Variations on Truth: Approaches in Contemporary Phenomenology 9781472547804, 9781441112903, 9781441146670

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Variations on Truth

Issues in Phenomenology and Hermeneutics Series Editors: Pol Vandevelde, Marquette University and Kevin Hermberg, Dominican College Issues in Phenomenology and Hermeneutics presents original research work that appeals to the phenomenological method while also being informed by the tradition of hermeneutics. The books in this series abide by the rigor of traditional Husserlian phenomenology and bridge the gap between philosophical, religious, literary and legal hermeneutics. Informed by current debates within both these fields, the series advances and promotes dialogue between the two movements. Epistemology, Archaeology, Ethics: Current Investigations of Husserl’s Corpus— edited by Pol Vandevelde and Sebastian Luft

Variations on Truth: Approaches in Contemporary Phenomenology

Edited by

Pol Vandevelde and Kevin Hermberg

Continuum International Publishing Group The Tower Building 80 Maiden Lane 11 York Road Suite 704 London SE1 7NX New York NY 10038 www.continuumbooks.com © Pol Vandevelde, Kevin Hermberg and contributors, 2011 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. EISBN:

978–1–4411–4667–0

Library of Congress Catalog ing-in-Publication Data Variations on truth : approaches in contemporary phenomenology / edited by Pol Vandevelde and Kevin Hermberg. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references (p. ) and index. ISBN 978-1-4411-1290-3 1. Phenomenology. 2. Truth. I. Vandevelde, Pol. II. Hermberg, Kevin. III. Title. BD171.V375 2011 121--dc22 2011008363

Typeset by Newgen Imaging Systems Pvt Ltd, Chennai, India Printed and bound in Great Britain

Contents

Notes on Contributors Preface Part I:

Introduction

Chapter 1: The Phenomenological Correlation between Consciousness and Object Faced with Its Hermeneutical Challenge Pol Vandevelde Part II:

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3

Husserlian Resources: Reduction, Imagination, Transcendental Idealism

Chapter 2: Does Husserl Have a Principle of Reducibility? Dominique Pradelle

25

Chapter 3: The Seduction of Images: A Look at the Role of Images in Husserl’s Phenomenology John Brough

41

Chapter 4: From “Natural Attitude” to Transcendental Idealism: Continuousness, or Logical Conflict? Jean-François Lavigne

57

Part III:

Heideggerean Variations: Dasein’s Opening, Disclosure, and the History of Being

Chapter 5: Heidegger’s Hermeneutical Critique of Consciousness Revisited Burt C. Hopkins

79

Chapter 6: Transformations in Heidegger’s Conception of Truth between 1927 and 1930 László Tengelyi

94

Contents

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Chapter 7: Heidegger’s Fluid Ontology in the 1930s: The Platonic Connection Pol Vandevelde Part IV:

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Toward a Broadened Ontology and Epistemology: Nature, Judgment, and Intersubjectivity

Chapter 8: Harmony in Opposition: On Merleau-Ponty’s Heraclitean Vision of Truth Shazad Akhtar

129

Chapter 9: The Role of Infinite Judgment in Hegel’s Phenomenology of Truth Russell Newstadt and Andrew Cutrofello

145

Chapter 10: Husserl’s (even more) Social Epistemology Kevin Hermberg

161

Part V: The Avatars of Truth: Deconstruction, Conversation, and Interpretation Chapter 11: Reduction, Construction, Destruction of a Three-Way Dialogue: Natorp, Husserl, and Heidegger Jean-François Courtine

179

Chapter 12: Truth’s Absence: The Hermeneutic Resistance to Phenomenology Santiago Zabala

201

Chapter 13: Truth and Interpretation Daniel O. Dahlstrom

209

Bibliography Index

225 234

Notes on Contributors

Shazad Akhtar is a doctor of philosophy. He is the author of “Between Oneself and Another: Merleau-Ponty’s Organic Appropriation of Husserlian Phenomenology” (Phenomenology 2008) and co-author of “Husserl at Marquette: A Report on the 38th International Husserl Circle Conference” (Phänomenologische Forschungen 2009). John B. Brough is Professor Emeritus of Philosophy at Georgetown University. He has translated Husserliana X, On the Phenomenology of the Consciousness of Internal Time, and Husserliana XXIII, Phantasy, Image Consciousness, and Memory. He has also written essays on the phenomenology of time and on the nature of the work of art, with particular attention to imaging. Jean-François Courtine is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Paris-Sorbonne and researcher at the Husserl Archives in Paris. His recent books include: Les catégories de l’être. Etudes de philosophie ancienne et médiévale (PUF 2003), Inventio analogiae, Métaphysique et onto-théo-logie (Vrin, 2005), La cause de la phénoménologie (PUF, 2007). He has also edited several volumes, among them: Heidegger. Introduction à la métaphysique (Vrin, 2007), Schelling (Edition du Cerf, 2010). Andrew Cutrofello is Professor of Philosophy at Loyola University Chicago. He is the author of four books, including Continental Philosophy: A Contemporary Introduction (Routledge, 2005) and The Owl at Dawn: A Sequel to Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit (State University of New York Press, 1995). Daniel O. Dahlstrom, Chair of the Philosophy Department at Boston University, is the author of Das logische Vorurteil (Passagan, 1994), Heidegger’s Concept of Truth (Cambridge University Press, 2001) and Philosophical Legacies (Catholic University of Americal, 2008). He has published numerous articles, translated works of Mendelssohn, Schiller, Hegel, Feuerbach,

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and Heidegger, and edited several collected volumes, including Interpreting Heidegger: New Essays (Cambridge University Press, 2011). Kevin Hermberg is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Dominican College. He is the author of Husserl’s Phenomenology: Knowledge, Objectivity, and Others (Continuum 2006). Burt Hopkins is Professor of Philosophy at Seattle University. He is the coeditor of The New Yearbook for Phenomenology and Phenomenological Philosophy, author of, among others, The Origin of the Logic of Symbolic Mathematics: Edmund Husserl and Jacob Klein (Indiana 2011), The Philosophy of Husserl (Acumen 2010), Intentionality in Husserl and Heidegger: The Problem of Original Method and Phenomenon of Phenomenology (Kluwer 1993). Jean-François Lavigne is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Nice. He is the author of, among others, Husserl et la naissance de la phénoménologie (1900–1913) (PUF, 2005), Michel Henry: Pensée de la vie et culture contemporaine (Beauchesne, 2006), Accéder au transcendantal? Réduction et idéalisme transcendantal dans les Idées I de Husserl (Vrin, 2009). He is the president of the “Société Internationale Michel Henry.” Russell Newstadt is a doctoral candidate in the Philosophy Department at Loyola University Chicago. He studied philosophy and classics at the University of California, Berkeley and the University of Chicago. His dissertation is tentatively entitled, Omnis Determinatio est Negatio: A Secret History of Negation in Early Medieval Philosophy. Dominique Pradelle is Professor of Philosophy at Blaise Pascal University (Clermont-Ferrand). He is the co-editor of the journal Philosophie (Paris, Editions de Minuit). His books include: Par-delà la révolution copernicienne. Le sujet transcendantal et ses facultés (PUF, 2011), L’archéologie du monde. Constitution de l’espace, idéalisme et intuitionnisme chez Husserl (Kluwer, 2000). He is a co-editor of Penser avec Desanti (Trans Europ Repress, 2010). László Tengelyi is Professor of Philosophy at the Bergische-Universität Wuppertal. He is the author of, among others, The Wild Region in Life-History (Northwestern University Press, 2004), L’expérience retrouvée. Essais philosophiques I (L’Harmattan, 2006), Erfahrung und Ausdruck: Phänomenologie im Umbruch bei Husserl und seinen Nachfolgern (Springer, 2007) and co-author of Neue Phänomenologie in Frankreich (Suhrkamp, 2011).

Notes on Contributors

ix

Pol Vandevelde is Professor of Philosophy at Marquette University. He is the author of Être et Discours: La question du langage dans l’itinéraire de Heidegger (Académie Royale, 1994), The Task of the Interpreter: Text, Meaning, and Negotiation (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2005), and Heidegger and the Romantics: The Literary Invention of Meaning (Routledge, 2011). He also edited several books and translated works by Husserl, Heidegger, Apel, and Rousselot. Santiago Zabala is ICREA Research Professor at the University of Barcelona. He is the author of five books, including: The Remains of Being (Columbia University Press, 2009) and The Hermeneutic Nature of Analytic Philosophy (Columbia University Press, 2008), and editor of Art’s Claim to Truth (Columbia University Press, 2008). He co-edited Consequences of Hermeneutics (Northwestern University Press, 2010). His forthcoming book, coauthored with Gianni Vattimo, is Hermeneutic Communism (Columbia University Press, 2011).

Preface

The aim of this volume is to provide a wide sample of the kind of research that is done in phenomenological circles on some important aspects of the problem of truth. It is no wild claim to say that there is no unified phenomenological theory of truth and no established or accepted set of components that would belong to the problem of truth. The essays included in this volume are research essays by prominent phenomenologists in the United States, France, and Germany showing how relevant the phenomenological approach is with regard to the problem of truth and how complex this problem is when examined through the phenomenological method. The previous volume in the series, Epistemology, Archaeology, Ethics: Current Investigations of Husserl’s Corpus (Vandevelde and Luft 2010), included a first part on epistemological issues. The present volume does not repeat the aspects of a theory of truth treated there. It rather continues the “broadened epistemology” that was sketched out in that volume. The focus here is on a dynamic conception of truth, understood as a process rather than statically as a propositional content or a determination of specific properties. Such an approach requires an examination of questions concerning, for example, imagination, culture, or history. An advantage of the phenomenological approach remains its capacity to provide detailed analysis, while engaging fruitfully with the history of philosophy in order to forge new and illuminating connections. The directors of the series plan to have other volumes on themes related to epistemological concerns and these future volumes in the series will address issues and topics that this volume cannot cover. As the title of the series, “Issues in Phenomenology and Hermeneutics,” states it, the goal is to focus on “Issues” and in order to focus on these issues we follow Husserl’s own recommendation of proceeding in a “zigzag” manner. Not all aspects of an issue can be treated at once (in one volume). For, it is the virtue of phenomenology to try as much as possible to refrain from imposing constraints on the topic under analysis, for example by selecting some

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aspects as essential and declaring others secondary. By letting the phenomena manifest themselves, according to its creed, phenomenology can thus resist the common view that truth is a matter of propositional content so that its relation to history or imagination is secondary. While the constraints imposed on a topic have the advantage of delineating the problem in a systematic way and breaking it down into its components, there always remains a certain arbitrariness in how the problem was circumscribed, and one can then question whether some assumptions have not been implicitly made. For, the price of a systematic approach seems to be the assumptions that have to be made for the method to work. By contrast, letting the phenomena manifest themselves allows phenomenologists to examine constantly whatever assumptions were made and to bring them to the fore. The correlative aspect of this phenomenological approach is the open-ended nature of the problem itself. Philosophical problems do not seem to have an unchanging nature with a strictly defined set of aspects, no matter how perennial they may appear to be. This applies to the philosophical problem of truth in an acute manner. By treating the very notion of what a philosophical problem is, not as a puzzle to be solved, but as an issue that requires a treatment, the phenomenological approach to truth treats the problem dynamically by raising questions and pointing to some issues that may go beyond the purview of epistemology as it tends to be discussed today. The “zigzag” approach that Husserl mentions allows us to remain rigorous without being rigidly systematic. This approach allows us to go back to the things themselves by recognizing only those constraints that emerge from the object under investigation and from the description of this object. The volume is structured in five sections. The fi rst one is an introduction that situates the problem of truth in phenomenological research by explaining how this problem arises. According to Husserl the problem of truth emerges from within the context of a correlation between consciousness and object. This correlation is Husserl’s understanding of the relationship between subject and object: consciousness is “of” an object and objects are “for” consciousness, neither of them being a free floating device that could be examined independently of its link to the other pole of the correlation in which it “appears.” However, later phenomenologists like Heidegger pointed out that such a correlation between consciousness and object is manifested in some form of articulation, for example through language. The correlation, it was thus contended, is rather an interpretation on the part of the subject who finds itself part of a world of related objects and of history. Husserl’s thesis of a correlation between consciousness and

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object thus invited a hermeneutic challenge to the extent that the interaction between consciousness and object seems to be a form of articulation in some medium and a form of interpretation. This element of interpretation in turn opens itself to be challenged by an ontological question: what is thus the status of the object of consciousness if phenomenology even in its hermeneutic form does not want to fall into a classic idealism? The second section is about “Husserlian Resources: Reduction, Imagination, Transcendental Idealism” and includes essays that reflect the all-encompassing nature of phenomenology and especially of Husserl’s original approach. Three aspects are particularly addressed in this section: reduction, the role of imagination, and the brand of transcendental theory Husserl advocates. Reduction is the method through which a particular empirical subject can transcend his or her particular perspective or framework and become what Husserl calls a “disinterested or non-participating spectator.” As one of the most crucial components of the phenomenological method, reduction guarantees that the starting point in experience will not remain encapsulated in experience, but will lead to logical and scientific claims. The second theme, imagination, is crucial for any aspect of consciousness. Even in perception, imagination is involved to the extent that one aspect of an object, for example, is associated with other objects. Imagination thus has to be part of any approach to truth. The third topic, the possibility of self-transcendence in a form of transcendental idealism, is Husserl’s overall theoretical framework within which he believes he can account for the correlation between consciousness and object without this correlation being limited to psychology, the workings of human consciousness, or even any form of anthropologism. The essays in the third section, “Heideggerean Variations: Dasein’s Opening, Disclosure, and the History of Being,” examine three of the stages in Heidegger’s thought between Being and Time and the early 1940s: the critique of consciousness, the transformation of the concept of truth soon after Being and Time in a metontology, and the history of being. The fourth section, “Toward a Broadened Ontology and Epistemology: Nature, Judgment, and Intersubjectivity,” includes essays that reflect a broadening of the traditional phenomenological approaches to truth and the implications of such a broadened epistemology for ontology. The essays operate a variation on three traditional themes: questioning the boundaries of nature and its alleged separation from spirit, challenging the very goal of a judgment, and opening up individual consciousness by revealing its intersubjective nature, and showing what it means for consciousness to be historical.

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The fi fth section is about “The Avatars of Truth: Deconstruction, Conversation, and Interpretation.” Phenomenology is not a theory, but, as Husserl said, a method. The essays in this section illustrate the variation of methods that can be used for dealing with the issue of truth. The topics treated include the relationship between Natorp, Husserl, and Heidegger, the relationship between hermeneutics and pragmatism, and the question of the truth in interpretation. Several of the contributors to this volume were participants in the Seminar on Phenomenology and Hermeneutics at Marquette University (Milwaukee) sponsored by Marquette Way Klingler College of Arts and Sciences and Dominican College (New York). We want to express our gratitude to our respective institutions for the support in our enterprise. We also want to thank David Avital, Continuum interim editor, for supporting the original idea of this volume and the anonymous reviewers for their comments and suggestions. Tom Crick has been, as always, extremely helpful during all the stages of this project. Finally, we are thankful to Sarah Campbell, editor, for her good advice and unfailing support.

Part I

Introduction

Chapter 1

The Phenomenological Correlation between Consciousness and Object Faced with Its Hermeneutical Challenge Pol Vandevelde

The issue of truth has always been a divisive philosophical issue, pitting traditional style philosophy against rhetoric, against literature, or against social and applied philosophy. While the notion of truth as a univocal concept associated with a well-delineated referent has long been seen as part of an idle Wittgensteinian language game, the use of the term is still very much a pragmatic component of any assertion, discussion, or communication that makes the writer or speaker accountable for the veracity of what they say. This disconnect between the theoretical front on truth, where the notion seems to be expandable and replaceable, and the practical front, where the notion of truth seems to remain uncircumventable has taken different forms in AngloAmerican and in continental philosophy. In Anglo-American philosophy the discussion tends to focus on the criterion of the truth or the method used to reach the truth, leading to distinctions among the different candidates for what a theory of truth is or should be: correspondence, foundationalist, coherentist, or pragmatic theories, with their possible variations and combinations. In continental philosophy the debate has taken another form and has focused on what is involved in what is called “the truth.” As the main representative of continental philosophy, phenomenology has seen itself as the place of a debate in which the truth as evidence, as defended by the early Husserl, has been challenged by the truth as “disclosure,” as powerfully presented by Heidegger. This alternative view on truth within phenomenology represents what we addressed in the Preface as the hermeneutic challenge. Once an element of interpretation is introduced in the concept of truth it was only a natural step to ask about the linguistic or discursive mediation of the disclosure.

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Phenomenology in this sense lent itself to a critique that subsequently led to its being recast in terms of what Hans-Georg Gadamer has called “the mediation of language” (Sprachlichkeit). This critique was obviously prepared by Heidegger and later radicalized in its linguistic form by the likes of Jacques Derrida and Michel Foucault. This element of language that is part of the flesh of reality has reintroduced the ontological question into phenomenology by the rather provocative claim that “everything is interpretation” (Derrida) or by the view that things are “discursive formations” (Foucault). In this introduction I focus on what in my view is the core of the phenomenological attitude toward truth—the correlation between consciousness and object—and how such a correlation already contains in the innovative framework it opens the notions of disclosure and discursive formations. The notion of correlation between consciousness and object entails an overlap between consciousness and object that turns the activity of knowing and reaching the truth into a process of translation or “translatability” understood in the broad sense of an exchange between what is of the order of consciousness and what is of the order of reality. I will, first, present Husserl’s understanding of the correlation between consciousness and object, with its epistemological emphasis, and, second, examine three versions of the overlap that emphasize the ontological repercussions of such an interaction between consciousness and object. I will start with a historical account of the origin of such a correlation. We can find in early German romanticism, in the figures of Friedrich Schlegel or Novalis, the first effort to bridge the apparent gap between consciousness and object. They use the term “translation” for this bridge, thereby granting translation an ontological function. Heidegger also appeals to translation in the 1930s and early 1940s as a way to regain our historical identity and Merleau-Ponty speaks of a “translation of the world.” What these three versions of the overlap between consciousness and object show is the need to see the object in a certain fluidity. They, thus, bring to the fore the ontological side of the correlation between consciousness and object that the Husserlian version somewhat downplays. These three versions of “ontological translation” show how, within phenomenology, the truth as Husserlian evidence could lead to the truth as Heideggerean disclosure and to the emphasis on the mediation of language, which was to transform phenomenology. Besides the conceptual continuity with its ruptures between the correlation between consciousness and object, on the one hand, and the hermeneutic “turn,” on the other, these three versions show us that an investigation into the nature of truth cannot be confined to a strictly epistemological approach, but encroaches

Correlation Between Consciousness and Object

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upon ontological territories. One can do justice to the complex nature of truth only by taking into consideration these ontological entailments.

The Epistemological Emphasis in the Husserlian Correlation between Consciousness and Object The correlation between consciousness and object, which Husserl considers the breakthrough of his phenomenology, adds to a mere relationship between consciousness and object the suggestion of an overlap between the two terms correlated. If there is something in consciousness that makes it consciousness “of” and something in the object that makes it an object “for” consciousness or an object that matters to consciousness, there is what Husserl calls a “sense” (Sinn) that emerges from the correlation and can be expressed as meaning at the logical or linguistic level (Bedeutung). As an example of this Husserl mentions what he calls a “wordless recognition,” for example of a Roman milestone (Husserl 2001, 222–223). I may immediately recognize it as such without saying a word—this is the emergence of sense—and I may formulate a judgment or assert a proposition about it—in expressed meanings. In the Logical Investigations, Husserl himself admits that there is some ambiguity in the use of the two terms, Sinn and Bedeutung, an ambiguity he lamented but at the same time praised: it is a “very unpleasant equivocation” (sehr unliebsame Äquivokation), he says, but this ambiguity is also felicitous for it is “very welcome [sehr angenehm] to have parallel terms with which we can alternate” (Husserl 1984 Hua XIX/1, 58). Although he agrees with Frege that if meanings are in some way dependent on their instantiation they are psychological products, he refuses to uncouple the object from the sense through which the object is presented and thus to separate Sinn and Bedeutung. The alternation between “sense” and “meaning” is an indication of a movement within the correlation between consciousness and object. On the one hand, consciousness must exercise some form of activity in order to reach the sense of the object—it is roughly what the term “constitution” involves—but, on the other hand, the object itself must have some capacity to give itself or reveal itself, thereby gaining salience for consciousness. However, from early on, Husserl seems to downplay the activity proper to the object and shift the center of gravity of the correlation toward consciousness alone in what he calls “evidence” in the sense of self-evidence. This power of “evidence” and the downplaying of the role of the object

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were reinforced by Husserl’s idealistic turn. Although the correlation was already very much at play in the Logical Investigations, it is really with Ideas I that the subject receives such a degree of attention that all of Husserl’s subsequent work can be characterized as an eidetic of consciousness or of subjectivity.1 This investigation of subjectivity soon encountered the question of how complex my subjective capacities are. Somehow, in my very personal constitutive achievements, I borrow others’ ways and manners of perceiving objects or otherwise relating to the world. I perceive Michelangelo’s David through borrowed eyes that were loaned to me early on in my intellectual development through my culture and tradition. This expansion of subjectivity to intersubjectivity is a remarkable advance. On the one hand, it broadens my own subjectivity, but also allows the history of others to weave itself into my own subjective sphere. On the other, this expansion also provides a form of articulation to a rigid understanding of subjectivity. Subjectivity now is a complex entity made of singular egos who act and think as individuals, but who are also, in their very accomplishments, communal or corporate entities. This advance, however, raises another question. How can I, myself, “be” others in some way? While my attitude before Michelangelo’s David is indeed informed by linguistically mediated intentional states extending from my parents through my teachers and to books I read, it is not others who see in me the David. Despite the claims made by postmodernism, deconstruction or other theories of the socially constructed self, I seem to remain stubbornly the one who sees it. There are thus two problems to solve. The first one is the problem of passing from an “I” to a “we.” Husserl’s solution lies in the notion of empathy, which leads a subject to have access to the subjective accomplishments of other subjects. The second problem concerns the validity of intersubjective constitution and the kind of evidence that is available to an intersubjective consciousness. Husserl’s answer consists in maintaining both the empirical and the transcendental aspects of subjectivity and thus facing what he calls the paradox of subjectivity of being both empirical and transcendental. For the sake of brevity I will leave aside the issue of empathy and focus on the paradox of subjectivity. In the Cartesian Meditations Husserl formulates the paradox in terms of a “splitting of the Ego” (Husserl 1999, 35) between empirical and transcendental, and he explicitly addresses the question of such a split in par. 53 of the Crisis, the title of which is: “The paradox of human subjectivity: being a subject for the world and at the same time being an object in the world” (Husserl 1981, 178). Husserl elaborates:

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How can a component part of the world, its human subjectivity, constitute the whole world, namely, constitute it as its intentional formation . . . while the latter, the subjects accomplishing in cooperation, are themselves only a partial formation within the total accomplishment? (179)2 Husserl believes that the way he treats intersubjectivity solves the paradox of subjectivity as being both empirical and transcendental and makes his philosophy coherent, by providing the “full and proper sense” of his transcendental phenomenology (150). This is a challenging claim particularly for the notion of evidence, which Husserl considers as the criterion of the truth. Evidence is a synthesis and in it the meaning intention is partially or fully fulfilled or disappointed. Once consciousness is broadened to intersubjectivity, it becomes rather difficult to maintain that evidence could be a “seeing” of an intersubjective nature. Still, this seems to be the way Husserl pursued this question. While Husserl always maintained that the sense anything can have is a sense in and out of my intentional life, he notes the consequence of intersubjective constitution: “we need . . . to perform a systematic unfolding [Entfaltung] of the open and implicit intentionalities in which the being of the others ‘makes itself for me’ ” (Husserl 1973 Hua XV, 5). However, Husserl (as well as Fink after him) adamantly rejects the possibility of equating intersubjectivity with a community of subjects so that intersubjectivity would be the result of the interaction between subjects: “the plurality of those who phenomenologize cannot be understood . . . on the model of a mundane community of subjects of knowledge” (Fink 1988, 137). Husserl mentions several times the role of mutual understanding (Verständigung) and communication in the performance of an intersubjective synthesis, but does not go so far as acknowledging that evidence, now that it is intersubjective, needs an articulation. The intersubjective constitution seems to be performed by individual consciousnesses that can re-effectuate what other consciousnesses have already performed. Intersubjectivity is thus supposed to solve the paradox of subjectivity by allowing a movement back and forth between individual subjects, whether real, dead, or virtual. Empathy seems to Husserl to be powerful enough to allow for this exchange between subjects and thus to lead to understanding and communication. Remarkably, although Husserl acknowledges the role of language in the very formation of an ideality in the Crisis, he does not extend the role of language to evidence nor to the formation of subjectivity. The broadening of consciousness to intersubjectivity does not only render consciousness more complex but also has repercussions on the status

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of the object correlated to such an intersubjective consciousness. If the object that is for consciousness is also and has also been for other consciousnesses, it means that the object has layers of constitution that exceed what my present consciousness may perceive. This raises the question of what the essence of an object is. If the constitution is made by a corporate entity, it seems that the object cannot have an essence that is fully disclosed at the time of the givenness to a particular subject. And, still, it remains that it cannot be the case that things would disappear forever and new things would suddenly impose their strange outlook on us. Thus, some form of stability is clearly part of our understanding of the world, while some fluidity has to be tolerated in the very being of things. When during this idealistic period Husserl characterizes an object as an idea he most of the time uses the term in the Kantian sense of what regulates our capacity to perceive and to know an object. The object keeps a clear and stable essence even if the object itself is only given through perspectives. There are, however, some passages where Husserl indicates that an object may not have a fully articulated essence, but an open one. In Ideas II, for example, he writes: But does each thing (or, what is equivalent here: does any thing at all) have such an essence of its own in the first place? Or is the thing, as it were, always underway [auf dem Marsch], not at all graspable therefore in pure objectivity, but rather, in virtue of its relation to subjectivity, in principle only a relatively identical something, which does not have its essence in advance or graspable once and for all, but instead has an open essence [ein offenes Wesen], one that can always take on new properties according to the constitutive circumstances of givenness? But this is precisely the problem, to determine more exactly the sense of this openness [Offenheit], as regards, specifically, the “objectivity” of natural science. Does the “infinity” of the world, instead of referring to a transfinite endlessness [einer transfiniten Unendlichkeit] as if the world were something finished in itself [ein in sich fertig seiendes], an all-encompassing thing [ein allumfassendes Ding] or a self-enclosed collectivity of things [abgeschlossenes Kollektivum von Dingen], which would nevertheless contain in itself an infinity of things, not rather mean an “openness” [Offenheit] . . . No thing has its individuality in itself ” (Husserl 1952 Hua IV, 299; 1989, 312–313. Translation modified). However, Husserl does not really develop this view of an open essence that is not limited to an anticipated completeness. Most of the time the

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indeterminacy of the unfolding of the object is understood as having a determined style. Through his focus on consciousness and the complexity of its multiple layers Husserl does not fully address the ontological repercussions his correlation between consciousness and object can have. However, by mentioning the question of the status of the object, Husserl shows, first, how the correlation is not merely an epistemological claim, but also an ontological one and, second, that the object as a pole in the correlation has to be recognized as being completable. This ontological aspect was already brought to the fore by early German romanticism and it will be the task of phenomenologists like Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty to make it explicit.

The Ontological Emphasis in the Phenomenological Correlation between Consciousness and Object It is Heidegger in the 1930s who clearly affirms the fluid essence of things. He plays with the word Wesen, which means “essence,” but is etymologically related to the old verb wesen, meaning “to unfold”: an essence is both what a thing is and how a thing unfolds in the course of time. He borrows the figure of translation to name the ability of things to give themselves differently in the course of time and the ability of human beings to gain or regain their own historical identity. Remarkably this view was already defended by the romantics, especially Friedrich Schlegel and Novalis, in their effort to bridge the gap between consciousness and object. The romantics in some respect anticipate the correlation between consciousness and object. On the one hand, they want to find a way around the idealism of Fichte, which starts with an absolute subject. On the other hand, a naïve realism in which we could start with objects is no longer seen as a serious option. Influenced by both Heidegger and the romantics MerleauPonty also assents to a form of fluidity of things and speaks of “operative essence.” He also uses the expression of “translation of the world” precisely in his criticism of Husserl’s too rigid understanding of the correlation between consciousness and object. The term “translation” as used in an ontological sense by the early romantics, Heidegger, and Merleau-Ponty, or we could say “translatability,” may be an apt description of the exchange between consciousness and object. Translatability is already the model followed by interpretation: to transfer (the Latin transferre or the English “translation”) or to transpose (the Latin

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transducere, the French traduction or the German Übersetzung) what is called a content of meaning into another framework. Once the status of the object is factored into the correlation, there arises the further question of what maintains consciousness and the object in their correlation, a consciousness that has a complex intersubjective and historical make-up and an object that has a multi layered fluidity. Early German romanticism argued that an attitude of love toward the object was needed. Heidegger emphasizes the fact that any act of understanding is always performed in a certain mood, that there is a being affected that is correlative to the act of consciousness. Merleau-Ponty makes the case that, even in perception, we need to be in an attitude of listening and responding to things. Early German Romanticism and the Translation of Humanity For the romantics the opposition between subject and object is a false dichotomy but maybe a necessary one since we seem to need these oppositions. Clearly, in one respect there is no other starting point than the human subject, but the starting point can be abandoned once the activity of thinking or poetizing is in operation. One can then inhabit the space inbetween through a mode of thinking that Novalis characterizes as Idealreale or Realideale (Novalis 1960, 114) in order to show that it is not a matter of choosing either the subject or the object. Thus, the issue of whether the starting point is the subject or reality is not, strictly speaking, a problem in the sense of a puzzle that can be solved. It is rather a condition, the human condition, but also a medical condition for which there is no solution, only a treatment. The romanticization of the world the romantics advocate is such a treatment of the human condition and, to follow the medical metaphor, the poet is aptly characterized by Novalis as “the transcendental physician” (535, Fragment 42). What thus matters is not so much to get rid of these oppositions, but to treat them methodologically as the heuristic devices that they are, with quotation marks, as it were. We need to speak of a “subject” or an “object,” or a “reality” that is not a mere figment of our mind, but these “concepts’ should be seen as “operative” concepts, as Husserl would say. They are useful devices but no rigid designators. They serve as parameters in the constant transfer that takes place between the realm of things at the physical level and the realm of the spirit at the mental or subjective level. Most of the time this transfer or this process of exchangeability between the two realms takes place in language.

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Schlegel sees in the figure of translation what articulates the correlation between consciousness and object and uses translation in an ontological sense, broadening its use from the linguistic sense of translating a work into another language to criticism, and history. In all these applications there is an analogical operation to what takes place in a linguistic translation. For, what a translation does is to play with the original and tinker with it, making appear in the original what was not obvious or salient. In the words of Schlegel and Novalis a translation brings the original to its second power. Thus, a translation of necessity is “other” than the original in one respect—it uses other lexical, semantic, and syntactic means—and the “same”—it furthers the life of the original. As Schlegel writes, “All translation is a transplantation or transformation or both” (Schlegel 1963, 204, Fragment 87). But in either case it is—and has to be in order to be successful—a renewal of the original. “All true translation must be a rejuvenation” (207, Fragment 87).3 This is also what criticism accomplishes, what Schlegel calls Charakteristik and which is “a mode of translation” (Schlegel 1963, 386, Fragment 784). In addition he also uses the figure of translation for history and speaks of “historical” translations.4 In order to do justice to “what took place” “as it really was,” to use Leopold Ranke’s expression, historians have to complete history, filling the gaps, adding transitions, making connections between facts and events in order to render them intelligible like the “diaskeuasts” who compiled the pieces, fragments, and different versions of Homer’s texts and turn them into a coherent whole by adding transitions or changing some words, thereby directly rearranging the materiality of the text. 5 To these three levels of application, Schlegel adds a fourth one: the world itself needs a translation: “Just as there is a geography and a characteristic of the universe there must also be a translation of the universe” (Schlegel 1963, 235). He also speaks of a “translation of humanity” (Übersetzung der Menschheit, 204, Fragment 88). If the physical realm of things and events as well as people can be translated it means that there is in the world itself, things and people, a potency or a force that can be transposed—carried over and translated. From the thing to its grasp in concepts and words we thus have an exchangeability. Translation is not just the carrying over of a content, but a configuration and an exchange. There are fluidity and stability. The fluidity lies in the potentiality of anything—things, events, and works—to be “translated”—transposed and transformed. The stability is precisely in this possibility of exchange: the translation is a process that takes place between what become the two poles of a correlation: the

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original and the translated work. If a thing (through knowledge), an event (through historical recounting), a work (through critique or linguistic translation) can be translated in the broad sense, it is because the thing, the event, and the work were themselves a first crystallization of a primordial translatability. This is why we have this exchange between the poetry of nature (Naturpoesie) and actual poetry (Kunstpoesie) (Schlegel 1978, 166). Both are the two poles of a general translatability of the world. The human subject inhabits this fluidity of things and events and has to navigate it. Schlegel again uses the figure of translation to characterize human beings: “Perhaps the determination of human beings is to be considered only as translation” (Schlegel 1963, 459, Fragment 295). The task of the translator, as evoked by Benjamin, influenced by the romantics, is in fact the task of human beings themselves. To be human means to translate. Besides anticipating the correlation between consciousness and object and working out the ontological consequences of such a correlation, the early German romantics also pointed out the importance of an impetus for this process of translatability between object and consciousness to be initiated and they called it “love.” For the exchange between consciousness and object to be set in motion, the subject has to be drawn out of itself and be allowed to think in a de-subjectivized way. The subject must then be in a certain mood (Stimmung) as Hölderlin powerfully showed. For, the mood makes the subject vulnerable to things or the world and susceptible to be affected. We know that Heidegger already in Being and Time makes of the situatedness (Befindlichkeit) one of the main existential components of human existence besides understanding (Verstehen) and discourse (Rede). The manifestation of situatedness is precisely the mood (Stimmung). Mood is thus a component of the truth as disclosure. Later on in the 1930s he will use Hölderlin’s notion of Grundstimmung as what characterizes an entire epoch, speaking of the Grundstimmung of the first Greek beginning—the wonder that things are—and of our epoch as in transition toward another beginning—the terror that things are. Mood or feeling in general is this aspect in us that makes our mind amenable to being touched by other material entities, like things, and what indicates or testifies to the fact that we, as subjects, are in fact already in overlap with things. Mood or feeling points to the fact that the bridge between subject and object in one respect has already been built so that the dichotomy or opposition between subject and object, mental and physical is a false one. As what allows the subject to know the object, since there is something of the object that asked to be revealed, love is both a mood—subjective—and

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a force in the world—objective. On the subjective side, love reveals, as if chemically, a thing as an object of knowledge in the sense of being “worth knowing” and in the process love extends the boundaries of the empirical subject so that it can fuse with the object in what Schlegel calls a “mixing [Vermischung] of the ego with the thou in the object” (Schlegel 1964, 356). On the objective side, love reveals objects as interactive objects, as it were, and thus completable. For, objects themselves have a life. As Schlegel wrote, things “are not non-ego outside the ego; not merely a dead, dull, empty, sensible reflection of the ego, which limits the ego in an unintelligible manner, but . . . a living, potent counter-ego, a thou” (337). An object has a inner sense (Sinn) and through perception “the sense immediately shines, the thou speaks at the moment the essence in its totality is understood by the ego, addresses the ego and manifests to him the essence of its existence” (350). This means that the essence of an object not only is for consciousness, in classical phenomenological fashion, but the object is of the nature of consciousness because it is of the order of the spirit (Geist). To grant to the object, like a physical thing, the status of a counter-subject turns knowledge away from the unilateral activity of an all-powerful subject as well as from a causal framework in which things could act upon a subject. The truth as what is yielded by knowledge arises out of this mental overlap between consciousness and object through love. It will be Heidegger’s task, whether influenced by the romantics or not, to articulate this new ontology of objects as unfolding and of a subject that is affected by them. Since a section of this volume is dedicated to Heidegger’s different ontologies, I will limit myself to his ontological use of translation. Heidegger and the Recovering of the Being-at-Home through Translation In the 1930s Heidegger considers that we are at the end of metaphysics and in transition toward what he calls “another beginning,” which would be analogous to the first beginning of the Western tradition in Greece. The terms he uses to describe our situation indicate a lack or an absence: we live in the oblivion of being and even in the abandonment of being in a time in which the gods have fled. In some of his works he appeals to translation as a way for us to recover our own ontological place within what he names the “history of being.” Mixing ontological vocabulary with a political assessment Heidegger characterizes our situation as being one

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that is dominated by “machination,” the manifestation of which is what he terms Amerikanismus, which also includes Bolshevism. We recall that in the Introduction to Metaphysics he saw Germany as being caught in the two pincers of Russia and America, capitalism and communism. However, “Americanism” is not so much a term for a political entity, since Heidegger sees Bolshevism as a derived form of it, but rather for what such a political entity instantiates, what Bolshevism or any political system can also instantiate: the surrender to a technological understanding—machination—that permeates the ontological fabric of things. As he will later say in response to Rilke’s attack on “Americanism,” “It is not that Americanism first surrounds us moderns with its menace; the menace of the unexperienced nature of technology surrounded even our forefathers and their things” (Heidegger 1971, 113). It is in this context that Heidegger uses the word “translation” for a recovery of our own stance in this time of transition because he believes that German (or any language, for that matter) suffers from what he characterizes in the lecture course The Ister of 1942 as the “americanization of our language” (Heidegger 1982 GA 52, 10): “It may therefore be that we speak ‘German,’ yet talk entirely ‘American’ ” (Heidegger 1984 GA 53, 80; 1996b, 65). He could use Novalis’ expression that we have become “formulaic beings” (Formularwesen) (Novalis 1960, 594, Fragment 316). Since we talk “American” while speaking German, the first task of translation is precisely to translate our own language from the foreign into its own. Thus, the simple fact of speaking is translation. As he says in Parmenides, “we are already constantly translating our own language, our native tongue, into its genuine word. To speak and to say is itself a translation . . . in every dialogue and in every soliloquy an original translation holds sway” (Heidegger 1992b, 12). This effort at translating aims at recovering our being at home at a time when the foreign has permeated it. “We know today that the Anglo-Saxon world of Americanism has resolved to annihilate Europe, that is, the homeland [Heimat]” (Heidegger 1984 GA 53, 68; 1996b, 54). The expressions Heidegger uses to characterize Amerikanismus: entschlossen ist and vernichten, indicate that the threat is not merely military because the United States entered the war (the lecture was given in 1942). It is an event in the history of being and thus a historical decision and this decision consists in turning the dwelling where we are our own into a nothing, a non-being. This Americanism or Bolshevism (ibid., 86; 70) subverts our language, puts us in the situation of an “alienation toward the word” (Heidegger 1982 GA 52, 11).

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The transformation we need in order to find our home will take place when we own our language in the sense that our language leads us to be our own. We thus have to face the foreign and endure it. This is what translation allows. As the lecture course on The Ister describes it, translation aims at making foreign the very source of the familiar. When we translate the Greeks, for example, we have to think “Greeker” than the Greeks: “It seems as though we must think more Greek than the Greeks themselves. It does not merely seem so, it is so. For in the future we ourselves must, in relation to ourselves, think more German than all Germans hitherto” (Heidegger 1984 GA 53, 100; 1996b, 81). The “more” does not indicate a recovery or a retrieval of what has already been thought, but a translation as a transporting ourselves into the foreign so as to recover the movement through which our familiar became familiar. Translation is thus first of all a self-translation and allows us to bring ourselves before the foreign, pass through it, so as to come back to ourselves. “A historical people is only from the dialogue [Zwiesprache] between its language and foreign languages” (Heidegger 1984 GA 53, 80; 1996b, 65). Thus, translation does not mean an appropriation of the foreign, but rather the converse: to make one’s own native language surge from the foreign. In this period of transition toward another beginning, in which Heidegger claims we are, the being-at-home is not given, but must be reconquered. We are those poets who “are not yet able to read and to show” (ibid., 190; 153). Hölderlin, the poet of the transition, the poet of the decisions is the one who can create a being-at-home for the German people: his word speaks “out of a poetic care for the becoming-homely [Heimischwerden] of the Western historical humankind of the Germans” (ibid., 84; 69). This return to a home-world through translation means that “ ‘translating’ [Übersetzen] is not so much a trans-lating [Über-setzen] and passing over into a foreign language with the help of one’s own. Rather, translating is more an awakening, clarification, and unfolding of one’s own language with the help of an encounter [Auseinandersetzung] with the foreign language” (Heidegger 1984 GA 53; 1996b, 65–66). In such a discussion the awakening of a new language may take place by retranslating one’s own language. All translating must be an interpreting. Yet at the same time, the reverse is also true: every interpretation, and everything that stands in its service, is a translating. In that case, translating does not only move between two different languages, but there is a translating within one and the

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same language. The interpretation of Holderlin’s hymns is a translating within our German language. (Heidegger 1984 GA 53, 75; 1996b, 62) The claim Heidegger makes is that poets make us more attuned to what can be another beginning. Hölderlin, whose poetry is “the most German in German poetry” (Heidegger 1982 GA 52, 119) is the thinker of the transition toward another beginning because his poetry represents a turn in the history of Being (Heidegger 2000 GA 75, 28) through which Hölderlin proposes “the beginning of new decisions” (25) and which can lead to “the beginning of another history” (32).

Merleau-Ponty’s Translation of the World Merleau-Ponty offers another variation on Husserl’s correlation between consciousness and object in order to think consciousness and thing from within the correlation but in their nascent state, as they are emerging and gaining their identity in and through the correlation. He also appeals to the figure of translation as what displaces consciousness and thing out of their position as poles of the correlation. For once we start with the correlation, as Husserl does, we may never be able to question its origin or necessity. I am forever subjected to the centrifugal movement that makes an object of thought be for a thought, and there is no question of my quitting this position and examining what Being can indeed be before it be thought by me or (what amounts to the same thing) by another, what indeed can be the intermundane space [l’intermonde] where our gazes cross and our perceptions overlap; there is no brute world, there is only an elaborated world; there is no intermundane space, there is only a signification “world.” (Merleau-Ponty 1969, 48) The correlation between consciousness and object breaks down the brute world or the brute thing into meaning (Husserl’s logical or linguistic Bedeutungen), but by so doing cannot account for the emergent sense that things yield (Husserl’s Sinn). Whether consciously or not, Merleau-Ponty takes over some of the views of the romantics and draws the ontological consequences of the fluidity of things. This allows him to give a forceful expression to the romantic bridge between spirit and nature and to question the very boundaries of the body and of consciousness as well as the boundaries between mind/body, on the one hand, and things, on the other. Both the perceiving body/consciousness

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and thing are part of what he calls, in The Visible and the Invisible, a “visibility.” Again in a manner that is analogous to the romantics’ Merleau-Ponty attempts to think the unity that we form with things in a way that is not the unification of pre-existing entities, but an overlap or chiasm that, on the one hand, makes us susceptible to be affected and even pierced by things and, on the other, renders things susceptible to becoming mental and spiritual. In order to name this fusion Merleau-Ponty uses different metaphors: spiritual—perception is a communion—sexual—perception is a coition—and biological—perception is a symbiosis. These metaphors, which are not mere metaphors, are part of an attempt to think beyond traditional metaphysical categories. We have to think a thing as something that has open boundaries, but is not free-floating or mere flux. In Phenomenology of Perception Merleau-Ponty characterizes the thing that we know in the form of a unified entity as being secondary compared with its manner of existing: “the unity of the thing beyond all its fixed properties is not a substratum, a vacant X, a subject in which properties inhere, but that unique accent which is to be found in each one of them, that unique manner of existing of which they are a second order expression” (Merleau-Ponty 1962, 372). The inner core of things or the stable essence of a thing is only a set of “opaque structures” (389).6 The unity of the thing consists in “a certain style, a certain manner of managing the domain of space and time over which it has competency, of pronouncing, of articulating that domain, of radiating about a wholly virtual center—in short a certain manner of being, in the active sense, a certain Wesen, in the sense that, says Heidegger, this word has when it is used as a verb” (Merleau-Ponty 1969, 115). If we speak of essences, Merleau-Ponty tells us, these cannot be “essences above us, like positive objects, offered to a spiritual eye” (118), but “operative essences” (118) in a “transversal dimension.” These operative essences are “beneath us, a common nervure of the signifying and the signified, adherence in and reversibility of one another” (118). This entails that “to be” cannot mean “to be something,” but to aggregate, to become a configuration. “What there is is a whole architecture, a whole complex of phenomena ‘in tiers,’ a whole series of ‘levels of being’ ” (114). Precisely because they do not have a firm stability guaranteed by an unchangeable core, things in their fluidity are to be granted a form of seeing or at least of providing a visibility on other things or on us. Merleau-Ponty already defended such a provocative view in Phenomenology of Perception: When I look at the lamp on my table, I attribute to it not only the qualities visible from where I am, but also those which the chimney, the walls,

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the table can “see”; the back of my lamp is nothing but the face which it “shows” on the chimney . . . the house itself is not the house seen from nowhere, but the house seen from everywhere. The completed object is translucent, being shot through from all sides by an actual infinity of scrutinies [regards] which intersect in its depths leaving nothing hidden. (Merleau-Ponty 1962, 79 [Translation modified]) This fact that things provide a visibility and thus decenter us from the visible realm goes significantly farther than Heidegger’s referring network of things in Being and Time, in which a thing means something by being referred to other things, and it comes closer to the late Heidegger who sees a thing, like a jug, as the gathering of a world. It also reformulates Husserl’s notion of horizon quite dramatically by by-passing the acts of consciousness that are embedded in the horizons of things. For, if there is an external horizon of things, it is because, for example in Husserl, things have been associated or connected to other things through acts of consciousness. Merleau-Ponty by-passes consciousness altogether. It is the things that see and show the hidden sides of other things. In place of the duality of the perceiver and the perceived MerleauPonty substitutes a movement of differentiation within visibility itself, and through such a differentiation we have a perceiver and a perceived, both of which are encompassed by visibility. This requires from us an attitude of listening to them, looking at them in a way that shifts the visibility away from us, that removes us from the center of visibility and places us at the margin as what can be rendered visible. “The vision [the seer] exercises, he also undergoes from things, such that, as many painters have said, I feel myself looked at by the things, my activity is equally passivity” (MerleauPonty 1969, 139). The decentering of visibility that things may produce is not merely a shifting of the act of seeing away from the subject and into things. This decentering means a loosening up of the boundaries between seer and seen, subject and object, spirit and nature. If things “see” and “speak,” it means that when we understand them we must perform some kind of translation: “to understand is to translate into disposable significations a meaning first held captive in the thing and in the world itself. But this translation aims to convey the text” (Merleau-Ponty 1969, 36).7 Since we try to think not in terms of oppositions, but from within the visibility that gives rise to subject and thing, these notions of language and translation are not to be understood as a supplement to the thing or the

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subject, but rather as the mode of being out of which a thing and a subject live. Perception itself, which is neither merely active nor merely passive, is articulation in the linguistic sense. “The vision itself, the thought itself, are . . . ‘structured as a language,’ are articulation before the letter, apparition of something where there was nothing or something else” (MerleauPonty 1969, 126). Just as by pronouncing sounds in my mouth I articulate what becomes meaningful words and neat sentences, my perception in the same way articulates things in their beautiful or frightening concatenations that make up the world in which I live.8 In order to offer an alternative to the correlation of consciousness and object, Merleau-Ponty uses the notion of flesh, which is, in a sense, the metaphor of all metaphors and which serves as a device to gather in their unity the metaphors of communion, coition, symbiosis, language and translation. The flesh is a device for a thinking that does not soar over its object, but, like in the romantics, brings the object to its manifestation or epiphany. The things—here, there, now, then—are no longer in themselves, in their own place, in their own time; they exist only at the end of those rays of spatiality and of temporality emitted in the secrecy of my flesh. And their solidity is not that of a pure object which the mind soars over; I experience their solidity from within insofar as I am among them and insofar as they communicate through me as a sentient thing. (MerleauPonty 1969, 114) Things are “quasi-companions. They are lifted from my substance, thorns in my flesh” (180–181). The notion of flesh as the metaphor of all metaphors is also a form of command. For, it includes an injunction on us that, by thinking, we are asked to occupy the space in-between, between consciousness and object, the place of visibility itself. We are asked “to emigrate into it, to be seduced, captivated, alienated by the phantom, so that the seer and the visible reciprocate one another and we no longer know which sees and which is seen” (Merleau-Ponty 1969, 139). Once we emigrate in the in-between we also abandon the confines of our consciousness. With regard to other subjects it means that I would become part of a “synergy” of organisms, mine and others’ (142). This synergy among organisms “is possible as soon as we no longer make belongingness to one same ‘consciousness’ the primordial definition of sensibility, as soon as we rather understand it as a return of

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the visible upon itself, a carnal adherence of the sentient to the sensed and of the sensed to the sentient” (142). With regard to things to emigrate from the comfort of our consciousness consists in emigrating from oneself, as he says in L’oeil et l’esprit: “sight is not a certain mode of thinking or of presence to myself: it is the means given to me to be absent from myself, to attend from within to the fission of being” (Merleau-Ponty 1964c, 81).9 Merleau-Ponty continues the efforts of early German romanticism and Heidegger to think the correlation between consciousness and object and bring out the ontological consequences of Husserl’s fundamental discovery. If there is a correlation between consciousness and object there is an overlap between them and this means that we have to come to see things in their native fluidity. Things are determined entities and yet they are completable; they have definite boundaries with an essence and still the boundaries are porous and the essence is an open one. These three attempts by the early romantics, Heidegger, and MerleauPonty aim at avoiding a traditional form of idealism and recover what the romantics believe is the genuine sense of realism, one that includes the role of consciousness. Because of their belief in the stability of things within an exchangeability or translatability with consciousness and their conviction that we have to start with consciousness, they all appeal to an attitude that allows consciousness to enter into the process of exchangeability with things: love (for the romantics), fundamental mood (for Heidegger), and receptivity and listening (for Merleau-Ponty). The truth is no longer evidence in the early Husserlian sense, but disclosure. However, disclosure is not a non-subjective event taking place outside the realm of consciousness, but an event that needs our collaboration or requires from us a certain benevolence toward things or an acceptance that we are called upon, affected, seized by awe (for the Greeks) or terror (for us now, according to Heidegger). We can thus see how the correlation between consciousness and object prepared the hermeneutic challenge mounted by people like Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty and how the ontological repercussions were already seen by the romantics. The hermeneutic challenge does not undermine Husserl’s original version of the correlation between consciousness and object, but in fact leads it to its completion. It shows how consciousness redefines itself when correlated to things in a way that does not jeopardize objectivity or validity, but rather turns truth into a notion that is at once epistemic, ontological, and affective.

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Notes 1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

9

Husserl himself encouraged the idealistic unilateralism when referring to the object in its reality as an “idea.” In Ideas I Husserl formulates this paradox as follows: “Thus, on the one hand, consciousness is said to be the absolute in which everything transcendent and, therefore, ultimately the whole pyschophysical world, becomes constituted; and, on the other hand, consciousness is said to be a subordinate real event within that world. How can those statements be reconciled?” (1976 Hua III, 103; 1983, 124). It is to be noted that the romantics were not only theoreticians of language; they were also practitioners and the romantic period is characterized by an ebullience of translation activities. Goethe translated works by Cellini, Diderot, Voltaire, Euripides, Racine, Corneille and many others; Hölderlin translated Sophocles and Pindar; Schleiermacher translated the complete works of Plato (from 1804 to 1828 and the translation is still in use today); August Schlegel translated Shakespeare, Dante, Cervantes, Calderón, Petrarch, Ariosto, the Bhagavad Gita and other works. Tieck translated Don Quixote. “The more similar a historical history is to translation, the more excellent it is” (Schlegel 1963, 211, Fragment 181) or “the so-called universal history is also only a translation” (261 Fragment 807). Schlegel writes: “almost all historical works which are not documents of records are diaskeuastic translations” (Schlegel 1963, 204, Fragment 88). On the importance of the “diaskeuasis” in Schlegel see Thouard 1996, 18f. This manner of existing, which he also calls after Husserl a “style,” is further explained in terms of language. Through its specific manner of existing a thing manifests a certain symbolism that can be grasped, for example, in perception or even a language that can be deciphered. “There is a symbolism in the thing which links each sensible quality to the rest . . . The passing of sensory givens before our eyes or under our hands is, as it were, a language which teaches itself, and in which the meaning is secreted by the very structure of the signs, and this is why it can literally be said that our senses question things and that things reply to them” (Merleau-Ponty 1962, 372). Analogous formulations can be found in The Visible and the Invisible. Merleau-Ponty also speaks of “exegesis” for naming our relation to the visible (1969, 133). We detect here the influence of Saussure’s linguistics. Perception is like langue (as opposed to parole); it is a system of oppositions so that when I perceive I carve out a chunk of the possibilities opened by the system. “I describe perception as a diacritical, relative, oppositional system” (Merleau-Ponty 1969, 213). This means a return to a kind of general corporeity: “No more than are the sky or the earth is the horizon a collection of things held together, or a class name, or a logical possibility of conception, or a system of ‘potentiality of consciousness’: it is a new type of being, a being by porosity, pregnancy, or generality, and he before whom the horizon opens is caught up, included within it. His body and the distances participate in one same corporeity or visibility in general, which reigns between them and it, and even beyond the horizon, beneath his skin, unto the depths of being” (1969, 148–149).

Part II

Husserlian Resources Reduction, Imagination, Transcendental Idealism

Chapter 2

Does Husserl Have a Principle of Reducibility? Dominique Pradelle

In the fourth chapter of the second part of Formal and Transcendental Logic, Husserl wants to prove the relativity of traditional logic to a real world of experience: even if logic is completely formal, even if propositional forms are obtained by a process of formalization, it has to be ranked among the positive sciences which presuppose a relationship to a world of empirical objects. This can be made evident by proving that the different levels of logic imply a reference to real empirical objects, to judgments and truths about these objects. So it is possible to apply the method of reduction to all the levels of logic: to the theory of forms, to the consequence-logic and to the truth-logic. Let us recall the different formulations of this method of reducing: “Reduction of judgments to ultimate judgments” (Die Reduktion der Urteile auf letzte Urteile, Husserl 1974 Hua XVII, § 82, 209; 1978, 202), “Parallel reduction of truths. Relationship of all truths to an antecedent world of individuals” (Parallele Reduktion der Wahrheiten. Rückbeziehung aller Wahrheiten auf eine Welt von Individuen, ibid., § 83, 212; 204), “A reduction of the truths belonging to a higher level to those belonging to the lowest level, that is: to truths that relate directly . . . to individual objects in their object-spheres (eine Reduktion der Wahrheiten von den Wahrheiten höherer Stufe auf diejenigen der niedersten Stufe, d.i. auf Wahrheiten, die direct bezogen sind auf individuelle Gegenstände, ibid., 212; 204). What is the sense of this principle of reduction? Does it have an empiricist range? Is it a principle of verification about empirical testability of categorial propositions? Is it a genetic empiricist thesis which expresses that categorial formations have an empirical origin in judgments about objects of direct experience? Is it a principle of reducibility which affirms that the sense of categorial propositions is reducible to the sense of ultimate judgments about empirical objects? Moreover, does this reductive deliberation (reduktive Überlegung, ibid., 212; 204) have to be understood in the same sense at the different levels

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of logic? Does it have the same meaning within the pure theory of forms, within the consequence-logic, and within the truth-logic? Does it have the same meaning concerning the isolated syntactical forms, concerning the isolated propositions and concerning the principles of logic?

The Method of Reduction within the Theory of Forms Let us apply the reductive deliberation to the pure theory of forms of meaning; what are its sense and its principle? First, let us give a short characterization of the theory of forms. It consists in giving a descriptive classification of judgments exclusively from the formal point of view, regardless of any question concerning non-contradiction and truth; its interest is purely syntactical and belongs to the level of pure logical grammar. Its point of view is merely constructive: it has to make obvious the laws of syntactical construction of simple and complex forms of meaning starting from nuclear elements of meaning; the modes of formation of complex judgments are composition (disjunction, conjunction, implication) and transformation (negation, modalization, quantification); these laws of formation have a purely operative character, similar to that of mathematical operations, which implies the presence of a law and the possibility of infinite iteration. But third, all these operative transformations relate to a system of fundamental operative forms (Urformen von Operationen, Grundoperationen) out of which the totality of judgment-forms emerges by relative composition: predication, attribution, negation, conjunction, disjunction, modalization, quantification; it is possible to make obvious the elementary syntactical actions which produce the system of all the complex forms of judgments (Husserl 1974 Hua XVII, § 13, 54–58; 1978, 49–53). At this point, there arises a fundamental question. Husserl writes in § 13 that “every operative fashioning of one form out of others has its law” (jede operative Gestaltung einer Form aus Formen hat ihre Gesetz, Husserl 1974 Hua XVII, § 13, 57; 1978, 52). But what is the origin of the syntactical laws of construction of judgment-forms? What is the foundation of the laws of pure grammar, of the laws that make it possible to avoid formal non-sense, of the laws which prove that a composition of “partial meanings” (Teilbedeutungen) will produce a unitary sense (eine Gesamtbedeutung)? Is it true that syntactical laws of construction have a conventional origin, as Carnap says in § 17 of Logic Syntax of Language, formulating the “tolerance principle: in logic there is no morality. Everybody can build his logic, that is, his language

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form as he wants (Toleranzprinzip der Syntax: In der Logik gibt es keine Moral. Jeder mag seine Logik, d. h. seine Sprachform aufbauen wie er will, Carnap 1934, 45). By contrast, the Husserlian thesis is absolutely anti-conventionalistic: there are absolute and essential laws in the pure grammar of logic, an a priori syntax that settles the composition and transformation of meanings in order to produce unitary propositional meanings. It is impossible to create languages arbitrarily with different systems of formation; grammatical rules must be in accordance with aprioristic laws. As Husserl writes in the fourth Logical Investigation, these laws belong to the different categories of meanings: each category implies some modalities of linking with other categories. If syntactical laws belong to the syntactical forms, it is necessary to analyze the syntactical concept of form. Husserl performs this analysis in the first appendix to Formal and Transcendental Logic and makes various distinctions. First, we have to distinguish between stuffs and moments of form (§ 2): on the one hand, the stuffs are linked to objectivities, to subject-matter (Sachbezüglichkeit); on the other hand, moments of form (such as “and,” “or”) lack intrinsic relatedness to objectivities (Husserl 1974 Hua XVII, 301; 1978, 296). Secondly, in the field of combination-forms (Verbindungsformen) we have to distinguish between Kopulation and Konjunktion—between the predicative or copular unity-form “is” and the conjunctive forms in a general sense (i.e., logical connectors like conjunction, disjunction, implication, equivalence, etc.) (ibid., § 5, 303–304; 299–300). Thirdly, what are the laws that belong to each category of combination-forms? Concerning conjunctive forms, Husserl does not make combination-rules obvious, but only substitution-rules, that is rules of fulfilling syntactical stuffs with particular stuffs—for example the form of hypothetical antecedent or consequent proposition requires stuffs that are already syntactically articulated in themselves (ibid., § 10, 308–309; 306–307). But the most important rule concerns the predicative form, which is the most fundamental of the entire tradition of apophantic logic. Here we have to distinguish two concepts of form: syntactical forms (like subject, property-predicate, relationshippredicate, attribute) and non-syntactical-forms, that is, forms of entirely new style that are immanent to the stuffs—stuffs have a certain immanent forming like substantive, adjective, relationship (ibid., § 11, 309–310; 307–308). The essential laws of predicative combination concern relationships between syntactical and non-syntactical forms: it is impossible to substitute arbitrarily non-syntactical stuffs within a certain syntactical form—for example, a stuff of substantive form cannot enter syntactical forms like property-predicate, relationship-predicate or attribute.

