Overcoming Psychologism: Husserl and the Transcendental Reform of Psychology [1st ed.] 9783030599317, 9783030599324

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Larry Davidson

Overcoming Psychologism: Husserl and the Transcendental Reform of Psychology

Overcoming Psychologism: Husserl and the Transcendental Reform of Psychology

Larry Davidson

Overcoming Psychologism: Husserl and the Transcendental Reform of Psychology

Larry Davidson Department of Psychiatry Yale University New Haven, CT, USA

ISBN 978-3-030-59931-7    ISBN 978-3-030-59932-4 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-59932-4 © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are reserved by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors, and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. This Springer imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

For John Strauss Who could not have been a better mentor, or friend. And who encouraged me, for 30 years, to write this book.

We would also state expressly that it would of course be pointless to treat the positive science of intentional psychology and transcendental phenomenology separately. Obviously, the work of actual execution must devolve upon the latter, whereas psychology … will take over the results. Yet it is important to note that, just as the psyche and the whole Objective world do not lose their existence and existential sense when considered transcendentally (since they are merely rendered originarily understandable, by the uncovering of their concrete all-sidedness), so positive psychology does not lose its rightful content but rather, freed of naïve positivity, becomes a discipline within universal transcendental philosophy itself. From this point of view, we may say that, among the sciences that have been raised above the level of naïve positivity, intentional psychology is intrinsically the first from the Cartesian Meditations (Husserl, 1977a, p. 147).

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Acknowledgments

This book is dedicated to John Strauss, who has served as my mentor and good friend for the last 30 years and at whose insistence this book was finally completed. Much of this work was drafted in the late 1980s as my doctoral thesis at Duquesne University; work that colleagues and I have then published piecemeal through a series of largely theoretical articles (Davidson, 1988a, 2017; Davidson and Cosgrove, 1991, 2002; Davidson and Solomon, 2010), sketching out the framework on which I here hope to add flesh and bones. I thank Amadeo Giorgi and John Scanlon for their guidance and support during that early time in my career. I then met John Strauss upon arriving at Yale and spent the next three decades under his tutelage trying to describe and understand the “things themselves” of clinical psychological interest. While John eschews the abstruse, dense, hyphen-filled, and off-putting terminology of phenomenological philosophy, he was born to be a phenomenologically oriented psychiatrist. So, while I learned to think and write as a Husserlian at Duquesne, it was through John’s role modeling and warm generosity that I have now spent three decades learning how to actually do clinical psychology in a phenomenologically grounded way. I thank him for paving, and showing me, the way to respect, work with, learn from, befriend, love, and find ways to support persons with serious mental illnesses as persons first and foremost. Even though it does not become explicit until the last chapter, that lesson is at the heart of this book. I also would like to thank my wife, Maryanne, for encouraging me to take the sabbatical that enabled me to finally finish this prolonged labor of love, and for her steadfast belief in me and whatever I try to do. And I thank the faculty and staff of the Yale Program for Recovery and Community Health (you know who you are) for making the sabbatical possible and for working closely with me for 20 years as I have tried to flesh out further the implications of transcendental phenomenology for psychological research and practice. Like John, most of them are natural phenomenologists who have no desire or need to learn about Husserl, but for whom human dignity is considered sacred and to be honored, regardless of the circumstances in which one finds oneself. I have learned much from working with each of you, and have been enormously proud of, and gratified by, your many successes. The work of ix

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promoting recovery is not easy, but it provides its own rewards; working closely with each of you on this meandering path has been one such reward. Finally, I thank the many people in recovery who have patiently and persistently taught me about the fundamental humanity of persons struggling with mental illnesses and other life circumstances. In addition to Husserl, they have been my main teachers as I have striven to understand their efforts to preserve their fundamental humanity in the face of dehumanizing circumstances and inhumane treatments. I offer this book in the hope that it will contribute, in some small way, to the transformation of mental health care to a respectful and dignified, strength-based and healing, human enterprise.

References Davidson, Larry. 2017. Transcendental intersubjectivity as the foundation for a phenomenological social psychiatry. In Phenomenology and the Social Context of Psychiatry. ed. Marcus Englander, 7–26. London: Bloomsbury Academic. Davidson, Larry & Lisa Cosgrove. 1991. Psychologism and phenomenological psychology revisited: I. The liberation from naturalism. Journal of Phenomenological Psychology ­ 22(2):87–108. Davidson, Larry & Lisa Cosgrove. 2002. Psychologism and phenomenological psychology revisited, Part II: The return to positivity. Journal of Phenomenological Psychology ­ 33(2):141–177.

Introduction

When given the opportunity in 1931 to write a new Preface to accompany the soon to be published English translation of the first volume of his Ideen series, Edmund Husserl chose, as one of the few topics he would address directly, the relationship between phenomenology and psychology. Those who have had only a cursory exposure to Husserl’s works might be somewhat surprised by this choice, considering that this publication was to appear 30 years after he had completed the first edition of the Logical Investigations (1970b). That work had taken up the psychologism prevalent in the logic and epistemology of the day and had gone to great lengths to demonstrate how philosophy cannot be grounded in psychology. Since it was phenomenology that replaced psychology as the ground discipline for epistemology and logic following the refutation offered in the Logical Investigations, many within the phenomenological tradition have subsequently assumed that phenomenology and psychology were to be mutually exclusive. Phenomenology, as a philosophical discipline, was to be decidedly nonpsychological in orientation and method. For psychologism to be radically overcome in philosophy, the new science of phenomenology must have nothing to do with psychology. Thus, while Husserl’s early roots in Brentano’s descriptive psychology of consciousness are well known, it has been the received wisdom that Husserl became increasingly indifferent to matters of psychology once he succeeded in liberating phenomenology from its psychological background. Psychologists and philosophers alike, ranging from Titchner (cf. Giorgi, 1981) to Spiegelberg (1967a, 1972), considered Husserl’s version of phenomenological philosophy to hold little, if any, significance for the practice of psychology. They concluded that Husserl left the concrete and mundane concerns of psychology behind in his quest for a transcendental, philosophical science. Why, then, would Husserl address the question of the nature of the relationship between phenomenology and psychology in the publication that was to introduce phenomenology as a transcendental, philosophical science to the English-speaking world? Why would he speak about psychology to an audience that he very much wanted to win over to his program of a nonpsychological discipline? Why waste

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valuable space dealing with what must seem, at least philosophically, to be a tangential issue? Among the more serious students of Husserl, however, the inclusion of this topic in the Preface to Ideas I comes as no surprise. Those who read Husserl’s own texts know that the issue of psychology remained one of his persistent concerns well beyond the period of the Logical Investigations. Farber, for example, commented that: “The relationship between phenomenology and psychology … remained one of [Husserl’s] major themes throughout his scholarly life” (1966, pp. 90–91). Other commentators similarly have noted that this relationship continued to be a preoccupation of Husserl’s, even as he worked to develop phenomenology as a transcendental, nonpsychological discipline; a preoccupation located more accurately at the center, rather than on the periphery, of his project (cf., e.g., Biemel, 1970; de Boer, 1978; Kockelmans, 1967a; Paci, 1972). Apparently, Husserl did not simply leave the question of psychology behind. It is important to note, in addition, that Husserl’s concern with psychology was not limited to the task of exclusion begun in the Logical Investigations. In other words, Husserl was not only concerned with demonstrating how phenomenology was not psychological. Rather, he remained concerned with the question of psychology in its own right. He continued to question the role and nature of the psychology now that it was relieved of its more philosophical duties. As Mohanty has pointed out, Husserl’s “anti-psychologism did not hinder the continued growth of his concern with psychology as a science” (1984, p. 14). The fact that psychology is inadequate for the task of grounding epistemology and logic is no reason to adopt an attitude of indifference to the properly psychological tasks and aims of psychology itself. In fact, it might be that it is only when psychology is relieved of those tasks for which it is not suited that it will be best able to pursue those tasks for which it is suited. As Farber, once again, asserted: “Husserl’s opposition to psychologism by no means implied an opposition to psychology” (1940, p. 17). So, while it is clear that Husserl worked hard to establish phenomenological philosophy as a nonpsychological discipline, he also appears to have remained interested at the same time in the development of psychology as its own, separate and distinct, science. Were this all there were to the story—were it simply the case that phenomenology and psychology were to be separate and distinct sciences—there would be no need for an extended treatise on the relationship between the two. The fact that in the years between 1925 and 1927, Husserl delivered a series of lectures on the topic of “phenomenological psychology,” however, should lead us to wonder about the nature of the relationship that would exist between these separate, but apparently related, disciplines. How could phenomenological philosophy, which was explicitly established as a nonpsychological discipline, be applied to psychology? And how could a psychology that was replaced by phenomenology be conducted phenomenologically? The fact that Husserl lectured on the topic of “phenomenological psychology” 25 years after the publication of the Logical Investigations should add weight to the suggestion that he considered there to be a relation between phenomenology and psychology more than, or other than, that of mutual exclusion. It should also suggest to us that perhaps Husserl held the development of phenomenology to

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hold more than a little significance for the practice of psychology. What would be the nature of this relationship, and what would be its significance for an empirical science of psychology? It is to these two questions to which the entirety of this work is devoted. Based on the conviction that Husserl considered there to be a productive relation between phenomenology and psychology other than that of mutual exclusion, and the anticipation that this relationship holds profound and far-reaching implications for a phenomenological reform of psychology based upon it, the following work explores Husserl’s understanding of the nature of this relationship as it evolved throughout his career. We shall find that, while Husserl did want to differentiate philosophical phenomenology as a transcendental and universal science from psychology (in order to overcome psychologism), he also maintained that the development of transcendental phenomenology held tremendous significance for a “radical reform” of psychological practice and understanding. It is with the nature of this reform that we will be especially concerned in the following, as we examine Husserl’s ideas for the development of what we shall call a transcendentally or phenomenologically grounded psychology. The task of clarification that lies ahead is by no means straightforward, as suggested by a glance at the aforementioned Preface to the English edition of Ideas I. In it, Husserl writes: The understanding, or at any rate the sure grasp, of the distinction between transcendental phenomenology and “descriptive,” or as it is often called nowadays, “phenomenological” psychology, is a problem that as a rule brings great difficulties with it, which indeed are grounded in the very nature of the case. It has led to misunderstandings, to which even thinkers who subscribe to the phenomenological line of thought are subject. Some attempt to clarify the situation should prove useful (1931, p. 7).

It was precisely this question with which Husserl was concerned over three decades after publication of Logical Investigations. It is, as he writes, a problem that “as a rule brings great difficulties with it.” After repeated efforts of his own—spanning decades and several texts—Husserl still felt the need in 1931 to speak to and attempt to clarify the nature of this relationship. The extent of the proliferation of the misunderstandings to which he felt the need to address himself is attested to by Farber’s comment that it is this issue of the relationship between phenomenology and psychology that has become “that controversy for which Husserl has been most famous” (1940, p.  2). Given the breadth and depth of Husserl’s contributions to philosophy, this is a distinction of some note. What is to account for this problematic state of affairs? What, we may well wonder, are the “great difficulties” that are “grounded in the very nature of the case”? Why is it that even those “who suscribe to the phenomenological line of thought”— that is, Husserl’s own students, including Martin Heidegger—have not been able to get a sure grasp on the nature of this relationship? One begins to develop an appreciation for the complexity involved when one realizes that Husserl has proposed to accomplish simultaneously two conflicting, perhaps even contradictory, tasks in developing both a transcendental phenomenology and a phenomenological psychology. On the one hand, for phenomenological philosophy to be a transcendental

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science, it must be nonpsychological. As Husserl wrote in the Logical Investigations (2nd edition), phenomenology must be “infinitely removed” from the psychological (1970b, p. 253). On the other hand, for there to be a “phenomenological psychology” it must be possible for psychology to utilize phenomenology; it must be possible for psychology to become, in essence, a phenomenological discipline. In fact, Husserl later wrote that phenomenology was indeed to signify “a fundamental refashioning of psychology” as well as of philosophy once it adopted the phenomenological method (1977a, p. 144). Given this context, the questions raised above as to the possible nature of the relationship between phenomenology and psychology become increasingly problematic. How can phenomenology simultaneously distance itself “infinitely” from psychology and yet become a method for psychology? While phenomenology is not itself to be psychology, its development is at the same time to lead to a “fundamental refashioning” of psychology. Our task is to come to an understanding of the relation between these two disciplines that allows phenomenology to be distinct from, yet also related to, psychology in a fundamental way. In 1931, Husserl clearly felt that this had yet to be achieved. As we shall see, Husserl’s 1931 attempt also did not prove to be sufficiently clear. The misunderstandings that had already begun to proliferate at that time continued to do so. Several other attempts were also made to clarify the situation further. Merleau-Ponty, for example, took up this topic in a series of lectures he delivered at the Sorbonne early in the 1960s. Feeling that Husserl’s mature position on this matter remained in question, he tried, in his “Phenomenology and the Sciences of Man” (1964), to bring both historical and systematic coherence to Husserl’s problematic legacy. There was also the appearance of the 1963 German text by Drue, entitled Edmund Husserls System der phenomenologischen Psychologie, and the 1967(a) English text by Kocklemans, Edmund Husserl’s Phenomenological Psychology: A Historico-Critical Study. This is not the place to justify adding these authors’ interpretations of Husserl’s thought to the list of misunderstandings. We will have occasion to return to a criticism of their positions at a later point in this text. For now, we merely point out that another 30 years after the publication of Husserl’s Preface to Ideas I there was still a widely acknowledged sense that adequate clarity had yet to be achieved. The fact that this has still—now an additional 60 years later—yet to be achieved will become evident as we proceed. Once we have reached our final conclusions as to the nature of this relationship, we will be able to see, conclusively, that it is for the most part, only misunderstandings that have continued to proliferate. As is often the case in phenomenology, it will only be in the fruits of our labors that we will be able to find their justification. We will agree with Merleau-Ponty, Drue, and Kockelmans, however, on one important aspect of our challenge. That is, we too will find it necessary to examine Husserl’s thought, both historically and systematically. As Paci has written: “In Husserl the relation of phenomenology and psychology has always been difficult and dramatic. We may say that the two have always been flowing and in a state of crises” (1972, p.  181). When working to clarify the thought of a man whose

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“­ thinking never stood still” (de Boer, 1978, p. xix), an historical approach is a necessity. Our end goal in conducting such a history, however, is a coherent account that can then be applied in the human sciences. Our interests are not purely scholarly; we are not only interested in providing a systematic analysis of Husserl’s philosophical development. Our watchword shall not be merely “back to Husserl himself.” Rather, in clarifying Husserl’s understanding of psychology in its relations to phenomenology, we shall hope to shed light on the things themselves of psychological interest. While an historical approach is our necessary vehicle, our destination is a sure grasp on Husserl’s mature position in all of its concrete implications. The usefulness of our clarification shall be measured by its applicability to a phenomenologically grounded psychological research and practice. We will find that in the case of Husserl, these two approaches are far from contradictory. As de Boer described, in Husserl’s case a true sense of his systematic coherence can only be discovered through an appreciation of the “unity of development” he demonstrated historically. de Boer writes: Husserl’s philosophical work does exhibit a distinct unity, even if it is only a unity of development. In his philosophy there is a definite major theme that is ever more consistently unfolded, and consequently the final phase of his thinking can be regarded as the culmination of all previous intentions (1978, p. xx).

We shall arrive at the conclusion of our historical journey at a final phase in which all of our previous intentions shall culminate, as well. The major theme, whose unfolding provides our path in de Boer’s judgment (as well as in our own), is the persistently problematic relationship between phenomenology and psychology. Husserl’s final phase comes with the fulfillment of his intentions of developing both a transcendental phenomenology and a phenomenologically grounded psychology. The unity of development exhibited may be characterized by his struggle to find a universal philosophy grounded in a reflective analysis of experience. What makes this struggle so difficult is what Husserl referred to as the “temptation” of psychologism (1970a, p.  263); the temptation to consider any reflective analysis of consciousness to be psychological in nature. With psychology providing an inadequate grounding for the universal philosophy he hoped to develop, Husserl was left with the task of developing a nonpsychological science of consciousness that would, at the same time, ground a psychology of consciousness. We will show that in the final phase of his thought, Husserl found a way to satisfy both of these demands by avoiding psychologism in both philosophy and psychology. We will find, in fact, that it was only Husserl’s radical overcoming of psychologism in psychology that enabled him both to establish transcendental phenomenology as a nonpsychological philosophy and to reform psychology as an empirical science upon this newly won epistemological ground. In this way, we will take as our guide for this project the first line of the passage from the Cartesian Meditations (1977a), which serves as the epigraph for this text. We might say that the remainder of this text is nothing more than an extended meditation on this single passage in its entirety, a kind of Midrash on this section of the Husserlian scripture. The first line is of particular significance in determining the

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strategy for our approach. In it, Husserl writes, “it would of course be pointless to treat the positive science of intentional psychology and transcendental phenomenology separately” (1977a, p. 147). We will take his advice in this matter. As phenomenology initially arose as a replacement for psychology out of Husserl’s refutation of psychologism, and as the promise which transcendental phenomenology holds for a radical reform of psychology is inseparably wrapped up in this same development, we will examine the possibility of a phenomenologically grounded psychology in the context of Husserl’s overcoming of psychologism. We will treat psychology in its relation to transcendental phenomenology, that is, rather than as separate from it. We will find that it is in this domain in particular in which prior attempts at clarification of Husserl’s thought have fallen short. Others have failed to appreciate the importance of treating psychology in its relation to transcendental phenomenology, and thus have missed the transformation of psychology that occurs when it is grounded transcendentally. A central reason for this failure, we will argue, is that it only becomes possible to ground psychology in phenomenology after the transcendental domain has been firmly established, in what Husserl terms a “return” to positivity (1970a, p. 260). Rather than stopping short of the transcendental reduction in order to remain focused on the psychological as a worldly domain—as, e.g., in Kockelman’s (1967a) interpretation—Husserl is seen finally to conclude that a phenomenologically grounded psychology only becomes possible when the psychic becomes viewed as one constituted domain of transcendental intersubjectivity. The ramifications of doing so are spelled out in concrete detail in our concluding chapter. You, the reader, however, should not take our explicit concern with transcendental subjectivity and phenomenology as a sign that there will be nothing of psychological value in what is offered here. Perhaps contrary to appearances (particularly in the first few chapters), this text is primarily intended for psychologists who view phenomenology as offering something of value to their work. It arose out of the very concrete and mundane concerns associated with the actual doing of psychology. In this sense, this work hopes to continue the job begun 50 years ago in 1970  in Amadeo Giorgi’s book Psychology as a Human Science: A Phenomenologically-­ Based Approach, a book that has, in part, made this undertaking possible. In his book, Giorgi addressed directly the question of what promise phenomenology held for the actual work of the psychologist. He envisioned a refashioning of psychology from the ground up, which would be based on its being grounded in phenomenology. Rather than applying a phenomenological corrective to existing psychological practices, as many have attempted within the mainstream, this text endeavors to join and further Giorgi’s project of calling for the development of a phenomenologically based psychology as a human science. We depart from Giorgi’s earlier work, as we depart from the majority of previous efforts at clarification, in our appreciation of the role of the transcendental in the fundamental refashioning of psychological practice and understanding. It will be a major thrust of this work that the transcendental is not reserved solely for the philosopher; that it is of crucial interest to the psychologist, as well. It is for this reason that we so painstakingly take the first three chapters to establish the centrality of the concept of the transcendental reduction and the access it provides to transcendental intersubjectivity. For readers who are

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already familiar with the terrain of the transcendental, these chapters may be skipped, picking up the argument for the value of the transcendental for psychology in Chap. 4. I also should note that we have made this case in a few prior publications in more schematic form (e.g., Davidson, 1988a, 2017; Davidson and Cosgrove, 1991, 2002; Davidson and Solomon, 2010), but there has been little uptake in the field based on these initial attempts at staking out the implications of the transcendental terrain for psychology. Unfortunately once more, no justification can be provided for this position beforehand. The fruits of our labors will also provide, within themselves, their own plea for reform, as the transcendental domain has to be firmly established as that from which we may then return in taking up our properly psychological interests. The value that this discussion holds for psychologists in their own thinking and practice will thus have to become evident as we proceed. With this in mind, we turn to the tasks of exploration, exegesis, and application.

Contents

1 Phenomenology as Descriptive Psychology�������������������������������������������    1 2 Phenomenology as Rigorous Philosophy������������������������������������������������   33 3 Phenomenology as Transcendental Philosophy������������������������������������   69 4 Phenomenological Psychology����������������������������������������������������������������  109 5 Transcendental Psychologism ����������������������������������������������������������������  149 6 The “Return” from the Transcendental������������������������������������������������  199 7 Conclusion: Toward a Contextualized Psychology ������������������������������  261 Epilogue: Toward a Generous Psychology����������������������������������������������������  325 References ��������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������  327

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Chapter 1

Phenomenology as Descriptive Psychology

Phenomenology is descriptive psychology from the Logical Investigations. 1st edition (Husserl, 1970b, p. 262n)

Farber has suggested that Husserl’s works can be grouped, chronologically, into three broadly defined periods: a psychologistic period, a simple descriptive phenomenological period, and a transcendental phenomenological period (1940, p. 11). The psychologistic period consists of Husserl’s earliest writings through the Philosophy of Arithmetic, while the simple descriptive phenomenological period consists of the first edition of the Logical Investigations and the transcendental period subsumes all of the work following the Logical Investigations and Husserl’s “breakthrough” to the transcendental of 1907–1908. Farber’s heuristic is helpful for our own purposes here, except that we will be mainly interested in the last two of these three periods: those which Farber refers to as the “two major periods” of Husserl’s thought, and which he designates as “pre-transcendental” and “transcendental” periods (1940, p. 11). We will, likewise, divide our treatment of Husserl into these two phases of development. This first chapter is concerned with the pre-transcendental position of the first edition of the Logical Investigations and Husserl’s understanding of the relation between phenomenology and psychology before he made the transcendental turn. The first period of Husserl’s work, his psychologistic phase, will only come into play as the background for the refutation of psychologism offered in the Logical Investigations, which serves as our real point of departure. In order to understand fully the significance and role of this refutation in Husserl’s overall project, we must understand its origin: what is Husserl refuting here, and why? Our perspective on his earliest work is thus somewhat that of an over the shoulder glance; we are concerned with psychologism as that which we must leave behind. Since the Logical Investigations is the site for the overcoming of this earlier psychologism and the institution of phenomenology as the replacement discipline for psychology, it is natural for us to begin there.

© Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 L. Davidson, Overcoming Psychologism: Husserl and the Transcendental Reform of Psychology, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-59932-4_1

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It should be noted, beforehand, that the lengthy and detailed refutation that Husserl offers under the title of “Prolegomena to Pure Logic” (1970b) occupies the entirety of the first volume of the German edition. It will not be necessary for us to recount his argument in all of its various articulations. Rather, we shall attempt to synthesize Husserl’s dispersed treatment of the various issues involved in light of our present interest. We wish to distill from this first volume the train of thought that succeeds in overthrowing psychology as the foundational discipline for logic and puts in its place the newly fashioned science of “phenomenology.” After this has been accomplished, we may then ask about the relationship between phenomenology and psychology that survives this displacement. In other words, we can then turn to the question of how this new science is related to the old.

Psychologism Critiqued The Logical Investigations takes as its point of departure the problematic nature of the earlier Philosophy of Arithmetic. Husserl speaks to this directly near the close of his Foreword to the first edition, situating his own thought within its historical context and, at the same time, expressing his dissatisfaction with this established psychologistic philosophy. He will attempt, in this text, to go beyond the uncritical positions of his teachers and of his own previous work: I began work on the prevailing assumption that psychology was the science from which logic in general, and the logic of the deductive sciences, had to hope for philosophical clarification. For this reason psychological researches occupy a very large place in the first volume of my Philosophy of Arithmetic. There were, however, connections in which such a psychological foundation never came to satisfy me. Where one was concerned with questions as to the origin of mathematical presentations, or with the elaboration of those practical methods which are indeed psychologically determined, psychological analyses seemed to me to promote clearness and instruction. But once one had passed from the psychological connections of thinking, to the logical unity of the thought-content (the unity of theory), no true continuity and unity could be established. I became more and more disquieted by doubts of principle, as to how to reconcile the objectivity of mathematics, and of all science in general, with a psychological foundation of logic. In this manner my whole method, which I had taken over from the convictions of the reigning logic, that sought to illuminate the given science through psychological analyses, became shaken, and I felt myself more and more pushed towards general critical reflections on the essence of logic, and on the relationship, in particular, between the objectivity of knowing and the objectivity of the content known (1970b, p. 42).

The received wisdom of the tradition, which Husserl had himself embodied in his Philosophy of Arithmetic, was that psychology was to provide the philosophical foundation for logic; the validity of logical law was to be grounded in psychological analyses of the subjectivity of knowing (as a human act). Whether or not partially due to Frege’s critique of his initial work (cf. with respect to this debate Føllesdal, 1982 and Mohanty, 1974, 1982), Husserl soon thereafter found this position to be inadequate, especially with respect to the apparent discontinuity between the

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p­ sychological connections of thinking and logical connections among that which is thought (i.e., the thought-content). The critical reflections towards which he felt pushed are what follow as the body of the first volume of the Logical Investigations. They are characterized by Husserl as a “Prolegomena to Pure Logic,” since they prepare the way for his attempt to found logic on a non-psychologistic basis. First, he must clear the way for the laying of new foundations by razing the ruins of the old system; he provides a prolegomena by way of exorcising the ghosts of his own past. The focus for these reflections, as we saw above, will be the relationship between the “the subjectivity of knowing and the objectivity of the content known.” The reigning conviction at the time was that the objectivity of the content known could be grounded adequately in the science of the subjectivity of knowing. Husserl explains how this position came about in the following way. Logic, he informs us, arose out of the “practical motives connected with the business of science” as a kind of “technology” of scientific thought (1970b, pp. 74, 79). Such a technology is considered to be a “normative” science in the sense that it: seeks to search into what pertains to genuine, valid science as such, what constitutes the Idea of Science, so as to be able to use the latter to measure the empirically given sciences as to their agreement with their Idea, the degree to which they approach it, and where they offend against it (1970b, p. 71).

Logic, in other words, is considered to be the science of “thinking as it should be,” if it is to be scientific (1970b, p. 92), if it is to meet the demands for rational-­ scientific discourse. The laws of logic tell us how we must think if our thought is to be valid scientifically. They tell us what constitutes “good” scientific discourse. Such a normative discipline, however, requires a theoretical discipline as its ground. In order to legislate how one should think, one must already be able to distinguish between good and bad thought, and that is no longer the task of a normative discipline. For instance: To be able to pass the normative judgment, ‘A soldier must be brave’, I must have some conception of a ‘good’ soldier, and this concept cannot be founded on an arbitrary nominal definition, but on a general valuation, which permits us to value soldiers as good or bad according to these or those properties (1970b, p. 84).

In this way: Every normative proposition of, e.g., the form ‘An A should be B’ implies the theoretical proposition ‘Only an A which is B has the properties C’, in which ‘C’ serves to indicate the constitutive content of the standard-setting predicate ‘good’ … The new proposition is purely theoretical: it contains no trace of the thought of normativity … In other words, every normative discipline demands that we know certain non-normative truths: these it takes from certain theoretical sciences (1970b, pp. 87–88).

According to the psychologistic thinkers, including the Husserl of the Philosophy of Arithmetic, the theoretical science that provided these non-normative truths for logic was psychology. Their thinking in this regard is nicely summed up in Husserl’s statement that, in their view, “Thinking as it should be, is merely a special case of thinking as it is” (1970b, p. 92). If we want to know what determines whether or not

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a thought is a “good” one (in the sense of logically correct), we must consult the theoretical researches of the psychology of thinking, which as a theoretical science of thinking as it is, can provide us with a sound basis for such a valuation. We appeal to psychology in order to determine the properties essential to thinking as it should be (i.e., good thinking) because one of the domains of psychology is thinking as a human act. Obviously, it will be this analysis of thinking as a human act that will provide us with a theoretical foundation upon which to distinguish between good and bad thinking. Husserl elaborates: However, one may define logic as a technology … we find invariably that mental activities or products are the objects of practical regulation. And just as, in general, the artificial working over a material presupposes the knowledge of its properties, so this will be the case here too, where we are especially concerned with psychological material. The scientific investigation of the rules according to which this stuff should be worked over, naturally leads back to the scientific investigation of these properties. Psychology therefore provides the theoretical basis for constructing a logical technology, and, more particularly, the psychology of cognition (1970b, p. 91).

That which one is concerned to regulate normatively, scientific thinking, is most evidently an act of human subjectivity (or the subjectivity of knowing). It only makes sense that one should seek a ground for one’s normative regulation in the science of human subjectivity (or more particularly, in the science of the subjectivity of knowing). As a result, logic is based on psychology. According to the psychologistic thinkers, logic is, in fact, understood to be a “part,” a “branch,” or a “specific discipline” of psychology (1970b, pp. 90–91). If psychology subsumes the natural(-causal) laws for all thinking, then logic pertains to the natural(-causal) laws for correct thinking or thinking which proceeds according to its own essence. That is, logic becomes the study of the natural laws of psychic life that determine “logical behavior.” Thinking as it should be is thinking as determined by the natural laws of thought, thinking which is a “pure” expression of these laws. In this way, logical laws are understood to be natural-psychological laws; they pertain to the subjective acts of knowing, judging, etc., which belong to the domain of the psychologist. They differ from other natural-psychological laws only in so far as they pertain to, and only in so far as they bring about, correct thinking as opposed to incorrect or faulty thinking. Other natural-psychological laws may be evoked in order to explain fallacious thinking, but any incident of logically sound thinking will be understood as a manifestation of the efficacy of the laws of logic qua their determinative power as natural laws of thinking. Logic is merely a specific discipline within the empirical science of human subjectivity. What first renders this position suspect to Husserl is that the nature of logical laws is fundamentally different from the nature of natural laws. An empirical science, such as the psychology of cognition, can only lead to a knowledge of “merely contingent laws,” whereas logic, in Husserl’s view, “does not however ask after contingent, but after necessary laws—not how we think, but how we ought to think” (1970b, p. 92). Empirical sciences are necessarily sciences of the real or the factual; their laws are laws of contingency, of what happens to be the case. Logic is not a science of the real in this way; its laws are laws of what must be the case necessarily.

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They are not laws of what merely happens to constitute logical discourse, but of what is necessary to logical discourse. “The rules of logic must therefore be taken, not from the contingent, but from the necessary use of reason” (1970b, p. 92), not from how we happen to think factually, but from how we must think—logically. In a related way, empirical sciences also can only lead to knowledge in an empirical fashion, that is, “by induction from the singular facts of experience” (1970b, p. 99). Induction can only lead to knowledge of probability; empirical sciences furnish only probable laws. In this view, logical laws must, then, “without exception, rank as mere probabilities” (1970b, p. 99). But “nothing, however, seems plainer” to Husserl’s thinking “than that the laws of ‘pure logic’ all have a priori validity” (1970b, p. 99). Empirical science cannot provide a priori validity: “no natural laws can be known a priori” (1970b, p. 99). Psychology does not seem to be able to provide logical laws with their characteristic necessity, nor with their characteristic intuitive certainty. It only produces probable and contingent generalities. There seems to be a fundamental discontinuity between the laws of natural science and the laws of logic, creating a problem that Husserl summarizes in the following: Logical laws are laws for validations, proofs. What are validations but peculiar human trains of thought, in which, in normal circumstances, the finally emergent judgments seem endowed with a necessarily consequential character. This character is itself a mental one, a peculiar mode of mindedness and no more. And, obviously, none of these mental phenomena is isolated, but is a single thread in the tangled web of mental phenomena, of mental disposition and organic process, called human life. How could anything beyond empirical generalities result in such circumstances? Where has psychology yielded more? We reply: Psychology certainly does not yield more, and cannot for this reason yield the apodictically evident, and so meta-empirical and absolutely exact laws which form the core of all logic (1970b, pp. 100–101).

How are we to understand this problematic state of affairs? While it seems clear that logic should be based on psychology as the science of mental phenomena, it is also clear—at least to Husserl—that such a psychology is inadequate for establishing the necessity and universality requisite to logical truth. While it seems that logical laws are laws for mental processes, the science of these mental processes is not able to provide us with what we know to be the laws of logic in their essential form. As noted at the outset for Husserl, it becomes clear that the problem is to be located in the relationship between the subjectivity of knowing and objectivity of the content known. That is, a psychology of mental acts (the subjectivity of knowing) that would seem to constitute the subject matter of the logician cannot adequately address the necessary unity of the thought-content of these acts (the objectivity of the content known). Evidently, it would behoove us to join Husserl in reflecting upon the nature of this relationship further. Psychologistic thinkers have attempted to justify the lawful connectedness among the thought-content of mental acts by appealing to the lawfulness of these acts, which themselves are products. It is thought that it is the lawfulness of mental processes that brings about the lawfulness of the contents of these processes. For example, the principle of contradiction can be grounded in a presumed inability on the part of human beings to entertain two contradictory propositions in the same

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unified train of thought. In this sense, two contradictory propositions cannot both be true, for the mind is determined by the natural-psychological laws of cognition to be unable to entertain them simultaneously in the same train of thought. The mind qua thinking thing proceeds logically by nature; that is the way it is constructed. Just as an object falling freely may not fall, according to the laws of gravity, as if it were in a vacuum, but will inevitably be effected by extraneous factors, such as wind currents, etc., so, too, a mind will not operate according to the laws of logic, as if it were in its pure state. It will inevitably be affected by extraneous influences, which lead it astray from its own essence. Logical laws pertain to how the mind would think, were these “alien mental influences” successfully eradicated, were the mind in its pure state. Husserl phrases it this way: The laws of thought count as natural laws characterizing the peculiarity of our mind qua thinking, and the essence of the conformity, as definitory of correct thinking, lies in the pure operation of these laws, their non-disturbance by alien mental influences (such as custom, inclination, tradition) (1970b, p. 101).

In this way, the lawfulness that defines correct thought is presumed to stem directly from the lawfulness that determines correct thinking. Husserl, however, as he mentioned in his Foreword, has become skeptical of such a solution. We have already seen that the natural-causal laws of a psychology of cognition seem to be of a fundamentally different nature than the universal and necessary laws of logic. Guided by this problem, Husserl asks: “Does the assessment of thoughts by logical laws amount to a proof of their causal origin in these same laws as laws of nature?” (1970b, p. 102). That is, can the “laws of thought count as natural laws characterizing the peculiarity of our mind qua thinking”? Do logical laws describe the way our mind works essentially, in its purity? Is logic justified by an appeal to natural-causal explanation as the science of the laws of cognition, in an analogous way to the way in which physiology is the science of respiration or circulation? Husserl’s entire refutation of psychologism can be read as his attempt to answer a resounding and convincing “No” to this question. What follows for the remainder of this chapter are the ways in which he justifies this negative conclusion. We review these responses in detail, and in the variety of forms they take, because they not only are important in establishing a non-psychologistic approach to philosophy but also are important—as we plan to show in what follows—in establishing a non-­ psychologistic approach to psychology as well. In response to his own question, Husserl initially replies that “certain ready confusions” must have occurred in order to allow this position to develop as it has. The first confusion that he cites, and which is the most basic to his critique, is the confusion between what he has already differentiated for us as the subjectivity of knowing and the objectivity of the content known. Psychologism has been predicated upon confusion between the acts of knowing and their content. Writes Husserl: “Logical laws have first been confused with judgments. In the sense of acts of judgment, in which we may know them: the laws, as ‘contents of judgment’ have been confused with the judgments themselves” (1970b, p. 102). The subjectivity of knowing may

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indeed be an appropriate topic for a psychology of cognition; acts of judgment are in fact “real events, having causes and effects” (1970b, p. 102) and are thus amenable to a natural-causal science, conducted empirically and resulting in probabilities. The contents of these acts, their objects, are of an entirely different nature and require, therefore, an entirely different treatment. While the actual act of judgment is a real event and can be situated within the natural-causal context of natural science as an effect of some real cause, what is known through this act, the judgment itself is neither real nor subjective. As the content of knowledge, as what is known, it is both objective and ideal. The judgment itself cannot be considered to be a real part of the flow of psychic life; it is not itself subjective in the way that the act of judging, through which it arises, is. Neither can it be considered to refer to any actual state of affairs; it does not refer to anything in the domain of the real. The laws which pertain to ideality and objectivity are of an intrinsically different nature than the natural laws of causal determination found in empirical psychology—laws which obviously refer to factual states of affairs, unfolding within the flow of psychic life, understood as one region of the real. Husserl had established this difference earlier, but is coming, at this point, to a clearer understanding of the source of confusion. The ideal laws of logic are simply not, in any way, concerned with real events in the causal context of Nature (or psychic life as one region of Nature). Husserl makes use here of the Leibnizian distinction between “verities de raison” and “verities de fait,” translated by Hume as relations of ideas and matters of fact (1970b, p. 193), in order to establish a “never-­ to-­be-bridged gulf” (1970b, p. 104) between sciences of the real and sciences of the ideal. He argues that “ideal objects of thought” cannot be reduced merely to “individual, singular experiences, mere presentations and judgments concerning individual facts” (1970b, p. 193). In the first place, logic is just as much an ideal science as geometry, for instance. No one would attempt to argue that geometry makes claims about the real world or that which takes place within it. Logic similarly deals with ideal relations, relations obtaining between ideas or concepts rather than between matters of fact. Husserl repeatedly stresses this kinship between logic and other ideal sciences and their fundamental difference from sciences of the real, regarding this as a much overlooked but essential distinction: No logical law implies a ‘matter of fact’, not even the existence of presentations or judgments or other phenomena of knowledge. No logical law, properly understood, is a law for the facilities of mental life, and so not a law for presentations (as experiences), nor for judgments (experiences of judging), nor for our other mental experiences … [Logical laws] presuppose nothing mental, no facts of psychic life, whether in their establishment or their content. They do so no more than the laws of pure mathematics do so (1970b, pp. 104–105). No proposition whose roots lie in mere concepts, which merely states what those concepts contain, and what is given with them, makes an assertion about the real. One need only consider the genuine sense of the laws of logic to see that they do not do this. Even where they speak of judgments, they do not refer to what psychological laws seek to indicate by this word, i.e., judgments as real experiences, but they mean judgments in the sense of statement-meanings in specie, meanings which retain their identity whether serving to found actual acts of assertion or not, and without regard as to who asserts them. If logical laws are treated as laws of the real that, like natural laws, govern our real presentation and judgment, their whole sense is altered (1970b, p. 157).

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The word judgment can, most evidently, have at least two very different meanings. The judgments with which logic is concerned are not the real events taking place in natural psychic life. Logic refers to real acts of judgment no more so than it refers to real relations among ideas of concepts. The judgments of logic are, as Husserl wrote in the last passage quoted above, “statement-meanings in specie,” by which he means that they are the ideal meanings of judgments. The meaning, or truth value, of such a statement as 2 × 2 = 4 is not in the least affected by who says it, when it is said, how often, etc., or even if it is ever said at all. The meaning of such judgment transcends the actual subjective act of judgment. This is what we mean when we refer to it as objective and ideal. Regardless of whether it has been uttered one thousand times or never once uttered, the meaning of 2 × 2 = 4 remains the same; it retains its identity across all subjective conditions and is indifferent to these conditions. One would “not confuse the true judgment” (qua act) “with the truth of this judgment or with the true content of judgment” (1970b, p.  142). Husserl’s establishment of a gulf between the ideal and the real, and its significance for the relation between logic and psychology, is perhaps nowhere better captured than in his remark that: “My act of judging that 2 × 2 = 4 is no doubt causally determined, but this is not true of the truth 2 × 2 = 4” (1970b, p. 142). We must subsequently distinguish between the laws that can and do explain the subjective acts of knowing through which such truths are known and the laws which pertain to what is known through these acts. Psychologism’s first confusion results from it’s overlooking this fundamental distinction: Psychologistic logicians ignore the fundamental, essential, never-to-be-bridged gulf between ideal and real laws, between normative and causal regulation, between logical and real necessity, between logical and real grounds. No conceivable gradation could mediate between the ideal and the real (1970b, p. 104).

We have yet to come to an adequate grasp, however, of how psychologistic logicians have attempted to establish this faulty mediation between the ideal and the real. How have they managed to transfer the causal determination of the act of judgment to the judgment itself? How have they justified their belief that the logical truth of 2 × 2 = 4 is based on the fact that I must (as causally determined by natural psychological laws) judge it to be so, and that I must judge it to be so because 2 × 2 does in fact equal 4 logically? Husserl argues that a second confusion is built upon this initial confusion of the ideal with the real that makes such apparent mediation possible. He continues: If, however, the law is confused with the judgment of knowledge of the law, the ideal with the real, the law appears as a governing power in our train of thought. With understandable ease a second confusion is added to the first; we confuse a law as a term in causation with a law as the rule of causation (1970b, p. 102).

Psychologism apparently also entails the belief that logical laws act themselves to determine subjective acts of judgment, rather than just to describe the necessary causal connections between these acts. This is a confusion between a law as descriptive of a causal connection, as descriptive of cause effect relations between entities in the world, and a law as being itself a term in a causal connection, as being itself

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a cause in such a cause effect relation. Husserl notes that such a confusion has occurred in other fields as well, as when, for instance, we talk of the law of gravitation causing an apple to fall; “as if,” he writes, “their rules of causal connection could themselves once more significantly function as causes, i.e., as terms in just such connections” (1970b, p. 102). In the case of logic, the law itself comes to be seen as a governing power in thought—as the cause that brings about logical thinking as its effect. It was by way of this second confusion that psychologistic thinkers have been able to assert that logical laws “expressed how we must think in consequence of the nature of our mind,” that they “characterized the human mind as a thinking mind in the pointed sense” (1970b, pp. 102–103). Once logical laws are taken to be themselves causes of behavior, one comes to view the mind as a kind of thinking machine, constructed according to these laws. Correct thought, thought which abides by these laws, is understood to be their effect; it is what is caused by the operation of these laws in their natural determinative capacity. What of thought that does not abide by the laws of logic? Thought that is incorrect, in terms of the tenets of logic, must be explained on the basis of other natural laws, but laws that do not pertain to thinking per se. That is, if logical thought is brought about by the laws of logic, then non-­ logical thought must be brought about by what we referred to previously as “alien mental influences.” These, of course, would not be laws of thought, but laws which pertain to other behavior that interferes with thought in its pure form; laws, that is, that pertain to a straying from the norm, a departure or deviation from our mind’s normal operation qua thinking thing. As Husserl explains: If at times we think otherwise then these laws require, we are not, properly speaking, ‘thinking at all’, we are not judging as the natural laws of thinking, or the nature of our mind qua thinking, requires, but as other laws determine (once more causally). We are following the disturbing leads of custom, passion, etc. (1970b, p. 103).

Thought that does not abide by the laws of logic could not have been brought about by the laws of logic and is not, properly speaking, therefore thought at all. It then must be explained on the basis of other laws than the laws of thought. The implication of this position is that once logical laws are made causes of thinking, all logically incorrect thought, no longer considered to be thought, must now be considered to be deviations from a state of normal functioning, in which the mind (qua thinking machine) runs smoothly, unhampered by external or extraneous influences. These (supposedly) “isolated deviations from the norm,” Husserl adds, “may readily be put to the account of the troubling influences stemming from other psychological sources” (1970b, p. 103). These deviations must, that is, be explained as deviations due to other factors than those entailed in, or related to, thinking. They must be explained on the basis of other natural-psychological laws that would pertain, in the context of the normal functioning of the mind, to a psychologically defined pathology as opposed to psychologically defined normality. In this view, when one does, for example, entertain contradictory judgments in the same unified train of thought, one is no longer simply considered to be wrong logically, to be mistaken, but one’s thought must now be considered to be deviant

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and must now be explained on the basis of another set of natural laws as a symptom of a psychological malfunction. One is not only incorrect, but one’s mind is not working as it should, or more accurately, as it would was it to be operating normally. Since this behavior was not the effect of the laws of logic acting as causes, it must be the effect of other psychological laws that pertain to breakdowns in the system, wind currents that compromise the integrity of the vacuum. In essence, once the law of contradiction is posited as essential to thinking as a human act (and we have said that thought which does not abide by this law is not, properly speaking, thought at all), then all thought which falls outside of the domain of the logical must be explained in terms of other natural laws as a deviation from some natural state. Psychologism can be understood to hinge on this concept of the natural or normal state in its constitutive capacity. For, certainly, individuals do judge incorrectly with respect to logical norms quite frequently in their daily personal, as well as vocational (even scientific), lives. If logical laws are thought to cause the correct thinking that is dispersed amidst the incorrect, then these frequent errors must be explained. The positing of logical laws as natural laws of cognition relies on this distinction between the normal and the deviant to ensure the desired homogeneity between the lawfulness of the contents of judgments and the lawfulness of the judgments themselves. After all, it was the lawfulness regulating the thought content which we were seeking to ground in the necessary nature of our mind qua thinking. Since the mind does not operate according to its own nature all of the time, or in every case, then these aberrations must be excluded as aberrations in order to justify such talk of normality. This poses a dilemma for psychologism, which Husserl is quick to point out. We take as our point of entry the fact that the psychology upon which logic is assumed to be based is an empirical science which, as all empirical sciences, operates through induction from the facts of experience and produces probable generalities. This point was made earlier, but here its significance is quite different. Husserl asks if the establishment of the mind’s nature qua thinking can be the result of such an empirical inquiry. How do we come to know that the mind is constructed or structured on the basis of the laws of logic, that when it operates “according to its nature,” it operates logically, and that only logical thought is thought at all? With respect to the law of contradiction, as one example of a logical law grounded in this fashion, Husserl asks: What are the psychological inductions which justify its acceptance? May there not have been people, and may there not still be people who, deceived by fallacies, contrive at times to believe contradictories together? Has the occurrence of contradictions, even quite obvious ones, been scientifically investigated in the case of the insane? (1970b, p. 114).

That is, on what empirical-psychological basis can we assert the priority of logical over illogical thinking as essential to the nature of thought? Husserl raises an interesting and challenging question. When one consults the facts of experience empirically, as a psychologist, one does not in fact find the logical lawfulness one would find were one to consult an introductory text in logic. One does not find a community of Mr. Spocks, nor does one find what we have referred to as “alien mental influences” clearly identified as such. Husserl asks the psychologist:

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Where are the descriptive and genetic analyses which entitle us to explain the phenomena of thought by two sorts of natural law, one exclusively determining such causal sequences as allow logical thought to emerge, whereas others help to determine alogical thought? (1970b, p. 102)

While the empiricist will attempt to “escape these objections by suitably qualifying his law, e.g., by saying that it only applies to normal individuals of the genus homo, having a normal mental constitution” (1970b, p. 114), we may well wonder whether such an attempt is successful. While the occurrence of contradictions may be most pronounced in the so-called “insane,” it is by no means limited to them. When encountered in others, who are perhaps deceived by fallacies, are we not more likely to judge them to be wrong, if not simply mistaken, rather than abnormal? Indeed, is not the potential for error, or the possibility of deception, just as much a part of what we consider to be normal? For Husserl, who is explicitly concerned with the exact and universal status of logical law: It is sufficient to raise the insidious question of the exact definition of the concepts ‘normal individual’, and ‘normal mental constitution’ to see how imprecise and complex (and thus, inadequate) the content of the law, as now stated, has become (1970b, p. 114).

For those readers who may be less troubled by the imprecise and complex nature of this concept, however, we proceed further. According to Husserl, a “genuine psychologism tends always to confuse the psychological origin of certain general judgments in experience, on account of some supposed ‘naturalness’, with a justification of the same judgments” (1970b, p. 117). The validity of the laws of logic is assumed in this view to be based on their supposed ‘naturalness’. They are justified on account of their being discovered, inductively, to be operating in the normal mental constitution of normal individuals. Husserl concedes the point that “in the actual thought of normal persons, the actual denial of a law of thought does not usually occur,” but, he continues: it can scarcely be said that it cannot thus occur, since great philosophers like Epicurus and Hegel have denied the law of contradiction. Perhaps genius and madness are in this respect allied, perhaps there are also lunatic rejecters of the laws of thought: these will certainly also have to count as men (1970b, p. 158).

On what basis have we established the naturalness of these laws and on what basis have we established our distinction between normal mental constitution and abnormal or pathological mental constitution? It seems that we have employed this distinction in order to justify our talk of the normal or natural state of our mind qua thinking, but that we have also based this distinction upon the presumed naturalness of this state. Husserl points out that we must still consider thinkers such as Epicurus and Hegel, and even “lunatics” and “madmen” as persons, even though their thinking does not abide by the laws of logic. How could we justify calling these persons abnormal or deviant, thereby excluding them from our empirical survey, other than by appealing to the laws of logic, whose validity we are attempting to establish through this empirical survey? Pfänder, a contemporary of Husserl’s, pauses parenthetically in his own exegesis of Husserl’s refutation of psychologism to point out that:

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1  Phenomenology as Descriptive Psychology We have no right simply to declare insane those people who can consider mutually contradictory judgments as both true and have no right to ignore them in the psychological result. Perhaps this is justified merely if one presupposes the validity of the principle of contradiction in its independence of all psychology and makes it one criterion of mental illness (1967, p. 63).

In a purely empirical psychological inquiry the allegedly insane should count equally as persons (as should Epicurus and Hegel), and their thought should count equally as legitimate examples of thinking. The only way in which it has been possible to exclude them from such legitimate status has been through the use of the principle of contradiction. But this was the same principle whose validity we were attempting to establish though our empirical psychological analysis. Our reasoning has thus obviously been circular. In positing logical laws to be the natural psychological laws of cognition, we have committed a serious and dangerous error in our own thinking: we have, ourselves, acted illogically. We have confused normative laws, which pertain to one, clearly defined, domain of content with natural laws taken to be the source for an entire sphere of human behavior. Writes Husserl: No one can believe in a contradiction, no one can take something both to be and not to be—no one, that is, who is rational, to add an obvious qualification. The impossibility concerns anyone who wishes to judge rightly and no one else (1970b, p. 119).

Logical laws only apply to individuals who wish to judge logically, and then purely in a normative fashion. They do not determine human behavior to be rational: “no psychological law drives the judging subject under the yoke of logical laws” (1970b, p. 119). It is only impossible to deny the principle of contradiction if one wishes to be rational, since this principle does, in fact, constitute what we mean by rationality. It does not constitute what we mean by human or by natural. Were we to define normality strictly by adherence to the law of contradiction, no one would qualify as normal, since all of us are prone to error at times and none of us are immune to what we must continue to view in this context as alien mental influences—influences, however, whose presence is so pervasive and seemingly natural that one wonders in what sense they are considered to be alien. As Husserl remarks in a related context: One would surely not wish to conceive the ‘normality’ in question in such a way that no actual human being, and no possible human being living in our finite natural conditions, could be called ‘normal’ (1970b, p. 194).

Our psychologistic thinkers have apparently done just this. In equating the normative laws by which we evaluate scientific discourse with the natural laws of human behavior, they have been forced to consider all non-scientific discourse to be the product of abnormal forces. A contemporary of Husserl’s teacher, Brentano, had exposed a similar confusion between norms for objective content and laws of Nature prior to Husserl. De Boer relates that Exner had pointed to such a confusion in the last half of the nineteenth century in announcing that “a school of jurists flourishing in Italy is transforming criminology into psychiatry” (1978, p. 109). Such a transformation belies a fundamental confusion between abiding by the law (in the legal or logical sense) as a

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motivated accomplishment of human activity, and obedience (or logical thinking) as constitutive of being human. It is to assume that behavior which transgresses artificial (i.e., human made) institutions must be explained on the basis of naturally constitutive forces. In Husserl’s post-Logical Investigations language, logical discourse is constituted; it is something akin to a category mistake to presume that the laws of logic are constitutive, to consider them to be causal origins of behavior, rather than abstracted from a particular constituted domain of experience. One need only abide by the laws of logic if one is to carry on rational, scientific discourse; one need not be logical in order to be human. It should be evident at this point that this aspect of Husserl’s critique has far-­ reaching implications for many other disciplines as well as for related issues within psychology itself. As de Boër has written, Husserl’s “struggle against naturalism in logic, which reduces all laws of thought to ‘laws of nature governing thought’, is significant for all other areas of human endeavor as an example” (1978, p. 217). We shall not tarry long in exploring these implications, but will provide one illustrative application, alluded to by Husserl himself, in order to show how this aspect of our critique can be used effectively in other areas of human endeavor. Our critique of psychologism in logic is directly relevant to the case of psychosis treated in the literature of clinical psychology. We quoted Husserl previously as to the fact that the “occurrence of contradictions” has not been “scientifically investigated in the case of the insane” (1970b, p. 114). We have danced around this notion of the insane and their irrationality in the above argument, but it would perhaps be beneficial to pause briefly in order to make the point more explicitly. What understanding of insanity is presupposed by psychologism, and how did this position arise? Non-adherence to the principle of contradiction does, in fact, prove to serve as one criterion of mental illness. As we shall see later, its presence as a symptom leads clinicians and researchers to look for a natural cause in such sources as a malfunction in the frontal lobe of the brain or in an imbalance in brain chemistry. On what basis do we judge that non-logical discourse must have a natural causal origin in a deficiency or dysfunction of the brain’s physiology and than that logical discourse is the result, or the effect, of a proper working of the brain? Obviously, if a person’s brain were not on the fritz, she or he would not be uttering such non-sense. An individual’s non-adherence to the laws of logic must be understood as a symptom of an illness, as pathological, as it results from a deviation from the norm of natural thinking. Husserl’s seemingly abstract analysis of psychologism in logic has very concrete implications. We shall investigate these further in our last chapter in the context of the promise which transcendental phenomenology holds for a “radical reform” of psychology. At present, we are concerned with the confusion made evident in the case of psychosis, a confusion that can be phrased in more mundane terms as a confusion between a (constituted) product of human endeavor and a (constitutive) source of such an endeavor. Marx made an analogous point in terms of the relation between labor and capital. He showed how in a capitalist economic system the capital that is initially produced by the productive powers of labor comes to be posited as the

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source for those same powers; that labor eventually comes to be seen as issuing “from the womb of capital itself” (cited in Deleuze and Guattari, 1983, p. 11). In reality, capital is dependent upon labor, deriving its very life from it; but, in the capitalist transformation, capital is taken to be its source. In the case of psychosis, the logical discourse, which, in reality, is a constituted achievement of human cognitive labor, comes to be posited as the natural causal determinative source for such labor. We contend that logical thinking issues from the mind itself qua its nature as a thinking thing, even though we have only come to our awareness of this nature, as determined by the laws of logic, through one specific and clearly delineated realm of human activity (namely scientific discourse). On this point, with reference to psychosis as defined in opposition to reason and rationality, the works of Foucault (1965) and Deleuze and Guattari (1983) are especially enlightening. At this point we can now rejoin Husserl’s critique and ask whether even a Mr. Spock’s behavior is adequately explained on the basis of the natural laws that we are presuming constitute human nature. In other words, let us put aside any questions as to deviation from the norm or the distinction between the normal and pathological; let us merely ask after the positive example of someone who does judge according to the laws of logic. Husserl suggests that we “imagine an ideal person, in whom all thinking proceeds as logical laws require” (1970b, p. 103). We concede to the psychologistic thinkers that this individual must be a psychic being whose behavior is determined by natural psychological law; “naturally the fact that this occurs must have its explanatory ground in certain psychological laws, which govern the course of the mental experiences of this being” (1970b, p. 103). Now that we have established that this being’s thought adheres to the laws of logic and that their behavior is determined by the natural laws of psychology, we can ask: “Would the natural laws and logical laws in this assumed situation be one and the same?” (1970b, p. 103). Given an ideal person who could only judge in a logically correct fashion, the question would still remain as to whether the laws of logic were operating in this case as laws of nature. Would the natural laws that determine this person’s behavior in a psychological sense be the laws of logic? Husserl responds: “Obviously the answer is ‘No’” (1970b, p. 103). He provides the following argument: The example of a computer makes the difference quite clear. The arrangement and connection of the figures which spring forth is regulated by natural laws which accord with the demands of the arithmetical propositions which fix their meanings. No one, however, who wants to give a physical explanation of the machine’s procedures will appeal to arithmetical instead of mechanical laws (1970b, p. 103).

Simply stated, no one who wishes to give a physical explanation of the machine’s procedures will appeal to logic because the machine was constructed according to the laws of mechanics. In this example it is easier to see that there can be no interface or mediation between the laws of logic, which pertain to the meaning of the computer’s statements, and the laws of mechanics, which pertain to its physical construction. To attempt to ground the laws of logic in mechanical laws would be equivalent to attempting to explain the truth value of the computer’s operations on the basis of the mechanical laws by which it was constructed. But these same

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mechanical laws could have been used to construct a computer that emitted only logically incorrect statements as well. Psychological, as well as mechanical, laws apply equally well to incorrect as much as to correct judgments qua act of judging. Neither applies at all to judgments qua judgment (i.e., qua meaning). The objective, ideal meaning of logical propositions can no more be grounded in connections between neurons in the brain than it can be in the connections between electrical circuits in a computer. We return to Husserl’s basic distinction between the ideal and the real and their respective sciences. In the science of logic proper, which is an ideal science, no reference to real acts of judging need be made at all. It is not only the case that we need not concern ourselves with explaining these acts as natural psychological events, but also we need not make any reference to these acts. Our interest is solely the objects of these acts. Logic is only concerned with judgments in the ideal sense. By way of summary of our progression this far, we have the following substantial passage, in which Husserl asserts that, with respect to the logical understanding of the principle of contradiction, and all of logic in general: We need not think of judgments as real acts; they are in no sense our relevant objects. One need only look in order to see that only judgments in an ideal sense fall within the range of this logical law: ‘the’ judgment 2 × 2 = 5 is one judgment; ‘the’ judgment, There are dragons another, ‘the’ proposition about the sum of the angles, etc., another, but not one of the actual or imaginary acts of judgment falls within it, that in their endless multiplicity, correspond to each of these ideal unities. The case of all purely logical propositions, e.g., the laws of syllogism, is exactly parallel. The distinction between the psychological mode of treatment, whose terms function as class-terms for mental states, and the objective or ideal mode of treatment where the same terms stand for ideal genera and species, is not a subsidiary, or a merely subjective distinction. It determines the difference between essentially distinct sciences. Pure logic and arithmetic, as sciences dealing in the ideal singulars belonging to certain genera (or what is founded a priori in the ideal essence of these genera) are separated from psychology, which deals with the individual singulars belonging to certain empirical classes (1970b, pp. 184–185).

We will return, repeatedly, in what is to follow, to cases in which an apparently subjective or subsidiary distinction is responsible for determining the difference between essentially distinct sciences. In this instance, it has become clear that logic and psychology are to be separated in this way; they are to be essentially distinct sciences treating essentially different subject matters. Assuming that we have been convinced that ‘the’ judgment, 2  ×  2  =  4, has a singular, objective and ideal meaning, which is of an entirely and fundamentally different nature than that of the endless multiplicity of acts through which such a judgment may be judged, we can conclude that the treatment of the judgment itself must be kept separate from the treatment of the acts of judging. It seems that if we are to develop a pure logic adequate to its subject matter and providing laws with the requisite universality and necessity, it would be best to leave the subjectivity of knowing out of the picture all together. In this way, we could cordon off the desired realm of ideality from all factual and real instances and concerns. Husserl concludes, accordingly, that:

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1  Phenomenology as Descriptive Psychology There is an essential, quite unbridgeable difference between sciences of the ideal and sciences of the real. The former are a priori, the latter, empirical. The former set forth ideal general laws, grounded with intuitive certainty in certain general concepts; the latter establish real general laws, relating to a sphere of fact, with probabilities into which we have insight (1970b, p. 185).

In this way, psychology may remain content with its contingent and probable generalities, while logic succeeds in achieving its necessary and certain universals. By no longer attempting to reconcile the objectivity of logic with the subjectivity of knowing, we have managed to rescue pure logic from psychologism.

Biologism Critiqued By refuting this form of psychologism we are not yet out of the woods, however. We must be careful in our attempt to separate the ideality of logic from all real concerns in making sure that we do not interpret this newly liberated sense of ideality as being that of a “real” ideal. Such a confusion between ideal in the sense of objective—or, in the terminology of Ideas I (1931/1983), “irreal”—and ideal in the sense of a real aim or goal can be found, suggests Husserl, in the work of such thinkers as Avenarious and Mach, who proposed to understand the laws of logic biologically, as principles of evolution or adaptation. This position Husserl refers to as “biologism” and, as he notes, “this new tendency ends up by being a psychologism” (1970b, p. 197). We shall treat it here in our broader context of his refutation of psychologism as a further obstacle to understanding the true ideality of logical laws and their appropriate science. Just establishing that logic must deal with an ideal subject matter is not sufficient if we might misinterpret the sense in which this subject matter is ideal. This possibility is evident in the theory of thought economy or in the principle of the economy of thought, to which we now turn. The principle of the economy of thought, Husserl explains, “is a principle of evolution or adaptation; its concern is to conceive science as the most purposive (economical, power-saving) adaptation of thought” (1970b, p.  198). Those thinkers who propose to base logic on such a principle reason that, if logical law cannot be understood to be the naturalistic source of thought, then perhaps it can be understood to be the ideal toward which all thought aims. Certainly, at least in our scientific and mathematical discourse, we do desire to be rational; we do aim toward the rationality embodied in the laws of logic. Perhaps this ideal of rationality acts to bring about such an adherence to these laws. If we consider logical thinking to be the most economic, power saving form of thought, then perhaps we could view our species as evolving towards being logical in this way; towards actualizing this ideal in an evolutionary biological fashion. Science, in this way, would be a higher (or more adaptive) mode of existence; it would come closer, as an expression of our subjectivity, to our true, ideal nature as a rational species.

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We noted previously, however, that in our daily lives we do not ordinarily proceed scientifically. Rather, we proceed in what Husserl refers to as a “blind” fashion, in the sense that our activity is not guided by formal insight into the laws that regulate scientific rational activity. If our pre-scientific life is not, in an obvious way at least, characterized by aiming toward or tending toward the scientific, how is it to be explained on the basis of this principle? Husserl writes: Survival requires a certain adaptation to external nature; it demands … the capacity to judge things more or less rightly, to foresee the course of events, to assess causal consequences correctly, etc. Real knowledge of all this is achieved first, if at all, in science. But how can we in practice judge and infer without the insight which only science, the possession of so few, can offer? The practical needs of pre-scientific life are subserved by many highly complex, efficient procedures—one need only think of the decimal system of numbers. If they are not discovered by insight, but naturally developed, one must ponder the question of their possibility, as to how the operation of blind mechanism can coincide in outcome with the demands of insight (1970b, pp. 203–204).

How have these pre-scientific achievements come about? How have they “naturally developed” according to our evolutionary principle? According to this position, Husserl continues: To throw light on the teleology of pre-scientific or extra-scientific procedures, one must first carefully analyze the combinations of presentations and judgments in question, and the dispositions at work; one must establish the actual facts, the psychological mechanism of the thought-procedure in question… If the natural origin of the machinery which economizes thought is not to remain a miracle … we shall have to start with a careful analysis of the naturally dominant circumstances and motives of the ordinary man’s ideas (perhaps of a savage’s or animal’s idea), and show on this basis how a procedure which has had such success could and must have issued spontaneously out of purely natural causes (1970b, p. 204).

It is clear then, that “attempts to found epistemology on an economy of thought ultimately are reduced to attempts to found it on psychology” (1970b, p. 205). In the end, this view results in appealing to a psychological mechanism that acts as a natural cause of thought, whether scientific or pre-scientific. It should be no surprise to us that Husserl will oppose this position as another form of psychologism. He writes that: “Against such a conception, or such a use of the economy of thought, we must train the whole arsenal of objections that we above opposed to psychologism” (1970b, p. 205). It should also be no surprise that one of the arguments that Husserl uses to refute this new position is analogous to an argument used previously. We can ask how rationality has come to be considered to the most economical or adaptive mode of thought. Does not this theory presuppose the legitimacy of logic, which is what it was originally designed to establish? The circularity uncovered in this case is reminiscent of that operating in our distinction between the normal and deviant. How do we know that logical thought is more adaptive than a logical thought unless we already have a basis upon which to ­distinguish them from one another, and upon which to assert the priority of the logical? As Husserl points out:

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1  Phenomenology as Descriptive Psychology The ideal validity of this norm is presupposed by all meaningful talk of an economy of thinking; it is not therefore a possible explanatory outcome of a theory of such economy … Before all economizing of thought, we must already know our ideal, we must know what science ideally aims at, what law-governed connections, which basic laws and derived laws, etc., ideally are and do, before we can discuss and assess the thought-economical function of knowing them (1970b, p. 209).

We cannot presuppose through our proof that which we are trying to prove. More to the point, however, this theory merely perpetuates our earlier confusion between the ideal and the real. Its apparent plausibility “stems from confusion between the factually given and the logically ideal, the former being tacitly substituted for the latter” (1970b, p. 207). The ideal of logical normativity is not factually given and cannot be given, even though science may appear to be oriented toward this ideal. The factual orientation of science has no bearing on the laws of logic understood in their true ideality. It certainly cannot be taken to be proof for a real orientation of human thought—a natural-psychological drive toward this ideal. Husserl does concur that “the ideal drift of logical thinking is as such towards rationality” (1970b, p. 208). But this is neither based upon, nor provides the basis for, a real drift of human thought. The thought-economist, according to Husserl, turns the ideal drift of logical thought “into a dominant real drift of human thought, bases it on the vague principle of power-saving, and ultimately on adoption, and imagines that he has … explained the objective sense and worth of rational science in general” (1970b, p. 209). This is not the sense in which we have struggled to establish the ideality of logical law, but another realist interpretation of ideality. Ideal normativity is not the same as real causality, even if understood teleologically. This is once again an attempt to bridge an unbridgeable gap. While it is “no doubt … instructive to point out the teleological significance of our mental functions,” we cannot treat these “descriptively given facts as ‘necessary consequences’ of such principles, so as to seem to be giving a real explanation of these facts” (1970b, p. 206). For logical laws to be understood in this way—i.e., as a naturalistic source of explanation—we should have to place all actual experiences upon a gradation of degrees of actualization of this norm as a way of bridging the gap between the real and the ideal. In this way, certain experiences would be considered to be higher or more real to the extent that they actualized this ideal, while others would be lower or less real. In the end, scientific activity would be a higher form of natural activity; scientists would, in a very real sense, be a higher form of human than the ordinary person—i.e., higher up on the evolutionary scale. We would be driven by the natural force of this ideal to be as rational as possible. This drive would be the expression of logical normativity as an evolutionary biological principle. As Husserl counters, this way of situating experiences along a scale of higher and lower is totally alien to a proper psychological understanding of behavior: A psychological or epistemological law concerned with an endeavor to achieve as much as possible in this or that respect, is a chimera. In the pure sphere of fact, there is no maximum possibility, in the sphere of law, no endeavor. What happens in each case, as psychological matter of fact, is quite definite: there is so much to it and not more (1970b, p. 206).

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In the sphere of fact with which both psychology and biology deal, there is no room for degrees of actualization of an ideal as a natural force. Every experience, every fact, is equally real and equally valid. Each act must be explained in its own definiteness, understood in terms of its being just what it is (rather than in terms of its not being something other than what it is). As de Boer has remarked: “It makes no sense to criticize an experience simply because it is the way it is” (1978, p. 365). A judgment is not measured against the ideal norms of logic with respect to its character as a subjective act of judging, but only with respect to its ideal meaning. When one is interested in the logical nature of logical activity, it is a mistake to seek recourse to the activity through which it arises as one sphere of natural activity. This would be appropriate were one interested in its properties as one sphere of natural activity, e.g., in a sociology of scientific knowledge, but not when one is interested in its character as logical. When one takes up an interest in the logical character of this activity, all concern with its subjective aspect falls away; it ceases to be seen as an activity at all and becomes pure thought in the sense of its content as abstracted from this activity. Writes Husserl: Science is, in the first place, a unified item in anthropology; it is a unity of acts of thinking, of thought-dispositions, as well as of certain external arrangements pertinent thereto. What makes this unified whole anthropological, and what especially makes it psychological, are not here our concern. We are rather interested in what makes science, science, which is certainly not its psychology, nor any real context into which acts of thought are fitted, but a certain objective or ideal interconnection which gives these acts a unitary objective relevance, and, in such unitary relevance, an ideal validity (1970b, p. 225).

Logical thought is not a higher form of natural thought, nor is scientific activity a higher form of natural or blind activity. Rather they are constituted, as subject matters for inquiry, by a specific, theoretical interest in one characteristic of their content: its adherence to the ideal norms for rational discourse. In this way, poetry (or, once again, psychotic discourse) may be considered to be poor science, but this in no way implies that it is a lower form of natural thought, nor that it is a deficient or deviant form of mental expression. The ideal normativity of logic “permits no resolution or reinterpretation into facts of our mental life, or the life of human society” (1970b, p. 208). As Husserl also writes: It is … an error to think that one can … play down the distinction between logical and natural thought, that one can treat scientific activity as a mere ‘continuation’ of natural, blind activity … One must not forget that a logical theory in no sense does the same thing as a natural one, or only does this in a ‘higher’ manner (1970b, p. 210).

Husserl captures the crux of the issue pointedly when he states that, in the context of the founding of a pure logic: “The question is not how experience, whether naïve or scientific, arises, but what must be its content if it is to have objective validity” (1970b, p. 207). We are not asking after the natural origin of logical discourse, but after its necessary character if it is to qualify, in fact, as logical. The question is an ideal question; it applies to the experience in question regardless of its origin, regardless of what brings this experience about as a real experience of a given subject.

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In this way it should now be evident that this theory, as well, falls short in its appreciation of logical laws as ideal as opposed to real. Husserl urges that we must “go as deep as we can into the basically different thought-trends in the spheres of the ideal and real” (1970b, p. 211). The theory of thought-economy, in its understanding of the ideal normativity of logic as a real ideal that acts as a natural force in the determination of cognition, does not go deeply enough into this basic difference. It, like our initial psychologism, confuses these two different thought-trends and interprets logical ideality as a real force. Its convergence with psychologism —i.e., that it too is psychologistic—is more relevant in our present context than any possible divergences; it too provides an inadequate foundation for logic. Having now successfully distinguished between questions as to how scientific experience arises (real questions) and questions as to the nature of its content (ideal questions), we may proceed to distinguish between the sciences appropriate to each. Empirical psychology had traditionally been considered to be the appropriate science for questions of experience, or activity in its subjective aspect. Psychology was the appropriate discipline for a theoretical interest in the acts of judging qua act. Husserl allows this to remain the case; he has no argument with those thinkers who wish for psychology to maintain its hold on subjective activity in its subjectivity. His concern is to secure for the contents of these acts, the judgments themselves, a science of their own that can provide the universality and necessity suited to a pure logic. This science will be a priori, rather than empirical, it will proceed intuitively, rather than inductively and, most importantly, it will be a science of the ideal rather than the real. It will rescue from psychology the sphere of ideal meaning, treating it in its ideality rather than attempting to interpret it in terms of the real (whether as a real natural law or as a real ideal). It will be a science of objectivity as such, a science that concerns itself with the ideal meanings that transcend all subjective acts (real or imagined). This science will be named “phenomenology.”

Anthropologism Critiqued Before attempting to define this new science further, we should first note that the initial property that we attributed to it stems from our awareness of the gap from which it arose. That is, our initial characterization of phenomenology is that it is not psychological in its treatment of logic. Having arisen out of Husserl’s increasing concern with the unbridgeable gap between the ideal and real, phenomenology is initially defined it its opposition to sciences of the real. It is what it is by not being a factual, empirical, inductive science of real subjectivity; it is what it is by not being psychological. Husserl, however, makes the additional point that the sense in which phenomenology cannot be psychological is not limited to the empirical psychological. He argues that if the ideal nature of logic is to be preserved in all of its ideality (and we are beginning to get a sense for just how difficult this may be), then the sense in which phenomenology is not psychological must extend to the ­transcendental psychological as well, with transcendental meant here in the purely

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epistemological sense. Even an a priori, or rational, psychology, as the science of the mental constitution of a given, factual species of being, would remain too fettered to the real to provide an adequate foundation for logic. Husserl’s critique of this position, which he refers to as anthropologism, was actually already indicated in our initial critique of psychologism. The same arguments for the absurdity of basing a science of ideal relations on “matters of fact” are given in this context, and many of our previously quoted passages were actually taken from this section of the text (1970b, pp. 139–146) and will not be repeated here. The critique of anthropologism in particular does, however, contribute one new feature to our determination of phenomenology, which was not subsumed by the more general critique of psychologism offered earlier. We shall review this additional factor briefly before moving on to define phenomenology in a positive fashion. Husserl defines anthropologism as the belief that: “Man as such is … the measure of all human truth” (1970b, p. 138). As one version of Protagoras’ “Man is the measure of all things,” this thesis holds that: “Every judgment whose roots are to found in what is specific to man, in the constitutive laws of man as a species—is a true judgment, for us human beings” (1970b, p. 138). The twist of this argument, which is peculiar to anthropologism, is that the laws of logic are taken to be true for us; they are taken to be specific to and true only for human beings. Truth, in this view, is relative to that group of beings for which it is true; this position is thus considered to constitute relativism. It asserts that “anything is true for a given species of judging beings that, by their constitution and laws of thought, must count as true” (1970b, p. 140). The implication is that what is true for one given species of judging beings may not be true for another species. The laws of logic may hold for human beings, but we have no way of knowing or ensuring that they would hold for any other conceivable species of judging beings other than the human species. They are relative to our particular, factual, and contingent make-up. Predictably enough, Husserl describes such a position as follows: This doctrine is absurd. For it is part of its sense that the same proposition or content of judgment can be true for a subject of the species homo but may be false for another subject of a differently constituted species. The same content of judgment cannot, however, be both true and false: this follows from the sense of ‘true’ and ‘false’. If the relativist gives these words their appropriate meaning, his thesis is in conflict with its own sense (1970b, p. 140).

His refutation in this context is based mainly on an argument from definition: it is counter to the basic sense of logical law and what we mean by truth that they would in any way be relative. For Husserl, the phrase, ‘Truth for this or that species’ is to be considered, quite simply, “an absurd mode of speech.” He explains that: What is true is absolutely, intrinsically true: truth is one and the same, whether men or non-­ men, angels or gods apprehend and judge it. Logical laws speak of truth in this ideal unity, set over against the real multiplicity of races, individuals, and experiences and it is of this ideal unity that we all speak when we are not confused by relativism (1970b, p. 140).

While it is true that the phrase ‘Truth for this or that species’ could refer in a “good sense” to the “circle of truths to which man, as such, has access,” this would be a psychological determination that would in no way have a bearing on the truth itself

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(1970b, p. 140). It would only refer to an intrinsic limitation in the subjectivity of knowing peculiar to a given species. This limitation on the part of the subject, however, would not have the least effect on what can be known ideally—on what is absolutely and intrinsically true, regardless of who or what apprehends it to be so. The ideal status of this truth is as indifferent to the factual particularities of any given species as it is to the factual particularities of any given individual. Ideal meaning transcends classes of experience in the same way that it transcends individual experiences. The result of this critique of anthropologism is that the laws of logic may no more be deduced, in a (supposedly) a priori fashion, “from certain ‘original forms’ or ‘modes of function-ing’ of the (human) understanding” than they could be grounded, inductively, in an empirical science of the laws of human behavior (1970b, p. 145). We cannot consider them to be relative to “consciousness as such, conceived as generic (human) reason” (1970b, p. 145); this would imply they were specific to the human species. Husserl places human in parentheses in these passages not to minimize the importance of this qualification, but to call the reader’s attention to its implicit and easily overlooked character. The consequence of leaving out this qualification, of overlooking its significance, would be to be plunged into the skeptical waters of relativism. Logic could not be grounded in a phenomenology of the understanding, consciousness, or reason, if these words are taken “in the natural sense which give them an essential connection with the human species” (1970b, p. 145). Husserl argues that: What is not psychological is not accessible to a psychological illumination, and each well-­ meant attempt to use psychological researches to throw light on the essence of ‘laws of thinking’, presupposes a psychological reinterpretation of those laws (1970b, p. 122).

We cannot allow such a reinterpretation, even when the terms are those of transcendental psychology, due to its basis in matters of fact. Even a transcendental psychology is a science of the real, in the sense that it is a science of the constitution of a given species of judging beings. This given species and its constitution are every bit matters of fact; they are factual and, thus, necessarily contingent. It was in this sense that Husserl meant, “even transcendental psychology also is psychology” (1970b, p. 122n). In this way, it is disqualified as an adequate foundation for logic, for “any theory is logically absurd which deduces logical principles from any matters of fact” (1970b, pp. 144–145). We seem to have arrived, through our critique of anthropologism, at the realization that for phenomenology to be adequately distanced from the real and all sciences of the real, it must not only drop all interest in actual and individual acts of judgment, but must also drop all interest in judgment as an act characteristic of the human species. There is no room in phenomenology for any reinterpretation of the laws of logic as psychological, or pertaining to the psychological, in any sense—in any way that would give them an essential connection with the human species. Psychology, in whatever form, can only be a science of the real; even in its transcendental form, it remains interested in the ‘original forms’ or ‘modes of function’ of the human understanding in consciousness “conceived as generic (human) reason.” Phenomenology, apparently, is not psychology.

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Phenomenology Defined The circumspect reader may well be wondering how Husserl could then define phenomenology in this same text as being descriptive psychology—a point noted in the quotation opening this chapter. When it comes time for him to define his newly created discipline further, to elaborate on how it does approach logic in an other than psychological fashion, he falls back on the definition of: “Phenomenology is descriptive psychology” (1970b, p. 262n). Husserl is himself aware of the apparent paradox in such a definition, following as it does after an entire volume in which he critiqued an association of phenomenology with any form of psychology. In the sentences that directly follow this definition, he wonders aloud: Epistemological criticism is therefore in essence psychology, or at least only capable of being built on a psychological basis. Pure logic, therefore, also rests on psychology—what then is the point of the whole battle against psychologism? (1970b, p. 262n).

What, indeed, could be the point of the whole battle against psychologism if logic is to be grounded in phenomenology and phenomenology is to be descriptive psychology? Is a descriptive psychology, biology, or anthropology really any different from those we have just rejected as being psychologistic, biologistic, or anthropologistic? Or is Husserl guilty here of a blatant contradiction, clearing out the old psychologistic systems only to replace them with a new one of his own? Early critics of the Logical Investigations considered Husserl to be guilty of precisely just such a contradiction. They either wrote off the second and third volumes as having not lived up to the stringent, non-psychologistic criteria of volume one or they accepted the second and third volumes, unconcerned with what they nevertheless perceived to be their psychologistic nature. If we, on the other hand, are going to work with the assumption that Husserl, after spending an entire volume refuting psychologism, would not so readily fall back into it unknowingly, we must find a way to distinguish a descriptive psychology from the psychologies that we have already shown to be inadequate to the task at hand. If Husserl is not to lapse back into the psychologism from which he has just struggled to extricate himself, he must, as he describes, “sharply distinguish empirical psychology from the phenomenology … that underlies it” (1970b, p. 213n). Husserl’s dilemma is that he seems to be unable to find any access to the contents of experience other than through the realm of experience itself. There is no avenue of access to objectivity other than through subjectivity. The objects of thought that we want to take as the subject matter for our pure logic are only given in and through the acts of thinking, which we have wanted to leave out of the picture as being real, and thus appropriate only to psychology. Regardless of the fact that the ideal meaning of the thought-content known is indifferent to the subjectivity that knows it, we have no way of approaching ideal meaning other than through this subjectivity. This content of thought seems to belong to the psychical sphere, to be given through psychical experience. We used this apparent fact earlier to explain the logic of the psychologistic position, why those thinkers had, to begin

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with, taken logic to be a topic for psychology. Husserl, at this point, has to concede this tendency in their thought; he must acknowledge this as the truth of the psychologistic position. It appears to be the case that the objects of thought which we want to study are only given in and through psychic acts, whether we wish to study these acts or not. It is clear that we must at least begin with the psychological in this sense, even if we are, as Husserl must be, aware of the dangers in such a concession. Otherwise, we lose our subject matter altogether. Pure logic offers the norms for rational thought, thought is the product of thinking, thinking is (apparently) a human function, and human functions are the domain of psychology. Were we to leave the psychological altogether, it would appear to be at the cost of leaving the logical behind as well. One can begin to sense here the tension in Husserl’s thought, a tension of which we shall have to remain aware and with which we shall have to deal throughout the remainder of what follows. This tension permeates his work from this point onwards and has been considered, by de Boer for instance, to be the “driving force” behind it (1978, p. 223). In order to provide a non-psychologistic foundation for logic, our new science cannot be in any way psychological; yet, if it is to have any access to its subject matter, it must seek recourse to psychology. Husserl is drawn toward a science of consciousness (as the site of the thought-content in which we are interested), but away from psychology (as the natural causal science of psychic life). At this point in his career, he attempts to resolve this dilemma from within psychology. He reasons that there must be a way to study consciousness without lapsing into psychologism; there must be a way to achieve both of these apparently conflicting and contradictory goals without sacrificing the integrity of either one. In order to do this, we must determine what it is about a psychological approach to thought-­ content that would render it psychologistic. Where has the psychological approach to logic fundamentally faltered; exactly where does it go wrong? We have suggested all along that this most basic error has occurred in the mistaken equating of the contents of judgment with the acts of judging themselves, in this way confusing the ideal with the real. Husserl wonders whether there is a way to distinguish between the contents of acts and the acts themselves within psychology; that is, rather than assuming that the acts serve as subject matter for psychology and that the contents cannot, might there be a way of treating the contents as contents within psychology? In other words, can we maintain our psychological interest in the objects of thought as objects without confusing them with the acts that produce them? It is this which Husserl’s descriptive, as opposed to empirical, psychology purports to do. Psychologistic thinkers had found it necessary to move from a description of psychic contents to an explanation for the presence of those contents in consciousness. They assumed that the natural-causal explanation of these contents was commensurate with an understanding of them, that they could only be understood in terms of their origin in acts of consciousness. Husserl questions the necessity of this move. Why must one provide a naturalistic explanation for psychic content? Why may it not be understood in its own terms as content? May one not remain with the descriptive account of this content and forestall such explanation, forestall a theoretical

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movement to causal origins? Was it not just this movement to explanation that created the confusion mentioned above—the confusion between act and content, between real and ideal? If we wish to rid phenomenology of the association with natural law and causality found in empirical psychology, it would make sense not to make such a move. It was the appeal to naturalistic explanation that Husserl critiqued as psychologistic; it is this move that we will not make in the development of phenomenology as non-psychologistic. By separating the initial descriptions of psychic reality from the theoretical researches that attempt to provide an explanation for them, Husserl makes it possible to distinguish between a descriptive psychology and an empirical one. By pointing out that these are two distinct and separate moments, he attempts to make it possible to exclude naturalistic explanation from what then becomes a purely descriptive discipline. Husserl seems to be saying that with the exclusion of naturalistic explanation, we have rid ourselves of the danger of psychologism. A purely descriptive psychology does not involve us in the same problematic tie to the real rejected in empirical psychology. He writes: Pure description is merely a preparatory step toward theory, not theory itself. One and the same sphere of pure description can accordingly serve to prepare for very different theoretical sciences. It is not the full science of psychology that serves as a foundation for pure logic, but certain classes of descriptions, which are the step preparatory to the theoretical researches of psychology. These in so far as they describe the empirical objects whose genetic connections the science wishes to pursue, also form the substrate for those fundamental abstractions in which logic seizes the essence of its ideal objects and connections with inward evidence (1970b, pp. 262–263n).

Psychology led to psychologism by pursuing a certain path to the sphere of causal explanation. It need not have taken such a path but could just as easily have taken a different path at what proves to be a fork in the road. Pure description may serve two different roles in the development of science: it may lead to theoretical researches into the genetic connections obtaining between the acts that have brought about the objects described, or it may lead to a more intuitive analysis of the intrinsic character of the objects themselves and the relations obtaining between them. Empirical psychology would in this sense be a genetic discipline, while it is phenomenology that would take the alternative path of being a descriptive science, operating through abstractions based on inward evidence. In so far as these two sciences share the descriptive moment, Husserl is able to refer to phenomenology as underlying empirical psychology; but in so far as they take different paths and treat their descriptive base differently, they must be considered to be distinct sciences. Thus, Husserl proposes the use of the word “phenomenology” as a replacement for descriptive psychology: Since it is epistemologically of unique importance that we should separate the purely descriptive examination of the knowledge-experience, disembarrassed of all theoretical psychological interest, from the truly psychological researches directed to empirical ­explanation and origins, it will be good if we rather speak of ‘phenomenology’ than of descriptive psychology (1970b, p. 263n).

By doing so, we hope to distance ourselves sufficiently from the dangers of psychologism.

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Although Husserl’s use of the word “phenomenology” in this context is somewhat of an invention or improvisation, the distinction he is using in order to create room for this science can also be found in the work both of his own teacher, Brentano (cf. De Boer, 1978), and in that of Dilthey (1977). Prior to the work of these two sympathetic thinkers, descriptive analyses like those to be found eventually in Husserl’s phenomenology only served the function of steps preparatory to genetic and causal explanations for what had just been described. Brentano himself began with this understanding of the respective roles of what he called genetic psychology and descriptive psychology (cf. de Boer, 1978, pp. 52–61). Descriptive psychology was a kind of “pre-science” (de Boer, 1978, p. 48) that supplied genetic psychology with its subject matter. It simply described the contents of mental life, which were then to be explained on the basis of causal hypotheses understood to pertain to the “the genetic connections” between them. Description was initially preparatory to explanation; it had no intrinsic value of its own. Brentano gradually came to see, however, that a descriptive approach to mental life could actually rival a genetic approach rather than merely prepare the way for it. He came eventually to concentrate most of his energies on developing a descriptive psychology that “laid bare the structural laws of consciousness” (de Boer, 1978, p. 57). That is, he attempted to understand the contents of consciousness more on their own terms as structurally interrelated (as opposed to genetically caused). In his mature thought, descriptive psychology came to take on a more autonomous and independent existence, separate from genetic psychology. Its days as a handmaiden were over. Dilthey offers a similar position in his “Ideas Concerning a Descriptive and Analytic Psychology,” originally published in 1894 (1977). In this work, he distinguishes between an explanatory (causal genetic) psychology and a descriptive (structural analytic) psychology and proposes to establish the priority of descriptive psychology over genetic psychology as more appropriate for the comprehension of psychic life. Descriptive psychology would make valuable use of our direct access to our own inner experience, describing and analyzing the “nexus that is originally and continuously given as life itself” (Dilthey, 1977, p.  35). Since this nexus is always given as a “coherent whole,” its intrinsic “connectedness” is always “originally and continually given in (the) lived experience” which constitutes it, this descriptive psychology does not need to make use of hypothesis or causal explanation to account for its data. In genetic psychology, “all connectedness is obtained by means of formation of hypotheses,” but since a descriptive psychology deals analytically with the connectedness that is already given in experience, it “therefore has no need of basing itself on the concepts yielded from inferences in order to establish a coherent whole among the main groups of mental affairs” (Dilthey, 1977, p. 28). This approach to the contents of mental life offers a more faithful and appropriate method that allows us to study these phenomena on their own terms, in light of their own structural inter-connectedness. Genetic psychology, on the other hand, must pull in foreign hypotheses of a non-psychological nature in order to account for these phenomena causally, and ends up being more physiology than psychology (Dilthey, 1977, p. 49). In Dilthey’s view, it is still the case that a genetic psychology “works with the materials which descriptive psychology furnished” (1977, p. 38),

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but there is no question in his mind that it is descriptive psychology that is to supply the epistemological foundation for human science. Causal explanation must be excluded from the clear apprehension of the psychic nexus required for such a foundation and must be replaced by the analytic and structural understanding of that nexus given in lived experience. Dilthey writes: One will disencumber the theory of knowledge from the occasional influences of erroneous psychologies, only if one succeeds in placing at his disposal the valid principles concerning the coherent whole of psychic life (1977, p. 34).

In this way, we can see Dilthey’s position as an earlier parallel to that of Husserl in the first edition of the Logical Investigations, including the dual role allotted to descriptive psychology as being both a precursor to, and providing a foundation for, explanatory psychology. Dilthey writes similarly that: “The theory of knowledge has no need of a perfectly elaborated psychology, but every established psychology is still only the scientific completion of what also forms the substrate of epistemology” (1977, p. 35). While there certainly are differences between Dilthey’s position and that of the early Husserl (cf. Jalbert, 1982), as well as between Brentano and the early Husserl (c.f. de Boer, 1978), we have only been interested here in the precedent set prior to the Logical Investigation which helped to afford Husserl a way out of his dilemma. Apparently, his first instinct was to take this route. Husserl concluded that if logic cannot be grounded in an empirical genetic psychology, then perhaps a descriptive analytic psychology could provide a sounder and less problematic basis. This descriptive psychology would operate intuitively on the givens of inward evidence and, in this way, would already appear on the surface to be better suited to its subject matter and to the required character of logical discourse. We shall replace our rejected empirical psychology with this new descriptive psychology and call it “phenomenology” in order to differentiate it more clearly from theoretical and fully scientific psychologies directed to empirical explanation. As de Boer remarks, in the Logical Investigations Husserl “understands by psychologism the attempt to base logic on genetic psychology” (1978, p. 93). His argument was that a descriptive psychology would not engender the same consequences. Does this argument hold, however, in light of our earlier refutations of psychologism? In anticipation of the next chapter, we might pause here to ask in what ways this new position might still be susceptible to critique, might still evidence vestiges of psychologistic tendencies. Does this solution of defining phenomenology as descriptive psychology work to our full satisfaction? If we agree with Husserl, for example, that the distinction between descriptive and genetic psychologies is sufficient to distance phenomenology from empirical psychology, we may still wonder if it succeeds in distancing phenomenology ­sufficiently from what we referred to earlier as transcendental psychology. In other words, is not a descriptive psychology of consciousness susceptible to the same critique as a transcendental psychology of consciousness? Does it not, too, understand consciousness in the natural sense giving it an “essential connection with the human species”? In another part of this text, Husserl states that the unity of a descriptive science is “fixed by the empirical unity of the object or class” of which

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it is a science (1970b, p. 230). If phenomenology is to be a descriptive science in this sense, then how, when it is explicitly interested in and limited to a study of the empirical class of beings belonging to the species homo, does it escape the psychologistic tie to the real uncovered in transcendental psychology? Is it not, too, a science of a factual and contingent “given species of judging beings”? Would not this psychology also result in what we labeled earlier as anthropologism? Another way of raising this same question is to ask if a descriptive psychology can, in the way Husserl seems to propose, be a self-sufficient and autonomous science. Will there not come a time when one will have to ask the genetic question, when one will have to look beyond one’s descriptions and structural connections to their explanatory origin? Can Husserl, in other words, successfully avoid the question of explanation in this manner, or has he only forestalled it temporarily? Is a descriptive science of conscious life not going to become, inevitably, merely preparatory to a natural science of conscious life? Can one simply put off the genetic question and think that one has, thereby, rescued logic from the natural-causal context of the real in a definitive way, or does that context remain, only now in an implicit, unacknowledged fashion? We will return to these questions at the opening of Chap. 2. They will serve as our point of departure for the next phase of Husserl’s thought. We might remember from our introduction that in 1903, Husserl was already disclaiming the definition of phenomenology offered here, stating that phenomenology was no longer to be considered a descriptive psychology. Soon after completion of the first edition of the Logical Investigations he evidently began to see through the apparent adequacy of this position and embarked on a radically new course that would save logic from the psychologistic threat still to be found, albeit implicitly, in that text. While this text did significantly overcome the problems of the psychologistic position of Husserl’s predecessors, and while his own position offered a significant departure from that position in the light of his later development, we must conclude that the first edition of the Logical Investigations remained somewhat psychologistic in its understanding of phenomenology as descriptive psychology. We will explore this further in our next chapter. It now remains only to explicate the understanding of the relationship between phenomenology and psychology that belongs to this early view. In other words, what might a psychologist benefit from a reading of the first edition of the Logical Investigations?

Psychology “Reformed” While Husserl mentions along the way (almost as if under his breath) that psychologism would “entail the corruption of all genuine logic and epistemology, as well as of all psychology” (1970b, p.  197; italics added), he makes no further allusion in the Logical Investigations as to how his refutation of psychologism might bear on psychology itself as a positive science. His interest is almost exclusively with logic and epistemology; he does not, properly speaking, take up the psychological problematic at all.

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One therefore might easily read the entirety of the Logical Investigations without ever wondering about this question, and certainly many have done so. In fact, in much of the literature on the phenomenological approach to psychology the period of the Logical Investigations is conspicuously absent (cf., e.g., Binswanger, 1941; Buytendijk, 1967; Natanson, 1973b). We shall now examine if such an exclusion is justified. In our presentation of Husserl’s view thus far we can justify the separation of empirical psychology from descriptive psychology, but have acquired no basis yet upon which to assert that the development of the new science of phenomenology will have the least impact on the nature or character of the old and established empirical psychology. As a matter of fact, de Boer comments that “what characterizes the thought” of the early Husserl “is the juxtaposition of two conceptions of science”; that in the context of the Logical Investigations “the natural scientific method is placed alongside the phenomenological, and each is allowed a limited validity” (1978, p. 111). The mere juxtaposition of a natural scientific psychology and a descriptive psychology severely limits the value of phenomenology for psychology. It would seem to carry with it the notion of a kind of parallelism of separate and different sciences, having no overlap or influence shared between them. Either phenomenology would have no reformative value for psychology—due to its indifference to its empirical psychological parallel—or it would serve empirical psychology as a preparatory discipline in the way descriptive sciences had prior to Husserl’s time. Empirical psychology would pick up where descriptive psychology leaves off. This later understanding can be found, for instance, in the work of Pfänder who, as mentioned previously, was a colleague of Husserl’s. According to Spiegelberg, “Pfänder’s original conception of phenomenology … was that of a descriptive psychology to precede experimental work” (1967b, pp. xxiv–xxv). In this way, while phenomenology might provide a descriptive starting point for natural psychological explanation, the nature of that explanation, and the experimentation through which the hypotheses are reached, would not be changed in the least by the addition of phenomenology. One would also have to wonder how the logician was kept from being psychologistic by simply not doing what the psychologist qua scientist did do in terms of taking the genetic path at our “fork” in the road. According to this view, the logician, in actuality, merely stops halfway down the path, the only real destination being that of natural psychological explanation. Husserl seems to have understood the nature of this juxtaposition quite differently, though. According to de Boer, once again Husserl’s opposition to psychologism could also be read rather as a “protest against the dominant natural scientific method of his time” (1978, p. 214). Once we see that a descriptive psychology can and need exist alongside a genetic psychology, we come to view the role and significance of genetic psychology differently. de Boer explains: [Husserl’s] complaint comes down to this: that neither of the two functions of descriptive psychology has been properly appreciated. On the one hand, explanation has been attempted without a thorough description of the phenomena to be explained, and on the other hand, attempts have been made to use this explanatory psychology in the founding of the normative sciences (e.g., logic) (1978, pp. 214–215).

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That the development of a descriptive psychology would limit the scope of genetic psychology, allowing it no longer to attempt to provide a foundation for logic, is the obvious result of our refutation. That the development of a descriptive psychology, preparatory to genetic psychology, could also serve to show that the prevailing empirical psychology did not have an adequate or faithful grasp on its subject matter is a new implication worthy of exploration. Husserl seems to think that empirical psychology has been operating on a false apprehension of its subject matter and that it does not begin with the proper understanding of the phenomena that it then attempts to explain. The development of a descriptive psychology, more appropriately attuned to these phenomena, would act as a corrective in this regard. Descriptive psychology would not only prepare the way for genetic psychology, but also would educate genetic psychology as to the true nature of its subject matter. Husserl’s’ belief that psychology has, from the very first, misunderstood the nature of its subject matter will bear much constructive fruit as his thinking continues to develop. Although this point is not made explicitly until the 1911 Logos article entitled, “Philosophy as Rigorous Science” (1981c), the seeds for it are already sown in the attitude of the Logical Investigations. In fact, de Boer informs us that in a sketch for a later preface to the Logical Investigations: Husserl praises Dilthey and Wundt for recognizing the importance of the [Logical Investigations] for the reformation of psychology despite the fact that Husserl had not as much mentioned the reformation of psychology in that work and first raised this prospect in [“Philosophy as Rigorous Science”] (1978, p. 215).

While we must await our treatment of this later article in order to discover the way in which psychology had misunderstood its subject matter, we can, in this context, establish the fact that phenomenology does offer an epistemologically relevant reform for psychology. That is, while the content of this reform remains to be determined, the fact that psychology has operated on an inadequate and mistaken descriptive base and that it, in fact, needs a descriptive science at its foundation in order to correct this error is of special significance. Farber tells us that with respect to the Logical Investigations: “In Husserl’s view, new modes of treatment of psychological problems are prepared by this work, and indeed, as Wundt stated it, a ‘reform of psychology’ is involved” (1967, p. 209). Apparently, the development of phenomenology as a descriptive psychology already carries within it profound implications for the treatment of psychological problems in an empirical, as well as a descriptive, fashion. The new science does hold some promise for a reform of the old. The only directive explicitly offered for this reform in the first edition of the Logical Investigations, however, is that scientific psychology should be epistemologically grounded in phenomenology. As we shall discover, the “Philosophy as Rigorous Science” article will give a somewhat ontological slant to the consequences of this movement. The Logical Investigations offers a purely epistemological clarification of the respective status of each of these two sciences under what Husserl refers to as a “division of labor” (1970b, p.  244). We already know that phenomenology and scientific psychology operate differently, i.e., phenomenology through intuition based on inner evidence and scientific psychology inductively

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through empirical research (e.g., experimentation). Husserl’s “division of labor” refers to the additional fact that these two sciences are also geared toward different areas of interest, with different goals and different responsibilities. He explores these differences specifically with respect to mathematics and the pure logic achieved through phenomenology but adds that the same differences can be found between phenomenology and the rest of the “special sciences” including scientific psychology. Husserl describes the situation as follows: Here we must note that the mathematician is not really the pure theoretician, but only the ingenious technician, the constructor, as it were, who looking merely to formal inter-­ connections, builds up his theory like a technical work of art. As the practical mechanic constructs machines without needing to have ultimate insight into the essence of nature and its laws, so the mathematician constructs theories of numbers, quantities, syllogisms, manifolds, without ultimate insight into the essence of theory, in general, and that of the concepts and laws which are its conditions. The like holds of all ‘special sciences’… It is not, unfortunately, essential insight which makes science, in the common, practically most fruitful sense, possible, but scientific insight and method. For this very reason, the ingenious, methodical work of the special sciences, more concerned with practical results and mastery than with essential insight, is in need of a continuous ‘epistemological’ reflection which only the philosopher can provide, which allows only the interest of pure theory to dominate, and helps it to claim its rights. Philosophical investigation … does not seek to meddle in the work of the specialist, but to achieve insight in regard to the sense and essence of this achievement, as regards method and manner (1970b, pp. 244–245).

The phenomenologist does not seek to do the work of the scientific psychologist; intuition does not replace induction as a method for positive science. The phenomenologist, rather, provides for the psychologist a fundamental clarification of the essential insights that circumscribe and comprise the positive science of psychology such as, e.g., the nature of its subject matter and the manner of approach appropriate to it. The phenomenologist delineates for the scientist the framework in which they can carry out the concrete and empirical work proper to science as such; the phenomenologist clarifies the scientist’s context of research, its essential nature, and its meaning. As an epistemological ground, it clarifies the nature of what is to be known scientifically and how that which is to be known can come to be known through scientific means. It clarifies, in Husserl’s words, what “makes science, science” (1970b, p. 225). Farber helps to translate this division of labor from the mathematical to the psychological through the use of a characteristically Husserlian analogy: that of the relation between pure mathematics (i.e., geometry) and natural science (or physics). He writes: Phenomenology functions as the necessary foundation of scientific psychology, just as pure mathematics is the necessary foundation of every exact natural science. Essential insights into perceptions, volitions, etc., naturally apply to the corresponding empirical conditions of animal beings, just as geometrical insights apply to the spatial forms of nature (1967, pp. 215–216).

Just as mathematicians construct theories of syllogisms without knowing through essential insight the nature of a proposition, psychologists construct theories of perceiving without knowing the essential nature of a perception. It would be the task of the phenomenologist to provide this basic and certain knowledge to the scientist as

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technician, who would then utilize it in their empirical work. Geometric knowledge pertaining to the nature of triangles and other spatial forms is used in a similar fashion by empirical scientists concerned, for example, with the mathematical structure of what Locke referred to as “primary qualities.” Physicists have clearly assumed that geometric insights apply to “the spatial forms of nature”; psychologists may assume likewise that essential insights into the a priori structure of volition will apply concretely to actual cases of will. Farber also writes, accordingly, that: The phenomenology of thinking and knowing is concerned with the essential structure of the experiences of presentation, judgment, and knowledge, which psychology conceives empirically and investigates as real occurrences in the natural world (1967, p. 212).

This position does not entail a collapsing of the ideal with the real, as it may at first appear, but rather serves to keep them distinct and separate. There is one science to deal with the essential structure of experiences, such as judgments (in their ideality), while there is another, wholly different science to deal with judgments as real experiences, taking place as events in the natural world. Husserl’s point seems to be that we should know what a judgment essentially is before we attempt to investigate how judgments are actually (psychologically) made in the realm of psychic life. Phenomenology provides this service. In the pre-transcendental period of the first edition of the Logical Investigations, phenomenology in this way is both a form of psychology and a foundation for psychology. It is a descriptive and analytic, a priori and intuitive, ideal science of the necessary and essential structures of experience that seeks no recourse to natural causal explanation to account for these structures. Rather, it provides the epistemological foundation upon which positive science may make use of such explanation with respect to the real occurrence of structured experience. In so far as it remains a psychological discipline, in the sense that it does, contrary to Husserl’s apparent intentions, pertain to the structures of consciousness taken in the “natural sense,” the understanding of phenomenology presented in this text can be accurately labeled a “realist” interpretation of its sense and status (cf. de Boer, 1978, pp. 197, 260–269). That is, phenomenology here presupposes the naturalistic view of the world, in which the psychic is one domain of Nature as its background, as that in which it is situated. de Boer cites this as one cause of Husserl’s uncertainties with respect to this text; he quotes from Husserl’s diary that: I was tormented by incomprehensible new worlds. The world of pure logic and world of act-consciousness, or, as I would now call them, of the phenomenological and also, the psychological. I did not know how to unite them, yet they had to have some relation to one another and form an inner unity (1978, p. 267n).

The relation established here was not to last long; Husserl was quick to call into question what he came to understand later to be his realist presupposition. We shall now turn to his own reservations with and revisions of this early, yet important, attempt to overcome the psychologistic bias in logic and in psychology. He was to see that the psychologistic waters ran even deeper than he had at first imagined.

Chapter 2

Phenomenology as Rigorous Philosophy

We abandon finally the standpoint of psychology, even of descriptive psychology from “The Idea of Phenomenology” (Husserl, 1964, p. 5)

Having presented Husserl’s pre-transcendental position in Chap. 1, we may now turn our attention to his breakthrough to the transcendental and the initial stages of his transcendental period proper. We shall find, however, that this is no simple or straightforward matter. In this chapter, we begin by picking up where we left off in the closing pages of Chap. 1, exploring further Husserl’s own reservations with his first edition of the Logical Investigations. We then track the changes that he found necessary to make, following the first edition, in order to create and maintain a more coherent position relative to the non-psychological nature of the new science of phenomenology. Since these changes took place slowly and gradually in the development of Husserl’s thought, this chapter will only be concerned with the transition from Husserl’s early, pre-transcendental, position to the mature, transcendental period of the remainder of his works. We strive, in this chapter, to establish “an entirely new point of departure” for phenomenology, which will enable it to overcome the dangers of psychologism still lurking in the first edition of the Logical Investigations. Once we have been able to establish this point of departure, we then will be able, once again, to ask after the relationship obtained between our newly defined phenomenology and the psychology from which it is has now become more fully and definitively differentiated. To return to where we left off in our last chapter, we take up de Boer’s remark that: Perhaps no statement of Husserl has occasioned more surprise than his remark in the introduction of the second volume of the original German edition of [the Logical Investigations] to the effect that he proposed to base the ‘pure logic’ defended in the Prolegomena on a descriptive psychology (1978, p. 272).

