it is tending toward nonexistence.65

(2) Secondly, there are also irreal (purely intentional) objects such as the objects of dreams that are temporal so that the identification of real being with being-in-time has to be absolutely rejected.66 Max Scheler as well understood real existence in a quite insufficient way as “Widerständigkeit,” which is also found in relation to ideal objects and even to tactile hallucinations. Moreover, the peculiar resistence to our senses and acts possessed by real things only, presupposes real existence both of our acts and of their objects and hence cannot explain this ur-phenomenon of actual existence sufficiently.67

65

The full text is the following: fidenter tamen dico scire me, quod, si nihil praeteriret, non esset praeteritum tempus, et si nihil adueniret, non esset futurum tempus, et si nihil esset, non esset praesens tempus. duo ergo illa tempora, praeteritum et futurum, quomodo sunt, quando et praeteritum iam non est et futurum nondum est? praesens autem si semper esset praesens nec in praeteritum transiret, non iam esset tempus, sed aeternitas. si ergo praesens, ut tempus sit, ideo fit, quia in praeteritum transit, quomodo et hoc esse dicimus, cui causa, ut sit, illa est, quia non erit, ut scilicet non uere dicamus tempus esse, nisi quia tendit non esse? St. Augustine, Confessions XI, 14. [[CCL 27 p. 203/19] Corpus Augustinianum Gissense a C. Mayer editum].

66

67

On Louis Lavelle’s notion of time, see, e. g., Judith G. Garcia Caffarena, El Instante y el Tiempo en la Filosofía de Louis Lavelle (Rosario, Rep. Argentina: Talleres Graficos Raul Fernandez, 1983). See also the brief and deep discusison of the theme of time and eternity in Louis Lavelle in Tarcisio Meirelles Padilha, A ontologia axiológica de Louis Lavelle, tese de cátedra (Rio de Janeiro, UDF, Rio, 1955), pp. 82-87, especially 82. See also Plotinus, Enn. III, 7, and the outstanding German version and commentary: Plotinus, Über Ewigkeit und Zeit, Enneade III, 7. Übers., eingel. u. komm. von W. Beierwaltes (Frankfurt/M., 1967). See also my Essere e persona, ch. 10. For a further explication of these two points, see my Essere e persona, ch. 10; and my Gott als Gottesbeweis. Eine phänomenologische Neubegründung des ontologischen Arguments. I have investigated this question in Josef Seifert, Sein und Wesen, ch. 2.

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VIII The Manifold Methods and Forms of Knowledge of Concretely Existing Beings: a Second Break with the Exclusiveness of the Methods of Epoché and of ‘Eidetic Intuition (Reduction)’ /Wesenseinsicht Not only the esse as such, which we still grasp upon performing a sort of epoché and bracketing of both essence and individual existence (concentrating, in a form of peculiar abstraction, on what esse is in all really existing beings) but also the concrete existence of many beings is a fundamental object of philosophy. To know really existing beings, we do not use any epoché, understood as bracketing of existence. But what are the concretely existing beings which to know is of importance for philosophy? As we shall see, the question of concrete existence of contingent beings concerns philosophy only when it entails a more universally important knowledge than just being the knowledge of this individual finite being. This is not to deny that for us personally, our own existence and that of persons we love, and hence, the existence of precisely this and no other individual being might be of utmost importance. Nor do we deny that the knowledge of our own person is cognitively more evident and a more primary knowledge than the knowledge of other real beings and persons. Nevertheless, philosophy per se is never solely interested in “this contingent being’s” existence but always in a broader importance of such an existential knowledge. Which really existing beings then are objects of philosophical knowledge? - (i) The simultaneous knowledge of the existence of the real world and of a really existing person reached in our own person (“first person” Cogito-cognition): There is first the unique form of indubitable existential knowledge contained in the Cogito, which long before Descartes Augustine has seen with lucid clarity,68 and less clearly before Augustine Parmenides, 68

See Ludger Hölscher, The Reality of the Mind. St. Augustine’s Arguments for the Human Soul as Spiritual Substance (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1986); Die Realität des Geistes. Eine Darstellung und phänomenologische Neubegründung der Argumente Augustins für die geistige Substantialität der Seele (Heidelberg: Universitätsverlag Winter, 1999).

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Plato, Aristotle, and several Platonists and Neoplatonists. In this knowledge I grasp precisely my own acts and myself as really and individually existing personal subject and not as a “transcendental ego” (which is a Kantian and, in another form, also a Husserlian construct in which wholly different and mutually exclusive and partly self-contradictory elements and ideas merge to result in a confusion).69 But while it is for myself or for those who know and love me very important that Josef Seifert exists, there is no philosophical interest in this knowledge as such, but only in its much wider implications and consequences: (1) First of all, in understanding that I exist (sum; si enim fallor, sum!) I understand that any other person likewise can know his existence with certainty. (2) I understand something of wider philosophical significance: the concrete existence of one really existing being, of a living being, and of a conscious and thinking being, and hence of one person (myself as given in the Cartesian Cogito or the Augustinian si enim fallor sum). We could summarize this wider impact of the Cogito-knowledge as: a) cogito; b) sum (vivens and cogitans=persona); — ergo: c) esse est; d) ens vivens est; e) ens cogitans (persona) est. All the other mentioned cognitions (c-e) do not only, by the mediation of some evident principles and valid immediate and mediate inferences, logically follow from the immediate evidence that I think and that I exist (and for other persons from the evidence that they have regarding their existence), but they are equally immediately given with and in this knowledge. (If we take into account also our evidence about each perception and act which we experience from within, we know infinitely many existential truths indubitably in the cogito). - (ii) The real existence of the world given to the senses: matter, bodies, etc. For knowing the real existence of the world given to the senses several kinds of methods (cognitions) are necessary: on the one hand, an 69

See my “Kritik am Relativismus und Immanentismus in Edmund Husserls Cartesianischen Meditationen. Die Aequivokationen im Ausdruck ‘transzendentales Ego’ an der Basis jedes transzendentalen Idealismus,” Salzbuger Jahrbuch für Philosophie XIV, 1970.

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immediate evidence of the senses, but the absolute indubitability of this immediate sense knowledge (linked to equally evident intellectual cognitions about their natures and those of their objects) only extends to (A) the purely intentional objects of sense-perceptions and, apart from the givenness of necessary essences in them and in their objects, (B) to the kind of claims of autonomous existence these objects make (a) in virtue of their essence as well as (b) in virtue of the entirely different factor of their sort of givenness.70 There is here a cognitive gap between our absolutely indubitable knowledge of the self-given phenomena and the knowledge (in the wider sense) of the existence of the word given to our senses. Hence the hyperbolic real or methodic doubt which Augustine, Descartes and Husserl were able to extend, with some good reasons, to the real existence of the world, are only meaningfully possible because we do not possess an apodictic and immediate evidence of the autonomous real existence of the world given through the senses. This fact made Husserl speak of a mere naïve belief in the world (Weltglaube), whose object (the really existing world) he thought philosophy ought to bracket. In reality, however, philosophy has an eminent interest in reaching certainty of knowledge regarding the intrinsic existence of the “natural world”. Husserl, in his radical quest for epistemic indubitability and for other reasons, saw the knowledge-gap between the absolute evidence of the senses and the recognition that their object, the world, makes the claim to possess an autonomous existence and the fact that fulfillment of this existential claim is not equally evidently self-given, as sufficient to demand a permanent epoché of the extramental existence of the world as it presents itself to the “natural attitude” (natürliche Einstellung). We hold, on the contrary, that even if the real existence of the world given to and through the senses and the intellectual acts built on sense-knowledge (that are necessary to grasp the existing world and substances, causality, living beings, and other persons that compose the world) were never absolutely indubitably given, the task of the philosopher would not be a permanent epoché, in an uncritical selfrestriction to indubitable certainty, but, in view of the crucial importance of

70

See on all of this Josef Seifert, Back to Things in Themselves.

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the autonomous existence of this world, a justification of this world-belief to the utmost of our human possibilities. Although the evidence of the world as intentional object is absolute and immediate, the evidence of the world’s autonomous being is indeed not simply immediate but requires further philosophical steps. For the reason of the limits of indubitable immediate certainty regarding the real existence of the external world, the validity of the knowledge of the world mediated through the senses needs to be indirectly confirmed by arguments, in order to reach the rank of the fullest philosophical knowledge we can gain of the existing world.71 Especially two kinds of arguments, besides the kind of Widerständigkeit of the real world to our senses, especially to the sense of touch, are important here: (a) Some of these arguments are built on the consistent and mutually complementary and corroborating network of the experience of the real world which sharply differs from the experience of a world of purely intentional objects and simply cannot be explained by mere chance;72 (b) Other arguments are of metaphysical nature and have been most clearly expressed by Descartes: if it were possible that the being and origin of the world would be a blind material force of nature or a spiritus malignus or even an omnipotent deceiver out to deceive us, who alone could explain the immensely intelligible and structured world of ours which even as illusion could not be accounted for by matter and chance, we could never reach ultimate evidence of the real existence of the world given to the senses because hallucinations, sense deceptions, etc., are possible and an omnipotent evil spirit could no doubt make us confuse a dream with real life experience. Therefore only a proof of the existence and veracity of God can provide the ultimate foundation of the evidence of the real existence of the sense world. If the absolute being were a blind material force, not only sense knowledge but no knowledge would be 71

72

See on Scheler’s implicit critique of Husserl’s philosophy of the natural attitude or standpoint also Quentin Smith, “Scheler’s Critique of Husserl’s Theory of the World of the Natural Standpoint,” The Modern Schoolman, Vol. 55, No. 4, May 1978, pp. 387-396. See Dietrich von Hildebrand, What is Philosophy?/Che cos’è la filosofia? (bilingual 4th ed.: engl./it).

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possible, not only because there would be no spirit that is necessarily presupposed for any knowledge but also because the content of our thinking and perceiving would depend on blind physical causes that would not even provide minimal reason to believe that the intentional objects produced by unthinking causes would have anything to do with the real world. But therefore precisely the indubitable evidence that we do in fact possess evident knowledge proves that such a materialist and atheist metaphysics is false.73 - (iii) The knowledge of the existence of other human persons: Within the world disclosed to us originally through sense perception, we get acquainted, not without many cognitive acts that go far beyond sense perceptions, with many things, both living and dead, and with their causal and other relations and properties. Among all of these things, we attribute the greatest and a unique importance to other persons. A properly human existence cannot be conceived without some forms of community, interaction with others, love, and social acts. Also Husserl74 and almost all idealists (with the exception of some forms, for example Stirner’s, of solipsism)75 have therefore approached the theme of the existence of other egos and defended some form of knowledge of the other person and sought some way out of solipsism. They frequently did so even when they have recognized, as Husserl has, that solipsism follows, or at least seems to follow, necessarily from idealism.76

73

74

75

76

See Josef Seifert, What is Life? On the Originality, Irreducibility and Value of Life (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1997). Edmund Husserl, Cartesian Meditations, V. trans. Dorion Cairns, 5th impression (The Hague: M. Nijhoff, 1973). See Max Stirner, Der Einzige und sein Eigenthum (Leipzig: Otto Wigand, 1845); The Ego and Its Own, ed. by David Leopold (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995). I think solipsism objectively and in a way that is insuperable by any form of transcendental idealism including Husserl’s, does follow from transcendental idealism if one does not introduce something like a general and absolute consciousness shared by all persons or make another contradictory or untenable assumption. In fact, without recognizing the receptive transcendence of knowledge it is impossible to defend even an objective knowledge of our own existence, and thereby of solipsism, or of any other object or state of affairs.

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Above and beyond a defense of sense perception and the intellectual understanding of real beings inseparable from it, disclosing to us also really existing other persons (among other really existing beings perceived by us outside ourselves), there are other and special forms of knowledge and methods through which we can know the real existence of other persons: a. First, there are relatively immediate forms of knowledge of other persons such as understanding and interpreting human acts expressed in language or presupposed for using it in certain intelligent ways; grasping the inner being of persons by looking at their external actions, works, or linguistic expressions and their Kundgabefunktion;77 understanding the bodily expressions of human feelings, volitions, or intellectual acts; as well as a special form of placing ourselves into the shoes of the other person (empathy). There is also a certain direct givenness of the other in social acts, in love, etc. b. Besides the more or less immediate forms of grasping other persons qua existing beings there are also indirect arguments that confirm the truth of that central conviction (that the other persons with whom we live have a real existence incomparably greater than just being intentional objects of our experience) on which the meaning of human social and legal life and of man’s deepest acts depend, such as the argument from the inner meaningful whole of other personalities, their resistance to our expectations, etc. It is most important for a realist reform of the phenomenological method to note: The really existing other person, the ‘Thou’, we can never reach on the basis of epoché. Hence philosophy needs both to use forms of knowledge that are not based on epoché but refer to really existing beings and to investigate all these forms of knowing existing other persons in order to raise the knowledge of the really existing other persons to the level of philosophical knowledge and in order to understand this most fundamental knowledge that is the basis of all interpersonal relations and of all communities. 77

This term of Husserl in his “Ausdruck und Bedeutung”, Logische Untersuchungen, Bd. II, 1, 1, refers to the function of language not only to express meanings and refer to objects, but also to reveal or manifest the acts of the speakers.