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That leads us to the following conclusion: by the analysis of elementary combination-rules we have to go back to the question about the origin of non-syntactical forms or “categories of meaning” (Bedeutungskategorien) which are the ultimate elements of any discourse. What is the origin of the core-formation-forms (Kerngebildeformen)? We can now reveal the precise function of the reductive deliberation within the pure theory of forms: it has to answer the question of the origin of elementary categories of syntax, of ultimate components of meaning. The reductive method consists in reversing the operative possibilities of constructing more and more complex and articulated stuffs. In fact, we have the possibility of constructing complex stuffs by substantivation or nominalization (Husserl 1974 Hua XVII, § 13, 311; 1978, 310): the substantival category have a notable pre-eminence, because every adjective, every relative and every proposition has as its counterpart a corresponding substantive, that is the “substantivized” adjective or relative or state of affairs; so it is always possible to form a syntactical stuff of superior level by incorporating a syntactical action into a meaning—for example “this roof is red,” “redness is a property of this roof,” “the redness of this roof,” “the fact that this roof is red.” According to Husserl (§ 42), the syntaxes have as their function, not only to give the possible syntactical forms for stuffs, but also to create syntactical or categorial objectivities of higher levels (ibid., 119–120; 114–115). But there is also a reverse possibility of deconstructing the steps of this genetic process of form-construction (or the levels of syntactical forming): it is possible to go back from the predicatively formed state of affairs to the proposition that expresses it, and to go back from the substantivized form “the redness” to the primitive adjective “red.” This process of deconstruction relates ultimately to core-formations which are nuclear components of sense, or elementary cores which no longer contain any implicit syntax and which do not derive from syntactical forming: absolute or original substantives, absolute adjectives and absolute relationships, which belong to an ultimate level of meaning and are irreducible primitive forms, primitive categorial variants of the sense (Husserl 1974 Hua XVII, § 82, 209–211; 1978, 202–204). These ultimate cores are substrates, predicates and relations that enter empirical judgments, those of immediate experience; they are directly “linked to objectivities” (sachbezüglich), because they relate to the immediate expression of perceptive judgments. Hence, the primitive categorial forms are nuclear forms of ultimate cores which enter perceptive judgments (ibid., § 83, 212; 204). Hence, the primitive categorial forms are nuclear forms of ultimate cores that enter perceptive judgments.

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However, this reduction is not the ultimate one. It is also possible to go back from the perceptive judgments to the pre-predicative or perceptive experience itself, which precedes any predicative expression (Husserl 1974 Hua XVII, § 84, 213–214; 205–206). So it is possible to show the perceptive and ontological origin of the ultimate core-forms: in fact the nuclear forms that enter primitive judgments relate to ontological articulations of the individuals which are given in perceptive experiences. The individual objects of pre-predicative experience imply formal-ontological articulations, that is to say a pre-linguistic or pre-grammatical syntax. For example, ultimate substantives correspond to concrete or independent perceptive contents; adjectives correspond to abstract or dependent perceptive contents; and relatives correspond to primary relationships, which are immanent to perceptive contents. So the general concept of logos has to be enlarged to an ontological field, which precedes any judgment and any general meaning and includes syntactical and ontological categories, which are the models for categories of meaning. To conclude at this level, we can now answer our initial question: is the reductive method a principle of reducibility? The answer is negative. At the level of the theory of forms there is no reduction in the strong sense of the term. There is no reduction of a form belonging to a higher level to a form belonging to a lower level—“the roof is red” does not have the same meaning as “the redness of the roof is a real property”: there is no reducibility of the sense. But what Husserl means is a principle of genetic order (Prinzip genetischer Ordnung, Husserl 1974 Hua XVII, § 85, 215; 1978, 207) or an essentially and necessary sense-history (wesensmäßige Sinnesgeschichte, ibid., 215; 208), which is specific to the syntactical sphere: he emphasizes, on the one hand, the syntactical primitive operations, which create new categorial forms, and, on the other hand, the primitive forms of cores in perceptive judgments and ultimately the ontological forms of contents of perceptive experience. So the linguistic syntax appears as being founded on the pre-linguistic syntax of perception.

The Method of Reduction in the Consequence-Logic What sense does the reductive deliberation have at the second level of logic, that is in the consequence-logic? Is it a principle of reducibility of judgments belonging to higher levels to judgments belonging to lower levels? Let us recall that consequence-logic is the logic of non- contradiction (Widerspruchslosigkeit), a level of logic that requires the evidence of

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distinctness (Deutlichkeit) of the propositions. “Distinctness” means, first, that we have to perform, explicitly and step by step, all the syntactical steps that are implied by the propositional form; and second, that we have to make explicit the analytic consequences of propositional forms in order to be able to manifest possible contradictions. The essential laws of consequence-logic are laws of determining analytic inclusion and exclusion of propositions, analytic consistency of propositions, that is to say, their mutual compatibility or lack thereof. It is a logic of the sense, regardless of all questions concerning truth, falsity and objects. Hence, there is a double stratification in the consequence-logic: on the one hand, the level of meaning (Bedeutung); on the other hand, the level of the formal or analytic validity (Geltung). And there are two meanings of the concept of distinctness: it means, first, the analytic process of “making explicit” (Deutlichmachen,Verdeutlichen,1974 Hua XVII, § 16, 61–65; 1978, 56–60), which consists in reducing a propositional meaning into elementary meanings; second, the evidence of analytic non-contradiction, which requires the determination of formal relationships of compatibility or incompatibility (ibid., § 14, 58–60; 53–55). What is here the sense of the method of reduction? According to Husserl (1974 Hua XVII, § 82), it is a reduction of the judicial meanings or opinions (Urteilsmeinungen), that is to say ,of the aim of propositional senses, which is parallel to the genetic reduction of syntactical cores to ultimate cores of empirical judgments. Hence, it is a reduction of the propositional meanings to ultimate something-meanings (letzte Etwas-Meinungen, 1974 Hua XVII, § 82, 211; 1978, 203), that is, to meanings which refer to experience-judgments about ultimate objects-about-which, ultimate predicates and ultimate relationships (ibid., 210–211; 203). The genetic process of deconstructing articulated stuffs implies a parallel process of following up the meanings in order to reach the ultimate level of judgments about empirical objects; it seems to be a reduction of all forms of judgments to conjunctions of singular judgments belonging to the type “this S is p.” The reduction has an essentially different meaning, whether we consider the level of meaning (Bedeutung) or the level of formal validity (Geltung). At the level of Bedeutung the criterion of identity of two sentences is the Gleichbedeutsamkeit, that is the fact that both sentences have the same meaning or correspond to the same intention of signifying (das, was wir gerade sagen wollen, Husserl 1996 Hua XXX, § 39, 169). Yet this relationship gleichbedeutend does not allow us to identify a proposition belonging to the level n with an equivalent proposition belonging to the level n-1; it does not affect the strict hierarchy and irreducibility of successive categorial levels.

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On the contrary, at the level of Geltung the criterion of identity of two propositions is the Äquivalenz, that is the relation gleichgeltend or “having the same validity.” Yet, this relationship allows a transition from a higher level to the immediate lower level; the genetic principle of going back from level to level means here a principle of reducibility (Husserl 1996 Hua XXX, §§ 34 and 39, 152, 168). Here is an example: the distinction between totality-proposition and universal proposition (Allheitsgedanke and Allgemeinheitsgedanke). The totality-proposition (Allheitsgedanke) is a universal proposition that says something about a finite set of elements, for example, “all the flowers in this garden are roses.” It is meant about the totality of the A that they are B, that is, that the totality of the flowers in the garden are roses. In this case, there is not only equivalence, but also Gleichbedeutsamkeit between “all the As are B,” “each A is B” and “the As are B”; the universal proposition has the same sense as the conjunction of a finite plurality of singular propositions. So we have here reducibility in the strict sense! By contrast, an Allgemeinheitsgedanke is a universal proposition which says something about an infinite totality of ideal objects, like mathematical propositions: “all the triangles have the sum of their angles equal to two right angles” or “all the cardinal numbers have a successor.” In this case, according to Husserl it is quite impossible to have the effective intuition of the total set of triangles, because in general it is impossible to have an intuition that gives us an infinite totality of objects, or impossible to consider an actual infinity as given to us.1 In this case there is an equivalence, but not an identity of sense between “all the As are B” and “each A is B.” From the point of view of Geltung there is an extensional reducibility of universal propositions to singular ones; but from the point of view of meaning only the second form, “each A is B,” expresses the nomological character (Gesetzcharakter) of the eidetic relationship. Hence, in the consequencelogic of meaning the relevance of the intention of signifying implies an anti-extensionalistic principle; it is impossible to express a universal infinite judgment under an extensional form and it is impossible to reduce it to an infi nite conjunction of singular judgments (Husserl 1996 Hua XXX, § 39, 166–168). This may be proven right by the fact that pure concepts have a purely intensional, and non extensional character: “No pure concept has in truth anything like an extension” (Kein reiner Begriff hat in Wahrheit so etwas wie einen Umfang, Husserl 1996 Hua XXX, § 39, 170). In the case of pure concepts the distinction between intension and extension (Inhalt and Umfang) has no validity; the extension of the concept is a methodological

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fiction (ein Fingiertes, 170), an inconsistent multiplicity. What is the function of this extensional representation of the pure concept? Its function is merely psychological and not logical: as a matter of fact, the extension is “a surrogate,” “a convenient auxiliary” (ein Surrogat, ein bequemes Hilfsmittel, 171), which allows us to have a near-intuitive representation of an essence (quasi-anschauliche Vorstellung). There is no reduction, but only a progressive transition from the insight of an eidetic relationship to the intuition of an imaginary extensional totality: “each A is B” → “any A in general are B” → “in the totality of the As there is none which is not B” → “in a universal generality, a plurality of As is a totality of As which has the B-property” (§ 39, 170). Let us apply this to the truth-logic. Does the method of reduction imply an extensionalistic principle of reducibility? In the truth-logic we can find a case similar to the universal judgments in the consequence-logic: it is the case of the pure laws (reine Gesetze) that express an apodictic necessity (apodiktische Notwendigkeit, Husserl 1996 Hua XXX, § 44, 221). The pure eidetic laws exclude any individual cores (Individualkerne) and admit exclusively general cores (Generalkerne), in so far as they express relationships between pure essences. For example, the judgment “all human beings are mortal (alle Menschen sind sterblich) excludes any restriction to individual existence (222).2 And contrary to the “universal judgments” (universelle Urteile) (that is to say, judgments that have the form of universality), “general judgments” (generelle Urteile) are judgments about ideal objects, about essences; insofar as these judgments have pure idealities as objects-about-which, they are not reducible to extensionally universal judgments (“Universell ist jedes Funktionalurteil, das die Form des Allgemeinen überhaupt hat. Generell ist hingegen ein Urteil über ideale Gegenstände,” § 45, 224–225). Nevertheless in Formale und transzendale Logik (Husserl 1974 Hua XVII, §§ 82–83), Husserl expresses a principle of reducibility of the categorial truths belonging to a higher level to those belonging to a lower level, and ultimately to truths belonging to the lowest level—that is, to ultimate truths that relate directly to individual objects of perceptual experience. And in the Logic of 1917 he writes: “Each general judgment can be so expressed that it does not bear on general objects, but on individual objects, even if they are meant in a unconditioned universality” (Jedes generelle Urteil kann so gewendet werden, daß er nicht mehr über generelle Gegenstände, sondern über individuelle, aber in unbedingter Allgemeinheit, urteilt (also nicht als Daseinsurteil), Husserl 1996 Hua XXX, § 45, 225).

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What is the sense of this process of reduction? It means a principle of applicability or testability rather than reducibility, and that at two different levels. First, each law of elementary arithmetic can be applied to singular cardinal numbers: it is a transition from the general to the particular, but remaining on the field of ideal objects. Secondly, ideal objects involve an indirect link to individual objects that are instantiations of them: for example, the idea “two” can be replaced by a pair of individual objects. So the so-called principle of reducibility is in fact a principle of empirical exemplification, application, instantiation, testability of truths, but not of empirical reducibility of truths. While the general eidetic law implies singular or particular cases, the opposite implication does not have any validity at all. According to Husserl, it seems that this relationship of application can be converted into the converse relationship of genesis or gradation of the evidences (Stufenordnung der Evidenzen, Husserl 1974 Hua XVII, § 85, 215; 1978, 206): the principle of empirical application becomes a principle of genetic order in the process of making materially evident (Prinzip genetischer Ordnung sachlicher Evidentmachung, ibid., 215; 207) and a principle of gradation of the different levels of true materialities themselves (Abstufung der wahren Sachlichkeiten selbst, ibid., 215; 207). The order of empirical foundation or genesis is quite the opposite of the order of empirical application: what is meant here is that empirical propositions are primitive, and that they offer a primitive level of evidences on which can be founded evidences belonging to higher categorial levels by a process of generalization or formalization. So the request of empirical application becomes a principle of empirical derivation or genetic foundation on experience. Such a conversion is very problematic. Let us take with Husserl the example of the principles and laws in physical science: is it possible to assert that these principles derive genetically from experience by induction or generalization? Husserl himself answers negatively: “The fundamental principles originate from experience, but not from the immediate experience . . . they originate from long processes of elaboration. And this elaboration . . . is not a sequence of steps in a reasoning that are immediately self-evident like in deduction.”3 Thus, it is strictly impossible to let principles of physical science (like the principle of relativity of movements or the principle of inertia) derive from experience or be directly founded on experience. The testability of physical principles does not mean that they have an empirical origin, because the theoretical elaboration of these

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principles belongs to the method of thought and requires pure processes of thought.

Is There any Reducibility of the Principles of Logic to the Empirical Level? The third level on which we have to consider the sense of the reduction is that of the principles of logic. These principles have a double meaning: first they are principles of formal validity in the consequence-logic, second they are formal principles of truth in the truth-logic (Husserl 1974 Hua XVII, § 20, 71–73; 1978, 66–68).4 The problem of reduction concerning both types of principles is about the method of making evident the logical principles (Evidentmachung der logischen Prinzipien, ibid., § 85, 216; 208). But what is the meaning of the process of going back from the sense of the principles to their evidence? Does this process of making evident entail that we have to disclose an intentional genesis of these principles by going back to the ultimate levels of empirical judgments and pre-predicative evidence of empirical objects? Does it imply a real process of reducing these principles to the empirical level? Here we have to consider the theory of the relevance of the cores (Relevanz der Kerne, ibid., § 87, 220; 212). Let us first make clear the sense of the analytic laws in the consequencelogic. They are universal and formal principles of non-contradiction, of consistency, that is, principles of analytic inclusion of propositional forms in other ones: the law of non-contradiction, the law of excluded middle, the law of double negation. These principles make it possible to reveal the forms of analytic inclusion (tautologies) and those of analytic exclusion or anti-consequence (antilogies); they are principles of formal compatibility and incompatibility of propositional forms within the discursive unity of a theory (Husserl 1974 Hua XVII, §§ 14 and 18, 58–60 and 68–69; 1978, 53–55 and 63–65). What sort of idealizing presuppositions do these formal principles imply? According to Husserl in § 88 of Formale und transzendentale Logik, each possible judgment has to be made distinctly evident (Jedes Urteil ist zur Deutlichkeitsevidenz zu bringen, Husserl 1974 Hua XVII, §§ 17 and 88; 67–68 and 222–223; 1978, 62–63 and 214–215). This means that all their formal components and analytic implications can be made explicit. Yet the formal non-contradiction is precisely the necessary and sufficient condition for having a judgment distinctly evident, that is to say, to make obvious

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the possibility of making this judgment; if the propositional form is not contradictory, the judgment can be made without any restriction. So the presupposition is that formal non-contradiction is sufficient for making a judgment distinctly evident without any restriction regarding the fulfillment of syntactical cores by material cores. Now what is the sense of the principles of truth-logic? They are formal principles of possible truth in the sense of adequation between the proposition and the categorial objectivity, the latter being the possible state of affairs meant by the judgment. So it is possible to convert the analytic principles of non-contradiction into principles of possible truth, using the truth-values. For example (Husserl 1974 Hua XVII, § 20), the analytic law of the modus ponens can be translated into a principle of inference in the truth-logic: if (p → q) is true and if p is true, then q is true. The analytic laws of non-contradiction and excluded middle have in the truth-logic the following sense: either p is true or p is false; if p is true, then non-p is false (Hua XVII § 20, 71–73; 1978, 66–68). This allows us to disclose the idealizing presupposition of the principles of truth (Husserl 1974 Hua XVII, § 77). Each judgment necessarily can be brought to a positive or negative adequation to the affairs themselves: truth is in fact the intentional correlate of the evidence of identity between the sense meant and the categorial object. Hence, we can translate the principles of truth-logic in subjective terms, in terms of subjective evidence. The principle of non-contradiction means the following: if p can be brought to the evidence of positive adequation, non-p cannot be brought to this evidence. The excluded middle means: each proposition can be brought to the evidence of positive or negative adequation (Hua XVII, § 77, 200–202; 1978, 193–195).5 The essential consequence of these possibilities is as follows: “a judgment is true or false once and for all” (Ein Urteil ist wahr oder falsch ein für allemal, Husserl 1974 Hua XVII, § 77, 201; 1978, 194). That is to say, the truth of propositions has an omnitemporal and intersubjective character. The idealizing presupposition is that of truth-in-itself or falsity-in-itself (Entschiedenheit oder Entscheidbarbeit an sich, ibid., § 79, 203, 205; 196–197), each judgment is supposed to be decided in itself, even if it is not decided for us, even if we do not have any effective method to prove its truth or falsity; its decidability is completely independent from our capacity of discovering its truth or falsity. Hence, the formal non-contradiction of judgments is a necessary and sufficient condition for its decidability in itself. So the formal principles are necessary and sufficient conditions for validity and possible truth.

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Moreover, let us recall that the principles of logic have a merely formal character. Given that we can make them obvious by a process of formalizing syntactical cores (by replacing each material sense with a pure and empty anything whatever-form), they are completely independent from the material sense (Sachhaltigkeit) of the cores. Then, they must have a universal sphere of validity, and formal logic must have a universal sovereignty: it must be possible to give an instance of the logical principles by replacing syntactical stuffs with arbitrarily taken cores, without any restriction on a definite field. As Russell says in the Principles of Mathematics, in the sphere of logic the field of variables is absolutely without limits: there is a principle of unlimited substitutability.6 Now, let us consider Husserl’s essential argument, the theory of the relevance of the cores. This argument is simple: the principle of unlimited substitutability does not have unconditioned validity in logic. On the contrary, there are material limits to the variability of the syntactical cores—the syntactical stuffs of non-intuitive judgments cannot be varied with complete freedom (Husserl 1974 Hua XVII, § 89, 226–227; 1978, 218–219).7 Thus the formal non-contradiction of a judgment is not a sufficient condition for being sure of its validity or decidability in itself; but validity and decidability imply both a material presupposition that belongs to the Sachhaltigkeit of the cores. Let us recall what is asserted by Husserl about formal relationships between propositional forms (§ 18). There are only three possible cases for the propositional forms: either the form is tautological (p or non-p) (S is p or S is not p); or it is antilogical—it contains an analytic anti-consequence (p and non-p) (S is p and S is non-p); or there is an empty compatibility (leere Verträglichkeit) between judgments or cores, which do not have anything to do with one another (S is p and T is q) (Husserl 1974 Hua XVII, § 18, 68–69; 1978, 63–65). Let us take two examples: “This color plus one makes three,” “The sum of the angles of a triangle is equal to the color red” (ibid., §§ 89 and 90, 224 and 228; 216 and 220). In both cases we have a purely grammatical sensefulness (rein grammatische Sinnhaftigkeit, § 89), but we do not have material or contentual sensefulness (inhaltliche Sinnhaltigkeit); both propositions make no proper sense, they offer examples of senselessness (Sinnlosigleit): the totality of the proposition is not a unitary sense, that is: the judgmentcontent (Urteilsinhalt, beurteilbarer Inhalt) does not have any ideal existence (ibid., § 89, 224; 216). Such judgments are neither contradictory nor noncontradictory, but “exalted above concordance and contradiction” (ibid., 224; 216); they are neither true nor false, but “exalted above truth and falsity” (ibid., § 90, 229; 221). For such materially senseless judgments the

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middle is not excluded; and formal contradiction does not have any sense at all: the principles of logic cannot be applied to such judgments. Consequently, the sense of the theory of relevance of the cores is the following: the principles of logic do not have absolute validity, validity for the infinite universe of discourse, validity for arbitrarily variable stuffs. They have validity only for judgments whose cores are congruous with respect to the sense (Urteile, deren Kerne sinngemäß zusammengehören, Husserl 1974 Hua XVII, § 90, 228; 1978, 220). There are material or contentual limits or conditions for sensefulness through the application of the principles of logic. Let us make a last step. How is it possible to show the material coherence of the syntactical cores? To make obvious the congruousness of cores, it is necessary to make obvious the cores themselves, to make obvious the objects-about-which and their properties. And here it becomes possible to apply the method of reducing ideal objects-about-which (and properties and relationships) to ultimate objects-about-which (and ultimate properties and ultimate relations). At this last step, the requirement of essential community (Wesensgemeinschaft) between the cores becomes a demand of senseful coherence between an ultimate substrate and an ultimate property or relationship. This senseful relationship between ultimate empirical cores refers to the conditions of coherence of the matters, of concordance of possible experience, and these are pre-predicative (Husserl 1974 Hua XVII, § 89, 226–227; 218–219). So it is senseless to ask if the snow is or is not courageous: first of all, because there is no community of essence between snow and courage, but ultimately because the perceptual experience excludes the possibility of finding such a thing as a moral property in the snow. A possible experience of a real world is not a structureless experience of objects in general. Rather, there are spheres of objects, categories of concrete objects (such as material object, animal, person, cultural object, ideal object . . . ) that admit correlative spheres of possible properties and relations. Hence, the material conditions for having sensefulness go back to the ontological structures of a possible world of experience. In that sense, the presupposition of a world of experience ranks logic among positive sciences. What is the real purpose of the theory of relevance in the cores? Let us refer to Carnap, who gives us a similar example of senselessness of propositions: “my pencil weighs five kilos” is a senseful proposition; on the other hand, “my courage weighs five kilos” is not a proposition because it is senseless. We must not just replace the syntactical cores within a certain category of names (names for things, or names for properties, names for relationships), but also within a definite syntactical type. Two words belong to the same syntactical type if it is possible to replace one with the other without

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losing the propositional sense. In the same perspective, Carnap speaks in the Aufbau about spheres of objects and relationship of Sphärenverwandschaft between objects; he refers to the Russellian theory of logical types, which he applies to the extra-logical objects, claiming that the theory of logical types expresses the conditions for guaranteeing sensefulness (Carnap 1998, 38–39).8 Yet the function of the theory of types is to avoid paradoxes or antinomies of the set-theory by expressing stronger syntactical rules. The common characteristic of all antinomies is the self-reference or reflexiveness: something is said about all cases of a certain kind, and from what is said a new case seems to be generated, which both is and is not of the same kind as the cases falling under what is said. It leads Russell to the rule: “Whatever involves all of a collection must not be one of the collection” (Russell 1908, 203. See also 1903, 535–536); so propositional functions must be limited to a certain type or level, that is, to a definite range of significance, so that an n-order function cannot assert anything about (n+1)-order objects. This leads us to the following assumption: the essential scope of the Husserlian theory of the relevance of cores is to safeguard logic against the antinomies of set-theory. Indeed in § 71 of Formale und transzendentale Logik Husserl writes that formal sciences have paradoxes because they develop their theory in a merely symbolic and calculative mode, establishing arbitrary (Spielregel) or mere computational conventions (bloße Rechenkonventionen, Husserl 1974 Hua XVII, §§ 40 and 33, 115 and 102; 1978, 110 and 98), without elucidating the fundamental concepts and principles and going back to the evidence of their origin (ibid., § 71, 189; 181). In § 75 he writes that it is necessary to develop “an analytics for which there can be no paradoxes” by making reflexively obvious the structures of subjective evidence of the formal rules in the theory of forms and consequence-logic. And in § 64 of the Cartesian Meditations, Husserl writes that it is necessary to make obvious the system of the fundamental concepts for each scientific field, and that such evidence brings a guarantee against paradoxes (Husserl 1950 Hua I, § 64, 180); in particular, we can avoid antinomies in the field of logic by developing a transcendental reflection about the limits of the applicability of formal principles. In conclusion, the Husserlian position concerning antinomies seems to be similar to Zermelo’s: according to Zermelo the Aussonderungsaxiom imposes essential limits to the formation of set; it is not possible to define a set absolutely by defining a property on the infinite field of objects; it is only possible to separate a set-part within a set of objects that must be already given to us, by expressing strictly decidable properties within this set (Zermelo 1967,

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202).9 Thus, new classes of objects do not result from an arbitrary conceptual creation of a property within an undefined field, but only from the foundation of an already given set and respecting the condition of decidability: it is a double principle that limits the variability of the cores.

Conclusion Is the Husserlian method of reducing syntactical stuffs, propositions and truths equivalent to a principle of reducibility or a principle of verification? Not quite. We must rather conclude that this method has a different sense depending on the level of logic at which we are. 1. At the syntactical level of the theory of forms, there is a genetic or foundational principle, whose finality is to make obvious the nuclear forms of syntactical stuffs and reveal their ontological foundation on the structure of empirical objects. The scope is to found the predicative syntax on the structures of pre-predicative syntax. 2. At the level of isolated propositions within consequence-logic or truthlogic there are two results. In the logic of validity there is an extensional reduction of propositions to equivalent propositions belonging to a lower level. By contrast, in the Bedeutungslogik there is no extensional reducibility of propositions or truths, but only a problem concerning the possibility of applying categorial propositions to lower levels of syntactical stuffs; and it is impossible to turn this applicability into a principle of genetic derivation of truths going back to the ultimate level of empirical truths. 3. Lastly, at the level of principles of logic, the scope is not to reduce these principles to the level of empirical evidences; but only to make obvious the semantic and ontological conditions of their application in order to avoid antinomies.

Notes 1

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3

“Ein Inbegriff von Dreiecken, in dem kein Dreieck fehlt, läßt sich nicht zur Gegebenheit bringen. Das ist ein Non-Sens,” “eine Allheit von Dreiecken, eine Allheit von Zahlen, das ist, wenn wir den Sinn der Allheit festhalten, nicht anschaulich zu geben, kann also auch nicht sein.” “Eine volle Allgemeinheit im Sinne des Gesetzes erfordert, daß es absolut heißt: ‘alle Menschen,’ unter Absehen von aller Beschränkung auf irgendein individuelles Dasein.” “Die Grundsätze entspringen der Erfahrung, aber nicht der unmittelbaren Erfahrung . . . , sondern langen Prozessen methodischer Verarbeitung. Und diese Verarbeitung . . . ist nicht

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eine Kette solcher unmittelbar selbsverständlicher Denkschritte wie bei der Deduktion” (Husserl 1996 Hua XXX, § 66, 314). Husserl gives as an example the double significance of the principles of contradiction and excluded middle. “Es beschließt . . . daß, wie gesagt, jedes Urteil prinzipiell zur Adäquation gebracht werden kann” (Husserl 1974 Hua XVII, 201; 1978, 194). Russell 1903 [2010] § 7, 7: Part I, chapter 1 “Definition of pure mathematics” : “Thus in every proposition of pure mathematics, when fully stated, the variables have an absolutely unrestricted field: any conceivable entity may be substituted for any one of our variables without impairing the truth of our proposition.” “Die syntaktischen Stoffe unanschaulicher Urteile können aus den angedeuteten Gründen ihrer Seins- und Sinnesgenesis nicht völlig frei variabel sein” (Husserl 1974 Hua XVII, 227; 1978, 219). “Sphärenverwandtschaft. Gegenstandssphären. Zwei Gegenstände . . . heißen ‘sphärenverwandt,’ wenn es eine Argumentstelle in einer Aussage gibt, für die die beiden Gegenstandsnamen zulässige Argumente sind . . . Sind zwei Gegenstände nicht sphärenverwandt, so heißen sie ‘sphärenfremd’ zueinander.” “Axiom III. (Axiom of separation). Whenever the propositional function F(x) is definite for all elements of a setM, M possesses a subset MF containing as elements precisely those elements x of M for which F(x) is true. By giving us a large measure of freedom in defining new sets, Axiom III in a sense furnisches a substitute for the general definition of set that was cited in the introduction and rejected an untenable . . . In the first place, sets may never be independently defined by means of this axiom but must always be separated as subsets from sets already given; thus contradictory notions such as ‘the set of all sets’ or ‘the set of all ordinal numbers,’ and with them the ‘ultrafinite paradoxes’ . . . are excluded.”

Chapter 3

The Seduction of Images A Look at the Role of Images in Husserl’s Phenomenology John Brough

Postmodern thinkers like to remind us that we swim in a sea of images or wander about in a “forest of signs.” We are rarely eyewitnesses: we experience the world through pictures on screens and in newspapers. When we become overwhelmed or simply bored by pictured reality, we turn off the television or put down the paper and go to the movies or the art museum to see still more images in the hope of being enthralled, entertained, or enlightened. Reality is still there, of course, but it furnishes feeble competition for the astonishing speed with which our ways of imaging the world proliferate and mutate. Images are not only ubiquitous, however; they are also seductive. Televised images of certain events, usually catastrophic, are replayed again and again. A movie or a play is a “must see,” and we may dress and comport ourselves like the people we admire in films or in magazines. Philosophers are no more immune to the seductive power of images than anyone else. As philosophers, however, they succumb not to images as such but to a philosophical way of exploiting them. The history of philosophy from antiquity on is replete with examples of thinkers who have succumbed to the attractions of what Edmund Husserl called the “image theory” of consciousness (Husserl 1984 Hua XIX/1, 436; 1970, 593; 1976 Hua III, 98; 1983, 92). In order to understand the role of images in Husserl’s phenomenology, we must get some sense of what Husserl meant by the image theory, why he criticized it, and the extent to which for a time and in certain respects he accepted it. Since the image theory takes image consciousness as its model, to understand the theory we must have at least some grasp of image consciousness as Husserl conceived it.

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Image Consciousness Husserl gives many names to image consciousness. He variously calls it “physical imagination” (Husserl 1981 Hua XXIII, 21; 2005, 22), “perceptual re-presentation” (ibid., 476; 565), “perceptual phantasy” (ibid., 504; 605), and “iconic phantasy” (ibid., 383; 456)—all suggesting that image consciousness has a foot in two worlds: the perceptual and the imagined. The complex structure of image consciousness explains how this is possible. Ordinary perception has a single object: the person I am now seeing, for example. When I experience an image, on the other hand, three objects can be involved (Husserl 1981 Hua XXIII, §9). Consider the example of a painting. I see the painted image: perhaps a person is depicted—Napoleon, let us say. The image is what directly appears to me in the experience; it is what I see. Husserl calls this the “image object,” also referring to it on occasion as a “figment” [Fiktum] or “semblance” [Schein]. The image or image object has a physical support, the canvas and pigment that serve as the substratum for the image I see and that instigate or stimulate my seeing of it. This material support, which Husserl sometimes calls the “physical image,” can be destroyed by fire and hang askew on the wall. Although it is not itself the appearing image—I do not see canvas and pigment but an image of Napoleon in uniform when I look at the painting—it must be there if I am to be conscious of the image at all. If it were destroyed, the image would be destroyed along with it. There can also be a third object involved in image consciousness: a subject. I apprehend the image that is present to me as depicting something that is not present, which Husserl calls the “image subject.” The subject does not actually appear when I look at the painting. I may be conscious of the subject in the image, but it remains absent in its actuality. The image of Napoleon, with its image colors and image size, is present; Napoleon himself is not. Husserl captures this situation by saying that the image appears, while the subject does not appear but is meant. In ordinary perception, on the other hand, what appears and what is meant are the same; there is no distinction between the two. Perception is presenting as opposed to re-presenting consciousness. Image consciousness is also, in part, presenting consciousness, and to that extent is perceptual. It includes a “suppressed” perception of the image’s material support, and an explicit perceptual presentation of the image. But the latter is not an ordinary perception. “In image consciousness perception is . . . carried out in an inactual way” (Husserl 1981 Hua XXIII, 299; 2005, 360). This means, first of all, that while the image object, which is what I see when I look at the painting, appears to me “with the full force

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and intensity of perception” (ibid., 57, 60; 62, 64), the depicted subject does not. Though I do see the subject in the image—the phenomenon of “seeing in”—it is not perceived and not actually present there. The image may depict a person who does or once did actually exist, but is not itself that person. Furthermore, the image object, even though it is seen and is perceptually present to me, is not an actually existing thing in the world of perceived rooms, clocks, and desks. The image’s physical support, pigment and canvas, is indeed part of that world, and thus can interact causally with the surrounding environment, becoming spotted with mildew, for example, or cracking with age, while the image cannot. The image is also not a real event in conscious life, as the acts of perceiving or imaging are. Husserl insists that the image is nothing actual in either of these senses: “the image object truly does not exist, which means not only that it has no existence outside my consciousness, but also that it has no existence inside my consciousness; it has no existence at all” (ibid., 22; 23). It is “nothing,” a “nullity.” In all of these senses, then, the perception that occurs in “perceptual image consciousness” or “iconic imagining” (ibid., 384; 456) “is not perceptual consciousness simply” (ibid., 471; 560). It is important to understand that the image theory is not image consciousness itself. Image consciousness is the perfectly legitimate kind of awareness we have just described, the kind we enjoy when we contemplate a painting in a gallery or see a play on the stage. The image theory is a philosophical position that takes certain features of image consciousness to be the model for the understanding of other kinds of conscious acts, such as memory and phantasy, and even perception. The image theory assumes at its core that conscious presenting means “‛making an image of something’ ” (Husserl 1979 Hua XXII, 306), and it particularly stresses the involvement of two of the three objects we mentioned above: the appearing image and the subject meant by the image. Furthermore, the theory takes the appearing image to be immanent to consciousness, like the Lockean idea, while the object meant by means of it is in some sense transcendent.

The Image Theory of Perception and Husserl’s Criticism of It Some philosophers, particularly in the Cartesian tradition, interpret intuitive presentations (perception, memory, expectation, phantasy) in terms of the image theory. All would be forms of imaging or picturing, broadly conceived. The theory may have cast its spell over Husserl himself for a

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time with respect to memory and phantasy, but he steadfastly resisted it as a way of understanding perception. His arguments are worth examining; they are interesting in their own right, and prepare the ground for his general rejection of the image theory. As early as 1894, Husserl formulated and criticized the image theory in the context of a discussion of “so-called objectless perceptions”: perceptions or other presentations that do not have actually existing objects (Husserl 1979 Hua XXII, 304). The popular view, Husserl reports, is that there is no difficulty in understanding how we can present a nonexistent object, “for to present it means to have a mental image corresponding to it, and just as a picture can, after all, exist, while what is depicted does not exist, so too here.” The image, he goes on to say, is within consciousness, but the object is “either outside or does not exist” (304). A few years later, in the Logical Investigations, Husserl concisely describes the image theory of perception as holding that “the thing itself is ‛outside’ . . . : an image is in consciousness as its representative” (Husserl 1984 Hua XIX/1, 436; 1970, 593). He adds in the Investigations that this application of the image theory to perception is a “fundamental and almost ineradicable error” (ibid., 436; 593), a charge he repeats in Ideas I in 1913. Husserl indicates that some have mustered arguments from ordinary experience and from physical science in defense of the image theory, and to many the theory might appear to solve some thorny epistemological problems. Indeed, Husserl warns that “the popular appeal of this solution could seduce us” (Husserl 1979 Hua XXII, 304). It could seduce us, he goes on to say, but does not, because “decisive objections . . . speak against [it]” (ibid.,). These objections are sufficient to show that the image theory of perception is a “fundamental error” and that “an image consciousness or a sign consciousness must not be substituted for perception” (Husserl 1976 Hua III, 99; 1983, 93). Between perception and image consciousness “there is an unbridgeable essential difference” (ibid., 99; 93). The objections Husserl mentions and the essential distinctions he draws concern both the objects and the constitutional structures of the two kinds of consciousness. The arguments are mainly descriptive in character, flowing from Husserl’s principle that in phenomenology “what is decisive consists in the absolutely faithful description of what is actually present in phenomenological purity and in keeping at a distance all interpretations transcending the given” (Husserl 1976 Hua III, 224; 1983, 218). In 1894, Husserl charged that the image theory of perception ‟does entirely unnecessary violence to the facts,” subordinating them ‟to the theory . . . rather than adapting the theory to an unprejudiced and encompassing

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establishment of the facts” (Husserl 1979 Hua XXII, 304). He observes that “experience has never confirmed [its] quixotic assumptions” (305). The image theory, then, is a vivid example of an interpretation that transcends what is given in experience, which is why Husserl takes its claim that presentations relate to their objects by means of mental images to be “a theoretical fiction” (305). How, then, do perception and image consciousness differ descriptively? In the latter, we are intuitively aware of something—the image—“as depicting or signitively indicating something else,” and we are directed, not toward the image we intuit, but toward what is depicted (Husserl 1976 Hua III, 99; 1983, 93). In perception, by contrast, there is only one object, which is both what appears in the perceptual act and what is meant by the act. What appears intuitively in perception is not taken to depict something else. Perception gives its object as “it itself” and as present “in person” (ibid.,), not as the representing image or surrogate for the “real” perceptual object. “I perceive the physical thing,” Husserl writes, “the object belonging to nature, the tree there in the garden; that and nothing else is the actual object of the perceptual ‛intention.’ A second immanental tree, or even an ‛internal image’ of the actual tree standing out there before me, is in no way given, and to suppose that hypothetically leads to absurdity” (ibid., 224; 219. Translation modified). Husserl mentions one such absurdity, taking the form of a contradiction: “The images are supposed to be the presented objects, of which it is truly said: every presentation presents an object. The corresponding things are supposed to be, on the other side, the presented objects, of which it is truly said: an object does not correspond to every presentation” (Husserl 1979 Hua XXII, 305). In effect, the theory holds that every presentation presents two objects: the mental image, which is actually present to consciousness, and then what is imaged, the perceived object, which is also supposed to be presented, indeed, to be the object of the perceptual act, but which, if the theory is correct, does not actually appear at all. The notion of a duality of objects forced on perception leads to confusion and contradiction. A further absurdity following from the image theory is that it leads to an infinite regress. The regress results not simply from the fact that the theory introduces two entities into perception, but from the way in which the two entities are conceived. In this respect, the image theory as applied to perception is a version of a second fundamental error; that is, the notion that the ‟intentional object” of any act is immanent to consciousness and distinct from the act’s actual object. In the case of the image theory as applied to perception, the image is taken to be an immanent object distinct from

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“the ‛transcendent’ or ‛actual’ object that may correspond to it” (Husserl 1984 Hua XIX/1, 439; 1970, 595). Now something can function as an image only if it is first perceived in its own right. According to the theory, if an object can be given to consciousness only by means of an image, then the object that serves as the perceptual image would itself have to be given by means of an image, and so on to infinity (ibid., 437; 594; Hua III, 224; 1983, 219). The threat of an infinite regress vanishes, however, if one simply takes perception as it presents itself. In that case, one finds no separation of intentional object from actual object. Two realities do not face each other in perception. The intentional object of perception is its actual, transcendent object: “It is nonsense to distinguish between the two” (Husserl 1984 Hua XIX/1, 439; 1970, 595). These differences between image consciousness and perception with respect to their objects run parallel to distinctions in their respective constitutional structures. “Descriptively considered,” image consciousness “is something with an entirely different constitution” from perception (Husserl 1976 Hua III, 224; 1983, 219). Above all, the image theory fails to appreciate the complex nature of imaging. It naively assumes that an act contains one thing, the image, which, without further ado, depicts another thing, the physical thing that we take to be the actual object of the perception. It is as if the image had some property or aspect that immediately announces its imaging character. But that is not the case. The image, Husserl observes, does not possess its imaging capacity as an “internal characteristic” or “real predicate,” like being red or being round (Husserl 1984 Hua XIX/1, 436; 1970, 593). One might grant this, but then argue that the image’s ability to depict is a relational rather than intrinsic property; specifically, that it is based on the resemblance of the image to what it represents. Husserl thinks that this suggestion fails too. According to the image theory, only the image is immediately present to consciousness, and so resemblance cannot clarify the given image’s relation to its subject, which is not given. Even if one could compare the two and see a resemblance, this would not explain imaging. As Husserl succinctly puts it, “the resemblance between two objects, however great it may be, still does not make one into the image of the other” (ibid., 436; 594). One red Ferrari may resemble another red Ferrari but not be the image of it. Even two pictures or two sculptures, which are already images—the two lions flanking the entrance to the New York Public Library, for example—can resemble one another without either being the image of the other. What, then, accounts for imaging? According to Husserl, whether something becomes an image depends on how one takes it; that is, it depends on a particular kind of act. This is

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not to deny that what is taken to be an image must possess certain features and stand in certain relations that will enable it to function as an image of a specific thing under a definite aspect or aspects. Not just anything can be taken to be the image of a seated man, hand on chin and deeply absorbed in thought, for example. Images, on Husserl’s understanding, are not arbitrary signs, and they do involve resemblance. On the other hand, even the “appropriate” thing will not appear as an image unless it is taken to be an image. “The image becomes constituted as an image in a peculiar intentional consciousness, . . . and the ‛internal’ character of the act, the specific peculiarity of this ‛mode of apperception,’ ” accounts for the act of presenting an object in image (Husserl 1984 Hua XIX/1, 436; 1970, 594. Translation modified). It is a unique mode of apperception, then, that apprehends an appearing object as an image. Thanks to it, I take David’s painting to be an image of Napoleon and not an ordinary physical thing, such as a light switch. “The painting is an image only for an imageconstituting consciousness, namely, the consciousness that, by means of its imaginative apperception (here founded in a perception), bestows on a primary and perceptually appearing object the ‛validity’ or ‛significance’ of an image” (ibid., 437; 594. Translation modified). The simple act of perception does not possess this unique mode of apprehension. Its object is not taken to be an image. A further constitutional contrast between perception and image consciousness is that perception posits its object as present and actually existing, while in image consciousness such positing does not occur. “Turning toward the ‛image’ (not toward what is imaged), we do not seize upon anything actual as object, but instead precisely an image, a fiction” (Husserl 1976 Hua III, 274; 1983, 266). Of course, if one focused on David’s portrait of Napoleon as simply a piece of canvas covered with pigment set into a wooden frame, one could speak of seizing upon some physical thing as actually existing. But if one’s regard is directed toward the image, an entirely different awareness comes into play. At one point, Husserl took this awareness to be a “neutrality modification of perception” (ibid., 267; 262). He eventually came to the conclusion, however, that phantasy does not arise through the neutralizing of positing acts, and hence that “ ‘neutrality modification’ is suitable for the change in thematizing interest but not for phantasy” (Husserl 1981 Hua XXIII, 591; 2005, 709). Perception and image consciousness differ, then, as the simple differs from the complex. Perception has a single apperception and a single object. It is not founded on any other act. It is this unmodified simplicity of perception that lets it function, in Husserl’s estimation, as a kind of paradigm

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or foundational experience in our conscious lives. Image consciousness, on the other hand, is a founded act—specifically, an act founded on perception. It involves at least two apprehensions and the corresponding duality of image and subject.

The Image Theory of Re-presentation or Reproduction We have looked at some of the reasons why Husserl thinks that it is “not only incorrect but nonsensical” (Husserl 1976 Hua III, 78; 1983, 92) to interpret perception as a form of image consciousness. There are other experiences, however, that might be more likely candidates for interpretation by the image theory. Acts of re-presentation [Vergegenwärtigung] or reproduction, unlike acts of perceptual presentation [Gegenwärtigung], do not present their objects as actually there “in person.” The objects of memory and phantasy, for example, are absent: neither a recollected past event nor an imagined centaur is actually present. Since image consciousness itself is a form of re-presentation, a way of being aware of something that is not actually there, might it not be an enticing model for the understanding of re-presentational experiences such as memory and phantasy? In fact, until 1905 or so, Husserl himself surrendered, with some reservations, to what he described as the “temptation” (Husserl 1981 Hua XXIII, 87; 2005, 94) to assimilate phantasy and other forms of reproduction, such as memory and expectation, to image consciousness (I will focus mainly on phantasy in the ensuing discussion). He took the “imaginative modification” (ibid., 276; 335) to be the sole model for the interpretation of all forms of re-presentational awareness. Thus he wrote in 1898 that “perceptual presentations present their object as present itself in the presentation; phantasy presentations, on the other hand, re-present their object in the phantasy image, just as ordinary image presentations do their re-presenting in the physical image” (ibid., 109; 117). Seven years later he claimed to find a community of essence between perceptual imagining and ordinary phantasy. “In both cases . . . the mental image is precisely an image; it represents a subject” (ibid., 21; 22). What did Husserl think the two had in common? The key feature they share, according to the image theory, is the possession of two objects. We have seen that in ordinary imaging—in the case of a portrait, for example—there is a distinction between the image that actually appears and the subject that is meant but does not appear. In phantasy too, Husserl writes, “we have a distinction between appearance and subject,” and in that respect the imaging in phantasy runs parallel to the

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imaging or depicting that occurs in image-consciousness (Husserl 1981 Hua XXIII, 64; 2005, 69). This would mean that we do not experience the thing itself in phantasy. My phantasy of Napoleon on St. Helena would not present Napoleon himself. “In phantasying, we mean another object, for which the object that appears and that differs perceptibly from the phantasied object serves as an image representant . . . We have only one appearance, the appearance belonging to the image object” (ibid., 29; 31). The phantasied subject appears in the image, and Husserl insists that the “image is precisely an image; it represents a subject” (ibid., 21; 22). Behind the application of the image theory to phantasy and to other representational acts lies what might be described as the “prejudice of presence”: the conviction that one can be aware of what is absent only through something that is present. Thus a portrait enables one to be conscious of an absent person through its present image object, which one actually sees. Similarly, in memory a past object, precisely because it is past and no longer available, can be recalled only through a present memory image. In phantasy, one can be conscious of a phantasied and absent object only through a present phantasy image. The image theory thus takes phantasy, memory, and expectation to be species of indirect or mediated consciousness, like picturing. One is not aware of the remembered or phantasied object itself; one is instead conscious of it only through a present surrogate or representative. In phantasy there is “a certain mediacy in the act of representing that is absent from perceptual representation. Perception represents its object directly: An object appears, and it is this object that is meant and taken as actual” (Husserl 1981 Hua XXIII, 24; 2005, 25). Phantasy, on the other hand, represents its object indirectly by making another object appear, which it takes to be the representative or “‛image’—‛image’ is surely the only word to use here—for the object genuinely meant” (ibid., 24; 26). Husserl adds, in a claim he will soon retract, that “no one considers this appearance to be an appearance of the object itself” (ibid., 26; 22). What about the status of the phantasy image? Is it something subjective in the sense of a mental event? Again, Husserl finds a parallel between phantasy and image consciousness: just as the image object in perceptual imaging does not exist either as a fleeting mental event or as an actual physical thing in the world, “likewise the phantasy image does not truly exist at all; it does not perchance have a psychological existence” (Husserl 1981 Hua XXIII, 22; 2005, 23). His refusal to give the image a psychological existence even when he subscribed to the image theory of phantasy enabled Husserl to avoid a certain “naive interpretation” of the phantasy image. This interpretation takes the

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image to be a little picture hidden in the cabinet of the mind.1 Husserl notes, however, that the mere fact that the image is in the mind would not explain how the mind is able to represent the subject of the image, which is something different from the image itself. “If I put a picture in a drawer,” Husserl asks, “does the drawer represent something?” (Husserl 1981 Hua XXIII, 21; 2005, 23). The deep problem with the naive interpretation is that “it conceives of the image as there in the mind just as a physical thing is there in reality. Phenomenologically, however, there is no image thing in the mind, or, better, in consciousness” (ibid.). If the image were a thing in the mind, then the relation between image and phantasied object would have to be a matter of comparing two different appearing objects. When we phantasy something, however, what occurs is not like what we do “when we place two pictures side by side or carry out two phantasy representations in succession” (ibid., 27; 28). In both image consciousness and phantasy, the subject “does not appear as a second thing in addition to the image. It appears in and with the image” (ibid., 28; 29). The subject is not intuited in a separate representation. If the relationship between phantasy image and subject is not established according to the pattern of the comparison of two things, what is the nature of the relationship? Again, as in the case of image consciousness, it is a matter of “seeing-in.” According to the image theory, the image is the only object that actually appears, and “in the image one sees the subject” (Husserl 1981 Hua XXIII, 26; 2005, 27). Just as one “sees” Napoleon in his study in David’s portrait, so one “sees” Napoleon in one’s phantasy image of the solitary exile gazing out to sea from St. Helena. In the image experience or in the phantasy, there is no second, separate representation with which to compare the image. The image, of course, represents the subject only under certain aspects, and it is in those aspects that one experiences the subject; thus the image represents Napoleon in full dress uniform and not in his imperial robes. The specific content of the image object “exhibits . . . re-presents, pictorializes, makes intuitable. The subject looks at us, as it were, through these traits” (ibid., 30; 31). This means that one is aware of the subject within the image; both image consciousness and phantasy are instances of internal consciousness (§40). In contrast, symbolic or signitive consciousness, the sort of consciousness one has when one sees the symbol for a restaurant in an airport, is external consciousness in the sense that it points one away from the appearing symbol to something external to it. One does not see the subject in the symbol. The phenomenon of seeing-in implies that in image consciousness and phantasy I am ordinarily absorbed in the subject. Unless one is engaged in reflection of a particular sort, one does not look at the image and “say to

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oneself: this is an image” (Husserl 1981 Hua XXIII, 26; 2005, 27). That does not mean, however, that one is not aware that one is experiencing an image rather than the thing itself. “On the contrary, the image is immediately felt to be an image” (ibid., 26; 28). If it were not, then, phenomenologically, one would be perceiving and not imagining, and the object would appear as present and as actually existing. One’s phantasy world would become one’s real world, an object of belief taken to be real. This does not happen in phantasy, however. A minimal awareness of the real world remains, so “that a faint consciousness that (the images) are semblances constantly colors our phantasy formations” (ibid., 42; 45). Images as “nullities” only “hover before” us (ibid.), and it may seem quite as if the subjects we see in them “were there themselves–but only ‘quite as i f ’ ” (ibid., 33; 34).

Husserl’s Criticism of the Image Theory of Phantasy Even when Husserl “officially” embraced the image theory of phantasy and memory early in the last century, he seems to have had reservations about it. In the lectures on phantasy and image consciousness from 1905, in which he advances the image interpretation, he cautions that there are “objections to this attempt, objections that subsequently turn out to be justified” (Husserl 1981 Hua XXIII, 16, note 1; 2005, 18, note 2). He also expressed doubts in the same lectures about whether one can legitimately distinguish between an image object and a subject in phantasy (ibid., 54, 70; 59, 76). Still, he stays with the theory, although it is also in 1905, later in the same series of lectures, in fact, that serious criticisms of the theory begin to emerge, preparing the way for its rejection. Even when Husserl accepted the theory, he pointed to differences between image consciousness and phantasy. Image consciousness, we noted earlier, has a triune of objects: the physical support, the image object, and the subject. According to the image theory, phantasy would involve only two objects: the phantasy image and the subject. In ordinary images, such as paintings or photographs, there is also the physical support, a third “object” that “functions as the instigator of the pictorial apprehension.” Phantasy representation, on the other hand, “has no instigator” (Husserl 1981 Hua XXIII, 123; 2005, 135). Phantasy images would consequently be private, unlike paintings or photographs, which do have physical supports and are therefore public and intersubjective. That phantasy has no anchor in the actual, physical world means that “the phantasy image exists outside all connection with ‛actuality,’ that is,

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with the field of regard of possible perception.” The painting’s image with its physical substratum, on the other hand, “is incorporated in a certain sense into the nexus of actuality, although it is not itself taken to be something actual in that nexus” (Husserl 1981 Hua XXIII, 123; 2005, 135). The image in a painting is a “perceptual figment,” which enables it to be both in the world and out of it; the phantasy image is not perceptual at all (ibid., 64; 70). The phantasy image also appears to us differently from the perceptual appearance and from the image-object appearance (ibid.). One of these differences is that the phantasy image and the memory image as well, no matter how clear they may be, appear to us as if through a veil, a mist, as if in twilight (ibid., 162; 194). The perceptual image, by contrast, appears with the force and vivacity of a perception. In Humean language, which Husserl occasionally employs, the images in perceptual imagining are “impressions,” while those in phantasy, memory, and expectation are “ideas,” reproductions or re-presentations of perceptions. Another difference in appearance involves stability. The image in perceptual imagination, because it has a physical foundation, is fi xed and stable, while “fleeting and multiple appearances, yielding changing, fluctuating image objects, support the imaging consciousness” (ibid., 148; 175). Phantasy images have a Protean character. These differences between perceptual imagining and phantasy are important phenomenologically, but do not by themselves undermine the image theory of phantasy. For that, a specific critique would be required. By 1909, Husserl’s earlier hesitations about the theory had evolved into full-blown criticisms, and he was prepared to claim that “an essential distinction must be drawn between phantasy apprehension and image apprehension proper” (Husserl 1981 Hua XXIII, 276; 2005, 335). Husserl’s criticism of the image theory was an instance of his gradual weaning from the prejudice of presence. In fact, this process took place under various forms in several areas of his thought during this period, particularly in his phenomenology of time consciousness, including his understanding of memory, retention, and what he described as the “absolute flow of time-constituting consciousness.” A specific concern in his mature analysis of time consciousness was to escape the prejudice of the now, a particularly virulent form of the prejudice of presence, blocking the way to an understanding of the experience of time as reaching out beyond what is immediately present. In all of these areas, Husserl rejected the view that the consciousness of what is absent depends on the actual presence of some content or image in consciousness. His early reservations about the image theory even when he generally subscribed to it suggest that he had

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begun to free himself from the prejudice as early as 1905. He writes, for example, that “in phantasy, we do not have anything ‛present’; and in this sense we do not have an image object” (Husserl 1981 Hua XXIII, 79; 2005, 86). In clear, simple phantasy of the town hall, “no apprehending of a ‛present town-hall appearance,’ of an image object presently presenting itself, is carried out” that would serve as the analogue or representative of what is phantasied (ibid.). Only in reflection could I separate the appearance and the town hall itself. In fairness, it should be noted that it is still not perfectly clear in these earlier texts whether Husserl is decisively separating himself from the image theory. He may still be holding that there is an image in phantasy distinct from its subject, but that one is not conscious of the distinction prereflectively. He may also be saying that the phantasy image is not perceptual in the fashion of the image in a painting or photograph, “though it certainly does appear as an image” (ibid., 80; 87). Other texts, however, come much closer to a clear-cut rejection of the theory, and of the prejudice of presence. He writes, for example, that the object of phantasy “is an object appearing in the manner peculiar to phantasy, hence not appearing as present” (ibid., 84; 91). Phantasy, in other words, should not be reduced to a species of image consciousness. It is sui generis.2 By denying that what immediately appears to us in phantasy is a surrogate, analogue, or image of some other objectivity, Husserl is able to claim that “the simple phantasy appearance . . . relates to its object just as straightforwardly as perception does” (Husserl 1981 Hua XXIII, 85; 2005, 92).3 It does not achieve awareness of its object through the medium of an image; it is direct consciousness of what it imagines. This means that although its object may not be present, as it is in perception, phantasy nonetheless has in common with perception that its “intention aims at the thing itself throughout [its] peculiarly volatile appearance” (ibid., 161; 192). In escaping the prejudice of presence, Husserl sees that one can be conscious of something itself without that something’s being present: The actual presence of something and the consciousness of something itself do not coincide. There is a difference between being aware of something itself and being aware of it as present in person. If I phantasy a centaur, I am conscious of the centaur itself, just as in remembering an event I once lived through I am conscious of the event and not of some image as its present surrogate. What I phantasy or remember is the thing itself, though the thing is not something present (Husserl 1981 Hua XXIII, 162; 2005, 193). Phantasy, then, resists assimilation or reduction to image consciousness or to any other form of intentionality. It is an “ultimate mode of intuitive

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objectivation just like perceptual presentation” (Husserl 1981 Hua XXIII, 86; 2005, 93). This is equally true of memory and expectation. They are not species of image consciousness either.