This statement came as such a surprise due to the fact that it followed after an entire volume that, in effect, appeared to reject any tie between phenomenology and psychology. It was not only Husserl’s readers who found this statement p­ roblematic, © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 L. Davidson, Overcoming Psychologism: Husserl and the Transcendental Reform of Psychology, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-59932-4_2

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as de Boer also remarks, “it is not likely that Husserl wrote many sentences he regretted more than this one” (1978, p. 207). He quickly came to see, after publication of the first edition of the Logical Investigations, that he had convinced neither his readers nor himself of the viability of this position. Such a definition was highly problematic, in that it did not provide a sufficient differentiation between his new position and the psychologism of his predecessors. We already mentioned that in 1903, shortly after this publication, Husserl issued a disclaimer, announcing that phenomenology was no longer to be considered descriptive psychology. While we touched lightly in our first chapter on the issues that gave rise to Husserl’s dissatisfaction with such a definition, it will be the task of this chapter to delve into them more deeply and to follow his thinking toward the new ground of the transcendental—the product of his further reflections. We should remark at this point that Husserl’s eventual transcendental move was not achieved all at once but was won gradually through several years of reflection and struggle. While his dissatisfaction with the position of the Logical Investigations was evident publicly as early as 1903, he did not experience what has come to be considered his “philosophical crisis” until around 1906. Then, while his self-­ proclaimed breakthrough was said to occur “about the year 1908” (cited in de Boer, 1978, p. 323n), it did not achieve a full articulation in print until the publication of the first volume of the Ideen in 1913. Since we are interested in following the development of Husserl’s position on and understanding of the relationship between phenomenology and psychology as it evolved, we shall follow him along this gradual and painstaking route, not actually reaching our final destination until the next chapter. In this chapter we begin with lectures Husserl gave in 1907 published later under the title “The Idea of Phenomenology” (1964), which represent his first significant advance beyond the position of the Logical Investigations. These lectures, while no longer psychological in any sense, remain in an important sense pre-transcendental and are in this way indicative of where his thought had stalled prior to the breakthrough of 1908. They can be considered, in this way, to be transitional. The work that follows shortly after this breakthrough, the 1911 Logos article entitled “Philosophy as Rigorous Science” (1981c), presents the new position in its early and—while not tentative—still largely implicit, phases. Since this work also stops short of labeling the appropriate dimension and attitude of phenomenology as transcendental, it may also be considered transitional in status. In addition to these two texts, de Boer’s work on The Development of Husserl’s Thought (1978), to which we referred occasionally in Chap. 1, will also prove to be helpful in our explication of the movement of Husserl’s thinking as evidenced in each of these texts. We begin with a re-examination of the difficulties uncovered in the early position of the Logical Investigations.

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The Logical Investigations Reconsidered We may remember from Chap. 1 that one of the problems that emerged with Husserl’s definition of phenomenology as descriptive psychology was that it seemed to leave the genetic question unresolved. Prior to Brentano and Dilthey, descriptive psychology had been understood to be a preparatory discipline, providing the data for genetic naturalistic explanation. While Husserl wanted to forestall this theoretical causal movement to genetic explanation in the attempt to separate the realm of ideal objects from any tie to the real, it remained a question of whether or not he could provide a fundamentally different answer to the question of the origin of these objects in psychic experience. We may, in fact, wish to disregard the naturalistic explanation for the contents of psychic acts so that we may look at the structural inter-connections between this content. This in no way challenges the appropriateness, or even necessity, of such explanation. As long as phenomenology remains a descriptive psychology, and in this way refers to the psychic subjectivity that is considered a domain of the natural world, naturalistic explanation comes to bear on the content of phenomenological description, even if only implicitly. In this way, Husserl had not so much succeeded in severing phenomenology’s tie to the real as simply allowing it to go unacknowledged, putting it temporarily “out of play.” The problem remains that if one pressed Husserl at the stage of the Logical Investigations and asked for an explanatory account of the objects of judgments, etc. that comprised the subject matter of the phenomenologist, he would have nowhere to look but back to the empirical, explanatory psychology he had rejected as psychologistic. In defining phenomenology as descriptive psychology, he had retained the contents of conscious acts as psychological contents. They were the same contents that had been and would continue to be explained genetically by psychology. In this way, the epistemological exclusions of the Logical Investigations of any questions concerning the nature of the real could only be, at best, temporary and artificial exclusions. Husserl could only ask us not to ask. Since the contents of psychic acts were still understood to be psychic contents, they continued to be situated within the realm of real as contents of the domain of the psychic: a real domain within Nature. Belonging to a natural sphere of reality, they would be considered the proper material for naturalistic explanation. For this reason, de Boer comments that the Logical Investigations only provide “a temporary disregarding of the connection that actually exists. The purity is artificial; it is the result of a methodological device and has only methodological meaning—and no ontological meaning” (1978, p. 230). The exclusions of the Logical Investigations have no ontological meaning because the descriptions of phenomenology are the same descriptions as those used by empirical and genetic psychology; they pertain to the same reality. It is in this sense that the connection between the descriptive psychological content and genetic psychological explanation actually exists and is only temporarily disregarded. Husserl has not really distanced himself from the real at all but has only attempted to forget that what he has been describing in his phenomenology is still psychic

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reality and is still the proper domain of the naturalistic theoretical psychologist. Phenomenology may be a descriptive and analytic discipline, but it remains a discipline whose descriptions are those of a natural sphere of reality and, thus, whose findings will remain restricted to that sphere. In the language of the Logical Investigations, this means that phenomenology remains a relative discipline—relative, that is, to the sphere of reality that it describes and analyzes. While Husserl knew that phenomenology must be distanced from any such tie to the real in order not to result in a psychologism, he only seems to have succeeded in temporarily putting this connection in abeyance as irrelevant to his present interest. Simply saying that such a tie is irrelevant methodologically is not sufficient for the kind of philosophical integrity with which he hoped to ground logic and epistemology. This is why de Boer refers to the solution found in the Logical Investigations as “an answer born of desperation, and thus as something provisional in character” (1978, p. 300). He remarks, in addition, that Husserl later came to see this attempt at a solution as “a half-way measure and a lack of radicalism” (1978, p. 231). The half-way and provisional character of this solution refers to the fact that, as de Boer once again explains, it “is not so much a solution as an evasion of the actual problem” (1978, p. 199). The actual problem with which Husserl was faced was finding a way to rescue the ideal objectivity of the contents of psychic acts from the natural explanatory theory of empirical psychology. Since Husserl intended phenomenology to serve as a preparatory discipline for empirical psychology, as well as an epistemological foundation for it, he could not have intended for the descriptions of phenomenology to be unsuitable for natural psychological explanation. As de Boer comments: “The laying of a descriptive foundation as a preparatory stage makes little sense if the explanation to follow is to be rejected” (1978, p. 219). It seems that in this way Husserl’s rescue has been incomplete. It constitutes merely an artificial separation of a domain of the real from the explanation appropriate to it. It is just that, as long as we are doing phenomenology rather that psychology, we do not bother to look—a philosophical equivalent, perhaps, to the unsatisfactory Clinton-era military policy of “don’t ask, don’t tell.” In a somewhat lengthy, but useful, passage, de Boer addresses directly the artificial nature of this separation: The immanent psychical sphere is the result of an artificial abstraction within the natural world. In this sense, this psychology is still mundane. It is a science that continues to stand on the “basis of the world” and brings about an artificial isolation within the world. We could also put it another way. Descriptive psychology is regional. It investigates a certain region of the world. Alongside this region is the region investigated by pure physics. The connection with the physical world is actually put between brackets. When we remove these brackets again, it becomes apparent that the psychical sphere is bound to a fundamental stratum that supports it, i.e., the material world. Explanatory psychology, which follows descriptive psychology, investigates the causal connections between psychical entities and between consciousness and the phys(iolog)ical contributing causes. Thus, the phenomenological sphere is only an artificial island with a “natural world” (1978, p. 455).

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Once we remove our methodologically imposed brackets, we find that our structurally analyzed contents are still understood as being produced by the natural causal forces of the physical world. We are back to where we began in the Prolegomena, with a natural causal explanation of logical discourse as an event in Nature. We might pause here and wonder why it would be necessary to remove Husserl’s methodological brackets at all; why is the temporary or provisional evasion of naturalistic explanation not adequate? Is it necessary to ask the genetic question, or may we instead rest content with a permanent exclusion of such questions as irrelevant? What are the concerns that do not allow Husserl to remain satisfied with this position, in which the question of genetic explanation simply goes unasked? In one sense, it is because Husserl defined phenomenology as descriptive psychology that he was, at first, able to ignore this question. In restricting phenomenology to the psychological domain, he could, apparently at least, consider its sphere to be somewhat self-contained. He wanted to block out the appeal to natural causal explanation that inhibited philosophers from studying the contents of psychic life on its own terms, with respect to its intrinsic connectedness. In excluding the acts themselves as irrelevant and concentrating solely on the objects of these acts as ideal, he no longer needed to concern himself with the correspondence of these acts to the true nature of the real. It was through a bracketing of this objective state of affairs to begin with that Husserl had been able to secure his descriptive, psychic sphere. Propositions or judgments were evaluated on the basis of their inner sense and their adherence to the laws of logic, not on the basis of their factual accuracy, nor on the basis of an appeal to their objective validity (since this is precisely what we were trying to justify). All such questions of fact were to be left out of the picture in our turn away from empirical psychology to phenomenology. It was the restricting of phenomenology to the psychical sphere that made such an exclusion possible. In order to clarify this point further, let us move from a proposition of logical discourse to the perception of an object in the real world. Husserl himself makes this transition between the period of the Logical Investigations and the 1907 lectures that we shall take up shortly. Our own explication of his thought will be made easier, accordingly, if we make a similar transition. In the Logical Investigations, we were concerned with whether a proposition such as 2 × 2 = 4 could be justified as a necessary truth of logic or mathematics without referring to whether or not the utterance of this proposition was brought about by a factual state of affairs. We have now gone to great lengths to show how such a factual state of affairs has no effect on the truth of this proposition as an ideal meaning. Similarly, we could take an act of perceiving an object in the real world as another example of a moment of psychic life, analogous to the uttering of a mathematical proposition. In this case, we could be concerned as to whether or not we could understand the nature of this perception on its own terms, without appealing in a similar fashion to the factual state of affairs thought to bring about this perception. We would attempt to understand this perception without appealing to the object perceived as its cause. From the naturalistic position, this perception would be explained on the basis of a causal relationship existing between, e.g., the house that I am perceiving and my act of perceiving the house. It is in accord with natural scientific understanding to

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assume that I do in fact perceive a house because a house does in fact exist out there in the world, and to assume that my act of perceiving this house is causally related to the existence of this house. My perception is an effect of such a causal relationship. In the context of the Logical Investigations, it is this factual existence of the house that would be put in brackets or excluded from our analysis, much as the natural causes that brought about my judgment that 2 × 2 = 4. I will want to study the perception of the house itself without any reference to real states of affairs or real causes. I will only want to take as my subject matter the perception itself as an ideal meaning, just as I had previously taken as my subject matter the judgment that 2 × 2 = 4. I will be asking what it means to perceive a house, as I would have asked, ‘what does it mean to judge that 2 × 2 = 4?’ We may now understand better how Husserl’s restriction of this sphere of the objects of perceptions (or judgments, etc.) to the domain of the psychic allowed him initially to exclude or ignore the question of genetic origin. It is appropriate for a psychologist to disregard the actual state of affairs of whether a house actually exists or not as a cause of my perception, if she or he is interested in the fact that I perceive one at the moment. A psychologist can suspend the question of the accuracy of my perception, if she or he is interested in the perception itself as a moment of my psychic life. In this sense, as de Boer explains, the bracketing of the Logical Investigations “has the character of a psychological reduction; it is a methodological limitation to the psychical sphere” (1978, p. 299). Because I have explicitly limited my interest to the psychical sphere, I need only be concerned with what is taking place there. The state of affairs in which I am interested is that state of affairs of a house being perceived by me (whether it exists of not). It would be reasonable, of course, to wonder whether this perception is an accurate perception as opposed to a hallucination, etc., but initially, at least, it is possible for me to restrict my investigation to the nature of this perception. I can investigate the psychical sphere as a self-contained realm, separated from the rest of Nature by my theoretical interest in the nature of psychic experience. As de Boer notes, in this way for Husserl, “it makes no difference from a psychological standpoint whether or not there is an actually existing object” (1978, p. 1985). Whether the house really exists or not, my experience is such that I perceive a house to be there. As a psychologist, this experience may be taken as my point of departure. A descriptive psychology would differ in this way from an explanatory or genetic psychology in that it would be interested only in the appearance of objects in consciousness, rather than in their genetic origin in Nature. Explanatory psychology would look to the existing house and to the physiology of perceptual processes. Descriptive psychology looks to the nature of perception in terms of its meaning or significance. The meaning of perception is indifferent to its origin in an event of Nature. As de Boer again points out, “The question of the origin of sensations comes up only in explanatory psychology. Phenomenology concerns itself only with the ‘appearance’” (1978, p. 186). This appearance, i.e., “that house over there,” signifies the same content or meaning, regardless of whether the actual house exists or not. Its significance remains unaltered. While such an act of perceiving a house seems to entail the positing of an actual house over there, it remains the case that in

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terms of the significance of this act “it makes no difference to psychological description whether there is an actually existing object corresponding to the act of positing” (1978, p. 181). Once again, the ideal meaning of the perception is totally indifferent to any and all real states of affairs. It was due to this irrelevance of the real that we were able to justify excluding it in our limiting phenomenology to the realm of the contents of psychic life. This exclusion is problematic, however, in that one does remain concerned with the realm of the psychic, which is itself considered to be one domain of the real. The psychologist does remain interested in a factual state of affairs, even if he or she is not interested in the factual existence of the house. In this case, however, the state of affairs that is factual is the experience of perceiving a house as existing out there. As a psychic experience, my perception of the house takes place in the natural causal context of the real; it is a real experience. While limiting our interest to the realm of psychic content, and thus excluding questions about the real house, we are still considering these contents to be contents of psychic experience and thus the proper subject matter for explanatory psychology as well. As a real experience of a house, we must assume that this experience has causes. It must have a genetic origin in Nature as a real experience taking place in the world. Even though psychology may not need to be concerned with the existence of the object perceived as out there, it must, as psychology, be concerned with the act of perceiving which takes place, so to speak, in here—and this in a natural causal way. Psychology, in whatever sense, is a science of the real; it situates its subject matter within the world, understanding it to be one domain of Nature. It was in this sense that we were forced to recognize previously the artificial and provisional nature of our exclusions. A limitation to the psychological does not eliminate all questions pertaining to the real because the psychological itself is one domain of the real. We remain within the context of Nature and natural explanation. Were this not sufficiently problematic to make Husserl pause and reconsider his definition of phenomenology, there is the additional concern that what he wanted to establish through the creation of phenomenology was not so much a psychology of consciousness, but rather an epistemological foundation for scientific knowledge. Given this explicit goal, the question of the existence of the objects of consciousness could not be considered to be irrelevant at all, as it might at least seem to have been in a psychology. If phenomenology was developed in order to check the status of the truth claims made by propositions, perceptions, etc., then it must obviously have ready access to the objective state of affairs that are intended by these acts in order to carry out its task. Of what value would a theory of knowledge be that cannot adequately address the question of whether or not an act of perception could count as knowledge? It was precisely this kind of question that phenomenology was called upon to address. We could have arrived at this same impasse had we pursued our psychological interest as well. That is, we could have noted that even within a purely psychological interest we must, at some point, take into account in our analysis of our subject’s experience whether or not the object of this experience exists. It does make a ­considerable difference to psychologists whether a subject is perceiving accurately

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or is hallucinating, for example. It is presumed in psychology that the scientist has a way of determining the actual case. It would not make sense to investigate hallucinations per se were we not assured, as investigators, that we could distinguish between accurate perceptions and hallucinations. This kind of access to the real is presupposed by positive science, just as it is presupposed by the natural scientist who assumes that they have somewhat direct access to this individual’s experience of a house at this moment. The epistemological question is in this way presupposed by positive science, rather than answered through it. It is phenomenology’s task to provide this epistemological foundation for positive science, including the science of psychology. Once again, we cannot presume that which we are attempting to provide and justify. The first issue we raised was that a limitation to the realm of the psychic could not successfully exclude all questions of existence, due to the fact that the realm of the psychic is itself presumed to exist. In this way, descriptive psychology remains a science of the real. Genetic questions may only remain implicit, but they are nonetheless appropriate and pressing. The second issue we are raising is that these questions are pressing, not only because psychology cannot be satisfied with half-way measures and evasions of fundamental questions, but also because Husserl was attempting to establish, via phenomenology, an epistemological foundation for science. He could not simply allow this question of existence to go unanswered if he wished to provide a theory of knowledge. A theory of knowledge is concerned with just this question: How do we know the real world? Either way, phenomenology, as descriptive psychology or as epistemology, is stuck at an impasse. It cannot be just a psychology because psychology, as a positive science, presupposes the reality of the natural world as known (as the domain of the psychic). It cannot be epistemology because it has no access to its proper subject matter—the relation obtained between the knower and the known. As de Boer concludes, “because no judgment about the actually existing world is possible” within a phenomenology defined as a descriptive psychology, “this theory of knowledge is caught in an impasse” (1978, p. 190). It is with a full awareness of this impasse that Husserl begins his lectures in 1907 on “The Idea of Phenomenology.”

“The Idea of Phenomenology” Husserl opens these lectures by drawing a distinction between “sciences of the natural sort,” with their “natural mode” of reflection, and philosophy, with its “philosophical mode” of reflection (1964, pp. 13–14). Sciences of the natural sort include psychology and those sciences we have referred to previously as positive sciences. They presuppose the accuracy of cognition, or at least the potential accuracy of cognition, as their avenue of access to the world and their subject matter, situated within the world. As noted above, even a psychologist, for example, who manages to suspend questions pertaining to the existence or non-existence of the object of their subject’s perception, must still assume that they, as a psychologist, have reliable and

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trustworthy access to this subject as a real human being in the natural world. The natural mode of reflection in this way presupposes a direct and unproblematic relation to the real world, the world that (appears to) exists independent of my subjectivity. In the natural mode of reflection, I investigate this real world. I attempt to come to a deeper understanding of its character. I correct mistaken or incorrect previous perceptions of it. In all of this, I assume that I do have a mode of access to this reality of the world outside of myself and my experience that can be taken for granted as valid. In the natural mode of reflection, this assumption is never questioned. I continue to operate within its confines, asking for judgments about things, investigating relations between things, etc., but never stopping to question whether this thing that I perceive to exist outside of myself actually does exist outside of my experience of it. As noted, it would make no sense for a psychologist to be interested in hallucinations as such were the possibility of accurate perception not in this way presupposed as one’s starting point. As a scientist in the “natural attitude of mind,” I already know that the world and the objects within it exist (1964, p. 13). I am only interested in investigating the nature of the existents within it. I never wonder how I know that this world or these existents within it exist; that is my given. The philosophical mode of reflection, on the other hand, begins precisely with such wonder. It comes into play when one begins to ask how it is possible that one knows that the world outside of one’s experience does exist independently of that experience. It emerges, as Husserl writes in these lectures, when “cognition, the thing most taken for granted in natural thinking, suddenly emerges as a mystery” (1964, pp. 14–15). Philosophy, as contrasted with sciences of the positive sort, takes up this mystery as its proper subject matter. It investigates the possibility of cognition itself, as that which is presupposed by natural sciences in their orientation toward the world as pre-given. It is philosophy’s task to justify this taken for grantedness of natural sciences by showing how cognition is possible, how perception does manage to give us a world that is perceived to exist outside of our experience of it. Philosophy in this way provides natural sciences with their presupposed epistemological ground; it provides the foundation upon which they can be built. While cognition can be investigated in psychology genetically, in the context of an explanatory psychology that would research its genetic origins in acts of a psychic subject, its possibility is already presupposed. Cognition in this context would be investigated as a fact of Nature, as an event taking place in the natural causal context of psychic life (as one domain of the real). Philosophy’s task will be quite different. Philosophy wishes to investigate the possibility of cognition as such; not as a fact whose validity is taken for granted and after whose genetic origin we might ask, but as an ideal possibility. Philosophy asks, regardless of whether actual knowing subjects exist or not: “How can knowledge transcend itself and reach its object reliably?” (1964, p. 15). How is the knowledge presupposed by natural sciences as given possible to begin with? Writes Husserl: What is taken for granted in natural thinking is the possibility of cognition. Constantly busy producing results advancing from discovery to discovery in new and newer branches of science, natural thinking finds no occasion to raise the question of the possibility of cognition, as such.

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2  Phenomenology as Rigorous Philosophy To be sure, as with everything else in the world, cognition, too, will appear as a problem in a certain manner, becoming an object of natural investigation. Cognition is a fact in nature. It is the experience of a cognizing organic being. It is psychological fact. As any psychological fact, it can be described according to is kinds and internal connections, and its genetic relations can be investigated … So far, we are still in the realm of natural thinking. However, the correlation between cognition as mental process, its referent and what objectively is, which has just been touched upon in order to contrast the psychology of cognition with pure logic and ontology, is the source of the deepest and most difficult problems. Taken collectively, they are the problem of the possibility of cognition. Cognition in all of its manifestations is a psychic act; it is the cognition of a cognizing subject. The objects cognized stand over and against the cognition. But how can we be certain of the correspondence between cognition and the object cognized? (1964, p. 15).

It is with the raising of this question that we no longer find ourselves within the confines of natural thinking but have stepped into the philosophical mode proper. Since it is of the utmost importance that we are able to make the transition from the natural mode of reflection to the philosophical before moving on to explore the differences that emerge between psychology and phenomenology as a result, allow Husserl to recount for us the path that led him from the one mode to the other. We begin in the natural attitude of mind: “Before my perceiving eyes stands the thing. I see it, and I grasp it” (1964, p. 16). Ordinarily, when one is not otherwise predisposed, this is taken for granted as valid and unproblematic. However, once we make the turn toward the psychic realm as initiated in the Logical Investigations, we realize that “the perceiving is simply a mental act of mine, of the perceiving subject” (1964, p. 16). We realize that this perception is part of subjective experience. We may then be led to wonder, in Cartesian-like fashion: How do I, the cognizing subject, know if I can ever really know, that there exists not only my own mental processes, these acts of cognizing, but also that which they apprehend? How can I ever know that there is anything at all which could be set over against cognition as its object? (1964, p. 16).

Once we realize that my perception of this object is my perception, and that this object is only given through such perceptions, how can we ever know if such an object exists outside of these perceptions? While psychology would simply assume that these acts of perceiving take place in the real world, as part of the causal context of Nature, philosophy must put such an assumption aside and wonder how we can know that my acts of perceiving are real acts, taking place in a real world outside of the realm of my experience. We are not assured, within the natural mode of reflection, “that there is anything at all which could be set over against cognition as its object.” When this lack of assurance becomes a thematic concern, we have left behind the taken for granted nature of the natural attitude of mind and entered into a philosophical attitude. We are dwelling on this point at some length because it will have to be this difference in attitude, Husserl asserts, which will enable us to differentiate between a phenomenological discipline and a psychological one. Once the descriptive ­psychology of the Logical Investigations takes up this question of the ideal possibility of cognition, it can no longer remain a psychology in any sense, since psychology, as a “science of the natural sort,” presupposes this possibility as an actuality.

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The possibility of doing psychology is based upon the validity of cognition as a natural fact; we cannot attempt to provide, through psychology, a justification for this validity. Rather, this must be the task of a philosophical discipline that is in no sense a science of the natural sort, but on the contrary, provides an epistemological foundation for these natural sciences. This philosophical discipline will take place in an entirely different mode of reflection—its own particularly philosophical mode that bears witness to a departure from the natural mode appropriate to natural sciences. Since psychology is merely one such natural science in need of an epistemological foundation, it cannot itself provide this foundation. In the context of these lectures, psychologism is further defined as such an attempt on the part of psychology to provide its own epistemological foundation through its “pre-epistemological” (naïve) reflections on cognition as a fact of Nature (1964, pp.  18, 31). Here we would be labeling as psychologistic the confusion of a science of the natural sort with a philosophical science. It was this kind of psychologism that the Logical Investigations could be justly accused of perpetuating in its definition of phenomenology as descriptive psychology, since even a descriptive psychology remains within the natural mode of reflection. These lectures mark an advance beyond that position in that, by this time, Husserl had arrived “at the distinction between the sciences of a natural sort and philosophy” and had decided that phenomenology was to be a philosophical science (1964, p. 18). In his own summary of these lectures, Husserl marks this progression beyond his earlier position by noting and emphasizing that: “We abandon finally the standpoint of psychology, even of descriptive psychology” (1964, p. 5). Having abandoned descriptive psychology in this way, we can expect Husserl to define phenomenology differently in these lectures. He fulfills this expectation by defining it as a philosophical discipline, in the sense that we have been discussing, as follows: Phenomenology: this denotes a science, a system of scientific disciplines. But it also and above all denotes a method and an attitude of mind, the specifically philosophical attitude of mind, the specifically philosophical method (1964, pp. 18–19).

Husserl strives hard, in these lectures, to set this new philosophical discipline off from any and all sciences of the natural sort, especially the natural science of psychic subjectivity. He stresses, repeatedly, that in contrast to such a psychology conducted in the natural mode of reflection, “philosophy lies in a wholly new dimension. It needs an entirely new point of departure and an entirely new method distinguishing it in principle from any ‘natural’ science” (1964, p. 19). He does not, it seems, want to run the risk of compromising phenomenology by associating it in any way with the psychological, as he had done, albeit surprisingly, in the Logical Investigations. Phenomenology is to be equated with the altogether different mode of reflection appropriate to philosophy, a mode of reflection radically different and entirely new. He concludes his first lecture on this note, stressing to his audience the crucial importance of this new distinction and the importance of recognizing that phenomenology is to be conducted in this new attitude, and thus no longer as a natural science. In our

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present context we could say that in this conclusion, Husserl is pointing out to his audience the discovery through which he finally overcame the problems that remained with the position of the Logical Investigations. He wants us to understand fully just how phenomenology is no longer descriptive psychology. He writes: In contradistinction to all natural cognition, philosophy lies, I repeat, with a new dimension; and what corresponds to this new dimension, even if, as the phrase suggests, it is essentially connected with the old dimensions, is a new and radically new method which is set over against the “natural” method. He who denies this has failed to understand entirely the whole of the level at which the characteristic problem of the critique of cognition lies, and with this he has failed to understand what philosophy really wants to do and should do and what gives it its own character and authority vis-à-vis the whole of natural cognition and science of the natural sort (1964, p. 21).

It is obviously of great importance that we come to an adequate understanding of the “new and radically new” dimension and method that sets phenomenology off from sciences of the natural sort, if we are faithfully to follow Husserl in his thinking. He has rarely seemed so insistent in pointing the way. Having discussed thus far the dimension or attitude appropriate to phenomenology, we may now turn to the question of method. How does this new science operate differently? What is its radically new method? Husserl begins the second of these lectures by asking, “How can such a science of cognition in general get started?” He answers: That which a science questions it cannot use as a presupposition. But what is in question is the possibility of all cognition in that the critique of cognition regards as problematic the possibility of cognition in general and its capacity to reach the object. Once it is launched, the critique of cognition cannot take any cognition for granted. Nor can it take over anything whatever from pre-scientific cognition. All cognition bears the mark of being questionable (1964, p. 25).

In our reconsideration of the Logical Investigations, we realized that once we restricted our subject matter to the realm of the psychic, we had no way to assure that our experience corresponded to the objective state of affairs out there in the real, natural world. Husserl remarks, in the “Idea of Phenomenology” lectures, that it is this assurance that is the first thing that must be left out of our new, philosophical science. Since we have no way of knowing, prior to our development of this discipline, whether or not such a correspondence obtains, we must not take its validity for granted in the conduct of our inquiry but must instead take as our point of departure its questionable character. Our method begins with a resolve no longer to take the validity of cognition as a given, no longer to presuppose that it does reach its object. In this way, our method is initially defined in terms of what it is not. In like fashion to its accompanying attitude, the phenomenological method is what it is by not being natural. Here we rejoin our reconsideration of the Logical Investigations in the sense that our new science begins at the impasse left by the phenomenology introduced in that work. This new, now philosophical, science takes up explicitly the problematic nature of cognition that we uncovered in the first section of this chapter. Due to its epistemological interest, it cannot remain content with an investigation of a self-­contained

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psychic sphere, cut off methodologically from the rest of the real world. It is interested precisely in just this relation between cognition and the real world. That is exactly the focus of its questioning. We have seen why it would be problematic to appeal to naturalistic explanation for a justification of the validity of cognition, i.e., for a genetic account. Husserl has informed us, in no uncertain terms, that he will not appeal to a science of the natural sort in order to resolve this issue. We cannot turn from a descriptive psychology to its explanatory complement in order to overcome this impasse. The direction left to us, and the direction pursued in the remainder of these lectures, is a turning inward to the realm of experience itself. Since we have established in our method that we will not presuppose that cognition does reliably reach its object or the external world, we seem to be left once again with a self-contained sphere of psychic experience. Husserl now suggests, however, that we take another and deeper look at the contents of this sphere. Initially we stated that all cognition must bear “the mark of being questionable.” We could not have meant, however, that nothing could count as evidence in the pursuit of our new science, for then, as Husserl notes, there could be “no such science at all” (1964, p. 26). What we meant was that which we have exposed as being problematic in cognition—namely its claim to transcend itself and reach its object— cannot be presumed to be valid until it is shown to be so. It is this claim of cognition that specifically is to be marked as questionable. Husserl points out once more, in Cartesian-like fashion, that there are certain things I can know about cognition at this particular moment in my experience. While I may not be able to assure myself, at this point, that the house I am perceiving right now actually does exist outside of my present experience of it, I can be certain that I am having the experience of perceiving a house (as being “out there”). The only thing that must be marked as questionable is whether that house actually exists or not. It is this fact that we cannot presuppose in our investigation of our experience of perceiving a house to exist. Husserl accordingly draws a distinction at this point between my experience of the house, which can count as evidence, and which he refers to as “immanent” to my experience, and the house itself, whose existence cannot be presupposed, and which he refers to as “transcendent” to my experience of it. The seeing of a house is immanent to experience, while the house, as an object in the real world (and the real world itself) is transcendent to it (1964, pp.  26–27). What is questionable is thus the “transcendence” of the actual, real house. What must be excluded from the radically new method of phenomenology is this transcendence. Husserl writes: I said that the cognition with which the critique of cognition must begin must contain nothing doubtful or questionable. They must contain none of that which precipitates epistemological confusion and gives impetus to the critique of cognition … If we look closer at what is so enigmatic and what, in the course of subsequent reflection on the possibility of cognition, causes embarrassment, we will find it to be the transcendence of cognition. All cognition of the natural sort, and especially the pre-scientific, is cognition that makes its object transcendent. It posits objects as existent, claims to reach matters of fact which are not “strictly given to it,” are not “immanent” to it … So, the question is: how can the mental process so to speak transcend itself? Immanent here means then genuinely immanent in the cognitive mental process (1964, pp. 27–28).

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In our reconsideration of the contents of psychic experience, we realize that these contents may be broadly divided into these two categories: that of the immanent and that of the transcendent. By immanent we refer to the mental process itself, the flow of experience through which one is presumed to be present to the objects that exist in the real world. The existence of these objects as independent of that experience, however, is not given immanently, in the sense that these objects are presumed to transcend the experience itself. This is what we mean when we refer to them as “existing independently.” Since these objects are presumed to exist outside of our experiences of them, this presumed existence cannot be located within these experiences. In this way, Husserl now comments that this presumption of an independent existence actually goes beyond what is given immanently, and in this sense, what is given with certainty and in an unproblematic way. He writes that cognitions of the natural sort, which posit their objects as transcendent, “go beyond what at any time is truly given, beyond what can be directly ‘seen’ and apprehended” (1964, p. 28). The contents of consciousness considered as transcendent do not share in the same certainty as those that are given immanently. In restricting our new phenomenology to the realm of experience, we shall accordingly restrict it to what is immanent, and therefore given with certainty in that experience. We restrict it to the sphere of immanence, to the subjective flow itself. Were the uncertainty of transcendence not enough to disqualify it as inappropriate for phenomenological inquiry, there is the additional consideration, articulated by Husserl, that an appeal to the transcendent object itself in order to validate or explain the transcendence of cognition would be tautologous. When we begin to search for a solution to the “riddle” of transcendence that we have taken as our point of departure (1964, p. 29), it becomes obvious that we cannot look to the transcendent object itself for an explanation of how it has come to be perceived as transcendent. Once we realize that the source of difficulty, and thus the focus of our investigation, must be the transcendence of cognition, our method, as Husserl explains, is determined: If then the riddle connected with the initial establishment of the discipline lies here, it becomes more definitely clear what must not be claimed as presupposed. Nothing transcendent must be used as a presupposition. If I do not understand how it is possible that cognition reach something transcendent, then I also do not know whether it is possible (1964, p. 29).

If we are asking how cognition can claim that its objects exist transcendent to the acts of cognition, we cannot answer that these claims are valid because the objects do, in fact, exist in this way. This would provide no real solution to our riddle, since it would merely beg the question of transcendence by remaining within the natural attitude of mind. The question is one of how such knowledge is possible at all; how can we know that they do exist? Obviously, such an appeal to their actual existence is not a sufficient response to this question. Husserl insists, consequently, that such an attempt be rejected. He writes:

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Let us emphatically reject that approach and let us go on to illustrate the basic idea that the problem of the “how” (how cognition of the transcendent is possible and even more generally, how cognition is possible at all) can never be answered on the basis of a prior knowledge of the transcendent, or prior judgments about it, no matter whence the knowledge or judgments are borrowed, not even if they are taken from the exact sciences (1964, p. 30).

It is just this scientific knowledge that we have called into question, for which we are attempting to provide a sound foundation. If we are wondering how cognition is possible, we cannot, in essence, reply that it is possible because it is, that objects are experienced as transcendent to consciousness because they are transcendent to it. The possibility of cognition cannot be based on any cognized property of transcendent objects. We have no right, at this stage, to claim any such knowledge. All such claims must be suspended, pending the results of our epistemological inquiry. All prior knowledge of the transcendent must be put aside and cannot be utilized in our attempt to find a solution to this persistent riddle. Since we do not know yet whether it is possible that cognition reach objects transcendent to it, we cannot presume such knowledge in order to prove that it is possible. This is precisely what must no longer be taken for granted, what must be marked as questionable and excluded from our phenomenological method. This marking as questionable, putting aside, suspending, or simply no longer taking for granted the existence of objects transcendent to cognition is a direct outgrowth of what we referred to in the context of the Logical Investigations, following de Boer, as a “psychological reduction” in the sense of a “limitation to the psychical sphere” (1978, p. 299). We began this chapter by showing how that exclusion, however, was only a provisional and temporary solution, or more accurately, an evasion, due to the fact that the realm of the psychic remained, as the subject matter of psychology, a domain of the real world. Now that we have abandoned the psychological for good in the pursuit of a philosophical discipline, we may wonder whether a phenomenological science no longer conducted in the natural attitude of mind is still confronted with the same problems with respect to this methodological procedure. While the bracketing that is conducted may appear to be essentially the same as that which arose out of the necessity for a descriptive discipline as opposed to an explanatory genetic one in the context of the Logical Investigations, its significance in this context may be somewhat different. It is this change in significance that we must now explore. Husserl refers to the procedure outlined in these lectures, which assumes the explicit status of being the phenomenological method, as an “epistemological reduction.” He describes what is entailed in this procedure as follows: Everything transcendent that is involved must be bracketed, or be assigned the index of indifference, or epistemological nullity, an index which indicates: the existence of all these transcendencies, whether I believe in them or not, is not here my concern; this is not the place to make judgments about them; they are entirely irrelevant (1964, p. 31).

While he may refer to the existential status of these transcendencies as being irrelevant, we have seen in the last several pages that this status is actually questionable and problematic. The exclusion of everything transcendent is referred to as

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being an epistemological reduction because it has been brought about by the epistemological motivations previously discussed. We have seen, in several different ways, how we cannot appeal to the existence of such transcendencies in order to solve the riddle of transcendence. To do so would be psychologistic and circular. The reduction proposed here is based upon the necessity of this methodological exclusion due to the fact that we do not yet have such knowledge in an epistemologically grounded way. We bracket these objects because they are inaccessible to us, because we are not yet assured of our access to them. In doing so, we are merely making this inaccessibility explicit. Once we understand the reduction in this way, it is clear that we do not so much need to justify our performance of it as require of others a justification for their failure to do so. We may justifiably inquire as to how they can ground the knowledge that they purport to have of the objects that they utilize in the development of their science. We have spent the last several pages demonstrating the various ways in which this very knowledge is rendered suspect. An articulation of the epistemological necessity of this reduction, as provided above, already changes the way we view its significance. It is no longer in danger of being considered a provisional, temporary, or half-way measure. As opposed to being an evasion of the real issue, it is the result of our meeting this issue head on and having made explicit in this regard what must be considered to be problematic. We may still wonder, however, how this alters the problematic relationship uncovered in our reconsideration of the Logical Investigations; how, that is, it alters the status of the genetic question that remained implicit in the earlier text. Though we have succeeded in demonstrating the epistemological necessity of this exclusion, does it still not leave us stranded on an artificially cordoned off island of the psychic? How are we to understand the relationship between the reduced sphere and the natural world? Husserl anticipates this concern and comments that: “One must guard himself from the fundamental confusion between the pure phenomenon, in the sense of phenomenology, and the psychological phenomenon, the object of empirical psychology” (1964, p. 33). The phenomenon or appearance—i.e., the content of experience that was taken as our subject matter in the Logical Investigations—was what Husserl is referring to here as a psychological phenomenon, in the sense that it was a content of the psychic realm, a moment of psychic life. He describes here the kind of psychological reflection that would make such a science possible: If I, as a human being employing my natural modes of thought, look at the perception which I am undergoing at the moment, then I immediately and almost inevitably apperceive it (that is a fact) in relation to my ego. It stands there as a mental process of this mentally living person, as his state, his act … Perception … so apperceived, is a psychological fact… This then, is the phenomenon which is investigated by that natural science we call “psychology” (1964, p. 33–34).

This kind of reflection, as he notes in this passage, is characteristic of the natural modes of thought appropriate to sciences of the natural sort, such as psychology, which deal with facts and factual states of affairs. This was the kind of reflection performed in the Logical Investigations under the title descriptive psychology due to the fact that at that point Husserl was still concerned with what he took to be a

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circumscribed domain of the real. We have seen how he remained concerned with the factual state of affairs of the psychic, how he remained interested in real experience. This, however, will not be the kind of reflection performed in the form of phenomenology proposed in “The Idea of Phenomenology.” We remember that at the close of the first of these lectures, Husserl had stressed the importance of realizing that phenomenology was a philosophical discipline, no longer carried out in the natural mode of thought. He warned us not to confuse the radically new attitude of phenomenology with this natural attitude. In similar fashion, he is warning us not to make the fundamental confusion between this type of psychological phenomenon and the “pure phenomenon, in the sense of phenomenology.” Apparently, phenomenology now understands its subject matter differently. Being a philosophical discipline, having abandoned the psychological, it can no longer understand its phenomena to be psychic in nature. How then, are they to be understood, and what is the significance of this change in status? In Husserl’s examination of the natural attitude, he comes to recognize that the very possibility of having psychological phenomena is itself based upon natural cognition; it is a mode of reflection that takes place within the natural attitude. The phenomenology proposed by the Logical Investigations was in this way a naïve and pre-epistemological attempt to establish a critical epistemology, and it was in this sense that it lacked radicality. In so far as I take cognition to be the actual act of a psychological subject existing in the world, I am presuming the existence of this subject and the world in which it exists. As noted above, I am situating this experience within the realm of the psychic, which is understood to be one domain of Nature. It is this consideration that leads Husserl to define psychology as a natural science. Having established the methodological necessity of the epistemological reduction, Husserl realizes that this reduction should apply to these psychological subjects and their domain of the psychic as well. As real existents, they are presumed to exist independent of, or transcendent to, the acts of cognition understood to take place within their domain. If we were to bracket all presumed transcendencies, then this reduction would subsume this domain also. Husserl writes: “The ego as a person, as a thing in the world, and the mental life of this person … are all transcendent and epistemologically null” (1964, p.  34). They must take their place within the brackets along with all other transcendencies. We seem to be no more assured of our existence as psychological subjects situated within the world than we are of the existence of the world or the houses within it. The psychological ego is as much transcendent to our experience, as much in the world, as are the objects of that experience that we take to be the outside of that ego. They all belong to the realm of the real. In this way, psychological phenomena must be placed within brackets; they must be excluded from the pursuit of a phenomenological discipline that does not allow itself to take such facts for granted. This further exclusion of the experience of cognition as a psychic act may at first seem contradictory to our stated goal. If what we are appealing to as the subject matter of our science is cognition itself, how can we bracket, or put aside, this act of cognition as well and still maintain our subject matter? Have we not just put out of

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play exactly that in which we are interested? We noted as early as the Logical Investigations that we were not interested in the act itself as a psychic event, but only in its content. The temporary disinterest in this act, however, proved to be an insufficient methodological tool, in so far as it left the real character of the act implicitly intact. What was initiated in the Logical Investigations as a temporary and operative guide is here made definitive of our discipline of phenomenology as a properly philosophical science. It is through this reduction that we will be able to suspend successfully the real character of the acts in questions and leave behind the psychological in the acquisition of a new attitude. Husserl here refers to the process through which the psychological ego and the psychic in general, as well as all other transcendent objects, are bracketed as the “phenomenological reduction” (1964, p. 34). It is this reduction that now subsumes the psychic, and this reduction that, as a result, is to become the definitive concept for phenomenology, securing the central role in Husserl’s philosophy from this point onward (cf. Wagner, 1970, p. 217). Through this reduction we are able to acquire the new attitude insisted upon at the close of the first of these lectures, the new dimension and new method that are said to be of such crucial importance. The phenomenological reduction is the “new and radically new” method, the specific philosophical method that transforms phenomenology into a properly philosophical science. How does this reduction exclude the psychological character of the acts of cognition while nonetheless maintaining the cognitions themselves as our subject matter? With psychological phenomena we take the appearance of any an object in consciousness to be the real experience of a psychological subject perceiving the world in which they are situated as a natural entity, as a person. “But,” Husserl suggests, “while I am perceiving I can also look by way of purely ‘seeing’, at the perception, at it itself as it is there, and ignore its relation to the ego, or at least abstract from it” (1964, p. 34). It is this abstraction from the ego, or its having been placed within brackets, that transforms our initial epistemological reduction into the phenomenological reduction. The “pure phenomenon, in the sense of phenomenology,” as opposed to the psychological phenomenon discussed above, is acquired through this reduction. By leaving out the relation of this experience to the ego as a psychic entity we have transformed what was, in the context of the Logical Investigations, a psychological phenomenon into a pure phenomenon. This pure phenomenon need not be understood as the real experience of an existing subject, residing within the natural world, but can be taken purely as an experience in itself, as “itself as it is there.” It is this cognition, or experience itself, in which we are properly interested and not the act that brought it about as an event in Nature. We retain our subject matter, but now in a more purified form. We remember that in our reservations with the definition of phenomenology as a descriptive psychology, we wondered whether this would allow a sufficient distancing from the real, as was required by our critique of psychologism. Was psychology not still tied to the real in a problematic way? Here Husserl has found a way of overcoming this problem, of getting through this impasse, by severing all ties to the real, including all ties to actual subjects. Through the performance of the phenomenological reduction “nothing is assumed concerning

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the existence or non-existence of actuality” (1964, p.  35). We need no longer appeal to any real state of affairs, anything factual or situated within the natural world. Once we have abstracted cognition from its relation to the ego as a subject in the world, it is obvious that we are now no longer within psychology as a natural science. No longer within psychology, we need no longer concern ourselves with the status of genetic explanation. Through this reduction, we have left behind the natural attitude of mind and all questions appropriate to it and its sciences of the natural sort. The relation to the real, as the psychically real, having been excluded as the last vestige of the natural attitude, we are now free to enter into the philosophical attitude and its own domain. Through the reduction, Husserl writes with uncharacteristic elegance, “we have dropped anchor on the shore of phenomenology” (1964, p. 35). In the process of establishing an avenue of access to this domain, we seem to have stumbled across a fundamental parallelism between psychological and pure phenomena, separated as they are through the reduction. Since this parallelism will become increasingly important in the chapters that follow, and since, once again, it is of the most crucial importance that we firmly and convincingly establish the difference between these two attitudes, we shall explore this parallelism briefly before moving on and, in the process, provide a review of our progress thus far. The nature of this parallelism is captured succinctly when Husserl writes that: “To each psychic lived process there corresponds through the device of phenomenological reduction a pure phenomenon” (1964, p. 35). The emphasis placed on this statement should alert us to the fact that it is imperative that we recognize that any given cognition, or experience in general, can be viewed from within the natural attitude as a psychological phenomenon or from within the phenomenological attitude as a pure phenomenon. In the first case, we take this cognition as an object for natural reflection, in the second case, as an object for philosophical reflection. While these two modes may correspond to each other as parallels, the difference between them is of the utmost importance. Which approach we opt for is a direct result of our interest, and in the case of the “The Idea of Phenomenology,” the pervasive, determinative interest is in the provision of an epistemological foundation for scientific knowledge. In order to resolve the problems that remain from the Logical Investigations, the natural attitude of mind must be given up and this new attitude of philosophy must be explored. Given this interest, Husserl states early in these lectures that he wants, procedurally, to base his development of phenomenology only on what is immanently given in experience. He then utilizes this principle in the exclusion, through the reduction, of the existence of all objects transcendent to experience, including the existence of the psychological ego presumed to be having these experiences. We had already managed, implicitly, to put aside questions regarding the actual existence of the objects of consciousness by way of the psychological reduction of the Logical Investigations, but here Husserl takes up the additional question of the existence of the subject presumed to be having these experiences as psychic phenomena. He points out, in the course of these lectures, that to say that this seeing of a house is my act as a psychic subject existing within the real world is also to make a claim

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about an existent independent of that experience, to claim a transcendence for this cognition. Instead, we could, with Cartesian-like doubt, take this cognition to be a “perception construed as my perception” (1964, p. 34; emphasis added). This alternative would be to remain with what is immanently and certainly given in the cognition itself. To claim this perception as mine—in the sense of an actual moment of my psychic life—is to transcend what is immanently given and to make a transcendent claim. I posit myself, through my experience, to be a psychological subject in the real world, just as I posit the house I am perceiving to be a real house existing out there, independent of myself. The me for whom the house exists independently is as real and transcendent as the house itself. It must similarly be suspended along with the house; they are both of a piece. This psychological apperception of my cognition as the concrete and real act of a psychological subject in the world “transcends the given and must therefore be suspended” (de Boer, 1978, p.  310). We define this suspension as the phenomenological reduction. It is just this suspension of psychological apperception that allows us to differentiate between the pure phenomena of phenomenology and the psychological phenomena of empirical psychology. It is by way of this suspension that we have been able to abandon the psychological, overcome the problematic position of the Logical Investigations, and drop anchor on the shores of the phenomenological proper. By having bracketed the psychological apperception through which experience was taken to be psychic experience, we have been able to bracket the entire realm of naturalistic explanation in which we became stuck. No longer concerned with the psychological nature of these experiences, we need any longer concern ourselves with their relation to the real, in the sense of their taking place within the natural-­ causal context of genetic psychology. We are interested in their relation to the real, but we have established, through these lectures, that our approach to this riddle will be through an investigation of the immanence of these experiences, rather than through an explanation of their real relation to the transcendent. We will no longer try to account for the transcendence of experience by appealing to the transcendent context in which it takes place. In this way, we have broken through the impasse encountered by epistemology based on descriptive psychology. While we have yet to solve the riddle of transcendence, we have resolved the initial problems entailed in any attempt to do so based on contact with transcendencies, implicitly or otherwise. With this impasse behind us, we are now on our way to the achievement of an adequate solution that will come from the adoption of the specifically philosophical attitude and specifically philosophical method of a non-­ natural phenomenology. We will be able to investigate the realm of pure experience in order to come to an understanding of the possibility of cognition itself as an ideal possibility, without having to take into account any tie to the real that would compromise this enterprise; which would, in effect, reduce it to psychologism. The result of these lectures is that we have identified and established an important difference between the two attitudes distinguished at the very opening of the first lecture. We have demonstrated the crucial difference between natural and philosophical reflection with respect to the question of cognition and shown how natural reflection is inadequate to the task of accounting for the very possibility of cognition, prior

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to its being taken for granted as a fact of Nature. Husserl summarizes the movement and contribution of these lectures in a passage near the end of his fifth and final lecture. He takes the psychological position of the Logical Investigations as his point of departure and concludes with the newly established philosophical position of a nonpsychological, non-natural phenomenology. He writes: Originally the problem concerned the relation between subjective psychological experience and the actuality grasped therein, as it is in itself—first of all actual reality, and then also the mathematical and other sorts of ideal realities. But first we need the insight that the crucial problem must rather have to do with the relation between cognition and its object, but in the reduced sense, according to which we are dealing not with human cognition, but with cognition in general, apart from any existential assumptions either of the empirical ego or of a real world (1964, p. 60).

These lectures provided an insight into this crucial problem and offered a way out by performing the phenomenological reduction. Through this reduction, we are able to consider the immanent relation between cognition and its object unencumbered of anything questionable or problematic about, or transcendent to, this relation as such. By way of this reduction, phenomenology can now look to its subject matter—cognition in its ideality—without worrying about residual and psychologistic ties to the real. Since cognition is no longer taken to be the real act of an empirical ego existing in the world, natural genetic explanation is neither pressing nor appropriate. It has been justifiably excluded. Phenomenology accordingly has achieved for itself a new, independent dimension and Husserl has instituted a fundamentally new science, no longer in the tradition of Brentano and Dilthey, but now initiating a tradition all its own.

“Philosophy as Rigorous Science” De Boer has commented that: “It is because Husserl’s position in 1907 stands on the boundary between psychology and transcendental phenomenology that it is of such great interest. It gives us an insight into the historical growth of transcendental phenomenology out of psychology” (1978, p. 323). We have discussed the 1907 position of the “The Idea of Phenomenology” lectures at such great length for this reason, but it is not as yet evident to us how a transcendental phenomenology arose out of the rejected descriptive psychology of the Logical Investigations. Although we may have dropped anchor, as Husserl wrote in 1907, we have yet to set foot upon the shores of the transcendental proper. With “The Idea of Phenomenology,” we have begun the journey. With Husserl’s 1911 article for the journal Logos, “Philosophy as Rigorous Science” (1981c), we move a bit further down the path toward our destination. While in the 1907 lectures, Husserl insists that we abandon psychology, and seems to base the possibility of a non-psychologistic phenomenology upon the suspension of psychological apperception, he does not go very far in providing a positive characterization of the new attitude and dimension for which we have abandoned our old terrain. He does not provide us with much in the way of

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a justification for this additional suspension of the psychological, nor with a substantive sense for what takes its place. The characterization provided there, much like in the Logical Investigations, was largely a negative one. The phenomenological is the non-psychological. Phenomenological method is defined by its suspension of the natural psychological mode. We can look now to Husserl’s 1911 article for a more extended meditation upon philosophy’s autonomy and independence from such natural sciences as psychology and the natural attitude of mind in which they are conducted. In Chap. 1 we noticed that, in addition to the problems associated with the genetic origins of the content described in our descriptive psychology, we also ran into difficulties with respect to the initial definition offered in the Logical Investigations. It seemed to render phenomenology suspect of what Husserl had earlier characterized in that same text as anthropologism. In defining phenomenology as a form of psychology, he seemed to be committing the same error that he had detected in a transcendental psychology—restricting the truths of logic to a given, factual species of judging beings, namely humans. If phenomenology remains a form of psychology, its truths must be considered similarly to be relative to the factual and contingent nature of its subject matter, which is that of the specifically human. Husserl labeled this as a form of relativism and dismissed it as inadequate for an epistemological foundation for logic in the case of transcendental psychology. We wondered at the time why the same would not be true of a descriptive psychology, restricted as it is to a contingent and factual region of the real. In the 1907 lectures just discussed, he successfully suspended this psychological determination of our subject matter and freed phenomenology from such a lingering tie to the real. We have now abandoned the psychological by putting into brackets the question of the real existence of our subjects as human beings. We have achieved this through a methodological exclusion, through an abstraction from the real relation to the ego. In his essay entitled “Philosophy as Rigorous Science,” Husserl then turns the tables and asks why, as de Boer phrases it, “our natural inclination is to interpret consciousness in a psychological way” (1978, p. 312). Why do we find ourselves in a position at the outset in which we have to bracket or suspend psychological apperception? Is that apperception necessary in the first place, and if not, where does it come from? Are we once again temporarily bracketing something that is essential to our subject matter, but irrelevant to the issue at hand, and thus simply disregarded, or are we putting out of play an unfounded and unjustified belief that would only confound the issue at hand were it not so excluded? That is, is experience really psychological in nature, and are we suspending its essential psychological nature only methodologically, as a matter of convenience, or is psychological apperception a problematic mode of apperception, an unjustified way of perceiving experience, which is best put out of play until we can provide a justification for it? We noticed a movement between the Logical Investigations and the “The Idea of Phenomenology” from an understanding of the psychological reduction as temporary and provisional, and in a sense, ungrounded, to an understanding of the phenomenological reduction as a natural and inescapable conclusion of our epistemological reflection on the givens of experience. By the time Husserl had elaborated the phenomenological

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reduction fully, one would have to justify not excluding the objects transcendent to experience due to his convincing argument that our belief in this transcendence is as yet ungrounded. Can Husserl now do the same for the psychological apperception of experience, which does at first seem to be the natural result of an inclination to understand experience to be psychic in nature? In the 1907 lectures, Husserl presumed the naturalness of psychological apperception, that “our natural inclination is to interpret consciousness in a psychological way,” and then proceeded to suspend this apperception, never questioning in a radical way its appropriateness as the natural mode of apperception with respect to consciousness. While he did show that such an apperception transcends what is immanently given and is justifiably excluded from our phenomenological enterprise on this score, he did not take up the question of this mode of apperception itself. He did not wonder about or explore its supposed naturalness. In fact, he wrote at the time that “cognition in all of its manifestations is a psychic act.” If such a psychological interpretation of consciousness were not based on what is immanently given, then it would be reasonable to ask from where it came. It is this question that is explored at length in the “Philosophy as Rigorous Science” article to which we now turn. Husserl returns briefly to the critical impetus of the Logical Investigations in this essay in order to re-emphasize what has become a persistent theme for us: the inadequacy of a psychological discipline for the provision of an epistemological foundation. He echoes his argument against anthropologism here in showing how philosophy cannot be conducted in the natural attitude of mind first introduced conceptually in “The Idea of Phenomenology.” Philosophy cannot be conducted as a psychology of consciousness, as long as psychology is viewed as a natural science, which was, at the time, the only way in which psychology was viewed in both the psychological and philosophical traditions. At this point, however, Husserl turns to the question of why such an attempt had been made repeatedly in the century prior to this publication of this article. Why, he asks, have so many thinkers attempted to provide an epistemological foundation for science through a natural science of consciousness, understood in a psychological way? After having spent over ten years demonstrating the impossibility of such an attempt, Husserl now turns to the question of its origin. How are we to understand this inclination? How is Husserl, especially, to understand his own inclination in the Logical Investigations to define phenomenology as a descriptive psychology of consciousness, given his full and vigilant awareness of the inadequacy of a psychological discipline for the task at hand? The emergent villain responsible in the context of this essay for such an inclination is the “naturalistic” philosophy that arose “consequent upon the discovery of Nature” as the object for the natural sciences of the nineteenth century (Husserl, 1981c, p. 169). For Husserl, “naturalism” refers to a philosophy in which one “has the tendency to look upon everything as Nature,” to see “only Nature, and primarily physical Nature,” as the real (1981c, p. 169). Husserl ties the obviousness and pervasiveness of this philosophy to the abundant successes of the natural sciences (in the sense of sciences of Nature) that came into their own in the nineteenth century, and uses the term “naturalism” to refer to the over-generalization of this approach

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to the totality of reality. In naturalism, everything is subsumed by Nature as the appropriate object for natural science. Everything is to be studied natural scientifically, as a physical element of the natural world. Husserl argues that scientists and philosophers alike seized upon an approach that worked, that produced results, and were very quick to apply it to all domains of research, regardless of the nature of the subject matter to be studied. In the process, consciousness became one of the areas of research subsumed under Nature. It was approached as if it was an entity in Nature in the same way as are objects of physics. Psychology was to be conducted as natural science, modeling itself after the quantitative and mathematical approach of physics; consciousness was to be studied as a natural phenomenon. Husserl refers to the process through which consciousness and the psychic have been subsumed in this way as the “naturalization” of consciousness and its contents. He writes: Characteristic of all forms of extreme and consistent naturalism, from popular naturalism to the most recent forms of sensation-monism and energism, is on one hand the naturalizing of consciousness, including all intentionally immanent data of consciousness, and on the other the naturalizing of ideas and consequently of all absolute ideals and norms (1981c, p. 169).

We dealt, under a different label, with this naturalizing of ideas in the Logical Investigations, showing how ideas and ideal norms could not be considered to be real elements of real, subjective events in Nature, but must be considered to be objective and ideal. At that time, however, Husserl perpetuated what he has now come to see as a naturalization of consciousness itself. While he recognized that the contents of experience were being unduly “naturalized,” he failed to see that the same applied to experience itself. It is in this essay where he first comes to the explicit realization that in defining phenomenology as descriptive psychology, he remained within this naturalistic tradition with respect to consciousness. He had not questioned the interpretation of consciousness that situated it within Nature and took the psychic to be a region of the natural world. In the Logical Investigations, Husserl simply assumed that consciousness, or experience, was the appropriate object for a psychology and that this psychology, even if conducted descriptively, still pertained to a domain of Nature. In this essay, he is coming to see this earlier position as the uncritical result of a process of naturalization, which, as we shall see, is far from necessary or essential to consciousness as such. Husserl accounts for this process in the following way. Within a naturalistic framework, which is related to and yet in some ways different from the natural attitude of mind of the 1907 lectures (a point to be clarified later), the psychic “reveals itself empirically as bound to certain physical things called bodies” which belong, “without question,” to Nature (1981c, p. 171). Due to this link between the psychic and the body as that place in which consciousness dwells, he reasons, the psychic itself has been taken to be a part of Nature. It becomes merely one more property of the human organism, defined as a species in the natural world. Psychology, accordingly, takes its place as the science of these human organisms, alongside the other natural physical sciences, such as biology. Consciousness is an element of the physical; psychology is the psychophysical science belonging to it. Husserl writes:

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It is the task of psychology to explore this psychic element scientifically within the psychophysical nexus of Nature (the nexus in which, without question, it occurs) … Every psychological determination is by that very fact psychophysical, which is to say in the broadest sense (which we retain from now on), that it has a never-failing physical connotation. Even where psychology—the empirical science—concerns itself with determination of bare events of consciousness and not with dependences that are psychophysical in the usual and narrower sense, those events are thought of, nevertheless, as belonging to Nature, that is, as belonging to human or brute consciousness that for their part have an unquestioned and co-apprehended connection with human and brute organisms. To eliminate the relation to Nature would deprive the psychical of its character as an objectively and temporally determinable fact. Then let us hold fast to this: every psychological judgment involves the existential positing of physical Nature, whether expressly or not (1981c, pp. 171–172).

We discovered the last point made in this passage at the opening of this chapter, when we realized that naturalistic genetic explanation merely remained implicit in our descriptive psychology. Here Husserl is making this relation explicit, pointing out that the psychical is a fact of Nature and that psychology must, therefore, presuppose, “whether expressly or not,” the context of physical Nature as its ground. All psychology sees consciousness as human consciousness and in this way as a part of Nature. This is, as we have said, our natural inclination with respect to consciousness. We perceive it to have an “unquestioned and co-apprehended connection” with human organisms. While we have shown the necessity of suspending this connection in the pursuit of phenomenology as epistemology, can we now show that such a suspension is actually called for on the basis of an as yet uncovered “questionableness” with regard to this connection. Is the unquestioned status of this inclination justified? In order to respond to this question, Husserl turns to experience and asks how it is that Nature, or the natural world of physical bodies, is given to us. How do we come to experience bodies as bodies, as entities in Nature? Initially, we notice that “corporeal being can be experienced in a number of direct experiences, i.e., perceptions as individually identical” (1981c, p. 178). What we experience as a corporeal being is given to us through several different experiences as being the same body, as a unity that stands against the multiplicity of experiences through which it is given. It presents itself “in experience according to diversely varying ‘subjective appearances’” (1981c, p. 179), but is not taken by us to be any one of these appearances. Rather it presents itself as that which appears through these appearances as the same, identical and unitary thing. Bodies are experienced as temporal unities, subsisting an individual’s experiences of them. They stand over against these diverse experiences as being one and the same body, and “they are what they are only in this unity” (1981c, p.  179). By this Husserl means that it is only because bodies are given in experience as subsisting through different experiences, as being the same body even though the subjective appearances of it may differ, that we take this body to exist outside of our experience of it, that we take it to be a part of the natural world outside of us. In addition to the unity experienced against the background of multiple appearances, we may also notice that this body is experienced as the particular body that it is in relation to other bodies that are related to it causally in the context of Nature as

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a whole. No body is given in an isolated fashion but is given as being one body in the natural world, made up of a multitude of bodies, all of which are causally interrelated. Any single body is defined in terms of the regularities and law like changes that it exhibits as it interacts with other, similarly defined bodies in the context of Nature as a whole. As Husserl writes: “only in the causal relation to or connection with each other do they retain their individual identity” (1981c, p. 179). This individual identity is understood to be that which accounts for the regularities encountered in its causal relations with other bodies; it pertains to a substrate that carries certain real properties that are understood to determine the nature of its specific contribution to the causal chain of Nature. This substance with its properties makes up the reality of the body which, as we noted at the outset, is actually given “as unities of immediate experience, as unities of diverse sensible appearances” (1981c, p. 179). We may now ask if this is the same for consciousness. Does consciousness give itself to experience as a temporal and substantial unity that persists through change, established as a unity through its law like interaction with other bodies in the causal context of Nature? Husserl writes: “We ask, then, whether in every perception of the psychical … there is included ‘Nature’-objectivity?” (1981c, p. 179). In our experience of that which we ordinarily take to be the psychic, is there corporeal being, experienced over against the appearances through which it appears as such? Do we perceive that which we consider to be the properly psychic in the same way as we perceive bodies? Husserl responds: We soon see that the relationships in the sphere of the psychical are totally different from those in the physical sphere … Psychical being, being as “phenomenon,” is in principle not a unity that could be experienced in several separate perceptions as individually identical, not even in perceptions of the same subject. In the psychical sphere there is, in other words, no distinction between appearance and being, and if Nature is a being that appears in appearances, still appearances themselves (which the psychologist certainly looks upon as psychical) do not constitute a being which itself appears by means of appearances lying behind it (1981c, p. 179).

Psychical being refers to the being of the appearances through which bodies were experienced as bodies. These appearances themselves cannot be understood to be of the same nature as that which is said to appear through them. As appearances, they do not appear as such through other appearances that lie behind them. They simply are the appearances that they are. They are not given through different experiences, whether of the same subject or different ones, because they are these experiences themselves. There can be no distinction in the sphere of the psychic because in the sphere of the psychic being is being as appearance, as phenomenon. As Husserl concludes: “Everything that in the broadest sense of psychology we call a psychical phenomenon, when looked at in and for itself, is precisely phenomena and not Nature” (1981c, p. 179). Consciousness is not experienced as a part of Nature. It is not given to experience as an entity in Nature, since it is given to experience as that experience itself through which such entities, and Nature as a whole, are experienced.

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Having established that consciousness is of a totally different nature, Husserl defines it in contradistinction to corporeal being. “A phenomenon, then, is not ‘substantial’ unity; it has no ‘real properties’; it knows no real parts, no real changes and no causality” (1981c, p. 179). Phenomena are not related to each other causally but are immanently related as moments of the flow of experience that is consciousness. Husserl gives the following positive characterization: “The psychical is simply not experienced as something that appears; it is ‘vital experience’ and vital experience seen in reflection; it appears as itself through itself, in an absolute flow” (1981c, p. 180). This flow is not to be conceptualized on the basis of the nature of that which transcends this flow. Consciousness cannot be given to itself as a body that transcends itself. On the contrary, consciousness is given to itself immanently, through reflection, “as itself through itself,” as the flow that it is. Consciousness is given, in other words, as the temporal unfolding of appearances, these appearances being those phenomena through which the unities are constituted, which are then taken to be bodies existing in the natural world. The manifold or flow of appearances through which bodies come to be seen as bodies is not itself a body, cannot justifiably be taken to be just another body alongside of all the others, interacting causally with them. It is fundamentally different. It cannot be subsumed under the aegis of Nature as part of the causal network or chain. Those readers who are intrigued, or skeptical, of this analysis are encouraged to consult Husserl’s discussion of the givenness of Nature in contrast to that of consciousness offered in Ideas II (1952). As a result of this analysis, Husserl concludes that consciousness has been unduly naturalized through its close association with the human body as a natural entity. We are justified in our exclusion of naturalistic genetic explanation from phenomenology, since we have shown how consciousness is not, properly understood, a part of the causal context of Nature to begin with. Consciousness is not a natural entity, and as such should not be investigated on the basis of naturalistic explanation. In severing the ties between naturalistic explanation and the sphere of experiences or phenomena we are only, once again, making explicit the questionable nature of their initial connection to each other. Since they apparently were not properly joined in the first place, the phenomenological reduction as a de-­ naturalization of consciousness proves to be a justifiable, if not necessary, procedure. Once more, it should now be incumbent upon others to justify their failure to exclude naturalistic explanation from the realm of the phenomenal, rather than for us to account for our doing so. In so far as we have understood psychological apperception to entail the “existential positing of physical Nature, whether expressly or not” and the existential positing of the psychic as one domain of physical Nature, we have also justified our exclusion or suspension of this mode of apperception in our pursuit of phenomenology. The unquestioned and co-apprehended connection between consciousness and human organisms as natural entities has been found suspect and questionable. It, like the existence of objects transcendent to consciousness, is no longer to be taken for granted as valid, but can now be reasonably suspended, pending the results of our epistemological inquiry. We need no longer give in to our natural inclination in

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this matter but, through the phenomenological reduction, can put such psychological apperception out of play in order to investigate consciousness on its own terms; that is, immanently. Husserl is now able, at this point, to redefine his old nemesis of psychologism as a failure to distinguish between a psychological interpretation of consciousness, which we have just managed to expose as questionable, and what he now frames as a pure interpretation of consciousness as the subject matter for a philosophical phenomenology. He writes: It would be possible to foresee that any psychologistic theory of knowledge must owe its existence to that fact that, missing the proper sense of the epistemological problematic, it is a victim of a presumably facile confusion between pure and empirical consciousness. To put the same in another way: it “naturalizes” pure consciousness (1981c, p. 174).

Psychologism is now understood to be due to this process of naturalization, which as we noted above, was still present implicitly in the Logical Investigations. By no longer perpetuating such a process of naturalization, Husserl has finally overcome that earlier position. He has silenced the unresolved genetic question by showing it to be inappropriate to the sphere of consciousness. This sphere is to be acquired as the proper subject matter of phenomenology through the phenomenological reduction that essentially reverses the process of naturalization that led us into psychologistic error in our initial attempts at establishing an epistemological foundation for logic. Having corrected these errors, we may now pursue our discipline in an unproblematic way. We may reasonably wonder, however, whether psychological apperception must essentially entail the kind of existential positing of Nature that we have just shown to be problematic. Is all psychological apperception necessarily of the naturalistic kind, or would it be possible to interpret consciousness as psychic without unduly naturalizing it in this way? We remember that in his initial definition of psychology as a natural science in this essay, Husserl remarked that every psychological determination had a “never-failing physical connotation.” We may also remember remarking early on in our discussion of this text, that this was at the time the only way psychology had been viewed in both the psychological and philosophical traditions, as a result of the spread of naturalism. It is possible for us to ask at this time, however, whether this must necessarily continue to be the case or whether, on the other hand, it is not possible for the psychological to be re-interpreted in a non-­naturalistic fashion. Now that we have demonstrated in a convincing way that consciousness should not be viewed causally, as an element of the physical natural world, does this not have profound implications for the science of psychology as well as for philosophical phenomenology? And, if psychology is indeed to be reformed on the basis of this de-naturalization of consciousness, how would this then effect the relationship between phenomenology and psychology? In other words, if psychology reinterprets the psychic no longer as a physical entity, does this not produce a non-naturalistic psychology that will once again vie for the epistemological ground recently won by phenomenology as a philosophical discipline? Are we not to back to where we started, with parallel

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(if de-naturalized) psychological and philosophical disciplines that we have a hard time keeping distinct and separate? It is to these implications and questions that we now turn.

Psychology Reformed In exploring these implications, we begin with the question, is it possible to conduct psychology non-naturalistically, and if so, how does this effect the status of psychological apperception, both in itself and in its relation to phenomenology? While we have shown that the reduction is justified in its exclusion of psychological apperception in its naturalistic form, have we shown that it is justified in its exclusion of all forms of psychological apperception? Has our inclination to view consciousness as physical in nature been convincingly rejected, or do we not continue to be convinced that experience is given to me as my experience, and that phenomena are given as appearances that appear as moments of my psychic life? Is not consciousness “really” psychological in nature, even if it is not an element of the physical natural world? I do seem to experience myself as in the world in some sense. Has Husserl adequately addressed this fact, or is he once again attempting simply to ignore a relation that does, in fact, exist? If we look back on our discussion of the last several pages, we notice that this equivocation is indeed present in Husserl’s own presentation and that he did seem to be aware of this issue. In differentiating between consciousness and Nature, he referred to consciousness as the psychic as, e.g., in such phrases as “psychic being” and “psychic phenomena.” It was precisely the “psychic” that he defined in contradistinction to Nature as “vital experience,” as the realm of the phenomenal. It was the psychological that he defined as “precisely phenomenon and not Nature.” Through his use of the language of the psychic he seems to be implying that a naturalized interpretation of consciousness was as inappropriate to psychology as it was to phenomenology. As a result, he seems to be restoring consciousness to its properly psychological sense, rather than providing evidence for a rejection of psychological apperception. Psychology, it seems, should benefit from the de-naturalization of consciousness (also), rather than be rejected because of it. Husserl does, in fact, take this position in “Philosophy as Rigorous Science,” accusing psychology of having misunderstood the nature of its subject matter due to its imitation of the physical sciences under the persuasive influence of naturalism. In so doing, psychology has missed completely the “totally different” nature of the psychic; a difference that requires its own methods of approach and research other than those of the physical natural sciences. He writes: The phenomenal had to elude psychology because of its naturalistic point of view as well as its zeal to imitate the natural sciences and to see experimental procedures as the main point … It has neglected to consider to what extent the psychical, rather than being the presentation of a Nature, has an essence proper to itself to be rigorously and in full adequation investigated prior to any psycho-physics. It has not considered what lies in the “sense” of psychological experience and what “demands” being (in the sense of the psychical) of itself makes on method (1981c, p. 178).

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In adopting a naturalized view of consciousness, psychology has not properly oriented itself toward its own subject matter: that of a non-naturalized psychic understood in its own terms, or in terms of its own essence. As long as the being of the psychic was taken to be the being of Nature, i.e., physical being, it was impossible for psychology to recognize psychic being, or the sense of the psychic in its own right. It is this kind of ontological transformation that is initiated in “Philosophy as Rigorous Science” with respect to psychology. Through his exposure of the naturalization of consciousness, Husserl does intend to provide a reform of psychology, whether or not a suspension of this new sense of the psychic is entailed in our phenomenological method of reduction. We noted near the close of Chap. 1 that Husserl seemed to imply, already in the Logical Investigations (albeit in germinal form), that a properly conducted descriptive psychology would provide empirical psychology with a clarification of the nature of its subject matter and the manner of approach appropriate to it. Through his “division of labor” between phenomenology and psychology, he gave the phenomenologist the task of providing for the psychologist the essential insights into the nature of the psychic that are needed to circumscribe the domain for psychological investigation. At that time, we said that his suggestions for reform remained implicit and purely epistemological. They fell short of the ontological—a move which, we said, would have to await the “Philosophy as Rigorous Science” article we are presently discussing. It is just this ontological reform that is at issue here. We are now beginning to fulfill the promise made at the end of Chap. 1 with respect to the initial implications for psychology entailed in the development of phenomenology. With the rejection of the naturalization of consciousness outlined above, Husserl has provided an adequate ground upon which to reject natural scientific approaches as inappropriate for psychology as well as for philosophy. He writes: “What has constantly confused empirical psychology since its beginnings in the eighteenth century is thus the deceptive image of a scientific method modeled on that of the physio-chemical method” (1981c, p. 178). In the sphere of the psychic, where use of this method is inappropriate, he continues: “To follow the model of the natural sciences almost inevitably means to reify consciousness” (1981c, p. 178). This reification, or as we have called it thus far this “naturalization” of c­ onsciousness, has been an unfortunate turn in the history of the development of the science of psychology. It has constituted a wrong turn that Husserl adds is “heavy with consequences”: No matter how much this psychology may consider itself on the strength of the experimental method the sole scientific psychology … I am obliged to declare its opinion that it is the psychology, psychological science in the full sense, a serious error heavy with consequences (1981c, p. 174).

In this way Husserl has effected, in this article, a rejection of natural-scientific psychology as being unjustifiably naturalistic, as having been based upon a mistaken insight into the essence of the psychic. This error has made it impossible for psychology to develop as a true and fully scientific science of the psychic, properly understood.

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In the Logical Investigations, the discipline to be responsible for correcting this error was the descriptive psychology first presented there as both providing a foundation for and being preparatory to empirical, genetic psychology. We have seen a transformation of this descriptive psychology occur in Husserl’s 1907 lectures, through which phenomenology has now become a philosophical, as opposed to psychological, discipline. It appears that it is now this philosophical discipline that will bring about the needed reform in psychology, as well as in epistemology. Husserl writes that: “It is the fundamental error of modern psychology, preventing it from being psychology in the true, fully scientific sense, that it has not recognized and developed this phenomenological method” (1981c, p. 184). It seems that the new phenomenology presented in “The Idea of Phenomenology,” made possible through the bracketing of psychological apperception through the reduction, will take the place of the old descriptive psychology in its role as providing fundamental clarification with respect to the essential insights of the discipline. Through the foundational, epistemological work of phenomenology, a positive reform of psychology, as a science in its own right, will be brought about. We will have to look to phenomenology for a positive characterization of the nature of the psychic and the methods of research appropriate to it. Since “all psychological knowledge in the ordinary sense presupposes essential knowledge of the psychical,” Husserl argues that: A really adequate empirical science of the psychical in its relations to Nature can be realized only when psychology is constructed on the base of systematic phenomenology … [That is because] only a really radical and systematic phenomenology … carried on with a completely free spirit blinded by no naturalistic prejudices, can give us an understanding of the “psychical”—in the sphere of social as well as of individual consciousness (1981c, pp. 184–185).

It will require phenomenology to overcome our historical naturalistic prejudice with respect to consciousness and the psychic in order for psychology to free itself of the natural scientific method. It will then be able to fashion itself a method more consistent with the essence of the psychic understood in its own terms. Phenomenology seems to provide, then, a way of access to the psychic as such; it seems to provide an avenue through which we can determine the essence of the psychic as the proper subject matter for psychology. Husserl writes that phenomenological research will become valuable when: it directs itself purely to the sense of the experiences, which are given as experiences of the “psychical,” and when thereby it accepts and tries to determine the “psychical” exactly as it demands … to be accepted and determined, when it is seen—above all where one admits no absurd naturalizings (1981c, p. 180).

Being more concerned in this essay with establishing and laying the groundwork for philosophy as a “rigorous science,” rather than with psychology, he does not pursue this direction very far. He does provide hints as to this determination of the psychical as being “intentional” in nature (1981c, p. 182), writing, for example, that: “There is food for thought in the fact that everything psychical … has the character of a more or less complex ‘consciousness-of’” (1981c, p. 175). Since his present

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interests lie elsewhere, he cuts this discussion short, however, by leaving this as a direction to be pursued in the future: “For our purposes it is not necessary to pursue the essential analysis of these unity constructions” of personality as a psychic phenomenon “nor the problem of how they by themselves determine the task of psychology” (1981c, p. 184). This is obviously a direction that we shall want to pursue, given our more explicitly psychological interest, but we shall have to return to this as well. This topic, along with the constitution of physical Nature, is taken up in detail in Ideas II (1952; cf. Chap. 4). In our present context, this is the extent of Husserl’s interest in the reformation of the psychological in and of itself. What is more to the point in the context of Husserl’s essay, and in the context of the body of this chapter, is how we are to understand this corrected view of the psychological in relation to phenomenology as a philosophical discipline. We embarked on this analysis of the nature of a psychological interpretation of consciousness initially in order to see if we could provide a justification for its exclusion through the performance of the phenomenological reduction. In our last paragraph, however, we quoted Husserl as saying that phenomenology, to the contrary, must accept the psychical exactly as it demands to be accepted. How can a reduction that was meant to exclude or suspend psychological apperception lead to an acceptance of it? How, for that matter, could psychology have “recognized and developed” the phenomenological method of reduction as Husserl insisted was necessary to its becoming “psychology in the true, fully scientific sense,” if the reduction suspends psychological apperception? He refers in this article to the reduction to “the pure phenomenological sphere” as being the “ultimate foundation of all psychological method” (1981c, p. 181). How are we to understand this apparent equivocation on the status of psychological apperception with respect to the phenomenological reduction? Does the reduction exclude the psychological, as we had thought following our analysis of the 1907 lectures, or does it lead to an acceptance of the psychological and a reform of psychological method? If the latter is the case, are we back to defining phenomenology as a kind of psychology, although now in a de-naturalized form? At this point in the development of Husserl’s thought, the answer to this question remains unclear. At times he appears, once again, to be placing phenomenology and psychology in such close proximity that any real difference between them is easily lost. While we must enact the reduction in order to de-naturalize consciousness, it at times appears that this process has led to a “truer,” more “fully scientific,” psychology rather than to a rejection of psychology. We might better understand the reduction as having bracketed an erroneous interpretation of consciousness as an element of the physical natural world in order to make room for a properly psychological interpretation of it. This would not so much challenge our natural inclination in a radical way as revise its content; we would still view consciousness psychologically, only now in a non-naturalized form. Husserl writes, for example, that “the spell of the naturalistic point of view” has made us “incapable of prescinding from Nature and hence, too, of making the psychical an object of intuitive investigation from the pure rather than from the psychophysical point of view” (1981c, p. 181). In this sense, the reduction seems to be a suspension of naturalism and a psychophysical interpretation of consciousness in order to allow us to view consciousness

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in a purely psychic fashion. In this vein he refers to phenomenology as: “A science which is on the one hand the fundamental condition for a complete scientific psychology and on the other the field for the genuine critique of reason” (1981c, p. 181). He also writes that once phenomenology has given us a proper understanding of the psychic: Then, too, will we again be able to admit—what we can in no way admit with regard to present-day psychology—that psychology stands in close, even the closest, relation to philosophy. Then, too, the paradox of antipsychologism, according to which a theory of knowledge is not a psychological theory, will cease to scandalize, in so far as every real theory of knowledge must necessarily be based on phenomenology, which thus constitutes the common foundation for every possible philosophy and psychology (1981c, p. 185).

We began this chapter with an examination of how such a “common foundation” shared between phenomenology and psychology had been problematic for the Husserl of the Logical Investigations. We thus cannot avoid the question: Are we back now to where we started? Husserl seems to be aligning himself in this passage with “antipsychologism.” How can he regard phenomenology as a common foundation for “every possible philosophy and psychology” without returning to the psychologistic problems discussed at the beginning of this chapter, with respect to the shared descriptive moment common to descriptive and genetic psychology? Has the overcoming of naturalism been a sufficient condition for the overcoming of psychologism as well? Would a psychological, yet non-naturalistic, view of consciousness offer an adequate basis upon which to construct an epistemological discipline, i.e., a “genuine critique of reason”? Husserl writes, following the passage just cited, that: “The critical separation of the psychological and phenomenological methods shows that the latter is the true way to a scientific theory of reason and, by the same token, to an adequate psychology” (1981c, p. 185). Is this the result of our abandonment of the psychological in “The Idea of Phenomenology” lectures? Are we to replace a rejected naturalistic psychology with a phenomenologically based psychology, when we only separated phenomenology from psychology initially in order to come to a more adequate view of the psychological through the use of the phenomenological method? Having e­ stablished a radical differentiation between phenomenology and psychology in the 1907 lectures, have we returned to an identification of phenomenology and psychology in “Philosophy as Rigorous Science,” now that we have de-naturalized the psychic? Was that all that was needed in order to overcome psychologism? While the evidence for this interpretation seems strong, at other times in this text Husserl appears to think quite differently. He writes, for example, that: When freed from the false naturalism that absurdly misconstrues them, the problems of origin, for centuries so much discussed, are phenomenological problems … Only when these pure problems … are formulated and solved do the empirical problems regarding the occurrence of such representations as events of human consciousness acquire a sense that can be scientifically grasped and comprehended with a view to their solution (1981c, p. 183).

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In this passage, Husserl seems to be saying that phenomenology deals with problems of origins or representations, etc., in a pure form, prior to any consideration of these representations “as events of human consciousness”—a consideration that would presumably fall to psychology. He also refers to phenomenology as “a science of whose extraordinary extent our contemporaries have as yet no concept; a science, it is true, of consciousness that is still not psychology” (1981c, p.  173). Apparently, even though phenomenology and psychology share such basic and essential constituents, such as a foundation and method, they are not to be considered to be one science. Phenomenology is still not to be considered to be psychology. It might at least be comforting to know that this equivocation on Husserl’s part is not accidental and that he was, in fact, aware of it. He remarks, following his definition of phenomenology as not being psychology, that: But since there will be no question here of an accidental equivocation, it is to be expected beforehand that phenomenology and psychology must stand in close relationship to each other, since both are concerned with consciousness, even though in a different way, according to a different “orientation.” This we may express by saying that psychology is concerned with “empirical consciousness,” with consciousness from the empirical point of view, as an empirical being in the ensemble of Nature, whereas phenomenology is concerned with “pure” consciousness, i.e., consciousness from the phenomenological point of view (1981c, pp. 173–174).

It may seem that we have wound up in a somewhat hopeless muddle. Phenomenology and psychology, even though they stand in the “the closest relation” to each other, also differ from each other on the basis of their differing “orientations” or attitudes. But that which we thought was responsible for this change in attitude, i.e., the phenomenological reduction, is a method that is apparently shared by them both. The reduction was said to lead to a “true, fully scientific” and “adequate” psychology as well as to phenomenology. The pure phenomenological sphere was said to provide the ultimate foundation for all psychological methods. How then, can phenomenology and psychology still differ in their respective orientations? Here Husserl is saying that psychology is concerned with consciousness as “an empirical being in the ensemble of Nature.” Have we not just spent several pages rejecting this very view of the psychological? If not, then how is psychology to view consciousness as “an empirical being in the ensemble of Nature” without naturalizing it in the manner we have just shown to be inappropriate? Is there a way to view consciousness naturally (i.e., as part of Nature) without viewing it naturalistically? This challenge would seem to be one implication of “The Idea of Phenomenology” taken together with “Philosophy as Rigorous Science,” but we have yet to discover such a natural but non-naturalistic psychological apperception of consciousness. Thus far, we have only discussed a naturalistic apperception, which is excluded by the phenomenological reduction, and a non-naturalistic, intentional apperception, which seems to be shared by both phenomenology and psychology. If these two disciplines are still to be differentiated from each other on the basis of their orientation, how is it that they differ with respect to consciousness? If, for example, a non-­ naturalized view of consciousness was a possibility for psychology, would this

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psychological apperception also have to be excluded from phenomenology via the reduction? If so, how is such an exclusion to be justified? On the other hand, if this non-naturalized yet psychological interpretation of consciousness is to be accepted by phenomenology, how would it, then, differ from psychology? These are some of the questions that remain to be resolved in Husserl’s first fully mature work, the three volumes of the Ideen, and which will now be carried over into our next chapter. In this chapter, we have succeeded in justifying the phenomenological reduction as a bracketing of objects transcendent to consciousness, but we have run into a bit of difficulty in justifying the extension of this reduction to psychological apperception. When we attempted to provide further evidence for this extension of the scope of the reduction, we were only able to justify an exclusion of a naturalistic-psychological interpretation of consciousness. This leaves us with the question of whether other possible forms of psychological apperception need also be bracketed, and, if so, how this bracketing is to be justified. Is the apparent change in orientation leading from empirical consciousness to pure consciousness an epistemologically valid movement, or is it the same kind of provisional methodological device utilized in the Logical Investigations? At the opening of this chapter, we remarked that the purity achieved in the Logical Investigations was the result of a methodological device that had no ontological meaning. Have we now exhausted the ontological meaning of the reduction in the process of de-naturalizing consciousness, or is there also an ontological movement to be made between what Husserl has enigmatically referred to here as empirical and pure consciousness, and what is to be bracketed in order for us to reach the pure phenomenological sphere? On the other hand, if not, then is a change in orientation, as first discussed in the context of the Logical Investigations and apparently reappearing here, a sufficient difference if it does not also entail an ontological difference? Would that not simply be another artificial and temporary disregarding of a connection that does, in reality, exist? It is to these questions that we now turn as we take up the first volume of the Ideen.

Chapter 3

Phenomenology as Transcendental Philosophy

Psychologism can only be radically overcome by a pure phenomenology, a science infinitely removed from psychology as the empirical science of the mental attributes and states of animal realities. from the “Logical Investigations”. 2nd edition (Husserl, 1970b, p. 253)

In our last chapter we seemed to have resolved one dilemma only to be faced with several new ones. Initially, we found a way through our impasse with respect to the genetic question of the Logical Investigations by differentiating between natural and philosophical sciences and holding that phenomenology, as a philosophical discipline, would be interested in cognition only as an ideal possibility, rather than as an event in Nature. Genetic naturalistic explanation could then be considered to be inappropriate in phenomenology, since phenomenology would now be defined as a non-natural discipline. Once we make such a distinction between phenomenology as a philosophical science, and psychology as a natural science, the question arises as to how phenomenology is to understand the nature of its subject matter as different from that of psychology. In “The Idea of Phenomenology” lectures, Husserl simply stated that in order to study consciousness phenomenologically, we must suspend our natural psychological apperception with respect to it. We wondered at the time, however, how such a suspension could be justified. Granted that we wish to study the possibility of cognition as an ideal possibility, do we not still understand this possibility to be a human possibility? Would we, once again, simply be ignoring, temporarily, a connection that does, in essence, exist? It is here that things became problematic. When, in his “Philosophy as Rigorous Science” article, Husserl addressed this issue of whether or not cognition must be considered to be a possibility for persons as subjects for the natural science of psychology, he seemed to waiver in his conclusion. He showed us convincingly how the naturalistic apperception of consciousness inherent in a natural scientific psychology is ungrounded and mistaken, and therefore, justifiably suspended. But he then seemed to link phenomenology © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 L. Davidson, Overcoming Psychologism: Husserl and the Transcendental Reform of Psychology, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-59932-4_3

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together with a truer and more adequate psychology, admittedly yet to be developed, in their mutual rejection of this naturalistic approach to consciousness. While in the 1907 lectures, phenomenology achieved its new dimension through an abandonment of the psychological, in the 1911 Logos article it seems to lead to a true appreciation of the nature of the psychic and to a reform of psychology based upon it. We are left with the question, then, as to whether the rejection, or suspension, of psychological apperception carried out in the 1907 lectures is to be understood as a justified rejection of naturalistic psychology, based upon the insights of the Logos article. If the former, we can only wonder how this would not remain a psychologism, given that phenomenology would still refer to psychic experience, only no longer understood naturalistically. If the latter, we can ask how Husserl would justify this suspension of non-naturalistic psychological apperception, how he would understand the difference between a non-naturalistic psychology and phenomenology. Would a non-naturalistic psychology still be considered a natural science, in the sense of the 1907 lectures, and how can phenomenology be used to reform such a psychology, if it itself is no longer psychological? In either case, we can raise once more, in the terminology of our last chapter, the genetic question: Does phenomenology now remain, whether expressly or not, tied to a non-naturalistic psychology? Is it only an ancillary to a non-naturalistic psychology—a psychology that remains nonetheless within the natural attitude of mind? We will now turn in this chapter to Husserl’s first fully mature work in order to begin to answer these questions. We will take up the first volume of the Ideen, published in 1913, in which these issues receive their first treatment in the context of the establishment of phenomenology as a transcendental science. Before doing so, however, we will begin the chapter with a discussion of the revisions that Husserl made for the second edition of his Logical Investigations, having returned to them at this time in order to raise them to the level achieved and articulated in the Ideen. We will use these revisions, made also in 1913, as a point of departure for our examination of this new “transcendental” position, since it is through them that Husserl attempted to resolve the problems, occasioned by the first edition, which we have been discussing thus far. Through our discussion of the updating of the Logical Investigations, we will be able to review our progress to this point and place ourselves in a position to appreciate the advance embodied in the three volumes of the Ideen, only the first of which will be dealt with here. We will, in this chapter, follow Husserl through the first and most significant portion of this text: his “winning” of the region of Absolute Being as that which is the proper domain of consciousness. Having established phenomenology as a transcendental science in this chapter, we will then move on to the remainder of Ideas I and the other two volumes of the Ideen in our next chapter, when we will have to take up the question of the implications of this transcendental position for psychology.

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The Logical Investigations Revised We remember that when it came time for Husserl to define his newly created phenomenology in the first edition of the Logical Investigations, he stated, quite simply, that it was descriptive psychology. By 1913, when he had decided to make revisions in this text for a second edition in order to integrate the developments in his own understanding of phenomenology as it had evolved since 1900, this definition was foremost among those passages that had to be revised. We can most easily begin our own discussion of these revisions as reflecting the changes in Husserl’s thought by looking to the revised definition that he offers here, now that phenomenology can no longer be considered to be a psychological discipline, even in the sense of descriptive psychology. In the place of his earlier definition, we now read the following explanation: If our sense of phenomenology has been grasped, and if it has not been given the current interpretation of an ordinary ‘descriptive psychology’, a part of natural science, then an objection, otherwise justifiable, will fall to the ground, an objection to the effect that all theory of knowledge, conceived as a systematic phenomenological clarification of knowledge, is built upon psychology (1970b, p. 261n).

Initially, that is, Husserl wants to alert his reader to his own awareness of the issue of psychologism as it remained after the publication of this first edition. Phenomenology is not to be considered a part of natural science, an ordinary descriptive psychology, for this could be objected to justifiably as a perpetuation of psychologism (as we argued in our re-consideration of Chap. 2). Philosophy cannot be based upon a psychological discipline, he now agrees, even “if only upon its preliminary descriptive researches into intentional experience” (1970b, p.  261n). This last qualification, or further separation of phenomenology from psychology, speaks directly to Husserl’s position in the first edition and to our own concerns at the outset of our last chapter. Apparently, phenomenology and psychology cannot even share a common descriptive moment. What is Husserl’s new sense of phenomenology, then? How do the “descriptive researches into intentional experience” differ in phenomenology from those of an ordinary descriptive psychology? To the objection of a residual psychologism, no longer justifiable, Husserl responds: We naturally reply that if psychology is given its old meaning, phenomenology is not descriptive psychology: its peculiar ‘pure’ description, its contemplation of pure essences on a basis of exemplary individual intuitions of experiences (often freely imagined ones), and its descriptive fixation of the contemplated essences into pure concepts, is no empirical, scientific description. It rather excludes the natural performance of all empirical (naturalistic) apperceptions and positings. Statements of descriptive psychology regarding ‘perceptions’, ‘judgments’, ‘feelings’, ‘volitions’, etc., use such names to refer to the real states of animal organisms in a real natural order, just as descriptive statements concerning psychical states deal with happenings in a Nature not imagined but real. All general statements have here a character of empirical generality: they hold for this Nature. Phenomenology, however, does not discuss states of animal organisms (not even as belonging to a possible Nature as such), but perceptions, judgments, feelings as such, and what pertains to them a priori with unlimited generality, as pure species, of what may be seen through a purely intuitive apprehension of essence, whether generic or specific (1970b, pp. 261–262n).

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If phenomenology is not to share a descriptive base with psychology, then its descriptions cannot be of psychological reality; they cannot be of the experiences of real states of animal organisms. If such a difference was not established between phenomenological and psychological description, the insights of phenomenological science would be restricted to empirical generalities about the nature of the organism being studied and this would result, as we have seen, in a psychologism. In order to avoid such a restriction to a natural species, and the implicit tie to the naturalistic explanation appropriate to sciences of such species, phenomenological description, writes Husserl, “excludes the natural performance” of “naturalistic” apperceptions. It does not regard perception, for example, as a real state of an animal organism in Nature. We came this far in our review of the 1907 lectures on “The Idea of Phenomenology.” In order to do phenomenology, we are to bracket our “natural inclination” to interpret consciousness in a psychological way. What remains, we may wonder, following such a bracketing. How is experience to be interpreted once naturalistic apperceptions have been excluded? Husserl seems to be saying that the exclusion of naturalistic apperception is sufficient to distance phenomenology from an “ordinary” psychology, or from a psychology that has what he refers to as “its old meaning.” This old meaning, as we discovered in the “Philosophy as Rigorous Science” article, is the meaning of the naturalized, natural scientific psychology that interprets consciousness as a material property of human organisms existing as natural entities within the context of physical Nature. If psychology is given this old meaning, writes Husserl, then phenomenology is not descriptive psychology. Phenomenology is not a natural scientific, even if descriptive, psychology of consciousness. But are we to take Husserl to mean that if psychology is not given its old meaning, if it is not meant in this sense, that phenomenology may still be considered a descriptive psychology—in some new and yet to be determined, non-naturalistic, sense? Are we still to interpret consciousness psychologically, but now in a non-naturalized way? Have we merely “purified” our idea of the psychic? Is this what Husserl means by a “pure species”? In line with this position, Husserl states further on in the passage that we have been citing that phenomenology functions as “the necessary basis for every psychology that could with justification and in strictness be called scientific” (1970b, p. 262n). He leads us to believe that phenomenology must remain concerned with the psychic, in so far as he writes: “Our essential insights into perceptions, volitions and other forms of experience will naturally hold also of the corresponding empirical states of animal organisms, as geometrical insights hold of spatial figures in Nature” (1970b, p. 262n). But were phenomenology and psychology not to share a common descriptive base in some sense, how would it be that the insights of phenomenology naturally hold for the corresponding states of animal organisms? Were phenomenology and psychology no longer to share the same realm of description, where is the source of such a “correspondence”? Are we not still studying the perceptions that are, in reality, the perceptions of such an animal organism, merely overlooking this reality as long as we are doing phenomenology rather than psychology? This would account for our natural correspondence, but it is difficult to see how such a temporary and seemingly arbitrary exclusion could be of such philosophical import.

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The necessary basis that phenomenology seems to provide for psychology is understood in 1913 in the same way as it was in 1900, when phenomenology was still thought to be a descriptive psychology in the ordinary sense. As noted at the conclusion of Chap. 1, phenomenology was concerned with the nature of perceptions or judgments per se, while psychology was concerned with perceptions or judgements as empirical realities, or events in Nature. The point made at the time and in this regard was that it is inappropriate for psychology to attempt to study perceptions as real events taking place in the psychic realm (as one domain of Nature) without an initial understanding of the nature of perception. One needs to know what a perception is before one can study how perceptions are experienced empirically. Husserl seems to be merely restating this earlier position in terms of states of animal realities. He seems to be saying that phenomenology must provide an epistemological clarification of the nature of perception as such in order for psychology to be able to study perceptions as “empirical states of animal organisms.” Given that phenomenology seems to be providing the same basis for psychology that it had 13 years earlier, we might wonder whether the relationship between phenomenology and psychology was really changed in any substantial way in that time. Do the descriptions of phenomenology and psychology not really pertain to the same reality? In our discussion of Husserl’s “Philosophy as Rigorous Science” article, we saw him point out that phenomenology and psychology must stand in “even the closest” relationship to each other due to the fact that they are both concerned with consciousness, even though according to a different orientation. We are having trouble at the moment, we might say, in evaluating the extent of this difference. There is, at least, an obvious tension between the way in which phenomenology is no longer psychological and the way in which it remains related to, if not directly concerned with, the psychological. We can take as another example of this tension, the revisions introduced by Husserl into his Introduction for the second volume of the Logical Investigations. In this Introduction, we are once again faced with a separation of phenomenology from psychology, at the same time that we are made aware of their apparent kinship. Initially, Husserl established the fact that phenomenology is not interested in experience as an empirical fact. He writes that phenomenology: has as its exclusive concern, experiences intuitively seizable and analysable in the pure generality of their essence, not experiences empirically perceived and treated as real facts, as experiences of human or animal experiments in the phenomenal world that we posit as an empirical fact (1970b, p. 249).

As it stands, this marks, as we have said, an advance beyond the first edition of this text, in that by circumscribing phenomenology’s domain in this way, we have severed all residual ties to naturalism and naturalistic explanation. If these ­experiences are not to be considered the experience of human experiments in the natural world, then phenomenology is liberated from genetic accounts of such experiences as natural events. However, in the very next paragraph Husserl adds that phenomenology should also be considered “an ancillary to psychology conceived as an empirical science,” by which he means:

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3  Phenomenology as Transcendental Philosophy Proceeding in purely intuitive fashion, it analyses and describes in their essential generality—in the specific guise of a phenomenology of thought and knowledge—the experiences of presentation, judgment and knowledge, experiences which, treated as classes of real evens in the natural context of zoological reality, receive a scientific probing at the hands of empirical psychology (1970b, p. 249).

Apparently, phenomenology does describe and analyze the same reality (i.e., consciousness) as that of empirical psychology, only under a different guise. Apparently, as Husserl suggested in the Logos article, the subject matter is shared; it is only that it is viewed differently, depending upon one’s interest or orientation. Psychology treats experiences as “real events in the natural context of zoological reality,” while phenomenology disregards or suspends this particular treatment of experience in order to describe and analyze it in its essential generality. The question remains as to whether or not in doing so, phenomenology is merely, and temporarily, ignoring a connection that actually does obtain, not only naturally but necessarily—as we saw Husserl doing in the first edition. Before attempting to answer this question, we should note that Husserl was himself aware of this tension and that he considered it “rooted in grounds of essence.” The difficulty that we are having in separating phenomenology from psychology, while at the same time acknowledging their close relation to each other, is not simply a manifestation of our lack of conceptual clarity with respect to this issue. It is partly attributable to the nature of this relationship itself. This is apparently also true of our “by no means chance inclination” to consider the properly phenomenological to be psychological in nature. Husserl writes what might be considered the most important passage introduced into this second edition, and the passage from which we drew our epigraph for this chapter: Clarifying researches are especially needed to explain our by no means chance inclination to slip unwitting from an objective to a psychological attitude, and to mix up two bodies of data distinguishable in principle however much they may be essentially related, and to be deceived by psychological misconstructions and misinterpretations of the objects of logic. Such clarifications can, by their nature, only be achieved within a phenomenological theory of the essences of our thought —and knowledge—experiences, with continuous regard to the things essentially meant by, and so belonging to the latter … Psychologism can only be radically overcome by a pure phenomenology, a science infinitely removed from psychology as the empirical science of the mental attributes and states of animal realities. In our sphere, too, the sphere of pure logic, such a phenomenology alone offers us all the necessary conditions for a finally satisfactory establishment of the totality of basic distinctions and insights. It alone frees us from the strong temptation, at first inevitable, since rooted in grounds of essence, to turn the logically objective into the psychological (1970b, p. 253).

Husserl now considers his own attempt in the first edition to conduct phenomenology from a descriptive psychological perspective, while still mistaken, to have been due to a by no means chance inclination, but to an inevitable temptation rooted “in grounds of essence.” “Clarifying researches” are needed in order to explain such a mistake and to clear up the mix up we have been guilty of with respect to the two bodies of data distinguishable in principle yet related.

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Such clarifying researches are not, however, offered by Husserl in his revisions of this text. We shall have to await our treatment of his later works before coming across any explicit appraisals of the inevitability of this temptation or any of the reasons why this inclination is by no means chance. At this point, Husserl remains content with an account of the establishment of this “infinite distance” required between phenomenology and psychology that recapitulates his own historical development as covered thus far from the Philosophy of Arithmetic through “Philosophy as Rigorous Science.” He is attempting, through these revisions, to bring his audience up to date with his own thinking—to where he has come thus far in his own struggles with these issues. Husserl began in the Philosophy of Arithmetic from an ordinary psychological point of departure, attempting to ground mathematics in psychological analyses of the subjectivity of knowing. He remarks in a note to the second edition of the Logical Investigations that one “naturally” starts with “the psychological point of view” (1970b, p. 576n). Through his lengthy refutation of psychologism in the first volume of the first edition, he realized that this point of view was inappropriate with regard to the objects of logic, and attempted through “methodological exclusions” to abstract from the psychological apperception that had attempted to subsume these objects under the aegis of the psychological. In his revisions of the Fifth Investigation, he writes: One should again recall that it is possible to leave out all presupposing of natural reality, persons and other conscious animals included therein in our completed studies, so that they are understood as discussions of ideal possibilities. One finally sees them in the light of methodological exclusions, which cut out whatever is a matter of transcendent apperception and assertion, so as to bring out what is really part of an experience and of its essence. Experience has then become the pure experience of phenomenology from which psychological apperception has likewise dropped away (1970b, p. 559n).

These methodological exclusions were justified on the basis of the questionable character of transcendent apperception and assertion in the 1907 lectures on “The Idea of Phenomenology,” in which psychological apperception was shown to be merely one form of transcendent apperception, and which, thereby, was subsequently called into question. In the 1911 article, “Philosophy as Rigorous Science,” psychological apperception was defined as entailing a naturalization of consciousness through which it was considered to be a part of psycho-physical Nature. Through this further exploration of its questionable character, Husserl was then able to justify its exclusion from phenomenology on the basis of its basic misconstrual of its subject matter. A psychological apperception of consciousness was not only inappropriate to phenomenology, but it was based on an as yet ungrounded assertion of real or transcendent existence that should be considered problematic for psychology as well. In his revisions of the Fifth Investigation, Husserl also writes: Assertions of phenomenological fact can never be epistemologically grounded in psychological experience … Phenomenological intuition … as often stressed, fundamentally excludes all psychological apperception and real assertion of existence, all positings of psycho-physical Nature with its actual things, bodies and persons, including one’s own empirical ego, as well as all that transcends pure consciousness … It is of the greatest importance to be quite clear on this matter (1970b, p. 607).

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This brings us up to our present state of conceptual clarity and confusion. We are aware that “it is of the greatest importance to be quite clear” on the nature of the difference between phenomenological intuition and psychological insight, but we seem to be at a loss as to how to characterize this difference beyond the rejection of naturalistic psychology provided in the 1911 Logos article. We understand that our epistemological interest requires that we exclude from our subject matter all psychological apperception, but that if our interest is of a psychological nature, this apperception is not only allowed to remain but is constitutive of our subject matter. If, as Husserl has written, it is through the methodological exclusion of phenomenology that we are able to “bring out what is really part of an experience and of its essence,” does this mean that our inclination to interpret consciousness psychologically is fundamentally mistaken? Does this mean that experience is not, in essence, psychological in nature? If so, what implications would this have for psychology, as that discipline that seems to remain alongside phenomenology, standing in close relationship to it? At this point, Husserl only remarks that the “tie-up” to psychology that has remained problematic ever since the first edition must be understood as “merely transitional.” He writes: When we speak simply of the real, and in general of the phenomenological analysis and description of experiences, the tie-up of our discussions to the psychological material is (we must keep on stressing) merely transitional, since none of its empirically real conceptions and assertions of existence (e.g., of experience as states of animal beings having experiences in a real, space-time world) are at all operative, that pure phenomenological validity of essence is aimed at and claimed (1970b, p. 577).