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- (iv) Knowledge of the real existence of human freedom Especially when it comes to freedom, we can well understand the fundamental difference between grasping the essence of freedom (which has also to be done by the determinist who denies the existence of human freedom), and knowing the existence of human freedom. We can reach the knowledge of the real existence of our freedom as part of the indubitable evidence of the cogito; it can be known with the same immediacy as our own existence, or, as Augustine puts it, even more immediately; because even if we were mistaken, per impossibile, about our own existence, it would still be evident to us that we would not want to be deceived. Of course, objectively the knowledge of the real existence of our freedom depends on the evidence of the Cogito but concretizes it in an extremely significant direction that we can understand so clearly that the evidence of this knowledge somehow exceeds that of any other knowledge.78 Augustine79 — as René Descartes80 or Hans Urs von Balthasar81 after him — asserts the truth that nothing is more evident to us than our freedom: Our very existence and conscious life are not more indubitably given, though perhaps more easily understood, than our freedom. And indeed we know of our freedom with the same type of immediate and reflective evidence with which we know of our own existence.82 The 78

79 80 81

82

See Josef Seifert, “To Be a Person – To Be Free,” in: Zofia J. Zdybicka, et al. (ed.), Freedom in Contemporary Culture. Acts of the V World Congress of Christian Philosophy. Catholic University of Lublin 20-25 August 1996, Vol. I (Lublin: The University Press of the Catholic University of Lublin, 1998), pp. 145-185. Augustine, De libero arbitrio, 2; De civitate Dei, V. René Descartes, Discours de la Méthode; Meditationes de Prima Philosophia. See Hans Urs von Balthasar, Theodramatik II: Die Personen des Spiels, 1: Der Mensch in Gott (Einsiedeln: Johannes Verlag, 1976), pp. 186 ff. See also Balthasar, TheoLogik, Wahrheit der Welt (Einsiedeln: Johannes Verlag, 1985), II, A. Wahrheit als Freiheit, 1. In the Italian translation of this work by Guido Sommavilla: Verità del Mondo. TeoLogica, vol I (Milan: Jaka Book, 1987), pp. 96 ff. See also Hans-Eduard Hengstenberg, Grundlegung der Ethik (Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 1969), pp. 11 ff., where he analyzes a similar ineluctable givenness of moral good and evil, a sort of cogito-argument for the givenness of good and evil. Investigating this matter more closely, we could distinguish between the evident givenness of freedom on different levels: a) in the immediate inner conscious

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awareness of our own free will — a knowledge which is so evident that it cannot be deception — is part of the evidence of the Cogito as unfolded by Augustine.83 And the existence of free will in us is so evident that its evidence in a certain sense is more primary and indubitable than that of all other evident truths given in the Cogito. For even if we could be in error about all things, which is impossible, Augustine says, it would still remain true that we do not want to be in error and of this free will we can have certain knowledge: Likewise if someone were to say: ‘I do not will to err,’ will it not be true that whether he errs or does not err, yet he does not will to err? Would it not be the height of impudence of anyone to say to this man: ‘Perhaps you are deceived,’ since no matter in what he may be deceived, he is certainly not deceived in not willing to be deceived? And if he says that he knows this, he adds as many known things as he pleases, and perceives it to be an infinite number. For he who says, ‘I do not will to be deceived, and I know that I do not will this, and I know that I know this,’ can also continue from here towards an indefinite number, however awkward this manner of expressing it may 84 be. (Translated by McKenna, ibid., pp. 480-2)

And again:

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living of our acts, b) in what Karol Wojtyáa calls “reflective consciousness” (which precedes the fully conscious self-knowledge), and c) in explicit reflection and selfknowledge properly speaking in which we make our personal freedom the explicit object of reflection, d) in the insight into the nature of freedom, an insight which grasps the necessary and intelligible essence of personhood, which is realized in each and every person, and e) in the clear and indubitable recognition of our personal individual freedom, an evident knowledge which depends, on the one hand, on the immediate and reflected experience of our being and freedom, and, on the other hand, on the essential insight into the eternal and evident truth of the connection between freedom and personhood. See The Acting Person (Boston: Reidel, 1979), ch. 1. See Ludger Hölscher, The Reality of the Mind. See also the discussion of this in Josef Seifert, Back to Things in Themselves, ch. 4-5. Augustine, De Trinitate XV, xii, 21: Item si quispiam dicat, errare nolo; nonne sive erret sive non erret, errare tamen eum nolle verum erit? Quis est qui huic non impudentissime dicat, Forsitan falleris? cum profecto ubicumque fallatur, falli se tamen nolle non fallitur. Et si hoc scire se dicat, addit quantum vult rerum numerum cognitarum, et numerum esse perspicit infinitum. Qui enim dicit, Nolo me falli et hoc me nolle scio, et hoc me scire scio; jam et si non commoda elocutione, potest hinc infinitum numerum ostendere.

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On the other hand who would doubt that he lives, remembers, understands, wills, thinks, knows, and judges? For even if he doubts, he lives; if he doubts, he remembers why he doubts; if he doubts, he understands that he doubts; if he doubts, he wants (wills) to be certain; if he doubts, he thinks; if he doubts, he knows that he does not know; if he doubts, he judges that he ought not to consent rashly. Whoever then doubts about anything else ought never to doubt about all of these; for if they were not, he 85 would be unable to doubt about anything at all.

The evidence of this knowledge cannot even be refuted by any and all possible forms of self-deception because these imply or presuppose already the evidence of free will.86 It is not possible in this context to discuss all the possible objections against the evidence of this thesis and thereby bring more fully to evidence the indubitable knowledge we can gain regarding our freedom. But also this knowledge of the reality of freedom is in no way based on epoché and it is one of the crucial objects of philosophical knowledge of man and of ethics. - (v) The real existence of the human soul Inseparable from the real knowledge of the existing human person given in the Cogito is the evidence of the existence of the human soul. But while there is a direct self-givenness of the subject of our conscious life, the recognition of its spiritual nature and hence of our soul, requires further steps, in part also proofs from various evident premises. Again, we are in no way only interested in the knowledge of the essence of a soul but in knowing its real existence, on which the whole reality and possibility of

85

St Augustine, The Trinity, translated by Stephen McKenna (Washington, DC: The Catholic University of America Press, 1970) X, X, 14: Vivere se tamen et meminisse, et intelligere, et velle, et cogitare, et scire, et judicare quis dubitet? Quandoquidem etiam si dubitat, vivit; si dubitat, unde dubitet, meminit; si dubitat, dubitare se intelligit; si dubitat, certus esse vult; si dubitat, cogitat; si dubitat, scit se nescire; si dubitat, judicat non se temere consentire oportere. Quisquis igitur aliunde dubitat, de his omnibus dubitare non debet: quae si non essent, de ulla re dubitare non posset.

86

Cf. D. von Hildebrand, “Das Cogito und die Erkenntnis der realen Welt. Teilveröffentlichung der Salzburger Vorlesungen Hildebrands (Salzburg, Herbst 1964): ‘Wesen und Wert menschlicher Erkenntnis’” Aletheia 6/1993-1994 (1994), pp. 227. Josef Seifert, Back to Things in Themselves.

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spiritual personal life, and of our responsibility for our acts, and finally the whole moral and legal order, depend.87 - (vi) Knowledge of human death and of the immortality of the soul as existential knowledge: Likewise, the knowledge we can reach about human death makes sense primarily as existential knowledge that we and any other human person are mortal and actually will die. Thus again, the method of epoché makes no sense here and the actual reality of death, also as object of anguish or hope, is a condition of the meaning of the question about death, but is not an eidetic problem of possible world discussions. The same is true of the immortality of the soul, a classical topic of philosophy since Plato. In whatever way we may approach this topic, it calls for existential knowledge and never can be restricted to a pure eidetic knowledge. As a matter of fact, we presuppose for an answer other existential knowledge: the experience of our own self, the insights necessary to proceed from the knowledge of the self to that of the soul, and from there through existential and essential metaphysical insights and arguments to the recognition of the immortality of the human soul.88 – (vii) God as supreme object of essential and existential knowledge: The question about the existence of God is the most profound question philosophy can ask. And it makes only sense if it is not solely a question of essence but also about the real existence of God, not only because the existence of the absolute divine being is inseparable from His essence (and without it the divine essence would entirely collapse as a contradictory absurdity), but also because, if it could be separated, it would still remain the 87

88

See Josef Seifert, Leib und Seele. Ein Beitrag zur philosophischen Anthropologie (Salzburg: A. Pustet, 1973); the same author, Das Leib-Seele Problem und die gegenwärtige philosophische Diskussion. Eine kritisch-systematische Analyse; and “Sind Geist und Gehirn verschieden? Kritische Anmerkungen zu einigen Neuerscheinungen zum Leib-Seele-Problem,” Allgemeine Zeitschrift für Philosophie 18. 2 (1993), pp. 37-60. See Gabriel Marcel, Présence et immortalité: Journal métaphysique (1939-1943) et autres textes, (Paris: Flammarion, 1959); See also Josef Seifert, “Das Unsterblichkeitsproblem aus der Sicht der philosophischen Ethik und Anthropologie”; the same author, „“Unsterblichkeit”, in: Evangelisches Lexikon für Theologie und Gemeinde, ed.v. H. Burkhardt und U. Swarat Bd. III. (Wuppertal und Zürich: R. Brockhausverlag, 1994), pp. 2061-2064.

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most important question whether the infinite good is a mere idea or a really existing, omniscient and all-perfect being. It cannot be unfolded here what we have argued elsewhere that God’s is the only real existence that can be known by an immediate intuition or con-tuition into the divine essence and reached through the supreme intuitive knowledge of the divine essence and essence-existence-unity that forms the basis of the ontological argument,89 as well as through a series of indirect proofs of various kinds.90 To discover and use the many methods of such immediate or mediated existential philosophical knowledge contributed further to the birth of realist phenomenology and to a radically new and enlarged understanding of the phenomenological method. Philosophy includes still other forms of immediate as well as “negative knowledge” related to existence, for example, in a metaphysics of nothingness that requires a sort of radical via remotionis regarding existence that cannot be based solely on eidetic reduction or essential knowledge. IX Imperfect Understanding and docta ignorantia as Methods of Knowing the Incomprehensible: Apories, Apparent Antinomies, Paradoxes, and the Infinite It is an important part of philosophical knowledge to deal with apories, apparent antinomies, and logical paradoxes. While the logical paradoxes and some apparent antinomies based on equivocations can be solved by means of insights into essential necessities, apories constitute impenetrable objects of human thought, regarding which a crucial philosophical act is the humble admission that we cannot reach a comprehensive and adequate 89

90

See my attempts to argue for this in Josef Seifert, Gott als Gottesbeweis. As a Christian, one might argue that also the real existence of Christ as God-man can be known through insights into the essential uninventable glory and necessity disclosed in his holiness, but I do not consider this as a purely philosophical proof of the central mystery of the incarnation but only as an unfolding the deepest reason for our faith in Christ. See Josef Seifert, Essere e persona, ch. 10-14; the same author, “Die natürliche Gotteserkenntnis als menschlicher Zugang zu Gott,” pp. 9-102.

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knowledge of them. Such apories are found, for example, in how the traversing of infinitely many parts of spatial extension in movement is possible, or in the exact way in which body and soul are united in the incarnate human person, or how a necessary and eternal being can give rise to a contingent and temporal one, or how a human being that is wholly dependent in his being on a first cause, can be free, and countless others. The philosophical method required here is first an analysis of the terms between which the apory exists and a careful understanding of why their coexistence, known indirectly to be a fact, is incomprehensible. The truly philosophical way to face these apories is, as a first step, a Socratic “I know that I do not know”. If the human mind wants to solve completely these incomprehensibilities, it will fall into terrible difficulties or into constructions in which it will deny one or the other evident truth between which an incomprehensible relation exists so as to render things more “understandable.” At the same time, it will fail to analyze rationally and sufficiently all that is clearly given. Moreover, the human mind will be led to constructions in which it simultaneously fails to see many things that are clearly knowable and fails to admit human limits and ignorance. We have not sufficient space here to analyze this question in depth.91 X The Importance Experience Holds for All Philosophical/ Phenomenological Methods and Its Different Forms and Uses in Philosophy and Empirical Science A certain type of experience is absolutely essential for phenomenological knowledge, both for essential and for existential knowledge. For essential knowledge, if it arises from a strict going back to things themselves in a fundamentally receptive cognitive act, each aspect of the known essences must be given in some form of experience, or at least co-given with what we experience; as a matter of fact, here the knowledge itself, 91

See Josef Seifert, “Das Antinomienproblem als ein Grundproblem aller Metaphysik: Kritik der Kritik der reinen Vernunft” in: Prima Philosophia, Bd. 2, H 2, 1989; See also my Überwindung des Skandals der reinen Vernunft. Die Widerspruchsfreiheit der Wirklichkeit — trotz Kant (Freiburg/München: Karl Alber, 2001).

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intuition of essences or categorical intuition, is not sharply distinguished from experience but forms itself an important and high part of it. The experience of which we are speaking here is one of essence or such-beingexperience. But also knowledge of existence always is based on experience, on experience of existence, Daseinserfahrung,92 and — with the sole exception of the knowledge of God in the ontological argument — on an entirely different type of experience: either on immediate perception of the external world given to the senses and understood by the intellect with respect to the kind of existence it claims to possess; or on indirect proof based on experience of essences and existing things; or on the indubitable inner experience of our own existence in lived consciousness/Vollzugsbewußtsein, reflective consciousness and explicit reflection on existence.93 Thus we 92

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On these two kinds of experience, such-being-experience (Wesenserfahrung, Soseinserfahrung) and experience of existing being (Daseinserfahrung) see Dietrich von Hildebrand, What Is Philosophy? ch. 4. See on this notion of Vollzugsbewußtsein Dietrich von Hildebrand, Die Idee der sittlichen Handlung, 2. Auflage (unveränderter reprographischer Nachdruck, zusammen mit der Habilitationsschrift “Sittlichkeit und ethische Werterkenntnis” Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1969), pp. 8 ff.; the same author, Moralia, Nachgelassenes Werk. Gesammelte Werke Band V. (Regensburg: Josef Habbel, 1980), pp. 208 ff.; Dietrich von Hildebrand, Ästhetik. 1. Teil 1. Gesammelte Werke, Band V (Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 1977), pp. 32-40, 49-57; Dietrich von Hildebrand, Ethik (Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, Stuttgart o. J., 1971), pp. 202 ff., 212, 242; the same author, Ethics, 2nd ed. (Chicago: Franciscan Herald Press, 1978), pp. 191 ff.; idem, “Das Cogito und die Erkenntnis der realen Welt. Teilveröffentlichung der Salzburger Vorlesungen Hildebrands: ‘Wesen und Wert menschlicher Erkenntnis’”, pp. 2- 27; idem, Transformation in Christ. Our Path to Holiness (New Hampshire: Sophia Institute Press. 1989), ch. 4; Die Umgestaltung in Christus (St. Ottilien: Eos Verlag, 1988), Kap. 4. On its relation to reflective and reflexive comsciousness see also Karol Wojtyáa, The Acting Person (Boston: Reidel, 1979). See also Josef Seifert, “Karol Cardinal Wojtyáa (Pope John Paul II) as Philosopher and the Cracow/Lublin School of Philosophy” in Aletheia II (1981); the same author, Back to Things in Themselves;, 144 ff., 176 ff., 181-198, 249 ff., 286 ff., see also the passages indicated in the Index of Josef Seifert, Back to Things in Themselves, under consciousness, and constitution. See likewise Josef Seifert, Leib und Seele, cit., pp. 45 ff.; Josef Seifert, Erkenntnis objektiver Wahrheit, 59 ff., 65 ff., 118 ff., 212 ff., 233 ff., 150 ff., 161 ff., 203 ff.

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cannot say that the experience which is crucial for philosophy is only essential experience or such-being-experience. On the contrary, in philosophy existential experience or Daseinserfahrung is taken seriously for its own sake: to get to know what existing (esse) is and to know a series of existing entities whose real existence itself calls in the utmost degree for philosophical knowledge. Moreover, philosophy, while being independent from the experience of actually existing entities when it deals with absolutely necessary essences, is not entirely independent from experience of existence when it deals with historical epochs, styles, femininity, and so on which require, with the softer methods of an esprit de finesse, also some reliance on the actual existence of certain contingent elements of these natures. Natural science, history or sociology depend in a completely different way on existential experience in their cognitions: the actual existence of the observed examples are indispensable for the empirical and inductive essential knowledge, as we have seen.