The Mature View of Phantasy (in place by 1910) If phantasy is not a species of image consciousness, then what does characterize it essentially? Phantasy, Husserl comes to claim, belongs to the genus of reproduction. Every reproduction is a “modification” (Husserl 1981 Hua XXIII, 559; 2005, 672), and therefore phantasy is a modification as well, or, as Husserl often puts it, a “modified consciousness” (ibid., 546; 659), which, like every other modification, “is consciousness of . . .” (ibid., 559; 672). “Modified” has an obvious sense when applied to phantasy. With respect to the phantasied object, it means “not actual”; with respect to the act, it means “not related to what is actual.” Consciousness in the mode of phantasy does not constitute existing or actual objects: “There are no phantasy objects = existing objects; there are no existing phantasy worlds.” The most we can say is that “phantasy objects are possible objects; phantasy worlds are possible worlds” (Husserl 1981 Hua XXIII, 558; 2005, 671). But the image theory of phantasy would grant that too, so there must be something more to the claim that phantasy is modified “consciousness-of.” We noted that when Husserl surrendered the image theory of phantasy, he embraced the view that phantasy is a direct, unmediated consciousness of its object; that is, it does not depend on a mediating image standing between it and the object phantasied. We also noted that he makes the same claim about memory at this time. The rejection of the image theory, however, does not mean that phantasy, or memory, is not a mediated experience in another sense. Husserl points to this when he writes that by “modified consciousness of” we understand “a consciousness in which something objective is intended as if it were being actually experienced or had been actually experienced, and so on, although in reality it is not being actually experienced, not being perceived, not being remembered, etc. What is phantasied is intended ‛as if [it were] existing’ ” (Husserl 1981 Hua XXIII, 546; 2005, 659). This characteristic of the “as if” is not hidden; one is aware of it when one has a phantasy, which is one reason why phantasy is not hallucination. The clue to grasping Husserl’s mature view of phantasy is to be found in his new conception of memory as imageless intentionality, which emerged

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roughly in parallel with his revised understanding of phantasy. Husserl holds that memory intends both a past object and the act in which I originally perceived the object. It is by reproducing the earlier perceptual act, not by producing an image, that I am able to recall the past object. This is memory’s “double intentionality” (Husserl 1966 Hua X, 53f; 1991, 55f). I recall the past object or event by remembering the past act that originally intended it. I do not intend the two in the same way, of course. Unless I choose to reflect on it in a new and distinct thematizing act, my consciousness of the past act is nonobjectivating, while my awareness of its object is objectivating. This mediation is quite different from the mediation that occurs in image consciousness. No image intervenes between the act of memory and what is remembered. It is the remembered act that becomes the medium through which I become aware of the past object. Phantasy, on Husserl’s mature view, achieves its consciousness of the phantasied object in the same way, that is, by reproducing an act. But here everything occurs in the mode of the as-if. Phantasy does not reproduce an act that I actually experienced in the past, as happens in memory. The act reproduced in phantasy is an “as if” perceiving, an act that mimics perception but does not actually perceive anything and never has or will perceive anything. Both it and its object are given in the manner peculiar to phantasy. If I have an intuitive phantasy of a castle, the castle appears to me from one side, in varied lighting conditions, and so on, precisely as if I were perceiving it, for it is perception that originally presents an object from a particular side and under definite lighting conditions (Husserl 1981 Hua XXIII, 448; 2005, 531). Now since perception is the act that directly intends an object itself, one can say that by reproducing a perception in the mode of the as-if, one also intends that quasi-perception’s quasi-object. To reproduce the perception is to re-present the perception’s object—the object itself, not its image. The only indirect or mediated aspect of phantasy, then, is that it directly represents its object by reproducing the act that intends the object, that is, the act that intends it “as if.” Hence one can say that in phantasy one has “an original quasi-perceptual as-if giving of the object itself” (ibid., 579; 696). The “as if” is the mark that separates phantasy from perception, and therefore from hallucination. It also separates phantasy from memory, the consciousness of the past, which bestows on an elapsed present “the characteristic of a present that has been, of a present that stands in a definite relation to the actual now, specifically, in the mode of positing” (Husserl 1981 Hua XXIII, 254; 2005, 309). Perception and memory are both positing acts, perception positing its object as actually present and existing,

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memory positing its object as actually past. Both include belief as well. Pure phantasy, however, is not a positing act, and its belief is only as-if belief. “Mere phantasy in itself is mere modified consciousness (I always indicate this by the ‛as if’). It posits nothing: it ‛merely presents’ ” (ibid., 254; 309), and what it presents is its object, not an image of its object. The image as opaque mediator between phantasy act and phantasied object dissolves into a “pure” intentional consciousness, uncluttered and modified: “ ‘Consciousness’ consists of consciousness through and through, and the sensation as well as the phantasm is already ‘consciousness’ ” (ibid., 265; 323). The temptation of the image theory has been overcome. *** What can we finally say, then, about the role of images in Husserl’s phenomenology? That he resisted their allure not only as a way of interpreting perception but also—after some dalliance—as a way of understanding memory and phantasy. We can say as well that he created a rich phenomenological account of the one place in which images clearly and happily reside—in authentic image consciousness, in our experience of such things as pictures, sculptures, films, and plays.

Notes 1 2

3

The image theory of perception is “naive” in this sense as well. Husserl does discuss one case in which he thinks phantasy can be said to involve an image distinct from its subject. A scientist might unearth some fossils and then deliberately fabricate ‟an intuitive representation of a prehistoric species on the basis of a few distinctive traits suggested by the fossils” (Husserl 1981 Hua XXIII, 84; 2005, 91). This would be analogous to painting a picture of a prehistoric beast. Or someone—an artist planning a painting that would depict the death of Caesar—might undertake a self-conscious effort to produce an image of a certain subject. Husserl thinks that such an effort would yield ‟a genuine image representation. I ‛know’ that the image is not Caesar but only represents Caesar to me as a more or less satisfactory analogue” (ibid., 153; 182). Here, presumably, the distinction between subject and image would be reinstated. These cases represent artificial situations, however, not what occurs in ordinary phantasy. Furthermore, it is doubtful whether they are genuine instances of image consciousness; it seems more likely that they are direct phantasies of an imaging situation, as when an artist might phantasy a potential picture phantasied precisely as a picture. The intention in phantasy “aims at an object in a direct way” (Husserl 1981 Hua XXIII, 161; 2005, 192).

Chapter 4

From “Natural Attitude” to Transcendental Idealism Continuousness, or Logical Conflict? Jean-François Lavigne

The object of the present study is one of the most fundamental and recurring problems that Husserl meets in his effort to secure for transcendental phenomenology an absolute epistemological justification, that is, to develop a “phenomenological critique of phenomenology itself.”1 The problem is to know in what way natural attitude and transcendental attitude are connected with one another. How is their relation to be understood, if it is indeed at the same time a logical and a methodological relation? From a logical point of view, there seems to be an opposition, and even a thorough incompatibility, between the thesis of actual existence implied, according to Husserl, in the natural attitude of consciousness in naïve world experience, on the one hand, and the phenomenological reduction as transcendental on the other, since the latter consists in ceasing to hold to this belief, and in suspending such a thesis. If the phenomenological reduction is transcendental, it includes a radical epoche toward any actual reality, which is strictly contrary to the spontaneous realism of the natural attitude. But from a methodological point of view, the phenomenological reduction works as the unique coherent way out of the contradictions of naturalistic theory of knowledge, and so it is due to replace the natural attitude as an adequate fundamental position in general epistemology. Therefore, the natural attitude should in some way or other lead to the transcendental reduction, since the latter plays the part of a key-mediation between two symmetrical, and equally possible, “attitudes.” But, if there must be a methodologically continuous transition between the natural attitude and the phenomenological attitude, what becomes then, in this practical continuity,

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of their logical conflict? If these two attitudes contradict one another on the essential point of the very sense of the being of reality, one of them must necessarily be true and the other one false. Or, if they are not contradictory, should one suppose that there is a hidden link of dependence between them, so that the phenomenological attitude, though it seems to free itself from the natural attitude and its immediate realism, would actually remain under its dependence, and so tacitly continue it? So this is a true dilemma, the stake of which is essential. At least, before endeavoring to reach a decision, we can agree on the following point: Husserl’s well-known insistence on the ultimate validity of his radically idealistic interpretation of transcendental constitution urges us to clarify the point, whether the “natural” comprehension of being, as ontological independence, is a mere illusion or, on the contrary, contains a certain amount of truth.

Husserl’s “Official” Doctrine: What is the “Natural Attitude”? Let me briefly recall the elements of the problem. First: What does Husserl call “natural attitude”? This concept includes a double purport, an intentional and an ontological one. The latter component does not appear until the transcendentalizing “turn” of the winter 1906–1907. Before that, during the years of the Logical Investigations and their publication, this expression of “natural attitude” names the fact that immediate consciousness is directed straight toward its objects, in an unreflective attitude. From 1907 on, Husserl adds a second, ontological determination, according to which the natural attitude consists in taking reality as a mere matter of fact that is non-problematic and does not deserve being questioned. In this sense he wrote in his first lecture of May 1907: The natural attitude of the mind is not concerned with the critique of knowledge. In such an attitude, our attention is turned—in acts of intuition and thought—to things given to us, and given as a matter of course, even though they are given in different ways and in different modes of being, according to the source and level of our knowledge of them. In perception, for example, a thing stands before us as a matter of course. It is there, in the midst of other things, both living and lifeless, animate and inanimate. That is, it stands before us in the midst of a world. (Husserl 1973, 15)

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Husserl characterizes this immediate existence of worldly beings, which is prior to any kind of knowledge, as being sein an sich, and will then, from that time on, always designate it with a term already present in the Logical Investigations, and in the lessons of the subsequent years2 (though with an adequately different meaning): “transcendence.” Thus, the general concept of “natural attitude” is settled rather soon, after 1907, in accordance with its future classical definition in Ideas I, as the spontaneous belief in the existence of the world on the mode of transcendence.

The Transcendental Reduction as “Putting Out of Play” (Ausschaltung) The notion of natural attitude enables us to understand the concept of transcendental reduction. Husserl’s “official” teaching—so to speak—defines the transcendental reduction as the putting out of play (or “switching off”) (Ausschaltung) of the natural attitude. This operation includes two distinct aspects. It is first an epoche, which consists in “suspending” our “natural” agreement with the so-called unproblematical obviousness of the transcendence of reality. By this epoche the positing of transcendence implied within perception is not abolished; while consciousness no longer takes part in it, this act of positing remains present within the subjective experience as one of its components. However, this first step of reduction is not sufficient. It protects indeed against the risk of a petitio principii in accounting for the possibility of knowledge,3 but it does not establish the necessary critique of knowledge itself. What is still needed within these previously “suspended” data—this is the second aspect—is a reflection upon the cognitive act, which lets these first phenomenal data appear, and appear as conscious experiences of the living ego. Thanks to this reflective self-apprehension of the living act of perception, this perception, through which reality appears as transcendent, appears itself to the perceiving ego as his act, and so the reductive parenthesizing of transcendence leads directly to the manifestation of the unbreakable functional solidarity that links the appearing transcendence of the perceived thing with the subjective operation of the intentional act of consciousness, and with the identification syntheses that this act performs. As a consequence, the object formerly perceived as transcendent is brought back to its subjective origin and genesis in the synthetic and positing activity of the pure ego. This act of “bringing back” the object to the noetic act is what Husserl calls the Rückführung, which characterizes exactly the core and essence of the phenomenological “re-duction.”

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Two Successive Ways of Conceiving and Practicing the Reduction in Husserl’s Development. (1902–1906 and 1906/1907–1913) It must be added, however, that this reductive turning back of reflection toward the intentional act does not necessarily lead to a transcendental interpretation of constitution. This is so true that Husserl himself, in a first stage of his research, from the publication of the Logical Investigations to the autumn of 1906, began to practice this reductive reflection without any transcendental tenor. For there are in Husserl’s writings two different and successive conceptions of the “phenomenological reduction.” The first form of phenomenological reduction is gained by excluding the transcendent object out of the phenomenological field. He designates it by expressions like Ausschluß, (exclusion) and stehen lassen or stehen bleiben lassen (to leave something apart, without any concern about it). The second one, which was discovered and theorized for the first time—according to Rudolf Bernet—at the end of 1906, is a reduction obtained by inclusion: instead of “leaving apart” transcendence outside the phenomenological sphere, it consists in enclosing the transcendent object, such as it is intentionally pointed to, within the intentional experience itself (especially in the case of perception). The first reductive phenomenology was, as it were, “immanentistic,” because it defined phenomenological immanence according to a Cartesian and minimal understanding of reduction as residing inside the internal space of noetic life and consisting in “real” (reell) contents of consciousness. The second phenomenology, by contrast, is transcendental because, without exceeding the limits of what is actually given to consciousness and experienced as such (the famous Gegebenheit), it has the power to account for the conscious genesis of the intentional object as transcendent. In this widened new field of the phenomenological reduction, thanks to the inclusion of the transcendent object of perception, Husserl acquired the means to reinterpret transcendence as a form of “intentional immanence.” It is this reduction to the data of intentional immanence which he calls, from that time onwards, Ausschaltung. It is the transcendental phenomenological reduction.

From Reduction to Transcendental Constitution: Toward a Foundation of Transcendental Idealism? In an unpublished note, Husserl wrote down for himself a brief reflection and comments on his lecture course of the winter term 1906–1907 (Logik

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und Theorie der Erkenntnis, Husserl 1984, Hua XXIV), and especially on the decisive turn he had just accomplished by including the transcendent intentional object within the field of the phenomena and establishing thereby his new conception of immanence. In this note we find strikingly clear evidence that, towards Christmas eve of this year 1906, Husserl had already perceived the far, but direct, ontological consequence of that new conception of intentionality: by becoming transcendental, constitution could not but lead to an idealism of absolute subjectivity, according to which reality would rest entirely on the sole foundation of the being of consciousness, then conceived of as an absolute being. This is exactly what he writes—still with slight hesitation—in the personal note published as Beilage B.XIV in Hua XXIV. Not long afterward, in the five introductory lectures of May 1907 where he expounded for the first time this new theory of consciousness as “pure consciousness,” Husserl develops and already systematizes this ontological foresight. In a first step, the “gnoseological” reduction (although it is already transcendental, even if Husserl does not call it so yet) secures a methodical access to the field of pure subjective experiences, the “phenomena of phenomenology.” Then, in a second step, the descriptive-eidetic analysis of these typical experiences, in which perceptive objects are given through “adumbrations,” results directly in the discovery of the general ontological theorem: world as a whole is originally constituted in the flow of absolute consciousness.

Conclusion: Husserl’s “Official” Discourse Upon the Logical Path Leading from the Natural Attitude to Transcendental Idealism, through the Reduction This is the logical scheme that will be retained by Husserl’s “official” discourse, when he wants to ascertain a continuous connection between natural and phenomenological attitude, and explain the way the phenomenological attitude can be established as well as the relation it has with the general metaphysical thesis that will become the culminating point of his philosophical position, reiterated into the 1930s. This position is the well-known thesis of absolute transcendental idealism, solemnly asserted in section 41 of the Cartesian Meditations. The logical scheme works as follows: the validation of phenomenological transcendental idealism as an unavoidable conclusion requires the all-embracing application of constitution, understood as transcendental

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constitution. But this understanding of constitutive genesis demands, as a previous step, that one has already taken up transcendental reduction as a methodical position. So, the phenomenological attitude imposes itself as the indispensable condition of any understanding and assumption of Husserlian transcendental idealism.

The Problem of the Motives of Transcendental Reduction It is easy to see what problem results from the transcendental reduction. When we analyze intentional object-experiences—especially perceptions—it seems that it is already by effectuating the transcendental reduction that we can apprehend these constituting acts as the ultimate and absolute origin of the very being of those objects (and not only, according to a psychological understanding of phenomenology, as a mere condition of their appearing to an individual subject). In addition, it is this way of understanding constitution—precisely as transcendental—that makes phenomenological idealism valid. All this makes it difficult to avoid a fundamental question: What are then the first motives that can impose such a reduction, that is, understanding the phenomenological reduction as transcendental? If transcendental reduction is the only and indispensable “sesame” that gives access to the field of transcendental life and its pure phenomena, what can convince the “natural attitude” thinker to adopt such a theoretical procedure, in which he could not feel simply interested unless he were already believing in the existence of such a transcendental life, believing that the flow of consciousness possesses such powers? It seems that he should have, paradoxically, already completed the ontological “conversion” to which Husserl wants to introduce him. To put it succinctly, if phenomenology wants to avoid being enclosed in an impenetrable hermeneutical circle, phenomenology must determine the concrete conditions of a continuous mediation between natural attitude—as our immediate belief in being’s absolute transcendence—and transcendental reduction.

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From the Natural Attitude to the Transcendental Phenomenological Reduction: A Link of Continuous Motivation The Idea of Phenomenology: The Access to Phenomenological Reduction Relies on the Presupposition of the Natural Attitude. The path of logical continuousness is the one that Husserl tried first to follow, in order to lead without any gap from the natural attitude to the transcendental reduction. He did so in his five lectures in The Idea of Phenomenology. Indeed, in these lectures the epoche of transcendence is the logical result of the skeptical crisis into which the perceiving and knowing subject has fallen, as a direct consequence of “natural reflection,” that is, of the natural attitude becoming reflective. In the first lecture Husserl writes: Once reflection on the relation between knowledge and the object is awakened, abysmal difficulties open up. . . . Thus far, however, we still stand on the ground of natural thinking. But it is precisely this correlation between epistemic experience, meaning, and object . . . that represents the source of the deepest and most difficult problems, which, taken together, comprise the problem of the possibility of knowledge. In all of its manifestations, knowledge is a mental experience: knowledge belongs to a knowing subject. The known objects stand over against it. How, then, can knowledge be sure of its agreement with the known objects? (Husserl 1950 Hua II, 19–20; 1973, 16–17, passim) This text shows very clearly that the very problem which awakens epistemological skepticism, and in which, consequently, the logical necessity of transcendental epoche originates, cannot appear but in the context of the natural attitude, and on the basis of its assumed validity. The “enigma” of the possibility of knowledge, radically understood as the “enigma of transcendence” itself, rests upon the psychological opposition between the known object and knowledge as a mental act—an opposition which undeniably includes the “natural thesis” of the “external” world. Thus, one must conclude from Husserl’s first methodological foundation of the phenomenological attitude that the transcendental-Cartesian way to the reduction in 1907 continues to presuppose, as its implicit and persistent basis, the spontaneous ontological “realism” of the natural attitude— under the form of a psychological reflection on the acts of consciousness.

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Ideas I: Transcendental Idealism Comes First. In Ideas I, Husserl tries to lead his reader from the “naïve” natural thesis to transcendental attitude by following a reverse order of progress: here, reduction is not presented as a preliminary methodological condition for the analyses meant to end in his transcendental-idealistic position. Rather, the double idealistic thesis (as formally stated in § 49) must be established first—this is the one and final aim of the whole series of analyses developed from § 33 to § 48—in order to justify and authorize afterward the actual and definitive practice of transcendental reduction. This reversal becomes obvious if one takes notice of the fact that, whereas the epoche of natural attitude had already been defined as soon as § 30–32, Husserl does not come to actually operating transcendental reduction until § 50, where one can—at last!—read: It is clear now that in fact, as opposed to the natural theoretical attitude whose correlate is the world, a new attitude must be possible [My emphasis], which, even when the whole physical nature has been cancelled, lets something remain, that is, the whole field of absolute consciousness. So, instead of living in a naïve way in the experience, and of submitting the empirical sphere of transcendent nature to a theoretical research, let us accomplish the “phenomenological reduction.” (Husserl 1976 Hua III/1, 106. My translation) Clearly Husserl accomplishes here the phenomenological reduction only after the principle of the very possibility and legitimacy of the new attitude has been ascertained. The previous stage consisted in justifying this possibility. The content of this previous stage is summarized in these terms: So, the usual meaning of the words “to be” is reversed. The being which for us comes first, in itself is second, i.e., what it is, it is only relatively to the first . . . Reality, either reality of a singular thing or reality of the world taken as a whole, does not imply, by essence (in the rigorous sense we have adopted) any autonomy. It is not in itself something absolute, which would be linked secondarily with another absolute; it is, in the absolute sense of the word, strictly nothing.” (Husserl 1976 Hua III/1, 106) It appears, then, that the content of this former justifying step consists exactly in establishing transcendental phenomenological idealism. And indeed, the very last lines of § 49 have hardly concluded the whole sequence of the forecoming analyses (§ 34 to 48) by settling the complete ontological relatedness of the real world to consciousness:

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The whole space-time world has, in virtue of its own sense, a being which is merely intentional . . . This being is posited by consciousness in its own experiences . . . as what remains identical through the motivated multiple appearances—but a being which, beyond this identity is a nothing [d a r ü b e r h i n a u s aber ein Nichts ist]. (Husserl 1976 Hua III/1, 106. Husserl’s italics) The metaphysical thesis of transcendental idealism is the foundation on which rests the legitimacy and right of the phenomenological reduction. It is not the phenomenological reduction that is the fundamental condition of transcendental idealism. If transcendental idealism can be valid before the reduction, this implies that transcendental idealism is true without the reduction. But then, if transcendental idealism is validated and demonstrated on the basis of a non-reductive epistemological and ontological attitude of mind, what kind of attitude can that be? Would it be on the basis of the natural attitude? Indeed, surprisingly enough, this is the case. Husserl never tires of claiming in the most explicit way that this demonstration of the necessity of acknowledging reality’s radical ontological dependence toward consciousness is rooted in the natural attitude and in its upholding all along this logical process. By doing so, he wants to give the “most striking turn” to what he planned to be a progressive access to transcendental life,” as he will later explain in his Nachwort zu meinen Ideen for the English edition in 1930. As a matter of fact, the “Fundamental phenomenological considerations” of the Second Section begin on the ground of the natural attitude, opening up with a description of the so-called “world of natural attitude.” In fact, as a thorough examination of §§ 27 and 28 shows, Husserl does not describe the world such as “naïve” natural consciousness conceives it (as a whole set of transcendent beings, existing on their own, independently of any knowledge or any knowing subject), but the world of perceptive experience as viewed from the standpoint of descriptive intentional psychology, which was the scientific standpoint of his Logical Investigations. And it is indeed within natural attitude that this intentional psychology considers all “spontaneous activities of consciousness.” Their active subject is the empirical ego, which is found inside the world quite as much as any other perceptible thing: “Continuously I can find myself [bin ich mir vorfindlich] as somebody who perceives, represents himself, thinks, feels, desires, etc.” (Husserl 1976 Hua III/1, 59 [My emphasis])

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And the same psychological approach of conscious experiences prevails in § 33 as the fundamental methodological position of the following intentional analyses (§§ 35–38); Husserl writes then: Let us go straight ahead in our discoveries . . . The starting point of our analyses will be this “I,” this consciousness and these experiences which are given us in natural attitude. I am—I, the man actually existing—a real object [in reales Objekt] as other object included in the natural world. I perform some “cogitations,” “acts of consciousness” . . . and these acts, since they are accomplished by a human subject, are events situated in the same natural reality. (Husserl 1976 Hua III/1, 67) On such a basis, reducing the perceived thing to an intentional correlate, hence the phenomenological reduction associated with the claim that in so doing nothing from its being would be left apart, would be a kind of transcendental psychologism. But such a psychologistic subjectivism is the exact opposite of what Husserl thinks he has attained by stating the transcendental idealism of his Ideas I! Hence the necessary hypothesis that, between the psychological-reflexive start and the new apprehension of conscious experiences as “pure phenomena” referred to as “transcendental subjectivity,” another modification of the original natural attitude must have occurred. The new problem is then to determine what peculiar modification this is, and if this new methodological mediation is sufficient to justify the idealistic conversion.

Eidetics The cognitive process that is meant to enable Husserl’s intentional reflexive analyses to escape psychologism and avoid the trap of a non-transcendental (“Berkeleyan”) idealism is distinctly indicated in two passages of § 33, where Husserl chooses to characterize, anticipatorily, the aim of his “preparatory analyses”: if these analyses are to unveil a new “region of being” (Seinsregion), which is to be apprehended in its “specificity” (Eigenheit) because it is characterized by a “specific way of being” (Eigensein) and implies an “absolute specific essence” (absoluten Eigenwesen), they cannot bear on singular and empirical facts, but on the essence (or eidos) involved in them, as this essence makes the—universal—specificity of each empirical fact. To put forth “consciousness” in general as being “by principle a

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specific region of being” is thus only possible in the context of a regional ontology of experiences of consciousness —that is, in an eidetic approach. That is why in § 34, just after characterizing the applied method as “psychological reflection,” Husserl adds: Let us immerge ourselves, exactly as though we did not know anything of the new sort of attitude, in the essence of the “consciousness of something”; let us obey our general principle according to which each individual event has its essence, that can be seized in its eidetic purity, and that, in this purity, must belong to the field of a possible eidetic science. In those conditions, the natural universal fact that I express by saying “I am,” “I think,” “I have a world in front of me,” etc. implies also its own eidetic tenor. (Husserl 1976 Hua III/1, 69) And a little further, in the same passage, we can read: Let us consider the conscious experiences, with all the concrete content with which they take place in their concrete sequence—the flow of subjective life . . . It becomes then obvious that in this flow each singular experience that reflection can point out has an essence of its own, that it is the task of intuition to apprehend, a “content” which can be considered in itself and with respect to its specificity [in seiner Eigenheit für sich betrachten]. We must apprehend and characterize in general this peculiar tenor of the cogitatio according to its pure specificity. (Husserl 1976 Hua III/1, 61) The new methodological device by which Ideas I intends to lead the reader to the logical necessity of phenomenological transcendental idealism consists in submitting psychical intentional experiences, as objectivated by reflection, to eidetic intuition or ideation.

Nevertheless, the Logical Opposition Remains. Psycho-Phenomenological Reduction and Transcendental Phenomenology Once the method of eidetic reduction (or “ideation”4) is adopted and applied, in the service of an eidetic analysis of living intentional experiences in general, does the phenomenological research still remain on the ground of psychology? The eidetic study of consciousness is no longer psychology, if one conceives psychology, according to Husserl, as an empirical

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science that bears only on matters of fact. But one may as well consider it is still psychology, if one takes into account that—as Husserl repeatedly underlines—it has not left the “ground of the natural attitude,” and that, consequently, the lived experiences to which it keeps related, through the indirect mediation of the description of their typical essences, are and remain, undeniably, natural empirical facts. In this way, the very possibility of realizing through a “regional ontology” as an a priori eidetic study of intentional experiences the ontological transition from natural to transcendental attitude appears dubious and problematic. Husserl himself states it, with great clarity and insight, in the first version of the Encyclopaedia Britannica article, published in Phenomenological Psychology: A psychology could not be the foundation of transcendental philosophy. Even pure psychology in the phenomenological sense, thematically delimited by the psycho-phenomenological reduction, still is and always will be a positive science: it has the world as its pre-given foundation. The pure psyches and communities of psyches that it treats are psyches that belong to bodies in nature that are presupposed, but simply left out of consideration. Like every positive science, this pure psychology is itself transcendentally problematic. But the objectives of a transcendental philosophy require a broadened and fully universal phenomenological reduction (the transcendental reduction) that does justice to the universality of the problem, and practices an “epoche” regarding the whole world of experience and regarding all the positive cognition and sciences that rest on it, transforming them all into phenomena—transcendental phenomena. (Husserl 1968 Hua IX, 248–249 [My translation]) As we can see here, this paradoxical situation imposes a necessary distinction between two “phenomenological reductions” based on two fundamental differences. The first difference is ontological, since the second reduction (the transcendental one) objectivates and questions the implicit determination of being that the first reduction (the psychological one) presupposes; and the second difference is of a logical and epistemological nature: for only transcendental reduction is universal, enlarged beyond every limitation, so as to reduce the complete whole of all subjective intentional life (“all the positive cognition and sciences”) and all its correlates (“the whole world of experience”). This difference in the ontological position and epistemological scope is also reflected in a corresponding opposition

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between the two sorts of subjectivity that each of these reductions reveals, as to both their respective essence and their function: What results is the theme and method of present-day transcendental phenomenology. Instead of a reduction merely to purely psychic subjectivity (to the purely mental part of man in the world), we get a reduction to transcendental subjectivity by means of a methodical epoche regarding the real world as such and even regarding all ideal objectivities as well. (Husserl 1968 Hua IX, 249 [My emphasis]) However, even though both phenomenological disciplines are separated from the standpoint of their sense—of the meaning of their fundamental ontological position, of the scope covered by the reductive procedure, of the functional meaning of the subjectivity involved—they nevertheless strictly coincide as to their object, in its singular identity. Because their operation bears on exactly the same thing, numerically and eidetically identical: In a certain way, purely psychological phenomenology in fact coincides with transcendental phenomenology, proposition for proposition, except that what, under their respective assertions, we understand by the phenomenologically pure [realm] is, in the one case, the psychic, a stratum of being within the naturally accepted world, and, in the other case, the transcendental-subjective, where the sense and existential validity of the naturally accepted world originate. (Husserl 1968 Hua IX, 250 [My emphasis]) A little further on, Husserl states more precisely that the methodological parallelism of both phenomenologies is a “consequence resulting” out of the “parallelism between both spheres of experience, transcendental and psychological.” Now, this parallelism itself, as such, is not a consequence of the identity of the contents concerned—the “rough” or immediate contents of self-experience—but, obviously, of the fact that these contents of subjective life are liable to be apprehended in two different and rival ways. So, it is indeed the effect of the possibility and necessity of an “attitude modification.” Hence the conclusion that it is this shift in the apprehensive “attitude” which must finally be clarified, because everything else depends on it. The transition from psycho-phenomenological reduction to transcendental reduction, which this “attitude modification” is to operate, is finally motivated by the appearing of what Husserl calls “the transcendental problem.” When he comes to the point of precisely and descriptively

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determining the specific nature of reduction understood as transcendental, he points out, as its distinguishing property, that this reduction is realized “through a certain epoche,” which is merely a consequence of the universal epoche implied in the meaning of the transcendental problem: We would like to proceed here by introducing the “transcendental reduction” as built on the psychological reduction—as an additional part of the purification which can be performed on it any time, a purification that is accomplished once more by means of a certain epoche. This is merely a consequence of the all-embracing epoche which belongs to the meaning of the transcendental question. (Husserl 1968 Hua IX, 293 [My translation. My emphasis]) There is, thus, a continuous and direct relation between the nature of the “transcendental problem” and the essential sense of transcendental reduction: for this problem implies, as belonging to its very and proper meaning, a universal epoche—hence, the epoche of all knowledge of mundane reality— which provokes, as a “simple consequence,” the implicit practice of that methodical and voluntary epoche designated in Ideas I as the transcendental reduction itself. In other words, the systematic epoche, which is a transcendental reduction, is itself nothing else but a taking over of the universal epoche of objective knowledge, under the form of a deliberate, reflective and voluntary attitude—that is, as a method. This objective knowledge already belongs to the logical content of the “transcendental problem.” One may thus claim that the transcendental phenomenological reduction is both motivated and foreshadowed within the structure of this problem.

The Question of the “Attitude Shifting”: Its Nature and Its Effects What is, then, the original motive that makes the “transcendental question” problematical? This problematicity has in fact a double origin. On the one hand, it originates in the fact that consciousness is pre-apprehended at first as a closed inner sphere. On the other, the problem results from the fact that subjective intentional activity becomes the object of a reflective thematizing look, which makes it become an immanent object. Let me explain. What first conjures up the difficulty—the “problem”—is the fact that experience and knowledge, conceived as “merely subjective” acts appear incapable (even when reaching the utmost and plainest obviousness) of fulfilling the program inscribed in their very essence, that is, to reach and seize beings as really existing beyond subjectivity. The problematic character of

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the “transcendental problem” implies then, indeed, the ontological presupposition that being is absolute transcendence, and that, by contrast, subjectivity is a lesser being, limited by the necessary link binding all its objects to act-consciousness. This limitation is clearly designated, in Husserl’s text, by the metaphorical simile of an inner closed space: “every meaning it has for us is conscious in our proper inner perceptive life . . . Every being is validated within ourselves . . .” (Husserl 1968 Hua IX, 288 [My translation. My italics]). Now, presupposing the conception of being as absolute transcendence is none other than the natural attitude itself. So, the apprehension of subjectivity, and subjective knowledge, as being a problem that manifests itself as “transcendental problem,” is nothing but an avatar of the natural attitude, and consequently depends on its implicit persistence, as lastingly valid. It is to be noted that the natural attitude does not by itself give rise to such a problem: the problem arises only as a result of an essential modification of the spontaneous modality of the natural attitude: the conversion into a reflective attitude. It now appears that the intentional operation that raises the original problem out of which the transcendental reduction will spring is exactly identical to psychological reflection, as the fulfillment of psycho-phenomenological reduction: the presupposition of natural transcendence accompanied by reflective objectivation of experienced conscious acts. But where is the difference?

Universality: “All-Inclusiveness” of Transcendental Reduction Husserl states it clearly: the difference consists in the universal extension of the reflective objectivation, that is, in its ability to include absolutely everything. It is an all-inclusiveness, which means at the same time “global” and “without any exception”: “To the essential sense of the transcendental problem belongs its all-inclusiveness [Universalität], the all-inclusiveness in which it places in question the world and all the sciences investigating it” (Husserl 1968 Hua IX, 288 [My translation. My emphasis]). The difference between psychological reductive reflection and the reflection that generates the “transcendental problem” lies in the fact that the former reflects only this or that individual momentary act, for example the perception I am now experiencing. Never can psychological reflection embrace at a time, as a whole and at once, with the simultaneity and unity of a reflection involving every conscious activity, actual and possible, without any exception, the total infinite whole of all subjective life. The “transcendental problem,” by contrast, arises out of a “general” (allgemeinen; indeed, universal) conversion

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of natural attitude. The reflective look, when consciousness turns out to consider itself and so gives rise to the “transcendental problem,” is no more bound and limited to a peculiar theme: As soon as the theoretical interest abandons this natural attitude and, in a general turning around [in einer allgemeinen Blickwendung] of our regard directs itself to the life of consciousness, in which the world is for us precisely the world which is present to us, we find ourselves in a new cognitive attitude. (Husserl 1968 Hua IX, 288 [My translation. My emphasis]) Now, the strict universality of this way of objectivating—the ability to ensure a priori the absolute absence of the least exception—relies on its eidetic character. The proper theme of the reflection which gives birth to the transcendental problem is the eidos of “conscious experience” in general (überhaupt), of “objective sense” and “mundane object,” as identical contents embracing the whole infinite extension of the corresponding empirical cases.

Radicality Nevertheless, the all-inclusiveness of this reflection has still another dimension. Its generality is completed by radicality. Whereas psycho-phenomenological reduction leaves out of the reach of psychological reflection the whole field of being in itself as a characteristic ontological feature of mundane beings, Every acceptance of something as validly existing is brought about within ourselves; and every evidence establishing it, in experience and theory, is operative in ourselves, habitually and continually motivating us. This applies to the world in every determination, even that which is self-evident, and which entails that what belongs to the world, be it “in itself” and “for itself” as it is and whether or not myself or anybody happens to be aware of it. (Husserl 1968 Hua IX, 288 [My translation]) This radicalization of the reduction requires, then, that the ontological dimension of “being in itself” be nothing more, when considered in its essence (eidetically), than an element or content of sense. However, this latter requirement of transcendental reduction, now discovered as a radicalized version of psycho-phenomenological reduction, is already a reductive

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process, since it implies the equivalence of absolute ontological transcendence and intentional correlativeness! In becoming aware of this implicit condition, we reach the decisive point of the interpretation of the link between natural attitude and transcendental reduction. The universal reflection meant to give access to transcendental subjectivity implies, as an inner moment, and as the condition of the radicalization that gives the psychological reflection its transcendental meaning, a preliminary and implicit ontological reduction, before any phenomenological one. This (tacit and unthematic) ontological reduction consists in presenting as equivalent real transcendence and intentionally posited transcendence—or in simpler terms: transcendence and objectivity. Two consequences must be drawn out of these remarks: (1) The very access to transcendental subjectivity (to subjectivity conceived as transcendental) does not take place by passing to the phenomenological attitude, but already takes place before this passing, before the enigmatic “transition” from one attitude to the other: in the first universal reflection on the life of consciousness, which is the origin and principle of its motivation. (2) This universal reflection is at the same time the source of the “transcendental problem” and is even the transcendental reduction itself. It is to the implicit accomplishment of a true ontological reduction that universal reflection owes this remarkable ability to anticipate what seems to be its mere result.

Again the problem of motivation: the dialectics of motivation, between natural attitude and phenomenological attitude. The logical relation between the methodical and ontological attitude of what Husserl calls “pure phenomenology”—that is, phenomenological psychology—and the attitude of transcendental phenomenology is in the form of a “parallelism” because, independently of their content, it consists only in the possibility of an hermeneutical transposition. Thus, one may indeed assert a logical gap, or lack of continuousness, between the fundamental realism of psychological phenomenology and the radical transcendentalism of transcendental phenomenology, since it is impossible to shift from one to the other, if not by means of a modified attitude.

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Now, the philosophical claim about the determination of truth impels us to define the right criteria for a comparative appraisal of the motives that one can have, to interpret the data of purely descriptive and reflective phenomenology either in terms of an intentional psychology, or, rather, in terms of a transcendental constitution. We are impelled to choose to operate the famous and decisive “modification of the attitude” (Einstellungsänderung). Again here we have to face, in the last stage of our reflection, the question of ultimate motivation. But it is no longer with the same meaning. For now, under that name we do not understand a subjective motive any more. We are in search of the objective motivating data that work as the necessary conditions for this fundamental shift in attitude. Now if we look for these objective motives in each of the steps that have led us to transcendental phenomenology, we find that the relation between both attitudes reveals itself as dialectical. Let us fi nally characterize in a few words the main stages of this dialectics of phenomenological motivation. (a) First: The belief in the absolute transcendence (as being in itself) of reality is the ultimate datum that makes possible, as its implicit motive, the “transcendental problem,” as Husserl defines it. It is this problem that in turn works as the matrix of the “transcendental conversion”—and so, of transcendental reduction, which becomes itself stable and enduring, under the form of the “transcendental attitude.” At this stage, one may stress the fact that nothing but the implicit upholding of the natural attitude objectively motivates the reductive modification, in the sense that it makes it possible (through the transcendental problem) and necessary (in order to escape the skepticism of a mere psychological reduction). (b) Once we are established in this attitude of transcendental reduction, subjectivity is revealed to itself as original constitution of the transcendence of the world. Now, the relation of motivation reverts itself: it is the constituting life, apprehended in a transcendental sense (as radical and universal) that is the motivating power. It is this transcendental life that noetically motivates, through its constituting syntheses, the act of positing the world and its actual reality. Hence Husserl’s claim about the subjective foundation of the natural attitude, as the “thesis of natural world.”

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At this second stage, the relation is reversed: it is now the natural attitude that appears motivated, as far as it is dynamically constituted, through the intentional genesis. This is the moment of Husserl’s last ontological position: it is the moment of transcendental phenomenological idealism. (c) However, the original constitution of transcendence relies, in its turn, on motivating conditions. The conditions that allow this original noetico-noematic genesis are of two kinds: first, this constitution requires a formal condition: the original proto-donation of the “living present”; secondly, it requires also a material condition: the original proto-donation of new pure qualitative contents, as the matter or content of each new “original impression” (Urimpression). Now, it is the absolute emerging of this new qualitative content, utterly unforeseeable in itself, that finally plays the ultimately decisive part in the process of passive and original constitution of the things and the world. This is because it is the event of this new pure content that motivates and directs the course the apprehension synthesis will have to take and to follow, in order to give some intelligibility to perceptual experience and to the object. Thus, the most radical motivation of transcendental genesis belongs to an under-egological source, toward which transcendental subjectivity cannot but be passive. Subjectivity has neither any control of this source and of its original productions nor any initiative in respect of it. This source of primeval impressions and of time is within us although it works without us. It is before us, before any constitution of any ego and of its possible world, since it is the original source of both egological consciousness and things. (d) So, finally, the motivating relation reverses itself again, and this time in favor of a new kind of transcendence. This sort of transcendence is new, because it escapes radically, right from the origin, the dual opposition between world and consciousness, between natural attitude and transcendental attitude—at least, as far as we understand this last phrase according to Husserl, that is, in the context of his transcendental idealism. This new radical transcendence is, at the same time, on this side and beyond the whole process of phenomenal appearing. Consequently, this transcendence—which deserves to be qualified as absolute—originally neutralizes the claim of transcendental subjectivity to be an absolutely closed, and self-sufficient, sphere of being.

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Notes 1

2

3

4

See: “Instead of dealing here with further and ultimate problems of Phenomenology, we preferred to outline in their main features the immensely difficult problems of the first phenomenology, somehow still affected by a certain naïveness . . . We preferred it to the whole investigations forming the self-criticism of phenomenology, which aims at determining its scope, its limits, but also the modes of its apodicticity.” It is precisely a brief sketch of such a transcendental self-criticism of the meaning and scope of transcendental phenomenology, viewed as universal ontology, that we endeavour to outline here (Husserl 1999, Conclusion, § 63). In particular in the lectures of the winter semester 1901–1902 (unpublished manuscript F I 19). As Ingarden had perfectly understood from the very beginning (see his comments on the Cartesian Meditations; and also the Husserlian fundamental project of a “critique of knowledge,” as Husserl conceived of it as early as September 1906 (Husserl 1984 Hua XXIV, Beilage B IX, Personal remarks of 1906, September 25). As defined and exemplified in the lessons of Phenomenological Psychology: see Husserl 1968 Hua IX, §§ 9 and 10, 72–93; and according to the terminology of the 4th version of the Encyclopaedia Britannica article, section 4. See 284–285.

Part III

Heideggerean Variations Dasein’s Opening, Disclosure, and the History of Being

Chapter 5

Heidegger’s Hermeneutical Critique of Consciousness Revisited Burt C. Hopkins

In what follows, I will take fundamental issue with Heidegger’s critical claim that Husserl’s reflective and eidetic method is incapable of overcoming its ontological limitations. The ontological limitations that Heidegger claims are inseparable from Husserl’s reflective and eidetic method concern the structural limitations that condition their exclusive focus on discovering what there is to be discovered in entities with their perception. What is excluded by this focus is supposed to be the way to be of entities when they are not being perceptually apprehended and the interrogation of the meaning of their Being that is presupposed by this exclusive mode of their apprehension. Heidegger’s shorthand for this exclusive mode of apprehension is “discovery” and for that which it excludes “disclosure.” For Heidegger, then, entities are discovered and their Being and its meaning is disclosed. Husserl’s reflective and eidetic method (and not just his but any such method) is on Heidegger’s telling limited to the pure seeing of what can be discovered in entities, to what, Heidegger assures us, the Greeks (and presumably both Plato and Aristotle) understood as pure appearance, eidos in the sense of their “outward look.” Because of this, Husserl’s method is therefore supposed to be cut off from the disclosure of the Being of entities and the interrogation of both the meaning of their Being and that of Being overall (überhaupt). Rather than try to show that a reflective and eidetic phenomenological method can, indeed, disclose the Being of entities and interrogate the meaning of their Being, I will examine the phenomenological method Heidegger proposes is necessary in order to advance phenomenology beyond the limits posed by Husserl’s method. This will allow me to examine Heidegger’s critical methodical claims without necessarily presupposing the suppositions that guide them, namely, that the Being of entities is

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the most fundamental philosophical theme and that the question of the meaning of Being overall is philosophy’s most basic question. This manner of approaching Heidegger’s critique will also allow me to examine the presupposition that is implicit in his claim that ontology is only possible as phenomenology: it is only as ontology that philosophy is possible.

The Phenomenological Distinction between Fundamental and Universal Ontology Heidegger formulates the method of what he characterizes as the “preliminary concept” of phenomenology in terms of a “hermeneutic” of Dasein, wherein what is meant by hermeneutic is the “interpretation” (Auslegung) of the phenomenological self-showing of Dasein as an entity together with the meaning of Being that properly belongs to this entity. What makes this concept of phenomenology preliminary is its function to establish the horizon for what Heidegger characterizes as the “idea of phenomenology,” in which he projected (but never developed) the working out of an “existential concept of science” (Heidegger 1979, 357; 1962, 408) by clarifying “the meaning of Being and the ‘connection’ between Being and truth.” Heidegger calls the ontology executed under phenomenology’s preliminary concept “fundamental ontology,” to indicate its thematic focus on “making known” (kundgebegen) (ibid.) to “the understanding of Being that belongs to Dasein itself ” (ibid., 37; 62) the “proper meaning of its Being” together with its “basic structures” (ibid.). Opposed to fundamental ontology is the universal ontology projected by Heidegger, in the guise of the idea of phenomenology, in order to investigate entities other than Dasein and the meaning of Being overall. Heidegger envisaged the universal ontological interrogation of the Being of entities to issue from within the “horizon for all further ontological research” (ibid.) exhibited by the results of fundamental ontology. Heidegger positions the explicitly interpretative meaning of the method guiding the preliminary concept of phenomenology in explicit opposition to Husserl’s method, when he states, “that the methodological meaning of phenomenological description is interpretation” (Heidegger 1979, 36; 1962, 61). By interpretation he means the business of “wresting” from the objects of phenomenology their encounter in the mode of phenomenon, which is to say, making these objects manifest in their “self-showing.” Thus, in contradistinction to Husserl’s reflective and eidetic phenomenological

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method, the very structure of which assumes (according to Heidegger) that the objects of phenomenology are either already present and available for phenomenological cognition or, if presently unavailable, that they can, in principle, always be made available, on Heidegger’s view the proper objects of phenomenology are “proximally and for the most part” unavailable in terms of their self-showing. By the “objects” of phenomenology Heidegger means the Being of entities generally, and the Being of the entity Dasein in particular. What phenomenology “has taken into its ‘grasp’ thematically as its object” (Heidegger 1979, 35; 1962, 59) is something that “demands to become a phenomenon in a distinctive sense, in terms of its own most proper content [Sachgehalt]” (ibid.). And this can only mean that, at the outset, the “object” of phenomenology in Heidegger’s sense is not yet properly a phenomenon but, rather, precisely something that requires hermeneutic phenomenology’s methodical intervention in order to be brought to its self-showing. Strictly speaking, then, for Heidegger, phenomenology’s methodical concern is not with the Being of entities but with the phenomenon of the Being of entities. Heidegger situates this concern within the context of two basic claims. One, the question of Being and its urgency for philosophy as the fundamental question is something that needs to be reawakened. Two, the “primary meaning” (ibid., 37; 62) of the hermeneutical character of phenomenology, as the method proper to fundamental ontology, is “an analysis of the existentiality of existence” (ibid.). The basis of Heidegger’s first claim is his view that despite sustaining “the avid research of Plato and Aristotle” (Heidegger 1979, 2; 1962, 21), the question of Being has “from then on ceased to be heard as a thematic question of actual investigation” (ibid.). His second claim grows out of his “formulation” of the question of the meaning of Being on the basis of the “structural moments” belonging to a question in general. According to Heidegger, questioning, as a seeking, is guided by what is sought, which is “an entity with regard to the that and how of its Being” (ibid., 5; 24). The seeking inseparable from questioning has three moments: that which is asked about, that which is interrogated, and that which is to be found out by asking the question. After articulating the “formal structure” of the question of the meaning of Being in terms of these three structural moments, Heidegger then establishes both the ontic and ontological priority of the analysis of the structure of the Being of the questioner as the point of departure for the investigation of the meaning of Being overall. He does so by making “transparent” (ibid., 5; 25) “all the constitutive characters of the question itself” (ibid.) in a manner that, he claims, establishes this priority.

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The Circular Structure of the Questioning and Question about the Meaning of Being In the question of the meaning of Being, what is asked about is that which determines entities, Being; what is interrogated are these entities themselves in regard to their Being; and what is to be found out by asking the question is the meaning of Being. Heidegger maintains that despite the ignorance of the meaning of Being that is inseparable from the formal structure of asking the question about this meaning, three things can be established about Being by attending to this structure. One, that the very asking of the question presupposes the “average and vague” understanding of Being by the questioner. Two, that what is “asked about,” the Being of entities, “is” not itself an entity. And, three, that the entity that asks the question has a priority over all other entities. The average and vague understanding of Being by the questioner means that this entity is already determined in its Being without the availability of the explicit concept of this Being. Heidegger characterizes this determination as “existence,” in the precise sense that the questioner’s “way to be” is something that is always in question for it, and, as such, “an issue.” Thus the relation between this entity’s questioning of Being and the question of Being is a “concrete” circle, insofar as what is asked about in its questioning is something that it already—in a pre-conceptual manner— understands. Heidegger insists that this way of working out the connection between questioning and the question in the case of the meaning of Being is not a “circular proof,” and he also maintains that the questioner’s preconceptual understanding is what is behind both its ontic and ontological priority for answering the question about this meaning. The questioner is ontically prior because its Being, as an entity, is defined by existence. It is ontologically prior because the pre-conceptual understanding of Being definitive of its existence “includes an understanding of the Being of all entities unlike itself” (Heidegger 1979, 13; 1962, 34). Now it is precisely this ontico-ontological priority of the questioner that Heidegger maintains deprives of its priority Husserl’s understanding of phenomenological cognition. Because what is asked about in the question of the meaning of Being is not an entity, Husserl’s reflective and eidetic method, which is limited in its very structure (according to Heidegger) to describing that which can be discovered in entities on the basis of consciousness’ intentional (and therefore perceptual) comportment toward them, is incapable of interrogating the understanding of Being characteristic of the existence of the entity whose very existence makes possible the disclosure of the Being of entities that makes possible, in turn, their discovery. In direct opposition to Husserl’s articulation of the basic structures of entities

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in terms of their categorial or (equivalently for Heidegger) eidetic structure, Heidegger’s hermeneutic of Dasein articulates the structure of its existence, or, more precisely, the structure of the self-showing (phenomenon) of its existence, in terms of what he calls “existentials”—structures of existence. Thus, not only does it have to be said that for Heidegger the proper object of phenomenology is not the Being of entities but the selfshowing of this Being, it also has to be said that it is not the self-showing per se that is of concern for him, but its structure. As mentioned, because this self-showing is proximally and for the most part unavailable—at least, initially—phenomenological description assumes the guise of interpretation according to Heidegger. For our purposes, the consideration of one such interpretation, namely, of the existentials that structure what Heidegger terms the “wherein of intelligibility,” “meaning,” will be considered with a view to answering the following questions: What is the understanding of structure that guides Heidegger’s existential analytic disclosure of the basic structures of the “there” wherein the Being of entities is disclosed? And what is the source of the “sight” that thematizes and presumably grasps or otherwise makes known these basic structures?

Heidegger’s indefinite postponement of the discussion of the connection between categories and existential structures We have seen that Heidegger initially establishes the structure of the question about the meaning of Being and the ontico-ontological priority of the Being of the questioner on the basis of appeals to the formal structural moments of, first, any question, and then, the question of the meaning of Being. Curiously, especially given their importance for Heidegger’s ontological refashioning of phenomenology, the status of the formality of these formal structures is not addressed by him. But Heidegger does address, if only to postpone indefinitely, an account of the connection between the self-showing of the “existence structure” (Existenzstruktur) (Heidegger 1979, 45; 1962, 71) of Dasein, which as a “whole” is composed of “being characters” determined by “the existentiality of its existence” (ibid., 43; 69), and that of the categories of the tradition, which refer to the “what,” the presence, of an extant (Vorhanden) entity whose being character is other than existence. Not “until the horizon for the question of Being has been clarified” (ibid., 45; 71) can “the connection between these modes of being characters be dealt with” (ibid.) and, as mentioned, Heidegger never realized the project of a universal ontology that was to take its departure from this horizon. Hence, he never addressed this connection.

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This is significant on two related counts. First, in Heidegger’s reformulation of phenomenology it is not clear what the relation is between the ontologically restricted categorial structures of the what, which, according to Heidegger, both defi ne Husserl’s method and determine its phenomenological limits, and “the existential structures in which the Being of the ‘there’ holds itself ” (Heidegger 1979, 142; 1962, 182). Thus, Heidegger’s account of the existential structures that guide the hermeneutic clarification of the horizon for the question of Being does not address precisely how, in its self-showing, the structural moment of a category is to be distinguished from the self-showing of the structural moment of an existential. And, second, related to this structural issue, precisely how Heidegger’s hermeneutic method achieves access to existential structures remains a mystery. For Husserl, as is well known, the reflective thematization of a multiplicity is clearly requisite for the “seeing” and apprehension of the categorial structure of an entity. What about the “seeing” guiding Heidegger’s hermeneutic method? As mentioned, he clearly understands reflection as a derivative manner of securing access to the structure of phenomena. But does he also reject the requirement of a multiplicity, which for Husserl provides a basis for the comparisons from out of which the structure of a phenomenon is uncovered? As we will see from our consideration of Heidegger’s account of the existential structures within which the “there” holds itself, he remains silent about the methodical role of multiplicity in “the logos of the phenomenology of Dasein” (ibid., 36; 61f), which, as we have seen, “has the character of hermêneuein” (ibid.).

The Structural Whole of Dasein’s Most Basic Phenomenon is a Phenomenal Multiplicity But that “the structural whole” (Heidegger 1979, 180; 1962, 225) of the most basic phenomenon proper to Dasein is composed by a “phenomenal multiplicity (Vielfältigkeit)” (ibid.) is something to which Heidegger calls explicit attention. This phenomenon, “being-in-the-world,” characterizes the “way” that Dasein, qua existing, is its there: as the “clearing” that makes possible the encounter with entities, both like and unlike the entity Dasein. Heidegger writes that being-in-the-world “is a structure which is originally and constantly whole” (ibid.) even if “the unified phenomenological view of the whole as such” (ibid.) is easily distorted because of this very multiplicity. One crucial component of the phenomenal multiplicity is the existential

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structure of “understanding” (Verstehen). “Understanding” for Heidegger is manifestly not a mode of knowing that arises “first from immanent selfperception” (ibid., 144; 184), but rather pertains to the most basic composition of being-in-the-world, which is tied to the “understanding of Being” that is inseparable from Dasein’s existential character of being. As an existential structure of this character of being, “understanding” is not “versed” (Gekonnte) (ibid.) in a “what” (ibid.) but in the disclosure of Dasein’s relation to itself and to inner-worldly entities with which it deals “for the sake of itself” (ibid.). This relation is most originally manifest in terms of definite possibilities from which Dasein cannot escape and upon which it, as existing, “has itself always already projected” (ibid., 145; 185) the “surge” (dringt) (ibid.) of its understanding qua its being-in-the-world. “Projection” is therefore “the existential structure which the understanding has in itself” (ibid., 145; 184f). The projective character of understanding, in turn, makes up what Heidegger characterizes existentially as “sight” (Heidegger 1979, 146; 1962, 186). This “sight” is coextensive with the “there” of Dasein’s disclosedness, and thus shows itself in both Dasein’s dealings with innerworld entities and in the orientation “towards Being over all, for the sake of which Dasein is as it is” (ibid.). Heidegger sharply distinguishes the existential structure of understanding’s “projective sight” from the traditional “seeing’ ” that orients philosophy as the way of its access to the Being of entities. Traditional “seeing” occurs when understanding’s projective sight is “formalized” to yield “access in general to entities and to Being” (ibid., 147; 187); this formalization is what is behind Heidegger’s claim that “ ‘[i]ntuition’ and ‘thinking’ are both already remote derivatives of understanding” (ibid.), including, of course, Husserl’s “pure intuition, which corresponds noetically to the traditional ontological priority of the extant” (ibid.).

Understanding’s Development as Interpretation: Meaning as the ‘Wherein’ of Intelligibility The whole composed of understanding’s projective sight “has its own possibility of development” (Heidegger 1979, 148; 1962, 188), which Heidegger calls “interpretation” (ibid.) Through “the recoil [Rückschlag]” (ibid.) of the possibilities disclosed by the understanding, understanding “becomes itself” (ibid.). Based “existentially in understanding,” “[i]nterpretation is not the acknowledgement of what has been understood,

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but rather the development of possibilities projected in understanding” (ibid.). This development culminates for Heidegger in “meaning [Sinn]” (ibid., 151; 192), characterized as “the formal, existential framework of the disclosedness belonging to understanding.” This framework is manifest as the “existential fore-structure of Dasein itself” (ibid., 153; 195), whereby interpretation “is never the presuppositionless grasping of something previously given” (ibid., 150; 191), but rather it is always “grounded” in an “existential” a priori, structured as a “fore having,” “fore sight,” and “fore conception.” “Fore having” characterizes the situation whereby interpretation is always grounded in the understanding of “entities, or Being” (ibid., 151; 193). “Fore sight” characterizes interpretation’s always being guided by a “perspective that fi xes that with regard to which what has been understood is to be interpreted” (ibid.). And, finally, “fore conception” characterizes interpretation’s either drawing the conceptuality belonging to what is to be interpreted from the entities themselves or Being itself, or else forcing them into concepts “opposed in their kind of Being” (ibid.). Heidegger’s account of meaning makes it clear that it “is an existential of Dasein, not a property that is attached to beings.” Therefore “only Dasein can be meaningful or meaningless” (Heidegger 1979, 151; 1962, 193) and this means that it “ ‘has’ meaning in that the disclosedness of being-in-theworld can be ‘fulfilled’ through the entities discoverable in it” (ibid.). His account also makes it clear that “when we ask about the meaning of Being, our inquiry does not become profound and does not brood on anything that stands behind Being, but questions Being itself in so far as it stands within the intelligibility of Dasein” (ibid., 152; 193). And Heidegger is consistent in the conclusion he draws from this: “strictly speaking, what is understood is not the meaning, but entities, or Being” (ibid., 151; 193), from which it also follows: that “[t]he meaning of Being can never be contrasted with entities or with Being as the supporting ‘ground’ of entities because ‘ground’ is only accessible as meaning, even if that meaning itself is an abyss of meaninglessness” (ibid., 152; 193). That is, because both Being’s meaning and the ground of entities have their locus within Dasein’s intelligibility, neither can be contrasted with entities or Being per se, because this intelligibility has its source in the interpretive “recoil” of the understanding upon itself, the formal meaning structure of which Heidegger distinguishes from the entities and Being disclosed by the understanding’s original projective surge. Finally, Heidegger could not be more clear that his pursuit of the analysis of the “phenomenon of interpretation” (ibid.,

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148; 189) in Being in Time, which is the locus classicus for not only his but the hermeneutic development of phenomenology generally, is limited to “interpretation in the understanding of the world” (ibid.). Such interpretive understanding deals exclusively with inner-worldly entities that are on hand (zuhanden) and have already been understood and interpreted with regard to the mode of Being belonging to entities that are used “in-order-to” do something. What is not at all clear in Heidegger’s account of the phenomenon of interpretation, however, are two related issues. On the one hand, there is the issue of the character of the method that is responsible for making manifest the phenomenal structure of interpretation itself articulated in his analysis. On the other hand, there is the issue of the precise status of the structural distinctions that emerge in the analysis. To be sure, ready responses to both these issues are available and, indeed, have been appealed to for more than eighty years. The character of Heidegger’s method is hermeneutical, not reflective, and the structural distinctions are existential, not categorial. But these responses do not address satisfactorily the following issues. First, the source of the sight that presumably guides the phenomenological interpretation that makes manifest the phenomenal structure of interpretation. Second, precisely how this sight brings about the “thematization” of the existential structures Heidegger credits it with thematizing. And, third, the structural character of the most fundamental distinction governing his account of interpretation, namely, that between understanding and meaning. Because Heidegger restricts his analysis to interpretation in understanding the world, his account of the understanding’s recoil upon Dasein, such that this understanding comes to itself interpretatively, deals exclusively with how an inner-worldly entity “comes explicitly into the sight of understanding” (Heidegger 1979, 149; 1962, 189). His account of the way it does so, according to “the structure belonging to something as something,” is taken by him to characterize “the original ‘as’ of an interpretation [hermêneia]” (ibid.)—the so-called “existential-hermeneutical ‘as’ ” (ibid., 158; 210). The hermeneutical “as,” as the structure of interpretation, is contrasted with the “as” operative in the determining statement that manifests its explicitness, what Heidegger calls the “apophantical ‘as’ ” (ibid. ). Any “pre-predicative seeing” (ibid., 149; 189), therefore, is “in itself already understanding and interpretative” (ibid.), and its “ ‘as’ therefore does not first show up in the statement, but is only first stated, which is possible only because it is there as something to be stated” (ibid.).