Apparently, the psychological apperception that considers experiences to be states of animal beings, while it is our natural point of departure, simply need not be operative when one pursues properly phenomenological interests. We begin with what is inevitably or “by no means” arbitrarily considered to be psychological material, but our consideration of it as such is “merely transitional.” We soon realize that we must exclude all psychological apperception, all of its empirically real conceptions, in order to attain the purified material that can then be considered phenomenologically, or in its essential generality. It is this transformation that is of the greatest importance. Husserl stresses the significance of this transformation often and made several notes to the second edition where he pointed out that it is this transformation that delineates phenomenology as a non-psychological, and thus non-psychologistic, science. For example, in a note to the Fifth Investigation, Husserl comments that a “purification” is necessary “if we wish our treatments to have, not a descriptive-psychological, but a purely phenomenological value.” He then adds with respect to this purification that: “One should note how, up to this point and for the future, each analysis can be first, conducted as mere psychology, but there really permits of that ‘purification’ which gives it value as ‘pure’ phenomenology” (1970b, p. 538n). There is, then, at least a methodological parallelism between phenomenology and psychology such that each experience can be described and analyzed from either orientation, depending, as we said, upon one’s interest. We might remember that we

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first introduced this notion of a parallelism between phenomenology and psychology in Chap. 1, as Husserl’s characterization in the first edition of the Logical Investigations of the relationship between descriptive psychology (or phenomenology) and genetic, or explanatory, psychology. Here we have a similar parallel relationship, except that it is now between phenomenology (as a non-psychological, non-natural science) and psychology. Husserl writes, for instance, in the context of the Fifth Investigation, that: “What has here been made plain, in a context of natural existence, and by methods appropriate to psychology … will yield up its phenomenological substance if we abstract from the empirically real” (1970b, p. 565). The nature of this parallelism is also captured well in Husserl’s statement, once more introduced as a note into the second edition, that: “According as psychological apperception is kept out or kept in, the same sort of analysis has phenomenological or psychological import” (1970b, p. 556n). Phenomenology is a non-psychological approach to what would otherwise be considered, naturally, to be psychological material. It gains its subject matter, no longer psychological in nature, through a purification that brings out “what is really part of an experience and of its essence.” We have shown already in our last chapter, however, that a merely methodological exclusion is problematic in that it does not address the ontological issue raised by this kind of separation of disciplines. In our purification of psychological material, are we putting out of play something that is not essential to the nature of our subject matter, or are we temporarily, out of theoretical interest in epistemological questions, ignoring a relation that does essentially exist? Is this merely a methodological parallelism; is the only difference one of theoretical orientation? If so, are our methodological exclusions fully justified by this theoretical interest? Is the phenomenological reduction simply something that one chooses to perform, based upon one’s interest in establishing an epistemological foundation for science (cf. Boehm, 1965)? Can psychological apperception be rejected on this basis, or is this not the kind of artificial and provisional attempt at an exclusion that Husserl himself critiqued as being a “halfway measure and lack of radicalism” in his first edition? We raised these questions several pages ago but put them aside temporarily in order to attend to how Husserl understood these issues to be entailed in the very nature of the relationship between phenomenology and psychology. We came no closer to a resolution, however, in so far as these passages provided no real answers. They did serve to establish a parallelism between phenomenology and psychology and to highlight for us the way in which these two disciplines are “distinguishable in principle” (in terms of the infinite distance between them) while being at the same time essentially related. Since Husserl has yet to provide us with the researches needed to come to an adequate grasp of the nature of this relationship, the most that we can do at this point is to make explicit the questions that remain to be answered. They are as follows: Is experience psychological in nature? If so, how can psychological apperception be justifiably excluded from an analysis of experience? If not, then what is the nature of experience? Why is it natural to begin with a psychological point of view, but then necessary to leave it? Is such a point of departure mistaken? If so, how could psychology exist alongside phenomenology as its parallel? Should we abandon psychology

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for good? How can experience both be and not be psychological in nature? What is pure experience? How can phenomenology be infinitely removed from psychology, if the only difference between them is one of orientation? Did we not read in Husserl’s “Philosophy as Rigorous Science” article that psychology must also utilize the phenomenological reduction, thereby acquiring a phenomenological orientation? If it is possible for psychology to do so, then how can we understand the nature of this infinite distance? How can psychology utilize the phenomenological method, if this is the only thing that separates phenomenology from psychology to begin with? It is with these questions in mind that we turn to the Ideen.

Ideas I: the Introduction Husserl’s own preoccupation with these issues, and the central significance he attributed to them in the context of phenomenology as a whole, is evident in his Introduction to this text. He spends fully half of this Introduction addressing once more the relation between phenomenology and psychology and complains that the nature of this relation remains misunderstood. In so far as this text was to serve as the first fully adequate and comprehensive introduction to phenomenology offered by Husserl, this fact is of no small significance. As a matter of fact, one gets the impression from Husserl’s tone, as well as from his text, that the nature of this relation must be properly understood before any real headway can be made in the establishment of phenomenology as a legitimate philosophy. It is confusion in this area that remains the obstacle to true progress. Given Husserl’s concern with overcoming psychologism, and the fact that phenomenology has arisen out of this struggle with psychologism, this should not surprise us. Rather, the fact that this still remains a central concern of his in his Introduction to the first volume of the series entitled: “Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy,” which itself is entitled “General Introduction to Pure Phenomenology,” seems perfectly in order, especially given our own treatment of these issues thus far. A “general introduction to pure phenomenology” requires just this kind of clarification; we have seen how it is needed. Husserl begins this Introduction by telling us that: To bring about the phenomenological attitude and, by reflecting, to elevate its specific peculiarity and that of the natural attitudes into the scientific consciousness—this is the first and by no means easy task whose demands we must perfectly satisfy if we are to achieve the realm of phenomenology and scientifically assure ourselves of the essence proper to phenomenology (1983, p. xvii).

It could be said that Husserl’s General Introduction seeks to accomplish only this, as well as having to accomplish it first. Regardless of whether this remains a primary task or the primary task, the determination of the phenomenological standpoint in its “specific peculiarity” necessarily entails along with it the determination of the natural attitude in contrast to it. Husserl thus sets out in this text to determine the nature of phenomenology in contrast to that of psychology, as one science of the natural attitude. This task begins in the Introduction in the very next sentence. Husserl writes:

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During the last decade much has been said in German philosophy and psychology about phenomenology. In supposed agreement with the Logical Investigations, phenomenology has been conceived as a substratum of empirical psychology … It would seem that my protest against this conception has been of little avail; and the added explanations, which sharply pinpointed at least some chief points of difference, either have not been understood or have been heedlessly pushed aside (1983, pp. xvii–xviii).

Phenomenology, as we are by now used to hearing, is not to be identified with psychology as it was in the first edition of the Logical Investigations. We are perhaps in a good position to understand why Husserl’s protests against such an interpretation have been of such “little avail” as his elucidations have perhaps not been as sharp as he would like to believe. We, being explicitly interested in just these points of difference, wish not to set them heedlessly aside, however, but to follow Husserl in his attempt to clear up these misunderstandings. We gladly and patiently follow behind. In addition to the problems that this has created with respect to a correct understanding of the nature of phenomenology, Husserl is quick to point out that these misunderstandings also have kept his readers from appreciating the reform of psychology that would be entailed in the development of phenomenology, apparently as a non-psychological disciple. As he had done in the “Philosophy as Rigorous Science” article, he sees the development of phenomenology as a non-­psychological discipline to lead, nonetheless, to a correction of a psychological method and a reform of psychology as a science. This has also not as yet taken place, due to the mistaken identification of phenomenology with psychology. This identification is beneficial for neither discipline. He continues: Thus the replies directed against my criticism of psychological method are also quite negative because they miss the straightforward sense of my presentation. My criticism of psychological method did not at all deny the value of modern psychology, did not at all disparage the experimental work done by eminent men. Rather it laid bare certain … radical defects of method upon the removal of which … must depend an elevation of psychology to a higher scientific level and an extraordinary amplification of its field of work (1983, p. xviii).

Once again, we may question Husserl’s characterization of his prior statements on this issue as being “straightforward,” but their significance is nonetheless apparent. Husserl does wish to keep alive both the project of a universal philosophy as an epistemological ground for science and the project of a scientific psychology, as one of the sciences for which this ground will have been provided. For those of us ­interested in the “elevating” of psychology to a “higher scientific level,” this passage brings hope. In the midst of this somewhat hopeless muddle, Husserl gives us reason to read on. Perhaps, we might even think, this muddle has been brought about by the fact that he has been unwilling to give up the second of these projects. We have remained confused because Husserl has wanted to keep psychology alive in conjunction with establishing phenomenology as a non-psychological discipline; accordingly, he has refused to exile psychology from the overall picture unconditionally.

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Having made us aware of the present and potential pitfalls and their price, Husserl proceeds to attempt to set the record straight. He has pointed out these problems for a reason: I touch on this dispute here so that, in view of the prevailing misinterpretations, ever so rich in consequences, I can sharply emphasize from the start that pure phenomenology … is not psychology and that neither accidental delimitations of its field not its terminologies, but most radical essential grounds, prevent its inclusion in psychology (1983, p. xviii).

We are to understand at the very outset that the discipline we are setting out to establish is not a form, or sub-domain, of psychology and that, for reasons of principle, this should begin to resolve, at least, the difficulties that remained for us following “Philosophy as Rigorous Science.” Husserl’s emphasis, both explicitly stated and implied in his use of italics, is clear; this is a difference not to be taken lightly, but is, as he has said previously, of the greatest importance. By this time, he is aware of the considerations that have made this difference difficult to grasp; namely, the apparent connection between phenomenology and psychology in terms of their shared subject matter and his own connection between phenomenology and psychology, with respect to the reform of psychological method mentioned above. He addresses these considerations here, in his attempt to establish this all-important difference in spite of them: No matter how great the significance which phenomenology must claim to have for the method of psychology, no matter how essential the “foundations” which it furnishes for it, pure phenomenology … is no more psychology than geometry is natural science… The fact that pure phenomenology is not psychology is in no respect altered by the fact that phenomenology has to do with “consciousness,” with all sorts of mental processes, acts and act-­ correlates. What with the prevailing habits of thinking, to achieve an insight into that indeed requires no little effort (1983, pp. xviii–xix).

We may pause at this point to note several things that will prove helpful in what is to come. Firstly, Husserl is arguing for a new way of looking at things, which contrasts with what he now refers to as the natural attitude. Both in terminology and in tone (of insistence), this passage is reminiscent of the conclusion of the first of the 1907 lectures, as mentioned above. We might remember that the difficulty that remained at the close of these lectures was that we had yet to provide an adequate justification for the performance of the reduction that led from one attitude to the next, other than that of our epistemological interest. We were not quite sure as yet how this change of attitude fully distanced us from the apparent psychological nature of our subject matter. We were still studying consciousness or experience. How was the psychological justifiably excluded? What was the source of the infinite distance needed to overcome psychologism? We might expect Husserl to provide an answer to this question here. Secondly, we might note that in order to obtain the phenomenological perspective, we must set aside “prevailing misinterpretations” and “habits of thinking.” In this, Husserl seems to be saying that phenomenology provided a new way of looking at old material, and that we must put aside the way we usually, habitually, think about things in order to see them anew, from a different perspective. We can assume,

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from this passage and from the revisions for the second edition of the Logical Investigations just discussed, that the old way of looking, which must now be set aside, and to which we must keep from reverting, is that of psychology (as a natural science, in the sense of a science of the natural attitude). The psychological approach to consciousness constitutes the old viewpoint, which we must leave behind. That this is indeed Husserl’s view becomes clear in the next paragraph. He elaborates on the reasons that it requires no little effort to gain clarity on this point in the lengthy passage which follows. He seems to be getting at here, for the first time since the concluding paragraph of his first of “Idea of Phenomenology” lectures, the difficulty involved in actually performing the phenomenological reduction and moving, thereby, from the natural attitude of mind (as he called it in 1907), to the philosophical or phenomenological attitude. It is through the performance of this reduction that one leaves the psychological for the phenomenological, as had been the case in the earlier lectures. In this text, Husserl is no longer viewing the process as simply a change in attitude or perspective, but as a new way of looking at things and a new way which is most evidently a very difficult way to learn. It is this new way that we have been unable thus far to appreciate fully and to acquire adequately to overcome the problems of understanding elucidated above. But as Husserl writes, “noting less is required”: That we set aside all hitherto prevailing habits of thinking, that we recognize and tear down the intellectual barrier with which they confine the horizon of our thinking and now, with full freedom of thought, seize upon the genuine philosophical problems to be set completely anew made accessible to us only by the horizon open on all sides: these are hard demands. But nothing less is required. Indeed, what makes so extraordinarily hard the acquisition of the proper essence of phenomenology, the understanding of the peculiar sense of its problems, and of its relationship to all other sciences (in particular to psychology), is that, for all this, a new style of attitude is needed which is entirely altered in contrast to the natural attitude in experiencing and the natural attitude in thinking. To move freely in it without relapsing into the old attitudes, to learn to see, distinguish, and describe what lies within view, require, moreover, peculiar and laborious studies (1983, p. xix).

At first he states that this book shall proceed “from the natural standpoint, from the world as it confronts us, from consciousness as it offers itself in psychological experience” (1983, p. xix). He then adds that we shall move from this initial psychological viewpoint, through the method of phenomenological reduction, to a properly phenomenological viewpoint, which, for the first time, he refers to as that of the “transcendental” (1983, p. xix). The third point that we should note at this juncture is Husserl’s motivation for this particular plan of action. That is, why would Husserl begin with the psychological viewpoint, given that that is the viewpoint that we wish to leave behind, to abandon for good? If he wishes to establish a new way of looking at things in place of the old, psychological, way, why start with the old way? Husserl tells us that it will be the “pre-eminent task” of this first volume “to seek ways by which the excessive difficulties of penetrating into this new world can be overcome, so to speak, piece by piece” (1983, p. xix). Fully aware of the difficulties involved in moving from the natural attitude to the phenomenological, as bemoaned in the lengthy passage above, Husserl is seeking a way in this General Introduction

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to a Pure Phenomenology to help us along this path step by step. He is concerned how to make this transition to a new way of seeing understandable and accessible to his readers. The plan of action that he introduces here is actually a pedagogical strategy designed to initiate his readers into the new way of seeing in a manageable and gradual fashion. We begin with the reader’s (as it was Husserl’s) natural starting point, the standpoint, as he writes, “of the world as it confronts us.” We will then proceed to “lay bare the presuppositions essential to psychological experience” (1983, p. xix), allowing us to set aside this habitual way of seeing once it has been proven to be unjustified, ungrounded, or simply relative to one’s interest. This movement, from a psychological treatment of consciousness to a phenomenological one, is the same movement outlined in the revisions to the second edition of the Logical Investigations discussed above, in which Husserl wrote that each analysis could first be conducted psychologically, but could then be purified of its psychological significance and conducted in the manner of pure phenomenology. The movement outlined in those revisions, as well as the movement performed here, is that of the phenomenological reduction, the reduction through which, Husserl here writes, we can “do away with barriers to cognition that belong to the essence of every natural style of research” (1983, p. xix). We have seen how this pedagogical strategy recapitulates Husserl’s own development of this point. He began with the psychological viewpoint in the Philosophy of Arithmetic and has been working his way out of it toward the genuine phenomenological viewpoint ever since, as it were piece by piece. We would suppose that, faced with the difficult task of introducing his reader to this radically new standpoint that it took Husserl himself over 10 years to discover, he decided that he should gradually retrace his own steps for us so that we could follow him along in his own reasoning, ending up eventually at the final destination of pure phenomenology. The leap cannot be made all at once but must be won gradually through exacting and “laborious” studies. Husserl actually suggests that there is a two-fold reason for our beginning with the psychological perspective, only one of which has to do with his own history. He writes that the analyses of this text will start from psychology “as demanded not only by the prejudices of the times but also by the internal communities of the matters in question” (1983, p. xx). It was the prejudices of the times that led him in his own early works to presume a psychological, even if descriptive psychological, perspective. This is also the perspective, he said above, that confronts us in everyday life. We are reminded here of the clarifying researches that were not offered in the revisions to the Logical Investigations, but which were alluded to there as being needed in order to clarify the kind of inner affinity mentioned. There is apparently an inner affinity between phenomenology and psychology that makes it natural for us to begin with the psychological, regardless of our interest. It will only make sense for Husserl to begin there in this text in so far as his intent is to overcome this prejudice, whatever its source. We begin with the psychological in order to expose these inner affinities and to defuse them, or to render them unproblematic. This choice of a pedagogical strategy will play an increasingly interesting and integral role in Husserl’s works from this point on, as we shall come to appreciate.

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What we need to appreciate at this point is that Husserl is adopting such a strategy in the work with which we are presently engaged. Phenomenology must be contrasted with psychology because otherwise, we would continue to do psychology, whether or not we were expressly aware of doing so (cf. de Boer, 1978; Ricoeur, 1967). Husserl concludes his treatment of this relationship in the Introduction by defining for us the differences between phenomenology and psychology, which we are eventually to come by piece by piece in what is to follow. “Psychology,” he writes, “is an experiential science” and “two things are implied is the usual sense of the word ‘experience’”: psychology first is a “science of facts” and secondly, it is a science of “realities.” By this second attribute, Husserl means that: The “phenomena” that it, as psychological “phenomenology,” deals with are real occurrences which, as such occurrences, if they have actual existence, find their place with the real subjects to whom they belong in the one spatiotemporal world (1983, p. xx).

This is the same as saying that psychology treats experiences as real states of animal organisms, or real events in the natural context of zoological reality. Since we are striving for clarity here, after having tolerated patiently the persistent confusion of the last sections of this book, we will temporarily overlook Husserl’s reference to “psychological ‘phenomenology’,” given that he is in the midst of attempting explicitly to differentiate between phenomenology and psychology. We shall return to this anomaly later, however, when we are in a better position to understand it without unnecessarily intensifying our already heightened state of confusion. Presently, phenomenology is differentiated from psychology by being a “science of essences” as opposed to a science of facts, and the phenomena of this science are to be “characterized as irreal” as opposed to “real” (1983, p. xx). The pure phenomenology that comes to parallel psychology is now called “transcendental phenomenology” (1983, p. xx). In so far as Husserl has only mentioned this in anticipation of that which we shall establish systematically in what is to follow in the text, he does not elaborate on these distinctions further at this point. He does stop to make one remark, though, with respect to these points of differentiation. He comments: It will strike the reader that in the aforementioned two points, instead of the generally customary single separations of sciences into sciences of realities and sciences of idealities … two separations of sciences appear to be used which correspond to the two contrasting pairs: matter of fact and essence, real and non-real (1983, p. xx).

We remember that the distinction between sciences of the real and sciences of the ideal was the primary distinction utilized in the Logical Investigations to differentiate phenomenology from psychology and overcome psychologism. That distinction is now going to be replaced by a two-fold division, necessitated by the ever richer and deeper meaning which phenomenology has come to take on in the 10 or so years since it was initially defined as descriptive psychology. This two-fold division will essentially enable us to distinguish phenomenology from psychology in ways that were undreamt of at the time of the Logical Investigations. We can now turn to the text of Ideas I itself in order to see what kinds of changes have taken place in these 10 or so years and how they have altered the relationship between phenomenology and psychology.

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Ideas I: the Natural Attitude Suspended The first chapter of this work is devoted to establishing the difference between fact and essence and between the respective sciences appropriate to each. This, as we saw, is one of the divisions that will enable us to distinguish phenomenology from other sciences. It will be a science of essence, what is called an “eidetic” science. The difference that Husserl is concerned with can be seen as built upon the kind of analyses he originally offered in the Logical Investigations, dealing with the ideality of objects as opposed to the reality of the acts whose objects these are. It is a difference between the empirical and the essential, or between the contingent and the necessary, between what happens to be the case factually, and what must be the case ideally. This difference is possible due to the difference in forms of intuition, which are possible with respect to any given object. Any given object can be viewed with respect to its factuality, with respect to its given, contingent existential status. It can, that is, be viewed as a fact. On the other hand, it is also possible to view this object through an essential intuition that disregards its empirical nature and looks only to its essence. It is possible to view the object in terms of what makes it the object that it is and not any other object, or form of object. Thus, there are “two sorts of intuition” that are “essentially different”: the “essence” of an object itself being “a new sort of object” (1983, pp.  10, 9). Corresponding to every fact there is its “eidos,” which is not itself a fact, which does not make any assertion about facts (1983, p.  9), but which expresses the “whatness” of the fact. This “eidos” is a correlate of non-­empirical, essential intuition and is itself a non-empirical, non-factual object. Correspondingly, there are sciences of facts, concerned with “individual factual existent,” and sciences of essences, concerned with what is essential to such being (1983, p.  10). Phenomenology is an eidetic science. Thus far we know that phenomenology is to be a science of essential being, while psychology is to be a science of empirical being. Phenomenology is concerned with essence, psychology with existence. All of these distinctions can be applied within what Husserl has called in his Introduction, the natural attitude. The mathematician or logician, for example, is concerned with essences, but need not, qua mathematician, be a phenomenologist. There are eidetic sciences that do not take for granted the validity of cognition as a fact of Nature, whether implicitly or otherwise, or that are totally unconcerned with the validity of cognition (that naively presume an ­epistemological foundation, which they do, in reality, possess). Husserl, however, is concerned to provide an epistemological foundation for these sciences, as well as all others, as he has since prior to 1900. Subsequently, he reflects further on the nature of what he has defined in the above as an essence and takes up, in his second chapter, the traditional theories on the nature of knowledge and the status of essences. This discussion, entitled “Naturalistic Misinterpretations,” (1983, p. 33) prepares us for the critical discussions which follow and in which phenomenology is to be established as an entirely new approach to these old dilemmas.

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Here Husserl is concerned to show how phenomenology does not fit the mold of any extant epistemologies, how it is a radical departure from the existing historical tradition, even though it may share concerns and terminology with it. He provides this discussion so that phenomenology, once created, will not be misconstrued as merely a new term for an old discipline. Phenomenology will escape the naturalistic bias of the times, still evident in the Logical Investigations. Husserl wants to alert the reader as to the radicalism of the epistemological stance to be taken in this text; we shall approach the critical discussion that follows, expecting something entirely new. In the last section of this chapter, entitled, “Sciences of the Dogmatic and Sciences of the Philosophical Attitude” (1983, p. 46), Husserl reminds us of the distinction that he first made in 1907 with respect to what he then considered to be the two fundamental categories of science: natural science, here referred to as “dogmatic” or “prephilosophical,” and philosophy (1983, pp. 46–48). In the 1907 lectures, Husserl characterized natural science as such, due to the fact that it remained within the natural attitude of mind, meaning that it took for granted the validity of cognition as a psychological actuality, as a natural event. Philosophy, on the other hand, began with the suspension of this taken for granted validity, in the attempt to come to an understanding of the possibility of cognition as such, as an ideal possibility. Similarly, in the present text, dogmatic sciences are characterized as “prephilosophical” in so far as they take their start from the primordial given of the facts they deal with, “unconcerned with epistemological or skeptical problems” (1983, p. 47). They do not wonder how they have gained a credible access to these facts or what the nature of this access is. Sciences of the philosophical standpoint, in contrast, pursue “the skeptical problems of the possibility of knowledge” (1983, p. 48). One takes up the philosophical problematic when one begins to wonder how the knowledge presumed to be gained through dogmatic science is itself possible, when one asks how one knows what one presumes to know. We can see that the distinction made here is consonant with that made 6 years earlier in “The Idea of Phenomenology.” Husserl has provided this discussion here, at the end of the first part of this work, because he wants to situate himself and his reader firmly in the dogmatic, or natural, standpoint at the outset of the second part, entitled, “The Considerations Fundamental to Phenomenology” (1983, p. 49). We remember that this is for pedagogical reasons and that we will be concerned to discover the presuppositions of this standpoint so we will be able to justify our setting it aside methodologically through the performance of the phenomenological reduction. The exploration of the natural attitude to be offered here initiates the critical discussions for which he wanted to prepare the way. It is here that we begin our attempt to establish the phenomenological attitude. He writes: We begin our considerations as human beings who are living naturally, objectivating, judging, feeling, willing “in the natural attitude.” What that signifies we shall make clear in simple meditations which can best be carried out in the first person singular.

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3  Phenomenology as Transcendental Philosophy I am conscious of a world endlessly spread straightforward out in space, endlessly becoming and having endlessly become in time. I am conscious of it: that signifies, above all, that intuitively I find it immediately, that I experience it. By my seeing, touching, hearing, and so forth, and in the different modes of sensuous perception, corporeal physical things with some spatial distribution or other as simply there for me (1983, p. 51).

As Husserl emphasizes, it is this aspect of being “simply there” that characterizes best the natural attitude. It is the attitude he suggests of natural human beings, the attitude, we could say, of everyday life, whether personal or vocational, in which we simply assume that the objects of our perception do exist as we perceive them. As he described in the 1907 lectures, I take for granted that cognition delivers to me a world that exists outside of myself and my cognition of it. Husserl adds here to the description given in the earlier lectures that these objects of my experience are not experienced merely as objects, but as objects of value, or use, etc. The world I experience as being “simply there for me” is the world of my everyday life, which includes objects of use, such as tables and books, and has “value-characteristics, as beautiful and ugly, pleasant and unpleasant, agreeable and disagreeable, and the like.” He continues: Moreover, this world is there for me not only as a world of mere things, but also with the same immediacy as a world of objects with values, a world of goods, a practical world … These value-characteristics and practical characteristics also belong constitutively to the Objects “on hand” as Objects (1983, p. 53).

Lastly, this world of the natural attitude is experienced as being intersubjective in nature, as being the same world as that experienced by the others whom I experience as being my fellow human beings. Husserl adds: “All that holds for me myself holds, as I know, for all other human beings whom I find present in my surrounding world” (1983, p. 55). Our account of this world of the natural attitude has been, thus far, “a piece of pure description prior to any ‘theory’” (1983, p. 56). All that Husserl has attempted to do to this point is to describe for us the attitude with which we would all be beginning this task, regardless of any other considerations. He has merely made explicit our own natural outlook that we bring in with us to the task at hand, in an otherwise implicit and unacknowledged fashion. By making explicit and acknowledging that this is our natural starting point, our habitual way of experiencing the world, however, Husserl has already altered its character significantly. He has conceptualized this standpoint or outlook as an attitude, as a way of experiencing the world. He captures this by framing what he refers to as the “general positing which characterizes the natural attitude” (1983, p. 57). This thesis is merely an explicit articulation of the belief in the reality of the external world and its objects that characterizes this attitude. Usually, we simply live this belief implicitly, without realizing it. He writes: As what confronts me, I continually find the one spatiotemporal actuality to which I belong like all other human beings who are to be found in it and who are related to it as I am. I find the “actuality” … as a factually existent actuality and also accept it as it presents itself to me as factually existing. No doubt about or rejection of data belonging to the natural world alters in any respect the general positing which characterizes the natural attitude” (1983, pp. 56–57).

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Even when we do doubt or reject data of the natural world, we do so within the context of a belief in its reality; we were simply mistaken about a particular aspect of it. What is left standing is the general thesis that the world of facts, about which I might be temporarily mistaken, does exist out there, over and against me. While this natural thesis “does not consist of a particular act, perchance an articulated judgment about existence,” in making it explicit we can articulate it, frame it, as such. “We can … proceed with the potential and inexplicit positing precisely as we can with the explicit judgment-positing” (1983, pp. 57–58). In so doing, we are bringing out into the open the presupposition that allows the natural attitude to function in our everyday life. We are showing what is entailed, although unexpressed, in our holding this attitude. Once we have transformed the “potential and inexplicit” general thesis of the natural attitude into an explicit judgment in this way, we find ourselves in a slightly different position than the one we were in at the outset. We can, in short, suspend this thesis. We can notice that it expresses a belief that lacks certainty. We can refrain from continuing to make such a judgment, until we have further grounds upon which to justify it. Husserl writes that: “Instead of remaining in this attitude, we propose to alter it radically” (1983, p. 57). The alteration introduced through this suspension of the validity of this judgment is referred to by Husserl as a “bracketing,” a “disconnecting,” or a “putting out of play” of the general thesis. It is the movement of the phenomenological reduction and it is important that we be clear on its nature. This particular kind of doubt, though, left the general thesis standing; it did not at all effect its status of being taken for granted, as valid. This kind of doubting is the kind that goes on routinely within the dogmatic sciences. It is a doubting of the accuracy of cognition, of its comprehension of the facts as given. This kind of doubt never calls into question the status of facts as such; it never questions whether cognition itself is credible. As we noted in our earlier discussion of the 1907 lectures, to wonder whether a perception is accurate or not is to assume that you will be able to tell the difference between an accurate perception and an inaccurate or mistaken perception, an illusion. It is this assumption that Husserl more radically calls into question. This more Cartesian move “stands over against all cogitative position-takings” which take the world just as it gives itself to me as something that exists out there (1983, p. 59). It sets the general thesis itself aside, and is, in this way, no longer interested in the accuracy or inaccuracy of perception, but in its claim to be a presence to a state of affairs outside of itself which it can present accurately or inaccurately. As Husserl writes: “We put out of action the general positing which belongs to the essence of the natural attitude” (1983, p. 61). This bracketing, as he explains, is not a negation of the thesis, nor does it set up its antithesis; it merely puts it out of play, suspends it and its claims until further notice. This means that the thesis is still there naturally for us. We do still experience the work in this way, but we alter its value; we no longer operate according to it, or upon its basis. “The positing,” Husserl writes, “is a mental process, but we make ‘no use’ of it” (1983, p. 59). The sense in which we make no use of this thesis in our critical discussions in Ideas I is the same sense in which we did not use natural cognition in 1907 in order to provide an epistemological solution to the riddle of transcendence. We make no

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use of the general thesis here because it is similarly “epistemologically null.” If we are interested in how such a presupposition as this is possible, then we cannot utilize this presupposition in our analysis of it. We cannot use analyses from within the natural attitude in order to account for the existence of such an attitude. We must look elsewhere in order to do so, and this elsewhere must lie outside of its domain. It is this looking elsewhere that is made possible by the phenomenological reduction. Through the reduction, we put aside the claims made by the natural attitude so that we may look in order to see whether or not these claims can be taken as they give themselves to us. We disconnect, bracket, or suspend them in order to see what else we might be able to come up with which would shed light on their nature as claims. We begin the fourth chapter by turning to this question of this elsewhere. In other words, once we perform the phenomenological reduction, what remains? Husserl begins this chapter with the remark that even though “we have learned to understand” the phenomenological reduction, we do “not by any means” understand “its possible effect.” The key question is: “What can remain, if the whole world, including ourselves with all our cogitare, is excluded?” (1983, p. 63). This was the question that remained after the 1907 lectures still to be answered. We did not come to an adequate characterization in those lectures of what Husserl here calls the residue of the reduction. We did not, and have yet to, fully understand the non-­psychological nature of the discipline and subject matter that remained after the rejection of psychological apperception. Our turn to “Philosophy as Rigorous Science” complicated matters by not providing a simple, unequivocal answer to this question either, vacillating on the nature of phenomenological and psychological subject matters. Husserl returns us to this question here and asks, what is the reside of the reduction? What do we find left over once natural cognition and the natural attitude in which it is carried out are bracketed? If we are deprived of our natural outlook, in which we and the world to which we directly relate are presumed naively to be existing, and all of the knowledge that is possible within this domain (which we can no longer make use of), then are we not left stranded—without the possibility of any knowledge whatsoever? Is not all knowledge possible only as natural knowledge, as based upon cognition as a psychological function? Rather than considering us stranded at this point, Husserl writes that the goal of the reduction, the direction that we are to follow, lies in “the acquisition of a new region of being never before delimited in its own peculiarity” (1983, p. 63). There is apparently, an elsewhere yet to be explored. We now take our first step into this new region: We shall proceed, first of all, with a direct demonstrable showing and, since the being we want to demonstrably show is nothing else than what we shall designate, for essential reasons, as “pure mental processes,” “pure consciousness” with its pure “correlates of consciousness” and, on the other hand, its “pure Ego” [we shall] start with the Ego, the consciousness, and the mental processes which are given to us in the natural attitude (1983, p. 64).

If we cannot look to the data of the natural world for help, if the presence of the world to us through these data is in question, then where can we turn, but to the experience itself, which is presumed to deliver the world to us? This is the famous,

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or infamous, Cartesian turn to subjectivity that is responsible for the creation of phenomenology in its entirety. This is the crucial step. We cannot trust our presumed relation to the world outside of us, so we turn for clarification to the relation itself, to our experience of the world. We turn to experience itself, rather than to what we are given through this experience. We realize, as we said in the context or our discussion of the “The Idea of Phenomenology,” that my experience of the world and its objects is just that: my experience. It is through my consciousness, my subjectivity, that the world is given to me as existing out there. Having put the transcendence of cognition aside for the moment, we can now look to cognition itself— no longer as providing access to the world, as useful, but as a phenomenon in its own right—as an object for reflection. Writes Husserl: I, the actual human being, am a real Object like others in the natural world. I effect cogitations, acts of consciousness in both the broader and narrower sense and these acts, as belonging to this human subject, are occurrences within the same natural actuality… “In the natural attitude,” as we are even in our scientific thinking … we take all these findings of psychological reflection as real worldly occurrences, just as mental processes in the lives of animate beings (1983, p. 64).

This is experience as given from the natural attitude, and it is from here, as Husserl noted, that we take our start. As we argued in our discussion of “The Idea of Phenomenology,” and as we saw Husserl stress often in his revisions to the Logical Investigations, we cannot remain here. In so far as the psychological ego, the human subject or animate being, remains a natural organism, a being existing in the natural world, it too must go into the brackets of the phenomenological reduction. The reduction whose residue we are attempting to discover subsumes the psychic nature of experience, it suspends psychological apperception. Psychological subjectivity cannot thus be the residue. The new region of being is not that of the psychic. With respect to the lingering of the natural attitude in this way (i.e., that of the psychological) and the difficulty involved, which we have ourselves experienced thus far, in appreciating this new region as distinct from of the natural attitude, Husserl writes: So natural is it for us to see them only as such that now … we do not even note that it is from these very spheres of mental processes that the new province arises by virtue of the new attitude (1983, pp. 64–65).

In viewing these experiences as objects for psychological reflection, we have already done what Husserl referred to in the Introduction as “reverting” to an old viewpoint; we have returned to the natural attitude. We may infer from Husserl’s statement that the new region of being has yet to be won because it is exceptionally difficult not to do so. As he comments: “In the natural attitude nothing else but the natural world is seen” (1983, p. 66). As long as one remains within the natural attitude, experience is going to be interpreted as being a part of this natural world. This has been the case, Husserl seems to feel, up until the time of the present text. He writes that “as long as the possibility of the phenomenological attitude had not been recognized … the phenomenological world had to remain unknown, indeed hardly even suspected” (1983, p. 66).

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What does remain, then, if we do not follow our natural inclination and interpret experience psychologically, as a real-world event? What happens if we do not revert to the natural attitude but retain our brackets intact? We are then free to “keep our regard fixed upon the sphere of consciousness and study what we find immanently within it” (1983, p. 65). We are free to study the experiences themselves, to become interested in consciousness in its own terms. A bracketing of all transcendence allows us to turn toward immanence as a new region in and of itself. The terminology used here should remind us both of the first edition of the Logical Investigations, in which we wanted to reflect on the contents of consciousness in their own terms, and “The Idea of Phenomenology,” in which Husserl introduced the categories of transcendence and immanence. We can expect him to be going beyond both of those earlier positions here, pursuing further the direction in which he set out prior to 1900. What was missing in the earlier works, and what he will try to achieve here, he writes, “is a certain universal insight into the essence of any consciousness whatever and also, quite particularly of consciousness in so far as it is, in itself, by its essence consciousness of ‘natural’ actuality” (1983, p. 65). It is this insight into the essence of consciousness that in and through which the natural world is presumed to be known that we have yet to achieve in our earlier discussions. Husserl promises that, whereas his other works may have fallen short of this goal, in this text, he will “go as far as is necessary”: In these studies we shall go as far as is necessary to effect the insight at which we are aiming, namely the insight that consciousness has, in itself, a being of its own which in its own absolute essence, is not touched by the phenomenological exclusion. It therefore remains as the “phenomenological residuum,” as a region of being which is of essential necessity quite unique and which can indeed become the field of a science of a novel kind: phenomenology (1983, pp. 65–66).

This region he proposes to name that of transcendental consciousness and the reduction which will now, according to Husserl, “deserve its name only by means of this insight,” he proposes to call the transcendental reduction (1983, p. 66). These terms, he cautions, “must be understood exclusively in the senses that our expositions prescribe for them and not in any others which history or the terminological habits of the reader may suggest” (1983, p. 66). We can expect, that is, that Husserl will give a new meaning to these terms all his own, dependent upon the analyses that give rise to them. It is to these that we now turn.

Ideas I: Being as Experience Our task is to investigate the immanent domain and to determine its essence or nature, as it were, from within. In order to begin such an undertaking, we return at first in accord with our pedagogical strategy to the natural attitude of psychological reflection. Husserl writes that we “effect a psychological reflection on our Ego and its mental living” (1983, p. 67). We recall that we begin in this fashion, “quite as we should had we heard nothing of the new sort of attitude” of phenomenology

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(1983, p.  67), so that we can make sure that we address what would otherwise remain implicit, but operative, presuppositions. In this instance, Husserl is reacting to the fact that, prior to his present attempt to create a non-psychological phenomenology, all reflections on experience and consciousness were presumed to be psychological in nature. We begin then with psychological reflection: Let us begin with examples. Lying in front of me in the semi-darkness is this sheet of paper. I am seeing it, touching it. This perceptual seeing and touching of the sheet of paper, as the full concrete mental awareness of the sheet of paper lying here … is a cogitation, a mental process of consciousness (1983, p. 69).

We are presently concerned with the actual, concrete experience of perceiving the paper that appears to lie in front of me. The first thing we notice, with respect to this experience, is “it is evident that such an affair as a material physical thing, for example, this sheet of paper given in the mental process of perception, is by essential necessity not a mental process but a being of a wholly different mode of being” (1983, p. 70). That is, the object itself that is perceived is different from the perception of it; it is a being of a completely different kind in that it is itself an object, while the experience through which we are aware of it as an object is not itself an object, but precisely an experience (of an object). This distinction between appearance and that which appears through them had been drawn already for us in “Philosophy as Rigorous Science.” In that work, Husserl used this distinction in order to show convincingly how consciousness was not itself part of the causal chain of Nature, since it was not itself a material being, but consciousness of material beings. An appearance of an object is different from the object itself which appears. In the present text, Husserl remarks similarly: “We shall not think of confusing the objects intended to in these modes of consciousness … with the mental processes themselves of consciousness which are consciousness of those objects” (1983, p. 71). Once we have drawn this distinction between experience and its object, as that of which it is an experience, we realize that all consciousness has objects of which it is the consciousness that it is; this we referred to above in passing as the “intentional” nature of consciousness. Here Husserl writes that, “universally it belongs to the essence of every actual cogito to be consciousness of something” (1983, p. 73). This definition of intentionally was also given in the “Philosophy as Rigorous Science” article, but at that time, Husserl pursued it no further; his interests led him elsewhere. Here we are free to take up this train of thought and pursue it in more depth. Of what consequence is the fact that consciousness is intentional in nature? It is at this juncture that we must leave our natural starting point of the psychological, leaving the natural attitude in order to take up the phenomenological, performing the reduction to purify our analyses of their psychological significance. Within the domain of psychological reflection, this notion of the intentional nature of consciousness can only be understood, naively, as referring to a real relation obtaining between a psychological subject and material object—a real relation obtaining between two realities existing in the natural world. To restrict our understanding of intentionality to this domain would be, in essence, to leave it forever to

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remain a mystery. To remain within the natural attitude with respect to the nature of cognition is to assume simply that cognition can and does reliably “reach” its object that is given as existing outside of itself as transcending it. It is precisely this ability of cognition to transcend itself to an object which is of interest to us—as it was in the 1907 lectures, when we initially encountered this need to leave behind our natural attitude of mind if we were to penetrate at all into this mystery. Husserl thereby interrupts his treatment of intentionality to make the following comment: It shall be well heeded that here we are not speaking of a relation between some psychological occurrence—called a mental process—and another real factual existence—called an object—nor of a psychological connection taking place in Objective actuality between the one and the other. Rather we are speaking of mental processes purely with respect to their essence … That a mental process is consciousness of something … this concerns, rather than the fact of the mental process in the world, specifically, in the complex of psychological facts, the pure essence which is seized upon in ideation as a pure idea (1983, p. 74).

To the extent that we are looking on this relation between experience and its object as a psychological relation obtaining between two real existents, we must necessarily miss the nature of intentionality per se. Perhaps it has been our tendency to do just this which has kept us from discovering the new region of being which belongs to phenomenology, and which we are here seeking out explicitly for the first time. In order to continue our pursuit, then, we bracket, through the reduction, the subjects and objects of psychological reflection, the real existents of an objective reality, and turn to the intentional relation which exists within the immanent sphere. We restrict our exploration of the domain of immanence to that which is immanent to it. There remains within this immanent sphere, however, the distinction which we have just drawn between appearances and that which appears through them. In every experience there is that of which this particular experience is the experience that it is; to every experience belongs its object as its “correlate” (1983, p. 76). This remains the case even after our bracketing of the objective reality of material entities in the world; it remains the case in the so-called “reduced” sphere. There is, however, the difference that we are no longer speaking of objects as material entities existing in the natural world; our objects are not real existents. The language which Husserl uses in this domain with which to refer to the object of an intention which is necessarily related to, but different from, the act of intending itself is that of the “intentional object” (1983, p.  76). Within the domain of immanence itself, then, there is the act of intending, the intentional act, and the object of the intention, or the intentional object. The relation between this act and its object is not understood as a real relation, but precisely as an intentional relation. Ordinarily (that is, prior to the kind of reflection Husserl is carrying out here), the intentional object of experience is other than experience itself. We are ordinarily turned toward the world and its objects, rather than turned inward toward our own experience of the world. Husserl writes that, “When living in the cogito we are not conscious of the cogitatio itself as an intentional Object.” “But,” he continues, “at any time it can become an Object of consciousness” (1983, p. 78). We could not be

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carrying out our own reflections here if it were not for the fact that such a turn inward to experience itself was at any time a possibility. Husserl writes that “its essence involves the essential possibility of a reflective turning of regard and naturally in the form of a new cogitatio … any [cogatio] can become the object of a so-­ called ‘internal perception’” (1983, p. 78). In addition, then, to the point made in the previous paragraph, we note that the intentional object of an experience can have one of two possible origins: it can originate in the so-called ‘internal perception’ of reflection upon experience, or it can originate in the so-called ‘external perception’ of straightforward experience of the world outside of experience (1983, p.  79). Husserl wishes to avoid the use of such terms as internal and external experience, because they only make sense within the psychological domain which we have just bracketed. They refer to the inside and outside of a psychological subject situated within the natural world. For our present purposes, then, these terms will only engender confusion, since our own reflections are no longer to be carried out in this context. In their place, Husserl suggests the use of “immanent” perception or “intentive mental processes related to something immanent” and “transcendent” perception or “intentive processes directed to something transcendent” (1983, p.  79). Immanent perceptions have as their intentional objects experiences that belong to the same stream of experience as themselves; their intentional objects originate in the same immanent flow of experience in which this perception itself takes place. In contrast, transcendent perceptions are experiences for which the intentional objects originate from outside of the immanent flow itself. These could be acts directed toward “essences or … physical things or to realities of whatever sort” (1983, p. 79). It is important to remember, however, that we are drawing this distinction within the immanent sphere; this distinction pertains to the kinds of experiences that can take place immanently, within conscious life. There is the possibility within the domain of experience that one orients oneself immanently toward one’s own experiences themselves, or that one orients oneself transcendently, toward objects given as outside of those experiences themselves. Since this is a distinction that pertains to the reduced sphere, we are not distinguishing between psychological reflection and sensory experience—however much this may seem, on the surface, to the case. We are remaining interested in the modes of givenness to consciousness, the nature of the intentional relations that obtain within immanence, of two fundamentally different types of intentional objects. The intentional objects of immanent perception are given as being immanent to the flow of experience itself; as Husserl emphasizes, “In the case of a perception directed to something immanent … perception and perceived form essentially an unmediated unity, that of a single concrete cogitatio” (1983, p. 79). The intentional objects of transcendent perception, on the other hand, are given as being transcendent to the flow of experience; transcendent perception, he writes, is “without any essential unity” with its object other than this relation of transcendence (1983, p. 80). In other words, transcendent perception brings together an act and an object that are of a basically different nature, while between the act and the object of immanent perception, a shared nature; they both belong to the same single concrete experience.

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Having at first established the status of the intentional object in general and having then distinguished between the intentional objects of immanent and transcendent perception respectively, we can now look more deeply into the nature of transcendent perception in particular in its relation to its object. It is this relation between consciousness and transcendent objects that has been a persistent focus of our epistemological reflections since 1907, if not before. At that time, we referred to our present dilemma as the riddle of transcendence. We return to this riddle now that we have, so Husserl has promised, all of the requisite equipment and concepts needed in order finally to discover its solution. We concluded our treatment of the 1907 lectures having only decided on the necessary methodological procedure to insure an epistemologically valid solution to this riddle, but no actual solution was offered. With our “brackets” once again firmly in place, we can at this time “acquire a deeper insight into how the transcendent stands with respect to the consciousness of it” (1983, p. 86). We have bothered to differentiate between the immanent and transcendent within immanence in order to make this task a bit more manageable, as well as to make us aware, again, of the presence of this riddle within the domain of consciousness. In characteristically Husserlian fashion, we begin with an example: Constantly seeing this table and meanwhile walking around it, changing my position in space in whatever way, I have continually the consciousness of this one identical table as factually existing “in person” and remaining quite unchanged. The table-perception, however, is a continually changing one; it is a continuity of changing perceptions. I close my eyes. My other senses have no relation to the table. Now I have no perception of it. I open my eyes; and I have the perception again. The perception? Let us be more precise. Returning, it is not, under any circumstances, individually the same. Only the table is the same (1983, p. 86).

In this example we have a transcendent object, a table, given as transcendent to the different perceptions of it, which change both with respect to one’s spatial position and with respect to temporal succession. The disunity between transcendent perception and its object, noted above, is evident already in the fact that there are many different perceptions, a “continuity of changing perceptions,” but only one, self-same table. The perceptions change while the table remains the same, unchanged throughout. The same object appears in “a multifarious system of continuous multiplicities of appearances” (1983, p. 87), while each experience of the table is itself one such “appearance.” While each experience is an experience of the one and self-­ same table, each experience of this table is different, never returning individually the same. The table itself, then, or any of its parts or aspects cannot be immanent to these experiences of it, which continually differ, but must necessarily be ­transcendent to them. While it may seem that this is the insight with which we began the present consideration, our realization that transcendent perceptions are perspective variations on an object which retains its identity throughout these variations and thus gives itself as transcendent to them, has actually brought us a bit closer to the solution of our riddle. The solution lies implicitly in Husserl’s conclusion that: “The adumbration, though called by the same name, of essential necessity is not of the same genus as the one to which the adumbrated belongs” (1983, p. 88).

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We remember that we had already distinguished between the modes of givenness of the intentional objects of immanent and transcendent perceptions. We are attempting to determine at this point how we can characterize the givenness of the intentional object of transcendent perception, having already defined it in contrast to that of immanent perception as giving its object as transcendent to the flow of experience itself. In discovering that transcendent objects are given through this kind of perspective variation, we have located a basis upon which to make such a characterization. Transcendent objects are given transcendently, in so far as they are given through perspective variations that are themselves given, as the only way through which these objects can be given. Transcendent objects cannot be given as “really immanent in any possible perception,” writes Husserl (1983, p. 89). Conversely, while “we perceive the physical thing by virtue of its being ‘adumbrated’ in respect of all the determinations which, in a given case, ‘actually’ and properly ‘fall within the scope of’ perception,” he continues, “a mental process is not adumbrated” (1983, p. 90). There is “an essentially fundamental difference between the corresponding kinds of givenness,” Husserl concludes, which “is neither an accident of the own peculiar sense of the physical thing nor a contingency of ‘our human constitution’, that ‘our’ perception can arrive at physical things themselves only through mere adumbrations of them” (1983, pp. 90–91). It is rather essential to the nature of both experience and its objects. If we accept that perception can reach its (transcendent) object only through the perspective manifestations of it, and that these perspective manifestations are perspective manifestations of the one and self-same object, then we no longer are confronted with a riddle. Our spatial thing is defined as being the “intentional unity” of these perspective variations, and these perspective variations are understood to be the only way through which such a unity can be given (1983, p. 92). This is the nature of the transcendence of consciousness. Before moving on to explore the implications of this solution, however, we must be certain that we have grasped it fully. We pause here because we are aware that a solution of this type will not immediately appear satisfactory. Our habitual way of thinking in this matter would lead us to believe that in concentrating solely on the appearance of objects through perspective variations, the actual things with which we were concerned, the objects transcendent to consciousness, have escaped our analysis altogether. What has happened, for instance, to the table-in-itself; have we no direct access to it? Within the natural attitude, the intentional object appears to us to exist inside of consciousness, as a “representation” of the objective reality of the object existing out there. Once we take such a position, the relation between the conscious subject and the external object becomes a mystery—it results in a gap that cannot be bridged. This was precisely Descartes’ dilemma, once he made the turn to subjectivity similarly undertaken here. It is a dilemma, Husserl suggests, that exists only within psychological reflection, or within the natural attitude. It is a view that upon further and phenomenological reflection proves to be “countersense” (1983, p. 92). Let us see how this is so.

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Such a view is countersensical because it is predicated upon the belief that for a transcendent object to be experienced as it exists in-itself would be for it to be experienced all at once, “without any mediation by ‘appearances’” (1983, p.  92). According to this position, the object should be a real constituent of an experience, given immanently to our intuitive grasp in its entirety. Such a view argues Husserl “implies that there is no essential difference between something transcendent and something immanent” (1983, p.  92). It fails to acknowledge the fact that part of what it means to experience an object as transcendent is to experience it as transcendent to one’s own experience of it, to experience it as only accessible through its perspective variation and to experience it as the unity of these diverse perspectives on it. It is “inherent” in the essence of the perception of a thing “to be an adumbrated perception” (1983, p. 93). It is in the nature of a transcendent object, we could also say, “to be essentially perceivable only … by adumbrative perceptions” (1983, p. 94). Since this is the only sense in which an object can be understood to be transcendent, and if we are to avoid nonsense (and remain within our brackets), then Husserl insists, “it is therefore fundamentally erroneous to believe that perception … does not reach the physical thing itself” (1983, p.  92). The thing itself is the intentional unity of its perspective variations. To define the transcendent object in this way does significantly alter our naïve understanding of transcendence. Once we have bracketed, through the reduction, the sphere of transcendence as such, due to its apparent inaccessibility, we find that the transcendent in a reduced sense does in fact become accessible to us for the first time, in a fully justifiable way, as transcendence within immanence. Having successfully suspended the thing in-itself, and the Cartesian legacy related to it, we discover that we are brought into direct contact with the thing itself, but as given through experiences of it, through experience in which it is given as transcendent. Transcendence, we could say, has become a function of the mode of givenness of the object; it is defined in accordance with it accessibility to consciousness, rather than in terms of its inaccessibility. We are now in a position to elaborate on the initial distinction drawn between appearances and what appears through them within the immanent sphere. Having discovered certain fundamental differences between the nature of experience and the nature of transcendent objects, we can now flesh out the implications of these differences with respect to what Husserl refers to as the “essentially necessary difference” between “being as consciousness and being as reality” (1983, p. 89). How can we characterize the being of consciousness as opposed to the being of transcendent objects, now that we have come to an understanding of the intentional relation between them? What are the ontological implications of an intentional view of experience? The first thing we notice with respect to this “essentially necessary difference” is that things can only be grasped in experience incompletely. Never, as noted above, all at once or in their entirety. Husserl writes that “the perception of a physical thing involves a certain inadequacy.” Since in principle a thing can be given only in one of its aspects at a time, we are never given the thing completely, in an adequate fashion that would preclude the necessity of further experience of it. If a thing can only be given through appearances, then this leaves open the possibility that there

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could always be new appearances of it. Whether or not these new appearances significantly alter the sense derived from prior appearances, this does mean that experience of a thing will always remain incomplete and indeterminate—it could always change in the next minute, the next hour, etc. No matter how well we think we know what a thing is, our next experience of it could, conceivably, change our entire conception of it. It is part of the nature of transcendent being, being as reality, that it requires such incompleteness. We do not find this to be the case, however, in the domain of being as consciousness. Consciousness, as we said before, does not present itself through appearances or perspectives. It is not given in only one of its aspects. It is the appearance, perspective, aspect, etc., and in so far as it is this, and this only, it is given immanently in its entirety. “The perception of a mental process,” Husserl writes, “is a simple seeing of something which is (or can become) perceptually given as something absolute, and not as something identical in modes of appearance by adumbration” (1983, pp. 95–96). When we reflect on an experience, we have all of it there at once for our circumspection; we have the experience itself, as it was experienced. If we take an appearance as an object for reflection, we do not then get appearances of this appearance, varying with perspective, etc. We get the appearance itself as it appeared. While memory may err and reflection may be corrupted by other influences, such that we may be inaccurate or mistaken, what is given to reflection immanently is given nonetheless absolutely. It is not given as incomplete, indeterminate, or inadequate, but is given directly in an unmediated fashion that delivers it up to us whole, in its entirety. While we may not be able to recapture it precisely as it was lived, we do not have to perceive it “by means of adumbrative presentation, by means of something such as appearance” (1983, p. 97). It does not present itself as only accessible through an infinity of different experiences, with determinable indeterminacy, but as the particular experience that it was when experienced, now having receded into the past, never to be experienced again (although accessible to memory, imagination, etc.). Accordingly, Husserl summarizes this first difference between things and experience in their being in the following: We therefore hold fast to the following: Whereas it is essential to givenness by appearances that no appearance presents the affair as something ‘absolute’ instead of in a one-sided presentation, it is essential to the givenness of something immanent precisely to present something absolute which cannot ever be presented with respect to sides or be adumbrated (1983, p. 97).

In addition to this initial difference, Husserl also notes that experience and things differ with respect to their accessibility to reflection. Experience is always a­ ccessible for reflection; we may always turn our gaze inward and take up our experiences as objects for reflection. The sphere of immanence is always there for us, as the stream of experience itself; we can always turn it around on itself. As Husserl writes: The kind of being belonging to mental processes is such that a seeing regard of perception can be directed quite immediately to any actual mental process as an originary living present. This occurs in the form of “reflection … We see that the sort of being which belongs to the mental process is such that the latter is essentially capable of being perceived in reflection” (1983, pp. 98–99).

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This obviously does not hold for things in the same way that it does for experience, even within the reduced sphere. To say that a thing must be accessible for possible perception is not to say that it is always so accessible, that it is always available for our circumspection. We have a ready and unobstructed access to the immanent sphere that we do not have to the sphere of transcendence within it. While we may, at any time, be able to reflect on our experiences of tables, for instance, we may not be able at any time to perceive an actual table, simply by wishing to do so. The table that is given as transcending our experience of it is not always there to be perceived. In order for the table to become accessible to perception, we often must go through a number of manipulations of reality—that is, if it is to become accessible at all. In contrast, it is not always there for us, in the background, awaiting our reflective gaze. The actual background in terms of reality is very limited, both spatially and temporally. The majority of it remains at any given time inaccessible. Pursuing this train of thought further, Husserl notes a final differentiation, which is that of the indubitability of experience as opposed to the dubitability of things. Not only is experience always accessible to reflection, but it is given to reflection indubitably. He writes: “Every perception of something immanent necessarily guarantees the existence of its object” (1983, p. 100). The refection through which we are aware of an experience gives that experience to us as existing self-evidently, as guaranteeing its existence necessarily (or in principle). We could not reflect on an experience unless it was to exist within the immanent stream. Thus, any reflection on an experience delivers that experience up to us as existing immanently, as being a part of the flow itself. Husserl invokes the spirit of Descartes in his discovery of the certainty with which the existence of experience is grasped though reflection upon it: If reflective seizing-upon is directed to a mental process of mine, I have seized upon something absolute itself, the factual being of which is essentially incapable of being negated … The stream of mental processes which is mine, of the one who is thinking, no matter to what extent it is not grasped … as soon as I look at the flowing life in its actual present and, while doing so, apprehend myself as the pure subject of this life … I say unqualifiedly and necessarily that I am, this life is, I am living: cogito (1983, p. 100).

We may, at any time, provide ourselves with the assurance that the sphere of immanence does itself exist merely by turning our attention to it, thereby seizing it in its self-evidence. The objects of its experience may not, in reality, exist, they may be mere fictions, but our experiencing of these fictions is not itself a fiction: “what hovers before one may be a mere figment; the hovering itself, the inventive ­consciousness, is not itself invented” (1983, p. 101). This was, in fact, the only certainty which Descartes was able to discover before appealing to a deus ex machina. This kind of certainty and self-evidence is not provided, of course, with transcendent perception. The mere perception of things in no way guarantees their existence, necessarily or otherwise. In fact, we are never—as noted above with respect to the incompleteness of transcendent perception—able to attain certainty with respect to their existence in this or any other way. We could always have a new perception of an object that would call into question its presumed existence as transcendent. “In contradistinction” to what we have just discovered about the immanent sphere, Husserl asserts:

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As we know, it is of the essence of the physical world that no perception, however perfect, presents anything absolute in that realm; and essentially connected with this is the fact that any experience, however extensive, leaves open the possibility that what is given does not exist in spite of the continual consciousness of its own presence “in person.” According to eidetic law it is the case that physical existence is never required as necessary by the givenness of something physical but is always in a certain manner contingent (1983, p. 102).

We never experience things as existing necessarily; their existence is always a matter of contingency. It could always be otherwise; they could always just as well not exist. But our experience of them is certain. I am certain that I am experiencing that tree as existing out there at this moment. The existence of the tree itself is always open to doubt. In the next moment, I could realize that it was merely a dream, an illusion, etc. Such a re-gestalting of my experience changes the status only of the object of experience, the thing. It does not effect, in the least, my prior experience. I did, a moment ago, experience that thing as if it were a tree that existed out there, even if I was mistaken. That I experienced it as a tree is certain, and always accessible for verification, but that it is in reality a tree, is merely “presumptive” and always open to correction, revision, or possible further confirmation. I will never have an experience, no matter how long I pursue further experiences of this tree, that will guarantee its existence, that will give its existence in a more direct or self-evident matter. The tree could always not be out there in the future. Husserl concludes: Thus in every manner it is clear that whatever is there for me in the world of physical things is necessarily only a presumptive actuality and, on the other hand, that I myself, for whom it is there … am absolute actuality or that the present phase of my mental processes is an absolute actuality, given by an unconditional, absolutely indefeasible positing … Over against the positing of the world, which is a “contingent” positing, there stands then the positing of my pure Ego and Ego-life which is a “necessary,” absolutely indubitable positing” (1983, p. 102).

With the articulation of this essential law, we have achieved all of the insights necessary for the present task. We have determined that being as experience is given absolutely, immediately, self-evidently, indubitably, and necessarily. In contrast, being as thing is given incompletely, through the necessary mediation of appearances, dubitably, and contingently. While there may not have been much that was completely new offered in this analysis, since most of these differences were already hinted at in the “Idea of Phenomenology,” Husserl wishes here to draw out the important consequences which follow from these differences in terms of the being of the immanent and that of the transcendent—an interest absent from the earlier lectures. In the 1907 lectures our interest was largely epistemological; we were interested in the certainty with which the immanent was given and the questionableness of the transcendent. In the present text, Husserl has switched to an ontological focus. We are interested in the manner of givenness as an indication of the nature of the mode of these two types of being. Husserl concludes this portion of Ideas I by informing us that with respect to the determination of this ontological difference: We have acquired the cognitions we needed. Already included in the concatenations of essences disclosed to us are the most important premises from which we shall draw the inferences concerning the essential detachableness of the whole natural world from the domains of consciousness, of the sphere of being pertaining to mental processes (1983, pp. 103–104).

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We are now in a position to draw out these inferences. We have achieved the premise needed upon which to characterize, in a positive fashion, the nature of consciousness as intentional.

Ideas I: Consciousness as Absolute What is it, precisely, that we do know at this point? What is it that we have achieved thus far in our exploration of the realm of experience? It would be helpful in our attempt to answer these questions if we were to remember that we began this investigation of the immanent domain initially in order to see if we could account for the existence of the natural attitude as the attitude of everyday life and to see, consequently, if we could account for the taken for granted quality of natural cognition, without seeking recourse to knowledge gained through natural cognition in the natural attitude. In order to do this, we had to, as Husserl writes in the above quote, “detach” consciousness from the natural world, since any knowledge of this world would have to come through natural cognition and would thus have to be considered unusable. What we have discovered in our last section, then, is that consciousness can indeed be explored and understood in its own terms without recourse to naturalistic explanation or natural science and that it is in fact best understood in this way. There is knowledge of consciousness that is non-natural, and this form of knowledge is most appropriately suited to the nature of consciousness as a subject matter for inquiry. There is a way to understand the domain of immanence without conceiving of it as a merely internal or subjective part of the transcendent, natural world Had we continued to struggle to understand consciousness in the terms of naturalistic disciplines, we would have conceived of it on the basis of those characteristics of being which belong properly to things, such as dubitability and contingency. What we have discovered, however, is that consciousness is actually best conceived of in terms of wholly different, and somewhat opposite, characteristics, such as those of indubitability and necessity. This not only will have implications for the kind of science appropriate for a study of consciousness, as we will eventually see, but also has implications for the nature of the relationship between consciousness and the natural world, a relationship that has remained problematic for us to this point, but a relationship that we have also not yet explicitly discussed, as such. The position implicit in the natural attitude with respect to this relationship is that which we have previously attributed to the psychological viewpoint. According to such a view, as we did mention briefly in our discussion of the 1911 Logos article, consciousness is thought to be one property of the physical organism of the human person as zoological reality. It is the properly psychic property, but a psycho-­ physical property of the material reality of the body, nonetheless. It was the predominance of this position historically that Husserl addressed in that article under the label of the naturalization of consciousness. Through this process of naturalization, Husserl felt, consciousness itself came to be conceived of on the same basis as that of natural reality; as itself being one more thing causally interacting with other

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things in Nature. The “field of pure consciousness,” in this view, is taken to be “a component part of Nature” (1983, p. 114), and it is in this fashion, in the context of such a view, that naturalistic explanation can be thought to be appropriate to such topics as the subjectivity of knowing, and consequently, the basic principles of logic, etc. If this position was correct, then genetic naturalistic explanation could not be justifiably excluded from psychological understanding, nor could psychological apperception be justifiably excluded from the analysis of consciousness. Consciousness would, in such a view, be a part of Nature, and thus any study of consciousness would have to take into account its naturalistic origins in the causal nexus of Nature. Husserl’s “methodological exclusions” would be unjustified. What Husserl has just provided us with, however—through his analysis of being as experience as different from that of being as thing—is the insight necessary to overturn this natural(istic) way of understanding consciousness as a portion of Nature. What Husserl has provided are the premises upon which a reversal (1983, p. 112) of this relation between reality and consciousness can be achieved. In the natural attitude the priority, ontologically, is given to the body as a physical thing, Nature as the totality of physical things, and consciousness is considered to be a mere supplement to this fullness of being, an epiphenomenon added to the human organism as one of its material properties. What Husserl has just gone to great pains to show is that the priority in truth falls with consciousness, not with Nature. It is consciousness that is given absolutely and necessarily, while transcendent being is always given incompletely, dubitably, and contingently. It is consciousness that is given immediately and with self-evidence, while transcendent being is given through appearances and forever without a guarantee as to its existence. Due to these epistemological discoveries, Husserl suggests that we reverse our ontological priorities and recognize that rather than being an epiphenomenon of Nature, it is consciousness that is responsible for the apparent existence of Nature; that Nature in effect is one intentional object for consciousness. This conclusion will understandably, due to the prevailing habits of thought, meet with serious criticism and reserve. In order to forestall such a response as long as possible, we shall follow Husserl further through his own presentation of his case. The main obstacle to the breakthrough he is arguing for is the natural assumption that the natural world exists independently of consciousness and that regardless of how it is given to experience or known, it is what it is physically or materially. Experience, Husserl allows, compels us to place at the basis of things a physical truth which we understand to pertain to the natural world indifferent to our experience of it. Even if no humans existed, we might think, the natural, physical world would continue on undisturbed in its fundamental being (of primary qualities or the latest constructs of physics). Human being is only one species of the being (as thing) found within the natural world, so it can in no way be seen as responsible for the world and the objects existing within it. Husserl reminds us and emphasizes to the contrary that “whatever physical things are … they are as experienceable physical things. It is experience alone that prescribes their sense” (1983, p. 106). It is futile and nonsensical to speculate about what might exist behind or outside of the scope of experience, for we can never, by definition, have experience of or otherwise gain

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access to it. All knowledge, of whatever type, is only possible as knowledge to the extent that it can be brought within the scope of consciousness. In this sense, we can only concern ourselves with the world as experienced and known, and it is precisely this to which we gained access through the phenomenological reduction in our last two sections. We might remember that Husserl refuted a concern similar to this one with the world in-itself when he challenged the status of the thing in-itself earlier in Ideas I. At that time, he refuted the persistent insistence on a thing in-itself by showing how the phenomenological insight into the nature of things as things of experience, things themselves as given through the necessary mediation of appearances, sufficed in order to account for all possible experiences of, or knowledge about, things. The point is the same here: the presumed existence of the natural world is sufficiently handled through a concept of the world itself as an object, or horizon for objects, of experience. There is no need to hold onto a notion of the world in-itself, if by in-itself we mean outside of a relationship to consciousness. We could never get to a Nature that was not given through its relation to consciousness. As Husserl insists, “an object existing in itself is never one with which consciousness or the Ego pertaining to consciousness has nothing to do” (1983, p. 106). The world, then, and the objects within it are most properly understood as being objects for consciousness, as being “constituted” (1983, p. 110) in and through this relation. “The existence of a world,” writes Husserl, “is the correlate of certain multiplicities of experience distinguished by certain essential formations” (1983, p. 109). Once we realize that the natural world must be considered in this way to be the correlate of consciousness rather than its physical foundation, we can pause to reconsider the relationship between consciousness and the natural world accordingly. Just as we wondered, for example, whether the existence of human beings as conscious organisms was necessary for the existence of the natural world within a natural framework, we can now wonder within our phenomenological framework whether or not it is essential to consciousness that it have physical entities such as we have described and the natural world in which they exist as its correlates. Is it necessary that consciousness constitute things and Nature as existing outside of itself? In other words, once we realize that the world is a correlate of certain essential formations, we can ask whether or not the particular formations that constitute the world are necessary ones in and of themselves. Must consciousness, that is, experience itself as being part of such a world, or could not consciousness equally well have very different formation that would not cohere in this particular and specific way? Husserl asserts that, “it cannot be seen that actual experiences can flow only in such concatenated forms” (1983, p. 109). There is nothing intrinsic to the nature of consciousness that guarantees that a world as such will always be one of its correlates; that it must be so. “It is instead quite conceivable,” Husserl argues: That experience, because of conflict, might dissolve into illusion not only in detail, and that it might not be the case, as it is facto, that every illusion manifest a deeper truth and that every conflict, in the place where it occurs, is precisely what is demanded by more inclusive contextures in order to preserve the total harmony; in our experiencing it is conceivable that there might be a host of irreconcilable conflicts not just for us but in themselves, that experience

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might suddenly show itself to be refractory to the demand that it carry on its positings of physical things harmoniously, that its context might lose its fixed regular organizations of adumbrations, apprehensions, and appearances—in short, that there might no longer be any world (1983, p. 109).

This startling revelation of the possibility that consciousness could remain unaffected, that “its own existence would not be touched” (1983, p. 110), by the virtual disappearance of the world is expressed in the section of Ideas I entitled, appropriately, “Absolute Consciousness as the Residuum After the Annihilation of the World” (1983, pp. 109–112). This has for a long time been considered one of the more controversial sections of the entire Husserliana. As a result of their reading of this particularly important portion of Ideas I, various commentators have accused Husserl of destroying the world, or severing the tie between consciousness and the world to what seems like an absurd degree; in essence, losing the world and replacing it with an empty, solipsistic vacuum. Actually, all that Husserl has done is to make explicit the implications of the fact that what we ordinarily take to be the world is in fact the correlate of coherent and consistent, harmonious and connected, essential formations that are not given to consciousness with any guarantee as to their future continuation in such a consistent and coherent fashion. Experience may, at any time, no longer constitute such a unity, such a harmonious whole. When Husserl writes that “there might no longer be any world,” he means that it is conceivable that experience could be such as not to cohere into the ordered and consistent patterns which we take for granted as inherent in reality, the patterns through which we experience a shared, common, and enduring world. We are reminded here of Kafka, whose writings consistently worked to expose and explode many of the formations implicitly utilized in the constitution of this world. Since every thing-­ like transcendence was given incompletely and contingently, as we have discovered, then it is conceivable that all such transcendencies might no longer be. It is conceivable that the entire thing-world could be nullified in this manner and that consciousness would continue to exist without a natural world as its correlate. The significance of this insight, that “absolute consciousness” does remain as the residuum following such a theoretical annihilation of the world, is that the domain of consciousness is a region of being independent of any and all other forms of being. Immanent being, as Husserl concludes, is “therefore indubitably absolute being in the sense that by essential necessity immanental being nulla ‘re’ indiget ad existendum” (1983, p. 110). Regardless of whether or not its experience cohered into the patterns necessary for there to be a world, consciousness would continue on “in its own proper existence” unaffected. Rather than the world continuing on in the face of the end of all human psychic life, as we had presumed in the natural attitude, it seems that consciousness would continue on in the face of the end of all natural reality. While in the natural attitude, we had presumed that the physical body of the human organism was a necessary substratum for consciousness as psychological subjectivity, we now realize that “no real being … is necessary to the being of consciousness itself.” Quite to the contrary, we have discovered that this relation is reversed, and it is, on the other hand, that the world of things “is entirely referred to consciousness” (1983, p. 110). It is the being of consciousness that is the necessary

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substratum (albeit in a different sense) for the being of things, and not the being of things, such as the body and Nature, which are the necessary substrata for the being of consciousness. This is indeed a reversal of the “sense commonly expressed in speaking of being”; as Husserl describes it, “The being which is first for us is second in itself; i.e., it is what it is, only in ‘relation’ to the first” (1983, p. 113). It is this new conception of consciousness, as absolute being, which is then termed by Husserl the “transcendental” view (1983, p.  114). In referring to consciousness as transcendental, he is defining or characterizing consciousness in contradistinction to transcendent Being. Consciousness is not to be thought of as a portion of the transcendent world. Transcendental consciousness is absolute, it is the realm of being in and through which transcendent being comes to be constituted as transcendent. In this way, transcendental consciousness is first or primary in its being; transcendent being is what it is only in relation to transcendental consciousness. We have in this reversal accomplished what Husserl referred to in the epigraph for this book, taken from the Cartesian Meditations, as the “Copernican shift” (1977a, p. 147); a shift from the presumed primacy of Nature to the demonstrated primacy of consciousness. Phenomenology shall study transcendental consciousness as absolute being. It will be built upon this Copernican shift or reversal. It will be a transcendental science, which is in no way tied to natural cognition of the natural attitude but is carried out precisely through they’re having been put aside through what now has come to be called the transcendental reduction. Through this reduction, we put the natural attitude and its natural world within brackets, so that we may investigate their source, their origins in transcendental consciousness as absolute being. By now it should be clear that phenomenology, as a transcendental science, can no longer be considered psychological in any sense. Confusions might arise at this juncture, however, unless we are careful to realize that the non-psychological nature of phenomenology extends to the nature of its subject matter as well as to its method; that is, that consciousness as we have been discussing it here is no longer understood to be psychological subjectivity, as it is in the natural attitude and its dogmatic sciences. Were we still thinking of consciousness in psychological terms, this radically new position would be paradoxical in that psychological subjectivity does belong to the world and is dependent upon the world for its existence. In our carrying out of the phenomenological reduction, however, we bracketed that conception or interpretation of consciousness (the psychological apperception of consciousness) due to its transcendent nature in order to reach the domain of pure consciousness. Pure consciousness, as we have discovered, is transcendental rather than transcendent and can thus no longer be considered to be psychological, since the psychological belongs within the transcendent domain, within the world. We have here, then, two radically different apperceptions of consciousness, one transcendent and one transcendental. We can begin to detect here the grave importance involved in making sure that phenomenology as transcendental is not confused with psychology as transcendent, for a consciousness that was understood to exist within the world could in no way at the same time be considered to be the foundation for that world. The consciousness that Husserl has detached from the natural world through the transcen-

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dental phenomenological reduction is thought precisely to be such a foundation for the being of the natural world. It is with respect to this transcendental consciousness that Husserl writes that, “Reality, the reality of the physical thing taken singly and the reality of the whole world, lacks self-sufficiency in virtue of its essence” (1983, p. 113). It was this conception of consciousness that Husserl had anticipated earlier when he wrote that in Ideas I that we could be seeking a “certain universal insight” into the essence of consciousness as that through which “natural” actualities come to be constituted and known as such (1983, p. 65). This consciousness is not a portion of Nature nor is it a “coordinate” form of being, living “peaceably side by side” to transcendent being, “occasionally becom[ing] ‘related to’ or ‘connected with’ one another” (1983, p. 111). This consciousness, then, for all of these reasons, can no longer be considered psychological in nature. To the contrary, we have been able to explore and characterize the being of consciousness without appealing to naturalistic explanation or natural cognition because consciousness is not properly situated within the natural world, as the natural attitude assumes. It comprises a domain all its own, a “self-contained complex of being” (1983, p. 112) more primordial and ontologically primary to that of things and their natural world. It is no longer merely one circumscribed region within it, a psychic property of material organisms. We began this section of our text with the realization that “a veritable abyss yawns between consciousness and reality” (1983, p. 111). This abyss was initially characterized as the gap between differing epistemological attributes, such as the self-evident nature of the givenness of the existence of experience as opposed to the contingent nature of the givenness of transcendent objects. Built upon these epistemological considerations, we have been able to conclude that the being of experience is absolute and primary over the being of objects, which is relative and contingent. We are now speaking to the implications that such a conclusion has for the status of consciousness in its relation to the world of which it was presumed to be a part. In this regard, Husserl writes that: Thus it becomes clear that, in spite of all our assuredly well-founded statements about the real being of the human Ego and its conscious mental processes, in the world and about everything in the way of “psychophysical” interconnections pertaining to them—that, in spite of all that, consciousness considered in its “purity” must be held to be a self-contained complex of being, a complex of absolute being into which nothing can penetrate and out of which nothing can slip, to which nothing is spatiotemporally external and which cannot be within any spatiotemporally complex, which cannot be affected by any physical thing and cannot exercise causation upon any physical thing (1931, p. 139).

Considered in its purity, consciousness is not psychological subjectivity, but the self-contained system of absolute being, which we have termed transcendental. What implications does such a view hold for consciousness as psychic? What of the real being of the human ego, which certainly does seem to belong to this world as one of its regions? Of this Husserl writes: On the other hand, the whole spatiotemporal world, which includes human being and the human Ego as subordinate single realities is, according to its sense, a merely intentional being, thus one has the merely secondary sense of a being for a consciousness. It is a being

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posited by consciousness in its experiences which, of essential necessity, can be determined and intuited only as something identical belonging to motivated multiplicities of appearances: beyond that, it is nothing (1983, p. 112).

The human ego and its experiences, it seems, are objects for pure consciousness in the same manner as are the physical things of the natural world, which co-exist alongside of it. Psychic subjectivity has the merely secondary, relative sense of a being for consciousness understood transcendentally. Psychic subjectivity, along with the natural world of which it is a part, has been posited by transcendental consciousness and has the status of an intentional object; outside of its relation to transcendental consciousness, it is just nothing at all. It is here, at this relationship identified between pure consciousness and psychological subjectivity, that Husserl’s philosophy is transformed from the realism of the Logical Investigations (as we noted at the close of Chap. 1) to the transcendentalism of the Ideen and his later works. It was also at this point that Husserl lost, as a result, many of his early students who refused to undertake such a transformation, a Copernican shift, along with him. It would take us much too far afield to debate the philosophical advantages and disadvantages of this position, to explore its possibility from a purely philosophical perspective. This has already been a much-discussed topic in the Husserlian literature and continues to be so, and while the outcome of these debates is, of course, of profound relevance for our entire project, this is not our central concern in this work. Readers interested in a further defense of, or the nature of the criticisms of, this position may consult the appropriate philosophical sources (cf., e.g., Caputo, 1977, 1979, 1984; Cobb-Stevens, 1983b; Edie, 1964; Fink, 1970; Merleau-Ponty, 1962; Mohanty, 1985a; Schmitt, 1971; Seebohm, 1983). In our own work we have decided to delay external criticisms of Husserl’s position until we have clarified its implications for psychology, as Husserl understood it. Husserl was insistent upon making the transcendental turn in pursuit of a radically non-psychologistic phenomenology, and so we follow him along this path in order to discern the implications for psychology which result from this reversal. It is to this that we now return. We have succeeded in breaking through to the dimension or realm of the transcendental, of discovering an alternative to the natural attitude which will, although it has not as yet, allow us to understand the presence and predominance of the natural attitude in everyday life. Husserl writes that: It is now becomes clear that, in contrast to the natural theoretical attitude, the correlate of which is the world, a new attitude must in fact be possible which, in spite of the “exclusion” of this psychophysical universe of Nature, leaves us something: the whole field of absolute consciousness (1983, p. 113).

It was this “whole field of absolute consciousness” which, as he adds, “is left as the sought-for ‘phenomenological residuum’” (1983, p. 113) when we had bracketed the natural world as epistemologically inaccessible to us. It is in taking up this residuum of the whole field of absolute experiences as our subject matter that we have reached at last “the fundamental field of phenomenology” (1983, p.  114). Experiences understood in the absoluteness of their being, rather than as natural,

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psychological events, provide a very different subject matter for our discipline, which has struggled to demonstrate its difference without much success. It is in the context of this difference that we are finally able to locate the infinite distance required between phenomenology and psychology. This is a difference that has been very hard to come by. We had dropped anchor on the shores of this field in 1907, when we first suspended psychological apperception, and perhaps we had initially set off for this destination in 1900 when we first realized the necessity of understanding consciousness in its own terms, even though, at the time, we obviously had not yet come to a sufficient insight into what those terms were. Here, at the culmination of Husserl’s last 13 years of struggle, we have achieved this insight; we have come to a radically new understanding of the nature of those terms. To understand consciousness in its own terms is not to understand it as a portion of Nature, as a natural-psychic reality, as we had in the Logical Investigations. Husserl criticizes this earlier view indirectly here in Ideas I, when he writes of the phenomenological reduction that: They are necessary in order to recognize that our disregarding of the whole world in the form of the phenomenological reduction is something totally different from a mere abstracting from components within more comprehensive interconnections, be they necessary or factual. If mental processes of consciousness were inconceivable without involvement with Nature in the same fashion in which colors are inconceivable without extension, then we could not regard consciousness as an absolutely peculiar region by itself in the sense in which we must regard it. One must see, however, that by such an “abstracting” from Nature only something natural can be acquired, and not transcendentally pure consciousness (1983, p. 115).

In the works prior to the Ideen, the reduction was only understood as this kind of abstraction from Nature through which we “could win only what was natural.” We had yet to realize that we could conceive of experiences apart from their interlacing with Nature, and this limited the differences that could be drawn between phenomenology and psychology. As long as the reduction was an abstraction from the natural world, consciousness could not be seen as the absolute region that it is. It is this conception of consciousness as absolute, as transcendental, which we were in quest of, which remains after the phenomenological suspensions of Nature and the psychological already outlined in 1907 as their residuum. After our discussion of the “The Idea of Phenomenology” lectures, we were at a loss as to how to characterize this residuum, how to understand the nature of a consciousness that was non-­ psychological. Again, after our discussion of the “Philosophy as Rigorous Science” article, we were confused as to how to understand what Husserl could mean by pure consciousness and whether it was a contrast to or revision of psychological consciousness. These questions can now be answered on the basis of a conception of consciousness as transcendental. Conscious experiences are conceivable apart from their interlacing with Nature. As long as we were unaware of this, and as long as we continued to conceive of consciousness as a region of the natural world, the exclusions brought about through the phenomenological reduction could not be anything but temporary and provisional. If we were to suspend the link between Nature and consciousness that we

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thought essential, then this could only be due to our present theoretical interest or orientation. Our exclusions of natural-psychological (even if non-naturalistic) explanation from the realm of consciousness proved to be more than merely methodological in that they have now been provided with an ontological justification. These exclusions are not merely temporary or provisional, as we had feared, for they lead to a realm of consciousness that is not interlaced with Nature, but proves to be independent from, and primary to, Nature. As we have seen, when the reduction was justified only as a methodological exclusion, it could not distance phenomenology from psychology in a radical enough manner to overcome psychologism. The genetic question remained to be answered and would not be silenced so easily. We have here in a transcendental apperception of consciousness, a new answer to that genetic question. We can no longer look to naturalistic explanation, nor to non-­ naturalistic psychological explanation, for the system of consciousness is a self-­ centered realm of absolute being of a nature fundamentally different, in principle, from the nature of natural and psychic being. Rather than appealing, whether expressly or not, to natural-causal explanation, we must appeal explicitly to transcendental consciousness as that through which the natural world is constituted as its correlate. We appeal genetically to intentional constitution as a transcendental function. It is clear how this alters radically the status and method of phenomenology as a transcendental science, how phenomenology is now infinitely distanced from psychology and other natural sciences. But of what significance is this breakthrough for psychology? How are we to understand the relation between what is now a transcendental phenomenology and psychology? If experience is absolute and transcendental in nature, and therefore not psychological, does it make sense to do psychology at all? Is there still a place for psychology after this transcendental turn? Now that we have justified our exclusion of psychological apperception as part of the phenomenological method, have we lost it for good? How, then, could psychology utilize the phenomenological method, as Husserl had written in 1911, and become thereby a truer and more adequate psychology? We have clarified the nature of the subject matter with which phenomenology deals; we must now do the same for psychology. We take up these questions in our next chapter.

Chapter 4

Phenomenological Psychology

Consciousness therefore makes its appearance here in different modes of apprehension and different contexts, and different ones moreover within phenomenology itself: namely, within the latter itself first as absolute consciousness and secondly, in the correlate, as psychological consciousness which occurs in the natural world—as in a certain manner revalued, yet without losing the content peculiar to it as consciousness from “Ideas I” (Husserl, 1983, p. 172)

In discovering the intentional nature of consciousness and in pursuing the ontological implications of such a view to the further discovery of the transcendental domain as its proper sphere, we have accomplished much, but we have yet to answer many of the questions raised along the way. We are now able to characterize positively what survives the bracketing of the natural attitude and its knowledge; we know that a residue remains, and that this residue is a self-contained region of absolute being, independent of the natural world and responsible for its very existence. Our “winning” of this absolute region does not, in and of itself, allow us to account for the fact of the natural world, nor does it explain the fact of the natural cognition through which this world is encountered. We may still ask, if consciousness is transcendental in nature, then why is there a natural attitude through which consciousness appears as worldly, as a portion of Nature? Why is experience in everyday life such that the world appears to us as out there, existing independent of our experience of it and primary with respect to it? Why did our winning of the transcendental domain require the “exacting and laborious studies” involved in the laying out and performance of the phenomenological reduction? Why was not consciousness in its transcendental form immediately accessible to us, but rather hidden within the naturalistic bent of the natural attitude? Once again, the answer that we have managed to secure to one question—that of the true nature of consciousness—raises a number of further issues yet to be resolved. Fortunately for us, Husserl was fully aware of this fact as well, and viewed the establishment of the transcendental more as a point of departure for further analysis than as the culmination of his efforts. It is here where the real work of phenomenology begins. © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 L. Davidson, Overcoming Psychologism: Husserl and the Transcendental Reform of Psychology, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-59932-4_4

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Given our explicit concern with the psychological problematic in Husserl’s work, we can rephrase the questions that do remain at this point in terms of their significance for the relation between phenomenology and psychology. Following our discussion of “Philosophy as Rigorous Science,” we had several questions regarding the nature of consciousness, the nature of the psychic, and the nature of the relation between them. We have only answered the first of these thus far. Pure consciousness, as we now know, is transcendental, absolute in its being and ontologically primary in relation to the world that it constitutes. As we remarked in our last chapter, this pure consciousness cannot be considered to be psychological in nature, for psychological subjectivity is given as belonging to the world, as being a part of it. A subjectivity that belongs to the world cannot also constitute that world, cannot be responsible for its existence. It cannot be both a portion of the world and its foundation. Two basic questions thus remain: what is the nature of the psychic and how is it related to transcendental consciousness? If consciousness is transcendental in nature, then how are we to understand psychological apperception and its apparent naturalness? Why is it natural to begin with psychological reflection, and how is that form of reflection even possible? Further, if the reduction brackets this apperception of consciousness in the turn to the transcendental, how is psychology to utilize this reduction, as Husserl suggested in 1911? What, in essence, are the implications of a transcendental conception of consciousness for psychology? We take up these questions in this chapter as we move through the remainder of Ideas I and then through the other two volumes of the Ideen series. In these later two works, Husserl returns to the psychological problematic explicitly and clarifies for us the relation that can now exist between a natural psychology and a transcendental psychology. It is here that we will be able to account for his use of the phrase “psychological phenomenology” in Ideas I, and that we will come to a first appreciation of a phenomenological psychology as a discipline different from both naturalistic psychology and transcendental phenomenology. It will appear to us at that time that a phenomenologically reformed psychology can arise in the gap, or infinite distance, created between naturalism and the transcendental by virtue of the reduction. Such a psychology seems to be presented in Husserl’s own lectures on “Phenomenological Psychology,” and the further exploration of this position, as articulated in that text, will provide the material for the reflection undertaken in our next chapter.

Ideas I: the Psychological Problematic What, then, of psychological subjectivity or the psychological apperception of consciousness? Is a psychological apperception simply fundamentally mistaken, or is there a way in which consciousness can be viewed psychologically with justification, even if perhaps at the price of our newly won transcendental domain? Husserl once again takes up this problematic in Ideas I, after having successfully staked out the territory of the transcendental as a departure from, or abandonment of, the psychological. He asks:

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We have included within the sphere of our findings the whole of material Nature, appearing sensuously, and the nature founded in the latter and determined by physics at a higher level of cognition. But what about animate realities, human and beasts? What about their psyches and psychical mental processes (1983, p. 124)?

We remember that it was this view of consciousness as belonging to animate realities, as a property of man as zoological reality, that we had bracketed as part of the phenomenological method that led us to the transcendental sphere. We also remember that the reduction does not negate or refute such a view with respect to the reality status of its objects, but simply puts such a thesis aside until it can be evaluated from an epistemologically grounded position, until it can be accounted for. In this sense, psychological apperception has been by passed in our ascent to the transcendental, but it has not been unconditionally rejected; it remains to be accounted for, to be grounded in the epistemological and now ontological insights that we have gained through its suspension. If the psychological is, in fact, the natural starting point for the kind of reflection we have been conducting, how can we account for this fact given our transcendental view of consciousness? How are we to understand psychic experience, once it is no longer taken for granted as the natural stance with respect to consciousness. It apparently remains as a stance with respect to consciousness for which we must be able to give an account. We have already said that psychic subjectivity is a part of the world; it was for this reason that it was bracketed along with the physical world in the performance of the reduction. Husserl writes here, similarly, that, “the complete world is not merely physical; it is also psychophysical. It must—who can deny it?—include all the streams of consciousness connected with animated organisms” (1983, p. 124). The return to psychological subjectivity as a reality to be explained seems to place us in a paradoxical position not in evidence when it is a question of accounting for the existence of other, physical objects of consciousness. In the case of psychological subjectivity, it is consciousness itself that is perceived as a transcendent object, as part of its own world. It was this paradoxical position that we thought we could avoid at the end of our last chapter, by insisting that transcendental, world-­ constituting consciousness not be psychological, and thus, worldly consciousness. This paradox has returned, now that we are asked to account, in some way, for psychological apperception; for the fact that, despite its transcendental nature, consciousness is “connected with animated organisms” and does belong to the natural world. Husserl expresses this paradox in terms of the apparent dual nature of conscious life: Thus, on the one hand consciousness is said to be the absolute in which everything transcendent, and, therefore, ultimately the whole psychophysical world, becomes constituted; and, on the other hand, consciousness is said to be a subordinate real event within that world. How can these statements be reconciled (1983, p. 124)?

Before attempting to answer this question, we should explicitly recognize its importance in the overall context of Husserl’s project(s). The fact that there is a psychological apperception possible, through which consciousness comes to be viewed as a subordinate real event within the natural world, is what we referred to

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earlier as the truth of psychologism. It is such an insight as this, upon which psychologism is based, through which judgments came to be taken as events in Nature produced by natural-causal forces. We are now being asked to account for such a possibility even though the anti-psychologistic bent in our own thinking would tend to make us want to deny its validity. By attributing validity to a psychological apperception of consciousness that situates it with the natural world, are we not then returning to a psychologistic position? We must be careful in what follows to see how this is not the case. While Husserl apparently feels compelled to accord psychological subjectivity some validity, he will not want to equate it with the transcendental view of consciousness so newly won. How does he manage this? How, indeed, does he reconcile the two statements? At first, Husserl suggests that consciousness “enter[s] the real world” through its connection to the human or animal body with which it forms an empirical unity, which then serves as its empirical embodiment. It is “only by virtue of its experienced relation to the organism,” he writes, “does consciousness become real human or brute consciousness, and only thereby does it acquire a place in the space belonging to Nature and the time belonging to Nature” (1983, p. 125). It was such a process as this that Husserl referred to in his Logos article as the naturalization of consciousness which he critiqued at that time as leading to psychologism. He seems to be returning to the insights articulated in that article as a way of accounting for the possibility of psychological apperception, even though these same insights, in the earlier article, proved to be problematic and mistaken. Is there perhaps a truth of naturalism, as there has been a truth of psychologism in general, which, though not unsurpassable, could be said to account for the naturalistic tendencies of Husserl’s predecessors and the natural attitude itself? Rather than challenging this process based upon its questionable epistemological and ontological implications, as he did in 1911, he here seems to be offering us this process as that through which psychological apperception becomes possible. Through this process of “annexation,” consciousness can “enter into the real world” as a transcendent reality within it; it can become part of the world, which it has constituted as its correlate. In this fashion, consciousness “can relinquish its immanence and take on the characteristic of transcendence”; it can constitute itself as psychological in nature (1983, p. 124). Why would consciousness naturalize itself in this way? What possible purpose could be served through such an abandonment and concealment? Husserl answers that it is only through such a process as this that consciousness could enter into relation with others having a like nature and thereby share a common world with them. He writes: Only by virtue of the connection joining a consciousness and an organism to make up an empirically intuited unity within Nature is any such thing as mutual understanding between animate beings pertaining to a world possible; and that only thereby can any cognizing subject find the complete world and at the same time know it as one and the same surrounding world belonging in common to him and to all other subjects (1983, p. 125).

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Such is one consequence of Husserl’s transcendentalism: that for a subjectivity to enter into relation with other subjectivities and to be able to share a common world with them, it must link itself onto a natural entity such as the human or animal body and become a part of that world. While this position will most likely, and understandably, raise many eyebrows, Husserl accounts for its possibility in a rather straightforward manner. Once more he takes what might seem to the uninitiated to be an esoteric conception and grounds it in experience in its modes of givenness. We remember from our last chapter that there is a “twofold point of view” possible with respect to reflection upon experience and its objects. We may direct our reflection either immanently or transcendently, taking either the experience itself or its object as our intentional object respectively. What we have been describing thus far in fairly unusual terms can be explained simply and directly upon the basis of a transcendent perception of consciousness itself. Husserl writes that it is “a peculiar kind of apprehending or experiencing” which “effects the production of this so-­ called ‘annexation’” (1983, p. 125). Rather than reflecting upon itself in its immanence, consciousness may also apprehend itself transcendently; it may take itself as an object for its perception as transcendent. In this case, as Husserl writes: “Our seizing regard is directed to the apperceived object, as it were, through the transcending apprehension” (1983, p. 126). Consciousness can take itself as an object for transcendent perception; it can look upon itself as transcendence along with all of the other objects that it perceives to be transcendent to itself; it is this that constitutes psychological apperception. We have then, as we said, a twofold point of view with respect to consciousness. We can either view consciousness immanently, as transcendental, or we can view consciousness transcendently, as a part of the natural world. In the first case, consciousness constitutes the world as its correlate, in the second, consciousness belongs to the world as a subordinate reality within it. Husserl describes this apparent parallelism: We have, accordingly, on the one hand, the psychological attitude in which our naturally focused regard is directed to mental processes—e.g., to a mental process of rejoicing—as a sequence of mental states of human or beast. On the other hand, we have the phenomenological attitude combined with the latter as an essential possibility which, reflecting and excluding the positings of something transcendent, is a turning toward absolute, pure consciousness and finds, as an absolute mental process, the apperception of a sequence of states (1983, p. 126).

We are reminded here of the parallelism spoken of in Husserl’s second edition revisions of the Logical Investigations, in which it was dependent upon the nature of one’s apperception of consciousness as to whether one’s analyses were to have psychological or phenomenological import. We now have the insight required to understand those passages more fully. When consciousness is being apprehended in its relation to the body as its natural foundation, when it is being viewed “as the natural standpoint dictates,” one’s descriptions have psychological significance and status. But when consciousness is being apprehended in its own nature, as absolute and pure, disconnected from all transcendences, one’s descriptions have phenomenological significance and status. Both forms of apprehension are possible and valid

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and, accordingly, we can imagine that the sciences appropriate to each form of apprehension are also possible and valid. In this particular example, for instance, the “feeling of rejoicing” can be taken as “an absolute phenomenological datum.” But it can also, “in the medium of an apprehensional function,” be taken as “precisely the function of ‘manifesting’ a sequence of states connected with the appearing organism and belonging to a human Ego-subject” (1983, p. 126). We can further imagine that, as we have quoted Husserl to the effect in the past, which way one does view this same affective experience will depend upon one’s own orientation or interest. How has this view not relapsed into psychologism, however? When confronted with a similar twofold point of view prior to this, we had raised serious objections as to whether or not such a position distanced phenomenology radically enough from psychology in order to overcome psychologism. We have been consistently dissatisfied with such a parallelism due to its implicit ontological implications. The same would seem to apply here. Is this not to say that consciousness is psychological in nature, that it is justifiably naturalized, and that phenomenology merely overlooks this fact temporarily in its own pursuit of a purified consciousness, free from transcendence? Husserl himself, as we noted above, critiques this process of linking-­on in his Logos article as being psychologistic; how has he not given himself over to the same fate through his appeal to this very same process? He writes that: “The ‘pure’ mental process ‘lies’, in a certain sense, within what is psychologically apperceived, in the mental process as a human state” (1983, p. 126). If pure mental process is in this way tied to the subjective human state, would this not make of phenomenology a psychological discipline? Once we have linked consciousness onto the body in this fashion, can it be separated from Nature in anything but a temporary and provisional way? Have we now lost sight of consciousness in its own nature as transcendental? It is here that we must exert care in order to see how Husserl has not simply and blindly returned to a pre-transcendental position with respect to the nature of consciousness. He insists, to the contrary, that even if consciousness does, so to speak, forget its nature through its annexation to the body and the resultant psychological apprehension, it nevertheless does not forfeit it. This process or apperception does not have ontological effects. He writes: Regardless of that whereof this apperception consists, or of what particular kind of demonstration it may demand, this much is obvious: Consciousness itself, in these apperceptive involvements or in this psychophysical relationship to something corporeal, loses none of its own essence and can take up into itself nothing alien to its essence; indeed that would be a countersense (1983, p. 125).

Whatever the nature of this process and the relation it constitutes between consciousness and the body, it cannot be the case that through this process either consciousness or the body lose their respective being. Consciousness must, then, we can assume, remain transcendental and absolute. It is not actually transformed into natural reality; it “naturally does not become, by means of that apperception” Husserl writes, “something which appears by virtue of adumbration.” Corporeal

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being, on the other hand, must remain corporeal and continues to “be presented by virtue of sensuous adumbration.” While consciousness does, through this apperception, perceive itself as a natural reality, an animated being, it does not cease thereby to be non-natural “in its essential nature.” “In itself, it is what it is by its absolute essence,” but it is “not seized upon in this flowing thisness; it is instead ‘apprehended as something’.” When apprehended in this manner, it is seen “as something which appears … as a somatically founded unity corresponding to the founding involved in apperception” (1983, p. 126). The constitution of psychological apperception, then, is not a process through which consciousness actually alters its own essential nature but is only a process though which consciousness comes to be “apprehended” as something other than what it essentially and in its absolute being actually is. Consciousness may appear as transcendent, but it is never anything but transcendental in nature. One of our reservations is accordingly assuaged; we are not returning to the naturalistic position critiqued in “Philosophy as Rigorous Science.” We are not going to allow consciousness to be subsumed under the natural order, even if we are struggling at the moment to understand how it can appear to be a part of this order. There is a truth of naturalism, as there had been a truth of psychologism, insofar as consciousness, through psychological apperception, can appear to be a part of the natural world, forming a psychophysical unity with the body. We do not attribute unconditional validity to this apprehension, we do not say that consciousness must be or is most appropriately apprehended in this way. We do, in fact, say quite the opposite; consciousness is not most appropriately apprehended in this fashion (i.e., psychologically), but appears as something other than it is when so apprehended (1983, p. 126). Of what use, then, is such an apperception of consciousness, if it is not appropriate to the true nature of its object, but is present nonetheless as a possibility with respect to it? What status or significance can we attribute to psychological apperception, given the fact that it seems somewhat unavoidable? We have raised this question several times already, whenever it seemed that psychological apperception had been justifiably excluded from the phenomenological domain. If consciousness is transcendental in nature, then what possible validity could psychological apperception have? How can, and why would, consciousness appear as transcendent when it in actuality is not—is transcendental? Given that we are not reverting to naturalism, how are we to understand this? Before moving on to answer this question, we should pause here to tie up a loose end or two. We can note at this point, even if we have not yet understood its nature fully, that it is through psychological apperception, as we have been discussing it, that the natural attitude and natural cognition become possible. As we noted in our introduction to this chapter, the question of the possibility and the origin of both the natural attitude and natural cognition was raised in our last chapter but has yet to receive an answer. We wondered how consciousness could take for granted its access to transcendent objects and the knowledge pertaining to them acquired through natural cognition. We set the natural attitude and its knowledge aside in order to seek their justification elsewhere. Having now made our transcendental turn, we can return to this question. We can now state that the natural attitude and

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natural cognition are possible, due to the fact that consciousness can and does take itself for an object through psychological apperception and, thereby, appears to itself to belong to the world that we know to be its (transcendental) correlate. It is precisely the natural attitude that is entered into as a result of a psychological apprehension of consciousness. As consciousness enters, or appears to enter the natural order, the natural standpoint with respect to consciousness and its world is assumed; consciousness comes to be viewed as a subordinate part of nature, founded upon its bodily being. Similarly, natural cognition arises as the access available to psychological subjectivity through which it may be present to the world in which it exists. Consciousness appears to itself to be relating to objects existing outside of itself, due to the fact that when it enters the transcendent world, it must do so through becoming, or appearing to become, merely one part of this world existing alongside of the other parts, all standing in causal relation to each other. In linking-on with a body, consciousness situates itself as transcendent to the objects existing in the world. It takes itself to be a real state of an animal being, and thereby as existing inside of this animal in a real relation with the objects that exist outside. It seems that the forgetting of the transcendental-intentional relation of constitution that is necessary for consciousness to enter into the world allows for the real relation that is assumed in the natural attitude to exist between psychological subject and the objects of its experience, the relation upon which natural cognition is based, to arise and take its place. The natural attitude and natural cognition are possible because consciousness can appear to itself to be transcendent; it is such an appearance that serves as their origin. We could say that the natural attitude and its positive or dogmatic knowledge are based upon a natural apperception of consciousness, even if we are as yet unclear as to the validity of such an apperception. We return, then, to this question: if we are not to revert to naturalism, how are we to understand the status and validity accorded to a natural apperception of consciousness such as this? While Husserl will not take up the task of distinguishing explicitly between a natural apperception of consciousness and a naturalistic one until Ideas II, as we shall see, he does clarify the nature and status of the psychological as a part of the natural world in what remains of Ideas I. In order to do so, he recalls the distinctions made earlier with respect to the difference in being that belongs, respectively, to Experience and to Things. Psychological subjectivity, as a part of the natural world, must be understood as belonging to the realm of Things; it must share the characteristics that we discovered earlier to belong to the realm of the transcendent. Absolute or transcendental subjectivity remains what it was judged to be at the time; it is characterized as Absolute, necessary, independent, etc. Psychological subjectivity differs from transcendental subjectivity in at least appearing to have transcendent, as opposed to absolute, being. Through psychological apperception, consciousness takes its place alongside of all other transcendent realities in the world. All of these trancendences to which consciousness now relates psychologically have the merely intentional being of Things; they are constituted and stand in a necessary and dependent relation to consciousness as Absolute. The same must now be said of psychological subjectivity

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itself; it, too, has the merely intentional being of a Thing. It, too, is constituted and stands in a dependent relation to transcendental subjectivity. Psychological apperception, like the world in which it situates psychic life, is a correlate of certain experience-patterns empirically present in the life of transcendental consciousness. Husserl writes: All empirical unities, and therefore also psychological mental processes, are indices pointing to concatenations of absolute mental processes having a distinctive essential formation, along with which other formations are imaginable; all are, in the same sense, transcendent, merely relative, accidental (1983, p. 128).

Psychological subjectivity is relative and contingent in the sense that, as a transcendent reality, it could quite possibly not be—other formations are conceivable. By this, Husserl means that the experience-patterns that cohere in order to constitute psychic reality are in no sense necessary; experience could equally well cohere in other formations, consciousness could appear to itself in other than psychological forms. Just as we said, with respect to the natural world, that it could exist no longer, we can now point out with respect to psychic realty that it could, in like fashion, no longer be a form of apprehension through which consciousness is aware of itself. “Certainly,” Husserl suggests, “a consciousness without an animated organism and, paradoxical as it sounds, also without a psyche, a consciousness which is not personal, is imaginable” (1983, p. 127). In this sense, it is not necessary or essential for consciousness to be annexed onto a body and to become the object of psychological apperception. The existence of psychic reality is relative to and contingent upon the “absolute mental processes” that constitute it; the fact that consciousness is apperceived psychologically is just that: an empirical fact. This empirical fact stands in the same relation to transcendental consciousness as all other empirical facts, lacking necessity and independence, having merely intentional (i.e., contingent, relative, etc.) being. From our insight into the nature of this relation, we can imagine that, while we do wish to allow a place for psychological reality, we will want to remain cognizant of its relative and dependent nature; that is, we will want to keep in mind that we are dealing with a secondary or contingent reality and not with being as absolute or independent (cf. Ricoeur, 1967, p. 56). Husserl writes: One must convince oneself that anything psychical, in the sense relative to psychology … are empirical unities and are therefore, like other realities of every kind and level, merely unities of intentional ‘constitution’—in its sense, truly existing: intuitable, experienceable, scientifically determinable on the basis of experience, but still ‘merely intentional’ and hence merely ‘relative’. To take them as existing in the absolute sense is consequently a countersense (1983, p. 128).

Psychic reality truly exists in so far as, and in the same manner as, all transcendent realties exist. As such, as a transcendent reality, psychic life is scientifically determinable in an empirical fashion, just as other natural realities serve as objects for empirical inquiry in other natural sciences. The point here, as it had been earlier with the natural world itself as one such object, is that psychological reality does not exist in itself, in an absolute sense, independent of transcendental consciousness.

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It seems, then, that psychological subjectivity can be afforded an intentional existence; it can have validity as truly existing and as serving as the appropriate subject matter for a positive science of psychology in so far as it has the relative, contingent, and dependent being belonging to the transcendent realm. Problems arise only when this relative and dependent reality is taken to be absolute, to exist independently of transcendental constitution. Problems arise only when psychological subjectivity is taken to exist in the absolute and independent manner that belongs properly to transcendental subjectivity. These problems, are, of course, the problems of psychologism with which we have been continuously concerned to this point. Were we not able to distinguish between psychological subjectivity and transcendental subjectivity in this fashion, then, we would be face to face, once again, with a psychologistic position with respect to consciousness. The acknowledgement of the relative and contingent nature of the psychic is crucial, because it serves, of necessity, to point back directly to what it is that psychological reality is relative to and contingent upon. Acknowledging that psychic reality is dependent necessarily involves the recognition of what it is that the psychic is dependent upon for its being; it points to that which constitutes psychic unities as the unities that they are. In this way, insight into the true nature of the psychic only serves to reaffirm the necessity of the transcendental. Insight into the nature of the psychic serves as a reminder that transcendent reality is a correlate of the transcendental consciousness that provides its ground. In this vein, Husserl writes: One must convince oneself that the obviousness with which every mental process in one’s own life or in another’s is accepted, and quite legitimately, as a psychological and psychophysical sequence of states of an animate subject, has its limit in the aforementioned consideration: that in contrast to the empirical mental process there stands, as a presupposition for the sense of that process, the absolute mental process (1983, p. 128).

It was precisely this sense of relevant limits for which we were striving in the above discussion of psychological apperception. We have been attempting to determine the status of the transcendental viewpoint established in our last chapter. With this concept of relevant limits, we have found our answer: consciousness as transcendental and absolute must remain the primary viewpoint, while consciousness as psychological must be allowed as a valid empirical viewpoint, but only in relation to the absolute experience upon which it depends for its very meaning. To hold that psychological subjectivity exists in an absolute independent sense, that a psychological viewpoint is sufficient with respect to consciousness in its essential nature, is absurd and, as we have seen repeatedly, psychologistic as well. We avoid falling back into psychologism by restricting the psychological to within these relevant limits, by acknowledging the assumption upon which psychological apperception depends for its meaning. In this way, we keep in view the sense and importance of our transcendental insights. We overcome our natural tendency to interpret consciousness psychologically by realizing that psychological apperception, while a possible empirical perspective on consciousness, is merely relative to the transcendental perspective, which in itself is absolute. Psychological apperception, as c­ ontingent and empirical in nature, provides only a limited perspective on consciousness.