CHAPTER TWO PHILOSOPHICAL/PHENOMENOLOGICAL METHODS INHERENT IN KNOWLEDGE ITSELF AS WAYS TO OBTAIN AND PERFECT KNOWLEDGE As the second fundamental class of things that are designated by this term, we can mean by ‘method’ not the kind of knowledge itself but the more concrete modes of proceeding in the process of knowing something. Understood in this way, the method of knowing colors is not sufficiently described by the answer “seeing” but by expressions such as: “paying attention to all the neighboring colors as well as to the specific identity of the quality of the color we see,” and other ways used in “a school of learning to see.”94 In an analogous way one could identify many methodic elements of phenomenology as methods to be used to learn to see intellectually, for example by: a) Using a wide spectrum of carefully chosen authentic examples of a phenomenon from real life and literature, our own or other experiences, in order to avoid confusing accidental characteristics of some forms of a phenomenon with its general essence and to gain a richer experiential contact with the respective essence. b) Purification and transcendence of the experience of an essence as contained in such examples. The pure ideal essence of gratitude or love, for example, is far more perfect than what is contained of it in the experienced examples; therefore we have to learn to go beyond what is given in these examples and to ascend, in a kind of Platonic upward intellectual movement, to the pure essences that are in some ways co-given with our 94

Similarly, the method of knowing music would not just be listening but keeping in mind the notes just heard, but also learning to hear more precisely, paying attention to the pitch of tones, to the harmonies between them, counting all the different tones contained in a harmony, distinguishing rhythm, speed, etc., and learn to recognize musical forms and the formal and aesthetic characteristics of compositions.

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examples but can be reached only by transcending their concrete existing embodiments known to us; such a transcending and contemplative experience of pure essences reveals the imperfections of the concrete examples from which we take our starting point. c) delving carefully into, and as completely as possible analyzing, the different essential marks of a thing. d) comparison of a given phenomenon with other data This methodic step includes many sub-steps: i. identification of common moments; ii. distinction especially from closely related or similar but also from very different data (seeing, for example, what forgiveness or promising are not); iii. distinction of many data meant by the same linguistic term, and their essential analysis;95 iv. noting and using similarities and analogies, but observing strict rules in the use of analogies: 1. The analogy must be a valid analogy, not a false or superficially apparent, misleading one; 2. The analogon must not be confused with a genus; rather different analogous phenomena belong to different orders of being. 3. The analogous datum must only be used to grasp a given datum with respect to what actually is similar and not to what is dissimilar in it from the investigated phenomenon. 4. The analogy must be used to help us to know something, but within its limits: it never ought to prevent us from recognizing what is different and original in the phenomenon we investigate.96 95

96

See the many meanings of “Vorstellung” and of “Urteil” in Edmund Husserl, Logische Untersuchungen, text der ersten und zweiten Auflage, Bd I: Prolegomena zu einer reinen Logik, hrsg.v. E. Holenstein, Husserliana, Bd. xviii (Den Haag: M. Nijhoff, 1975). See also my “Die vierfache Quelle der Menschenwürde als Fundament der Menschenrechte”,,” in: Burkhardt Ziemske (ed.), Staatsphilosophie und Rechtspolitik. Festschrift für Martin Kriele zum 65. Geburtstag (München: Verlag C.H. Beck, 1997), pp. 165-185. For a more extensive treatment of this method of using analogies and the rules this method must observe, see Dietrich von Hildebrand, Das Wesen der Liebe, Prolegomena. Gesammelte Werke III (Regensburg: J. Habbel, 1971). La essenza

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e) finding opposites, possibly different kinds of opposites, to a given datum: (e.g., analyzing error and ignorance when we want to understand knowledge, falsity when we investigate truth, nothing when investigating being, etc.). The old saying “opposita per opposita cognoscuntur” refers to this.97 f) A significant method of realist phenomenology incorporates important elements of Kant’s so-called “transcendental method.” A realist transcendental method, which I interpret as pointing out “evident data, that are necessarily presupposed by others or by their own negation” and constitute objective “conditions of the possibility” of any being, any knowledge, any proposition, etc. This method consists in several elements: a. Demonstrations of the necessary presupposedness of certain data for all experience, knowledge, all being, or for all data of a certain kind; for example, some knowledge of being or of the state of affairs that something is rather than nothing is presupposed in any conceivable theory and affirmation; showing in which ways even any negation of certain

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del amore. Das Wesen der Liebe, 2e Aufl., italienisch-deutsch (Milano: Pompiani, 2003). All this would deserve Goethe’s term of a method that is appropriate to vision, eine dem Anschaun gemäße Methode. This method plays also an important role in our knowledge of the first principles of being and of logic, such as the principles of contradiction and excluded middle. Thomas Aquinas, Commentary on Aristotle, De Interpretatione, Book I, L. 15, describes this method well even though his text fails to distinguish two very distinct principles, sharply distinguished by Alexander Pfänder: the principle of contradiction that says that of two contradictory propositions not both can be true, and the principle of excluded middle, according to which of two contradictory propositions not both can be false: 3. He shows how truth and necessity is had about things through the comparing of their opposites where he says, this is also the case with respect to contradiction, etc. The reasoning is the same, he says, in respect to contradiction and in respect to supposition. For just as that which is not absolutely necessary becomes necessary by supposition of the same (for it must be when it is), so also what in itself is not necessary absolutely, becomes necessary through the disjunction of the opposite, for of each thing it is necessary that it is or is not, and that it will or will not be in the future, and this under disjunction. This necessity is founded upon the principle that it is impossible for contradictories to be at once true and false. Accordingly, it is impossible that a thing neither be nor not be; therefore it is necessary that it either be or not be.

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phenomena, such as of all being, of truth, of the receptivity of knowledge, of freedom, etc., presupposes what is being denied. This method is not a sufficient proof of anything but rests on evident cognitions and constitutes an important aid and method to gain evident knowledge. 98 b. Showing that X is the condition of the possibility of: 1. knowing and judging that something is the case; 2. of experiencing; 3. or of things themselves (e.g., principle of contradiction).

98

See Max Scheler, “Lehre von den Drei Tatsachen” in: Max Scheler, Schriften aus dem Nachlaß, Bd. I, 2. Aufl,. hrsg. Maria Scheler (Bern: Francke, 1957), pp. 431502; see also his “Idealismus — Realismus” in: Max Scheler, Gesammelte Werke Bd. 9, Späte Schriften, pp. 187-188. See also “Vom Wesen der Philosophie. Der philosophische Aufschwung und die moralischen Vorbedingungen”, pp. 93-94: Die erste und unmittelbarste Evidenz, zugleich diejenige, die schon zur Konstituierung des Wortes „Zweifel an etwas” (an dem Sein von etwas, an der Wahrheit eines Satzes usw.) vorausgesetzt ist, ist aber die evidente Einsicht, daß überhaupt Etwas sei oder, noch schärfer gesagt, daß „nicht Nichts sei” (wobei das Wort Nichts weder ausschließlich das Nicht-Etwas noch das Nicht-Da-sein von Etwas, sondern jenes absolute Nichts bedeutet, dessen Seinsnegation im negierten Sein das So-Sein oder Wesen und das Da-Sein noch nicht scheidet). Der Tatbestand, daß nicht Nichts sei, ist gleichzeitig der Gegenstand erster und unmittelbarster Einsicht, wie der Gegenstand der intensivsten und letzten philosophischen Verwunderung — wobei diese letztere emotionale Bewegung angesichts des Tatbestandes freilich erst dann voll einzutreten vermag, wenn ihr unter den die philosophische Haltung prädisponierenden Gemütsakten die den Selbstverständlichkeitscharakter... des Tatbestandes des Seins auslöschende Demutshaltung vorangegangen ist. Also: Gleichgültig, auf welche Sache ich mich hinwende und auf welche, nach untergeordneteren Seinskategorien schon genauer bestimmte Sache — als da z. B. sind Sosein - Dasein; Bewußtsein - Natursein; reales Sein oder objektives nichtreales Sein; Gegenstand-sein - Aktsein, desgleichen Gegenstandsein - Widerstandsein; Wertsein oder wertindifferentes „existentiales” Sein; substantielles, attributives, akzidentelles oder Beziehungsein; Möglichsein ... oder Wirklichsein; zeitfreies, schlechthin dauerndes oder Gegenwärtig-, Vergangen-, Zukünftigsein; das Wahrsein (z. B. eines Satzes), Gültigsein oder vorlogisches Sein; ausschließlich mentales „fiktives” Sein (z. B. der nur vorgestellte „goldene Berg” oder das nur vorgestellte Gefühl) oder außermentales resp. beiderseitiges Sein — ich hinblicke: an jedem einzelnen beliebig herausgegriffenen Beispiel innerhalb einer oder mehrerer sich je kreuzender sog. Arten des Seins, wie an jeder dieser herausgegriffenen Arten selbst wieder wird mir diese Einsicht mit unumstößlicher Evidenz klar — so klar, daß sie an Klarheit alles überstrahlt, was mit ihr nur in denkbaren Vergleich gebracht werden kann. Freilich: Wer gleichsam nicht in den Abgrund des absoluten Nichts geschaut hat, der wird auch die eminente Positivität des Inhalts der Einsicht, daß überhaupt Etwas ist und nicht lieber Nichts, vollständig übersehen. Er wird bei irgendeiner der vielleicht nicht minder evidenten, aber der Evidenz dieser Einsicht doch nachgeordneten Einsichten beginnen.

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Such a transcendental method can never be the highest form of knowledge nor provide the highest criterion of truth, which can only lie in the inner evidence of things, but it rests on evident knowledge of the truth and is often an important way to know a truth by showing, in different ways, that it is an evident condition of the possibility of other things which we know and recognize. It can never replace the philosophical intuition and knowledge of the truth, however, because the mere presupposedness, if it is not seen to be grounded in the evidence of truth, could never suffice as foundation of knowledge, except if that of which something else is the necessary condition is itself evident; then also the conditions can not only be intuited in a direct way but also be proven to be objective in this indirect way. In its negative use, such a transcendental method can be an absolute proof of falsity and serve as a refutation through reductio ad absurdum. But even here it is impossible to separate this method from the direct intuition of essences as highest criterion. While we agree with Kant that such a demonstration that something is a condition of the possibility of experience and its objects is an excellent method to cognize it, we differ from Kant’s understanding of the transcendental method in decisive respects: a. we strictly separate this method as method of realist phenomenology from the subjectivist interpretation in Kant, according to which we deal here only with “conditions of the possibility of human thinking or experiencing,” which are not intrinsically and objectively necessary, and even are: i. characterized by a “transcendental acidentality” that allows for other thinking subjects to be bound by other rules,99 rather than being 99

See Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgment, § 77, V 406, trans. J. H. Bernard (New York Hafner Publishing Co., 1968): We have now to deal with the relation of our understanding to the judgement, viz. we seek for a certain contingency in the constitution of our understanding, to which we may point as a peculiarity distinguishing it from other possible understandings.

Hence, if our intellect and its synthetic a priori structures are ‘accidental’ (contingent) in relation to another intellect, this means at least that the opposite (other forms of thought, etc.) are possible. This follows also from Kant’s own explanations of the concept:

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conditions of the possibility of cognitions and judgments, and/or of things and essences themselves, and being this in any possible world.100

Kant explains best what he understands under ‚Zufälligkeit’ (accidentality/contingency) in relation to existence in his pre-critical writing: Der einzig mögliche Beweisgrund zu einer Demonstration des Daseins Gottes (1763), II/83: Bis dahin erhellt, daß ein Dasein eines oder mehrerer Dinge selbst aller Möglichkeit zum Grunde liege, und daß dieses Dasein an sich selbst nothwendig sei. Man kann hieraus auch leichtlich den Begriff der Zufälligkeit abnehmen. Zufällig ist nach der Worterklärung, dessen Gegentheil möglich ist. Um aber die Sacherklärung davon zu finden, so muß man auf folgende Art unterscheiden. Im logischen Verstande ist dasjenige als ein Prädicat an einem Subjecte zufällig, dessen Gegentheil demselben nicht widerspricht. Z.E. Einem Triangel überhaupt ist es zufällig, daß er rechtwinklicht sei. Diese Zufälligkeit findet lediglich bei der Beziehung der Prädicate zu ihren Subjecten statt und leidet, weil das Dasein kein Prädicat ist, auch gar keine Anwendung auf die Existenz. Dagegen ist im Realverstande zufällig dasjenige, dessen Nichtsein zu denken ist, das ist, dessen Aufhebung nicht alles Denkliche aufhebt. Wenn demnach die innere Möglichkeit der Dinge ein gewisses Dasein nicht voraussetzt, so ist dieses zufällig, weil sein Gegentheil die Möglichkeit nicht aufhebt. Oder: Dasjenige Dasein, wodurch nicht das Materiale zu allem Denklichen gegeben ist, ohne welches also noch etwas zu denken, das ist, möglich ist, dessen Gegentheil ist im Realverstande möglich, und das ist in eben demselben Verstande auch zufällig.

Kant’s implication of the ‚transzendentale Zufälligkeit’ (transcendental contingency/accidentality) of the subjective a priori forms of intuition and thought are of course in the final analysis contradictory, because Kant claims here to grasp an “absolute predicate” of the subjective forms of thought, something which he denies in other places, for example in the Critique of Pure Reason, B 644: If I am constrained to think something necessary as a condition of existing things, but am unable to think any particular thing as in itself necessary, it inevitably follows that necessity and contingency do not concern the things themselves; otherwise there would be a contradiction. Consequently, neither of these two principles can be objective. They may, however, be regarded as subjective principles of reason. The one calls upon us to seek something necessary as a condition of all that is given as existent, that is, to stop nowhere until we have arrived at an explanation which is completely a priori; the other forbids use ever to hope for this completion, that is, forbids us to treat anything empirical as unconditioned and to exempt ourselves thereby from the toil of its further derivation. 100

Cf. Immanuel Kant, Logic, in : Kants Werke, Band IX, 12 f., trans. Thomas Kingsmill Abbott (Westport: Greenwood Press, 1963): All rules which the understanding follows, are either necessary or contingent. The former are those without which no exercise of the understanding would be possible at all; the latter are those without which some certain definite exercise of the understanding could not take place. The contingent rules which depend on a definite object of knowledge are as manifold as these objects themselves. For example, there is an exercise of the understanding in mathematics, metaphysics, morals, etc. The rules of this special definite exercise of the understanding in these sciences are contingent, because it is contingent that I think of this or that object to which these special rules have reference.

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ii. We disagree with any Kantian attempt to replace intuition of essences by this transcendental method, which is due to Kant’s unfounded distrust in the human capacity of knowing things in themselves. iii. Quite contrary to this: the discovery that something really is the condition of the possibility of something else, if it is not a mere empirical statement about human thinking, already presupposes some knowledge of necessary essences and states of affairs rooted in them.101 iv. We would also apply Kant’s transcendental method against Kant showing that the condition of the possibility of knowing appearances is the knowledge of some things and states of affairs that exist in themselves. v. Further, to solely know that we always presuppose something does nothing to prove its truth. As Friedrich Nietzsche puts it, such presuppositions could be inborn errors of the human race. Therefore a higher criterion of truth can only lie in evidence. vi. Kant also overlooks the fact that many absolutely evident states of affairs, such as that “‘orange’ lies between yellow and red,” are not everywhere presupposed; presupposedness must be sharply distinguished from essential necessity and evidence also for this reason, in order to recognize the clearly given fact that evident truths are not restricted to that part of them that is everywhere presupposed for all knowledge and experience. We also do not think that Kant was the first to have used a transcendental method in this sense but find it in Plato’s dialectical refutations of Sophists and relativists in Theaitetos, in Aristotle’s Book Ƚ of the Metaphysics, where he shows that all thoughts (judgments), all distinctions, and all actions presuppose the truth of the principle of contradiction, but also in Augustine, Bonaventura, and many others.