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The Incompleteness of Heidegger’s Analysis of the Interpretative Character of Phenomenological “Description” This account of the hermeneutical “as” is clearly not presented by Heidegger as a general theory of interpretation, in the sense of advancing the claim that not just the interpretation of entities on hand in the world, but any interpretation, whether it be of entities or the Being of entities, is manifest according to the structure of something as something. As we have seen, he is quite clear that his analysis pertains to the interpretation of entities that are on hand in the world, as does the structure of the “as.” Unaddressed, then, by Heidegger in this analysis is the interpretation—in the sense of interpretation having the methodological meaning of phenomenological description—that functions both to make explicit and to articulate conceptually the fore structures of interpretation and its development into meaning in the case of understanding the world. That is, Heidegger articulates these structures and their development with respect to entities on hand in the world, but not with regard to the phenomenological interpretation that is carrying out the analysis of the existentials that structure the interpretive manifestation of inner-worldly entities. Unaddressed, then, is precisely how these structures of the interpretative understanding of the world show themselves interpretively to the interpretation characteristic of the phenomenological method that manifests them. Do they appear according to the structure of “something as something”? Perhaps “as” existential structures, seen within the “perspective” of existential structures? Moreover, what is the source of the “sight” guiding the phenomenological interpretation? This “sight” cannot be the same “sight” as the “sight” that structures the seeing of something as something, because the structure of this latter “sight” is something that is being seen by phenomenological interpretation, while the former “sight” is the “sight” doing the “seeing” of the phenomenological structure being seen. And, fi nally, what about Being? Is the structure of the interpretation of Being also governed by the structure “something as something”? But would this not be analytically impossible on the basis of Heidegger’s own distinction between the mode of self-showing of entities and their Being, because the former are discovered while the latter are disclosed? Given the incompleteness of Heidegger’s analysis of interpretation, these questions are as necessary as they are unanswerable on its basis. Heidegger, in fact, is himself not entirely unaware of this, as he describes ontological

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investigation as a “possible mode of interpretation” (Heidegger 1979, 231; 1962, 275), namely, “an interpretation [Auslegung], as Interpretation [Interpretation]” (ibid., 232; 275), which “becomes an explicit task for research.” His account of ontological Interpretation, which adumbrates rather than fully caries out such an Interpretation, is very instructive for our purposes. His account stipulates that the ontological Interpretation of the Being of an entity must first bring into the fore having the phenomenal characterization of the thematic entity, to which the following steps of the analysis must conform. These steps require, however, at the same time guidance through the possible fore sight towards the mode of Being belonging to the entity. And this fore having and fore sight then trace out the conceptuality that will bring into relief the structures of Being. (ibid.) In the case of the entity Dasein, the ontological projection operative in its existential Interpretation takes as its clue “the ‘presupposed’ idea of existence as such” (Heidegger 1979, 313; 1962, 361), which has the character of an understanding projection in which such understanding allows the developing Interpretation of that which is to be interpreted to come itself into words for the very first time, so that it may decide of its own accord whether it, as this entity, yields the composition of being upon which it has been disclosed in projection in a formal indicative manner. (ibid., 314f; 362) Heidegger’s account here, with its reference to the fore structures of meaning, suggests that the analysis of the interpretation of inner-worldly entities is, in a sense, exemplary, such that even though the theme of the analysis is interpretation in understanding the world, the structure of interpretation made manifest by the analysis would not be limited to this thematic content. The absence of any reference to the “as” in Heidegger’s account of ontological Interpretation, however, makes it difficult to conclude one way or the other whether the structure of “something as something” is limited to inner-world entities or extends to the phenomenological interpretation of any existential structure whatever. In the latter case, presumably the interpretation of Being itself would be made explicit by the “as structure,” which, as already mentioned, would mean that the meaning of Being is structured existentially in the same way as the meaning of an entity.

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Heidegger’s Unwitting Exchange of “Seeing” with “Being Seen” in the Existential Structure of “Sight” For our purposes, however, settling these issues is not crucial. Even granting that the fore structures of meaning manifest the formal existential structure of any interpretive understanding whatever of any entity and of the Being of any entity whatever, Heidegger’s account of ontological interpretation, as the capital “I” Interpretation that becomes an explicit task for research, does not address the issue we have raised about the absence of an account of the methodical interpretation presupposed by the existential analytic. Rather, his account of ontological Interpretation, as taking its own methodical point of departure from the bringing into its own fore having the phenomenal characterization of the thematic entity whose structures of Being are to be traced out in its Interpreation, proceeds as if the methodical basis of the interpretation that makes manifest this phenomenal characterization has already been secured. That it has not been secured is patent in Heidegger’s account of ontological Interpretation as already operating within what he calls “the hermeneutical situation” (Heidegger 1979, 232; 1962, 275), namely, the “ ‘presuppositions’ ” that belong to every interpretation: fore having, fore sight, and fore conception. Thus rather than provide an account of the methodically interpretive sight that is presupposed in the being seen of the structures that compose the hermeneutical situation, Heidegger’s account of ontological Interpretation is exclusively concerned with having “a fore sight of Being,” which “must see it with respect to the unity of the possible structural factors belonging to it” (ibid.). The methodical “sight” guiding the interpretative method of either entities or the Being of entities is therefore not only not secured, but Heidegger’s account of ontological Interpretation proceeds as if the “fore sight” presupposed by the hermeneutical situation is also the source of the “sight” that makes this presupposition explicit. In other words, that which, in his own account of this situation is characterized as an existential structure of the “there” of Dasein and therefore a structure that is “being seen,” is also treated by him as being responsible for the “seeing” of the methodical sight that makes explicit this structure in its “being seen.” What is at issue in Heidegger’s failure to distinguish “sight” as an existential structure that is “being seen” and “sight” as the methodical “seeing” that is the source of this being seen is manifestly not the circular nature of interpretation as the development of understanding. Getting into the “hermeneutical circle” in the proper way prescribed by Heidegger, such that understanding is projected on the fore structures of meaning as the wherein of the intelligibility of anything, does not remedy the failure to distinguish the “seeing” and

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“being seen” of an existential structure that is presupposed by his account of the methodical interpretation that makes explicit the circularity of the hermeneutical situation. The problem here is not that interpretation and understanding are related as a circle but rather the unwitting exchange of what is the same and what is other in Heidegger’s account of the circularity of this circle. What is “other,” the “being seen” of the existential structure of fore sight, is taken to be something the “same” as the “seeing” that is responsible precisely for this “being seen.” Not only is this a mistake, but it is also a mistake that is not made by the phenomenological method that the hermeneutical method of phenomenology is designed to supersede. Transcendental phenomenological reflection clearly distinguishes the “being seen” of the object made thematic by the reflecting regard of phenomenology’s methodical reflection, the reflected object, from the reflective “seeing” that is the source of the thematization accomplished by this methodical regard. The latter is initiated by a reflection whose lived-experience is structurally distinct from the lived-experience that is reflected upon. Indeed, this distinction is confirmed by a “higher” level methodical reflection that encompasses both, the reflected and the reflecting, and thematizes their structural difference.

The fundamental presupposition of Heidegger’s hermeneutical reformulation of phenomenology: that to the being of entities there belongs a meaning of being overall Directly related to the methodical obscurity at the heart of Heidegger’s hermeneutical reformulation of phenomenology is the presupposition responsible for the most fundamental distinction governing its account of interpretation. This is the distinction between what is understood in understanding—an entity or entities, or Being—and meaning, which, as mentioned, is not a property attached to entities but the “wherein” of their intelligibility. By the presupposition responsible for the distinction we do not have in mind the supposition that, as objects of the understanding, entities and Being are distinct from their meaning as entities and Being made explicit in interpretation. Rather, the presupposition that concerns us is that there is a kind of “seeing” that is capable of “seeing” the difference between entities and Being and the meaning of entities and Being. As we have seen, Heidegger’s account of the fore having characteristic of understanding cannot see this difference, because the objects of its understanding are entities, or Being—not their meaning. And his account of the formal existential structure of interpretation as meaning rules out the

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possibility that the fore sight of understanding’s development as interpretation be a candidate for the “sight” responsible for “seeing” the difference in question. This is the case because this “sight” is a moment of the structural whole of “meaning,” while what is at stake in the presupposition we are calling attention to is a “sight” capable of “seeing” not just meaning, but also entities and Being, such that their difference is seen and thus made explicit as something being seen. Once the fore sight of interpretation is ruled out as the source of the sight that sees the difference in question here, the conclusion becomes unavoidable that Heidegger’s account of interpretation presupposes something other than what can be seen in the fore sight proper to interpretation, when it posits as fundamental the difference between that which is understood in understanding and that which is made intelligible in meaning. The “other” that is presupposed in the hermeneutical positing of a fundamental difference between entities and Being, on the one hand, and the meaning of entities and Being, on the other, therefore has the status of a whole that encompasses the distinction between entities, Being, and their meaning. Because the sight of interpretation cannot surpass the whereupon of its projection, namely meaning, it must presuppose that, when entities and Being are understood in understanding’s fore having, this understanding is unmediated by meaning; in addition, it must also presuppose that entities and Being are such as to have a meaning. In the case of the hermeneutical investigation of the question of the meaning of Being, then, these considerations lead to the unavoidable conclusion that Heidegger’s formulation of fundamental ontology is guided by the mereological presupposition that to the Being of entities there belongs a meaning of Being overall. The mistaking of what is other for the same in fundamental ontology’s account of the seeing and being seen of the fore sight proper to the hermeneutical situation, and the presupposition of something “other” than what can be seen by interpretation in its account of the relation between understanding entities and Being and the meaning of entities and Being, is no doubt what is behind Heidegger’s abandonment of the explicitly phenomenological phase of his philosophy in 1928. In his own words, “the question of the extent to which one might conceive the interpretation of Dasein . . . in a universal-ontological way . . . is a question which I myself am not able to decide, one which is still completely unclear to me” (Heidegger 1978, 271; 1984, 210). For the mistaking of the “being seen” of an existential for the “seeing” that is responsible for its “being seen” makes it impossible for the interpretation of Dasein to become explicitly ontological, that is, to

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thematize and eventually conceptualize the existential structures that are projected as the basis of ontological Interpretation. And the mereological presupposition operative in hermeneutic phenomenology, that to the Being of entities there belongs a meaning of Being overall, prevents fundamental ontology, in principle, from preparing the horizon for an interrogation of the meaning of Being overall.

Chapter 6

Transformations in Heidegger’s Conception of Truth between 1927 and 1930 László Tengelyi

From early on, the question of truth has occupied a central place in Heidegger’s thought. By drawing on Aristotle and Greek philosophy he tries to develop further and appropriate critically Edmund Husserl’s phenomenological concept of truth. His concern is to show that the original site of truth is not the proposition. Appealing to the Greek concept of ἀλήθεια, he conceives of pre-predicative truth as unconcealment. He also uses the term “openness” with a similar meaning. Already in Being and Time he assigns different concepts of pre-predicative truth to the different modes of being. For example, he differentiates the being-open (Erschlossenheit) of Dasein from the being-discovered (Entdecktheit) of the present-at-hand and the ready-to-hand. In § 44 of Being and Time, these reflections take on a firm shape. The thought of a pre-predicative truth is in complete harmony with the way Heidegger determines the phenomenon. If the statement, according to which the phenomenon is something that shows itself out of itself, is correct, then the phenomenon is from the outset characterized by an unconcealment or an openness. Nevertheless, the openness of the phenomenon can be concealed or dissimulated. It is in this sense that it is said in Being and Time: “Concealedness [Verdecktheit] is the counter-concept to ‘phenomenon’ ” (Heidegger 1979 SZ, 36; 1996, 31 [Translation modified]). The phenomenon of being, according to Heidegger, is precisely what is concealed and dissimulated. That is the reason why phenomenological ontology, following from the basic approach of Being and Time, can in no way be confined to a description and analysis of the phenomenon of being but must resort to a hermeneutic approach. But this approach always already presupposes a pre-ontological understanding of being. From this it follows

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that even the phenomenon of being is characterized by a singular kind of openness and unconcealedness. In many instances Heidegger in his terminology speaks of a disclosure (or disclosedness) of being. It is not only an ontic but also an ontological truth that belongs to the pre-predicative sphere. However, it is only after the drafting of Being and Time that the distinction between ontic and ontological truth is linked to the theme of ontological difference. This theme is indeed first touched upon in the Marburg lecture The Basic Problems of Phenomenology in the summer semester of 1927. In this lecture Heidegger also uses the distinction between being and beings to give the “phenomenological reduction,” which, in this text, he explicitly names, a new sense (Heidegger 1989 GA 24, 29; 1982, 21). These innovations show that Heidegger’s thinking at this time was still fully in flux. During the period 1927–1930, during which the outline of a metaphysics of Dasein is worked out and which, precisely because of this, can also be characterized as a metaphysical period, new insights come to the fore which also transform the earlier conception of truth. Certainly a lot remains unchanged. At the end of the 1920s, as before, Heidegger still has in view that very openness of the world that precedes predication and logos (in the sense of the proposition). Again and again he points to the pre-predicative—or also the pre-logical—openness, which according to him is a condition of possibility for the truth as much as for the falsity of the proposition. He claims that this pre-predicative openness is not to be understood as a correspondence between the representation and the thing itself. It is thus not an adaequatio rei et intellectus but simply arises out of the self-manifestation of beings out of themselves, along with their being and thus out of their ability to show themselves as what they are in themselves.1 Even when Heidegger, in the Freiburg lecture Introduction to Philosophy from the winter semester of 1928/1929, designates the prepredicative openness—particularly in its form as the unconcealedness of being—as “transcendental truth” (Heidegger 1976 GA 27, 207), it is only a case of expressing more crisply what he had already thought for a long time. Still, while the framework remains the same, new questions thrust themselves into it. This happens first of all in the above-mentioned Freiburg lecture. Here, what first becomes the object of new considerations is the relationship of correspondence between the various modes of being and the concepts of pre-predicative truth that are assigned to them. It is not the case, Heidegger insists, that “all the beings that are readily accessible to us are unconcealed in the same manner of openness” (Heidegger 1976 GA 27, 83). Assuredly,

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there exists a “uniform possibility of expression that extends over all occurrent beings” (82). This necessarily implies that an analysis of the proposition takes a “uniform manner of openness, unconcealedness, truth of beings” (82). However, the proposition is here not a good adviser. For, it is not even the original site of the truth. It pretends to a uniformity at the predicative level even though, at the pre-predicative level, we come across a manifold of heterogeneous modes of openness that correspond to the different modes of being. Heidegger no longer brings into consideration just two, but now four, modes of being: presence-at-hand, life, existence and perdurance (83). (The stone is present-at-hand, the plant and the animal live, the human being exists, and the number perdures.) The idea of a differentiation of modes of being and their corresponding forms of truth shows great promise. Despite this, Heidegger never comes around to developing this scheme. He rather contents himself with dealing again—albeit extensively—only with the two extreme modes: presence-at-hand and existence (84). As a consequence, the advance toward a new question remains confined to a sketch. The situation is different with two other questions. It is a notable peculiarity of the Freiburg lecture of 1928/1929 that the problem of truth is set in the perspective of being-with. Heidegger shows that being-with not only belongs always and necessarily to Dasein, but that this being-with is, in accordance with its nature, “always and necessarily a sharing in the truth” (Heidegger 1976 GA 27, 120). This idea of a shared truth is without doubt something new in the concept of unconcealedness, but it also acquires something of a merely supplementary status. By contrast, in the lecture The Basic Problems of Metaphysics: World, Finitude, Solitude from the winter semester of 1929/1930, Heidegger formulates a self-critique of his earlier conception of truth. This self-critique grows out of a new insight into the relationship between truth and freedom. In what follows, these two changes in the concept of truth as presented in Being and Time will be given a close consideration. Our reflection will, thus, be confined to Heidegger’s metaphysical period from 1927 to 1930.

Truth and Being-with-One-Another Already in Being and Time, Heidegger starts out with the idea that beingwith belongs to Dasein as an existential (Heidegger 1979 SZ, 120; 1996, 112–113). According to this idea, the being of Dasein is from the outset a being-with-others. Heidegger says: “Being-with is an attribute of one’s own

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Dasein; Mitda-sein characterizes the Dasein of others in that it is freed for a being-with by the world of that being-with” (ibid., 121; 113). The individuation (Vereinzelung) that is frequently mentioned in Being and Time has nothing to do with the danger of solipsism, which constantly threatened the “encapsulated,” “worldless” subject of modern philosophy. Rather it concerns an individuation (Vereinzelung) that presupposes the being of Dasein with others and thus also the Mitdasein of others. In addition to this, Heidegger indicates a distinction between existential being-with and factical being-with-one-another (ibid., 118f; 111–112). He allows no doubt to be cast upon the fact that a lack of being-with-one-another is not connected with a deficiency of being-with. That is to say: “The being-alone of Dasein, too, is being-with in the world” (ibid., 120; 113). Nevertheless the author of Being and Time was already accused immediately after the publication of his work of having isolated Dasein in its individuation (Vereinzelung) and not adequately focusing on the relationship between Dasein and the other in his investigations. In his last Marburg lecture Heidegger seems to address this objection when he says: “The approach that begins with neutrality does imply a peculiar isolation of the human being, but not in the factical existentiell sense as if the one philosophizing were the center of the world. Rather it is the metaphysical isolation of the human being” (Heidegger 1990 GA 26, 172; 1984, 137). Thus at this point Heidegger insists on characterizing Dasein in its “neutrality” through a “metaphysical isolation.” But he notes immediately that no solipsistic world-view follows from this “as if the one who philosophizes were the center of the world.” In all appearances the expression “metaphysical isolation” means nothing else than the fact that in the existential analytic—in opposition, for example, to the Platonic tradition or even to German Idealism—no pre-given unity (e.g., no unifying bond of spirit) binds from the outset the well-understood subject with its co-subjects. What we have here is a presupposition that is shared by most—perhaps even all—phenomenologists. To name only three thinkers, who have made a significant contribution to the phenomenology of intersubjectivity, we can mention the following: Edmund Husserl holds that the lifetime of the self is “separated by an abyss” (abgrundtief geschieden)2 from the lifetime of the other; Jean-Paul Sartre rejects the attempt to derive consciousnesses from the primordial fission of a spiritual totality as the “fragments of a radical explosion” (Sartre 1943, 361; 1956, 300) and Emmanuel Levinas battles against an original unity of consciousnesses presupposed in the manner of the French philosophy of spirit—the name of Jean Nabert is mentioned in the text (Levinas 1990, 182)—even if it is to search only “in reflection and

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its figures,” “without actually guaranteeing the possibility of a comprehensive reflection and unity of spirit beyond the multiplicity of souls” (ibid., 199). A separation by an abyss in Husserl, a separation (séparation) in Sartre and Levinas, a breaking away of consciousnesses (sécession des consciences) in Nabert (Nabert 1955, 115) express the same insight as the metaphysical isolation of Dasein in Heidegger. But that is only one side of the story. The other side is the task of making Dasein intelligible in its being-with with the other. To that end, Heidegger makes a new attempt in his first Freiburg lecture from the winter semester of 1928/1929 to the extent that he ponders the common givenness of truth as unconcealedness. However, the argument, in which this reflection finds expression remains bound to a presupposition that we have to bring out clearly before considering more closely the argument itself. Heidegger is convinced that a true community can emerge exclusively out of a common affair or task. Being-with-one-another means for him that “the many relate in different ways to the same thing” (Heidegger 1976 GA 27, 91). In the lecture from 1928/1929 Heidegger coins an emblematic expression for this conception. He gives the example of two wanderers who catch sight of two boulders at a scree. The text says: Let us take it that the two wanderers suddenly come around a turn of the path to an unexpected sight of the mountain so that they are suddenly enraptured and quietly stand next to each other. There is, then, no trace of a mutual engagement, each stands rather taken by the sight. Are the two now just next to each other like the two boulders or are they in this moment rather in a certain way with-one-another, in a way they would not be if they were incessantly chatting to each other or even engaging with each other and surmise their complexes? (Heidegger 1976 GA 27, 86) These rhetorical questions, whose polemical thrust, as attested to by the word “complex,” is directed against psychoanalysis, leads us to the conclusion that can be formulated in the following way: “In order for mutual engagement in general and as such to be possible, being-with-one-another must be possible beforehand” (87). Or more simply: “Mutual engagement is founded in being-with-one-another” (87). The view on the relationship between the self and others, which Heidegger presents at this point, indicates precisely the point at which the great minds in the phenomenology of intersubjectivity diverge. This view is put into question and unilaterally rejected by no smaller phenomenologists than the already mentioned three thinkers, Husserl, Sartre,

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and Levinas. These thinkers commit themselves to the opposite view, according to which an explicit comportment of the self to the other, which is, however, not to be understood from the very outset as a mutual engagement, can make intelligible how a being-with-one-another, a community, a “we” is at all possible. Heidegger misunderstands this basic approach in a fundamental way when he accuses Husserl of accepting an encapsulated “carcass of a subject” (Rumpfsubjekt) (Heidegger 1976 GA 27, 140) that “at any time fi nds itself in a shell” (141) and precisely for this reason sees itself with the task of going over to its fellow-subjects through the “window” of an “I-thou relationship” (141). In fact, according to Husserl, the fellow-subject is from the very outset given in flesh and blood in the perception of any given subject; the co-subject is therefore also there with the subject in Husserl exactly as it is in Heidegger. There is as little a skeptical problem of other minds for Husserl as for Heidegger; for both this problem turns out to be a pseudo-problem. That is also the case with other phenomenologists such as Sartre and Levinas. In addition to this, we can wonder whether the thought of a being-withone-another, which has to be given from the very outset as the founding instance of mutual engagement, fully accounts for the insight into the metaphysical isolation of Dasein or if Husserl, Sartre and Levinas rather draw the consequences of this fundamental fact, which was also recognized by Heidegger. Heidegger seems even to give up his earlier terminological distinction between existential being-with and factical being-with-one-another when he asserts: “in being-alone there is a being-without-the-other; but withoutthe-other is but a specific being-with-one-another. Thus every being-alone is also a being-with-one-another” (Heidegger 1976 GA 27, 118). As we recall, earlier in Being and Time it is said that “being-alone of Dasein” is “being-with in the world”; now being-alone is really understood as a determinate form of being-with-one-another. The reason for this change arises as a consequence of the transformation that occurs in Heidegger’s thinking between 1927 and 1930. The conception of being—the fundamental ontology of Being and Time—constitutes in this period only part of the newly arising metaphysics of Dasein; this conception of being is completed within this whole through a conception of the world; in the last Marburg lecture, this conception of the world receives the name of “metontology” (Heidegger 1990 GA 26, 199f; 1984, 156–157). Metontology is not an ontology; it is rather a “metaphysical ontic” (ibid., 201; 158) that is beyond (meta) ontology; it is a conception of the different types of beings in the totality of their relations to one another.

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The fundamental thesis, on which the metontological approach is grounded, is that Dasein necessarily comports itself toward the world-totality, to the extent that Dasein goes beyond beings toward the world-totality. What we now have in Heidegger is not only a transcendence toward Being (as it is still the case in the lecture The Fundamental Problems of Phenomenology of the summer semester of 1927), but also—or even, in the first place—a transcendence toward the world. At the end of the epoch we are considering, this latter transcendence is characterized terminologically as “world-formation” (Weltbildung). The metaphysics of Dasein is nothing other than precisely a conception of the world-forming character of human beings. The understanding of being, which took center stage in the fundamental ontology of Being and Time, is, from the standpoint of metontology, retrospectively regarded only as a pre-condition for the world-formation of Dasein. In our epoch, world-formation is seen in the realms of science, world-view, and philosophy; at the beginning of the 1930s the realm of art is also added to this list. The question of truth is connected to the idea of world-formation as well. Thus truth in our period is understood primarily as a pre-predicative openness of the world. It however follows from the world-forming character of Dasein in human beings that a whole world is always already common to the self and the other. Thus, from now on, it is not just the being-with of Dasein with the other that is taken into consideration as an existential; it can also always already be presupposed that there is a being-with-one-another, which arises out of the communal nature of the world. This is the background against which the idea of a truth that is shared by all of us is made intelligible. For Heidegger the communal nature of the world means nothing other than the openness of the world that is common because it is accessible to every individual Dasein. Heidegger clearly sees that there is no truth in the full sense of the term without the possibility of communally sharing in it. From this it follows for him that we always already share in the truth as unconcealedness or openness. Heidegger resorts to the remarkable expression “sharing in the truth” to protect the idea of a communal sharing in the truth from misunderstandings. We can share a thing by dividing it among ourselves. The thing is thereby broken into pieces (Heidegger 1976 GA 27, 100). But in the case of the truth what we have is a sharing that can bring no harm to the things. This is what Heidegger wants to emphasize when he defines the sharing in the truth as “letting things be” (102). He says: We ask about a sharing in beings by which we share in something that belongs to beings without anything in beings lost or changed. In what do

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we share in this remarkable sharing-in in beings? We share in its openness, its truth. Only so far as we share in the unconcealedness of beings, can we let them, beings, be as they manifest themselves to us.” (105) With this Heidegger finds at the same time the key to the understanding of an already given being-with-one-another. What is significant for this argument is still the conviction, which is formulated in one passage as follows: “The Being in what is common is always essential for the with-one-another” (Heidegger 1976 GA 27, 148). With the truth as unconcealedness or openness of the world, in which we share, Heidegger finds what is common or the same as that to which we in different ways comport ourselves. Out of the common or the same there results an original with-one-another, which, according to Heidegger, first makes possible a “community of egos” (145). Nevertheless, in the epoch with which we are dealing, we should never dissociate the world, whose unconcealedness or openness we are discussing, from the connection it has with the world-formation of Dasein. To the original plan, which the Freiburg lecture from the winter semester of 1928/1929 follows, there belongs a discussion of the relationship between philosophy and history. Even though this discussion did not eventually take place due to time-constraints, it does form the conceptual horizon of the investigations that are devoted to the question of the truth. We thus have to accept that, when speaking of the truth as unconcealedness or openness of the world, Heidegger has in mind not only the single world as such but also a world which is always historical. The common, the same, which constitutes an original with-one-another is thus at any time bound to a historical projection of the world that manifests itself in the worldview, the science, the philosophy and the art of a specific people or of a specific period. In this way we can understand the concept of truth—in accordance with Heidegger’s methodological approach—as a formal indication. From this there results not just the strength but also the limits of Heidegger’s approach toward the understanding of the original beingwith-one-another. This approach is based on the insight that an I-thou relationship is always bound to the condition of a communal openness of the world which is already shared by the respective I and thou. That is why Heidegger can link in his own way his project to the monadology of Leibniz to the extent that he starts out from the idea that in Leibniz the monads represent the whole from their particular standpoint and that for this reason they not only have no windows but also “require none” (Heidegger 1976 GA 27, 144). Heidegger says: “The point is not to complete

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the monadological approach and improving it through empathy, but to radicalize it” (145). With this he takes on a position that is downright the opposite of Husserl’s approach to a phenomenology of intersubjectivity. In a research text that was published in volume XIV of the Husserliana, it is indeed stated explicitly: Every ‘I’ is a ‘monad.’ But monads have windows. They have no windows or doors in so far as no other subject can really enter, but through them the other (the windows are the empathies) can throughout be experienced just as past events that the subject has lived through can be experienced through recollection. (Husserl 1973 Hua XIV, 260) It definitely speaks for Husserl’s approach that in it not only the relationship of the self to the other can be thematized but also the relationship of the home-world to a foreign world. By contrast, the merit of Heidegger is rather limited to only having brought to the fore the communal character of pre-predicative truth.

Truth and Freedom The idea of a shared truth is an essential piece of the puzzle in the understanding of truth as presented in lectures given after the publication of Being and Time, but it changes little to the sense and the substance of the earlier conception of truth as exposed in Being and Time. The situation is different with the specific view of truth formulated at the end of the Freiburg lecture The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics: World, Finitude, Solitude of the winter semester of 1929/1930: it brings a real novelty with itself. Heidegger presents his thoughts here in a form that results from his turn to the Aristotelian theory of the propositions in De interpretatione. Aristotle distinguishes, on the one hand, between true and false propositions and, on the other, between affirming (positive) and denying (negative) propositions. What is suggested, in the interpretation of truth, is to focus, first and foremost, on the affirmative (positive) true proposition in order to understand the three other possibilities of combination by starting with this exceptional case. However, Heidegger recognizes what is deceptive in this approach. He says: This kind of approach in logic, which starts with the positive true judgment, is justified within certain limits but for this very reason it gives rise to a fundamental deception that it is only a matter of relating the

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other possible forms of assertion to this one in a supplementary fashion. I myself—at least in carrying out the interpretation of λόγος—also fell victim to this deception in Being and Time (cf. as exempt from this deception in Being and Time 222 and 285f [Heidegger 1996, 264 and 330f.]. (Heidegger 1992 GA 29/30, 488; 1995, 337. Translation modified) It is not easy to understand this self-critical remark. Surprisingly this remark does not refer at all to the understanding of pre-predicative truth, but to the analysis of propositions, of judgments, even though the unique achievement of Being and Time consists primarily in the development of a prepredicative understanding of truth. In addition, it is not easily understood how Heidegger can accuse himself of neglecting not only the problem of the denying (negative) true proposition but also the problem of the false proposition. For, in the Marburg period, he dealt repeatedly with this philosophical problem, well-known since Plato’s Sophist. It suffices here to refer, on the one hand, to the Marburg lecture on Plato’s Sophist from the winter semester of 1924/1925 (Heidegger 1992 GA 19, 410f and 559–562; 1997, 383–384f and 387–389) and, on the other hand, to the Marburg logic lecture from the year 1925 (Heidegger 1976 GA 21, 162–190, § 13) in which the question concerning the falsity of the proposition was exhaustively treated. Precisely for this reason we must take the self-critical remark in the 1929/1930 lecture in another sense. What he complains about is rather a peculiarity of the pre-predicative understanding of the truth, which has a bearing on the analysis of the proposition and of the judgment. For all appearances the selfcritical remark points to the fact that the conflation of truth with the openness of the world deprives judgment of the unique space of play (Spielraum) in which it can be true or false. In the sense of Being and Time the proposition is, in accordance with its definition, a mere expression of the immediately perceived openness. In the logic lecture of 1925 a similar interpretation had been developed. There Heidegger had drawn on the famous chapter 10 of Book IX of Aristotle’s Metaphysics in order to show truth as the “most authentic sense” of being in Aristotle (Heidegger 1976 GA 21, 179). In his interpretation of this chapter he had brought truth back to an immediate perception of the unconcealedness of a being (181). This interpretation however imparts from the very outset a priority to the affirmative true proposition. If truth is indeed conflated substantially with being, then the proposition serves only to express what is as that which it is. The totality of affirmative (positive) true propositions is, then, completely adequate to record the truth so understood in its entirety. Then nothing can express more simply that which is as that which it is than an affirmative (positive) true proposition.

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In such a conception of truth, which is established in this manner, the denying (negative) true propositions receive only a secondary and episodic role. They merely serve to rectify false sentences. But the ground of the falsity of these propositions is solely the circumstance that beings, in spite of their fundamental unconcealedness and openness, only seldom emerge unconcealed and instead often remain hidden and dissimulated. In false propositions, according to Heidegger’s Marburg texts, what comes to expression is always only the hiddenness or the dissimulation of beings. This is the reason why falsity, according to the understanding of truth of this period, does not necessarily belong together with truth. This explains why the false and also the rectifying, denying (negative), true propositions are at this time neglected. Certainly Heidegger already strives toward a “positive understanding of negation” since his Marburg lecture on Plato’s Sophist.3 In Being and Time, which indeed also belongs to the Marburg period, he not only makes it clear that the “ontological sense”—or even the “origin”—“of negation [Nichtheit]” (Heidegger 1979, 285f; 1996, 262–263f)4 requires explication, but continues to emphasize that Dasein is not only in the truth but also always in the untruth (ibid., 222; 204–205).5 The fact that truth and falsity always belong to Dasein at the same time does not mean that they also belong to one another. Thus the denying (negative) true propositions as the means of rectifying false propositions have an epistemic, but no aletheic value. In principle they can always be replaced by affirmative (positive) true propositions. This fundamental attitude toward truth is in my view the authentic target of Heidegger’s self-critique in the lecture of 1929/1930. He now understands that there lies a judgment at the bottom of the proposition, which is no mere expression of something immediately perceived, but rather contains in itself a position to what is immediately so perceived. A similar insight holds as the basic motive of the critique, that Ernst Tugendhat will level at Heidegger’s phenomenological concept of truth at the end of the sixties. But the 1929/1930 lecture, which of course Tugendhat at the end of the 1960s would not have known, takes full account of the entirely legitimate demand that is at the heart of Tugendhat’s critique. Heidegger writes in the text of this lecture: However, in order to be able to decide upon the adequacy or inadequacy of what the λόγος says revealingly, or more precisely, to be indeed able to comport oneself in this ‘either-or,’ the speaking, expressing human being must from the very outset have a space of play [Spielraum] for the comparative to-and-fro of the ‘either-or,’ of truth or falsity and in addition a space of play [Spielraum] inside of which beings, about which something

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can be said, are manifest. (Heidegger 1992 GA 29/30, 493; 1995, 339 [Translation modified]) Still, the judgment can have a space of play (Spielraum) for the comparative here and there of the either-or, of truth or falsity only if the judging human being can go beyond being and its Being. From this the essential sense of metontology becomes clear. With metontology we have a new kind of transcendence, a going-beyond beings but toward the world, not toward Being. The difference consists in this, that the world in contradistinction to Being opens up a space of play (Spielraum) for the either-or of truth and falsity. Only at this point can we see that Heidegger in his metaphysical period does not mean the same thing with world as he did in Being and Time. The referential connections of beings that are encountered at any time are in fact no longer enough to determine the world-structure—the “worldliness” of the world. So long as the world in its totality was conflated with these referential connections no fundamental distinction between Being and world was possible. Actually the world in Being and Time was an existential of Dasein, that is, a fundamental determination of existence; it belonged to the ontological constitution of Dasein. By contrast the idea of metontology is from the very outset based on a distinction between Being and world. This distinction is possible in the period from 1927 to 1930 through the fact that the world is understood as a space of play (Spielraum) for the either-or of truth and falsity. This new approach is obviously in need of elaboration but in the lecture of 1929/1930 Heidegger continues to owe us in that regard. We are therefore largely dependent upon conjectures. In order to make this new approach, stemming from Heidegger’s self-critique, comprehensible and amenable to concepts, we must proceed from the idea that this approach places in a new light the sense of false propositions and the role of denying true judgments. A further indication for this interpretation arises from Heidegger’s tying back the concept of the world in this period of his thinking to the world-projection that is always proper to Dasein. If we connect these two indications with the idea of a space of play (Spielraum) for the either-or of truth and falsity, we can reconstruct the fundamental positive thoughts that underlie Heidegger’s self-critique in the following steps: 1. Transformations of truth-values within the world-projections. No worldprojection is without holes. No matter how comprehensive it is, it is never based on all the true propositions that can be formulated about the

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world. Certainly there are many core propositions with which a worldprojection stands or falls but there are innumerable others on which it is not immediately dependent. To every world-projection there indeed belongs an immeasurable region of possible propositions, which have not yet been formulated. Alongside this empty region there is in every world-projection an open region of propositions that can be shown to be false without the whole world-projection being essentially affected by it. The size of this open region depends upon the respective worldprojection. In any case at this point the picture of a process of knowledge emerges in which what is held to be true can transform itself into something false (and vice-versa). Such transformations of truth-values are reflected in denying (negative) true judgments. These judgments are granted a constitutive role for the underlying world-projection so long as the latter can sustain itself in the course of the transformation of truth-values. But even if the epistemic dynamic affects the core propositions of a world-projection, a new world-projection can be built upon the propositions, which from now on are held to be true. 2. Indifference of the world toward such transformations of truth-values. If we reflect on the nature of this possibility we can succeed in drawing aletheic consequences for the concept of the world from the epistemic dynamic that is presented. We arrive at the insight that new world-projections can emerge out of the transformations of truth-values because the world—in contradistinction to Being—is in a certain sense indifferent to these transformations. If propositions that are held to be true turn out to be false, the (presumed) being reveals itself as non-being. The existence of a being can be affected from this change as much as its being so and so. Therefore the Being of beings is anything but indifferent to the transformations of truth-values. Against this the world always remains stable in the midst of such transformations. This is because any totality of true propositions holds as a description of the unique world. If the description changes then the state of being of the world also changes, but the world itself remains stable. It only reveals itself in some ways to be different from before. 3. The world as the Being in a space of play (Spielraum) for the either-or of truth and falsity. Every world-projection testifies to a going-beyond beings that are manifest at any time, toward the world. Only this going-beyond makes it possible to keep constantly in view the eventual transformation of beings into non-beings. The world is, in other words, only grasped when Being is envisaged in a space of play (Spielraum) for the either-or of truth and falsity. It is in this way that we have to understand Heidegger’s talk

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of “a primordial metaphysical transformation” of fundamental ontology into metontology (Heidegger 1990 GA 26, 199; 1984, 156). This means that Being from now on will be placed in the perspective of the world as a space of play (Spielraum) for the either-or of truth and falsity. From this transformed perspective the judgment manifests itself no more as a mere expression of an immediately perceived openness but rather as a stance taken toward what is immediately perceived. This stance that is taken presupposes freedom—or more precisely a being-free—of Dasein, which in the transformed conception of truth, may no longer be left out of consideration. Actually Heidegger asserts in the 1929/1930 lecture that truth is grounded “in a being-free for beings as such” (Heidegger 1992 GA 29/30, 492; 1995, 339). We must clearly see that this being-free for beings excludes any immediate bond to beings. In no way does Dasein remain bound to beings; it rather goes beyond beings in order to come back to them out of the world as the space of play (Spielraum) for the either-or of truth and falsity. We thus have a fundamental attitude that lets itself be bound by beings and through this imposes upon itself a boundedness. This is what we can read in the lecture of 1929/1930: “This holding oneself toward— toward something binding—which occurs in all propositional comportment and grounds it is what we call a fundamental comportment: being-free in an original sense” (ibid., 497; 342–343). The consideration of this comportment transforms Heidegger’s conception of truth from the ground up. The unconcealedness and openness of beings is no longer deemed from the outset as truth. It rather acquires the form of truth only through the fact that the being-free for beings expresses itself, a beingfree that lets itself be bound and thus imposes upon itself a boundedness. In conclusion let us point to a consequence that results from the new way of connecting truth and freedom in our epoch. This connection is indeed the reason why Heidegger already claims in his last Marburg lecture that “the question of ethics” is not to be raised in fundamental ontology but first in metontology (Heidegger 1990 GA 26, 199; 1984 157). The word “ethics” means in this passage obviously not something like a theory of morality as a system of societal rules, but a reflection on the possibility of developing a thoughtful position in the midst of the openness of beings in totality. Such a kind of ethics is a theory of the correct dealing with Being in a space of play (Spielraum) for the either-or of truth and falsity. What is at stake in such an ethics is thus precisely the grounding of a fundamental metontological attitude as a correct manner of comporting oneself toward the world. Translated from the German by Arun Iyer

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Notes 1 2

3

4

5

Compare, for example, Heidegger 1990 GA 26, 158; 1984, 127. “The time of my life which flows along that of my neighbor is thus separated by the depth of an abyss (abgrundtief geschieden), and even this word, with its vivid image (Bildlichkeit), still says too little” (Husserl 1973 Hua XV, 339). “Above all the positive understanding of negation is important for the research that moves primarily and exclusively by exhibiting the matters at issue. Phenomenological research itself accords negation an eminent position: Negation as something carried out after a prior acquisition and disclosure of some substantive content” (Heidegger 1992 GA 19, 560; 1997, 388). In the self-critical remark made in the lecture of 1929–1930, Heidegger mentions this passage as one of two passages that avoid the error that he had just discovered. Here we find the other passage that Heidegger excludes in his self-critique of 1929–1930 from the newly discovered error. It says here: “The full existential and ontological meaning of the statement ‘Dasein is in the truth’ also says equiprimordially that ‘Dasein is in the untruth.’ ”

Chapter 7

Heidegger’s Fluid Ontology in the 1930s The Platonic Connection Pol Vandevelde

In the 1930s and up to the early 1940s, Heidegger engages in a multifaceted enterprise, manifested by his many variegated lectures, to move away from subjectivism and to find the resources to articulate what he calls the history of being. He entertains the view that metaphysics, which started with Plato, had come to its end and that a new beginning may be possible. Because metaphysics started with Plato, the new beginning will be reached by overcoming Platonism (Die Überwindung des Platonismus) (Heidegger 1989 GA 65, 221; 1999, 154). This will usher in a new way of thinking that Heidegger calls a thinking-poetizing. Since we (and Heidegger) do not know what this new beginning will be, we can only play it out against the first beginning.1 The situation, in which Heidegger believes we find ourselves, that is, at the end of metaphysics and in transition toward another beginning, explains why the figure of Plato becomes attractive. As the founder of metaphysics, Plato stands both inside and outside metaphysics. On the one hand, his philosophy can be understood as a doctrine, namely, Platonism, but, on the other hand, as the founder of this doctrine, his thinking is not yet metaphysics. “The ‘teaching’ (Lehre) of a thinker is the unsaid in his saying” (Heidegger 1978, 201). If we attend to the unsaid of Plato’s doctrine, which is also the unsaid of metaphysics, we can retrieve Plato’s thinking from his philosophy. There is thus an entry into the moment Plato became a metaphysician. This moment is the coming to word of what became his doctrine or the moment Plato became a sayer. Heidegger illustrates Plato’s metaphysical ambivalence through his view on the beautiful. On the one hand, Plato clearly started what will become our aesthetic tradition; on the other hand, he also thinks the beautiful, in the active sense of thinking as bringing such a view to its articulation.

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Insofar as Western metaphysics begins in Plato’s thought, Plato also prepares the subsequent aesthetic interpretation of the beautiful and of art. Yet to the extent that Plato simultaneously stands in the tradition of the Greek thinking of the “commencement” and is a transition, he also still thinks to kalon non-aesthetically. This can be seen in his equating of to kalon with the on. (Heidegger 1984 GA 53, 109; 1996, 88–89) This thinking-in-the-making is the transition that Plato accomplishes toward metaphysics. Heidegger considers it to be the fi rst beginning. Given that we are ourselves in transition toward another beginning, we have to effectuate what Plato did as a thinker (not as a philosopher). Heidegger thus sees himself in an analogous situation to Plato. However, there is more than an analogy between their respective situations. There is also a kinship between the striving of their thinking. Plato attempts to think that which ushers things into the realm of the visible, illustrated by the release of the prisoner in the allegory of the cave, wherein one turns from one type of being (fleeting, transitory, and illusory) toward another real one. Since Heidegger understands himself as in transition toward another type of thinking, he is also looking for that which makes a being what it is. His questioning of being is parallel to Plato’s meditation on ideas and Heidegger himself asserts the link between Plato’s ideas and his own notion of being. In this essay, I will only examine two aspects of this connection between Plato and Heidegger. First, like Plato, Heidegger accepts a gradation in being: things can be un-being (unseiend), less being (weniger seiend) or more being (seiender, mehr seiend), expressions that correspond to Plato’s mallon onta (more being) and me on (un-being) in the allegory of the cave in Book VII of the Republic. Secondly, the role that language plays in Heidegger’s ontology is analogous to the role of ideas in Plato’s ontology. According to Heidegger, language brings things into the realm of the intelligible. The Platonic connection is most apparent in Heidegger’s commentary on the allegory of the cave in his 1931–1932 lecture course Vom Wesen der Wahrheit. Zu Platons Höhlengleichnis und Theätet (Heidegger 1988 GA 34) and his 1940 lecture, “Platons Lehre von der Wahrheit” (1978). It also appears in the Contributions to Philosophy (From Enowning) (Heidegger 1989 GA 65; 1999) and his other lectures from the 1930s and early 1940s. These Platonic notions allow Heidegger to articulate his fluid ontology in the 1930s, according to which the essence of things is understood as an unfolding— wesen as a verb—so that things are stages or guises of a process.

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The Non-Being as a Transitory Stage Already in Being and Time, Heidegger considers that things do not have in themselves the principle of their intelligibility. We, human beings, must distinguish reality from the real: “But the fact that Reality is ontologically grounded in the Being of Dasein, does not signify that only when Dasein exists and as long as Dasein exists, can the Real be as that which in itself it is” (Heidegger 1962, 255). Or even more explicit: “Being (not entities [Seiende]) is dependent upon the understanding of Being; that is to say, Reality [Realität] (not the Real [das Reale]) is dependent upon care” (ibid.). Once the being of things is correlated to the being-in-the world of human beings, Heidegger, like Husserl before him, has to contend with the label of idealism. If what the term “idealism” says, amounts to the understanding that Being can never be explained by entities but is already that which is “transcendental” for every entity, then idealism affords the only correct possibility for a philosophical problematic. If so, Aristotle was no less an idealist than Kant. But if “idealism” signifies tracing back every entity to a subject or consciousness whose sole distinguishing features are that it remains indefinite in its Being and is best characterized negatively as “unThing-like” [undinglich], then this idealism is no less naive in its method than the most grossly militant realism. (251–252) However, it is not easy to come so close to common idealism without also falling into it. This danger is best manifested by Heidegger’s famous interpretation of Husserl’s categorial intuition in History of the Concept of Time. Prolegomena of 1925 (Heidegger 1985). Here, Heidegger writes: “It is not so much that we see the objects and things but rather that we first talk about them. To put it more precisely: we do not say what we see, but rather the reverse, we see what one says about the matter.” There is, he continues, an “inherently determinate character of the world and its potential apprehension and comprehension through expressness, through already having been spoken and talked over” (56). Heidegger’s difficulty with navigating away from idealism is, compared to Husserl, compounded by the primary role that Heidegger grants to language after Being and Time. If language is the threshold that entities have to pass in order to enter into being and thus, literally, be, it is all the more difficult to avoid that the relatedness of beings to human beings collapses on the relativity of beings to human beings. And still, this is what Heidegger

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relentlessly fought against. He defended his version of a non-relative but idealistic ontology. One version of this non-relative idealistic ontology is in my view best formulated in the Contributions to Philosophy. From Enowning, written between 1936 and 1938. Things as they appear are related to how human beings comport themselves toward them, but things as they appear are only one stage of a process Heidegger calls unconcealment. This process is not related to human beings. To the contrary, such a process also allows human beings to be who they are. In Being and Time, Heidegger’s motivation to ask the question of being anew was the fact that being had fallen into oblivion. In the Contributions, we are told that this oblivion of being is itself encompassed by an abandonment of being: “Abandonment of being is the ground for the forgottenness of being” (Heidegger 1999, 80). The notion of abandonment of being is strange in many respects; how can being perform something like an abandonment? How is it not a form of reification of being, despite all of Heidegger’s claims to the contrary? Finally, what sense does it make to speak of a global abandonment in such grand and general terms? Upon closer examination, Heidegger uses the expression of abandonment of being in both a weak and a strong sense. In the weak sense, abandonment of being means a deficit in being; things are merely objects for an all-powerful subject, at the service of such a subject or a community as objects of experience, and so on. In this way, the question of the being of such things has become irrelevant. Nobody cares about asking the question anymore, because the being of things has been flattened out and nothing of them remains other than their use. They are “for” and “for the sake of x,” and nothing else. The abandonment is thus not much different from the oblivion of being. It emphasizes a deficit in being: things have less being. Heidegger also speaks of the “essential impotence (Unkraft) of beings” (Heidegger 2000 GA 75, 7). This also means that things can regain more being if the oblivion or abandonment is overcome. Heidegger sometimes expresses this weak sense of abandonment of being as the “lostness (Verlorenheit) in the bustle of mere events and machinations” (Heidegger1999, 40), “the lostness into beings” (349) or the fact that things are left to themselves (sich selbst überlassen) (Heidegger 1984 GA 45, 185). To speak of an abandonment in this weak sense is thus more metaphorical than literal. It is an “as if,” an “almost as if beings were abandoned by being” (85). However, Heidegger also uses “abandonment of being” in a strong sense. “Be-ing . . . has abandoned all ‘beings’ and all that appeared to be beings and has withdrawn from them” (Heidegger 1999, 11). What can this mean?

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The above quotes from Being and Time state that the real is not dependent on Dasein. What cannot happen without Dasein is the possibility to say about the real that “it is” or that “it is not.” The status of the real, before it can be meaningful to Dasein, is undifferentiated in the sense that nobody would be there to make any assessment of it. This means that nothing can be said about it (or, to paraphrase Maurice Blanchot, if the question is about what the real was, before it is meaningful to Dasein, there was nobody there to ask such a question). While Dasein obviously is not the cause for the being of things, Dasein is nevertheless the threshold of their being. In Being and Time, this threshold is called the sense (Sinn). In the 1930s, the sense becomes the truth. “The meaning (Sinn) (See Being and Time), i.e., . . . the truth of be-ing” (Heidegger 1999, 31). This change has a significant impact on the state of limbo of the real, before it entered the realm of what can “be” or “not be.” If the sense is now the truth, something is already true—and this means for Heidegger “unconcealed”—before it can be said to be or not. The sense as truth thus precedes the Dasein of Being and Time and is no longer “that in which the intelligibility [Verständlichkeit] of something maintains itself” (Heidegger 1962, 193). Moreover, it means that the undifferentiated state of “what is,” before it makes sense, is no longer the fact that nobody is there to be concerned with what a thing might be. The non-ontological qualification of undifferentiation in Being and Time became in the 1930s the ontological qualification of what is not being, but already unfolds as what has been unconcealed. These torturous formulations are not gratuitous. They point to Heidegger’s search for an alternative meaning of “to be.” In the 1930s, Heidegger acknowledges a movement of entering into being. Yet, unlike in Being and Time, this movement does not consist in an act of conferring being. It is no longer Dasein that “be-deutet” beings. Instead, there is an antecedent meaning-giver. As Heidegger says of Hölderlin, what Hölderlin poetized is not what he meant, “it is rather that which meant him [was ihn meinte] as what called him in this task of the poet [Dichtertum]” (Heidegger 1982 GA 52, 13). Something can thus be true while its mode of being has not yet been determined. “What is true [is]: what stands in truth and so becomes a being or a non-being [unseiend]” (Heidegger 1999, 241). In the 1930s, Heidegger holds that there is an instance or a process that makes something be a being, and this is the true. What is true “lets a being be a being” (ibid.). In such a framework, being has to be understood adjectivally: “to be” means to become being or to enter being. Only then can something “be”

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the entity it is now: it was not such an entity before entering being, although it was already true in the sense of unconcealed. Thus, when we say that an entity “is,” we in fact say that it “is being” (understood as an adjective) and this means it “became being” in the sense of entering into being. Heidegger’s adjectival understanding of being has several significant ramifications: 1. This new dimension of “becoming being” grants an ontological status to the moment that preceded the becoming. Before the entity “became being,” it may already be unconcealed and, consequently, “true,” despite being “non-being” (again, adjectivally understood). It also means that the sense, which in Being and Time was an articulation by Dasein, is now, as the true, an articulation before human Dasein. In the realm of what has been unconcealed and, subsequently, of what has become being, the “un-’ of “un-being” corresponds to what, in the process of unconcealing, is the withdrawal itself. Heidegger grants a mobility to withdrawal. “But wherever plant, animal, rock, and sea and sky become beings (seiend werden), without falling into objectness, there withdrawal (refusal/not-granting) of be-ing reigns—be-ing as withdrawal” (Heidegger 1999, 207). 2. It means that a plant, an animal, a rock, the sea and the sky do not have in themselves enough of what Sartre calls a coefficient of adversity to constrain our understanding. They are only the guises of a process of unfolding: their essence (Wesen) is a stage in their unfolding (Wesung). And this means that they could have “been being” otherwise or could “be being” otherwise if the process had unfolded differently or were to regain traction. This is what I call a fluid ontology: things are in fact stages of things. 3. A third consequence consists in the possibility for having a glimpse at that movement of entering being, what Heidegger calls “withdrawal.” If we can regress in the process of becoming being to the stage before, say, a rock “is being,” we would reach the point of unconcealement of “something” (which is not yet a something) in its way toward “being a rock.” It would be the retrieval of the very becoming at the heart of things. Such a retrieval would then allow to uncouple being from beings, thereby turning the ontological difference, enacted in Being and Time and explicitly named so in the Basic Problems of 1928, into an effect of unconcealment itself. In the 1930s, the view is that “a being is. Be-ing unfolds” (das Seiende ist. Das Seyn west)” (Heidegger 1999, 52). This uncoupling of being from beings puts on the unconcealment another dynamic than its dealings with things, what Heidegger in Being and Time called the

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comportment of Dasein. Being has now its own motion of unfolding and its own history. 4. Beings, which have “become being” are now what they are once “preserved.” This preservation (Verwahrung) “first of all lets beings be—and indeed those beings that they are and can be in the truth of the not-yetdifferentiated being and the manner in which this truth is unfolded . . . The sheltering [Bergung] itself is enacted in and as Da-sein” (Heidegger 1999, 49). Although he does not explicitly distinguish them, Heidegger understands the preservation in two different senses. In the first sense there is a preservation of the true in unconcealment, before something has become “being.” In the second sense there is a preservation when precisely something has become “being.” Correlatively, Heidegger speaks of “un-being” in two different senses: either as what has been unconcealed and is true, but has not yet become “being” or as something that has become “being” but not in truth. In the latter sense, Heidegger tells us, for example, that “beings can still ‘be’ in the abandonment of beings, under whose dominance the immediate availability and usefulness and serviceability of every kind (e.g., everything must serve the people) obviously make up what is a being and what is not [was seiend ist und was nicht]” (22). In this second sense, “to be” means to remain when abandoned by being. This latter mode of being is characterized as a fall (Verfall) (22), so that “what is an ‘actual’ being is a non-being [das Un-seiende]” (22). This notion of preservation in the second sense, namely, that something is not only disclosed, but preserved, lends itself to a political stance, in the broad sense. Since “what is” is what is preserved, the mode of preservation is not just accessory to entities; it is their flesh and blood. The mode of preservation is linked to the world that is current. According to Heidegger the world in which we are is one ruled by what he calls “machination” (Machenschaft). Things have been flattened to the desires, needs, and experiences of human beings who understand themselves as subjects. And this is how things have been abandoned by being. “Abandonment of being means that be-ing abandons beings and leaves beings to themselves and thus lets beings become objects of machination” (Heidegger 1999, 78).2 By being preserved in this way things have been deprived of the very possibility to become, which means that they are not “being”: “The abandonment of be-ing is a dis-folding [Ver-wesung] of be-ing” (81) and leads to the non-unfolding of beings (das Unwesen des Seienden), to non-beings (das Unseiende) (85).3 Nevertheless, this stage of nonbeing passes itself as being: “Under the illusion of a being, machination takes what is not-being into the protection of a being” (286).

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Heidegger’s notion of un-being as part of a process of increase or decrease of being can be seen as a reformulation of Plato’s own gradation of being, according to which entities are susceptible to be non-being and more being. Heidegger discusses this gradation of being in his 1931–1932 lecture course on Plato’s allegory of the cave and his 1940 essay, “Plato’s doctrine of the truth” (based in part on the lecture of 1930).

Plato’s Me on (un-being) and Mallon Onta (more being) If retrieved from Platonism, Plato can offer Heidegger an alternative to phenomenology. For phenomenology is still too subjectivist and thus metaphysical. “It was a mistake of phenomenology to mean that phenomena could be seen correctly just through a freedom from prejudices” (Heidegger 1988 GA 34, 286). Immediately, Heidegger adds that it would be an even bigger mistake to claim that phenomena cannot be seen, that they are always relative to perspectives. What matters is to gain the right insight (die richtige Hinsicht) (286). This insight or this perspective, which goes beyond the givenness of things, thus has to be non-subjective or a-subjective. Plato’s ideas, according to Heidegger, accomplish this. They provide entities the guise under which they “are being.” Ideas are thus part of a process of being in which they are the preservation of the unconcealment of things and things are also the preservation of what the ideas disclosed. There is thus a gradation of being. Ideas are more being, sensible things less being. In his description of the liberation of the prisoner in the cave myth and his turn toward the entrance of the cave, Plato uses two comparatives. First, the prisoner is turned toward “what is more being” (pros mallon onta tetrammenos).4 The second occurs when Socrates asks whether the prisoner, in pain because of the light, would not say that what he saw in the darkness of the cave was more true (alesthestera).5 Let us focus on this notion of seiender, more being, which Heidegger also formulates as mehr seiend (Heidegger 1988 GA 34, 33). Heidegger notes with approval and astonishment that, for Plato, “beings have gradation!” (das Seiende hat ebenfalls Grade! ) (Heidegger 1988 GA 34, 33). This means that “being and being are not without further ado the same” (Seiend und seiend is nicht ohne weiteres dasselbe) (33). This is the origin of Heidegger’s adjectival use of “being.” When we say that something is, there are different stages of “being” (understood as an adjective) at which the entity can be positioned. There can be “a more in being” (ein Mehr an seiendem) (33)6 or a less in being (weniger).