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The limited perspective that it provides is, of course, perfectly appropriate, if one wishes to investigate the domain of conscious life empirically; if one wishes, that is, to investigate the psychical unities which are found to exist in the natural world. In order to investigate consciousness with respect to its own nature, however, to investigate pure consciousness, rather than as it appears empirically, a transcendental perspective is called for and this relative and secondary perspective is abandoned as inappropriate. As we saw in the 1907 lectures, we abandon the level of the psychological when we take up the question of the nature of pure consciousness, or consciousness in its own terms. In doing so, we do not, it seems, thereby have to dispense with the psychological altogether. We must simply confine it to within its relevant limits. We must come to an understanding of the psychological that does not threaten the integrity of our transcendental position, but which is built upon its insights. We do this by acknowledging that psychological states have validity as empirical realities, and that these empirical realities are constituted by and grounded in absolute experiences that are non-psychologistic (i.e., transcendental) in nature. Psychology cannot be left to stand alone, but it can stand in a valid and scientifically accessible way upon the ground of transcendental constitution. We should pause here for a moment to tie up another loose end and to stress the importance of a correct understanding of the nature of these limits within which psychological apperception is to be allowed to function. It is with a correct understanding of these limits that we are finally able to overcome the psychologism that has been plaguing us from the very beginning of our journey. We have seen Husserl attempt to break through his own psychologistic tendencies in every text that we have discussed to this point. These tendencies have surfaced to varying degrees and in various forms throughout these works, and our own treatment of them has grown increasingly complex as the questions have multiplied and issues remain unresolved. Let us return to these questions briefly at this juncture, so that we may silence some of the concerns that have lingered in the preceding pages. Mohanty, for example, has written that: “The obvious presupposition of … a radical critique of psychologism is a conception of consciousness as transcendental” (1984, p. 151). Now that we have achieved a transcendental perspective and taken a first stab at understanding the psychological perspective in its relation to it, we should be able to see just how this has allowed us to overcome psychologism in a radical manner. This has, after all, been the driving force behind Husserl’s thinking (de Boer, 1978, p. 527). We discussed at length in our first chapter the necessity of distancing the epistemological and universal science that we were attempting to develop from any naturalistic-­psychological discipline, and we saw, at the time, that a descriptive psychology could not serve this function. We then followed Husserl faithfully and without reservation, in our second chapter, through his 1907 lectures in which he carried the methodological exclusions operating implicitly in the Logical Investigations further to the extent of bracketing psychological apperception itself, abandoning even the descriptive psychological in the pursuit of a pure phenomenology. At that time, though, he seemed to lack any positive characterization of consciousness as non-psychological. While we understood the need to bracket the psychological, we

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did not seem to have anything to take its place. Was this rejection of psychological apperception fully justified, we wondered, especially since we had already, in the first edition of the Logical Investigations, attempted to study consciousness in its own terms without being able to distance our descriptions and analyses sufficiently from the naturalistic context of descriptive psychology. How was this solution different? Did not consciousness present itself as psychological, regardless of our epistemological interests? Can we, in fact, bracket psychological apperception in a radical or substantive way? To tackle this question, we then followed Husserl to the 1911 Logos article in which he promised to clarify this matter, successfully refuting a naturalistic apperception of consciousness as part of Nature. We remained in doubt, however, as to how to characterize a non-naturalistic, pure consciousness. Husserl himself seemed to waiver as to whether such a view would be no longer psychic or whether it would be the most properly psychic view, purified of naturalistic tendencies. In Chap. 3, we reached the initial, yet profound conclusion that pure consciousness is transcendental in nature; it is such a transcendental view of consciousness that remains as the residuum of our reduction and its exclusions. We characterized consciousness positively in this fashion, and in doing so, arrived at a non-psychic view, at least in the psychological sense. The discovery of the transcendental allows us, in de Boer’s words, to “see through” our “natural” apperception of consciousness as psychological in nature and finally affords us, thereby, the “infinite distance” we had been seeking (1978, p. 323). With the breakthrough to the transcendental, the phenomenological reduction can no longer be viewed as a temporary or provisional exclusion of the psychological. It provides us with consciousness in its purity, in its own essence, and need not fear being reversed or nullified by our natural inclination to presume a psychological framework. The psychological has proven not to be the most appropriate perspective to take with regard to consciousness; its bracketing is therefore justifiable. This brings us to our topic for this chapter: but what of the psychological? How does it figure in? Consciousness is, undeniably, apperceived psychologically; how is this to be explained? If it is not grounded in the true nature of consciousness, what is the origin of psychological apperception? From whence does it arise and what is its status? In his answers to these questions, Husserl silences the final objection raised by the psychologistic interpretation of consciousness (and thus phenomenology) by demonstrating, as we have in the last few pages, that a psychological apperception, while valid within limits, is not absolute and need not interfere with the transcendental science that takes consciousness in its absoluteness as its subject matter. Psychology is the appropriate science for a constituted domain of reality, for a science of the transcendent intentional being of the psychic. Phenomenology is the appropriate science for constituting consciousness, for a science of the immanent and necessary absolute being of the transcendental. The psychological is a valid domain for empirical inquiry, but not for the epistemological and universal science of transcendental phenomenology. Psychologism is radically overcome by a ­phenomenology infinitely removed from the psychological by having taken root in the transcendental—the wholly new dimension and attitude anticipated in “The Idea of Phenomenology” lectures.

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Mohanty, foremost among Husserl’s interpreters, has discussed the issue of psychologism and its overcoming in the context of Husserl’s related projects of transcendental phenomenology and scientific psychology. In his view, Husserl eventually overcomes psychologism by recognizing that both the psychologistic and anti-psychologistic positions of his predecessors shared a basic assumption about the nature of consciousness: that it is psychological in nature in an absolute sense. Husserl breaks through the problematic impasse of their debate by not buying into this assumption, by not sharing this view of the nature of what Mohantly refers to as “the mental.” By viewing consciousness as transcendental in its own essence and being psychological only in an empirical and relative sense, Husserl has bypassed the fundamental assumption that keeps this debate alive. Acknowledging both the absolute validity of consciousness as transcendental and the relative validity of consciousness as psychic, he can allow for a scientific psychology that does not in any way threaten the ontological priority that consciousness has been discovered to have through the transcendental insights of phenomenology. Psychological apperception comes to be, in Mohanty’s words, an “interpretive framework” that cannot make ontological claims. It is only valid within the relevant limits of empirical, scientific endeavor. Transcendental phenomenology, on the other hand, is grounded in ontology and, as such, is unaffected in its essence by the psychological addition. Mohanty writes: It has been often uncritically assumed that the mental as such is psychological. By ‘psychological’ may more appropriately be understood a certain interpretation of the mental, an interpretation which construes the mental as a natural event occurring ‘within’ the mental life of a person, connected causally to that person’s bodily states and environmental conditions. An intentional act construed thus as a natural event ceases to be ‘intentional’ in the strict sense, it becomes a mental event and inserted into the causal order or Nature. At the basis of psychologism, then, is not merely psychologization of the logical entities, of ideal meanings, etc., but at a deeper level, a ‘mundanization’ of consciousness. Psychologism, then is a consequence of this mundanization, and can be overcome only by a recognition of this origin (1982, p. 116).

And, again in reference to the origin of this mundanization and its overcoming: What psychologism and anti-psychologism have in common is a certain conception of psychological discourse. It is an interpretation of the mental as a private particular which makes psychologism and so also its opponent’s stance possible in the first place. What we need to do is recognize this as an interpretation. True overcoming of psychologism requires, not rejection of this or of any other interpretive framework, but first of all recognizing that an interpretive framework should not be construed as an ontology (1985a, p. 13). The mental as such is not the psychological. It becomes the subject matter of psychology as a natural science by being, in that very thematisation, inserted in the causal order of Nature … What makes psychologism possible in the first place is that interpretive framework within which one life of consciousness comes to be contoured as the domain of private particulars or as the subject matter of introspective or even of scientific psychology. True overcoming of psychologism requires, not rejection of this interpretive framework, but first of all recognizing that it is an interpretive framework that passes for an ontological insight, and then asking how this framework itself is possible—eidetically as well as historically. Both require subjecting it to the famed epoche. We are thereby on the threshold of transcendental philosophy (1984, p. 150).

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Several points made in these passages from Mohanty remind us of the path of discovery we have traversed to this point. We are now in a position to look back at our progress and assess it from a different perspective: the perspective made possible through our winning of the new region of the transcendental. From this perspective, we can appreciate the fact that the Husserl of the Logical Investigations did, in fact, perpetuate a form of psychologism, in so far as he still considered the mental to be the psychological, the intentional act to be a natural event. While that text did combat the psychologization of the logical entities, it did not seriously question the mundanization of consciousness. As de Boer notes, “there was no transcendental purification in the first edition” of this text (1978, p. 210). The pre-transcendental Husserl remained a “victim” of psychologism in the sense that he continued “to take any investigation oriented toward subjectivity for a psychological investigation” (Bachelard, 1968, p. 95). The breakthrough outlined above has been made possible, not by a rejection or suspension of the psychological, as implied in the 1907 lectures, but by the recognition that the psychological was one possible perspective upon consciousness that had both historical and eidetic origins in transcendental constitution. While the “Philosophy as Rigorous Science” essay anticipated such a parallelism of perspectives, with its notions of pure and empirical consciousness, it was not until the Ideen that Husserl actually articulated the transcendental insights that made the deontologization of the psychological possible. In Mohanty’s words, it is only “on the threshold of a transcendental philosophy” that we are able to view the psychological as an interpretation and to take up the question of its origins. It is to these origins, historical and eidetic, to which Husserl had alluded earlier, when he wrote of both a “bias of the ties” and “inner affinities of the subject matter” as accounting for the persistence of the confusions between phenomenology and psychology. What has now become clear is these confusions can only be resolved through the performance of the transcendental reduction. It is only from the transcendental perspective made possible through this reduction that the psychological can be understood as an interpretation of consciousness and that it can be situated within its relevant limits, relative to a transcendental view of consciousness. Returning to the text of Ideas I, we find Husserl speaking to this point in a section entitled, “The Methodological Importance of the Systematic Theory of Phenomenological Reductions” (1983, pp. 139–141). In this section, he reiterates his position that the reduction is of crucial importance in the development of phenomenology, due to the fact that it is “the extraordinarily widespread inclination of our age to psychologize the eidetic” (1983, p.  139). We find ourselves, prior to the performance of this reduction, in a psychologistic position with respect to both epistemology and psychology. We do not begin with an acknowledgement of the transcendental nature of consciousness, so this must be won through the reduction if we are to avoid the psychologistic temptations that have surfaced repeatedly in our prior discussions. As Husserl here writes: “If the province of phenomenology were presented with such immediate obviousness as the province pertaining to the natural attitude”—if, that is, it were our “natural” starting point, the attitude of everyday life—“then there would be no need of circumstantial reductions with the difficult deliberations which they involve” (1983, p. 139).

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But this not the case, as we have seen. Thus, to overcome the confusions engendered from the psychological point of departure natural to us, we must enact the reduction, acquire the transcendental domain, and then situate the psychic in its relation to the phenomenological in the fashion outlined above. The fact that we had been unable to do so prior to this text, since the reduction had yet to be understood in its transcendental significance, had resulted in what Husserl here refers to as “on the one hand” a “corruption” of psychology and on the other hand, a “corruption” of phenomenology. Neither discipline, as we pointed out before, benefited from such confusion. With his characteristic insistence, Husserl adds that “it is of very great importance, then, that clarity be produced in this respect” (1983, p. 140). Now that we have achieved such clarity, we can ask the question that most directly concerns us in this work: how will the development of transcendental phenomenology reform the science of psychology? What are the implications of a transcendental view of consciousness for psychological disciplines? We have seen how the psychological has been redefined in its relation to transcendental subjectivity; we may now wonder if the same is to be true for the science of psychological subjectivity. Does psychology, as a science, have to be concerned with the nature of its subject matter in this way? Must it take into account the dependent, relative nature of the psychic as one domain of transcendence, contingent upon its roots in transcendental constitution? As early as the Logical Investigations, Husserl had suggested that phenomenology should offer this kind of epistemological service for psychology, that it should be up to phenomenology to define for psychology the nature of its subject matter. This began to take on ontological significance in 1911 in “Philosophy as Rigorous Science,” when the concept of intentionality was first introduced, even though, at the time, its significance remained unclear. We can well imagine, then, that Husserl wanted phenomenology to perform such a service for psychology, now that he has attained full insight into the nature of both transcendental consciousness and psychological apperception. Husserl does touch on this topic briefly in a later section of Ideas I. He writes that we must start “entirely from this most radical of all ontological distinctions”: the distinction between “being as consciousness and being as something which becomes ‘manifested’ in consciousness, transcendent being”—a distinction which, he reminds us, “can be attained in its purity and appreciated only by the method of the phenomenological reduction.” “In the essential relationship between transcendental and transcendent being are rooted all the relationships” he then continues “between phenomenology and all other sciences” (1983, p. 171). The relation between phenomenology and psychology, then, will apparently be built upon the difference in the ontological status of their respective subject matters. Phenomenology is a science of the transcendental, psychology a science of the transcendent. The question that surfaces in the context of this difference is, does a psychology of the transcendent differ in any substantive way from a psychology that is either unaware of or unconcerned with the ontological status of its subject matter? Would a psychology that arises following the performance of the reduction, explicitly aware of the transcendent nature of its objects of inquiry, differ in any way from a psychology conducted “naively” in the natural attitude, prior to any performance of

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the reduction and seemingly indifferent to questions of ontological status? Given both Husserl’s comment in the Logos article that psychology should utilize the phenomenological reduction and his comment here that our natural disposition to interpret consciousness psychologically in an absolute fashion has led to a corruption of psychology, it would certainly seem that Husserl considers there to be such a difference, and that he considers this difference to be of considerable importance for psychology (as well as for phenomenology). Husserl seems to think that psychology can be radically reformed on the basis of these ontological insights. How are we to understand the nature of this reform, both epistemologically and methodologically? How would psychology utilize the phenomenological method and how would the utilization of this method alter its character? We are familiar with the psychology that does not utilize the phenomenological method, as the naturalistic psychology critiqued by Husserl in 1911 and the empirical-theoretical psychology bracketed in the Logical Investigations. This psychology is bracketed explicitly as part of the transcendental reduction elaborated in this text; we had to put this psychology aside in order to discover the difference between transcendental and transcendent being. As we noted above, this bracketing of the psychological is not to be equated with a rejection of the psychological out of hand. It remains following the reduction, as content that has been bracketed—as content to be accounted for and re-understood within the phenomenological domain. As Husserl writes: Figuratively speaking, that which is parenthesized is not erased from the phenomenological blackboard but only parenthesized, and thereby provided with an index. As having the latter, it is, however, part of the major theme of inquiry. It is absolutely necessary that this situation with the points of view peculiar to it be understood thoroughly” (1983, p. 171).

We have “disconnected” all natural disciplines in our move to the transcendental, it is true, but this does not mean, Husserl insists, that these sciences and their subject matters have simply disappeared or have ceased attracting our interest. They remain in the picture, but as bracketed, as disciplines to re-arise upon the epistemological foundation provided by transcendental phenomenology as universal science. We remember that Husserl’s desire all along in the creation of phenomenology has been to provide an epistemological foundation for science. Now that we have established this foundation, we are simply asking how its presence as a foundation alters the character and method of the sciences for which it provides this foundation. Husserl’s answer is that these sciences are not to be “excluded” but to be “revalued” and find “a place once again in the phenomenological sphere” by bringing along with them the “index” that indicates their having been bracketed (1983, p. 171). How are we to interpret this index? We discovered in our last chapter that the world as bracketed, as well as the object as bracketed, served sufficiently to account for all that could be known or experienced of what we ordinarily take in the natural attitude to be the world, or object in itself. The radical breakthrough to the transcendental required, in fact, that we realize that the world and its objects are only what they are in their relation to consciousness, and beyond this are just “nothing at all.” At the time we referred to this as their transcendence within immanence. The fact remains that in the natural

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attitude, the world and its objects are not recognized as having a transcendence within immanence but are taken naively to exist in themselves. Now that we have achieved a transcendental perspective, we may consider this natural standpoint with respect to the ontological independence of the world and its objects to be mistaken and, in Husserl’s words, “absurd.” Just as psychological subjectivity must not be taken to be absolute or independent of the transcendental subjectivity that constitutes it, the same must be said of all transcendences, viewed in the natural attitude as natural realities existing in an absolute sense. As de Boer notes: The epoche, then, must be understood as a taking back of this absolutizing of material reality … What is out in brackets is not the existence of the world … but a certain absurd interpretation of it … What is suspended is a certain kind of belief, a belief that absolutizes the world. The suspension of belief in the world is not a cancellation of this positing, but only a cancellation of a certain ‘natural’ quality it possesses. What is disconnected [through the reduction] is not reality but its natural character … We free ourselves from a certain view of the world. What remains is not a remainder or residue of the natural world, but the totality of this world freed from a naturalistic interpretation (1978, pp. 367, 370).

The performance of the reduction changes the way we view the subject matter of our natural sciences. Having bracketed their natural character, we realize that they are most properly defined and understood in their relation to consciousness, as transcendences within immanence. To say that they are not to be “excluded” but to instead be “revalued” within “the phenomenological sphere” is to say that they are to be considered as constituted realities, contingent and dependent upon the absolute being of transcendental subjectivity, rather than as natural realties existing in themselves, independent of consciousness. It is this that Husserl captures in his idea of the index which indicates bracketing. Bracketed “matter” is to be understood in its relation to transcendental consciousness, it is to be understood as a transcendence within immanence, rather than as a transcendence in itself. The index should be taken to be read: as relative to (as constituted by) consciousness as transcendental. To be “revalued” within the phenomenological sphere is to be taken as transcendental correlate, as what Husserl comes to refer to in Ideas I as an object in “pure immanence” (1983, p. 215). Objects are objects for consciousness. We can turn our attention to the bracketed matter, but we must do so with the understanding that this matter is now to be viewed in its immanence, as correlate of transcendental constitution. In pointing this out, we are echoing the sentiment expressed in Husserl’s concern with psychological apperception being kept within its relevant limits. Psychology, as a science utilizing the phenomenological reduction, as being built upon insights into the difference between transcendental and transcendent being, must view its subject matter as constituted, as relative to ­consciousness. We established the necessity of this acknowledgement of ontological dependence in our evaluation of the status and validity of psychological apperception, but to say that the same holds for psychology as a discipline, as well, creates new problems that we have yet to encounter. Our insight that psychological apperception is dependent upon transcendental constitution is rightly considered a transcendental insight; it belongs to phenomenology as a transcendental and epistemological science. To require this of psychology, as well, would seem to

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threaten its status as a natural science. Psychology is to view consciousness naturally, as a part of the natural world, a subordinate reality within it. How can psychology view consciousness this way and at the same time, view it in its relation to transcendental subjectivity as its correlate? How can psychology, on the one hand, situate consciousness within the world as transcendent and, on the other hand, view it as an appearance of transcendental subjectivity, relative to and dependent upon it for its being? We could not entertain such a paradox in the context of the development of phenomenology, how are we to do so in the context of the development of a psychology built upon phenomenological insights? It is no less a paradox in this context, as Husserl acknowledges. He writes: “In the case of psychology and the cultural sciences this inclusion of what has been parenthesized results in quite peculiar and at first rather confusing situations” (1983, p. 172). As we have seen since the very beginning, psychology presents a different case that gives rise to “confusing situations” due to the fact that it seems, at least, to share a common subject matter with phenomenology. As we have also seen since the beginning, and as Husserl stresses again in this context: these “are difficult and extraordinarily important contexts.” We shall, then, quote him at length, as he speaks here directly to the “case of psychology”: To indicate this only in the case of psychology we note that consciousness, as a datum of psychological experience, thus as human … consciousness, is an object of psychology… On the other hand, as having the modification effected by parenthesizing, the whole world with all its psychical individuals and their psychical processes, belongs in phenomenology: all of it as a correlate of absolute consciousness. Consciousness therefore makes its appearance here in different modes of apprehension and different contexts, and different ones moreover within phenomenology itself: namely, within the latter itself first as absolute consciousness and secondly, in the correlate, as psychological consciousness which occurs in the natural world—as in a certain manner revalued, yet without losing the content peculiar to it as consciousness (1983, p. 172).

Husserl points out several things in this passage. First, there is a psychology that simply considers consciousness to belong to the world of animals and humans as a natural property. This is what we have labeled as a naturalistic view of consciousness, and it belongs to a psychology that is situated within the natural attitude as a positive science. This psychology existed prior to Husserl’s work and can continue to do so, indifferent to the advances made by transcendental phenomenology. This would clearly not be a phenomenologically reformed psychology but would be the natural-scientific psychology effectively rejected by Husserl in 1911. Husserl then points out, secondly, that within the phenomenological sphere itself, there are different forms of apprehension with respect to consciousness. There is room within phenomenology for both absolute and psychological consciousness, though the latter is “revalued,” yet without “losing the content peculiar to it as consciousness.” It is this second understanding of the psychological, as a correlate, as having its value altered in a certain way, in which we are particularly interested. It is this approach to the psychological from within phenomenology that Husserl must have been referring to earlier, when he mentioned the possibility of a psychological phenomenology.

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At the time that this phrase first surfaced, we did not have the concepts required in order to be able to make sense of it. As we return to it here, it remains questionable as to whether or not we are now in a much better position to do so. This passage of Husserl’s has, unfortunately, not really clarified anything for us. We know that a rejection of a naturalistic psychology is justified on the basis of our having seen through the absurdity of naturalism. However, once this interpretation of the psychic is rejected, there remains the question of the relation between the different forms of apprehension possible within the phenomenological sphere. We remember Husserl’s enigmatic reference to empirical as opposed to pure consciousness in the Logos article; the questions that we raised with respect to this difference are equally relevant here. How has the rejection of the naturalistic-psychological led to a more adequate appreciation of the psychic for psychology? How can psychology utilize a reduction that brackets the psychological? How can the natural science of psychology be conducted within the phenomenological domain, when we know the phenomenological and natural attitudes to be mutually exclusive? Is not the idea of a psychological phenomenology a contradiction in terms as long as phenomenology is only possible on the basis of a non-psychological apperception of consciousness? Even though we are most assuredly wary of this concern, would this not constitute a return to psychologism? Husserl seems to be suggesting that a properly phenomenological (i.e., transcendental) apprehension of consciousness can exist side by side with a psychological (i.e., natural) apprehension of consciousness within phenomenology itself, meaning that for psychology to be conducted phenomenologically, or upon the epistemological foundation provided by phenomenology, it must be able to recognize and accept both psychological subjectivity and transcendental subjective as that upon which the psychological depends. How can consciousness appear as transcendental, and thus as responsible for, psychological apperception, while at the same time appearing as psychological and thus, as that for which it is responsible? How can it appear as both constituting and constituted, especially within the sphere of one discipline? Husserl writes here that: Any phenomenological finding concerning absolute consciousness can be reinterpreted as an eidetic-psychological finding (which, strictly considered, is itself by no means phenomenological), although here the phenomenological modes of observing things is the more inclusive and, as absolute, is the more radical mode (1983, pp. 172–173).

We have become accustomed to this notion of a parallelism between phenomenology and psychology, but even after our transcendental breakthrough, it remains a problematic notion. How can psychology which, strictly considered, is not ­phenomenological, make use of phenomenological insights concerning absolute consciousness without thereby becoming phenomenology itself? How can psychology reinterpret transcendental insights into their natural significance, while at the same time, explicitly situating psychological subjectivity in its relation to absolute consciousness? For Husserl, psychology “which is aspiring so strongly in our times, can acquire the radical foundation still lacking to it only if it has as its command far-reaching insights into the essential contexts indicated” (1983, p. 173). But we

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remain unclear as to how this is possible. As has happened in the past, at least we are not alone. Husserl concludes his discussion of the “extraordinarily important” connections between phenomenology and psychology by stating that: “The indications just given make us sensible of how far we still are from an understanding of phenomenology” (1983, p. 173). When we first raised the question in this chapter of the nature of the phenomenological reform of psychology, we did so in terms of the epistemological service that phenomenology could perform for psychology, by defining the nature of its subject matter ontologically. We asked whether psychology should be concerned with the ontological status of psychological subjectivity and found that Husserl considered the relation between phenomenology and psychology to be built upon this kind of ontological awareness. He grounded the relation between the two disciplines in “the most radical of all distinctions,” being, namely, the ontological distinction between transcendental and transcendent being. Problems arose in our attempt to understand how psychology is to make use of these ontological insights. How precisely it is to be grounded in such an ontological awareness. Before leaving behind the text of Ideas I in order to pursue the clarification offered in the other volumes of the series, we should take the one step further toward an understanding of this relation that Husserl offers in this volume. He does return to this topic, if briefly, to remind us of the service that phenomenology is to provide for psychology, relative to these ontological concerns. We noted earlier that, already in the Logical Investigations, Husserl had given phenomenology the task of defining for psychology the nature of its subject matter, and that this service took on ontological significance in 1911 with “Philosophy as Rigorous Science.” It fell, in that article, to phenomenology to articulate the essential nature of the psychic considered, by Husserl, to be that of intentionality. Psychological understanding and method were then to be reformed on the basis of this essential insight, replacing the naturalistic-psychological with a more adequate appreciation of the psychic in its own terms. While the actual significance of such a reform remains unclear to us, Husserl does reaffirm the importance of phenomenology in its provision of this service. He writes: Phenomenology is the court of appeal for methodologically basic questions of psychology. Psychology must recognize, and if need be, rely on, what it has established generically as the condition for the possibility of all its future methods (1983, p. 189).

We see the value here of reinterpreting phenomenological insights concerning absolute consciousness into psychological insights, given that the work of the psychologist conducting empirical investigations should be guided by eidetic insights into the nature of their subject matter. Such a reinterpretation, as we have pointed out previously, seems to assume a certain natural correspondence between the respective subject matter of phenomenology and psychology. Eidetic insights concerning absolute consciousness are presumed to be applicable to psychological subjectivity as long as the necessary translation is made. This would seem to present a different scenario for the relation between phenomenology and psychology from that established earlier in this chapter with respect to psychological apperception and its limits.

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When we first returned to this problematic following the transcendental turn, we found it necessary to distinguish between absolute consciousness as transcendental and psychological consciousness as transcendent, relating the psychological to the transcendental in a dependent fashion. In this view, the realm of the psychological was merely one realm of transcendence constituted within and through the immanent sphere of transcendental subjectivity. Such a correspondence, as we have outlined here, would not seem to fit so readily into a view such as this, in which the absolute and the relative appear almost interchangeable, requiring simply a reinterpretation of significance. Why would we believe, as Husserl suggests, that eidetic insights concerning consciousness as constituting would equally well apply to consciousness as constituted, or in its appearance as a transcendent reality? Rather than situating psychological subjectivity in its dependent relation to transcendental consciousness, as he had in the earlier passages of Ideas I discussed above, Husserl seems now to be considering psychological subjectivity to be a parallel subjectivity, existing alongside of it as an equally valid apprehension of consciousness. What has happened to its relative status, or to its relevant limits? This interpretation of the parallel relation between phenomenology and psychology is corroborated by Husserl’s only other passage in Ideas I in which he tries to spell out a bit further the value of such a reinterpretation from the phenomenological to the psychological. Making use of the analogy that we invoked in our treatment of the Logical Investigations, Husserl writes: I am certain that in the not too distant future it will be a common conviction that phenomenology (or eidetic psychology) will be the methodologically foundational science for empirical psychology in the same sense that the material mathematical disciplines … are foundational for physics (1983, p. 190).

We earlier agreed with Husserl that eidetic disciplines needed to provide epistemological and methodological guidelines for empirical disciplines; this has not been a source of confusion. What is most striking about this passage, and what is a profound source of confusion, is what Husserl implies within the parentheses. In this passage, he seems to equate phenomenology with eidetic psychology, at least in its relation to empirical psychology. Such a collapsing of the distinction heralded by Husserl previously as “the most radical of all distinctions” would have dire consequences for both phenomenology and psychology. Psychologism returns to the scene as threatening the advances we had thought we had made with our breakthrough to the transcendental. Has Husserl forgotten his “greatest of all discoveries” (de Boer, 1978, p. 460)? We can only answer, at this time, that Husserl seems to be involved in two different approaches to the psychological problematic within Ideas I. Initially, we saw him concerned to articulate the implications of a transcendental conception of consciousness for the status of psychological apperception, grounding the relation between phenomenology and psychology in the radical difference between transcendental and transcendent being. This difference was based upon the position between the transcendental attitude, in which consciousness was apperceived immanently, and the natural attitude, in which it was apprehended transcendently.

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We will find this to be an important opposition, indeed in that it will replace the opposition between the real and ideal articulated in the Logical Investigations as being the most fundamental distinction employed by Husserl (cf. de Boer, 1978, p.  301n). It is this difference that has seemingly been called into question by Husserl’s desire to distinguish between an eidetic and an empirical psychology, given that he at least provisionally equates eidetic psychology with phenomenology. His concern is to provide empirical psychology with an eidetic framework, but in doing so, he appears to be suggesting that either phenomenology or eidetic psychology can provide this framework. Such indifference, however, would appear to be ignoring the initial important difference established above between the attitudes in which phenomenology and psychology are to be conducted. Our difficulty is basically one of being able to accommodate the status of the psychological for psychology, given that psychological subjectivity is a constituted domain of the natural world and yet, at the same time, the appearance of transcendental subjectivity as world-constituting. Ricoeur expressed our present dilemma well in the following: The distinction between the pure ego, product of the phenomenological reduction, and the human ego, a reality of this world, is a constant in Husserl’s thought; it separates phenomenology from psychology. But psychology does not understand itself; it literally strays from the path when it does not lean upon phenomenology. Phenomenology instructs psychology concerning the essence of subjectivity. Psychology does not know that the pure ego is the constitutor of all reality that for which and in which things, animals, and men are. Psychology cannot know what the psyche is, a constituted reality woven into the surrounding world of the pure ego. The pure ego and the psychic reality are to be elaborated as poles, the first as the only constituter and the second as one entity constituted among others. And yet the psyche is not one entity constituted like others, for it is the same ego, the same subjectivity, the same stream of subjective life without beginning or end, now, however, “grasped” in a body, interwoven with it so as to form a unique reality (1967, p. 52).

This dilemma is not resolved within the pages of Ideas I, but we are informed that clarification is forthcoming in the volumes to follow. Husserl acknowledges the source of this difficulty, i.e., his provisional identification of eidetic psychology with phenomenology, and promises to address this issue and all the “profound problems” to which it gives rise in the next book of the series: The relations touched upon here between phenomenology (or between eidetic psychology, which has not even been separated from phenomenology in a preliminary way and which in any case is intimately tied up with phenomenology) and psychology as an experiential science will also be subject to clarification in the Second Book with all the profound problems pertaining to it (1983, pp. 189–190).

We can expect, then, that Husserl will in fact separate off phenomenology from eidetic psychology in a way that he has yet to articulate. We now turn to this Second Book in order to address this and related questions, but we should know beforehand that what Husserl referred to here as the Second Book of his treatise is what has actually been published, since his death, as both volumes two and three of the Ideen series. We will look for clarification to both additional volumes of the Ideen, starting with Ideas II.

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Ideas II The second volume of the Ideen (1952), building upon the general introduction offered in volume I, explored the constitution of the different domains of reality that are investigated in the natural sciences. Subtitled “Phenomenological Investigations in Constitution,” it presumes the transcendental framework established in Ideas I and attempts to determine the nature of the constitution carried out by consciousness, such that the world can come to be experienced as an appropriate object for scientific inquiry. How is it that the world is experienced as being scientifically determinable? How does the world deliver itself up to scientific scrutiny? The text falls into three main divisions, based upon the three different domains of reality, these being: first, physical Nature, second, animal Nature, and third, the spiritual world. We will be mainly concerned with the second and third division, both of which pertain to the psychological. We should remark that this volume offers a wealth of descriptive and analytic insights into the nature of the psychic, in both its physical embodiment (section “Ideas II”) and its cultural expressivity (section “Ideas III”), which will have to remain, in our present work, untapped. We will not be able to explore to any significant extent the considerable richness of this text, even in its direct relevance to the nature of psychic life. At this point, we must restrict our discussion of Ideas II to the light it sheds on our current concern, so our treatment will be very brief and limited. A further exploration of Husserl’s ideas with respect to the psychic and psychology, which builds upon the theoretical framework provided here, would benefit much from a return to this text. This will, however, have to remain as a task for the future. If we are to use Ideas II to help clarify the paradoxical coincidence (Ricoeur, 1967, p.  55) between the pure (transcendental) and empirical (transcendent-­ psychological) ego, we will first have to return to the topic of the natural attitude in its relation to naturalism. We know that it is in the natural attitude that consciousness is apperceived as psychological in nature and as being a part of the natural world. We remember, however, that in situating consciousness within the natural world, we did not want to revert to a naturalistic position, attributing to consciousness the physical material being of Nature. So far we have assumed that this would be possible in so far as we remained aware of the fact that psychological apperception was relative to and contingent upon transcendental subjectivity, that consciousness would not have to “forfeit” its nature (to Nature) as it entered into the transcendent realm, as long as it was seen to be constituted by transcendental subjectivity as its real appearance in the world. It is equally accurate to say, however, that physical Nature is also dependent upon, or relative to, transcendental subjectivity; that it, too, is a correlate of transcendental constitution and has the intentional being of a constituted domain of reality. Once we acknowledge that psychic reality and physical reality share this dependence upon the transcendental, the question arises as to how the relation between transcendental subjectivity and the psychic is different from the relation between transcendental subjectivity and physical Nature, such that a naturalization of consciousness is unwarranted and mistaken, while a

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“mundanization” that still situates consciousness within the natural world, but yet not within Nature, is not only possible, but apparently necessary—at least if one is to do psychology. We know that a psychic subject is not just a thing in the way a physical object is a thing. But how, then, does it differ? It is this question which is taken up in Ideas II. In his Logos article, Husserl employed the term naturalism to refer to an over-­ generalization of the methods of the physical sciences to all of reality. He complained at the time that psychology had adopted the physico-chemical method of these sciences without first asking if it was appropriate to the nature of its subject matter. Phenomenology was to correct this over-generalization by providing psychologists with eidetic insight into the nature of their subject matter, which differed significantly from that of the physical sciences, and a reform of psychological methodology was to be based upon this insight. This position has just reappeared in the text of Ideas I. We return to this issue here and attempt to clarify this situation by first asking, as Husserl does in the first section of Ideas II, what it is that is essential to experiences of Nature such that it can be taken as an appropriate object for physical-­scientific inquiry in the form of the physico-chemical method. What is the naturalistic perception of the world that has been generalized to include the psychic? Once we have discovered what is entailed in naturalistic apperception, we can ask if it is appropriate with respect to the psychic. If, as we might guess, it proves not to be so, we may then investigate alternative modes of apperception of the psychic—modes of apperception that situate the psychic within the world without unduly naturalizing it. We recall that when Husserl defined the natural attitude in Ideas I, he pointed out that the objects that are taken to be simply there for us in this attitude are not given in the context of a mere world of facts and affairs; they are not, that is, given as mere things, but are given, “with the same immediacy,” as objects of value, objects of use, etc. The world is given in the natural attitude as a world “of values, a world of goods, a practical world.” Our perceptions of things, of objects, is saturated with valuecharacter, with an evaluative, practical, aesthetic stratum of sense that gives these objects the significance they have as objects in a human, cultural world. Such a perception of things, however, is not the kind of apperception appropriate to the physical sciences. It is not the kind of apperception utilized in the physico-chemical method. In the physical sciences, objects in the world are taken to be mere things in the sense that their value-characters are taken to be irrelevant to the particular theoretical interest that guides physical-scientific inquiry, a determination of the material-­physical reality of things as substance (1952, pp. 25–27). In as much as one is interested in a determination of the materiality or substantiality of reality, one must ignore the nonmaterial stratum of sense; one must take things solely in their “thing-ness” as mere things which, taken together, make up the realm of physical Nature. Naturalistic apperception, unlike simple natural apperception, sees things solely in terms of their materiality, losing sight of their cultural and human significance. There is, then, a difference between the experience of everyday life, or experience in the natural attitude, and natural scientific experience, or experience in the naturalistic attitude. Since objects are given in everyday life as valued, as beautiful or ugly, etc.,

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the natural scientific apperception of objects that excludes these evaluative, practical, etc. characters must be based upon an abstraction from the world of the natural attitude. In order to perceive the natural world as Nature, as purely physical, one must perform a particular operation upon one’s everyday perception that alleviates it of its human and cultural significance. In his first section of Ideas II, Husserl explores in detail the nature of this operation or abstraction and concludes that there is an attitude peculiar to physical science that results from a specific theoretical transformation of the natural attitude: a theoretical transformation dictated by the interest in materiality definitive of physical science. Husserl demonstrates that what we take to be Nature is actually the intentional correlate of experiences carried out in the particular attitude he comes to call the natural scientific attitude (1952, p. 2). This attitude is to be distinguished from the attitude of everyday life, what we have called, to this point, the natural attitude, in that it is a theoretical attitude constituted out of specifically theoretical and scientific concern. If one wishes to do natural (i.e., physical) science, then this attitude must be adopted in order for one to acquire one’s proper subject matter: the world as sphere of mere things (1952, p. 24). It is important to note that this world (i.e., Nature) is world as correlate of a theoretical interest and attitude; it is not the world of everyday life, which includes all of the evaluative, ethical, etc., predicates excluded by one’s theoretical interest in materiality. Once we have made this distinction, it is easy to see that “naturalism” is the term appropriately used to describe an over-generalization of the natural scientific attitude to all of reality. In naturalistic apperception, the world that is the intentional correlate of the natural scientific attitude is (mis)taken to be the world of everyday life, the world that is for us in the natural attitude simply there. Naturalism is mistaken in so far as the world of mere things is not simply there for us, but only comes to be there for us through a process of abstraction from the world that is simply there: the world of everyday experience, the world in its human and cultural significance. To replace the human world with Nature is to forget that Nature is an idea constituted out of a theoretical scientific interest. It is not given to naïve perception but is the product of a theoretical transformation of everyday experience. We must not lose sight of this theoretical abstraction, for to do so is to sacrifice the experiential groundedness of natural science, the result of which is both a corruption of natural science and a corruption of our understanding of everyday experience. It is just such a corruption that has operated historically in the naturalization of consciousness, as Husserl had shown in 1911. The naturalization critiqued in that essay can now be understood to be the result of an over-generalization of the natural scientific attitude to the sphere of the psychic. Human, as well as animal, beings are not merely material realities in the proper, or strict, sense (1952, p. 33). To attempt to situate human beings within Nature as mere things may be appropriate to some degree, with respect to the human body as a psycho-physical reality, but it is not appropriate, not justifiable, with respect to psychic reality in its “concrete totality” (1952, p. 33). As Husserl had already shown in 1911, and as he shows here in more detail and at more length, consciousness as a psychological reality cannot be understood as a material-physical property. The “lower functions” that presume a psycho­physical reality may be studied in their necessary relation to the body as material

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reality, and for this, the physico-chemical method of the physical sciences remains appropriate. But the body as animated, as a psycho-physical reality, differs in a fundamental way from a mere thing. It is this fact that is lost in the naturalistic transformation. While it is true that psychic reality is entwined with the body as physical reality, that it is “linked-on,” and thus that there is a need for a psycho-physical psychology, this reality, which is the correlate of the natural-scientific attitude as applied to the psychic, should not be taken to exhaust the psychological sphere. There is more to the psychological than what can be captured in the natural scientific attitude and its disciplines. Naturalism assumes that psychic reality can be situated in its entirety within Nature and studied accordingly on the basis of causal relations operating between material substantial entities, discovered through the physico-chemical method. In the second section of Ideas II, Husserl takes up the question of the constitution of animal Nature and argues that animate reality is of a somewhat different nature than material reality and, therefore, cannot be adequately studied solely within the confines of the natural scientific attitude. The psychic, once again, is shown not to be given through the mediation of appearances, but immediately in and through each of its “properties” or “states” in its entirety (1952, p. 123). It is not given as the unity of its properties or as that which persists through change, as is a substance causally related to other substances in the causal chain of Nature, but is given, on the contrary, “in flux” as a temporal unfolding that is never the same twice, but develops a history and coheres immanently on the basis of motivational, rather than causal, relations (1952, pp. 133–139). These temporal and motivational relations, the internal unfolding of the temporal flux of conscious life, cannot be studied within a natural scientific attitude. Conscious life is directed toward the very value-characters that were excluded from natural scientific experience. In order to adopt a natural scientific attitude, we had to exclude those characteristics of conscious life most essential to it as psychic. For these reasons, a science of psychic life in its own essence cannot be conducted within this attitude. Husserl’s 1911 rejection of natural scientific psychology as inappropriate for anything other than the realm of the psycho-­physical is thus reaffirmed. As we can plainly see within this context, however, a rejection of the natural scientific attitude and its physico-chemical method on this basis does not constitute a rejection of a natural attitude with respect to conscious life. In fact, it is on the basis of our everyday experience of the psychic, of experience of the psychic within the natural attitude, as situated within a context of value, practicality, etc., that we have rejected the naturalistic approach. Psychic reality is given in the natural attitude as a reality not properly understood within a natural scientific attitude. While this attitude is perfectly appropriate for the sciences of Nature, it is apparently not appropriate for the sciences that investigate other domains of reality, likewise given in the natural attitude, but given as having a different, i.e., non-physical, nature. The fallacy of naturalism has taught us that the natural scientific attitude is merely one theoretical attitude possible within the natural attitude itself. It is neither the natural attitude nor the only theoretical transformation of the natural attitude possible. There should be a theoretical attitude that is more appropriate for the nature of

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psychic reality, which addresses it in its immediacy and temporality, in its essential directness toward values and other persons, etc. Once we have rejected an over-­generalization of the natural scientific attitude to the realm of the psychic as naturalistic, other possibilities that were previously ignored become evident. When Husserl rejected naturalism in 1911, he was preparing the way for alternative, natural approaches to the psychic, not yet appreciated by his contemporaries, due to their preoccupation with the physico-chemical method. By relativizing the natural scientific attitude and returning us to the world of everyday experience, Husserl has demonstrated both the possibility of and the need for several natural attitudes, as opposed to the singular natural attitude referred to in our previous discussions. We are aware thus far of the natural attitude of everyday life, the natural scientific transformation of this attitude, and the possibility of a different theoretical transformation of this attitude more appropriate for the study of the psychic as a non-material domain of the real. Husserl chooses to label the first of these, the natural attitude of everyday life, the “personalistic attitude” in order to distinguish it explicitly from the “naturalistic attitude” resulting, as we have said, from an over-generalization of the natural scientific attitude to all of reality (1952, p. 139). The world of everyday experience is not Nature, but is a practical, ethical, aesthetic, and intersubjective world; it is a world rich with human and cultural significance. Husserl chooses the term “personalistic” in order to capture these elements of everyday experience excluded by naturalism. He views this world as being “personal” in nature, as being simply there but in a personally engaging way. While this world is left behind in the pursuit of natural scientific knowledge, it serves as the ever present background for this pursuit, as the everyday world out of which this theoretical interest arises and to which the scientist returns in their non-vocational, but precisely personal life. The natural attitude in its everydayness is personalistic in nature; naturalistic apperception pertains to a founded stratum of sense, built upon an abstraction from this more primordial and rich reality. The personalistic attitude, as the attitude of everyday life is not, however, itself a theoretical attitude appropriate for psychology or sciences directed toward psychic reality in a non-naturalistic fashion. Psychology as a non-naturalistic science still requires a theoretical attitude of its own, which transforms the personalistic world of everyday life into the world as object for the theoretical scientific interest of the psychologist. The third section of Ideas II is devoted partly to an elaboration of this attitude and the nature of its subject matter; and it is this portion of the text especially that contains much important material for further reflection upon the nature of the psychological as subject matter and as science. We, however, will have to restrict our treatment of this material to a schematic assessment of its role and position in our present framework. We have, at this time, to remain content with a definition of the attitude belonging to psychology, and its status as a theoretical transformation of the personalistic attitude. How does psychology abstract its own subject matter from the world of everyday life? Naturalistic observation operates through an abstraction from the personalistic attitude that excludes or suspends all evaluative or practical concerns, all personal significance, in order to leave the realm of mere materiality as its residue. This kind

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of abstraction can be considered, Husserl suggests, as a “sort of ‘reduction’,” different, of course, from the phenomenological reduction, but operating through an analogous disconnection or “bracketing” (1952, p. 25). We can imagine, then, that the theoretical attitude belonging to what we will now call human scientific disciplines will arise through a similar operation, but one that will exclude or suspend the realm of mere materiality as opposed to the realm of the personal. This reduction will leave, as its residue, the realm that the naturalistic reduction suspended, and will suspend that which remained following the naturalistic reduction as its residue. We perform, then, what Husserl later comes to call a “complementary abstraction” (1970a, p. 226), isolating the purely psychic for psychology, just as the natural scientific attitude had isolated the purely physical for the natural (i.e., physical) sciences. Once performed, this reduction leaves as its residue the realm of the personal: the cultural world of evaluative and practical concerns, disconnected from its materiality, from its physical being. The “complementary abstraction” performed by the psychologist transforms the world of the personalistic attitude, which contains both Nature and spirit, into a purely personal world made up solely of cultural significations. In this attitude, we are interested in realities only in their psychic or spiritual cultural significance; this pertains to things in their evaluative and practical significance, as well as to the animated beings for whom they hold such significance. Even though we abstract from their materiality, this does not mean that we are no longer interested in the realm of things. It merely means that we are interested in things solely in so far as they express or embody cultural meaning. This holds for the body, as well. It becomes, through this reduction, an expressive reality, as opposed to the merely material reality it was taken to be in physical science. Husserl suggests that “motivation” replace causality as the “fundamental law” operative within this domain; motivation being the proper term to use to describe the relations between psychic realties that are relations of significance or meaning. As causality is the fundamental law of nature, motivation is to be taken to the fundamental law of spiritual life (1952, p. 220). The psychologist is thus to look to motivational relations, rather than causal relations, in the attempt to understand their subject matter, a subject matter “purified” of all materiality, and thus no longer part of the causal nexus of Nature. We have, then, to parallel the natural scientific attitude, a human scientific attitude that likewise transforms the world of the personalistic attitude of everyday life in accord with its theoretical interest in the life of the psyche. While this attitude is not explicitly named in Ideas II, Husserl does begin to refer to it as the “personal attitude” of the human sciences in his lectures on “Phenomenological Psychology” (1977b, p. 175), beginning in 1925. We will accordingly adopt this terminology in anticipation of the later works in which it is employed. This attitude, as is now evident, is another of the natural attitudes possible with respect to experience; like the personalistic and natural scientific attitudes it parallels, it is carried out within the confines of the natural attitude. There has only been a complementary abstraction performed that has isolated the sphere of the personal within the real world. In the personal attitude, the world remains simply there, only now in its cultural significance rather than in its materiality. We take a theoretical interest in the psychological

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as a mundane reality, as real component of the transcendent world. A phenomenological reduction in the proper (i.e., transcendental) sense has not been performed. Our newly discovered personal attitude is not (yet) transcendental. Such a pre- or non-transcendental division of the world into the two parallel domains of Nature and the psychic reminds us of the framework in which Husserl attempted to carry out a “psychological reduction” in the first edition of the Logical Investigations. The position articulated here is actually very similar to the one found in that text, and before going further with our analysis of Ideas II, we should pause to consider the nature of this similarity. In the Logical Investigations, we performed a methodological exclusion of the naturalistic causal domain, in order to isolate the purely psychological as the sphere of ideal meaning. We wished to concentrate on the ideal relations between the contents of experience, without compromising their ideality by having to take into account the naturalistic origins of these experiences as events in Nature. We wanted to study what we took, at the time, to be the realm of the descriptive psychological in its own terms, as meaningful, without having to consider it in its ties to the real, understood as material; we wanted to study the psychological without having to consider it as a part of Nature. This is precisely what Husserl is suggesting a human scientific psychology do in the context of Ideas II. The reductions that we are performing here stem from purely theoretical interests. They are similarly methodological exclusions that have no ontological significance. It was the attempt to attribute ontological meaning to the natural scientific reduction that we have rejected as naturalistic; we might assume that the same would result from an ontologization of the human scientific attitude. We have, in each case, isolated what we called earlier an “artificial island” within the real world. There seems to be a “psycho-physical parallelism” (1952, p. 288) here, as there had been a parallelism between descriptive and genetic psychology in the Logical Investigations. The position of the Logical Investigations proved to be problematic, in that purely methodological exclusions would only be considered to be provisional or temporary, and a parallelism of this kind offered no real isolation of the psychic. How is the position of Ideas II not similarly problematic? The answer to this question will have to be found in the fact that Ideas II presumes the transcendental framework of Ideas I, and thereby does not share the pre-­ transcendental naiveté of the Logical Investigations. The entire volume of Ideas II has been devoted to analyses of the constitution of the various domains of reality; the transcendental perspective has, in a very important sense, been presupposed throughout what has been discovered and discussed above. While neither of the theoretical attitudes delineated in Ideas II as requiring methodological exclusions entailed the phenomenological reduction, it was only possible for us to delineate them as attitudes because a phenomenological reduction had already been performed (1952, p. 174). In exploring the constitution of physical Nature and the spiritual world, we have been assuming the transcendental perspective of phenomenology as that to which each of these realities and their corresponding attitudes is relative. It is due to the fact that we are implicitly viewing each of these domains as a constituted domain that we are able to view them as domains of relative sense, rather than of absolute reality (1952, pp. 179–180). The being of the psychic, as well as the

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being of Nature, is to be considered to be intentional being constituted by, and dependent upon, transcendental subjectivity. It is this grounding in transcendental constitution that has allowed us to view Nature as an idea, rather than as an absolute reality, and to reject naturalism by de-ontologizing the natural scientific attitude, in order to allow room for a non-naturalistic apperception of the psychic as a parallel domain. We may still wonder, however, how this resolved the problems that surfaced earlier in the Logical Investigations. How has this transcendental grounding changed the nature and status of descriptive psychology in a significant way? It is true that the human scientific psychology that Husserl proposed in Ideas II will resemble the descriptive psychology of his earlier text (cf. de Boer, 1978, p. 199), but we must take care, once again, to see what changes have been brought about by the breakthrough to the transcendental. We asked, at the beginning of this section of our text, how the relation between transcendental subjectivity and psychological subjectivity differed from the relation between transcendental subjectivity and psychic things in Nature; we have yet to answer this question. We remain concerned with psychology’s own understanding of the ontological status of its subject matter. Has the epistemological grounding provided by transcendental phenomenology altered this understanding in any way? In order to get a sense for the solution offered in Ideas II, it is most convenient to take up the question of the ontological status of the human being, the person, in their entirety. In a way, it was this kind of question, which in refusing to be silenced, brought the first edition of the Logical Investigations to its epistemological impasse. In Chap. 2, we noted that the psychological reduction performed in that text lacked sufficient radicality, in that the sphere of the psychic remained situated within the real world, and thus remained the appropriate subject matter for a naturalistic explanatory psychology, as well as for descriptive psychology. The psychic was, after all, merely one property of the human being as natural organism. This position is seemingly being challenged in Ideas II, in so far as Husserl is attempting to separate the psychic from the physical in a more substantive way. How is this separation to be understood? The psychological, as belonging to the realm of personal cultural significations, is to be isolated through an exclusion of materiality. The human being or person is not solely psychic, however, but does have a physical body and is, to this extent, a part of Nature. Husserl acknowledged the undeniability and importance of this stratum in the second section of Ideas II in allowing for a psycho-­ physical psychology that would study animal Nature (as opposed to material Nature). What relation exists between the physical component and the psychic component in this psycho-physical synthesis? In the Logical Investigations, we were implicitly presuming a naturalistic, as well as realistic, framework and thus, we were compelled to subordinate the psychic to be merely an artificial island within Nature. Husserl has already relativized Nature in this context, however, and thus, is not driven necessarily to a similar conclusion in this text. We do not have to consider the domain of personal cultural significance subordinate to Nature as one of its properties or as founded upon physical causal reality. Rather, Husserl suggests, we can consider the personal cultural to

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be the more fundamental of the two domains and consider the material physical to be founded upon, or relative to it (1952, p. 297). If we are not to accept a Cartesian dualism, or a Husserlian psycho-physical parallelism—which would, of course, be extremely problematic—and if we are not to return to the naturalism of the Logical Investigations—which has proven equally problematic—then we must give the priority to the psychological. We must consider the physical material domain to be a relative domain and the person cultural domain to be non-relative, or in this sense, absolute (1952, p. 297). It is the personal cultural stratum that has ontological priority, which is more the absolute reality of the two, and Nature is to be considered, on this basis, as a relative reality, as itself being one “unity of sense,” one particular domain of significations within the larger context of all significations. Nature, as a constituted domain of sense, becomes one domain of sense within the “world of persons” (1952, p. 297). With respect to the psycho-physical unity of the person, the body as physical is one possible significance that the body can have as a reality in the personal cultural world of spiritual life. It is on this basis that we can understand what would otherwise be an enigmatic choice of terminology on Husserl’s part. Were the relation between the psychic and the physical not one of ontological priority in favor of the psychic, we could well have wondered why Husserl would have referred to the world of the natural attitude as a “personalistic” world. We know, for example, that an overgeneralization of the world of the natural scientific attitude to the world of everyday life has been referred to as naturalistic and taken, in this fashion, to be mistaken. Why, then, would Husserl refer to the attitude appropriate to everyday life as the “personalistic” attitude, unless a generalization of the world of the human scientific attitude was justified in a way that a generalization of the natural scientific attitude was not? While the human scientific attitude remains a theoretical attitude, and thus, a transformation of the attitude of everyday life, Husserl’s choice of terminology can be taken to reflect his position that the personal cultural world of the human sciences can be taken to be absolute. “Personalism,” by which we would mean to refer to this generalization of the personal cultural to the everyday is, in Husserl’s view, ontologically sound (cf. Kohák, 1984, p. 125). The world is primarily a personal cultural reality; it is a personalistic reality, and Nature is a subordinate and relative domain within this reality. This inversion of the priority of the psychic over the physical will have profound and far-reaching implications for the nature of a human-scientific psychology made possible by the rejection of naturalism and psychologies grounded in naturalism. This, as well, would be a topic to be explored in much more depth, owing a great deal to the analyses offered in Ideas II, once the theoretical framework for this psychology has been established. At this juncture, however, it is more incumbent upon us to confront and clarify a source of potential confusion that this position poses in its attribution of absolute reality to the world of mind. How can we define the ontological status of the personal to be absolute, when we had explicitly reserved this status for the transcendental? How can we have an absolute reality at all, given that we know that all reality is constituted and thus, relative to, transcendental constitution (cf. de Boer, 1978, p. 348)? How can a constituted domain be considered absolute? We return here to the question of the nature of the relation between the

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psychological and phenomenological approaches to consciousness, the relation between consciousness as transcendent and consciousness as transcendental. What is the relation between this worldly absolute and the world constituting absolute and their sciences, between psychological phenomenology and transcendental phenomenology? These questions are addressed in Ideas III.

Ideas III The text that was originally intended to serve as the final section of the second volume of the Ideen, but which was then eventually published as a third volume, is subtitled “Phenomenology and the Foundations of the Sciences” (1980). As this title suggests, Husserl explores further in this text the framework established in Ideas II by taking up the questions of the relation between the sciences outlined in that text and phenomenology as the foundational discipline for all such sciences. The relation between human scientific psychology, or what comes to be called in this text, “psychology as socio-cultural science” (1980, p. 42), and transcendental phenomenology is thus addressed explicitly here. Husserl will offer a solution to the problem of the paradoxical coincidence that has puzzled us since the establishment of the transcendental perspective in Ideas I. Prior to our excursion into the territory of Ideas II, we had phrased our dilemma in terms of the nature of the parallelism that seemed to exist between absolute consciousness and psychological consciousness within a phenomenological perspective. How, we wondered, would psychology take consciousness to be both a constituted reality and the constituting source of reality—which is what seemed to be necessary for psychology not to naturalize consciousness? Now that we have also discussed the additional insights of Ideas II, insights into the nature of a non-naturalistic psychology, we can also phrase our questions in terms of the apparent absoluteness of both psychological and ­transcendental consciousness. We can similarly ask, how can psychology view its object, i.e., the psychic, as absolute, when we have argued convincingly that it is only the transcendental that can truly be considered absolute? These questions are, of course, related. The basic question from which both of these are derived is: How is psychology to understand the ontological status, the essential nature, of its subject matter? How is psychology to understand the psychic? In Ideas III, Husserl reiterates his belief in the importance of this question and reaffirms that phenomenology is to provide the answer. It is not for the psychologist to define the nature of the psychic and its science as we remember from the Logical Investigations, but the philosopher, i.e., the phenomenologist: To clarify or to determine scientifically the essence of the psyche and therewith the possible goals and methods (in fundamental universality) is not the business of the psychological technician, i.e., the psychologist, but rather of the philosopher (1980, p. 11).

This is, of course, true not only for psychology, but also for all natural or non-­ phenomenological sciences. It is for phenomenology as universal science, as epistemology, to provide eidetic insight into the nature of the various subject matters of

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other positive sciences and to determine for them their appropriate methods and goals accordingly. It was this task that was begun in Ideas II with the delineation of the various regions of reality; it is continued in this text in that Husserl is now going to relate each of these regions to its respective science and also relate these sciences to phenomenology as their foundation. The eidetic insights furnished by phenomenology circumscribe what Husserl here refers to as “regional” ontologies (1980, p. 29), and we know already that all such ontologies are to be situated within phenomenology as the science of transcendental constitution in which they are to be grounded (1980, pp. 65–66). These insights into the essential nature of all regions of reality constituted by transcendental subjectivity are then to be used to determine the methodological character of the various sciences concerned with each of these regions. The relationship between phenomenology as universal science and empirical science, as taken up in this text, poses no problem in the case of material reality and the physical sciences appropriate to it. In such a case, the constituted reality, material being, is clearly set off against the constituting source of its being, transcendental subjectivity, as a transcendent unity of appearances, as a transcendence within immanence. To study how such material realities are related to each other causally, as one does in the physical sciences, one is not obliged in the least to explore the nature of constitution itself. A regional ontology of material reality sets the stage for, but does not actually overlap with, physical science. To be a good physicist, one need not be well versed in phenomenology. The same also seems to hold, Husserl suggests, for what we have called to this point psycho-physical psychology, or what he refers to in this text as “somatology” (1980, p. 7). In this case, we are interested in “animate organisms” as natural realities founded upon material reality, but also including a “higher stratum” of being defined by Husserl as the “animate-­ organismic” (1980, pp. 7, 5). Here we study, for example, the physiology of sensation, still within the domain of the natural sciences of zoology and physiology. In so far as the animate-organismic is founded upon the material, it remains set off, as well, against consciousness as constituting, as belonging to the noematic sphere. In both of these cases, we have consciousness as constituting, as noetic, and its object, as constituted, as noematic. Problems do arise, however, when we try to carry this structure to the level of the psychic proper. In so far as the sensations studied by somatology are part of “the life of the Ego,” Husserl notes, they also seem to belong to the noetic sphere, although under the guise of the “psychic-real” (1980, pp. 10–11). In the third case of psychology as the science of the personal cultural, our once clear boundaries seem to blur; the relationship is no longer one between consciousness and its correlate, for in psychology our subject matter is precisely consciousness itself. How can consciousness constitute itself as its object: We ask once again, how does this tally? When we take up the properly psychic as our third region of reality, we seem to be concerned with the noetic aspect of consciousness within the domain of the real to be studied, as well as in the constituting consciousness responsible for its being. We have, in a sense, the same subject matter in psychology as we do in phenomenology; only in the first case, we take it in its empirical manifestation, in the second, in its purity. Such a parallelism complicates our task, however, in that an eidetic analysis of pure consciousness would seem to be based upon an interpretation of consciousness

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as transcendental, while an eidetic analysis of empirical consciousness would seem to preclude the transcendental view required for phenomenology. If we are not to view consciousness simultaneously as both transcendental and psychological in nature, then we may either view consciousness transcendentally, remaining phenomenologists, but losing psychology altogether, or view consciousness empirically, adopting an eidetic attitude that can no longer be considered to be phenomenological in the proper sense. We can either, it seems, be phenomenologists or psychologists with respect to the essence of conscious life, but not both at the same time. Otherwise, we would be maintaining that the noesis, the act of experiencing, is both transcendental and psychological in nature. Not only would such a view psychologize the transcendental and return us to the psychologism we had finally overcome, but also, more importantly, it is absurd. As long as psychology is understood to be a science of conscious life, as our socio-cultural science is, it cannot have as its subject matter a constituted, noematic, sphere in the same sense as the physical and somatological sciences do. The solution offered initially in Ideas I seems, on this score, to fall apart. Rather than differentiating phenomenology from psychology on the basis of the constituting-constituted distinction introduced in Ideas I, Husserl here attempts to differentiate them on the basis of their approach to consciousness as outlined above. A science that studied consciousness eidetically in its purity would be an eidetic phenomenology and would retain its transcendental status. A science that studied consciousness eidetically in its empirical psychological appearance would remain an eidetic science, obviously, but it would no longer be phenomenological. Such an eidetic approach to the psychological, Husserl here proposes to call “rational psychology” (1980, p. 21). We have seen a psychology of this sort before in the descriptive psychology of the Logical Investigations, as we noted in our discussion of Ideas II. Husserl makes such a connection himself in this text, remarking that in the Logical Investigations, “phenomenological eidetic doctrine and rational psychology coincided” (1980, pp. 21–22) due to the fact that phenomenology, at that time, was a pre-transcendental science. Now that we have achieved our transcendental breakthrough, phenomenological eidetic doctrine can be considered transcendental, while rational psychology is to be considered natural. In this view, the eidetic analysis of the psychic becomes the task for a rational psychology as opposed to phenomenology. Phenomenology remains transcendental and thus, parallels, but does not directly pertain to, the psychological. We may now recall the enigmatic passages cited at the close of our treatment of Ideas I, in which Husserl had similarly equated eidetic psychology with phenomenology, having yet to separate them off from one another, while implying that such a separation was possible. We now begin to understand the reasoning behind these passages, even though we must remain concerned with such a coincidence. Apparently, eidetic, or rational, psychology can be separated off from phenomenology through the performance of the reduction that elevates phenomenology to the appropriate level of the transcendental. This performance of the reduction and transition to the transcendental perspective appear to be neither necessary nor appropriate if one is interested in psychology, however, since the reduction serves to bracket or suspend precisely that which is one’s subject matter. The eidetic psychologist need

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not abandon the psychological, since that is their region of interest. Phenomenology does serve the “auxiliary” (1980, p. 62) function for psychology, however, laid out in the analyses of Ideas II, of relativizing Nature and the material and allowing the psychological, as the personal, to thereby assume its proper status as absolute. Once the psychic is de-naturalized in this fashion, psychology may assume a position parallel to phenomenology, differing from it once again on the basis of its orientation or attitude. It is in this vein that we can understand the passage that immediately follows Husserl’s equation of phenomenology with rational psychology in Ideas III, a passage in which he seems to be saying that we may now give up our old concerns with the psychologistic implications of such a parallelism. He writes: That it is in various ways incorrect that a rational psychology must be apprehended as the ontology of something real becoming constituted in the nexus of lived-process and cannot then coincide with the essence of a nexus of lived-process, we will be able to see after we have clarified the idea of reality in general, as well as that of the psychic reality and have given up the old mistrust (still controlling even the author of the Logical Investigations) of psychic and Egoical reality. The remarkable relationship between phenomenology and psychological ontology which permits the former to find its place in the latter and again in a certain manner also permits the latter, like all ontological disciplines, to find a place in the former, will occupy us extensively, and we will learn to see parallel relationships for the ontology of the mind (1980, p. 22).

It is our own earlier view with respect to the psychic, derived from the text of Ideas I and discussed in the first section of this chapter, which Husserl is here labeling incorrect. In that view, the psychic has to be taken to be a constituted domain of reality that did not coincide with the constituting source of reality, but was situated within relevant limits as relative to, and dependent upon, that source, transcendental subjectivity, for its being. The clarification of the idea of psychic reality, provided most fully in Ideas II, requires us, on the contrary, to view the psychic as itself absolute in that it is concerned with the “nexus of lived-process” as well as phenomenology. The only difference is that psychology views this nexus under the guise of the psychic real, while phenomenology views it as transcendental. While the being of the psychic as a reality must still be understood to be dependent upon, or constituted by, transcendental consciousness, Husserl seems to be suggesting here that once we recognize the psychic as lived-process, as a worldly absolute, we need no longer be afraid of the psychologistic implications of such a parallelism. We may now give up our old mistrust of the psychic, since phenomenology has allowed us to see the psychic in its own essence by having effectively overturned the naturalization of consciousness first critiqued in “Philosophy as Rigorous Science.” In line with this, Husserl reaffirms the position taken in that essay, writing here that it has been naturalism that has kept psychology from being reformed by phenomenology in a fundamental and novel way (1980, p. 33). Perhaps, then, our old mistrust of the psychic was only tied necessarily to a naturalistic idea of psychic reality. Now that that idea has been replaced with a personalistic one, we need not be overly concerned with the psychologistic implications of a parallelism between phenomenology and psychology.

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We are now returning to yet another recurrent tendency in Husserl’s thought that has always proved worrisome for us in the past. We have seen Husserl repeatedly maintain that consciousness in its true nature is not forfeited when it is linked-on to the body and apperceived psychologically. We cited him previously as writing that: “The ‘pure’ mental process ‘lies’, in a certain sense, within what is psychologically apperceived” (1983, p.  126). What has proven repeatedly to be worrisome about such statements, and the parallelism that they imply, is that they do not seem to be able to differentiate between the transcendental and the psychological in any substantive way. A psychological apperception of consciousness seems to result from a minor addition to the perception of consciousness as transcendental, as the transcendental view of consciousness seems to result from a minor exclusion of psychological apperception. In a style that reminds us of the second edition revisions of the Logical Investigations, Husserl asserts again the presence of such a parallelism: Every phenomenological description, of course, passes over into a psychological one with regard to the lived-process of a psyche undergoing them through psychological apperception, as conversely, every description of psychic lived-process passes over into a purely phenomenological one through the ideally possible reduction (1980, p. 77).

In passages such as these, the reduction, which functions as the cornerstone of Husserl’s philosophy, and to which he attributed the greatest of significance, appears to be fairly inconsequential, to be of no substantive significance. In fact, in an earlier passage, Husserl seems to speak to this issue directly, suggesting that neither the reduction nor the psychological apperception it disregards are of any consequence in the determination of the nature of “lived-processes in themselves”: We can limit our eidetic analysis to the lived processes in themselves, disregarding what distinguishes them as sets of states, as authentications of a real psychic unity with psychic properties. But everything that we explore in the framework of such a lived-process would naturally also belong in the framework of rational-psychological investigations. For it is evident that the peculiar essence of every lived-process (as idea and not as fact) is not altered by the realizing apperception and cannot be changed (1980, p. 34).

It seems that the “lived-process” in itself “cannot be changed” in its essence by the adoption of either attitude; whether bracketed and thus viewed as transcendental, or “altered by the realizing apperception” of the natural attitude and thus viewed psychologically, the “lived-process” is simply what it is. Phenomenology and psychology do share a common subject matter. While this position remains problematic, as we shall see in a moment, it does enable us to understand better the position of Ideas II with respect to the absoluteness of the psychic. If the lived-process is not “altered by the realizing apperception” of the natural attitude, then psychological subjectivity shares the absoluteness that we discovered in the sphere of transcendental subjectivity, only it situates this absolute within the world of mind. The linking-on that constitutes psychological apperception does not affect the absoluteness of consciousness; the fact that consciousness is absolute is not lost or forfeited in the process of becoming worldly. It retains, then, its absolute nature, even though it is viewed as a region of reality. We did note in our discussion of Ideas II that it was to be considered to be the region of

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reality, in so far as Nature, or the region of materiality, was to be subordinated to it. In this sense, consciousness is no longer to be viewed as a part of Nature, as an epiphenomenon that is in its nature, if not its appearance, a physical reality, but is to be viewed as the fundamental reality in which Nature is to find its ground. The world is not fundamentally a physical reality but is fundamentally a world of mind. This does clarify for us the problematic conclusion of Ideas II, but it leaves unsettled the epistemological problems that remain from Ideas I. If consciousness is transcendental and thus, non-psychological in nature, how can psychological apperception be justified as a parallel orientation toward it, which seems interchangeable with the transcendental orientation? Is the psychological view of consciousness merely a way of viewing transcendental consciousness in its worldliness, its mundaneity? Does consciousness become just as psychological when viewed through psychological apperception, as it is transcendental, when viewed as the residue of the reduction? What would be the implications of such a position for our epistemological project? To see the psychological and transcendental as so readily interchangeable with respect to consciousness would seem to throw us back to a psychologistic position. Has Husserl given up his old mistrust too easily? With the blurring of distinctions for which we have fought long and hard, as seems evident in passages like the following, his answer would appear to be yes. The beginner at first tends to let descriptive psychology and phenomenology blend with one another without distinction. Let us persist at first in not separating the eidetic theory of states of consciousness from transcendental phenomenology (as I did not yet separate them even in the Logical Investigations) since, for what follows, it does not matter (1980, p. 39).

With this passage, our return to the descriptive psychology of the Logical Investigations, along with all of its psychologistic problems, seems complete. Phenomenology is eidetic, or rational, psychology. Yet, Husserl writes that this is the position of a beginner, and that we have yet to separate eidetic psychology from transcendental phenomenology, because for the task at hand, such a distinction “does not matter.” Should we take this comment to imply that in other contexts, such a distinction would, indeed, matter and that in those contexts, we would be able to effect such a separation? What, after all, is the task at hand in our present text? What does follow this passage, for which we need not uphold the distinction between phenomenology and psychology? We are at present concerned to lay out the relation between eidetic and empirical psychology. We wish to reform psychological methodology in a fundamental and novel way, based upon eidetic insights into the nature of the psychic. For this purpose, for revisions within the domain of the psychic, the difference between the transcendental and the psychological is of no consequence. The psychic is to be viewed as a worldly absolute, as the fundamental reality and empirical psychology is to be revised accordingly. For the psychologist, whose natural point of departure is psychological reflection, there is no need to disregard the “realizing apperception” of the psychological, for to do so would be to sacrifice one’s subject matter, to lose precisely that in which one was interested. For the psychologist, then, the fact that the psychological is merely one possible apperception or interpretation of consciousness is not important. After all, it is just that interpretation in which the psychologist is empirically interested.

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It is not for the psychologist, a true beginner in matters of epistemology and psychologism, to be concerned with the separation of phenomenology from psychology. For the psychologist, this difference simply “does not matter.” But Husserl implied that there would be other contexts in which, and others for whom, such a difference would matter. As we know already from our previous discussions, but as Husserl here recapitulates again with his customary emphasis, this context would be the context of epistemology. The distinction between eidetic psychology and phenomenology matters greatly for the philosopher, as Husserl himself had to learn following the first edition publication of the Logical Investigations. Husserl has given up his mistrust of the psychic in order to establish and develop a phenomenological psychology, both eidetic and empirical, but this mistrust is very much alive when it comes to epistemological concerns and his project of a universal science. In this context, as we have learned over and over again along with Husserl, it does matter significantly whether or not one views, or must view, consciousness psychologically. The philosopher must be able to separate transcendental phenomenology from eidetic psychology in order to avoid the criticism of psychologism. It was in the context of this task, of establishing a universal, epistemological science, in Ideas I that Husserl distinguished between the transcendental and the psychological on the basis of the constituting-constituted distinction. In that text we were concerned with epistemological clarification, and thus, with the dangers of psychologism, and so in that text, it was necessary to separate the transcendental from the psychological in this way. Husserl does the same in Ideas III, when he turns to epistemological questions that transcend the scope of rational psychology. When it is a question of universal ontology, when it is a question of providing a foundation for all science, then it is no longer possible to equate phenomenology with eidetic psychology. In the context of this project, Husserl writes: “It is of the greatest importance to be freed from the prejudice that lived-process, consciousness, is in itself something psychic, eo ipso a matter of psychology, whether it be of the empirical or the rational, eidetic (if one concedes such) psychology” (1980, p. 63). This prejudice is operative for the psychologist in an unproblematic way; we could even say that it is this prejudice that furnishes the psychologist with their subject matter. For the philosopher, as we were told in Ideas I, this prejudice must be kept within its relevant limits; meaning that psychological apperception is necessary for psychology, but if taken as necessary as opposed to as relative, is deadly for philosophy. Writes Husserl: Whoever cannot free himself from this particular apperception, whoever cannot perform the phenomenological reductions and grasp the pure, absolutely posited lived-process, the pure consciousness as idea, to him is denied not only the penetration into transcendental phenomenology but also that into philosophy in general (1980, p. 64).

If one is interested in the philosophical project of universal science, then one must remember that consciousness is not necessarily or in its essence psychological, but is only so empirically, factually, as a contingent, constituted state of affairs. It is of the utmost importance for the philosopher, then, to make the separation that, for the psychologist, is a matter of indifference. The philosopher must restrict

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the psychological to the plane of appearance as a constituted and relative reality, dependent for its being upon transcendental consciousness as the constituting source of all reality. For the philosopher, psychological consciousness belongs to the realm of the real, and thus, shares its status with Nature and material being. The psychic is part of the world, and thus, differs from the transcendental to the same extent, in the same fashion, as all other constituted and relative realities. When the reduction is performed, the psychological is bracketed along with all other transcendences. In this context, the relation between, and the significant difference between, the transcendental and the psychic is clear and unambiguous. Husserl concludes: The material thing, the animate organism, the psyche—these are quite determinate and particular transcendences constituting themselves in their manner and fully understandable in the pure consciousness for the pure Ego, and only by reduction thereto is the “absolute” to be attained, which represents the absolute relational member for all realities whose being is entirely relative being. Pure consciousness has absolute priority in relation to which all being is the aposteriori, and this relation between apriori and aposteriori already belongs in the sphere of essence. Accordingly, it is a fundamental necessity, and of cardinal importance for philosophy, to lift oneself to the recognition that one must differentiate between the eidetics of states of consciousness, which is a piece of the rational ontology of the psyche, and the eidetics of the transcendentally purified consciousness (or of being lived-­ process), that the latter, the genuine and pure phenomenology, is just as little rational psychology as rational natural theory (1980, p. 64).

What has justified characterizing “the eidetics of the psychic states of consciousness as phenomenology” as we had done when pursuing rational psychology, writes Husserl, is that “the pure lived-process with its entire essence” does enter into the psychic state; but even then it “experiences only an apperception that does not change the lived-process itself, but rather, apprehends it appurtenantly.” In entering into the psychic state, consciousness has not lost the purity that is essential for the philosophical task: “for it itself belongs to a pure Ego as its pure lived-process, to which, as everything belongs, the eidetic possibility of being empirically apperceived” (1980, p. 64). Philosophy is not an empirical science, and thus has no interest in the empirical apperception of consciousness. It is interested only in “pure consciousness as idea.” Psychology, on the other hand, is interested in the empirical appearance of the pure lived-process as psychic state, and thus it can remain transcendentally naïve, situating consciousness within the world of mind. Such a psychology will not be the genuine and pure phenomenology of the philosopher, but psychology is not, after all, philosophy just as much as philosophy is not psychology. To require of psychology that it be philosophy would be to commit the psychologistic error in reverse. Psychology can no more be interested in the transcendental than philosophy can be in the psychic. “When one has once understood” these connections between the phenomenological and psychological and the division of labor required by them, Husserl comments, they “possess nothing wonderful” (1980, p. 64). The situation seems to be this: as long as one is interested in philosophy and epistemology, as we first were in Ideas I, then one must distinguish between phenomenology and psychology and situate the psychic within its relevant limits as a relative and constituted region of reality. As long as one is only interested in psychology, as

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we first were in Ideas III and at times in both Ideas I and Ideas II, then one need not distinguish between phenomenology and psychology by performing the reduction, but can develop a phenomenological psychology by basing psychological understanding and method on the eidetic insights into the nature of the psychic provided in Ideas II. The transcendental insights achieved in Ideas I concerning the constituting-constituted relation remain transcendental insights; insights, that is, relevant to and important for transcendental phenomenology as philosophy. In the context of psychology, though, they remain implicit to the extent that they allow for a de-naturalization of consciousness and the assumption of the personal attitude but remain unacknowledged to the extent that the transcendental problematic does not arise. Transcendental phenomenology, we might say, allows for a radical, fundamental, and novel reform of psychology, but it does not itself become psychology; it does not usurp the psychologist’s project and territory. Psychology, on the other hand, remains within its relevant limits in so far as it does not attempt to tackle transcendental epistemological issues, in so far as it remains psychology and does not presume to be philosophy. In this view, phenomenological psychology arises upon the ruins of naturalistic psychology. The reduction has been performed by the philosopher in order to refute the naturalistic prejudice that led psychologists to situate the psychic within and subordinate to Nature. Once this false view of the psychic has been razed, a new view of the psychic that “incorporates” (1980, p. 38) the phenomenological insights gained through the reduction can arise and take its place. In this sense, phenomenological psychology fills in the gap created by the reduction between naturalism and the transcendental; it is situated in the infinite distance between them as a science pertaining to a mundane, but non-naturalistic reality, a worldly absolute. Psychology, as a natural science, remains at a pre-transcendental level, operating within the confines of the personal attitude, while it is left to philosophy proper to take up the epistemological problematic and to study consciousness in its transcendental purity. It is such a picture as this—that of a pre-transcendental, yet phenomenological, psychology and a transcendental phenomenological philosophy—which Husserl draws in his lectures entitled “Phenomenological Psychology” (1977b). We shall now turn to these lectures in order to explore this position further and to determine whether or not these connections possess anything problematic, even though Husserl has already assured us that they possess nothing wonderful.

Chapter 5

Transcendental Psychologism

We want to remain in the natural attitude; we want actually to be nothing else but psychologists, directed in a natural, human manner toward the objective world as actuality, and endeavoring to investigate it in so far as it is a world of mind from “Phenomenological Psychology” (Husserl, 1977b, p. 34)

We have arrived at a complicated position on psychology that appears, at least initially, to resolve satisfactorily the majority of the issues raised thus far. It is a position made possible by Husserl’s legitimization of his earlier pronouncements on the nature of one’s subject matter being partly a result of one’s orientation or interest. When we are interested in doing philosophy and providing an epistemological foundation for science, phenomenology utilizes the transcendental reduction, consciousness is taken to be transcendental in nature, and the psychological is considered a constituted and relative domain. When we are interested in doing psychology, however, transcendental insights are only employed implicitly to de-ontologize naturalist tendencies, while the reduction is apparently not utilized, consciousness is explicitly taken to be psychological in nature, and the psychic is considered absolute, albeit in a worldly sense. The psychologist, we could say, need not be a transcendental phenomenologist (as would a philosopher), but is indebted to the transcendental insights of phenomenological philosophy for the delineation of their subject matter as a non-naturalistic reality. Phenomenology has served to free psychology from its naturalistic tradition. With this position, we have reached a fairly well accepted and somewhat practiced interpretation of Husserl’s view of the phenomenological reform of psychology. There has been considerable agreement within the human scientific tradition that this interpretation of Husserl’s work faithfully and adequately captures the value of phenomenology for psychology, that the development of a pre-­transcendental, non-naturalistic psychology is the fulfillment of the promise of Husserl’s thoughts on this matter. We must now take up this position and explore it in more depth and detail in order to see if it does, indeed, accurately depict Husserl’s mature view on this topic. Is this solution fully satisfactory? Given the development of our treatise © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 L. Davidson, Overcoming Psychologism: Husserl and the Transcendental Reform of Psychology, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-59932-4_5

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thus far, it should come as no surprise to the reader if we find it necessary once again to rephrase this question in terms of psychologism. Is this manner of differentiating between the transcendental and the psychological adequate to overcome substantive problems of ontological identification? Does separating philosophy from psychology, purely on the basis of interest, provide us with a sufficiently radical measure of difference to assuage our ontological concerns? We asked this question before, whenever Husserl proposed to differentiate between these two pursuits on the basis of their orientations; we shall find this question surfacing again in what is to follow. We turn now to Husserl’s lectures on “Phenomenological Psychology” (1977b) in order to pursue these questions further. We will utilize the Introduction that he provides with this text to help us summarize this position once more and then look to the body of the lectures to see what is actually entailed in the development of this form of psychological phenomenology. Since this position has been treated in the secondary literature, we will also review the work of those of Husserl’s interpreters who found in it a satisfactory solution to the problems plaguing the relationship between phenomenology and psychology. It will become evident, however, that Husserl himself was not fully satisfied with this position, feeling especially moved to express his dissatisfaction when certain of his successors (such as Heidegger) began, in their own work, to apply such a schema. In the wake of this misunderstanding, Husserl provided sound criticisms of this apparent resolution and moved beyond it in his own thinking to a position that appreciated the value of the transcendental even for psychology. We will, in the remainder of this chapter, take up these criticisms that surfaced in the works following shortly after these lectures, most notably Husserl’s “Phenomenology” article for the Encyclopaedia Britannica (1981a). A discussion of the alternative offered as a result of these criticisms will remain as the task for the next chapter.

“Phenomenological Psychology”: the Introduction Between the years of 1925 and 1928, Husserl delivered a series of lectures on the general topic of phenomenological psychology. Aside from providing further evidence of the central contention upon which this work is based—i.e., that the relationship between phenomenology and psychology remained a core concern of Husserl’s throughout his career—the text for the first, and most important of these series of lectures, published under the title “Phenomenological Psychology” (1977b), focuses its spotlight directly on the nature of the phenomenological reform of psychology and its importance in Husserl’s view. The separation of psychology from the methods and modes of understanding of natural science that were sketched in broad, theoretical strokes in earlier works is carried out concretely here. Husserl promises to provide us with the conceptual guidelines for the development of a phenomenological approach to psychology, an approach obviously lacking in the history of the discipline, but one that he feels to be necessary for its future success. In this spirit, the text of the lectures carries out, as John Scanlon writes in his Translator’s Introduction,

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“a thoroughgoing critique of physicalism in psychology” so as then to be able to offer “phenomenology as a suitably scientific alternative approach to the conceptual foundations of psychology” (1977b, p. xii). We have in these lectures, then, an essay in eidetic or rational psychology, as envisioned in Ideas III. Since we have already covered Husserl’s critique of physicalism (and naturalism) in sufficient depth, we will not go back over that territory again. What is of more interest to us at present is Husserl’s view of the alternative offered by phenomenology. How does the new approach of phenomenology alter the conceptual foundations of psychology, and what kind of psychology is produced as a result of this alteration? We are finally in a position to ask these questions directly. In his Introduction to these lectures, Husserl provides a brief outline of the nature of these changes, and it is to this discussion that we now turn our attention. Our discussion of this Introduction will also enable us to bring together the divergent aspects of the position at which we arrived at the end of our last chapter. Husserl finds it convenient, in introducing the subject matter of a phenomenological approach to psychology, to begin with the example of the Logical Investigations. This text represents his first substantive attempt to conduct a reflective analysis of consciousness outside of the scope of naturalistic explanatory psychology. As we know, the motivation for this endeavor was to provide a nonpsychologistic foundation for logic and epistemology. We have come to see, and as Husserl writes here, what unexpectedly became the “chief theme” in the context of this endeavor was the nature and status of such reflection; whether or not, that is, it was to be considered to be psychological in nature. Husserl found that if the reflective analyses offered in the Logical Investigations were taken as part of the domain of a “psychology of cognition,” then a “pernicious contamination of ideality” occurred that landed him back in the psychologistic camp (1977b, p. 17). At that time, all such psychologies belonged to the naturalistic tradition, and in order to secure the eidetic necessity appropriate to logical law, he had to find a way to separate the sphere of conscious life from the natural scientific domain of natural probability. Thus, began Husserl’s deepening insight into, and long struggle against, ever subtler forms of psychologism. In order to provide a non-psychologistic foundation for logic, Husserl had to ensure that his reflective approach to conscious life did not share the problematic presuppositions of natural scientific psychology. Such a reflective approach was not, however, in existence at the time. Therefore, as he writes, “a novel method of dealing with the psychic had to emerge in the Logical Investigations to meet the requirements of its subject matter” (1977b, p. 19); a method both descriptive and intuitive, rather than explanatory and inductive. Realizing that, rather than jumping “all too hastily to produce explanation in psychology, and to do so after the model of explanation in the natural sciences … psychology had at first to begin as a purely descriptive science of psychic life” (1977b, pp. 21–23), Husserl introduced in this text a new, less “pernicious” psychology. While “at first there was no thought of a reform of the existing psychology” when he undertook the task of this work, it soon became apparent “that the beginning of a novel psychology lay here.” The goals toward which he was working demanded “that in place of empirical psychology there had

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to appear a novel, purely a priori and yet at the same time, descriptive science of the psychic” (1977b, p. 29). So, while Husserl initially set out to develop a new epistemological discipline, he was rewarded unexpectedly, and in addition, with a new, novel form of psychology. As we have also come to see, however, basing epistemology on this new form of psychology remained problematically psychologistic, in that it was still a form of psychology. In order to avoid this form of psychologism, Husserl found it necessary to take the transcendental turn begun in 1907, with the explicit introduction of the phenomenological reduction, and then completed in 1913 in Ideas I. If one wishes to pursue epistemology through a reflective analysis of consciousness, then conscious life cannot be taken to be psychic in nature, and thus, one adopts the transcendental perspective. It is this path to the transcendental that we have pursued, along with Husserl, since our initial discussion of the Logical Investigations. What we may not have realized in our preoccupation with our epistemological concerns, however—and what Husserl wishes to point out for us here—is that this turn to the transcendental has only been necessitated by such philosophical issues. If one does not get caught up in these issues, but remains, instead, interested in a psychological level of discourse, then there appears to be no need to leave behind the a priori and descriptive psychology initiated in the Logical Investigations. Transcendental phenomenology had to abandon the descriptive psychological in order to achieve full philosophical integrity, but psychological phenomenology can remain, nonetheless, as a novel and deserving approach to the psychic. It would be senseless, apparently, for the psychologist to abandon such a promising method and mode of access to the psychic, due to the fact that it does not provide an adequate epistemological foundation in and of itself, when such was not the concern of the psychologist from the beginning. Thus, Husserl writes that “reflection on the sense of a radical and ultimately essential science of reason,” as transcendental phenomenology was to become, “necessitated an essential differentiation of the new idea of an a priori and descriptive psychology into two parallel sciences distinguished only by their fundamental attitude.” Since “no psychology, not even an a priori psychology, is so self-sufficient that it is capable on its own simultaneously to pose and to solve epistemological problems,” a transcendental phenomenology must be distinguished from it that does provide, in a non-psychological fashion, an epistemological ground for science (1977b, p. 31). Also, since epistemology does not eradicate the need for a descriptive psychology of psychic life, as one such science epistemologically grounded, the new a priori and descriptive psychology remains as a pre-transcendental parallel to meet these needs. Such a psychology utilizes a “psychological-phenomenological method” (1977b, p. 26) that stops short of taking the transcendental turn, and benefits from the insights gained through this descriptive and intuitive approach to conscious life, redefining the nature of the psychic accordingly. Husserl felt that he had come through his reflective work to establish that consciousness had a fundamentally different nature than that presumed by the naturalistic tradition and that this obviously had implications, not only for philosophy, but for psychology as well. He writes:

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Previously there prevailed in psychology, and still now in all natural-scientifically oriented psychology, an interpretation of psychic life which regarded it as obviously an analogue of a physical natural event … Accordingly, one held that the task was to reduce the complexes to the elements and to elementary forms of combinations and to corresponding causal laws. On the contrary, it was now established that this entire interpretation was senseless, that the synthesis of consciousness is completely different form the external combination of natural elements, that instead of the spatial mutual externality, spatial intermingling and interpenetration, and spatial totality, it pertains to the essence of conscious life to contain an intentional intertwining, motivation, mutual implication by meaning, and this in a way which in its form and principle has no analogue at all in the physical (1977b, p. 26).

A non-physicalistic psychology would thus be justified and called for, regardless of one’s philosophical interests. That Husserl had been entertaining such a view of this parallelism since as early as his abandonment of the psychological for philosophy in 1907 helps us to understand better several of the ambiguities and equivocations that we have encountered along our way. We remember that in his second edition revisions for the Logical Investigations, Husserl remarked that “clarifying researches are especially needed to explain our by no means chance inclination” to “mix up” phenomenology with psychology with respect to their attitudes and subject matters. He himself demonstrated this kind of mix up, apparently, in his own earlier Logos article, collapsing the phenomenological approach to consciousness with a “true” and “fully scientific” psychology, while at the same time writing that phenomenology is a science “of consciousness that is still not psychology.” Although these clarifying researches have yet to be provided in any direct way, we can take passages from the Introduction to these lectures to serve this purpose. And while Husserl’s appeal to the different interests or orientations of these parallel disciplines is not new here, perhaps we are again in a better position to understand its significance. The first step to achieving clarity in this matter is to acknowledge explicitly that Husserl has, in fact, been carrying out two separate, but related projects, at least since he recognized the unexpected “beginning of a novel psychology” in the work of the Logical Investigations. The first and primary project, undertaken in that text was to found a universal, philosophical science, a “critique of reason” grounded in a reflective analysis of transcendental consciousness (1977b, p.  31). The second project, which he takes up at length for the first time in these lectures, but which he makes clear is not to be taken thereby to be a new interest, is that of developing an a priori and descriptive psychology of consciousness that utilizes an analogous method, but which remains pre-philosophical. It is Husserl’s contention here that clarity can be retained as long as these projects are kept distinct, and that clarity is lost and confusion engendered whenever this distinction is blurred. Of course, it has been Husserl himself on occasion who has been unintentionally responsible for such confusion. The problem is as follows: whenever Husserl was primarily interested in the first of these projects and his discussion concerned philosophy, as it had for the most part for example, in Ideas I, his wish to avoid psychologism led him to emphasize “that this phenomenology was in no way identical with a naturally understood a priori psychology.” He found, however, that “this was frequently so understood” by his

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readers “as if the psychologist as a scientist referring to the world did not need to bother with this sort of philosophical inquiry into principles.” In other words, psychologists considered such discussions to hold no relevance for their own work. This was all the more confirmed, Husserl admits, by his own statements that “dogmatic sciences would be hereafter as heretofore quite possible without recourse to the posing of transcendental questions.” The result of this was that Husserl could pursue his first project, but only at the cost of sacrificing the second. To stick strictly with his philosophical program and not to mention at the same time that phenomenology also holds promise for a reform of psychology, would be to allow these misunderstandings to continue and allow his second project to remain unfulfilled. What was missed by those who assumed, as psychologists, they need not bother with phenomenology was: the fact that a phenomenological method essentially similar can also ground a naturally objective a priori psychology from the start, if one only omits the radical change of attitude by which alone the transcendental can become thematic and if one does not permit the co-­ functioning of methodic intentions relating to the transcendental, nor of philosophically ultimate questions, which lead quite beyond the normal natural science (1977b, p. 32).

Thus, even in the context of purely philosophical discussions, Husserl found it necessary to point toward the possibility of psychological applications of phenomenology, rendering the non-psychological nature of philosophical phenomenology questionable. Not to do so, however, would to be render the possibility of a non-­ physicalistic, phenomenological psychology equally questionable. Excluding psychology from the philosophical context threatens to result in its exile from phenomenology altogether, while speaking to psychological concerns within this context threatens to undermine the integrity of the philosophical program. Husserl’s dilemma is now clear; he wishes to work toward two mutually exclusive goals at the same time. There would be no such dilemma if these two projects of phenomenologically reforming philosophy and phenomenologically reforming psychology were not mutually exclusive. But what Husserl has been telling us in this Introduction, as he had in Ideas III, is that consciousness can either be viewed as transcendental or as psychological, but not both at the same time. In order to keep both of these projects alive simultaneously, though, as Husserl found it necessary to do, one must be able to entertain both of these possibilities: that of a philosophical and that of a psychological approach to consciousness. Were Husserl to allow the psychological interest to recede fully when developing philosophical phenomenology or were he to allow the philosophical interest to recede fully when developing psychological phenomenology then perhaps these equivocations would be eradicated. Husserl seems to find it necessary to keep both in view at all times, which accounts for the ambiguities and equivocations we encountered repeatedly above. Perhaps we will come, at a later point, to a better understanding of this tendency on his part, which results in an apparently unnecessarily confusing picture. For now, we may be content with an indication of the characteristics of this new form of psychology that set it off from both transcendental phenomenology and traditional empirical psychology. We remember the criteria introduced in Ideas I by

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Husserl to distinguish transcendental phenomenology from psychology. Psychology was to be a science of fact and of the real, while phenomenology was to be a science of essences and the irreal. In reintroducing these criteria at this point, it becomes obvious that this relationship has become somewhat more complex. Transcendental phenomenology remains an eidetic science of the irreal, while empirical psychology remains a science of real facts, but phenomenological psychology is now introduced as possessing a different combination of these traits. It shares with transcendental phenomenology a concern for essences, but also shares with empirical psychology a concern for a domain of the real. It differs from transcendental phenomenology by virtue of its attitude, being a natural as opposed to transcendental science, but differs from empirical psychology by being an eidetic, as opposed to factual, science (Landgrebe, 1970, p. 276). It thus occupies a kind of middle position between these two disciplines, sharing certain elements with, but also differing from, both. Here Husserl describes it as an a priori, eidetic, descriptive, and intuitive science of psychic life conducted in the natural, as opposed to, transcendental attitude (1977b, p. 33). This science, as we remember from our reading of Ideas III, provides the necessary framework within which empirical psychology is to be conducted. Any empirical science requires an eidetic science to delineate and circumscribe its subject matter and the methods appropriate to it. That such a science can be conducted in the natural attitude should not surprise or overly concern us, for Husserl had already shown in Ideas I that there are other eidetic sciences conducted in this fashion, such as geometry. As long as psychology remains uninterested in the philosophical status of its essences, it may remain in this attitude, providing the “irrefrangible, formal border” within which the empirically, “contingently factual” may occur (1977b, p. 36). If questions do arise, though, with respect to epistemological and philosophical concerns, then phenomenological psychology must look to transcendental phenomenology for solutions and subordinate itself and its orientation to consciousness to that of the transcendental. Not to do so, and to attempt to resolve its own epistemological issues within its own psychological orientation, would, as we have been adequately warned, result in psychologism. This last point brings us to a final feature of Husserl’s Introduction that we should note before moving on to other matters, as we shall find it to be of some use in what follows. Husserl does take pains to point out that while “as psychologists we do not want to be philosophers” in these lectures, it is nonetheless the case that our psychological researches might lead us to the threshold of transcendental phenomenology by raising just these kinds of epistemological issues. In pursuing a scientific psychology, we may find ourselves face to face in confrontation with issues that transcend the boundaries and competence of psychology, issues that therefore require a transcendental resolution. Since we are developing a psychological discipline in these lectures, these issues will not be pursued here, nor will their resolution become a thematic concern of ours. As we quoted in the beginning of this chapter, Husserl makes it clear that in these lectures, “we want to remain in the natural attitude; we want actually to be nothing else but psychologists.” But as we just discussed, we cannot therefore expect Husserl’s philosophical interests simply to disappear now

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that he has turned to psychological matters. He feels compelled not to allow us to lose sight of what is at stake philosophically, even in this context, and adds that proper resolution of these issues does require an “ascent” to the transcendental. While we will not pursue such a move here, Husserl wants us nonetheless to be aware of its possibility and ultimate necessity in the struggle against psychologism (1977b, p. 34). It is obvious that Husserl’s concern with philosophical integrity is still, as he writes, “effective” in these properly psychologically oriented lectures. This moves him to suggest that, in so far as these researches do lead to the exposure of epistemological issues, they can perhaps serve a second function of providing a “natural point of departure” for this “ascent” to the transcendental. They can be used, that is, as psychological reflection was used in Ideas I, as the first step of a gradual introduction of the method and subject matter of phenomenological philosophy. They can also serve another, more “pedagogical,” function. As he writes: I merely suggest here further that, for essential reasons, no one can be born a philosopher. Each can begin only as a natural, unphilosophical human being. Accordingly, a radical, systematic grounding of philosophy demands a priori a subjective and also a historical ascent from the natural standpoint to the philosophical … Perhaps our psychology provides an a priori possible and natural point of departure for the ascent to a transcendental phenomenology and philosophy. To that extent, such an inner psychology would be of special philosophical interest as a pedagogical, motivating stage preliminary to philosophy (1977b, p. 34).

Husserl’s desire to develop a transcendental phenomenology may also benefit from this exercise in phenomenological psychology, in that it can be taken to “prepare” the way for philosophical reflection that may otherwise seem uncalled for or foreign (1977b, p. 34). The entire lecture series may be used pedagogically as a first introduction to phenomenological terrain, serving as a point of departure for actually transcendental philosophical work. In this sense, these lectures serve a dual role: that of developing a phenomenological approach to psychology and that of preparing the way for the development of a philosophical phenomenology. While mutually exclusive in actual practice, these two projects do seem nevertheless related in theory. We should also note, before moving on to explore this position in its actual development, that it is one which, as mentioned above, receives much support in the secondary literature on Husserl and psychology. de Boer, for example—who helped us to come this far in our understanding of Husserl’s development—restricts phenomenological psychology to this pre-philosophical role and writes, subsequently, that it “analyzes consciousness on a pre-transcendental level” (1978, p. 407). “As long as the psychologist speaks as psychologist” and does not develop philosophical pretensions, psychology can and should remain a natural, dogmatic science; the transcendental problematic “does not touch psychology as such” (de Boer, pp. 486, 476). Farber wrote, in a similar vein, that the distinction between transcendental phenomenology and rational, eidetic psychology “does not affect the psychologist” in their “particular empirical procedures” (1967, p. 211), implying that psychology is uninterested in such a distinction.

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This interpretation can also be found in the work of Kockelmans, that interpreter and successor Husserl who has surely written the most on the topic of Husserl’s understanding of the relation between phenomenology and psychology and the value of this relation for a phenomenological reform of social science. Kockelmans agrees with this notion of a pre-transcendental psychology and writes, for instance, that: Whereas phenomenological psychology and transcendental phenomenology have the same subject matter, namely the eidetic structures of man’s intentional consciousness, phenomenological psychology, which does not make use of the transcendental reduction, investigates intentional consciousness from the natural point of view, while transcendental phenomenology examines it from a transcendental and thus absolute point of view (1973, p. 235).

While we shall examine Kockelmans’ position in more detail later, we can mention at this point that throughout all of his writings on Husserl’s understanding of the nature and role of phenomenological psychology, he maintained that, for Husserl, psychology “remains within the realm of the natural attitude” and “does not employ the transcendental reduction” (1973, p. 232, cf., also 1967a, b, c, 1972). For Kockelmans, we could say, Husserl’s last word on the value of phenomenology for psychology has been expressed here in these lectures. Similar views have been aired by Alfred Schutz, who was an acquaintance of Husserl’s, and his student, Maurice Natanson. Schutz and Natanson appeal to Husserl’s concept of the parallelism between phenomenological psychology and transcendental phenomenology to agree that a psychology that remains in the natural attitude loses nothing by virtue of the fact that it retains access to consciousness, only in its natural form. They maintain that phenomenological psychological insights into the nature of consciousness may be gained within the natural attitude and that the only possible reason for leaving this attitude would be to pursue philosophical, and thus non-psychological, interests. Since, as Husserl writes in this Introduction, “transcendental phenomenology has this characteristic, that every one of its propositions admits of being transformed into an a priori psychological proposition in the natural sense” (1977b, p. 32), Natanson argues that “the level of phenomenological work we settle for is a function, in part, of what we are after” (1973b, p. 27). If we are “after” psychological insight, then we take these propositions in their natural sense and remain indifferent to the transcendental problematic. Explains Natanson: Schutz was chiefly concerned with what he called a phenomenology of the natural attitude carried on at the level of phenomenological psychology. In virtue of what might be called the principle of phenomenological isomorphism, it is possible to find for every distinction located at the psychological level of analysis a transcendental counterpart, “for Husserl himself,” Schutz writes, “has established once and for all the principle that analyses made in the reduced sphere are valid also for the realm of the natural attitude.” All descriptions made at the psychological level have constitutive roots in transcendental subjectivity, though it does not follow that the phenomenological-transcendental reduction must be employed to make out the eidetic contours of the social world. It is a matter of what one wishes to achieve (1973b, p. 26).

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Such an eschewing of the transcendental allows for phenomenological psychology to discern the “eidetic contours of the social world” at a pre-transcendental level; psychology can function without explicit guidance from transcendental phenomenology. As Schutz himself had concluded: “In summing up, we may say that the empirical social sciences will find their true foundation not in transcendental phenomenology, but in the constitutive phenomenology of the natural attitude” (1962, p. 149; cf. Natanson, 1962, 1973a; Schutz, 1966; and Wagner, 1984). Most recently, this same conclusion has been drawn by a leading contemporary Husserl scholar, Zahavi (2019), who has argued that little progress has been made in psychology and other human sciences by virtue of the use of the transcendental reduction, while much progress has been made in these positive sciences by the application of other phenomenological methods and concepts. Lastly, while the picture is a bit more complicated in the case of Merleau-Ponty, as we shall soon see, his interpretation of Husserl’s views on psychology, mentioned briefly in our own Introduction, would also fall into this general group. In his “Phenomenology and the Sciences of Man” lectures (1964), Merleau-Ponty concentrates on the nature of the relationship between eidetic and empirical psychology to the exclusion of any mention of the transcendental problematic. He seems to equate phenomenology with phenomenological, or eidetic, psychology and points, as had Schutz and Natanson, to a phenomenology of the natural attitude. Giorgi’s early book, Psychology as a Human Science (1970), also mentioned in our Introduction, takes the majority of its guidance from Merleau-Ponty’s perspective and presents a similar, pre-transcendental position. The same could be said of many others within this tradition, such as, e.g., Jenning (1986), Linschoten (1979), McCall (1983), Misiak and Sexton (1973), Strasser (1967), Straus (1966), Stroker (1983), and Yee (1969), all of whom seem to agree, whether expressly, through statements to this effect, or implicitly, by virtue of their failure to mention and account for the transcendental reduction, that phenomenological psychology is to be conducted within the natural attitude, with transcendental naiveté. We mention these interpreters and their work at this point to demonstrate that there has been a considerable amount of satisfaction with this apparent resolution of the difficulties associated with developing a phenomenological approach to psychology; what Merleau-Ponty termed “the problems of psychology and the problems of Husserl” (1964, p. 46). Many have been convinced that this solution is, at the same time, the most philosophically coherent and the most psychologically practicable. We shall see now, however, why Husserl himself could not let matters rest at this point.

“Phenomenological Psychology”: Consciousness as Intentional As we now turn our attention to the body of these lectures themselves, we have in mind the following question: What, precisely, is the nature of the “psychological-­ phenomenological method”? How, exactly, does an a priori, descriptive, and intui-

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tive psychology proceed? What are we to do to develop such a hybrid science, one that searches for the “eidetic contours” of psychic life, but from within the natural attitude? The first thing we must do, in Husserl’s view, is return to the world of the personalistic attitude of Ideas II. We remember this as the world of everyday life, the natural point of departure for reflection. In the context of these lectures, Husserl refers to this world as the “pre-scientific experiential world” or the “pre-theoretical world” (1977b, pp. 40, 46). Husserl’s choice of such terminology is, as usual, telling, for by referring to this world as “pre-scientific” and “pre-theoretical,” he means to convey that the experience to which he is referring is unencumbered by scientific concepts or abstractions. This is the realm of experience that exists prior to the adoption of a scientific attitude and the formulation of theory within the strictures of such an attitude and, most importantly, the realm of experience upon which science and theory is based. It is important, Husserl feels, to begin with a return to this world of experience prior to science, so as to be able to gain a direct, descriptive access to our subject matter of the psychic. If we do not take such a step, we would run the risk of viewing the psychic already through the predetermined eyes of a certain scientific theoretical approach which would then preclude the possibility of pure description. From our previous discussion, we can guess that there is a specific scientific theoretical approach that Husserl has in mind in his argument for the value of returning to a pre-scientific sphere, which is that of the physical sciences. He does seem to feel, in his presentation of these lectures, that the natural scientific attitude has become so deeply entrenched in our thinking about science that we must put it aside explicitly in order to ensure that our circumscribed domain for inquiry is free from its influence. We return to the pre-theoretical world so that we may be sure that we have not unknowingly or uncritically adopted the natural scientific attitude at the outset, a mistake that would pre-figure the nature of our description. To achieve any measure of success in the development of a phenomenological psychology, Husserl insists: “The naturalistic prejudice must fall” (1977b, p. 109). What do we find when we turn to this pre-theoretical world? We seem to find the two spheres of the physical and the mental, the objective and the subjective, which, taken together, make up one all-inclusive world. We have before us the objective world of physical Nature, but this world is given to us through the medium of subjective appearance. Also, we have the realm of subjective appearance, but what is given through this realm is the objective world. When one wishes to develop a science of Nature, then, one abstracts the physical, the objective, from this totality through the adoption of the natural scientific attitude. This attitude excludes the realm of appearance, of “anything and everything subjective,” in order to acquire physical Nature as a “self-contained sphere” (1977b, pp. 113–114). In the physical sciences, we must investigate Nature as independent from its varying appearances. We concentrate on the objective and exclude, thereby, anything that can be considered merely subjective (1977b, p. 111). For the physical scientist, of course, this poses no real problem (or so it seemed, at the time, to Husserl). Were this approach applied to the subject matter of psychology, however, we would be faced with quite a different challenge. In this case, as

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Husserl writes, “we are unclear in advance as to how the subjective is to become objective by the exclusion of the subjective” (1977b, p.  114). The abstraction employed by the natural scientist obviously cannot be used by the psychologist, for were we to approach our subject matter of the subjective objectively, we would lose it altogether. We would exclude that which we wished to study. Husserl writes: Here the difficulties arise that the merely subjective moment to be excluded at any time, all the subjective modes of orientation, perspectival variations of appearances … and the like are not foreign to psychic life, that they belong necessarily to the psychic or personal domains, precisely to those domains in which they appear … they cannot drop out of the thematic domain so simply as out of the thematic sphere of natural science, which is in principle subject-alienated (1977b, p. 111).