If, however, we set aside all knowledge that we can only borrow from objects, and reflect simply on the exercise of the understandings in general, then we discover those rules which are absolutely necessary, independently of any particular objects of thought, because without them we cannot think at all. These rules, accordingly, can be discerned a priori, that is, independently of all experience, because they contain merely the conditions of the use of the understanding in general, whether pure or empirical, without distinction of its objects. 101

See Josef Seifert, Back to Things in Themselves, ch. 4-5.

CHAPTER THREE PHENOMENOLOGICAL (PHILOSOPHICAL) METHODS IN THE THIRD SENSE — THE TOOLS (OR TRICKS) USED TO OBTAIN PHILOSOPHICAL KNOWLEDGE In a fundamentally different, third, sense we speak of method in the sense of theoretical devices, tools, or tricks which neither are a type of philosophical knowledge nor elements and conditions of carrying it out with rigor. Rather ‘method’ here refers to special ways used in order to obtain philosophical knowledge. I Abstraction We may call, in a certain sense, abstraction such a method, except when it is understood as a moment in the knowledge of universal essence itself.102 We mean here abstracting when it is used in order to obtain knowledge of the essence, in a way analogous to ‘free variation’. In this case, abstraction can be regarded, not as a consequence or type of knowledge, but as a means to obtain it, by prescinding from all individual or specific traits that only belong to certain samples of an essence or species. We leave here open whether such a process of abstracting already presupposes some knowledge of an essence, but consider it here as a method of “abstracting from” many individual and specific features of an essence in order to get at a better knowledge of universal essences. Understood in this way, the method of abstraction is similar to free variation.

102

Then it would belong as an element to method in the first sense but not itself be knowledge but rather part of what Jacques Maritain has called very well “abstracting intuition.” See Jacques Maritain, The Degrees of Knowledge (Notre Dame, Indiana: University of Notre Dame, 1999).

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Also the use of free variation in imagination of all the elements that can be changed in a datum without changing its fundamental invariant essence and identity, is such a method of philosophy proposed by Husserl and Reinach:103 in order to fix our minds on the authentic essence of a thing, it is useful to make the experiment of altering in our imagination all elements of a given example that we can vary without losing the essence in question. Free variation is thus a tool used in order to grasp the essence of a thing and not to confuse the given essence with moments that accidentally or even frequently are linked to it but do not constitute its essence. Also Plato uses this method often, for example when he criticizes the definition of beauty in terms of a beautiful girl, pointing out that there are many other beautiful things and that we must not therefore define beauty in terms of something that can vary, without the invariant essence of beautiful varying, and can therefore be replaced by other bearers without the essential character of beauty being lost.104 Gurwitsch points out that this method is not self-sufficient: Later Husserl developed the method of “free variation in imagination”, published in both “Erfahrung und Urteil” and “Phänomenologische Psychologie”. To sketch it roughly and superficially, that method consists in starting from a given nuance, say, violet, and varying it in imagination, having, e.g., the component of blue again increasing predominance over the component of red. The purpose of the method is to ascertain the limits which the process of variation must not transgress for the resulting imaginary varieties still possibly to be considered as specimina of violet. The limits within which the process of free variation has to be confined define the İȓįȠȢ or, if you please, the essence in question. The method of free variation in imagination proves fruitful for establishing relations of the kind as exemplified by Brentano’s propositions which Mr. Chisholm has mentioned. Still there remains a difficulty. It may, and must, be asked how we come to know the limits which are not to be transgressed in the

103

104

See Edmund Husserl, Erfahrung und Urteil (Experience and Judgment), (Prag: Academia/Verlagsbuchhandlung, 1939), pp. 294-307. Plato, Hippias Maior 287d ff.

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course of the process of free variation. For an answer to that question, we must — I submit — turn to perceptual experience, especially the generic and typical features embedded in it. Those features may be disclosed by the specific operation of disengaging thematization. By means of this operation, the generic is transformed into the general, the type becomes the İȓįȠȢ. After the disengaging thematization has been performed, the method of free variation may come into play for the sake of explication. The limits of time do not permit me to pursue the matter any further and to enter into a discussion of the complementary underpinning which the method of free variation requires. 105

I would answer that free variation presupposes the first method of the first class of methods discussed above: the insight into necessary essences and is a mere tool that is helpful to reach it but simultaneously presupposes it, in this respect similar to the methods of the first kind. James Dubois argues interestingly that Reinach sees free variation possible only within objects of presentation (Vorstellung) and within non-formal (material) objects.106 III Methodic Doubt The most famous method in this third basic sense is the methodic doubt of everything not known with indubitable evidence in order to reach indubitable knowledge. This method is introduced systematically by

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Aron Gurwitsch, “Bemerkungen zu den Referaten der Herren Patocka, Landgrebe und Chisholm,” (Proceedings of the XIVth International Congress of Philosophy, Vienna, 2nd to 9th September 1968), III. See James Dubois, “An Introduction to Adolf Reinach’s ‘The supreme rules of rational inference according to Kant’,” in: Aletheia 6: 70-80 (1994); the same author, Judgment and Sachverhalt: An Introduction to Adolf Reinach’s Phenomenological Realism (Dodrecht: Reidel, 1995); see also Nebojsa Kujundzic, “Reinach, Material Necessity, and Free Variation,” Dialogue 36: 721-739 (1997), as well as his doctoral dissertation, An Inquiry into Mental Variation, A Doctoral thesis presented to the University of Waterloo, Ontario, Canada 1995, pp. 116 ff.: “Reinach, Material Necessity and Free Variation,” See also my Sein und Wesen, ch. 1, and “Essence and Existence.”

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Descartes in his Discours de la Méthode,107 but also found, in some ways, in Augustine’s si enim fallor, sum-Argument.108 We must recognize this as a possible and useful methodic “instrument” in order to reach indubitable certainty, because, by performing a systematic methodic doubt in order to see what we know with indubitable certainty, we will be far more easily apt to distinguish between what we truly know and what we only opine. Moreover, methodic doubt makes somehow explicit what is implicitly contained whenever we become consciously reflectively aware of possessing apodictically certain and indubitable knowledge: in recognizing this absolute certainty, we have to grasp also its indubitablity and hence see it somehow over against that which we can possibly doubt. Nevertheless, a consciously and methodically exerted universal doubt, as Descartes understands it, is not the only methodic device philosophy must use; we can also proceed simply from a sense of wonder, not using methodic doubt! Moreover, methodic doubt being only a method of the third and least significant group of what one might call method, of the tricks and devices philosophy uses in order to reach knowledge, and is only one of many of these methods, it is certainly not the method of philosophy. Finally, the greatest error of Descartes about method is his extending methodic doubt to absolutely evident necessary essential truths and restricting absolute certainty to “I am, I exist.” This is not only false because it declares the objectively uncreatable and intrinsically necessary essences to be created and creatable and therefore doubtful,109 but also 107 108

109

See René Descartes, Discours de la Méthode. Augustine, Contra Academicos; also Augustine, De Trinitate, X, X, 14 (the text we have already cited above). See also, Augustine, Contra Academicos, II, xiii, 29, ibid., III, 23; De Vera Religione, XXXIX, 73, 205-7; De Trinitate, X, X, 14; ibid., XIV, vi, 8; ibid., XV, xii, 21; De Civitate Dei XI, xxvi. Cf. Ludger Hölscher, The Reality of the Mind. See also Josef Seifert, Back to Things in Themselves, ch. 5. Jean-Luc Marion believes that this unheard of thesis is the core of René Descartes’s philosophy, while I regard it as a deviation from his most essential contributions. See Jean-Luc Marion, Sur l’ontologie grise de Descartes. Savoir aristotélicien et science cartésienne dans les Regulae (Paris: J. Vrin, 1975, 2nd ed. 1981); the same author, Sur la théologie blanche de Descartes (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1981).

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because stopping doubt only with our real existence is impossible because we could not gain the indubitable certainty of our existence if we did not gain as well indubitable knowledge about universal essentially necessary states of affairs such as the principle of contradiction without which the truths about our existence could not be known. 110 ‘Methodic doubt’ is not a method in the first sense; it is not a form of philosophical knowledge, and not even an element of this knowledge, like the distinction of a datum from its opposites; nor is it properly speaking a tool, let alone a necessary tool, to obtain philosophical knowledge, but it is a certain starting point useful in order to reach that nucleus of knowledge in the narrower sense of the term that is indubitable. By universalizing this method, however, Descartes forgets not only that the methodic doubt is not indispensable for reaching evident knowledge but also that philosophy is legitimately interested in some objects that are not in the same way indubitably certain and “clear and distinct ideas” (necessary essences) and with regard to which “methodic doubt” has no meaningful application whatsoever because instead of constituting the method of knowing them it would eliminate them in the way in which Descartes eliminated so many things that did not suit his method such as plant and animal life that is not given, at least in existence, from within in indubitable knowledge. Authentic philosophy, however, is interested, for example, in the real existence of the sense-world and of vegetative and sensitive forms of irrational life, in the more mysterious and aporetic aspects of the bodymind relation and in the ‘incarnate’ human person, or in the essential characteristics of masculinity and femininity. If we were to prescind here from everything that can possibly be doubted in some hyperbolic doubt, little or nothing of this legitimate group of objects of philosophical knowledge would remain. A similarly Cartesian assumption leads Husserl to a false extension of the epoché as a perennial bracketing of the real existence of the external world because it is not so evident that it could not

110

See Josef Seifert, Back to Things in Themselves; see also my “Bonaventuras Interpretation der augustinischen These vom notwendigen Sein der Wahrheit,” in: Franziskanische Studien 59 (1977), 38-52.

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be bracketed in methodic doubt, as he puts it in his Cartesian Meditations.111 IV Epoché in the Double Sense of ‘Eidetic Reduction’ of Bracketing Real Existence and of Bracketing Inessential Moments of Essences in Eidetic Reduction A closely related method, or two closely related methods for obtaining knowledge of essences in phenomenology is the method of epoché, a method that has many legitimate and many illegitimate aspects. Epoché in the sense of some bracketing of, or prescinding from, existence is no doubt an important philosophical and phenomenological method used in eidetic analysis of essences. This prescinding from, or bracketing of, the real existence of the object that is being considered, a method in the third sense that would be absurd in empirical sciences, is a valid mathematical or philosophical method. It is not a form of philosophical knowledge but a tool in order to concentrate purely on the essence in question. Yet it cannot be applied to all such-beings, namely not to the contingent ones such as that of human brain structure and functioning but only to highly intelligible and necessary essences, whose objectivity and intelligibility is so powerful that the objectivity of such uninventable essences and the validity of our knowledge of them does not depend on their real existence. Epoché in this sense is a certain prescinding from, and bracketing of, existence when our goal is purely essential knowledge of necessary essences. It has a similar character to the Cartesian methodic doubt: all uncertain and dubitable aspects of the object from which we take our starting point, including its existence, are bracketed in order to reach indubitable knowledge of its essence.112 111

112

See Edmund Husserl, Cartesianische Meditationen und Pariser Vorträge, Cartesian Meditations. For a critique of this Husserlian assumption, see Josef Seifert, Back to Things in Themselves, ch. 4. Many philosophical and historical relations to Descartes are pointed out by Husserl himself. See Cartesian Meditations, transl. Dorion Cairns, 5th impression (The Hague: M. Nijhoff, 1973).

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Recognizing the validity of this method, we must add four things to avoid misunderstandings: (1) This method is in no way a universal method used in philosophy, as we have seen when insisting on the important task of philosophy to explore real existence that can evidently not be reached by ‘bracketing it’, neither when ‘to be’ as such is considered (which does indeed entail a sort of “bracketing the individual existence” in order to concentrate on the actus essendi as such, but this cannot be called “a bracketing of existence,” entailing rather a “bracketing of essence” in order to throw existence better into relief),113 nor (and even less), as we have seen, when those existing beings are explored that constitute a chief object of philosophy. (2) Moreover, we do not really know essences in virtue of exerting epoché but in spite of it. In other words, the bracketing of the concrete existence of something is a good tool we may use in order to concentrate on its essence (except in the unique case of the absolute being) but it is not necessary to perform an act of systematically considering the whole world as possibly not existing in order to know essences: a mere distinction between essence and existence is quite enough. For example, when I analyze the essence of friendship, having experienced it concretely in heroic acts and a life-long faithful friend, I can understand the eidos of friendship in such a way that the validity of my knowledge of its essence in no way depends on the real existence of friendship in my friend in whom I have experienced it. Even if he turned out to be a hypocrite or a spy who abused my confidence for years or whose intention was in no way benevolent but aiming at betraying me to my foes, this would change nothing in the validity of my knowledge of the essence of friendship. I would then understand that my friend was no true friend but a traitor and hypocrite but precisely for this judgment the truth of my knowledge of the essence of friendship is a condition. Similarly, if all I have experienced with my friend were a dream and my friend and room-mate during my studies a purely intentional object and

113

See Josef Seifert, Sein und Wesen, ch. 2; and the same author, “Essence and Existence.” ch. 2.

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illusion produced by a schizophrenic condition of mine,114 this would change nothing of the validity of eidetic knowledge of the essence of friendship. On the contrary, I would still clearly understand that another ‘person’ who would be nothing but a purely intentional object of my consciousness could not be a real friend and that friendship can only exist between real persons and that therefore I have lived during years with an ‘illusory friend,’ who has never realized the acts necessary for real friendship and could therefore not be called my friend. I would also comprehend that the validity of my judgment that such a purely hallucinated person could not be a friend, precisely presupposes the validity of my insight into the essence of friendship to which the reality of all persons who are friends essentially belongs. At the same time, I would understand that a beautiful fiction about friendship could in some may manifest the essence of friendship in a more perfect way than an imperfect friendship in real life. Think of the first part of the “tale of the unseemly curiosity” in Cervantes’ Don Quixote, or of the friendship between Patroclos and Achilles in Homer’s Iliad, or of Friedrich Schiller’s magnificent example of heroic friendship (based on a historic friendship between Damon and Phintias or Phytias that inspired many literary portrayals of it) in his ballade Die Bürgschaft, between Damon (in earlier versions of the poem Möros), who freely returns to die from the hands of the tyrant Dionys(os) and his friend, who accepts to be a hostage or living bail and to be crucified by the tyrant if his friend does not return from marrying his sister off before suffering his death penalty. In some literary personages we find a far more perfect ideal of friendship embodied than often in real life. As we see then, I could exercise an epoché in the form of a bracketing of real existence in my eidetic analysis of the essence of friendship. But at the same time I recognize that such an existential epoché is neither necessary nor sufficient for obtaining valid essential knowledge. I do not have to perform explicitly the act of suspending or bracketing the real existence of my friend, or of imagining him to be in reality a traitor, or 114

Think, for example, of the movie based on the authentic life of the Nobel laureate John Nash, A Beautiful Mind.