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This gradation in being with regard to “what is” goes hand in hand with a gradation in unconcealment. For Heidegger notes that even for the prisoner in the cave, things were unconcealed. Only when things were shown to the prisoner, were they more being. Heidegger sees a direct correlation between what Plato says about ta tote horomena alesthetera (“what the prisoners saw in the cave was truer”) and ta nun deiknumena (“what the prisoner is shown,” which is “more being”). Heidegger can then say: “The more unconcealed the unconcealed is, the closer do we come to beings . . . Thus the coming closer to beings goes hand in hand with the increase of the unconcealment of beings (mit der Steigerung der Unverborgenheit des Seienden) and vice versa” (Heidegger 1988 GA 34, 33). There is in fact a third term in the correlation. To the “gradation of unconcealment” (der Grad seiner Un-verborgenheit) and the “increase of beings themselves” (die Steigerung des Seienden selbst) (Heidegger 1988 GA 34, 33), we have to add the proximity that prisoners have to beings. The proximity [Nähe] to beings, i.e., the being-there of Dasein, the inner proximity of the being-human to beings (or the distance), the gradation [Grad] of the unconcealment of beings, the increase [Steigerung] of beings themselves as beings, these three are linked together [verkettet]. (Heidegger 1988 GA 34, 33) This interconnection explains why “there is ‘more being’ ” (es gibt ‘Seienderes’) (33–34). The place of human beings in the chain of unfolding of being is crucial for Heidegger. It means that “proximity and distance with regard to beings modify [verändern] beings themselves” (34). In Plato, it is the prisoner’s comportment toward things that measures the increase in unconcealment and the correlate increase in being. This is what Heidegger calls freedom. “Whether . . . beings become more being or more un-being [unseiender], this lies in the freedom of human beings” (60). When the prisoners were held in the cave, things might well be unconcealed, but they were “un-being” (in the adjectival sense); they were not in truth. The prisoners believed that there are only beings and knew “nothing of being, of the understanding of being” (52). When the prisoner is freed, he comes closer to the ideas; this determines the increase of being. By correlating the increase of being with the comportment of human beings, Heidegger can then understand Plato’s notion of idea in a prePlatonic sense, that is, not as eternal models located in another world, but as the very heart of the unfolding of things to which human beings themselves contribute. The idea is thus not in the thing, but not radically

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separated from it either, since the thing is itself a process of unfolding. The idea is thus the “right insight” or the “right standpoint” (Hinsicht) that Heidegger is looking for. Plato’s idea is the outlook [Anblick] of that as which something presents itself [darbietet] as being. These outlooks are that in which the individual thing presents itself [präsentiert] as this or that: is present [präsent] and unfolded [anwesend] . . . Something is, means it is unfolded [anwesend] or, better, it unfolds [es west an]. (Heidegger 1988 GA 34, 51) Heidegger calls the idea the being of beings (52). It is what is seen in advance, what is grasped in advance and what lets beings be [Seiendes Duchlassende], as the interpretation of being [Auslegung des “Seins”]. The idea lets us see what beings are, lets beings so to speak through it come to us [zukommen] . . . Being, the idea is what lets being be [das Durchlassende]: light. (57) The idea not only gives the thing its outlook so that it can be present; it also brings us in the presence of things so that they can matter to us. Ideas give to things their visibility and to us the capacity to see: “We only see a being-book (Buch-seiendes) when we understand the meaning of its being [Seinssinn] in light of the what-being [Was-sein], of the ‘idea’,—what is seen through the idea” (57). It is this difference between the reality of ideas, on the one hand, and what we take reality to be (things), on the other, that supports the view of degrees in being. At the top of the scale, Plato puts ideas as what is both most unconcealed and most being (das Unverborgenste und das Seiendste) (Heidegger 1988 GA 34, 69). At the bottom of the scale (in the cave) is the sensible world, which is “unbeing” (me on) (although still understood as a mode of being): Plato considers the sensual realm as encompassing the me on; this is usually translated as “non-beings”—more precisely, we should say: whatever is not truly a being, those beings which, according to Plato’s doctrine, look like beings yet are not, and therefore should not properly be called beings . . . ouk on names that which merely is not; me on names something that “is,” yet is not in truth; for example the house that is present at hand is indeed not nothing, but in it the essence of house presents itself only in this particular, and moreover transitory, appearance, in accordance with a particular size, as made of particular material, and according to a particular form. (Heidegger 1984 GA 53, 27; 1996, 24)

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Heidegger then transplants Plato’s scale of being into a historical framework: the bottom of the scale is not the sensible world, but a world in the abandonment of being. And this abandonment is manifested by machination that is itself the political manifestation of Amerikanismus, of which, Heidegger assures us, Bolshevism is only a derivative form (ibid., 86; 70). Americanism is our cave, and by enjoying things, experiencing them, or using them, we do not care to ask about the being of these things. We are like the prisoners in the cave and only see things. Plato provided a method, which is philosophy itself, to help us turn, like the prisoner in the cave, to what is “more being” (mallon onta) and “more true” (alesthestera). Heidegger calls such method a paideia and understands it as “a crossing over [Übergang] from apeideusia into paideia” (Heidegger 1978, 215). What paideia teaches us is how to see things as “more being.” When moving away from the shadows and turning to the things, the gaze is turned toward “what is ‘more being’ [‘seiender’] than the shadows: pros mallon onta . . . ” (228). Again, Heidegger understands this paideia in political terms, namely, as freedom. “By throwing themselves free from a ‘being,’ human beings first become human beings” (Heidegger 1999, 318). Just as the prisoners have to free themselves from shadows, we have to free ourselves from things. But how can ideas allow us to free ourselves? In Plato, ideas are approached positively by moving away from the me on. However, in so doing, he has to treat them as entities. Heidegger reminds us that in the allegory of the cave, the things outside the cave are an image for “that in which the being of beings consists” (Heidegger 1978, 212). It is no coincidence that ideas are represented as things. But “that through which beings show themselves in their ‘outlook’ [Aussehen]” (212) cannot be things. In Heidegger’s retrieval of Plato, ideas are not approached directly by moving away from the me on and toward some uncertain outside of the cave, but indirectly, by recovering the me on positively, so as not to reify ideas as entities located somewhere. Heidegger reminds us that there are two movements of appearing in ideas, namely “of the phusis” and “of the outlook.” “Appearing in the first sense first rips space open. Appearing in the second sense simply gives space an outline and measures the space that has been opened up” (Heidegger 2000, 195). In their second appearing, ideas shine through the unfolding of things, allowing them to enter being and be present as what they are. In their first appearing, ideas are themselves the manifestation and the testimony of a first event of unconcealment. This first appearing of ideas legitimates Heidegger, first, to associate Plato’s idea, namely, what looks through beings and gives them their outlook so that they can unfold, with the divine, and, second, to ascribe this association to

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Plato himself. For Plato puts the idea of the good as the highest “cause” and this cause was named to theion, the divine (das Göttliche) (1978, 233). The introduction of the divine in the unfolding of things reinforces again Heidegger’s non-subjectivistic framework. Although the comportment of human beings is linked to the increase or decrease in the being of things, human beings are only a parameter in the process of unfolding. While the Da-sein in the 1931 lecture course on Plato was still human Dasein, it becomes in the Contributions a space and time “in-between,” between human beings and the gods. But Da-sein as “in-between” does not precede the relationship between human beings and gods. Both the members of the relationship and the relationship itself (as Da-sein) are “appropriated” or “enowned” (ereignet) at the same time. Da-sein is in fact the sheltering of gods and human beings. Once this event of appropriation or this enowning occurs, “what is true comes to be preserved” (Heidegger 1999, 342). The correlation between the increase in unconcealment, the increase in being, and the freedom of human beings, mentioned above, now reveals its significance. While Heidegger used Plato to articulate an ontological view of things as fluid stages in a process of unfolding, he can now draw the consequences of this view to human beings and gods. He has established that “be-ing arises [entspringt] unto ‘a being’ ” (Heidegger 1999, 175) so that “a being is above all sheltered in be-ing in such a manner of course that a being can immediately be abandoned by be-ing and continue to exist [bestehen bleiben] only as semblance” (226). He also linked this possibility of abandonment to the comportment of human beings now playing the absolute subjects in the last version of Americanism or Bolshevism. He can then conclude that there is also a fluidity of human beings. They have freedom, but their freedom is not of a voluntarist nature: they are in fact set free, and what sets them free is being itself. When this happens, there is Da-sein as an open space-time: “Be-ing sets free in that it enowns Da-sein” (340). The fluidity of things and human beings also bears upon the divine. The gods he speaks of are clearly not the gods of theology or faith.7 Rather, Heidegger takes seriously Nietzsche’s remark about the absence of new gods in thousands of years. Gods themselves are sheltered and preserved (Heidegger 1999, 185), so that old gods may disappear and new ones arise. Gods are guises that can change so that we may have future gods that are different from those we have known.8 Since human beings and the gods are only a parameter in a process of historical proportion, the paideia that will lead us toward more being cannot be a teaching or a revelation, which are still subjective enterprises. We saw that ideas are enablers, letting things unfold and letting us be in their presence. But we cannot represent

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ideas. Instead, we will approach them by becoming sensitive to them. We thus have to let ourselves be disposed or attuned in what Heidegger calls a “fundamental mood” (Grundstimmung). While for Plato and the Greeks at the beginning of metaphysics, the fundamental mood was one of astonishment and wonder, the fundamental mood to which we have to be sensitive at the end of metaphysics is startled dismay (Er-schrekken), which can also be translated as alarm or terror, that is, that the whole of being is (Heidegger 1999, 32). Terror (das Erschrecken) is not as an immense fear of something, but rather a “freeing dismay” (Entsetzen). The terror is precisely that we are free from things, that we see the whole of being as un-hinged and, literally, free-floating. In both cases, in the mood of the first beginning and in the mood of the other beginning, we are sensitive to this moment when things are in limbo: not yet being, but not nothing either. They are positively “un-being,” in the adjectival sense, and it is Da-sein that will give them a ground, the Da-sein of the Greeks, and our futural Da-sein. But in order for our future Da-sein to come, we need to encounter our god or our gods. This grounding of our Da-sein happens when “enowning [Ereignis] owns god over to man [diesen den Gott zueignet] in that enowning owns man to god [übereignet den Gott an den Menschen]” (Heidegger 1999, 19). Being is precisely “the between [Zwischen] in the midst of beings and gods . . . ‘needed’ [gebraucht] by the gods and withdrawn [entzogen] from a being” (172).9 But how can an encounter with our god or gods take place that would not be subjective, for example by human beings listening to the voice of a god and a god revealing himself? There is, Heidegger claims, an a-subjective version of such an encounter and he calls it Gespräch, which “is, in its original essence, that which unifies in the encounter, through which human beings and gods are sent to their mutual essence” (Heidegger 1952, 157). When such a dialogue happens, there is history. “History is this happening [Geschehen] in which beings, through human beings, become more being” (Heidegger 1999, 201). Still, what kind of dialogue do we have, if gods and human beings do not “speak” as subjects? In his 1942–1943 lecture course, Parmenides, Heidegger claims that the Greek gods are those who shine into beings, who look into the unconcealed. The same expressions were used about Plato’s ideas. Gods “are being itself as looking into beings” (Heidegger 1992b, 111). Heidegger plays on the Greek word thea, which, when stressed on the first syllable (théa), means “the look” and, when stressed on the second syllable (theá), means “the goddess.” Despite the difference in stress, he claims that the two words “are one and the same ‘word,’ considering that the Greeks did

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not use accent marks” (108).10 If we could have a grasp of that shining into beings, we would see the fluidity of the process making things what they are; we would see them entering and exiting being; we could be struck by the radiance of things before they become actualizations of possibles. Dialogue provides Heidegger the chance to have this possibility. Plato’s idea is a divine dimension, shining through things and this divine dimension manifests itself as dialogue. Recall that the preservation was twofold: there is a preservation in the true before something is being and there is preservation of the thing once it has entered into being. Also, recall that ideas have two appearings: backwardlooking, it is the appearing of phusis as unconcealment and forward-looking, it is what gives the things their appearance. The preservation of the thing in the second sense corresponds to the appearing of the idea in the second sense. Now, the preservation that allows a thing to be being does not fall from the sky, but is, Heidegger tells us, a configuration, the result of a dichten. This configuration also happens when a change in the unfolding of the thing occurs, when, for example, things from less being become more being—and poetry does precisely that: “Poetry makes a being more being” (Heidegger 1988 GA 34, 64). What Heidegger calls foundation (Gründung) is the moment when “these few, isolated, strange . . . in different ways as poets, thinkers, as builders and visual artists [Bildende], as agents and people of action ground and shelter the truth of be-ing by re-configuring [Umgestaltung] beings in beings themselves” (Heidegger 1984 GA 45, 215). The dialogue between human beings and gods, allowing gods to shine through things and thus allowing ideas to appear and things to come to us, is, therefore, not an exchange between human beings and gods, but a configuration or setting-into-work. It is within the dialogue that ideas, being configured, function as enablers. Heidegger’s wager in his a-subjective effort to find the right insight is that language is the dialogue that links together the fluidity of things, the fluidity of human beings and the fluidity of the gods. And the ideas are the enabling aspect of language that is not subjective, but divine in the sense of not being contained in things and not coming from the perspective of human beings. Language for Heidegger is in my view what ideas are for Plato: what prepares for things their dwelling in the intelligible realm.

The Scale of Being through Language Language alone brings what is, as something that is, into the Open for the first time . . . Language, by naming beings for the first time, first

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brings beings to word and to appearance . . . Such a saying is a projecting of the clearing, in which announcement is made of that as which beings come into the open. (Heidegger 1982 GA 52, 73) The word is the threshold a thing has to pass in order to reach the realm of intelligibility and thus to be. “Only the word makes a being be a being” (Heridegger 1999 GA 85, 72).11 All these formulations could be substituted for those Heidegger uses to describe Plato’s ideas. But the significant difference, which allows Heidegger not to reify ideas, is that language is a configuration or a Dichtung. Ideas themselves are such configurations: “It is only from a world that ‘the’ sun and ‘the’ wind come to appearance and are only what they are to the extent that they are poeticized from ‘this’ ‘world’ ” (Heidegger 1982 GA 52, 40). Let us note the emphasis on “the” sun and “the” wind, which makes them sound like Platonic ideas. There is a “Dichten of astronomy and meteorology” that pertains to modern natural explanation on the mode of “calculation and planning” (40). This latter mode of dichten is, as we saw, part of the abandonment of being in which Heidegger believes we find ourselves. The abandonment manifests itself through language; more specifically through the disappearance of a genuine language. As we saw in the Introduction to this volume, the German language, Heidegger tells us, suffers from an “americanization of language” (Heidegger 1982 GA 52, 10) through which language has become a mere means of exchange. “It may be that our language is ‘German’ and still we speak completely ‘American’ ” (Heidegger 1984 GA 53, 80; 1996, 65. Translation modified). This “alienation toward the word” (Entfremdung zum Wort) (Heidegger 1982 GA 52, 11) bears upon the way a thing can be preserved (and this means: can “be”). Since the most important way of being preserved is precisely by being said, a subversion of language amounts to a subversion of the way things are preserved. It is a contamination of the very ontological roots of reality. How does this ontological connection between things and words function? Heidegger applies to words the twofold aspect of preservation, which explained the two appearings of ideas. The word has two sides: forwardlooking, it is what provides a thing with its public clothing, allowing the thing named and nameable to have currency and be a node in human relationships and dealings in the world; it is one mode of preservation. But the word is also, backward-looking, as the other mode of preservation, what brings the true to its crystallization in a thing and as such carries with it the trace of the withdrawal of being. Before the word is available, the movement of disclosure or the unfolding of the truth has already started. The

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word both brings a thing to its being and conceals the truth of that thing in the sense that it conceals the movement of entering being. “The word itself already discloses something (familiar) and thus hides that which has to be brought into the open through thinking-saying [im denkerischen Sagen]” (Heidegger 1999, 58). However, a common language cannot speak the movement of entering being, nor can a new language. “The truth of be-ing cannot be said with the ordinary language that today is ever more widely misused and destroyed by incessant talking. . . . Or can a new language for be-ing be invented? No” (Heidegger 1999b, 54). If we cannot invent a new language, the only path left is to perform some operation on language so as to recover from it its unveiling power. This happens when the word “fails.” For, when the word fails, the movement of entering being is not brought to its conclusion in the form of a word functioning as a label. This movement of entering being itself appears, which is, seen from the perspective of the thing once named, a concealing. By failing, the word reveals, because the thing that could be named, but is not, is deprived of its entry into the realm of intelligibility and thus is “not being” (in the adjectival sense); it is disclosed as un-being. The word fails [es verschlägt einem das Wort], not as an occasional event—in which an accomplishable speech or expression does not take place . . . —but originarily. The word does not even come to word [das Wort kommt gar nicht zum Wort], even though it is precisely when the word escapes one [verschlagen] that the word begins to take its first leap. The word’s escaping one is enowning as the hint and onset of be-ing. (Heidegger 1999, 26) Heidegger likes to appeal to Stefan George’s verse, “May no thing be where the word breaks open” (Kein Ding sei wo das Wort gebricht). He explains it as follows: “the word first makes a being be . . . When the word breaks up, Being refuses itself. But in this refusal Being manifests itself as refusal [Verweigerung]—as silence, as ‘in-between’, as there” (Heidegger 1999 GA 85, 72). We can see now the connection between “un-being” as the stage (Let us call it Stage1) preceding “being” (understood adjectivally) and “un-being” as the stage of “being” but not in truth (Let us call it Stage2). Since they are linked to each other, the glimpse we have at the un-being when the word escapes (Stage1) renders what “was being” hitherto un-being (Stage2). This is what “The Origin” calls the thrust that a work of art causes, or the disruption of the familiar. It was also manifested, first, in the fundamental mood of the first beginning, where the whole of being was wrapped in wonder,

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an astonishment that things are, and, second, in the fundamental mood of the other beginning, the startled dismay or terror that things are. In both cases, this mood takes away the necessity that things may still have, as we see them. It releases them in their native fluidity: “in the astonishment what is the most habitual of all and in all and thus all becomes the most inhabitual [Ungewönhlichsten]” (Heidegger 1984 GA 45, 166). If we cultivate the word’s escaping, we will replicate the coming to word that the word both allows and conceals. “The word’s escaping is the inceptual condition for the self-unfolding possibility of an originary-poeticnaming of be-ing [ursprünglichen-dichtenden-Nennung des Seyns]” (Heidegger 1999, 26). We will thus attend to the coming into being of entities, at that moment when “plant, animal, rock, and sea and sky become beings [seiend werden]” (207). Plato is the one to be credited with that effort to think the coming-intobeing. When re-read by Heidegger non-metaphysically, the me on is the moment of becoming before something is and ideas are, like language,12 the enabler of this becoming. It is thus with approval that Heidegger quotes Hölderlin: “I believe that at the end we will all say: holy Plato, forgive us! We have . . . heavily sinned against you” (Heidegger 1982 GA 52, 177).

Notes 1

2

3 4

5 6 7

8

This playing out of the first and the other beginning is the second joining of the Contributions under the name of “playing-forth.” Human beings themselves are under the illusion that they are absolute subjects, although they have been brought to such an understanding. “The abandonment of be-ing happens to beings, indeed to beings in the whole, and thus also and precisely to that being which as man stands in the midst of beings and thereby forgets their be-ing” (Heidegger 1999, 81). This subjectivism corresponds to the simplistic idealism Heidegger derided in Being and Time. Heidegger lists sixteen signs of such an abandonment (Heidegger 1999, 82–83). Paul Shorey in the Loeb bi-lingual edition translates as “turned toward more real things” (Plato 1987, 125). Heidegger translates as Seienderem zugewendet (1988 GA 34, 31). Shorey translates as “more real” and Heidegger as unverborgener. “Beings differentiate themselves in more or less being” (Heidegger 1988 GA 34, 33). Recall Heidegger’s stern warning in Introduction to Metaphysics: “What is really asked in our question [why are there beings at all instead of nothing?] is, for faith, foolishness. Philosophy consists in such a foolishness. A ‘Christian philosophy’ is a round square and a misunderstanding” (Heidegger 2000, 8). When Heidegger speaks of god in the singular or gods in the plural, he only points to a place-holder for the divine. Whether it is one god or several gods, this

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is not decidable yet. It will depend on the particular configuration of the new Da-sein of the other beginning. “The undecidability concerning which god and whether a god can, in utmost distress, once again arise, from which way of being of man and in what way—this is what is named with the name ‘gods’ ” (Heidegger 1999, 308). Let us note that gods are not being, for “be-ing is never a determination of god itself. Rather be-ing is that which the godding of gods needs, in order nonetheless to remain totally differentiated from be-ing” (Heidegger 1999, 169). Strictly speaking, “gods ‘are’ not at all. Be-ing ‘is’ the between [Zwischen] in the midst of beings and gods . . . Not attributing being to ‘gods’ initially means only that being does not stand ‘over’ gods and that gods do not stand ‘over’ being. But gods do need be-ing” (308–309). To ascribe this collapse of the two meanings to the Greeks is highly dubious. We foreigners may see it as one word and we indeed have to be careful when learning Greek to remember which one has the stress on the first and which one on the second syllable. But the reason is that we learn the word through reading and writing. It is thus a visual bias that causes the similarity between the two words. When these words were spoken by the Greeks they were as different as words can be, like our English words desert and desert; these English words pose a problem only for foreigners, precisely because they learn English very often by dealing with the written words. It is because of this visual bias that théa and theá or desert and desert look the same. Not so for native speakers who learn words phonetically and for whom a difference in stress is all that is needed to differentiate two words. Heidegger’s speculation with thea is as dubious as a speculation about an AngloSaxon metaphysics associating a barren place with what is deserved. Or, as Heidegger will write later in a more colorful and powerful manner, “when we go to the well, when we go through the woods, we are always already going through the word ‘well,’ through the word ‘woods,’ even if we do not speak the words and do not think of anything relating to language” (Heidegger 1971, 132). If, indeed, language plays a role analogous to the role of ideas for Plato, language not only provides the thing with its outlook, it also shows the extent to which the gods shine through in things, and how much we are “sayers” (Heidegger 2000, 86). To be a sayer means to be capable of saying “it is.” “It is because human beings can say ‘is,’ because they ‘have’ a relation to being, that they are able to ‘say’ at all, that they ‘have’ the word, that they are zoon logon echon” (Heidegger 1984 GA 53, 112; 1996, 90).

Part IV

Toward a Broadened Ontology and Epistemology Nature, Judgment, and Intersubjectivity

Chapter 8

Harmony in Opposition On Merleau-Ponty’s Heraclitean Vision of Truth Shazad Akhtar

Like Hegel, Nietzsche, and other modern German philosophers, phenomenologists Husserl and Heidegger tied their own philosophical agendas to the concerns or aspirations of the ancient Greeks. This is a less characteristic feature of the work of French phenomenologists Sartre and Merleau-Ponty, both of whom did look back, to be sure, but mainly with respect to their German predecessors (plus, of course, Descartes) rather than to, say, Plato or Parmenides. Yet at least in the case of Merleau-Ponty, the ties to ancient Greek thinking are real, though not necessarily of a Platonic-Aristotelian kind. One has to push back, instead, to the storied figure of Heraclitus. The conjunction of Merleau-Ponty’s and Heraclitus’ thought stems from their similar ontologies and views of logic and truth. They share the conviction that ultimate reality—Being, Nature (phūsis), and so on—is self-divided and oppositionally structured, yet also that this “antagonism” is the secret to the real unity of reality: “The hidden attunement [harmonie] is better than the obvious one” (Kahn 1983, 80/65).1 For Merleau-Ponty, human subjectivity is implicated at the heart of this paradox, being both the “subject” that is “visible/tangible” and the “object” that “sees/touches.” Self and world, le soi and l’autre, are intertwined and co-defined, but always as opposites, always retaining an irreducible tension and difference. Like Schelling, Merleau-Ponty comes to understand this human situation as ontologically revelatory—it is Being that is internally “folded,” not simply “human being,” as if humanity were an aberration or a happenstance. Yet by disavowing the “transcendental idealism” of Kantian or Husserlian (or earlier-Schellingean) varieties, which privilege the subject (however it be defined—consciousness, ego, “intersubjectivity,” etc.), Merleau-Ponty dives headlong into the mysterious “depths,” the abyss even, of a “Nature” that produces a dialectic from which it withdraws as a kind of lost or primordial unity.

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It is undoubtedly true that we can have little certainty about what Heraclitus “really” said or meant, based on the small number of enigmatic fragments of his teaching that we possess. Concerning, for example, Merleau-Ponty’s lost unity, the “past that has never been present,” I would be personally tempted to compare Heraclitus’ famous fragment, “Nature (phūsis) loves to hide” (Kahn 1983 10/33). What is common here is a sense of the essentially concealed nature of the ground of things—or so one might say, based on one of many possible ways of reading the pertinent texts. No single strategy of interpretation can claim more than partial plausibility, let alone a monopolistic authority. Nonetheless, one’s case for the force or plausibility of one interpretation over another becomes considerably stronger if it can be tied consistently to other statements by the philosopher in question, to the patterns that develop over many statements and which, together, manifest a general vision or “total” perspective. I compare Merleau-Ponty and Heraclitus in this essay under three major themes, all converging ultimately in the fourth, namely “truth” itself. I expend some effort in trying to give the Heraclitean fragments, reproduced in translation, a consistent and nuanced reading, but my emphasis is on reconstructing Merleau-Ponty qua “Heraclitean” theorist of truth (which in turn rests on various foundational ontological ideas). It should also be made clear that my intent in this paper is not to show a causal “influence” of Herlaclitus’ thought on Merleau-Ponty. Merleau-Ponty obviously reads Heraclitus and quotes him occasionally and favorably, 2 but he does the same thing with dozens of other thinkers. He was a voracious and generous reader. What this paper reveals is a resonance between the two thinkers based on correlations, not causality.

First Theme: Identity-in-Contradiction Heraclitus’ principal contribution to human discourse appears to have been his principle of (in my terms, of course) harmonious opposition. Though not explicitly stated (in the fragments we possess) as a “law,” in the mold for example of Parmenides’ strictures against the saying or thinking of what “is not,” Heraclitus offers many instances, clearly for illustrative effect, of the phenomenon of the identity of contraries—contrary ideas, things, phenomena, forces, and so on. It is less well known that MerleauPonty came to embrace just this sort of principle. Indeed, it becomes the

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basis of his later ontology of the “visible” and the “invisible,” the “sensible” and “sentient.” Let us begin with Heraclitus. Here is a list of many of the fragments (rendered here by two different translators) that illustrate the present theme (I have numbered them arbitrarily for reference): 1. “The teacher of most is Hesiod. It is him they know as knowing most, who did not recognize day and night: they are one.” (Kahn 1983, 19/37) 2. “The counter-thrust brings together, and from tones at variance comes perfect attunement, and all things come to pass through conflict.” (Kahn 1983, 75/63) 3. “They do not comprehend how a thing agrees at variance with itself: [it is] an attunement turning back [on itself], like that of the bow and lyre.” (Kahn 1983, 78/65) 4. “The cosmos works/by harmony of tensions/like the lyre and bow.” (Haxton 2001, 56/37) 5. “From the strain/of binding opposites/comes harmony.” (Haxton 2001, 46/31) 6. “The beginning and the end are shared in the circumference of a circle.” (Kahn 1983, 99/75) 7. “The way up and down is one and the same.” (Kahn 1983, 103/75) 8. “Therefore, good/and ill are one.” (Haxton 2001, 57/37) The way in which opposites may be said to be “one” surely varies, and, it must be admitted, not always in particularly (philosophically) interesting ways. Should we interpret Heraclitus in a more mundane way than people typically do? For instance, one may say that day and night are “one” in the sense that they seamlessly blend into each other, with no strictly discernible boundary between them. But then why would Hesiod bother to “recognize” such a triviality, or be rebuked for failing to do so? Fragments 2–6, as well as possibly 8, could be interpreted in far bolder ways. Certainly the notion that a thing “agrees at variance with itself” (3) is meant to challenge our intuitions, just as Heraclitus himself prefaces (3) with “They do not comprehend . . .,” “they” presumably being those—the hoi polloi, natural philosophers, or the ancient poets—operating foolishly and with a common sense bias. Heraclitus’ own suspicion of “common sense” is evident from his famous denunciation of Homer, reported to us by Aristotle, for giving lyrical voice to the common-sense view that life would be better without conflict than with it: “Heraclitus reproaches the poet for the verse ‘Would that Conflict

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might vanish from among gods and men!’ For there would be no harmonie without high and low notes nor any animals without male and female, both of which are opposites” (Kahn 1983, 81[A]/67). This also seems to be what is at play when Heraclitus startlingly declares that “War is the father of all and king of all” (Kahn 1983, 83/67). In this light, Heraclitus’ observation of the identity of beginning-point and end-point in the revolution of a circle (6) has clear cosmological implications: just as the circle could not exist except as a manifestation of conflict, permeating each point of its circumference, so the cosmos could not exist without being a harmonie of opposition. A circle is perhaps something mundane, but to see a circle in this way, as illustrating this concept, is not. Let us next consider the famous “river fragments,” which can be read in much the same spirit as what has preceded. Here are the relevant remarks, first from a second-hand report from Plutarch: One cannot step twice into the same river, nor can one grasp any mortal substance in a stable condition, but it scatters and again gathers; it forms and dissolves, and approaches and departs. (Kahn 1983, 51/53) Plotinus adds his own gloss as follows: Heraclitus left us to guess what he meant when he said . . . ‘it rests by changing’ and ‘its weariness to toil at the same tasks and be [always] beginning.’ (Kahn 1983, 52–53/53) These particular fragments, and other related ones, have been subject to much varied interpretation. I think that a useful way to think about them arises out of a consistent reading of the idea of identity-in-opposition. The river is a symbol of a certain paradox: it lacks any self-identity, but does not, all the same, cease to “be” a river. It “rests by changing.” But its being is the same as its becoming, for its self-abiding (“rest”) is also its self-dispersal (“change”). The line between being and not-being cannot—at least when it comes to the evanescent things of this world (“mortal substance”)—be sharply drawn. But that is because, against what Plato and Aristotle will later contend, to be “identical to oneself” in a way that excludes or precludes change is an illusion, even though there being a river as such is not. Are we not talking about one now? There is a river, but what it is is this: self-abiding-qua-self-dispersal. Paradoxically, then, the river’s instability is its stability, its non-being its being. (Thus there may be another sense in which “Phusis loves to hide.”)

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There is a striking parallel to the Heraclitean river fragments in MerleauPonty’s formulation of “dialectic.” Note the following passage: [My conception of dialectic is] self-manifestation, disclosure, in the process of forming itself . . . [My] dialectic is indeed all this, and it is, in this sense, what we are looking for. If nonetheless [I] have not hitherto said so, it is because, in [the] history of philosophy, it has never been all [of] that unadulteratedly; it is because the dialectic is unstable (in the sense that the chemists give to the word), it is even essentially and by definition unstable, so that it has never been able to formulate itself into theses without denaturing itself, and because if one wishes to maintain its spirit it is perhaps necessary to not even name it. (Merleau-Ponty 1969, 92 [My emphasis]) Note here the paradoxical combination of something’s having a nature (dialectic must not be forced to “denature” itself by becoming static) and maintaining absolute fluidity (“by definition unstable . . .”). And of course what Merleau-Ponty understands by “dialectic,” as we will see later on, is grounded, like the Hegelian version, in (what is called) “contradiction.” The “non-Hegelian” and very much Heraclitean part of Merleau-Ponty’s view, however, is that the dialectic must not resolve itself into a triangular movement toward an absolute that is other than the (movement of) dialectic itself. Merleau-Ponty’s concept of “reversibility,” a prominent theme in his later work, is nothing more, I would argue, than the Heraclitean principle of the identity of opposites as played out, as it were, on the stage of postCartesian philosophy. Indeed, consider the way Merleau-Ponty characterizes Descartes’ difficulty with respect to the mind-body problem: There is an extraordinary difficulty in thinking according to both the first and the second order [physical and mental] at the same time. It is difficult to conceive the soul and the body as one and the same thing, while at the same time thinking of them as distinct. Union and distinction are, however, both required, yet they are unthinkable both at the same time.” (Merleau-Ponty 2003, 17–18 [My emphasis]) Merleau-Ponty’s concept of reversibility originates in his appreciation of an everyday phenomenon. Merleau-Ponty notes, like Husserl before him, that to “touch” something, when that something happens to be another part of one’s body, is also to be “touched” by that something. “Subject” here

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becomes “object,” and vice-versa.3 The most dramatic case is that of one’s own hands touching one another; but Merleau-Ponty sees “reversibility” as extending beyond the sense of touch to include vision, which explains the title of The Visible and the Invisible and the repeated references to, for example, the “strange adhesion of the seer and the visible” (Merleau-Ponty 1969, 140). Husserl had initially distinguished touching from vision by noticing that while touch is reversible, vision is not. That is, we cannot see ourselves seeing in the way we can touch ourselves touching. But Merleau-Ponty questions the validity of this distinction on two counts. First, vision could not truly “see” the world if the world did not “adhere” to its glance; and second, even in self-touching, there is no complete coincidence of sensing and sensed—in fact, “non-coincidence” turns out to be one of Merleau-Ponty’s fundamental ideas, and it applies as truly to this case as to any other. As he explains in one characteristic passage: To begin with, we spoke summarily of the reversibility of the seeing and the visible, of the touching and the touched. It is time to emphasize that it is a reversibility always imminent and never realized in fact. My left hand is always on the verge of touching my right hand touching the things; but I never reach coincidence; the coincidence eclipses at the moment of realization, and one of two things always occurs: either my right hand really passes over into the ranks of the touched, or it retains its hold on the world, but then I do not really touch it—my right hand touching, I palpate with my left hand only its outer covering. (MerleauPonty 1969, 148) Thus while it is true that we cannot truly “see ourselves seeing,” in that the eye cannot bend its vision back upon itself, neither, finally can touch. And to the extent that either sense is reversible, it is reversible in this complex manner—that is, with a combination of identity and difference. There are basically three fundamental lessons or themes Merleau-Ponty takes from reversibility. The first is that of the unity or “chiasm” of subject and object, touching and touched, sentient and sensible, and so on. The second is, in apparent opposition to the first, “non-coincidence”; and the third is the interplay of identity and difference, chiasm and non-coincidence, that produces the paradoxical “sameness without identity” (Merleau-Ponty 1969, 261) that we experience with respect to the world as well as to other people (e.g., in the paradigmatic case of a shaking of hands). After all, the phenomenon of reversibility could not become known to us if it were merely a difference or merely an identity. Clearly the sensible and the sentient are

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not simply two but rather in some way one (or else how could they be reversible and simply “trade places”?), and yet they are two, since if they were simply one, then how could they be related “intentionally” as seer to seen, toucher to touched, and so on? This interweaving of identity and difference is embodied in Merleau-Ponty’s reciprocal expressions “difference without contradiction” and “identity without superposition” (Merleau-Ponty 1969, 135). Thus, “non-coincidence” for Merleau-Ponty serves exactly the same function in his discourse as Heraclitus’ anti-Homeric emphasis on conflict does in the latter’s discourse: to underscore the “oppositional” element of identity-in-opposition.

Second Theme: Holism and the Question of the “One and the Many” Merleau-Ponty states during an important series of lectures at the Collège de France that the question of wholeness or “totality” “[lies] at the center of this course on the idea of nature and maybe the whole of philosophy” (MerleauPonty 2003, 145 [My italics]). What is it that binds together the unbonded, makes a unity of many? Merleau-Ponty and Heraclitus are both “holists.” But what exactly does this term mean in the present context? I will here make a distinction between two kinds of holism, general holism and vertical holism. In general holism, the “many” are united inextricably in a larger system, for example in deep-ecological thinking of Buddhist “interdependent arising.” Vertical holism is a macrocosm/microcosm principle, or whole-in-part immanence. I will argue that Merleau-Ponty and Heraclitus affirm both types of holism. This makes their holisms all the more radical and their horizonal convergence, so to speak, all the more striking. (Another way to state the difference between general and vertical holism is to say that the former is a “one-of-many,” while the latter is a “one-in-many”). Heraclitus’ general holism shows up most directly in the following fragment, especially the last part of it: Graspings: wholes and not wholes, convergent and divergent, consonant and dissonant, from all things one and from one thing all. (Kahn 1983, 124/85) One is led to interpret this fragment as a statement of holism in the sense that the “all” are regarded here as belonging together inextricably—“from

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all things one.” But what might the next part mean—“from one thing all”? Is this a reflection of Heraclitus’ notorious “fire-monism”? It is hard to say, but if we take the first part of the fragment into account and logically connect beginning to end, it seems that Heraclitus’ point may be that the many are united in their differences (“consonant and dissonant”)—that is, they are what they are only in relations of difference with everything else. This paradoxically brings all things together “as one,” inseparably linked to each other in their unlikenesses. Of course this echoes the familiar modern idea, expressed by Spinoza and picked up by the German Idealists, that “determination is negation.” There is certainly support for this interpretation in this rendering of a Heraclitean fragment by Haxton: “Some, blundering/ with what I set before you,/ try in vain with empty talk/ to separate the essences of things/ and say how each thing truly is” (Haxton 2001, 1/3). In other words, one cannot say how each thing truly “is,” since it is nothing in itself, only a reflection of the whole. The parallel with Buddhism surfaces again. As for Merleau-Ponty, Fred Evans puts it well when he says, What [Merleau-Ponty] offers is . . . closer to what we might call a ‘unity composed of difference’ rather than a collection of separate, merely externally related entities or a unity formed through domination by one of the elements of that unity—he eschews, in other words, both pluralism and monism. (Evans 2008, 191) Merleau-Ponty’s general holism is prevalent from his early and enduring interest in Gestalt psychology to the “Nature” lectures quoted from above, in which it is made a central theme. But Merleau-Ponty also develops his holism in the subtle direction of vertical holism as well. He does this in two ways. First, he embraces the implication, from the principle of reversibility, of an underlying isomorphism of the inner and the outer; and second, he applies this sort of intertwinement to all instances of “wholes” or “totalities” with respect to their “parts”— their “total parts.” First, let us look at how this relates to Heraclitus. It is seldom acknowledged how deeply Heraclitus enmeshed discourse on the soul with that concerning the universe at large. The fact is not lost on Charles Kahn. “I believe,” states Kahn, “that [my predecessor Hermann] Diels was right in locating the central insight of Heraclitus in [the] identity of structure between the inner, personal world of the psyche and the larger natural order of the universe” (Kahn 1983, 21 [My emphasis]). For example, when Heraclitus proclaims, “The god: day and

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night, winter and summer, war and peace, satiety and hunger . . . ” (Kahn 1983, 123/85), we can see how he might agree with Merleau-Ponty that spirit and nature are “two leaves” of a single Being. The macrocosm/microcosm correlation in Heraclitus is reflected in the fact that his cosmological discourse seems to have an ultimate personal and moral significance: Man’s character is his fate. (Kahn 1983, 114/81) Applicants for wisdom/ do what I have done:/ inquire within. (Haxton 2001, 80/51) Heraclitus’ emphasis on personality and introspection has even led Kahn to see him as an existentialist, and to detect a resonance between him and a thinker like Unamuno in their common “meditation[s] on human life and human destiny in the context of biological death” (Kahn 1983, 21). Natural-philosophical doctrines for Heraclitus, while not purely allegorical, are, says Kahn, “significant only insofar as they reveal a general truth about the unity of opposites, a truth whose primary application for human beings lies in a deeper understanding of their own experience of life and death, sleeping and waking, youth and old age . . .” (Kahn 1983, 21). The unity or “chiasm” of mind and world, spirit and nature, suggests for Merleau-Ponty a kind of “pre-established harmony” (Merleau-Ponty 1969, 133), one that Merleau-Ponty understands as expressive of an ontological logic of reciprocity: “since vision is a palpation with the look, it must also be inscribed in the order of being that it discloses to us; he who looks must not himself be foreign to the world that he looks at” (Merleau-Ponty 1969, 134). Merleau-Ponty sometimes expresses this idea of a subjective-objective or natural-spiritual harmony by referring to “the nature in us, [by which] we can know Nature” and by remarking that “reciprocally it is from ourselves that living beings and even space speak to us . . .” (Merleau-Ponty 2003, 205).4 Central to this particular notion of an inner/outer intimacy is the ultimate continuity of the visible and the invisible: The superficial pellicle of the visible is only for my vision and for my body. But the depth beneath this surface contains my body and hence contains my vision. My body as a visible thing is contained within the full spectacle. (Merleau-Ponty 1969, 138) Perhaps relevant to this commitment to the reversibility of inner and outer realms is Merleau-Ponty’s comment that “man contains in silence all the paradoxes of philosophy” (Merleau-Ponty 1988, 63–64).

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Merleau-Ponty illustrates the idea of unity-in-many (and not merely unity-of-many, or general holism) further through the expression “total part,” that is, a wholeness immanent in a “part,” thereby rendering, paradoxically, the “whole” as “part” of itself. Let us consider an example (the case of the five senses) of what Merleau-Ponty means by the term: Each “sense” is a “world,” i.e. absolutely incommunicable for the other senses, and yet construing a something which, through its structure, is from the first open upon the world of the other senses, and with them forms one sole Being . . . The “World” is this whole where each “part,” when one takes it for itself, suddenly opens unlimited dimensions—becomes a total part. Now this particularity of the color, of the yellow, and this universality are not a contradiction, are together sensoriality itself: it is by the same virtue that the color, the yellow, at the same time gives itself as a certain being and as a dimension, the expression of every possible being—What is proper to the sensible (as to language) is to be representative of the whole, not by a sign-signification relation, or by the immanence of the parts in one another and in the whole, but because each part is torn up from the whole, comes with its roots, encroaches upon the whole, transgresses the frontiers of the others. (Merleau-Ponty 1969, 218) This passage distills the essence of Merleau-Ponty’s complete answer to the question of the relation of the many—for example, many egos, or multiple orders of being—to the one or the whole, and what he says of the senses, or of colors, applies to these other sets of “many” as well. (It is also an example of his characteristic—and effective, I think—use of metaphor.) That what he has in mind is a highly general law can be gathered from the fact that he sees the same vertical-holistic principle involved in the coordinated anatomical/behavioral development of organisms, on the one hand, and to the “becoming of a painting” out of many strokes of the brush, on the other. 5 This is one of the most powerful ideas in all of Merleau-Ponty’s later thinking, though it is almost totally buried in obscurity, as he never got a chance to develop it in greater depth in an “official” or completed work.

Third Theme: Paradox and Dialectic Heraclitus’ notorious fondness for paradoxical language is mirrored by Merleau-Ponty’s own—not only this, but Merleau-Ponty was an eloquent

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philosopher of paradox itself, like Nicholas of Cusa, Kierkegaard, Jaspers, Heidegger, and others before him. In both the Merleau-Pontian and Heraclitean cases, their paradoxicality stems, I think, from the view that human thought is constrained by a logic of non-contradiction that somehow comes “too late” to capture the essence of the truth. This is a trope common among mystics, but philosophers also sometimes reach the same conclusion. We must keep in mind that for paradoxical philosophers, paradox is not simply “contradiction” but more like an “identity of opposites” that problematizes propositional thought itself, at least as a vehicle of (whole) truth. In this way, paradox is in fact a corollary of any rigorous holism. In a sense, it is actually “common-sense” world-views that are contradictory. Thus, the Phenomenology of Perception proceeds by applying reductio ad absurdum arguments against various one-sided views of perception, while in Heraclitus we have seen a persistent opposition to common sense, the “sleeping world” and its confusions. The seed of Merleau-Ponty’s approach to paradox and Being as a paradoxical phenomenon are to be found already in this dense and startling passage, which is worth quoting in full, from “The Primacy of Perception and Its Philosophical Consequences”: It is true that we arrive at contradictions when we describe the perceived world. And it is also true that if there were such a thing as a non-contradictory thought, it would exclude the world of perception as a simple appearance. But the question is precisely to know whether there is such a thing as logically coherent thought or thought in the pure state. This is the question Kant asked himself . . . One of Kant’s discoveries, whose consequences we have not yet fully grasped, is that all our experience of the world is throughout a tissue of concepts which lead to irreducible contradictions6 if we attempt to take them in an absolute sense or transfer them into pure being, and that they nevertheless found the structure of all phenomena, or everything which is for us . . . I wish only to point out that the accusation of contradiction is not decisive, if the acknowledged contradiction appears as the very condition of consciousness [my emphasis] . . . There is a vain form of contradiction which consists in affirming two theses which exclude one another at the same time and under the same aspect . . . There is the sterile non-contradiction of formal logic [versus] the justified contradictions of transcendental logic. The objection with which we are concerned would be admissible only if we could put a system of eternal truths in the place of the perceived world, freed from its contradictions. (Merleau-Ponty 1964b, 18)

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Merleau-Ponty’s reconceptualization of opposition emerges as the idea of “complementarity.” A dialectic of complementarity refuses, we might now say, to remain “static” by cresting into any form of synthesis of horizons. It is in this spirit that I read Merleau-Ponty’s remarkable interweaving of his critique of Sartrean ontology and his own burgeoning dialectical method:7 Has not our discussion consisted in showing that the relationship between the two terms [Being and Nothingness] (whether one takes them in a relative sense, within the world, or in an absolute sense, of the index of the thinker and what he thinks) covers a swarm of relations with double meaning, incompatible and yet necessary to one another (complementarity, as the physicists say today), and that this complex totality is the truth of the abstract dichotomy from which we started? (Merleau-Ponty 1969, 92) Other relevant passages: There are two “sides” of an experience, conjugated and incompossible, but complementary. Their unity is irrecusable; it is simply as the invisible hinge on which two experiences are articulated—a self torn apart. (Merleau-Ponty 2003, 65–66 [My emphasis]) [C]ontradiction, understood as interior to Nature, must be assumed. We must admit the idea of an operating negation in Nature.8 (MerleauPonty 2003, 65–66) As we see, Merleau-Ponty’s use of the term “complementarity” involves a deliberate reference to Bohr’s theory of quantum mechanics by the same name, a subject to which he devotes a good amount of attention in the “Nature” lectures (Merleau-Ponty 2003, 89–100). He applies what is true of sub-atomic particles, in particular the symmetrical applicability of mutually incompatible wave-theory and corpuscular theory to the description of elementary particles, to the total spectacle of being itself: “. . . the two maps are complete, and yet they do not merge into one. The two parts are total parts and yet not superposable” (Merleau-Ponty 1969, 134 [Note again the idea of a “total part”]). But Merleau-Ponty is also in an ongoing dialogue with Hegel, who had been a major part of the French scene of philosophy at the time (and still is, interestingly). With respect to Hegelian dialectic specifically MerleauPonty ruminates critically (and somewhat cryptically): Position, negation, negation of the negation: this side, the other, the other than the other. What do I bring to the problem of the same and

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the other? This: that the same be the other than the other, and identity difference of difference—this 1) does not realize a surpassing, a dialectic in the Hegelian sense; 2) is realized on the spot, by encroachment, thickness, spatiality. (Merleau-Ponty 1969, 264)9 Most noteworthy for us here are his self-comparison with Hegelian dialectic and his rejection of its teleology of “surpassing.” Merleau-Ponty is careful to identify what he calls a “trap in the dialectic” and the “bad dialectic” (Merleau-Ponty 1969, 94) that ensues, ironically echoing Hegel’s own terminological style (“bad infinity,” etc.). As against these, Merleau-Ponty advances a new form or method of thinking, “hyperdialectic”: What we call hyperdialectic is a thought . . . that is capable of reaching truth because it envisages without restriction the plurality of the relationships and what has been called ambiguity. The bad dialectic is that which thinks it recomposes being by a thetic thought, by an assemblage of statements, by thesis, antithesis, and synthesis; the good dialectic is that which is conscious of the fact that every thesis is an idealization, that Being is not made up of idealizations or of things said, as the old logic believed, but of bound wholes where signification never is except in tendency. (Merleau-Ponty 1969, 94) Merleau-Ponty’s critique of Hegel thus lies, ironically, in the latter’s not being thorough enough in thinking dialectically, and in relying on teleological explanations where none truly obtain (or are even relevant— Merleau-Ponty is critical of Kantian “as-if” teleology as well). Thus “the only good dialectic is hyperdialectic” (Merleau-Ponty 1969, 94). MerleauPonty’s “good” dialecticity is a movement of thought and the manner in which thought must pursue the whole without pretending to have a grasp of it unilaterally—a by now familiar theme: The point to be noticed is this: that the dialectic without synthesis of which we speak is not therefore scepticism, vulgar relativism, or the reign of the ineffable. What we reject or deny is not the idea of a surpassing that reassembles, it is the idea that it results in a new positive, a new position . . . What we seek is a dialectical definition of being that can be neither the being for itself nor the being in itself—rapid, fragile, labile definitions. (Merleau-Ponty 1969, 95) Because of his resolute commitment of Nature’s “internal contradictions,” Merleau-Ponty handles and develops many individual paradoxes; indeed,

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his view is that philosophy itself is replete with them, just insofar as it is philosophical. One of the more paradigmatic paradoxes concerns the interplay of “distance” and “proximity.” This is the dialectic that defines our strange intimacy with things, even as things remain resolutely “outside” of what Husserl calls the “sphere of immanence.” Indeed, Merleau-Ponty takes the Husserlian notion of an “immanent transcendency” of things in consciousness to its logical conclusion: By definition perception puts us in the presence of a definitively opaque term. In other words, the Nature that we perceive is as distant and as close as possible, and for the same reasons. There is nothing between me and the Nature that I perceive. When I perceive a thing, I cannot conceive of a perception interposed between me and the object. (MerleauPonty 2003, 118 [My emphasis]) The emphasized clause here shows that Merleau-Ponty is not talking about a distance “in this respect” but a proximity “in another”—one of the mundane routes to simple non-contradiction. He reiterates this same idea of distancequa-proximity in The Visible and the Invisible : “this distance is not the contrary of this proximity, it is deeply consonant with it, it is synonymous with it” (MerleauPonty 1969, 135 [My emphasis]). And in a similar vein: “Vision does not completely blend into the visible; nonetheless we are close to it, palpation, gaze envelops things, clothes them with its own flesh” (Merleau-Ponty 1969, 131). For Merleau-Ponty, as for Heraclitus, the tightly wound unity of contraries in Being actually serves to preserve as opposed to wound its intelligibility. This, in fact, is the true depth of paradox—that it is the only way to say what is true, rather than itself being a threat to truth or the saying of it. Thus in one place Merleau-Ponty remarks that Husserl tries wrongly to disentangle knots, since disentanglement destroys intelligibility (Merleau-Ponty 1969, 268). What he has in mind is that Cartesian dualism, for instance, has increased “intelligibility” of parts at the expense of making entirely unintelligible the whole—that is, the whole being that is alive, embodied, thinking, and sensing. In this way, his analytic procedure, separating substances “in thought” that cannot be separated (by Descartes’ admission) “in experience,” is doomed to failure—and “sterile” contradiction.

Conclusion: The Notion of Truth As I hope to have shown, Heraclitus and Merleau-Ponty present to us a very unified front on some of the most basic questions of philosophy. The

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consequences of their basically “ontological” ideas for the notion of truth, the theme of the present volume, may now be directly examined. Chiefly at issue is the question of the relation between unity and multiplicity. Truth, since the early Greeks, has almost always been understood as some type of unity, wholeness, harmony, coherence, or correspondence. But truth also, necessarily, involves multiple components. For truth “unites”—and for this unison to take place, a disparity must be present, if only to be overcome. Heraclitean and Merleau-Pontian discourse tends to undermine this picture radically. Unity and multiplicity are intertwined; they never exist apart, and they never can. Wholeness is a harmony—yet harmony is not a fusion of elements. There is nothing but opposition—“War is . . . king of all”—but equally, opposition is nothing but an expression of unity. War is peace! For Merleau-Ponty and Heraclitus, therefore, truth can never be selfcoincident, never “at one with itself,” only constantly self-disrupting. But this does not make truth impossible; what it makes impossible is the truth’s (total) recovery in conceptual constructions and imagined “correspondences,” all of which presuppose a sameness over difference, a sameness that reduces to identity. In Merleau-Ponty, we can see that truth is the disruption that produces the conditions for the possibility, as it were, of one’s experience of a deceptively stable world. It is a “stabilized explosion, i.e. involving return” (Merleau-Ponty 1969, 268). That is, there is a coincidence—a “return”—but this hides the underlying “explosion” that is the condition of this very “returning.” The necessity of explosion, “dehiscence,” and living contradiction are brought out by Merleau-Ponty in his reference to Montaigne: “If [Montaigne’s skepticism] multiplies contrasts and contradictions, it is because truth demands it.” And even more provocatively, Merleau-Ponty in the same essay offers this: “Montaigne begins by teaching that all truth contradicts itself; perhaps he ends up recognizing that contradiction is truth” (Merleau-Ponty 1964a, 198 [My emphasis]). Merleau-Ponty’s is therefore a conception of truth that permits “multiplicity” to infiltrate unity—not from the outside, as it were, but from within. Truth is the sort of “unity” or “wholeness” that is a harmony not of sameness but of difference, a harmony in and of opposition. Or again, it is the harmony—not “identity,” as in some of the German Idealists—of “identity” and “difference.” In both Heraclitus and Merleau-Ponty, this conception of harmony has important implications for the relation of humanity—in particular, human subjectivity or “soul”—to the broader cosmos or “nature,” the “visible” realm of “things.” For in Merleau-Ponty, phenomenology becomes a dialectical meditation on the “chiasm” of

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subjectivity and objectivity, humanity and Nature. Yet this is also true of Heraclitus, whose pivotal role in the history of Western philosophy may lie in his discovery that cosmology and psychology are intertwined—indeed, reversible.

Notes 1

2 3 4

5

6

7

8

9

All citations of Heraclitus include both the fragment number (as determined by the translator and compiler in question—orderings of the fragments vary widely from translator to translator) and, next, the page number from the cited volume. See, for example, Merleau-Ponty 1969, 92. See Merleau-Ponty 2003, 217, 224; 1969, 141–142; 147, 148; 154, 155; 223; 272. See the following statement: “the homogeneity of the measured and the measuring implies that the subject makes common cause with space.” There is also something analogous in Merleau-Ponty’s description of what Matisse’s method of painting and the “body of behavior” in the organism have in common: “Threads are tied up, which come from everywhere, and which constitute independent forms, and at the same time, he finds that these threads realize something which has a unity” (Merleau-Ponty 2003, 154). He even invokes sexuality in this regard. “Thus the sexual is coextensive with the human not as a unique cause, but as a dimension outside of which nothing exists” (282). Compare: “Every attempt at elucidation brings us back to the dilemmas” (Merleau-Ponty 1969, 11). It is interesting that one of the early words he uses for his method is in fact “elucidation” (See, for example: Merleau-Ponty 1969, 23). Merleau-Ponty formally endorses a method of “dialectic” in chapter 2 of The Visible and the Invisible (Merleau-Ponty 1969, 89). The notion that Being contains its own negation ties in with the second of Merleau-Ponty’s lessons learnt from the reversibility of touch—that is, the impossibility of pure coincidence or a simple “identity of opposites” (Merleau-Ponty 1969, 250–251). Compare, also in an obvious reference to Hegel: “Against the doctrine of contradiction, absolute negation, the either/or—Transcendence is identity within difference” (Merleau-Ponty 1969, 225).

Chapter 9

The Role of Infinite Judgment in Hegel’s Phenomenology of Truth Russell Newstadt and Andrew Cutrofello

But just as the grave-diggers in Hamlet become familiar with skulls, so logicians become familiar with truth. (Russell 2009, 280) In the Encyclopaedia Logic, Hegel remarks that while qualitative judgments are commonly thought to express truth, they fail to do so, though they are indeed capable of being “correct” (Hegel 1991, 249). That they so fail is a function of an incongruity between the subject and predicate of the categorical proposition that furnishes the logical structure of judgment. The logico-metaphysical form of every categorical proposition, or, as Hegel will put it, the proposition “expressed in every judgment,” is “The singular is the universal” (244). From the perspective of finite understanding, to determine the singular as the universal is, epistemically, to determine a perceived individual to be the bearer of some property. Logically, it is to express the incongruous equation of subject and predicate, object and concept. However, from the absolute standpoint achieved at the end of the Phenomenology, judgment will find its true, speculative form in the instantaneous traversal of the phenomenon itself qua instantiated concept. If, in the end, truth is no longer for Hegel the representational adequacy of judgment to intuited phenomenon, it nevertheless recovers an important link to the scholastic adaequatio intellectus et rei through the development of the speculative proposition as the proper medium of logical, cognitive, and metaphysical reflection. This conception anticipates, but also corrects, Heidegger’s conception of phenomenological truth as alētheia, for inasmuch as the formal proposition cited above is true, that is, insofar as the singular is in fact the universal, it follows, as Hegel insists, that the concept is already present in the subject of predication, the empirical instance already in its universal predicate, and so on. That adequation in its speculative guise is inexpressible in categorical

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form will be expressed by the infinite judgment, which in effect deconstructs categorical judgment as a vehicle of truth. We can say, then, that the infinite judgment, in its specifically Hegelian employment, is the exemplary form of the speculative proposition, albeit still cast in the predicative garb of categorical equivalence. That it is simultaneously true and incoherent is an indication of the function it serves in announcing the collapse and reconstitution of the logico-grammatical form it exhibits. What is more, since judgment as such remains, as the engine of syllogistic inference, the bridge between static representation and speculative form, what is thereby announced is the overcoming of categorical thought as such. This brings us to a difficulty more profound than that of mere incongruity, namely, that the truth of a proposition, categorical or otherwise, implies its literal senselessness. As Hegel tells us, this is because a proposition promises a distinction between subject and predicate as well as identity; and the identity-proposition does not furnish what its form demands. Specifically, however, it is sublated by the so-called laws of thought that follow it; for these make the contrary of this law into laws—If someone says that this proposition cannot be proven, but that every consciousness proceeds in accordance with it and, as experience shows agrees with it at once, as soon as it takes it in, then against this alleged experience of the Schools we have to set the universal experience that no consciousness thinks, has notions, or speaks, according to this law, and no existence of any kind at all exists in accordance with it. (Hegel 1991, 180) The “universal experience” to which Hegel refers here is the fact that logical analysis reduces every true proposition to a special kind of identity statement, namely, one that refers, along with every other true proposition, to the True as the absolute night in which all propositional cows are black—a result that Wittgenstein, following Frege, will later identify, in addressing different but related concerns, as a consequence of the formal analysis of truth. The trouble, then, is that the proposition undermines itself in both semantic directions: in the first instance as “tragedy” (the misrecognition of truth in the “collision” of paradox), in the second instance, but simultaneously, as “farce” (the masquerade of truth in vacuous identity). Traditionally, the dilemma between contradiction and tautology is resolved through the ontological anchor of substance. The problem

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is to see how, apart from nostalgic stipulation, substance can enter the proposition so as to negotiate the tension between difference and indifference introduced by the copula. Hegel’s insight is, quite simply, to have recognized, before Frege, that the traditional categorical proposition is incapable of expressing the relationship between substance, subject and accident, because it is incapable of representing the logical and metaphysical unity of identity and difference. To do this, to think substance and subject simultaneously, is to recast the copula as the logico-metaphysical qua (“is” qua “qua”), thereby overcoming the logical form that immediately falsifies it. Through this qua, what we might call the modular copula (to borrow a term from abstract algebra), substance, subject, predicate, concept, etc., recover a coordinate proximity to one another in much the same way as congruence between distinct mathematical groups is established through integral modulation. That such predicative or, more broadly, symbolic modulation should play so central a philosophical role points to an interesting connection between Marx’s eleventh thesis on Feuerbach (“The philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways; the point is to change it”) and Hegel’s “thesis on Spinoza,” namely, that Spinoza only interpreted truth as substance; the task is to think it “equally as subject” (Hegel 1977, 10). To make this connection explicit, it is helpful to mention the work of Alain Badiou, for whom changing the world (or changing worlds) consists in discerning or naming a previously unmarked (or “uninterpreted”) logical subject to which a “revolutionary” subject pledges its fidelity. For Hegel, to name an event is to pass from affirmative to infinite judgment, a judgment that bears witness to the fact that the world-totality (substance) is never closed. Long before Gödel demonstrated the logical impossibility of a jointly consistent and complete formal system, Hegel maintained, for an otherwise radically different logic, that the notion of world as a totality of truths is both metaphysically and logically incoherent. Only through, and as, the succession and breakdown of particular truths can the world reflect the True. Totality, as Hegel will eventually understand it, is “the movement of the universal through determination to individuality, as also the reverse movement from individuality . . . to the universal” (480). It is, in other words, the continuous return of the subject to itself through the circuit of predication or judgment. To grasp the True, then, is to comprehend this actualized totality, what Hegel will call, without distinction, the absolute, absolute spirit, or absolute knowing. From the standpoint of absolute knowing, interpretation and change are the shapes of the “Bacchanalian revel” through which the world manifests itself as phenomenon or phantasia.