The thinking behind the natural scientific mode of abstraction is that the “merely subjective” appearances of objectivity are foreign to the properly circumscribed subject matter of physical science. Nature, we believe, exists in itself, “behind” our experiences of it (1977b, p. 95). As we have already shown, there is no sphere of appearances in themselves “behind” the sphere of appearances. To exclude this sphere in pursuit of a science of subjectivity would result in a subject-alienated science of the subject. It is this that has resulted in Husserl’s view from the uncritical acceptance of naturalism. Evidently, our approach will have to be different from that of the physical sciences. We must carry out a different kind of abstraction here, one that preserves our subject matter of the subjective and excludes that which is foreign to it. What is it that we should exclude that is foreign, in a sense, to the subjective? In the terms of the dichotomy that we assume here, it is obvious that that which is foreign to the sphere of appearances is that which is taken to transcend this sphere, that which is given as other than the appearances themselves. This would be precisely that domain of the physical acquired through an exclusion of the psychic. If the physical is to be acquired thorough an exclusion of the psychic, then the psychic must be considered foreign to it. We could simply reverse this process to gain a purified psychic sphere. Husserl writes: “In a ‘pure psychology’ we would have the situation the reverse of that in natural science; everything ‘objectively physical’ would have to be excluded here” (1977b, p. 111n). In a science of the subject, we exclude that which we have already determined to be subject-alienated. It is thus, as Husserl describes, that we acquire the subject matter for psychology: By an eventually multiple turning of regard away from the experienced thing and its determinations as a thing toward the subjective modes of appearance of the thing and then eventually toward me myself, toward the I which finds this subjective moment already there, toward the I which is at all active there, e.g., as experiencing this thing, considering it more closely, relating it to other things, evaluating it, desiring to enjoy it, etc. (1977b, p. 112).

In our discussion of Ideas II, we briefly described this as a “complementary abstraction” of the realm of the personal-cultural from the totality of the all-­inclusive world through an exclusion of materiality. Husserl labels this turn to the subjective and the method appropriate to it in these lectures as the “socio-cultural scientific attitude of experience” (1977b, p. 115).

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We had, it is true, come this far in our discussion of Ideas II. At the time, we left the nature of this attitude and its method otherwise unexplored. Husserl suggested that a “sort of reduction” be performed, but that this reduction was not to be the properly phenomenological reduction, for we wished to remain within the personal attitude, which was a variant of the natural attitude. Were we to perform the phenomenological reduction then, we would, of necessity, leave the natural, personal attitude and, apparently, leave the domain of our subject matter, as well. It is for these reasons that the commentators mentioned above did not find the transcendental turn to be necessary for phenomenological psychology, especially for one that explicitly claims to remain in the natural attitude, as we have seen Husserl do in his Introduction to these lectures. It is also for these reasons that others (Scanlon, 1989; Yee, 1976) suggested that a descriptive psychology of the personal-cultural need not utilize the phenomenological reduction in order to gain access to its subject matter. A return to the pre-theoretical world of everyday life, brought about through a bracketing of the naturalistic prejudice, would be enough to ground a descriptive psychology of the psychic as it itself is given in this experience. Such a view was intended when we stated earlier that phenomenology services implicitly to de-­naturalize the psychic but is then otherwise restricted to properly philosophical purposes. Let us try to carry out this method, however, and we see that this view is neither adequate nor accurate with respect to the actual work undertaken and discoveries made. In fact, Husserl’s description above of a “turning of regard away from the experienced thing … toward the subjective modes of appearance of the thing” seems highly reminiscent of his previous descriptions of the phenomenological reduction. Did not the reduction begin with just such an exclusion of the objects transcendent to experience when it was first introduced explicitly in 1907? Is not the abstraction of the subjective through an exclusion of the objective precisely a reduction to the sphere of “pure” subjectivity? We must take a closer look at the actual method of the socio-cultural scientist, in order to clarify for ourselves whether or not this is the case. We turn our regard to the subjective modes of appearance but find these appearances to be appearances of the physical, appearances of objectivity. “The first theme of the scientific investigation of subjectivity,” writes Husserl, is “simply the ‘I perceive something pertaining to a spatial thing’” (1977b, p. 120). We remember the example of the white paper from Ideas I. We restrict ourselves, then, to the subjective appearances of this thing, the white paper, and exclude any concern with the paper itself as an object of Nature. What we find, however, is that the paper itself reappears within the realm of appearance as the paper perceived by me. The subjective appearances upon which we are reflecting are appearances of this white paper. We have not lost the physical object through this exclusion, but have merely regained it, as we put it earlier, as a transcendence within immanence. The thing has become idea. Husserl writes: Whatever is present to consciousness and is present to consciousness as the same in multiple consciousness is, taken purely as it is thus present to consciousness, an ideal correlate of the syntheses really occurring in the immanence of the intentional lived experience. But everywhere this something, the object of consciousness, is inseparable from this synthesis

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as something itself exhibitable in it (in a certain broad sense a what directly visible in it) but as something irreal in contrast to what is immanent or, as we say also, something transcendent in relation to it (1977b, p. 134).

Even though we wished to bracket the domain of transcendence in order to acquire the subjective sphere, what we find in subjectivity is the experience of the transcendent as transcendent. This is not only true with respect to our white paper and other individual physical things but is also true of the entire natural world. Is not everything “objectively physical” that we excluded from our science, Husserl asks, to be found “hidden within the psychic sphere again as an idea,” as that of which one is conscious (1977b, p. 111n)? What we seem to have stumbled across here, however unexpectedly, is the intentional view of consciousness that we know to be appropriate to transcendental phenomenology. This should, in a way, not surprise us, since we have seen Husserl repeatedly insist that the realizing apperception through which consciousness comes to be apprehended as psychological does not in the least alter its fundamental nature. We know this fundamental nature to be that of intentionality and so it is evident that, even when one approaches consciousness psychologically, this is what one will discover. Without retracing our steps through the arguments provided in Chaps. 2 and 3, we realize here that when we do turn our regard to the subjective, what we discover is an intentional relation between subject and object. It is this relation that is contained in the “real lived experience” which is our subject matter (1977b, p. 135). How are we to understand the relationship between the intentional object of this relation, the white paper as perceived, and the actual, physical white paper in itself? What is the relationship between the idea and the physical thing? Once we realize that the physical object, and the entire world of the physically objective, reappears within the subjective sphere, we can no longer avoid such a question. It has been precisely on this issue that we have become stuck in the past whenever we have attempted to do phenomenology on a psychological level; it was here that we encountered our impasse following the Logical Investigations. It is a salient issue because, as long as consciousness is being viewed from within a psychological framework, it remains situated within the world and is thus merely one reality among others. As long as we remain within the natural attitude, psychological subjectivity is situated in relation to physical objects and other subjects on the basis of real relations. How, then, can we make sense of the intentional relation between subject and object in the larger context of this real relation? We could, perhaps, argue that this concern is a properly epistemological, rather than a psychological one and that it, therefore, belongs to the domain of philosophy rather than to that of psychology. A psychologist, we might say, need only be ­interested in the psychic sphere and may, therefore, limit their interest to an exploration of the sphere of appearances. Such a psychological reduction, we may remember, was attempted in the first edition of the Logical Investigations. We had to move beyond that position partly because phenomenology was intended by Husserl to resolve epistemological issues, such as the one in which we have presently become entangled.

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If we are no longer pursuing a philosophical project and are only interested in pursuing psychology, then perhaps we may let such a question as this go unanswered. Such a question, we could say, transcends the bounds and competence of psychology; it is, therefore, not a psychological issue. The philosopher, of course, is free to pursue this question further, but whatever its solution, this is a matter of indifference to the psychologist. Is this not precisely what Husserl meant when he said that the distinction between eidetic psychology and transcendental phenomenology did not matter to the psychologist? Is this not where Husserl would say phenomenological psychology must give way to transcendental phenomenology, now that epistemological, and thus, philosophical questions have been raised? This has been the view of a majority of Husserl’s successors as described in the above; thinkers who have assumed that psychologists could be indifferent to matters of epistemology and who have also assumed that actual scientific work could be carried out at such a pre-epistemological level. This view has been adopted, in Husserl’s words, from his Introduction, “as if the psychologist as a scientist referring to the world did not need to bother with this sort of philosophical inquiry into principles.” Yet, what we learned for our own discussion in Chap. 2 is that this question does actually matter to the psychologist. It does make a difference in psychology, for instance, whether one is perceiving accurately or hallucinating. It does make a great deal of difference whether or not the tree I claim to be perceiving actually does exist in front of me, even in a purely psychological evaluation or assessment of such an experience. At an even more basic level, how are we to know that a psychologist has a trustworthy and reliable access to other psychological subjects, i.e., to the subjects of inquiry, if we do not know how to understand the relation between the intentional object and the real world? The epistemological credibility of experience does matter even on this quite concrete, psychological level. The psychologist is driven, just as the philosopher, to overcome this impasse. We referred to this question in the context of Chap. 2 as the genetic question, and what we found in that context was that all that Husserl could really do in order to forestall this kind of impasse was to ask us not to ask such a question. The interpreters of Husserl discussed above, who agree that psychology can and should remain at this pre-epistemological level, would seem to be opting for this same kind of solution here, only in the context of psychology rather than philosophy. They simply ask the psychologist not to ask these kinds of questions. However, not only have we just shown that psychologists must be concerned with such questions, but we have also demonstrated that, regardless of whether or not these questions are asked and answered explicitly, as we are trying to do here, they are at least implicitly resolved in the actual practice of the psychologist. Psychology, like all positive sciences, presumes some form of an epistemological framework. The psychologist assumes that s/he already knows what it means to know something about the ­psychic. The genetic question is already being answered in some fashion, it is just that that fashion is implicit and taken for granted to be valid. What, then, are the psychologist’s options at this point? There seem to be two possible paths to take, two possible ways of answering the genetic question. Since we are operating on a psychological level and have remained within the natural

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attitude, then it might seem reasonable to appeal to a correspondence between the idea (as a representation of the object) and the physical object (as that which is represented), brought about by the real relation between subjectivity and the natural world. This has been the view presupposed by natural scientific psychology, but perhaps it is valid for a human scientific psychology that remains within the natural attitude as well. The other option is to take the intentional relation between the subject and idea to be constitutive in nature, doing away with any need for the object in itself through the use of the phenomenological reduction. While the first possibility seems to lead back to naturalism, the second questionably seems to lead either to solipsism or to the transcendental. It is Husserl’s view that the first solution does, in fact, lead back to naturalism and he is therefore unwilling to settle for this interpretation. To regress back to a Cartesian split between subject and (physical) object is to relegate the relationship between consciousness and the world to the realm of mystery. We remember that Husserl convincingly demonstrated that a real relation between consciousness and its object remained essentially enigmatic and that the only possible solution to this “riddle” of transcendence was to replace the real relation with an intentional relation, viewing transcendence as a function of the mode of givenness of the object (see Chap. 3). It seems now that even within our psychology, we must overcome the Cartesian legacy of a view of consciousness as representational. In psychology, as well as philosophy, we must replace the real relation presumed to exist between consciousness and its objects, between two realties taken to exist in the natural world, with an intentional constitutive relation. For consciousness to be intentional in nature means that experience is a process of “sense-bestowal” and that the objects of experience, even of perceptual experience, are “nothing else, but meaning, meant sense” (1977b, p. 141). The physical object must be taken to exist in its relation to consciousness as physical, as nothing else but the transcendence within immanence discovered in the subjective sphere. A real, natural causal, relation between subject and physical object and a constitutive relation between subject and intentional object are mutually exclusive. Phenomenological psychology, in its liberation from naturalism, must opt for the constitutive view. With this step, however, it seems we have left the natural attitude by virtue of the phenomenological reduction. Our abstraction of the personal psychic from the pre-theoretical world has taken on properly phenomenological proportions. Scanlon (1989) explains the reasoning that has led us eventually to equate the method of the socio-cultural scientist with that, apparently, of the phenomenological philosopher: The approach to a descriptive psychology can be understood as achieved by simply disregarding all experience of the external world and focusing on the psychic life as it presents itself to internal experience. The problem that Husserl sees in such an approach is that it can result either implicitly or explicitly in a view of the psychic life as encapsulated in its own physical body, cut off from all direct contact with other psychic selves. All contact with anything beyond the self’s own psychic life would be construed as mediated by sensations and feelings that themselves would be construed as effects of psychophysical stimulation, to be explored by way of the set-aside external experience, and naturalistic explanation.

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By contrast, Husserl’s phenomenological reduction, by focusing attention upon the sense “transcendent world” as the complex noematic correlate of the complex noetic sense-­ formation essential to experience as intentional, discloses the distinctive way in which psychic life relates to the experiential world. The distinctive relation is toto caelo different from a causal relation. It is not a real relation between real, causally interacting, material entities. It is a relation of sense to the intending of sense, of complex unities of sense to constitutive moments of sense … All experience of transcendent objects remains subject to intentional analysis of the formation of their sense, including the sense of their actual existence in the transcendent world of experience. The intentional character of lived experience, thus, allows an appropriate intentional analysis of the ideal unity of consciousness that is at the same time its ideal relation with the world of experience, including other psychic lives as objectified in the world (1989, pp. 24–25).

It is only through this method that pure subjectivity becomes accessible to our human scientific psychology, uncorrupted by the foreign influences of naturalism (1977b, p. 146). We should realize, of course, as Scanlon points out, that it is not only necessary to perform the reduction in order to avoid the “incompleteness” that resulted from a mere “methodological exclusion to the psychical sphere” as Husserl had employed in the Logical Investigations—a move that served only to make of the psychic an artificial island within Nature. It is also, and more importantly, necessary to perform the reduction in order to overcome the “blindness to the distinctive way psychic life is in the world of experience” that would otherwise result from our having situated the psychic within the real, causal nexus of the natural world (Scanlon, 1989, p. 24). Consciousness simply does not relate to objects in a real, causal fashion and the reduction is necessary in order to make this clear—even for the psychologist. Husserl thus finds it necessary to acknowledge that, despite his earlier proclamations to the contrary, phenomenological psychology does employ the phenomenological reduction and that this reduction to pure subjectivity has already been put to use in our phenomenological psychological researches to this point. He writes: “You recognize now that all our pure descriptions of the last series of lectures were carried out in the phenomenological reduction—except that we did not make that scientifically clear” (1977b, p. 147). Not only had he not made this scientifically clear, but he had actually led us (explicitly) to believe that these descriptions were to be carried out in the natural attitude, as we know from our reading of the Introduction. Now Husserl finds the demands made by the intentional nature of consciousness and a psychology that wishes to remain faithful to this nature to lead him to a more radical position than even he had, perhaps, anticipated. He must now insist that: “Only the conscious execution of the reduction and clarity concerning its sense makes science possible here. Only in that way do we protect ourselves from the natural relapse into the natural attitude” (1977b, p. 147). So that there will be no confusion in this obviously important matter, Husserl goes to some length to ensure clarity, to acknowledge that phenomenological psychology shares the method we thought to be restricted to transcendental phenomenology. With respect to the reduction, he writes: The understanding of all of phenomenology depends upon the understanding of this method; we acquire phenomena in the sense of phenomenology only by it. And that is true whether (as I recently distinguish) we have aimed at a philosophically transcendental

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phenomenology, or, as here, at a psychological phenomenology which should deliver us the purely self-contained realm of psychic phenomena in their concrete total unity (1977b, p. 144).

With this admission we can now, finally, make sense of Husserl’s previously enigmatic remark, made in “Philosophy as Rigorous Science,” that it has been the fundamental error of modern psychology that it has not recognized and developed the phenomenological method. It is now clear what Husserl meant at the time: that psychology must employ the reduction in order to be able to gain access to and appreciate fully the intentional nature of consciousness. But does this not raise a whole slew of new problems with respect to the relationship between psychology and phenomenology? Does this not make phenomenological psychology, for instance, a transcendental science? Does it not, in fact, serve to erase any possible distinction remaining between phenomenological psychology and transcendental phenomenology? If both are sciences of pure subjectivity, can we distinguish between them at all? We distinguished between them solely on the basis of their differing attitudes, but if they both utilize the phenomenological reduction, how is such a difference to be preserved? The passage quoted above, in which Husserl explicitly distinguishes between transcendental phenomenology and phenomenological psychology, would lead us to believe that he has, in fact, found some way to preserve this distinction. Perhaps we can locate the source of a possible difference in the way Husserl has contrasted these two sciences in this same passage. In this instance, he used both “transcendental” and “psychological” as adjectives to describe different forms of phenomenology. Perhaps the phenomenological approach, as required by intentionality, is to be used by both disciplines, but each for its own purposes. Phenomenological psychology does indeed utilize the reduction, but it utilizes it as a psychological method, while transcendental phenomenology utilizes the same reduction, but as a tool for philosophical reflection. As we concluded at the end of our last chapter, perhaps the only difference to be discovered here is to be based upon the differing interests of psychological, as opposed to philosophical, science. At the time, however, we assumed that phenomenological psychology would remain within the natural attitude, as it was concerned with consciousness as psychic, and thus, worldly. Is there perhaps a way in which phenomenological psychology could utilize the reduction, while remaining in the natural attitude? At least since 1907 and “The Idea of Phenomenology” this would be contradictory; it was the phenomenological reduction that raised us up out of the natural attitude into the phenomenological. Husserl defined the phenomenological attitude at that time as a philosophical attitude, and in 1907, of course, we were interested primarily in doing philosophy. It is also true, however, that what was described and introduced in the “The Idea of Phenomenology” as a philosophical tool and philosophical attitude had already been at work implicitly and in an incipient form in the Logical Investigations, when we understood our work to have descriptive psychological import (cf. Boehm, 1965). At that time, we were employing a kind of reduction that still did not cause us to leave the natural attitude. The reduction had psychological value, even while it

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remained philosophically problematic. As Husserl suggested in this Introduction to “Phenomenological Psychology,” as psychologists we may remain content with an application of the kind of method first employed here. If the philosophical motivations that led Husserl beyond the position of the Logical Investigations do not concern the psychologist, then perhaps we have found a way to distinguish between two different applications of phenomenology. We remember that in this Introduction, Husserl had commented that it was at such a point that phenomenology was divided into two parallel sciences. The issue that motivated Husserl to revise the descriptive psychological position of the Logical Investigations was that of psychologism, as we have seen. In order to overcome this problem, we had to abandon the psychological in 1907. This move was made possible by severing the tie between experience and the psychological ego as an additional step in the reduction. Not only were transcendent objects to be bracketed, but the psychological subject was also to be placed in brackets, in so far as it, too, was taken to be transcendent. But it is precisely this move, this additional step, that we do not want to make in the development of psychological phenomenology. To sever the tie with the psychological ego, to put aside the prejudice that experience does belong to a psychological subject, would result in the loss of our subject matter. In this sense, we do want to remain psychologists, and therefore, seem to remain at a pre-transcendental level. While we employ the reduction to bracket the objects of consciousness, consciousness itself remains as a natural, psychological reality. Pure subjectivity is viewed as psychological, rather than transcendental. We are not returning completely to the position of the Logical Investigations, however, as we made clear in our last chapter. The first edition of the Logical Investigations was situated within a naturalistic framework; the parallelism between descriptive and genetic psychologies resulted in a necessary appeal to naturalistic explanation in response to the genetic question that refused to be silenced. As we have just seen, Husserl no longer wishes for psychology to have to resort to such an appeal. Phenomenological psychology is not to be corrupted in any way by the foreign influences of naturalism. How, then, is this position to differ from that of the Logical Investigations? When we asked this same question in our last chapter, in the context of our discussion of Ideas II, we were able to answer it through an appeal to the transcendental context in which the analyses of that text were conducted. Descriptive psychology need not appeal to Nature because the physical is merely one constituted domain among others, including that of the psychic. In fact, in terms of priority of constituted domains, it was the psychic that turned out to have priority over the physical. All of these were philosophical insights, grounded in a transcendental phenomenology of consciousness as constituting these domains for scientific inquiry. If our phenomenological psychology is, in fact, a pre-transcendental, or transcendentally naïve, discipline we would not, at this point, have access to these insights. We would not know, from within the confines of the natural attitude, that the physical is merely one constituted domain along with and subordinate to the psychic. It was just for these reasons that we found it necessary, within the confines of phenomenological psychology itself, to perform the reduction. It was only by way of the reduction that we did not have to situate the psychic within Nature, as we had

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in the Logical Investigations. Where, then, is the psychic to be situated? To put this another way, how can phenomenological psychology transcend the naturalistic position of the Logical Investigations without assuming the fully transcendental position of Ideas I, ceasing, thereby, to be psychology? We assumed at the beginning of our discussion in this chapter that the only service transcendental phenomenology would provide for psychology was that of the de-naturalization of the psychic, and this on an implicit basis. What did not occur to us at the time to ask is where does this leave the psychic? The answer provided by Ideas II is that the psychic belongs to the personal-cultural world of mind, which has replaced Nature as the absolute reality. As we just mentioned, however, this position only became possible within the framework of transcendental phenomenology. Our phenomenological psychology does not have the access to transcendental subjectivity that Husserl employed in Ideas II in order to relativize the physical and absolutize the psychic. It seems that it is just such a reversal that we need to be able to carry out here. If we cannot appeal to a transcendental context in order to do so, then perhaps we can carry this out from within the domain of phenomenological psychology itself. Perhaps this is the value of the reduction for psychology. Through the performance of the reduction, the objects of consciousness come to be considered exclusively in their meaning for consciousness. In this way, the entire natural world appears within consciousness as a transcendence within immanence; it retains its character of being given as transcendent but is situated in its relation to consciousness. In the philosophical context, as in Ideas I, this results in an absolutizing of transcendental consciousness. Nature is understood to be one of its constituted domains and is thus relativized. In this case, however, in the case of phenomenological psychology, where the reduction is a reduction back to pure subjectivity viewed psychologically, this must result, in an analogous fashion, in an absolutizing of psychological subjectivity. Nature is still understood be a constituted domain but is now situated within the sphere of psychological subjectivity. The psychic sphere, as opposed to the transcendental, has become the absolute. What we perhaps have not fully understood to this point is that a relativizing of Nature, a de-naturalization of the psychic, appears necessarily to entail a simultaneous absolutizing of consciousness. If this cannot be the transcendental consciousness of transcendental phenomenology, then it will have to he the psychological subjectivity of phenomenological psychology. We now understand better the position of Ideas II, the way in which the psychic can be considered to be the worldly absolute. It necessarily arises as such in the development of a phenomenological psychology. What we seem to be discovering in all of this is that a phenomenological psychology that has remained pre-transcendental has had to provide for itself the kinds of insights that we previously considered being the proper domain of transcendental phenomenological philosophy. Without a transcendental framework explicitly at its disposal, it has had to cover the same territory, only under the guise of pure psychology. It has arrived at the same insights, effected the same changes and results, only all the while conceiving of pure subjectivity to be psychological, rather than transcendental, in nature. In so far as it remains a psychology, it is a worldly science; it takes the psychic to be a worldly absolute. As Husserl writes: “All psychology in the historical

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sense and in the reformed sense which can naturally join it refers to the already given world and belongs to the sciences of the world” (1977b, p. 170). Yet, at precisely the same time, it has adopted the phenomenological method and, through its bracketing of the objects of consciousness, come to view this psychological subjectivity to be constituting in nature. It has come to a somewhat “transcendental” view of the objects of consciousness in their relations to the subjectivity and has come to satisfy the demands of a science appropriate to this relation, while at the same time, viewing consciousness “naturally” as psychological in nature. While worldly, it seems nonetheless to have acquired what would otherwise be considered a transcendental status. Thus, Husserl also writes that: “Pure phenomenology, as a science referring to pure subjectivity, can of course also be called psychology, pure psychology in a quite determinate sense” (1977b, p. 166). There is no question that a statement such as this in an earlier context would have struck Husserl as problematic, in that it seems to return us to an undesirable psychologism. How can pure phenomenology be equated with psychology without having this inevitable result? It is at this point where Husserl finds phenomenological psychology leading to the threshold of transcendental phenomenology, here where its pedagogical value is found. It certainly is the case, that if one attempted to conduct philosophy at this psychological level one would be guilty of psychologism. But remember that we are only psychologists, interested in doing psychology. The problem of psychologism, Husserl seems to be saying, need not concern us as psychologists. It is at this point, as he wrote in his Introduction, that we omit the “radical change of attitude by which alone the transcendental can become thematic.” As psychologists, we do not pursue the “methodic intentions relating to the transcendental,” we do not pursue “philosophically ultimate questions.” Were we concerned with the problem of psychologism, then we would leave the psychological behind, abandon it as it were, in order to pursue our philosophical concerns. To do this would be to leave the psychological, and that, of course, would not be required of those whose interests center on the psychological; such a move would obviously be counter-productive. While it is true that one must overcome psychologism to do philosophy, it seems also to be true that one must tolerate psychologism in order to do psychology, otherwise one loses one’s subject matter entirely (cf. Giorgi, 1981; Seebohm, 1985). In this way, we can appreciate the pedagogical value of phenomenological psychology, the way in which it “prepares” the path for properly philosophical reflection and the ascent to the transcendental. “One step further” is all that is needed at this point in order to transform our science and its analyses into the fully transcendental attitude of transcendental phenomenology. We began this chapter wondering whether such a single step would be enough to overcome psychologism in a radical manner, whether differentiating transcendental phenomenology from phenomenological psychology on the basis of their differing interests, as have now done in some depth, would be a satisfactory solution to the problems associated with this kind of parallelism. Now that we have explored this position in more detail and evaluated the extent to which this difference is operative in differentiating between these two disciples, we can confront this issue directly. The issue is

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basically this: has psychology assimilated so much of phenomenology in order to do justice to the intentional nature of consciousness that it has now become indistinguishable from transcendental phenomenology? Have we returned to the position with which we started, that phenomenology is psychology, or that psychology is (transcendental) phenomenology? For example, Husserl writes that, following our one further step: “The fundamental science then becomes transcendental phenomenology, a psychology of the highest sense, a new sense which includes all critique of reason and all genuine philosophical problems” (1977b, p. 170). If even he can so easily equate transcendental phenomenology with psychology, as he does here, then should we not be concerned that we have returned to a psychologistic position? Has Husserl’s insistence that psychology utilize the reduction as its own phenomenological method erased any sign of difference between psychology and philosophy? We will return to this question in our next section, when we take up the works that followed these lectures. Before doing so, however, it might be helpful to summarize the movement of these lectures briefly, in order to tie the related issues together in a more manageable way. It is possible that we have gotten lost in the maze of this increasingly complicated picture. In the closing pages of these lectures, Husserl provides, perhaps for just this purpose, a “retrospective” synopsis of the lectures as a whole. Since we seem to have come to a position different is some ways than the one with which we began, it will benefit us to join Husserl in this retrospective glance over the territory covered. We began with the aim of developing a phenomenological approach to the psychic that remained within the natural attitude, while at the same time, making use of the insights into the personal-cultural nature of everyday experience, made possible by the refutation of naturalism provided by phenomenological philosophy. In order to do so, we thought it would be necessary to perform an abstraction of the psychic from the context of the pre-theoretical world, as physical scientists had with respect to Nature in their wok. As Husserl writes, it seems at first as if “a purely personal research is possible even on the ground of natural experience” (1977b, p. 167). In this case, when the personal is investigated on the ground of natural experience, “a phenomenological reduction does not take place” (1977b, p. 168). However, upon closer inspection of our subject matter, the abstraction carried out in this fashion proves not wholly satisfactory. An abstraction that stops short of the phenomenological reduction is incapable of delivering consciousness to us in its intentionally. Husserl finds it necessary to insist that: If one seriously wants to become acquainted with the psyche’s own essence, and especially to become acquainted with it in pure self-experience, as it is and can be seen in abstraction from all physis—then one must of course carry this abstraction out in the right way and in strict consistency. In other words: if inductive external psychology, psycho-physical and experimental, instead of operating with the rough notions of pre-scientific life concerning psychic internality and basing experimental inductions upon them, is to gain scientific concepts of this internality, then it must adopt the method of phenomenological reduction. Therefore, it requires a proper science of pure subjectivity, as we have constructed it (1977b, p. 166).

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If eidetic psychology is to clarify for empirical psychology the nature of the psychic and the methods appropriate for its study, it must utilize the phenomenological reduction as the method most appropriate to the intentional nature of the psychic as pure consciousness. The view espoused here is thus apparently contrary to the one presented in Ideas II, for in that text we were led to believe that a phenomenological reduction was not to be performed, and that the personal attitude of human science was itself a natural attitude. At that time, we did not stop to consider the nature of the psychic and the demands that this would make on our method. As Husserl remarks here, that “is precisely a further main point” (1977b, p. 169). When we look more deeply into the essence of the psychic, we discover that its distinctiveness is only captured adequately in an intentional view, and that this requires that we employ a reduction. While this may complicate matters in relation to philosophy, this move is extremely important for psychology in that it is only through this acknowledgement and appreciation of intentionality that our phenomenological psychology is able to transcend fully the naturalistic tradition that has consistently falsified its subject matter. In Husserl’s view: Mistakes in the attempts of psychologists to form descriptive concepts of the psychic itself rest on the fact that they are incapable of seeing intentionality in its specific character and of treating it accordingly… [But] whoever does not see what is essential to intentionality and the particular methodology pertaining to it, does not see what is essential to personality and personal productions either (1977b, pp. 167n, 169).

It is necessary for a true and fully scientific psychology to overcome the Cartesian split between subject and object, just as it was for true philosophy. Accordingly, psychology must also leave the natural attitude in adopting a view of psychological subjectivity as constituting. Thus, writes Husserl, in conducting a phenomenological psychology, “I am in the personal rather than the natural attitude” (1977b, p. 175). Yet there is a way in which this view is in line with that presented in Ideas II, in that in so far as we are still concerned with psychology here, rather than philosophy, we are conducting a worldly or natural science. We do not want, as psychologists, to ascend to the transcendental level, but wish to situate our subject matter within the world. Through our performance of the reduction, we realize that subjectivity is situated within the world of mind rather than the world of Nature, but psychology remains, nevertheless, a worldly discipline. It adopts the reduction for its own purposes, employs it as a psychological method, and thus appears to stop short of the transcendental. It remains at a somewhat intermediate position, halfway between the natural and transcendental attitudes. As we saw in our discussion of Husserl’s Introduction to these lectures, phenomenological psychology is a kind of hybrid discipline, sharing certain characteristics with both empirical psychology and transcendental phenomenology, while not being either. We may now re-describe those characteristics in terms of this discussion and say that phenomenological psychology is transcendental with respect to the objects of consciousness, as is transcendental phenomenology, but natural with respect to consciousness itself, as is empirical psychology. It does not view the objects of consciousness naturally as things in themselves, as does traditional

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empirical psychology, but also does not view consciousness transcendentally, as does transcendental phenomenology. Perhaps we could say that phenomenological psychology replaces the real causal relation between subject and object with an intentional constitutive relation, but views this relation itself as being real. The personal attitude is in one sense still a natural attitude, in that it is not fully transcendental; but in another sense, it is a somewhat transcendental attitude, in that it is also not fully natural. We know that if we are interested in doing philosophy, in resolving epistemological issues, then this intermediate position is not fully satisfactory. As soon as these concerns become focal, we find it necessary, as Husserl concludes these lectures, to move “from the psychological reduction to the transcendental phenomenological” (1977b, p. 179), from the personal attitude to the transcendental. Only in this way will we be able to avoid the psychologism that would result from our attempt to ground philosophy in this psychological discipline. If grounding philosophy is indeed an operative interest, then phenomenological psychology can be seen as providing the pedagogical entrée to the proper attitude and subject matter of this science, leading the way into the transcendental problematic. However, if one does not become interested in these properly philosophical issues, but remains simply a psychologist with psychological interest, then one may remain at this intermediate level in order to carry out concrete phenomenological psychological work. So it appears at this point. We may now turn to the question of whether or not this view is completely satisfactory, even for psychology. It is obvious that the philosopher may not remain at this intermediate level, for to do so would be psychologistic. But what of the psychologist? Is it not problematic for psychology to be psychologistic, or is this only a problem for philosophy? We have found that as long as psychology remains a pre-transcendental science, as long as it has no direct recourse to transcendental insights, it must provide its own alternative approach to the conceptual foundations of psychology if it is not to relapse into naturalism. It must employ the reduction itself in order to establish the psychic as the fundamental, absolute reality. We have seen Husserl insist, repeatedly, that “no psychology, not even an a priori psychology, is so self-sufficient that it is capable, on it its own simultaneously, to pose and to solve epistemological problems (1977b, p. 31). But have we not just discovered phenomenological psychology to be doing precisely this? If psychology cannot solve epistemological problems for philosophy without philosophy becoming thereby psychologistic, would not the same be true of a psychology that solved its own epistemological problems? In our presentation of this position thus far, it appears that Husserl is saying that the problem of psychologism only exists for the philosopher and need not concern the psychologist. It is this question that we now want to confront directly. In the past, we have seen Husserl remark that psychologism corrupts both philosophy and psychology; that neither discipline benefits from this kind of confusion. Did that only hold for psychologism in the form of naturalism? Now that we have overcome naturalism, may we put aside, as Husserl had intimated in Ideas III, our old mistrust of the psychic, at least if we are interested in doing psychology? Is the move to the

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transcendental only required for the philosopher? If that is indeed the case, then what, we may wonder, has happened to the relevant limits integral to the presentation of Ideas I, within which psychology is supposed to operate? Does not a psychology that provides its own epistemology transgress those limits? Also, in the context of Ideas I, the psychological was understood to be a constituted domain, relative to and dependent upon transcendental subjectivity. How can that which is constituted also be constituting? Are these concerns pressing only for the philosopher, or are these not exactly the kinds of confusions that Husserl sought to avoid throughout his career, to make possible the development of both a pure philosophy and a phenomenological psychology? The best way to address these questions is to consider the example of just such a psychologistic form of phenomenological psychology in its actual development and to see what has been entailed in its application. While Husserl considered it unfortunate, we may consider it convenient that such an application was attempted by several of his successors in the years that followed these lectures. We will be able to take into account his reactions to this event, as expressed in the works he wrote in the late 1920s, as we try to resolve the issues generated by this pre-transcendental approach to psychology.

The “Phenomenology” Article and the Case of Heidegger While involved in giving his series of lectures on phenomenological psychology, Husserl was invited by the Encyclopaedia Britannica to draft a statement defining the nature of phenomenological philosophy. Hoping to be able to use this invitation as an opportunity to introduce phenomenology to the English-speaking world, the actual article he eventually submitted, under the simple heading, “Phenomenology” (1981a), was the product of several drafts and revisions. Great care had been exerted in his framing of this somewhat concise presentation, which was finally published in 1929. The task was further complicated by Husserl’s initial desire to use the invitation to draft this statement also as an opportunity for collaboration between himself and one of his more promising students, Martin Heidegger. While none of Heidegger’s (1970) input was actually incorporated into the final version of this article, for reasons that will become evident, the attempted collaboration between Husserl and Heidegger generated a lively exchange of ideas that Husserl had to take into account in the composition of his eventual statement. Fortunately, this debate centered on the issue with which we have been involved thus far in this chapter, and it is for this reason that we now turn to this article and the discussion it engendered between these two thinkers. Husserl’s “Phenomenology” article provides us with his first articulation of a response to, and rejection of, Heidegger’s criticisms of his position. It will be most helpful in our consideration of the questions remaining at the close of our last section to explore the nature of the differences which emerged between Husserl and Heidegger and the reasons for Husserl’s subsequent rejection of Heidegger’s assistance, reasons which contributed very soon thereafter to their parting of the ways.

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By way of preview, and for the sake of orientation, we may briefly mention that Heidegger’s position in this debate is basically the one articulated thus far in this chapter, with only minor revisions. It was perhaps partly through the example that he provided of the actual implementation of this position that Husserl, on the other hand, found it to be profoundly unacceptable and was moved, in the “Phenomenology” article and the works that follow it, to critique this position and to offer in its place a different view of the role and method of phenomenological psychology. It should thus be clear why bringing Heidegger into our discussion at this point is germane to our present concern. We turn now to Husserl’s plan for the “Phenomenology” article. As he had in the lectures on “Phenomenological Psychology” delivered just 2 years earlier, Husserl wishes to employ the pedagogical strategy of developing a phenomenological approach to psychology as a first introduction to the phenomenological attitude and terrain, to be followed by an ascension to the fully transcendental attitude and terrain of philosophy proper. He begins, therefore, by laying out the “field of experience” and the method and function of phenomenological psychology. Since “psychological phenomenology” stands “nearer to our natural thinking,” he writes, it “is well suited to serve as a preliminary step that will lead up to an understanding of philosophical phenomenology” (1981a, p. 22). We remember such a scheme of a gradual introduction to philosophical phenomenology also from Ideas I. Here, as in that text, once the transcendental problematic becomes evident in the development of our pure psychology, the level of the psychological is to be superseded and the reader is introduced, thereby, to transcendental phenomenology proper. Since Husserl’s interests in this article are primarily philosophical, the psychological will be transcended to avoid psychologism. This article thus goes further than the lectures on psychology just discussed but follows basically the same plan. If we follow Husserl through the steps of his presentation, we come to the point where a psychological phenomenology is no longer adequate and the further step to the transcendental philosophical must be taken. It is this step that carries us beyond the scope of the psychology lectures and to the heart of our present concerns. In the context of this article, Husserl discusses this step in terms of a movement from the “phenomenological psychological reduction” of phenomenological psychology to the “transcendental reduction” of transcendental phenomenology, which, as he writes, is “built on the psychological reduction—as an additional part of the ­purification that can be performed at any time” (1981a, p. 30). The time when this further step must be taken we know to be the time when our interest turns away from the psychological to the philosophical, the time when the transcendental problematic becomes evident and when psychologism becomes unacceptable. At the close of our last section, we questioned whether this step need be taken by the psychologist as well as the philosopher, and what the significance of this further reduction could be, once the psychic was already considered to be intentional constitutive in nature. We can now bring these questions to the Husserl of the “Phenomenology” article. It is precisely this that Heidegger does in his comments on Husserl’s draft of this article. At precisely this point, the point at which our psychology lectures ended, Heidegger takes issue with Husserl and presses him to explain further the necessity

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for and nature of this further purification. As he had in the psychology lectures, Husserl writes that the problem of psychologism requires “at once the sharp separation, and at the same time the parallel treatment, of pure phenomenological psychology. .. and transcendental phenomenology as true transcendental philosophy” (1981a, p. 27). Phenomenological psychology may be a science of pure (intentional) subjectivity, but it considers the “I” or “ego” psychologically, as a worldly reality. Such a science cannot ground philosophy. In order to develop a non-psychologistic philosophy, we must differentiate between this I or ego of psychology and the I or ego of transcendental phenomenology, an I or ego no longer worldly, no longer psychological in nature (1981a, p. 30). We must move from the psychological level to the transcendental to avoid grounding philosophy in a worldly discipline. At this point, Heidegger is moved to raise the following question in his remarks on a draft of this article: “What is the mode of Being of this absolute ego—in what sense is it the same as the factual I and in what sense is it not the same?” (cited in Biemel, 1977, p. 297). Heidegger is raising the kind of ontological concern that we expressed at the beginning of this chapter and which we have just seen resurface at the close of our discussion of the psychology lectures. The concern, again, is this: if both phenomenological psychology and transcendental phenomenology deal with consciousness as intentional, then on what basis can we differentiate them? In Heidegger’s terms, how is the ego of phenomenological psychology not the same ego of transcendental phenomenology? Is not transcendental subjectivity really (still) psychological subjectivity? Are we not back to a purely methodological exclusion that has no ontological import? Is there an ontological difference to be found between the subject matters of these two parallel, yet supposedly separate, sciences? As Stapleton writes in his book on Husserl and Heidegger, once there is a “material parallelism” between phenomenological psychology and transcendental phenomenology, the Heideggerian question becomes: What differentiates the psychological from the philosophical proposition? It surely cannot be the intentionally of consciousness, for both uphold it. What distinguishes them can be nothing other than the meaning of the “is,” the meaning of “to be,” the meaning of the Being of the entity which is intentionally directed (1983, p. 96).

Heidegger asks Husserl directly the question that has been on our minds throughout this chapter: if we can view pure subjectivity as psychological within the confines of phenomenological psychology, does this not imply that pure subjectivity, transcendental consciousness, is psychological in nature? If not, then how is it not the same as that which is studied by our pure psychology? Perhaps we should backup for a moment and acquire a bit of background. Within the framework that Husserl has provided thus far there have been two basic ontological categories, two possible meanings of “is” or “to be”: there is the being of experience and the being of things, otherwise considered that of the constituting and the constituted, respectively. In Ideas I, Husserl defined the being of the psychic as that of a constituted reality, while transcendental subjectivity was considered constituting in nature. Prior to their ill-fated attempt at collaboration on the “Phenomenology”

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article, Heidegger had given his own lectures in 1925, published under the title History of the Concept of Time (1985), in which he criticized such a position. These lectures, which served as a first draft for his major work, Being and Time (1962), confronted the ontological problematic explicitly and took both Husserl and Dilthey to task for not establishing an adequately non-naturalistic psychology of the human. In so far as the psychic is a constituted reality, it is essentially no different, writes Heidegger, from “houses, tables, trees, mountains,” etc. (1985, p. 96). Such a view of the psychic, which Husserl himself admitted to be “zoological” in nature, did not do justice to what Heidegger felt was distinctly human. Asks Heidegger: “Does man experience himself, to put it curtly, zoologically?” (1985, p. 113). Heidegger realized, of course, that this was not Husserl’s final position on the nature of the psychic. He knew that Husserl did not want to situate the psychic within Nature; that Husserl had been battling against naturalism within psychology as well as philosophy. In fact, Husserl had sent Heidegger the unpublished manuscripts of Ideas II shortly before he began delivering these lectures. What is the only other possible avenue open to Husserl, if he is to redefine the psychic? What definition did he, in fact, offer in the “Phenomenological Psychology” lectures just discussed? If the psychic is not to be a constituted reality, then it must be constituting in nature. This is the option that Husserl has now apparently chosen. If the psychic is not to be part of Nature, then it must, as we have just realized, be considered absolute. The psychic thus becomes pure subjectivity and moves from the constituted side of the dichotomy, from being as thing, to the constituting side, being as experience. We no longer speak of the psychic as a natural reality in the sense of Nature but speak of it as a personal reality. What is the nature of this personal being? When we look deeper into the personal nature of the psychic, as introduced in Ideas II, we find that psychological subjectivity as constituting is itself pure, or transcendental, subjectivity—only considered naturally. “If we ask what the positive sense of this personal Being is,” writes Heidegger, “we are again referred back to the immanent structure of consciousness with which we are already familiar under the name of pure consciousness” (1985, p. 120). The problem Heidegger raises in his early lectures, and which then leads him to confront Husserl directly over the manuscript of the “Phenomenology” article, is that, if there are only two possible ontological categories, that of the constituted and that of the constituting, then either the psychic is to be considered naturally, as constituted and thus, as part of Nature (like houses, trees, etc.), or it is to be considered to be constituting, and thus, in the same category as transcendental subjectivity. While Heidegger and Husserl agree that the psychic is not to be considered a part of Nature, they disagree as to whether or not this necessarily entails the psychic becoming transcendental. Heidegger is hard pressed to find a reason why this should not be the result of Husserl’s battle against naturalism. Being more interested in the ontological than the epistemological problematic, Heidegger argues that transcendental subjectivity should be taken to belong to the psychic, to be definitive of the human. Phenomenological psychology is the same as transcendental phenomenology; there is no further purification to perform. We have, with the phenomenological psychological reduction, already reached transcendental subjectivity.

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Here we hit upon the major source of disagreement between Husserl and Heidegger and the major topic of their debate (cf. Biemel, 1977). In a letter to Husserl, Heidegger characterizes his basic disagreement with Husserl’s version of the “Phenomenology” article as a failure on his part to see the need to perform the “additional purification” of the transcendental reduction. It seems to him that one has already reached the level of the transcendental within the domain of the psychic. He writes: There is agreement that the entity in the sense of what you call “world” cannot be explained in its transcendental constitution by a return to an entity with the very same kind of Being. However, this does not mean that what makes up the place of the transcendental is not an entity at all. Rather, just this problem arises: what is the kind of Being of the entity in which the “world” is constituted? That is the central problem of Being and Time—i.e., a fundamental ontology of Dasein. It is a matter of showing that the kind of Being of human Dasein is totally different from that of all other entities, and that this kind of Being which it is, shelters right within it the possibility of transcendental constitution. Transcendental constitution is a central possibility for the existence of the factual self … The “wondrous” thing to be marveled at is that the constitution of the existence of Dasein makes possible the transcendental constitution of all that is positive … What constitutes is not nothing; thus, it is something and exists—though not in the sense of the positive. The question about the kind of Being of what does the constituting itself cannot be circumvented. Thus the problem of Being is universally tied to what constitutes and what is constituted (cited in Biemel, 1977, pp. 299–300).

Heidegger, in essence, wants Husserl to admit that transcendental constitution is a human function. The transcendental ego must be some kind of entity, and it most obviously is that entity normally called the person—what Heidegger will prefer to call “Dasein.” How else, we might wonder, could Husserl characterize being as experience? As we know, Husserl wanted to distance the transcendental from the human in order to avoid psychologism. He found it necessary, therefore, to define the transcendental negatively as being non-human, non-psychic, in nature. In one of the drafts of the “Phenomenology” article, he wrote that the transcendental reduction could not be an act of the human I: “If I act in this way for myself, then I am not a human I.” Once again questioning the validity of this move, Heidegger had double-­ underlined the “I am” and the “not” and remarked: “Or perhaps exactly such, in its peculiar ‘wondrous’ possibility of existence.” He then asked, “Why not? Is this action not a possibility for man?” (cited in Biemel, 1977, p. 302). Heidegger’s line of questioning here is certainly reasonable. We could say that he is confronting Husserl with a very naïve, but also very obvious, question. Is it not the psychological I–you, Edmund Husserl, or I, Martin Heidegger—who is performing the transcendental reduction? Is it not my consciousness that is being reduced or purified to the level of the transcendental? It certainly does seem to be the case that pure consciousness belongs to me, this concrete human being who happens at this time to be philosophically motivated. How could a transcendental reduction alter this fundamental fact? How else could transcendental subjectivity be positively characterized? If Husserl is not simply to circumvent such a question, how can he refuse to acknowledge the validity of such an obvious connection between transcendental constitution and the human, especially since he already allowed for an

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intentional constitutive view of consciousness within his phenomenological psychology? Otherwise stated, what possible difference can a further, transcendental reduction make? As we have already said, and as Stapleton concludes: “From the Heideggerian perspective, the transcendental reduction must be seen as superfluous” (1983, p. 112). We might note that while Heidegger may have been the first to raise such an objection directly to Husserl, he is by no means alone in this matter. As we noted in Chap. 3, the necessity of the transcendental has been a major source of debate in the phenomenological tradition; it is on this point in particular where the debate has most often centered. While intentionality and constitution are foundational concepts for all of phenomenology, there has been a considerable amount of disagreement as to whether or not these concepts must necessarily be considered transcendental in nature. Many commentators have supported Heidegger’s hesitation at this point in the development of Husserl’s position and have wondered whether the difference between transcendental subjectivity and psychological subjectivity is in fact a difference at all. Derrida, for example, has written that it is “a difference in fact distinguishing nothing, a difference separating no state, no experience, no determined signification.” The distance between the psychic and the transcendental, he writes, is a “precarious and fragile distance” (1973, pp.  11–13). Schmitt closes his consideration of Husserl’s argument for the transcendental with the statement: “I can see no way of escaping the conclusion that Husserl’s transcendental phenomenology is a big muddle” (1971, p. 27, cf. also van de Pitte, 1981). Even those most faithful of Husserl’s followers, such as Mohanty for example, have admitted that: “The wonderful, paradoxical parallelism between the mundane psychic life and transcendental consciousness remains one of the major embarrassments, as well as mysteries of phenomenology” (1985a, p. 153; cf. also, Carr, 1974; Cobb-Stevens, 1983a, b; Kohák, 1978; Natanson, 1962). This reference to Mohanty should not be taken, however, to imply that he sides with Heidegger in this debate, nor that the situation for Husserl should be considered hopeless. Rather, as Mohanty also remarked, we are only coming to recognize that “the line divid[ing] a transcendental foundation from a psychologistic foundation is so thin that its transgression may go unnoticed” (1985b, p. 2). As we might imagine, Husserl was especially aware of this problem after his collaboration with Heidegger on this article fell through. As we might also imagine, Husserl was not about to allow such a transgression to remain unnoticed. In fact, it is just this issue that he addresses in his Preface to the English edition of Ideas I when he attempts to clarify the confusions between phenomenological psychology and transcendental phenomenology “to which even thinkers who subscribe to the phenomenological line of thought are subject.” While we shall return to this Preface at a later point, we might just quote that part of the text that speaks directly to our concern here, in which Husserl acknowledges that it is apparently only a “nuance” that differentiates psychology from philosophy and which carries, as a result, such grave responsibility. He writes: Here in fact lie the chief difficulties in the way of an understanding, since it must be felt at first as a most unreasonable demand that such a “nuance” springing from a mere change of standpoint should possess such great, and indeed, for all genuine philosophy, such decisive significance (1931, p. 9).

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While it will become clear that this nuance is of fundamental philosophical importance to Husserl (de Boer, 1978, p. 450), it is already clear that many of those who came after him had great difficulty appreciating its decisive significance. Another of Husserl’s students, Eugen Fink, blames the “countless misunderstandings which Husserl’s philosophy had to suffer” largely on this very difficulty, agreeing with Husserl’s somewhat prophetic remark (1970, p. 117; cf. also Kockelmans, 1967a). While the difference between the transcendental and the psychological may appear at this time to be one solely of nuance, Husserl will go to some length to establish this difference and argue for its decisive significance. Before turning to his justification for the necessity of this nuance and his reactions to Heidegger’s remarks, we should note that Heidegger’s turn away from the transcendental reduction to a human or psychic incorporation of the transcendental was a move that generated much enthusiasm within the phenomenological tradition. As Husserl feared, many followed Heidegger down this alternative path which, as we have seen, was set up initially by Husserl himself (even if only by allowing for such a confusion). We are pursuing this issue at such length because it does represent what we feel to be the faithful implementation of the framework established, at least apparently, in the “Phenomenological Psychology” lectures. As long as Husserl maintains what we have surmised to be the position of those lectures, as described above, he has no basis upon which to object to a psychology that views consciousness as constituting in nature. With this admission, the transcendental has already been reached—whether for psychology or philosophy. Heidegger’s interpretation of the implications of the identification of the transcendental with the psychological seemed to many others as well to resolve the difficulties that Husserl had repeatedly encountered in his attempts to separate one from the other. Before returning to the task of separation, we might take a closer look at the solution offered by this alternative path. A position very similar to Heidegger’s is to be found in the works of Merleau-­ Ponty and the Existentialists, such as Sartre. As we noted earlier in this chapter, Merleau-Ponty seemed to agree that Husserl held that phenomenological psychology was to hold a pre-transcendental, pre-epistemological position and was to remain within the natural attitude. However, when Merleau-Ponty undertakes his own phenomenological psychological researches, for example in his book Phenomenology of Perception (1962), he encounters the same difficulty that we found Husserl to encounter in the “Phenomenological Psychology” lectures. That is, when he analyzes a concrete act of perceiving, he finds that he is confronted with the question of the relation between the object as perceived and the (physical) object in itself. As had Husserl, he then realized that: “A psychology is always brought face to face with the problem of the constitution of the world. Psychological reflection, once begun, then, outruns itself through its momentum” (1962, p. 60). Of course, we need only say that psychology outruns itself if we accept a definition of psychology that restricts it to the domain of the constituted; but as Merleau-Ponty recognized, it is the move “from constituted to constituting [which] would complete the thematizing begun by psychology” (1962, p. 60). For a psychology to be complete, it must turn to the act of constitution itself. In this way, he reasons: “It follows that the transcendental attitude is already implied in the descriptions of the psychologist, in so far as they are faithful ones” (1962, p. 59).

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Thus far, Merleau-Ponty could be considered in agreement with our own presentation of Husserl’s reasoning in the psychology lectures. The transcendental attitude is “implied in the descriptions of the psychologist.” At this point, Husserl would feel compelled to add, however, that for the psychologist, the implication of the transcendental must remain implicit. The psychologist must understand their subject matter naturally, as a worldly or mundane reality. Like Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty was very much aware of Husserl’s insistence on this point and his separation of the psychological and transcendental attitudes. Also, like Heidegger, he felt that once he made this admission, that the transcendental was implicitly in the psychological, there was really no basis upon which to preserve this distinction, regardless of its significance to Husserl. In a footnote to the text of the Phenomenology of Perception, he points out what he takes to be the “dilemma” that confronts Husserl at this point. In terminology different from that employed by Heidegger, he airs a basically similar reservation: It is clear, however, that we are faced with a dilemma: either the constitution makes the world transparent, in which case it is not obvious why reflection needs to pass through the world of experience, or else it retains something of that world, and never rids it of its opacity (1962, p. 365n).

Rephrased in terminology more familiar to us in this work, Merleau-Ponty is suggesting that if the transcendental cannot be taken to be psychological, then constitution should not be considered to be relevant for psychology; on the other hand, if constitution is psychological in nature, then there seems to be no need for a separate, transcendental, attitude. At a later point in the text he will conclude that: There is no psychology in a philosophy of constituting consciousness. Or at least, there can be nothing valid for such a psychology to say, for it can do nothing but apply the results of analytic reflection to each particular content, while nevertheless distorting them, since it deprives them of their transcendental significance (1962, p. 387).

Perhaps we can use this last passage from Merleau-Ponty to recharacterize the nature of our dilemma in a different light. We have seen Husserl argue for a parallelism between the transcendental and the psychological in which the contents from either attitude can simply be reinterpreted in the terms of the other attitude, altering their significance accordingly. The question that we have phrased ontologically repeatedly to this point can be rephrased, following Merleau-Ponty, in terms of this reinterpretation. Can the contents of psychological analysis be reinterpreted transcendentally without a fundamental distortion of their sense? Can the same be said of transcendental contents being reinterpreted psychologically? If there is no distortion of sense, as Husserl would seem to hold, then was there any reinterpretation at all? If the psychological can be taken up transcendentally without a significant alteration of sense, without distortion, and the same can be said of the transcendental being applied to the psychological, then are they not the same? Would this not mean that the transcendental was the psychological and that the psychological was the transcendental? If this is so, then how could we justify having two separate sciences? We would only need either a psychology of consciousness or a transcendental philosophy of consciousness; we could not have both.

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Merleau-Ponty, like Heidegger, chooses to forgo the transcendental reduction in order to situate the transcendental within the psychological. He develops, as Devettere describes it, an “existential interpretation of Husserl’s transcendental” dimension (1973, p. 307). It is commonly considered that it was this turn away from the transcendental as unworldly to the constitution of meaning as a human, psychological function that fueled the Existentialist fires in the generation of philosophers and social scientists that succeeded Husserl. Merleau-Ponty perhaps put it best in his Introduction to the Phenomenology of Perception when he wrote that: “the most important lesson which the reduction teaches us is the impossibility of a complete reduction” (1962, p. xiv). We take this to mean that the actual performance of the reduction proves to us that a non-worldly, non-human, transcendental cannot be found apart from the transcendental already implicit in the psychological. While we do have access to the intentionality of consciousness, it is only an access to consciousness in its concrete, worldly, natural embodiment as a function of the human person. A transcendental reduction that would somehow suspend this human and worldly context is impossible. “Man is in the world,” Merleau-Ponty insists, “and only in the world does he know himself” (1962, p. xi). Another of the Existentialists who joined in this turn away from the transcendental toward the human as in the world was Jean-Paul Sartre. Sartre confronted the transcendental problematic directly in his early The Transcendence of the Ego (1957). This work, perhaps more than any other, shows clearly how the existentialist transformation of Husserl’s phenomenology revolves around the status of the transcendental ego and whether this ego is to be identified with, or opposed to, the psychological ego. After laying out Husserl’s position on the necessity of a ­transcendental ego that differs significantly from the psychological ego, Sartre writes: “But we raise the following question: is not this psychic and psycho-physical me enough? Need one double it with a transcendental I, a structure of absolute consciousness” (1957, p. 36)? His answer, a few pages later, is that the transcendental ego “has no raison d’être”; it is “the death of consciousness” (1957, p. 40). Like Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty, Sartre saw the ascent to the transcendental as an abandonment of the human, and consequently turned away from Husserl’s insistence on a further reduction for philosophy to develop a concrete phenomenology of the human as situated within the world. He conceived of consciousness as constituting, what he called the “for-itself” (1956), as being both in(-)the(-)world, but not of the world. Consciousness does constitute meaning, but it does so within the horizon of the world in which it is situated. The human remains worldly but is in the world in a way different from that of all other worldly realities. As Heidegger was to explore in much detail, and in more poetic terms, in his Being and Time (1962), human being is that being who constitutes a world as that wherein it belongs, as that in which it finds itself situated. This brief survey of Existential interpretations of the status of consciousness brings us to a further interesting question that arose earlier in our treatment of Husserl’s psychology lectures: the question of how consciousness as constituting can also be constituted. While Husserl had initially set up constituting and constituted being as opposites of each other, as mutually exclusive, all of these thinkers,

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including Husserl, would agree that human being, as a worldly reality, is constituted in nature. All of these same thinkers, also including the Husserl of the psychology lectures, would want to hold that human being, consciousness as psychic, is at the same time intentional and, thus, constituting in nature. As we had asked at the close of our last section: how can that which is constituted also be constituting? It is not simply that we have switched to a view of the human as constituting as opposed to constituted, for it is obvious that the human is experienced as being part of the world, not as being prior to or independent of it. It was for just this reason that Heidegger et al. rejected the transcendental turn. The human is not given transcendentally as absolute. Heidegger phrases the question this way: How is it at all possible that this sphere of absolute position, pure consciousness, which is supposed to be separated from every transcendence by an absolute gulf, is at the same time united with reality in the unity of a real human being, who himself occurs as a real object in the world? How is it possible that lived experiences constitute an absolute and pure region of Being and at the same time occur in the transcendence of the world (1985, p. 101)?

While Husserl defined constituting and constituted being as opposites of each other and mutually exclusive, they seem to come together in the case of the human. How, as he might have asked, does this tally? While we are primarily interested in Husserl’s solution to this “paradox of subjectivity,” as he would come to call it (1970a), it will provide us with an illuminating contrast to his eventual position if we pause and consider how the Existentialists handled this dilemma, before returning finally to Husserl’s texts. While they each used their own terminology, all of these thinkers basically seemed to agree that the human, understood as “Dasein” by Heidegger (1962), “human reality” by Sartre (1956), and the “lived-body” by Merleau-Ponty (1962), was what we shall call a “constituted-constituting.” In describing the nature of this being, they associated the constituted aspect with the “factical” (Heidegger, 1962) or the situated (Merleau-­ Ponty, 1962; Sartre, 1956) and associated constitution with possibility (“existenz”; Heidegger, 1962) or freedom (Merleau-Ponty, 1962; Sartre, 1956). Merleau-Ponty has summarized this position in the most straightforward manner: To be born is both to be born of the world and to be born into the world. The world is already constituted, but also never completely constituted; in the first case we are acted upon, in the second we are open to an infinite number of possibilities. But this analysis is abstract, for we exist in both ways at once. There is, therefore, never determinism and never absolute choice, I am never a thing and never bare consciousness … In this exchange between the situation and the person who takes it up, it is impossible to determine precisely the ‘share contributed by the situation’ and the ‘share contributed by freedom’ (1962, p. 453).

While Merleau-Ponty may be striving in this passage to achieve a balance between the constituted and the constituting, and while he may acknowledge that it is impossible to determine precisely how much of any particular event is attributable to each of these two aspects, between the lines it is evident that possibility and freedom are to be valued more highly than facticity and situatedness. It has been the tendency on the part of these thinkers, and others in the existential phenomenological tradition who follow them (such as e.g., Binswanger, 1941, 1963; Boss, 1963; Buytendijk, 1967; Marcel, 1956, 1973; Ricoeur, 1966, 1981; Strasser, 1967; Straus,

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1966; van den Berg, 1955, 1972, etc.—cf. for brief reviews of the tradition Dallmayr, 1973; Misiak and Sexton, 1973; Landsman, 1958; Spiegelberg, 1972; Strasser, 1967), to consider constitution to be, in some sense, the “more human” of the two aspects. As we saw in Heidegger’s comments to Husserl, the act of constitution is considered to be that which is the most human about humans, as the “peculiar ‘wondrous’ possibility of existence” that makes us what we are. The mission of a human science, or of philosophy (since here they tend to blend into one another), in this case is to liberate the human as much as possible from its situatedness, so that it may be free to participate in or enjoy this “wondrous” possibility. It seeks to move the human from a more constituted, and thus, determined position to a more fully constituting, and thus free position. This movement has been itself situated within various contexts, depending upon the persuasion of the particular thinkers in question, some of these contexts being neo-Marxist (de Boer, 1983; Sartre, 1968, 1976), ethical and/or religious (Levin, 1985; Marcel, 1973), and psychological, with the movement here being understood as one from sickness to health (Binswanger, 1941, 1963; Boss, 1963; Buytendijk, 1967; van den Berg, 1955, 1972). How would a psychology or philosophy which holds such a view of the nature of the human, and the nature of its task, proceed? Once again, while the terminology may differ, what has been largely a source of agreement among these thinkers is that a method is required that can treat both sides of this duality in their relation to each other. Heidegger first introduced such a method in Being and Time as that of a hermeneutic phenomenology that operated through a dialectical movement back forth between the factical and the free (1962, p. 62). Sartre proposed a similar dialectical method in his early, psychological, work The Emotions: Outline of a Theory (1948), and then secured a central role for this method explicitly in his Search for a Method, labeling it the “progressive-regressive method” (1968, pp.  85ff.). Merleau-Ponty likewise argued that phenomenological analyses involved an “inevitable dialectic” such that “phenomenology, in Husserl’s sense, rejoins phenomenology in the Hegelian sense” (1964, pp. 72, 92). We are witness here to what Dallmayr described as a “transition from a transcendental to a dialectical phenomenology” (1973, p.  160; cf. also Edie, 1964). Such a view operates by replacing the dichotomy between the transcendental as world constituting and the transcendent as constituted, between transcendental subjectivity and the world, with a dialectic between facticity and freedom within the confines of the human. Integrating the transcendental into the human, and thus, into a worldly context, as we have, we may limit our scope to one attitude and one science: that of concrete human existence in the world. Could such a method and such a science be what Husserl had actually been working toward in his “Phenomenological Psychology” lectures? The dialectical nature of this method does seem to be appropriate to the type of hybrid science with which we ended up in our discussion of those lectures; a science in some sense both natural and transcendental, and yet in another sense, neither natural nor transcendental. Is this the method appropriate to the intermediate position apparently occupied by a phenomenological psychology, a middle ground between a rejected naturalism and a philosophically distant, perhaps empty, transcendentalism? Did Husserl join the ranks of those who followed Heidegger down this path?

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“Phenomenology and Anthropology” Given that Husserl did reject Heidegger’s suggested revisions for the “Phenomenology” article, and that this failed collaboration did give way to their eventual parting of the ways, we might imagine that the answer to this question is a simple and straightforward, “No.” We would, in a sense, be right. Husserl will not agree with Heidegger’s reformulation of the relation between the transcendental and the psychic. On the other hand, we should not overlook the fact that, if we take Husserl at his word, Heidegger’s questions did at least make him take a second look at his stated position; that, as he writes, he did take Heidegger’s reservations into account. In a letter to Roman Ingarden, sent at the end of 1927, Husserl wrote the following: The new article for the Encyclopaedia Britannica has cost me a great deal of effort, chiefly because I again thought through from the ground up my basic direction and took into account the fact that Heidegger, as I now must believe, has not understood this direction and thus the entire sense of the method of the phenomenological reduction … I allow myself to become depressed by the kind of impact that my publications have and by the fact that my better students overlook the depth dimension that I point to and, instead of finishing what I have started, time and again prefer to go their own way. So also Heidegger, this natural power of a genius, who carries all the youth away with him … (cited in Caputo, 1977, p. 86).

Clearly, Husserl decided that Heidegger’s suggestions resulted from a basic misunderstanding of his work, and that they would constitute a departure from the direction that he wished to pursue. He will not, then, follow Heidegger down this path. Yet Husserl also saw that he must contend with this kind of misunderstanding, and not only from Heidegger. He must readdress himself to the “entire sense” of phenomenology that has been missed by this redirection, the “depth dimension” that has been persistently overlooked. Thus, we can expect that Husserl’s final article for the Encyclopaedia Britannica will be informed by the possible objections that we have been raising; it will, that is, not be a simple rejection of the Heideggerian alternative, but will be a thoughtful reformulation of Husserl’s own position that speaks to these issues directly. It is also the case that, a few years after the publication of the “Phenomenology” article in 1931, Husserl gave an address in which he chose this difference as his main topic. At that time, he opposed what he called the “philosophical anthropology” of Heidegger and other contemporary German philosophers with his own transcendental phenomenology (cf. Scanlon, 1972). As we return to the text of the “Phenomenology” article, we will also call upon the text from this address, entitled “Phenomenology and Anthropology” (1981b), when appropriate in the context of the following discussion. Since we have strayed from our path somewhat in order to explore the existential phenomenological alternative in some detail, we should restate the nature of the issue confronting Husserl at this point. Scanlon, in his own treatment of the Husserl-­ Heidegger debate, summarizes the problem nicely; he writes:

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Heidegger wants Husserl to recognize that transcendental constitution of the world is an essential possibility of concrete human existence. Husserl, on the contrary, insists that human existence, including human consciousness, belongs to the world in such a way that it cannot without paradox be regarded as that consciousness which constitutes the world (1972, p. 98).

Throughout the considerable literature that has been generated by this difference of opinion, the vast majority of commentators, whether they side with Husserl (e.g., Cobb-Stevens, 1983a, b; Mohanty, 1978; Scanlon, 1972; Seebohm, 1983;) or with Heidegger (e.g., Caputo, 1977, 1984; Seeburger, 1975; Stapleton, 1983), agree that the crux of the issue is whether or not transcendental subjectivity may be distinguished from psychological subjectivity in any meaningful way. We know that Husserl considers “a transcendental philosophy founded through a psychology of inner experience” to be guilty of psychologism, as he reminds us once again in the “Phenomenology” article (1981a, p.  27). Heidegger has now challenged him to explain why a phenomenological psychology, in particular, would be inappropriate for such a task. If psychology is only possible as psychologism, as we seem to have concluded earlier in this chapter, then why should this not be true of philosophy as well? If transcendental constitution were a psychological function, then would this not mean that psychology was already philosophy, regardless of Husserl’s preoccupation with psychologism? While this may appear at first to be a purely philosophical question, the answer to which is a matter of indifference to the psychologist, we may have been able to surmise from our brief exploration of the existential phenomenological alternative that the answer we are seeking is, quite the contrary, of direct and profound relevance for psychology. The question of whether or not the philosopher must move on from the phenomenological psychological reduction to the transcendental will determine for us, as psychologists, the nature of our subject matter. Are we to view transcendental constitution as a properly psychic, properly human, act? Or, is the psychic to be understood simply as a constituted, and thus, worldly, domain? Or is there a third alternative that we have yet to discover, which fits neatly into neither of these two camps? Husserl makes his own intent clear in the “Phenomenology” article before even broaching the transcendental problematic proper. In the face of the Heideggerian temptation, he reaffirms the unifying thread of his struggles and insists once more, that: “The fate of scientific philosophy hangs on the radical overcoming of every trace of psychologism.” He will not be able to follow along with the identification of the transcendental and the psychological egos, but will, instead, have to separate out the “double sense” had by “all concepts of the subjective.” This “double sense,” Husserl realizes, is not only the source of psychologism, but is also its “transcendentally significant kernel of truth.” Heidegger et  al. are not wrong in stating that transcendental constitution appears to belong to the human subject. They are wrong in not reflecting on this matter further and realizing that such a position involves an “unnoticed” lapse into psychologism. It will be Husserl’s task in this article to rectify this lapse, while at the same time acknowledging the “kernel of truth” it embodied. To this end, he will have to delve into the transcendental

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problematic more deeply, rather than allowing it to be “shunted off to a sidetrack”—Husserl’s characterization, we assume, of the Heideggerian alternative (1981a, p. 27). What, then, is the nature of the “transcendental problem” (1981a, p.  27) as Husserl understands it? What is untenable in Heidegger’s solution? We return again to where we left off in our discussion of the psychology lectures. We return again to the question of the necessity of the transcendental reduction as a further purification. The problem that Heidegger has shunted off to a side-track is the problem entailed in viewing intentionality as a psychological function. Let us return to the framework of a phenomenological approach to the psychic, as Husserl does in the “Phenomenology” article, to see what gives rise to this problematic. We perform the phenomenological psychological reduction and secure the personal attitude. What have we achieved? Through the performance of the reduction explains Husserl, “the world, or rather individual things in the world as absolute, are replaced by the respective meaning of each in consciousness” (1981a, p. 24). We have turned from individual things in the world, things that we take to exist absolutely, to the sphere of consciousness in which those things appear to us. We have turned from the objective thing to its appearance in our sense. In order to avoid the epistemological problems entailed in a representational view of the relation between consciousness and object, we view this relation as intentional in nature, and thus, view consciousness as constitutive of this appearance or sense. We remember we had to overcome the Cartesian split between subject and object in this way in order to resolve the epistemological impasse that results from questions regarding the correspondence between the object as absolute and its appearance. We put aside any questions of correspondence by bracketing the object in itself, “replacing” it, in Husserl’s words, by the object as meant sense, as for consciousness. In this way, the meaning of the object as its appearance in consciousness is viewed as an intentional correlate. Once the move has been made to subjectivity, all independence on the side of the object is lost; there is no appearance without a consciousness in which it appears. “When we start with the sense of the world given with our mundane existing,” writes Husserl, “we are thus again referred back to ourselves and our conscious life-process as that wherein for us this sense is first formed” (1981a, p. 28). In effect, the phenomenological psychological reduction places the responsibility for the appearance of things in consciousness on the consciousness in which they appear. It is here that they are constituted. When we undertook this shift in our psychology earlier in this chapter, we only applied it directly to a concrete act of perception. This same shift must hold, clearly, not only for each individual act of perception and the individual objects that are perceived; it must hold for any and all intentional acts and their correlates. If the entire epistemological problematic is not to arise again in every concrete, particular, case, we must assume that consciousness constitutes all the objects of its experience and the world in which they are experienced. It is, as Husserl wrote above, the “world given with our mundane existing” that must be subjected to the reduction and the world inclusive of all possible objects of experience that must be considered constituted by consciousness. In each and every case, my experience need not be measured against a worldly reality in itself, for this reality only exists in its relation

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to consciousness. “It is precisely as meant by us, and from nowhere else than in us,” Husserl writes, that the world “has gained and can gain its sense and validity” (1981a, p. 28). Everything that can be experienced, including the world of our experience itself, must be bracketed and considered in its relation to consciousness. As was the case with that individual object, consciousness is to be held responsible. Within the parameters of psychology, we might imagine that this would only hold for the world as it enters into my experience; it would only hold, we might think, for “my” world, in some limiting, personal sense of that word. We might think that we are talking about the constitution of personal worlds as the appropriate correlate of the personal attitude. It is clear that my experience, as the experience of a psychological subject, will be limited to a very small portion of the world as a totality. The world as a whole can never be contained in, nor exhausted by, my own particular experiences of it. Therefore, we might imagine that by “my world,” we mean to refer to how “the” world as a whole has been, in Merleau-Ponty’s words, “taken up” by me, this particular psychic subject. Yet if we are to consider the world of my experience as simply the world as it is “taken up” by me, are we not back to where we started in terms of our epistemological dilemma? Have we not lapsed back into a representational schema where the next question that logically follows is: how does “my” world in this personal sense correspond to “the” world as that which I have “taken up”? How does the personal world compare to the world as a whole? We appealed to constitution in order to resolve this dilemma initially; it seems that if constitution is merely the constitution of a personal world, then we have only succeeded in forestalling this question temporarily. In order to overcome the dilemma, rather than merely forestall it, it is apparent that constitution must be extended to “the” world as a whole. It must be “the” world that is the intentional correlate of experience, not just “my” world—otherwise the relation between the two would be rendered enigmatic. Another way for us to come to this same insight would be to realize that once we make the turn to the subjective and place the responsibility for constitution squarely on the shoulders of consciousness, we have committed ourselves to extending this intentional relation to all possible worlds, just as we had necessarily extended it to all possible objects. For any possible world to enter the circumspection of our science, it must do so in the form of intentional correlate. Were it not to do so, then it would escape altogether the scope of our psychology; it would be neither experience itself nor that which was experienced. For any sense of world to enter into the purview of our psychology it must enter through the personal world that is constituted as the correlate of my experience. It must be experienced by me in some fashion and would become thereby a correlate of my experience. We must recognize, insists Husserl, “that the relativity of consciousness referred to just now applies not just to the brute fact of our world, but in eidetic necessity to every conceivable world whatever” (1981a, p. 28). For “the” world to have any place within our psychology then, it would have to assume the status of intentional correlate. Within this science there is only subjectivity as constituting and the objective world that it constitutes. We can only refer to psychic subjectivity as “taking up” the world if we realize that it is also responsible for that which is being “taken up.”

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Had we expected a psychology to take on, as its subject matter, such universality as the constitution of every conceivable world whatever, including “the” world as a whole? It is one thing to view psychology as appropriate to the constitution of a personal world as that which appears within the confines of my own, personal experience. Is psychological subjectivity an adequate conduit for the constitution of every conceivable world whatever? Husserl feels that this line of reasoning raises serious questions with respect to our understanding of the nature of the psychic as intentional. He writes: Once the world in this full universality has been related to the subjectivity of consciousness, in whose living consciousness it makes its appearance precisely as “the” world in its varying sense, then its whole mode of Being acquires a dimension of unintelligibility, or rather of questionableness. This “making an appearance,” this being-for-us of the world as only subjectively having come to acceptance and only subjectively brought and to be brought to well-grounded evident presentation, requires clarification. Because of its empty generality, one’s first awakening to the relatedness of the world to consciousness gives no understanding of how the varied life of consciousness, barely discerned and sinking back into obscurity, accomplishes such functions; how it, so to say, manages in its immanence that something which manifests itself can present itself as something existing in itself, and not only as something meant but as something authenticated in concordant experience (1981a, p. 28).

How is it, Husserl asks, that the life of consciousness, which we have barely managed to discern, is to be held responsible for the constitution of the world as something that exists independently of it? We remember Heidegger’s phrasing of a similar question earlier. This question is rendered doubly problematic when we realize that we are not referring simply to the constitution of meaning that remains specific to me, but to meaning that is “authenticated in concordant experience”— that is, meaning that is confirmed by further experience, both my own and others, and when we realize that we are referring to the constitution of the world in which we are presumed, as psychological subjects, to belong. As Husserl remarks, “as human creatures … we ourselves are supposed to belong to the world” (1981a, p. 28). How can consciousness constitute that wherein it is presumed to belong, the ground on which it is said to be standing? We are back, then, to the paradox of subjectivity, to the fact that the human seems to be in the world at the same time that it is constituting that same world in its meaning. It is at this point, we could say, that Husserl must have felt that Heidegger had simply shunted off the transcendental problematic to a side-track. Existential phenomenology gets around this problem by simply insisting that this is, in fact, the case and that life is, in this way, mysterious. Such is the nature of the human, they might say. For Husserl, if we stop at this point, we end our researches exactly where they should begin in earnest. We may not rest content by simply putting this question off, by forestalling a resolution, which, as we know from our past analysis, is already being implicitly assumed. While Heidegger et al. remain content with psychological analyses of constitution and never penetrate this paradox further, Husserl will proceed on to what he considered the “depth dimension” of his work. It is here that psychology confronts the transcendental problematic directly.

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Husserl will allow that it might seem at first as if phenomenological psychology could “comprehend in itself from the outset in foundational (precisely, eidetic) universality the whole of correlation research on being and consciousness” and would thus “seem to be the [proper] locus for all transcendental elucidation” (1981a, pp.  28–29). It would seem that a psychology of pure subjectivity would be the appropriate discipline to resolve this dilemma of the constitution of the world since we said that it is in and through subjectivity that this world comes to be experienced. However, we must remember that as a psychology, this science remains a worldly discipline, itself only possible upon the ground of “the” world. Husserl thus objects to this apparent solution: On the other hand, we must not overlook the fact that psychology in all its empirical and eidetic disciplines remains a “positive science,” a science operating within the natural attitude, in which the simply present world is thematic ground. What it wishes to explore are the psyches and communities of psyches that are to be found in the world. Phenomenological reduction serves as psychological only to the end that it gets at the psychical aspect of animal realities in its pure own essential specificity and its pure own specific essential interconnections. Even in eidetic research [then], the psyche retains the sense of Being which belongs in the realm of what is present in the world; it is merely related to possible real worlds. Even as eidetic phenomenologist, the psychologist is transcendentally naïve: he takes the possible “minds” (“I”-subjects) completely according to the relative sense of the world as those of men and animals considered purely and simply as present in a possible spatial world (1981a, p. 29).

As a positive science, psychology presumes “the” world as the context in which its subjects exist. To this extent, it must remain transcendentally naïve, not calling into question the real world, which serves, in this way, as its ground. Whether we view the psychic as existing as part of Nature or as part of the world of mind, in either case, we are viewing consciousness, as psychic, to be part of “the” world. The psychic is still conceived of as being present in the world; it is this which we meant when we said that phenomenological psychology continues to view consciousness naturally. If we are wondering how “the” world could be constituted in consciousness, then Husserl is arguing, the psychic, as one region of “the” world must be considered part of the problem. It, too, is constituted; it, too, must account for its own presence. As long as we could presume the existence of “the” world as that in which our psychological subjects were situated, then our natural worldly interest could hold sway and we had no reason to consider the psychic as questionable. However, as soon as “we allow the transcendental interest to be decisive,” as soon, that is, as we ask how that world came to be constituted as such, “then psychology as a whole receives the stamp of what is transcendentally problematic” (1981a, p.  29). It was precisely this question that we did not allow to become “decisive” at the close of the psychology lectures. At that point, we were naively assuming that psychological constitution took place within the worldly context of the world of mind. We now realize that constitution subsumes all possible worlds, including “the” world in which our psychological subjects were presumed to exist. A science that deals with these subjects takes this world as its ground. It therefore cannot be the science through which we will be able to

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account for this world to begin with. It is for this reason that the transcendental question, the question of how “the” world is constituted, cannot be answered through psychology. Husserl’s line of reasoning at this point is similar to that employed in Chap. 1, when we had seen him point out repeatedly that psychologism presumes that which it is trying to justify and utilizes this presumption in its justification. Similarly, to answer the transcendental question through an appeal to psychology would involve circular reasoning of this sort. We cannot appeal to that which is itself questionable (the psychic) in order to resolve its own questionableness. This form of psychologism presumes the unquestionable character of the psychic in order to utilize the psychic to ground in an unquestionable manner the constitution of “the” world. Yet, the psychic is one part of this world, and thereby one reality that must itself be grounded. Explains Husserl: Like every meaningful question, this transcendental question presupposes a ground of unquestioned being, in which all means of solution must be contained. This ground is here the subjectivity of that kind of conscious life in which a possible world, of whatever kind, is constituted as present. However, a self-evident basic requirement of any rational method is that this ground presupposed as beyond question is not confused with what the ­transcendental question, in its universality, puts into question. Hence the realm of this questionability includes the whole realm of the transcendentally naïve and therefore every possible world simply claimed in the natural attitude. Accordingly, all possible sciences, including all their various areas of objects, are transcendentally to be subjected to an epoche. So also psychology and the entirety of what is considered the psychical in its sense. It would therefore be circular, a transcendental circle, to base the answer to the transcendental question on psychology, be it empirical or eidetic-phenomenological. We face at this point the paradoxical ambiguity: the subjectivity and consciousness to which the transcendental question recurs can thus really not be the subjectivity and consciousness with which psychology deals (1981a, p. 29).

If we propose to ground the existence of the world in the constituting function of consciousness, then we cannot take one member of this world to be the locus for constitution. If we are trying to ground our access to the psychic as one region of the world, we cannot ground this access in the psychic itself, since at this point, we have no access to it. We cannot explain the constitution of “the” world through an appeal to a worldly being. We must look elsewhere. Before taking up the question of this elsewhere, let us look a bit more closely at the circularity that Husserl has exposed as entailed in this particular form of psychologism, what he will call “transcendental psychologism” (1931). It may be expressed in this way: is the world in its meaning for me “the” same world in which I exist as a meaning-bestowing creature? Could I, in Alice in Wonderland like fashion, have constituted the world in which I find myself constituting a world, etc.? Such a position is not only circular, but it demonstrates as well how psychology cannot provide its own epistemology, regardless of our earlier impression. In thinking earlier that psychology could overcome the Cartesian impasse, we forgot we were necessarily dealing with a worldly, and thus, relative and limited domain. We forgot, that is, that we were dealing with a psychological process, which changes the status of constitution and its correlate. The experiences of psychological subjects do

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not constitute “the” world; they take place within it. This is not to be taken in a naturalistic sense, of course, but even experiences that are understood personalistically, on the basis of motivational relations, take place within the world of mind, which is itself a constituted world, a correlate of consciousness. Thus, it is obvious that one worldly region, the psychic, cannot be held responsible for the constitution of “the” world in its universality. That which is merely relative cannot be taken to be absolute. In order to discover just how this view remains epistemologically problematic we need only consult an example of deviance, as we had occasion to do in Chap. 1 as well. We resolved the epistemological impasse in our psychology by viewing the psychic as constitutive in nature, thus equating the personal world of my experience to “the” world. Can we, in fact, make such an equation? Is the world that is constituted in my experience, my personal world, “the” world itself? What of the hallucinatory experience? What of the experience of the so-called “insane”? Do these experiences not constitute a world as well as all others? How do these experiences stand in relation to “the” world that we all share? Are we to say that only “normal” or “accurate” experiences are constitutive in nature? Then on what grounds do we determine them to be normal or accurate, if we have no world in itself with which to compare them? How can we judge a perception to be inaccurate or mistaken, as we asked earlier, if we have no other access to the object of this perception than through the perception itself? These examples make palpably clear how psychology cannot provide its own epistemology. In order for it even to appear to do so, it must be operating on the basis of implicit assumptions about the nature of “the” world as that which is “taken up” in individuals’ experiences. But it is precisely that question that we have yet to answer explicitly. We cannot take the personal worlds studied by our phenomenological psychology to be “the” world itself; they are only limited perspectives on this world, relative to each individual. In this way, phenomenological psychology does not, merely through an appeal to the intentional nature of consciousness, furnish its own epistemological ground. In fact, we commit transcendental psychologism if we take one such personal world to be “the” world itself and when we take, thereby, the science of personal worlds to be epistemology. We see clear examples of this, if we return to the alternative offered by existential phenomenology. While it would take us too far afield to develop this point at any length, we might merely suggest that in existential phenomenology, implicit and unacknowledged assumptions are always being made about the nature of “the” world that is being “taken up” by different individuals in personal and relative ways. It is then against this presumed portrait of objective reality that particular experiences are assessed and judged to be embodying whatever admixture of health and sickness, authenticity and inauthenticity, or freedom and facticity, etc. In this view, as we mentioned earlier, the more one is constituting and the less one is constituted, the more human one is considered. In the present context that is to be interpreted as the more human one is, the more one’s experience will correspond to the nature of the objective reality that is “the” world. It is evident that in such a view, the epistemological impasse is not truly overcome, but is merely resolved by an implicit fiat by a given party that: “thus is the nature of the real.”

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Psychology is thus incapable of resolving the epistemological impasse posed by the question of the relation between my personal world and “the” world itself, for psychology only has access to personal worlds. As a positive science, psychology always presupposes its access to “the” world, but in so far as this is the case, it cannot at the same time provide access to this presupposed reality. A psychological view of intentionality is not adequate, then, to account for the constitution of “the” world in and through consciousness. This same point can also be approached from other angles, with the same result. In addition to Husserl’s argument that transcendental psychologism entails a transcendental circle, and is therefore unacceptable, we can provide other reasons why such a position is untenable. The first comes from an adherence to the tenets of phenomenology, which propose that one should begin with the givens of experience and interrogate them as to their sense and genesis. Should we consult our own experience within a psychological framework, it becomes obvious that I do not experience myself as constituting “the” world in the sense articulated above. I do not perceive “the” world to be the correlate of my experience, but to be the ground upon which experience of a world is possible. One meaning that the psychic seems to entail in our everyday experience is that of passivity, or at lest receptivity, in the face of the world. As Fink argued: “Developed as a positive science, psychology moves from the start within the self-explication of human experience as being only receptive and impotent” (1970, pp. 118–119). By this, we mean that we experience ourselves, as Heidegger himself admitted, as taking in the world, as perceiving what is already out there, existing independently of ourselves. This is, of course, how Husserl described the natural attitude, but in as much as the psychic remains a natural (though non-naturalistic) reality and psychology remains a positive science, this must remain true of the psychic as well. “The psychological experience of man in the world is receptive” (de Boer, 1978, p. 168). We experience the world as always already there; we experience perception as a passive and receptive process. The world is “taken up” by us, but it is already there to be taken up; we, as psychological subjects, are not responsible for it. The other side of this same issue is that we do not experience ourselves as constituting, at least in a transcendental sense, i.e., constituting “the” world in which we all live. As mentioned above, we do not see ourselves as responsible for this world. Similarly, we do not experience ourselves, as Scanlon pointed out, as “pure spirit nor pure transcendental consciousness” (1972, p. 108). If we took transcendental constitution to be a psychological function, then we would run the risk, in Scanlon’s words, of perpetrating a “spiritualistic or transcendentalist reductionism in anthropology” (1972, p. 108). Especially as phenomenologists, we should not ignore the way in which the psychic is given to experience. It is not given as creative, free, and constituting, but is given as receptive, situated, and constituted. It is not given as absolute and universal but is given as relative and limited. A second, related reason why transcendental psychologism is untenable is that the psychic is itself a meaning that must necessarily have been constituted by consciousness. For this reason, consciousness cannot itself be considered psychic in nature; such a position would entail consciousness pulling itself up, so to speak, by its own metaphysical bootstraps. As Mohanty has explained:

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If all meanings are constituted, so also are the meanings (or predicates) ‘human’ and ‘existing’. ‘I am human’ certainly represents my interpretation of myself in terms of meanings that are results of historically sedimented layers of meanings. As we, one after another, recognize such predicates as interpretations, we also begin to see the plausibility of the thesis that these are not self-interpretations of a human, but ‘being human’ is itself a constituted meaning and so a self-interpretation of whatever provided the field of horizon for such history. This precisely is transcendental subjectivity (1978, p. 334).

As the existential phenomenologists themselves have demonstrated by way of their example, the meaning of the “human” or the “psychic” changes over the course of history and, we could add, between cultures. It is a historically culturally constituted meaning. Even if we are to say that what it means to be human is to have to define for oneself what it means to be human, as Sartre seemed to do early in his own thinking, we cannot escape the fact that this meaning is itself constituted, and thus, must have its source elsewhere, in an act of constitution that is not of its own making. The constitution of meaning of the human cannot itself be a human act. It must be an act that originates from other than the human; in the field, as Mohanty writes, which provides the horizon for the historical and cultural changes that the meaning of the human undergoes. This field is that of transcendental subjectivity. For all of these reasons, hopefully by now persuasive, Husserl suggests that we must propose another attitude and another view of consciousness to parallel that of the personal and psychological. We must undertake the “additional purification” of the transcendental reduction in order to gain access to this attitude and its object, which is that of transcendental subjectivity. We must put, as we first did in 1907, the entire world into brackets, including now my own human existence. Husserl continues the argument of the “Phenomenology” article: If the transcendental relativity of every possible world demands an all-embracing bracketing, it also postulates the bracketing of pure psyches and the pure phenomenological psychology related to them. Through this bracketing they are transformed into transcendental phenomena. Thus, while the psychologist, operating within what for him is the naturally accepted world, reduces to pure psychic subjectivity the subjectivity occurring there (but still within the world), the transcendental phenomenologist, through his absolutely all-­embracing epoche, reduces this psychologically pure element to transcendental pure subjectivity, to that which performs and posits within itself the apperception of the world and therein the objectivating apperception of a “psyche [belonging to] animal realities” … For the transcendental philosopher … even this “mundanization” of consciousness which is omnipresent in the natural attitude is inhibited once and for all (1981a, p. 30).

For the philosopher, it is necessary to bracket the natural apperception of consciousness that constitutes the psychological plane of reflection; it is necessary to leave the psychic behind as a worldly relative domain. For the reasons delineated above, Husserl insists on a further reduction. Having read Heidegger’s objections and comments, as we know, Husserl must be sensitive to the difficulties that the reader may have in following this final step. He refers to these reservations under the rubric of “the semblance of transcendental duplication” (1981a, p. 29) and admits that “manifestly this parallelism” between the transcendental and the psychological “spells nothing less than theoretical

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equivalence” (1981a, p. 31). It would seem, Husserl allows, that we have merely duplicated the psychological and proposed to establish some kind of difference between these apparently identical, equivalent entities. He writes: Are we then supposed to be dual beings—psychological, as human objectivities in the world, the subjects of psychic life, and at the same time transcendental, as the subjects of a transcendental, world-constituting life-process (1981a, p. 29)?

If we are not to identify the transcendental ego with the psychological, then would this not make of us a double being or double consciousness? Would we not be both psychological and transcendental? The psychic subjectivity that is in the world cannot be the same subjectivity that constitutes that world, so we have said. Does this mean that while at the same time that we are psychic subjects in the world, we are also transcendental subjects constituting that world? It is not apparent how such a dubious duplication of egos resolves our problems, rather than merely compounds them. While acknowledging the legitimate difficulties involved in clarifying such a parallelism, Husserl will not be dissuaded. He responds to these observations accordingly: As men, mentally as well as bodily present in the world, we are for ourselves; we are appearances standing within an extremely variegated intentional life-process, “our” life, in which this being on hand constitutes itself “for us” apperceptively, with its entire sense-­ content. The (apperceived) I and we on hand presuppose an (apperceiving) I and we, for which they are on hand, which, however, is not itself present in the same sense. To this transcendental subjectivity, we have direct access through a transcendental experience. Just as the psychic experience requires a reductive method for purity, so does the transcendental (1981a, p. 30).

The fact that I am a human being is something of which I become aware in my experience; that is the meaning that my being has for me. The fact that I can apperceive myself as human means that there must also be an I who is doing this apperceiving, an I for whom my humanity is apparent. My perception of myself involves an I who is perceived and I who is perceiving. If we insist that the I who is doing the perceiving is itself a worldly human I, then we are involved in an infinite regress— for that I, too, must be the object for another apperception which presupposes another I as the apperceiving I (recall the metaphysical bootstraps comment above). To avoid such a regress, Husserl stipulates that the apperceiving I is an I free, through the purification of the transcendental reduction, of all worldliness. It is an I who is never on hand, never constituted, but is always the constituting I for whom the worldly I, along with “the” world itself, is on hand. Do we still have, however, two different egos, both of which belong to me? We recall the Heideggerian objection: is it not I who performs the transcendental reduction? Does not this transcendental ego still belong to me, this concrete, psychological subject? Have we not merely duplicated the psychological ego and then ignored the fact that this second, transcendental ego is still a worldly subject? Husserl “takes into account” such an objection; he responds: My transcendental ego is thus evidently “different” from the natural ego, but by no means as a second, as one separated from it in the natural sense of the word, just as on the contrary it is by no means bound up with it or intertwined with it, in the usual sense of the words. It is just the field of transcendental self-experience (conceived in full concreteness) which in

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every case can, through mere alteration of attitude, be changed into psychological self-­experience. In this transition, an identity of the I is necessarily brought about; in transcendental reflection on this transition the psychological Objectification becomes visible as self-objectivation of the transcendental I, and so it is if in every moment of the natural attitude the I finds itself with an apperception imposed upon it (1981a, p. 31).

We are not to understand this relation between apperceiving I and apperceived I as if it were the relation between a psychological subject reflecting on itself (cf. de Boer, 1978, p. 466). Such a relation obtains between two entities within the natural attitude; in that case we do have a duplication of egos, both of whom belong to the same subject. In the case of the relation between the psychological and transcendental egos, however, we are talking about a transition that entails a change of attitude. The psychological ego exists in the natural attitude as a worldly being out there, while the transcendental ego, on the other hand, could not exist within the natural attitude, since the world of this attitude is its transcendental correlate. The transcendental ego is not another ego separate from the psychological ego; it is the same ego, differently perceived. This same, admittedly problematic concept was addressed by Husserl in his aforementioned “Phenomenology and Anthropology” (1981b) lecture. Once again, Husserl speaks to Heidegger’s concern. He wonders aloud with us: What is more obvious than saying that it is I, this human being, who employs the method of the transcendental change of attitude and who thus retreats to his pure ego? What else is this ego but his pure spiritual being in abstraction from the body (1981b, p. 319)?

To this, he replies: To say this is to obviously relapse into the naïve and natural attitude and to think in terms of the given world rather than of the epoche. If I regard myself as a human being, I presuppose the validity of the world. The epoche, however, makes it clear that the apperception, “human being,” receives its existential meaning within the universal apperception, “world,” only in the life of the ego (1981b, p. 319).

What is the human but a part of the world? In referring back to the psychological subject as the locus for the transcendental, we have thus referred back to the world in which this subject exists. It is precisely for this world and its subjects that we have been trying to give an account. We performed the reduction because this world was found to be transcendentally questionable. If we attempt to turn back to the human being who performed this reduction, after having done so, we are merely demonstrating that we did not understand fully the significance of the reduction to begin with. Such a relapse (to naturalism) shows that we are still thinking in terms of the world and worldly realities, as naively given. It shows that we have yet to complete the performance of the reduction. It is in this sense that Husserl must have felt that Heidegger missed the “deeper” meaning of the reduction. It is only by virtue of the actual performance of the reduction that these two egos can be differentiated on anything other than a natural, and thereby, unacceptable, basis. For this reason, Husserl stresses in his “Phenomenology and Anthropology” address that, “if we miss the meaning of the reduction … everything is lost” (1981b, p. 319). If we miss the meaning of the reduction, we tend, as did Heidegger et al., to conceive of the transcendental ego as a natural entity. In such

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a case, we do have a duplication of egos, and we encounter great difficulty in differentiating in any substantive way between the two. As Mohanty has remarked: “There are not two different sets of mental acts; one empirical, the other transcendental. One and the same act is both, depending upon how one looks at it, and what function one assigns to it” (1985b, p. 14). It is, we could say, the same I, as long as we realize that such a change in attitude, from the psychological to the transcendental, does have substantive ontological implications. These implications can only be grasped through an appreciation of the significance of the reduction, however, and of this Husserl writes in apparent frustration, “the temptations to misunderstand are almost irresistible” (1981b, p. 319). If we can overcome these temptations, then we realize that transcendental subjectivity is consciousness apperceived in its world-constituting function, while psychological subjectivity is consciousness apperceived in its mundane appearance as belonging to an animal reality. We might recall here the discussion of the first section of Chap. 4, in which this relation was first established. Without retracing that argument, we can simply recall that the transcendental ego, as divorced from all worldly status, was considered absolute, necessary, independent, etc., while psychological subjectivity was considered a factual, empirical, and thus relative, contingent, and dependent appearance of transcendental subjectivity. It is transcendental subjectivity that appears as the psychic; but in its appearing as the psychic, it takes on a relative and limited status that is inappropriate for epistemology and philosophy. In order to avoid the problems that we have now encountered in our attempt to ground epistemology in psychology, we must bracket any empirical and factual appearance of transcendental subjectivity, i.e., the psychic, so as to be able to ground epistemology in the purified transcendental itself. It is transcendental subjectivity, not its appearance as the psychic, which constitutes “the” world. In fact, transcendental subjectivity constitutes itself as the psychic as part of this very process; the world and the worldly I appear together as (transcendental) correlates. The world serves as the context in which this I appears. Transcendental constitution cannot be a function of the psychological ego; this much is clear. Where we go from here, and what implications this realization has for both philosophy and psychology, is not nearly as clear. We began this chapter thinking that phenomenological psychology could operate at a pre-transcendental and preepistemological level, viewing consciousness as psychological, and thus, worldly, in nature. As long as psychology held no philosophical pretensions, as long as it remained psychology, it appeared that we could avoid psychologism—or at least we could leave that to the philosophers to worry about. But that was before we asked explicitly about the nature of psychic. Once we allowed this question to be, in Husserl’s word “decisive,” we realized that we would have to adopt an intentional view of consciousness, even at the psychic level. This created a number of problems for us. Once we allow for constitution within the psychological sphere, we seem to lose any criteria by which we can differentiate psychology from philosophy. Also, once we allow for constitution within the psychological sphere, it seems that a psychology that remains pre-transcendental must supply its own epistemological ground; thus did both philosophy and psychology become psychologistic.

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Husserl’s solution to this dilemma is to move, as he mentioned at the end of his lectures on psychology, from the phenomenological psychological to transcendental phenomenological. It is at this level that constitution properly belongs, not at the level of the psychological. Thus, he writes in his “Phenomenology and Anthropology” lecture that “a fundamental decision between anthropologism and transcendentalism must be possible” (1981b, p. 315). The remainder of this address is devoted to Husserl’s justification for his choice of transcendentalism, a justification that we have now provided in some depth. But, as usual, questions remain. How does the choice of “transcendentalism” effect the psychologist? Is this only a concern for the philosopher, as we have seen Husserl imply in the past? Or does the judgement of transcendentalism change the way the psychologist must view their subject matter. Does intentionality, in other words, only belong on the level of the transcendental? If so, would this mean that there is no longer a need for psychology, since psychology has apparently misunderstood the nature of intentionality? Or does psychology return to the natural attitude altogether, and resume its original place as a naïve, positive discipline of the psychic as situated within Nature? On the other hand, if intentionality is transcendental, then did our phenomenological psychology make pretensions to a being personalistic science of the psychic that it could not fulfill? Why, then, would Husserl have presented it in this fashion? We hope to clarify and resolve these lingering questions in our next chapter.

Chapter 6

The “Return” from the Transcendental

With the break with naiveté brought about by the transcendental-phenomenological reorientation there occurs a significant transformation, significant for psychology itself … In fact, for a genuine psychology, and for the exactness that belongs essentially to it, transcendental philosophy plays the role of the a priori science to which it must have recourse in all its actually psychological knowledge, the science whose a priori structural concepts it must utilize in its mundane inquiry from “The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology” (Husserl, 1970a, p. 260)

In our last chapter we explored a possible solution to the number of problems attendant to applying a phenomenological approach to psychology, only to discover that this solution was apparently unsatisfactory from both a psychological and philosophical perspective. Husserl’s suggestion that phenomenological psychology could operate on a pre-transcendental, pre-epistemological level and occupy a kind of middle ground between natural and transcendental attitudes could not, in fact, be carried out. The attempt to view consciousness as intentional from within a psychological framework runs into the same dilemma within the parameters of psychology as it did in 1903 within the parameters of philosophy. In both cases, the impasse encountered is the same: how are we to understand the relation between the subjectivity of knowing and the objectivity that is known? In order to overcome this impasse, intentionality must be viewed as constitutive, regardless of whether we are operating within the parameters of psychology or philosophy. The move to a constitutive view of consciousness, though, challenges the status of our psychological discipline in a fundamental way. Can a psychology of constituting consciousness remain a positive, worldly science or does it cease to be psychology and become transcendental phenomenology instead? Since psychology cannot view consciousness as intentional without assuming a transcendental perspective, should it abandon that effort and retreat to the naturalistic attitude from whence it came? Our realization that psychology cannot simply remain epistemologically naïve and settle for half-truths about its subject matter, i.e., consciousness in its relation to “the” world, leaves us with these and other related questions. © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 L. Davidson, Overcoming Psychologism: Husserl and the Transcendental Reform of Psychology, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-59932-4_6

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Husserl’s attempt to conduct phenomenological psychology from a pre-­ transcendental position elaborated in his psychology lectures apparently left him with two choices. Since we cannot allow psychology to remain epistemologically ungrounded, either it is to be elevated to the transcendental attitude presumably appropriate for philosophy or it is to be relegated back to the naturalistic attitude suited to the natural sciences. While it appeared earlier that Husserl was willing to allow phenomenological psychology to be psychologistic as long as it did not presume to tackle philosophical problems, we now see that even for psychology to be psychologistic is inherently unsound. Psychology must appeal to some epistemological framework in its own understanding of its subject matter and method; it cannot merely allow the transcendental question to go unanswered or allow its answer to remain implicit or unacknowledged. In his “Phenomenology and Anthropology” address, Husserl therefore presented the fundamental decision between anthropologism and transcendentalism. Are we to situate psychology within a naturalistic anthropological framework or within the framework of transcendental phenomenology? Where is psychology to be located, now that the middle ground proposed in Chap. 4 proved not to exist? The majority of this chapter will be devoted to laying out the answer that Husserl provided to this question in his last, most important yet unfinished, work entitled, The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology (1970a). In our discussion of the body of this work (hereafter referred to as the Crisis) we come, at last, to the full articulation of Husserl’s mature position on the relation between phenomenology and psychology and, in the process, tie up all of the loose ends that have accumulated thus far. It is in the text of the Crisis that Husserl developed and presented the “final form” of psychology that “uproots the naturalistic sense of modern psychology” in a definitive fashion (1970a, p. 70). Before turning to this text, however, we will briefly review the nature of the criticisms that we found necessary to level against the position presented in the first half of Chap. 5. For this recapitulation of the inadequacy of a natural though non-naturalistic psychology of the personal attitude, we look to Husserl’s Author’s Preface to the first English translation of Ideas I, which appeared in 1931, and to two other works with which Husserl was involved around this same time, Formal and Transcendental Logic (1977c) and Experience and Judgment (1973). A brief discussion of these works will set the stage for the significant new steps taken in the Crisis, which allow us to bring closure to the problematics concerning us throughout this work.