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assume that my friend is only the object of a schizophrenic hallucination of mine to know the essence of friendship. Thus while epoché in the form of bracketing real existence would be compatible with, and possibly helpful for eidetic knowledge of necessary essences, it is in no way necessary to obtain it. Moreover, the mere bracketing of existence in epoché is not sufficient to get eidetic knowledge, not only because with contingent and in their essential content non-necessary essences such an époche does not lead anywhere, but also because the ideal depth of necessary essences such as those of love and friendship cannot at all be grasped simply on the basis of suspending the question of existence of concrete examples of friendship. It requires an intuitive grasp of these essences that — in their unity — are much more perfect than their finite concrete embodiments in persons even though these do no longer belong to a pure eidetic but to a real order and in this respect are superior. Nonetheless, the essential content of love and friendship encountered among our acquaintances, in our families and in ourselves is usually quite poor and far from embodying these essences perfectly but mixed with many opposite elements. While it is therefore important to insist on the validity of my knowledge of the essence of friendship in spite of my performing such an epoché, it is not through it that I know the true essence of friendship, and even less would the type of thoroughgoing transformation of the whole world into a world of “pure phenomena” through a universal epoché be necessary in order to reach this knowledge, as Husserl seems to suggest in his Ideas and elsewhere. Even if I never have any doubt of the reality of the person and of the friendship of my friend, I can gain the same eideitic knowledge of the essence of friendship as when I perform existential epoché or eidetic epoché, i. e. bracketing real existence or inessential and foreign aspects of an essence as it exists in concreto in order to concentrate on the pure essence (eidos). Hence existential epoché is a potentially useful but neither a necessary nor a sufficient tool to obtain eidetic knowledge. (3) That epoché as a bracketing of existence is not a universal method (in the third sense of the term) of philosophy is even clearer if we consider the following: Some really existing beings, especially our own person and God, are known to us with indubitable certainty. We know our own

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existence (esse) in an immediate form or inner experience of reflection on our Vollzugsbewußtsein in which our own being is given to us. Now, while the existence of my own individual person is not of interest for philosophy, it is of utmost interest for philosophy to know, with our own existence, that a real person and real being exists: cogito; ergo sum; ergo persona est; ergo esse est.115 Of a more absolute and intrinsic interest is the question of the real existence of the absolute divine being, the existence of God. Since any philosophical investigation that confronts this supreme object of philosophical knowledge treated by Aristotle in the last books of his Metaphysics and central for other ancient, medieval, modern and contemporary philosophers, both atheists and theists, is concerned with a question about real existence, a bracketing of existence can certainly not be part of the method of a philosophy of God that affirms or denies divine existence. Therefore epoché as bracketing of existence cannot be a universal method for philosophy, even not for a philosophy that is set solely on indubitably evident knowledge. For the answers to both the question of my own existence and that of the existence of God can be given based on indubitable philosophical evidence that precisely pertains to real existence.116 (4) There is a very different reason why epoché as a bracketing of all real existence in the pursuit of indubitable and evident knowledge is not a universal methodological basis of philosophy: philosophy is not solely concerned with indubitably evident knowledge. Although a purely rational and indubitable knowledge of truth is an indispensable condition of any absolute and firm foundation of all philosophy and science and a major goal philosophical (and to some extent mathematical) knowledge should strive for and can reach, as most great philosophers from Plato to Husserl have recognized, philosophy should not exclusively aim at indubitable knowledge, as we have pointed out before; otherwise, an inhuman, pseudodivine idol of philosophy is espoused that neglects all those domains of

115

116

For a lengthy study of the texts in Augustine and Descartes on the cogito, and its systematic unfolding, see Dietrich von Hildebrand, “Das Cogito und die Erkenntnis der realen Welt”, pp. 2-27. For an extensive treatment of these questions see my books Back to Things in Themselves; Essence and Existence, Gott als Gottesbeweis.

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important and legitimate interest for philosophy regarding which such an absolute evidence is inaccessible to the human mind. For example, even if we assume, against claims of immediate evidence or the Cartesian proof of the reality of the sensible world through reference to divine veracity, that the knowledge we gain about other persons in empathy or the knowledge we gain about the material universe through our sense perceptions is not absolutely certain but an object of a well-founded belief or common sense, it still remains a perfectly legitimate object of philosophical enquiry to point out the good reasons for such a realist belief in the world that surrounds us and it would in no way be an adequate stance of the philosopher to banish this topic from the field of philosophical investigation because we could not reach indubitable certainty about it. The idea that indubitable knowledge is the only goal of philosophy such that everything that is not indubitably certain should be banished from its sphere makes of indubitable knowledge an idol and is unwilling to see that the inherent importance of the question of the reality of the objects of our senses deserves philosophical inquiry and defense even if it were found to lack indubitable certainty. The term “eidetic reduction” (epoché) can also refer not to bracketing real existence but to a bracketing all inessential or non-substantial elements in a given essence itself inasmuch as it is disclosed to our mind in concrete examples; we may call this a reduction of the totality of the concrete essence given in our experience to the pure content of the essence and the prescinding from all accidental moments. Such an eidetic epoché can refer at least to three moments from which an eidetic analysis has to prescind in order to grasp the pure essence of something: (1) first, we have to prescind from the moments of concretion which do not belong to a general essence as such; thus, in order to grasp the essence of friendship, we have to bracket from the individuals from whose friendship we proceed (from Achilles, Patroclos, Damon, etc.); we also have to bracket the historic period in which they lived or are imagined to have lived, the concrete content of their acts of friendship, etc. (2) We likewise have to bracket all imperfections with which a concrete friendship is fraught: limits of the courage and audacity that belong to the fidelity of friendship, limits of benevolence, etc.; (3) Thirdly, and even more, we have to bracket all elements in concrete examples that go against the true essence of friendship

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but are found in concrete examples of human love and friendship: such as egocentric behavior, unjust reproaches, lack of consideration of the friend’s legitimate interest and happiness, irrational anger, etc. Unlike the existential epoché that is not necessary for knowledge of an eidos but compatible with, and useful for, it, an eidetic epoché in the three senses discussed plays a more essential role for eidetic knowledge. While it is replaced by other methodic elements in the case of eidetic knowledge of the absolute being, it is indispensable for the purification of those eide of finite beings that are the proper object of philosophical knowledge, although the second and third step of eidetic epoché is applicable only where imperfect embodiments of an essence or their mixture in concrete cases with opposite elements is possible. For example, in understanding the ideal object of the number 3 in its necessary essence it does not seem possible to speak of an imperfect embodiment of this number, which we should bracket, or of it being mixed with opposite elements. Moreover, when we regard this eidetic epoché as an indispensable methodic tool for the purification or better for the pure grasp of such essences as that of friendship, there remains a question as to whether we actually use this epoché (as prescinding from foreign or hostile elements that darken the concrete embodiments of friendship) in order to achieve eidetic knowledge or whether such an epoché already presupposes some knowledge of the pure essence of friendship that alone allows us to bracket all imperfections in which such an essence shows itself to us in concrete experience. I am inclined to think (for these and other reasons)117 that the latter is correct and that the co-givenness of necessary essences with concrete examples is of a nature that can never be accounted for by epoché. It may well be, however, that in human knowledge there is an interpretation of intuitive knowledge of a pure essence such as that of friendship, in the light of which we are capable of excluding from the object of this knowledge the impure and limited or opposite elements that are mixed into concrete examples of its embodiment, but that we also use a conscious effort to exclude and bracket these moments in concrete experienced cases of it as a tool to reach the pure grasp of these essences as such.

117

Expounded in Josef Seifert, Sein und Wesen, ch. 1.

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V Epoché as Bracketing Opinions of Earlier Philosophers In order to get at the essences of things themselves, one also of course has to bracket the opinions of philosophers in order to see things oneself. Husserl at times uses the term epoché also in this sense.118 And it is of course necessary for any philosophizing about things themselves to perform such an epoché, explicitly or implicitly. In other words, we can never return to things themselves if we do not bracket the opinions of other philosophers, even of the ones we most admire, in order to achieve what Thomas Aquinas so well formulates as the goal of philosophy: Studium philosophiae non est ad hoc quod sciatur quod homines senserint, sed qualiter se habeat veritas rerum. The study of philosophy does not aim at knowing what people thought but what the truth of things is.119

VI Transcendental Epoché as an Invalid Method (in the Third Sense) That Presupposes a False Interpretation of the Objects of Philosophical Knowledge If it is clear that — as philosophical knowledge possesses a selftranscendence and sees essences and necessary states of affairs as well as existing beings that exist in themselves and give themselves in their 118

119

See Edmund Husserl, “Philosophie als strenge Wissenschaft,” in: Edmund Husserl, Aufsätze und Vorträge (1911-1921), Hrsg. Thomas Nenon und Hans Rainer Sepp, Husserliana Bd. XXV (Dordrecht/Boston/Lancaster: M. Nijhoff, 1987), pp. 3-62; see also Josef Seifert, “Phänomenologie und Philosophie als strenge Wissenschaft. Zur Grundlegung einer realistischen phänomenologischen Methode — in kritischem Dialog mit Edmund Husserls Ideen über die Philosophie als strenge Wissenschaft,” in: Filosofie, Pravda, Nesmrtlenost. Tòi praúskå pòednáóky/Philosophie, Wahrheit, Unsterblichkeit. Drei Prager Vorlesungen (tschechisch-deutsch), pòeklad, úvod a bibliografi Martin Cajthaml, (Prague: Vydala Kòestanská akademie Òim, svacek, edice Studium, 1998), pp. 14-50. Thomas Aquinas, De Caelo et Mundo, I, 22, n° 9.

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autonomous being to philosophical knowledge — the Husserlian thesis that a transcendental epoché ought to put into brackets, or even deny, any extramental and intrinsic being and validity of ideal essences or of real beings is a pure Irrweg (aberration) of philosophical method, in no way justified through the given but in flagrant contradiction to the it, as well as self-contradictory. Only a completely immanentistic and self-contradictory interpretation of philosophical knowledge can demand such a transcendental epoché as an inhibiting (putting in brackets) any transcendent being or autonomy of the objects of philosophical knowledge as a condition and methodic tool of philosophical knowledge. As a matter of fact, as we have shown elsewhere, in Husserl, this transcendental epoché is not only a bracketing of autonomous being and validity of the known essences analogous to a radical methodic doubt but a double thesis of a denial of transcendence and an explicit exclusion of such a transcendent autonomous world of eide as absurd: 1st Husserlian thesis: there are no such autonomous essences above and beyond being intentional objects of our human consciousness; 2nd thesis: if they existed, it would be absurd to believe that we could know them in their transcendence. From all we have said about the first type of philosophical method it follows that on the contrary such a transcendental epoché both as a skeptical bracketing and suspending any transcendent claim of knowing something which is not and cannot be just an intentional object of consciousness, and above all as a negation of the intrinsic character of necessary essences and states of affairs rooted in them is not only unnecessary for philosophy but false and self-contradictory because any such thesis contradicts the datum of cognitive transcendence and besides presupposes what it negates: the knowledge of essences and existence as they are in themselves.120

120

See my critique of this demand for the method of “transcendental epoch” in Josef Seifert, Back to Things in Themselves, ch. 1-5. See also my Erkenntnis objektiver Wahrheit.

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VII Linguistic Analysis Linguistic analysis, if it is not pretending to be the only starting point of philosophy, reducing philosophizing to a reflection about linguistic meanings or word-usages instead of the data themselves that are meant by these words, is another legitimate philosophical method and another important tool to obtain philosophical knowledge that implies that one interprets the objects of philosophical knowledge themselves in the light of word meanings. For obviously, looking into the many meanings and usages of a given word in one or in many languages, and taking into account the different dictionary meanings of a term might give a clue to understand things better; for language embodies a tremendous wisdom and wealth of interconnected meanings. (This use of linguistic analysis is wholly different from, and much closer to, a phenomenological analysis of essences than mere behaviouristic analytic philosophy that prescinds from concepts and considers language and even human speech acts merely as a complex manipulation of words à la Gilbert Ryle or at best only as language games à la Wittgenstein).121 Linguistic analysis can be understood as the only method of philosophy, and then it stands in deep conflict to what we have said about the forms of knowing that characterize philosophy and the phenomenological method. But it also can be understood as a limited means, a subordinated method in the third group and kind of methods, to get to know the essences of things themselves. And understood in that way, as a pointing stick to the phenomena themselves, being inserted in a critical philosophical context, linguistic analysis can be immensely helpful for understanding being itself better. For often the different meanings of words refer to entirely different things and therefore, to analyze language may help us to see and to distinguish these different things better, which we might confuse without such linguistic distinctions. 121

See Gilbert Ryle, The Concept of Mind (London: Hutchinson’s University Library, 1949). See also my critique of this method in Josef Seifert, Das Leib-Seele Problem und die gegenwärtige philosophische Diskussion.

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The correct use of linguistic analysis, however, also calls for not sticking solely to those parts of the essences of things that are referred to in the conceptual meanings of words. There are many more moments in things (for example in the essence of a triangle or of love) than are embodied in the corresponding word-meanings. Moreover, without going beyond the meanings to things themselves, it would not even be possible to recognize the word-meanings adequately.122 This will become more understandable if we consider another methodic tool of philosophical knowledge which lately tends to absorb philosophy and to make a claim to be the method of philosophy or even all that philosophy is. VIII Hermeneutics of Texts and History of Philosophy as Tools to Reach Philosophical Understanding of Things — A Transcendent Use of Texts In our efforts to get to know things themselves, we can be helped even more than by linguistic analysis through interpreting and trying to understand the texts of other, and especially of great and real philosophers who have discovered much of things themselves. It is clear that in a specific sense each person must “start anew” in philosophical knowledge since philosophy cannot simply build on previous knowledge nor can a philosopher content himself with results obtained by others as it is quite natural for natural science, geography and other fields to provide the cumulative treasure of knowledge to be used by anyone who studies them. But philosophizing on one’s own also requires becoming a student of great masters. To study and interpret great works of other thinkers has been therefore always an important tool to do philosophy. We cannot call this strictly speaking a method of philosophical knowledge except in the sense in which a practical year in a hospital is a method of learning medicine for young doctors. Similarly, witnessing the use of philosophical method in action in great texts is a tool of doing and learning philosophy. However, strictly speaking, this method of interpreting and commenting philosophical texts, which the Great Book Approach, initiated by Leo Strauss and other teachers in the United States, praised as the best or even 122

See Josef Seifert, “Texts and Things”, pp. 41-68.