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Spinoza’s resolute monism accomplishes something similar, but only via the abstract representation of a closed and consistent world sub specie aeternitatis, that is, without acknowledging the ontological force of contradiction (as evinced, for Hegel, in the fundamental identity between being and nothing). As Hegel suggests in the Preface to the Phenomenology, to tarry with the negative is not to forgo the world but to realize it. Hegel’s remark implicitly identifies the infinite judgment as the cornerstone of his conception of truth. Infinite judgment, qua affirmative negation, is the vehicle through which the philosophical subject fulfills its logical, historical, and metaphysical promise, that is, that it arrives at the speculative identity of substantial and subjective truth. The trouble with Spinoza’s monism is that while it sidesteps the problems of multiplicity and incongruity, it does so at the expense of subjectivity, and therefore of truth itself. This is because truth qua truth presupposes an act of negation or differentiation (Urteil qua Ur-teilung) through which substance realizes itself as a relation between a logico-grammatical subject of predication and a logically determining, thinking subject. Without this division, Spinozistic thought, considered as a mere attribute of substance, remains (pace Marx) a mere interpretation of a merely substantial world, what Hegel characterizes as an “inert simplicity” completely, yet abstractly, determined by its modes and attributes. Kant had already shown that the phenomenal world could not be represented as a closed totality insofar as it exists only for thinking subjects, but he continued to maintain that things in themselves could be represented, however obscurely, as completely determined. Slavoj Žižek has argued that Hegel made the reference to things in themselves superfluous by identifying the judging subject with the cosmological gap preventing the world-totality from reaching closure (Žižek, 1993, 58). On our reading, the non-closure of the world is equivalent to the endless appearance of appearances, that is, to the relationship between the finitude of the judging subject and the infinite Truth it (ad)judges. To remain at the level of finite judging is to be subject to what Hegel famously calls “the cunning of reason,” the process by which the subject’s truth-takings (“interpretations”), and the phenomenal world these designate, are sacrificed, behind its back, to the Truth of the absolute. To pass from finite judgment to infinite judgment is not to “seize the reins” of galloping reason, but to acknowledge the cunning of reason as such: finitude in the service of infinitude. If Hegelian phenomenology is, thus, the sublation of the world qua substance, and of the categorical logic that sustains it, then infinite judgment is the logical signature of this phenomenology and of the logic that succeeds it. Through its confounding of logical form it manages to demonstrate,

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if not quite express, the truth of every concept—ultimately, the Concept itself—that it propositionally expands. This is not, however, to say that it confers validity upon truth, that it proves the truth of the proposition, for indeed the “deduction” of any proposition is its truth, on Hegel’s view, though without the logical transparency of infinite judgment it is unclear what this amounts to. Rather, it merely shows how the veridical concept is logically extrapolated, how conscious reason thinks or deduces truth, similarly to the way in which Frege’s much maligned assertion sign is supposed to indicate a proposition’s being held true, and to tell us therefore that asserting is what holding a proposition true amounts to, without thereby certifying or explicating its truth. The traditional, that is, scholastic, form of the infinite judgment, A is not-B, is a categorical proposition whose quality, or locutionary force, is affirmative and whose predicate is infinite, from the Latin infinitus, a translation, and indeed transformation (by Boethius), of Aristotle’s original Greek aoristos. As such, infinite judgment is strictly, if counter-intuitively, undefined with respect to quantity, that is, with respect to quantification, in modern logical parlance. What identifies the predicate, and thus the proposition it occurs in, as infinite, is its internal negation. In other words, the predicate of every such proposition, or equivalently the attribution involved in any judgment of this form, is determined through negation. A judgment of this form both proffers an attribution or predicate and privatively withholds its determination. By virtue of this operation, the infinite judgment captures the primacy of negation for consciousness and its acts, and thus may be considered the propria persona, or perhaps more precisely the propria species, of judgment as such, inasmuch as it is the formal expression of determinate negation. At the same time, it advances the cause of conceptual truth, or, as we should understand it, phenomenological truth, over the truth or truths of representational thought. In so doing, it heralds the demise of categorical logic and the advent of a conceptual logic from which it is formally excluded. It is this logic, Hegel’s Begriffsschrift, as it were, that the Phenomenology gives way to, though its exposition will require the labor of two separate logics. Before seeing how this works, that is, before turning our attention to the specific occurrences of infinite judgment in the Phenomenology, we would do well to pause over the expression affirmative negation used above to characterize it. To speak of such a thing is to approach the infinite judgment from a strictly formal perspective. Yet the negation involved in a negatively determined predicate, that is, in the kind of predicate that establishes a proposition as infinite, is not necessarily, and indeed not typically, determinate.

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Determinacy, in other words, is not a formal property of negation as Hegel understands it. But then what might it mean to say that infinite judgment is the formal expression of “determinate negation”? It is impossible to answer this question without knowing something both about what “form” (Form), “shape” (Gestalt) and formalism (das Formelle) amount to for Hegel, and, relatedly, what he means by “determinate (bestimmte) negation” (Hegel 1977, 51). As to his treatment of form, a few things need to be noted. Regardless of how subject and predicate are differentiated to begin with, within the predicative framework of (categorical) judgment that is the hallmark of thinking, or at least of discursivity, Hegel thinks that logical differentiations of this sort are dissolved. For the logical form of every such judgment is that of identity. But from Hegel’s perspective, the problem is not form as such, but form conceived as empty, contentless structure (das Formelle), what he also calls “indifferent, external” form (Form), something that he detects in Kant, but which will only find its full expression in the mathematical and logical formalisms at the turn of the twentieth century. As Hegel insists throughout the Phenomenology and more directly in the section on “content and form” in the Encyclopedia Logic, the abstract notion of form is ill-conceived, since form is inconceivable without content: “form is so far from being indifferent with respect to content, however, that, on the contrary, it is the content itself” (Hegel 1991, 202–203). Questions of form are paramount for Hegel since it is through the forms they assume that concepts are realized, and not in the weak sense of merely achieving materiality, but in the robust Aristotelian sense of becoming the actualized concepts they are otherwise merely potentially. To understand this is to understand that Hegelian phenomenology is directed less toward the representation of truth than toward its actualization. This is why, for example, Hegel can speak so naturally of propositions, judgments and epistemic states, as well as institutional, aesthetic, and religious formations, as shapes (Gestalten) or forms of consciousness, spirit, or the Concept. What is still more relevant to our discussion is Hegel’s identification of actualization with rationalization as indicated in his comment on his (in)famous remark that “what is rational, is actual, and what is actual, is rational” (Hegel 1991, 29). As a provisional formulation, we might say then that the infinite judgment is the form of determinate negation in the sense that it exhibits its rational content. Yet to say this is necessarily to speak misleadingly. If form is what is actualized, and what is actualized is what is rationalized, then the mere form, that is, its logico-grammatical shape, cannot on its own show us how that form is arrived at. It cannot tell us that the predicative negation within such a judgment occurs determinatively. It is in this more precise sense that infinite

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judgment must be understood as the mere, or, let us say, the dead signature of determination, and, as we may now put it, of rational extrapolation. Talk of form thus takes us directly to talk of determination, which, as the Phenomenology already makes clear, must be understood as the rational itinerary of the subject, qua spirit. What is implicit in the Phenomenology, with its regular and marked employment of the language of syllogistic deduction, is programmatically established in the works on logic, namely, that this itinerary, in turn, is to be identified with the semantic and inferential processes of the syllogism. With characteristic paradox, the Science of Logic tells us: The syllogism is the result of the restoration of the concept in the judgment, and consequently the unity and the truth of the two. The concept as such holds its moments sublated in this unity; in judgment, the unity is an internal or, what amounts to the same, an external one, and although the moments are connected, they are posited as self-subsisting extremes. In the syllogism, the determinations of the concept are like the extremes of the judgment, and at the same time their determinate unity is posited . . . the syllogism is the completely posited concept; it is, therefore, the rational. (Hegel 2010, 588) In identifying the syllogism as the rationalization of the concept, Hegel recasts it as a conceptual logic whose propositional formulae represent the constituents of inference, no longer as its structural elements but as transitional moments in the inferential diffraction and unification of the concept. The syllogism so formulated is the formal discursus of the concept, its actualization, though not quite yet its actuality; judgment is identified both with its categorical structure, and with the rational mobility it affords the concept, as a conduit between its indeterminate and determinate “extremes,” the terminal poles of its categorical representation. The seemingly paradoxical equivalence of its internal and external unity in judgment expresses this double status of the judgment as the expressive instrument of both identity and attribution, of concentration and diffraction, and of mobility and immobility. It expresses as well the dual character of the concept as exemplar and as the embodiment, or rather the actuality, of thought. The syllogism thus has the paradoxical role of expressing the movement of the concept by parsing it into the signal moments of its logical (as distinct from its historical) constitution. So understood, the syllogistic represents at once the exterior or explicit logic of discursive rationality and the interior or implicit logic of the concept,

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though not simultaneously. For it is only in passing from a qualitative to a disjunctive form that exterior and interior rationality converge, or, from the perspective of absolute knowing, it is only in overcoming the contingency of attribution that the concept eventually realizes its absolute, universal (or infinite) extension via the circuit of discursive engagement. Hegel summarizes the conclusion of this circuit as follows: Since it [the concept] is still in this way the inwardness of this now acquired externality, in the course of the syllogisms this externality is equated with the inner unity; the different determinations return into the latter through the mediation that unites them at first in a third term. . . . Conversely, however, that determinateness of the concept which was considered as reality is equally a positedness. For the identity of the concept’s inwardness and externality has been exhibited as the truth of the concept not only in this result; on the contrary, already in the judgment the moments of the concept remain, even in their reciprocal indifference, determinations that have significance only in their connection. The syllogism is mediation, the complete concept in its positedness. Its movement is the sublation of this mediation in which nothing is in and for itself, but each thing is only through the mediation of an other. (Hegel 2010, 624) In passing beyond mere qualitative or categorical attribution to (potentially) exhaustive disjunction, the syllogism, or rather the concept that is its motive force, overcomes, while preserving, mediation as well as the breach between rational form and content. It thereby achieves an (approximate) infinity, the (approximate) totality of determinations proper to a given concept. Yet insofar as mediation is overcome, even if only approximately, so is the propositional structure that permitted its expression. What emerges from the sublation of propositional mediation is, if not quite the speculative concept, at least the concept as the dynamic embodiment of the True, as the modulation between a substantial subject and its succession of determinate negations. What, then, of the determinacy of such determinate negations? Here we need to recall Hegel’s distinction between abstract negation and determinate negation. Hegel distinguishes three types of negation in the Phenomenology: natural, abstract, and determinate. Natural negation, to which we will return, is a judgment that has not yet been marked within the realm of spirit; as such, it is equivalent to death “without burial”: death as “the natural negation of consciousness, negation without independence” (Hegel 1977,

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114). Abstract negation is natural negation formally expressed by spirit. It is the logical form of skepticism, the spiritual power of death (51). To every naturally given “thesis,” abstract negation opposes an “antithesis” that leaves the object completely undetermined, or determined only through the abstract proposition “S is not P.” To pass from abstract to determinate negation is to transfer the operation of negation from the proposition to its object and, reflexively, its subject. In other words, it is not merely to pass from “S is not P” to “S is non-P” but to determine S as non-P. Epistemically, to determine S as non-P is also to pass from dogmatic skepticism to a dialectically critical skepticism, something Kant implicitly accomplishes in his solution to the antinomies of pure reason. If Hegel criticizes Kant for failing to understand the true significance of the antinomies, it is because he takes Kant to misconceive the determinative character of negation in infinite judgment (Hegel 1991, 93). And yet for this very reason Kant’s critical treatment of the antinomies can help us to understand Hegel’s antinomian phenomenology of negation. As we will see, the difference between Kant and Hegel can be encapsulated in the fundamental difference between their respective paradigmatic examples of infinite judgment: “The soul is non-mortal” and “Spirit is a bone.” Supposing that the logical form of determinate negation is “S is non-P,” in what sense would it be true to say that abstract negation might also be so represented, or that determinate negation is abstract negation differently conceived? Here we need to recall Kant’s distinction between general and transcendental logic. As Kant observes, from the standpoint of general logic, infinite judgment is simply an instance of affirmative judgment, because general logic, concerned with the form of thought insofar as it is indifferent to its objects, ignores the distinction between positive (finite) and negative (infinite) predicates. This distinction becomes pertinent only in transcendental logic inasmuch as the latter is concerned with the logical form of objects of cognition. From a general logical point of view, to say that S is not P is abstractly to negate the affirmation that S is P. But to consider the content of such an utterance from a transcendental point of view is to regard it as determining S as non-P. For Kant, representing an abstract negation as an infinite judgment in no way facilitates our determination of its object. It merely places the object in “the infinite sphere of the possible,” limited only by the excluded predicate (Kant 1998, 208 [A72/B97]). To see why, and how, Hegel disagrees with this conclusion, we must turn to Kant’s treatment of the antinomies. For Kant, antinomies arise because infinite reason incites finite understanding to determine the phenomenal world as a totality. We are thereby led to affirm

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that the world has a beginning in time, a boundary in space, indivisible constituent parts, an ultimate cause, and a necessary ground. Each of these affirmative theses turns out to be illegitimate insofar as it posits a worldly property that transcends possible experience. But each of these theses is opposed, with equal justification, by an abstractly negating antithesis that denies that the world has the property in question. The antitheses do not merely “remind” the understanding that it is transgressing the bounds of possible experience; they prompt it to determine the totality in the “opposite” way (as infinite with respect to time, space, divisibility, and so on.). Kant’s solution to the antinomies is filtered through his distinction between appearances and things in themselves. “Mathematical” antinomies concern the totality of appearances. Construing their antitheses as infinite judgments is the first step toward resolving them. In the case of the First Antinomy, the thesis that the world is finite in time and space is demonstrably false, as the argument in support of its antithesis demonstrates. The problem arises when the antithesis (“The world is non-finite”) is represented by reason as extending our knowledge in a positive way (“The world is non-finite—i.e., the world is infinite”). Kant’s solution is, in effect, to point out that the antithesis has the form of an infinite judgment, but to deny that it extends our knowledge in a positive way. This requires him to distinguish between two different kinds of negative predicates—“nonfinite” and “infinite”—the latter of which he takes to be illicitly positive. We are entitled to say that the world is non-finite, but not to conclude from this that the world is infinite. Paradoxically, then, an infinite judgment is, for Kant, a judgment that never reaches the infinite, since excluding the world from the class of finite things merely places it within the infinite domain of defined classes instead of placing it in a specific class of “infinite things.” In the case of the “dynamical” antinomies, the distinction between the non-finite and the infinite yields a slightly different result. Here reason is concerned not simply with the totality of appearances, but with the relation between appearances and their posited noumenal grounds. The fact that the phenomenal causal chain (or the phenomenal chain of contingent beings) is non-finite (without being infinite!) leaves room for noumenal grounds, despite the impossibility of our determining them as such. Once again, infinite judgment is the vehicle through which we recognize our failure to touch the infinite “itself.” We are now in a position to interpret Kant’s paradigm case of an infinite judgment, namely, “The soul is non-mortal.” The paralogisms through which reason leads us to believe that we can demonstrate the immortality of our souls are not two-sided like the antinomies; they are “one-sided

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illusion[s]” that show us that every dialectical inference of reason yields an infinite judgment that must be properly interpreted so that the (unavoidable) illusion does not deceive us (Kant 1998, 459 [A406/B433]). Just as it is necessary to distinguish the negative predicate “non-finite” from the positive predicate “infinite,” so we must distinguish “non-mortal” from “immortal.” For reasons having to do with the fact that the thinking subject is not an object in space, Kant concludes that it is non-mortal, but from being non-mortal it doesn’t follow that the subject is immortal. Heidegger popularized the notion that, for Kant, finitude is prior to infinitude. This interpretation is correct insofar as “being finite” (or “being mortal”) is represented by Kant as a positive predicate. As we have seen, however, the key feature of Kant’s critique of metaphysics is the distinction that he draws between two different kinds of negative predicates (“nonfinite” vs “infinite;” “non-mortal” vs “immortal”). The key feature of our cognitive predicament is neither our finitude, nor our infinitude, but our non-finitude. Like Eros as described by Diotima, human reason lacks infinitude but is not for all that merely finite. Human reason is an intermediate, a daimon, stretched between finite objects of experience and the infinite objects it would derive from them. These infinite objects (psyche, cosmos, theos) are regulative ideals of reason. Hegel acknowledges the distinction between the non-finite and the infinite, for indeed it is grounded in the distinction proper between abstract and determinate negation. He criticizes Kant for remaining at the level of the former (the “bad” infinite of the understanding) instead of rising to the level of the latter (the “true” infinite of reason). We do not arrive at the true infinite by stubbornly clinging to the dogmatically asserted objects of rational psychology, cosmology, and theology. On the contrary, we arrive at it by “tarrying with the negative.” To tarry (verweilen) with the skeptical antithesis of an antinomy is to think through the manner in which what at first appears as an abstract negation shows itself to be a determinate negation. More specifically, to tarry with the negative is to relinquish the proposition abstractly posited and negated in both thesis and antithesis in favor of the negatively determined Concept as the appropriate vehicle of truth. “Tarrying” (the logic of which will concern us in a moment) is the operation necessary to reinterpret abstract negations, qua infinite judgments, as affirmative (i.e., determinate) negations. Tarrying at the level of reason is precisely what Kant fails to do inasmuch as he retreats to the standpoint of the understanding, representing the objects of reason as “mere” regulative ideals. As Hegel never tires of repeating, Kant conceives the infinite only as an “ought,” not just in his moral philosophy (inasmuch as we can only

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strive to achieve moral perfection), but also in his theoretical philosophy (inasmuch as objects of reason are represented as regulative ideals) (e.g., Hegel 1991, 88). Against this perspective, Hegel will maintain that the infinite is actualized in infinite judgment itself. In the introduction to the Phenomenology, Hegel criticizes both Kant and Locke for thinking that they could determine the mind’s capacities prior to engaging in a positive quest for truth. His objection is not, as is often thought, that it would be absurd to use an instrument to study itself. On the contrary, Hegel suggests that we only achieve rational insight when our “cognitive instrument” (judgment) reflexively operates on itself. The problem with Kantian (and Lockean) critique is that it fails to reach this level of self-reflection, or, rather, that insofar as critical reason discovers “paradoxes of self-reference”—paralogisms, antinomies, etc.—it fails to recognize the manner in which they transform the “instrument” itself. Kant posits a fi xed division (Ur-teilung) between understanding and reason, that is, between the constitutive “instrument” of cognition and the regulative meta-instrument whose function is merely to guide the understanding to seek ever more remote propositional grounds of propositional truths. Hegel’s refutation of this formalistic attitude (the speculative equivalent of the “beautiful soul”) will consist in showing that critical reason (like the “evil” acting consciousness) is no less engaged with worldly content than any other cognitive or practical attitude. To clarify further the nature of tarrying, it is helpful to recall how Hegel was led to characterize his introduction to “the science of knowledge” as a phenomenology. Lambert used the term Phänomenologie to refer to a theory or doctrine of illusion (Schein) (Spiegelberg 1982, 11ff). So conceived, phenomenology would have a merely negative relation to truth. It was this conception that led Kant, in a 1770 letter to Lambert, to characterize his incipient critical project as a “purely negative science, general phenomenology” (Kant 1999, 108). General phenomenology was the necessary propaedeutic to metaphysics conceived as a positive doctrine of truth. At this stage of his thinking, Kant believed that metaphysical truths about noumena could be determined through pure understanding. Eventually, he drew his critical distinction between cognitively accessible phenomena and inscrutable things in themselves. Illusion (Schein) became a function of dialectical inferences of reason about the nature of things in themselves, while spatio-temporal appearance (Erscheinung) became the sole touchstone of empirical truth. This two-fold transformation made it impossible to characterize the critique of pure reason as general phenomenology. If phenomenal appearance were the touchstone of truth, then a merely negative

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phenomenology would have to be restricted to “the fundamental critical distinction between mere appearance and experience,” that is, to the distinction between appearances qua subjective perceptions and appearances qua objects of experience (Allison 2002, 14). General phenomenology was thereby demoted to a subsidiary doctrine of empirical illusions (appearances of appearances), while rational illusions became the target of critique proper. From the retrospective vantage point of Husserlian phenomenology, Kant’s demotion of phenomenology looks like a missed opportunity. Like Descartes before him, Kant failed to see that the disclosure of phenomena as phenomena opened up the way to a positive phenomenology that would investigate the essential structures of phenomena qua phenomena. Not only would such a phenomenology no longer have a merely negative relation to truth; it alone would be capable of providing philosophy with a positive doctrine of the essence of truth. Philosophers convinced that Husserl had shown the way to this Promised Land could look back condescendingly at the manner in which the German idealists tried to give phenomenology a more prominent place in their post-Kantian metaphysical systems. In his 1804 lectures on the Wissenschaftslehre, Fichte represented phenomenology as “a doctrine of appearance and illusion” (Erscheinungsund Scheinlehre) (Fichte 2005, 107. Our emphasis). By blurring the distinction between appearance and illusion, Fichte implicitly returned to the very project that Kant had initially outlined in his letter to Lambert. The still merely negative task of Fichte’s phenomenology was to free consciousness from all facticity, thereby raising it to the level of the positive doctrine of truth made available through his science of knowledge. Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit—initially conceived as the merely negative first part of his own System of Science—has a similar pedagogical task. The crucial difference between Hegel’s approach and Fichte’s depends on the extra “turn of the screw” represented by the passage from negative judgment to infinite judgment. Hegelian phenomenology is still negative rather than positive, but its deployment of determinate negation—the “tarrying operator”—issues in something radically different from both the rationalist metaphysics that Fichte sought to ground in intellectual intuition and the positive science that Husserl hoped to found on eidetic intuition. It issues, specifically, in what Hegel calls “absolute knowing,” the modular equation of substance and consciousness, subject and object, spirit and individual through the economy of negation that absolves each of its moments of identity and difference, and incorporates them in the “absolute Concept,” the sole legitimate bearer of Truth. With this, truth as adaequatio rei et intellectus

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gives way to the True as adaequatio rei qua intellectus, and with it discursive thought resolves itself in the infinite modulation of the Concept. This movement of the Concept, or equivalently the movement of consciousness, is thus the (perpetual) concentration, and thereby the retraction, of the inferential record of predication into the Concept itself. This tells decisively against the inferentialist reading of Hegel that Robert Brandom has devoted himself to spelling out. A truly Hegelian counter-text to his justly renowned Making it Explicit would bear the title Making it Implicit. As Hegel makes clear in the Phenomenology’s concluding section on absolute knowing, the Phenomenology has three major turning points, each of which is expressed in the form of an infinite judgment: (1) “ ‘I’ is a thing” (“Spirit is a bone”), (2) “The thing is ‘I,’ ” and (3) “ ‘I’=‘I.’ ” Schematically, Hegel’s idea is that phenomenology is the path by which spirit comes to determine itself as spirit (“ ‘I’=‘I’ ”) only after determining itself as an indifferent object, first in the realm of nature (“Spirit is a bone”) and then in the realm of spirit itself (“The [spiritual] thing —e.g., wealth, power, the state, etc.—is ‘I’ ”). For our purposes, we may focus on the first (natural) form of spirit’s alienation/reification. The judgment that “spirit is a bone”—or, more precisely, the judgment that “the being of spirit is a bone” [das Sein des Geistes ein Knochen ist]—is the climax of the section on Observing Reason in which spirit manifests itself in the form of the individual judging subject. The climax is reached when the individual finds itself judged by another individual who reduces it to the form of a mere object—a mortal brain enclosed in a skull with a face (the determinations of spirit proper to physiognomy and phrenology). Reflectively faced with a skull that is its own eventual caput mortuum, spirit recognizes that, qua individual judging subject, its being is, in fact, that of a bone. Yet this speculative identity, in which grammatical and thinking subject together lose themselves in their objective predicate, immediately discloses its own absurdity through what is best described, in contemporary parlance, as a major “disconnect.” In Lacanian terms, to say that the being of spirit is a bone is to indicate the loss of the enunciating subject in the enunciated subject of predication. Paradoxically, spirit would be nothing but a bone if we could not say so; but the fact that we can say so makes it both false and, yet more profoundly, true. Its truth can only be arrived at, however, once the propositional form of its enunciation is itself renounced. As Hegel puts it, “the infinite judgment, qua infinite, would be the fulfilment of life that comprehends itself” (Hegel 1977, 210). To appreciate what is at stake here, it is helpful to hearken back to the struggle to the death that marks the advent of the master/slave dialectic,

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and to look forward to Hegel’s representation of Antigone’s struggle with Creon over the spiritual meaning of the death of Polyneices. In each case, the negative with which spirit must tarry is death. We have already indicated that, in the first instance, death is the merely natural negative in the face of which the terrified subject acquires its servile consciousness. We have also seen how the slave internalizes death as the abstract negativity of skepticism. The liberation of the slave transforms its hyper-skeptical (“unhappy”) consciousness into the abstractly determining consciousness of observing reason. When the individual judging subject confronts its other, however, it undergoes a sublated form of the struggle to the death. This time, the subject’s mortification is given to it in the form of a determinate negation. Knowing itself to be the power of negativity claimed in its skeptical youth, the individual determines its own being as that of a bone. In so doing, however, it simultaneously determines itself as the power that exceeds the very havoc it wreaks upon itself and its object (“I am Shiva, destroyer of worlds”). We have not yet reached the stage of absolute knowing because the infinite judgment “Spirit is a bone” reflects spirit’s triumph over natural death, but not yet over spiritual death. Henceforth, the object of every individual shape of spirit will be another individual shape of spirit, from Antigone’s struggle with Creon over the symbolic marking of the corpse of Polyneices to the Terror of the guillotine transforming living heads with faces (including those of kings) to the equivalent of mere cabbages (Hegel 1977, 360). To reach absolute knowing, spirit must tarry with itself as the infinite power of negativity, an arduous procedure that will eventually win it the reconciling judgment “ ‘I’=‘I.’ ” Going back to “Spirit is a bone,” we can now see how this functions as Hegel’s alternative to the Kantian judgment “The soul is non-mortal.” What must strike us right away is the fact that none of the three paradigmatic infinite judgments of the Phenomenology appears to have a negative predicate. Hegel further complicates matters by distinguishing in his two Logics between positive infinite judgments such as “Spirit is a bone” and negative infinite judgments like “the rose is not an elephant, the understanding is not a table” (Hegel 2010, 567). What essentially determines the form of an infinite judgment for Hegel, whether positive or negative, is the radical disseverance it establishes between its subject and its predicate, and thus its self-deconstructing status as a pseudo-judgment. For Hegel it is not enough that the subject be identified with its other, with its contradictory. What is further required is its identification with an incommensurable other. “Spirit is a bone,” for example, identifies the being of spirit with the being of a thing; the bone is not simply non-spirit, but beyond the genus and

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species of spirit: “ ‘I’ is ‘non-I.’ ” If infinite judgment nevertheless retains the revelatory character it possesses in the Phenomenology, it is inasmuch as its self-deconstruction signs the death warrant of every finite truth. Our reference to deconstruction is neither arbitrary nor accidental. As we know, Derrida developed his conception of deconstruction to account for the manner in which Husserlian phenomenology necessarily fails in its endeavor to determine pure essences. In Speech and Phenomena, Derrida specifically focuses on Husserl’s attempt to determine the phenomenological subject in its mode of self-expression. At issue is the determination of the being of the cogito without its having to pass through the “detour” of its objects, that is, the possibility of reaching “ ‘I’= ‘I’ ” without the mediation of either objects or other subjects. Derrida argues that this is an impossible dream for the eminently Hegelian reason that every expression is essentially an Äusserung (in Husserl’s terminology, an indicative sign)—an alienation/reification that can determine itself only by confronting the possibility of its own annihilation. As Derrida puts it, the bare assertion “I am” (or the bare assertion of the individual consciousness that “ ‘I’= ‘I’ ”) both presupposes, and ultimately implies, the truth of the proposition “I am dead”—his version of “Spirit is a bone” (Derrida 1973, 96). More would need to be said in this context about Derrida’s lengthy engagement with Hegel, which turns, precisely, on the sense of the negativity of death. For our purposes, the crucial point is that insofar as the Hegelian infinite judgment deconstructs itself, it shows why phenomenology must remain an essentially negative endeavor, revealing spirit to be the all-consuming power of determinate negation rather than the placid contemplation of essences sub specie aeternitatis. In attempting to transform phenomenology into a positive doctrine of the truth of appearances, Husserl rejoins not Spinoza but Descartes, representing subjectivity as a surveying, transcendental ego rather than as the restless negativity of “the things themselves” (i.e., phenomena). As Derrida emphasizes, I am only there where the sign or bone indicates my death in advance (his equivalent to Sartre’s determination of the ego as a transcendent object). If assertion exceeds its enunciated content, it does so only in and through the movement of the caput mortuum that is its “remainder.” Phenomenology remains a negative propadeutic to the logical self-determination of thought, but it nevertheless “reaches the absolute” by allowing its own negativity to determine itself as determinate negativity. In passing from phenomenology to logic, however, we lose the finite register of infinite truth, the “human face” of the skull unearthed in the graveyard of spirit.

Chapter 10

Husserl’s (even more) Social Epistemology Kevin Hermberg

In the Western philosophical tradition, knowledge and knowers have been viewed primarily in atomistic terms and the predominant focus of epistemologists has been on individual epistemic agents (Corlett 1996, ix).1 This atomistic approach was re-solidified by Descartes and the hyperbolic doubt he introduced as part of his quest for a certain starting point of all knowledge and foundation for science. The first and most fundamental thing that passed the test of doubt, it is well known, was the doubting subject itself. From this solipsistic starting point, Descartes hoped to found all knowledge and science. Despite their vast differences, the starting point of the theories of knowledge since Descartes has been largely atomistic. To be sure, there have been momentary explorations of the social dimensions of knowledge sprinkled throughout the history of Western Philosophy. Plato, in Charmides, asked how a layperson can determine whether someone who claims to be an expert really is an expert and dependence on experts or the testimony of authorities is a problem within the scope of social epistemology. Bacon, Locke, Hume, and Reid each offered some treatment of testimony and questions when one should rely on the opinions and reports of others and what one needs to know about a speaker in order to be justified in to trusting the speaker’s assertions. They are examples of early treatments, even if only brief ones, of some social dimensions of epistemic justification. However, the epistemologies in which they reside were generally atomistic and so they do not serve as early examples of genuinely social epistemology (Goldman 2006). Much of our knowledge and how we learn things is through the testimony of others, so it seems we are clearly not autonomous, atomistic knowers. But, as Tollefsen reminds us, those earlier discussions surrounding testimony “maintained a commitment to epistemic agent individualism” (Tollefsen 2007, 300) and in those treatments, common opinion, testimony, and even

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received philosophy were often seen as impediments to proper method (Schmitt 1994, 2). Limiting the scope of epistemology to non-social, atomistic, knowers not only stands on a big and potentially dangerous presupposition but also seems to make it impossible to provide a complete picture of the nature of human knowledge. Acknowledging this shortcoming, several recent philosophers have begun to investigate the role of social relations in knowledge. This broadened view has come to be called social epistemology which is the “study of the relevance of social relations, roles, interests, and institutions to knowledge. . . . Social epistemology centers on the question whether knowledge is to be understood individualistically or socially” (1).2 Both Schmitt and Corlett place the beginnings of social epistemology in the 1980s. This chapter proceeds in two parts. In part 1, I briefly survey some of the field of social epistemology.3 I will emphasize Helen Longino’s view because she not only argues that the social dimension of science does not necessarily contaminate science but also that it is a means by which scientific objectivity comes to fruition. In part 2, I survey the roles of multiple subjects in Husserl’s epistemology. My claim is that, in contrast to the atomistic, individualistic epistemologies that have dominated the Western philosophical tradition, Husserl’s is a social epistemology that does not abandon the possibility of objectivity, AND that on Husserl’s view knowledge is even MORE social than on the typical social epistemologist’s view. My intent is not to merely celebrate Husserl’s foresight; rather, I hope that those working in analytic social epistemology might realize they have an untapped resource in Husserl’s corpus and those working on the Husserlian epistemology and themes like intersubjectivity and the life-world might benefit from investigating the work of the analytic social epistemologists.

Social Epistemology In recent decades, several philosophers have taken seriously the notion that traditional individualistic epistemologies are lacking. These contemporary philosophers are investigating the roles of social relations in knowledge attainment. The broadened approach, developed mostly among analytic philosophers, has come to be called social epistemology. There are several approaches to non-atomistic, social, epistemology. Some (e.g., Fuller 1988) argue that knowledge is social because it is had by collectives like crowds, institutions, and countries. Others (e.g., Cohen 1987; Lehrer 1987) focus

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on the social context of individual knowers, for instance, on the production of scientific knowledge by researchers working individually and as a group. Within each of these broad approaches, there are several camps.4 What the various approaches to social epistemology have in common is that they focus on social contexts, collectives, institutions, and so on where knowledge is concerned. Although we can point to a few examples of treatments of the sociality of epistemology in the history of philosophy, the beginnings of social epistemology are usually placed in the 1980s (Schmitt 1994; Corlett 1996). Surveying the work of those who have analyzed social epistemology, one sees that whether a stance is consensualist (arguing that knowledge amounts to group consensus), contextualist (arguing that truth and knowledge are relative to a specific social context and thus that there is no such thing as objective truth arrived at by cognizers), or expertist (arguing that what counts as knowledge is what a particular social group, the experts, identifies as knowledge), there are serious problems to resolve. Consensualism and expertism seem to involve a sort of contradiction because those coming to consensus or qualifying as experts are generally regarded as atomistic knowers and there is a sort of contradiction in suggesting that knowledge is social because what counts as knowledge or justified belief is what the group or the experts can agree on but then basing that agreement on atomistic knowers. As Miriam Solomon suggests, even the most social of social epistemologies seem to “still assume the operation of individual rationality at some crucial stage” (Solomon 1994, 218).5 Additionally, contextualists seem to face a traditional problem regarding objectivity and all three approaches are faced with the difficulty of navigating or adjudicating real disagreement between contexts, groups, or experts. As Helen Longino puts it, “the problem with recognizing the social locatedness and, hence, conditioned character of individual epistemic subjects is that it seems to force us into choosing between relativism and demonstrating the epistemic superiority of one among the various locations” (Longino 1994, 139). Longino is one social epistemologist who tries to tackle these problems directly. She works to reconcile the objectivity of science with the roles of contextual values in science’s social and cultural construction. She goes further than many social epistemologists in that she does not merely describe the contexts in which we work or explore questions about whether collectives of individual agents can legitimately be said to have knowledge. Both of those approaches assume the individuality of epistemic agents and Longino attempts to show that and how knowledge is social at a more fundamental level.

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In Science as Social Knowledge (1990), Longino argues that our tradition’s prioritization of the individual gets in the way of an adequate understanding of scientific knowledge and that scientific knowledge is fundamentally social. In “The Fate of Knowledge” (1994), the text on which I focus here, she summarizes the earlier text’s thesis: “only if we understand scientific inquiry as fundamentally social, and the scientific knowledge as the outcome of discursive interactions, is it possible to claim that scientific inquiry is objective” (Longino 1994, 139), and goes on to argue that the central elements of scientific knowledge construction—for example, observation and justificatory reasoning—are social and that critical dialog is required as part of the process of something becoming considered knowledge. On Longino’s view, “observation is not simple sense perception” (140). The observation involved in the attainment of knowledge rests on ordering and classification that themselves rest on a sort of consensus about the categories in question or the boundaries of the concepts and categories (e.g., just what counts as an acid as opposed to a base) and that consensus requires a critical dialog. In order to be useful data, observations must be stable enough to transfer from one lab to another—they must be reproducible if they are to count. Critical dialog among scientists is what provides this stability. In claiming that observation is social, Longino is not denying that atomistic agents take in information. She is claiming, rather, “that the status of the activity of observation depends on” the observer’s relations with others. The crucial relation is an openness to correction of reports which is what makes possible the transformation of observations from one lab to the other and the move from the subjective “it seems to me that p” to the objective “P.” The interaction of multiple perspectives is what secures this objectivity by offering any necessary correctives (Longino 1994, 141). The claim that observational data collection in science is social because it requires a community of researchers who agree on concepts and their boundaries, and so on, is a fairly modest claim. But Longino goes further than that by arguing that the very reasoning involved in the production of scientific knowledge is social. Such reasoning is not mere calculation; it is the bringing of “the appropriate considerations to bear on judgments” (Longino 1994, 141). This reasoning is justificatory and involves a dialectic pattern of challenge and response. Reasons to support a claim are offered in response to challenges to the claim and those reasons can then be challenged, and so forth; this has been the core of scientific practice at least since the pre-Socratic natural philosophers. What counts as a reason or an appropriate consideration is determined and stabilized discursively and discursive interactions require more than one agent (141–142). Longino

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calls these interactions “intersubjective” and holds that reasoning “gets its point in a social context” of interaction between individuals, not between an individual and the object of cognition (141). Both observation and reasoning rest on background assumptions. That is, in the background of the discursive interactions involved in determining whether data gathered counts as observation, and the grounds on which the challenges and responses at the core of reasoning rest, are assumptions. And, “ just as not any old observations will do, so not just any old assumptions will do” (Longino 1994, 142). The assumptions on which it is appropriate to rely depend upon a (sometimes tacit) consensus among the discourse community. These assumptions are public, at least in principle, even though they are often invisible to those within the scientific community and not consciously-reflectively decided upon. This public nature opens the assumptions to critical evaluation which might lead to their abandonment or modification. Not all assumptions underlying the work of a scientific community are, in practice, scrutinized, but the presumption is that they would survive if critically evaluated. This scrutiny “requires multiple points of view in order to ensure that the hypotheses accepted by a community do not represent someone’s idiosyncratic interpretation” of information taken in via experimentation and sense perception (142). That is to say, the scrutiny underlying both observation and scientific reasoning is social in the sense that it cannot be properly understood in terms of individual epistemic agents. Since observation, reasoning, and their background assumptions require discursive interactions that are supposed to “transform the subjective into the objective,” those interactions ought not merely preserve and disseminate one subjective point of view over all others but should, instead, “constitute genuine mutual checks” (Longino 1994, 144). In light of this role and requirement of the discourse, Longino outlines the features of communities that facilitate criticism and enable a consensus to qualify as knowledge. These are the features of an idealized epistemic community—that which assures the objectivity of scientific knowledge even while acknowledging the locatedness of scientific observation and reasoning. Longino argues that in order to make possible scientific knowledge, there must be: (1) publicly recognized forums for criticism of evidence, methods, and assumptions of reasoning; (2) criticism that makes possible or leads to the changing of the community’s theories and beliefs; (3) publicly recognized standards that make the criticism possible, in the light of which the criticism is made relevant, and by reference to which the theories, hypotheses, and observational practices are evaluated; and (4) equality of intellectual

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authority so that the consensus that obtains is the result of a critical dialog in which all relevant perspectives are presented and not the result of the exercise of political or economic power or the silencing of dissenting views (Longino 1994, 144–145).6 That is to say, there must be space and standards that make criticism possible and that criticism must truly take place and not merely be the result of the wielding of political or economic power in order to silence some perspectives. Longino contends that scientific objectivity is the result of such critical discourse. The first three criteria of the ideal epistemic community assure a sort of objectivity (or at least that what one claims is not relevant to the individual agent); the fourth avoids prioritizing one context over the others. Because this discursive work requires and involves more than one epistemic agent, scientific knowledge is both social and objective. If such an ideal epistemic community and critical discourse obtain, that which survives the criticism will be objective in the sense of being available to everyone and not dependent on any one particular point of view for its validity. That is to say, the view Longino puts forward recognizes the locatedness of epistemic agents while attempting to preserve objectivity and thus avoid relativism—all without prioritizing one context over the others. If the four criteria are met, Longino’s view appears to escape the intolerable choice that most social epistemologies face and thus offer a significant advance when it comes to dealing with the social dimensions of knowledge.7 Her view embraces, rather than attempts to explain away, the fact that much of our knowledge involves others (because it comes to us through testimony or because it depends on concepts that we inherit from others) and it addresses ways in which knowledge is social at levels more fundamental than many other thinkers carefully consider (observation and reasoning). Despite its strengths, this account of scientific knowledge is still vulnerable to Solomon’s critique that the social epistemologists ultimately rely on atomistic epistemic agents. Longino argues that science is objective because of the critical evaluative processes involved and she argues that scientific knowledge is social at a deep level because the very processes of science—observation and reasoning—are social. Longino argues that what qualifies as observation for science and which data matter depend on the background assumptions, categories, and so on and are thus social. However, the legitimate observations and data are based on perception. The view described above holds that observation is not simple sense perception, but the view appears to be based upon such perception. That is to say, underneath the social level investigated and articulated by Longino is

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the individual, atomistic, subject engaged with the world via sense perception. It is, then a social epistemology that stands on the shoulders of nonsocial sense perception. Although not widely recognized as such, Husserl’s epistemological project is social at an even deeper level because the raw materials of the critical discourse, sense perception, cannot be had by individual agents in the absence of others.

Husserl’s Social Epistemology Husserl, was firmly rooted in his philosophical tradition. Like Kant, he aimed at a transcendental philosophy. Like Locke and Descartes, he investigated the structures of consciousness as experienced from a first person point of view and, like Descartes and others, he aimed at the establishment of a rigorous science with universally valid results. His aim was for his phenomenology to breathe new life into the ancient hope for philosophy as the all-embracing science that can provide insight into the conditions for the possibility of our everyday lives. Although Husserl’s general concern was with consciousness, its structure and acts, his specific concern was primarily “with the ‘validity,’ the ‘being-true’ of objects on the basis of the way in which they are ‘given’ or ‘constituted’ in the lived experience of consciousness” (Bernet 1998, 199). More specifically, Husserl was concerned with objective validity on which rigorous science must stand—being there for everyone, with apodictic certainty, rather than accessible to or relative to only one individual subject. In order to arrive at the evidence required for objective validity, Husserl took note of the natural standpoint from which we usually go about our lives, recognized that it incorporates a multitude of unsubstantiated presuppositions or assumptions, and advocated the suspension of judgment regarding the empirical facts about which such assumptions are routinely made. This abstaining—this excluding from his interrogation the affirmation, denial, or even doubting of empirical facts about things in the world—is Husserl’s phenomenological epoché, the methodological core of his philosophy. What remains after this reduction is the subject and its experience. The heart of that experience is consciousness which is intentional thus involving both subject and object in relation to one another. At least that’s how the story is often told. It is easy to see, from this alltoo-familiar sketch, how it came to be that Husserl is often read as having held the sort of atomistic approach mentioned earlier. But there is another

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side to this story. Others are significantly involved, on Husserl’s view, in the attainment of knowledge. Consequently, Husserl developed an epistemology that is social decades before “social epistemology” came into the picture. Tracing the roles of others in knowledge attainment and the establishment of validity will begin to put Husserl’s view into dialog with Longino and the social epistemologists.8 In several of Husserl’s works, subjects other than the epistemic agent play a significant role related to knowledge in at least two ways: they help to offer evidence for validity and they help to broaden one’s knowledge by making it possible to have intentional objects (even those of basic perception). The one way in which others are involved in knowledge is very much like the role of others in Longio’s view—they help us verify our views and decide what data counts, and so on. The other way in which others are involved in knowledge is related to the experience and sense perception of individuals on which Longino’s view rests. A text in which Husserl’s concerns with the social are relatively obvious is the 1936 text, The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology (Husserl 1981). The views offered in this text have some points in contact with the social epistemologists like Longino who wrote in the 1990s that all scientific observation, reasoning, and knowledge depends on background assumptions and is thus social. Nearly sixty years earlier, Husserl wrote that our access to and the meaning of everything is dependent on the life-world and that “the knowledge of the objective-scientific world is ‘grounded’ in the self-evidence of the life-world. The latter is pregiven . . . as ground” (130). That is to say, science “presupposes as its point of departure . . . the intuitive surrounding world of life, pregiven as existing for all in common” (121). The pregiven is given in a context with some meaning as part of the life-world in which we always already live and which furnishes the ground for all cognition and is “already valid, [in] which we experience or are otherwise conscious of either prescientifically or scientifically” (110). But others are not part of the epistemic experience merely because they happen to be part of the life-world on which scientific knowledge is constructed. For Husserl, it is not the case that the life-world adds a social dimension to what atomistic individuals experience—a sort of social membrane over top prescientific experience, making science possible. Rather, even perception of physical objects, even prescientific consciousness, is meaningful and always already involves others. Because it is already valid, already imbued with sense that the individual epistemic agent did not provide, the life-world against which or within which the agent is conscious

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reveals that others are involved in its constitution and thus things appear from within horizons inherent in phenomena. A horizon, in this sense, is a referral network or a series of relationships. The life-world provides the horizons. Husserl distinguished between internal and external horizons. Internal horizons offer the subject all the other possible perspectives that can be taken on an object—the perspectives included in the apperception of the object which thus make it transcendent as an object. External horizons offer the relationships between the object and the surrounding world. Husserl summarized the horizons inherent in perception as follows: For consciousness the individual thing is not alone; the perception of a thing is perception of it within a perceptual field. And just as the individual thing in perception has meaning only through an open horizon of “possible perceptions,” insofar as what is actually perceived “points” to a systematic multiplicity of all possible perceptual exhibitings belonging to it harmoniously, so the thing has yet another horizon: besides this “internal horizon” it has an “external horizon” precisely as a thing within a field of things; and this points finally to the whole “world as perceptual world.” (Husserl 1981, 162) In my perception of a physical object like a car, for example, I perceive more than my eyes actually take in. I see one side of the car and I perceive the car (complete with an interior, a backside, an underside, an engine, etc.). Other perspectives are added to the perspective on the car my senses provide me—other aspects of the car are apperceived. My view on the material object is perspectival and thus incomplete, but I perceive the object, not just one side of it. That is to say, the object is perceived within a horizon of possibilities. This sort of horizon is internal to all perception and includes all the “views” of the intentional object that I do not have right now but that are possible. To perceive a car, or anything for that matter, is also to anticipate the other perspectives included in or referred to by the internal horizon. These other perspectives are tacit allusions and without them, I would “see” a bundle of shapes, colors, textures, and so on, rather than a car. They are all part of the act and to perceive the car from one perspective involves all the others. Every sense perception has an internal “horizon belonging to its object (i.e, whatever is meant in the perception)” (Husserl 1981, 158). To see the car also entails, whether reflectively-scientifically or not, a network of associations between the car and other things—that it was built

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by someone with some purpose in mind, that it is made to engage roads and traffic, a plan or decision to drive away, and so on. That is to say, the perception of the car driving off, which is incomplete in the sense that it is perspectival, is also incomplete in the sense that it occurs against a background of other objects which are also present and in which we participate. This background or series of relationships is the external horizon. The meaning of what lies on this horizon is pregiven with my perception of the car. The external horizon links even the simple perception of an object to the whole perceptual world and thus to others in the life-world (e.g., Husserl 1981, 251).9 In the Crisis, then, Husserl talks of the perception on which Longino’s data-gathering and observation depend in light of both internal and external horizons. The intentional object is what it is because of the horizons and the horizons involve others. Even simple sense perception, then, links intentional objects to the life-world and to others within it. Every phenomenon is thus imbued with awareness of Others (even if it is only a tacit awareness). So, to have any relationship with an object involves a relationship with other subjects. The intersubjective life-world is at the ground of all intentional activity and validity is attained via intersubjective harmony. Consequently, not only are other subjects required for science, they are required for any access to any objects whatsoever. My focus on Husserl thus far has prioritized sense perception because that is the point at which social epistemology appears to be less-than-social. In an appendix to The Crisis—The Origin of Geometry—Husserl went beyond sense perception and investigated the role of language in the establishment of something as an object that is accessible to all and not merely the intentional object of a single act of consciousness. Something becomes an ideality and thus accessible to all, by being articulated, repeated, and recorded. Through such records, a subject can empathize with, and trace the path back through, those who came before and thus know what others know. Objects of geometry (to use Husserl’s example) become objects for all by being recorded and made available to the communication community. Once recorded, someone can carefully trace back through the records, see them as expressions of intentional states and empathize with the first geometers who experienced such intentional states, and in turn, re-access the kind of idealities they accessed, thereby gaining knowledge.10 The text focuses on objects of geometry, but the process is the same for any intentional object. Language and its constitution of idealities, according to

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Husserl, allows objects of consciousness to exist in and be accessed by our spatio-temporal world, “for all the future”: Linguistic embodiment make[s] out of the merely intrasubjective structure the objective structure which . . . is in fact present as understandable by all and is valid, already in its linguistic expression. (Husserl 1981, 358) So, others are involved in (or referred to by) one’s conscious perceptual activity and others can make possible one’s access to idealities with which one is not familiar. That is, others play both the sort of confirmation and consensus roles they play in Longino’s epistemology, but they also play a more foundational role of making access to objects possible. The Crisis is one of the more obviously social of Husserl’s texts, but even the more atomistic texts like Ideas offer an epistemology that is more fundamentally social than the “social epistemologies” of the past few decades. Ideas on a Pure Phenomenology and Phenomenological Philosophy: a General Introduction to Pure Phenomenology (Husserl 1983) was first published in 1913. This is the text with which Husserl reached a full-fledged phenomenology. As articulated in Ideas, Husserl’s view is that the objects of one’s knowledge, or even perception, or memory, and so on, are intentional objects and the intentional object brings with it or refers to perspectives on the object other than the one the subject actually has at the time. This network of associations is expressed in terms of horizons in the Crisis and in terms of noemata in Ideas. In looking at the tree in the garden, to use Husserl’s example (Husserl 1931, chapter 3), I see it from one side and distance but constitute it as a seen apple tree (complete with other sides, textures, smells, etc.). That is the object I apperceive by means of the full noema (or noematic complex). The one perspective “brings with it,” so to speak, other perspectives, including those had by other subjects. If I close my eyes and then open them, only to find the tree has disappeared, the experience of the tree as-seen explodes and I have evidence that I was wrong about it. If I walk up to the tree and find that it is twodimensional and does not have a backside, the experience of the tree explodes. If there is no such explosion some aspect(s) of the tree-as-seen have been verified. As more perspectives are taken and more expectations are fulfilled, there is an increase in validity. That is how I move to a more dependable knowledge of the tree-as-seen—motivated by the idea of the tree in complete givenness of perfect evidence which includes all possible perspectives.

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It looks as though this fulfillment, or at least the lack of explosion, can be had in isolation and that explains the common, atomistic reading of this text. However, the multiple perspectives to which an individual perspective refers and which comprise the complete intentional object bring with them perspectives and points of view had by other subjects. That is, the intentional object is “all meanings and significant positions . . . the system of all possible ‘subjective modes of appearing’ ” (Husserl 1931, 375). That is to say, each intentional object is a system of noemata and its constitution relates to “a possible community-consciousness . . . for whom one thing as the self-same objective real entity must be given and identified intersubjectively” (375). It is this link to the community-consciousness that confirms an object’s transcendence: if it is also there for others, the object is not dependent upon or related to any particular subject or perspective (Hermberg 2006, 36; Zahavi 2001, 271–272). Additionally, the perspectives had by others are often involved in fulfillment/explosion of an intentional object—harmony with other subjects is fulfilling while disharmony is explosive. If, for example, I ask a colleague to meet me under the apple tree in the garden for lunch and, without seeing me, she walks unreservedly toward the tree I have apperceived as an apple tree, this harmony further verifies my experience. If, however, she finally arrives and says she thought we were to meet under the apple tree and is surprised to find me under a cherry tree, this disharmony causes me to question the apple-tree-as-seen. We might then investigate, by increasing the number of perspectives from which the tree is discussed and asking a horticulturist or by looking at specific leaves (something that was not really part of the initial experience)—increased harmony brings validity, disharmony brings explosion of some aspect(s) of the experience. In this way, the experience of others serves to buttress or confirm (or even disconfirm) what one could know. So far, this echoes much of what Longino describes, even if the terminology is different. But others play another role in Ideas; they are already involved in one’s having access to or knowledge of objects in the first place. Husserl offers a brief treatment of the degrees of apodicticity of judgments and veridical statements (Husserl 1931, § 6). This treatment relies on an intersubjective community. Judgments and predication are involved in moving from the certainty or apodicticity from that had by the individual with the self-givenness of experience to that which can approach adequacy by means of criticism.11 If Ideas (a text often mis-read as particularly atomistic) relies on others to help the subject move from basic sense perception to knowledge of objects—to move from an intentional object related to

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the subject to an object available to all, to objectivity—it offers a social epistemology. But if others are involved in a subject even having access to an intentional object or to objects of perception, then Husserl offers an epistemology that is social at a deeper level and is thus an even more social epistemology than is typical of the social epistemologists. The roles of others and the tacit awareness of others that one’s experience involves only holds up if the possibility of the inclusion of the perspectives of others in one’s conscious experience can be established. One of the main tasks of Cartesian Meditations (Husserl 1950) is to investigate that possibility. In his Fifth Meditation, Husserl acknowledged the apparent threat of solipsism and went on to offer a descriptive phenomenology of our experience of other subjects and thus gets at one of the conditions of the possibility of what was involved in Ideas—the inclusion of perspectives other than one’s own in one’s experience. Establishing this possibility makes possible the objectivity upon which scientific knowledge relies. Husserl approached this by arguing that having undertaken the phenomenological reduction, one can focus on the sphere of ownness (by means of a “special” further reduction). From within this sphere, what belongs to a subject or is from the subject becomes clearly delimited from what is not the subject’s. Having noticed, from within the sphere of ownness, others, one can take the place of another subject and see things from that perspective because one can empathize with the other on the basis of the other’s body with which one pairs. By means of pairing, one can come to experience others as other subjects and see things as if from their vantage points. This pairing is really a pair of pairings: the pairing of similarity between the subject’s body and bodies of others, and the pairing of association between the subject’s body and the subject.12 In pairing, the intuitive presence of one part of the pair is the basis of the co-intending of the other part so that experience of the one “awakens” experience of the other—much like engaging an object from one perspective brings with it other perspectives (in Ideas and The Crisis). Pairing brings about a “living and mutual awakening and an overlaying of each with the objective sense of the other” (Husserl 1959, 113). Since my body and ego are paired (by association) and my body and bodies of others are paired (by similarity), my awareness of the other body awakens for me an awareness of the other ego (with which that body is paired). Consequently, the intersubjectivity required for the harmony of experience is possible, and objective validity becomes that which is maintained by intersubjective harmony or agreement. In each text, this all happens passively; it is not the result of some sort of argument from analogy. What I see, Husserl reminds

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us, is not some sign or analogue from which I infer the perceptual object or the other subject; rather, in the case of others, I see someone else (124). With the ego of the other in place, the objectivity on which science rests is possible. At first glance, it might look as though this aspect of Husserl’s thought and thus his social epistemology falls prey to the same shortcoming as Longino’s—reliance on atomistic epistemic agents at the base of all knowledge. That is, this intersubjective dynamic still seems to prioritize the first subject. Although Husserl claims that the various subjects are equal, as they need to be equal if others truly have more to do with knowledge than the confirmation of what the first subject already knows, Husserl has been criticized for prioritizing the first subject. This alleged prioritization rests in the fact that it is from the sphere of ownness that the empathetic relationships and intersubjectivity are established. That objection, however, ignores the fact that implicit in the theory expressed in the Cartesian Meditations is an awareness of (or set of experiences of) others insofar as the move to the sphere of ownness happens against the backdrop of others and insofar as the description of pairing as a vehicle for the experience of others as other subjects relies on a set of previous experiences involving the members of the pair (Husserl 1950, 111). The pre-awareness of others is brought to us by means of the horizons (The Crisis) and the full noematic sense (Ideas) involved in all experience. In all four of these texts, then, others are involved in or even required, at the deepest level, for attainment of knowledge. In Ideas, others help to solidify one’s knowledge by confirming it, but also make intentional objects possible. In the Cartesian Meditations, there is a heavier emphasis on others and their possibility, but the relationship between others and knowledge is largely the same as in the earlier text. In The Crisis, Husserl’s treatment of the life-world and the intersubjective horizon of perception establishes how it is that others help to broaden one’s knowledge by affording the ability to gain access to meaningful objects. In The Origin Of Geometry, Husserl shows how it is that others help to extend one’s knowledge by making possible access to the knowledge others have (and have had), if, that is, we are willing to do the work to trace-back through the texts to the originary experience. In answer to the primary question—whether there is a non-trivial element of the social in Husserl’s epistemology—we must say, “Yes.” Others are involved in the solidification of one’s knowledge by helping to move the evidence toward adequacy via intersubjective harmony. Others are also, and more importantly, at the root of all one’s knowledge of the world as

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part of the external horizons against which intentional objects take on their noematic meanings AND the experience of others as other subjects makes possible access to idealities and cultural objects that others know or have known, without having to actually have the originary experiences those other subjects had. The first of these roles is in line with Longino’s view and the view of many social epistemologists. The second is more fundamental: rather than an agent having perceptual access to an object and that experience’s status as observation involving others, the very perceptual access has a social dimension. That suggests that, some 50 years before Social Epistemology hit the stage, Husserl’s epistemology was radically social.

Notes 1

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The term “atomistic” as applied to epistemology is one I borrow from J. Angelo Corlett. This definition is echoed by Corlett: “by social epistemology I mean the philosophical study of human knowledge obtained by individuals in a social context or by certain collectives” (73, see also 3–4). On p.4 Corlett writes that “an epistemology is social to the extent that it investigates philosophically the possibility that knowledge, justification, and belief have as their subjects or objects either individuals in a social context or collectives.” There are two main aspects of sociality of knowledge on which one could focus and be considered a social epistemologist: collectives (crowds, institutions, countries, etc.) and the social context of individual knowers. There has been quite a lot of work done on collectives, but since much of that work still rests on the notion of atomistic knowers comprising collectives, my focus is on the latter and the degree to which it surfaces in the introductions to phenomenology published by Husserl. For very brief surveys of some of the main approaches to and positions within social epistemology, consult Goldman (2006), Corlett (2007), Schmitt (1994), and Wray (2007), among others. Solomon also suggests that social epistemologists are not merely interested in investigating the social processes and epistemological dimensions. She argues that social epistemologists generally endorse or praise social processes if they are “conducive to individual rational choice” and condone or chastise social process if they are “an intermediate step in the process of individual enlightenment” (Solomon 1994, 218). These criteria are quite similar to those outlined in Science as Social Knowledge (Longino 1990, 76–78). But that is a big IF. One significant difficulty with Longino’s view that cannot be explored here is that it is difficult to see, based on what she has written, that Longino’s ideal epistemic community can truly exist. That is, the fourth ciriterion of the community has been put in place, in part, to avoid problems of the apparent incommensurability of different epistemic locations with which one is faced

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as soon as one suggests that knowledge is relative to or dependent upon the contexts (including the social interactions) of epistemic agents. Without a view from no-where, an inclusive critical dialog through which things are judged and disagreements adjudicated is required. What, on Longino’s view, guarantees the intercultural, cross-schema, communication eventually required by the continual exercise of critical dialog and negotiation? The fourth criterion of an ideal epistemic community calls for all qualified parties to be allowed a voice in the critical dialog, but the questions remain: what constitutes being “qualified” and who is to say who is qualified to participate in the dialog? That is, what is it that keeps this sort of scheme from turning into yet another form of imperialism by which the ideas and ideals of those currently in power dictate, in a sense, the outcome of the dialog by controlling who can participate in the conversation—thereby facilitating the expansion of their own ideas rather than a genuine critical evaluation of competing ideas? In this essay, I can only begin to sketch the roles of others in one’s knowledge. In doing so I echo a thorough treatment offered elsewhere (Hermberg 2006). That investigation revealed that throughout most of his career, Husserl held that other subjects are involved in one’s attainment of knowledge; that, for Husserl, one’s experience of others as other subjects takes on multi-faceted roles regarding knowledge; and that the texts reveal a continuity across time regarding the sociality of Husserl’s epistemology. This story is very much the story of noematic apperception told by Husserl in Ideas, even if the terminology differs. Of course, it is not automatic. We have to do our work. The seductive danger of language consists in that people can, from the meaning of words, passively take the content of the experiences referred to, without re-doing the enactment. I can read a novel relating the oppression of a people, for example, without redoing the experiences of the author and thus without ‘feeling’ the pain, the suffering, the injustice of the situation described but, as Fink says, phenomenological propositions can only be truly understood when the situation of the givenness of sense is repeated, “when the predicative explicates are always again verified through phenomenologizing intuition” (Fink 1995, 101). See Husserl 1981, 364. This points to the difference between being merely able to recite the Pythagorean theorem and truly seeing how it is so. The former is an instance of the seduction of language, the latter is an example of tracing back through the record to the experience of an Other and thereby broadening one’s knowledge. This is a movement from de facto apodicticity to de jure apodicticity. See Reeder (1990). See Hermberg 2006, 59–64.