Psychological Idealism In our own Introduction to this work, we mentioned that Husserl utilized the opportunity presented by the publication of an English translation of Ideas I to speak directly to misunderstandings concerning the relationship between phenomenology and psychology, which had, by that time, already begun to proliferate. The Author’s Preface that he wrote to accompany this translation was composed after both the psychology

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lectures and “Phenomenology” article discussed in our last chapter, and it included Husserl’s “attempt to clarify the situation” posed most recently by those works. Perhaps we can better understand now why already in 1931, when the Preface was published, the situation was so much in need of clarification and why there were so many misunderstandings “to which even thinkers who subscribe to the phenomenological line of thought are subject” to which Husserl felt he should address himself (1931, p. 7). His evolving thinking certainly allowed much room for misinterpretation. We remarked briefly in our last chapter that Husserl identified in this Preface the nuance separating psychological from transcendental subjectivity as the source of this confusion. One might argue that this was the case for Husserl since 1903 and that it remains the case to the present day (cf. Fink, 1970), as is evident in the debates conducted in the secondary literature alluded to in our last chapter. At this point, however, the dilemma took on the specific shape of a need to differentiate between intentionality viewed psychologically and intentionality viewed transcendentally. As we quoted Husserl from this Preface in our last chapter: “Here in fact lie the chief difficulties in the way of understanding.” Once we have acknowledged the “remarkable thoroughgoing parallelism” between phenomenological psychology and transcendental phenomenology, we find ourselves at a loss as to how to distinguish between them (1931, p. 9). Let us now review briefly Husserl’s reasons for doing so, for maintaining the importance of such an apparent nuance in the face of what was, in 1931, already a substantial body of dissent. We remember from Chap. 1 that there was, prior to Husserl, a tradition already established that argued for the importance of a descriptive psychology or a psychology “conducted purely within the framework of ‘inner experience’” (1931, p. 16). It was this tradition, which can be traced back to Locke and Mill, which sought, under the hands of Husserl’s teacher, Brentano, to incorporate an intentional view of consciousness. What we came to realize in Chap. 1, and what Husserl reminded us of in his Preface, is that this psychology, even Brentano’s, remained “fettered” to an “inherited naturalism”; it situated the realm of “inner experience” within Nature, viewing Nature as the absolute reality. For Husserl to depart radically from this tradition and free psychology from naturalism, he must, as we pointed out in Chap. 5, absolutize the psychic in the place of Nature. If the phenomenological psychology that Husserl proposed in the lectures of the same name is to be substantially different from a descriptive naturalistic psychology, it must break from this aspect of its tradition and no longer consider consciousness a subordinate and dependent realm within Nature. It was only possible for Brentano et al. not to recognize the necessity of such a move by virtue of avoiding altogether the posing of what Husserl repeatedly referred to as the “transcendental question.” They had simply not asked about the relation between the psychic and Nature, between experience and its object. We have seen once again, in our last chapter, how this question cannot be ignored, even within psychology. In this Preface, Husserl credits the recognition of this issue with the separation of a phenomenological psychology from a descriptive naturalistic psychology. Phenomenological psychology is built upon acknowledgement of the legitimacy of the transcendental issue; it asks what Brentano and his predecessors had not thought to ask. Husserl writes:

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The essentially new influence that in transcendentally directed phenomenology becomes active for descriptive psychology, and is now completely changing the whole aspect of this psychology … is the insight that a concrete description of the sphere of consciousness as a self-contained sphere of intentionality (it is never otherwise concretely given), a concrete description, for instance, of perceptions or recollections, and so forth, also calls, of necessity, for a description of the object as such, referred to in intentional experiences, as such, we say, indicating thereby that they belong inseparably to the current experience itself as its objectively intended or “objective meaning” (1931, p. 17).

The influence that changed psychology from being descriptive (within a naturalistic framework) to being truly phenomenological is the recognition of the importance of the question of the status of the object of experience. This question is answered implicitly within naturalism, as we saw, with the positing of the object as the absolute reality, with the result that the experience of the object is seen as dependent upon the object itself, as being in some sense caused by it. In such a view, objects exist independently of experience and somehow enter into experience via a causal relation, the experience of the object being an effect. Husserl’s point above is that a psychology that is influenced by phenomenological insights will have to abandon this notion of the relation between experience and its object, acknowledging explicitly that the two are inseparable, as is indicated within an intentional view. The object cannot come first but must be considered in its relation to experience. The question for a phenomenologically informed psychology then becomes: how are we to understand the nature of this relation? Given that we recognize the necessity of including the object in any description of experience, how does this change the way we view our subject matter? At the close of his Preface, Husserl urges the reader who wishes to explore this issue further to consult, among other works, his recent publication, entitled Formal and Transcendental Logic (1977c). While we will still find it helpful to refer back to this Preface, we should, at this point, heed his suggestion in order to address this question more thoroughly. In addition, we shall benefit from taking into consideration portions of another work of Husserl’s that may be considered a companion volume to Formal and Transcendental Logic, which is Experience and Judgement (1973). Our turn to these texts brings us back, eventually, to the dilemma with which we closed our last Chapter, the dilemma encountered by a phenomenologically informed psychology that is forced to tackle the question of the status of the object of experience. In Formal and Transcendental Logic (1977c), Husserl again takes up the philosophical epistemological project undertaken initially in the Logical Investigations, extending and deepening the problematic encountered there to incorporate the notion of the transcendental. In this way, the text picks up where the Logic Investigations left off in terms of confronting directly the question that remained concerning the status of the subject of experience; questions relegated to footnotes in the second edition revisions (cf. Bachelard, 1968, p. 76). It is for this reason that this text is useful for us in the present context; it serves to clarify the “sense of transcendental problems” (1977c, p. 232) in their relation to psychology. Presently, we are trying to appreciate the alteration that must take place within psychology once

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the transcendental question is recognized as a valid question even for psychologists. We just witnessed Husserl establish that it is this recognition that separates phenomenological psychology from its predecessors. We begin our exploration of the nature of the relation between experience and object with the insight that what concerns us must constitute a self-contained sphere. If the object cannot have caused the experience of it, or entered into it in some causal fashion, then the two must belong together in some yet to be determined sense. They cannot, that is, be considered alien to each other. Consciousness cannot be made up of internal representations of objects that are actually existing outside of it. Husserl begins his discussion of this issue in Formal and Transcendental Logic by succinctly refuting such a view, the view that we know as the one held by the naturalistic tradition. He writes: Experience is not an opening through which a world, existing prior to all experience, shines into a room of consciousness, it is not a mere taking of something alien to consciousness into consciousness. For how could I make a rational statement to that effect, without seeing such a state-of-affairs and therefore seeing not only consciousness, but also the something alien to consciousness—that is: experience the alien affair? And how could I objectivate such a state-of-affairs as at least a conceivability? Would that not be immersing myself intuitionally in such a countersensical experiencing of something alien to experience (1977c, pp. 232–233)?

There can only be that which is experienced and the experiencing of it; anything in some sense outside of this relation would be, by definition, unexperienceable and, thus, unknowable. In reference to the ground covered in our last chapter, Husserl argues that there could be no world outside of experience, which is then, in the words of Merleau-Ponty, “taken up” by experience. We only come to know “the” world through the process of “taking it up”; it therefore cannot be said to exist prior to, or independent of, this process. I cannot make a statement to that effect without abandoning the only epistemological ground upon which I have to stand. If we accept this, however, we are faced with the conclusion that objects must be considered a part of the experience through which they are given. If they cannot be said to exist outside of experience, does this not mean that they must be considered to exist within experience, to be a part of the experience itself? We might remember that it was against such a psychological understanding of the relation between knowing and the known, expressed by Husserl in his early Philosophy of Arithmetic, that he rebelled in the Logical Investigations. At that time, he argued that the object of experience could not be a real part of the real experience of a psychological subject. Have we now come full circle back to that original position? How are we to understand the apparent truth that the object of experience must be situated in relation to experience itself and considered inseparable from it? Husserl writes: “experience is the performance in which for me, the experiencer, experienced being ‘is there’” (1977c, p.  233). In what sense is experienced being “there” within the ­performance of experience? What can be the status of the world and its objects, if they cannot be considered to exist independently of, outside of, experience? If it is not that experience provides an opening through which the world and its objects somehow appear, then it must be that experience itself brings about, i.e.,

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constitutes, the world and its objects as its correlate. The world must be, in some sense, a product of experience, dependent upon the performance of consciousness for its sense of being. “If what is experienced has the sense of ‘transcendent’ being,” writes Husserl, “then it is the experiencing that constitutes this sense” (1977c, p. 233). The reality that we attribute to the object must be derived from the experience itself, for we have just demonstrated how it could not come from elsewhere. To perceive something to exist is to perceive it as existing; this is all that we can possibly mean by the perception of existing objects. The only other alternative would be to hold that the existing object brings into its relation with experience its own, pre-established existence. As Husserl stresses once again: There is no conceivable place where the life of consciousness is broken through, or could be broken through, and we might come upon a transcendency that possibly had any sense other than that of an intentional unity making its appearance in the subjectivity itself of consciousness (1977c, p. 236).

The existing object only becomes known as existing through experiences of it through which it is given as existing. We must equate existence with manner of givenness to experience and thereby attribute the sense of being which an existent has to the experience itself through which it is given. In such a view, it becomes the experiencer, the conscious subject, who is to be held accountable, so to speak, for the appearance of the world and its objects in experience. The existence of transcendent objects is derived from, and dependent upon, their having been perceived as existing by the perceiver. As Husserl insists: “Nothing exists for me otherwise than by virtue of the actual and potential performance of my own consciousness” (1977c, p. 234). It would appear, then, that we are back to the position of the Philosophy of Arithmetic, in so far as all objects are considered subjective productions or psychological realities. It would appear, also, that we are back to a position very similar to Berkeley’s in which “to be is to be perceived.” For we must conclude that it is by the actual and potential performance of consciousness that all existence, including that of “the” world we all share, comes to be what it is. “Even the world for everyone, then,” Husserl concludes, “is something of which I am conscious, something accepted by me as the world for everyone” (1977c, p. 237). The question not tackled by Husserl in the Philosophy of Arithmetic, however, and which was essentially relegated to the footnotes of the second edition of the Logical Investigations, is that of the nature of this subject. Who is this “me” for whom the world is given as existing? To what are we referring by the phrase “my consciousness”? The object, it is clear, is dependent upon the experiencing subject for its very being(-sense). The question now becomes: but what of the nature of this subject? It is with this question that Husserl has struggled since 1903. It is this question that was taken up explicitly in Formal and Transcendental Logic, where it remained unclarified in the earlier works noted above. We replace questions regarding the status of the object with questions regarding the status of the constituting subject. The text of Formal and Transcendental Logic reflected an advancement beyond those earlier texts in its answer to these questions to the extent that it is a product of the transcendental period marked by the publication of Ideas I. It is at this point that our nuance is introduced.

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Our natural inclination, as was Husserl’s in these earlier works, is to assume that the “me” to whom we are referring in the above is the psychological subject. “My consciousness” must refer, we would think, to “my psychic life, the psycho-­physical and worldly life of consciousness” that belongs to “myself as a psychophysical reality” (1977c, p. 238). It is true that I experience myself as a human being, as a psychic subject, within the world. One of the many unities that I experience as existing out there in the world is that of myself as a concrete embodied person. But is our natural inclination in this matter to be trusted? Is it in fact this me for whom the world is given as existing? Is it the psychophysical, worldly “I” who constitutes the world and its objects as existing? Is it in the worldly life of consciousness, in the life of the psychic subject, where we locate the constitutive power of experience? Is it in my experience as a concrete, embodied person that the world we share comes to be what it is? The answer that Husserl provided to this question in Formal and Transcendental Logic is a simple and direct “No.” His only apparent justification for such an answer is derived from a line of reasoning similar to that offered in our last chapter, where we argued that the consciousness that constitutes the world could not be the same consciousness that is discovered within that world to exist as a constituted reality. I, the psychophysical subject, cannot be the one constituting the world in which I find myself, as psychophysical subject, to be constituting a world, etc. If we turn to the other text with which Husserl was concerned around the same time, we find a slightly different line of reasoning to supplement that already spelled out in our last chapter. Within the span of only two pages in Experience and Judgment (1973), Husserl provides the guidelines for a more concrete and descriptive refutation of what amounts to a psychologistic solution to this question. Husserl’s approach in Experience and Judgment is first to consider what it is that is given to psychological reflection, to reflection on the experience of the psychophysical subject, and then to compare this to what we consider to be transcendental reflection, or reflection on the performance of the constituting ego. Are they, in fact, the same? We begin with psychological reflection. What is it that we can investigate and discern within the scope of psychological reflection? Husserl writes: Psychology, even where it is pure, where it concerns pure lived experience and where it is given to consciousness as such … could at best inquire regressively … to the lived experiences of the self-evidence of subjects who are precisely as such already subjects of our world—of a world which is already overlaid by idealizations and always apperceived in accordance with the sense of this overlaying … [I]t would be brought to a halt by experience which is, just as a matter of course, already conceived to refer to an idealized world (1973, p. 47).

The experience of psychophysical subjects is always an experience of a world already given as existing, and existing in certain idealized ways. This is what was meant in our last chapter, when we said that experience psychologically considered was passive or receptive in nature; a psychic subject takes in what is already existing out there in their world. My experience as a psychic subject is always taken to refer to the world of which I am merely one part, the world that exists around me and has, prior to my exposure to it, a predetermined non-personal sense. I am given

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to my own experience as a certain kind of person, living in a certain kind of world, with certain attributes, values, etc. It is this which is given to, and which constitutes, psychological reflection. All of this is, in an important sense, already there prior to my reflection. I do not, for example, experience my computer as only coming into being when I sit down and choose to write, using it as tool of composition. I do not experience my home, my hometown, or any other parts of the map as depending upon my experience of them for their existence. My experience as a psychic subject gives me access to these worldly realities, but it in no way brings them about. As a psychological ego, I experience what is given to me as having already been constituted in certain definable ways. “My” world, in this sense, is given as independent of my experience. It is for this reason that psychological reflection cannot deliver the constituting transcendental ego that is responsible for the very being of this same world. We cannot gain access through psychological reflection to the origin of this specific and predetermined world in which I exist as a psychic subject. For psychology, a pre-­ given world is always assumed as its necessary background. As far as the psychic subject is concerned, the world simply is that way; its origin cannot be investigated psychologically. To understand how a psychic subject comes to have the kind of world they have to live in, to gain insight into the origin of the idealizations in which this particular world is garbed, cannot be a psychological undertaking. In psychology, we must stop at the world given to me as existing already, the world in which I come to have experience of a world. We cannot look behind this world to its origin in consciousness, the ways through which it became constituted as the world that it is. Husserl writes: The dismantling of these idealizations, the breakthrough to the concealed foundation of this sense in the most original experience, is no longer a problem which can be handled by psychology, no matter how comprehensively and purely it may be carried out. For psychological reflection on lived experiences as they are accessible to internal perception can never lead to the origination of this garb of ideas thrown over the world from the original experience of the life-world. Psychological reflection takes lived experiences as isolated, as occurrences separated from one another within our consciousness, which it, of course, can study as particulars with regard to their origin just as the logician studies particular forms. But every such psychological reflection leads to lived experiences which, in so far as they are such, are experiences of the world, of a world which, for this subject, is already given as complete … This world as the correlate of lived experiences always belongs to the lived experiences which the psychologist meets with entirely as a matter of course and which he studies, but from these lived experiences he has no way of going back to the origin of this world itself—a world which is what it is because of the subjective operations, cognitive activities, and pursuit of scientific methods through which it stands before us as determined in such and such a way and as in principle infinitely determinable with regard to its true being (1973, pp. 47–48).

Simply put, psychology takes too much for granted. It is the study of my actual experience of the world as it factually, as a matter of course, exists. Any questions concerning how this world came to be the way it presently, factually, is—any questions, that is, concerning the origin of this particular world in consciousness—transcend the scope and competence of psychology. They are, properly, what we have come to refer to as transcendental questions.

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What renders this state of affairs especially problematic is that, as implied in the above, the origin of this world is found in subjective operations, in the performance of consciousness—although apparently not at the psychological level. This, once again, is what Husserl considers the “truth” of psychologism (cf. Mohanty, 1982, p.  42). Within a naturalistic framework, though, we know that the idealizations through which the world comes to be experienced by psychic subjects as a certain kind of world are, as Husserl writes, “also sedimentations of subjective intentional operations.” They are the correlates of intentional acts. Confusion stems from the fact that “the intentionality of these operations does not lie open to view of reflection but is only implied in the sedimentations that refer to it” (1973, p. 48). We know that if we do ask how this world came to be the way it factually is, we would have to refer back once again to previous performances of consciousness. However, these performances would not be the immediately accessible experiences of a psychophysical subject—those experiences through which this world is given as complete. They would be the performances that are now implied in the presence of constituted senses—what Husserl here refers to as “sedimentations.” The fact that there is sedimented sense necessarily implies prior performances of consciousness responsible for the constitution of this sense. A complete world implies a prior act of completion. A ready-made world could only have come about through a prior process of constitution that remains, on the psychological level, hidden, but nonetheless in effect. This process cannot be psychological in nature. Husserl continues: The revealing of these intentional implications and with them the history of the world itself, in which the subject of psychology already finds himself as in one ready-made, also means, therefore, a retrogression to what is subjective, since it is through the intentional activity of the subject that the world has obtained this form; but it is a retrogression to a hidden subjectivity—hidden because it is not capable of being exhibited as present in reflection in its intentional activity but can only be indicated by the sedimentations left by this activity in the pre-given world. Thus, the regressive inquiry bearing on the most original self-evidence is also a subjective one, but it bears on a subjectivity understood in a more radical sense than can ever be the case in psychology (1973, p. 48).

We have, then, two very different questions that require two different sources for answers. To ask what it is like for me, as a psychological ego, to experience a world of such and such a kind, is to ask a psychological question that can be answered through psychological reflection. To ask how the world that I experience in this fashion came to constituted as such a world—to ask how my experience of this world came to be constituted as it is—is to ask a question that points to the very possibility of the psychological and is, therefore, not a psychological question itself. It is to ask a question that bears on the constitution of psychological subjectivity and its world by another “hidden” subjectivity of a non-worldly nature. Psychology can only deliver a “ready-made” world; to ask after the constitution of this world is to have to regress to the operations of a subject who is not part of this world, but through whose operations this world and its subjects come to be. While non-­ psychological in nature, this is, nonetheless, a question that we must ask. Writes Husserl:

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It is necessary to dismantle everything which already pre-exists in the sedimentation of sense in the world of our present experience, to interrogate these sedimentations relative to the subjective sources out of which they have developed and, consequently, relative to an effective subjectivity. This is not the subjectivity of psychological reflection, of a subject perceiving itself situated in the presence of this world as already complete. It is, on the contrary, the subjectivity whose operations of sense have made the world which is pre-given to us what it is, namely, our world (1973, pp. 48–49).

This transcendental question cannot be answered through psychological reflection but must appeal to another form of reflection that has as its object another form of subjectivity. What we referred to as “my consciousness” within the framework of Formal and Transcendental Logic must be understood, insists Husserl: “not as subjectivity which finds itself in a world ready-made, as in simple psychological reflection, but as a subjectivity bearing within itself, and achieving, all of the possible operations to which this world owes its becoming” (1973, p. 49). This subjectivity, whose intentional acts constituted the world pre-given to psychic subjectivity through a process of sedimentation, we refer to as transcendental subjectivity. We have to differentiate between two different senses of “my” consciousness: one psychological and one transcendental. The first is associated with the experience of the psychophysical, worldly ego in its interactions with the factual, pre-­ given world. The second is associated with the transcendental, non-worldly ego, which is responsible for the constitution of this worldly ego and its world through a process of intentional sedimentation. If we return now to Formal and Transcendental Logic, we find Husserl to restate the conclusion drawn from Experience and Judgment as follows: Certainly, I am in psychophysical causal connexion with the outside world—that is to say: I, this human being, a man among men and brutes, among other realities too, all going together to make up the world. But the world with all its realities, including my human real being, is a universe of constituted transcendencies—constituted in mental processes and abilities of my ego … accordingly, this constituted word is preceded by my ego, as the ultimately constitutive subjectivity (1977c, p. 251).

This difference between transcendental subjectivity, “with its constitutive life of consciousness and its transcendental abilities,” and the psychological subject, the human person with their psychic mental processes as one component part of the real world, Husserl refers to here as “the most fundamental difference of all for the theory of cognition” (1977c, p. 252). It was this difference that he sought to establish in his English Preface to Ideas I as being of “decisive significance.” The nuance responsible for this difference may be subtle, but is necessary and of foundational importance nonetheless. With the recognition and appreciation of this difference, we come to the realization that constitutional problems necessarily fall to the discipline that has as its object transcendental, as opposed to, psychological subjectivity. As one worldly reality that is itself constituted, psychological subjectivity cannot be considered the locus of constitution. Husserl writes with respect to this difference and its implications in Formal and Transcendental Logic:

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It was because of this difference that all attempts to establish the existence of an Objective world by causal inferences from an ego given in the first place all by himself … were characterized by us as involving a countersensical confounding of psychophysical causation, occurring in the world, with the correlation, occurring in transcendental subjectivity, between constitutive consciousness and the world constituted in consciousness. For the true and genuine sense of transcendental philosophy it is decidedly important to lay hold of the fact that human being, and not only human organism, but also human psyche … are worldly concepts and, as worldly, objectives of a transcendent apperception, which therefore are included, as constitutional problems, within the universal transcendental problem (1977c, p. 252).

As we noted in our discussion of the “Phenomenology” article, psychology must be considered a part of the transcendental problem, it cannot be a key to its solution. Therefore, once we make the move to an intentional-constitutive view of consciousness, we necessarily commit ourselves to a transcendental discipline, leaving psychology behind as pertaining solely to the realm of the constituted. It is clear that Husserl felt that with clarification of this difference and the resultant delineation of separate disciplines for the constitutive and the constituted he contributed significantly to overcoming his long-time antagonist, psychologism. By relegating all problems concerned with constitution to a properly transcendental, non-psychological science, we escaped the potential psychologistic trap anticipated in our last chapter. The psychological may be the worldly, constituted parallel of the transcendental, but it is not the transcendental itself. In concluding the section of Formal and Transcendental Logic with which we are concerned, he writes: Insight into this parallelism between purely immanental and a priori psychology (psychological phenomenology), on the one hand, and transcendental phenomenology, on the other, and the showing of its essential necessity are the radically ultimate clarification of the problem of transcendental psychologism and, at the same time, its solution (1977c, p. 255).

Our insight into the difference between transcendental and psychological subjectivity provides the ultimate clarification of the problem of psychologism, because it allows us to redefine psychologism as due to the loss or neglect of this difference. Transcendental psychologism holds the position that the objective world is the intentional correlate of the experience of the psychological subject. The solution to this problem is the recognition that the objective world is the intentional correlate, not of psychological, but of transcendental subjectivity. If we return to Husserl’s Preface to the English edition of Ideas I, we now can understand better his concise criticisms of psychologism and his insistence on the preservation of this nuance of difference. In this text, he labeled what we have come to refer to as transcendental psychologism as psychological idealism, dismissing it accordingly. The problem, Husserl here points out, is that, if we fail to recognize the difference between transcendental and psychic subjectivity, we will simply consider consciousness to be psychic in nature in an absolute sense, situating the constitutive power of intentionality within the psychological subject. He writes: So long as it was only the psychological subject that was recognized, and one sought to posit it as absolute, and to understand the world as its correlate, the result could only be an absurd Idealism, a psychological Idealism (1931, p. 15).

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It would be such a position of psychological idealism that would result from the direction of the psychology lectures, had we taken them to suggest that psychological subjectivity be considered as the ontological absolute in the place of Nature. As Husserl insists in this text, “only transcendental subjectivity has ontologically the meaning of Absolute Being” (1931, p. 14). To attempt to put psychological subjectivity in its place, to study the constitution of the world and its objects on a psychological level, would indeed perpetuate a psychological idealism that is as unsatisfactory for psychology as for philosophy. It simply is not the psychological subject who constitutes the objective world, regardless of one’s disciplinary interest. For the psychologist to consider the process of intentional constitution as their proper subject matter is to commit an ontological error of grave consequence. We are left, thereby, with a problem, however, given that we are interested primarily in understanding the nature of a phenomenological approach to psychology. We established the necessity of a transcendental science for the resolution of transcendental issues; that much is evident. We began this discussion with an inquiry into the nature of the difference between phenomenological psychology and descriptive naturalistic psychology, stating at the time that phenomenological psychology differs by virtue of its explicit recognition of the legitimacy of transcendental questions, even for psychology. We now have argued that in order to resolve these questions, a transcendental and non-psychological discipline is required. Are we to conclude from this that phenomenological psychology differs from descriptive naturalistic psychology by being transcendental phenomenology, by being, that is, no longer a psychological discipline at all? If phenomenological psychology has as its subject matter consciousness as intentional, and if intentionality is necessarily transcendental in nature, then is phenomenological psychology actually transcendental phenomenology and not, in fact, a psychological discipline after all? Do we, as psychologists, have to leave behind the psychological for good, as had Husserl the philosopher in 1907? Is this the only way to avoid transcendental psychologism and psychological idealism? It is at this point that we appear to have two options, neither of which is particularly satisfactory on the surface. The first option is to follow Husserl along this path to the transcendental, apparently making of phenomenological psychology a philosophical, rather than psychological science. This appeared to be the option suggested in Husserl’s “Phenomenology and Anthropology” address under the rubric of transcendentalism. It is also the option that Husserl appears to be suggesting in his Preface to Ideas I, in which he comments that “the majority of professional ­psychologists” have “failed to notice at all the radical psychological reform which was involved in the transcendental”; a psychological reform which, he writes, “made its first entry as the concealed implication of a transcendental reform” based on the philosophical “compulsion” to settle the transcendental question (1931, pp. 18–19). The other option, implicit in some of the passages cited above from Formal and Transcendental Logic, is to consider the psychic simply a constituted realm and to return, accordingly, to a descriptive naturalistic position with respect to psychology, leaving intentionality and phenomenology, in a strict sense, to the philosophers.

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It is difficult to see how such a position allowed for an intentional psychology substantially different from that of Brentano, which is how Husserl described a phenomenologically influenced psychology in his Preface to Ideas I (1931, p. 19). If, as he wrote above, I, as a psychic subject, “am in psychophysical causal connexion with the outside world,” then perhaps a return to a naturalistic causal psychology is in order. Perhaps phenomenology can only be conducted on the transcendental level, and psychology should remain a worldly, and thus, natural science. Perhaps psychologists should leave intentionality to the philosophers and remain content with a descriptive naturalistic science of the psyche as a constituted, psychophysical reality. It is difficult to imagine how psychology could do more than this, could integrate the “radical reform” brought about by the move to the transcendental, without becoming itself a transcendental, and thus, philosophical discipline. We now appreciate the necessity and nature of the parallelism between transcendental and psychological subjectivity. The remaining question is that of the significance of this parallelism for psychology. Is psychology to remain concerned with the psychophysical, worldly, and constituted “me” and withdraw, apparently, to a naturalistic framework? Or, is it to become interested in the transcendental, non-­ worldly and non-psychological, constituting “me” and cease, apparently, being psychology in order to become transcendental philosophy? It is in order to clarify these options and to discover Husserl’s final solution to this dilemma that we now turn to the text of the Crisis.

The Crisis: The Primacy of the Life-World The text published under the title of The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology (1970a) is actually an extension of lectures that Husserl delivered in Prague between 1934 and 1937, published at the time in a journal out of Belgrade. This lecture series and, thus this text, were never completed, as Husserl died in 1938. What we are furnished with in the place of a completed text is an outline for the remainder of the lectures composed by Eugen Fink, who was at that time Husserl’s assistant. Arising out of a growing concern with the state of European culture and science in the mid-1930s, these lectures aimed to address what Husserl and others came to refer to as the “crisis” of European humanity. Being born a Jew who was thus forbidden to publish in his native country and ­having already lost one son to World War I, as well as being a witness to the general events of his day, Husserl felt personally, as well as professionally, called upon to speak out concerning what he took to be the dramatic degeneration of society. For him, the main villain in this scenario was the misdirection and misapplication of philosophy and science. As the original title of these lectures, “The Crisis of European Sciences and Psychology” (1970a, p. 3), makes evident, it was psychology in particular that Husserl came to view as “the truly decisive field” (1970a, p. 208) in this tragedy of errors. The contemporary misdirection of philosophy and science that Husserl found so problematic was

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found particularly concretized and manifest in the discipline of psychology. Contemporary European humanity’s dilemma was to be found most evident here. From the above paragraph, it should be clear why we chose this text to represent Husserl’s mature and final position on the relation between phenomenology and psychology. It is, of course, his last work, but it is also a work explicitly concerned with the proper role and development of psychology and a work that views the role of psychology as primary and, as mentioned above, decisive. It is, thus, a particularly appropriate work with which to close our analysis of the historical progression of Husserl’s thought on this matter. It is lastly a work that reinforces our initial impression that psychology was not only a primary concern of Husserl in his early works, but remained a central concern throughout his career, still holding center stage in this last and most mature work. In our discussion of this text, we will come to a better understanding of why this is, in fact, the case. At this point, we may be content with the fact that Husserl himself remained concerned with and interested in what still appears to us a problematic and enigmatic issue. How, we may wonder, could a “crisis” of European sciences account, even partially, for the state of the culture in the midst of which these lectures were being delivered? How could a misdirection of philosophy lead to, or allow for, such phenomena as the rise of fascism? Husserl described his “crisis” initially as the loss of what science “had meant and could mean for human existence” (1970a, p.  5). Science and philosophy were no longer providing concrete guidance for the everyday life of European humanity; they, it is currently felt, have “nothing to say” regarding how life should be lived. Science was understood as “exclusively a matter of establishing what the world, the physical as well as the spiritual world, is in fact.” Such an excessive concern with facts, with what simply is the case, had led culture, in Husserl’s view, away from questions regarding values and norms, questions, as he writes, “of the meaning or meaninglessness of the whole of this human existence” (1970a, p. 6). With the loss of concern for value and meaning, society was allowed to stray from its true purpose and to begin a downward course of decline and deterioration. The reader will surely detect properly existentialist themes here, and the similarity is by no means accidental. However, we must remember that Husserl’s solution to these crises of meaning will be different from that of the Existentialists, who came after him. While the text of the Crisis comes closer than any of Husserl’s other works to expressing a position at least sympathetic to that of the French Existentialists who followed, it should by no means be mistaken as an Existentialist treatise. It embodies in Husserl’s view the mature development of transcendental phenomenology and its importance in bringing about a fundamental refashioning of the central, decisive science of psychology. We return to the question of crisis. As the crisis with which we are concerned is evidently a historical crisis, Husserl’s initial approach to understanding its nature is itself a historical one. From where did a purely “fact-minded” science (1970a, p. 6) come? How are we to understand our present loss of meaningfulness in science and philosophy when, as Husserl writes, “the specifically human questions were not always banned from the realm of science” (1970a, p. 7)? When did this first happen, and why? In order to place the current crisis in its proper perspective, we must

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discover its historical origins and expose its mistaken motivation. We must be able to account for the loss of proper direction in order to be able to restore it and reinstate science in its proper role and function. Before we can take steps to correct our present mistakes, we must understand how we became so mistaken. Husserl locates the origin of these mistakes in what he terms Galileo’s “mathematization of Nature” (1970a, p. 23). In order to understand what Husserl meant by this phrase, we must first come to terms with the historical role of philosophy and science in culture. According to Husserl, philosophy and science, as we know them today, first arose in ancient Greece as a way of making sense of everyday experience. Confronted with a proliferation of doxa, or opinion, which appeared to be dependent upon the perspective of the individual, the Greek founders of science searched for principles that would bring order into this variety of perspectives. These principles were adopted from mathematics and geometry, as with Plato and Euclid, as well as from other sources, and were viewed as finite principles upon which one could found true knowledge, or “episteme.” A fundamental alteration occurred, though, with the further development of Euclidean geometry in the hands of Galileo at the beginning of the modern age. In Husserl’s view, the expansion of axiomatic principles in a deductive fashion allowed for an application of geometry beyond the finite horizons of the ancients. Once it was recognized that geometry could, in a sense, build itself, it no longer needed to remain fettered to a finite and closed system of partial principles. It could be expanded into the infinite and encompass a “self-enclosed, coherent systematic theory” that could be applied to any and all imaginable portions of the real. No longer dealing with each fragment of experience in isolation, all of reality could be approached at once through the mastery of this single system. In brief, all of reality was seen as geometric and accessible to the geometric method. Writes Husserl: What is new, unprecedented is the conceiving of this ideal of a rational infinite totality of Being with a rational science systematically mastering it. An infinite world, here a world of idealities, is conceived, not as one whose objects become accessible to our knowledge singly, imperfectly, and as it were accidentally, but as one which is attained by a rational, systematically coherent method. In the infinite progression of this method, every object is ultimately attained according to its full being-in-itself (1970a, p. 22).

Replacing the number of finite principles employed in antiquity in order to make sense of everyday experience by one universal principle, that of the geometric and mathematical, the modern age came to a new view of the nature of knowledge. Philosophy and science became universal in scope and mathematical in nature, extending the geometric method infinitely to all of the real and viewing it as equally applicable in every sphere of this domain. With the discovery of this self-contained system that could be extended infinitely in a deductive fashion, there was no longer any need for partial and merely finite principles of knowledge. All true knowledge could be conceptualized within this mathematical system and could be restricted to that which could be so conceptualized. That which could not be rendered understandable within this system, that which could not be mathematized, would be relegated to the sphere of doxa and considered, at a more basic level, founded upon or grounded in the properly mathematical. In this fashion, to know something came to

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mean to render it mathematical. With this alteration in the sense of episteme, we have come to a new understanding of the nature of the real. The real as that which is truly knowable, as that which comes to be known in true knowledge, has become the mathematical. Husserl explains the reasoning entailed in this alteration as follows: Pre-scientifically, in everyday sense-experience, the world is given in a subjectively relative way. Each of us has his own appearances; and for each of us they count as that which actually is. Dealing with one another, we have long since become aware of this discrepancy between our various ontic validities. But we do not think that, because of this, there are many worlds. Necessarily, we believe in the world, whose things only appear to us differently but are the same. [Now] have we nothing more than the empty, necessary idea of things that exist objectively in themselves? Is there not in the appearances themselves a content we must ascribe to true Nature? Surely this includes everything which pure geometry, and in general the mathematics of the pure form of space-time, teaches us, with the self-evidence of absolute, universal validity (1970a, pp. 23–24).

We began with the distinction between the variety of diverse experiences of “the” shared and common world that differed significantly and appeared to be dependent upon individual perspectives and the true knowledge of this same world that was not similarly relative. Prior to Galileo, the true and absolute nature of this world remained shrouded in mystery, though many attempts were made to capture the essence of finite and isolable aspects of it. These finite principles, it was hoped, would shed some light on the nature of the otherwise empty idea of what was concealed behind the varieties of subjectively relative perspectives. With Galileo, pure geometry stepped in to fill this void of the non-relative real. “The” world became a mathematical manifold (1970a, p. 23). While Husserl credits Galileo with primary responsibility for this significant development in the history of philosophy and science, he admits to not being overly concerned with the actual historical accuracy of his account. He was more interested in the intellectual and conceptual progression through which Nature because mathematized, in the process of “mathematization” itself, than in the concrete historical events surrounding it. He does, however, point to the possible historical origins and influences for this development in conjunction with the somewhat mythic figure of Galileo. He cites the practice of land surveying and the development of the “art of measuring” as salient aspects of the historical background for this conceptual advance. It became increasingly the case, Husserl suggests, that what could be measured, and the measurements themselves that were made, were given ontic priority over the appearances through which measurements were made. With the productive application of measuring in land surveying and elsewhere, it became increasingly obvious that objectively established measures could be intersubjectively validated and, thus, provide an avenue of access to a common and shared reality. Soon, it also became obvious that this was how “the” world that existed beyond its subjective appearances could be reliably accessed (1970a, pp. 27–28). The problem that arose out of this apparent scientific advance is that the mathematical conceptualizations of Nature that are conceived, i.e., the measures that are made, are actually human constructions. They are, in our prior terminology, constituted

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achievements. With Galileo, however, it was felt that these were discoveries of the actual constitution of “the” world itself. Nature simply was mathematical in nature and scientists and philosophers were embarked on the career of simply uncovering the actual mathematical structure of Nature that existed independent of human conceptualization. The measurements that were made came to be taken for the true nature of the real, rather than as ways of making sense of conceptualizing this nature. As Husserl notes, “some were misled into taking these formulae and their formulaemeaning for the true being of Nature itself” (1970a, pp.  43–44). By situating this substitution of a mathematical manifold for the world of sense-­experience in its historical context, Husserl demonstrates clearly how, what began as a cultural achievement—i.e., the axiomatic expansion of Euclidean geometry—was then taken as a universal and self-evident insight into the absolute nature of the real. The text of the Crisis carefully tracks the historical process though which this substitution is made, demonstrating again in a rigorous manner how this process was made possible by virtue of a gradual forgetting of the origins of mathematical conceptualization in human consciousness. We shall find this process of substitution made possible through forgetfulness to be of primary importance for Husserl in terms of the development of both philosophy and psychology. At this point, we suggest that had Galileo been mindful of the historical origins of his own mathematical approach to Nature, he would have at least questioned the obviousness with which he applied geometry to Nature. He would have had reason, that is, to wonder whether his conceptualizations of “the” world were anything more than simply that. As it stands, he proceeded to operate under the “illusion” that geometry “produces a self-sufficient, absolute truth which, as such—‘obviously’— could be applied without further ado” (1970a, p. 49). It is as a result of this process of forgetting that Husserl came to view Galileo as “at once a discovering and concealing genius” (1970a, p. 52). It is easy to understand the sense in which Galileo was a discoverer. It was, according to Husserl’s admittedly mythic account, Galileo who first discovered that geometry could be applied in this fashion to Nature with productive results. It was Galileo who first conceived of Nature as a mathematical manifold, accessible through the quantitative methods of what has since become natural science. This was Galileo’s discovering genius. However, it is the basic gist of Husserl’s presentation, that in the process of making this discovery, Galileo also brought about a profound and far-reaching concealment that Husserl considered his main challenge to uncover. In substituting a mathematical manifold for the world of everyday ­sense-­experience, Galileo unknowingly managed to bring about a depreciation and devaluing of that same sense-experience to such a degree that it became lost and excluded from the domain of that which is a valid concern of the sciences. Once the real was conceived of as the geometric, sense-experience and its world lost all claim to reality; the world of sense-experience became hidden under the “garb of ideas” taken for “true being” (1970a, p. 51). “As early as Galileo,” writes Husserl, there was a “surreptitious substitution of the mathematically substructed world of idealities for the only real world, the one that is actually given through perception, that is ever experienced and experienceable—our everyday life-world” (1970a, pp. 48–49).

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With this notion of the “concealment” of the “life-world,” we arrive at one of Husserl’s central concerns throughout the Crisis. We also arrive, not accidentally, at the historical origin of what we repeatedly referred to above as naturalism. We remember that in the text of the Logos article, Husserl suggested that the rise of naturalism could be associated with the productive employment of the natural scientific method and the impressive advances of the physical sciences. In the text of the Crisis, he goes back, as it were, one step further to the impetus for the development of the natural scientific method as such. This impetus was provided by Galileo’s “mathematization of Nature” and its resulting concealment of the life-­world. If not for the illusory obviousness with which Galileo applied geometry to all of reality, the extension of the natural scientific method to the domain of the psychic, which Husserl criticized in the Logos article, would not have been possible. The generalization of the geometric method to the totality of the real provided the necessary ground upon which the natural scientific attitude was able to subsume the psychic under its own rule. As was discussed in the context of Ideas II, it was in this fashion that the object and attitude of natural science were absolutized, resulting in naturalism. Husserl tracks this development in the context of the Crisis from Galileo through Hobbes and shows how an integral part of naturalism is a naturalistic psychology that reinterprets the data of everyday sense-experience as “false” and “vague” indications of an underlying, mathematically structured, physical substrate. It is through this process of reinterpretation that everyday sense-experience and its world lose any value and meaning that they possessed in their own right, becoming merely one, minimally significant region within Nature itself. He writes: With Galileo’s mathematizing reinterpretation of Nature, false consequences established themselves even beyond the realm of Nature that were so intimately connected with this reinterpretation that they could dominate all further developments of views about the world up to the present day. I mean Galileo’s famous doctrine of the merely subjective character of the specific sense-qualities, which soon afterward was consistently formulated by Hobbes as the doctrine of the subjectivity of all concrete phenomena of sensibly intuitive nature and world in general. The phenomena are only in the subjects: they are there only as causal results of events taking place in true Nature, which events exist only with mathematical properties (1970a, pp. 53–54).

Once the being of Nature is determined to be mathematical, the appearances through which Nature is given must be considered “merely” subjective appearances of what objectively exists in itself. Being belongs properly to that which appears through these appearances, rather than to the appearances themselves. If these appearances are to have any Being, then it must also be understood on the order of Nature and conceived of along this same, mathematical causal basis. Thus, the realm of the psychic itself is only an effect of the causal relations existing in Nature, providing only a distorted and relative access to true being; that which belongs, not to the appearances themselves, but to what it is that brought about those appearances as effects. With this consequence of the mathematization of Nature, subjectivity lost any direct access that it may have possessed to “true knowledge.” Being assigned a derivative and subordinate position within Nature, the psychic, in becoming part of the physical world, lost its claim to a separate and equal status. Husserl concludes:

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If the intuited world of our life is merely subjective, then all the truths of pre- and extra-­ scientific life which have to do only with its factual being are deprived of value. They have meaning only in so far as they, while themselves false, vaguely indicate an in-itself that lies behind this world of possible experience and is transcendent in respect to it (1970a, p. 54).

With our consideration of this further consequence of the mathematization of Nature, we can secure a glimpse of how Husserl understood the naturalistic progression since the time of Galileo to account for the present crisis of a fact-minded, and meaning-less, science. Value and meaning belong to the realm of the subjective. In the world view that resulted from Galileo’s extension of the geometric method, the subjective is discredited in itself and is only allowed to play any role in the larger scheme of things as a false and vague indication of the underlying mathematical manifold that is Absolute Being. We know this to be the position that Husserl consistently challenged since the days of the Logical Investigations, especially in relation to philosophy and psychology. In the Crisis, he expanded this challenge to include the historical context discussed above, while its object remains the same. In this work, we now see how naturalism itself was the result of an historical process of generalizing geometry from the praxis of land surveyors, first of all to Nature and then to all of reality, inclusive of the subjective. With the establishment of naturalism, we further succeeded in concealing the world of everyday life, the world of meaning and value. This world was referred to by Husserl previously as the world of the personalistic attitude and is referred to by him here as the “life-world.” It is in the concealment of this world that we are to locate the source of our crisis. This concealment of the life-world brought about by the mathematization of Nature and naturalism had, for Husserl, far reaching effects for both philosophy and psychology. These effects and the possibility of undoing or overcoming them absorbed his interest for the remainder of the Crisis. In fact, from the retrospective provided by this text, it is possible to understand the entirety of Husserl’s intellectual career as a sustained attempt to reverse the effects of this process of naturalization. As we will see in what follows, the phenomenological reductions will be better understood as methods developed and employed to overcome the biases that have remained sedimented in the wake of this historical progression; that is, historically constituted practices that have, as their chief goal, returning the practitioner to a pre-naturalistic position (cf. de Boer, 1978, p. 387). Let us see how this is, in fact, the case. We begin with consideration of the fact that the depreciation and discrediting of the subjective brought about by naturalism must have implications for epistemology, as well as for the role of science in culture. Have we not, with our assessment of the subjective as providing only a false and vague access to true being, painted ourselves, as it were, into an epistemological corner? This first became evident in the work of Descartes, which follows along the heels of Galileo. It was in Descartes’ Mediations that we first confronted the epistemological legacy left by Galileo, and first gained insight into the unbridgeable “dualism” that is its end result. In short, with Descartes, we discovered that once we discredited the subjective and consigned it to the status of doxa, we left ourselves no direct access to true knowledge and separated ourselves completely from true being. Subjectivity provides our only

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access to knowledge. If it is epistemologically discredited, then are we not left without a valid access to the truth? How can we possibly bridge the gap between subjectively relative, false, and vague indications of the truth and the true being of Nature in itself, which exists behind its subjective appearances? How can we know when our subjective thoughts and impressions do match, or correspond to, what is out there, and when they don’t? This problem first arose with Descartes because of the separation that Galileo brought about between everyday sense-experience and the true being of Nature as mathematical manifold. Prior to Galileo, according to Husserl’s account, there was no such rift between subjective life and the object of true knowledge. With Galileo, however, Nature became a self-enclosed sphere cut off from the subjective; and from this enclosure and exclusion resulted an ontological and epistemological dualism. Husserl writes: Galileo abstracts from the subjects as persons leading a personal life; he abstracts from all that is in any way spiritual, from all cultural properties that are attached to things in human praxis. The result of this abstraction is the things purely as bodies; but these are taken as concrete real objects, the totality of which makes up a world that becomes the subject matter of research. One can truly say that the idea of Nature as a really self-enclosed world of bodies first emerges with Galileo. A consequence of this, along with mathematization, which was too quickly taken for granted, is [the idea of] a self-enclosed natural causality in which every occurrence is determined unequivocally and in advance. Clearly the way is thus prepared for dualism, which appears immediately afterward in Descartes. In general, we must realize that the conception of the new idea of “Nature” as an encapsulated, really and theoretically self-enclosed world of bodies soon brings about a complete transformation of the idea of the world in general. The world splits, so to speak, into two worlds: Nature and the psychic world, although the latter, because of the way in which it is related to Nature, does not achieve the status of an independent world (1970a, p. 60).

Conceiving of Nature as a mathematical manifold does not in and of itself eradicate altogether the subjective realm of appearances through which Nature is given to sense-experience. This realm of doxa, of all the personal, spiritual, and cultural properties from which Nature was abstracted, remains as lying outside of the self-­ enclosed sphere of bodies, as outside of the mathematizable. We have, then, not only the one world of Nature as true being, but two worlds: the world of Nature and the residual world of the psychic. The question that such a dualism raises is how these two worlds are situated in relation to each other. As we asked above, how are we to know when the content of the psychic sphere corresponds to that of Nature? Descartes was only able to resolve this dilemma through an appeal to a trustworthy Deity and the pineal gland. While very few in the history of philosophy took up his solution, all who followed inherited his dilemma. The first significant attempt to resolve the epistemological impasse that he left behind was that which sought recourse to naturalistic psychology via Hobbes, as mentioned above. This line of reasoning is anticipated by the last sentence of the lengthy passage from Husserl cited in the preceding paragraph, in which he alluded to the nature of the relation between the psychic world and Nature being such that the psychic world “does not achieve the status of an independent world.” Apparently, it would be overtly problematic to have two independent worlds of equal status, for then the question would

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remain, as we said, of how these two worlds are to relate to each other. The solution first made explicit with Hobbes is simply to subsume the world of the psychic under the mantle of the natural causal, to make it a part of Nature and, thus, to return to the position of having only one, self-enclosed and self-contained world. The psychic may appear on the surface to be of a different nature than Nature, it may appear to be other than mathematical, but this is merely how it appears to itself on the surface. In reality, it is an extension of the mathematical manifold of Nature, a further effect of the causal relations underlying it. The progression from Descartes’ dualism to a Hobbesian naturalistic monism is fairly straightforward in Husserl’s view. Since we already determined that the nature of the real is that of the mathematical, this other world of the psychic that appears to lie outside of the self-enclosed sphere of bodies cannot actually have an existence independent from Nature. Within such a view, there can be no existence outside of the sphere of Nature, for to be is to be mathematical and thus to be within the causal nexus of the natural world. For the psychic to lie wholly outside of Nature, then, would be for it not to exist at all, for it not to be real. Thus, it cannot really exist on its own, independently, but must be considered a derivation of Nature, dependent upon it for its Being. It, too, is part of Nature; it, too, is part of the natural-causal chain, part of the mathematical manifold—regardless of its mode of appearance. Husserl explains: In regard to the soul … which is left over after the animal and the human bodies have been speared off as belonging inside the enclosed region of Nature: here the exemplary role of physics’ conception of Nature, and of the scientific method, has the understandable effect— this since the time of Hobbes—that a type of Being is ascribed to the soul which is similar in principle to that of Nature; and to psychology is ascribed a progression from description to ultimate theoretical “explanation” similar to that of biophysics (1970a, p. 63).

If we are to make any sense of this other realm while retaining our conviction in the mathematical nature of the real, we must find a way of applying geometry even to the residual realm of the psychic. So, while initially we recognized the realm of subjective appearances to be other than the realm of Nature, we must now concede that it is only a subordinate and apparently separate region within Nature itself. The appearances themselves that constitute our personal lives, even with their content of value and meaning and their varying and perspectival nature, must be considered, in reality, only a further extension of the mathematical manifold. On this basis, psychology thus becomes a natural(istic) science and the epistemological impasse of dualism is overcome. For with this, there is no longer a problem, it would appear, of relating two independent and separate worlds of different natures and no longer a problem of establishing a correspondence between these two worlds: all is now Nature, even the psychic. We remember this position, especially in its relation to psychology as the key discipline in resolving this epistemological dilemma, as the one with which we began in Chap. 1 in our earlier discussion of the Logical Investigations. Husserl began his philosophical career with a refutation of the validity of this kind of application of naturalistic psychology to epistemology, tracing it at the time to thinkers such as Locke and Mill. In the context of the Crisis, he suggested that Locke’s

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development of a naturalistic psychology, as a ground discipline for epistemology, owed its historical origins to this progression from Descartes through Hobbes. Certainly, he provided us in the above with the historical background necessary to make sense of the necessity of the move from a descriptive to an explanatory(-naturalistic) psychology that he perceived within the philosophical and psychological traditions prior to the twentieth century, as we discussed in our first two chapters. Since we dealt at length in those earlier parts of our own text with Husserl’s arguments against such a position, we shall not review them here. In the context of the Crisis, Husserl is not so much interested in refuting the Lockean position, for certainly he did that sufficiently already, as he is in exposing its historical origins and its mistaken presuppositions. It represented, in the context of the Crisis, an errant attempt to deal with and overcome the Cartesian legacy. Resolving Descartes’ dualism into a naturalistic monism does not enable us to overcome our epistemological impasse. Simply stated, and recalling the gist of Husserl’s earlier arguments, we cannot presuppose valid that for which we are attempting to provide validation. It is only through the realm of appearances, only through the subjective, that we are able to have any access to Nature and the natural causal to begin with. If the psychic itself cannot be trusted epistemologically—that is, if it cannot be considered credible on its own terms, but is only a distorted and vague representation of Nature—then how can we possibly know that our knowledge of Nature can be trusted? Our knowledge of Nature is only one subclass of knowledge, and all knowledge is subjective, human knowledge. We cannot ground our knowledge of Nature on natural causal relations when we have no other access to these relations other than through our knowledge of them. With Locke, we conceived of the psychic as being a subordinate region within Nature, and yet have only been able to conceive of Nature as being itself the absolute and primary reality through its appearances within the realm of the psychic. As Husserl writes: “the whole investigation proceeds as an objective psychological one, indeed even has recourse to the physiological—when it is precisely all this objectivity, after all, which is in question” (1970a, pp. 84–85). Locke’s position thus entailed an unacceptable circularity in which subjectivity is trusted to the extent necessary to p­ rovide the absolute and certain knowledge of Nature upon which this same subjectivity can then be grounded. This circularity was first recognized and broken, according to Husserl’s historical recounting, by Hume’s skepticism. It was Hume, long before the publication of the Logical Investigations, who suggested that all we could be certain of is that we have mental representations of a natural world presumed to exist outside of our awareness of it and a felt sense that this world operates causally. We have, he suggested, no proof of this, no certainty of affairs outside of our awareness. In essence, Hume was unwilling to presuppose as valid that which Locke had taken for granted: the certainty of our knowledge of Nature as mathematical manifold. In this sense, we might say that Hume rediscovered the truth that Galileo, Descartes, Hobbes, and then Locke had forgotten, i.e., that knowledge of Nature remains a constituted and human psychological achievement. With Hume’s rediscovery of this truth, we have what Husserl referred to as the “taking of subjectivism” (1970a, p. 88). With this

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rediscovery, the exact natural sciences upon which we presumed we would ground psychology are left themselves ungrounded. Writes Husserl: “As soon as one took into account that they are the accomplishments of the consciousness of knowing subjects, their self-evidence and clarity were transformed into incomprehensible absurdity” (1970a, p. 89). The mental representations that we took as accurate and certain representations of the actual mathematical structure of the natural world existing outside of and around us, of which we are merely one part, turn out to be nothing more than psychological fictions that we can never verify nor disprove and which we must accept on a faith no longer even grounded in a belief in a trustworthy Deity (1970a, p. 87). In the hands of Hume, naturalistic psychology led only to the dead end of epistemological skepticism; the circularity of Locke’s position is exposed, but we are given nothing with which to replace it and all claims to knowledge of any sort are found suspect. With Hume, then, we return to an explicit appreciation of the epistemological impasse inherited from Descartes. It appeared that once we separated the psychic from Nature in this fashion, we would forever have a problem in bringing them back together in any satisfactory way. We have the realm of the psychic, which has been cut off from any direct contact with the world outside of it, and we have that world outside that we thought to be the object of certain, mathematizable knowledge. Now that we have recognized that even knowledge of Nature remains a subjective, human achievement, and thus belongs to the realm of the psychic, we lose that initial claim to certain and absolute knowledge of the natural world and are left simply with two disconnected and separate spheres. We have a strong sense of, and belief in, the reality of the external world, but no epistemologically sound basis upon which to prove or justify its existence. While we remain competent at expanding and furthering Euclidean geometry, we no longer know whether or not it applies to the real world. Conversely, while we have immediate and direct access to the contents of the psychic sphere, we can secure no guarantee as to their relation to anything outside of themselves. It is no longer Nature that is a self-enclosed sphere, but that of the subjective. Hume’s skepticism results in a subjectivistic solipsism. It is at this juncture, historically, that Kant stepped in to salvage the value and validity of the subjective, developing a position in which the subjective nature of knowledge does not lead necessarily to a skeptical and solipsistic impasse. Kant’s turn to subjectivity as providing the ground for epistemology is, in a way, a throwback to Descartes’ initial turn to the ego cogito in his Meditations and to Locke’s turn to the psychological ego as the object of naturalistic psychology. In turning to subjectivity, however, Kant did not appeal to a trustworthy God to ensure its validity as an access to truth, nor did he appeal to its underlying mathematical material substrate, its grounding in the causal nexus of Nature, to insure the validity of its existence. Kant departed from this tradition by appealing only to the internal or intrinsic nature of subjectivity itself, by attempting to study consciousness with respect to its own structure. The goal of Kant’s turn to subjectivity is different; he attempted to approach consciousness on its own terms in order to see what light can be shed on the nature of knowledge as a constituted and subjective achievement. Kant again took up the contents of the subjective sphere after having already

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been awakened by Hume’s skepticism. His was a more informed and enlightened attempt to rescue epistemology from the effects of Galileo’s forgetfulness and concealment. To the extent that this was Kant’s intent and goal, Husserl is appreciative of his attempt and credits him with establishing the first philosophical view “in which the Cartesian turn to conscious subjectivity works itself out in the form of a transcendental subjectivism” (1970a, p.  95). Knowing as we do the importance that Husserl placed on the transcendental and on transcendental subjectivity, we should recognize this as high praise indeed. However, Husserl claims to find a fundamental problem inherent in Kant’s position, and it is a problem that, in his view, placed Kant more in the company of his predecessors than in the company of those who were to develop the true transcendental subjectivism that was to follow. While straining against the limits imposed by the Galilean/Cartesian legacy, Kant nevertheless remained, according to Husserl, within the parameters resulting from their presuppositions. In his treatment of Descartes’ Meditations in the Crisis, Husserl felt he stumbled across a fundamental oversight of Descartes, which had it not been made, may have been responsible for a basic redirection of philosophy from his time onward. This oversight involved the nature of the ego to which Descartes returned in his quest for certitude, the ego whose existence is assured absolutely and indubitably, and which serves as the source for all other certain knowledge. Descartes arrived at the absolute and indubitable existence of this ego only by doubting the reality of the entire world outside of it, by bracketing the existence of the external world and limiting his focus to the sphere of appearances themselves. How is it then, Husserl wondered, that Descartes could identify the ego, which remained as the residue of this bracketing, with the pure soul that exists as part of the human being, the person who exists within this same world (1970a, p. 80)? Descartes should have realized that the ego which remains, once the existence of the entire world has been put into doubt, could not itself be a part of this world. It cannot belong to the human being who resides within the sphere of the questionable without itself being rendered questionable as well. If it is to retain its absoluteness and certainty, then it must be of a non-worldly and non-human nature. It cannot be identified with the human soul. Husserl writes: Descartes does not make clear to himself that the ego, his ego deprived of its worldly character through the epoche, in whose functioning cogitationes the world has all the ontic meaning it can ever have for him, cannot possibly turn up as subject matter in the world, since everything that is of the world derives its meaning precisely from these functions— including, then, one’s own psychic being, the ego in the usual sense (1970a, pp. 81–82).

Descartes’ mistake, when phrased in the terminology to which we are becoming accustomed, was to confuse the transcendental ego, the pure ego that remains following the bracketing of the natural world, with the psychological ego, which is a part of this same world. Descartes, like so many of those who came after him, placed the residue from his all-encompassing bracketing of the world back into that same world in an unacknowledged fashion. The importance of this oversight on the part of Descartes, which Husserl labeled here as “the psychologistic falsification of the pure ego” (1970a, p. 78), is that it kept him from understanding and appreciating fully the extraordinary

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breakthrough that he brought about in his turn to subjectivity. Instead of constructing a philosophy upon the ground provided by the study of the constituting functioning of the pure ego, i.e., what we have come to call transcendental phenomenology, Descartes could only be responsible for establishing a “psychologically adulterated transcendentalism” (1970a, p. 83), which continued to presuppose the validity of the natural world as the ground for the psychological ego, even as it tried to place the existence of this world into question. Descartes’ significance, in this vein, was that he was the first, so to speak, to make such a mistake; he set a poor precedent confusing the pure ego, which he had newly discovered, with the worldly ego of psychology with which he was quite familiar. Husserl suggested that it was by being “dominated in advance by the Galilean certainty of a universal and absolutely pure world of physical bodies” in which the ego must be situated in order to exist that Descartes was misled in falsifying the true nature of the pure ego. It was by staying within a Galilean view that Descartes was kept from appreciating fully the “‘Archimedean point’ of any genuine philosophy,” which he had, by all rights, discovered (1970a, pp. 79–80). The question that interests Husserl most throughout this discussion, and that motivates his historical curiosity, is that of what kept thinkers like Descartes from recognizing and appreciating fully the transcendental nature of subjectivity and the non-absolute nature of the psychological subject. Why did Descartes insist on situating the pure ego within the human and personal, and therefore, worldly sphere— psychologistically falsifying its true nature? As we suggested in the above discussion of Descartes’ oversight, the reason is located in the shared and mistaken Galilean presuppositions that they uncritically accepted. Descartes assumed that all questions must refer to the reality of this presupposed world, and that all answers are likewise to be situated within its borders. Thus, the necessity for seeing subjectivity as a worldly reality, and for situating the pure ego inside of the human person. What is taken as beyond question is the existence of this world, independently of and prior to our subjective awareness of it. Once this was assumed, then the horizon for all possible questions was determined as a worldly horizon, and all sciences must necessarily be worldly sciences. Any question concerned with the validity of this horizon appeared nonsensical. How is proof to be provided for something so obvious? And yet the problem, “Hume’s problem” properly speaking (1970a, p.  97), remained that this world can only be known and has only come to be taken for granted as existing through subjectivity. The problem remains that we do not know how it is that we know with such certainty that this world does exist, and exist in such and such (i.e., mathematical causal) fashion. Descartes, no more than Galileo, provided little if any justification for such an assumption, and he did not reflect, as Galileo had not, on the problems that ensued from the lack of such justification. These problems concern the origin of this everyday world in subjectivity and with the recognition of these problems, Husserl notes, “there arises questions of Being in a new and immediately highly enigmatic dimension.” He continues: These questions, too, concern the obviously existing, ever intuitively pre-given world … they are questions of how the object, the pre-scientifically and then the scientifically true object, stands in relation to all the subjective elements which everywhere have a voice in what is taken for granted in advance (1970a, p. 111).

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How was it possible for Descartes not to recognize that “the” world, the existence of which he was taking for granted, was actually a correlate of, or constituted by, subjectivity itself? The questions raised subsequent to the recognition of this oversight were questions concerning the origin in the constituting life of subjectivity of what we referred to previously as the life-world. In order for them not to have been part and parcel of Descartes’ inquiry, in order for him to evade altogether their problematic yet pressing nature, we must assume that the concealment of the life-world brought about by Galileo had remained operative. For Descartes, as well as for Galileo, the life-world remained concealed from view as a problem in and of itself. Had Descartes paused to wonder how he came to know with such certainty that the world of Nature did exist in-itself, he would have become aware of the life-world as itself an achievement, rather than as something that remained inconspicuously operative as the ground for all further inquiry. Had Descartes not gone along naively with Galileo’s concealment of the life-world as an achievement of subjectivity, he would have realized that the absoluteness of the psychological subject was not a given and that it was subjectivity that was given prior to the reality of the world, rather than the other way around. Descartes would have realized that we must begin, before all else, with the question of the relation between the domain of subjectivity and its objects within itself. It is only after we have resolved that question that we may wonder about the nature of the objects and the object world given through this relation. We should recognize in the last few sentences the program of Husserl’s philosophy. The questions that we have raised as having been neglected due to the concealment of the life-world are questions that referred to the constitution of the life-world in the life of what Husserl has referred to as transcendental subjectivity. It is only when the life-world is seen as an achievement rather than as a given that one is then led to look to its origins, and only then that one is led to uncover the constituting function of transcendental subjectivity at play as it were behind the scenes. It is this which Husserl undertook in the Crisis, and which he saw as lacking in the history of philosophy prior to his own development of transcendental phenomenology. With respect to this discovery of transcendental subjectivity, he writes: No objective science, no psychology—which, after all, sought to become the universal science of the subjective—and no philosophy has ever made thematic and thereby actually discovered this realm of the subjective … which is completely closed off within itself, existing in its own way, functioning in all experiencing, all thinking, all life, thus everywhere inseparably involved; yet, it has never been held in view, never been grasped and understood (1970a, p. 112).

It is the main task of the Crisis, as it was of the works preceding it, to hold in view, grasp, and understand the life of transcendental subjectivity. It is here where Husserl departs from the historical legacy of Galileo, and here where transcendental phenomenology offers hope for resolution of the cultural and epistemological crises that resulted from this legacy. Here Husserl refers to “the problem of the life-world” “not as a partial problem” with philosophy, “but rather as a universal problem”—in fact, “the genuine and most universal problem” (1970a, pp. 132–134) for all philosophy. In the text of the

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Crisis, it is through the exposure of the life-world as the problem for philosophy, and then through the resolution of this problem, that the reader is introduced to the territory and approach of transcendental phenomenology. With the acquisition of the transcendental, as we know from our previous discussions, the epistemological impasse left by Descartes is finally overcome. Within the framework of transcendental phenomenology, we replace naturalism as an ontological position with transcendentalism and overcome the epistemological impasses of dualism by overcoming dualism itself. This is achieved in the Crisis, as elsewhere, through the performance of the series of phenomenological reductions. The difference that is introduced in the Crisis is that the reductions are now seen as employed in order to counteract historically sedimented prejudices that we now discover having been operative from the time of Galileo. No longer seen as called forth solely by the nature of the subject matter itself, the reductions play the role on the historical stage of the Crisis of corrective measures utilized in returning philosophy to its proper task: the exposure and study of the historically concealed, constituting life of transcendental subjectivity. The historic reversal of this historical process of concealment is brought about, as Husserl first outlines it in the Crisis, through a two-step process, both of which we know from earlier works. The first step is what he calls in this work “the epoche of objective science” (1970a, p. 135). We are familiar with this step from the psychology lectures as the return to the pre-scientific experiential world or the pre-­ theoretical world. We are also familiar with this step as the return in Ideas II to the world of the personalistic attitude. It is a reduction to the life-world as itself an object for reflection. Husserl refers to it here as an epoche of objective science because in the context of the Crisis, we realize that we can only return to this primordial reality of our everyday experience within the life-world by bracketing all of the purported knowledge that we accumulated through the objective sciences that were responsible for the concealment of this very domain. If we are to turn to the life-world itself as a problem, as a horizon of inquiry, then we must put aside all theories and concepts that were laid over this sphere of experience, behind which it was hidden from view. We must bracket the idea of Nature and its mathematical manifold in returning to the subjective life out of which it was abstracted. While in earlier works this step was seen primarily as a simple turn to pure description of naïve experience, in the Crisis Husserl operates with greater historical sensitivity and redefines this step as an explicit and purposeful suspension of one’s scientific theoretical, historically sedimented, baggage. We can return to our naïve experience within the life-world only by putting out of play the entire history of science which has developed since the time of Galileo, when this world was first forgotten. Once this epoche is performed, we may then take up the life-world in all of its richness and variety in a concrete and purely descriptive, i.e. phenomenological, fashion. The next step is to trace this experience to its origins in subjectivity, to view the life-world as a constituted achievement of the activity of the transcendental or pure ego. This next step is what we already know as the transcendental reduction—a phrase that Husserl uses in this context as well (1970a, p. 151). Once the life-world has been brought out of concealment, we may then turn to the question of its constitution in

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consciousness; the question, that is, of how it came to be for us what it appears to be. In order to answer this question, we must look to the hidden and “anonymous” (1970a, p. 111) life of transcendental subjectivity that is always at work at an implicit, prethematic level. As long as the world was presumed simply to exist on its own and to provide the ontological(-material) ground for subjectivity, it was impossible for us to recognize this hidden subjectivity at play in the constitution of the life-world itself. In turning to transcendental subjectivity as the origin of the life-world, we turn the ontological tables, give priority to transcendental subjectivity, and view the life-world as dependent upon it for its being. With this reversal, we see the life-world as the constituted correlate of the pure ego and we come to a better appreciation of the fundamental role of consciousness in the constitution of our everyday experience in and of the world. This is the step that we know well from Ideas I as the ascent to the transcendental, and which we saw secure a central role in Husserl’s thought since its first official appearance in 1913. With this second and final step, we arrive at the proper attitude and domain for transcendental phenomenology. We are able to take this step because we can no longer continue to take for granted that the world simply is the way it appears to be, and begin to wonder how it has come to be this way. Once such a question is asked, in Husserl’s view, the horizon of the transcendental is laid open and the path of inquiry determined. Since we have discussed both of these steps at length and in some detail in earlier parts of this work, we will not repeat such discussion here. The presentation in the Crisis of the gradual acquisition of the transcendental does not differ significantly from that provided in other works, and we would not benefit much at this point from further reiteration of these themes. The question to which we return at this point is that of the significance of this historical analysis and contextualization of the phenomenological project for the development of a phenomenologically informed psychology. Now that we have been provided with this historical understanding and appreciation of the need for and value of the phenomenological reductions, we may still wonder whether and how they will be employed in the development of psychology. Where does psychology fit within this framework? Why did Husserl refer to psychology as the decisive field in the overcoming of the Galilean legacy, when he has barely mentioned it to this point? How is psychology to fulfill this role in the historical drama that unfolds in the Crisis? How does the science of psychology, in its own relation to transcendental phenomenology, help to alleviate or combat the cultural crisis in which we find ourselves? While we have come to understand how transcendental phenomenology overcame the epistemological crisis of Cartesian dualism, we have yet to discuss in any detail its role in redressing the cultural crisis that also resulted from the misdirection of philosophy and science initiated by Galileo. We shall now turn to these concerns.

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The Crisis: The Inadequacy of the Life-World Our excursion through the historical background for the development of phenomenology has been lengthy. What is its lesson for us, as we struggle to determine the role and nature of a phenomenologically informed psychology? What is it we were attempting to establish through this survey of pre-Husserlian philosophers, and how will it help us to understand better the place of psychology? What we achieved on the surface is a historically sensitive appreciation of the value and importance of the ascent to the transcendental for the resolution of philosophical and epistemological problems handed down to us through the last several hundred years. We came to understand that the question resulting from the assumption of a dualistic framework, the question of a correspondence between the contents of the meant (psychic) sphere and the objects in-themselves of Nature, is a misguided and unnecessary question. It is not so much our task to answer this question, as it is to realize that it is fundamentally the wrong question to ask, which does not have a possible solution. Once we find ourselves asking such a question, we are already traveling down the wrong path, inevitably finding ourselves at a dead end. The initial value of our excursion, then, is that it diverts us from this path; it persuades us that our energies are better spent in exploring the terrain of the life-world in it relation to transcendental subjectivity than in attempting to overcome the epistemological impasse of dualism. We can set aside the worldview of Galileo that was built upon the concealment of the life-world and begin our own researches on the ground provided by the life-­ world that we have now reclaimed. If this were the only result, the only contribution of our last section, it would still be the result of time and energy well spent. The exposure of the concealment of the life-world and its reappropriation by us for these purposes seem to indicate a fundamental redirection of science as well as philosophy. We have, with these insights, overcome what Husserl refers to as “physicalistic objectivism” within science as a result of the “Copernican turn” we made in the history of philosophy (1970a, pp. 191, 199). We now know not to look to the mathematical manifold of Nature existing in itself in order to ground and conduct scientific inquiry, including that of psychology. Following our Copernican turn we know, instead, to look to the structure of the life-world and to its constitution in transcendental subjectivity. It is the life-world that provides the horizon within which all scientific questions are to be framed and within which they are to be brought to resolution. Rather than simply bypassing the sphere of everyday sense experience, all science will have to begin there, viewing its knowledge as constituted achievements within the sphere of the subjective. Having attributed to the reappropriated life-world a primary position within our new, transcendental phenomenological worldview, we now know that the psychology we develop will have to take this life-world as its point of departure. Our psychology, as all science, will have to be grounded in the no longer concealed world of everyday sense experience. This much we can assume to be at least one effect of the Copernican turn for psychology.

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What precisely does this mean? What will be the significance of having our psychology take as its point of departure the no longer concealed life-world? Most obviously, this means that we will not begin with naturalistic presuppositions about the nature of the psychic. We will not begin with the assumption that the psychic is part of Nature, with an underlying material causal substrate. These presuppositions will be set aside along with all of the theories and concepts of objective science as a result of our “epoche of objective science.” We will begin, then, with a purified description of the psychic as it appears to us in everyday sense experience, with naïve description of the psychic as it appears within the life-world. “The first thing we must do,” writes Husserl, “is to take the conscious life, completely without prejudice, just as what it quite immediately gives itself, as itself, to be” (1970a, p. 233). We perform the epoche that returns us to the life-world and then simply describe what we see as belonging to the psychic. We described earlier such a position with respect to psychology in our discussion of both Ideas II and the psychology lectures. In both texts, Husserl suggested that psychology might operate through naive description of the psychic as it appears in the pre-theoretical/personalistic world after being liberated from its naturalistic biases through the implicit de-ontologization of Nature brought about by the Copernican turn to the transcendental within philosophy. We wondered, when discussing these works, whether or not psychology could simply re-arise upon the ground of a rejected naturalism, taking from phenomenology only the right of describing its own subject matter in such a naïve fashion. At the time, we found that such a position with respect to psychology proved to be inadequate once our naïve description of the psychic was brought into confrontation with the intentional nature of consciousness. Once we recognized that the psychic appeared within the life-­ world as intentional in nature, we could no longer remain within the confines of the life-world and found it necessary to ascend to the transcendental attitude in order to remain faithful to our discovery of intentionality. For intentionality, we decided, belongs within a transcendental science. It cannot be described and analyzed completely and coherently within a worldly, psychological discipline. Due to these considerations, the descriptive psychology that took the life-world as its point of departure was eventually rejected in our own presentation in pursuit of the ­transcendental and the establishment of grounding for science in transcendental subjectivity. Within the context of the Crisis, however, this pursuit of the transcendental was already brought to completion. We already agreed that all of philosophy and science must be grounded in transcendental phenomenology. As in Ideas II, we already assumed a transcendental perspective and thus need not be concerned with establishing it explicitly through the discovery of the limits of psychology in relation to intentionality. We might remember, also, that within the context of Ideas II alone the idea of a descriptive and worldly science of the psychic as it appeared within the life-world was not found to be inadequate. Perhaps, we could return to that position with respect to psychology, leaving the ascent to the transcendental beyond the limitations of psychology as the explicit task for philosophers. We now know that once we take a first step along that path, we are committed to following it all the way to

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transcendental subjectivity; once we perform the proper phenomenological reduction, we must see it through to its transcendental conclusion. Perhaps, then, if we are interested in doing psychology rather than philosophy, we should not take this first step toward the transcendental but should remain on the level of the life-world, performing only the epoche of objective science that serves solely to return us to this purified sphere. We recall Husserl’s comment at the outset of the psychology lectures, that as psychologists, we want to remain in the natural attitude. Now that we see how leaving this attitude commits us to a transcendental science, perhaps we should consider returning to it. As psychologists, we are indebted to philosophy for its rescue of the life-world out of its concealment. It may not be incumbent upon us, as psychologists, to take on the life-world as the focus for transcendental problems. These problems fall to philosophy. For psychology, the life-world is not seen as a problem, but is seen instead as the ground or horizon for inquiry. While for philosophy, the life-world is a question, for psychology it is a given. If we can be assured that the question of the life-world will be pursued and resolved by philosophers who operate at the transcendental level, then should not we, as psychologists, simply take the life-world as our given and operate at its worldly level in our studies of the psychic? We stated repeatedly that the psychic is a worldly and constituted domain. As psychologists, it would appear appropriate, in accordance with this realization, to conduct our science at that level. It is for the philosopher to become interested in the constitution of the psychic, as it is for the philosopher to become interested in all aspects of the life-world as constituted realities. It is for the psychologist to describe and analyze this constituted sphere as one domain of the life-world, as one region of reality that has its origins in transcendental constitution. When we divide the labor in this fashion, it appears that psychology must remain within the confines of the life-world in order to be faithful to the nature of its subject matter. Were psychology to ascend to the transcendental along with philosophy, it would replace its subject matter of the constituted and worldly sphere of the psychic with the constituting and non-worldly sphere of transcendental subjectivity. As we know from our repeated battles with psychologism, it should not fall to psychology to be a science of transcendental subjectivity. Thus, it appears that we should conduct our science within the constituted horizon of the life-world. Such a position, with respect to psychology, was suggested within the phenomenological tradition in an explicit fashion by Kockelmans (1967a, b, c, 1972, 1973) and has been further elaborated by his student, Yee (1969). Both of these thinkers argued that the performance of what Husserl called the phenomenological psychological reduction would lead necessarily to the transcendental reduction and would lead us beyond the psychological proper. For this reason, they suggested that if we wish to remain within the domain of the psychic, we do not perform the phenomenological reduction at all, conducting our psychology well within the horizon the life world. Rather than making the Copernican turn to the transcendental itself, psychology leaves that to philosophy and “remains within the realm of the natural attitude” (Kockelmans, 1973, p. 232). “We can explain,” Kockelmans suggests, “the subject matter, the method, and function of phenomenological psychology without

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an overt reference to transcendental problems” (1967a, p. 262). Thus, the psychologist “is completely justified” in remaining within the natural attitude, he argues, “in view of the goal he wishes to achieve” (1972, p. 88)—being that of description and analysis of the psychic as a real “entity in the real world” (1967b, p. 446). In order to conduct psychological inquiries, then, we perform what Yee re-dubs the “life-­ world reduction” (1969) and take as our subject matter the particular constituted domain of the real, the particular entity found in the real world, which is the psychic. In such a view, it is evident that psychology will rejoin the ranks of the other empirical sciences in distancing itself from philosophy and the transcendental. Being a positive science of a worldly entity, it need not “be an empirical science in a way which is essentially different from that which has developed in the physical sciences” (Kockelmans, 1967c, p. 553). Since psychology, like physics, deals with constituted, real entities in the world, it need not be essentially different from physics in its manner of approach. It simply has a different subject matter; it is simply interested in a different region of the real. While this position has been developed explicitly by Kockelmans and Yee, it is also a position that can be found implicit in the view of a number of other thinkers associated to varying degrees with the phenomenological movement (cf., e.g., Creegan, 1948; Oosthuizen, 1970; Stroker, 1983). In the views of these thinkers, what appeared to make this kind of psychology phenomenological is that the psychologist turns to pure, naïve description of the psychic as the initial step in their methodology. The phenomenological method as applied to psychology becomes defined as a “freeing oneself from any preconceptions or presuppositions” concerning one’s subject matter, thus leaving one with a purified field for description of the psychic as it gives itself to experience (Misiak and Sexton, 1973, p. 7). This description serves as the point of departure for further psychological inquiry. We can see how, in such a position, phenomenology is used primarily in a propaedeutic or preparatory fashion, allowing psychologists to acquire a purified subject matter. It is here, however, where the use or influence of phenomenology ends. Our subject matter remains a worldly entity that requires the kind of empirical methods suited to worldly, as opposed to intentional, being. In beginning with naïve description, this psychology finds it possible to emphasize the study of experience; in this way it differs from other, non-phenomenological, psychologies. But throughout, it continues to view this experience as worldly and real, as situated within the constituted horizons of the life-world. This is a position that is perhaps best represented by the thought of MacLeod, of whom Misiak and Sexton had written: “Phenomenology has so far not had a better spokesman among American psychology” (1973, p. 54). A cursory glance at this work enables us to evaluate this position further. MacLeod initially distinguished his phenomenologically informed psychology from more naturalistic psychologies by virtue of the fact that phenomenological psychologists attempted “to liberate their science from some of its theoretical biases” (1947, pp. 193–194n). “The phenomenologist,” that is, “beings his observation of phenomena by suspending his biases, by putting his implicit assumptions in brackets” (MacLeod, 1964, p. 52). It is this bracketing that constitutes the phenomenological method. Once we have

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done so, and have acquired our purified field of phenomena, however, where do we go from there? Is this field of description enough in the carrying out of concrete psychological research? In the past, we always saw this kind of description within positive sciences to followed immediately by explanation; it was always restricted to a preparatory or propaedeutic role. Once we acquired our descriptions, we always felt called to go beyond them to provide an account, an explanation, for them. We find the same to be true of MacLeod, who writes: “Psychological phenomenology is not psychology: it is propaedeutic to a science of psychology. To build a science of psychology one must begin with the phenomenal world. But then one must transcend it” (1964, p. 54). In simply describing the psychic as it appears in everyday experience, we have not yet built a science of psychology. A science must do more than merely describe; it must help us to make sense of, to account for, that which we have described. How does our performance of the epoche of objective science do this? Simply stated, it does not. Once we acquire our data, we must still appeal to some other source as their origin. We must, in terminology to which we have become accustomed, ask the genetic question. How should we go about making sense of these descriptions? What will help us to account for the reality that we find within the life-world that we label as the psychic? We have seen Kockelmans suggest that our psychology need not be “essentially different” from physical science. Does this mean that we may appeal in our psychological explanation to Nature and its causal nexus? Are we back to viewing psychology as analogue to physics, to viewing the psychic as a region within Nature, to Galileo’s mathematical manifold? We know that we cannot expect the psychic to provide its own explanation, nor can we expect psychology to ground itself. This would result, as we have seen several times already, in psychologism. Similarly, we know that we cannot appeal to the transcendental in order to account for the psychic, for this would elevate us to the level of philosophy. It appears that the only possibility remaining would be a return to a modified, perhaps, purified form of naturalism in order to ground the descriptions of the worldly and natural science. This alternative was raised at the end of our last chapter and at the end of the first section of this chapter, when Husserl presented us with the choice between anthropologism and transcendentalism. Perhaps we should preserve the transcendental for philosophy and restore our psychology to its rightful naturalistic framework. Remember that in Formal and Transcendental Logic, Husserl wrote that “I, this human being” am “in a psychophysical causal connexion with the outside world.” Perhaps we should return in our psychology to the psychophysical, causal nexus of Nature. It is precisely this that MacLeod did within his own psychology. As he writes: Phenomenology in psychology can never be a substitute for psychophysics and psychophysiology. Its function is rather to set the initial problem, to define the psychological datum which must then be envisaged in the setting of its physical and physiological correlates (1947, p. 193n).

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While unhappy with such an answer to the genetic question within philosophy when attempting to do epistemology, perhaps there is nothing wrong with such an appeal within psychology. Since the psychic is being viewed as a real and worldly entity, perhaps this kind of appeal to the physical and physiological substrate of consciousness is appropriate. Perhaps this is what it means to study consciousness in its embodied form. One need only consult the work of neuropsychologists, for example, in order to see the profound effect that neurological organic impairments may have on consciousness. Clearly, in cases like these, experience is limited and determined, at least in part, by the nature of the physical substrate underlying it. In the phenomenological literature, Merleau-Ponty (1962, 1983) discussed at length just such a relation between neurology and psychology, pointing to constitutional factors within the body that consciousness cannot simply transcend of its own accord. It is possible that a psychology that claimed to view consciousness within the life-world in its embodied form would have to appeal to psychophysical causal relations existing between the person and the natural world. The result of such an appeal, according to MacLeod, would be as follows: The phenomenological approach in psychology is likely to lead us into psychophysics, into psychophysiology, into social psychology, perhaps even—and I suggest this with great diffidence—into a sophisticated behaviorism (1964, pp. 54–55).

What would make this psychology “sophisticated”? What would set it apart from other, non-phenomenological psychologies would be its emphases on experience, as we noted above. The way in which it set about to make sense of this, however, brings this psychology back into the company of other naturalistic psychologies. As MacLeod concludes: In presenting psychological phenomenology may I repeat that I am not presenting a psychological system, much less a philosophy. I am not even sure I am offering an alternative to behaviorism. I am merely insisting that what, in the old, pre-scientific days, we used to call “consciousness” still can and should be studied (1964, pp. 71–72).

If MacLeod was indeed the most influential phenomenologically informed psychologist in America early on, then it is now understandable how “phenomenology” could become virtually equated with “introspectionism” within American psychological circles. It also becomes understandable, given this assessment of the value of phenomenology for psychology, how authors of psychology text books in personality theory, for example, could include under the heading “Phenomenological Psychology” such figures as Carl Rogers and George Kelley (cf. e.g., Liebert and Spiegler, 1987; Mischel, 1976). In the thought of MacLeod and others of like persuasion, what is accomplished which is of specifically phenomenological import is the acquisition of some room within psychological theory for the appearance of consciousness—consciousness as a natural entity, consciousness as naturalized, but consciousness in some sense as the proper subject matter for psychology. What, in fact, came to characterize a psychology as “phenomenological” within American psychology since the time of MacLeod is just this kind of reference to consciousness or experience (whether it be the psychology of Husserl or of Rogers). Was this, after all, Husserl’s view as well?

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Certainly, Husserl agreed that what we “used to call ‘consciousness’” still can and should be studied; he devoted his career to that task. Yet, the appeal to psychophysical causality as an explanatory mechanism would appear to Husserl to signify a too quick and too complete return to naturalism. It would signify a misunderstanding of the universality of the Copernican turn and its effects, not only for psychology, but also for all positive science. It is fortunate for us that Husserl had the foresight to anticipate this proposed alternative, having enough experience with his audience by 1937 to know the potentialities for misunderstanding that exist within phenomenology. He is quick to reject this position himself as being a further naïve result of the uncritical perpetuation of Galilean presuppositions with respect to the psychic. The psychologist “at first,” Husserl writes, “will probably think that without proclaiming it expressly as a method he has already been quietly practicing the epoche” (1970a, p. 244). To turn toward one’s subject matter, bracket all preconceptions and presuppositions regarding it, and then describe it naively does not seem on the surface to be a very new or novel method. Such a method was utilized by all scientists who do not remain uncritically tied to the work of their predecessors and who allow room for conceptual advance within their fields. As Fouche argued cogently in her article entitled “Is the Phenomenological Reduction of Use to the Human Scientist”? there is nothing exclusively phenomenological about such a procedure. She writes: If the phenomenological human scientist does not bracket the natural attitude but only the presuppositions likely to affect progress in his field, what distinguishes his practice from that of non-phenomenological human scientists and indeed from that of the natural scientist? It is obvious that phenomenologists do not hold a monopoly on the methodological procedure of suspending presupposition or bias. Natural scientists could not make even routine advances in their fields if they did not proceed to some extent at least by setting aside personal prejudice and superstition, and there could be no scientific discoveries without significant paradigm shifts which could not take place if scientists were never brought to a radical questioning of knowledge previously thought secure (1984, p. 109).

The epoche of objective science held by this position to be the essential and sole step of the phenomenological method is something, apparently, which one might very well feel one was doing all long, before ever having read Husserl. If the only significance of this reduction is that one brackets one’s presuppositions regarding one’s subject matter, phenomenological, as it is used in this context, would be better replaced by “thoughtful” or “reflective.” What, then, is left for the phenomenological psychologist to do, except to appeal to psychophysical causation for explanations of the content described? In anticipation of this turn back to Nature, Husserl writes: The habits of thought of a centuries-old tradition are not so easy to overcome, and they make themselves felt even when one expressly renounces them. Inwardly, the psychologist will persist in regarding this whole descriptive psychology as a discipline which is not self-­ sufficient, which presupposes natural science as the science of bodies, and which is at the same time a preliminary step toward a psychophysiologically or possibly psychophysically explanatory natural science. And even if it were accorded an autonomous existence as a purely descriptive psychology, it would still require an “explanatory” psychology alongside

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it … The beginner (and every institute-psychologist is, in terms of his education, a beginner here) will think at first that [what we have described as] pure psychology is simply a matter of a limited set of tasks, a useful but secondary, auxiliary discipline (1970a, pp. 245–246).

This last passage could well have been Husserl’s description of MacLeod’s alternative, had he lived long enough to come into contact with it. We can see that Husserl clearly anticipated a suggestion such as MacLeod’s with respect to the role of descriptive psychology. How did he appraise this solution? He writes: All this appears to be perfectly obvious. Thus one will take it in part as a gross exaggeration, in part as an absurdity, if I say in advance that the properly understood epoche, with its properly understood universality, totally changes all the notions that one could ever have of the task of the psychology, and it reveals everything that was just put forward as obvious to be a naiveté which necessarily and forever becomes impossible as soon as the epoche and the reduction are actually, and in their full sense, understood and carried out (1970a, p. 247).

Apparently, the alternative offered by Kockelmans, MacLeod, and others is only possible on the basis of a naiveté that is challenged and overcome by the actual performance of the reduction. A correct understanding and application of the reduction would make this kind of return to a purified naturalism impossible and would “totally change” the way we view the task, role, and nature of psychology. As in the psychology lectures, it appears that within the transcendental framework of the Crisis we must perform the phenomenological reduction in addition to the epoche of objective science in order to carry out properly phenomenological research within psychology. A psychology that stops short of doing so remains naïve to the actual nature of its subject matter, falsifying its true sense. It remains bound to habits of thought we thought we had already overcome. It would seem we cannot remain within the natural attitude at all, once we grasp the proper sense of the reduction in its full universality. The concept upon which this argument turns is, once again, that of intentionality. To turn toward the psychic as it appears within the context of the life-world is to take up consciousness in its worldly, embodied form. Consciousness, even in its worldly appearance, is intentional in nature. If we are to consider the psychic in its actual appearance, we must recognize its intentional nature and fashion our approach and method accordingly. As we ­realized in our discussion of the psychology lectures, once we actually allow ourselves to describe the psychic as it gives itself to everyday sense experience, purely and naively, we inevitably find ourselves committed to an intentional view of the nature of the psychic. This necessarily has implications for the further development of our psychology. With respect to this discovery of intentionality within the psychic, and its implications for psychology, Husserl comments: Indeed this is, in accord with our whole presentation, the main point, about which one must be perfectly certain before one can even begin. It is only though the universal epoche that one sees, as a thematic field of its own, what pure ego-life actually is: as an intentional life (1970a, p. 245).

A psychology that begins with the life-world as its point of departure soon discovers the need for the phenomenological reduction as its only genuine access to the true being of the psychic, which is that of intentionality. Through the performance

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of the reduction, however, it finds it necessary to leave the ground of the life-world behind, along with the natural attitude. It is only through locating its true ground in the description and analysis of pure subjectivity, as that which remains as the residue of the reduction, that it may view the psychic as it actually is. It may not be adequately clear at this point why this must, in fact, be the case. By way of clarification, Husserl breaks the progression of his thinking involved down into gradual steps. Phenomenological psychology, he writes, “reveals itself, in accord with its sense, in various steps.” The first step that we perform is that of the epoche of objective science, bringing to the psychic a naively descriptive approach that leaves all questions of explanation unanswered. Initially we merely described what we find out there in the life-world in the psychic life of individual subjects. “But,” Husserl suggests: Even at the first step, where one focuses upon individual subjects and must leave the accomplishment of a psychophysical or biological science an open question, one must still painstakingly extract for oneself the meaning of these subjects; one doesn’t obtain this meaning simply by carrying out the behaviorist reductions with which one necessarily began (1970a, p. 247).

Description, as we noted above, does not carry within itself an explication of the meaning of that which is described. A second step must be taken in order to reach such an understanding. “With his first reduction,” Husserl writes, “one has not yet arrived at what is essentially proper to the soul” (1970a, p. 248). In order to arrive at the essence of the soul, we must do more than simply describe the appearance of the psychic within sense experience; we must do more than simply look inward in the sense of introspectionism, into our conscious life. In order to arrive at the essence of psychic life, we must suspend all that is alien to it, all that lies outside of its proper sphere, and consider it solely in its own terms. We shall not reiterate here the body of the discussion of Chap. 5, where we laid out this same argument in more detail. We shall, instead, simply cite evidence of Husserl’s renewed insistence on the performance of the phenomenological reduction within psychology for genuine access to, and full appreciation of, the intentional nature of consciousness. “For the psychologist,” he writes, “as long as he limits himself to pure description, the only simple objects are ego-subjects and what can be experienced ‘in’ these ego-subjects themselves … as what is immanently their own.” We know that what is considered immanently their own are the intentional objects of experience, and that these objects belong to the experiences themselves as constituted correlates. Thus, for pure descriptive psychology, there are no real subjects existing in the natural world, “standing in intentional-real relations to objects that are [also] real in the mundane sense” (1970a, pp. 242–244). Consequently, the kind of approach that was appropriate for such real subjects is not appropriate here. The approach that is appropriate, as Husserl comments, is rather far removed from the psychophysical and behaviorist approaches to consciousness advocated by MacLeod and the others. He writes: “Inner perception” in the sense of genuine psychology, and psychological experience in general, understood as the experience of souls according to their own pure being, is so far from being an immediate and everyday affair, something gained through a simple “epoche”

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at the very beginnings, that it was not possible at all prior to the introduction of the peculiar method of the phenomenological epoche. Accordingly, anyone taking the phenomenological attitude first has to learn to see, gain practice, and then in practice acquire at first a rough and shaky, then a more and more precise, conception of what is essentially proper to himself and others (1970a, p. 248).

It was impossible, Husserl insists, to arrive at a correct understanding of the nature of the psychic prior to the introduction of the phenomenological reduction. The second step of our psychology is to suspend all that is alien to the sphere of the psychic itself through the properly phenomenological reduction in order to arrive at a proper appreciation of internationality. We must leave behind our initial description of the psychic as a constituted reality within the life-world, relating in an external, psychophysical, causal fashion with other constituted realities, in order to penetrate into the “sole genuine ‘inner experience’” that is the intentional life of consciousness. To the reader who considers this to be an unreasonable or overly exacting demand for psychology, Husserl replies: To be sure, this looks like a bad exaggeration, but only to the beginner who is bound to the tradition, who, starting with experiences of the external attitude (the natural, anthropological subject-object attitude, the psychomundane attitude), at first thinks that this is a matter of an obvious, simple “purification” of oneself from one’s load of realistic presuppositions, whereas the psychic experiential content is essentially already known and even expressible in ordinary language. But this is a fundamental error … For the psychologist who has not learned, in the phenomenological sense which makes the true epoche possible, to understand the superficial as such and to inquire into its immense depth-dimensions, all the genuinely psychological apperceptions are lacking and thus also all possibilities of asking genuinely psychological questions (1970a, pp. 248–249).

It is a fundamental error for the beginner to assume that psychology may be conducted within the external attitude of a naturalistic anthropological framework. It is a fundamental error to think that one may arrive at a genuine understanding of the nature of the psychic, while presuming it to relate to its objects in an external and causal fashion. As long as one maintains such a view, one remains bound to the tradition from which one attempted to extricate oneself through the epoche. To view the psychic in such an external fashion is to perpetuate precisely the same realistic presuppositions from which one had presumably just purified oneself. The naturalistic anthropological framework of MacLeod et al., within which we attempted to conduct psychology, is predicated upon the same Galilean presuppositions that we saw Husserl, in our last section, labor to overcome. The phenomenological reduction is required within psychology as a second step in order to overcome these same presuppositions. How else could we assume the psychic to be related to other realities within the life-world in an external, psychophysical causal, manner than to presume that Galileo’s world of pure bodies was a more primary reality than the life-world itself? How else could we have naively taken conscious life to be a real property of the human being, “real in the same sense as his corporeity,” then to assume that it be given in necessary relation to an underlying physical substrate (1970a, p. 233)? If we take the life-world purely as it presents itself to experience— “superficially,” as Husserl wrote above—we find no persuasive evidence for causal

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psychophysical relations underlying the sphere of the psychic. What we find are internal, intentional relations of meaning. We find experience and its objects related inseparably within their realm of experience itself. To situate experience within a naturalistic anthropological subject and to situate its objects outside of this subject is to appeal implicitly to the Galilean view rejected above. This is the same mistake uncovered within the Cartesian project earlier in this chapter. When we take the life-­ world on its own terms, as it gives itself to experience, we are not confronted with its objects. What we are presented with instead is a life-world as the realm of meanings constituted by consciousness, and consciousness itself as the intentional medium for constitution. The anthropological subject inside of which experience is thought to take place must be viewed as a residue of the Galilean assumptions of which the beginner has yet to purify themselves fully. Accordingly, Husserl insists: Thus the alleged “purification” … makes the psychic accessible for the first item, brings its own being and everything “involved” in it into view for the first time, only if one penetrates from the externalized internationalities into the internal ones which constitute the others intentionally. Only in this way does one come to understand what psychological analysis actually means, and conversely what psychological synthesis actually means, and to understand the gulf of meaning which separates these from what one was able to understand by analysis and synthesis through the sciences of the external attitude (1970a, p. 249).

The intentional real experiences of an anthropological subject as described and analyzed within the natural attitude must be replaced within psychology by the intentional constitutive experiences of a pure subject as described and analyzed within the phenomenological attitude. As we found it necessary to do in our discussion of the psychology lectures, we must move from the personal attitude that remained natural to the fully phenomenological attitude in order to escape fully from the naturalistic-objectivistic-physicalistic-Galilean tradition. As we saw with psychologism, we must overcome Cartesianism within psychology as well as within philosophy. Otherwise, Husserl remarks, “nothing more has been achieved than sense-distorting applications of the first results of the genuine intentional description to the old psychology” (1970a, p. 250). While this may have been exactly what Kockelmans and MacLeod had in mind, it is clear that it is not enough for Husserl to allow for some room within psychology for consciousness, if its nature is then going to be misunderstood and falsified. A true psychology of consciousness must be built upon the performance of the phenomenological reduction as the only genuine access to intentional constitution. As we know from our discussion of the last chapter, however, such a turn to subjectivity as intentional and constitutive in nature may not remain, even for psychologists, on the level of the psychic as a worldly reality. To perform this second step of the phenomenological reduction, even in its phenomenological psychological form, is also to commit oneself to the transcendental reduction of transcendental philosophy. Intentionality is necessarily a transcendental concept. It was precisely for this reason that Kockelmans (1967a) and Yee (1969) decided not to pursue the phenomenological reduction within psychology. Yet for Husserl, it is clear that this still has to be the third step in the development of our psychology. As soon as the psychic is recognized as intentional and constitutive in nature, the life-world becomes once

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again a problem, and an ascent to the transcendental is required as its solution. We can no longer take the life-world as our given once we acknowledge its origins in the constituting activity of subjectivity. We must, at that point, view the life-world instead in its character as transcendental achievement. If we are also to avoid psychologism within our psychology, we know that we cannot continue to view the consciousness that constitutes the life-world as its correlate to be a worldly, psychic subjectivity. Having in a sense lost the life-world in its role as ground and horizon for inquiry, we have also lost our hold on consciousness in its worldly and embodied form. The life-world is a constituted correlate of transcendental, as opposed to, psychological subjectivity. Recalling the arguments of our last chapter, it should not strike us as too surprising that Husserl proposed the transcendental reduction as a necessary step for psychology, as he did within the section of the Crisis with which we have been concerned over the last several pages, entitled: “The danger of misunderstanding the ‘universality’ of the phenomenological-psychological epoche. The decisive significance of the correct understanding” (1970a, p. 244). In bringing this section to its conclusion, he writes: Thus we see with surprise, I think, that in the pure development of the idea of a descriptive psychology … there necessarily occurs a transformation of the phenomenological-­ psychological epoche and reduction into the transcendental; and we see that we have done and could do nothing else here but repeat in basic outlines the considerations that we had to carry out earlier in quite another interest, i.e., in the interest not of a psychology as a positive science but of a universal and then transcendental philosophy (1970a, p. 256).

Even when we are interested in developing psychology as a positive science, we must perform the transcendental reduction. This is not a step to be reserved solely for philosophical interests. Yet it is a step that recapitulates the entire progression to transcendental phenomenology carried out in our last section. Why could we do nothing else but repeat that same progression here? Why must psychology ascend to the same level as philosophy, acquiring for its own, presumably worldly purposes the transcendental attitude and domain? When we began this section of our text, we commented that the psychology that we thought we could develop within the horizon of the life-world would be grounded in the transcendental framework achieved in the first part of the Crisis. In actuality, however, when we went about developing such a psychology of the natural attitude, the transcendental framework assumed was not found operative in any relevant or significant fashion. The MacLeod example made clear how easily we fell prey to the same realist presuppositions that we fought so hard to overcome in our last section. Had the transcendental perspective truly been operative, such a relapse into naturalism would have been avoided. It is evident, then, that for psychology not to remain naively bound to naturalism it must have explicit recourse to the transcendental perspective as established in the first part of the Crisis. Otherwise, as we saw, it continues to operate on the basis of the Galilean presuppositions that philosophy appeared to have already overcome. The phenomenological reductions are historically required, not only for philosophy, but also for psychology, if psychology is to escape from “the habits of thought of a centuries-old tradition.” If psychology is to

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integrate and make adequate use of the Copernican turn brought about by philosophy, it must situate itself explicitly within the transcendental context of phenomenological philosophy. In order to do this, it must ascend to the transcendental along with philosophy. Not to take this additional step is to remain, instead, Galilean and Cartesian in its orientation; it is to remain, so to speak, pre-Husserlian. Yet, was this not already achieved through the overturning of the Galilean tradition by the ascent to the transcendental within philosophy? Was this not what made it possible for our psychology to take the life-world as its point of departure? It is important to remember, however, that within a transcendental framework, the life-­ world is a constituted correlate of consciousness, rather than its ground. For the phenomenological psychologist who is situated fully within the transcendental framework, the life-world may serve only as their point of departure. For the psychologist, as well as for the philosopher, while the life-world is where one must begin, it in no way is where one may stop. It must be seen as constituted by transcendental subjectivity (cf. Biemel, 1970, p. 170; de Boer, 1978, pp. 424–425). It is required for the psychologist also to trace the life-world back to its origins in transcendental constitution. For this, the transcendental reduction is the necessary tool, even apparently for phenomenological psychology. So it is that psychology must repeat the same considerations that we carried out earlier in pursuit of philosophical interests. Psychology, too, must ascend to the level of the transcendental in order to break away from its own Galilean-Cartesian heritage. It must do this in order to replace its inherited framework of naturalism with the newly discovered framework of transcendentalism. We can say that psychology’s appeal to the fully transcendental reduction is also historically constituted. Only in this way will psychology be able to follow along with philosophy as it departs from the Cartesian path. Yet, our realization of the historical necessity of this transcendental path for psychology leaves us, not surprisingly, with several questions. Does this path not elevate psychology beyond its proper attitude and subject matter? Does it not result in psychology’s abandonment of the psychological? How has psychology not become, in the process, transcendental philosophy? And would such a transformation not lead us back, yet again, to psychologism? Is there to be any difference between transcendental philosophy and, what we might now refer to as a “transcendental psychology” (1970a, p. 257)? These are the kinds of questions that shall finally be resolved in our next section.

The Crisis: The Notion of the Return The life-world has proven to serve inadequately as the ground for the development of a phenomenological psychology. The psychic may not be situated simply within the constituted horizon of the life-world, as the life-world must be viewed as its intentional correlate. As we saw clearly in the examples provided by the work of Kockelmans and MacLeod, any attempt to describe and analyze the context of the psychic sphere within the natural attitude would result necessarily in a relapse into

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naturalism. Having tied naturalism to Galileo’s forgetting and the resultant concealment of the life-world, we cannot, unless we are to revert to a pre-Husserlian position, allow for such a revival of Galilean presuppositions concerning the nature of the psychic. If we are not to give in to these “temptations” (1970a, p. 263), then, apparently, we must include the transcendental reduction in the methodology of the psychologist, as well as the philosopher. The epoche of objective science is not enough, for it allows for a quick and complete return to Nature as the ground for the psychic. The performance of this reduction alone is not sufficient for overcoming the Galilean tradition, since it results in psychology’s “obvious” appeal to psychophysics and psychophysiology for its theoretical and explanatory framework. Unless the life-world is viewed in its proper role as correlate of constituting consciousness, it very easily becomes concealed once again and is replaced by Nature and its mathematical, causal nexus. If the life-world is taken as a given for psychology, its roots in transcendental constitution are forgotten, and the psychic continues to be viewed as a real part of the real world. This is not, in Husserl’s view, the way the psychic is truly given to experience, nor is it, in Husserl’s view, the way it should be described and analyzed within psychology. With this separation of psychology and the psychic from the real world, however, have we not equated the psychic with the transcendental and lost our subject matter of the psychic as a worldly and constituted domain? Why would psychology have to duplicate the accomplishments of philosophy in order to do psychology? Is not psychology a worldly science concerned with a worldly subject matter? Has Husserl not repeatedly insisted that psychology remain a positive science in all of its forms, and did he not insist in his psychology lectures that it remains, for this reason, within the natural attitude? As early as the Logical Investigations, Husserl insisted that a transcendental psychology remained a psychology and was therefore unfit for philosophical purposes, as we recall from our discussion in Chap. 1. How is the transcendental psychology that utilizes the transcendental reduction any different from transcendental philosophy? Is not equating the psychic with the transcendental in this fashion ultimately psychologistic? Was Heidegger not right after all? In order to resolve these questions, we must take into account an aspect of Husserl’s work that is otherwise easily forgotten or overlooked, an aspect that had a strong influence on both the style and content of his writing. It is the aspect that we referred to previously as his pedagogical interest. We saw how, in the past, Husserl initiated his reader into the phenomenological method and terrain on the level of the psychic, only then, as a second step, to raise the level of analysis and discourse to that of the transcendental. He did so out of his pedagogical concern to elevate his reader beyond their own implicit presuppositions, presuppositions that we know Husserl shared at the outset of his own intellectual career. We saw this pedagogical strategy at work in Ideas I and Husserl alluded to it at the close of his psychology lectures also, suggesting that they serve the function of preparing the reader for the further ascent to the transcendental. We now know this natural inclination with respect to the subjective actually to be a residue of our Galilean-Cartesian heritage. Husserl repeatedly stressed, as we witnessed, how difficult it is to overcome this heritage and its naturalistic assumptions in a definitive fashion. It is for this reason

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that he calls this pedagogical strategy into play again in the remainder of the text of the Crisis following the overcoming of Cartesianism in philosophy. Following our recognition of the need for a phenomenological approach in order to resolve the Cartesian impasse, we turn first to psychology. It is true that we already argued for and justified our ascent to the transcendental through our historical survey of pre-phenomenological philosophy. We settled the issue of the necessity of a transcendental origin for the life-world two sections ago in our own text, and without a single reference to psychology. What is to assure us that this solution will not be interpreted in terms of a naturalistic psychological framework, and thus, psychologistically? What is to assure Husserl that his audience will not interpret his transcendental solution as pertaining to a real property of psychic, worldly being, as Heidegger was seen to do in our last chapter? This happened repeatedly in the series of misunderstandings surveyed within this text. Husserl was aware of the possibility for such a misunderstanding, not only from seeing it actualized by Heidegger and others, but by his own example. He did exactly that in his own early, pre-transcendental period. It had been his experience that whenever reference was not made directly to the psychological problematic in his writings, his results had been misinterpreted psychologistically. Such was the hold of the Galilean tradition. How was Husserl to keep his audience from this kind of mistake? Husserl only came to realize the need for a transcendental reduction and transcendental grounding of science through his own insight into the limitations of psychology. It is necessary, he seemed to feel, for his audience to follow this same path, if they are not to duplicate his own, earlier, mistakes. As de Boer explains in the following, Husserl decided that a “pedagogical preparation” was in order: As I see it, this personal history, this ‘way from psychology’ that Husserl himself took, was determinative for his presentation of transcendental phenomenology. Husserl was himself aware of what a long way he had come. How could the new insight that he had gained only after years of intense study and a personal crisis best be presented? … Could Husserl, who had gone through such a laborious struggle, expect his readers and students to understand this radical turn quickly and easily? If this was his original expectation, the way Ideen I was received by his students and his friends … must have stripped him of this illusion … A pedagogical preparation is necessary if we are to be able to understand transcendental phenomenology. Husserl looked more and more to pure phenomenological psychology to accomplish this goal (1977c, pp. 434–436).