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the only correct method of studying philosophy,123 and studying the history of philosophy is only helpful as a tool to obtain philosophical knowledge if our mental eye is not fixed on these texts as such as if we could only be readers of great books but if this reading and interpreting leads us on to the things themselves of which these texts speak. Without such a constant effort not to get stuck in the texts and in the labor to understand their meaning but to return to things themselves, this method is more a consequence of a relativistic or skeptical intellectual corruption rather than a tool to gain philosophical knowledge. To just read great books instead of thinking oneself about things in the pursuit of truth corrupts and confuses the mind and ceases being a help to understand things more clearly. All philosophical texts and the interpretation of them or of the commentaries on these great texts should, if we do philosophy and not just history of ideas, have one single goal: following the meaning of the texts of philosophers we ought to conceive of them just like a pointer at things themselves. In his way, of course reading philosophical texts can become an enormous help by inviting us to see things with the help of greater thinkers. But if we fail to see and recognize that each person himself has a capacity to understand things themselves and if historical studies or great texts and their exposition take the place of our own philosophizing, perhaps based on a deep skepticism of the historian or of the Straussian conception of liberal education, the great book approach replaces philosophy and thus ceases to be a way of doing it but becomes an enemy of real philosophizing. We always have to keep in mind the words of Saint Augustine:

123

See Leo Strauss, “Liberal Education and Mass Democracy,” in: Higher Education and Modern Democracy: The Crisis of the Few and Many, ed. Robert A. Goldwin (Chicago: Rand McNally & Co., 1967), pp. 73-96. See my critique in Josef Seifert, “Texts and Things”, pp. 41-68; in Back to Things in Themselves; and in “Is Advocacy of Specific Philosophical Positions in the Classroom Pedagogically Acceptable?,” in: The American Philosophical Association (APA) Newsletter on Teaching Philosophy, (1999), 99, 1, pp. 114-117. A similar teaching method through reading great books is also being practiced in Thomas Aquinas College in California and the great book Colleges Saint John’s in Anapolis and in Santa Fe, and others.

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While the text which is the object of interpretation consists primarily of meaning-units and could be accessible as such to a pure mind, these meaning-units only become texts in the human sense of this term when they are expressed and as it were embodied in words.125 Conceptual formations, but incarnated in a verbal body, are as it were the ‘stuff’ out of which texts are made and in which they consist. Text in such a strict sense then seems to be the union of Ausdruck and Bedeutung. Texts are meanings but embodied meanings, and embodied in written or spoken verbal bodies. The problems of hermeneutics begin only on the level of meanings which words express.126

124 125

126

Augustine, De Magistro, ch. 2, 12. Husserl distinguishes Begriffe (concepts) which he regards as timeless ideal meaning-units, and “schwankende Wortbedeutungen,” the changeable meanings of concrete words which can, by linguistic developments or by arbitrary decisions, express different meanings. See chapter 3 of the 1st Logical Investigation, pp. 83 ff., in the English translation ibid., pp. 312 ff. Edmund Husserl, “Ausdruck und Bedeutung”, Logische Untersuchungen. Text der ersten und zweiten Auflage, , Bd. II, 1, 1.: Untersuchungen zur Phänomenologie und Theorie der Erkenntnis, 1. Teil, hrsg.v. U. Panzer, Husserliana, xix, 1 und xix, 2 (Den Haag: Nijhoff, 1984). Logical Investigations, II, 1, Expression and Meaning.

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IX Philosophical Texts and the Things They Speak About When we speak of the ‘material’ of which texts are made, we do not mean the special psychic experiences and acts of asking questions, commanding, etc. which Husserl intends by the questionable term „bedeutungsverleihende Akte”127 but we mean the objective or objectivezed sphere of meaning-units expressed in texts which differ from the acts that give rise to them or more precisely from the acts that use them. By the various types of meanings expressed in linguistic texts, we do not mean the acts of subjects who wish or judge or command but we mean the objective meaning-units expressed in texts which, long after any subject ceased to perform acts of judging or questioning, still are objectively questions, judgments, and the like, and are parts of the text an author leaves to us to interpret. Thus Aristotle does not perform any more any of the acts that gave rise to the judgments and questions contained in his Physics but the judgments and questions themselves remain parts of his work. This text has even an objectivity and autonomy with respect to the original subjective acts and meaning-intentions of the author or speaker. Texts128 do not only express meanings but, through these their meanings they speak of things in various ways, either by asserting positive or negative states of affairs about them or by relating to them in other forms. Whether a philosophical text contains judgments about the history of philosophy or about the meaning of other texts, or whether it speaks about 127

128

This term is problematic for various reasons which cannot be analyzed here in detail: (a) because it might suggest that the meaning-bestowing or meaninggiving acts are not understood to be preceded by receptive cognitive acts but followed by bedeutungs-vernehmende acts; and this would reverse the whole structure of human knowledge in which receptivity precedes spontaneous acts of meaning; (b) because the idea, rejected by the Husserl of Logical Investigations [Edmund Husserl, Logical Investigations, translated by J.N. Findlay (from the second edition of LU), vol. I and II [1970]. 2nd edn. (London, Boston: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1982), II, II, VIth Investigation, ch. 1, §§ 1 ff., but later adopted, of some creation of meanings and of the intentional objects meant by the subject is suggested by such a terminology. If we prescind from pure Dadaism.

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God, man, soul, logical entities, etc., it always refers to some thing, or more precisely, to some state of affairs distinct from itself.129 Judgments or propositions are meaning-units of a special kind. Consisting of at least a subject-concept, a predicate-concept and a copula, they differ from questions or wishes in the peculiar function the copula possesses in them. The copula of the judgment does not only, as its name indicates, relate the subject-concept and the predicate-concept, and through them subject and predicate themselves which are meant by these concepts. Above and beyond that, it does not possess “pure functions” of relating and asserting but it means the kind of being which Hedwig Conrad-Martius calls the “pure being of states of affairs” (das reine Sachverhaltssein).130 This being always has some autonomy with respect to a judgment, even if it is only a fictional state of affairs fixed in a novel, a possible state of affairs, etc. Of course, it can also have the full autonomy of timeless necessary states of affairs or of real states of affairs which are part of, or grounded in, the really existing world such as that I or the reader exist and live. There is always some ontological meaning of the copula, however weak or strong, and the latter is therefore not a purely functional concept.131 Conrad-Martius thus says rightly against Alexander Pfänder132 that there is an ontological meaning of the copula and that the latter is therefore not a purely functional concept, as Alexander Pfänder claims.133

129

130 131 132 133

See on the notion of state of affairs (Sachverhalt) Adolf Reinach, “Zur Theorie des negativen Urteils,” in: Sämtliche Werke. Texktritische Ausgabe in zwei Bänden, Bd. I: Die Werke, Teil I: Kritische Neuausgabe (1905-1914), Teil II: Nachgelassene Texte (1906-1917), pp. 95-140. See also Josef Seifert, Sein und Wesen, V, ch. 2-3. See Hedwig Conrad-Martius, Das Sein (München: Kösel, 1957). See on all this also Josef Seifert, Sein und Wesens, ch. 1-2. See Alexander Pfänder, “The Theory of The Judgment”, in: Logic, pp. 61-158. See Alexander Pfänder, “The Theory of The Judgment.” Pfänder recognizes only the relating and asserting function of the copula in the judgment, overlooking the additional ontological meaning of the copula. See also Hedwig Conrad-Martius, ibid., pp. 19-36.

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It has an ontological meaning as well and precisely refers to the being characteristic of the Sachverhalt. 134 Franz Brentano on the other hand rightly rejected real existence as reference point of the truth of all judgments, for example the judgment “nothing is not a thing.” But while Brentano rejected for this reason the whole classical adaequatio-theory of truth, replacing it by an evidence theory of truth, Conrad-Martius showed this conclusion to be erroneous.135 Though the ontological meaning of the copula as such is not that of the real existence of a real thing — which can easily be seen when one thinks of the being that corresponds to the true judgment “Nothing is not a thing” — there is nevertheless in the case of all true propositions a thing in the sense of something on the object-side, to which the true judgment refers. And there is a matching ontological meaning of the copula in the judgment itself. And it is this autonomous being proper to any state of affairs (sachverhaltsimmanente Sein) that justifies the classical definition of truth in terms of adaequatio and allows us to defend it against Brentano’s as well as against many other attacks from rivaling theories of truth, such as the consensus and coherence theories of truth, utilitarian truth theories, etc. The strange being of the state of affairs is the appropriate ontological referent of the truth of the judgment.136 And this point was also clearly recognized by Alexander Pfänder even though he did not draw the consequence to preserve the ontological meaning of the copula and its reference

134

135

136

See Hedwig Conrad-Martius, Das Sein, pp. 19 ff. I think that Hedwig ConradMartius is completely right in her criticism and further development of Pfänder on this point and in her demonstration that the copula, in order to assert a state of affairs, a point Pfänder himself insists on, does possess an ontological meaning. This ontological meaning of the copula must be seen, and thus the copula should not, simply because it does not mean real existence, be conceived as a purely functional concept. Certainly, Pfänder is right inasmuch as he insists that the things which are the referent of the judgment are of course not the res, the real thing, but states of affairs. Moreover, many of these positive or negative states of affairs (the being-a-of-a-B or the not-being-a-of a B) do not even refer to really existing things but to possibilities, fictions, absences, etc. See Franz Brentano, Wahrheit und Evidenz. Erkenntnistheoretische Abhandlungen und Briefe (Leipzig: F. Meiner 1930; 31979). See Josef Seifert, Sein und Wesen, ch. 2-3.

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to being as pure being of a state of affairs.137 The ontological referent of the true proposition needs to be further explained and explored.138 Also in the question or in the command the copula exerts its relating function and possesses this ontological meaning. In the judgment, however, the copula is distinguished by a new function that uniquely belongs to the judgment: the asserting function. The copula ‘is’, for example in the judgment ‘the apple is sour,’ does not only relate the predicate sour to apple in the special way proper to the function of the copula, but it also asserts “that the apple is sour.” It posits that X is y, the ‘being-a-of-a-B’ or the ‘not-being-a-of-a-B,’ and in judging a positive or negative state of affairs, it is the assertive function of the copula that is as it were the soul of the judgment; it forms the judgment which necessarily makes two distinct claims: a) the claim that a state of affairs obtains independently of the judgment itself, and b) the claim that it itself, the judgment, is true. And its truth consists in a unique mode of adequation, in a conformity sui generis between the judgment and the state of affairs asserted in it. The claim to truth is inseparable from the essence of the judgment: this claim is therefore found in true as well as in false propositions. While the claim to truth is common to true and false propositions, truth and falsity of the 137

See Alexander Pfänder, Logic, p. 73 f., 110: In the judgment, on the other hand, the claim is made that the relation of the predicatedetermination to the subject coincides with the demands of the object itself. The judgment is not a decree over the object; it is repugnant to its innermost nature to coerce the object in any way or assign to it something that it does not require of itself. Completely free in the choice of its subject, which it selects autocratically, the judgment wants to be totally compliant in the interpretation of the object once chosen, and submit to it in every respect. Any dictatorial gesture, even the slightest oppression of the object by the judgment, is a sin against the spirit of the judgment and contaminates the intellectual conscience. One must, therefore, remove every taint of willful opposition from the meaning of the assertion-moment. [...] And the answer to this is that the judgment means some objects, which it makes its referent and concerning which it asserts something, either by joining or separating a determination, in conformity with the self-comportment of those objects. … It [the judgment] must conform to it absolutely slavishly and with the greatest care. It lies in the nature of the judgment to give up, on its own, freely and absolutely, its autocracy vis-à-vis the object-world and, in this sense, to choose to be absolutely objective.

138

See also Hedwig Conrad-Martius, ibid. See Josef Seifert, Sein und Wesen, ch. 3.

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proposition are radically different. If things are as the judgment asserts them to be, the judgment really is true; if the claim is not fulfilled, the judgment is false. Thus a proposition or judgment that is part of a text is never a selfenclosed meaningful set of signs but it means a state of affairs. Being similar in this respect to a question, the judgment still differs from the question, asserting as it does a state of affairs, while the question refers to the state of affairs in an open, questioning way; it does not assert anything but aims at something essentially distinct from itself. The question calls for an answer, a judgment cannot be answered. The judgment refers not to things, at least not directly, but to states of affairs. While I cannot judge directly a thing like ‘rose,’ indirectly the judgment also asserts something about those things which are not the direct object of the judgment. While we cannot affirm simply ‘this apple,’ we do still speak indirectly about the apple itself when we affirm the states of affairs rooted in it such as ‘this apple is sour.’ X The Two Ways in Which the Understanding of Texts Presupposes an Understanding of Things and Can Perform Its Role as Tool for Philosophical Knowledge Only if a “Canon of Transcendence” is Applied in the Hermeneutics of Interpreting Texts Given the direction of judgments, of which philosophical texts mainly consist, beyond themselves to the state of affairs they assert, it remains wholly impossible to understand or to interpret a text without any comprehension of the things of which the text speaks. When the text of Plato’s Phaedo asserts that man possesses a soul or when Friedrich Nietzsche’s Also sprach Zaratustra affirms that there is no God, we cannot understand these assertions at all without having any understanding of the things of which they speak. The general intentional direction of propositions and judgments to things and states of affairs forbids any understanding of a text without any understanding of the things of which it speaks. This is true even of propositions of purely formal logic which cannot be understood without some grasp of the type of formal-logical

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states of affairs which they mean. It is even clearer when we think of contentful sentences such as “the eagle is a larger bird than a dove.” As soon as we understand the expression eagle, we also have some grasp of birds and of the species of birds which we call eagles. I cannot understand a text on cows if I have never seen or experienced cows or at least had a description of them in terms of other things known to me to which they resemble. If I had no understanding at all of the things which we call cows, a text about cows would be, in that measure, unintelligible to me. If you do not understand the meaning and referent of the Russian word gorod you will never be able to understand a sentence of which this word is the subject. And even if you understand that gorod means ‘town,’ you will not be able to interpret a text in which you only know this single word and do not understand the things to which other terms that figure in the text refer. Similarly, I cannot understand a text on free will if I have no preceding grasp of either will or freedom and some acquaintance with the things of which a text on freedom speaks. Here not only the principle of hermeneutics applies according to which the meaning of the whole sentence cannot be understood without understanding the meaning of its parts, but also the principle that no text can be understood without any understanding of the things to which it refers. In this sense, Gadamer’s assertion in Truth and Method and elsewhere that texts can only be understood in terms of things (of the „Sache selbst“)139 is entirely evident in its truth and a radical ‘principle of immanence’ as a canon of hermeneutics, as Betti demanded it, untenable.140

139

140

Hans Georg Gadamer, “Dialektik und Sophistik im siebenten platonischen Brief,” in: Gadamer, Gesammelte Werke, Bd. VI, Griechische Philosophie II, pp. 90-115. See also Hans-Georg Gadamer’s words about “sich in der Sache Verstehen” and his quote of Luther as Motto of the 2nd Part of Wahrheit und Methode (Tübingen: J.C.B. Mohr, 1960), pp. 177 ff. “Qui non intelligit res, non potest ex verbis sensum elicere.” Emilio Betti, Allgemeine Auslegungslehre als Methodik der Geisteswissenschaften (Tübingen: Mohr 1967), § 16, pp. 216 ff.; 218, n° 5; the same author, Die Hermeneutik als allgemeine Methodik der Geisteswissenschaften (Tübingen: Mohr, 1962), p. 14.