Part V

The Avatars of Truth Interpretation, Deconstruction, and Conversation

Chapter 11

Reduction, Construction, Destruction of a Three-way Dialogue Natorp, Husserl and Heidegger 1 Jean-François Courtine

In order to introduce the question of the “given” and of its elaboration with respect to the motifs of reduction, construction and destruction, I shall take as a point of departure the state of the dossier established by Heidegger on the occasion of the first two courses that he gave as Husserl’s young assistant at the University of Freiburg in the years 1919–1920. In these courses, Heidegger’s aim was to take up and to radicalize Husserl’s phenomenological enterprise, while remaining free from any concerns with an orthodoxy or allegiance to a school. Framed by a sustained debate with the various figures of Neokantianism that stood at the forefront of the philosophical scene in Germany at the time, it was this project of taking up Husserl’s enterprise and radicalizing it that led Heidegger to reopen the (ongoing) debate between Husserl and Natorp.2 To this dossier, already complex in itself, one should add Heidegger’s Habilitationschrift on Duns Scotus, as well as the two first lectures in Freiburg, Zur Bestimmung der Philosophie (Heidegger 1987 GA 56/57) and Grundprobleme der Phänomenologie (Heidegger 1992 GA 58). Finally, the debate between Husserl and Natorp as considered by the young Heidegger should also be read in conjunction with the works of Emil Lask, in particular his monograph of 1911/1913, Die Logik der Philosophie und die Kategorienlehre, which is of considerable importance for Heidegger’s Habilitationschrift, as well as for Rickert’s works and for the Neokantianism of the Baden School in general.3 I would like to dwell for a moment on this Heideggerian point of departure. As I indicated, it is characterized by the attempt to radicalize phenomenology, which is defined as the archi-science of the origin, as a

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pre-theoretical science of the Ur-etwas, as Vorwissenschaft, and even as an inquiry into factical life. This determination of phenomenology takes place within the framework of science in the 1911 article in Logos, “Philosophy as a Rigorous Science” and from a perspective that one might characterize as architectonic and foundational. The guiding question is: what is at the foundation of the system of knowledge? In particular, what are the roles of logic and of psychology? It is in this framework that Heidegger takes up again the discussion concerning the question of the given (of the Gegebenheit, and of the es gibt). These themes are central in the HusserlNatorp-Rickert-Lask debates, and by emphasizing them, Heidegger brings them to the forefront in a resolute way. It is of course beyond the scope of the present chapter to consider this dossier in all its complexity (it has already given rise to a secondary literature that is just as rich). It is also beyond our present aim to examine its relation to other later debates centered around the given or the “myth of the given.”4 At this initial stage, we will limit ourselves to consideration of the Husserl-Natorp debate; subsequently we shall return to Heidegger’s illumination of it and the radicalizing effect this will have. *** At the beginning of his 1919 course (Die Grundprobleme der Phänomenologie, 1919–1920), Heidegger gives a clear formulation of the guiding question and its stakes: What does “given” and “givenness” mean? This magic word of phenomenology and a “stumbling block” for other philosophical orientations? [Was heißt “gegeben,” “Gegebenheit”–dieses Zaubertwort der Phänomenologie und der “Stein des Anstoßes” bei den anderen?]. (Heidegger 1992 GA 58, 5) In a sense, it is as a phenomenologist attentive to the methodological question or to the first definition of phenomenology as a method, that the young Heidegger proposes to raise again the question of givenness and of the given, insofar as this question is at the very center of Husserl’s project of a descriptive psychology indexed to intuition. But while Heidegger does begin with a declaration of fidelity with regard to Husserl, and to the phenomenological school in general, his critical freedom, which is geared toward the repetition and radicalization of the phenomenological project, is also clearly formulated from the outset: “It is in the most radical way that the radicalism of phenomenology must be exercised, against itself and

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against everything that presents itself as phenomenological knowledge” (Am radikalisten hat sich aber der Radikalismus der Phänomenologie auszuwirken gegen sie selbst und alles, was als phänomenologische Erkenntnis sich äußert) (Heidegger 1992 GA 58, 6). Heidegger continues, in a free variation on the Aristotelian motif of the amicus Plato: There is no jurare in verba magistri within scientific investigation, and the constitution of an authentic generation of investigators and of subsequent generations depends on this: that scientific enquiry does not lose itself in the marginal domain of special questions, but rather finds a new and genuine way back to the original sources of the problems in order to lead them deeper.5 At the forefront of these problems, drawn from the source, there lies the problem of the delimitation of the domain of phenomenology, of its scientific character, and most importantly—and this is the point on which we shall focus here—of the ultimate authority on which its legitimacy depends, its allocation to the given or to the present—given in an irresistible evidence. However, to put the magic word to the test (Gegebenheit, which could serve as a catchword) is also to enter into the debate with other schools, in the first place with the neo-Kantians of both the Marburg School, represented mainly by Herman Cohen and Paul Natorp, and the Baden School, here represented by Heinrich Rickert and Emile Lask. It is also clear that outside this initial debate—but we cannot here consider all of its elements—the Gegebenheit still remains a “stumbling stone” for other disputes, anchored in other schools. I have in mind notably the Carnap of the 1928 Aufbau, who opens anew the debate with Husserl concerning the status that in the founding enterprise is commonly assigned to the flux of experience, and concerning the choice of an ultimate given, under the heading that Carnap then names the “proprio-psychic basis” (eigenpsychische Basis). *** The question of the given, of givenness, naturally finds its place in a course devoted to the determination of philosophy,6 and to its determination as Urwissenschaft, as an archi-science of the originary. The guiding question, which will be taken up again in the 1919–1920 course (Grundprobleme der Phänomenologie), is substantively the following: What is phenomenology? And the answer comes immediately: its very Idea is linked to the demand

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for an originary science of life in and for itself.7 Although it would of course be necessary to pause over this decisive shift from the Erlebnis to the Leben an und für sich, we must leave this question aside, and let it suffice to note that it is in terms of this “idea” that the question of the “given” emerges, in the first instance, in direct connection with this other inquiry: What is the domain of investigation of phenomenology (Forschungsgebiet)? Is this domain itself “given” or “pre-given” (gegeben, vorgegeben)? Is it given directly or purely and simply, without intermediaries, without mediation? Or, inversely, is this originary domain (precisely the domain of the origin, Ursprungsgebiet) never given, but always only and foremost a domain that must be “conquered” (Heidegger 1992 GA 58, 29)? The manuscript of the first Freiburg course is presently incomplete, but we can read in a Nachschrift, from the auditor Oskar Becker, this even more striking formulation: The originary domain of philosophy could not be an ultimate proposition, an axiom . . . This originary domain is not given to us . . . It is never given in life in itself. It must always be grasped anew, at a new cost.8 (Heidegger 1992 GA 58, 26–27) This question of access and this requirement of a grasp in need of constant renewal, of a given that is never entirely given, and most importantly, never definitely given, is undoubtedly one of the main motifs that in the immediately succeeding courses Heidegger will characterize expressly under the headings of repetition and destruction (Wiederholung, Destruktion). I shall return to this point briefly at the conclusion of this chapter. The question of givenness and of the conditions of access to the given is even more important and decisive, as we have already indicated, to the extent that one purports to give consistency to the idea of phenomenology as Urwissenschaft. What about the archi- or the arkhè, the Ur- of this original science, or science of the origin? Is it possible—and, if so, how?—to establish methodically the way that leads from the non-original back to the original, to the Ursprung? (This is also the central theme of Hermann Cohen’s Logik der Erkenntnis). If the young Heidegger at the outset objects to the determination of this originary science (Ursprungswissenschaft) as theoretical or even pre-theoretical, that is, always governed by the theoretical,9 he nonetheless preserves the idea of a genuine originary science (eine echte Ur-wissenschaft), from which even the theoretical itself would draw its origin. Not only must this science of the origin be apprehended in such a way that it will not need to make presuppositions (as is already required by

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Husserl’s principle of Voraussetzunglosigkeit, indicated in the introduction to the Logical Investigations), it will also not be able to involve any presuppositions, to the extent that it will not be a theory. The masterful move—or, if one prefers, Heidegger’s forceful move— the one that is going to direct the entire development of the problem of the final given, undergoes an additional significant shift, from a question which no longer bears so much on what there is, as it bears on the elucidation of the “Frageerlebnis” itself, of the experience-of-the-question that is proper to the ultimate questioning: gibt es etwas? Is there something? Or “is something given”? It is an apparently minimalistic or elementary question (whose insignificance and “poverty” (Kümmerlichkeit) Heidegger himself underscores), but it is also a crucial question, one that decides the life or death of philosophy! It is a question that finally, and for the first time, lets one take a leap . . . “into the world.” I cite this quite striking passage: We are here before the crossing of the ways, before a choice that decides the life or death of philosophy in general, as before an abyss. Either we go down the road toward the nothing, i.e., in absolute objective positivity [Sachlichkeit], or we succeed in taking a leap into another world, or more exactly, a leap finally into the world, in the absolute sense.10 (Heidegger 1987 GA 56/57, 63) In the courses of the following year (Grundprobleme der Phänomenologie, 1919–1920), we find the same set of problems concerning “final givenness as a question,” again accentuated in its radicality (Heidegger 1992 GA 58, 131). I have already cited the beginning of this passage, which continues as follows: The problem of givenness [of being-given] is not a particular problem, arising in a specialized investigation. With the problem of givenness, the pathways of the modern theory of knowledge split in two [hear: the path of the Marbourg School on the one hand, and the Baden School on the other], and at the same time they together split from phenomenology, whose task is above all to free the problem from the narrow confines of the theory of knowledge.11 (224) In order to move forward in the development of the field of questions related to Gegebenheit, Heidegger, in a way of proceeding that is critical of Natorp, on the one hand, and of Rickert, on the other, begins by recalling the classical Husserlian distinctions between the different modes of

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givenness, which correspond also to the different modalities of intentional directedness (Heidegger 1992 GA 58, 224).12 A distinction will thus be made between that which is self-given (sebstgegeben) in the flesh (leibhaftig), that which is given-itself (in its ipseity), but not leibhaftig, and finally that which is neither self-given, nor given in the flesh, namely that which is given “bloß symbolisch,” merely symbolically. One will also distinguish the given in the sense of “what I give (to) myself” (that is in effect, as we shall see, the von mir Gesetzes) and the given in the sense of “what is given to me from the outside” (the “mir (von außen) Vorgegeben,” 224); in other words, the given in the sense of “I give myself,” the given as layed out or posed, and the given as found outside, pre-given.13 What Heidegger characterizes as the two “typical treatments of the problem of givenness, in the Marburg School and by Rickert,” might also correspond with these distinctions (Heidegger 1992 GA 58, 131). For the members of the Marburg School, “one would never be able to speak of an object completed and given. Before any givenness stands thought, and its particular lawfulness, for which an object alone can be given. In this way a given object is never primary or first; its positing or position is always indexed to an originary function of thought.” The object is understood from then on as “object = x,” in other words, as the “task (Aufgabe) of a positing that progresses ad infinitum.” In a different appendix to the same course, “ ‘Givenness’ in the Marburg School,” in reference to the review of Bruno Bauch’s book on Kant that Natorp had recently published in Kantstudien (Natorp 1918, 426–459), Heidegger drastically summarized the position of the Marburg School in the following manner: To be conscious, consciousness [Bewußtsein], that means: to think, to determine, to posit an object. Each given is such only insofar as it is determined in thought. It is only on the basis of this determination that givenness [Gegebenheit] emerges for the first time. The positing-of-thought thus retains absolute primacy. To know is to determine an object, to posit in thought. Thus, there is no pre-given [es gibt nichts Vorgegebenes]. There are [es gibt] objects only in thought, and since knowledge is a process which, as a matter of principle, knows no end, the object is never given, only its Idea. (Heidegger 1992 GA 58, 224) Although in this context the direct reference is to Emil Lask, it remains— and this is another decisive point on which Heidegger never stopped insisting since the time of his Habilitationschrift—that thought, thus characterized

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as a “positing” or “determining,” necessarily requires a something (etwas) to determine, some thing that constitutes, as it were, an ultimate irreducible “pregiven,” a final “remainder” (ein letzter Rest). In this connection, it is not irrelevant that Natorp himself, in the notes that he writes down after reading Cohen’s Logik der reinen Erkenntnis (Logic of Pure Knowledge), reacts negatively to this virtual elimination of every given or pre-given. He notes that for Cohen, in effect, “it is in itself and by itself that pure thought must produce pure knowledge,” and moreover, “Only thought itself can produce what can count as being.” This is what culminates in the complete elimination of every given. Accordingly, even if Natorp grants that “the ‘given’ can only have a sense as task [Aufgabe],” he does so only to add immediately a major restriction: “but according to the very sense of the task thus established—a task that thought itself must first accomplish—the given nonetheless remains, and certainly under this heading, given in advance (voraus Gegebenes). In his undoubtedly legitimate aversion to the pseudo-‘given,’ Cohen runs the risk of passing over the authentic sense and significance of givenness”14 (Holzhey 1986, 21). This criticism is thus internal to the Marburg School, and one finds it also in the 1910 work, Die logischen Grundlagen der exakten Wissenschaften (The Logical Foundations of the Exact Sciences) (Natorp 1910, 48), where Natorp asks even more precisely, “What then should this ‘given-in-advance-to-knowledge’ be?” (Was sollte das voraus Gegebene der Erkenntnis denn sein?). And after having rejected the standard answers, he answers: representation, sensation, manifold (Vorstellung, Empfindung, Mannigfaltiges); which itself always already requires in turn an act of determination. He continues: It is rather this x, which, as manifold and also as unity, must be determined by thought. For thought, there is [es gibt] no being that has not been posited within thought itself. To think means nothing other than to posit that something is. As for knowing what is outside and anterior to this being that is a question that has absolutely no acceptable meaning.15 In his earlier study, Objective and Subjective Foundation of Knowledge (Natorp 1887, 282–283), Natorp related this to-be-determined x to the Aristotelian dynamei on: The given is not the concrete of the phenomenon except insofar as it is to be determined in advance, that is, insofar as it is a determinable x, and to this extent the analogue of Aristotle’s dynamei on. It is given in only the sense that a task to be accomplished is given. It is not given as a datum of

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knowledge, on the basis of which something else, still unknown, would let itself be determined. It becomes increasingly clear that the “positive,” the allegedly initial given, is in fact what is sought. This is why it is preferable to speak in terms of what is ultimately sought . . . But of this ‘absolutely last’ one has made a first. One has taken the quaesitum for a datum and one has thereby denatured the task of knowledge. [But] if every determination is first and foremost a production of knowledge, then one cannot avoid reflecting on the fact that, prior to this production, something must have been given, something like a subjective originary, like an immediate which must be determined and which thereby must be brought to objectivity. Indeed, something is given prior to the production of knowledge: namely the task. We could also say that the object would be given; in other words, given as that which initially requires determination as an x, and not as a known magnitude. Would this “ultimate given” be an “originary subjective,” Natorp asks, a “phenomenon of the last instance,” wherein it would be permissible to see the “immediate of (subjective) consciousness”? Is it permissible to “posit this immediate of consciousness as an immediate and originary datum of knowledge”? To which Natorp objects that, “it is more advisable to ask oneself whether this orginary can itself be attained by consciousness. Subjectivity as such does not let itself be grasped in its immediacy” (Natorp 1887, 165. My emphasis). It cannot be apprehended except after the fact, in its accomplishments (Leistungen), or in its products, in a procedure that must accordingly be characterized as a “reconstruction.” From that point on, before any concept, the level of “pure” subjectivity is the level of “absolute indetermination.” “One may certainly go back to such subjectivity as to originary chaos, but one may not apprehend it in itself” (Natorp 1887, 282–283). The constructive, objectifying production of knowledge is absolutely antecedent. It is from an anterior production that we reconstruct, to the extent that it is possible, the level of originary subjectivity. Knowledge cannot attain originary subjectivity apart from this reconstructive way, by starting from the objective construction initially carried out. Heidegger, in turn, summarized the Marburg thesis faithfully, but in a drastic way, in the following terms: Theoretical thought, and in particular mathematical thought, is “the true sense of consciousness.” Consciousness is “thinking, determining, positing an object.” Every given is given only insofar as it is determined

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in thought. It is only on the basis of this determination that givenness arises. Thought, accordingly, has an absolutely privileged position. Knowledge is objective determination, it is positing in thought. There is no pregiven. There are objects only in thought and because knowledge is, as a matter of principle, a process without end, the object is never given; only its Idea (only the fiction of a process of knowledge that has arrived at its term gives the object).16 (Heidegger 1992 GA 58, 224) And again: “We can never speak of a finalized and given object. Thought and its lawfulness remain prior to every given, for which only an object may be ‘given’ ” (132).17 *** I will now turn to my second main point, Husserl—Natorp, by considering more closely the two reviews of Husserl’s Prolegomena to Pure Logic and Ideen I written by Natorp. In the Logical Investigations, Prolegomena to Pure Logic, Husserl made reference to the 1887 article Über objektive und subjektive Begründung der Erkenntnis (“On the Objective and Subjective Foundations of Knowledge”), as well as to the 1888 Einleitung in die Psychologie (“Introduction to Psychology”), and paid tribute to Natorp, praising his contribution to the delimitation of the domain of pure logic. He also quoted a slightly later remark of Natorp (Natorp 1898, § 4) according to which “the laws of logic say as little about the way we actually think, in such and such situation” as they say about how one ought to think; and he emphasized the “stimulating influence” that the two aforementioned texts had exerted on him (Husserl 1975, Hua XVIII, 156). In the important 1887 article (Natorp 1887), Natorp had criticized Ernst Mach and rejected Mach’s earlier project of a “phenomenological physics,”18 which purported to take as its point of departure an ultimate subjective datum. Concerning this datum, one could legitimately ask: What does “given” mean here? Is the given “known”? Far from representing a final element, this purported given must be determined beforehand. It is a “determinable,” an x, “analogous to Aristotle’s δύναμει ὄν.” And here we find something that will play the role of a leitmotiv in the Natorpian critique of the immediacy of givenness. The given (das Gegebene) is given only in the sense of a task (Aufgabe) to be accomplished. It is not a “datum of knowledge, on the basis of which something else, still unknown, would be determined.” The general structure of the argument is here clearly established, one which opposes some indeterminate thing = x, to the process of knowledge and of thought as Bestimmung, determination, or to be more precise, production.

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To be fair, one must acknowledge a “correct hunch” in the “positivism” demanded by Ernst Mach.19 If every determination is a “production” of knowledge, it is important that one take into account the fact that “prior to any production, something should be given as a subjective originary,” 20 an immediate given, but one which must precisely be led back to objectivity. That is the “task”! The fundamental error of positivism is just to posit “this originary of knowledge as a datum that is immediate and originary,” when it is precisely “subjectivity as such that does not let itself be determined in its immediacy.” In its immediacy, it is nothing other than “absolute indetermination,” or as Natorp again says, “original chaos.” In order to gain access to this level of “originary subjectivity,” what is required is precisely a mediated work of “production” and of “construction,” which is always objectivation: Other than through this reconstructive way, and on the basis of the construction carried out initially, subjectivity cannot be attained by any other kind of knowledge . . . The subjective is not primary except insofar as the task of knowledge is presented from the outset as already accomplished; but even this subjective would not be a given in the sense of a datum for knowledge.21 In his 1887 article, Natorp evidently does not at all have Husserl in mind. The target, which is easy to identify even though the author is not cited explicitly, is indeed Mach’s anti-metaphysical “positivism.” Mach would not have characterized this “subjective originary” in egological terms, since one of the peremptory and fundamental theses of The Analysis of Sensations (Mach 1903) is that “the I cannot in any way be recovered” (das Ich ist unrettbar). It is nonetheless permissible to wonder whether and to what extent this Natorpian criticism does not anticipate and bear legitimately on the Husserl of Ideen I when on behalf of phenenomenology he lays claim to the very term “positivism”: “If ‘positivism’ is tantamount to an absolutely unprejudiced grounding of all sciences on the ‘positive,’ that is to say, on what can be seized upon originaliter, then we are the genuine positivists” (Husserl 1983, 39). This is a “positivism” that then takes as its point of departure what lies prior to all points of view; indeed, the entire field of whatever is given intuitionally, which is prior even to every thought that elaborates this given theoretically; everything that one can immediately see and grasp—on the condition that one does not let oneself be

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blinded by prejudices and prevented from taking into consideration whole classes of genuine givens.” (Husserl 1983, 38–39) Beyond the review of Husserl’s Prolegomena to Pure Logic, which Natorp published under the title Zur Frage der logischen Methode (“On the Question of Logical Method”) in Kantstudien in 1901, it is above all in the Allgemeine Psychologie (General Psychology) of 1912, and in the review of Ideen which he published in 1917–1918 (Natorp 1917–1918, 224–246) that Natorp returns to the question of the given and of the double foundation, objective and subjective, of knowledge. In Chapter XI of the General Psychology, devoted to the critical assessment of a number of theories, Natorp discusses (§11) the Logical Investigations in order to emphasize what, at the time of the first review, he had characterized as a “logical malaise,” namely the tension that subsists between the “formal,” “pure,” or “ideal,” and the real, in the sense of “a residual that is not understood, irrational” (“unbegriffener, unvernünftiger Rest”), “an extraneous residue, rejected and yet ineliminable.”22 In order to break away from this logical malaise, one would need to reestablish a logical link between these two antagonistic instances, which are “the supra-temporal existence of the logical” on the one hand, and its “temporal factuality in psychological experience” on the other. This logical link would make it possible to give sense to the idea of a “Realisierung des Idealen” (a realization of ideals), understood as a “rigorous logical transition” from one mode of consideration to the other, a “transition” that Natorp for his part would name, “objectivation,” “reconstruction.” By 1912, Natorp had become acquainted with the Logical Investigations as a whole, which had not been the case when he wrote the review of the Prolegomena, and this time the criticism is more acute. Husserl, who seemed to require, and rightly so, a “strictly objective foundation of logic and of objective knowledge in general,” had proposed only a phenomenological foundation of knowledge, in other words, a “subjective and psychological foundation” (Natorp 1973a, 12). But Natorp raises the following question: Even limiting oneself to description, how could this description escape the objectivation that is characteristic of all theories? If reflection on a psychological experience necessarily makes it an object, how can this experience, how can the intentional acts themselves (die meinende Akte) be apprehended in abstraction from the expressions that are valid only for the realities that are aimed at or intended? According to Husserl, Natorp concludes, “subjectivity is manifestly a second objectivity of the same nature as the first objectivity, the objectivity that one thinks habitually, and which is coordinated with it” (Husserl 1917–1918, 244).

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However, this is precisely what Natorp wants to reject. Subjectivity, the counterpart of objectivity, is not a “second objectivity,” the objectivity of the “acts of consciousness.” Far from every description, subjectivity, insofar as it is the counterpart or the counter-image (Gegenbild), can be attained only by an “indirect route.” This is precisely a route that one must name not Reducktion, but Rekonstruktion. The procedure must here remain essentially indirect, to the extent that the reflective objectivation of the acts, or of the subjective in general, can only be “absolutely non-immediate,” and to the extent that reflective objectivation remains in all cases “totally dependent on the primary act of specific and originary objectivation” (Natorp 1912, 281). Grasping the subjective, and the acts purely in themselves, “this is what I have not succeeded in doing up to now,” Natorp remarked ironically, in relation to Husserl, even though Natorp agrees that this strong opposition of the subjective and the objective is likely to be dimmed down as soon as the “processual character” of “being” is brought into consideration. When one examines a particular cognitive experience, one realizes that “in general, there is not the subjective and the objective in themselves; rather, in the pursuit of the process of objectivation and thus also of subjectivation, the character of the subjective and of the objective is transferred stage by stage to more and more members, the subjective becomes the objective, and the objective becomes subjective again” (Natorp 1912, 283). As Natorp had pointed out at the beginning of the General Psychology, this opposition of the subjective and the objective is in fact entirely relative, since it sends us back in the end to a single movement of thought, one that may be accomplished now in one of its directions, now in the other: The relation of opposition [Gegensatz] becomes a reciprocal relation [Gegenseitigkeit] that has the sense, at the same time, of a necessary correlation [Korrelation] . . . What is here decisive, is that the face to face of the subjective and the objective, which at first seemed fixed, dissolves entirely in the living process of objectivation on the one hand and subjectivation on the other, in which processes there is neither objective nor subjective in an absolute sense, but always only relative degrees of objective and subjective that one may also and as legitimately characterize as a difference in degree of objectivation or, inversely, of subjectivation. (Natorp 1912, 71)23 Of course, it is the consideration of this processual character of this “being”—a term which Natorp can from then on use only in quotation marks—that is decisive. Knowledge must be envisaged as a process in

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relation to which the object, which always “needs determination,” calls for a “function of knowledge,” which is clear itself only after the fact, through the complementary route of subjectivation, which then in turn is pursued “within the indeterminate, and ad infinitum.” This is what Natorp presents as a “genetic” or “dynamic” examination of knowledge, in contrast to any “ontic” or “static” examination. This is what defines the point of view of method, in contrast to any perspective organized around the idea of a fi xed or “settled” “result”; or what defines even the perspective of the fieri, in contrast to all pretentions to approach an ultimate factum or datum. To avoid turning the object into an “in itsel f ” or a choriston, “standing on its own by itself on the exterior,” is also to refuse delving deeper in the direction from which “the given,” “the subjective” would purportedly emerge, when thought in a fi xed or unconnected way, independently of the thinking process (Natorp 1912, 286–287). At this point, Natorp’s criticism of Husserl becomes more nunaced. He writes: Husserl does not envisage the relation between the content and the object, between the presentation [Präsentation] and the representation [Repräsentation], in a way fundamentally different from my way of envisaging it. He acknowledges, at least . . . as an ideal case, that the meaning intention and its “fulfillment” are absolutely one, so that the object itself is encompassed in the “phenomenological content” [Husserl 1984 Hua XIX/2, 608, 645–648]. We overcome this position by emphasizing the fact that such “fulfillment” does not take place once, but again at every stage—by emphasizing that there never is and never could be an absolute fulfillment. We acknowledge that Husserl comes close to idealism when he makes the perceptual content dependent on thought, the “fulfillment” dependent on the “intention,” the presentation on the representation, and when he determines essentially the first term by the second—but with the following restriction: The identification is “accomplished,” but is not itself aimed at [intentionally] [Husserl 1984, Hua XIX/2, A 622]. The “genetic” perspective thus leads to a radical reassessment of the very idea of an experience, and especially of the idea of an “originary experience,” which, as Natorp does not fail to point out, is already characterized by Husserl himself as that which is “perceived or apprehended in reflection” (Husserl 1986, Hua XXV, 29–30). The purported “originary experience” thereby becomes in turn a “problem,” no longer the theme of a “description,” but rather of a “reconstruction.”24 In this new dynamic conception, he remarks further:

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There is no longer the settled givenness of a “content” and therefore there is no longer the possibility of a direct “description” of the content—such description being nothing but the concept correlating to such a settled givenness. But in its place the “reconstruction” emerges. This is only the reverse side of the construction of the object, and shares with it the genetic or methodological character, and thereby also the sense of the “intention,” the intention that is, of course, never fulfilled. (290) The critical part of the General Psychology concerning the unquestioned privilege Husserl assigns to intuition and in particular the motif of eidetic intuition, is taken up again and developed further in Natorp’s review of Ideen I shortly thereafter. In direct reference to the well-known § 24, where Husserl formulates the “principle of principles,” Natorp lays emphasis on the Cartesian strand in Husserlian phenomenology, ultimately linked to the “given,” which is directly offered in intuition. In his answer to the question of the grounds of certainty, which one cannot refer back to experience in an empirical way, Husserl, as Natorp points out, “limits himself to Descartes’s position”: Knowledge of the essence is grounded first and foremost in intuition. Intuition is characterized as an immediate seeing, an intuiting, an “evidence” [§ 3, 12] a “vision of the essence,” a “grasping” within an immediate intellectual evidence . . . All that phenomenology establishes thus appears as claiming to be finally given directly in “intuition” [§18, 33], without the adjunction of any hypotheses, without any exegetical work [ohne jede hypothetische oder interpretierende Auslegung oder Hindeutung]. (Natorp 1973b, 38) Besides the remaining questions about the legitimacy of this criticism, I want simply to indicate in passing that in the rewriting of the “principle of principles” that he proposes (Heidegger 1987 GA 56/57, § 20, 109–110), this characterization may have played an important role for the young Heidegger (109–110).25 Nevertheless, it is the same Natorp who will give a more nuanced form to this criticism by drawing attention to the fact that Husserl speaks not so much of the given or of being given (Gegebensein) as he speaks of an “originary giving act,” or of “giving intuition,” thereby excluding the idea that there might be some given in the sense of “simple receptivity.” If the “giving” (das Geben) thus leads back to an act, or if it is an “entirely specific” act, one may wonder—and Natorp evidently goes this far—whether the

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“fundamental act of knowledge” is not rather “an act of positing” (Akt des Setzens), and conclude, at the end of an analysis that this time goes through the Platonic and Kantian determinations, that (I cite the somewhat long although crucial passage): the act of giving must be able to—and can effectively—mean nothing other than the foundation of singular positings of thought, at first isolated, from the continuity of thought and through it. In other words, the fixity [Starrheit], the punctual character of “sight” [Einsicht] taken in isolation, must be abolished and overcome, but at the same time must be explained by this overcoming. Thought is movement and not repose; the halting points can be nothing but processes, just as the point can only be “determined” by the tracing of the line, and cannot be determined on its own before the line is traced. If thought is movement, one must interrogate the factum from the perspective of the fieri, and recognize it only insofar as the fieri is in turn foundation: This is the reason why we do not accept any finished givenness [fertige Gegebenheit], no ready-made, whether it is a priori or empirical. The purported “fi xed stars” of thought must be recognized as the “wandering stars of a higher order,” the purported fixed points of thought must be resolved, they must be liquefied in the continuity of the process of thought. Therefore nothing is “given,” but some thing merely becomes “given” [So ist nichts, sondern wird etwas “gegeben”]. (Natorp 1973b, 42) Accordingly, it is the very idea of givenness or of a final given that needs to be absolutely rejected. Even a “positing” could not be considered as ultimately and absolutely given. There is only givenness in the “process” of thought and through it. It is thus legitimate to conclude that “the process itself is the giving” (Der Prozeß selbst ist das ‘Gebend’); that, strictly speaking, there is no giving instance; and that what does the giving is the process itself. In the paper that he devotes in 1918 to Bruno Bauch’s Kant, Natorp will also bring to light this active character of the “giving” in the background of all givenness: Es muß der Gegebenheit ein aktives Geben entsprechen (“To every being-given [to every givenness], an ‘active giving’ must necessarily correspond) (Natorp 1918, 440). Nur so “gibt” es, “gibt sich” . . . Gegebenes (“Only in this way ‘is there’ the given, only in this way . . . does it ‘give itself’).

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The wordplay will also have drawn Heidegger’s attention. Radicalizing the question in his first lecture of 1919 a few months later, Heidegger will ask, gibt es etwas? (“is there something [given]?”), Gibt es das ‘es gibt’? (“Is there the ‘there is’ [the ‘given’ of the ‘it gives’]?) (Heidegger 1987 GA 56/57, 62–63). If, according to the reductive procedure of Husserlian phenomenology in the Ideen, pure consciousness (or more accurately the “region of consciousness”) becomes the last “sphere of absolute positing” (§ 46), which is separated by “an abyss of sense” from “reality,” this ontological region where being sketches itself, without ever being absolutely given (§ 49)—in contrast to the region of consciousness that remains, as the outcome of the phenomenological reduction, as the final, absolutely-given “phenomenological residuum”—then it matters, in Natorp’s eyes, to replace this reduction with the “reconstruction.” In truth, this reduction is only the “simple omission of the act of objective positing” (das bloße Unterlassen des gegenständlich setzenden Aktes). Contrary to every attempt aimed at gaining access to consciousness attained in its “purity,” as a “system of being closed upon itself,” a “system of absolute being into which nothing can break and from which nothing can escape” (§ 49), reconstruction presents itself as another specific task, requiring a “corresponding method.” Natorp may grant Husserl that “this method is exactly the inverse of the method of objectivation.” Nonetheless—and it is by virtue of this that the separation from the phenomenological procedure is definitive—this method must remain “in the strictest correspondence with it [with objectivation],” whereby, Natorp adds, “it opens a way within the infinite” (Heidegger 1987 GA 56/57, 49). It is thus and only thus that it becomes possible to “redirect all objectivations” to an “originary consciousness,” which (we have seen) would never be absolutely given nor ever constitute a “source” strictly speaking, since even its alleged “originarity” (Ursprünglichkeit) is intertwined with its “character of being grounded in itself” (in sich-selbst-Gegründetheit). Strictly speaking, this character belongs only to pure “thought,” given that being-in-itself “means and can only mean im Prozeß sein, being in the process.” We find here again, in a richer sense, the formula cited above: “The absolutely and ultimately given can be ‘given’ only in and by the process of thought.” Der Prozeß selbst ist das “Gebende” (“The process itself is that which “gives”). In laying emphasis on the processuality of thought in this way, in providing a reminder of the radical difference, which Husserl would not have recognized, between the presentation (Darstellung) of pure consciousness, on the one hand, and the clarification of “that which can be presented (dargestellt) in actual knowledge,” on the other hand, Natorp can even luxuriously

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afford to insist on the infinite intertwining or intrication (Verflechtung) of consciousness and of objectifying acts. And Natorp can insist upon this against the “abstraction” of the Husserlian way of proceeding, which is in reality a “refusal to take into account the whole of the world of objectivity.” Natorp thus becomes the defender of a “flux” that Husserl would be constrained to “halt” or “fi x” without succeeding in remaining faithful to the nonetheless acknowledged thesis that “originarily, it is time that is in consciousness, and not consciousness in time” (Natorp 1912, 228). Before leaving Natorp behind, I would like—and it is not a point prompted only by curiosity—to evoke again the position of the later Natorp relative to the question of the “given,” of the “there is” (es gibt), of the “ factum.” This is no longer the factum of constituted science, from which it would be important to return, by “reconstruction,” all the way back to the unassignable gathering place of objectifying and constituting consciousness. In his Marburg Lectures of 1922–1923, published posthumously in 1958 under the title Philosophische Systematik, an entire section is devoted to the “categories of individuation” (Natorp 1958, Section C, § 62, 223 ff.). Natorp again takes a singular Faktum as his point of departure, but this time it is the factum that there is, or better still the factum of the “there is”: “es gibt das Factum, es gibt: das ‘es gibt.’ ” What should we say about the factuality (Faktizität) of this singular fact, now intertwined with a final and irreducible “givenness,” “there is,” this “there is” that simultaneously gives and is given? The “there is,” is here also the ultimate “it is”: “es ist, das es ist.” What should we say about this “being” (Sein) that seems from then on to gain priority over every process, over all fieri? Natorp underscores its irreducible singleness (Einzigkeit), a singleness that it is no longer possible to produce or to present (aufweisen) through any development (Entwicklung), regardless of how contrived it is; a singleness which does not let itself be grounded in reason or fathomed (begründen, ergründen), since it is this singleness itself which constitutes the ultimate sense of being (Sinn des Seins), the last sense one may be able to access and bring to the fore. Natorp also characterizes this ultimate singleness somewhat enigmatically as the ultimate singleness of the Sache, the “Thing” “. . . die Sache . . . die letzte Einzigkeit” (Natorp 1958, 227). This single “Thing,” writes Natorp, is “the most astonishing wonder,” which governs through and through “the whole of being and of sense.” This wonder is also the consequence of the fact that “that which is the furthest” is equally, in a sense, “the closest,” which can never be attained through any mediation, even the most sublime one, and which is rather like das unmittlebar Vorliegende (“the immediate at hand”), that which is present immediately in front, that which dies alles unter Frage Stellende (“calling

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everything into question”), remains itself das schlechthin Unfragliche (“definitively un-questionable”). This Sache (“thing”) is once again single and unique, and is destined to remain the true point of departure, our only unavoidable Ausgang (“way out”): das schlichte Daß, das schlichte “es ist”: das Faktum (“the pure and simple quod, the pure and simple ‘it is,’ the factum” (Natorp 1912, 227). Nothing, simply nothing entitles us to think that the young Heidegger, who begins his teaching career in Freiburg with Husserl in 1919, might have been acquainted with the reflections of the latter Natorp. The degree of inconsequentiality or incoherence of these reflections with respect to the criticism of a specific version of the “myth of the given” that had been formulated twenty years earlier, would have to be assessed. Whatever the case may be with respect to this last point, which I will not pursue any further, it is not necessary to formulate a hypothesis of that kind (a highly implausible one) in order to understand how the young Heidegger, in a gesture of critical reappropriation of Husserlian phenomenology, was able to take up again the question of the given, of the “es gibt,” through renewed formulations and within a renewed horizon. On the level of “sources,” if some such thing exists and has some importance here, the reference to Emil Lask should suffice; in particular to his 1911 work Die Logik der Philosophie und Kategorienlehre, massively present in the Habilitation work devoted to Duns Scotus and his doctrine of categories and meaning. In effect, Emil Lask there develops a number of long analyses of the es gibt under the title of “categories of reflection.” But this is another chapter that I will not take up here. I will rather limit myself to venture one last hypothesis, according to which the Heideggerian theme of Destruktion (“destruction” or “deconstruction”) even if it does inherit a sense from the Husserlian Abbau (“destruction”), from the de-sedimentation of accumulated strata that have come to obstruct the intuitive grasp (Einsicht), could all the same be understood as the theme of taking up again—in a near-reversal—Rekonstruktion, Natorpian reconstruction. With respect to the general project of “reconstruction,” Heidegger indicates that “with reconstruction, we have a total and complete reversal of the procedure of objectifying knowledge,” a procedure aimed at gaining access to the “flux of experience,” to the “ultimate subject of consciousness,” to “immediate experience,” and to the “concrete context of originary experience.” By the same token, “reconstruction” seems to present more than loose affinities with what Heidegger at the outset names the “method” of “destruction,” insofar as the latter aimed at “leading philosophy back into itself, taking its exteriorization as the staring point.” “Deconstruction”

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(Abbau) aims, in effect, “to free itself from an inauthentic tradition that imposes itself upon us in a non-originary way (nicht ursprünglich zugeeignet) (Heidegger 1993 GA 59, 5), and far from being a purely negative destruction (Zerschlagen und Zertrümmern), it is “dijudication” (Diiudication) (74). “Destruction consists fundamentally in an act of ‘ judgment.’ ” Its first operating function is the “ judgment between that which, from a phenomenological perspective, must be regarded as originary and non-originary (ursprünglich–nichtursprünlich).” But when we come to the decisive question (Heidegger 1987 GA 56/57, 108)—Heidegger formulates it as follows: “We raise the question, does the method of destruction achieve what it is meant to achieve? Is it generally capable of achieving it?”—The answer is clearly, “No,” since we have not left the domain of objectivation. “Reconstruction is also construction, and this being-constructive is precisely what properly characterizes objectivation, which as such is theoretical” (108).26 This is why, as Heidegger continues to point out, “the destructive factor, which characterizes Natorp’s position, is necessary and fertile for a number of reasons . . . This position investigates, according to its own sense, the ‘origin,’ with an intensity and a radicality that is commensurate with its misleading character.” One will take that to be a compliment! The problem that must be taken up again or repeated where Natorp has left it, is precisely the problem of the description Husserl ascribes to intuition. If one may assert that “a decisive step has been taken by phenomenology, the emphasis laid upon originary intuition [originäre Anschauung]—evidence!—and the idea of the adequate description,” it is nonetheless convenient to oppose to the privileged status assigned by Husserl to intuition, the idea of an undissociable co-belonging of intuition and understanding, the idea of a verstehende Anschauung. It is from this perspective that the way of Destruktion imposes itself resolutely, since what is characteristic of “factical life” is precisely “the fading of significance” (das Verblassen der Bedeutsamkeit) (Heidegger 1993 GA 59, 37) that looms over it like a permanent threat—fading of signifi cance, loss of concrete and contextual meaningfulness, which stems from the fact that a sense is no longer “accomplished,” that it is thus amputated from the specific intentional dimension, which in every instance confers on it its fulfilled sense (Vollzugssinn). It is at this Vollzug (fulfillment), at this effective accomplishment, that deconstruction attempts to arrive. In this way, it undertakes a return upstream, going back up all the way to the giving source. But the latter remains unattainable as a matter of principle; or rather, it would be approachable only within the horizon of a path that goes not so much through “objectivations” as it goes through sediments, the layers of fixed or theoretically-settled sense, faded and thus dissimulating

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no longer a process, but rather a fulfillment (Vollzug), an effectuation in every instance concrete and factical, which constitutes the true gathering place of all significance: the significant, significance (das Bedeutsame, die Bedeutsamkeit). Translated by Karl Hefty and Daniel R. Rodríguez Navas

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The bibliography relative to the Heidegger-Husserl-Natorp debate is as follows: (1) von Wolzogen 1988; (2) Stolzenberg 1995; (3) Stolzenberg 2002; (4) Ferrari 2002; (5) Lazzari 2002; and (6) Lembeck, 2002. See also (1) Marion 2008; (2) Arrien 2009. The main documents of this debate include: (1) Natorp 1887; (2) Husserl 1975 Hua XVIII; (3) Husserl 1994, 39–165; Natorp, 1912, reprint1965 (in particular XI, §§11–14); (4) Husserl1976, Hua III; (5) Husserl 2002b, in particular 276–292; and (6) Natorp 1917–1918. Reprint in Natorp 1973b, 36–60. To this we may add the essay of 1901 (Natorp 2008a), to be found (in Italian) in the excellent volume, of which the main focus is admittedly different (Natorp 2008b). On this point, see Heidegger’s global exposition in GA 58, 224ff: “Das Probleme der Gegebenheit—Kritik Natorps und Rickert.” See notably the discussion opened in the anglo-saxon world by Wilfrid Sellars’s series of lectures in 1956 (Sellars 1997). “Es gibt kein jurare in verba magistri innerhalb der wissenschaftlichen Forschung, und das Wesen einer echten Forschergeneration und Generationsfolge liegt darin, daß sie sich nicht an die Randbezirke der Spezialfragen verliert, sondern neu und echt auf die Urquellen der Probleme zurückgeht und sie tiefer leitet” (GA 58, 6). “Zur Bestimmung der Philosophie. (1) Die Idee der Philosophie und das Weltanschauungsproblem (Kriegsnotsemester 1919); (2) Phänomenologie und transzendentale Wertphilosophie (Summer semester 1919); and (3) Anhang: Über das Wesen der Universität und des akademischen Studiums (Summer semester 1919)” (GA 56/57). “Was ist phänomenologie? Als ihre Idee ist angesetzt: absolute Ursprungswissenschaft von Leben an und für sich” (GA 58, 171). “Das Ursprungsgebiet der Philosophie ist kein letzter Satz, keine Axiom . . . Das Ursprungsgebiet ist wesentlich nie gegeben im Leben an sich. Er muß immer von Neuem erfaßt werden” (GA 58, 203). See also: “Die berümten und ‘berüchtigten’ ‘unmittelbaren Gegebenheiten’ der Phänomenologie und phänomenologischen Wissenschaft sind ‘zunächst’ ‘bekanntermaßen’ nie und nirgends gegeben, wir mögen das Leben in seiner aktuellen Strömungsrichtung nach allen Dimensionen durchsehen. Vielleicht ist das Ursprungsgebiet uns jetzt noch nich gegeben—aber wenn die Phänomenologie weiter ist? Auch dann nicht—und nie. . . . Das Gegenstandsgebiet der wissenschaftlichen Philosophie muß also immer wieder neu gesucht, die Zugänge neu geöffnet werden” (GA 58, 26–27).

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See: “Diese Vorherrschaft des Theoretischen muß gebrochen werden . . . ” (This prevalence of the theoretical must be broken) (GA 56/57, 59). “Wir stehen an der methodischen Wegkreuzung, die über Leben oder Tod der Philosophie überhaupt entscheidet, an einem Abgrund: entweder ins Nichts, d.h. der absoluten Sachlichkeit, oder es gelingt der Sprung in eine andere Welt, oder genauer: überhaupt erst in die Welt” (GA 56/57, 63). See “das Problem der Gegebenheit ist kein spezialistisches Sonderproblem. An ihm scheiden sich die Wege der modernen Erkenntnistheorie unter sich und zugleich von der Phänomenologie, die das Problem vor allem aus seiner verengenden erkenntnistheoretischen Problematik loslösen muß” (GA 58, 224. See also Oskar Becker’s Nachschrift, GA 58, 221). “Ich kann im Leben auf etwas gerichtet sein, ohne daß ich das, worauf ich gerichtet bin, im Charakter der Gegebenheit, des Präsentseins mir gegenüber stehend habe” (GA 58, 224). See the notes of Becker: “Es ist zu scheiden: (a) ‘Gegebensein’ im Sinne des von mir Gesetzten, d.h. der Fall, wo ich mir etwas ‘gebe’. (b) ‘Gegeben’ im Sinn des mir (von außen) Vorgegeben” (GA 58, 224). From Zu Cohens Logik): “aber im Sinne der gestellten Aufgabe, die vom Denken erst zu lösen, bleibt es doch das Gegebene, und zwar voraus Gegebene. In der begründeten Abwehr gegen das falsche ‘Gegebene’ kommt Cohen in Gefahr auch diesen echten Sinne der Gegebenheit zu übersehen” (Holzey 1986, 21). My emphasis. “Es ist vielmehr dasjenige X, welches als Mannigfaltiges, ebenso wie andererseits als Einheit, durch das Denken erst zu bestimmen ist . . . Es gibt für das Denken kein Sein, das nicht im Denken selbst gesetzt würde. Denken heißt nichts Anders als: setzen, daß etwas sei; und was außerdem und vordem dies Sein—sei, ist eine Frage, die überhaupt keinen angebaren Sinn hat” (Natorp 1910, 48). “Denken, Bestimmen, Setzen eines Gegenstandes. Jedes Gegebene ist nur als im Denken bestimmt gegeben. Aus dieser Bestimmung entspringt erst die Gegebenheit. Die Denksetzung hat einen absoluten Vorrang. Das Erkennen ist Gegenstandsbestimmung, Setzen im Denken. Es gibt nichts Vorgegebenes. Es gibt Gegenstände erst im Denken und weil das Erkennen ein prinzipiell endloser Prozeß ist, ist der Gegenstand nie gegeben, sondern nur seine Idee (erst die Fiktion des ans Ende gelangten Erkenntnisprozesses gibt den Gegenstand)” (GA 58, 224. My emphasis). “Es ist nirgends von einem fertigen und gegebenen Gegenstand zu reden. Vor allen Gegebenheiten steht das Denken und seine Gesetzlichkeit, für welche allein ein Gegenstand ‘gegeben’ sein kann” (GA 58, 132). See the definition of the project in the piece of 1872: “Die Geschichte und die Wurzel des Satzes von der Erhaltung der Arbeit.” See Sommer 1988, 309–328. Here I am drawing attention to a passage already quoted. See also Natorp 1887: “It is not at all in the object—which is not given but is precisely what is at stake—that one must find the origin and, on its basis, establish the conceivability of subjective knowledge. On the contrary, one must first and foremost limit oneself to the point of view of knowledge and ask how knowledge itself understands objectivity, how knowledge posits this and that, and what it

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means for knowledge to pose the object in front of itself as something independent of the subjectivity of knowledge. . . . The object (Gegenstand), the object (Objekt) means first and foremost that which is posited before (or in front of) knowledge; thus it is knowledge itself which, first and foremost, will be able to indicate and account for what that ‘positing before itself’ may be.” “. . . das Reale bleibt als fremder, verworfener, und doch nicht wegzuschaffender Rest Stehen” (Natorp 1973a, 14). See Natorp 1918, 432–433. “Description” becomes, necessarily, “reconstruction” (Natorp 1912, 290). “Das methodische Grundproblem der Phänomenologie, die Frage nach der Weise der wissenschaftlichen Erschließung der Erlebnissphäre, steht selbst unter dem “Prinzip der Prinzipien” der Phänomenologie. Husserl formuliert es so : “Alles, was sich in der ‘Intuition’ originär . . . darbietet, [ist] einfach hinzunehmen . . . als was es sich gibt.” Das ist das “Prinzip der Prinzipien”, an dem “uns keine erdenkliche Theorie irre machen” kann. Verstünde man unter Prinzip einen theoretischen Satz, dann wäre die Bezeichnung nicht kongruent. Aber schon, daß Husserl von einem Prinzip der Prinzipien spricht, also von etwas, das allen Prinzipien vorausliegt, woran keine Theorie irre machen kann, zeigt, daß es nicht theoretischer Natur ist, wenn auch Husserl darüber sich nicht ausspricht. Es ist die Urintention des wahrhaften Lebens überhaupt, die Urhaltung des Erlebens und Lebens als solchen, die absolute, mit dem Erleben selbst identische Lebenssympathie. Vorläufig, d.h. auf diesem Weg vom Theoretischen herkommend, in der Weise des immer mehr Sichfreimachens von ihm, sehen wir diese Grundhaltung immer, wir haben zu ihr eine Orientierung. Dieselbe Grundhaltung ist erst absolut, wenn wir in ihr selbst leben—und das erreicht kein noch so weit gebautes Begriffssystem, sondern das phänomenologische Leben in seiner wachsenden Steigerung seiner selbst” (GA 56/57, § 20, 109–110). See also, “Die Psychologie kann nichts rekonstruieren, was nicht zuvor konstruiert ist. Inhaltlich und umfänglich decken sich bezüglich des zu Erforschenden Objektivierung und Subjektivierung, nur die Richtung ist diametral entgegengesetz. Das Logische (Objektive) bleibt immer die Gegenseite alles Psychischen (Subjektiven)” (GA 59, 105).

Chapter 12

Truth’s Absence The Hermeneutic Resistance to Phenomenology Santiago Zabala

Truth is not a relation that is “just there” between two beings that themselves are “just there”—one mental, the other physical. Nor is it a coordination, as philosophers like to say these days. If it is a relation at all, it is one that has no analogies with any other relation between beings. If I may put it this way, it is the relation of existence as such to its very world. It is the world-openness of existence that is itself uncovered—existence whose very being unto the world gets disclosed/uncovered in and with its being unto the world. (Heidegger 1976 GA 21) Recently I have suggested that Being, after the destruction of metaphysics, ought to be understood as “conversation” (Zabala 2010, 161–176; 2009). Contrary to my fellow philosophers’ interpretations, I did not advance this argument because “conversation” is “truer” than any other approach to Being but rather because it emphasizes, among other things, the absence of truth instead of its origin or essence. While phenomenology and analytic philosophy continue to examine the origin or essence of truth, philosophical hermeneutics has finally begun to emphasize not only why truth is absent but also how philosophy can disregard it in favor of Being. Philosophy can do this not because Being has priority over truth but rather because there is not a truer interpretation of Being which could justify it. Such a truer interpretation (or “description of Being”) would entangle philosophy with metaphysics, that is, submit it to realism, science, or a culturally dominant philosophical position. The fact that the history of philosophy is actually constituted by precisely these periodic dominating positions does not justify the search for truth; rather, it calls for the different interpretations or events of truth, hence, truth’s absence. In sum, from a philosophical

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position advocating the interpretative nature of truth, hermeneutics has become an ontological account of the remains of Being where truth ceases to have any normative power. The goal of this essay is to outline both how the absence of truth is palpable within the conversation and, most of all, why the remains of Being are the result of Heidegger’s resistance to phenomenology’s concept of truth. This resistance, which is linked to his destruction of metaphysics, allowed hermeneutics to become not only a philosophical position, through Hans-Georg Gadamer, Luigi Pareyson, and Paul Ricoeur, but, moreover, a thought beyond any position as Richard Rorty and Gianni Vattimo have emphasized.1 Contrary to the majority of hermeneutic philosophers, who believe Heidegger has only “elevated hermeneutics to the center of philosophical concern” (Grondin 1994, 91), I emphasize that he is also responsible for radicalizing hermeneutics’ intrinsic resistance to truth, which can be found throughout its history.2 Although most interpreters agree that Heidegger resisted Husserl’s concept of truth, not all hermeneutic philosophers explicitly recognize resistance as one of the fundamental characteristics of hermeneutics because of the normative power truth continues to have. There is not enough space here to venture into a historical account of the anarchic vein of hermeneutics, 3 that is, its resistance to truth, but the fact that Luther, Schleiermacher, and Dilthey have emphasized the inevitable interpretative nature of truth (through different philological, physiological and political approaches) implies the existence of the anarchic strain of hermeneutics, if not its centrality to the system. Even though Gadamer’s contribution to hermeneutics allowed it to assume its place among the most fully articulated philosophical positions, his conservative, traditional approach not only has circumscribed Heidegger’s resistance to truth, primarily to the human sciences, but also has covered over the anarchic vein of hermeneutics. This is probably why Gerald Burns felt compelled to emphasize in his History of Ancient and Modern Hermeneutics that: if hermeneutics were as self-contained as geometry, or as coherent as a branch of philosophy, or even as tractable as one of the discursive or textual fields that an archeologist might analyze, or (most unlikely of all) as methodologically self-conscious as a school or movement in literary criticism one might have been able to confine it sufficiently to deal with it comprehensively and conclusively, thus finally getting beyond it, or in control of it, in some nontrivial way. But in fact hermeneutics is a loose and baggy monster, or anyhow a less than fully disciplined body of thinking whose

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inventory of topics spreads out over many different historical, cultural, and intellectual contexts. Hermeneutics is “anarchic” in Rainer Schürmann’s sense of this word; it does not try to assault its Sache but rather tries to grant what is singular and unrepeatable an open field. (Burns 1992, 16–17) Against this anarchic vein at the center of hermeneutics, Gadamer’s followers have instead tried to maintain its conservative disciplinary approach to the point of excluding Nietzsche from the history of hermeneutics, and also considering Heidegger’s general resistance to truth an error (Grondin 2009, 53–66). An example of this hunger for “coherence,” “self-containment,” and “self-consciousness” can be found in the volume Hermeneutics and Truth wherein the contributors emphasize the significance of truth in hermeneutics (James Risser, Rüdiger Bubner, Robert Dostal) and also criticize its absence in Heidegger (Ernst Tugendhat) (Wachterhauser 1994).4 While such systematization might have been necessary to establish hermeneutics as an academically accepted discipline, it has also covered over an essential feature. Regardless of these academic interpretations of what or who constitutes a standard hermeneutic philosopher, the fact that Heidegger elevated the discipline to the center of ontology and at the same time resisted Husserl’s phenomenology through hermeneutics inevitably questions both the concern for truth in philosophical hermeneutics and also the role of interpretation for Heidegger’s formation. Heidegger’s reevaluation of interpretation before Being and Time entails hermeneutics’ rising above its traditional position as a subordinate discipline of the human sciences and instead becoming the self-interpretation of the human sciences. Theodore Kisiel, in his classic study on the genesis of Being and Time, emphasized that the origin of this text lies “in the first analysis of the environing world within the context of a ‘hermeneutics of facticity’ ” (Kisiel 1993, 21). Such facticity does not allude to different relations with the world, ourselves, or others but rather to the totality of these relations, that is, the ontological relation. As the publication of Heidegger’s early courses indicate, 5 hermeneutics, just as Christianity, has been not only constantly present throughout this formation but also determinate in the reception of phenomenology. The relation between Heidegger and Husserl has been at the center of a great number of studies that sought either to demonstrate how the disciple distanced himself from the teacher or to show how much the former was dependent on phenomenology.6 While both interpretations are vital to understanding contemporary philosophy, it is also important to stress why Heidegger distanced himself from a philosophical position that was at the

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peak of its success. Ernst Tugendhat is among the few philosophers who did not limit himself to analyzing their relationship; he goes on to emphasize how Heidegger, by resisting Husserl’s phenomenology, also “lost” the concept of truth through hermeneutics.7 Although Heidegger did not refer explicitly to hermeneutics as an alternative to phenomenology, the latter did not seem to him appropriate for overcoming metaphysics, in other words, for operating beyond the frames of the sciences. But what are these frames? These frames, common also to other philosophical positions, are founded upon the fundamental question of ontology, “Why are there beings at all instead of nothing?” This formulation is not only at the core of Western ontology but also the expression of a fundamental duplicity in Being that articulates its presence by splitting, that is, by duplicating Being. In such duplicity Being “is” only as long as the two parts are joined, creating a relation between two terms where one refers to the other as the predicate and subject. In his classic study on Husserl’s and Heidegger’s concepts of truth, Tugendhat points out how the specific Husserlian sense of truth in terms of a difference between mere “intention” and the matter “itself” also presupposes the duplicity of Being common to this metaphysical tradition because it distinguishes between the manner in which something in fact appears and the manner in which it “itself” is. Having said this, a proposition, for example, will be true only if it refers to things in a way that permits them to be seen as they are in themselves. This is why the truth of statements is also grounded in a metaphysical, preliminary aesthetic structure: the truth of intuition. In order to resist Husserl’s progression within traditional logics Heidegger substituted interpretation, which presents an alternative and preliminary structure of the statement, for this aesthetic intuition. But if the statement (the “apophantic as”) must be grounded in interpretation (the “hermeneutic as”), it is not because the latter is truer than the former but rather because the statement’s truth is actually rooted in the disclosedness of Dasein’s understanding, which determines not only prelinguistic duplicity but also its adequacy and correspondence.8 This is why Heidegger, in Being and Time, specified: The statement is not the primary “locus” of truth but the other way around: the statement as a mode of appropriation of discoveredness and as a way of being-in-the-world is based in discovering, or in the disclosedness of Dasein. The most primordial “truth” is the “locus” of the statement and the ontological condition of the possibility that statement can be true or false (discovering or covering over). (Heidegger 1996, 207–208)

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By separating evidence from the adequation formula and correspondence from the appearance formula, Heidegger proposed a concept of truth that consists of the self-manifestation of Being in its unconcealment. But, as Tugendhat pointed out, truth as uncovering (Unverborgenheit) or disclosure (Erschlossenheit) does not have anything to do with sentences that declare something because it consists only in the “event” of this same unconcealment. According to Tugendhat and many other philosophers, such as Karl-Otto Apel and Jürgen Habermas, even if Heidegger retained the word “truth,” it still “lost” its specific meaning since it is transposed “without further justification to all disclosedness of entities within-the-word” (Tugendhat 1967, 350). That is, both true and false statements. This difference does not represent a progression toward truth but rather an alternative between “truth” and “truth’s absence” or, which is the same, knowledge and thought.9 While knowledge belongs within a paradigm in which truth and error operate, thought is the realm where truth, error, and paradigms occur. Although such occurrence (also called “event” by Heidegger) may be interpreted as truth itself, it actually indicates truth’s absence, given that it is not something “outside” or “above” us but rather something that belongs to us: “Truth makes it ontologically possible that we can be in such a way that we presuppose something” (Heidegger 1996, 209). This is why “Being—not entities—is something which ‘there is’ [‘gibt es’] only in so far as [solange] truth is. Beings are discovered only when Dasein is, and only as long as Dasein is are they disclosed” (Heidegger 1996, 208). But if the event of disclosure is not useful for distinguishing between Being and beings, true and false, or good or evil actions, what is it philosophically productive for? The answer to this question lies in freedom, that is, in the possibility of generating more Being. If philosophy, as Heidegger demanded, “must at all times work out Being for itself anew” (Heidegger 2000, 97), then truth must at least allow Being to take place, if not facilitate its occurrence. This is why Heidegger’s new fundamental question of philosophy—“How is it going with Being?”10 —revealed for the first time in Introduction to Metaphysics (1935), was meant not only to maintain unconcealed the horizon for further Being but also to resist the relation or coordination of beings, hence, truth. Contrary to the traditional metaphysical question, where truth was sought in a correspondence between beings and Being, in this new question the priority is given to the possibility of “working out” Being again, that is, generating further Being. In sum, truth as disclosedness, instead of as a contribution to the relation between beings, emphasizes the resistance to this same relation, which is responsible not only for forgetting Being but also for submitting contemporary phenomenology and analytic philosophy to realism.11

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Given that it is only within truth’s absence that Being takes place, ontology can no longer refer to Being’s presence (which frames it within truth) but must rather rely on its own existential Being. This is why Brice Wachterhauser explained that what Heidegger’s disclosedness “points to is the privileged place that human being has in the economy of Being. Human beings are capable of truth because they find themselves in the clearing (Lichtung) of Being’s disclosure” (Wachterhauser 1994, 4). But how does such Being relate to metaphysics? If metaphysics could be overcome once for all (Überwindung) freedom would imply a correspondence, that is, a truth we would have to submit to. But given that such a truth varies as much as our interpretations, freedom assumes the same possible variance, that is, the ability to resist any correspondence. The fact that metaphysics can only be overcome through a productive twisting, that is, Verwindung and not Überwindung, implies an actual resistance, which, as I claimed at the outset, is constitutive of hermeneutics. Ontology, after metaphysics, instead of relying on presences must rely on its own resistance to presences, or, which is the same, the remains of Being. If a response to the new fundamental question of philosophy (“How is it going with Being?”) is possible within the remains of Being, it is not because of philosophy’s accuracy but rather its lack of accuracy, that is, “truth’s absence.” These remains are the result of Heidegger’s destruction of metaphysics where Being—instead of another presence in accordance with an empirical image or ideal—becomes the absence, discharge, or weakness of such accordance. But what does such absence refer to? Everything that does not work, that is, that does not function through such an accordance, especially those philosophical positions constantly accused of irrationalism, relativism, and nihilism. These features, which could be grouped under the general rubric of “weak thought,” are hermeneutic ontology’s means of maintaining not only the conflict of interpretation and the resistance to metaphysics but also the generation of Being, which is possible only as long as truth is discarded. But just as truth as correspondence is possible only within disclosure, so is Being possible only within the remains of Being. As Derrida explains: The remainder is not, it is not a Being, not a modification of that which is. Like the trace, the remaining offers itself for thought before or beyond Being. It is inaccessible to a straightforward intuitive perception (since it refers to something wholly other, it inscribes in itself something of the infinitely other), and it escapes all forms of prehension, all forms of monumentalization, and all forms of archivation. Often, like the

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trace, I associate it with ashes: remains without a substantial remainder, essentially, but which have to be taken account of and without which there would be neither accounting nor calculation, nor a principle of reason able to give an account or a rationale [reddere rationem], nor a Being as such. That is why there are remainder effects, in the sense of a result or a present, idealizable, ideally iterable residue. (Derrida 2005, 151–152) If truth is absent in the “trace,” “conversation,” and other weak concepts, it is not because they are not true or cannot be defined but rather because they belong to the remains of Being, that is, where not “what is” but what “remains” is relevant for philosophy. Remnants are those concepts that, by resisting truth as accordance and its inevitable realism, not only escape “all forms of prehension, monumentalization, and archivation” but also “exist” since, as Jean-Luc Nancy stated, only “what remains thus, or what is coming and does not stop coming as what remains, is what we call existence” (Nancy 1997, 132). But how does Dasein’s existence take place in these remnants? Dasein’s existence takes place in the same way as the truth of conversation, that is, as “what is coming,” as the resistance to the “present” of “presence.” Just as we are not in control of the outcome of a conversation, neither are we in control of “what is coming,” that is, of the future. Truth’s absence becomes the resistance to existence’s frame or to a state of Being where history is reduced to the present. This is probably why in The Concept of Time Heidegger emphasized that: the possibility of access to history is grounded in the possibility according to which any specific present understands how to be futural. This is the first principle of all hermeneutics. It says something about the Being of Dasein, which is historicity itself (Heidegger 1992, 20). When Heidegger stresses the “futural” possibility of hermeneutics as its first principle, it does not favor the conservative nature of the tradition, as Gadamer or Ricoeur would have it, but rather “what is coming,” that is, the possibility of different interpretations. Although different interpretations demand the absence of truth in order to take place, such absence also includes the possibility of freedom, which is what differentiates Dasein from beings. This is why if Dasein does not want to be reduced to another present being but instead exist, it must engage in hermeneutic ontology and the conflict of interpretations, which instead of justifications for descriptions seek disclosures for further Being. Such disclosures belong to the remains of Being where, as Schürmann said, “much remains for us to think but little for us to know” (Schürmann 1990, 49).