It is just such an appeal to pure phenomenological psychology that Husserl made in the remainder of the text of the Crisis following his rescue of the life-world from its concealment and the discovery of its roots in transcendental constitution. The historical survey that we conducted in the second section of this chapter is concluded in that portion of the Crisis (Part IIIA), entitled, “The Way into Phenomenological Transcendental Philosophy by Inquiring Back from the Pre-­ given Life-World” (1970a, p. 103). The next portion (Part IIIB), which concludes the formal text of the Crisis and from which we drew our citations for our last section of this chapter, is entitled, “The Way into Phenomenological Transcendental Philosophy from Psychology” (1970a, p. 191). These two parts, taken together, constitute the part of

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the text (Part III) entitled, “The Clarification of the Transcendental Problem and the Related Function of Psychology” (1970a, p. 102). If the questions that were raised at the beginning of this section are to be answered, the function of psychology, in terms of both Husserl’s overall project and his pedagogical preparation for it, must be clarified. We begin with the question that Husserl imagined being on the mind of his reader as they reached the conclusion that a transcendental philosophy that utilizes a “purely mental approach to the world” is, in fact, required in order to overcome Cartesianism within philosophy. The basic question is this: if transcendental philosophy “had to deal with the mental, why did it not turn to the psychology that had been practiced so diligently for centuries” (1970a, p. 201)? That is, if we were to turn from the life-world back to its origins in subjectivity, why would we not do so through what we already know to be the science of subjectivity, i.e., psychology? Does not such a turn to the subjective require a psychological discipline? We came across this question earlier when wondering if the transcendental ego did not properly belong to me, this human being? Would not the description and analysis of the subjective constitution of the life-world, which we are pursuing as the ground for all positive science, come about “only through a genuine psychology”? The phenomenologically naïve reader must surely wonder why such an appeal to psychology would not be the “obvious” choice (1970a, p. 202). Husserl’s initial response to this question is as follows: The first answer to this question is that transcendental philosophy … quite apart from concern about psychologism, had reason enough not to hope for any counsel from psychology. This was due to psychology itself and to the fateful, erroneous path forced upon it by the peculiarity of the modern idea of an objectivistic universal science more geometrico, with its psychophysical dualism. In the following I shall try to show … that it is precisely this restriction placed upon psychology, which falsifies its meaning and to the present day has kept it from grasping its peculiar task, that bears the primary responsibility for the fact that transcendental philosophy found no way out of its uncomfortable situation and was thus caught in the concepts and construction it used to interpret its … empirical observations, concepts, and constructions, which are completely devoid of any legitimation from original self-evidence. If psychology had not failed, it would have performed a necessary mediating work for a concrete, working transcendental philosophy (1970a, pp. 202–203).

Husserl’s first answer, then, is that transcendental philosophy could not appeal to psychology in order to investigate the constitution of the life-world due to the falsification of the nature of the subjective within psychology. Once psychology had modeled itself after physics and naturalized consciousness, it had no way of accommodating the intentional view of subjectivity required by transcendental philosophy. While it may appear that psychology would be an obvious choice, it cannot fulfill this function because it had followed the equally obvious path chosen by Galileo and Descartes. It was trapped within a Cartesian view. Being a science grounded in dualistic and physicalistic assumptions, psychology could not be called upon to resolve the epistemological and philosophical problems resulting from dualism and physicalism. As Husserl writes:

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Psychology failed … because, even in its primal establishment as a new kind of [science] alongside the new natural science, it failed to inquire after what was essentially the only genuine sense of its task as the universal science of psychic Being. Rather, it let its task and method be set according to the model of natural science or according to the guiding idea of modern philosophy as objective and thus concrete universal science—a task which, of course, considering the given historical motivation, appeared to be quite obvious (1970a, p. 203).

Transcendental philosophy could not “hope for any counsel” from existing psychology because it remained naively pre-transcendental and tied to the naturalistic worldview handed down from Galileo. This psychology, as we remarked above, would have to be considered a part of the “transcendental problem” (1970a, p. 204); it could not its solution. Historically, then, psychology was ill suited to perform the task that we thought it might tackle as its own. Historically, it was misguided and misdirected by the prevailing Galilean worldview to falsify and misunderstand the true nature of its subject matter and its task. Psychology has naively followed philosophy down the path of dualism and, thus, provides no help for Husserl in his project of overcoming it. “Thus,” he concludes: The history of psychology is actually only a history of crisis. And for this reason psychology could also not aid in the development of a genuine transcendental philosophy, since this was possible only after a radical reform through which psychology’s essentially proper task and method were clarified through the deepest sort of reflection upon itself. The reason for this is that the consistent and pure execution of this task had to lead, of itself and of necessity, to a science of transcendental subjectivity and thus to its transformation into a universal transcendental philosophy (1970a, p. 203).

Yet it is clear from this passage and the others cited above that Husserl held that a properly directed and conducted psychology could aid in the development of a genuine transcendental philosophy. As Husserl’s imagined reader might ask, if the existing, naturalistic psychology “no longer sufficed” for the resolution of our transcendental problem, why did transcendental philosophy “not work out a better psychology” (1970a, p. 201), a psychology that did not perpetuate the mistakes of its predecessor? It became Husserl’s task in the remainder of the text of the Crisis to do just that: to attempt to develop a better psychology, more appropriate for the study of the subjective constitution of the life-world. By way of pedagogical preparation, Husserl laid out the guidelines for the development of a phenomenologically informed psychology as a first attempt to resolve the transcendental problem on the level of a worldly, positive discipline. Since it is our natural inclination to view the subjective constitution of the life-world initially as a psychological phenomenon, we should design and develop a psychological discipline better suited for this task than the existing naturalistic psychology. It is in pursuit of this goal that Husserl ran though the arguments presented in our last section in this part of the Crisis, rejecting a naturalistic anthropological approach to subjectivity in favor of a phenomenological psychological approach (1970a, p. 235). This psychology will begin with a purified description of the psychic as it appears within the world of everyday sense experience acquired through the performance of the epoche of objective science. It then

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limits itself to that which appears within the sphere of the psychic, bracketing all that lies outside of it through the performance of the phenomenological psychological reduction to the personal attitude (1970a, pp. 236, 323). As we know from our last section, however, the performance of this phenomenological psychological reduction leads necessarily to the transcendental reduction, even within the confines of our psychology (1970a, p. 256). A psychology that attempted to remain at the level of the phenomenological psychological reduction would be guilty of misunderstanding the universality of the reduction and remain tied to naturalism. Husserl outlines in the Crisis, as in the psychology lectures, a phenomenological approach to the psychic that finds it necessary, in order to remain faithful to the essence of the subjective, to undergo the radical reform of the transcendental turn. The concept upon which the argument turns is once again that of intentionality. When we undertake the task of working out a better psychology, we are confronted immediately with the determination of the essence of the subjective as the first step in the delineation of our subject matter. In order to develop our psychology, we must decide the question of the nature of the psychic. For Husserl, of course, this question was already settled in advance. He writes: We can already say in advance, on the basis of insight, that the psychic, considered purely in terms of its own essence, has no [physical] nature, has no conceivable in-itself in the natural sense, no spatiotemporally causal, no idealizable and mathematizable in-itself, no laws after the fashion of natural laws … in spite of all the self-misunderstandings of empirical … psychology (1970a, p. 222).

Regardless of the claims of the existing psychology, the psychic simply cannot be situated within the mathematical causal nexus of Nature and cannot be understood on the basis of natural laws. When we turn to subjectivity as the sphere in and through which the life-world is constituted, we do not find merely one more reality, one more real (i.e., constituted) entity, analogous to the objects found within the life-world. As we discovered in our discussion of the psychology lectures, a complementary abstraction of the psychic, analogous to that performed by the physical sciences, stops short of recognizing the constitutive nature of intentionality. For this reason, an “exact” psychology “as an analogue to physics” was, in Husserl’s view, “an absurdity” (1970a, p. 223). “A psychology derived from an abstraction which is parallel” to that of the physicist, he wrote, “is impossible in principle” (1970a, p. 231). Subjectivity cannot be described and analyzed in worldly, i.e., natural scientific, terms. It is intentional, and therefore, transcendental in nature. For psychology to study the subjective constitution of the life-world, it must therefore accept the act of constitution to be definitive of its subject matter. The act of constitution, as shown previously, is intentional and transcendental in nature. Being world constituting, it cannot be worldly. Thus, psychology, in its efforts to remain faithful to the essence of its subject matter, finds itself driven beyond the original, worldly horizon of the positive discipline it thought itself to be, to the radically new and different horizon of the transcendental. It cannot remain a worldly discipline. “There can no longer be a descriptive psychology,” writes Husserl, “which is the analogue of a descriptive natural science” (1970a, p. 223). Psychology

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must transcend the boundaries of the natural sciences and become a transcendental discipline, leaving the natural attitude behind in its recognition that, as intentional, subjectivity requires a radically new kind of attitude and science. While “as a human being and a human soul, I first become a theme for psychophysics and psychology,” it soon becomes evident that “in a new and higher dimension I become a transcendental theme” (1970a, p. 205). At this stage, psychology must employ the transcendental reduction in order to achieve the “definitive removal of the objectivistic ideal from the science of the soul” (1970a, p. 257). In addition to recapitulating the history of Husserl’s own intellectual development, as tracked in our own work, this progression allows us to understand better the position of the psychology lectures. When we begin to develop our psychological discipline, we assume that, as psychologists, we will remain within the natural attitude. It is only in the course of our phenomenological researches into the essence of the psychic that we discover the inadequacy of that attitude for a full appreciation of the intentional nature of subjectivity and are driven thereby to ascend to the transcendental. It is in precisely this way that the psychology lectures, along with the section of the Crisis with which we are now concerned, are to serve their pedagogical function. They begin with the reader’s natural inclination, addressing them at the level of their own implicit presuppositions, but then expose those presuppositions as inadequate and lead the reader beyond them to the new territory of phenomenology. They function pedagogically by pulling the reader out of the natural attitude with which they are familiar and in which they began their phenomenological inquiry into the transcendental attitude required for genuine phenomenological work. It was in this sense that the psychology lectures prepared the way for the eventual ascent to the transcendental; had we not recognized at their close that a phenomenological psychology at the level of the personal attitude was not sufficient for our purposes, we would miss this extremely important point. A phenomenological psychology that attempts to operate pre-transcendentally must confront and acknowledge its limits and its impossibility; otherwise it would not fulfill its pedagogical function of leading us to the transcendental reduction. The phenomenological psychology that is presented initially in the Crisis is meant to serve this purpose. It prepares us pedagogically for the turn to the transcendental as a way of overcoming the limits of a natural, even if non-naturalistic, psychology. This is not merely the case, however, for the imagined individual reader. This was also the case historically for Husserl in his own development. We can now view his work in the Logical Investigations as his initial attempt to work out a better psychology, more appropriate to the task of studying intentionality. It was through this attempt that Husserl recognized the inherent limitations of a psychological approach to intentionality and the subsequent necessity of the transcendental turn. It is, thus, in the history of philosophy, as well as in the education of the individual reader, that psychology serves such a preparatory function. It is for this reason that psychology comes to be viewed in the Crisis as the “truly decisive field” in the context of Husserl’s overall project of overcoming Cartesianism (1970a, p. 208). By beginning as a worldly and objectivistic science, tied historically to naturalism, and “then becoming transcendental” through the inner necessity of recognizing the

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intentional constitutive nature of subjectivity, psychology “bridges the gap” between its Cartesian past and its transcendental future (1970a, p. 208n). It is in the context of the development of a genuine psychology that the transcendental turn is discovered as the necessary step in overcoming Cartesianism. By making this discovery, psychology settled the question of direction for both itself and philosophy. Psychology provides the field upon which the battle between naturalism and transcendentalism is to be fought. For this reason, Husserl described it as the “place of decisions” (1970a, p. 241). It is the place of decisions because it is here that the fork in the historical road is located, here where the two paths diverge. We choose our path on the basis of what we determined the essence of the subjective to be. An intentional constitutive view commits one to the path of transcendentalism. It is a choice of where psychology will look in order to ground its explanations and theories, how it will choose to answer what we have referred to previously as the genetic question. Will psychology turn to the psychophysics and psychophysiology as Kockelmans and MacLeod had, or will it turn to the constituting activity of transcendental subjectivity? What will we consider to be the horizon for psychological description and analysis? As Husserl notes, the “way into phenomenological transcendental philosophy from psychology” down which we have just been led brings us into direct confrontation with this question. It clarified for us the nature of our options and their implications for both psychology and philosophy. He writes: This important supplement to our systematic expositions clarified the essential difference between the essentially limited thematic horizon, beyond which a psychology on the basis of the naïve having of the world (i.e., any psychology of the past prior to transcendental phenomenology) cannot think in principle … and, on the other hand, the new thematic horizon which a psychology receives only when the transcendental, coming from transcendental phenomenology, flows into psychic Being and life, i.e., only when naiveté is overcome … With this the alliance between psychology and transcendental philosophy is illuminated and understood in a new way; and at the same time we are provided with a new guideline for understanding the failure of psychology throughout its whole modern history, over and above everything we have attained in our earlier systematic considerations by way of motives of revaluating it. Psychology had to fail because it could fulfill its task, the investigation of concrete, full subjectivity, only through a radical, completely unprejudiced reflection, which would then necessarily open up the transcendental-subjective dimension (1970a, p. 211).

Our attempt at developing a better psychology brought us to the realization that we must overcome our naiveté with respect to the nature of subjectivity. It is incumbent upon us, whether we are psychologists or philosophers, to make the Copernican turn to the transcendental, committing ourselves in the process to the path of transcendentalism. Psychology has failed throughout its whole modern history, according to Husserl, because it has not yet recognized the need for this turn to the transcendental. It had to fail because it had yet to acquire direct access to this domain of subjectivity. For psychology to develop in accord with its own inner necessity, as a genuine psychology, it must settle this question in favor of the transcendental. Philosophy will then follow upon its heels.

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Yet, lest we forget, there were reasons why psychology had not pursued this path, even in our own earlier thinking. If psychology is to ascend to the transcendental along with philosophy, does it cease thereby to be psychology? Does it not become transcendental philosophy itself? Even if the decision of choice of paths is made within psychology and psychology leads the way to the transcendental, will it not become transcendental philosophy as a result? How would this not result in psychologism? We argued long and hard to distinguish between the psychological ego and transcendental ego, the ego of psychology and that of transcendental phenomenology. If psychology is to employ the transcendental reduction as the third step in its own methodology, will we not thereby erase this crucial difference? Will we not be doing a psychology of the transcendental ego? Did we not criticize Descartes for attempting such a thing? At first it appears that Husserl will simply acknowledge this identification of the psychological with the transcendental, agreeing that once psychology employs the transcendental reduction, it becomes transcendental philosophy. Perhaps this is the only way in which we can remove naturalism from psychology once and for all. He writes: The surprising result of our investigation can also, it seems, be expressed as follows: a pure psychology as positive science, a psychology which would investigate universally the human beings living in the world as real facts in the world, similarly to other positive sciences … does not exist. There is only a transcendental psychology, which is identical with transcendental philosophy (1970a, p. 257).

So it appears that in order to overcome in a radical and definitive fashion the Cartesian dualistic impasse, psychology must itself become transcendental philosophy. However, the very next sentence in the text, which is of crucial importance for our purposes here, is as follows: “We must now consider in what sense this needs to be corrected” (1970a, p. 257). It only appears at first that this will be the end result of our development of a phenomenologically informed psychology. But to assume that psychology is identical with transcendental philosophy is mistaken. Husserl provides the following correction: It would naturally be wrong to say that there can be no psychology as a science on the ground of the pre-given world, i.e., a science dealing straightforwardly with human beings … in the world. It is certain that no psychology in this sense is possible without an inquiry into what is purely essentially proper to psychic Being; and it is equally certain that the latter is not something to be had gratis, so to speak, as something one need only look at, something that is already there but simply unnoticed. Everything that is “there” in this way belongs to the world as what is apperceived by him who sees it in this way and falls along with everything else within the domain of what is to be reduced. But if the universal epoche, which encompasses all having-consciousness-of-the-world, is necessary, then the psychologist loses, during this epoche, the ground of the objective world. Thus pure psychology in itself is identical with transcendental philosophy as the science of transcendental subjectivity. This is unassailable. But now let us remember what we have learned before about the phenomenological reduction as a reorientation of the natural mundane attitude. We can return from the reorientation into the natural attitude; as we said in advance, psychology, like every other science and every life-vocation, has its vocational times and the epoche belonging to these vocational times (1970a, pp. 257–258).

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Psychology is a positive and worldly science of human beings in the world. It operates on the ground the pre-given world. This is its task and its function. It does not give up or lose this role when brought to the recognition of its own limitations with respect to intentionality, when it recognizes the need for the transcendental turn. Apparently, psychology will make this turn, but will not forget its worldly nature and function. It will ascend to the transcendental but then “return” to the natural attitude in order to carry out its properly psychological tasks. In order to break away from its own Cartesian heritage, it will employ the transcendental reduction and purify itself of objectivism. But in order to resume its properly psychological, as opposed to philosophical, interest it will “return” to the natural attitude and its pre-given world. Psychology leads us to the attitude and domain of the transcendental philosophy, but then is called back to the natural attitude by its particular function and role. Writes Husserl: Thus pure psychology is and can be nothing other than what was sought earlier from the philosophical point of view as absolutely grounded philosophy, which can fulfill itself only as phenomenological transcendental philosophy. But I as a pure psychologist or transcendental philosopher have not thereby ceased being a human being; no more has the actual being of the world and of all men and other beings in the world changed in the least. And I have also not ceased having this particular worldly interest which bears the title: universal science of human beings in respect to their psychic being, both individual-psychic and social; I thus return to the natural attitude, changing my vocation: I take up my work as a psychologist on the ground of the world (1970a, pp. 259–260).

How are we to understand this notion of a return from the transcendental to the natural attitude? Husserl provides us with two important clues in the passages above. The first is the notion of “vocation” and “vocational time.” We spoke of this same issue previously in the less formal language of interest. At those times, we wondered whether it was the nature of our interest at any given time that determined the nature of our subject matter, an interest in psychology determining that consciousness was viewed as worldly and psychic in nature, an interest in philosophy determining that it was to be viewed as non-worldly and transcendental. The problem raised at that time was the question of whether or not a difference of this sort, apparently grounded only in a difference of interest, was substantive enough to overcome objections of psychologism. If consciousness can be viewed equally well as psychic within psychology as it can be viewed as transcendental within philosophy, then are they not really the same? We seem to have a similar situation here, only phrased in terms of vocation. The vocation of the psychologist requires that they be interested in the universal science of human beings in respect to their psychic being, both individual psychic and social. In order to fulfill this vocational goal, the psychologist must operate on the ground of the pre-given world and within the natural attitude. Therefore, in order to be a psychologist, one must return from the transcendental attitude required by the philosophical and epistemological considerations entailed in an intentional view of consciousness. The psychologist, that is, has no interest in remaining within the sphere of transcendental subjectivity, since their subject matter is that of the psychic. The psychologist, thus, changes their vocation back to that of psychologist in returning to the natural attitude with which they began.

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We were not aware, however, that we had changed our vocation from that of psychology in the first place. This was clarified by Husserl’s second clue provided in the passages above. He stated in the last passage cited, that pure psychology “can fulfill itself only as phenomenological transcendental philosophy.” Likewise, the title of Part IIIB of the Crisis is: “The Way into Phenomenological Transcendental Philosophy from Psychology.” What we overlooked to this point is that when psychology confronts its own limits with respect to intentionality and turns to the transcendental reduction as the method required for a full appreciation of the intentional nature of consciousness, it does cease thereby to be psychology. In turning from the psychological ego to the transcendental ego, psychology does give itself over to philosophy and gives up, at least temporarily, its properly psychological interests. It is only in this fashion that Husserl can avoid the psychologism that would otherwise result from the identification of pure psychology with transcendental philosophy. It falls to the philosopher to transcend the limitations of psychology by performing the transcendental reduction. To the extent that we have done so in our attempt to develop a better psychology, we have set aside our vocation as psychologists and temporarily become philosophers. The task of grounding psychological explanation and theory in the constituting activity of transcendental subjectivity is philosophical in nature; it is not an appropriate task for the psychologist. Were the psychologist to attempt to do so while remaining a psychologist, they would be guilty of psychologism. It is for this reason that the psychologist changes their vocation from that of psychologist to that of philosopher, only then to have to change back to that of psychologist following the transcendental turn. This is, indeed, a complicated position that requires close attention, if we are not to lose our way. It is a position that is substantially different from the position suggested earlier in which the nature of our subject matter was determined simply and solely on the basis of our disciplinary interest. The psychological ego remains distinguished from the transcendental ego in the manner articulated at the end of Chap. 5. The psychologist retains a positive and worldly interest in the psychological ego as belonging to the human being living in the world, while the transcendental ­philosopher retains a purely philosophical interest in the transcendental ego as the non-­worldly origin of the constitution of the world. The picture becomes more complicated when we realize that the psychologist must appeal to the constituting activity of the transcendental ego in the founding of their discipline. It is for this reason that the psychologist must employ the transcendental reduction. However, the performance of the transcendental reduction is not a step that the psychologist takes qua psychologist; it is a step that they take, after changing vocation, as a philosopher providing psychology with a proper theoretical framework of transcendentalism. In stepping outside of the worldly horizon of the psychic, the psychologist also steps outside of their role as psychologist, becoming a transcendental philosopher. In order to return to the role of psychologist, it is then necessary to step back into the natural attitude within its worldly horizon. Why would the psychologist have to become a temporary philosopher in this way? Why, as we asked before, does psychology have to cover the same territory as philosophy? Husserl’s answer to this question is framed in terms of an analogy that

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we have seen surface repeatedly since the days of the Logical Investigations. The analogy is to that of physical science and the role that mathematics plays in the explanations and theories of physical science. Here, as elsewhere, Husserl likens phenomenological philosophy to mathematics in its provision of a similar service for psychology. His answer is that the psychologist must temporarily become a philosopher in order to be able to develop a genuine psychology because otherwise this service could not be performed. He writes: It was precisely as a psychologist that I was compelled to decide upon developing a pure psychology. This is obviously similar, then, to the way in which the interest of the natural sciences demands the development of a pure mathematics and would have demanded it even if mathematics had not grown up earlier as the result of a theoretical interest of its own. In fact, for a genuine psychology, and for the exactness which belongs essentially to it, transcendental philosophy plays the role of the a priori science to which it must have recourse in all is actually psychological knowledge, the science whose a priori structural concepts it must utilize in its mundane inquiry (1970a, p. 260).

In order to appreciate this analogy fully, we must try to imagine what it would be like to attempt to do physical science without already having mathematics at one’s disposal. This is precisely the position in which we find our phenomenologically informed psychology in relation to transcendental phenomenology. It is only because transcendental phenomenology does not already exist, is not already at the psychologist’s disposal, that the psychologist must temporarily give up their vocation as psychologist in order to establish the transcendental philosophical perspective as that from which they may then return. The analogous case would be for a physicist who did not already have mathematics at their disposal to cease temporarily being a physicist in order to develop mathematics first. Naturally, in turning to the development of mathematics, the physicist becomes, vocationally speaking, a mathematician. It is in a similar fashion that the psychologist becomes a philosopher. We see how the psychologist’s ascent to the transcendental is historically required. The psychologist must only change vocations from that of psychologist to that of philosopher and then back to that of psychologist because positive psychology does not have “already at work at its disposal” a viable established phenomenological transcendental philosophy (1970a, p. 264). Psychology was to provide the pedagogical preparation for the development of such a philosophy; but this philosophy does not as yet exist. The historically prevailing philosophical framework is that of Galilean naturalism. For psychology not to situate itself within that framework, it must point beyond it to the framework of a yet to be achieved transcendentalism. Philosophers carry out the actual work of developing this philosophical framework; it is a properly philosophical task. Yet psychologists cannot simply wait for it to be achieved by philosophers, forestalling their own properly psychological work until transcendental idealism replaces naturalism as the historically prevailing philosophy. They must, in developing a genuine and phenomenologically informed psychology, demand the development of transcendental phenomenology as the necessary ground for their discipline, as that to which they must be able to have recourse in their actually psychological knowledge. There is, Husserl notes, an

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“enormous difference” between the service provided for psychology by transcendental phenomenology and that provided for physical science by mathematics (1970a, p. 260), and we shall turn to the nature of this difference shortly. However, to the extent that the analogy does fit, it enables us to appreciate the urgency of the need for a transcendental phenomenological framework for psychology. Without it, psychology must look for its philosophical grounding either to the naturalistic framework from which it has tried to free itself, returning to the naïve (naturalistic) psychologism refuted in the Logical Investigations, or to itself, falling into the transcendental psychologism refuted in the “Phenomenology” article. It is only by having ready access to the framework of phenomenological transcendental philosophy that psychology can avoid being grounded in a psychologistic fashion. Similarly, it is only by transcending the limitations and sphere of psychology that transcendental philosophy may be viewed as a non-psychologistic science. The fact that psychologists must seek recourse to transcendental phenomenology in order to ground and achieve actually psychological knowledge, and that they must leave behind their own discipline of psychology in order to acquire this transcendental grounding, no more makes of the transcendental a psychic reality than does the psychologists’ turning to mathematics make of mathematics (e.g., numbers) a physical reality. Transcendental subjectivity remains non-worldly and non-psychic in nature, just as the subject matter of mathematics remains ideal rather than real. Likewise, the study of transcendental subjectivity remains a philosophical task, just as the study of numbers remains the task of the mathematician. The psychologist, while demanding access to the transcendental, remains interested vocationally in the worldly and psychic appearance of subjectivity. As is the physicist in an analogous fashion, the psychologist is interested in the application of their transcendental insights to the real world of mind in which they exist as one human being among others. With this insight, we have come to the crucially important understanding that for the psychologist to demand of the philosopher that they provide a transcendental context for psychology is not to perpetuate psychologism, but rather is precisely the only possible way to avoid one—for both psychology and philosophy. We have, once again, a division of labor between psychology and philosophy. It is a division of labor in this case, though, which alters fundamentally the nature of psychology. The phenomenological psychology, which was presented initially in both the psychology lectures and in the opening of Part IIIB of the Crisis, can serve only the pedagogical function of preparing the reader for the ascent to the transcendental. A psychology that employs the phenomenological psychological reduction only and remains at the level of the personal attitude is impossible. Psychology must either employ a four-step method, in which it both acquires for itself and returns from the transcendental framework of phenomenological philosophy, or a one-step method, which would consist solely of returning from the transcendental framework that should have already been provided by an existing phenomenological philosophy. Thus, if psychology starts out, as in the psychology lectures, as an objectivistic science of the natural attitude, it must: (1) perform the epoche of objective science and return to the life-world; then (2) perform the phenomenological psychological reduction to the origin of the life-world in constituting subjectivity; then (3) perform

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the transcendental reduction in the recognition that constituting subjectivity is transcendental rather than psychological in nature; and then (4) return to the natural attitude with which one began in the pursuit of one’s properly psychological interests. This is precisely the sequence we have had to reenact in the writing of this book, lacking an adequate transcendental framework of our own at the outset, we had to spend our first five chapters as philosophers establishing this framework as that from which we may now return to our original interests as psychologists. However, if the first three steps have already been taken by a viable phenomenological transcendental philosophy, then it falls to the psychologist only to perform this last and final step. In that case, we would have started from the transcendental, as opposed to the natural attitude and would, thus, not have to acquire a transcendental framework ourselves. It would already exist at our disposal, and the only requirement of method would be to return to the natural attitude in which their subjects are situated. In either case, it is this return from the transcendental to the life-world which constitutes the proper task of the psychologist. It is only a question of whether or not the psychologist will also have to perform the tasks that belong properly to the philosopher before being able to take up their own psychological interests. But what does it mean to return the natural attitude from the transcendental? “The question,” Husserl writes, “will still be up to us” as to how phenomenological philosophy, “which with transcendental subjectivity has taken leave of the ground of the world, can serve the psychologist in his positive work upon this very ground” (1970a, p. 263). What exactly is the significance of a transcendental framework for the actual work of the psychologist? How will the replacement of naturalism with transcendentalism “totally change all the notions that one could ever have of the task of psychology,” its methods and its approach (1970a, p. 247). “What interests” the psychologist, writes Husserl, “is not transcendental interiority, but the interiority that exists in the world—human beings and human communities found in the world” (1970a, p. 263). How would the philosophical knowledge that these worldly realities, like all worldly realties, were constituted by transcendental interiority change totally the nature of psychology? At first glance, it might seem that the psychologist could simply acknowledge the philosopher’s claims to truths of this sort, i.e., truths concerning the ultimately absolute nature of transcendental constitution, and return to the properly psychological quest for relative truths concerning the activity of worldly, psychic subjectivity. Perhaps, the psychologist is being asked to recognize that the constitution of the real world in which their subjects exist is being achieved by transcendental subjectivity, before turning to the constitution of worldly experiences achieved by the psychological subjects living within the horizons of this world. The world in which our psychological subjects exist must be recognized as a transcendental correlate, while their experiences of this world must be studied as psychologically constituted achievements. Would not such a further division of labor remain faithful to the distinction between the transcendental and psychological egos drawn above? Would this not be accurately described as a return to the natural attitude, with which we began, in that we are viewing the relative and limited constitution of personal worlds as a psychological function? Can we not simply return to the framework of the

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psychology lectures, now that we clarified that the constitution of “the” world in which our subjects are situated is the achievement of transcendental, as opposed to psychological, subjectivity. Writes Husserl: Is it not the case, after all, that psychophysical or psycho-physiological dualism has its experiential legitimacy for the world, whatever the world may signify transcendentally, and that it sets a task for the psychology of human beings and animals which is analogous to the task of natural science (1970a, p. 263)?

Is it a return to this sense of real intentionality that we mean by the return to the natural attitude carried out by the psychologist? Such a position does call to mind the importance that Husserl placed in Ideas I on psychology remaining within its relevant limits. In such a position, psychology would simply not tackle the constitution of “the” world, as that would be viewed, accurately, as the concern of philosophy. It would limit itself to the study of the constitution of the varying and diverse versions of personal worlds constituted by psychological subjects within “the” world that they all have in common. The service that philosophy would provide for such a psychology would be the knowledge of the true nature of “the” world, against which these personal worlds might be compared and evaluated. For Husserl, however, this position is only a further result of the return, not to the natural attitude, but to the “old temptations” of naturalism (1970a, p. 263). He writes: It is naïve to stop at the subject-object correlation conceived in the anthropological, mundane manner and to misinterpret what was shown phenomenologically in my first writings as belonging to this correlation. To do this is to be blind precisely to the great problems of this paradox, namely, that man, and in communalization mankind, is subjectivity for the world and at the same time is supposed to be in it in an objective and worldly manner (1970a, p. 262).

Such a position misinterprets what has been shown phenomenologically by attempting to situate the intentional constitutive relation between ego and object back within the confines of the anthropological subject. To attempt to do so is to forget what we should have learned by our ascent to the transcendental. It is not only to return to the natural attitude, but to return also to its pre-transcendental naiveté. The psychological ego does not constitute a personal world that is merely one, individually relative representation of “the” world constituted by the transcendental ego, against which it might be judged. Such is not the nature of constitution, as understood by transcendental philosophy. If our psychology were built upon such an understanding of constitution, it would prove to remain transcendentally naïve, and, thus, not benefit at all from the ascent to the transcendental performed for it by transcendental phenomenology. The return to the natural attitude we are seeking to understand will not, apparently, be a return to this kind of naiveté with respect to the nature of subjectivity and constitution. It will have to be a return, as Husserl describes it, “to the natural—though now no longer naïve—attitude” which is itself situated explicitly within the transcendental framework of phenomenological philosophy (1970a, p. 264). In returning to the natural attitude, we will not be allowed, so to speak, to forget what we learned, transcendentally. We will no longer be allowed to be naïve.

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In this sense, our analogy to physics and mathematics is found lacking. When psychology returns to its own subject matter and interest following its ascent to the transcendental, it is no longer the same. It has been fundamentally and permanently altered. Husserl addresses the nature of this change in clarifying the notion of the return in a section of the Crisis which has as part of its title: “Psychology ‘Before’ and ‘After’ the Phenomenological Reduction (The Problem of ‘Flowing In’)” (1970a, p. 208). In our attempt to develop a genuinely phenomenologically informed psychology, we must understand the extent to which psychology becomes a different discipline after the performance of the transcendental reduction. Husserl explains this difference with respect to the limitations of a naïve psychology as follows: In psychology the natural, naïve attitude has the result that the human self-objectifications of transcendental intersubjectivity, which belong with essential necessity to the makeup of the constituted world regimen to me and to us, inevitably have a horizon of transcendentally functioning intentionalities which are not accessible to reflection, not even psychological-­ scientific reflection. “I, this man,” and likewise “other men”—these signify, respectively, a self-apperception and apperception of others which are transcendental acquisitions involving everything psychic that belongs to them, acquisitions which flowingly change in their particularity through transcendental functions which are hidden from the naïve attitude. We can inquire back into the transcendental historical dimension, from which the meaning and validity accomplishment of these apperceptions ultimately stems, only by breaking with naiveté through the method of transcendental reduction (1970, pp. 208–209).

Within the confines of a naïve natural psychology, the horizon of transcendentally functioning intentionalities that belong necessarily to both the psychological subjects and the world within which they live that make up one’s subject matter are not accessible to reflection. Within the naïve natural attitude all transcendental functioning, all constitution, remains hidden from view, including that of the constitution of those subjects with which one is psychologically concerned. As Husserl stresses, within this attitude, “the (immediately active or sedimented) functioning intentionality” which is “constitutive of all particular apperceptions,” including those which have the “ontic sense of ‘psychic experiences of this and that human being’ … remains completely hidden” (1970a, p. 209). It is only by performing the transcendental reduction that these hidden intentionalities, which we know to be functioning universally, may be uncovered. With the performance of the transcendental reduction, what was once hidden thus becomes exposed and accessible to reflection. This would mean that for the psychologist, the transcendentally functioning intentionalities that constituted both the psychic subject and their world would no longer be hidden from view; like the life-world, they would be brought out of their prior concealment. With this transformation, the psychologist must now view their subject matter in a different light and in a substantively different way. As Husserl explains: With the break with naiveté brought about by the transcendental-phenomenological reorientation there occurs a significant transformation, significant for psychology itself. As a phenomenologist, I can, of course, at any time go back into the natural attitude, back to the straightforward pursuit of my theoretical or other life-interests; I can, as before, be active as a father, a citizen, an official, as a “good European,” etc. … that is, as a human being in my

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human community, in my world. As before—and yet not quite as before. For I can never again achieve the old naiveté; I can only understand it. My transcendental insights and purposes have become merely inactive, but they continue to be my own (1970a, p. 210).

While the psychologist is interested, as a psychologist, in the worldly experience of psychic subjects on the ground of the pre-given world, the transcendental insights provided by phenomenological philosophy continue to inform their understanding of the nature and origin of this experience. While I do not continue to pursue strictly transcendental interests and purposes, I do, as a phenomenologically informed psychologist, continue to operate explicitly within the transcendentally constituted horizons of my subject matter. I no longer situate my subjects within Nature, or within the natural world as naively understood, but situate them now within the horizon of transcendental constitution that serves as their origin. The insights acquired through my ascent to the transcendental continue to inform my understanding and practice, even as a psychologist; “they continue to be my own.” In an earlier section of our text, we distinguished between psychological reflection and philosophical transcendental reflection on the basis of the differing concerns of each type. Psychological reflection, we stated, was concerned with the actual experience of the world pre-given to psychic subjects. It asked about the “lived experience … of subjects who are precisely as such already subjects” of a world always “already given as complete.” It was the task of philosophy, on the other hand, to ask about the origin of this already completed world that was given in the lived experiences of our psychological subjects. Philosophical reflection, that is, was concerned with the origins of these actual experiences, with how the world came to be experienced in the way that it was. We now know that our philosophical questions are answered through an appeal to transcendental subjectivity, and that our psychology must remain cognizant of this fact if it is not to return to a pre-­transcendental naiveté. This means that the psychological reflection carried out in our new psychology must view the actual experience with which it is concerned as arising out of the horizon of “transcendentally functioning intentionalities” that are no longer hidden. It must view the experiences of its subjects as stemming from the activity of transcendental subjectivity taking place in the “transcendental historical dimension.” It must view the experiences of its subject as taking place within the socio-cultural and historical context of transcendental constitution. The world that is “pre-given” to human beings must be viewed no longer as a natural fact, as Nature, but now as the socio-cultural world of mind constituted intentionally by transcendental subjectivity. The genetic question in psychology must be answered through an appeal to transcendental constitution. This is what is so significant about our appeal to the transcendental framework provided for psychology by phenomenological philosophy. As Husserl explains, with the transcendental reorientation brought about by phenomenological philosophy: All the new sorts of apperception which are exclusively tied to the phenomenological reduction, together with the new sort of language (new even if I use ordinary language, as is unavoidable, though its meanings are also unavoidably transformed)—all this, which before was completely hidden and inexpressible, and now flows into the self-­objectification, into my psychic life, and becomes apperceived as its newly revealed intentional background of constitutive accomplishments (1970a, p. 210).

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The psychologist who has a transcendental framework already at work at their disposal views psychic life against the background of intentional constitutive “accomplishments,” as opposed to against the background of the mathematical manifold or causal nexus of Nature. Psychologists will be freed from the naiveté of assuming that the world in which the human beings with which they are concerned live “is” the way it is “naturally” (and therefore complete in itself). They will instead realize that this particular world has been constituted historically and intersubjectively by immediately active, as well as by historically sedimented, intentionalities that both constitute and transcend these subjects themselves. “The” world that is pre-given to these subjects and within which they live is not, in fact, a static and pre-determined whole, but is an on-going creation of constitution that continues to be engaged in a process of constant, on-going change. It is here that we see concretely the sense in which the service provided for psychology by phenomenological philosophy does differ significantly from the service provided for psychics by mathematics. Mathematics provides for physics insight into the true being of Nature, which is that of the mathematical. It can have this knowledge in advance of any actual physical scientific research, and it will also be unaffected by the accumulation of such research. As Husserl writes: “Nature is in itself what it is, and is in itself mathematical, no matter how much we know or do not know of mathematics” (1970a, pp. 264–265). For physical science, “everything is decided in advance as pure mathematics,” and will remain so whether or not we carry out actual physical or mathematical inquiry (1970a, p. 265). Acquiring knowledge of the mathematical nature of Nature cannot in any way change or “influence” the being of Nature itself (1970a, p. 264). We find a very different picture in psychology, however, once we come to understand the true significance of its transcendental grounding in phenomenological philosophy. “For the world as a world which also contains spiritual beings,” writes Husserl, “this ‘being-in-advance’ is an absurdity” (1970a, p. 265). Philosophy cannot decide for psychology the true nature of the world of mind in a fashion similar to mathematics, for such a nature does not exist in advance of actual constitutive activity. What philosophy can do for psychology, on the contrary, is to provide it with the insight that the nature of the world of mind is to be constantly in the process of active intentional constitution, in the on-­ going process of being historically and intersubjectively shaped. Writes Husserl: Nature can be thought as definite manifold, and we can take this idea as a basis hypothetically. But in so far as the world is a world of knowledge, a world of consciousness, a world with human beings, such an idea is absurd for it to unsurpassable degree (1970a, p. 265).

The world of mind, to the extent that it is not a definite manifold, can and will be affected and influenced by present and future constitutive actions, both of ordinary people in their daily lives and by the work of philosophers and psychologists. Their knowledge contributes to the further shaping of the world as it continues to change. In this domain, there is nothing of importance that is decided in advance. While this issue will be explored in more concrete detail in our conclusion, we might just mention at this point that it is in this way that philosophy and psychology are viewed by Husserl as able to address the spiritual and cultural “crisis” of his

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time. By turning away from a philosophy and psychology grounded naively in presumed facts about the nature of human community and world, phenomenological philosophy and its derivative psychology turn us toward the role and responsibility of consciousness in the constitution of these same presumed facts. They no longer allow us to look indifferently on a world we assumed was already complete and determined in advance to be the way it currently happens to be. They no longer allow us the recourse to Nature that places the responsibility for our present situation on a finite mathematical manifold that we could not effectively alter, even if we tried. Rather, they force us to recognize our present situation to be the product of historical and cultural influences that we may now control and alter significantly, regardless of whether or not we are responsible for their initial creation. They force us to recognize that our present situation is the result of an historical and intersubjective process of which we are a part. They allow us to recognize that philosophy and psychology are in actuality intimately concerned with motivation and choice, as opposed to facts. The emphasis that phenomenological philosophy and its attendant psychology places on subjectivity restores to science its proper concern with value and meaning—the concern that we know now to have become lost through Galileo’s turn to the presumed objectivity of mathematics—and, as a result, also restores science’s confidence in its task and its ability to have an influence on the world through its acquired, and constantly acquiring, knowledge. As mentioned, however, we will explore this issue in more detail in the conclusion that follows this chapter. At that time, we will also consider in more concrete terms the implication of this position for the actual development of a phenomenologically informed psychology. For now, we should bring to a close this analysis of the historical progression of Husserl’s thought on the relationship between phenomenology and psychology. At last, we have reached our final clarification of this ­relationship. Phenomenological transcendental philosophy made the Copernican turn to the transcendental attitude and dimension belonging to transcendental subjectivity in order to avoid psychologism, while the phenomenologically informed psychology that arose within its non-Cartesian framework “returned” from this attitude to the natural, though no longer naïve, attitude in order to purse its own worldly and positive, properly psychological interests. This phenomenologically informed psychology is not itself transcendental philosophy, since it does return to the natural attitude to carry out its positive tasks. It relies on transcendental philosophy and its transcendentalist framework in order to escape fully and definitively from its own Cartesian naturalistic tradition, returning to the natural attitude having been freed from its prior naiveté. Transcendental philosophy, on the other hand, relies on psychology to prepare the way for it, leading to the ascent to the transcendental (both historically and pedagogically) through its own recognition of its limitations as psychology. Psychology, thus, performs the necessary mediating work between Cartesian dualism and transcendentalism that allows for the development of phenomenological philosophy (1970a, p. 203). Situating itself within the context of this philosophy, psychology further ensures that neither itself nor transcendental philosophy will be psychologistic: psychology, in that it is grounded in philosophy and philosophy, in that it has transcended the relevant limits of psychology. By dividing

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up the labor in this fashion, psychology and philosophy remain inseparable in both theory and practice; they require each other for the mutual determination of their subject matters and their functions. With this, we have arrived at an interpretation of Husserl’s position on the nature of the relationship between phenomenology and psychology that received some, if limited, support within the phenomenological tradition. It is an interpretation, for example, which appears to be supported by Aron Gurwitsch, who, in his commentary on the Crisis, has written: Having performed the phenomenological reduction, we are free to relinquish it and to return to the natural attitude, though not to the former naiveté in which we lived previously to performing the reduction. We can understand but not reassume that naiveté. After the transcendental dimensions have been disclosed, no return to the natural attitude is ever able to undo that disclosure … When, returning to the natural attitude, we take mundane existents as such, they will now appear in a light in which they had not appeared prior to the performance of the phenomenological reduction—viz., in the light of the disclosed transcendental dimensions to which they will continue referring. If for the legitimacy of psychology as a science in the natural attitude, Husserl insists upon a return, it is because transcendental phenomenology proves to be the fundamental a priori science with regard to empirical psychology that has to respect, and to avail itself of, phenomenological insights and results (1966b, p. 445).

While the content of this passage is certainly in agreement with our own presentation, the remainder of Gurwitsch’s work on this topic (1947, 1966a) unfortunately provided no further help in clarifying or fleshing out Husserl’s position and its implications for the actual development of a phenomenologically informed psychology. His interpretation is restricted to statements that merely mirror Husserl’s own, and do not substantially go beyond them. It is this difficulty which is experienced with the majority of thinkers who have come to a conclusion similar to our own and that of Gurwitsch. With the exception of the work by the two authors cited in our conclusion (Kohak and Paci), very little assistance has been offered to this point in translating Husserl’s sketchy outline for the development of a final form of psychology into any kind of concrete and descriptive detail. The others who appear to support the conclusions we reached here (cf. Allen, 1977a, b; Fluckiger and Sullivan, 1965; Golomb, 1976; Howard, 1965; Jalbert, 1982; Stack, 1973; Uhler, 1987) have gone no further in adding flesh to the bones that we have finally uncovered. We shall provide one brief attempt to do so in the conclusion that follows this chapter. Before turning to that task, however, we pause here to suggest why, in fact, this interpretation of Husserl’s position has not as yet generated much support in philosophical and social scientific circles. Given that we have now settled on what we take to be his actual and mature position on these issues, we might also consider, in retrospect, why so many misunderstandings of this position arose and proliferated. The answer is found, we suggest, in the inseparability discovered to characterize the relationship between phenomenological philosophy and a “fundamentally refashioned” psychology. It is apparent that in Husserl’s final estimation of the nature of this relationship, he considered phenomenological philosophy and a phenomenologially informed psychology to require each other for the pursuit of their

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own interests and tasks. Rather than psychology performing both its own task and that of philosophy and rather than philosophy considering itself to be grounded in psychology, it is the resolution of Husserl’s battle with psychologism to insist on the development of both a philosophy and a psychology which will then not usurp each other’s roles and functions. The pursuit of his dual goals of a universal philosophy and a positive psychology not only belong together in his own mind and in his writings, but also belong together in theory and in practice. He could not achieve one goal at the exclusion or cost of the other. They can only be achieved in conjunction with each other. How does this help us to understand the proliferation of misunderstandings of Husserl’s position and the lack of any substantive assistance in applying his mature understanding? It appears that Husserl’s insistence on the role of the transcendental in grounding and informing psychological understanding and practice has led to a split between philosophical and psychological disciplines that has undermined any possibility of preserving their inseparability. On the one side, there are psychologists who wish to put Husserl to some use in formulating and practicing a form of psychology purified of its naturalistic heritage. As psychologists, they eschew any interest in the transcendental as un-unworldly or as of no relevance for psychology, leaving any concern with the transcendental to the philosophers. These psychologists remain transcendentally naïve, and thereby stop short of appreciating Husserl’s greater value for psychology. On the other side, are the philosophers who appreciate Husserl’s interest in the transcendental, even for psychology, and who provide us with sketches and outlines of how a psychology that was transcendentally grounded might look. As philosophers, they are not interested in going any further than this; having their own properly philosophical interests, they leave the concrete filling in of these outlines to the psychologists. Husserl unfortunately set the precedent for this second position himself, never getting to the task of fleshing out a glimpse of the phenomenologically informed psychology he provided here and there in philosophically skeletal form. Had Husserl been a social scientist, perhaps we would not have this gap in the literature and practice of his successors. As it stands, Husserl only pointed the way, and it is for us to continue the task he left to be done. We take this up in the following concluding chapter.

Chapter 7

Conclusion: Toward a Contextualized Psychology

It becomes evident that, as intentional, the analysis of consciousness is totally different from analysis in the usual and natural sense … Intentional analysis is guided by the fundamental cognition that, as a consciousness, every cogito is indeed (in the broadest sense) a meaning of its meant, but that, at any moment, this something meant is more—something meant with something more—than what is meant at that moment “explicitly” from “Cartesian Meditations” (Husserl, 1977a, p. 46)

One gets the impression that even the most astute psychological description and analysis amounts, relatively speaking, to a brilliant flash of lightning which illumines momentarily a small segment of a vast landscape shrouded in darkness and extending to unknown depths (Scanlon, 1982, p. 198).

We have now expended much effort and energy, not to mention pages, to wind our way through the conceptual labyrinth that is the evolution of Husserl’s thought concerning the relationship between phenomenology and psychology. We have arrived at what we take to be his mature and final position on the topic and situate his earlier views as stages on the way to the full articulation achieved in the Crisis. We have been able in the process to testify to the accuracy of de Boer’s statement, cited in our own Introduction, that Husserl’s work exhibits a “unity of development” around the major theme of psychologism in both philosophy and psychology. And we have come also to appreciate how this final phase of Husserl’s development offers a “culmination of all [of his] previous intentions” (de Boer, 1978, p. xx); how it allows for a reflective analysis of consciousness to ground philosophy and epistemology non-psychologically (in the form of transcendental phenomenology), while also allowing for a psychology of subjectivity on the worldly or mundane plane (in the form of a return from the transcendental back to positivity). It now remains for us to translate these largely conceptual insights to the more concrete plane of psychological understanding. It remains for us to spell out in more descriptive detail what such a phenomenologically informed psychology looks like in practice. What, we can now ask, is the significance for psychology of returning from the transcendental back to what is no longer a naïve positivity? © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 L. Davidson, Overcoming Psychologism: Husserl and the Transcendental Reform of Psychology, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-59932-4_7

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Since the way we have had to come to arrive at this place has been complex and full of conceptual wrong turns and seeming dead ends, a brief review of our progress to this point is in order. We shall begin, then, with a survey of the terrain we have already covered, using the passage with which we opened this volume as our guide. This will allow us a chance to pull together the various theoretical strands that have been woven throughout this work. Once we have clarified this theoretical base, we shall then implement our new psychology in an investigation of consciousness viewed psychologically but grounded in transcendental phenomenological philosophy. We shall provide concrete examples of areas of psychological research and practice in which this new psychology will be found to be particularly helpful and instructive. It is hoped that this brief discussion will offer a beginning for further development of a radically Husserlian phenomenologically informed psychology; a psychology that secures its rightful place alongside of the other “socio-cultural sciences” that are fundamentally refashioned by phenomenology (Husserl, 1980, p. 42). For assistance with this task we will look primarily to Husserl’s Cartesian Meditations (1977a), supplementing the discussion provided there with statements drawn both from other of Husserl’s texts which we have already discussed and from Fink’s outline for the remainder of the text of the Crisis lectures. We shall also appeal to the works of several of Husserl’s successors who have made initial attempts to sketch out the kind of application of phenomenological theory to the practice of psychology that we are advocating here. While drawing support from the sympathetic views of these thinkers, we shall need to go substantially beyond their contributions by fleshing out concretely the implications of Husserl’s mature position and by filling in with some detail the more abstract outline they have provided. It will be through this examination of the examples provided in descriptive detail that we will come to an appreciation of how a radically reformed Husserlian psychology differs even from its sister disciplines—existential-phenomenological and hermeneutic-phenomenological psychologies—in its appeal to the transcendental framework of phenomenological philosophy.

Overcoming Psychologism in Psychology As was the case with Husserl’s Preface to the English edition of Ideas I, the text that comprises the Cartesian Meditations (1977a) was initially meant to introduce phenomenology to a specific audience; in this case, that of the French philosophical community. Delivered originally in a series of two lectures at the Sorbonne in 1929, the Cartesian Meditations take their title from the Meditations of Descartes after which they are modeled. Husserl gives credit in these lectures to Descartes for inaugurating a new style and direction for philosophy, as he was later to reiterate in the Crisis (cf. Chap. 6). In their appreciation and then critique of Descartes, and in their offering of a radicalized, post-Cartesian transcendentalism, they present a position identical in all important respects with that found in the Crisis. Thus, even though

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these lectures were delivered before Husserl began his actual work on the Crisis lectures, we can take them to belong to his final phase and can take the guidance they provide for our summary to reflect the position just achieved in Chap. 6. The passage which served as the epigraph for this work was taken from the text of these lectures. As we shall want to refer to it directly in the following review, we will reprint it here in its entirety. It reads: We would also state expressly that it would of course be pointless to treat the positive science of intentional psychology and transcendental phenomenology separately. Obviously, the work of actual execution must devolve upon the latter, whereas psychology … will take over the results. Yet it is important to note that, just as the psyche and the whole Objective world do not lose their existence and existential sense when considered transcendentally (since they are merely rendered originarily understandable, by the uncovering of their concrete all-sidedness), so positive psychology does not lose its rightful content but rather, freed of naïve positivity, becomes a discipline within universal transcendental philosophy itself. From this point of view, we may say that, among the sciences that have been raised above the level of naïve positivity, intentional psychology is intrinsically the first (Husserl, 1977a, p. 147).

We now set to the task of explicating this passage as representative of the end result of our extended historical and exegetical enterprises. Husserl begins this paragraph with the statement that we have adopted as the guiding strategy for our work. He writes that psychology and transcendental phenomenology should not be treated separately. As we noted in our own Introduction, this is advice which has rarely been followed within either the phenomenological or psychological traditions. Most attempts at “phenomenologizing” psychology have neglected the transcendental problematic altogether, as most discussions of transcendental phenomenology have either devalued the psychological or considered it to be irrelevant to the philosophical issues at hand. In retrospect, however, we can now understand that it is only by keeping the two disciplines together that we may avoid the persistent threat and “temptation” of psychologism. Any attempt to treat transcendental phenomenology in isolation would easily fall prey to the misunderstanding that transcendental subjectivity was psychic in nature, that it was merely one property of human beings. It would falsely psychologize the transcendental. Similarly, any attempt to treat intentional psychology in isolation would easily fall prey to the misunderstanding that psychological subjectivity was transcendental in nature, and thereby adequate to serve as the ground for philosophy. It would falsely transcendentalize the psychic. It is only when these two disciplines are treated together in their relation to each other that we may be assured of the necessary division of labor by virtue of which psychology remains concerned with properly psychological (though no longer naïve) issues and transcendental phenomenology remains reserved for properly philosophical purposes. We find next, however, Husserl’s statement that “obviously the work of actual execution must devolve” upon transcendental phenomenology, while psychology will “take over the results.” Once we have established our parallel, we must apparently look to philosophy first. Why is this, and what is the “actual execution” that is carried out by philosophy? The actual execution to be carried out by philosophy is

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the work of the Copernican shift; that is, the turn to the transcendental. It must fall to philosophy to achieve this shift because the transcendental attitude belongs properly to philosophical pursuits and philosophical terrain. Were psychology to attempt to achieve the Copernican shift itself, were the turn to the transcendental be made within the boundaries of psychology, then we would be back to a transcendental psychologism. The overturning of naturalism and the institution of transcendentalism in its place must be the work of philosophy. The epistemological dilemmas inherited from Descartes belong to philosophers. It is up to them to replace this misguided dualism, which is in reality and in practice a naturalistic monism, with a more adequate ontology. Even though it may be in part the failures of naturalistic psychology that call for such a correction of philosophical premises, it should not fall to psychology to make this correction itself. Ontology and epistemology are philosophical concerns, and they should be corrected from within the boundaries of philosophy. Once this correction is made, however, it does fall to psychology to “take over the results” for its own purposes and tasks. Psychology must make use of the Copernican shift made in philosophy it if is not to remain fettered to its misguided naturalistic past. Psychology is only “unconcerned” about the actual achievement of a transcendental framework that overturns Cartesianism, it decidedly is not unconcerned about the implications of this shift for its own understanding and practice. A psychology that remained unconcerned about the implications of this profound shift would remain naturalistic in its premises and principles. It would remain grounded in a naturalistic ontology that has since been proven philosophically to be inadequate and mistaken. If psychology is thus not to remain philosophically naïve, it must allow itself to be fundamentally refashioned along the lines of this philosophical discovery. It must become grounded in transcendental phenomenology as it once had been grounded in a naturalistic monism, in Galileo’s mathematical manifold. Contrary to initial appearances, this does not mean, though, that psychology is to become itself a transcendental discipline. It is here that our analogy to naturalism is found lacking. While naturalistically grounded psychology became itself a naturalistic discipline, a transcendentally grounded psychology does not take over the transcendental attitude and domain as its own. The turn to the transcendental, Husserl is quick to point out, does not “erase” the existential sense that the psychic has as a positive reality. “It is important to note,” he writes, that “psychology does not lose its rightful content, but rather” is freed of “naïve positivity,” becoming a discipline “within transcendental phenomenology itself.” Rather than becoming the study of transcendental subjectivity, which belongs properly to philosophy, psychology remains the study of a positive reality, a worldly domain, but now situated within the framework of a transcendental ontology. It studies the psychic within the all-­ important context of transcendental constitution. We would not be avoiding psychologism successfully were we simply to elevate the psychic to the level of the transcendental following the Copernican shift. This is not what it means for psychology to “take over the results” of the transcendental reduction. What it does mean is that psychology becomes informed by ­transcendental phenomenology in such a way as to lose its naiveté without losing its focus and content.

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It is by understanding the psychic as a positive reality which is constantly being constituted by transcendental subjectivity that the proper subject matter of psychology is “rendered originarily understandable.” Taking over the results of the turn to the transcendental means relativizing the psychic, viewing it no longer as an absolute reality, existing in and of itself in a naturalistic sense. The “uncovery” of the “concrete all-sidedness” of the psychic brought about by the transcendental turn is the exposing of the “hidden intentionalities” that constitute the psychic as the worldly, positive reality we experience it to be. In uncovering these sedimented intentionalities already at work, we do not alter the nature of the psychic in any way. We only show it more clearly to be what in essence it has always been. We show it to be a constituted reality, relative to and dependent upon the constituting activity of transcendental subjectivity. With this important advance, we overcome the naiveté of a psychology that considers itself to be describing and analyzing a self-contained and autonomous subject matter. We overcome the naiveté of thinking that the psychic is somehow responsible for founding itself, for an act of “spontaneous (self-)generation” through which it pulls itself up by its own metaphysical bootstraps into a fully formed and independent reality (Husserl, 1977a, p. 147). It is through the overcoming of this naiveté that psychology becomes a discipline within universal transcendental philosophy itself. By situating the psychic in relation to transcendental subjectivity we have provided the science of psychology with a new ground, both ontological and epistemological. We have provided a framework for psychology radically different from the one provided by naturalism, within which it must now work out new theoretical constructs and methods. Rather than appealing to Nature, causality, and the mathematical manifold of physics, psychology must appeal instead to the constituting activity of transcendental subjectivity, motivational relations of meaning, and intentionality in its temporal and intersubjective unfolding. It is this change which brings about the “fundamental refashioning” of psychology of which Husserl wrote, which changes totally “all the notions that one could ever have of the task of psychology” (1970a, p. 247). Thus, it is by viewing the psychic, not as transcendental in nature itself, but as relative to the constituting activity of the transcendental, that psychology takes its rightful place within the philosophical framework of transcendental phenomenology. It does not become transcendental philosophy itself but does change radically the way it views and understands the psychic upon this basis. In altering fundamentally its view of the nature of its subject matter, intentional psychology becomes historically the first discipline to be transcendentally transformed. Thus, Husserl closes this paragraph by highlighting the historical role that psychology has to play in the elevation of the sciences above the level of naiveté inherent in naturalism. The transformation that takes place in psychology is to serve as a model for all other sciences, which are likewise to find their proper places within transcendental philosophy itself. We know that psychology is to play this historic role because of Husserl’s own struggles with psychologism. In retrospect, we may also say that psychology is “intrinsically the first” discipline to be “raised above the level of naïve positivity” due to aspects essential to its relation to ­transcendental phenomenology and to aspects essential to naturalism. It is the parallelism between

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the psychic and the transcendental that accords psychology this privileged status, and because of this parallelism that psychology must be intrinsically the first science to be transcendentally transformed. Naturalism has determined this priority for us in advance. As Husserl pointed out in the Crisis, within a naturalistic framework we view the psyche as the primary manifestation of consciousness and understand subjectivity to be psychic in nature. Having taken the body to be the absolute reality, we have individuated subjectivity. We have placed a soul in a body in order to afford subjectivity any reality-sense and then considered these souls, like their physical hosts, to be external to each other. It has thus become our natural inclination, as it was Husserl’s in the Philosophy of Arithmetic, simply to assume that subjectivity exists solely in this individuated and embodied form. Within such a context, as Husserl writes in the Crisis, “psychology can be the science of the general features of individual souls only,” and can then act in this capacity as the foundation for sociology and other social sciences (1970a, p. 228). While a sociology thus grounded can only view the social as a collective of separate individuals, this is because there is no other sense of the social, or of what Husserl refers to as “intersubjectivity,” which could be offered within such an individualistic framework. The dilemma faced by sociology is the same one which will be faced by philosophy when it attempts to introduce a non-psychic view of subjectivity. With naturalism we have assumed an individualistic ontology. Any attempt to redefine or understand subjectivity as other than primarily psychic in nature must take this assumption as its point of departure. The battle for transcendentalism must be fought, and won, here first. Having been himself a victim of this historical legacy, Husserl is acutely aware of the difficulties involved in proposing a non-psychological view of subjectivity. He also is acutely aware of the temptation of translating any non-psychological view of subjectivity surreptitiously back into a veiled psychological view, as had both Descartes and Kant. If psychologism is to be truly, and permanently, overcome this issue must thus be tackled head on from the very start. Before the notion of the transcendental can make any sense to us, we must see through and discard this notion of the primacy of the individual psyche, we must leave behind our conviction in the primordial reality of the body and our conviction in the autonomy of the psychological subject. How else could we ever accept a non-individual sense of subjectivity, a transcendental intersubjectivity that is not contained within the mundane boundaries of the psyche? How else could we view the transcendental as other than simply one more property of the human soul? Since we begin with a position in which the psychic is considered to be primary, it is the psychic which must be relativized first. Otherwise other realities, and other disciplines, will come to be considered to be relative to the psychic rather than to the transcendental, as is necessary. If we do not undermine the absolute status of the psychic first, the transcendental will be viewed as a property of the psychic and it will not be established as absolute in its own right, and as founding for the psychic as well as for all other constituted realities. It is for this reason that Husserl writes in the Cartesian Meditations that the parallelism between the transcendental and the psychic “is something to be made evident transcendentally” (1977a, p. 131; cf. Cobb-Stevens, 1983b). It is for this reason that

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we must look to philosophy first. We can only situate the transcendental in a parallel relation to the psychic from the position of the transcendental. Any attempt to understand this parallelism naively, from the side of the psychic, will continue to individualize and psychologize the transcendental. We must, as had Husserl, abandon the psychic first in order to discover a non-psychological view of subjectivity, and then we may view the psychic in its relation to this subjectivity. If we attempt instead to understand this parallelism from within the confines of psychology, we will simply continue to consider the psychic to be primary, adding on the transcendental as a corrective measure (to overcome psychologism). It is this which we have seen over and over again within the psychological tradition as attempts have been made to incorporate phenomenological insights into the practice of psychology. All of these attempts have been based upon an unacknowledged incorporation of the transcendental into the psychic; they have been attempts to employ the parallelism from the side of psychology. All of these attempts—and there have been several, from Merleau-Ponty through MacLeod to Giorgi—thus fail to secure the proper transcendental perspective within which psychology may then be situated as one, relative and limited discipline focusing on a regional and constituted domain. They fail to secure the transcendental as that from which the psychologist may then return. In order for psychology to secure this perspective as its philosophical ground, it is clear that it must give up any pretense to be more than this kind of relative and limited discipline. It must give up its pretension to be a self-sufficient, autonomous, and self-grounding science. Yet it is also clear, at least to Husserl, that psychology is only suited to perform this kind of limited and derivative task. As a positive science, psychology is only suited to study a well-delineated, clearly circumscribed dimension of the entirety of the life-world. Everyday life is much richer and more varied than could ever be captured within a single scientific perspective. There is much more to human existence than what can be studied in psychology; even human existence is not solely psychic in nature. In limiting psychology to one aspect of human life, Husserl has simply insisted on limiting it to what it can actually do. He has merely reserved psychology for the study of the psychic, leaving all other aspects of reality, including the constitution of reality itself, to other disciplines (cf. Wagner, 1970). This last point, crucial to our own presentation, was also considered to be crucial by Fink, Husserl’s assistant toward the end of his career, in his outline for the continuation of the text of the Crisis. Under Husserl’s direction, Fink had prepared a proposal for the remainder of the lecture series which has since been published as an appendix to the English translation of the Crisis (1970a, pp. 397–400). The body of this proposal centers on the issues of “the paradox of psychology” and a “characterization of the relation between psychology and phenomenology” (1970a, pp. 398–399). The paradox to which Fink refers is that of the attempt on the part of psychology both to be a positive science grounded in the pre-given world and a science of the subjectivity that constitutes or “gives” this same world. The paradox thus applies to the attempt to develop a phenomenological psychology on the naïve side of the transcendental turn. In the terms of our last few paragraphs, it would apply to any attempt to establish a phenomenological psychology

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on the psychological side of the parallelism; to develop an intentional psychology as a pre-­transcendental parallel to transcendental philosophy. It is the resolution of this paradox that then determines how we are to characterize the relationship that exists between psychology and phenomenology. Fink’s outline thus recapitulates our own discussion in its emphasis on the resolution of this paradox as both historically necessary for, but yet only preparatory to, the development of a truly phenomenologically informed psychology. What precisely is the nature of this paradox? We remember that in our previous attempt to conduct a phenomenological psychology which was transcendentally naïve we tried at first to abstract the psychic from the entirety of the life-world in a fashion analogous or complementary to the abstraction of the physical carried out by natural science. While the natural scientist excludes all evaluative, ethical, and aesthetic dimensions, the human scientist similarly excludes all material-physical dimensions in order to focus solely on subjectivity. In this way, writes Fink, “psychology begins as a special science alongside others on the ground of the pre-given world” (1970a, p. 398). Psychology assumes the validity of the life-world as that out of which it may abstract the subjective dimension. It is merely taking up for description and analysis one region of the already existing world; placing under its microscope one part of the world that always already exists, even before one takes up one’s work as a scientist. Yet, in order for this psychology to be carried out phenomenologically—in order for the psychologist to remain faithful to the discovery of the intentional nature of subjectivity—this very same world must be seen as a product, an achievement, of this same worldly subjectivity. In order for a psychologist to explore the subjective dimension in its own terms, in order for subjectivity to be viewed as other than a property of the physical world, the “presupposition of the world-ground” must be suspended. In order for the life-world to be seen as a correlate of consciousness, it must be abandoned as ground. In adopting an intentional view of subjectivity, psychology, writes Fink, “divests itself of the ground on which it established itself; it becomes groundless by its own efforts” (1970a, p. 398). It is this groundlessness which, in Fink’s view, “exhibits the paradox of psychology” (1970a, p. 398). The psychologist approaches their subject matter as if it were “a definite region of what is.” Yet when the psychologist reflects on the nature of its subject matter, they must realize that “what is” is only as an object of the particular region of what is under study. In focusing on one particular region of the real, the psychologist comes to recognize the medium through which all of the real is constituted. A part of the whole comes to be seen as responsible for the whole of which it is but a part. Such would be the result of an attempt to understand the nature of the transcendental from the psychological side of the parallelism. Located within the human body and its soul, transcendental subjectivity constitutes the world in which this same human body and soul exist as a constituted reality. “In the antinomy between psychology establishing itself on the world-ground and psychology ­divesting itself of the world-ground,” writes Fink, “lies the crux” (1970a, p. 398). How is a psychology that has discovered the constitution of the life-world in consciousness to continue to presume this same life-world as its pre-given ground?

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Following the discovery of intentionality, psychology faces a fork in the road. It may either pursue the constitution of the life-world in consciousness, becoming thereby philosophy, or it may limit itself to the study of the appearance of consciousness within the constituted life-world, giving up thereby any pretension of pursuing constitution itself as a psychic activity. In the first case “psychology suspends itself: it leads into transcendental phenomenology” (1970a, p. 398). One goes from the psychological side of the parallelism to the transcendental side, becoming as a result a philosopher. In the second case, psychology gives up its pretense to be a self-contained and self-grounding science and seeks its grounding in the science that is appropriate to the study of constitution itself, now as a transcendental activity. Psychology, that is, acknowledges its lack of autonomy, turning over the task of establishing an epistemological ground for science to philosophy. In either case, according to Fink, “psychology sees through its own first approach ‘upon the world ground’ in its meaning-bestowing origins …There is no psychology,” he thus concludes, “that could remain psychology” (1970a, p. 399). Conducting a phenomenological psychology in the natural attitude is an impossibility. Once psychology is brought to this fork in the road, the division of labor discussed above becomes necessary. It becomes essential to develop both a transcendental philosophy (first) and then also a transcendentally grounded psychology. It becomes necessary to establish parallel psychological and philosophical disciplines from the side of the transcendental. The psychology which develops as a result will have as its subject matter the constituted “self-apperception” of consciousness that appears within the horizon of the pre-given life-world. The difference that is instituted in this psychology as a result of the movement to, and return from, the transcendental side of the parallelism is that this “pre-givenness” is now understood to be itself a constituted achievement. Even from the transcendental perspective, consciousness appears within the life-world to exist as an embodied, individuated psychic reality. It is just that from the transcendental perspective this reality has been rendered transparent as one specific self-objectification of consciousness. Writes Fink: Even after the transcendental reduction, subjectivity does not cease objectifying itself as man among fellow men and things; it is just that this continuing self-constitution is now a transcendentally elucidated process. The horizon of constituted self-objectification (even when transcendentally “transparent”) determines the legitimate problem-sphere of psychology after its self-dissolution into phenomenology (1970a, p. 399).

Psychology thus limits itself as a result of the move to acquire a transcendental ground “to the scope of self-objectification,” allowing for philosophy to take over the task of the study of the constitution of the life-world in its entirety. Psychology accepts the limited horizon that belongs to the self-constitution of consciousness as merely one member of the “world of mind,” while philosophy retains the “absolute horizon” of the transcendental (1970a, pp.  399–400). In doing so, psychology accepts its limitations as a positive science of a well-delineated and clearly circumscribed region of the life-world. It agrees to remain within the “relevant limits” of its competence and not to presume to account for other dimensions of the life-world

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than those that lie within its proper scope, including its origins in transcendental constitution. It agrees, in other words, not to be psychologistic in its attempt to do psychology. The significance of Husserl’s pioneering work for psychology thus, and finally, becomes clear. It is, as we have said repeatedly: overcome transcendental naiveté first, over psychologism first, and then do psychology. The transcendentally grounded psychology which we will be able to establish on this basis will be as novel and radically different from psychology as a natural science as the transcendental phenomenology that grounds it. Such a psychology does not yet exist, but for the sake of both psychology and philosophy, Husserl insists, it “must be developed” (1977a, p. 38). Far from having little to no significance for the science of psychology, it was Husserl’s conviction that the Copernican conversion brought about in philosophy would have profound and far-reaching implications for psychology as well as all other social sciences. Psychology also, he writes, “is open to a ‘Copernican conversion’, wherewith it assumes the new sense of a completely radical transcendental consideration of the world and impresses this sense on all phenomenological-­ psychological analyses” (1977a, p. 144). Phenomenology not only brings about a revolutionary change in direction in philosophy, but properly understood, “signifies indeed a fundamental refashioning of psychology too” (1977a, p. 144). Now that we have established in review that psychology must give way and allow for transcendental phenomenology to provide it with a radically new and different ontological and epistemological framework, in which it may then situate and carry out its own psychological analysis and theory, we have left but to describe this new psychology in practice. We may now turn to the exploration of our newly won transcendentally grounded psychological terrain. What, in fact, will such a psychology look like? What is the “new sense” that is impressed upon it by virtue of its own, parallel, Copernican conversion and return to a no longer naïve positivity?

An Illustrative Example At this point in our work we must leave behind the security of having Husserl or one of his interpreters telling us what to do. He has provided us with nothing more than hints as to how to develop our new psychology, and nothing more than glimpses into what it would actually look like in practice. Because of this, we must depart from the more systematic appeal to Husserl’s works that we have been able to maintain thus far and seek assistance instead from the hints and glimpses provided here and there throughout the works already discussed. Building upon the arguments offered in previous chapters, we will develop a transcendentally, phenomenologically informed psychology in a gradual and stepwise fashion, walking self-consciously, as it were, through each of the four steps outlined in Chap. 6. As we do not as yet have at our disposal an established transcendental framework, we will have to start from the natural attitude and carry out progressively the series of reductions. Proceeding in this manner will allow us to point out

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along the way the differences that arise between a transcendentally grounded psychology and other transcendentally naïve (e.g., existential/hermeneutic) phenomenological psychologies. The first step in this procedure is that of the epoche of objective science, or the bracketing of all theoretical scientific constructs about the nature of our subject matter. We return, that is, from the naturalistic attitude to the life-world. We put aside naturalistic preconceptions about the nature of the psychic and simply describe what we find to belong to its sphere. We find the life-world restored to its original state, inclusive not only of the material physical aspects that natural science had abstracted and absolutized, but also of the evaluative, aesthetic, and ethical aspects that had been excluded. We find the psychic to be embedded in a nexus of practical and otherwise significant relationships with objects in its environment, carrying out activities that both presume and intend meaning. We find, in other words, persons engaged in meaningful activities, interacting with their environments in intentional, meaning-bestowing ways. The environment with which these persons interact thus does not appear purely as Nature, but as a socio-cultural and historical world that engages their interests, arouses their aesthetic awe and appreciation, appeals to their social conscience, etc. It is this intentional relation between person and environment that arouses our interest as psychologists. We take the person in their motivational intentional relations of meaning to be our subject matter. As Husserl described in the Crisis: “The specific subject matter of descriptive psychology is what is purely, essentially proper to persons as such, as subjects of a life which is in itself exclusively intentional” (1970a, p. 238; cf. also Chap. 4). Any phenomenologically based psychology, or psychology otherwise not naturalistically grounded, might begin with this purified descriptive sphere of the psychic in its intentional relation to the life-world. The initial index of differentiation is introduced, however, when we turn to the question of how these relations are to be studied. Let us take an example that we will be able to follow through our several steps. We take the example of a young woman’s experiences of not eating when hungry. Our subject describes her experience as follows: In overcoming the desire to eat, I feel successful—but only in that area—mainly because … I am hungry most of the time. I think about food almost constantly. There’s other areas of my life that I don’t feel like a complete failure at, but they don’t even matter that much ‘cause I don't really think about other areas—all I think about all the time is food—it’s the focus of my life and so that’s the area where I judge if I’m good or bad. Also, I feel like I must stick to my diet or I’ll go off the deep end … Because I do not trust my body to signal “stop” when I have had enough to eat, I avoid eating whenever possible. I’m afraid that if I yield to my appetite, it will carry me off on an eating rampage that I won’t be able to control. Hunger pangs frighten me because they signal a potential loss of control. When hunger strikes, I attempt to deny its existence, to ignore it. I pick up a book (very often a cookbook or calorie counter, ironically enough—either as a test of my will in the face of temptation, i.e., I deliberately read recipes and look at pictures of food when I’m hungry in order to prove to myself that even in a vulnerable, “hungry” state I can “pass the test” … I can overcome my craving for food [or, because] it satisfies the mental, if not the physical desire to eat and enjoy food). If I don’t feel I have the strength to pass the cookbook test, without yielding to hunger, I usually go for a walk or do some other strenuous activity, which not only takes my mind off my hunger but also helps to decrease the severity of the hunger pangs (cited in Davidson and Cosgrove, 1991, p. 91).

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There is much to this particular woman’s actual experience of not eating in the face of her hunger pangs that could be described in detail, from her initial sense of being hungry to her poring over the pages of a cookbook or taking a strenuous walk. How are we to study all of this? It might seem at first to be an overwhelming task. Husserl himself recognized that: “At first, to be sure, the possibility of a pure phenomenology of consciousness seems highly questionable, since the realm of phenomena of consciousness is so truly the realm of a Heraclitean flux” (1977a, p. 49). How are we to bring order into this chaos of sensations, associations, memories, desires, etc.? It is at this point that there is an initial parting of the ways amongst the various descriptive psychologies. We have a decision to make as to where we shall look in order to locate the principles that would allow us to understand what has just been described. We remember that description of this sort is only the first step in our method; we must also provide accounts for the content described. Where did these experiences come from, and how are we to understand their presence in this woman’s intentional life? What can account for this particular Heraclitean flux of experiences? The decision to be made at this point is decided on the basis of the direction we choose to pursue in order to ground the explanations to be offered in our psychology. We decide on the basis of how we answer what we have called the genetic question within psychology. Do we look, for example, “outside” of this woman’s experience, or do we look more deeply “into” her experience? Do we step outside of the experience in order to see what category it might belong to, what physiological mechanism might have brought it about, or what learned maladaptive response might account for it, or do we look to the meanings which constitute the experience as the experience that it is, the intrinsic structure which allows these experiences to cohere into a unified and meaningful whole, or to the temporal unfolding that synthesizes these diverse experiences along the continuum which is this woman’s psychic life? Kockelmans, MacLeod, and others whom we shall call naturalistic phenomenologists would advise that we look at this point to factors external to the experiences themselves which act as explanatory mechanisms for them. They would advise us to consult psychophysiological principles, for example, as well as behavioral principles, principles of social learning theory, and perhaps even psychoanalytic principles in order to explain this woman’s experiences. Her awareness of her almost constant hunger could be explained through the physiology of sensation, while her interest in her weight and her dieting behavior could be explained as over-­generalized learning or a learned maladaptive response. One instance of her flipping hungrily through the pages of her calorie counter, with all its attendant thoughts, feelings, associations, memories, etc., could be explained as the product of all of these various factors intersecting at this particular time and place. We remember that MacLeod had concluded that, in his view, “the phenomenological approach in psychology is likely to lead us … into a sophisticated behaviorism” (1964, pp. 54–55). Such an approach quickly loses the psychological subject as intentional agent, as it also loses the focus on experience in the life-world with which we began. As we know from our own previous discussion, it also is not the approach advocated by Husserl. He wrote to the contrary:

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The attempt to determine a process of consciousness as an identical object, on the basis of experience, in the same fashion as a natural object—ultimately then with the ideal presumption of a possible explication into identical elements, which might be apprehended by means of fixed concepts—would indeed be folly (1977a, p. 49).

The point of beginning with this woman’s actual, concrete experiences in the life-world was not to treat her experience as it if were itself a natural object or event brought about by natural causes. We cannot treat the process of experiencing as a thing, as the product of intersecting causal relationships. Neither may we appeal to the objective characteristics of a box of chocolate chip cookies sitting on her counter and the physiology of perception, to her rods and cones, for example, in order to account for this woman’s seeing of the cookies as a “temptation.” We may not appeal to her having received negative reinforcement in the past for eating sweets as the cause of her present guilt and self-disgust. The guilt she feels and the meaning that the box of cookies holds for her are not identical things that may occur at different times in the course of one’s life, each time brought about by identical causes. They are not things at all, but rather the intentional objects of constitutive acts of consciousness (cf. Chaps. 1 and 2). In order to remain faithful, then, to the intentional nature of this woman’s experiences we must take our second step of the phenomenological psychological reduction, limiting our scope to what is immanent to these acts themselves. We leave behind the position of naturalistic phenomenology, recognizing in it the naïve psychologism that Husserl had refuted in the Logical Investigations. We pursue a more radically phenomenological psychology that views experiencing as an intentional action rather than as a real event within Nature. We had quoted Husserl above as to the proper subject matter of psychology being “persons … as subjects of a life which is in itself exclusively intentional.” At this stage we thus suspend all realities outside of this particular woman’s experiencing and focus solely on the experiences themselves as the realities in which we are interested. We delve more deeply into her experiences, rather than looking to factors external to them. We employ the reduction operative in the Logical Investigations and outlined explicitly in “The Idea of Phenomenology” as a psychological method. For further discussion of the use of this method in psychological research, one may consult the writings of Giorgi (1970, 1975, 1985), Polkinghorne (1983), and Wertz (1983). In brief, we begin by eliciting a description from our subject of her experience of not eating when hungry, either through a written self-report, as provided above, or through an in-depth interview into the details of her experience. We take as our data, that is, our subject’s description of her experiences as lived by her (Davidson, 2003). This shift from data as reliably and publicly observable facts to self-reported, more private inner givens belies a more fundamental shift from a focus on objects and their causal underpinnings as reality to a focus on the act of experiencing itself as reality. As Kohák has written regarding this move: “The shift is subtle but significant. As lived, reality is the experiencing of an object. As [the natural attitude] interprets it, the reality is the object; the experience incidental to it” (1978, p. 32). What may appear to be a subtle shift on the level of ontology thus has profound significance on the level of methodology. In performing the phenomenological psychological reduction,

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we take an entirely different sphere of reality than that traditionally taken by science to constitute our subject matter. We are no longer interested in the objects themselves of experience and their (causal) structure but are rather interested in the experiencing of these objects and the structure we find to be intrinsic to the acts of experiencing themselves. In shifting our focus in this way, we turn away from a concern with the existential status of the objects experienced and concern ourselves solely with the experiencing of them. We leave the natural attitude and adopt the personal attitude, described by Husserl as follows: In the personal attitude, interest is directed toward the persons and their comportment toward the world, toward the ways in which the thematic persons have consciousness of whatever they are conscious of as existing for them, and also toward the particular objective sense the latter has in their consciousness of it. In this sense what is in question is not the world as it actually is but the particular world which is valid for the persons, the world appearing to them with the particular properties it has in appearing to them; the question is how they, as persons, comport themselves in action and passion—how they are motivated to their specifically personal acts of perception, of remembering, of thinking, of valuing, of making plans, of being frightened and automatically starting, of defending themselves, of attacking, etc. Persons are motivated only by what they are conscious of and in virtue of the way in which this [object of consciousness] exists for them in their consciousness of it, in virtue of its sense (1970a, p. 317).

Restricting our focus to what is immanent to this woman’s experience, we disregard the presumably objective nature of the physiology of hunger and concentrate instead on the meaning that her experienced hunger has for her. Rather than seeing sensations of hunger as separate from, existing independently of, her experience and then having to wonder as to how to bring the two together (e.g., neuronally), we begin with the two in relation to each other as our primary reality. How does this woman experience hunger? What is the meaning of being hungry for her? There is nothing intrinsic to the nature of hunger itself as a physical state, nor is there anything intrinsic to the subject herself as a woman, which could answer this question for us. The answer does not lie on either side of the relation, but precisely in the relation itself. It lies in the particular way in which this woman is currently engaged with her world. It is that which we, as psychologists, must account for, must make sense of. Kohák’s work is again helpful. He writes: Think of your own ordinary day—kindling the fire, hitching the horses, hauling wood, saying prayers, blowing out the lamp, or, for that matter, reading a book or studying philosophy. These are not thoughts, but neither are they things. They are acts, irreducible to either res cogitans or res extensa. It may seem “natural” to dismiss lived experience as purely subjective; it is not a thing and so must fit the category of mere thought. But, as we are aware of living it, it is neither; it is an act that includes both awareness and the object within itself. I do not begin with a subjective inner experience, “hitching,” and wonder how I can reach my team in the world. I begin with the overt subject act, hitching my horses, which includes, ab initio, both my awareness and my team (1978, p. 50).

It might seem, as Kohák writes, that we are taking something purely subjective for our data. Yet, if we are to conduct a psychology of subjectivity, where else might we start or what else might we study? We begin, then, with our subject’s acts of feeling hungry, trying to ignore her hunger, and then reaching for a cookbook.

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These acts include her sensations of needing and wanting to eat, and her attempts to stick to her diet and not give in to the temptations of food. They also include her feelings about and responses to these sensations of hunger, and her feelings about the meaning of eating or not eating (i.e., failure or success). We have before us in this one experience an entire drama; the temporal unfolding of a distinctly human scenario contained in the simple experience of feeling hungry and not eating. How are we to understand or account for this drama? What principles might we now use to bring order into this flux of sensations, thoughts, feelings, etc.—now that we have resolved not to explain them away in terms of factors external to them? Giorgi, following both Husserl and Merleau-Ponty, suggests that we look for an overall “structure” to this experience that will allow us to understand it intrinsically. Rather than looking outside of the stream of experience to objective principles, we look to the inherent organizing principle for the flux of phenomena itself: the meaning into which these diverse experiences cohere (Giorgi, 1985, p. 19). In terms of Kohák’s example, we compare the hitching of horses to an act in a play, to one moment of the unfolding of a plot. We compare it, let us say, to Othello’s giving of a handkerchief to Desdemona in the unfolding of his jealousy. If we can comprehend the logic (loosely speaking) of being jealous itself, as an act, then we have no need of appealing to other factors external to the experience of being jealous. Jealousy as a distinctly human experience need not be explained away in terms of other, not-so-human, causes. It carries its own telos, its own reason, within it. As Kohák argues: “The principle of jealousy is not susceptible of any proof other than that based on its own intrinsic necessity” (1978, pp. 20–21). This would be what it would mean to understand the subjective in its own terms. What, then, is the nature of the intrinsic necessity to be found in our woman’s story? What was the motivational structure of her acts? What was her experience of hunger like, such that she would respond to it in this fashion? And what was she dieting for? What was she trying to achieve in her life, and how did this particular act (of turning to the cookbook as opposed to the cookies) fit in or not fit in with her present plans and her imagined future? What sense did this act make for her? A young woman with whom I worked in psychotherapy once described a similar experience to me as one of being tempted by an eating of the forbidden fruit. She likened it to Eve’s act in the Garden of Eden of eating the apple that she had been explicitly prohibited from eating. Our subject appears to find herself in a similar situation, describing her turning to her cookbook, as a test of her will in the face of temptation. She is, as she describes, thinking about food and feeling hungry all the time. Yet, she is afraid of yielding to her appetite, afraid of giving in to the temptation of eating, because she feels she will not be able to stop. She will lose control and go on an eating rampage. Thus, if successful, she overcomes the temptation of giving in to her hunger. As a result, she feels successful in this struggle and avoids the feeling of being a failure. In such a situation, we might understand successful dieting as providing our subject with a fairly empty feeling of victory. She has temporarily overcome the hunger pangs that threaten her with a loss of control, but this will necessarily be a short-lived victory, as the pangs of hunger will return, and the battle will ensue again. She has only staved off the enemy for but a moment.

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As there was much that we could have provided in the way of concrete descriptive detail of this woman’s experience of hunger, the above description being but a portion of her actual narrative, there is also much that we could discuss regarding its structure and meaning. As we are using this case simply as an example, however, we may settle on an overly concise but workable understanding that will then allow us to pursue our presentation further. For the sake of the present discussion, let us say that the structure of this woman’s experience of not eating when hungry is captured in the meaning which hunger has for her in her experience. It appears from the qualitative data that she experienced being hungry as a wrong or unnecessary state of affairs. In other words, she lived her life as if she should not be hungry; experiencing her hunger solely as something to be overcome (Davidson and Cosgrove, 1991). It is in the context provided by this meaning of hunger in her experience that her sustained dieting and her act of turning to the cookbook as opposed to the cookies is to make sense. But how are we to account for this? Now that we have a reasonable handle on the structure and meaning of this woman’s experience, where do we go from here? Regardless of whether or not one agrees entirely with the structural understanding provided above, what is the next step in our psychology? Is it enough to understand the internal logic, the lived necessity, of her actions, or is more to be demanded of a scientific psychology than simply this? What do we do once we have arrived at the structure of our subject’s experience? How are we to make further sense of it, and is it imperative that we do so? Are we, as psychologists, content with this level of analysis? Can we stop here? We have simply to raise the obvious question in order to see that our real work has just begun. The obvious question is this: why does this woman experience hunger in this fashion? Why does she experience hunger solely as something to be overcome? Why does she feel that she should not be hungry? Clearly, not all women experience hunger as wrong and unnecessary. Some women experience hunger as an opportunity (for dieting or for eating) rather than as an obstacle to be overcome (Davidson and Cosgrove, 1991). Why is she different? How are we to account for the fact that her experience of hunger has such meaning? In terms of Kohák’s prior example, where does jealousy come from? How are we to understand that as humans we become at times jealous, or ashamed, or afraid, etc.? If we are not to look to external causes to explain the content of our experiences, what kind of accounts may we offer instead? Once this question has been raised a second index of differentiation is introduced that will now distinguish between a phenomenological psychology and a ­transcendentally grounded, or phenomenologically informed, psychology. Once again, the index is found in where one looks in order to answer this question. We have initially looked to within the experiences themselves in order to discover their structure and internal logic. Now that we have unearthed the intentional thread that holds the varying experiences together, we must tackle this question anew. How are we to understand that our subject’s experience has the structure that it does? As we have seen repeatedly in previous chapters, this question is most pressing when it comes to examples of deviance. It becomes more obviously a question, that is, when it is a matter, for example, of hallucinations as compared to accurate perceptions. Yet as we have also seen in previous chapters, it is a question which is

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operative below the surface at other times, in other cases, as well. It is the question of how we are to account for an individual’s experiences of the world in which they live. Even if our subject had experienced being hungry as an unequivocally pleasant experience, even if she had simply felt hungry, noticed the box of chocolate chip cookies on the counter before her, decided that she wanted to eat a few and then proceeded to do so with much straightforward delight, this string of experiences too would need to be accounted for psychologically. We have picked this example, however, precisely because it does represent an example of deviance. It will thus require us to confront this issue directly. It was at this point in our discussion of Husserl’s psychology lectures (in Chap. 5) that we were presented with the choice of either turning back to naturalism or viewing the psychic as being itself transcendental in nature. This juncture was reached when it became apparent that there might be this kind of discrepancy between the personal world of a given individual and “the” world that we presumably all (including this individual) share in common. At such a point, as we have now reached with our subject’s experience of hunger, we must decide as to how we are going to understand the nature of such a discrepancy. One option was to consider “the” world to exist objectively, independent of experience, and then to look to objective physical factors to explain why this individual’s experience of the world does not correspond to the objective nature of reality. This would be to return to naturalism. The other option appeared to be to consider this individual’s experience to be constitutive in nature, elevating the psychic thereby to the level of the transcendental. Thus, if we are not to return to the naturalistic position, we must view our subject as constituting her world and her hunger to have the particular meanings that they do. We say, then, that our subject constitutes hunger and food to have the significance that they do for her. She chooses in an existential sense to give food the meaning of being the forbidden fruit, as she chooses similarly to give hunger the meaning of being wrong and unnecessary. She constitutes her world as one in which she must be thin, and as one in which dieting and abstinence are the only ways through which she may achieve success. She sets up in this way an impossible goal for herself, which she must then feel badly for falling short of each time she actually eats. Placing her self-esteem contingent upon her sticking constantly to her diet and denying her own physiological needs, she engages in what Sartre called an “impossible project” (1956). She constitutes herself as someone who should not feel ­hungry. Thus, whether she eats or not, the mere experience of hunger itself is enough to torment her. To fill out this picture, we should include our subject’s constituting of the others in her life, herself in relation to them, and “the” world in general. Perhaps she constitutes others in her life, like her father, as responsible for her own ideals and goals. When questioned, for example, as to why she must be thin, our subject might very well respond that she initiated her dieting program to please her father, who desires that she be forever a size 2. She further constitutes herself as powerless in relation to him, choosing to see herself as someone who must submit to and live out his wishes. Or perhaps she cites her boyfriend’s preoccupation with her weight or her

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mother’s obsession with nutrition and exercise as the origin of her conviction in the inherent badness of hunger. She likewise constitutes herself as powerless in relation to them. Or perhaps she chooses to see the world as a place in which one must be thin to be accepted and loved, refusing to acknowledge that hunger may be experienced by others as other than unnecessary and wrong. She constitutes the world, in other words, as one in which constant dieting is the only practice that makes any sense for her. Would this not be what it would mean were we to take constitution to be a psychological activity? Is this not what is meant by the constitution of personal worlds? Our young woman as a psychological subject constitutes herself, the others in her life, and the world in which she lives to have the meanings that they do. Yet, how does this resolve the discrepancy between her world and the world in which the rest of us live? How are we to account for the nature of her (apparently pathological) constituting activity? Since there is nothing, as we have said, intrinsic to the nature of hunger itself as a physiological state that could account for our subject’s experiencing of it—for, after all, many others experience hunger quite differently—then perhaps there might be something intrinsic to the nature of our subject herself which could account for her actions and their significance. Perhaps she simply is the kind of woman who has such experiences of hunger. Perhaps she constitutes hunger to have this meaning, in other words, because she has (in some sense) an eating disorder. Those who stop at this level of analysis do so by attributing this woman’s experience to her. They do so by characterizing her as a particular type of woman; that is, the kind of woman who has these kinds of experiences. Thus, either we go further in our analysis or we stop where we are and pronounce this woman “anorexic” (or, in the case of jealousy, for example, “overly possessive”). But—questions concerning the accuracy of our diagnosis or the politics of psychiatric labeling in general aside—have we really achieved anything through this solution? Has categorizing our subject’s experiences or our subject herself contributed anything to our understanding of psychology in general or of her in particular? We have appealed to anorexia or eating disorders in the same manner that naturalistic psychologists appeal to rods and cones in their explanations of the act of perceiving: as a cause of her experience. She constitutes hunger as wrong and unnecessary because she is anorexic. But what does it mean to be anorexic other than to experience hunger in this fashion? As a descriptive term, we might find anorexia of some utility; as a kind of shorthand for this particular form of psychological conflict. There is, we could say, an anorexic-like experience of hunger and calorie counters. But as an explanatory device, it explains nothing. The result of a structural analysis of experience cannot be posited as the cause of the experience of which it is the structure. In other words, we cannot say that this woman constitutes hunger in this fashion because her experience has an anorexic structure, as we were able to pronounce her anorexic only on the basis of an analysis of her experience of hunger. The presence of an anorexic-­ like structure in a person’s experience does not account for itself. Regardless of whether one understood anorexia as a physical illness or as a pathological mode of

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being-in-the-world (e.g., Buytendijk, 1974), it would still be perfectly reasonable to inquire further as to why “anorexics” experience hunger in this fashion. How does one come to have anorexic-like experiences of hunger and calorie counters? How does hunger come to have this particular meaning? How are we to understand what we mean by “anorexic”? If we return to our previous description of our subject’s constituting activity, we would have before us an example of what might be meant by the use of anorexic as a descriptive term. We have a woman who sets up an impossible ideal for herself while simultaneously holding either the others in her life or no one at all responsible for it. She constitutes the world as one in which she should not be hungry and should be thin, without recognizing that this is a product of her own constituting activity. Thus, she experiences herself as a passive victim of the impossible injunctions which she herself actively instituted without her own explicit knowledge or awareness. How does this work, and, if it does, how does it account for the discrepancy between this woman’s personal world and “the” world we all share? If we accept that this woman’s experience of the world is constitutive in nature, then we must find a way to account for the differences that arise between the world she constitutes and “the” world in which she lives. Once we have made psychic subjectivity to be constituting in nature, then the only world we have access to is the world as intentional object of consciousness. “The” world, in other words, is constituted by psychological subjectivity. Yet this woman appears to constitute a different world than most of the rest of us, even as she lives in the same world with us. Thus, we have concretely encountered what Husserl theoretically referred to as the “paradox of subjectivity” (1970a). If this woman constitutes “the” same world in which we all live, how can her personal world be so different? In order to overcome this impasse, existential and hermeneutic phenomenological psychologists have appealed to concepts such as duplicity, self-deception (Fischer, 1986), and Sartre’s classic notion of bad faith (1956). These concepts make it possible for us to assert that this woman constitutes both “the” world we all share and her particular (pathological) personal transformation of “the” world. Her constituting activity is in essence split between two levels in such a way that on one level she does, and on another level she does not, have access to the shared and common world. In addition, she remains unaware of this splitting process and her own role in it. A crucial element of her pathology, according to this view, is thus her disavowal of her own responsibility for experiencing the world in the particular way that she does. Let us explore this notion of levels a bit further. We distinguish first between a level of “transcendence” and a level of “facticity” (cf. Chap. 5). It is on the level of transcendence that our subject constitutes “the” world she shares with others. This would be the world of her future possibilities; the world, that is, in which she does not have to be thin and in which hunger does not have to be wrong. It is by virtue of her constant access to this world that it always remains possible for her to constitute her personal world differently, to shape its character in a “healthier” way. But on the level of facticity, on the level in which her experience has already been shaped by her history and situatedness, she is only in touch with her personal world of dieting

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and weight loss. It is on this level that her particular personal transformation of “the” world takes place. By virtue of her facticity, she believes that the world has always and will continue always to be structured in this limited way. On this level, she experiences herself as a passive victim of her world, and her future is seen only as a continuation of her problematic past and present. To phrase this in Heideggerian terms, we can say that our subject does constitute “the” world in which we all live on the ontological level of her existence, while she constitutes her personal anorexic world on the ontic level (Heidegger, 1962; cf. Chap. 5). It is to the extent that she keeps these two worlds apart in her actual experience that we may judge her to be at fault or at risk psychologically. It is the act itself of keeping these two worlds separate which is considered to be the act of self-­ deception or bad faith. On the ontological level she knows that “the” world is not really the way she personally constitutes it to be on the ontic level. However, she keeps this knowledge out of her awareness, insisting that her personal transformation of “the” world is “the” world itself. She deceives herself into believing that the world really is the way she personally constitutes it to be, all the while remaining pre-reflectively, un-thematically aware that it need not be so. As Fischer writes, psychopathology is brought about by an “adamant insistence upon a familiar world, a world that one has self-deceptively constituted” to have a certain unchangeable and restricted character (1986, p. 69). We thus are able to explain the discrepancy between our subject’s personal world and “the” world by appealing to her own constituting activity. In order to retain her familiar and restricted anorexic world, she actively blocks out, or closes off, all of the other possibilities of which she is pre-reflectively aware. She actively denies on the ontic level all other possibilities that she knows on the ontological level to be possible other than those by which her life is currently shaped. As Fischer, again, comments: “All forms of psychopathology entail an arbitrary closed-off-ness to certain possibilities” (1986, p. 69). It is this closing off of possibilities that entraps our subject in her problematic and pathological existence. It is this that makes of her “an anorexic.” Her pathology is revealed in the manner in which she lives as necessary something (e.g., being thin) that she knows on another level to be merely contingent. But how are we to account for this active closing off of possibilities? How are we to account for the bifurcation of consciousness that allows for self-deception and bad faith? We have said that our subject constitutes her personal world ­self-­deceptively, through an active closing off of possibilities. It is apparent on the surface, after all, that other possibilities do exist in the world. Thinness is clearly not experienced by everyone as necessary. Surely our subject is aware of that on some level, and surely, she experiences “the” world in which these others live alongside of her. How, then, are we to account for her living of thinness as necessary? How are we to account for the apparent fact that her constituting of the world has become split and self-deceptive; that she actively cuts herself off from aspects of herself and her world with which she is constantly in touch? And, perhaps most impressively, how are we to understand that she will not stop doing so even when it is at the expense of her own happiness, if not her very life?

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We have now established that there is something wrong with the way in which our subject constitutes her world; there is something pathological about the nature of her constituting activity itself. Her pathological mode of being-in-the-world may be traced back to her own self-deceptive constituting activity. Yet the pathological nature of this constituting activity must now also be accounted for. Are we to appeal at this point to a disease process which causes this disturbance in our subject’s constituting ability, understood as one function of her psychological make-up? Are we to understand constitution, that is, as a property of the human organism that can be affected by illness and impairments of various sorts? Might we say that there could be a genetic loading or physiological vulnerability for this kind of rigidity and defensiveness, for instance? This would constitute, yet again, a return to the naturalistic position. It would take us, once again, outside of our subject’s own experience to factors external to, yet responsible for, it. Or, are we to attribute this disturbance to our subject as well, as we initially did with her experience? Are we to attribute it, perhaps, to a disturbance of her “will”? Might we say, that is, that she chooses to live thinness as necessary and hunger as unnecessary, despite her pre-reflective awareness that she could do otherwise? Apparently, either we pronounce our subject, as before, to be anorexic due to external and objective physical factors or we pronounce her to be anorexic due to her own volition. We must say that she chooses to live an anorexic mode of being-in-the-world. Such would be the implicit position of the various existential and hermeneutic brands of phenomenological psychology; regardless of the language they chose in which to articulate it. In the last analysis, the emphasis must fall in such a view on the notion of choice as an existential and meaning bestowing act of the psychological subject. Our young woman chooses to become and remain anorexic, to close off and continue to keep closed off other possibilities that at least a part of her knows to exist. She chooses to live thinness as necessary and hunger as unnecessary, despite the fact that she knows these necessities to be contingent upon her own choice. First, we may ask whether such a view makes intuitive sense to us; whether it does justice to the experiences of young women with anorexia and to our experiences of and with them. But then, secondly, we may ask whether such a view makes theoretical sense. Does such an account of constitution as a psychological activity actually work conceptually? If we return to our subject’s actual description of her experiences of not eating when hungry, we find no strong support for such a view of her pathology. There are no indications of the presence of a self-deceptive process or a split in her constituting activity. There is evidence, of course, of a conflict. She both wants and does not want to eat. Yet there is no reason to think on the basis of her description alone that she is in touch with another world in which eating and not dieting would be a possibility. It seems on the basis of her report that for her being thin is just necessary and being hungry is just wrong. We could understand such descriptions in which a bifurcation of consciousness was not in evidence as being in support of this view, however, simply by attributing the absence of the “healthier” world of possibilities to our subject’s bad faith. Even if our subject did not herself present both levels of constitution in her narrative, we

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could still posit the other level to exist in a pre-reflective and unthematized manner not yet accessible to her reflective awareness. Once this view is accepted, then various descriptions may be assimilated to fit our theoretical framework precisely due to the explicitly un-thematic quality attributed to the ontological level of constitution. Since our theory asserts that this level of constitution is taken for granted in all forms of psychopathology, both a presence of and absence of descriptive evidence for it may be taken as proof of the efficacy of the theory. The extent to which a given subject remains unaware of the presence of the ontological level in their own experience is the exact degree to which they are deceiving themselves and thus in the throes of their psychopathology. A similar case might be made for the presence or absence of descriptive evidence for the role that “choice” plays in this theory. There are no explicit references to choice or volition in our subject’s account of her experiences of hunger. This cannot be seen necessarily as a disproof of their importance, however, in that entailed in the notion of self-deception is the subject’s disavowal of the role of their own choice and responsibility. As above, it is the extent to which subjects do not recognize the role of their own responsibility and choice in constituting the world in the particular way that they do that they may be judged to be psychologically impaired. As the level on which the subject chooses to constitute the world may remain, according to this theory, un-thematic and pre-reflective, descriptions of experience may not be used directly to affirm or disaffirm the accuracy of the theoretical account offered. Whether or not our subjects are aware of their own choices in their experiences, we may continue to assert that choice plays a crucial—even if unacknowledged—role. Thus, while we might cite some descriptive evidence that would go against the thrust of this theoretical account, we cannot disprove it solely on descriptive grounds. It will not suffice to appeal to women’s own accounts of their anorexic experiences, to the degree to which they experienced being thin as necessary and the degree to which they appeared not to be aware of the conditioned and conditional nature of this necessity. Nor will it suffice to appeal to our own experiences of them and the degree to which they appeared to us to be out of control of their own lives, the degree to which they did not seem to have any choice in the matter, and to which they seemed genuinely convinced of the necessity of being thin. All of this counter evidence may be read merely as further evidence of the presence and power of self-deception. This fact alone should give us pause and lead us to wonder as to the phenomenological validity of such a view. Is it a mark of the phenomenological value of a theoretical account that it can assimilate all descriptive data to its conceptual framework? Or, would it be a more faithful, phenomenologically based account which left open in an explicit and self-conscious manner the way in which new data would be made sense of and accounted for? A hallmark of Husserlian phenomenology is that it adapts its theory and concepts to the data described. How can a theory be considered phenomenological in this sense when the actual content described, the actual data, are inconsequential to the account given for them? How can a theory be considered to be faithful to its phenomenon of interest when the nature of this phenomenon has already been dictated by the theory? It is at least problematic for a phenomenological account to posit the existence of experiences for which it has no descriptive evidence.