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But it is neither easy nor appropriate to dismiss entirely what Betti calls the hermeneutic “canon of immanence.”141 There are two ways of understanding things, and of texts in terms of them. The first of these is far more imperfect than the second. The second way to understand things refers to a transcending authentic knowledge of the true natures of things of which a text speaks. Correspondingly, there is a way of interpreting and criticizing texts in light of such an understanding of things. And to defend such a “canon of transcendence” for hermeneutics gives rise to a new philosophical conception of hermeneutics, although this “new” ideal of hermeneutics is an old and classical one. The first way of understanding the things a text speaks of, in contrast, could be called a mere immanent understanding of the text and of the things the text speaks of. It is very different from, and inferior to, the second. While these two ways of interpreting texts are essentially different, they are not totally separate. Any hermeneutical understanding and interpretation of a text in terms of a mere immanent grasp of the things as intended by the text requires in spite of its immanence some transcendent grasp of things themselves as they are independently of any text. As the most radical skeptical doubt, and each error, so also each immanent interpretation of a text necessarily involves and presupposes some transcendent grasp of the real nature of things. Nevertheless, while we require some understanding of things as condition of any interpretation of texts, we do not have to possess an unambiguous and clear notion of the real nature of things themselves in front of our minds in order to understand the meaning of a text and therefore, as long as we do not arrive at the second type of understanding the text through understanding the things of which it speaks it is not a method of philosophy but a method of failing to philosophize. For while an understanding of a text requires some understanding of the basic sort of object intended by concepts or by theories, we do not necessarily require any adequate or complete knowledge of the real nature of the things meant, in the second sense of understanding things, in order to understand a given 141

Cf. Emilio Betti, “Immanenz des hermeneutischen Maßstabs”: in Emilio Betti, Allgemeine Auslegungslehre als Methodik der Geisteswissenschaften, pp. 216-218.

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theory, and even in order to understand it well. This is particularly obvious with respect to the understanding of empirical texts. Their meaning and the things meant by them can be understood by us without us having any way to grasp the real nature of the things and states of affairs themselves to which these empirical statements refer. While we cannot understand any text without some grasp of the objects intended by it, we can very well understand a text without understanding the things of which it speaks in this second and more important sense: i.e., without understanding the reality or the real essences of the things of which texts are speaking or its truth or falsity. The possibility of grasping the meaning of a text without understanding the true nature of the things meant by it applies also to apriori sciences: to philosophical, mathematical and to other texts whose objects are in principle so evident and open to any mind that we always could understand them. Also philosophical texts can be understood by the historian of philosophy without a grasp of the real nature of the things intended by these texts sufficient to understand their truth or falsity. Thus a great interpreter of Kant may very well explain the notion of a ‘transcendental ego’ in terms of passages in Kant and form some conception of such a strange thing; yet, while having some grasp of the kind of thing or nonthing Kant intended by his famous term, the interpreter might still suspend any judgment of whether the states of affairs asserted by Kant really are facts and whether Kant’s assertions about them are correct or not. He may even fail to see or even to ask whether such a thing as a ‘transcendental ego’ is actually free of contradictions, or whether perhaps it could not even exist for the reason of its self-contradictory character. Even all questions about the true nature of the things themselves of which Kant speaks could well be omitted by our interpreter; nevertheless, he could be an excellent Kant-scholar. If we mean by ‘things’ the actual natures and the being of entities and states of affairs themselves, it is quite possible that we do not possess knowledge of these things themselves and are still able to understand the things meant by a text, the things as they are projected by a text as purely intentional objects. Thus it seems that understanding things in the authentic sense is not presupposed for understanding texts nor is it the task of hermeneutics to do so. This being true, Dilthey, like Betti, makes this the basis

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for a fundamentally immanentistic theory of interpretation according to which no transcendent grasp of things must guide interpretations of texts and philosophizing would only mean a hermeneutical effort of grasping the immanent meanings of texts or the psychological life that gave rise to them. Believing that no other interpretation of texts except such an immanentistic one, is possible, gives rise to, or has its root in, a totally skeptical or relativistic concept of hermeneutics which will soon also lose the objectivity of interpretations of texts. For without acceptance of true and absolute codes of correct hermeneutics of texts also the interpretation of texts must be conceived relativistically, in culturally, individually, or historically changing patterns of interpretation. An absolutized immanentistic hermeneutics must embrace in the end a total relativism, which “lives through” all kinds of contradictory historical beliefs and prescinds from any judgment of their truth value. Dilthey, who still (unsuccessfully, as Gadamer shows) seeks to retain historical objectivity but rejects any other objective knowledge of reality itself, regards his relativistic model of interpreting texts as the true liberation of mankind from dogmas of any kind.142 Gadamer and many members of his school, while being critical of many aspects of Dilthey’s historicist theory of hermeneutics, above all of the last remainder of (historical) objectivism Dilthey seeks to retain in historical knowledge, go one step further in the direction of relativism by knocking down the last bastion of objectivity still upheld by Dilthey: the objectivity of historical understanding of the meaning of a text.143 For Gadamer and the modern hermeneutical school also the horizons and standards of interpretation change with history and hence not even purely historical objectivity is reachable. We can only attain to changing and perspectivally distorted and subjective visions of things and of texts dominated by our respective prejudices and the philosophy we would learn by this methodic tool of hermeneutics would make us mere visitors of the world of the 142

143

See Wilhelm Dilthey, Der Aufbau der geschichtlichen Welt in den Geisteswissenschaften, 7. unveränderte Auflage, Gesammelte Schriften VII (Stuttgart/Göttingen: Teubner, Vandenhöck und Ruprecht, 1979), pp. 290-291. See also Hans-Georg Gadamer, Philosophical Hermeneutics, trans. and ed. by David E. Linge (Berkeley/Los Angeles/London: University of California Press, 1977), pp. 129, 144 ff., 240.

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purely intentional objects intended by the author and by our own prejudices, without ever leaving the doubly subjective world of the wordmeanings of the texts and of our own life-world with its continuously changing perspectives.144 Under these assumptions, also any claim of knowing things in themselves and objectively is regarded as naive or even as luciferic.145 Now it is to both of these theories of Hermes to which I object and it is neither one of them that can count as a method of philosophy belonging to the third kind of method. The Diltheyan theory is one of passively delivering oneself to texts or at least to delving actively into nothing but things as intended by them. Gadamer allows for an experience of things on our own and justifies this experience’s entering into the interpretation of texts. Yet he claims that we can interpret texts from no other standpoint but the changing historical or individual perspectives and horizons of interpretation with their inherent relativity. To both of these theories of hermeneutics I strongly object and do not consider them to explain the way in which truly the hermeneutics of interpreting philosophical texts can count as a methodic tool of philosophizing. For both of these versions of hermeneutics, the Diltheyan-Bettian and the Gadamerian one, have a central point in common with each other and with many other theories, for example that of Leo Strauss who desperately denies any capacity of a common or second rate mind to achieve any acquaintance of things or of eternal truths in the light of which he could judge the texts he is reading. In responding to such theories of hermeneutics, I wish to defend below a radically different and transcendent theory of hermeneutics as the only

144

145

See Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method (New York, Seabury Press, 1975); the same author, “Dialektik und Sophistik im siebenten platonischen Brief”, pp. 90-115. See Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method, p. 406: A person who sets this being-in-itself over and against these ‘aspect’ must think either theologically — in which case the ‘being-in-itself’ is not for him, but only for God — or else he will think in the manner of Lucifer.

See also my discussion of this position, which confuses the truly luciferic claim to know all of things in themselves with the modest claim to know some of their being and characteristics, in Josef Seifert, Back to Things in Themselves, ch. 3-6.

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form in which hermeneutics of texts and reading of great books can be a tool of philosophizing. If we intend those states of affairs and laws which are in themselves not purely intentional objects as if they were purely intentional objects, prescinding in an act of complete epoché from their transcendent reality or validity, we do not yet understand the things of which texts speak in a truly significant sense of this term. In other words, we do not yet understand the real nature of things. Texts — as well as the things as they are meant by a text — can exactly differ from the real nature of those things and states of affairs about which a text speaks. This is the case in each error and in each erroneous judgment. Now from these things in themselves the interpreter of a text can abstract. He can fail to inquire into the specific and exactly matching real objects in the sense of the things and states of affairs which are thematized by the text. It is possible even for an excellent interpreter of texts to prescind from any assertion about these things themselves. The interpreter both as the mere translator and as the exegete of a text, may just concentrate on the immanent meaning of the text in the sense that he entirely prescinds from the question whether and, if so, to which extent, the text is true or false. In prescinding in such a manner from the question of the truth or falsity of a text, we prescind likewise from the things themselves of which the text speaks. Certainly, and in this Betti is correct, we must, in our hermeneutical efforts as historians of philosophy, respect the text qua expressing certain meanings and opinions, and hence exercise a certain kind of hermeneutical epoché with regard to the truth or falsity of the opinions expressed by a text when we simply have to state what it says. The example of translation as the lowest level of hermeneutics is helpful here: whether or not he disapproves of the opinion of a speaker or a book, the translator has to render precisely its meaning. Making reference to the beautiful words of Saint Thomas in De Coelo et Mundo about the task of philosophy, we might say:146 while the task of philosophy does not consist in reporting faithfully the opinions of authors, the task of hermeneutics consists precisely in that.

146

Thomas Aquinas, De Coelo et Mundo, Book I, 22, n° 9.

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Therefore hermeneutics as such is never philosophy nor a methodic tool to do it, as long as the “things themselves” in the light of which we interpret texts are not the real things themselves, but the things as intended by the text. Rather, hermeneutics becomes a methodic tool of philosophical knowledge only in the moment in which we go beyond the text to the things themselves in the sense of the true essences and natures of things as they are independent of our thought and meaning. In an improper understanding of the things of which a text speaks, we find the two following elements: (1) some real comprehension of the objective natures of at least some aspects of the things under consideration, i.e., some real knowledge without which even the most radical skeptical doubt147 and an error148 are impossible and (2) confusions and errors which become possible because of a vague or imprecise grasp of a thing. In the latter case, some understanding of things themselves, as also every doubt and error presuppose it, is mixed with a confused grasp of objects and with false judgments about them, in which their true nature is not understood. Such an “understanding” of things is not a proper understanding of a thing; it is in part a misunderstanding and construction. It is decisive to see that a proper understanding of a text, particularly of a philosophical text, requires some proper understanding of things. An authentic understanding of a philosophical text requires its being read in the light not only of the states of affairs and things asserted or meant in it but in the light of the true natures of the things themselves which are meant by the text. Any theory of interpreting texts, according to which we can never know the things independent from the meanings of texts or of the author’s or our own opinions and meaning-intentions, and therefore can never judge their truth or falsity, flatly ignores the author’s, at least the scientific and philosophic author’s, most fundamental intention: namely that to convey truth, that to mediate for us some knowledge of states of affairs which are 147

148

This point of René Descartes was forcefully made by Plato, Aristotle, and Saint Augustine before. On the precondition of knowledge for any error see — besides the Augustinian texts collected by Ludger Hölscher, The Reality of the Mind — Balduin Schwarz, Das Problem des Irrtums in der Philosophie (Münster: Aschaffenburg, 1934). See also my Erkenntnis objektiver Wahrheit, Part I, ch. 3.

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really as he judges them to be, of the natures of things themselves. No authentic philosopher, and ultimately no one, just wishes to convey his own opinions but in and through his judgments the truth of things. But if it is possible and the task of each student and teacher of philosophy to gain knowledge about things themselves, the hermeneutical task of understanding the ‘things’ of which a text is speaking serves only as condition of grasping them in their true and real natures, and to interpret texts in such a light. The meaning of his text can only be understood very imperfectly if one does not read it in the light of things themselves: only to the extent to which we have ourselves access to the things of which an author speaks, can we properly complement by means of other words and observations what he said in his text; only then can we really penetrate into the vast domain of what remains unsaid in a given philosophy. Otherwise, we will interpret an author in a dead way stuck with his expressions and words and deprived of any contact with the things of which he speaks and which give life and meaning to what he says. And even if we can to some extent accomplish this task by means of some kind of empathy or sympathetic reading of his ‘system’ in the context of a largely immanent reading of his text, such a purely immanent ‘completing’ and ‘restating’ or explaining of a text will in the last analysis be sterile as long as we lack our own contact with the things themselves of which the author speaks; it will be a hermeneutical circumvention and not a tool of philosophical knowledge. Let us use an example of a philosophical text in order to illustrate our understanding of a transcendent use of hermeneutics of texts in the light of things themselves as the only kind of hermeneutics that is a methodological tool for philosophical knowledge: Max Scheler speaks in the following text on the first of all evidences: that there is something rather than nothing. Now, without gaining this most elementary and fundamental insight with Scheler, it is impossible to interpret his text correctly nor is it possible that its hermeneutics serves as a tool or method of philosophy. The first and most immediate evidence, and simultaneously an evidence which is already presupposed for the constitution of the word doubt of something (doubt of the being of something, of the truth of a proposition)

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It is impossible to understand this text at all without becoming aware of the indubitable insight of which Max Scheler is speaking in it. Only an understanding of things themselves, of the fact that truly there is not nothing and that we understand with evidence that there is something, allows us to understand Scheler’s text. Only when we turn to things themselves, we see what the author of a text has adequately seen, and can criticize what he has overlooked or confused. Of course, we must be extremely careful not to judge rashly, arro149

My translation of the text: Die erste und unmittelbarste Evidenz, zugleich diejenige, die schon zur Konstituierung des Wortes „Zweifel an etwas“ (an dem Sein von etwas, an der Wahrheit eines Satzes usw.) vorausgesetzt ist, ist aber die evidente Einsicht, daß überhaupt Etwas sei oder, noch schärfer gesagt, daß „nicht Nichts sei“...

The text continues: (wobei das Wort Nichts weder ausschließlich das Nicht-Etwas noch das Nicht-Da-sein von Etwas, sondern jenes absolute Nichts bedeutet, dessen Seinsnegation im negierten Sein das So-Sein oder Wesen und das Da-Sein noch nicht scheidet). Der Tatbestand, daß nicht Nichts sei, ist gleichzeitig der Gegenstand erster und unmittelbarster Einsicht, wie der Gegenstand der intensivsten und letzten philosophischen Verwunderung — wobei diese letztere emotionale Bewegung angesichts des Tatbestandes freilich erst dann voll einzutreten vermag, wenn ihr unter den die philosophische Haltung prädisponierenden Gemütsakten die den Selbstverständlichkeitscharakter ... des Tatbestandes des Seins auslöschende Demutshaltung vorangegangen ist. Also: Gleichgültig, auf welche Sache ich mich hinwende und auf welche, nach untergeordneteren Seinskategorien schon genauer bestimmte Sache ... ich hinblicke: an jedem einzelnen beliebig herausgegriffenen Beispiel innerhalb einer oder mehrerer sich je kreuzender sog. Arten des Seins, wie an jeder dieser herausgegriffenen Arten selbst wieder wird mir diese Einsicht mit unumstößlicher Evidenz klar — so klar, daß sie an Klarheit alles überstrahlt, was mit ihr nur in denkbaren Vergleich gebracht werden kann. Freilich: Wer gleichsam nicht in den Abgrund des absoluten Nichts geschaut hat, der wird auch die eminente Positivität des Inhalts der Einsicht, daß überhaupt Etwas ist und nicht lieber Nichts, vollständig übersehen. Er wird bei irgendeiner der vielleicht nicht minder evidenten, aber der Evidenz dieser Einsicht doch nachgeordneten Einsichten beginnen ...