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While Rorty considered hermeneutics the “expression of hope that the cultural space left by the demise of epistemology will not be filled” (Rorty 1980, 315), Vattimo conceived it as the only philosophical theory “lucid about itself as no more than an interpretation” (Vattimo 1997, 7). Since there is not enough space here to expose the various examples of hermeneutic resistance, here are some histories of hermeneutics where this “resistance” factor can be detected: Wach 1926–1933; Burns 1992; Ferraris 1996; Grondin1994 and 1995; Gusdorf 1988 and 1990. An analysis of the anarchic vein of hermeneutics can be found in the third chapter of Vattimo and Zabala 2011. Another clear defense of truth in hermeneutics is available in Grondin 1982. Among the many early courses published, perhaps Ontology: The Hermeneutics of Facticity (Heidegger 1999) is the most representative in indicating the significance of hermeneutics for Heidegger. The most important studies still belong to Thomas Sheehan (1997); FriedrichWilhelm von Hermann (1981); Michael Theunissen (1986); Ernst Tugendhat (1967); and the recent Søren Overgaard (2009). Tugendhat analyzed Heidegger’s concept of truth throughout his early philosophy, and in particular in Der Wahrheitsbegriff bei Husserl und Heidegger (1967). A comprehensive reconstruction of such analysis is available in the second chapter of Zabala 2008. Recently, Greg Shirley (2010) systematically explained how Heidegger did not discredit or devalue logic with his criticism of Husserl but, on the contrary, further justified its necessity and foundations. As John Sallis explained, “Disclosedness is a matter neither of intuition nor for intuition. The originary phenomenon of truth, truth as disclosedness, is a truth that is not of knowledge” (Sallis 1994, 390). Here is the passage where Heidegger formulates this new question: “As the fundamental question of metaphysics, we ask: ‘Why are there beings at all instead of nothing?’ In this fundamental question there already resonates the prior question: how is it going with Being? What do we mean by the words ‘to be,’ Being? In our attempt to answer, we run into difficulties. We grasp at the un-graspable. Yet we are increasingly engaged by beings, related to beings, and we know about ourselves ‘as beings.’ Being now just counts as the sound of a word for us, a used-up term. If this is all we have left, then we must at least attempt to grasp this last remnant of a possession. This is why we asked: how is it going with the word Being?” (Heidegger 2000, 35). Note that Fried and Polt translate “Wie steht es mit dem Sein?” by “What is the status of Being?” and even “What about Being?” Examples of phenomenology and analytical philosophy submitting to realism can be found in Derrida’s debates with Jean-Luc Marion (in Caputo and Scanlon 1999) and John Searle (Derrida, 1988).

Chapter 13

Truth and Interpretation Daniel O. Dahlstrom

The theme of the following paper is the relation between truth and interpretation. After elaborating some traditional ways of construing that relation, I argue that there is a justifiable sense of determining the truth of an interpretation or, alternatively, determining a true meaning of the object of interpretation. In other words, the paper’s thesis is that there are ways of discerning truth hermeneutically, at least for a particular sort of object and given a particular conception of truth. Before taking up the main argument for this thesis and applying it to the factors of interpretation, I describe an assortment of phenomena that, falling under the heading of understanding, are directly related to interpretation. I review the relation between these phenomena and interpretation as a means of specifying a general sense of “interpretation.”1

Understanding and Interpretation Interpretive phenomena typically emerge from phenomena of understanding. Understanding is, implicitly, an interpretation, whether we are talking about understanding a process, a tool, a sign, a language, a game, an art, a natural phenomenon, or a person. “Understanding” may stand for grasping how something works, what something signifies, how to speak or what someone is saying in a particular language, how to use something, how to play, what something is, or who someone is.2 Many of these forms of understanding are interwoven with practices, practices of participating in or at least recognizing what is understood. The observation that understanding is implicitly interpretation is meant to convey the difference between understanding and interpretation as a difference between implicitly and explicitly taking x as y. It may be helpful

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to introduce “construal” as a third, umbrella term, where “construing x as y” is equivalent to “taking x as y.” Thus, understanding and interpretation are implicit and explicit ways of construing things respectively. Interpretation makes explicit what is understood, that is, what is construed implicitly. When I understand and accordingly follow a traffic signal, I typically do so thoughtlessly yet meaningfully. My implicit construal of an object as a sign and, indeed, as a sign signaling a specific structure and directions (think of a four-way stop sign) can be made explicit and, when it is, my understanding is interpreted.3 With this terminology in place, we can begin to specify how interpretation emerges from and is grounded in understanding. The first aspect of this emergence is foreunderstanding. Whatever we interpret, we interpret in terms of some foregoing understanding, including some foregoing understanding of what we interpret and how we interpret it (i.e., a foreunderstanding of the x and of the y in taking x as y). Even in extreme cases where we are at a loss for words or hopelessly puzzled, the object of our ignorance or confusion is never fully opaque to us (nor is the meaning of “ignorance” or “confusion”). When we understand (implicitly construe) something as befuddling or mysterious, we have some means of contrasting it with being befuddling or mysterious. Foreunderstanding extends beyond these elements of construal to the aims and projects that ground explicit construals, that is, interpretations. These aims and projects may be deliberate or unconscious and, when made explicit, they may or may not be recognizable by the one who understands. The second aspect of the emergence of interpretation from understanding concerns the motivation for interpretation, what moves someone to attempt to make explicit this or that construal at the level of understanding. We typically interpret or look for an interpretation because of the possibility of misunderstanding. Given foreunderstanding, a complete failure of understanding is no less in the cards than a completely successful interpretation.4 “Misunderstanding” here thus signifies a range of phenomena, from merely shallow and incomplete to quite faulty and misguided sorts of understanding. Given the prospect and, in some cases, the dangers of illusory, anomalous, or simply superficial understanding, clarifying interpretations are needed. A certain foreunderstanding together with the possibilities of misunderstanding usually tips us off whether something needs to be interpreted, for example, whether a passage of a text or speech calls for commentary or not, whether a painting demands an explanation, or whether the meaning of an opponent’s move needs elucidation.

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The interpretation of something can be described as a reconstrual of it. The interpretation, in other words, changes the understanding, the implicit construal of something, leading to a new understanding or re-understanding of it. But via this re-understanding, we also come back, not to the identical thing from which we began, but to a version of it. Herein lies the familiar principle of the hermeneutical circle, so entrenched in biblical and juridical practice of interpretation.5 This re-understanding is the third relevant aspect of the relation between understanding and interpretation. Interpretations can be transforming; they can transform the understandings of things and the practices interwoven with those understandings. As already noted, the interpretation need not be recognizable by the one who understands. Indeed, the acceptance of a reconstrual, a new understanding, may only come about quite begrudgingly. Understanding has the weight of tradition, constituted by préjugés légitimes, as Gadamer puts it (Gadamer 1972, 255). Given the foregoing notion of re-understanding, two different types of interpretation, what I dub “internal” and “external” interpretations, present themselves. If an interpretation makes explicit A’s understanding (A’s implicit construal of something as such-and-such) such that A is subsequently able to recognize that construal as her own, the interpretation is internal; otherwise it is an external interpretation. Every successful selfinterpretation, that is, where someone makes explicit to herself how she in fact understands matters, is an internal interpretation. But so, too, is an interpretation made by someone other than the person with the understanding that is being made explicit. For example, a psychotherapist might interpret a patient’s attitude toward her husband, that is, her way of construing her husband, as an attitude of fear. The psychotherapist says to the patient: “You construe your husband as threatening.” If the patient is capable of recognizing that the psychotherapist is right, the interpretation is internal. If she in fact accepts the psychotherapist’s analysis as true, she may be said to have a second-hand self-interpretation. Once an understanding has been made explicit via an internal interpretation, the respective understanding undergoes a change. In the just depicted scenario of the patient, she may continue to understand, that is, implicitly understand her husband as this-or-that, but now with an interpretation in mind, namely, that to take him as this-or-that is to take him as a threat to her. That interpretation changes the dynamics fundamentally, even if she cannot stop understanding her husband as she did before. Moreover, interpretations often become habitual and, when or if they do,

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they become “sedimented,” contributing to a re-understanding (Husserl 1954, Hua VI, 52, 72f, 380; 1981, 52, 72). A fourth aspect of the relation of understanding and interpretation falls under the category of self-understanding. In the course of interpreting anything, we understand-and-realize ourselves (Dilthey 1979, 191, 214). This fourth principle links up with the others (foreunderstanding, possibilities of misunderstanding, and re-understanding). The self-understanding in interpretation is no less implicit than the foreunderstanding and, thanks in part to its implicitness, we are all too capable of misunderstanding ourselves. Our re-understanding of something in the wake of interpretation contributes to a new self-understanding, though, of course, the latter should not be confused with self-interpretation. The understanding generally and self-understanding in particular always involve a level of opacity that interpretation attempts to remove, at least to some degree. Just as we typically do not know what we mean, until we hear what we have to say, so our selfunderstanding only becomes perspicuous in the course of interpretation. Accordingly, we might distinguish the pre-interpretive self-understanding, the interpretation-driven self-understanding, and self-interpretation where the interpreter turns her attention to her interpretation as such.

True Interpretation Truth is often distinguished from meaning, and verification from interpretation. Meanings are interpreted, truths are verified. Yet there are not only different truths but different accounts of truth and different accounts of what constitutes a verification. Since these differences are differences of interpretation and since the discrepancies among them call for interpretation, they put in question—at least prima facie—any sharp distinction of truth and meaning, interpretation and verification. The point here is not simply that truth and meaning are in some sense parasitic on each other, that is, that truth is always the truth of what is meant by something said (or done) and that meanings are expressed because some meanings are true. The conclusion to this sort of argument is rather that determination of what is true is itself a matter of interpretation and thus fully ensconced within the sphere of meanings. My aim here is not to defend the foregoing argument or its conclusion. But the conclusion is useful because it states in no uncertain terms that truth is superfluous in matters of interpretation. The reduction of truth in this unqualified way to interpretation effectively eliminates any constraints

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on interpretation, based upon considerations of its truth. For the sake of future reference, it will be helpful to state formally and name the thesis of this unqualified reduction of truth to interpretation. The unqualified reductive thesis (UR): the truth of an interpretation is nothing but the interpretation itself. By not allowing for any means of determining truth that escapes the vagaries of interpretation, UR amounts to a denial of correspondence theories of truth. Whatever is said to be the truth about any subject matter falls fully within the scope of meanings and their interpretation. In other words, there is no uninterpreted phenomenon to which the interpretation can be said to correspond. If this thesis is unsettling, it is no doubt due to two common beliefs that together make it compelling to insist on distinguishing verification from interpretation. The first belief concerns the difference in the make-up of interpretation and verification. Meanings and interpretations are largely of our individual and collective making, a product of thinking, imagining, and opining, limited only by our ability to entertain various ideas and concepts. By contrast, truth and verification (as the distinctive mode of determining which meanings expressed are true) restrict the scope of our thoughts and imagination, suggesting constraints that cannot be simply self-imposed, like a poet’s adoption of meter or a representative government’s tax structure. In short, according to this first belief, meanings and interpretation are subjective, truth and verification are objective. The second belief stems from the fact that arguably the most unambiguous sorts of verification are those typically associated and, in some case, even identified with iterable sensory experiences that we can expect normal human perceivers commonly to have. We verify assertions through perception, through direct sensory acquaintance with their references. To be sure, sensory perception without interpretation is blind, if we may paraphrase Kant’s famous dictum. The warrant for the assertions supposes a common interpretation in the form, at the very least, of descriptions in a shared language. (In other words, those “normal human perceivers” must also have acquired certain normal abilities to use language.) Yet, in contrast to interpretations, expressed in assertions or other linguistic descriptions, the colors that we see and the sounds that we hear are at some level not of our making or choosing, and, while part of the interpretandum, they also mark a limit to interpretation. Hence, at least when it comes to assertions about experiential objects or states of affairs, we rely upon the ways

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they present themselves in perceptual experience in order to ascertain the truth or falsity of those assertions. For the purposes of this chapter, it is important to add that this second belief cuts two ways; that is to say, truth and verification are largely a matter of assertions and perceptions. The second belief underlying the usual distinction between interpretation and verification is a belief in the paradigmatic status of sensory perception as a means or even part of the criterion of determining the truth in contrast to the meaning or, better, a true meaning in contrast to a merely possible meaning of an assertion.6 However, whatever the merits of these two beliefs when it comes to statements about perceivable, physical objects, matters are far murkier if one supposes, on the basis of those beliefs, that the truth or a true meaning can be assigned to intended, human creations (such as artistic and cultural works). How do we verify an interpretation as objective and true (the first belief) when the object of interpretation is no less a product of human subjectivity than interpretation itself? Moreover, even if we acknowledge that sensory experience is necessary to gain access to artworks, media, or communication (gestures, speech and writing), it is hardly sufficient to determine their true meaning(s). In other words, the paradigm of a truth-making, observable object or state of affairs simply does not transfer without further ado to human products (thus, limiting the import of the second belief). The foregoing considerations suggest a more qualified statement of the thesis of the reducibility of truth to meaning, along the following lines: The qualified reductive thesis (QR): the truth of an interpretation is the coherence of its overriding meaning with the meanings of the interpretatum or interpretata (the thing or things already interpreted) that are part of the constitution of the interpretandum If UR amounts to a denial of truth as correspondence or, at least, the superfluousness of considerations of truth as correspondence, QR affirms that truth as a form of coherence provides a criterion of interpretation, such that it is not merely redundant to speak of “true meanings” and “true interpretations.” Truth here is always in medias res and the res are interpretations. There are three patent ways in which QR delimits UR. First, it restricts the subject matter of interpretation (and thus a possibly true interpretation) to those things whose make-up already involves interpretation. The most obvious such things are works, that is, intended, human creations (literary, artistic, cultural). Second, QR supposes an overriding (primary) meaning distinct from other, subsidiary and presupposed meanings. An “overriding

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meaning of an interpretation” stands here for an interpretation of the main elements of a work, taken as a whole.7 This qualification leaves some room for the input of factors that, while underdetermining the overriding meaning, are not themselves directly subject to the interpretation that produces that meaning. For example, the experience of a shade as Poussin blue need not determine the overriding meaning and interpretation of Poussin’s Arcadia. Moreover, if there is a compelling account of the truth of the claim that someone looking at the painting perceives blue rather than some other color in its top left corner, that verification and truth may be relatively independent of perceiving it as Poussin’s blue or perceiving the painting in terms of some allegedly, overriding interpretation of it. Third, the truth of a particular interpretation is not internal to or entailed by that interpretation itself.

Discerning Truth Through the Factors of Interpretation The preceding section contains a formal statement (QR) of a theory of true interpretations, that is, a way of maintaining a sense in which truth can matter to interpretation and serve as a criterion, whether delivering a true interpretation is the main task of the interpreter or not.8 The aim of this final section is to argue for the cogency of this thesis through closer consideration of the factors involved in interpretation. If, as supposed by QR, the object to be interpreted includes elements that have already been interpreted, there are plainly three distinct factors of interpretation in general.9 The three factors are: 3.1 the interpretandum in itself, that is, what is to be interpreted and its distinctiveness; 3.2 the interpretandum as effect, that is, its relation to the conditions (fons interpretandi) responsible for it, for example, in the case of a work, its producer (artist, author, sculptor, director, etc.); and 3.3 the interpretandum as cause, that is, its relation to the interpreter. Strategies for refuting UR typically consist in construing one or more of these factors as entailing a true meaning and a possibility of verification that marks the closure of interpretation. Various reasons why these strategies fail have already been suggested and, in what follows, I further elaborate these reasons with respect to each factor of interpretation. At the same

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time I hope to show how these three factors can be incorporated into a useful conception and practice of true interpretation, based upon QR. Some caveats, however, are immediately in order. First, these factors are by no means always clearly isolable from one another but each can be taken as supplying an avenue to a true meaning in contrast to a mere interpretation. Second, the references to cause and effect here are not intended in the sense of supplying necessary and sufficient conditions. For the purposes of this analysis, it suffices for a painting, for example, to be taken as an effect if a painter can be identified (or even if it is the sort of object requiring a painter). So, too, it suffices to take it as a cause if it has an effect on the interpreter such that that effect enters in some way into the interpretation. Third, as already signaled in the first part of this chapter, I take “interpretation” in a broad sense (in keeping with ordinary usage) to signify any instance of explicit construal (explicitly taking x as y). In other words, to interpret is to determine the meaning (y) of some phenomenon (x), including artificial and natural things, that is, things that can be traced to human and/or nonhuman causes or conditions. However, in what follows I focus principally on the interpretation of works, as I attempt to explain the sense in which truth can and cannot be a criterion of their interpretation. My aim again is to establish, on the basis of QR, the possibility of true interpretations. The Interpretandum in Itself In regard to the first factor, the interpretandum necessarily corresponds at some level to the modes of access to it. For example, the access may be visual or aural and the interpretandum might be a natural object (e.g., clouds, a weather pattern, a forest), natural or artificial images (e.g., a reflection in a lake, a photograph, a portrait) and sounds (e.g., a loon’s yodel or a piece of music), written or spoken words, or a combination of some or all the above (as in sculpture or opera). Given such access and the capacity for it to be shared, there may be levels of common acquaintance or even understanding of the interpretandum. At a staging of Hamlet, for example, everyone in the audience sees the skull in Hamlet’s hands; everyone understands the same sentence “Alas, poor Yorick”; everyone recognizes Hamlet’s staging of “The Mousetrap” as a play within a play, and so on. As in everyday experience and discourse, we have an acquaintance with things and an understanding of how to talk about them that allow for what are commonly accepted to be uncontroversially true, indefeasible descriptions. Indeed, insofar as discourse is communication about something at all, it necessarily supposes truthmakers (objects, facts, events) and the capacity to refer to

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them. This supposition, moreover, is one with the old insight that illusion and deceit presuppose veracity. The distinction often made in ordinary discourse between description and interpretation issues from a certain level of confidence assigned to descriptions of experience, as elaborated above. To be sure, these descriptions, like the languages in which they are formed, are historical, cultural, and environmental (think of the pre-Copernican descriptions of planetary motion or the variety of descriptions of “snow” in different cultures). They are part of the re-understanding that, as noted in part one, ensues from previous interpretations. Nevertheless, like the facts and experiences they describe, those descriptions are reliable and iterable, providing a secure foundation for common sense. Against the background of such descriptions, interpretations become necessary only when the possibility of misunderstanding presents itself, for example, when we are confronted with optical illusions or erratic behavior, or when the curiosity of a restless mind gets the better of it. Yet the appeal to true descriptions, while certainly supposed in many a practice of interpretation, does not suffice to salvage a sharp distinction between truth and meaning. Thus, they cannot be the basis for refuting UR. The main reason the appeal to true descriptions in this regard fails is that descriptions are not themselves free of interpretation. True descriptions are interpretations that correspond with some foreunderstanding and that foreunderstanding, it bears iterating, is an implicit way of taking something—implicit with respect to what we take it as and why. In this connection one is reminded of Heidegger’s critique of Husserl’s project of a presupposition-less phenomenology, one that merely describes. As Heidegger points out, since those phenomenological descriptions are for the sake of grounding science and, indeed, a certain conception of science, they fail to be neutral, as would any other sort of description (Heidegger 1994 GA 17, 2).10 Something analogous occurs in interpretation of literary works and visual arts. Here there are at least four levels of foreunderstanding and re-understanding typically at work in such interpretations. Consider the following ways of categorizing a work, embedded in the following claim: “It is a work of art, a powerful tale of tragedy, but woefully sentimental.” The claim supposes a foreunderstanding on four distinct levels or categories: (a) artistic or literary (e.g., “a work of art”) (b) type of work (e.g., “tale,” “painting,” “book,” “poem”)

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Daniel O. Dahlstrom (c) genre (e.g., “tragedy,” “drama,” “comedy,” “Romantic,” “Realist”) (d) aesthetic, expressive, or metaphorical (e.g., “powerful,” “sublime,” “sentimental”).

Each level of foreunderstanding is not simply an implicit construal, but also a re-understanding, the product of a foregoing interpretation that is subsequently ingrained and taken for granted. The debates over the proper application of the predicates listed from (a) to (d) amply illustrate their interpretive character.11 Controversies surrounding (d) in particular— that is, what constitutes the aesthetic, expressive, or metaphorical—often stem from the fact that in ordinary discourse there are descriptions commonly accepted as indefeasible and, indeed, without recourse to interpretation. In these cases, we carry over into the interpretation of the work the distinction between ready-made, indefeasible descriptions and controversial ones, in need of interpretation. To take a celebrated example, Lessing and Winckelmann agree that Laöcoon’s face in the famous sculpture by that name does not express the pain that one would expect in such a situation; they only differ on why the expression is softened.12 But sometimes even descriptions are controversial (is Mona Lisa’s smile a smirk? Is the woman in Vermeer’s Woman Holding a Balance pregnant? Is the Washington Monument a building? Is the Sissinghurst Castle Garden an example of an English garden, a French garden, or both?). The controversy, moreover, need not be about the fittingness of the description so much as the vagueness or simply the ambiguity of the terms of the description. For example, what precisely does Coleridge mean when he speaks of “the sense of sublimity” that arises from Hamlet’s unhealthy, constant preoccupation “with the world within”? Or when Iago is described as “motiveless malignity” (Coleridge), “a moral pyromaniac” (Harold Goddard) or the “ontotheologian” of evil (Harold Bloom)? Or consider the ironic praise given to “non-post-modern” critics for being “old fashioned.” There is no shortage of such examples of phrases and words of interpretation that, while clearly not devoid of meaning, cry out for interpretation themselves.13 In all the cases cited in the last two paragraphs, the question of the controversial description makes sense only against the background of a shared acceptance—to be sure, no less a matter of interpretation—of the subject and the terms in which it is described. Such debates about the interpretandum at these different levels undermine the notion of a true interpretation based upon appeals to correspondence. Yet they also demonstrate

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that considerations of truth as coherence are often, indeed, not merely germane but necessary to interpretation, thereby lending support to QR. For even if truth is not the aim of interpretation (and there is no reason that it need be), the interpretation must suppose the identity of the interpretandum, something that can typically be ascertained or determined through canons of coherence.

The Interpretandum as Effect Particularly where we do not immediately understand a work of art and thus recognize the possibility of misunderstanding it, nothing would seem to make more sense than to ask the artist why she created it. In other words, we look to an artist’s intentions in creating a work to determine its meaning. Since the artist’s intentions are plainly external to the critic’s, the appeal to the artist’s intention introduces an element of objectivity into the interpretation. Assuming the parallel of this non-subjective input with that provided by the sensory experience of a physical object, theorists of interpretation have repeatedly argued that the artist’s intention provides a criterion for true interpretations where, indeed, truth is a matter of correspondence with a state of affairs (what the artist or writer intends or intended). In other words, these theorists contend that the path to a true interpretation consists in considering the interpretandum as the effect of its creator or, in other words, looking to the fons interpretandi, the conscious or unconscious process responsible for the work. If this cause is independent of the effect and if determination of this cause yields the true interpretation, then this strategy amounts to a denial of UR. Yet the identification of a work’s meaning with its creator’s intentions cannot be right without further ado since the work can mean things that the creator did not mean. A work has more than one meaning. Moreover, how often do we find ourselves trying to find the right words or apologizing that what we said was not what we meant? The problem with this strategy, however, is not simply the fact that we misspeak or that what we said fails to capture what we meant. After all, in a polished work in contrast to everyday discourse, the author or artist may present the work to the public, confident that the work expresses her intention. But even if we acknowledge that the work is precisely what its creator intended, its meaning cannot be confined to that relationship. For whenever we speak, write, or otherwise express ourselves, we also always say, write, or express more than we mean because the saying, writing, and expressing—however carefully crafted—say more than we can thereby intend.14 Meanings proliferate and, with them, truths.

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A further, practical problem with this strategy is the issue of access to the creator’s intentions. This problem, at times no doubt insurmountable, lends legitimacy to what Wimsatt and Beardsley dub “the intentional fallacy.” To be sure, these theorists of interpretation plainly overstate matters with their contention that “the design or intention of the author is neither available nor desirable as a standard of judging the success of a work of literary art.”15 While a work’s meanings, including its true meanings, are not reducible to its creator’s intentions, a work depends upon a creator, its meanings depend upon its creator’s intentions, and those intentions may be relevant, even highly relevant, to giving a true interpretation of the work. For example, the work may exhibit personal qualities and a style that are fully understandable only by consideration of the artist or writer.16 However, incorporation of considerations of the author’s intentions in determining a true interpretation of that author’s work is consistent with QR (where, of course, “artist” may substitute for “author”). Indeed, depending upon the purposes of interpretation, determination of those intentions may be not simply coherent with some overriding interpretation, but may themselves constitute the overriding interpretation itself.

The Interpretandum as Cause The earlier discussion of the problems surrounding (d)—describing the interpretandum in aesthetic, expressive, or metaphorical terms—anticipates some of the problems involved in identifying a true interpretation with the interpretandum’s effect. Bringing a distinctive perspective to the interpretandum, each critic experiences it differently and may describe it in ways that, even if not idiosyncratic, demand interpretation in turn. In practice, to be sure, a critic is often deemed successful for having the knack to capture elements of the interpretandum in words or other words that resonate or suitably provoke those who have also experienced the interpretandum. But this mark of success introduces a particular problem besetting the strategy of looking to the interpretandum’s effect for a true interpretation. The problem can be expressed in a single question: its effect on whom? Demographics, it turns out, are not irrelevant to understandability, interpretation, or truth.17 But the determination of whose aesthetic point of view is relevant accords with the conception of true interpretation outlined in QR.

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So, too, the emotional impact of the interpretandum, insofar as it is shared, conveyable, and even further shaped by an interpretation, can indeed be central to the task that the interpreter sets for herself. But whether consideration of the emotional expression of a work is central to the overriding interpretation or only subsidiary to that overriding interpretation, it is not sufficient by itself. In order to capture the expressiveness of a work, an interpretation must be about the work and not about something else. In other words, it must not fail to sustain the identity of the interpretandum and it does so by cohering with other descriptions of it (regardless of whether these are indefeasible or not). Herein lies the basis for legitimate complaints against the so-called “affective fallacy” where the interpretation confines itself to describing the emotional effect of a work, as though the work (as the cause of that effect), were itself superfluous (Wimsatt with Beardsley 1954, 21). Yet considerations of truth in the sense of QR can certainly be applied to these and other effects of a work (on a possible audience, viewership, readership, etc.).

Concluding Remarks The aim of the foregoing paper has been to outline a conception of the relation of truth and interpretation in general and to show that truth, so conceived (namely, in the form of the coherence of interpretations) serves a legitimate and, in some respects, even essential function in interpretation. This conception of truth and interpretation does not preclude a variety of aims of interpretation but suggests how the truth of the interpretation remains significant, regardless of the aim. A further virtue of the view glossed here is that QR, the qualified reduction of truth to interpretation, is compatible with taking all three factors of interpretation seriously and, indeed, interactively (Vandevelde 2005, 11f.) A final qualifying remark concerning the limitations of the analysis given in this chapter is in order here. The foregoing meditation on the relation of truth and interpretation has suggested that truth as correspondence must give way to truth as coherence, at the very least in regard to the interpretation of works. There is, however, a third way of understanding truth, namely, in terms of the historical ground of the ways that the interpretandum presents itself to and absences itself from the interpreter. Truth, so construed, is the truth of an interpretation but an interpretation that (a) concretely supposes untruth and errancy and (b) cannot be reduced to any single one of the factors of interpretation (e.g., author,

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work, interpreter) but instead involves them all—and more. This way of understanding truth, inspired by Heidegger, provides a necessary corrective to a potential tendency to collapse meanings and their coherence into something for which human subjectivity is solely responsible or into some ahistorical, transcending identity. For if truth is a matter of the coherence of interpretations, that coherence and the incoherence it supposes are grounded, not in those interpretations, but in an unfinished history of interpretations.

Notes 1

2

3

4

5

6

I am grateful to Jeremy Butman and Nolan Little for their critical readings of early drafts of this paper. For some examples of the uses indicated, replace the variable x in “Joe understands x” with the following words: “thermostats,” “traffic signals,” “French,” “planes,” “chess,” “dance,” “earthquakes,” “his wife.” Something analogous happens when I speak and thus understand a language, but have not begun to reflect upon the rules according to which I speak that language and use its terms accordingly. The semiotic component obviously complicates the interpretive structure, such that we take x as y for z, where “y” is a sign or word for z. This claim by no means discounts genuine novelties in need of interpretation. The notion of novelty, as the notion of being different from anything preceding it, obviously supposes a foreunderstanding in at least two senses, a foreunderstanding of what precedes it and a foreunderstanding of difference. I am grateful to Nolan Little for calling my attention to this issue. Since we do not return to the identical theme from which we began, it may be useful, adopting a metaphor from Hegel, to refer to this pattern as an interpretive helix. For more on this vital dimension of interpretation, see Dahlstrom 2010. Whether the meaning of a sentence is equated with the possibility of its truth (Davidson) or with the empty, signifying thought that awaits identification with a fulfilling intuition (Husserl), the task of interpretation is frequently construed as determining meaning not truth. In the main body I have been suggesting that we find these considerations compelling to the extent that we take our bearings from the way that ordinary perceptual experiences provide access to the truthmakers, the objects or states of affairs that make certain sentences true. The access in such cases involves, by some accounts, a component of sensation, some non-conceptual content that necessarily marks the end of conception and, with it, interpretation. Even for outright conceptualists, declared enemies of the socalled “Myth of the Given” like Sellars, Davidson, and MacDowell (at least at times), the task of interpretation ends where perception begins, even if the content of perception is said to be thoroughly conceptual.

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8

9

10

11

12

13

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By “overriding meaning or interpretation,” I do not mean to suggest something that necessarily takes the form of a single assertion or, for that matter, the form of an assertion at all. It also seems to me that we should resist the compositional view of true interpretations, that is, the view that what is true about an interpretation can be broken down into the truth of single assertions, as though their conjunction were simply truth-functional, for example, “p ^ q”. While I am not confident that I have a good argument for this intuition, my hunch is that just as a meaning of a poem, a painting, or a novel often resists reduction to a single assertion, so, too, it resists reduction to a mere string or conjunction of assertions. The defense of QR in this chapter is, I suspect, consistent with Pol Vandevelde’s account of the act, as opposed to the event, of interpretation; see Vandevelde 2005, 4: “By act, I mean an act of consciousness: someone interpreting a text makes a statement or an utterance and through his or her act is committed regarding the truth of what is said, his or her truthfulness, and the rightness or appropriateness of what is said, so that, if prompted, the interpreter must be ready to defend the interpretation made regarding these three claims.” Vandevelde 2005, 8f; see, too, Livingston 2005, 136–174 and the essays in Iseminger 1992. “Die Meinung, kein Vorurteil zu haben, ist selbst das größte Vorurteil.” See, also Heidegger 1993 GA 59, 102f, 171, 194. See, too, Paul Feyerabend on interpreting Galileo’s findings from his telescope and Bellarmine’s position in Feyerabend 1993, 87f, 110, and 124–134. For a sampling of the diversity among theories of art, see Parts One and Two of Dickie et al. 1989; for diverse views on aesthetic concepts and the “aesthetic/nonaesthetic distinction,” see the articles by Frank Sibley, Ted Cohen, and Kendall Walton in Dickie et al. 1989, 356–414. Lessing 1972, 10f: “Die Bemerkung, welche hier zum Grunde liegt, daß der Schmerz sich in dem Gesichte des Laokoon mit derjenigen Wut nicht zeige, welche man bei der Heftigkeit desselben vermuten sollte, ist vollkommen richtig. Auch das ist unstreitig, daß eben hierin, wo ein Halbkenner den Künstler unter der Natur geblieben zu sein, das wahre Pathetische des Schmerzes nicht erreicht zu haben, urteilen dürfte; daß, sage ich, eben hierin die Weisheit desselben ganz besonders hervorleuchtet.” See, also: “. . . er [der Künstler] mußte Schreien in Seufzen mildern; nicht weil das Schreien eine unedle Seele verrät, sondern, weil es das Gesicht auf eine ekelhafte Weise verstellet” (1972, 20). Further complicating matters, of course, is the role that irony may play, in the object of interpretation as well as in the terms of the interpretation, though this issue overlaps with 3.3 below. See Plato, Phaedrus, 275c–d, translated by Reginald Hackforth, in Plato 1971, 521: “Anyone who leaves behind him a written manual, and likewise anyone who takes it over from him, on the supposition that such writing will provide something reliable and permanent, must be exceedingly simple-minded; he must really be ignorant of Ammon’s utterance, if he imagines that written words can do anything more than remind one who knows that which the writing is concerned

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with.” See, too, the Seventh Letter, 341b–345a, translated by L. A. Post, in Plato 1971, 1588–1590. Wimsatt and Beardsley 1954, 431. In order to invoke a version of this strategy, while recognizing the inaccessibility of the author’s intention, some theorists distinguish between “actual” and “hypothetical” intentionalism; see Carroll 2000, 75–95. See the essays by Lyas and Robinson in Dickie et al. 1989, 442–454 and 455–468. Common sense can obviously be common nonsense and a true interpretation one that only a few can understand.

Bibliography

Abbreviations Husserl’s Husserliana (published by Martinus Nijhoff, Kluwer Academic Publishers, and Springer): Hua I: Cartesianische Meditationen und Pariser Vorträge, ed. Stephan Strasser, 1950. Hua II: Die Idee der Phänomenologie. Fünf Vorlesungen, ed. Walter Biemel, 1950. Hua III: Ideen zu einer reinen Phänomenologie und phänomenologischen Philosophie. Band I: Allgemeine Einführung in die reine Phänomenologie, ed. Karl Schuhmann, 1976. Hua IV: Ideen zu einer reinen Phänomenologie und phänomenologischen Philosophie. Band II: Phänomenologische Untersuchungen zur Konstitution, ed. Walter Biemel, 1952. Hua VI: Die Krisis der Europäischen Wissenschaften und die transzendentale Phänomenologie. Eine Einleitung in die phänomenologische Philosophie, ed. Walter Biemel, 1954. Hua IX, Phänomenologische Psychologie. Vorlesungen Sommersemester 1925, ed. Walter Biemel, 1968. Hua X: Zur Phänomenologie des inneren Zeitbewusstseins (1893–1917), ed. Rudolf Boehm, 1966. Hua XIV: Zur Phänomenologie der Intersubjektivität. Zweiter Teil: 1921–1928, ed. Iso Kern., 1973. Hua XV: Zur Phänomenologie der Intersubjektivität, Dritter Teil: 1929–1935, ed. Iso Kern, 1973. Hua XVII: Formale und transzendentale Logik. Versuch einer Kritik der logischen Vernunft, ed. Paul Janssen, 1974. Hua XVIII: Logische Untersuchungen I, Prolegomena zur reinen Logik, ed. Elmar Holenstein, 1975. Hua XIX/1: Logische Untersuchungen. Erster Band: Untersuchungen zur Phänomenologie und Theorie der Erkenntnis. Erster Teil, ed. Ursula Panzer, 1984. Hua XIX/2: Logische Untersuchungen. Zweiter Band: Untersuchungen zur Phänomenologie und Theorie der Erkenntnis, Zweiter Teil, ed. Ursula Panzer, 1984. Hua XX/I: Logische Untersuchungen, Ergänzungsband, Erster Teil, ed. Ullrich Melle, 2002. Hua XXII: Aufsätze und Rezensionen (1890–1910), ed. B. Rang, 1979. Hua XXIII: Phantasie, Bildbewusstsein, Erinnerung (1895–1925), ed. Eduard Marbach, 1981. Hua XXIV: Einleitung in die Logik und Erkenntnistheorie. Vorlesungen 1906/07, ed. Ullrich Melle, 1984.

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Hua XXV: Aufsätze und Vorträge (1911–1921), ed. Thomas Nenon and Hans Rainer Sepp, 1986. Hua XXX: Logik und allgemeine Wissenschaftstheorie. Vorlesungen 1917/18 mit ergänzenden Texten aus der ersten Fassung von 1910/11, ed. Ursula Panzer, 1996.

Heidegger’s Gesamtausgabe (published by Vottorio Klostermann, Frankfurt am Main): GA 17: Einführung in die phänomenologische Forschung (Marburger Vorlesung Wintersemester 1923/24), ed. Friedrich-Wilhelm von Herrmann, 1994. GA 19: Platon: Sophistes (Marburger Vorlesung Wintersemester 1924/25), ed. Ingeborg Schüßler, 1992. GA 21: Logik. Die Frage nach der Wahrheit (Marburger Vorlesung Wintersemester 1925/26), ed. Walter Biemel, 1976. GA 24: Die Grundprobleme der Phänomenologie (Marburger Vorlesung Sommersemester 1927), ed. Friedrich-Wilhelm von Herrmann, 1989 [1975]. GA 26: Metaphysische Anfangsgründe der Logik im Ausgang von Leibniz (Marburger Vorlesung Sommersemester 1928), ed. Klaus Held, 1990 [1978]. GA 27: Einleitung in die Philosophie (Freiburger Vorlesung Wintersemester 1928/1929), ed. Otto Saame und Ina Saame-Speidel, 1976. GA 29/30: Die Grundbegriffe der Metaphysik: Welt–Endlichkeit–Einsamkeit (Freiburger Vorlesung Wintersemester 1929/1930), ed. Friedrich-Wilhelm von Herrmann. 1992 [1983]. GA 34: Vom Wesen der Wahrheit. Zu Platons Höhlengleichnis und Theätet, ed. Hermann Mörchen, 1988. GA 45: Grundfragen der Philosophie. Ausgewählte “Probleme” der “Logik,” ed. FriedrichWilhelm von Herrmann, 1984. GA 52: Hölderlins Hymne “Andenken” (Freiburger Vorlesung 1941/1942), ed. Curd Ochwadt. 1982. GA 53: Hölderlins Hymne “Der Ister” (Freiburger Vorlesung Sommersemester 1942), ed. Walter Biemel, 1984. GA 56/57: Zur Bestimmung der Philosophie 1. Die Idee der Philosophie und das Weltanschauungsproblem (Kriegsnotsemester 1919); 2. Phänomenologie und transzendentale Wertphilosophie (Sommersemester 1919); 3. Anhang: Über das Wesen der Universität und des akademischen Studiums (Sommersemester 1919), ed. Bernd Heimbüchel, 1987. GA 58: Grundprobleme der Phänomenologie (Wintersemester 1919/20), ed. HansHelmuth Gander, 1992. GA 59: Phänomenologie der Anschauung und des Ausdrucks; Theorie der philosophishcen Begriffsbildung (Sommersemester 1920), ed. Claudius Strube, 1993. GA 65: Beiträge zur Philosophie (Vom Ereignis) (1936–1938), ed. F.-W. von Herrmann, 1989. GA 75: “Andenken und Mnemosyne,” in Zu Hölderlin—Griechenlandreisen, ed. Curd Ochwadt, 2000. GA 85: Vom Wesen der Sprache: die Metaphysik der Sprache und die Wesung des Wortes. Zu Herders Abhandlung “über den Ursprung der Sprache.” Oberseminar Sommersemester 1939, ed. Ingrid Schüssler, 1999.

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Other works by Heidegger: SZ: Sein und Zeit. Tübingen: Max Niemeyer Verlag, 1979.

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Index

a priori 27, 68, 72, 86, 193 abandonment of being 13, 112, 119, 123 absolute (the) 21, 64, 74, 75, 145–8, 160, 183 absolute knowing 147, 153, 157–9 absolute standpoint 145 abstract negation 152–3, 155 adequacy (adequate evidence) 104, 145, 172, 174, 197, 204 analytic 30, 34–6, 83, 90, 97, 142, 162, 201, 205 another beginning 12–13, 15–16, 109–10 antinomies 38–9, 153–4, 156 Apel, Karl-Otto 205 apodicticity, apodictic (apodictic evidence) 32, 167, 172, 176 appearance 48–9, 52–3, 79, 118, 122–3, 139, 148, 156–7, 205 apperception 48, 169, 176 application 11, 33, 37, 39, 44, 49, 61, 137, 218 apprehension 47–8, 51–2, 59, 62, 66–7, 71, 74–75, 79, 84, 111 Aristotle 79, 81, 94, 102–3, 111, 131–2, 149, 185, 187 Ausschaltung 59–60 being, history of 13–14, 109 being, meaning of 80–3, 86, 89, 92–3 belief 20, 51, 56–7, 59, 62, 74, 163, 175, 213–14 Berkeley, George 66 Boethius 149 Brandom, Robert 158

Bubner, Rüdiger 203 Carnap, Rudolf 26–7, 37–8, 181 Cohen, Hermann 181–2, 185 coherence 37, 143, 203, 214, 219, 221–2 coherence theory of truth 3 compatibility 30, 34, 36 concept 111, 145, 149–50, 155, 157–8, 207 concept of science 80 consciousness 4–13, 16, 18–21, 41–56 passim, 66–7, 70–1, 73, 75, 82, 111, 129, 139, 142, 146, 149, 150, 152, 157–60, 167–72, 184, 186, 190, 194–6, 203, 223 modified consciousness 54 sign consciousness 44 consequence-logic 25–40 passim constitution 5–8, 47, 58, 60–2, 74–5, 105, 151, 169–70, 172, 181, 214 construction 26, 28, 163–4, 179, 186, 188, 192, 197 copula 147 modular copula 147 cores 28–30, 32, 34–9 Corlett, J. Angelo 163–5 correspondence 95, 143, 194, 204–6, 213–14, 218–19, 221 correspondence theory of truth 3 decidability 35, 36, 39 deconstruction 6, 28, 160, 196–7 Derrida, Jacques 4, 160, 206–7 Descartes, René 129, 133, 142, 157, 160, 161, 167, 192

Index destruction 179, 182, 196–7, 201–2, 206 determinate negation 149–50, 152–3, 155, 157, 159–60 dialectics 73–4 Dichtung 123 distinctness 30 Dostal, Robert 203 eidetic, eidetics 6, 31–3, 61, 66–9, 72, 79–80, 82–3, 157, 192 empathy 6–7, 102, 170, 173–4 empirical 6–7, 13, 25, 28, 30, 33–4, 37, 39, 64–8, 72, 145, 156–7, 167, 192–3, 206 epoché 57, 59, 63–4, 68–70, 167 Eros (Diotima) 155 essence 8–9, 13, 17, 20, 32, 37, 48, 59, 64, 66–8, 70, 72, 110, 114, 118, 121, 138–9, 157, 192, 201 evidence, evident 3–7, 20, 25, 29–30, 33–5, 38, 61, 72, 131, 165, 167–8, 171, 174, 181, 192, 197, 205 adequate evidence 104, 145, 172, 174, 204 apodictic evidence 32, 167, 172, 176 excluded middle 34–5, 40 existential 12, 69, 80, 83–93, 96–7, 99–100, 105, 206 extension 31–2, 71–2, 152 Fichte, Johann Gottlieb 9, 157 figment 10, 42, 52 finitude 96, 102, 148, 155 foreunderstanding 210, 212, 217–18 formal logic 36, 139 formalism 150 formalization 25, 33, 85 forms 25–9, 39, 150 syntactical 26–8 theory of 25–9, 38 found, founded, founding 26, 33, 39, 47–8, 99–100, 139, 157, 181, 204 foundation 26, 33, 39, 52, 60–1, 63, 65, 68, 74, 122, 130, 161, 180, 189, 193, 217

235

foundationalist theory of truth 3 ontological foundation 39 freedom 36, 96, 107, 116–17, 119–20, 205–7 Frege, Gottlob 5, 146, 147, 149 fundamental ontology 80–1, 92–3, 99–100, 107 Gadamer, Hans-Georg 4, 202–3, 207, 211 grammar of logic 27 grounding 107, 121–2, 168, 188, 217 harmony 129–44 passim, 172–3 intersubjective 170, 174–5 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich 129, 133, 140–1, 145–60 Heidegger, Martin 3, 4, 9–10, 12–18, 20, 79–92, 94–107, 109–25, 129, 139, 145, 155, 179–87, 192, 194, 196–8, 201–7, 217, 222 hermeneutic, hermeneutics 3, 4, 20, 81–4, 87, 93, 94, 202–7 hermeneutical circle 62, 90, 211 history of being 13–14, 109 Hölderlin, Friedrich 12, 15, 16, 113, 125 horizon 18, 80, 83, 84, 93, 101, 140, 170, 174, 196, 197, 205 external horizon 18, 169–70 internal horizon 171 intersubjective horizon 174 Husserl, Edmund 3–9, 10, 16, 18, 20, 25–38, 41–56, 57–75, 79–85, 94, 97–9, 102, 111, 129, 133–4, 142, 157, 160, 161–2, 167–75, 179–81, 183, 187–98, 202, 203–4, 212, 217 ideal object 31–3, 37, 69 ideation, ideality 7, 67, 170 image, images 41–56 image consciousness 41–8, 50, 55 image object 42–3, 49–51, 53 image subject 42 image theory 41, 43–6, 48–54, 56

236 physical image 42, 48 individuals 6, 25, 29, 165, 168 infinite judgment 31, 145–51, 153–60 infinitude 148, 155 intension 31 intentional object 45–6, 60–2, 168–75 intentional psychology 65, 74 intentionality 53–5, 61 interpretation 3, 4, 9, 15–16, 45, 48–51, 58, 60, 73, 80, 83, 85–92, 102–3, 105, 110–11, 118, 130, 132, 136, 147–8, 155, 165, 201–4, 206, 209–22 external interpretation 211 internal interpretation 211 intersubjectivity 6–8, 10, 35, 51, 97–8, 102, 129, 162, 165, 170–4 intersubjective horizon 174 intuition 31–2, 58, 67, 85, 111, 157, 176, 180, 192, 197, 204, 208 judgment 5, 26, 29, 32, 34–6, 102–5, 107, 145–54, 156, 158–9, 167, 197 affirmative judgment 153 categorical judgment 146 infinite judgment 31, 145–51, 153–60 negative judgment 157 qualitative judgment 145 universal judgments 32 Kant, Immanuel 111, 139, 148, 150, 153–7, 167, 184, 193, 213 Lambert, Johann Heinrich 156–7 life-world 162, 168–70, 174 logical form 147–8, 150, 153 Longino, Helen E. 162–75 Marx, Karl 147, 148 material, materially, materialities 12, 33, 35–7, 42, 75, 118, 150, 169 meaning 5, 7, 10, 16, 18, 26–31, 63, 69–71, 73–4, 79–83, 85–93, 108, 113, 118, 140, 168–70, 172, 174–6, 191, 196–7, 209–10, 212, 214–19,

Index 220, 222 meaning of being 80–3, 86, 89, 92–3 memory 43–4, 48–9, 51–2, 54–6, 171 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice 4, 9–10, 16–21, 129–43 misunderstanding 125, 210, 212, 217, 219 modified consciousness 54 motivation 73–5, 112, 210 Nancy, Jean-Luc 207 Natorp, Paul 179–81, 183–200 natural attitude or standpoint 57–9, 61–8, 71–5, 107 necessity 11, 16, 32, 63, 65, 67, 69, 125, 143, 208 negation 26, 34, 104, 108, 136, 140, 144, 148–50, 152–3, 155, 157 abstract negation 152–3, 155 determinate negation 149–50, 152–3, 155, 157, 159–60 natural negation 152–3, 159 negative judgment 157 noema, noematic 75, 171–5 full noema (noematic complex or system) 171 noesis, noetic 59–60, 74–5, 85 nomological 31 non-contradiction 26, 29–30, 34–6, 139, 142 Novalis 4, 9–11, 14 object 3–21, 35, 37, 42, 43–57, 59–63, 66, 69–70, 72, 75, 81, 83, 91, 95, 129, 134, 142, 145, 153, 155, 157–60, 165, 167, 169–75, 184, 186–7, 189, 192–3, 199–200, 209–10, 214–16, 219 ideal object 31–3, 37, 69 image object 42–3, 49–51, 53 intentional object 45–6, 60–2, 168–75 object-spheres 25 ontology, ontological 4–5, 9, 11–14, 16, 20, 29, 37, 39, 58, 61–5, 67–9, 71–3, 79–85, 88–90, 92–5, 99–101, 104–5, 108, 110, 112–14, 120, 123, 130–1,

Index 137, 140, 143, 146, 148, 194, 202–4, 206–7 fundamental ontology 80–1, 92–3, 99–100, 107 ontological foundation 39 universal ontology 80–1, 83 painting 42, 43, 47, 52–3, 56, 138, 144, 210, 215–17 pairing 173–4 Pareyson, Luigi 202 perception 10, 13, 17, 19, 21, 29, 42–8, 52–3, 55–6, 58–60, 71, 79, 85, 99, 103, 139, 142, 164–74, 206, 213–14 phantasy 42, 43–4, 47–56 phenomenological attitude 4, 57–8, 61–3, 73 phenomenological reduction 57, 60, 62, 63–6, 67–73, 95, 173, 194 physical image 42, 48 Plato, Platonic 21, 79, 81, 97, 103–4, 109–10, 116–23, 125–6, 129, 132, 161, 181, 193 prejudice of presence 49, 52–3 pre-predicative 29, 34, 37, 39, 87, 94–6, 100, 102–3 evidence 34 experience 39 openness 96, 100 seeing 87 syntax 39 truth 94–5, 102–3 understanding 103 presentation 42, 45, 48, 54, 191, 194 presenting consciousness 42 preservation, 115–16, 122–3 principles of logic 26, 34, 36–7, 39 proposition, propositional 5, 25, 27–8, 30–1, 34–8, 40, 69, 94–6, 102–4, 107, 139, 145–7, 149, 151–3, 155–6, 158, 160, 182, 204 qualitative judgment 145 reality 4, 10, 41, 50, 57–9, 61, 64–6, 70, 74, 111, 118, 123, 129, 152, 194

237

reason, reasoning 33, 148–9, 153–6, 158–60, 164–6, 168, 195, 207 reconstruction 168, 189, 191–2, 194–7 reducibility 25, 29, 31–3, 39, 214 reduction 25, 26, 29–34, 39, 53, 57, 59–70, 72–4, 167, 173, 179, 194, 212–13, 221 phenomenological reduction 57, 60, 62, 63–6, 67–73, 95, 173, 194 to sphere of ownness 173 transcendental reduction 57, 59, 62–4, 68–74 reductive 25–6, 28–9, 59–60, 65, 69, 71–2, 74, 194, 213–14 Reeder, Harry P. 176 reflection 13, 38, 50, 53, 59–60, 63, 66–7, 71–3, 84, 91, 97–8, 145, 156, 189, 191, 196, 216 remains, remnants 202, 206–7 re-presentation 42, 48–51, 55 re-presenting consciousness 42 reproduction 48, 54 resistance 201–2, 206–8 re-understanding 211–12, 217–18 Rickert, Heinrich 179–81, 183–4 Ricoeur, Paul 202, 207 Risser, James 203 romanticism 4, 9–10, 20 Rorty, Richard 202 Russell, Bertrand 36, 38, 40, 145 Schelling, Friedrich 129 Schlegel, Friedrich 4, 9, 11–13, 21 Schmitt, Frederick F. 162–3 Schürmann, Reiner 203, 207 seeing 7, 17–18, 79, 84–5, 88, 90–2, 134, 192 pre-predicative 87 seeing-in 43, 50, 134 self-interpretation 203, 211–12 self-understanding 212 sign consciousness 44 significance 38, 47, 185, 197–8 skepticism 63, 74, 143, 153, 159 social epistemology 161–3, 167–75 sphere of ownness 173–4 Spinoza, Benedict De 136, 147–8, 160

238

Index

spirit 10, 13, 16, 97–8, 137, 151, 153, 158–60 stuff 27–8, 30, 36–7, 39 subject 6, 8–10, 12–13, 17–19, 27, 42, 43, 46, 48–51, 53, 62–3, 65–6, 97, 99, 102, 111–12, 129, 132, 134, 140, 144–8, 150–3, 155, 157–61, 167, 169–74, 196, 204, 213–15, 218 logical subject 147 thinking subject 148, 155, 158 subjectivity 6–8, 61, 66, 69–75, 129, 143–4, 148, 160, 186, 188–90, 200, 214, absolute 61, 64, 120, 125n. 2 transcendental 6, 66, 69–75 substance 19, 102, 132, 146–8, 157 substitutability 36 syllogism 151–2 syntactical forms 26–8 testability 25, 33 totality 13, 26, 31–2, 36, 97, 99–100, 103, 105–7, 135–6, 140, 147–8, 152–4, 203 transcendence, transcendental 6–7, 10, 38, 57–75, 91, 95, 100, 105, 111, 137, 144, 153, 167, 172 transcendental attitude 57, 64, 68, 74–5, 92 transcendental constitution 58, 60–2, 74 transcendental idealism 57, 60–2, 65–7, 75, 129 transcendental logic 139, 153 transcendental phenomenology 7, 57, 67–9, 73–4 transcendental problem 69–74 transcendental reduction 57, 59, 62–4, 68–74

transcendental subjectivity 6, 66, 69, 73–5 truth 3–7, 12–13, 20, 25–6, 30–2, 34–6, 39–40, 58, 74, 80, 94–8, 100–8, 113, 115–18, 122–4, 129–30, 137, 139–43, 145–52, 155–8, 160, 163, 194, 201–7, 209, 212–22 truth-logic 34–5 Tugendhat, Ernst 104, 203–5 Überwindung 206 understanding 4, 6–10, 12, 14, 43–4, 47–8, 52, 55–6, 60–2, 80, 82–3, 85–92, 94, 100–4, 111, 114, 117, 137, 145, 153–6, 159, 164, 197, 203–4, 209–12, 216, 221–2 foreunderstanding 210, 212, 217–18 misunderstanding 125, 210, 212, 217, 219 re-understanding 211–12, 217–18 self-understanding 212 understanding and interpretation, 209 universal, universality 32, 68, 71–2, 138, 145–7 universal judgments 32 universal ontology 80–1, 83 validity, valid, 6, 20, 30–1, 33–7, 39, 47, 58, 63, 69, 71–2, 134, 149, 167–8, 170–3 Vandevelde, Pol 221, 223 Vattimo, Gianni 202 Verwindung 206 Wittgenstein, Ludwig 147 Zermelo, Ernst 38 Žižek, Slavoj 149