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There is a more basic level on which this theory falters in its adherence to a phenomenological approach, however, which accounts for its indifference to data. That is the manner in which it has been quick to discount our subject’s particular personal transformation of “the” world in which she lives as the product of an arbitrary and pathological closing off of possibilities. On what basis do we assert that these other possibilities were possibilities for her to begin with? On what basis do we assert that her living of thinness as necessary is contingent upon her choice, is really conditional? Our subject describes to us her experiences of hunger. Against what norm do we compare them in judging them to be constituted self-deceptively? In her personal world, our subject experiences hunger as unnecessary and being thin as necessary. This is not the case in our world, where hunger simply invites us to eat. Therefore, our subject must be anorexic. That would account for the discrepancy between her experience and ours. However, before appealing to explanations of this discrepancy, we seem to have already concluded that our world must be taken as “the” world against which our subject’s experiences may be judged. How did we arrive at this position? While the answer to this question might seem obvious, how do we know that hunger is not unnecessary and thinness not necessary in “the” world we all share? We should not wince at the obviousness of this question, as we have seen Husserl call just such “obvious” matters into question repeatedly over the course of his career. The point is not so much one of how we know that this woman is not “normal” in some sense, but how we are to know the nature of “normal” constitution. How do we know what the nature of “the” world is? How do we know that there are possibilities that this woman is closing off or blocking out of her awareness? Where did our knowledge of this world of possibilities come from? It has, quite simply, been assumed. We have assumed throughout our analysis of our subject’s experience that we had a firm grasp on the nature of “the” world against which we might compare her personal world. We have presumed knowledge of the nature of “normal” constitution. We have assumed that hunger has an objective meaning and significance to which our experience of it should correspond. But where are the researches, Husserl might ask, which allow us to assert that hunger should have such a meaning? Rather than carrying out such researches prior to exploring the particular experiences of our subject, we have simply presumed a knowledge of “the” world as a given in our investigation. We have carried out our investigation on the ground of the life-world, situated our subject’s experiences in its context. But the life-world is itself an achievement of consciousness, a correlate of intentional constitution. How can we take it as a given? How can we carry out our investigation upon its ground, when it is itself grounded in the very constituting activity that we are investigating? Such a circularity in reasoning reminds us of the transcendental psychologism that Husserl found to be inherent to this form of phenomenology (cf. Chaps. 5 and 6). And, in fact, we have only been able to carry out our investigation in this fashion by psychologistically positing our life-world of certain necessities and possibilities to exist as “the” world in which our subject lives. We have then accounted for the differing necessities and possibilities by which her personal world is structured by

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claiming that she closes off the other possibilities which exist in our world through her self-deceptive acts. We have taken possibilities that are real for us, but apparently not real for our subject, posited them as ideal possibilities for her, and then attributed them to the life-world as “pseudo actualities” (Sokolowski, 1974) which she is actively turned away from. Thus, while we begin with the recognition that our subject’s experience differs from our own, we insist that she share the same world with us and then find it necessary to appeal to self-deception to account for the fact that her experience of this assumed world differs. We have no reason to believe that these possibilities exist in her experience, however, other than on the basis of our own experience—which we know from the outset to be different from hers. The psychologistic reasoning upon which this view is built is most clearly evident in its understanding of the nature of pathology. We know “the” world we all share to be an achievement of intentional constitution, and we consider this constitution to be a psychological function. It has thus been necessary for us to include our subject in this process of constitution as well, asserting that she carries this out on the ontological level in addition to constituting her own pathological personal transformation of this world on the ontic level. But in doing so we have thus asserted that she is both “normal” and “sick.” She has ontological access to the healthy world, and only remains limited ontically. At any given time, she could cease this self-­ deceptive activity and return to more normal or healthy (“ontological” or “authentic,” etc.) functioning. She thus only remains sick through her own willful activity. Her sickness is actually only a pseudo sickness (cf. e.g., Keen, 1984). Such a view suffers from what Flynn has referred to as “the ontic/ontological aporia” (1980). We have taken both the ontological and ontic levels to apply to our young woman as a psychological subject. We have then judged her to be deficient (pathological, inauthentic, etc.) to the extent that her ontic world differs from the ontological world. Yet does anyone live on the ontological level? Is this not precisely what is meant by “ontic”? Is anyone’s personal world not structured by lived necessities that might be considered ontologically to be contingent? Is it not ­precisely the living of contingencies as necessary that characterizes the psychological as such (cf. Giorgi, 1981)? We have confused what may be taken to characterize constitution on the ideal level of ontology and pure possibility with what actually happens on the real level of concrete, human existence. The existential or hermeneutic position we are exploring here thus shares the same fundamental confusion between the real and ideal that we discovered in Chap. 1 to characterize psychologism. We remember that in Husserl’s initial refutation of psychologism he pointed out various forms this confusion could take. There was the confusion of taking the ideal to be present as a real characteristic of the present (naive psychologism), the confusion of taking it to be present as a real ideal of the future (biologism), and the confusion of taking it to be present as an ideal essential to a real species (anthropologism). In all of these cases there was a failure to appreciate the ideal as ideal. The same can be found to be true in our present attempt to account for our subject’s anorexia. Here our ideal is that of “the” world of pure possibilities and contingencies. But whether we posit “the” world to exist for our subject as a real

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(but unthematic) characteristic of her present life, as a real ideal for her future (transcendence), or as an (ontological) ideal of what it means to be human, we miss the extent to which it is experienced by her as simply not real. We fail to appreciate the possible as (only) possible (for us). Our subject’s world is one in which being thin is necessary and being unconcerned with her weight and caloric intake is not possible. It is our task to make sense of this in the context of the world in which our subject lives, rather than in the context of an ideal world in which she does not; to make sense of her experience in terms of what it is, rather than in contrast to what it is not. We should thus return to our task of giving an account of her experience from within, in its own terms, rather than by appealing to factors outside of it—whether they be physiological or metaphysical (i.e., ontological) in nature (cf. Dilthey, 1977; Sokolowski, 1974).

The Crisis of Relativism Our mistake was to attempt to account for the nature of our subject’s constitution of the world by appealing to her (pathological) nature as a psychological subject. To do so was to psychologize the process of constitution; to place it, so to speak, within our subject’s head—or at least within the boundaries of her psychological ego. But constitution is not a process that takes place in a subject’s head and then reaches out in some fashion to the world. As we argued previously, it is transcendental in nature (cf. Chaps. 3 and 5). It is the intentional relation which is primary, and which is constitutive of both psychological subject and world. Thus, it is in the relation between our subject and her world that we should look in order to account for her experience. Kohák offers the following example of a “paranoid” subject: A paranoidal subject will seek a community of persons who do not threaten him—in vain, since being-threatened is a mode of experiencing rather than a function of its object. A well-­ meaning friend might, no less in vain, seek to convince that the threat is “in his mind,” and conclude that the subject needs to be “cured of his mind,” by surgery, analysis, or behavior modification. But neither attempt will serve. The threat is there: not in the world, not in the mind, but in experience. To understand it, we need to focus not on the subject, not on the world, but on the way [(the subject) experiences (the world)] (1978, p. 92).

Clinical practice based upon the existential or hermeneutic-phenomenological approach discussed above would be directed toward changing the nature of the subject’s constituting activity. It would seek to correct this subject’s feelings of being threatened, or our young woman’s conviction in the necessity of being thin, as located within their respective minds. Addressing the self-deceptive split in the subject’s experience, it would try to bring the closed off aspects of “the” world back into their personal world. It would see no reason to address the nature of “the” world directly, since this world is simply assumed and taken for granted to exist in an objective and independent fashion. “The” world simply is what it is and will remain so, regardless of the extent to which our subject manages to be open to it. It would also see no need to address the nature of the personal world in which the subject

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lives, assuming this world to be only a pathological product of their self-deceptive constituting. Holding the psychological subject responsible for this world, so to speak, its energies would be focused on changing the subject rather than their world. Changes in this world would then come as a matter of course upon the heels of changes in the subject. But we have found this view to be built upon transcendental psychologism. “The” world is not an objective given against which our subject’s personal world may be compared, but itself an achievement of (transcendental) subjectivity. In viewing our subject’s personal world merely as a pathological transformation of “the” world, we did not take into account this constituted nature of “the” world itself. In order to do so, however, we must move from a psychological level of analysis to a properly transcendental one. We must move from the phenomenological psychological reduction and its personal attitude to the third step of the transcendental reduction of philosophical phenomenology (cf. Chap. 6). We thus abandon phenomenological psychology due to its basis in the transcendental psychologism that holds that the life-world is objectively given as the context in which psychological constitution takes place. In its place, we adopt a transcendentalism which, according to Husserl, holds that: The ontic meaning of the pre-given life-world is a subjective structure, it is the achievement of experiencing … life. In this life the meaning and the ontic validity of the world are built up—of that particular world, that is, which is actually valid for the individual experience (1970a, p. 69).

We should be careful to remember, however, that we are now no longer dealing with psychological subjects and a psychological level of analysis. We should remember as well that in leaving that level of analysis we have now become, temporarily, philosophers rather than psychologists. This has been required, we recall, because we do not as yet have access to the nature of “the” world against which we had desired to compare our subject’s personal world. The task of gaining access to and exploring the nature of this world is philosophical, rather than psychological, in nature. In taking this third step in our methodology, then, we leave behind momentarily our young woman as a psychological subject and look instead to the constitution of both her and her world that take place in the experiencing life that she describes. We no longer look at this experience, that is, as if it were taking place in her mind, but rather as one segment of the on-going constitutive relation between subject and world which accounts for the existence of both (cf. Landgrebe, 1970). We turn, then, to consider “the” world as well in its character as intentional correlate of consciousness. We consider even the pre-given life-world as a subjective achievement. How, exactly, are we to do this? Writes Husserl: When the phenomenologist explores everything objective, and whatever can be found in it, exclusively as a “correlate of consciousness,” he does not consider and describe it only straightforwardly and only as somehow related back to the corresponding Ego and the ego cogito of which it is the cogitatum. Rather, with his reflective regard, he penetrates the anonymous “cogitative” life, he uncovers the definite synthetic courses of the manifold modes of consciousness and, further back, the modes of Ego-comportment, which make understandable the objective affair’s simple meantness for the Ego, its intuitive or

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non-­intuitive meantness. Or, stated more precisely, they make it understandable how, in itself and by virtue of its current intentional structure, consciousness makes possible and necessary the fact that such an “existing” and “thus determined” Object is intended in it, occurs in it as such a sense (1977a, p. 47).

We do not take the assertion that our psychological subject and her world are constituted by consciousness in a vague, abstract, and empty fashion; we do not simply say that they are related to consciousness. Rather, we take this assertion concretely as a point of departure in exploring just how this is so in our particular case. We ask how this subject and world came into existence in precisely the ways that they have. How did our subject come to experience the world as having the particular sense that it does for her? How did it become both possible and necessary for her to experience hunger as wrong? The presence of which definite intentional structures of consciousness would account for the fact that thinness has the sense that it does in our subject’s life? What anonymous syntheses of transcendental subjectivity have made it both possible and necessary for our subject to experience food in this fashion, for it to have this sense? We return, then, to the question of how we are to account for our subject’s experience having the structure that it does. We discovered earlier that this structure could not account for itself, and that we could not account for it by attributing it to the personal constituting activity of our psychological subject. We therefore pursue our analysis further. We turn to the task of accounting for the structure of our subject’s experience on the basis of the activity of transcendental subjectivity. This entails doing research into the nature of the implicit context of meaning in which our subject’s experience takes place; research, that is, into the “hidden” and “anonymous” transcendental constitution of this experience and the world in which it is situated. To conduct this research, we look beyond the explicit meanings that are present in our subject’s description to the meanings that are implied as it were behind, or underneath, them. At this point we may begin to get a sense of how a transcendental intentional analysis of consciousness differs from more naïve approaches. It is here where the true radicalism of phenomenology comes into play; here where the difference between intentional analysis and other forms of analysis becomes most important and most apparent. For a description of this difference, we appeal to the important passage from Husserl which we included as one of the opening quotations for this chapter; it reads: It becomes evident that, as intentional, the analysis of consciousness is totally different from analysis in the usual and natural sense … Intentional analysis is guided by the fundamental cognition that, as a consciousness every cogito is indeed (in the broadest sense) a meaning of its meant, but that, at any moment, this something meant is more—something meant with something more—than what is meant at that moment “explicitly” (1977a, p. 46).

When we undertake a truly intentional analysis, we understand from the outset that the explicit meanings that will be found in our subject’s experience will be only a small portion of the actual meanings that go into constituting an experience to be the experience that it is. They comprise only the tip of the intentional iceberg. But,

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as such, they provide what Husserl calls a “transcendental clue” (1977a, p. 50) as to the layers and syntheses of hidden meanings which provide their implicit context. In intentional analysis we begin with what is meant at any moment explicitly and then work our way back to the meanings which must have been meant implicitly in order for this explicit meaning to have been possible. With respect to the nature of this form of analysis, Husserl continues: As intentional, it reaches out beyond the isolated subjective processes that are to be analyzed. By explicating their correlative horizons, it brings the highly diverse anonymous processes into the field comprising those that function “constitutively” in relation to the objective sense of the cogitatum in question—that is to say: not only the actual but also the potential subjective processes, which, as such, are “implicit” and “pre-delineated” in the sense-producing intentionality of the actual ones and which, when discovered, have the evident character of processes that explicate the implicit sense (1977a, p. 48).

It is precisely this “reaching out beyond isolated subjective processes” which makes of intentional analysis a transcendental, as opposed to a psychological, method. In order to make sense of experience as intentional in nature, we look beyond the isolated experiences themselves to their implicit and pre-delineated horizon (Davidson, 2003). This horizon is itself a further constituted achievement of subjectivity. It cannot be considered to be a psychological achievement, however; it is not attributable to the psychological subject as constituting ego. Rather, it reaches out beyond the boundaries of the psychological ego as being likewise the horizon and context for it. It is, in other words, in this context, within this horizon, that our young woman comes to be the particular person that she is. She is constituted as this particular individual as a result of the same process that constituted her world as the particular world that it is. Psychological subject and world are but different ­(constituted) poles of the same intentional relation. The subjectivity that constitutes them cannot be psychological (cf. Chap. 5). In addition, it is important to note that this reaching out beyond isolated subjective processes is essential to intentional analysis because it is essential to intentionality itself. Subjective processes are not isolated in experiencing life; their reaching beyond themselves is part of their essential structure. As Husserl writes: “This intendingbeyond-itself, which is implicit in any consciousness, must be considered an essential moment of it” (1977a, p. 46). It is thus because experience possesses this “horizon structure” as one of its essential moments that phenomenology and intentional analysis require, in Husserl’s words, “methods of a totally new kind” (1977a, p. 48). We first encountered these methods in Chap. 6, when we quoted Husserl as writing that, in leaving the psychological “it is necessary to dismantle everything which already pre-exists in the sedimentation of sense in the world of our present experience” and “to interrogate these sedimentations relative to the subjective sources out of which they have developed.” At the time, Husserl was arguing that psychological subjectivity affords us access only to a “world as already complete,” while what we need to explore is “the subjectivity whose operations of sense have made the world which is pre-given to us what it is” (1973, pp. 48–49). We thus abandon, for now, psychological subjectivity in order to trace the origins of this subjectivity in the layers of sedimented sense that resulted from previous acts of transcendental constitution.

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So, we set now to the task of applying this new method to the case of our young woman with anorexia. We are interested in discovering the implicit horizons of her experiences of not eating when hungry. We take her experience of hunger as wrong and unnecessary, and her experience of thinness as necessary, as “transcendental clues” for further intentional exploration. Now what do we do? How do we go about this task of discovery? Writes Husserl: Naturally it is everywhere a matter of uncovering the intentionality implicit in the experience itself as a transcendental process, a matter of explicating systematically the pre-­ delineative horizons by a conversion into possible fulfilling evidence (1977a, p. 64).

We first take these “transcendental clues” and turn them into questions. It is apparent from our psychological analysis that our subject lives certain contingencies as necessary. What context would account for these particular structures being lived in this way? We then take these questions back to our subject’s experience itself in order to find the answers that are implicit in it. We “explicate systematically” the horizons which are already implied in our subject’s description, converting them thereby into “possible fulfilling evidence”—making them, that is, accessible to validation, revision, or rejection. Traditional natural science might refer to such a step as one of hypothesis generation. There is, however, an important difference between what we are attempting here and a brainstorming of possible explanations for a natural event that will then be empirically tested. We have obtained a structural understanding of our subject’s experience that contains certain gaps, certain crucial junctures at which something has been taken for granted. Our next step is to explore these gaps; to delve more deeply into our subject’s experience to the more implicit yet silently operative levels of meaning which, in being taken for granted, are obvious neither to her nor to us at first. We thus derive our answers directly from the same experiences out of which our questions first arose. Rather than speculating as to possible external causes of our subject’s experience, we are making explicit what is already implicit in it and then tracing these implicit meanings back to their own origins in other subjective acts of constitution. What is there on the horizon of our young woman’s experience, then, which would help us to understand how she has come to live being thin as necessary? In order to answer this question, we must first know what the horizons of her experience are. Where are we to look for our answers? We have said that we are to look back to her experience itself, and that these horizons are to be found implicit in it. Yet we have also said that subjective processes are not isolated, and that they reach beyond themselves. Where is it that they reach to? Where in her experience are these implicit horizons to be located? The first sense of horizon with which we are already familiar is that of temporal horizon. We remember that we discovered experience to be temporal in nature, and to have as essential moments within it, its own retentional and protentional horizons (cf. Chap. 3). Thus, a first horizon to which we might appeal, as implicitly present in our subject’s experience, is that of her experiences in the past and her expectations of the future. We would in this way situate her present experiences of not eating

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when hungry in the overall context of her life, as one moment in the unfolding of her personal history. Her present experiences are to be made sense of as both coming out of the horizon of her previous experiences and moving toward the horizon of her anticipated future. Perhaps her father did want her to fit forever into a size 2, and perhaps she does want to continue to attract her boyfriend, hoping that he will eventually marry her. To this extent our intentional analysis remains similar to psychodynamic clinical practice. Thus far we have situated our subject’s present activity in the horizon of her past experiences and future aspirations. Yet we must remember that we are no longer on a psychological level of analysis. While we continue to refer to our subject as a young woman and continue to refer to her individual experience, we need to keep in mind that we are not utilizing these terms in a psychic sense. Our subject’s experiences reach beyond the boundaries of her psychological ego; they do not take place within her mind. When we refer to her history, we therefore refer to previous experiences that likewise took place in a life-world of which she as a psychological subject was a part. In other words, when we refer to the meaning of her past experiences, we refer to meanings that transcended our subject as a psychological ego. The meanings in terms of which she now lives and has previously lived her life are and were not products of psychological constitution. It is thus not only our subject’s own history as a psychological subject to which we are referring. But what other sense of history is there? How can we move from a psychological attitude to a transcendental attitude and continue to speak of history? Does not history only make sense on the psychological level? Is not the transcendental o­ rdinarily understood to be a-temporal and a-historical? For Husserl, however, the transcendental is understood to be essentially temporal in nature. Transcendental constitution is precisely a process of temporalizing (cf. Cairns, 1976). For Husserl, therefore, it makes eminent sense to speak of temporal horizons for transcendental constitution. They are built in as essential moments of the process. But how are we to understand this sense of history? In order to do so we must appeal briefly to Husserl’s notions of passive generation and sedimentation. Husserl divides constitution into two basic forms: an active form and a passive form. The active form we are already familiar with; we have referred repeatedly to the activity of transcendental subjectivity. It is “in active genesis,” Husserl writes, that “the Ego functions as productively constitutive, by means of subjective processes that are specifically acts of the Ego” (1977a, p. 77). But we cannot account for all of experience on the basis of such activity alone. “Anything built by activity necessarily presupposes,” claims Husserl, “a passivity that gives something beforehand.” There is in addition to acts of subjectivity, then, a sphere of passively generated meaning upon which these acts are built. There is already a pre-­ given stratum of significance that provides the context for further active constitution. Thus, he writes: “When we trace anything built actively, we run into constitution by passive generation” (1977a, p. 78). These meanings that have been passively generated, which are pre-given to acts of consciousness, did not arise out of nothingness, however. They are given passively at this particular point on the basis of their having been constituted actively at

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some other point in the past. All meaning is constituted by acts of consciousness. Once meanings have been constituted, though, they do not simply disappear. They become what Husserl referred to as “sedimented” (1970a, p. 361); taking their place in the retentional horizon of the temporal flux of phenomena. They become part of the passively generated strata of sense, part of what henceforth is pre-given to future acts of constitution. It is through the process of sedimentation that this stratum of meaning comes to be available for further incorporation into ever new acts of constitution. Sedimentation is the process through which actively generated meanings become part of the passively pre-given world. In is in this sense that transcendental constitution may be seen as an essentially temporal and temporalizing process. Acts of constitution bridge between previous acts of constitution and what are now their pre-given meanings and future acts of constitution which will be built upon the then sedimented meanings of these present acts. It is in this way that the intentional thread of experience holds together the entire temporal flux: leading out of a previously constituted past into a yet to be constituted future. History becomes thus one of the constituted achievements of this process; it is, writes Husserl, “from the start nothing other than the vital movement of the co-existence and the interweaving of original formations and sedimentations of meaning” (1970a, p. 371). It is this sense of history that may serve as the first horizon of our subject’s experience. We look to the implicit layers of passively generated meanings that have become sedimented from past acts. As Husserl writes, we “penetrate into the intentional constituents of experiential phenomena themselves … and thus find intentional references leading back to a ‘history’.” Situating ­phenomena in the horizons of their intentional history then renders them “knowable as formations subsequent to other, essentially antecedent formations” (1977a, p. 79). We are able thus to make sense of whatever it is that our subject has taken for granted in her present experience by viewing it as “an obscurity arising out of a sedimentation of tradition” (1970a, p. 72). We account for the structure of her experience by viewing it as a constituted product with its own implicit intentional history consisting of previously sedimented meanings. By adopting such an approach to the analysis of experience we give a new meaning and a new answer to the genetic question. This is the question of how we provide an account for the content of experience described. Other approaches attempt to account for experience through appeals to naturalistic causality (naive psychologism) or psychological idealism (transcendental psychologism). Transcendentalism provides its own genetic account by appealing to the active and passive generation of meaning as the context in which experience takes place. We answer the genetic question by appealing to the genesis of meaning as a transcendental process. In such a view, the presence of structures in a subject’s experience need not account for themselves, nor need they be attributed to psychological subjects as products of their existential choices (as in existential phenomenology). They may be seen rather as historical in nature, and thus as having their own implicit origins in prior acts of constitution. It is in this sense that structure is taken as a transcendental clue for further historical investigation.

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In investigating the gaps in our subject’s description, we thus turn to exploring the facticity of the meanings by which her experience has been structured. Once this step is taken, intentional analysis turns into a process of both static and genetic “intentional explication” (1977a, p.  143; cf., also, Bachelard, 1968; Seebohm, 1983). We explicate the meanings that are both present statically in the phenomenon under investigation and implicit genetically in its own history. Thus, Husserl writes that understanding “any given cultural fact is to be conscious of its historicity, albeit ‘implicitly’” and that making a structure “self-evident” entails “the disclosure of its historical tradition” (1970a, pp. 370–371). It is this disclosure of the facticity, the historical tradition and origin, of a structure, a cultural fact, that we previously referred to as the conversion of its pre-delineative horizons into fulfilling evidence. We recall that, as this process is one of explication of meanings, it differs considerably from a more natural scientific sense of hypothesis testing. We can now examine this difference more fully. Husserl refers to this process as one of “reactivation” of the meanings sedimented in the intentional history of the phenomenon of interest (1970a, p. 361). Converting implicit horizons into possible fulfilling evidence consists of bringing these sedimented structures back to life as the intentional correlates of active constitution. We take what are presently passively generated meanings and trace them back to their original source in acts of constitution. The history of a given cultural fact is a history of pre-given meanings. These meanings were, at some point, however, the achievements of actual acts of subjectivity. Explicating the pre-­ delineative horizons of an experience is thus a process of reclaiming, or reactivating, these original acts; it is to place the researcher in the role of subject constituting these now sedimented meanings as if for the first time. Fulfilling evidence is achieved when we are able to recapture the unfolding of these original acts as functioning constitutively in the on-going history that is our subject’s experiential life. It would seem that to understand adequately our subject’s experience, then, we would have to situate it in the horizon of the sedimented historical and cultural meanings and traditions that comprise the life of transcendental subjectivity. Yet how did we arrive at viewing the structures of our subject’s experience as “cultural facts”? Were we not just discussing the horizons of her individual experience? How did we come to view these horizons as the historical traditions of a culture? We have come to an appreciation of the temporal nature of consciousness and its essential horizonal moments of retention and protention. But how did our subject’s experience come to be situated in a cultural sense of history? Did moving to history require that we also take into account culture and society at large? We have remarked at several places along the way, since we left behind the position of phenomenological psychology, that we are no longer on a psychological level of analysis. This is yet another point at which it is crucial that we keep this in mind. The experience that we are in the process of analyzing transcends the boundaries of a psychological ego; it is constitutive of both this ego and its life-world. The meanings constituted in this experience transcend the experience itself and its (constituted) psychological subject. They reside in the life-world. Our subject’s experience transcendentally considered thus possesses all of the various aspects that Husserl had initially attributed to our everyday experience of the life-world.

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It possesses ethical, practical, aesthetic, and evaluative aspects. It also is intrinsically temporal in nature, as we have seen. All of these aspects thus provide experience with additional motivational horizons. We also remarked in our introduction to the life-world (cf. Chap. 3) that it was intrinsically intersubjective in nature; that essential to our experience of the life-­ world was the fact that it was shared with other Ego-subjects (1931, p. 94). It should thus be no surprise to us to find that once we liberate our analysis of experience from the boundaries of a (naturalistic) psychology it is revealed to be essentially social in nature as well. “The historical world,” writes Husserl, is “first pre-given as a social-historical world” (1970a, p. 372n). We might recall at this point our comment in Chap. 6 that the conviction in the individualistic nature of experience was a residue of naturalism. In overcoming naturalism and individualism (cf. also the first part of this chapter), we realize that our subject’s experience is not so much her personal psychological property as it is a cultural event. It is situated in society and culture as well as in history; it is as social and cultural in essence as it is historical. “In general, the world exists not only for isolated men but for the community of men,” writes Husserl, “even what is straightforwardly perceptual is communalized” (1970a, p. 163). Let us now return to our analysis of our subject’s experiences of being hungry and not eating and see what further light can be shed on them as a result of these considerations. Let us take one aspect of her experience as an example. She reported in her description that she judged herself to be good or bad solely on the basis of her overcoming or giving in to the temptation of eating. There is implied in this a meaningful relation between worth and weight. Being good for our subject means being thin. Goodness and worth have come to be implicitly related, perhaps exclusively, to one particular form of physical appearance. There appears to be no other way to be good than to match this ideal. This relationship or structure thus poses a gap in our subject’s report. How has such a relation come about? In what kind of context, within what socio-cultural, historical, ethical, practical, etc., horizons, would such a structure make sense? Viewing this experience as a cultural fact in this way, we now have many avenues of exploration to account for our subject’s experience having this particular structure. We return to her experience and examine it for traces of these horizons. What evidence is there in her experience for the operation of implicit layers of sedimented meaning in the passive genesis of her experience of hunger? There is perhaps the meaning for her of the experiences alluded to earlier; the meaning which she derives from her father’s wishes for her to fit into a size 2 and her boyfriend’s unspoken desires for her to be slim and shapely. These experiences contribute to her own conviction in the value of thinness. But there are also more subtle experiences with related meanings. There are her experiences of television commercials and magazine advertisements in which female models are always less than 100 lbs., in which attractiveness is equated with thinness. There are her experiences of the societal and cultural institutions (e.g., beauty pageants) that embody the accepted social and cultural emphasis on the role of physical attractiveness in the determination of the desirability of women. And there are other experiences in her life which call into

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play even more subtle historical and political contexts, such as her experiences of the concrete manifestations of patriarchal systems of gender definition upon which a woman’s worth has come to be associated with her desirability, which is associated with her physical appearance. These would include, for example, her initiation into her role as an object of sexual desire (as opposed to agent) and the male centered language which preserves it. A foundational horizon for her experience would thus be what Husserl referred to as the “problem of the sexes” (1970a, p. 188)— meaning the problem of how subjects come to be constituted as gendered and the meaning which this has for them based on historical, cultural, and social contexts (cf. McKenna, 1982). Once we have a grasp on what it is we are looking for we can thus find much evidence in our subject’s experience as to the socio-cultural facticity or the social and historical origin of her living of thinness as necessary. There has been, in fact, a valuable body of descriptive literature that relates eating disorders in particular to just these kinds of socio-cultural and historical forces (cf., e.g., Boskind-Lodahl, 1976; Orbach, 1986; Szekely, 1987). This literature strongly suggests what we have come to expect from our own discussion: that a given subject’s experience of not eating when hungry cannot be divorced, without a distortion of its sense, from the socio-cultural and historico-political context in which it takes place. Szekely, for example, writes that: Once the phenomena designated by the diagnostic category of eating disorders are detached from actual life situations, we can no longer understand how these phenomena have developed, how they have come to be identified as psychopathologies, and what they signify about the social relations in which they are embedded (1987, p. 36).

In doing phenomenological research it is precisely our task to describe, analyze, and comprehend these phenomena as they are lived in actual life situations. Since these actual life situations take place in the life-world as a socio-cultural and historico-­political (as well as ethical, aesthetic, etc.) reality, it only seems reasonable that our descriptions and analyses would also address these horizons of meaning as well. We have moved with this step to a more comprehensive understanding of our subject’s particular experience. We have situated it in its varying horizons and traced its structure and explicit meaning to their origins in the sedimented layers of implicit meanings that were pre-given to it. In doing so we have certainly transcended the scope of a purely psychological discipline and have lost our previous grasp on our subject’s experience as a psychological phenomenon. We have obtained in its stead, however, a rich and complex horizon of meanings in which we may more accurately and faithfully contextualize our phenomenon of interest. Having adopted a transcendental attitude, we know that while phenomena may have psychological dimensions or aspects to them, they are not solely psychological in nature. Moving as we have to a multi-dimensional understanding of experience allows us not to overestimate or overvalue the psychological dimension to the exclusion of the other, equally salient dimensions of the phenomenon of study. In commenting on Husserl’s concept of horizon, Gadamer described the value of this step as follows:

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A person who has no horizon is a man who does not see far enough and hence overvalues what is nearest to him … To acquire a horizon means that one learns to look beyond what is close at hand—not in order to look away from it, but to see it better within a larger whole and in truer proportion (1985, pp. 269–272).

In order to do psychology, one need not believe that all there is to life is the psychological. One need not, in Gadamer’s words, overvalue the psychological in order to research it. In fact, the psychological may be best and most accurately researched only when it is placed in its proper perspective. Thus, while we have embarked on this more philosophical enterprise out of a properly psychological interest and not lost our specific concern with the psychological aspects and dimension of our subject’s experience, we have, with this transcendental turn, now acquired a larger whole in which to see our particular aspect of interest in truer proportion. But one might reasonably wonder as to what has, in fact, happened to the psychological dimension of our subject’s experience. Has it not been absorbed, that is, into the historical and socio-cultural dimensions? Have we not lost sight of the psychological subject altogether in reaching out beyond it to these larger horizons of meaning? Have we not accounted for our subject’s experience solely on the basis of historical and social forces? If such historical and social forces are truly at play to this extent in our young woman’s experience, then why, we may wonder, are not all young women in this culture and at this time anorexic? In turning to history have we not merely abandoned our phenomenological psychology for a form of historical determinism? It is here where the relation between Husserl and Dilthey mentioned briefly at an earlier point in our work becomes directly relevant. This relation has, of course, been the topic of substantial scholarly research and debate (cf., e.g., Biemel, 1981; Jalbert, 1982; McCormick, 1981; Makkreel, 1975; Scanlon, 1982), as it also received a substantial amount of Husserl’s own attention (cf. especially, 1977b, pp.  1–37 and 1981c, pp.  185–196). We have not the luxury of time nor space to devote to a thorough discussion of this relation as a whole. We shall limit our discussion here to the specific issue of Husserl’s assessment of the kind of historical determinism suggested above. For, whether rightly or wrongly, Husserl initially viewed the work of Dilthey as representing just this kind of historicism (cf. McCormick, 1981). He viewed Dilthey’s Weltanschauung Philosophy as losing fundamental aspects of experience in the overvaluation of the unfolding of cultural history in precisely the manner suspected in our last paragraph. It is best to respond to this concern, then, by exploring Husserl’s assessment of and response to what he took— rightly or wrongly—to be Dilthey’s position. For our present purposes, Husserl’s critique of Dilthey can perhaps best be summarized in a simple, straightforward manner. Husserl rejected Dilthey’s view of the role of history precisely for being historicistic. It represented for him, in other words, simply another form of the relativism and skepticism that was characteristic of psychologism. Attributing all of experiencing life to transformations of cultural history is no different structurally from attributing all of experiencing life to the processes of individual psyches or to the nexus of causal relations in Nature. While Husserl admits that “we need history,” he is quick to point out that we do not need

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it “as the historian does” (1981c, p. 195). We do not need it, that is, to become our all-encompassing concern. Were we to become exclusively absorbed in the study of history, then we would once again lose sight of the intentional and constitutive activity that brings history about in the first place. We would, in effect, lose intentionality as a constitutive process. In saying that the transcendental is essentially temporalizing in nature we have not meant to imply that it is therefore historical in essence as well. To say that the transcendental is historical in essence would be to confuse, once more, an intentional correlate of constitution with the source of constitution itself. The historical refers to a constituted stratum of sense in the same manner that the psychic and the material physical do. To consider acts of constitution and constituted meanings to belong solely to the unfolding of cultural history as historical events would be to historicize the process of constitution itself. It would be to confuse, again, the ideality of meaning with the reality of historical fact. For Husserl, this would be no different in essence from the confusions of the ideal and the real discovered in naturalism and psychologism. He thus writes that naturalists and historicists both “are at work on different sides to misinterpret ideas as facts and to transform all reality, all life, into an incomprehensible, idealess confusion of ‘facts’” (1981c, p. 193). Historicism, he concludes, should be seen “as an epistemological mistake that … must be just as unceremoniously rejected as was naturalism” (1981c, p. 188). History—just as much as, but no more or less than, the psychological subject—is an achievement of consciousness, and therefore cannot be viewed as its source. While Husserl stresses that he does “fully recognize the extraordinary value of history in the broadest sense” (1981c, p. 188), he does not make of the t­ ranscendental a historical reality. We are not to confuse the historical dimensions of a phenomenon with the phenomenon itself. Were all to be absorbed by history, then we would once again be in the position of seeing all ideality, including that of truth itself, as relative to the real conditions (whether they be physiological, psychological, or historical) which produced it. For Husserl, a relativism of any kind, an absolutizing of any dimension of the life-world or any scientific discipline, is to be avoided at all costs. History, like psychology, only provides one piece of the puzzle, one perspective on a much richer and more complex subject matter. Although we recognize that this issue has been one of controversy in phenomenology (cf. Carr, 1974; Mohanty, 1985a; Ricoeur, 1967), we thus maintain that even in his last and most historically sophisticated works such as the Crisis, Husserl did not allow the transcendental to be exhausted by or equated with the historical. Rather, we agree with Landgrebe, who wrote that: The constituting accomplishments of transcendental subjectivity must contain, in themselves, the conditions of the possibility of encountering the life-world as historical world in its historicity … Our analysis, therefore, must transcend the configuration of history as a flux, in which there is nothing permanent and abiding, and in which all cultural worlds are life-horizons relative to the ones living them, by a reflection upon the conditions of the possibility of this relativity, conditions discovered in transcendental subjectivity (1981, pp. 190–193).

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Landgrebe here helps us to understand how Husserl differentiated his position from the one he attributed to Dilthey; how he managed to relativize all of the various dimensions of the life-world and their respective disciplines in order to overcome these kinds of relativisms. He did this through his appeal to transcendental subjectivity as the ground for the possibility of there being any and all of these aspects to experience, including its historical nature. History comes about through both the active and passive generation of meaning. The generation of meaning cannot itself be seen, however, as a historical process. Active and passive genesis provide the conditions for the possibility of history and therefore cannot be historical. They provide the conditions for the possibility of the psychic and therefore cannot be psychological, etc. The conditions that make possible all of these relative perspectives on experience also cannot themselves be relative. Writes Husserl: The world which is for us is itself a historical structure belonging to us, who are ourselves in our being a historical structure. What does all this relativity itself presuppose as being nonrelative? Subjectivity as transcendental subjectivity (1970a, p. 334).

It is thus the transcendental to which all of these various dimensions are relative. It was the provision of such a non-relative ground that Husserl claimed was missing from Dilthey’s account of experience as historical (cf. Paci, 1972). There is more to life than what can be captured in any one perspective on it. One of the roles that the transcendental plays in Husserl’s work is to be a constant reminder of this. In relativizing all empirical and worldly perspectives in the context of transcendental constitution, we avoid overvaluing any given perspective, whether it be that of psychology or that of history, etc. The transcendental acts as a kind of ideal limit against which all positive approaches to experience may be judged as partial and incomplete: as not giving us the whole story. This view of the transcendental has been addressed most directly, perhaps, by Cobb-Stevens, who appears to consider its value to lie solely in the provision of this service of contextualization. He writes: It shall be concluded that the locus of Husserl’s most profound discovery is the ‘space’ that transcendental reflection opens up between its own unthematic life and its thematic appropriation of that life … If we attempt to collapse this difference, we inevitably objectify the non-objective status of the ego’s operative mode of being … If one were to remove the tension between transcendental and empirical dimensions … one might be tempted to think that the person’s unity could be thought from within a single attitude (1983a, pp.  19, 256–257).

It is this necessary gap or space between worldly perspectives and the transcendental that allows us not to misunderstand our subject matter as reducible to any given worldly perspective. The transcendental serves as a reminder that there is always more. Yet is this more a more of the same? Does the transcendental serve solely as a reminder that there are other, similarly worldly, perspectives that one must take into account? Was Husserl dissatisfied with Dilthey’s version of historicism, for example, simply because it did not do justice to the psychic or the material? Cobb-Stevens states in the above that the transcendental allows us not to

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objectify the non-objective status of the ego’s activities. Is the nature of the ego’s activity different in some way from what can be captured by even the sum total of all possible worldly perspectives? Is the transcendental anything more than just an ideal limit? How are we to understand what we mean by transcendental? It would seem that this question would be crucial not only for understanding Husserl’s rejection of Dilthey and historicism but also for understanding fully the position we have now reached in our discussion. The description given above equating it with the “conditions for the possibility of …” is very reminiscent of Kantianism. But Husserl criticized Kant for providing a solely negative definition of the transcendental. Has our definition of the transcendental thus far been anything more than just this kind of negative definition? We have argued repeatedly that certain specific perspectives (such as the natural scientific, psychological, and now historical ones) should not be equated with the transcendental. But have we ourselves provided anything more than this by way of defining the transcendental in positive terms? Is the transcendental anything more than that to which all other perspectives must be seen as relative? How would it differ, then, from Heidegger’s view of the ontological (cf. Chap. 5)? In viewing the transcendental as an ideal limit, are we not adopting a similarly negative position with respect to its definition? And if so, how would such a view not be susceptible to the same criticisms that Husserl leveled against Kant and Heidegger? This is, of course, both a terribly important and terribly difficult question. As we have remarked in previous chapters, it too is an issue of much controversy in the phenomenological tradition. Kohák, for example, has written that Husserl’s “recognition of the transcendental dimension of subjectivity may be his greatest challenge to his successors.” Recognizing as we have that this dimension must be c­ haracterized in a positive as well as a negative sense, Kohák further comments that “the leading edge of philosophy” is constituted by the “labor of transforming [the] transcendental dimension from an epistemological vanishing point to a conception of the Person as a transcendental presence” (1978, pp. 182, 175). While mindful of the magnitude of the task undertaken, we shall, nevertheless, take a stab at a positive definition which we hope will allow us then to continue our present discussion. This will remain, however, an issue requiring much more development and deliberation, to be pursued elsewhere. We have, thus far, used words such as consciousness, subjectivity, and experiencing life to refer to the transcendental. We know, however, that these words may be used in a parallel psychological as well as transcendental sense. They may be used to refer to worldly or objective realities as well as to the constitutive source of these realities. We have also reserved terms such as constitution and intentionality solely for the transcendental level of discourse. Our challenge is now to come to an understanding of all of these terms that does not objectify them; which does not falsely psychologize, anthropologize, or historicize them. As Fink writes, the transcendental reduction “de-objectifies transcendental life” (1970, p. 133). We thus need to be able to characterize the transcendental in a positive fashion in other than objectivizing terms; in a way that preserves its non-objective status. We need to come to an understanding of subjectivity that is different from the psychological, historical, etc. How are we to understand this difference?

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We know all of these realities to be constituted in nature. They are constituted by lived experience as the particular worldly appearances which may be taken on by lived experience. Experience may appear, that is, as psychic, as historical, as social, etc. in nature, even while it remains fundamentally transcendental. Each of these perspectives thus refers back to, or is an interpretation of, the transcendental. Each is constituted as a self-objectification of the non-objective transcendental. We referred to this earlier as the truth of psychologism. Mohanty writes, for example, that “the possibility of psychologism … [is due] to the fact that the empirical and the transcendental are indeed different ‘interpretations’ of one and the same consciousness” (1982, p. 42). Perhaps, then, we can appreciate the transcendental as transcendental by viewing experience without the assistance of any of these worldly interpretations; by viewing it, in Mohanty’s words, “freed from its mundaneity” (1985a, p. 208). What would experience look like, we could ask, if it were seen as neither psychological nor historical, etc., in nature? Kohák makes one such an attempt in his discussion of the transcendental. Rather than asking what experience might look like without any of these self-­interpretations, however, he simply defines the transcendental as being subjectivity prior to it taking on any of them. Building upon the “personalism” which Husserl offered especially in Ideas II (cf. Chap. 4), and as we saw above, Kohák equates the transcendental subject with the Person as constituting ego. He understands “Person,” however, as the fundamental ontological entity, rather than as a psychological or anthropological being. It is the Person who may become the worldly focus of psychology or anthropology—or, for that matter, of biology or anatomy—but the Person itself exists prior to taking on any of these objective characteristics. Writes Kohák: “The Person is precisely the transcendental I in its full density but prior to the peculiarities of a culture or a personality” (1978, p. 185). The transcendental, in this sense, is that which becomes (self-objectified as) the psychic or the historical, etc. It is that which takes on a worldly appearance; that which becomes objective. Considered in its own right, prior to the act of self-objectification, however, it is quite simply the “Person” as constituting subject. But how does such an approach, we might wonder, not make of the “Person” merely a blank slate upon which we then write any number of objective characteristics? How does it avoid limiting the transcendental to being an ideal limit? Defining it solely as the Person prior to culture or personality would appear to be just another way of defining it negatively, in terms of what it is not (yet). Kohák himself realizes the dilemma but is adamant that: “The I which I am and am aware of being is emphatically not an epistemological vanishing point” (1978, p. 186). Yet how are we to understand this I as more than just such a vanishing point? Husserl offers the following solution. He argues that the pure or transcendental I of lived experience (Kohák’s Person) is not to be equated or identified with the experience itself. The subject of experience is not a real moment or part of the experiencing itself. It can thus be considered to be apart from, or different from, both the objects of these experiences and the experiences themselves as objectively interpreted. Husserl writes:

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From everything which is given directly as an object, reflection leads not only to constituting lived experiences in which the object is constituted as a pole, but at any time a reflection directed toward the identical I is possible: and this I is the subject of all lived experiences and the subject for all its objects as a pole of unity of its intentionalities; but it is not itself a lived experience (1977b, pp. 158–159).

We must separate the subject of experience even from experiences of reflection upon experience. When we reflect upon our own experiences we thereby constitute, or objectify, as objects ourselves as subjects. This is required by the nature of intentionality and reflection. We should not thereby, however, mistake the constituted object of reflection to be the subject reflected on (i.e., the Person). “Of course, every reflection which I relate to myself,” writes Husserl, “is itself a lived experience and makes me objective—objective for me.” Yet in the very fact that I am objectified for myself there is evidence of an I for whom I have become objective. There is still the I as subject functioning behind this reflection and allowing it to be a reflection forme. “I am as subject of the reflecting a functioning I”; and “even unreflectedly,” he adds, “I am constantly a pole of identity in relation to which everything else is ‘objective’” (1977b, p. 159). It is this I functioning behind all lived experiences as their subject that Husserl equates with the transcendental. As we remarked earlier (cf. Chap. 5), we cannot understand the process of this I reflecting on, and thus objectifying, itself as that of a psychological subject reflecting on itself. Psychological reflection takes place in the natural attitude, and we are speaking here instead of the transcendental perspective. To consider the pure subject or Person to be a human being would be to lapse back into the natural attitude. While the objectified Person may become the object of psychology, of history, or of biology (etc.), the functioning I, the Person itself, remains neither psychological, nor historical, nor biological in nature. It remains a pole of identity in relation to which each of these objects may be considered to be objective. It is the I for whom I appear to be a psychic being; for whom my being a psychic being is on hand. Before criticizing Husserl’s notion of the pure I for simply constituting more of the same empty talk of ideal limits and vanishing points, we should note that Husserl was clear to point out that this pure I is not to be considered merely “a dead pole of identity.” It is not only an epistemological concept. Rather, he writes: It is the I of affections and actions, the I which has its life in the stream of lived experiences only because it on the one hand exercises intentions in them as intentional lived experiences, toward and busied with their intentional objects, and because on the other hand it is stimulated by these objects, in feeling is touched by them, is attracted to them, is motivated by them to actions … The I is constantly there … not as an empty word, but as a directly exhibitable center (1977b, pp. 159–160).

The pure I may be considered to represent more than a dead pole of identity or an empty word precisely because it is fully alive. It is not an empty ideal polar point, but an I who performs activities. It is a vital and vibrant I who touches and is touched in its living by the objects of its experiences. It is the primordial actor whose actions bring to life and enrich its surrounding world of objects as both constituted by previous actions and affecting and motivating future actions. This is the I of both the

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passive and active genesis of meaning: the I that is passively moved by a pre-given world of sedimented significance, but who also actively generates on this basis a new and original world of significance. Originality is possible, Husserl writes, “as a result of an active doing of the I on the basis of something or other given passively beforehand” (1977b, pp. 160–161). This makes of our pure I more of a substantive concept than a mere vanishing point. In recognition of the I’s being alive, in the recognition of its being both affected and active, it does perhaps make more sense to use Kohák’s term of the Person. For lack of a better term, we therefore will use this term from here on to refer to subjectivity understood as the transcendental I. It carries with it the connotation of vitality and emotion that Husserl here attributes to the I. In doing so, however, we must keep in mind that we are speaking of a transcendental concept. We must remember that this Person is not the psychological ego per se, but is a Person equally present in its self-interpretations as psychological, historical, biological, etc. It is a Person equally as social as it is individual, equally as temporal and historical as it is spatial and material physical. But it is also a Person whose life is not exhausted by the sum total of these varying perspectives on it. It is the living Person who takes on this number of varying modes of objective appearance, who provides the conditions for the very possibility of appearing in these ways, but who also is preserved as a source of constituting, of life, itself. It is, perhaps most accurately stated, the life force of the Person who lives in certain objectively definable ways. This last point might give us some cause to be dissatisfied with Kohák’s formulation of the transcendental I as Person. To the extent that the I is pure subjectivity, pure life, we should acknowledge that it does not stand alone, it is not ontologically self-sufficient. Use of the term Person, no matter how de-objectified or de-­ anthropologized we may intend, would appear to imply an absolutizing of the individualized subject, autonomy of the individual actor. Husserl, however, makes it clear that the transcendental is an intersubjective domain, and that the pure I does not represent a self-contained or solipsistic world. We recall that the individuation of subjectivity came about through naturalism. Here Husserl claims that subjectivity is not in itself fragmentary and split off into personally relative spheres; that it is not autonomous and arbitrary, not relative to the whimsy of individual subjects, but is universally structured as teleological (1970a, pp.  269–299). It is rather that the Person participates in a transcendental intersubjective domain that is greater than itself, of which it is but a part (cf. Englander, 2018). We may thus only continue to refer to the transcendental as the Person if we are willing to consider the Person in its activity as relative to or subordinate to absolute intersubjectivity. Such a view would entail humility with respect to the Person’s activity in the face of a more overarching sense of subjective life. While this may begin to sound spiritual in nature, this kind of humility is no different in principle, however, from the operative sense of humility presently entailed in naturalism: the humility we experience that is, in the face of Nature (e.g., in natural disasters and medicine, as well as in the awe of a beautiful landscape). As it is apparently acceptable to view the human body as subordinate to the over-arching causal nexus of Nature, of which it is but a part, there is no obvious reason to consider as unacceptable a parallel subordination of the

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Person as individual subject to an overarching sense of intersubjectivity of which it is also but a member (A. Giorgi, personal communication, 1988). Intersubjectivity may be considered as universally structured within transcendental phenomenology as Nature is within naturalism. The basis of this structure is, of course, different, in that intersubjectivity has as its fundamental law motivation and teleology rather than natural causality (cf. Chap. 4). Still, it would appear to be just as arguable that an intersubjective realm of motivation and teleology is the necessarily pre-given context for Persons as it is that a natural world of causality is the pre-given context for individual bodies. With this understanding of the transcendental, we are now in a position to appreciate more fully Husserl’s rejection of all forms of isms, including particularly Dilthey’s historicism. Any position that sought to elevate a constituted region of reality to the role of (transcendental) source or origin for all reality would necessarily overlook the truly crucial and all-important role of living, affected and active, intersubjectivity in the constitution of this and all other worldly regions. It would replace the life of the Person with a lifeless region of constituted sense which, deprived of its life-giving relation to intersubjectivity, would be converted into a meaningless accumulation of facts. Kohák illustrates this point with respect to the example of sociologism, but it would apply equally well to all forms of psychologism. He writes: When sociologists explain delinquent behavior as a product of underprivileged environment, they leave society helpless in dealing with the delinquent. What we need is not to explain what “made” him do it but rather to understand what, as he understood his own acts, he chose to do. In our terminology, we need to understand what kind of … world he ­constituted about himself so that his behavior appeared appropriate to him. We have to understand his choice. Assigning human acts to material “causes” is a dubious procedure, since objects function as motives not qua material entities but as presented in consciousness … It is also not overtly helpful, for it leaves society no recourse other than behavioral conditioning, which may assure tranquility but contributes little to the growth of free moral Persons (1978, p. 137).

This example demonstrates how an explanation of intersubjective activity grounded in deterministic understandings of history, or sociology, or psychology, etc., would miss the fundamental role of intentionality. It is the foundational importance of the life of the Person, the constituting activity of consciousness, which must be preserved in psychology and all forms of science. We have had to inquire back to the transcendental source of the horizons of our subject’s experience and her experience itself in order to reach this dimension explicitly. Our account of our subject’s experience will have to be situated explicitly upon its ground. Kohák’s phrasing, as well as his example in general, raises a problematic issue, however. He speaks of his “delinquent” as “choosing” and thereby as constituting his world. Are these not psychologistic appeals to constitution? Is this not precisely the view of behavior and experience that we rejected under the label transcendental psychologism? Such an example raises the question of how we are to get back to our young woman as psychological subject now that we have acquired our transcendental context. Now that we have situated her experiences in their varying horizons,

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what is left for us, as psychologists, to do? How do we understand the nature of the psychic within our newly won transcendental framework? What sense of the psychic remains following the turn to the transcendental? How do we return from this philosophical excursion to our core task and interest as psychologists?

The Return to Positivity We have reached out beyond our subject’s experience to horizons that transcend her as psychological ego. How are we now to get back to her concrete psychological presence in the life-world? What light does this newly gained transcendental knowledge shed on her particular experiences? How does a psychology which comes after the transcendental reduction differ from one conducted before it? We have taken the first three of the four steps which comprise our method: we have asked our subject to describe certain of her experiences, we have analyzed those experiences in terms of the meanings which they had for her, and we have traced those meanings genetically to their origins in transcendental constitution. We have now to take our fourth step of returning from this transcendental horizon to our woman as psychological subject. Given the socio-cultural and historico-political data provided above, why, we may ask again, are not all young women living in this culture at this time in history anorexic? Husserl referred to this issue as “the problem of ‘flowing in’” (1970a, p. 208). Prior to the performance of the transcendental reduction, the psychic is understood either as a material property of the human organism (in naturalism) or as a transcendental function of the human being (in transcendental psychologism). Following the performance of the transcendental reduction the psychic is understood to be a self-­ objectification of the Person, of transcendental subjectivity. The problem is one of how the transcendental “flows into” this self-objectification and “becomes apperceived as its newly revealed intentional background of constitutive accomplishments” (1970a, p. 210). How does viewing the psychic in this way, in its relation to the Person, change our understanding of it? And, other than by becoming formally the first discipline to be taken up within transcendental phenomenological philosophy, how does the science of psychology differ as a result of it as well? What is the significance of this flowing in for our work as psychologists? Viewing the psychic as a self-objectification of subjectivity means viewing it, along with the world in which it is situated, as a transcendental achievement. The psychic is no longer to be understood as a given, but rather as a region of sense constituted, and in the process of continuing to be constituted, by transcendental intersubjectivity. It is the correlate of certain experience-patterns, of the coherence of specific and definite structures of experiencing life (cf. Chap. 3). Paci writes concerning this transcendental understanding of the psychic: Mundane psychological life is now characterized in a particular way whereby the transcendental ego operates in it … Psychological life is revealed in its structure and thus allows for psychology as the science of a special region of transcendental life. The vast transcendental

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horizon comes to be determined as psychological life and thus constitutes psychology as a science to the extent that it establishes the essential region of those essential typical operations of transcendental consciousness which we can call psychological (1972, p. 147).

The psychic is taken to refer to one region of transcendental life, the study of which constitutes one regional ontology. As a region unto itself, the psychic has its own particular, definable character, its own “internal structure” (Paci, 1972, p. 147). We are to describe and investigate our young woman’s experience as one instance of the typical way in which a Person’s life comes to be internally structured as psychological. Were we historians rather than psychologists, we would find ourselves interested analogously in a different regional ontology: in describing and investigating the typical way in which life comes to be internally structured as historical. We have, then, but to characterize what is essential to the psychic as a region of constituted sense, as one typical way in which the life of the Person comes to be internally structured. We know that for Husserl, psychology in all of its forms situates the psychic upon the pre-given ground of the life-world. Regardless of whether we view the life-world as an objective given or as an achievement of transcendental constitution, the psychic is given as existing within its horizon. It was for this reason that we had earlier to leave behind a psychological level of analysis. For our present purpose, however, we can use this insight concerning the limitations of the psychic as shedding light on its own essence. The life-world is pre-given to the psychic, and the psychic is experienced as taking in this reality existing outside of and independently of itself. The psychic is constituted, then, as a worldly and mundane reality that is essentially passively receptive in the face of the life-world. As we quoted from Fink in Chap. 5: “Psychology moves from the start within the self-explication of human experience as being only receptive and impotent” (1970, pp. 118–119; cf. also de Boer, 1978, p. 168). The psychic is constituted as that region of sense characterized by a passive receptiveness and impotence in the face of the larger world in which it is situated and of which it is but a part. Phrased in this way, our definition of the psychic reminds us of the description of our young woman from the perspective of the phenomenological psychologist given earlier in this chapter. We had described her at the time as viewing herself as a passive victim of the meanings that she herself had constituted, and as having constituted herself as powerless in the face of them. The structures of passivity and impotence were thus prominent in our psychological understanding of her experience and world. But in the view of phenomenological psychology, this was the result of our young woman’s deceiving herself about the origins of the meanings in terms of which she was living her life. She was deceiving herself about the fact that she had actually chosen these meanings, deceiving herself about the fact that she was actually the one actively constituting herself and the others around her to have the meanings that they did for her. Having taken the transcendental turn, we now know, however, that our young woman did not constitute these meanings as a psychological subject, nor did she choose in any sense to have them pre-given to her. She did not choose to be born

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into a culture in which women are valued for their physical attractiveness, for example, or into one in which being physically attractive is equated with being thin. Nor would it make sense to suggest that at the age of 14 years she knew ontologically that possibilities other than these really existed in the world; that she need not have taken for granted these implicit and sedimented meanings as valid for her as well. She did not choose, nor did she actively generate, the passively generated meanings which were pre-given to her. Having taken the transcendental turn, we now know that there are ways in which even transcendental intersubjectivity has a passive dimension and in which meanings are given to consciousness prior to or as the precondition for its own constituting activity. Phenomenological psychology was psychologistic in attributing what were for our Person passively generated meanings to her own psychological activity. In returning from the transcendental to the psychic we will not want to repeat this mistake. We will not want to hold psychological subjects responsible for the pre-given horizons in which they themselves come to be constituted as such. This example reminds us that there are ways in which consciousness is passive, receptive, and impotent. The problem with phenomenological psychology was that it misunderstood the essential nature of this passivity and impotence. It misplaced this essential aspect by attributing it to the subject’s active self-deception. Within a transcendental framework we may consider this aspect instead to be an integral moment of subjective life, we may consider it to belong to constitution itself as one of its internal structures. In doing so, we may then attribute it to the psychological self-objectification of the transcendental. We may say that it is this aspect of experience in particular which comprises the experience patterns that constitute the psychic. Transcendental intersubjectivity objectifies itself as embodied psychological subjectivity by objectifying its pre-given strata of passively generated sense as the defining characteristics of psychic being. The condition for the possibility of my having psychic being is the presence of the realm of passively generated sense pre-­ given to me in my active constituting life. Were the transcendental not to involve the passive generation of meaning, then it could not take on a worldly and mundane appearance. Were sedimentation not possible, then neither would be the self-­ objectification of the transcendental as psychic. It is thus the possibility and nature of this appearance, the possibility and content of the horizons of sedimented meaning, which constitute the psychic. Psychic being is determined on the basis of the characteristics of this pre-given sense. Who I am as a psychological ego is a product of my own intentional history, which itself evolves out of layers of pre-given sedimented meanings that preceded my birth. We now are in a position to understand how the psychological ego parallels for Husserl the transcendental ego. The psychological ego is the manner in which the transcendental is able to appear in the world as a mundane reality. It is the Person, but now as constituted by all of the particularities of culture, history, personality, etc. It is the particular individuated and embodied way in which subjective life has come to exist here in this space, at this time, and in this specific body. Psychic being thus includes all of the various horizons of sedimented meaning that have gone into constituting me to be the particular Person that I am right here and now. It includes

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all that I am passively receptive to and impotent in the face of, all that is pre-given to me as the ground upon which my constitutive activity may take place. As Paci writes: “The specific field of psychology is the field of conditionings, of what conditions me in relations with others, my motivations, and my projects” (1972, p. 186). It is the field of constituted sense in which the Person objectifies itself to be situated in order to become a part of the life-world. It is for Husserl thus the “first” self-­ objectification of the transcendental, the first appearance of intersubjectivity in the life-world (1970a, p. 262). Returning to our psychological interest in our young woman’s life, we view her now as a self-objectification of the transcendental (Person) whose psychic being has been constituted in certain determinable ways. These ways span several different levels of constitution. They range from her being constituted as embodied and individuated, to being constituted as gendered, to being constituted as having a particular temperament and way of gesturing and as living with particular others in a particular part of a particular country at a particular time in the unfolding of a particular cultural, political, and global history. Such a rich and multi-dimensional view of our young woman raises a series of questions and implications for our new psychology. First, does not such a view of the psychic as encompassing all of the various levels of constitution of pre-given meanings simply take on too much? Would this not be in reality an inexhaustible task? Each of the structures found in the Person’s experience is traceable to its own origins in layers of passively generated meanings. But each of these passively generated meanings was itself at some point actively generated on the basis of some other passively generated meanings. Once we start down this road of pre-givenness will we ever be able to stop in order to return to our young woman as a concrete psychological subject? Would we not lose sight of her again in an infinite historical regression? Husserl himself suggests that: “Every ‘ground’ that is reached points to further grounds, every horizon opened up awakens new horizons” (1970a, p. 170). How can we ever come to an understanding of our young woman as a psychological being, as a conditioned or constituted being, when every constituted characteristic which we might attribute to her is further situated in its own horizon of sedimented sense? It is here where a limiting of the scope of psychology is both necessary and helpful, here where Husserl’s comments as to the indifference of the psychologist appropriately come into play (cf. Chap. 5). While what we have just said in the above paragraph is certainly true, it is not therefore necessarily directly relevant for the psychologist. We are interested in this young woman’s experience in particular. We need not pursue in depth the origins of this experience to the extent that we lose sight of the experience itself altogether. We may limit our scope to what is directly involved in this particular self-objectification (the woman) in whom we are interested. It is important that as psychologists we recognize that the structures of the Person’s experience are themselves factical achievements of transcendental constitution. It is important that we not return to a pre-transcendental naïveté and attribute these structures to Nature or to our psychological subject herself. However, it is not

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therefore necessary for us to become historians or political scientists rather than psychologists. As psychologists we are interested specifically in the ways these constituted structures have passively contributed to the constitution of this particular Person’s experiences. Our focus is on the impact of these pre-given structures on Persons’ experiences, not on the pre-givenness of the structures themselves. We may limit ourselves therefore to what we shall call the “motivational horizon” of the Person’s experience: to that proximate environment of pre-given sense that directly informs her own life experiences (Davidson, 1988a, 2003). We pursue the transcendental origins of these structures to the extent necessary to come to an understanding of how this Person’s experience has been structured by them. We return from the transcendental once we have a grasp on the character of the particular horizon within which this experience has arisen. While the psychic may be the first self-­ objectification of the transcendental, it is not the only one. The other forms of objectification may, however, be left to other disciplines to explore. But then, secondly, how does this motivational horizon differ from the personal world of the phenomenological psychologists? Does it not comprise precisely what they referred to as the shaped or factical element of the human? Does not our concept of the motivational horizon imply that we are speaking of the situation, the context, in which the Person will then make her own choices? How would this sense of psychology not be similarly psychologistic? It is true that use of the phrase motivational horizon implies an element of choice or will. It does so accurately, however, as we know subjective life, according to Husserl, to be structured teleologically. The motivational horizon is the horizon of meaning in which the Person actively chooses, actively constitutes, new and original meaning. To this extent it may be equated with our earlier notion of the personal world. However, while we consider this horizon to be a direct concern of psychology, we are not, thereby, to consider the act of choosing, of constituting, itself to be psychological in nature as well. Even within psychology this act remains transcendental in nature; it remains an action of the Person as transcendental subject. It is in our recognition of this that we do not repeat the psychologistic mistake of existential or hermeneutic phenomenology, we do not return to our pre-transcendental naïveté. It is here where the paths diverge. We are not, we remember, to exhaust all of the Person in any one worldly perspective on it. Were we to consider the creative act of constitution to be itself a psychological act, then we would have subsumed the entirety of the Person under the psychic; we would have captured all of life within one worldly attitude. Thus, while we can consider the sedimented residue of any transcendental act as an aspect of the psychic make-up of a Person, we cannot consider that act itself to have been psychic in nature. Psychology is the study of the ways in which Persons may be motivated to act. A significant portion of its subject matter consists of the meaningful ways in which prior acts of a Person motivate their future activity. But these acts themselves, the active generation of what later will become a part of the Person’s motivational horizon as pre-given meanings, cannot be captured within psychology. Psychology can only study these acts retrospectively, as having played a role in the constitution of the Person’s present or previous motivational horizon (cf. Paci, 1972, p.  146).

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It can only study a constituted region of sense, not the acts of constitution themselves. The acts themselves transcend the boundaries of psychology, just as they transcend the boundaries of the psychological ego. They, also, do not lie within the scope of the psychologist. In restricting psychology to the study of the motivational horizon for individual activity we have therefore, however, limited significantly its competence as well as its scope. The implications of such a limitation for our new science may be considered fairly profound. It is obvious, for instance, that a transcendentally grounded psychology could not consider itself to be predictive in nature. It could not presume to explain in a deterministic manner each new action of the Person as simply being an effect of the operation of previous experiences acting as causes. While it may be able to delineate clearly the horizon for a given action, including its pre-existing possibilities, it would not be able to guarantee that this action would actualize any of the already given possibilities as opposed to creating an entirely new one. Nor would it be able to explain how creation of a new possibility came about, nor why it came about in this instance as opposed to that one, etc. While able, perhaps, to delineate typical patterns of experiencing (cf. Giorgi, 1979), it would not be able to know in advance how a given Person will act in a given situation. Further, while the origins of our motivational horizon may not themselves be the proper object of study for the psychologist, they remain important for psychology, nonetheless. Their impact on its subject matter cannot be overlooked, as they essentially constitute it to be what it is. They are present in the passive generation of the motivational horizon in which we do take an explicit interest. As we are no longer transcendentally naïve, we may no longer allow ourselves the false comfort of naturalism or psychologism, in which the horizon of experience is viewed as an ­objective and static given. Rather, we know the motivational horizon to be itself only a small part of a much larger picture; to be the tip, as we described above, of the intentional iceberg. Thus, not only are we unable, as psychologists, to predict the future, but we are also unable, as psychologists, to account in depth for the past. It is here where the second quotation with which we opened this chapter finds its rightful place. In the context of such a framework, writes Scanlon: One gets the impression that even the most astute psychological description and analysis amounts, relatively speaking, to a brilliant flash of lightning which illumines momentarily a small segment of a vast landscape shrouded in darkness and extending to unknown depths (1982, p. 198).

The Person as self-objectified remains only one aspect of the Person as transcendental subject. The motivational horizon to be studied by psychology, as both the product of previous acts of constitution and the precondition for future such acts, is only a small segment of a transcendental intersubjective landscape. It is in this sense that the notion of motivational horizon most differs from that of personal world. World carries with it the connotation of being self-contained or complete in and of itself. Horizon, on the other hand, preserves this sense of incompleteness, of opening onto infinite depth and darkness. As with a perceptual horizon, the horizon of experience is constituted only by the limitations of our own seeing, our own exploration.

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We remember that, although we return from the transcendental to positivity, we are not to return thereby to our pre-transcendental naïveté. As we are not to forget what we have learned transcendentally, we thus remain aware that subjective life is the only absolute given; that all else, including the psychic, derives its sense (and existence status) from this sole life-giving source (cf. Chap. 6). We therefore cannot consider the transcendental act of constitution to be one property of the psychological subject. Rather, we recognize that the psychic is only one (constituted) aspect of the (transcendental) Person. This Person we know to be as much ethical, historical, political, economic, etc., as it is psychological. All of these aspects we also know to contribute directly to the constitution of the psychic as psychic. In limiting the competence of psychology explicitly to this circumscribed segment of the whole, we thus also acknowledge explicitly the importance of the remainder of the landscape that we have left to our colleagues in other disciplines to explore. We recognize that we require the assistance of these disciplines in shedding light on the other aspects of the phenomena we take to be of psychological interest. Following the return to positivity, the psychic, even within psychology, thus comes to be seen as only one component of a much larger landscape. Psychology as a science correlatively becomes only a small part of a much larger interdisciplinary whole. It becomes situated as only one well-circumscribed avenue of access to the Person in its transcendental identity (cf. Scanlon, 1972). But we remember that the Person is not to be exhausted by the sum total of these worldly perspectives either. It is not merely the psychological taken together with the historical, political, ethical, social, etc., but is to be understood to be a whole which is more than the sum of parts. It is the very presence of life which provides the condition for their possibility. In this sense, psychology is not one discipline that can simply be added to other disciplines to create an aggregate all-encompassing science. The sense of interdisciplinary used here is not that of independent sciences coming together externally. Rather, psychology, like all other positive sciences, is to be subordinated to the transcendental perspective in which it is situated. Each discipline is taken to be only one beam of light shone on what is to be considered an essentially transperspectival subject matter. It is the transcendental life of the Person that always remains primary; the presence of the Person as non-psychological of which psychology only provides one glimpse among many. Lastly, this subordination of the psychic to the transcendental implies that it is activity itself that is primary and passivity and receptivity secondary, even within psychology itself. While psychology is to be the study of passivity, it is to view passivity as only one moment of an active process. It is to be the study of the role of the motivational horizon in the on-going life of the Person, as opposed to the study of the motivational horizon as the cause or source of this life. Rather than being given as a motivational horizon which then causes or brings about the Person’s activity, it is the activity of the subject itself, the intentional life of the Person, which brings to life the motivational horizon as that which motivated the activity to take on the particular form that it did—motivated rather than caused, allowing for new possibilities to emerge at any time.

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To understand this point fully one must in essence reverse one’s ordinary (“natural”) way of thinking. For Husserl, all meaning is to be understood only as playing a role in the intentional life of the Person, whether as product or as pre-given horizon. This constitutes, however, a Copernican reversal of the natural attitude view, in which the life of the subject is attributed to some constituted region of sense, whether it be that of the psychic, the biological, etc. According to Paci: “the meaning of the problem of the reabsorption” of the transcendental—what we saw Husserl refer to above as the problem of flowing in—is captured in the development whereby “all the sciences become sciences of life” (1972, p. 155). The result of the transcendental flowing into the psychic is that passivity, while remaining an essential moment of experiencing life, comes to be seen as playing a role in the service of activity, rather than as its source. Sciences thus become sciences of the on-going life of transcendental intersubjectivity, of Persons, rather than remaining sciences of the constituted (lifeless) products of this life. Sciences also move from being passive to being active (cf. Paci, 1972, p. 152). Perhaps we can best clarify the radical nature of these implications if we elaborate further on this issue of the role of science within this view. We remember that the crisis that served as Husserl’s motivation for the Crisis lecture series was that of the function of science in culture and history in the 1920s and 30s. We remarked only briefly in our last chapter as to how the acquiring of a transcendental grounding for science would enable us to resolve this crisis. We may return to this issue in order to flesh out more concretely the implications discovered in the above. How may we characterize the transcendental phenomenologist’s understanding of the role of science, as compared to that of the existential or hermeneutic p­ henomenologist? What is the crucial significance of our moving transcendentally to a “science of life”? We remarked at the beginning of the last section of our text that clinical practice based upon the existential or hermeneutic phenomenological approach would be directed toward changing the subject itself rather than the world in which this subject lives. “The” world has been assumed by this view to be existing independently of our subject’s activity and to be unaffected by this activity. It is what it is and will remain so, regardless of how much we come to know of it and/or how much we try to change it. It may be seen, for instance, as a world of pure possibility and contingency; or perhaps as a world of other certain, however defined, “correct” meanings (e.g., as in the objective meaning of hunger). In either case, it becomes the individual’s task in life to accept these meanings: to accept, for instance, that “the” world is one of only pure possibility and contingency, or to accept that hunger has this particular meaning, etc. Clinical practice is aimed at resolving the discrepancy between personal worlds and “the” world by bringing the subject’s activity more in line with the nature of “the” world itself. It is directed toward enabling the patient to accept, adapt, or adjust to the objective state of affairs that is out of their control that we take up “the” world to be. But what is it exactly that the subject is to adapt to or accept? From a transcendental perspective this objective and pre-given world is to be understood as a constituted correlate of subjective activity. It is what is it only as a particular instance of

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the passive generation of meaning pre-given to active constitution. As such, it is simply the product of previous acts of constitution and the precondition for further such acts. It might be thought of as one frame abstracted from the movie that is the on-going process of the constituting of “the” world by subjectivity. “The” world is thus not itself the source of life, not itself an objective given. Rather, it is the ever changing and lifeless product of subjective life, of Persons. It is a realm of previously constituted, and now dead, sense. It is only the realm of subjectivity itself which is absolute; “the” world follows after as its intentional achievement. What possible value, then, might we attribute to adapting a Person’s constitutive activity to this previously constituted stratum of sense? What would be the point of actively accepting that this realm of meaning has been passively generated to be pre-given to me, rather than using this realm of meaning as the point of departure for further active constitution? Why are activity and life to be placed in the service of passively pre-given and presently dead sense? But this would be precisely the function of science within an existential or hermeneutic phenomenology. It would be directed toward encouraging and bringing about subjects’ acceptance of and adaptation to whatever objective world is assumed to exist—whether that be the “incomplete,” “uncertain,” and “ambiguous” world of French existentialism (cf. Fischer, 1986) or the National Socialist world of Heidegger’s hermeneutic phenomenology (cf. Kohák, 1978, p.  184). Phenomenological psychologists start with a particular personally or culturally relative world and absolutize this sphere of constituted meanings (psychologistically) to be “the” world as the source of subjective life. They then compare individual subjects’ activity against this posited ideal world and find these subjects to be “deficient” (cf. Soldz, 1988) or lacking in their personal constitution of their differing experiences. The task of psychology is to come to an understanding of the various aspects of “the” world that these subjects have self-­ deceptively closed off, in order then to reintroduce these aspects into the subject’s experience. It is to fill in the subject’s lack, to adapt or adjust the subject more fully to “the” (assumed) world (Davidson and Shahar, 2007). Such a science presents a good example of what we might consider transcendentally to be a science of passivity and death, rather than of activity and life. It sees subjective activity as arising out of, owing its source to, a certain objectively existing state of affairs that it should then accept or adjust to. It thus places activity and life in the service of what is in actuality a passively generated strata of sense, a dead layer of previously constituted meaning. Given the nature of the world to which science was attempting to adapt people in the 1920s and 30s, especially in Germany, one can well appreciate Husserl’s fear and distrust of this kind of science. One can understand his proclamation that not only society but its science as well was in a state of crisis. But what other alternative might there be? We have defined the psychic as being passively receptive and impotent in the face of the world—how else could psychology operate but to attempt to adapt the subject to this world? Has not phenomenological psychology simply taken this structure of the psychic seriously in its self-understanding of its role as science? Paci writes, to the contrary, that: “the Husserlian ontologism is the negation of the philosophy that considers being as if it

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were already constituted, fetishized, and dead” (1972, p. 153). How would a transcendentally grounded science, a science that equated being with the subjective life of Persons and activity, differ in its self-understanding of its role as science? The mistake made by phenomenological psychology was to consider the passivity and impotence of the psychic to be primary and subjective life to be secondary to its source in psychic being. Having taken the transcendental turn, we know this relation to be reversed, with the passivity and impotence of the psychic actually playing a secondary role in the on-going life of the Person. Psychology transcendentally grounded would thus not view the Person as subject as solely passive and impotent in the face of the world, as it would also not view the world as determined in advance. Rather, it would know the world to be contingent upon the activity of Persons and ever changing as a result of this activity. It would view the world as playing a passive role as the stage upon which the teleological movement of subjective life takes place. The psychic per se would be one segment of the backdrop for this drama. Subjective life, however, would be elsewhere—it would be in the temporal unfolding of the drama itself. Husserl writes that for the world as an intentional accomplishment of subjectivity its “‘being-in-advance’ is an absurdity” (1970a, p. 265). Viewing the world as constantly in the process of being constituted, and thus constantly changing, our psychology has no objective world at its disposal to which it might attempt to adapt or adjust its patients. Any thought that there might be an objective world to which one might try to adapt would be the result of a psychologistic attribution of necessity to what is actually a contingent structure. It would be attributable, as Kohák points out, to a return to our pre-transcendental naïveté; he writes: Whenever we lose clear sight of our phenomenological brackets, we lose the distinction between eidetic necessity … and contingent particularity … We need urgently to learn to deal with constituted reality without relapsing into a naïve naturalism or, more likely, into the psychologism or anthropologism which attributes to the products of consciousness a quasi-objective reality. We need to deal with the products of human acts as constituted, yet as radically contingent on (transcendental) subjectivity … to deal not only with constituting reality but also with constituted reality without lapsing into a pre-phenomenological naturalism (1978, pp. 139, 126, 129).

As long as we remain within a transcendental framework there is no world that might be passively accepted by our subject or against which her experience might be compared. As a result of the transcendental turn, writes Husserl: “there now arises a humanistic science which does not have the world in advance and does not constantly hold onto the world” (1970a, p. 326). Rather than holding onto the world as the source of life and as that to which life must be adapted, transcendental phenomenology views the world only as that which has been constituted by Persons (transcendental intersubjectivity) thus far. While existential phenomenology might have appeared to agree in principle with this sense of the world as “incomplete,” it also seemed to view this incompleteness as something that one was required to accept. The incompleteness of the world is not so much something one may accept, however, as it is something that one may confirm as it were by accident in the active process of the generation of new, original meanings. The incompleteness of the

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world is proven each time a new and different world is created. Transcendentally, we may thus view the world as providing the Person only with the existing precondition for the active generation of new meanings, with the tools or building blocks for further activity and further change (cf. Holzman, 1985; Holzman and Polk, 1988; Holzman and Newman, 1979). Transcendentally, the world is to be seen as a resource for life’s on-going teleological activity; as part of its equipment, rather than as its source or origin. Also, rather than viewing the subject as deficient and therefore needing to be changed by treatment, transcendental phenomenology views the Person as changer (cf. Kohák, 1978). It views the Person as a socio-cultural, historico-political, psychological, ethical, biological, etc., actor (cf. Paci, 1972) whose activity brings about substantive, meaningful changes in the world as constituted correlate of this activity. In such a view, the function of psychology becomes to support patients as Persons in understanding the myriad ways in which their lives have been previously constituted, previously conditioned, in order to enable them to utilize this passively pre-given sense in their own present and future creative activity. Psychology joins with the Person’s on-going teleological life by viewing the world in which the Person lives as providing them with the tools or resources for further activity and change. It is thus not the Person who is seen as deficient. The Person is seen instead as having been inadequately equipped—whether through a poor education, impoverished nurturance or socialization, bad genes, etc.—for their present life tasks. It is by viewing the psychic in this way as a more or less adequate tool for life that psychology preserves its transcendental grounding even as it returns to positivity. It is in this way that it preserves the primacy of activity and life over passivity and death. To the degree to which it is successful in doing so, it ceases to be a repressive force that re-affirms and tries to adapt Persons to various forms of discrimination and becomes instead an empowering and liberating force that engages with social justice movements as vehicles to creating a less traumatic and traumatizing world (cf. Desai, 2018). It might be helpful at this juncture to introduce a philosophical distinction employed by Mohanty in his own discussion of transcendental and hermeneutic phenomenologies. Mohanty proposes that transcendental phenomenology offers a “phenomenology of respect” as compared to the “phenomenology of suspicion” offered by hermeneutic phenomenology (1985a, pp.  205, 230). Translated to our own context, we may say that hermeneutic phenomenology posits an ideal essence for the world and psychological subjectivity, and then sets about the task, in the form of phenomenological psychology, to determine the various ways in which subjects fall short of or depart from this ideal. Phenomenological psychology is in this sense a suspicious discipline; it consists in the uncovering and exposing of what has been self-deceptively hidden or concealed. The psychologist is seen as a kind of Freudian detective, searching out and opening up closed off and well protected doors to the past, sometimes in the face of the patient’s active resistance. The goal of such a science is to fix the subject, who is found to be in some way deficient, abnormal, or maladjusted.

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Transcendental phenomenology, on the other hand, begins with a respect for the given as that which presently exists, as that which has been constituted to be precisely what it is. It does not contrast this given to what it is not, nor does it compare it to any ideals of what it should be. It simply takes the given as the point of departure for further activity and further constitution of new meanings. The realm of discovery for its science is thus not the past, not the realm of the concealed or hidden, but is rather the future, the realm of what may yet come. The past remains relevant in so far as it is seen as what has led up to (conditioned) the current situation, but a transcendentally grounded psychology looks to the past only as a stage for the future as open, as having not already been determined in advance. The psychologist is seen as serving more as a link to a future which is still to be created than as a link to a past which is to be uncovered. Its character may thus be likened more to the anticipatory excitement of an explorer of uncharted terrain than to the distrustful inquisitiveness of a detective. This comparison exemplifies the sense in which we may view the role of psychology as a science differently in each of these perspectives. As one practice in which Persons may be engaged, psychology as a science transcendentally considered is seen as having its own teleological role to play in the on-going intentional life of subjectivity. Rather than being “an abstract research technique,” we now know psychology to be a form of “praxis” which has its own “historical function,” its own goals and aims (Paci, 1972, pp. 148, 155, 152). We have seen that in an existential or hermeneutic phenomenological approach this role is seen to be one of adaptation and adjustment. The goal of this psychology is to change the subject, to facilitate an acceptance of the world as it is. In transcendental phenomenology, on the other hand, the goal of psychology is conceived very differently. In providing Persons with a self-understanding of the ways in which their activity has been passively constituted, in offering them insights into some of the ways in which the world has been pre-given to them, it calls them to participate actively and responsibly in the further constituting and changing of both themselves and “the” world (Husserl, 1970a, pp. 340–341, 400). Transcendental phenomenology offers a basic conviction in the responsibility of transcendental intersubjectivity for the nature of the world in which it situates itself. As one transcendentally grounded science, psychology provides some knowledge of how this on-going process has been conducted thus far. This knowledge is then to be used in assessing and altering both psychological subject and world as constituted poles of the same intentional relation. Husserl sees the resolution of the cultural crisis of his day to reside in the active pursuit of this kind of transformative science. He sees science as playing a crucial role in encouraging Persons to take active responsibility for themselves and the world in which they live. Viewing the world simply as an accumulation of meaningless and dead facts, already determined in advance, leaves one powerless to change it. Viewing it as meaningful and contingent upon one’s intentional constitution motivates one to be responsible for it and to take an active role in changing it for the better. Grounding psychology in a transcendental framework thus not only brings value and meaning back into science through the re-appropriation of the life-world, but, just as importantly, brings science back into the on-going life of human culture.

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Let us return now to the case of our anorexic subject and see how our understanding of her experience differs once it is grounded transcendentally. Returning from the transcendental to positivity, we may limit our interest to the particular self-­ objectification of transcendental intersubjectivity which is our young woman. We overcome problems of historicism or other forms of relativism by narrowing our focus to the particular motivational horizon for her own individual experience, and by viewing this horizon as the stage for her transcendental activity. Thus, while socio-cultural and historico-political factors remain important and provide us with necessary pieces of our context, they do not account in and of themselves for our particular Person’s experiences. Neither do the other levels of meaning which we recognize to be entailed in the self-objectification of subjectivity as individuated and embodied, such as those of our Person’s situatedness in a family (as social context) and a body (as material physical context), which are additional aspects of her motivational horizon. Such a view thus allows for a multidimensional approach to our Person’s experience, with all of the various factors entailed in it represented and none overvalued at the expense or exclusion of others. Speculating as to the respective contributions of these varying factors to the etiology of anorexia would take us much beyond the scope of the present work. Rather than making such an attempt, we shall instead spell out the implications of our approach for research and treatment more generally. This kind of multidimensional approach encourages research to be carried out in each of these varying domains and encourages also a close and sustained dialogue between the various disciplines involved. For psychology, this would translate to an awareness of socio-cultural and historico-political analyses as well as to an awareness of physiological, biological, and genetic findings. Psychology would become explicitly, as stated above, one of a number of interdisciplinary sciences. In terms of treatment, rather than viewing our Person’s behavior as caused by physical factors or as chosen by her self-­ deceptively, we would consider her behavior to be meaningful and appropriate for her given her motivational horizon. Rather than viewing her and her world as deficient, we would appreciate her present motivational horizon as her, and our, point of departure for the learning and appropriating of new and different tools. We would no longer assume, for example, that at some deeper and hidden level she really knows that she need not be thin in order to be loved and accepted, and that all we need do is put her back in touch with this truth. We would, instead, accept on face value that our Person actually does live being thin as necessary and hunger as wrong, and that these are the only possibilities that exist for her at the present time. But we would also believe that she is capable of exploring and appropriating new possibilities introduced to her, that she is able to learn and develop new resources and tools other than those with which she is presently equipped. Psychotherapy would become, as it were, the process of adding more colors to her already existing palate (T. Rainey, personal communication, 1988). Importantly, though, facilitating her appropriation of these possibilities and tools would also entail addressing directly the world in which this process takes place. It would entail confronting the reality of the socio-cultural and historico-political institutions and structures discussed above, just as it would entail addressing the physiological

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repercussions of extended dieting in the resumption of food intake. It would be no more reasonable to expect a young woman in this culture and at this time in history to accept that she need not be concerned with her weight and physical appearance than it would be to expect a woman who has been continuously dieting for several years to sit down suddenly and consume a four course meal. For women not to equate their worth and self-esteem with their desirability there have to be changes made in the social and cultural world in which they live. This, much like building on small but frequent snacks to the point of being able to eat an entire meal, entails a slow and gradual process of change. It is not for that reason, however, any less crucial to the effective treatment (and prevention) of anorexia. Appreciating the role of the socio-cultural and historico-political context in which this particular condition emerges would rather lead transcendentally grounded psychologists to join forces with feminists (e.g., Boskind-Lodahl, 1976; Orbach, 1986; Szekely, 1987) and other parties to make social, cultural, historical, and political changes in the status of women and in how they determine their own sense of value within a transformative context.

Implications for Research and Practice We shall close with two other examples of areas of clinical interest and research that provide good test cases for the implications of this transcendentally grounded approach to psychology. These are the cases of practice and research related to ­psychosis and the survival of sexual assault. They are cases that present very different challenges for psychology, and which will allow us thereby to explore different aspects of our new science. The case of psychosis will involve an acknowledgement of at least the possibility of a genetic or physiological contribution to a psychological phenomenon, while the case of the survival of sexual assault will involve studying the psychological repercussions of a factual, objective event. A brief examination of these two areas of interest will offer a glimpse into the far-reaching nature of the implications of our transcendentally grounded approach for concrete psychological research and practice. We might remember that the case of psychosis was already mentioned briefly in Chap. 1, and so we will begin with it. In the context of our earlier discussion of Husserl’s initial refutation of psychologism, we had utilized the case of psychosis as an example of non-logical thinking. We had pointed out that psychologistic philosophers had employed logical criteria in order to exclude “insane” (i.e., psychotic) thinking from their survey of human thinking, only then to justify the use of logical criteria upon this basis. They had, in other words, claimed that psychotic thinking was not normal human thinking in order to prove that all normal human thinking was logical in nature. But the only basis upon which they had judged psychotic thinking to be abnormal in the first place was that it was non-logical in nature; as Husserl wrote: “But abnormality must first be constituted as such; and the constitution of abnormality is possible only on the basis of an intrinsically antecedent normality” (1977, p. 125). Psychologism had presumed precisely that which it had set out to justify.

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From this discussion, we may conclude that a first implication of our non-­ psychologistic approach to psychology would be that we are no longer to view psychotic thinking to be abnormal simply because it does not abide by the tenets of logic. Psychotic thought—if it does indeed constitute its own phenomenon—is to be understood in terms of what it is, rather than in contrast to what it is not. Rather than viewing non-logical discourse only as lacking logic, as falling short of the ideal of logical discourse, we may view non-logical discourse—whether it is that of poetry, everyday conversation, or psychosis—as having its own structure. Experience need not be logical in order to be meaningful; nor must it be logical in order to be accessible to scientific exploration and reflection. Psychotic discourse needs no longer be dismissed as meaningless non-sense, nor need it be excluded from the realm of the scientifically respectable, merely because it appears to be non-logical. We will only know whether or not, or in what ways, there is such a thing as psychotic thinking to begin with, as well as whether and in what ways it is “abnormal” or different from non-psychotic thinking, when we have reclaimed it as a valid sphere of phenomenological investigation, when we have some sense of what its structure is. At this point we only presume to know what its structure is not. But what if evidence is provided from other corners that indicate that psychosis results from a disease process caused by an underlying physiological abnormality? What if evidence demonstrates that the experience of Persons with psychotic experiences is the direct result of a neurophysiological process? What if this type of non-logical thinking is shown to have its origin in a “brain disease” (Torrey, 1985)? Would this not only redirect our research into psychosis, but also call into question our entire transcendental project? How can we view the constitution of experience to be a transcendental process when the human body, and the brain as a physical organ, can have such an effect on the nature of this process? Would this not give us reason to return to a view of intentionality as a psychological, if not physiological, property of the human being? Would this not be proof of the truth of naturalism? We have used this example to arrive back at the question raised in Chap. 4 concerning the relation between the body and the subject, between causality and motivation. Certainly, there has been a long line of literature that has suggested that psychosis may have genetic and physiological underpinnings. For the last half-­ century, the accepted view has been that while “stress” may play a role in the exacerbation of psychotic episodes, the primary cause of the illness is an underlying physiological “vulnerability” (Zubin and Spring, 1977) or “diathesis” (Strauss & Carpenter, 1983). How are we to understand the relation between this physical cause and the intentional experience of the Person with psychotic experiences? How are we to understand the relation between physiology and psychology? We remarked in Chap. 4 that Husserl had decided this question in favor of subjectivity. Not wanting to return to a Cartesian dualism, he did not settle for a simple parallelism between the material and the intentional but had subordinated the physical to experience. The body as material, we had said, was merely one meaning which the body had as a personal and cultural reality. How may we use this approach in our understanding of the case of psychosis? We surely are not to interpret it to mean that Persons with psychotic experiences choose to constitute

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their bodies, or their brains, as abnormal. The body as physical material is rather to be seen as one passively pre-given aspect of the Person’s motivational horizon. One is as born into one’s body as one is born into one’s culture and one’s historical period. One has no more choice over the color of one’s skin than one has over the members of one’s family or the nature of the political and economic system in which one grows up. We may consider the physiological vulnerability hypothesized to be genetically inherited in psychosis to be in this way simply one element of one’s pre-given equipment; to be present along with all of the various other aspects of one’s bodily, familial, historical, etc., being. In this sense, thinking differently from what may be considered “normal” would not in any way make this Person less of a Person. Would this not, however, give precedence to the bodily component of one’s motivational horizon, as opposed to the transcendental act of constitution itself? Would this not result in our viewing the act of constitution as arising out of this stratum of constituted sense? Would not psychotic experience—if there is such a thing—be considered to be different from non-psychotic experience because of this difference in physiological resources? As we saw above in our discussion of our young woman’s experience, the answer to this question must be “No.” To conclude that psychotic experience is different because it is psychotic is to be circular in one’s reasoning. We may use the term “psychotic” as descriptive of a particular type of experience, but we may not use it as an explanation for the experience described. That the nature of one’s neuronal organization contributes to the constitution of one’s experience is as true for someone who does not have psychosis as it is for someone who does. Experience itself is still experience in either case, and still intentional and motivational in nature, regardless of its logical or non-logical structure. Having psychosis is simply to be understood as one of the many possible components of being alive as a human being. So that this last statement will not be dismissed as a mere truism, we might mention one change in direction for research which would issue from the acceptance of this position. Given that the physiological vulnerability assumed to be present in psychosis does not account in and of itself for its own meaning, we might wonder as to what meaning it might have, how this meaning might have come about, and what if any impact this meaning may have for Persons with this condition. In other words, not only might we wonder about the internal (non-logical) structure of psychotic experience, but we also might wonder about what meaning this structure itself has had in the past, both for the Person who has psychotic experiences and the others in their life, as well as what meaning it may have now and into the future. In viewing the brain as a material component of the body to be one of its meanings as a constituted reality, our research will want to explore the nature of this constituted meaning. It will want to focus on the meaning that this particular bodily equipment has come to have as one constituent of a Person’s horizon. As we had asked above what it meant for our young woman with anorexia to be gendered, we will in this case ask what it means for a Person to have psychosis. What does it mean, we will ask, for a Person to have this kind of brain?

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There is a considerable body of literature in this area that has in fact pointed to the importance of this level of meaning in the determination of the nature and quality of life of Persons with psychosis. Somewhat well-known aspects of the history of madness and medicine, from the Middle Ages to the backwards of state hospitals, speak directly to the issue of meanings attributed to psychosis and the influence these meanings have had on the lives of the so-called “insane.” Less well-known and more recent literature suggests that this issue needs to be explored, however, on even subtler and less obvious levels of the constitution of meaning. How, for example, did we come to decide that this particular neuronal organization—if indeed that is what it is—is indicative of deficiency or deviance as opposed simply to difference (cf. British Psychological Society Division of Clinical Psychology, 2017; Johnstone et  al., 2018; Klein, 1982; Soldz, 1988)? How did the psychotic process come to be constituted as a disease process? Foucault’s (1965, 1987) historical researches, as well as Deleuze and Gautarri’s (1983) political analyses, suggest that psychosis has come to be defined as an illness in the context of certain political and historical institutions. They suggest that madness has come to be equated with disability and disease by virtue of its lack of adherence not only to the tenets of Modern Western scientific rationality (i.e., logic), but also to the tenets of Modern Western industrial capitalism. Psychosis has come to be defined historically and culturally as an illness by virtue of the fact that it at times renders Persons incapable of working productively in a manner suitable to our current political economic system. Having this particular kind of brain as part of one’s equipment thus places the Person with psychosis in a position in their society which holds a particular passively generated meaning. Persons endowed with s­ imilar brains but living in other political systems or other historical periods might not be considered to be “vulnerable” or disabled in this way. This difference could help to explain the surprising but consistent finding in cross-cultural research that persons diagnosed with psychosis have better outcomes in the developing, as compared to the developed, world (Cooper and Sartorius, 1977; Lin and Kleinman, 1988; Warner, 1983, 1985; Waxler, 1979). Meehl, in his classic article entitled “Schizotaxia, Schizotypy, Schizophrenia,” illustrates this same point using the analogy of a “color psychosis” developed by people living “in a society entirely oriented around the making of fine color discriminations” (1973, p. 139). In such a society, persons who are color blind, who have a physiological inability to distinguish colors, would thereby be at a greater vulnerability for such a “disorder” (Davidson, 1988b). In this case, color blind individuals would be at a biological disadvantage because of the difficulties they would face in doing something their particular society requires. They would not be at such a disadvantage, however, in a culture such as ours that does not require subtle discriminations between different colors; a society, that is, in which color-blind individuals appear to function with little to no disability. Foucault, Deleuze, and others suggest that madness or psychosis are terms that apply to a possible biological vulnerability in being materially productive, in doing precisely that which is required of human cogs in the wheels of a capitalist economic system. In this way, not only may a genetic or physiological vulnerability be given as part of the Person’s horizon, but also are all of the socially, historically, and culturally constituted meanings which accrue to this particular bodily state.

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In researching and understanding psychosis as a transcendentally constituted phenomenon, we would thus find it important to recognize and incorporate the passively constitutive role of these factors in the constitution of the concrete everyday life of Persons with these experiences. As we did with our young woman with anorexia, we would want to understand the experience of having psychosis within its relevant motivational horizons. At the present time, this would entail an analysis of how having psychosis comes to be constituted within the context of our contemporary capitalist system. Whatever the neurophysiological component, our transcendentally grounded psychology would also be interested in the meaning which this bodily state would have for Persons in the context of their current motivational horizons. While neurocognitive research would remain important, it would be situated within the framework of psychology, studying bodily states in terms of their meanings for consciousness. For developments in this kind of socio-cultural approach to understanding psychosis, the reader is referred to the writings of Barham (1984), Davidson (2003), and Warner (1985). The case of the survival of sexual assault presents our new psychology with a very different challenge. In this case we are presented with the occurrence of a factual and objective event: a woman gets raped. The challenge might be phrased in this way: what role are such “facts” to be allowed to play in a transcendentally grounded science? How is our psychology to handle things which happen to Persons, things over which they have no control? This might appear to be an easy question. Can we not simply say that this fact can be studied within our psychology in terms of its meaning for our subject, the rape survivor? This would appear to be in accord with a phenomenological approach and would allow for all of the various meanings that we might expect to be involved in the experience of rape to be explored within the scope of our research. Not only would we be able thereby to explore the meanings of being raped as an instance of sexual assault, but we would also be able to explore cultural and historical contributions to these meanings. We would be able, for example, to trace such aspects of the experience as the survivor’s self-doubt and guilt as to whether she had really “asked for” or “wanted” to be raped to the particular cultural and political context in which rape occurs (e.g., Dworkin, 1981, 1983; MacKinnon, 1983). We would be able, that is, to study the experience of being raped in its socio-cultural and historical context, as we did above in the case of psychosis. Would this not adequately address the issue? If we consult the literature in this area, however, we can see that this would only address part of the issue at hand. The majority of the existing literature on the survival of sexual assault suggests that rape precipitates an “immediate and negative reaction followed by a gradual return to a pre-assault level of functioning” (Sales et al. 1984, p. 119). Following an initial phase of crisis and trauma, the survivor is expected to return to the way things were before the rape; to “pick up the pieces” and resume her previous lifestyle (cf. Burgess and Holmstrom, 1974). Phenomenological psychological research that has been conducted in the related area of criminal victimization also seems to bear out these conclusions. Fischer and Wertz (1979), on the basis of their research, suggest that in the aftermath of being criminally victimized Persons return to a pre-victimization lifestyle in which they

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live the event of victimization as past. It would appear, then, that the actual event of rape or criminal victimization is to become, following a gradual process of healing, a no longer impactful event in the Person’s life. It is understood to have substantially changed neither the Person nor her world. Given our discussion in earlier parts of this chapter, we should not be surprised by this conclusion. We have shown in the above how psychology has made it the Person’s task to accept or adapt to whatever the world offers. This is simply one more example of the application of such an approach and its understanding of the role of science. Since “the” world is assumed to exist independently of our subject’s experience of it, it will be there for her after her experience of being raped just as it was prior to it. The task of psychotherapy is thus to help the survivor to manage somehow to put the actual event and its meanings “behind” her, to put it in her past, and get on with her life as before. But this view implies that the actual event of the rape was not really a part of the world, that it was only an accidental or incidental fact which tells our subject nothing important about the nature of herself as a subject nor her world. It suggests that her rape can and should be forgotten. It assumes that “the” world is really safe and trustworthy. But is not the fact that our subject was raped a real fact about the real world as well? Is it not a real aspect of the world that, by current estimates, one in five women in the U.S. will be sexually assaulted? How did these researchers decide that ­survivors should disregard this very real fact and discount their own experiences of being raped, in order to return to a view of the world as safe and unthreatening and a view of themselves as invulnerable? On what basis is the actuality of their having been raped to be considered a less real or less valid aspect of the world than the safety of those who have not been raped? How has it been decided that women’s present vulnerability to rape is merely accidental? The experiences of rape survivors and existing statistics would seem to argue otherwise. In contrast to the phenomenological research conducted on being criminally victimized mentioned above, Cosgrove (1987, 1988), in her phenomenological analysis of experiences of the aftermath of sexual assault, found that survivors do not in fact return to a pre-rape lifestyle. Rather than coming to the kind of resolution of the experience of being raped suggested above, her subjects continued to experience the aftermath as lingering 2 years after the rape. The impact of the event appeared to persist in their lives and no evidence was found for a return to their previous sense of world or self (Cosgrove, 1988, pp. 4–5). In her analysis, the event of the rape irrevocably altered the nature of both subject and world. She suggested, accordingly, that rather than encouraging women to put the rape behind them and return to their previous lives, therapeutic interventions might more appropriately be directed toward helping women to mourn the losses of their pre-rape senses of self and invulnerability as a prelude to building a new post-victimization sense of self and world (Cosgrove, 1988, p. 6). Rather than resuming a life built upon the denial of having been raped, women might hope to build lives informed by an awareness of their on-­ going vulnerability. Once so equipped, they may then choose as to how they wish to respond to this vulnerability, and to the aspects of the world that continue to render them vulnerable in this way.

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It is this latter approach that would be more in line with a transcendentally grounded appreciation of facts and their significance for psychology. Within a phenomenological perspective, facts are not understood as accidental occurrences that happen while the world remains basically the same; they are not viewed as inconsequential to the nature of reality. Rather, they are understood as the events which constitute reality. As events, they are the real. They are the appearances, the phenomena, of life that we have set out to study. Husserl’s dissatisfaction with “fact-minded” science should not mislead us into a dismissal of the importance of factual events in the lives of Persons. Rather, it should remind us that facts are actually meaningful occurrences that provide the medium through which Persons’ lives become visible. They are thus not only meaningful for Persons, but also reveal the subjective activity which is Persons’ lives. Similarly, it should remind us that the world as the correlate of subjective activity is to be found revealed through events as the place in which these actions take place. As ever changing, the world becomes visible only as the backdrop for the unfolding of meaningful events in the lives of Persons. No longer having objectively existing psychic subjects and world given to it in advance, our new psychology will thus view the world and its subjects as the products of events, rather than as their source. It will look precisely to these events as constitutive of both its subjects and the world in which they live. In the case of sexual assault, we are thus to see the event of being raped in its properly constitutive role. The experience of being raped is to be seen as becoming a part of the survivor’s motivational horizon as passively constitutive of the nature of both herself and her world. From that event onward she will always be someone who has been raped, as her world will always be one in which rape was possible. While we may hope for the survivor that this aspect of her motivational horizon becomes gradually less and less “activated,” less and less immediately distressing for her, we may not act as if, nor may we ask her to act as if, it had never happened. To do so would be to deny the reality of her experience. Not to do so would be to treat her and her experience with respect, and to offer her an opportunity to build, with our help, a different world upon its basis (e.g., through individual and collective advocacy). Like the Existentialists’ view of the incompleteness of the world, being raped is not something that one may, and certainly not something that one should, passively accept. Neither is having been raped something to which one should have to adjust. Rather, it is an event that provides the precondition, the point of departure, for future activity on the part of the Person. Accepting and adapting are in this sense only two forms of doing. Many others exist. Recognizing this, our new psychology remains open to how rape survivors may choose to respond to this particular aspect of their world, to what they may decide to do about it. Being raped may motivate women to do any number of things, from becoming violent themselves to lobbying for stricter enforcement of anti-rape laws. Clinical work with rape survivors should be informed by and open to these varying possibilities, and responsive to how a Person chooses to integrate having been raped into her sense of self and community. Whatever events happen to Persons, our psychology will accordingly view their repercussions,

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their impact on Persons’ lives, as constituting of a new sense of self and world. It will view each event, in other words, as playing a role in the on-going activity of the Person’s life, the nature of which is always in the process of being determined. These two areas of research and clinical interest have provided us with additional illustrative examples of the nature of a psychology grounded in transcendental phenomenology. The implications of reforming psychological understanding and practice along Husserlian lines should by now be somewhat clear. With the historical exegesis and philosophical justification out of the way, the actual work of developing such a fundamentally refashioned psychology has begun. This text if offered as one tool to be used in that on-going process.

Epilogue: Toward a Generous Psychology

Today, psychologists have a favorite word, and that word is maladjusted. I tell you today that there are some things in our social system to which I am proud to be maladjusted. I shall never be adjusted to lynch mobs, segregation, economic inequalities, ‘the madness of militarism’, and self-defeating physical violence. The salvation of the world lies in the maladjusted Martin Luther King, Jr.

Seymour Sarason, in his autobiography The Making of an American Psychologist (1988), bemoans the fact that more clinical psychologists have not developed an active interest and expertise in child psychology and the primary prevention of psychological ills. He attributes this to two factors, the first being the history of the discipline of clinical psychology itself, with its origins in VA hospitals in the aftermath of World War II, and the second being that “working with children is ‘messy’,” in that it entails work with the child’s environment (i.e., family, school) as well as with the child him or herself (1988, pp. 290 ff.). Any clinician who has worked with children would agree that the work is indeed “messy” in this way. We find ourselves responding rather spontaneously to the powerlessness of children. We appear not to question that their environments, when problematic, should be changed, and that that is simply part of our work. How is it, then, that while we are apparently willing to accept that for a child the world is not yet completed or determined in advance, we appear at the same time to be convinced that the world of adults is complete and unchanging? As suggested by the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., in our work with adults we tend all too often to view their world as something to be adjusted to, to be accepted, no matter how problematic, no matter how pathology inducing, it may be. What has led us to think that adults do not need to effect changes in their worlds, or that they are less in need of assistance in doing so than children? The transcendentally grounded approach developed in this work offers an alternative perspective for practice and research in clinical psychology. It provides a view in which neither adults nor their worlds are given as already completed or determined in advance. It proposes that adults as well as children live in a changing and changeable © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 L. Davidson, Overcoming Psychologism: Husserl and the Transcendental Reform of Psychology, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-59932-4

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world, and that adults as well as children may be helped to change the world in which they live so as to decrease their misery and enhance the quality of their lives. Placing adults and children together in this fashion, we do not mean to imply that psychology should blur developmental boundaries, or treat adults as children, etc. Rather, we propose the adoption of a developmental model in which life is never to be considered to have been completed, and in which the world as well as its individual Persons are to be viewed as constantly in the process of ever further completion. In such a view, adults may simply be seen as being able to benefit from a bit of help along the way. Our work with them may be seen to require the same kind of “messy” generosity with which we already infuse our work with children. We may consider a psychology transcendentally grounded in the manner proposed herein to be “generous” in a number of ways. First and foremost, it is generous in not blaming the victim of whatever form of presumed pathology for his or her being sick, and in not absolutizing the sickness to the extent of losing the Person suffering from it. It is generous also in not approaching its subjects and patients suspiciously, but rather with respect for whatever it is they bring with them, no matter how inadequate for the tasks at hand. And lastly, it is generous in affirming the spark of life that animates all reality over any and all regions of reality itself; in placing the world and all of its various structures and institutions, including that of psychology, in the role of being tools to be used in the service of the lives of Persons. Child psychology and community psychological approaches to prevention provide the only models from within mainstream psychology for the kind of psychological praxis proposed in this work. They have in common an appreciation of the relation between subject and world as interactive and reciprocally determinative. This work departs from even these models, however, by viewing this relation not merely as interactive, but as intentional and therefore constitutive of both subject and world. Being grounded in transcendental phenomenology, it offers an even more radical appreciation of the importance of the generation of meaning, both passive and active, in the determination of the nature and quality of human life. Viewing the world as an ever-changing product of subjective activity, our transcendentally grounded psychology remains open to the future as a horizon of yet to be determined possibilities. In the last analysis, the value of situating Persons’ experiences and actions in their ever-changing social and historical contexts is not in that it allows us to change, or blame, our past, but in that it affords us the knowledge that we may create for ourselves a future which is radically different from our present. In the late 1950s, King delivered a sermon in which he stated that while we may recognize “that social change will not come overnight,” we may yet work “as though it is an imminent possibility” (1981, p. 23). A few years later, in his speech to the Irish Parliament, John Kennedy repeated these words of George Bernard Shaw: “Some men see things and say: ‘Why?’ … But I dream things that never were and I say: ‘Why not?’” (1988, p.  389). The work of these two Persons and many other similar social reformers stands as testaments to the power and efficacy of viewing the world as inherently changeable. Once grounded in such a vision, psychology will no longer work to adjust its patients to the world as it is but will rather see its task as that of equipping its patients more adequately for their creation of a future which is yet to come.

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