See Max Scheler, “Vom Wesen der Philosophie und der moralischen Bedingung des philosophischen Erkennens”, pp. 93-94. The quoted text begins with the remarkable sentence: “Darum muß auch jede Erörterung des Wesens der Philosophie mit diesem Problem der ‘Ordnung der fundamentalsten Evidenzen’ beginnen.”

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gantly, and in an attitude of losing the due respect for a text, for its author and above all for reality. But only when we grasp the true nature of the things a text speaks of, we reach a proper understanding of the text itself. Without such an understanding of the things themselves the text remains void and empty, containing nothing but opinions of its author. But it also remains closed to us in its authentic meaning which always aims at reality itself and can only be understood fully when this reality it seeks to open to us discloses itself. A philosophical text does not only inform us of some things which we cannot know on our own, like often a historical text which is our only source of information; a philosophical text accomplishes its purpose only when we understand the things and truths it expounds. If this finality of a philosophical text remains unaccomplished, the text is unable to unfold the end for the sake of which it was written: to lead the reader to a knowledge not about texts but about things themselves. Often a properly philosophical interpretation of texts in the light of things is rejected even by those who believe that philosophical knowledge of being and truth are possible. In spite of this, they wish to exclude any interpretation of texts in the light of things as if such an interpretation were a mere subjective interference with an objective reading of a text and a disturbance of the pure objectivity of an interpretation. To read a great book well then would mean to read it in suspending all judgments of our own about the things treated, to absorb its meaning without any effort to get in knowledge to the things as they are independently from how they are meant by a text. Such a purely immanent interpretation of texts, however, treats philosophical texts like texts of imbeciles who understand nothing about the things themselves of which they are speaking; or it suggests that the reader is a stupid person unable to understand anything of the issues about which the philosophical text speaks. To see the absurdity of such a theory of hermeneutics, let us take a simple example from chess theory. Let us assume that we are told in a chess book that it is impossible to checkmate the opponent’s king with just one bishop and a king on the field, or that a good player will never lose a game if, having nothing but his king left, while the opponent has king and one pawn, his king faces the opponent’s pawn on the h- or the a-line provided that this king is closer to the last line than the opponent’s pawn and hence able to either take the pawn or, blocking the

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way of the pawn, force a draw by stale-mate. Now we can understand all these assertions without understanding their truth, i.e., without understanding that they are entirely correct, as they are. As inexperienced players or lousy theoreticians we might dispute the described information our teacher or our book gives us, or we might try for hours to refute them. This example demonstrates at least two things: (1) the things meant by a book or a teacher can well be understood without understanding their truth. (2) An interpretation of a text in which we do not understand the things and problems themselves but only the meaning of a text is evidently incomparably inferior to one which grasps the problem and its solution as well. Obviously an instructor of chess is not satisfied with a mere immanent understanding of nothing but what he claims and thinks. We can go further: his lesson will be entirely unsuccessful as long as his pupil does not comprehend that and why these things really are as he says they are. In other words, only the understanding of things themselves, of the eternal laws which govern geometry and logic — and also chess once its conventional rules are accepted — do we have any real understanding of the text of a speech or book about end games.150 For this reason, we can draw the conclusion: a purely immanentistic interpretation of a philosophical text that speaks of things beyond texts and independent of texts requires, to be actually understood and even to be taken seriously, that we follow the intention of the author to the things themselves and to the states of affairs themselves of which he asserts that they exist. And as long as we do not understand these things themselves, we do not properly understand the texts that assert them or speak about them. Likewise, any chess instructor would be insulted and feel silly if his student said to him: “I know what you mean about end games but of course I can never know and judge myself whether you are right or deceive yourself and me. Do not expect that I ever understand any solution to any chess problem.” This remark would immediately come across as silly; and silly it would be.

150

See on all this Josef Seifert, Schachphilosophie (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1989).

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But in philosophy, whole generations of professors and students swallowed the same nonsense as profound truth, not using the understanding of philosophical texts as a methodological tool to reach knowledge but replacing and reducing philosophical knowledge to hermeneutics. Scientific and especially philosophical studies would be impossible without going beyond the interpretation of texts and meanings of linguistic formations. And the going beyond texts and words on the part of the pupil, as Augustine keenly notices, does not proceed to the mind and thought of the teacher (as a psychologistic misunderstanding would have it) but primarily to ‘things themselves.’ Saint Augustine expresses this with admirable clarity when he writes the words we wish to repeat in this context: For who is so stupidly curious as to send his son to school in order that he might learn what the teacher thinks? But all those sciences which they profess to teach, and the science of virtue itself and wisdom, teachers explain through words. Then those who are called pupils consider within themselves whether what has been explained has been said truly; looking of course to that interior truth, according to the measure of which each is able. Thus they learn, and when the interior truth makes known to them what true things have been said, they applaud, but without knowing that instead of applauding teachers they are applauding learners, if indeed their teachers know what they are saying…151

This leads to a further reason for adopting a “canon of transcendence” as paradigmatic standard for interpretations of texts as subordinated philosophical methodic tool of doing philosophy. Any truly critical reading of a text is impossible without genuine understanding of things. Now, the best way of understanding a text when it is false is to understand its falsity. But this is only possible by a return to the things themselves spoken about in the text. If we give a philosophical lecture and the reader notices that we confuse two different things and therefore make a false claim, he understands us certainly better than a reader or listener who blindly and unthinkingly repeats the same confusions.

151

Augustine, De Magistro, chapter 12.

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This implies another important element of an adequate hermeneutics: if the goal is to understand the truth of what an author says by going back to the things themselves of which he speaks, then this effort, if successful, can also lead to recognize the falsity of an author’s views, his confusions, his errors, his lack of distinguishing different phenomena. Also this understanding can be required to understand an author correctly and really. Therefore the critical reader can understand an author better than he understood himself, not only, as Troisfontaines tried to do with Gabriel Marcel, by presenting better the systematic unity of a thought which the author perhaps put into dispersed fragments and was unable to put together,152 but in understanding the things better of which the author speaks and by criticizing the author in their light. Thus I believe one could show with any text, for example Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, that an adequate understanding of Kant’s treatment of the antinomies, of his critique of the ontological argument for God’s existence, of his Copernican turn, of his distinctions between analytic and synthetic propositions a priori and their relation to experience, can only be reached when we go beyond the text and read Kant critically in the light of things themselves. Only then can we discover the countless things he actually saw, only then can we as well understand where he confused what he saw with other theoretical opinions he only posited.153 Balduin Schwarz has admirably shown, with respect to the notion of experience and the a priori in Plato, the need to do history of philosophy by going back to philosophy itself.154 Only in the light of philosophical knowledge can we properly understand what is correct or incorrect in a text. 152

153

154

Roger Troisfontaines, S.J., De l’Existence à l’Être. La philosophie de Gabriel Marcel (Louvain: Éditions Nauwelaerts, 1968). I try to show this in Josef Seifert, Überwindung des Skandals der reinen Vernunft. Die Widerspruchsfreiheit der Wirklichkeit — trotz Kant; and my: “Das Antinomienproblem als ein Grundproblem aller Metaphysik: Kritik der Kritik der reinen Vernunft”; and in Gott als Gottesbeweis. See Balduin Schwarz, “Dietrich von Hildebrands Lehre von der Soseinserfahrung in ihren philosophiegeschichtlichen Zusammenhängen,” in: B. Schwarz (Hrsg.): Wahrheit, Wert und Sein. Festgabe für Dietrich von Hildebrand zum 80. Geburtstag (Regensburg: Habbel, 1970), pp. 33-51. See also ibid., and Balduin Schwarz, “Bemerkungen zu Platons Menon,” in: Balduin Schwarz, Paula

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But is such a method of hermeneutics in the service of a knowledge of the things themselves of which an author speaks not naive or overbearing? Gadamer allows for introducing the reader’s own experiences and contact with things, and in this sense for a transcendent reading of texts, but, by forbidding even the objectivity of an interpretation, he arrives in a sense at an even more relativistically conceived and immanentistic theory of hermeneutics than Schleiermacher, Dilthey or Betti. Note that such a theory of hermeneutics is mostly a modern one, born by Hegelianism and by skepticism or historicism in various versions.155 In antiquity, we have a sort of predecessor of such a hermeneutics in Diogenes Laertius in whom a neutral and immanent history of philosophy was also a fruit of skepticism. In all truly classical ancient and medieval philosophical texts, however, we find a reading of texts and statement of opinions of philosopher only inserted in a philosophical discussion of things themselves. Take Aristotle or Thomas Aquinas as examples of this mode of arriving not only at a better understanding of things themselves but also of texts by a dialectical examination of dicitur, contra dicitur, respondeo dicendum. If we read Thomas Aquinas carefully, we find that his method uses hermeneutics and commentaries on Aristotle and other great thinkers exactly in the sense in which one may regard it as method of the third group: not only his response to things themselves but also his grasp and interpretation of texts is best in his respondeo dicendum in which he looks at texts in the light of things themselves which alone permit him to see truths and errors hidden in texts; and this dialectical and dialogical reading and movement from texts to things is indeed an important methodological tool for a philosophy that keeps an intense interest in texts, but a greater interest in the things themselves of which texts speak and to the knowledge of which text-interpretations are only servants and tools.

155

Premoli/Josef Seifert (eds.), Wahrheit, Irrtum und Verirrungen. Die sechs großen Krisen und sieben Ausfahrten der abendländischen Philosophie (Heidelberg: Universitätsverlag Winter, 1996), pp. 101-129. Gadamer, for example, criticizes the kind of historicism propounded by Dilthey. See also Thomas Aquinas, De Coelo et Mundo, book I, 22, n° 9.

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Only if we never forget the words of Thomas Aquinas quoted before, will reading and interpreting great books become an important method of authentic philosophizing. The study of philosophy does not have the purpose to know the opinions of men but the truth of things.

XI The “Negative Test” Possibly also into the third group of methods falls what Gabriel Marcel has called ‘negative experiment’ or ‘negative test’: let us see what would remain of human experience if such and such a datum did not exist or were not part of the world. In this way, we could ask: how would a world look like in which there would be no objective truth, no objective values, no freedom? As already Cicero and Augustine asked: what all in human experience and relations would become meaningless if man were not free? Laws, commands, reproaches, exhortations, punishments, etc. would all be meaningless.156 Or, the negative test could be turned the other way around: 156

Augustine speaks of this text of Cicero in De civitate Dei V, 9-10, especially: What is it, then, that Cicero feared in the prescience of future things? Doubtless it was this — that if all future things have been foreknown, they will happen in the order in which they have been foreknown; and if they come to pass in this order, there is a certain order of things foreknown by God; and if a certain order of things, then a certain order of causes, for nothing can happen which is not preceded by some efficient cause. But if there is a certain order of causes according to which everything happens which does happen, then by fate, says he, all things happen which do happen. But if this be so, then is there nothing in our own power, and there is no such thing as freedom of will; and if we grant that, says he, the whole economy of human life is subverted. In vain are laws enacted. In vain are reproaches, praises, chidings, exhortations had recourse to; and there is no justice whatever in the appointment of rewards for the good, and punishments for the wicked. And that consequences so disgraceful, and absurd, and pernicious to humanity may not follow, Cicero chooses to reject the foreknowledge of future things, and shuts up the religious mind to this alternative, to make choice between two things, either that something is in our own power, or that there is foreknowledge — both of which cannot be true; but if the one is affirmed, the other is thereby denied. He therefore, like a truly great and wise man, and one who consulted very much and very skillfully for the good of humanity, of those two chose the freedom of the will, to confirm which he denied the foreknowledge of future things; and thus, wishing to make men free he makes them sacrilegious. …

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How would a world look like, in which certain fundamental data such as love, gratitude, or hope, which evidently exist, would be meaningless? In other words, how would a world look in which the necessary metaphysical, logical, anthropological, and any other kind of presuppositions and implications of fundamental human acts and experiences would not exist? Such a negative test can be a potent tool to recognize the overwhelming positive evidence or trustworthiness of the cognitions in which the data that are being assumed to be non-existent or that are being denied show themselves. In a sense, Marcel’s method of the negative test is a new and more existential form of a method that is very important for Plato, in whose dialogues Socrates always draws out concrete consequences of what Trasymachos, Protagoras, Gorgias, Callicles, Polos, and other Sophists or his students such as Simmias or Kebes say, in order to bring them to the point at which they recognize the falsity, self-contradictory nature, or contradiction to philosophical evidences into which he who looks at the world through the looking glass of such a negative test in the light of the consequences of negations of truth, objective goodness, etc. inevitably falls. Now, against the sacrilegious and impious darings of reason, we assert both that God knows all things before they come to pass, and that we do by our free will whatsoever we know and feel to be done by us only because we will it…. But it does not follow that, though there is for God a certain order of all causes, there must therefore be nothing depending on the free exercise of our own wills, for our wills themselves are included in that order of causes which is certain to God, and is embraced by His foreknowledge, for human wills are also causes of human actions; and He who foreknew all the causes of things would certainly among those causes not have been ignorant of our wills. For even that very concession which Cicero himself makes is enough to refute him in this argument. For what does it help him to say that nothing takes place without a cause, but that every cause is not fatal, there being a fortuitous cause, a natural cause, and a voluntary cause? … Wherefore, be it far from us, in order to maintain our freedom, to deny the prescience of Him by whose help we are or shall be free. Consequently, it is not in vain that laws are enacted, and that reproaches, exhortations, praises, and vituperations are had recourse to; for these also He foreknew, and they are of great avail, even as great as He foreknew that they would be of. Prayers, also, are of avail to procure those things which He foreknew that He would grant to those who offered them; and with justice have rewards been appointed for good deeds, and punishments for sins. For a man does not therefore sin because God foreknew that he would sin. Nay, it cannot be doubted but that it is the man himself who sins when he does sin, because He, whose foreknowledge is infallible, foreknew not that fate, or fortune, or something else would sin, but that the man himself would sin, who, if he wills not, sins not. But if he shall not will to sin, even this did God foreknow.

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Having reviewed philosophical methods of the third and second group, we must never forget their subordinated role: they possess their raison d’être only in leading to the first kind of method of philosophy, the different forms of philosophical knowledge properly speaking. Therefore it is this first kind of method to which the philosopher has to assign prime importance, never idolizing and worshipping the methods of the second and third group or isolating them from the prime form of method: the ways in which we can know philosophically being and truth.